Six of Hamilton Countys nine county commissioners on Wednesday voted to pass a resolution that would open the door for the Hamilton County Commission to disconnect their salary from the county mayors.

Commissioner Randy Fairbanks said, "There seems to be quite a bit of misunderstanding and I want to clear a few things up on this resolution. Recently, an online poll was done and asked this way 'Should the law be changed to let the county commission to set their own pay,' and 93 percent said no.

Thats not what this resolution is doing. Right now in the other 94 counties, if they want to increase their pay, they bring forward a motion and a second and they vote in an open meeting. Hamilton County is the only county that doesnt do that.

Commissioner Fairbanks said that at the moment, the Commissions pay is tied to the county mayor, and that if his salary goes up, then thats the only way the Commissions will also increase. He stressed the public nature of this proposed new method, saying that if the group wants a pay increase, they will now have to publicly vote upon it for all to see.

What you think the online poll percentage would have been if the poll had said Should the County Commission, when setting their pay, should have to vote in public to do so, asked Commissioner Fairbanks. I dare say 100 percent would have said yes.

County Attorney Rheubin Taylor said the present language states that if the county employees receive a certain percent raise, then that same percent raise is also given to the county mayor as well. He told the Commission a vote was required today in order to beat a deadline for the Legislature to consider it..

You all are being asked to vote on it today because were in a recessed meeting, attorney Taylor said. We found out the deadline is tomorrow as to the Senate, and next Wednesday to the House. We ask you to consider it today, and if by chance you get feedback that someone wants to change your mind, you get a chance to reconsider it.

The attorney said that this resolution will need to be carried by a state senator and a few representatives. Commissioner Warren Mackey wondered if there were legislators willing to carry the bill, he also asked if the poll mentioned in the beginning was a 'professional poll.'

Commissioner Greg Martin said this was not the case and warned against using those kind of polls as evidence. Those polls are not professional, and yet Ive heard those be mentioned in this commission to validate a position one way or another, Commissioner Martin said. Ive never put much stock in polls one way or another.

Commissioner Martin was not in favor of this resolution, saying that the Commission does not vote to raise money on people in the highway department, the mayors salary, or the commissioners salary, saying that their salaries are all set in an open meeting where the Commission votes on a yearly budget. He also asked attorney Taylor if there were delegates willing to carry the bill.

I submitted it to the chairman of the Hamilton County delegation, requesting it be circulated among the delegation seeking sponsorship in both the House and Senate, attorney Taylor said.

Commissioner Tim Boyd agreed with the resolution, stating that when putting together a budget, the Commission usually does not discuss their pay as part of that budget. In 11 budgets Ive voted on, I dont recall one moment of deliberation that voting on a budget is going to affect our pay as commissioners,

Commissioner Boyd said. I do recall the media pointing it out to our constituents after the fact. Its a bit disingenuous to say we have open deliberation when were approving a budget that has a county employee raise that gives us an automatic raise if we approve the budget.

Commissioner Fairbanks said, I want every one of us to understand that if this stays in place, we cant give our employees a raise if we dont want a raise too. So its unbelievable for me that if we want to raise our pay, that we dont have to say it to the public.

Commissioner Mackey said he is willing to be a lightning rod for criticism for the Commission. He said he has supported increasing pay for sheriffs and teachers, and pushed for increased COVID-19 testing in the county, and so he is okay with "taking one for the team. 

He said, Leadership is realizing youre not going to satisfy everyone and saying no, no, no by being the most conservative person in the room. Take a stand.

Of the nine Commissioners, Greg Martin, Sabrena Smedley, and Chip Baker all voted no. In favor were Commissioners Boyd, Fairbanks, Mackey, Chester Bankston, Katherlyn Geter and David Sharpe.

The commissioners make about $24,500 per year now. The chairman gets an extra $5,000 and the vice chairman an extra $2,500.

The original letter read as follows: An Act Amending the Compensation Received by Hamilton County Commissioners

Amend Tennessee Code Annotated Section 5-5-107 by deleting in its entirety subsection (b)(2) which presently is applicable only to Hamilton County.

Said subsection reads, "Upon adoption of a resolution by a two-thirds vote of its membership, the county legislative body of any county having a population of not less than 285,000 or more than 286,000 according to the 1990 federal census or any subsequent federal census shall fix the salary of the members of the county legislative body by June 30, 1999 to become effective July 1, 1999. On July 1, 2000, and each July 1 thereafter, the compensation for members of the county legislative body shall be adjusted to reflect the same percentage increase the county executive of such county is to receive." By deleting said subsection, Hamilton County would be covered by the same general Provisions that affect all other counties in Tennessee.

We the undersigned members of the Board of Commissioners for Hamilton County, Tennessee, do hereby evidence our approval of the heretofore attached proposed legislation by fixing our signatures herein below, and commit to adopt said legislation when presented to the County Commission upon its passage by the Tennessee General Assembly. This 2nd day of February, 2021."
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Domestic flights' fare band is not permanent feature: Union minister Hardeep Singh Puri

India

oi-Ajay Joseph Raj P

New Delhi, Feb 10: Replying to a question in Parliament, Union civil aviation minister Hardeep Singh Puri on Wednesday said that fare band on domestic flights can't be a permanent feature and it is expected that when airlines which are now operating 80 per cent of their pre-Covid capacity resume their full services.

"The floor and ceiling price was an extraordinary measure which was necessitated by am extraordinary situation which we found ourselves in. It is designed to ensure that airlines in a situation of limited availability did not charge exorbitant prices. It is not our intention and can not be in an open market deregulated situation to have the fare band made a permanent feature," the minister said.

Rahul, Priyanka Gandhi to lead Congress campaign in upcoming Kerala assembly elections

Replying to a question from AIADMK MP M Thambidurai on exorbitant airfares that he faced while flying between Delhi and Chennai, Singh said the fare band the ministry imposed on airlines during COVID-19 pandemic pertains to only economy classes, not to the privilege of business classes that MP Thambidurai availed.

"The price band was confined to only economy class, not to business class...this also depends on when you are booking your tickets. If you are booking your business class tickets 60 days in advance, then the airlines might offer you a cheaper rate, but if you are booking just a day ahead, then the tickets are dearer. Airfare depends on the market. It is not something the Centre decides," he said.

Uttar Pradesh: Section 144 imposed in Saharanpur ahead of Kisan Mahapanchayat

Twitter blocks portion of accounts, cites free speech | OneIndia News

Talking about the overall loss of the aviation sector, the minister said, "Nobody has an overall figure on the losses, though IATA and some others put a fantastic figure on it. But the sector is reviving."

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Story first published: Wednesday, February 10, 2021, 12:01 [IST]
EDITORS NOTE: NJ Cannabis Insider is hosting a two-day business and networking conference March 9-10, featuring some of the states most prominent industry leaders. Early-bird registration is open. Tickets are limited.

Former U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius joined the National Cannabis Roundtable as an honorary co-chair, the group announced Tuesday.

Her appointment gives the cannabis lobbying group a second big political heavyweight as it pushes for end the federal ban on marijuana. Its other honorary co-chair is former House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio.

The path forward for cannabis reform in Washington will require a holistic approach, Sebelius said. We have to recognize and respond to multiple imperatives: there is an economic side to cannabis, but also a human side.

Whether its the jobs and revenue potential, the criminal and social justice reform, or the health implications, we need to embrace the human side and keep in mind how policy affects real people.

Sebelius was governor of Kansas before President Barack Obama tapped her for his administration, and she acknowledged the need to work with states, which have the led the way toward legalizing weed.

Working with the states and the governors will be a big part of achieving the proper state and federal regulatory balance, she said.

Boehner, who also sits on the board of director of Acreage Holdings. said Sebelius will be a great partner in advancing our cause. She understands policy and knows what it takes to make law. We look forward to working together as a team.

National Cannabis Roundtable spent $580,000 on lobbying in 2020, second only to the $635,000 spent by the Cannabis Trade Federation. The roundtable spent $695,000 in 2019. Marijiuana lobbying across the board dropped in 2020 compared with 2019 as the coronavirus pandemic curbed face-to-face meetings and visits to Capitol Hill.

Jonathan D. Salant may be reached at jsalant@njadvancemedia.com.

Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to NJ.com.
As businesses digital transformation plans multiply, Im prepared to lead a team that helps our clients strategically identify the solutions that best align with their unique business needs.  Jared Zagelbaum, Principal Consultant of Data and Analytics, AIM Consulting

AIM Consulting, a technology consulting firm and Addison Group company, is continuing to build its presence in the Minneapolis market with the addition of Jared Zagelbaum as principal consultant of data and analytics. Zagelbaums addition to the Minneapolis office reflects the companys continued strategic growth in the citys quickly expanding market, and across the country.

Were pleased to have Jared join AIM as principal consultant of data analytics and lead our team in Minneapolis, said Steve Tycast, director of data and analytics at AIM. Our clients expect us to bring an advanced level of expertise to their business and were confident Jareds diverse experience across the data ecosystem will add exceptional value to help solve the complex challenges were often working to mitigate.

Zagelbaum brings an expansive background in data and analytics, cloud computing, Microsoft consulting services and business development to AIM. Most recently, he worked as a data architect at 3Cloud  a Microsoft Azure technology consulting firm and Azure Expert Managed Services Provider where he provided cloud strategy consulting to clients across industries such as healthcare, health tech, SaaS, manufacturing, finance, the public sector and more.

In his new role, Zagelbaum will help lead delivery and engagement across several clients in industries such as healthcare, financial services, retail, energy, food and beverage, medical manufacturing, technology and manufacturing. As digital transformation initiatives accelerate amid the pandemic, Zagelbaums expertise in agile and delivery leadership positions him to drive successful and valuable projects in the short timelines AIMs enterprise clients often expect.

Im excited to join the AIM Minneapolis office and look forward to continuing to build our expanding team, said Zagelbaum. As businesses digital transformation plans multiply, Im prepared to lead a team that helps our clients strategically identify the solutions that best align with their unique business needs.

Founded in 2006, AIM Consulting provides industry-leading technology solutions to a diverse portfolio of clients across the United States, ranging from startups to the Fortune 500. AIM Consulting specializes in the areas of Enterprise Application Development, Data and Analytics, Cloud and Operations, Delivery Leadership, and Digital Experience and Mobile.

AIM Consulting is hiring across the country in its offices located in Chicago, Denver, Houston, Minneapolis and Seattle. Experienced recruiters or technology consultants interested in career opportunities can visit https://aimconsulting.com/join-our-team/.

About AIM Consulting

AIM Consulting, an Addison Group company, is an award-winning industry leader in technology consulting and solutions delivery. AIMs differentiation is our collaborative engagement model that provides cross-functional results. We work with clients, shoulder to shoulder, for one goal  their success. Founded in 2006, with offices in Seattle, Minneapolis, Denver, Houston, and Chicago, we are ranked among the fastest-growing private companies and best companies to work for due to a long track record of success with our partners and consultants. Our long-term relationships with the best technology consulting talent allows us to deliver on expectations, execute on roadmaps, and drive modern technology initiatives.

press release

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is appealing to donors for 20 million Swiss francs to urgently expand its response to the acute humanitarian needs created by the Tigray crisis in Ethiopia, while the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) is appealing for 27 million Swiss francs to support the Ethiopian Red Cross Society, the Sudanese Red Crescent Society and the Djibouti Red Crescent Society to address other drivers of vulnerability in the region.

Many people have been displaced within Tigray, and almost 60,000 sought refuge in Sudan. Refugees and people displaced within the region suffer from a lack of food and essential services, like water and healthcare. Some healthcare facilities in Tigray were abandoned and looted, while others are running short of supplies and are struggling to cope with the growing demand. Thousands have lost contact with their loved ones.

"The needs in Tigray are overwhelming. Government responses need to accelerate, and humanitarian organizations urgently need access so people can receive lifesaving assistance before it's too late," said Patrick Youssef, the ICRC's regional director for Africa. "Humanitarian access outside major towns remains challenging and there is little visibility on the humanitarian situation in rural areas."

"The recent developments in Tigray have compounded other existing vulnerabilities in Ethiopia and in neighbouring Sudan and Djibouti. Even before the fighting, the region was dealing with acute food insecurity, an invasion of desert locusts, drought and the COVID-19 pandemic," said Mohammed Mukhier, regional director for Africa at IFRC.

The Ethiopian Red Cross Society (ERCS), present across the country, including Tigray, has been providing humanitarian assistance since the first day of the fighting, working alongside the ICRC. The ERCS counts on a large network of volunteers who remained active despite being affected by the crisis themselves.

The ICRC has been working in Tigray for decades and maintained its operations throughout the fighting that erupted almost three months ago. Supporting hospitals in Mekelle, Axum, Adwa and Shire has been a priority. Following some of its initial assistance missions, which included sending the first humanitarian convoy into Mekelle and helping some 11,300 families reestablish contact, the ICRC is appealing to donors for funds needed to reinforce its operational capacity. It is expanding its presence in Mekelle and re-opening an office in Shire.

Besides scaling up its presence in Tigray, the ICRC will continue addressing the alarming humanitarian situation in Benishangul-Gumuz, Western Oromia and Guji, where armed violence episodes have been recurrent.

The Sudanese Red Crescent has been distributing food, household items and providing primary health services to refugees and communities hosting them. The IFRC released emergency funds to enable the Sudanese Red Crescent Society to assist 40,000 people. The Djibouti Red Crescent Society maintains a presence in Hol Hol refugee camp and Obock, where it provides water and sanitation services and works to promote hygiene and raise COVID-19 awareness.

The IFRC is appealing for funds to enable the Ethiopian Red Cross Society, the Sudanese Red Crescent Society and the Djibouti Red Crescent Society to deliver humanitarian assistance and recovery support to 660,000 people.

The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement is the world's largest humanitarian network. It consists of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) and national Red Cross and Red Crescent societies.

ICRC action:

The town of Mekelle has been struggling with a shortage of water in recent months and the ICRC has been supplying water to 3,700 people a day through water trucking and storage tank installations.

It provided medical assistance to 4,500 people wounded by weapons and 10,900 primary healthcare patients. 648 weapon-wounded people received physical rehabilitation services.

The organization has distributed 35 metric tons of food received from the Ministry of Health and Catholic Relief Services to four hospitals in Tigray.

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Almost 9,500 displaced people in Mekelle received essential household items.

11,300 families reestablished contact through the Ethiopian Red Cross, the Sudanese Red Crescent and the ICRC services in Sudan and Ethiopia.

IFRC action:

In November, the IFRC released funds to the Ethiopian Red Cross Society to target 7,500 affected people in Amhara to improve their access to health, water and sanitation, shelter and livelihood support for four months.

The IFRC also released emergency funds to the Sudanese Red Crescent Society to provide emergency services to 40,000 Ethiopian refugees in Sudan. The Sudanese Red Crescent Society works in Hamdayit and Al Lukdi centres and Um-Rakoba settlement to provide shelter, household items, health services, improved water and sanitation, and to carry out gender protection and inclusion activities.

In all the three countries, the IFRC continued supporting national societies to mitigate the impact of COVID-19.

Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US

Iran ready to help improve the defense capability of Syria

European Parliament head proposes to strengthen sanctions on Russia

UK PM gets married in London

Armenia reports COVID-19 new 81 cases: for people die

EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia

2 people die in Armenia road accident

Nigeria: Students taken hostage a month ago are released

61 quakes recorded in Congo per day

Syrian MFA: EU lost credibility due to blind obedience to US policy

Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack

Mher Grigoryan: Clarification of border points is possible only after withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops from Armenia

Suspicious deal: Whether there was profit from buying DNA IDs?

Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war

4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack

Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities

Kocharyan: I have to ask people how it happened that overwhelming majority elected this leader

Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country

Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia

US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs

Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners

Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions

Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US

Iran intensifies its diplomacy amid Armenia-Azerbaijan border tensions

Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes

Lukashenko accuses West of destabilizing situation in Belarus

Armenia Central Electoral Commission chief on snap elections: No legal basis for postponing, suspending any function

Armenias Pashinyan is met by Yerevan district residents chanting against him

We are ready to be fully engaged in negotiation process to resolve Karabakh issue, says Armenia acting PM

Armenia ex-President Kocharyan gives interview to Russia TV channel

Armenia acting premier: We are ready to start withdrawing troops at any moment

Canada MFA expresses concern over 6 Armenian soldiers capture by Azerbaijan troops

There are omissions in registration documents of political forces that applied to Armenia Central Electoral Commission

Armenia Central Electoral Commission chief: There is activeness in Yerevan for the past day or two

Three new cases of coronavirus reported in Artsakh

Group of US Congress members threaten Azerbaijans Aliyev regime with sanctions

Chicago mayor is sued for allegedly refusing interview with white reporter

Iran exports oil to US for first time after long interval

"Armenia" bloc top 50 MP candidates are announced

42 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia

Sri Lanka public beach is covered in charred plastic pellets due to fire in container ship

US preparing list of targeted sanctions on Belarus authorities

China believes it will own America by 2035, Biden says

15 al-Shabab militants killed in Somalia

Newspaper: Armenia political forces that applied for running in election impatiently await CEC decision

Newspaper: Changes are expected in Artsakh

California prisoner who considers himself Satanist beheads cellmate, dismembers his body

Newspaper: Armenia acting PM's "mutually beneficial" proposal to collapse state system?

Armenia National Security Service Reserve Officers' Union members meet with His Holiness Karekin II

EU is ready to help Armenia and Azerbaijan with border delimitation and demarcation

ARF-D member on Nikol Pashinyan: 103 years ago Armenia's founding fathers would have executed him for treason

Iran President hails brotherly ties with Azerbaijan

Robert Kocharyan on years of his leadership in Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia

Situation on Armenian-Azerbaijani border is still tense, more on COVID-19 in Armenia, May 28 digest

"Armenia" alliance of political parties paying tribute to founder of First Republic Aram Manukyan

Yerevan.today: Armenia acting PM not greeted at ruling party's headquarters, citizens call him 'capitulator'

Russia MOD reports on maintenance of ceasefire regime in Nagorno-Karabakh

Armenia acting MOD meets with Russian counterpart in Moscow

Armenia 2nd President: I see possibility of restoring borders of Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast

We can provide our army with some key, modernized weapons, says Armenia ex-President Kocharyan

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan: Captives issue is not one that any opposition force can resolve

OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs release statement on detention of 6 Armenian servicemen by Azerbaijan

Armenian acting Deputy PM: Discussion on issues possible only after withdrawal of Azeri troops from Armenia's territory

Armenia acting PM on Syunik roads, Russian military posts: This is only place where there are working nuances

Armenia acting PM: Process of return of POWs will intensify after upcoming elections

Putin congratulates Aliyev on Republic Day

Josep Borrell: A group of EU Ministers will visit Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan

Armenia acting PM: We're not going to escalate situation for 30% of Sev Lake

Armenia 3rd President visits Vanadzor, pays tribute to heroes of Battle of Gharakilisa (PHOTOS)

Armenia ex-President Kocharyan lays flowers at Battle of Karakilisa memorial (PHOTOS)

Armenia acting PM: Solution to captives issue is matter of time

Shoygu to Harutyunyan: Russia, Armenia strengthen military cooperation

Armenia acting premier: We are 100% honest toward our country

Artsakh President pays tribute at Stepanakert memorial, Shushi Tank-Monument

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan on Meghri corridor plan: Not beneficial to us now to discuss it as "corridor"

Acting PM: "Cement," "fittings" were stolen while constructing Armenia state "building"

Two new cases of coronavirus reported in Artsakh

Catholicos of All Armenians visits Sardarapat Memorial, again separate from state officials

MOD dismisses Azerbaijan statement on Armenia army firing toward Nakhchivan

Jerusalem Post: Israel prepares for a new war with Hamas

France, UN World Food Programme partner to support displaced people in Armenia

Armenia ex-President Kocharyan: Today we are not full-fledged negotiating party

Norwegian prime minister opposes series of NATO reforms

Armenia deputy FM briefs UN, Red Cross leaders on consequences of Azerbaijan aggression against Artsakh

NATO Secretary-General: Afghans must take full responsibility for peace and stability in their country

104 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia

Armenia acting premier: Our sovereignty, independence cannot be subject of discussion

Karabakh state-finance minister announces resignation

Artsakh MFA: Sardarapat victory has inspired all Armenians for over a century

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan: In contrast to kneeling, disgraceful authorities of the day, we have determination

Armenia President: Today we stand on threshold of Sardarapat of morality, dignity

Catholicos of All Armenians: Our people shall find strength to overcome this ordeal as well

Armenia First Republic Day event is held under very modest conditions

Newspaper: Armenia authorities claiming to be popular close off First Republic Day event to public

Armenia ex-President Sargsyan: Now or never!

Armenia President, then acting premier arrive at Sardarapat Memorial

Newspaper: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan's new "cleverness?"

France ambassador: I wish Armenia to be able to live its independence in peace, prosperity

Bashar al-Assad wins Syria presidential election

Reporters not allowed entering Sardarapat Memorial of Armenia
Bruce Springsteen was arrested on driving while intoxicated and related charges at the Jersey Shore last fall, authorities said.

On Nov. 14, 2020, Springsteen was cited for DWI, reckless driving and consuming alcohol in a closed area at Sandy Hook, in the Gateway National Recreation Area at the northeast tip of Monmouth County.

Springsteen was cooperative throughout the process, Gateway spokesperson Brenda Ling said in a statement Wednesday.

TMZ was first to report the arrest. The Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, a Freehold native and Colts Neck resident, is due for a court appearance in the next few weeks, the website said. Criminal charges at New Jersey federal parks are typically heard in Federal Court in Newark.

A spokesperson for Springsteen did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday morning.

The news comes after Springsteen, 71, made headlines this past weekend as he appeared in a two-minute Super Bowl commercial for Jeep, the first such product endorsement of his career.

Unlike many rock stars, Springsteen does not have a history of public intoxication. In fact, he avoided alcohol as a young man, not having his first drink until he was 22. As he wrote in his 2016 autobiography Born to Run, My experience with my father had been enough, referencing his father, Douglas Springsteen, and his struggles with alcoholism.

The terrifying, all-engulfing presence he became when he drank convinced me to never go there. He lost who he was.

Springsteen is very familiar with Sandy Hook, having used its beaches as backdrops for several music and film projects, most notably the album cover for 1987s Tunnel of Love. The music video for from the albums hit single Brilliant Disguise was shot in the kitchen of an abandoned house on Sandy Hooks Fort Hancock property. His 2014 short film Hunter of Invisible Game was also filmed there.

Please subscribe now and support the local journalism YOU rely on and trust.

Bobby Olivier may be reached at bolivier@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @BobbyOlivier and Facebook. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 10, ARMENPRESS. The ministry of emergency situations reports that some roads are closed or difficult to pass in Armenia due to weather conditions.

The roads leading to Amberd Fortress and Lake Kari are closed.

The Vardenyats Pass is difficult to pass for trailer trucks.

The Georgian authorities inform that the Stepantsminda-Lars highway is open for all types of vehicles.

Drivers are urged to use snow tires.



Editing and Translating by Aneta Harutyunyan




The historic second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump started Tuesday in the United States Senate.

The House of Representatives impeachment managers opened with video from the deadly attack at the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6. Five people died, including a woman who was shot by police inside the building and a police officer who died the next day of his injuries.



The 13-minute video shows Trump claiming that he won the election and telling supporters, Were going to walk down to the Capitol. The video also shows images of lawmakers in the Capitol Building. Lawmakers were meeting to confirm President-elect Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 presidential election.

The video includes scenes of the mob breaking windows and pushing past police officers to enter the building. As then-Vice President Mike Pence and lawmakers left for safety, the rioters marched through the Senate chamber  the same place where senators will vote to decide if Trump is guilty of incitement of insurrection against the United States.



U.S. Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland leads the House impeachment case against Trump. He said, Thats a high crime and misdemeanor, and said, if thats not an impeachable offense, then theres no such thing.

Impeachment is the first step in the removal of a federal official from his or her office. The U.S. Senate is required by the Constitution to decide whether to remove an impeached president from office.

Raskin told about how he could not reach his own children that day at the Capitol. He talked about how others suffered and died. He said, "Senators, this cannot be our future. This cannot be the future of America. We cannot have presidents inciting and mobilizing mob violence against our government and our institutions because they refuse to accept the will of the people under the Constitution of the United States.



Bruce Castor was the first lawyer to represent Trump in his defense. In his opening statement Tuesday, Castor agreed that Trump had lost the election  a fact Trump never admitted.

President Trump is no longer in office, the lawyer said. The object of the Constitution has been achieved. He was removed by the voters.

Castor defended what Trump said to supporters as political speech. He argued that the former president has not been charged in any of the cases against the rioters. Reports say the U.S. government has charged more than 200 people with involvement in the Capitol attack. More charges are expected.

Another member of Trumps defense team said the impeachment trial is unconstitutional because Trump is out of office.

"Many Americans see this process for exactly what it is: a chance by a group of partisan politicians seeking to eliminate Donald Trump from the American political scene and seeking to disenfranchise 74 million-plus American voters," he said.

Trump is the first president to be impeached two times. He is also the first to face an impeachment charge after leaving office.

In a document sent to the Senate before the start of the trial, the House said President Trumps incitement of insurrection requires his conviction and disqualification from future federal officeholding.

A conviction would require a two-thirds majority of the Senate. That means at least 17 Republican Party senators would need to join the senates 50 Democrats and independents in voting against Trump.

Timothy Naftali is a professor at New York University and an expert on impeachment. He told the Associated Press, In trying to make sense of a second Trump trial, the public should keep in mind that Donald Trump was the first president ever to refuse to accept his defeat.

This trial is one way of having that difficult national conversation about the difference between dissent and insurrection, Naftali said.

Presidential impeachment trials have only been held three times before. All three, Andrew Johnson, Bill Clinton and then Trump last year, were found not guilty of the charges.

Im Caty Weaver.

Hai Do reported this story for VOA Learning English. Mario Ritter Jr. was the editor.

_______________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

manager n. someone who directs a specific effort

scene n. part of a movie or video

insurrection n. a usually violent attempt to take control of a government

achieve v. to reach a goal

partisan adj. strongly supporting one party over another

eliminate v. to remove

disenfranchise v. to prevent a person or group of people from having the right to vote as provided by law

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TBILISI -- Dozens of Georgian nationals suspected of being members of organized criminal groups have been apprehended in several European Union countries.

The Georgian Interior Ministry said on February 10 that the arrests in Italy, France, Greece, Poland, Slovenia, and Belgium were made a day earlier with the participation of Georgia's Criminal Police Department.

"Investigators found out that Georgian citizens had robbed apartments in northern Italy and used finances obtained via the robberies in their attempts to start legal businesses," the ministry said, adding that the suspects also used forged documents and false identities.

Of the individuals arrested, 23 were apprehended in Italy, two in Poland, and one each in Greece, Belgium, and Slovenia. The suspects were charged with the organization of a criminal group, theft, and money laundering. If found guilty, the suspects face up to 10 years in prison.

In France, police detained 18 Georgian nationals, including one person known as a "thief-in-law," the highest title in the hierarchy among criminals in the former Soviet Union.

That group was charged with thefts, participation in criminal activities, the trading of illegally obtained properties, and the illegal sales of smuggled tobacco products. If convicted, the members of this group also face up to 10 years in prison and may be ordered to pay up to 375,000 euros ($450,000) in fines.
Livingston Schools Superintendent Resigns

By West Kentucky Star Staff





LIVINGSTON COUNTY - During Monday's Livingston County School Board meeting, superintendent Victor Zimmerman announced his resignation.The resignation was approved by the board unanimously.Although Zimmerman resigned as superintendent, he will continue to serve the district as an independent consultant.Following the announcement, Daryl Chittenden was named as interim superintendent.Chittenden retired from Livingston County Schools in 2015 after serving as superintendent for five years. Beyond his role as superintendent, he has worked for the school system in various roles for 27 years.Chittenden told West Kentucky Star it's an honor to come back to the school system.He said, "Just the opportunity to come back home where I taught, where I served as an administrator before, it's an honor and a privilege to be able to come back here."Crittenden says his goal is to make the transition to a new superintendent as smooth and seamless as possible."I want everyone to know that I'm here to try to provide stability and a good transition for the remainder of this school year so that the students will finish the year as they should and everything will operate smoothly up until the point that a new superintendent can take over," Crittenden continued.You can see the full meeting below.
Photo: Saudi state television

Yemens Houthi rebels on Wednesday targeted an airport in southwestern Saudi Arabia causing a civilian plane on the tarmac to catch fire, the kingdom's state television reported, an attack that threatened to escalate Yemen's grinding war.

No one was hurt in the assault, but the damaged passenger plane at Abha airport served as a powerful reminder of the danger that Houthi rebels pose to Saudi Arabia, which nearly six years ago launched a bombing campaign that has devastated the Arab world's poorest country.

The Iran-aligned Houthis soon claimed responsibility for the assault, with military spokesman Yehia Sarea stressing that the Houthis consider Abha airport to be a military, not civilian, target.

This targeting comes in response to the continued aerial bombardment and the brutal siege of our country, Sarea said, adding the group attacked with four bomb-laden drones.

Col. Turki al-Maliki, the spokesman for the Saudi-led military coalition fighting in Yemen, said forces earlier intercepted and destroyed two drones launched by Houthis toward the country's south. He condemned the assault as a systematic and deliberate attempt to target civilians."

Photographs later aired by Saudi state television showed the aircraft, a 3-year-old Airbus A320 flown by low-cost carrier FlyADeal. It appeared the drone had punched a hole through its fuselage, with scorch marks on the metal. An anchor on state television said there were no injuries on the ground from the fire. FlyADeal did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Since 2015, the Houthis battling the Saudi-led military coalition have targeted international airports, along with military installations and critical oil infrastructure, within Saudi Arabia. The Houthis repeatedly have used drones against Saudi Arabia, including crashing them into the kingdoms Patriot missile batteries, most recently on Sunday when the coalition said it intercepted five booby-trapped drones. Those attacks, often striking near the southern cities of Abha and Jizan, have wounded dozens and killed at least one person in recent years.

As recently as late January, U.S. forces stationed at Prince Sultan Air Base near Riyadh trained Saudi troops on how to counter the threat posed by drones, which can fly low to the ground, evade radar and detonate against targets in the kingdom.

Saudi officials have blamed Iran for providing ballistic missiles to the Houthis used in such attacks against the kingdom. Tehran denies arming to the Houthis, despite evidence to the contrary.

The attack late Wednesday afternoon reportedly was the first to impact a civilian aircraft at the facility. Flight-tracking websites showed delayed and cancelled flights scheduled to either take off or land at the airport. Flights at Abha airport resumed some time after the attack.
A group of Arab and European countries nicknamed The Munich Group is lobbying Israeli and Palestinian leaders to commit to a package of confidence-building measures, Israeli and European diplomats tell me.

Why it matters: The initiative from France, Germany, Egypt and Jordan is the only active effort to create some movement in the frozen Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

They're hoping to improve the atmosphere between the Israelis and Palestinians as the Biden administration reviews its policy on the issue.

But European diplomats say both sides are hesitant to take any steps without the participation of the Biden administration.

Flashback: The initiative began last February when the four countries' foreign ministers met on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference in an attempt to start a dialogue with the Palestinians after the Trump peace plan was presented.

The countries later convened to coordinate a response to Israel's annexation plan, which was taken off the table last fall.

When the group met in Cairo a month ago, they wanted the Israeli and Palestinian foreign ministers to join them, but COVID-19 restrictions and political sensitivities in Israel made that impossible.

Driving the news: Last week, the ambassadors of the four countries met with the director general of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, Alon Ushpiz, and presented him with possible steps Israel could take.

They included providing more vaccines to Palestinian medical teams, unfreezing the bank accounts of Palestinian prisoners and transferring the dead bodies of suspected Palestinian terrorists, which are withheld by Israeli security forces.

The most substantial request was a freeze on all new settlement building in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. That's always a politically charged issue, but particularly so during an Israeli election campaign.

A similar meeting was held in Ramallah between diplomats from the four countries and Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Malki.

They presented him with steps the Palestinians could take, such as enhancing coordination with Israel on COVID-19, reconvening a joint civilian committee that deals with issues in the West Bank and Gaza, and reforming the system of payments the Palestinian Authority makes to prisoners in Israeli prisons, European diplomats say.

What's next: The foreign ministers of the four countries proposed that the Israeli and Palestinian foreign ministers meet them separately in Paris in early March to discuss the proposals.

The Israelis rejected most of the proposed steps out of hand. Ushpiz told the ambassadors he was surprised that a forum aimed at reassuring the Palestinians turned into a forum to demand steps from Israel.

When I see this evolution, I have to rethink if we are even interested in engaging with this initiative," Ushpiz told the ambassadors, according to European diplomats.

He also stressed that the initiative cant exclude the Biden administration. The ambassadors replied that the initiative is intended to help the new U.S. administration.

According to the European diplomats, al-Malki said he was prepared to attend the meeting in Paris and consider the proposal, while stressing the need to coordinate the initiative with the Biden administration.

Go deeper: Potential war crimes probe pulls Biden into Israel-Palestine conflict
COVID situation going from bad to worse; PM, health min refuse to own responsibility: Chidambaram

Cant say Centre did not anticipate the consequence: P Chidambaram

Proud to be andolan jeevi: Chidambaram

India

oi-Deepika S

New Delhi, Feb 10: Congress leader Chidambaram took a dig at Prime Minister Narendra Modi and said he is a proud andolan jeevi.

"I am a proud andolan jeevi. The quintessential andolan jeevi was Mahatma Gandhi," he said in a tweet.

On Monday, Modi hit out at those behind the protests, saying a new crop of agitators has emerged in India who cannot live without agitation and the country should be beware of them.

"There is a new crop of ''andolan jeevi''. They live for protests. They look for ways to start a new movement.

"The country needs to be aware of these andolan jeevi," the PM said in the Upper House of Parliament while replying to the Motion of Thanks on the President''s address.

Twitter blocks portion of accounts, cites free speech | OneIndia News

However, opposition leaders and farmers' unions have condemned as an "insult of farmers by the Prime Minister by calling them andolan-jivi (survivors on protests)".

For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications

Story first published: Wednesday, February 10, 2021, 12:28 [IST]





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WASHINGTON  New York could receive as much as $23 billion in federal aid to state and local governments from the coronavirus relief bill that Congress is expected to pass in the next few weeks.

The House version of the bill allocates $12.7 billion for New York's state government and $10.6 billion to county, city and town governments, according to proposed allocations shared with the Times Union. Under the House bill, Albany County would get $60 million and the city of Albany would receive $79 million. Local towns are also expected to receive hundreds of thousands of dollars.

A congressional aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details on unfinished legislation, said the estimates are the maximum New York governments should expect and when the Senate finishes its version, the final tallies could drop.

Asked about the forthcoming aid, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo reiterated his claim Wednesday that it's not enough and state government needs at least $15 billion to avoid budget cuts.

"There is no distribution formula for that $350 billion that does not get the state of New York $15 billion which is fair, in my opinion," Cuomo said. "This state was ambushed by COVID; it came here for three months and no one told us because the federal government failed. We were subjected and victimized by federal negligence. Provide the relief to the places that were damaged."

Cuomo has repeatedly said there is a $15 billion gap between estimated revenue and spending, although others, including state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli, peg the deficit as being far less and likely half that amount.

Cuomo on Wednesday also reiterated a controversial call for the federal government to direct federal aid for schools, hospitals and local governments to the state for distribution. Cuomo made the same claim in a letter last week that was criticized by Democrats and Republicans.

"The federal government wants to distribute to schools and local governments and hospitals and all these other entities," Cuomo said. "Just give it to the state. Who do you think we fund? I fund the schools and the hospitals and the same entities. In many ways, what the federal government is doing is duplicative, but the state needs $15 billion and that's the actual need."

New York state agencies have already received at least $28 billion through the multiple coronavirus relief bills that have been passed. Those numbers do not include the billions of federal relief sent directly to small businesses, individuals, local governments and health care providers.

Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., has insisted that $350 billion in funds to state and local governments be included in the new coronavirus relief package, up from the $160 billion proposed by centrist senators in December.

"For nearly a year now, Ive met with local upstate leaders  both Republicans and Democrats  struggling to meet the needs of their communities during a pandemic without adequate federal support," said U.S. Rep. Antonio Delgado, D-Rhinebeck. "Last May, I introduced the Direct Support for Communities Act, the only proposal at the time to give federal funding to all localities, regardless of population size. My bill passed the House twice last year, only to stall in the Senate both times. Im proud that my colleagues have once again chosen my bill as the vehicle."

The December coronavirus package passed by Congress included no direct grants to state and local governments, but did provide money to the Federal Emergency Management Agency to reimburse state and local governments for their coronavirus expenses, like paying for vaccine and testing sites. The state has negotiated a deal to get $934 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to cover its projected vaccine costs.

In addition, the coronavirus bill includes billions in direct aid to schools and other forms of relief. It's expected to include $11 billion for K-12 and college education in New York, $1.8 billion for child care providers and $8 billion for transportation authorities.

Many Republicans have opposed large amounts of direct aid to state governments, calling them "blue state bail-outs." But Democrats will move ahead with the money in the coronavirus bill that they will pass through the reconciliation budget process, which can be approved by simple majorities, eliminating the need for Republican votes.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 10) - The Binibining Pilipinas Charities, Inc. officially confirmed that current contestant Samantha Bernardo was appointed to represent the Philippines in the Miss Grand International pageant in Thailand in March.

The local pageant explained reigning Bb. Pilipinas Grand International Aya Abesamis was not able to compete internationally due to the age limit, after the Miss Grand International pageant was delayed because of the pandemic.

"We extend our full support to her [Bernardo] in her quest to win the first MGI crown for the country," BPCI said in a statement.

"Also, our heart goes out to Aya Abesamis for being unable to join MGI 2020 due to age limit, caused by the delay of the MGI contest because of the COVID-19 pandemic," it added.

Bernardo was crowned 2nd runner-up in her first two attempts in Bb. Pilipinas in 2018 and 2019.

Meanwhile, Abesamis was initially crowned 1st runner-up in 2019, but took over the Bb. Pilipinas Grand International title from Samantha Lo after the latter resigned.

But the BPCI noted that Abesamis would still pass her crown during the coronation night in April.

The highest that the Philippines reached in the pageant was a 1st runner-up finish, courtesy of Nicole Cordoves in 2016.
New Delhi, Feb 10 : Congress MP from Gujarat Shakti Singh Gohil on Wednesday in Rajya Sabha raised the issue of fishermen languishing in Pakistan jails.

Gohil said, "Gujarat maritime borders are with Pakistan and the Marines of Pakistan arrests the fishermen and their boats and puts them in jail. There are 400 fishermen and 1,100 vessels in Pakistan captivity." He requested the government 'to do something for the release of the fishermen and vessels in Pakistan'. He also demanded an increase in the patrolling by the Indian forces to stop the Pakistan Maritime Security Agency (MSA) to nab the fishermen.

As per reports India and Pakistan exchanged a list of prisoners in 2020. According to it, 270 Indian fishermen and 54 civilians are in Pakistan's prisons. Out of these, around 100 Indian fishermen have already completed their sentences and their nationality has also been confirmed.

The fishing boats are also confiscated when the men are arrested. These boats are their primary source of livelihood. More than 1,000 fishing boats of Indian fishermen have been confiscated by Pakistan's Maritime Security Agency.
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A special PMLA court here on Wednesday sent former Uttar Pradesh cabinet minister to a seven-day (ED) custody after he was arrested by the agency in a linked to disproportionate assets, officials said.

The agency had sought at least 10 days' custody from the court to "dig out details of funds and 59 immovable properties worth Rs 20.90 crore" allegedly amassed by Prajapati and his family members using purported proceeds of crime earned from illegal mining and other avenues.

Prajapati was booked last month by the agency in a fresh after analysing an Uttar Pradesh Police vigilance FIR filed against him on charges of possessing alleged disproportionate assets, sources said.

A special court for hearing cases filed under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) sent him to ED custody for seven days, beginning Thursday, they said.

Prajapati, who held the mining portfolio in the Samajwadi Party government led by Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav, is also accused of raping a woman and attempting to molest her minor daughter along with others.

In this case, he was arrested and sent to jail on March 15, 2017 and has been in judicial custody since then.

The ED had raided a number of his premises and those of his associated at Lucknow, Kanpur and Amethi in December last year.

The agency had then said that during the raids it seized Rs 1.42 lakh cash, demonetised currency valuing Rs 11.50 lakh, stamp papers worth Rs 5 lakh, some property-related documents and computers.

"During the search, more than 100 registries of different properties spread across Lucknow, Kanpur, Amethi, Sitapur and others were unearthed.

"In addition, allotment letters of four villas in Mumbai, valued at Rs 2.5 crore each, belonging to the family members of the former minister were also seized," it had said in a statement.

The agency added its probe found that "after the arrest of Prajapati in March, 2017 in a rape case, his sons have clandestinely sold off some of the properties for personal gains and influencing key witnesses in the trial case against him."



It had claimed that "cash deposits in the bank accounts of Prajapati family members and companies were found to be non-commensurate with their income tax filings".

"It was revealed that during the period the accused (Prajapati) remained minister in the UP government his company rose exponentially in net worth which he could not explain satisfactorily during his examination," the ED had said.

The ED added that his family members "had paid substantial tax on undisclosed income" under the Union government initiated Income Declaration Scheme (IDS) or the black money declaration scheme of 2016.

It said the probe against benami asset holders of Prajapati "revealed that they were daily wage earners from humble backgrounds and incapable of owning or acquiring the properties found during investigation".

"Twenty-three properties ranging between Rs 3-36 lakh in the name of a single benami, and whose residence was also searched, have also been found," the agency had said.

The ED is also probing his role in connection with the renewal of sand mining leases in Fatehpur district between 2012-2016.

It has been alleged in this case that Prajapati, "in collusion with other government officials and private persons, got the mining leases renewed without following proper process of e-tendering and thereby aiding and abetting illegal mining in the district.

(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.)
[February 10, 2021] Cerevance Appoints Naidong Ye, Ph.D., As Vice President and Head of Chemistry, Manufacturing and Controls

BOSTON, Feb. 10, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Cerevance, a private drug discovery and development company focused on brain diseases, today announced the appointment of Naidong Ye, Ph.D., a seasoned chemist with extensive pharmaceutical industry experience, as vice president and head of chemistry, manufacturing and controls (CMC).

Prior to joining Cerevance, Dr. Ye served as vice president of CMC for Millendo Therapeutics, a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company focused on developing novel treatments for endocrine diseases. While at Millendo, Dr. Ye was responsible for all CMC-related activities, including two late-stage programs. Before Millendo, Dr. Ye was senior director, head of CMC operations for AstraZenecas Neuroscience Innovative Medicines (NS iMed), where he led CMC operations for all small molecule development projects. In this role, Dr. Ye was responsible for projects ranging from candidate drug nomination to large scale, global pivotal trials. Earlier in his career, Dr. Ye served as chief technology officer for Dongguan Jinmeiji Pharmaceutical Co., and held leadership positions as both a scientist and CMC lead at several life sciences companies, including Pharmos Corporation, ViroPharma and Nycomed. It is wth great pleasure that we welcome Naidong to Cerevance as we continue making significant progress in both our clinical development and drug discovery efforts, said David H. Margolin, senior vice president of clinical and translational medicine at Cerevance. His expertise in the production and formulation of small molecule pharmaceuticals for CNS indications will be invaluable as we prepare to conduct Phase 2 and first-in-human studies of several novel compounds this year.



Dr. Ye commented, Cerevances rapid progress in finding new druggable targets and compounds that modulate them has created a pipeline of potentially transformative treatments for patients with diverse brain disorders. I welcome the challenge of formulating and supplying each drug for use in preclinical and clinical studies. Dr. Ye earned a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from Zhongshan University and a doctorate in chemistry from Ohio State University.

About Cerevance

Cerevance, a private, clinical-stage pharmaceutical company focused on brain diseases, is applying a new technology, called NETSseq, to reveal transcriptional and epigenetic differences between specific cell types in human brains spanning nine decades in age. NETSseq profiles neuronal and glial cell populations at depths not possible with other approaches, generating unprecedented data sets and insights. The company has thus far partnered with 20 brain banks around the world to assemble a growing collection of more than 8,000 clinically annotated, human brain tissue samples from healthy and diseased donors. By applying NETSseq to specific cell types critical to circuits disrupted by disease and comparing vulnerable and resilient cell populations, Cerevances scientists have begun identifying targets and advancing a pipeline of novel therapeutics that modulate them for CNS diseases. Contacts Cerevance:

Robert Middlebrook, +1-408-220-5722 Media:

Andrew Mielach, amielach@lifescicomms.com, +1-646-876-5868



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A member of the Lagos State Judicial Panel of Inquiry into the Lekki Tollgate Shooting, Ebun-Olu Adegboruwa, has called on youth to shelve the planned protest and counter-protest at the toll gate this Saturday.

Mr Adegboruwa, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), made this appeal on Wednesday in a statement.

The alleged bloodshed, mayhem, repressions and violence of October 2020 in general, should not be encouraged to be repeated again, he wrote, appealing to youths not to go ahead with the protests.

PREMIUM TIMES reported how Doris Okuwobi, the chairperson of the Judicial Panel returned the control of Lekki Tollgate to the Lekki Concession Company last Saturday.

This, however, stirred controversy at the panel with four out of the nine-man panel expressing dissenting views to the ruling.

Mr Adegboruwa was one of the four members of the Panel that formed the minority group which disagreed with ruling on the reopening of Lekki Tollgate.

The senior lawyer and three others fiercely opposed the ruling of the retired judge heading the panel and four others that Lekki tollgate should be reopened.

Following the repossession order, youths have taken to the social media to express outrage and planned the #occupyLekkitollgate protest against the reopening of the toll gate.

A counter-protest #DefendLagos also surfaced on the social media, on Thursday, with some youth planning to defend Lagos State.

Both the protest and counter-protest will hold at the Lekki Toll Gate on Saturday, February 13, 2021.

Call for Peace

Mr Adegboruwa, in his statement, on Wednesday, appealed that the protest and counter-protest be shelved.

Giving reasons for the call, he said the Judicial Panel of Inquiry was still sitting and yet to make any finding or recommendations on the Lekki Toll Gate Incident of October 20, 2020.

Im concerned about the consequences of protests and counter-protests, at the same location, in relation to security and likely violation of COVID 19 protocols, given the rising wave of the pandemic, in Lagos State especially, where most economic, social, educational and other activities, are partially grounded, presently, the lawyer wrote.

He said although Section 39 of the 1999 Constitution has granted to every person the right to freedom of expression, and freedom to hold opinions, it must be done with caution.

The Panels of Inquiry that were set up were all done in response to the EndSARS five for five demands. It will be good to await the decisions of these Panels.

A protest or counter-protest at this time, may work to jeopardize the overall work of the Panel, the witnesses appearing or to appear, the testimonies, the investigations or even affect its ultimate assignment, he said.

The senior lawyer added that the ruling of the chairperson of the panel and the dissenting ruling of other members of the panel are interlocutory decisions, which will be collated for necessary action.

He said the investigation of the Lekki shooting incident which is yet to be concluded should not be the basis for renewed calls for protest and counter-protest.

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It is safer for now, for the Lagos State Government and its agencies, the EndSARS group and indeed all those concerned with the Lekki Toll Gate Incident, to await the final report of the Panel, he wrote.

While urging the youth to put the planned protests on hold, the lawyer appealed to all security agencies, especially the police and the army, to embrace caution and demonstrate utmost respect for the fundamental rights of all citizens, including protesters, counter-protesters and non-protesters alike.
COLUMBIA, S.C.  South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster on Monday removed the head of the State Accident Fund, calling for an investigation into whether she improperly steered a $600,000 government contract to her husbands company.

In a letter, McMaster asked State Inspector General Brian Lamkin to conduct a thorough investigation to determine whether criminal violations of state law have occurred, writing that his office was tipped off in January to allegations that Amy Cofields agency had hired her husband, Jimmy Terrapin, as a contractor.

Cofield has led the agency responsible for workers compensation insurance for nearly 200,000 employees in the state since McMaster appointed her in 2019. She confirmed the arrangement _ which calls for her husband to work nearly 40 hours a week at $150 an hour for the next two years, or about $300,000 a year _ when questioned by McMasters attorney, the governor wrote.

These procurement actions raise significant ethical and legal questions about the conduct of employees at the State Accident Fund, McMaster said in a statement.

Last year, the fund sought a consultants help with picking and implementing a new software program to handle a case management system. But Cofield said no one responded to an initial request for bids. Cofield told media outlets she knew her husband could do the job and assumed it would be a conflict of interest to hire him, with the process only proceeding once procurement officials approved it.

I would never, never, never, never have done anything wrong and jeopardized this job, Cofield told The State. I love this job.

Cofield told media outlets she was shocked by the removal, suggesting that a disgruntled employee had turned on her and reported the deal, which she said had been sanctioned by procurement officials.

Cofield alleged that Tommy Windsor, a former McMaster aide and now the funds government affairs director, was denied a job as her chief of staff and chose to get back at her by reporting the situation to the governor.

I know he was mad, Cofield told The Post and Courier. Im not happy about his unloyalty.

A spokesman for McMaster had no comment about Windsor or whether he informed the governors office about the contract. Windsor did not respond to messages Monday.

McMaster and Windsor have a long history. In 2003, then-Attorney General McMaster re-hired Windsor as a special investigator, seven years after Windsors resignation over sending a derogatory e-mail. At the time, McMaster called Windsors earlier action a stupid mistake that had been meant as a satirical gag.

The governor said Monday that Erin Farthing, the agencys chief counsel, will serve as acting director until a permanent replacement is nominated and confirmed by the state Senate.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.


Six former VNPF staff brought a claim of constructive dismissal from employment to the court. The claim was struck out by the court following an application by VNPF

Barclay Training Center, Monrovia - Liberian Defense boss, Major General Daniel D. Ziankahn, Jr., (Rtd.),has called for reinforced relationship between the French Defense Sector and its Liberian counterpart.

He said despite cordial working relationship between the two sectors, it will be more beneficiary to the Liberian Defense Sector, if the two sectors can reinforce existing relationship to enable them deal with emerging threats, such as piracy and terrorism.

Minister Ziankahn assured the French delegation of Liberia's commitment in working along with the Government of France and learning from its maritime expertise that continues to benefit both Liberian Coast Guard and staffs of the Ministry of National Defense.

Minister Ziankahn lauded the Government of France for its valuable services being rendered to the Liberian Government, most especially, the training of personnel of the Armed Forces of Liberia (AFL) and the Ministry of National Defense by extension.

He lauded the French Defense Sector for their participation in the AFL pre-deployment trainings for peacekeeping operations in Mali, stressing that it has benefited the AFL in more ways such as lessening the fatality rate of Liberian troops deployed in Mali.
Johannesburg, Feb 10 : South Africa is now planning to use Johnson and Johnson's Covid-19 vaccine after putting brakes on the AstraZeneca vaccines against the disease as it was found less effective against a new variant in a study.

"Given the outcomes of the efficacy studies, the Department of Health will continue with the planned phase 1 vaccination using the Johnson & Johnson vaccine instead of the AstraZeneca vaccine," South Africa's Health Minister Zweli Mkhize said on Wednesday in a public briefing on the government's Covid-19 vaccine roll out.

A total of 1 million AstraZeneca vaccine doses arrived in South Africa on February 1 and will expire in April, triggering fears that the cost spent on procuring these vaccines will be wasted.

Dismissing such fears, Mkhize said the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines could be swapped for new ones before their expiry date.

"The government's process of procuring vaccines preceded the discovery of the 501Y.V2 variant and other variants," he said, while addressing the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine's lack of effectiveness against the 501Y.V2 strand of Covid-19.

"We will look at the value and what alternatives there are that we can swop Astrazenica for. There is flexibility from Covax," he said.

He also said the government was holding talks with a number of manufacturers and vaccines from different countries were being considered.

"We are in advanced stages of evaluating and engaging the manufacturers of the Sputnik -V candidate. Engagements with Sinopharm also continue with an offer made by China currently being considered," he said.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on February 10 that the private sector is as important as the public sector for development, in one of the most forceful endorsements by a senior policymaker of the role that businesses can play to distribute wealth and create jobs.

Take any sectortelecom, pharmawe see the role of the private sector. If India is able to serve humanity, it is also due to the role of the private sector, Modi said, while replying to the Motion of Thanks on the Presidents address in the Lok Sabha.

Modis statement is a marked departure from previous governments that were reluctant to associate, let alone endorse, with private enterprises due to the dominance of a socialist agenda in policymaking. The remarks, coming soon after the unveiling of the budget in which the finance minister laid bare a clear intent to chase growth and reduce involvement in the public sector, signals that the reform agenda of the government should be in full swing.

Modi said it was not right to malign wealth creators as they were important for generating employment in the country. Wealth creators are required in the country. How else can wealth be distributed, who will create employment, the PM asked.

Successive governments have been keen to distance themselves from the private sector for fear of inviting criticism that they would be seen pro-elite and anti-poor. Indeed, the Modi government itself has often had to backpedal on reforms. Even as recent as the farmer protests against new agricultural laws, the government faced backlash for its pro-business outlook.

On Wednesday, Modi signalled that it would no longer fret over such attacks. The PM said that to use improper words against the private sector may have got votes to a few people in the past but those times are gone. The culture of abusing the private sector is not acceptable any longer. We cannot keep insulting our youth like this," he said.

Modi also unleashed a broadside against Indias overweening bureaucracy, which has long been accused of stalling growth.

Babus (IAS officers) cannot do everything. An IAS cannot run a fertiliser factory, a chemical factory or fly a plane. What do we want to achieve by giving the country in the hands of babus (IAS officers).

Initiatives of the Modi government, much like its predecessors, too have faced delays due die to Indias statist bureaucracy. Red tape is often blamed for the difficulties in implementing welfare measures and doing business.

Babus are as much ours as are our youth. The more we give chance to our youth, the better it is, Modi said.

'Should differentiate between andolankaris and andolanjeevis'

PM Modi said he considered the Kisan Andolan (Farmers Protest) pious, but expressed concern over andolanjeevis, people who survive on protests, hijacking it.

When Andolanjeevis hijack protest, showcase photos of those jailed for serious offences, does it serve any purpose? Not allowing toll plazas to work, destroying telecom towers-does it serve pious protests, he said asserting that the protestors (andolankaris) should be differentiated from andolanjeevis'."

The PM launched an attack on the Opposition and said those who disrupted the House proceedings were doing so as per a well-planned strategy. On the farm laws, he said his government respected farmers, but they needed to come up with specific demands which could be changed in the law.

After the Laws relating to agriculture were passed by Parliament  no mandi has been shut. Likewise, MSP has remained. Procurement on MSP has remained. These facts cant be ignored, he said.

'Congress a confused party'

"The Congress party is divided and confused. Neither it can work for its own good nor it can think about solving the issues of the country. What can be more unfortunate than this," he asked.

Earlier, Opposition MPs created an uproar in the Lok Sabha as Prime Minister started speaking. Congress and TMC MPs staged walkout during his speech.

I am surprised for the first time a new argument has come that we did not ask, so why did you give. Be it dowry or triple talaq, no one had demanded a law for this, but due to being necessary for progressive society, the law was made, he said.

Enacted in September 2020, the three farm laws have been projected by the Centre as major reforms in the agriculture sector. But, thousands of protesting farmers, primarily from Punjab and Haryana, have been camping at several Delhi border points for over two months, demanding the repeal of the laws, and a legal guarantee on minimum support prices (MSP) for their crops.
As the European Union began its campaign to line up vaccines, it was slower off the mark, focused on prices while the United States and Britain made money no object, and succumbed to an abundance of regulatory caution. All of those things have left the bloc flat-footed as drugmakers fall behind on their promised orders.

But the 27 countries of the European Union are also attempting something they have never tried before and have broken yet another barrier in their deeper integration  albeit shakily  by casting their lot together in the vaccine hunt.

In doing so, they have inverted the blocs usual power equation. Bigger, richer countries like Germany and France  which could have afforded to sign contracts directly with drugmakers, as the United States and Britain did  saw their vaccine campaigns delayed by the more cumbersome joint effort, while smaller countries wound up with better supply terms than they were likely to have negotiated on their own.

For the bulk of E.U. nations, that experiment has been beneficial. But it has not necessarily been greeted happily in the wealthiest countries, and it has left leaders like Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President Emmanuel Macron of France open to criticism at home.
On February 9, the World Health Organization confirmed that the SARS-CoV-2 virus evolved naturally, possibly in bats in southeast China, and passed to humans either directly or through another intermediary species. It ruled out the hypothesis that the virus had been made by humans and released into the wild.

These findings were presented in preliminary fashion at a press briefing which concluded the 12-day joint WHO-China mission to study the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus which has caused the COVID-19 pandemic. The mission, which included 17 medical experts from 10 countries, was a follow-up to the initial January 2020 investigation into the origins of the virus and provided more details about the path of transmission from animals to humans.

A worker wearing a hazardous materials suit takes the temperature of a passenger at the entrance to a subway station in Beijing, Sunday, Jan. 26, 2020. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

The results were released at a critical stage of the pandemic. An average of more than 12,000 people are dying everyday worldwide, and a total of more than 2.34 million are now dead. There have been more than 107 million confirmed cases of the coronavirus since the pandemic began in December 2019, and nearly 26 million people have known active infections. New, more infectious and deadly variants of the virus have spawned in Britain, South Africa and Brazil, all of which threaten a renewed surge of the deadly pandemic.

The team examined four ways for the virus to have emerged, including directly from wildlife to people, from wildlife to people through some number of intermediate hosts, from wildlife to people though food and from a laboratory.

Our initial findings suggest that the introduction through an intermediary host species is the most likely pathway and one that will require more studies and more specific targeted research, said Dr. Peter Embarek, a specialist in food safety and zoonotic diseases and the leader of the WHO delegation. He continued, All the work that has been done on the virus and trying to identify its origin continue to point toward a natural reservoir.

Such natural reservoirs include local farms, where viruses jump from animal to animal, as well as the possibility of an origin in animals from another country in Southeast Asia.

The WHO-China mission also addressed concerns that the virus was circulating widely before it was detected, noting that there was no indication that the virus was circulating in broader parts of the world before being detected in Wuhan at the end of December 2019. At most, epidemiological teams led by Thea Fischer found that the virus had been circulating outside of the infamous Huanan wet markets, indicating more potential ways for the virus to have begun infecting humans.

Embarek also made clear that, the findings suggest that the laboratory incidents hypothesis is extremely unlikely to explain the introduction of the virus to the human population, and that it would no longer be viewed as an avenue of study.

Such statements are a direct refutation of allegations first made by ruling circles in the United States and Europe last year, that the virus was made by Chinese authorities and that COVID-19 is a product of Chinese germ-warfare programs. The center of this campaign has been unfounded accusations that the virus was made and released by the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and that the Chinese government concealed this fact while stockpiling medical supplies to whether the initial storm.

This was promoted most heavily by then-US President Donald Trump, who alluded that China was knowingly responsible for the pandemic. The media latched on to this narrative, with the Washington Post for example making the incendiary remark in an editorial that the coronavirus was spread from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, breathlessly noting that researchers there had carried out research on bat coronaviruses.

Even then, the scientific evidence clearly showed such claims to be false. A study written by US and UK biologists and published in Nature stated in no uncertain terms, Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus. A different study from a group of US physicians wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine that, SARS-CoV-2 did not escape from a jar.

Those same physicians also noted the coronavirus RNA sequences closely resemble those of viruses that silently circulate in bats, and epidemiologic information implicates a bat-origin virus infecting unidentified animal species sold in Chinas live-animal markets. They further commented on the increasing likelihood of encountering zoonotic disease. It took the genome of the human species 8 million years to evolve by 1 percent. Many animal RNA viruses can evolve by more than 1 percent in a matter of days. It is not difficult to understand why we increasingly see the emergence of zoonotic viruses.

Moreover, it is a matter of public record that Chinese health authorities reacted swiftly to the emergence of the new coronavirus. The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission reported a cluster of pneumonia cases on December 31, 2019. China informed the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on January 3 and on January 7 identified the virus that causes COVID-19. Chinese health authorities updated the WHO and warned of the dangers of human-to-human transmission of the disease.

On January 22, Beijing locked down Wuhan and the entire province of Hubei to contain the spread of the disease. This allowed the country to contain and suppress the virus to the extent that there has been no reported death of the coronavirus in China since last May. It is not a statement of political agreement with the Chinese government to admit these facts.

The opposite is now taking place in the United States, Brazil, Europe and other world powers. In the face of emerging and more infectious variants, lockdown measures are being lifted as swiftly and completely as possible. It was the unimpeded circulation of the coronavirus in animals that allowed it to evolve to infect humans in the first place, and it is the unimpeded circulation in humans that is making the virus more deadly.

As WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus noted in remarks on Monday, These results are a reminder that we need to do everything we can to reduce circulation of the virus with proven public health measures. He again stated that non-pharmaceutical interventions, which include lockdowns of schools and nonessential businesses, are critical in denying the virus the opportunity to spread, and the opportunity to change in ways that could make vaccines less effective.

By Tony Hicks

Bay City News Foundation

Younger children can head back to school and local church congregations can move back indoors, county health officials told the Contra Costa County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday, saying COVID-19 numbers are again down this week.

"We are happy to report that, according to the state data, school districts may choose to reopen grades K through 6, starting (Wednesday) and we've reached five days where we were below the threshold where states are allowed to resume K through 6 in-person education, that's below 25 cases per 100,000 per day," said health officer, Dr. Chris Farnitano.

"The higher grades, 7 through 12, will be allowed to open when our county is below the state's red tier for at least five days."

Farnitano said state guidelines don't require teachers and other school staff to be vaccinated to go back to in-person learning. He said at least 14 schools from nine districts have already submitted re-opening plans to the county.

Church congregations no larger than 25 people can also return indoors with safety precautions, for the first time in 2021. The Supreme Court ruled last week against California in two lawsuits challenging the legality of the state's restrictions on indoor worship. The state can, however, continue banning meals associated with services, and singing and chanting, due to increased risk of virus spread.

"But it's important to point out that, just because something is allowed by the state, doesn't necessarily mean it's not without risk," Farnitano said. "Indoor religious gatherings are still considered much higher risk than outdoor religious service or virtual services."

County health director Dr. Anna Roth told the board COVID-19 numbers are falling "across the board." She said more county residents with vaccine appointments outnumbered doses available in the county, which recently moved from only vaccinating people 75 and older into the next tier, for those 65 to 74.

"Like every other state in our nation, California continues to struggle with vaccine scarcity," Roth said. "As well as how to best administer the vaccine in an equitable and efficient manner."

Health department Chief Equity Officer Gilbert Salinas said the county is trying to reach communities that so far have been underrepresented by vaccine numbers, with increased mobile clinics. "That's how we dig into our communities that are most impacted," he said.

More information on vaccines can be found at www.CCHealth.org, where county residents can also register for appointments. Residents can also call the vaccination help center at 833-829-2626 and either wait to talk to a staff member or leave a message for a return call.

Copyright  2021 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited.
The NHS is under pressure to change its official list of coronavirus symptoms after another study found coughs, loss of taste and smell and a fever were not the only signs of the disease.

A Government-led study of a million people in England revealed infected patients were also likely to suffer headaches, muscle pains, chills or a loss of appetite.

But current Test and Trace rules mean people only suffering those symptoms would not be able to access to a test and therefore may not self-isolate. Swabs are reserved for people with a fever, continuous cough or loss of smell or taste.

Professor Paul Elliott, who led the REACT study, said the results highlight how many infected people are slipping through the cracks due to the narrow guidance.

He added: 'I hope that our findings on the most informative symptoms mean that the testing programme can take advantage of the most up-to-date evidence, helping to identify more infected people.'

The study said the national testing scheme should pick up about half of all symptomatic infections if everyone with the three classic symptoms. However, if the four extra symptoms were included this could be bolstered to three quarters.

The findings came from swabs test and questionnaires collected between last June and January as part of the REACT study.

They come on the back of a reporter by Office for National Statistics yesterday, which also linked headaches and muscle pains to Covid infection.

The UK has repeatedly been accused of playing catch up with the rest of the world when it comes to spotting Covid throughout the crisis.

In the US, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warns of 11 primary symptoms, including fatigue, body aches, headache, sore throat and shortness of breath  but admits the virus can cause an array of other side effects.

Findings from swabs and questionnaires carried out between last June and December, when the original Covid strain was the dominant version in the UK

Findings from swabs and questionnaires carried out this January, when the Kent strain accounted for 86 per cent of infections

The UK has been accused of missing 'the majority' of Covid-19 cases because it still only recognises three tell-tale signs of the infection (the NHS website, shown)

The REACT programme, led by Imperial College London, looked at nearly a million random swabs sent to homes in England between June and January and compared them to people's self-reported symptoms.

It found that up to a quarter of adults suffered from one of the three current official symptoms listed by the NHS.

WHAT WERE THE MOST COMMON SYMPTOMS? Below are the data from the REACT study looking at adults aged 18 to 54 between last June and December: Symptom % of patients Headache Tiredness Muscle aches Loss of smell Sore throat Blocked nose Sneezing Runny nose Loss of taste Difficulty sleeping Chills Fever Appetite loss Persistent cough 26.6% 23.4% 18.3% 15% 14.8% 14.5% 13.6% 12.9% 12.8% 11.7% 10.3% 9.4% 9.4% 8.9% Advertisement

Up to 26 per cent of adults who tested positive also complained of a sore head, while up to 18 per cent had muscle pains.

As many as one in 10 infected patients reported chills, and around the same number suffered a loss of appetite.

The REACT study also found a variation in symptoms between different age groups.

While chills were linked with testing positive across all ages, headaches were reported more commonly in young people aged five to 17.

Appetite loss was more prevalent in elderly and middle aged people and muscle aches were most common in patients between 18 and 54.

Infected five-to-17-year-olds were also less likely to report fever, persistent cough and appetite loss compared with adults.

The programme, funded by the Department of Health and Social Care, also found 60 per cent of people with Covid suffer no symptoms at all.

Doctors and experts have called for the criteria for coronavirus testing to be widened in the UK repeatedly over the course of the pandemic.

But policy makers must balance the benefit of picking up more positive cases that would have otherwise been missed with the risk that the testing system would become overwhelmed by people with symptoms unlikely to be coronavirus.

Only a small percentage of people even with the three main symptoms actually have coronavirus  currently only about 5.5 per cent of tests taken by members of the public are positive, according to Public Health England data.

This rose to 18 per cent at the height of the second wave over Christmas and the new year, but this still meant eight out of 10 people who thought they had the virus did not.

Scientists at King's College London who lead the ZOE Covid Symptom Study app have repeatedly called on ministers to expand their list.

Their app allows users to log symptoms whenever they suffer them and then whether they test positive for the virus, revealing other warning signs.

The team masterminded the push to get the NHS to include anosmia  or loss of taste and smell  in the symptoms list after it was previously excluded at the start of the pandemic.

The REACT study also explored whether the emergence of the UK's new coronavirus variant, first identified in Kent, was linked with a different profile of symptoms.

The team compared symptoms in November and December, when the Kent variant accounted for less than 20 per cent of cases, and January, when it made up 86 per cent of infections.

Office for National Statistics testing shows that fewer than half of people testing positive for coronavirus had any symptoms at all, with cough the most common at almost 30% in England

They found people with the mutant strain were more likely to suffer a cough and less likely to have a loss or change to sense of smell.

Dr Joshua Elliott, from Imperial College London's School of Public Health, said: 'As the epidemic progresses and new variants emerge, it's essential that we keep monitoring how the virus affects people so that testing programmes meet changing needs.

'We hope that our data will help inform testing guidance and the development of systems which could help better identify people who should take a COVID-19 test based on their symptoms.'

It comes after an ONS report, which was based on random community testing of around 9,000 people rather than people who came forward for swabs, found that 47 per cent of positive cases had symptoms.

This was similar in other parts of the UK, at 55 per cent in Wales, 47 per cent in Scotland and 38 per cent in Northern Ireland.

Most common symptoms among those who did get them were coughs, fatigue and weakness and headache.

Those symptoms each affected more than 25 per cent of people who were testing positive, the survey found.

By comparison in England, 19 per cent of people developed a fever and 22 per cent said they lost either their sense of taste or smell.

Swab tests were done by people across the UK between October 1 and January 30 and they were asked to describe any symptoms they had had within seven days of the test.
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2. Public safety. The crime rate is too high. Police pay and resources come first.

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The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
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A valet at a Boston hospital who was shot in the eye by police as officers confronted a man armed with what they thought was a real gun has sued his employer, saying the hospitals security staff mishandled ths situation.

Justin Desmarais, a valet at Brigham and Womens Hospital, was doing his job on Feb. 7, 2020, when he ended up with a gunshot wound to the head and right eye that left bullet fragments in his brain, according to the suit filed last month in Suffolk Superior Court, The Boston Globe reported Tuesday.

The events were set in motion by Juston Root, who was armed with a paintball gun.

When hospital security first interacted with Root, he was nonsensical, the lawsuit said. When Root showed his paintball gun, security bungled their response, mischaracterized the threat when they summoned police, and escalated matters while waiting for officers to arrive, the lawsuit said.

A spokesperson said Brigham and Womens Hospital does not comment on pending litigation.

The suit seeks a jury trial and unspecified damages.

Root, who had a history of mental health issues according to his family, fled the area in a car and was fatally shot by police a few miles away.

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We were only a few miles away from the hospital, but we might as well have been in another galaxy. Normally I wouldnt have minded that feeling since Ive spent most of my adult life in hospitals going through the different larval stages a medical trainee must on their way to their final form of an attending physician. But this current feeling of disconnect from the local hospital was unsettling because my normally healthy 19-year-old sister-in-law had suddenly found herself in the hospital in the middle of a pandemic.

The abdominal pain she had been experiencing the entire weekend was getting worse by the hour, and now she was reporting pools of dark red blood every time she used the bathroom. Symptoms that would usually prompt a no discussions visit to the ED were now being heavily scrutinized by everyone involved, most of all by my sister-in-law. I tried to reassure her about the low risk of transmission of SARS-CoV-2 while in the hospital and about the precautions hospitals were taking to keep everyone safe. And as I spoke to her, I could see the tears welling up in her eyes as she finally said what was lost on me but clearly weighing on everyone else in the room, I dont want to be alone in the hospital.

As hospitals adjust to their new normal in this pandemic, most have instituted strict, even draconian hospital visitor policies. Most hospitals have not allowed any visitors unless a loved one was at deaths door for most of the pandemic. And only recently, select hospitals have shown to be more flexible and allow visitation for a limited time window. The CDC does not give specific recommendations regarding hospital visitor policy other than to say hospitals should limit visitors to those who are essential for the patients physical or emotional well-being and care. And it appears that we have collectively decided that almost all patient visitors in the hospital are non-essential.

While these policies are well-intentioned, they at best are a source of emotional distress and, at worst, compromising the care we provide to our patients. The modern hospital is a complex and flawed ecosystem where everyone must play their part, and a family member at the bedside is an integral part of that ecosystem. From warning us of a potential allergy that was not noted on EMR, to aiding in small tasks with their loved ones at the bedside as to decrease the load on an already overtaxed nurse, they can help grease the levers of an awkward and disjointed healthcare machine. But by far, their biggest impact is in the comfort, warmth, and companionship they provide our patients at a time of great need for them. They provide strength when our patients are facing impossible decisions and a hand to hold when theres not much else to hold on to. These are not luxuries to be discarded so easily and completely but rather are an essential aspect of the care our patients need to heal. And try as we might, what we provide in their absence is just not the same.

And the care I provide my patients is just not the same.

My 85-year-old patient whose hospital stay was complicated with severe delirium while his wife stayed on the phone, desperately trying to break through his mental fog. Both of us wondered if the situation would have been different had she been at the bedside. Or my 35-year-old patient who looked at me with a blank stare when I told him that he had heart failure. His wife was on video call propped up on the table next to him. After my usual heart failure spiel, I asked if he had any questions. But there was only silence as I was certain he heard very little after the words heart failure. I looked over at his phone and the screen had gone blank too. After several unsuccessful attempts at reaching his wife, we came to the realization that her phone must have died. I assured him we would try again and that I would come back later. So I left him there in the silence of his room, and the blankness of his phone screen still propped up.

My sister in laws experience wasnt much better. No number of phone calls to the nursing station or messages left for the different services caring for her were adequate enough to feel like a true advocate for a family member in need. We have been so swift in our decision to severely restrict hospital visitors and have put little thought into making up for it with established protocols for better communication with families.

Communicating with families of hospitalized patients pre-COVID-19 was haphazard at best, but now more than ever, we need to work on establishing standardized protocols for communicating with patient families so that the level of communication is less dependent on who happens to be on service that week. But more than that, we need to be more critical of our blanket visitor policies and more creative on how to accommodate for our patients needs.

At the start of the pandemic when hospitals were overrun, testing and PPE were scarce, and unknowns about COVID-19 transmission abound, such restrictions were reasonable, perhaps even essential. But we have made progress since then; most hospitals test most if not all admitted patients for COVID-19; most Americans own a mask, and hospitals are able to provide to those without one. We must still take reasonable precautions. Allowing only one visitor at bedside, placing restrictions on movement of visitors throughout the hospital, and ensuring they practice social distancing from other hospital staff. With this, we can maintain patient and staff safety but also prioritize a part of care that is currently being undervalued.

And as hospitals and cities across the country continue to try and get a handle on the pandemic, we must also continually re-examine what aspects of care we determine to be essential and must preserve in some way. And we must realize that family at the bedside is part of that essential care our patients need to heal.

Taimur Safder is a cardiology fellow.

Image credit: Shutterstock.com
Police said a 20-year-old UTC student who was shot and killed on March 19, 2020, died after there was a robbery at gunpoint and he resisted turning over any items to the robbers.

Jakob Demoss, 20, and Israel Ackerman, 21. are charged in the killing and robbery of Tanner Holman.

Officers who went to the scene on MLK Boulevard said they found the student with a gunshot wound to his neck, and he was pronounced dead on the scene.

Police said witnesses told them a black male wearing a white hoodie came into the living room and pointed a gun at everyone inside. A second suspect was also said to run past the entrance of the living room into the kitchen. The witnesses said the first suspect shouted, Give me all your phones, give me all your (expletive).

Several girls at the residence handed over their purses. The gunman then demanded the cellphone of Holman's girlfriend. At this point, he said no and lunged at the robber. The gunman shot him and left the scene.

In September, police spoke to a witness who had knowledge of the event. The witness said another witness told them Israel Ackerman killed a UTC student, and gave details that were not public knowledge at the time. The witness told police Ackerman and the other suspect were looking for money, and after the shooting, Ackerman and the other person stripped their clothing and placed them into trash bags.

When police viewed pictures of Ackerman, they said those pictures matched a description given to them by the witness. After search warrants for phones were obtained, police found Ackermans location data matched the place and time of the homicide.

On Feb. 1, police interviewed a witness, who said Ackerman and Demoss went to smoke some weed before going back to an Airbnb in Red Bank in March. Other witnesses on the scene had previously said a man named Jakob had been hanging around the residence, and that Tanner Holman was known to deal drugs.

Police had interviewed Demoss that March, and he told them he had been in the area earlier the day before. But he told them he left for Pikeville around 7 p.m. Police used geolocation information from Snapchat to confirm he was at the MLK residence at the time of the homicide, and he headed toward Red Bank afterward. Geolocation info also showed Demoss and Ackerman both going to the same Airbnb location before and after the homicide.

Demoss was arrested on Sunday night and is facing charges of first-degree murder, especially aggravated robbery, and aggravated robbery.

Ackerman was taken into custody in Lake County, Fla. He will be extradited back to Chattanooga.

The victim was a junior mechanical engineering student.




Time to overhaul executive reshuffle systems in public organizations



A Seoul court convicted a former environment minister and a former presidential aide of abuse of power Tuesday. The Seoul Central District Court sentenced former Environment Minister Kim Eun-kyung to two-and-a-half years in prison for ousting state-run company executives affiliated with her ministry and replacing them with loyalists of President Moon Jae-in. The court ordered Kim, who had stood trial without detention, to be jailed immediately.



Shin Mi-sook, former presidential secretary for personnel affairs, received a suspended prison sentence of one-and-a-half years for her involvement in what was dubbed a new "blacklist" scandal. The prosecution indicted Kim and Shin in April 2019 on charges of drawing up a blacklist of executives appointed by the former Park Geun-hye administration and forcing 15 of them to step down. Among them, 13 resigned due to the pressure.



The verdict comes as a surprise because the defendants received jail sentences over personnel affairs conducted customarily in public organizations. The court lambasted Kim for breaching the law, stating that she had asked the executives to submit their resignations, ordered an inspection of those who refused to resign and unduly meddled in the selection of new executives. Shin was also criticized for implanting distrust among civil servants.



The case came to light in December 2018 when Kim Tae-woo, a former member of the Cheong Wa Dae inspection team, blew the whistle on the existence of a blacklist at the environment ministry. Throughout the trial, the former minister argued that political purges were inevitable to implement environmental policies of the new administration and these practices were customary in previous governments.



But the court rejected Kim's argument, stating, "It is an illegal act that must be uprooted." Unsurprisingly, "parachute appointments" have remained intact in this administration, and there is an urgent need to overhaul executive reshuffle policies at public organizations. The prosecution should also look into the possibility of blacklists in other government agencies.


You can listen to the latest episode of Today in Pa at this link, or on any of your favorite app including Alexa, Apple, Google, Spotify and Stitcher. Episodes are available every weekday on PennLive. Feel free to subscribe, follow or rate Today in Pa. as you see fit!

Today in Pa. Daily Podcast | Feb. 10, 2021

A hunter from Lancaster who named his quarry after Democratic party leaders is charged with assaulting police officers during the events at the Capitol. Governor Tom Wolf reveals a new bipartisan task force that will seek to make the states COVID-19 vaccination rollout more effective. A flight student and their instructor were forced to make an emergency landing on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. And seeds that were brought to the moon have grown into trees on Earth.

Those are the stories we cover in the latest episode of Today in Pa, a daily weekday podcast from PennLive.com and hosted by Claudia Dimuro. Today in Pa is dedicated to sharing the most important and interesting stories pertaining to Pennsylvania that lets you know, indeed, whats happening today in Pa.

Todays episode refers to the following articles:

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Shane Tritton never had any doubts that My Ruebe Star N could succeed in America after coming from Australia. But even the optimistic trainer has his limits.

I know she cant keep doing what shes doing, Tritton said.

Thats about the only negative he can muster, and it makes sense considering she has won 89 per cent of her North American starts. And, he quickly added, But as long as she can keep racing well, then Im sure shes going to be thereabouts.

The seven-year-old pacing mare was one of 20-odd horses Tritton and wife Lauren brought to their farm in Pine Bush, N.Y., when they relocated from Down Under last March. She was the quickest of them all to acclimate to American racing, and the result has been eight wins in nine U.S. starts entering Thursdays (Feb. 11) $30,000 Fillies and Mares Open Handicap at Yonkers.

My Ruebe Star N was assigned post seven in the seven-horse field, and is the 2-1 morning-line favourite with regular driver Jordan Stratton.

Shes just so competitive, Tritton said. Shes good to drive, she can sit in a space, she can leave, she can come from behind, and, to me, thats the ultimate in America. You obviously have to have ability, but when youve got everything else, that makes it easier  they can get a lot better.

The New Zealand-bred showed promise in her homeland before being exported to Australia by breeder and co-owner Mike Siemelink in May 2019. After joining Trittons ranks, she had enough success at Tabcorp Park Menangle that the owners wanted to stake her in Australia before breeding her.

But Tritton felt her gait would help her find success in the States, and he eventually got the green light to bring her over.

My Ruebe Star N became the first winner in America for Team Tritton when she prevailed at The Meadowlands last June. Racing predominantly at Yonkers, the horse won her first five races before taking a third-place finish; then finished with two more wins before getting a rest at Trittons farm in October.

I only gave her three weeks off, he said. There was nothing wrong with her. I just let her wind down and get a little bit of a break, and were sort of taking our time bringing her right up. We just gave her a break because shes good, and every time weve done that, shes gotten better ... and were hoping she can do that again.

My Ruebe Star N made her 2021 debut on Jan. 28 and won the Fillies and Mares Open Handicap at Yonkers in 1:57. As for this weeks Open, Tritton remains hopeful.

Weve been in this position before where she gets the outside in the Open, he said. We sort of look at it and think, 'This might be tough,' but shes very fast off the gate, she gets herself in a good spot. If she can cross them, she will. If not, she gets a handy spot and gets to where she needs to be. So, were pretty confident shes always going to go well.

One day, shes going to get no luck, but at the end of the day, so far she keeps defying those odds. Its always tough in the Open; youve got to respect everybody.

In looking forward to this season, Tritton plans on putting the mare in the Blue Chip Matchmaker Series next month and will also stake her to several Meadowlands races. He looks forward to a random draw at the Blue Chip.

Its tough at Yonkers because shes done so well she keeps getting the outside, the trainer said. She keeps defying the odds and Jordan drives her really well. Shes done an extremely good job. We know she cant keep doing that, but at this point in time, were looking forward to the Blue Chip. She wouldnt know what the inside looks like. She hasnt been there for a long time, so it would be good to get her at an inside draw a few times and take it a little easier on her.

The strategy is to race My Ruebe Star N fairly solidly for six months, and then back off and start prepping for next year.

Im hoping she can do real good and make all the effort worthwhile, Tritton said. Theres a lot of racing in America. She loves Yonkers, were going to stick to there as often as we can, and venture a couple times to The Meadowlands to see how she stacks up.

It just depends on her. I want to race her for the next five years if I can. We want to look after her, let her keep getting better, but shell tell us how shes going.

(USTA)
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Visakhapatnam, Feb 10 (IANS As many as 61 villages in Andhra Pradesh's Visakhapatnam district went for unanimous sarpanch elections in the first phase of the four-phase panchayat elections.

"In Narsipatnam, 21 panchayats went for unanimous polls and about 40 in Anakapalle so far. We are yet to receive information from Paderu. That makes it 61," Visakhapatnam district collector V. Vinay Chand told IANS.

One of the major driving forces for many villages to go for unanimous polls was the financial incentives declared by the state government, which stretch up to Rs 20 lakh depending on the population of a village.

"I think after the conclusion of the poll process," said Chand when quizzed as to when these villages could encash their incentives.

According to the IAS officer, the trend of unanimous polls was almost similar in the last panchayat elections in 2013 in the north Andhra district.

Similarly, unanimous polls resulted in the conduct of peaceful elections in the district, meeting the expectations of the Y. S. Jagan Mohan Reddy-led government.

"Yeah, we haven't received any complaints anywhere about the unanimous thing (polls). They have been peaceful," confirmed the collector.

Andhra Pradesh successfully completed the first phase of four phase panchayat elections on Tuesday, in which nearly 3,244 villages went to the rural local bodies polls.
The bridge being built to ease access to the Chinese-occupied Tibet border has suddenly collapsed. In this case, 3 workers have died and 9 workers are still missing. The collapse of this under-construction bridge of BRO close to the Tibet border, after 2 days of disaster due to the breaking of the glacier in Uttarakhand, is bound to raise concerns as both incidents are 100 km from the Chinese border.

As part of India's flagship strategic project Dantak, the Border Roads Organization (BRO) under the Ministry of Defense was constructing the 204-meter-long Wangchu Bridge in Bhutan along the Tibetan border. This bridge is on the 12 km long Damchu-Hai Link Road being constructed by BRO. The bridge is connected to the Chuzom-ha road in Paro, Wanokha, Bhutan, near the Tibet border. BRO had almost completed the construction of this bridge and was nearing completion in a few days.

This strategically important 204-meter long Wangchu Bridge in Bhutan was being constructed by the BRO of the Indian Army under Project Dantak. On Tuesday night, a section of the 204-meter long Wangchu Bridge suddenly collapsed. In this sudden incident, the laborers working on the bridge could not even get a chance to recover. The Bhutan Bridge collapse killed 3 workers and nearly 9 are missing. Rescue and relief operations have been started to search for them and to remove the bodies of the slain workers from the rubble.

India had decided to construct this bridge under the flagship project Dantak to reach the Tibet border occupied by China. Logistic operations are likely to be affected on the Tibetan border in the coming time due to the collapse of this bridge after 2 days of the devastation caused by the breaking of the glacier in Uttarakhand.

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Yesterday, the head of the National Centre for Disease Control Amiran Gamkrelidze announced that 14,000 individuals have been selected to be vaccinated for coronavirus during the initial stage of the countrys vaccination program. Gamkrelidze said that the vaccination will be carried out in Tbilisi, Batumi, and Kutaisi. He added that the vaccination of doctors, nurses, and junior medical workers will be voluntary and that the list of medical professionals will be compounded by the time the vaccine arrives in the country.Deputy Health Minister Tamar Gabunia stated that 9 institutions were selected to be in charge of the vaccination across the country. According to Gamkrelidze, training of the personnel in charge of the vaccination will begin this week. Last month, Prime Minister Giorgi Gakharia announced that the first doses of Pfizer vaccine are expected to arrive in Georgia by late February, while 180,000 doses of AstraZeneca are to arrive by mid-March. The vaccination will first be carried out with the medical workers and senior citizens.According to Deputy Health Minister Gabunia, the AstraZeneca vaccine is recommended for individuals 16 years old or older, while the Pfizer vaccine is more suitable for adults. She added that the existing vaccination plan aims to vaccinate all adults regardless of whether an individual fully recovered from the virus or not. It has been found that approximately 40-42% of the countrys population wishes to receive a vaccine, but the rate is expected to grow as soon as the educational campaign on the benefits of vaccination launches at the end of February or the beginning of March.One of the leaders of the opposition Lelo party Anna Natsvlishvili called the government to be completely transparent about everything related to the countrys vaccination process. She called for the government to release all the information it has about the vaccine since the failure to do so will result in Lelos taking the matter to Court. Deputy Health Minister Gabunia responded by saying that the government cannot release the complete information about the vaccines as Natsvlishvili and her party requires because it is legally bound by the conditions of the agreement the country signed with the COVAX platform and the manufacturers of the vaccines the country is to acquire.


Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US

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YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 10, ARMENPRESS. Diaspora Armenians continue making donations to the Hayastan All Armenian Fund, with post-war donations alone amounting to 27,000,000 dollars, the organizations marketing and PR chief Ashot Barseghyan told ARMENPRESS.

When the 2020 Nagorno Karabakh War began, the Hayastan All Armenian Fund initiated a worldwide fundraiser to help Artsakh. A total of 170,694,341 dollars was raised during the We Are Our Borders campaign.

This money was collected through the efforts of the Armenian communities particularly from the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Belgium, Argentina and several other countries, Barseghyan said, referring to the post-war donations.

Speaking about the post-war aid programs for Artsakh, Barseghyan mentioned that their fund has implemented the rebuilding and renovation of more than 1000 apartments and houses which were damaged during the war.

Tens of thousands of our compatriots received financial assistance of 300,000 and 68,000 plus 15,000 drams with the resources transferred to the government. Besides, a huge quantity of humanitarian aid was taken to Artsakh, such as high-capacity power generators, vehicles and various other aid, Barseghyan said.

Among the priorities of the Hayastan Funds programs are the rehabilitation treatment of wounded servicemen, the housing issue of displaced citizens, support to the healthcare system and food supplies to those in need.

He said the fund is assisting the military rehabilitation center in Yerevan and is providing humanitarian support to numerous other medical facilities.

Regarding the planned construction of apartments in Artsakh with the funds of their organization, Barseghyan said this project requires big resources and it is still under discussion.

Reporting by Van Novikov

Editing and Translating by Stepan Kocharyan

Dansons USA will open the country's largest barbecue wood pellet mill and distribution center in Hope, Arkansas. Tweet this

The site, which will be the crown jewel of Danson's pellet creation and distribution operation, is a former Georgia-Pacific facility and has a strong infrastructure for wood processing. The town of Hope also has extensive fiber processing abilities, with several sawmills, paper mills and particle board plants already in the area. For Dansons, the pellets will be manufactured for the Pit Boss Grills and Louisiana Grills brands and are a 100% all-natural product that are free of artificial flavors, spray scents and binders.

"This is a great day for the city of Hope," Arkansas Secretary of Commerce Mike Preston said. "Dansons is renowned for their exceptional products and community involvement, and I know they will have a huge impact on economic and community development in Southwest Arkansas. I look forward to continuing to work with them as they join Arkansas' diverse business community."

"We are blessed to be able to expand our operation and open our new pellet mill location in Hope, Arkansas," said Dansons President Jeff Thiessen. "The state of Arkansas has been the most welcoming, most friendly and most encouraging location we've ever done business in. The Arkansas Economic Development Commission, from the town, county and state level, has welcomed us with open arms from the onset of this project. As a family-owned business, the personal touches that have come from Governor Hutchinson and Secretary Preston's offices, as well as those from Jack Thomas and Steve Harris with the state and local EDC, have meant a lot to us. We believe in relationships and people and we really like the people we are working with."

"Dansons conducts business with both integrity and excellence, and we are thrilled to welcome them to our community," Hope Mayor Don Still said. "Dansons' family-focused values are a great fit for Hope, and I look forward to a long and fruitful partnership with the company in the future."

Dansons was founded in 1999 by Dan Thiessen and his two sons. They own and operate multiple companies and brands within Dansons itself. Each brand has a reputation that fits the founders  reliable, dependable, honest and family-oriented. From world-class wood pellet grills and vertical smokers to industrial lubricants and horse bedding, Dansons offers a wide range of quality products within their respective industries. For more information, visit https://internal.dansons.com.

Patrick Kurish (480) 542-9449 ext. 1304

[email protected]

SOURCE Dansons, USA
Prayer is always alive, like an ember, even when our mouth does not speak. Every thought, even if apparently 'profane', can be permeated with prayer ". At the end of the general audience, Francis invited people to pray for the victims of the landslide in India and made his wishes for the Lunar New Year.

Vatican City (AsiaNews)  Pray always, at all times, in every situation, even for enemies and for those we do not know, and "prayer when it is according to the heart of Jesus, achieves miracles". "Praying in daily life" was the theme of Pope Franciss catechesis for today's general audience, again held in the private library.

At the end of the audience Francis recalled the victims of the glacier landslide in India and the Lunar New Year. "I express my closeness to the victims of the disaster that occurred three days ago in northern India". "A part of the glacier broke away causing a violent flood, which overwhelmed the construction sites of two power plants", continued Francis: "We pray for the deceased workers and their families and for all the injured and affected people".

He went on: "On February 12, in the Far East and in various parts of the world many millions of men and women will celebrate the Lunar New Year. I send them a cordial greeting, together with the wish that the new year bear fruits of fraternity and solidarity ".

Previously, continuing in the cycle of reflections on prayer, Francis stated that "whoever prays is like a lover, who always carries the loved one in his heart, wherever he is. In fact, everything is taken up in this dialogue with God: every joy becomes a reason for praise, every trial is an occasion for a request for help. Prayer is always alive, like an ember, even when the mouth does not speak. Every thought, even if apparently 'profane', can be permeated with prayer. There is also a prayerful aspect in human intelligence; in fact, it is a window overlooking the mystery: it illuminates the few steps that are in front of us and then opens itself to the whole reality, which precedes and surpasses it.

Francis has repeatedly invited to daily prayer "on the streets, in offices, on means of transport ...", "in every situation of life - he added in the greeting to the Poles - may a heart to heart conversation with Christ accompany; not only in front of the Blessed Sacrament, the Cross or a sacred image, but also on your way to work, traveling and during your daily tasks ".

"Christian prayer - he stressed - instills an invincible hope in the human heart: whatever experience we touch on our journey, Gods love can turn it into good. Regarding this, the Catechism reads: We learn to pray at certain moments by hearing the Word of the Lord and sharing in his Paschal Mystery, but his Spirit is offered us at all times, in the events of each day, to make prayer spring up from us. [] Time is in the Fathers hands; it is in the present that we encounter him, not yesterday or tomorrow, but today (n. 2659). There is always the today of the meeting. There is no more wonderful day than the today we are experiencing ".

Time - he explained - is in the hands of the Father: And it is prayer that transforms it into grace, or better, it transforms us: it appeases anger, sustains love, multiplies joy, instills the strength to forgive. Sometimes it will seem that it is no longer we who are living, but that grace lives and works in us through prayer. Each day that begins is accompanied by courage if it is welcomed in prayer. Thus, the problems we face no longer seem to be obstacles to our happiness, but appeals from God, opportunities to encounter Him. " But always this, don't forget it. "Take today. When you think of anger, of bewilderment, stop. Ask yourself: 'Lord, where are you staying? And where am I going? The Lord will give you the right word, the true advice. To go on without that bitter juice of the negative, that prayer is always positive, it carries you forward.

And prayer helps us to love others, despite their mistakes and their sins, because the person is always more important than his actions, and Jesus did not judge the world, but saved it. It's a bad life for those people who always judge others, are always condemning by judging, he added. "It is a bad, unhappy life. Jesus came to save us: open your heart, forgive, justify others, be close to others, have compassion, have tenderness, like Jesus.

We must love each and every one, remembering in prayer that we are all sinners and at the same time loved by God one by one.

Loving this world in this way, loving it with tenderness, we will discover that every day and everything carries a fragment of the mystery of God hidden within itself. "It is good and right to pray for the advent of the Kingdom of justice and peace to influence the journey of history, but it is equally important to 'knead' humble everyday situations through prayer."
Montana Cox has revealed she contracted coronavirus twice while living in London last year.

The 27-year-old model told the Herald Sun on Wednesday, she tested positive after travelling from New York to the UK for a job.

'I had it early on and then got it again in October,' she said.

Coronavirus: Montana Cox (pictured) has revealed she contracted Covid TWICE while living in London last year

'The first time I didn't really know I had it, it felt like the flu, but the second I was in bed for a few weeks.'

The Australian model returned back home to Melbourne in December last year.

She completed two weeks of mandatory quarantine before reuniting with her family for Christmas.

Montana said she's very grateful to be back in Australia because 'there's nothing like coming home'.

'I had it early on and then got it again in October. The first time I didn't really know I had it, it felt like the flu, but the second I was in bed for a few weeks,' she revealed

It comes after Montana denied claims she's dating Melbourne businessman Lewis Romano.

The 26-year-old told Daily Mail Australia last month that she was baffled by the story, which appeared in The Sun-Herald's Emerald City column.

'I have met Lewis once not sure where they come up with this,' Montana said, adding that she already has a boyfriend who is based in LA.

Denied: It comes after Montana (pictured) denied claims she's dating Melbourne businessman Lewis Romano

Lewis also poured cold water on the rumours.

'I have met Montana once and we are certainly not dating or even know each other,' he told Daily Mail Australia.

Citing unnamed 'friends', Emerald City had claimed that Montana and Lewis were 'totally smitten' with each other.

Montana rose to fame on Australia's Next Top Model in 2011, while Lewis is the co-founder of financial technology company Credit Clear.
Street vendors have continued to breach lockdown regulations despite regular clashes with police.

While vendors do operate almost everywhere in defiance of the level four lockdown, they are usually alone or operating in twos or threes.

But in Mbare, Gazaland area in Highfield, Tichagarika business centre in Glen View and Chigovanyika in Chitungwiza numbers are larger and social distancing is not always possible, although generally vendors wear facemasks.

In Mbare police have had to use teargas to disperse groups. The Herald yesterday visited some of the areas and spoke to some of the traders.

A vendor identified as Teclar operating in Mbare said they are now used to police throwing tear canisters, but they always find their way back to sell their goods.

"This is now a daily occasion. We are now used to inhaling the smoke of tear gas.

"They always throw it on us in an attempt to disperse us. As we speak, we are expecting them."

Another vendor operating opposite Mupedzanhamo said even if the police chase them, they will always find a way of coming back to sell their goods.

"We are fending for our families. Yes we are aware that there is a deadly pandemic that is why we are wearing masks," said the vendor.

"Maybe our council should allocate us bigger space to operate from, so that we can ensure social distancing."

Another vendor who sells second-hand clothes at Chigovanyika appealed to Government to at least allow them to operate three days a week so they could rotate and selling points and reduce numbers physically present.
A Cleveland serial killer charged with killing 11 women in Cleveland died of a fatal disease in jail on Monday, authorities said.

Cleveland serial killer died of terminal disease

Anthony Sowell, 61, was transferred to the end-of-life care center at a psychiatric treatment prison in Columbus on January 21, a spokesperson for the corrections department said.

At 3:27 p.m., the Cleveland serial killer was pronounced dead after a disease unrelated to Covid-19, spokesman JoEllen Smith said on Monday. After a jury convicted him of attempted murder, kidnapping, rape, corpse violence, and tampering with evidence, Sowell, who worked as a Marine, was sentenced to death in 2011.

In 2007, the Cleveland serial killer started luring women to his house, investigators said. Two years later, after a woman told police that she had been assaulted at his home, two bodies and a freshly created grave were discovered by the authorities, the NBCNews via MSN reported.

They later found the bodies of other women dumped or buried around his house and property in trash bags and plastic sheets. Tonia Carmichael, Nancy Cobbs, Tishana Culver, Crystal Dozier, Telacia Fortson, Amelda Hunter, Leshanda Long, Michelle Mason, Kim Yvette Smith, Diane Turner, and Janice Webb were among Sowell's victims.

Cleveland.com confirmed that Sowell tried to reverse his conviction and death sentence, with a public defender arguing in an appeal that capital punishment is illegal and that Sowell did not have ample investigators and qualified experts to represent himself properly in the court.

According to the web, a three-judge jury dismissed the appeal last year. The city of Cleveland has paid more than $1.3 million in lawsuit settlements to the victims' families for how detectives treated allegations before the arrest of Sowell, the site reported.

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Former marine serial killer did not die of COVID-19

Former Marine Anthony Sowell, 61, had been detained at the Chillicothe Correctional Institution in Ohio. Sowell was undergoing end-of-life treatment at the Franklin Medical Center for a chronic condition that was not linked to COVID, the Ohio Department of Corrections said.

Police found two bodies in a room adjacent to his bedroom when his home was raided in October 2009 before finally finding three more bodies and a skull in a building with five bodies buried in shallow graves in the backyard.

On 81 counts, including attempted murder and abduction, Sowell was found guilty. He was later charged with assaulting two other women and planning to rape another one.

According to Daily Mail, the serial killer continued to appeal against his conviction after being sentenced to death. As early as May 2020, he had his final appeal.

'I'm happy that he's dead. God allowed it to happen. I will never ever forgive him,' said Donnita Carmichael, Tonia Carmichael's daughter.

'Because he's gone, we should move ahead. "We don't have to hear about him anymore," Joann Moore, Janice Webb's niece, told Fox 8.

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For weeks or months, several slain women had been gone, and others had criminal records that indicated their disappearances were not always reported to the authorities immediately.

Apparently, random objects, including shoe-strings, socks, a belt, a bag tie, a coaxial cable, and a cell-phone charging cord, were strangled and tied by the victims.

In trash bags and plastic sheets, their remains were disposed of, then discarded in various house and yard areas. There was nothing left of one victim in a plastic bucket with non-human bite marks on the edge: a skeleton.

An overpowering smell was produced by the decaying bodies that residents blamed on an adjacent sausage factory. To no avail, the landlord spent $20,000 on new plumbing fixtures and drainage pipes.

Many of the victims were strangled with household items and had traces of cocaine or depressants in their systems, naked from the waist down. Prior to convicting Sowell, jurors sat through weeks of upsetting and emotional testimony. They saw photos of the blackened, skeletal remains of the victims sitting on autopsy tables and listened to police explain how Sowell's Cleveland home and backyard had been left to rot with their bodies. Sowell took to the stand at his trial to apologize.

'The only thing I want to say is that I'm sorry,' Sowell told jurors. 'I know that may not sound like much, but from the bottom of my heart, I am sincerely sorry.'

They never figured out why he murdered the women and stayed in the house for two years with their bodies bagged in corners or hidden in the backyard. Investigators called him a 'vile and hideous' serial murderer.

Read also: North Carolina Police Officers Shot, Wounded by Man Who Barricaded Himself at Home

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With both the UAE and China successfully reaching Mars' orbit, the Red Planet has already dominated the headlines this week.

Now, a new study has put Mars in the spotlight once again, with the discovery of water vapours rising from the planet.

The ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), operated by the European Space Agency (ESA) and Russia's Roscosmos, made the discovery by measuring light as vapour passes through the atmosphere.

The findings offer an insight into the Martian water cycle, and could provide scientists with fresh clues as to whether or not Mars was once home to life.

The ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), operated by the European Space Agency (ESA) and Russia's Roscosmos, made the discovery by measuring light as vapour passes through the atmosphere

Scientists, including two from the Open University, used an instrument on board the orbiter called the 'Nadir and Occultation for Mars Discovery' (NOMAD) to study water vapour and 'semi-heavy' water.

As hydrogen chloride gas rises, it gives researchers an indication of the history of water on Mars.

The red planet features several ancient dried out valleys and river channels which have long pointed towards the possibility of liquid water once flowing there.

A new study has put Mars in the spotlight once again, with the discovery of water vapours rising from the planet.

As hydrogen chloride gas rises, it gives researchers an indication of the history of water on Mars

Much of it is now locked up in the ice caps and buried underground.

Dr Manish Patel, co-principal investigator of NOMAD, said: 'The NOMAD instrument is fundamentally changing our understanding of the evolution of water on Mars.

'This fantastic instrument is giving us a never-before-seen view of water isotopes (water variants with different molecular masses) in the atmosphere of Mars as a function of both time and location on Mars.

'Measuring water isotopes is a crucial element of understanding how Mars as a planet has lost its water over time, and therefore how the habitability of Mars has changed throughout its history.'

As well as helping scientists understand the workings of a Martian water cycle, the findings also provide signs of magmatic activity.

Sue Horne, head of space exploration at the UK Space Agency, said: 'This research is a key component in our quest to unearth the mysteries of the Red Planet.

'Understanding water vapour on Mars would help answer the all-important question, was there life on Mars?

'UK scientists and technology are playing a leading part in Nasa's Perseverance rover mission due to land on Mars this month.

'The mission will collect samples from the planet's surface to further our understanding of our neighbouring world.'

A pair of studies were published in the Science Advances journal.
YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 10, ARMENPRESS. The Armenian side handed over 1 captive to Azerbaijan in the latest prisoner exchange, the Commander of the Russian peacekeeping forces in Nagorno Karabakh Lt. General Rustam Muradov said.

A new exchange of prisoners took place, the general told reporters. As a result of the implemented work, 1 captive was taken to Baku and 5 captives were returned to Yerevan.

Editing and Translating by Stepan Kocharyan
Guwahati: In an attempt to understand the problems in the state, Assam Pradesh Congress Committee (APCC) on Tuesday (February 9) launched a social media video contest as part of its manifesto building campaign called Assam Bachao.

The campaign is a 10-day video contest on social media. Months ahead of the Assembly polls in Assam Congress has asked people to post a two-minute video on the biggest issues and problems of the state. The best videos would be given prizes ranging from iPhone to cash.

To participate in the contest, till February 19, people have to record and post a two-minute video along with the hashtag #AssamBachao on any major social media platform and then submit the link on the AssamBachao website.

A contest which lets you contribute towards uplifting your beloved Assam, makes you an inspiration for others & rewards you as well!

That's #AssamBachao!

Get ready to express yourself & make your voice count!

#AsaamElections2021 #AssamElections #AssemblyElections2021 pic.twitter.com/MRqo5syLZR  Assam Congress (@INCAssam) February 9, 2021

Launching the campaign, Lok Sabha Member and party's manifesto committee chief Gaurav Gogoi said that to solve a problem, we have to acknowledge and understand the issue, and this video contest is a first step.

"The feedback from this campaign would tell us what are the most urgent issues to be taken up in our election manifesto and the manifesto would offer the solutions to these very issues and problems," he told the media.

Gogoi, son of former three-time Assam Chief Minister and veteran Congress leader late Tarun Gogoi, said that it is time for the youth to take charge of their own future and save the state from the BJP's evil and motivated designs.

"Ranging from increasing the prices of essential commodities to the implementation of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, against the wishes of majority of people, the saffron party has decided to spoil the peace, prosperity and ethnic harmony of Assam," Congresss Deputy leader in the Lok Sabha said.

Congress state president Ripun Bora said the social media campaign would bring out the people's resentment against the BJPs misrule.

"This is just the first step. The Congress party is gearing up for an innovative campaign that would bring out the people's resentment against the BJPs mis-governance, he said.

The BJPs attempts to muzzle the people's voices with intimidation and fear psychosis won't last till polling day. The people would show through the #AssamBachao campaign shows how desperate Assam is for change," the Congress leader said. The Congress led by Tarun Gogoi governed Assam from 2001 to 2016 before the BJP came to power five years ago.

Live TV

Featuring a gross weight of 7,000 pounds (3,175 kilograms) and 52,000 miles (83,686 kilometers) on the clock, the long-wheelbase Forward Control before your eyes is a one-owner truck according to the seller. Following a nut-and-bold rotisserie restoration with great attention to detail, the FC-170 has been listed on eBay by carreauski with a buy-it-now price of $39,950 OBO.Considered brand-spanking-new because the FC-170 wasnt registered or titled until the summer of 2020, the cab-over truck spent its entire life on a farm and around town in Mississippi. The original radio and fan are still featured; they were the only optional extras available that year, according to the seller.Refinished in the original red-and-white exterior combo and beautified with red upholstery for the seats, the Forward Control runs and drives beautifully. Chassis number 615681646 hides a Super Hurricane straight-six motor under the cabin, matched to a Borg-Warner T-90 stick shift, a two-speed transfer case, and Dana axles for great off-road capability.From 3.7 liters of displacement, the 6-226 engine is much obliged to crank out 115 horsepower and 190 pound-feet (257 Nm) of torque. Its not a lot, but dont forget the Forward Control wasnt designed to go anywhere fast.Take, for instance, the four military variants of the FC-170 contracted by the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps. Powered by a Cerlist three-cylinder and two-stroke diesel, these variants are the M676 cargo pickup truck, the M677 four-door cargo truck, the M678 carry-all truck, and the M679 ambulance.Not the big seller that Willys had hoped it would be, the Forward Control was phased out in 1964 after a little more than 30,000 examples were sold. After its original tenure, the Forward Control lived on under license in India and Spain thanks to Mahindra & Mahindra and Vehiculos Industriales y Agricolas.
Labor is assuring businesses its plan to let some contract workers transfer leave between jobs will not blow out costs, after Attorney-General Christian Porter claimed the oppositions new workplace proposal would add $20 billion a year in fresh leave costs.

Drawing on a promise from Labor to let insecure workers accumulate paid leave across multiple jobs, Mr Porter argued the opposition had promised to give sick, annual and long service leave to casual workers and contractors at massive expense.

An energised Christian Porter went on the attack on Wednesday. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

But Labor rejected that claim, with the partys industrial relations spokesman Tony Burke accusing Mr Porter of telling a big fat lie about what the party was proposing to distract media attention that has been focused on the governments own industrial relations bill.

Modelling Mr Porter commissioned from the Attorney-Generals Department puts the cost of giving paid leave to casuals and self-employed contractors at $20.3 billion a year or almost $8000 per casual employee if individual workers had to fund it.
CLP candidate Jacinta Price during the Australian Prime Minister's press conference at the Bowali Visitor Centre, Jabiru, in the Northern Territory on Jan. 13, 2019. (AAP Image/ Michael Franchi)

Cancel Culture Attacks Targeting Jacinta Price Very Dangerous to Australia: Expert

An expert on cancel culture has said that conservative Indigenous politician Jacinta Price gets vilified by Indigenous activists because she calls attention to the issues they dont want to talk about, like family violence, alcohol abuse, and the problems caused by welfare dependency.

Peter Kurti, the director of the Culture, Prosperity, and Civil Society program at the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS), said that unlike other Indigenous activists Price doesnt champion abstract or symbolic efforts like changing or abolishing the date of Australia Day.

And she gets vilified and called terrible names by Indigenous activists when she herself is an Indigenous woman, Kurti told The Epoch Times on Feb. 9.

Related Coverage Jacinta Price Calls for Forgiveness and Healing on Australia Day

He thinks the kind of cancel culture that tries to prevent a figure like Price from giving a speech, or that leads activists to tear down statues starts to tear at the fabric of our society.

His comments come as this week News Corps The Australian reported that one of Australias public broadcasters is being sued by Price over remarks made on its local radio by people who sought to cancel her speaking tour appearance in northern New South Wales in 2019.

The logo for Australias public broadcaster ABC is seen on its head office building in Sydney on Sept. 27, 2018. (Saeed Khan/AFP via Getty Images)

Price is pursuing an amended claim against the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC)which was recently successfully sued for defamation by a Chinese billionairein the Federal Court after she settled her claims against Coffs Harbour and District Local Aboriginal Land Council in November last year, The Australian reported on Feb. 8.

The lawsuit reportedly centres around several defamatory meanings allegedly conveyed across two ABC radio reports, one by ABC Coffs Coast and one by the broadcasters Alice Springs station.

Price is the deputy mayor of Alice Springs but was at the time of the reports a city councillor. She said the move to cancel her Mind the Gap speaking tour appearance in Coffs Habour was backward.

One of the 13 defamatory meanings allegedly conveyed in the Alice Springs report was that Price labelled the local Gumbaynggirr people themselves as backward, instead of the attempt to cancel her speech.

By doing so, the statement of claim says, she shares the same attitude towards Aboriginal people that has enabled Europeans to massacre them, to rape their women, to kill them, to steal their land and to treat them as sub-human,' The Australian reported.

In her amended statement of claim filed in December, Price reportedly claims to have been greatly injured and suffered hurt feelings by the reports.

An ABC spokesperson told The Epoch Times on Feb. 9: The ABC has put forward a proposal to resolve this matter; no response has yet been received.

Price has until Feb. 12 to respond, according to a court order (pdf).

Cancel Culture

Cancel culture is an umbrella term for a range of activism taking place with increasing frequency which Kurti says is very dangerous and tears at the fabric of Australian society.

What it involves is activists of some kind putting pressure on a person or an institution to sanction them because that institution or that person expresses or is considered to represent views or a position that is no longer acceptable, Kurti said.

While some of the targets of cancel culture are laughablelike Coon cheese becoming Cheer cheesesome present serious dangers and Kurti outlines three in particular in his report Cancelled! How ideological cleansing threatens Australia (pdf).

Peter Kurti, Director of Culture, Prosperity & Civil Society program at the Centre for Independent Studies. (CIS)

The first is the promotion of the idea that Australia as a society is torn apart by racism when Kurti would argue that were the worlds most successful multicultural society.

This leads to the erosion of trust when people dont feel they can express an honest opinion because they fear the backlash by those who disagree.

So trust is destroyed. Trust is eroded when you cant trust somebody to listen to you and to hear a genuine point of view, he said.

This then goes on to fuel bitterness, division, and discord in society.

Demonstrators attend a Black Lives Matter protest to express solidarity with US protestors in Melbourne on June 6, 2020. (Con Chronis/AFP via Getty Images)

So in a sense, pulling down a statue is an act of vandalism, renaming cheese can seem a bit comical, but what it does, I think, at a deeper level, is set us against each other and we start to see racism, misogyny, all kinds of hatred being espoused in a society where I think in fact we are a society (in Australia) that is very peaceful and harmonious, Kurti said.

Cancel Cultures Roots

Dr. Frank Turek from Summit Ministries Online told NTDs Focus Talk program that cancel culture began with Vladimir Lenin.

[Cancel culture] came out of the Soviet Union with Vladimir Lenin. And it came with the whole Marxist movement into the United States, Turek said.

[It] does not want to persuade; it merely wants to punish because they view the world in just two categories. Youre either an oppressor, or youre oppressed, he continued. And if they consider you an oppressor, theyre going to try and actually oppress you, ironically, theyre going to try and shut you down, theyre going to try and prevent you from actually engaging in the economy, or theyre going to get you fired, theyre going to hurt you in some way.

Appearing on the same program, Prof. Frank Xie from the University of South Carolina, said cancel culture was also seen in communist China.

As someone from communist China, I see a lot of resemblance between these kinds of culture with whats happening, what happened in China during the Cultural Revolution  as the Chinese do under communist rule, they have instituted this social credit system, where basically you are measured  you are measured against your attitude toward the communist party, your political view.

Watch Next

The Root of Cancel Culture and Its Consequences
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While a red line can be seen in (A) due to an visual illusion, the line is actually gray. See the enlarged diagram. The difference is a contour formed from white lines. Once removed, it appears gray (B). Credit: Toyohashi University of Technology.

A color illusion that strongly induces color contrast effect has been found by a research team at the Toyohashi University of Technology Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and Electronics-Inspired Interdisciplinary Research Institute (EIIRIS). The powerful visual illusion clarified a century-old contradiction relating to simultaneous color contrast theory. Through a human psychophysical experiment, the team demonstrated that the presence or absence of flanking contours formed from extremely thin white lines could be used to switch between contradictory visual phenomena, enabling consistent explanation for both discrepant theories. This solution alters theories of visual computation relating to color appearance, and is expected to contribute to industrial design and high-definition imaging.

Under certain circumstances, colors and shapes of physically identical objects will appear to be different. This is known as a visual illusion. Visual illusions dealing with colors have long been documented. In the 19th century, a French chemist Michel-Eugene Chevreul has explained that the cause of a complaint relating to textile dyes was not due to chemical reactions but to the visual illusion. These types of optical illusions may have a strong impact on the appearance of a product, with designers having avoided them through trial and error. However, researchers believe that visual illusions are not a failure of human visual function, but they occur as an accompanying side effect of intrinsically important functions. Some novel functions that allow us to see the outside world effectively are often responsible for producing a variety of visual illusions. Thus, discovering new visual illusions is a clue to discover an unknown visual function, and many vision researchers are engaged in such projects.

Among visual illusions alters colors appearance, the most famous one is a simultaneous color contrast. Simultaneous color contrast is a phenomenon in which color appearance of gray lines changes depending on the background color, based on the opposite color of the background color. Simultaneous color contrast is considered to be an important factor in color constancy, which compensates color appearances of certain objects under various colored illuminations. While it is known that the effects of simultaneous color contrast vary depending on the luminance of the gray lines being affected, there are two discrepant theories about what level of luminance results produces the strongest simultaneous color contrast. Kirschmann's Third Law says that the effect is strongest when the luminance is the same as that of the background, and the Helson-Judd Effect says that the darker it gets, the stronger the effect. These phenomena have been verified in the separate research fields of psychology and lighting technology, respectively.

Right: Quantitative results showing the appearance of the colors of the visual illusion using a matching experiment. Vertically, the line appears redder as it ascends. With no contour (gray bars), with white contours (white bars), with black contour (black bars). The horizontal numbers denote the luminance of the gray line. Under conditions of a contour formed with white lines, we can see that it turns a strong reddish hue. http://illusionoftheyear.com/cat/top-10-finalists/2018/ Credit: Toyohashi University of Technology.

Upon discovering a new color illusion, the research team realized the potential to reconcile the above contradiction. In the discovered visual illusion, a phenomenon occurs in which a thin gray line atop a cyan background appears red when bordered by a thin white line (Figure 1). The illusion is gaining attention, and was reported in the World Illusion Contest, winning a place as a Top 10 Finalist in the Best Illusion of the Year 2018. Through human psychophysical experiment, it was demonstrated that a strong color contrast was produced regardless of the luminance levels of the gray line, and that the visual illusion effects became stronger the darker the color was comparatively. This result is concordant with the Helson-Judd Effect. On the other hand, with the white line removed, the visual illusion is strongest with identical luminance, reproducing Kirschmann's Third Law. In other words, the presence or absence of the flanking white line makes it possible to switch between the two contradictory phenomena. A consistent explanation becomes possible by assuming that the adjacent white line created a separate phenomenon in the gray line known as color assimilation. In conclusion, the team succeeded in resolving a contradiction that has existed among visual illusion researchers for some 100 years.

"This new color illusion produced extremely strong illusory effects regardless of the luminance of the gray line," says lead author Tama Kanematsu (Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and DC2 research fellow at the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science). This contradicts accepted color illusion research dating back to 1891. By incorporating additional knowledge about color constancy into the illusion, I believe we succeeded in illuminating the true nature of simultaneous contrast in the visual system. Moreover, our newly devised color appearance model allows for a consistent explanation that includes past research," explains Kanematsu.

Lead author Tama Kanematsu says the visual illusion was found accidentally. "Kowa Koida (Associate Professor, Electronics-Inspired Interdisciplinary Research Institute), one of the co-authors, reported seeing purple (which he had not been using) when creating a diagram using light blue and blue lines. Koida first thought it was an optical phenomenon known as chromatic aberration. Upon precisely analyzing the characteristics of the area which appeared purple, we were able to prove that it was a new illusion. In addition, it is clear that this illusion requires an extremely thin line. Without an extremely detailed modern high-performance monitor, it may not have been discovered. This illusion showcased an instance in which a development in engineering contributed to the further development of basic science."

The research team believes it will be necessary to construct a computational model of the illusion that reproduces the color appearance. The visual illusions also help to understand theoretical framework of visual neurons in the brain. This model is expected to help in improving user impressions of high-definition digital device screen designs, and in industrial design fields such as textiles.

Explore further Convolutional neural networks can be tricked by the same visual illusions as people

More information: Tama Kanematsu et al, Large enhancement of simultaneous color contrast by white flanking contours, Scientific Reports (2020). Journal information: Scientific Reports Tama Kanematsu et al, Large enhancement of simultaneous color contrast by white flanking contours,(2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-77241-5
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Fastmarkets weekly price assessment for steel billet, export, fob ports Iran , was $510-520 per tonne fob on February 10, unchanged week on week.A cargo of 16,000 tonnes was reported sold at $520 per tonne fob southern ports of Iran. Two more cargoes were heard sold within the range of $515-518 per tonne fob last week.Market participants said that these prices were workable only in the Persian Gulf markets.A source on the traders side reported that re-rollers in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) nations were bidding $530 per tonne cfr, equivalent to $511-513 per tonne fob.

One more cargo was reported sold...
The band director at Chilton County High School is behind bars, accused of having an inappropriate relationship with a male student.

Ashlee Elizabeth Steinman, 29, was arrested Tuesday on two felony charges - a school employee engaging in a sex act with a student and using her official position to gain access to the student and carryout the illegal relationship, according to CJ Robinson, chief deputy district attorney of the 19th Judicial Circuit, which includes Chilton County.

The investigation began when Clanton police received a report of the possible relationship between Steinman and the 18-year-old student, Robinson said. Details about the alleged relationship have not been made public.

Steinman was booked into the Chilton County Jail Tuesday and remained held without bond Wednesday morning. She does not yet have an attorney to speak on her behalf.

Robinson said the investigation is ongoing. We go where the evidence takes us, but we are very early in the process,' he said. If the investigation reveals probable cause for more charges or, heaven forbid, additional victims, then we are ready to act.

The charge of an employee engaging in a sex act with a student is a Class B felony with a range of punishment of two to 20 years.

According to the schools website, Steinman has been the band director at Chilton County since 2017. She was previously a graduate teaching assistant at Troy University and a substitute teacher at Alexander City Schools in 2015. She is a graduate of Russell County High School and Troy University where she obtained her masters degree in music education.

A court date for Steinman has not yet been set. Authorities are asking anyone with information about the ongoing investigation to contact Det. David Kline with the Clanton Police Department directly at david.kline@clantonpd.org or at 205-755-1194.

Robinson praised the investigators for their diligence and professionalism. I cant say enough about the dedication and hard work of the Clanton Police Department and the cooperation of the Chilton County Board of Education,' he said.

These are serious offenses and while we pray things like this dont happen, unfortunately sometimes they do. When the public trust is betrayed, we want to act as swiftly, but as thoroughly as possible,' he said.

The investigators on this case have worked tirelessly to uncover the truth. I hope we have found all there is to find. If there are more victims out there, please know that you are not alone and coming forward is the right thing to do,' Robinson said. We have so many honorable people in Chilton County who have devoted their lives to being the best teachers they can be. Bringing those who use their position to victimize students to justice is the first step in rebuilding the trust of the community.
Acquisition brings together two market leaders with complementary legal solutions; continues Opus 2's drive to build a connected digital practice

LONDON, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Opus 2, the leader in cloud-based collaboration for law firms, today announced it has acquired Bar Squared, the leading provider of chambers management software, which is used by more than 240 chambers and 11,000 barristers and clerks worldwide. Together, the two companies will unite the LEX platform with Opus 2's collaborative solutions for disputes, enabling a connected digital practice.

Many barristers worldwide already use the Opus 2 platform to collaborate with law firms and their clients. The acquisition enables the Opus 2 and Bar Squared teams to make this collaboration more seamless and more easily available to a greater number of barristers, allowing them to work more consistently across matters and facilitating earlier access to the benefits of the Opus 2 platform. For solicitors, it will provide a unique opportunity to streamline their work with counsel and, as a connected digital practice, deliver better services more rapidly and more efficiently to their clients.

"Bar Squared is a great business and we are very excited about the possibilities this transaction brings us," said Graham Smith-Bernal, Executive Chairman of Opus 2. "Opus 2 and Bar Squared are not only the established leaders within their respective markets, but more importantly, also share a strong client-focused culture and a deep understanding of their markets' and clients' needs."

"Seamless engagement between all stakeholders across the entire workflow represents the future of legal work," said Martin Coen, CEO of Opus 2. "The acquisition aligns with Opus 2's vision of delivering a broad range of best-in-class solutions into a single connected environment so lawyers, barristers, clerks, other third-parties and clients can more easily work together wherever they are and focus on substantive legal issues-without friction and without having to think about the tools or technology."

"From the beginning, our focus at Bar Squared has been on developing simple, highly functional, intuitive and feature-rich tools for progressive barristers' chambers," said David Connolly, Sales Director at Bar Squared.

Helen Ford, Managing Director of Bar Squared said: "Joining Opus 2 is an exciting opportunity, strengthening our ability to deliver the best services to barristers and clerks globally."

About Opus 2

Opus 2 provides game-changing, cloud-based legal technology and services to connect people, case information, analysis and data throughout the lifecycle of a dispute. Our secure platform, tailor-made for lawyers, provides a connected and flexible way of working. Case teams and clients can log in to access a shared, centralized set of documents and collaborate from anywhere in the world and at any time, enabling seamless and meaningful communication and interactions. Combined with our services expertise, we deliver electronic trials and hearings worldwide.

About Bar Squared

Since 2007, LEX has been at the cutting edge of chambers software and continues to innovatively develop to satisfy the changing needs of today's Bar. Most recently, development has been focused on Microsoft Office 365 integration, incorporating secure Multi Factor Authentication, bi-directional Exchange calendar synchronization and the planned delivery of a SharePoint-based document management system. LEX is the intuitive, accessible, cross-platform application, delivering barristers and clerks an encompassing, world-class, case and practice management solution.

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SHARJAH, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News / WAM - 10th Feb, 2021) Their Highnesses the Supreme Council Members and Rulers of the Emirates extended congratulations to President His Highness Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President, Prime Minister and Ruler of Dubai, His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces, and the people of the UAE on the success of the Hope Probe reaching Mars orbit.

H.H. Dr. Sheikh Sultan bin Muhammad Al Qasimi, Supreme Council Member and Ruler of Sharjah, confirmed, on the occasion of the success of the Hope Probe reaching Mars orbit, that the ambition of the United Arab Emirates has no limits, and its blessed endeavours in the service of humanity have been a constant concern since its establishment, as the UAEs people engrave the name of the country in the history of space.

In a statement on this historic occasion, His Highness said that the ambition of the United Arab Emirates has no limits, and its blessed endeavours to serve humanity have been its Primary concern since its union was established 50 years ago from today.

H.H. Sheikh Humaid bin Rashid Al Nuaimi, Supreme Council Member and Ruler of Ajman, said, "Today is an extraordinary day in the history of our nation, as well as the Arab and Islamic world, as the Hope Probe is set to reach Mars."

"This achievement was due to the courage and patience of our leadership and people, to strengthen the position of the country in the field of space sciences and Martian discoveries, shaping a bright future in the field of space and scientific discoveries that will serve humanity," he added.

He also said the Hope Probe project underscores the confidence of the countrys leadership in the Emirati youth, as it believes in their pivotal role in consolidating the process of national development. Since the establishment of the Emirates Mars Mission seven years ago, national working teams have accomplished distinguished achievements, due to Allah Almightys willing and their hard work, overcoming numerous challenges and obstacles.

H.H. Sheikh Saud bin Rashid Al Mu'alla, Supreme Council Member and Ruler of Umm Al Qaiwain, said the Hope Probe helped realise the dream of the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan to reach the outer space.

"Following on the footsteps of the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the wise leadership worked very hard to build national capabilities and their effort paid off with the an all Emirati team overseeing planning, execution and management of the Mars Mission, translating the leadership's vision into achievements," he added.

H.H. Sheikh Hamad bin Mohammed Al Sharqi, Supreme Council Member and Ruler of Fujairah, affirmed that the UAE has won the race to the space and ushered into the future of space exploration.

''We are confident of success because our nation's loyal young men have planned and implemented the Emirates Mars Mission. We are setting an example of remarkable success for the generations to come,'' H.H. said.

This spectacular success was a culmination of years of hard work, perseverance and perfect implementation,'' he added.

The dream of the Founding Father, the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan, top reach the Red Planet has become a reality today, he noted.
The second impeachment trial of former president Donald Trump is underway.

While Trump is no longer in office - which led to an initial debate about the jurisdiction of the proceedings - he could still be sanctioned and prevented from holding high office again.

Below are some takeaways from the first day of the trial.

- - -

1. Democrats' appeal to emotion

Democrats have decided to move things on a fast track, including likely not calling any witnesses. The best evidence, they maintain, is what has already been established - on video and otherwise - showing what happened before and during the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol.

Their early argument was heavy on that. To begin the debate over the proceedings, lead impeachment manager Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.) played a 13-minute video recapping the ugly scenes of Jan. 6. The video, which cable news and broadcast networks played in full, featured violent conduct and rhetoric, extensive vulgarity and even video of a Capitol rioter, Ashli Babbitt, being shot to death.

Raskin later closed by recounting his own experience during the Capitol siege, citing "a sound I will never forget: the sound of pounding on the door like a battering ram, the most haunting sound I ever heard." He mentioned the deaths and many injuries that occurred that day, and officers who took their own lives in the days afterward. He cited an officer who was "tortured" with an American flagpole. Raskin, who buried his son around the time of the Capitol siege, broke down repeatedly while recounting these things.

It was unquestionably moving.

The question before the Senate, though, isn't about whether what happened on Jan. 6 was bad. It's whether Trump incited it, as the impeachment article alleges. The 13-minute video showed some of Trump's comments, including clips of his speech from a rally just beforehand, and his mealy-mouthed comments in the hours after it began. But it didn't dwell too much on how Trump might actually have fomented the scenes.

Trump's team countered that such emotion shouldn't obscure the culpability question. Trump lawyer Bruce L. Castor Jr. began his remarks by commending Raskin for his presentation and personal reflection, but arguing that emotion shouldn't define the response.

"It's natural to recoil. It's an immediate thing that comes over you without your ability to stop it - the desire for retribution," Castor said. " 'Who caused this awful thing? How do we make them pay?' We recognize in the law . . . [that] we have a specific body of law that deals with passion and rage, blinding logic and reason. That's the difference between manslaughter and murder."

There is little doubt that whatever Democrats put forward won't be compelling to enough Republican senators, or at least the 17 who would be needed to convict Trump. All but 13 have already signaled they support Trump's acquittal. But there is a real question about just how compelling it is to the broader American public. Polls show Americans favor his conviction, but only marginally.

And there is indeed a difference between saying "this thing involving Trump and his supporters was bad" and "Trump incited this thing." The onus will be on Democrats to prove the latter.

- - -

2. Trump lawyer Bruce Castor's head-scratching opening

I wrote earlier Tuesday about how Trump's team probably didn't need to do much to actually succeed in this case. I also wrote about how their brief filed Monday didn't exactly suggest a coherent and well-considered case.

The first comments from his legal team didn't do anything to correct that impression.

After initially dealing directly with Democrats' arguments, Castor was all over the place. He tried to work the refs by sympathizing with senators who might have competing motivations in their upcoming votes. The comparison between manslaughter and murder for Trump's conduct was perhaps ill-advised, given both involve culpability.

But more than anything, it seemed to be an exceedingly off-the-cuff commentary on the issues at hand. And Castor often struggled for specifics. One of the most notable examples came when he recounted a politician - he wasn't sure who it was, where they served or when it happened - but he was sure that their apology for their comments was unwarranted:

I saw a headline: Representative So-and-so seeks to walk back comments about - I forget what was, something that bothered her. I was devastated when I saw that she thought it was necessary to go on television yesterday or the day before and say she needs to walk back her comments. She should be able to comment as much as she wants, and she should be able to say exactly how she feels. . . .

I don't expect and I don't believe that the former president expects anybody to walk back any of the language. If that's how they feel about the way things transpired over the last couple of years in this country, they should be allowed to say that. And I will go to court and defend them if anything happens to them as a result, if the government takes action against that state representative or that U.S. representative who wants to walk back her comments ...

I have no problem going into court and defending those things, even though I don't agree with them.

Got that? Me neither. Castor had notes, which makes it perplexing that he didn't offer any specifics. But even so: What? He seemed to be arguing that a politician can say whatever they want regardless of the impact, even as there are well-established limits on speech, including incitement and defamation. (Trump's lawyers have taken care not to delve into that meddling issue.)

While Castor also tried to empathize with senators facing a tough choice, including his home-state Sen. Robert P. Casey Jr. (D-Pa.), he also took time to target a GOP senator who seems inclined toward convicting Trump: Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.).

"But Nebraska, you're going to hear, is quite a judicial thinking place. And just maybe Sen. Sasse is on to something," Castor said. "You'll hear about what it is that the Nebraska courts have to say about the issue that you all are deciding this week. They seem to be some pretty smart jurists in Nebraska, and I can't believe a United States senator doesn't know that."

Castor added, apparently referring to Sasse's censure by the state GOP: "He faces the whirlwind, even though he knows what the judiciary in his state thinks."

Maybe Sasse wasn't a winnable vote, but again, it was certainly a novel strategy.

And Trump allies acknowledged it as such.

"I've seen a lot of lawyers and a lot of arguments and that was - that was not one of the finest I've seen," Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) said.

Trump ally Alan Dershowitz also added on Newsmax: "Maybe he'll bring it home, but right now, it does not appear to me to be effective advocacy. ... It's not the kind of argument I would have made, I have to tell you that."

A Trump ally familiar with the legal strategy told The Washington Post that Castor's presentation was meant to lower the temperature in the room after Raskin's presentation "before dropping the hammer."

David I. Schoen, Trump's other lawyer, offered a more detailed legal case about the issue at hand, repeatedly calling it a "snap impeachment." He was also much harsher about Democrats' motives, concluding by suggesting this was somehow an effort to negate the votes of Trump's supporters (even as those votes objectively counted in the election).

"The singular goal of the House managers and House leadership in pursuing the impeachment conviction of Donald Trump is to use these proceedings to disenfranchise at least 74 million Americans with whom they viscerally disagree and to ensure that neither they nor any other American ever again can cast a vote for Donald Trump," Schoen said.

- - -

3. The key vote

The day concluded with a significant vote on whether the Senate had jurisdiction to hold this trial. The result indicated Trump's conviction is no more likely today than it was yesterday.

Previously, 45 of 50 GOP senators voted that the trial was unconstitutional. That was somewhat surprising given some voting that it was unconstitutional had previously expressed reservations about Trump's conduct, such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

The vote Tuesday, though, was pretty much the same. Only one Republican voted that the Senate had jurisdiction after previously voting the trial was unconstitutional: Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.). McConnell voted that it didn't. In the end, 44 GOP senators voted not to move forward.

Cassidy had previewed such a vote this weekend, indicating he was still open to hearing the evidence. He also suggested the previous vote was a hasty one in which senators didn't have a chance to fully digest the arguments. And the Trump team's performance didn't do much for him.

That apparently only applies to Cassidy. And while his vote is significant as a senator from a very conservative state, it still leaves Democrats needing the votes of 11 Republicans who voted that the Senate didn't even have jurisdiction to try a former president in the first place.

- - -

4. Democrats cite conservative scholars

One of the most compelling arguments about the issue at hand on day one - the constitutionality of proceeding with the trial - came from Rep. Joe Neguse (D-Colo.)

Neguse cited the opinions of several conservative legal scholars and a past Trump impeachment witness assuring that impeaching - or at least trying, as the Senate is now doing - a former president is constitutional.

Neguse delved deep into the opinions of Reagan administration solicitor general Charles Fried, former federal judge Michael McConnell, Federalist Society co-founder Steven Calabresi, renowned conservative lawyer Chuck Cooper and Jonathan Turley, whom Republicans called as a witness during Trump's first impeachment.

Most interestingly, Neguse seemed to allow that there could be debate about impeachment itself occurring for a former official, but cited Michael McConnell's analysis that the House impeached Trump when he was still in office, and thus that the Senate is tasked with holding a trial.

"We laid it out step by step so that you could consider it, and so that opposing counsel could consider it as well," Neguse said of the impeachment managers' brief last week. "We received President Trump's response yesterday, and the trial brief offers no rebuttal to this point - none. And in fairness, I can't think of any convincing response. The Constitution is just exceptionally clear on this point."

The Constitution might not be as clear as Neguse argues - even some of the men he cited acknowledge this situation isn't directly addressed, nor have courts ruled conclusively on it - but he's right that Trump's team hasn't dealt with this head-on. Instead, its brief Monday cited people who don't actually agree with their conclusions.
Drug firmWockhardt on Wednesday said it has been awarded a six-month extension of its agreement with the UK government to fill-finishCOVID-19 vaccines.

This expands the original agreement untilAugust 2022, and the manufacturing will continue to be undertaken at the company's North Wales-based subsidiary CP Pharmaceuticals, said in a regulatory filing.

On the development,UK Trade Secretary Liz Truss said, "It brings important investment to the local area, bringing jobs and security to the community as we battle this awful pandemic".

Wockhardt's investment shows "the strength of our trading ties with India which is a further boost to our already-strong vaccine supply as we build back stronger from coronavirus", she added.

UK Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng said it will ensure uninterrupted fill and finish capacity for the UK.

"By extending our contract with Wockhardt, we will ensure the UK has uninterrupted fill and finishcapacity, guaranteeing we have sufficient supplies to protect the British public in the long term," he said.

"We are happy to extend our collaboration with the UK Government to make vaccines available and the arrangement brings in a huge sense of purpose and pride, it upholds our ongoing global commitment to fight against an unprecedented pandemic", Group Founder Chairman Habil Khorakiwala said.

in August 2020 had said in a regulatory filing that it had entered into an agreement with the UK government to fill-finish the COVID-19 vaccines.

Shares of Wockhardt were trading at Rs527.15on BSE, up 1.47 per cent from the previous close.

(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.)

NEW YORK, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- OTC Markets Group Inc. (OTCQX: OTCM), operator of financial markets for 11,000 U.S. and global securities, today announced Blackstone Minerals Ltd. (ASX: BSX;OTCQX: BLSTF; FRA: B9S), developer of the district scale Ta Khoa Project in Northern Vietnam where the company has a maiden resource and scoping study for the large-scale Ban Phuc Nickel-PGE deposit, has qualified to trade on the OTCQX Best Market. Blackstone Minerals Ltd. upgraded to OTCQX from the OTCQB Venture Market.

Blackstone Minerals Ltd. begins trading on OTCQX under the symbol "BLSTF." U.S. investors can find current financial disclosure and Real-Time Level 2 quotes for the company on www.otcmarkets.com.

The OTCQX Market is designed for established, investor-focused U.S. and international companies. To qualify for OTCQX, companies must meet high financial standards, follow best practice corporate governance, and demonstrate compliance with applicable securities laws. Graduating to the OTCQX Market from the OTCQB Market marks an important milestone for companies, enabling them to demonstrate their qualifications and build visibility among U.S. investors.

"We're pleased to now be trading on the OTCQX; after many years of marketing in North America, we believe now is a great time to increase our exposure to one of the largest pools of capital in the world. Given the recent focus on the rise of Tesla and the electric vehicle revolution, we see North America becoming an important investor market for Blackstone's future green nickel battery opportunities at the Ta Khoa Nickel-Cu-PGE Project," said Scott Williamson, Managing Director of Blackstone Minerals.

About Blackstone Minerals Ltd.

Blackstone Minerals Limited is listed on the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX code: BSX) and is developing the district scale Ta Khoa Project in Northern Vietnam where the Company is drilling out the large-scale Ban Phuc Nickel-Cu-PGE deposit. The Ta Khoa Nickel-Cu-PGE Project has existing modern mine infrastructure built to International Standards including a 450ktpa processing plant and permitted mine facilities. Blackstone also owns a large land holding at the Gold Bridge project within the BC porphyry belt in British Columbia, Canada with large scale drill targets prospective for high grade gold-cobalt-copper mineralisation. In Australia, Blackstone is exploring for nickel and gold in the Eastern Goldfields and gold in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. Blackstone has a board and management team with a proven track record of mineral discovery and corporate success.

About OTC Markets Group Inc.

OTC Markets Group Inc. (OTCQX: OTCM) operates the OTCQX Best Market, the OTCQB Venture Market and the Pink Open Market for 11,000 U.S. and global securities. Through OTC Link ATS and OTC Link ECN, we connect a diverse network of broker-dealers that provide liquidity and execution services. We enable investors to easily trade through the broker of their choice and empower companies to improve the quality of information available for investors.

To learn more about how we create better informed and more efficient markets, visit www.otcmarkets.com.

OTC Link ATS and OTC Link ECN are SEC regulated ATSs, operated by OTC Link LLC, member FINRA/SIPC.

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SOURCE OTC Markets Group Inc.

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Marriott International has announced a significant planned expansion of its all-inclusive portfolio through a long-term agreement with Sunwing Travel Groups hotel division, Blue Diamond Resorts, which has an extensive portfolio of resort properties throughout the Caribbean, Central America and Mexico.

The agreement is expected to propel Marriott into the list of top 10 global all-inclusive players by adding 19 franchised resorts totaling nearly 7,000 rooms across six destinations and more than doubling the companys presence in the all-inclusive segment to 33 properties by 2025. The majority of the properties are expected to be converted into Marriotts Autograph Collection by mid 2021.

We are thrilled to work with Sunwing Travel Group and expand into two new leisure destinations  St. Lucia and Antigua, said Tony Capuano, Group President, Global Development, Design and Operations Services, Marriott International. Blue Diamonds expertise in the all-inclusive segment and high-quality resorts will help ensure that these properties serve as excellent additions to the Marriott portfolio. Todays signing is a testament to Marriott Internationals scale and loyalty platform, and we look forward to providing travelers seeking an all-inclusive experience with more choices in the Caribbean and Latin America.

Marriott International launched its multi-brand all-inclusive portfolio platform in August 2019 and has nine open hotels across Costa Rica, Barbados and Mexico with an additional five hotels in the pipeline in Mexico, Curacao, Dominican Republic, Jamaica and Brazil. With todays agreement, another 19 are expected to join the portfolio. The platform will provide the companys 145 million Marriott Bonvoy members the option to earn and redeem points for the convenient, pay-one-price concept.

We are excited to enter into this agreement with Marriott International, and introduce Blue Diamond Resorts portfolio of hotels to their Autograph Collection brand, said Stephen Hunter, CEO, Sunwing Travel Group. Our luxurious, award-winning hotels will benefit from Marriotts world-renowned reputation and esteemed travel program, all while bolstering our mission to bring unparalleled vacation experiences to customers.

The following resorts are anticipated to convert to the Autograph Collection:

Mexico

 840-room Royalton Riviera Cancun Resort & Spa

 343-room Hideaway at Royalton Riviera Cancun

 566-room Planet Hollywood Beach Resort Cancun

 332-room Planet Hollywood Adults Scene Cancun

 457-room Royalton CHIC Suites Cancun Resort & Spa

Dominican Republic

 730-room Royalton Bavaro Resort & Spa

 320-room Royalton CHIC Punta Cana Resort & Spa

 525-room Royalton Splash Punta Cana Resort & Spa

 317-room Royalton Punta Cana Resort & Casino

 168-room Hideaway at Royalton Punta Cana

Jamaica

 352-room Royalton White Sands Montego Bay

 228-room Royalton Blue Waters Montego Bay

 140-room Hideaway at Royalton Negril

 407-room Royalton Negril Resort & Spa

St. Lucia

 290-room Royalton Saint Lucia Resort & Spa

 166-room Hideaway at Royalton Saint Lucia

Antigua

 294-room Royalton Antigua Resort & Spa

Costa Rica

 294-room Planet Hollywood Beach Resort Costa Rica

Multi-Brand All-Inclusive Portfolio

Given growing demand for premium and luxury all-inclusive stays, Marriott International previously announced it would leverage eight of its 30 global iconic brands in the all-inclusive category: The Ritz-Carlton, The Luxury Collection, Marriott Hotels, Westin Hotels, W Hotels, Autograph Collection, Tribute Portfolio and Delta Hotels by Marriott. Todays agreement reflects the addition of 19 resorts into Marriott Internationals Autograph Collection, a curated collection of remarkably independent hotels hand-selected for their inherent craft and distinct perspectives on design and hospitality. Guests will revel in an elevated all-inclusive leisure vacation experience with a unique design aesthetic, enriching programs and redesigned dynamic dining options, along with enhanced spa and wellness offerings.

Marriott Commitment to Clean Protocols

Hotels in the Marriott portfolio are following Marriott Internationals Commitment to Clean protocols created together with leading experts in food and water safety, hygiene and infection prevention and hotel operations. These protocols include mandated mask-wearing for all associates within the hotel, and the use of electrostatic sprayers and disinfectants recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and World Health Organization to sanitise surfaces in the hotels. In addition, the company has modified its food and beverage operational practices creating a newly designed approach to buffets and in-room dining. Measures include but are not limited to contactless and low-touch service, digital menus, pre-plated mini buffet options and a hybrid buffet with elements of self-guided service around individually plated or packaged selections. - TradeArabia News Service
This year our dine and drink business locations throughout the Gorge have suffered with closures. You can help support your favorites by purchasing take out and gift cards. Many of these business will offer curb-side delivery and some will deliver to your home. Lets keep the Gorge going strong!
The UN Security Council called the establishment of a transitional government in Libya `an important milestone' Tuesday and urged all countries with foreign forces and mercenaries in the North African nation to withdraw them `without further delay' as the divided North African nation moves toward elections in December.

The Libya conflict, which began with a NATO-backed uprising in 2011 that toppled longtime dictator Muammar Gaddafi and split the country, has been one of the most intractable remnants of the `Arab spring` a decade ago.

The agreement on a three-member interim presidency council and prime minister Friday has been seen as a major if uncertain step toward unifying Libya, which has rival governments in Tobruk and Tripoli.

The council called on the interim executives `to agree swiftly on the formation of a new, inclusive government,' make preparations for presidential and parliamentary elections planned for Dec. 24, improve services for the Libyan people, `and launch a comprehensive national reconciliation process.'

The presidential statement, approved by all 15 council members, is a step below a resolution and becomes part of the council's record.

The latest upsurge in violence in Libya began in April 2019 when the commander of the Libyan National Army (LNA), Khalifa Hafter, backed by Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, launched an offensive seeking to capture the capital, Tripoli. His campaign collapsed after Turkey stepped up its military support for the UN supported government in Tripoli and the west with hundreds of troops and thousands of Syrian mercenaries.

This led to a cease-fire agreement in October that called for the withdrawal of all foreign forces and mercenaries in three months and adherence to a U.N. arms embargo, provisions which have not been met.

Security Council members called on all parties to implement the cease-fire agreement `in full,' to quickly withdraw foreign forces and mercenaries, and fully comply with the arms embargo.

Last Thursday, the council requested Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to swiftly deploy an advance team to Libya as a first step to sending monitors to observe the cease-fire between the warring parties.

Guterres recommended in late December that international monitors be sent under a UN umbrella to observe the cease-fire from a base in the strategic city of Sirte, the gateway to Libya's major oil fields and export terminals. He said an advance team should be sent to Tripoli as a first step to `provide the foundations for a scalable United Nations cease-fire monitoring mechanism based in Sirte.'

The council statement adopted Tuesday `underlines the importance of a credible and effective Libyan-led cease-fire monitoring mechanism under UN auspices' and welcomes the swift deployment of an advance team.

`The Security Council looks forward to receiving proposals on the tasks and scale of the cease-fire monitoring mechanism from the secretary-general,' the presidential statement said.

The council thanked American diplomat Stephanie Williams, the former acting UN special envoy for Libya, for her role in getting the Libyan rivals to agree to the cease-fire, December elections and the transitional government.

Former Slovak foreign minister Jan Kubis, a veteran UN diplomat, took over Monday as the UN special representative for Libya His office said he has spoken with key players in the east and west, the president-designate of the presidency council and the prime minister-designate.

The Security Council reaffirmed its strong commitment `to the UN facilitated Libyan-led and Libyan-owned political process and to the sovereignty, independence, territorial integrity and national unity of Libya.'Kubis pledged to build `on the momentum generated by positive developments achieved in the past months.'

*This story was edited by Ahram Online.

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COLUMBUS, Ind. and BENGALURU, India, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Infosys (NYSE: INFY), a global leader in next-generation digital services and consulting, announced that it further enhanced its collaboration with Toyota Material Handling (TMH), a North American leader in material handling innovation, to deliver an immersive experience to its dealer ecosystem on the Infosys Meridian platform. A part of Infosys Cobalt, Infosys Meridian enables enterprises to evolve into a remote-first, hyper-productive anywhere workplace that deepens stakeholder engagement, streamlines work processes and enhances productivity.

Infosys has been collaborating with TMH for about two years in multiple digital transformation initiatives including its global telematics solution, enterprise data strategy and hyper automation. TMH holds a premier annual event to engage with its dealer partners. In this event, they showcase their existing offerings and solutions and launch new products. With wide-spread social distancing, it was very challenging for them to achieve this in an effective manner. TMH partnered with Infosys to host this 4-day event, virtually on the Infosys platform. Delivering hyper-personalized experiences to dealers from across North America, the company disseminated information on the latest products and innovations in its forklifts and advanced logistics solutions. Infosys Meridian's observability and AI virtual assistant capabilities helped Toyota Material Handling to engage with dealers seamlessly through highly captivating and experiential virtual events.

Jeff Rufener, President & CEO, Toyota Material Handling, said, "During these times of social distancing, it's challenging to make quality connections with dealers and customers. But we were able to delight our dealers with an immersive experience using Infosys Meridian. This platform allowed us to hold a virtual Toyota Week, an event that brought our dealers from across North America together for keynote sessions, breakout meetings, and a product showcase. Infosys Meridian helped us reach more than twice as many people as we could with a live event. We believe the platform's many features and capabilities deliver great value in areas such as virtual training and interactive virtual showrooms."

Jasmeet Singh, EVP and Global Head of Manufacturing, Infosys, said, "Manufacturers today are looking to use technology in myriad ways to reimagine their business processes and redefine stakeholder engagement in the new normal. Through the power of Infosys Meridian, a cloud-powered, mobile-first platform, Toyota Material Handling was able to engage the dealer community, who are key to their business. We look forward to collaborating with TMH in future on the virtual platform."

View the enhanced event experience for Toyota Material Handling powered by Infosys Meridian: https://youtu.be/anr57Hw7cJY

About Infosys

Infosys is a global leader in next-generation digital services and consulting. We enable clients in 46 countries to navigate their digital transformation. With nearly four decades of experience in managing the systems and workings of global enterprises, we expertly steer our clients through their digital journey. We do it by enabling the enterprise with an AI-powered core that helps prioritize the execution of change. We also empower the business with agile digital at scale to deliver unprecedented levels of performance and customer delight. Our always-on learning agenda drives their continuous improvement through building and transferring digital skills, expertise, and ideas from our innovation ecosystem.

Visit www.infosys.com to see how Infosys (NYSE: INFY) can help your enterprise navigate your next.

Safe harbor

Certain statements in this release concerning our future growth prospects, financial expectations and plans for navigating the COVID-19 impact on our employees, clients and stakeholders are forward-looking statements 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 COVID-19 and the effects of government and other measures seeking to contain its spread, risks related to an economic downturn or recession in India, the United States and other countries around the world, changes in political, business, and economic conditions, 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, unauthorized use of our intellectual property and general economic conditions affecting our industry and the outcome of pending litigation and government investigation. 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, 2020. 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.

SOURCE Infosys
The New York Times

A team of astronomers made a blockbuster claim in the fall. They said they had discovered compelling evidence pointing to life floating in the clouds of Venus.

If true, that would be stunning. People have long gazed into the cosmos and wondered whether something is alive out there. For an affirmative answer to pop up on the planet in the orbit next to Earths would suggest that life is not rare in the universe, but commonplace.

The astronomers, led by Jane Greaves of Cardiff University in Wales, could not see any microscopic Venusians with their telescopes on Earth. Rather, in a paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy, they reported the detection of a molecule called phosphine and said they could come up with no plausible explanation for how it could form there except as the waste product of microbes.

Five months later, after unexpected twists and nagging doubts, scientists are not quite sure what to make of the data and what it might mean. It might spur a renaissance in the study of Venus, which has largely been overlooked for decades. It could point to exotic volcanism and new geological puzzles. It could indeed be aliens. Or it could be nothing at all.

Greaves and her colleagues remain certain about their findings even as they have lowered their estimates of how much phosphine is there. I am very confident there is phosphine in the clouds, she said.

Clara Sousa-Silva, a research scientist at the Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and one of the authors of the Nature Astronomy paper, said, I think the team in general still feels pretty confident that its phosphine, that the signal is real and that there are no real abiotic explanations.

But, Sousa-Silva added, theres a lot of uncertainty in all of us.

In the wider circle of planetary scientists, many are sceptical, if not disbelieving. Some think that the signal is just a wiggle of noise, or that it could be explained by sulfur dioxide, a chemical known to be in the Venus atmosphere. For them, there is so far no persuasive evidence of phosphine  let alone microbes that would make it  at all.

Whatever it is, its going to be faint, said Ignas Snellen, an astronomer at Leiden University in the Netherlands. If the signal is faint, he said, its not clear whether its real, and, if its real, whether its going to be phosphine or not.

The debate could linger, unresolved, for years, much like past disputed claims for evidence of life on Mars.

When the observation came out, I was like, Oh, thats interesting,  said Martha S. Gilmore, a professor of geology at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. Gilmore is the principal investigator of a study that has proposed to NASA an ambitious flagship robotic mission to Venus that would include an airship flying through the clouds for 60 days.

I think were sceptical, Gilmore said. But I dont personally feel yet that we want to throw out this observation at all.

The surface of Venus today is a hellish place where temperatures roast well over 800 degrees Fahrenheit. But early in the history of the solar system, it could have been much more like Earth today, with oceans and a moderate climate. In this early era, Mars, which is now cold and dry, also appears to have had water flowing across its surface.

Potentially, 4 billion years ago, we had habitable environments on Venus, Earth and Mars  all three of them, said Dirk Schulze-Makuch, a professor at the Technical University Berlin in Germany. And we know that there is still a viable, thriving biosphere on our planet. So on Venus, it got too hot. On Mars, it got too cold.

But life, once it arises, seems to stubbornly hold on, surviving in harsh environs. You could have potentially, in environmental niches, microbial life hanging on, Schulze-Makuch said.

For Mars, some scientists think it is possible that life persists today underground, in the rocks. But the subsurface of Venus is too hot, said Schulze-Makuch, who two decades ago scrutinized whether any parts of that planet were still habitable.

Instead, he said, Venusian life could have moved up, to the clouds. Thirty miles up are short-sleeve temperatures  about 85 degrees Fahrenheit. Microbes in that part of the atmosphere would stay aloft at that altitude for several months, more than long enough to reproduce and maintain a viable population.

But even the clouds are not a serene, benign place. They are filled with droplets of sulfuric acid and bathed in ultraviolet radiation from the sun. And it is dry, with only smidgens of water, an essential ingredient for life as we know it.

Still, if that was the environment that Venus microbes had to survive in, it was possible that they had evolved to do just that.

Phosphine is a simple molecule  a pyramid of three atoms of hydrogen attached to one phosphorus atom. But it takes considerable energy to push the atoms together, and conditions for such chemical reactions do not seem to exist in the atmosphere of Venus.

Phosphine could be created in the heat and crushing pressure of the interior of Venus. Even with the lower amounts of phosphine that Greaves group now estimates, it would be unexpected and surprising if Venus volcanic eruptions turned out to be so violently voluminous that they spewed out enough phosphine to be detected where Greaves team said it was: in the clouds, more than 30 miles up.

We cant easily rule in or out volcanism to explain this new, lower phosphine abundance, said Paul Byrne, a professor of planetary science at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, who pointed to the many unknowns about the planet and its geological system. Its probably not volcanism. But we cant say for sure.

On Earth, phosphine is produced by microbes that thrive without oxygen. It is found in our intestines, in the feces of badgers and penguins, and in some deep sea worms.

In 2017, Greaves found indications of phosphine using the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii. Different molecules absorb and emit specific wavelengths of light, and these form a fingerprint that enables scientists to identify them from far away. The measurements found what scientists call an absorption line at a wavelength that corresponded to phosphine. They calculated that there were 20 parts per billion of phosphine in that part of Venuss air.

Follow-up observations in 2019 used the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, or ALMA, a radio telescope in Chile that consists of 66 antennas. Those again turned up the same dark line corresponding to phosphine, although at lower concentrations, about 10 parts per billion.

But other scientists like Snellen did not find the analysis by the scientists, and the suggestions of a biological source, nearly as convincing.

The ALMA data, which recorded the brightness of light from Venus over a range of wavelengths, contained many wiggles and the one corresponding to phosphine was not particularly larger than any of the others. Greaves and her colleagues used a technique called polynomial fitting to subtract out what they believed was noise and pull out the phosphine signal. The technique is common, but they also used a polynomial with an unusually large number of variables  12.

That, critics said, could generate a false signal.

If your signal is not stronger than your noise, then you just cannot succeed, Snellen said.

Other scientists contend that even if there was a signal, it was much more likely to come from sulfur dioxide, which absorbs light at nearly the same wavelength.

Greaves argued that the critics did not understand the precautions taken to rule out fake lines. She said the specific shape of the absorption line was too narrow to match that of sulfur dioxide.

As the scientists debated, there was a surprise in October: the ALMA observatory had provided incorrectly calibrated data to Greaves, and it contained spurious noise. For weeks, the Venus researchers waited in limbo.

When the reprocessed ALMA data became available in November, the noisy wiggles around the phosphine absorption line were diminished, but there now also appeared to be less phosphine  about 1 part per billion overall, with places that might be as high as 5 parts per billion.

The line weve got now is much nicer looking, Greaves said, even though it was not as pronounced. But it is what it is. We now have a better result.

Bryan Butler, an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Socorro, New Mexico, said he and others had looked at the same ALMA data, both the original and reprocessed versions, and failed to see any sign of phosphine.

They claim they still see it, and we still claim that its not there, Butler said. From a purely data scientists viewpoint, nobody is backing them up because nobodys been able to reproduce their results.

A new paper by a team of astronomers, led by Victoria S. Meadows at the University of Washington, says that a more detailed model of Venus atmosphere developed in the 1990s shows that phosphine in the cloud layer would not even create an absorption line detectable from Earth. The team found that the phosphine would have to be some 15 miles higher in order to absorb the light. The research will be published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

What were showing is that the gas above basically doesnt cool to the point that it can absorb until it gets to about 75 or 80 kilometers, Meadows said. Which is well above the cloud deck.

Other scientists delved into older observations of Venus to see whether there might be signs of phosphine hidden there.

In 1978, a NASA spacecraft, Pioneer Venus, dropped four probes in the planets atmosphere. One of them even continued sending back data from the surface for more than an hour after impact.

Reviewing the Pioneer Venus data, Rakesh Mogul, a professor of chemistry at California State Polytechnic University-Pomona, spotted telltale signs for the element phosphorous in Venus clouds. There is a chemical, most likely a gas, that contains phosphorus, Mogul said. The data does support the presence of phosphine. Its not the highest amounts, but its there.

However, scientists looking at data from Venus Express, a European Space Agency spacecraft that orbited Venus from 2006 to 2014, came up empty for phosphine.

So did astronomers  including Greaves and Sousa-Silva  who were trying to identify a different absorption line of phosphine in infrared observations from a NASA telescope in Hawaii.

Greaves said the Venus Express and the infrared observations in Hawaii did not peer as deeply into the Venus atmosphere, and thus it should not be a surprise that they did not detect phosphine.

The levels of phosphine, if it is there, could also be changing over time.

That would make it more difficult to come up with definitive answers, much like the enduring mystery of methane on Mars. More than a decade ago, telescopes on Earth and an orbiting European spacecraft reported the presence of methane in the Martian air. On Earth, most methane is produced by living organisms, but it can also be produced in hydrothermal systems without any biology involved.

But the methane readings were faint, and then subsequent observations failed to confirm it. Perhaps the readings were misinterpreted noise. When NASAs Curiosity rover arrived on Mars in 2012, it carried an instrument that could measure minute amounts of methane. The scientists looked and looked  and measured none.

But Curiosity did detect a burst of methane that persisted for weeks before dissipating. Later, it detected an even stronger outburst, but then it was gone again.

Mars scientists remain at a loss as to the quick appearance  and disappearance  of the methane.

The Venus phosphine debate will remain a stalemate until there are further observations. But the coronavirus pandemic has shut down ALMA as well as NASAs Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, or SOFIA, a telescope aboard a modified 747 that can study infrared light from high in Earths atmosphere.

The balloon that would be part of Gilmores flagship Venus mission could resolve the uncertainties by directly collecting samples of air. It would be able to find not only the phosphine but also carbon-based molecules of any microbes.

We really need to be in the clouds, Gilmore said, because that is the habitat that is hypothesized to support life.

Planetary scientists are in the process of putting together their once-a-decade recommendations to NASA about their priorities. There are many intriguing places to study, and NASA usually undertakes only one costly flagship mission at a time. A flagship mission also takes longer to build and one for Venus would not be scheduled to launch until 2031 at the earliest.

NASA is also considering a couple of smaller Venus missions for its Discovery program, a competition in which scientists propose missions capped at $500 million.

One of them, DAVINCI+, would be a 21st-century version of one of the Pioneer Venus probes. It could look for phosphine, although just at one place and one time.

The second proposal, VERITAS, would send an orbiter that would produce high-resolution images of the surface. Although it does not include a phosphine-detecting instrument, one could be added.

And at least one private company, Rocket Lab, wants to send a small probe to study Venus in the coming years.

Further observations are warranted, said Butler of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Theres nothing you can point to that says, Oh, yeah, we absolutely see phosphine on Venus. But, you know, its tantalizing.

But he also said, I would not bet my life savings that its not there.

Kenneth Chang and Shannon Stirone c. 2021 The New York Times Company

DUBLIN, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Global Pharmaceutical Continuous Manufacturing Market 2021-2028" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

This report insinuates that the global pharmaceutical continuous manufacturing market is likely to showcase an upward trend at a CAGR of 10.35% over the estimated period 2021-2028.



Factors such as the surge in initiatives by regulatory authorities for the adoption of continuous manufacturing, coupled with the growing acceptance of PCM systems, are stimulating the global market's growth. Further, the increasing opportunities in the untapped emerging economies and the rise in large molecules and biologics manufacturing, are opening new avenues for the pharmaceutical continuous manufacturing market.



However, the lack of demand for pharmaceutical continuous manufacturing systems in underdeveloped countries and growing consumer expectations pertaining to better medicines, are restricting the global market's development to a large extent.



The global pharmaceutical continuous manufacturing market comprises the regions of North America, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East and Africa.



The Asia-Pacific is projected to become the fastest-growing market for pharmaceutical continuous manufacturing during the assessed period. The region's growth can be attributed to growing investments in the pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical industry, along with the rising contract research organization. Additionally, the surging concentration of prominent manufacturers on extending their operations in the emerging countries is creating multiple opportunities across the APAC region.



In China, favorable policies to promote the healthcare sector are likely to boost the pharmaceutical companies. Moreover, several companies are striving to conduct continuous bioprocessing, thereby strengthening the pharmaceutical continuous manufacturing market in China.



The established companies involved in the market are Korsch AG, Glatt GmbH, Hosokawa Micron Corporation, Siemens Healthineers, Eli Lilly & Company, Gebruder Lodige Maschinenbau GmbH, Syntegon, Thermofisher Scientific Inc, Coperion GmbH, LB Bohle Maschinen + Verfahren GmbH, Pfizer Inc, and GEA Group AG.



Thermofisher Scientific Inc is among the leading companies with a broad clientele base. Its business segments include laboratory products, analytical instruments, specialty diagnostics, and life sciences solutions. Moreover, the company develops and sells its products to research institutions, government agencies, clinical laboratories, biotech companies, and more. Among its products, ProtoArray Human Protein Microarrays are able to read with a commercially available fluorescent microarray scanner. It has its operations in more than 50 countries, with headquarter in the United States.



Key Topics Covered:



1. Global Pharmaceutical Continuous Manufacturing Market - Summary



2. Industry Outlook

2.1. Porter's Five Forces Model

2.1.1. Threat of New Entrants

2.1.2. Threat of Substitute Products

2.1.3. Bargaining Power of Buyers

2.1.4. Bargaining Power of Suppliers

2.1.5. Competitive Rivalry

2.2. Impact of Covid-19 on Pharmaceutical Continuous Manufacturing Market

2.3. Legal, Policy, & Regulatory Framework

2.4. Market Attractiveness Index

2.5. Vendor Scorecard

2.6. Key Insights

2.7. Market Drivers

2.7.1. Rise in Initiatives by Regulatory Authorities for the Adoption of Continuous Manufacturing

2.7.2. Surging Acceptance of Pharmaceutical Continuous Manufacturing Systems

2.7.3. Rising Healthcare Expenditure

2.8. Market Restraints

2.8.1. Lack of Demand for Pcm Systems in Underdeveloped Economies

2.8.2. Rising Customer Expectations for Better Medicines

2.9. Market Opportunities

2.9.1. Increasing Opportunities in the Untapped Emerging Economies

2.9.2. Surge in the Manufacturing of Large Molecules and Biologics



3. Global Pharmaceutical Continuous Manufacturing Market Outlook - by Product

3.1. Integrated Continuous System

3.2. Semi-Continuous System

3.3. Control & Software



4. Global Pharmaceutical Continuous Manufacturing Market Outlook - by Application

4.1. Final Drug Product Manufacturing

4.2. Api Manufacturing



5. Global Pharmaceutical Continuous Manufacturing Market Outlook - by End-User

5.1. Pharmaceutical Companies

5.2. Contract Manufacturing Organizations

5.3. Other End-Users



6. Global Pharmaceutical Continuous Manufacturing Market - Regional Outlook

6.1. North America

6.1.1. Market by Product

6.1.2. Market by Application

6.1.3. Market by End-User

6.1.4. Country Analysis

6.1.4.1. United States

6.1.4.2. Canada

6.2. Europe

6.2.1. Market by Product

6.2.2. Market by Application

6.2.3. Market by End-User

6.2.4. Country Analysis

6.2.4.1. Germany

6.2.4.2. France

6.2.4.3. United Kingdom

6.2.4.4. Italy

6.2.4.5. Russia

6.2.4.6. Spain

6.2.4.7. Rest of Europe

6.3. Asia-Pacific

6.3.1. Market by Product

6.3.2. Market by Application

6.3.3. Market by End-User

6.3.4. Country Analysis

6.3.4.1. China

6.3.4.2. India

6.3.4.3. Japan

6.3.4.4. Australia & New Zealand

6.3.4.5. South Korea

6.3.4.6. Asean Countries

6.3.4.7. Rest of Asia-Pacific

6.4. Latin America

6.4.1. Market by Product

6.4.2. Market by Application

6.4.3. Market by End-User

6.4.4. Country Analysis

6.4.4.1. Mexico

6.4.4.2. Brazil

6.4.4.3. Rest of Latin America

6.5. Middle East and Africa

6.5.1. Market by Product

6.5.2. Market by Application

6.5.3. Market by End-User

6.5.4. Country Analysis

6.5.4.1. Saudi Arabia

6.5.4.2. United Arab Emirates

6.5.4.3. Turkey

6.5.4.4. South Africa

6.5.4.5. Rest of Middle East & Africa



7. Company Profile

7.1. Hosokawa Micron Corporation

7.2. Gea Group AG

7.3. LB Bohle Maschinen + Verfahren GmbH

7.4. Thermofisher Scientific Inc

7.5. Siemens Healthineers

7.6. Eli Lilly & Company

7.7. Pfizer Inc

7.8. Glatt GmbH

7.9. Syntegon (Formerly Bosch Packaging Technology)

7.10. Gebruder Lodige Maschinenbau GmbH

7.11. Korsch AG

7.12. Coperion GmbH

7.13. Munson Machinery Company



8. Research Methodology & Scope

8.1. Research Scope & Deliverables

8.1.1. Objectives of Study

8.1.2. Scope of Study

8.2. Sources of Data

8.2.1. Primary Data Sources

8.2.2. Secondary Data Sources

8.3. Research Methodology

8.3.1. Evaluation of Proposed Market

8.3.2. Identification of Data Sources

8.3.3. Assessment of Market Determinants

8.3.4. Data Collection

8.3.5. Data Validation & Analysis



For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/8fsbpt



Media Contact:

Research and Markets

Laura Wood, Senior Manager

[email protected]



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The newly-founded businesses mainly work in the industries deemed "safer" amid the pandemic

About 10,000 businesses were opened during the first month of the year, following data published by the National Business Registration Portal under the Ministry of Planning and Investment. In addition, the average registered capital per enterprise was VND15.4 billion ($669,565), up 3.3 per cent on-year, while total added capital increased by 10.5 per cent or VND395 trillion ($17.17 billion).

The firms mainly specialise in power distribution, water, gas, mining, retail, healthcare, and real estate, among others. This reflects businesses turning towards the least risky industries.

Meanwhile, sectors like retail, construction, and manufacturing were hit the worst, with the highest number of businesses leaving the market (9,585, 3,189, and 3,053, respectively).

As of the end of January, the total number of businesses withdrawing from the market hit 25,752, about 18,000 establishments of which have temporarily halted operations, up 53.4 per cent on-year. The rest are waiting for dissolution or have finished the procedures for dissolution.

Notably, businesses suspending operations hail from all 17 industries with an on-year growth of more than 40 per cent.

Elsewhere, the number of businesses resuming operations in January dropped 23.2 per cent on-year to 6,503.
SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Innovations in modern learning that support learning agility, responsiveness and real-time operational learning in the flow of work fueled significant momentum for Inkling , a global leader in digital learning platform solutions, during 2020. The company added many new customers and extended its digital learning footprint with existing customers via new products and use cases. Inkling also entered into several new strategic partnerships. The company was honored with more than three dozen prestigious industry awards for its advances in mobile technology for learning, workforce development and digital transformation of the workplace.

"The COVID-19 pandemic cast a glaring spotlight on the critical deficiencies of traditional learning and training tools when companies needed them most. Even organizations that had aggressively invested in digital transformation over the previous years were ill-prepared to make rapid and accurate workforce decisions. It was during this difficult time that Inkling shone brightest, providing an agile modern platform that enabled companies in high consequence industries to identify critical skill needs, deploy that expertise, maintain operations and keep employees informed and safe as their business dramatically shifted," said Inkling CEO Jeff Carr.

"During the challenging months of 2020, companies across all industry sectors realized great value from their Inkling deployments, which allowed them to provide essential front line and remote workers with the continually updated visual knowledge required to do their jobs safely, with high confidence. As more organizations seek ways to compress years of digital transformation into months in the post-pandemic world, the expansion of remote work and need for virtual training will drive them to provide a better experience to modern learners. Inkling looks forward to continuing to build on our current momentum and providing the solutions to help businesses become agile organizations."

In the past year, Inkling strengthened its footprint in the healthcare sector with the addition of CHRISTUS Health and one of the nation's largest pharmacy retailers that is very prominent on the forefront of the Coronavirus vaccination mission. Inkling also onboarded many new customers across a variety of industries, including GOSH Enterprises, which operates Charley's Philly Cheese Steaks and BIBIBOP Asian Grill; G6 Hospitality; and Jack in the Box. The company also saw existing customers expand their usage of Inkling solutions. For example, 13 customers, including Pure Storage and G6 Hospitality, adopted Inkling Learning Pathways, which was launched in 2019 to provide guided training, automated assignments and certification in the flow of work.

"Inkling has innovated through its delivery of rich, immersive content experiences at enterprise scale," said Jim Lundy, founder, CEO and lead analyst for Aragon Research. "Inkling applies digital transformation at the intersection of the learner experience and operational processes. This approach appeals to learners, who want access to knowledge anytime and anywhere, as well as companies that have struggled with the efficiency and effectiveness of in-person and paper-based training programs."

Inkling Announces New Partnerships in Modern Learning

Inkling extended its reach through new strategic partnerships with several industry-leading learning technology companies:

EdCast , an AI-powered knowledge cloud for personalized learning and career mobility, which Inkling is working with to improve how enterprises create and distribute mission-critical learning to employees.

, an AI-powered knowledge cloud for personalized learning and career mobility, which Inkling is working with to improve how enterprises create and distribute mission-critical learning to employees. The Educe Group , a leading provider of talent management consulting services, with which Inkling will collaborate, enabling major corporations and government agencies to benefit from interoperability of Inkling and other learning applications and processes.

, a leading provider of talent management consulting services, with which Inkling will collaborate, enabling major corporations and government agencies to benefit from interoperability of Inkling and other learning applications and processes. OpenSesame , a global e-learning innovator, which Inkling will support streamlining access to more than 20,000 modern e-learning courses.

Inkling Names Former McDonald's Corp. CLO Rob Lauber to Advisory Board

Inkling also added some deep industry expertise to its advisory board, with the appointment of Rob Lauber, former SVP and chief learning officer at McDonald's Corp. Lauber was responsible for the overall learning and talent development strategy and execution across McDonald's more than 38,000 restaurants worldwide from 2014 to 2020. Prior to McDonald's, Lauber was vice president of Yum University at Yum Brands, Inc., for more than eight years. He has been recognized many times by Chief Learning Officer Magazine for his work on leading business change and global learning best practices, including being named CLO of the Year.

Record Number of 2020 Industry Award Wins Validate Inkling's Leadership

Inkling's proven performance delivering solutions that power operational agility and responsiveness  or "learning at workspeed"  as the pandemic created an unprecedented health, economic, and social crisis, helped earn it more than three dozen awards in 2020 alone.

Inkling received 15 Brandon Hall Group Awards for Technology Excellence in December, focused on Inkling solutions to support crisis management, content authoring and management, external training and mobile learning. Earlier in 2020, Inkling was honored with 16 HCM Excellence Awards from Brandon Hall Group for solutions deployed with Inkling customers Abbott Diagnostics, Project Lead the Way, Pure Storage and Taco Bell.

Aragon Research named Inkling as a leader for strategy in its Globe for Corporate Learning, 2020. Aragon cited the need for businesses to keep pace to ensure employees have the skills and information needed to pivot quickly, which Inkling enables with its platform that supports real-time impactful learning from any device. Inkling also won Aragon's 2020 Innovation Award for Learning , recognizing its end-to-end digital platform that advances operational training and learning.

Inkling also received a Stevie Award in the "Corporate Learning/Workforce Development Solution" category of the 18th Annual American Business Awards, for its Learning Pathways solution, which gives employees easy, on-demand access to bite-sized lessons and media rich content, anytime and anywhere.

About Inkling

Inkling is a leading, global, modern learning platform designed for today's learners and today's work. The company delivers your most critical knowledge to your people in the flow of work, anytime, anywhere, and on any device. With easy content authoring, simplified learning paths, a modern learning experience, and meaningful insights, Inkling's modern operational learning platform delivers learning flawlessly and with simplicity. Named a Hot Vendor and Leader in Strategy for Learning by Aragon Research and a Training Industry Top 20 Training Delivery Company, Inkling also has earned several Excellence in Technology and Human Capital Management and Innovation awards from Brandon Hall Group. Leading brands trust Inkling to help them efficiently onboard employees, ensure continued performance enablement, and successfully execute corporate initiatives while providing new levels of visibility into critical operating metrics. Founded in 2009, Inkling is based in San Francisco.

For more information about Inkling, visit www.inkling.com .

SOURCE Inkling

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Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-10 20:58:16|Editor: huaxia

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ULAN BATOR, Feb.10 (Xinhua) -- Mongolian Prime Minister Luvsannamsrai Oyun-Erdene announced here on Wednesday that his government approved a comprehensive plan to protect the health of people and recover the economy amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

The country will spend a total of 10 trillion Mongolian Tugriks (3.5 billion U.S. dollars), almost equal to the country's annual budget, to implement the comprehensive plan in the coming three years, Oyun-Erdene said at a press conference.

"The essence of this plan is to create jobs, not welfare. The best care is a guaranteed and well-paid job," Oyun-Erdene said, noting that much of the plan will focus on job creation.

In addition, the country will vaccinate at least 60 percent of its population of 3.3 million against the COVID-19 under the plan, and the vaccination campaign is expected to begin in March, said the prime minister.

The Asian country has so far registered 2,174 COVID-19 cases, with four deaths. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-10 11:54:37|Editor: huaxia

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PYONGYANG, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- Kim Jong Un, the top leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), specified the direction of polices related to this year's economic development plan at a meeting on Tuesday, the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported Wednesday.

At the second plenary meeting of the eighth Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea (WPK), Kim, the newly-reelected party general secretary, set forth tasks for different sectors, including economy and culture, and called for "enhancing the role of the state organs for economic guidance to carry them out," the report said.

Kim also put forward tasks for the fishing sector so as to provide people with more marine products.

He stressed the need for the economic sector to carry out innovative and reasonable plans to protect the economy and consolidate its independence, it said.

"Propping up agriculture is an important state affair" that must be successful in solving the food problem and pushing ahead the cause of socialist construction, the DPRK leader added.

Noting that the party will support bold economic renovation, Kim reiterated the need for economic officials to "decisively enhance their responsibility and role in planning and guiding this year's economic work," the report said.

The meeting, which will run through Wednesday, is the second of its kind this year after the first plenary meeting of the WPK central committee was held last month, it added. Enditem

[February 10, 2021] CGTN: China Eyes Good Start to 14th Five-Year Plan Period Ahead of Spring Festival

A New Year is a new beginning. With this year's Spring Festival, or the Chinese Lunar New Year, just around the corner, China is also well prepared for the beginning of the 14th Five-Year Plan (FYP) period (2021-2025) and the centenary of the Communist Party of China ( CPC (News - Alert) ). This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210210005816/en/ Ahead of the Spring Festival, Chinese President Xi Jinping extended Spring Festival greetings to all Chinese Wednesday at a reception in Beijing and called for a good start in boosting the country's development during the 14th FYP period so as to celebrate the Party's centenary with outstanding achievements. Ready for a new journey in the 14th FYP period Facts have once again proven that the system of socialism with Chinese characteristics has incomparable vitality and creativity, Xi said. As long as the entire Party and the Chinese people of all ethnic groups rally closely around the CPC Central Committee, there is no difficulty that cannot be overcome, he said. The year 2021 is crucial to China as the nation is set to achieve its first centenary goal within the set time frame - to complete the building of a moderately prosperous society in all respects - nd begin the work towards the second goal, to fully build a modern socialist country.



Stressing the goal of promoting high-quality development, President Xi highlighted the importance of the country's new stage of development, the implementation of this new vision of development, and the construction of a new pattern of development in 2021. To meet the people's ever-growing needs for a better life, efforts are needed in deepening supply-side structural reform while taking reform and innovation as the fundamental driving force, the Chinese president said.

Consolidating and expanding achievements in epidemic containment and economic and social development are necessary, he added. Great achievements in 2020 as solid foundation President Xi also looked back on the past year which he described as "extraordinary" in his New Year speech. Xi hailed what has achieved in COVID-19 prevention, poverty alleviation, flood prevention, rescue and relief work, and reform and opening-up, and highlighted the country's progress in technology, economy and the Belt and Road construction. China is one of the most resilient economies amid the ravaging pandemic and global economic slump. The country was among the first to have put the virus under control, to have resumed work and production and to have realized economic stability and recovery, which not only made it the first major economy in the world to register positive growth in 2020 but also brought confidence and hope to others in the world. On November 23, as southwest China's Guizhou Province cleared all the names on its poverty list, China announced the eradication of absolute poverty and regional poverty. At a symposium on securing a decisive victory in poverty alleviation in March, President Xi said lifting all rural residents living below the poverty line out of poverty by 2020 is a solemn promise made by the CPC Central Committee and it must be fulfilled on time. Original article: here. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210210005816/en/

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A lot of our medicines and other bioactive drugs are based on chemical structures called "enantiomers"-- molecules that are mirror images of each other and are non-superimposable. Notable among them are chiral N,N-acetals contained in diuretic drugs like bendroflumethiazide and thiabutazide, used to treat high blood pressure and edema.

Because an enantiomer and its mirror image version often have different biological activities, with only one of them having pharmacological utility, an "enantioselective" or asymmetric synthesis yielding the desired enantiomer in greater amounts is highly desirable.

In the case of N,N-acetals, several studies have demonstrated their enantioselective preparation from aldehydes, aldimines, or enamines. However, in all these cases, their reaction partner has been limited to aldehyde or imines. While ketones have been employed, with instances of successful enantioselective N,N-acetal synthesis, their use--in general--is not considered effective.

In a recent study published in Advanced Synthesis & Catalysis, scientists from Nagoya Institute of Technology (NITech) and Osaka University in Japan explored this situation with an enantioselective synthesis of chiral N,N-acetals from -dicarbonyl compounds--compounds with two carbonyl (ketone) groups on the -carbon--in presence of chiral imidazoline phosphoric acid catalysts, and obtained yields as high as 99% with a maximum enantiopurity of 96%.

Our study presents the first highly stereoselective formation of chiral N,N-acetals from -ketoesters using an original catalyst that can be used for other stereoselective synthetic reactions as well." Shuichi Nakamura, Study Lead and Professor, Nagoya Institute of Technology

The scientists began by examining the reaction of 2-aminobenzamide with various -ketoesters in presence of different catalysts.

The -ketoesters differed from one another in the nature of the functional group attached to the -carbon, while the catalysts chosen were bis(imidazoline)-phosphoric acid with different substituents attached to the nitrogen in the imidazoline ring, mono-imidazoline-phosphoric acid, and two commercial chiral phosphoric acids.

Among these various combinations, scientists found the best yield (99%) and enantiopurity (92%) in the case of -ketoester with benzhydryl group and a bis(imidazoline)-phosphoric acid catalyst with 1-naphthalenesulfonyl group.

Scientists next examined the reaction of various aminobenzamides (bearing either an electron-donating methyl group or electron-withdrawing fluoro, chloro, and bromo groups) with different -ketoesters (containing the same benzhydryl group but different functional groups in place of an earlier phenyl group) keeping the same bis(imidazoline)-phosphoric acid catalyst with 1-naphthalenesulfonyl group. All the combinations showed good yield (77-95%) along with high enantioselectivity (82-96%).

In addition, the team looked at the enantioselective synthesis of N,N-acetals via the reaction of N-benzyl isatin (a cyclic -ketoamide), benzil (an acyclic diketone), and benzaldehyde with 2-aminobenzamide for the same catalyst. All three reactions yielded products with high enantiopurity (91-93%).

The team also proposed a possible mechanism for the N,N-acetal formation reaction corresponding to the best yield (99%), involving a ketimine intermediate with an amide group that helps avoid steric repulsion between the phenyl group on imidazoline, enabling the formation of an (R)-isomer with high enantiopurity.

While the mechanism is still speculative and requires further investigation, scientists are excited about the potential implications of the experimental results. "Our new method will enable the synthesis of candidate pharmaceutical drugs that are currently difficult to synthesize, and can even potentially help create and provide people with new and better medicines in the future," concludes Prof. Nakamura.

Now, those are some promising consequences to look forward to!
The owners of Phoenix Theatres Beacon Cinema in Pittsfield plan to reopen the North Street venue Feb. 26.
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Ramani had, in October 2017, wrote an open letter in Vogue.in titled, To the Harvey Weinsteins of the World.

The hearing of criminal defamation case filed by former Union Minister MJ Akbar against journalist Priya Ramani was on February 10 adjourned till February 17, when the court would pronounce the judgement, news agency ANI reported.

Court adjourned the case stating that the written submissions were submitted late, according to LiveLaw.in.

The trial has been underway at Delhi's Rouse Avenue Court for almost two years and is linked to the MeToo movement against sexual abuse and sexual harassment towards women.

Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Ravindra Kumar had on February 1 reserved the judgment for February 10 after Akbar and Ramani completed their arguments.

Ramani had, in October 2017, wrote an open letter in Vogue.in titled, To the Harvey Weinsteins of the World. The article addressed to an anonymous male boss recalled a 1994 incident that took place in a hotel room.

A year later on October 8, 2018, at the height of MeToo movement in India, Ramani revealed in a tweet that "male boss" she had written about in 2017 was MJ Akbar.

On October 15, 2017, Akbar, then a Union Minister, filed a complaint against Ramani naming her as the sole accused of allegedly defaming him by accusing him of sexual misconduct decades ago when he was a journalist. Akbar claimed that an article caused damage to his unblemished reputation for 50 years.

Two days later, Akbar resigned as the Union minister.

Akbar has denied all the allegations of sexual harassment by all the women who came forward during MeToo campaign against him.

READ: MeToo: Court grants bail to scribe Priya Ramani in defamation case by M J Akbar

On February 25, 2019, the Court granted bail to Priya Ramani.

Ramanis lawyer, senior advocate Rebecca John, concluded her arguments on February 1, according to reports, contending that the onus to prove the case beyond reasonable doubt was on the complainant, and that she had crossed the threshold of proving her defence beyond preponderance of probabilities.
[February 10, 2021] EXXON INVESTORS: March 29, 2021 Filing Deadline in Class Action - Contact Lieff Cabraser

The law firm of Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, LLP announces that class action litigation has been filed on behalf of investors who purchased or otherwise acquired the securities of Exxon Mobil Corporation ("Exxon" or the "Company") (NYSE: XOM) between November 6, 2019 and January 14, 2021, inclusive (the "Class Period"). If you purchased or otherwise acquired Exxon securities during the Class Period, you may move the Court for appointment as lead plaintiff by no later than March 29, 2021. A lead plaintiff is a representative party who acts on behalf of other class members in directing the litigation. Your share of any recovery in the actions will not be affected by your decision of whether to seek appointment as lead plaintiff. You may retain Lieff Cabraser, or other attorneys, as your counsel in the action. Exxon investors who wish to learn more about the litigation and how to seek appointment as lead plaintiff should click ere or contact Sharon M. Lee of Lieff Cabraser toll-free at 1-800-541-7358.



Background on the Exxon Securities Class Litigation Exxon, headquartered in Irving, Texas, explores for and produces crude oil and natural gas in the U.S. and abroad. The action alleges that, during the Class Period, defendants made false and/or misleading statements and failed to disclose to investors that (1) Exxon forced its employees to use unrealistic assumptions regarding the timelines for well drilling in the Permian Basin, currently the highest-producing oil field in the U.S.; (2) the foregoing assumptions artificially inflated the value of the Company's well operations in the Permian Basin; and (3) the foregoing conduct, when revealed, subjected Exxon to an increased risk of regulatory investigation and oversight.

On January 15, 2021, The Wall Street Journal published an article entitled "Exxon Draws SEC (News - Alert) Probe Over Permian Basin Asset Valuation" revealing that the SEC began probing the company after a whistleblower complaint. According to the article, the whistleblower complaint alleges that Exxon forced workers to use unrealistic assumptions about how quickly wells in the Permian Basin could be drilled to reach a higher valuation during a 2019 internal assessment. At least one worker who complained about the assumptions was fired. The Wall Street Journal previously reported that there had been disagreements about the valuation. On this news, Exxon's stock price fell $2.42 per share, or 4.81%, to close at $47.89 on January 15, 2021, on unusually heavy trading volume. About Lieff Cabraser Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, LLP, with offices in San Francisco, New York, and Nashville, is a nationally recognized law firm committed to advancing the rights of investors and promoting corporate responsibility. The National Law Journal has recognized Lieff Cabraser as one of the nation's top plaintiffs' law firms for fourteen years. In compiling the list, the National Law Journal examines recent verdicts and settlements and looked for firms "representing the best qualities of the plaintiffs' bar and that demonstrated unusual dedication and creativity." Law360 has selected Lieff Cabraser as one of the Top 50 law firms nationwide for litigation, highlighting our firm's "laser focus" and noting that our firm routinely finds itself "facing off against some of the largest and strongest defense law firms in the world." Benchmark Litigation has named Lieff Cabraser one of the "Top 10 Plaintiffs' Firms in America." For more information about Lieff Cabraser and the firm's representation of investors, please visit https://www.lieffcabraser.com/. This press release may be considered Attorney Advertising in some jurisdictions under the applicable law and ethical rules. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210210005822/en/

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STATEN ISLAND, N.Y.  Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Tuesday that the federal government will send additional coronavirus (COIVD-19) vaccine supply to New York with a three-week projection that will help the state better plan its distribution.

During a conference call with governors, the White House told Cuomo of an additional 5% weekly supply of vaccine coming to the Empire State. Thats in addition to increased supply announced last week, but Cuomo said during Tuesdays press call that more is still needed.

With vaccination eligibility to expand to people with underlying conditions next week, Cuomo said the demand will far outpace the states supply. He doesnt expect a major spike in supply until the federal Food and Drug Administration grants Johnson & Johnson an emergency authorization for its vaccine.

The whole question is the supply,' Cuomo said. You now have about 10 million New Yorkers waiting on 300,000 doses.

Since vaccinations began in December, approximately 10% of the states almost 20 million people have received at least one dose of the two-dose vaccines offered by Pfizer and Moderna  the only two versions currently available.

Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Tuesday that more than 1 million residents of New York City had received their initial inoculations

Cuomo called the three-week supply projection a big deal that would allow the state to better plan its distribution.

A mass vaccination site announced for Empire Outlets has been delayed since January because of supply issues.

When asked about that site Tuesday after mass vaccination centers at Yankee Stadium and Citi Field have already opened, de Blasio said the city would announce scheduling later this week.

Its the same underlying problem,' the mayor said. We would have been up and running already if we had supply and its really distressing. But I want to get Empire Outlets going. I want to get it to 24/7 basis. I want to get an ample supply  people of Staten Island need it, and well have an announcement on that very soon.

His office did not respond by the time of publication to a request for comment about Cuomos supply announcement and whether it would speed up the Empire Outlets site opening.

During his press briefing, the governor reiterated the federal governments opposition to using second vaccine doses as first doses  as de Blasio requested  but said the state will be looking at possible excess doses sent to nursing homes in an effort to further increase supply.

Cuomo said overall numbers continue to improve in New York. The seven-day positivity average is down to 4.3%, the lowest since Dec. 1, but a total 7,875 people remain hospitalized with the virus while another 138 New Yorkers died of COVID on Monday, the governor said.
Forty-seven deer had been culled in the upscale Woodside community as of earlier this week.

The thinning of the herd was approved by the city of Aiken late last month, after the S.C. Department of Natural Resources signed off and stricter, more-local requirements were met.

The killing and harvesting, which the Woodside Property Owners Association set aside tens of thousands of dollars for, is cleared to continue overnight, Sunday through Thursday, until Feb. 25, according to a letter from Aiken City Manager Stuart Bedenbaugh. No shooting is planned for Feb. 14.

The cull underway is the second such operation in the Southside neighborhood. One hundred deer were killed in the first sweep in 2020.

Culls in Aiken  controversial as they are  were made possible in late 2019 by an update to city code. Generally speaking, wildlife management practices are backed by state law.
Micromax launched its IN series smartphones back in November last year. At the launch the company confirmed guaranteed updates for 2 years and security updates for 3 years. Today during the second Lets Talk INdia Ke Liye Q&A session, the Micromax Co-founder Rahul Sharma confirmed that the IN Note 1 smartphone will get the Android 11 update in April.

He added that it will roll out Android 11 early access soon on Micromax Forums. The company will also release source code for the phones soon. The phone got the January 2021 update that added EIS, RAW mode, improvements to portrait mode for the front camera.

The IN 1B will should also get the Android 11 update after the IN Note 1. The month the phone will get an update to improve the camera, speakers, Slo-mo option in rear camera, January 2021 Android security patch and improvements in overall performance.

Regarding the custom UI, he said that the company will not release any custom UI on top of Android since it doesnt want to add any later or bloatware in order to offer a clean Android experience.

Micromax 5G Smartphone and Wireless Headset coming soon

Regarding the Micromax 5G smartphone, he said that the company has been working on a 5G smartphone and accessories including wireless earphones with a unique design and new technology in the Bengaluru R&D centre. Hope we can expect the next launch from the company soon.

Source
SPARTANBURG, S.C., Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Contec Healthcare, an enterprise focused on meeting the demands of Sterile Compounding Pharmacies ongoing implementation of USP chapters <795>, <797>, <800> and <825> is excited to announce the launch of their revised website: contechealthcare.com. Significant customer research inspired and anchored the design and functionality of the new site, which incorporates improved search, multimedia resources, and product filtering for swifter access to relevant product detail.

"In this new digital age, it's more important than ever to offer our customers an easier user experience," says Kedar Patel, Product Manager for Contec, Inc. "We are thrilled to debut our new website to our internal and external stakeholders, all of whom are looking to better understand and access the breadth of our products and services." Rich Harris, Contec Healthcare's Business Manager echoed this sentiment, sharing, "This website redesign truly ties together all of our critical assets into one place and allows for our customers and partners to have robust access and interaction with our products, compliance updates, and significant training resources."

Product Search and Pages:

Contec has been in business for more than 30 years, with a proven track record of continuous, customer-inspired innovation. This has fostered a vast and growing range of contamination control products. In turn, this has necessitated a robust filtering tool which allows visitors to efficiently search and find the most relevant product for their needs. The new site's updated search function allows for filtering by various product characteristics including point of use, wipe solutions, sterility, solution (chemistry) and more. Additionally, 'related products' are now listed as suitable solutions for use in conjunction with the provided search results.

All product pages have been substantially redesigned and feature 'cards' which list product name, photo and key features. This improved interface helps visitors decipher which product is most appropriate for the desired application. Every single product page highlights a product description, product features and benefits, and part numbers, plus sample and purchasing information, technical data, related literature and video assets.

USP Regulation Guidelines

Contec Healthcare continues to maintain and share its resources in support of USP best practices and protocols. As such, the updated website now boasts substantial sections devoted to USP General Chapters including USP Guideline <797>, USP Guideline <800> and USP Guideline <825>.

Enhanced Mobile Capabilities:

Contec Healthcare's new website has been designed for responsiveness regardless of visitor's preferred device. Moreover, the site works seamlessly whether the user experience is on a desktop or mobile platform.

Multimedia Utilization:

Contec Healthcare features video assets for ease of understanding and training efficiency throughout the new website. The home page, industry pages, and product pages all showcase this updated user experience. Now, visitors can see their desired product in action across a variety of critical environments concurrent with concluding their search.

Learn more about Contec Healthcare's new website by visiting www.contechealthcare.com.

About Contec, Inc.

For more than 30 years, Contec, Inc. has been a leading manufacturer of contamination control products for critical manufacturing environments in the Pharmaceutical, Life Sciences, Medical Device, Healthcare, Automotive, Aerospace and Recreation/Outdoors industries worldwide. With manufacturing facilities in Spartanburg, South Carolina, Suzhou China, and Vannes, France, our extensive product line for cleanrooms and controlled environments includes knitted, woven and nonwoven wipes, presaturated wipes, sterile and non-sterile wipes, mopping systems, wall washing systems, disinfectants, sponges and swabs. Our ISO 9001:2015 registration ensures customers of consistent quality products  from development to delivery. We are committed to exceeding customer requirements and expectations.

Contact:

Christina Adkison

864-503-8333

[email protected]

SOURCE Contec

Related Links

http://www.contechealthcare.com


BANGKOK  A preliminary investigation into the crash in Indonesia last month of Sriwijaya Air Flight 182 has found that a difference in the level of thrust between the planes two engines may have contributed to the aircraft rolling over before it plunged into the Java Sea, investigators said Wednesday.

As in most crashes, the investigators are looking at a range of factors that may have contributed to the cause. They are assessing information from the flight data recorder and the planes maintenance records, but searchers have not recovered the cockpit voice recorder, which would tell them what the pilots were saying in their final minutes.

A difference in the level of thrust  the force of the engines that propels the aircraft forward  can make planes difficult to control. It is not clear, at this point, why that problem may have occurred during the Sriwijaya flight.

Many questions remain unanswered, including why the pilot and co-pilot were unable to recover control of the plane before it plummeted more than 10,000 feet in less than a minute, said Nurcahyo Utomo, chief of the investigation team.
Burma Myanmar Military Raids Suu Kyi's Party Headquarters in Yangon

The NLDs headquarters is guarded by soldiers in Shwe Gone Daing, Yangon, on Tuesday. / Facebook

YANGONThe Myanmar military raided the headquarters and executive committee offices of the National League for Democracy (NLD), the party led by State Counselor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, in Yangon on Tuesday night, following a day of continued nationwide protests against the coup in defiance of a warning from the military regime.

At 10 p.m. on Tuesday, the same day the regime announced an 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. curfew and a ban on gatherings of five or more people in almost all of the townships in Yangon, the countrys commercial capital, military personnel broke down doors to enter the partys headquarters in Shwe Gone Daing, Bahan Township, and its Central Executive Committee office in Tamwe Township.

NLD Central Information Committee member U Kyi Toe said the military confiscated property from the offices including documents and computer hard disks.

We strongly condemn this unlawful act by the military, he said.

Following the coup on Feb. 1, NLD offices across Myanmars states and regions were raided by the military and guarded by troops. The regime sealed off the offices and even removed portraits of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and party flags, according to NLD members.

Last week, the CEC demanded the military stop its unlawful actions after soldiers sealed off after a number of party headquarters and offices in Kachin and Kayah states and Mandalay and Ayeyarwady regions.

On the fourth day of nationwide protests against the coup, the military regime banned gatherings of five or more people in Yangon, Mandalay, Naypyitaw, Magwe, Sagaing, Kachin, Kayah, Mon, Karen and Shan. Despite the order, protests against the military coup continue to gain momentum in the country. On Tuesday, at least six people were injured when police opened fire on a protest in Naypyitaw; two of the injured remain in critical condition.

US State Department spokesperson Ned Price said the US is very concerned about the militarys announcement restricting public gatherings.

He said the US stands with the people of Myanmar and supports their right to assemble peacefully and protest peacefully in support of the democratically elected government.

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Quaker Oats is releasing a new name and logo for its 'Aunt Jemima' products, finally retiring the racist stereotype that has adorned its pancake mixes and syrups for decades.

The name 'Aunt Jemima,' long criticized as a racist caricature of a Black woman stemming from slavery, will be replaced with the Pearl Milling Company name and logo on the former brand's new packaging, according to parent company PepsiCo.

'We are starting a new day with Pearl Milling Company,' a PepsiCo spokesperson said. 'A new day rooted in the brand's historic beginnings and its mission to create moments that matter at the breakfast table.'

PepsiCo attorneys purchased brand name and logo trademarks for Pearl Milling Company on February 1. Trademark attorney Josh Gerben of Gerben Perrott, PLLC in Washington DC spotted the filing Monday morning.

'We've been looking for it ever since they made the announcement,' Gerben told CNN Business on Tuesday.

The new brand is scheduled to launch in June, one year after the company announced the change. Aunt Jemima was one of several food brands  including Uncle Ben's, Cream of Wheat and Mrs. Butterworth's  to announce redesigns as protests against systemic racism erupted across the United States this past summer.

The story behind 'Pearl Milling Company'

The Pearl Milling Company was the late-19th-century business that created the original ready-made pancake mix, according to PepsiCo. It was founded in 1888 by Chris L. Rutt.

Rutt named the original company after 'Old Aunt Jemima,' an 1875 song from a minstrel show that featured performers in blackface who wore aprons and bandana headbands.

The new Pearl Milling Company brand logo replaces the Aunt Jemima image with what appears to be a 19th century watermill, where flour was ground at the time. The new logo's red, white and yellow color scheme matches the colors that were used on Aunt Jemima's packaging.

'This name is a nod to where our delicious products began before becoming a family-favorite breakfast staple,' PepsiCo said of its new Pearl Milling Company branding. 'While the Aunt Jemima brand was updated over the years in a manner intended to remove racial stereotypes, it has not progressed enough to appropriately reflect the dignity, respect and warmth that we stand for today.'

PepsiCo said it conducted extensive market research to come up with its new brand name.

'Quaker worked with consumers, employees, external cultural and subject-matter experts, and diverse agency partners to gather broad perspectives and ensure the new brand was developed with inclusivity in mind,' the company said.

News of Aunt Jemima's rebranding in June started a domino effect among food brands with racist or otherwise controversial mascots. Within hours of the announcement, the Mars food company announced it would do away with the brand name and logo for Uncle Ben's rice, eventually rebranding itself as Ben's Original.

Conagra-owned syrup maker Mrs. Butterworth's, whose humanoid bottle shape looks like a woman of color when filled with maple syrup, announced they were changing the brand's name on the same day. And one day later, Cream of Wheat's parent, B&G Foods, said it was doing away with its Black chef logo, which was based on a dim-witted, blackface minstrel show caricature seen in early 20th century Cream of Wheat ads.

PepsiCo said Pearl Milling Company will also announce an annual $1 million commitment to empower and uplift Black girls and women in the coming weeks. This investment is in addition to PepsiCo's $400 million, five-year commitment to advance and uplift the Black community, the company said.

Pearl Milling is inviting the public to visit its website and nominate nonprofit organizations for an opportunity to receive grants to further that mission.

'The commitment we're making is a reflection of our broader PepsiCo values of diversity and inclusion and support of the Black community,' PepsiCo said.

How will the public react?

It's tough to gauge the reaction to Aunt Jemima's new branding, said Apex Marketing Group president Eric Smallwood, who says the reception for the new branding will depend on Pepsi's rollout plan.

'It's a little different because you're changing the name of a brand,' he said after previewing an image of the trademarked logo. 'If you just saw it by itself, you'd have no idea it was Aunt Jemima, which had its tie longstanding with pancakes and pancake mix. This doesn't.'

Allen Adamson, co-founder of New York-based branding consultancy Metaforce, says the new name of Pearl Milling is a strong choice.

'The name has craft and artesian imagery, a key for success in the food category,' he said. 'It is also importantly authentic, as it was the product's original name. Younger consumers are keenly interested in authenticity.'

Howard University Afro-American Studies professor Greg Carr says it appears PepsiCo is trying to strike a balance between continuing to market a popular product while scrubbing every vestige of racism from that product's new branding.

'In a way, a change to Pearl Milling Company could be interpreted as a form of corporate mea culpa for an original sin it did not commit,' Carr told CNN Business. But, he added, 'the market will ultimately determine whether this will be a win for PepsiCo.'

Correction: The original Pearl Milling Company was founded in 1888. An earlier version of this story misstated the year.
On Friday, February 12, at 12.00, the press center of the Interfax-Ukraine news agency will host a press conference entitled "End of Social, Political Aggravation Change of Government or Early Parliamentary Elections?" Participants include Expert of Gardarika Strategic Consulting Corporation Konstantin Matvienko; Director of the Institute of Global Strategies Vadym Karasev; Director of the Ukrainian Barometer sociological service Viktor Nebozhenko; Political Scientist Taras Zahorodny (8/5a Reitarska Street). The press conference will be available on the YouTube channel of Interfax-Ukraine. Admission of journalists requires registration on the spot.
Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US

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European Parliament head proposes to strengthen sanctions on Russia

UK PM gets married in London

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EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia

2 people die in Armenia road accident

Nigeria: Students taken hostage a month ago are released

61 quakes recorded in Congo per day

Syrian MFA: EU lost credibility due to blind obedience to US policy

Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack

Mher Grigoryan: Clarification of border points is possible only after withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops from Armenia

Suspicious deal: Whether there was profit from buying DNA IDs?

Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war

4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack

Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities

Kocharyan: I have to ask people how it happened that overwhelming majority elected this leader

Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country

Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia

US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs

Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners

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Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 10)  The impact of the economic decline in the Philippines would not have been as bad had the government been more aggressive in the disbursement of the 162.5-billion funds under the Bayanihan to Recover as One Act or Bayanihan 2, a congressman said on Wednesday.

Marikina Rep. Stella Quimbo said economic contraction would have been reduced from 9.5% to 8.2% in 2020 if only the government was more transparent in the utilization of the Bayanihan 2 funds. She also said that more than 252 billion or over 1.3% would have been added to the country's gross domestic product last year had the funds been disbursed faster.

"Ang ending, 252 billion sana ang madadagdag sa kabuuang kita ng ekonomiya and that's about 1.3% of the GDP," she explained. "Ibig sabihin kung nagastos natin yung 165 billion, sa halip na 9.5% na lang siya, mas maliit, magiging 8.2% na lang ang economic contraction."

[Translation: In the end, an additional 252 billion would have been added to the country's income and that's about 1.3% of the GDP. That means if we fully utilized the 165 billion, instead of 9.5% , we would have a smaller economic contraction at 8.2%.]

The country's overall economic performance for the entire 2020 dropped to -9.5%, the sharpest since the Philippine Statistics Authority started collecting data on annual growth rates in 1946. Bank of the Philippine Islands lead economist Jun Neri previously told CNN Philippines that economic stimulus bills passed in Congress also failed to mitigate the economic contraction in the last quarter of the year.

At least 37 lawmakers on Monday filed House Resolution 1558 to look into over half of the 140 billion funds that remain unreleased under Bayanihan 2. The measure authorized 165.5 billion in emergency relief and spending to finance the country's pandemic response and recovery, with 140 billion falling under regular appropriations and 25.5 billion serving as standby funds.

The Office of the President previously said in its report that as of November 2020, only 76.2 billion of the 140 billion fund has been released.

Quimbo also reiterated her appeal to Malacanang and economic managers to take a "second look" at the newly proposed Bayanihan to Arise as One Act or Bayanihan 3, a 420 billion stimulus package that is much bigger than the previous Bayanihan measures. Quimbo and Speaker Lord Allan Velasco are the main proponents of the proposed law.

"I hope they take a close look at Bayanihan 3. It actually culls from a lot of lessons learned under Bayanihan 1 and 2 especially on how to implement and how to disburse the funds better," said Quimbo, also noting that various loans for the government's pandemic response could make room for the bill.

Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque earlier said that he "appreciates" the filing of Bayanihan 3, but the full implementation of Bayanihan 2 and other stimulus measures in place should be prioritized under the government's plan of action to combat the pandemic.

READ: House lawmaker calls on economic managers to take second look at Bayanihan 3
Baghdad, Feb 10 : Iraqi authorities have pledged to recover all the ancient artefacts that were stolen after the US-led invasion in 2003, a local media report said citing a top official.

"The board is determined to recover the first and last Iraqi artefact smuggled abroad, and we will not give up a single piece of it, regardless of its size and importance," Xinhua news agency quoted Laith Hussein, head of the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage of the Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Antiquities, as saying to the Iraqi al-Sabah on Tuesday.

There is international cooperation in recovering the antiquities that were looted and stolen from the archaeological sites as well as the Iraq Museum in the capital Baghdad, he said.

Hundreds of lawsuits have been filed by the Ministry outside Iraq on the stolen artefacts, Hussein added.

According to the official, the Iraqi authorities have great difficulty in protecting archaeological sites in Iraq as the country is "like a museum", where "thousands of archaeological sites spread widely across its land from north to south".

"Nevertheless, the board continues to intensify monitoring of archaeological sites by fencing them with wires and increasing the number of guards to prevent their damage," Hussein noted.

According to official statistics, about 15,000 pieces of cultural relics from the Stone Age ranging from the Babylonian, Assyrian, and Islamic periods were stolen or destroyed, mainly in the Iraq Museum, after Saddam Hussein's regime was toppled by US-led troops in 2003.

Then after the Islamic State (IS) terror group took control of large territories in northern and western Iraq in 2014, the museum of Mosul as well as the ancient cities of Hatra and Nimrud were destroyed, with large numbers of antiquities smuggled.

Statistics show that more than 10,000 sites in Iraq are officially recognised as archaeological sites, but most of them are not safeguarded and many were still being looted.
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Chairperson of the Nepal Communist Party's splinter faction and former PM Pushpa Kamal Dahal 'Prachanda' said on Tuesday that his party has appealed to the international community, including India and China, to extend support to its ongoing struggle against Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli's "unconstitutional and undemocratic move" to dissolve Parliament.

'We seek support from the international community'

"The House of Representatives must be reinstated if we are to consolidate federalism and democracy and take the peace process to the logical conclusion," Prachanda said during an interaction with a select group of international media representatives based in Kathmandu, according to a report by PTI.

"I believe that the Supreme Court would not endorse PM KP Sharma Oli's unconstitutional and undemocratic move to dissolve the House of Representatives," he said ahead of his faction's massive protest rally in Kathmandu on Wednesday.

"We have conveyed to the international community that Oli's move has resulted in the demise of democracy and we seek support from the international community including India, China, European Union and the US to protect hard-earned federalism and democracy," said Prachanda.

Nepal plunged into a political crisis on December 20 after Oli, in a surprise move, dissolved the House of Representatives, amidst a tussle for power with Prachanda. His move to dissolve the 275-member House sparked protests from a large section of the NCP led by Prachanda, also a co-chair of the ruling party.

India has described Oli's sudden decision to dissolve Parliament and call for fresh elections as an "internal matter" that is for the country to decide as per its democratic processes.

However, China sent a four-member high-level delegation to Nepal in December to prevent a split within the ruling party. The team - led by a Vice-minister of the Chinese Communist Party, Guo Yezhou - held separate meetings with several top NCP leaders before returning home without much success in its mission.

READ | Uttarakhand floods: CM Rawat meets injured, informs glacier burst did not cause avalanche

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China's request to political parties in Nepal

Earlier this week, China again urged Nepali political parties to shelve differences and maintain unity and stability in Nepal for its own development and prosperity. According to a press statement issued by Chinas Foreign Ministry on Monday, in the context of a recent telephonic conversation between Foreign Minister Pradeep Gyawali and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said that both the ministers exchanged views on Nepals domestic political situation, besides extending Covid-19 vaccine cooperation.

On Friday, Gyawali and Wang held a telephonic conversation where the Chinese minister, according to a statement by Nepals Ministry of Foreign Affairs, announced that China would provide 500,000 doses of Covid-19 vaccine to Nepal on a grant basis, The Kathmandu Post reported. The Foreign Ministry statement, however, was silent on the discussion over the recent political situation in Nepal.

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[February 10, 2021] Publishing Company Gives Original Lesson Plans to Parents and Teachers for Black History Month

SARATOGA SPRINGS, Utah, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- To commemorate Black History Month, Analytic Orange (AO), a teacher-led education publishing company, is offering parents and teachers free lesson plans focusing on historic African American contributions. "We believe Black history is American history and should be taught year-round. We recognize that parents and teachers are particularly in need of fresh, authentic lessons to use with students this month," says AO founder and CEO Dr. Kim Mogilevsky. "When I was a teacher, I would have welcomed the lessons we're producing now. I know many teachers are hungry for compelling, primary-source materials and relevant lesson plans," she says. AO textbooks, teacher editions, and support materials will be available soon nationwide for kindergarten through fifth-grade students. All materials will be conveniently available through the AO website. "Because we've written these materials for schools nationwide, we felt that making some of them available now to parents and teachers at home, online, and in classrooms during COVID-19 would be of great value," says Dr. Mogilevsky. "And, given the national attention on diversity in America, it is vital we share this inclusive curriculum." Analytic Orange provides comprehensive, multi-perspective,and inclusive social studies textbooks and curriculum materials, including hands-on projects and community engagement while focusing on critical thinking and problem-solving.



"As veteran teachers, we are talking to teachers and educators across the country every day, so we know the desperate need for new material to engage and inspire more students and also help boost student knowledge and achievement," says Dr. Mogilevsky. The company says, "Our goal is for all students to see themselves reflected in Analytic Orange's materials as leaders, role models, and innovators. All students benefit from learning about historical events from the diverse points-of-view of the people who experienced history."

Parents and teachers interested in lesson plan materials for Black History Month may visit tinyurl.com/1ljyn3cs . Parents, teachers, and all education facilitators looking for diverse complimentary education resources can sign up here: tinyurl.com/432wcv9j . Our March Women's History Month will be available soon. Sign up to receive complimentary resources every month. For information, contact us at 291149@email4pr.com, 801-410-0618, and find us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/publishing-company-gives-original-lesson-plans-to-parents-and-teachers-for-black-history-month-301225799.html SOURCE Analytic Orange

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The Illinois Department of Natural Resources will be celebrating President Abraham Lincolns birthday in conjunction with two veterans organizations Friday.

The department will be working with the American Legion Springfield Post 32 for its 87th annual National American Legion Pilgrimage, in which participants will walk to the final resting place of Lincoln and his family.
The Chinese foreign ministry said that the front-line troops of the two militaries began simultaneous and planned disengagement on Pangong bank on 10 Feb, in keeping with the consensus reached in Moscow and at the 9th round of commander-level talks

Beijing: The frontline troops of China and India at the south and north banks of the Pangong Lake in eastern Ladakh started synchronised and organised disengagement from Wednesday, the Chinese defence ministry announced in Beijing.

There was no comment from the Indian side on the statement made by the spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of National Defence, Senior Colonel Wu Qian.

"The Chinese and Indian frontline troops at the southern and northern bank of the Pangong Tso Lake start synchronised and organised disengagement from 10 February," Wu said in a brief statement.

Reacting to the Chinese defence ministry's statement, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said that according to the consensus reached at the Chinese and Indian Foreign Ministers' meeting in Moscow and the 9th round of commander-level talks between the two sides, the front-line troops of the Chinese and Indian militaries began to conduct simultaneous and planned disengagement in the Pangong Lake area on 10 February.

"We hope the Indian side will work with China to meet each other halfway, strictly implement the consensus reached between the two sides and ensure the smooth implementation of the disengagement process," Wang said in a separate statement.

"This move is in accordance with the consensus reached by both sides at the 9th round of China-India Corps Commander Level Meeting," the statement added.

The militaries of China and India have been engaged in a tense standoff in eastern Ladakh since early May last year. The two countries have held several rounds of military and diplomatic-level talks to resolve the face-off.

On 24 January, the 9th round of China-India Corps Commander-level meeting was held on the Chinese side of the Moldo-Chushul border meeting point.

During the meeting, the two sides agreed that the meeting was "positive, practical and constructive," which further enhanced mutual trust and understanding. The two sides agreed to push for an early disengagement of the frontline troops.

"The two sides agreed to continue their effective efforts in ensuring the restraint of the frontline troops, stabilise and control the situation along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in the Western Sector of the China-India border, and jointly maintain peace and tranquillity," a joint press release of the 9th round of India-China military Commander-level meeting said last month.
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Coming up with a strong, unique password and storing it in a password manager or browser isnt good enough. You need to know if and when your password was stolen in a password breach, so you can act quickly enough to change that password before your personal information is potentially compromised. Heres how.

Its been some time since the massive Collections breaches of 2019 leaked literally billions of email addresses and passwords to the web, putting the security of those accounts at risk. The problem users faced at the time was a limited number of ways to tell if they were actually at risk. Now, there are many password monitoring services that will reveal if your password has been stolen. Many are designed to let you quickly take action and change them.

Basic services to reveal email breaches

Two reputable services to check this information existed at the time of the Collections breach, and still do: HaveIBeenPwned, and a service run by the Hass-Platner-Institut in Potsdam, Berlin. Both ask you to enter your email address (not your password!), and both will then match your email address against a database of known breaches.

Both services have their appeal. HaveIBeenPwneds reputation attracts those who wish to publicize their attacks, so the sites breach reporting seems comprehensive. The site will list the breaches that an email address has been caught up in, along with any corollary informationsuch as your gender or what your phone number is, for example. The site organizes the breaches by the service attacked, not the date. Why is this important? Because if your email was exposed in a breach in 2016, for example, chances are that your password has been changed since then. But if your email and password were exposed last month, youll want to change them right away.

HaveIBeenPwned.com HaveIBeenPwned supplies a large amount of information in regards to breaches, but it could be better organized.

HaveIBeenPwned also publishes the breach information for any email address, which is handy for checking up on friends and family, though it isnt the most privacy-conscious.

HPIs service takes a different approach. It lists the breaches by date, along with a matrix of what information was exposed. If you enter an email address on the site, it will send a security report to that specific email, along with a color-coded chart of what data is at risk, and from what breach.

Hass-Platner-Institut HPI will send you a matrix of what information has been released in conjunction with your email, organized by most recent.

Browsers are adding password monitoring for free

Both of the above services only reveal if a specific email address has been part of a breach, howevernot if a non-email usernamebillg, sayhas been exposed. Here, youll want a trusted service that knows you, as well as the passwords that youve chosen. Dont go chasing random sites to check your passwordsyoull want to stick with a few trusted names. (Also, note that password monitoring is a paid service for most password managersbut not for password managers within a web browser.)

Google Password Checkup

In 2019, Google added a free browser plugin for Chrome that warned you, once youd logged into a compromised site, if your email or password had been compromised. In October of 2019 Google began automatically checking passwords against breaches, and as of Chrome 79 began monitoring your online use to avoid getting phished, or lured into divulging your password under false pretenses.

Mark Hachman / IDG Googles Password Checker has a handy dashboard to display if your password has been compromised.

Now, if you go to passwords.google.com and authenticate yourself, Googles online Password Checkup will give you a quick dashboard of which passwords have been exposed in security breaches, which have been duplicated across various sites, and which could be improved with more complex passwords to avoid being easily cracked if a breach were to occur. There are also links to change the passwords on the sites themselves. However, this works only if youve stored passwords using Google itself.

Firefox Lockwise

Firefox Lockwise, part of the free Mozilla Firefox browser, works in a slightly different manner. It doesnt offer the recommendations that Google does about redundant and weak passwords, but its password monitoring feature otherwise works similarly. It also seems to work regardless of whether youve stored a password within Firefox, or simply imported passwords from another browser. Like Google, though, it needs to know your password, which requires you to store it in the browser.

The easiest way to get to Lockwise is by typing about:logins into the Firefox URL bar.

Mark Hachman / IDG Firefox Lockwise builds in password monitoring inside the Firefox browser.

If a password has been exposed, youll see a bright-red banner, the account and password in question, and a link to jump to the account in question. (It may also flag accounts that you may have already disabled, as it did with a LinkedIn breach it showed for me, which had been tied to a previous work account.)

Microsoft Edge Password Monitor

Last year Microsoft promised an upcoming Password Monitor within Microsoft Edge, and it will soon roll out as part of Microsoft Edge 88. Like the other similar services offered by other browser makers, it will be free.

Microsoft Edge is rolling out a complex password generator, and soon a password monitor as well.

Paid password monitoring: Password managers

We already review password managers, which are hands-down the most convenient way to manage passwords. Below is a summary of which password managers do what in terms of monitoring.

LastPass

While LastPass offers a robust, free version of the password storage services that the browsers offer, password monitoring is a service that LogMeIns LastPass service charges for. LastPass will keep an eye on the dark web in case a password leaks outbut it will also send you a notification when it does so, something that the browser makers dont do yet. Is that heads-up worth the $3 LastPass charges per month for the service? If you value locking down your personal data immediately, it might be.

LastPass LastPass monitors the dark web for breached passwords, for a small monthly fee.

Dashlane

Dashlane, too, regards dark web monitoring as a paid service, and charges $6.49 per month for it.

1Password

1Password doesnt offer a free tier, but its $2.49/month basic service includes what the company calls Watchtower, which alerts you to compromised passwords, as well as those that should be updated because theyre weak. 1Password actually works with the HaveIBeenPwned service to check your passwords (not your email) against its database of breached passwords. But as an added security measure, 1Password send only part of your password (or, specifically, part of the password hash), collects all of the potential matches, then checks them privately on your machine.

1Password 1Passwords Watchtower password monitoring service.

Other password managers tend to charge small fees for password monitoring, but who knows? Its possible that the competitive influence of Microsoft and Google, plus Mozilla, may tug password monitoring back into a free service for years to come.

The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
Kids want to fish? You don't know how yourself? Here's a little help
Tunis/Tunisia  All forms of protests in the heath sector have been suspended, it was decided, following an agreement concluded on Tuesday at the end of a working session held between the government and the Tunisian General Labour Union (UGTT).

Both sides also agreed to draw up a specific statute to public health workers, according to the meeting's minute inked by the government and the UGTT.

A joint committee will kick off works on February 17 to draw up this statute, which is expected to be ready by next November.

The General Health Federation had on Monday staged a protest movement in front of the Health Ministry to demand the integration of health workers in Article 2 of the law on the General Status of Civil Servants, Local Public Authorities and Public Institutions of administrative nature.
analysis

Exposing corruption, abuse of power and criminality pits those who take the risk against powerful vested interests in government at all levels.

Whistle-blowers have a critical role to play in upholding democracy, but typically they are callously pushed to the margins of society and subjected to humiliation, ostracisation, stigma, fear and anxiety.

Grassroots activists and whistle-blowers rarely make national headlines unless someone is assassinated, as was the case when four unknown gunmen killed Fikile Ntshangase, 65, at her home near the Tendele coal mine in KwaZulu-Natal in October 2020.

Ntshangase, a prominent activist from the Mfolozi Community Environmental Justice Organisation, was working with lawyers against the expansion of an opencast coal mine at Somkhele, on the southeastern border of the Hluhluwe-iMfolozi game park, in violation of environmental and other laws.

"Most people in the cities don't know what is happening in a small village in [KwaZulu-Natal] until something bad happens, and then lawyers get involved and then it becomes public," said Stha Yeni, a PhD student at the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS). "But the question is how do we create awareness before somebody dies?"

Wherever there are mining activities in South Africa, it is common for mining companies to bribe traditional leaders and local politicians, Yeni added.

The battle in Xolobeni

In the Wild Coast region of the Eastern Cape, members of the Xolobeni community have resisted titanium mining in their remote rural area since 1996. They have accused the Australian company Mineral Resource Commodities and its local subsidiary, Transworld Energy and Mineral Resources, of trying to buy them off. Local traditional authorities, provincial and national black economic empowerment (BEE) players and the minister of mineral resources and energy, Gwede Mantashe, have sided with the mining companies against the community.

"When it comes to mining, there is a lot of money involved and some members of the community are bribed. Right now, our chief is driving a 44 from the mining company," said Amadiba Crisis Committee activist Nonhle Mbuthuma.

The government is appealing a judgment handed down in favour of the community in November 2018, which states that any mining rights can be granted only after the people of Xolobeni have given their full, free and informed consent. "It is shocking that the government is appealing against its own people, saying they have no right to decide, they have no right to choose how they want to live," Mbuthuma said.

The court hearing is currently on hold. "Our lawyers are trying their best but you can't argue with Covid," she explained.

A non-governmental organisation is paying for guards to protect Mbuthuma, who is regularly intimidated, harassed and threatened. "I am under protection because they are trying by all means to threaten me. The threats are coming from the so-called BEE faction mostly, from all over the country... They count the people who are already dead and they say I am next."

Two Xolobeni activists have been assassinated: Mandoda Ndovela in 2003 and Sikhosiphi "Bazooka" Radebe in 2016. Others have died in mysterious circumstances, like Velaphi Ndovela, who suffered a brain haemorrhage in 2006. "People have died in a very strange way, but we don't have the money to do all sorts of tests," Mbuthuma said.

As with Ntshangase's assassination, there have been no arrests to date.

Fight or flight

Yeni says communities taking up the fight against powerful mining interests can be a double-edged sword. "All these cases, even if sometimes they [cause] death, they do make a difference because people can see that they are able to stand up and fight," said Yeni. "[But] it also creates fear because people don't want to be killed. People are scared. They say if we fight this mining we may be killed. And often lawyers and outsiders only come in when there has been a disaster."

The Zondo commission has honed in on state capture at a national level, but state apparatus includes national, provincial and local spheres - and the corruption is happening in all of them.

Mzwandile Banjathwa, project coordinator at Corruption Watch, says whistle-blowers at a local level often suffer more than those in the national government sphere because they are more exposed in their communities. "People come to us and say they have suffered detriment because they have reported internally at municipalities or schools or health services. They may lose their jobs or be unfairly demoted or be transferred to other departments where their skills are not necessarily used, and some are even moved to other provinces.

"They tend to suffer personal detriments, which is even worse, where their lives are threatened and those of their loved ones and people who are closest to them."

Politicians at local level "take their cue from the national government", adds Banjathwa. They cover for each other, particularly in councils where the ANC is in the majority. "We see this in the national government, particularly in Parliament, where people are accused of corruption and nothing is done about it."

The agony of delays

Kwazi Dlamini, an investigative reporter at Corruption Watch, says whistle-blowers suffer while their cases are being investigated. "Our job is to carry out investigations and this takes time, but when you are out of a job you want to get back to work as soon as possible. That has been our biggest frustration. People lose jobs because of blowing the whistle, and there is not really much we can do about that as Corruption Watch."

Luvuyo Mooi, a whistle-blower who has been working with Corruption Watch for years, echoes this frustration. "I have been living in fear for the past five years," he said. Mooi used to work for the Emalahleni Local Municipality in the Chris Hani District in the Eastern Cape, but he was essentially forced out of his job after exposing alleged corruption in 2016.

An ANC councillor from 2006 to 2016 and chairperson of the municipal public accounts committee for the last four years of his term, Mooi says he unearthed significant proof of irregular expenditure. Documentation is available to support his claim. "Even my close colleagues were afraid that I was going to be killed because the reports were very sensitive," Mooi said.

He followed all the approved internal processes to report the corruption and has reported the matter to the police commissioner over the years, even meeting with several investigators from the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation, the Hawks. However, the matter has been taken up and dropped time and again because of a lack of cooperation from the implicated persons.

"Imagine the trauma," said Mooi. "I was trying to be honest to my government and to my organisation. This has affected me dearly. It has affected my marriage and my family."

According to Corruption Watch, one of the difficulties in its investigation of this case has been that, year after year, the municipal officers implicated do not respond to requests for information and fail to take up their right to defend themselves against the allegations. "It has been frustrating for us because it is difficult to get anything out of the municipality. [The Eastern Cape] is the hardest province for us to work in," Dlamini said.

Too worn out to care

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In one NLC initiative, the plan was to build six old-age homes in different locations at a cost of approximately R26 million each. Maila village, about 30km southeast of Louis Trichardt, was one of the sites selected.

According to Van Zyl, approximately R20 million was allocated and paid out by the NLC over the course of 2017. An additional R6 million was paid in 2019, although no real progress had been made in completing the homes. Half-built structures were abandoned two years ago. Looters are rapidly reducing them to a pile of rubble.

The Maila village project is a prime example of how impoverished communities are abused in corrupt schemes, Van Zyl said.

"This is a village where, according to the latest stats, only 116 of the almost 2 000 families have a toilet in their houses, yet someone from outside decided they needed a R26m old age home," said Van Zyl.

Old-age homes are an alien concept in Venda villages, where elderly people are generally integrated into the family structure and not looked after by strangers. "That is absolutely not what happens," Van Zyl said.

"The NLC has wasted hundreds of millions in the past few years. Why don't communities revolt? Where are the whistle-blowers? If you go to the village and speak to people who have effectively been cheated out of R26 million, you would think they would be up in arms, but they are not. The dynamics are sometimes way more complicated... Whistle-blowers appear once investigative reporters have started scratching," said van Zyl.

Communities are reluctant to stand up as a collective, seemingly afraid that if they speak out they will lose the little they get. But they are willing to come to the fore and leak documents to support an investigation when reporters take the initiative.

"This community is so neglected that they get a promise of something and even if it is not what they want, they just accept it," he said.
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The federal government Tuesday continued its ongoing deployment of 19,000 Solar Homes Systems (SHS), with the inauguration of an 85KWP Solar Hybrid Mini-grid in Dakiti, Akko Local Government of Gombe State.

The power plant also consists of 100 solar panels, 96 batteries and over 4.5KM distribution network cables and is expected to serve over 1,500 people in the area with constant electricity.

Speaking during the event, the Managing Director of the Rural Electrification Agency (REA), the implementing agency, Mr Ahmad Salihijo, noted that the project has been successfully deployed under the First REF Call of the federal government's Rural Electrification Fund (REF), an initiative designed to promote off-grid electrification and ensure that electricity is equitably distributed across Nigeria.

He stated that having been saddled with the responsibility of powering unserved and underserved communities across Nigeria using off-grid solutions, the federal government had taken the initiative to several states, including Kogi, Kebbi, Ebonyi and Akwa Ibom.

"It might interest you to know that through this first Rural Electrification Fund (REF) Call, we are ensuring electricity access across 12 communities and deploying over 19,000 Solar Home Systems (SHS) across the nation.

"We have commissioned this kind of project in Kogi, Kebbi, Ebonyi, Akwa Ibom and much more across the country. I can confidently tell you it is working and we will continue to do more.

"These interventions are testaments of the federal government's resolve to improve energy infrastructure across Nigeria, especially in unserved and underserved communities," he said.

He added that with the deliberate plan to power Nigeria, more communities will be energised across the country under the second Call of the REF as well as other REA programmes.

He noted that the intervention in off-grid communities was key to accelerating true national development as great opportunities abound in communities such as Dakiti, with the availability of sustainable and reliable energy.

Salihijo lauded President Muhammadu Buhari for his unwavering support in driving the agency's mandate that has continued to steer the process of transformation in the energy sector.

In his remarks, the Governor of Gombe State, Mr Muhammad Yahaya, explained that the project confirms the federal government's agenda to improve electricity access to Nigerians.

He underscored the importance of Public Private Partnership (PPP) in the implementation of the project, which he said will ensure clean, safe and reliable electricity in the benefitting communities.

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"It is important to stress that the benefits of clean and safe and constant electricity will increase the income of the people in this community through improved business activities as well as improve productivity of the people while ensuring good education for school children.

"I want to assure you that the people of Gombe State will do our best to support not just this project but all electrification projects to ensure greater success and sustainability because the impact is already changing lives," the governor noted.

He commended the efforts of the REA in providing reliable electricity to underserved and unserved communities across several states in the country.

He urged the benefitting areas to treat the project as their own by guarding it against vandalism and in ensuring prompt payments of electricity consumed.

"You should also bear in mind that other communities will be watching to see how you make use of the power plant and the constant electricity it will provide," he stressed.

The Managing Director of the company, which executed the project, Leading Diagonal Engineering Nigeria Limited, Mr Abdallah Kasimu, explained that in delivering the project, the company made immense use of the the communities' local labour force thereby training and providing them with employment.

LANE COUNTY, Ore. -- Lane County Public Health will be receiving 3,200 doses of a COVID-19 vaccine this week.

Heres the breakdown: 800 will go to K-12 public schools, 30 to private schools, 400 to Phase 1A and 2,000 to the 80+ population.

The county was able to gather 5,500 doses within the community to vaccinate the 80 and older population in the coming days and weeks.

A mass vaccination clinic is set for Sunday for those over the age of 80. This is invite-only, and 1,500 people will be given their first dose there.

Plus, 2000 doses were sent to providers in the community to begin vaccinating the 80+ population.

Kitty Paxson falls within the 80+ population and received her first dose Tuesday through her senior living community. She said she felt honored to get vaccinated.

Im happy to help with the herd immunity, Eugene resident Kitty Paxson said. I miss my great granddaughter very much and want to be able to see her again. This is going to help me do that.

Her daughter-in-law, Springfield resident Debbie Cowan, weighed in.

It's very exciting, Cowan said. We're going to be able to be a little more safer and feel a little more secure being able to see each other. I personally just got vaccinated through the school district, as well, a few days ago. Its kind of a double whammy for us.

Seniors who have preregistered for the vaccine on the Lane County website or through the COVID-19 call center will be given a call to schedule an appointment.

For those without Internet access, the county said there is an autotext option you can utilize for updates, as well as the phone service offered by the county.

Lane County Public Health officials said there are 15,000 people over the age 80 in Lane County, and 6,000 have pre-registered.

So, whos next in line for the vaccine after those 65 and up? Lane County Public Health officials broke that down Tuesday, after they received recommendations from the State.

First, doses are reserved for those with pre-existing health conditions, then essential workers, those in low-income housing and then those in multi-generational housing.

There are 14,000 individuals in Phase 1A left to be vaccinated. In Phase 1B, Group 1 -- educators -- roughly half have received their first dose.

RELATED: LANE COUNTY SCHOOLS HALFWAY THROUGH FIRST ROUND OF VACCINATIONS

A booster clinic is scheduled for Saturday. This is for individuals who have already received their first dose through the county, and you will receive a letter in the mail with instructions.

CLICK HERE to sign up for updates.

CLICK HERE to pre-register.

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In their guest blog, student writers Whitney Dykehouse and Marcelina Kiszkiel explain how Senior Design students help companies tailor materials in response to the pandemic.

From the masks we wore to attend face-to-face classes on campus to the gloves we keep on while we push our grocery carts, the COVID-19 pandemic has introduced numerous new tools and practices into our daily lives that we use to stop the spread of the virus. Since the start of the pandemic, we have seen all sorts of new ideas arise for mask and glove designs to be more comfortable, effective, and even fashionable. However, the usefulness of all these products comes down to the incorporation of the right materials designed to protect us from contact with harmful microbes.

Materials science and engineering students Anna Isaacson, Sidney Feige, Lauren Bowling and Maria Rochow teamed up for their Senior Design project to find a new tool to prevent the spread of viruses and bacteria. The Michigan Technological University team is researching the possibilities of making copper alloy a more accessible, affordable and appealing material for building high-touch surfaces (such as doorknobs or tabletops) due to its naturally antimicrobial properties.

Currently, these alloys can reduce the rate of bacterial contamination by up to 99.9% on a surface within two hours of exposure. The goal of this project is to improve the effectiveness of the alloy in reducing both bacterial and flu viruses within a shorter amount of time. Overall, the team is striving to create a product that is appealing to both manufacturers and consumers, meaning their ideal copper alloy will be lightweight, low-cost and color customizable.

Copper Surfaces

Copper alloys naturally kill viruses, bacteria, mold and fungi. When these microbes make contact with a copper surface, copper ions tear down the cell wall and flood into the cell, effectively killing the microbe. Copper is also one of the few materials officially recognized for having antimicrobial properties by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

However, copper is also a heavy and expensive material. And, consumers typically dont find coppers rustic color appealing, preferring the appearance of silver materials such as steel. These factors can make it difficult for manufacturers to produce large quantities of products made entirely from copper. At the same time, the antimicrobial ability of an alloy significantly decreases if its composition is less than 67% copper, meaning a surface would need a significant amount of copper within it to effectively fight off microbes.

To address these challenges, the team has been researching the possibility of combining other materials with copper to create an alloy that retains coppers antimicrobial properties while minimizing the cost and weight of the alloy as a whole.

Coextrusion to Combine Materials

The team is able to combine multiple materials into a single alloy through the process of coextrusion. This process combines two materials, with one making up the interior of the alloy while the other is coextruded to coat the outside. The team describes the process as playing with a Play-Doh mold  you can insert multiple colors of Play-Doh to create a new shape composed of both original materials.

One of the materials the team has considered for coextrusion is aluminum, which is lightweight and inexpensive. However, aluminum and copper have differing flow stresses, which is the level of stress required to break down a material to allow it to flow. Aluminum flows much more freely than copper at lower temperatures, making it unsuitable for coextrusion. So, the team has been investigating the potential of using AL-6063, an aluminum alloy with a higher melting point.

The team is also investigating brass, which is an alloy composed of copper and zinc. Brass has a high copper content, and is also much stronger than pure copper, which makes it less susceptible to corrosion and cracking.

Classroom to Foundry

Isaacson, Feige, Bowling and Rochow are the Michigan Tech students behind the copper alloy Senior Design project. Through experiences within the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE), they developed the skills necessary to work together developing the alloy.

MSE is the study of materials, from metals to plastics, which are frequently used in our everyday lives. We call it the hub of engineering, said Isaacson. You cant build things or engineer things without having the materials to do so. So, were here to advance that field for other engineers.

Each of the team members began in different departments. Feige started in chemical engineering, Rochow began in biomedical engineering, Isaacson began in pre-medical, and Bowling began in general engineering with an interest in chemical engineering. They each discovered that MSE was more aligned with their interests, especially the focus on manipulating chemical and atomic structures to develop products.

When you think, Oh, I like chemistry  OK, chemical engineer. But theyre more processing, said Bowling. Whereas were more, How can we manipulate it on the atomic scale to get it [to do] what we want it to do?

The whole manipulation of the atomic structure really appealed to me, said Rochow.

The copper alloy project is one of many the team members have worked on that provide hands-on experiences with real world applications. The team is especially excited to create a new product they developed entirely together. Although many engineers develop products, MSE students have the unique opportunity to manipulate chemical structures that influence the state of the final product they present.

Were very much a hands-on, get stuff done, very direct department, said Feige.

The department has also allowed the team members to participate in fun activities such as Foundry Fun Days, where students have used the MSE foundry to create everything from cast-iron pans to Thors hammer. Multiple team members have also been able to travel and participate in bladesmithing competitions.

The team feels that the range of academic and extracurricular opportunities the MSE department provides has given them unique skills and experiences that have aided in their professional development.

You take classes in all realms of things, said Isaacson. From math to chemistry, to physics, to electricity.

We end up with a wide range of applicable knowledge, said Feige. So, we can take our degree and go in infinite ways with it.

Bowling hopes to take her experiences and apply them to work with NASA. Isaacson is interested in working within the marine or defense industries. With MSE experiences, students can work in a variety of other industries as well, including plastics, metals and ceramics.

Being part of a smaller department, MSE students also interact more with faculty. The department feels like a family due to its small size and everyone knows each other well.

You will start working in the foundry and pouring metal in the beginning of your second year, said Feige.

Due to their unique experiences and the support theyve received from the department, the team is prepared to take on the challenge of making copper alloys a more accessible tool in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Michigan Technological University is a public research university, home to more than 7,000 students from 54 countries. Founded in 1885, the University offers more than 120 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in science and technology, engineering, forestry, business and economics, health professions, humanities, mathematics, and social sciences. Our campus in Michigans Upper Peninsula overlooks the Keweenaw Waterway and is just a few miles from Lake Superior.

Envirothon, which began in Pennsylvania in 1979, will be held in a virtual format this year due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

The National Conservation Foundation Board of Trustees and the 2021 hosting organization, the Nebraska Association of Resources Districts, recently announced the transition to online for the 2021 NCF-Envirothon annual international competition.

Pennsylvania Envirothon Inc. last September made a similar announcement about the state competition, which annually determines the Pennsylvania team that will compete at the international level.

Pennsylvania has won the international competition in 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1994, 1997, 2000, 2001, 2003, 2005, 2009 and 2017, and frequently placed in the top 10 and top 3 finishers.

This decision was made after much deliberation but was determined to be the best option to protect the health and safety of the general public and to prevent the spread of COVID-19, NCF Chair Steve Robinson said. The top priority for the organizers is the health and safety of students, advisors, volunteers, sponsors and education partners.

NARD will still host the 2021 NCF-Envirothon competition, to be held over several days beginning Monday, July 26. Nebraskas ecology, natural resources and the current environmental topic of Water Resources Management: Local Control and Local Solutions, will remain the main focal points of the 2021 competition.

NCF said the 2021 Envirothon will be an innovative competition, with the same quality of training, testing and commitment to providing students with the knowledge and skills to change the world.

The first Envirothon competition was created by the Fulton, Luzerne and Schuylkill conservation districts in Pennsylvania in 1979. By 1984 the program expanded to a statewide competition, and then nationally and internationally.

More than 15,000 high school students across Pennsylvania compete in 67 county envirothons, preliminary to the state competition.
ROME, FEB 10 - There has been a plot twist in path towards a new government led by Premier-designate Mario Draghi after 5-Star Movement (M5S) founder Beppe Grillo announced an online vote of the anti-establishment group's members on whether to support it should be delayed. "I'd wait until he makes the statements he made with us in public," comedian-cum-politician Grillo said after leading an M5S delegation that met Draghi on Tuesday as part of a second round of government-formation consultations with the nation's parties. "I'd wait for him to have his ideas clear in his mind". M5S's members had been set to vote on whether to back an eventual Draghi government on Wednesday and Thursday. The M5S is by its nature hostile to the idea of government led by a non-politician technocrat like the former head of the European Central Bank. The delay has been interpreted by some pundits as being designed to stop the M5S splitting over whether to support a broadly-backed Draghi government and avoid having to have snap elections in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, with Italy holding the presidency of the G20 this year and co-chairing the COP-26 UN Climate Summit with the UK. (ANSA).
Bruce Springsteen was arrested on driving while intoxicated and related charges at the Jersey Shore last fall, authorities said.

On Nov. 14, 2020, Springsteen was cited for DWI, reckless driving and consuming alcohol in a closed area at Sandy Hook, in the Gateway National Recreation Area at the northeast tip of Monmouth County.

Springsteen was cooperative throughout the process, Gateway spokesperson Brenda Ling said in a statement Wednesday.

TMZ was first to report the arrest. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member, a Colts Neck, New Jersey, resident, is due for a court appearance in the next few weeks, the website said.

The news comes after Springsteen, 71, made headlines this past weekend as he appeared in a two-minute Super Bowl commercial for Jeep, the first such product endorsement of his career.

Unlike many rock stars, Springsteen does not have a history of public intoxication. In fact, he avoided alcohol as a young man, not having his first drink until he was 22. As he wrote in his 2016 autobiography Born to Run, My experience with my father had been enough, referencing his father, Douglas Springsteen, and his struggles with alcoholism.

The terrifying, all-engulfing presence he became when he drank convinced me to never go there. He lost who he was.

Springsteen is very familiar with Sandy Hook, having used its beaches as backdrops for several music and film projects, most notably the album cover for 1987s Tunnel of Love. The music video for from the albums hit single Brilliant Disguise was shot in the kitchen of an abandoned house on Sandy Hooks Fort Hancock property. His 2014 short film Hunter of Invisible Game was also filmed there.

Bobby Olivier may be reached at bolivier@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @BobbyOlivier and Facebook. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
UPDATE: Police report that Alicia was located and is safe.

Police in Gloucester County are asking for the publics help in locating a missing 17-year-old.

Alicia Green, of Newfield, was reported missing by her family on Monday, according to Franklin Township Police.

Authorities say she could be in the Hammonton or Egg Harbor Township area.

Alicia is 5 feet 1 inch tall and 120 pounds. She was last seen wearing a black hooded sweatshirt, black pants, and black and white checkered shoes.

Anyone with information on her whereabouts is asked to contact police at 856-694-1414.

Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to NJ.com.

Matt Gray may be reached at mgray@njadvancemedia.com.
Kirinyaga Governor Anne Waiguru has applauded the British government for partnering with her county in delivering socio-economic development programmes.

The governor spoke at an event where the UK High Commissioner to Kenya Jane Marriot met with governors from the Central Region Economic Bloc (Cereb).

Ms Waiguru said that the cordial relationship between Kirinyaga County and the UK government will see the county get one of the biggest value addition factories in the county.

Through the UKAid-funded Sustainable Urban Economic Development programme (Sued), Kirinyaga will build a husks factory in which by-products of agricultural produce such as coffee, cassava and rice will be made into furniture boards.

The factory will be a source of employment for Kirinyaga residents, besides bringing extra income to farmers.

Urban economic plan

Through Sued, the county is also developing an urban economic plan for the Kerugoya-Kutus Municipality which is expected to be completed by August.

The governor said the plan will promote economic growth in a sustainable and inclusive manner through prioritised integrated projects. It will also harness the great potential in the municipality, transforming it into a major investment hub.

Ms Waiguru said the programmes will go a long way in improving the livelihoods of the county's residents and achieving Kirinyaga's development agenda.

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Extend to other counties

She appealed to the UK envoy to extend similar economic empowerment programmes to other counties within the economic bloc.

Kirinyaga and Tharaka-Nithi are the only counties in Mt Kenya region which are among the 12 in the country which qualified for the Sued programme.

The envoy noted that UK and Kenya enjoy a cordial development partnership and that Britain is willing to extend more development programmes to more counties in the region.

Cereb comprises 10 counties, namely Kirinyaga, Embu, Kiambu, Murang'a, Laikipia, Meru, Nakuru, Nyandarua, Nyeri and Tharaka-Nithi.

Other governors who attended the meeting, held in Nyeri, were Muthomi Njuki (Tharaka-Nithi), Francis Kimemia (Nyandarua), Mutahi Kahiga (Nyeri) and Kiambu's James Nyoro.
Wearing Miao clothing, women in Gaoya Village learn to write Chinese characters. [For chinadaily.com.cn]

Located in a remote mountainous area, Gaoya Village in Rongjiang County, Qiandongnan Prefecture in Guizhou Province, is a traditional Miao village. Some of the women are illiterate or semiliterate, especially those born in the 70s and 80s.

Being illiterate and unable to speak Mandarin not only restricts them from going out to work but also restricts their employability and entrepreneurial prospects.

Since Jan 20, the Guizhou Women's Federation has been organizing training courses for women's improvement at the women's night school of Gaoya Village. Eight college students returning to Gaoya were invited to be teachers. They were skilled in using the Miao language to communicate smoothly, and they also had certain teaching knowledge and enthusiasm for public welfare.

The training class runs at night, with instruction set for 8:30 pm to 9:30 pm to increase the participation rate of local women and reduce the impact on their normal production and life.

According to the women's federation, they will continue to innovate and enrich the training content, adopt innovative teaching methods, improve the women's knowledge and give full play to the unique role of women in rural revitalization.

Wearing Miao clothing, women in Gaoya Village learn to write Chinese characters. [For chinadaily.com.cn]

Wearing Miao clothing, women in Gaoya Village learn to write Chinese characters. [For chinadaily.com.cn]

Wearing Miao clothing, women in Gaoya Village learn to write Chinese characters. [For chinadaily.com.cn]

(Source: chinadaily.com.cn)
President Biden's Sunday speech on foreign policy highlights his administration's commitment to standing up to communist China, but foreign policy experts are questioning the legitimacy of his claims to be extremely competitive with the Asian economic power.

On Sunday, President Joe Biden gave a speech on foreign policy, stating, "America is back. Diplomacy is back at the center of our foreign policy." He immediately delved into addressing issues with the two superpowers, China and Russia.

One of Biden's promises is that under his administration, the country will commit to face the "advancing authoritarianism" in the form of communist China's "growing ambitions" and Russia's "determination to damage and disrupt our democracy."

President Biden shared that he has already communicated with several of the United States' allies, including neighbors Canada and Mexico, as well as the U.K., Germany, France, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and NATO to strengthen its democratic alliances that he claims the previous administration had tarnished. Biden's promises also included a commitment to stand up to communist China, a statement that earned experts' criticism.

According to One America News Network's Hans Hubbard, Biden seems to be caught between "the need to appear strong against Beijing" and his "natural inclination to acquiesce to Chinese demands."

Experts are calling out Biden's ambivalence on communist China's growing global influence, as it seemed that his speech was more directed to the State Department employees and foreign diplomats instead of the general foreign audience. TIME reports that among Biden's promises were a "return to normalcy" following the previous administration's alleged "mishandling" of foreign affairs.

OANN noted that one can question the "merits of a so-called return to normalcy," especially if this means a return to the "conciliatory policies" enacted by the Obama administration. These policies allowed China to establish its global influence.

Biden, who has spent more than four decades in politics, was Obama's vice president from 2009 to 2017, and was "a leading proponent - if not 'the' leading proponent of appeasing China," OANN noted.

This prompted experts to question his promises to stand up to communist China.

Biden said that his leadership is committed to "confront China's economic abuses; counter its aggressive, coercive action; to push back on China's attack on human rights, intellectual property, and global governance."

Biden, however, immediately followed his promises with a "but." He said,

"But we are ready to work with Beijing when it's in America's interest to do so."

Sunday's speech suggested that Biden's policy when it comes to China isn't really focused on what the communist-led nation will do. Rather, "we will compete from a position of strength by building back better from home."

He didn't spend time elaborating on what his plans for China really are, but he did insert comments denigrating the Trump administration's work - particularly its foreign policy that made sure to prioritize America first.

Interestingly, according to CNBC, Biden admitted how he knows China's Xi Jinping "pretty well," enough to know that "He's very bright and he's very tough and doesn't have a democratic bone in his body."

This adds another layer of complexity as to how Biden plans to stand up to communist China.


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Court has ordered eviction of a government prison sitting on about 500 acres of land in Buliisa District over wrongful occupation.

Buliisa Prison at Kabolwa hosts a prison farm. It has a cotton plantation on about 200 acres while the rest of about 300 acres hosts staff quarters and trees whose worth could not be readily established by presstime.

Chief Magistrate Deo John Ssejjemba ruled that the Uganda Prisons Service (UPS) is a trespasser on the estate of the late Jackson Bikobo Mwanga.

"By way of removing the defendant ... at Kabolwa - Buliisa District, each and every police officer of Uganda Police Force or other relevant authorities are hereby instructed to facilitate this bailiff in ensuring that the execution is done/carried out without delay or obstruction as ordered herein by court," Mr Ssejjemba said in a decree issued on February 4.

Ms Winnie Bikobo Nalumu, the administrator of the late Mwanga's estate, sued government in 2017 seeking repossession of the said land.

The court said the Attorney General, the government chief pleader, did not challenge the suit although he was served the hearing notice.

On December 16, 2020, the court ruled in favour of Ms Bikobo and awarded her Shs40m in general damages and legal costs.

"For a period of three years, the plaintiff has been prevented from using the land without any legitimate excuse on the part of UPS. The plaintiff is accordingly awarded Shs40m in general damages," Mr Ssejjemba ruled.

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The next day, Mr Ssejjemba issued a decree ordering UPS to vacate the land immediately or evicted by force at their own cost. "UPS are barred permanently from using in any way the plaintiff's land described as Kabolwa Estate at Buliisa," he decreed.

However, UPS did not vacate the land. Ms Bikobo ran back to court and sought a fresh order to evict UPS.

On February 4, the court issued another decree to Mr Denis Asiimwe, a court bailiff of Majimoto Auctioneers, who represented Ms Bikobo (plaintiff).

"Whereas the undermentioned property in the occupancy of the defendant has been decreed to the plaintiff in this suit. You are directed to put the plaintiff in possession of the land and you are authorised to remove any person bound by the decree who may refuse to vacate the same," Mr Ssejjemba's decree read in part.

Mr Asiimwe yesterday said they have served UPS the court order and eviction notice and informed the Attorney General and police to witness the eviction.

"We informed them to vacate peacefully and they have been unyielding. Court has given us powers to evict them. We have done with all the lawful procedures to remove them. We are waiting for police to agree on the date they will witness the eviction," Mr Asiimwe said.

The spokesman of UPS, Mr Frank Baine, said there is contention on the said land, but declined to give further details, saying the Commissioner General of Prisons Dr Johnson Byabashaija is more authoritated to talk about the issue.

By press time, Dr Byabashaija had not responded to our calls and text messages sent to him.

Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US

Iran ready to help improve the defense capability of Syria

European Parliament head proposes to strengthen sanctions on Russia

UK PM gets married in London

Armenia reports COVID-19 new 81 cases: for people die

EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia

2 people die in Armenia road accident

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61 quakes recorded in Congo per day

Syrian MFA: EU lost credibility due to blind obedience to US policy

Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack

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Suspicious deal: Whether there was profit from buying DNA IDs?

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Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities

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Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia

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15 al-Shabab militants killed in Somalia

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Newspaper: Changes are expected in Artsakh

California prisoner who considers himself Satanist beheads cellmate, dismembers his body

Newspaper: Armenia acting PM's "mutually beneficial" proposal to collapse state system?

Armenia National Security Service Reserve Officers' Union members meet with His Holiness Karekin II

EU is ready to help Armenia and Azerbaijan with border delimitation and demarcation

ARF-D member on Nikol Pashinyan: 103 years ago Armenia's founding fathers would have executed him for treason

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Armenia acting MOD meets with Russian counterpart in Moscow

Armenia 2nd President: I see possibility of restoring borders of Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast

We can provide our army with some key, modernized weapons, says Armenia ex-President Kocharyan

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan: Captives issue is not one that any opposition force can resolve

OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs release statement on detention of 6 Armenian servicemen by Azerbaijan

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Putin congratulates Aliyev on Republic Day

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Shoygu to Harutyunyan: Russia, Armenia strengthen military cooperation

Armenia acting premier: We are 100% honest toward our country

Artsakh President pays tribute at Stepanakert memorial, Shushi Tank-Monument

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Acting PM: "Cement," "fittings" were stolen while constructing Armenia state "building"

Two new cases of coronavirus reported in Artsakh

Catholicos of All Armenians visits Sardarapat Memorial, again separate from state officials

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104 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia

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Karabakh state-finance minister announces resignation

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A man who fractured his then partner's nose and left her sitting in a pool of her own blood has been jailed for six months.

Dubliner Dean McAuley (28) twice punched his then girlfriend in the face and struck her with his knee while she was on the ground.

McAuley of Kerlouge Road, Irishtown pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to assault causing harm to Rachel Williams at Kingswood LUAS Stop, Kilnamanagh, Tallaght, on September 13, 2019.

His five previous convictions include convictions for violent behaviour in a garda station, intoxication in a public place and possession of controlled drugs.

Garda Dean O'Neill told Antonia Boyle BL, prosecuting, that on the night in question, McAuley and Ms Williams were on their way back to his home having attended her family home for dinner. They had been in a relationship for over a year at that time.

Gda O'Neill said a bottle of wine they were carrying fell to the ground and smashed. He said they began arguing before McAuley pushed her and then punched her in the face, knocking her to the ground.

While Ms Williams was on the ground, McAuley struck her in the face with his knee. Ms Williams got back to her feet, only for McAuley to punch her in the face a second time and again knock her to the ground.

When gardai arrived at the scene, Ms Williams was bleeding heavily from her nose and sitting in a pool of blood which had formed on the ground. She also had two swollen eyes and was crying.

Gardai spoke to McAuley at the scene, who was unsteady on his feet and slurring his speech. In interview with gardai following his arrest, McAuley denied assaulting the victim.

Ms Williams was brought to hospital and treated for a fractured nose. McAuley was apologetic to the victim in the hospital and they departed together the following day.

Gda O'Neill agreed with Sarah-Jane O'Callaghan BL, defending, that alcohol was a problem area for her client. He agreed that McAuley is no longer communicating with the victim and is engaged to another woman.

Ms O'Callaghan said her client has suffered from depression his whole life. She said he has had to leave his family home for his own mental health and is currently homeless and residing in hostels.

Counsel said described the offence as a moment of utter madness that will change his life forever.

Judge Martin Nolan said some of McAuley's previous convictions display a bad temper particularly with drink taken. He said he should have known that drink does not affect him well.

Judge Nolan said this was a serious offence. He said he believes McAuley is well capable of contributing to society and reforming himself.

He sentenced McAuley to two years imprisonment but suspended the final 18 months of the sentence on strict conditions.

Judge Nolan said if McAuley had a more substantial record of conviction then the deduction of the sentence would have been lesser.
Lorry carrying frozen carrots and mixed herbs waits for EIGHT DAYS to board a ferry to Northern Ireland 'because of missing paperwork'

Peter Summerton, of McCulla Refrigerated Transport, said: 'It's absolutely criminal what has been allowed to happen'

A lorry carrying frozen carrots and mixed herbs has been waiting for clearance to board a ferry from Birkenhead to Belfast for eight days.

Six separate customers, supermarkets and corner stores have other consignments on truck, all stuck in Lymm because the paperwork for a single pallet of carrots is missing key information required by EU customs checks.

A report by the Guardian reveals that in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, the haulage firm's operations team have had no luck in persuading the British supplier that the carrots ordered on December 27 are now classed as an export to Northern Ireland.

They are supposed to be accompanied by a litany of EU customs documents and certificates before the trailer can be cleared to board the ferry at Birkenhead.

Peter Summerton, managing director of McCulla Refrigerated Transport, said: 'It's absolutely criminal what has been allowed to happen between these two islands that have traded with each other for so long.'

Scottish potato seed merchant banned from exporting spuds to Northern Ireland or the EU 'is losing 125,000 per year in trade'

Iain Barbour, who manages family-run JBA Seed Potatoes, is apoplectic that it is now illegal to send seed potatoes to any EU country or Northern Ireland

A Scottish potato seed merchant who has been banned from exporting potatoes to Northern Ireland under EU rules could lose up to 125,000 per year in trade.

Iain Barbour, who manages family-run JBA Seed Potatoes, is apoplectic that it is now illegal to send seed potatoes to any EU country or Northern Ireland.

The business at Rosefield Farm, Annan, is the current world record holder for the highest number of different potato varieties on offer, at 667.

Mr Barbour told the Daily Record: 'Value wise its about 75,000 to 125,000 of business we will not be able to service anymore.

'There is no way around it as all seed potatoes must now be accompanied by a plant passport. All my passports are GB only so they are not valid anywhere else at the moment.'

Sarah-Jane Laing, chief executive at Scottish Land & Estates, said: 'Most within the Scottish farming and food sectors will view the trade deal with the EU as positive news at a time when the risk of a no deal Brexit was edging closer.'

Digger 'banned from entering Northern Ireland for having soil on its tracks' due to rules on British soil being brought to province

Seamus Leheny of Logistics UK said a business bringing machinery back from Great Britain was barred because 'there was soil on the tracks of the digger'

Strict EU phytosanitary checks around British soil being brought into Northern Ireland has seen a digger temporarily banned from entry to the province.

Seamus Leheny of Logistics UK said a business bringing machinery back from Great Britain was barred because 'there was soil on the tracks of the digger'.

'The digger wasn't allowed to come to Northern Ireland until it was fully power-washed and cleaned,' he claimed.

'My understanding is that the digger was inspected and soil was found beneath the mat, and that had to be cleaned out.'

Mr Leheny said it is an issue which must now be considered by the UK-EU Joint Committee. The checks are understood to have been carried out by Daera officials.

He also called Dublin port a 'minefield for trucks arriving from GB', telling the BBC: 'One Northern Ireland operator had two loads arrive on Tuesday night and only got released at 22:30 GMT on Thursday night.

'For over 48 hours the drivers were left living in the vehicles with operators incurring costs by the hour.'

Colin Holmes, a specialist haulier handling second hand agricultural machinery, told the News Letter that for years there had been a requirement to wash farm equipment before bringing it into Northern Ireland.

However, visual inspections have now become more onerous and bureaucratic - and that was pushing up prices. He said that it was now necessary to obtain a new 'wash certificate' with each item of machinery there is 'a wee bit of leeway on it at the minute, that's coming to an end'.

Guidelines published on the department's website state 'second hand machinery which has been used for agricultural, forestry, horticultural or soil preparation/cultivation purposes' is part of 'regulated plants and plant products' requiring Phytosanitary Certificates from Great Britain confirming it is 'free from relevant pests and diseases'. Anyone buying such machinery must register as an 'importer' with the EU.

TUV leader Jim Allister described the situation as 'beyond parody'.

Scampi brand warns border delays are 'starting to bite' as seafood industry faces delays and increased costs over customs rules

Scampi brand Whitby Seafoods has claimed that the customs rules hurt companies who are reliant on fresh-caught fish to be moved seamlessly between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Stock photo used

Customs rules requiring British businesses to notify customs in advance of moving goods across the Irish Sea are 'really disadvantaging' fish suppliers.

Scampi brand Whitby Seafoods has claimed that the customs rules hurt companies who are reliant on fresh-caught fish to be moved seamlessly between Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Its sales and marketing director Laura Whittle told the Grocer that there are fears if a load is rejected at the border, the company could lose 'hundreds of thousands of pounds'.

'Customs have a requirement that they will have full visibility of the load we're bringing across by 10am the day it's being brought over [to Northern Ireland],' she said.

'Our scampi tails are still in the water then. We bring them across at 11pm, so they're not even caught [by 10am]. It's fresh food, so there's a very fast turnaround. We don't want that product out of the water a long time before it's processed and frozen because it could deteriorate.'

She added that all of Whitby's scampi was processed at Kilkeel, County Down, before being frozen, because two-thirds of the langoustine Whitby derives scampi from was landed in Northern Ireland. Once processed, the product is then transported back to its North Yorkshire base for distribution.

'Weakened by Covid-19, and the closure of the French border before Christmas, the end of the Brexit transition period has unleashed layer upon layer of administrative problems, resulting in queues, border refusals and utter confusion,' said Donna Fordyce, CEO of Seafood Scotland.

The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
Vincent DAmico, Robert Frost scholar, retired educator and proud University of St. Thomas alumnus, died of cancer at his home on Jan. 31 at age 90.

During his lifetime, he decided that like Frost he would acquire acres of land of his own. In 2019, he donated 50 acres of land near Conroe to the University of St. Thomas to help it establish a nursing program and to raise capital for the colleges new micro-campus.

(I decided) I was going to do something and that its going to make me excited until I die  a campus in the woods, DAmico said more than a year before his death.

DAmico, a dedicated alumnus, donated more than $1 million in support of the students and programs at the University of St. Thomas, officials said. His donations funded endowed scholarships in various programs, including music, education, communications, environmental studies, creative writing and nursing.

DAmico was born June 6, 1930, in Houston to typesetter and proofreader Nicolas DAmico and homemaker Pauline DAmico.

At a young age, he played the organ in church and at the Italian Cultural Center. He attended St. Thomas High School and later graduated in the University of St. Thomas second class of students in 1952, earning a bachelors degree in English with minors in philosophy and history. He attended a year of law school before enlisting in the Army for two years, and later returned to St. Thomas to earn his teacher certification in 1956. He began his career as an educator teaching English and, later, Latin at Luther Burbank Junior High School.

His last living cousin Bernadine Falco, 78, said DAmico was a giving and brilliant man who found joy in traveling, reading and working with his hands. He excelled in woodworking.

On HoustonChronicle.com: St. Thomas alum helping make the university's Conroe campus possible

He was just gifted in that way, Falco said.

DAmico, who spent more than four decades as an educator within the Houston Independent School District, often brought his personal interests to the classroom, incorporating works from the lauded poet Frost into his courses and engaging students with their surroundings through imagery. In his free time and during school breaks, he researched Frost, learning about the poets life and work.

In 1958, DAmico set out on a Frost-themed journey, toting a clipboard with a list of things he wanted to see and photograph. He visited about 40 literary sites related to Frost, including the poets birthplace and his eight farms, all in scenic parts of New England. That same year, DAmico met Frost  a moment he later recalled as one of his fondest.

Photographs taken during his trips were later used to create postcards and slides that hed show students and display in exhibits  many of which would also be shown at Frosts established museums.

On HoustonChronicle.com: St. Thomas president leads Houstons only private Catholic college with unconventional flair

Falco said giving to others was a part of her cousins nature.

But when it came to himself, he was often frugal, said Keith Glenn, 65, a close friend who likened DAmico to a big brother. Known for his unique style and sharp hats, DAmico often shopped secondhand then took his clothes to his tailor, Glenn said.

Above all, DAmico was a lifelong proponent of education  emphasizing the need for Glenn to set aside money for his childrens education and quizzing them with English exams for fun.

He had his little edge as an educator until the end. His intelligence, perspective and memory were excellent, even in his old age, Glenn said, adding that the two would often read the newspaper and discuss the articles each morning.

In the end, DAmico donated his body to Baylor College of Medicine, a decision he made in April 2016, Glenn said.

A memorial service is being planned and will take place on St. Thomas campus sometime this summer.

brittany.britto@chron.com
Work is moving at a steady pace on the new Kuwait Airport Terminal 2 (T2) project being developed at an investment of $4.3 billion.

Limak Construction, a part of leading Turkish conglomerate Limak Group, is the main contractor of the T2 project, which was designed by Foster + Partner. Structural engineering of the main structure was carried out by Werner Sobek.

The airport project is a key component of Kuwaits National Development Plan and Vision 2035, New Kuwait, which stems from the late Amir Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabahs vision to transform Kuwait into a leading financial, commercial and cultural hub, said the statement from Limak Group.

The Turkish group has been playing a vital role in constructing Kuwaits landmark projects through its subsidiary Limak Insaat Kuwait, and continues to work in full compliance with Covid-19 regulations being implemented by Kuwait government.

Limak Insaat Kuwait was established in 2016 through the Kuwait Direct Investment Promotion Authority under the Foreign Direct Investment Law as an independent subsidiary of Limak Holding.

Turkey's Minister of Foreign Affairs Mevlut Cavusoglu yesterday (February 9) visited the T2 project site along with the Ambassador of Turkey in Kuwait Ayse Hilal Sayan Koytak to monitor the progress.

Currently employing 40 Kuwaiti engineers and training over 70 female engineers as part of the companys Kuwaits Engineer Girls Program, Limak aims to add permanent value to society by supporting education and learning opportunities in the fields of construction, engineering, architecture, and project management.

They were welcomed by senior representatives from the Turkish company including Limak CEO and Board Member Feyiz Genc and Limak Insaat Kuwait Country Manager Kayihan Bagdatli, and later given a briefing on the giant project and also the $559 million car park.

Limak began its Kuwaits foray in 2009 with the companys first project, the Infectious Diseases Hospital, followed by the West Abdullah Al-Mubarak Housing project, the Kuwait International Airport T2 construction project including Package No. 2, South Abdullah Al-Mubarak Infrastructure Works, and the Al-Mutlaa Residential project (N11).

Limak officials said the company has implemented additional preventive safety precautions on-site and at offices, facilities, and support centres, all of which undergo daily monitoring and compliance checks in accordance with the directions of the Limak Health, Safety, and Environment (HSE) team.
The additions of Cynthia Grossman, PhD, Jason Colquitt, and Simon Frost to the board are very strategic. All bring a depth of knowledge in patient advocacy, health tech, scaling-up organizations, and operational excellence, said Nicole Boice, RARE-X Co-Founder/Executive Director.

RARE-X today announced three new board members who will help support the nonprofits work in structured patient data collection, responsible data sharing, and the promise of its Federated Data Sharing Platform for data sharing and analysis. The new board members are Cynthia Grossman, PhD, director at Biogen; Jason Colquitt, CEO of Across Healthcare; and Simon Frost, CEO of Tiber Capital Group.

The additions of Cynthia Grossman, PhD, Jason Colquitt, and Simon Frost to the board are very strategic. All bring a depth of knowledge in patient advocacy, health tech, scaling-up organizations, and operational excellence, said Nicole Boice, RARE-X Co-Founder/Executive Director. We are honored to have them join an already extraordinary board and thrilled to channel their expertise, talent, and energy into helping RARE-X build towards the future.

Cynthia Grossman, PhD, is a director at Biogen, leading the MS PATHS program, a collaborative research network aimed at generating evidence to improve outcomes for patients living with Multiple Sclerosis. Prior to joining Biogen, Cynthia was director at FasterCures, a center of the Milken Institute. Before joining FasterCures, she was chief of the HIV Care Engagement and Secondary Prevention Program in the Division of AIDS Research (DAR) at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). Cynthia has spent her career working to improve health by expanding opportunities for patients perspectives to shape the processes by which new therapies are discovered, developed, and delivered. Cynthia graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Earlham College with a B.A. in psychology and biology and earned her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Vermont. She has been the recipient of a National Science Foundation Incentives for Excellence Scholarship, an NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Services Award, and a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Pediatric Psychology at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University.

Jason Colquitt is CEO of Across Healthcare, a company he founded in 2012, leveraging his 20+ years in the healthcare technology field. His work has caused positive disruption within the healthcare industry as he has partnered with many organizations ranging from small start-ups to some of the world's largest health companies including Greenway Health, Walgreens Boots Alliance, Quintiles, IQVIA, Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, Muscular Dystrophy Association, American College of Surgeons, and American Heart Association. Jason has worked directly with patients, caregivers, physicians, regulators, and researchers. Jason was diagnosed with Carnitine Palmitoyltransferase II Deficiency (CPT II), a rare mitochondrial disease. He has used his experiences and technical background to help the rare disease community. Jason holds a Bachelors degree in Applied Mathematics from Auburn University.

Simon Frost is the CEO of Tiber Capital Group. Before joining Tiber Capital Group, he was the chief investment officer of Greencourt Capital, a public company with approximately $1 billion in real estate assets. Before joining Greencourt Capital, Simon was president and COO of Key Properties. He was also the co-founder of The American Home, one of the largest single-family rental aggregators in the United States. Simon holds Bachelors and Masters degrees in economics from Cambridge University in England, and a Bachelors degree in finance from the University of South Africa. Simon serves as director of both Cure AHC and Hope For Annabel, charities dedicated to finding therapies for Alternating Hemiplegia of Childhood.

The current RARE-X Board of Directors includes: Betsy Bogard, head of program and alliance management within the 4:59 Initiative at 5AM Ventures; Nicole Boice, co-founder and executive director of RARE-X; Jason Colquitt, CEO of Across Healthcare; Wendy Erler, vice president of Patient Experience, STAR and Advocacy at Alexion Pharmaceuticals; Simon Frost, CEO of Tiber Capital Group; Peter Goodhand, CEO of Global Alliance for Genomics and Health; Cynthia Grossman, PhD, director at Biogen; Walt Kowtoniuk, PhD, COO of MOMA Therapeutics and venture partner at Third Rock Ventures; Craig Martin, president of Rithm Health and interim CEO at Global Genes; Katherine Maynard, principal at PWR; Angeli Moeller, PhD, head of Pharma Informatics International at Roche; David Pearce, PhD, president of Innovation and Research for Sanford Health; Anthony Philippakis, MD, PhD, chief data officer at Broad Institute; John Reynders, PhD, chief data scientist at Reynders Consulting; Morrie Ruffin, co-founder and board member of ARM Foundation for Cell and Gene Medicine and managing partner, Adjuvant Partners; Alvin Shih, MD, president and CEO at Catamaran Bio.

ABOUT RARE-X

RARE-X is a 501(c)(3) patient advocacy organization focused on supporting the acceleration and development of life-altering treatments and future cures for patients impacted by rare disease. Enabled by best-in-class technology, patients, researchers, and other technology vendors, RARE-X will gather structured, fit-for-purpose data to share broadly, benefitting from 21st-century governance, consent, and federated data sharing technology. RARE-X is building the largest collaborative patient-driven, open-data access project for rare diseases globally. For more information, visit http://www.rare-x.org.

Media Contact:

Tom Hume, Marketing Communications  RARE-X

tomh@rare-x.org
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Nigerian stocks were down by 1.96 per cent or N425.919 billion on Wednesday, bringing the month to date loss close to N1 trillion as selling pressure weighed on a market beset by loss-making since February began.

Investors put up large volumes of shares in Fidson, CAP, Regal Insurance, Sovereign Trust Insurance and Sunu Assurance for sale, making them contribute the most to the downtrend.

A 3.70 per cent tumble in the Industrial Index to 1,963.12 index points also aided loss.

Market breadth was negative with 37 losers emerging against 13 gainers.

The All Share Index (ASI) slipped to 40,696.01 index points while market capitalisation tapered to N21.290 trillion at the end of trade.

Year to date, the index was up by 1.06 per cent.

TOP FIVE GAINERS

Niger Insurance led the flock of gainers, appreciating by 10% to close at N0.22. Champion Breweries added 9.82% to end todays trade at N3.02. Wapic went up by 7.41% to N0.58. Academy rose to N0.35, notching up 6.06% in the process. Guinness completed the top 5, climbing by 4.83% to N20.60.

TOP FIVE LOSERS

Etranzact was the worst performing stock, declining by 10% to close at N2.25. CAP fell to N18, losing 10%. Fidson dipped to N5.40, recording 10% depreciation. Sunu Assurance shed 10% to close at N0.81. Sovereign Trust Insurance closed at N0.27, going down by 10%.

TOP FIVE TRADES

In all, 366.859 million shares estimated at N5.483 billion were traded in 5,718 deals.

Zenith was the most active stock with 43.742 million units of its stocks worth N1.103 billion traded in 527 deals. 40.029 million units of FBN Holdings shares priced at N289.261 million exchanged hands in 279 transactions. GTB traded 35.980 million shares estimated at N1.168 billion in 270 transactions.

Courteville traded 35.119 million shares valued at N7.024 million in 27 deals. Transcorp had 23.739 million shares valued at N23.228 million traded in 169 deals.
WASHINGTON  East Bay Rep. Eric Swalwell returned to his courtroom roots Wednesday as he helped prosecute the impeachment case against Donald Trump, arguing that the former president whipped up supporters with baseless charges of voting fraud to steal the election for himself.

Swalwell, one of nine House managers arguing for conviction in the Senate, said Trump consciously laid the groundwork in the weeks after the November election for the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by militant supporters seeking to block Congress from certifying Joe Biden as president-elect.

That attack didnt come after just a handful of tweets and offhand remarks, Swalwell and other House prosecutors told senators.

Just like to build a fire it doesnt just start with the flames, Donald Trump for months and months assembled the tinder, the kindling, threw on logs for fuel to have his supporters believe that the only way that their victory would be lost was if it was stolen, said Swalwell, D-Dublin. So that way, President Trump was ready if he lost the election to light the match.

And lose he did, Swalwell noted, by 7 million votes.

Instead of accepting the results or pursuing legitimate claims, he told his base more lies, Swalwell said. He doused the flames with kerosene.

The former Alameda County deputy district attorney helped make Democrats opening presentation in their case that Trump incited the insurrection; Swalwell returned later to narrate a harrowing series of social media videos, surveillance camera footage and police communications from when rioters broke into the Capitol.

Prosecutors laid out what lead impeachment manager Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin labeled as the provocation by Trump in three parts: initiating the big lie that the election would be fraudulent, urging supporters to stop the election counting, and then telling them to fight like hell to install him in a second term.

Reps. Joe Neguse of Colorado and Joaquin Castro of Texas highlighted tweets and statements from Trump in the months leading up to the election telling his supporters that the only way he could lose would be through fraud.

Handout / Getty Images

Swalwell picked up the narrative in December, as states were certifying their Electoral College votes. He said Trump repeatedly used words evoking violence and told supporters they had to show up in Washington on Jan. 6 to prevent Congress from ratifying the results.

He built this mob over many months with repeated messaging until they believed that they had been robbed of their vote and they would do anything to stop the certification, Swalwell said. He made them believe that their victory was stolen and incited them so he could use them to steal the election for himself. ... And when they were primed and angry and ready to fight, he escalated and channeled their rage with a call to arms.

Swalwell noted his own background prosecuting violent crimes in Alameda County  he was a deputy district attorney from 2006 to 2012  and the frequent need for prosecutors to prove in court that defendants acted with premeditation.

The evidence here on this count is overwhelming, Swalwell said. President Trumps conduct leading up to Jan. 6 was deliberate, planned and premeditated. This was not one speech, not one tweet. It was dozens in rapid succession with the specific details. He was acting as part of the host committee.

It was the highest-profile impeachment moment for Swalwell, but not an entirely unfamiliar one. Swalwell was also a key player in Trumps first impeachment, on abuse of power and obstruction of justice, as a member of the Intelligence and Judiciary committees that held hearings on removing Trump from office. Swalwell was also on the House floor the day the Capitol was breached, and was evacuated from the House chamber as rioters attempted to break in.

Swalwell described the moment when lawmakers learned the mob was inside the building. He said they were told to look for the gas masks under their seats while a chaplain prayed.

Uncertain what would happen next, I sent a text message to my wife: I love you and the babies, please hug them for me, Swalwell said.

He told senators that the mob came within about 58 steps of them as they were evacuated from their chamber. Swalwell played a security video showing how Capitol police blocked the hallway with their bodies to prevent rioters from reaching you and your staff.

The public does not know how close these rioters came to you, he said.

Another Californian among the nine House managers, Rep. Ted Lieu of Torrance (Los Angeles County), followed Swalwell to make the case that as Trump ran out of nonviolent options to stay in office, he targeted Republican officials including Vice President Mike Pence and Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

He was coming for you, Lieu told senators. He was coming for all of us, just as the mob did at his direction.

Its unlikely that Democrats arguments will sway enough Republicans to convict Trump. Only six Republicans joined the 50 Democrats on Tuesday in voting that the Senate had the right to hear the case  far fewer than the 67 votes needed to convict Trump in the 100-member chamber.

Before wrapping up his case, Swalwell seemed to acknowledge the task ahead of him. He made a point of not implicating Republican senators who had backed Trumps pre-Jan. 6 arguments in the insurrection. And he noted that Trump tweeted the night before in a threatening way at three top Republicans in the Senate, including McConnell, about the thousands of his supporters in the city.

What our commander in chief did was wildly different from what anyone here in this room did to raise election concerns, Swalwell said.

Swalwell is a polarizing figure for some Republicans, however, and at least one saw him as a flawed messenger. A spokesperson for Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, one of the six Republicans who voted in favor of hearing the impeachment case, noted that in 2018, Swalwell reacted to a report of ugly voice mails directed at her for voting to confirm Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh by tweeting, Boo hoo hoo. Youre a senator who police will protect.

Collins spokesperson Annie Clark said Wednesday, After he derisively mocked death threats aimed at Sen. Collins, it was ironic to hear Rep. Swalwell today talk about the importance of taking such threats seriously.

Chronicle staff writer Dustin Gardiner contributed to this report.

Tal Kopan is The San Francisco Chronicles Washington correspondent. Email: tal.kopan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @talkopan
A total of 310 girls at a secondary school in Bomet stormed out of school and walked for more than 20 kilometres at night to the sub-county headquarters offices protesting alleged mistreatment by the institution's administration.

The students, from Mogor Girls' Secondary School in Chepalungu constituency, walked to Sigor divisional headquarters on Sunday night to seek audience with senior education officers and present their grievances.

The students are reported to have left their dormitories at 1am, ripped open a fence and headed to the county headquarters.

At one point, the girls got tired of walking at night and stopped next to the Oreyet Secondary School's main gate for a rest before they continued with their journey at dawn.

They accused the school principal of being high-handed and complained of being served little and non-nutritious food. They told education officials that they had raised the grievances with the principal but their complaints had not been addressed.

Mr Johnson Mogusu, the Chepalungu sub-county director of education, and Mr Nelson Masai, the sub-county police commander, and other government officers held a meeting with the students and took note of their grievances.

Five buses belonging to schools in the sub-county were then used to transport the students back to school on Monday.

A police Toyota Land Cruiser escorted the students back to school after they were bought snacks and drinks to quench their thirst.

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The students created quite a spectacle as they trekked to the sub-county headquarters with motorists forced to pave way for the girls who were armed with stones. The girls braved the night chilly weather and walked along the main highway despite the risks and dangers lurking in the darkness.

Repeated attempts to get a comment from the County Director of Education Indiatsi Mabale were unsuccessful. All of our calls went unanswered.

"It is by sheer luck that the girls were not molested or injured as they walked at night to the sub-county headquarters. This issue has to be addressed as a matter of urgency as it is about the safety of our children," said Mrs Beatrice Kirui, a parent.

Kabungut, Kimulot and Chebunyo boys secondary schools and Mengit Mixed Day and Boarding Secondary School in Bomet County have been affected by fire incidents in the last two weeks, in which dormitories were destroyed.

Mr Mabale has convened a meeting of members of the County Education Board to discuss the issue on Friday.

According to a letter dispatched to the board members on Monday, Mr Mabale, who is the secretary of the board, indicated that the County Director of Education, the County Director of the Teachers Service Commission (TSC) and the County Executive of Committee (CEC) member in charge of Education are expected to table reports.

Issues to be discussed by the board include school unrest, 2021 academic calendar, and registration of learning institutions.
Mumbai, Feb 10 : In a surprise development, Bollywood actress Kangana Ranaut has decided to unconditionally withdraw her suit against the BrihanMumbai Municipal Corporation over a 2018 demolition notice pertaining to certain illegalities effected in her properties in a Khar building.

"She has decided to withdraw the suit in the next four days and has informed the Bombay High Court accordingly," her lawyer Rizwan Siddique told IANS on Wednesday.

He said this case was related to her property in Orchid Breeze building in Khar in which the BMC had served a demolition notice in 2018 for certain unauthorised constructions.

Instead of pursuing the suit in the high court, Ranaut will apply for regularisation of the structure as per the BMC rules within four weeks.

The BMC on its part will expeditiously take a decision on her application for regularisation as per the court orders.

However, in case the BMC order goes against her, then the actress would get two weeks' time to approach the court again, despite strong opposition by BMC counsel Aspi Chinoy.

To a query by Justice P. K. Chavan to Ranaut's lawyer Birendra Saraf whether the withdrawal was conditional or not, he said it was unconditional.

In 2018, the BMC served a demolition notice to Ranaut for various unauthorised constructions in the premises, which involved merging three apartments on the 5th floor, constructing more than permissible limits, and availing 50 per cent area of the uninhabited floor space.

Ranaut, along with the realtor RKW Construction had approached the Dindoshi Sessions Court against the BMC seeking a stay on the execution of the notice.

However, after the Sessions Court rejected her plea in Dec. 2020, Ranaut approached the high court seeking a stay on the BMC notice for demolishing the illegal portions in her property.

The Sessions Court ruled that Ranaut had indulged in grave violations of the sanctions plans, converting three units into a single one, covered the sunk, duct and common passage areas as per her own convenience and availed free FSI.

Terming these as serious, the lower court had ruled that these violations of the sanctioned plans required the permission of the Competent Authority (BMC), and hence rejected her plea for relief.
Michigan Tech students took home top honors  the Artemis Award  in NASAs Breakthrough, Innovative and Game-changing (BIG) Idea Challenge.

Students from Michigan Technological University want to shine a light on the darkest places of the moon. Their design, a rover called Tethered permanently shadowed Region EXplorer (T-REX), deploys a lightweight, superconducting cable to keep other lunar rovers powered and provide wireless communication as they operate in the extreme environments of the moons frigid, lightless craters.

Eight university teams competed in the BIG Idea Challenge for 2020, called the Lunar PSR Challenge. The goal? Demonstrating different technologies and designs to study and explore the moons permanently shadowed regions (PSRs), which NASA officials note are a formidable challenge for space exploration.

Think about T-REX as a recharging station and comms tower in a small, portable package, said Marcello Guadagno, Michigan Techs student lead on the project. The whole time we were holding our breath and cheered when our team was announced as the winner of the competition. This was a major victory for our lab, which was only just founded in 2019.

The senior design team drafted the initial rover design: Samual Lakenen, Jacob Wolff, Mark Wallach, Alexander Mathias, Alec Mitteer and Jonathan Fritsch. The rest of the team made all the test facilities, produced more refined rover iterations, conducted testing, and presented at the BIG Idea Challenge Forum: Travis Wavrunek, Elijah Cobb, Ted Gronda, Collin Miller, Marcello Guadagno, Hunter McGillivray, Nicholas Zamora, Austen Goddu, Erik Van Horn, Wyatt Wagoner, Anthony Miller. The team is advised by Paul van Susante.

NASA awarded nearly $1 million through the BIG Idea grant in February 2020, including $162,637 to the Michigan Tech team. Then the pandemic hit.

When we think about tenacity, one of our Universitys core values, it was important to keep everyone healthy and still move forward with the project, said Paul Van Susante, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Michigan Tech and the T-REX teams faculty adviser. The pandemic required us to adapt and overcome, and the team rose magnificently to that challenge.

As the NASA press release notes, Studying permanently shadowed regions in or near the Moon's poles could help improve understanding of the Moon's history and composition. When NASA lands the first woman and next man at the Moon's South Pole with the Artemis program, new technologies will be needed to allow astronauts to live and work on the Moon for extended missions.

BIG Idea teams took on near-term technology capability requirements to support NASAs exploration objectives for permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) in and near the moons polar regions.

In addition to the Artemis Award, Michigan Techs team received multiple peer awards: the Fly Me to the Moon award, after other university teams voted that Michigan Techs team was most likely to go to the moon, and the Above and Beyond award. (As Guadagno puts it, we broke things and then unbroke them.) The T-REX crew also got the Welcome Llama for being the most inviting team: Specifically, at the start of the final presentation, some of the Northeastern students accidentally stayed on long, so the Michigan Tech team welcomed them as new Huskies.

The team is part of the Husky Works Planetary Surface Technology Development Lab and Van Susante jokes that their work was fueled by a lab stockpile of candy and popsicles. Mostly undergraduates and the youngest team in the competition, the experience has encouraged many of the team members to pursue masters and doctoral degrees.

Guadagno says the teams hard work, sugar consumption and creativity has paid off. "This technology can play a key role in enabling a sustainable human presence on the Moon, he said. We are proud to be part of the Artemis Generation."

Michigan Technological University is a public research university, home to more than 7,000 students from 54 countries. Founded in 1885, the University offers more than 120 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in science and technology, engineering, forestry, business and economics, health professions, humanities, mathematics, and social sciences. Our campus in Michigans Upper Peninsula overlooks the Keweenaw Waterway and is just a few miles from Lake Superior.
Immediately after the Jan. 6 demonstrations at the Capitol, the cabal of "woke" Silicon Valley communications platforms  led by Twitter  banned President Donald J. Trump from ever posting again. This was meant to be punitive. After all, Amazon did roughly the same thing by banning Parler, a civil liberties alternative to Twitter, from the giant firm's pervasive server farms. That was clearly punitive.

But was the move against Trump really hurtful?

With the impeachment trial now going on in the Senate, and because a super-majority is highly improbable, this exercise in manufactured outrage is a farce. A non-starter. DOA. However, if the president hadn't been banned from virtually all social media platforms, it's almost inconceivable that he wouldn't be back in the fray on a daily basis. Instead, he's been quiet for the past month, something almost equally inconceivable, considering the Twitter track record President Trump has created since he first announced his candidacy, way back in 2015.

In many ways, Donald Trump is a remarkable populist, a billionaire "everyman" who not only didn't profit from his presidency, but even gave back his annual salary as president, nearly half a million dollars. However, his one glaring weakness was his seeming inability to control his tweets. Take those away, and Trump would have been considered a change-agent president in the mold of Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy was essentially a Washington outsider who dramatically changed the way government monitored and regulated the rapacious American monopolies and cartels rampant at the dawn of the 20th century.

But right up until the very end, Trump had almost unfettered access to Twitter and other social media platforms, and he used that access for good and for ill. Some of his better tweets allowed him to circumvent a hostile media establishment and speak directly to the American public. This is very much akin to President Franklin Roosevelt, who also had a hostile, partisan (conservative) press. Through his brilliant fireside chats, FDR made use of the most dramatic new communications technology (radio) in ways never before attempted. Like his fifth cousin, Teddy, and unlike Trump, Roosevelt was a consummate communicator who didn't make many (maybe not any) serious political gaffes.

However, President Trump  in addition to his insightful and politically powerful tweets that bypassed the media to get his views directly to the electorate  also "vented his spleen" on topics far removed from his legislative or leadership priorities. These tweets became President Trump's "Achilles heel," his one area of real vulnerability. These tweets churned up a great deal of vitriol among liberal media (about 90% of all media), as well as among true believers who hated him on principle. Each over-the-top tweet just added fuel to the fire of their outrage, making it harder for Trump-supporters to express their support publicly.

If Twitter and its fellow corporate censors hadn't colluded in blocking Trump completely from their social media platforms, we can only imagine how Trump's raging tweets in the month between the Capitol Hill crisis and the beginning of the impeachment trial would have fueled the flame of a self-inflicted auto-da-fe  the act of being burnt at the stake. This was the most popular death sentence during the Spanish Inquisition and has come to mean, metaphorically, being burnt at the stake. Instead, he was  not by choice  silent.

With no fuel being added to the fire, America lost interest. Reflecting this, Rasmussen Report noted on Feb. 9 that "Most Voters Don't Expect Senate to Convict Trump, Won't Watch Impeachment Trial." In brief, only 11% of likely U.S. voters think it is very likely that the Senate will convict Trump, and 20% think it is somewhat likely. However, 28% think it's not very likely, and 36% says the conviction is not likely at all. At the same time, Trump's stature has risen.

This negative expectation among American voters the day before the Senate trial began reflects the fact that other news was more immediate, especially after Biden was sworn in. No president was ever impeached after he left office, since impeachment merely removes a president from office.

Immediately after the Jan. 6 rally-turned-violent at the U.S. Capitol, Rasmussen reported that half of all voters supported removing President Trump from office before President Biden's inauguration. However, two weeks later, the Rasmussen Report noted that "57% of Voters Say Trump Impeachment Will Further Divide America." This is a dramatic switch from just two weeks before, and it reflects the fact that Trump had largely faded from the news. Since most Trump-created news was linked to his most incendiary tweets, his absence from the national stage showed this remarkable reversal.

So, with President Trump unable to "stir the pot" with his public Twitter announcements, the very idea of his impeachment faded from view, until people were not expecting anything to come of the trial beyond some political grandstanding and more division among Americans.

Ned Barnett is a communications specialist and political commentator based in Nevada, where he runs Barnett Marketing Communications. A regular contributor to American Thinker, he is currently working on his latest book, The COVID Diaries, a fictionalized diary recording the appearance and impact of COVID during its first full year in America. It will be published by Sidekick Press in May of this year.

Image: Pixabay / Pixabay License.
press release

Today, on the International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting (FGM/C), the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) reaffirms our commitment to ending this human rights violation and the gender inequalities that contribute to the prevalence of FGM/C around the world.

FGM/C is a public health issue and a violation of a woman's right to bodily integrity. This practice has no health benefits and leads to a range of physical and mental health challenges that can last a lifetime. UNICEF estimates that at least 200 million girls and women alive today have experienced FGM/C.

While the harmful practice is still prevalent, FGM/C has become less common today and opposition to the practice is growing widely. Support to end this practice among women and girls between the ages of 15-49 in high-prevalence countries has doubled from two decades ago. USAID is actively involved in addressing this topic through a number of initiatives, including its project, Koota Injena ("Come Let Us Talk") which partners with local and international organizations in Northeast Kenya to tackle the common root causes that drive FGM/C. The project involves working with religious and traditional leaders, youth champions of all genders, mothers and daughters, and clan leaders in 40 communities.

Lasting change to end harmful traditional practices must be led by the communities themselves, as they re-envision norms, values, safety, rights, and empowerment of women and girls. While the international community has made progress on ending FGM/C globally, there is still a long way to go. We must all work together to overturn deeply entrenched gender norms on the value of the girl child that are not only harmful to women and girls, but to the development and stability of nations.
JAMISON, Pa., Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Physicians Endoscopy partner, Barry Kaufman, MD, of Atlantic Gastroenterology Associates, has led a COVID-19 testing program that has grown over the course of the pandemic to allow his ambulatory surgery center, ACCESS Surgery Center, to maintain high procedure volume and patient safety throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

Atlantic Gastroenterology Associates had an existing strategic partnership with Genesis Laboratory Management LLC for pathology, advanced fecal pathogens, and chemistry studies. After learning Genesis also invested in COVID-19 RNA swab testing, Dr. Kaufman quickly leveraged their relationship to set up on-site testing so ACCESS could resume elective procedures. Dr. Kaufman, medical director at ACCESS, found himself in the parking lot swabbing patients and staff himself to maintain the highest level of patient and staff safety.

Soon, the program grew beyond ACCESS Surgery Center. "It quickly became a community hub where many people came for convenient testing," explained Dr. Kaufman. Moving forward, he hopes the increased public awareness of ACCESS Surgery Center can lead to successful community engagement campaigns beyond COVID-19 initiativeslike a program to increase colorectal cancer screening rates.

"PE is proud to partner with Dr. Kaufman and ACCESS Surgery Center," says Lara Jordan, Vice President of Operations at Physicians Endoscopy. Jordan oversees the day-to-day business operations of seven PE centers in the Northeast region. "PE partners like Dr. Kaufman have increasingly stepped up in new and innovative ways over the past year to achieve our shared goalsmaintaining both procedure volume and patient safety."

ACCESS Surgery Center continues to provide COVID-19 testing and plans to do so until there is no longer a substantial need. ACCESS is an outpatient surgery center in Egg Harbor Township, NJ, boasting over 30 physicians of seven specialties. Physician Endoscopy's partners in Gastroenterology include both Barry Kaufman, MD and Gary Rosman, MD.

To learn more about ACCESS Surgery Center, please visit the center's website here.

To learn more about Physicians Endoscopy partnerships, please visit the company's website here.

About Physicians Endoscopy

Physicians Endoscopy (PE) is a nationally recognized development and management partner for over 60 GI-focused practices and ambulatory surgery centers. From regulations and compliance support to operations and governance, PE builds and sustains dynamic and growing GI practices and surgery centers through collaborative, long-term relationships with physicians. To learn more about Physicians Endoscopy, please visit www.endocenters.com.

Contact: Kelly McCormick ([email protected])

SOURCE Physicians Endoscopy

Related Links

endocenters.com


Its Valentines Day weekend and love is in the air, or on the air, due to coronavirus restrictions. For the days ahead, weve gathered both love-themed, and non-holiday events, including a poetry reading, sappy movies, and the reunion of an 1980s-90s iconic Portland jazz band.

Cast photo of "My Funny Valentine" - left to right: Alan Anderson, Debbie Hunter, Tim Smith, Joan Freed, and Norman Wilson.Photo courtesy of Lakewood Theatre

My Funny Valentine

Lakewood Theatre Companys offers a look back at a one-night, sold-out fundraising performance filled with comic love songs from stage musicals. The musical revue was recorded on the Lakewood mainstage in 2014 and stars Lakewood performers in an evening of songs filled with clever lyrics, theatrical mishap stories, and audience participation games.

Online viewing available Friday-Thursday, Feb. 12-18 only; sign up for tickets at lakewood-center.org or phone 503-635-3901; free but donations are requested.

Love-Struck Valentines Drive-in movie and dinner

How about a movie and dinner date night for Valentines Day? In a parking lot at Washington Square, Love-Struck drive-in offers three nights of iconic romance movies (including The Notebook, P.S. I Love You and Shes All That) that can be combined with snacks, or even a full meal. Movie sound will be piped into the vehicle via FM radio band. Catering is provided by Pearl Catering.

6 p.m. Friday-Sunday, Feb. 12-14, Washington Square Mall near the old Sears parking area; $79-$150 per vehicle; reservations required in advance at swiy.io/lovestruckED.

1987 press photo of the Tom Grant Band by Jeff Leonard Carlton Jackson

Tom Grant reunion concert

The original members of Portland jazz favorite, the Tom Grant Band, reunite for an evening of music presented by Classic Pianos. The setlist will highlight the songs that marked the bands nearly 10 years of performing together in the 1980s-90s, and the guys will relate stories from their time spent together touring the country.

7:30-9 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 13; streaming on YouTube and Facebook, visit www.tomgrant.com; free, but donations are requested.

Homework: Exercising Wombhood

White Bird dance presents a cross-Atlantic virtual duet by Iris Erez, an Israeli dancer and choreographer, and Marjani Forte-Saunders, a choreographer, performer, educator and community organizer, based in California. The work was commissioned by Portlands White Bird. The piece is a work-in-progress performance and is about 15-20 minutes long, followed by a conversation between the two artists.

Noon Monday, Feb. 15, via Zoom link, and will also be accessible for at least 10 days on White Birds website whitebird.org; free.

Poet Ross Gay

Linfield University hosts a virtual reading with acclaimed poet and essayist Ross Gay. He will read excerpts from The Book of Delights and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, followed by a discussion of the texts. Ross Gay is the one writer you need to be reading right now, says Joe Wilkins, director of creative writing at Linfield University in a recent release. Wilkins said, Rosss poems are fun, wise, and full of rhythm and sound, and reading one of his essays is like having a long talk with a good friend.

Gays work has won the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, in addition to being a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry. He is a professor of English at Indiana University.

The Book of Delights is the Multnomah County Librarys Everybody Reads 2021 selection.

4:30 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 16, livestreamed on the universitys YouTube channel and open to the public.

Performance Works NW Happy Hour

This latest installment features new work by Intisar Abioto, an artist working across photography, dance, and writing. The performance will be in response to events in her life from the prior week. Video artist Maura Campbell-Balkits will present Talk Show a comedy sketch piece looking at the dark side of self-help. Happy Hour performances are presented via Zoom link.

5 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 18, sliding-scale tickets up to $30; Zoom link provided at the ticket page.

If you have live or virtual events youd like to see highlighted at OregonLive.com or in the weekly printed A&E section of The Oregonian, please email submissions to events@oregonian.com at least three weeks prior to the start of your event. Digital images or links to videos are helpful.

 Rosemarie Stein, rstein@oregonian.com; 503-221-4376
Editors note: In relation to Saturdays log entry regarding a student with COVID-19, St. Helena High School Principal Ben Scinto sent the following email to parents Tuesday morning: Good morning Saints families. We are informing you that there was a student on the high school campus from 1/6 to 1/11/21 who we later found out had COVID-like symptoms and did not notify the school. The student was later tested for COVID-19 on 1/20/21 and found to be positive. After doing contact tracing, Napa County Public Health informed us yesterday afternoon that they determined the individual was infectious from 12/30/20- 1/11/21. Had we been alerted at the time of the infectious period, we would have immediately performed site-based contact tracing and informed everyone who had close contact with this person. We would also have informed the entire high school community as is our policy. The quarantine period for any close contact is over, and so there is nothing to do at this time. We are not aware of any COVID-19 cases linked to this individual. Please ring us at 967-2740 should you have any questions. Thank you.
The first full day of arguments are beginning in Donald Trump's impeachment trial, as House Democratic prosecutors said the former president was no innocent bystander but the inciter in chief of deadly attack at the Capitol to overturn the election.

Prosecutors in Donald Trump's impeachment trial said Wednesday they would prove that Trump was no innocent bystander but the inciter in chief of the deadly attack at the Capitol aimed at overturning his election loss to Joe Biden.

Opening the first full day of arguments, the lead House prosecutor said they will lay out evidence that shows the president encouraged a rally crowd to head to the Capitol, then did nothing to stem the violence and watched with glee" as a mob stormed the iconic building. Five people died.

To us it may have felt like chaos and madness, but there was method to the madness that day, said Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md.

The day's proceedings were unfolding after an emotional Tuesday start to the trial that left the f ormer president fuming after his attorneys delivered a meandering defense and failed to halt the trial on constitutional grounds. Some allies called for yet another shakeup to his legal team.

Trump is the first president to face an impeachment trial after leaving office and the first to be twice impeached. The riot followed a rally during which Trump urged his supporters to fight like hell, words his lawyers say were simply a figure of speech. He is charged with incitement of insurrection.

Senators, many of whom fled for safety the day of the attack, watched Tuesday's graphic videos of the Trump supporters who battled past police to storm the halls, Trump flags waving. More video is expected Wednesday, including some that hasn't been seen before.

House Democratic prosecutors on Wednesday plan to use Capitol security footage that hasn't been publicly released before as they argue that Trump incited the insurrection, according to Democratic aides working on the case.

Security remains extremely tight at the Capitol, fenced off with razor wire and patrolled by National Guard troops.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Biden would not be watching the trial.

Joe Biden is the president, he's not a pundit, he's not going to opine on back and forth arguments, she said.

The House impeachment managers described police officers maimed in the chaos and rioters parading in the very chamber where the trial was being held. Trump's team countered that the Constitution doesn't allow impeachment at this late date.

That's a legal issue that could resonate with Senate Republicans eager to acquit Trump without being seen as condoning his behaviour.

Lead defense lawyer Bruce Castor said he shifted his planned approach after hearing the prosecutors' emotional opening and instead spoke conversationally to the senators, saying Trump's team would denounce the repugnant attack and in the strongest possible way denounce the rioters.

He appealed to the senators as patriots first, and encouraged them to be cool headed as they assessed the arguments.

Trump attorney David Schoen turned the trial toward starkly partisan tones, arguing the Democrats were fuelled by a base hatred of the former president.

Republicans made it clear that they were unhappy with Trump's defense, many of them saying they didn't understand where it was going particularly Castor's opening. Louisiana Sen.

Bill Cassidy, who voted with Democrats to move forward with the trial, said that Trump's team did a terrible job. Maine Sen. Susan Collins, who also voted with Democrats, said she was perplexed. Sen. Lisa Murkowki of Alaska said it was a missed opportunity for the defense.

Six Republicans joined with Democrats to vote to proceed with the trial, but the 56-44 vote was far from the two-thirds threshold of 67 votes that would be needed for conviction.

At one pivotal point, Raskin told his personal story of bringing his family to the Capitol that day to witness the certification of the Electoral College vote, only to have his daughter and son-in-law hiding in an office, fearing for their lives.

Senators, this cannot be our future, Raskin said through tears. This cannot be the future of America.

The House prosecutors had argued there is no January exception for a president to avoid impeachment on his way out the door. Rep. Joe Neguse, D-Colo., referred to the corruption case of William Belknap, a war secretary in the Grant administration, who was impeached, tried and ultimately acquitted by the Senate after leaving office.

If Congress stands by, it would invite future presidents to use their power without any fear of accountability," he said.

It appears unlikely that the House prosecutors will call witnesses, and Trump has declined a request to testify. The trial is expected to continue into the weekend.

Trump's second impeachment trial is expected to diverge from the lengthy, complicated affair of a year ago. In that case, Trump was charged with having privately pressured Ukraine to dig up dirt on Biden, then a Democratic rival for the presidency.

This time, Trump's stop the steal rally rhetoric and the storming of the Capitol played out for the world to see.

The Democratic-led House impeached the president swiftly, one week after the attack.

(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.)
More bird conservation opportunities are coming to San Antonio.

Bird City Texas, a partnership program between Audubon Texas and the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, announced in a news release Wednesday that San Antonio, Galveston, and Surfside Beach have been certified as Bird City Texas communities. The program helps people protect birds and their habitats.

Audubon Texas Director of Conservation Strategy, Romey Swanson, said the cities did an outstanding job in 2020 by creating and maintaining places of respite for people and wildlife alike. For example, the new Robert L.B. Tobin Land Bridge at Phil Hardberger Park provides a safe passage for people and animals.

READ ALSO: PINS reminds beachgoers about releasing balloons ahead of Valentine's Day

"Intuitively, many people understand the value of nature and green spaces, and the need to escape to green spaces was highlighted in 2020," Swanson said in the release. "...Galveston, San Antonio, and Surfside Beach all embody the conservation ethic and leadership both TPWD and Audubon Texas want for all our Texas communities."

The program helps enhance and restore bird habitats, increase native plant coverage, reduce population-level threats, increase public awareness of the benefits and challenges of bird conservation and promote environmental stewardship, the release stated.

In the coming months, Bird City Texas will provide virtual or socially distanced birding opportunities in each community. To learn more about Bird City Texas community programming, those interested can visit the TPWD Bird City Texas website.

Priscilla Aguirre is a general assignment reporter for MySA.com | priscilla.aguirre@express-news.net | @CillaAguirre


A WOMAN from Epyaenene village in the Okatana constituency has defied the odds by proving that women have the skills to advance in the construction industry - not only as ordinary labourers, but also as brickmakers.

Martha Iipumbu (37) is one such brickmaker at a small brickmaking project owned by her younger brother on the outskirts of Oshakati.

The single mother of four wakes up every morning to prepare her children for school before she gets her hands dirty by moulding cement with sand to make bricks, which are sold to the locals at the village.

Late afternoons Iipumbu returns home to work in the mahangu fields during the rainy season.

She is not deterred by spending long hours in the scorching sun making bricks, lifting heavy machinery, and pushing wheelbarrows.

"We are two women who are working as brickmakers and we do everything on our own. All those bricks you see, we made ourselves, and we pack them up too after drying for some days before they are ready for customers to buy.

"It is not easy, but I'm not complaining, because with the little I earn, I'm able to send my children to school and put food on the table. I'm lucky to be employed," she says.

When The Namibian visited Iipumbu at work, she was indeed pushing heavy machinery while carrying her nine-month-old daughter on her back.

She says she has been coming to work with her baby since it was about two months old, because she cannot afford to send her to a creche.

"I come to work as early as possible so that I can knock off a bit earlier to go home and cook my children dinner. I know I cannot have it easier than this, but I am grateful for my job, and I truly thank God for the opportunity," she says.

Iipumbu makes about 100 bricks per day on average.

Iipumbu has only completed primary school as she got pregnant at an early age.

Her younger brother taught her how to make bricks when she was 17, she says.

"At first I found it hard, and sometimes people would ask me why am I learning how to make bricks when I'm a woman. Some people would even laugh at me, but I soldiered on until I mastered my skills. I know how to mix cement with sand, and how to mould bricks. This was my first job, and I have never worked anywhere else," Iipumbu says.

She says she hopes to own her own brickmaking business one day if she secures funding, adding that has the necessary skills to run her own project and provide other women at her village with employment opportunities.

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"I am appealing to any good Samaritan out there to help me start my own business. For starters, I only need bags of cement, sand and a machine to mould the bricks, and also water. This would kick-start my own brickmaking project," she says.

Iipumbu remembers her first day of brickmaking was not without challenges as she had to push a wheelbarrow full of sand and carry bags of cement on her shoulders.

"At times I thought of quitting and staying idle at home, but I think I'm used to it now. I was also impatient at the beginning and I never thought I would overcome all the challenges. Today I am standing tall and making bricks as if I'm making bread," she says.

Iipumbu encourages women to ignore the shame and stigma associated with women in the construction industry, to put on brave faces, and work or become employers themselves.
Consumers in China shook off a long absence from the steel billet import market to book a cargo via traders sold at an Indian billet tender late last week.A source with knowledge of the transaction said the delivered price to China will be around $540 per tonne cfr.An Indonesian blast furnace (BF) producer also sold a cargo to China at $546 per tonne cfr, Fastmarkets heard on Wednesday.

The sales to China are $10-16 per tonne higher than the last unconfirmed deal level into the Philippines, which was rumored at $530 per tonne cfr Manila. This deal, which was said to be for Far East Russia-origin 125mm 5sp billet, was not...


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Russia, China and Iran will kick off a joint naval exercise in the northern Indian Ocean this month, the Kremlins ambassador to Iran said Monday.

Ambassador Levan Dzhagaryan told Russias RIA news agency that the exercises would include search and rescue and shipping safety drills.

In December 2019, the three countries held a joint naval exercise in the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Oman as tensions escalated between Washington and Tehran.

Six months prior to that exercise, two civilian oil tankers were bombed in an attack the United States blamed on Irans Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), though officials in Tehran denied responsibility.

The attack led Gulf countries and Western allies led by the United States to form an international naval security task force, known as Task Force Sentinel, to deter harassment and seizures of maritime vessels in the Persian Gulf region.

Iran seized a South Korean tanker in the Persian Gulf in January, citing an environmental pollution violation. Observers suspected the seizure may have been related to Seouls freezing of some $7 billion in Iranian oil revenue after the Trump administration tightened sanctions on Iranian oil exports.

Last month Indonesia seized two tankers, one Iranian-owned and the other owned by a company in Shanghai, accusing them of transferring illegal oil between the ships. Indonesias coast guard denied the seizure was related to US sanctions.

With its economy suffering in recent years amid sanctions imposed by the Trump administration, Iran has sought to ship petroleum to Venezuela and Syria, two countries also under heavy US sanctions.

Last year, the United States worked with authorities in Cape Verde to seize Iranian-owned fuel onboard four tankers bound for Venezuela in what the US Justice Department said was the largest seizure of Iranian petroleum shipments to date. US federal prosecutors alleged the fuel was shipped on behalf of the IRGC, which the Trump administration designated a terrorist organization in 2019. The United States has seized some $7 million worth of Iranian assets in its crackdown on Tehran's attempts to evade US sanctions.

The United States has also put on a military show of force in the Persian Gulf region in recent months amid threats of revenge from Iranian leaders for the death of Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani in a US drone strike in January 2020. Iran has since conducted its own military exercises, including naval missile drills, in the Gulf of Oman.

On Monday, the commander of US military forces in the Middle East, Gen. Kenneth Frank McKenzie, signaled that Iran's activities remain the United States' greatest concern in the region. He also said Russia seeks to expand its influence in the Middle East via transactional relationships with regional governments.

The commander has previously described Russia's inroads in the Middle East as opportunistic, and suggested China may pose a greater long-term threat to US dominance in the region. Late last year, Russia held joint naval exercises with Egypt in the Black Sea for the first time.

In its final weeks, the Trump administration internally debated cutting off all US military aid to Egypt over Cairo's purchase of Russia's Su-35 fighter aircraft, but wound up deciding not to do so.

The US administration of President Joe Biden is seeking to reenter the 2015 nuclear agreement with Tehran, but Iranian leaders have said Washington must first lift sanctions. Russia has expressed support for Tehran's position.
Sally Dussin, who grew The Old Spaghetti Factory with her husband Guss from a single location in Portland to more than 40 locations across the country died of natural causes on Jan. 28. She was 92.

Sally was a grand Texas gem with a big heart who lived a big life with her loving husband Guss, the company said in a press release announcing her death. Together this devoted duo created The Old Spaghetti Factory and shared their passion for spaghetti, antiques, crystal light fixtures, rich jewel colored velvet and old trolleys with millions of guests across the U.S. and abroad.

She remained an active participant in day-to-day operations, marketing coordinator Kim Davidson told The News Tribune in an email, and was regularly in the office until the COVID-19 pandemic began last March.

Her passion was for the decor of the restaurants and she played a significant role in new openings and remodeling of existing locations, said Davidson. Sally remained passionate and found great joy in being in her restaurants.

The original Portland restaurant celebrated its 50th anniversary in January 2019, albeit in a new home along the Willamette River. It was a milestone Dussin saw without her husband, who died in 2004.

We were young and full of aspiration, Sally Farris Dussin, then 90, said in a release at the time. We trusted Guss instincts in the restaurant industry and believed in the simplicity of delicious, affordable, three-course meals.

23 The Old Spaghetti Factory

Guests are always welcomed with fresh-baked bread, and many order salads with the house creamy pesto dressing, a recipe dreamed up by an employee and, of course, spumoni ice cream: cherry, pistachio, chocolate.

Still headquartered in Oregon today, the company operates restaurants in 12 states, including five in Oregon.

In 1984, one opened in Hamburg, Germany, though it closed 10 years later. Late last year, the Nashville location, open for 40 years, was badly damaged in the Christmas Day bombing that affected dozens of downtown businesses and could take a year to rebuild.

Sally Farris Dussin relished the joy and purpose of creating and nurturing new restaurants, the company said, as well as her staff. She had a hug and a beautiful smile for everyone. She looked and found the good qualities in everyone and everything.

The original Old Spaghetti Factory opened on Jan. 10, 1969, in the historic three-story Carriage and Baggage building at Southwest Second Avenue and Pine Street. Guss Dussin and his brother-in-law Mike Poulos put their experience running restaurants like Virginia Cafe and Iron Horse into play.

If you couldnt score a table in the streetcar, you could sit in booths made out of recycled iron bed frames, an idea of Sally Dussin.

The first one was in the original restaurants, and its popularity makes them a fixture in all our restaurants, Chris Dussin told The Oregonian/OregonLive in 2019. Mom and dad had a deal: He took care of the food and kitchen side of the restaurant, and she handled the design.

The company remains family-owned. Dussin is survived by two children, Alexandra and Chris, six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

--Kristine Sherred/Tacoma News Tribune/Tribune News Service and staff reports


Mobile, AL -- (SBWIRE) -- 02/10/2021 -- Secret Scientist will be conducting interviews for all positions on Friday, February 12 from 3 pm to 7 pm and on Saturday, February 13 from 12 pm to 3 pm. Potential applicants are encouraged to dress the way they would for a day at work.



February 12 and February 13 will be the only days Secret Scientist will be holding interviews for individuals seeking to work at the Dothan store. Details on where applicants should go to apply will be shared on the official Facebook page soon: https://www.facebook.com/secretscientistclothing/.



About Secret Scientist Clothing

Launched in 2009, Secret Scientist Clothing is an urban streetwear brand based in Mobile, Alabama providing a range of products from t-shirts, hoodies, jackets, and footwear to accessories and more. The brand recognizes and embraces individuality while making fashion fun, accessible, and always trendy. For more information, please call 251-385-8344. Customers can also visit the store located in The Shoppes at Bel Air.

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.

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Robert Irwin has praised his resilient mum Terri for keeping their family zoo afloat during the coronavirus pandemic.

During an interview on Sunrise on Wednesday, the 17-year-old said he couldn't be prouder of how his mother handled the Covid crisis.

'I think for myself and for Bindi and Chandler and the entire Australia Zoo team, I think we all got through it stronger on the other side,' he said.

'We got through it stronger on the other side': Robert Irwin has praised his resilient mum Terri for keeping their family zoo afloat during the coronavirus pandemic

'And that was absolutely thanks to mum. She is the most incredible fearless leader who took us through this incredible difficult time,' he continued.

'We've come out so strong, everyone's been so supportive and the only reason that I think that we're still here and all of our conservation work can continue is because of mum... I think she's pretty amazing, she's a superwoman for sure.'

Australia Zoo's financial struggles during the Covid-19 pandemic will be documented on the new season of the family's reality show, Crikey! It's the Irwins.

Proud: 'I think she's pretty amazing, she's a superwoman for sure,' Robert gushed on Sunrise

Meanwhile, Robert's sister Bindi is counting down the weeks until she welcomes her first child with husband Chandler Powell.

Last week, the 22-year-old wildlife warrior shared a sweet tribute to Terri on Instagram.

She posted a photo of herself smiling alongside Terri, 56, as they sat by the fireplace with their dogs.

Family affair: Australia Zoo's financial struggles during the Covid-19 pandemic will be documented on the new season of the family's reality show, Crikey! It's the Irwins

'Always laughing with my beautiful mama. Her amazing sense of humour and kind heart make me smile every day,' she wrote in the caption.

'Thankful for moments like this,' Bindi added.

Earlier this month, Bindi revealed she'd started wearing her husband's Australia Zoo uniform because her bump no longer fits under her shirt.

The brunette, who is expecting a baby girl, shared a photo of herself showing off her button-up top, with Chandler's name embroidered above the pocket.

'Thankful for moments like this': Pregnant Bindi Irwin shared a tribute to mum Terri last week

'Reason 1 million I'm thankful for my husband. Borrowing Chandler's uniform because my khakis won't button over my belly,' she wrote.

On November 11, the conservationist revealed she was 20 weeks along in her pregnancy, meaning she is due to give birth in late March or early April.

The young couple were married on March 25 in a makeshift ceremony at Australia Zoo, just before the Covid-19 lockdown took effect.

Mumbai, Feb 10 : Actress Sonakshi Sinha on Wednesday extended support to the ongoing farmers' protest. Sonakshi posted a poem on Instagram, which she has recited and dedicated to the hands that feed us.

The Hindi poem is titled "Kyun" (Why) "Nazarein milake khud se poochho- kyun? A tribute to the hands that feed us... a beautiful poem written by @varadbhatnagar. Shot and conceptualized by @gursanjam.s.puri and narrated by me. #farmersprotest," the actress wrote on Instagram.

The Hindi poem "Kyun" tries to explore the reasons behind why farmers have left the fields and taken to the streets, and why the protesters are being tagged as rioters.

This comes a few days after the actress shared a note on her Instagram story that speaks about journalists being harassed, internet being banned and the protesters being vilified.
US President Joe Biden delivered his first foreign policy speech Feb. 4. His address worried Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for two reasons. The first was what Biden said, and the second was what Biden did not say.

Biden repeated in his speech the need for America to repair its alliances and engage again with the world. In an apparent reference to Europe, Biden said, "We must meet the new moment accelerating global challenges  from the pandemic to the climate crisis to nuclear proliferation  challenging the will only to be solved by nations working together and in common. We cant do it alone.  Americas alliances are our greatest asset, and leading with diplomacy means standing shoulder to shoulder with our allies and key partners once again."

Biden also named world leaders and friends of America he had already spoken with since taking office, including the leaders of Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, NATO, Japan, South Korea and Australia. Israel was not on that list. As of Feb. 10, Netanyahu is still waiting for a phone call from the White House. Clearly, for the new Biden administration, its principal interlocutors and allies for the coming years would be the Europeans, not Israel.

Another demonstration of the Biden administration rehabilitating American strategic alliance with Europe came on Feb. 5. Secretary of State Antony Blinken held a virtual conference with his British, French and German counterparts. The three European ministers welcomed Americas return to center stage in world affairs. The last time top foreign affairs officials from these four countries met was in April 2018. Blinkens Feb. 5 message was clear: Multilateralism is back. Netanyahu has been dreading that change of policy ever since former President Donald Trump lost the November elections. Israels prime minister knows he has few other world leaders to turn to.

This is especially pertinent regarding the six world powers that had negotiated the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)  the United States, Russia, China, France, the United Kingdom and Germany. Biden is now the driving force behind a possible revival of the nuclear deal, so Netanyahu cannot count on him. Over the years, Netanyahu had nurtured a special relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, but few in Jerusalem believe that Putin will save Israel from the agreement. On Feb. 8, Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi spoke with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, about Iran. He tweeted later, "Russia has an important role in the Middle East, particularly in preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons as well as its entrenchment in the region." Still, it is safe to assume that Lavrov made no promises to Ashkenazi. The same could be said about China. As for Europe  the United Kingdom included for that matter  it is not an alternative Netanyahu can rely on, and he has only himself to blame for that.

Eight years ago, before entering formal negotiations with Tehran, when talks were still informal, Paris featured strict positions vis-a-vis the Iranian nuclear program. In a 2013 visit in Israel, then-French President Francois Hollande pledged that France will not give in on the nuclear file, and warned against a threat to world peace and security. He told Netanyahu that he was a true friend of Israel.

Netanyahu praised Hollande for his position on Iran, but failed to follow up on this and did not establish close relations with the French leader. Israeli diplomats did their best to engage their French counterparts against the Iranian nuclear program, but they had little backing from the prime ministers office, where Hollande was not trusted. In 2015, it was already too late. Israel was left outside of the formal P5+1 talks, and had little to no influence on the final agreement.

Jerusalems ties with Paris under President Emmanuel Macron have been cool. The French president distanced himself from the Israel-Palestinian file, leaving this geopolitical arena to the Trump administration. Instead, he focused on Lebanon, the Gulf states and Iran. This suited Israel just fine. No one in Jerusalem was interested in a remake of the Paris peace conferences on the Middle East, and neither was Macron.

Clearly, the victory of Biden offers the European Union and France in particular a significant tailwind in relaunching dialogue with Iran. Several reports claim that the Europeans have engaged with senior Democratic officials already during the election campaign, to inspect together possibilities for renewing dialogue with Iran.

On Feb. 4, Macron took another step in advancing the reopening of negotiations with Tehran. He offered to mediate talks between the United States and Iran in order to revive the 2015 JCPOA agreement. Addressing the Atlantic Council, Macron said, We do need to finalize, indeed, a new negotiation with Iran.  I will do whatever I can to support any initiative from the US side to reengage in a demanding dialogue, and I will  try to be an honest broker and a committed broker in this dialogue.

But nonsentimental Macron said also another thing, which surprised Jerusalem. We have to find a way to involve in these discussions Saudi Arabia and Israel because they are some of the key partners of the region directly interested by the outcomes with our other friends of the region. This was in fact what Jerusalem has been trying to get from Washington in the past few weeks  a promise to keep Israel "inside the room" of the negotiations. Ironically, it was the leader of France, not the United States, who put this request on the table. A lesson for Jerusalem about realpolitik, and perhaps even a diplomatic opportunity to be seized.
PM Modi accuses 'Andolanjeevis' of hijacking farmers protests

India

oi-Briti Roy Barman

New Delhi, Feb 10: Prime Minister Narendra Modi while replying to the Motion of Thanks on the President's address in Lok Sabha on Wednesday has called out "andolanjeevis" for "hijacking" the farmers' protest.

Modi said he considered the farmers' protest to be "pavitra (pure)".

"I consider the Kisan Andolan to be Pavitra. But, when Andolanjeevis hijack Pavitra Andolans, showcase photos of those jailed for serious offences, does it serve any purpose? Not allowing toll plazas to work, destroying telecom towers- does it serve a Pavitra Andolan."

The PM urged the country to stay wary of "andolanjeevis".

Modi said the central government and the Parliament have great respect for the farmers who are voicing their views on the three farm bills and that is why top most ministers have been talking to them. He again allayed apprehensions on the farm laws, saying neither any agriculture 'mandi' (market) has shut down after the three laws were enacted nor has the MSP stopped, rather the MSP has only increased which no one can deny.

As the Congress party made an uproar and staged a walk out during the speech, the Prime Minister also took a sharp dig at the Congress and said its Rajya Sabha and Lok Sabha units move in opposite directions.

He asserted that such a "divided" and "confused" party can neither do any good for itself nor can it think of any solutions for the country's problems.

Earlier PM Modi said while replying to The Motion of Thanks on President's address in the Rajya Sabha, "We are well aware of some terms like 'shram jeevi' and 'buddhi jeevi'. But I am seeing that for some time a new entity has come up in this country- andolan jeevi. This community can be spotted wherever there is a protest, be it agitation by lawyers, students, or labourers, sometimes at the forefront and sometimes from behind. They cannot live without protests. We have to identify such people and protect the nation from them. They are parasites."

Slamming the PM over his andolanjeevi remark, several opposition leaders including P Chidambaram and Rahul Gandhi earlier on Wednesday have reacted.
The contract, worth about $57 million, includes the crushing circuit associated with the plant and will be awarded as a guaranteed maximum price contract.

Contract documentation is being finalised and is expected to be executed before the end of February 2021

( ) (FRA:RKN) has issued a Letter of Intent for the award of engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) works for the processing facility at the Norseman Gold Project to GR Engineering Services ( ).

The contract, worth about $57 million, includes the crushing circuit associated with the plant and will be awarded as a guaranteed maximum price contract.

Detailed engineering works will begin immediately and orders will be placed for long-lead items including the 3.3MW ball mill.

Contract documentation is being finalised and is expected to be executed before the end of February 2021.

Quality of the project

Pantoro managing director Paul Cmrlec said: The competitive tender process drew a number of quality submissions reflecting the quality of the project and of the preparatory work completed as part of the DFS.

"We are pleased that GR Engineering Services (GRES) will undertake work with their proven track record in new processing plant builds in recent years.

"GRES has been the dominant supplier of new processing plant builds in Western Australia in recent times, and we look forward to drawing on their experience in construction of the plant at Norseman.

Demolition works for existing plant

The definitive feasibility study (DFS) contemplated a build-own-operate-transfer (BOOT) for the crusher, with the transfer planned in year three.

This upfront purchase is superior on an NPV basis relative to the BOOT arrangement.

Separately, demolition works for the existing plant on site have been awarded with the commencement of site works planned for mid-February.

Norseman Gold Project

Pantoro acquired 50% of the Norseman Gold Project in 2019, becoming the manager of the unincorporated joint venture, responsible for defining and implementing the exploration and development work programs, and the day-to-day management.

Norseman Project in the Eastern Goldfields of WA, at the southern end of the highly productive Norseman-Wiluna greenstone belt, is about 725 kilometres east of Perth, 200 kilometres south of Kalgoorlie and 200 kilometres north of Esperance.

The current mineral resource is 4.2 million ounces of gold with an ore reserve of 602,000 ounces.

Historically, the Norseman Gold Project areas have produced over 5.5 million ounces of gold since operations began in 1935, and is one of, if not the highest grade fields within the Yilgarn Craton.
To provide access to drug testing, Thermo Fisher and Mindray have entered into an agreement

Thermo Fisher Scientific has announced a partnership with Mindray to make available to customers two clinical chemistry analysers in the US and Canada for drug screening in clinical and drug court laboratories.

Stefan Wolf, President, Clinical Diagnostics Business, Thermo Fisher Scientific said, "Through this exclusive partnership with Mindray we are able to address the needs of our customers in commercial labs, hospitals and the criminal justice field. Now we can better cater to the needs of those laboratories seeking to expand or increase their testing volumes, and laboratories working to consolidate and centralise their testing sites with these two medium- to high-throughput instruments."

To provide access to drug testing, Thermo Fisher and Mindray have entered into an agreement to offer the FDA-cleared and Health Canadaapproved BS-480 (400 tests/hour) and BA-800M (800 tests/hour) analysers to toxicology labs. Thermo Fisher will also provide an extensive menu of wet labvalidated Thermo Scientific DRI and CEDIA drugs of abuse immunoassay reagents with the instruments to enable the screening of urine samples for the presence of a given drug or a class of drugs.

Taken together, the world-class DRI and CEDIA drugs of abuse immunoassay reagents, validated on Mindray's instruments, bring a combination of performance and reliability from a single source in a cost-effective, plug-and-play solution. The solution streamlines the drug screening workflow and automates it to reduce risk of human error. The instruments also come with onboard software that has many advanced features, including sample/reagent probe collision protection, sample aggregate detection and a five-minute daily push-button self-service maintenance programme.

Thermo Fisher began distributing, installing, training and servicing Mindray BS-480 and BA-800M instruments in the US and Canada last month.

BAY CITY, MI - Changes could be coming to Bay City State Park if it is selected as a part of the states public land strategy.

The Bay County Board of Commissioners made an official recommendation on Tuesday, Feb. 9 to the Michigan Department of Natural Resources (DNR) to consider the Bay City State Park in Bangor Township as a possible contender for a new special designation for urban outdoor recreation.

Bay County environmental affairs & community development director Laura Ogar explained that the DNR is currently taking public comment on its public land strategy for 2021 - 2026, with one of the goals listed in its plan is the establishment of a signature park. This designation allows a park to to be recognized for additional investments by the DNR, said Ogar.

The DNRs public land strategy describes the goal as follows, Work with partners to establish one new signature park in a core urban area as a tool for urban revitalization, thus establishing a prototype model of collaboration that can be used in other cities.

Ogar said that the DNRs long-term strategy and plan is to eventually pick five parks later on to receive the designation throughout the state.

Whether its their first one or one of the upcoming signature parks, it would be a real unique opportunity in the state of Michigan for outdoor recreation, Ogar said.

The designation could mean things like alternative accommodations such as cabins and yurts, alternative outdoor recreational amenities and outdoor concessions as possibilities for the selected park, said Ogar.

Ogar said that there are two factors that help to give Bay City a boost for consideration.

The Bay City State Park is actually a very good candidate for this because we do have a history of a lot of community partnerships with the DNR for improvements out at that state park, she said.

Ogar added that Bay County has a high participation rate in the license plate-based recreational passport program and that the state has taken notice of the positive trend.

The Bay City States Park amped up beach wellness program helped to spur on the idea of such investments from the DNR, said Ogar.

The work that has gone on through beach wellness at the Bay City State Park is really what kicked off early on the idea of the DNR to look at community investments, she said. Because of the work from beach wellness, the grooming , the improvements, the mobi-mats out there - the DNR has recognized that they can get further ahead in some of these state parks when they have the community support and the community support like you have.

While on the topic of possible improvements to the park, County Commissioner Ernie Krygier stated during the meeting that he would like to see some type of fishing pier going out into the Saginaw Bay to increase access to the water.

I would like to see something put together that would support further development and looking into a possible pier, seeing that we wouldnt use any general fund dollars but utilize the moneys that have already been put out there to help with natural resources, he said. I think that would be a huge plus for us to be able to have that additional access.

Krygier said that a 360 feet parcel of additional land that was purchased by the old Bay City Water Works building on State Park Drive would be a perfect spot in the park for such an access point.

No motions were made aside the recommendation for consideration by the board regarding the Bay City State Park.

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Audi expects the U.S. to be the largest market for its new electric four-door coupe, one of the most powerful cars Volkswagen AGs premium brand has ever built. It offers slightly less-blazing acceleration than Tesla Inc.s latest flagship sedan, the Plaid version of the Model S, which Elon Musk has promoted to those seeking speed beyond ludicrous" mode.

The car is predestined for the U.S. market," Audis global sales chief Hildegard Wortmann told reporters in a webcast. She expects North America to account for a sales share of 50% plus," followed by Europe and Asian markets including China, South Korea and Japan.

Flanking the e-tron SUV with a niche sportscar like the GT is intended to showcase Audis latest design and technology rather than boosting EV volumes, she said. Annual deliveries of the GT will probably be just below 10,000 cars. Audi will introduce its next high-volume EVa compact crossover dubbed Q4 e-tronlater this year.

In a follow-up interview, Wortmann clarifies the point is more about communicating a progressive mindset than pure performance: Its that you want to do something good, you want to contribute to the solution. With the e-tron GT our customers can see this holistic picture of what the Audi brand stands for."

Reworked Strategy

Volkswagen has put Audi at the center of its reworked strategy to take on Tesla under the leadership of Markus Duesmann, who joined from German rival BMW AG just over a year ago. The e-tron GT is based on the underpinnings of sister brand Porsches Taycan model and flanks the e-tron SUV and Sportback that outsold Tesla in Norway last year before the Scandinavian country rose to Super Bowl fame over its crave for battery-powered vehicles.

After a bumpy start, VW group is ramping up output of purely battery-powered cars this year with new models including the VW ID.4 and more spacious version of the Taycan. The e-tron GT is manufactured at an Audi site in Germany that specializes in exclusive, niche cars alongside the brands combustion-era hero, the R8 roadster, which faces an uncertain future as Duesmann has vowed to accelerate the shift toward electric vehicles.

Sculpted Design

Featuring a fresh iteration of Audis distinctive front grille, accentuated rear fenders, and more sculptured design compared to the R8 or other more clean-cut sportscars, the e-tron GT will hit showrooms this spring, with prices in Germany starting at 99,800 ($121,000). Its LG Chem Ltd.-supplied batteries will offer up to 383 kilometers (238 miles) of range, according to unofficial EPA estimates.

A sportier RS version commands at least 138,200, a price tag similar to the Model S Plaid, touted by Tesla as the fastest-accelerating car in the world. Audi has said the RS offers 637 horsepower with overboost and can accelerate from zero to 100 kilometers per hour in 3.3 seconds, compared to the 2.1 seconds claimed for the Plaid. Top speed is 250 km/hr (155 mph).

The e-tron GTs acceleration was still fast enough to make VW Chief Executive Officer Herbert Diess smile and giggle during a test drive he promoted on LinkedIn last week, where he praised features including 800-volt fast charging and optional vegan interior that uses recycled materials rather than leather. He predicted the car will take many customers away from the combustion world forever."

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In a typical year, more than 1,600 trials reach the Harris County court system, where a jury of ones peers decides guilt or innocence for a crime or whether a person or business is financially responsible for an injury.

But 2020 was no typical year. From COVID-19s local onset in March 2020 to mid-January, the county held a fraction of those cases  at least 36 civil jury trials and 16 criminal jury trials, according to state data and the Harris County District Clerks Office.

The pace isnt expected to pick up as the county continues operating on a COVID plan that some criminal justice officials fear does little to lower caseloads yet defense attorneys say endangers the public. Judges insist the proceedings are safe, necessary and ultimately, allowed by the state. Many defense attorneys cite safety risks and constitutional concerns on behalf of their defendants. Meanwhile, significant progress is far off until vaccinations are more widely available, court officials say.

In a criminal justice system designed on the promise a speedy trial, COVID has brought it to a near-grinding halt and most defendants seeking trial as well as families of crime victims are caught in the gears.

Steve Gonzales, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer

Until the vast majority of our population is vaccinated, I dont see really large volumes being moved, said Jim Bethke, director of the countys Justice Administration Department. We can have a valve to help move some of the cases, but I dont see real meaningful relief.

The lack of trials illustrates one way that coronavirus-prompted changes at the courthouse have further burdened an already clogged system, which suffered from major backlogs after Hurricane Harvey shut down the courthouse in 2017. While some criminal justice leaders cite early success contracting with Reliant Park for social distanced jury selection at NRG Arena, even that location comes with a hitch  any increase in trials stalled last week , when the arena will no longer be available because of the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeos student competitions.

County officials shuttered the criminal and civil courthouses after the virus local outbreak in March and only resumed trials officially after Oct. 1 following a series of emergency orders by the Supreme Court of Texas, although some trials occurred with special permission before then. Local judges have agreed on guidelines to safely operate their courts, including that the administrative district judge approves every jury trial and consults on each with the local health authority.

Defense attorneys organizations have fought the judges from the start. They argue that social distancing procedures make it difficult to read prospective jurors faces  deemed important because facial expressions can betray true feelings  and that returning to the courtroom isnt safe for them or their clients.

And because of lower vaccination rates in minority communities, many attorneys worry that those groups would show up for jury service in smaller numbers, not giving defendants a true jury of their peers.

Harris County judges who push forward with trials right now over the objections of the parties, as well as any county official who approves them, need to take a long hard look in the mirror, said Grant Scheiner, president of the Texas Criminal Defense Lawyers Association. Theres no reason why court cases cant wait just several more months during a time of emergency.

Steve Gonzales, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer

Harris County Chief Public Defender Alex Bunin agreed that safety concerns have dampened defense attorneys desire to conduct trials.

I certainly am not advising clients to go forward, but we cant rule it out either, he said. If it was in the clients interest to go forward and they wanted to, we would do that.

Judge Robert Schaffer, who oversees his own civil court as well as the administrative functions of the civil and criminal district courts, said the implementation of a jury plan at least gets cases moving. Without that, dockets would be nearly stagnant, he said.

Jury trials arent always the best benchmark for how swiftly judges move through their caseloads, but experts and judges say theyre still indicative: Without the threat of trial, defendants usually dont receive good plea offers and all parties are less compelled to move cases forward.

Very few cases actually go to trial - in 2018 and 2019, between 1 and 3 percent of state criminal cases saw a jury, according to the Texas Office of Court Administration.

I completely understand the issues that the criminal defense bar raises, but were following the orders that were getting from Austin, Schaffer said, referencing the Supreme Court of Texas orders. We have had the Harris County Public Health review our plan and they have neither suggested, implied or recommended that we not go forward with jury trials.

The public health organization doesnt actually have a complete say in trial oversight, said Harris County Public Health spokeswoman Elizabeth Perez. But the judges have listened to her offices suggestions.

As a separate branch of government, our authority is limited when it comes to jurisdiction over trials, Perez said. However, over the past year weve worked very closely with court officials to make sure they have all the health guidance they need from us to make informed decisions about how to protect residents from COVID-19. Theyve taken much of that advice to heart, including protocols theyve implemented for their jury selection process.

Trial by Zoom

Harris County is the only urban county in Texas holding jury trials at all, according to the Texas Office of Court Administration. Less than 100 counties out of the total 254 have even created and submitted plans for holding jury trials, and many of them arent being used.

Texas tries 186 cases every week in a usual year, and since March, the state hasnt tried that many yet, said David Slayton, administrative director of the Texas Office of Court administration.

The resulting backlog likely means criminal cases will get priority for juries in most Texas courts, leaving civil courts more likely to suffer.

If its a civil case or a family case or some other small claims eviction traffic, any of those that need to occur, theyre going to be behind criminal cases, Slayton said. That could be frankly years before we get to those.

Steve Gonzales, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer

That might push civil courts to embrace Zoom trials - an idea that criminal judges have largely rejected over constitutional concerns for defendants. Through mid-January, no trials in Harris County had been held exclusively over Zoom, but one judge last week allowed a defendant to appear by the video conferencing platform in a civil trial involving former Astros pitcher Roger Clemens son.

In criminal cases, the district attorneys office voiced a need to increase jury proceedings with the help of technology, however.

Jury trials are the heart of the justice system. Crime victims should have their day in court as should persons charged with crimes, Harris County District Attorneys Office spokesman Dane Schiller said. These are challenging times, first with delays caused by Hurricane Harvey and now COVID-19, and we strongly support embracing technology for courtrooms to be used as efficiently and safely as possible.

Access at NRG

The year-to-year change in trials is stark. In 2019, the Harris County district clerks office sent 1,617 panels, or groups of prospective jurors, to jury selection. Since jury trials began on a limited basis in July, the district clerks office sent 77 panels to jury selection, according to the district clerks office. Not all of those juries were actually seated because of case continuances or last-minute pleas.

Many more cases remain on the books: The backlog on felony cases sits at more than 42,000, Bethke said. Misdemeanor backlogs top out over 37,698, County Courts-at-Law Administrative Judge Sedrick Walker said.

Clearance rates - cases disposed divided by cases filed - dropped to 53.5 percent in the felony courts in 2020, according to court administrators. To even begin lowering backlogs of cases from previous years, clearance rates need to be at 100 percent.

At NRG, officials can convene four panels a day - a large number that still doesnt make a dent with the dozens of trial courts in Harris County, Walker said.

Its really comes down to, how much space over at NRG do we have access to? said Walker, who oversees the misdemeanor courts. Obviously some district courts and some misdemeanor courts havent requested as many trials as others have. I do think judges are working on getting cases set.

Schaffer said judges requested more jury panels in January than they have since the start of the pandemic. But even then, not every slot at NRG gets used.

Just by the virtue of fact that jury trials are now available, weve seen a lot of trials settled, Harris County District Clerk Marilyn Burgess said.

Risk vs. possible reward

Trials also arent occurring at full capacity because defendants dont always want their day in court during a pandemic.

Even for higher-profile murder cases where defendants have been waiting years for justice, the risk isnt worth the possible reward. Antonio Armstrong, Jr., who was 16 when police alleged he shot his mother and father to death at his Bellaire-area home, has a jury re-trial date in April that probably cant happen, defense attorney Rick DeToto said. Armstrong has been on bond for almost four years.

Because many in the public know about the case after a jury deadlocked and called a mistrial in 2019, possibly 300 potential jurors would need to be called the second time around  a real difficulty during a public health crisis, he said. DeToto also worried about the cross-section of jurors that would appear.

Like the public defenders office, DeToto is helping his other clients get to trial if thats what they want. But he added another common viewpoint among defense lawyers, that people on bond are often viewed as the lowest priority for trials as the Harris County Jail population climbs to dangerous levels.

I think the courts are doing their best to balance the right to a jury trial versus getting Covid, DeToto said. I understand what theyre trying to balance, but I think its dangerous.

Steve Gonzales, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer

Some people might be otherwise inclined to go before a jury. Aside from those who want to get out of jail, people with bond requirements could be hurting financially from taking days off work to go to court, or paying for ignition interlock devices for DWI cases, said Whitney Kubik, associate professor at the Center for Criminal Justice at Thurgood Marshall School of Laws Earl Carl Institute.

Its really a catch 22 for the defendant, Kubik said.

Jennifer Laurin, professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law, said widespread case dismissals would likely have to occur at some point to lower the jail population and grant reprieve for people who are being denied the right to a speedy trial. Thats a traditionally difficult violation to prove, and mass dismissals likely would have occurred by now, she said.

From the standpoint of conducting jury trials in a prudent manner with respect to health and safety, I dont see it happening at the volume that our massive criminal legal system needs to have it happening at, Laurin said.

That dilemma has pushed Texas court administrators to try cases where they can.

We want to make sure were protecting the public, Slayton said. But at the same time, as soon as we can and as much as we can, we need to be trying jury cases.

samantha.ketterer@chron.com

Mr Lawan made the appeal on Wednesday during plenary following a protest on the floor by the senator representing FCT, Philip Aduda.

The President of the Senate, Ahmad Lawan, has appealed to President Muhammadu Buhari to forward the nomination of an indigene from the Federal Capital Territory as a non-career ambassador to the upper chamber for screening and confirmation.

Mr Lawan made the appeal on Wednesday during plenary following a protest on the floor by the senator representing FCT, Philip Aduda, over the continuous exclusion of a nominee from the FCT in previous nominations forwarded by President Buhari.

Rising under Order 43 of the Senate Standing Rules, Mr Aduda said, "Mr. President, Distinguished Colleagues, I did yesterday raise some issues with you, Your Excellency, about the issue of the appointment of ambassadors.

"Your Excellency, I've consistently mentioned that before now we had a non-career ambassador for the FCT.

"But when the first list came, the FCT was omitted. The second list came, the FCT was omitted; and then we have another opportunity where the FCT is supposed to be represented but it has still been omitted.

"Your Excellency, this gives us worry in the FCT, because it is showing that maybe it is Federal Character, or something is wrong somewhere.

"Mr President, we know that the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria has the power to hire and fire, but Mr President, we urge you as our leader and Speaker of the people of the FCT, and indeed, the President, who incidentally by the Constitution - Section 299 - happens to be the Governor of the FCT, that in making nominations, he should look at us and please grant us our heart desire which is to have a non-career ambassador for the FCT.

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"Indeed, the opportunity has come again, when some ambassadorial nominees have been submitted, and the committee will be doing its work very soon.

"We want to crave the indulgence of this Senate, and it is a constitutional matter. Mr President, my Distinguished Colleagues, here I come again today with the hope that we will get support from our State House of Assembly, which is the National Assembly, and indeed the Senate with you as Chairman, to intervene in this matter and ensure that the people of the FCT have a non-career ambassador."

In his response, the Senate President, Ahmad Lawan, appealed to President Buhari to send in a nomination for the FCT in the fifth non-career ambassadors list to be forwarded to the National Assembly for screening and confirmation.

Mr Lawan said, "As speaker of the FCT House of Assembly and as members of the FCT House of Assembly, we are appealing to the Executive to send the nomination of a non-career ambassadorial nominee for the FCT in the fifth and final phase."

Signed:

Ezrel TABIOWO, MBSC, Fsca

Special Assistant (Press)

to President of the Senate
Republicans have warmed to paid leave over the years, but the proposals clash with what Gillibrand has offered. She believes her plan is the best one because it doesn't affect other benefits, such as Social Security.

Now, though, Democrats control the House and Senate. President Joe Biden supports the creation of a national paid leave program. Vice President Kamala Harris, who served with Gillibrand in the Senate, was a cosponsor of the FAMILY Act.

During a videoconference call announcing the bill's reintroduction last week, Gillibrand noted that her plan also has the support of Senate Democratic leadership, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a fellow New Yorker. The bill has 35 cosponsors in the Senate and 197 in the House.

"I see this as a unique moment in time where all the work that (DeLauro) and I and every advocate on this call have put in over the last seven years," Gillibrand said. "Not only is paid leave understood, it is something supported by a majority of Americans, Democrats and Republicans."

DeLauro agreed with Gillibrand that it's a great moment for the paid leave legislation. On the day of the news conference, DeLauro was among a group of House Democrats who met with Biden and Harris. She used her time to discuss the paid leave legislation.
New York, Feb 10 : After a day of tearful arguments and harrowing videos, Democrats have managed to pry only one more Republican Senator to their side as the second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump started and they were still 11 votes short of the number needed to convict him.

For all the drama on Tuesday, with more to come in the next two days as the Democratic prosecutors continue presenting their case, it still seemed likely that they will not have the 67 votes to convict Trump on the charge of inciting an insurrection making the trial a spectacle rather than a vehicle of punishment.

The vote on the constitutionality of the impeachment trial was 56-44 in the 100-member Senate, with six Republicans joining the 50 Democrats to vote for it.

The other 44 Republicans closed ranks to oppose the preliminary measure required for the trial to proceed.

In an earlier vote on the same issue on January 26, only five Republicans had gone over to the other side and on Tuesday they were joined by one more, Bill Cassidy.

He attributed his change of heart to the "terrible job" done by Trump's lawyers.

The Democrats were doing a "great job" and as "an impartial juror, I'm going to vote for the side that did the good job", he said.

Even Trump's lead lawyer Bruce Castor conceded during his argument that the prosecution had performed well.

Under the US political system, the House of Representatives frames charges against the President or other officials and sends the chargesheet to the Senate for a judicial-style trial with the senators acting as jurors.

A two-thirds majority of Senators, which is 67, has to vote to convict.

In February 2020, Trump was impeached for the first time on charges of abuse of authority and impeding the work of Congress. But he was acquitted by the Senate as Democrats could not muster the two-thirds majority.

The first day of arguments in the second impeachment on Tuesday was supposed to have been filled with dry legal arguments on the constitutionality of impeaching Trump, who was already out of office, but the Democratic Party prosecutors brought in drama with videos of the deadly January 6 Capitol riots and also one shocking clip of a police officer firing into the mob killing a woman protester.

Lead prosecutor Jamie Raskin wiped his eyes and appeared to suppress a sob as he narrated how his daughter, who had come to the Capitol that day said she would never want to return there.

Raskin even brought up Warren Hastings, the colonial Governor-General of India, who was impeached by the House of Commons in Britain and tried by the House of Lords years after he had left office to buttress his case that Trump can be impeached even though he was no longer President.

Trump's defence, and most Republican lawmakers, contended by a narrow reading of the Constitution that only a sitting President could be impeached because the penalty for conviction was removal from office.

The Democrats who cited the other penalty of being barred from future office, which could be imposed on Trump, prevailed in the voting.

Over the next two days, the Democrats will make their case for convicting Trump because they say he incited the mob attack on the Capitolwhile Congress was in the process of confirming the Electoral College votes that elected Joe Biden as President and Kamala Harris as Vice President.

They will be followed by Trump's lawyers who will also have 16 hours over two days to present their defence.

After both sides make their concluding statements, the Senate will vote early next week whether to convict Trump.

The leaderships of both parties agreed on having a short trial so that they can get on with the work of confirming key nominees for the Biden administration and proceeding with the President's agenda, especially on Covid-19 relief, and Republicans to put the Trump episode behind them.

While the prosecutors showed action-filled videos of the attacks to make the Senators relive the moments of terror, Trump's lawyers countered with clips of various Democrats calling for his impeachment right from the start of his term.

One of them had Democratic Representative Rashida Tlaib calling Trump a "m**********r", with the obscenity bleeped out.

Several Republican Senators complained about the performance of Trump's lawyers.

Senator Ted Cruz told reporters: "I don't think the lawyers did the most effective job." But that was also of Trump's making. His original set of lawyers, who had agreed to take on his case after several others had turned him down, dropped out about 10 days ago.

According to media reports it was because of differences over how to make the defence arguments and Trump interfering with their briefs.

That left little time for his current defence team to prepare their case.

They and Trump count on the continuing staunch support of his base to keep enough of the Republican senators in line to deny the votes needed to convict.

(Arul Louis can be reached at arul.l@ians.in and followed on Twitter at @arulouis)

-- Except for the title, this story has not been edited by Prokerala team and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed
February 9, 2021

A recent study led by Idaho State University faculty members Elizabeth Schniedewind and Ryan Lindsay, along with Steven Snow from the Idaho Council for Deaf and Hard of Hearing, found that deaf patients often face discrimination in access to health care.

This cross-sectional study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Network Open Forum, looked at eight simulated patients, four hearing and four deaf. Each simulated patient called clinics in Idaho to request an appointment. Those who could hear were nearly two times more likely to secure an appointment than the simulated deaf patients.

Deaf patients were significantly less likely to be accepted as new patients, Schniedewind said. Some deaf patients who were given an appointment were later told they could not be accepted, mostly because they asked for a sign language interpreter.

The study has some initial data that suggests that some barriers that exist for deaf patients arent caused by the care providers.

Training is needed for front-line staff, Schniedewind said. Recognizing that clinic staff make a huge difference in patient experience is one great take-away from our study that can benefit all health care providers. It is worth investing in front-line staff because they play an important part in ensuring that equitable access to care exists.

Schniedewind hopes that their study can help address the health care disparities that deaf patients experience.

I would hope deaf people would be allowed to receive services from the interpreter who is most qualified to provide services for them, Schniedewind said. I hope that deaf people will receive health care services that respect their dignity and autonomy.

To view the full article, visit https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2775364.
The vaccination drive in India commenced on January 16. (AP)

India said on Tuesday said it had no concerns over the efficacy of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine despite South Africa putting it on hold, and ordered 10 million more doses of the shot for its own huge immunisation campaign.

South Africa delayed use of the vaccine after researchers found it offered minimal protection against mild-to-moderate COVID-19 disease caused by the country's dominant coronavirus variant.

India, with the highest number of infections after the United States, has yet to detect the South African variant and will continue to use the vaccine in an inoculation drive that has covered 6.3 million front-line workers since January 16.

"Our vaccination programme is robust and valid, and I assure you that we are going ahead with it, not worried at the moment," Vinod Kumar Paul, a top Indian vaccine official, told a news conference.

"We will intensify our surveillance and we will be watching other developments in due course."

COVID-19 Vaccine Frequently Asked Questions View more How does a vaccine work? A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine. How many types of vaccines are there? There are broadly four types of vaccine  one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine. What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind? Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time. View more Show

Follow our LIVE blog for latest updates of the novel coronavirus pandemic

The Serum Institute of India (SII), the world's biggest vaccine maker, has licenced the vaccine from AstraZeneca and Oxford University and markets it as COVISHIELD for low-and middle-income countries.

India has ordered 10 million more doses of COVISHIELD on top of 11 million supplied earlier, an SII spokesman told Reuters on Tuesday. SII has agreed to sell at least 100 million doses to the government at a discounted price of 200 rupees ($2.74) each, though the government says firm orders will be staggered based on its needs, and also on vaccine shelf-life.

COVISHIELD is about 72 percent effective, based on late-stage trials done abroad, India's drug regulator says.

The country is also using the COVAXIN shot developed at home by Bharat Biotech with the state-run Indian Council of Medical Research. Bharat Biotech has supplied 5.5 million doses to the government and is selling 4.5 million more, a company spokeswoman told Reuters.

The government wants to cover 300 million people by August, reaching the elderly and those with existing conditions by March.

India has reported 10.85 million infections and more than 155,000 deaths - though cases have fallen sharply since September.

MAKE IN INDIA

Paul said Johnson & Johnson could manufacture its shot in India. He also said many more vaccines, including Russia's Sputnik V, Cadila Healthcare's ZyCov-D and a Novavax product, were in the queue.

"India is fortunate to have two great made-in-India vaccines, and as many as six-seven vaccines in the pipeline and perhaps many more," he said, days after Pfizer Inc pulled an application seeking emergency-use authorisation in the country.

The U.S. company had declined to immediately do a small local safety study for its shot and produce it in India, unlike the other vaccine developers.

New Delhi, meanwhile, is aggressively pushing the SII and Bharat Biotech vaccines abroad as part of a diplomatic campaign to recoup ground lost to China.

Bharat Biotech told Reuters it could export its vaccine to Brazil and the United Arab Emirates this week, a major success for the shot approved at home for emergency use without efficacy data from a late-stage trial.

The company expects results from an ongoing trial involving 25,800 participants in India only by March, though the country's drug regulator has called the vaccine safe and effective amid criticism from doctors and health experts. A study on 26 participants has found COVAXIN effective against the UK strain of the coronavirus.

Bharat Biotech has also applied to conduct a Phase III trial for COVAXIN in Brazil, which plans to import 8 million doses in February and another 12 million in March.

Bharat Biotech has also sought emergency use authorisation in the Philippines.

Follow our full coverage of the coronavirus pandemic here
JERSEYVILLE  A Florissant, Missouri, man faces felony charges after being accused of stealing a handgun from a sporting goods store.

Harold Pierce Jennings, 18, of Florissant was charged Feb. 4 with possession of stolen firearm and retail theft, both felonies.
On the last day of 2020 a Greek oil tanker at anchor off Iraq was found to have an Iranian limpet mine attached. The mine was apparently attached to the hull by a diver dropped off at night from one of the armed Iranian speedboats that move through the area at all hours. Another Iranian speedboat then came along and picked up the diver. Iran has been using these tactics since 2019 when they were caught using limpet mines and other weapons against tankers entering the Persian Gulf. In one case the Iranians were caught on a video placing and removing the limpet mines on tanker hulls. In mid-2019 the U.S. provided surveillance video of Iranians in a small boat removing a limpet mine that did not go off. The video was taken by an American MH-60R surveillance helicopter patrolling the Gulf of Oman when a small boat was spotted, apparently Iranian and headed towards an anchored tanker. The helicopter stayed with the small boat and eventually got the video of the Iranians removing a limpet mine. At one point an Iranian spotted, or suspected, the distant helicopter overhead and fired a portable anti-aircraft missile at it, which missed. MH-60Rs are equipped to deal with such missiles.

These mines use magnets to remain on the hull and are detonated by timer or remote control. Iran denies they are using these mines but the video and past performance say otherwise. Iran often stages attacks on shipping using naval mines or remotely controlled speedboats loaded with explosives, Iran does this because they can deny responsibility and avoid triggering a destructive response.

The late 2020 another limpet mine was discovered by the security contractors on the ship. An Iraqi EOD (Explosives Ordnance Disposal) team was brought in and within 24 hours the mine was disabled and removed. Apparently, this prompt action in detecting and deactivating the mine prevented Iran from carrying out another anonymous attack on shipping in the Persian Gulf and Red Sea. The disabled mine was scrutinized to determine where it came from. Iran does manufacture limpet mines, something that was made public in 2015 when a navy media event displayed the many naval weapons manufactured in Iran. One of these was a 42 kg (92 pound) limpet mine, described by Iranian media as a sticking mine. Another Iranian news item in 2020 showed naval personnel carrying out a variety of chores, including placing a limpet mine on the hull of a ship. Iran has apparently manufactured smaller, and lighter, limpet mines that can be more easily transported and emplaced by speedboat crews or divers using underwater flotation devices to carry the limpet mines. The flotation devices are uninflated after use and taken away by the divers.

So far, all these Persian Gulf, Red Sea and Gulf of Oman incidents have been traced back to Iran, which denies any involvement. This sort of it wasnt me terrorism is a favorite tactic of Iran and it keeps getting used because the Iranians know how to back off (stop the mining) if the public outroar becomes too intense. Once the outrage has passed from the headlines, Iran will resume the unattributable attacks. Over the last decade several investigation teams, including one from the UN, have examined the evidence and concluded that Iran was the source of the weapons. Iran has tried to make that more difficult by using unmarked components. This does not work because the source of such parts can, and has been, traced back to Iran.

Iran does make some threats openly, but usually the kind that sound scary but Iran rarely follows through. For example, after the Americans revived their sanctions in 2017, Iran threatened to close the Straits of Hormuz or, at the very least, assert control over the Straits. Iran sometimes runs into problems while publicizing such threats. For example, by early 2018 the United States had moved military forces into the Gulf region to deal with any Iranian efforts to close the Straits. This effort gained added impact because even China is opposed to Iranian threats to close the straits. The U.S. also noted that its current military posture in the Gulf had put an end to Iranian harassment of U.S. warships. There had been 22 of those incidents in 2015, 36 in 2016 but only 14 in 2017, none in 2018 and in 2019 there have been attacks (as with the limpet mines) against tankers but nothing Iran will take credit for.

In 2019 the Iranian use of limpet mines and other weapons against tankers entering the Persian Gulf has led to a sharp increase in demand for the armed guards normally employed by large ships passing close to pirate-infested Somali waters. As a result of this some Iranians were caught on camera placing and removing limpet mines to the sides of tankers. These mines use magnets to remain on the hull and are detonated by a timer or remote control. The armed guards hired were there to scan for such mines, to stand watch at night and fire on any small boats that approach a tanker at night. Iran has plenty of experienced combat divers who practice moving underwater at night over long distances to carry out surveillance or something like putting limpet mines on ships while not being detected. Even getting caught in the act once or twice is not enough to trigger major retaliation. One or two incidents can be explained with the rogue element excuse. Eventually the weight of evidence triggers serious retaliation and thats when Iran backs off for a while.

Israeli intelligence agreed with the Americans, who captured Iranians on video, that Iranian IRGC (Islamic Republican Guard Corps) operatives have used limpet mines to anonymously attack shipping near the Straits of Hormuz. Warships tend to be more alert to such threats but there are far more commercial ships (mainly tankers) moving through the Gulf of Oman and past Hormuz and into the Persian Gulf to pick up oil cargoes. Many of these tankers will sometimes anchor just off the shipping channel overnight, or longer, waiting for an available berth. Crews on these huge (often size of a large aircraft carrier) ships are small, usually fewer than 40 personnel, and except for someone on the bridge to answer the phone and monitor the automated systems that run the engines and so on, there is no one watching out for small boats approaching in the darkness and quietly attaching or removing a limpet mine. In mid-2019 two tankers in the Gulf of Oman were apparently attacked with limpet mines that did explode and caused fires.

The Iranians were angry at the American response to their tactics. Evidence of Iranian responsibility for it wasnt me terror operations were part of the evidence the Americans presented to justify reviving sanctions on Iran. This did major damage to Iranian terrorist activities. Then, in early 2020, the Americans used a UAV missile attack to kill Qasem Soleimani, the veteran commander of the IRGC Quds Force. Quds specializes in overt and covert terrorism outside Iran and the loss of the charismatic and very effective Quds boss was a major setback and embarrassment. Iranian limpet mines remain in play, even though this has led to more evidence of Iranian bad behavior.
Eleanor Holmes Norton, a Democrat and D.C.s delegate in the U.S. House, is on to something big.

A longtime champion of, and leader on, civil rights and free speech issues, she has a clear mastery of common sense.

You see, the west side of the U.S. Capitol grounds has long been the place for sledding when the occasional snowstorm hits Washington  one of D.C.s few hills steep enough to give riders a thrill.

Is there a better sight reflecting our great countrys freedom than children and others flocking to Congress backyard to ride sleds, build snowmen and throw snowballs?

Well, the Capitol Police said bah humbug to all that in 2001.

Worried about sledding accidents  and surely worried about lawsuits in the worlds most litigious city  they banned west-side sledding 20 years ago.

The ban was still in effect in early March 2015, but kids got away with defying it one snowy day back then, according to The Hill, which noted that Norton thanked Capitol Police for not enforcing their no-fun rule.

Later in 2015, Norton successfully added language into a federal spending bill that once again permitted winter fun on the Capitol grounds.

But Capitol Police have banned west-side sledding again.

Unfortunately, due to the current security posture, COVID-19 restrictions, and the deconstruction of the Inaugural platform, we cannot permit sledding on the Capitol Complex at this time, Eva Malecki, Capitol Police communications director, told NBCs local Washington TV station.

Thats why Nortons rising to the challenge again.

In a statement, she says: Children across America have endured an extremely challenging year, and D.C. children in particular have not only endured the coronavirus pandemic but now the militarization of their city, with the hostile symbols of fences and barbed wire. Sledding is a simple, childhood thrill. It is the least we can allow for our resilient children this winter season.

But Norton should go further! She should demand that every member of Congress, and every congressional staff member, be required to ride sleds, build snowmen and throw snowballs  right now!  on the west side of the Capitol.

Way too many of these leaders exhibit childrens worst qualities  childishness, poutiness, brattiness. It would do them good to frolic in the snow, relearning and embracing childrens best qualities.

Those qualities are summed up well in Robert Fulghums famous essay All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.

Share everything, he writes.

Politicians must embrace our shared responsibility by debating ideas civilly - by working out agreements as well-mannered adults. Not like theyre doing things now!

Play fair, writes Fulghum.

Attempts to destroy or discredit political opponents with hyperbole and unsubstantiated accusations only lather up half the country and alienate the other half. Such cynical dishonesty drives us apart, making it harder to find orderly, sensible solutions.

Dont hit people is another of Fulghums insights.

Unfounded cheap shots have to stop. Calling people Nazis just because you dislike them or disagree with their ideas does more to discredit this overused label than it does to discredit your targets.

Washington badly needs civility and common sense right now. I say put Norton in charge of the Sledding to Make Congress Better Committee immediately.

I told you she was on to something big.

Tom Purcell, author of Misadventures of a 1970s Childhood, can be reached at Tom@TomPurcell.com.
A new version of the 80s TV series The Equalizer started on CBS on Feb. 7. Queen Latifah stars as Robyn McCall, an enigmatic woman with a mysterious background who uses her extensive skills to help those with nowhere else to turn. ADAM GOLDBERG, 50, is a main cast member. Hes best known as the star of the Hebrew Hammer movies and as the Jewish army soldier who tragically dies in a one-on-one fight with a Nazi soldier near the end of Saving Private Ryan.

Clarice, another new CBS series, starts on Feb. 11 at 9 p.m., follows FBI agent Clarice Sterling a year after (1993) the events depicted in the film The Silence of the Lambs. MICHAEL CUDLITZ, 56, a big burly guy whose father is Jewish, plays a main character. He was a series regular in Band of Brothers and Southland.

Clarice was created by ALEX KURTZMAN, 47, and JENNY LUMET, 53. Kurtzman credits include co-writing Star Trek (2009) and Star Trek: Into the Darkness (2013). Lumet is the daughter of the late, great director SIDNEY LUMET (Dog Day Afternoon and 12 Angry Men). Lena Horne was her maternal grandmother. Now mostly a producer, Jenny Lumet is best known for writing Rachel Getting Married (2008), a critically acclaimed film. Her husband, ALEX WEINSTEIN, is an artist whom Lumet once referred to as a nice Jewish boy.

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The original Netflix film, Malcolm & Maria, began streaming on Feb. 5. Its a two-character movie, made during the pandemic, with a very small crew. Here is the brief official description: When filmmaker Malcolm (John David Washington) and his girlfriend Marie (Zendaya) return home from a movie premiere and await his films critical response, the evening takes a turn as revelations about their relationships begin to surface, testing the couples love.

For more details, see the long Variety review on-line, which gave it a rave review, as did other many outlets. (Oscar nominations seem a certainty.) All this praise includes SAM LEVINSON, 36, the films director and writer. He is best known as the creator and showrunner of the American version of Euphoria on HBO (which stars Zendaya and was based on an Israeli series). Levinson is the son of Oscar-winning (Rain Man) director BARRY LEVINSON, 77.

French Exit, a new film, opens in whatever theaters are open on Feb. 12 and will begin streaming on demand the same day or shortly thereafter. Michelle Pfeiffer plays an aging American socialite living on the little that is left of her inheritance. She moves to a small Parisan apartment with her son and cat (who is the reincarnation of her late husband). The film played the New York Film Festival and major reviews are already in. Pfeiffers performance has been widely praised and she will probably get an Oscar nom. Major reviewers were about evenly split on the film. Likewise, critics were divided on how well AZAZEL JACOBS, 49, directed the film. I always root for himbecause his father, avant-garde filmmaker KEN JACOBS, 87, was my college cinema studies professor.

On Feb. 2, it was announced that Jeff Bezos would step down as CEO of Amazon sometime in the third quarter of 2021. He would transition into the role of executive chairman. His replacement as CEO will be ANDY JASSY, 53. (Bezos will retain a lot of oversight power in his new role.)

Jassy is currently the head of Amazons highly successful cloud computing division (AWS). A Harvard business school grad, he joined Amazon in 1997 and worked in several positions before he and Bezos decided to launch AWS in 2005. Jassy has been the head of the division since then. He has a reputation as being even-tempered and low-key, like Bezos. His even-temper will be tested in the public arena. Big tech, including Amazon, is facing a storm of varied criticisms.

Jassy grew-up in a wealthy New York City suburb. His father, EVERETT, now 83, is a Harvard Law School grad and was a partner in a major law firm. His grandfather, DAVID, also an attorney, was born in Russia. Andy Jassys mother, MARGERY, 82, is also Jewish and she grew up near Detroit.

Andy Jassy married (1997) his wife, ELANA CAPLAN JASSY, 53, in a ceremony presided over a rabbi who is her cousin. The couple has two children. At the time of their marriage, Elanas father, GEORGE, was a partner in the same firm as Andys father and he was also head of the Jewish Television Network, a production company.
The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
(ANSAmed) - BEIRUT, FEBRUARY 10 - Some women in the conservative, wealthy Arab emirate of Kuwait have begun to take part in a social media campaign to speak out against harassment, sexual assault, and rape.



The initiative is in the wake of a mobilisation that began in 2017 in the US using the hashtag and slogan #MeToo.



On Wednesday, the hashtag "lan asket" (in Arabic: 'I will not be silent') began showcasing dozens of stories of being stalked, harassed, and assaulted.



The campaign was launched by Kuwait fashion blogger Asha al-Faraj, who is followed by 2.5 million people on social media.



In recent days, Faraj had posted a film in which "the problem" that has its grip on Kuwait was discussed explicitly.



Faraj said that "the problem" is that constant harassment of women: "every time I go out, there is someone who harasses me or harasses another woman in the street", she stated in the video.



"Have you no shame? We have a problem with harassment in this country, and I have had enough," she added.



The mobilization started by Faraj has received support in recent days from the US embassy in Kuwait as well. The diplomatic office called on social media for support to the campaign, noting that everyone can do more to prevent the harassment of women in both Kuwait and the US.



Those taking part in the online mobilisation underscore that foreign women are hit the worst by both violence of a sexual nature and harassment, many of whom migrant workers and thus more vulnerable to abuse. (ANSA).
RAWALPINDI, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 10th Feb, 2021 ) :Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee (CJCSC) General Nadeem Raza Wednesday said all the relevant sectors of the country contributed in the fight against the Coronavirus pandemic.

He was addressing the national seminar on "Global, Strategic and Socio-Economic Impacts of COVID-19 and Pakistan" organized by Institute of Strategic Studies, Research and Analysis (ISSRA) at National Defence University (NDU), a press release said.

CJCSC General Nadeem Raza, in his keynote address, dilated upon the need to formulate appropriate responses and strategies emerging from the issues other than the traditional security concerns.

The CJCSC thanked President NDU and ISSRA for organizing the seminar that enabled to study the intricate challenges of the present time and to come up with innovative solutions for the national effort.
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In the face of a changing climate and crop diseases, manufacturers of products containing natural flavors and fragrances are pivoting to a new way to source ingredients. Companies have been partnering with biotechnology firms to manufacture scents and flavors using fermented microbes, which experts say are more sustainable. A new story in Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society, details how the industry is brewing up new fragrances.

Although the availability of natural fragrances and flavors like citrus and vanilla is dwindling, the demand for them has increased, writes Senior Business Editor Melody Bomgardner. In recent years, flavor and fragrance companies have been working with the biotech industry to shore up supply chains and avoid issues like seasonality and poor harvests, without having to use synthetic compounds. Fermentation-derived ingredients can be listed as natural in the U.S. and Europe, which appeals greatly to consumers. Biotech firms and major chemical companies are stepping up their production of fermented products while also making the process more efficient and less expensive.

To be commercially viable, engineered microbes need to make a flavor or scent molecule at a much higher concentration than what's found in plants. Once microbial engineers figure out which plant genes they need to get microbes to produce a new flavor or scent molecule, it's relatively easy to make variants of that structure, they say. For example, -decalactone, which smells like peaches, is just one of 20 fruity and buttery molecules that can be made from a lactone process. These new fragrance molecules can be used in products such as hard seltzers, laundry detergents and fine perfumes. Another advantage of fermented molecules is consistency of flavor and smell, which is hard to achieve with naturally derived ingredients. With sustainability being a must-have for consumers and manufacturers alike, experts are hopeful that this is a versatile, cost-effective solution.

###

The paper, "Why the flavor and fragrance industry is embracing biotechnology," is freely available here.

The American Chemical Society (ACS) is a nonprofit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. ACS' mission is to advance the broader chemistry enterprise and its practitioners for the benefit of Earth and its people. The Society is a global leader in providing access to chemistry-related information and research through its multiple research solutions, peer-reviewed journals, scientific conferences, eBooks and weekly news periodical Chemical & Engineering News. ACS journals are among the most cited, most trusted and most read within the scientific literature; however, ACS itself does not conduct chemical research. As a specialist in scientific information solutions (including SciFinder and STN), its CAS division powers global research, discovery and innovation. ACS' main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.

To automatically receive news releases from the American Chemical Society, contact newsroom@acs.org.

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Colorado Springs, CO (80903)

Today

Scattered thunderstorms during the morning becoming more widespread this afternoon. High 58F. Winds NNE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 90%..

Tonight

A steady rain this evening. Showers continuing overnight. Low around 45F. Winds N at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 80%.
Berger said when he read the findings of the first probe, "it was pretty clear to me we needed to do a follow-on...
MINNEAPOLIS, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Vireo Health of Minnesota, LLC ("Vireo" or "the Company"), a subsidiary of Vireo Health International, Inc. (CNSX: VREO,OTCQX: VREOF), today announced the official openings of two new medical cannabis patient centers located in Burnsville, MN and Woodbury, MN. The new locations officially opened for business on December 31, 2020 and expanded the Green Goods brand to eight total locations in Minnesota. The new locations will be the first medical cannabis dispensaries in the cities of Burnsville and Woodbury.

The opening of the new locations comes as Vireo Health of Minnesota also completed a full rebranding of its four existing retail locations throughout the state, now also known as Green Goods. Despite the challenges of 2020, the Company successfully completed these construction projects on time and on budget to effectively meet its own previously announced deadline to augment patient access in the state. Vireo Health of Minnesota now has eight operational Green Goods retail locations in the state.

"We are excited to announce that by launching the new locations in Burnsville and Woodbury, Vireo has fulfilled our promise to Minnesotans to renovate and expand our retail footprint to eight medical cannabis patient centers in the state," said Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Dr. Kyle Kingsley. "Previously, patients in Burnsville and Woodbury had to travel long distances to get their medicine. These new locations will increase access and ensure that all patients in the greater Twin Cities-area will be able to easily access the important treatment and medicine they require."

The two newest Green Goods cannabis patient centers are located at:

Green Goods Burnsville, 14334 Burnhaven Drive, Suite 14334, Burnsville, MN 55306

55306 Green Goods Woodbury, 803 Bielenberg Drive, Building F5, Suites 101, Woodbury, MN 55125

Both locations will offer medical cannabis in a variety of consumption formats familiar to most patients, including soft gels capsules, oral solutions, tablets, dissolvable powders, and concentrated cannabis oils. Green Goods will also feature a 'knowledge bar' for patients seeking expert information and full-time, onsite pharmacists to help guide patients through their medical cannabis journey.

A Minnesota-based company founded in 2014 by Minneapolis emergency physician Dr. Kyle Kingsley, Vireo is committed to helping Minnesotans who qualify for medical cannabis to better understand and gain access to safe, effective cannabis-based products.

Green Goods locations are designed to create an inviting atmosphere that provides personalized service and wellness programs for patients. The locations will also be used for community engagement events, charitable giving programs, and educational outreach efforts. The rebrand which occurred at the Company's existing cannabis patient centers in Minneapolis, Bloomington, Rochester, and Moorhead now makes for a more relaxing and engaging environment that helps streamline the process of purchasing medical cannabis products in order to help serve more patients in a timely fashion.

To learn more about Vireo Health of Minnesota and Green Goods retail locations, please visit www.minnesotamedicalsolutions.com .

About Vireo Health International, Inc.

Vireo Health International, Inc. is a physician-led cannabis company focused on bringing the best of technology, science, and engineering to the cannabis industry. Vireo manufactures proprietary, branded cannabis products at environmentally friendly, state-of-the-art cultivation facilities and distributes its products through its growing network of Green Goods retail locations and third-party dispensaries. Vireo's team of more than 400 employees, led by scientists, engineers, and cultivation experts, is focused on efficiency and the creation of best-in-class products, while driving scientific innovation within the cannabis industry and developing meaningful intellectual property. Today, Vireo is licensed to grow and/or process cannabis in nine markets. The Company is operational in five of those markets  including the core markets of Arizona, Maryland, Minnesota, New Mexico, and New York. The Company currently operates 16 dispensaries nationwide and holds additional retail licenses in four markets. For more information about Vireo Health, please visit www.vireohealth.com.

Contact Information

Media Inquiries

Albe Zakes

Vice President, Corporate Communications

[email protected]

(267) 221-4800

Investor Inquiries

Sam Gibbons

Vice President, Investor Relations

[email protected]

(612) 314-8995

SOURCE Vireo Health International, Inc.

Related Links

www.vireohealth.com



As is tradition, Ghanaians celebrated the life of late Dancehall artiste Ebony Reigns on the anniversary of her death yesterday. Every year since her passing, fans take to social media to share memorable moments of the artiste during her time with the hashtag EbonyLivesOn.



From fan videos, interviews to stage performances, social media is flooded with footage of the late RuffTown Records artiste.



Others share pictures of Ebony, her friend Frankie and the soldier who died with her in the accident that occurred on February 8 on the Kimtampo road.



A lady decided to tattoo her fan ebony's face on her back

Check it out below:-









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Goose Creek, SC (29445)

Today

Cloudy skies early, then partly cloudy this afternoon. High 76F. Winds N at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Mainly clear skies. Low around 55F. Winds NE at 5 to 10 mph.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-10 22:15:38|Editor: huaxia

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LONDON, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- Chills, loss of appetite, headache and muscle aches are among a new set of symptoms related to COVID-19, experts at Imperial College London said Wednesday in a report.

Based on a study of more than 1 million people between June last year and January 2021, the report said new symptoms are in addition to the "classic" symptoms of COVID-19 already included in the National Health Service (NHS) guidance, such as fever, new persistent cough, loss of sense of smell and/or taste.

There was some variation in symptoms depending on age, but chills were associated with COVID-19 across all age groups, said the report released by the REACT (Real-time Assessment of Community Transmission) team at Imperial College London.

The more symptoms people showed, the more likely they are infected by the virus, said the report.

However, around 60 percent of infected people did not report any symptoms at all in the week leading up to their test, it added.

Another 12,364 people in Britain have tested positive for COVID-19, bringing the total number of coronavirus cases in the country to 3,972,148, according to official figures released Tuesday.

The country also reported another 1,052 coronavirus-related deaths. The total number of coronavirus-related deaths in Britain now stands at 113,850. These figures only include the deaths of people who died within 28 days of their first positive test.

The latest figures were revealed as Britain is stepping up efforts to speed up vaccine roll-out to bring the pandemic under control.

More than 12.6 million people in Britain have been given the first jab of the coronavirus vaccine, according to the latest official figures.

England is currently under the third national lockdown since outbreak of the pandemic in the country. Similar restriction measures are also in place in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

To bring life back to normal, countries such as Britain, China, Germany, Russia and the United States have been racing against time to roll out coronavirus vaccines. Enditem
The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
Director M Bharath Raj, actor and producer Rishab Shetty and stunt choreographer Vikram Mor speak about making a full-length commercial Kannada movie during the pandemic, and the challenges it posed.

Greenery that is uniquely Chikkamagaluru, lyrical action choreography that bears Vikram Mors stamp, a hairdresser who enters the dons lair, a woman in distress who seems to take charge, and, of course, Rishab Shetty, doing Rishab Shetty things on screen. This was the trailer of Kannada film Hero, co-starring Ganavi Laxman, which was released a fortnight ago. It marks the directorial debut of M Bharath Raj.

To think, the film was not a planned one. In fact, the ideation and writing just took three days, and the team suddenly found itself in the midst of shooting. This is Bharaths debut, and even his parents did not know that. Our dialogue writer was writing dialogues till the last day of shoot, laughs Rishab, who is also the films producer.

What makes Hero special is that unlike a typical lockdown project, it has all the trappings of a commercial film  stunts galore, great music, a lot of characters, and the vast expanse of coffee estates. In one fell stroke, it has changed what a film shot during the pandemic must look like.

We are creators and that is all we know to do. Whatever we have now is because of this industry, and it felt terrible sitting at home. And so, two months after lockdown, we got back to meeting in the office, and took a call on the scripts we had on hand. There was Bharaths Laughing Buddha, Harikathe Alla Girikathe, a couple of my projects... Then, the COVID-19 cases increased in Bengaluru, and we knew we could not possibly shoot those movies. Thats when we got this line of a hairdresser romancing the villains wife, says Rishab.

Before they changed their mind, the team of about 25 headed to shoot in idyllic Chikkamagaluru. We decided to do something, a short, a 90-minute film, a full feature... and release it in the theatre, on OTT or YouTube, says Rishab. We did not think about the format or release, we just needed to do what we were used to doing.

By the time the team left for shoot, dialogue writer Anirudh Mahesh (whos also co-director of Harikathe Alla) had about 40 pages ready. This was an adventurous process, and we were all high on energy, says Rishab.

Since restrictions were still in place, they decided to keep the team small and efficient. Over these 16 years in the industry, Ive seen how even in the biggest sets, there are about 25 hard working folks. We decided to take along only 25 such people, Rishab smiles.

Hero was shot during lockdown, but they wanted it to look like a regular film. Our only compromise was doing something differently from what we were used to, not on the quality, says Bharath. We tried to convert those limitations into a challenge that we could overcome. We were on set 24x7, and we spent every moment together. The cot you see in the trailer, that was where Rishab, Pramod Shetty and the others slept at night. We lived and shot together.

This is something National Award-winning stunt choreographer Vikram Mor, known for his dance-like action movements, also says. He came with just an assistant, and says they decided to shun any movement that defied physics and gravity or anything that needed a crane and ropes. The focus was on realistic fights and we used everyone. The topography lent itself to some stunts. My assistant appeared in a scene, so did the director and his assistant. You can see my back too. In fact, Anirudh even wrote out the fight scenes. It was an invigorating experience, he says.

Rishab says that no one on set was anything less than involved. That is the reason we have managed to do what we did. There was no hierarchy or division. Everyone did their job and went on to help the other.

Did the restrictions also mean they worked more efficiently? Has it changed the way they will approach any film henceforth? I wont say that. I enjoy the normal process of filmmaking too, with hundreds of people on set. Thats a different vibe. This period called for a certain kind of austerity, yet we managed to create a film high on quality, says Rishab.

Bharath, who has worked with Rishab in his award-winning Sa.Hi.Pra.Shaale, Kasaragodu, says this is an experience he did not expect, but one that helped him grow as a director too. We learnt to adapt to changing situations.

In these years in the industry, Rishab, who is from Dakshina Kannada, has built a wonderful team of sorts. In 2019, he put together Katha Sangama, an anthology of seven stories directed by seven directors. If you dont build a team, nothing works. Cinema is about teamwork, after all, he says. Bharath chips in to say that the one thing missing during filming was ego. We were ruthless with feedback, and everyone accepted what was best for the film. It was a very democratic process, just like it was during the shoot of Sarkari, he adds.

Anirudhs presence on the sets helped, because from 10-15 days of shoot, Hero was eventually shot over 43 days, and he wrote till the last day. You could always see him with a white paper and pen, laughs Rishab.

Music by Ajaneesh Loknath has already struck a chord, and the haunting BGM has been released separately on YouTube. Id put it this way. We all worked hard so that everyones work shines in the final product. It was like the shoot of a typical commercial film, but with a lot of improvisation, says Bharath.

As for the look that everyone is raving about, Bharath puts it down to the fact that everyone was involved in what was happening. Many of the cast are non-actors. I did not interfere too much in how they reacted. When you give people freedom, it shows on screen.

Loknaths music was what helped everyone fit into the zone the scene demanded, since everything else about the set was the same, says Rishab.

Vikram was initially supposed to be with the team for just two or three days. The film now has about 30-40 minutes of action. I used everything we had in the spot  a stream, the undulating terrain  to create stunt sequences. And, everyone trained hard, because there was no other short-cut possible.

This film, says Vikram, has meant a lot of learning. We learnt to push ourselves, we learnt what we were capable of, and we learnt to have fun too.

Watch the trailer of Hero here 


Public health officials have largely accepted that last year's Mardi Gras helped make New Orleans an early coronavirus hotspot in the U.S., even if a lack of testing made it hard to be sure.

But a new study that sought to pinpoint how the virus spread through the city has found that 2020 Carnival revelry was responsible for tens of thousands of coronavirus cases, after a single person likely brought it to New Orleans in the weeks before Mardi Gras.

Researchers at the Scripps Research Institute, Tulane University, LSU Health Shreveport and several other institutions said in a pre-publication report released Monday that the coronavirus probably arrived in New Orleans about two weeks before Fat Tuesday, likely from a person traveling from Texas.

They found that almost 800 people were likely infected by time crowds died down on Ash Wednesday, and that those new infections went on to seed most of the 50,000 confirmed cases in Louisianas first wave over the next few months.

The entire outbreak in Louisiana is almost certainly fueled by what happened on Mardi Gras, said Mark Zeller, study author and a researcher at Scripps. Its basically the snowball. Once its going, its just going. Its really hard to stop.

The paper, which hasn't yet gone through peer review, used death data to retroactively model how many cases the city would have had. It employed genome sequencing to trace the cases to a single source and cell phone tracking data to help simulate the spread.

The findings, taken with earlier studies and reports focused on the spread in New Orleans, added further evidence that Mardi Gras was a superspreader event that changed the shape of the pandemic, both in Louisiana as well as across the southern U.S.

CDC: Mardi Gras quickened spread of coronavirus in Louisiana; canceling was never recommended A report issued by the nations top health agency this week says Mardi Gras likely accelerated the spread of the new coronavirus in Louisiana,

And it suggests that the timing of Carnival could hardly have been worse, with the festivities picking up steam just before shut downs were recommended by federal officials. It was also a period when providers had little experience treating coronavirus patients and a limited ability to test and track exposure.

In March, I think New Orleans had the sharpest increase of patients anywhere in the world, said Zeller. Its just very unfortunate timing. If Mardi Gras would have been two, three weeks earlier, maybe it wouldn't have resulted in this many cases.

The virus spread through New Orleans differently than other cities with early spikes, like Seattle and New York City. In those places, multiple people likely brought in slightly different strains over a short period of time, seeding mini-outbreaks that quickly exploded.

But based on the study's examination of the genetic variety of the virus present in New Orleans, Mardi Gras essentially created cruise ship-like conditions, where a single variety of the virus quickly spreads wildly from a single source.

Its the same kind of situation, said Robert Garry, a Tulane University virologist and one of the papers lead authors. A cruise ship, people are crammed into smaller spaces, people are in these confined areas, said Garry. Almost like with a Mardi Gras krewe, right? People spend a lot of time together, in the balls, in those close spaces.

Garry said that in other cities, international travelers brought strains in from different places. But as scientists mapped the spread of the virus based on genetic similarities between cases, they found the same was not true in Louisiana.

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+7 New Orleans leaders bristle over Mardi Gras criticism, point to lack of coronavirus warning A growing consensus that Mardi Gras celebrations in New Orleans helped to seed the citys spiraling coronavirus crisis has spawned a wave of r

People worried a lot of travelers were coming in from Asia and Europe introducing different strains, that didnt happen, said Garry. It tells us about the way this virus spreads  when people get into close spaces, talking and shouting and having a good time, drinking, thats where it spreads.

That only one main strain was passed around was part luck and part timing, according to Jeremy Kamil, a professor of microbiology and immunology at LSU Health Shreveport who helped coordinate sequencing of coronavirus test samples. Louisianas unique pattern of a single strain helped illuminate the reach of Mardi Gras as a superspreader.

Cantrell: New Orleans would have called off Mardi Gras if coronavirus 'red flags' were raised With national media giving New Orleans heat for not canceling this year's Mardi Gras celebration as the coronavirus epidemic spread overseas, 

"Its like a spark," said Kamil. "In Louisiana, by chance, there was more than one introduction, but only one caught fire."

Although larger areas, such as Houston, had more strains of the virus, Mardi Gras seemed to set off a chain of transmission that shaped the path of the pandemic as it ripped through New Orleans, making it a city with the highest deaths per capita at times.

In some ways, it was lucky that only one strain took hold. But it took hold at the most opportune time for a virus -- when people were jammed together in crowds, sharing drinks and food, yelling and singing with little thought of a respiratory virus.

It was a sweet spot in the pandemic, in that it was a very early phase, said Kamil.

+2 Louisiana coronavirus: 867 more confirmed cases reported; 102,376 more vaccine doses given The Louisiana Department of Health reported 867 more confirmed coronavirus cases and 18 more confirmed deaths in its noon update Tuesday.

Like humans, viruses pass down certain characteristics to each other. When scientists analyze all those differences, a picture starts to emerge, just like ancestors on a family tree.

When you do that with the New Orleans strains, they show up on one branch of the tree, said Garry, which means they were related.

The paper compared 235 Louisiana genome sequences to sequences from other parts of the country and the world. Over 30,000 pieces of each virus were analyzed and compared so scientists could connect the dots between transmission.

The paper also puts to rest the idea that Mardi Gras seeded infections across the U.S. The virus strain in New Orleans did seed infections throughout the south  to other parts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas and Alabama  but stay-at-home restrictions and limited air travel appear to have kept it from spreading to other regions.

As the city looks ahead to a Mardi Gras that will look very different this year with bars closed, pedestrian traffic limited and go-cups banned, the study authors hope their findings will serve as a warning about the downstream effects of gathering while the virus circulates.

With new, more transmissible variants in circulation, the chain of transmission is even harder to break.

If college students are crowding on Bourbon Street, a lot of those people wont get seriously ill, said Kamil. But if they go home and visit grandma, or if they spread it to someone else who spreads it to someone else who works in a nursing home or is a prison employee, then all of a sudden youre indirectly involved in a chain of events where now you, in some way, have participated in the death of 90 people.
Residents temporarily evacuated from Homestead after fire, no injuries

A Saturday afternoon fire in an apartment at a senior living complex was quickly extinguished and nobody was injured.
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At the end of 2020, His Grace Bishop Petroniu of Salaj became infected with the new coronavirus. His health quickly deteriorated, so he had to be hospitalized. After 37 days of hospitalization, he overcame the difficult period, but the diseases traces can still be seen now, a few months away, according to Basilica.ro.

During the night, I am still addicted to an oxygen concentrator. If during the day I have a too-busy schedule or I put more physical effort, and the oxygen saturation in my blood drops below 90%, I use the oxygen concentrator again, says the bishop.

Blood oxygen saturation is one of the essential factors in monitoring a patient confirmed with SARS-CoV-2. Usually, problems occur when the saturation drops below 93% and when the pulse rises above 100.

Upon discharge, the doctors warned bishop Petroniu that his total recovery would be in a few months and that he would be dependent on medical technology for a while. I was told that my lungs had not healed 100% and for at least two months, I would have to use an oxygen concentrator to ensure the saturation my body needed.

His current health state allows him to carry out any task that falls to him, but certain seemingly mundane activities have become challenging.

Although I move daily, for now, I cant cover a long distance in one piece, but only in stages, with short breaks between them. But the touchstone is the stairs, which I climb a little slower than before, while my saturation decreases with each floor added, which means I still have to be patient.

Bishop Petroniu was born on November 30, 1965, in Targu-Mures. On October 1, 2000, he was ordained to the Episcopate and appointed an auxiliary bishop to the Diocese of Oradea. Eight years later he became Bishop of Salaj.

Near the valley of the shadow of death

The thirty-seven days spent in the hospital left their mark on the servant of the Lord, who lived the thrill of death. My health was deteriorating more and more, the doctors who treated me were very reserved about my recovery, and I felt a few nights in a row that I was very close to the valley of the shadow of death (Psalm 23: 4).

When physical pain is overwhelming, the fear of death makes its place easier in a persons mind. The bishop found courage in the example of the righteous Job. The fact that the devil cannot touch mans life without Gods permission gave me the courage and made me trust in His will.

On another day the angels came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also came with them to present himself before him. And the Lord said to Satan, Where have you come from? Satan answered the Lord, From roaming throughout the earth, going back and forth on it. Then the Lord said to Satan, Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil. And he still maintains his integrity, though you incited me against him to ruin him without any reason. Skin for skin! Satan replied. A man will give all he has for his own life. But now stretch out your hand and strike his flesh and bones, and he will surely curse you to your face. The Lord said to Satan, Very well, then, he is in your hands; but you must spare his life. So Satan went out from the presence of the Lord and afflicted Job with painful sores from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head. (Job 2:1-7)

Hospitalization: I felt that I was getting weaker mentally

The time spent in the hospital made Bishop Petroniu realize how fragile the human being is and how vital is the care for the body. Too often we dont care about our health, confessed the Bishop of Salaj, recalling the delicate moments he went through, mostly while he was at ICU.

The first week of intensive care, when the doctors did not give me good news about my health, and I felt this on my own skin, fearing a few times for my life, was the most difficult. Only faith in God, hope and constant prayer gave me the strength to overcome those moments.

The time spent in the medical institution was a great opportunity for introspection. The four walls, the constant suffering and the picture of the disease contemplated daily in the hospital room represented a strong impetus for internal analysis. Having a lot of time at my disposal, I did several thorough examinations of my conscience, regretting more deeply than ever the decisions in life that I consider to have been made wrong and, implicitly, their consequences.

The last days of hospitalization came with a new challenge. Patience had weakened, medication had left its mark, and the urge to leave the hospital grew stronger.

I could barely find the resources to withstand a long treatment, which I, a healthy man until then, was not used to. All the faith in God, the hope and the unceasing prayer, to which the plans for the future were added in the meantime (since my life was no longer in danger), gave me the strength to overcome those difficult moments.

How can an infected person be helped?

After going through the experience of the disease, His Grace Bishop Petroniu is convinced that the attitude towards those suffering from Covid-19 must be one of compassion and understanding, because they are, after all, innocent victims of a deadly virus that spread very quickly. on the surface of the whole earth.

He does not believe that Romanians are irresponsible. Still, he is convinced that most of them became ill not because they did not respect the authorities hygiene measures, but because they have weaker immunity. He also has a gentle word for the negligent: They must be accepted as they are, because you do not scold the sick man, but advise him, take care of him and help him.

Those infected must understand the risks they are exposed to and the risks they subject others to. And our role, says Bishop Petroniu, is to make them aware of the danger and send them to the doctor urgently.

Then, prayer for the sick, but also acts of almsgiving are essential, says His Grace.

If they do not have material possibilities, and we can afford it, it is good to buy the medicines recommended by the doctor. If they are hospitalized and have no one to take care of their family, let us do it. Also, after they have been discharged from the hospital and are in the recovery period, it is good to visit them at home and procure what they need if they are in need or unable to leave their home due to the diseases consequences they suffered from.

We asked Bishop Petroniu what changed the pandemic in our lives. The answer referred very much to the spiritual side.

This relentless virus has taught us how fragile and vulnerable we humans are, while the planets flora and fauna have nothing to suffer. This coronavirus makes us increase our faith in God and put our hope in His help, without fear of anything, as stated by the psalmist David: The Lord is my light and my salvationwhom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my lifeof whom shall I be afraid? (Psalm 27: 1).

In a future article, His Grace Bishop Petroniu will describe the days spent in the hospital, the feelings and challenges he went through. We thank him for his openness and kindness to tell us about a delicate period in his life.

Chargent 6.0: The Next Generation of Salesforce Payments We listened to our customers and what they needed for success, then went to work, says Co-Founder Micaiah Filkins. Im proud to announce Chargent 6.0, the next generation of Salesforce payments. Our customers have so many great options to customize their billing process according to what works for

AppFrontier has launched Chargent 6.0, a new version of its top rated Salesforce payments app on the AppExchange. A major upgrade to the platform first released in 2008, this latest release puts self-service payments in Salesforce Communities, automated collections for failed payments, and recurring billing in easy reach for any organization using Salesforce.

This significant new release from AppFrontier is driven by valued customer feedback and requests. As a result, Chargent offers customers more flexibility to easily customize Salesforce payments to fit their process. Salesforce Community payments can now be implemented with drag-and-drop ease, allowing businesses to offer a branded, self-service payment portal for their customers. The Automated Collections add-on module gives businesses the ability to customize their collections process based on their schedule and logic, including easily configurable retries and email notifications. Payment Request links let customers enter billing information securely online instead of over the phone or other less secure methods, while keeping all transaction data in Salesforce.

We listened to our customers and what they needed for success, then went to work, says Co-Founder Micaiah Filkins. Im proud to announce Chargent 6.0, the next generation of Salesforce payments. Our customers have so many great options to customize their billing process according to what works for them.

Other popular features have been given an update for 2021, delivering the strongest, most secure version to date. 30+ direct payment gateway connections to Salesforce, including NMI and Worldpay (Vantiv) integrations, offer secure online payments for businesses. Updated dashboards offer better understanding of payment trends and issues. Chargent 6.0 makes Salesforce a well-rounded single source of truth for CRM and payments.

Additional Resources

Visit the Chargent website: https://www.appfrontier.com

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About AppFrontier

Chargent Payments for Salesforce is a leading payment solution on Salesforce AppExchange for credit card, ACH / direct debit, recurring billing, and automated collections. Chargent puts you in control of your payments, managing everything 100% on the Salesforce platform. Capture revenue faster, eliminate duplicate data entry, and improve the order or invoicing process by adding payments. Chargent includes direct connections to 30+ payment gateways, and has been trusted by millions of users since 2008. Its parent company, AppFrontier, is headquartered in San Francisco.
Burma UN, US Offer Support for Peaceful Protest Against Myanmar Military Regime

Police shoot at unarmed protesters who did not cross the restricted line in Naypyitaw on Feb. 9. / Facebook

The UN office in Myanmar and the US have expressed concerned about the military regimes treatment of people peacefully protesting against the military coup, following a police crackdown on Tuesday.

Anti-coup protesters continued to demonstrate in opposition to the military regime in Yangon, Mandalay, Naypyitaw and other cities on Wednesday.

I call on the security forces to respect human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the right to peaceful assembly and freedom of expression, said Ola Almgren, UN resident coordinator and humanitarian coordinator in Myanmar.

The use of disproportionate force against demonstrators is unacceptable, he said in a statement Tuesday.

Myanmars armed forces on Feb. 1 seized power from the democratically elected government led by the National League for Democracy (NLD) and detained its leaders, including President U Win Myint and State Counselor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.

Hundreds of thousands of Myanmar citizens have taken part in ongoing nationwide mass rallies against the military coup since Saturday. They have demonstrated in front of the United Nations office, the US Embassy and the Chinese Embassy in Yangon, calling for the restoration of democracy and the release of the detained leaders, and denouncing the military dictatorship.

On Tuesday, protesters defied the regimes ban on gatherings of more than four people and participated in nationwide protests. The police fired water cannons at protesters in the capital Naypyitaw, as well as in Mandalay and other cities, injuring some demonstrators. In Naypyitaw, police turned their weapons on protesters, shooting and injuring at least six people, two of them seriously. Some 40 people were reportedly arrested in various places, and it is feared that more arrests and a violent police crackdown are imminent.

Also on Tuesday, the US reiterated its support for the Myanmar peoples demands to restore the democratically elected government ousted by the military on Feb. 1.

US State Department spokesman Ned Price said, Were of course very concerned about the militarys recent announcement restricting public gatherings.

The spokesman said the US stands with the members of Parliament elected to office last year. The majority of the elected MPs are from the NLD.

Price added, We stand with the people of Burma [Myanmar], support their right to assemble peacefully, including to protest peacefully in support of the democratically elected government, and the right to freedom of expression, including the freedom to seek, to receive, to impart information both online and offline.

Since the coup, the US administration led by President Joe Biden has repeatedly called on the Myanmar military to relinquish power and to restore the elected government.

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A survey of more than 80,000 adolescents has revealed factors associated with having friends outside of school, and shows that non-school friendships are more strongly associated with alcohol use than school friendships. Rupa Jose of the University of California, Irvine, and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on February 10, 2021.

Most research on adolescent friendships has focused on ties between peers who attend the same school. While some evidence suggests that friendships between adolescents who attend different schools may have a significant influence on delinquency, few studies have explored this topic on a large scale.

Now, Jose and colleagues have analyzed survey data from 81,674 adolescents who enrolled in sixth to twelfth grade from 1994 to 1995. Participants reported how many in-school and non-school friendships they had and how often they engaged in alcohol use or delinquent behaviors, such as skipping school or lying to parents. The researchers also examined factors that might impact friendships, such as participation in school clubs, socioeconomic status, and distance from school to home.

The analysis revealed two main findings: Non-school friendships are more strongly associated with deviant behaviors and alcohol use to a significantly greater degree than in-school friendships. In addition, participants with non-school friends still tended to be engaged with their schools, such as by participating in clubs, and they tended to play central roles in their peer groups.

The study also identified factors associated with a greater proportion of non-school friends, such as attendance at a private Catholic school (perhaps a proxy for attending a school further from home, and/or economic status) or having more educated parents (potentially a proxy for wealth or economic status). Further, it identified factors linked to greater delinquency or alcohol use, such as lack of parental support or enrollment at a school with a high dropout rate.

These findings add to mounting evidence that non-school friendships may be more likely to promote delinquency and alcohol use than in-school friendships. The various associations identified in the study could help inform efforts to reduce delinquency and underage drinking.

The authors add: "Most existing research focused on in-school friendships, but we found that out of school friendships are important as well; adolescents with more out of school friendships reported more adolescent deviance and alcohol use. Also, a somewhat surprising finding was that youth who have more out of school friendships are more central in the school network and more likely to participate in school-based clubs."

###

Citation: Jose R, Hipp JR, Butts CT, Wang C, Lakon CM (2021) A multi-contextual examination of non-school friendships and their impact on adolescent deviance and alcohol use. PLoS ONE 16(2): e0245837. https:/ / doi. org/ 10. 1371/ journal. pone. 0245837

Funding: This study was funded by Grant #1 R21 DA031152-01A1, Cascades of Network Structure& Function: Pathways to Adolescent SubstanceUse. National Institute on Drug Abuse(https:/ / www. drugabuse. gov/ ), administered through the Program in Public Health at the University of California Irvine. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
The FBI is searching for hackers who tried to infiltrate a Florida water department and poision people by changing the chemicals in the water. So WAAY31 wanted to know how safe are our water systems here?

WAAY31 spoke with Mike Doyle. He's the director of Florence's Water and Gas Department. The water department has two intake centers that are surrounded by barbed wire. The facilities have security systems and are manned 24/7.

These facilities aren't connected to the internet either which helps stop potential hacking situations like what happened in Florida.

"We feel comfortable but you can't ever be too comfortable because there is always someone trying to find away around what you've got," said Doyle.

Doyle said people might not realize how many safety training seminars, and classes water departments do to protect their customers from threats.

"Following 9/11 we all in the water industry had to do some real serious security reviews and assessments were still doing that even today. We just went through some reviews and assessments just recently for emergency response plans and how they are reported to the epa," said Doyle.

Not only that but every water deparment falls under federal protection. Doyle said that's why the fbi is involved in the Florida hacking case.

"We're one of the few things in public water in Alabama that's not public information. We're protected there from releasing any information that might apply to the security of our facilities," said Doyle.

In the Florida case a hacker used a software that hadn't been used in 6 months to get into the water system and adjust the levels of sodium hydroxide. Doyle said that kind of hack would be unlikely in Alabama since their facility and others in the state do not use the internet.

"Our form of connection with the outside world and outside the plant to these remote facilities is not internet based which is an easy open door for somebody to get in. We use a different form of communication to communicate with our remote sites and even internal in the plant it's all wired internally so it's not easy to get into," said Doyle.

Doyle said his biggest worry is a physical type of attack but that's the reason these facilities are monitored by police and staff members. He also said to work at a water department you have to pass a lot of tests because the safe drinking water of thousands is in your hands.
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Artsakh President pays tribute at Stepanakert memorial, Shushi Tank-Monument

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan on Meghri corridor plan: Not beneficial to us now to discuss it as "corridor"

Acting PM: "Cement," "fittings" were stolen while constructing Armenia state "building"

Two new cases of coronavirus reported in Artsakh

Catholicos of All Armenians visits Sardarapat Memorial, again separate from state officials

MOD dismisses Azerbaijan statement on Armenia army firing toward Nakhchivan

Jerusalem Post: Israel prepares for a new war with Hamas

France, UN World Food Programme partner to support displaced people in Armenia

Armenia ex-President Kocharyan: Today we are not full-fledged negotiating party

Norwegian prime minister opposes series of NATO reforms

Armenia deputy FM briefs UN, Red Cross leaders on consequences of Azerbaijan aggression against Artsakh

NATO Secretary-General: Afghans must take full responsibility for peace and stability in their country

104 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia

Armenia acting premier: Our sovereignty, independence cannot be subject of discussion

Karabakh state-finance minister announces resignation

Artsakh MFA: Sardarapat victory has inspired all Armenians for over a century

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan: In contrast to kneeling, disgraceful authorities of the day, we have determination

Armenia President: Today we stand on threshold of Sardarapat of morality, dignity

Catholicos of All Armenians: Our people shall find strength to overcome this ordeal as well

Armenia First Republic Day event is held under very modest conditions

Newspaper: Armenia authorities claiming to be popular close off First Republic Day event to public

Armenia ex-President Sargsyan: Now or never!

Armenia President, then acting premier arrive at Sardarapat Memorial

Newspaper: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan's new "cleverness?"

France ambassador: I wish Armenia to be able to live its independence in peace, prosperity

Bashar al-Assad wins Syria presidential election

Reporters not allowed entering Sardarapat Memorial of Armenia
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Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US

Iran ready to help improve the defense capability of Syria

European Parliament head proposes to strengthen sanctions on Russia

UK PM gets married in London

Armenia reports COVID-19 new 81 cases: for people die

EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia

2 people die in Armenia road accident

Nigeria: Students taken hostage a month ago are released

61 quakes recorded in Congo per day

Syrian MFA: EU lost credibility due to blind obedience to US policy

Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack

Mher Grigoryan: Clarification of border points is possible only after withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops from Armenia

Suspicious deal: Whether there was profit from buying DNA IDs?

Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war

4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack

Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities

Kocharyan: I have to ask people how it happened that overwhelming majority elected this leader

Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country

Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia

US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs

Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners

Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions

Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US

Iran intensifies its diplomacy amid Armenia-Azerbaijan border tensions

Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes

Lukashenko accuses West of destabilizing situation in Belarus

Armenia Central Electoral Commission chief on snap elections: No legal basis for postponing, suspending any function

Armenias Pashinyan is met by Yerevan district residents chanting against him

We are ready to be fully engaged in negotiation process to resolve Karabakh issue, says Armenia acting PM

Armenia ex-President Kocharyan gives interview to Russia TV channel

Armenia acting premier: We are ready to start withdrawing troops at any moment

Canada MFA expresses concern over 6 Armenian soldiers capture by Azerbaijan troops

There are omissions in registration documents of political forces that applied to Armenia Central Electoral Commission

Armenia Central Electoral Commission chief: There is activeness in Yerevan for the past day or two

Three new cases of coronavirus reported in Artsakh

Group of US Congress members threaten Azerbaijans Aliyev regime with sanctions

Chicago mayor is sued for allegedly refusing interview with white reporter

Iran exports oil to US for first time after long interval

"Armenia" bloc top 50 MP candidates are announced

42 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia

Sri Lanka public beach is covered in charred plastic pellets due to fire in container ship

US preparing list of targeted sanctions on Belarus authorities

China believes it will own America by 2035, Biden says

15 al-Shabab militants killed in Somalia

Newspaper: Armenia political forces that applied for running in election impatiently await CEC decision

Newspaper: Changes are expected in Artsakh

California prisoner who considers himself Satanist beheads cellmate, dismembers his body

Newspaper: Armenia acting PM's "mutually beneficial" proposal to collapse state system?

Armenia National Security Service Reserve Officers' Union members meet with His Holiness Karekin II

EU is ready to help Armenia and Azerbaijan with border delimitation and demarcation

ARF-D member on Nikol Pashinyan: 103 years ago Armenia's founding fathers would have executed him for treason

Iran President hails brotherly ties with Azerbaijan

Robert Kocharyan on years of his leadership in Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia

Situation on Armenian-Azerbaijani border is still tense, more on COVID-19 in Armenia, May 28 digest

"Armenia" alliance of political parties paying tribute to founder of First Republic Aram Manukyan

Yerevan.today: Armenia acting PM not greeted at ruling party's headquarters, citizens call him 'capitulator'

Russia MOD reports on maintenance of ceasefire regime in Nagorno-Karabakh

Armenia acting MOD meets with Russian counterpart in Moscow

Armenia 2nd President: I see possibility of restoring borders of Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast

We can provide our army with some key, modernized weapons, says Armenia ex-President Kocharyan

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan: Captives issue is not one that any opposition force can resolve

OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs release statement on detention of 6 Armenian servicemen by Azerbaijan

Armenian acting Deputy PM: Discussion on issues possible only after withdrawal of Azeri troops from Armenia's territory

Armenia acting PM on Syunik roads, Russian military posts: This is only place where there are working nuances

Armenia acting PM: Process of return of POWs will intensify after upcoming elections

Putin congratulates Aliyev on Republic Day

Josep Borrell: A group of EU Ministers will visit Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan

Armenia acting PM: We're not going to escalate situation for 30% of Sev Lake

Armenia 3rd President visits Vanadzor, pays tribute to heroes of Battle of Gharakilisa (PHOTOS)

Armenia ex-President Kocharyan lays flowers at Battle of Karakilisa memorial (PHOTOS)

Armenia acting PM: Solution to captives issue is matter of time

Shoygu to Harutyunyan: Russia, Armenia strengthen military cooperation

Armenia acting premier: We are 100% honest toward our country

Artsakh President pays tribute at Stepanakert memorial, Shushi Tank-Monument

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan on Meghri corridor plan: Not beneficial to us now to discuss it as "corridor"

Acting PM: "Cement," "fittings" were stolen while constructing Armenia state "building"

Two new cases of coronavirus reported in Artsakh

Catholicos of All Armenians visits Sardarapat Memorial, again separate from state officials

MOD dismisses Azerbaijan statement on Armenia army firing toward Nakhchivan

Jerusalem Post: Israel prepares for a new war with Hamas

France, UN World Food Programme partner to support displaced people in Armenia

Armenia ex-President Kocharyan: Today we are not full-fledged negotiating party

Norwegian prime minister opposes series of NATO reforms

Armenia deputy FM briefs UN, Red Cross leaders on consequences of Azerbaijan aggression against Artsakh

NATO Secretary-General: Afghans must take full responsibility for peace and stability in their country

104 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia

Armenia acting premier: Our sovereignty, independence cannot be subject of discussion

Karabakh state-finance minister announces resignation

Artsakh MFA: Sardarapat victory has inspired all Armenians for over a century

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan: In contrast to kneeling, disgraceful authorities of the day, we have determination

Armenia President: Today we stand on threshold of Sardarapat of morality, dignity

Catholicos of All Armenians: Our people shall find strength to overcome this ordeal as well

Armenia First Republic Day event is held under very modest conditions

Newspaper: Armenia authorities claiming to be popular close off First Republic Day event to public

Armenia ex-President Sargsyan: Now or never!

Armenia President, then acting premier arrive at Sardarapat Memorial

Newspaper: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan's new "cleverness?"

France ambassador: I wish Armenia to be able to live its independence in peace, prosperity

Bashar al-Assad wins Syria presidential election

Reporters not allowed entering Sardarapat Memorial of Armenia
A third stimulus check, direct deposit, or prepaid debit card from the IRS is almost certainly going to be part of a new coronavirus economic relief package that will one day be signed into law by President Joe Biden.

When that could happen, however, is anyones guess.

The most optimistic timelines still say early-to-mid March, which would have up to $1,400 going out to single tax filers and $2,800 to joint filers who make less than $75,000 and $150,000, respectively, by late March to early April.

If youre wondering why something wont get done sooner, there are a few reasons.

First, Congress is still dealing with the second impeachment trial of now-former President Donald Trump, and despite claims that the Senate could handle both that and debates about future legislation that would include a stimulus check, that hasnt been the case so far.

Then, there are disagreements to resolve, namely regarding whether or not the stimulus checks should be more targeted, or in other words, should the $75,000/$150,000 thresholds to receive the maximum amount be lower? One of the other arguments focuses on whether or not federal extra unemployment benefits will continue or expire in mid-March.

And, finally, among many other things, Democrats and Republicans must agree on the total size of their latest spending plan. The former partys is in the trillions, while the latters proposal sits in the hundreds of billions.

These negotiations are ongoing, White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said recently, according to NJ.com.

We certainly support the discussions as theyre happening, and certainly his view is hes open to the discussion about making them more targeted and ensuring that people who need relief the most receive the relief.

NJ.com also reports that:

The House Ways and Means Committee on Wednesday will begin drafting its section of the coronavirus bill, including the $1,400 stimulus payments and an extension of temporary federal unemployment insurance benefits until Aug. 29 and increases the extra weekly federal payment to $400 from $300.

The proposal also would cut off all stimulus payments for individuals earning more than $100,000 or couples earning more than $200,000.

Finally, NBC News reports that dependents of any age, and not just children, could be worth $1,400 to the person or people who claim then, as well.

The latest relief package, which is expected to pass Congress in the coming weeks through a budget reconciliation process, includes $1,400 payments for both children and non-child dependents, such as college students, disabled adults and even older Americans who are claimed as a dependent for tax purposes, NBC News Megan Leonhardt writes.

Put it all together, an aide is almost certainly coming to millions of eligible Americans at some point before either the end of the first quarter or very early in the second. But, many details must be ironed out first, and that will make many wait longer than theyd like to before the latest IRS payment arrives.
WASHINGTON  Central Texas winery owner Christopher Grider says he was in D.C. on Jan. 6 to show support for President Donald Trump at a rally outside the White House.

He never planned to be at the Capitol, much less take part in an insurrection, his attorney says. Now Grider is accused of pushing and kicking the doors of the House Chamber, where members of Congress were working to certify Joe Bidens electoral victory. The Department of Justice says he helped break the glass doors of the House Speakers Lobby, where a 35-year-old woman was shot and killed by Capitol Police.

The president asked people to come and show their support. I feel like its the least that we can do, its kind of why I came from Central Texas all the way to D.C., Grider, a former Army National Guard member, said in an interview with a Waco TV station later that evening in which he admitted walking into the Capitol with rioters.

He would never have anticipated finding himself in the situation, but for the president and the rally and the way everything went down, said Brent Mayr, a Houston defense attorney representing Grider, one of nearly two dozen Texans charged in the Capitol riots. Weve heard mob mentality  and he describes it to a T.

THE ACCUSED: North Texas real estate agent among 23 Texans facing charges in connection with Capitol riot

As the Senate begins its impeachment trial against former President Donald Trump this week  with House impeachment managers, including U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro of San Antonio, trying to hold the president personally responsible for the violence on Jan. 6  several of the two dozen Texans arrested after the riot claim they were inspired by the presidents words and actions, according to charging documents and interviews with their attorneys.

The same documents, however, say that others went to D.C. prepared to act  apparently with or without the presidents encouragement. And others claim they were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, not intentionally taking part in an insurrection.

The impeachment trial launched Tuesday with arguments over whether the Constitution allows for a former president to be tried. Presidents cant inflame insurrection in their final weeks and then walk away like nothing happened, U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse, D-Colo., told senators.

Trumps attorneys, meanwhile, argued that convicting the former president would open the floodgates for politically motivated efforts in the future.

Texans arrested include alleged members of extremist groups like the Three Percenters. They also include a former mayoral candidate from Midland, a police officer from Houston and North Texas real estate agents who flew to D.C. on a private jet. Several have been released from federal custody while they await trial  including the mayoral candidate, a florist who received a judges permission to travel to Mexico for a pre-planned retreat with her employees.

Patriots stood their ground today!

Trumps exhortation to his supporters that they fight like hell will be a key point in the impeachment trial. The theme was picked up on by at least one Texan.

Today President Trump told us to fight like hell, Troy Smocks, a Dallas man who was at the Capitol, wrote Jan. 6 on Parler, a social media site popular among those on the right. He said that our case was a matter of national security and that these people behind the massive fraud must be arrested and brought to justice.

Attorney James Whalen, who represented Smocks in Texas before his case was transferred to D.C., says the social media post reflects what was on his former clients mind that day.

It was clear from the messages, things he posted  it was like, well the president said  This is what were reacting to, Whalen said.

Two days later, Smocks, who faces federal charges for making threats online, tweeted: He is still the President. And when the President says that your country is under attack, then every American has a duty to rise and defend. But when the President calls for peace. There shall be peace. The end!

TEXAS TAKE: Get political headlines from across the state sent directly to your inbox

There is evidence that others had expected violence, no matter what Trump said at his Capitol rally that afternoon.

Garret Miller, a 34-year-old from Richardson, wrote in a Jan. 2 Facebook post about the crazy scene he anticipated:

Dollar might collapse. . . . civil war could start . . . not sure what to do in DC, he wrote, according to charging documents. The next day Miller said he was bringing a grappling hook and rope and a level 3 vest. Helmets, mouth guard and bump cap.

In a Facebook post after the riots, Miller wrote that he and others had decided before the trump speech that they were going in . . . No matter what.

In a statement given to CNN by his attorney, however, Miller said he was following the instructions of former President Trump and he was my president and the Commander-in-Chief. His statements also had me believing the election was stolen from him."

Legal experts have questioned the blame Trump strategy.

If anything, it is an admission to criminal conduct, said Jay Town, who served as the top federal prosecutor in Birmingham, Alabama, during the Trump administration, in an interview with Reuters. While this ineffective tactic may help with headlines, it will not help the fate of any defendant.

Even after the riot, some did not seem to grasp the trouble they were in, bragging about what they did on social media and echoing Trumps rhetoric about a stolen election.

Patriots stood their ground today! We arent done yet, either! You want to steal our election, and not hear us in court? Good! Now youll hear our civil unrest! says a Facebook post by Ryan Taylor Nichols, a 30-year-old resident of Longview who also posted a selfie in front of the U.S. Capitol with Alex Kirk Harkrider, a 32-year-old from Carthage. Both face federal charges.

The tourist defense

Attorneys for others describe their clients as tourists who went to D.C. to see the president speak and protest peacefully. They say they did not know they werent allowed to enter the Capitol and were unaware of what some in the crowd were doing inside.

Among them is former Houston police officer Tam Pham, whose attorney says Pham was in D.C. on a trip with family and friends and had tagged along with others to see Trumps speech.

By the time he got inside the building, there were no barricades. It was the belief far back in the crowd that they were being allowed to go in, Phams attorney Nicole DeBorde said. By the time he was told to leave he leaves immediately.

Another is Nolan Cooke, a 22-year-old from Sherman, who contends he never went into the Capitol and was only protesting outside. The barriers outside were already down by the time he arrived, his attorney said.

Hes not a real partisan person or real die-hard Trump supporter, Cookes attorney Donald Flanary said. Him and his family wanted to go and see the rally.

Trumps attorneys insisted in their trial brief that he not be blamed for the behavior of a small group of criminals.

Some of his former supporters who now face charges harbor hard feelings about him, as well.

As Grider, owner of Kissing Tree Vineyards near Waco, faces eight different federal charges for his role in the riots, theres some frustration in the fact that hes sitting in a federal detention facility awaiting transport to Washington, D.C. while Donald Trump is down in Florida doing whatever he wants to do, said his attorney, Mayr.

He didnt go there to do what the government is trying to make him out to have done, Mayr said. My client went to Washington to support his president. Hes not QAnon, hes not Proud Boys, hes not any of that stuff. Hes a winery owner, he owns a vineyard. He just, he loved Trump, like millions of people throughout this country.

He really thought Ted Cruz was going to come out and congratulate them and thank them for being there and letting their voices be heard.

ben.wermund@chron.com
Chamoli: As many as 32 bodies have been recovered so far from different areas hit by the glacier burst in Chamoli district of Uttarakhand. According to the state government. 206 people including 25-35 persons stuck inside the Tapovan tunnel are still missing.

The rescue operation at the 2.5 km long Tapovan tunnel is still underway. The teams worked to remove slush and debris in the tunnel.

We just know that tunnel is 2.5 km long & 30-35 workers inside got stuck. SDRF, police, ITPB, Army & Navy divers removing debris to find those stuck inside the tunnel: Piyoosh Rautela, Disaster Mitigation & Management Centre, Uttarakhand pic.twitter.com/gDpv50mXqW  ANI (@ANI) February 10, 2021





A joint team of ITBP, NDRF, SDRF and sister agencies entered the tunnel this morning. The tunnel is still approachable to about 120 meters.

Meanwhile, a meeting of all agencies including senior officials of ITBP, NDRF, Army and local administration has been called today to decide further course of action.

Also Read | Inside the third front of the farm agitation

The police have issued a helpline number to provide information about bodies that have not been identified yet.

"People, who know someone who is missing, can contact DIG Law and Order on 91 7500016666, they will be sent photos of 24 bodies that are yet to be identified, on WhatsApp," police said.

On Tuesday, Union Home Minister Amit Shah informed the Lok Sabha that efforts are underway on a war footing to rescue those who are trapped in a tunnel after a glacier burst in Chamoli district.

A glacial broke in the Tapovan-Reni area of Chamoli District of Uttarakhand on Sunday, which led to massive flooding in Dhauliganga and Alaknanda rivers and damaged houses and the nearby Rishiganga power project.

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SAGINAW, MI  A month after her boyfriend was killed when police served a search warrant on their residence, a Chesaning woman has been charged with two new drug offenses.

Samantha Jo Searles, 33, on Friday, Feb. 5, appeared in Saginaw County District Court for arraignment on single counts of maintaining a drug house and conspiracy to possess methamphetamine. The former is punishable by up to two years in prison, while the latter is a 10-year felony.

The charges stem from the Michigan State Police Emergency Support Team serving a high-risk search warrant on Searles home at 406 E. Broad St. in Chesaning the morning of Jan. 7. The warrant was being served on behalf of the Bay Area Narcotics Enforcement Team, or BAYANET.

EST members approached the front of the residence and were confronted by Searles live-in boyfriend, John R. Neitling, who had a gun, police have said. Police fired their weapons at him in response.

Shortly thereafter, police found the Neitling deceased inside the residence. Police safely removed Searles from the home.

Neither Searles nor police personnel were injured, according to police. Police also found an undisclosed amount of crystal methamphetamine in the home.

Searles and Neitling were both free on bond when the incident occurred. Searles on May 4 was arraigned on single counts of felony firearm and maintaining a drug house and was freed on a $5,000 personal recognizance bond. Three days later, Neitling was arraigned on two counts of felony firearm and single counts of maintaining a drug house and conspiracy to deliver or manufacture methamphetamine.

Neitlings bond was set at $10,000 cash-surety or 10 percent. He bonded out of jail on May 11.

Authorities revoked Searles bond on Jan. 7 and lodged her in the Saginaw County Jail after the shooting.

EST members who were involved were placed on administrative leave, according to department protocol, while investigations were underway.

MSP Lt. Lizabeth Rich said on Feb. 3 the troopers are no longer on leave and have been reinstated, as an internal investigation found they had not violated departmental policies in the incident.

Police have not disclosed how many EST members fired their guns, how many times Neitling was struck by their gunfire, if Neitling fired any shots himself, or how many troopers were placed on administrative leave.

The Saginaw County Prosecutors Office is still reviewing investigative reports related to Neitlings death, having received them from the state police on Jan. 28.

Searles arraigning judge on Feb. 5 set bond on her new charges at $7,500 cash-surety or 10 percent. She remains jailed as of Tuesday, Feb. 9 and is due back in court for a hearing on Feb. 19.

Read more:

Prosecutors reviewing police-involved shooting that left Saginaw County man dead

Chesaning couple arraigned on drug and gun charges

Investigation continues into fatal police-involved shooting in Chesaning

Authorities release name of Chesaning man killed in police-involved shooting

Police-involved shooting leaves Chesaning man dead

A total of 142 COVID-19 positive cases have been recorded in some junior and senior high schools in four regions.



Fifty-six (56) positive cases were confirmed in 23 schools in the Greater Accra Region.



Eighty-two (82) positive cases, comprising 73 students and nine staff were recorded in the Eastern Region, three cases in the Upper West Region and a single case in a school in the Western Region.



They have been isolated and receiving treatment at the various treatment centres.



No death has, so far, been recorded from the school infections.



Dr Patrick Kuma-Aboagye, the Director-General of the Ghana Health Service, announced this at a COVID-19 Media Updates in Accra on Tuesday.



There have been 82 confirmed positive cases in the Eastern Region, comprising 73 students and nine staff after 553 suspected samples were tested.



He said, for stance, 17 suspected cases were reported in Presbyterian Boys Senior High School(PRESEC.), Legon, in LA NKwatanang District, but only four were confirmed positive.



Twenty-four(24) suspected cases were reported in West Africa Senior High School((WASS) but 13 students tested positive.



Three suspected cases were reported in Wesley Grammar School, but only one student tested positive.



The Odorkor Cluster of Schools reported 15 suspected cases, but five students tested positive.



Achimota Senior High School reported six suspected cases and all the six tested positive. There were eight suspected cases in Achimota Basic School and all eight cases were positive.



Six students tested positive in New Page Preparatory School, two confirmed positive cases in Accra Technical Institute after reporting 11 suspected cases, Dzowolu JHS reported 11 suspected cases but only one positive.



Roman Ridge School also recorded 11 suspected cases, but one was positive, while three positive cases were confirmed in the Saint Elizabeth Schools after 10 suspected cases were reported in the school.



Students and pupils returned to school in January this year, after almost 10 months at home due to the COVID-19 pandemic.



A total 9.2 million students were affected, while 500,000 teachers and non-teaching staff were also affected.

Source: GNA









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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[February 10, 2021] City of Natchez Receives $97,700 to Renovate 10 Homes

Concordia Bank & Trust Company and the Federal Home Loan Bank of Dallas (FHLB Dallas) have awarded a $97,700 Affordable Housing Program (AHP) subsidy to the city of Natchez to provide upgrades to one of the oldest settlements on the Mississippi River. Ten homeowners have been pre-approved based on their income for improvements to their homes. Each homeowner will be provided with a $9,700 budget, which includes covering costs such as a city inspection and administration fees. "The city of Natchez will be able to provide very low- to moderate-income residents with healthier and safer homes to improve their quality of life," said James Johnston with the Planning and Community Development department at the city of Natchez. Concordia Bank & Trust Company said it is committed to improving the lives of Natchez residents. "We are excited to partner with FHLB Dallas via AHP to help the city of Natchez provide home improvements," said Paula Morris, Concordia Bank & Trust Company vice president. Patrick R. Biglane, president and CEO, said that over the past eight years Concordia Bank & Trust Company has provided housing-related subsidies to 80 applicants in the Natchez area totaling more than $400,000. AHP funds are intended to assist FHLB Dallas members in financing the purchase, construction and/or rehabilitation of owner-occupied, rental or transitional housing and housing for homeless individuals. AHP funds must be used to benefit households with incomes at or below 80 percent of th median income for the area.



In 2020, FHLB Dallas awarded $19.3 million in subsidies to 38 affordable housing projects. The subsidies will help create 2,749 new or rehabilitated housing units. Included in that total, are $2.3 million in subsidies for 231 units of housing in the state of Mississippi. Since the AHP's inception in 1990, FHLB Dallas has awarded more than $323 million in AHP and Homeownership Set-Aside Programs and has assisted more than 57,000 households.

"Members like Concordia Bank & Trust Company benefit from AHP by providing local organizations like the city of Natchez with funds they need to repair homes for special-needs homeowners," said Greg Hettrick, first vice president and director of Community Investment at FHLB Dallas. For more information about the AHP, visit fhlb.com/ahp. About Concordia Bank & Trust Company Concordia Bank & Trust Company, established in 1903, is headquartered in Vidalia, Louisiana, with approximately $600 million in assets, $500 million in deposits and equity capital at $69 million. Concordia Bank operates 8 full-service branch locations as well as one loan production office in Louisiana and Mississippi. The bank is a responsible citizen and business leader and is committed to serving the financial needs of our communities, businesses and its citizens. To learn more, visit our website at concordiabank.com About the Federal Home Loan Bank of Dallas The Federal Home Loan Bank of Dallas is one of 11 district banks in the FHLBank System created by Congress in 1932. FHLB Dallas, with total assets of $66.3 billion as of September 30, 2020, is a member-owned cooperative that supports housing and community development by providing competitively priced loans and other credit products to approximately 800 members and associated institutions in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico and Texas. For more information, visit our website at fhlb.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210210005811/en/

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The youth wings of Norway's main political parties have signed a letter calling for the country to rescind its normalization agreement with China and stop free trade negotiations due to China's human rights violations.

The big picture: Amid growing global awareness that close economic ties with China can have a chilling effect on free speech, opposition to China's Uyghur genocide is gaining momentum in Norway, where some politicians are fearful of jeopardizing ties with Beijing.

Driving the news: In a letter dated Feb. 9, a coalition of four advocacy groups  the Norwegian Uyghur Committee, Hong Kong Committee in Norway, Norwegian Tibet Committee and the Norwegian Taiwan Friendship Association  enumerate Beijing's human rights violations in Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and Tibet, and accuse the Norwegian government of compromising democratic values in order to negotiate a free trade agreement.

The letter's signatories include leaders from the youth wings of eight out of the nine political parties currently represented in Norway's parliament. Only the youth organization of the right-wing populist Progress Party did not sign.

What they're saying: "When we do not oppose dictatorships, we help to legitimize and strengthen them," the letter states.

"Never before in world history has a dictatorship had so much economic and political power as China has today. Through a free trade agreement, we are not only contributing to strengthening this dictatorship, but to further undermining Norwegian democracy and the Norwegian space for expression."

Background: China froze diplomatic ties with Norway in 2010, after the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010.

In 2016, the two countries signed a normalization agreement to end the diplomatic freeze, issuing a joint statement in which the Norwegian government stated that it "attaches high importance to China's core interests and major concerns" and "will not support actions that undermine them."

With diplomatic ties restored, the two countries resumed free trade talks.

In September 2020, the Norwegian industry minister said he was hopeful that a free trade agreement with China could be signed with by the end of the year, though a deal has yet to materialize.

The Feb. 9 letter calls for the end of trade talks and for the 2016 normalization agreement to be canceled, stating that, "With this agreement, Norway renounces the right to criticize the Chinese authorities, and at the same time undermines the freedom of expression of Norwegian civil society."

It is a question about our future, about the values we stand for," Adiljan Abdurihim, secretary of the non-profit Norwegian Uyghur Committee, one of the non-profit groups that organized the letter, told Axios. "What we are suggesting to the government is, its ok to have economic relations with China but it should be on Norways terms.

Go deeper: The scope of forced labor in Xinjiang is bigger than we knew

Editor's note: This story has been updated to include more information about the Progress Party and to clarify the date of the letter.
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HMD Global announced the launch of Nokia 5.4, Nokia 3.4, and TWS (truly wireless stereo) earbuds called Nokia Power Earbuds Lite on Wednesday. Both Nokia phones are budgeted smartphones with a price range of Rs 10,000- 15,500. Both Nokia 5.4 and Nokia 3.4 come with a promise of two years of software updates and three years of monthly security updates.

About Nokia 5.4:

Nokia 5.4 has a 6.39-inch HD plus punch-hole display with a resolution of 720x1560 pixels and an aspect ratio of 19.5:9. The phone packs a 4,000mAh battery with 10W fast charging support. It is a dual SIM phone that allows two nano-SIM cards. Nokia 5.4 is powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 662 processor. It starts at a price of Rs 13,999 for the 4GB RAM and 64GB and its 6GB RAM and 64GB variant is priced at Rs 15,499.

The phone's camera is a combination of dual 48-megapixel sensors, a 2-megapixel depth camera, a 5-megapixel ultra-wide camera, and a 2-megapixel macro camera. It supports LED flash as well. The front camera is 16-megapixel, which is included in the punch hole.

The phone can be bought in two colour options including Polar Night and Dusk. The sale of the phone will start on February 17.

About Nokia 3.4:

The phone features a 6.39-inch HD plus punch-hole display with an aspect ratio of 19.5:9. Nokia 3.4 is backed by a 4,000mAh battery. Nokia 3.4 will feature a triple camera set-up, which includes a 13-megapixel camera, a 2-megapixel depth sensor, and a 5-megapixels ultra-wide camera with LED flash. The smartphone features an 8-megapixel front camera. Connectivity options are 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.2, GPS/AGPS, and GLONASS, BDS, and Galileo.

The phone is available in the 4GB RAM+64GB storage and is priced at Rs 11,999. Customers will get two colour options--Fjord Dusk and Charcoal colour.

The Nokia 3.4 can be pre-booked on the Nokia's website from February 10 while the sale on other e-commerce website and offline retails store will start from February 20.

Customers who will pre-book the Nokia 3.4 on Nokia.com can bundle it with Nokia Power Earbuds Lite to avail of a discount of Rs 1,600. This offer is valid for the pre-booking period between February 10 and February 19.

Nokia Power Earbuds Lite:

It is said to offer up to 35 hours of playtime. The earbuds feature 6 mm graphene drivers and come with IPX7 waterproofing for up to 30 minutes in 1m of water. The battery capacity of the case is 600 mAh. The Nokia Power Earbuds Lite will be available in Snow and Charcoal colour options at Rs 3,599. The Nokia power earbuds will be available on Nokia.com and Amazon.in starting February 17.
When government shut down internet on January 13, the eve of the presidential and parliamentary elections, the reasoning was to prevent its misuse that might bring about chaos and disorder.

Government said it switched off the internet to prevent some people, especially in the opposition, from causing insecurity in the country. It insists that some of them are harbouring these ideas and have openly made the threats. That shutdown was lifted January 18 and according to various reports, the economy is estimated to have lost about Shs 700 billion in those six days.

However, social media has remained cut off and this continues to affect several businesses that rely on it to survive. According to the Uganda Communications Commission, there are about 21 million mobile phones connected to the internet and of these, 10 to 14 million access social media via mobile broadband (internet on a mobile phone).

Since then, there has been social media access with most Ugandans able to access it using the Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), a kind of connection that establishes a secure connection between you and the internet, disguising your address or location.

This makes it hard for regulators to track the user, who, at this time is able to manoeuvre around regulation. Last week, government warned that using VPNs is illegal and there could be a crackdown on those using them.

Unfortunately, more people had embraced the calls by the government to adopt digital systems and methods to do businesses since the Covid-19 pandemic had disrupted the movement of persons, while close contact had also become more dangerous.

Whereas many people have by-passed this social media shutdown by using VPN, it is estimated that more than 70 per cent of the users are still in the blackout and this has severely hampered services that depend on it. These are mainly fintechs and service providers which use WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter to connect different people or clients. Even NGOs and government agencies that use these platforms are crying foul.

"Our programmes to empower youth from poverty to prosperity have been greatly disrupted but the continued shutdown," said a Gender ministry commissioner who prefers anonymity because she is a government official.

"Social media has proven to be the most effective way of communicating with the youth, who are the most vulnerable. So, we hope government lifts the ban as soon as possible."

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One affected NGO is healthcare provider, Spectrum Uganda, whose services have come to a halt due to the shutdown.

"We do a lot of services using social media to offer counselling and testing for HIV/Aids, referrals to healthcare centres and safe male circumcision but the shutdown has broken the connection," said a Spectrum Uganda official who preferred anonymity.

A top telecom official who also doesn't want to be named said the industry is losing billions of shillings daily.

"People buy data mostly to visit social media sites and from the time of closure, we are losing about Shs 15bn on a daily basis," he said.

MABIRIZI PETITION

Meanwhile, Hassan Male Mabirizi has petitioned the court to compel telecoms to refund money for unused data, but IT experts think the government could have avoided such developments by seeking advice from professionals.

According to Mabirizi, millions of internet users had spent billions of shillings to buy data bundles from telecom companies when the government directed them to shut down the internet, leaving the country in a total blackout.

Apart from the individuals who use the internet to chat on social media with friends and relatives, the platforms have increasingly become an important part of businesses both small and big.

Mabirizi wants the companies to refund the month he and other subscribers gave to the companies between January 13 and 18.

Many had also paid Uganda Revenue Authority, the Over the Top Tax (OTT), sure of accessing the platforms throughout. These included thousands of Ugandans who are using social media platforms mainly Facebook and WhatsApp to market their businesses, locally and internationally.

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The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-10 00:25:48|Editor: huaxia

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BELGRADE, Feb. 9 (Xinhua) -- "I will always be very thankful to President Xi and the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, and very proud" that the two countries could achieve the level of cooperation that they have now, says Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic in an interview with Xinhua.

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The breakfast foods brand formerly known as Aunt Jemima finally has a new name and logo.

The name "Aunt Jemima," which has long been criticized as a racist caricature of a Black woman stemming from slavery, will be replaced with the Pearl Milling Company name and logo on the former brand's new packaging, according to parent company PepsiCo.

"We are starting a new day with Pearl Milling Company. A new day rooted in the brand's historic beginnings and its mission to create moments that matter at the breakfast table," a PepsiCo spokesperson told CNN Business.

PepsiCo says the new brand is scheduled to launch in June.

"Pearl Milling Company will offer people all their favorite pancake mix and syrup varieties in the same familiar red packaging previously found under the Aunt Jemima logo," the company said. "Cornmeal and grits products will also transition to the new name."

The Pearl Milling Company was the late 19th century business that created the original ready-made pancake mix, according to PepsiCo. It was founded in 1988 by former St. Joseph Gazette editor Chris L Rutt. PepsiCo says Charles Underwood joined in 1889.

Rutt named the original company after "Old Aunt Jemima," an 1875 song from a minstrel show that featured performers in blackface who wore aprons and bandanna headbands. The new Pearl Milling Company brand logo replaces the Aunt Jemima image with what appears to be a 19th century watermill, where flour was ground at the time. The new logo's red, white and yellow color scheme matches the colors that were used on Aunt Jemima's packaging.

"This name is a nod to where our delicious products began before becoming a family-favorite breakfast staple," PepsiCo said of its new Pearl Milling Company branding. "While the Aunt Jemima brand was updated over the years in a manner intended to remove racial stereotypes, it has not progressed enough to appropriately reflect the dignity, respect and warmth that we stand for today."

PepsiCo confirmed it conducted extensive market research to come up with its new brand name.

"Quaker worked with consumers, employees, external cultural and subject-matter experts, and diverse agency partners to gather broad perspectives and ensure the new brand was developed with inclusivity in mind," the company said.

PepsiCo announced on June 17 that it was getting rid of the Aunt Jemima name and branding. The beverage and food maker's attorneys purchased brand name and logo trademarks for Pearl Milling Company on February 1, according to records filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Quaker Foods is listed as the owner of both trademarks.

Trademark attorney Josh Gerben of Gerben Perrott, PLLC in Washington DC spotted the PepsiCo filing over the weekend. "We've been looking for it ever since they made the announcement," Gerben told CNN Business on Tuesday.

The retirement of the Aunt Jemima brand name came in the wake of the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd, which set off a firestorm of racial reckoning and compelled many companies to change longstanding practices and products that were regarded as institutionally racist.

News of Aunt Jemima's rebranding started a domino effect among food brands with racist or otherwise controversial mascots. Within hours of the announcement, the Mars food company announced it would do away with the brand name and logo for Uncle Ben's rice, eventually rebranding itself as Ben's Original.

Conagra-owned syrup maker Mrs. Butterworth's, whose humanoid bottle shape looks like a woman of color when filled with maple syrup, announced they were changing the brand's name on the same day. And one day later, Cream of Wheat's parent, B&G Foods, said it was doing away with its Black chef logo, which was based on a dim-witted, blackface minstrel show caricature seen in early 20th century Cream of Wheat ads.

PepsiCo said Pearl Milling Company will also announce an annual $1 million commitment to empower and uplift Black girls and women in the coming weeks. This investment is in addition to PepsiCo's $400 million, five-year commitment to advance and uplift the Black community, the company said.

Pearl Milling is inviting the public to visit its website and nominate non-profit organizations for an opportunity to receive grants to further that mission.

"The commitment we're making is a reflection of our broader PepsiCo values of diversity and inclusion and support of the Black community," PepsiCo said.

How will the public react?

It's tough to gauge the reaction to Aunt Jemima's new branding, said Apex Marketing Group president Eric Smallwood, who says the reception for the new branding will depend on Pepsi's rollout plan.

"It's a little different because you're changing the name of a brand," he said after previewing an image of the trademarked logo. "If you just saw it by itself, you'd have no idea it was Aunt Jemima, which had its tie longstanding with pancakes and pancake mix. This doesn't."

Allen Adamson, co-founder of New York-based branding consultancy Metaforce, says the new name of Pearl Milling is a strong choice.

"The name has craft and artesian imagery, a key for success in the food category," he said. "It is also importantly authentic, as it was the product's original name. Younger consumers are keenly interested in authenticity."

Howard University Afro-American Studies professor Greg Carr says it appears that PepsiCo is trying to strike a balance between continuing to market a popular product while scrubbing every vestige of racism from that product's new branding.

"In a way, a change to Pearl Milling Company could be interpreted as a form of corporate mea culpa for an original sin it did not commit," Carr told CNN Business. But, he added, "the market will ultimately determine whether this will be a win for PepsiCo."
Tata Steel Ltds December quarter (Q3) earnings have many positives. Consolidated earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization (Ebitda) was at a record high, aided by favourable demand and pricing environment. Additionally, debt reduction with improved cash flows is helpful.

In Q3, consolidated Ebitda grew 2.6 times year-on-year and also improved 1.53 times over Q2. This was despite higher operating losses in European operations and a decline in domestic volumes sequentially. Higher steel realizations and integrated domestic operations accrued benefits as product mix improved. Reduced exports and lower opening inventory at the start of Q3 were key reasons for the sequential sales decline. However, exports earn lower margins and, hence, high domestic sales bode well. A higher proportion of auto sheet sale in the overall mix also helped.

View Full Image Catching pace

Note that despite a steep rise in key raw material iron-ore prices, Tata Steel beat peers with an Ebitda per tonne of 20,175 at the standalone level. This was up 53.6% sequentially and significantly higher compared to 11,059 seen in Q3FY20. In comparison, this measure for peers, JSW Steel Ltd and SAIL, stood at 14,444 and 7,722, respectively. On the other hand, Jindal Steel and Power Ltd, which is benefiting from operating leverages post expansion of capacities and captive Sarda mine iron-ore inventory, had reported a relatively higher Ebitda per tonne of 20,800.

To be sure, the European operations remain a weak link and Tata Steel Europe saw its Ebitda loss widening to 724 crore from 462 crore in Q2. This, however, was also on the back of reversal of wage support and higher provisions for carbon emissions. The same can rebound to a positive zone in Q4 with European steel prices having improved. The Street, disappointed with the talks on Netherlands plant sale getting stalled, will be keenly watching for a turnaround in European profitability and any other progress on restructuring efforts.

Even so, Tata Steel impresses on deleveraging efforts as consolidated net debt reduced by 10,325 crore to 86,170 crore. Plans to reduce gross debt by 12,000 crore in Q4 will help in reducing its net debt further.

Meanwhile, domestic operations are expected to continue to see strong margin improvement. Given the lagged impact of steel price hikes, and likely interim auto contract resets higher, we expect 4Q to be even stronger versus 3Q," said analysts at JP Morgan Asia Pacific Research.

They have also increased their FY21 earnings estimates by 63%.

Investors though will closely follow steel price movement in the country. News reports suggest that the Competition Commission of India is launching a probe against steel companies for forming a cartel to increase prices. This has added to Streets concerns that already remain elevated looking at weak demand from China

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The Helix theatre in Dublin is to be the venue for the countrys first clinic to vaccinate thousands of over-70s, the Irish Independent has learned.

The venue, located at Dublin City University, is to be transformed with 50 bays to accommodate the older age group from February 20.

It will cater for around 1,600 patients aged over 85 from 121 practices who cannot be vaccinated in their own GP practices. These practices have too few patients over 85 to warrant offering them a vaccine there.

It is expected to be the first test of how to run one of these clinics for the over-70s and will be followed by similar vaccination centres in Galway and at City Hall in Cork.

A webinar for around 4,000 GPs and GP practice nurses was held last night by the Irish Medical Organisation to outline how the roll-out of vaccinations to the over-70s will be handled.

All over-85s are expected to be vaccinated by the end of the week beginning March 1.

When the over-85s are getting their second dose, GPs will have moved on to younger people within the over-70s age group.

It is expected that each venue will need to have an ambulance on standby in the event of a patient becoming unwell.

Gardai are also to be involved, along with medical students who will help to direct people.

It is understood the roll-out of the vaccines  beginning with the over-85s  will be confined to GP practices in the first phase.

The entire vaccination programme for the over-70s will run over 12 weeks, which includes giving a second dose.

There are 490,000 people aged over 70 in the country, including 72,000 over-85s.

The roll-out is to start next week and will run over three weeks for the over-85s and work downwards to the other over-70s.

Vaccines will be delivered to 85 practices from next Monday. Some GPs will hold weekend clinics in their practices.

All practices with more than 200 patients aged over 70 on their list will receive deliveries of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines.

They will all need to have an observation area where the vaccinated person can stay for around 15 minutes in case of a reaction.

Around 900 practices have more than 200 patients in the over-70 age group.

Most people will receive the vaccine from their own doctors.

In other instances, GP practices will buddy up and the patient will go to another surgery or get the vaccine in a designated centre.

The GP practices which will buddy up will be those located outside the big cities and which have fewer than 200 patients aged over 70.

Under a deal already agreed, doctors are paid 25 for administering each dose of the vaccine with an additional one-off 10 processing fee per patient  60 for two doses and 35 for one dose.

GPs are expected to have a reserve list of patients in case a booked patient fails to turn up or there are doses left over.

Some groups of patients will be asked to wait in their cars before being called, to allow for safe spacing. There will be a maximum of eight patients in a waiting area.

Housebound patients are to be subject to special arrangements.

The HSE is to organise a community call-out service for those without transport.
Gurugram, Feb 10 : Three people, including a woman, have been arrested by the Gurugram Police for property fraud worth Rs 523 crore.

Officials said that the Punjab-based gang used to prepare false documents related to plots in Ansal Townships owned by NRIs and sell them to unsuspecting buyers.

According to the police, the arrested persons have been identified as Kavita Rani alias Riya Sehgal (33), Rahul (29) and Ranveer Kumar (49), all residents of Punjab.

The prime accused has been identified as Sanjay Katuhriya, a proclaimed offender (PO), while the others accused have been identified as Sandeep alias Mota, Ajay Sehgal alias Mota alias Alok Kumar and Rakesh Kumar alias Ram, who are yet to be arrested.

Katuhriya lives in Dubai along with his family, the police said.

The Haryana Police had fixed a bounty of Rs 1 lakh each on Kavita, Rahul, Kumar, Katuhriya and Rakesh Kumar.

A total of nine cases of property fraud were registered against the culprits at the Sushant Lok and Sector-29 police stations. Till now, the culprits had sold more than 10 plots in fraudulent manner.

According to the police, to nab the culprits, an SIT was formed following the direction of the police chief, which was led by Karan Goyal, ACP (DLF), and Preet Pal Sangwan, ACP (crime).

"The culprits were nabbed by a team of crime branch from a guest house located in Sector-39 after a tip-off on February 5 and were placed on five-day police remand," Sangwan said.

"During interrogation, the accused revealed that they used to open fake bank accounts based on forged documents and later transfered the amount by selling plots into these accounts," Sangwan said.

"The prime accused, Katuhriya, used to conduct recces to find plots and houses in Ansal townships in Sushant Lok, Palam Vihar and Sector-29 areas, whose owners did not visit often. They used to prepare false documents after taking details of the owner from the society. Later, they prepared false seal for the documents, and transferred the property to either themselves or someone they knew. They would then sell it to unsuspecting buyers," the ACP added.

"Rakesh Kumar used to ferry people from Punjab to Gurugram to falsely represent them as the owners of the plots and prepared fake sale deed documents and sold them to the buyers. The accused also paid Rs 50,000 to Rs 1.5 lakh as commission to these people," Sangwan said.

The accused have also disclosed the name of an accused -- Kunal from Punjab -- who used to prepare fake IDs and Aadhaar cards, besides naming one Kamal, who used to prepare fake passports in Chandigarh.

"During investigation, the probe team unearthed transactions worth around Rs 523 crore in their accounts carried out during the past six months. The Enforcement Directorate (ED) will be informed about the case," Sangwan said.
The Government plans to vaccinate 10 million people against the Covid-19 virus for free, as the health system battles to reduce the threat of the global pandemic.

Zimbabwe is expected to receive vaccines donated by The People's Republic of China next week, while negotiations are ongoing with Russia for procurement of their Sputnik V. India has also promised to donate some vaccines and the country is also joining the African Union (AU) vaccination programme.

Information, Publicity and Broadcasting Services Minister Monica Mutsvangwa announced the plan last night after the first Cabinet meeting for this year.

"Regarding the Covid-19 vaccination programme, the Ministry of Health and Child Care plans to vaccinate about 60 percent of the country's population in order to achieve herd immunity (10 million people)," said Minister Mutsvangwa.

"A development plan mapping the priority groups for roll-out of the vaccine has already been developed

"Already, Government has set aside US$100 million for the procurement of Covid-19 vaccines. Treasury will continue to ensure funding for procurement of other medical supplies including medicines and Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) in the fight against the Covid-19.

"The Covid-19 vaccines will be administered to citizens freely. The initial consignment will cater for frontline workers, the elderly and other vulnerable groups in Zimbabwe. The administration of the Covid-19 vaccinations in Zimbabwe will be on a voluntary basis."

Minister Mutsvangwa said while cases are falling, Cabinet had noted that it was imperative to accelerate the acquisition of vaccines to halt a potential third wave.

Some of the Cabinet endorsements on the vaccination programme include agreement on the choices of vaccines which need to be science-based.

"Zimbabwe will take decisions independently in the national interest, without undue influence. The vaccination programme shall be undertaken in a structured manner, with groups such as the health frontline workers being accorded first priority."

President Mnangagwa is on record that the Covid-19 vaccine jabs will be administered for free on everyone willing, this in the interest of public health.

The virus has killed more than 1 000 from related complications in Zimbabwe, across the globe more than two-million have succumbed.

Minister Mutsvangwa gave an update on the expected date of arrival of the vaccines donated by China.

"In terms of vaccine procurement, the Government of the People's Republic of China extended a donation of 200 000 SINOPHARM Covid-19 vaccine doses.

"The donation and initial batch purchases are expected in Zimbabwe by February 15, 2021, and the first week of March, 2021, respectively. The 76 to 86 per cent efficacy of the SINOPHARM vaccine was endorsed by the World Health Organisation," she said.

"Efforts to procure other Covid-19 vaccines such as the Sputnik V (Victory) from Russia, among others, are underway.

"India, like China, has also offered a donation and an option to purchase commercially and modalities for this offer are still being worked out," said Minister Mutsvangwa.

She said Zimbabwe has submitted its expression of interest to participate under the AU Covid-19 Vaccination Programme, on which the private sector support companies will keep 50 percent for their employees.

Meanwhile, Cabinet also deliberated on the issue of irregular and dysfunctional settlements, which is now being handled by the Presidency.

In that regard Cabinet agreed, among other things on the deregistering of some co-operatives and ensuring that those found on the wrong side would account for their actions.

Ministries, Departments and Agencies will work in concert to stem the neglect and malpractices around illegal settlements, and arrests will be effected on criminal elements regardless of social standing.

Task teams on mapping of wetlands and other ecologically sensitive spaces at growth points, in towns, cities and peri-urban areas were created.

"The exercise shall be expanded to cover the whole country to draw up a National Master Plan of all ecologically sensitive spaces on which human settlements and related developments shall not take place," said Minister Mutsvangwa.

"A National Wetlands Policy and Guidelines is being formulated in order to protect the environment for sustainable development. The identification of and quantification of all settlements in flood-prone areas, on illegal spaces and other irregular places and thereby enabling the Government to establish the magnitude of likely displacements from unavoidable demolitions.

"The identification of suitable alternative land on which to relocate families and households facing displacement under the corrective exercise, both for temporary settlement and for the eventual construction of permanent structures.

"The provision of off-site and on-site infrastructure and general comprehensive servicing of land in anticipation of allocation of stands and construction of structures according to set plans and standards."

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She said such planned settlements are integrated into the national power grid for electricity supply.

In the same vein, the Ministry of Information Communication Technologies, Postal and Courier Services will ensure access to the requisite ICT services.

Minister Mutsvangwa said the production of appropriate housing plans and architectural designs which promote the new thrust of settlement densification through high-rise structures, compact and integrated residential housing.

"The streamlining of the operations of co-operatives, including through de-registering all co-operatives which were captured by land barons but ensuring that innocent co-operatives and bona fide home-seekers are not unduly victimised.

"The re-drawing of boundaries and de-demarcations are done to clearly assign jurisdiction, rights, responsibilities and entitlements. The Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission and the Special Anti-Corruption Unit in the Office of the President and Cabinet will be part of this process in order to ensure that corrupt individuals are arrested and the law takes its course."
COVID-19 concerns forced Iranian authorities to cancel the typically flamboyant annual rallies on the Feb. 10 anniversary of the Islamic Revolution that overthrew the Pahlavi Dynasty in 1979.

Instead, this years event was characterized by street parades involving private vehicles, motorcycles and bicycles. Yet another epic and different presence of the nation, the state-funded IRNA News Agency wrote.

Traditionally, crowds at such anniversary rallies have been addressed by sitting presidents at Tehrans iconic Azadi Square. Particularly wary of the virus, President Hassan Rouhani has been avoiding almost every public event since the start of the pandemic last year. He therefore decided to make his speech to the vehicle parades a televised one in which he praised his nations victory against pressure.

Earlier, Rouhani addressed a ceremony where ambassadors and heads of foreign missions in Tehran had gathered to congratulate the Iranian president on the revolution anniversary.

Iran has honored all its obligations, Rouhani said of the Islamic Republics level of compliance with the multilateral nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the accord in 2018. In response to that decision, and to the other signatories perceived reluctance to live up to their economic promises, Tehran started breaching the deal in 2019, a phased process that continues to date. The fate of the accord is currently hanging in the balance with Tehran and Washington in ping-pong exchanges, each calling on the other side to take the first step toward reviving the JCPOA.

No one should have any expectation from the Iranian side, Rouhani told the Tehran-based ambassadors, but noted that any hour that the other parties honor their commitments, Iran will respect its own obligations the next hour.

Rouhani was reaffirming Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameneis statement Sunday, when he announced that the Islamic Republic will fully comply with the accord only after it verifies that Washington has entirely removed all sanctions against Tehran. US President Joe Biden, on the other hand, has noted that a US reentry into the deal will not take place before Iran is back to full compliance.

On the eve of the anniversary of the revolution, Iranian officials spoke in triumph about how the Islamic Republic has survived 42 years of pressure from the West. Those who waged an economic war on the Iranian nation  ended up going down in history, said Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in an indirect reference to Trump at the same ambassadorial ceremony.

Such economic pressure has only mounted since the former US administrations reinstatement of onerous sanctions against Tehran in 2018. But those sanctions, coupled with prevalent domestic corruption, have reduced the purchasing power of ordinary Iranians to levels unseen in the 42-year lifetime of the Islamic Republic.

Despite lacking foreign support, the Iranian nation overcame the regime [of executed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein], which was armed to the teeth, Zarif declared as part of his diplomatic message. He spoke of a lesson for the new US government and other countries that such people cannot be treated with anything less than dignity and respect.
A recent uptick in COVID-19 cases on sparsely populated Bolivar Peninsula has local officials and residents scratching their heads.

On Jan. 18, Bolivar Peninsula had 17 active cases before spiking to 57 cases on Jan. 28, according to the Galveston County Health District. The seven-day positivity rate during that period increased from 1.7 percent to 5.4 percent, one of the only cities in Galveston County where the positivity rate hasnt steadily declined over the past several weeks. As of Feb. 2, Bolivars seven-day positivity rate had leveled off to 3.7 percent, which is still well above the peninsulas average rate since the beginning of the pandemic.

Its a little behind what weve been seeing everywhere else, said Philip Keiser, the local health authority for Galveston County. We have pockets in the county where we have not only numbers ticking up, but (COVID-19 case totals) taking up a disproportionate amount of their population as well.

Bolivar Peninsula, an unincorporated part of Galveston County, is primarily a vacation second-home destination for many in the Houston-Galveston region. Roughly 2,000 people live there permanently, according to U.S. Census data, and the peninsula can only be reached from the west by ferry from Galveston or from the east via Texas 124 in Winnie.

The peninsulas relative isolation compared to other unincorporated parts of the county makes it difficult to pinpoint an exact cause of the recent uptick, Keiser said. While there has been significant concern regionally and nationally about new COVID-19 variants from the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Brazil driving new surges in cases and hospitalizations across the country, Keiser dismissed that as a possible explanation for a hyper-local increase on Bolivar Peninsula.

Keiser said the Galveston National Laboratory recently tested hundreds of samples of COVID-19 cases throughout Galveston and Brazoria counties to look for the Brazilian and South African variants and identified only three cases.

One (variant case) was from Galveston County and it wasnt on Bolivar, he said.

Darrell Apffel, a Galveston County commissioner whose district includes Bolivar Peninsula, was also flummoxed by the small surge of cases there. He noted there havent been any large events that would have precipitated an increase in virus cases. In May, video clips of people partying on the peninsula during Go Topless Jeep Weekend went viral as people were visibly not social distancing or wearing masks.

Everybodys practicing social distancing that Im aware of, everybodys using COVID-19 protocols, so I just dont have an answer for it, Apffel said.

Anecdotally, Bolivar residents paint a somewhat different picture. Claudia Perkins, who owns a home on the peninsula, said she saw a photo recently on social media of a weekend event on the peninsula  a large crowd at a party and not one mask. She said that while she and most of her friends are staying indoors, shes not sure if mask wearing is being stressed at local establishments.

I think until it hits home, people dont realize that it can literally kill you, Perkins said. And that applies to all ages and physical shapes.

Winnie Burkett, who lives in Port Bolivar, said she avoids shopping at the local market  The Big Store in Crystal Beach  unless there are few cars in the parking lot.

My guess is that cases here are going up because people are not careful, many dont wear masks or social distance, Burkett said. We mostly shop and eat out in Galveston because of that.

One solution for Bolivar Peninsula will be getting the COVID-19 vaccine to more people there. Galveston County as a whole has been successful in getting its vaccine dosages out to people who are eligible. Roughly 1 in 20 Galveston County residents over the age of 16 have been fully vaccinated, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services. Statewide, 3.1 percent of Texans have been fully vaccinated, figures show.

The Galveston County Health District also has a mobile truck it is using to vaccinate people in low-income parts of the county, such as Hitchcock and San Leon. The truck has the ability to vaccinate 500 people per day.

(The vaccine) needs to go to places that dont have good transportation, Apfeel said. Places like Bolivar where theres kind of a disconnect.

nick.powell@chron.com
Building Trades School joins the Bid4Michigan Bid System Building Trades School invites all interested bidders to register today.

Building Trades School announced it has joined the Bid4Michigan Bid System and will be publishing and distributing upcoming bid opportunities on the system. The purchasing group provides a transparent bid process through which the bid is available to all vendors at the same time.

Building Trades School joined the purchasing group in January. Building Trades School will utilize the system to streamline the purchasing process including bid management, bid distribution and vendor relations. The Bid4Michigan Bid System is a single, online location for managing sourcing information and activities and provides agencies the tools needed to have a transparent bid process while minimizing costs and saving time.

The Purchasing Group expands an agencys vendor pool and enhances vendor competition without increasing distribution costs. In addition to the existing vendors on the Bid4Michigan Bid System, all vendors looking to do business with Building Trades School can register online: http://www.bid4michigan.com. Building Trades School invites all interested bidders to register today.

Registered vendors can access open bids, related documents and files, additional addendum and award information from all participating agencies at no cost. In addition, the Bid4Michigan Bid System offers a value-added service to notify vendors of new bids targeted to their industry, all addenda and advance notification of expiring term contracts.

Vendors may register on the Bid4Michigan Bid System: http://www.bid4michigan.com. BidNets vendor support team is available to answer any questions regarding the registration process or the bid system at 800-835-4603 option 2.
NEW ORLEANS, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Jones Walker LLP is pleased to announce the addition of 12 associates to the firm.

The firm welcomes the following new associates:

Trey K. Bartholomew is an associate in the Litigation Practice Group in the Baton Rouge office and also serves as a member of the firm's property and personal injury team. Trey represents clients in a wide range of business and commercial litigation. Prior to joining Jones Walker, he completed an internship with the Honorable Brian A. Jackson of the US District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana. Trey earned his JD, magna cum laude, from the Southern University Law Center in 2020 and graduated in the top 10% of his class. While in law school, Trey was a member of the Moot Court Board and the Black Law Students Association, and he served as an editor for the Journal of Race, Gender & Poverty.

Christopher C. Broughton is an associate in the Litigation Practice Group in the Atlanta office and a member of the firm's Construction Industry Team. Chris represents clients in the many issues that can arise over the course of a construction project. Before joining Jones Walker, he completed a summer internship for the Honorable David M. Warren of the US Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina and an externship for the Honorable John M. Tyson of the North Carolina Court of Appeals. Chris earned his JD from the University of North Carolina School of Law in 2020.

Seth A. Cohen is an associate in the Tax Practice Group in the Birmingham office, where he concentrates on tax credit financing in the context of affordable housing developments and rehabilitation projects. His practice area focuses on the representation of lenders and investors in all aspects of affordable housing transactions. Prior to joining the firm, Seth practiced and managed a variety of real estate and healthcare matters at Waller, Lansden, Dortch & Davis. He earned his JD from the University of Alabama School of Law in 2014, where he earned several academic honors in healthcare law and corporate finance. In addition, Seth received his undergraduate degree from Vanderbilt University, where he was a National Merit Scholar.

Joshua A. DeCuir is an associate in the Corporate Practice Group in the New Orleans office. Josh focuses his practice on financial and commercial transactions and represents clients in the energy, oil, and gas marketplaces. Prior to joining Jones Walker, he served as in-house counsel for several large and small companies as well as in private practice. Josh draws on his dual perspective to analyze issues at hand and creatively assess the needs of each client. He earned his JD and Bachelor of Civil Law, summa cum laude, from the Louisiana State University Paul M. Hebert Law Center in 2008, where he served as editor-in-chief of the Louisiana Law Review. Josh also holds a BA in History from Loyola University in New Orleans and an MA in Religion from Yale University.

Liam B. Doolin is an associate in the Corporate Practice Group in the New Orleans office. Liam has significant experience researching, gathering, and analyzing data in the legal sphere and private sector. He worked as a summer associate at Jones Walker and another Am Law 200 firm in New Orleans. Liam also completed internships at the Supreme Court of Louisiana and the US District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana during law school. He earned his JD, magna cum laude, from the University of Notre Dame Law School in 2020, where he served as managing articles editor for the Notre Dame Journal of Legislation. Liam graduated from Tulane University in 2016 with a BS in Geology.

Patrick J. Fackrell is an associate in the Litigation Practice Group in the Houston office. Before joining the firm, Patrick served as a judicial law clerk for the Honorable David Hittner of the US District Court for the Southern District of Texas and Chief Justice Roger S. Burdick of the Idaho Supreme Court. He earned his JD from the University of Idaho College of Law in 2016, where he graduated as valedictorian and served as chief articles editor of the Idaho Law Review.

Emily M. Gauthier is an associate in the Corporate Practice Group in the Baton Rouge office. Her practice focuses on securities law and mergers and acquisitions. Emily earned her JD and Graduate Diploma in Civil Law, magna cum laude, from the Louisiana State University Paul M. Hebert Law Center in 2020, where she was named to the Order of the Coif. While earning her law degree, she served as articles editor for the Louisiana Law Review and as an extern for the Honorable John deGravelles of the US District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana. Emily received an Honors BA in Sociology and a BA in English Literature, summa cum laude, from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

John A. "Hobie" Hotard, Jr., is an associate in the Tax Practice Group in the New Orleans office. His practice covers a wide range of tax matters including employee benefits; estate planning; and federal, state, and local tax compliance. While in law school, Hobie completed an externship with the Honorable James L. Dennis of the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and worked as an audit intern at the largest accounting and business advisory firm in Louisiana. Hobie earned his JD, cum laude, from Tulane University Law School in 2020.

Caroline V. McCaffrey is an associate in the Litigation Practice Group in the New Orleans office and serves as a member of the firm's bankruptcy team. Her practice focuses on bankruptcy law, creditors'/debtors' rights, and commercial litigation. While attending law school, Caroline completed a judicial externship for the Honorable Harlin D. Hale of the US Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Texas. She also worked with Louisiana State University's Immigration Clinic, where she provided legal services to asylum seekers. Caroline earned her JD, magna cum laude, and a diploma in comparative law from the Louisiana State University Paul M. Hebert Law Center in 2020, where she also served as a senior editor for the Louisiana Law Review.

Rachel F. Moody is an associate in the Litigation Practice Group in the Baton Rouge office and serves as a member of the firm's property and personal injury team. She assists clients in a wide range of business and commercial litigation involving property, energy, environmental, and contractual disputes. Prior to joining Jones Walker, Rachel served as a judicial extern for the Honorable John deGravelles of the US District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana. She earned her JD, cum laude, from the Louisiana State University Paul M. Hebert Law Center in 2020 and served as editor-in-chief of the Louisiana State University Journal of Energy Law and Resources, Volume VIII.

Gabrielle A. Ramirez is an associate in the Litigation Practice Group in the Houston office. Gabrielle focuses her practice on bankruptcy, restructuring, and creditors'/debtors' rights, and represents secured and unsecured creditors in all types of bankruptcy cases. Before joining Jones Walker, she practiced in the litigation practice group of an Am Law 200 law firm. Gabrielle earned her JD, magna cum laude, from Michigan State University College of Law in 2019. During her time as a law student, she served as the head teaching assistant and senior managing editor of the Michigan State Law Review.

John W. Zimmer, III, is an associate in the Corporate Practice Group in the New Orleans office. John works in a variety of legal areas that include corporate, securities, finance, real estate, and mergers and acquisitions. While in law school, he was a member of the Law Review Editorial Board, served as chief of staff for the Alternative Dispute Resolution Society, and competed in multiple American Bar Association competitions as a member of the Negotiation Team. John earned his JD from Loyola University New Orleans College of Law in 2020, where he graduated first in his class.

About Jones Walker

Jones Walker LLP (joneswalker.com) is among the largest 120 law firms in the United States. With offices in Alabama, Arizona, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, New York, and Texas, we serve local, regional, national, and international business interests. The firm is committed to providing a comprehensive range of legal services to major multinational public and private corporations, Fortune 500 companies, money center banks, worldwide insurers, and emerging companies doing business in the United States and abroad.

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The annual March indexation of pensions in Ukraine, which has been formalized and enshrined at the legislative level for more than three years, is again under threat, since the government has not yet taken the decisions provided for by law, Prime Minister of Ukraine (2016-2019), leader of the Ukrainian Strategy of Groysman Party, Volodymyr Groysman, has said.

On the air of the Ukraine 24 TV channel, he said that last year the indexation of pensions was also failed for various reasons, in particular due to the lockdown in the country.

"In October 2017, systemic changes were carried out at the initiative of our government. We have increased pensions to the military by 100%. The number of pensioners with a minimal pension has decreased from eight to four million. March 1 is coming soon. Indexation is to be done. Somewhat by 11%. But now it is February 9-10, and the government's decision [on the percentage of indexation] has not yet been made. It should have been made back in January - pensioners should understand how payments will grow. Last year, pensions were indexed in May - retroactively. But people cannot live in hindsight," Groysman said.

Separately, he drew attention to the fact that the same situation is with entrepreneurship support programs. As the politician said, the Cabinet of Ministers talks about the issuance of more than UAH 20 billion of loans at 5-7-9%, but it was necessary to issue, conditionally, UAH 220 billion at "zero" percent - for development and modernization.

"What is the meaning of public administration: the state cares about its citizen! We must give people money not so that they take out loans at interest and pay wages to workers. We had to give money for technology, for growth, for startups - for the growth of the economy," Groysman said.

Want to buy your next car with bitcoin? What about your next cup of coffee?

Elon Musk, a longtime advocate for bitcoin, will soon give Tesla Inc.s customers the chance to buy the companys electric vehicles using the digital currency. The newsalong with Teslas move to acquire $1.5 billion of the cryptocurrency for its corporate treasurysent the price of bitcoin up 25% from Sunday to a new intraday record of $48,226 on Tuesday.

For bitcoin bulls, the announcement was the latest sign of validation for the burgeoning digital currency.

Despite making inroads with investors, bitcoin has been slow to take off as a form of payment. It was originally created in 2008 to operate like an electronic version of cash, allowing two people anywhere in the world to digitally exchange value as if they were physically exchanging cash.

In practice, it hasnt worked that way. The cost of using bitcoin, and its volatility, have made normal, day-to-day transactions impractical. That isnt likely to change with Teslas acceptance of the currency.

For users who might want to buy something small, say a $4 cup of coffee at Starbucks, bitcoin is an unattractive payment option because of the associated fees. The median transaction fee is currently around $5.40, according to the website BitInfoCharts, but the average is more than $11, and it varies wildly, depending on network traffic. (The fee rises when traffic is heavier.) Over the past three months, the daily average fee has varied between $2.18 and $17.20.

Luxury purchases, on the other hand, are where bitcoin has found its niche. Concerns about such fees are unlikely to be an issue for large-scale items, like an $80,000 Tesla Model S.

Bitcoin buyers tend to be loyal and spend more, said Jeff Klee, chief executive of CheapAir.com, which has been accepting bitcoin since 2013. Since we started accepting bitcoin, we have consistently seen a wealth effect where sales have increased as the valuation has gotten higher," he said.

Among the other stumbling blocks bitcoin faces in becoming more ubiquitous is its inherent volatility. Despite its recent surge in valuebitcoin has nearly quadrupled since Septemberit still swings wildly. It can rise or fall 20% in a single day, sometimes for no apparent reason.

Tesla hasnt revealed any details about how its bitcoin payments system would work, and a representative for the company didnt respond to a request for comment. But industry watchers suggest Tesla would likely use a third-party processor to mitigate the risk of price volatility in the period between the parties agreeing to a deal and the funds clearing the bank.

Companies like BitPay automate the process, handling the back-end logistics for digital-currency payments. Unlike cash wirings, which can take days to process, bitcoin transactions close quickly, usually in a matter of minutes.

For example, if Tesla were to sell a Model S for $79,990the listed price on its websitethe customer would send $79,990 in bitcoin to a processor like BitPay, which would then direct $79,990 in cash to Tesla. BitPay tacks on a 1% processing fee.

Another big hurdle for bitcoin transactions: Taxes. Because the Internal Revenue Service classifies bitcoin as property rather than currency, users selling bitcoin, no matter the reason, are subject to capital-gains taxes on that transaction.

Of course, some longtime bitcoin holders have seen the value of their holdings rise so muchbitcoins price has surged from $1,000 at the beginning of 2017they can afford to take a hit to cash out some of their gains.

Despite the hoopla surrounding Teslas announcement, it is unlikely to be a game changer for bitcoin or the company itself, at least in terms of transactions.

Among the few retailers that currently accept bitcoin, payments in the cryptocurrency tend to comprise about 5% of total sales. Applied to Tesla, bitcoin sales would have represented just 25,000 of the 500,000 cars it sold last year. Meanwhile, bitcoin transactions, which are mostly among traders, total in the hundreds of thousands a day.

This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text.

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An animal rights attorney from Colorado is alleged to have attempted to hire a hitman to kill her estranged husband's girlfriend, who had been the family's au pair.

Jennifer Emmi, 43, from Evergreen was arrested late last month on charges that include solicitation of murder, stalking and retaliating against a witness or victim.

Emmi had been locked in a divorce battle with her estranged husband when she allegedly attempted to have his girlfriend murdered.

She is alleged to have asked ranch hand, 28-year-old Timothy Lindsey, to help kill the woman in November.

Jennifer Emmi, 43, a well known Colorado animal rights attorney and media personality, has been charged with trying to hire a hit man to murder her husband's girlfriend

Jennifer Emmi, 43, who is also known as Jennifer Edwards, was arrested in late January and charged with solicitation of first-degree murder, two counts of retaliating against a witness or victim and three counts of stalking

The murder-for-hire arrest followed a six-month investigation by the sheriff's office that involved undercover meetings, blackmail and extortion attempts

Emmi was allegedly recorded in a series of telephone calls asking if Lindsey knew anyone who could 'get rid' of the woman.

She is said to have provided the girlfriend's name and workplace, the affidavit states.

Lindsey 'played along' telling Emmi it would cost her about $100,000.

The pair are also alleged to have discussed whether the killing should happen at his Evergreen ranch or somewhere else.

'Jennifer responded that the money would not be a problem,' Lindsey told investigators, according to CBS4 reported.

Emmi is alleged to have suggested that both the au pair and her husband could be killed because, 'if there was a car accident or something, no one would know,' according to the affidavit, then later said the plan was 'on hold.

The ranch hand said he believed the animal rights attorney was serious.

When investigators accessed Emmi's computer, they say she had searched for 'how to get rid of the other woman for good.'

Emmi is being held in the Jefferson County jail on a $3 million cash bond that she must post herself

The charges are in addition to 16 felonies and 16 misdemeanors that allege domestic violence, retaliation against witnesses and attempts to influence public servants over the last year

Attorney Colin Bresee, who has represented Emmi in the past, said Monday he hasn't seen any evidence in the case but that the allegations are based largely on Emmi's conversations

Emmi also allegedly weighed the possibility that she would have both her husband and his girlfriend killed.

'if there was a car accident or something, no one would know,' according to the Denver Post.

Lindsey then notified Emmie's estranged hubby along with the police.

The sheriff's office then began a six-month operation that included undercover meetings, blackmail and extortion attempts before finally Emmi was booked into the Jefferson County jail, where she's being held on $3 million bond.

Colin Bresee, Emmi's defense lawyer, said the police evidence suggests his client did not plan to go through with the plot.

'The allegations, at least the way the warrant reads, is she's understandably upset,' Bresee told news station KDVR.

Emmi set up the Animal Law Center in Colorado

Emmi, pictured, is alleged to have asked a man who worked at her Evergreen ranch to 'take care' of her husband's girlfriend

'She finds out that after sacrificing her body and had three beautiful kids that her husband literally traded her in for a much younger girl.

'It's not unusual for someone whose husband is having an affair with the au pair to be upset and mad,' Bresee said to the Denver Post. 'The line of saying how mad you are and how enraged you are and saying it to other people  it seems odd one of them was then a confidential informant who was working with police.'

The affidavit also alleges Emmi also researched witnesses, judges, prosecutors and investigators involved in her case, sometimes keeping handwritten notes with personal information on those people and their families.

She also researched whether law enforcement could track her phone and bought devices meant to block tracking.

Emmi was booked into the Jefferson County jail, where she's being held on $3 million bond

Emmi's estranged husband and his girlfriend have told investigators they live in constant fear due to domestic violence incidents with the family, including the three children, having to go into hiding.

Over the last year, Emmi has been charged with 16 felonies and 16 misdemeanors for alleged domestic violence, retaliation against witnesses and attempts to influence public servants. The charges are all still outstanding.

Emmi founded The Animal Law Center, established a nonprofit ranch in Evergreen to accentuate the bond between humans and animals, and has been regularly interviewed by local media outlets about various animal cases.

According to the affidavit Emmi has been diagnosed with a mental health disorder
Just like they spent the most part of last year, Nigerian senators have resumed plenary this year with deliberations on pervasive insecurity in the country.

The days debate, General Insecurity in Nigeria was sponsored by 107 senators. It was the major item on the order of the day and the debate lasted for about an hour.

The Senate Deputy Leader, Ajayi Borrofice, who led the motion, cited recent attacks in nine states  all of which occurred this year alone.

Most lawmakers who contributed to the debate faulted the federal government for doing very little or nothing to end the insecurity. A lawmaker also indicted the Fulani ethnic group as he said most of the bandits are sponsored by the elites of the group.

The motion was deliberated despite the resignation of the former service chiefs and appointment of new ones.

In 2020, the ninth Senate dedicated most of their time to debating issues of insecurity across the country as well as possible solutions. These debates were borne out of several attacks from different states with representatives calling out the federal government to act.

On three occasions, they asked President Muhamadu Buhari to sack the former service chiefs whom they said have overstayed their time and bereft of new ideas to tackle insurgency. They made the first call call in January 2020. A similar call was made in July. And the third call was made in December of the same year.

Also on each of these occasions, they asked the president to either rejig, restructure, remodel or reposition the nations security architecture.

The presidency on January 26, announced the resignation of the former service chiefs and appointed a new set.

Debate

Lawmakers took turns to make their contributions during the debate portraying different emotions.

Leading the debate, Mr Boroffice cited recent reports of killings in nine states in January 2021 alone. They include Ondo, Edo, Oyo, Imo and Kaduna States.

Others are Zamfara, Niger, Nasarawa and Kebbi States.

He said security challenges have led to issuance and counter issuance of eviction notices by some ethnic entrepreneurs and groups posing as ethnic nationalists and champions.

He said even though many perpetrators of killings, kidnappings and banditry are illegal immigrants, they are harboured and nourished by Nigerian informants, collaborators and arm suppliers.

While he expressed concern that many Nigerians have injected ethnic sentiments into insecurity issues, he said the present spate of insecurity across the nation if not curtailed, will lead to food insecurity and famine as many farmers can no longer access their farmlands.

Kogi senator, Smart Adeyemi, noted that most bandits carrying out crimes across the country are foreigners and urged the president to seek international help where needed.

It is not a sign of weakness if the president asks for international support when this issue of insecurity gets out of hand.

Today we are talking about N500 billion for COVID-19 intervention. Nigerias problem is beyond COVID-19. That N500 billion is needed to fight insurgency not for COVID-19.

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Biodun Olujimi (PDP, Ekiti) said Nigeria is in a state of denial else insecurity would have been declared a national emergency just COVID-19.

Right now, we are an endangered species. People are going into homes to adopt, to rape, herdsmen are everywhere. We have spoken several times and nothing has been done. Posterity beckons.

We should declare insecurity a national emergency so that everybody will start to work on it as we are working on COVID-19. The figures that are coming out of insecurity are higher than the figures from COVID-19, the deaths are more, she said.

Fulanis being sponsored

Adamawa senator, Binos Yaroe, stirred mixed reactions when he said the topic should be the menace of Fulani herdsmen in Nigeria.

Every time kidnappers are arrested, he said, seven or eight turn out to be Fulani.

It is so because the Fulani men are being encouraged or allowed to do whatever they like. Recently, a Fulani herder was accused of causing mayhem and kidnapping a district head and in his response, he said, we are not learned, we dont know anything.

The only thing we know is to graze our cows in the bush, it is you learned Fulanis that buy guns and give us and send us on missions. These people are being supported in high places. It must stop.

His comments generated murmuring in the chamber and the Senate President, Ahmad Lawan, was forced to caution him. Mr Lawan warned lawmakers not to stick the conversation to a particular ethnic group.

Abdullahi Adamu (APC, Nasarawa) wondered why a governor of a state will ask people who are not indigenes of his state to leave his state making reference to Governor Rotim Akeredolus quit order to bandits two weeks ago.

This is even as he stressed the need to find out the exact truth or otherwise of these allegations of killings as reported.

A seemingly unhappy Enyinnaya Abaribe (PDP, Abia), noted that no Nigerian is being set away from anywhere, rather criminals are being sent away from the forest where they are.

When we come here and say such, you send the wrong message out. The message is simple, the police IG has told us, these are criminal elements coming from outside Nigeria and what we should ask ourselves is, if someone is a criminal, and he is in the forest, what is he doing there?

We should not water down the issue to please whateverWe either want to solve this problem or not and in order to solve the problem, the desideratum is that all criminal elements coming into this county must be flushed out.

Resolutions

The lawmakers, thereafter, urged the president to direct the National Security Adviser, the IGP and the newly nominated service chiefs to devise a proposal to rejig the nations security architecture and dispose of forces for more effective counter measures against the current security challenges.

They also urged the federal government to embark on an operation to checkmate proliferation of firearms and enforce the laws against illegal possession of firearms by arresting, disarming and punishing anyone in illegal possession of arms, and for state governors to implement the National Livestock Transformation Plan  a modern scheme designed to eliminate transhumance in order to prevent farmer-herder conflicts and activate highly productive livestock sector in Nigeria.

They called on security agencies to deploy drones and helicopters to monitor forests and ungoverned areas in Nigeria

The senators also asked the federal government to resuscitate and inaugurate the National Task Force Commission to combat the proliferation of light weapons, small arms and ammunition.
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"We're thrilled to welcome Andre and Donta to the Signet Board of Directors," said H. Todd Stitzer, Board Chairman. "These dynamic, transformative leaders with incredible backgrounds and track records join Signet at an exciting time, and embody what we seek from our directors  agile mindsets, proven leadership and innovative thinking. I'm confident they will help fuel our work accelerating Signet's digital-first, omnichannel transformation under CEO Gina Drosos' leadership."

About Andre Branch

Branch is passionate about building and reinventing brands, as well as expanding customer experiences through services. Last year, he became the Senior Vice President and General Manager of MAC Cosmetics North America - Estee Lauder. Branch previously served as Senior Vice President of e-Commerce and Digital Operations at L'Oreal USA. He is a well-rounded operator and, in previous roles there, led some of the company's most iconic brands such as Viktor & Rolf Flowerbomb, Diesel, Stella McCartney, and Ralph Lauren  where he oversaw one of the most successful men's fragrance launches in the country.

An entrepreneurial business leader and modern marketer, Branch has substantial experience managing P&Ls, generating top-line and bottom-line growth, and leading cross-functional teams. He received an MBA from the University of Michigan and a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of Maryland. Prior to receiving his MBA, Branch worked as a CPA in audit for Deloitte & Touche. He is a native of Baltimore and often volunteers his time inspiring and motivating kids from disadvantaged backgrounds.

"I'm delighted to join the Signet board, especially at this critical moment when the company has demonstrated remarkable agility as part of its Path to Brilliance transformation," Branch said. "I'm also energized by Signet's purpose of inspiring love for its customers, employees and communities."

About Donta Wilson

Wilson currently serves as the Chief Digital and Client Experience Officer of Truist Financial Corporation, the nation's 6th largest and highly innovative purpose-driven bank. He leads Truist's digital innovation and transformation, overseeing digital banking and commerce, delivering the company's largest-ever new branding launch, and responsible for omni-channel client experience strategy, client analytics and client journey execution. Wilson has a passion for accelerating employee experience and serves as an executive sponsor of Truist's diversity, equity and inclusion initiative and co-chair of its culture council. He is a strategic, tech-savvy and operationally grounded leader who brings a proven track record of positively impacting growth, digital transformation, brand equity and culture across organizations, along with an intense focus on delivering a distinctive client experience.

A five-time winner of Savoy Magazine's Top 100 Most Influential Blacks in Corporate America, Wilson received an MBA from the University of Maryland and a bachelor's in business administration from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He also has deep experience serving on not-for-profit boards, primarily focused on ensuring that disadvantaged youth have opportunity for education and focused on eliminating the digital divide.

"I am excited to join Signet's board of directors, particularly in this moment as it accelerates the company's transformation with breakthroughs in customers' digital experience and innovation in every part of the business and organization," Wilson said. "I'm energized to help Signet leverage its purpose as a key business growth driver delivering positive impact across the industry and world."

For more information regarding the Signet Board of Directors, please see http://www.signetjewelers.com/investors/corporate-governance/default.aspx.

Signet's Commitment to Diversity, Equity & Inclusion

Signet Jewelers Limited is the world's largest retailer of diamond jewelry with a Purpose of Inspiring Love. The company operates approximately 2,900 stores primarily under the name brands of Kay Jewelers, Zales, Jared, H.Samuel, Ernest Jones, Peoples, Piercing Pagoda, and JamesAllen.com as well as digital marketplaces under the URLs www.kay.com, www.zales.com, www.jared.com, www.hsamuel.co.uk, www.ernestjones.co.uk, www.peoplesjewellers.com, www.pagoda.com, and www.jamesallen.com.

For its third consecutive year, Signet Jewelers in January 2021 was recognized by Bloomberg Gender Equality Index for its commitment to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, and was recently named a Certified Great Place to Work. A key part of Signet's transformation plan is advancing the company's commitment to diversity both within the company and within the communities in which it operates. Further information on Signet is available at www.signetjewelers.com.

With the appointment of Branch and Wilson, 59% percent of Signet's Board is now comprised of women or persons of color. Additionally, within its employee base, 82% of Signet's team members represent gender or ethnic diversity, including 58% within the executive team since August 2020.

Safe Harbor Statement

This release contains statements which are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements, based upon management's beliefs and expectations as well as on assumptions made by and data currently available to management, appear in a number of places throughout this document and include statements regarding, among other things, Signet's prospects, growth and strategies. The use of the words "expects," "intends," "anticipates," "estimates," "predicts," "believes," "should," "potential," "may," "preliminary," "forecast," "objective," "plan," or "target," and other similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties which could cause the actual results to not be realized. For a discussion of the risks and uncertainties which could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed in any forward looking statement, see the "Risk Factors" and "Forward-Looking Statements" sections of Signet's Fiscal 2020 Annual Report on Form 10-K filed with the SEC on March 26, 2020 and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q and the "Safe Harbor Statements" in current reports on Form 8-K filed with the SEC. Signet undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements to reflect subsequent events or circumstances, except as required by law.

Media

Colleen Rooney

Chief Communications Officer

[email protected]

Barbara DeLollis

VP, Media Relations

[email protected]

+1-301-814-3357

SOURCE Signet Jewelers Ltd.

Related Links

https://www.signetjewelers.com/


Airbnb in conjunction with the Secretariat for Women (Semujeres) of Mexico City will provide temporary accommodation to women victims of gender-based violence. ,

The accommodation platform will support through a donation of 52 thousand 500 dollars to Semujeres with the aim of providing protection in a safe, free and warm space to women who need to leave their homes to start the process that allows them to overcome the circumstance of violence in which they are.
New Delhi, Feb 10 : The Rajya Sabha initiating the discussion on Union Budget on Wednesday marked only the sixth instance when the Budget was discussed in the Upper House first, after 2002, 1955, 1965, 1963 and 1959.

The last time the Budget was discussed in the Rajya Sabha first was in 2002 when Atal Bihari Vajpayee was the Prime Minister, while the first time it happened was way back in 1955 when Jawahar Lal Nehru was the Prime Minister.

Initiating the debate on the Union Budget in the Rajya Sabha, Congress leader Kapil Sibal said that there should be no excuses, as the BJP has been in power for six years now. He also accused the Central government of giving all the assets to four-five big players.

Without naming anybody, Sibal said, "It's a classic case of crony capitalism, with one big boy having footprint everywhere." He also accused the BJP of indulging in vote-bank politics, citing Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman's announcement to allocate chunks of highway projects to the poll-bound states of Tamil Nadu, Kerala, West Bengal and Assam.

After the Rajya Sabha, the Lok Sabha too started the debate on the Union Budget with Congress MP Shashi Tharoor initiating the process.

Given the numbers in both the Houses, the government should not face any problem in passing the Budget. But it will be interesting to see which House passes the Budget first. The bone of contention between the government and the opposition seems to be the three Central farm laws, against which scores of farmers are protesting for well over two months now.

Speaking in the Lok Sabha on Wednesday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that these laws are "optional and not compulsory". In the backdrop of the ongoing farmers' agitation on Delhi's borders, Modi said that "rumours are being spread that these laws are against the farmers".

The Prime Minister also said that these laws were passed in the Parliament with a view to bring reforms in the agriculture sector, which is the need of the hour.
New Delhi: Actress Malvi Malhotra underwent a very traumatic event last year when she was repeatedly stabbed by someone. While she was literally fighting for her life in the hospital, she wanted to reach out to someone influential who could help her and many other women who go through this sort of violence.

For this purpose, she made a video and sent it to actor Kangana Ranaut. But she had not expected what followed.

I had a lot of faith in Kangana and I believed that she will come forward to help me and fight against this issue. So, I requested one of the doctors taking care of me to record a video and put it in the public domain. The same day Kangana tweeted about it. She was targeting the industry and nepotism but she tweeted that she will come and help me and fight for me in this case. But after this, when I got discharged, I was waiting for her to come forward and help, but nothing happened. Not only her, but no one from her team also contacted me. I was surprised, Malvi said.

However, there was someone who has been consistently been helping Malvi fight for her cause. This is actor-turned-politician Urmila Matondkar. At the same time, Urmila ji helped me a lot. I was not expecting this from her. But she was helping me from the very start of this incident. I got to know later on that she also called someone in the police and asked them to take care of this case. She realised that it is her moral responsibility to help me as a woman. I saw that pain in her eyes for me. She also told me that they are making some laws in Maharashtra so that women feel protected here. She assured me that if I face any problems in my fight for justice, I can approach her and she will help me, she added.



The target of the first significant raids by the Criminal Assets Bureau in 2021 are a family-based gang who have been described as a mini Rathkeale Rovers crew whose criminal base in the southeast has grown significantly in recent times.

Senior sources say the gang has made tens of thousands of euro from tarmac scams across Europe, the US and Canada and have been laundering the cash as well as significant money for one of the biggest drug dealing gangs based in the region.

Gardai announced that CAB had frozen 16 bank accounts containing 540,000 in total, following search operations in Tipperary and Kilkenny.

This is a crew that have invested in at least two pubs, multiple houses and apartments as part of a money laundering scam which is very international in its dimension, a senior source said.

Independent.ie can reveal that a number of suspected main players in the gang are facing money laundering charges in Sweden.

It is not just Sweden that this gang have their tentacles, intelligence indicates that they are also known to law enforcement in the United States and Canada as well as a number of EU states, the source said.

The gang operates nationwide and overseas by posing as tradesmen and quoting a "good price" for jobs ranging from laying tarmac to cleaning gutters.

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Because of their international tarmac scams, the gang whose base is a Co Tipperary town, have been compared to the infamous Rathkeale Rovers gang but gardai say there are no major links between them and the Limerick gang.

This crew do their own thing  like other similar crews they are not overly involved in organised burglary but in saying that a key member is up on charges for a burglary in south Dublin, the source said.

They are heavily involved in laundering money for other criminal networks, including those based in south Kilkenny and Waterford city.

Sources said the links the gang have with one of the most prolific drugs trafficking networks in the southeast is particularly concerning with the tarmac crew suspected of now engaging in wide-scale money laundering for them.

Investigations have established there are around 20 core members aged from early 20s to late 60s.

Sources said there will be more arrests and searches as part of this probe.

In the operation, CAB officers targeted four residential properties and a business premises where they seized a 201 Volvo XC90 and financial documents.

The search operation targeted an Organised Crime Group (OCG) originating in the Munster and south Leinster region with considerable links across the continent of Europe, a Garda spokeswoman said.

Over the course of the investigation, assistance was sought from and provided by Europol. Fund transfers in excess of 4m were identified from other jurisdictions to Irish bank accounts linked to members of the OCG.

The search operation involved searches of four residential properties and a business premises. It was conducted by Criminal Assets Bureau personnel supported by the Emergency Response Unit and assisted by local Divisional personnel and the Garda Dog Unit.

This morning's operation has resulted in the freezing of 16 bank accounts linked to members of the OCG. The accounts contain cumulative funds of 540,000, she added.
New Delhi:

Amid tight security, the sixteenth batch of 3,398 pilgrims on Saturday left Jammu for the 3,888-metre Amarnath cave shrine of Lord Shiva in the south Kashmir Himalayas.

Escorted by the CRPF and police, the batch consisting of 2,535 males, 758 females, 100 sadhus and sadhvis, and five transgenders left in a convoy of 191 vehicles for Baltal and Pahalgam base camps this morning, officials said.

With todays batch, a total of 50,028 pilgrims have left Jammu for Amarnath in 16 batches since the yatra began from Jammu on June 28.

Over 1,86,853 pilgrims have paid obeisance at the cave shrine till last evening.

The yatra will conclude on Shravan Purnima (Raksha Bandhan) on August 7.

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The company was quoted in 1978 and will leave at ending of March.

11 PLC, which until October 2016 was known as Mobil Oil Nigeria Plc, hopes to delist its more than 360.592 million ordinary shares from the daily official list of the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) by the end of the first quarter, in furtherance of a resolution passed at its last annual general meeting in October.

"The purpose of delisting is to enable the company explore strategic opportunities, alliances and collaborations that can bolster earnings and/or provide synergized benefits with little or no regulatory obligations," the energy firm said in an explanatory statement issued Tuesday and obtained by PREMIUM TIMES.

Shareholders who do not consent to the exit proposal will be in the frame to sell their stakes at N213.90 per ordinary share, "being the highest price at which 11 Plc shares have traded, six (6) months preceding the notice of the AGM at which the resolution to delist was deliberated, as provided by the rules of the Nigerian Stock Exchange."

11 Plc will still maintain its public liability company status after delisting, even though its shares will no longer be eligible for trade on the bourse.

For the exit plan to materialise, both the Securities and Exchange Commission and the NSE have to give their approvals, after which dissenting shareholders will be settled and cease to be stockholders in the company.

"11 Plc shareholders will be able to elect to accept the Exit Consideration from February 1, 2021 to March 1, 2021," the document said.

It added that the delisting would not affect the current employment contracts of staff and the composition of the board of directors.

Socony Vacuum Oil Company, the precursor of 11 Plc, started marketing operations in Nigeria in 1907 through the sale of Sunflower Kerosene.

It transformed to a limited liability company in 1951, the same year it adopted the name Mobil Oil Nigeria Limited. In 1978, it was quoted on the NSE, assuming the identity: Mobil Oil Nigeria Plc.

NIPCO Investment Company's purchase of 60 per cent interest belonging to ExxonMobil in 2016 set in motion a corporate transformation process leading to the new name 11 Plc (pronounced as double one Plc).

Shares in 11 Plc closed trade in Lagos on Tuesday at N228 per unit, recording no price movement.
Two quick-thinking sanitation workers helped to rescue a ten-year-old girl who was kidnapped by a convicted sex offender in Louisiana.

Jalisa Lasalle went missing on Sunday, with state police putting out an amber alert as they searched for her abductor who was last seen driving a Nissan sedan.

On Sunday morning, two Pelican Waste & Debris employees, Dion Merrick and Brandon Antoine, were driving their route at around 7am when they spotted the kidnapper's car and recognized it from the alert.

Merrick and Antoine took swift action, using their garbage truck to block the Nissan's exit and stop it from escaping, and calling the police.

When police arrived, they arrested registered sex offender Michael Sereal, 33, and rescued ten-year-old Lasalle from his car. Sereal is now in jail accused of aggravated kidnapping.

Cellphone video, taken by Merrick, shows Sereal being arrested by police and walked to their car as the sanitation worker addresses the camera.

'Thank god they got him now,' said Merrick, who says he is the father of a little girl. 'I just saved that little girl's life. They got him, thanks to two Pelican drivers.'

'That girl is ten years old. The car right there the girl is safe right now, thank god, because I have a little girl.'

Scroll down for video

Michael Sereal (left) was arrested for kidnapping Jalisa Lasalle (right) after sanitation workers spotted his car, blocked it in, and called the police

Police had put out an alert for his car, a silver Nissan sedan, which the sanitation workers spotted in a field (pictured)

'Something told me... what's that car doing off in the field like that? That's the dude with the little girl,' he said.

A law enforcement official at the scene thanked the pair for a 'great job' in the footage, while Merrick said he was 'just doing my job'.

'I called the cops, they saved that little girl's life,' he said. 'I blocked that truck in, make sure [he] couldn't get out.'

Pelican Waste & Debris paid tribute to its employees on social media, giving them a 'huge shoutout' and adding: 'Way to go guys!'.

Jalisa was given a medical examination after her ordeal, local media said.

The 10-year-old had been reported missing from a family member's home on Monday afternoon, having last been seen wearing a red hooded sweatshirt.

But shortly before 7am the following morning, Merrick and Antoine spotted the vehicle while working their shift.

Dion Merrick, left, described how he and his colleague parked their garbage truck, right, at the end of a path in order to stop a suspect's vehicle from getting away

'Local authorities were immediately contacted and Sereal was taken into custody,' the New Iberia police department said.

'Sereal was taken into custody by St. Martin Parish Deputies and then transferred to the custody of the New Iberia Police Department where he is being arrested for aggravated kidnapping. Jalisa was found safe!'.

Sereal is also accused of failing to register as a sex offender, according to jailhouse records.

According to KATC, Sereal has a history of flouting sex offender registration rules in Louisiana since a 2006 conviction for carnal knowledge of a juvenile.

He was initially given a 10-year suspended sentence, but it was converted into real prison time after a court found he had violated the terms of his probation in 2007.

In 2019 he was again charged with failing to register, and last December an arrest warrant was issued after he failed to appear at a court hearing.
Tema-based Steel and iron manufacturing company, B5 Plus Limited clinched four awards in December 2020.



The company have scooped the awards following their key contributions to the Ghanaian economy.



B5 Plus Limited were bestowed the best corporate governance, iron and steel industry awards.



Throughout their existence in Ghana, the company have been contributing keenly. They have been offering scholarships to brilliant but needy students in the country.



Last year during the outbreak of the devastating coronavirus, the company were donating free oxygen to private and government hospitals nationwide as well as providing Covid-19 safety equipment like nose/face masks, Veronica buckets, sanitizers and others to Organizations and institutions in the country.



The company also donated hugely to the government Covid-19 fund established by President Akufo-Addo. Due to these, the company were handed a philanthropic award in December 2020.



The Chief Executive Officer of the company, Mr. Mukesh Thakwani was also honoured as a Hall of Famer from corporate Ghana for his contributions to society.



Speaking in an interview after the five awards, Mr. Thakwani believes the company has been able to achieve the success due to that hard work of their workers and the management for ensuring the company producing quality products to the Ghanaian and the international market.



On the deadly Coronavirus, Mr. Thakwani praised President Akufo-Addo for putting measures in place as the fight against the disease continues.



He entreated Ghanaians to continue adhering to the safety protocols like wearing of the nose/face masks, using of hand sanitizers, ensuring social distance and others to help eliminate the pandemic.



He prayed that Covid-19 will be a thing of the past in 2021 as the pandemic brought huge problems to businesses globally.

Source: Peacefmonline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Mary Schenk is a reporter covering police, courts and breaking news at The News-Gazette. Her email is mschenk@news-gazette.com, and you can follow her on Twitter (@schenk).
After Harold and Dorothy Schneider got married, they drove north from St. Louis and took a car ferry across Lake Michigan to a hotel, where they planned to spend their honeymoon night. One small problem though: It was midnight, they had no reservations, and the hotel had no rooms available.

Harold explained that this was their wedding night, couldnt something be done?

So the hotel people rolled a bed into one of their conference rooms, and thats where we spent our honeymoon, Harold recalled recently, noting that the evening was most definitely memorable.

That at age 98, Harold can still recall his wedding night  save the name of the hotel and the town where it was located  might strike some as remarkable. Then again, remarkable is a few superlatives short of describing Harold and his 95-year-old bride Dorothy, who hopefully will celebrate 75 years of marriage together in August.

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We met in 1940, so weve really been together more like 80 years, noted Dorothy, who explained in great detail how the two met.

On Saturday nights, she and a few boys would crash dances after wedding ceremonies at Congregation Bnai Amoona, then on Academy Avenue in the city of St. Louis. There were so many people at the weddings we would be lost in the crowd, Dorothy recalled.

One Saturday night, Harolds cousin happened to be getting married there. While Dorothy was dancing with a friend a boy cut in, she said. There was a common practice in those days. The girls would just continue to dance with whoever cut in. In this case, it was someone I didnt know named Harold Schneider. Shortly thereafter, he phoned me for a date.

Dorothy was 15 at the time; Harold was 18. Both attended Soldan High School, though they didnt know each other before that fateful night.

And what did they think of each other after they first met?

He was smart, and he was kind, said Dorothy. Thats basically it.

She was very cute, and I liked her hairdo, Harold retorted. But she wasnt that good a dancer.

With Valentines Day approaching, the two sat down to reminisce about their romance and long, happy marriage, which produced three children, nine grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren, many of whom continue to live in St. Louis.

For me, the high points of being married as long as we have are the kids, the grandkids and the great grandkids, said Dorothy, adding that even during quarantine, they have been able to social distance with family through a screened-in porch. They all happen to be good people who care about us and come by to visit as frequently as they can.

The hardest part is not being able to hold any of the great grandkids.

From modest beginnings

Harold Schneider married Dorothy Kaufman on Aug. 18, 1946 at downtowns DeSoto Hotel. Dorothy remembers splurging on a wedding cake from Lake Forest Bakery while her mother, Minnie, sister Ruth and Ruths friends prepared fingertip sandwiches for the many guests, along with strudel and Minnie Kaufmans famous kamish (mandel) bread.

But the wedding didnt take place until after Harold completed his engineering degree at Washington University and served in the U.S. Navy. He spent several months training as an electronics service technician at the Navy Pier in Chicago, before he was dispatched for three years to the USS Tutuila repair ship, in Japan.

Dad told me that when he was based at Navy Pier, hed get a couple days off, but he wasnt given clearance to leave Chicago, said Terry Schneider, the couples son. So hed hitchhike to St. Louis to see my mother every weekend. He was afraid if he took the train, someone would see him in uniform and report him.

As the couple explains it, after World War II finding an affordable apartment in St. Louis proved difficult because there had been no new construction during the war years. So when two rooms above a grocery store became available, they pounced. Mind you, says Dorothy, the two rooms werent actually connected.

To get from one room to the other meant going through a common hallway, she said, where the shared bathroom was also located.

They learned about their next apartment, a small efficiency in a 100-unit building at 4500 Delmar Blvd., through a family friend. They made friends with many of the other young Jewish couples living there, partying at each others apartments and enjoying game nights together. We never had to leave the building for social events, Dorothy recalled.

Harold, with his engineering skills and know-how, rewired the apartment to accommodate an air-conditioner. Even better, the landlord agreed to pay the electric bill.

In 1951, the couple moved with their eldest, Barbara, to a small home in Richmond Heights. It cost $15,000 and was in the Clayton school district. Two weeks later, second child Kathy arrived, followed by son Terry a few years later.

In 1958, when it became clear the family needed more space, Harold spent the next three years designing and building an addition by himself, which doubled the size of the home.

My dad is just one of the hardest working people youve ever met, said Terry, explaining that Harold spent his professional career at Monsanto, where he worked his way up from hands-on engineering to operation management to big picture human resources management, developing training courses and standards for all Monsanto employees.

Terry jokes that no sooner did he start first grade, then his mother started job hunting. After high school, Dorothy had worked as a receptionist, secretary and legal stenographer, but stopped to stay home fulltime when she and Harold had children.

Eventually, she got a job at Brentwood Travel Services, where she developed a following of Washington University physicians and other professionals who were connected to her and Harolds huge network of friends and acquaintances. The job signaled the start of a 45-year career with the travel agency that took her and Harold, as well as other family members, to places all over the world  multiple times.

Whenever a grandchild turned 9 years old, they would take us anywhere we wanted to go in the United States, recalled grandson Adam Schneider, 33, Terrys son. I chose Washington, D.C. Every restaurant we ate out at during the entire trip, my grandparents would tell the waiter it was my birthday, so I got a celebration cake at every meal.

Family has been our joy

Both Adam and Terry, in separate conversations, talked about Harold and Dorothys eternal optimism and zest for life. You really cant talk about them without talking about their will and determination and how hardworking and reliable they are, said Terry. They are both very smart, forward thinking, positive people who do not quit trying to be relevant and interesting. They are dedicated to each other and so supportive. They go forward every day without looking back.

Of course, sometimes its hard not to look back, being the ages they are and sharing nearly 75 years of marriage together. Yet when they do so, there seems to be no regret. In fact, its quite the opposite.

Both say their greatest joy is each other and their family. They also are proud of the example they set. Their children and grandchildren each married wonderful people, they say, and no one, at least not at this point, has gotten a divorce.

When they downsized from their house in Richmond Heights, they landed in a larger high-rise condo in Clayton where they lived independently well into their 90s. They also split their time during retirement between homes in St. Louis and Longboat Key, Fla.

In fact, when asked what the key to their long, happy marriage is, Harold, the jokester, replied: We used to live in Florida for six months. She went in the winter and I went in the summer.

Badum-ching  so much for the borscht-belt humor. Besides, Harolds longtime hobby has been investing in the stock market while Dorothy is a die-hard Cardinals fan.

These days, the couple, who belong to Temple Israel, reside in an assisted-living facility in Richmond Heights. Harold is confined to a wheelchair because of neuropathy. Dorothy has limited sight and hearing. The pandemic has made them feel more isolated than ever before, though they are thankful for FaceTime and other technology that allows Harold to keep up with current events and Dorothy to play Words with Friends.

Unfortunately, they dont have many friends their age who are still alive. Were old. Sometimes I cant believe how old we really are, said Dorothy, laughing.

For Valentines Day, Harold plans to buy his sweetheart Dorothy flowers and enjoy dinner with her. In years past, Dorothy would bake Harold her mothers famous kamish bread, but nowadays he will have to make-do with two chocolate chip cookies for dessert.

Knowing that my wife cares about me and I care about her and that we have a mutual relationship with love and respect is the best part of our love story, said Harold.

And Dorothy? What words of wisdom or advice can she offer to couples during this month that celebrates love and romance?

Ignore the things that bother you about the other person, she said. And agree.


ANN ARBOR, MI  A man accused of assaulting a neighbor then setting his own apartment on fire, which caused the mass evacuation of more than 100 tenants, has been charged with arson.

Dave Andrew Clair was arraigned on one count each of first-degree arson, malicious destruction of police property and assault and battery Wednesday, Feb. 10.

Clair, 27, is accused of attacking a fellow resident at the Miller Manor Apartments, 727 Miller Avenue, late Sunday night, Feb. 7, then intentionally setting his own apartment of fire, according to the Ann Arbor Police Department.

One injured, one arrested for suspected arson in Ann Arbor apartment fire

Clair was arrested at the scene after he made several statements to police and residents admitting he started the fire. It is unclear exactly why he set his own apartment on fire, though it is believed mental health issues are factor, police said.

During his arraignment, Clair admitted he needed assistance and asked the court not to release him from jail unless hes being sent to a mental health facility.

I shouldnt be on the streets right now, he said.

Emergency crews were called to the 106-unit apartment building at 11:36 p.m. for a fire after heavy smoke was seen on the second floor of the seven-story building.

Crews arrived to find flames in the windows of one of the apartments. Due to the large number of tenants living in the building, crews called for additional support to assist with fire suppression and the evacuation of residents, officials said.

One resident was taken to Michigan Medicine to be treated for minor injuries. No firefighters were injured in the incident, officials said.

While being arrested, Clair was incoherent, acting erratically and damaged a police cruiser before being taken to the hospital for an emergency psychiatric evaluation, police said.

Clair was free on a personal recognizance bond in an unrelated case at the time of the fire.

In that case he is charged one count each with felonious assault, assault and battery and disturbing the peace for an incident that occurred at the Fleetwood Diner on Nov. 12. Clair is accused of repeatedly hitting a woman over the head with a plastic ketchup bottle after she told him he wasnt wearing his mask properly, and then hit a man with a coffee mug that shattered on the mans head, causing injuries, according to Ann Arbor police.

Another personal recognizance bond was granted for Clair with the stipulation he can only be released from the jail to an inpatient mental health facility or remain in jail with no bond.

Hearings for both cases are scheduled for March 25 in Ann Arbors 15th District Court. First-degree arson is punishable by up to life in prison.

Editors note: A previous version of this story had incorrect information from police about the incident that took place at the Fleetwood Diner on Nov. 12. It has since been updated with the accurate information.

More from The Ann Arbor News:

Take a virtual tour inside Ann Arbors new 7-story Broadway Street apartments

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Vaccination frustration: Washtenaw County has states lowest percentage of vaccinated teachers
Nestle Vietnam presenting the donation of nutritional products to quarantine areas and field hospitals in Hai Duong

In February, the company donated more than 30,000 Nescafe products to the frontline healthcare professionals in Hanoi Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Hopefully, frontline healthcare professionals will be healthy and alert to protect the health of the community. The total value of these products is more than VND1 billion ($43,480). This is the second round of support from Nestle Vietnam since the COVID-19 cases resurfaced in early 2021.

In the past year, Nestle Vietnam provided significant support to government agencies, business partners, and frontliners to fight COVID-19.

The Lunar New Year Holiday is a special occasion for every Vietnamese. It is an opportunity for family reunions and showing affection to beloved ones. Due to the resurgence of COVID-19 cases, many families will have to celebrate the holiday in quarantine areas and field hospitals. There are many children of preschool and primary age in these areas who are in need of comprehensive nutritional care both physically and mentally.

As a global company with local insights, Nestle Vietnam has collaborated with the Central Vietnam Women's Union, the Women's Union of Hai Duong province, and its partners to deliver nutritional products like milk and breakfast cereal as well as loving New Year greetings to nearly 1,000 children in quarantine areas and field hospitals in Hai Duong.

Binu Jacob, managing director of Nestle Vietnam, said that, As the world's leading nutrition, health, and wellness company, we would like to join forces with the government and community to fight against the COVID-19 pandemic as well as spread positive lifestyles for a healthier future.

In the past year, Nestle Vietnam and La Vie, a member of Nestle Group, have donated VND40 billion($1.74 million) including products, cash, and 88,000 medical masks to Vietnams COVID-19 fight.

The company has also offered support for small business partners affected by the pandemic like small restaurants, small eateries, and school canteens to overcome challenges with a total value of gifts up to VND22 billion ($956,520). At the same time, the company maintains sustainable business development by creating a safe and flexible working environment as well as ensuring employment with stable benefits for its employees.
Now Open

10 February 2021

IHG Hotels & Resorts one of the world's leading hotel companies, opens door to the newest hotel in the tricity - Holiday Inn Chandigarh Zirakpur in association with ABC Sites Pvt Ltd. Featuring 131 keys with scenic city views, the hotel is located on Chandigarh- Ambala highway connecting the city of Chandigarh to all famous landmarks and attractions in the Northern belt. Distanced just 20 minutes away from the Chandigarh International Airport and 25 minutes from the Chandigarh Railway Station, the hotel is an ideal destination for leisure and business travellers alike.

Holiday Inn Chandigarh Zirakpur opens to a capacious lobby area and appoints modern rooms, finished with technological additions and boasts of the largest gym in the Chandigarh city, spread across incredible area of 10,000 sq ft. Coupled with a dedicated team of experts and hospitable staff members, the hotel also offers two distinctive dining options; an All Day Dining Restaurant - Viva that brings together Indian, Italian and Asian cuisine and the Lounge Bar, overlooking the city, serving as the perfect spot for the guests to unwind and relax.

Besides, the new hotel provides an expansive indoor and outdoor space for corporate and social gatherings comprising of an impressive 8340 sq. ft. poolside terrace and 26000 sq. ft. of banqueting space. The incomparable banqueting space with 7200 sq. ft. of pillar-less grand ballroom and 4440 sq. ft. of pre-function area and rooftop pool terrace on the 14th floor that gives a 360-degree view of the city, makes the newly opened hotel a perfect venue for all kind of celebrations and events.

As part of the IHG family, Holiday Inn Chandigarh Zirakpaur will comply with IHG's Way of Clean industry-leading standards, including the new IHG Clean Promise. IHG's global Clean Promise was announced in May as part of an overhaul of IHG Way of Clean to introduce heightened cleanliness standards to protect guests in the wake of COVID. Using new, science-led protocols and service measures, partnering with industry leading experts Cleveland Clinic, Ecolab and Diversey, and launching a global IHG Clean Promise, these strengthened measures will give guests greater confidence and hotel teams the protection needed.

Holiday Inn Chandigarh Zirakpaur is the latest addition to one of the world's largest hotel companies, where guests can earn and redeem exclusive member benefits at over 5,900 hotels and major airlines globally through the IHG Rewards.

IHG currently has 42 hotels operating across five brands in SWA, including Six Senses, InterContinental Hotels and Resorts, Crowne Plaza, Holiday Inn , Holiday Inn Resort and Holiday Inn Express, and a strong pipeline of 54 hotels due to open in the next 2-3 years.
The Trump-ordered sale of TikTok by its Chinese owners to US companies Oracle and Walmart has been put on hold while President Biden reviews the executive order that strong-armed it.

In what could be a huge gift to Beijing, the new president was reported to have stopped a landmark action by his predecessor Donald Trump who called the app a threat to national security.

Last year, as TikTok erupted in the US amid a spike in social media usage thanks to the pandemic, concerns grew with it that ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns it, was using it to gather intelligence on American consumers.

Trump issued an executive order banning the app in the US unless ByteDance sold it to a US-owned company.

Oracle, which is owned by Trump mega-donor Larry Ellison, then stepped forward to buy it and Walmart joined in later. The Trump administration said it would endorse the deal.

ByteDance fought it and filed court papers contesting the executive order. Three federal judges sided with them but before Trump left office, his administration appealed those decisions and those appeals are still before the court.

On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal cited anonymous sources saying the entire deal had been put on hold while Biden's administration reviews the national security information that went behind it.

The Journal sources did not indicate whether Biden's team plans to reverse the executive order entirely. He may instead impose limits on how to restrict the collection or storage of user data rather than bans or forced sales.

TikTok has more than 8billion users worldwide and 100million are in the US. Last year, Trump signed an executive order banning it in the US unless its Chinese owner divested its US operations to an American company

Trump issued an executive order last August banning TikTok in the US unless it could be sold to a US company. Biden's administration has put the sale of it on ice while they review that order and the national security data that went behind it

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, when asked about the deal, played down the suggestion that Biden had ordered a stop to the deal but she was vague on other details.

'It's not accurate to suggest that there is a new proactive step by the Biden White House.

'We are comprehensively evaluating the risks to US data, including from TikTok.

'If we have news to announce, we will announce it,' she said.

It's unclear if he has ordered Walmart and Oracle to halt negotiations, but now there's a question of whether any sale will actually be necessary.

If Biden rescinds the executive order which banned TikTok and allows ByteDance to continue operating in the US, it will signal a victory for the Chinese and would stiff Walmart and Oracle out of a major opportunity.

Neither Walmart nor Oracle has commented on the Wall Street Journal report and both companies have been quiet on the details of the forced sale for months.

There remain huge questions about whether TikTok was gathering intelligence on US consumers for the Chinese government, as Trump claimed.

The company has always denied it.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison (left) who is a Trump mega-donor and Walmart CEO Doug McMillon (right). McMillon was among business leaders invited to the Oval Office on Tuesday to discuss Biden's economic revival plans

Trump's order meant that the Commerce Department had to shut down the app in the US by November 12 unless it was sold to a US company.

TikTok denies that it has ever given user data to the Chinese government. President Xi Jinping is pictured

It came after months of concern from policy makers about its fast-growing popularity and whether the Chinese government was using it to harvest information on Americans.

In October 2019, Senators Chuck Schumer and Tom Cotton asked the intelligence community to review the national security risks it posed.

In August 2020, Trump - acting on the suspicion that it did pose a risk - ordered the company to stop operating in the US.

By then, American teenage influencers had started making thousands of dollars per video and the app had grown its US audience to 100million users.

There was uproar among millennials, many of whom proudly claim on the app to have abandoned Facebook-owned Instagram in favor of it.

Trump then told ByteDance it had the option of selling the American branch of TikTok to a US-majority-owned company.

Oracle, which is run by his friend Larry Ellison, emerged as the buyer after a failed bid from Microsoft.

Trump endorsed the Oracle bid. He then said the US government should take a cut of the deal. One of the provisions of the sale was a $5billion education fund.
WASHINGTON - House impeachment managers on Wednesday led a rapt U.S. Senate on a harrowing retelling of the terror that engulfed the Capitol last month, sharing shocking new audio and video recordings of rioters declaring their intent to harm Vice President Mike Pence and other top officials - and showing how close they came to doing so.

The House Democrats, led by lead manager Jamie Raskin, D-Md., spent Day 2 of former president Donald Trump's impeachment trial displaying violent video scenes of the Jan. 6 attack and the rioters' relentlessly raw language, including chants to "hang" Pence and a sinister clip of a man looking for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi asking, "Naaaancy? Where aaaare you, Nancy?"

All of it, the impeachment managers said, was a direct result of the president's months-long effort to persuade his supporters of the "big lie" that the election had been stolen. After he had exhausted all other options to overturn President Joe Biden's victory, they said - including dozens of lawsuits and a sustained campaign to pressure state election officials - Trump turned his sights to Jan. 6, the day Congress was scheduled formalize Joe Biden's electoral college victory.

His supporters, the managers said, were heeding his calls with their violent plans to stop the vote count and even harm lawmakers.

"President Trump put a target on their backs," said Stacey Plaskett, a Democratic House delegate from the Virgin Islands, describing the threat to lawmakers and Pence. "And his mob broke into the Capitol to hunt them down."

Worse still, she and the other managers said, is that when lawmakers, Trump's aides and even his family members implored the president to call off the rioters as the attack unfolded, he refused initially to do so - because, the managers argued, he hoped the mayhem would block the electoral vote count.

"Senators, you've seen all the evidence so far," Rep Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, said toward the end of nearly eight hours of arguments. "And this is clear: On January 6th, President Trump left everyone in this Capitol for dead."

It was unclear whether the dramatic new evidence would change the minds of Republicans, most of whom have indicated their intent to acquit the former president on charges that he incited the Jan. 6 insurrection. A conviction would require the support of two-thirds of senators in the evenly divided chamber.

"They spent a great deal of time focusing on the horrific acts of violence that were played out by the criminals, but the language from the president doesn't come close to meeting the legal standard for incitement," said Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas.

Still, some GOP senators appeared shaken by the graphic video presentation, which included wrenching footage of an officer howling in pain as the mob crushed him in a doorway.

As the Senate recessed for dinner, Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., appeared to grow emotional at his desk, bending his head down. Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., who sits next to him, put his hand on Lankford's arm as if to comfort him.

"The evidence that has been presented so far is pretty damning," said Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, who has indicated she is open to conviction.

Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., called the case laid out by the House "gut-wrenching," adding: "I just hope that our Republican colleagues have an open mind."

Over and over again, the impeachment managers implored the senators to consider the message they wanted to send to Americans about the character of our country.

"That's the question before all of you in this trial: Is this America?" Raskin said. "Can our country and our democracy ever be the same if we don't hold accountable the person responsible for inciting the violent attack against our country?"

The House Democrats were expected to continue making their case Thursday, with Trump's lawyers expected to mount their defense Friday and Saturday. The Senate is not expected to vote on whether to allow witness testimony until after that, though Republicans and Democrats alike have said they want the trial to move at a swift pace. Democrats are eager to turn their attention back to President Biden's Cabinet appointees and a coronavirus relief bill, while Republicans simply want to turn the page on the former president's role in the insurrection.

In their presentations, the House managers revealed several gripping new details about the events that unfolded on Jan. 6 - including new surveillance footage showing Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, running down a hallway at a police officer's instruction seconds before rioters breached windows downstairs.

The officer, Eugene Goodman, had already been commended for leading rioters away from the Senate chamber as it was being evacuated, an act of heroism documented on a reporter's cellphone and widely circulated. The new scene with Romney took place just before then, the House managers said.

During a break in the trial, Romney told reporters he had no idea how close he'd been to harm's way - nor that Goodman was the officer who had helped him.

"I look forward to thanking him when I next see him," he said, adding: "It was obviously very troubling to see the great violence that our Capitol Police and others were subjected to. It tears at your heart and brings tears to your eyes. That was overwhelmingly distressing and emotional."

The managers also showed just how intent some of the rioters were on doing harm to elected leaders, actively searching for Pence at the same time he was being evacuated from a room off the Senate floor.

As Goodman led the mob up the stairs, the rioters were at one moment within 100 feet of the small room where the vice president was sheltering with his family, according to Plaskett. Goodman led the mob away from where Pence was hiding.

Surveillance video then shows Pence, along with his security detail and members of his family and staff, being evacuated down a Capitol stairway to a secure location away from the building. The evacuation took place at 2:26 p.m. - 14 minutes after rioters had entered the building.

On the other side of the building, the pro-Trump mob was banging on locked doors in search of Pelosi. House managers zoomed in on a widely circulated photo of a man sitting in a chair in Pelosi's office to reveal that he was wearing a stun gun on his belt.

As the House team walked senators through a timeline of the day's events, the managers used a diagram of the building to show where the rioters were in relation to elected officials - and how close they came to confrontation.

In another newly released bit of footage, Schumer can be seen being ushered along a basement hallway, disappearing - and then hastily changing direction with his security team after they encountered rioters blocking their planned route.

Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., showed senators an image of one rioter inside the Senate chamber with a large bunch of plastic handcuffs on his hip. "If the doors to this chamber had been breached just minutes earlier, imagine what they could have done with those cuffs," he said.

Salwell had the full attention of the Senate chamber with a 30-minute presentation designed to show them the events of Jan. 6 they were less familiar with: what happened on the House side and how police confronted the mob on the West Front of the Capitol.

He also played a chilling video of House members instructing one another to take off their identifying lapel pins.

Not until 2:30 p.m., 15 minutes after the Senate had stopped its proceedings and secured its doors, did the House fully implement internal security measures.

Republicans and Democrats intently watched every video Swalwell played, building to the confrontation just a few feet from the floor of the House chamber where a police officer shot and killed a rioter trying to enter the chamber.

Swalwell paused, and the Senate was silent as the sound of the gunshot resonated from the video. He then turned to footage of the rioters' attacks on police, again leaving the Senate in stunned silence.

When the impeachment managers began their presentation, which showed how the rioters flooded through the halls of the Capitol, many senators strained in their seats to get a better view of the video monitor.

In the back row on the Democratic side, Sens. Mark Warner of Virginia and Michael Bennet of Colorado took to their feet to watch. Bennett eventually sat down, but Warner paced behind his seat for several minutes before sitting back down.

On the Republican side, senators showed little emotion - but all paid close attention, most turning their heads away only occasionally to take notes.

As Plaskett played audio of police officers urgently summoning help, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell appeared very focused, leaning over to watch the screen on the GOP side. GOP Sen. Mike Lee of Utah took furious notes as he watched.

Trump is apparently aware of the emotional punch of the Democratic case. According to one adviser, he has pushed his team to produce its own videos to counters those of their opponents - including shots of Democratic lawmakers making controversial statements over the years.

The former president has talked to a number of advisers in the past 24 hours about the trial, including Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., his former chief of staff Mark Meadows, adviser Jason Miller and his lawyers, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Trump was displeased with the meandering presentation Tuesday by his lawyer Bruce Castor, but his team has persuaded him for now to stick with Castor and promised that the weekend would bring more prepared presentations.

The House managers began the day with a meticulous presentation documenting how Trump provoked the riot for weeks - beginning with his refusal to commit to a peaceful transfer of power before Election Day and his preemptive assertion that his defeat would mean the election had been rigged.

Senators heard him exhort his supporters in combat terms that "the election was stolen," to "stop the steal" and "to fight like hell." The impeachment managers described how Trump lost legal challenge after legal challenge - yet continued to claim he'd actually won the election. They documented how he pressured state officials in key battleground states to overturn the results.

And when all of those efforts failed, he set his sights on Jan. 6, the day Congress was scheduled to certify Biden's electoral college victory, because he "ran out of nonviolent options to maintain power," said Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif.

Trump even sent what the House managers described as a "save the date" message to his supporters more than two weeks ahead of Jan. 6, tweeting, "Be there, will be wild!"

Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, one of the impeachment managers, told senators that Trump's goal all along was "to make sure that his supporters were angry, like the election was being ripped away from them." And he showed how the resentment that Trump cultivated built up, playing footage of CNN interviews with Trump supporters who said they believed a Biden win would not be legitimate.

"Now, all of us in this room have run for election - and it's no fun to lose," Castro said. "I'm a Texas Democrat. We've lost a few elections over the years. But can you imagine telling your supporters that the only way you could possibly lose is if an American election was rigged and stolen from you? . . . But that's exactly what President Trump did."

"His words," Castro added, "became their actions."

The impeachment managers closed the day with a rundown of Trump's actions once the riot had begun. Castro showed video of Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., who first went on Twitter to tell Trump to "call it off" before giving a live television interview making the same plea. Castro also cited tweets by Mick Mulvaney, then-U.S. special envoy for Northern Ireland, and then-White House communications director Alyssa Farah urging Trump to call off the rioters because he is "the only one they'll listen to."

Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who has advised Trump, said on Jan. 6 that Trump not calling off the attack on the Capitol was an "abrogation of his responsibility" as commander in chief."He's right! Chris Christie is right!" Castro said. Rep. David Cicilline, D-R.I., laid out Trump's actions as the attacks were unfolding, showing how the president did nothing to stop them and instead remained focused solely on delaying the recognition of Biden's victory.

"We all know that President Trump had the power to stop these attacks. He was our commander in chief. He had the power to assess the security situation, send backup, send help. He also had incited this violent attack. They were listening to him. He could have commanded them to leave," Cicilline said. "But he didn't."

- - -

The Washington Post's Josh Dawsey, Colby Itkowitz, Seung Min Kim, Mike DeBonis, Ann E. Marimow, Amy B Wang and John Wagner contributed to this report.
Amit Shah likely to visit Meghalaya in March, NEC revamp on cards

India

pti-Madhuri Adnal

Shillong, Feb 10: Meghalaya Chief Minister Conrad K Sangma held a meeting with Union Home Minister Amit Shah in Delhi on Wednesday, during which the top central leader assured him that he would visit the state next month to discuss ways to revamp the North Eastern Council (NEC), an official statement said.

Sangma, along with his deputy Prestone Tynsong, raised several issues pertaining to the welfare of the people of the state at the meeting, it said. NEC is the nodal agency for economic and social development of the northeastern region.

According to the statement issued by the chief ministers office (CMO), the Union home minister also affirmed that he would hold meetings with pro-ILP groups during his two-day visit.

PM Modi to address BJP MPs on Thursday

Several organisations have been demanding immediate implementation of the Inner Line Permit (ILP) in the state. Shah has also asserted that he will do everything possible to ensure that the culture, identity and language of the people of the Northeast are safeguarded under all circumstances, the official statement noted.

Contending that issues of border fencing need to be resolved and expedited, the Union minister said that construction work hasn't begin in certain areas due to local bottlenecks and urged Sangma to ensure they are removed.

During the meeting, Shah also pointed out that "infiltration is a matter of concern not only in Meghalaya but also the entire North East and the whole country", the CMO said in its statement.
ALBANY  When Dutchess County opened its stabilization center in 2017, helping provide services for individuals in crisis, officials hoped the 24-hour drop-in center would reduce the countys jail population as well as avoidable hospital visits.

And while there have been some changes and growing pains along the way, Dutchess County Executive Marc Molinaro said the Mid-Hudson Valley county has seen success. Since the center opened, the county jail population has declined 40 percent, and thats before bail reforms were implemented, Molinaro said.

We believe that in most cases, we drove down jail populations because of the work that the stabilization does to centralize delivery, he said. There was a noticeable reduction in emergency room visits as well that we think is important. The emergency room and jail are the least effective tools to help someone in a mental health crisis.

The Dutchess County Stabilization Center provides 24-hour services for individuals who want to get sober or need a respite from their home for a period of time, and connect them to the right resources to help with the situation. The center partners with various service providers  from substance abuse prevention groups to local hospitals  in the community to ensure ease of access and delivery of services.

Now the model is being eyed at a state level: tucked in Gov. Andrew M. Cuomos executive budget proposal is a plan to launch Behavioral Health Stabilization centers, which would operate year-round and accept admissions at all hours without referral, including drop-offs by law enforcement and other first responders, according to the executive budget briefing book.

Stabilization centers operating in New York state have demonstrated that treating people in crisis in community-based programs results in better outcomes along with cost savings, when compared to traditional emergency services that are relied upon less for people experiencing mental health crisis in areas where stabilization centers are operating," said Freeman Klopott, a state budget office spokesman. "We fully expect these same results as the program expands in accordance with best practices and is informed by the experience of centers already in operation.

Molinaro said state and local lawmakers have toured the countys center with consideration of how a similar model could be brought to their respective communities.

How the state plans to roll out this initiative remains unclear. Outside of the budget document noting the creation of the centers would improve outcomes for individuals in crisis, state officials did not say how much would be budgeted for the initiative, how many centers would be created, or if the centers would model the one in Dutchess County.

We do believe the state (Office of Mental Health) understands the value of the facility and has learned a lot from our experience, Molinaro said. If that has helped the state to really seize this opportunity and present this as a model statewide, then thats wonderful.

The 2020 fiscal year budget authorized $50 million in capital funds to build the centers, and the budget proposal anticipates spending those funds as well as generating legislation that allows for those in crisis to be taken to a stabilization center rather than an emergency room, Klopott said. The Office of Mental Health will create 33 crisis-residential programs and at least 10 stabilization centers across the state, he added.

Laws and regulations already on the books require a community to apply for numerous waivers to operate and establish a stabilization center, the Dutchess County executive said, and so any plans to simplify that process will help in ramping up centers across the state.

Albany County Sheriff Craig Apple said he first learned of the states plans for stabilization centers following the countys announcement of a pilot program to have social workers and sheriffs EMS workers respond to mental health, addiction and other nonviolent 911 calls.

The pilot is using the model to respond to calls in the hilltowns as well as the outskirts of Guilderland, Bethlehem and Coeymans, where sheriff's deputies are typically the primary responders.

I told them I have a place at the jail, he said, referencing the converted space for the countys homeless improvement program. I would love you guys to consider that being one of the stabilization centers. We are doing exactly what they want to do, and I think it would be a huge cost savings because we already got the facility. I didnt really hear back on that.

Apple said a one-stop shop for residents experiencing a mental health or substance abuse crisis would be a welcome resource in the Capital Region. He said there is a dire need for the service.

I just think its overdue, he said of stabilization centers. I also think it kind of goes hand-in-glove with what the governor is proposing with bail and police reforms.

Dutchess Countys stabilization center relies solely on taxpayer funds to run  at a cost of $1.7 million annually, Molinaro said.

His hope is that New Yorks plan to bring the centers to scale will include consistent revenue streams for communities to operate the valuable resource, but engaging with community service providers  from hospitals to mental health and substance abuse clinics  is key, Molinaro said.

Youve got to empower the community to do it. Mental health is as much a personal health concern as it is a public health concern, as it is a social concern, he said. The stigma associated with it; the barriers that exist to it; the ridicule, hurt and anger --- all of that has to be brought together otherwise you wont effectively help those with mental wellness concerns.

Portland is expected to get snow Thursday and Friday, the first significant flurry of the winter. But it wont come close to the record.

Just over 78 years ago, on Jan. 21, 1943, the City of Roses saw the most snowfall ever recorded on a single day in the city. More than 15 inches dropped on downtown, with slightly less recorded at the airport.

King Winter Rules Barren Realm in Portland, stated The Oregonian headline over a photograph of magnificent blankness: a downtown street amid mounds of white, with lonely parking meters standing sentinel.

A larger headline stated: Storm Hampers Transport and War Plants. This blizzard came in the midst of World War II, lets remember.

The front page of The Oregonian on January 22, 1943, showcased a deserted downtown Portland.

In Portland, shipbuilding for the war effort continued, even though hundreds of workers couldnt make it to the shipyards. The main problem: the citys streetcars had ground to a halt, awaiting a recruited panzer corps of privately owned bulldozers to clear the rails. Snow forced a backup of 10 streetcars on Northeast Glisan Street in the afternoon. Seeing the motormen shivering in front of their house, a young couple invited them in for sandwiches and coffee. Some of the streetcar drivers ended up staying the night.

Travel wasnt any better for automobiles. Cars skidded into ditches or spun in place throughout that January day. The local Office of Defense Transportation ordered milkmen off the roads except in cases of emergency.

As temperatures outside dropped to 18 degrees Fahrenheit, a banquet room at the Mallory Hotel was turned into a temporary dormitory for Portlanders stuck downtown.

The Associated Press weighed in, informing the rest of the country that Old Man Oregons domain was in the soggy grip of winter today with considerable snow and an underlayer of ice on the ground.

The January 1943 snowstorm caused problems at airbases throughout the Northwest. (The Oregonian archive)

At least three deaths were attributed to the storm, including a 12-year-old who died after crashing his makeshift sled.

If you could make it out of your home, The Oregonian recommended a movie opening that day at the Broadway Theater. The new film was loaded with intrigue, double-crossing and romance, and it had plenty of thrills. Casablanca Rich Drama, offered the headline.

The classic film "Casablanca," starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, opened in Portland in the midst of a snowstorm.bn

Also playing (to mostly empty houses thanks to the weather): Yankee Doodle Dandy, starring James Cagney, and the Jack Benny vehicle George Washington Slept Here. The Mayfair Theater at Broadway and Taylor streets presented the Gordon Douglas film The Devil With Hitler, in which Hells board of directors considers replacing Satan with Der Fuhrer.

Being on a war footing, Portland quickly dug out from the piles of snow. The city issued a plea for volunteers to help clear streets and sidewalks. Hundreds responded to the call to duty. Soon the shipyards had returned to full output, and milk deliveries resumed.

-- Douglas Perry

dperry@oregonian.com

@douglasmperry



Koo has received an understandable boost thanks to its latest adoption by central government ministers. Speaking to News18, founder Mayank Bidawatka has revealed that over the past six months, since the announcement of Koo being one of the winners of the MyGov Aatmanirbhar App Challenge, downloads for the app has grown 4x. With the latest boost that Indias own Twitter clone has received from ministers signing up on the platform, Koo has now crossed gross downloads of 3 million, and Bidawatka says that he naturally expects the growth pace of his app to continue at a steeper, more exponential pace in the next few months.

Bidawatka further added that in the coming time, the Koo app will expectedly undergo a few changes as it matures into a more engaged ecosystem. New policies will be necessitated in the due course of time. We aim to meet all guidelines and regulations issued by the central government, and maintain the overall sanctity of our platform, so a natural course of changes may come about in the due course of time, Bidawatka added. He further confirmed that as of now, there have been no communication from the Indian government to Koo in terms of operating policies, or any guideline as such.

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Back when Koo first made news after being ranked as one of the top made in India apps, Bidawatka had projected Koos adoption among politicians in India as one of the biggest scopes of its growth. In a previous interview with News18, he had said, There is certainly a large amount of interest in following key personalities and listening to what these people are saying among our users. It is this gap that we are targeting, and we believe that the scope of organic growth in this space is great in India, as more people come online in the country.

He had further underlined the rationale behind a platform like Koo, saying, A personality like PM Modi would not want to associate with a platform like TikTok. However, a platform like Koo can give him good scope to reach out to his vernacular followers, such as those who speak Gujarati. His projection appears to have come good, after union ministers announced a wider adoption of Koo to reach out on social media services.

Twitter, on which Koo is modelled, is at an inflection point with the Indian government, after reports claimed that the platform has refused to keep banned individuals that the Indian government had requested to censor. However, with the urban population still heavily centred on Twitter in terms of micro-blogging platforms, it may take a fair amount of time before Koo becomes a platform of major consequence. The expedited push by Indias ministers will help Koo on this note, even though Bidawatka refused to share monthly active users count that his app is seeing at the moment.
Police have charged a Rottnest Barge skipper over the death of a Perth grandfather after the mammoth vessel ploughed into his small fishing boat.

Nine News Perth exclusively revealed 80-year-old John Gillard allegedly had just 10 seconds notice before he was hit.

The grandfather and his 77-year-old friend Peter Whittaker were fishing in a small speed boat in waters off Fremantle in January when the accident happened.

Police say the Rottnest Barge approached them from behind, and allege that by the time the men turned around and saw the vessel, they had just seconds before impact.
Valentines Day will not be rosy for retailers or restaurants.

The coronavirus is leaving American consumers feeling blue. While two-thirds of people said they bought Valentines gifts in 2020, less than half will this year, according to Numerator, a market research firm. Nearly half said they bought flowers last year, but only 31 percent will spring for roses this time.

Restaurants will take the biggest hit. The number of people who said they would go out to eat dropped by 27 percentage points from 2020 to just 17 percent. Ordering for delivery or cooking at home are the only two activities Americans say they will do more this year than last.

Lending Tree reports their survey showed 40 percent of Americans will skip Valentines entirely.

TOMLINSONS TAKE: Vaccine offers promise, but COVID still requires discipline, sacrifice in months ahead

A lot of people are suffering from low-level depression, and recent economic indicators reveal why. The U.S. economy only added 49,000 jobs this month, and the Labor Department revised Novembers and Decembers results lower.

On balance, the U.S. lost 227,000 jobs over the last three months.

"We have 10 million people unemployed, 4 million have dropped out of the labor market and another 2 million are working part time who really would like full-time work," Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told CBS on Sunday Morning. "We're in a deep hole with respect to the job market and a long way to dig out."

Retailers should not be surprised that the number of consumers planning to buy Valentines gifts has dropped 20 percentage points. But understanding a terrible blow to your business does not lessen the pain.

Retail sales have been declining since October, according to the Census Bureau, with local brick-and-mortar stores suffering the most. Restaurants and bars have reported a 21 percent drop in business compared to December 2019.

"The December retail sales results were an absolute disaster, Stephen Stanley, chief economist at Amherst Pierpont Securities, said in a note to investors. The good news is that these losses are likely to be reversed once the pandemic abates, but in the meantime, things look like they were worse than I had previously thought.

Online retailers, meanwhile, saw 32 percent year-over-year growth in holiday shopping last year. Average daily online revenue exceeded $3.1 billion, up from $2.3 billion in 2019, according to Adobe Digital Insights. Numerator predicts those same websites will see a boost for Valentines Day.

Not all of that holiday spending will go toward gifts. Online grocery sales were up 404 percent, signaling another shift in pandemic behavior that could stick.

In light of the pandemic, digital has become the primary way for people to connect, work, be entertained and shop, Taylor Schreiner, director of Adobe Digital Insights, summarized. Online spending is expected to stay elevated, at least for the early part of 2021.

As the pandemic drags on, COVID-19s toll in bankruptcies will grow. Coresight Research, which tracks the retail sector, predicts 10,000 stores will close in 2021 after 8,741 closed in 2020, according to CNBC News.

U.S. retailers Bed Bath & Beyond, Macys and J.C. Penney have already said they will close a combined 1,678 stores this year. Every store that closes, including locations in Houston and San Antonio, leaves dozens unemployed.

Nevertheless, thousands of businesses are fighting to hang on because owners know the pandemic will not last forever. More than a million Americans are getting vaccinated every day, and most economists predict a strong rebound later this year as they release pent-up demand.

Data analysis and consulting firm IHS Markit upwardly revised its 2021 U.S. economic growth forecast on Monday.

The new near certainty of a $1.9 trillion pandemic relief measure by springcoming against the backdrop of falling COVID-19 infection rates, some relaxation of containment measures, and an acceleration of the national inoculation campaignencouraged us to revise up our forecast of GDP growth for 2021 from 4 percent to 5.7 percent, Joel Prakken, IHSs chief US economist, said.

TOMLINSONS TAKE: Texas retailers must upgrade to survive the coronavirus

Most economists predict employment will not return to pre-pandemic levels until 2023, though. But that could change depending on how American consumers behave this year.

Every time we spend a dollar, we are casting a vote for which businesses we want to survive. Do we value a big online retailer over a local store, a one-of-a-kind restaurant or a national franchise?

If you have lost your job, or youre worried about it, by all means, save your money. But at least half of us are doing just fine financially and can afford to spend.

The world needs a lot more love right now, so why not send some flowers, buy a bauble, or order a to-go meal from a nice restaurant. Sending a Valentine of any kind will lift up everyones mood.

Chris Tomlinson writes commentary about business, economics and politics.

twitter.com/cltomlinson

chris.tomlinson@chron.com
Wavemaker has completed the global roll out of a new AI-powered media planning platform, Maximize, that allows planners to create media plans that reach multiple audiences and optimise media investments in just a matter of minutes.

Increasing audience fragmentation is adding complexity and time to the media planning process for both the client and the agency. Maximize allows planners to deliver on the industry-wide vision of planning against individuals rather than audience segments. The result is planning at a granular customer level, with the power to simultaneously explore multiple audiences across many attributes and assess the best media partners to create an optimised campaign across channels and market, in record time.

Driven by AI and machine learning, Maximize ingests and analyses data from global and local sources including client 1st party data, GroupMs LivePanel and Wavemakers own Momentum data, and is part of Wavemakers global Provocative Planning system, a modular system that fuses machine learning and human intelligence to get the best from both.

Toby Jenner, Global CEO of Wavemaker, explains further: Maximize addresses one of the industrys longest standing frustrations  that all media plans look the same. Pre-loaded with strong data sources and packed with AI, Maximize produces media plans at incredible speed and has the brainpower to create market-beating growth plans for our clients.

It is already delivering results, producing media plans that are on average 30% more effective for clients and in pitches, helping us reach the ranking of most successful media agency in the COMvergence new business barometer for Q1-Q3 2020.

Stephan Bruneau, Global Head of Product at Wavemaker, who lead the project, adds: Creating media plans has become challenging due to the increased number of audience segments that need to be included in a campaign. Some can overlap significantly, with people belonging to multiple audience segments at risk of being over exposed to ads and creating an unnecessary waste of money for clients. Maximize uses techniques and technology rarely used in the marketing industry and is effectively the only way to solve the audience fragmentation problem.

Stephan Pretorius, Global Chief Technology Officer at WPP, commented: AI has extended its sphere of influence to many aspects of marketing, but until now not in media planning. Wavemakers exciting new AI-powered planning platform Maximize is set to transform the way its teams work and empower its planners to produce the most effective and efficient media plans yet for clients in an increasingly complex and fragmented media landscape.

Maximize was developed by a project team of 75 strategists, planners, data architects, data scientists, software developers, testers and designers based at Wavemakers campus in Warsaw, with user design support from WPPs Mirum.

During development the team did human vs. machine parallel tests, challenging an experienced team of planners to create a plan that would optimise reach across three overlapping audiences, and they could not complete the task. Every time they improved reach for one audience, they lost reach for the other two. In contrast, Maximize solved the problem in just 1.5 minutes. Using Maximize free the Wavemaker planners to work more creatively, focusing on the innovative methods they can also provoke growth for clients.
Kigali, Feb. 09, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Pan-African energy leasing company, Solarise Africa, today announced their expansion into three new countries in Africa after signing a partnership agreement with Centennial Generating Co, a leading turnkey energy services company in the region.

The partnership adds seven projects in Rwanda, spread across education, healthcare, retail, manufacturing, hospitality, and agriculture sectors, two additional projects in Zambia and one upcoming project in Uganda, to the Solarise Africa portfolio. This comes after Solarise Africa last year raised $10M in its Series B funding round, bolstering their focus on expansion into Africa.

The Solarise team is a customer-centric, responsive and predictable partner, which aligns with our companys approach to working with customers, said David John Frenkil, Founder and Managing Director of Centennial.

By partnering with Solarise, we are offering both battery energy storage and solar projects to commercial and industrial facilities. These projects are fully financed with turnkey engineering and asset management services. Centennials projects are designed to improve our customers profitability, stabilize their power supply and support their commitments to achieving sustainability goals.

He continued by saying that an example is a portfolio of HIV testing and treatment facilities that uses energy-intensive freezers required for storing vaccines. By using solar and battery energy storage, the customer has reduced power costs while also ensuring the operation of the cold storage for vaccines which support the treatment of over 2,200 at-risk patients every month.

Our solutions allow business customers to bridge the financing hurdle and reduce dependability on an unstable power grid. This greatly improves up-time and productivity said Patrik Huber, Co-Founder and Managing Director for East Africa at Solarise Africa.

One of our new projects power one of the largest commercial buildings in Rwanda. Sustainable energy provides reliable electricity that reduced its power costs by over 50%. That is the kind of impact solar can have and we are proud to help make it happen.

Solarise Africa is currently active in five countries and plans to significantly expand its portfolio throughout 2021.

About Solarise Africa

Solarise Africa is a pan-African energy leasing company. Through their smart financing solutions, they unlock possibilities and empower their partners to thrive and actively drive Africas progress. Solarise Africa works with a selected group of renewable energy solution companies and they collaborate very closely with their partners to provide a range of tailor-made financial solutions for their customers. They offer innovative leasing solutions that require minimal capital expenditure with short payback periods that companies save money. For more information, please visit www.solariseafrica.com

About Centennial

Centennial is a turnkey energy services and financing company with a proven track record in delivering high-quality battery energy storage and solar projects for commercial and industrial facilities in Sub-Saharan Africa. Since 2014, Centennial has financed, designed, installed, operated and maintained projects for customers that include Fortune 500 businesses, publicly-traded companies and other leading organizations. For more information, please visit https://www.centennialgen.com/.

For the original news story, please visit https://www.prdistribution.com/news/solarise-africa-expands-pv-footprint-in-africa-2.html

Attachment

Contra Costa County officials temporarily issued a public health advisory for portions of Richmond, North Richmond and San Pablo after an oil spill sent roughly 600 gallons of a petroleum and water mixture into San Francisco Bay at the Chevron Refinery in Richmond on Tuesday, authorities said.

The cause of the spill was not immediately known, but officials at the scene determined that roughly 600 gallons leaked, Bay Area Air Quality Management District officials said on Twitter.

Chevron officials told The Chronicle that refinery employees observed a sheen on the water near the facilitys wharf at about 3 p.m. and launched their response protocol.

Oil was no longer spilling, officials said in a statement at about 5 p.m., and the clean-up was underway. Contra Costa Health Services issued an All Clear and lifted the health advisory for the area before 9 p.m. Tuesday, but urged residents in Richmond, North Richmond and San Pablo to open their doors and windows to air out buildings and homes.

The investigation into the spill is a multi-agency effort involving Chevron, the U.S. Coast Guard, California Office of Spill Prevention and Response, California Department of Fish and Wildlife, and Contra Costa County, Chevron officials told The Chronicle. Other state and federal agencies may elect to join the investigation, said Tyler Kruzich, a Chevron spokesperson.

Kruzich told The Chronicle that Chevron officials are developing an estimate of how much hydrocarbon was released, in addition to testing the hydrocarbon to determine its composition.

County Supervisor John Gioia  who said on Facebook that there was a 5 gallon-per-minute leak of a petroleum product at the Chevron Richmond Long Wharf  said the leak started around 2:40 p.m. and continued until about 4:30 p.m.

Park District closed local beaches and petroleum washed ashore along South Richmond shoreline which will harm wildlife and marine life, Gioia said.

Beaches in the area had been closed during the clean up process, and Chevron officials had asked the public to stay away from the impacted area so crews could  quickly contain and clean up the released volumes.

County officials said the incident could be harmful for people with respiratory sensitivities. Anyone who experiences irritation should go inside and rinse any irritated area of their body with water, officials said.

Firefighters and Chevron officials were at the scene working to contain the leak and Contra Costa County hazmat personnel responded to the scene, Gioia said on Facebook.

Richmond Fire Department officials said on Facebook that Chevron reported the oil spill into the bay at 3:43 p.m. Tuesday.

Officials with the U.S. Coast Guard and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife responded to the scene. Chevron officials said they are cooperating with authorities.

Lauren Hernandez is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: lauren.hernandez@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ByLHernandez

MONTREAL, QC, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Hardbacon, a personal finance application used by more than 25,000 Canadians, has announced its intention to go public in 2021.

The company has proved itself a pioneer in equity crowdfunding with over 1,000 shareholders. Hardbacon raised more than $1 million through its first two rounds on the regulated GoTroo and FrontFundr platforms.

"Having proved our concept to thousands of satisfied users, now is the time for us to pour fuel on the fire," said Hardbacon CEO Julien Brault. "This IPO will allow Hardbacon to accelerate its growth and pursue strategic acquisitions."

Hardbacon has retained the services of lawyer Michel Lebeuf of the law firm Dunton Rainville. Lebeuf has helped no less than 30 companies go public in Canada and the United States.

Veronique Laberge, CPA, auditor, also joins Hardbacon as its new Director of Finance ahead of the IPO. Laberge has several years of experience as CFO of publicly traded companies.

"Going through social equity financing led us to reach the minimum number of shareholders required to go public," said Brault, a longtime former business reporter at Les Affaires. "More importantly, it ensures that we've already complied with many of the regulatory requirements imposed on listed companies," said Hardbacon CEO Julien Brault.

Hardbacon's decision comes at a time when initial public offerings (IPOs) are on the rise in Canada. According to PwC Canada, the value of IPOs jumped 500% between 2019 and 2020 to reach $5 billion.

About Hardbacon

Bacon Financial Technologies, better known by its brand name Hardbacon, is dedicated to helping Canadians make better financial decisions, get wealthier and achieve their financial goals. The company, which has secured $1.1 million in funding, markets a mobile app that links to its users' accounts and helps them plan, budget and invest. Hardbacon also enables its users to compare different financial services such as credit cards, bank accounts, online brokers and robo-advisers. The company also markets its technology to financial institutions to help them accelerate their digital transformation.

Disclaimer: The news site hosting this press release is not associated with Hardbacon, Bacon Financial Technologies or Julien Brault. It is merely publishing a paid press release announcement submitted by a company, without any stated or implied endorsement of the person, product, service or information above. Please consult a registered investment advisor or CFP before making any investment. This is not a solicitation.

Press Contact:

Julien Brault

5142503255

https://hardbacon.ca/

SOURCE Hardbacon

Related Links

https://hardbacon.ca/


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Ohio lawmakers in March approved pandemic changes to municipal income tax rules. (Jeremy Pelzer, cleveland.com file photo)

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Cleveland firefighters discovered a burning body beneath a mattress early Tuesday morning in the southwest corner of Ohio City, authorities said.

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Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., center, as well as Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., left, and Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, right, arrive Tuesday for the second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump.AP

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Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-10 16:43:29|Editor: huaxia

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SUVA, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- A total of 37,282 hectares of lands in Fiji have been planned to undergo emission reduction programs, Minister for Economy Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum said on Wednesday.

According to Fiji Broadcasting Corporation (FBC), Khaiyum, who is also the minister responsible for affairs related to climate change, said in the parliament that the lands involved in the program are in Fiji's three largest islands of Viti Levu, Vanua Levu, and Taveuni.

The minister said that the lands are potentially to be expanded.

Fiji is expected to get support by the World Bank's Carbon Fund for its programs include forestation of degraded land, sustainable management of designated timber production forests, protection of the existing natural forests, incorporation of trees into farming and agricultural systems and promotion of forests-based livelihood ventures.

Khaiyum said that the five-year agreement will unlock around 25.4 million Fijian dollars (about 12.5 million U.S. dollars) in result-based payments for reducing emissions and boosting climate resilience.

He said the funds will be directed to resource owners as incentive payments through a benefit-sharing plan developed by the Fijian government in collaboration with the World Bank.

Fiji has been working to plant 4 million timber, fruit, ornamental and other trees in a four-year initiative, which is part of the Fijian government's renewed efforts to fight against climate change and protect Fiji's environment and rich biodiversity.

Fiji is also planning to plant 500,000 mangrove trees in the next three years to protect the coastal ecosystems. In 15 years the Fijian government aims to plant 30 million trees for protecting environment. Enditem
Catherine Murphy of the Social Democrats claims 'we have left ourselves exposed'. (Tom Burke)

THE Government is insisting that the absence of a World Health Organisation (WHO) required competent authority for dealing with contagious diseases at our ports and airports is not affecting Irelands Covid-19 response.

It emerged today Ireland is in breach of WHO International Health Regulations (IHR) because of the lack of monitoring facilities for such diseases.

Documents released to RTE under the Freedom of Information Act also show Ireland has been non-compliant for around 10 years, despite high-level discussions on the issue between the HSE, the Health Department and Transport Department.

The opinion that Ireland is leaky in terms of ports and airports has been put forward by the National Public Health Emergency Team (Nphet) as a reason why a zero-Covid strategy proposed by academics and some politicians would be unworkable in Ireland.

In a document from January last year, the Health Surveillance Protection Centres interim director reported that no competent authority existed at Dublin, Cork and Shannon airports, and the ports at Dublin, Cork, Rosslare, Limerick and Waterford, the documents said.

Ireland's most recent self-assessments on IHR compliance, which were submitted to the WHO in 2018 and 2019, reported no ability to identify risk at points of entry to the country, they add.

In a statement, the Health Department said non-compliance with the IHR does not affect Irelands pandemic response at ports and airports in any practical way, and that checks are carried out by health officers under existing domestic law and other regulations.

Following engagement between the Department and HSE, work was conducted to progress this issue during the course of 2019, including the commencement of a review of the relevant legislation by the Department and the submission of a proposal document by the HSE, a Health Department spokesperson told Independent.ie.

Read More

This work was paused following the onset of the pandemic. The issue has had no impact on the pandemic response.

Commenting on the lack of a competent authority at ports, Catherine Murphy of the Social Democrats said we had left ourselves exposed by not setting one up.

Members of her party has been advocates of the zero-Covid strategy, and the Kildare North TD said Ireland has a history of being reactive rather than proactive when it comes to building institutions.

We have tended to take a laissez faire approach to regulations and treat them as a box-ticking exercise, and Covid has highlighted a lot of our inadequacies in this regard, said Ms Murphy.

This matter about the authority to deal with contagious diseases coming into the country has been ongoing for a few years now, and anyone that says another pandemic wont happen again is likely to be wrong.

We have left ourselves exposed by not clearing this matter up, and by not having a proper health care system or enough ICU beds.

We seem to be good at solving problems because weve had a lot of practice at it, but we need to think of ways of stopping the problems occurring in the first place and we would be supportive of measures to fix this.

The fact that there are two jurisdictions on the island is an issue in sorting this out, but we have to realise that controls like these authorities are there for our wellbeing. Weve got away with it up to now but it needs to be resolved, she added.

A group of academics presented the case for zero Covid to the Special Oireachtas Committee on Covid last August.

They suggested stopping the virus through a ban on non-essential foreign travel along with testing, isolation and strict tracking of people once they arrive into the country.

Last month, Nphet said the zero-Covid strategy advocated by opposition politicians was impractical and risky.

It is an utterly false promise to say we can go to Level 0 or 1 in the space of weeks or months, said Prof Philip Nolan, chair of Nphets epidemiological modelling advisory group.

That wont happen, and it would be an incredibly risky thing to do because we will inevitably be a leaky country and get reintroduction of disease, and that could easily be new variants, he added.

Eight Minnesota jail guards filed a lawsuit Tuesday alleging racial discrimination after they were barred from working on the floor where a former police officer charged in George Floyd's death was being held.

The eight guards, who identify as African American, Hispanic, Pacific Islander American and multiracial, say they were segregated and prevented from doing their jobs at the Ramsey County jail solely because of the color of their skin.

The guards have accused Steve Lydon, the superintendent of Ramsey County Adult Detention Center, of enforcing a 'segregation order' that meant only white corrections officers could guard or interact with Derek Chauvin, the ex-cop filmed kneeling on Floyd's neck.

They say Lyndon believed they could not be trusted to professionally perform their duties around Chauvin and he allegedly told a lieutentant 'let's not have officers of color working with [Chauvin] on the 5th floor'.

According to the suit, when challenged about the segregation order, Lyndon claimed he is not racist but had acted to 'protect them because if something happened to Chauvin, the officers of color would be blamed'.

However, two of the officers also claim to have seen surveillance footage of a white lieutenant getting 'special access' to Chauvin's cell and allegedly letting him use her cell phone.

Eight guards at the Ramsey County jail, picured above, filed a lawsuit on Tuesday claiming discrimination after they were moved from guarding former police officer Derek Chauvin

Derek Chauvin (left) is now out on bail and scheduled to go to trial in March on charges of second-degree murder and manslaughter for the death of George Floyd (pictured right)

Ramsey County Jail Superintendent Steve Lydon claims he 'erred in judgement' after he kept minority officers at the Minnesota detention center away from ex-cop Derek Chauvin

The lieutenant is not identified in the suit but according to the Star Tribune, was previously named in correspondence between lawyers and the Sheriff's Office as Lt. Lugene Werner.

The paper adds that Werner is related to Chauvin's sister by marriage.

Floyd's death on May 25 sparked protests in Minneapolis and beyond, and led to a nationwide reckoning on race.

Chauvin was arrested May 29 and brought to the Ramsey County Adult Detention Center, before he was transferred to a state prison.

He is now out on bail and scheduled to go to trial in March on charges of second-degree murder and manslaughter.

The guards, whose tenure ranges from two to 10 years, claim that on the day he arrived to the county jail, they were ordered to a separate floor and a black sergeant was forbidden from bringing Chauvin to his cell, simply because of their race.

'Segregation has no place in society or the workplace and on May 29, 2020, eight Ramsey County correctional officers experienced blatant discrimination based on their race and skin color,' said Lucas Kaster, an attorney for the guards.

'Ramsey County's segregation order caused immediate and lasting harm to the correctional officers and the jail environment.'

The guards allege Ramsey County violated the Minnesota Human Rights Act by discriminating against them because of their race, and by creating a hostile work environment.

The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages, including damages arising from loss of past and future income and benefits and damages for mental anguish and suffering.

The board of commissioners for Ramsey County is the sole defendant.

Extra defenses being installed at the Ramsey County Law Enforcement Center where disgraced former cop Derek Chauvin was being held during the summer

Lydon said his decision to segregate officers of color away from Chauvin was 'to protect and support' minority employees inside the jail (pictured) but they said they were never told

Some of the guards went on leave and missed pay due to the discrimination, and one no longer works as a guard, the lawsuit says.

Ramsey County spokesman John Siqveland said in a statement Tuesday that the county board and sheriff had participated in voluntary mediation with the officers starting in July in an attempt to resolve their claims, but they were unable to reach a settlement.

He had no comment on the lawsuit, citing the active litigation. A message left with the sheriff's office was not returned.

According to the lawsuit, before Chauvin arrived at the jail, Superintendent Steve Lydon prohibited all correctional officers of color from interacting with or guarding him.

One guard, a plaintiff in the case, had the routine responsibility of booking and supervising the transport of high-risk or high-profile inmates.

When Chauvin arrived, the guard, who is black, began the routine booking process, including a pat down of Chauvin.

The guards have accused Steve Lydon, the superintendent of Ramsey County Adult Detention Center, of enforcing a 'segregation order' that meant only white corrections officers could guard or interact with Chauvin, as pictured in the 30-page lawsuit filed on Tuesday

'Let's not have officers of color working with [Chauvin] on the 5th floor', the suit claims Steve Lydon, the superintendent of Ramsey County Adult Detention Center, said

Lydon was watching and said he did not want that guard to complete the booking process, and instead, two white officers finished it.

A short time later, another guard who is a plaintiff came into the booking unit said he as reassigned from the fifth floor, where Chauvin was being housed, because Lydon did not want him or any other minorities near Chauvin.

Another plaintiff who was watching cameras in the jail noticed that guards who were minorities were all working on the third floor instead of being dispersed throughout the building as usual.

When there was a call for help on Chauvin's floor due to an uncooperative inmate, minority guards who responded were turned away and prohibited from going on that floor to help, the lawsuit says.

The lawsuit says that white officers and non-white guards who have lighter skin were not reassigned duties.

In one case, one of the plaintiffs was watching cameras when he saw a white lieutenant, identified earlier as Werner, get special access to Chauvin on May 30.

That lieutenant went into Chauvin's cell, sat on his bed and patted his back to comfort him. It also appeared the white guard allowed Chauvin to use a cell phone, the lawsuit says.

Werner denied the claims to the Star Tribune, claiming they were 'unfounded' as she refused to confirm her links to Chauvin.

The lawsuit claims Lydon's segregation order caused 'immediate and long-lasting damage'

Derek Chauvin is the white Minneapolis officer who pressed his knee on the neck of George Floyd, a handcuffed black man who was pleading for air before he died on May 25

Kaster said that they were unaware of her alleged personal ties to Chauvin until after the guards had filed their public complaints.

'Her being on duty isn't necessarily something that we would take issue with, but her receiving some special privileges and Officer Chauvin receiving some special privileges would certainly be something that we would take issue with,' he said.

Kaster added in a news conference Tuesday that the reassignment of the guards called into question their ability to do their jobs professionally, solely because of the color of their skin.

'The impact on our clients has been immense. They're deeply humiliated and distressed and the bonds necessary within the high stress and high pressure environment of the (jail) have been broken,' Kaster said.

The guards also filed a complaint with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights in June but asked to have it closed so they could pursue litigation.

The board of commissioners for Ramsey County and the Ramsey County Sheriff's Office said it also tried to solve the issue with voluntary mediation in July.

'Unfortunately, the parties were unable to achieve a settlement,' they said in a statement.

'Now that the officers have decided to pursue a lawsuit in state court, the County Board will follow their customary practice of withholding public comment during pending litigation.'

Ramsey County initially denied that there was any sort of segregation order, but the Star Tribune previously reported that Lydon later told his superiors that he issued the order 'to protect and support' minority employees.

'Out of care and concern, and without the comfort of time, I made a decision to limit exposure to employees of color to a murder suspect who could potentially aggravate those feelings,' Lydon said in a statement last summer.

The guards have said that the sentiment was never communicated to them and that they continue to feel 'deeply humiliated, distressed and negatively impacted'.

The suit also adds that no policy changes have been made to prevent it from happening again.

The Star Tribune reported that Lydon was demoted last June as the sheriff's office agency conducted an internal investigation. The results of the investigation are not clear.

Bonnie Smith, another attorney for the guards, said the case is 'shocking in some ways because of how overt it is. You know, this is a decision that was made expressly and only because of the color of our clients' skin and their race.'
There was such a paucity of facts in the Crown case against former politician Eddie Obeid that the judge could not be satisfied of his guilt, his barrister April Francis said in her closing submission to the NSW Supreme Court.

Ms Francis, who arrived at court in a wheelchair due to a leg injury, was critical of the prosecutions case, saying it was full of conceptual difficulties and it was challenging for the defence lawyers to unravel the riddle that is the indictment.

Eddie Obieds barrister April Francis arrives at the Supreme Court in a wheelchair. Credit:Steven Siewert

The Crown case is that sometime between September 1, 2007 and late May 2008, Eddie Obeid, 77, and his son Moses, 51, became part of a conspiracy with former mining minister Ian Macdonald, 71.

Mr Macdonald is alleged to have provided inside information to the Obeids about a coal exploration licence which was eventually granted over the Obeids rural property in the Bylong valley.
Eric Peebles has spastic cerebral palsy from oxygen deprivation at birth and is functionally quadriplegic. He gets around in a powered wheelchair and needs help with essential tasks like bathing and dressing.

Peebles doesnt want to live in a nursing home at age 39, and for that reason, he is not yet eligible for a vaccine.

I have a known underlying medical condition, and Im still standing in the breadline wanting to get punched in the arm, he said. That doesnt make sense.

This week Alabama expanded vaccine eligibility to people 65 and older, teachers, and some essential workers. But disability advocates in Alabama are speaking out over worries that some of the states most vulnerable residents are at the back of the line for COVID-19 vaccines.

The expansion effectively delayed vaccination for people with pre-existing health conditions and for the disabled. The CDC and the state had originally planned for people with underlying health conditions to get the vaccine alongside those 65 and older.

(Disabled people) are at a higher risk of fatality if they dont get a timely vaccine, said James Tucker, director of the Alabama Disabilities Advocacy Program. As you work through a priority process, people who are at greater risk of dying should be prioritized, period.

Assistant State Health Officer Karen Landers said the state wants to administer the vaccine to everyone, but supply is the obstacle.

Product is very limited, she said via email. The current allocation plan is (that) with persons who have underlying medical conditions and/or disabilities (are) in Phase 1c. Plans can change if more vaccine becomes available.

Peebles, who lives in Auburn, said he is among several thousand disabled Alabamians using his Medicaid dollars to hire at-home health aides. He is executive director of Accessible Alabama, a group focused on housing for the disabled.

To him, it makes more sense to put the people with the greatest medical need at the front of the line.

Because we dont move very well, were at a greater susceptibility for respiratory illnesses like pneumonia (and COVID-19).

According to the CDC, adults with disabilities are more likely to have underlying medical conditions that put them at risk for COVID-19, and their disabilities may make it more difficult to practice social distancing.

Very often, people with disabilities live in poverty. When you put those two characteristics together, people with disabilities who live in poverty are less able to navigate the pandemic by just sitting at home, said Tucker.

According to State Health Officer Scott Harris, one reason to prioritize vaccines for Alabamians above 65 is the state wants to immunize as many people as possible, quickly.

The main thing we dont want is to have vaccine sitting on the shelf. We want to get it into people as soon as possible, Dr. Harris told AL.com in January.

But among Alabamians with the most severe disabilities, eligibility remains uneven.

Roughly 2,000 disabled Alabamians with intellectual disabilities on a Medicaid waiting list are not yet eligible for the vaccine. Yet for about 17,000 disabled Alabamians who live in a facility, vaccines are arriving at their homes through a federal partnership with Walgreens and CVS.

Peebles, who uses those same Medicaid dollars to live at home, feels hes being penalized arbitrarily.

According to Landers, the available vaccines have strict limitations for use, such as refrigeration, that make them difficult to deliver to private residences.

Peebles points to the state of Delaware, which is delivering the vaccine to home-bound disabled people.

He said his aides can take him to get the shot at a clinic, so he hopes the state will expand vaccination to people like him.

If you vaccinate those people that have preexisting or underlying conditions, youre actually reducing your long-term costs, he said, focusing solely on the economics of vaccine distribution.

Its cheaper to give someone a vaccine than pay for them to be on a ventilator for 30 to 45 days.
[February 10, 2021] Newly Released Antiviral Fabric from SQ Group Kills COVID-19 Virus

JINAN, China, Feb. 10, 2021 /CNW/ -- Jinan Shengquan Group Share Holding Co., Ltd. (SQ Group) in collaboration with Hong Kong Nano and Advanced Materials Institute (NAMI) released its latest scientific research result, a newly unveiled antiviral, antibacterial fabric. According to the report, the fabric, which is named Nano-VTS, is treated with a special biopolysaccharide material, and able to kill 100% of the COVID-19 virus (SARS-CoV-2) under experimental conditions. This specially designed fabric can provide a long-term and effective prevention against COVID-19 virus infection and is currently being used to mass-produce masks and other personal protective equipment. Recently in Jinan, an appraisal meeting was held to discuss the scientific and technological achievements of SQ Group's Nano-VTC antibacterial, antiviral material. Jiang Shicheng, academician from the Chinese Academy of Engineering, Sun Gang, director of the Heilongjiang Animal Disease Prevention and Control Center, and Guan Yuntao, biosafety review expert with the National Health Commission of the People's Republic of China, attended the meeting and concurred that the breakthrough as being a positive step forward in combatting the COVID-19 pandemic both domestically and abroad. Given the absence of such fabrics being used around the world, the attendees concluded that this fabric has extensive application value and recommended its accelerating production and distribution.





The antiviral effectivity of Nano-VTS has been verified by international and third party institutes. So far, the fabric has passed international standard antiviral and safety tests in US Microbac, British Intertek, Swiss SGS, Guangdong Detection Centre of Microbiology, CNTAC Testing Centre, and German Hohenstein. Patents have been filed around the world to protect its intellectual property. The newly developed Nano-VTS antibacterial and antiviral fabric effectively kills 3 of the 7 currently known coronaviruses that can infect humans, COVID-19, SARS, and HCoV-229E. Test data from Chinese high-level biosafety laboratories confirm that the fabric can kill 100% of the COVID-19 virus within 60 minutes. The British Virology Research Services (VRS) , an independent third-part testing agency, confirmed the findings that the virus was reduced by 90% within 5 minutes of contact with the fabric and 99.99% after 120 minutes. According to reports, the biopolysaccharide polymer structure in the fabric can actively adsorb and capture bacteria and viruses by contacting, then kills them through biological activity. As it is the structure of the fabric that make it effective, even after 30 washes, it is still able to kill over 99% of the viruses. This resilience means the Nano-VTS antiviral, antibacterial fabric is ideal for daily use without frequent replacement. Currently, SQ Group masks produced with this fabric have already passed the EU mask standard CWA17553-2020 test and entered the market. In the future, this fabric could also be used in gloves, PPE, hospital bed sheets, and public transportation seat covers. Experts believe that in terms of epidemic-prevention, anything that can limit the infectivity of surfaces in high-population and high-risk areas will be of great value. SQ Group's Nano-VTS antiviral, antibacterial fabric is a positive achievement in combatting the COVID-19 coronavirus epidemic and saving lives. For more information, please visit http://e.shengquan.com/index.php About SQ Group Jinan Shengquan Group Share Holding Co., Ltd. was founded in 1979 and is located in Shandong province, Zhangqiu City. With 3,600 employees, SQ Group focuses on R&D, and application in biomass materials, and pharmaceuticals. Innovation is at the heart of SQ Group and the company firmly holds respect for labor, knowledge, talent, and creative ideas. Every year, SQ Group invests more than RMB 150 million into research in pursuit of its vision to 'take from nature, serve society, and benefit mankind'. http://e.shengquan.com/index.php?m=content&c=index&a=show&catid=193&id=238 View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/newly-released-antiviral-fabric-from-sq-group-kills-covid-19-virus-301225627.html SOURCE JINAN SHENGQUAN GROUP SHARE HOLDING CO.,LTD

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CHICAGO (AP)  Boeing raised cash in January by delivering 26 new planes  including 21 Max jets  to airline customers, but it still suffered canceled orders for the plane with a troubled history.

Most of the new 737 Max planes went to U.S. airlines. Boeing said Tuesday that Southwest took six Max jets, American and United got five each, and Alaska Airlines received two.





. . .


FILE - In this Jan. 11, 2021, file photo, police officers carry a part of aircraft recovered from Java Sea where a Sriwijaya Air passenger jet crashed, at Tanjung Priok Port in Jakarta, Indonesia. A malfunctioning automatic throttle may have caused the pilots of the Sriwijaya Air jet to lose control, leading to the plane's plunge into the Java Sea last month, Indonesian investigators said Wednesday., Feb. 10, 2021. (AP Photo/Dita Alangkara, File)
YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 10, ARMENPRESS. The parliament of Abkhazia has appealed to the State Duma of Russia expressing willingness to participate under equal conditions in the project of opening the railway communication between Russia and Armenia through Abkhazia, a senior lawmaker said.

Our committee presented the initiative, the head of the Abkhaz parliaments committee on international, inter-parliamentary and compatriots affairs Astamur Loguan told Sputnik Abkhazia. We were following the developments in the region and the conflict in Nagorno Karabakh which had such a settlement. We welcome the fact of unblocking the transport communications.

The lawmaker said that Abkhazia has always expressed readiness to participate in major regional projects by equal conditions. He said the Abkhaz parliament held hearings over the matter and debated potential options in this regard.

Editing and Translating by Stepan Kocharyan
The former chief of Victorias gambling regulator says the watchdogs public servants are too preoccupied with the administration of liquor licences to properly police Crown casino.

Peter Cohen, who ran the Victorian Commission for Gambling and Liquor Regulation until 2010, said the organisation had lost its focus on gaming and it should be split. I think liquor and gaming should be separated, he said.

Crown casino in Melbourne. Credit:Scott McNaughton

His criticism came the day after the release of a NSW judicial review that said Crown was not fit to open a Sydney casino, finding there was no doubt money laundering involving an international drug-trafficking syndicate had occurred at the Melbourne casino.

Premier Daniel Andrews on Wednesday said he took the NSW findings seriously and the VCGLR would examine the report. He said his government would consider establishing a dedicated agency to oversee the casino in Melbourne.
The Biden administration is looking into expanding a recent Executive Order that requires foreign travelers coming into the United States to present a negative COVID-19 test. Specifically, it is looking at putting the same requirements for domestic travel.

On Jan. 21, the White House released the Executive Order on Promoting COVID-19 Safety in Domestic and International Travel, which enforced stricter mask-wearing rules during flights and for individuals coming into the United States through air travel, "proof of a recent negative COVID-19 test prior to entry."

Now, officials in the Biden administration are in talks to implement the same policies for domestic flights. Officials remain tight-lipped of the developments of this policy, but Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told Axios on HBO (via CNN) that "There's an active conversation with the CDC right now."

"What I can tell you is, it's going to be guided by data, by science, by medicine, and by the input of the people who are actually going to have to carry this out," the new Transport Secretary said. Buttigieg explained that while domestic situations are "very different" from the international airline industry, the CDC is continuously evaluating the best steps to "keep Americans safe."

During a recent town hall, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky strongly opposed air travel, whether internationally or domestically, saying that now is not the right time to travel. According to The Washington Post, she also shared that the government has a budget for more people to get tested for COVID-19, a larger portion of which is going to schools for them to safely reopen. She said however that the Biden administration is looking into allotting a portion of the budget to other high-risk activities, which include flying domestically.

While an increase in individuals to get tested for COVID-19 sounds like a good measure to help stop the spread, the news of this new policy for domestic flights is gaining negative feedback from several parties, including the Airlines for America (A4A), which already presented to the White House new research on how in-flight infection has lowered thanks to the industry's newly adapted COVID-19 safety measures.

A4A was also concerned that implementing a policy that requires individuals to get tested for COVID-19 before boarding domestic flights will "disproportionately prevent low-income travelers and rural Americans in small communities from travel."

Meanwhile, the U.S. Travel Association is worried about this new policy taking effect, as the burden of shouldering the costs of having passengers get tested for COVID-19 before boarding domestic flights may most likely fall on the airlines. The association believes that it will also take up valuable testing resources that could be allotted to those who need it the most: medical frontliners and other public health priorities.

Airplane manufacturer Boeing opposes such a policy to be implemented, citing that the entire airline industry has already been crippled by the pandemic and the cost to pay for people to get tested for COVID-19 before flying should be shouldered by the policymakers themselves.

According to The Blaze, House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Rep. Peter A. DeFazio pointed out how such a policy will see a 50% increase in daily testing capacity. It is unclear whether the resources for the implementation of such a policy will be part of Biden's proposed $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief plan.
Local News, Community, Charity & Cause, Health & Wellness

By Long Island Published: February 09 2021

Governor Andrew M. Cuomo has announced the state has administered over 2,136,209 vaccine doses through the states vaccination program

The total week 8 federal allocation of vaccine delivery to providers will be complete today. As of 11AM today, New Yorks health care distribution sites have received 1,874,975 first doses and already administered 87 percent 1,627,191 first dose vaccinations and 76 percent of first and second doses. Delivery of the week 9 allocation from the federal government begins mid-week.

Our singular focus right now is getting vaccines into arms and the daily numbers continue to demonstrate we are doing that job quickly and effectively, as we have administered over 2.1 million doses so far, Governor Cuomo said. We have the operational capacity to do much more and the only limiting factor is lack of supply. But I am hopeful because we now have a partner in the White House who is working to increase supply to states, and we will continue to work hand in glove with them to get every single New Yorker vaccinated as fast as possible.

Approximately 7 million New Yorkers are currently eligible to receive the vaccine. The federal government has increased the weekly supply by more than 20 percent over the next three weeks, but New Yorks vast distribution network and large population of eligible individuals still far exceed the supply coming from the federal government. Due to limited supply, New Yorkers are encouraged to remain patient and are advised not to show up at vaccination sites without an appointment.

A breakdown of New York State vaccine administrations through the federal governments Long Term Care Facility program as of 11:00 AM today is as follows. The states Vaccine Dashboard includes a county-by-county breakdown.

Vaccination program numbers below are for doses distributed and delivered to New York for the states vaccination program, and do not include those reserved for the federal governments Long Term Care Facility program. A breakdown of the data based on numbers reported to New York State as of 11:00 AM today is as follows. The allocation totals below include 100 percent of the week 8 allocation which will finish being distributed to New York provider sites today.

STATEWIDE BREAKDOWN

First Doses Received  1,874,975

First Doses Administered  1,627,191; 87%

Second Doses Received  933,850

Second Doses Administered  509,018

To date, New Yorks health care distribution sites have administered 87 percent of week first doses received from the federal government but due to the federal governments limited allocation, appointments have filled up quickly. New Yorkers seeking to determine eligibility and schedule an appointment at a state-run mass vaccination site, can visit the Am I Eligible website. New Yorkers may also call their local health department, pharmacy, doctor, or hospital for additional information and to schedule appointments where vaccines are available.

The COVID-19 Vaccine Tracker Dashboard is available to update New Yorkers on the distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine. The New York State Department of Health requires vaccinating facilities to report all COVID-19 vaccine administration data within 24 hours; the vaccine administration data on the dashboard is updated daily to reflect the most up-to-date metrics in the states vaccination effort.

New Yorkers who suspect fraud in the vaccine distribution process can now call 833-VAX-SCAM (833-829-7226) toll-free or email the state Department of Health at STOPVAXFRAUD@health.ny.gov. Hotline staff will route complaints to the appropriate investigative agencies to ensure New Yorkers are not being taken advantage of as the State works to vaccinate the entire eligible population.

Dr. Gokal, 48, immigrated from Pakistan as a boy and earned a medical degree at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse. After working at hospitals in Central New York, he moved to Texas in 2009 to oversee the emergency department at a suburban Houston hospital. His volunteer work has included rebuilding homes and providing medical care after Hurricane Harvey in 2017.

In recent years, Dr. Gokal split his time between two area hospitals. But when the pandemic hit in early 2020, he lived for a month in a hotel and an apartment rather than risk infecting his wife, Maria, 47, who has pulmonary sarcoidosis, a disease in her lungs that leaves her winded after even minimal activity.

I was petrified to go home and bring Covid to my wife, he said.

Fortunately, he said, the Harris County Public Health department recruited him in April to become the medical director for its Covid-response team. The job paid less, but he was eager to protect his wife by limiting his exposure to the coronavirus in emergency rooms.

On Dec. 22, Dr. Gokal joined a conference call in which state health officials explained the protocols for administering the recently approved Moderna vaccine. The 10 or 11 doses in a vial are viable for six hours after the seal is punctured.

Dr. Gokal said the advice was to vaccinate people eligible under the 1(a) category (health care workers and residents in long-term-care facilities), then those under the 1(b) category (people over 65 or with a health condition that increases risk of severe Covid-related illness).

After that, he said, the message was: Just put it in peoples arms. We dont want any doses to go to waste. Period.

On Dec. 29, a mild Tuesday, Dr. Gokal arrived before dawn at a park in the Houston suburb of Humble to supervise a vaccination event intended mostly for emergency workers. In part because of minimal publicity, the pace was slow, with no more than 250 doses administered. But this was the countys first public event, he said. We knew there would be hiccups.
OSHA Could Look to Virginia's COVID-19 Safety Rule for Nationwide Standard

Industry experts have praised Virginias Jan. 27 COVID-19 worker safety rule.

Virginias safety rule that protects workers from COVID-19 is seen as a superior model for regulation across the United States, says Bloomberg Law.

On Jan. 27, the state became the first to enact a permanent rule on the matter. Virginias rule arrived less than one week after President Bidens executive order that instructed OSHA to decide on whether a national COVID-19 rule is necessary. Industry managers and attorneys believe that the contents of Virginias rule should be applied to other states.

My thought is that the federal standard will be like the Virginia rule, said Travis Vance, a partner at a North Carolina law firm. Californias standard has a lot of difficult things to comply with. I think a lot of employers would be taken aback at the resources they would have to pour into complying.

The Virginia standard classifies workplaces into high, medium and low risk. High risk workplaces include health care facilities, while medium risk workplaces include transportation, schools and retail. Office buildings are considered low risk workplaces.

A characteristic of Virginias rule that makes it a possible template for a national rule is its adaptability. The rule is written so that any CDC guidance changes will be incorporated into a revised version of the rule.
The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company


The Indian diaspora which celebrates its 176th Indian Arrival Day in Trinidad and Tobago is not an abstract entity, but one that flowers the socio-economic and cultural growth and development of our peoples.

It remains a proud moment for all of uspoliticians, sociologists, economists, civic, religious and cultural leadersin world history.
There has been a substantial rise in the number of people buying things online because of the global health crisis. Photo: freepik.com

Greenjoy, a local startup specialised in grass-based straws has been using Amazons and Alibabas sites as effective tools to approach overseas markets for more than a year now. Straws from Greenjoy are present in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Cambodia, and Europe.

The go-global strategy through e-commerce platforms has greatly profited the company. To date, Europe is occupying about 60 per cent of our outputs, Nguyen Vo, co-founder of Greenjoy, told VIR.

Thanks to cross-border e-commerce, we have quickly shifted to markets such as Japan and South Korea, and the number of orders from these countries remains stable since the third quarter 2020, Vo added.

In addition to Amazon and Alibaba, Greenjoy diversified its sales channels through Tiki, Lazada, and Shopee which have also promoted cross-border trading.

According to Tiki, the growing local demand for overseas purchases is the main reason behind its decision to penetrate cross-border trade through its Tiki Global site.

Along with Tiki, smaller platforms such as Fado and newcomers Phong Duy and 1Ship have also targeted cross-border trade as the business form from their very beginning.

Positive prospects

From the end of last year, payment providers like Payoneer, an American financial services company that provides online money transfer, digital payment services and provides customers with working capital, have been organising several workshops aimed at informing and connecting local vendors as they feel the time has come to penetrate the market through cross-border trade on sites like Alibaba and Amazon.

Tran Xuan Thuy, director of Amazon Global Selling Vietnam, said that cross-border e-commerce will keep developing from the end of 2020. The growth rate of cross-border e-commerce will be much larger than local e-commerce in certain markets, Thuy said.

Thuy projected that the current global value of cross-border e-commerce of around $900 billion will keep extending thanks to favourable conditions. With international e-commerce growing, smaller players like Greenjoy may also be able to profit and extend their business.

New international trade deals, such as the EU-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement and the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership  which both came into effect for Vietnam  formed a solid base for local importers and exporters. About 32 per cent of domestic companies have established business relations with foreign partners through online platforms, according to information published by Alibaba at a seminar on cross-border trade last October.

According to the Ministry of Industry and Trades (MoIT) e-Commerce and Digital Economy Agency (iDEA), the pandemic has leveraged the annual growth rate of Vietnams e-commerce sector to 35 per cent, 2.5 times against Japans, and its scale is forecast to reach $33 billion in 2025, ranking third in the region, only behind Indonesia and Thailand.

The agencys recent survey with 4,000 participating businesses also showed that most of them are using the internet for parts of their business, with about 70 per cent of them being small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

More than half of the remaining 30 per cent constituting larger enterprises participate in e-commerce platforms, while the rate for SMEs stood at about 36 per cent. In addition, about 42 per cent of businesses with online sales activities claimed that their online sales make up about 50 per cent of total revenue.

With cross-border e-commerce growing in popularity, domestic import-export could expand. According to the General Statistic Office, the total import-export turnover of the country reached $544 billion last year with a trade surplus of $19 billion, the highest level over the past five years.

Right time to enter

Through cross-border platforms, businesses can approach new markets and integrate into global supply chains with reasonable operation costs, said Dang Hoang Hai, director of the iDEA.

However, Nguyen Hoa Binh, chairman of technology developer Nexttech, said that reaching global markets requires the right blueprint. A slew of larger Vietnamese businesses have been inferior to overseas medium-sized competitors, just because of their strategy.

Binh referred to the example of VNG and its competitor Garena under Singaporean SEA Group in the gaming sector. For about a decade, both companies have been the biggest competitors to each other in the local market. Currently, the total business value of local unicorn VNG is assessed at over $2 billion, while Garenas value amounts to up to $100 billion.

Garena went global as soon as it entered the gaming market, while VNG initially focused on the local sphere, which is the main reason for the disparity, Binh said.

Similarly, many local businesses from other sectors are also facing the risk of losing the upper hand to overseas players. Hai therefore argued, this time should be the most appropriate to map out a strategy and make use of the favourable conditions for cross-border e-commerce development. Vietnamese companies should quickly grasp the opportunities to keep the initiative in the market.

Most e-commerce platforms in Vietnam have been backed by overseas investors from China, Singapore, and Japan, among others. As a result, Vietnamese goods may potentially lose market share on those platforms.

In comparison with other retail business models, supervision on e-commerce sites has been less tight. Perceiving the issue, the MoIT last year published a draft amendment for Decree No.52/2013/ND-CP from 2013 on e-commerce.

The draft decree outlines the responsibilities of operators of e-commerce platforms regardless of where overseas vendors operate from. Accordingly, these operators are obliged to gather and filter information about international vendors to ensure they can be held liable for their trade activities on the platform.

The draft is currently awaiting comments from related agencies before being finalised and enacted, which typically takes a few months.
Ruchi Soya, which was acquired by a consortium led by Baba Ramdev's Patanjali Ayurveda in December 2019, on Wednesday reported 50.26 per cent year-on-year (YoY) growth in profit after tax (PAT) at Rs 227.44 crore for third quarter ended December 31, 2020. On sequential basis, the profit of soya food brand Nutrela-maker jumped 79.46 per cent from Rs 126.74 crore in September quarter of 2020 (Q2 FY21).

The edible oil manufacturer, which has Baba Ramdev, his younger brother Ram Bharat and close aide Acharya Balkrishna on its board, posted 20.13 per cent YoY and 12.15 per cent QoQ rise in total income at Rs 4,475.60 crore in Q3 FY21.

On the operational front, the company delivered EBITDA of Rs 351.71 crore, registering 36.06 per cent increase QoQ and 76.78 per cent YoY. EBITDA margins for the December quarter of the current fiscal stood at 7.86 per cent, up by 1.38 per cent on QoQ basis and by 2.52 per cent on YoY.

During the quarter under review, the performance of the company's branded business was encouraging, with Ruchi Gold, Mahakosh, Nutrela and Ruchi Star registering significant growth. The company's branded business, including brands sold under royalty arrangement, achieved sales worth Rs 3,017.58 crore in Q3FY21, contributing to 67.42 per cent of the total sales. The branded business sale registered a growth of 13.99 per cent QoQ and 21.30 per cent YoY.

As per the company, other businesses comprising of oil palm plantation, windmills, export business, oleochemicals and institutional sales cumulatively reported 8.52 per cent growth on QoQ basis. Exports surged 93.35 per cent sequentially and 73.85 per cent on YoY basis.

"The continuous focus on strengthening its brand portfolio will ensure its sustainable growth in coming years. The company has demonstrated agility and execution excellence in testing times of COVID in recent past that has enabled the company to achieve growth across various product categories," Ruchi Soya said in a regulatory filing.

Going forward, the company plans to undertake several new initiatives to strengthen current business segments and expand the footprints by entering in new product categories. The company mulls to increase market penetration by launching new products in health food category as Indian consumer is shifting towards healthier lifestyle.

Ahead of Q3 earnings, shares of Ruchi Soya Industries ended Wednesday trade at Rs 711.85, up 1.01 per cent, against previous closing price of Rs 704.75 on the Bombay Stock Exchange.

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Politicians from around the world could be sharing topless photos online as they receive the Covid-19 vaccine in an effort to 'raise their public profile and boost popularity', experts have claimed.

The Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, 52, became an overnight social media sensation last month after he stripped off to receive the jab at the Attikon hospital, in Athens.

But rather than rolling up his sleeves or wearing a t-shirt or vest for the occasion, Mr Mitsotakis chose to unbutton his shirt to his naval, revealing his bare chest.

Leaders from across Europe have since taken to copying the move, with former British Army officer and MP Johnny Mercer, 39, and the French health minister Olivier Veran removing their shirts and sharing snaps on social media as they were vaccinated this week.

Branding experts told FEMAIL that while the underlying message of receiving a vaccine was 'important', the 'vain' move of sharing snaps online could be 'a trick' to 'increase popularity and public profile.'

Politicians from around the world could be sharing topless photographs as they receive the Covid-19 vaccine in an effort to 'raise their public profile and boost popularity', experts have claimed (pictured, Greek PM Kyriakos Mitsotakis, 52, went viral after bearing his hairy chest while receiving the second dose of the vaccine at at the Attikon hospital, in Athens, last month)

Brand and popular culture commentator Nick Ede said politicians were most likely sharing the snaps to encourage people to be vaccinated, saying: 'I think there are two agendas going on here.

'The most important thing to do if you are in the public eye is to make a good impression and drive interest and bring awareness.

'Showing that you as a public figure are leading the way with a vaccine shot is an important measure.'

However he added that there was a 'secondary pr-able moment' in a politician showing off a toned body and potentially going viral online.

Meanwhile earlier this week French health minister Olivier Veran (pictured) stripped off to receive the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine

Who are the topless politicians? Kyriakos Mitsotakis Mitsotakis, 52, a member of Greece's New Democracy party, has been president since 2016. He is the son of former Prime Minister Konstantinos Mitsotakis. He was among the first people in Greece to receive the first dose of the vaccine in December after the decision was taken that 'state and political leadership' should be included alongside frontline healthcare staff in the first round. Mitsotakis is married to Mareva Grabowski, an investment banker with Greek, Polish and Egyptian roots. They have three children, Sophia, Constantine and Daphne. Olivier Veran Veran, 40, is a French neurologist and politician who has been serving as Minister of Solidarity and Health since 2020. Veran worked as a neurologist at the Grenoble-Alpes University Hospital. He has served as president of the Association of Hospital Assistants in Grenoble, spokesperson for the National Intersyncal of Hospital Interns, and advisor to the Departmental Order of Physicians of Isere. He was first elected to the National Assembly in 2012. Veran is in a relationship with fellow politician Coralie Dubost. Johnny Mercer Mercer, 39, is a British Conservative politician who has served as MP for Plymouth Moor View since 2015. Mercer was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Royal Artillery after graduating from Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in June 2003 and was promoted to lieutenant in April 2005. He did three tours in Afghanistan: as a liaison and training officer with Afghan forces; attached to a Special Forces unit; and as a co-ordinator of artillery and air strikes in support of ground operations. Mercer retired from military service in December 2013 with the rank of captain. Mercer is married to Felicity and they have three children. Advertisement

He explained: 'Showing off your body, should it be as toned as the Greek minister, has the ability to create the phwoar factor.

'Potentially that image can go viral and increase your popularity and public profile.

'Its a trick thats been used on many occasions in the celebrity world to increase interest and popularity and now politicians may be jumping on that bandwagon to show theres more to them than policies and ill fitting suits.

Meanwhile Andy Barr, CEO for 10 Yetis, a branding and PR agency. explained the move might not work for every politician.

Tory MP Johnny Mercer followed suit earlier this week as he shared a photo of himself topless while receiving the jab online

The MP for Plymouth Moor View explained in a further tweet that he tried getting the jab with his shirt on but 'simply couldn't get the sleeves over my muscles'

He said: 'Whilst a buff former Army Officer such as Mp Jonny Mercer could probably win votes by stripping off, I am not sure that there will be many queueing up to see Boriss pecs of glory.

'Even though the underlying message is aimed, quite rightly, at getting more people to line up and have the vaccine, there is also a certain vanity that you could only associate with politicians in deciding to strip off for the publicity shot.'

Mr Mitsotakis attracted global attention when he stripped off to receive the vaccine in Athens last month after choosing to unbutton his shirt to his naval, revealing his bare chest, for the jab.

A photo of the moment went viral, with social media users left feeling hot under the collar.

Branding expert Nick Ede said 'showing off your body' could create a 'phwoar' moment for politicians which could help boost popularity and public profile (pictured, Veran)

Meanwhile MP Johnny Mercer went on to follow in his footsteps last week when he said he stripped off to receive his Covid-19 jab because he 'couldn't get his shirt sleeves over his muscles'.

The MP for Plymouth Moor View was given the injection at Derriford Hospital this morning as part of a coronavirus vaccine trial.

He posted a tweet to thank staff at the hospital, attaching a photo of himself topless while receiving the jab, saying: 'Rarely do they see such a wimp in these parts when it comes to injections, but the lovely staff at Derriford Hospital made it all as seamless as ever this morning, in the latest round of the Covid-19 vaccine trial were doing here in Plymouth'.

In a comment underneath, Mr Mercer further explained: 'We tried with the shirt on but I simply couldn't get the sleeves over my muscles, but I thought it was a bit self-indulgent to put that out in public. You know I'm shy.'

Viral sensation: Mr Mitsotakis, a member of Greece's New Democracy party, has been president since 2016 but is likely to have found new supporters thanks to his bold photo op

Swooning: Social media users were left feeling hot under the collar after Mr Mitsotakis shared the snap online (above)

Politicians mockingly reacted to the image, with Matt Hancock thanking Mr Mercer for 'playing his part' and Ruth Davidson simply asking: 'Would it have killed you to wear a T-shirt?'

And earlier this week French health minister Veran followed suit by removing his shirt to get the vaccine.

Veran was seen on French television with his shirt off while being inoculated at a vaccination centre in the city of Melun near Paris.
You ask what a high crime and misdemeanor is under our Constitution, Mr. Raskin told the senators at the conclusion of the video. Thats a high crime and misdemeanor. If thats not an impeachable offense, then theres no such thing.

One of Mr. Trumps defense lawyers, David I. Schoen, accused the House managers of hiring a movie company to string together the most disturbing footage from that day. Mr. Schoen also offered a video account featuring a collection of calls by Democrats for Mr. Trumps impeachment over the past four years, a false equivalency as none of those comments led to violence.

The expected outcome of this trial is the same as Mr. Trumps first.

Even though it is a new Senate  with Democrats in the majority  and the nature of what Mr. Trump is accused of is different than the allegations he faced in his first impeachment trial, there is little question that Mr. Trump will ultimately be acquitted, the same as he was a year ago.

The Democrats would need 17 Republicans to break with the former president and vote with them to have the two-thirds necessary to convict Mr. Trump. If the six Republican senators who voted with Democrats on Tuesday on the Senates right to hold the trial also vote to convict Mr. Trump, Democrats would still need 11 more Republican defectors to secure a conviction.

For Democrats, a guilty verdict would be a formal, permanent renunciation of Mr. Trumps behavior. If Mr. Trump were to be convicted, the Senate could hold a vote to decide whether to bar him from running for office again  something Democrats have argued is in the countrys best interest.

An acquittal would give Republicans a stay of condemnation of the most popular member of their party. But it would only delay the inevitable reckoning their party faces between the more moderate members and the far-right wing that not only defends Mr. Trump but also seeks to punish fellow Republicans for betraying him.

For Democrats, an acquittal could still be a political victory of sorts because the trial was an opportunity to publicly condemn Mr. Trumps actions in his last days as president and delivered a formal record of Republican senators refusing to punish him.

Tunis/Tunisia  Organisations, associations, trade unions and personalities from all over the world - especially from the Arab Maghreb and Europe - consider that it is now more necessary than ever to cancel Tunisia's debt to European Union countries and to offer Tunisian youth the opportunity to live and work in the country.

In a statement issued on Tuesday by the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights (FTDES), the signatories underline that the Tunisian government is bound to respect the principles enshrined in the 2014 Constitution which commit the Tunisian State to respect the dignity of its citizens and condemn the use of ill-treatment, torture and expeditious legal proceedings.

They deem that the absence of any questioning of the economic and social choices of the former regime by successive Tunisian governments since 2011 has only further impoverished the population, particularly the precarious social categories, and forced thousands of young people and adults into precarious odd jobs, thus feeding the informal economy or religious extremism.

"Such a situation could only lead to a clash with the authorities who, today once again is responding to their distress and their legitimate demands through repression," adds the statement.

Besides, the signatories call on the Tunisian government to release all those unjustly arrested and to take measures in line with the aspirations of the Tunisian people and the objectives of its Revolution.

They also call on all those who believe in democracy, freedom and justice in Europe and around the world to exert pressure on the Tunisian authorities to ensure that the 2011 Revolution does not degenerate into a nightmare where the repressive practices of the past are used as a response to the legitimate aspirations of the Tunisian people.
The head of WHO mission, Ben Embarek said that the laboratory incident hypotheses was extremely unlikely to explain the introduction of the virus into the human population. He added that the laboratory hypotheses was not the hypotheses they would suggest for future studies.

A joint World Health Organization (WHO) and Chinese expert mission into the origins of Coronavirus pandemic said on Tuesday that there is insufficient evidence to confirm that Coronavirus was being spread in Wuhan before December 2019.

The head of China team, Liang Wannian said that there was no indication of transmission of the Sars-Cov-2 in the population of the period before Dec 2019. He added that there was not enough evidence to determine if the virus had spread in the city prior to that.

The head of WHO mission, Ben Embarek said that the laboratory incident hypotheses was extremely unlikely to explain the introduction of the virus into the human population. He added that the laboratory hypotheses was not the hypotheses they would suggest for future studies.

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The WHO mission eliminated a controversial and much talked about theory around Coronavirus. According to this theory, Covid-19 emerged from a Chinese laboratory in Wuhan.

The WHO experts said that the mission had failed to identify the animal source of the virus but the experts believe that Covid-19 originated from bats and it was later transmitted to humans via some other mammal.

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Map of Storfjorden and Storfjorden Trough with ice-sheet extent at 22,000 years and ice streams indicated. Areas, where the shelf ice and ice streams broke up during atmospheric and ocean warming are marked with whitish colours. (A) Collapse during the first warming phase c. 15,000 years ago. (B) Collapse at the start of the present warm period (intergladial) 11,000 years ago. Black lines marked G4 to G1 are groundings lines where the ice stood still for an extended period of time. Credit: T. Rasmussen/E. Thomsen

10,000 km2 of ice disappeared in a blink of an eye from an ice sheet in the Storfjorden Through offshore Svalbard, a new study shows. This dramatic break off was preceded by a rapid melt of 2.5 kilometers of ice a year. This parallels the current melt rates in Antarctica and Greenland and worries the scientists behind the study.

"Our measurements of the ice retreat in Storfjorden Through show that the prevailing conditions to the great break off match what we see in Antarctica and Greenland today. It is uncanny. There are new studies published almost weekly that show that the retreat of current ice sheets is two to four km a year and that it's speeding up." Says CAGE-professor and first author Tine Lander Rasmussen.

Climatically unstable period

The last deglaciation, 20,000-10,000 years ago, was a period of coexisting global warming and rapidly shrinking ice sheets. But stating the actual correlation between the two is not as simple as it sounds. The period in question was climatically unstable, and big melts were interrupted by re-freezing and formation of new ice. The speed of the ice retreat, relative to climatic changes, has therefore been difficult to establish.

"We have studied the ice sheet development 20,000-10,000 years ago using marine sediment cores. The 12 cores have been collected in the area during the past 18 years, and meticulously analyzed for different types of microfossils of single-celled organisms called foraminifera," says Rasmussen.

The biochemistry in the foraminifera fossils helps reconstruct the enormous amount of information about the state of the environment in prehistoric times. The sediments were sliced up in slices representing time periods of 30 to 70 years. Over 70 samples were dated and analyzed.

"What we saw is that the ice sheet starts retreating some 20,000 years ago but lingers on a ridge in the fjord. Then, some 15,000 years ago the atmosphere and ocean temperatures warm up, impacting the ocean circulation. A huge chunk of the ice sheet disappears at the same time. At the start of the Holocene warm period, 11,000 years ago, things really pick up speed. We can't see any more evidence of an ice sheet covering the ocean floor after that time."

Foraminifera are microfossils that record the environmental parameters in their shells. They are found deposited in the ocean sediments and can be analysed for biogeochemical components that tell the story of past climate. Credit: S. Ofstad, P. Domel, N, El bani Altuna.

Consistent correlation between global warming and ice retreat

The periods of extremely rapid ice sheet retreats are consistently correlating with periods of global warming of oceans and temperature. This is mirrored in ice sheet retreat from other eight Northern Norwegian fjord systems.

"This is strengthening our hypothesis that an increase in ocean temperature and global warming is the direct cause of the chain of the events leading up to the dramatically rapid ice sheet disintegration," says Rasmussen.

This gives some alarming perspectives on present-day outlook. The great melt of the glacial maximum to the Holocene was 10,000 years in the making. The present climate change is much more rapid.

"The final retreat of the Storfjorden Through ice sheet happened as rapidly in the outer parts as it did further up the through. This means that as soon as warmer oceanic water got access to the ice sheet, it surged pretty rapidly inward from the edge of the ice shelf. To the interior of the sheet itself. We see this happening in Antarctica today. The Larsen A (1995), B (2003) and C (2017) break-offs are examples of this process. "

Explore further Eurasian ice sheet collapse raised seas eight metres: study

More information: Tine L. Rasmussen et al, Climate and ocean forcing of ice-sheet dynamics along the Svalbard-Barents Sea ice sheet during the deglaciation 20,00010,000 years BP, Quaternary Science Advances (2020). Tine L. Rasmussen et al, Climate and ocean forcing of ice-sheet dynamics along the Svalbard-Barents Sea ice sheet during the deglaciation 20,00010,000 years BP,(2020). DOI: 10.1016/j.qsa.2020.100019

Provided by UiT The Arctic University of Norway
The trial of a suspected Sierra Leonean warlord, Gibril Ealoghima Massaquoi, accused of atrocities in Liberia during the civil war, which started in Finland is finally bringing the much debated court to Liberia. The Finnish Non-Governmental Organization Civitas Maxima, which is heavily promoting the trial is pushing prosecutors to conduct the earing of witness testimonies in Liberia and Sierra Leone.

The court is expected to move to Liberia and neighboring Sierra Leone in the next few weeks to hear testimony from up to 80 witnesses and visit sites where the atrocities are alleged to have been carried out under Mr. Massaquoi's orders.

Massaquoi, this paper has learnt from sources, played a key role in former President Charles Taylor's conviction as a protected star witness.

Like Tayor, who is currently serving a 50-years sentence in a British prison for war crimes committed in Sierra Leone, Massaquoi, is standing trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity allegedly committed in Liberia between 1999 and 2003.

Prosecutors have accused him of killing civilians and soldiers who had just been disarmed, rape, and recruiting child soldiers. Massaquoi has since denied the charges and says he was taking part in peace talks at the time of the alleged crimes.

But are there support for a war crimes court in Liberia?

The United States House of Representatives passed a Resolution 1055, calling for the establishment of a war and economic crimes court in Liberia.

The U.S House of Representative 115th Congress (2017-2018) Resolution 1055, affirms the strong United States-Liberia ties and support for democratic principles, and call for full implementation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission recommendations, including the establishment of an Extraordinary Criminal Tribunal for Liberia. Liberia witnessed one of Africa's most brutal conflicts - the first and second civil wars of 1989-1997 and 1999-2003, respectively.

Many Liberians if not most, welcome the establishment of the Extraordinary Criminal Tribunal in Liberia, but few opposed it. One man who has been so vociferous against the establishment of the war crimes tribunal here is Nimba County Senator Prince Johnson.

Johnson was the leader of the breakaway Independent National Patriotic Front of Liberia (INPFL) that slaughtered former President Samuel K. Doe on his Cardwell based in 1990.

Johnson thinks the establishment of a war crimes tribunal here will dig out old wounds and probably plunge the country back into civil war. He believes Liberians have healed and should move on.

But others think Johnson and others like him who committed atrocities here should not go unpunished.

Cllr. FonatiKoffa, is Liberia's newly elected Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives. He believes that those who committed atrocities here should be made to account for their crimes. To him that will bring about true accountability to the horrible tragedy that took place here decades ago.

"In order to bring true accountability to the horrible tragedy of the Liberian civil war, I support a process in line with US House of Rep Resolution 1055 which calls for the full implementation of the TRC as the sole legitimate manner in which we can hold those responsible who bear the greatest responsibility," Cllr. Koffa told the New Dawn Tuesday February 9 via a WhatAppinterveiw.

Deputy Speaker Koffa says in order to have the full implementation of the TRC recommendation, he calls for the establishment of the relevant infrastructure both legal and physical to ensure sustainable justice.

But can an EU NGO like Civitas Maxima have any form of authority or jurisdiction over Liberia outside of the TRC? To this Cllr. Koffa thinks differently. He says this could lead to a misstep that may not be legally recoverable.

"To have ad hoc NGOs conducting bounty hunting throughout the world, while laudable, will lead to missteps that may not be legally recoverable" explained Cllr. Koffa."I am not sure they (NGOs) can because the Liberian prosecutorial authorities have not been joined in the matter and I don't think they can be joined outside of the TRC process set up by the Liberian legislature," he added.

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The first of such case in Liberia

If the prosecutors succeed in moving the court to Liberia to interview witnesses in connection to the Massaquoi trial, this will be the first of such case to be partly held in Liberia, with Massaquoi remaining in Finland.

The wars in Liberia did not only destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Liberians, but eventually spilled into neighbouring Sierra Leone and Cote d'Ivoire.

And yet only victims in Sierra Leone havehad some degree of accountability for those responsible for committing such atrocities. This was achieved through the efforts of the UN-backed special court for which jurisdiction was limited to crimes in Sierra Leone.

In Liberia, no perpetrator has been brought to book both internationally and locally. But there are calls overwhelming for those responsible for the spillage here to be held accountable.
As technology and automation rapidly remake a very different future of work, some economists predict that women will benefit the most from the coming disruptions. Although women have no doubt been hardest hit by the COVID-19 economy, in the coming years, women-dominated caring jobslike nursing, teaching, and providing child and elder carethat arent easily replaced by machines will be among the fastest-growing occupations and thus more likely to be future-proof.

Its not that many womens jobs wont be automated away. They will. Just as men-dominated mechanical and machine operating jobs are predicted to disappear, so too are women-dominated administrative and clerical jobs. But most of these future-of-work predictions assume women will continue to dominate the care economy. And all because men arent expected to care.

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The majority of men working as professional caregivers said they actively sought a job in a caring profession and considered it a career with opportunities for growth and advancement.

So even as women are the focus of a host of training programs and investment to help them break into the growing and high-paying men-dominated fields of science and technology, there is little effort on the flip side to draw men to the growing but decidedly lower-paid women-dominated jobs of caring, or to transform care work into good jobs that would pay any worker well.

Already, occupations in the United States are deeply segregated by gender. About 40 percent of employed women work in women-dominated occupations and 48 percent of men work in men-dominated jobs. Nearly four decades after the Supreme Court struck down bans that excluded men from nursing school, men make up only 12 percent of registered nurses, about as much as the percent of women who work in mining. That segregation is a big part of what contributes to the persistent gender wage gap, as men-dominated professions pay so much more than do women-dominated ones. And while some care economy jobs like nurse practitioners may offer good wages, child care workers and home health aides often teeter on the brink of poverty.

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Which leads to the question: Will the deeply ingrained traditional gender norm that care work is womens workan extension of the labor of love provided for free in the homemean that care work will continue to be undervalued and segregated in the future, even as demand for it grows, as well as bar men from pursuing these certain jobs in an uncertain future?

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What would happen if men did care?

Thats what we asked men who are professional caregivers for a new report we released Thursday. (We work for New Americas Better Life Lab; New America is a partner with Slate and Arizona State University in Future Tense.) In a national survey and in-depth focus group discussion, men who are nurses, home health aides, kindergarten teachers, and child care workers overwhelmingly said they are proud of the work they do and find it meaningful and challenging. Care work is good work, the men said, and they want to encourage more men to do it. And the only way thats going to happen is for care jobs to become better jobs.

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Contrary to conventional wisdom, the majority of men working as professional caregivers said they actively sought a job in a caring profession and considered it a career with opportunities for growth and advancement; it was not a fallback of job of last resort. I feel like Im making a difference in peoples lives, said Joshua, a surgical nurse in Nebraska. The men described the responsibility they face making life-and-death decisions, caring for people in their most devastating moments, or being present at the most joyouswhen a child takes a first step, a medical treatment goes well, or a young mind flashes with new understanding.

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Whats more, caregiving men, especially those in nursing, said that, far from the stereotype of just emptying bedpans, their work requires a complex mix of high-level cognitive skills and human warmth. To succeed in their jobs, the men said, requires attention to detail, fast thinking, and the ability to multitask, but also, you have to have a heart and soul, as Louisiana ICU nurse Lucas said. The child care workers and educators, in particular, emphasized traits of human warmth, like patience and a desire to help others, as essential to do their jobs well, traits long assumed that either only women have or are simply better at.

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That gender stigma, while perhaps not as intense as it was decades ago, is still something many men in care face. I hate the term murse, said one. The men in early care and education said they often faced suspicion and mistrust from fearful parents. And most agreed that society valued care work but only to a certain point, and argued that only when care jobs pay well and become better jobs would caregivers get the respect they deserve.

There is no question that society values men and the work they do more than the work of women. Already the few men in nursing are often paid more than their women counterpartssomething the men in our focus groups acknowledged with chagrin. And economists have tracked how wages drop as women take over formerly men-dominated jobs. People may have forgotten, but men have always cared. At one time, teaching was a high-paying profession for men. And for centuries, nursing was a job for monks and knights. Two of the four patron saints of nursing are men: St. Camillus de Lellis, with the red cross on his robes that have come to signify the universal symbol of medical healing, and St. John of God. That only changed with Florence Nightingale, who insisted only women should nurse. While Nightingale created a pathway to employment for many women for the first time, her act also feminized the profession and cemented both lower wages and the notion that nurses were subservient to, rather than partners with, doctors. But if the presence of women depresses wages, could the reverse also be true? Would an influx of men into care work be what it takes to raise the value of it for all workers?

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Already, efforts are underway to transform care economy jobs. The Biden administration is proposing a major investment in child care infrastructure and promises to give early educators and child care workers a raise and stronger benefits, treating them as the professionals they are. Some child care and health care workers are seeking to unionize to push for better pay. The state of Washington has figured out how to make home health jobs good jobs. And organizations like the American Association for Men in Nursing are working to draw more men into the care sector.*

Mike Ward, the AAMN vice president and an offshore oil rig workerturnedacute care nurse practitioner in Texas, has been working on the organizations Future RN effort to counteract persistent gender bias and attract more men to nursing. Not only because more men would then be assured of good, future-proof jobs that are in high demand, Ward said, but because nurses and professional caregivers should look like the populations they care for. More and more women are becoming physicians, which is great, Ward said. We feel the nursing community should mirror the communities we serve.

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To do that, theyre starting early, reaching out to boys in elementary and middle school. Nursing was never presented as an option to me by my high school guidance counselor, Ward said. Were trying to change thatopening the minds of young men and boys to a great profession that most men have probably not considered and is going to be around for a long time.

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And while a 2009 effort of some nursing schools took on a highly gendered and decidedly macho flavorwith a campaign demanding, Are You Man Enough to Be a Nurse?Ward said AAMNs effort is all about men in nursing dispelling gendered stereotypes by sharing their everyday experiences. One study found that the number of male high school students who said theyd consider nursing as a career choice increased more than threefold when the same tasks were described with the more gender-neutral title of registered clinician.

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Ward uses his own story in recruitment efforts. He works a seven-day-on, seven-day-off schedule, which enables him to be engaged in the lives of his at-home wife and five children and active in martial arts, reading, and other pursuits. I have a job that is just so fulfilling and tremendous work-life balance, Ward said. For all my friends who thought it was kind of weird that I went into nursing, and even some of my family that didnt understand, nobodys laughing now.

For Ramon Kapoor, a nurse practitioner in New York, the crucible of COVID-19 may be what helps finally dispel gendered stereotypes about men in care. The need has been so great that theres been no place for judgment because of your gender, Kapoor said. People are finally seeing what nurses actually do, not what they think they do. And what nurses like Kapoor have been doing is risking their own lives going into ICU rooms to assess, treat, and care for critically ill and dying COVID-19 patients, while doctors watch from screens or through glass partitions. (Nurses make up roughly 1 in 3 of the more than 3,000 health care workers who had died as a result of COVID as of December.)

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Similarly, the closures of so many schools and child care centers because of the pandemic has brought into sharp focus just how critical the care work is of early educators and teachers, of any gender, to keep businesses open, families supported, and the economy humming, as well as educate the next generation.

Kapoor, Ward, and the professional caregiving men we spoke to in our focus group like to say that caring is human, not the province of women alone. To make that a reality in the future of work, however, will require not only celebrating girls who code, but boys who care. And ensuring that either one will have not only meaningful and satisfying work, but jobs that enable them to live meaningful and satisfying lives.

Correction, Feb. 23, 2021: This article originally misidentified the American Association for Men in Nursing as the American Association of Men in Nursing.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.
Judge: Ex-doctor who berated neighbor not motivated by race

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP)  A retired Rhode Island doctor who shouted racial epithets at a neighbor during a property boundary dispute did not violate the states hate crime law, a judge ruled on Tuesday.

The judge said that while Dr. Richard Gordons actions were nothing less than repulsive, prosecutors did not prove the defendant was motivated by race.

Judge Stephen Isherwood sentenced Gordon, 71, to 18 months of probation and 40 hours of community service, and also ordered him to undergo a mental health evaluation and racial sensitivity counseling.

Gordon, a white man from Barrington, was convicted last week of simple assault and disorderly conduct, both misdemeanors, in connection with the Aug. 3 altercation with Bahram Pahlavi, who is of Iranian heritage.

Rhode Island does not have a free-standing hate crime law. A defendant must first be convicted of a criminal offense, and if it is found that the states hate crime statute was violated, it could lead to a more severe sentence. Had the judge determined a hate crime occurred, Gordon faced up to a year in jail.

Attorney General Peter Neronha called Gordons words reprehensible and said he was disappointed with the judges decision.

Criminal misconduct that is motivated in any way by bigotry merits the strongest possible response, he said in a statement.

The attorney generals office was supported by impact statements from the Anti-Defamation League, the NAACP and Black Lives Matter.

During the confrontation, Gordon exited his house and assaulted Pahlavi after Pahlavi replaced a surveyors stake in Gordons front yard, prosecutors said.

The altercation was caught on video and prompted Black Lives Matter protests in town.

Gordon maintains Pahlavi struck him with a hammer first, causing a forearm injury that required stitches, his lawyers said.

The judge correctly applied the law here, Gordons attorney, Robert Flanders Jr. said in a telephone interview Tuesday. What the judge found is that this was really a property dispute. Mr. Pahlavi wrongly claimed he owned part of Dr. Gordons property.

Gordon is considering an appeal, Flanders said.
In under a week, Mario Draghi has managed to bring together warring parties from across the political spectrum in Italy, boosting financial markets and projecting a new image for the country.

How has he pulled it off? Hes Draghi, said one official involved in the talks, who asked not to be named. The former head of the European Central Banks (ECB) prestige is so strong, it appears, that suddenly everyone wants a piece.

Mr Draghis track record as a policymaker and skills as a mediator are helping to forge a rare consensus in Italy, with potential opponents reasoning that its now politically risky not to back him. Thanks to the EUs recovery fund, Mr Draghi also has $250bn (209bn) to turn around the countrys ailing economy  and he doesnt want to run in elections.

That is an appealing recipe for markets too. Italian stocks and bonds have rallied since Mr Draghi accepted a mandate to form a new government.

Italys 10-year yield spread versus Germany, a key measure of sovereign risk, fell below 100 basis points last week to the narrowest level in five years, and the nations benchmark stock index rose 1.9pc to a one-year high, led by gains in banks, which are

sensitive to the spread.

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I am sure that Draghi will use his extraordinary experience and his strong leadership to make the right things happen, said the EUs economy chief Paolo Gentiloni in an interview with the Financial Times. He knows very well all the bottlenecks, the difficulties, the challenges involved in making reforms happen in Italy.

Mr Draghi (73) was in Rome yesterday to conclude his second round of talks with parties and he could reveal his cabinet this week.

The stakes couldnt be higher for Italy. The coronavirus pandemic caused the economy to shrink around 9pc last year and left more than 90,000 dead, while government debt is heading toward 160pc of output. The ECBs bond-

buying programme has kept a lid on borrowing costs so far but there are questions about how long that can be sustained.

Mr Draghi reaffirmed the possibility of a common euro-area budget. That would help protect the Italian economy from the risk posed by its public finances, but it would be a tough sell for some other euro members, who worry about picking up the tab for Italys problems.

In Rome, most parties seem to be falling in line. Many of the political leaders that Mr Draghi has met have gone out of their way to present an accommodating face and soft-pedal the issues which saw them clash with each other during Giuseppe Contes two tumultuous administrations.

For many  some officials observed  its reassuring that Mr Draghi seems to harbour no long-term political ambitions of his own. For others its enough that he doesnt seem anything like Mario Monti, a technocrat who once led the country, and who many voters associate with the horrors of austerity.



Arguably the most important of the ex-ECB heads recent meetings was with Matteo Salvini of the rightist League, the party tipped to get the most votes in an election.

Mr Salvini made atypically pro-European noises at their Saturday meeting, after years of slamming Brussels. This could be a chance, said a party official, for the League to clean up its image abroad.
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A cyber intruder broke into the computer network of the water treatment system of a Florida city and attempted to poison it with lye.

News of the attack was made public Monday by officials of Oldsmar, who revealed the attack was foiled by an operator at the facility within minutes of its launch.

After gaining access to the city's water system through software used by employees for remote network access, the intruder increased the levels of sodium hydroxide in the system from 100 parts per million to 11,000 parts per million.

Sodium hydroxide, commonly known as lye, is the main ingredient in liquid drain cleaners. In the water system, it's used in small amounts to control the acidity of the city's drinking water.

The Oldsmar plant provides water to businesses and about 15,000 residents.

"Because the operator noticed the increase and lowered it right away, at no time was there a significant adverse effect on the water being treated," Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said at a news conference.

"Importantly, the public was never in danger," he observed.

Oldsmar Mayor Eric Seidel added that the good news is that the monitoring protocols the city's water department have in place work. "Even had they not caught them, there's redundancies that have alarms in the system that would have caught the change in PH level, anyhow," he asserted.

On Monday, Feb. 8, 2021, Sheriff Bob Gualtieri gave a press conference surrounding the unlawful intrusion to the City of Oldsmar's water treatment system. He was joined by Mayor Eric Seidel and City Manager Al Braithwaite.

"The important thing is to put everybody on notice," he continued. "And I think that's really the purpose of today is to make sure that everyone realizes these kinds of bad actors are out there. It's happening. So take a really hard look at what you have in place."

The incident is currently being investigated by the sheriff's office, FBI and Secret Service.

TeamViewer Targeted

In staging the attack, the threat actor used TeamViewer, a popular remote control program that was being used by the water administration team to control the chemical mix of the water, explained Chris Risley, CEO of Bastille, in San Francisco, a provider of protection from mobile and wireless threats.

"The attacker compromised TeamViewer, perhaps by hacking the passwords, and took over the mouse to reset the chemical balance," he told TechNewsWorld.

"It comes down to the notion that people think that as long as they have a password on something, they can secure it," observed Rick Moy, vice president of sales and marketing at Tempered Networks, an identity-based micro-segmentation provider in Seattle.

"That's not true," he told TechNewsWorld. "People can guess passwords. There are hacker tools out there to do that."

Amateur Actor

Although details about who mounted the attack are unknown, their modus operandi reveals something about them.

"We can reasonably speculate this was an amateur," noted Bryson Bort, CEO of Scythe, a computer and network security company in Arlington, Va.

"It shows in their timing -- during the day when they could be seen -- and the use of the tool without obfuscating what they were doing," he told TechNewsWorld.

Moy agreed that an experienced hacker would have entered the system in a more clandestine manner. "It was a pretty low-tech attack," he added.

Since the intruder grabbed control of the operator's workstation while the operator was sitting in front of it, it's possible the threat actor wanted to be caught in the act of sabotaging the chemical mix of the water, maintained Saryu Nayyar, CEO of Gurucul, a threat intelligence company in El Segundo, Calif.

"There is a very slim possibility that the attacker did it when and how they did as a wakeup call to the operator," she told TechNewsWorld.

"So-called White Hat Hackers have been known to execute an exploit to prove a point when someone has ignored their repeated warnings about a vulnerability," she explained.

"That would be the very unlikely 'best case' scenario here," she added.

Inside Job?

The length of time the intruder was on the system -- once in the morning and again in the afternoon, both for very short periods of time -- may also add something to their profile.

"The attacker knew what they were after," said Israel Barak, CISO of Cybereason, an endpoint security and response company in Boston.

"If that's the case, it suggests that the attack was done by someone who knew the system well," he told TechNewsWorld. "They may have even had the password for the remote supervisory system."

Since the attack lacked sophistication, it's unlikely a nation-state was behind it, Risley asserted. "It might have been from overseas," he said, "but it doesn't show the depth, precision or persistence of a nation-state attack."

"Honestly, a nation-state attack might have worked," he added.

When we think about industrial control systems attacks, there's a misconception about what the adversary profile is, Barak explained.

"It's common to think these attacks are nation-state operations," he said. "While these facilities are attractive to nation-state groups, they're also targeted on an ongoing basis by a lot of different cybercrime threat actors."

"A lot of times they're targeted because they're low hanging fruit.," he continued. "In a broad network scan, a threat actor will find a remote supervisory interface, the password might be easy to guess, and they'll get into the system looking for a quick payday with a ransomware attack."

More Attacks Coming

Mayor Seidel appears to have had a good reason to raise the alarm about bad actors targeting municipal infrastructure.

"We can expect more of these attacks," Risley said. "There are dozens, or hundreds, of published vulnerabilities and municipalities are not great at keeping up with the latest security patches on their computer equipment. So, there are many opportunities for hackers to execute these kinds of attacks."

"Given the pandemic time we are in, remote tools and software are becoming ubiquitous for all types of industries and verticals," added Krishnan Subramanian, a security researcher at Menlo Security, a cybersecurity company in Mountain View, Calif.

"This could mean more room for attackers to take advantage of weaknesses in such tools," he told TechNewsWorld.

Chloe Messdaghi, vice president of strategy at Point3 Security, a provider of training and analytic tools to the security industry in Baltimore also warned that municipalities should expect more attacks.

"Attackers know that people aren't communicating with their colleagues and IT staff like they used to, and they know many people aren't even physically on site," she told TechNewsWorld.

"Picture a thief walking around a dark parking lot checking car doors," she said. "The chances he comes across an unlocked door are good."

John P. Mello Jr. has been an ECT News Network reporter since 2003. His areas of focus include cybersecurity, IT issues, privacy, e-commerce, social media, artificial intelligence, big data and consumer electronics. He has written and edited for numerous publications, including the Boston Business Journal, the Boston Phoenix, Megapixel.Net and Government Security News. Email John.


Father-of-four Gilson Paiva, 36, has been spared jail after vowing to set his partner and family on fire as revenge for her dumping him

A father of four who vowed to set his ex-lover and family on fire as revenge for her dumping him has been spared jail so he can seek professional 'help'.

Gilson Paiva, 36, subjected Sara Andrade and her mother Rita to terrifying phone calls during he which he warned: 'Don't worry, I am going to buy petrol. I am going to light a fire on you and kill you.'

Portuguese national Paiva - who lives in Salford, Greater Manchester - has four children aged 13, 10, eight and two - two of which are Ms Andrade's.

Police arrested Paiva after he turned up at the victim's home dressed in a high-visibility jacket and cut her internet cable with a pair of pliers.

He had a previous conviction from 2019 for making threats against Miss Andrade.

He admitted harassment and criminal damage but was given a nine-month sentence suspended for two years at Minshull Street Crown Court.

Paiva was also handed an indefinite restraining order that bans him from contacting Miss Andrade and her mother - but he is still allowed to see his children.

In one rambling 12-minute call to a family friend prior to his arrest, Paiva who was drunk, said: 'We are going to die together.

'Tell her that I am going to light a fire on her and in the house. She is going to die with fire on her body. I am going to kill her, her mum and everyone.'

Sentencing the judge Mr Recorder Ian Harris QC told Paiva: 'Your behaviour was disgraceful over that period.

'I have no idea what got into your mind to make these abusive and terrifying threats.

Paiva, 36, (right) subjected Sara Andrade (left) and her mother Rita to terrifying phone calls during he which he warned: 'Don't worry, I am going to buy petrol. I am going to light a fire on you and kill you'

'I am told that it was alcohol but it seems to be something deeper.

'I think you need assistance as I believe it will stop this type of behaviour.

'I see an unfortunate pattern developing and if that can be broken, it will be good for you, your family and the community at large.'

The court heard Paiva and Miss Andrade had endured a 'turbulent' relationship during which they had two children together.

David Toal, prosecuting, said: 'He would be verbally abusive often following periods of excessive drinking and in 2019, Sara ended the relationship.

'Shortly thereafter the defendant attended her home address and banged on the front door before striking the rear windows with a set of metal ladders

'The police were called, and the defendant arrested. In June 2019, he was given a 12-month conditional discharge and a restraining order was imposed.

'It seems that after that, the relationship stabilised, and the defendant would routinely see the children without incident at Sara's home.

'But for unknown reasons, in October last year he called Sara's mother mother at around 12pm and stated: "I am going to kill you because you do not allow Sara to take me back into the house."

'Rita was scared and hung up. The defendant called back but Rita did not answer and then blocked his number.

'However, despite this, the defendant continued to try and contact her. The following day he called again, this time from a private number, and when Rita answered he threatened her stating: "Your days to be alive are counted."

'Numerous unanswered calls from a private number were made that same day - as late as midnight and 2am.

'At around the same time, he was also threatening and abusive to Sara herself.

'At around 11 pm, he called the mobile phone of their daughter, who was aged 11 at the time, Sara answered and the defendant - who sounded as if he was under the influence of alcohol - began to issue threats in the two-minute call.'

'Sara attributed his words to alcohol and did not believe them to be serious.

'But later the defendant called a friend of hers and during that call, which lasted about 12 minutes he made a series of threats to Sara that he asked her to pass on.'

During the call - which was recorded - Paiva said: 'I will light a fire on here alive.

'Sara is going to die. I am going to buy petrol and light her on fire.

Portuguese national Paiva (pictured) - who lives in Salford, Greater Manchester - has four children aged 13, 10, eight and two - two of which are Ms Andrade's

'We are going to die together. Tell her that I am going to light a fire on her and in the house.

'She is going to die with fire on her body. I am going to kill her, her mum and everyone.'

Later Miss Andrade's brother, Rito was at home when Paiva opened the front door to find Paiva on the doorstep wearing a high visibility jacket and holding a pair of pliers saying: 'Tell your sister I have been here.'

Rito realised the internet and TV were no longer working and found the internet cable had been cut. Police were alerted with Sara saying she feared he posed a danger to her and her family.

In interview Paiva denied making any threats, claimed Sara was lying and said he only cut the internet cable as he was paying for the wi-fi.

In mitigation defence counsel Adrian Farrow said: 'He was at that stage abusing alcohol and that lead him to commit the offences in the way that he did. I do not seek to minimize the threats made.

'He has four children. They are 13, 10, eight and two. The defendant's intention is that he can continue the relationship with these children.'

Paiva was also banned from contacting Miss Andrade and her mother under the terms of an indefinite restraining order - although he will be allowed to see the children.

He was also ordered to complete 100 hours unpaid work.
Three compelling and differentiated assets

Potential coronavirus treatment AP-003s Phase 2 trial to start in 2Q 2021

Management team led by veteran entrepreneur CEO Dr Ahmad Doroudian

What BetterLife Pharma does:

( ) ( ) (FRA:NPAU) is a life sciences company engaged in the development of next-generation psychedelic products for the treatment of mental disorders.

Additionally, by utilizing drug delivery platform technologies, BetterLife is also refining and developing drug candidates from a broad set of complementary interferon-based technologies, which have the potential to engage the immune system to fight virus infections, such as the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) and human papillomavirus (HPV) and directly inhibit tumours to treat specific types of cancer.

The Vancouver, British Columbia-based company was formerly known as Pivot Pharmaceuticals Inc and changed its name to BetterLife Pharma in December 2019.

The company has at least three compelling and differentiated assets. The firm is aggressively developing psychedelic products, such as TD-0148A, to become a leader in an emerging market.

The biotech firm is also developing AP-003 for the treatment of pandemic respiratory viral infections and AP-001, a cream formulation for the treatment of humanpapilloma virus (HPV).

A serial entrepreneur, BetterLife Pharma CEO Dr Ahmad Doroudian is the founder of several companies including Merus Labs International, PanGeo and Altum Pharmaceuticals. Significantly, BetterLife completed a merger of equals with Altum Pharma and is advancing Altum's pipeline, especially AP-003 and its potential as a COVID-19 treatment.

How is it doing:

BetterLife Pharma has had a busy 2021 so far with a product development roadmap for its products.

On March 23, the company said it had signed an agreement with the laboratory of Dr Adam L. Halberstadt at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) for pre-clinical behavioral pharmacology studies of TD-0148A, which is a second-generation lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) derivative that the company believes will mimic the therapeutic potential of LSD without producing hallucinogenic effects or other psychoactive side-effects.

As part of the research agreement, BetterLife said it will work with Halberstadts team to test TD-0148A in various preclinical models that are established in their lab and use their expertise in understanding how psychedelics and related compounds interact with the serotonergic system and how those molecules could be developed to treat psychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders.

Earlier in March, BetterLife had said it was partnering up with Carleton University in Ottawa to study TD-0148A to treat depression. The company reckons the therapy will mimic the projected therapeutic potential of LSD without causing undesirable psychoactive dissociative side effects.

The university's head of neuroscience Dr Argel Aguilar-Valles and his team will work with BetterLife to test TD-0148A in both in vitro and in vivo models in the lab in a bid to understand the molecular mechanisms that underlie psychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders.

And in the same month, BetterLife revealed that it had signed an agreement with Eurofins CDMO (contract development and manufacturing organization) Alphora Inc for the manufacturing of TD-0148A. Eurofins CDMO will conduct process development, scale-up and GMP (good manufacturing practice) manufacturing of TD-0148A at its plant facility in Mississauga, Ontario. The manufacturing will be based on BetterLifes proprietary process that does not involve any controlled substances, the company said

On the coronavirus front, also in March, BetterLife announced that its wholly-owned subsidiary Altum Pharmaceuticals had entered into a Letter of Intent with Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile to conduct a randomized, placebo-controlled trial in COVID-19 patients testing Altums proprietary inhaled interferon alpha-2b product AP-003.

The IN2COVID trial is projected to start in the second quarter of this year and be completed by the end of the 3Q. Interferon alpha-2b (IFN-a2b), a Type I interferon, is a naturally occurring protein integral to the bodys first line of anti-viral defenses. BetterLife said there is evidence that coronaviruses, such as SARS-CoV-2, have mechanisms that suppress IFN-a2b production, allowing the virus to evade the innate immune system.

BetterLife said the goal of the IN2COVID trial is to confirm the benefit of inhaled IFN-a2b in early-stage COVID-19 patients.

On the personnel front, in April, the company announced the appointment of a former Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Psychiatry Division director, Thomas Laughren as a regulatory advisor.

Laughren led the Division of Psychiatry Products and the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research at the FDA. He oversaw the review of all psychiatric drug development activities conducted under investigational new drugs (INDs) and the review of all new drug applications (NDAs) and supplements for new psychiatric drug claims, the company said. He has authored and co-authored papers and book chapters on regulatory and methodological issues pertaining to psychiatric drugs, and he is a frequent speaker at professional meetings, the company added.

And in a boost for its shares at the end of March, BetterLife revealed that its stock has been added to the high-profile Horizons Psychedelic Stock Index ETF after its first quarterly rebalance of holdings. The world's first exchange-traded fund (ETF) offers exposure to North American securities that have significant exposure to the rapidly growing psychedelics industry. The proprietary index is operated by Horizons ETFs, and Solactive AG is the independent calculation agent for the index.

In the same statement, BetterLife also announced that it had closed a non-brokered private placement by issuing 1,779,833 common shares at a price of C$1.40 per share for gross proceeds of C$2,491,766. The company said it would use the proceeds for working capital purposes and for advancement of pre-clinical and clinical programs.

Inflection points:

Completion of the AP-003 Phase 2 coronavirus trial, and approval under emergency use authorization

Advancing AP-001 as potentially the first treatment to prevent/halt HPV

Progressing second-generation psychedelic compounds to address unmet needs in mental health

What the boss says:

In the March statement announcing the appointment of Eurofins CDMO to manufacture LSD derivative TD-0148A, BetterLife CEO Ahmad Doroudian said: Following our recent acquisition of Transcend Biodynamics, we are pleased to be moving rapidly ahead with the manufacturing program of TD-0148A for treatment of major depressive disorders and other indications."

He added: We believe our novel manufacturing process and product is a significant step forward in bringing non-hallucinogenic psychoactive drugs to patients in need. Eurofins CDMO with its state-of-the-art manufacturing plant and agile team is an ideal partner to help realize our vision.

Contact the author at jon.hoipkins@proactiveinvestors.com
This is the Wednesday, February 10, 2021 edition of Today in Slovakia. Learn about politics, business, and other notable events of the day in Slovakia in less than five minutes. If you like what we are doing and want to support good journalism, buy our online subscription. Thank you.

Everybody coming from abroad must register and self-isolate

Due to the rising threat of Covid variants, Slovakia will toughen up conditions for everybody crossing its borders.

Starting on February 15, all incomers (including those coming from safe countries) will have to register with the eHranica form and self-isolate for 14 days, either at home or at a state quarantine facility.

After eight days, incomers can get a PCR test. If they test negative, they can end their quarantine.

There will be exceptions for cross-border commuters, who will need a negative PCR or antigen test result no older than seven days.

More details should be specified in the coming days.

Rules at borders change. Everybody entering Slovakia from abroad must enter quarantine Read more

Chaos in statistics

Several analysts working with Slovak coronavirus data have recently pointed out that the statistics on recovered patients include not only the number of positive cases identified by PCR tests but also those who have recovered after testing positive with an antigen test.

However, it is not clearly stated in the statistics that the number includes both these categories.

The authorities report the number of new positive cases separately for those identified with PCR tests and those identified with rapid antigen tests conducted at mobile testing sites set up around the country.

As a result, it is not clear now how many active cases there are in Slovakia and the statistics presented on the official korona.gov.sk website might be distorted, as several analysts have pointed out.

Statistics on active Covid-19 cases in Slovakia might be distorted Read more



More coronavirus-related developments

Slovakia reported more than 3,000 new Covid cases revealed by PCR tests for the first time since mid-January. Of nearly 14,000 PCR tests from February 9, some 3,200 were positive (or 22.74 percent ). At the same time, more than 167,500 rapid antigen tests were conducted, and 3,067 were positive (or 1.83 percent ).

from February 9, some 3,200 were positive (or ). At the same time, more than tests were conducted, and were positive (or ). The situation in Slovakia keeps deteriorating, and six more districts will turn black next Monday.

next Monday. People working in black and dark-red regions need a negative test no older than 7 days as of today.

need a negative test as of today. Ombudswoman Maria Patakyova has turned to the Constitutional Court, requesting it checks the constitutionality of some interference in peoples rights during the pandemic. This includes the stripping of personal freedom via quarantine or isolation, and insufficient legal and court protection from interference in fundamental rights.

A second satellite to space

The second satellite constructed in Slovakia should start orbiting the Earth this autumn.

Named GRBAlpha, the satellite is an international project. It has a cubic shape measuring 10 x 10 x 10 cm. The satellite is currently in Moscow, awaiting its launch into space. It will be carried onboard a Russian space rocket, which will be launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in March or April.

The main task of the satellite will be to support amateur radio activities. It will also perform a scientific experiment related to gamma rays.

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Related article Slovakia will send a second satellite to space Read more

Tweet of the day:

Picture of the day:

A new avalanche beacon checkpoint was established in Hrebienok in the High Tatras. (Source: TASR)

Feature story for today:

Mobster Marian Kocner used to call him Gambino. He feared the idea that Daniel Lipsic could get into power because the state would then start paying attention to how Kocner and his friend Norbert Bodor earned their millions.

When Robert Fico's government started wobbling after the murder of Jan Kuciak and Martina Kusnirova, Kocner conversed about it in the coded Threema app with tax fraudster Ladislav Basternak.

Today, Kocner is serving a 19-year prison sentence for the forgery of promissory notes. Basternak is serving five years in prison for tax fraud. Bodor is in pretrial custody regarding the corruption case Dobytkar (Cattle Breeder).

Daniel Lipsic has been elected special prosecutor by MPs of the ruling coalition led by OLaNO of Igor Matovic.

Read a profile on Lipsic by Sme daily reporter Roman Cuprik.

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Related article An enemy of Kocner with many friends in politics. Daniel Lipsic is the new special prosecutor Read more

In other news

1,975 schools have restored in-person classes , which represents some 28 percent of all schools, and 144,000 pupils have returned to school , said Education Minister Branislav Grohling (SaS). He believes that all school employees will be vaccinated by the end of the current school year and that all schools will reopen in September.

, which represents some 28 percent of all schools, and , said Education Minister Branislav Grohling (SaS). He believes that all school employees will be vaccinated by the end of the current school year and that all schools will reopen in September. The Prague-based court turned down the appeal of Jozef Majsky and accepted the Slovak Supreme Court verdict confirming a nine-year prison sentence in the case of embezzling non-banking companies. Majsky will serve the rest of his sentence in the Czech Republic.

and accepted the Slovak Supreme Court verdict confirming a nine-year prison sentence in the case of embezzling non-banking companies. Majsky will serve the rest of his sentence in the Czech Republic. The Specialised Criminal Court decided that financier Martin Kvietik , charged in the Dobytkar (Stock Farmer) case, will remain in custody .

, charged in the Dobytkar (Stock Farmer) case, . The Special Prosecutors Office will add three more prosecutors (increasing the number to 38) and five new assistants . At the same time, it will merge the department for the fight against extremism with the department for the fight against organised crime and terrorism.

(increasing the number to 38) . At the same time, it will the department for the fight against extremism with the department for the fight against organised crime and terrorism. Industrial production in December 2020 rose the most since March 2019, by 6.8 percent year-on-year. The most influential component, the manufacturing of transport equipment, increased 9.9 percent. However, production dropped by 9.1 percent y-o-y in 2020 due to the pandemic. The manufacturing of cars fell by 16.4 percent y-o-y.

rose the most since March 2019, by 6.8 percent year-on-year. The most influential component, the manufacturing of transport equipment, increased 9.9 percent. However, production dropped by 9.1 percent y-o-y in 2020 due to the pandemic. The manufacturing of cars fell by 16.4 percent y-o-y. The year-on-year volume of construction output increased in December 2020 after a nine-month decline, mostly due to the growth of the volume of civil engineering by almost one quarter and the high growth of production abroad. The construction output amounted to 5.3 billion in 2020, which was 11.3 percent less than in 2019.

after a nine-month decline, mostly due to the growth of the volume of civil engineering by almost one quarter and the high growth of production abroad. The construction output amounted to 5.3 billion in 2020, which was 11.3 percent less than in 2019. The cabinet approved investment aid totalling 3.2 million in the form of tax relief . The aid will go to two companies, Hydac Electronic and Nestle Slovensko , which have promised to create a total of 107 new jobs in return.

. The aid will go to two companies, , which have promised to create a total of 107 new jobs in return. E-payments for goods and services in Slovakia surpassed cash payments for the first time in history. The pandemic teaches people to be more careful when paying, which is why they use cashless payments more, according to Iveta Behunova of the National Bank of Slovakia.

for the first time in history. The pandemic teaches people to be more careful when paying, which is why they use cashless payments more, according to Iveta Behunova of the National Bank of Slovakia. The Slovak Red Cross has launched the 26th year of its Valentine Blood Drop campaign, with the aim to secure enough donated blood despite the pandemic.

More on Spectator.sk today:

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What it owns

Ruvuma PSA (Tanzania) gas: 25% working interest through subsidiary Ndovu Resources

Kiliwani North (Tanzania) gas: Aminex owns 63.83% through Ndovu.

Nyuni PSA : Offshore licence surrounding Kiliwani. Aminex owns 100% through Ndovu.

How it is doing

On 29 Jan 2021 Proactive reported:

( ) has told investors it is to restructure its board and further cut costs, as it seeks to take advantage of opportunities provided by the recently sealed farm-out deal for the Ruvuma project.

The company said it plans to reduce gross general and administrative costs by 30% this year plus by a further 25%-30% next year.

It aims to lower these costs to below 1mln per year, which would equate to a 75% reduction since 2018.

23 Nov 2020

Aminex highlighted that an exciting time finally lies ahead as its new partner, APT advances the Ruvuma asset in Tanzania.

APT has now put in place a road-map for the project including a work programme of seismic and drilling, which will allow the project to move a final financing decision for the Ntorya discovery before the end of 2022.

23 Oct 2020

Aminex PLC ( ) has announced the completion of its farm-out deal with ARA Petroleum Tanzania Limited (APT).

"We are delighted to finally complete the farm-out and hand over operatorship of the Ruvuma PSA to APT, said Robert Ambrose, Aminex chief executive in a statement.

The company now retains a 25% interest in the Ruvuma asset  which includes the Ntorya gas project and exploration areas  and APT will fund a forward programme including the drilling of the Chikumbi-1 well and a new seismic programme over at least 200 square kilometres.

What management says

Charles Santos, Aminex executive chairman, in January said: "Our objectives now are to capitalise on Aminex's fully carried valuable Ruvuma asset, maintain discipline on expenditures, and with a lean and effective management team pursue our strategic initiatives."
The company believes new appointments will be instrumental in its plans to aggressively explore and develop its Saints, Leinster and Nepean nickel projects in Western Australia.

Trevor Eton has been appointed a non-executive director and Rebecca Moylan chief financial officer.

( ) has strengthened its board and executive team as it steps up exploration efforts at highly prospective nickel projects in Western Australia.

Trevor Eton has been appointed as a non-executive director and Rebecca Moylan as chief financial officer (CFO) of the company.

Eton is a well-respected finance executive with more than 35 years extensive experience in corporate finance within the minerals industry.

Moylan is an experienced CFO with expertise in financial and corporate management, accounting, project financing and contract negotiation.

Aggressive exploration strategy

Auroch managing director Aidan Platel said: We are extremely pleased that Trevor has joined Aurochs Board of Directors.

His nickel industry knowledge, leadership and experience in all areas of corporate finance, treasury, offtake, risk management, cost control and equity markets will be a tremendous asset as the company continues to aggressively explore and develop its Saints, Leinster and Nepean nickel projects in Western Australia.

Previous experience

In his previous full-time role as CFO and company secretary of sulphide nickel producer Panoramic Resources Limited ( ) from 2003 to 2020, Eton was instrumental in the financing, construction and development of the Savannah nickel project.

He was also heavily involved in the acquisition and subsequent development of the Lanfranchi Nickel Project, which saw Panoramic reach a market capitalisation exceeding $1 billion in 2007.

Before joining Panoramic, he has held corporate finance roles with various other resource companies, including diversified metal producers, MPI Mines Limited (MPI) and Australian Consolidated Minerals Limited (ACM).

Eton holds a Bachelor of Arts (Hons.) degree with a major in economics from the Victoria University of Wellington (VUW), New Zealand, a Post Graduate Diploma in Management from the Melbourne Business School and is an Associate Fellow of the Australian Institute of Management (AFAIM).

Experience in similar roles

During her career in the mining industry, Moylan has spent nearly 10 years in various senior roles including as CFO and company secretary of several ASX-listed companies.

She holds a Bachelor of Business (Accounting and Finance) degree and, is a certified practising accountant (CPA), a fellow of Financial Services Institute of Australasia and a Graduate Member of Australian Institute of Company Directors (GAICD).

Platel said: We are also very pleased to welcome Rebecca to the Auroch team as CFO.

Her wealth of knowledge and experience gained in similar roles for other ASX-listed resource companies will be invaluable as the company builds the team it needs to aggressively progress its high-quality nickel sulphide portfolio.

Every time another regulation is added to a farmers plate, it seems like a brand new challenge to tackle. Oftentimes, it is. But in the case of growing constraints in agricultural labor laws, the ideals stretch back further than we might realize.

The 40-hour work week, restrictions on child labor, and authorization of worker unions were all established as a response to the Great Depression, explained Richard Stup of Cornell Cooperative Extension on the February 3 Hoards Dairyman DairyLivestream. The National Labor Relations Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act were passed with the purpose of protecting workers and forcing employers to create more jobs at a time when many people were unemployed.

How does this relate to farm workers?

For the most part, it hasnt.

Congress passed these laws after compromises led by rural and Southern states to carve out farm labor from the new labor rules, said the agricultural workforce specialist. Subsequently, state legislatures throughout the country also recognized that farm jobs were different from other jobs, and they created similar carve outs from state labor laws to treat farm labor differently from most other industries.

Modern attention

These exemptions created a patchwork of labor laws across the country.

How this works today is that we have federal and state labor laws, and most states mirror the federal laws to a large degree, Stup pointed out. But when there are differences, whichever law is most restrictive, or protective, depending on your point of view, is the law that operates for you.

Today, we find states in various places across the country making changes to their laws that affect farm employees, Stup said. For example, federal minimum wage is still $7.25. But in New York, the minimum wage is now $12.50 for most of the upstate outside of New York City. So, employers there, where the dairy farms are, must use the $12.50 because the state one is higher, he explained.

Minimum wage is just one example of protection for workers that states are adopting. New York labor laws that went into effect in 2020 set overtime restrictions, require a weekly day of rest, and authorize farm unions. There are exemptions from these laws for certain family members and for certain management employees, but theyre rather strict to meet those exemptions, Stup noted. Other states such as California and Minnesota have similar laws.

All of these changes are happening at a time when farms struggle to find enough employees, Stup continued.

Why now?

Theyre also coming at a time of growing calls for worker justice. Online media, the pandemic, and societal factors continue to shine a light on topics people would otherwise rarely be exposed to, DairyLivestream guests agreed. Consumers are increasingly concerned about the entire chain of how their food is produced.

Of course, there is a financial cost that comes to the dairy farmer as he or she balances these regulations, and wanting to provide a great working environment, with running their business. For more on that discussion, check out the Intel Whats driving changes in farm labor rules?

At the end of the day, dairy farmers want to do what is best for their animals, their land, and their people. Leading those good initiatives ourselves remains critical in supporting the future of the industry.

California dairyman Frank Cardoza summed up the labor debates by saying, Its something that was going to change anyway because in the publics eye, they feel that its a hard job. Things have changed, and I think its a good thing.

An ongoing series of events

The next broadcast of DairyLivestream will be on Wednesday, February 17 at 11 a.m. CST. Each episode is designed for panelists to answer over 30 minutes of audience questions. If you havent joined a DairyLivestream broadcast yet, register here. Registering once registers you for all future events.

To comment, email your remarks to intel@hoards.com.

(c) Hoard's Dairyman Intel 2021

February 8, 2021
A new study led by VCU Massey Cancer Center researcher Jeanine Guidry, Ph.D., found that parents of children with cancer were more likely to believe misinformation and unverifiable content associated with COVID-19 than parents of children with no cancer history.

"These findings help us better understand the spread and threat of COVID-19 misinformation," said Guidry, who is a member of the Cancer Prevention and Control research program at Massey Cancer Center, assistant professor in the Richard T. Robertson School of Media and Culture in the College of Humanities and Sciences and director of the Media+Health Lab at VCU. "Misinformation can have devastating effects on people's perception of the disease and on decisions they make related to prevention and treatment. Understanding who is at greater risk for endorsing COVID-19 misinformation may help us better mitigate this issue."

Previous research shows that information about the pandemic is circulating online at high rates and not all of it is accurate. Public health officials have expressed concern about falsehoods creating an increase in nonadherence to safety guidelines among vulnerable communities.

Guidry's study, published in Emerging Infectious Diseases, was fueled by data from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) that shows pediatric cancer mortality has increased during the pandemic due to delayed access to medical care, with COVID-19 misinformation cited as a potential contributing factor.

To determine whether parents of pediatric cancer patients are more susceptible to misinformation than their counterparts, Guidry's team conducted a survey among 735 parents of children ages 2 to 17 - 315 of them had children currently undergoing cancer treatment and 420 of them had children with no cancer history. The parents evaluated a series of COVID-19 misinformation statements taken from the World Health Organization website.

Results of the survey showed that parents of children with cancer were more likely to endorse COVID-19 misinformation compared with the other parents. Susceptibility to misinformation was more likely for fathers, younger parents and parents with higher perceived stress.

"It is not completely clear why parents of children with cancer are more vulnerable to misinformation," said Guidry. "They may be at greater risk as a result of greater levels of COVID-19 related stress, resulting in more time spent looking for information online. Moreover, the increased stress levels reported by these parents could be affecting their information-processing abilities."

These results suggest that pediatric oncology providers should be aware of the potentially high endorsement of COVID-19 misinformation among parents of their patients and proactively address this issue during visits.

The findings will be used to provide direction for future research on acceptance of other forms of health misinformation among medically vulnerable populations.

"The evolving nature of our understanding of COVID-19 necessitates coordinated and diligent efforts to reduce illness and death," said Guidry. "Paramount among these efforts is the development of innovative preventive interventions to combat COVID-19-related misinformation."

###

Guidry collaborated on this research with Carrie A. Miller, Ph.D., M.P.H., of the Department of Health Behavior and Policy at the VCU School of Medicine; Bernard F. Fuemmeler, Ph.D., M.P.H., the Gordon D. Ginder, M.D., Chair in Cancer Research, associate director for population science and co-leader of the Cancer Prevention and Control research program at VCU Massey Cancer Center and professor in the VCU Department of Health Behavior and Policy; Kellie E. Carlyle, Ph.D., M.P.H., of the VCU Department of Health Behavior and Policy; Jennifer Rohan, Ph.D., L.C.P., of the Department of Pediatrics at the VCU School of Medicine and Massey's Cancer Prevention and Control research program; Marcia Winter, Ph.D., of the Department of Psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University and Massey's Cancer Prevention and Control research program, and Albert J Ksinan, Ph.D., of Masaryk University, Czech Republic.

This study was supported by award 2T32CA093423 from the National Cancer Institute and in part by VCU Massey Cancer Center's NCI Cancer Center Support Grant P30 CA016059.
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The police in Delta State said they have arrested three suspected kidnappers in Agbarho, Ughelli North Local Government area of the state.

The police spokesperson, Onome Onovwakpoyeya, confirmed the arrest to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Wednesday.

It is true that three suspected kidnappers have been arrested by the command. We are out for them, it is either the criminals repent or relocate from Delta, she said.

The suspects were apprehended on Tuesday in Agbarho.

They were alleged to have been involved in the abduction of one Emmanuel Piopio on Sunday on Ekwerhe Road, Agbarho.

The suspects were arrested in Ophori-Agbarho community forest with the help of the army and members of a local vigilante group.

Kidnapping has been on the increase of late in several states in Nigeria.

(NAN)

Welcome back to Tech Chronicle. Do please subscribe to this fine newsletter; I promise it wont be too taxing.

San Francisco voters decided to hike the citys gross receipts tax, its primary business tax, in November. As someone who actually reads tax codes for a living  yes, I need more hobbies  I worry they had no idea what they were doing.

Backers of the business-tax overhaul, which Mayor London Breed and others pitched as a needed reform, noted that it got rid of the citys payroll tax. But it kept the basic structure of the gross receipts tax untouched, and for most companies, that tax is a stealth payroll tax.

Thats because San Francisco asks businesses to calculate their gross receipts tax burden in part on the portion of their overall payroll thats earned in the city. This apportionment factor helps determine how much they pay.

Salesforces move to let most of its employees work from home some or all days of the week provides a good example of the complexities that the city and its businesses now face.

Lets say a Salesforce employee who lives in Oakland comes into a San Francisco office two days a week. Will Salesforce count 40% of her payroll as a factor in its San Francisco tax bill? Thats my reading of the tax code: Its based on the working hours an employee spends in the city proper versus anywhere else.

Lea Suzuki / The Chronicle

Ah, unless shes a salesperson whose commissions vary considerably. In that case, San Francisco considers the volume of business. What if shes working from home at the end of the quarter when deals usually close? Will those escape the apportionment factor, and lower Salesforces tax burden accordingly? It seems like enough of a loophole that we might see some memos encouraging workers to time their days in the office carefully.

It could even lead companies to encourage employees, especially highly compensated ones, to live and work anywhere but San Francisco. (An employee who works from home in San Francisco is counted just like they were working in an office in San Francisco.)

All of this holds doubly true for financial companies, and companies San Francisco considers financial in nature, including online payments processors, lenders and the like. Those companies have an apportionment factor thats purely based on their payroll distribution. Square has been squabbling with the city for years over its taxes, largely because of this classification.

Yalonda M. James / The Chronicle 2020

Amanda Fried, a spokesperson for the Office of the Treasurer and Tax Collector, said that remote work is not a new issue for city auditors.

The city code says the tax collector can issue rules or regulations to address situations where it is impractical, unreasonable or improper to account for payroll based on working hours or business volume in the city. Fried said the tax collector has not issued any such rules related to working from home.

The predictable response from the Board of Supervisors will be a call to tax remote work. That will not go over well at a time when we have the equivalent of 10 empty Salesforce Towers in the city.

I know we just voted for what we were told was an overhaul of our business taxes. What we need instead is a rethink of the whole system  one that calls on big employers to pay their fair share, but doesnt impose these perverse incentives or obtuse calculations.

Anything else would be impractical, unreasonable or improper.

 Owen Thomas, othomas@sfchronicle.com

Interactive Vaccine Tracker: Latest developments Detailed information about the coronavirus vaccines as it becomes available.

Quote of the week

Im here live. Im not a cat.  Texas lawyer Rod Ponton, appearing in court with a cute-kitten Zoom filter on, via Vice

Coming up

Uber reports earnings Wednesday. Its shares already got a boost from rival Lyft, which reported better-than-expected numbers Tuesday.

What Im reading

Gunseli Yalcinkya on Rebecca Blacks viral Friday, 10 years on. (Dazed)

Chase DiFeliciantonio on a new challenge to Silicon Valleys use of NDAs. (San Francisco Chronicle)

Kaya Yurieff and Oliver Darcy on the prevalence of coronavirus vaccine misinformation on Facebook. (CNN Business)

Tech Chronicle is a weekly newsletter from Owen Thomas, The Chronicles business editor, and the rest of the tech team. Follow along on Twitter: @techchronicle and Instagram: @techchronicle
Director of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) Artem Sytnyk confirmed the information about searches conducted at the National Nuclear Generating Company Energoatom in the case of the sale of electricity.

"This [information from MP Geo Leros] is true. Searches are underway, authorized by the High Anti-Corruption Court [HACC]," Sytnyk said at a briefing in Kyiv on Wednesday.

At the same time, he said that the case concerns the sale of electricity to a number of commercial structures.
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This is the moment a pair of hikers found a missing dog that had somehow survived on snow-covered mountains for two weeks, and carried the freezing pet home.

Ciara Nolan and Jean-Francois Bonnet found eight-year-old golden retriever Neesha near a summit in the Wicklow Mountains, Ireland.





They wrapped the dog, who had been reported missing two weeks earlier, in a coat before Jean carried her on his back for six miles to reach level ground.

Ciara Nolan and Jean Francois Bonnet found the pooch, an eight-year-old golden retriever named Neesha, near the summit of a peak in the Wicklow Mountains, Ireland, before carrying her back to safety

The dog (pictured during the rescue) had been reported missing two weeks earlier after she ran off while chasing deer

In the clip, recorded on February 6 and posted on TikTok the following day, Neesha can be seen dangling from a make-shift harness - created using a scarf - on Jean's back as they make their way across the uneven terrain.

Wind buffers the microphone but Ciara can be heard saying: 'She looks so uncomfortable. She is so cute.'

The clip cuts to another leg of the trio's journey with Neesha this time placed across Jean's shoulders as Ciara continues: 'We are so far away from home. She is so weak, poor little baby.'

Ciara continuously tries to comfort the poorly pooch before the group eventually reach level ground after nearly five hours.

The couple decided to dress the poorly pooch up in their spare clothes to ensure she was warm enough on the journey back down to level ground

The couple, who are both doctors, eventually managed to get Neesha safely back down to level ground and into their car

The couple, who are both doctors, ensured Neesha was warm and dry before contacting local animal charity Ash Animal Rescue Centre who managed to help find her owners.

A separate clip showed the family during an emotional reunion with their golden retriever as they all huddled around the pooch.

Jean told Storyful: 'She was near the summit, covered in snow, freezing cold, couldn't stand or bark, and covered in wounds on her legs.

'We dressed her in our spare clothes and carried her down the mountain for about 10 kilometers.'

The couple then decided to contacting local animal charity Ash Animal Rescue Centre who managed to help find Neesha's owners

A separate clip showed the family during an emotional reunion with their golden retriever as they all huddled around the pooch

Neesha had been walking with her owners, along with another family pet three-year-old German shepherd Harley, on Lugnaquilla mountain on January 23 when the pair bolted after a deer and failed to return, according to RTE News.

The family searched for the dogs throughout the evening but had no luck in locating them in the vast landscape.

They called off the search but returned the following day to continue in daylight and found Harley waiting in the car park - but there was still no sign of Neesha.

Her owners made desperate pleas on social media before enlisting the help of a drone to scan the area.

They also left a basket of unwashed laundry on the trail - hoping Neesha would catch the scent - but had been unable to locate her.

One of her owners, Erina OShea Goetelen, said they had started to give up hope before Ciara and Jean stumbled across the pooch by chance.

After being reunited Erina took Neesha to the vets who said the family pet had lost a third of her body weight during the two weeks away from home.

She had also developed dermatitis - a skin irritation - but concluded that Neesha would soon be back to her usual self.
Approximately 16,000 people have got appointments each hour on the platform programare.vaccinare-covid.gov.ro to be vaccinated in the new offices opened for the administration of the serum produced by AstraZeneca, reads a posting on the Facebook page of the platform.

The new offices for the administration of the vaccine produced by AstraZeneca were activated on Wednesday, at 12:30, in the scheduling platform, informed the National Coordinating Committee on anti-COVID-19 Vaccination Activities (CNCAV).

According to the quoted source, 10,800 slots are available daily in the 180 offices across the country."The scheduling for AstraZeneca begins today and it is done for a 20-day session from February 15 to March 6. Subsequently, new slots will be allocated each day to allow appointments for vaccination with AstraZeneca until April 11," the CNCAV informed.According to the recommendations of the medical authorities, vaccination against COVID-19 with AstraZeneca vaccine will be done for the age group 18-55 years.For the good development of the vaccination activity, the appointment will be made in the same office both for the first dose and for the booster, 56 days apart.

AGERPRES

Probe opened into operation of banned Jehovahs Witnesses cell in Moscow

 flickr.com/guampedia.com

11:29 10/02/2021

MOSCOW, February 10 (RAPSI)  A criminal case has been opened over operation in north Moscow of a cell of the Jehovahs Witnesses religious organization banned in Russia, RAPSI has learnt from the press service of the Investigative Committees Moscow Main Investigations Directorate.

According to the investigation, a group of people aware of the Supreme Courts ruling declaring the Jehovahs Witnesses an extremist organization created a cell of the religious group in a safe flat in north Moscow in 2017. The Jehovahs Witnesses adepts studied propagating literature and committed other actions peculiar to the community. Moreover, they held online gatherings there, the statement reads.

Investigators conduct searches at the premises of the alleged cell members.
Pipeline

10 February 2021

Katara Hospitality, a leading global hotel owner, developer and operator based in Qatar, today announced a new partnership with Accor, a world-leading hospitality group for an exciting new evolution of the iconic Delano brand, Maison Delano Paris planned to open in 2022.

Delano's well-earned reputation as the ultimate luxury lifestyle destination which was launched in Miami with first-class service and customized guest experiences will now be replicated in major global urban city centers.

Maison Delano will boast a new F&B concept by world renowned chef Dani Garcia which will provide guests with an oasis in the center of bustling cities and feature unparalleled accommodations, cuisine and mixology experiences.

As the first addition to the Delano brand, Maison Delano Paris is destined to be a jewel in the crown of Accor's lifestyle portfolio and will set the standard for future expansion. Located in the heart of the prestigious 8th Arrondissement in an 18th century mansion at 4 Rue d'Anjou, just steps away from the famous Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore, the hotel will boast 56 extraordinary rooms and suites, a vibrant restaurant and bar nestled in the mansion's historical courtyard.

Over the course of the next year, the hotel will be renovated and updated to provide guests with a luxurious and chic aesthetic encompassing a lush entrance, a glorious courtyard, and light and relaxing guestrooms. Consistent with the Delano legacy, the focus will be on superior service in a lifestyle setting, providing guests exceptional dining options, expert mixology and an immersive spa experience.

Katara Hospitality is a global hotel owner, developer and operator, based in Qatar. With 50 years' experience in the industry, Katara Hospitality actively pursues its strategic expansion plans by investing in peerless hotels in Qatar while growing its collection of iconic properties in key international markets. Katara Hospitality's portfolio has grown to include 42 owned and / or managed hotels and the company is now focused on achieving its target of 60 hotels in its portfolio by 2030. As the country's flagship hospitality organisation, Katara Hospitality supports Qatar's long-term economic vision.

Katara Hospitality currently owns properties spread across four continents in Qatar, Egypt, Morocco, UK, France, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Singapore, Thailand and United States of America. While it partners with some of the finest hotel management companies, Katara Hospitality operates owned and non-owned hotels through its standalone operating arm, Burgenstock Selection and Murwab Hotel Group.

Katara Hospitality has gained global recognition for its contributions to the Qatari and international hospitality landscape, through numerous prestigious accolades from the industry.
LONDON, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Founded in 2018, Storfund is a technology driven global eCommerce funding enterprise. Storfund announced today it has raised $36.5 million of capital through the Private Debt team of Swiss bank Union Bancaire Privee (UBP) and private investors. This fresh investment will be used to expand Storfund's global operations and help marketplace merchants access working capital and unlock liquidity.

In its initial 18 months of operations, Storfund has enjoyed rapid growth, fast becoming Europe's leading eCommerce funder  a feat that saw the business break even in its first six months. Between December 2019 and December 2020 Storfund saw a 1200% growth and expects to continue this growth trajectory for the next two years. This year, Storfund aims to provide $1 billion of cash advances to eCommerce merchants selling on Amazon and other European, American, and Asian marketplaces.

The only European Amazon approved funding provider, Storfund has a presence in 17 out of Amazon's 20 marketplaces. It is also integrated into other leading European eCommerce sites and is due to be rolled out onto several other marketplaces during 2021.

Storfund's API driven propriety technology brings innovation and efficiency to the receivables finance industry which has been unable to serve e-commerce merchants due to its traditional approach. Technology streamlines processes and lowers costs, which is ultimately passed on the e-commerce merchants. Storfund's bespoke underwriting standards based on marketplace microstructure indicators rather than traditional credit metrics allow Storfund to onboard e-commerce merchants within 24 hours and manage risk on a dynamic basis.

By combining access to working capital and international cross-border payments in over 50 currencies, London-based Storfund provides eCommerce sellers around the world with an end-to-end solution for stabilising cash flow, accelerating growth and increasing profitability from their local and international sales.

eCommerce is now an indispensable part of the global retail framework. Like many other industries the pandemic has reshaped the retail landscape and accelerated its exponential transformation. 2020 saw global eCommerce surpass $3.5 trillion in sales, accounting for 22% of the entire global retail market.

Storfund was conceived by former investment bankers George Brintalos and Akbar Ahsan. Together they recognised the unique financial needs of eCommerce merchants. George Brintalos said: "Storfund bridges the gap between eCommerce and capital, which is under served by traditional banks which are either too rigid to adapt or are withdrawing from the SME sector. We are here to address the capital needs of this new category of entrepreneurs, providing them with the liquidity they need to naturally grow their business, without adding unnecessary debt on their balance sheet or diluting their share capital base."

Akbar Ahsan added: "Storfund uniquely understands the cashflow challenges of eCommerce merchants and offers a frictionless liquidity solution for the digital age. We are pleased that investors saw the value of Storfund's tech-first approach which combined with our real time risk management puts us at the forefront of our industry. This investment round will accelerate our scale up and help us in our mission to alleviate the pain of long payment terms and provide growth capital to eCommerce merchants."

Colin Greene, Head of Private Debt at UBP said: "Fintech and e-commerce are generating attractive financing opportunities. We are pleased to work with Storfund and support the financing they provide to SMEs who sell through e-commerce marketplaces."

For more information, please visit https://storfund.com.

Please contact / [email protected] / [email protected] / [email protected] for more additional information, assets and interviews.

SOURCE Storfund
The Andrews government is being urged to consider all options to get international school students back into the country, including putting them on charter flights and into residential quarantine.

Education Minister James Merlino met with principals from state, Catholic and independent schools on Tuesday afternoon, but offered them no commitment on when overseas students might be allowed back into the state.

Oakleigh Grammar principal Mark Robertson with international students Sinky and Betty. Credit:Penny Stephens

More than 40 high-fee Victorian schools are proposing that year 11 and 12 students from low-COVID places such as China, Vietnam, Singapore, Hong Kong and Cambodia would take exclusively commissioned charter flights to Melbourne. The students would then go into hotel quarantine with parents or school staff, and rejoin Victorian classrooms.

Separately, the Australian Boarding School Association is in talks for international students to quarantine, alongside school staff, at hotels in South Australia and Tasmania.
The Eli Lilly logo is shown on one of the company's offices in San Diego, Calif., on Sept. 17, 2020. (Mike Blake/Reuters)

FDA Grants Eli Lillys Experimental COVID-19 Antibody-Drug Emergency Use Authorization

Eli Lillys COVID-19 antibody-drug has been granted emergency use authorization by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), widening access to a therapy that has shown improvement in treating patients with mild to moderate cases of the CCP virus.

Data from a late-stage trial last month showed that Eli Lillys combination therapy of two antibodies, bamlanivimab and etesevimab, helped cut the risk of hospitalization and death in COVID-19, the disease caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, in patients by 70 percent.

The therapy will be available immediately, the Indianapolis-based pharmaceutical company said.

U.S. drug regulators previously granted emergency use authorization to a treatment from Eli Lilly that just used bamlanivimab. Former President Donald Trump received a similar treatment developed by Regeneron Pharmaceuticals after he tested positive for COVID-19 in October 2020.

Todays action, which provides another treatment for COVID-19, reflects the FDAs strong commitment to working with sponsors to expand potential treatment options health care providers can use to fight this pandemic, Dr. Patrizia Cavazzoni, acting director of the FDAs Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said in a statement.

The FDA said in a release that while bamlanivimab and etesevimab administered together resulted in a lower risk of resistant viruses developing during treatment compared with bamlanivimab administered alone, both treatments are expected to benefit patients at high risk of disease progression.

The headquarters of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is seen in Silver Spring, Md., on Nov. 4, 2009. (Jason Reed/File Photo/Reuters)

Eli Lilly said in a statement that 100,000 doses of its antibody-drug will be ready immediately and an additional 150,000 doses will be available throughout the first quarter of the year. It will also work with Amgen to manufacture up to 1 million doses of etesevimab for administration with bamlanivimab by the middle of the year.

The therapy is authorized for the treatment of mild to moderate COVID-19 in patients aged 12 and older who are at high risk for progressing to severe COVID-19 and/or hospitalization, the company said.

Lilly has dedicated our time, resources, and expertise to discover and develop therapies to treat COVID-19, said Daniel Skovronsky, Eli Lillys chief scientific officer. Bamlanivimab alone under emergency use authorization has already provided many people with an early treatment option that could prevent hospitalizations and we are excited to now add an additional therapeutic option with a similar demonstrated clinical benefit.

Skovronsky added, With the risk of resistance emerging as various strains of the virus arise, bamlanivimab and etesevimab together could potentially allow efficacy against a broader range of naturally occurring SARS-CoV-2 variants as these new strains spread around the world.

Reuters contributed to this report.

At about 4:00 pm, a team from the field support team from the World Health Organization (WHO) meets Fahad Barigira, a 24-year-old man on the shores of Lake Edward. He is getting ready for his next fishing shift which starts at 5:00 pm and ends at 7:00 am the next day.

Fahad is married with one child and has spent three years as a fisherman on the lake. He is part of a three-man fishing crew which includes his brother and a friend.

There is a noticeable rise in the water level and indeed the WHO team drove a flooded road to reach this place. "Every day for the last three months, the water attacks homes, when it rains, at night, and even when the tide rises. I don't feel safe because it is not healthy when the floods come," says Fahad.

His fears are shared by Ms Safinah Bukenya, a Village Health Team (VHT) member supporting COVID-19 screening at the landing site. "I worry about my children getting malaria or bilharzia, especially now that they are home and not going to school, they play in the water all the time," she says.

Luckily, the District Health Office has commenced vaccination against Bilharzia in the community, but not everyone is covered by the exercise. Majority of the people are yet to receive the vaccines.

Nearby, a restaurant owner, Ms Addy Kyomukunda prepares food on a makeshift raised wooden platform in a shack that used to be her restaurant, customers come in for a quick meal of fish stew.

Unbothered by the knee-high water levels, they hurriedly eat their meals. In an interaction with the WHO team, she says, "this is my only source of income, it's the only thing I know how to do ever since I was a young girl, if I could, I would find other ways to make money."

Worryingly, more customers wade through the water as they enter Addy's restaurant, unbothered by the water and the stale stench of stagnant water and rotting fish.

The heavy rains and a very low water table means that several latrines in the community have since collapsed. In addition, the households cannot dig new latrines so they requested support in the form of eco-san latrines to help in the meantime. The health assistant based at the health centre concurs with this request.

"If you can help us with the improved eco-san latrines, we would be very grateful, people are defecating in the open and in the water near their homes, anytime, cholera or dysentery will break out here," Health Assistant Mr Mukundenta Kenneth.

Served by just four functional latrines, the landing site is in great danger of experiencing yet another cholera outbreak or other diarrheal diseases. This last occurred in 2009 and it claimed many lives as attested by Mr Arinaitwe Muhamadi, the chairman of the local area.

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"The last time we had cholera here, it was very bad and we suffered so much, if we can prevent this from happening again, this would be good, we have the local power but we also need support." However, due to the COVID-19 outbreak, accessing resources has not been easy yet the water will not recede until June or July when the next cycle of the dry season begins.

For a fishing village with a total population of 2,300, the VHTs remained committed to supporting the community access health services. They continue to man screening points, carry out community sensitization and distributes medicines despite the hardships.

Following the field visit, the WHO team has since sensitized 910 members of the community together with the leaders on the underlying health risks and concerns and COVID-19. Community feedback has been invaluable in these activities.

As a result, the local leaders agreed to form three committees to cater to the health issues, enforcement of guidelines and general community health sensitization in order to address the health concerns in the village.

The WHO team also donated an assortment of Infection Prevention and Control materials.

While briefing the Chief Administrative Officer, Mr Elias and the District Health Officer, Dr Akasiima Mucunguzi, they both agree that these are big challenges that need to be addressed soon. Mr Elias has since visited the landing site and assessed the situation.

A major stakeholder's workshop on the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) Agreement has officially opened at the Ministry of Commerce and Industry in Monrovia, with stakeholders emphasizing the significance of the instrument in boosting trade for Liberia.

The workshop, being held from February 9-10, 2021, brings together participants from the public and private sectors. The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) was established in January 2012, in Addis Abba, Ethiopia, and entered into force on May 30, 2021, with a focus on creating a single African market for goods and services.

According to a press release, the idea is also aimed at facilitating the free movement of persons and capital to deepen economic integration and accelerate the establishment of a single continental customs union. The AfCFTA is also aimed at facilitating the free movement of persons and capital to deepen economic integration and accelerate the establishment of a single continental customs union.

State parties to the AfCFTA, agreed to a 90% elimination of tariffs on goods and that the remaining 10%, 7% may be designated as sensitive, while 3% of the tariff lines can be excluded from liberalization.

Speaking on behalf of the Minister of Commerce and Industry, Madam Mawine G. Diggs, Deputy Commerce Minister for Administration, Wilfred J.S. Bangura, highlighted efforts made by Liberia in implementing the AfCFTA Agreement.

Deputy Minister Bangura said Liberia signed the AfCFTA on March 21, 2018."These are few benefits of the private sector actors and the general consuming public stand to enjoy as a result of Liberia's participation in the continental body," Mr. Bangura said.

He named access to the wider African market of around 1.3 billion consumers, lower or no import duties to designated importing African countries, innovation and production of better quality of products due to specialization and diversification, as well as value for money due to increased supply of variety of goods on the Liberian market.

Deputy Minister Bangura told the gathering that the primary objective of the national strategy is to interlock the main objective of the African Continental Free Trade Area, with Liberia's national development strategy (Pro-poor Agenda for Prosperity and Development (PAPD).

He also announced the establishment of a National AfCFTA Technical Working Group (NATWG), which will be drawn from trade- related government ministries, agencies, private sector and appropriate civil society organizations.

For his part, Margibi County, Senator, James Emmanuel Nuquay, said the Liberian Senate welcomes the issue of the AfCFTA Agreement and its internal ratification by the National Legislature.

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Deputizing for the Senate Committee Chairman on Commerce and Industry, Rivercess County Senator, Francis Paye, Senator Nuquay, noted that the launch of the AfCFTA on January 1, 2021, succeeded the African Union's 13th Extraordinary Assembly on December 5, 2020, at which time heads of state finally approved the launch of the flagship program.

The Margibi County Senator also noted that the intent of the AfCFTA Agreement is to accelerate intra African trade and boost Africa's trading position in the global market place.

Also speaking, the Chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on Commerce, Samuel Kogar, said the AfCFTA Agreement will create the largest free trade area in the world that will constitute 1.3 billion people across 53 countries with a combined GDP, put at 3.4 trillion United States Dollars.

The Nimba County Representative said implementation of the AfCFTA will provide the window of opportunities for Foreign Direct Investment, encourage and empower Liberian-owned businesses to find a wider continental access to huge trade opportunities, boost inter and extra Africa trade regime, spotlight trade opportunities for youth and women, create a huge platform for foreign exchange generation, among others.
Ciena Announces Reporting Date and Web Broadcast for Fiscal First Quarter Results

Ciena Corporation (NYSE: CIEN) expects to announce its fiscal first quarter financial results on Thursday, March 4, 2021 before the open of the financial markets. The press release will be available on Ciena's website at www.ciena.com.

In conjunction with the announcement, Ciena will post an additional set of supporting materials to the Quarterly Results page of the Investor Relations section of its website. Ciena's management will then host a live audio web broadcast beginning at 8:30 a.m. Eastern accessible via www.ciena.com.







Rebroadcast Information

For those listeners unable to participate in the live web broadcast, an archived version of the conference call will be available shortly following the conclusion of the live call in the Events & Presentations section of the Investor Relations section of Ciena's website.

About Ciena

Ciena (NYSE: CIEN) is a networking systems, services and software company. We provide solutions that help our customers create the Adaptive Network in response to the constantly changing demands of their users. By delivering best-in-class networking technology through high-touch consultative relationships, we build the world's most agile networks with automation, openness and scale. For updates on Ciena, follow us on Twitter (News - Alert) @Ciena, LinkedIn, the Ciena Insights blog, or visit www.ciena.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210210005565/en/
Hyderabad: The absence of an absolute majority has made political parties curious over the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) Mayoral election. This would be the first election after the formation of GHMC, from its earlier avatar as MCH, when political parties are in dilemma over the outcome till the last minute.

In the past, these elections have been unanimous and clear. In 2009, the Congress and the MIM cracked a deal to share the term of mayor for two and half years. As part of the deal, while Banda Karthika Reddy served from December 4, 2009 to January 3, 2012, Mr Majid Hussain served for the remaining period until March 7, 2014.

After the formation of Telangana, TRS won the first elections with a thumping majority by winning 99 corporator seats. Bonthu Rammohan, president of TRS youth, was unanimously elected as the mayor.

The newly-elected ward members of the GHMC would take oath at 11 am. A special meeting for the election of Mayor and Deputy Mayor would be held at 12.30 pm. The election of Mayor would be held first, and followed by the elections of Deputy Mayor.

Both elections would be held by the voice vote method or by raising of hands by the members present, with 50 per cent of total members having voting rights treated as the quorum.

In the absence of a quorum at the time of election, the meeting and election process would be postponed for an hour by the president officer. If the same position continued, it would be put off for the next day. In the event of elections not being held the next day, the presiding officer will refer the matter to the State Election Commission for further orders.

In the current house, the ruling TRS has only eight seats more than BJP, which has made the Mayoral election interesting. The TRS has won 56 seats and BJP 48 seats.

Cutting across party lines, sources said that a cabinet minister is backing Bharathi Nagar corporator Sindhu Adarsh Reddy for mayoral post while MLAs from Kukatpally and Serilingampally are opposing her. Late P. Janardhan Reddys daughter and ward member from P. Vijaya Reddys candidature for mayor ward has been opposed by the Khairatabad MLA, while Chintala Vijayashanthis bid is being opposed by the Malkajgiri MLA.

Sources said that BJP is in constant touch with corporators, who are dissatisfied with the ongoing developments and may surprise the TRS in the GHMC council hall. This apart, Bonthu Rammohan, in his efforts to promote his wife Sridevi, has been constantly in touch with the party high command.

Sources said the Mayoral election would be a surprise for all political parties based on the quorum and party strength present in the council hall. They said that the MIM with 44 seats could play a crucial role on the poll day as well.

Meanwhile, as per SEC, if only one Mayor candidate is proposed by corporators, there shall be no election and he or she shall be declared elected unanimously.

In case, there are two or more candidates in fray, a list of the contesting candidates will be prepared. Thereafter, names of each contesting candidate shall be put to vote in order and members, including ex-officio, present will have to raise their hands as a means of voting.

The presiding officer will record the number of votes polled for each candidate, ascertained by show of hands. In the event of there being equality of votes between two candidates, the officer shall draw lots in presence of members and the name of candidate drawn first, will be declared elected.

Update: This story has been updated to note two of the affordable housing units are still available.

ANN ARBOR, MI  A stones throw from the University of Michigan hospital system and the Huron River, the new Beekman on Broadway Apartments are bringing new life to Ann Arbors Lower Town area along Broadway Street.

The seven-story development by Chicago-based Morningside Group, first proposed four years ago, started welcoming tenants in December and is continuing leasing its first 254 units.

We opened and were really excited about it, said Ron Mucha, Morningside Group principal. Weve had a really great public reception to the building ... from people who are interested in living in the building and really from the community.

Cars come and go on Broadway Street off Plymouth Road in Ann Arbor's Lower Town area on Sept. 18, 2020. In the background is a new Broadway Street roundabout at the entrance to the new Beekman on Broadway Apartments.Ryan Stanton | The Ann Arbor News

Monthly rents range from $1,740 to over $3,200, with unit sizes from 435 to 1,137 square feet, including a mix of studios and one-, two- and three-bedroom units.

There also are eight designated affordable housing units, with seven more planned in a second building yet to be built. Six of the first eight are leased now.

Finding people to fill 2 affordable housing units in Ann Arbor turns out to be a challenge

Alison Solway, Morningsides marketing and leasing director, declined to say how many total units are leased at this point, but she said shes very happy with how things are going.

Theres a nice group of residents in the building, some good activity, she said, noting Beekman on Broadway has gotten 18 positive reviews so far on Google.

I have lived here for a month now and Im obsessed with the place, one person wrote. I there are absolutely ZERO flaws. Im in love with the state-of-the-art gym, and the media room is an amazing bonus. Everything is so modern, and they are very accommodating and willing to help any of your needs.

Another wrote, Great location with a beautiful interior. The rooms are spacious and up to date, making the living experience high-quality. The surplus of amenities add to the well-rounded nature of the complex and ... take the apartment feel to the next level.

Given its location near the Michigan Medicine campus and the UM Kellogg Eye Center, the new building has drawn a lot of interest from the medical community, as well as UM graduate students, Solway said.

And then with the proximity to Kerrytown and downtown, weve seen a big draw from Ann Arbors more permanent resident base in town, she said.

Morningside is offering one month of complimentary rent, waiving application fees and giving a $750 rental credit for those who sign a lease by Feb. 15 and move in by Aug. 31.

The building includes an impressive set of amenities, the most unique being the co-working space by the lobby with a lot of different areas to sit, plug in and work or play, Solway said.

Theres a ton of accessibility in terms of electrical ports, things of that nature, and then kind of different-style seating areas depending on what your likes are, she said.

Then the building has what we call a 24-7 fresh market, so a big vending area with different types of drinks and a coffee station, as well as both perishable and fresh food brought in, she said. Its a really nice offering there if you want to just grab a quick meal on site and snacks, and then its all done through an app.

Theres also an outdoor pool and sundeck, fitness center and yoga room, game room, catering kitchen, 14-seat private dining and conference room, bicycle storage, Spin scooters, dry-cleaning lockers, package receiving area and more. The building is pet-friendly, with two pets allowed per tenant.

A small solar array at the new Beekman on Broadway Apartments at 1200 Broadway St. in Ann Arbor on Oct. 24, 2020. The city hopes to power the entire community with 100% renewable energy by 2030.Ryan Stanton | The Ann Arbor News

Apartments feature high ceilings, plank flooring, walk-in closets, in-unit washers and dryers, storage lockers and pet yards for select apartments, with furnished units available.

There are furnished studios that are pretty unique with adaptable furniture, Solway said.

Theres a Murphy bed where you kind of pull out the back couch cushions and the bed flips over, and then some tables and chairs that fold up really small, she said.

As for when the building might be fully leased, Mucha said, We expect to be stabilized as we get into the summer period.

The building, which includes an interior parking deck, is mostly complete, with some final punch-list work being done. Its the first in three buildings to be built on the site, the next being another apartment building, with ground-floor retail.

Construction on that second building at the corner of Broadway and Maiden Lane is expected to start in the fall, Mucha said.

24 Ann Arbor developments to watch in 2021

The third building coming was originally supposed to be condos, but pre-sales were slow, so Morningside put that on hold. Theres no update on that, Mucha said.

It also hasnt been decided who the retail tenant will be for the next apartment building, Mucha said. The approved square footage for the space was about 5,000 square feet, but it could be larger if theres market demand, he said.

Mucha has hinted at the possibility that the strip mall across the street on Broadway could be redeveloped at some point, along with other Lower Town properties.

Ive always been bullish about that, Mucha said of Lower Towns future as a vibrant hub of downtown-style activity.

A major mixed-use redevelopment down the street on DTE Energys riverfront property is in the works. Detroit-based Roxbury Group plans to build 96 condos, a nine-story hotel with 148 rooms, a riverfront restaurant, commercial spaces, public green space, walking trails, an event pavilion and more.

You can easily see a redevelopment of properties right on that intersection of Broadway, Plymouth and Maiden Lane, and then its bookended on the other end by whats happening with the DTE site, Mucha said. So, between our development and the DTE development as anchors ... the other infill sites in between will redevelop. Its going to be a great area.

Its just going to take some time. You have to start someplace and our development gets it going, and then absolutely it will continue.

MORE FROM THE ANN ARBOR NEWS:

Ann Arbor may trim police and fire budgets while putting millions extra toward climate change

538 new houses, condos and apartments proposed on Ann Arbors north side

Big zoning changes on the horizon could allow more housing in Ann Arbor

Developer aims to save Ann Arbor oak forest from becoming a subdivision

Ann Arbor officials enthusiastically OK Packard Street mixed-use development
Rating Action: Moody's affirms the Czech Republic's Aa3 ratings and maintains stable outlookGlobal Credit Research - 05 Feb 2021Frankfurt am Main, February 05, 2021 -- Moody's Investors Service ("Moody's") has today affirmed the Government of the Czech Republic's long-term issuer and senior unsecured local and foreign currency debt ratings at Aa3 and maintained the stable outlook.Concurrently, Moody's has affirmed the Czech Republic's senior unsecured foreign currency MTN programme rating at (P)Aa3, and the other short-term foreign currency rating at (P)P-1.The key drivers for the rating action are:(1) Despite the severe coronavirus pandemic-induced growth shock in 2020, the Czech Republic's medium- to long-term economic resiliency remains strong;(2) The Czech Republic entered the crisis with a low debt level and strong debt affordability, and overall fiscal strength will stay solid despite an increase in the debt burden over the coming three to four years.The stable outlook reflects the Czech Republic's inherent fundamental credit strengths and the low exposure to event risks, which are based on a resilient and stable banking sector, as well as strong government and external liquidity metrics.The Czech Republic's local and foreign currency country ceilings remain unchanged at Aaa. The three-notch gap to the sovereign rating is supported by the limited government footprint in the economy, the high degree of reliability and predictability of government actions, as well as low political risk. In addition, the very high capital account openness and moderate external indebtedness inform the zero notch gap between local currency and foreign currency ceiling. These ceilings typically act as a cap on the ratings that can be assigned to the obligations of other entities domiciled in the country.RATINGS RATIONALERATIONALE FOR AFFIRMING THE Aa3 RATINGSFIRST DRIVER: ECONOMIC RESILIENCE REMAINS STRONG DESPITE GROWTH SHOCKThe first driver of affirming the Czech Republic's Aa3 ratings is based on the country's medium- to long-term economic resiliency. Fundamentally, the Czech Republic compares favourably to similarly-rated peers and those at comparable economic strength levels. Moody's does not expect significant permanent scarring from the pandemic, and the economy will return to its pre-crisis real GDP level by 2022. Compared to its close rating peers -- particularly Belgium and the United Kingdom -- the Czech Republic has a stronger potential growth rate, which the Czech National Bank estimates at around 3%.Following a sharp contraction in real GDP growth in 2020 of almost 6%, the Czech economy will start recovering from the second half of 2021, and Moody's forecasts real GDP growth to average 3.2% in 2021 and 2022. The Czech Republic's expected growth performance will be broadly in line with that of its close peer group median. In Moody's view the recovery in consumption will be faster (potentially reaching the Q4 2019 level during the second half of this year already), while the recovery in investment growth could take well into 2023.The Czech Republic has a high share of manufacturing in gross value added (25% in 2019), and particularly automotive. This is slightly lower than for Korea and Taiwan, but higher than for Germany and other European peers. While there was a sharp contraction in manufacturing industrial production during the first wave of the pandemic, Czech industry recovered very quickly once the lockdown measures were lifted, underlining the sector's flexibility and competitiveness.Government restrictions in response to elevated infection rates since the autumn of 2020 will remain in place for at least the first quarter, and the rebound in economic activity will remain dependent on pandemic developments, as well as effective administration of the vaccination programme. Downside risks to the growth outlook remain and the evolution of business and consumer confidence, as well as developments in the Czech Republic's main trading partners and particularly Germany will be crucial in 2021 and beyond.SECOND DRIVER: AMPLE FISCAL SPACE SUPPORTS FISCAL STRENGTH IN LIGHT OF RISING GOVERNMENT DEBT BURDENThe second driver of today's rating action is based on Moody's expectation that the Czech Republic's overall fiscal strength will stay solid, despite the expected significant increase in the debt burden over the coming three to four years. The Czech Republic's low government debt burden of only 30.2% of GDP in 2019 provides fiscal space for government support measures, which amounted to an available envelope of around 20% of GDP in 2020, consisting of direct fiscal measures and sizable guarantees. That said, only 60% of the direct support envelope was actually paid out, and 8% of the announced guarantees were demanded by companies, resulting in only 2.7% of GDP of direct fiscal support and 1.1% of GDP in guarantees being used.Moody's estimates that the Czech Republic's general government debt ratio has increased to 37.5% of GDP by the end of 2020, reflecting significant borrowing increases in light of the large stimulus package and due to declining nominal GDP as result of the economic shock.Mainly due to the general elections in October 2021, Moody's does not incorporate any meaningful fiscal consolidation measures into its projection. Fiscal deficits will therefore stay sizable (at around 6% of GDP in 2021 and 2022), and the debt-to-GDP ratio will continue to rise to 45% in 2022 and above 48% by 2024. This means that the Czech Republic's debt burden as a share of GDP will deviate from the Aa3-rated median of 34.9% of GDP in 2020. Having said that, the Czech Republic's debt affordability will remain strong, and its relative position compared to its peers will not deteriorate significantly. Moody's forecasts average annual interest payments-to-revenues of 1.8% during 2020-24, below the Aa3-rated median of 2.4% over the same period.RATIONALE FOR THE STABLE OUTLOOKThe stable outlook reflects the Czech Republic's inherent fundamental credit strengths and the low exposure to event risks, reflecting the resilient and stable banking sector, as well as strong government and external liquidity metrics.Czech banks are well-capitalized, highly liquid and the share of NPLs has remained low in 2020, although some increase is expected in 2021 and 2022. Overall, there are limited risks of contingent liabilities from the banking sector for the sovereign. Strong demand for residential real estate and the limited supply of new flats pushes up prices and according to estimates by the Czech National Bank apartment prices are overvalued by around 17%. However, there are no visible imminent threats to financial stability, and the private sector shows only very limited foreign currency exposure.The Czech government has strong market access and no difficulties in funding its borrowing needs in domestic and international markets. In addition to market access, the government has a sizable liquidity buffer in the single treasury account (about 7% to 8% of GDP in 2020), and has access to EU funds under the Next Generation EU facility, with grants amounting to about 3% of GDP for the three years 2021-23. Given its favourable funding conditions, the Czech government decided not to utilise loans under SURE, the EU's unemployment support scheme, in 2020.Moreover, the Czech Republic does not face external liquidity pressures. Moody's expects a large current account surplus of close to 4% of GDP in 2020, reflecting the dampening effect on imports from the coronavirus pandemic, strong export competitiveness and narrowing of the primary income deficit. Foreign direct investment into the country has continued in 2020, albeit at a lower level than in previous years, but nevertheless underlining its attractiveness as an investment destination. As a result, the Czech Republic's net international investment position has further improved, reaching a net liability position of only 12% of GDP (based on data for the first three quarters), up from above 20% in 2019.ENVIRONMENTAL, SOCIAL, GOVERNANCE CONSIDERATIONSThe Czech Republic's ESG Credit Impact Score is neutral-to-low (CIS-2), reflecting low exposure to environmental and social risks, and a very strong governance profile that supports the capacity to respond to shocks.The Czech Republic's overall E issuer profile score is neutral to low (E-2), reflecting low exposure to environmental risks across all categories.Moody's assesses the Czech Republic's S issuer profile score as neutral to low (S-2), reflecting low exposure to social risks across most categories. Demographic change in the form of relatively fast population ageing poses a long-term fiscal sustainability challenge to the Czech Republic and entails a moderately negative social risk. Without further pension and healthcare reforms the very strong government balance sheet could deteriorate significantly from the mid-2030s. While overall unemployment rates are low, persistent skills mismatches could lead to rising challenges for new entrants to the labour market and labour and income considerations therefore pose a moderately negative social risk as well.The Czech Republic's strong institutions and governance profile support its rating and this is captured by a positive G issuer profile score (G-1). The country has an overall strong institutional framework (despite some concerns about the control of corruption). The Czech Republic also benefits from independent and high-quality monetary policy, and fiscal policy formulation and implementation are overall prudent and transparent. Coupled with high wealth levels and a strong government financial position, this supports a high degree of resilience, mitigating further already low E and S risks.GDP per capita (PPP basis, US$): 42,670 (2019 Actual) (also known as Per Capita Income)Real GDP growth (% change): 2.3% (2019 Actual) (also known as GDP Growth)Inflation Rate (CPI, % change Dec/Dec): 3.2% (2019 Actual)Gen. Gov. Financial Balance/GDP: 0.3% (2019 Actual) (also known as Fiscal Balance)Current Account Balance/GDP: -0.3% (2019 Actual) (also known as External Balance)External debt/GDP: [not available]Economic resiliency: a1Default history: No default events (on bonds or loans) have been recorded since 1983.On 2 February 2021, a rating committee was called to discuss the rating of the Government of the Czech Republic. The main points raised during the discussion were: The issuer's economic fundamentals, including its economic strength, have not materially changed. The issuer's fiscal or financial strength, including its debt profile, has not materially changed. The issuer's susceptibility to event risks has not materially changed. Other views raised included: The issuer's institutions and governance strength, have not materially changed.FACTORS THAT COULD LEAD TO AN UPGRADE OR DOWNGRADE OF THE RATINGSWHAT COULD CHANGE THE RATING UPA positive rating action seems unlikely over the next two years, given the expected further weakening in key credit metrics. Having said that, a clear focus on comprehensive social security system reform, including old age pensions but also health and long-term care, that contains the projected rise in old-age related spending would be positive for the Czech Republic's credit profile. Similarly, signs that the economy moves into a higher value-added, innovation-driven stage together with faster-than-currently expected income convergence with higher-rated peers would also support a change in the outlook to positive, and could ultimately lead to a rating upgrade.WHAT COULD CHANGE THE RATING DOWNThe formulation and implementation of a strategy to reduce fiscal deficits and stabilize or lower the government debt burden will be key for the Czech Republic's rating trajectory after 2022. Fiscal deterioration beyond the current baseline expectations would be credit-negative and could lead to a change in outlook to negative from stable. Similarly, a weakening in the Czech Republic's economic strength, or a significant rise in event risk exposure would be negative for the rating.The principal methodology used in these ratings was Sovereign Ratings Methodology published in November 2019 and available at https://www.moodys.com/researchdocumentcontentpage.aspx?docid=PBC_1158631. Alternatively, please see the Rating Methodologies page on www.moodys.com for a copy of this methodology.The weighting of all rating factors is described in the methodology used in this credit rating action, if applicable.REGULATORY DISCLOSURESFor further specification of Moody's key rating assumptions and sensitivity analysis, see the sections Methodology Assumptions and Sensitivity to Assumptions in the disclosure form. Moody's Rating Symbols and Definitions can be found at: https://www.moodys.com/researchdocumentcontentpage.aspx?docid=PBC_79004.For ratings issued on a program, series, category/class of debt or security this announcement provides certain regulatory disclosures in relation to each rating of a subsequently issued bond or note of the same series, category/class of debt, security or pursuant to a program for which the ratings are derived exclusively from existing ratings in accordance with Moody's rating practices. For ratings issued on a support provider, this announcement provides certain regulatory disclosures in relation to the credit rating action on the support provider and in relation to each particular credit rating action for securities that derive their credit ratings from the support provider's credit rating. For provisional ratings, this announcement provides certain regulatory disclosures in relation to the provisional rating assigned, and in relation to a definitive rating that may be assigned subsequent to the final issuance of the debt, in each case where the transaction structure and terms have not changed prior to the assignment of the definitive rating in a manner that would have affected the rating. For further information please see the ratings tab on the issuer/entity page for the respective issuer on www.moodys.com.For any affected securities or rated entities receiving direct credit support from the primary entity(ies) of this credit rating action, and whose ratings may change as a result of this credit rating action, the associated regulatory disclosures will be those of the guarantor entity. Exceptions to this approach exist for the following disclosures, if applicable to jurisdiction: Ancillary Services, Disclosure to rated entity, Disclosure from rated entity.The ratings have been disclosed to the rated entity or its designated agent(s) and issued with no amendment resulting from that disclosure.These ratings are solicited. Please refer to Moody's Policy for Designating and Assigning Unsolicited Credit Ratings available on its website www.moodys.com.Regulatory disclosures contained in this press release apply to the credit rating and, if applicable, the related rating outlook or rating review.Moody's general principles for assessing environmental, social and governance (ESG) risks in our credit analysis can be found at https://www.moodys.com/researchdocumentcontentpage.aspx?docid=PBC_1243406.The Global Scale Credit Rating on this Credit Rating Announcement was issued by one of Moody's affiliates outside the UK and is endorsed by Moody's Investors Service Limited, One Canada Square, Canary Wharf, London E14 5FA under the law applicable to credit rating agencies in the UK. 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US President Joe Biden is expected to announce on Wednesday a Pentagon review of its strategy towards China, looking at key areas including intelligence, technology and the military footprint in the region, a US official said

The review will be just one of several that the Pentagon is already carrying out, on everything from troops in the Middle East to its policy towards NATO.

It comes as both countries are at loggerheads over issues from technology and human rights to Chinese military activities in the disputed South China Sea, with each accusing the other of deliberately provocative behavior.

The official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said a new 15-person task force would be created at the Pentagon to review the strategy and present its recommendations within four months.

Under Biden's predecessor, the Pentagon made countering China it's top priority, something Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has signaled will continue.

Biden's remarks on China are only expected to be a small part of a broader list of issues he will raise during his first visit to the Pentagon since his Jan. 20 inauguration as US president.

Biden has already lifted a ban on recruiting transgender servicemembers imposed by Donald Trump's administration and secured Senate confirmation of Austin as the Pentagon's first Black defense secretary.

Democratic lawmakers are hoping Biden will usher in reforms intended to do everything from curbing sexual assault to addressing extremism and white nationalism in the ranks.

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Investigators of the World Health Organization (WHO), who were in China's Wuhan city to find about the origin of coronavirus, have found that the virus may have originated outside the country and brought to China through import of frozen foods.

The team also rejected the theory that the virus may have leaked from a lab, calling it 'extremely unlikely' and said further studies are not required on this.

The leader of WHO's 14-member team, Peter Embarek, said studies should be carried out to ascertian if the virus came to China through frozen foods sold at the Huanan Seafood market in Wuhan, where the initial cases of coronavirus were detected, the Daily Mail reported.

Also read: Wear surgical, cloth mask together to protect against COVID-19 variants, say experts

China had received flak from a lot of quarters, including the then US President Donald Trump, for not informing the world about the virus and trying to cover up deaths in the Hubei province, where infections were first reported.

Chinese officials have said that the virus may have originated outside the country and found its way through imported frozen foods, including Australian beef. The country's relations with Australia soured after the latter's government called for a probe to find about the orgin of the virus.

The findings may prove to be a shot in the arm for the Chinese Communist Party.

Also read: COVID-19 vaccination: Health workers who miss scheduled rounds to be shifted to age-specific batches

Also read: 84% willing to get vaccinated for COVID-19 but many fear side-effects: survey
Six Republican senators on Tuesday joined 50 Democrats in voting to proceed with the impeachment trial of former President Donald J. Trump, forming a contingent far smaller than what would be needed to convict Mr. Trump of incitement of insurrection related to the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

The six Republicans were Senators Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitt Romney of Utah, Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania.

The vote addressed the constitutional question of whether the Senate has the power to try Mr. Trump even though he has left office.

The result largely mirrored the tally last month, when the Senate voted to kill an attempt to dismiss the trial as unconstitutional. Five Republicans had joined all 50 Democrats in support of going ahead with the trial, though others later said they were still open to hearing the case and described their votes as a call for more debate on the constitutionality of the trial.
The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall have had their first Covid-19 vaccinations, Clarence House has said.

Heir to the throne Charles, 72, and Camilla, 73, are, as over 70-year-olds, in the fourth priority group for the rollout of the jabs.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson has set a target for all people in the top four groups to be offered a coronavirus vaccine by February 15.

The confirmation comes after the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh were given the injection last month, announced in an unusual move by Buckingham Palace which rarely comments on the private health matters of the 94-year-old head of state and her consort, 99.

A Clarence House spokesman said: The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall have had their first Covid-19 vaccinations.

No further details have been released.

The Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall during a visit to the National Gallery in December (Dominic Lipinski/PA)

It is not known whether Charles and Camilla were vaccinated together, or which version of the vaccine they were given.

Charles had previously said he would absolutely get the Covid-19 vaccine when it was offered to him.

The heir to the throne and his eldest son, the Duke of Cambridge, both contracted coronavirus during the first wave of the pandemic.

Charles was described as having mild symptoms and lost his sense of taste and smell for a period, while it was reported William was hit pretty hard by the virus.

Both Charles and William caught coronavirus (Aaron Chown/PA)

On a visit to a vaccination centre at Gloucestershire Royal Hospital before Christmas, Charles said he was way down the list for an inoculation.

It is not known which vaccine the Queen and Philip were given, but it is likely they will receive their second dose up to 12 weeks later.

It is understood the Queen decided the information about her and her husband should be made public to prevent inaccuracies and further speculation.

Speaking to CNN following the launch of his new Terra Carta initiative on Monday, Charles said vaccination was vital to ending the pandemic.

I think vaccination is critical to ensure we have a way out of this, otherwise it is going to be very difficult, he said.

People over the age of 70 who have not yet been offered a Covid jab are being encouraged to contact the NHS to arrange an appointment.

The top four priority groups include all those over 70, health and social care workers, care home residents, their carers and people deemed to be clinically extremely vulnerable to the virus.
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An Alabama-based company with several restaurants around metro Atlanta will be relocating its headquarters to Cobb County.

Chicken Salad Chick announced this week that it will move from Auburn, Alabama, to the Overlook II building at 2839 Paces Ferry Road in Vinings.

The relocation will take place by the end of March. The company said 17 employees based in Alabama will relocate to Vinings by May. It will fill the remaining 20 positions with local hires.

Chicken Salad Chick President and CEO Scott Deviney said the moving to metro Atlanta will help the company meet aggressive growth goals, while allowing us to broaden our vision for the future. He also said Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport allows the company swift access to possible vendors and people who may be interested in opening a franchise.

" Atlanta has always fostered a nurturing business environment for companies to kickstart their growth, he said.

The company was founded in 2008 by Stacy Brown and her late husband, Kevin. According to its website, Chicken Salad Chick has 166 restaurants in 17 states. It has 32 restaurants in Georgia, including in Alpharetta, Buckhead, Buford, Johns Creek, Kennesaw, Loganville, Marietta, Roswell and Snellville.

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LANSING, MI - The Michigan Democratic Party made it clear what they want Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkeys to do next:

Resign.

The party called for the Clarklake Republican to step down after he was seen in a video calling the violent Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol in Washington D.C. a hoax in a meeting with Hillsdale County Republican Party leaders.

We have one message for @SenMikeShirkey, who amplified and repeated lies to undermine our democracy, openly met with militia groups and gave them messaging advice: Resign, wrote the Michigan Democratic Party on Twitter. His rhetoric and actions are not worthy of the office he holds.

In a video shot at Spanglers Family Restaurant in Jonesville, Shirkey falsely claimed supporters of President Donald Trump were not at fault in the storming of the U.S. Capitol building.

Thats been a hoax from day one, Shirkey said, later adding that what occurred was all staged and implied Sen. Mitch McConnell and other leaders wanted to have a mess.

Read more: U.S. Capitol insurrection was a hoax, Michigan Senate leader says in video

The Democratic Party alluded to Shirkey meeting with right-wing militia leaders in September, which he said was to improve their messaging by adopting codes of conduct that would be more palatable to the general public.

I was challenging them to demonstrate to the public that, yes, you have the right to do what youre doing, he said to JTVs Bart Hawley on Jan. 18, but you have the responsibility to do it responsibly and safely.

Read more: Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey says he wrestled COVID-19 sent by Chinese flu army

Elsewhere in the conversation with the Hillsdale Republicans, Shirkey remarked that he contemplated inviting Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to a fistfight on the Capitol lawn and spanked her on a number of issues.

Weve spanked her hard on the budget, spanked her hard on appointments, he said.

In a statement issued Tuesday evening by Shirkeys office, he is quoted apologizing for his most recent comments, noting he has many flaws, including being passionate coupled with an occasional lapse in restraint of tongue.

I said some things in a videoed conversation that are not fitting for the role I am privileged to serve, the statement reads. I regret the words I chose, and I apologize for my insensitive comments.

Video from a Wednesday Senate session picked up Shirkey on a hot mic telling Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist the events at the U.S. Capitol were very real, but that he doesnt take back any of the points I was trying to make.

I frankly dont take back any of the points I was trying to make, he said. Some of the words I chose I do regret.

He continued by saying the FBI is going to identify the people behind the Jan. 6 riots at the U.S. Capitol within the next couple weeks.

Democrats in the Michigan Senate spoke against Shirkey on the floor Wednesday. Senate Minority Leader Jim Ananich, D-Flint, said he was more disappointed than surprised by the comments.

This isnt the first time youve asked for grace, he said, referencing a prayer Shirkey gave on the Senate floor Wednesday. Lord knows youve been given it. I would ask that you accept it and learn from it.

Sen. Stephanie Chang, D-Detroit, said forgiveness requires genuine apologies.

I have always believed in forgiveness, working together in a bipartisan way, and seeing the good in people, including those I disagree with, she wrote on Twitter. But forgiveness requires genuine apologies. It demands acknowledgement of specific wrongdoing.

Michigan House Democratic Leader Donna Laskinsi, D-Scio Township, said his most comments bring into question Shirkeys fitness to lead.

We would expect such comments from a leader of a QAnon chat group or local militia chapter  not the Majority Leader of the Michigan Senate, she said in a statement. Claiming the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol was a hoax is a slap in the face to the law enforcement there that day and to the people who died and were injured.

U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Dearborn, blasted Shirkey for his rhetoric.

@SenMikeShirkey, I was there with my colleagues as we put on gas masks & evacuated the House Chamber, she wrote on Twitter. I heard the gunshot that killed a woman. They came to kidnap and kill lawmakers. It wasnt a hoax, it was life or death.

Read more from MLive:

Michigans senators convinced Trump incited Capitol riots as impeachment trial unfolds this week

Constitutional sheriffs ask Michigan police to stand against Biden, COVID-19 orders

Sen. Gary Peters to investigate domestic terror threats as leader of homeland security committee

Who are Michigans militias? Armed patriot groups resurface during anti-government climate
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Three priests at San Franciscos Sts. Peter and Paul Church have contracted the coronavirus, forcing the church to hold all of its Masses online just as court rulings and health orders are allowing in-person religious services in California.

The church confirmed on its website that three priests at the landmark North Beach church tested positive for the coronavirus on Friday, and that all Masses will be streamed online and the church will be closed until Saturday.

Pray for us! the churchs statement said.

Jan Potts, a spokeswoman for the San Francisco archdiocese of the Roman Catholic Church, said Sts. Peter and Paul decided independently to shut down because it has five priests, and didnt have the resources to offer in-person services.

The church drew attention in July after it held a clandestine wedding, in which guests were secreted inside through an underground parking garage. The wedding violated health orders prohibiting large indoor religious services and came just days after the city ordered the church to stop holding such events. At least 10 people, including the newlywed couple, ended up testing positive for the coronavirus. San Francisco officials decided not to cite the church.

The archdiocese has sparred frequently with San Francisco officials over restrictions on indoor services. Health experts have warned that the duration of time people can spend inside churches for ordinary worship services, in addition to the singing and chanting that accompany many of those services, pose a unique health risk.

The outbreak hit Sts. Peter and Paul as federal court rulings, including one from the U.S. Supreme Court, struck down bans on indoor worship services.

Late Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Gov. Gavin Newsoms ban on indoor worship services in most of California, saying the state was discriminating against religion by applying stricter standards to places of worship than to retail stores and other businesses during the pandemic.

Most California counties quickly revised their health orders to permit indoor worship services at up to 25% of capacity, but Santa Clara County continued to allow only outdoor religious services, saying its ban applied to all large indoor gatherings  not just religious services.

But the prohibition ended late Monday night after a U.S. district court judge issued an injunction temporarily preventing the county from banning indoor worship. The ruling came in a lawsuit filed by San Joses Gateway City Church.

We are disappointed by the temporary order of the federal district court, said James R. Williams, Santa Clara County counsel, in a statement. COVID-19 continues to pose a serious risk in our community, and unfortunately no court decision can decree otherwise. The county has consistently had a legal framework for its health orders that respects well-established constitutional precedent.

Santa Clara Countys revised health order allows indoor worship at 20% capacity with participants required to wear masks, maintain social distancing, and refrain from singing and chanting. Other types of indoor gatherings are still prohibited.

Santa Clara County has been a prominent battleground in the dispute between churches that consider gathering for worship a constitutionally protected right and public health officials who want to prevent large gatherings from spreading the coronavirus.

Calvary Chapel of San Jose has been found in contempt of court for ignoring county health orders and faces roughly $2 million in fines.

While prohibitions on indoor services were lifted in most California counties after the Supreme Court ruling, San Franciscos acting public health officer, Dr. Susan Philip, advised seniors and those who live with seniors to avoid indoor worship.

There is still the possibility of another surge in cases and hospitalizations, she said.

Michael Cabanatuan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mcabanatuan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ctuan
Published on 2021/02/09

"Royal Secret Agent" ended with its own highest ratings.



According to Nielsen Korea, KBS 2TV's Monday-Tuesday drama "Royal Secret Agent" which broadcasted on the 9th recorded 10.2% and 14% (Ep.16) of national ratings.



This exceeds the existing highest record of 13.6% (Ep.13). In the last episode, it renewed its own highest ratings and ended successfully.



On the other hand, JTBC's "She Would Never Know" recorded 1.497% (Ep.8) its own lowest rating.



Meanwhile, tvN's "L.U.C.A. : The Beginning" also recorded its own highest rating with 5.811% (Ep.4), a slight increase from 5.794% (Ep.3).

CHICO, Calif. - Enloe Medical Center was recognized as one of the country's top 250 best hospitals for patient safety and quality, according to new research released by Healthgrades.

The distinction places Enloe Medical Center in the top 5% of nearly 4,500 hospitals assessed across the country.

Patient safety and quality care will always be our priority at Enloe, said Mike Wiltermood, Enloe Medical Centers president and CEO. This recognition from Healthgrades is a wonderful affirmation of the ongoing commitment to our mission from each and every Enloe caregiver. We are extremely proud to earn this accolade while navigating our way through the multiple disasters that our region has faced these past few years.

Enloe officials said it was also recognized this year as one of Americas 100 Best Hospitals for General Surgery and Gastrointestinal Care for two years in a row (2020-2021); a recipient of the Healthgrades Cranial Neurosurgery Excellence Award for three years in a row (2019-2021); and named among the top 10% in the Nation for Critical Care in 2021.

Activist Rona Wilson (Image: YouTube/ Dalit Camera)

The National Investigation Agency (NIA) has rejected the findings of a report, published on February 10, which claimed that Bhima Koregaon activist Rona Wilson was framed using "planted evidence".

The Washington Post report, based on a study conducted by a top US-based forensic lab, said the evidence based on which Wilson was arrested was planted on his laptop using the NetWire malware.

NIA spokesperson Jaya Roy, when reached out for comment by The Print, dismissed the report's finding and called it "distortion of facts".

The investigators had arrested Wilson in June 2018, after documents which were retrieved from his laptop reportedly showed links with a banned Maoist militant group.

The several letters which the probing officials reportedly retrieved from Wilson's laptop also included a "plot to carry out a Rajiv Gandhi-style attack" - which was being decoded as an alleged plan to assassinate Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

According to Arsenal Consulting, which examined the electronic copy of Wilson's laptop, the malware had entered into his machine in 2016.

Notably, Arsenal has not identified the perpetrator of the cyberattack on Wilsons laptop yet.

Arsenal claimed that this is one of the most serious cases involving evidence tampering they have ever seen. Their report said the cyber attacker compromised the contents of the laptop over almost two years.

It started back in June 2016, when Wilson received a couple of emails from a person who appeared to be a fellow activist acquainted with him. The other activist had reportedly urged him to click on a link to download a statement from a civil liberties group. However, upon being clicked, the link deployed NetWire, which gave the hacker access to Wilsons device.

The hacker used the malware to create a hidden folder where the 10 incriminating letters were deposited. The letters, as per Arsenal, were drafted using an advanced version of Microsoft Word that did not even exist on Wilsons laptop.

The digital forensics firm also found "zero evidence" of the documents or the hidden folder ever being opened by Wilson.

Sudeep Pasbola, one of the lawyers representing Wilson, said the Arsenal report has dismissed the credibility of the evidence submitted against the accused by the NIA. The lawyers have added the forensic lab's report to their filings before a Bombay High Court seeking dismissal of the case.
New Delhi, Feb 10 : The Directorate General of GST Intelligence (DGGI) in Gurugram has arrested one Ritesh Aggarwal, a resident of Bahadurgarh in Haryana, on charges of passing and availing fake input tax credit (ITC).

The fraud was committed by operating dummy, fake and non-existent firms and encashing the unduly availed ITC through IGST refund mode by showing export of cigarettes.

A Finance Ministry release said that during the course of the investigation, it became apparent that Aggarwal, the proprietor of M/s SR Impex, was the de-facto controller of another firm, M/s SR International.

In the supply chain of these firms, six other dummy firms were found by the names of M/s Joles Trading Co, AS Traders, AR Traders, Om Traders, Capital India, and S.M Enterprises - all controlled by Agarwal.

In all these firms, Aggarwal had availed and passed on ITC of Rs 376 crore by means of billing without goods. Aggarwal was sanctioned refund of Rs 37.13 crore from the department.

In addition, Aggarwal was found to be a habitual offender. In an earlier case, a showcause notice was sent to him for availing and passing on fake ITC.

Further, the release said that Aggarwal, who also goes by the name of Ravi Gupta, was found to be an accused in the showcause notice dated March 1, 2019 issued by the DGRI wherein fraudulent drawback was availed on imported areca nuts by forging the certificate of origins.

The DGGI investigation spanned multiple locations in Delhi and Haryana and based on documentary evidence and statement of many suppliers of these firms, it was ascertained that Aggarwal is a key person in orchestrating this racket of making fake/non-existent/dummy firms and wrongly availing and passing on ITC of Rs 376 crore.

Accordingly, he was arrested on Wednesday and produced before the Patiala House Court, which sent him to judicial custody.
The Otjozondjupa police have issued 5 077 warrants of arrest between January 2018 and December 2020 for the Otjiwarongo district.

Regional police spokesperson Inspector Maureen Mbeha said the authorities were now on the hunt for motorists with outstanding fines.

Mbeha urged motorists who were issued with traffic fines in the Otjiwarongo district between January 2018 and December 2020 and did not pay or might have misplaced the fines, to visit the traffic department in Otjiwarongo.

"Procedurally, when such a person come to our office, we will take him or her to court where they will go and settle their outstanding fines," she said.

"In the same vein, the police are hereby sending a serious warning to seven-seater and sedan drivers transporting passengers from Otjiwarongo or elsewhere in the region to any town without transportation permits and a professional authorization (PA) to cease the practice with immediate

effect. If found they will be fined N$4 000 for transportation permit and N$2 000 PA." Furthermore, Mbeha said the fines to be issued to drivers found transporting passengers in private and unauthorised vehicles only apply to first-time offenders, while a case would be opened against those repeatedly contravening the road traffic regulations.

"We will lock you up and take you to court. So far, seven drivers were charged last week for repeatedly contravening this law," she added.

Phil LaFata, President of Dunmore Dunmore is an exciting technology driven company that I'm proud to join. The company has built a strong foundation of technical capabilities and excellent customer service. This will be critical as we strive to serve new high tech markets that will shape the future of our business, said LaFata.

Dunmore, a Steel Partners company, announced today that Phil LaFata has been chosen as the new President. Prior to Dunmore, LaFata has successfully started multiple manufacturing companies and held various executive leadership positions in plastics casting and coating companies focused on the graphics industry. The combination of his commitment to Lean Manufacturing, a strong background in Steel Partners Business Systems, and a focus on technical and commercial innovation will help lead Dunmore to sustained, long-term growth.

Most recently, LaFata was COO of General Formulations, and prior to that he was VP of Sales & Marketing at Arlon Graphics. He also brings technical expertise in coating technology and production assets. While his accomplishments varied with each organization there were also common themes. He helped family owned businesses transform into world class, growth oriented companies. This was achieved through implementing lean management systems and creating a focused, strategic roadmap.

LaFatas early career started with a strong entrepreneurial spirit. He successfully grew multiple companies from the ground up. During this time LaFata gained invaluable experience operating businesses in international markets and with global supply chains.

LaFata looks forward to applying his cross-functional expertise to transform Dunmore into a sustainable, growth oriented business. There will be an increased focus on creating long-term value to all stakeholders, while retaining Dunmore's core strengths, by attracting the best talent and mobilizing the business around an impactful strategic roadmap of continuous improvement.

Dunmore is an exciting technology driven company that I'm proud to join. The company has built a strong foundation of technical capabilities and excellent customer service. This will be critical as we strive to serve new high tech markets that will shape the future of our business, said Phil LaFata, President of Dunmore.

About DUNMORE

Dunmore is a global manufacturer of engineered coated and laminated films and foils with manufacturing facilities in the U.S and Germany. Dunmore produces coated film, metallized film and laminated film substrates for the aircraft, spacecraft, photovoltaic, graphic arts, packaging, insulation, and electronics industries. Dunmore is a Steel Partners company, and is ISO 9001:2015 and OSHA VPP Star certified. For complete information on Dunmores products, services and industries served, please visit https://www.dunmore.com.



David E. Fishman will deliver Emorys annual Tenenbaum Lecture on Monday, Feb. 22. He will explore The Book Smugglers of the Vilna Ghetto: A Story of Spiritual Resistance.

24th Tenenbaum Family Lecture Series in Judaic Studies David E. Fishman on The Book Smugglers of the Vilna Ghetto: A Story of Spiritual Resistance Monday, Feb. 22, 2021 7:30 p.m. Online Register for the event.

Guest scholar David E. Fishman of the Jewish Theological Seminary will deliver Emorys annual Tenenbaum Lecture on Monday, Feb. 22. His presentation will explore The Book Smugglers of the Vilna Ghetto: A Story of Spiritual Resistance.

The lecture, sponsored by the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies, will take place at 7:30 p.m. via Zoom. This event is free and open to the public. Registration is required.

In Vilna, the city Jews called The Jerusalem of Lithuania, a group of ghetto inmates risked their lives to rescue thousands of rare books, documents and works of art from the Nazis. In an operation that lasted 18 months, they smuggled the materials past guards and buried them in bunkers.

Members of the group who survived World War II returned to Vilna after the citys liberation and dug up the materials. They eventually smuggled the books across Europe until they reached the United States and Israel. What did they rescue and why did they do it?

Fishman is a professor of Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary. He also serves as director of Project Judaica, which publishes guides to Jewish archival materials in the former Soviet Union. Fishman is the author of numerous books and articles on the history and culture of East European Jewry. His most recent book, The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis, received a 2017 National Jewish Book Award.

This year marks the 24th anniversary of the Tenenbaum Family Lecture in Judaic Studies, which salutes the family of the late Meyer W. Tenenbaum, a graduate of Emory School of Law. The lectureship was established in 1997 by Meyers son, Samuel Tenenbaum, and honors the entire Tenenbaum family and its ethos of citizenship and public service, which is expressed through its support of religious, educational, social service and arts institutions across the United States.

For more information and to register, visit the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies.

Photo: wikimedia commons Magic the Gathering cards

Police in New Westminster are looking for a robbery suspect who brandished a sword while stealing cards.

The NWPD say they were called about the theft on Feb. 2 at a local games store.

The suspect allegedly placed several Magic the Gathering card bundles into a large bag and when confronted by a store employee he pulled out a curved sword. The suspect then fled to a nearby exit.

The suspect is described as a Caucasian male between 20 to 40 years of age, a bandage on his left hand, wearing a dark coloured rain jacket with a hood, a dark t-shirt, grey pants, white runners with dark coloured laces, a red and yellow face mask with the lightning logo of The Flash on it, carrying a big blue Costco brand cooler bag.

If you believe you know who this suspect is, we encourage you to reach out to our investigators, stated Sergeant Sanjay Kumar. We are reviewing security camera footage to try to identify the person responsible for the theft.
A man was rushed to hospital after having part of his ear bitten off in a savage attack in Dublin city centre last night.

The victim, a man in his 40s, is understood to have been attacked on Fleet Street in the Temple Bar area of the city at around 9pm.

Gardai are investigating if he was attacked by someone he had met by arrangement before a row developed and turned violent very quickly.

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The man was taken to St James's Hospital to be treated for his injuries.

Gardai from the technical bureau later carried out a forensic examination of the scene.

They could be seen removing bloodied tissues from the street and gathering samples from bloodstains.

No arrests were made and gardai are continuing to investigate the incident.





New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday (February 10, 2021) took a jibe at Congress leader Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury and told him that he will get more publicity than Trinamool Congress (TMC).

Modi's comments came when the Congress MP from Berhampore was interrupting during PM's reply in Lok Sabha to the discussion on the motion of thanks to the President's address to the joint sitting of Parliament.

"Adhir Ranjan ji, ab zyada ho raha hai. I respect you. You will get more publicity than TMC in Bengal. Don't worry," said PM Modi.

He added, "This doesn't look good, why are you doing this?"

The Congress and TMC MPs also staged a walkout during PM Modi's address.

Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury said that the reason for walking out during the session was that PM Modi did not discuss the opposition's concerns over the deaths of agitating farmers.

Chowdhury said, "We walked out because PM didn't discuss our concerns over farmers' death. He agreed that amendments are required in Farm Laws, some states will be benefitted and some won't. Why do you have to bring laws that won't be benefitting everyone?"

Subsequently, PM Modi attacked the Opposition and called Congress a 'divided party' that cannot look above their pity propaganda to defame the current government.

"Congress party is divided and confused. Neither it can work for its own good nor it can think about solving the issues of the country. What can be more unfortunate than this," PM said.

Live TV
Freezing orders have been made by the High Court preventing a passenger jet from leaving Dublin Airport.

The orders were made in respect of a Moldovan Air Airbus A319 aircraft which arrived at the airport late on Tuesday night.

It was due to return to Chisinau International Airport in Moldova, and over 20 passengers as well as the aircraft's crew were stranded in Ireland as result of the order.

The plane was frozen on foot of a 4.2m arbitration award made in favour of a Romanian aircraft leasing firm called Just-US Air Srl against Compania Aeriana "Air Moldova" Srl.

The court heard the airline has had assets seized by Moldova's Agency for the recovery of Criminal Assets in 2019 as part of an investigation into alleged criminal activity including money laundering.

The arbitration dispute

Air Moldova is country's national airline, and was state-owned until it was privatised in 2018.

Represented by Martin Hayden SC and Martin Canny Bl, Just-Srl claims that it obtained an internationally recognised, final and binding award of 4.2m following an arbitration regarding the lease of an aircraft, by a Romanian arbitrator.

Counsel said the award has not been paid and it has sought to enforce the arbitration against Air Moldova in this jurisdiction where the airline has a significant asset, namely the airline's Airbus aircraft.

The aircraft operates a passenger and limited cargo service between Moldova and Ireland.

Counsel said the applicant was seeking the freezing type orders against the aircraft because it fears that the airline may seek to remove the asset from the country and beyond the reach of Just-US Air Slr.

It said it had concerns arising out of several media reports concerning the Moldovan authority's criminal investigation into the airline and 35m asset seizure, which arose after the airline's privatisation.

The applicant has further concerns, about other reports that creditors of the airline have not been paid, and that last September one of the airline's other aircraft was detained in Turkey over an alleged failure to pay a $2m fuel bill.

The airline's owners have denied in media reports any wrongdoing and say that the investigations have not had an impact on its commercial activity.

The freezing style orders preventing the aircraft leaving Dublin were granted on an ex-parte basis last week by Mr Justice David Barniville.

The media was prevented from reporting on the matter by the court until the aircraft had been secured, and the court documents were served on relevant parties, including the aircraft's captain.

Reporting ban lifted

When the case returned before the court today, the judge lifted the reporting ban, and said that the various orders previously granted should remain in place.

The judge, in adjourning the case, praised the applicant's solicitors Crowley Millar for providing assistance to passengers and crew affected by the orders.

As well as seeking the freezing orders the applicant is also seeking permission to appoint a receiver over the aircraft, which it says has been leased by another entity to Air Moldova.

The case returns before the court later this month.
News and commentary on organized crime, street crime, white collar crime, cyber crime, sex crime, crime fiction, crime prevention, espionage and terrorism.
PARIS  The director of a prestigious French political science university resigned on Tuesday evening, weeks after accusations of incest involving one of the schools most prominent figures had raised suspicions about who might have known about the allegations and kept silent.

Frederic Mion, who has been the director of the university, Sciences Po, since 2013, said in a letter to students that he had decided to resign after a report from education ministry inspectors pointed to errors in judgment in my handling of the allegations which were communicated to me in 2018, and inconsistencies in the way I communicated about this case after it arose.

Mr. Mion, 51, had been under increasing pressure from students to step down after it became clear that he had taken no action against Olivier Duhamel, a longtime professor who also headed the governing board overseeing Sciences Po, despite knowing of the accusations against him.

In the latest in a series of sexual abuse scandals that have shaken Frances intellectual and political elite, Mr. Duhamel, a well-known 70-year-old intellectual, was accused by his stepdaughter, Camille Kouchner, of having abused her twin brother starting when he was 14.
Sewages have always been an eyesore. Their putrid smell makes one to instantly hold their breath. If you have encountered one, you would not want to go back anywhere near it. If you have not, then you would probably need an air purifier to protect your breathing system if you have to go near one.

Residents of Githurai 45 off the Nairobi-Thika highway know this only too well.

On Sunday morning, they woke up to a nauseating stench wafting from a dirty grey sludge that was flowing right into their houses.

Two days later, they are still living with the spectre of waterborne diseases, besides having their daily activities disrupted.

A night downpour in Nairobi on Monday worsened the situation, as more water made its way into their houses.

A whole estate is now flooded with raw-sewage water that the residents do not know how to drain.

Foodstuffs destroyed

They blame the mess on a sewer line inspection chamber that collapsed and the recent construction of a murram road near their houses.

"The lorries that were ferrying road construction material tampered with the sewer line inspection chamber, making it shrink and blocking sewage from flowing into a nearby river," said Ms Josephine Kathure, a resident of Kiuu ward in Githurai 45.

Ms Kathure explained that, to avert cases people falling into the sewer line inspection chamber, which had been left open, the residents closed it with stones.

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That further worsened the situation, as the resultant blockage meant there was no way to drain the sewage water into the river. The sewage water continued rising, overflowing to their houses.

"Our foodstuffs have been destroyed," Ms Kathure lamented.

The residents have unsuccessfully been trying to unblock the drainage system.

Water-logged houses

School-going children have to be ferried to school by their parents. Those that can walk on their own have to gingerly step on the rocks to get to their water-logged houses.

"We have a storey building nearby where our children now spend most of their days on people's verandas because they cannot play in the dirty water," says Ms Kathure.

Their landlord, she says, cannot solve the problem because it affects close to 20 gated households.

"No one has come to our rescue yet. We are on our own," Ms Kathure says.

As of Tuesday evening, well-wishers were still trying to remove the rocks that had blocked the drainage system.

But by the time of filing this report, their efforts were yet to bear fruit.
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WATERLOO, Ontario, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- illumiSonics Inc., a medical tissue imaging company, announced today the appointment of Kevin Fahey, Ph.D., to the Board of Directors. The company has taken this action in anticipation of its growth and the commercial introduction of its proprietary Photo Acoustic Remote Sensing (PARS) tissue imaging platform.

"Dr. Fahey brings new skills and will help us to improve the strength of our board of directors. His knowledge in the field and his passion for making an impact is impressive. We are looking forward to working with him," said Dr. Parsin Haji Reza Chairman.

"Dr. Fahey brings commercial imaging domain expertise and industry-specific relationships to fully enable the power and unique capabilities of PARS as we fundamentally change the way the world looks at living tissue," said Rocky Ganske CEO.

"PARS brings all of the valuable imaging of traditional photoacoustics, uniquely without the need for an interface. This capability opens several clinical applications not possible today with any other commercial imaging technology. We believe this creates a number of product and partnering opportunities for illumiSonics, and I am looking forward to participating," said Dr. Fahey.

Dr. Fahey held executive positions at Xradia (acquired by ZEISS) and FEI (acquired by ThermoFisher), and at both large and small companies. In every case, he drove dramatic growth, creating new business lines and implementing integrated sales and marketing channels that drove rapid increases in sales. Dr. Fahey holds a Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from Stanford University and a B.S. in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

illumiSonics' proprietary PARS photoacoustic remote sensing technology is a revolution in optical imaging. Like traditional photoacoustic imaging, PARS measures optical absorption and is capable of providing functional and molecular imaging of anything that can absorb light. Traditional photoacoustic imaging has been constrained by the need to have contact with targeted tissues, the size of transducers and an inability to easily integrate with other optical imaging techniques. PARS is the first fully optical, non-contact photoacoustic imaging technology. This allows PARS to maintain all of the advantages of photoacoustic imaging while addressing its shortcomings, which provides incredible flexibility in how it can be deployed.

About illumiSonics

illumiSonics develops, patents and commercializes PARS advanced optical imaging systems for a wide range of pre-clinical and clinical applications. Founded in 2014, illumiSonics is a privately held medical device company with offices in Toronto, ON, Canada with R&D facilities in Waterloo, ON. The company's executive team of medical device leaders holds an excellent track record of successfully building companies and improving outcomes for clinicians and patients. The technical R&D teams are made up of the pioneers in PARS technology. illumiSonics works with market-leading partners to develop systems for specific applications.

Related Images

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Corporate Logo

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Related Links

https://www.illumisonics.com/the-board.html

Contact:

For Investors and Media:

Rocky Ganske

CEO, illumiSonics Inc.

[email protected]

519-279-6824

www.illumisonics.com

SOURCE illumiSonics Inc.
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President Museveni, the Electoral Commission and the Attorney General who are respondents in a case in which National Unity Platform (NUP) presidential candidate Robert Kyagulanyi petitioned the Supreme Court challenging Mr Museveni's victory have asked the judges to dismiss his application seeking amendment.

Mr Kyagulanyi through his lawyers led by Mr Medard Ssegona have asked court to amend the petition to allow more evidence on grounds that after the presidential elections on January 14, he (Kyagulanyi) was placed under house arrest which subjected him to post election detention trauma that hindered him from putting together all the evidence he had for his petition in the stipulated time (15 days).

However, Mr Museveni's lawyers led by Mr Ebert Byenkya have told the panel of nine Justices led by Chief Justice Alfonse Owiny Dollo, that the power to amend Mr Kyagulanyi's petition in this short time frame doesn't arise because the rules of the Supreme Court have also provide for specific times within which to file and hear such petitions.

Byenkya contended that if the Court is inclined to grant Kyagulanyi's application it should not allow amendment after the time to file the petition has expired.

"The first respondent (Museveni) objects to the [petition] amendments on a number of grounds. The first is that the determination of presidential elections petitions does not provide for amendments. In fact, it does not allow amendments," Mr Byenkya said.

Mr Byenkya asked the court to dismiss the application, arguing that it is out of the specified 15 days' deadline stipulated in the law.

When the Chief Justice Owiny-Dollo asked Mr Byenkya about the inconvenience of the house arrest on Kyagulanyi's petition, he (Byenkya0 argueed that other National Unity Platform (NUP) officials and lawyers should have prepared the petition while he was under house arrest.

The Electoral Commission's legal team led by Mr Joseph Matsiko also argued that what is comprised in Mr Kyagulanyi's application for amendment are new grounds that were never included in the original petition and therefore should not be admitted by the Supreme Court after the expiry of the 15 days within which he had to file the petition.

"It's not permissible to introduce new grounds outside the time frame allowed by the constitution, so the amendment should not be allowed," Mr Matsiko said.

There are 15 electoral offenses including bribery that Mr Kyagulanyi accuses the respondents.

However, Mr Matsiko argues that the amendments in the Amama Mbabazi election petition which Mr Kyagulanyi is relying on, were ordinary amendments not new evidence and he therefore, invited the Justices to dismiss the application with costs.

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"When it comes to the amendment of the presidential elections petition, the constitution does not provide for amendment especially when it introduces fresh causes of actions because the time stipulated (15 days) is cast in stone," Mr Matsiko argues.

In his response, the Attorney General, Mr William Byaruhanga (3rd respondent) also asked the Supreme Court to dismiss the application for amendment.

"The election petition is constitutionally time-bound. The petitioner has had time to read through my answers and then come up with amendments. The said (amendment) application is intended to defeat the answers of the respondent," Mr Byaruhanga said.

By the time of filing this story, court was still hearing the arguments and submissions from Mr Kyagulanyi and the respondents' legal teams.
PHILADELPHIA, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Integrated Ventures, Inc is pleased to disclose that BHP Capital NY, Inc has completed its second funding round, as part of $3,000,000 Equity Investment, in the amount of $375,000, by purchasing 375 Preferred Class C Shares.

Steve Rubakh, CEO of Integrated Ventures, adds the following:

"On 01/28/2021, the Company has issued 8K with details, regarding $3,000,000 Equity Investment by BP Capital NY, Inc. As of 02/05/2021, the total amount funded under this agreement is $1,125,000 million.

"The Company is pleased to confirm the latest shipment of WhatsMiners has arrived and being installed in our NY location. It must be noted, that due to (1) Chinese New Year, (2) low availability of mining equipment for sale and (3) high demand, INTV is committed to executing smart purchases and will only commit to the value priced deals. Thus, on 02/07/21, the Company purchased 26 WhatsMiners, priced at $55,450 (shipping and customs included).

"During the next weeks, INTV plans to announce more details on (1) mining equipment purchases from Canaan (BTC) and PandaMiner (ETH) and on (2) expanded deal with PetaWatt Holdings, including information on purchases of "MiniPods": 20 ft mobile, 300kw, turn-key and fully build out with smart PDUS, modular mining containers, to be installed at Carthage, NY."

About: Integrated Ventures, Inc is Technology Portfolio Holdings Company with focus on Hosting, Development Of Blockchain Applications and Cryptocurrency Mining.

For more details, please visit the Company's website: www.integratedventuresinc.com.

Safe Harbor Statement:

The information posted in this release may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. You can identify these statements by use of the words "may," "will," "should," "plans," "explores," "expects," "anticipates," "continue," "estimate," "project," "intend," and similar expressions. Forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected or anticipated. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, general economic and business conditions, effects of continued geopolitical unrest and regional conflicts, competition, changes in technology and methods of marketing, and various other factors beyond the company's control.

Contact:

Steve Rubakh

+1 (215) 613-1111

[email protected]

SOURCE Integrated Ventures, Inc

Related Links

https://www.integratedventuresinc.com


Philippine Health Secretary Francisco Duque gives a thumbs up as he directs operations during simulation exercises on how to deliver COVID-19 vaccines, at Terminal 2 of the Ninoy Aquino International Airport in Metro Manila, Feb. 9, 2021.

Communist rebels in the Philippines have vowed to open a humanitarian corridor for the transport of coronavirus vaccines in remote areas but have asked that military vehicles carrying armed soldiers not be used for this purpose.

Marco Valbuena, a spokesman for the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and its armed wing, the New Peoples Army (NPA), issued the statement on Tuesday in response to an appeal by President Rodrigo Duterte for the armed group not to disrupt the delivery of vaccines.

At least 117,000 doses of vaccines developed by U.S. and European manufacturers are expected in the country by next week, the government has announced. The initial batch is expected to be given to health workers nationwide, though more are expected to arrive later.

Responding to Duterte, Valbuena assured the government that the rebels would create a corridor for the safe and unimpeded transport of vaccines.

[T]he NPA will ensure that transportation of COVID-19 vaccines will be provided a humanitarian corridor for safe and unimpeded passage in guerilla base areas and zones, the rebels said in their statement. It is a matter of principle for the NPA to respect all humanitarian undertakings that benefit the masses.

But Valbuena also suggested that the delivery of vaccines in remote areas be handled by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Philippine Red Cross, and other civilian humanitarian agencies, which he said were better suited for transporting and distributing drugs for mass inoculations.

We strongly suggest that COVID-19 vaccines not be transported in AFP military vehicles, especially those which are not properly marked and carrying armed soldiers, he said, referring to the Armed Forces of the Philippines.

Non-Red Cross vehicles that will be used as COVID-19 vaccine transporters must be clearly and properly marked with a red cross over a white background, Valbuena said.

In a late-night message on Monday, President Duterte had said that the CPP and NPA must guarantee the safe and unhindered transportation of the vaccine to far-flung areas of the Philippine archipelago.

Do not touch the medicines. Allow the vaccines to be transported freely and safely, Duterte said during a cabinet meeting, according to transcripts released Tuesday. I am asking you now to observe the rule of law because that is for the Filipino people.

It ends there

Presidential spokesperson Harry Roque snubbed the rebels in their response to Duterte, saying Manila would stick with its vaccination delivery plan.

First of all, we have a rollout plan. That will be followed no matter what the CPP-NPA says. Number two, I guess they have freedom of expression but they are tagged as a terrorist group so they can express their opinion but it ends there, Roque said.

Our rollout plan was crafted with the help of experts and it will remain, he added.

Military spokesman Maj. Gen. Edgard Arevalo said that the NPA should not dictate how the government delivers vaccines. Some remote corners of the country can only be properly accessed by military aircraft and ground assets, he said.

Those assets are there after all to cater to the interest and welfare of the people we are constitutionally mandated to protect and serve, Arevalo said.

On Tuesday, Philippine health authorities confirmed 65 more deaths from COVID-19, bringing the nationwide death toll from the pandemic to close to 11,300. More than 1,200 new cases were also recorded during the previous 24 hours to bring the countrys total caseload to 540,227  the second highest number of cumulative cases in East Asia behind neighboring Indonesia.

The CPP and NPA, meanwhile, have been waging a Maoist rebellion aimed at overthrowing the government since 1969  Asias longest running insurgency.

Negotiations with the group have been on and off over the years. One of Dutertes first official acts when he became president in 2016 was to launch peace talks. But he later pulled out of the talks, accusing the rebels of carrying on with attacks despite the negotiations.

Hours after Duterte made his appeal, three NPA suspected rebels were killed early Tuesday in a clash with state forces in the town of President Roxas in southern Cotabato province.

Slain were Buenaventura Dawal, executive committee chairman of the NPAs southern Mindanao regional command, and two other fighters, municipal police chief Maj. Judgie Barotas said.

They all died on the spot. They fired first but luckily there were no casualties on the government side, Barotas told reporters.

Marielle Lucenio contributed to this report from Manila.
Italian health official Alessio D'Amato insisted time was the "fundamental factor" in the fight against the coronavirus and said Russia's Sputnik V would likely be one of the jabs Rome turned to in order to speed up the country's vaccination programme, Express reported.

The Lazio Region Health Counselor added that Italy would be able to source alternative vaccines quickly by "limiting time spent on bureaucracy" amid the EU's struggle to secure adequate supplies.



Mr D'Amato told RT: "In this case, it's not the jabs' origin that we should focus on but the efficacy of test results.



"And we must run fast because in the eternal fight between viruses and humans time is the fundamental factor. We can quickly examine other alternatives to contracts already signed in Europe. Among which is certainly the Russian-made Sputnik V vaccine."



"We will ask to test Sputnik V as quickly as possible by limiting time spent on bureaucracy," he explained. "After all its is a vaccine which is already being administered in many countries around the world."



Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz has also said his country would welcome Chinese and Russian vaccines as EU member states become desperate to speed up their vaccine rollout.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said she is open to the use of the Russian made vaccine Sputnik V.
She has been living in LA after a 'work trip' to Mexico.

And Lottie Moss set pulses racing as she took to Instagram on Tuesday to flaunt her figure in black lingerie.

The model, 23, slipped into a sexy lace negligee and black stockings as she posed up a storm in the mirror.

Sizzling display: Lottie Moss set pulses racing as she took to Instagram on Tuesday to flaunt her figure in black lingerie

Lottie showed off her ample cleavage and toned stomach in the slinky dress, while the lace suspenders amped up the sex appeal.

She captioned the shot: 'Someone give me an excuse to wear this'.

The star showed a canvas print of her older sister Kate Moss in the background who was dressed as a Playboy bunny for a prison themed photoshoot.

Working it: The model, 23, slipped into a sexy lace negligee and black stockings as she posed up a storm in the mirror

Strike a pose: Lottie has moved back to her home in Beverly Hills full time to work on modelling and various campaigns for brands including PrettyLittleThing

Racy display: Lottie showed off her ample cleavage and toned stomach in the slinky dress, while the lace suspenders amped up the sex appeal

Lottie has moved back to her home in Beverly Hills full time to work on modelling and various campaigns for brands including PrettyLittleThing.

In January, Lottie avoided the UK's latest coronavirus lockdown by jetting to Mexico for a work trip.

Despite being abroad for work, Lottie didn't seem to be stretching herself too much as she lived it up in the sunshine with her friends on the vessel.

Prior to her trip, Lottie apologised for saying she was a 'coronavirus super-spreader' in December, calling herself 'young and dumb'.

She sparked controversy after filming herself kissing two female friends and claiming she was a 'coronavirus super-spreader'.

Her clip was broadcast during an Instagram Live when London was in Tier 2 and social distancing, as well as wearing masks, was very much a requirement.

The video was filmed while Lottie was out for dinner with four friends who live in the same household, a scenario justified by the model as she lives alone and can therefore join someone else's support bubble.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-10 21:06:19|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- The China-Central and Eastern European Countries (CEEC) Summit has gathered new consensus and provided momentum for further cooperation, Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi has told the press.

The summit held on Tuesday via video link, the first diplomatic event hosted by China this year, is the highest-level leaders' meeting since the establishment of the China-CEEC cooperation mechanism, and an important multilateral event held against the backdrop of the global response to COVID-19.

The summit has rallied global consensus concerning the joint response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Wang said, adding many CEE countries see China's proposals for enhancing cooperation in combating the pandemic as a demonstration of China shouldering responsibility as a major country, and have expressed the readiness to deepen cooperation with China in vaccine research and the resumption of work and production.

Wang pointed out the summit has also injected positive energy into cooperation between China and Europe.

Calling the summit an example of multilateralism in action, Wang said leaders of CEE countries have expressed their clear desire to uphold multilateralism and support free trade.

Vice Foreign Minister Qin Gang has said the summit, held at an opportune moment, has reached fruitful outcomes and produced a far-reaching impact.

The summit has offered a valuable opportunity for China and CEE countries to jointly tide over difficulties and seek development, and is a milestone in the development of China-CEEC cooperation and a vivid example of China jointly building a community with a shared future for mankind with CEE and other countries, said Qin. Enditem

Hyderabad-based Biological E is looking at contract-manufacturing 60 crore doses of Johnson & Johnson covid vaccine a year, Reuters reported, citing a top official of the Indian company. In August, Biological E had entered into an agreement with Janssen Pharmaceutica NV, one of the Janssen Pharmaceutical companies of Johnson & Johnson, for the creation/enhancement of manufacturing capacities for drug substance and drug product for Johnson & Johnsons COVID-19 vaccine candidate.

"We are targeting 600 million doses for J&J," said Mahima Datla, managing director of the privately-held company said today. "This will be in addition to our own product for which we are targeting approximately 1 billion doses."

Biological E is also looking at producing about 100 crore doses of its own covid vaccine year. Biological E's own covid vaccine is under clinical trials and interim data is expected this quarter.

The Johnson & Johnson covid vaccine is currently under regulatory review in the US. J&J applied this month for U.S. emergency use authorization. It expects to have some vaccine ready for distribution as soon as authorized but has not said how much.

The vaccine is one-shot, as opposed to Pfizer's and Moderna Inc's two-dose vaccines, and can be stored in a refrigerator.

US officials have hoped that the ease of giving the J&J vaccine will mean that states will be able to more quickly immunize residents.

The drugmaker's application to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) follows its Jan. 29 report in which it said the vaccine had a 66% rate of preventing infections in its large global trial.

The FDA said on Thursday evening that it has scheduled a meeting of its Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee on Feb. 26, to discuss the company's request for emergency use authorization.

Vaccines from Pfizer Inc/BioNTech SE and Moderna Inc were authorized a day after such a meeting.

J&J's vaccine uses a common cold virus, adenovirus 26, to ferry instructions for making coronavirus proteins into cells and trigger an immune response.

The Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines are based on messenger RNA (mRNA), which requires them to be stored in a freezer. (With Agency Inputs)

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As the United States enters a critical phase of its national coronavirus vaccination campaign, a new poll shows that two-thirds of Americans are frustrated with how hard it is to get immunized against COVID-19.

The Gallup Poll, released Wednesday morning, comes as health officials across the country are desperately juggling precious vaccine doses so they can put second shots into the arms of those who have had their first dose, while still getting first shots to eligible Americans.

In the poll, 66 percent of Americans were dissatisfied with the handling of the vaccine rollout, including 21 percent who were "very dissatisfied," according to the survey of 4,098 adults conducted between Jan. 25 and Jan. 31. The effort, hampered by long lines and vaccine shortages, has frustrated many people eligible for immunization, including health-care workers and seniors, as some have been unable to book appointments, the Washington Post reported.

But a heartening sign also emerged: Despite the frustration, the same survey found an increase in interest to get the vaccine, with 71 percent of Americans now willing to be vaccinated, up from 65 percent in late December, the Post reported.

One of the most common reasons people gave for feeling reluctant was concern about the rushed timeline. Twenty-two percent said they want to wait for more people to get vaccinated to confirm it is safe. But 28 percent cited other reasons, including theories that concern about the virus is overblown or they already have antibodies because of previous COVID-19 infection.

The results may reflect lingering worries from the Trump administration's initial rollout of vaccines, according to Gallup, as Biden and other Democrats have campaigned to convince Americans the approved vaccines are safe and effective.

While Americans in both political parties have increasingly expressed their willingness to get the vaccine, Democrats surveyed were far more likely to want to get vaccinated. Ninety-one percent of Democrats said they were willing to be immunized, and about 51 percent of Republicans said the samethe highest percentages to date for either group, the Post reported.

FDA approves emergency use of second antibody cocktail

On Tuesday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the emergency use of a second antibody cocktail for treating COVID-19 infection.

The approval of the treatment, which combines two monoclonal antibody drugs and is made by Eli Lilly, gives doctors another option for patients with COVID-19 who are not sick enough to be hospitalized but are at high risk of becoming seriously ill. Such therapies received a boost under President Donald Trump when he and several other politicians took them while sick with COVID-19, but the drugs have not been widely available, The New York Times reported,

The therapy combines the company's drug known as bamlanivimabwhich was authorized in November and is being used for high-risk COVID-19 patientswith a second drug known as etesevimab. Both consist of artificially synthesized copies of the antibodies generated naturally when an immune system fights off infection.

Another monoclonal antibody combination therapy, made by Regeneron, is also authorized for emergency use in the United States.

In clinical trial results released last month, high-risk patients with COVID-19 who were given Eli Lilly's cocktail were significantly less likely to end up hospitalized than those who received a placebo. No patients who were given the antibody treatment died.

The combination therapy must be given via an intravenous infusion. On Tuesday, the FDA also said that bamlanivimab alone could now be infused for a period as short as 16 minutes, down from an hour when the therapy was first authorized, the Times reported.

That long infusion time is one reason that monoclonal antibody drugs have not been more widely used. But some hospitals have also been too overwhelmed to prioritize the drugs, the Times reported. And some doctors have been hesitant to embrace them, saying that they want to see more evidence from clinical trials supporting the drug's use.

British COVID variant spreading rapidly across U.S.

The highly contagious coronavirus variant that drove Britain into lockdown in December is now spreading quickly across the United States, a new study shows.

What has been dubbed the B.1.1.7 variant is doubling its prevalence every nine days in this country, according to a report posted on the preprint server MedRxiv this week and not yet peer-reviewed or published in a journal. The findings, from a large collaboration of scientists, buttresses a forecast issued last month by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that showed the variant becoming dominant in this country by late March.

The researchers scrutinized genomic analyses of the virus samples from 10 states, including from 212 infections involving the variant, and concluded that the variant has been 35% to 45% more transmissible than other variants in the United States.

"It is here, it's got its hooks deep into this country, and it's on its way to very quickly becoming the dominant lineage," study co-author Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona, told the Post.

In the study, Florida stands out as the state with the highest estimated prevalence of the variant. The new report estimated the doubling time of B.1.1.7 prevalence in positive test results at just over nine days.

Florida leads the nation in reported B.1.1.7 cases, with 343 as of Wednesday, followed by much more populous California with 156, according to the CDC. A total of 932 cases have been reported in 34 states, according to the CDC.

Mary Jo Trepka, an epidemiologist at Florida International University, told the Post she is not surprised by the spread of the variant in Florida, because the state has not been strict about mask mandates or other restrictions, while at the same time it is a hub for international travel.

"The message is that we have to work harder to prevent transmission of all these cases of COVID," she said. "If we don't, we'll potentially see more variants. We need to get everybody vaccinated and we need to do a much better job at preventing transmission."

The variant first appeared in genomic surveys in the United Kingdom in September, but did not get tagged as a "variant of concern" until early December when its rapid spread stunned scientists and prompted lockdowns in southern England.

"What concerns me is the exponential growth in the early stages doesn't look very fast," Andrew Noymer, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Irvine, who was not part of the new study, told the Post. "It kind of putzes alongand then goes boom."

U.S. health officials say they are in a race against time to increase the number of Americans vaccinated as more contagious variants of the virus spread across America. By Wednesday, more than 43.2 million Americans had been vaccinated, while nearly 62.9 million doses have been distributed. Just over 9.8 million people have had their second shot, according to the CDC.

A global scourge

By Wednesday, the U.S. coronavirus case count passed 27.2 million while the death toll passed 468,000, according to a Times tally. On Wednesday, the top five states for coronavirus infections were: California with over 3.4 million cases; Texas with more than 2.5 million cases; Florida with nearly 1.8 million cases; New York with nearly 1.5 million cases; and Illinois with over 1.1 million cases.

Curbing the spread of the coronavirus in the rest of the world remains challenging.

In India, the coronavirus case count was more than 10.8 million by Wednesday, a Johns Hopkins University tally showed. Brazil had over 9.6 million cases and more than 233,500 deaths as of Wednesday, the Hopkins tally showed.

Worldwide, the number of reported infections passed 106.9 million on Wednesday, with over 2.3 million deaths recorded, according to the Hopkins tally.

Explore further Follow the latest news on the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak

More information: The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more on the The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more on the new coronavirus

Copyright  2020 HealthDay. All rights reserved.
The U.S. Capitol building is seen through barbed wire fencing at sunrise in Washington on Feb. 8, 2021. (Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images)

Demands Intensify for Security Fence Around Capitol to Come Down

Forty-two House Republicans want Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to take down the razor-wire-topped steel barrier surrounding the U.S. Capitol complex and send the troops manning it home as soon as possible.

We write with concerns about the security measures and enhanced fencing around the U.S. Capitol even though high-profile events like the inauguration are over, the group said in a Feb. 5 letter to Pelosi.

In particular, we are concerned with recent reports that the fencing surrounding the Capitol may become permanent. We are willing to have an honest debate about providing Capitol Hill Police (CHP) with the resources they need to be better prepared without turning the Capitol into a permanent fortress.

To that end, we urge you to remove the barbed wire fencing surrounding the Capitol and send the National Guard troops home to their families. Its time. Its time for healing and its time for the removal of the fencing so the nation may move forward.

Rep. Ted Budd (R-N.C.) was the leading signer of the letter, which was also signed by congressmen representing districts in 20 states spanning the country.

A spokesman for Budd told The Epoch Times that Pelosis office acknowledged receiving the letter but hasnt otherwise responded to it. A spokesman for Pelosi didnt respond to a request by The Epoch Times for comment by press time.

The signers acknowledged that the events that happened on January 6 were horrific and stronger security was needed in the wake of the violence.

But it is time for Congress and its representatives to stop hiding. The American people see through the double standard. Members of Congress cannot demand more security and protection for themselves after they decried federal law enforcement activity across American cities last summer, the signers said.

The U.S. Capitol is a symbol of freedom both at home and abroad. It is a place where Americans from all walks of life can visit, learn about, and witness U.S. history. Sadly, because of the fortress-like security in place, this is no longer the case.

American citizens who wish to visit are not allowed to because only authorized personnel and the military are permitted. The people who call Capitol Hill home live day in and out with fences, military trucks, and military personnel in their backyards, on their way to work, to school, or the grocery store. Enough is enough.

Riot

The imposing barrier was hastily erected after the Jan. 6 riot, in which hundreds of protestors broke into the Capitol building, penetrating the Senate and House chambers, doing extensive property damage, and occasioning the deaths of five people.

President Donald Trump is being tried this week in the U.S. Senate after being impeached by the House for a second time on Jan. 14. Trump was acquitted last year by the Senate on unrelated charges. He appears likely to be acquitted again on the House Democrats charge that he incited an insurrection by encouraging the Jan. 6 riot.

The CHP conceded after the violence that it was unprepared for the events of Jan. 6 despite being forewarned. Trump had offered before that day to send 10,000 National Guard troops to help protect the Capitol.

Reluctance to Comment

A survey by The Epoch Times of members of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs and the House Homeland Security Committee found a marked reluctance to comment.

Spokesmen for each of the 49 senators and representatives were emailed Feb. 9 with a message noting that a Jan. 27 Department of Homeland Security terrorism bulletin said the government does not have any information to indicate a specific, credible plot against the Capitol.

The message also linked to the letter from the 41 House Republicans and asked if the senator or representative supports the letters call for the fence to be taken down and the troops sent home.

Each of the offices was called on Feb. 10 with a repeated request for comment on the issue. Only a few of the committee members responded.

Chris Gallegos, spokesman for Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.), told The Epoch Times that the senator is committed to ensuring the safety of the Capitol Complex and will carefully consider proposals submitted by the appropriate agencies making safety recommendations.

Senator Hyde-Smith would prefer to see fencing removed and troops return to their families as soon as possible, he said.

Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) told The Epoch Times: [The] fencing and barbed wire around the U.S. Capitol shouldve come down weeks ago. Such drastic and extended security measures were excessive and unnecessary.

This is still the Peoples House. Congress should be accessible to the Citizens we serve, as the Founders intended. Further, making members pass through metal detectors when entering onto the House floor is absurd. It is certainly an act of political theater and part of Speaker Pelosis insidious effort to demonize Republicans.

Higgins was referring to the installation of metal detectors that House members must pass through before entering the House chamber.

Patrick Wright, spokesman for Rep. Donald Payne Jr. (D-N.J.) told The Epoch Times that [Payne] believes that it is really a question for Capitol Police and that hes sure the fencing will be removed when they believe there is no longer a credible threat to the nations elected officials.

Strategists Respond

Heritage Foundation constitutional law expert Hans von Spakovsky said the issue hinges on the threat to the Capitol.

Unless law enforcement authorities can produce detailed, confirmed information about a specific threat, there is no need to put barbed wire around the Capitol, and to fence it off from the American people, said von Spakovsky, whose offices are across the street from the Senate office buildings.

Campaign strategists asked by The Epoch Times about the issue were divided in their responses, but not necessarily along partisan lines.

Republican strategist Matt Mackowiak said he would let the Capitol Police make the determination of when to remove the security measures, but he added that GOPers, should focus instead on making [Pelosi] explain what the basis is and what the cost is for continuing the security.

Democratic strategist Robin Biro, a U.S. Special Forces veteran, said he gets that Speaker Pelosi is concerned about the optics of having that fencing still up.

I know that she has come under significant criticism from the GOP specifically for the fencing, but personally, I would be operating from an abundance of caution with this and would leave that fencing up until we were further away from the events of Jan. 6, Biro said.

The Capitol clearly had a physical security problem, and if layered fencing is a deterrent, I do not see the problem with leaving it up until calmer heads prevail and the political rhetoric dies down a bit and, at some point, politics goes back to being delightfully boring.

But Brian Darling, former senior counsel to Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), and Jim Manley, former communications director for then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), told The Epoch Times the fence should come down now and the troops sent home, though for different reasons.

Manley, who also worked for Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), said, As a long-time resident of Capitol Hill and someone who was lucky enough to spend most of my 21 years as a Senate staffer working out of the Capitol, I am totally opposed to a massive security presence that includes fencing off the complex.

Manley added that mistakes were madewith the former president deserving much of the blame for what happenedbut the American people deserve ready access to the Capitol and other buildings.

Darling said Pelosi has created an unprecedented military encampment surrounding the Capitol and should have instead put up the fencing and called in the troops before the riots.

He believes Republicans should be stronger in calling for Pelosi to send the National Guard home and to lessen the fencing around the Capitol, because the troops and fencing are little more than political theater.

Contact Mark Tapscott at Mark.Tapscott@epochtimes.nyc
Colorado Springs, CO (80903)

Today

Scattered thunderstorms during the morning becoming more widespread this afternoon. High 58F. Winds NNE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 90%..

Tonight

A steady rain this evening. Showers continuing overnight. Low around 45F. Winds N at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 80%.

The Project's Waleed Aly has been slammed over a controversial interview with Heritier Lumumba that called his claims of racism at Collingwood into doubt.

Comedian Aamer Rahman said he was in the room for the 2017 interview, in which Aly grilled Lumumba over his allegations he was the butt of 'racist jokes', including the nickname 'chimp', during his 10-year stint with the AFL club from 2005 to 2014.

Days after a report found Collingwood was guilty of fostering 'systemic racism', Channel 10 took down footage of the interview from all platforms.

The Project's Waleed Aly (pictured) has been slammed by a friend of Collingwood star Heritier Lumumba over a controversial interview that called his claims of racism into doubt

During the 2017 interview, Aly grilled Lumumba (pictured) over allegations he was subject to 'racist jokes', including the nickname 'chimp', during his 10-year stint with the club from 2005 to 2014

Rahman, a friend of Lumumba, said The Project lost all credibility in light of the interview resurfacing.

'Unfortunately I think The Project's refusal to acknowledge the role they played in discrediting Lumumba will be a permanent mark on the program and the careers of its hosts,' he told news.com.au.

'I'm not sure how they can credibly cover stories about racism and discrimination after this.'

The comedian said Channel 10's decision to remove videos of the interview has only made matters worse and likened it to Collingwood's current behaviour.

'It demonstrates a refusal to acknowledge a mistake and instead a desire to just block criticism,' he said.

Rahman said Aly's interview with Lumumba 'started out fine, but soon turned into a gruelling, circular cross-examination' in a Twitter thread last year.

Comedian Aamer Rahman (pictured) is a friend of Lumumba. He said the interview 'brought Heritier to tears'

'The questions were bizarre. For example, if Heritier was telling the truth, why wouldn't more players admit to a culture of racism at the club?' Rahman wrote.

'Imagine staking a victim's credibility on why none of their abusers had publicly admitted to their behaviour.'

Rahman said the hour and a half interview 'brought Heritier to tears' and only 10 minutes was shown on TV.

Aly grilled Lumumba over his bombshell accusations in the interview, saying many Collingwood players claimed to have not been aware of racism or the alleged name.

After the interview, The Project panellist Peter Helliar, who is a Collingwood club member, said 'we can't find anyone who knew of the nickname' and accused Heritier of 'smearing an entire club'.

Former Collingwood players Brent Macaffer, Chris Dawes and Andrew Krakouer have all said they heard the nickname 'chimp', with Leon Davis also later confirming it.

Rahman said Aly's interview with Lumumba 'started out fine, but soon turned into a gruelling, circular cross-examination' in a Twitter thread last year

The Project panellist Peter Helliar (pictured) has apologised to former Collingwood defender Heritier Lumumba for questioning his claims of racism within the club

Helliar apologised to Lumumba after Collingwood's 'Do Better' report was released last week, which found the club's attempts to deal with allegations of racism were either 'ineffective' or 'exacerbated' the situation.

'I urge all fans & members to demand better from @CollingwoodFC. This report is heartbreaking,' Helliar wrote on Twitter

'To Lumumba I am truly, unequivocally sorry. I should have believed you. I will do better.'

After Helliar's apology, Rahman then called for Aly and The Project to follow suit and also apologise on-air.

'Heritier Lumumba deserves a complete, on-air apology from Waleed Aly and The Project that acknowledges the role they played in covering for Collingwood FC's racism, not a lone tweet from Peter Helliar,' he wrote on Twitter.

'This is a permanent stain on the program's history.

'Waleed Aly asked us to forgive Sonia Kruger when she said Muslims should be banned from Australia, but can't find the energy to apologise to Heritier Lumumba for treating him like a liar when he said he was a victim of racism.'
Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-10 21:46:09|Editor: huaxia

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Products made out of cassava by Zhongkai International Limited are displayed at a signing ceremony of the deal between Zhongkai International Limited and Chifwani Concepts in Lusaka, capital of Zambia, on Feb. 10, 2021. Chinese firm Zhongkai International Limited and Zambian organization Chifwani Concepts on Wednesday signed an agreement aimed at commercializing the production of cassava growing for industrial use. (Photo by Martin Mbangweta/Xinhua)

LUSAKA, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese firm and a Zambian organization on Wednesday signed an agreement aimed at commercializing the production of cassava growing for industrial use.

Zhongkai International Limited, the Chinese firm, signed the deal with Chifwani Concepts in which Zhongkai International will be buying cassava from farmers in the northern part of the country for use in its production of various products.

The agreement will initially benefit over 1,000 mainly smallholder farmers in northern Zambia's Kasama district before venturing to other parts of the country.

Chen Guiping, the company's chief executive officer said the partnership will support its 200 tons a day production plant requires huge quantities of cassava.

He said farmers will now have a ready market for their produce.

"We are going to engage many farmers because our plant has a very big capacity. We are also planning to construct another plant," he said.

The company is involved in the production of ethanol, biofuel, glue, among other products.

According to him, the company decided to set base in Zambia after a survey conducted in several African countries established that the country's cassava was of good quality.

Emmanuel Mwamba, the proponent of the cassava project, said his organization was acting as a link between farmers and commercial entities.

He said the partnership with the Chinese firm was vital as it comes at a time when the government was promoting the diversification of the economy from dependence on copper.

He said cassava growing, which has historically been grown as a consumption crop, will now be commercially viable as farmers will have a ready market.

He said the organization intends to promote the growth of cassava on a large scale in all parts of the country because farmers have a ready market.

Mwamba, who is also Zambia's Ambassador to Ethiopia and Permanent Representative to the African Union, has since urged farmers to venture into massive production of cassava as the commercial use of the crop was growing. Enditem
(Natural News) More than a month since the Jan. 6 uprising at the US Capitol, public information remains scant about the deaths of Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt and Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, the only two casualties that reportedly came as a direct result of violence in the conflict.

(Article by Ben Sellers republished from HeadlineUSA.com)

Rosanne Boyland of Georgia was reportedly trampled in the melee, and two others died as the result of medical conditions, leading mainstream media widely to cite five as the total death count.

While the lossesall Trump supporters, including Sicknickare equally tragic, the dearth of details about his death, in particular, has led to growing concern that pro-Establishment deep-state officials may be using Sicknick as a tool to promote a false narrative and manipulate public sentiment against former president Donald Trump.

The Left, as past and present show, will stop at nothing to destroy Donald Trump and vilify his supporters, wrote American Greatness writer Julie Kelly on Tuesday.

No one should discount the idea that Democrats and the news media would intentionally promote a totally fabricated story or use as a prop an untimely death to satisfy that mission, she added.

Much of what has been reported is based upon a Jan. 8 New York Times piece that cited two law enforcement officials as its anonymous background sources to claim that Sicknick died from injuries sustained while fending off Capitol insurgents.

House impeachment managers have since used the uncorroborated claims in their memorandum outlining the supposed case against President Donald Trump for inciting violence.

The insurrectionists killed a Capitol Police officer by striking him in the head with a fire extinguisher, they wrote.

But the lack of a medical report or charging documents offered reason to question the official narrativeparticularly since Sicknicks death serves as the only rallying point for the Establishment to counter Trump supporters David vs. Goliath tale of an oppressive government killing its own citizens.

Sicknick did not die on site, but hours laterconveniently after video emerged of Babbitt being shot to death by a yet-unknown police officer while attempting to enter the Speakers Lobby.

Even far-left CNN acknowledged the flimsy evidence supporting the Timess account of record in Sicknicks death.

Investigators are struggling to build a federal murder case regarding fallen U.S. Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, vexed by a lack of evidence that could prove someone caused his death, CNN reported.

Authorities have reviewed video and photographs that show Sicknick engaging with rioters amid the siege but have yet to identify a moment in which he suffered his fatal injuries, it said.

But medical examiners have, apparently, been able to rule out blunt-force trauma as the cause, with CNN admitting that early reports that he was fatally struck by a fire extinguisher are not true.

Likewise, they reportedly ruled out pepper spray, according to Kelly, who reached out to the DC medical examiner as part of her own investigation.

They replied, via email, that they would release the cause and manner of death when this information is available.

She also noted that while the FBI and others have not rushed to publicly clarify the false reporting, they have, in their own statements, been far more prudent, saying that Sicknick passed away rather than being murdered.

And members of Sicknicks own family have been less than forthcoming.

Many details regarding Wednesdays events and the direct causes of Brians injuries remain unknown, and our family asks the public and the press to respect our wishes in not making Brians passing a political issue, Sicknicks brother said in a Jan. 8 statement.

They were rewarded for their silence with the honor of seeing him lie in state at the Capitol and be buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

With Trumps impeachment do-over set to begin Tuesday, Kelly called on Trumps legal defense to use the situation to shed more light on the suspicious circumstances.

[S]ince Democrats included the murder of Brian Sicknick in its bill of particulars against the president, the impeachment trial, ironically, offers the only opportunity for Trump and his defenders to clear the air on Sicknics deathits an opportunity they should not waste, she wrote.

Read more at: HeadlineUSA.com
The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
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The supply and testing of vaccines against coronavirus are governed by agreements signed by Ukraine under the COVAX Facility.

The Ukrainian government has banned the use of a Russian-developed vaccine against COVID-19.

This is stipulated in a government resolution, dated February 8, 2021, which was posted on the governmental portal.

Read alsoNABU probing possible abuse in procurement of Chinese COVID-19 vaccine

The document states that vaccines or other medical immunobiological preparations for specific measures to prevent COVID-19 under the obligation for emergency medical use, development and/or production of which was carried out in Russia are not allowed to be used in Ukraine.

The supply and testing of vaccines against coronavirus are governed by agreements signed by Ukraine under the COVAX Facility.

The assessment of risks, registration materials for the authenticity of COVID-19 vaccines shall be supervised by the State Expert Center under the Health Ministry of Ukraine.

COVID-19 vaccine for Ukraine

Ukraine plans to launch a COVID-19 vaccination campaign in the middle of February 2021. The first stage is expected to take about 20 days when healthcare workers who have contacts with COVID-19 patients will get vaccinated.

On December 30, 2020, Ukraine signed a contract for the supply of 1.9 million doses of China's Sinovac vaccine.

On January 30, 2021, Ukrainian Deputy Health Minister, Chief Medical Officer Viktor Liashko said Ukraine would receive 117,000 doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine within the COVAX (the COVID-19 Vaccine Global Access Facility) in February.

From the middle of February to the end of June 2021, Ukraine will obtain 2.2 million to 3.7 million doses of an AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine.

On February 5, Health Minister Stepanov said shipments of 12 million doses of vaccines produced by AstraZeneca and Novavax to Ukraine had been confirmed.

In December 2020, the Health Ministry's coronavirus task force approved a COVID-19 immunization plan under which at least 50% of Ukrainians (20 million people) are to be vaccinated during 2021-2022.

Reporting by UNIAN
Heineken NV plans to cut about 8,000 jobs, the Dutch beer group said on Wednesday.

The company is seeking to restore operating margins to pre-pandemic levels after a sharp decline in profit because of coronavirus restrictions.

The worlds second-largest brewer, which makes Europes top selling lager Heineken as well as Tiger and Sol, said it would save two billion euros (2.4 billion dollars) over the three years to 2023 under new CEO Dolf van den Brinks EverGreen plan.

Savings will be achieved by redesigning its organisation, reducing the complexity and number of its products and identifying its least effective spending, Heineken said.

The review of its operations will result in about 8,000 job losses, about nine per cent of its workforce at the end of 2019 and a related 420-million-euro charge.

Personnel expenses will be cut by about 350 million euros, it added.

The brewer said ongoing restrictions on social gatherings and hospitality venues meant 2021 revenue, operating profit and operating profit margin would be below levels in 2019.

It expects market conditions to improve gradually in 2021 and more into 2022, with a slow recovery in European bars and restaurants, less than 30 per cent of which were open at the end of January.

The operating profit margin before one-offs should rise to 17 per cent by 2023, the company said, versus 12.3 per cent in 2020 and 16.8 per cent in 2019.

Heineken shares were down by 2.2 per cent at 0955 GMT, making them 4.6 per cent weaker in the year to date.

Analysts said the cautious 2021 outlook and the fact that large restructuring only brought margins back to 2019 levels weighed on the stock.

Underwhelming was the verdict of Bernstein Securities beverage analyst Trevor Stirling of the margin goal.

The brewer said it wanted more top-line growth than competitors and would push premium brands such as Heineken, and zero-alcohol lager even more.

It also aims to become the best digitally connected brewer to serve consumers who are increasingly looking to buy beer online.

Carlsberg, the worlds third-largest brewer, last week said it was banking on most COVID-19 restrictions being lifted in the coming months, serving to buoy earnings in the peak summer season.

Heinekens Van den Brink, who took charge in June, was more cautious, but said vaccination programmes in Europe, North America and some more developed countries in Asia would allow a return to normality this year.

But we are a global company and only when the whole world is vaccinated to a certain degree can we say we really come out of it.

ALSO READ: Heineken extends dominance of Nigerian brewery market with potential Champion Breweries takeover

Directionally, we partly agree, but we have a bit of caution given the global footprint of our company, he told Reuters.

Brazil and Mexico, two of Heinekens biggest markets, are still struggling to deal with the pandemic.

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Heinekens operating profit fell 35.6 per cent in 2020 in line with expectations.

In January, Heineken made clear its plan to expand its control of the Nigerian brewery business, after racking up further 1,903,609,538 ordinary shares of Champion Breweries Plc in a move bringing its stake in the Uyo-based brewer to 84.7 per cent.

It will help broaden its dominance beyond Nigerias most capitalised beverage maker, Nigerian Breweries Plc, where Heineken wields 37.94 per cent stake via ownership of 3,034,100,563 shares.

Consumers in Nigeria, Brazil and the United Kingdom  the brewers three biggest markets  drank 1 million hectolitres of Heineken brands in the 12 months of 2019, according to its 2019 financial results.
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Newspaper: Changes are expected in Artsakh

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A 22-month investigation by a provincial market supervision administration unearthed a meticulously implemented cartel scheme in which seven local cement firms banded together to coordinate pricing. Photo: IC Photo

Market regulators have taken a sledgehammer to a sophisticated cement industry price-fixing scheme in East Chinas Shandong province, fining eight companies a record 228 million yuan (35.4 million) for violating the Anti-Monopoly Law.

A 22-month investigation by the provincial market supervision administration unearthed a meticulously implemented cartel scheme in which seven local cement firms banded together to coordinate pricing, monitor all of their inputs and output, and even punish any of their number that erred.

It was all to squeeze downstream companies, according to a notice from the Anti-Monopoly Bureau of Chinas State Administration for Market Regulation on Tuesday.

The seven firms established an eighth company, Zibo United Cement Enterprise Management Co. Ltd., in February 2017 to oversee their monopoly agreement, investigators said. All eight firms were fined.

The size of the fine  the largest ever in an industry prone to anticompetitive behavior reflected the level of planning and coordination behind the scheme, the regulator said.

The board of directors and senior executives of Zibo United were from the seven other firms. It acted as a kind of clearing house for their invoicing, sales and price fixing, as well as carving up local territory to stop the companies from competing on each others turf.

Cement, the main ingredient in concrete, is big business in China where infrastructure spending has driven decades of growth, and underpinned the largest mass urbanization in history. China is by far the worlds largest producer and consumer of the essential construction material.

Chinas cement industry generated 1 trillion yuan in revenue in 2019, while total profits were up 19.6% year-on-year to a record 186.7 billion yuan, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. The sector experienced a 1.6% dip in profits in the first 10 months of 2020, even as production rose 9.6%.

But even if firms are willing to break the rules, it can be tough to fix prices in practice because the material is pretty uniform. In China, parties to concrete monopoly agreements regularly backstab and undercut their collaborators, meaning agreements often break down.

The Shandong firms found a way to avoid this. In March 2018, Zibo United and its linked companies founded a price management committee that laid out detailed rules on pricing, approvals, assessment, and monitoring of sales.

Firms were even given the power to appeal to Zibo United for price changes based on market conditions, but could proceed only with approval. If they failed to do so, Zibo United was empowered to fine them 300,000 yuan.

Zibo United even had a real-time supervision and monitoring department, which audited product sales and performed random inspections to ensure the firms that were cheating downstream buyers were not also cheating each other.

Regulators said the firm had also organized members to restrict production around times of peak demand in order to reduce supply and spike prices.

Cement factories were fitted with automatic scales that measured their output and their trucks were fitted with GPS locators so all deliveries could be accounted for.

Price fixing has long been a feature of Chinas cement industry. The first fine meted out by Chinas then-State Administration for Industry and Commerce under the countrys newly-minted Anti-Monopoly Law was in 2011 against a concrete cartel in East Chinas Jiangsu province. The fine was 200,000 yuan.

Last month six cement-makers in Southwest China were fined about $9 million for colluding to raise prices, which an industry expert said looked like the start of a broader crackdown on corporate misconduct in the industry. The Sichuan Cement Association was also fined 500,000 yuan, the first time a cement association had been penalized in such a way.

In China, price fixing agreements are often facilitated by local cement associations, which organize industrial conferences to provide a venue for such collusion.

Liu Xu, a monopoly researcher at Tsinghua Universitys National Strategy Institute, said there were dozens of cement monopoly agreements in China, with some linked to powerful listed giants. He declined to name them publicly, but said Chinas law enforcement agencies should apply the same scrutiny to other more powerful firms.

The eight Shandong concrete companies fined were Zibo United, Shandong Baoshan Technology Co. Ltd., Shandong Donghua Cement Co. Ltd., Shandong Shanlu Environmental New Material Co. Ltd., Zibo Luzhong Cement Co. Ltd., Shandong Chongzheng Special Cement Co. Ltd. Zibo Shanshui Cement Co. Ltd. and Linqu Shanshui Cement Co. Ltd.

Contact reporter Flynn Murphy (flynnmurphy@caixin.com)

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Officials in Florida on Monday said a hacker tried to poison the water supply in a community that serves 15,000 people. States and cities monitor the water supply consumed by their constituents, just like in Florida. The advancement in technology made watching the water system more accessible, but it also grants hackers a chance to do unusual things.

In a report by Business Insider, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), U.S. Secret Service, along with the local authorities, probe the source of a recent cyberattack that targeted the water supply in a town outside Tampa.

E&E News shared that the unsuccessful cyberattack on Friday targeted the plant situated in Pinellas County and was marked as the first documented attempt in hacking and contaminating a United States community water supply.

Read also: Romney Warns Next Cyberattack Could Disrupt US Food and Water Supply

How Did the Hack on Florida's Municipal Water Supply System Happen?

The Christian Science Monitor reported that the hacker, who was able to break the water treatment system in Oldsmar by utilizing a remote access program shared among plant workers, attempted to increase the sodium hydroxide content from 100 to 11,100 parts per million - an 11,000 percent increase.

According to Chemical Safety Facts, the said chemical is utilized to manufacture many everyday products like paper, aluminum, commercial drain, oven cleaners, and even soap, soap, and detergents. In water treatment, sodium hydroxide controls the acidity and removes heavy metals from the water. The chemical is also used to produce sodium hypochlorite, which is a water disinfectant.

In an interview with Insider, Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said an Oldsmar water facility operator initially noticed someone remotely accessing a part of the water treatment system in the morning. He noted that this was not surprising since supervisors sometimes troubleshoot problems from remote locations.

But the operator noticed that the system was once again being accessed remotely past 1 p.m., and this time, the operator saw the hacker open the water treatment software and increase the sodium hydroxide levels in the system.

Gualtieri said the operator immediately reverted the levels back to normal and "at no time" was there danger to the public.

E&E News reported that the recent incident raised concern among experts, saying digitizing the so-called operational technology (OT) that allows the water to flow and electricity running can increases ways for hackers to infiltrate the system.

Experts added that municipal water and other systems are hackers' potential targets since local governments' computer infrastructure tends to be underfunded and lack the cybersecurity depth of power grid and nuclear plants.

What if the Attack on the Water Treatment Facility Had Not Been Noticed?

According to Agency for Toxic Substances and Diseases Registry, sodium hydroxide is extremely corrosive and irritating, which can cause severe burns and permanent damage to any tissue that it has contracted. It adds that this chemical may also cause permanent eye damage since it can burn the eyes and cause hydrolysis.

If the attack had not been noticed by personnel, Gualtieri said it would take 24 to 36 hours for the changes to fully take effect. But the sheriff, mayor, and city manager stressed that there are protocols in place that would have prevented a catastrophe as the system would catch the change in the pH level.

The officials added that they have already disabled the remote-access system to ensure a breach like this would not happen again. As of Monday, Insider reported that investigators have yet to identify the hacker and did not know if the attack originated in the U.S.

Related article: Brain-Eating Amoeba Found in Texas City's Water Supply, Residents Warned
By Sun Luming and Mo Xiaoliang

BEIJING, Feb. 10 -- On the afternoon of February 9, the Chinese PLA Navy headquarters in Beijing held a video conference to extend blessings and sincere greetings to the PLA Navys 36th and 37th escort taskforces, the 175th taskforce, the Nansha Garrison troops and the Djibouti Support Base, who are still performing missions during the oncoming Spring Festival.

From February 11, all the Chinese people will enter the holiday season of Spring Festival, the most important traditional festival in China. When all Chinese people look forward to the family reunion, these naval service members are still performing their duties thousands of miles away.

After the handover ceremony between the 36th and 37th escort taskforce last week, the 37th escort taskforce has replaced its predecessor to perform the escort missions, while the 36th escort taskforce set sail for the waters near Karachi, Pakistan, to participate in the upcoming 7th Multinational Maritime Exercise AMAN-2021 without delay. Meanwhile, the PLA Navy's 175th taskforce is also embarking on a far sea journey for training missions.

The PLA Navys Nansha Garrison troops are keeping a close eye on the sea and air conditions of the South China Sea, maintaining high-level alert and trying to respond to complex situations cautiously. The troops stationed in the PLA Djibouti Support Base, on the other hand, have successfully carried out multiple support missions for the escort taskforces and peacekeeping troops stationed therein.

"At the moment of bidding 2020 farewell and ushering in the New Year, you are determined to stand your grounds overseas and safeguard the peace of China, the happiness of the Chinese people, and the reunion of thousands of families at home with your practical actions. Your families are proud of you and the Navy pays you its lofty respect," said the PLA naval chiefs via videolink.

New Delhi:

The Uttar Pradesh Anti-Terrorist Squad on Friday conducted an extensive security check-up of the Uttar Pradesh Assembly after a powerful explosive PETN found under the seat of Leader of Opposition (LoP).

The UP ATS said that a media report possibly mentioned of a packet with magnesium sulphate which ATS has seized it and it will be sent for test if need be.

Surveying area according to security plan so that team will be ready for every situation. Tighter the security the better, said P Chaudhary, SP ATS.

Earlier on Friday, The Inspector General of UP ATS Aseem Arun on Friday said that they will do a detailed investigation into the incident. Arun said that they will scan through CCTV footage to reach conclusion in case. He said that the fact that PETN was found at the spot hints at possibility of a terrorist activity.

As per reports, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) has also visited the spot to carry out investigation.

While addressing the members, the chief minister Yogi Adityanath vowed that the government will expose those who have conspired this terror threat. He said it posed a life threat to all public representatives, staffers and 22 crore people of the state.

Adityanath informed that 150 gram PETN was found in assembly. He said the nature of the explosive was so powerful that 500 gram of PETN can blow the state assembly.

Also read: Powerful explosive PETN found in UP Assembly; CM Adityanath calls high-level meeting on security today

Also read: PETN explosive found in UP Assembly: CM Adityanath seeks NIA probe, vows to expose who are involved in terror conspiracy

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.

Dr. Tawa Anderson will deliver a lecture Feb. 26 during the first Philosophy Forum of the spring semester.

Anderson to Kick-Off Spring Philosophy Forum Series Feb. 26 February 24, 2021

Dr. Tawa Anderson, associate professor of philosophy, will deliver a faculty lecture for the first Philosophy Forum of the spring semester. The event will take place Friday, Feb. 26, at 4 p.m. in rooms 218-220 in the Geiger Center. [Please note: This event was rescheduled from its original date of Feb. 12 due to winter weather.] Andersons lecture is titled, The Quest for a Satisfied Insignificance. The forum is scheduled to conclude by 5:15 p.m.

Philosophy Forums bring issues of broad philosophical importance to the sphere of public conversation on campus. Anderson organizes the Philosophy Forum series.

Aspiring pastors are frequently accused of possessing a 'Messiah complex,' a pressing need to be needed, and/or a desire to be important or influential, Anderson said. More broadly, Western society celebrates the contributions of significant personages who chart the course for institutions or nations. We admire C. S. Lewis for his literary and apologetic impact; we respect Winston Churchill for fortifying the United Kingdom in its mortal battle with Nazi Germany; we idolize Martin Luther King Jr. for sparking the end of racial segregation. We do not merely admire, respect, and idolize such figures - we want to be like them ourselves.

In this reflective and self-critical Forum, Anderson will diagnose his own delusions of grandeur, while contemplating what a life of Christian discipleship, virtue and faithfulness ought to look like. Particular attention will be paid to the spiritual disciplines of simplicity and submission and the spiritual virtue of humility. Ultimately, Anderson will argue that, fulfillment in Christ is attained through meaningful contentment in obscurity ... or in prominence, should the Lord so require.

The second Forum of the spring will take place Friday, March 5, from 4 to 5:15 p.m., also in GC 220. Dr. Robert B. Stewart, professor of theology and philosophy at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, will deliver the lecture, A-Paul-ogetics: The Apologetics of the Apostle Paul.

The third Forum will be held Friday, April 16, from 4 to 5:15 p.m. in Stavros Hall room 214. Dr. Matthew Halsted, associate professor of biblical studies at Eternity Bible College, will deliver a lecture titled, Can God Be Incited to Cause Suffering? Evaluating Job 2:3 in Light of Gregory of Nyssas Philosophical Theology.

The fourth and final Forum of the spring 2021 semester will happen Friday, April 30, from 4 to 5:30 p.m. in Stavros Hall 214. This event will be a mock debate, featuring Joshua Knox, senior philosophy major, versus Anderson. The duo will debate the question, Does God Exist? with Knox debating the yea, while Anderson will debate the nay.

The events are free and open to the entire campus community. Face coverings and physical distancing are required for those in attendance.
"It's an incredible feeling to be an ambassador for a beauty brand that uplifts women..." - Megan Thee Stallion Tweet this

"Mielle has seen phenomenal growth in many key categories and the addition of Megan Thee Stallion as our global ambassador will further fuel our continued expansion and reshape the beauty industry. We are excited to partner with the leading female rapper to realize our global trajectory and to pursue new avenues of engagement that will bring new customers to our products," says CEO Monique Rodriguez. "By teaming with Megan, we are well positioned to explore and expand our product lines to continue to meet the needs of our clients," added COO Melvin Rodriguez.

"I'm excited to represent a global hair care brand that is Black-owned and women led," said Megan. "It's an incredible feeling to become an ambassador for a beauty brand that uplifts women to stand in their natural beauty."

The global beauty industry has benefited from advancements in digital marketing and Mielle plans to develop a series of innovative campaigns using Megan Thee Stallion to connect new and existing clients to their products and philanthropic mission. In advance of the announcement of Mielle's association with Megan Thee Stallion, the company has experienced a 46% increase in sales and new customer acquisition.

About Mielle

Mielle Organics is a natural hair care and beauty brand that believes healthier ingredients encourage healthier hair and skin. Mielle Organics launched in 2014 with the creation of the first Mielle Organics product, the Advanced Hair Formula, a unique proprietary blend of herbs, amino acids and minerals to support healthy hair, skin and nails, and immune system. Mielle products are 100% Black-owned and CEO made and tested. Every product that leaves Mielle's warehouse in Indiana has been formulated and developed with a level of care and attention that is unmatched. Mielle is sold nationally at Sally, Target, Kroger, CVS, Walgreens, Walmart, Rite Aid, HEB, internationally in Europe, Africa and online at www.mielleorganics.com .

Contact:

Martine Charles

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Candace Lane

m: 478.442.1725

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SOURCE Mielle Organics

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Kids want to fish? You don't know how yourself? Here's a little help

Ex-St. Petersburg and Leningrad Region penitentiary official sentenced to 18 years in prison

 RAPSI, Eugeny Varlamov

18:06 10/02/2021

ST. PETERSBURG, February 10 (RAPSI, Mikhail Telekhov)  Former deputy chief of the Federal Penitentiary Services (FSIN) St. Petersburg and Leningrad Region Directorate Sergey Moiseyenko has been sentenced to 18 years in a maximum security penal colony, after found guilty of receiving bribes amounting to 710 million rubles ($9.6 million at the current exchange rate) during a detention center construction, the United press service of St. Petersburg courts informs RAPSI.

The Kolpinsky District Court of St. Petersburg found the defendant guilty of receiving a bribe as a state official acting in conspiracy with other persons and with the use of extortion. Moiseyenko did not plead guilty and refused to testify. The court sentenced him to 11 years behind bars; in combination with the 15 years term Moiseyenko had been given earlier for organization of assassination against his subordinate by the Leningrad Regional Court he is to be in confinement for 18 years, according to the statement. The defendant was also deprived of his rank of the colonel of internal service.

According to case papers, from March 2010 to August 2015, Moiseyenko received over 710 million rubles from CEOs of two commercial organizations for common protection. In particular, he ordered his subordinates to sign without delays reports of completion, cover them, pay advances at the start of every year at the maximum value stipulated by a state contract signed earlier.

Another defendant in the case, ex-deputy director of the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) Nikolay Barinov has been earlier convicted and sentenced to 3.5 years in prison and a 950,000-ruble ($15,000) fine.


In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, governments across the country have tried to limit the economic damage caused by the unprecedented lockdowns. That is certainly a worthy goal. But far too often, rather than providing assistance across the board  which might require unpopular tax hikes on everyone  governments stick only some people with the bill.

San Francisco, for example, recently adopted an ordinance that prohibits landlords from evicting certain business tenants that cant pay rent because of COVID-related impacts. The ordinance allows these tenants, upon a showing of financial hardship, to stop paying rent immediately and grants them a forbearance period to repay, during which time landlords cannot recover possession of their property. Businesses with less than 10 full-time employees are even permitted to cancel their leases altogether and avoid early-termination fees, regardless of what their leases say. The ordinance provides one meager sop to smaller landlords (those that own less than 25,000 square feet of rental space), who may proceed with eviction against non-paying tenants, but only if the landlords can prove that the inability to evict would cause them a significant financial hardship.

No one doubts that businesses are suffering, but the San Francisco ban ignores the suffering of landlords who  like their tenants  are also businesses that need income to pay bills. Nor does the ordinance consider that, precisely because of the economic downturn and the difficulty in finding new tenants, landlords have every incentive to work with their existing tenants to help them stay in business so that they can continue to pay rent over the long term.

In the eviction-ban ordinance itself, San Francisco acknowledges that its facing an unprecedented public health and economic crisis due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Nonetheless, San Francisco targets innocent property owners for special  unfair  treatment. Why are landlords singled out to bear the burdens of the pandemic?

Aside from the questionable ethics of picking COVID winners and losers, San Franciscos ordinance is unconstitutional. First, the ordinance effectively rewrites the contracts between landlords and their tenants, in violation of the U.S. Constitutions contracts clause. This clause provides that No State shall  pass any  Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts. According to the Supreme Court, a law that substantially impairs contractual rights will survive only if the government identifies a legitimate and significant public interest and shows that the contractual impairment is reasonably related to that interest.

Assuming San Francisco has a legitimate interest in mitigating the economic effects of the COVID-19 lockdowns and the pandemics public-health risks, the ordinance is not reasonably related to that interest.

First, a ban on evicting business tenants has nothing to do with responding to public-health risks  one could argue that closing shop and staying home would be a better response. Second, by imposing non-recoverable costs on the landlords, the ordinance increases net economic harm. Among other things, the ordinance encourages existing landlords to convert their properties to non-tenant uses, thereby causing an increase in rental prices. It also discourages non-landlord property owners from offering new spaces for rent, which would put downward pressure on rental prices. Any short-term gains to tenants, therefore, will be far outstripped by the immediate- and long-term harms to the broader economy  precisely the opposite of the ordinances stated goal.

The second constitutional deficiency arises out of the Constitutions guarantee of due process. Here, because the landlords have not caused any harm, San Franciscos eviction moratorium deprives landlords of their property rights without due process of law. Of course, if a tenant or the city shows that a landlord engaged in illegal conduct to the detriment of the landlords tenant, then the landlord can and should be held liable  after a court of law so determines. But the eviction-ban ordinance effectively declares that all commercial landlords in the city may be deprived of their property without any judicial process whatsoever.

In short, San Franciscos eviction ban is both unfair and illegal. Politicians may score some public relations points, but the ordinance does nothing to stop the spread of COVID-19 and it harms, rather than helps, the citys economy.

Oliver Dunford is an attorney for Pacific Legal Foundation, which litigates nationwide to achieve court victories enforcing the Constitutions guarantee of individual liberty.
The slammed the government in the on Wednesday for ignoring the "aam admi" and showing insensitivity towards agitating farmers in the budget proposals for 2021-22, which were unveiled by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman earlier this month.

"The aam aadmi has been let down totally in the last seven years...and the budget has betrayed his most fundamental aspirations," Congress member Shashi Tharoor said while initiating the general discussion on the

The finance minister has neither played defensive nor hit the ball, he said, adding, "She has just run out of ideas. You cannot cross the sea but just keep staring at it."



Tharoor said the budget has reduced expenditure on defence and healthcare, and "delivered a blow to the economic system".

Although the nation suffered a lot because of the stringent lockdown in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the government's response to deal with the sufferings of people "showed no sensitivity", he said, adding, "Bharat should become aatmanirbhar (self-reliant) and not Bharatvasis."



Accusing the government of ignoring the crisis instead of recognising that there is one at the border with China, Tharoor said the Centre seems to have overturned the slogan "Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan" into "Na Jawan, Na Kisan".

Dayanidhi Maran of the DMK said that the government did not extend any income tax concessions to the middle class and the budget was not for the common people.

He said that the COVID-19-induced lockdown has severely impacted the tourism industry and the government has not done anything to support that sector.

"This budget was touted as an unprecedented budget. True Sir. It is unprecedent left all budget," Maran said, adding that there is no clarity on sector-specific revival.

Congress member Tharoor said the budget, did nothing to assuage the concerns of the agitating farmers with regard to the minimum support price (MSP).

The road to a new India should not be littered with the wreckage of the old India, the MP from Thiruvananthapuram said and urged the government not to create barriers on the path of the "annadatas" (farmers), who are protesting against three new farm laws at the borders of Delhi.

During the debate, Maran also said that despite the fact that crude oil prices have seen a dip in global markets, fuel prices in India shot up during the pandemic time.

Talking about defence sector, he said the budget for this important segment has been increased marginally. "We are in the middle of extreme tension with China...The figures of defence spending barely show any change. We are worried...We are in a war situation. We have to ensure that our army is well armoured to protect our country," he said.

He claimed that the allocations for agriculture was slashed.

The DMK MP said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi became emotional in Rajya Sabha while giving his farewell speech to Leader of Ghulam Nabi Azad on Tuesday and asked why Modi cannot show the same compassion for protesting farmers.

Referring to the Rs 35,000 crore allocation for COVID-19 vaccines in the budget, Maran said a forensic audit should be done on companies that receive the funds to ensure that it is not a "backdoor for funding political parties".

Lone AIADMK member P Ravindhranath and some BJP members protested Maran's remarks regarding Tamil Nadu, including that the state government was corrupt.

On the corruption remark, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) member Anurag Singh Thakur made an apparent reference to a corruption case that involved Maran.

BJP's Nishikant Dubey sought to raise a point of order saying that things about a state government should not be mentioned in the House. However, N K Premachandran, who was in the Chair, said there was no point of order.

Participating in the discussion, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) member Meenakshi Lekhi said due to the efforts of the Narendra Modi government, the country has come out of the "fragile five" economies.

Today, India is among the top five economies in the world, she said, adding that the finance minister is now talking about a double-digit growth rate.

The economy is projected to grow at 11 per cent during 2021-22 after a likely contraction of 7.7 per cent in the current financial year as a result of the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

After saving lives, the focus is now on promoting livelihood, which the budget has tried to do, Lekhi said, adding that the allocations for most of the sectors have been doubled.

Trinamool Congress member Saugata Roy alleged that budget failed to provide support measures for poor and migrant labours.

"I think this budget is not good for the country... There is nothing to discuss in the budget. She (Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman) is part of OLX, which sells everything," he said.

He added that fiscal prudence has been thrown out of window and the government is getting most of the money from borrowing.

Roy stated that the finance minister is a "Great Dismantler".

"Public assets built over time will be sold to cronies of the government. This is the worst form of crony capitalism," he added.

He said that allocations to key programmes like MNREGA has been reduced.

(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.)
Kids want to fish? You don't know how yourself? Here's a little help
The UAE Water Aid Foundation (Suqia) has launched a promotion campaign in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) region to boost participation for the third cycle of the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Global Water Award.

Addressing a virtual media briefing, Suqia said the upcoming cycle will grant awards worth $1 million to research institutions, organisations, individuals, and innovators from around the world with the most creative, sustainable and cost-effective technology solutions to address the growing lack of access to safe potable water.

Suqia officials and executives led by Mohammed Abdulkareem Alshamsi, the Acting Executive Director, briefed the media about the objectives of the Award, its categories, criteria and process that will attract more entries from Asean member countries.

"One of the awards objectives is to discover and find the most innovative solutions that provide communities with access to clean water. This is a basic human right," stated Saeed Mohammed Al Tayer, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the UAE Water Aid Foundation.

The award, which was launched by HH Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President, Prime Minister, and Ruler of Dubai, reflects the commitment of Dubai and the UAE to help poverty- and disaster-stricken communities.

It is organised every two years and has four award categories. During the previous two cycles, the pioneering projects of 20 awardees, including individuals, pioneering organisations, and research centres, received awards for developing innovative models capable of producing clean water using solar power.

It also highlights Dubais belief in the importance of integrating innovation and sustainability into the international movement geared towards solving global water scarcity. Through the award, we intend to support projects and innovations that provide safe drinking water to those communities that lack access to it," said Al Tayer.

"Since its launch, the award has been instrumental in discovering creative and cost-effective approaches to water supply issues. We aim to continue this goal with the staging of the upcoming third cycle," Al Tayer added.

For the third cycle, Suqia has expanded the award's scope to include new technologies that produce, distribute, store, monitor, desalinate and purify water using renewable energy. A fourth new category was added  Innovative Crisis Solutions Award.

It recognises innovations that can provide relief within the critical 48 hours after internationally-declared emergencies. This highlights the fact that rapid access to safe drinking water is a crucial element for survival in crises and natural disasters.
Richard Gentry, a veteran lobbyist who last year represented a utility-backed nonprofit, was appointed Tuesday by legislators to be the chief lawyer representing consumers in utility rate cases before state regulators.

The Joint Legislative Committee on Public Counsel Oversight unanimously named Gentry to the job, one of the most important but least appreciated in state government. There was no debate. Under state law, the Office of Public Counsel serves as the voice of consumers in electric, water and natural gas cases that relate to consumer finances.

Gentry, 70, has spent four decades as a lobbyist representing developers, sugar producers, the parimutuel industry and the utility-backed nonprofit called Floridians for Government Accountability during the 2020 legislative session. He replaces J.R. Kelly, the lawyer who for the last 14 years represented the public in rate cases and has been an aggressive opponent to rate requests and legal maneuverings of the states largest utility, Florida Power & Light.

Last year, as FPL, Duke Power, and Tampa Electric began preparing to ask the Public Service Commission to allow them to raise their rates on Florida customers, Senate President Wilton Simpson successfully pushed legislation to impose a 12-year term limit on the public counsel and required Kelly to reapply for the job.

While the utilities have a team of lawyers and experts to make their case on behalf of their investors, the OPC has a smaller group of state-paid lawyers working on behalf of customers. Unlike many states where the consumer advocate is independent, Floridas OPC works for the Legislature, which in the last election cycle received more than $4 million in campaign contributions from the utility industry.

According to public records, Kelly, who was paid $127,000, made numerous attempts to discuss with Simpson whether he supported Kelly remaining on the job. Simpson never agreed to discuss it with him, and Kelly concluded that he had lost his support and announced his retirement in December.

Story continues

In the last election cycle, FPL was among the largest contributors to legislative campaigns with $3.1 million in donations, according to reports filed with the Florida Division of Elections. Included in the 2020 contributions was $1.5 million to the Florida Republican Senatorial Leadership Committee, headed by Simpson, who spent the last year securing the Republican majority in the Senate.

Rate increase requests are coming

In March, FPL is expected to begin its rate case in which it is asking for about a $2 billion increase in base-rate revenues over the next four years. In 2022, FPL is asking for $1.1 billion, which would be followed by a $615 million increase in 2023, a $140 million increase in 2024 and $140 million in 2025 to pay for solar-energy projects, the News Service of Florida reported in January.

TECO also has a rate case, asking to charge customers between $280 million and $295 million starting in 2022.

In an interview last week with the committee, Gentry said: If I were fortunate enough to be selected for this important role, my philosophy would be very simple  in all cases, get the best deal for the ratepayers of Florida.

He added that while the electric utility issues tend to get the most airtime, there are also real drinking water challenges facing some communities in this state, and I strongly believe that they deserve to command the attention of the Office of Public Counsel.

Sen. Jason Pizzo, a Miami Democrat, asked if he knew that the office had no jurisdiction over rate cases related to water treatment plants owned or operated by local governments.

While that certainly is a policy issue that those of you behind these desks have to grapple with, Gentry replied. If assigned to my office, I would deal with water quality.

After the meeting, Pizzo said he would like to see more state oversight of water authorities. Theres a lot of shadiness going on, he said.

Very few candidates for the job

On Tuesday, the chairman of the committee, Sen. Bobby Powell, D-West Palm Beach, defended the fact that there was only one candidate after two other candidates said they had gotten other jobs and a fourth withdrew his application.

He said the job was advertised in the National Association of State Utility Consumer Advocates, the Florida Bar Association and the Tallahassee Bar Association, a Tallahassee-based organization thats composed primarily of African-American law students and lawyers, and the Tallahassee Women Lawyers, and it was posted on the Online Sunshine website and posted internally among legislative staff.

Last week, the Herald/Times made a public records request for the emails and dates of those job postings to verify those claims, but it has not been returned.

I do recognize that were in a diverse state, Powell said. I think the biggest thing here is that this process was transparent.

He added: Im excited for you, Mr. Gentry, were prepared to continue to do the business of the state.

Responding to a question from Pizzo, Gentry said he was a little bit surprised that he had become the only candidate.

Ive wondered from time to time if they knew something I didnt know, he said.

The states largest utilities welcomed Gentry.

Duke Energy Florida looks forward to working with Mr. Gentry as we continue to provide our customers with safe and reliable service, said Ana Gibbs, Duke Energy spokesperson in a statement.

FPL spokesperson Bill Orlove said the company is proud of our long-standing relationship with the Office of Public Counsel, which has benefited our customers and all Floridians for many years. We look forward to working with the new public counsel to further strengthen the energy value we provide to the state.

FPL, a regulated monopoly with more than 10 million customers in Florida, is currently making profits at about 11.6%, the most allowed under current law. The companys rate agreement ends this year, and it is now expected to be asking regulators to allow profits of between 11.5% and 12.5%. TECO, which also has a rate case this year, is asking for 10.75%.

On Kellys last day on the job, he completed a settlement agreement with Duke Energy to lock in rates that would give the company profits of 9.85% return on equity. That agreement must still be approved by the PSC.

Mary Ellen Klas can be reached at meklas@miamiherald.com and @MaryEllenKlas
 Flash

Chinese President Xi Jinping on Wednesday exchanged congratulatory messages with his Nigerian counterpart, Muhammadu Buhari, on the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the two countries' diplomatic relations.

In his message, Xi noted that over the past half century, the two countries have seen their traditional friendship growing stronger and practical cooperation bearing rich fruit, and have coordinated closely on international and regional affairs.

In recent years, the China-Nigeria strategic partnership has shown a sound momentum of development, and has effectively improved people's well-being in both countries, Xi said.

Since the onset of the COVID-19 epidemic, China has joined hands with African nations, including Nigeria, to fight it, which has demonstrated the brotherly friendship between China and Africa featuring solidarity in the face of adversity, he added.

Xi stressed that he attaches great importance to the development of China-Nigeria relations, and stands ready to work with Buhari to take the 50th anniversary as an opportunity to make positive contributions to the building of a closer China-Africa community with a shared future.

He suggested that the two sides carry forward their traditional friendship and deepen cooperation in various fields within the frameworks of the Belt and Road Initiative as well as the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC).

For his part, Buhari said that since the establishment of the diplomatic ties 50 years ago, Nigeria and China have been trusting each other and working closely, and have achieved fruitful results in cooperation, bringing enormous benefits for the two countries and their people.

Nigeria appreciates China's support in such fields as railway, highway, electric power and national defense, Buhari said, adding that China has been fighting together with Nigeria and other African countries against COVID-19 since the outbreak of the pandemic, which enriches the connotation of the bilateral ties.

Facing major global challenges, the two countries have been upholding multilateralism and the principle of non-interference in other countries' internal affairs, and also staying committed to defending common interests of developing countries, the Nigerian president said.

Nigeria is willing to work with China to ensure a successful meeting of the FOCAC this year, he added.
Tension between law enforcement and rebellious populations in Mandouri, wounded recorded

The descent into the street of the populations of the city of Mandouri (105 km east of the city of Dapaong) on Tuesday, February 9, resulted in damage. Wounded after dispersal with tear gas, these populations denounced the state of the Borgou-Mandouri road. The state of this road is the result of unfinished asphalting work undertaken by the company EBOMAF which had come to withdraw its machinery in October 2020. And since that date, everything has remained without action and according to the demonstrators, this causes traffic accidents .

From Dapaong to Borgou, the road is paved ; and also what revolts these populations is that other localities like Naki East have electricity and drinking water, which is not the case. In their frustration, these populations of Mandouri, capital of the prefecture, went so far as to demand the resignation of the prefect, Mr. YOUA.

Were considered jerks here in Mandouri. If the state does not decide something in our favor this time around, everything will be fine because we are not going to give in to it anymore. We are too abandoned, disadvantaged and yet we were made promises in October 2020 that EBOMAF would come back, to keep our calm. So it was to deceive us and make the machines go ; drinking water and electricity are problems ... we are given it like a drop of water on our tongue and therefore we are not free to use it as we see fit. Really, it is time for our government to react to meet our needs. All the roads of the cantons of the prefecture are asphalted and electrified, but not the main town of Mandouri ; There is not a prefecture in Togo that is in the conditions we live in or if we are not Togolese, let us be told ".

The authorities tried to calm the situation ; an attempt which failed and the populations continued their demonstration which resulted in a direct disagreement with the police.

V.G. (T228)
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Sir Elton John and Sir Michael Caine have appeared in an NHS advert urging the public to get vaccinated against coronavirus.

The video, shot at London's Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, aims to 'show others that getting the life-saving jab is easy and safe', according to a statement.

The clip shows the famous pair appearing to audition for a part in an advert promoting the jab.

Important: Sir Elton John and Sir Michael Caine have appeared in an NHS advert urging the public to get vaccinated against coronavirus

In the video, Sir Elton, 73, said: 'The more people in society that get vaccinated, the more chance there is of eradicating the national Covid pandemic.

'It is really important to know that the vaccines have all been through and met the necessary safety and quality standards.'

After apparently being given the injection, Sir Elton then references his 1983 hit I'm Still Standing by saying: 'As you can see, I'm still standing, yeah, yeah, yeah.'

The director then responded by saying: 'Thanks Elton, we will let you know.' Sir Elton replied: 'Well at this short notice you won't find anyone bigger.'

Campaign: The video, shot at London's Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, aims to 'show others that getting the life-saving jab is easy and safe', according to a statement

The video then cuts to Sir Michael, 87, as he appears to be given the vaccine.

The actor said it 'didn't hurt' before saying: 'Not many people know that.'

Afterwards, the director can be heard telling someone to 'let the little fella know he didn't get the job'.

The video has been released after the NHS asked anyone aged 70 and above who has not yet been vaccinated to come forward to receive one.

Vaccine: The clip shows the famous pair appearing to audition for a part in an advert promoting the jab

The campaign's co-ordinator Professor Lord Ara Darzi, who is co-director of the Institute of Global Health Innovation at Imperial College London, said Sir Elton and Sir Michael are 'trusted faces' who are 'loved' by the public.

'I asked them [to take part] and they were extremely generous in giving us the time to do this, which I was very grateful for, and I hope it does the job in convincing the population that vaccines for Covid is the best way out of this pandemic,' he told the PA news agency.

'They were extremely keen to help in any way possible.' Lord Darzi added he wanted the video to be 'humorous and engaging' and he hopes people who are sceptical about the vaccine will change their minds.

'I think many people who have had two thoughts about this will think again,' he said.

Jab: After getting the vaccine, Michael said it 'didn't hurt' before saying: 'Not many people know that'

NHS chief executive Sir Simon Stevens said: 'Well over nine out of 10 people aged 75 and over have already taken up the offer of their NHS Covid vaccination, and now we want to encourage everyone in the high priority groups to do so.

'That's why we're grateful to Sir Elton and Sir Michael for helping the NHS promote vaccine uptake, building on the fast and efficient programme to date, which has seen the NHS already vaccinate one in four adults across England.'

Some 352,480 people had their first dose on Monday, taking the total to 12,646,486.

On Monday, the Health Secretary trumpeted the success of the roll-out so far, confirming the NHS is on track to hit its target of immunising the 15million most vulnerable Brits by next Monday.

Almost 12.5million people have already received their first dose of vaccine and the health service is administering 450,000 every day, on average, putting the country well on track to hit the milestone next Monday.

Previously, over-70s were told to wait until they were contacted  through a letter, email, text or phone call  to ensure all over-80s, care home residents and patients with serious underlying health conditions had first access.

People in that age group can now schedule an appointment using the NHS booking service or those unable to get online can phone 119.

On track: On Monday, the Health Secretary trumpeted the success of the roll-out so far, confirming the NHS is on track to hit its target of immunising the 15million most vulnerable Brits by next Monday

Matt Hancock said take-up of the vaccines has so far been 'significantly better than we hoped for', claiming it has hit a staggering 95 per cent in people in their late 70s, 91 per cent of over-80s and almost three quarters of people in their early 70s. He said the Government had been expecting approximately 75 per cent.

Frontline health and social care workers, who are also at the top of the priority list, are also being urged to come forward and arrange an appointment if they've not had a dose. And GP practices have been told to contact any extremely vulnerable patients who have still yet to receive their first injection.

Meanwhile, Downing Street said today it expects to have vaccinated all over-50s by the end of April, raising hopes that Britain could drop the vast majority of curbs in May. Boris Johnson is under pressure to step up the reopening of the country as soon as the top nine groups - around 32million people - are covered.

Britain is jabbing at record pace, dishing out more vaccines per person than any country in the world other than Israel.
Nestled in the Texas Hill Country lies the small town of Fredericksburg, which has earned a top spot on a Forbes roundup of the the most idyllic small towns in the U.S. to visit in 2021.

Founded in 1846, the Texas small town gem has lured visitors to its rolling hills dotted with bluebonnets and cool bungalow rentals called "Sunday Houses."

Featured on the Forbes list for small town charm include Deadwood, South Dakota; Rockport Massachusetts, Captiva Island, Florida; Elizabeth City, North Carolinaand our own Texas destination, Fredericksburg. These small town jewels provide travelers with a way to get off the grid and enjoy the small town pace.

TEXAS TRAVEL DESTINATIONS: These are the top 5 Texas travel destinations for 2021

"Equipped with spectacular natural beauty and fascinating historic backgrounds, these five towns are the perfect fit for experiencing the quieter side of the United States," Forbes' Jared Ranahan writes.

Fredericksburg, Texas

Named after Prince Frederick of Prussia, Fredericksburg has been affectionately deemed "The Aspen of Texas," according to Fodor's Travel Publication. Tucked in the heart of the Texas Hill Country, the German-influenced town offers attractions that include a wildflower farm, wine tastings and a historic downtown strip filled with eclectic boutiques. Outdoor enthusiasts might want to spend a day hiking Enchanted Rock or hitting the Texas Wine Trail.

"The truth is that its hard not to love the town where you can shop a day on Main Street and still not see everything...Or spend a day touring the Texas Wine Trail in townor afternoon hiking Enchanted Rock, according to Fodors Hill Country editor Debbie Harmsen.

Elizabeth City, North Carolina

Located in the northeastern corner of North Carolina, Elizabeth City has been named one of the "100 Best Small Towns in America." This waterfront small town gem was founded in 1794. Visitors can head out to the beaches of the Outer Banks, Ghost Harbor or Hampton Roads. If you love the outdoors, travelers can explore the 20,000 acres of nearby state parks or head out hiking on the Fenwick-Hollowell Wetlands Trail.

UniversalImagesGroup/Universal Images Group via Getty

Deadwood, South Dakota

If you want a taste of the Old West, Deadwood is a step back in time. The small town destination is nestled among the Black Hills of South Dakota, and the historic downtown area is a perfect spot to stroll through. Travelers can head out to the Black Hills underground mine, Broken Boot Gold Mine or go on one of the historic tours offered by a Wild West tour guide.

John Greim/LightRocket via Getty Images

Rockport, Massachusetts

If lobsters and lighthouses are more of your thing, consider heading to the small coastal town of Rockport. Venture over to the creative district of Bearskin Neck or the cool waters of Halibut Point State Park. Travelers can also head to Gloucester, Manchester-by-the Sea or the historic Salem for their East Coast journey.

Jeff Greenberg/Jeff Greenberg/Universal Images

Captiva Island, Florida

Just off of Florida's Gulf Coast, the idyllic small town gem of Captiva Island boasts miles of sandy beaches and activities including biking, sailing and birding. If you need a peaceful, off-the-grid getaway, consider some of the other barrier islands, like Sanibel Island and Cayo Costa.
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Pfizer and Oxford University's Covid vaccines both cut the risk of falling ill with the disease by 65 per cent after just one dose, in a ray of hope for Britain's lockdown-easing plans.

In the most concrete proof yet that the NHS inoculation drive is working, unpublished Government data shows the Pfizer/BioNTech jab kicks in within two weeks and is just as effective at blocking symptoms in the elderly as it is in the young. The Oxford/AstraZeneca jab is similarly robust.

The first Pfizer dose reportedly cuts the risk of getting symptoms by 64 per cent in over-80s and by 65 per cent in younger adults, the first data from the UK immunisation programme has found. Protection soars to between 79 and 84 per cent after the second dose for all ages. Similar results have been seen in Israel.

Number 10 sources told The Sun hospitalisation rates among the 12.6million Britons who've been vaccinated have also reportedly starting falling to a 'fraction of previous levels'.

Public Health England chiefs monitoring the UK's mammoth vaccination rollout have not yet released any actual data detailing the real-world efficacy of either jab. Initial results are expected within days.

Although the leaked findings are lower than the 95 per cent efficacy shown in Pfizer's original trial, top scientists today described them as 'amazing'. Efficacy is always higher in controlled studies because researchers use more young and healthy people to make the trials run smoothly and quickly. Older people  who are at the front of the queue for vaccines because they are most vulnerable  have weaker immune systems.

Reacting to the early results, Professor Paul Hunter, an infectious disease specialist at the University of East Anglia, said he was 'quite confident' ministers will be able to gradually ease lockdown within weeks, if they are proven to be true.

There are still questions about how effective jabs will be at stopping people from falling ill with the South African Covid variant, however, after studies indicated they are less effective against the mutant strain. But scientists are confident they will be potent enough to reduce Covid to 'the sniffles' and prevent vaccinated people from being hospitalised or dying  which is their main purpose.

The news will come as a boost for lockdown-sceptic Tories, who yesterday savaged Matt Hancock for his 'forever lockdown' after the Health Secretary warned border restrictions might be needed until booster jabs arrive in the autumn. Backbenchers skewered the Downing Street dove as he unveiled the brutal measures aimed at stopping mutant variants  some of which are already spreading in Britain  from entering the country.

As Mr Hancock ratcheted restrictions, his department announced 12,364 new Covid cases and 1,052 deaths. Both daily counts were 25 per cent lower than last Tuesday's figures.

A patients receiving a Pfizer BioNTech Covid-19 vaccination at Haxby and Wiggington Surgery on December 22, 2020 in York, England

In other coronavirus developments today:

Transport Secretary Grant Shapps has warned Brits against booking any holiday this summer, foreign or domestic, amid crackdown on mutant strains entering the UK;

Families face bills running into hundreds of pounds for compulsory new Covid tests if they holiday abroad, with the two-swab package to be offered at a cost of 210 per person;

A scientist on the WHO's controversial fact-finding mission to China today lashed out at the US and said its intelligence linking coronavirus to a biochemical lab in Wuhan was 'wrong on many aspects';

A commonly used asthma drug cuts the need to send Covid patients to hospital by 90 per cent and shortens recovery times, Oxford University said today.

The leaked findings show the vaccines take three weeks to build up immunity in the elderly, while it starts after two weeks for younger people.

Paul Hunter, professor of medicine at the University of East Anglia, called the findings 'quite amazing.' He told The Sun: 'If these numbers are borne out, then they are very reassuring. If they are achieving 65 per cent protection after three weeks with both jabs, then I think that's really good.

Compulsory Covid-19 tests for travellers could add 1,000 to the cost of a holiday abroad Families face bills running into hundreds of pounds for compulsory new Covid tests if they holiday abroad. The rules announced by Health Secretary Matt Hancock yesterday will force all travellers to take an extra two tests after entering the UK. The two-test package will be offered at a cost of 210 per person. Holidaymakers and business travellers will have to book tests through an online portal before returning home. People are already required to get a test at their own expense three days before arriving in the UK. The new regime means that a family of four is likely to face a total bill well in excess of 1,000, making foreign holidays unaffordable for many. Those wanting to leave quarantine after five days under the test to release scheme would have to pay for another test. Mr Hancock did not say how long the rules would stay in place but a Government source said travel testing was here to stay. While hotel quarantine applies to arrivals from 33 red-listed countries, the new regime will cover all arrivals. The first test will be taken two days after arrival and sent for analysis to help identify new virus strains. The second test will be taken after eight days. Failure to take them could incur fines totalling 3,000 per person. Advertisement

'And that's a vindication of our current strategy as it protects more people than giving two doses three weeks apart. I am still, despite the South African strain, quite confident that we will see a gradual opening of the society, probably starting with schools opening early March.'

A government source also told the newspaper that Downing Street would be proven right for approving the Oxford jab for the elderly, while other European countries decided not to give it to over-65s.

Germany, France, Spain and Sweden have all decided not to administer the Oxford vaccine to the older age bracket over a lack of data from the drug company.

The results echo findings coming out of Israel, where daily case rates for over-60s have plunged by 46 per cent since mid-January after rolling out the Pfizer and Oxford jabs.

Hospital admissions have dropped by 35 per cent compared to mid-January, while admissions for younger adults have stayed flat and are even slightly higher now.

A similar disparity is seen in hospital admissions, with a 30 per cent decline for over-60s in the two weeks to February 1.

It comes after another 356,291 coronavirus jabs were administered on Monday, with 12.6million Brits having now received their first dose.

With five days still to go, No10 is within touching distance of delivering on its target of injecting the 15million most vulnerable by February 15.

The Government has said more than half of all UK adults should receive a coronavirus vaccine by May.

Downing Street confirmed that the vaccine programme planned to reach all those aged 50 and over, as well as adults aged 16-65 in an at-risk group, by May  having previously said it aimed to do so 'by the spring'.

Mr Hancock warned that 'lots of things have got to go right' to hit the goal, including supply, but he said he was 'sure' it was achievable. More than 10.9 million first doses have already been given.

According to the Government's vaccines delivery plan, some 32 million people across the UK are estimated to fall into the first nine groups. There are 52.7 million people aged 18 and over in the UK.

The target was disclosed as the Cabinet Office announced that local elections in England and Wales would go ahead as planned on May 6  though voters will have to wear face coverings and will be asked to take their own pen or pencil to mark their ballot.

It will be seen as indicative of lockdown restrictions easing in the spring, with reports that outdoor team and individual sports, as well as outdoor gatherings, could be possible within weeks of a planned return of schools from March 8.

But hopes of Britain's vaccine rollout bringing an end to brutal lockdown curbs any time soon were shot down yesterday by Mr Hancock, who unveiled a suite of new border curbs in the Commons, aimed at tackling new mutant strains.

There are now six variants of coronavirus being investigated by Public Health England, five of which have already been found in the UK

'Does Matt Hancock really think it's worse than a sexual offence?' Lord Sumption blasts 'inhumane' 10-year jail terms for travellers who lie about whether they have been to mutant Covid hotspots Former Supreme Court justice Lord Sumption has blasted a 10-year prison term for travellers who lie about travelling to mutant Covid-19 hotspots as 'inhumane'. Health Secretary Matt Hancock yesterday unveiled the toughest crackdown on border measures to prevent strains of coronavirus entering the UK from 33 'red list,' countries. From Monday, all arrivals from those countries will have to pay 1,750 to quarantine for 10 days in Government-designated hotels. The Health Secretary said those caught lying about their movements could be fined 10,000 or be jailed for 10 years. Former Attorney General Dominic Grieve today said courts would never impose the 10-year sentence, which he branded 'draconian'. In a comment piece published yesterday, Lord Sumption wrote: 'Does Mr Hancock really think that non-disclosure of a visit to Portugal is worse than the large number of violent firearms offences or sexual offences involving minors, for which the maximum is seven years?' But Transport Secretary Grant Shapps insisted the move was 'appropriate'. 'It's up to 10 years, it's a tariff, it's not necessarily how long somebody would go to prison for,' he told BBC Breakfast. 'But I do think it is serious if people put others in danger by deliberately misleading and saying that you weren't in Brazil or South Africa, or one of the red list countries, which as you say does include Portugal. 'But I think the British public would expect pretty strong action because we're not talking now just about, 'oh there's a lot of coronavirus in that country and you might bring some more of it back when we already have plenty of it here'. 'What we're talking about now are the mutations, the variants, and that is a different matter, because we don't want to be in a situation where we later on discover that there's a problem with vaccines.' Advertisement

As of Monday travellers from high-risk 'Red List' countries will be forced to spend 10 days in 'quarantine hotels', and all arrivals must test negative three times through gold-standard PCR coronavirus tests before being allowed to freely move around the UK.

Anyone who lies about whether they have been to places on the banned list recently will face up to 10 years in prison.

Travel and hospitality bosses warned the UK faces a second summer write off as uncertainty over when restrictions will end squashes demand for holidays and social venues.

They called for reassurances that curbs will be eased from April to avoid pushing their industries 'over a cliff-edge'.

In a Commons statement, Mr Hancock was confronted by a series of senior Conservatives over when the restrictions might ease  and whether the goalposts were being shifted on relaxing the wider lockdown.

Former chief whip Mark Harper, chair of the lockdown-sceptic CRG bloc of around 70 MPs, urged the government to reconsider its approach with Covid likely to be a permanent issue.

'If the virus continues to mutate, surely the risk is going to be there forever,' he said.



Tory MP Craig Mackinlay told MailOnline that he was sceptical about the border crackdown and it might do 'more damage than it tries to solve'. He added: 'This whole trying to stop things from coming in, I think we are way beyond that frankly. The virus does its own thing no matter where it is.'

It came as one of Oxford's vaccine chiefs, Professor Andrew Pollard, said today the South African variant was not a 'reason for alarm' and jabs should work to prevent hospitalisations and deaths and reduce the disease to 'the sniffles'.

It comes after South Africa suspended the Oxford roll-out after finding the jab was ineffective against the mutant strain in the country.

It comes after another strain, first identified in Bristol, was yesterday labelled a 'variant of concern' by scientists.

Public Health England said it has now found 21 cases of this version of the virus, with 14 in Bristol and the South West, four in Manchester and three 'scattered' across the UK.

It is a version of the Kent variant  the dominant strain of the virus in England  which has mutated further to develop a change first found on the South African strain which may make vaccines less effective.

Because of this mutation named E484K, which also raises the risk of people getting reinfected after they already had Covid-19, experts are desperate to stamp it out.

It becomes the third variant of concern found in Britain, alongside the now-dominant Kent variant and the South African one.

A fourth  one of two strains from Brazil  is also listed by Public Health England but it has not yet been found in the UK.

Experts said they were worried about the Bristol variant's combination of mutations because it would be 'at least as transmissible' as the fast-spreading Kent variant but also potentially able to dodge immunity from vaccines.

Although it is not likely to take over and become dominant now, there is a risk it could come through when the Kent strain has been suppressed by vaccinations.

Sir Elton John and Sir Michael Caine have appeared in an NHS advert urging the public to get vaccinated against coronavirus

The video, shot at London's Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, aims to 'show others that getting the life-saving jab is easy and safe', according to a statement

The Department of Health announced today it had finished its surge testing  which is used to weed out these variants  in Woking, but started it in Lambeth, London.

The NHS vaccinated 352,480 people on Monday, taking the total number of Britons given their first dose to more than 12.6 million.

Matt Hancock has now invited over-70s who have not yet had the jab to book an appointment after first ensuring that the most vulnerable were looked after.

People in that age group can now schedule an appointment using the NHS booking service or those unable to get online can phone 119.

Mr Hancock said take-up of the vaccines has so far been 'significantly better than we hoped for', claiming it has hit a staggering 95 per cent in people in their late 70s, 91 per cent of over-80s and almost three quarters of people in their early 70s.

He said the Government had been expecting approximately 75 per cent, at a Downing Street briefing on Monday.

Frontline health and social care workers, who are also at the top of the priority list, are also being urged to come forward and arrange an appointment if they've not had a dose.

And GP practices have been told to contact any extremely vulnerable patients who have still yet to receive their first injection.

Downing Street said it expects to have vaccinated all over-50s by the end of April, raising hopes that Britain could drop the vast majority of curbs in May.

Boris Johnson is under pressure to step up the reopening of the country as soon as the top nine groups - around 32 million people - are covered.

Britain is jabbing at record pace, dishing out more vaccines per person than any country in the world other than Israel.

Boris Johnson is due to unveil his 'road map' for easing the lockdown in the week of February 22, by which time the four most vulnerable groups should have received vaccine doses.

Schools are set to be the first things back from March 8, but the concerns about mutant strains have sparked warnings from scientists that any relaxation must be slower.

Ukraine wants to catch up with Georgia in terms of obtaining a NATO Membership Action Plan and is doing its homework to meet NATO standards, according to Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal.

He said this at a joint briefing with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg in Brussels on Tuesday, February 9, according to an Ukrinform correspondent.

"NATO membership is an important priority for Ukraine. We discussed it with the Secretary General, and we are absolutely ready. We are indeed doing our homework very well. [...] We want to catch up with Georgia and receive the MAP, but we are working actively over this," Shmyhal said.

He also said that Ukraine had passed a number of bills, was reforming its armed forces, moving towards NATO standards, conducting joint exercises with the Alliance and participating in NATO-led peacekeeping operations.

"We have got quite a number of achievements, which now give us hope that we can implement our homework quite quickly. Achieving NATO standards in the sector of security and defense of Ukraine will indeed be a precondition leading us to the NATO membership. Our short-term strategy at the moment is indeed the aspiration to receive the MAP," Shmyhal said.

Shmyhal added that his meeting with Stoltenberg was "quite a positive and important symbolic signal, which gives us positive charge and positive hope."

NATO granted Ukraine the status of an enhanced opportunities partner in June 2020. Ukraine has become the sixth such NATO partner, along with Sweden, Finland, Georgia, Australia, and Jordan.

The issue of Georgia's obtaining a NATO Membership Action Plan is to be considered at the NATO summit in 2021.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said last December that he saw no indications that Georgia would receive the MAP earlier than Ukraine, but if that happens, it would only strengthen Ukraine's positions as it would show that there is no alternative to the MAP.

Ukrainian Defense Minister Andriy Taran, addressing the ambassadors and military attaches of NATO member states in December 2020, stated that Ukraine hoped to receive the MAP at the NATO summit in 2021.

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Short term safety measures are to be taken on a south Kilkenny road to prevent accidents while a permanent safety solution is designed.



The road into Mooncoin from Carrick on Suir has been the site of a lot of accidents and making it safer is going to take a year or more, according to local councillor, Pat Dunphy.

Cllr Dunphy appealed to local area engineers to erect warning signs in the meantime.

Lucky

Were lucky somebody wasnt killed there, a few weeks ago, Cllr Dunphy said, adding there are accidents on that stretch of road all the time.

There is a driver feedback sign already there but it is not working and drivers are not reducing their speed, Cllr Dunphy told the recent meeting of Piltown Municipal District.

There are far too many accidents happening, people coming off the bypass at speed, Cllr Dunphy said, describing the road as having lots of bends, and saying it is narrow and slippery.

Area Engineer Stan Cullen said people are driving at unacceptable speed there, which is the main problem.

He told councillors he has already consulted with the road design section of Kilkenny County Council and will now consult with Transport Infrastructure Ireland but it looks like he will be able to get something in place along that road pretty quickly.
Amid financial and political turmoil that deteriorated mail delivery to historically low levels, Americans rallied behind the U.S. Postal Service in 2020. Workers, activists, and Democratic legislators gathered to #SavetheUSPS. Dozens of attorneys general sued the postmaster general, and federal judges ruled the operational changes contributing to mail delays be reversed ahead of the election.

In the end, the agency did its job. The USPS delivered 543 million pieces of election and political mail, including 135 million ballots. Mission accomplished, right?

Not really.

The Postal Service is still failing, with cities including Philadelphia seeing their worst delays yet. But Democrats hands are tied when it comes to solutions, and delays may worsen with more operational changes on the horizon.

Small business owners and residents who rely on the mail for medicine, checks, and important documents say that theyre suffering in silence and that the issue has fallen out of the national spotlight and off local legislators list of concerns.

I dont feel like Congress has the understanding of what small businesses are going through, said Anjali Bhatia, cofounder of Philly-based Lash Bee Pro, which produces and ships supplies for eyelash extensions to salons across the country.

President Joe Biden cannot simply fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy  thats up to the now Republican-controlled board of governors. Biden has three board vacancies to fill, but congressional Democrats are pressuring him to remove all board members and install a new slate that ousts DeJoy, a Trump donor whose cost-cutting measures last summer led to a decline in mail performance.

A White House spokesperson said Biden is focused on filling these vacancies, but did not provide specifics on a timeline.

 READ MORE: Checks are being stolen from Postal Service mailboxes, raising concerns about the blue boxes security

As soon as next week, DeJoy is expected to roll out new changes, including service cuts, price hikes depending on region and distance, retail-hour reductions, and lower delivery expectations.

If we dont speak up now, this is a doomed institution, said Rep. Bill Pascrell (D., N.J.), who sent a letter to Biden last month demanding he fire the postal board of governors and replace DeJoy. Pascrell said he was meeting with the White House on Tuesday to discuss Postal Service issues, but declined to specify further.

We need dramatic change. Not window dressing, Pascrell said.

In a statement, the Postal Service apologized for the inconvenience caused by delays, and said the agency has returned to pre-peak operational conditions in most areas and we fully anticipate continued improvements in service performance.

That may be true in some places, but in Philadelphia, delays persist, and the USPS has not yet released any performance data for 2021. Just last month, the agency terminated upward of 50 Philadelphia staffers, mostly mail handlers and package sorters originally hired temporarily during the pandemic, despite having signed an agreement with the American Postal Workers Union to make them career employees. In December, in Eastern Pennsylvania, less than a third of the mail was delivered on time, according to data collected by the New York Times.

Rep. Gerry Connolly (D., Va.), chairman of the House Government Operations subcommittee, which oversees USPS, said the subject should be a priority for Congress but has not been.

There is a lot of lip service, but there hasnt been a lot of action, he said in an interview.

What can be done?

The Postal Service is a self-financing, independent entity within the executive branch.

The agency is run by a nine-member board of governors that appoints the postmaster general and deputy postmaster general. The board is designed to be nonpolitical, with members serving seven-year terms and no more than five from one party. The president can remove members only for cause, which is not clearly defined, and only the board can replace the postmaster general.

On Tuesday, former labor leader and Obama administration official Ron Bloom was elected chair, marking a partial shakeup.

Former President Donald Trump appointed four Republicans to the board, and one Democrat currently serves. Biden has three vacancies to fill, and can also replace Bloom, whos serving a one-year holdover term. Filling those slots could give the board the edge to unseat DeJoy, but the positions require Senate confirmations, which could take months.

Plus, with only the slimmest majority in the Senate, Democrats are balancing bipartisanship, making it unlikely for Biden to make any sweeping changes.

Last year, the USPS became an unusual partisan flash point. DeJoy  a former logistics executive who has donated millions to the Republican Party, including the Trump campaign  installed a series of cost-cutting measures that slashed overtime, delivery trips, and removed mail sorting machines. Democrats, supported by Trumps attacks on mail-in voting, accused DeJoy of deliberately slowing the mail ahead of the election. By August, dozens of legislators had called for his resignation. DeJoy eventually suspended the changes.

Still, the agency lost $9.2 billion in 2020.

[DeJoy] should not be in that position anymore, said Rep. Andy Kim (D., N.J.). His decision not to resign is an indication that he seeks to do more harm to the USPS while in office.

Last Monday, the House reintroduced a bipartisan bill, cosponsored by Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R., Pa.), that would eliminate the 2006 act requiring the agency to pre-fund 75 years worth of retirees health benefits  a cost of about $100 billion, and an obligation no other government entity faces. The mandate has contributed to nearly 90% of the agencys losses. Between 2013 and 2018 it accounted for 100% of the losses. When excluding those debts, the Postal Service has been profitable for most of the last decade.

 READ MORE: Still waiting for packages that were mailed in December? It could be a while.

The bill was introduced last year and died in the Senate, but now with a Democratic majority, it may push through. The Washington Post also reported that lawmakers are, in an unusual move, considering giving the Postal Service a nearly $100 billion credit for years of pension overpayments.

The Postal Service has also been largely excluded from coronavirus relief bills, aside from a $10 billion loan forgiven in December. Relief for the agency is not included on Bidens upcoming package.

We need revenue stabilization just like the airline industry did, just like the restaurant industry did, just like small businesses did, said Connolly. I dont understand why the Postal Service  is not eligible and in fact high on the list for some assistance as we finalize another COVID relief bill.

But financial assistance can go only so far. It could take months to push something through and even longer to have an impact on local delivery.

Philadelphia-area Democrats Mary Gay Scanlon, Dwight Evans, and Brendan Boyle said they continue to hear from constituents about delays.

We got to take the action and show that we mean what we say, said Evans.

Jane Nadelson, the owner of K9NWSource, a Chester County-based company that sells supplies for dog scent training products, said about 45 orders she mailed in mid-January are stuck in limbo. Nadelson runs the business out of her basement and relies solely on internet sales and USPS shipping. Customers are complaining and requesting refunds, or theyre switching to competitors in places where delays arent so persistent, she said.

Nadelson, 64, said it feels as if legislators are not viewing this as a top priority.

A lot more businesses will go out of business by ignoring this, she said.

Correction: An earlier version of this article used a preliminary election mail total. The total pieces of political mail USPS delivered is 543 million.
YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 10, ARMENPRESS. There havent been any incidents in the line of contact of the Armenian and Azerbaijani sides from December 2020 until now, the Defense Minister of Armenia Vagharshak Harutyunyan told lawmakers in parliament on February 10.

Since December until now, we dont have any fatality at the line of contact, we have one wounded in Shushi, he said. Ceasefire violation happened, but not directed at our positions. They [Azeri military] shot in the air. We are recording all cases, if it happens in the Nagorno Karabakh section we convey it to the peacekeeping forces, Harutyunyan said.

Harutyunyan says he has raised the issue of the Azeri irregular gunfire during his meeting with the Commander of the Russian peacekeeping forces in Nagorno Karabakh Lt. General Rustam Muradov.

Editing and Translating by Stepan Kocharyan
MDC  Alliance activists Joana Mamombe and Cecilia Chimbiri have been granted $10 000 bail each pending trial on charges of insulting the police.

The duo approached the higher court after the magistrates court last week denied them bail on their latest charges of insulting police in central Harare, in flagrant disregard of their bail conditions set in two previous cases of allegedly faking their abductions last year and violating national lockdown regulations by staging an illegal demonstration.

Justice Webster Chinamora granted the application by the two after the State, which initially was opposing bail, relented and conceded that the lower court had misdirected itself when it denied the duo bail.

In denying the pair bail, Harare regional magistrate Mr Stanford Mambanje ruled that the duo bail had a propensity to commit further offences once freed.

But in their application, Mamombe and Chimbiri argued that the lower court had misdirected itself in denying them bail on the sole ground of propensity to commit similar offences.

In this regard, the duo argued that there are no compelling reasons for the State to deny them bail.

The two are denying insulting the police and instead accused the police of arresting them on suspicion that they were participating in an illegal demonstration.

It is alleged that Mamombe was driving an unregistered Toyota Fortuner along Kwame Nkrumah Avenue in Harare side-by-side with a police patrol vehicle.

The police van was carrying some accused persons and while at the intersection of Kwame Nkrumah Avenue and Sam Nujoma Street, the two motor vehicles were stopped by traffic lights.

The court heard that Mamombe and Chimbiri opened their windows and started shouting at the police officers.
Chahid El Hafed, Feb 10, 2021 (SPS) - The head of the Political Secretariat of Frente POLISARIO, Mr. Jatri Adduh said that the African Union has reaffirmed the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republics sovereignty over its entire national territory, represent a significant gain for the struggle of the Sahrawi people towards its independence and freedom.

Jatri Adduh goes on saying, while replying to national media at the Sahara Hora Forum, that the solution to the Sahrawi issue went through the Moroccan recognition of the sovereignty of the SADR over its entire national territory, highlighting, the international community does not recognize Morocco's sovereignty over Western Sahara.

The inaction of the international community as well as influential countries interests in Morocco encourages him to breach international law and legality in Western Sahara, he added SPS

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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.
(L to R): Patricia Heaton as Frankie Heck, Atticus Shaffer as Brick Heck, and Neil Flynn as Mike Heck on ABCs The Middle | Michael Ansell via Getty Images

The television show The Middle started its nine-season run on ABC in 2009 and soon gained a following of dedicated fans.

Viewers tuned in to the comedy to see how the lower-middle class Heck family of mom Frankie (Everybody Loves Raymond star Patricia Heaton), dad Mike (Scrubs star Neil Flynn) and their kids Axl (Charlie McDermott), Sue (Eden Sher), and Brick (Atticus Shaffer) were making it through another week in their hometown of Orson, Indiana.

Shaffer brilliantly portrayed Brick from a young age: cute, precocious, an avid reader, with quirky traits that endeared him to one and all.

So, how old is the actor today, and whats he been up to?

The Middle ran for 9 seasons

The show about the lower-middle class family in the middle of the U.S. (get the shows title now?) eking out a life with some semblance of happiness struck a chord with viewers.

Many fans may have at first tuned in to see the new sitcom in 2009 with established actors Heaton and Flynn. But the rest of the cast, made up mostly of younger actors, easily gained admirers as well. McDermott was 19 when the show started, Sher was 17, and Shaffer, 11.

Eileen Heisler who, along with co-executive producer DeAnn Heline created the comedy, spoke in 2015 with AssignmentX about working with such a young cast.

Were kind of shocked when we see [reruns], she said. Now that the shows in syndication, when we see the old [episodes], we cant believe how much theyve grown, we cant believe how tiny Brick was. Were like, Hes really gotten big. I think our kids have been able to age  we just keep thinking, What would happen at this age?'

What Shaffers doing lately

Born in 1998, Shaffer turns 23 in June 2021.

His now-deleted Twitter account carried a bio that communicates the actors good-head-on-his-shoulders attitude: Count all the hours lost which are not accompanied by some worthy deed. I am a huge nerd and a homesteader who enjoys the simple things in life.

RELATED: Scrubs: Most of Neil Flynns Lines Were Totally Unscripted

After The Middles series finale in 2018, Shaffer continued voice-over work on programs including The Lion Guard, Home Adventures with Tip & Oh, Pete the Cat, Star vs. the Forces of Evil, and Harvey Girls Forever!

He also made an appearance in 2020 on the Mindy Kaling-produced Netflix show Never Have I Ever as Russia in a Model U.N. episode of the teenage coming-of-age comedy/drama.

What Shaffer said hes learned from his role as Brick Heck

It would be diabolical of us to not let you know to enjoy an encore of #TheMiddle on ABC tonight!

*whisper* The Middle. *whisper* pic.twitter.com/8wUQnxoqb1  The Middle (@TheMiddle_TV) June 5, 2018

As a budding actor during the sleeper hits nearly ten-year run, Shaffer grew to love the character of Brick Heck and to admire the characters qualities and ability to inspire viewers.

I love playing Brick, he told DailyActor in 2015. I think hes such a cool kid and love the fact that he shows that its okay to be smart and to be unique and to do what you love to do and to follow the beat to your own drummer.

And I think thats whats so cool, because I am in a position where I can be a role model, he continued. And I play a character that is a good role model and have people be inspired by and shows it is okay to be unique.
Health Minister Greg Hunt engaged in a fiery encounter with ABC Breakfast presenter Michael Rowland after he was pressed on a controversial vaccine tweet featuring the Liberal party logo.

Rowland, who earlier in the week expressed his concerns over the tweet that used the logo on a government announcement about the acquisition of a further 10 million Pfizer doses, called out Mr Hunt on Wednesday morning for a perceived political point-scoring attempt.

When you welcomed the 10 million doses of Pfizer on your media channels last week, why did you have the need to attach a Liberal Party logo on an Australian Government announcement? Rowland asked.

As Mr Hunt began his response, Rowland pressed him again to answer the question before the minister responded: I know you have strong views.

Michael Rowland and Greg Hunt clashed on Wednesday morning during an interview on the ABC. source: ABC

The veteran journalist disagreed before Mr Hunt said: Ill finish if you let me.

Mr Hunt defended the logos appearance, saying there was no problem with using it and it was within the rules.

We were elected by the Australian people.

But an incensed Rowland refused to back down, asking Mr Hunt who had paid for the vaccines.

His persistence ruffled Mr Hunts feathers who accused the presenter of a clear affinity to the Labor party.

I know this is an issue for you. In many ways, you identify with the left, you do this a lot and I respect that... youre open about that, he said.

Rowland refuted such a claim, hitting back saying: I find that offensive.

But Mr Hunt doubled down on his claims.

There's nobody who's watching you that don't identify you as the left. You should be open about that.

It's important for you to be honest about your position and your origins.

I did predict to people that Michael Rowland would spend 50% of this interview on this topic... I win the bet with my office.

This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it.

Mr Hunts tweet last week sparked a wave of anger from users, many angry he had associated a tax-payer funded development with the Liberal Party.

And Wednesdays exchange again prompted an angry reaction online when shared by the ABC on Twitter.

Story continues

One user called Hunts behaviour in the interview disgusting and offensive.

Greg Hunt could not come up with a good explanation why the LNP logo was used so he just goes in to personal attack mode to deflect, another said.

Do you have a story tip? Email: newsroomau@yahoonews.com.

You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and download the Yahoo News app from the App Store or Google Play.
A delegate casts her vote in the electoral process to choose members of parliament into Somalia's House of the People in Mogadishu, Somalia, on 6 December 2016.

President Mohamed Abdullahi Farmaajo has announced the resumption of electoral talks in Garowe on February 15.

In a statement, Villa Somalia said the meeting will bring the leaders of federal and regional states together and will focus on the ways to agree on the current electoral impasse.

This comes barely a week after the 5th round in Dhusamareb collapsed.

In rejoinder, Puntland State welcomed the call to hold the meeting and said the summit to be attended by stakeholders and the International Community.

It also said there was no consultation to hold the summit in Garowe and the meeting moved to Mogadishu in a statement.

Last week regional state leaders held a three days summit in Dhusamreb the headquarters of Galmudug state over the electoral issues.

The leaders failed to agree on the issues of Gedo and Somaliland electoral committees with President Farmaajo and Jubaland leader Ahmed Madobe both pointing fingers at each other.
Descend 33 steep concrete steps from an entrance that rises out of a sand dune and you are transported back in time into what is arguably Sydneys best example of World War II history.

After restoration work that took two years, the North Fort Plotting Room, associated artillery tunnels and gun placements at North Head are now open to small, socially-distanced groups.

Volunteers Peter Lawrence (left) and Ron Ray show the newly restored Fortress and Battery plotting rooms at North Head. Credit:Nick Moir

More than 70 years after the heavy gas-tight doors were closed we enter the cool and ventilated steel-roofed bunker where 18 men and women worked. Apparently, its a great place to store wine.

Volunteers from the Harbour Trust, supported by the Royal Australian Artillery Historical Company, have replaced ceilings and tobacco-stained panels, cut away cancerous concrete and built a replica plotting table from the remnants of the original.
Fides was the obvious choice for a strategic partnership focused on growth.  Daniel Sandmeier, CEO, Instimatch Global

Fides Treasury Services Ltd., the global leader in multibank connectivity and communications, today announced a new partnership with money markets digital platform Instimatch Global. The partnership will enable Fides to offer access to money market liquidity on Instimatchs platform directly through the Fides Multibanking Suite portal.

Our clients have told us that money market access is important, and we believe in supporting the needs of our customers, said Fides CEO Andreas Lutz. We are delighted by the opportunity to simplify access to Instimatch, which has demonstrably secured growing interest from treasurers globally.

Instimatch Global is at the forefront of disrupting the traditional phone and broker-based ways in which money markets still largely operate. By connecting borrowers with lenders digitally within the huge unsecured money markets, the global network provides more efficient workflow, better pricing and the ability to diversify counterparty risk. The firm won the Swiss Fintech Awards last year, and experienced a significant increase in usage in 2020.

Fides was the obvious choice for a strategic partnership focused on growth, said Daniel Sandmeier, CEO of Instimatch Global. The Fides global multibanking network is the largest of its kind, and this alliance marks a step change for Instimatch as we further industrialize use of our platform. Many Instimatch clients have stressed to us the importance of portal-based accessibility, integrating Instimatch more easily with other treasury solutions.

The Fides partner network is both broad and deep, spanning the entire treasury world and offering a wide range of innovative solutions, from ERP and TMS vendors to software and consultancy services. The Instimatch partnership allows Fides to offer the first of a number of new types of complementary partner solutions to its clients, meeting the diverse range of needs for corporate treasury and finance professionals.

As part of Fides digital open ecosystem expansion strategy, Fides will integrate more complementary partner solutions within the next few months, allowing corporate treasurers to further leverage the Fides Multibanking Suite.

ABOUT FIDES

Fides is the global leader in multi-bank connectivity and transaction communications, enabling corporates to connect to any bank, in any region, through any channel. With Fides, you can reach further, and connect faster. Our solutions deliver critical multi-bank account statement, payment workflow and reporting capabilities for treasury and finance teams, helping more than 3,500 clients communicate with over 13,000 banks and payment providers across 200 countries. Whether you are using a TMS, ERP, the Fides Multibanking Suite, or any combination, Fides is the only connectivity platform you need.

ABOUT INSTIMATCH GLOBAL

Instimatch Global is a digital marketplace for trading cash deposits across multiple geographies, sectors, and currencies, offering unparalleled market depth and breadth. Clients include banks, corporations, pension funds, asset managers, family offices, insurance companies and municipalities. Our digital network enables a global community of institutional borrowers and lenders to directly engage with each other and execute on their liquidity needs  all within our convenient and easy to use platform. Founded in 2017, Instimatch has offices in Zurich, London and Doha, and serves over 140 institutional clients across 20 countries.

Press Contact: Please email marketing@fides.ch and/or info@instimatch.com for all press inquiries.
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There was such a paucity of facts in the Crown case against former politician Eddie Obeid that the judge could not be satisfied of his guilt, his barrister April Francis said in her closing submission to the NSW Supreme Court.

Ms Francis, who arrived at court in a wheelchair due to a leg injury, was critical of the prosecutions case, saying it was full of conceptual difficulties and it was challenging for the defence lawyers to unravel the riddle that is the indictment.

Eddie Obieds barrister April Francis arrives at the Supreme Court in a wheelchair. Credit:Steven Siewert

The Crown case is that sometime between September 1, 2007 and late May 2008, Eddie Obeid, 77, and his son Moses, 51, became part of a conspiracy with former mining minister Ian Macdonald, 71.

Mr Macdonald is alleged to have provided inside information to the Obeids about a coal exploration licence which was eventually granted over the Obeids rural property in the Bylong valley.
After collaborating on timepieces with brands like Louis Vuitton and Casio G-Shock, the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami wasnt interested, at least initially, in creating a watch for Hublot.

Its a concept I refused many times, he said in a phone interview. I thought, I already did that.

Last year, however, the brand  which previously created watches with the graphic artist Shepard Fairey and the sculptor Richard Orlinski  persuaded Mr. Murakami to change his mind.

Their partnership produced the Classic Fusion Takashi Murakami All Black, which was unveiled last month at Hublots Ginza boutique in Tokyo.
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Copyright  2021 Albuquerque Journal

After several delays, the Tiny Homes Village opened Tuesday, with the first resident moving in and the second expected to arrive Wednesday.

The first resident was identified as a man in his 20s who had been homeless for several years, and who has been staying in local shelters and living on the streets.

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The village had been expected to be open in October, but COVID-related supply-line interruptions caused construction delays.

Village resource manager Ilse Biel said she expects five people to be living in the village by the end of February, up to 10 by the end of April and full occupancy  roughly 40  by the end of June.

The vetting process for selecting people to live in the gated community takes time, as does building a community within the village, which will make it more stable, she said.

Among those touring the site on opening day was Bernalillo County Commissioner Debbie OMalley, who spearheaded the project along with Albuquerque City Councilor Diane Gibson.

You cant help people move forward if they dont have an address and a safe place to stay, if they cant take a shower or get their mail, OMalley said. Now, they have a key to a door that locks, and thats huge.

Getting to this point was not easy. A not-in-my-backyard attitude prevailed during a series of town hall meetings held to inform Albuquerque residents of the sites being evaluated for the Tiny Homes Village.

One meeting in August 2018 at the Manzano Mesa Multigenerational Center in the Southeast Heights drew a crowd of about 300. The mostly hostile audience said they were tired of dealing with the areas homeless population and the problems they bring to those neighborhoods. At one point, the crowd booed loudly during a presentation by OMalley, who nevertheless pressed on.

The location problem was solved when, two months later, the Albuquerque Indian Center at 105 Texas SE offered a weed-strewn 1.38-acre vacant lot behind its property. Because the AIC was already providing services to homeless people, mostly Native Americans, there was little resistance from surrounding neighbors.

The Indian Center will manage the Tiny Homes Village under an operating agreement with Bernalillo County. Residents will participate in community chores and programs, and help with the general maintenance of the property. They can stay for up to two years while they take advantage of social services, find employment, and become independent and financially stable enough to afford their own housing.

The $4.92 million project has 30 tiny homes, each 120 square feet. A limited number of homes will be used for couples and five have been constructed with ramps to accommodate wheelchairs. Each home has a queen-size bed, a desk, chair, shelves and a closet. They are insulated, and have electric heating and cooling. Although attached to a fire sprinkler system, they do not have running water or indoor plumbing.

Residents have access to communal buildings with toilets, showers, a kitchen, a laundry, a library, a computer area and common meeting spaces.

The Tiny Homes Village was designed by the Albuquerque firm Baker Architecture and Design.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-09 22:30:28|Editor: huaxia

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A rescue worker makes an announcement during rescue near the Dhauliganga hydro power project after a glacier bursts in Chamoli district in India's northern hilly state of Uttarakhand on Feb. 9, 2021. The number of dead bodies recovered so far from the affected areas has risen to 32, out of which only seven could be identified yet, confirmed a senior state police official. (Str/Xinhua)

by Pankaj Yadav

NEW DELHI, Feb. 9 (Xinhua) -- Relief and rescue work continued on a war footing in India's northern hilly state of Uttarakhand, which was hit by a glacier burst on Sunday morning.

However, the greatest difficulty that's coming in the way is the identification of the dead bodies being retrieved from under the slush and rubble.

The number of dead bodies recovered so far from the affected areas has risen to 32, out of which only seven could be identified yet, confirmed a senior state police official to Xinhua.

As many as 174 people are still missing. Most of them are laborers from different states, including Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand and a few from Nepal too.

These laborers were working at two hydropower projects when the natural tragedy suddenly struck the area. The dead bodies can be identified only when their near and dear ones reach the site, which is located in difficult and remote terrain in the hills.

"The dead bodies being retrieved are really in a bad shape," said one of the officials at the local disaster management office.

The dead bodies are being recovered between the upper reaches of the state where the glacier burst took place and downstream till Srinagar area, added the officials.

It is believed that some of the missing persons are stuck in one of the tunnels which is over 1800-meter long. Efforts are being made to rescue them, though nearly 58 hours have passed since the tragedy hit them.

Meanwhile, during the day the country's Home (Internal Security) Minister Amit Shah said the parliament that the glacier burst had affected an area of approximately 14 square kilometres.

"A large-scale operation is underway to rescue those missing," Shah said, and added that it is observed from the satellite data of Feb. 7 in the catchment of Rishi Ganga river at the terminus of the glacier at an altitude of 5,600 meters a landslide triggered a snow avalanche covering approximately 14 square km area.

Members of the parliament also observed a two-minute silence in the memory of the victims. Enditem
Georgia Prosecutor Probing Attempts to Influence 2020 Election

A district attorney on Feb. 10 asked state officials to preserve records potentially related to the 2020 election as she revealed that her office has opened a probe into attempts to influence the administration of the election.

The investigation includes potential violations of Georgia law prohibiting the solicitation of election fraud, the making of false statements to state and local governmental bodies, conspiracy, racketeering, violation of oath of office and any involvement in violence or threats related to the elections administration, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, a Democrat, said in letters to Republican Gov. Brian Kemp and other officials.

Willis asked Kemp, Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, and Attorney General Chris Carr to preserve all records potentially related to the administration of the election.

Particular care, she said, should be given to records that may be evidence of attempts to influence the actions of persons who were administering the election.

Attempts to destroy the records would be a violation of criminal law, the prosecutor noted.

Raffenspergers office confirmed receipt of a letter from Willis and noted preservation of all election documents is already required by law for 22 months. The office declined further comment.

The offices of Kemp and Carr didnt immediately respond to requests by The Epoch Times for comment.

Willis didnt mention former President Donald Trump by name, and her office didnt respond when asked whether she is probing a phone call he had with Raffensperger and other officials on Jan. 2 concerning the presidential election in Georgia.

Raffenspergers office earlier this week opened an investigation into the call described as fact finding and administrative.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger gives an update on the state of the election and ballot count during a news conference at the State Capitol in Atlanta on Nov. 6, 2020. (Dustin Chambers/Reuters)

Trump claimed in the call to have won Georgia over Democrat Joe Biden despite Biden being certified the winner following several recounts. At one point, he said he just wanted to find 11,780 votes as he discussed state officials probing claims of election irregularities. He said he had won by many more votes than that, but he didnt need to uncover all of them, just enough to show that he won.

Trumps campaign defended the call, saying the former president was spot-on in his criticisms of the terrible job Raffensperger did. Raffensperger called the requests from Trump just plain wrong.

The discussion was referenced in the article of impeachment against Trump approved by the House of Representatives in mid-January. They said Trump threatened Raffensperger if the state official failed to find enough votes to overturn the election.

Willis alluded to the call in her letters to officials.

It has come to our attention via media reports that contacts were made by subjects of the investigation with other agencies that could be investigating this matter, including Raffensperger, she said.

The prosecutor, who was elected last year, claimed her office is the only one with jurisdiction that isnt a witness to the conduct being investigated.

Willis said she would request grand jury subpoenas as necessary in March and that no Georgia official is a target of the probe at this time.
Englands deputy chief medical officer has effectively ruled out safety issues with the coronavirus vaccines being used in the UK, saying so many people have now had the jab that it would be pretty obvious if it caused adverse reactions.

Prof Jonathan Van-Tam also played down the threat from the South African variant of the disease in the UK, saying that 90 per cent of cases now involve the strain first identified in Kent.

Comparing the two variants to hot and cold water taps on a bath, he said that as long as one was flowing hard, the other would have little impact.

Answering questions from viewers on the BBC News Channel and Asian Channel, Prof Van-Tam sought to reassure people from black and minority ethnic (Name)backgrounds that they were at no risk from taking the vaccine, declaring that coronavirus does not discriminate.

And he dismissed rumours that the vaccine could affect fertility as a nasty, pernicious scare story which was completely, utterly groundless.

Prof Van-Tam urged Britons to trust reliable medical sources and not social media for information about the pandemic.

We're always concerned when we get disinformation and things that are just patently wrong and patently misleading and designed to frighten people and damage their confidence in what we are doing, he said.

If my central heating system breaks down, I'm going to call the heating engineer to explain to me what's wrong and what needs to be fixed I'm not going to ask a brain surgeon.

Why would you go to those kinds of sources of information, when you have really very readily accessible good sources from trusted voices in the NHS?

Challenged over whether there could be any threat to health from taking the Covid-19 vaccine, particularly among BAME people, he replied: If you have a vaccine  and you think you've had some kind of reaction to it or a side effect, you can report that on the yellow card system. That's being done every single day spontaneously by the public in relation to the Covid-19 vaccines that we've deployed.

We are well over the 12 million mark now in terms of vaccines we've deployed. We're getting to a point where, if we were going to see any kind of safety signal, it would be pretty obvious by now.

Prof Van-Tam said that studies which have raised questions over the efficacy of the AstraZeneca vaccine in South Africa related only to mild cases of Covid among younger people and had little bearing on the key issue of serious illness and deaths.

The South African variant remains far from dominant in the UK, with fewer than 200 cases discovered, he said.

Comparing it to the Kent variant, he said: If you are running a bath and you have got the hot water tap on and you add in a very small amount of cold water, so the cold tap is running as well but at really a very low volume, your bath water is basically going to remain hot,.

Its only if that cold tap was gushing much more than the hot tap, the cold water would take over.

Thats probably the best analogy I can give you at the moment. There are no signs that South African variant is running at that speed at the moment and therefore I dont frame it as something that is going to be a dominant issue in the next few months.
While all non-essential travel to and from Belgium officially remains prohibited until 1 April 2021, a number of locals and cross-border workers report that the Belgian police only occasionally seems to check up on it.

Following the decision to extent the ban on non-essential travel for one additional month, Belgium's Minister of Justice Vincent Van Quickenborne went on a Belgian news show on 7 February to announce that "there will be border controls". The Minister warned that anyone found in violation of the ban would be fined and forced to turn around.

While Van Quickenborne's words may have sounded quite unambiguous, it turns out that the reality at the Belgian border seems to be quite different.

'I have never seen a single police officer'

On the cross-border workers website www.lesfrontaliers.lu, a number of residents who live near the Belgian border report that not much has changed for them since the ban was announced.

Eleonore, a pharmacist in the municipality of Arlon, states that she still travels to Luxembourg and even France to go grocery shopping. She has never seen a single police officer, adding that she even goes to the hairdresser's in Luxembourg.

Belgium's Federal Police specified that they were in fact carrying out checks, but they were random, and the location changed every day. Since the restrictions entered into force, police have recorded 434 violations involving people who did not fill in the necessary form and 105 penalty notices for non-residents who were unable to present a negative test result.

According to Leoni, who has worked as a construction worker in Belgium for over 30 years, the main problem is that the government simply does not have enough officers to carry out extensive checks at their borders. From his construction site, he sometimes observes the number plates of the cars entering the country and says that they "come from many different places and, above all, a lot of them are coming into Belgium".

The whole situation is not made any easier by the sometimes confusing documentation required to cross the border. Vita, who works as a psychologist in Luxembourg, crosses the border two times a week to travel to Namur and only needs a declaration of honour. However, such a declaration must be filled in for each trip across the border until April and if the nature of the trip changes, a different type of declaration is needed. According to her, the government should simplify the procedures as every citizen has their own responsibility.
Another Pennsylvanian has been charged in connection with the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol.

In a motion for pre-trial detention filed in federal court, prosecutors accuse Michael J. Lopatic Sr., of Lancaster County, of obstructive and violent behavior by repeatedly punching one police officer and stealing the body camera of another when he was among the mob trying to impede the certification of the 2020 Presidential Election.

Lopatics charges were first reported by LancasterOnline.com Tuesday.

Lopatic makes at least 19 Pennsylvanians who have been charged in connection with the riot. Only Texas has more defendants with 21.

Authorities say Lopatic was indicted by a federal grand jury in Washington D.C. Jan. 29 and arrested at his home in Lancaster County Feb. 3.

According to court documents filed with the U.S. Eastern District of Pennsylvania, between 4 and 5 p.m. the day of the riot, a Washington D.C. Metropolitan Police Department officer, who was assigned to the Capitol to assist that day, was posted in an archway to help prevent the crowd from getting inside.

He saw a group of thousands approaching, some of whom were throwing and swinging various objects, and they grabbed another officer and dragged him down the stairs, engulfing him in a violent mob, according to court documents.

The Metropolitan officer rushed in to help, but a man, later identified as Lopatic, climbed over a handrail and charged the officer, prosecutors say.

His actions were caught on the officers body camera.

Prosecutors say Lopatic continuously punched the officer in the head, then grabbed him by the head and hit him with an uppercut punch.

Thats when Lopatic went back to the other officer, who was now surrounded by people trying to form a human shield and protect him from the violent members of the mob. Lopatic reached into the crowd and stole that officers body camera, which would have contained crucial evidence in the investigation, prosecutors say.

Lopatic admitted later to the FBI that he had disposed of the camera on his way back to Lancaster County, records state.

In building the case against Lopatic, prosecutors also say his own words on social media showed his actions at the Capitol were not spontaneous.

After the November Election, he posted Call to Arms, as well as a hunting photo of two dead birds, writing I named them Joe and Kamala, prosecutors say. In the coming days, he posted further photos of dead birds, naming them after other Democratic leaders, court records state.

And days ahead of the riot, he posted Assemble on the Capital (sic) Jan. 6th, 2021. United we stand, go forth and fight.

Lopatic faces a maximum penalty of 21 years and 6 months in prison and more than $1 million in fines, court records state.

The court ordered that he be held in custody

Former President Donald Trumps second impeachment trial is underway. It will be up to the Senate to decide whether to convict him of incitement of insurrection in connection with the storming of the Capitol. While Trumps acquittal is expected, Democrats hope to gain at least some Senate Republican votes by linking Trumps actions to a vivid description of the violence, which resulted in five deaths and sent lawmakers fleeing for safety.
Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US

Iran ready to help improve the defense capability of Syria

European Parliament head proposes to strengthen sanctions on Russia

UK PM gets married in London

Armenia reports COVID-19 new 81 cases: for people die

EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia

2 people die in Armenia road accident

Nigeria: Students taken hostage a month ago are released

61 quakes recorded in Congo per day

Syrian MFA: EU lost credibility due to blind obedience to US policy

Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack

Mher Grigoryan: Clarification of border points is possible only after withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops from Armenia

Suspicious deal: Whether there was profit from buying DNA IDs?

Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war

4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack

Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities

Kocharyan: I have to ask people how it happened that overwhelming majority elected this leader

Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country

Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia

US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs

Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners

Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions

Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US

Iran intensifies its diplomacy amid Armenia-Azerbaijan border tensions

Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes

Lukashenko accuses West of destabilizing situation in Belarus

Armenia Central Electoral Commission chief on snap elections: No legal basis for postponing, suspending any function

Armenias Pashinyan is met by Yerevan district residents chanting against him

We are ready to be fully engaged in negotiation process to resolve Karabakh issue, says Armenia acting PM

Armenia ex-President Kocharyan gives interview to Russia TV channel

Armenia acting premier: We are ready to start withdrawing troops at any moment

Canada MFA expresses concern over 6 Armenian soldiers capture by Azerbaijan troops

There are omissions in registration documents of political forces that applied to Armenia Central Electoral Commission

Armenia Central Electoral Commission chief: There is activeness in Yerevan for the past day or two

Three new cases of coronavirus reported in Artsakh

Group of US Congress members threaten Azerbaijans Aliyev regime with sanctions

Chicago mayor is sued for allegedly refusing interview with white reporter

Iran exports oil to US for first time after long interval

"Armenia" bloc top 50 MP candidates are announced

42 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia

Sri Lanka public beach is covered in charred plastic pellets due to fire in container ship

US preparing list of targeted sanctions on Belarus authorities

China believes it will own America by 2035, Biden says

15 al-Shabab militants killed in Somalia

Newspaper: Armenia political forces that applied for running in election impatiently await CEC decision

Newspaper: Changes are expected in Artsakh

California prisoner who considers himself Satanist beheads cellmate, dismembers his body

Newspaper: Armenia acting PM's "mutually beneficial" proposal to collapse state system?

Armenia National Security Service Reserve Officers' Union members meet with His Holiness Karekin II

EU is ready to help Armenia and Azerbaijan with border delimitation and demarcation

ARF-D member on Nikol Pashinyan: 103 years ago Armenia's founding fathers would have executed him for treason

Iran President hails brotherly ties with Azerbaijan

Robert Kocharyan on years of his leadership in Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia

Situation on Armenian-Azerbaijani border is still tense, more on COVID-19 in Armenia, May 28 digest

"Armenia" alliance of political parties paying tribute to founder of First Republic Aram Manukyan

Yerevan.today: Armenia acting PM not greeted at ruling party's headquarters, citizens call him 'capitulator'

Russia MOD reports on maintenance of ceasefire regime in Nagorno-Karabakh

Armenia acting MOD meets with Russian counterpart in Moscow

Armenia 2nd President: I see possibility of restoring borders of Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast

We can provide our army with some key, modernized weapons, says Armenia ex-President Kocharyan

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan: Captives issue is not one that any opposition force can resolve

OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs release statement on detention of 6 Armenian servicemen by Azerbaijan

Armenian acting Deputy PM: Discussion on issues possible only after withdrawal of Azeri troops from Armenia's territory

Armenia acting PM on Syunik roads, Russian military posts: This is only place where there are working nuances

Armenia acting PM: Process of return of POWs will intensify after upcoming elections

Putin congratulates Aliyev on Republic Day

Josep Borrell: A group of EU Ministers will visit Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan

Armenia acting PM: We're not going to escalate situation for 30% of Sev Lake

Armenia 3rd President visits Vanadzor, pays tribute to heroes of Battle of Gharakilisa (PHOTOS)

Armenia ex-President Kocharyan lays flowers at Battle of Karakilisa memorial (PHOTOS)

Armenia acting PM: Solution to captives issue is matter of time

Shoygu to Harutyunyan: Russia, Armenia strengthen military cooperation

Armenia acting premier: We are 100% honest toward our country

Artsakh President pays tribute at Stepanakert memorial, Shushi Tank-Monument

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan on Meghri corridor plan: Not beneficial to us now to discuss it as "corridor"

Acting PM: "Cement," "fittings" were stolen while constructing Armenia state "building"

Two new cases of coronavirus reported in Artsakh

Catholicos of All Armenians visits Sardarapat Memorial, again separate from state officials

MOD dismisses Azerbaijan statement on Armenia army firing toward Nakhchivan

Jerusalem Post: Israel prepares for a new war with Hamas

France, UN World Food Programme partner to support displaced people in Armenia

Armenia ex-President Kocharyan: Today we are not full-fledged negotiating party

Norwegian prime minister opposes series of NATO reforms

Armenia deputy FM briefs UN, Red Cross leaders on consequences of Azerbaijan aggression against Artsakh

NATO Secretary-General: Afghans must take full responsibility for peace and stability in their country

104 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia

Armenia acting premier: Our sovereignty, independence cannot be subject of discussion

Karabakh state-finance minister announces resignation

Artsakh MFA: Sardarapat victory has inspired all Armenians for over a century

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan: In contrast to kneeling, disgraceful authorities of the day, we have determination

Armenia President: Today we stand on threshold of Sardarapat of morality, dignity

Catholicos of All Armenians: Our people shall find strength to overcome this ordeal as well

Armenia First Republic Day event is held under very modest conditions

Newspaper: Armenia authorities claiming to be popular close off First Republic Day event to public

Armenia ex-President Sargsyan: Now or never!

Armenia President, then acting premier arrive at Sardarapat Memorial

Newspaper: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan's new "cleverness?"

France ambassador: I wish Armenia to be able to live its independence in peace, prosperity

Bashar al-Assad wins Syria presidential election

Reporters not allowed entering Sardarapat Memorial of Armenia

(CVE: STND- OTCQB: STTDF) CEO Jon Bey joined Steve Darling from Proactive with news the company has begun their Phase 2 winter drill program at their flagship Davidson River Uranium Project in the Southwest District of Saskatchewan.

Bey telling Proactive what they are planning to do in this program as they follow up on Warrior Corridor and explore two new corridors.
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GALVESTON, Texas  A North Dakota man has been sentenced to three years in federal prison after pleading guilty to attempting to strangle a woman he was dating while aboard a Texas-based cruise ship.

Hector Blanco, 45, of Watford City, was sentenced Tuesday for the 2018 attack aboard Miami-based Royal Caribbeans Liberty of the Seas cruise ship, federal prosecutors said. He pleaded guilty in January 2020 to an assault charge.

The case was investigated by the FBI.

No excuse can justify Hector Blancos violent actions that turned a dream vacation into a dreadful nightmare for his victim, said Special Agent in Charge Perrye K. Turner.

Blanco admitted in his plea that he attempted to strangle the woman in their cruise ship cabin, but she was able to escape. Prosecutors say the attack happened about 45 miles (70 kilometers) from Galveston in the Gulf of Mexico.

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A Laois school team managed to create a stunning gown out of discarded plastic, toys and beads, to take home one of the top prizes in the Junk Kouture grand final this year.

The three girls behind the 'Peace Unfolds' design are holding off celebrating their win until the end of the Covid-19 Level 5 lockdown.

Sarah Tuohy, Grainne Mc Caul, Elise Finn from Scoil Chriost Ri told the Leinster Express about the moment the televised awards announced their win.

"We were so shocked to see our name announced as the enterprise winners. But it was so rewarding to see that our hard work had paid off from sewing to implementing our promotional campaign across social media for our sustainable design from the get go of our journey and everything in between.

The 'bright Enterprise' sponsored award was given to the entry with the best promotion campaign, as the girls had won lots of votes using social media.

"We were absolutely thrilled to have come away with an award especially the Enterprise Award as its one that was important to us because of all the extra work that went into campaigning and promoting our dress.

"The support we received leading up to the final and afterwards was immense and we couldnt thank everyone enough for voting and following our journey in general via Instagram. Were also really looking to celebrating together when its safe to do so," they said.

They explained what went in to making the outfit.

"The materials used to create our design include over 120 non-recyclable plastic art folders previously owned by art students in our school, 2 damaged skipping ropes from a local primary school, beads from an old children's jewelry-making kit, old communion gloves and gems from old project work. The skill of sewing was instrumental to our design as each plastic diamond was handstitched to the skirt.

"The concept behind the design is to make a statement against violence in our world. The main colour in this design is white, a symbol of peace. The hard and soft materials used reflect the differences in our societies and how they can complement each other once used correctly. This is difficult to achieve and can easily unfold in the same way that peace can crumble. We hope that our white dress may be a symbol of the need for peace and harmony in todays world," Elise, Grainne and Sarah said.

Their proud art teacher is Jayne Louise Kelly.

"What an amazing experience this has been and such a proud moment for Scoil Chriost Ri! I was on the edge of my seat on the sofa at home watching my students take to the catwalk in the Junk Kouture Grand Final on RTE2 this year.

"Both "Peace Unfolds" modelled by Sarah Tuohy and "Canine99" modelled by Jade Laffen were absolutely stunning on the catwalk! What a wonderful keepsake it is to have footage of my students' JK performances along with all the wonderful grand finalist creations performances saved on the Sky box at home!

"I am chuffed for Team "Peace Unfolds" winning the enterprise award. Sarah, Grainne and Elise have been a wonderful team. They worked their socks off creating and making their dress. They shared and promoted their creation, concept and JK journey on social media platforms using photography and videography thoughout the year. Well done Grainne, Sarah, Elise and well done to all my TY Scoil Chriost Ri Junk Kouture teams from 2019-2020 that entered the competition.

"They were all wonderfully creative students and always showed huge support and encouragement towards each other. They have all won the most special prize of all throughout their JK experience and that is friendship and the magical memories that they made along the way." Jayne Louise Kelly said.

Photo: Patrick Ryan
Coronavirus: African ministers meet with IMF, ECA on immediate economic response to COVID-19
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Highlights Redmi K40 and K40 Pro have appeared on TENNA.

Redmi K40 launch is confirmed for February 25.

Both smartphones likely to have similar designs.

Redmi K40 and K40 Pro have appeared on Chinese certification website TENAA ahead of their launch. The listing gives us the first look at the possible designs of the two smartphones. The Redmi K40 launch has already been confirmed for February 25 by and Redmi general manager Lu Weibing while the Pro model can arrive on a later date. The smartphone is confirmed to feature smallest hole-punch in the world and the company executive also hinted at its possible price.

Both the smartphones will feature similar designs according to the images posted on TENNA. Both the phones will feature a centre-aligned hole-punch cutout on the display. At the back, it features a rectangular camera module with curved corners which is very similar to what we have recently seen on the Mi 11. The camera system seems to have two large camera sensors and two smaller sensors. This is for both the Redmi K40 and Redmi K40 Pro.

The smartphone will come with a starting price of CNY 2,999 (around Rs 34,000), Weibing had revealed last month while confirming the launch. The smartphone will be more aggressively priced than the Mi 11 which is powered by the same processor. However, the exact pricing along with the configuration will be known only on February 25.

As far as the specs go, Weibing also revealed that the phone will come with the "smallest" selfie camera hole, stereo speakers, and a "great" battery life. It will be powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 888 SoC. It can feature a flat display that may have a full-HD+ (1,080x2,400 pixels) panel. The smartphone is tipped to have 33W fast charging support. The battery backing the phone could reportedly be a 45000mAh pack.

Coming to the front camera, Weibing has said that the Redmi K40 will feature a centre-positioned punch-hole display to house the selfie camera. He said that this has been done in a bid to achieve highest possible screen-to-body ratio and this is why Xiaomi is also looking to introducing the smallest punch-hole cutout seen on a phone yet.

There is still no word on the India availability of the phone. Xiaomi had launched the Redmi K20 in India in 2019 but decided against bringing the Redmi K30. There is a chance that the Redmi K40 might be rebranded for India market too.
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GERMANTOWN, Md., Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The HealthWell Foundation, an independent non-profit that provides a financial lifeline for inadequately insured Americans, has launched a new fund to provide copayment assistance for behavioral health treatments for frontline health care workers who have been impacted by the COVID-19 health crisis. Through the COVID-19 Frontline Health Care Workers Behavioral Health Fund, HealthWell will provide up to $2,000 in financial assistance for a 12-month grant period to eligible health care workers who have annual household incomes up to 500 percent of the federal poverty level.

The HealthWell Foundation recognizes the unmet needs of frontline health care workers during the public health crisis and the importance mental health has on their ability to cope with the devastating impact the COVID-19 pandemic has imparted on the patients they serve.

Through this unique, HealthWell-sponsored fund, HealthWell will assist frontline health care workers in covering their out-of-pocket treatment-related copayments for prescription drugs, counseling services, psychotherapy, and transportation needed to manage COVID-19 related behavioral health issues.

"History has taught us that the psychological impact of traumatic events doesn't always reveal itself immediately. For health care workers dealing with the often tragic outcomes of COVID-19 cases, stress and anxiety can have serious, long-term effects on their mental wellbeing," said Suzanne M. Miller, Ph.D., Professor of Cancer Prevention and Control and Director of Patient Empowerment and Health Decision Making at Fox Chase Cancer Center/Temple University Hospital Outpatient Services. "HealthWell's new fund will provide these workers with the financial assistance they need to seek and adhere to behavioral health treatments to address the effects of stress and burnout." Dr. Miller is Chairman of the Board for the New Jersey Health Care Quality Institute and also serves on the boards of the Society of Behavioral Medicine and the HealthWell Foundation.

An editorial in the Society of Behavioral Medicine's journal, Translational Behavioral Medicine: Practice, Policy, Research (Dr. Miller, Editor-in-Chief), demonstrated that emotional distress for first responders in 9/11 was at a peak 6 months after the event. Therefore, the greatest need among COVID-19 frontline health care workers might not appear until several months post-vaccine or mitigation of positive cases. There is also anecdotal evidence that 1 in 3 of these workers may eventually suffer from diagnosed or undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

"I know first-hand that treating patients who have become infected with COVID-19 can be very challenging. Many nurses, physicians and other health care workers have been called to play roles outside of their normal practice. At many sites, clinicians have had to work with limited resources and inadequate protective gear. It can be devastating to see patients suffer from COVID without their family and friends able to visit and support them during their illness. Despite the challenges, health care workers strive to provide the best possible care while dealing with their own fatigue, anxiety, and exhaustion," said Jeffrey Peppercorn, MD, MPH, Director, Massachusetts General Hospital Supportive Care and Survivorship Program, Associate Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, and Scientific and Ethics Advisor for the HealthWell Foundation. "Under these difficult conditions, many health care workers feel helpless even as they persist in their efforts to save the lives of those infected with the virus. HealthWell's new fund to assist frontline health care workers so they can access and afford behavioral health services to manage anxiety and depression resulting from their roles addresses a critical need during the pandemic and well beyond."

Susan Gurley, Executive Director, Anxiety and Depression Association of America, added, "The COVID-19 pandemic continues to have an unshakeable impact on our lives. For those who are treating patients infected with the virus, the impact is exacerbated by reoccurring traumatic events and uncontrollable outcomes. During these unprecedented times, many are dealing with added anxiety, thoughts of helplessness, failure, and fear. Oftentimes, people suffering from these feelings do not seek necessary treatment and counseling, which can lead to more serious situations, including PTSD, and even thoughts of suicide. We applaud the HealthWell Foundation for recognizing the paramount need for frontline health care workers who are going to heroic measures to save the lives of those impacted by COVID-19 by providing a vital financial resource that will enable them to obtain critical behavioral health services."

To determine eligibility and apply for financial assistance, visit HealthWell's COVID-19 Frontline Health Care Workers Behavioral Health Fund page. To learn how you can support this or other HealthWell programs, visit HealthWellFoundation.org.

About the HealthWell Foundation

A nationally recognized, independent non-profit organization founded in 2003, the HealthWell Foundation has served as a safety net across over 80 disease areas for more than 615,000 underinsured patients. Since its inception, HealthWell has provided over $2.1 billion in grant support to access life-changing medical treatments patients otherwise would not be able to afford. HealthWell provides financial assistance to adults and children facing medical hardship resulting from gaps in their insurance that cause out-of-pocket medical expenses to escalate rapidly; HealthWell assists with the treatment-related cost-sharing obligations of these patients. HealthWell ranked 29th on the 2020 Forbes list of The 100 Largest U.S. Charities and was recognized for its 100 percent fundraising efficiency. For more information, visit www.HealthWellFoundation.org.

About Anxiety and Depression Association of America (ADAA)

ADAA's mission focuses on improving quality of life for those with anxiety, depression, OCD, PTSD, and co-occurring disorders through education, practice, and research. ADAA helps people find treatment, resources, and support. ADAA strives to improve patient care by promoting implementation of evidence-based treatments and best practices across disciplines through continuing education and trainings and accelerating dissemination of research into practice. ADAA promotes scientific innovation and engages a diverse network of basic and clinical anxiety and depression researchers and providers encouraging the implementation of new treatments to clinicians. These commitments drive ADAA's promise to find new treatments and one day prevent and cure these disorders. To learn more, visit: ADAA.org.

CONTACT:

Ginny Dunn

240-632-5309

[email protected]

SOURCE HealthWell Foundation

Related Links

healthwellfoundation.org


The homegrown website Koo, which is a desi version of microblogging site Twitter, has become the new tool of conversation as several ministries and union ministers have made their accounts on the Koo App.

The Centre's immediate interest in the Koo app has come after Twitter failed to respond to a government's notice, which was sent last week. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeiTY) asked Twitter India to block around 257 tweets and accounts that were tweeting about sake tweets like "farmer genocide". However, the microblogging site has, so far, not responded to the notice.

The MeiTY, on February 4, asked Twitter to remove more than 1,000 accounts flagged by national security agencies as those belonging to Pakistan or Khalistan sympathisers. But Twitter did not respond to it, in fact, Twitter India's policy head Mahima Kaul tendered her resignation last week.

As a result, media reports have surfaced saying that the government is mulling suspending Twitter in India to put pressure on the social media giant to respond to its directives. Also, several union ministers and government organisations have switched to 'made in India' Twitter's version called Koo app.

What is Koo App?

Koo is more like a Twitter, it's a social media app, which was launched in March 2020. Last year in August, this app won Prime Minister's Aatma Nirbhar Bharat App Innovation Challenge, since then the app has garnered over a million subscribers. In fact, PM Narendra Modi encouraged Indians to use the Koo App in his Mann Ki Baat speech too.

Who has made Koo App?

Koo has been co-founded by Aprameya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka. The duo has also built startups like TaxiForSure and redBus in their past entrepreneurial avatars.

Koo App features

Currently, Koo App is available in 4 Indian languages--Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada. While, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Bangla, Oriya, Malayalam, and Assamese will be added soon.

Koo App enables users to write opinions on anything using text, audio, or video. A user either conveys thoughts in 400 characters or a one-minute video. Koo is available for download on both Google Play Store and Apple App Store. Users can download the Koo app on their iPhone and Android devices.

Who has joined Koo app?

According to YourStory, Union IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, MeiTY, Digital India, India Post, NIC, NIELIT, SAMEER, Common Services Center, UMANG app, Digi Locker, NIXI, STPI, CDAC, and CMET among others can be found on Koo App.

Besides, many prominent personalities like Sadhguru, Ravi Shankar Prasad, Anil Kumble, Javagal Srinath, among other have also joined Koo.Also several Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders are also on Koo app now, for example, Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, Union Railway Minister Piyush Goyal among others.





Hello Friends, I am now on Koo.



Connect with me on this Indian micro-blogging platform.



Let us exchange our thoughts and ideas on Koo



Y Join me: @chouhanshivraj on Koo App - https://t.co/vjWSPiKD87 a Shivraj Singh Chouhan (@ChouhanShivraj) February 9, 2021

I am now on Koo.



Connect with me on this Indian micro-blogging platform for real-time, exciting and exclusive updates.



Let us exchange our thoughts and ideas on Koo.



Y Join me: https://t.co/zIL6YI0epMpic.twitter.com/REGioTdMfm a Piyush Goyal (@PiyushGoyal) February 9, 2021

Also read: India Inc's billion-dollar club grows to 302

Also read: GST officers bust racket of 46 firms behind Rs 82 crore fake ITC claims

By MIKE STOBBE and HANNAH FINGERHUT, The Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP)  About 1 in 3 Americans say they definitely or probably wont get the COVID-19 vaccine, according to a new poll that some experts say is discouraging news if the U.S. hopes to achieve herd immunity and vanquish the outbreak.

The poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that while 67% of Americans plan to get vaccinated or have already done so, 15% are certain they wont and 17% say probably not. Many expressed doubts about the vaccines safety and effectiveness.

The poll suggests that substantial skepticism persists more than a month and a half into a U.S. vaccination drive that has encountered few if any serious side effects. It found that resistance runs higher among younger people, people without college degrees, Black Americans and Republicans.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the governments leading infectious-disease scientist, has estimated that somewhere between 70% and 85% of the U.S. population needs to get inoculated to stop the scourge that has killed close to 470,000 Americans. More recently, he said the spread of more contagious variants of the virus increases the need for more people to get their shots  and quickly.

So is 67% of Americans enough?

No. No, no, no, no, said William Hanage, a Harvard University expert on disease dynamics. He added: Youre going to need to get quite large proportions of the population vaccinated before you see a real effect.

Nearly 33 million Americans, or about 10% of the population, have received at least one dose, and 9.8 million have been fully vaccinated, according to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention.

The poll of 1,055 adults, taken Jan. 28 through Feb. 1, provides insight into the skepticism.

Of those who said they definitely will not get the vaccine, 65% cited worries about side effects, despite the shots safety record over the past months. About the same percentage said they dont trust COVID-19 vaccines. And 38% said they dont believe they need a vaccine, with a similar share saying that they dont know if a COVID-19 vaccine will work and that they dont trust the government.

Of those who probably will not get the vaccine but have not ruled it out completely, 63% said they are waiting to see if it is safe, and 60% said they are concerned about possible side effects.

I dont trust pharmaceuticals. I really dont. And it doesnt sound like its going to be safe, said Debra Nanez, a 67-year-old retired nurse from Tucson, Arizona.

Nanez said she has gotten flu and pneumonia shots but is concerned about rumors about whats in the coronavirus vaccine, and her friends have the same hesitation.

It would take a while for me to do research on it to make sure its safe. I just dont want to take anything thats going to harm me, she said.

Baron Walker, a 42-year-old laid-off insulation installer from Parkersburg, West Virginia, said he is in the probably not column, at least for now.

He said that if he were elderly, or lived in a densely populated area, he might consider the vaccine more strongly. But he is in rural part of the country, he has been wearing a mask and social-distancing, and he feels there is a good chance the nation will achieve herd immunity, he said.

I feel like I have plenty of time before I get a chance to get (the vaccine) anyway, to find out if there are bad side effects and whether its even worth getting it, Walker said.

In interviews, some Americans expressed concerns about the revolutionary speed with which the vaccines were developed  less than a year.

I feel like they rushed it, Walker said.

Health officials are trying to counter concerns about the vaccine with science.

The latest evidence indicates that the two vaccines being used in the U.S.  Pfizers and Modernas  are effective even against the variants, Fauci said.

Also, while the development of the vaccines was unusually fast, it was the culmination of many years of research. And the vaccines went through clinical trials involving thousands of people who were monitored for 60 days after their last dose. Studies of other vaccines have found that harmful side effects almost always materialize within 45 days.

Safety certainly was not compromised, nor was scientific integrity compromised, Fauci said. Many have reason for skepticism. But I think that when you explain the facts and the data to them, you can win them over.

The survey found that older Americans, who are more vulnerable to COVID-19, are especially likely to say they have received a shot or will probably or definitely get vaccinated. Four in 10 of those under 45 say they will probably or definitely not get a vaccine, compared with a quarter of those older.

Black Americans appear less likely than white Americans to say they have received the shot or will definitely or probably get vaccinated, 57% versus 68%. Among Hispanic Americans, 65% say they have gotten or plan to get the vaccine.

Public health experts have long known that some Black Americans are distrustful of the medical establishment because of its history of abuses, including the infamous Tuskegee study, in which Black patients with syphilis were left untreated so that doctors could study the disease.

Americans without a college degree are more likely than college-educated ones to say they will definitely or probably not get vaccinated, 40% versus 17%. And Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say that, 44% versus 17%.

The AP-NORC poll of 1,055 adults was conducted Jan. 28-Feb. 1 using a sample drawn from NORCs probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 3.8 percentage points.

More: Pa. offers new tool and hotline for COVID-19 vaccine info, but not appointments
Colorado Springs, CO (80903)

Today

Scattered thunderstorms during the morning becoming more widespread this afternoon. High 58F. Winds NNE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 90%..

Tonight

A steady rain this evening. Showers continuing overnight. Low around 45F. Winds N at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 80%.
Authorities chased people suspected of armed robbery and car theft across Houston highways Tuesday night and early Wednesday, in one case reaching speeds of more than 140 mph, officials said. Eight suspects were taken into custody and no one was injured in the three separate high-speed police pursuits.

In the first case, two people around 10:30 p.m. robbed a convenience store at gunpoint, said Lt. R. Willkens of the Houston Police Department. The duo grabbed money from the cash register and fled in a silver Chevy Impala from the store, located at 738 Lathrop Street in northeast Houston.

Police officers located the vehicle through a retail security system that provides GPS tracking and attempted to pull them over, Willkens said. The driver stopped, but then took off, prompting a police chase that lasted for several minutes.

The driver crashed on Collingsworth Street near Interstate 59 and both suspected robbers ran. Officers caught up and arrested the pair, Willkens said. No one was injured in the pursuit.

Separately, an HPD officer spotted a stolen car around 1 a.m. Wednesday at Bingle Road and Hammerly Boulevard in the Spring Branch area. When the driver refused to stop, police pursued the car for half an hour across Houston's highways from Interstate 10 to U.S. 59 to Interstate 610 to U.S. 290.

A police officer performed a "pit maneuver" to stop the car at Hollister Street and West Little York Road. Five people, including two males and three females, were taken into custody and their parents were called to the scene. Police did not disclose their ages.

An hour later in northwest Harris County, a man armed with a handgun robbed a Circle K store at 9096 Jones Road, said Lt. S. Wilson of the Harris County Sheriff's Office. The man made off with cash, but officials tracked him through a similar GPS tracker in the stolen money.

Authorities spotted the vehicle and tried to stop it, but the driver fled. Deputies chased the fleeing suspect through neighborhoods and down highways for 35 minutes at speeds of more than 140 mph, Wilson said.

The Texas Department of Public Safety and Harris County Constable's Office Precinct 4 helped with the pursuit.

Eventually, deputies deployed strip spikes that worked to stop the driver, who crashed into a curb on North Gessner Road near Fallbrook Drive, Wilson said. The man tried to run but law enforcement took him into custody.

The weapon and cash were recovered inside the car. No one was injured and no property was damaged in the chase.
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Amid all our focus and efforts towards staying safe, what we perhaps missed celebrating is an important landmark -- 1 July 2020. It was the fifth anniversary of the Government of India's commencement of the 'Digital India' campaign. What we did, however, is far more significant, colossal and emphatic. The government made Digital India the key apparatus in keeping its citizens empowered, secure, healthy and taking the country's economy forward. The country's central bank, the Reserve Bank of India, estimates that by 2025, payments through digital platforms will jump to 1.5 billion transactions, or Rs 15 trillion a day. The daily transaction averaged about 125 million before March 2020, much of it powered by the government's famed United Payment Interface, or UPI. To track citizens' health and monitor the spread of the pandemic, the government launched the Aarogya Setu app, having a download hit of more than 127 million times, a testimony of how Digital is transforming India rapidly.

Putting IT behind e-Governance push

From the governance's standpoint, Information Technology in contemporary India has played a revolutionary role in positioning the country as one of the top nations making the most advancements digitally in recent times. Most importantly, digital transformation has widened India's possibility of innovation in every aspect of its economic engine and even optimization of resources, currently being pursued across sectors ranging from e-Education, manufacturing, agriculture, healthcare, retail, financial services, banking, national defence, and security to public utilities.

Overall, data, technology and governance are coming together as a force to accelerate social change and address the criticality of harnessing the data generated through various e-governance initiatives to optimize decision making.

World-class products & localized solutions

Take, for example, the collaboration between Hitachi Systems Micro Clinic Pvt. Ltd., a Hitachi Group Company, and State Bank of India (SBI), the country's largest public-sector lender. The underlying philosophy between Hitachi and SBI has always been bringing 'people-centric innovations' by putting the customer at the core of their business strategy. Hitachi Systems Micro Clinic accelerated technology-driven digital banking initiatives for SBI by leveraging private cloud technology 'Meghdoot' and developing a data lake concept. With the adoption of a cloud-first strategy, Hitachi enabled centralized server security solution for SBI's virtual servers and secured the web gateway.

The digital technology and analytics have helped SBI realize security and granular control for resources and services, faster response for application, and made available information at fingertips.

Guided by the mission of promoting Social Innovation Business in India aimed towards 'Powering Good' for the larger society, Hitachi continues to bolster its commitment to SBI to help revolutionize digital banking, especially during unprecedented times.

Saksham is another innovative and revolutionary effort by Hitachi Systems Micro Clinic created for the current adverse situation which responds to Covid-19 disruptions by enabling one's return to the workplace with compliance on safety and health. It is a comprehensive AI-enabled Self Service Helpdesk and a cognitive learning platform with IT Service Management capable to process Incident Management, Service Request, Change Management and Problem Management for all business requirements. Saksham ensures that an organization's IT assets are healthy, compliant, up and running through zero or minimal contact.

Similarly, the integrated IT environment infrastructure in Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) core cloud solution - security solution for another leading public sector scheduled financial institute - is another work of excellence by the Hitachi Systems Micro Clinic. They worked with the bank and proposed to them the solutions for Network Behaviour Anomaly detection, Decoy/Deception, Next Gen Firewall, Network Advanced Threat Protection, Endpoint Anti-virus, Data Loss Prevention, Intrusion Prevention System, Load Balancers and Security Orchestration and Automation Response. Being a government undertaking, the bank strictly follows cyber-security guidelines laid down by the Reserve Bank of India. Within the given parameters, the bank has embarked on a digital transformation journey, which will help them strengthen and secure their banking operations.

Leveraging its expertise in OT and IT, Hitachi MGRM Net has rolled out its state-of-the-art M-StarTM Health eGovernance Platform. The platform is an end-to-end comprehensive Healthcare Management System that covers all aspects of a healthcare institution, ranging from hospital management information system, citizen/patient health record, unique health ID, health scheme, policy, claims, tele-health, administration, and clinical operations to clinical decision support system. It offers a single source of authentic architecture and near-real-time information for decision making and monitoring.

"Throughout this journey wherein the government envisions India transforming into a digitally empowered society, Hitachi has played the most fundamental role of a partner bolstering the government's initiatives. Hitachi has been offering solutions, products that are relevant not only for present-day but for its future development. Our credible expertise in OT x IT technologies is a reassurance of Hitachi laying strong foundations for a Digitally self-reliant India." Mr Bharat Kaushal, Managing Director,Hitachi India.

Leading India into the future

It's quite evident how Hitachi is playing a vital role in aiding better decision-making for not only the government but also private enterprises. With its 'Connected Citizen' solutions, Hitachi is also strengthening eGovernance in India, partnering with the government on several initiatives and empowering the citizens of India through its diversified range of OT x IT solutions across various industries like Healthcare, e-Education, Agriculture, and more. M-Star-enabled digital Healthcare solutions, e-learning, agriculture solutions are some of the key solutions that are supporting the very backbone of nation-building.

Hitachi's partnership with the Government of India's progressive projects, such as Make in India and Digital India initiatives, to take a predominantly agrarian India into the IoT era, a leap that is critical to the nation's emergence as a global production and economic powerhouse is bearing fruit. Hitachi is leading India to the future!

Know more about Hitachi Social Innovation

Know more about Solutions in India

See Powering Good in Action

Source: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/08/covid-19-has-accelerated-india-s-digital-reset/

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In late January, Alex Jones made a huge mistake.

For weeks, hed been trying to deflect blame for the Jan. 6 attack at the U.S. Capitol by pointing fingers at invented provocateurs. The InfoWars host took turns blaming antifa, QAnon believers and certain militia groups, tailoring his narratives as new information about the siege came to light. On Jan. 27, hed settled on blaming the boogaloo boys, a pro-militia extremist ideology that believes in agitating for an armed revolution.

So when Jones invited Mike Dunn, the 20-year-old leader of a Virginia faction of the boogaloo boys, it was clear he wanted to put Dunn on the spot for the violence at the Capitol. Instead, Jones ended up platforming Dunn, someone who is more extreme  and confident  than himself.

We go there armed. We disobey the law. We stand against the tyranny, and we see people like you, Alex, who used to be my hero as a young man, we see you bending the knee to it repeatedly, Dunn said.

Jones, who has been on the radio spewing conspiracy theories longer than Dunn has been alive, squirmed as Dunn turned the interview on him. How am I not standing against tyranny, fighting against evil legislation, marching, going out and having events? Jones shot back.

Because you talk, Dunn responded. We go out there, we actually disobey. We stand there armed. We dont bootlick like a lot of you and Republicans do.

For decades, Jones has been one of talk radios most prolific and lucrative liars. But his prominence among Americas far-right media figures is slipping as the next generation of listeners demands increasingly extreme rhetoric and dangerous, real-life action.

Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters for America, a left-leaning watchdog organization that studies conservative media, argues that over the past four years, the ecosystem has changed irrevocably. Where once narratives were driven by a few influential people  Roger Ailes at Fox, Rush Limbaugh on talk radio, Jones in the conspiracy space  now chaotic talking points are originating instead from anonymous message boards like TheDonald (which was kicked off Reddit and found its own home elsewhere) or 4chan.

Right now, there is no center of gravity, Carusone said. Its entirely atomized.

[They feel] the traditional conservative voices failed them, he added.

After months of being reassured Trump would secure a second term, many on the right feel unmoored by their current reality: Trump is definitively out of office, Democrats control the White House and Congress, and theres no white knight on the horizon to change any of that. While some are content to trust the former president has a secret plan to get back into power, others are increasingly convinced only violent action will bring about the revolution they seek.

A lot of people in the [far right] community are pissed because they trusted the plan, Carusone said. The reality was they were ready for violence, and the only thing holding them back was the plan.

For obvious reasons, this is an alarming trend. For many on the far right, places like Fox News and InfoWars are no longer reflective of their increasingly violent and accelerationist fantasies. Recently, Fox News wannabe Newsmax learned this the hard way; after fact-checking MyPillows Mike Lindell as he repeated debunked election fraud claims, Newsmax was vilified by the far right for what they saw as a capitulation to mainstream narratives.

Raw with disappointment after Trumps exit, some are moving away from talk radio and TV into darker corners of the internet  and the recruitment of these disaffected former viewers is underway. In one pro-Hitler group on Telegram (boasting some 9,000 members), Carusone said he saw a coordinated effort to seize audience from other platforms.

When Parler shut down, the more influential people in the group were admonishing the others to knock off the pro-Hitler stuff, Carusone said. This is our moment to explain to people what the Jews did. You cant just show them a picture of Hitler, that will turn them off.

Everybody at every level understood there was audience to capture, he said.

A January Mother Jones story reported similar recruiting tactics by the Proud Boys, an anti-immigrant, far-right group who self-describe as "Western chauvinists."

Parler being shut down has sent tens of thousands (or more) of people to telegram. All of them are seeking refuge and looking for answers since their Q-bullst lied to them, read one post in a Proud Boys Telegram group. Now is our opportunity to grab them by the hand and lead them toward ideological truth.

Sensing the shift, right-wing media personalities are now taking their cues from those spaces, allowing the most popular online narratives to shape their content. And that online rhetoric, devoid of fact-checking, accountability or even real names associated with it, is inherently more radical than anything once aired on talk radio.

You see Tucker leaning into this in his programming.  One of the things that struck us is that his producers were going to places like TheDonald subreddit and saying, Here we are, Carusone said.  They were actually building programming, not all of their programming, but they were beginning to build programming from these fever swamps.

More fringe platforms, like InfoWars, are even using those anonymous, unverified boards as pseudo-intel. Jones regularly speaks about antifa contracts; his source for the so-called contract was a post on 4chan, a message board infamous for trolling. Theyre using these comment boards as sources, Carusone said. Theyre reporting things they see there as information. ... I think youre gonna see more of that.

But for Jones, that pandering may be too little, too late. Removed from every major social media platform, buried under lawsuits for vilifying the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre and now deemed too weak for his most extreme listeners, the extreme ecosystem he fostered for decades is moving on without him.
Eugenia Solis gets a COVID-19 vaccine Tuesday at South Park Recreation Center in Los Angeles. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

With COVID-19 vaccine still in short supply, state and local officials vowed Tuesday to make improvements to ensure doses are delivered equitably and that California's hardest-hit, harder-to-reach communities aren't left behind.

Recent data released by L.A. County showed that Black, Latino and Native American seniors were receiving COVID-19 vaccinations at a lower rate than white, Asian American and Pacific Islander seniors in the county.

We have a lot of work to do to fix this, Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said during Tuesday's Board of Supervisors meeting, because however way you cut this data, it's clear that in some of our hardest-hit communities, there are populations that are not getting vaccinated at the same rate as other groups.

Overall, only 7% of Black residents age 65 and over have received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, according to county figures presented Monday. About 9% of Native American seniors and 14% of Latino seniors have received at least one dose  compared with 17% of white senior residents, 18% of Asian American and 29% of Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander seniors.

"I think its important that we look at it as a two-prong issue. Its supply, and its equitable distribution of that albeit very limited supply," L.A. County Supervisor Holly Mitchell said Tuesday.

As of Monday, the countys Department of Health Services, which serves thousands of low-income residents at its four public hospitals and about 30 clinics, had vaccinated 11,000 of its patients who were either at least 65 years old, healthcare workers or both.

Among those vaccinated by the countys health services agency, 61% were Latino, 11% Asian, 9% Black, 3% white and 15% either multiracial, other race or unknown.

We are currently conducting about 1,200 vaccinations per day, but the volume is entirely dependent on supply, Dr. Christina Ghaly, the agencys director, said during Tuesdays supervisors meeting.

Story continues

Gov. Gavin Newsom said Tuesday that he planned to release statewide demographic data on vaccine distribution later this week, and foreshadowed it would "show what we all knew it was going to show, that we have a lot of work to do in terms of addressing those gaps and those disparities."

"We have a unique responsibility and obligation to do more and do better," he said.

Though the state is planning to collect and release vaccination data by race and ethnicity, much of that information is currently missing, and the collection process needs to improve, state epidemiologist Dr. Erica Pan said during a vaccine advisory committee meeting last week.

An emphasis is being placed on improving collection of demographic data as Blue Shield of California comes on board to administer the state's vaccine program. Incentive payments will be made to local healthcare providers based on their ability to meet certain metrics, such as collecting real-time data and administering vaccines to the most vulnerable communities.

We have to convince people that its OK to share it, said Paul Markovich, Blue Shield of California's president and chief executive, referring to people's personal information. Thats where I think we could use a lot of help  getting trust in the process.

That information has been lacking throughout the country.

We cannot ensure an equitable vaccination program without data to guide us, said Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith at a briefing last week. Nunez-Smith leads President Bidens COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force.

Im worried about how behind we are," she said. "We must address these insufficient data points as an urgent priority.

Federal officials also announced a new strategy Tuesday to send doses directly to community health centers, "enabling them to vaccinate more of the people they serve," said White House press secretary Jen Psaki.

"This announcement is another tool we are providing to state and local leaders in their work to reach underserved and hardest-hit populations," she said during a briefing.

Officials in California have also said a key strategy in removing barriers to and allaying fears about vaccinations should involve tapping into already familiar and trusted resources in communities of need.

But that must be done with care. Mitchell, whose Second District includes a significant percentage of the countys Black population, said its great for the county to open more vaccination sites in communities of color, but that many of them are frustrated because they have no control over who registers for their open appointments.

When residents hear of new vaccination sites opening in their communities, Mitchell said, the natural assumption is that they will be able to get their vaccines at those sites  but that hasnt happened at the rate it should.

Thats why our equity numbers are as paltry as they are, Mitchell said.

Ferrer said she shares the frustration of federally qualified health centers, which predominantly serve low-income and uninsured residents and have to vaccinate whoever signs up.

"They end up seeing not their patients, not their neighbors, but people coming ... from 50 miles away because they managed to snag an appointment," Ferrer said. "And thats working against us."

L.A. Supervisor Hilda Solis said the county must quickly get boots on the ground in hard-hit communities of color.

This should include using mobile units to offer door-to-door vaccinations, especially to those residents who dont have vehicles or are homebound, Solis said.

It's not lost on me that African American and Latino communities are the ones that are really suffering the most, said Solis, whose First District includes several predominantly Latino communities with high rates of coronavirus cases and deaths.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
An injured hang glider in critical condition was airlifted Tuesday by helicopter from San Francisco's Fort Funston to a local trauma center, officials said.

Lt. Jonathan Baxter, a spokesperson with the San Francisco Fire Department, said the hang glider collided with the rocky cliffs above the beach and fell to the sand.

In response to UC Berkeleys surge of coronavirus cases, the university has extended a lockdown on dorms, banned outdoor exercise and added more security guards to walk by residence halls.

During the first week of February, 156 people at UC Berkeley tested positive for the virus, 95% of them undergraduates, according to data from UC Berkeley, which tracks virus cases among students, faculty and staff tested through the universitys health service. As a result, the university has a higher rate of coronavirus tests coming back positive than the city of Berkeley: 1.6% compared to 0.6%.

The lockdown, originally implemented from Feb. 1 to Monday, was extended to next Monday, requiring all 2,000 students in dorm-style residence halls to continue staying in their rooms except to seek medical treatment, comply with testing requirements, use the bathroom or pick up food from the closest dining kiosk, according to an email sent to students.

Students may only use a communal restroom if no one else is in it, and must continue to get tested two times per week.

The ban on outdoor exercise is new, though the university said in its email that it was working with the City of Berkeley to determine whether outdoor exercise may be permitted, and we will provide more information on this in the near future.

Adam Ahmad, a freshman living in an on-campus apartment, said Wednesday that students have not adhered to all the rules and enforcement has been scarce.

No one is following everything to a T because of the fact that there is no presiding authority figure, Ahmad said, explaining that no one stopped students from leaving their dorms. Occasionally, theyll check your badge.

Now, however, UC Berkeley has added staff at the front desk of housing areas and more staff and security guards to check the areas around residence halls. Students who are found to be in violation of the rules may be disqualified from housing or even suspended from the university.

The university said Wednesday that some students had left their rooms and congregated with others, which they described as actions that risk further spread.

As to whether the lockdown might remain in effect after Monday, campus spokesperson Janet Gilmore said its possible and that it depends on coronavirus conditions.

It is not as simple as one set number, she said, adding that the decision would be made in consultation with local public health officials.

This uncertainty has left some students  especially ones following the rules  upset.

Dominic de Bettencourt, a freshman who moved into the dorms at UC Berkeley at the start of this semester, said he came to campus because he wanted to socialize with others in a safe way.

When the university went into the lockdown last week, he said he adhered to all the protocols because he wanted to help stop the surge and be able to get together with others safely.

But the new restrictions on exercising alone outside go too far, de Bettencourt said.

I saw that there was a spike in COVID-19 cases, so I understand the need for more restrictions. But one that I dont particularly understand is not allowing us to exercise outside by myself because it now means that I have to spend all my time alone in my room and thats not good for my mental health, he said.

His frustration is compounded by students not taking the lockdown seriously.

I think a lot of the people who werent following the rules before might still not be following the rules and these new rules hurt the people who were already following the rules the most, de Bettencourt said.

Two cases of the highly contagious coronavirus variant that has spread widely in the United Kingdom were found in off-campus students who had spent negligible time on campus, the university announced last week. A university spokesperson said Wednesday that she was not aware of any cases on campus of either the United Kingdom variant or another variant that has spread in South Africa  with one case found so far in Alameda County.

Meghan Bobrowsky is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: meghan.bobrowsky@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @MeghanBobrowsky

Government officials unveil five high-tech robots to support in the fight against Covid-19 (file photo).

The government of Rwanda, in partnership with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), on Tuesday, deployed another set of robots in the country, in a move that seeks to strengthen national response to Covid-19 pandemic.

The three 'THOR UVC' robots, which are expected to play a crucial role in infection prevention and control, were due to be handed over to the recently inaugurated Nyarugenge District Hospital.

This is the second time the country deploys robots to minimise contact between frontline workers and persons infected with the virus and to help enforce safety guidelines at strategic points.

"The new robots are cutting-edge THOR UVC robots which will help in cleaning and disinfecting treatment centres, hospitals and places of mass gathering, such as markets, offices or borders as means to limit the spread of the Covid-19", a statement from the Ministry of Health reads in part.

THOR ultra-violet (UVC) is a high output UVC disinfection robot, which utilizes room mapping technology to deliver a fast and effective germicidal dose of continuous-wave UVC energy killing germs and pathogens.

Since March 14, when the first case of coronavirus was recorded in Rwanda, the country, just like many in the world, has been grappling with the pandemic.

The pandemic has so far claimed 226 lives, leaving 16 patients in critical condition.

Covid-19 preventive measures which mainly include physical distancing, washing hands and properly wearing masks have become part of everyday life.

To step up the measures, however, the country has rolled out various innovations to enable people to live with the virus as they go about their routine activities with relative safety.

According to experts, the virus has shown that disease does not respect geographic boundaries, but that emerging technology such as robotics will make it easier for prepared countries to combat both the Covid-19 pandemic and future pandemics.

The robots will be handed over on Tuesday, February 9 at the recently launched Nyarugenge District Hospital in Nyarugenge District.
Russia and the European Union continue to square off over the detention and poisoning of opposition politician Aleksei Navalny as his team prepares for a new round of protests aimed at avoiding the mass and sometimes violent arrests that have occurred at previous events.

A court in Moscow on February 10 ordered the arrest of Leonid Volkov, an exiled ally of Navalny's, in a move seen as part of an effort to squelch demonstrations demanding the release of Navalny, President Vladimir Putin's most vocal critic, who has been jailed since January 17.

The arrest order, based on charges that Volkov, the head of the network of Navalny's teams across Russia, encouraged minors to take part in unauthorized rallies, came hours after Russia's Investigative Committee added him to the country's wanted list.

The moves ratcheted up tensions with the European Union, which has sharply criticized the Kremlin for Navalny's detention and is considering new sanctions against Russian officials because of their treatment of the 44-year-old lawyer.

In the past week, Russia has expelled several diplomats from EU countries after the Kremlin accused them of participating in the protests. The moves have been matched tit-for-tat by Sweden, Poland, and Germany, which have told Russian diplomats to pack their bags and head home.

The two sides were already at odds over Russia's 2014 annexation of the Ukrainian region of Crimea and its support for separatist formations waging a war against Kyiv in parts of eastern Ukraine, the EU's rejection of a disputed presidential election in Belarus and criticism of a brutal crackdown by the government of strongman Alyaksandr Lukashenka, and other issues.

"Using international tools for politically motivated prosecution is a wrong practice," Lithuanian Interior Minister Agne Bilotaite said on February 10, referring to the Russian warrant for Volkov sent through Interpol.

"This raises serious doubts about Russia's membership in these organizations," she added.

Navalny, an anti-corruption campaigner, was arrested on January 17 upon his return to Russia from Germany, where he was being treated for a nerve-agent poisoning that he says was ordered by Putin, which the Kremlin has denied.

The detention sparked outrage across the country, drawing tens of thousands of people to the streets for two straight weekends in January.

More protests rocked Moscow and St. Petersburg after a court on February 2 sentenced Navalny to 2 years and 8 months in prison for violating terms of his probation while recuperating in Germany.

That sentence stems from a 2014 embezzlement conviction that Navalny has rejected as fabricated and the European Court of Human Rights has ruled to be unlawful. He described his new imprisonment as "Putin's personal revenge" for surviving and exposing the assassination plot.

The arrests included Navalny's wife, Yulia, who has been detained several times in recent weeks.

On February 10, the Interfax news agency quoted a source as saying she had left the country, flying to Germany.

Navalnaya's lawyer, Svetlana Davydova, could not confirm the report when asked about it by the TASS news agency, saying she didn't "have such an information."

The protests have been some of the largest anti-government demonstrations that Russia has seen in years. They have also sparked a massive reaction by officials, with some 11,000 people detained for taking to the streets in what the Kremlin has called "illegal" rallies.

In a shift of strategy amid the crackdown, Volkov said last week that the pro-Navalny demonstrations should pause until the spring, arguing that an attempt to maintain rallies each weekend would only lead to thousands more arrests and wear out participants.

On February 9, however, he announced a new form of protest, urging residents in big cities to briefly gather in courtyards on February 14 and flash lights toward the sky.

The new tactics -- similar to ones used by anti-government protesters in Belarus -- are aimed at preventing Russian riot police from interfering and will allow more people to participate without fearing repressions, Volkov said.

The Belarusian protests follow the reelection in August of Lukashenka, the country's longtime autocratic ruler, in balloting widely seen as rigged.

With reporting by RFE/RL's Russian Service, Current Time, Interfax, AP, and Reuters

Vancouver police on Tuesday released the names of three Clark County sheriffs deputies placed on leave after one of them shot a driver last week.

Deputies were conducting a traffic stop Thursday in Hazel Dell when one of them fired their weapon and hit the driver, Jenoah D. Donald, Vancouver police said.

Donald, a 30-year-old Black man, was taken to a hospital with life-threatening injuries. He remains on life support in an intensive care unit, according to a Tuesday update on an online crowdfunding page in his name.

Donalds mother was told he wasnt going to survive but is not ready to give up hope and has to give him a chance, according to the update.

The deputies on leave are Sean Boyle, whos worked for the agency for 21 years; Greg Agar, a six-year deputy; and Holly Troupe, a 1 -year deputy, according to the Vancouver Police Department, which is leading an investigation into the shooting.

The agency previously said four deputies were involved, but investigators found Monday that the fourth deputy arrived after the shooting and was determined to be uninvolved, said Kim Kapp, a Vancouver police spokeswoman.

Authorities have not provided a detailed description of the circumstances surrounding the shooting, which happened in a residential neighborhood at the corner of Northeast 68th Street and Second Avenue. They also didnt say which deputy shot Donald.

The shooting happened less than one mile away from the Oct. 29 shooting of Kevin Peterson Jr., a 21-year-old Black man from Camas who was shot and killed by Clark County deputies during an undercover drug sting.

Donalds family is being represented by Herrmann Law Group, the same attorneys representing Petersons family.

If a shooting is justified, it doesnt take five days to explain why. If a shooting isnt justified, you still owe it to the victims family and the public to explain what happened, said Mark Lindquist, a lawyer with the firm.

He said the firm has retained an investigation agency in Vancouver, John Visser Investigative Solutions, to independently investigate the shooting. Visser was also hired to investigate Petersons shooting.

-- Jaimie Ding

jding@oregonian.com; 503-221-4395; @j_dingdingding
"Serving our communities is the heart of what we do at Dutch Bros," said Travis Boersma, co-founder and executive chairman of Dutch Bros Coffee. "As we continue to grow as a company, our commitment to make a difference in our communities grows right along with it. I'm stoked to see how our broistas, franchisees, operators and customers come together this year to share the Dutch Luv."

Dutch Luv Day started as a canned food drive in 2007. It's grown over the last 15 years to raise more than $1.8 million for nonprofits dedicated to feeding the hungry.

"We're so excited for our 15th annual Dutch Luv campaign," said Katie Hutchison, vice president of philanthropy at Dutch Bros Coffee. "We can't wait to see how our customers will show up to help fight hunger in our communities and make a difference one cup at a time!"

In 2020, Dutch Bros raised $483,346 for its Dutch Luv campaign. This allowed local organizations to serve 1,450,038 meals for hungry members of their community.

This year, Dutch Luv Day partners include the Oregon Food Bank, Utah Food Bank, Boise Rescue Mission, Central California Food Bank, Roadrunner Food Bank of New Mexico, St. Mary's Food Bank in Arizona, Brazos Valley Food Bank in Texas, Springs Rescue Mission in Colorado and more.

If you need inspiration for your next Dutch Bros fix, check out the 6 Drinks You Will Luv A "Latte" this Valentine's Day .

About Dutch Bros

Dutch Bros Coffee is the country's largest privately held drive-thru coffee company, with more than 400 locations and 14,000 employees in 10 states. The company is headquartered in Grants Pass, Oregon, where it was founded in 1992 by Dane and Travis Boersma. Dutch Bros serves specialty coffee, smoothies, freezes, teas, a private-label Dutch Bros Blue Rebel energy drink and nitrogen-infused cold brew coffee. Its rich, proprietary coffee blend is handcrafted from start to finish.

In addition to its mission of speed, quality and service, Dutch Bros is committed to giving back to the communities it serves. Through its Dutch Bros Foundation and local franchisees, the company donates several million dollars to causes across the country each year.

To learn more about Dutch Bros, visit www.dutchbros.com, like Dutch Bros Coffee on Facebook or follow @DutchBros on Twitter.

SOURCE Dutch Bros Coffee

Related Links

http://www.dutchbros.com


The Midland City Council on Tuesday approved creating an assistance program for landlords whose tenants are not paying rent because of the COVID-19 pandemic and economic downturn.

Council member Lori Blong said she added the item to Tuesdays meeting agenda after being contacted by local property owners.

A lot of folks who rent properties in and around Midland  and throughout the nation, frankly  are not paying rent because they know they cant be evicted, she said during the meeting. And theyre not availing themselves of the rental programs that exist because theyre not incented to go to those programs.

A federal eviction moratorium was issued by the CDC in September and is in effect until March 31. Theres speculation the moratorium will be extended before it expires.

Blong said some of the landlords shes spoken to are unable to pay their mortgages and are at risk of losing their properties because their renters are several months behind on payments.

Its creating a scenario where some of the property owners are not going to be able to make their property tax payments, those that have mortgages are having trouble meeting those mortgage requirements, but they still have no mechanism to require the renter to pay, she said.

As it was proposed, the program would use funds from the citys existing rental assistance program. The council previously allocated $800,000 to be used toward rental assistance and about $335,000 of those funds have been used.

However, Community Development Manager Isaac Garnett expressed concern during Tuesdays meeting about expanding funds that were allocated for rental assistance to include property owners.

The money the council allocated for rental assistance was a mix of CDBG funds and federal CARES funding, Garnett said. He said those funds are subject to different requirements and the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs may ask the city to pay back the CDBG grants if given to landlords.

In order for us to stay out of trouble, we have to be very careful how we proceed, he said.

The council instructed Garnett and city planning staff to look for a way to create the program without using CDBG funding and to establish guidelines for participating in the program. If city planning staff determine its not feasible, the program will not move forward.

Currently, theres a $5,000 per applicant cap on the citys rental assistance program. That program is being run in partnership with CASA and St. Vincent De Paul and St. Ann churches.
President of Siemens Healthineers Asia Pacific: Digitalization the biggest trend of medical industry

By:Lu Yukun | From:english.eastday.com | 2021-02-09 20:08

The past year was doomed to be a tumultuous year for most enterprises around the globe. It presented a challenge that every enterprise had to take up and decide whether to remain stuck in trouble or to turn crisis into opportunity. The same is true for Siemens Healthineers, a leading global medical technology company with nearly 150 years of history in China. Elisabeth Staudinger, president of Siemens Healthineers Asia Pacific, was interviewed by Eastday.com and other media, and exchanged her views on the situation of Siemens Healthineers in China in the past year and its prospects for the future.

Challenges and opportunities amid the pandemic

For me the most impressive thing last year was that, as the pandemic unfolded in Wuhan, how the team of Siemens Healthineers really went into to make sure the hospitals can keep running and operating, especially our service engineers, the frontline people who helped to train people and maintain the scanners, as well as everybody there to support them. After receiving the demand from Wuhan on January 22, we delivered a new CT machine from Shanghai factory to Wuhan within 24 hours, and our engineers in Wuhan quickly completed the installation and commissioning and put it into use. At the same time, our three production bases in China resumed their production at the fastest speed, so as to guarantee production capacity for the fight against the epidemic, Elisabeth said.

When talking about the impact of the epidemic on the business, Elisabeth also said frankly that when the epidemic broke out last year, it was really difficult to predict how much impact it would have on Siemens Healthineers' business. "There are mainly two types of business affected, namely Laboratory Diagnostics business and Point-of-Care Diagnostics business. Due to the impact of the epidemic, the number of patients who went to the hospital for routine examination decreased significantly. On the other hand the epidemic also required that we have enough capacity to ensure that the patients are diagnosed and treated in time, which has also created many opportunities. So, on the whole, our business also achieved good results last year. "

Although the epidemic has brought great challenges, it has also promoted the application of innovative solutions. "In fact, as early as in 2019, we demonstrated the 5G remote ultrasound solution. Our 5G remote scanning assistant can help CT scanning and ultrasound scanning. Last year the demand for this solution was particularly urgent due to the epidemic. We quickly transformed the original design into a deliverable product, and now many users are using it. It is worth mentioning that this solution is 100% developed for the Chinese market by our local R&D team. "

Of course, this kind of remote diagnostic and treatment technology is not only used to deal with the epidemic, but also reflects the change of traditional diagnostic and treatment methods. In the future, there will be more applications of remote technologies and robots, which will promote the flow of high-quality medical resources to the third and fourth tier cities and even rural areas, and help improve the level of primary medical care in China.

"People everywhere yearn for high-quality medical services. The medical resources in China's big cities are relatively sufficient, but there are still many unmet medical needs in rural areas, so Siemens Healthineers is also cooperating with Chinese customers and hospitals to provide medical services in remote areas." Elisabeth explained.

Digital medical is the biggest trend of medical industry

In addition to remote medical care, Elisabeth believes that the biggest trend of the medical industry is the digitalization of medical treatment. Siemens Healthineers, which is famous for its professional medical imaging equipment, has been increasing its investment in medical digitalization in recent years, and is committed to promoting the digitalization of images. This also fits in with Shanghais strategy of promoting the development of its artificial intelligence industry.

Siemens Healthineers set up medical innovation center in Zhangjiang

Elisabeth told reporters that in January 2020, Siemens Healthineers established Siemens Healthineers Digital Technology (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. in China, hoping to make more contributions to the "Healthy China 2030 plan" through digital medical solutions. "Siemens Healthineers is very optimistic about the development of artificial intelligence in China, especially in Shanghai. For this reason, we set up this new company in Waigaoqiao Free Trade Zone, Shanghai, so as to create a larger digital technology platform. At the same time, Siemens Healthineers is also cooperating with Zhangjiang High Tech Park to build an open innovation platform, and cooperating with local start-ups, multinational companies, medical institutions and scientific research institutes to explore digital, artificial intelligence and other technologies, so as to better meet the needs of the Chinese market. "

"In recent years, our team has also grown rapidly. China's R&D department has obtained nearly 700 technical patents. In the past, our R&D mainly focused on CT and X-ray equipment. Now we are also increasing R&D efforts in the digital field," Elisabeth added.

"There will be many opportunities in the field of medical imaging artificial intelligence. Today, artificial intelligence can do better and more accurately in many aspects," Elisabeth, to use Elisabeths Chinese name, told reporters. "For example, medical imaging analysis can become easier. At present, most of the medical image data need to be analyzed manually, but now we can complete the daily medical image analysis through core algorithms, deep learning and other artificial intelligence technologies, to help doctors locate the lesions, analyze the disease, assist in diagnosis, and greatly reduce medical misdiagnosis. "

Elisabeth attending the foundation laying ceremony of the new laboratory diagnostics factory in Shanghai in 2018

Talking about the plan for the next five years, Elisabeth said that she was looking forward to the new laboratory diagnostics factory being built by Siemens Healthineers in Zhangjiang, Shanghai. This is the largest investment of Siemens Healthineers in Shanghai in recent years. It is expected to create 500 jobs, with a total investment of 3 billion yuan. The foundation of the new factory in Shanghai marks the expansion of Siemens Healthineers' existing manufacturing capacity in Shanghai, China. "I also look forward to continuing to improve our digital technology and capabilities in Shanghai to support our vision in telemedicine, smart medicine, artificial intelligence, etc. Of course, I also hope that the epidemic will end as soon as possible so that we can travel. There are many places I want to go in China," Elisabeth said with a smile.






In a report issued on Tuesday, the Coffee Exporters Council (Cecafe) said the drop followed record coffee exports in 2020, reports Xinhua news agency.

Brasilia, Feb 10 (IANS) Brazil, the world's leading coffee producer and exporter, exported 3,147,222 60 kg sacks of coffee in January this year, down 9.4 per cent compared to the same month last year (3,474,252 sacks), authorities said.

According to the report, billing in the national currency (Brazilian real) increased 10.2 per cent compared to January 2020 as a result of the real's devaluation against the US dollar.

"We had good results in January, with an increase in billing in reals," Cecafe's president, Nicolas Rueda, said.

Taking into account the harvest period between July 2020 and January 2021, the first month of this year registered an increase of 17.2 per cent compared to the same period of the previous harvest, said Rueda.

According to the report, January foreign sales were lower than the 4,388,120 60 kg bags shipped in December 2020.

The main destination markets for Brazilian coffee are the US, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Japan, Colombia, Russia, Turkey, France and Canada.

--IANS

ksk/



David Hogg, the former student at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Broward County, Florida during the lethal school shooting there, has a knack for publicity. He parlayed his attendance on that awful day into fame as a gun control advocate, an acceptance at Harvard, and co-authorship of a book. Now, apparently seeking vengeance on Mike Lindell for being a pro-Trump advocate of the thesis that there was serious vote fraud behind Joe Biden's electoral victory in 2020, Hogg announced plans to start a rival pillow company. Before he had a product, before he had a manufacturing site, before he even had a name for the product or for the company.



David Hogg in 2019 (photo credit: Lorie Schaull CC BY-2.0 license).

Jim Treacher of PJM has a delightful takedown of Hogg, using his own words and tweets.

You can almost see the cartoon thought-balloon over Hogg's adorable little head: "Hey, if a crazy crackhead can become a multimillionaire by making pillows, how tough can it be?" Unfortunately, young Mr. Hogg is quickly discovering exactly how tough it can be. And thanks to the modern miracle of Twitter, we can watch him sink into a pit of disillusioned despair in real-time.

I NEED A UNIONIZED PILLOW MANUFACTURER IN THE US



Were having a hard time finding one



If you know one PLEASE dm  David Hogg (@davidhogg111) February 5, 2021

Since Lindell's TV commercials show footage of workers in his home state of Minnesota happily stitching together pillows, Hogg seems to realize that outsourcing to China might be a mistake. And because he is appealing to Trump-haters, a union label is a must. That will mean a premium price, but after a couple of days, Hogg realized that costs might be a consideration:

What states would you say are the best to start a business in and why so?



States that are not California (cost of living is way too high)  David Hogg (@davidhogg111) February 7, 2021

California is a high-cost state because greenie land development restrictions and regulations make housing costs double or more those of most states, and because taxes and business regulations are both stratospheric. But these are policies his target consumers must approve of. And, in fact, in Europe, companies that flee high-cost countries to operate in cheaper, less welfare-statish locations are accused of "social dumping." It sounds as though Hogg is flirting with this sin against progressivism.

Hogg has a partner, older (27 years old) and with some business experience, software developer William LeGate, who has offered to put up $100,000 for starting capital (always a key problem for budding entrepreneurs). And the duo scored publicity that would be out of reach for most entrepreneurs less than a week into their venture, an admiring feature in the Washington Post, owned by perhaps the most successful (measured by wealth) entrepreneur in history, Jeff Bezos. They've settled on a name, "Good Pillow," and although they still don't have an actual product, they are seeking sophisticated expert help on a logo, but on a budget:

Looking for top-tier designer who has availability within next 3 hours - will pay $200 to help us finalize our logo by noon. Already have it more or less done, just need an expert's eye re: spacing. Respond with link to portfolio, if interested.  William LeGate - #GoodPillow :) (@williamlegate) February 9, 2021

It is very clear from all of this that their appeal to consumers is a chance to signal virtue, not anything to do with a superior product, which is still an afterthought. Buy a "Good Pillow" because it is not owned by Mike Lindell, but it will help make David Hogg rich! I wonder how big a market that will be  especially if the pillow is expensive and not perceivably better than the bargain basement pillows one might find elsewhere. After all, Hogg has got to cover some other costs, too, via the WaPo:

After sharing memes about the idea on Twitter for the past week, Hogg and LeGate are now formally committing to a list of progressive promises, including using unionized manufacturers and allocating a percentage of profits to charitable organizations chosen by their customers.

Lindell's pitch stresses the superiority of his product, which he avers took years of research to perfect. Hogg has already foreclosed the notion that his product will be anything special. He hasn't even figured out who will manufacture it for him under contract. The logo is more urgent that the product design.

Like fellow progressive Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, David Hogg seems to believe that becoming an entrepreneur is pretty simple. You may not know  because the media have zero interest in publicizing it  that before she turned to politics from bartending, the much-publicized Congresswoman founded a publishing company that turned out to be more than she could handle, failing to publish a single book. Here she is  in her pre-glam nerdy habitus  announcing her plan to put out children's books focusing on urban artists and experiences.

Because she was not yet famous, Ocasio-Cortez, then 22 (two years older than Hogg is now), foundered and failed with no help from publicity at big newspapers or from rich supporters, as Hogg can reasonably anticipate. She even went out of business, leaving an unpaid tax bill of $1,870, owed to New York State. The advocate of higher taxes thought that was very unfair, apparently unaware that lots of taxes apply to businesses whether or not they turn a profit:

"You don't really make a profit in your first year," Ocasio-Cortez said Monday at the Sunshine Bronx Business Incubator in Hunts Point. "To get taxed on top of that is a real whammy."

At last report, N.Y. State is still seeking payment for the bill, now grown to over $2,000 with interest and penalties, and AOC is still stiff-arming the tax man. While a Republican would be pilloried for such behavior, the media are letting her get away with being a tax scofflaw with no adverse publicity.

Because he is already prominent and has support from the personal newspaper of Jeff Bezos, Hogg may find partners and contractors to do all the work and actually sell enough pillows to gun-grabbers to make some money off his planned venture. But it will all be based on his publicity, not his product.

Let's hope he doesn't end up sticking suppliers, workers, or taxpayers with any unpaid bills.
Milestone: 30 Million Toyota Vehicles Produced in U.S.







Indiana-assembled Toyota Sienna Celebrated As 30 Millionth U.S. Produced Vehicle

PLANO, Texas (February 10, 2021)  Toyota Motor North America (TMNA) rolled its 30 millionth U.S.assembled vehicle off the line this week at its Princeton, Indiana manufacturing plant tucked away in the southwest corner of the state. In a fitting tribute, that milestone vehicle was the most recent major model redesign by Toyota to hit the market  the all-new, all-hybrid 2021 Toyota Sienna minivan. With a flash of its lights and a honk of the horn, this versatile and stylish vehicle moved off the production line and into Toyotas history book.

For more than 60 years Toyota has been growing its presence in the U.S. with a commitment to invest locally and assemble cars where they are sold. Toyota began U.S. production in 1986 when it started manufacturing Corollas at its joint venture, New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc. Since that time, Toyota grew to include 10 plants in the U.S. and 14 in North America. Toyota affirmed this commitment by pledging to invest $13 billion in the U.S. over a five-year period starting in 2017 through 2021. The company would hit this target a year early, adding more than 6,500 new jobs.

At Toyota Indiana, the commitment led to the creation of 550 new jobs and an investment of $1.3 billion in new tooling and technology. This resulted in two new major model launches in the past yearthe latest being the 2021 Toyota Sienna. The Sienna is among Toyotas most American vehicles  styled and designed by CALTY Design Studios in California and Michigan and developed and engineered in Michigan at the companys R&D facility.

The 2021 Sienna is the first minivan in the segment to be offered with all-hybrid technology. TMNA has been the number one manufacturer of alternative powered vehicle sales  hybrids, electrified, fuel cells  for 21 consecutive years in the U.S., with cumulative sales of nearly four million during this time. In 2020, alternative powered vehicle sales represented nearly 16 percent of TMNAs sales volume, up 23 percent from or over versus the previous year. The Toyota and Lexus brands currently offer 16 hybrids, electrified and fuel cell vehicles in their lineup.

Being responsible for Toyotas 30-millionth U.S.assembled vehicle is a huge point of pride for all of us at Toyota Indiana, said Leah Curry, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Indiana president. Together with our supplier partners, we build vehicles with our customers in mind. Weve worked hard to give them an all-new Sienna thats ready for any of lifes adventures. That same pride spreads across all the Toyota manufacturing facilities.

For 35 years, our employees have been assembling vehicles in the U.S. with an unwavering commitment to safety and quality, said Brian Krinock, senior vice president, Vehicle Manufacturing & Production Engineering for TMNA. On behalf of our 36,000 employees in the U.S. who help design, engineer, assemble and distribute ten popular Toyota and Lexus models, we thank our loyal customers for putting their trust in our products and going places with us.

About Toyota

Toyota has been a part of the cultural fabric in the U.S. for more than 60 years, and is committed to advancing sustainable, next-generation mobility through our Toyota and Lexus brands, plus our nearly 1,500 dealerships.

Toyota has created a tremendous value chain and directly employs more than 36,000 in the U.S. The company has contributed world-class design, engineering, and assembly of more than 30 million cars and trucks at our 9 manufacturing plants, 10 including our joint venture in Alabama that begins production in 2021.

To help inspire the next generation for a career in STEM-based fields, including mobility, Toyota launched its virtual education hub at www.TourToyota.com with an immersive experience and chance to visit many of our U.S. manufacturing facilities. The hub also includes a series of free STEM-based lessons and curriculum through Toyota USA Foundation partners, virtual field trips and more. For more information about Toyota, visit www.toyotanewsroom.com.
Sarah Jessica Parker continues to play shop girl at her New York City store even though the pandemic is still raging.

The 55-year-old actress was spotted arriving at her SJP Collection store in the South Street Seaport District on Wednesday morning while wearing a pair of shoes from her brand.

The Sex And The City actress was later seen using her phone to shoot a promotional video for her brand.

Entrepreneur: Sarah Jessica Parker was spotted arriving at her SJP Collection store while wearing a pair of the brand's shoes on Wednesday morning

Parker wore a sizable black overcoat featuring a large fleece trim on its upper portion.

Underneath her outer layer, the actress was dressed in a long-sleeve shirt which was tucked into a cozy-looking undergarment.

She contrasted her top choices with a pair of semi-dyed white jeans that had been rolled up to her kneecaps.

The Divorce actress also wore a pair of Busker boots from her shoe collection.

Staying cozy: The Sex And The City actress wore a sizable overcoat featuring a large fleece trim on its upper portion. She added a Proper Cloth mask and a Pretty Connected mask chain

Parker kept her hair tied back in a ponytail and wore a pair of headphones and a gray facial covering when she arrived at her store.

She accessorized with various pairs of earrings, a grey mask from Proper Cloth - and a silver mask chain from Pretty Connected.

The actress first launched SJP Collection with her business partner George Malkemus in 2014, and the brand's products were initially distributed through the retailer Nordstrom.

The line later expanded to include fragrances, sunglasses and various accessories.

Branching out: Since founding SJP Collection in 2014, the line has expanded to include fragrances and sunglasses, among other products

Parker often makes appearances at the brand's stores to promote SJP Collection's products and meet with her fans.

In September of last year, the actress sat down for an interview with Footwear News and spoke about her favorite aspect of running a storefront.

She revealed, 'The best part about retail is the customer. It is truly the most fun, the most surprising, the most mysterious, the most inspiring thing  being in a room, on the floor with a customer.'

Getting the word out: After entering her store, Parker was spotted filming a promotional video for the brand

Opinion: In September, the actress took part in an interview where she remarked that the 'best part about retail is the customer

The New Year's Eve actress also noted that she tries to maintain an intimate connection with her clientele, as she feels that approach works better for her brand.

'Weve learned that you dont need a hundred shops across a globe. You need a touchstone, you need a place that feels real to people,' she said.

Parker then spoke about what her Sex And The City character Carrie Bradshaw would feel regarding shopping in New York City amid the global pandemic.

The actress remarked, 'I have a feeling that she would still be somebody who really loves the experience of walking into a store, especially a store where she has a history, and feeling a connection to something.'
TAMPA, Fla., Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Ron Whitchurch spent 50 years safely putting people to sleep, watching over them as they dozed through operations both planned and unplanned. In his new book, 50 Years in the OR: True Stories of Life, Loss, and Laughter While Giving Anesthesia (Loon Lake Press), he takes readers along for some of his most memorable cases. These incidents stood out in a long career in which he enjoyed every minute of this life-and-death job.

Ron Whitchurch 50 Years In The OR

He writes about his first post in a rural area near an Indian reservation, "We got almost every kind of emergency and trauma imaginable, from shootings, stabbings, beatings, and car wrecks to appendicitis, ectopic pregnancies, bowel obstructions, fish hooks in various body parts, and fractures. And, during deer hunting season in November, all the big-city hunters would converge on our north woods and fill the emergency room regularly with some of the most bizarre injuries imaginable."

Whitchurch worked in both rural and city environments before retiring two years ago. He points out that more than one-half of all the anesthetics administered in the U.S. are provided by certified registered nurse anesthetists (CRNAs) like himself, yet most people are unaware of this profession. For example, in an article about his mother written for a church bulletin, the writer mistakenly described him as an atheist  instead of an anesthetist.

In an interview, he can discuss:

What CRNAs do and why they are the unsung heroes of the OR

What patients need to know about anesthesia

The incident that frightened him most and what led up to it

The clever game he played to allay children's fears and why he had to stop using it

The patient with the funniest tattoo on her bottom

The strange case of the lady with multiple personalities

Praise for 50 Years in the OR

"I loved reading this wonderful collection of triumphs, tragedies, near misses, and so many funny situations in the OR. Ron is an anesthesia historian, a keen observer of the quirks and ironies of life in surgery and a colorful storyteller. A fascinating and clearly explained glimpse at the world on the other side of the drapes."  Antonio J. Gayoso, M.D., ASPS, ASAPS

"Ron Whitchurch has the observation, wit and insight of a modern-day Mark Twain and the eyebrows and mustache to match."  Koco Eaton, M.D., ABOS, team physician, Tampa Bay Rays

"These are amazing, authentic memories of as broad a scope of cases as one could imagine, stories that could not have been made up and told with insight, transparency and an indomitable sense of humor. Such a rich experience is a must-read for anyone who has had or is interested in anesthesia."  Sondra Shields, M.D., Mayo Clinic-trained, board-certified in anesthesiology and pain management

About the Author

Ron Whitchurch was raised in Minneapolis, Minn., where a part-time job as an orderly in a large hospital convinced him that healthcare was his calling. He earned his R.N. from Abbott Hospital before graduating from the Minneapolis School of Anesthesia's nurse anesthesia program. He became a CRNA in 1971. For the next 16 years, he worked in a 100-bed hospital in Bemidji, Minn., sharing the caseload with another CRNA and two part-timers. After moving to Tampa in 1987, he worked in a large group of CRNAs and anesthesiologists. He and his wife were the founders of Lonni's Sandwiches, Etc., in St. Petersburg.

Contact: Ron Whitchurch at (727) 221-3570; [email protected]; https://50yearsintheor.com

SOURCE Ron Whitchurch

SAN DIEGO, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Mapp, the international provider of insight-led customer engagement, is rolling out a major product update to its Mapp Cloud marketing platform.

The Winter Update launches eleven new functionalities  including substantial innovations in mobile push and comprehensive enhancements to the data export capabilities in the customer analytics solution, Mapp Intelligence. The product updates are designed to help customers operate more effectively and efficiently in their cross-channel strategy, relying on one centralized data source.

Michael Diestelberg, VP Product & Marketing at Mapp, comments: "In our conversations with marketers around the world, it has become clear that the requirements for successful customer communications have increased significantly over the past year. It is more important than ever to be able to successfully implement data-based strategies. In particular, the seamless linking of customer insights and personalized communication has become an essential skill that every marketer must master. Therefore, with the Mapp Cloud Winter Update, we are implementing numerous requests from our customers so that they can do their work even more efficiently and profitably."

In the Winter Update, Mapp has placed a special focus on mobile push within the cross-channel marketing solution, Mapp Engage. Complex contact scenarios can be mapped and analyzed even more easily to ensure consistent exchanges with consumers and more revenue-creating interactions, in the marketing automation module.

With the new A/B testing for mobile push messages , Mapp Engage in the future will allow to test two or more variations of their mobile push messages for their unique use cases. In this way, they can achieve the most effective automation workflow with the best conversion. This takes the possibilities for successful cross-channel engagement to the next level, allowing marketers to send perfectly targeted push messages.

, Mapp Engage in the future will allow to test two or more variations of their mobile push messages for their unique use cases. In this way, they can achieve the most effective automation workflow with the best conversion. This takes the possibilities for successful cross-channel engagement to the next level, allowing marketers to send perfectly targeted push messages. At the same time, the mobile push channel can now be managed via API . This enables marketers to create customized solutions for sending messages to their customers' smartphones. In particular, the ability to integrate this communication channel directly into the company's existing systems represents a significant simplification and increase in efficiency.

can now be . This enables marketers to create customized solutions for sending messages to their customers' smartphones. In particular, the ability to integrate this communication channel directly into the company's existing systems represents a significant simplification and increase in efficiency. Marketers can now identify target groups based on sent push notifications by using mobile push and in-app events in the segmentation builder. This advanced segmentation capability in Mapp Engage ensures precise targeting and tailored campaigns. In addition, mobile push events are now available in the response queue and can be queried in real time.

To boost customer engagement, Mapp Engage now also offers the option to create and automatically send reminder campaigns to those abandoning their shopping carts and wishlists.

In addition, Mapp Engage in the future features optimized audience management. To manage elaborate marketing scenarios, existing target groups that have already been created in the segmentation builder can be reused, saving valuable time, and enabling campaigns to be launched more quickly.

In addition to numerous new features in Mapp Engage, a completely revamped export management for reports and analyses is available for Mapp Intelligence users. This enhancement includes these exciting new capabilities:

The export management monitoring actively informs users about any faulty exports. Errors can be viewed centrally across all company accounts. In the case of planned exports, customers can jump directly to the problematic reports via a link, in order to intervene directly.

actively informs users about any faulty exports. Errors can be viewed centrally across all company accounts. In the case of planned exports, customers can jump directly to the problematic reports via a link, in order to intervene directly. Multiple export schedules for reports can now be configured to manage schedules, so marketers receive regular updates for relevant dashboards. Reports can also be exported automatically to any SFTP server.

can now be configured to manage schedules, so marketers receive regular updates for relevant dashboards. Reports can also be exported automatically to any SFTP server. The new connection profile store allows connection profiles for export destinations to be managed in one central location. Administrators can configure multiple export destinations without having to share passwords and other connection details. At the same time, administrators retain full control over who can configure scheduled exports.

Mapp's Winter Update includes additional new functionalities and enhancements. A detailed summary of all new features can be found here:

https://mapp.com/product-updates-winter-2021/

About Mapp

Marketers and data specialists should be able to focus on what will make a difference for their business, instead of spending all their time taming the technology behind it. With the insight-led customer engagement platform Mapp Cloud, they can focus on what really counts  and the exciting insights that come with it. Thanks to customer intelligence and marketing analytics, companies can easily and effectively gain data-driven customer insights across all channels in order to trigger highly personalized marketing activities. Customers benefit from AI-supported forecasting models that enable targeted and self-optimizing cross-channel campaigns. Automated messages are sent via the most suitable marketing channel, at the right time, with the optimal contact frequency. Thanks to advanced one-to-one personalization, the highest levels of engagement and long-term customer loyalty are achieved.

Mapp has global offices in six countries. Mapp's digital marketing platform helps more than 3,000 companies break away from the pack by uncovering missed opportunities, including Argos, Ella's Kitchen, Expert, Freesat, Lloyds Banking Group, MyToys, Pepsico, Quint and The Entertainer.

Press contact:

PR Agency: The PR Network

Matt Cartmell

+44 (0)7930485333

[email protected]

www.thepr.network

Mapp Digital

Harald Oberhofer

+49 30 755 415 120

[email protected]

www.mapp.com

SOURCE Mapp

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101cats/iStockBy WILL STEAKIN, ABC News



(WASHINGTON) -- At Donald Trump's second impeachment trial, a core argument made by the former president's legal team, and by Republicans, is that the trial is unconstitutional because Trump is no longer in office.



But at campaign rallies amid his reelection push, Trump himself repeatedly targeted former President Barack Obama, calling for his predecessor to be impeached despite being out of office for years, even joking about a "belated impeachment."



Arguing on the Senate floor on Tuesday during the first day of Trump's second impeachment trial, lawyer David Schoen forcefully argued that the trial was unconstitutional.



"Presidents are impeachable because presidents are removable. Former presidents are not, because they cannot be removed. The Constitution is clear," Schoen said. "Trial by the Senate sitting as a court of impeachment is reserved for the president of the United States, not a private citizen who used to be president of the United States."



In a brief submitted on Feb. 2 ahead of the trial, Trump's newly appointed legal team stated the trial is unconstitutional: "Since the 45th President is no longer 'President,' the clause 'shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for ...' is impossible."



The argument also has emerged as a central theme for Republicans and a way to focus on the process of the trial and avoid addressing whether or not Trump committed impeachable offenses tied to the Capitol attack. Last month, 45 Republican senators voted to dismiss the trial as unconstitutional on the grounds Trump is no longer president, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who said Trump "provoked" the mob that attacked the Capitol.



Facing his first impeachment trial for allegedly pressuring Ukraine for dirt on political opponents, Trump lashed out at Obama at multiple rallies around the country, calling for the former president to be impeached for promising "you can keep your doctor" -- referring to the Affordable Care Act -- despite having left office years earlier.



The night Congress voted to impeach Trump, Dec. 18, 2019, Trump first called for the former president to be impeached at a campaign rally in Battle Creek, Michigan.



"Remember Obama, 28 times? 'You can have your doctor, you can have your plan.' It did not work out that way, did it? I think we should impeach him for that. Let's impeach him. For that, for the IRS scandal, for the guns? Remember the guns?" Trump said at the packed rally. "Impeach him."



After being acquitted in the Senate in early February 2020, Trump again called for Obama to be impeached at a rally on Feb. 20 in Colorado Springs, Colorado, saying: "We should impeach him. We should impeach him. Impeach Obama."



The former president made similar statements a few days later at a rally in North Charleston, South Carolina, and then later that same month, at a rally in Las Vegas, Trump called for a "belated impeachment" of Obama before walking back the comment and saying it was a joke.



"Remember President Obama? He said, 'You can keep your doctor, keep your plan.' He lied. So we should impeach him. We should impeach him. We are going to impeach him. We will do a belated impeachment," Trump said. "We will do a belated impeachment."



"You have to be very careful when you say 'impeachment' because they go back and they write," Trump said, referring to the media. "I'm just kidding, OK?"



Representatives for Trump didn't respond to requests for comment on this story.



At the start of Tuesday's trial, Rep. David Cicilline, D-R.I., offered a pre-rebuttal for some arguments anticipated from former Trump's legal team, including the claim that the trial is now unconstitutional.



"The former president who promised on a Bible to use his power faithfully can and should answer for whether he kept that promise while bound by it in office," Cicilline said. "His insistence otherwise is just wrong. And so is his claim that there's a slippery slope to impeaching private citizens if you proceed."



Copyright  2021, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.
Louth Senator Erin McGreehan has welcomed a comprehensive 160m package of measures to help businesses and workers during the pandemic.

The package includes the Employment Wage Subsidy Scheme (EWSS), the Pandemic Unemployment Payment (PUP), the Covid Restrictions Support Scheme (CRSS), low-cost loans, the deferral and warehousing of tax liabilities and the waiver of commercial rates.

Senator McGreehan commented: These additional supports show that the Government are engaging, listening and responding to the needs of businesses as the pandemic continues to impact on their operations.

Businesses want to get back to what they do best  to be in a position to trade unhindered by Covid, to be profitable and to expand their operations once again.

An additional 10m will be allocated to the Covid-19 Products Scheme to help in the fight against the virus.

Firms researching or manufacturing PPE, sanitisers, tests, equipment or other medicinal products which are relevant to Covid-19 are eligible for funding of up to 50% of their capital costs.

Announced is a new 60m Scheme, called the COVID-19 Business Aid Scheme (CBAS) which is being developed to provide grants to businesses ineligible for the Governments other existing schemes designed to help with fixed costs.

Wholesalers, suppliers, caterers & events companies down 75% or more in turnover will benefit.

The Government also approved an additional 90m for the Sustaining Enterprise Fund, which offers funding of up to 800,000, with 200,000 or 50% in non-repayable grants to eligible manufacturing and internationally traded services companies.

The Fund has protected 22,000 jobs across the country to date.
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This illustrates chaos, discomfort; its like an explosion. Beethoven could have introduced the solo and choral voices immediately, but he wanted first to tell a story in instruments. We know that he always fought for the ideals of the French Revolution. Im convinced that what he wanted to tell us here is, Listen, not everything is beautiful in our world. Is it war? Is it another kind of conflict? Whatever it is, everything that destroys our soul is somehow here.

This must be as dissonant as possible, and it is as dissonant as possible. That it is a presto  extremely quick  is clear. And Beethoven starts not on the downbeat, but on the third beat; he starts with a syncope, something that brings unrest in a rhythm. He wanted to have it be uneven. The end of the slow movement is pleasant, and then he needed to shock people. Its desperation; its turmoil; its a riot.
BOSTON, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- IDTechEx have recently launched "Antimicrobial Technology Market 20212031," a market research report covering additives and coatings that imbue surfaces and products with the ability to remove microorganisms such as bacteria, virus, and fungi. This market has received significant attention from governments, industry, and even consumers over the past year (2020) due to the technology's potential to address transmission of COVID-19, with some companies experiencing triple- and quadruple-digit growth. Antimicrobial films and antimicrobial face masks are just two of the best-selling product types during the pandemic.

IDTechEx has tracked 60+ companies in the brand new antimicrobial report

Antimicrobial technologies, as covered in the brand new IDTechEx report, continuously remove (deactivate or destroy) microorganisms with little if any human intervention. Microorganisms that are targeted by these technologies can cause serious harm to human health and damage to property. The limitation is that antimicrobial surfaces do not replace the need for frequent cleaning.

IDTechEx's latest report, "Antimicrobial Technology Market 20212031" examines key antimicrobial technologies utilized by the industry. These include silver-based, copper-based, zinc-based technologies that leverage the oligodynamic effect of metals, as well as coatings containing silane quaternary ammonium compounds, and titanium dioxide, which utilize mechanical and chemical mechanisms respectively. The report highlights companies commercializing each technology, including comparison of efficacy claims and interviews with companies.

In addition to the core technologies, IDTechEx have also identified an additional 10 technologies of interest. These include innovative methods to stabilize and localize traditional disinfectants, as well as biomimetic technologies such as peptides and dyes.

IDTechEx have identified over 100 companies that have developed antimicrobial technologies, including over 60 companies focusing entirely on antimicrobial product development. Though the antimicrobial properties of materials such as silver and copper have been known for centuries, it is only recently that commercialization of these technologies has increased significantly. The report also includes discussion of business models, market sizing, market outlook, market forecast, and the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on this industry.

Caption: IDTechEx has tracked 60+ companies in the brand new antimicrobial report. Source: "Antimicrobial Technology Market 20212031."

Aside from fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, antimicrobial technologies are utilized in healthcare, food, agriculture, transport, construction, marine, and textiles industries. Antimicrobial technologies have a wide range of applications, from saving lives by preventing nosocomial infection to prolonging the lifetime of outdoor furniture to improving indoor air quality.

The brand new IDTechEx report, "Antimicrobial Technology Market 20212031" provides a comprehensive overview of the antimicrobial industry, including insights obtained from primary interviews with industry players. With high demand and awareness of antimicrobial technologies, companies should strike while the iron is still hot. Though vaccination efforts will allow the world to move on from COVID-19, the key lesson to be learned is that the groundwork needs to be laid down today in order for the world to be ready for the next pandemic.

To find out more about the IDTechex report on antimicrobial industry, please visit www.IDTechEx.com/antimicrobial. This report falls within the Healthcare market research portfolio.

About IDTechEx

IDTechEx guides your strategic business decisions through its Research, Subscription and Consultancy products, helping you profit from emerging technologies. For more information, contact [email protected] or visit www.IDTechEx.com.

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In the shadow of last years enduring reckoning over who we choose to honor through statues and naming rights, one local lawmaker is asking for a full review of the names born by the states prisons.

State Rep. James White, R-Hillister, is calling on the Texas Department of Criminal Justice to conduct a full review of each prison units name.

White, chairman of the House Corrections Committee, listed a few examples of units that defy (the) pattern of recognizing excellent service in a letter about the issue.

The Darrington unit, in Brazoria County, was named after John Darrington.

White notes that Darrington never actually lived in Texas, and he sold his land in Texas after slavery was abolished and the large plantation was made less profitable.

Related: Leaders press Senate on East Texas gambling

Huntsvilles Goree Unit was named after Thomas Goree, one of the first post-Civil War prison directors. He expanded convict leasing, a practice that eventually was renounced by the Texas Legislature and other officials and terminated more than a century ago, White said.

The Eastham Unit was named after plantation owners who probably benefited from the odious practice of convict leasing.

White says once convict leasing was discontinued, the land was sold to the Texas prison system because the enterprises were no longer profitable.

In Southeast Texas, state prisons are largely named after politicians or other leaders.

The Goodman Transfer Unit in Jasper is named for Glen Ray Goodman, whom the TDCJ credits with implementing a substance-abuse program used by the unit.

Top hits: Get Beaumont Enterprise stories sent directly to your inbox

The Stiles, Gist and Leblanc units in Jefferson County were named after more recent local political figures, including the late Judge Larry Gist, who was honored in 2004 with a Judicial Lifetime Achievement Award by the State Bar of Texas.

Whites Chief of Staff, Saul Mendoza, said White wants to give the Texas Board of Criminal Justice the task of re-evaluating which units should be renamed.

As an educator that has taught history, I understand the sensitive nature of historical topics, White said in the release. Nevertheless, this is not about who rode with who on the battlefield or the color of uniforms, or even a persons particular political policy position or partisan affiliation; this is about the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. It is about who we celebrate and the values we champion.

As of Tuesday, Mendoza said the office had not yet received a response from TDCJ or any members of the Criminal Justice board.

The TBCJs next meeting is Feb. 19, but the governor-appointed body has not yet listed an agenda on its website.

kaitlin.bain@beaumontenterprise.com

twitter.com/KaitlinBain
Hamas and Palestinian Authority agree on vote Cairo talks a success, elections on May 22 and July 31

(ANSAmed) - GAZA, FEBRUARY - Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on Wednesday called Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas to congratulate him on the success of inter-Palestinian talks in Cairo.



The talks came to a close on Tuesday with a detailed agreement between the various factions involved on how parliamentary (May 22) and presidential (July 31) elections will be held.



Local media reported the news, noting that both Hamas and Fatah appeared optimistic.



One Hamas leader, Ghazi Hammad, told the television station al-Ghad that his movement was prepared to enter a future Palestinian Authority government even if its positions have not changed.



He stressed that Hamas continues to oppose any Palestinian recognition of Israel and any security coordination with it.



Fatah's Jibril Rajub noted that the elections are an important step towards the establishment of an independent state.



On the agreement reached on Tuesday with the other factions involved, Rajub noted that "this is a sad, bleak day for the fascist government under (Israeli prime minister Benyamin) Netanyahu), while for us it is a day of happiness".



The Islamic Jihad noted that it will neither take part in the elections nor hinder them in any way. (ANSAmed).






BBC preventers have poked fun at a mishap which saw a Texas lawyer appear as a fluffy white kitten during a Zoom hearing.

Presidio County attorney Rod Ponton became an internet sensation after accidentally leaving a cat filter on during the Zoom call on Tuesday.

He appeared, in human form, on BBC News on Wednesday to talk about the gaff but when the camera cut back to Reeta Chakrabarti, the presenter had taken on a distinctly feline appearance herself.

'Well, they said they would do this to me and they have,' Chakrabarti said from behind a filter that superimposed a cat's snout, whiskers and ears onto her face.

'It was inevitable I supposed and it'll give you paws for thought,' she said.

Presenters of the British broadcaster's flagship BBC Radio 4 Today programme also tittered at the story earlier on Wednesday, with Nick Robinson ending his radio interview with Ponton saying: 'Thank you Mr Ponton, and meow.'

'Meow, meow,' Ponton said in response.

The attorney said he is happy to have 'provided a good laugh' with his accidental antics.

'I did not know that Zoom could turn me into a cat, and I did not know that a cat Zoom could turn me into an internet celebrity but it all happened in just a matter of hours,' Ponton told Robinson.

'It turns out it provided a good laugh for the country,' he said.

Presidio County attorney Rod Ponton (right) became an internet sensation after accidentally leaving a cat filter on during the Zoom call on Tuesday

In the now-viral video, Ponton hilariously tells the judge presiding over the hearing 'I'm not a cat' as he frantically tries to remove the animated image.

The video has been viewed at least 20million times as of Wednesday morning, with the amusing mishap apparently striking a chord with the millions around the world who have had to get to grips with remote working during the coronavirus pandemic.

'I think that anybody who's ever struggled with a computer or with Zoom could recognize that those kind of things could happen and it certainly did happen to me,' Ponton said.

The video begins with presiding judge Roy Ferguson telling Ponton: 'I believe you have a filter turned on in video settings and you might want to turn it off.'

Ponton, 69, is then heard letting out a panicked 'aghh', as the fluffy white kitten filter over his face begins shifting its eyes back-and-forth and moving its mouth in unison with his voice.

'Can you hear me judge?' the feline-emblazoned Ponto is heard asking, his voice quivering.

Ferguson confirms that he can hear Ponton and reiterates that he believes he has a filter switched on.

'It is [a filter]', Ponton hastily interjects. 'And I don't know how to remove it. I've got my assistant here, she's trying to, but ahhh I'm prepared to go forward with it I'm here live, I'm not a cat.'

BBC preventers have poked fun at a mishap which saw a Texas lawyer appear as a fluffy white kitten during a Zoom hearing. Presidio County attorney Rod Ponton became an internet sensation after accidentally leaving a cat filter on during the Zoom call on Tuesday. He appeared, in human form, on BBC News on Wednesday to talk about the gaff but when the camera cut back to Reeta Chakrabarti, the presenter had taken on a distinctly feline appearance herself

At this point, the two other people present at the 394th Judicial District Court of Brewster hearing - H. Gibbs Bauer and Jerry L. Phillips - begin to laugh.

Judge Ferguson, however, manages to keep a straight face, offering a deadpan response of, 'I can see that.'

The judge then begins calmly offering Ponton a step-by-step guide for how to remove the kitten filter, before the video abruptly cuts out.

Ponton has since revealed that he was using his secretary's computer at a remote office in Presidio, telling the San Antonio Express that this is the first time something like this has happened in the eight months he's been using Zoom amid the pandemic.

'It was certainly not an intentional thing to put the cat image up there but s*** happens,' he laughed. 'If I can make everybody laugh for a moment at my expense, I'll take it.'

The amusing mishap happened to attorney Rod Ponton during a live streamed hearing this morning for the 394th Judicial District Court of Brewster

Ponton said the filter was eventually removed and the hearing was able to continue as normal, though his secretary was 'mortified.'

He told the BBC that he was originally taken aback by the 'deluge of phone calls and emails' that came in following the video's publication as he is not on Twitter and was unaware of his newfound fame.

He said he had since decided to take it all in his stride.

'The Texans have a phrase 'You can't put toothpaste back in the tube' and I finally realised that this was gonna become an internet sensation,' he said.

'I just had to laugh at myself along with everybody else doing so and roll with it.'

Speaking to Vice on Tuesday, Ponton revealed that the hearing was being held for a man who was attempting to exit the US with contraband and illicitly-obtained cash.

Judge Ferguson (above in different hearing) managed to keep a straight face throughout the ordeal

Judge Ferguson released the video, which has been viewed at least 20million times as of Wednesday morning, saying it showed the 'legal profession's dedication'.

'IMPORTANT ZOOM TIP: If a child used your computer, before you join a virtual hearing check the Zoom Video Options to be sure filters are off. This kitten just made a formal announcement on a case in the 394th,' Ferguson wrote on Twitter after the call.

He continued in a second post: 'These fun moments are a by-product of the legal profession's dedication to ensuring that the justice system continues to function in these tough times. Everyone involved handled it with dignity, and the filtered lawyer showed incredible grace. True professionalism all around!'

Reaction among legal colleagues in the region began cropping up on Twitter in the hours since the video was shared online.

Kendyl Hanks called the exchange 'one of the funniest things I've ever seen'.

'The poor lawyer can't figure out how to turn off the filter so offers to proceed anyway, promising the judge he's not a cat. And kudos to [Judge Ferguson] for walking him through it calmly without bursting into giggles.'

Harold Cook added: 'Well we all suspected Rod Ponton would one day become accidentally famous for something. But I didn't have this on my bingo card.'

Ponton was formerly the District Attorney in the Big Bend region and was once the city attorney for Presidio.

He also appeared in the Netflix documentary The Confession Killer in 2019 about the infamous convicted murderer Henry Lee Lucas, whom he represented in his 1986 capital murder prosecution.
-- China's Tianwen-1 probe enters orbit around Mars Wednesday night.

-- It marks the first time that a Chinese spacecraft has orbited an extraterrestrial planet, and a key step in China's current Mars exploration program, which is designed to complete orbiting, landing and roving in one mission.

-- Tianwen-1 will now conduct multiple orbital corrections to enter a temporary Mars parking orbit, surveying potential landing sites in preparation to land in May or June.

by Xinhua writers Li Mi, Yu Fei, Quan Xiaoshu

BEIJING, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- China's Tianwen-1 probe successfully entered the orbit around Mars on Wednesday after a nearly seven-month voyage from Earth.

"Tianwen-1 entered the orbit around Mars exactly as it was designed," said Zhang Rongqiao, chief designer of China's first Mars exploration mission. "We are looking forward to a successful landing on Mars."

It marks the first time that a Chinese spacecraft has orbited an extraterrestrial planet, he noted.

A 3000N engine was ignited at 7:52 p.m. (Beijing time) to decelerate Tianwen-1, according to the China National Space Administration (CNSA).

After about 15 minutes, the spacecraft, including an orbiter, a lander and a rover, had slowed enough to be captured by Mars' gravity and entered an elliptical orbit around the red planet, with its closest distance from the Martian surface at about 400 km. It will take Tianwen-1 about 10 Earth days to complete one circle.

The development marks China's completion of a key step in its current Mars exploration program, which is designed to complete orbiting, landing and roving in one mission, said the CNSA.

Zhang Rongqiao, chief designer of China's first Mars exploration mission, speaks in an interview at the Beijing Aerospace Control Center in Beijing, capital of China, Feb. 10, 2021. China's Tianwen-1 probe successfully entered the orbit around Mars on Wednesday after a nearly seven-month voyage from Earth. (Xinhua/Jin Liwang)

After entering the Mars orbit, payloads aboard the orbiter, including cameras and various particle analyzers, will next start working and carry out surveys of the planet.

Tianwen-1 was launched via a Long March-5 rocket, China's largest launch vehicle, from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site on the coast of southern China's island province of Hainan on July 23, 2020.

Tianwen-1 has been traveling in space for 202 days. It has carried out four orbital corrections and a deep-space maneuver. It has flown 475 million km and was 192 million km from Earth when it reached the Mars orbit.

A steerable radio telescope with a 70-meter-diameter antenna in Wuqing District of northern China's Tianjin City is a key facility receiving scientific data sent back by the Mars probe. The one-way communication delay is about 10.7 minutes.

Tianwen-1 will now conduct multiple orbital corrections to enter a temporary Mars parking orbit, surveying potential landing sites in preparation to land in May or June.

The most challenging part of the mission will be the soft landing, an autonomous process of the probe lasting seven to eight minutes. The probe will use its aerodynamic shape, parachute and retrorocket to decelerate and buffer legs to touch down.

Technical personnel monitor China's Tianwen-1 probe at the Beijing Aerospace Control Center in Beijing, capital of China, Feb. 10, 2021. China's Tianwen-1 probe successfully entered the orbit around Mars on Wednesday after a nearly seven-month voyage from Earth. (CNSA/Handout via Xinhua)

Chinese space engineers and scientists have chosen a relatively flat region in the southern part of the Utopia Planitia, a large plain, as the potential landing zone.

The site was selected for its conditions for a safe landing and scientific research value. The place has not been investigated by other countries, so the scientific data can be shared with other countries to enrich the world's understanding of Mars.

Earlier research showed the potential landing site might be the edge of an ancient ocean or lake in the early history of Mars. Chinese scientists are looking forward to finding more evidence of water-ice.

The rover will be released after the landing to conduct scientific exploration with an expected lifespan of at least 90 Martian days (about three months on Earth), and the orbiter, with a design life of one Martian year (about 687 days on Earth), will relay communications for the rover while conducting its own scientific detection.

The scientific goals include mapping the morphology and geological structure, investigating surface soil characteristics and water-ice distribution, analyzing the surface material composition, measuring the ionosphere and the characteristics of the Martian climate and environment at the surface, and perceiving the physical fields and internal structure of Mars.

Technical personnel celebrate after China's Tianwen-1 probe successfully entered the orbit around Mars at the Beijing Aerospace Control Center in Beijing, capital of China, Feb. 10, 2021. China's Tianwen-1 probe successfully entered the orbit around Mars on Wednesday after a nearly seven-month voyage from Earth. (Xinhua/Jin Liwang)

The Mars mission has attracted active participation of non-governmental research agencies, with more than 600 domestic organizations joining the development of the probe system alone.

Extensive international cooperation has also been carried out. China works with the European Space Agency and Argentina in the mission's measurement and control, and with France and Austria in the calibration of multiple payloads and data analysis.

If China can succeed in orbiting, landing and roving with Tianwen-1, it will take the challenge of collecting and bringing back samples in the next Mars mission, as well as exploring asteroids and the Jovian system, said Geng Yan, an official at the Lunar Exploration and Space Program Center of the CNSA.

Tianwen-1 means Questions to Heaven and comes from a poem written by Qu Yuan (about 340-278 BC), one of the greatest poets of ancient China. The name signifies the Chinese nation's perseverance in pursuing truth and science and exploring nature and the universe, according to the CNSA.

(Yang Lu also contributed to the story.)
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For six years, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia has played a brutal, bloody role in propping up the besieged government of neighboring Yemen, where Iran-backed Houthi rebels seized the capital in 2015 and have waged war ever since.

Soon, it will no longer do so with the helping hand of the United States, which under Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump provided precision-guided missiles, other arms, money and even troops in the form of secret deployments of Green Berets operating on the Saudi side to destroy missiles and launch sites.

President Joe Biden announced last week that the United States would end its support for Saudi Arabias intercession in the Yemens civil war, a move that includes suspending relevant arms sales. It also is moving to rescind the Trump administrations Jan. 19 designation of the Houthi rebels as a terrorist organization  a move welcomed by the United Nations as a step toward alleviating the worlds worst humanitarian crisis.

We support both decisions, and the signals Biden has sent on foreign policy since being sworn in Jan. 20.

On HoustonChronicle.com: U.S. must get out of Yemen

We also recognize that some critics have raised legitimate concerns that, by cutting support for Saudi Arabia, the United States risks sending a message to the Houthis and their Iranian sponsors that theyve been given a free pass to continue brutality of their own in a deadly civil war that they instigated.

But whats clear is that policies of the Obama and Trump administrations have dragged America into a conflict it should have quit years ago, and into partnership with a nation whose own record of human rights abuses deserves censure, not continued cooperation.

Despite American aid, the civil war has persisted with terrible consequences for the civilian population in Yemen and, to a growing degree, Saudi Arabia, too.

About 100,000 Yemenis  many of them children  have died and 8 million or more are said to now be uprooted. Disease, hunger and homelessness are daily factors as the war rages on.

Two years ago, in a rare break with Trump, the Republican-led U.S. Senate called for America to end its support of Saudi Arabias role in the conflict, voting 56-41.

As we noted approvingly at the time of the Senates vote, The United States originally got involved in this war to support regional allies. We agreed with Saudi Arabias conclusion that a coup next door in Yemen could threaten its government. But things have changed, not just in terms of the conduct of the war, which has turned ugly, but also in our relations with the Saudis.

The White House ignored the resolution. (And when they tried again in 2019, when for the first time in history the House and Senate both approved a resolution under the War Powers Act, he vetoed it.)

The United States has instead expanded its partnership with Saudi Arabia, including selling tens of billions of dollars in arms to the kingdom. That persisted even as it became clear in 2018 that the ruling family in Riyadh was behind the outrageous murder of the Washington Post journalist and U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi.

Trump promptly caved on the red line he had drawn just weeks before, pledging severe punishment for the Saudis if they were found to be responsible for murder.

But he kept another promise: his America first foreign policy, announced in his 2017 inaugural address, that Americas diplomatic priorities would no longer be encumbered by human rights concerns.

Biden is quickly rooting out the most obvious pitfalls of America first in our foreign policy. He has expanded the number of refugees America will accept from 15,000 this year to 125,000 next and, more broadly, restored human rights as at least a factor in how we conduct ourselves on the world stage.

He has many challenges on that front, not the least of which is how hell pressure China on its murderous treatment of the Uighur minority in the Xinjiang region. But in the long run the return to a values-centered foreign policy will boost Americas influence in the world, and that in turn will make our nation safer.

That doesnt mean our challenges around the globe will get suddenly easier.

The rebels in Houthi mean Saudi Arabia no good, and given their strong support from Iran, they are no friends of America, either. But rather than powering Saudi Arabias offensive, Biden has named a special envoy to Yemen, and pledged to support efforts to find a cease-fire, which the UN and others call the first step toward allowing humanitarian aid.

The United States must also rally our allies, including the UK which has yet to suspend arm sales to the Saudis, to a united front capable of putting diplomatic pressure on both sides of the civil war with the aim of a negotiated peace.

This war has to end, Biden said last week. Now he must put the pieces in place to make that happen.

Correction: Feb. 11: The piece has been updated to correct the vote count in the U.S. Senate on a 2018 resolution opposing American involvement in Yemen.
February 09, 2021 " Information Clearing House " - In a new interview with CBS Evening News, President Biden confirmed that his administration will not be lifting sanctions imposed upon Iran in order to bring Tehran to the negotiating table for the restoration of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal.

Will the U.S. lift sanctions first in order to get Iran back to the negotiating table? Biden was asked by CBSs Norah ODonnell.

No, the president replied.

They have to stop enriching uranium first, asked ODonnell.

Biden nodded in response.

https://twitter.com/NorahODonnell/status/1358441977474334721

There are a few things that are ridiculous about this, the first being that the JCPOA does not require that Iran stop enriching uranium at all. As explained by Al-Monitors Arash Karami, the deal only calls for Iran to keep its level of uranium enrichment at up to 3.67 %, a level it only began exceeding when the Trump administration backed out of the deal and imposed sanctions. The administration later clarified that Biden meant Iran would have to return to its JCPOA levels before negotiations could begin, but the fact that neither the United States president nor the high-profile reporter interviewing him appear to have been clear on this says a lot about the vapid nature of Americas political/media class.

More importantly, this is confirmation from the horses mouth that Biden is in effect continuing Trumps Iran policy. Trump began strangling Iran with crushing sanctions in an effort to force it to obey US dictates, and Biden is continuing that exact same strangulation while continuing to demand compliance with its dictates. The demands might be a little different, but the effect is identical since Tehran would never bow to either of them.

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The Iranian government has repeatedly made it abundantly clear that it will not be rejoining the JCPOA until the United States comes back into compliance, since it was the US who first abandoned it. It claims, correctly, that it was in full compliance with the agreement when the Trump administration unilaterally backed out in May 2018. The argument that it is therefore Washingtons responsibility to come back into compliance first is indisputable. Why would it re-enter a deal with a government that is clearly acting in bad faith and could just back out and impose civilian-killing sanctions on the nation again?

And thats just getting back to the negotiating table for re-entering the deal as it is written. Gareth Porter reported last month that the Biden administration may plan on using the sanctions regime it inherited from the previous presidency as a Trump card to try and coerce Tehran into agreeing to a modified version of the deal.

Neither of these things are going to happen. Iran will not modify the deal, and it will not come back into compliance before the government which first abandoned the deal comes back into compliance. And the Biden administration appears to be perfectly fine with this, reportedly toying with the idea of waiting all the way until after Irans presidential elections in June to even begin approaching the deal.

The end result being that we still have a US presidency waging economic warfare upon Iran in exactly the same way it was before the 20th of January. Civilians are still having the life squeezed out of them by a far more powerful nation which does not view them as human beings, and its only a matter of time before this administration or a subsequent one causes another flare up which pushes things to the brink of hot war like we saw a year ago.

Bidens Iran policy is in effect just a continuation of Trumps Iran policy that liberals can feel good about. Its Trumps Iran policy with gender pronouns in its bio.

https://twitter.com/caitoz/status/1358517735643176965

Choosing to continue an immoral course of action is just as immoral as choosing to initiate an immoral course of action. If youre beating someone up and you leave when I get there, and then I choose to continue assaulting that person, I am just as culpable in that assault as you are. Presidents who choose to perpetuate one anothers depraved policies are just as guilty of that depravity as their predecessors.

Starvation sanctions are the only type of warfare in which it is considered normal and acceptable to deliberately target a civilian population with deadly force. But it is not normal, and it is not acceptable. Biden and his team of ventriloquists fully own the effects of their warmongering. They dont get to just scribble TRUMPS FAULT across them in crayon and act like theyre innocent.

The mainstream media are fixated on the differences between the Biden administration and the Trump administration, just as they were fixated on the differences between the Trump administration and the Obama administration four years ago. If you can mentally mute that vapid soundtrack and look at the similarities between administrations instead, regardless of party affiliation and campaign platforms, youll learn a lot more about whats really going on in the world.

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
Update 12:15 PM CST: The Chicago Teachers Union announced this morning that the tentative agreement with Chicago Public Schools has been ratified by a vote of 67 to 32 percent. Turnout was roughly 80 percent. The World Socialist Web Site will publishmore details and analysis later this evening.

On Tuesday, Chicago educators voted on whether or not to accept the deadly deal to reopen schools struck between the leadership of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), Chicago Public Schools (CPS) officials and Democratic Mayor Lori Lightfoot. Voting ends at midnight, and the final vote count is expected to be released Wednesday morning.

The entire process for voting on the deal has been thoroughly undemocratic. After an all-membership meeting Sunday at which no rank-and-file teachers were able to speak and the chatroom was disabled, on Monday evening the CTU House of Delegates approved the deal with 85 percent voting in favor.

Teachers were given a little over 24 hours to vote on the deal, which the CTU sought to ram through as quickly as possible. There was no forum to discuss the agreement or raise objections, and there were reports Tuesday that some teachers received notifications that they voted when they actually had not.

There is enormous opposition to the deal among rank-and-file teachers, but the unions betrayal and efforts to intimidate teachers, combined with the unrelenting propaganda campaign by the corporate media and the entire political establishment, have placed enormous pressures on educators to accept the deal.

Regardless of the outcome of Tuesdays vote, the class struggle will intensify in Chicago, throughout the US and internationally, with educators at the forefront of the working class movement to contain the pandemic and save lives.

Since its founding in January, the Chicago Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee has been the center of opposition to the CTU and the Democrats conspiracy to reopen schools. At an important online meeting of the committee held Tuesday evening, members resolved to deepen their fight to prevent school reopenings and advance a scientifically grounded program to contain the pandemic.

Chicago teachers expressed their sense of betrayal by the CTU, stressing that the entire negotiations process was completely illegitimate, and the union never had any mandate to send teachers back into classrooms. Multiple speakers noted the way in which the CTU ran roughshod over members democratic rights to push through the reopening plan. Instead of using the threat of a strike as a weapon against CPS and Lightfoot, they used it as a weapon against teachers, with the CTU President Sharkey saying little would be gained by striking and teachers could be subjected to massive fines.

Discussion then focused on the need to turn out to the broader working class, in Chicago, across the US and internationally, and to prepare for general strike action to close all schools and nonessential workplaces. Educators from Brazil who are on strike in Sao Paulo and Australian teachers took part in the online meeting and voiced support for the Chicago teachers, calling for a global struggle to save lives.

The entire premise that schools can be safely reopenedpromoted by the CTU, the Democrats, and all the teacher unions in the US and their counterparts globallyis absurd. For decades prior to the pandemic, public education has been systematically defunded by the same hypocritical politicians now howling for schools to reopen in order to supposedly help children learn. School infrastructure and ventilation systems have been left to rot, and whatever pittance is provided by Bidens relief package will do nothing to resolve this crisis.

The timeline for reopening Chicago schools has Pre-K through 8th grade educators, staff and students back in school by March 8, with Pre-K and special education cluster classes starting this Thursday. Experts predict that by late March, the more infectious and deadlier B.1.1.7 variant of COVID-19, first discovered in the UK, will be the dominant strain across the US.

The deal endorsed by the CTU will leave educators, students, parents and the wider community at greater risk of infection and death. With students nowhere near able to receive vaccines, an untold number will become infected, with potentially catastrophic long-term consequences .

One of the central lies promoted by the CTU to pressure teachers into accepting their plan to reopen schools was that if they were to reject the deal and go on strike, they would be isolated and face the wrath of the state.

The real relationship of forces becomes clear when one examines the global context of the struggle in Chicago. The truth is that the struggle waged by Chicago educators is the spearhead of the class struggle in the US and part of a worldwide upsurge of teachers and other workers opposing the pandemic policies of social murder implemented by the ruling elites in dozens of countries. With over 2,350,000 deaths from COVID-19 worldwide, the ruling elites everywhere demand the reopening of schools in order to pressure parents back to work producing corporate profits.

Most immediately, the struggle in Chicago has directly fueled the resistance of educators across the country who have closely followed developments in Chicago and drawn inspiration from their determination. As Democrats press to reopen schools in Philadelphia, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Washington D.C., Detroit, Boston, Nashville and other major cities, all eyes have been on Chicago as the voice of educators opposition everywhere. In Philadelphia, thousands of educators engaged in a one-day protest against school reopenings Monday, directly inspired by Chicago educators.

The struggle in Chicago is also being closely followed by educators internationally, and a determined strike would embolden them to resist the global efforts to reopen schools. Over the past month strikes and demonstrations among educators and students have either broken out or are being planned throughout the world, including in Brazil, Canada, Mexico, France, Germany, South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, India, Myanmar, Sao Tome, Cote dIvoire, Cameroon and other countries.

At present, the most significant workers struggle globally involves over 180,000 educators in Sao Paulo, Brazil, who on Monday began a powerful strike to oppose the reopening of schools in the second largest school district in the Americas. South America has suffered 432,265 deaths from COVID-19, with Brazil accounting for 233,588 of this total, the second highest figure for any country after the US.

A Sao Paulo educator commented on the parallels between their situation and that in Chicago, telling the WSWS, The Chicago educators movement against the criminal reopening of schools is a turning point in the struggle of educators and workers internationally. We are facing the exact same issues in Sao Paulo, the largest city in Brazil. The government wants to push millions of teachers and students to enclosed classrooms at the worst moment of the pandemic, with record numbers of infections and new variants of the virus circulating in the country.

There is gigantic opposition among educators, which the unions were unable to contain. We began a statewide strike this week. But the unions are already trying to isolate us, break our organization and open the way for a corrupt agreement. To be victorious we need to immediately form a rank-and-file committee and take this strike in our hands. I am sure that the first step of this committee will be to join forces with educators in Chicago and around the world, raising a force of the working class that cannot be stopped!

Educators are entering into struggle against school reopenings throughout Brazil, including in Rio de Janeiro and Parana, setting the stage for a direct confrontation with Brazils fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro.

In neighboring Argentina, officials are pressing to reopen schools in Buenos Aires, the capital and largest district in the country, on February 17. The district is simply testing educators for COVID-19 before sending them back into unsafe classrooms.

In Quebec and Ontario, Canada, there are growing calls for strike action among educators, which the unions have resisted. Students are slated to return for in-person learning in Toronto by mid-February, setting a precedent for reopenings throughout the region.

Educators across Europe are also entering into the same struggle as the continent has suffered nearly 750,000 deaths from COVID-19. In France, thousands of middle and high school teachers struck at the end of January, holding marches in Paris and other main cities alongside school nurses and students.

In Bavaria, Germany, a student strike last week took place at seven schools in Nuremberg, spreading to Augsburg and gaining wide popularity on social media. The students are strongly opposed to the governments efforts to force graduating classes to return for in-person instruction as the pandemic has spiraled out of control since last November.

In South Africa, where 46,869 people have died from COVID-19almost half of the 96,350 deaths across the continentofficials plan to reopen schools on February 15. There is enormous opposition among educators to this homicidal policy, with the Facebook group Parents Against the Opening of Schools now having over 111,000 members since forming last May.

In Edo, Nigeria, teachers recently defied an official directive that they return to their classrooms on February 1, extending their strike indefinitely. Only last Friday, after striking for 19 days, did the leadership of the Edo State Council of the Nigeria Union of Teachers (NUT) quell the rebellion that was driven by rank-and-file educators.

In Ghana, teachers have been engaged in a nationwide strike for nearly a month, defying the National Labour Commission, which has declared the walkout illegal under Ghanas anti-strike laws. The Teachers and Educational Workers Union has been meeting with the Fair Wages and Salaries Commission to try to settle the strike, but reports have not yet been published on the latest developments.

In Asia, which has suffered over 381,000 deaths from COVID-19, college teachers have been on strike in Punjab, India since January 25. In Myanmar, teachers are playing a significant role in the struggles against the imposition of a military dictatorship, with growing calls for a nationwide political general strike.

Amid this explosion of international struggles by educators, the critical task is to break free from the nationalist, reformist straitjacket of the trade unions and to build independent rank-and-file safety committees everywhere to unite all workers in a common global struggle. The CTU in Chicago is only one of hundreds of such pro-capitalist unions globally that seek to isolate their members and suppress the class struggle.

The fight against school reopenings is above all a political question over which class will decide how to respond to the pandemic. The ruling class all over the world has sacrificed millions of lives for corporate profit. Now the working class is responding internationally. The program required to contain the pandemic and save lives necessitates the expropriation of the vast wealth hoarded by the ruling classes of every country and the restructuring of society along socialist foundations.
RwandAir, the national airline of Rwanda, on Monday, suspended its flights to Zimbabwe, South Africa and Zambia owing to the new strain of coronavirus that has been reported in the three Southern African countries.

According to a statement from the Rwandese national airline, "scheduled flights will resume as soon as there is more clarity on the situation."

RwandAir suspended flights to the three countries with effect from Monday owing to fears of importing the 501Y.V2 COVID-19 variant.

Zimbabwe, currently battling with over 34,000 coronavirus cases, recorded 13 new deaths and 106 cases Monday. There are over 28,000 recoveries so far.

According to the Zimbabwean government, the country's tourism sector lost approximately US$1 billion in revenue last year due to the pandemic.

Meanwhile, Emirates Airline of the United Arab Emirates Tuesday also suspended flights to Zimbabwe "due to operational reasons."

Emirates flights to this country will not be operating for two weeks between Feb. 13 and Feb. 28, the airline's announcement said.

Image Credit:  AA
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A young woman was fighting for her life today after being shot in the head during protests in Myanmar where live rounds were fired on demonstrators as the military tightens its grip on power.

The 19-year-old woman, Mya Thwe Thwe Khaing, was in a critical condition after what human rights activists condemned as an 'unconscionable' shooting in the capital Naypyidaw where protests have erupted for a fifth consecutive day.

'They can shoot a young woman but they can't steal the hope and resolve of a determined people,' UN human rights envoy Tom Andrews said today. 'The world stands in solidarity with the protesters of Myanmar.'

A doctor in Naypyidaw said at least one other person was critically injured after live ammunition was fired at protesters, but undeterred crowds returned to the capital to blockade a major highway on Wednesday morning.

Shot in the head: Myanmar protester Mya Thwe Thwe Kaing lies injured after she was shot during a protest in Myanmar's capital Naypyidaw where security forces have used live ammunition on protesters following last week's coup

Undeterred: Protesters wave a flag of Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy party as they stage a rally in Yangon yesterday to voice their anger at the February 1 military takeover

Under fire: Protesters are splashed with water cannon as they continue to demonstrate in Naypyidaw despite a military crackdown and curfews imposed by the new ruling junta

The latest protests came after soldiers raided and ransacked the headquarters of detained leader Aung San Suu Kyi's party on Tuesday night, eight days after seizing power in the February 1 coup.

As the military moves to tighten its control, police shot water cannon, tear gas and rubber bullets on Tuesday in a sudden escalation of force against the protests sweeping the country.

In Mandalay, the country's cultural capital and seat of Myanmar's pre-colonial monarchy, witnesses saw security forces fire tear gas directly at protesters waving the red flags of Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy.

State media claimed that the crowd had used 'obscene language' and thrown objects at police, injuring four officers, in its first direct mention of the protests since they began on the weekend.

'Therefore, the police members dispersed in accordance with the methods and laws,' the state-run Global New Light of Myanmar newspaper reported, without mentioning other police confrontations elsewhere in the country.

At least one emergency room doctor said the military were also using live rounds, leaving a 23-year-old man and the 19-year-old woman in critical condition in hospital.

'We believe they are actual bullets because of the wounds and their injuries,' the doctor said.

The woman shot in the head was seen with protesters some distance from a row of riot police as a water cannon sprayed and several shots could be heard.

Prepared: A group of protesters wearing hard hats hold up placards near the US embassy in Yangon today demanding the return of democracy and the release of deposed Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi

Ready for the water cannon: Protesters wear colourful wet-weather gear as they take part in an anti-coup protest in Yangon

Symbol: A protester makes the pro-democracy movement's trademark three-finger salute during a protest in Yangon

'Myanmar police shooting at a woman demonstrator whose back was turned is unconscionable as well as unlawful,' said Richard Weir, a researcher at Human Rights Watch. '

'The police need to stop responding to peaceful protests by firing off guns and immediately investigate alleged wrongful use of force. Myanmar's military junta should rescind its draconian orders on protests and end its crackdown.'

Protesters had returned to the streets of Yangon on Wednesday morning, where the day before a large crowd faced off against water cannon and a phalanx of riot police near Suu Kyi's residence.

Though there were no reported clashes with authorities in the commercial hub on Tuesday, university student Khin Nyein Wai said she was still afraid.

'I still came out as I do not like the military dictatorship,' she said. 'This is for our future.'

The military justified last week's power grab by claiming widespread voter fraud in the November polls, which saw a landslide for Suu Kyi and her party. It quickly moved to stack courts and political offices with loyalists.

In the nine days since, medical staff, air traffic controllers and teachers have staged strikes, turned up for work while wearing red ribbons on their uniforms or posed for photos while brandishing the three-finger salute adopted by the anti-coup movement.

Defiance: Government employees from different ministries hold up signs calling for democracy and Suu Kyi's release today

Icon: Suu Kyi's face appears on a placard at a protest in Yangon today, more than a week since she was last seen

Sit-in: People hold placards at a protest in Yangon on Wednesday as demonstrations continue despite a military crackdown

Protesters on the streets have called for the release of Suu Kyi - who has not been publicly seen since she and other top political leaders were detained - and for the generals to respect the results of the last election.

By Tuesday, a ban on gatherings and a nighttime curfew was in effect in the three biggest cities of Yangon, Mandalay and Naypyidaw, along with various other towns.

One member of Suu Kyi's party, Soe Win, told AFP on Wednesday that a guard saw a raid conducted by security forces via remote CCTV, but was unable to intervene due to the imposed curfew.

In the morning, they found door locks broken, computer equipment missing, and electrical wiring and server cables cut. Bank documents from a safe box were gone.

The United States, which has led international condemnation of the coup, on Tuesday renewed its call for freedom of expression in Myanmar - and for the generals to step down.

The UN Human Rights Council has said it would hold a special session on Friday to discuss the crisis.

European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell warned the bloc could impose fresh sanctions on Myanmar's military, but said any measures should be targeted to avoid hitting the wider population.

New Zealand became the first country taking action to isolate the junta by suspending high-level military and political contacts with Myanmar.
PACIFICA, CA / ACCESSWIRE / February 10, 2021 / Thriving entrepreneur, Kristina De-Levi, is pleased to announce the launch of her blog.From her work as an entrepreneur in the healthcare industry to caring for aging family members, Kristina's blogs provide valuable insight for those seeking to turn their passions into businesses and those looking for advice on caring for loved ones. In her features, Kristina discusses important topics like the types of healthcare services available and how to determine what is right for you. She also explores the healthcare industry as a business in America while highlighting the importance of adhering to strict regulations in the field. If you've ever considered working in healthcare, she also discusses some of the various opportunities available in the industry.

With five years of operating a successful business under her belt, Kristina has a wealth of knowledge to share with her readers. Her work showcases the importance of balancing business goals with compassion for others while still making time for personal goals and family life. Kristina currently operates her business with her husband, is pursuing a bachelor's degree in Medical Administration, and cares for her children. Her publication highlights how ambition and family values are not mutually exclusive and inspires readers to pursue their dreams with integrity.

Despite her busy schedule, Kristina De-Levi continues to update her blog on a regular basis, providing readers with exclusive content and insight. Her articles cater to a wide range of audiences from budding entrepreneurs to those seeking more information about the types of healthcare services available in current landscape. Visit Kristina-DeLevi.com or Medium.com/@kristinade-levi to learn more today.

About Kristina De-Levi

Kristina De-Levi is an entrepreneur based out of California. After witnessing her grandparents struggle with health issues and receive care from home nursing staff as a teenager, Kristina took it upon herself to co-found HomeAssist Home Health Services with her husband, Frank. The company provides home healthcare services ranging from skilled nursing to physical and occupational therapy at affordable prices. As a working mother, Kristina understands the value of offering holistic, personalized, and coordinated health services in the comfort of her clients' homes on their schedule.

Contact Information:

Kristina De-Levi

Website: https://homeassistca.com/

Email: news@kristina-delevi.com

SOURCE: Kristina De-Levi

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/628921/Kristina-De-Levi-Shares-Her-Wisdom-Taking-to-Social-Media
Police who returned to the murder scene of Daniel McClean in north Belfast last night now believe the gunman fled the scene in a car, rather than on foot.

Uniformed officers stopped cars and spoke to members of the public around the Cliftonville Road area, where the 54-year-old was shot multiple times while sitting in his car last Tuesday night. They also distributed leaflets asking anyone with information about the killing to come forward.

The leaflet revealed police now believe the gunman made off in a silver coloured Vauxhall Vectra in the direction of the Old Park Road.

They previously said the gunman walked back towards Clifton Crescent just after the shooting.

McClean had links to dissident republican group ONH (Oglaigh na hEireann) and also previously served in the British Army.

On Friday two men aged 38 and 46 were arrested in connection with the murder in Belfast. They were released unconditionally on Monday.
Some 40,000 Brazilians are bringing a group-action lawsuit in the Netherlands against Norwegian aluminum producer Norsk Hydro over alleged toxic waste pollution in northern Brazil.

The lawsuit has been brought by a group of communities who live in the lower Amazon region in the state of Para, mainly members of Cainquiama  the Amazon Association of Mixed Race, Indigenous and Quilombolas  representing some 11,000 families.

They are seeking compensation for what they say is the incorrect disposal of toxic waste in the Murucupi River, as well as other effects from the presence of Norsk Hydro installations in the region, their law firm PGMBM said in a statement.

Hydro said on Tuesday it would respond as requested before the Dutch court where the lawsuit is being filed. The lawsuit was filed before the District Court of Rotterdam on Feb. 5, PGMBM said.

The matters brought forward by Cainquiama are already being discussed before Brazilian courts and Brazilian authorities, Hydro said in a statement to Reuters.

The Cainquiama association has since 2017 filed five lawsuits in Brazil against different Hydro entities in Brazil.

Alunorte Refinery

Hydro has three installations in Para including the Paragominas bauxite mine, its Alunorte refinery where bauxite is turned into alumina and Albras, where smelters turn alumina into aluminum.

Victims have been exposed to toxic residues from the processing of aluminum, which can cause health problems such as increased incidences of cancer, Alzheimers, skin diseases, stomach problems and diarrhea, PGMBM said.

The lawsuit also refers to a 2018 spill at Alunorte.

In early 2018, Hydro apologized for what it said was a completely unacceptable spill of untreated water during severe rains at Alunorte but denied that this had contaminated the local environment.

On Tuesday, Hydro reiterated that in respect of the 2018 rainfall event, there was no overflow and no evidence of contamination.

The unlicensed release of water prompted authorities and courts to demand that Hydro curtail alumina output from Alunorte, triggering the partial shutdown of Albras and resulting in outages that lasted more than 15 months.

PGMBM said the claimants were not filing the lawsuit in Brazil because they were frustrated at a lack of progress in the Brazilian legal system.

(Reporting by Gwladys Fouche; editing by Louise Heavens, Jason Neely and Barbara Lewis)

Topics Lawsuits Pollution
EBRDs first Green Financing Facility to be launched in Jordan

Financing facility supported by the GCF and the EU to benefit the private sector

New programme in line with Jordans National Green Growth Plan

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the European Union (EU) in Jordan are promoting green investments in the private sector by introducing the first internationally supported comprehensive green economy programme in the country.

The programme will support Jordans transition to a green economy as the country adapts to an increase in demand for water and energy following a substantial growth in population. The government of Jordan launched a National Green Growth Plan (NGGP) in 2016, identifying the most urgent projects in water, sustainable land management, energy efficiency, resource efficiency and renewable energy.

During a virtual webinar the EBRD presented its support programme, which is expected to be launched in Jordan in 2021. The EBRD plans to roll out its Green Economy Financing Facility (GEFF) and the related Green Value Chain (GVC) Facility for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The programme combines commercial loans from the EBRD, concessional loans from the Green Climate Fund (GCF) and grant funding by the EU.

GEFF supports businesses and homeowners with investments in green technologies to preserve natural resources, increase energy efficiency and reduce emissions through the introduction of state-of-the-art technologies and solutions. The programme offers loans through local banks and microfinance institutions for on-lending to local corporates and SMEs. The programme also provides free advisory services. To date, GEFF has established a network of more than 140 local financial institutions across 26 countries supported by more than 4 billion of EBRD finance.

GVC provides finance and advice for private sector SMEs to support their competitiveness and growth by strengthening product quality and adding value, improving standards and creating an enabling environment for exports.

The European Unions support for green growth in Jordan will be in line with the EU Green Deal, Europes main policy direction towards sustainable economic development, and climate action in Europe and the world. The EU Green Deal focuses on the use of green and affordable energy applications aligned with a NEXUS model on energy-water-food synergies, combined with sustainable agriculture practices, and nature conservation and rehabilitation.

The virtual event was joined Nabil Masarweh, Minister of Environment of Jordan; Maria Hadjitheodosiou, the EU Ambassador to Jordan; Philip ter Woort, EBRD Director for the eastern Mediterranean region; Iyad Abu Haltam, Board member of the Amman Chamber of Industry; and Maher Al-Mahrouq, Director General of the Association of Banks in Jordan.

Mr ter Woort said: The EBRD is strategically committed to promote greener investments in Jordan to benefit its private sector which also contributes to sustainable economic growth. We hope that the Jordanian financial sector will benefit from the EBRDs successful GEFF programme as has been the case in many other economies where the Bank has rolled out the programme.

Ambassador Hadjitheodosiou underlined that: with the launch of the EU Green Deal, the EU is placing its focus on green energy and the sustainable use of resources, promoting green growth and economy development within a circular economy approach, both at home, as well as in its support to its partners. We are keen to start the first green growth support programme in Jordan in 2021 and translate the EU Green Deal into action, in order to deliver on green growth, green jobs and new opportunities.

The EBRD aims to build green, low carbon and resilient economies through its Green Economy Transition approach with the goal of becoming a majority green bank by 2025 and helping reach net annual greenhouse gas emission reductions of at least 25 million tonnes over the next five years.

Since the start of its operations in Jordan in 2012, the EBRD has provided more than 1.4 billion in financing for 54 projects.
The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
Stephen Ngila Nthenge, the man who attacked his wife Jackline Mwende with a machete, slashing her face and hacking off her hands, has been sentenced to 30 years in prison.

While delivering the ruling, Machakos Law Courts Senior Resident Magistrate Brenda Bartoo said the prosecution had proved beyond any reasonable doubt that Ngila committed the heinous crime.

Ngila, 39, was found guilty of attempted murder, with the magistrate noting that the victim did not need restitution. Bartoo also mentioned that the accused was not remorseful for the offense convicted of.

The court notes that the offense committed was grave, and the victim in the statement does not wish for any restitution, therefore I proceed and sentence you for the offense of attempted murder contrary to section 220(A) of penal code. That you will serve an imprisonment of 30 years and you have 14 days of the appeal, the court ruled.

Ngila has 14-days to appeal the conviction.

Mwende, who told the media that Ngila attacked her because she had failed to bear him children, spoke after the ruling saying justice has finally been served.

My life changed permanently after he slashed both my hands, she added.

Read: Jackline Mwende Ditches Expensive To Maintain Prosthetic Limbs
"Controlling the COVID-19 pandmic continues to be the largest factor standing in the way of a full recovery, so Im very pleased to see businesses are optimistic for hiring to continue picking up." - Express CEO Bill Stoller

Aside from some lawmakers calling for a $15 minimum wage, forecasts are encouraging for a market-driven increase in employee wages, while benefits are largely expected to remain the same in 2021. This is according to a new survey from Express Employment Professionals.

This survey from The Harris Poll, commissioned by Express, reveals nearly 3 in 5 U.S. hiring decision-makers (58%) expect the average wage at their companies to increase this year with 30% anticipating no changes in pay. Only 7% of respondents foresee a decrease.

Of those who expect wages to increase, around half say the increases will be performance-based (55%), standard cost of living (53%) or market pay rates (40%).

While a similar proportion of small companies (29 employees) anticipate the average wage to increase (42%) or remain flat (44%) in 2021, about two-thirds of the largest companies anticipate wages to increase (5099 employees, 64%; 100499 employees, 63%; 500+ employees, 68%).

Regarding benefits, although more than 1 in 4 U.S. hiring decision-makers (28%) say offering competitive benefits is one of the biggest pain points for them when it comes to hiring, only 2 in 5 (39%) expect their companys benefits to increase in 2021. Further, about half (49%) expect their benefits to hold consistent from 2020 and 8% expect their companys benefit offerings to decrease.

Similar to wages, the smallest companies generally anticipate benefits to remain unchanged in 2021 (67%), while about half of larger companies expect benefits to expand in 2021 (100499 employees, 52%; 500+ employees, 52%).

Despite higher unemployment, Express experts say the hunt for talent is fierce, ultimately driving up wages.

We saw significant wage increases throughout 2020 as employers tried to compete to get talent and incentivize people to come to work, said David Robb, director of operations for the Express franchise in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I think that we will see wages stabilize in early 2021 and not increase as drastically. But much of this will just depend on the competitiveness of the talent market.

Focusing on talk of a federal $15 minimum wage mandate, a January 2021 survey from The Harris Poll revealed 66% of Americans supported this idea, while 65% are for ending the lower minimum wage for tipped workers.

The impact of a federally mandated minimum wage would be different in every local area, as wages and cost of living can vary so drastically across the country, Robb said. I think it could be particularly harmful for smaller businesses who may not have the profit margins or capital to adjust their business models to stay profitable with a mandated increase in wages.

In his market, hes seen wages for entry-level positions increase significantly over the last two years. Despite a state minimum wage of $9.65 per hour, very few positions start below $13.

At the heart of the minimum wage discussion is providing a living wage for anyone who has a job, Robb added. While that this is a valid and admirable goal, and something I strongly support, I think the solution to achieve this is much more complicated than just a mandated minimum wage increase.

In California, a law is already in place for the minimum wage to reach $15 an hour in 2022 for businesses with more than 26 employees. Some cities have already enacted their own ordinances pushing that pay even higher.

Santa Clarita franchise owner Yvonne Rockwell says willing and able job seekers already have abundant employment opportunities in her market with the current minimum wage of $13 for small businesses and $14 for larger ones.

Despite have a higher minimum wage in our area, employers will also have to compete with any government benefits like unemployment offered to those who are eligible, she said.

As to particular industries that are more inclined to raise wages in 2021, Robb says manufacturing likely will because of production goals.

They have to do what is necessary to get people in the door, he said.

Neither Rockwell nor Robb see any wage decreases on the horizon but possibly wage stabilization instead over the coming months.

There could be some decreases as COVID-19 bonuses and other incentives are phased out, Robb said. But it is always very difficult to lower someones wages, so I think we will see more stabilizing of wages, but not decreases.

With the focus on offering competitive wages right now, Rockwell says benefits have somewhat taken a backseat, but maintains that offering both high pay and benefits is the only way to attract and retain skilled workers.

I think job seekers and employees are looking for a complete package, she said. Were also seeing people start to consider employers that are essential businesses. Many want the security of knowing their employer will remain open should local, state or federal stay-at-home orders occur again, so this is a new attractive perk were seeing in the marketplace.

Robb also doesnt see any major benefit shifts for companies right now.

With everything going on in 2020, most companies have not had the time to do anything new in this area, he said. If there are changes, it will probably be reductions in benefits as prices rise and companies try to stay profitable.

There are still many unknowns about future economic conditions later in 2021, but rising wages to entice people off the sidelines for work is encouraging.

Controlling the COVID-19 pandmic continues to be the largest factor standing in the way of a full recovery, so Im very pleased to see businesses are optimistic for hiring to continue picking up, Express CEO Bill Stoller said. Businesses now need to take a look at what they can afford to hire, and retain, the best and brightest for their operations.

Survey Methodology

The survey was conducted online within the United States by The Harris Poll on behalf of Express Employment Professionals between Nov. 16 and Dec. 7, 2020, among 1,002 U.S. hiring decision-makers (defined as adults ages 18+ in the U.S. who are employed full-time or self-employed, work at companies with more than one employee, and have full/significant involvement in hiring decisions at their company). Data was weighted where necessary by company size to bring them into line with their actual proportions in the population.

***

If you would like to arrange for an interview with Bill Stoller to discuss this topic, please contact Sheena Karami-Hollander, Director of Corporate Communications and PR, at (405) 717-5966.

About Bill Stoller

William H. "Bill" Stoller is chairman and chief executive officer of Express Employment Professionals. Headquartered in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, the international staffing company has more than 830 franchises in the U.S., Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. Since inception, Express has put more than 8 million people to work worldwide.

About Express Employment Professionals

At Express Employment Professionals, were in the business of people. From job seekers to client companies, Express helps people thrive and businesses grow. Our international network of franchises offers localized staffing solutions to the communities they serve across the U.S., Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, employing 552,000 people globally in 2019. For more information, visit http://www.ExpressPros.com.
Bindel does not believe transgender women are real women or that preoperative trans women should be included in female-only spaces, such as hospitals, prisons and refuges. She also says prostitution was inherently abusive of women and should be abolished. The apology comes amid an increasingly toxic global debate over transgender rights and the inclusion of trans women in women-only spaces. Readings managing director Mark Rubbo. Credit:Penny Stephens Some feminists question the recognition of trans women as women and disagree that gender identity should replace biological sex. Transgender activists say this view is transphobic and denies the validity of their existence. Readings posted a statement on its blog and Twitter feed on Tuesday saying the independent bookseller prides itself on ensuring everyone in our community feels safe, respected and considered.

The statement thanked our community for opening the dialogue with us and said it was committed to considering the work of all authors to ensure our future program of events, reviews and discussions remain relevant and diverse. The apology was welcomed by Transgender Victoria media representative Sally Goldner, AM, and Dylan OHara, from Vixen Collective, Victorias peer-only sex worker organisation. Ms Goldner said: Her views have no reasonable and rational basis and they cause ridicule, vilify and could reasonably incite harm against transgender people. To say we dont exist, or to use twisted terms like to call someone like myself ... a so-called biological male, just denies that my sense of self exists. Transgender Victoria media representative Sally Goldner. Credit:Eddie Jim

Dylan OHara said the apology was overdue, but showed accountability and recognition of the harm that was caused to trans people and sex workers. It would be great to see other organisations look at it as an opportunity to pre-empt these kind of situations. Sex workers and trans people made their views very clear at the time. If you take a Nothing about us without us approach these kind of apologies arent necessary. Ms Crooks said on Wednesday that while the bookseller had the right to apologise, she worried about losing the ability to hold a dialogue. In my view if were not careful we will find that the capacity for considered safe, respectful and enlightened debate is being eroded before our eyes, she said. Ms Crooks said she was criticised at the time for appearing at the event with Ms Bindel.

I pushed back gently to say I didnt subscribe to the de-platform argument, she said. Victorian Womens Trust executive director Mary Crooks. Credit:Justin McManus Ms Crooks said she had been able to ask questions of Bindel that were deeply probing, including whether she could find it in her heart to include diverse people and give them her respect. The point is that the conversation that took part between Julie and myself was not some uncritical discussion but a thoughtful pushing of intellectual boundaries around her work, she said. She said she felt jumpy about the possibility of losing genuine debate in the future. The key is to understand peoples position and ideas, not stomp all over them.

Bindel has been outspoken for years against what she calls extreme transgender ideology. I dont believe trans women are real women. Those of us who are female are oppressed under the patriarchy, one of the tools used is our biology, she told The Age. Loading I have absolutely no beef with the transgender community but I will not have preoperative trans women imprisoned along with the most disenfranchised women on the planet. Some feminist perspectives on trans women have become increasingly heated.
opinion

The feeling of helplessness; the confusion to understand what is unfolding; and the dilemma to act was evident in Paul Kagame's face, once a stalwart of African Union (AU) reform and Rwanda's president. He sees the increasing toll in human casualties in Tigray and finds it "absolutely worrying." Speaking at an interview, Kagame notes the region is cut off from the rest of the world and wants to see the United States and the United Nations engage Africa to find a resolution to the crisis in Tigray.

Africa seems neither interested nor capable of having such an engagement. The last time it did, the effort was lacklustre at best.

There was rarely a moment more optimistic after the armed conflict broke out in Ethiopia's northern region last November than when the AU sent former statespersons to mediate between the two sides. They were big names of the continent, with all the authority and respect their positions command. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Kgalema Motlanthe and Joachim Chissano, all former heads of state, flew to Addis Abeba after being named envoys by the AU Chairperson, Cyril Ramaphosa, president of South Africa.

It seemed that too much had transpired by that moment - the federal government was at a stage of what it called the "final phase," with the army approaching Meqelle, capital of Tigray Regional State. Earlier in the military conflict, a call by Moussa Faki Mahamat, Commissioner of the African Union Commission, for a cessation of hostilities between forces of Tigray Regional State and those lined up under the federal government was rebuked by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed (PhD).

Although courteous, the Prime Minister was no less defiant when he met the eminent persons of Africa. He expressed "his profound gratitude" for their concern and their "well-meaning" gestures. But a dialogue was out of the question, as far as the government was concerned, as it would "nurture a culture of impunity" to allow such latitude to an entity it accuses of provocation. The envoys were not allowed to pay a visit to Tigray. Neither was the AU able to display political courage, diplomatic acumen or determination to stop the war that has forced over 60,000 to flee to Sudan, 2.4 million people to get displaced internally, over four million people into dangerous levels of hunger and an unaccounted number to death.

It is nothing but a paradox. A continental organisation that declared its commitment to see the year 2020 as one where "guns are silenced" was witness to hell breaking loose in its host country. The rhythm of death from AK-47s to artillery shells, from tanks to Migs and drones, Moussa Mahamat and his ilk were witnesses in a place not too distant from where they reside. History will judge them for their lack of conviction to speak and for choosing to remain silent.

Whatever the justifications for the federal government's military operation in the region, the AU's role should have been to drive the merits of dialogue to address the root of the conflict. It would have been remembered as such had the African Union not sent mixed messages that appeared to have taken sides. Before the envoys left in November, they met with and were briefed by the provisional administration. This was largely seen as a legitimising role taken by the AU.

Matters did not get better from here on. Following the annual summit of heads of state and government of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), Moussa Mahamat did not mince words endorsing the federal government's actions in the Tigray region.

"The federal [government] took bold steps to preserve the unity, stability and respect for the constitutional order of the country, which is legitimate for all states," he said.

He did add that the humanitarian crisis needs addressing. But it was also a statement that fanned away considerations for negotiations and mediation and appeared to legitimise the federal government's continued military engagements with forces in the region. It was partly understandable; he is desperate to get reelected for his second term in office and cannot afford to fan the leaders' wrath where he is seated.

For an organisation based in Addis Abeba, and whose founding owes much to Ethiopia, the AU's response is not just shallow but seemingly partisan, an indictment to how removed it has become from its founding principles.

Ironically, the organisation does have a well-funded centre established for conflict prevention. It is tasked to help decision makers with timely advice and proximate analysis on potential conflicts across the continent. The war in Tigray is too close to its home base to miss its genesis and evolution. It also boasts a web of agencies established for this purpose, including, but not limited to, the African Peace & Security Architecture, the Continental Early Warning System, the Panel of the Wise, the AU Border Programme, the African Standby Force and the African Peace Fund.

A roadmap for practical steps agreed to "silence the guns by 2020" in Lusaka, Zambia, goes further. Holding that the conditions for peace now exist, it outlines steps to be taken to realise this elusive dream.

It included expanding funding for the Standby Force; exposing political denial in the face of crisis; stopping non-state actors from acquiring illegal weapons; strengthening preventive diplomacy; potentially imposing sanctions on member states that do not comply with AU instruments, and completing the process of delimitation and demarcation of national borders. These are practical recommendations by the roadmap for 20 major political, economic and legal challenges.

Yet all these failed the millions of civilians in Tigray in having any meaningful input as two well-armed entities drove one another toward military conflict. It was clear that anything less than mediation and compromise would lead them toward engaging militarily. Even the Tigray Regional Government sent letters - politically tinged as they may have been on explaining the causes - to the African Union that the path could lead to nowhere but conflict if a different one is not taken.

With its Chinese-funded, marble and glass-clad headquarters on Roosevelt Street in Old Airport area, the AU has enough well-paid experts and analysts to recognise how dire the situation was getting. Indeed, it is not at all obvious where the confrontation could have led except armed conflict after both sides had delegitimised one another.

Ethiopia is not alone in this.

Both Burkina Faso and Mali are battling insurgencies; a more than decade-long conflict around Lake Chad Basin has displaced 2.5 million people; the South Sudanese peace deal is regularly interrupted by fighting that leaves dozens dead; the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo have not seen a break from civil wars in decades; an insurgency has peaked in Mozambique; Somalia's security situation is exasperated as foreign forces pull out their peacekeepers; and Boko Haram is in Nigeria and neighbouring countries.

"Conflicts last and they don't stop. And more are added," said Patricia Danzi, regional director for Africa for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), in January of last year.

The AU, burning an annual budget of 623.8 billion dollars, may be quite heavy in its ambitions; but it has not been effective at instrumentalising its objectives, not even to matters that are not controversial with member states, such as non-state violent extremism. But these challenges could be mitigated if the AU was more open to standing up to its members. True, this is easier said than done. The European Union is finding out the hard way with the likes of Hungary and Poland. The United Nations has long resigned itself to the tactics of Russia and China.

It is no easy task, but the AU should have the courage in its convictions to put standing behind its principles above institutional survival. The opposite stance it has taken thus far has made it more of a weak well-wisher than a relevant body to the continent's 1.3 billion people.

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In Ethiopia's case, it could have allies elsewhere internationally. A regional organisation made up of peers could make a difference if it adds its voice to that of the European Union and now the United States in pushing for unfettered access for the humanitarian provision and demanding the suspension of hostilities between forces on the ground. The latter goes hand-in-hand with insisting the total and verifiable withdrawal of Eritrean forces from the Tigray region - which has been corroborated by US diplomats and Ethiopian officials and threatens to internationalise the conflict.

When normalcy returns to the area, the African Union should also demand that the independent investigation of alleged atrocities in the region occurs - a request the Ethiopian government has thus far shunned. No less critical - perhaps inescapable for sustainable peace and stability - is national dialogue to start the process of healing from scars that keep going deeper.

What will be left of the AU if it fails to broach these topics except an exclusive club of heads of state and their ambassadors stationed in Addis Abeba?

Alas! A summit by the heads of state next week, held virtually, will have to discuss too many agendas prepared by the Permanent Representatives' Committee. As momentous, destructive and costly as the war in Tigray has been, Ethiopia is mentioned in passing in the AU's Political Affairs Director's report. It mentions Ethiopian authorities' explanations on the humanitarian work they undertook together with the UN agencies last month. And it hopes "Ethiopia would provide accurate information to the Commission in the near future."

There is little else to show how the AU miserably failed the African people.Submit Your comment
(Natural News) Historical figures like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln are on the chopping block in San Francisco after the citys Board of Education voted to remove their names from 44 schools.

The board voted six-to-one on Tuesday, Jan. 26, after months of review and national attention. Public officials, parents, students and alumni were at odds over whether or not schools needed new names with no connection to slavery, racism, oppression and similar criteria.

Board members have repeatedly argued that the renaming is necessary in light of what happened to statues of Confederate generals during the height of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests.

According to the resolution, the figures for whom the 44 schools are named have greatly diminished the opportunities of those amongst us to the right of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

However, critics slammed the decision and said the board was simply signaling political virtue by canceling the historical figures in question. The board did not consult historians, as was apparent at times. For instance, the board did not know whether Roosevelt Middle School was named after Theodore or Franklin Delano.

Even San Francisco native and Californias senior senator, Dianne Feinstein, was not spared from the list. Hers was a name that received mixed opinions. Board members in favor of removing her name from an elementary school said she had replaced a vandalized Confederate flag in front of the city hall while she was mayor.

But if it were up to current San Francisco Mayor London Breed, renaming schools amid a pandemic shouldnt be a priority. We need to bring a sense of urgency to safely reopening our schools, she said in a tweet on Jan. 28. Once that happens, we can have a longer conversation about the future of school names.

Meanwhile, board member Kevine Boggess, one of the six who voted in favor of the resolution, cautioned that the district should not make heroes out of mortal folk.

Cancel culture goes too far

The San Francisco public school boards resolution is just another example of cancel culture at work. In one of her recent articles, Brittany Hunter, a writer for the public interest law firm Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF), said that this kind of virtue signaling is only a means of proving to society how good a person is.

In the case of San Francisco, the resolution would show how good the board members are for even thinking about fixing schools named after unworthy historical figures.

But as some pointed out, such inconsequential gestures are more symbolic than anything and have no weight. Part of cancel culture is also personal destruction, such that the person or figure being canceled is brought to ruins with no chance at redemption. (Related: The cancel culture is losing its mind.)

One instance of cancel culture where personal destruction was the main driver was that of Mimi Groves. Back in 2016, Groves posted a video of herself using a racial slur on the social media platform Snapchat. She was 15 years old at the time.

Four years later, Groves was set to attend the University of Tennessee. When the BLM movement started, she took to social media to urge people to attend protests and sign petitions. Fellow classmate Jimmy Galligan, who had only seen Groves video four years after it was posted, blasted it on social media.

The video became viral and Groves withdrew from the school due to what she perceived was pressure from its admissions office. Groves said she quickly learned how social media can take something they know very little about and twist the truth to ruin peoples lives.

Go to ThoughtCrimes.news for more articles on cancel culture.

Sources include:

WSJ.com

TheGuardian.com

WakingTimes.com
(TCS), Indias largest IT services firm, has announced that it will recruit 1,500 technology employees across the UK over the next year.

The announcement followed Mondays meeting in Mumbai between visiting UK Trade Secretary Liz Truss and TCS CEO, Rajesh Gopinathan, during which they discussed the companys commitment to continue investing in UKs economy, innovation, technology sector, and in developing workforce skills.

UK contributed GBP 2.7 billion (Rs 270 crore) to TCS revenue at the end of FY20. The company has had its presence in the UK for 45 years. TCS is the second largest among UK software and IT services in UK. TCS is the largest provider of third-party policy administration services in the life insurance and pensions industry.

This development builds on the great work TCS is delivering to our UK customers. Our sustained investments have made TCS the preferred growth and transformation partner of our valued customers in the UK, allowing them to digitally transform their business for competitive growth, said Rajesh Gopinathan, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, TCS in a statement.

It is not TCS alone that is hiring more.

Indian players such as Infosys, Wipro and HCL Technologies who have been winning large deals in Europe are also adding on to their onshore presence. Analyst says that most of the large deals have also meant rebadging of employees or these deals also have a large number of people take over.

For instance, when Infosys signed one of its-largest ever deals with German automaker Daimler worth $3.2 billion it also agreed to transfer 600 employees from the automaker to Infosys. Similarly, Wipro agreed to take over close to 1,300 employees when Metro signed a $700 million deal. Employees of Metro from Germany, Romania and India were transferred to Wipro as a part of the deal.

In case of TCS when it acquired select assets of Pramerica Systems Ireland, an subsidiary of Prudential Financials, close to 1,500 staff of Pramerica were also transferred to TCS.

Continental Europe has been a challenge for Indian players due to the presence of large labour unions and language barrier. But as focus on their core and work closely with their IT partners and give more work to them, they are also making them transfer employee rather than fire them. Rebadging of employees is becoming an integrated part of large deals, said Pareekh Jain, founder and lead analyst, EIIRTrend.
President Uhuru Kenyatta on Tuesday unveiled a new state department to oversee the ongoing implementation of the Competence-Based Curriculum (CBC).

The new State Department for Implementation of Curriculum Reforms within the Ministry of Education has been tasked with the roll of the new education system including recommendations of a task force whose report the President launched today.

The Taskforce has made several recommendations and consulted widely including through 11 sector-based pre-conferences. This is important because it underscores my Administrations commitment to adhere to the tenets of public participation, as envisioned in our constitution.

In this regard, to ensure effective implementation of these recommendations, and other curriculum reforms, I have on this 9th Day of February 2021 set my hand and presidential seal and established a new State Department for Implementation of Curriculum Reforms vested in the Ministry of Education, President Kenyatta declared.

The Head of State announced the changes Tuesday at Kenyatta International Convention Centre (KICC) in Nairobi County when he presided over the unveiling of a taskforce report dubbed Enhancing Access, Relevance and Quality for Effective Curriculum Reforms Implementation.

The Head of State, who recalled Kenyas curriculum reforms over the decades, said CBC will make Kenyas education system responsive to the demands of the modern world and rallied Kenyans to back the process.

We are at a tipping-point in our education system. The old must give way to the new. The summons of our times requires us to re-imagine how we have educated our children.

It requires us to be bold, and not rigid. It calls us to imagine a system that creates responsible citizens as opposed to subjects; a system that celebrates the creative potential of all our children as opposed to one that leaves them with labels of failure, if they do not pass exams;

And a system that brings about freedom as opposed to conformity. This is the promise of the Competency-Based Curriculum, the President said.

Besides equipping Kenyan children with the competencies needed to excel in the 21st century, the Head of State said CBC will empower Kenyans to be better citizens.

On citizenship, we have a crisis of competence and our education system must give us a response. Youth violence and pessimism are partly a result of low civic competence amongst citizens.

And this is because we have not taught our children the values of citizen participation from an early age. This is why youth pessimism and blind activism are on the rise, President Kenyatta said.

The President applauded the Taskforce led by Professor Fatuma Chege for its report saying its recommendations will help lessen the rigidity in the current education system by introducing the leading to learn principle.

The purpose of the new system of Learning to Learn is to allow our children to explore, innovate and unshackle their minds from the old and rigid molds of learning.

This way they will be able to exploit their imagination, creativity, solve problems, use critical thinking, apply digital literacy, and feel a sense of civic duty as citizens, he said.

On the re-opening of schools, the Head of State said the Government continues to be vigilant as schools resume after a long period of closure due to the outbreak of the Coronavirus disease.

But I must say I am grateful for the patience you all have shown, and for the speed and care with which we have resumed learning after re-opening of our learning institutions.

Yes, through the tireless work of our doctors, our nurses, our medical staff, and the diligence of Kenyans themselves, we have gradually brought the pandemic under control; but we, nonetheless, remain vigilant as our children and teachers ease back into regular order, the President said.

Education CS Prof George Magoha, his Principal Secretary Dr Belio Kipsang, Teachers Service Commission CEO Nancy Macharia and Muranga Governor Mwangi WaIria who is also the Chairperson of the Education Committee at the Council Governors also spoke at the event attended by a cross-section of education sector stakeholders.
A hacker gained unauthorized entry into a remote access software system shared by workers at a Florida citys water treatment plant in an unsuccessful attempt to fill the water supply with a potentially harmful chemical, authorities said.

An unknown suspect breached a computer system for the city of Oldsmars water treatment plant on Friday and briefly increased the amount of sodium hydroxide from 100 parts per million to 11,100 parts per million, Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said during a news conference Monday.

Sodium hydroxide, also called lye, is used to treat water acidity but the compound is also found in cleaning supplies such as soaps and drain cleaners. It can cause irritation, burns and other complications in larger quantities.

A supervisor saw the chemical being tampered with  as a mouse controlled by the intruder moved across the screen changing settings  and was able to intervene and reverse it, Gualtieri said. Oldsmar, a city of 15,000 residents, is about 15 miles (24 kilometers) northwest of Tampa.

At no time was there a significant adverse effect on the water being treated, Gualtieri said. Importantly, the public was never in danger.

Oldsmar officials have since disabled the remote-access system, and say there were other safeguards to prevent the increased chemical from getting into the water. Officials told other city leaders in the region about the incident and suggested they check their systems.

Experts say municipal water and other systems have the potential to be easy targets for hackers because local governments computer infrastructure tends to be underfunded.

Robert M. Lee, CEO of Dragos Security, and a specialist in industrial control system vulnerabilities, said remote access to industrial control systems such as those running water treatment plants has become increasingly common.

As industries become more digitally connected we will continue to see more states and criminals target these sites for the impact they have on society, Lee said.

The leading cybersecurity firm FireEye attributed an uptick in hacking attempts it has seen in the last year mostly to novices seeking to learn about remotely accessible industrial systems. Many victims appear to have been selected arbitrarily and damage was not caused in any of the cases, it said in a statement.

Tarah Wheeler, a Harvard Cybersecurity Fellow, said communities should take every precaution possible when using remote access technology on something as critical as a water supply.

The systems administrators in charge of major civilian infrastructure like a water treatment facility should be securing that plant like theyre securing the water in their own kitchens, Wheeler told the Associated Press via email. Sometimes when people set up local networks, they dont understand the danger of an improperly configured and secured series of internet-connected devices.

A plant worker first noticed the unusual activity at around 8 a.m. Friday when someone briefly accessed the system but thought little of it because co-workers regularly accessed the system remotely, Gualtieri told reporters. But at about 1:30 p.m., someone accessed it again, took control of the mouse, directed it to the software that controls water treatment and increased the amount of sodium hydroxide.

The sheriff said the intruder was active for three to five minutes. When they exited, the plant operator immediately restored the proper chemical mix, he said.

Other safeguards in place  including manual monitoring  likely would have caught the change before it reached the water supply, the sheriff said.

Investigators said it wasnt immediately clear where the attack came from. The FBI, along with the Secret Service and the Pinellas County Sheriffs Office are investigating the case.

Russian state-backed hackers have in recent years penetrated some U.S. industrial control systems, including the power grid and manufacturing plants while Iranian hackers were caught seizing control of a suburban New York dam in 2013. In no case was damage inflicted but officials say they believe the foreign adversaries have planted software boobytraps that could be activated in an armed conflict.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Florida
A shortage of specialist syringes in Japan means millions of people will not receive the Pfizer covid-19 vaccine.

Standard syringes cannot extract the sixth and final dose from each vial manufactured by the US drugmaker. Without the specialist syringes, the final dose will be discarded.

Japan has secured 144 million shots of the Pfizer vaccine, enough for 72 million people, however, a shortage of specialist dead space syringes that can collect the sixth dose means 12 million people will be unable to receive the vaccine.

The syringes used in Japan can only draw five doses, health minister, Norihisa Tamura said, according to the Kyodo news agency. We will use all the syringes we have that can draw six doses, but it will, of course, not be enough as more shots are administered.

A Japanese health ministry official told Jiji Press: When the contract was made, we were not absolutely sure that one bottle could be used for six shots. We cant deny we were slow to confirm that.

When Japan begins its Covid immunisation programme later thing month, health workers who are unable to extract the sixth dose will have to discard them, the governments top spokesman, Katsunobu Kato said.

This problem is not isolated to Japan, with US and some EU countries also reporting a shortage of low dead space syringes, leading to the possibility of strong competition to quickly secure additional supplies.

When they begin, the Japanese inoculation efforts will first be delivered to 10,000 to 20,000 frontline healthcare workers

Japan will begin by inoculating 10,000 to 20,000 frontline health workers, with efforts ramped up to deliver vaccines to 3.7 million health workers from mid-March.

The rollout for 36 million people aged 65 and over is not expected to begin until early April.

AstraZeneca requested approval for its vaccine last month, while the Moderna vaccine is not expected to receive until May.
New machine learning system developed to identify deteriorating patients in hospital Credit: Shutterstock

Researchers in Oxford have developed a machine learning algorithm that could significantly improve clinicians' ability to identify hospitalized patients whose condition is deteriorating to the extent that they need intensive care.

The HAVEN system (Hospital-wide Alerting Via Electronic Noticeboard) was developed as part of a collaboration between the University of Oxford's Institute of Biomedical Engineering and the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, with support from the NIHR Oxford Biomedical Research Centre.

The findings of the study have been published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.

"The HAVEN machine learning algorithm, using electronic patient data collected routinely by most NHS hospitals, has the potential to substantially improve our ability to detect patients who require ICU, and those for whom a timely intervention is likely to change their outcome, so enhancing the National Early Warning Score (NEWS) system currently in use across the health service," said Prof Peter Watkinson, Associate Professor of Intensive Care Medicine at the University's Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences.

The HAVEN system combines patients' vital signssuch as blood pressure, heart rate and temperaturewith their blood test results, comorbidities and frailty into a single risk score. The HAVEN score gives a more precise indication of which patients are deteriorating when compared with previously published scores.

Every year, more than 60,000 patients deteriorate on UK hospital wards to the extent they require admission to an ICU.

Over the past 20 years, health care systems worldwide have implemented alerting systems to improve detection of patients at risk of deterioration. Most are based on abnormalities in patients' vital signs, usually by combining them into an early warning score. Clinicians are alerted when the EWS rises above a given threshold.

"Late recognition of patient deterioration in hospital is associated with worse outcomes, including higher mortality. Despite the widespread introduction of early warning score systems, which are based on vital signs, deterioration still goes unrecognized," Prof Watkinson explained.

"The HAVEN system we have developed and validated was able to detect nearly twice as many patients who suffered a cardiac arrest or needed intensive care up to 48 hours in advance, than the next best system."

Explore further COVID-19: Online tool identifies patients at highest risk of deterioration

More information: Marco AF Pimentel et al. Detecting Deteriorating Patients in Hospital: Development and Validation of a Novel Scoring System, American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine (2021). Journal information: American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine Marco AF Pimentel et al. Detecting Deteriorating Patients in Hospital: Development and Validation of a Novel Scoring System,(2021). DOI: 10.1164/rccm.202007-2700OC
USF Fulbright Day 2021

Friday, April 9th

USFs fourth annual Fulbright Day was held virtually through Microsoft Teams on Friday, April 9, 2021. USF Fulbright Day is a campus-wide event that celebrates international education through USFs Fulbright legacy with the Fulbright Scholar Program (for US and foreign Faculty) and the Fulbright Student Program (for US and foreign Students).

A variety of different programming celebrated our student and faculty Fulbrighters and allowed USF students, faculty and the community to learn more about the Fulbright Programs from a representative from the Institute of International Education (IIE) and USFs Fulbright Program Advisors.

Events at a Glance

Fulbright U.S. Student Program Information Session

Fulbright U.S. Student Program Student Experience Panel

Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program Information Session

Fulbright 75th Anniversary Celebration and Community Network Event

Please explore the content below for event details. To view the Fulbright Day video recordings, simply click the hyperlinked title of each event.

















Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-10 19:40:46|Editor: huaxia

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Citizens view lanterns ahead of the Spring Festival at Nanfeng Square in Yuncheng City, north China's Shanxi Province, Feb. 7, 2021. (Photo by Yan Xin/Xinhua)

BEIJING, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping, on behalf of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and the State Council, extended Spring Festival greetings to all Chinese Wednesday at a reception in Beijing.

Xi, also general secretary of the CPC Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, delivered a speech at the gathering at the Great Hall of the People, greeting Chinese people of all ethnic groups, compatriots in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, and overseas Chinese.

This year's Spring Festival, or the Chinese Lunar New Year, falls on Feb. 12.

Achieving the first centenary goal of finishing building a moderately prosperous society in all respects is a great feat of milestone significance, Xi noted.

Demanding the virtues of modesty and prudence, Xi called for efforts to achieve the second centenary goal and the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, and make new and greater contributions to the noble cause of securing peace and development for all mankind.

Party and state leaders Li Keqiang, Li Zhanshu, Wang Yang, Wang Huning, Zhao Leji, Han Zheng and Wang Qishan were present at the reception. Li Keqiang chaired the event.

A saleswoman picks decorations for the coming Spring Festival for customers in Nanning, south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, Feb. 8, 2021. (Xinhua/Lu Boan)

Xi summarized the nation's major achievements in 2020 under the Party's leadership, including emerging as one of the first countries that brought the COVID-19 epidemic under control, taking the lead among major economies in achieving positive economic growth, making historic progress in building a moderately prosperous society in all respects and accomplishing the poverty eradication tasks on time.

The country also saw the success of a number of key science and technology innovation projects, solid progress in pushing forward the Belt and Road Initiative and the successful conclusion of implementing the 13th Five-Year Plan, as well as growing global support for building a community with a shared future for humanity, Xi said.

Facts have once again proved that the system of socialism with Chinese characteristics has incomparable vitality and creativity, Xi noted.

As long as the entire Party and the Chinese people of all ethnic groups rally closely around the CPC Central Committee, there is no difficulty that cannot be overcome, he said.

In 2021, efforts should be made to consolidate and expand the results secured in epidemic containment and social and economic development, Xi stressed, demanding a good start in boosting the country's development during the 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021-2025) so as to celebrate the Party's centenary with outstanding achievements.

Having completed a glorious journey of 100 years, the CPC has grown into the world's largest Marxist ruling party that has been in power for over 70 years in the world's largest socialist country, Xi said.

The centenary sees the Party, with more than 91 million members, in its prime with the widespread support of 1.4 billion Chinese people, he added.

The Party will remain invincible as long as it stands at the forefront of the times, leads the charge in overcoming difficulties and challenges, and takes root among the people, Xi said. 


CHICAGO, Feb. 9, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- G Squared Ascend I Inc. ("G Squared Ascend I" or the "Company") a special purpose acquisition company formed for the purpose of entering into a merger, share exchange, asset acquisition, share purchase, reorganization or similar partnering transaction with one or more businesses, announced today that it closed its initial public offering of 34,500,000 units, including 4,500,000 units issued pursuant to the exercise by the underwriter of its over-allotment option in full. The offering was priced at $10 per unit, for aggregate gross proceeds of $345 million.

The units began trading on the New York Stock Exchange ("NYSE") under the ticker symbol "GSQD.U" on February 5, 2021. Each unit consists of one share of the Company's Class A common stock and one-fifth of one redeemable warrant. Each whole warrant entitles the holder thereof to purchase one Class A ordinary share at a price of $11.50 per share. Once the securities comprising the units begin separate trading, the Company expects that its Class A common stock and warrants will be listed on the NYSE under the symbols "GSQD" and "GSQD.WS", respectively.

G Squared Ascend I is a blank check company, also commonly referred to as a special purpose acquisition company or SPAC, incorporated as a Cayman Islands exempted company for the purpose of effecting a merger, share exchange, asset acquisition, share purchase, reorganization or similar business combination with one or more businesses. Although G Squared Ascend I may pursue an initial business combination target in any business industry or sector, it intends to focus on opportunities that fall within six core megatrends: Software-as-a-Service, Online Marketplaces, Mobility 2.0/Logistics, Fintech/Insurtech, New Age Media, and/or Sustainability.

UBS served as the sole book-running manager for the offering.

Of the proceeds received from the consummation of the initial public offering and a simultaneous private placement of warrants, $345 million was placed in trust. An audited balance sheet of the Company as of February 9, 2021 reflecting receipt of the proceeds upon consummation of the initial public offering and the private placement will be included as an exhibit to a Current Report on Form 8-K to be filed by the Company with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the "SEC").

G Squared Ascend I was founded by Larry Aschebrook, who also founded G Squared Equity Management LP, as well as Ward Davis, the Company's Chief Executive Officer and Director.

The public offering was made only by means of a prospectus. Copies of the final prospectus for G Squared Ascend I may be obtained for free by visiting EDGAR on the SEC's website at www.sec.gov or from UBS Securities LLC, Attn: Prospectus Department, 1285 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10019, by telephone at 888-827-7275 or by e-mail at [email protected].

Registration statements relating to these securities have been filed with the SEC and became effective on February 4, 2021. This press release shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such an offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction.

About G Squared:

Our sponsor is an affiliate of G Squared Equity Management LP ("G Squared"), an SEC-registered investment adviser ("RIA") and venture capital fund manager founded in 2011 by Larry Aschebrook. G Squared has 25 professionals across four offices, Chicago, San Francisco, Greenwich, and Zurich, Switzerland, and has deployed more than $2 billion of capital across several funds, separately managed accounts, and co-investment vehicles focused on growth stage opportunities in the global technology sector.

Forward-Looking Statements:

This press release contains statements that constitute "forward-looking statements," including with respect to the Company's initial public offering and the anticipated use of the net proceeds of such offering. No assurance can be given that the net proceeds of the offering will be used as indicated. Forward-looking statements are subject to numerous conditions, many of which are beyond the control of the Company, including those set forth in the Risk Factors section of the Company's Registration Statement and prospectus for the Company's initial public offering filed with the SEC. Copies are available on the SEC's website, www.sec.gov . The Company undertakes no obligation to update these statements for revisions or changes after the date of this release, except as required by law.

Contact:

Antonia Korduba

[email protected]

SOURCE G Squared Ascend I Inc.

Bennington, VT (05201)

Today

Cloudy with periods of rain. High around 50F. Winds ENE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 100%. Rainfall near a quarter of an inch..

Tonight

Cloudy with periods of rain. Low 44F. Winds NE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 90%. Rainfall near a half an inch.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-10 10:06:21|Editor: huaxia

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HARARE, Feb. 9 (Xinhua) -- Zimbabwe will receive a donation of 200,000 COVID-19 vaccine doses from China on Feb. 15, Information Minister Monica Mutsvangwa said on Tuesday.

China last week listed Zimbabwe among the first three African countries that will get free doses of the Chinese vaccine, along with 11 other developing nations.

Mutsvangwa told a post-cabinet media briefing that the country will also take delivery of the first batch of the vaccines it had purchased from China early next month.

"The donation and initial batch purchased are expected in Zimbabwe by 15 February 2021 and the first week of March 2021, respectively," she said.

She said Zimbabwe had also purchased an unspecified amount of Russia's Sputnik vaccine, while India, like China, has also offered a donation and an option to purchase commercially.

Zimbabwe has also submitted interest to participate in the African Union COVID-19 vaccines program, the minister added.

The private sector will also support the Zimbabwean government through a formula that allows them to keep 50 percent of what they procure for their employees.

"The administration of the COVID-19 vaccinations in Zimbabwe will be on a voluntary basis," said the minister.

The Zimbabwean government has said it will prioritize frontline healthcare workers, the elderly and other vulnerable groups in the vaccination program and plans to vaccinate 60 percent of the population to achieve herd immunity.

Zimbabwe has recorded 34,781 COVID-19 cases, including 29,289 recoveries and 1,353 deaths since last March. Enditem


the actor made the decision to take a break from acting, so that he could solely focus on his recovery and get the help he has admitted he needs



guaranteed armie hammer will be making a similar statement

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Maybe they can be roomies in rehab?

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group therapy!

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a 2-for-1! brandi glanville was just suddenly made aware of several traumas she needs therapy for and has checked into the co-ed dorms.

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An honest waste of money, resources, space, and oxygen. He better be walking his ass to treatment so he doesn't pollute the earth any further, at the very least.



Imagine needing to get help for treating people like garbage. He deserves a spot in the deep sea imo.

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Normally I say people getting treatment is fundamentally better than going to prison (especially since the American prison system is abhorrent) but I dont think you can cure or help someone like this. Like no amount of therapy was gonna make a guy like Ted Bundy better.



Edited at 2021-02-10 02:19 pm (UTC)

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Yeah, there's actually a lot of evidence that abusive men learn from therapy how to better position themselves as victims, use therapeutic language to manipulate people, etc.

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Yeah my mother is a narcissist who has mentally and emotionally abused me my entire life and one of her key manipulation tactics was to make herself a victim and to use her poor health (which is mostly bullshit and doctors have told her as much) to control me and make me feel too bad for her to ever defend myself.



Pretending like these men are also suffering in some way that needs treatment is so... fucked. Idk I know Im not speaking eloquently right now but Im tired.

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Its sadly like that for A LOT of people who check in for inpatient treatment for various situations. I have a friend who has been in several inpatient facilities for anorexia, and each time she would learn new techniques to keep her disorder hidden and make people think she as better.



This is a major reason why the person in need of help has to WANT help themselves, and when it isnt something they themselves want and they are doing it for others, image and for legal reasons, its not going to work.

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This is something talked about a lot in Lundy Bancroft's book, why does he do that. After fighting tooth and nail to get them into therapy, a lot of men (lbr, most of them) just use it as a tool to get their way.

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You can see this in Armie Hammer's texts with his victims. As one of them is telling him that he assaulted her and she's absolutely sick over it, he responds telling her to frame everything as an "I feel" statement etc. and as a result downplayed and reframed her experience for her



It's VERY clear he has been to a lot of therapy and is now using the tools he learned in therapy to gaslight women



Edited at 2021-02-10 04:53 pm (UTC)

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i won't agree because i never want to discourage therapy but shia seems so aware of his traumas and triggers, he wrote a fucking movie about it, and he is still pulling this shit. i feel like he knows what he is going to learn in treatment already, he is just too arrogant to actually apply it.

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Especially since he refused to go at first. Hes not going because he genuinely wants to but bc otherwise it might cost him.

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They need to develop a new kind of therapy that specifically addresses these kinds of destructive behaviors. I get that many of them probably had fucked up formative experiences but I think when you cross the line in being a danger to others taking responsibility for those actions need to be addressed.



Edited to add: although, will they want to change? thats a whole different kind of ballgame...



Edited at 2021-02-10 04:55 pm (UTC)

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cw: rape



It makes me so mad how abused men and abused women get the same thing: "treatment".



Reminds me of the book The Body Keeps the Score--I was so excited to read it, but I had to put it down because the first chapter was all about a veteran who got PTSD from.... raping a Vietnamese girl.

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Fucking hell someone recommended this to me to help with my own trauma and Im so glad I saw this first.

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Yeah, it was REALLY upsetting. I recently ordered Trauma and Recovery and look forward to reading it. It's by a woman, and it's more oriented towards sexual and domestic abuse. (It also covers veterans, but I'm hoping more sensitively.)

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Oh no. :( Ive been recommend that book as well. :(

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https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2018/03/07/allegations-employee-mistreatment-roil-renowned-trauma-center/sWW13agQDY9B9A1rt9eqnK/story.html I read that book too and I felt like it was really suspect because it read like trauma porn given how many terrible stories of abuse flooded the pages. I honestly wasn't that surprised to see later on that employees allege the author was an abusive bully. I guess he then sued the trauma center that fired him, they had to close down, and then he "donated the money to charity." I guess some of the discussions of treatment at the very end of the book were okay and I have personally found EMDR to be surprisingly really helpful for trauma work but, yeah, users here are making really good points about how abusers sometimes manipulate people using therapeutic language as a guise.

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whoa whoa whoa wtf

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I tried to read that and I got halfway through. It was too much for me. So was why does he do that? Theyre way too intense for me right now.

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I ... what?



I bought this book because of my own sexual abuse trauma, and this is the first chapter!? :\ Cool. Way to trigger sexual abuse survivors. That's exactly the kind of content I want to read. :\ :\ :\

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This turd just needs flushing.

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it's odd to me that Armie Hammer was dropped by his agent and publicist (which was the right move) but all that came out in FKA Twigs' lawsuit didn't make Shia's team drop him

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Shia is a far bigger celebrity and arguably talented unlike Arm & Hammer, who is a nobody to almost everyone.

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That's true. Maybe also Shia 'played ball' on going to rehab and Armie refused

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IMO bc they view this as something that is rehab-able. They can write a comeback story for him as someone who went and got intense therapy and anger management and who finally broke the cycle of abuse he was raised in, etc etc. have him publicly apologize and make a donation to abuse organizations, etc.



What story can you try to write for someone who expresses a desire to eat women, carves his initials into womens skin, rapes, abuses, and sexually assaults women? All while cheating on his wife and having public sex in the presence of his kid. Hes a lost cause that even being a white male cant save him atm

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Great! Can't wait for him to finish and come out with fantastic new psychiatric knowledge and vernacular he can use to better abuse women! Sadly that is what is statistically far more likely than him growing as a person.

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It's not enough, they should have cut ties completely. They obviously expect him to have a comeback in about 5 years and would hate to not make money from it.

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Im all here for rehabilitation and actually getting help for ones issue buuuuut I can also see this being used from a PR angle :/



Armie Hammer is probably gonna go a similar route.

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AH doesn't seem like he's interested in rehabbing his career or himself AT ALL right now. maybe when he finally runs out of money/his parents cut him off/he loses his kids for good, but while there are women to fuck and coke to do? doesn't seem likely.

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I'm going to be kind and say I hope it's a hard-core program that really helps him confront his fuckedupness instead of one that is like a resort.

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I wish I could just run away from my problems and check into a resort.



Stop abusing women you fucking clown.

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One of the last documents filed for her court case is to move her case management conference to June so he must be there for a while?

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Im not defending him at all because I agree hes an abusive piece of shit, but his agency may not be dropping him because if hes also being treated for mental illness, CAA would be opening itself up to a possible discrimination claim if he chose to pursue one.



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I was wondering why they werent dropping him. Seems like a reasonable explanation.

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Muzaffarnagar (UP):

The brother of the alleged Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) militant Sandeep Sharma, who was arrested in Jammu and Kashmir, has been held for questioning over Rs 2 lakh bank deposit, police said on Friday.

Praveen, who works as a taxi driver in Haridwar, was taken into custody here yesterday.

Police found a bank account in Haridwar in which Rs 2 lakh was deposited from Mumbai some months ago. There were also two transactions of Rs 50,000 each in the account.

Sandeep Sharma alias Adil was arrested by J-K Police on Monday.

Earlier, Sharmas mother Parvati and sister-in-law Rekha were also interrogated by a team of the Uttar Pradesh Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS).

Parvati had told reporters here that, If my son is a militant he must be punished. Due to his actions we are facing problems and shame.

Both Parvati and Rekha work as domestic workers in the district.

Sharma, alias Adil, had left the district in 2012 and told his family that he was earning Rs 12,000 per month in Jammu. His father died in 2007.

Also read: 'If my son is a militant he must be punished': Sandeep Sharma's mother

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
The President of the Republic of Madagascar, Andry Rajoelina received, on February 10, 2021, the Letters of Credence of the new Ambassador of the United Kingdom, HE Mr. David William Ashley, at the Iavoloha State Palace

The new Ambassador expressed his country's commitment to strengthen relations of friendship and cooperation between Madagascar and the United Kingdom. During of their meeting, President Andry Rajoelina and HE Mr. David William Ashley have reviewed the areas of cooperation that will be undertaken between the two countries, among others, in the fight against the effects of global warming and protection of endemic biodiversity in Madagascar.

United Kingdom has always been present to support the sustainable development projects of the Big Island. Also, the new Ambassador accredited to Madagascar reaffirmed its commitment to continue on this path.

Who is HE Mr. David William Ashley ?



www.madagate.org
The founder of Koo, the buzzy, homegrown micro-blogging site, to which several Union ministers flocked after the governments intense row with Twitter, said his platform is all for freedom of speech but will follow law of the land.

"We are built for freedom of speech. Our primary goal is to make sure that everybody who is in India has the right to express themselves.," Aprameya Radhakrishna, co-founder and chief executive officer of Koo, told Moneycontrol in an interview.

While that happens of course there will be exceptions like a threat to life. Like one person inciting violence or threatening to take his own life. So being a company registered in India, we will abide by the law of the land, he said.

Meanwhile, in an interview with CNBC TV18, he also confirmed that Chinese investor Shunwei is exiting the venture.

Twitter has found itself in a fierce tangle with Indian authorities, who want it to take down more than 1,100 accounts and posts that the government argues are spreading misinformation about the farmers protests against new agricultural laws. Many of the accounts are backed by Pakistan or are operated by supporters of a separatist Sikh movement, according to the government.

On Wednesday, the US social media giant said it would not fully comply with orders from the government, arguing that it does not believe the orders are consistent with Indian law.

Koo is the apparent primary beneficiary of this standoff. The government took to the platform to respond to Twitter over the ongoing tussle. Earlier, several Union ministers had opened accounts on Koo.

What is Koo?

Founded in March 2020 by Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka, Koo can be used to express views and opinions on various topics much like Twitter. Growth was fuelled soon after it won AatmaNirbhar App Innovation Challenge held by the government in August 2020. The app claims to be having around 3 million downloads.

Koo is now having a moment thanks to the Twitter row.

Radhakrishna, a serial entrepreneur and angel investor, said for the past couple of days there has been a lot of attention for us from Twitter users. In the past 10 months of our journey, we have had people from all parts. But in the past 48 hours, quite a few English-speaking users have joined the platform, said Radhakrishna, who sold his first venture TaxiForSure to Softbank-backed rival Ola for around $200 million.

On how Koo will be different from Twitter, Radhakrishna said that the company is focussing on Indian languages. "International products will always launch an English first platform which will not give a great experience for the Indian language users. Our aim is to get the voice of India who are not comfortable with English along with the people who are comfortable with English on one platform.

Koo has made it easier for users to create and type in Indian languages and also enabled voice and video, he said. So in case you don't want to type and just want to take a short video or an audio snippet, we have enabled that," he said.

The app supports multiple Indian regional languages such as Hindi, Telugu, Kannada, Bengali, Tamil, Malayalam, Gujarati, Marathi, Punjabi, Oriya and Assamese. Users can share posts, audio, video, photos on the platform. Like Twitter, Koo also allows users to chat with each other via DMs.

A Twitter Substitute?

Can Koo replace Twitter in India? "If you want to connect with the international community that's not what we are focusing on today. We want to go deeper in India. We will solve that first and when we solve that then we will go to other locations across the world," he said.

Koo counts investors such as Infosys veteran Mohandas Pais 3one4 Capital, Kalaari Capital and Blume Ventures among others on its cap table. It has raised around $4.1 million so far.
press release

The EU remains very concerned by the tragic humanitarian crisis unfolding in Tigray and its regional implications. Three months into the conflict, despite small openings, the limitations to humanitarian access to Tigray continue to prevent the provision of humanitarian assistance to address the immensity of needs, avert the risk of famine and prevent further loss of life. Central and Western Tigray remain largely out of reach and two Eritrean refugee camps remain completely inaccessible.

Humanitarian access needs to be guaranteed and humanitarian assistance allowed to reach all affected areas and people in Tigray, and border areas of Afar and Amhara regions, in line with the humanitarian principles of impartiality, humanity, neutrality and independence.

The EU is also increasingly concerned for the protection of civilians and refugees in Ethiopia, with reports of casualties and serious human rights, international refugee law and international humanitarian law violations. Effective protection of refugees from harm in accordance with international refugee, human rights and humanitarian law, including preventing any act of refoulement or coerced return targeting Eritrean refugees needs to be ensured.

The EU joins the United States call for the withdrawal of Eritrean troops from Ethiopia, which are fuelling the conflict in Tigray, reportedly committing atrocities, and exacerbating ethnic violence.

The EU expresses its support to the work of the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission and encourages it to continue its investigations on allegations of violations and abuses of human rights and violations of international law. We hope that the Government of Ethiopia will endorse its recommendations, and fully implement the independent investigations and judicial proceedings announced to ensure full accountability for violations and abuses committed. Access of international media to Tigray must be authorised and local journalists must be protected.
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.
Tunis/Tunisia  Sixteen more COVID-19 cases were recorded in Sidi Bouzid on Monday, bringing to 4751 the total number of cases detected in the region since the spread of the pandemic, local health director Mohamed Zaher Ahmadi told TAP.

In addition, 49 people have recovered from the virus in the region where the total number of recoveries has reached 3,892 cases, while 25 COVID-19 patients are currently admitted to hospitals.

According to the same source, 99 tests were carried out on Monday, taking to 18,208 the overall number of tests made in the governorate, since the outbreak of the virus.


Poet John Keats is being brought virtually back to life 200 years after he died - including his voice, face and clothing - by a team of scientists.

Keats died on February 23, 1821 and to mark the 200th anniversary of his death experts from the Institute for Digital Archaeology have 'virtually recreated him'.

Linguists, curators and physicists worked together to give the poet an 'extra 24 hours of life' - a comment on the fact his tombstone says he died a day later than he did.

The poet was 25-years-old when he died of tuberculosis in Rome - where he had gone in the hope the Mediterranean sun would ease his condition.

While in Rome he wrote one of his most famous poems - Bright Star - which will be recited by a virtual reality Keats on the anniversary of his death in a recreation of the Keats-Shelley House where he died 200 years ago.

This is a portrait of Posthumous Portrait of Percy Shelley writing in 1845 in Rome - the image was one used for inspiration by the Keats virtual resurrection team

As part of the celebration of his life, animators will recreate his appearance and his voice and diction are being recreated by vocal specialists.

His clothing is also being meticulously recreated by a team of experts - who still haven't completely agreed on the final look.

The plan, according to the team behind the work, is to make the virtual Keats as close to the real thing as modern technology can get.

Life and death masks of the poet survive, as well as miniature portraits - which have fed into the final design, with scans painstakingly made for the work.

Keats will appear virtually, including a recreation of his face, voice and clothing and will read Big Star to an awaiting audience on February 23, 2021

The Institute for Digital Archaeology combined scans of the portraits, death masks and other sources of information to produce a 'highly accurate 3D model'.

Keats published dozens of poems throughout his short life, including odes to melancholy, a nightingale and a Grecian urn.

Roger Michel, IDA's executive director who did much of the research on the image, said capturing the appearance was less of an issue than first thought.

'We had very high-quality sources, including miniatures painted from life. In those days, miniatures were executed in a photo-realistic style  they were the photographs of the era,' said Michel.

The real issue came in getting his clothes right - as anecdotal accounts suggested he adopted a more 'continental style' during his last five months in Rome.

As his time in Rome is the period they were recreating it was important to discard typical stiff English clothing options and recreate his most likely wardrobe.

They worked with Jenny Lister, curator of fashion and textiles at the Victoria and Albert Museum to work out the best options for clothing.

Michel said looking at images of Shelley and Byron helped in determining the clothing options as they both went to Italy at the same time as Keats.

'It's just like today  if you go to Hawaii on vacation you might buy a Hawaiian shirt. Keats was in Rome and started doing what the Romans did,' he explained.

The Victoria and Albert Museum were involved in the clothing selection - it had to match Keats working class background and the final outfits were 'contentious'

While the clothing was contentious, the accent was the most difficult part of the project, Michel said, as they had to capture his famous London voice.

He had been said by critics to be of the 'cockney school' with 'low diction' and that he made use of 'inelegant rhymes' - think thorns with fawns.

So to get his voice correct they turned to Dr Ranjen Sen of the University of Sheffield - a linguistic historian, who said Keats accent would have had distinctive features.

Keats would have emphasised the final 't' in words like fat, cat, sat and mat that would sound 'put on' or exaggerated to modern ears, said Sen.

This painting of Edouard Pingret , a French painter and lithographer, was used to design the clothing for the virtual Keats project

'He certainly pronounced 'l' in words like 'pool,' 'cool,' 'fill,' 'pill,' unlike modern-day Cockney' 'coow,' 'piw,' etc. To modern ears his accent would have sounded all over the place, a bit northern, a bit west country.'

American Broadway star, Marc Kudisch, has been required to create the voice samples that will be used to recreate Keats' synthesised voice.

The virtual reading of Big Star will start at 17:00 GMT on February 23, 2021 and will run until just after midnight to 'give him his full extra day the tombstone promised'.

Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- This time is different may be the most dangerous words in business: billions of dollars have been lost betting that history wont repeat itself. And yet now, in the oil world, it looks like this time really will be.For the first time in decades, oil companies arent rushing to increase production to chase rising oil prices as Brent crude approaches $70. Even in the Permian, the prolific shale basin at the center of the U.S. energy boom, drillers are resisting their traditional boom-and-bust cycle of spending.The oil industry is on the ropes, constrained by Wall Street investors demanding that companies spend less on drilling and instead return more money to shareholders, and climate change activists pushing against fossil fuels. Exxon Mobil Corp. is paradigmatic of the trend, after its humiliating defeat at the hands of a tiny activist elbowing itself onto the board.The dramatic events in the industry last week only add to what is emerging as an opportunity for the producers of OPEC+, giving the coalition led by Saudi Arabia and Russia more room for maneuver to bring back their own production. As non-OPEC output fails to rebound as fast as many expected -- or feared based on past experience -- the cartel is likely to continue adding more supply when it meets on June 1.CriminalizationShareholders are asking Exxon to drill less and focus on returning money to investors. They have been throwing money down the drill hole like crazy, Christopher Ailman, chief investment officer for CalSTRS. We really saw that company just heading down the hole, not surviving into the future, unless they change and adapt. And now they have to.Exxon is unlikely to be alone. Royal Dutch Shell Plc lost a landmark legal battle last week when a Dutch court told it to cut emissions significantly by 2030 -- something that would require less oil production. Many in the industry fear a wave of lawsuits elsewhere, with western oil majors more immediate targets than the state-owned oil companies that make up much of OPEC production.We see a shift from stigmatization toward criminalization of investing in higher oil production, said Bob McNally, president of consultant Rapidan Energy Group and a former White House official.While its true that non-OPEC+ output is creeping back from the crash of 2020 -- and the ultra-depressed levels of April and May last year -- its far from a full recovery. Overall, non-OPEC+ output will grow this year by 620,000 barrels a day, less than half the 1.3 million barrels a day it fell in 2020. The supply growth forecast through the rest of this year comes nowhere close to matching the expected increase in demand, according to the International Energy Agency.Beyond 2021, oil output is likely to rise in a handful of nations, including the U.S., Brazil, Canada and new oil-producer Guyana. But production will decline elsewhere, from the U.K. to Colombia, Malaysia and Argentina.As non-OPEC+ production increases less than global oil demand, the cartel will be in control of the market, executives and traders said. Its a major break with the past, when oil companies responded to higher prices by rushing to invest again, boosting non-OPEC output and leaving the ministers led by Saudi Arabias Abdulaziz bin Salman with a much more difficult balancing act.Drilling DownSo far, the lack of non-OPEC+ oil production growth isnt registering much in the market. After all, the coronavirus pandemic continues to constrain global oil demand. It may be more noticeable later this year and into 2022. By then, vaccination campaigns against Covid-19 are likely to be bearing fruit, and the world will need more oil. The expected return of Iran into the market will provide some of that, but there will likely be a need for more.When that happens, it will be largely up to OPEC to plug the gap. One signal of how the recovery will be different this time is the U.S. drilling count: It is gradually increasing, but the recovery is slower than it was after the last big oil price crash in 2008-09. Shale companies are sticking to their commitment to return more money to shareholders via dividends. While before the pandemic shale companies re-used 70-90% of their cash flow into further drilling, they are now keeping that metric at around 50%.The result is that U.S. crude production has flat-lined at around 11 million barrels a day since July 2020. Outside the U.S. and Canada, the outlook is even more somber: at the end of April, the ex-North America oil rig count stood at 523, lower than it was a year ago, and nearly 40% below the same month two years earlier, according to data from Baker Hughes Co.When Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz predicted earlier this year that drill, baby, drill is gone for ever, it sounded like a bold call. As ministers meet this week, they may dare to hope hes right.More stories like this are available on bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.2021 Bloomberg L.P.
Keith Bowes was a part of the team that was involved in the acquisition of Kayelekera Uranium Project in Malawi and has also been responsible for all site activities aimed at restarting production.

The new MD has more than 25 years experience and is a highly regarded mining executive.

Ltd ( ) has appointed Keith Bowes as managing director with strong expectations that he will drive the company towards restarting uranium production at Kayelekera project in Malawi.

Bowes has more than 25 years experience and is a highly regarded mining executive, with extensive experience in metallurgy, project development, capital markets and operations.

He was part of the original due diligence team involved in the acquisition of Kayelekera and has been responsible for all site activities and led the technical work completed on the project since then.

Bowes background

Bowes has been involved in a number of projects in Africa, including in Tanzania, Malawi and Namibia.

He has also worked for Anglo American, BHP and Vale across a range of technical and operational roles in Africa, Australia and South America.

During the past decade, Bowes has worked in director and senior executive positions for a number of ASX listed mining development companies.

Uranium experience

Before joining the company, Bowes was the technical lead for the Honeymoon Uranium Project in South Australia, taking it through the various study and technical development stages that resulted in the delivery of the feasibility study in early 2020.

He holds a BSc. chemical engineering from the University of Natal in South Africa.

Bowes succeeds Eduard Smirnov, who has resigned to pursue other interests, and the company has thanked Smirnov for his contributions.


Melbourne, Feb 9 (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 9th Feb, 2021 ) :Sofia Kenin made a nervous start to her Australian Open defence Tuesday, but ailing former champion Victoria Azarenka crashed out after needing treatment for breathing difficulties during a straight-sets defeat.

Kenin edged through 7-5, 6-4 against Australian Maddison Inglis, who is ranked outside the top 100, and vented her frustration verbally throughout a tetchy first round.

"I'm obviously not happy with the way I played," said Kenin, who made 27 unforced errors on her return to Rod Laver Arena.

The 22-year-old won her maiden Grand Slam a year ago against Garbine Muguruza, who turned the tables to beat Kenin in a warm-up tournament last week and had little trouble in dispatching Russia's Margarita Gasparyan 6-4, 6-0 on the adjacent Margaret Court Arena.

But the 2012 and 2013 champion Azarenka was a distressing sight as she went out to Jessica Pegula on the second day of the coronavirus-delayed Grand Slam.

Azarenka, who was one of the players locked down in hard quarantine before the tournament and not allowed out of her room to train for 14 days, began to suffer in the second set.

The 2020 US Open runner-up, who only played one warm-up match last week, was seen gasping and using an inhaler, and then looked close to collapse on court. After a medical timeout she played on but lost 7-5, 6-4.

"It was tough for her, she wasn't well but I just focused on myself," said the 61st-ranked Pegula.

Fifth seed Elina Svitolina of the Ukraine was pushed hard by Cezch Marie Bouzkouva before coming through 6-3, 7-5 (7/5).

In the men's draw, red-hot Russian seventh seed Andrey Rublev continued his unbeaten start to the year with a straight-sets win over German Yannick Hanfmann 6-3, 6-3, 6-4 on John Cain Arena.

"I was really happy I could control the match almost from the beginning," said the 23-year-old, who blasted 17 aces.

Rublev claimed a tour-leading five ATP titles last year and won four straight matches to help Russia win the ATP Cup last week, putting him in the conversation for a maiden Grand Slam crown.

Rafael Nadal's bid for a record 21st Grand Slam starts later, with fitness concerns hanging over the Spaniard.

The 34-year-old faces 56th-ranked Laslo Djere after back trouble ruled him out of last week's ATP Cup.

Nadal raised the alarm on Sunday when he said he'd been "suffering" with the injury for more than two weeks.

Nadal is currently tied with the absent Roger Federer on 20 Grand Slam titles.

Women's world number one Ashleigh Barty will open the night session on Rod Laver Arena as she aims to become the first Australian women's champion since Chris O'Neil in 1978.

Barty, fresh from winning the Yarra Valley Classic final against Muguruza on Sunday, plays Montenegro's Danka Kovinic.

Among the men's contenders, fourth seed Daniil Medvedev plays Vasek Pospisil of Canada, and fifth-seeded Stefanos Tsitsipas faces France's Gilles Simon.


BEIRUT, Lebanon  A Saudi activist best known for challenging the ban on women driving, Loujain al-Hathloul, was released Wednesday after the kingdom had jailed her for nearly three years on charges that Western governments and rights groups roundly dismissed as politically motivated.

Loujain is at home, Ms. al-Hathlouls sister Lina wrote on Twitter with a photo of herself grinning widely during a video call with her sister. Another sister, Alia, wrote that Ms. al-Hathloul had returned to the familys home and said her release marked the best day of my life.

Ms. al-Hathlouls release comes as the kingdoms rulers, who enjoyed particularly warm relations with the Trump administration, seek to set a new tone with President Biden, who criticized Saudi Arabia during the campaign and vowed to reassess the United States relationship with the kingdom.

Since entering the White House, the Biden administration has said it would emphasize democracy and human rights in foreign policy, frozen some arms sales to Saudi Arabia and reversed the Trump administrations designation of the Houthi rebels, who are at war with Saudi Arabia in Yemen, as a terrorist organization.

Egypt has expressed its condemnation in the strongest terms to the Houthi militias targeting of Abha International Airport in the south of the sisterly Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, a statement by the Egyptian foreign ministry said on Wednesday.

Egypt has also condemned the Houthis continuing hostile actions targeting the kingdoms territory, the statement said.

The Saudi-led Arab Coalition engaged in Yemen said on Wednesday that a terrorist attack by the Iran-backed Houthi militia targeting the airport caused a fire in a civilian aircraft.

The coalition clarified in a statement that the fire was brought under control.

Attempting to target Abha airport and threatening civilian travellers is a war crime, the coalition said.

The foreign ministrys statement added that Egypt has reaffirmed its solidarity and its stand with its sister country, Saudi Arabia, in facing such sinful terrorist acts, which threaten the security and stability of the Kingdom and the safety of its citizens and residents on its lands.

The statement added that such acts also represented a clear and direct threat to regional security and stability.

Earlier on the same day, Reuters reported, according to Saudi state television, that the Saudi-led coalition said it had intercepted and destroyed two armed drones launched by the Iran-aligned group towards Saudi Arabia.

Short link:


By Moses Ndhaye

The government has asked mobile telecommunication companies to remove barriers hindering the most isolated and least served communities in the country to access smartphones.

The minister for ICT Judith Nabakoba says as the government continues to make the internet affordable, its crucial for the telecommunication operators in the country to make smartphone handsets affordable to the community.

She says this will help the countrys digital sector to grow.

She adds that Ugandas telecommunication sector has grown from 26.7 million active subscribers to 28.4 million by the end of March 2020 which translates to 1 million scramblers in the country.

While launching a partnership between Airtel Uganda and MasterCard, to drive digital inclusion in Uganda through affordable Pay-on-Demand services, Nabakoba says the number of people using smartphones in the country now stands at 7.9 million people.
[February 10, 2021] Opportunity Financial ("OppFi"), a Leading Fintech Platform Powering Credit Access for the Everyday Consumer, Enters into Definitive Business Combination Agreement with FG New America Acquisition Corp.

CHICAGO, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Opportunity Financial, LLC ("OppFi"), a leading financial technology platform that serves the everyday consumer, and FG New America Acquisition Corp. (NYSE: FGNA), a special purpose acquisition corporation ("SPAC"), today announced they have entered into a definitive business combination agreement for a business combination that would result in OppFi becoming a public company. Upon closing, the combined company's common stock is expected to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker "OPFI." The business combination is expected to close by the end of the second quarter of 2021, subject to customary closing conditions. FGNA Chairman Joe Moglia stated, "My team at FG New America and I are thrilled to announce this transaction with OppFi, as serving the financial needs of the everyday consumer is very much in our DNA. We have been highly impressed by the significant growth the OppFi team has achieved through their innovative platform and the proven ability to scale, all while faithfully serving their customers." OppFi CEO Jared Kaplan stated, "OppFi is at the forefront of a high growth digital financial services revolution. We are a leading financial technology platform that powers banks through a multitude of products and our unwavering commitment to customer service. We're tremendously proud of the team that has made our progress possible through a commitment to serving consumers excluded from the traditional system through fair, transparent products and an extraordinary customer experience. We see a solid opportunity ahead for OppFi to be the financial champion for the nearly 60 million everyday consumers in the U.S. as we continue to innovate our array of products, technology and capabilities in the years ahead. We are excited to be joining with the FGNA team to help make this a reality."







* Non-GAAP Financial Measures: Adjusted EBITDA, Adjusted Net Income and Adjusted Net Income Margin are financial measures that have not been prepared in accordance with Regulation S-X. See the "Note Regarding Non-GAAP Financial Measures" below for a detailed description and reconciliation of such Non-GAAP financial measures to their most directly comparable GAAP financial measures, as required by Regulation G.

OppFi has facilitated more than 1.5 million loans over the past nine years and believes that the company's approach and strategy have positioned OppFi to continue to gain share of market and outperform. "I am extremely proud of the success and growth OppFi has experienced since its inception. More importantly, we help customers access a better financial path with the superior experience they deserve. This is an exciting stage in the company's evolution, which we believe will enable us to further expand our mission and be the financial destination for the tens of millions of everyday consumers that need access more than ever," said Todd Schwartz, Founder and Executive Chairman, OppFi. Key Takeaways OppFi addresses a vast unmet need for U.S. consumers, as nearly 60 million consumers lack access to mainstream financial products

AI-enabled financial services platform is scalable and mobile

Over 66% revenue CAGR since 2017, achieving estimated revenue of $323 million in 2020

in 2020 Consistent profitability, with estimated Adjusted Net Income* of $53 million in 2020 and an Adjusted Net Income margin* of 17%

in 2020 and an Adjusted Net Income margin* of 17% The core customer is the median U.S. consumer, earning approximately $50,000 annually, employed and has a bank account, but is often locked out of traditional mainstream financial products

annually, employed and has a bank account, but is often locked out of traditional mainstream financial products Significant scale, facilitating more than $2.3 billion in loan issuances covering over 1.5 million loans

in loan issuances covering over 1.5 million loans Nationally recognized and awarded for its exceptional customer service, and a net promoter score of 84, coupled with its focus on financial education

Meaningful opportunity to expand products and services Transaction Overview

The transaction implies an equity valuation at closing for the combined company of approximately $800 million and is expected to be fully funded through cash in trust. The equity value represents 12.2x and 9.1x projected 2021 and 2022 Adjusted Net Income, respectively. It is estimated that 100% of net proceeds will be used to pay cash consideration to existing equityholders of OppFi. Existing OppFi equityholders will initially retain approximately 62% ownership in the pro forma company, assuming none of FGNA's public stockholders elect to redeem their shares in connection with the closing of the transaction. Existing OppFi equityholders will have the potential to receive additional earn-out shares over three years if certain stock price targets are met. The Boards of Directors of OppFi and FGNA have each unanimously approved the transaction. Advisors

Moelis & Company is serving as exclusive financial advisor to Opportunity Financial, LLC. Needham & Company, ThinkEquity, a division of Fordham Financial Management, Inc., Piper Sandler & Co., and Northland Securities are serving as capital markets advisors to FG New America Acquisition Corp. DLA Piper LLP (US) is serving as legal advisor to Opportunity Financial, LLC. White & Case LLP is serving as legal advisor to FG New America Acquisition Corp. Investor Webcast and Conference Call Information

Opportunity Financial, LLC and FG New America Acquisition Corp. will host a joint investor webcast and conference call to discuss the proposed transaction today on February 10, 2021 at 8:00 am ET. A webcast will be available here and can also be accessed on www.opploans.com/investor-relations as well as on FG New America Acquisition Corp.'s website at https://www.fgnewamerica.com . For those who wish to participate by telephone, please dial 1- 877-407-4018 (U.S.) or 1- 201-689-8471 (International) and reference the Conference ID 13716408. A replay of the call will also be available via webcast at www.opploans.com/investor-relations or https://www.fgnewamerica.com. FG New America Acquisition Corp. will file an investor presentation relating to the proposed transaction with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the "SEC") as an exhibit to a Current Report on Form 8-K prior to the call, which will be available on the SEC's website at www.sec.gov . All materials can also be found at https://www.fgnewamerica.com and at www.opploans.com/investor-relations. About OppFi

OppFi is a leading financial technology platform that powers banks to offer accessible products and a top-rated experience to everyday consumers. Through its unwavering commitment to customer service, OppFi helps consumers who are turned away by traditional providers build a better financial path. To date, OppFi has facilitated the issuance of more than 1.5 million loans. The company has been ranked as an Inc. 5000 company for five straight years and was named the eighth fastest-growing Chicagoland company in 2020 by Crain's Chicago Business. The company maintains an A+ rating from the Better Business Bureau (BBB) and maintains a 4.9/5 star rating with more than 14,000 online customer reviews, making it one of the top customer-rated financial platforms online. For more information, please visit www.opploans.com/investor-relations. About FGNA

FG New America Acquisition Corp. is a NYSE-listed blank check company formed for the purpose of effecting a merger, capital stock exchange, asset acquisition, stock purchase, reorganization or similar business combination with one or more businesses. Non-GAAP Financial Measures

This press release includes certain non-GAAP financial measures that are unaudited and do not conform to Regulation S-X, including Adjusted EBITDA, Adjusted Net Income and Adjusted Net Income Margin. Adjusted EBITDA is defined as Adjusted Net Income, pro forma for fair market value accounting, plus 1) taxes at an assumed 25% tax rate, 2) depreciation and amortization 3) interest expense and 4) business (non-income) taxes. Adjusted Net Income is defined as current audited financials earnings before tax, pro forma for fair market value accounting, plus 1) recruiting fees, severance and relocation, 2) amortization of debt transaction costs and 3) other addbacks and one-time expenses including one-time implementation fees, stock compensation expenses, IPO readiness costs and management fees; and assumes a tax rate of 25%. The pro forma fair market value accounting adjustments are due to OppFi's transition from an expected credit loss application to a fair market value application acceptable under US GAAP. Historically, under the expected credit loss application, OppFi has reserved for life losses due to the short duration of receivables. These financial measures are not prepared in accordance with accounting principles generally accepted in the United States and may be different from non-GAAP financial measures used by other companies. FGNA and OppFi believe that the use of these non-GAAP financial measures provides an additional tool for investors to use in evaluating ongoing operating results and trends. These non-GAAP measures with comparable names should not be considered in isolation from, or as an alternative to, financial measures determined in accordance with GAAP. A reconciliation for the Company's non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures is located at the end of this press release. Forward-Looking Statements

This press release includes "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the "safe harbor" provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. FGNA's and OppFi's actual results may differ from their expectations, estimates and projections and consequently, you should not rely on these forward-looking statements as predictions of future events. Words such as "expect," "estimate," "project," "budget," "forecast," "anticipate," "intend," "plan," "may," "will," "could," "should," "believes," "predicts," "potential," "continue," and similar expressions are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements include, without limitation, FGNA's and OppFi's expectations with respect to future performance, performance, growth, and OppFi's market, OppFi's new products and their performance, the anticipated financial impacts of the proposed business combination, the satisfaction of the closing conditions to the proposed business combination and the timing of the completion of the proposed business combination. These forward-looking statements involve significant risks and uncertainties that could cause the actual results to differ materially from the expected results. Most of these factors are outside FGNA's and OppFi's control and are difficult to predict. Factors that may cause such differences include, but are not limited to: (1) the occurrence of any event, change or other circumstances that could give rise to the termination of the definitive business combination agreement (the "Agreement"); (2) the outcome of any legal proceedings that may be instituted against FGNA and OppFi following the announcement of the Agreement and the transactions contemplated therein; (3) the inability to complete the proposed business combination, including due to failure to obtain approval of the stockholders of FGNA, certain regulatory approvals or satisfy other conditions to closing in the Agreement, including with respect to the levels of FGNA stockholder redemptions; (4) the occurrence of any event, change or other circumstance that could give rise to the termination of the Agreement or could otherwise cause the transaction to fail to close; (5) the impact of COVID-19 on OppFi's business and/or the ability of the parties to complete the proposed business combination; (6) the inability to obtain or maintain the listing of the combined company's shares of common stock on the New York Stock Exchange following the proposed business combination; (7) the risk that the proposed business combination disrupts current plans and operations as a result of the announcement and consummation of the proposed business combination; (8) the ability to recognize the anticipated benefits of the proposed business combination, which may be affected by, among other things, competition, the ability of OppFi to grow and manage growth profitably and retain its key employees; (9) costs related to the proposed business combination; (10) changes in applicable laws or regulations; (11) the possibility that OppFi or FGNA may be adversely affected by other economic, business, and/or competitive factors; and (12) other risks and uncertainties indicated from time to time in the proxy statement relating to the proposed business combination, including those under "Risk Factors" therein, and in FGNA's other filings with the SEC. FGNA and OppFi caution that the foregoing list of factors is not exclusive. FGNA and OppFi caution readers not to place undue reliance upon any forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date made. FGNA and OppFi do not undertake or accept any obligation or undertaking to release publicly any updates or revisions to any forward-looking statements to reflect any change in its expectations or any change in events, conditions or circumstances on which any such statement is based. Important Information and Where to Find It

In connection with the proposed business combination, FGNA intends to file a preliminary proxy statement and a definitive proxy statement with the SEC. FGNA's stockholders and other interested persons are advised to read, when available, the preliminary proxy statement and the amendments thereto and the definitive proxy statement and documents incorporated by reference therein filed in connection with the proposed business combination, as these materials will contain important information about OppFi, FGNA and the proposed business combination. When available, the definitive proxy statement and other relevant materials for the proposed business combination will be mailed to stockholders of FGNA as of a record date to be established for voting on the proposed business combination. Stockholders will also be able to obtain copies of the preliminary proxy statement, the definitive proxy statement and other documents filed with the SEC that will be incorporated by reference therein, without charge, once available, at the SEC's web site at www.sec.gov, or by directing a request to: FG New America Acquisition Corp., Attention: Hassan Baqar, Chief Financial Officer, 105 S. Maple Street, Itasca, Illinois 60143. Participants in the Solicitation

FGNA and its directors and executive officers may be deemed participants in the solicitation of proxies from FGNA's stockholders with respect to the business combination. A list of the names of those directors and executive officers and a description of their interests in FGNA will be filed in the proxy statement for the proposed business combination and be available at www.sec.gov . Additional information regarding the interests of such participants will be contained in the proxy statement for the proposed business combination when available. OppFi and its directors and executive officers may also be deemed to be participants in the solicitation of proxies from the stockholders of FGNA in connection with the business combination. A list of the names of such directors and executive officers and information regarding their interests in the proposed business combination will be included in the proxy statement for the proposed business combination. Non-Solicitation

This press release shall not constitute a solicitation of a proxy, consent or authorization with respect to any securities or in respect of the proposed business combination. This press release shall also not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any securities, nor shall there be any sale of securities in any states or jurisdictions in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such jurisdiction. No offering of securities shall be made except by means of a prospectus meeting the requirements of Section 10 of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended. Contacts:

OppFi

Investor Relations: Investors@opploans.com

Media Relations: media@opploans.com FGNA

Investor Relations: info@fgnewamerica.com

Media Relations: media@fgnewamerica.com OppFi Current Audited Financials EBT to Fair Market Value EBT Reconciliation









($ in millions) 2017A 2018A 2019A 2020E Current Audited Financials EBT1 $3 $10 $33 $79 Loan Loss Reserve Adjustment 7 19 26 1 Capitalization Adjustment (1) (6) (8) 5 Increase / (Decrease) in FMV 5 14 18 (17) Pro Forma Fair Market Value EBT2 $13 $36 $68 $68 Taxes3 (3) (9) (17) (17) Pro Forma Fair Market Value Net Income $10 $27 $51 $51

Note: Excludes transaction expenses 1. Represents Net Income as reported in audited financial statements, as the Company does not have tax liability under current LLC pass-through structure 2. The Company is transitioning from an expected credit loss application to a fair market value application acceptable under US GAAP. Historically under the expected credit loss application, the Company has reserved for life losses due to the short duration of receivables 3. Assumes tax rate of 25% OppFi Current Audited Financials EBT to Adjusted EBT Reconciliation









($ in millions) 2017A 2018A 2019A 2020E Current Audited Financials EBT1 $3 $10 $33 $79 Recruiting Fees, Severance & Relocation 0.2 0.3 0.3 0.1 Amortization of Debt Transaction Costs 0.5 0.6 1.8 1.9 Other Addback and One-Time Expenses2 1.1 0.6 0.5 1.1 Current Audited Financials Adj. EBT $4 $11 $36 $82 Taxes3 (1) (3) (9) (20) Current Audited Financials Adj. Net Income $3 $8 $27 $61

Note: Excludes transaction expenses 1. Represents Net Income as reported in audited financial statements, as the Company does not have tax liability under current LLC pass-through structure 2. Includes one time implementation fees, stock compensation expenses, IPO readiness costs and management fees 3. Assumes tax rate of 25% OppFi Fair Market Value EBT to Fair Market Value Adj. EBT and EBITDA Reconciliation









($ in millions) 2017A 2018A 2019A 2020E Pro Forma Fair Market Value EBT $13 $36 $68 $68 Recruiting Fees, Severance & Relocation 0.2 0.3 0.3 0.1 Amortization of Debt Transaction Costs 0.5 0.6 1.8 1.9 Other Addback and One-Time Expenses1 1.1 0.6 0.5 1.1 Pro Forma Fair Market Value Adj. EBT $15 $37 $71 $71 Taxes2 (4) (9) (18) (18) Pro Forma Fair Market Value Adj. Net Income $11 $28 $53 $53 Taxes2 4 9 18 18 Depreciation and Amortization 1 2 4 7 Interest Expense 6 12 21 19 Business (Non-income) Taxes -- 0.3 1 2 Pro Forma Fair Market Value Adj. EBITDA $22 $52 $97 $99

Note: Excludes transaction expenses 1. Includes one time implementation fees, stock compensation expenses, IPO readiness costs and management fees 2. Assumes tax rate of 25% View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/opportunity-financial-oppfi-a-leading-fintech-platform-powering-credit-access-for-the-everyday-consumer-enters-into-definitive-business-combination-agreement-with-fg-new-america-acquisition-corp-301225844.html SOURCE www.oppfi.com

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STAMFORD  Health care information provider Sema4 announced Wednesday that it would become a publicly traded company, an ambitious plan intended to catalyze further growth for one of the fastest-expanding firms in Connecticut.

In a move that values the company at approximately $2 billion, Stamford-headquartered Sema4 is going public through a process that offers an alternative to an initial public offering. It would result in Sema4s shares trading on the Nasdaq Global Market upon the transactions expected completion in the second quarter of this year.

Itll be a big infusion of cash onto the Sema4 balance sheet to build out more rapidly and more completely the kind of solutions were delivering for patients, providers and health systems, Sema4 founder and CEO Eric Schadt said in an interview. What this provides is the right scale of fuel to get much more aggressive.

To facilitate its transformation into a public company, Sema4 has entered an agreement with special purpose acquisition company CM Life Sciences that is expected to generate proceeds of up to approximately $793 million when the transaction is completed. Up to $343 million of that amount would be paid to Sema4 stockholders, and the remainder would support Sema4s operations.

Through the SPAC framework, Sema4 expects to accrue up to $500 million in available cash  a total that would include $450 million from the transaction, as well as existing cash on its balance sheet.

For a biomedical company, you need so much money to keep doing the research and bringing products to market. Having that infusion of another $450 million will really help the company, said Paul Pescatello, executive director and senior counsel for the Connecticut Business & Industry Associations Connecticut Bioscience Growth Council. Its a very efficient way of raising the funds and being able to go forward.

In addition to approximately $443 million of cash held in CM Life Sciences trust account, a group of institutional investors plans to participate through $350 million of private investment in public equity.

Its sort of an IPO in reverse because youre setting the price up front, doing the road show up front with getting all these big-name public investors signed up and then you do that merger agreement and get ready to be public, Schadt said. It helps capture the value of the market today, helps set the (stock) price and gives you security.

Those investors include Casdin Capital, Corvex Management, Greenwich-based Viking Global Investors, Fidelity Management & Research Company LLC, Counterpoint Global (Morgan Stanley), Perceptive Advisors, SB Management, a subsidiary of SoftBank Group Corp, and funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates Inc. Existing investors include funds and accounts managed by Blackrock and Deerfield Management.

The disruptive promise in combining these genomic and clinical data sets, at the patient level, is profound but takes a team of experts, the right business model and lots of growth capital, Eli Casdin, founder and chief investment officer of Casdin Capital, said in a statement. We therefore could not be more excited to lend our partnership and fill the balance sheet for the foremost leader in the field, Eric Schadt and the expert team hes assembled at Sema4. With an early start, unique business strategy and more than 150 leading data scientists, this is the premier company in one of the biggest, winner-take-most markets in life sciences.

In a related move, CM Life Sciences held last September a $385 million initial public offering.

Signaling the markets optimism about Sema4s prospects, CM Life Sciences stock value surged by 42 percent on Wednesday, to close at about $22. CM Life Sciences trades under the CMLF ticker symbol.

This makes it easier for a company like Sema4 to go public because CMLF has already handled the work of registration and all the guts you need to be a public company, Schadt said. Whatever ticker symbol gets assigned to Sema4 will replace the CMLF ticker symbol, and we become that publicly traded stock.

Sema4 had already garnered major investments. Last year, the company received a $121 million infusion from a group of backers that included the state-chartered investment agency Connecticut Innovations and Greenwich-based Oak HC/FT. The investment helped the company achieve at that point a valuation of more than $1 billion.

Growing in Connecticut

Since its 2017 spinoff from the Mount Sinai Health System into its own firm, Sema4 has expanded significantly in Connecticut.

Among recent developments, it announced last December the opening of an approximately 70,000-square-foot lab in Stamfords Waterside section. It has the capacity to process thousands of genomic tests per day  crucial in Sema4s efforts to provide information related to thousands of genetically identifiable diseases to patients across the country.

The new facility opened following the renovation of a building at 62 Southfield Ave. that dates to 1904 and once operated as a chocolate factory.

It replaced the firms old laboratory at the Mount Sinai campus in Manhattan and complements another lab, in Branford.

In total, Sema4 employs approximately 560 in Connecticut. About 200 of them work at the Stamford lab, alongside about 110 based in Branford and around 250 based at the Ludlow Street offices.

To support its expansion, the state Department of Economic and Community Development has provided Sema4 a total of $15.5 million in loans.

Since its founding, Sema4 has focused largely on reproductive health-based testing and analysis.

But it has diversified its services in the past year to respond to the coronavirus pandemic. At the Branford lab, it has built out a testing program that recently has been processing about 20,000 to 25,000 viral tests each week.

Across all its operations, Sema4 has amassed more than 10 million patient records.

Sema4s name refers to semaphore  a system used to send signals. The company has said it aims to discern signal from noise across trillions of data points to gain insights into human health.

pschott@stamfordadvocate.com; Twitter: @paulschott
A 40-year-old Reading man was threatening and assaulting his mother when she pulled out a gun and shot him to death last month, Berks County authorities said.

Prosecutors announced Wednesday that the woman was justified in the shooting, which took place Jan. 20 on the 1400 block of Hampden Boulevard.

The woman told police her son Beau Gehret, 40, was intoxicated and trying to assault her when she grabbed a handgun and shot him, prosecutors said. They said the woman remained at the scene after the shooting and told a friend to call 911.

Prosecutors said Gehret had a history of assaulting his mother and father, which led his father to move from Reading to Delaware. Gehret was charged in at least two other altercations between him and his mother, authorities said.

In a Wednesday news release, the Berks County District Attorneys Office said, after a thorough review of the above incident and after consultation with the Reading Police Department, the District Attorney has determined that the homicide of Beau Gehret by his mother was a justified use of force.

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Abuja  As the National Assembly resumes plenary to debate amendment to the Electoral Act, political parties and other stakeholders have called for the conduct of all elections in one day on grounds that it would save cost for the country.

The Inter-party Advisory Council (IPAC) said conducting elections in one day was feasible and doable the way it is done in other developing.

The acting national president of IPAC, Chief Ralph Okey Nwosu, who spoke with LEADERSHIP, lamented the enormous resources and time wasted in organising staggered elections.

He added that unified elections will address the unnecessary challenge of huge spending and the needless grounding of businesses during multiple elections.

Nwosu who is also the national chairman of African Democratic Congress (ADC) further added that it would eliminate the bandwagon effect of the party in power as well as tame the desperation by politicians to manipulate polls.

He said, "Holding elections in one day will be the best thing to happen to this country. We should have the election in one day, it's very feasible and doable, and if other developing countries can do it why not Nigeria? INEC should be more disciplined and organized. It is feasible and it is the best thing for our democracy. It is unheard of to hold two or three elections in a year. We are closing shops, making businesses to stand still just for elections.

"Nigerians will go to the poll to vote for the president, governor and members of the National and State Assemblies. At times when we manipulate the election, the outcome shows desperation. Holding Nigeria's election in one day will help Nigeria to grow."

On the debate on card readers, the IPAC chieftain raised concerns over the number of cases on its use during election.

He said, "As a major stakeholder in the issue the way the National Assembly is discussing it shows a critical stakeholders debate. The National Assembly members want a situation where they will legislate based on their interest. We need to look at how successful it had been, how many court cases we have, how many times we abandoned card readers half way in elections.

"Do we have all the data? INEC has to supply the data. I am aware that there are a lot of court cases. In most cases the card readers are banned. If it is not working well, why are we legislating on it?"

In same vein, the leadership of the National Consultative Front (NCFront) has called for a one-off election for presidential, governorship and National Assembly election to save cost.

The NCFront however stated that to eradicate political nomadism, any political office holder who defects to another party should lose his/her seat.

Speaking with LEADERSHIP in Abuja, the spokesperson of the group, Dr Tanko Yunusa, said a one-off election will make the leadership of the National Assembly not to be a rubber stamp.

He said, "We support the idea of a one-off election because it saves a lot of costs. And the only area which I am suggesting for staggered election is, for instance, if the presidential and governorship election is done in February in the year of 2020 that of the National Assembly should be done in 2022.

"This means that the National Assembly and Senate election can take place as a one-off to reduce the heavy cost of electioneering.

"So within the four-year tenure of the president, there's an opportunity for a change of guard within the National Assembly within two years. That would give room for a competition just like what's happening in the United States.

"Also, they would not be a rubber-stamp National Assembly just the way we have now knowing fully well that they have a one-year tenure more or less like a four-year tenure together with Mr President.

"So, we support that the presidential and governorship election should be done once while the election for the National Assembly and House of Representatives should be staggered within a space of two years."

On the Electoral Act amendment, he said the NCFront has been advocating seriously the eradication of what he called political nomadism.

"When you contest an election under a political party and you want to change a party then such an office holder should lose his seat then contest another election under a new party."

Also, the Young Progressives Party (YPP) has said the electronic transmission of election results will drastically reduce electoral fraud.

The national publicity secretary of the party, Mr Wale Martins said this experiment took place in Edo and Ondo States, which gave a level of credibility to the results in both states.

He said if this process is not legalised by the Act of the National Assembly, it would leave a gap that may be selfishly exploited by politicians for selfish reasons.

"The stance of the Young Progressives Party on the legalisation of the card reader and electronic transmission of election results from the polling units is unambiguous as it will drastically reduce, if not completely eliminate, electoral fraud, especially the manipulation of election results before the final collation," he added.

On its part, Labour Party (LP) has called for granting of autonomy to local government councils and the abolition of state independent electoral commission thereby authorising INEC to conduct local council polls.

The party added that any electoral amendment that fails to include these issues is designed to serve the interest of the political elite and not the entirety of Nigerians.

The national secretary of Labour Party, Barr Julius Abure, who made the position of the party known, called on the legislators "to wear the garment of patriotism and to take hold of the momentous opportunity of the ongoing amendment to reflect the yearnings and aspirations of the people."

Some other recommendations by the Labour Party's scribe to be considered during the amendment include an amendment that would legitimise the use of technology in the electoral system, ease the participation of visually impaired persons and other persons living with disabilities in the electoral process and enhance youth participation amongst others.

He said, "We call on all members of the National Assembly to wear the garment of patriotism and to for once take hold of the momentous opportunity of the ongoing amendment to reflect the yearnings and aspirations of the people.

"However, any amendment which does not make provision for the underlisted is an amendment only for the political elite in Nigeria.

"The Constitution and the Electoral Act must be amended to give full autonomy to local government councils. State independent Electoral Commissions should be abolished and INEC should give the responsibility to conduct local government elections in the country. This will remove local councils from the claws, cleavages and prevent state governors from appointing their stooges as officials of local government areas. The state joint account must be abolished. This is without prejudice to what Mr President has done in the recent past to ensure that funds are released directly from the federation account to all LGAs in Nigeria

"An amendment that will legitimise the use of technology in the electoral system to wit; voters are electronically accredited which will confirm, authenticate and verify a voter; polling unit election results are published and electronically transmitted to INEC Website and other platforms and made accessible to members of the public; give INEC the power to adopt electronic voting and electronic collation and transmission of election results. This will reduce the huge cost of logistics, saves time and energy currently spent on election materials.

"Reflect amendments that will ease the participation of the visually impaired persons and other persons living with disabilities in the electoral process. Insert novel and incisive provisions that will remove all disabilities and enhance the participation of youths in the electoral process.

"Make deliberate provisions to enhance the participation of women in the electoral process. Insert provisions that will aid the prosecution of electoral offenders and discourage vote buying. INEC should be relieved of the burden of preventing, investigating and prosecuting electoral Electoral offences."

Also, the immediate-past secretary-general of the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF), Mr Anthony Sani said the country would cut the cost of elections if they are held on the same day.

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He also said that the ongoing constitution amendment must ensure the legality of the use of card readers in all elections insisting that all elections should be conducted by INEC, including the local government council elections.

Sani said such arrangement reduces the strength of democracy at the grassroots since it was on record the ruling party always wins in elections organised and conducted by the states.

"My take on which areas require amendment include legalisation of card readers away from being mere guidelines by INEC; electoral mandate is to the political party and not to individual; all elections should be conducted the same day. INEC should conduct local government elections and office of the Attorney General should be separated from that of minister of Justice," Sani said.

According to him, the legalisation of card readers would go a long way in reducing incidence of multiple voting, ghosts voting and confer credibility and integrity on the electoral processes and the system.

"Because of the confusion defections by politicians cause in our multiparty system and prevent the politicians and political parties from being ideological, it is important for the electoral act to be clear about who owns the electoral mandate. Is it the political parties or the individual candidates? If it is made clear that the electoral mandate is to political parties and not to individual candidates, it would prevent unbridled defections by politicians and, thus help build sturdy political parties based on ideological disposition and issues.

"Also, in order to reduce cost and prevent bandwagon effects, all elections should be conducted on the same day. If Kenya can do it, there is no reason why Nigeria cannot conduct all the elections on the same day.

"Following the dearth of democracy at local government level by governors who misuse state electoral commissions to kill the multiparty democracy at that level where no opposition party ever wins a councilor seat, let the electoral commissions be abolished in favour of INEC which should be allowed to conduct local government elections," Sani said.
Qatar and Saudi Arabia restore diplomatic relations After an almost four-year halt

(ANSAmed) - BEIRUT, FEBRUARY 10 - After an almost four-year suspension of high-level diplomatic ties, Qatar and Saudi Arabia have restored official relations.



A meeting was held Wednesday between Qatari foreign minister Sultan ben Saad Muraykhi and Saudi ambassador Ali al-Qahtani, who had shortly before arrived back in the Qatari capital.



Following a crisis that began in May 2017, the two countries re-established bilateral relations in January.



Arab media reported that Muraykhil and Qahtani on Wednesday discussed bilateral relations and issues of shared interest.



Saudi Arabia and its allies in the region - Egypt, Bahrain, the UAE - had in 2017 inflicted a trade, political, and diplomatic blockade on Qatar after accusing it of supporting "terrorism".



For months the US and Kuwait had been mediating in an attempt to put an end to the crisis, which officially ended in the Gulf Cooperation Council summit held in January in Saudi Arabia.



(ANSA).





by Francis Khoo Thwe

According to doctors who treated the wounded, the military used live ammunition. More demonstrations today. Sit-ins in front of the embassy of China, considered "too friendly" towards junta. Bishops remove their directive banning religious personnel from participating in demonstrations. "What is the Church doing when people are arrested and persecuted for no reason?". The condemnation of the USA and the UN.

Yangon (AsiaNews)  A woman has allegedly been shot in the head and is currently in serious conditions according to various human rights groups and social media reports. The woman allegedly was the victim of police violence that broke out yesterday during a large demonstration in Naypyidaw. To disperse the demonstrators, the police used powerful fire hydrants, rubber bullets, but also live ammunition, as confirmed by some doctors who visited the wounded.

These reports are also confirmed by the father of another victim. The man claims that his son was hit by a bullet "when he tried to use the megaphone to ask people to protest peacefully".

The demonstrations resumed today. In the capital, state employees demonstrated in front of various offices, including in front of the Chinese embassy, which was deemed "too friendly" towards the military junta. In recent days, with their veto, China and Russia have blocked any expression of condemnation by the UN Security Council.

Meanwhile, the Catholic bishops are reconsidering their position.

Yesterday's official statement - which prohibited priests, seminarians and religious from participating in pro-democracy demonstrations  was lifted this morning.

On social media it remains in some private tweets, such as that of Card. Charles Maung Bo. The official Episcopal Conference website no longer carries it.

The directive, in addition to the prohibition for religious personnel, gave instructions to the lay faithful not to carry religious symbols with them in demonstrations. There has been an avalanche of criticism of the bishops attitude of "fear" and "detachment from reality".

A priest asks: Our country has been under colonial powers for more than a century and under a military junta for over 50 years. What has the Church done for her people, for her nation? What is the Church doing when people are arrested and persecuted for no reason?.

Last night, around 9.30, the military carried out a raid on the headquarters of the National League for Democracy, the party of Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader currently under house arrest.

The United States, which leads the international community in its criticism of the coup, yesterday reiterated its condemnation of violence against demonstrations. The junta has imposed a ban on gatherings with more than five people. Ned Price, of the US State Department, said the people of Myanmar "have the right to gather peacefully".

Last night, the UN also declared "deep concern" for the violence against the population.
BERLIN, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Klarna, the leading global payment and shopping service, is launching consumer bank accounts in Germany, with the aim to provide them with further control of their finances. The launch marks a first for the company and will allow customers to easily track, categorize and analyze all of their everyday spending using the Klarna app. A Klarna bank account will come with a Visa debit card which can also be connected to both Google Pay and Apple Pay. The offering will exclusively be made available to a limited number of Klarna's most loyal consumers to intensively collect and integrate feedback before gradually rolling out to all Klarna users in Germany in the coming months.

With this new product, Klarna provides its consumers with a full Klarna end-to-end experience that puts consumers first: From shopping to keeping track, managing and predicting one's spendings, the Klarna app enables consumers to have all their finances in one place. In future, German consumers will also be able to set savings goals and benefit from Klarna's savings accounts product in the Klarna app, which was launched earlier this year in Sweden.

Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO of Klarna said, "Our focus is to provide a superior shopping experience to our consumers at the intersection of retail and banking. And we know that there's still massive room for improvement to the way many people bank and save their money today. Users are demanding more seamless, intuitive and transparent services to meet their daily needs, but many banks still do not cater for this. We are very excited to introduce Klarna Banking today, bundling shopping and banking in one app and allowing our consumers to bank in the same seamless way as they shop with Klarna."

Companies in the financial sector, especially traditional banks, have so far had to struggle with the changes brought about by digitization. According to current figures from the Deutsche Bundesbank, the number of bank branches has fallen back to the level of the 1950s. A study by Bitkom from 2019 shows that 7 out of 10 German citizens do their banking on the internet and that digital offers from their bank are more important than a well-known brand. This development shows an increasing change, which becomes manifest especially in the needs of the customers.

The Klarna Bank Account at a glance

Self-service sign up with an own developed KYC process called Klarna Ident. Video identification possible, but not necessary.

3-click transfers and instant top-ups - money never more than a tip-tap away.

Smart Budgeting - make monthly budgets for full transparency over spendings across purchase categories.

Klarna Bank Card - The account includes a Visa debit card, which can be individually selected with the distinctive Klarna card design, available in two colours.

Cash withdrawals can be made at all ATMs - free of charge 2 times a month. Even abroad.

The card can be connected to both Apple Pay and Google Pay.

Direct debit payments or bank transfers available for all 36 countries of the SEPA area.

24/7 Customer Service (Phone, chat).

The account is secured by biometric recognition data, including facial recognition and fingerprints.

No charge to open an account or account running fees

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Posted Wednesday, February 10, 2021 6:53 am

The state Court of Appeals has rejected claims of 13 young plaintiffs that they have a constitutional right to a stable climate system "that sustains human life and liberty." They asked the court to affirm that right, and called for an enforceable Washington plan to reduce carbon emissions.

But the Washington Appeals Court ruled that the "Youth's claims present a political question to be determined by the people and their elected representatives, not the judiciary."

The 36-page decision released this week affirms an earlier decision by the King County Superior Court and will be appealed to the state Supreme Court, according to Andrea Rodgers, attorney with Our Children's Trust who represents the plaintiffs.

The lawsuit, filed in 2018, names the state, Gov. Jay Inslee, and several state agencies as defendants. It alleges that actions the defendants are taking make the climate crisis worse and causing harm to the plaintiffs.

The lawsuit is part of a wide-ranging effort by Our Children's Trust to hold governments accountable in courtrooms for actions that cause climate change.

The organization has filed lawsuits or legal actions in 50 states, and actions in seven states are now pending. The organization also filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of 21 young plaintiffs in 2015 to tackle climate change more quickly that was dismissed in January 2020 by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court Appeals. Those plaintiffs have petitioned the court for a rehearing, and now are awaiting a ruling on that request.

In their initial Washington lawsuit in King County, the youth alleged that state the placed them "in a position of danger with deliberate indifference to their safety in a manner that ... violated fundamental and inalienable constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property." They sought a court order affirming those constitutional rights, and that they are being violated, according to Rodgers.

The Superior Court ruled that there is no fundamental constitutional right to a clean environment. In the Appeals Court ruling, judges wrote that this court "is not the vehicle by which the Youth may establish and enforce their goals."

Rodgers attacked the ruling as a "travesty of justice."

Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US

Iran ready to help improve the defense capability of Syria

European Parliament head proposes to strengthen sanctions on Russia

UK PM gets married in London

Armenia reports COVID-19 new 81 cases: for people die

EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia

2 people die in Armenia road accident

Nigeria: Students taken hostage a month ago are released

61 quakes recorded in Congo per day

Syrian MFA: EU lost credibility due to blind obedience to US policy

Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack

Mher Grigoryan: Clarification of border points is possible only after withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops from Armenia

Suspicious deal: Whether there was profit from buying DNA IDs?

Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war

4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack

Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities

Kocharyan: I have to ask people how it happened that overwhelming majority elected this leader

Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country

Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia

US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs

Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners

Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions

Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US

Iran intensifies its diplomacy amid Armenia-Azerbaijan border tensions

Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes

Lukashenko accuses West of destabilizing situation in Belarus

Armenia Central Electoral Commission chief on snap elections: No legal basis for postponing, suspending any function

Armenias Pashinyan is met by Yerevan district residents chanting against him

We are ready to be fully engaged in negotiation process to resolve Karabakh issue, says Armenia acting PM

Armenia ex-President Kocharyan gives interview to Russia TV channel

Armenia acting premier: We are ready to start withdrawing troops at any moment

Canada MFA expresses concern over 6 Armenian soldiers capture by Azerbaijan troops

There are omissions in registration documents of political forces that applied to Armenia Central Electoral Commission

Armenia Central Electoral Commission chief: There is activeness in Yerevan for the past day or two

Three new cases of coronavirus reported in Artsakh

Group of US Congress members threaten Azerbaijans Aliyev regime with sanctions

Chicago mayor is sued for allegedly refusing interview with white reporter

Iran exports oil to US for first time after long interval

"Armenia" bloc top 50 MP candidates are announced

42 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia

Sri Lanka public beach is covered in charred plastic pellets due to fire in container ship

US preparing list of targeted sanctions on Belarus authorities

China believes it will own America by 2035, Biden says

15 al-Shabab militants killed in Somalia

Newspaper: Armenia political forces that applied for running in election impatiently await CEC decision

Newspaper: Changes are expected in Artsakh

California prisoner who considers himself Satanist beheads cellmate, dismembers his body

Newspaper: Armenia acting PM's "mutually beneficial" proposal to collapse state system?

Armenia National Security Service Reserve Officers' Union members meet with His Holiness Karekin II

EU is ready to help Armenia and Azerbaijan with border delimitation and demarcation

ARF-D member on Nikol Pashinyan: 103 years ago Armenia's founding fathers would have executed him for treason

Iran President hails brotherly ties with Azerbaijan

Robert Kocharyan on years of his leadership in Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia

Situation on Armenian-Azerbaijani border is still tense, more on COVID-19 in Armenia, May 28 digest

"Armenia" alliance of political parties paying tribute to founder of First Republic Aram Manukyan

Yerevan.today: Armenia acting PM not greeted at ruling party's headquarters, citizens call him 'capitulator'

Russia MOD reports on maintenance of ceasefire regime in Nagorno-Karabakh

Armenia acting MOD meets with Russian counterpart in Moscow

Armenia 2nd President: I see possibility of restoring borders of Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast

We can provide our army with some key, modernized weapons, says Armenia ex-President Kocharyan

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan: Captives issue is not one that any opposition force can resolve

OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs release statement on detention of 6 Armenian servicemen by Azerbaijan

Armenian acting Deputy PM: Discussion on issues possible only after withdrawal of Azeri troops from Armenia's territory

Armenia acting PM on Syunik roads, Russian military posts: This is only place where there are working nuances

Armenia acting PM: Process of return of POWs will intensify after upcoming elections

Putin congratulates Aliyev on Republic Day

Josep Borrell: A group of EU Ministers will visit Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan

Armenia acting PM: We're not going to escalate situation for 30% of Sev Lake

Armenia 3rd President visits Vanadzor, pays tribute to heroes of Battle of Gharakilisa (PHOTOS)

Armenia ex-President Kocharyan lays flowers at Battle of Karakilisa memorial (PHOTOS)

Armenia acting PM: Solution to captives issue is matter of time

Shoygu to Harutyunyan: Russia, Armenia strengthen military cooperation

Armenia acting premier: We are 100% honest toward our country

Artsakh President pays tribute at Stepanakert memorial, Shushi Tank-Monument

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan on Meghri corridor plan: Not beneficial to us now to discuss it as "corridor"

Acting PM: "Cement," "fittings" were stolen while constructing Armenia state "building"

Two new cases of coronavirus reported in Artsakh

Catholicos of All Armenians visits Sardarapat Memorial, again separate from state officials

MOD dismisses Azerbaijan statement on Armenia army firing toward Nakhchivan

Jerusalem Post: Israel prepares for a new war with Hamas

France, UN World Food Programme partner to support displaced people in Armenia

Armenia ex-President Kocharyan: Today we are not full-fledged negotiating party

Norwegian prime minister opposes series of NATO reforms

Armenia deputy FM briefs UN, Red Cross leaders on consequences of Azerbaijan aggression against Artsakh

NATO Secretary-General: Afghans must take full responsibility for peace and stability in their country

104 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia

Armenia acting premier: Our sovereignty, independence cannot be subject of discussion

Karabakh state-finance minister announces resignation

Artsakh MFA: Sardarapat victory has inspired all Armenians for over a century

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan: In contrast to kneeling, disgraceful authorities of the day, we have determination

Armenia President: Today we stand on threshold of Sardarapat of morality, dignity

Catholicos of All Armenians: Our people shall find strength to overcome this ordeal as well

Armenia First Republic Day event is held under very modest conditions

Newspaper: Armenia authorities claiming to be popular close off First Republic Day event to public

Armenia ex-President Sargsyan: Now or never!

Armenia President, then acting premier arrive at Sardarapat Memorial

Newspaper: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan's new "cleverness?"

France ambassador: I wish Armenia to be able to live its independence in peace, prosperity

Bashar al-Assad wins Syria presidential election

Reporters not allowed entering Sardarapat Memorial of Armenia
Chennai, Feb 10 : Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Edappadi K Palaniswami on Wednesday assured that his government will ensure full security to the minorities.

Taking a dig at the Opposition parties, he said that they were running false propaganda against the AIADMK government on the minorities' safety in the state.

"The Opposition parties are spreading falsehood about the safety of minorities. They are creating a false impression that minorities are not safe but I assure that we will ensure full security to the minorities." The AIADMK leader stated this while addressing public meetings in Vellore region for the second consecutive day as part of the campaign for ensuing elections.

Speaking at a meeting at Ambur in the Tirupathur district, Palaniswami said AIADMK party or the government never discriminated people on the basis of either religion or caste He claimed that his party never played the religious or caste cards in elections.

"Some people are trying to garner votes in the name of religion and castes, but we never resorted to this," he said.

The Chief Minister slammed DMK and its president M K Stalin. He alleged that the DMK's first family is only bothered about its interests and not the welfare of the people.

"They always think of the interests of the family. Late Karunanidhi might have visited Delhi many times but not a single visit was for the welfare of the people of the State," he said.

He also targetted Stalin for focusing only on his Assembly constituency Kolathur. "Stalin distributes welfare assistance only in his constituency but we consider all the 234 Assembly segments as our segments and treat them equally without any partiality," he said.

The Chief Minister claimed that his government is providing welfare assistance and implementing schemes not only in those segments which AIADMK won but also in those where it was defeated.
Border Patrol agents intercepted two human smuggling attempts in commercial vehicles within a day of each other at the Interstate 35 north of Laredo, Texas, on Feb. 5, 2020. (US Customs and Border Protection)

Sex Offender Among Illegal Aliens Arrested at Texas Border Checkpoint Within 2 Human Smuggling Attempts

A convicted sex offender was among those arrested by border patrol agents at a Texas border checkpoint amid two human smuggling attempts in commercial vehicles that were intercepted within a day of each other, the U.S Border Patrol announced.

The first incident took place in the early evening of Feb. 5, when agents with the Laredo Sector Border Patrol intercepted a tractor-trailer at the Interstate 35 checkpoint, north of Laredo, Texas. While border agents were checking the immigration status of the driver, a dog working with the agents alerted them to the trailer. People who were found in the trailer turned out to be illegal aliens from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Ecuador, and Honduras.

The following evening, border agents found more illegal aliens inside another tractor-trailer at the same border checkpoint after putting the vehicle through a non-intrusive scan. The illegal aliens were found to be from Mexico and Guatemala.

In both instances, the drivers of the vehicles were found to be U.S. citizens. The two drivers were placed under arrest pending further investigation, along with the 138 people found in the two vehicles, which have been seized by U.S. Border Patrol.

Juan Castro-Castro, 41, was arrested among the illegal aliens. He was found to have been arrested in 2001 and convicted for Sexual Assault, Aggravated Assault with a Weapon in Salt Lake City, Utah, the U.S. Border Patrol announced. Castro-Castro, who is currently being held by the U.S. Border patrol pending prosecution of his immigration violations, will be remanded to the custody of the U.S. Marshal Service.

The arrests come just days after border patrol agents on Feb. 4 found 253 illegal aliens in two large groups in the Rio Grande Valley Sector at the Texas border within an hour. Agents on Feb. 3-5 also found 38 more illegal aliens in Roma and arrested another 18 more illegal aliens in two failed smuggling attempts near the Texas border.

More than 50 House Republicans on Tuesday in a letter called on President Joe Biden to take action to secure the border and warned him about a rising illegal immigration crisis starting at the southern border, citing increases in the number of immigrants just a few weeks into the new presidency.

Despite the increase in immigration numbers, Biden had signed multiple executive actions on the first day of his presidency that rescinded Trump administration policies that were working to reduce the flow of illegal immigration, including stopping the construction of the U.S.-Mexico border wall, the lawmakers noted.

Biden also suspended the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), a Trump program launched in January 2019 that forces asylum seekers to wait in Mexico while their asylum case is adjudicated. Prior to its implementation, thousands of illegal immigrants were released into the United States to await their cases, most failing to appear in court.

The new president also ordered a halt to the deportation of certain immigrants for 100 days. A federal judge temporarily blocked the order on Jan. 26a victory for Texas, whose attorney general sued the Biden administration over the executive order.

The initiatives are part of Bidens plan to legalize about 11 million illegal aliens living in the United States, something he had vowed during his campaign. The Republican lawmakers in their letter to Biden said that such initiatives also have all communicated that our borders are open to illegal immigrants seeking to move to the United States.



Isabel van Brugen contributed to this report.
A 52-year-old New Haven man faces nearly four years in federal prison after pleading guilty to a fentanyl drug charge last summer.

Anthony Esposito, also known as Mafia was sentenced to 46 months in prison followed by five years supervised release during a video conference appearance before U.S. District Judge Michael P. Shea on Tuesday.

His arrest stems from an investigation by the FBIs Northern Connecticut Gang Task Force into Richardo Reyes, a member of the Los Solidos street gang, and otherwise known as Rick the Ruler, the U.S. attorneys office for the District of Connecticut said.

Authorities claim Reyes was distributing fentanyl, heroin, cocaine and crack in the area of Park Street and Hungerford Street in Hartford, a press release said.

During the investigation, law enforcement conducted multiple controlled purchases of narcotics from Reyes, the release said. Court-authorized wiretaps confirmed that Reyes was distributing narcotics to numerous customers, and identified individuals who supplied drugs to Reyes and associates who sold drugs on his behalf. Intercepted communications also revealed Reyes was acquiring and trafficking firearms.

Authorities claim Reyes provided Esposito with fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, which Espoito then sold in the New Haven area.

Esposito was taken into custody on June 17, 2019, and has been in custody ever since. Ten days later, a Hartford grand jury indicted Reyes, Esposito and 13 others on narcotics and firearm charges

Esposito pleaded guilty on Aug. 6 of last year to a single count conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute, and to distribute, fentanyl, the U.S. attorneys office said.

Espositos criminal history spans 30 years and includes convictions for firearm, drug and violent crime offenses, including a 1998 federal conviction for possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, and a 2003 state conviction for first degree sexual assault, the release said.

Reyes has pleaded guilty and awaits sentencing.
Credit: University of Connecticut

This week in the New York Times a national group of leading Black health experts shined a light on the critical importance of the Black community receiving the COVID-19 vaccination. Amongst the 60 elected members of the National Academy of Medicine were UConn Health Surgeon-Scientist Dr. Cato T. Laurencin and other top experts bringing the critical issue to the national forefront urging the Black community to protect themselves and get vaccinated once available.

Read UConn Today's Q & A on this important awareness topic with Laurencin who chairs the National Academies Roundtable on Black Men and Black Women in Science, Engineering and Medicine, and serves as the Albert and Wilda Van Dusen Distinguished Endowed Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery at UConn Health and University Professor at UConn.

Q: Are Blacks contracting the COVID-19 virus at higher rates?

A: Our research data show that yes, Blacks not only have higher rates of contracting COVID-19, but also are dying of COVID-19 at high rates. Our team at the University of Connecticut published the first paper in the peer-reviewed literature presenting data showing higher rates of cases and deaths involving COVID-19 in Blacks. Our paper is entitled The COVID-19 Pandemic: A Call to Action to Identify and Address Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities. Since the latest data show that Blacks are continuing to die from high rates of COVID-19, a team of Black members of the National Academy of Medicine are hoping as trusted, reputable medical faces in the community we have a positive impact on the Black community making the choice to get vaccinated.

Q: How may racism in the healthcare system influence medical mistrust in the Black Community?

A: Racism in the healthcare system, whether it be called conscious bias, unconscious bias, stereotyping, or prejudice, contributes to healthcare disparities and high rates of morbidity and deaths among the Black population, and is a driver of mistrust. In order to build trust within the Black community, The National Academies Roundtable on Black Men and Black Women in Science, Engineering and Medicine suggests increasing the number of Black men and women in Medicine and Science. In 2018, the National Academies produced the landmark proceedings entitled An American Crisis: The Growing Absence of Black Men in Medicine and Science.

Q: How do we address medical mistrust right now and urge the Black community to get vaccinated?

A: Established in 2019, the Roundtable on Black Men and Black Women in Science, Engineering and Medicine convenes a broad array of stakeholders to tackle various issues facing the Black community. As a trusted source of information, Roundtable leadership and the COVID-19 Action Group of the Roundtable recorded an informational webinar video focused on addressing common questions and concerns around vaccine hesitation in the Black community. The hope is that this video will be a key resource for the Black community to learn more about the importance of being vaccinated.

Q: Where do we go from here?

A: We need to work to develop trustworthiness in medicine for Blacks in Connecticut, but also across the country. One way we are doing that in Connecticut is in relaunching the Imhotep Connecticut National Medical Association Society (CT NMA). The CT NMA will serve as a networking platform for Black physicians and play a role in the dissemination of health information to the Black Community. I have recently become President of this organization and I'm gratified to see that all the major health systems of the State of Connecticut have supported this relaunch.

Explore further Follow the latest news on the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak
President Moon Jae-in takes off a mask before a virtual Cabinet meeting at Cheong Wa Dae, Feb. 2. / Yonhap



By Kang Seung-woo



The Moon Jae-in administration's emphasis on morality and fairness is being overshadowed by a series of cases featuring former and current senior officials receiving moral rebukes and legal punishment.





Former Environment Minister Kim Eun-kyung / Yonhap

The opposition is criticizing the government, which took power in May 2017 after former President Park Geun-hye was removed from office due to a string of corruption and influence-peddling scandals, for its two-faced and hypocritical standards.



On Tuesday, Kim Eun-kyung, Moon's inaugural environment minister, was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison by the Seoul Central District Court on charges of forcing chiefs of ministry-affiliated organizations, appointed by the Park administration, to resign so she could fill the posts with pro-Moon government figures. Right after the ruling, Kim was taken into custody for fear of destroying evidence.



This was the first time a former member of the Moon administration's Cabinet has been put behind bars for abuse of power. Kim led the ministry from July 2017 to November 2018.



Along with the former minister, Shin Mi-sook, a former senior presidential secretary who was involved in the case, received a suspended prison sentence of 18 months.





Supreme Court Chief Justice Kim Myeong-su / Yonhap

Cheong Wa Dae failed to make an immediate comment on the convictions, citing a potential appeal, which was in sharp contrast to its previous response. When the environment ministry's "blacklist" allegations emerged in February 2019, the presidential office strongly denied them. And when a warrant to arrest Kim was rejected last year, Moon's office immediately said it respected the court's decision.



A response to the ruling came Wednesday, when Cheong Wa Dae spokesman Kang Min-seok again claimed that the current government had never drawn up any blacklists.



"The Moon administration has respected the terms of the heads of state-run organizations who were appointed by the previous administration," Kang said in a statement, adding that 330 chiefs and 90 standing auditors served their full terms in office or quit for "legitimate" reasons.



"This case is about whether it is an abuse of power to get resignation offers from the head of affiliates. The higher court will fact-check the matter," he said.



The brouhaha involving Supreme Court Chief Justice Kim Myeong-su is another scandal dealing a blow to the administration's morality.



Since last week, the chief justice has faced severe criticism after making a false denial linked to the resignation of Lim Seong-geun, a senior judge at the Busan High Court who was impeached by the ruling Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) led National Assembly earlier this month.



According to a recording of a conversation between Kim and Lim, Kim refused to accept Lim's resignation due to a possible backlash from the DPK, which was attempting to oust the judge for allegedly abusing his power during the previous Park administration  although he was acquitted by a local court. But before the recording was made public, the chief justice had denied the allegations.



Later, the chief justice imputed the false denial to a blurry memory of what happened nine months ago.



Kim is now under heavy pressure from the main opposition People Power Party to step down.



Another controversy involving a ranking government official is the energy ministry's decision on the early closure of the Wolsong-1 nuclear reactor in line with Moon's nuclear phase-out policy.





Former Energy Minister Paik Un-gyu / Yonhap
Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US

Iran ready to help improve the defense capability of Syria

European Parliament head proposes to strengthen sanctions on Russia

UK PM gets married in London

Armenia reports COVID-19 new 81 cases: for people die

EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia

2 people die in Armenia road accident

Nigeria: Students taken hostage a month ago are released

61 quakes recorded in Congo per day

Syrian MFA: EU lost credibility due to blind obedience to US policy

Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack

Mher Grigoryan: Clarification of border points is possible only after withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops from Armenia

Suspicious deal: Whether there was profit from buying DNA IDs?

Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war

4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack

Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities

Kocharyan: I have to ask people how it happened that overwhelming majority elected this leader

Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country

Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia

US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs

Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners

Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions

Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US

Iran intensifies its diplomacy amid Armenia-Azerbaijan border tensions

Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes

Lukashenko accuses West of destabilizing situation in Belarus

Armenia Central Electoral Commission chief on snap elections: No legal basis for postponing, suspending any function

Armenias Pashinyan is met by Yerevan district residents chanting against him

We are ready to be fully engaged in negotiation process to resolve Karabakh issue, says Armenia acting PM

Armenia ex-President Kocharyan gives interview to Russia TV channel

Armenia acting premier: We are ready to start withdrawing troops at any moment

Canada MFA expresses concern over 6 Armenian soldiers capture by Azerbaijan troops

There are omissions in registration documents of political forces that applied to Armenia Central Electoral Commission

Armenia Central Electoral Commission chief: There is activeness in Yerevan for the past day or two

Three new cases of coronavirus reported in Artsakh

Group of US Congress members threaten Azerbaijans Aliyev regime with sanctions

Chicago mayor is sued for allegedly refusing interview with white reporter

Iran exports oil to US for first time after long interval

"Armenia" bloc top 50 MP candidates are announced

42 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia

Sri Lanka public beach is covered in charred plastic pellets due to fire in container ship

US preparing list of targeted sanctions on Belarus authorities

China believes it will own America by 2035, Biden says

15 al-Shabab militants killed in Somalia

Newspaper: Armenia political forces that applied for running in election impatiently await CEC decision

Newspaper: Changes are expected in Artsakh

California prisoner who considers himself Satanist beheads cellmate, dismembers his body

Newspaper: Armenia acting PM's "mutually beneficial" proposal to collapse state system?

Armenia National Security Service Reserve Officers' Union members meet with His Holiness Karekin II

EU is ready to help Armenia and Azerbaijan with border delimitation and demarcation

ARF-D member on Nikol Pashinyan: 103 years ago Armenia's founding fathers would have executed him for treason

Iran President hails brotherly ties with Azerbaijan

Robert Kocharyan on years of his leadership in Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia

Situation on Armenian-Azerbaijani border is still tense, more on COVID-19 in Armenia, May 28 digest

"Armenia" alliance of political parties paying tribute to founder of First Republic Aram Manukyan

Yerevan.today: Armenia acting PM not greeted at ruling party's headquarters, citizens call him 'capitulator'

Russia MOD reports on maintenance of ceasefire regime in Nagorno-Karabakh

Armenia acting MOD meets with Russian counterpart in Moscow

Armenia 2nd President: I see possibility of restoring borders of Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast

We can provide our army with some key, modernized weapons, says Armenia ex-President Kocharyan

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan: Captives issue is not one that any opposition force can resolve

OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs release statement on detention of 6 Armenian servicemen by Azerbaijan

Armenian acting Deputy PM: Discussion on issues possible only after withdrawal of Azeri troops from Armenia's territory

Armenia acting PM on Syunik roads, Russian military posts: This is only place where there are working nuances

Armenia acting PM: Process of return of POWs will intensify after upcoming elections

Putin congratulates Aliyev on Republic Day

Josep Borrell: A group of EU Ministers will visit Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan

Armenia acting PM: We're not going to escalate situation for 30% of Sev Lake

Armenia 3rd President visits Vanadzor, pays tribute to heroes of Battle of Gharakilisa (PHOTOS)

Armenia ex-President Kocharyan lays flowers at Battle of Karakilisa memorial (PHOTOS)

Armenia acting PM: Solution to captives issue is matter of time

Shoygu to Harutyunyan: Russia, Armenia strengthen military cooperation

Armenia acting premier: We are 100% honest toward our country

Artsakh President pays tribute at Stepanakert memorial, Shushi Tank-Monument

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan on Meghri corridor plan: Not beneficial to us now to discuss it as "corridor"

Acting PM: "Cement," "fittings" were stolen while constructing Armenia state "building"

Two new cases of coronavirus reported in Artsakh

Catholicos of All Armenians visits Sardarapat Memorial, again separate from state officials

MOD dismisses Azerbaijan statement on Armenia army firing toward Nakhchivan

Jerusalem Post: Israel prepares for a new war with Hamas

France, UN World Food Programme partner to support displaced people in Armenia

Armenia ex-President Kocharyan: Today we are not full-fledged negotiating party

Norwegian prime minister opposes series of NATO reforms

Armenia deputy FM briefs UN, Red Cross leaders on consequences of Azerbaijan aggression against Artsakh

NATO Secretary-General: Afghans must take full responsibility for peace and stability in their country

104 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia

Armenia acting premier: Our sovereignty, independence cannot be subject of discussion

Karabakh state-finance minister announces resignation

Artsakh MFA: Sardarapat victory has inspired all Armenians for over a century

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan: In contrast to kneeling, disgraceful authorities of the day, we have determination

Armenia President: Today we stand on threshold of Sardarapat of morality, dignity

Catholicos of All Armenians: Our people shall find strength to overcome this ordeal as well

Armenia First Republic Day event is held under very modest conditions

Newspaper: Armenia authorities claiming to be popular close off First Republic Day event to public

Armenia ex-President Sargsyan: Now or never!

Armenia President, then acting premier arrive at Sardarapat Memorial

Newspaper: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan's new "cleverness?"

France ambassador: I wish Armenia to be able to live its independence in peace, prosperity

Bashar al-Assad wins Syria presidential election

Reporters not allowed entering Sardarapat Memorial of Armenia
A reluctant federal appellate court has dismissed a lawsuit filed by a woman who claimed an Angola deputy warden raped her several times in 2016, despite calling the allegations "sickening" and accusing the local district attorney of possibly harming the public's perception of the legal system.

Priscilla Lefebure had sued 20th Judicial District Attorney Sam D'Aquilla, saying he failed to adequately pursue rape charges against former Angola assistant warden Barrett Boeker. A grand jury looked at evidence in 2017, but D'Aquilla didn't give the panel access to a "rape kit" or a report compiled by a nurse at Woman's Hospital in Baton Rouge.

A three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in a ruling released Tuesday night, said that while D'Aquilla declined to help the woman, it had no authority to force him or any district attorney to investigate or prosecute someone and, as a result, had to end Lefebure's lawsuit.

Lefebure's attorney on Wednesday called the decision a disappointment and said he will ask the full 5th Circuit to review the case and, if unsuccessful, will file a petition with the U.S. Supreme Court.

Circuit Judge James Ho, writing for the court, said Lefebure's story is one shared by too many survivors who have been "doubly victimized by the horrifying crime of sexual assault  first by their assailants, and then again by a criminal justice system that fails to enforce the laws on the books."

"The allegations in this case are sickening" and what happened to Lefebure was "particularly appalling" because her alleged attacker held a position of significance in the criminal justice system. "We expect law enforcement officials to uphold the law, not to violate it  to protect the innocent, not to victimize them."

If Lefebure's account is correct, Ho added, "then the system failed her  badly. ... For surely she expected to have the support of her state's elected and appointed prosecutors, investigators, and other officials in her pursuit of justice."

West Feliciana Parish sends rape kit in case against Angola warden to be tested after months in possession The West Feliciana Parish Sheriff's Office on Monday gave the rape kit in the case against an Angola assistant warden to the State Police Crim

Lefebure is a cousin of Boeker's wife and children. She lived with Boeker and his family after the 2016 floods chased her from her Baton Rouge home. She alleges Boeker raped her several times in late 2016 at his home on prison grounds.

D'Aquilla has said the grand jury did not need to examine results of Lefebure's sexual assault forensic examination because both the victim and the perpetrator said sexual intercourse had occurred. He said the pertinent question in the case was consent, which could not be determined by the rape kit evidence.

Boeker and Lefebure each testified before the grand jury, and the lawsuit says Boeker is the only one who claimed Lefebure consented.

The district attorney said Wednesday he could not comment on the court's decision because there may be an appeal.

+3 Expert: DA omitting rape kit in case against Angola asst. warden 'unbelievable' The grand jury that declined to charge a state prison assistant warden in a rape case earlier this month was not provided the sexual assault f

Jack Rutherford, who represents Lefebure, said he believes the appeals court panel's decision was incorrect on the law.

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"The upshot of the Court's decision means any District Attorney who refuses to investigate, not refuses to prosecute, but refuses to even investigate crimes committed against women because they are women or against Black People because they are Black, will do so with impunity," he said in an email.

In the Tuesday night ruling, Circuit Judge James Graves Jr. added remarks of his own to "highlight the gravity of the allegations against the district attorney," with whom is vested vast prosecutorial discretion.

"Yet broad and even necessary though that discretion may be, prosecutorial conduct should not be an obstacle to crime victims and their pursuit of justice," Graves wrote. "If Lefebure's allegations are true, then she faced that obstacle here."

Lefebure's lawsuit, filed in late 2017, alleges that neither D'Aquilla nor anyone from his office ever met or spoke with her about the alleged rape, and that the district attorney told reporters he was "uncomfortable" speaking with her.

D'Aquilla "for whatever reason declined to help her," Ho wrote in the opinion.

+3 Woman accuses DA, sheriff of colluding in rape case to protect Angola assistant warden A woman whose sexual assault examination was not presented to a West Feliciana Parish grand jury that cleared an Angola assistant warden of ra

Boeker's attorney, Cy D'Aquila, a distant relative of the district attorney, has said previously that Boeker maintains the sex was consensual, and he passed a privately administered polygraph examination on that point.

Lefebure contends the district attorney conspired with Boeker to thwart the investigation and prosecution.

"Again, if Lefebure's allegations regarding the district attorney's conduct are true, then his handling of the matter was substandard and less than ethical," Graves stated. "And by (allegedly) engaging in this course of conduct, D'Aquilla, who occupies a position of public trust, may have caused `inestimable harm to the public's perception of the legal profession.'"

In addition to suing D'Aquilla, Lefebure has sued Boeker separately. Her claims against Boeker are pending.

Angola officer fired for allegedly spraying inmate with fire extinguisher charged with felony A corrections officer fired from the Louisiana State Penitentiary after officials say he used excessive force against an inmate has had his cr

The Advocate typically does not name people who report they are victims of sexual assault, but Lefebure has said she wanted to use her name.

Boeker had been placed on administrative leave following the rape allegation but later returned to work at the prison.

He had worked at Angola since 2001 but was fired last year after he argued with an inmate before spraying him with a fire extinguisher. He is facing felony criminal charges stemming from that incident.
Kids want to fish? You don't know how yourself? Here's a little help

New Delhi, Feb 10 : A company controlled by Adar Poonawalla, Rising Sun Holdings Private Limited and Magma Fincorp Limited have announced a transaction for preferential issue of equity shares of Magma Fincorp which will result in a controlling stake being taken by Rising Sun Holdings and an open offer as per Public Announcement made under SAST guidelines. Adar Poonawalla, is the CEO of Serum Institute of India.

The preferential allotment is for an aggregate value of Rs 3,456 crore, subject to shareholders' and other regulatory approvals.

The preferential allotment represents 64.68 per cent of MFL's enhanced equity share capital post the issue. Based on current shareholding, Rising Sun Holding would hold 60.0 per cent stake in the entity post issuance and the existing promoter group stake would get reduced to 13.3 per cent post issuance. The Net Worth of Magma Fincorp shall increase to over Rs 6,300 crore post the issuance.

Following the preferential issue, Rising Sun Holdings would be classified as "Promoter" of Magma Fincorp. Magma Fincorp Ltd. and its subsidiaries shall be renamed and rebranded under the brand name "Poonawalla Finance", subject to regulatory approvals.

Subsequent to the completion of the preferential allotment, the existing financial services business of Poonawalla Finance is proposed to be consolidated into Magma Fincorp subject to compliance with extant regulations.

Rising Sun Holdings intends to nominate Adar Poonawalla as the Chairman of the Board of Directors and Abhay Bhutada, presently Managing Director & CEO of Poonawalla Finance, as Managing Director. Sanjay Chamria would continue as the Executive Vice Chairman of the Board. The management team will be further strengthened through the appointment of a professional CEO & COO.

A statement said Rising Sun Holdings values the strength of the existing network and employees of Magma Fincorp, and the acquisition of a controlling stake along with huge capital infusion is expected to have a positive impact on the business operations, including for customers, employees, lenders and other stakeholders.

It said Adar Poonawalla and Magma Fincorp clearly believe that the transaction would be in the best interests of all the stakeholders and post transaction, the Magma Fincorp would be uniquely placed to leverage the vast opportunities in the lending space with expected reduction in borrowing cost. Strong corporate backing and substantial fund infusion is likely to have a positive effect on the credit rating of the company as well. This infusion would also enable Magma Fincorp to further invest in its Housing Finance subsidiary and General Insurance joint venture, as required.

Commenting on the proposed transaction, Adar Poonawalla, Director, Rising Sun Holdings Private Limited said, "I am excited at this opportunity to infuse majority capital for controlling stake of Magma Fincorp. I see an unlimited potential in India in the financial space as our economy is poised to grow in double digits and this ties in with our Group philosophy of serving the needs and dreams of the nation, and financial service plays an important role in supporting and fuelling the growth of our country. This transaction is subject to statutory and regulatory approvals." Commenting on the proposed transaction, Chamria, Vice Chairman and Managing Director, Magma Fincorp Limited said, "Considering the positives in the deal by way of huge capital infusion, strong brand value and ability to attract top notch talent, the Board of the Company has rightly decided to accept an offer for a substantial equity infusion into the Company."


Troy is awash in tacos. Three taquerias have joined the fluctuating downtown dining scene during the pandemic in a logical move for food thats fast, easy to prep and easy for takeout. The enduring love affair with Mexican street food has spread from Taco Tuesdays long entrenched in homes and the national lexicon to the breakout trend of regional Mexican birria tacos, which jumped from Los Angeles to the national scene.

In Tijuana-style birria de res, shredded braised beef brisket, slow-braised with beef fat in adobo and water, is piled onto flour tortillas topped with onions and cilantro, soaked with red braising broth and served with a cup on the side for dipping. A sort of taco au jus.

Increasingly, were being treated to taqueria making their own tortillas with nixtamalized masa dough. In Troy, tacos are selling fast, and the newcomers are staking a claim, whether its authenticity or Americanized street eats. We hit them up.

Taco Libre: River Street Market in the waterfront Hedley Building is a quiet shell of the bustling premium food court it sought to be. A few counters are still doing brisk weekday business thanks to the office audience and those stopping by. Youre spoiled for table choice in the beautiful, large space and might fit in a round of oversized chess if youre one of the few dining in. Theres hand sanitizer on every table.

At the back is Taco Libre, an offshoot of Troy-based Mex Cocina, where taco platters include four tacos, and our order of rusty-red birria are served in crisp folds sprinkled with cotija. On the side, lime wedges and finger-staining dipping sauce. Reduced sales means not all proteins are offered daily. Seek out the tinga (chipotle) chicken and de lengua (tongue), given the chance, though they offer pulled pork, pineapple-sweetened al pastor, chorizo, strip steak and vegetarian/vegan options. Pick your protein for chunky burritos loaded with rice and beans or tortas (grilled sandwiches) layered with Mexican string cheese, avocado, jalapenos and refried beans. We made short work of a cheese-oozing tinga chicken quesadilla, dunking it in fresh guacamole and sour cream, saved room for a slab of sweet milk-soaked Tres Leche cake and washed it down with Jarritos and Jumex sparkling apple juice.

Details: River Street Market, Hedley Building, 433 River St., Troy. facebook.com/tacolibreny. 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday to Friday.

Street Taco VII: No surprise that Street Taco VII on Fourth Street continues the same stylish interior as Genika Blandshaws Juice Factory VII on Broadway. Street Tacos VII is a fledgling new business for Blandshaws daughter, Osjah, born out of her love for tacos. In vibe and style, its closer to a smoothie-and-salad bar, but a drop-down menu with $1.20 to $1.40 add-ons (everything from sour cream to refried beans) lets Gen Z endlessly customize orders like a TikTok secret menu hack.

The menu puts chicken noodle soup alongside a deconstructed burrito salad, Mexican street corn and the kind of protein-topped rice bowls youd find in a poke bar. Jerk chicken and jerk salmon deliver a Jamaican twist in tacos sporting fresh pineapple-mango salsa, crema and pico salsa on the side. Unavailable via Mealeo, the business chosen ordering and delivery platform, are Troy-themed grilled cheeses including a vegan South Troy Melt and a Buffalo option with blue-cheese crumbs and ranch.

Lime-spiked cilantro rice makes a bright base across rice bowls and a Mexican street corn salad topped with cotija cheese and avocado, even if the corn is clearly not sheared off a cob. In bowls and tacos, the jerk-seasoned salmon is a burst of flavor; red and white corn chips accompany a bland guacamole that, if housemade, needs a boost. In a truly brilliant move, the Ultimate Taco is an order of potato skins stuffed with ground turkey. A slam dunk whether youre gluten-free.

Details: 151 Fourth St., Troy. streettacovii.com. 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesday to Saturday.

La Capital Tacos: La Capital Tacos gives it to you straight: Real Tacos by Real Mexicans. And no one wonders what they mean. The newest taqueria on the scene is open in the former Capital Taxi stand on the corner of Fourth and Ferry streets, a spot owned by Jinah Kim of Sunhees Farm & Kitchen and used in conjunction with her Ferry Street Night Market. With the newly boxy building clad in wood and La Capital in a built-out kitchen, the funky, grungy space  with graffiti on the ceiling and Asian stickers on the walls  holds future promise for a time when Kims team will run the 8-seat bar. Expect a good soju cocktail when they do.

Chef Yair De La Rosa, a Mexico City native and former chef at Glenvilles Glass Tavern, is behind La Capitals classic street menu. Salivate over juicy carnitas (slow-roasted pork), tender asada (strip steak) or calabacitas, a medley of sauteed squash and zucchini. Its the only place under consideration here offering mixed trios: any three with simple cilantro, onion and salsa ($10) or loaded with toppings (con todos, $12) if you want guacamole, lettuce, pico de gallo and cheese. A family platter of 20 tacos is available for $40, and, for Valentines Day, they stuff tacos in a heart-shaped box. Be still my beating heart.

We put away a taco six-pack and handmade masa quesadillas  campechanos, a mix of chorizo and New York strip, and Oaxacan cheese. La Capital scores big with a fresh, bold guacamole and house-fried tortilla chips, a bright ceviche of lime-cooked fish topped in avocado, onion and jalapeno, and Baja-style battered fish tacos served open-face with red cabbage and lime crema. On the side, we sip sweet, cinnamon-y, rice milk horchata water and vivid Jamaica water made from hibiscus petals. They offer catering (when we can even contemplate mass gathering). I cant wait to go back.

Details: 161 Fourth St., Troy. lacapitaltacostroy.com and 518-244-5132. 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesday to Saturday, noon to 7 p.m. Sunday, closed Monday.

Susie Davidson Powell is a British freelance food writer in upstate New York. Follow her on Twitter, @SusieDP
A staff member conducts disinfection process at Beijing South Railway Station in Beijing, capital of China, Feb 1, 2021. Beijing South Railway Station carries out a series of COVID-19 prevention and control measures to make sure the safety of passengers during the Spring Festival travel season. [Photo/Xinhua] The prevention of COVID-19 will be a normal practice for a relatively long time, and people should continue to take precautions during the Spring Festival holiday when they take part in social gatherings, a public health expert said in Shanghai on Monday. Zhang Wenhong, leader of the Shanghai team of experts on the clinical treatment of COVID-19 patients, said in a television program on Monday that although China has been vaccinating swathes of the population against COVID-19, it is still difficult to predict how the pandemic will play out in the future. According to the National Health Commission, more than 31.2 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines had been administered to people across the country as of Feb 3. "COVID-19 will stay for a relatively long period of time, which poses a great challenge for the public health system. Every community in the city will need to have the capacity to identify and treat COVID-19 patients," Zhang said. Although the spread of the virus has been largely controlled in China since May, sporadic local transmission had been reported in several cities, including Beijing and Shanghai, ahead of Lunar New Year. The recent outbreaks began in January, with more than 2,000 local cases reported. Through swift tracking and quarantine measures, no new cases were reported across the country on Sunday and Monday. The government has advised people not to travel during Spring Festival, which is normally the time of year when people return to their hometowns for family reunions. The Ministry of Transport said that 1.15 billion trips will be made during the holiday, 20 percent less than last year. Zhang also noted that China's testing capacity is now much stronger compared with last year. "Last year, the virus was out there in the environment, so I suggested that people not go out, but this year the environment is largely safe from the virus, and people can do some activities, but we should always be on alert because a 'spark' (an individual case) can cause a 'fire' (a big outbreak)," he said. Zhang said many medical workers, including himself, will be on duty during the holiday period to ensure a quick response should any cases emerge. "The key to the current COVID-19 prevention is to put out the 'spark' before it burns," he said.


South Africans can now put down a deposit to order SpaceXs Starlink high-speed, low-latency broadband service.

Starlink uses a constellation of lower-earth orbit (LEO) satellites to offer fast Internet connectivity to its users.

The service is of particular benefit to people living in rural locations who cannot get fibre or mobile broadband.

Starlink has started taking deposits from users in locations across the globe, allowing them to pay for a priority position to receive the service when it arrives in their respective regions.

The Starlink website  which is used for signing up beta customers in the US, Canada, and the UK  will now direct users with South African addresses to a payment gateway.

Previously, South Africans were presented with a message that informed them they would get updates via their provided email address on when the service will be available in their location.

The page now says that Starlink is targeting coverage in South Africa in 2022, with availability being limited. Orders will be fulfilled on a first-come, first-served basis.

After entering their email and physical address, users are required to fill out their personal details and make an online payment of $99 (R1,460) as a deposit for the service by using a debit or credit card.

Payment has to be made within 15 minutes before the user is required to resubmit their information to see if orders remain available.

Conditions of deposit

In a linked Terms and Conditions page, Starlink describes exactly what the purpose of the deposit is.

Your deposit payment is exclusive of any VAT or other taxes and will be applied towards a future purchase of Starlink equipment offered by SpaceX as part of its two-way satellite-based internet service, the page states.

By placing your deposit payment, you have established priority within your region for purchasing the Starlink Kit when available.

The Starlink Kit includes the Starlink dish antenna, Wi-Fi router, power supply, cables, and a mounting tripod.

The deposit amount will be subtracted from the monthly cost of $99 and upfront equipment cost of $499 once the kit is available for purchase by the customer.

It should be noted, however, paying the deposit does not guarantee you will receive the service. The deposit is also fully refundable, Starlink added.

MyBroadband tested orders by using various locations in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Cape Town, Durban, and Bloemfontein, all of which showed that the service is targeted for 2022 in that area.

The image below shows an Order Starlink page for one of the more remote addresses entered by MyBroadband.

Plans for expansion and improvements

According to a recent filing with the Federal Communications Commission in the US, the Starlink service currently has over 10,000 beta users served by more than 1,000 satellites in orbit.

The Starlink website now also includes additional information about the progress SpaceX has made with the service.

Starlink is now delivering initial beta service both domestically and internationally, and will continue its expansion to near-global coverage of the populated world in 2021.

During the beta, users can expect to see data speeds vary from 50Mbps to 150Mbps and latency from 20ms to 40ms in most locations over the next several months as it enhances the Starlink system.

There will also be brief periods of no connectivity at all, it added.

SpaceX said that as it launches more satellites, installs more ground stations, and improves its networking software, speed, latency and uptime will improve dramatically.
The United States has renewed its call on Turkey to renounce an advanced Russian air-defense system, rejecting a proposal by Ankara to resolve the dispute.

Defense Minister Hulusi Akar in an interview this week spoke of a compromise solution in which Turkey does not fully deploy the S-400s, which Russia originally built to target Western warplanes.

"Our policy vis-a-vis the S-400s has not changed," U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price said when asked about the Turkish proposal on February 10.

"Russian S-400s are incompatible with NATO equipment, they threaten the security of NATO technology and they are inconsistent with Turkey's commitments as a NATO ally," Price told reporters.

"We have and continue to urge Turkey not to retain this system."

Akar mentioned the case of Turkey's historic rival, Greece, which bought Russia's older S-300 system after Turkish threats to attack Cyprus but did not make them fully operational.

U.S. officials have dismissed the comparison, saying the S-400 was a more advanced system.

Turkey went ahead with the deal with Moscow despite warnings from the United States, which under former President Donald Trump excluded Ankara from the F-35 fighter-jet program and imposed sanctions on Turkey's military procurement department.

Price also said that U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was expected to speak with his Turkish counterpart, Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, soon.

"I would expect the secretary and his Turkish counterpart will have an opportunity to chat, to connect in the coming days," he told reporters.

President Joe Biden vowed during the election campaign to toughen the U.S. stance on Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whom he has described as an autocrat.

With reporting by AFP and Reuters

MBABANE  A debate has ensued on the authenticity of the IGCSE 2020 results which were released by government on Monday.

IGCSE is an acronym for the International General Certificate of Secondary Education, which are results for Form V pupils.

This follows an outcry which erupted on social media and other forums where some members of the public strongly felt that the results were moderated.

Some people were of the view that had the government provided the real results, it would have been an egg on their face following the accusations that schools were not ready to resume lessons amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

However, these claims were rubbished by government, which stated that those people making such accusations about the results being moderated should come up with proof.

Reflection

According to government, the results were a true reflection of how the pupils performed and stating that they were moderated was an insult to both pupils and teachers.

Responding to the claims, Minister of Education and Training Lady Mabuza said there was none such.

Mabuza said the pupils had worked hard under pressure.

Realising that you do not have enough time places you on the edge and it is the norm that when anyone feels hard-pressed, they work even harder to get good results, she said.

The minister said both pupils and teachers were under pressure and considered methods that would make them become successful. The minister said the Cambridge results were also exceptional, yet they were independent and could not in any way be compromised.

Eswatini Examinations Council (ECESWA) Registrar Dr Edmund Mazibuko wondered why some people doubted the results, especially because the pupils were trained as they were only forced out of school around March following the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. Dr Mazibuko said these pupils were able to attend classes in Form IV for the entire year as examination questions covered the syllabus from that grade. Also, he stated that in March, when schools closed, the syllabus had already been covered by most teachers. Further, he said even when the pupils were at home, an effort was made by government to teach them through radio and other media platforms. In July, the pupils returned to school and were able to learn face-to-face from their teachers and above that, examination dates were extended giving them enough time to catch up on lessons with their teachers, explained the registrar. He stated that he also got questions on whether the exams would be relaxed and made easier in order for the learners to pass.

Approved

Dr Mazibuko said his response was that examinations were set two years prior to being written and approved by Cambridge, which accredited certificates. He said markers only applied the examination mark scheme and did not tamper with the process. I have been questioned as well on national radio during the Letishisako programme if markers were lenient when marking scripts considering the fact that pupils wrote under difficult condition, he recalled.

Dr Mazibuko said such did not happen and concerns should be directed to the current learners expected to sit for external examination this year as they had not been in class for almost a year. He said he did not understand where so much doubt emanated from regarding the 2020 IGCSE results, which he said was watering down the teachers and pupils hard work.

Meanwhile, Swaziland National Association of Teachers (SNAT) Secretary General Sikelela Dlamini said the results were not a true reflection. Dlamini said in each and every exam, there was a moderation which was why the points of admitting students at universities varied. He said the current A* could not be similar to the previous years and depended on whether the learners had passed. Dlamini said it would differ at times that A* would be ranked at 75 per cent, while in another particular year it was placed at 95 per cent, depending on how the pupils had performed. He said it depended on the variances.







Colorado Springs, CO (80903)

Today

Scattered thunderstorms during the morning becoming more widespread this afternoon. High 58F. Winds NNE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 90%..

Tonight

A steady rain this evening. Showers continuing overnight. Low around 45F. Winds N at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 80%.


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Eleven cases of the South African variant of coronavirus have been detected in the Republic.

Dr Cillian De Gascun, medical virologist and director of the National Virus Reference Laboratory, told a National Public Health Emergency Team (Nphet) briefing that all the cases are directly linked to travel.

A variant first detected in Brazil has not been found in Ireland, where the so-called Kent variant is the most dominant.

The briefing heard that all variants are being monitored.

Deputy chief medical officer Dr Ronan Glynn urged adherence to public health advice.

"Viruses can't mutate if they're not replicating," he said.

"So the fewer the amount of virus we have in this country, the less chance there is of a mutation that's going to have a knock-on impact on vaccine effectiveness."

Professor Philip Nolan, chairman of the Nphet Epidemiological Modelling Advisory Group, said the Republic remains on track for 200 to 400 cases a day by the end of February if the effort to stay home continues.

Meanwhile 230,776 doses of coronavirus vaccine have been administered in Ireland, including 151,212 first doses and 79,554 second doses. No cases have been recorded in Northern Ireland, Stormont's chief medical officer said yesterday.

Dr Michael McBride said: "Clearly, more studies will be required on the full efficacy of vaccines against all variants. But I wish to assure people here on two important fronts.

"Firstly, the South Africa variant is not dominant in the UK - indeed there have been no confirmed cases of it at all in Northern Ireland at this time.

"Secondly, while protection against mild disease is obviously desirable, the most important objective is protection against serious illness, hospitalisation and death. Any vaccine that achieves that is a successful vaccine."





SYDNEY, NSW / ACCESSWIRE / Februry 10, 2021 / Sydney, NSW based Clean Group Sydney would like to announce the availability of their commercial office cleaning services. The company offers thorough top-to-bottom cleaning of office spaces, a service that is very important given the global pandemic. Using state-of-the-art technology and tried and tested cleaning methods, Clean Group has all the tools needed to keep office spaces dirt free as well as sanitized.

"Finding the right quality commercial cleaning company in Sydney is like looking for a needle in a haystack," the Sydney cleaning service says. "It can be a bit challenging, considering that there are many companies that claimed to be the expert in the world of commercial cleaning. Not all companies that provide these types of services are created equal. With Clean Group Sydney, you can be confident that you will receive top to bottom cleaning solutions. Clean Group Sydney guarantees that your business spaces are clean, refreshed, tidy and well-maintained. We also use the highest quality, non-toxic cleaning solutions to ensure that your environment is always safe and germ-free. Many cleaning companies can promise you all of these but only Clean Group Sydney will meet and exceed your expectations."

Over the last two decades, Clean Group has been offering some of the most advanced cleaning plans in all of Sydney and the Greater New South Wales community. The cleaning company makes it a point to work closely with clients to find the right cleaning solution to fit the latter's needs, budgets and schedule. Clean Group all but guarantees customer satisfaction in ways that few other cleaning companies in the area can match, and many in the area know to count on Clean Group Sydney for all their cleaning needs.

Clean Group Sydney is owned and operated by locals to the Sydney community, and the company makes sure that the entire community wakes up to the cleanest commercial properties every day. This provides the community with clean and (and more importantly in 2021) safe places of business. The company offers obligation-free onsite assessment to help clients choose the right cleaning service.

"There is an almost endless number of different commercial cleaning options and approaches to choose from," the company says. "You want to be sure you select the right one for your needs and budget. That's why we always perform an online assessment first. We visit your Sydney premises, find out what you would like to achieve and do a walk-through. From there, we develop a cleaning protocol, plan and pricing and get back to you with a comprehensive proposal listing various options to suit your needs and budget. That way you are armed with all the details you need to make a decision. We'd love to help you too."

Clean Group Sydney's team of highly trained cleaners all but guarantee quality service. The team is trained to go above and beyond when it comes to offering service, and this has led to Clean Group earning the trust of many prominent Sydney businesses. The company offers a guarantee: if the customer is not pleased with their work, they need only inform Clean Group Sydney, and the cleaning service will fix the problem for free.

A number of clients have been so pleased as to leave 5-Star reviews of the company on a variety of platforms. A multimedia company says, "Clean Group is very professional. They follow a very high standard in cleaning. Their manager is always hands-on and monitors the cleaner's job. I will recommend Clean Group to any friends who may be looking for the same service."

Another review from Rahul Mohapatra says, "We had hired sanitization service for COVID-19 in our house. The team response was prompt, and they did a great job. The professionals were courteous and very well mannered. Extremely satisfied with the work."

For more information on office cleaning services in Sydney, visit Clean Group Sydney's website. The cleaning company is always happy to help keep Sydney businesses clean, and one can rely on them to get the job done quickly and efficiently. Learn more here: Office Cleaning Sydney.

For more information about Clean Group Sydney, contact the company here:

Clean Group Sydney

Stephen Matthews

+61288598938

sales@cleangroup.email

50 Pitt St, Sydney NSW 2000

SOURCE: Clean Group

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/629095/Clean-Group-Offers-Office-Cleaning-In-Sydney
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(Newser)  Authorities in Arizona on Wednesday were looking for a man who allegedly abducted his 10-month-old son Tuesday night. The boy was found safe early Wednesday, the Arizona Republic reports. But his mother, 30-year-old Brittany Martie, died of injuries she sustained during the incident. Police say that Martie was loading her son, Abel Maes, into a minivan in Peoria when Eric Maes, 30, jumped into the vehicle and drove away with Martie still holding onto the van, per Fox10. She was thrown from the vehicle and taken to a hospital, where she died during surgery, AZ Family reports. At some point, Maes reportedly ditched the vehicle in Phoenixabout 14 miles south of Peoriaand was seen running with Abel.

story continues below

Responders with the Phoenix Fire Department found the boy uninjured around 1am after receiving a report of an abandoned child. We have one side of a story, but a very short part of a story," a Peoria police spokeswoman tells AZ Family. "We don't really know why everyone was in this area. And we don't know why specifically Eric was in this area, so we'd really like to talk to him." Police say that Maes, who is a non-custodial parent, is to be considered armed and dangerous and ask anyone with information about his whereabouts to call 623-773-8958. (Read more abduction stories.)
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BUDAPEST -- The suspension of the license of Hungary's last independent news radio station has drawn international condemnation, with the European Union and media watchdogs calling the move a further attack on democracy in the EU member state.

"We have expressed our concerns about media freedom and pluralism" in Hungary, which is already under investigation for flouting the rule of law, European Commission spokesman Christian Wigand said on February 10, a day after Klubradio lost an appeal to keep its license.

The case of the radio station "only aggravates these concerns," Wigand added.

Klubradio broadcasts mainly in Budapest. Its news and talk content is often critical of Prime Minister Viktor Orban's government.

In September 2020, Hungary's National Media and Infocommunications Authority (NMHH) refused to extend Klubradio's seven-year operating license, which expires on February 14, saying the station "repeatedly infringed" on the compulsory registration law by twice submitting documents late.

Such violations usually incur fines and the NMHH's announcement raised new concerns about political pressure from the government on the media in Hungary.

"Another silenced voice in Hungary. Another sad day for media freedom," Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights Dunja Mijatovic tweeted.

The Paris-based, media-freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) condemned "this major blow to media pluralism" and urged the European Commission to "stop delaying its investigation into [NMHH's] independence and state aid for pro-government media."

Hungarian government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs said Klubradio's management was to blame for the station's demise "by flagrantly disregarding broadcasting regulations."

On February 9, Klubradio's appeal at a Budapest court to force the NMHH to issue a temporary broadcasting license was turned down, taking it off the airwaves, though it will continue its programming online.

Calling the court decision "shameful and cowardly," Klubradio President Andras Arato said the radio station now plans to appeal the ruling to Hungary's Supreme Court.

The EU's Wigand told a news briefing on February 10 that the European Commission was "in contact with the Hungarian authorities to ensure that Klubradio can continue to operate legally," adding that it was checking whether the decision complied with EU law and would "not hesitate to take action if possible and necessary."

In a statement, Pavol Szalai, the head of RSF's European Union and Balkans desk, called on the European Commission to "delay no more in investigating [NMHH's] independence under the revised European directive on broadcast media, and in investigating the other curbs on press freedom, such as state aid to pro-government media."

Hungary is under EU investigation for undermining the independence of the judiciary, media, and nongovernmental organizations, and risks losing access to tens of billions of euros in funds from the bloc.

The EU member state is ranked 89th out of 180 countries in RSF's 2020 World Press Freedom Index. Only Bulgaria, at 111th, is ranked lower among the EU's 27 member states.

With reporting by AFP and Reuters
The special election to fill Cedric Richmonds Congressional seat is shaping up to be a race between longtime local politicians State Sens. Troy Carter and Karen Carter Peterson and newcomers Gary Chambers and Desiree Ontiveros.

The four Democratic candidates agreed on progressive stances on a host of issues at a virtual forum Tuesday night hosted by the Jefferson Parish Democratic Executive Committee  endorsing the Green New Deal, Medicare for All and at least a $15 minimum wage.

While the candidates agreed on the issues, their style and approached differed. Carter and Peterson talked of policy issues at the state and local level, where their experience lies, while Chambers and Ontiveros focused on big picture ideas.

For instance, Peterson noted her role as the chair of the Louisiana Democratic Party, and said she helped lay the landscape in the state for helping Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, get elected in 2015. Both Carter and Peterson counted Medicaid expansion, which Edwards signed into law in 2016, among their biggest accomplishments.

Chambers, a Baton Rouge activist who received national attention after a video of him at a school board meeting went viral, focused on his experience in grassroots organizing, touting his success in helping save the Baton Rouge Zoo and getting an emergency room in North Baton Rouge. As the only candidate of the four from Baton Rouge, he said he would prioritize the whole district.

You can be the congressman from New Orleans and ignore the River Parishes and ignore Baton Rouge, but you can't be the congressman from Baton Rouge and ignore New Orleans, he said.

+4 Clancy DuBos: Race to succeed Cedric Richmond about to heat up The special election to succeed Cedric Richmond in Congress is about to heat up. Election Day, March 20, is only seven weeks away  and early 

Ontiveros, a lesser known name in the race, focused on her experience building a small business, Badass Balloon Co., from humble roots starting with just $1,000. She said she faced many barriers to accessing capital for her business in the beginning, such as credit score requirements and property as collateral. As a member of Congress, she said shed work to remove those barriers and advocate for a dedicated Small Business Assistance fund for people of color.

The forum was friendly with none of the candidates criticizing or challenging each other, even during the segment when they each got to ask another candidate a question. Peterson said she supported federal legalization of marijuana and asked Carter whether he did as well. He agreed.

That was a softball, Peterson said with a laugh.

Louisianas 2nd Congressional District runs from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, encompassing the River Parishes, and its the states only solidly Democratic seat in Congress.

Richmond vacated the seat last year to join President Joe Bidens administration as an advisor. Richmond has endorsed Carter, while Peterson has garnered the endorsements of prominent national Democrat and Georgia activist Stacey Abrams.

Early voting starts March 6 and Election Day is March 20.

+2 In the race to replace Cedric Richmond, a look at the early lead, the money raised and more State Sen. Troy Carter began the new year having outraised his competitors in the race to replace U.S. Rep. Cedric Richmond in a House distric
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A Bronx woman was shoved onto the subway tracks by a stranger on Tuesday morning in a terrifying attack, amid a frightening surge of violence on New York City's public transport system.

Five people have been slashed with blades in just the past week, and two - including Rosa Galeas, 54, were attacked while traveling.

Galeas, who works as a house cleaner, was on her way to work and had just got off the subway shortly before 8am when she was accosted, she told The New York Post.

A woman wearing bright yellow pants and a short jacket unexpectedly came up behind her, and pushed her once.

Rosa Galeas told Tuesday of her horror at being pushed onto the subway tracks that morning

NYPD have released images of the woman, in yellow pants, who pushed Galeas in the Bronx

Galeas kept her balance, but then the woman shoved her a second time, sending her falling onto the tracks.

'She didn't say anything,' Galeas said. 'She just pushed me.'

Galeas said she had no previous interaction with the woman.

'I always have that fear that someone can hurt me so I don't walk near the train,' Galeas said.

'I always walk away, but this person was a young woman and, I don't know, she pushed me with such force. The second time, I fell.

'I started to panic when I looked up and saw the next train was coming.

'I became desperate to get out. I started screaming: 'help me, help me.''

A man standing on the platform helped to haul her out. Galeas hurt her hand in the fall, but was otherwise physically unharmed.

Galeas was pushed onto the track at the 174th Street subway station (pictured) in the Bronx

The 54-year-old cleaner, speaking in Spanish, showed off her bruised hands from her fall

She said her attacker was set on finding someone to push.

'She had no intention of getting on the train. She just wanted to hurt someone,' she said.

'She left quickly. On the video, you can see she left quickly. She went down the stairs.'

Galeas was taken to St. Barnabas Hospital, where she was treated and released.

'I have pain all over my body,' she said. 'I'm scared.

'I'm going to need to take time to recover. I have lots of bumps.

Galeas urged the New York City authorities to do more to prevent further attacks.

'We need more security, more police,' she said.

MTA statistics show an overall drop in felonies, but an increase in burglaries and robberies.

There were six murders on the system in 2020 - double the 2019 figure - despite a 70 per cent drop in ridership during the coronavirus pandemic.

The year also saw a 62 per cent decrease in total arrests in the transit system.

Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York, on Tuesday insisted the subway system was safer than ever before.

'It's not about comparison to even the '90s,' he said. 'It's comparison to even more recent years. The subways have gotten safer and safer.'

Yet riders and observers disagree.

'I don't ever remember it being this bad,' a retired transit supervisor told The Post.

'But I am not surprised considering the city is running amok and the politicians just keep putting their heads further in the sand or, in this case, the hole.

'The city is full of homeless and mentally ill people, but the city keeps throwing good money after bad but not helping or solving problems.'

Sarah Feinberg, the interim head of NYC Transit, wrote to de Blasio on January 5 asking for social workers to be called to 311 calls for incidents on the subway.

'There is no doubt the city can better serve the vulnerable homeless and mentally ill population by connecting them with trained professionals, instead of forcing bystanders to call 911, which inevitably results in repetitive police action,' Feinberg wrote.

The past week has seen a steady stream of violent attacks.

Two hours after the attack on Galeas on Tuesday, at around 10am ,a bus driver needed hospital treatment in Brooklyn after a passenger spat on him, and the driver gave chase.

The passenger stopped, turned, and smashed him in the head with a 2-by-4.

On Sunday two subway riders were slashed with blades.

Police have released the photo of a man (above) wanted for the stabbing of a 61-year-old passenger at 14th Street who was slashed in the face with a box cutter

NYPD released an image of a man wanted for the Saturday morning stabbing in the face of a man at Kosciuszko Street station. The assailant said: 'Do you want to die?'

At 7pm at West 4th Street-Washington Square subway station in Manhattan, a 'highly intoxicated' 28-year-old man was left with a gash to the face following a dispute with another man on board the D train.

Earlier that day, at the Sutphin Boulevard-Archer Avenue subway station in Queens, a 33-year-old man had both hands slashed by a stranger who made inappropriate comments to his friend.

On Saturday morning at around 8:30am a 30-year-old Home Depot employee, returning home after his shift, was stabbed at Kosciuszko Street station in the face by a man who said: 'Why are you following me? You're going to die today.'

The victim required stitches.

And on Wednesday, two attacks were recorded.

At 8:30am, inside the 14th Street subway station, a 61-year-old passenger was slashed in the face with a box cutter following a dispute on an L train platform, after a man kicked his bag.

At 10:50pm in Grand Central Terminal subway station a 22-year-old was slashed in the face after telling another passenger on a 6 train to turn down his music.

1. We need units. Were surrounded.

The Houses prosecution team laid out a sweeping narrative against former President Donald Trump, using detailed videos and never-before-heard audio of radio communications from Capitol Police officers from the day a mob of Trump supporters invaded the Capitol. Listen and watch here.

You were just 58 steps away from the mob, Representative Eric Swalwell told the Senate jurors. But Capitol Police officers led them to safety  even as the force was coming under vicious attack from insurrectionists wielding bats, stun guns, bear spray, metal poles and sticks. For hours.

The prosecutors also played one video clip after another showing Mr. Trump falsely claiming that the election was being rigged and calling on his backers to prevent him from losing power. (Our own 38-minute video tracks Mr. Trumps lies and calls for action that were echoed and amplified by rioters on Jan. 6.)
Lana Condor is one of Hollywoods hottest young stars, an actor who rose to fame for her work in the Netflix film To All the Boys Ive Loved Before. Over the past few years, Condor has proven her staying power, acting in a variety of projects and showing her fans that she has the ability to act out dramatic parts as well as comedic ones. Condor has achieved a lot of fame for her young age, and while she has managed it all with grace and poise, she has opened up several times over the years about the difficulties that she has experienced with stress and her own mental health.

Lana Condor | Ilya S. Savenok/Getty Images

How did Lana Condor become famous?

AND IM SO EXCITED !!!! https://t.co/psLbrxYeVg  Lana Condor (@lanacondor) February 6, 2021

RELATED: When Was To All the Boys Ive Loved 2: P.S. I Still Love You Filmed?

Lana Condor was born in Vietnam in 1997, according to IMDb. As a baby, she was adopted by American parents. Condor was raised alongside her brother in Washington, and later, in New York City. Condor trained as a dancer when she was young, working with a variety of different dance companies. Eventually, Condor refocused her attention on acting, attending the New York Film Academy and the Yale Summer Conservatory for Actors.

After a few years of training as an actor, Condor made her big-screen debut in 2016, playing Jubilee in the blockbuster film X-Men: Apocalypse. Condor landed several more film roles before appearing in the hit 2018 Netflix comedy To All the Boys Ive Loved Before. Condor made a splash in the film and was shot to worldwide fame.

Lana Condors To All the Boys Ive Loved Before breakout role

RELATED: 3 Things That Irked Viewers in To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You

In the years following her success in the movie To All the Boys Ive Loved Before, Lana Condor worked on a variety of projects. She landed several more roles, including the movies Alita: Battle Angel and Summer Night. In 2020, she appeared in the highly-anticipated follow up to To All the Boys Ive Loved Before, titled To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You.

Condor has also earned acclaim for the way that she opens up to her fans on social media. Her YouTube channel has become very popular with fans, and the young woman has opened up on a number of occasions about the way that she is able to manage a high-powered career and still maintain her own mental health.

What did Lana Condor say about learning to manage stress?

RELATED: Lana Condor Just Announced Her Latest Partnership on Instagram

In a February 2021 interview with Self Magazine, Lana Condor admitted that the process of learning how to say no to projects that would have overextended her did not always come easily. Condor revealed that after she found fame, she was just saying yes to everything because its a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and you want to capitalize on it, and you want to feel like youre fully embracing everything. But Ive never felt more horrible mentally. I was so burned out  I would go home at night and I couldnt speak. I couldnt eat. I couldnt sleep. I would shake going to bed and shake waking up because it was just so much stimulation.

Condor admitted that once she was able to admit her struggles to herself and those in her inner circle, she was better able to understand how to deal with the turbulent times. Im talking about my mental health and my heart. And thats something that I completely threw away for the sake of others. So once I shared it and was vulnerable with my team, it was a huge change, the star admitted. These days, Condor stated that she is able to navigate fame and life in the entertainment industry in a much more healthy way.
Slain publisher Faisal Arefin Dipans wife, Razia Rahman Jolly, leaves the courtroom after an anti-terrorism tribunal sentenced eight members of the banned militant group Ansar al-Islam to death for killing her husband, in Dhaka, Feb. 10, 2021.

A tribunal in Bangladesh on Wednesday sentenced to death eight members of an al-Qaeda-linked militant group after finding them guilty of killing publisher Faisal Arefin Dipan in 2015, in one of a string of gruesome murders of secular intellectuals in the South Asian country.

Dipan, killed in broad daylight by machete-wielding extremists at his workplace, printed the secular and science writings of slain American-Bangladeshi writer Avijit Roy, among others.

Dipans murder was premeditated and he was killed for publishing Roys books, as part of an effort to destroy secular Bangladesh, noted anti-terrorism tribunal judge Mojibur Rahman.

Those who kill people for publishing books are the enemies of the society and the state. They do not deserve sympathy, Rahman said in his observations before pronouncing the verdict.

Only the maximum capital punishment will guarantee fair justice, and it will be an exemplary punishment, he said.

Rahman delivered his guilty verdict and sentence Wednesday in a packed courtroom amid tight police protection.

Six of the eight defendants were present, wearing helmets and bulletproof vests. They appeared unfazed as they left the courtroom after the verdict.

Two other convicts  Akram Hossain and former major Syed Ziaul Haque, the alleged chief of Ansar al-Islam  were said to be on the run. The court ordered the police to arrest them, although investigators told BenarNews in 2019 that they are not sure whether the notorious Major Zia  blamed for multiple terror attacks in the country  is still alive.

The six other convicts  Moinul Hassan Shamim alias Samir, Abdur Sabur Samad, Khairul Islam, Abu Siddique Sohel, Mozammel Hussain and Sheikh Abdullah  were arrested in 2016.

The al-Qaeda-linked militant group has been held responsible by the authorities for planning the killings of secular bloggers, writers, publishers, gay rights activists and others in the last decade.

Dipan was hacked to death on Oct. 31, 2015, in his Jagriti Prokashani publishing house office in Dhakas Aziz Supermarket, which is a center for secular writers, publishers, poets, bloggers and journalists.

About an hour before Dipans murder, another group of alleged Ansar al-Islam members attacked Ahmedur Rashid Tutul, proprietor of Dhakas Shuddhashar publishing house, and two of his blogger friends, Ranadipam Basu and Tareq Rahim, with machetes. All three survived but were seriously injured.

Like Jagriti, Shuddhashar, too, had published Bangladeshi American Roys books, which militants said were anti-Islam.

Roy was hacked to death on Feb. 26, 2015, allegedly by Ansar al-Islam militants, as he was leaving Dhakas annual Ekushey Book Fair.

Men accused of killing him are scheduled to hear a verdict against them next week.

Al-Qaeda-linked militants smile upon their return to a prison van after being sentenced to death for the 2015 killing of a publisher, in Dhaka, Feb. 10, 2021. [Sharif Khiam/BenarNews]

Happy about the verdict

There is no doubt that the militants sentenced on Wednesday were linked to Dipans murder, said public prosecutor Golam Sarwar Khan Zakir.

All of the convicts had links with the murder beyond doubt. Some of them made the plan, some of them provided money and arms, some of them cased Dipans office and some supervised the execution of the murder, Zakir told BenarNews.

All of these activities are serious offenses under the Anti-Terrorism Act. So the court has handed them the maximum punishment of a death sentence. We are happy about the verdict.

But defense lawyer Khairul Islam Liton said he and his team were unhappy with the verdict.

The investigation officer has not been able to find the real killers of Dipan, Liton told BenarNews.

These people were picked up by the police, who extracted a confessional statement from them and prosecuted them as members of ABT. We will appeal against the verdict, he said, referring to Ansar al-Islam by its other name, Ansarullah Bangla Team.

According to Bangladesh law, the eight convicts have the right to appeal at the High Court, and then the Supreme Court. If both appeals are rejected, and the president declines to pardon them, the convicts will be executed.

Abul Kashem Fazlul Haque, Dipans father, said he felt justice had been done.

When Dipan was killed, there was a sense among the common people that we would not get justice. But finally we got justice, though Dipan will never come back, Kashem told BenarNews.

If trials of other killings take place, people will now trust the rule of law.

Dipans widow Razia Rahman Jolly broke down upon hearing the judgment.

The two absconding militants must be caught and the judgment must be executed, she said.

Representative Don Beyer, Democrat of Virginia, plans to reintroduce The Fair Representation Act, which would, if enacted, put into place many of the reforms Drutman supports. Beyer wrote on his website that the measure

would move U.S. House elections into multi-member districts drawn by independent redistricting commissions and elected through ranked choice voting. The multi-member districts would be effective in states apportioned six or more seats in the House, and would elect three to five Representatives each, depending on the size of the state. Taken together, these three measures would incentivize congressional candidates to appeal to a broader range of voters.

Drutman has received both support and criticism from specialists in elections.

Gretchen Helmke, a political scientist at the University of Rochester, wrote that Bright Line Watch  a group of political scientists that conducts surveys of experts and the general public  found that there was

quite strong support among political scientists for the proposal to repeal the 1967 law mandating single member districts for the House so that states have the option to use multi-member districts on the condition that they adopt a nonwinner-take-all election model. Of the more than 500 expert respondents, 73 percent either moderately or strongly supported the proposal.

Helmke noted that

My own view has been really shaped by Lee Drutmans excellent work on this. I agree with the general critique of the median voter theorem, which has been misinterpreted to mean that two parties automatically converge toward the middle of the ideological spectrum. Obviously, we can see that this hasnt been true for American politics for several decades.

Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, praises Drutman  the real expert on this right now  and noted that if it were possible, I do think such a shift would decrease polarization because it would eliminate the zero-sum nature of American politics.

In addition, Mason pointed out that

It shouldnt be overlooked that a PR system would also inevitably create some version of an explicitly white nationalist party. The big question is how many members of the current G.O.P. would join/vote for that party?

Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth, wrote in reply to my inquiry: Im convinced by Lee Drutmans argument in his Two Party Doom Loop book that we should move in this direction.

Pippa Norris, a political scientist at Harvard who examined different levels of dissatisfaction in democratic countries in Is Western Democracy Backsliding? finds evidence supportive of Drutmans argument:

Parliamentary democracies with PR elections and stable multiparty coalition governments, typical of the Nordic region, generate a broader consensus about welfare policies addressing inequality, exclusion, and social justice, and this avoids the adversarial winner-take-all divisive politics and social inequality more characteristic of majoritarian systems.

Jennifer McCoy, a political scientist at Georgia State University, proposed a set of reforms similar, but not identical, to those of Drutman and Beyer:

I would prefer ranked-choice voting with some multi-member districts for state and national legislatures, and proportional representation (by state popular vote, not by Congressional district which are already gerrymandered) for the Electoral College. These, she wrote, could all be accomplished with just legislative change, no constitutional amendments.

Along similar lines, Jennifer Victor, a political scientist at George Mason University, emailed to say that she doubts proportional representation could be enacted in this country, but

There are a number of reforms being talked about among activists, reformers, political scientists, and other thought leaders that are both feasible and would move the US toward a system that approximates a PR system.

Victor shares the view that Congress could repeal the law mandating single winner-take-all congressional districts to allow larger, multi-member districts coupled with

ranked choice voting and expanding the size of the House. These reforms can be accomplished locally, or by changes in federal law and would fundamentally change the way Congress works  in ways that are both good and bad, but where the positives outweigh the negatives.

Victor also acknowledges that such a system would allow the most extreme anti-democratic forces now present in U.S. politics to be institutionalized. But, she continued, that faction has always been there, even when we pretended it was gone. At least under a multiparty system it would be contained and perhaps minimized.
TANAISTE Leo Varadkar has warned that mandatory hotel quarantine will lead to really hard cases of people being unable to leave or get into Ireland for family or work reasons.

Several Fine Gael TDs raised concerns about the imminent introduction of the new mandatory hotel quarantine regime at a parliamentary party meeting on Wednesday.

Mr Varadkar pointed out a number of complications and constitutional difficulties which are currently being worked through in order to introduce new laws to confine overseas arrivals from high-risk countries to hotels for 14 days.

Read More

The Government is due to publish legislation next week introducing mandatory hotel quarantine for overseas arrivals from certain high-risk countries, including Brazil and South Africa.

The new regime would not be a silver bullet, Mr Varadkar said.

He said efforts are being made to coordinate across jurisdictions, but pointed out that while New Zealand has two islands and one government, the UK and Ireland are two islands with five jurisdictions.

Sources at the meeting said Mr Varadkar warned the new regime was unlikely to be as effective as it has been in Australia and New Zealand, saying he was not sure if the North was planning any mandatory quarantine regime.

He also noted that the second and third waves of the virus saw large numbers of cases in border counties.

Former housing minister Eoghan Murphy said he had received queries from people who were concerned about having to go into hotel quarantine if they travel for funerals.

Senator Regina Doherty expressed concerns about demonising travellers and said that more focus should be put on antigen testing for people travelling abroad as opposed to fines of up to 2,000.

Carlow-Kilkenny TD John Paul Phelan said he had been contacted by couples who were planning to travel for IVF treatment and were concerned about the new quarantine rules.

Cork North Central TD Colm Burke said he had been contacted by a person in Dubai who was planning to come home but had already been vaccinated.

Former justice minister Charlie Flanagan said there were real constitutional difficulties around mandatory quarantine and said the UK proposals to jail people who breach travel rules seemed disproportionate.

Meanwhile, Mr Varadkar told his parliamentary party that Covid-19 case numbers are going in the right direction and falling at a rate of 30pc week on week. He said the lockdown is working and this strengthens the case to reopen schools in February and March.

He said the revision of the existing Living with Covid plan later this month would take account of the vaccination programme and the emergence of new variants. He said the Government would give continuation dates for various pandemic support schemes that are due to expire at the end of March.

A number of TDs raised concerns that a new Covid business support scheme, announced by Mr Varadkar on Tuesday, does not cater for businesses that do not have a physical premises. Mr Varadkar said any further supports could only cover businessess fixed costs and could not compensate them for loss of income.


The controversy swirling around the decision to rename dozens of San Francisco schools continues to grow.

The San Francisco Unified School District Board of Educations recent vote to rename 44 schools because they bear the names of historical figures said to be linked to racism and oppression has opened the district to potential litigation under Californias meeting-transparency law, according to San Francisco attorney Paul D. Scott.

In a letter Saturday addressed to the boards president, Gabriela Lopez, Scott demanded that the board repeal the resolution it passed 6-1 at its Jan. 27 meeting. He alleged that the board did not properly notify the public that it was making a final decision to rename the school sites, which include ones honoring Abraham Lincoln and George Washington.

Scott said the board provided advance notice only that it would decide on a list of potential schools to be renamed. As a result, he said, the board violated the notice and agenda requirements under the Brown Act  Californias open-meeting law  and denied due process to families and the public.

His letter declared a 30-day window to cure or correct the action, and said that if the board does not reverse its decision, legal action will follow. He told The Chronicle, The only way to implement the will of the communities is by giving them adequate notice and an opportunity to be heard on a school-by-school basis.

Scott had outlined his legal conclusions in a letter Feb. 1 to Mayor London Breed, calling for a review and opinion by the City Attorneys Office so the School Board will have an opportunity, if appropriate, to reconsider its course of action.

While the language of the resolution indicated that the Board was going to consider approving a list of school names for potential renaming, Scott noted, the district then sent out a news release that goes further and states that the decision has now been made to rename the schools on the list and only alternate names will be considered going forward.

Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the Berkeley School of Law, said that the board could respond to the demand letter by changing its meeting notification  but then follow the same course.

I understand that the claim was that the notice given was not sufficiently specific to meet the requirements of the Brown Act, he said. If this is correct, there is a basis for overturning the decision. The board could then do it again, but would need to give proper notice of the meeting and then could deliberate and vote the same way again.

In other words, Chermerinsky said, if this succeeds, it would delay the decision, but likely not change the outcome.

Scott said that if the board followed that course, We would have to take a close look at the specific actions taken by the school board.

Scott said the matter should be handled on a school-by-school basis, after students are back in schools and the public can engage in person, particularly those who do not have access to technology. He expressed concern about a decision affecting the 44 campuses en masse, adding that the actions were based on the findings of an advisory panel created by a board resolution that was to offer recommendations by June 2020 but delivered its findings in September.

Beyond the notice issue, it is also highly problematic for the Board to be rubber-stamping a list of 44 schools produced by an unelected panel whose tenure had previously evidently expired, he said. Given how important each individual renaming decision would be to so many people, it is hard to imagine how the affected communities could possibly be given a fair hearing if the decision is made as to all of the schools at once.

Scott, whose children attended San Francisco public schools, told The Chronicle he has been approached by numerous others about their concerns or about them joining in an action if it proves necessary. He said there would be no shortage of plaintiffs for a lawsuit.

The school board, city attorney and mayors office did not respond to requests for comment.

Kellie Hwang is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kellie.hwang@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @KellieHwang
A new method has enabled the natural structure of particularly large and complex enzymes to be revealed. Scientists at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) and TU Berlin have published their findings in the journal Cell Reports. They investigated a multi-enzyme complex that plays an essential role in metabolism and have discovered that it functions differently than previously thought. This will help scientists better understand certain diseases.

Enzymes are a cell's biocatalysts. They accelerate chemical reactions in the body or ensure that these reactions even take place at all. As a result, they play an extremely important role in metabolism. Individual enzymes frequently form a complex with many subunits, as in the case of the pyruvate dehydrogenase complex. It occurs in all human, animal and plant cells, as well as in fungi and even in some bacteria. "It is vital for energy production in cells," explains Dr Panagiotis Kastritis, an assistant professor at MLU and group leader at the Centre for Innovation Competence HALOmem.

"Up until now, the enzyme complex has always been broken down into its individual parts before being examined. Studying the entire, functional complex is very complicated," says Kastritis. To solve this problem, his team combined various biochemical and biophysical methods of investigation. In addition to using mass spectrometry and chemical analyses, a special form of electron microscopy - cryo-electron microscopy - has been essential for studying such a complex structure, says the structural biologist. It enables complex, organic structures to be observed at a high resolution and in their natural state. "However, it is very important to subsequently bring together all this data in computer models," says Kastritis. For the current study, the team of researchers is using cell extracts of a fungus that can survive at high temperatures, which makes analysis easier.

The scientists have thus gained an insight into how the various subunits of the enzyme complex interact with each other and have also discovered that it functions differently than previously assumed. "It was previously thought that all of the subunits were directly involved in the reaction," says Kastritis. "But now we know that some of them seem to form a kind of chamber that protects the reaction." Because the complexes are very similar across organisms, the results are also helping researchers understand the human pyruvate dehydrogenase complex.

The new method could help scientists better understand many different diseases. Some viruses, for example, reduce the number of enzyme associations in the cells. This effect has also been observed in Alzheimer's disease. In some cases, however, the enzymes do not function properly and the vital reactions occur either too slowly or too quickly. "If we are able to better understand the natural structure, we will be able to recognise tiny changes and understand why the reaction is no longer occurring as it should," says Kastritis. This knowledge could theoretically also form the basis for new treatment options.

###

The study was funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation), the Wellcome Trust and with funds from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).
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.
Patna, Feb 10 : As Vikassheel Insaan Party (VIP) missed the bus in getting any ministerial berth in the second Cabinet expansion in Bihar, its chief Mukesh Sahani is not pleased and is set to meet Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Wednesday evening, sources said.

Sources close to Sahani said that the VIP chief was expecting at least one more ministerial berth for his party but Chief Minister Nitish Kumar inducted only 10 more BJP legislators, 5 of JD-U, former BSP leader Jama Khan and one Independent into his Council of Ministers on Tuesday.

Sahani was also reportedly expecting an "upgrade" in his portfolio in case another ministerial birth for the party was not forthcoming. Sahani was said to be eyeing the Public Works Department. He currently holds Animal Husbandry and Fisheries portfolio.

Sahani had lost the 2020 Assembly elections but was elected as Legislative Council member recently.

VIP is part of National Democratic Alliance in Bihar and played a crucial role in the formation of the Nitish Kumar government for another term.

In the last Assembly elections, the BJP won 74 seats, JD-U 43, HAM 4 and VIP 4. The NDA tally of 125 MLAs is just above the simple majority mark of 122. In case he opts to sit out of the government, it could be destabilised.

Nitish Kumar, in a bid to stabilise his government, had included former BSP MLA Jama Khan, who crossed over to the Janata Dal-United, and Independent MLA Sumit Singh in his Cabinet on Tuesday.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
LOS ANGELES, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- On February 10, 2021 at 10:00 a.m. (Pacific) in the courtroom of U.S. District Judge Virginia Phillips, Central District of California, there will be a hearing on Robinhood customer Levi Cobos's motion for a Temporary Restraining Order ("TRO") against ROBINHOOD FINANCIAL LLC; ROBINHOOD SECURITIES, LLC; and ROBINHOOD MARKETS, INC., (collectively "Robinhood") in the class action lawsuit entitled Levi Cobos v. Robinhood, etc. et al., US. District Court Case number 21-CV-00843. The motion for TRO seeks to restrain and enjoin Robinhood from suspending the "buy" feature/button on its "app," and to restore full functionality to its app.

Allowing any stock brokerage firm to suddenly, and without advance warning, suspend one-side of all transactions in a stock disrupts the natural order of supply and demand within. But, on January 28, 2021, Defendants, ROBINHOOD FINANCIAL LLC; ROBINHOOD SECURITIES, LLC; and ROBINHOOD MARKETS, INC., (collectively hereinafter "Robinhood.") did just that: they disabled the "buy" feature on their "app"  an unprecedented action - stranding its retail customers and subjecting them to increased risks and losses. That is what is alleged in court papers filed in Cobos v. Robinhood.

"This is not a case about a broker-dealer who limits or declines orders; it's about not accepting them at all," said Jerry Kroll, an attorney for Cobos.

The Cobos lawsuit alleges that "Robinhood continues to engage in the same conduct, unabated, costing Plaintiff and those similarly situated to suffer loss and damage as a result. This type of unnatural market manipulation continues to occur unabated and expanded, by all current public reports and accounts of Robinhood's activities. The request for a TRO reflects the urgency and irreparable harm from this unprecedented action that unbalances an already volatile stock market."

Contact: Gerald (Jerry) Kroll, Esq., (Tel: 310.598.1255, email: [email protected]) and Joseph Kar, Esq. (Tel: 818.501.6930, email: [email protected])

SOURCE Kroll Law
LARRY BECK, a longtime Denton resident, writes routinely on the local, state and national sociopolitical issues of our time on his blog, As I See It at asiseeyt.blogspot.com.
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[February 09, 2021] Mathematical Models Predict the Recent Political Insurgencies and Suggest Possible Remedies to the Effect of Social Media

SANTA BARBARA, Calif., Feb. 9, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Aimdyn, Inc., an Artificial Intelligence Research Company in California that uses Machine Learning Algorithms in order to make predictions based on big data has found mathematical evidence of correlations between the current large social media platforms' structure and algorithms, and the increased frequency of political insurgencies like the BLM protests of the last summer and the recent attack on the Capitol. AI Researchers write papers predicting political insurgencies due to current social media algorithms. The Social Media platforms provide users with two key elements in their interactions: 1) the ability to connect to people that are distant, but have similar political orientation and feeling of dissatisfaction with the political process (the so-called homophily) and 2) suggestions of content based on users' past content viewing history. Recent discussions and movies like Social Dilemma tend to emphasize the second aspect. However, two papers written before these events by Aimdyn researchers in collaboration with Criminal Justice professor Jason Gravel from Temple University showed both aspects are the basic ingredients for more frequent and larger insurgencies and political violence based on mathematical models and algorithms used in Artificial Intelligence (AI). "Algorithms on social media platforms are able to "optimize" homophilya powerful natural human tendency to associate with similar otherby sggesting content that your friends like even before those friends share that information with you. By sharing content an algorithm has already determined your friends are likely to be interested in, you give legitimacy to that content and to your friends' interest in that content," said Jason Gravel, Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at Temple University.



"Information and misinformation alike can rapidly permeate pockets of individuals with similar views, unencumbered by geographic, or time constraints. Soon things become "obvious" in some social circles, no matter how farfetched they may seem from the outside looking in. Under these conditions, little to no coordination among actors in a network is necessary for large scale mobilization around an issue," Gravel said. The models also suggest a possible remedy: a balancing of suggested content and suggested network associates, similar to the fairness doctrine of the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC), introduced in 1949 and abandoned in 1987.

The results could thus be used to inform future decisions made by the tech giants in order to move in a direction less susceptible to huge political outbursts. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Aimdyn Inc is an AI and ML Research company based in Santa Barbara, CA. It has a long history of ML and AI development and analysis with predictive capabilities, applied to large societal issues, from damage control for the Gulf Oil Spill to mapping out the spread of the current COVID-19 pandemic. To learn more about Aimdyn Inc. and these projects, visit www.aimdyn.com Research Papers: M. Fonoberova, I. Mezic, J. Mezic, J. Hogg, J. Gravel. "Small-world networks and synchronisation in an agent-based model of civil violence", Global Crime, 20:3-4, 161-195, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1080/17440572.2019.1662304 M. Fonoberova, I. Mezic, J. Mezic, R. Mohr. "An agent-based model of urban insurgence: Effect of gathering sites and Koopman mode analysis", PLOS ONE 13(10): e0205259, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0205259 View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mathematical-models-predict-the-recent-political-insurgencies-and-suggest-possible-remedies-to-the-effect-of-social-media-301225443.html SOURCE Aimdyn

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Male elephants often fight over dominance, but for these two jumbos in Thailand - their friendship comes first.

After a weeks-long standoff over a female mate, the two male elephants appeared to have made up with each other by a simple gesture of shaking trunks.

Footage shows Kaenggreang, one of the male elephants, touching trunks with his pal, Siplor, to make peace after the duel in Chachoengsao province, Thailand.

Footage shows Kaenggreang (pictured right), one of the male elephants, touching trunks with his pal, Siplor (left), to make peace after the duel in Chachoengsao province, Thailand

The clash between the two elephants occurred when the cheeky jumbo Siplor (pictured left) tried to challenge Kaenggreang (right), a larger and older elephant, said park rangers

The clash between the two elephants occurred when the cheeky jumbo Siplor tried to challenge Kaenggreang, a larger and older elephant, said park rangers.

Siplor, who was in heat during the mating season, attempted to steal a female elephant in the herd.

The two had been watching each other from a distance and even had a physical altercation bumping tusks two weeks ago.

However, they appeared to have settled their differences on Sunday as they came to a truce by shaking trunks with each other.

Park rangers at the Khao Ang Rue Nai Wildlife Sanctuary, the area where the two bulls roam, said they will continue monitoring them for signs they have made peace.

Park rangers at the Khao Ang Rue Nai Wildlife Sanctuary, the area where the two bulls roam, said they will continue monitoring them for signs they have made peace

After a weeks-long standoff over a female mate, the two male elephants in Thailand appeared to have made up with each other by a simple gesture of shaking trunks

'These two elephants have been squaring up to each other and fighting for the last few weeks,' said Panya Wajade, who works at the park.

'It's nice to see they have made friends again but the wildlife team will make sure that really is the case.'

As social creatures, elephants live in complex hierarchical communities.

Each herd has one female that is the matriarch while males stay with the family until they reach the age of 12 to 15, when they leave the herd and live alone or join up with other bulls.

Male and female elephants live separately and only visit when some of the females are in their mating season, known as estrus.

When a male approaches, a female in estrus may at first show wariness, but if she is interested, she will then leave the family group and walk with the male.

The male may chase the female if she retreats and will chase off any other males.

They may stroke each other with their trunks before the male mounts the female from behind, standing almost vertically as they mate.
The business community and landowners in Milltown have voiced criticism of plans to bypass Milltown, which they fear will be detrimental to the economic and social future of the town.

The community feels that the project is being undertaken without any need for such a major infrastructural project, given that there is little or no traffic congestion, they claim.

However, the biggest fear is the loss of business to the town which local business owners warn could lead to closures and job losses.

"We are worried about the impact it will have on our businesses," said businessman Jerry Casey.

"We have been compared to Castleisland but we are not the same. They have clothes shops and banks etc to bring people in we don't have that.

"We also feel there is no traffic problem in the town. We invite people to spend time here and tell us at what time there is traffic congestion."

Milltown Community and Chamber Alliance, which represents much of the local community, have also voiced concerns about the proposals, citing a lack of information and consultation as key issues. Chairman Stewart Stephens said the project will have an impact on the business community and the farming community. He is one of the affected landowners but he said others are more affected by the proposed plans with some farms potentially split in two.

"Business will go down and the business community are being told to take the bullet for the team," he added.

"We feel they don't want a discussion. They are telling us the town is to be bypassed and that is it and we can't accept that."

Mr Stephens added that the chamber has spent years seeking traffic statistics to back up the need for the project, but none were forthcoming until the webinar last week. However, he said despite the daily traffic, the town does not have a traffic congestion problem that warrants such a project. The chamber intends to engage planning consultants to give a more accurate picture of what the implications of the project will be for Milltown and this will form part of its submission to the planning process.

Business man Mike McCarthy Larkin said like many others he will have to consider his future if the project goes ahead.

"We are not a market town like Castleisland they have banks and large supermarkets to bring people in."

He is also critical of the plans and said the traffic situation in the town does not reflect the need for a bypass.

"Why are they by-passing our town? From my observation there is no traffic problems. A roundabout would solve the problem, not a bypass."

Meanwhile, landowners have also voiced their concerns and claimed landowners along the route of the proposed bypass for Milltown are 'powerless' to stop the project.

"Regardless of whether I am happy or not it will make no difference. My only hope is to accept it... We are powerless, they will CPO the land," said landowner Noel O'Connor.

"It will destroy the area and we will have this monument up in the air for the rest of our lives."
[February 10, 2021] SteelSky Ventures Wins Investment From Motley Fool Ventures

NEW YORK, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- SteelSky Ventures, a women's health tech fund, announced today that it has received investment from Motley Fool Ventures. SteelSky Ventures invests in companies that improve access, care, and outcomes in women's healthcare. The company's innovative approach allows the team to invest across the spectrum of women's health indications and in technology infrastructure that supports new and innovative care delivery models. "The Motley Fool's purpose is to make the world smarter, happier, and richer. We believe that SteelSky Ventures will be a great partner aligned with that mission and vision to improve the world while creating strong returns for investors," Ollen Douglass, Managing Director of Motley Fool Ventures, said. "We studied the team's experiences and investing performance prior to their new fund, their commitment to diversity, the underpinnings of their investment thesis, deal sourcing strategy, geographic focus, and key differentiating factors. We found their women's health thesis differentiated and compelling, and we are excited to partner with the SteelSky team." SteelSky has a diverse portfolio of companies ranging from Twentyeight Health, a telehealth platform that provides affordable and accessible reproductive health products with a focus on serving Medicaid and underinsured communities, to Zipline, a drone delivery service for prescription medicines and medical supplies, to Lark Health, the leading digital platform for chronic care management. SteelSky's portfolio also includes 23andMe, a personal genomics company that leverages a diverse set of DNA to advance prsonalized and culturally inclusive medical research and treatments, and Origin, a digital-first physical therapy program targeting the unique needs of women from motherhood to menopause.



"We believe we are investing in companies that not only improve the state of women's health but are also architecting the future of healthcare, where we will access, interact with, and consume medical treatment in new and more convenient ways. We are excited to partner with Motley Fool Ventures to help us introduce these companies to the world," said Maria Velissaris, Founding Partner of SteelSky Ventures. About SteelSky Ventures

SteelSky Ventures is an innovative venture capital fund investing in the future of women's healthcare. The firm invests across the spectrum of women's health focusing on scalable, high-growth companies innovating in digital health, telemedicine, remote monitoring, consumer health and next-generation care delivery platforms. For more information on SteelSky Ventures, visit https://steelskyventures.com. About Motley Fool Ventures Based in Alexandria, Virginia, Motley Fool Ventures brings The Motley Fool's investing principles and member community to venture capital. Launched in 2018, Motley Fool Ventures is a $150 million venture fund that invests in early-stage companies leveraging technology to create a clear competitive advantage in their industry. Its dedicated team, investor community, and robust network aim to provide value to entrepreneurs beyond just capital. Learn more about the MFV Partners program at http://mot.ly/mfvpartners. Media Contact

Maria Velissaris

maria@steelskyventures.com Related Images steelsky-ventures-logo.jpg

SteelSky Ventures Logo

An image of the NYC skyline View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/steelsky-ventures-wins-investment-from-motley-fool-ventures-301225888.html SOURCE SteelSky Ventures

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Iranian naval ships parading during the last day of a military exercise in the Gulf, near the strategic strait of Hormuz in southern Iran, in September 2020. (Iranian Army office/AFP via Getty Images)

Russia, Iran, China to Hold Joint Naval Drills in Indian Ocean

US Faces 'increasing competition' in region, says CENTCOM Chief

Russia, Iran, and China are set to hold joint naval drills in the Indian Ocean, as the chief of U.S. Central Command acknowledged that the United States faces increasing competition in the Middle East.

It comes as the United States is separately conducting joint exercises with Australia and Japan in Guam.

Russias ambassador to Iran, Levan Dzhagaryan, announced on Monday in an interview with RIA news agency that the trilateral naval exercises will be held in the northern Indian Ocean in mid-February. The joint naval drills will include rehearsing search and rescue operations, and ensuring the safety of shipping, he said.

Similar drills were held between the three countries in the Indian Ocean in the Gulf of Oman off the coast of Iran in December 2019, in a move that appeared to counter U.S. activity in the region. The Gulf of Oman is a waterway that connects the Arabian Sea with the Strait of Hormuz, where about a fifth of the worlds oil passes through.

At the time, tensions had been mounting between Iran and the United States since Washington pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal in 2018 and imposed sanctions on Tehran. Iran had repeatedly warned it would block the strategic Strait of Hormuz if it couldnt sell its oil due to U.S. sanctions.

The United States at the time accused Iran of being behind multiple attacks on oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz in May and June 2019, allegations that Iran denied.

President Joe Biden has said the United States will rejoin the Iran nuclear deal if Iran resumes strict compliance. More recently, Biden said in an interview with CBS News on Feb. 5 that the country would not lift its economic sanctions to get Iran back to negotiations over how to revive the nuclear deal. Soon after, Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Feb. 7 told state TV, If [the United States] wants Iran to return to its commitments, it must lift all sanctions in practice, then we will do verification  then we will return to our commitments.

The announcement of the upcoming drills comes after Biden earlier this February ordered the USS Nimitz, then the only U.S. Navy aircraft carrier in the Middle East, to leave its area of responsibility and return to its home port in Washington state. Former President Donald Trump at the beginning of the year ordered the aircraft carrier to remain in the region amid heightened tensions with Iran.

US Faces Increasing Competition From Russia, China in Region

U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) chief Gen. Kenneth McKenzie on Monday said that the actions of Iran present the most challenging driver of instability in the U.S. CENTCOM area of responsibility in the Middle East.

The United States faces increasing competition in the region from Russia and China, both vying for power and influence through a combination of diplomatic, military, and economic means, McKenzie said in a keynote online address at the Middle East Institutes virtual convention, in his first public remarks since Biden took office. This adds another layer of tension and instability to an already complex and challenging region.

Marine Corps Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie, commander of U.S. Central Command, speaks at a news briefing at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, on March 13, 2020. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

In 2020, Russia and China exploited the ongoing and regional crises, financial and infrastructure needs, perception of declining U.S. engagement, and opportunities created by COVID-19 to advance their objectives across the Middle East.  Russia and China leverage their proximity to the region, historical relations, and a perceived decline in U.S. engagement to establish and strengthen opportunistic relationships, he said.

Russia seeks to undermine and disrupt U.S. influence while also having economic reasons for engaging in the region, from maintaining oil production agreements to expanding Russian access to nuclear energy markets, trade and arms sales, he said, adding that it also wants to establish permanent military bases in Syria and Sudan.

Meanwhile, Chinas interest in the region is predominantly economic, the general said, noting that it relies on the region for half of its crude oil. Furthermore, China continues to cultivate trade relationships, economic investment, and comprehensive partnerships among regional states, he said. China also uses its Belt and Road Initiative and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor to expand its influence in the region, he added.

Coordinated U.S. interagency efforts, strong allies, and partner relationships are key in the great power competition, McKenzie said. Opportunities to bolster partnerships and compete with Russia and China in the region include border security measures, counternarcotics efforts, counterterrorism, defense, institution building, and even development assistance. These low cost and often overlooked programs possessed outsized impact in terms of building relationships and assuring key partners.

Separately, the United States is conducting its annual trilateral field training exercise Cope North with Australia and Japan in Guam, an island territory in Micronesia.

Air forces from the United States, Japan, and Australia will participate in Cope North 2021 at Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, Feb. 3-19 to conduct humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HA/DR) operations, as well as to conduct large force employment and combat air forces training, the U.S. Air Force in the Pacific said in a statement.

Hoping to spur a post-pandemic recovery, companies from Comcast to the makerspace chain NextFab are seeking small-business owners to apply for grant money and accelerator programs in the Philadelphia area.

Comcast on Tuesday said it will open applications March 1 through March 14 for $10,000 small business grants in Philadelphia and Chester. The grants are part of the Comcast RISE Investment Fund, which is giving $5 million to Black, Indigenous, and people of color-owned small businesses in five cities nationwide, including $1 million in Philadelphia and Chester.

Eligible businesses can apply for the $10,000 grant at ComcastRISE.com. Grants are available to small businesses operating for at least three years and employing up to 25 people.

Comcast will award a total of 100 grants in Philadelphia and Chester, and 500 grants nationally, in May.

The need for small business aid is acute: Between February and April 2020, the number of active Black-owned businesses declined by 41% nationally, Latino-owned businesses fell 32%, and Asian-owned businesses dropped by 25%, vs. just 21% for the general population, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Even before the pandemic, there were huge racial disparities in business ownership in Philadelphia, with far fewer businesses owned by people of color, according to research from Pew Charitable Trusts and the Center City District.

An estimated 30% of small businesses located on Phillys commercial corridors may close permanently, according to a recent survey by the Philadelphia Association of Community Development Corporations and TD Bank.

The RISE Investment Fund is an extension of Comcast RISE, the cable giants initiative launched in October that initially was open only to Black-owned small businesses. The grant money is now open to Black, Indigenous, and people of color-owned businesses hurt by COVID-19.

Comcast already awarded advertising, marketing consulting, and technology makeovers to local business owners such as Madi Still, owner of Be Still Nutrition, in Hatfield, Pa.; Lois Arnold, owner of Hairs 2 U Wig Bank, in Philadelphia, a nonprofit serving uninsured and underinsured women and children going through illnesses that cause hair loss or baldness; cardiologist Sanul Corrielus of Corrielus Cardiology in Philadelphia; Damian Smith of marketing firm Smith Enterprises LLC, Mount Laurel, N.J.; and Andrew Allen, owner of New Life Staffing LLC, Pottstown, Pa.

NextFab Accelerator

Founded by Evan Malone in 2009, NextFab provides 3D printers and other digitally controlled cutting, shaping, and reproduction tools to small-scale local manufacturers in Philadelphia.

NextFab this month will launch an eight-week accelerator program for entrepreneurs, in particular, artisans who need tools, support, and structure to build viable businesses.

Initially, we planned to make this program available only to existing members of NextFab, but we decided to open it up to the public, so that we can support even more artisans in these difficult times, said Todor Raykov, who runs the accelerator programs and venture initiatives at NextFab.

The programs sessions are virtual and provided at no cost. In addition to business workshops, NextFab will make introductions to advisers and successful entrepreneurs, and artisans receive free access to all three NextFab locations  in North and South Philadelphia and Wilmington  for the eight-week period.

The only requirement is that the artisan applicants are already in business and generating between $100 and $5,000 in sales per month, he said.

The 2021 Artisan Accelerator program runs from March 24 to May 21, and will be held virtually. For the cohort this year, NextFab provides artisan winners with three months of membership at the Ultimate level ($299/month, or $897 per person), and machine time.

We are accepting applications until February 21 and well select between six and eight entrepreneurs for the program, he said.

Candidates from the Philadelphia and Wilmington regions, who are selling custom, handmade, and unique goods, can apply for the accelerator until Feb. 21 online at: https://nextfab.com/grow/artisan-accelerator.

Following a pilot artisan accelerator program in Wilmington last spring, Todor expanded to Philadelphia this year.

The virtual format of the sessions, he said, makes it possible for entrepreneurs to take advantage of the training, hone marketing strategies, and increase online sales.

The NextFab program is good for people doing a craft and thinking about stepping it up, or who have been selling for a while. I had done one other accelerator, through the University of the Arts, which was similar, said Kensington-based Machele Nettles, 39, founder of Idol Light jewelry, who took part in the NextFab pilot accelerator.

I learned from critiques from other artisans. The most helpful things were understanding how to sell, and the value of my brand from buyers, and using that in marketing. She sells in retail locations at Ritual Shoppe on Walnut Street, and online at idol-light.com.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-10 09:07:30|Editor: huaxia

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ADDIS ABABA, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- Ethiopia registered 572 new COVID-19 cases in the past 24 hours, taking the nationwide tally to 143,566, the country's Ministry of Health said Tuesday.

The death toll from COVID-19 in the country reached 2,158 on Tuesday evening after two new deaths were reported.

The ministry said 248 more recoveries were logged during the same period, taking the national count to 126,004.

Ethiopia, Africa's second most populous nation, has so far reported the highest number of positive COVID-19 cases in the East Africa region.

The Ethiopian government has been urging the public to implement COVID-19 precautionary measures to contain the spread of the virus. Enditem

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About 3,000 consumers on Tuesday filed a complaint against two companies that produced and distributed baby bathtubs found to have an excessive level of a harmful chemical substance.







A lawyer representing about 1,000 infants and their parents reported Daehyun Chemistry Industry Co. and its distributor to Dongjak Police Station in southeastern Seoul on charges of violating the Special Act on the Safety of Children's Products.







In December, the state-run Korean Agency for Technology and Standards announced that the company's baby bathtub contains 612.5 times the amount of phthalate plasticizer allowed under safety standards.







The substance is used to make plastics soft and flexible. It is an endocrine-disrupting chemical, and experts said high exposure to it could lead to liver damage and reproductive dysfunction.







The bathtub was highly popular, selling for a mere 5,000 won (US$4.48) at Daiso, a leading flat-priced daily supplies store chain that runs more than 1,000 branches nationwide.







Asung Daiso Corp., the operator of the stores, has said that it confirmed official safety documents for the product, including a certificate of non-detection of phthalate plasticizer, before the first shipment, but that Daehyun did not comply with safety guidelines in making bathtubs that were supplied afterward.







"This case reveals a loophole in the state safety certification system that it cannot verify the change of materials of products in the course of (manufacturing)," Lee Seung-ik, the attorney representing the parents, said.







Investigation into the case has already been launched as Lee filed a complaint in December shortly after the announcement. The police station raided the two companies Friday and seized related materials, police officials said.







The complainants also reported the two companies to the Fair Trade Commission and applied for collective dispute mediation with the Korea Consumer Agency. (Yonhap)


Residents of some parts of Central Kenya are living in mortal fear of vicious criminal gangs that are mainly targeting widows, single mothers and elderly women for rape and robbery.

They have now asked security agencies to take action and stop the gangs that comprise mainly young men.

In Maragua, Murang'a County, Ms Jacinta Mugure has fallen victim to one such attack.

She says she found six male youths selling bhang outside her home in Mathare Estate.

Ms Mugure asked the young men why they were transforming her gate into a contraband market.

The youths, she told the Nation, responded with a torrent of verbal abuses and threats.

"The average age of these boys was at most 20 years while I am 52. These were my sons uttering such words to me!" she adds.

The matter was reported at Maragua Police Station, where an officer on duty asked Ms Mugure to bring along witnesses.

She tried to convince three of her neighbours who had witnessed her humiliation to accompany her to the station, but none was willing to risk their lives and testify against the youths.

Similar encounter

Ms Naomi Mwangi from Gatanga sub-county had a similar encounter.

Ms Mwangi was going to the shops at around 8am when she bumped into a group of youths that went on to forcibly sell her bhang.

"The youths noticed I was holding a Sh500 note in my hand. Then one of them blocked my way. He told me they are poor because those of us who have money have refused to help them and so I should give him the Sh500 and in exchange, I'd get 10 rolls of bhang," she claims.

Upon hesitating, she was slapped hard on her left cheek.

"I gave them the money and left," Ms Mwangi says.

In Kiambu, a widows' lobby is working with administrators to report such cases.

"We are working with area administrators, especially assistant chiefs, who sometimes visit the gangs' trading zones and warn them," Kiambu East Widows Welfare Association Secretary Charity Wanjiru told the Nation.

A disconnect

"But we have noted there is a disconnect in that police officers - who are supposed to arrest and prosecute the gangs - are reluctant to help us, saying we have to come with witnesses to prove our cases."

She claims in the past one year, "at least 10 widows have been raped right in their houses, countless single mothers forced into casual sex relationships by the gangs while assault and foul language being used against my members is the order of the day."

Central Region Coordinator Wilfred Nyagwanga told the Nation he has directed that the gangs be dealt with.

He said some illegal traders believe they are untouchable just because no one is willing to testify against them.

"The onus is on us in the security docket to devise ways of eradicating those gangs. We are not asleep and we shall not sit back and watch as widows and single mothers are transformed into play toys by criminals. The question the area security apparatus should answer to everyone else is why there are such gangs and what they are doing about them," Mr Nyagwanga said.

Deputy Inspector-General of Police Edward Mbugua told the Nation that "a proactive police officer cannot dismiss a complaint on grounds that the victim is incapacitated in any aspect of seeking justice".

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The police boss said it is the work of the police to investigate complaints and do all it takes to ensure justice is served.

"The argument that victims of injustice cannot access justice on account that they were not able to report or could not convince witnesses to testify is very stale. It is our work to go out there and make things happen," he warned.

"We should have mobile Occurrence Book officers to record those complaints and apply our horizons and capacities to gather evidence necessary to stand arraignment and conviction. Unless there are officers who have become tired of working for the government, cases of grievances not being addressed point to utter dereliction of duty."

Federation of African Women Educationists (Fawe) organising secretary Cecilia Gitu says more needs to be done to protect vulnerable women from such attacks.
TORONTO, Feb. 09, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Tanzanian Gold Corporation (TSX:TNX) (NYSE American:TRX) (TanGold, TRX or the Company), today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement with several institutional investors for the purchase and sale of 32,923,078 shares of its common stock at a purchase price of US$0.65 per share in a registered direct offering. The Company has also agreed to issue to the investors warrants to purchase up to an aggregate of 16,461,539 common stock in a concurrent private placement. The common stock warrants will be exercisable six months after the date of issuance, have an exercise price of US$0.80 per share and will expire five years from the date of issuance. The closing of the offering is expected to occur on or about February 11, 2021, subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions.



A.G.P./Alliance Global Partners is acting as sole placement agent for the offering.

The Company intends to use the net proceeds from the offering for continued development of the Buckreef Gold Project, including capital expenditures, continued exploration, general corporate purposes and working capital.



This offering of common stock is being made pursuant to effective shelf registration statements on Form F-3 (File No. 333-250146) previously filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the SEC) and declared effective on November 25, 2020, and Form F-3MEF filed thereafter. A prospectus supplement describing the terms of the proposed offering will be filed with the SEC and will be available on the SECs website located at http://www.sec.gov. Electronic copies of the prospectus supplement may be obtained, when available, from A.G.P./Alliance Global Partners, 590 Madison Avenue, 28th Floor, New York, NY 10022, or by telephone at (212) 624-2060, or by email at prospectus@allianceg.com.

The warrants described above were offered in a private placement under Section 4(a)(2) of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the Act"), and Regulation D promulgated thereunder and, along with the common stock underlying the warrants, have not been registered under the Act, or applicable state securities laws. Accordingly, the warrants and the underlying common stock may not be offered or sold in the United States except pursuant to an effective registration statement or an applicable exemption from the registration requirements of the Act and such applicable state securities laws. The Company has undertaken to file a registration statement as soon as practicable.

This press release shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction.

About Tanzania Gold Corporation

Tanzanian Gold Corporation along with its joint venture partner, STAMICO is building a significant gold project at Buckreef in Tanzania that is based on an expanded Mineral Resource base and the treatment of its mineable Mineral Reserves in two standalone plants. Measured and Indicated Mineral Resources now stand at a combined tonnage of 35.88MT at 1.77g/t gold containing 2,036,280 ounces of gold. The Buckreef Project also contains an Inferred Mineral Resource of 17.8MT at 1.11g/t gold for contained gold of 635,540oz. The Company is actively investigating and assessing multiple exploration targets on its property.

Tanzanian Gold Corporation is advancing on three value-creation tracks:

Strengthening its balance sheet from expanding near-term production to 15,000 - 20,000 oz. of gold per year from the processing oxides upon approval of an expanded oxide plant. Advancing the Final Feasibility Study for a stand-alone sulphide treating plant that is substantially larger than previously modelled and targeting significant annual gold production. Continuing with a drilling program to further test the potential of its Mineral Resource base by: (i) drilling at deeper levels; (ii) drilling new oxide targets; (iii) infill drilling to upgrade Mineral Resources currently in the Inferred category; and (iv) a step-out drilling program in the Northeast Extension.



Andrew M. Cheatle, P.Geo. is the Companys Qualified Person as defined by the NI 43-101 who has reviewed and assumes responsibility for the technical content of this press release.

For further information, please contact Michael Martin, Investor Relations, m.martin@tangoldcorp.com , 860-248-0999, or visit the Company website at www.tangoldcorp.com

The Toronto Stock Exchange and NYSE American have not reviewed and do not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

U.S. Investors are urged to consider closely the disclosure in our SEC filings. You can review and obtain copies of these filings from the SEC's website at http://www.sec.gov/edgar.shtml

Tanzanian Gold Corporation (TanGold or the Company), has taken all reasonable care in producing and publishing information contained in this press release. Tanzanian Gold does not warrant or make any representations regarding the use, validity, accuracy, completeness or reliability of any claims, statements or information in this press release. The information is not a substitute for independent professional advice before making any investment decisions. Furthermore, you may not modify or reproduce in any form, electronic or otherwise any information in this press release. Andrew M. Cheatle, P.Geo. is the Qualified Person as defined by the NI 43-101 who has reviewed and assumes responsibility for the technical content of this press release. The disclosure contained in this press release of a scientific or technical nature relating to the Companys Buckreef Project has been summarized or extracted from the technical report entitled The National Instrument 43-101 Independent Technical Report, Updated Mineral Resource Estimate for the Buckreef Gold Mine Project, Tanzania, East Africa For TanGold with an effective date of May 15, 2020 (the Effective Date), and with an amendment date of June 8, 2020. The Technical Report was prepared by or under the supervision Mr. Wenceslaus Kutekwatekwa (Mining Engineer, Mining and Project Management Consultant) BSc Hons (Mining Eng.), MBA, FSAIMM, of Virimai Projects., and, Dr Frank Crundwell, MBA, PhD, a Consulting Engineer, each of whom is an independent Qualified Person as such term is defined in NI 43-101. The information contained herein is subject to all of the assumptions, qualifications and procedures set out in the Technical Report and reference should be made to the full details of the Technical Report which has been filed with the applicable regulatory authorities and is available on the Companys profile at www.sedar.com.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains certain forward-looking statements as defined in the applicable securities laws. All statements, other than statements of historical facts, are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are frequently, but not always, identified by words such as expects, anticipates, believes, hopes, intends, estimated, potential, possible and similar expressions, or statements that events, conditions or results will, may, could or should occur or be achieved. Forward-looking statements relate to future events or future performance and reflect TanGold managements expectations or beliefs regarding future events and include, but are not limited to, statements with respect to the estimation of mineral reserves and resources, success of mining operations, the timing and amount of estimated future production, and capital expenditure.

Although TanGold believes the expectations expressed in such forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, such statements are not guarantees of future performance. The actual achievements of TanGold or other future events or conditions may differ materially from those reflected in the forward-looking statements due to a variety of risks, uncertainties and other factors. These risks, uncertainties and factors include general business, legal, economic, competitive, political, regulatory and social uncertainties; actual results of exploration activities and economic evaluations; fluctuations in currency exchange rates; changes in costs; future prices of gold and other minerals; mining method, production profile and mine plan; delays in exploration, development and construction activities; changes in government legislation and regulation; the ability to obtain financing on acceptable terms and in a timely manner or at all; contests over title to properties; employee relations and shortages of skilled personnel and contractors; the speculative nature of, and the risks involved in, the exploration, development and mining business. These risks are set forth under Item 3.D in Tanzanian Golds Form 20-F for the year ended August 31, 2020 and other documents we file with the SEC.

The information contained in this press release is as of the date of the press release and TanGold assumes no duty to update such information.

Note to U.S. Investors

US investors are advised that the Mineral Resource estimates disclosed in this press release have been calculated pursuant to Canadian standards which use terminology consistent with the requirements of CRIRSCO reporting standards. For its fiscal year ending August 31, 2021, and thereafter, the Company will follow new SEC regulations which uses a CRIRSCO based template for mineral resources and mineral reserves, that includes definitions for inferred, indicated, and measured mineral resources.
The seven-day rolling average for daily coronavirus deaths in the US has fallen by more than 15 percent in the past two weeks as daily new infections and hospitalizations continue to drop.

In the week ended Tuesday, an average of 2,787 Americans died from the virus each day, down from 3,302 in the week ended January 26, according to the COVID Tracking Project.

The database reported 2,795 new deaths and 92,986 new cases nationwide on Tuesday, with both metrics declining in the majority of states.

The case count marked an increase of about 15,000 from Monday, when 77,737 were reported. But the seven-day rolling average still decreased to 107,612, down 30 percent from 140,630 a week ago.

Hospitalizations have seen a similar downward trend in recent days, with a total of 79,179 patients receiving care on Monday. That's a decrease of nearly 30,000 from two weeks ago on January 26, when 108,960 patients were hospitalized.

As numbers continue to decline in all three key metrics, Americans' perception of the threat posed by the virus has also fallen to its lowest point since October.

An Axios-Ipsos survey published Tuesday found that 66 percent of people think the risk of returning to pre-pandemic life is 'large' or 'moderate', while 35 percent said the risk was 'small' and nine percent said there was no risk.

The seven-day rolling average for coronavirus deaths in the US has fallen by more than 15 percent in the past two weeks. In the week ended Tuesday, an average of 2,787 Americans died from the virus each day, according to the COVID Tracking Project

On Tuesday 92,986 new cases were reported nationwide, bringing the seven-day rolling average to 107,612, down from 140,630 a week ago

Hospitalizations have seen a similar downward trend in recent days, with a total of 79,179 patients receiving care on Monday. That's a decrease of nearly 30,000 from two weeks ago on January 26, when 108,960 patients were hospitalized

Republicans (49%) and people ages 18 to 29 (58%) were the least likely to see COVID-19 as a risk, compared with 76 percent of people who have already been vaccinated who see it as a high risk.

Asked when they think they will resume gatherings with family and friends, 28 percent said they already have, 22 percent said they will wait until their 'circle' is vaccinated, 24 percent said they will wait for official guidance and 24 percent said they didn't know.

Just 10 percent of Democrats said they were already going to in-person gatherings, compared with 42 percent of Republicans. Among people over the age of 65, 15 percent said they were already going to in-person gatherings and 29 percent said they were waiting to get the vaccine first.

The poll also found that only 68 percent of Americans trust the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to provide accurate information on COVID-19 information, and 53 percent trust what President Joe Biden says on the issue.

Pollster Chris Jackson, senior vice president for Ipsos Public Affair, said the results emphasized how Americans are unsure about what types of activities are safe or when they will be.

'People don't know how to get back to normal  or what the milestones are to get back to normal,' Jackson said.

'There is no single media, government or anything else that has a supermajority of trust. There's no source on its own that can push out any single path forward.'

An Axios-Ipsos survey published Tuesday found that 66 percent of people think the risk of returning to pre-pandemic life is 'large' or 'moderate', while 35 percent said the risk was 'small' and nine percent said there was no risk

About one-fifth of people surveyed in the Axios-Ipsos poll said they would wait until their 'circle' is vaccinated to resume gatherings with friends and family. Pictured: People line up to receive the vaccine at a health clinic in New York City on Tuesday

Over the past week the seven-day average for deaths has fallen by 10 percent or more in 24 states. The rate has remained steady in 18 states and risen by 10 percent or more in eight states.

In the same period the seven-day average for new cases has declined by 10 percent or more in 42 states and remained steady in eight.

Over the past week 41 states have seen hospitalizations decrease by 10 percent or more, while numbers are staying steady in eight and rising in just one, Idaho.

Despite the promising recent figures, top health officials have cautioned that the country is far from out of the woods due to the accelerating spread of virus variants - including three first discovered in the United Kingdom, South Africa and Brazil.

'Although hospital admissions and cases are consistently dropping, I'm asking everyone to please keep your guard up,' CDC Director Dr Rochelle Walensky said Monday. 'The proliferation of variants remains of great concern and is a threat that could reverse the recent positive trends we are seeing.'

The seven-day rolling average for new cases (grey line) now stands at 107,612, down from 140,630 a week ago, with rates falling in 44 states. The seven-day rolling average for daily deaths (red line) is 2,787, down from 3,097 a week ago

Over the past week the seven-day average for new cases has declined by 10 percent or more in 42 states and remained steady in eight

The seven-day average for deaths has fallen by 10 percent or more in 24 states in the last week. The rate has remained steady in 18 states and risen by 10 percent or more in eight states

At least 944 cases of coronavirus variants have been identified in the US, according to CDC data updated Tuesday.

Of those, 932 cases are from a more transmissible variant first discovered in the UK called B.1.1.7, which could become the dominant variant in the US by March, officials said.

Nine cases of the South African variant and two cases of the Brazilian variant have also been confirmed.

The US has not been testing widely for variants, so the actual number of cases is likely higher than official figures. All viruses mutate, but scientists are worried about changes in the virus that make it more transmissible or more deadly.

Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, on Monday said that the best defense against the variants is widespread vaccinations.

Despite the promising recent figures, top health officials have cautioned that the country is far from out of the woods due to the accelerating spread of virus variants - including three first discovered in the United Kingdom, South Africa and Brazil. At least 944 cases of coronavirus variants have been identified in the US, according to CDC data updated Tuesday

The latest CDC figures show that 43,206,190 coronavirus vaccine doses have been administered as of Tuesday morning, out of 62,898,775 delivered to states.

At least one dose of a vaccine has been administered to 32,867,213 people, which equals to just over 10 percent of the US population percent of the population.

Just over 9,840,429 Americans have now received both doses of a vaccine, amounting to just shy of three percent of the population.

Fauci said that while it is reasonable to study Pfizer's and Moderna's vaccines for a one-dose regime, given supply constraints, such a study would take months to complete and thus likely make its conclusions moot. He continued to encourage people get two doses of the vaccines.

The optimal 'approach would be to continue with getting as many people on their first dose as possible but also making sure that people on time get their second dose,' Fauci said.

Vaccinations have been credited with driving a 50 percent decrease in infections within nursing homes in the span of four weeks, according to data from the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

The data included cases from December 20 through January 24 - after a federal program opened vaccination clinics in nursing homes on December 19.

It showed that the 797 nursing homes with the clinics saw infection rates drop by half within three weeks, compared with 21 percent in 1,709 homes that did not have clinics in the first week.

The latest CDC figures show that 43,206,190 coronavirus vaccine doses have been administered as of Tuesday morning, out of 62,898,775 delivered to states

As the vaccine rollout picks up speed and infection rates fall across the board, some states have begun curtailing back coronavirus-related restrictions.

But on Monday Walensky, the CDC director, indicated that she does not approve of states relaxing their rules as she emphasized that rates for new cases and hospitalizations are still higher than they were over the summer.

'Given that we're still over a hundred thousand cases a day, I would discourage any such activity,' she said.

'And I would say that we are still in the first hundred days [of the Biden administration], where we wanted certainly everybody masked for the first hundred days.

'I think we have yet to control this pandemic. We still have this emerging threat of variants.'

Walensky also noted that efforts to safely reopen schools will be hampered by failure to control community spread.

'The data from schools suggests there's very little transmission that is happening within the schools, especially when there's masking and social distancing occurring,' she said.

'And where there is transmission in the schools, it's because they've been brought in from the community and because there are breaches in masking and distancing. So if we want to get our schools opened ... safely and well, the best way to do that is to decrease the community spread.'

On the same press call, Andy Slavitt, senior adviser to the White House COVID-19 response team, said the Biden administration understands 'the pressure the governors are under' to relax restrictions.

He said the administration is trying to help governors understand why they should continue to follow 'sensible public health measures' by collaborating closely and sharing data with them.

States that have rolled back restrictions in recent days include Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island.
Walmart and Sams Club pharmacies in Alabama will begin administering COVID-19 vaccines on Friday.

Eligible customers can schedule a vaccine appointment via the Walmart and Sams Club websites once appointments are available, while the allocation lasts. Vaccines will be available to those who meet the current phase of vaccine eligibility in Alabama, which can be found at the Alabama Public Health website.

Alabama is one of 22 states receiving federal vaccine allocations this week, with an emphasis on underserved communities with limited access to healthcare.

Walmart says it is working with the CDC and states to move as quickly as possible in administering vaccines to eligible populations. For a list of stores in each state administering the vaccine under the federal agreement, visit the website.

In a statement, Gov. Kay Ivey said the state is extremely grateful for this allocation, but I continue to urge patience as each location will have a limited supply.

Vaccine supply and eligibility will vary based on state and local guidelines. Those who receive the vaccine will also get a digital reminder when it is time to return for the second shot, which is why customers are asked to create a profile, helping to ensure customers receive the second dose of the vaccine in the timeframe required.

You do not have to be a member of Sams Club to sign-up for an appointment. Appointments are available seven days a week, but exact timing will vary based on the local availability of the vaccine.

For more information about the vaccine rollout, visit the corporate website.

Here are the Walmart locations (with Sams Club locations noted):

Alexander City, U.S. 280

Andalusia, M.L. King Jr.

Anniston, McClellan Boulevard

Attalla, Gilbert Ferry Road

Auburn, Sams Club, Walmarts at East University Drive, South College Street, Shug Jordan Parkway

Brent, Highway 5

Brewton, Douglas Avenue

Demopolis, U.S. 80

Dothan, Sams Club, Walmart Montgomery Highway and South Oates Street

Enterprise, Boll Weevil Circle

Fayette, Highway 171 North

Florence, Florence Boulevard, Hough Road, Cloverdale Road

Gadsden, East Meighan Boulevard

Haleyville, Highway 195

Hamilton, Military Street South

Huntsville, Sams Club, and Walmarts Oakwood Avenue, Memorial Parkway Sparkman Drive and Memorial Parkway Southwest

Jackson, North College Avenue

Jacksonville, Pelham Road South

Jasper, U.S. 78

Madison, Madison Boulevard, Wall Triana Highway

Mobile, Sams Club and Walmarts Rangeline Service Road South, Service Road South, Government Boulevard, Schillinger Road South, Dawes Road, Airport Boulevard, and Cottage Hill Road

Monroeville, South Alabama Avenue

Montgomery, Sams Club and Walmarts Federal Drive, Ann Street, Atlanta Highway, Eastern Boulevard, Chantilly Parkway, Vaughn Road

Muscle Shoals, Avalon Avenue

Northport, McFarland Boulevard

Opelika, Pepperell Parkway

Oxford, Sams Club and Plaza Lane

Ozark, U.S. 231

Phenix City, U.S. 280, U.S. 80

Roanoke, U.S. 431

Russellville, Highway 43

Saraland, Industrial Parkway

Selma, Alabama 14

Semmes, Moffett Road

Sylacauga, U.S. 280

Talladega, Haynes Street

Theodore, Theodore Dawes Road

Troy, U.S. 231

Tuscaloosa, Sams Club and Walmarts Skyland Boulevard, Hargrove Road

Valley, 20th Avenue

Winfield, U.S. 43
Dike Onwuamaeze writes that the reduction of the import tariffs on automobiles as contained in the Finance Act 2020 has triggered a war of attrition between automotive manufacturers and the federal government over the future and viability of the industry

When the PwC surveyed over 800 online respondents made up of business owners, chief executive officers, executive directors, tax managers and government officials on their perspectives on the Finance Act 2020, 92 per cent gave the legislation their approval.

These respondents also indicated that the top three changes in the Finance Act that excited them are the reduction of the minimum tax rate from 0.5 per cent to 0.25 per cent, the use of emails and other electronic means of communications with FIRS and the potential exemption of Small and Medium Enterprises from preparing audited financial statements.

They also showed that the top three changes they most disagreed with are the proposed establishment of unclaimed funds trust fund for unclaimed dividends and dormant bank balances, the plan to introduce excise duty on telecommunication services and the deployment of technology by FIRS for tax compliance monitoring.

None of these responses indicated wide-scale disapproval of the Finance Act or suggested that a raging storm is gathering around the act, especially on a section of the law that reduced import tariffs for automobiles from 70 per cent to 40 per cent.

The new import tariffs, as stated in the Finance Act, provides for a reduction in the import levy on cars from 30 per cent to five per cent, import duty on tractors from 35 per cent to five per cent as well as a reduction of imported duty on mass transit vehicles for the transportation of more than 10 persons and trucks from 35 per cent to 10 per cent.

The levy component of the tariff was set aside for the growth of the automotive industry in Nigeria while the import goes to the government.

However, the first sign that all is not calm about the policy manifested when the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN) and the Executive Director of Nigerian Automotive Manufacturers Association (NAMA), Mr. Remi Olaofe, aired their views on the reduction of tariffs on the importation of vehicles into the country as provided in Section 38 of the Finance Act 2020.

They said the reduction would destroy the market for sale of locally assembled automobiles.

Olaofe, described the reduction of the tariffs as deceit that would not enhance the welfare of Nigerians, which is being perpetrated by an administration that did not have full understanding of what the Nigerian Automobile Industry Development Plan (NAIDP) is all about.

He told THISDAY that it was sad that this is coming up at a time Nigeria should be working hard to remove its name from the lists of import-dependent nations and migrate to export-driven countries.

He said: "The sad part of it is that I am not even sure this administration has a good understanding of what we are doing. Because if it has had the understanding of this plan their approach to this issue would have been completely different from what they are doing.

"How can someone be saying that he is reducing tariffs because he wants to reduce transport costs? He is simply destroying the industry. They are not even giving a damn. Do you know how much people have pumped to this business and the government doesn't even care? People that have been sent abroad to be trained are going to be laid off.

"The offshoot industries that are attached to assembly plants will be off the ground again. And all we will be doing is to be going to Apapa to collect vehicles that have been produced in Japan and Korea and very soon from Rwanda and Ghana.

"This is a shame that Rwanda will be shipping vehicles to Nigeria," adding that the government is treating an ailment with a wrong medication because, "we have over the time confirmed that the correlation between duty paid on vehicles and the transportation fares is totally infinitesimal and almost not seen."

The executive director of the NAMA in a tone that was laden with a feeling of betrayal said with the policy, the government was turning its back on those it has lured to invest in the country's automotive sector to assemble cars within the concept of NAIDP.

"We invested hundreds of billions of naira based on the government's policy and now all these are going to go down the drain. The fundamental mistake behind this policy is that government is thinking that this only affects us as auto assemblers, which is an error.

"Nigeria is going to be viewed in the eyes of investors as a country that cannot abide by its investment policy."

Olaofe, stated that the NAIDP envisioned that operators of assembly plants would grow in phases from the importation of Semi-Knocked Down one (SKD1) components to the importation of SKD 2 and later to the Completely-Knocked Down (CKD) components at which point the original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) would begin to operate in Nigeria to produce components for automotive manufacturing in Nigeria.

Although many assemblers are still at the SKD level, there are some assemblers of trucks that have moved to the CKD stage.

He claimed that a lot of progress would have been made if the government had signed that automotive development policy into law, which would have given it a legal backing and encouraged investors to put more money into this sector.

"You cannot bring the OEMs into the country when they are unsure of the depth of your market. We want to grow volume first and foremost. It is volume that will drive every line of the business.

"So, the government came up with an executive order that said that government must patronise locally assembled vehicles. You can go around and check to see how many parastatals have locally assembled cars parked in front of their premises? People are expecting magic."

This suggests that the implementation of the executive order has been observed in the breach.

Another factor that is hindering effective implementation of the NAIDP apart from the absence of legislation to back it up, is the lack of standardised components for automotive manufacturing in the country.

The NAMA told THISDAY that the designs for the standardised components like windscreen should be done by the National Automotive Design and Development Council (NADDC) and distributed to licensed assemblers for them to produce to specification.

"This is what we have been looking for to kick start by having standardised basic items for everyone. So, it will be easier for the equipment manufacturers to produce to that specification because they have the volume to support them," he said.

It was expected that the volume attained with the standardised components would drive the addition of local content in the industry. According to the NAMA, the people that would mold seats, manufacture the windscreen, do the brake pads, and other components are already in this country. But they would not start operation without a sizable market to support them.

"So, we say that government should come up with a standardised vehicle template for Nigeria. This will be backed by the auto finance scheme that will enable people to buy the vehicles and the volume will pick up. Then the original manufacturers will come in," Olaofe said, adding that "we should create a road map and have milestones that must be achieved at a specified period. If it could not be attained, then let us do a variation analysis to ask why are we not where we should have been? Do we have such a guideline? The answer is no. So, what they are measuring us with does not even exist."

Olaofe, therefore, described the provision in the current Finance Act that lowered the import tariffs for automobiles as an opportunity for some people to make money instead of the government putting the right infrastructures in place and allow businesses to sort themselves out. "So, there is no argument the government can put up that will stand the test of time. It is just total rubbish," he said.

Similarly, the Director General of the MAN, Mr. Segun Ajayi-Kadir, described the reduction in tariff as an avoidable erosion of the traction we have gained in the implementation of the NAIDP.

"As you are aware, government in its wisdom has encouraged investors in the industry, as part of the anticipatory approval of National Automotive Industry Development Policy (NAIDP), to key into importing the Complete Knock Down (CKD) and Semi-Knock Down (SKD) for assembling of cars, buses and trucks in Nigeria.

"So, this section of the Finance Act is an affront on the NAIDP. It is not consistent with the earlier stated objectives of government in this sector that holds so much promise for Nigeria, especially in the West African region.

"As you would have seen, this has created confusion in the automotive sector and brought to question investor confidence in Nigeria," Ajayi-Kadir said, adding that the government's departure from the NAIDP is a negative signal to the investing community that Nigeria is a country with an unstable investment climate.

In the same manner, the Director General of the Nigerian Association of Chambers of Commerce, Industry, Mines and Agriculture, Ambassador Ayo Olukanni, pointed out that the policy on reduction of import levies on cars, and passenger transport vehicles would not augur well for Nigeria's local automotive industry which is struggling to cope in a harsh economic environment. "We must protect these producers and encourage them,' Olukanni said.

Yet, THISDAY's investigation also showed that there are strong arguments in support of the downward review of tariffs on imported vehicle from 70 per cent to 40 per cent.

The Minister of Industry, Trade and Investment, Mr. Niyi Adebayo, told THISDAY that the Finance Act 2020 is a significant milestone for Nigeria, as it marked a return to an era of active fiscal supervision geared towards making incremental adjustments to fiscal policy in order to stimulate the economy.

Adebayo, said the Finance Act 2020 was aimed at exploring various avenues to boost government revenue by addressing immediate and short-term issues affecting certain sectors across the economy.

"Accordingly, the Act seeks to relieve the pressure of high transportation and food cost brought about by fuel price and exchange rate changes that resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic. Section 38 of the Finance Act 2020 proposes significant reduction to the tariffs on importation of vehicles.

"On a general note, we have received various comments and even criticisms regarding what some are calling a policy somersault. It is important to distinguish between a policy somersault and what is essentially an absolutely critical review of an existing policy that requires adjustment," Adebayo said.

He also argued that the Federal Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investment (FMITI) has been the foremost champion and advocate for a robust automotive sector by robustly defending the tariff regime, pushing for access to credit for both producers and consumers and planning to build infrastructure such as automotive clusters.

He averred that the automotive industry could have a catalytic effect on the industrialisation of a country as it drives mass production, local content, localisation of production techniques and job creation.

"It also stimulated growth of other sectors such as glass, rubber, asphalt, wood, gasoline, insurance and road construction. These are the kinds of benefits that we sought from the inclusion of the Automotive Sector in the Nigerian Industrial Revolution Plan (NIRP)," he said.

Some of the achievements of the NAIDP, according to the minister, include renewed investors' confidence in the automotive industry in Nigeria; the attraction over $1 billion in foreign direct investment with installed capacity to assemble over 400,000 vehicles per annum. He added that over 30 companies are currently engaged in vehicle assembly operations in Nigeria and have created over 5,000 direct jobs and over 20,000 indirect jobs.

Other proponents of this argument believed that the previous rate had adverse impact on the cost of doing business, welfare of the people, government revenue and the capacity of the economy to create jobs as it has caused massive trade diversion to neighboring countries.

These proponents said that NAIDP, which was launched by former President Goodluck Jonathan, in 2013, is an import substitution industrialisation strategy aimed at reducing importation of vehicles and incentivise domestic vehicle assembly.

However, import substitution strategy would only thrive in the context of high domestic value addition in order for the economy to benefit from the inherent values of import substitution, which includes backward integration, economic inclusion, multiplier effects, conservation of foreign exchange, job creation and reduction of import bills.

They also contended that the cost of vehicles had risen beyond the reach of most citizens and corporate bodies and the impact has been negative with far-reaching consequences.

They further argued that the automotive policy, in its original form, is not in consonance with the NIRP, which is the main industrial policy document of the President Muhammadu Buhari's administration that espoused the strategy of resource-based industrialisation.

The economy, according to them, has witnessed an increase in the price of vehicles by between 200 per cent and 400 per cent or more over the past seven years and the implication of the scenario for operational costs of organisations is worrisome.

The auto policy in its present form is most inappropriate for an economy that is heavily dependent on road transportation.

The Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI) and the Nigerian Employers' Consultative Assembly (NECA) have said that the new policy that reduced the import tariffs would redirect the Nigerian automobile industry on the path of manufacturing CKD automobile components in the country and pave the way for the emergence of truly made-in-Nigeria vehicles.

According to the Director-General of NECA, Mr. Timothy Olawale, critics of the new tariff policy should first understand the policy direction of the government and what it intends to achieve with it, which is to embrace a long term policy for the automotive sector.

Olawale said: "What we had before was the importation of SKD components from abroad to be coupled in Nigeria. That generates less employment and less income. What government is trying to do now is to reduce levies to discourage the imports of SKD and encourage the manufacture of CKD components in Nigeria. This is to stimulate the interest of those who have signified willingness in setting up auto industries in Nigeria to manufacture those components here. This will create the opportunity for value addition, jobs creation and more revenue."

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Similarly, the Director-General of the LCCI, Dr. Muda Yusuf, supported the new policy.

"What the government has done is to reduce the levy component of the tariffs to five per cent from 35 per cent. But the import duty of 35 per cent still subsists. The implication is that there is still a protective tariff of 40 per cent. If an industry cannot be competitive with a 40 per cent tariff protection, then we should interrogate our industrialisation strategy," Yusuf said.

The Fiscal Policy Partner and West Africa Tax Leader of the PwC Nigeria, Mr. Taiwo Oyedele, said there was a need to review the NAIDP after seven years, especially when the local operators in the automotive industry have not been able to develop significant production capacity.

Oyedele said information the government had shared which has not been countered was that the operators are producing about 14,000 units per year while demand for cars is over 700,000 annually.

He advised the local auto assemblers to be content with the 40 per cent tariff because there are sectors that survive under five, 10 and 15 per cent import tariffs.

"So it does not make sense for citizens to be asked to pay 70 per cent import tariffs when the local producers cannot meet even 10 percent of the market demand.

"Secondly, government was not getting enough revenue even at the 70 per cent as a lot of smuggling was believed to be going on as only very few people, and well established companies, can pay that import tariffs.

"The point for me is that 40 per cent is high enough to discourage someone from importing a car from abroad. I still don't think that the local assemblers have a demand problem. What they lack is the ability to supply the market.

"So it makes sense to reduce the tariff to avoid punishing your citizens for the inefficiency of the system. If imported cars are still cheaper at 40 per cent than those produced in Nigeria then we have a problem to address," Oyedele said.

He advised the federal government to ensure that all agencies of government are compelled to patronize locally assemble vehicles as has been promised by the Vice President, Professor Yemi Osibanjo

Oyedele said: "I will tell the assemblers to first understand the policy properly. I have listened to some of them and in my view they have misinterpreted the policy. The second one is that they should sit down with the government with the spirit of partners in progress and provide data to proof that see what will be a better outcome for a win-win situation and prove that this 40 per cent is not going to solve problems. It must be a win-win for the investors, industry players, government and Nigerians because the citizens will not be penalised for the inefficiencies of the system."

He, however, stated that the future is not promising for automotive assembling in the country not just because of this import tariff amendment.

"The reality is that producing vehicles require a lot of infrastructure, logistics, an ecosystem of supply and research support, which we do not have in Nigeria. It will not work effectively no matter the level of import duties that will be imposed.

"So, I am not very optimistic about the sector. Nigeria has to make choice between producing a whole car or just a part of it like engines, tyres etc. We must specialise on the area of our comparative advantage. We do not have to do everything," Oyedele said.
U-Haul Company of Tennessee announces that The Mail Box Store of Chattanooga signed on as a U-Haul neighborhood dealer to serve the Chattanooga community.

The Mail Box Store of Chattanooga at 7022 Shallowford Road, Suite 1 will offer services like U-Haul trucks, trailers, towing equipment, moving supplies and in-store pickup for boxes.

Normal business hours are 8:30 a.m.-6 p.m. Monday-Friday and 9 a.m.-3 p.m. Saturday. Reserve U-Haul products at this dealer location by calling 702-6531.

The Mail Box Store of Chattanooga owner Charlie Patel said he is proud to team with the industry leader in do-it-yourself moving and self-storage to better meet the demands of Hamilton County.

U-Haul has teamed with independent dealers to offer moving equipment since 1945. With the COVID-19 outbreak creating challenging times for small businesses, more than 20,000 dealers across the U.S. and Canada are creating supplemental income through their U-Haul partnership. When a customer rents from a U-Haul dealer, they are directly supporting an independent small business in their community.




The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
In a shocking incident, Pakistan Army allegedly opened fire on the civilian population in Kohistan in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province on Tuesday. According to the Baloch Republican Party, the military has started a massive operation in the region where gunships are being used on the civilian population.

As per Sher Mohammad Bugti, the spokesperson of the party, the deaths of at least two Marri Balochs have been confirmed, while a large number of women and children have been reportedly been abducted. The region is located at a short distance from the ChinaPakistan Economic Corridor and has seen protests by locals who are against the massive development project.

Pakistan military has started a massive operation in the region of Kohistan Marri where gunships are being used on civil populations.



The deaths of two Marri Balochs have been confirmed, while a large number of women and children have also reportedly been abducted.  Sher Mohammad Bugti (@SherM_BRP) February 9, 2021

Read: Dubai Deputy Police Chief Raises Pak Hackles With Poll Over Giving Missiles To Balochistan

Read: Pakistan Opposition Alleges 'disrespect' Shown To Karima Baloch's Body; Pak Army Panned

Pakistan atrocities in Balochistan

Balochistan which is a restive province of Pakistan has had a history of gross human rights violations with hundreds of civilians and innocents being butchered and abducted every other day by the Pakistani Army. The resource-rich region has been gripped by insurgency for more than 15 years with thousands of Baloch political activists seeking asylum in European counties. However, even amidst this, the persecution of intellectuals, students, and journalists in Balochistan, Sindh, and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provinces has not come to an end.

Just recently, famed Baloch rights activist Karima Baloch was found dead in Ontario Lake Toronto harbourfront under mysterious circumstances. The 37-year-old was living in exile in Canada after being granted asylum in 2016. Protestors have made calls for justice and demanded a formal investigation into the death of the human rights activist. She was reported missing since December 20, last year.

Even amid the Coronavirus pandemic, Pakistan's secret agency ISI had made full use of the distraction to weed off top Baloch and Pashtun leaders. Missing Baloch journalist Sajid Hussain was found dead in Sweden last year. Shortly after, Arif Wazir, a Pashtun Rights Activist and leader of the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM) was shot dead by unidentified armed persons outside his home in Wana, South Waziristan.

Read: Karima Baloch's Demise: Toronto Police Suspects 'no Foul Play' In Activist's Death

Read: Karima Baloch's Kin Reveal Threats To Her Life; Canada's Trudeau Mum As Cops Turn Deaf Ear
STEPANAKERT, FEBRUARY 10, ARMENPRESS. The rescuers of Artsakh have resumed today the search operations for the bodies of the dead servicemen, the missing in action in the territories which have come under the Azerbaijani control, the official of the State Emergency Service of Artsakh told Armenpress.

Today the search operations will be carried out in Varanda (Fizuli). In the past two days the search operations have been suspended due to the shifts in the Russian and the Azerbaijani armed forces, the official said.

Editing and Translating by Aneta Harutyunyan
Law enforcement personnel and first responders gather outside of the Allina Health clinic, in Buffalo, Minn., on Feb. 9, 2021. (David Joles/Star Tribune via AP)

1 Dead, 4 Injured in Shooting at Minnesota Health Clinic

BUFFALO, Minn.A 67-year-old man unhappy with the health care hed received opened fire at a clinic Tuesday, killing one person and wounding four others, and bomb technicians were investigating a suspicious device left there and others at a motel where he was staying, authorities said.

All five victims were rushed to the hospital, and a hospital spokeswoman confirmed the one death Tuesday night. Three remained in stable but critical condition and a fourth had been discharged.

The attack happened Tuesday morning at an Allina clinic in Buffalo, a community of about 15,000 people roughly 40 miles northwest of Minneapolis. Authorities said Gregory Paul Ulrich, of Buffalo, opened fire at the facility and was arrested before noon.

Law enforcement personnel walk toward the Allina Health clinic, in Buffalo, Minn., on Feb. 9, 2021. (David Joles/Star Tribune via AP)

Though police said it was too early to tell if Ulrich had targeted a specific doctor, court records show he at one point had been ordered to have no contact with a man whose name matches that of a doctor at the clinic.

As authorities searched the clinic for more victims, they found the suspicious device and evacuated the building, Wright County Sheriff Sean Deringer said.

It was not immediately clear whether that device exploded, but TV footage showed several shattered plate-glass windows at the clinic. Deringer said suspicious devices were also found at a local Super 8 motel where Ulrich had been staying, and there were at least two shattered windows there as well.

Hennepin County Medical Center spokeswoman Christine Hill said Tuesday night that a person brought to the hospital after being shot at the Buffalo clinic had died. Hill said she could not release any other details.

Police Chief Pat Budke became emotional and had to pause during a news conference as he told reporters our heart breaks as a community. While an exact motive wasnt immediately known, Budke said Ulrich has had a long history of conflict with health care clinics in the area.

All I can say is, its a history that spans several years and theres certainly a history of him being unhappy with health care  with the health care that hed received, Budke said.

Budke said Ulrichs history led investigators to believe he was targeting the clinic or someone inside but that it was too early in the investigation to know if it was a specific doctor. He said the shooting did not appear to be a case of domestic terrorism.

None of the information that we have from our past contact with him would indicate that he was unhappy with, or would direct his anger at, anyone other than people within the facilities where he had been treated or where they had attempted to give treatment, Budke said.

Deringer said Ulrich was well known to law enforcement before the attack, and there were calls for service dating back to 2003.

Court records for Ulrich list a handful of arrests and convictions for drunken driving and possession of small amounts of marijuana from 2004 through 2015, mostly in Wright County, including two convictions for gross misdemeanor drunken driving that resulted in short jail sentences. A 2018 charge of violating a harassment restraining order was dismissed last April when the prosecutor said Ulrich was found mentally incompetent to proceed.

An order issued in 2018 and 2019 in the harassment case showed Ulrich was to have no contact with a man. The order didnt identify that man beyond giving his name, but the name appeared to match that of a doctor listed on the clinics staff list.

It was not known if that doctor was among Ulrichs victims. A phone call placed to the doctors home listing went unanswered Tuesday.

A court services agent who conducted a pre-sentence investigation wrote in a June 2019 filing that he had just learned that Ulrich had applied to police for a permit to purchaseapparently meaning a permit to buy a gunbut had not yet been approved. The agent said he highly recommended that Ulrich not be allowed to have use of or possession of any dangerous weapons or firearms as a condition of his probation.

Ulrich also had raised concerns for a local church. According to an August 2019 update on the website of Zion Lutheran Church, the church obtained a no trespassing order for Ulrich after the pastor received a disturbing letter. Church staff were given a picture of Ulrich and told to call 911 if he appeared on any of Zions properties.

Law enforcement personnel and first responders gather outside of the Allina Health clinic in Buffalo, Minn., on Feb. 9, 2021. (David Joles/Star Tribune via AP)

The FBI sent its bomb technicians to the scene, and the Minneapolis Police Department sent its bomb squad. Members of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms enforcement group and special agents from the states Bureau of Criminal Apprehension also responded.

The clinic is set off at the edge of Buffalo near an old red barn with flaking paint. Dozens of emergency vehicles and law enforcement officers carrying guns were on the scene, setting up a perimeter. TV footage showed little activity at the clinic itself.

Hours after the attack, law enforcement cordoned off a small mobile home park near the citys Pulaski Lake, about a mile from the clinic, and searched a mobile home where Ulrich had lived. Officers went in and out of the home wearing rubber gloves. Several neighbors who declined to give their names described Ulrich as argumentative and said they tried to avoid him.

Tom Potter, a 43-year-old who lives in the neighborhood, said Ulrich was nice to Potters kids yet described him as an odd guy.

Hed get into fights with neighbors, accuse them of stealing stuff, Potter said.

He said Ulrich spent a lot of time on a bench by the lake, listening to a radio, fishing and always drinking.

Another neighbor, Walter Rohde, told the Minneapolis Star Tribune that he was shocked to hear Ulrich was suspected of shooting people. He said Ulrich helped him build a shed over the summer and would often come over to sit at his fire ring in the evenings to chat.

I just knew him as a kindly old man, Rohde said.

Rohde said Ulrich was unemployed, living on disability.

Most doctors listed on the clinics website are family practitioners. It wasnt immediately clear if the clinic gives COVID-19 vaccinations. Allinas website says it gives the shots to staff and older patients at only three sites throughout its extensive system.

By Mohamed Ibrahim and Gretchen Ehlke
The Theodore Roosevelt and Nimitz Carrier Strike Groups steam in formation in the South China Sea on Feb. 9, 2021.

Two U.S. aircraft carrier strike groups conducted dual operations in the South China Sea on Tuesday, the latest in a series of U.S. military maneuvers in those turbulent waters.

In a sign of growing international pushback against Chinas expansive claims and assertive behavior, French Defense Minister Florence Parly also confirmed Monday that a French nuclear attack submarine and an accompanying support ship had recently completed a patrol in the South China Sea.

The operations point to the expanding role of non-claimant states in the South China Sea, which is contested by China, the Philippines, Taiwan, Vietnam, Brunei, and Malaysia.

Earlier in January, Nikkei Asia reported that Germany is considering sending a naval frigate through the South China Sea as early as this coming summer  indication of an increasing willingness among such states to deploy military assets to back up their diplomatic messaging.

The United States is at the forefront of this pushback.

The deployment of the Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group and the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group was the second dual aircraft carrier operation by the U.S. in the South China Sea in little over six months.

The ships and aircraft of the two strike groups coordinated operations in a highly trafficked area to demonstrate the U.S. Navy's ability to operate in challenging environments, the U.S. Navy said in a statement.

"Through operations like this, we ensure that we are tactically proficient to meet the challenge of maintaining peace and we are able to continue to show our partners and allies in the region that we are committed to promoting a Free and Open Indo-Pacific, Rear Adm. Doug Verissimo, commander of the Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group, was quoted as saying.

The last dual carrier operation in the South China Sea was in July 2020, involving the USS Ronald Reagan and USS Nimitz.

The Theodore Roosevelt and Nimitz Carrier Strike Groups steam in formation in the South China Sea on Feb. 9, 2021. Credit: U.S. Navy Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesman Wang Wenbin criticized Tuesdays operation, noting the U.S. has frequently sent warships and aircraft to the South China Sea as a show of force, which is not conducive to regional stability and peace.

China will continue to take necessary measures to firmly safeguard its national sovereignty and security, and will work with regional countries to resolutely protect the peace and stability of the South China Sea, Wang said.

Last week, the USS John S. McCain Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer conducted a freedom of navigation operation (FONOP) in the Chinese-occupied Paracel Islands, which a Chinese military spokesman described as seriously violating Chinas sovereignty and security. It was the first such FONOP since President Joe Biden took office last month.

And earlier in January, the Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group carried out routine operations in the South China Sea, including maritime strike exercises and coordinated tactical training between surface and air units.

Other countries are joining the fray too.

In series of tweets on Monday, French Defense Minister Florence Parly revealed that the SNA Emeraude, a nuclear attack submarine, recently completed operations in the South China Sea.

According to Parly, the SNA Emeraude was accompanied by a support ship, the BSAM Seine.

This extraordinary patrol has just completed a passage in the South China Sea. A striking proof of the capacity of our French Navy to deploy far away and for a long time together with our Australian, American and Japanese strategic partners, she said.

Parly added that operation was meant to affirm international law, and that France intends to protect its sovereignty and interests in the Indo-Pacific region, where it still controls numerous territories.

U.S. allies Japan and Australia have also participated in military exercises in the South China Sea in recent months.

Meanwhile, a growing number of non-claimant powers have formally challenged Chinas maximalist South China Sea claims in the United Nations, including the U.S. but also Australia, Indonesia, France, Germany, and Japan.

For instance, in September 2020 the United Kingdom, France, and Germany submitted joint diplomatic notes to the U.N. rejecting Chinas baseline claims in the Paracel Islands, its historic rights claims, and other aspects of Chinas position.

According to specialists, outside countries have long pursued their interests in this contested body of water. Hoang Viet, an expert on the South China Sea, told RFA that European countries are particularly concerned about upholding international law and in particular the navigational freedoms granted by international law.
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The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
German prosecutors have charged a 100-year-old man with 3,518 counts of accessory to murder on allegations he served during World War II as a Nazi SS guard at a concentration camp on the outskirts of Berlin, authorities said Tuesday.

The man is alleged to have worked at the Sachsenhausen camp between 1942 and 1945 as an enlisted member of the Nazi Party's paramilitary wing, said Cyrill Klement, who led the investigation of the centenarian for the Neuruppin prosecutors' office.

The man's name wasnt released in line with German privacy laws, Despite his advanced age the suspect is considered fit enough to stand trial, though accommodations may have to be made to limit how many hours per day the court is in session, Klement told The Associated Press.

The Neuruppin office was handed the case in 2019 by the special federal prosecutors' office in Ludwigsburg tasked with investigating Nazi-era war crimes, Klement said.

It comes after prosecutors in the northern town of Itzehoe announced accessory to murder charges last week against a 95-year-old woman who worked during the war as the secretary of the SS commandant of the Stutthof concentration camp. That case and the charges against the 100-year-old man both rely on recent legal precedent in Germany establishing that anyone who helped a Nazi camp function can be prosecuted for accessory to the murders committed there.

That was established in 2011 with the conviction of former Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk as an accessory to murder on allegations that he served as a guard at the Sobibor death camp in German-occupied Poland. Demjanjuk, who steadfastly denied the allegations, died before his appeal could be heard.

A federal court subsequently upheld the 2015 conviction of former Auschwitz guard Oskar Groening achieved with the same line of reasoning, solidifying the precedent.

Before that, German courts had required prosecutors to justify charges by presenting evidence of a former guards participation in a specific killing, often a near-impossible task.

The core of this case follows the decision of Demjanjuk and Groening, that being part of the functioning of this machinery of death is sufficient for an accessory to murder conviction, Klement said.

The court has not yet set a date for the trial.
EXCLUSIVE: Freddy, 71 died in Princess Alice Hospice in Esher, Surrey on May 20 after being admitted just four days earlier. He was diagnosed with cancer in January and told that he had only months to live. Mr Marks married Jane who married him in 2016 (left) after divorcing bandmate Rod Burton in 2019, part of the singing trio 'Rod, Jane and Freddy' (right) on the beloved children's TV show (inset), and Ms Tucker has said that her ex-husband is also bereft. Fighting back tears, Jane Tucker, who married Freddy only five years ago, told MailOnline: 'My final words to him were 'I love you.' 'But Freddy didn't say anything back, he just had a gentle smile on his face like he always did. It was incredibly beautiful. I'm totally devastated by his loss and it's going to take me and a lot of other people in the country a long time to get over this'. She added of her first husband, who comforted her at home yesterday, she said: ''Rod is feeling Freddy's loss very deeply. For a long time, the three of us were inseparable. We toured together, did Rainbow for a long time and were all very close'. Freddy married her five years ago, more than 30 years after they first met and became stars. Jane was first married to fellow Rainbow bandmate Rod, who she divorced in 1979 but they remained friends. 'Years later' she began dating Freddy, which when it emerged around 15 years ago led to rumours a secret love triangle between the singing trio.
The Northern Ireland Council for Integrated Education (NICIE) has said it's bitterly disappointed after the DUP Education Minister refused a proposal to increase the number of pupils at a North Down college.

Strangford Integrated College had hoped to bring in an extra 20 pupils each year to go some way to offset the excess demand for places at the school.

The extra pupils would have brought the number admitted to the Newtownards school each year to 130.

NICIE said there was disappointment all round at the refusal of what would have been a modest increase in school numbers at the college.

"Over recent years the level of demand for integrated education at Strangford College has led to a series of temporary variations being granted by the Department of Education to help meet strong parental preference.

"The demand for integrated education can be seen across Northern Ireland. In the 2018/19 academic year, 21% of pupils who had placed an integrated post primary school as their first choice could not be accommodated. This proposal would have gone some way towards meeting this demand in the Ards and North Down area."

The only means of appeal would be through judicial review.

"The reasons cited by the Minister for rejection were outlined as the negative impact on other non-selective schools and the need for a wider area solution," NICIE said.

"NICIE would question the consistency of how these reasons have been applied, given the same rationale was not utilised when the Minister gave approval to increase admissions for another school in the same area.

"The rejection of Strangford College's proposal would appear to be at odds with the Department's statutory duty to encourage and facilitate the development of integrated education."

The Education Minister has said the proposal was refused as he believes the change in admissions and enrolment numbers would have "a clear detrimental impact on non selective education provision within schools in the Ards and North Down area".

"I believe that any decision of this nature should be part of a wider plan for the area rather than judged in isolation," Mr Weir said.
File image: People take part in a candlelight vigil at Victoria Park in Hong Kong on June 4, 2019, to commemorate the protesters killed in Tiananmen Square 30 years before. The topic is heavily censored in mainland China. (Image by Lam Yik Fei  2021 The New York Times)

For years, the Chinese government has prevented its 1.4 billion people from speaking freely online. A digital wall separated them from the rest of the world.

Then, for a precious few days, that wall was breached.

Clubhouse, a new social media app that emerged faster than the censors could block it, became a place for Mandarin Chinese speakers from the mainland and anywhere else to speak their minds. They had a lot to say.

In Clubhouses audio chat rooms, people from the mainland joined those from Taiwan, Hong Kong, the global Chinese diaspora and anybody else who was interested to share their thoughts. The topics ranged from the politically charged (repression of Muslims in Chinas Xinjiang region, the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, censorship) to the mundane (hookups) to the unexpected (hemorrhoids).

The Chinese government blocked the app Monday afternoon. I knew it was coming, and yet I still didnt expect to feel so dismayed.

For that brief moment, people in China proved that they are as creative and well-spoken as people who enjoy the freedom to express themselves. They lined up, sometimes for hours, to wait for their turns to speak. They argued for the rights of the government loyalists to speak despite their disagreements. They held many honest, sincere conversations, sometimes with tears and sometimes with laughter.

Those conversations helped illuminate why the Chinese government blocks free speech online in the first place. Those free-flowing exchanges threaten to debunk the caricatures that the state-controlled media often foists upon the Chinese people. The state media dismisses people like the Tiananmen protesters, pro-democracy advocates in Hong Kong or those in Taiwan who want the island to take a different path from the mainland.

Likewise, mainlanders got a chance to prove that they arent brainwashed drones. People who had been demonized got a chance to speak out and be humanized.

Over the past two decades, Beijing has developed the most sophisticated online censorship system in the world. Big online platforms like Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were blocked long ago. Under Xi Jinpings leadership, a growing number of topics have become off-limits on the Chinese internet. Clubhouse gave mainland Chinese users a chance to flock to chat rooms focused on those taboos.

We enjoyed it with full knowledge that the excitement would be fleeting, said Clarence Lo, a 25-year-old writer, in an interview Monday. This is probably a unique experience for mainland online users.

Clubhouse allows up to 5,000 users to join audio chat rooms that disappear once the conversation is over. Some users said its format made them feel more willing to share personal stories and listen to different opinions. One user said in a chat room about censorship that everyone could see that all those people who in the mainland were labeled dissidents, like Hong Kongs pro-democracy protesters, were real people. No longer were they hearing their voices filtered through official media.

Since Saturday, I spent nearly all my waking hours wandering from one Clubhouse chat room to another. In one room, a documentary filmmaker shared his thoughts on making a film about a subculture of young migrant workers, called Smart, who try to stand out in a conformist culture through wild hair and piercings. In another, a doctoral student in sociology talked about his experiences as a meal delivery worker. A group of feminists read works by feminist writers. More than 3,000 people joined a chat room that was dedicated to parodying Hu Xijin, possibly the most infamous Communist Party propagandist. (A favorite line: As long as we have enemies everywhere, we have no enemies.)

One chat room with more than 100 people from northwestern China, where Im from, focused on their interactions with ethic minorities. A woman from Gansu province talked about how Muslims in her hometown were portrayed as troublemakers and how she learned to understand why it was offensive to hang the Chinese national flag in a mosque.

I learned about the de-Islamization of my home, the Ningxia Muslim Autonomous Region, after several people shared witness accounts. Jin Xu, an assistant art history professor at Vassar College who grew up there, talked about how his drawing of the Nanguan Mosque, a landmark of Ningxia, had won a national award when he was a sixth grader and how the mosque had been brutally reconstructed into what he told me in an interview was an ugly concrete building that eliminated its exterior elements of Islamic art and architecture.

One chat room asked the participants to criticize the government where they lived, be it China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan or the United States. The moderator called on each speaker by asking, So which government would you like to criticize? In China, where open criticism is treated as treachery, it felt like performance art.

Several chat rooms were devoted to the bloody crackdown in Tiananmen Square, a heavily censored topic on the Chinese internet. Cai Chongguo, a student leader during the protests, talked for about four hours, sharing his stories and answering questions from thousands of people. He said he hadn't expected that so many people would be interested.

It was the first time since 1989 I shared my story with so many Chinese, he said in a phone interview. Cai, who has been in exile in France and Hong Kong, said that he had given talks to 100 to 200 people but that the audiences were often mostly non-Chinese.

This platform offered a rare opportunity to talk about the tragedy with Chinese, he said.

Even during the freewheeling conversation, censorship was on the minds of many. On Monday afternoon, one room that reached Clubhouses maximum of 5,000 users featured speakers sharing their concerns over whether they would be questioned by authorities for speaking out on the app. An employee at a big Chinese social media platform told the room that nobody should ever think that he or she could escape the government surveillance. He continued by saying that he felt guilty about his job because it involved censorship.

A few hours later, mainland users began to report that the app had been blocked. Several rooms were set up immediately for people to chat it over. I joined a room for people to mourn the blocking.

The title of the room featured three candle emoticons. People lined up to share their most memorable experience. A few speakers cried.

A man compared his time on Clubhouse to taking contemporary Chinese history classes. A man from the Daur ethnic group in Xinjiang said how much he appreciated the opportunity to have a platform where people like him could share their stories. A woman said her most memorable experience was hearing a man who called himself a government loyalist describing how, after he heard the personal stories of how the Muslims in Xinjiang had been persecuted, he had to stop his car and weep.

Hannah Sun, one of the last to speak, relished finding like-minded people on Clubhouse. She shared her parents traumatic experiences in the devastating Tangshan earthquake in 1976 and how it shaped her view on the Chinese government.

Sun, who lives in Germany, had never talked about such politically sensitive topics with strangers. Then, Saturday, she had waited more than two hours to speak in a chat room about those very topics with thousands of people from mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and other parts of the world.

Someday, she said in an interview, Chinese people would be able to talk freely. Many Eastern Germans didnt expect the Berlin Wall to fall in 1989, she added, but it happened.

Nobody can predict the future, Sun said. We should believe in humanity and humanitys yearning for freedom.

By Li Yuan

c.2021 The New York Times Company
An insurance manager's assistant used her boss's corporate credit card to steal $165,000 which she splurged on business class trips and group dinners, a court has heard.

Jenna Ross, 35, pleaded guilty in December to obtaining financial advantage by deception after stealing money from Suncorp.

Her lawyer Sam Tovey told the County Court of Victoria on Tuesday Ross committed the fraud as she had an 'overwhelming desire to be appreciated' and suffered from a 'chronic, unrelenting lack of self worth', News Corp reported.

Mr Tovey asked Judge Chris Ryan to sentence Ross to a community corrections order instead of jail but Prosecutor Jessica Fallar pushed for a prison sentence.

Jenna Ross (pictured) stole $165,000 from Suncorp using her boss' corporate credit card

Judge Ryan said Ross had the brought the 'spotlight of investigation' to innocent staff after she forged signatures and used fellow employees' login details.

'There are plenty of white collar criminals who steal from their employers who don't put others in the frame,' he told the court.

The court heard Ross began skimming money just six weeks after she was hired by Suncorp on April 4, 2014.

She continued to do so until she resigned in March 2018 after Suncorp detected a fraudulent invoice.

The court heard Ross spent $80,000 on flights and accommodation for her and her friends using the credit card, including trips to the Gold Coast and Perth.

She also spent money on flights to Los Angeles and on hotel rooms in the United States for a male Suncorp employee she had a 'quasi-romantic attachment' to.

The County Court of Victoria (pictured) on Tuesday heard Ross had committed the fraud as she had an 'overwhelming desire to be appreciated'

Police facts tendered to the court showed Ross lied to the man by claiming her sister worked for an airline which entitled her to free flights and accommodation.

Ross entered the flights and hotels in the Suncorp system as a business trip for different, higher-level employees.

Between May 2014 and January 2018 Ross used the credit card to purchase 131 gifts cards, spending $86,250 on herself despite claiming the cards were for Suncorp and filing them as 'staff amenities', 'stationary' and 'seminars/workshops'.

Mr Tovey told the court Ross has already paid back $65,000 and intends to repay the outstanding amount.

Ross will be sentenced later this month.
The best things Jeremy Cowan ever discovered on a street corner were a chocolate maker and a coffee aficionado.

As Cowan, the owner of Shmaltz Brewing and its 518 Craft bar and bottle shop in Troy, recalls, he was driving east on Congress Street in Troy when he saw Oliver Holecek (owner of Primo Botanica bean to bar chocolate brand) and Hernan Lopez (owner of Alias Coffee Roasters) hosting a pop-up event to share their products. At the time, Cowan was looking to increase daytime activity in his Monument Square-facing bar, and the idea of including coffee and confections appealed to him. He already knew Holecek from the weekly Troy Waterfront Farmers Market, where Holecek sold his chocolate near Cowans bar on Monument Square in Troy. When Cowan saw the duos pop-up outside of the Mount Ida Preservation Hall location, he thought the combination of beer, chocolate and coffee might be the right combination to bring people into 518 Craft during the day.

It was a kind of kismet, said Cowan of the Congress Street encounter. He invited Holecek and Lopez to do pop-ups at 518 Craft last summer to see how it would attract customers. I dont think they knew I was scheming to get them to move in.

Holecek said that the offer to work within the 518 Craft space came from needs each entrepreneur independently had.

Ive been wanting to open a storefront for a while but was limited by the cost of space in Troy, he said. For a chocolate shop like his  which focuses on single origin, whole-spice chocolate and confection production  he needed exposure to walking traffic, and 518 Crafts location right on Monument Square provided that.

Lopez had been hoping to open a coffee shop since he moved to the Capital Region from New Jersey over four years ago, where he owned a cafe. He worked for Stacks Espresso Bar in Albany as manager and roaster and met Holocek through that connection. He roasts his Alias Coffee products in Delmar, but working with 518 Craft and Primo Botanica allowed him to open a coffee shop in a location with built-in customers.

The pandemic led to collaboration, said Lopez, as businesses looked for ways to cut expenses while sales were down. We thought this was a great idea because we could share the space and resources and collaborate, he said. The three businesses operate under a service agreement in which all sales are handled through 518 Crafts point-of-sale system. 518 Craft essentially purchases the chocolates and coffees, similar to how a restaurant or bar would pay a food distributor for produce. The difference is that the customer is able to interact with the source of their coffee and chocolate.

It creates more of an experience for my brand, said Holecek, adding that since he and Lopez took up space in 518 Craft in October, his sales have grown by 25 percent, especially online because new local customers are ordering chocolate for faraway friends. For Lopez, the arrangement allows him to sell coffee later in the day before customers transition to alcohol in the evenings. People want to enjoy some downtime and relax, to enjoy their coffee, chocolate and beer in their third place. We all gather a common clientele and all draw from a certain type of dedicated customer, Lopez said.

Lopez said he and Holecek took the opportunity to work with Cowan because of his decades of knowledge on building a national business. It is rewarding to collaborate with two other companies. We are benefiting from Jeremys experience and his branding advice, he said. For Cowan, it also brings in nonalcoholic options for those not partaking in beer, spirits, wine and cider and meets New York States COVID-related requirement that bars sell at least snack-sized food with every beverage purchase. (Bakery products from next doors The Placid Baker are also available at 518 Craft.)

Cowan was aware, coming from his own personal shortcomings, that there is a benefit from working with Holecek and Lopez. It was a big change for me to move from Clifton Park to downtown Troy, he said. The Shmaltz brewery was located in Clifton Park before selling the building and assets to Rich Buceta, owner of SingleCut Beersmiths of Queens, in 2018; Shmaltz currently contract brews its products in Newburgh. It was a challenge to convince customers to try a new location with so many established regular haunts in Troy, but working with people who already have a following in Troy helps introduce new people to 518 Craft. He calls it micro-marketing.

He had explored offering food and coffee service on his own, but the lag time of developing expertise did not alleviate the problem at hand. Just because you know one thing doesnt mean you know how to do another cool thing, he said.

The potential for sharing space with complementary businesses is growing in appeal, said Katie Hammon, executive director of Downtown Troy BID. We are seeing businesses interested in sharing space, she said, mostly by independent craftspeople or makers. A lot of our businesses are small and dont need all the space available to them, she added, noting it can help with rent costs.

The businesses at 518 Craft are examples of arrangements designed to accommodate customers from morning to late night in Troy. Superior Merchandise Co. opened with coffee, but now also sells beer and wine. Troy Kitchen added a bar in addition to its food stands, as did River Street Market inside the Hedley Building.

All three entrepreneurs said that the 518 Craft arrangement is overwhelmingly beneficial, but there are issues each is mindful of. Cowan said that adding more decision-makers into the mix means more work, more conversations. Learning to adapt was a challenge as well. We have different styles. Ive never had partners before. Theyre not my partners but also not my employees, he said. Holecek said the rapid growth in business, which has benefited from the attention from his recent win of a national Good Foods Award, has made it difficult to keep up production. Im limited in the amount of personal time that I have now. Any retailer can agree that self-care suffers, he said.

Still, they agree that other businesses should consider their model. If other businesses were thinking about doing it, make sure the businesses are synergistic and not competitive, Holecek said, a sentiment Lopez echoes. If the businesses complement each other, then go for it, he said.

Cowan said he is looking forward to producing beers using Primo Botanica chocolate and Alias Coffee beans and offering tastings of the brews with the ingredients they are made from. He said the common threads that weave the three companies together are love and goodness, and any partnership or product derived from the 518 Craft arrangement will be built on the same concepts.

Deanna Fox is a food and agriculture journalist. www.foxonfood.com, @DeannaNFox
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New Delhi [India], February 10 (ANI): All India Committee (AICC) General Secretary and in-charge of Vadra is set to launch her party's 'Jai Jawan Jai Kisan Abhiyan' in UP's Saharanpur district on Wednesday, where she will also address Kisan Panchayat in Behot area.

has called upon this campaign to take on the BJP government on the issue of three farm laws against which the farmers are agitating for more than 70 days at different borders of the capital.

The party has decided the outline of the village-farmer movement, and will launch the 'Jai Jawan-Jai Kisan Abhiyan' campaign from the big villages of every tehsil in every district of the state.

With this campaign, Congress' strategy is to establish a stronghold among the peasant, especially Jats, Gurjars, and Muslim communities.

According to an insider in the party's UP unit, under this campaign, Congress has targeted primarily those districts where there is a strong base of farmers and the significant impact of ongoing farmers' movement is being seen.

"'Jai Jawan Jai Kisan' campaign will be launched strongly in 27 districts including Saharanpur, Shamli, Muzaffarnagar, Baghpat, Meerut, Bijnore, Hapur, Bulandshahr, Aligarh, Hathras, Mathura, Agra, Firozabad, Badaun, Bareilly, Rampur, Pilibhit, Lakhimpur Kheri, Sitapur, and Hardoi," said the party source.

They said that all senior leaders including the party's UP in-charge Vadra will address the campaign meetings and take it forward.

Notably, Vadra has attended the last rites of Navreet Singh, the youth who died during the farmers' tractor rally on January 26 in Delhi, in his native home Bilaspur in Rampur. During the last ardas ritual, the Congress' UP in-charge had said that the government would have to "withdraw the anti-farmer laws, and the martyrdom of the farmers will not go in vain."

This will be a 10-day campaign programme where many senior leaders including Nirmal Khatri, Pramod Tiwari, Harendra Malik, Imran Masood, Raj Babbar, Deepak Singh, Nasimuddin Siddiqui, Rakesh Sachan, Pradeep Aditya Jain and Sachin Pilot, Randeep Surjewala, Hardik Patel, Navjot Singh Sidhu, Deepender Hooda, Mim Afzal, Begum Noor Ban, PL Punia, Pradeep Mathur, Rashid Alvi, and RPN Singh, will be part of the 'Jai Jawan Jai Kisan Abhiyan'.Congress state president Ajay Kumar Lallu and Leader of Legislature Party Aradhana Mishra will also participate in various districts.

UP Congress recently completed its block committee and Nyay Panchayats meetings and has prepared a strong team of workers at the block and Nyay Panchayat levels, through which it plans to vigorously carry out the upcoming campaigns.

After launching the campaign on Wednesday in Saharanpur, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra will initiate the party's movement in Bijnaur and Meerut districts on February 13.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

The Air Force F-35 jet team that performs at air shows around the world has had to scale back appearances this year. The problem: a growing shortage of engines because of longer repair periods, some due to previously unreported shortcomings with engine blade coatings.

The Air Combat Command that controls the F-35 demonstration team late last month cut the number of 2021 shows by eight performances, or about one-third, to ensure the flying doesn't aggravate a worsening service-wide shortage of Raytheon Technologies Corp. engines.

The engines on A-model F-35s, which take off and land conventionally, have been running "hot," or close to the limits of their design, and that heat has caused premature cracks, or delamination, of turbine blade coatings. That's forced the engines to be removed or repaired earlier than anticipated, aggravating an already backlogged depot system. The cracks in the coating are not a flight safety issue, but they do reduce an engine's useful life, said a defense official.

The Air Force is working "diligently" with the F-35 Joint Program Office and Raytheon's Pratt & Whitney engine unit "to resolve supply and maintenance issues" with the engine, according to an Air Combat Command statement. Reducing air show performances will help "ensure the Air Force has enough engine capacity to meet operational requirements," it added.

The previously undisclosed engine issue is just the latest complication with the $398 billion F-35 program that the Pentagon must contend with. President Joe Biden's defense secretary, retired General Lloyd Austin, is likely to recuse himself from any F-35 decisions because he served on Raytheon's board until mid-January.

The Pentagon's annual F-35 Selected Acquisition Report estimates the U.S. will spend $66.4 billion on the F-35's engine program. While the cutback in air shows is the most public signal of the engine's problems, the concerns aren't just affecting the flying team. The longer times in the engine repair depot are putting a pinch on Air Force jet engines across the service, according to the defense official. The Air Force has taken delivery of about 270 of a planned 1,763 F-35s.

F-35 spokeswoman Laura Seal in a statement the program office is "working closely" with the Pratt & Whitney unit to "resolve supply and maintenance issues."

Seal said the program office early last year began to see a confluence of two troubling trends -- a decrease in the number of F-35 engines returning to units in a timely manner after repair and an increase in "unscheduled engine repair requirements" from "premature distress of rotor blade coatings in a small number of engines," causing delaminations. The blades had to be replaced.

The program office and Pratt "have identified and are implementing aggressive solutions to both of these issues," she said. They are "expanding F-35 engine repair depot capacity" and "concurrently implementing engineering solutions that will keep engines deployed longer before needing maintenance or replacement."

Pratt & Whitney spokesman Kevin Anthony said in a statement that "collectively, we are pursuing multiple initiatives aimed at accelerating capacity growth and maturing the global" maintenance, repair and overhaul network to exceed program requirements. The company also recognizes the challenges that the engine program's "sustainment structure is presenting as the fleet matures, and continues to collaborate with" the Pentagon on a solution, he added.

The team of F-35 jets seeing their public performances scaled back are assigned to the 388th Fighter Wing at Hill Air Force Base in Utah. Their current schedule shows them making appearances from Cocoa Beach, Florida, in April to Toronto in September. The F-35 team is separate from the Air Force's signature Thunderbirds demonstration team, which flies F-16s.

While they serve as envoys of the Air Force and the U.S. military more generally, the F-35 jets are considered combat-ready and their pilots can be called on for overseas deployments when necessary.

Pentagon Keeps $398 Billion F-35's Full-Rate Production on Hold

Lieutenant Colonel Malinda Singleton, an Air Force spokeswoman, said in an email that the service is experiencing a shortage of engine sections, or modules, and facing a maintenance backlog but added that "F-35A units are not currently experiencing operational mission impacts."

Pentagon spokeswoman Jessica Maxwell said in an email that senior acquisition and sustainment leaders "are tracking issues affecting F-35 engine readiness."

The engine issue will be discussed at an "F-35 Commanders'" conference at Tinker Air Force Base, Oklahoma, attended by three- and four-generals and Pratt & Whitney officials, on Feb. 17.

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Sister Andre has lived through the 1918 flu pandemic, two world wars and many sad events, she once said. As Europes oldest known person, she turned 117 on Thursday, and has now accomplished another feat: defeating the coronavirus, with barely any complication.

Shes recovered, along with all the residents here, said David Tavella, the spokesman at the Ste. Catherine Laboure nursing home in Toulon, a city in southeastern France, where Sister Andre resides. She is calm, very radiant and she is quite looking forward to celebrating her 117th birthday, he said, adding that the homes most famous resident was resting on Wednesday and needed a break from interviews.

The coronavirus swept through the nursing home last month, just as nurses began consulting residents about vaccinations; 81 of its 88 residents became infected, including Sister Andre, and 11 eventually died.

Mr. Tavella said that until last month no case had been detected in the nursing home since the beginning of the pandemic. Still, the outbreak was a stark reminder that the virus has been devastating in places where the most vulnerable reside, even with stringent restrictions that have turned many nursing homes in the country and elsewhere in Europe into fortresses.
CONTRACT OPPORTUNITY

VA restarts on-ramp for $25B services vehicle

The Veterans Affairs Department has restarted the on-ramp process for a potential $25 billion professional services contract vehicle first awarded nearly two years ago.

Service-disabled, veteran-owned small businesses who missed the cut can now officially get to work on their proposals for the Veteran Enterprise Contracting for Transformation and Operational Readiness contract.

Bids to gain a seat on the potential 10-year VECTOR program through this on-ramp are due no later than 1 p.m. Eastern on March 1, the VA said Monday in a Beta.Sam.Gov notice.

This is not for every single portion of the vehicle however. In a LinkedIn post on the opportunity, Red Team Consulting points out that only three groups are covered under the on-ramp.

Contractors will have to focus their attention on Group 1 (management, oversight and improvement), Group 2 (analyses) and Group 4 (outreach). There are no on-ramps for the other half.

A second big idea Red Team Consulting highlighted is that this is apparently attempt number two by the VA to get through the on-ramp process for VECTOR. The VA cancelled its first request for proposals for this on-ramp due to the coronavirus pandemic and issued this latest RFP Monday as a replacement.

That gives new bidders a limited time to prepare a proposal, so those who already had a bid in may only have to make small updates and resubmit their bids.
The Sokoto State Government has commenced eviction of 146 persons who were illegally occupying quarters meant for teachers across 21 schools in the state.

The chairman of the committee set up to carry out the exercise, Bello Abdulkahi Sokoto, said people that would be ejected included those who had either retired from service or transferred their service to another organisation.

According to him, the affected people were given adequate notice to quit the houses.

Daily Trust learnt that some of the occupants were given between six months and one year quit notice. The Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Basic and Secondary Education, Musa Gobir, explained that among those to be ejected were staff of the Ministry of Education and the Teachers Service as the houses were meant for teachers alone.

"Henceforth, we will not tolerate illegal occupation of teachers' quarters. Many teachers are currently in rented places outside the school premises," he said.

Our reporter who visited Sani Dingyadi Unity School where the exercise was flagged off observed some of the victims removing their belongings from their respective quarters.

One of the victims told Daily Trust that they were served with several quit notices since last year. The victim, who is a retired policeman, said he occupied the house shortly after the retirement of his father who served in the school.

"After his retirement, he relocated to the city and asked me to come back to the house with my family," he said

Daily Trust gathered that his immediate neighbour who was also ejected was a staff of the Federal Inland Revenue.
The entrance to the Korean embassy in Beijing. Two Korean officials there allegedly assaulted a junior staffer, who is also Korean, while drinking at a bar recently, according to the Federation of Korean Trade Unions. Korea Times file



By Kim Rahn



Two officials at the South Korean Embassy in Beijing have been accused of assaulting a junior staff member, according to a union representing Korean embassy workers around the world, Tuesday.



It was the latest case of misconduct taking place at a Korean diplomatic mission overseas, following a series of sexual harassment, violence and corruption allegations against diplomats and other dispatched government officials.



According to the union, a unit of the Federation of Korean Trade Unions, two officials at the embassy allegedly assaulted the staffer at a bar in Beijing at around 11 p.m., Feb. 4. One of the officials worked for the National Assembly and the other was a member of the National Intelligence Service (NIS). The staffer who was assaulted is in charge of administrative work such as visa issuance and translation. All of them are South Koreans.



The staff member complained to the Assembly official about rude language and behavior, which prompted the official to allegedly strike the him in the head with a bottle of liquor. The official from the NIS allegedly threw the victim to the ground and punched him in the face.



The staffer received medical treatment and has been on leave due to mental shock, according to the union. He reported the case to the foreign ministry here, adding that he did not report the incident to local police, since the officials would avoid punishment due to their diplomatic immunity.



The union is composed of around 700 workers handling administrative affairs at Korean embassies in about 180 countries. It said such workers have suffered harassment and bullying by diplomats and other higher-ranking public officials, as seen in the Beijing Embassy case.



Calling for criminal punishment for the offenders, the union said in a statement, "The government should provide the victim with sufficient compensation and come up with official measures to prevent a recurrence of such acts of violence or bullying by higher-ranking officials at embassies."



The foreign ministry said it is looking into the case.


Photo: The Canadian Press

While the soaring rate of new COVID-19 infections has moderated substantially across the country in recent weeks because of anti-pandemic restrictions, health authorities warned against complacency.

Lockdowns and other restrictions appear to have had a significant effect in curbing the spread of the novel coronavirus, and strong measures need to stay in place, the Public Health Agency of Canada said in its latest summary.

"We are observing a steady decline in COVID-19 activity," the agency said. "With still-elevated daily case counts, the risk remains that trends could reverse quickly."

To date, Canada has seen more than 810,000 cases, with deaths approaching 21,000. The agency also noted the emergence of new variants of concern, with eight provinces now reporting finding new strains.

Despite falling case numbers, the financial costs of the pandemic remain steep.

Ontario, which has seen an almost 70 per cent plunge in new daily cases in the past month, also said it's one-time pandemic spending had reached $13.3 billion.

The money, from Ottawa, is going to support small business, hospitals and nursing homes, the province said in its third-quarter fiscal update, which also projected a $38.5-billion deficit this year.

"These deficits are not sustainable," Finance Minister Peter Bethlenfalvy said.

The province also said it had now set aside $3.9 billion for further pandemic-related spending.

The severity of the pandemic was brought into sharp relief by a new study reported on Wednesday that COVID-19 is 3.5 times more deadly than influenza. The study, which looked at hospitalizations for the flu between November 2019 and June 2020 in seven large Canadian hospitals, also found COVID patients needed more intensive care treatment and stayed in hospital longer than those with influenza.

"We can now say definitively that COVID-19 is much more severe than seasonal influenza," Dr. Amol Verma, of St. Michael's Hospital and the University of Toronto, said in a release.

The pandemic has also caused angst in Newfoundland and Labrador, where an outbreak in the St. John's region erupted in the middle of an election campaign. In the past two days, health officials reported 41 new cases of COVID-19 in the eastern health region, which includes the capital.

The province's opposition parties have attacked incumbent Liberal Premier Andrew Furey for calling the election in the middle of the pandemic. In response, Furey said on Wednesday that other, harder-hit provinces had voted safely during the pandemic.

"We've seen it in other jurisdictions with a higher burden of the disease," Furey said.

Ontario reported 1,072 new infections and 41 more deaths on Wednesday, while Quebec reported 989 new infections and 34 deaths.

The slowing rate of new cases prompted Ontario to end a state of emergency and allow three regions to reopen their economies Wednesday. The change ended stay-at-home orders and allowed restaurants and non-essential businesses to open their doors.

Remaining Ontario regions  with the exception of the Greater Toronto Area  were similarly set to ease lockdown measures next week. Toronto, Peel Region and York Region could follow suit on Feb. 22 depending on their situations at the time.

"Canadians are urged to remain vigilant and to continue following local public health advice as well as consistently maintaining individual practices that keep us and our families safer," the public health agency said.
An open letter to African American people:

February marks the 95th observation of what started as Negro History Week and later became Black History Month. I wanted to use the occasion to talk about what being black means, about how it feels, being us.

Hearing that, youre probably braced for a litany of depressing statistics, indignities and cruelties. But thats not why Im here. No, I want to talk about community.

Lately, I find myself thinking a lot about Shonda Rhimes, which is weird. Ive never met the lady, or even watched any of the hit shows, such as Bridgerton, Scandal, Greys Anatomy, that have made her one of the hottest producers in television. And yet, Im so deeply invested in her success, so all-fired proud of what shes achieved, youd swear we were related.

Same with Tyler Perry building his studio complex, Regina King winning her Oscar, Kamala Harris taking her oath. But the pride and investment I speak of is not limited to the celebrated and powerful. Maybe you remember a 2019 story about Morehouse College professor Nathan Alexander teaching a class with the infant daughter of his student, Wayne Hayer, strapped to his chest in a baby carrier after Hayer was unable to find child care.

I exulted in those brothers for the way they refuted a hundred lies about black men in a single viral image.

That pride speaks to a truth about being us, something I think even well-meaning white people find hard to grasp. Meaning how profound is that sense of connectedness, of community, that sense that each of us is all of us. I doubt your average white guy feels any special investment in Brad Pitts successes or any particular pride when some random white person makes news for doing good.

But it is different, being us. Because for as much as people pretend otherwise, the thing that most defines us as black is not common skin tone nor even common ancestry. Rather, it is common experience: All of us having gone through some variation of the same old story of denial and denigration.

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In the broad outlines, I know what youve been through and you know the same about me. And this is what binds us. Oppression from without creates cohesion from within.

Often, that bond expresses itself in the wake of tragedy: George Floyd was my brother, Breonna Taylor was my daughter, Trayvon Martin was my son. But it is not limited to that. We are bound in our joys and achievements as well.

Not to sound naive or to romanticize. We dont, nor should we, always agree on everything. And I know Zora Neale Hurston was right when she said not all skinfolk are kinfolk; there are some self-interested scoundrels among us.

On the other hand: Many years ago, I wrote a column  not one Im particularly proud of  that caused an uproar in Miami, even within the hallways of my paper, the Miami Herald. One day, at the height of the controversy, I get a call. This brother Ive never met has heard a rumor  untrue, as far as I knew  that I was about to be fired. He has a group together, and theyre ready to picket the building on my behalf.

I thanked him and told him no, but the gesture has always stuck with me. It reminded me that I was part of something that would always have my back. That would stand in the gap for me. That took pride in me. I felt humbled by that. I felt uplifted.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the best of what it means, being us. I am here for you.

And I know without asking that you are always there, for me.

Leonard Pitts is a columnist with the Miami Herald.

The Serious Miscalculation of COVID-19 School Closure: Hadley Heath Manning

Hadley Heath Manning, policy director of Independent Womens Forum, a leading national womens organization, told The Epoch Times that on the issue of school reopening, people are too concerned with the virus itself while failing to recognize the risks that come with school closures, which is a serious miscalculation.

Focusing so much on the risk of this particular disease, Im afraid, has taken our eye off of the risks, so many other things that come from social isolation, Manning said during the interview with The Epoch Times American Thought Leaders program.

Manning explained that lockdowns can cause many other risks such as mental health problems, substance abuse, and delayed health care for some elective procedures or chemotherapy for cancer patients, and so on.

She suggested that the current response to the CCP (China Communist Party) virus, also known as the novel coronavirus, comes with a cost not just in terms of human progress or money for the economy, but it comes with a cost for our human lives, for our life expectancy, for our enjoyment of life.

So thats a very serious miscalculation.

Manning pointed out that from early on, its been recognized that children are the least impacted group from a health perspective.

Referring to studies and reports from the Journal of Pediatrics, the Lancet, and Health Affairs, she said they suggest that school closures have more risks, more downsides, more harms to students and are not justified that school should be reopened for in-person learning.

The CDC says the rate of infection from students to teachers has been low; the Lancet say[s] that school closures might lead to a greater number of deaths than school openings, or than school closures might prevent; The Journal of Pediatrics suggests that school closures do not reduce the spread of COVID-19.

Manning also pointed out that the modeling was confirmed by studies from other countries, such as Ireland, Australia, and Sweden.

Swedish schools were even open last spring, the spring of 2020, and what they found was zero deaths resulted, she said.

Manning went on to say that a study in Health Affairs suggested that school closures actually lead to a higher incidence of COVID-19 in a community. She thought the reason might be that in classrooms students are being very cautious, suggesting that might not be the case outside of that controlled environment.

Kids being unable to perform as usual in their classrooms is only one piece of the puzzle, she said. I think maybe an even bigger piece is the mental health of students.

In reference to mental health issues, Manning gave the example of the Las Vegas school district. The Nevada Clark County district was forced to reopen because 18 students committed suicide during the school closures. The youngest was only 9 years old.

Manning pointed out that schools, for better or worse, serve as community hubs that work beyond their mission of educating children.

Without an open school facility, some children have fewer places to go to escape what might be a very toxic home life.

Manning also pointed out that the pandemic has exacerbated inequalities in our society.

She explained there are inequalities between men and women, as well as between people in essential wage jobs and those who have more resources.

While people in essential wage jobs have to leave the home and cannot ensure their childrens virtual learning, those with more resources will have kids go to private learning pods or private schools to have in-person learning.

Weve got to put schools at the very front of the line in terms of essential services that we have to keep open, even if it means putting more restrictions on other industries, Manning claimed. Because education is just a backbone of our society and feeds really the workforce of the future.

I dont know that theres really a one-size-fits-all when it comes to the right state or local policy. But I think, you know, schools that have managed to stay open, have done a great service to their students. And theyve really avoided some of these terrible outcomes, in terms of the mental health impact.

Rochelle Walensky, Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said Monday morning that the CDC would release guidance in the coming days so that schools can reopen safely and well, and data suggests that very little transmission is happening within the schools, especially when masking and distancing are occurring.
Watertown, NY (13601)

Today

Partly cloudy this morning, then becoming cloudy during the afternoon. High 66F. Winds ENE at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Cloudy skies early, followed by partial clearing. Low 44F. Winds ESE at 5 to 10 mph.
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) logo in the lobby of CIA Headquarters in Langley, Va., on Aug. 14, 2008. (Saul Loeb/Getty Images)

Former CIA Officer Says He Left Democratic Party Because of Impeachment

A former CIA officer wrote that he left the Democratic Party due to the second impeachment of former President Donald Trump, saying that it only serves to exacerbate the political divide.

For years, Democrats like me have watched with increasing alarm as our own political leaders and activists  have used an endless stream of hateful, violent and ultimately un-American rhetoric that has resulted in billions of dollars in economic damage and given birth to a violent national movement, wrote Bryan Dean Wright, the former intelligence officer, for the Daily Caller.

Wright said the modern Left is infused with systemic hatred that has inflamed profound political divisions and the predictable outcomes that come with them, most especially violence and destruction.

The most egregious example came in the summer of 2020, with Leftist race riots that cost upwards of $2 billion in damages, he said, adding that Democratic leaders didnt offer condemnations when fires raged, property was vandalized, and lives were destroyed.

Wright pointed out that democratically elected officials incited violence in 2020.

A woman in New York City threw a Molotov cocktail at four police officers sitting in their vehicle during a riot and were unharmed only because the gas bomb failed to ignite, he said.

Next, a group of rioters in Seattle tried to seal up the doors of a police precinct and ignite the building on fire, burning cops alive.

In all, over 700 federal, state, and local law enforcement officers sustained injuries in violence perpetrated by Leftist rioters. That includes retired St. Louis police Captain David Dorn, who died defending the city he loved from those encouraged by the Democrat Partys incitement.

Wright went on to cite rhetoric from mainstream media pundits such as CNNs Chris Cuomo, who told viewers last year, Show me where it says protesters are supposed to be polite and peaceful, and NPRs statement that looting is a powerful tool to bring about real, lasting change in society.

Such statements, he argued, served to gaslight people into committing acts of violence. At the same time, he suggested that its hypocritical to impeach Trump for allegedly inciting an insurrection when Democratic leaders and left-leaning media outlets emboldened rioters and anarchists last year.

House Democrats have argued that Trumps speech incited supporters on Jan. 6 to carry out the Capitol breach, which left several peopleincluding an officerdead.

For Democrats like me, we have no choice: we have to leave. But where do we go, politically, now that our party can no longer be salvaged? The answer is to be found in the exit data from the 2020 election: Were already leaving, it turns out, and joining the new, populist Republican Party, he said.
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The Petroleum Commission has reacted to media publications suggesting that a US$4.5 million sponsorship money paid to it by Aker Energy in support of capacity building has "vanished".

Aker Energy had pledged the money to support the Petroleum Commissions Accelerated Oil and Gas Capacity building (AOGC) programme.



Last week some media publications suggested that Aker Energy has since handed the money over to the Petroleum Commission and the money has vanished.



But reacting in a press statement issued by its Chief Executive, Mr. Egbert Faibille Jnr, on Sunday, [February 7, 2021] the commission said it has not received the said money from Aker Energy.



The statement explained that Aker promised to support the Accelerated Oil and Gas Capacity building programme with the sum of US$4.5 million.



However, before it could start its plans the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic struck, a development which has since affected the support for the AOGC.



The Commission said during the same period, it resolved that instead of sending Ghanaians abroad for training under the AOGC which is expensive, we can identify a training facility in Ghana and bring it up to world accredited standards and thereby train Ghanaians to international standards locally.



To that end, "the Commission identified the establishment of a world class welding and pipefitting centre as a major project that we can get Aker to commit its US$4.5M to build here in Ghana."



The statement said the Commission approached the management of Takoradi Technical University (TTU) for land for the project, which it has graciously given paving way for it take off.



It said having secured the land, the Commission wrote to Aker Energy informing it of the change of its scope from sending Ghanaians to train abroad to building a world class welding and pipefitting centre on the TTU campus to among others reduce the costs of such trainings whilst ensuring world class certifications.



Aker Energy communicated its acceptance of the change in scope in December 2020 and has only recently followed up with an announcement that it is increasing the original amount of $4.5 million by $ 500,000 thus making the package $5 million.



The commission said Aker Energy has not released the funds and will be responsible for the payments for the construction of the facility and all other incidental costs.



The statement emphasized that the Petroleum Commission will therefore not receive the money, and has not received the money either for it to "vanish" as alleged in the media report.



It added that the Commission is focused on its mandate and will not be distracted by such "false and baseless media reportage."









Source: GNA









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The has not shared any electoral roll data with the National Intelligence Grid (NATGRID), Lok Sabha was informed on Wednesday.

Responding to a question on whether the (EC) has shared electoral rolls data along with photos with agencies under the Ministry of Home Affairs, such as NATGRID, Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad replied in the negative.

"The commission has stated that it has not shared any electoral roll data with NATGRID," the minister said in a written reply.

He also said that the poll panel has informed that electoral roll data base is shared with departments of the central government or state governments as and when requests are received from them for specific purposes.

Citing the EC, Prasad said election commissions of Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Goa, Gujarat, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra use electoral roll data of assembly constituencies for preparing their electoral roll for local body and panchayat

Manipur, Mizoram Nagaland, Odisha, Punjab, Rajasthan,Sikkim,Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Tripura, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Chandigarh, Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu, Jammu and Kashmir, Ladakh, Delhi, Lakshadweep and Puducherry are also among those who use roll data for the purpose, he said.

The EC conducts Lok Sabha and assembly polls while state election commissions hold local body polls in their respective states.

(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.)
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Sky Mobile customers can now gift their monthly unused data to someone else

Sky Mobile customers can now share spare internet data with family and friends who need it more.

The telecoms giant currently allows customers to roll over unused data each month into a 'piggybank', which they have three years to use.

So if you pay for 4 gigabytes of data a month and only use 3GB, the extra 1GB will be saved for future use.

But from today you can now gift this data someone else. The change could benefit those working and learning from home.

It comes after research by the Mail found nearly one million children did not have broadband at home and families were at risk of racking up big mobile data bills while home schooling.

To take advantage, visit sky.com and add a free sim to your basket. Once activated you can send it to a loved one and share your spare data using the My Sky app.

The offer is available to all Sky Mobile customers until February 25. You must have fewer than seven Sims linked to your account.

The new card will be free for 12 months and then cost 5 a month after unless you cancel.

EE customers with pay-as-you-go deals and its 30-day sim-only Flex plans can also save up unused data.

Virgin Mobile, ID Mobile and Vodafone pay-as-you-go customers can roll over data for just one month. Other networks, such as Three, GiffGaff and Tesco Mobile, do not allow you to carry over unused data.

a.murray@dailymail.co.uk
State health officials confirmed 1,319 new COVID-19 cases on Tuesday, bringing the active number of cases statewide to 55,659.

Officials also announced another 68 COVID-related fatalities, bringing the death toll to 14,821.

Tuesdays positive test results are based on 52,112 new molecular tests, according to the Department of Public Health. More than 14 million tests have been carried out since the pandemic began.

There are currently 1,401 patients hospitalized with COVID-19, including 324 in intensive care. As of Tuesday, 191 COVID patients are intubated.

The seven-day average of positive tests is 2.96%.

While the transmission of new variants remains a top concern among health experts, cases have fallen considerable in 44 states in recent weeks, the New York Times reports. However, deaths nationwide remain at extremely high levels.

Roughly 1.4 million doses of COVID vaccine are being administered per day across the country as states, including Massachusetts, began ramping up their capacity to deliver the shots, the Times reports. About 10% of the population is partially vaccinated, meaning theyve gotten at least one dose of either the Moderna or the Pfizer vaccine.

Beginning on Monday in Massachusetts, restaurants, gyms and museums, among many other businesses and venues, can up their capacity from 25% to 40% amid encouraging numbers over the last few weeks. Boston officials on Friday said theyd follow the new state guidance, expanding capacity for those businesses this week also.

Total COVID cases by county:

Barnstable County: 9,363

Berkshire County: 4,660

Bristol County: 52,832

Dukes County: 811

Essex County: 79,820

Franklin County: 1,854

Hampden County: 38,960

Hampshire County: 6,362

Middlesex County: 105,754

Nantucket County: 1,117

Norfolk County: 42,430

Plymouth County: 37,823

Suffolk County: 74,098

Worcester County: 61,787

Related Content:
A Ukrainian defender has been wounded as a result of enemy shelling near the village of Pisky in Donbas, the press service of the East operational and tactical group has reported on Facebook.

"Today, on February 10, the armed formations of the Russian Federation once again violated the ceasefire in the area of responsibility of the East operational and tactical group. Near the settlement of Pisky, Russian occupation troops fired on our positions from a sniper rifle. As a result, one Ukrainian soldier sustained a gunshot wound," the report reads.

According to the report, the serviceman was promptly taken to a medical institution and provided with the necessary medical care. The wounded man is in good health.

The press service also said that Ukrainian defenders had responded to the enemy's attack.

The Ukrainian side of the Joint Center for Control and Coordination informed OSCE representatives about the actions of the armed formations of the Russian Federation and its mercenaries.

Three ceasefire violations were recorded in the area of the Joint Forces Operation in Donbas on February 9.

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Remote working was one of the topics discussed at a virtual constituency meeting of Laois-Offaly Fine Gael, which was held via Zoom on Thursday, February 4.

The meeting was attended by members from both counties, public representatives and guest speaker, Senator Emer Currie. The meeting provided members with the chance to engage with topical issues in a friendly setting.

"We were delighted to hold the meeting last week which gave members the opportunity to meet and discuss issues important to them. Aside from the policy side of things, there is certainly a social aspect to politics too, and with people spending more and more time at home with lockdown it's great to be able to facilitate such interactions online," said Constituency Chairperson Vivienne Phelan.

Aside from the usual agenda items, Cllr. Thomasina Connell provided an update on the work of Laois County Councillors including housing and leisure, while Cllr. John Clendennen from Kinnity spoke on progress in Offaly.

Guest speaker Senator Emer Currie, Seanad spokesperson on Employment Affairs, Work Life Balance and Northern Ireland, led an insightful discussion on the future of remote working in Ireland, which was very well received. Members spoke on some of the challenges encountered to working at home in rural areas, particularly in relation to broadband services and the feelings of isolation.

Finally, Charlie Flanagan TD paid a warm tribute to Cllr. Tom Mulhall on his excellent contribution as County Councillor since 2009. Deputy Flanagan thanked Cllr. Mulhall for his tireless efforts on behalf on constituents for many years. He was joined by Cllr. Conor Bergin.

"Cllr. Mulhall was a dedicated and hard-working public representative and will very much be missed by his constituents, colleagues and many friends in Fine Gael. He was someone to contact if you wanted something done, and he had a reputation for making things happen. We wish Cllr. Mulhall a speedy recovery and all the best for his retirement," remarked Constituency Chairperson Vivienne Phelan

"With face-to-face meetings out of the question for the near future, we hope to hold further constituency meetings online in the coming months. We would very much welcome new members to join Fine Gael in Laois-Offaly. For more information or to join please visit www.finegael.ie concluded Phelan.
Rep. Annette Glenn, R-Midland, has chaired the first 2021 hearing of a Michigan state budget subcommittee devoted to the Great Lakes, energy and the environment.

Glenn and other committee members heard a departmental overview from Liesl Clark  director of the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy  just a few days before Gov. Whitmers administration details a new budget recommendation for the 2021-22 fiscal year.
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PHILIPSBURG:--- Other than the Dutch wanting to know what is happening in St. Maarten, what is the purpose or necessity of a new protocol on border control with the Netherlands? MP Christophe Emmanuel on Wednesday dispatched a letter to Minister of Justice Anna Richardson asking for details of a reported new border control protocol she signed with Dutch Kingdom partners.

According to media reports, the Netherlands has drawn up a joint protocol for strengthening border control together with Aruba, Curacao, and St. Maarten. In this protocol, it has been agreed that additional investments will be made in border control for the next 7 years.

"So what were the results of the last protocol we had given the Dutch border control as part of their demands to support St. Maarten financially in 2017? Where are the reports? What was accomplished? What was not accomplished?" MP Emmanuel asked. "Also, it media reports clearly stated that the Dutch drafted these latest plans, so without input of St. Maarten? Why was this necessary again and now for 7 years? What are these investments? More Dutch personnel on the island? How many? Who is paying?

"We are continuing with the same way of operating in this country where we let others announce to the St. Maarten people things that should be announced by St. Maarten's elected representatives first. But I suspect this was another case of this government agreeing to something in the recent agreements it signed with the Dutch, with little to say about it. But I need answers to keep the people of St. Maarten properly informed about what's happening in their country," the MP said.

He added that the Minister has yet to explain in detail to the public or provide information to Parliament. He said he hopes the Minister can devote time in short order to answer his questions, since she has not found the time to update the public.
The University of Houston College of Medicine has become the Texas Medical Centers 63rd member institution, according to a university release.

The new partnership is a gain for UHs medical school, the first new medical institution in Houston in nearly 50 years.

The College of Medicine, which welcomed its inaugural class of 30 students in the fall, has emphasized its goal of aiding underserved communities and addressing a shortage of primary care physicians throughout Houston and greater Texas. TMCs network, which sees more than 10 million patients a year, is home to MD Anderson Cancer Center and Texas Childrens Hospital, the largest childrens hospital in the world.

We are elated to join the Texas Medical Center as a member institution and look forward to engaging with colleagues at other institutions to advance clinical issues and best practices, and further joint research endeavors, said Dr. Stephen Spann, founding dean of the medical school.

Spann, who also recently joined TMCs advisory board, said the medical school can assist with the coronavirus pandemic. The tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic has paradoxically produced an opportunity to address larger issues facing our health care systems, such as health equity, he said. Together with our TMC partners, we can help be part of the solution.

As a member institution, the medical school will also have the opportunity to collaborate with TMCs University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, Baylor College of Medicine, the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and Texas A&M College of Medicine.

On HoustonChronicle.com: UH College of Medicine launches program to address social obstacles to health

The medical school continues to expand its services and initiatives. Last semester, the college virtually launched a Household-Centered Care program, which teams social workers with healthcare professionals to create a network to aid communities in hopes of improving their health. And more recently the college announced its use of Unite Us, a newly launched electronic platform that provides a network of resources, partners and service providers for patients.

A new building for the college is under construction on the campus and is slated to open next summer. The three-story, 130,000 square-foot building will feature modern classrooms and meeting spaces and anatomy and simulation suites.

brittany.britto@chron.com
Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - February 10, 2021) - Maple Gold Mines Ltd. (TSXV: MGM) (OTCQB: MGMLF) (FSE: M3G) ("Maple Gold" or the "Company") is pleased to report that initial assay results from the first two holes drilled at the regional Northeast IP Target ("NE IP Target") in its Fall 2020 drill campaign at the Douay Gold Project have returned several anomalous gold and silver intercepts indicating the presence of a new sulfide-rich hydrothermal system. The Company also announces that drilling is underway on a planned 10,000-metre Winter 2021 drill campaign. The Douay Gold Project is part of a 50/50 Joint Venture (the "JV") between Maple Gold and Agnico Eagle Mines Limited ("Agnico") and is located in Quebec, Canada.

Initial Fall 2020 Program Highlights:

Initial results are from the first two holes drilled in the immediate NE IP Target area in over 25 years.

Results confirmed that the NE IP chargeability anomaly corresponds to a large new sediment-hosted, sulfide-rich hydrothermal system with locally significant gold and silver values, in contrast with the mainly volcanic and intrusive-hosted gold mineralization found at the Douay mineral resource area.

Hole DO-20-285 intercepted multiple gold showings including 2.52 g/t Au over 1 m and 1.29 g/t Au over 0.8 m, along with significant silver (up to 68.2 g/t) and anomalous arsenic, copper (up to 0.19%), antimony, and tellurium.

Hole DO-20-284 encountered several narrow zones of gold mineralization between 0.1 and 0.8 g/t Au from 68 to 278 m downhole, along with significant silver (up to 43.7 g/t) and anomalous arsenic, copper (up to 0.15%), antimony, and zinc (up to 0.65%).

"To encounter semi-continuous sulfide mineralization over up to 350 metres downhole along with several gold and silver showings in the first two holes drilled into the highly prospective, 2-km-long NE IP Target area is very encouraging," stated Fred Speidel, Maple Gold's VP Exploration. "We are also pleased to report that the JV's inaugural Winter 2021 drill campaign is underway, which will include further drilling at the NE IP Target. This demonstrates the commitment of the JV not only to expanding mineralization in and around the established gold resource at Douay but also to the systematic process required in making significant, new grassroots discoveries across the JV's 400 km joint Douay-Joutel property package."

NE IP Initial Results

The first two holes of the Fall 2020 campaign were regional exploration holes drilled to test the southwestern portion of the NE IP Target, a 2 x 0.7 km chargeability anomaly located approximately 4 km northeast of the Douay mineral resource (see news from October 22, 2020). The holes were drilled 160 m apart and encountered broad zones of nearly continuous sulfide mineralization associated with highly deformed (sheared) quartz-sericite-pyrite altered sedimentary rocks of the Taibi Group, starting from top of bedrock to about 350 m downhole.

As a result of these encouraging signs, a second drill rig was brought in and two additional holes were drilled on the same system, with the four completed holes covering 1.1 km of the chargeability anomaly's >2 km strike length (see figure 1).

Gold results are complete for the first two holes with multi-element assays complete for the first hole and partially complete for the second hole. Assays for the last two holes at the NE IP Target are currently pending. Portable XRF gun results show mineralization is typically anomalous in silver, arsenic, copper, antimony and zinc.







Fig. 1: NE IP chargeability target on tilt magnetic base from late 2020 high resolution airborne magnetic survey. Note frequent association between Au-Ag zones with magnetic lows. Highlighted drill hole labels represent the two holes for which results are reported in this press release and only assays over 0.5 g/t Au are shown. Interpreted drill target areas (in checkered areas) are open to W and to E and additional zones are expected with further drilling.

To view an enhanced version of Fig. 1, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/3077/74104_86ca509954bc6bec_001full.jpg

Hole DO-20-285 was the southwestern-most hole out of the four holes drilled. Gold mineralization is broadly associated with abundant sulfides (reflected in elevated sulfur contents from 1% to over 5%). The best new gold showings included 2.52 g/t Au over 1 m from 65 m downhole, together with anomalous silver (up to 68.2 g/t), arsenic (up to 0.06%), copper (up to 0.19%), antimony (up to 0.03%), molybdenum (up to 0.007%) and tellurium (up to 47.1 ppm). A further intercept from 323 m downhole returned 1.29 g/t Au over 0.8 m. See drill results table towards the end of this press release for more details.

Hole DO-20-284 encountered several narrow zones of gold mineralization between 0.1 and 0.8 g/t Au from 68 to 278m downhole. These were also associated with elevated sulfur, as well as silver (up to 43.7 g/t), arsenic (up to 0.06%), copper (up to 0.15%), antimony (up to 0.04%) and zinc (up to 0.65%). These pathfinder elements are distinct from what is seen at the Douay mineral resource area and are comparable to those observed at the past-producing, high-grade Vezza gold mine, located 12 km east of Douay (disclaimer: mineralization hosted on adjacent and/or nearby properties is not necessarily indicative of mineralization hosted on the Company's property).

Once the assays become available for the remaining two holes at the NE IP Target, Maple Gold's technical team expects to be able to vector towards higher and more continuous gold grades within the large chargeability anomaly (>2km) currently being tested. A further three holes have been approved for drilling and are expected to be completed as part of the JV's 2021 Winter drill campaign.

Multiple additional assay results remain outstanding at the various other holes drilled in the Fall 2020 drill program and will be reported once results are received, vetted, compiled and interpreted. See figure 2 for location of all holes drilled during the campaign.







Figure 2: Fall 2020 drill location map

To view an enhanced version of Figure 2, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/3077/74104_86ca509954bc6bec_002full.jpg

Winter 2021 Drill Program

The JV's Winter 2021 drill program is expected to total approximately 10,000 metres and is aimed at expanding mineral resources at Douay through step-out and select infill drilling at existing mineral resource zones as well as targeting new discoveries at regional exploration targets. The program will include approximately 20-30 holes broadly distributed across regional targets and various zones at the established mineral resource at the Douay project.

The program is now underway with a single drill rig and a second drill rig is expected to be added in the coming weeks. The JV is currently determining the sequencing of drill sites from the priority list of proposed holes.

Joint Venture Structure & Funding

As laid out in the Definitive JV Agreement between Maple Gold and Agnico (see news from February 3, 2021), Maple Gold's VP Exploration is the JV's General Manager and has direct oversight of the exploration work that is underway by Maple Gold's exploration team at site. All programs are designed in collaboration with Agnico's expert technical team, which has been exploring and operating in the Abitibi region of Quebec for decades.

As part of the JV agreement, Agnico will fund an aggregate of C$18 million of JV expenses over a four-year period, which includes the entire Winter 2021 drilling program.

Initial NE IP Drill Results







Table 1: NE IP Drill Results (Holes DO-20-284 & DO-20-285)

To view an enhanced version of this table, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/3077/74104_86ca509954bc6bec_003full.jpg

Notes: As this is still preliminary drilling on the mineralization at the NE IP target, the exact shape and true width cannot be determined with certainty at this time. The core lengths obtained may not reflect the true width of the mineralization. In the above table, true widths of intersections are estimated at approximately 90% of the core interval.

Qualified Person

The scientific and technical data contained in this press release was reviewed and prepared under the supervision of Fred Speidel, M. Sc., P. Geo., Vice-President Exploration of Maple Gold. Mr. Speidel is a Qualified Person under National Instrument 43-101 Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects. Mr. Speidel has verified the data related to the exploration information disclosed in this press release through his direct participation in the work.

Quality Assurance (QA) and Quality Control (QC)

Maple Gold implements strict Quality Assurance ("QA") and Quality Control ("QC") protocols at Douay covering the planning and placing of drill holes in the field; drilling and retrieving the NQ-sized drill core; drillhole surveying; core transport to the Douay Camp; core logging by qualified personnel; sampling and bagging of core for analysis; transport of core from site to the Val d'Or, QC, SGS laboratory; sample preparation for assaying; and analysis, recording and final statistical vetting of results. For a complete description of protocols, please visit the Company's QA/QC webpage at www.maplegoldmines.com.

About Maple Gold

Maple Gold Mines Ltd. is a Canadian advanced exploration company in a 50/50 joint venture with Agnico Eagle Mines Limited to jointly advance the district-scale Douay and Joutel gold projects located in Quebec's prolific Abitibi Greenstone Gold Belt. The project benefits from exceptional infrastructure access and boasts ~400 km2 of highly prospective ground including an established gold resource that holds significant resource expansion potential as well as the past-producing Telbel mine.

The property also hosts a significant number of regional exploration targets along a 55 km strike length of the Casa Berardi Deformation Zone that have yet to be tested through drilling, making the project ripe for new gold and polymetallic discoveries. The Company is well capitalized and is currently focused on carrying out aggressive exploration programs to grow resources and make new discoveries to establish an exciting new gold district in the heart of the Abitibi. For more information, please visit www.maplegoldmines.com.

ON BEHALF OF MAPLE GOLD MINES LTD.

"Matthew Hornor"

B. Matthew Hornor, President & CEO

For Further Information Please Contact:

Ms. Shirley Anthony

Director, Corporate Communications

Cell: 778.999.2771

Email: santhony@maplegoldmines.com

NEITHER THE TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE NOR ITS REGULATION SERVICES PROVIDER (AS THAT TERM IS DEFINED IN THE POLICIES OF THE TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE) ACCEPTS RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ADEQUACY OR ACCURACY OF THIS PRESS RELEASE.

Forward Looking Statements:

This press release contains "forward-looking information" and "forward-looking statements" (collectively referred to as "forward-looking statements") within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation in Canada, including statements about exploration activities at the Douay and Joutel gold projects. Forward-looking statements are based on assumptions, uncertainties and management's best estimate of future events. Actual events or results could differ materially from the Company's expectations and projections. Investors are cautioned that forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. For a more detailed discussion of such risks and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements, refer to Maple Gold Mines Ltd.'s filings with Canadian securities regulators available on www.sedar.com or the Company's website at www.maplegoldmines.com. The Company does not intend, and expressly disclaims any intention or obligation to, update or revise any forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/74104
Bharatiya Kisan Union spokesperson Rakesh Tikait said that protests against the contentious farm laws will spread across India.

Tikait was addressing a 'Kisan Mahapanchayat' in Pehowa in Haryanas Kurukshetra district.

Criticises PM Modi's "andolan-jeevi" remark

Tikait criticised Prime Minister Narendra Modi's 'Andolan-jivi' (professional protestors) remarks and asked if people like great freedom fighter Bhagat Singh will also be put in that category.

PTI

Addressing a well-attended 'Kisan Mahapanchayat' at Gumthala Garhu village in Pehowa in this district, a third within a week in Haryana, he said the government should not be under the wrong impression that the protesting farmers will return to their homes without their demands being accepted.

'Was Bhagat Singh who sacrificed his life for this nation a parjivi?'

Without naming the Prime Minister or using his Andolan-jivi' phrase, Tikait said, "In Parliament, they are saying these are parjivis (parasites). Was Bhagat Singh who sacrificed his life for this nation a parjivi? What about 150 farmers who died during this agitation? Were they parjivis too? Had they gone to Delhi to agitate and die?"

Speaking in Rajya Sabha on Monday, the prime minister had hit out at those behind the farmers' protests, saying a new "breed" of agitators called "Andolan jivi" has emerged in the country who cannot live without an agitation and the nation should guard against them.

Agitation against the Centre's farm laws is nationwide

Tikait also alleged that attempts were being made to divide the protesting farmers on the lines of region and other considerations, and appealed them to reject any such design.

AP

"They will try to divide you on Punjab-Haryana lines, as Sikh and non-Sikh, Hindus and Muslims..," he alleged. "The farmers' agitation against the Centre's farm laws is nationwide and not limited to Punjab or Haryana."

"We will win this fight," he declared.

Projecting the 40 farmers unions spearheading the agitation as fully united, he said, "We have said we will neither change 'Panch' (leader) nor 'Manch' (stage)."

"We have always said that if the government has to talk there are 40 representatives they can talk to them, whatever these unions decide will be acceptable to us," he said.

Tikait said the protesting farmers will divide their time between home, fields and the agitation. Every farmer's family, he said, is required to participate in the stir by sending at least one person at the Delhi border protest sites while other members would continue to work in their fields.

Myanmars military raided the Yangon headquarters of ousted leader Aung San Suu Kyis party on Tuesday, party officials said, as the United States joined the UN in strongly condemning violence against protesters demanding a return to democracy.

The most recent assault on Myanmars civilian leadership came as anger at last weeks coup and the detention of Suu Kyi by the generals has driven hundreds and thousands of people into the streets, defying a junta ban through rallies and protests. The military dictator raided and destroyed NLD headquarters at around 9.30pm, the National League for Democracy announced on its Facebook page.

The US on Tuesday condemned violence against protesters in ongoing protests against a military coup in Myanmar. US State department spokesman, Ned Price said that everyone had a right to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly. We repeat our calls for the military to relinquish power, restore democratically elected government, release those detained and lift all telecommunication restrictions and to refrain from violence said Price.

The United Nations also expressed strong concern over the violence. The use of disproportionate force against demonstrators is unacceptable said Ola Almgren, the UN resident co-ordinator in Myanmar. Meanwhile, the EUs foreign policy chief said the bloc could impose sanctions on Myanmars military and was reviewing all options.

Also read: Space Taxi: Indian startups Bellatrix Aerospace and Skyroot Aerospace partner to launch vehicle for satellites

The US and UNs concern were followed a raid by the military on the Yangon headquarters of ousted leader Aung San Suu Kyis party later that day. The raid came after demonstrations erupted for a fourth straight day on Tuesday, with police using water cannons in several cities, firing rubber bullets at protesters in the capital Naypyidaw and deploying tear gas in Mandalay.

Demonstrators want power restored to the deposed civilian government and freedom for the nations elected leader, Suu Kyi, and her allies. On February 1, army commander Min Aung Hlaing seized power in Myanmar. Coup leaders cited alleged irregularities in a November election that saw the NLD win in a vote the electoral commission said was fair. Suu Kyi was detained the same day and has not been seen since.

Also read: Lab leak virus theory extremely unlikely: WHO as China probe ends
Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-10 23:41:49|Editor: huaxia

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TIRANA, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- The Technical Committee of Experts (TCE) on the coronavirus situation in Albania decided on Wednesday to tighten restrictive measures against COVID-19 starting from Thursday, after a rise in new coronavirus cases and fatalities in the country.

Speaking at a press conference on Wednesday, Minister of Health and Social Protection Ogerta Manastirliu announced that TCE has decided to impose tighter measures in Albania from Feb. 11 to Feb. 25, considering the current situation of the pandemic in the country.

TCE has decided to bring forward the current 10 p.m.-6.a.m. curfew across the country by two hours.

Other restrictive measures include banning the activity of bars and restaurants during curfew hours, except for delivery services, and moving students in all high schools in 10 municipalities to remote learning.

According to health experts, the transition to online learning in high schools is due to an increase in new COVID-19 cases in the 15-24 age group.

Manastirliu called the coming 14 days as "crucial" for the country and called on all citizens to abide by the rules in order to prevent the deterioration of the pandemic in the country.

To date, Albania has confirmed 87,528 coronavirus cases, with 52,933 recoveries and 1,488 fatalities.

As the world is struggling to contain the pandemic, vaccination is underway in many countries with the already-authorized coronavirus vaccines.

Meanwhile, 238 candidate vaccines are still being developed worldwide -- 63 of them in clinical trials -- in countries including Germany, China, Russia, Britain and the United States, according to information released by the World Health Organization on Feb. 2. Enditem




The European Union views Ukraine as an important partner and will continue to provide political, financial and technical assistance to the country, including in overcoming the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Executive Vice President of the European Commission Valdis Dombrovskis.

He said this after talks with Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal in Brussels on Wednesday, according to an Ukrinform correspondent.

"Ukraine is high on the European agenda and we continue to provide political, financial and technical assistance. The EU is supporting Ukraine to address the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in different ways. First, we have re-oriented several ongoing and future assistance programs, with more than EUR 190 million going to Ukraine to help meet its COVID-19-related needs. In addition, we are exploring options to help provide vaccines to Ukraine," Dombrovskis said.

According to him, as part of the COVAX program, Ukraine will receive 117,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine in February, and 2.2 to 3.7 million doses of the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine during the first half of the year. In addition, the European Commission is assisting Poland in reselling 1.2 million doses of AstraZeneca vaccine to Ukraine. The EU purchase agreements allow for reselling at no profit. The Commission is helping with contractual agreements and with transport and delivery from Poland to Ukraine through the EU Civil Protection Mechanism.

"We are looking forward to seeing the vaccination start in Ukraine this month. However, we are concerned about the impact of Russian disinformation about the vaccination process in Ukraine and are ready to assist in the fight against disinformation and vaccine skepticism," Dombrovskis added.

A Ukrainian government delegation headed by Shmyhal began a working visit to Brussels on February 9. Shmyhal has already met with European Council President Charles Michel and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. The program of the visit also includes a series of working meetings with representatives of the European Commission and the European Parliament. On February 11, Shmyhal will lead the talks in the format of the EU-Ukraine Association Council.

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Global superstars BTS will be appearing on "MTV Unplugged" later this month, becoming the first Korean act to perform on the iconic music program produced by American broadcaster MTV.







"On Feb. 23, Jin, Suga, J-Hope, RM, Jimin, V and Jungkook will bring their collective energy to an update of the storied series straight from Seoul, South Korea," MTV reported on Tuesday (U.S. time).







While the broadcaster did not elaborate on the songs that BTS will perform, it said the "special promises to bring fans a new look at the group's latest album 'BE,' which dropped in November."







In South Korea, SBS MTV said it will be airing the show at 11 a.m. on Feb. 24.







The eight-track album includes title track "Life Goes On" as well as pre-released hit "Dynamite." Both songs have topped Billboard's main singles chart, writing history as the first song mostly sung in Korean and the first song by a K-pop act to reach No. 1, respectively







The album has extended an winning streak on Billboard charts, with "Dynamite" still staying at No. 46 on the Hot 100 this week and the album ranking No. 74 on the Billboard 200.







First aired in 1989, "MTV Unplugged" is a series that shows legendary artists playing acoustic instruments, which is where the program title comes from. Notable acts that have appeared on the show include Nirvana, Eric Clapton, Sting, Oasis and Mariah Carey. (Yonhap)


Bennington, VT (05201)

Today

Cloudy with periods of rain. High around 50F. Winds ENE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 100%. Rainfall near a quarter of an inch..

Tonight

Cloudy with periods of rain. Low 44F. Winds NE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 90%. Rainfall near a half an inch.

Tripoli, Libya (PANA) - The Special Envoy of the UN Secretary-General for Libya and chief of the UN Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL), Jan Kubis, Tuesday held talks on the phone with top Libyan officials over the smooth transition to the unified interim executive authority

She transformed herself this past year, from the inside out.

Now Rebel Wilson has announced her new partnership with OLLY supplements.

In the ad campaign, Rebel, 40, put her fabulously trim waist on display as she pumped some iron in hot pink lycra leggings.

Putting in the leg work! Rebel Wilson put her trim waist on display in hot pink lycra leggings in her new campaign with OLLY supplements

The Pitch Perfect star looked deep in thought as she stood inside her vibrant gym, with a kettle bell in her hands.

Further showcasing her toned physique, Rebel wore a bright, tangerine orange crop top that displayed a hint of her bare midriff.

Rebel has worked hard to shed a whooping 70 pounds, and the results of all her hard work were on display throughout the campaign.

In a second snap, the Australian actress oozed glamour with her blonde hair styled down into loose waves and a fuchsia dress showing off some cleavage.

Toned and terrific! Wilson looked incredible in her body-hugging apparel

Taking the plunge: Wilson flashed some cleavage in a low-cut fuchsia dress

She also appeared to be sleeping like a baby as she snuggled up in her satin pajamas.

Rebel was officially announced as OLLY'S newest celebrity ambassador on Wednesday.

'I am popping OLLY's supplements all day - from when I start my morning with the Women's Multi, followed by Goodbye Stress gummies to tackle my heavy workload times, my Undeniable Beauty and Collagen Rings in the afternoon for a beauty boost, and finally the Sleep gummies at night for a good night's rest!' Rebel said in a press release announcing the partnership.

Sweet dreams: She also appeared to be sleeping like a baby as she snuggled up in her satin pajamas

'From work to work out, I love that OLLY fits perfectly into my busy lifestyle and helps me manage everything in my daily routine for happiness and health.'

The new partnership fits seamlessly with Rebel's newfound routine of wellness and fitness.

Dubbed her 'year of health', 2020 saw the actress shed an impressive 70 pounds.

'I am popping OLLY's supplements all day': Wilson's new partnership with the supplement company was announced on Wednesday

Lights, camera, action: Wilson cut a chic figure in her jade green suit

Say cheese! Rebel beamed with joy as she posed with some anti-stress supplements

She also made her red carpet debut with her boyfriend, Anheuser-Busch heir Jacob Busch, whom she has since split from.

Rebel announced she was back on the market after more than a year of dating Jacob earlier this month.

'Lots on my mind...aghhhhhh...#single-girl-heading-to-Super-Bowl!,' she captioned an Instagram post of herself posing by a trailer in a form-fitting jean dress.
The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
The chair of Stormont's Justice Committee has described the backlog of Crown Court cases in Northern Ireland as "wholly unacceptable".

His comments come after figures obtained by the Belfast Telegraph showed a 48% hike in the number awaiting trial since the first lockdown last March.

This includes 23 murder and 36 rape cases as the full effects of the pandemic on our legal system emerge.

With victims awaiting the outcomes, and defendants remanded in custody far longer than could be reasonably expected, DUP MLA Paul Givan told this newspaper that the situation must be addressed as a matter of urgency.

"Justice delayed is justice denied to the victims of crime," said the Lagan Valley representative and Justice Committee chairman.

"The Covid health situation has not stopped criminal behaviour, including the most serious crimes of murder and sexual offences.

"It is therefore imperative the court systems function effectively, but instead it is failing victims and society."

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Mr Givan said he will be meeting with the Lord Chief Justice Sir Declan Morgan to express his concerns, and will also raise the issue with Justice Minister Naomi Long.

The figures, obtained through a Freedom of Information request, relate to Crown Court defendants that have had their first hearing following a decision to prosecute by the Public Prosecution Service (PPS) and which have yet to be dealt with.

The Department of Justice has confirmed that the number of outstanding Crown Court cases has risen from 352 to 521 since the first Covid-19 lockdown.

Of those cases, 87 involve offences against the person, including murder, while 84 involve sexual offences, including rape.

Drug offences account for 54 cases awaiting trial, according to the Northern Ireland Courts and Tribunals Service.

North Antrim MLA Jim Allister, a barrister, said the "very considerable backlog" is worrying.

"It's concerning that one of the casualties of Covid is the efficient functioning of the criminal justice system since there are issues of fundamental freedoms involved as well as the importance of bringing the guilty to justice," the TVU leader said.

"Anyone who turns out to be found not guilty if they've been in custody, they will have an added sense of grievance."

But he added: "I don't think there's an easy answer to this. You can't put 12 people into small jury rooms during Covid so they have to find much larger facilities and it's going to be difficult."

A spokesperson for the Department of Justice told the Belfast Telegraph that the first lockdown "undoubtedly had an impact" on jury trials.

"Significant work was, however, undertaken by the Northern Ireland Courts and Tribunals Service (NICTS), the PPS, the Judiciary and the legal profession to ensure that courts business did not completely grind to a halt last March," the spokesperson said.

"Jury trials resumed in August, with significant adaptations made to courtrooms at Laganside, Antrim, Craigavon, Coleraine, Newry and Dungannon, and protective measures introduced to ensure jury trials could proceed safely."

The spokesperson added that a Nightingale facility at the International Convention Centre in Belfast's Waterfront Hall came into operation, with a jury empanelment session, on January 4.

The first hearing, a Coroner's Court inquest, was held within the public health guidelines on January 18.

A Northern Ireland Prison Service spokesperson said jails here have taken in thousands of new inmates since last March.

"Since the beginning of the pandemic, approximately 3,000 people have been committed to prisons by the courts," they said.

"While the pandemic continues to be challenging, our staff support people whether they are on remand or have a custodial sentence."

The statistics show that fraud and forgery offences represent 25 cases awaiting trial, while 21 account for burglary offences.

There are 179 outstanding cases for a combination of offences.

The Justice Minister told the Assembly on Monday that the criminal court case backlog has reduced to 10,500.

Mrs Long also said that prior to lockdown there were 8,000 criminal cases in the court system, which rose to 12,800.

"With the reopening of more courts there have been more cases disposed by the courts than received and consequently the caseload has reduced," she told MLAs.

"The most recent information indicates that the figure now stands at around 10,500 cases - a significant achievement given that we have been battling against the effects of Covid."
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.

Crandell and Olien bring the leadership and experience needed in the next chapter of Kindhumans. Darin will act as key spokesperson and executive advisor in his role leading health innovation through educational content, community growth and product research. Paul will lead marketing, sales and operations globally amplifying the company's giveback strategy.

Kindhumans was created to celebrate the good in humanity by elevating community, commerce and world-changing causes. Founded by wife and husband team, Suzi and Justin Wilkenfeld, Kindhumans helps foster a kinder planet for future generations through a community of people who are passionate about being kind and giving back.

"Darin and Paul bring incredible experience to the Kindhumans Movement," Justin Wilkenfeld "Paul's leadership and marketing firepower combined with Darin's health and wellness innovation will support our goals of creating an ecosystem of kindness."

Darin Olien , host of the No. 1 Health & Wellness podcast , "The Darin Olien Show," New York Times bestselling author and featured co-host on the widely popular Netflix docu-series "Down to Earth with Zac Efron," is joining Kindhumans as VP of Health Innovation. Darin's insights through his world travels, especially around the environment, have driven his passion for promoting good through health and wellness.

Crandell, one of the foremost marketing experts behind Red Bull's rise and an AdWeek Brand Genius Award Winner , scaling GoPro into a global powerhouse leading marketing during the company's rocketship growth period helping take them public, going from $60 million in revenue to over $1 billion.

"My new mission in life is to be part of something which gives back, bringing together my amazing network of talented people who are passionate about promoting kindness," Crandell said of his new role.

At Kindhumans, Crandell is reconnecting with fellow GoPro alums like Lonie Paxton, three-time Super Bowl Champion and Kindhumans co-founder Justin Wilkenfeld, as well as olympian Elena Hight, scaling the company's growing product line of 1% for the Planet and Climate Neutral products, cultivating kindness, promoting conscious consumption and giving back to causes supporting children, the planet and humanitarian aid.

SOURCE Kindhumans
In the impeachment trial of former US President Donald Trump, Warren Hastings, the 18th Century British Governor-General of Bengal, made an appearance when the prosecutors cited his impeachment by the British House of Commons after he had left office as a precedent for Trump.

During the arguments on February 9 on the constitutionality of holding the impeachment trial of Trump when he has already left office, Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin, the House Democrats' impeachment manager, brought up the impeachment of Hastings, reported The Wall Street Journal.

The Founding Fathers knew about this precedent while they were writing the US Constitution and understood that impeachment trials could take place after the accused left office, said the report quoting Raskin.

"The framers knew all about it, and they strongly supported the impeachment. In fact, the Hastings case was invoked at the convention," Ruskin said.

In 1786, impeachment proceedings were initiated against Hastings after he left office, probing his alleged mismanagement, mistreatment of natives, and personal corruption during his stay in India. However, he was ultimately acquitted by the House of Lords in 1795, and the impeachment failed.

On February 9, six Republican Senators joined their Democratic colleagues in the United States Senate to vote that the impeachment trial of Trump is constitutional.

The Senate confirmed the constitutionality of Trump's impeachment trial by 56-44 votes following presentation from both sides -- House impeachment managers and lawyers representing the former president -- paving the way for the historic impeachment trial of the 45th President of the United States who left office on January 20.

From February 10 onwards, each of the two sides -- the House impeachment managers and Trump lawyers -- would have up to 16 hours to present their case before the 100-member Senate for them to vote on the impeachment of Trump days later.

As six Republicans supported the Democrats in their effort to impeach Trump on February 9. Now they need the support of at least another 11 Republicans to do that. Given the current situation that seems to be unlikely, political analysts said, noting that the entire process is most likely to end up in the acquittal of the former president.
The MoS Home said the Socio Economic and Caste Census -2011 data excluding the caste data has been finalised and published by the MoRD and HUPA

New Delhi: The raw data of the Socio Economic and Caste Census (SECC) conducted in 2011 has been handed over to the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment for classification and categorisation, the Rajya Sabha was informed on Wednesday.

Union Minister of State for Home Nityanand Rai said the SECC was carried out by the Ministry of Rural Development (MoRD) and the then Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation (HUPA) in rural and urban areas respectively.

Rai said the SECC-2011 data excluding the caste data has been finalised and published by MoRD and HUPA and the Registrar General, India had provided logistics and technical support in conducting the SECC-2011.

The raw caste data has been handed over to the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment for classification and categorisation, he said in a written reply to a question.

The minister said in the census, the castes and tribes which are specifically notified as Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes as per the President Order under the Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order 1950 and the Constitution (Scheduled Tribes) Order 1950, are enumerated.
Publishing: Estonian MEP Andrus Ansip said the Australian approach may help level the playing field. Photo: Krisztian Bocsi/Bloomberg

An EU fight over regulation of Big Tech threatens to put Ireland in a tight spot.

Some MEPs are looking to beef up draft rules to make companies like Google and Facebook pay publishers for news stories, following an Australian move that saw Google threaten to pull out of the country.

But Fine Gael MEP Deirdre Clune indicated her group would not seek to toughen the requirements, which were published by the European Commission last December.

We want to see  in terms of Big Tech  more accountability, that they will create a situation whereby European companies can flourish as well, she said on Tuesday.

We will be dealing with the proposals from the Commission as they are.

Under the new rules, it would be up to EU competition and digital chief Margrethe Vestager to supervise the largest tech companies, and not the Data Protection Commission.

The EUs plan is to set up an over-arching regime to counter the market dominance of online platforms, which would replace a 20-year-old e-commerce law.

Separate copyright rules, due to take effect this summer, already make platforms liable for content and give publishers the option to negotiate licensing deals with tech firms.

Estonian liberal MEP Andrus Ansip  a former commissioner  and Maltese Labour Party MEP Alex Agius Saliba told the Financial Times this week that the Australian approach to charging for news could help level the playing field between publishers and platforms.

MEPs have yet to debate the Commissions drafts, and will have to battle it out with national governments to reach a common position.

The EUs proposed new regime would give users more power to flag illegal content and force platforms to reveal how they moderate content and target ads.

There would also be extra restrictions on how gatekeeper companies like Google and Facebook use data and control access to other websites.

Gatekeeper companies that dont comply could face fines of up to 10pc of global turnover or be required to sell off parts of their company.

Ireland is the number one destination in Europe for US tech firms.

The industry employs over 37,000 people and generates 35bn in exports annually, according to IDA Ireland.

Social Development Minister Lindiwe Zulu has kick-started compliance and monitoring visits to the Western Cape as part of the build up to the State of the Nation Address (SONA) on Thursday.

Zulu is starting her three-day outreach programme today with a visit to the Saartjie Baartman Centre for Women and Children in Manenberg where she is expected to interact with the leadership of the local community.

Gender-Based Violence and Femicide (GBVF) forms part of the Department of Social Development's core function and given that the scourge of Gender-Based Violence (GBV) has increased, there is a public outcry for government to take decisive measures to end GBVF in all its forms.

Given the country's GBVF challenge, the Minister will also interact with staff at the Saartjie Baartman Centre for Women and Children as well as GBV survivors on issues impacting on their lives.

The Minister will also hand over a cheque for GBV survivor empowerment services.

Zulu will also revisit the South African Social Security Agency (SASSA) Bellville local office, where she will interact with social grant beneficiaries and applicants. She will also check on service delivery improvement, and progress on implementation of the Ten-Point Plan.

On Thursday, the Minister will conduct a site visit in the Mfuleni District to interact with staff members of Gwebsa - a National Development Agency (NDA) supported project and NDA volunteers.

To address measures of ensuring safety and protection of human rights for older persons who were evicted by the Cape Peninsula Organisation for the Aged, the Minister and Western Cape MEC for Social Development, Sharna Fernandez, will on Friday engage with older persons on issues impact them directly, on their daily lives.

A Georgia prosecutor said Wednesday that she has opened a criminal investigation into attempts to influence last years general election, including a call in which President Donald Trump asked a top official to find enough votes to overturn Joe Bidens victory in the state.

In a Jan. 2 telephone conversation with Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Trump repeatedly argued that Raffensperger could change the certified results of the presidential election, an assertion the secretary of state firmly rejected.

All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, Trump said. Because we won the state.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, a Democrat elected to the job in November, did not specifically mention Trump in the letters she sent to state officials Wednesday announcing her investigation. But the former president has been under intense criticism for the call.

Willis spokesman Jeff DiSantis told The Associated Press that while he could not name the subjects under investigation, he confirmed that Trumps call to Raffensperger was part of it and said the matters reported on over the last several weeks are the matters being investigated. In her letters, Willis also remarks that officials have no reason to believe that any Georgia official is a target of this investigation.

The letters, sent to Raffensperger, Gov. Brian Kemp, Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan and Attorney General Chris Carr, instruct the four Republican officials to preserve all records related to the election, particularly those that may contain evidence of attempts to influence elections officials.

Representatives for Raffensperger, Duncan and Carr acknowledged receiving the letters but declined to comment. Kemp spokesman Cody Hall declined to comment in a text message.

Senior Trump adviser Jason Miller decried the district attorneys announcement, saying the timing here is not accidental given todays impeachment trial.

This is simply the Democrats latest attempt to score political points by continuing their witch hunt against President Trump, and everybody sees through it, Miller said.

Nikema Williams, chair of the state Democratic Party, applauded Willis for holding Donald Trump accountable for attempting to influence our elections and throw out the votes of Georgia voters.

Lets be clear  we know Trump and his cronies attacks on our elections were the direct result of Black and brown voters making their voices heard, Williams said in a statement. Now, it is the responsibility of every leader of this state, regardless of party, to put protecting the rights of Georgia voters above letting Donald Trump get away with his crimes.

David Shafer, chair of the state Republican Party, did not immediately respond to a text or phone call seeking comment.

Noah Bookbinder, the executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said the watchdog group last month sent a criminal complaint to Willis office outlining laws that it said Trump appeared to have broken on his call with Raffensperger. The group asked Willis to begin a criminal investigation.

Trumps conduct violates not only the law, but the foundation on which our democracy is built, Bookbinder wrote in an emailed statement. He may have been able to evade facing criminal charges as president, but he is no longer president. We applaud Fulton County District Attorney Willis for launching this investigation and showing that no one is above the law.

Willis letters note the investigation is looking into potential violations of Georgia law prohibiting the solicitation of election fraud, the making of false statements to state and local government bodies, conspiracy, racketeering, violation of oath of office and any involvement in violence or threats related to the elections administration.

The district attorney added that she will request subpoenas for the investigation in March when the next Fulton County grand jury is set to meet.

After the November general election, Trump refused to accept that Biden had beaten him. His loss by about 12,000 votes in the state, a longtime Republican stronghold, seemed especially troubling to him. He and his allies made unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud in Georgia and repeatedly insulted Raffensperger and Kemp for not taking action to overturn his loss.

State and federal officials have repeatedly said the election was secure and that there is no evidence of systemic fraud.

Prior to his call last month to Raffensperger, Trump had tried to pressure others in Georgia. While election officials were verifying signatures on absentee ballot envelopes in one metro-Atlanta county in December, Trump told a lead investigator in a phone call to find the fraud, saying it would make the investigator a national hero. Also in December, he called Kemp and tried to persuade him to order a special session of the state legislature to overturn Bidens victory.

Earlier this week, Raffenspergers office opened an administrative investigation after a third party filed a complaint alleging that Trumps call to Raffensperger violated Georgia laws.

Investigators with the secretary of states office who look into such complaints typically present their findings to the state election board, which then decides how to proceed. If the board believes theres evidence that a crime occurred, it can take action ranging from issuing a letter of reprimand to referring the case to Georgias attorney general or to a local district attorney such as Willis.
In vouching for her belief that a phased-in return to in-person learning would support racial equity, Lightfoot last week evoked her own upbringing and said the city must do the right thing for our kids in this difficult time  Black and brown kids who look like me, coming from circumstances like the one that I grew up in, who are struggling and are failing.
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The President of the Senate, Ahmad Lawan, has appealed to President Muhammadu Buhari to forward the nomination of an indigene from the Federal Capital Territory as a non-career ambassador to the upper chamber for screening and confirmation.

Mr Lawan made the appeal on Wednesday during plenary following a protest on the floor by the senator representing FCT, Philip Aduda, over the continuous exclusion of a nominee from the FCT in previous nominations forwarded by President Buhari.

Rising under Order 43 of the Senate Standing Rules, Mr Aduda said, Mr. President, Distinguished Colleagues, I did yesterday raise some issues with you, Your Excellency, about the issue of the appointment of ambassadors.

Your Excellency, Ive consistently mentioned that before now we had a non-career ambassador for the FCT.

But when the first list came, the FCT was omitted. The second list came, the FCT was omitted; and then we have another opportunity where the FCT is supposed to be represented but it has still been omitted.

Your Excellency, this gives us worry in the FCT, because it is showing that maybe it is Federal Character, or something is wrong somewhere.

Mr President, we know that the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria has the power to hire and fire, but Mr President, we urge you as our leader and Speaker of the people of the FCT, and indeed, the President, who incidentally by the Constitution  Section 299  happens to be the Governor of the FCT, that in making nominations, he should look at us and please grant us our heart desire which is to have a non-career ambassador for the FCT.

Indeed, the opportunity has come again, when some ambassadorial nominees have been submitted, and the committee will be doing its work very soon.

We want to crave the indulgence of this Senate, and it is a constitutional matter. Mr President, my Distinguished Colleagues, here I come again today with the hope that we will get support from our State House of Assembly, which is the National Assembly, and indeed the Senate with you as Chairman, to intervene in this matter and ensure that the people of the FCT have a non-career ambassador.

In his response, the Senate President, Ahmad Lawan, appealed to President Buhari to send in a nomination for the FCT in the fifth non-career ambassadors list to be forwarded to the National Assembly for screening and confirmation.

Mr Lawan said, As speaker of the FCT House of Assembly and as members of the FCT House of Assembly, we are appealing to the Executive to send the nomination of a non-career ambassadorial nominee for the FCT in the fifth and final phase.

Signed:

Ezrel TABIOWO, MBSC, Fsca

Special Assistant (Press)

to President of the Senate
The Stalinist Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) has provided another illustration of its opportunist politics on the international arena. Having issued a statement on January 24 that glorified the opposition protests in Russia, but had nothing to say about the far-right character of their leader Alexei Navalny, the CPPs chief information officer posted an amended version just over a week later. It was published on February 4 to more clearly define the nature of the Russian oppositionist Navalny and to present the challenges to the communist forces in Russia.

Not mentioned is the fact that the World Socialist Web Site posted an article in the intervening period, on January 31, drawing attention to the CPPs tacit backing for the pro-Western Navalny and the connection to its manoeuvres in the Philippines. The WSWS said the CPP supports Navalny precisely because it is lining up with sections of the ruling class most closely aligned with US imperialism, represented by Vice-President Leni Robredo and her Liberal Party.

The Philippine Maoists did an abrupt about-face. The amended version discovered that Navalny did indeed enjoy the support of some big oligarchs in Russia, as well as the open endorsement of the US government. He is, in fact, an advocate of neoliberal ideas  [and] has also promoted Russian nationalism and anti-immigrant views. At the same time, the January 24 exhortation to the Philippines masses to follow the example of the pro-Navalny protests was edited out.

Alexei Navalny [Wikimedia Commons]

It is, of course, permissible for a political party to make a principled correction. But principled politics are completely alien to the CPP and Stalinism more generally. Theirs are the methods of slander and, when that fails to intimidate, physical violence. Their character assassination of academic Joseph Scalice for meticulously documenting the CPPs support for the installation of the fascistic Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte is just one recent case in point.

No explanation, let alone an examination, of how the CPP wound up alongside Navalny, has been provided. Rather the old Stalinist method of rewriting the textbooks and burning the old ones is employed. Moreover, it is so much easier with electronic forms of communicationa tap on the keyboard and the original statement is consigned to oblivion. It is now deeply buried in the CPPs website!

More importantly, however, the new amended version of the statement is just as politically revealing as the original. The original parroted Navalnys line that the Russian masses are fed up with the corruption of the Russian bureaucrats under Putin. The new statement has discovered that working class discontent in Russia is driven by worsening social conditions and police-state repression. It also makes the discovery that the anti-Putin Russian bourgeoisie wants the Russian people to rally around Navalny.

This situation, the CPP intones, challenges the revolutionary proletarian forces to provide political leadership to the working class and people. The communists, it continues, must teach the working class to grasp the fact that their conditions are bound to further deteriorate whether Putin perpetuates his dictatorship or is replaced by another representative of the bourgeoisie. The communist forces must build their own political strength and raise their capability in mobilizing the Russian workers to march back along the path of socialist revolution.

This claptrap is nothing but r-r-revolutionary window-dressing to divert attention from its previous dalliance with Navalny. The CPP holds to none of the above talk of fighting for socialism, least of all in the Philippines where it has opportunistically engaged in promoting one bourgeois political figure after another as representing the progressive bourgeoisie. Most recently that was Duterte, who the CPP now denounces as a fascist dictator, even as it seeks ties with anotherRobredo and her Liberal Party. As a proponent of the disastrous Stalinist two-stage theory, the CPP specifically insists that Philippine workers should not march along the path of socialist revolution, but must subordinate themselves to the supposedly progressive bourgeoisie. The CPP relegates the struggle for socialism to the indefinite future.

As for Russian workers, they are left to wonder who exactly are the communists to which the CPP refers. The CPP and its founder Jose Maria Sison are devotees of Joseph Stalin and his Chinese counterpart Mao Zedong, both of whom based themselves on the reactionary nationalist ideology of Socialism in One Country, and persecuted genuine communists, above all the Trotskyists who adhered to socialist internationalism.

After the Moscow Stalinist regime dissolved the Soviet Union in 1991, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union fragmented. What all the fragments have in common is the promotion of Russian nationalism and xenophobia, a pro-capitalist agenda and sordid manoeuvring with the various factions of the Russian bourgeoisiemuch as the CPP does in the Philippines. In the 2019 Moscow Council election, for instance, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF), which defends all the crimes of Stalin, enjoyed the support of the right-wing liberal Navalny, who called on his supporters to vote smart to try to block Putins United Russia party.

It is in these foetid political waters that the CPP has been fishing. In the past, Sison has occasionally shared material from Gennady Zyuganov, general secretary of the KPRF. In 2017, the CPP also heavily promoted Irina Malenko, a leading member of a Russian-North Korean Friendship group and author of books defending Stalin that the CPP has touted. She is notorious for an anti-Semitic article published shortly after the 9/11 attacks in the US, claiming that 4,000 Jews skipped work at the World Trade Centre on that day. Pravda later pulled the article and apologised.

More fundamentally, the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union and also China is a devastating indictment of Stalinism as whole. The CPP offers no explanationor rather no Marxist explanationof events that have had terrible consequences for the working class in Russia, China and internationally. It dates capitalist restoration in Russia to the 1950sthat is, after the death of Stalinignoring the fact that the gains of the Russian Revolution, nationalised property relations and the planned economy, remained, even though disfigured by Stalinism. The CPP dates capitalist restoration in China from the death of Maoignoring the fact that Mao had laid the basis for it through his rapprochement with US imperialism in 1972, which the CPP absurdly hailed at the time as a proletarian foreign policy.

To claim that such a fundamental shift in the economic base of society can be explained simply by the death of an individual, no matter how central, has nothing to do with Marxism. In the final analysis, capitalism restoration in both the Soviet Union and China was the consequence of the economic dead-end brought about by the perspective of Socialism in One Country and the accompanying suppression of the working class and genuine Marxism, represented by the Trotskyists. These shut-in autarchic economies were completely undermined by the globalisation of production from the late 1970s. Having rejected socialist internationalism, the Stalinist bureaucracies embraced global capitalism.

The CPP has no use for Marxism, which provides the scientific basis for the working class to fight for world socialism revolution. Insofar as it demagogically mouths Marxist-sounding phrases, it is to dupe the working class and justify its ever-shifting alliances with factions of the ruling class that have always proven catastrophic for working people. The new amended edition of the CPPs statement on the pro-Navalny protests in Russia is simply another demonstration of its political bankruptcy.

Anyone serious about revolutionary Marxist politics will only find a way forward by studying the lessons of struggles against Stalinism by the Trotskyist movement, represented today by the International Committee of the Fourth International.
A group of teenagers entered NSW Parliament on Wednesday morning with a mission: to guarantee students a seat at the table when bureaucrats make education policy.

Theres no ignoring that our current system is not working for everyone, said Jadzia Wolff, from Kingscliff High School in northern NSW. There are so many students who just dont fit. School isnt for them, theyre not engaged and thats never going to change unless something is done about the way they can voice their concerns and feel supported.

Enter DOVES, the new state-wide council of NSW student representatives. Jadzia is among 13 students who have designed the new model, which will have a direct line to the Education Minister on policy matters involving students.

Students from around NSW are part of a new advisory committee to the Education Minister. Credit:Janie Barrett

The 24-person councils name is an acronym for the Department of Student Voices in Education and Schools, as well as a symbol for peace. Its members will come from across NSW and host regular forums within their own communities before taking key messages back to the state government.
The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
Tetra Pak flags up consumer dilemma

According to the latest research from Sweden-based packaging solutions provider Tetra Pak, the global food supply chain system is responsible for 26 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions; a third of all food is lost or wasted somewhere in the supply chain; fossil fuel-based materials need to be phased out; and significant improvements are needed to the way packaging is dealt with after use.

As a move aimed at tackling the food packaging industrys sustainability challenges, Tetra Pak has introduced a new collaborative innovation model with leading paperboard producers, in which the entire industry works in close collaboration. This brings together not only producers and suppliers, but also research institutions, universities, and startups in an attempt to find answers.

Its possible to make a completely sustainable package, but you have to make it safe, said Laurence Mott, executive vice president for Development and Engineering at Tetra Pak. If you cant make it at scale, you cant minimise food waste, and you cant serve a growing global population. Bringing those three things together takes very strong collaboration.

Mott also highlighted that the scale of global environmental challenges requires that actors within the value chain join forces to develop truly sustainable packaging solutions.

The Tetra Pak Index 2020 reveals the same fact. More than two-thirds (68 per cent) of consumers worldwide now believe that food safety is a major concern for society. Nevertheless, the report shows a dilemma consumers are increasingly facing when trying to balance between the environment and food safety.

According to the report, consumers greater interest in food safety and environmentally-sound solutions is reflected in their expectations of food and beverage companies. When asked what the top three issues companies should tackle now and in the future are, improving food safety was ranked highest (53 per cent of consumers agreed), closely followed by using sustainable packaging and limiting food waste.

While holding manufacturers responsible for food safety (at 55 per cent, way ahead of government), less than a quarter (23 per cent) trust in them as a provider of information on the subject. Interestingly, on-pack information rates significantly higher  rated fourth (at 42 per cent), ahead of family and friends  perhaps because it is associated with key information such as ingredients and expiry dates, which are widely relied on. This suggests that on-pack is a good medium for brands to get their transparency message across.

The expiry date is also considered a vital sign of food safety, with 67 per cent thinking that a product may be unsafe to consume once this date has passed. This has a big impact on food waste, signalling an opportunity for less confusing labelling and for brands to rise to the dual challenge of ensuring food safety while protecting the environment, via consumer education.

In addition, respondents are looking for transparency as reassurance, with 58 per cent saying they really care about how food and beverages are produced and want to know everything they can about the process. This suggests appetite for more information about production methods and especially provenance  one of the strongest drivers of consumer purchasing decisions.

The report also shows when asked what is key for them in packaging, consumers perceive the main purpose of packaging is ensuring food safety, even when compared with other factors that they rate highly  such as the sustainability-related ones. This suggests an appetite for innovative packaging solutions helping consumers to address the dilemma.

This appetite is backed up by consumer expectations about future packaging innovations. In this case, the number one choice was protecting food for longer to avoid waste and maintain nutritional value (70 per cent). Then it comes to sustainability-specific choices that they still rate very highly (at 61 per cent for no over-packaging and 59 per cent for recyclability).

Generally speaking, the changing interplay between food safety and the environment encompasses many areas, deeply influencing consumer expectations, and Tetra Pak is working with customers to realise the opportunities this new consumer mindset presents.
Japan's Emperor Naruhito and Empress Masako are planning to make online visits to three prefectures hit hard by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

Sources told NHK that the couple is making arrangements to meet people in Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima prefectures via video link later this month and next month.

The Emperor and Empress are expected to talk with Fukushima Governor Uchibori Masao next week and be briefed on the current situation of some hard-hit areas.

The couple is also expected to speak to people in the towns of Okuma and Futaba. The towns are home to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, which suffered meltdowns due to the quake and tsunami.

The couple had visited the three prefectures in the Tohoku region three times each before Emperor Naruhito ascended the throne in 2019.

Last month, the couple made an online visit to Kumamoto Prefecture, which last year was hit by torrential rains that left scores of people dead or missing.
A child rescued from its mothers womb after she was murdered Wednesday morning is now being cared for at Huntsville Hospital.

The Scottsboro Police Department says Amber Michelle Coffman, 35, of Hollywood appears to be the victim of a murder/suicide.

Coffman was eight months pregnant and taken to Highlands Medical Center in an attempt to rescue her unborn child.

Through the actions of first responders and medical staff at Highlands the child was born and then transported to Huntsville Hospital for further care, police said.

Scottsboro Fire Chief Gene Necklaus explained that when they arrived paramedics and firefighters were able to perform CPR on Coffman in an effort to keep blood flowing to save the baby.

Coffman was then taken to Highlands Medical where the less than 4 pound baby was born.

Police said they got a call about 6:15 a.m. Wednesday about a suspicious vehicle stopped in the roadway at Maple Avenue and N. Houston Street.

Officers arrived on scene and discovered that both occupants of the vehicle appeared to have suffered fatal gunshot wounds and were deceased, police said.

Owen Deangelo Williamson, 33, of Hollywood has been identified as the suspect in the murder who then killed himself, police said.

The motive is unknown, and the investigation is ongoing, according to police.

People who live nearby explained to WAAY31 that the shooting is within walking distance of many loved ones of the victim and suspect. They say the area is a tight-knit community.
A Honduran family who fled gang threats in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic are pictured at a shelter in Guatemala.  UNHCR/Luis Sanchez Valverth

GUATEMALA CITY  UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, welcomes the establishment of a new asylum unit in Guatemala which will have expanded capacity to receive, process and adjudicate asylum claims in the country.

This is a crucial step in the right direction, that will better protect refugees and ensure a safer, humane and more efficient path to safety, said Jose Samaniego, UNHCR Regional Director for the Americas.

We are committed to strengthening the asylum system in our country; it is a challenge that we know will require a lot of effort, time, financial resources and shared responsibilities, said Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei.

Guatemala, one of the three countries of the North of Central America, is a country of origin, transit and asylum for people forced to flee their homes. In 2020, a total of 487 people applied for refugee status in the country, an 85 percent increase from 2018.

Most asylum seekers are from Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua. This is a trend expected to continue in the coming years, as people in Central America continue to be forcibly displaced by violence and persecution.

UNHCR welcomed, this week, the recently announced termination of the bilateral accords between the governments of the United States and Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador known as Asylum Cooperation Agreements (ACA). While UNHCR was never a party to those agreements or was involved in their implementation, it expressed to respective governments the protection risks they posed as well as the possibility of chain refoulement.

Guatemala is making significant effort to welcome those who need international protection by boosting its capacity to process asylum claims despite the challenges it faces, including those related to the impact of recent devastating storms and COVID-19.

The new Refugee Status Recognition Department of Guatemalas Migration Institute (IGM), will be staffed with psychologists, social workers and lawyers, attending to the needs of asylum seekers and will process their claims.

UNHCR contributed to the establishment of this facility, providing technology and equipment, supported through financial contributions from the government of the United States.

The initiative is part of Guatemalas commitments as part of the Comprehensive Regional Framework for Protection and Solutions (MIRPS), after several years of joint work in the creation protection spaces for refugees who arrive in the country.

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KYODO NEWS - Feb 11, 2021 - 10:35 | All, Japan

Japan and the United States "strongly condemn" Myanmar's escalation of police force against those protesting last week's military coup, and demand that local authorities stop the violence against civilians, the Foreign Ministry said Thursday.

During a phone call, Japanese Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi and his U.S. counterpart Antony Blinken also expressed concern over "increased Chinese assertiveness" around the Japan-administered Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea following Beijing's enactment of a new coast guard law, according to the U.S. State Department.

Earlier this month, China put into effect legislation that explicitly allows its coast guard to use weapons against foreign ships that it sees as illegally entering its waters.

Blinken reaffirmed the U.S. position that the Senkakus, which China calls Diaoyu, fall under the scope of a security treaty between the two countries, meaning Washington will defend Tokyo's interests in the event of an armed attack against the uninhabited islets.

Motegi and Blinken also agreed to steadily beef up cooperation among four Indo-Pacific democracies known as the Quad -- Japan, the United States, Australia and India -- and to work toward realizing a "free and open" region amid China's growing clout, according to the ministry and the department.

The talks between the top diplomats were the second in less than a month. Their first call took place just hours after Blinken won Senate confirmation to become secretary of state on Jan. 26.

The latest exchange also came amid continuing protests in Myanmar against the military coup with protestors defying a ban on large gatherings to take to the streets. A woman struck in head on Tuesday when police fired warning shots and rubber bullets in the capital Naypyitaw remains in critical condition.

According to the Japanese ministry, Motegi and Blinken expressed grave concern over the situation in Myanmar and agreed to strongly urge the Myanmar military to release civilian leaders, including Aung San Suu Kyi and others who have been detained since the Feb. 1 coup.

"We will continue to closely cooperate" on the issue, the ministry said in a press release.

Hours after the phone call, U.S. President Joe Biden announced plans to sanction Myanmar military leaders behind the coup.

It is unclear whether the Japanese government will follow suit and impose sanctions on the Southeast Asian nation. Tokyo has so far maintained a cautious stance, partly due to concern that isolating Myanmar could push the country further toward dependence on China.

U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price emphasized that Washington wants to make sure U.S. efforts on the Myanmar issue are known to its partners in the Indo-Pacific region and "to the extent possible calibrated with them."

"Working with our closest partners, our like-minded partners around the world, we can have the most impact, we can impose the most substantial costs on those who are responsible for this coup," he said at a press conference Wednesday.


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From the case studies examined, what have been achieved and what is on track to be achieved, very soon Nigerian youths will be the leaders of today, not tomorrow, in conformity with global best practices and trends.

A Tomorrow that Was Used Up Yesterday?

There is a hackneyed, even if eternally true, aphorism that proclaims the youths as the leaders of tomorrow. This ordinarily ought to brook no contradiction, in the contemplation of reality as governed by the natural laws of succession, in which one generation plays out its role and yields the stage for another, as a way of advancing the course of the human experience. Well, maybe not as much in Nigeria. Here, there appears the notion of a divine right to leadership, which transcends the categories of time, and persists among a coterie, a chosen breed, even in the face of changing norms and times.

Questions around leadership, the provenance of those able to aspire to, attain and exercise it, have captured some of the most vexing and disturbing concerns in Nigeria today, as it did in recent decades. Yet, could there really be a divine right to leadership, which has fossilised, and remains the same through time, despite the changing nature of society, its needs and demographic constitution? Or maybe there is a different force-field driving this notion of leadership, which has a class character or relates to some sort of elite consensus? How much of this could be said to have defined and restricted the participation, and then representation, of youths in governance in Nigeria, while also inspiring various acts of resistance to this status quo?

Perhaps a fair insight into what impels youth angst in relation to politics and political participation in present-day Nigeria can be summed up in an anecdote that was once popular in the countrys social media space. Without the following being the exact words, it went  in paraphrase  somewhat like this: They say the youths are the leaders of tomorrow, yet when I was born, General Muhammadu Buhari was the president of Nigeria. Now, 35 years after, he is still the president; and so have many in his generation been  they were in leadership yesterday, are there today, and are also likely to remain there in the future; as such, how much of a tomorrow, as leaders, do the Nigerian youths really have? Could this be a tomorrow that was used up yesterday?

While the steady progression of time is, no doubt, about to ease out a generation that has clung tightly to political power since the dawn of Independence from British colonial rule in 1960, and occasioned various manifestation of distortions, culminating in a civil war and break out cycles of authoritarian rule, there is now greater evidence that the playbook of political power and participation can no longer remain the same.

If anything, it is clear that the youths of Nigeria are intent on no longer being bystanders in the fare of governance and how their country is being run, particularly within the purview of the sustained failing of an older citizenry or power elite that has been described as a Wasted Generation (Soyinka: 1986). Contrary to the earlier aphorism, the youths no longer want to be leaders of tomorrow, but those of today.

The recent expressions of youth discontent through public dissent, as exemplified in the #EndSARS protests of 2020, also loosely connected to a previous, yet highly structured rally towards political advantage, evident in the #NotTooYoungToRun campaign, offer striking instances of the more recent political determination of the youths to take their engagement with Nigeria more seriously.

Who Are the Youths?

Before setting out on this enquiry, it would the necessary to offer some clarifications on the primary concept of the study. This pertains to the notion of youth; and hence, what could be described as constitutive of the band of demography regarded as the youth, and more specifically, the Nigerian Youth?

Across the slew of usage, it is obvious that the concept of youth is defined within the frame of differing sociological perspectives, which could also depend on cultural contexts. For instance, in some African cultures, one would remain a youth until one is married and/or has a paid job to meet personal and extended family responsibilities, or is able to move out of the family house (YIAGA Africa, 2019b).

However, in terms of more formal institutional definitions, for the purposes of regional and national policy-making and planning, a more age-based definition have been considered, for the statistical delineation of demography, even if these are at times overlapping. For the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), youths are those within the ages of 15 and 35, as likewise recognised in the African Youth Charter; while the United Nations considers the youth as people in the age band of 15 to 24, although the UN equally gives allowance for national contexts to guide the definition of those within this category. In Nigeria, the National Youth Policy of 2009 defines the youth as those between the ages of 18 and 35 years.

Further to this, the notion of youth could also be inclusively or exclusively defined, particularly across national lines, with the inclusive outlook accounting for all residents within the delineated demography, whilst the exclusive definition considers only the citizens of a country. In this regard, it has been observed (YIAGA Africa, 2019b) that Kenya and South Africa offer inclusive definitions of youth, whereas the youth mapping done by Nigeria and Sierra Leone relates essentially to citizens.

In the noted regards, the South African youth policy sees the youth as young people falling within the age group of 14 to 3 years, and for Kenya, they are persons resident in Kenya in the age bracket of 15 to 30 years. On the more restrained side, the Nigerian youths are Young males and females aged 18-35 years, who are citizens of the Republic of Nigeria, while for Sierra Leone, the youths are Sierra Leonean males and females between the ages of 15 and 35.

However, for the purpose of this lecture, the notion of youths will appeal to the outline offered by the National Youth Policy of 2009 as young people within the ages of 18 and 35.

A Demography On the March

Youths have constituted the most significant subcategory of growth in the Nigerian demography, since the early decades of the twentieth century. They have consistently accounted for over 40 per cent of the entire population (Statista), which points to one of the largest youth bulges in the world, in relation to other segments of the general population.

In Nigeria, these swelling numbers ought to be a source of huge demographic dividend, from the productivity capable of being unleashed by a greater youth population engaged in economic activities, growing the countrys gross domestic product (GDP), and enhancing human development as a whole. Yet, conversely, the rise of unfortunate anti-social behaviours and adverse manifestations from the increasing activities of youths has shown that this demographic bulge could not necessarily be an essential asset to society (Omoju and Abraham, 2014).

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The population of youths in Nigeria has been growing in leaps in the past decades on the back of high fertility rates, poor family planning choices, and lowering death rates. The country has one of the highest average birth rates in the world, ranking tenth in this regard between 2010 and 2015.

Nigeria is the seventh most populous country on earth, and with an estimated population of over 200 million people that is still growing at a rate close to 3 per cent per annum, the countrys population is primed to double and reach over 400 million by 2050, which is barely 30 years away.

Rather disconcertingly, with the national economy having been also growing, more or less, at about 3 per cent, prior to the advent of the global coronavirus pandemic that has accentuated the fast unravelling of the Nigerian economy, whatever gain could have been made on the fiscal front, was easily undermined by the unbridled surge of the population.

Now, with the countrys economic outlook still making faltering steps out of a negative growth territory, towards projections oscillating around a 1 per cent (IMF, 2020; World Bank, 2021) growth for the next one to two years, this speaks in grimmer accents about national prospects, particularly within the purview of the onward march of the population.

How can this be resolved? It leads back to the central notion that politics is fate, as the nature of politics determines the trajectory of human development  how society is governed, and how public resources are allocated in efficient manners that guarantee progress, and meet the needs of demographics such as youths, while equally promoting inclusion in access

The earlier population outlay is equally noted to have grown disproportionately between the urban and rural centres in the past 50 years, with the urban population attaining an average annual growth rate of 6.5 per cent, resulting from expanding infrastructural development, and the increasing liveability of Nigerian cities (Duruiheoma, 2005).

Despite its potentials, the youth demography in Nigeria, as in many parts of Africa, presents a most potent cause for worry, when considered in terms of an environment in which the population  essentially a swelling young one  is experiencing an upsurge that outstrips the rate of economic growth, as outlined above.

This view is complicated by the obvious deficiencies in which Nigeria tends to manage these dual growths, as the economy remains in deep woods with the bottoming out of the price of oil  the countrys main foreign revenue earner, which impacts massively on the size of the reserves that sustain Nigerias import-dependent economy. And, as the much-touted strides towards diversification from a mono-product economy, projected as spurring enormous growth for increased social provisioning, remains largely in the realm of rhetoric.

Equally, national investments in the wellbeing of the public, especially that of the expanding youth bulge, whether on the level of healthcare, education or nutrition, alongside other social safety nets, have been grossly inadequate. Education is essentially linked to the development of capacities for employment and the attainment of meaningful and decent livelihoods. Yet, the paucities in robust national training opportunities that have tallied up in the cumulative underemployment, or even non-employability of the youths, can only bode ill for the society.

This is more disturbing as we live in an era defined by great change and the disruption of everything that has been normative, hence the lack of requisite education for the attainment of future-ready capabilities sets the stage for some of the great conflicts of the future, which will emanate from huge scarcities and the unmet needs of the youths. These will be conflicts derived from deficits in productivity, having the lack of material provisioning for human sustainability as the unfortunate fallout.

How can this be resolved? It leads back to the central notion that politics is fate, as the nature of politics determines the trajectory of human development  how society is governed, and how public resources are allocated in efficient manners that guarantee progress, and meet the needs of demographics such as youths, while equally promoting inclusion in access  of the female, alongside different social groups like the elderly, the disabled, and others.

Youths and Political Participation In Nigeria

It accedes to barely any contestation that youths have played important and significant roles in the social and political organisations of society across the various nationalities and groups in Nigeria, from the historic to more recent times. These roles have straddled the pre-colonial to colonial and post-colonial periods, with continuities and variations to different extents.

The various indigenous systems of governance in place through traditional institutions, while differently constructed from the more modern constitutionally recognised governmental structures, were principally utilised in the administration of people in earlier times (Akinrinde and Omitola; 2020).

These created and allowed for salient roles for the youths who, in such a representative sample as the Hausa society, performed these according to the determination of systems of authority at the ward, district and emirate levels (for instance, under the Mai Gida). Similar roles were carried out through different age grade associations and the general assemblies in Igbo communities, and through the Egbe Odo or youth wings in the Yoruba system (ibid; 2020).

In the succeeding colonial period, much of the nationalism informing the campaigns and struggles of a range of actors and institutions against imperialism, and towards decolonisation, found expression in the activities of youths. These, in turn, led to the rally of youths, which dovetailed into political mobilisation and organisation, the formation of movements, and thereafter the quest for political power in the newly independent country.

Some of the youth movements formed leveraged on the political insights availed to African youths who had gone to seek the Golden Fleece in a place like England, who then came together to establish an omnibus West African Students Union (WASU) in August 1925. This Union, which catered for students from countries across the subregion, and sensitised them about the ills of imperialism, while serving as a pressure group for the protection of their interests, had in its membership such notable Nigerians as Herbert Macaulay and Julius Ojo-Cole, alongside the Ghanian, J.B. Danquah.



WASU subsequently succumbed to the forces of attrition and dispersal, yielding to the formation of other groups such as the Gold Coast Youth Conference in Ghana and the Nigerian Youth Movement (NYM) in Lagos.

As possibly the most prominent youth group of its time responding to anti-colonial nationalism, the NYM was founded in 1934, and had as leading lights the likes of Samuel Akinsanya, Eyo Ita, Adeyemo Alakija, and Kofo Abayomi, who was once its president. Also, Ernest Ikoli, who became its vice president; and H.O. Davies, its secretary. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Obafemi Awolowo and Samuel Ladoke Akintola, were also members of the NYM at overlapping points.

While it had as crucial to its objective the fostering of political advancement and enhancement of the social and economic wellbeing of Nigerians, it was equally reputed as being a multi-ethnic group that had a highly national outlook.

As it transmuted into a political party that contested the 1938 elections into the Lagos Town Council, upsetting the dominance of Herbert Macaulays National Democratic Party in that election, the NYM served as forerunner for the emergence of other youth movements into political parties in the country. These included the National Council for Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC) in 1944; the Action Group (AG) in 1950; the Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU) in 1950; and the Northern Peoples Congress (NPC) in 1949.

As such, most of the pre-Independence political parties engaging the likes of Anthony Enahoro, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, Obafemi Awolowo, and Ahmadu Bello, were all previously youth movements involved in the anti-colonial struggle. And those mentioned, alongside many others, were youths who played pivotal roles in the emergence of what became independent Nigeria. As an instance, Anthony Enahoro was only 30 when he moved a motion for the independence of Nigeria in 1953.

Also, Aminu Kano was 30 when he founded NEPU, like Isaac Adaka Boro, who was in his late 20s when he formed the Niger Delta Volunteer Force to fight for the right of his people in the 1966.

Since the advent of Independence, youths within the political and governance space have had fairly complex, if not contradictory, roles that were both progressive and less than fortunate. They occupied both a messianic and destructive continuum.

The youths took over government from the colonial powers, and not only did they drive huge national advancement, in terms of human and infrastructural development, it was equally a youth, aged 29, Major Kaduna Nzeogwu, who led the first military coup on January 15, 1966. This became construed across a section of the country as some form of ethnic cleansing of Northern leaders, thereby setting loose the tide of recriminations that motivated the counter-coup of July 1966. This accentuated the slippery slide of Nigerian politics into the ethnic cauldron.

Moreover, the commercialisation of politics, which is now regarded as a business with anticipated returns and no longer primarily about public service, has put the political selection process at the discretion of merchants of power, the godfathers, who wield near absolute control over political party machineries and processes.

It was also youths who initially led the transition from civilian to military rule, in the coup immediately following the actions of Nzeogwu and his cohorts in January 1966. Power had then temporarily come into the hands of General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi, till the July of that year.

Emergent upon the counter-coup of July 1966, it was a Nigerian youth, Major General Yakubu Gowon, in his early 30s, who became the Head of State, and led the country through a three-year civil war with the forces of the Republic of Biafra. Equally, governments headed by the youthful Generals, Murtala Mohammed and Olusegun Obasanjo, had emphasised the uniqueness and greatness of Nigeria on the international scene.

In this period, many youths were more so in the frontlines of radical politics in the country, through the students union movement across many of Nigerias tertiary education institutions. Whereas the era of activism of Nigerian students had commenced in 1956, with the founding of the National Union of Nigerian Students (NUNS), which also came after the unraveling of the West Africa Students Union (WASU), the unprecedented activist role of NUNS in the Ali-Must-Go protests of 1978, its subsequent banishment, and the setting up of the successor National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS), positioned the countrys youths in the vanguard of progressive social action.

Yet, it was during the Second Republic, starting in 1979, that the frontline public roles of youths began to diminish, as the era of sit-tight leaders, who ironically arose to power in the First Republic as youths, began. Thereafter, youths were consigned to youth wings of political parties (Amzat and Abdullahi, 2016).

From then, the roles of Nigerian youths transformed into those of tools in the hands of the political elite, who have been using them as thugs and enforcers during violent electoral campaigns, and as agents of destabilisation through political violence, etc., ever since. Similarly, due to the angst that has surrounded the existence of many youths due to numerous failings of the state, they have also been associated with restiveness in areas such as the Niger Delta, and the South-East, whilst further distorted into the constructs of area boys, agberos, the Yan Daba in other zones of the country. It has been pointed out that, essentially, it was the deployment of youths as vectors of violence that led to the termination of the First and Second Republics (Amzat and Abdullahi, 2016).

Despite the foregoing, some of the noblest roles played by Nigerian youths were those in the trenches as pushback against authoritarian military rule and the siege to freedom and human rights, during the years of the locust. From the activities of youth activists in the students union movement, civil society and professional groups, the media, etc., the Nigerian youths positioned themselves as a durable bulwark against oppression, in spite of the numerous consequences they bore for this.

Factors Limiting the Political Participation of Youths

While youths have been observed as being the dominant demography in the Nigerian electoral process, constituting over 50 per cent of registered voters in the country (YIAGA Africa, 2018), and being highly instrumental to political change, nevertheless various factors have restricted their political participation in the past decades.

Besides being a sizeable voting bloc, they are still largely precluded from participating directly in the decision-making processes that comes with political representation. They are the voters who the system in place does not allow to be voted for, due to various restrictions they have encountered, from legal and political structures. In addition, they are excluded as significant beneficiaries of political decision-making, as their concerns are never the primary considerations of the political elite, after being voted into power.

The marginalisation and limited political participation of the Nigerian youth is evident in the facts that since the return of democracy to the country in 1999, referred to as the beginning of the Fourth Republic, the cabinets at the federal level have not been youth-friendly. Most of the members of the Federal Executive Councils have been older politicians, who had served in government in one form or another since the 1970s. The average age in the cabinets has been 50, with other members being in their 60s, and some in their 70s. Also, it has been noted that from 1999 to 2016, no Minister for Youth has been a youth (Amzat and Abdullahi, 2016).

In spite of having a National Youth Policy that lays out a very bold vision for harnessing the potentials of youths, and signposts how strategy could be built for empowering the demography to make far-reaching contributions to national development, yet no concrete role has been designed for youths to attain political power.

A number of the key factors hindering the political participation of youths have included poverty, resulting from the failure of the state to attend to the welfare of the people, which is the primary purpose of government. As such, the lack of adequate social provisioning for education, health and decent housing has put the youth at the disadvantage of being fundamentally distracted by existential issues.

However, when programmes and schemes are put together to tackle poverty, the persistence of corruption detracts these programmes from working optimally in achieving their desired objectives.

Linked to poverty is the unfortunate situation of youth unemployment, seeing many lacking access to the opportunities for providing meaningfully for themselves, and those who depend on them. As much as many youths are not trained enough to have skills that make them employable, others are yet routinely offloaded from tertiary institutions into non-existent labour markets, which were destroyed by the poor economic policies of government. This has served as basis for many in the political elite to consider youths as only being suitable for roles as political enforcers, purveyors of violence and other nefarious purposes.

Moreover, the commercialisation of politics, which is now regarded as a business with anticipated returns and no longer primarily about public service, has put the political selection process at the discretion of merchants of power, the godfathers, who wield near absolute control over political party machineries and processes. This has been an enduring form of restriction, requiring aspirants to tow the line of approval of these godfathers, as the main route to endorsement and political participation.

There are also the eligibility restrictions preventing youths from participation in the countrys political processes. In Nigeria, this had basically been viewed by a section of the youths in the form of the limitations for seeking political office on the basis of the age criterion. Before the amendment of the Nigerian constitution in 2018, the age requirement for those vying for the office of the President was 40 years; that of governor was 40 years; senator, 40 years; membership of the federal House of Representatives, 30 years; and the state Houses of Assembly, 30 years.

The contention here was that if the youths constituted the largest voting bloc in the country, and that according to the Constitution, the voting age is put at 18 years, signifying enough mental capacity and maturity for that particular decision-making, why then should the eligibility age for contesting political office be much different, appealing to a different criteria and signposting discrimination?

Essentially, as already reiterated, the youths can be a creative force championing innovation in politics and governance in society, but when they are alienated from politics and the decision-making process, they can equally be made to lend their skills and energies to illicit acts, such as electoral brigandage and violence.

At this point, I will contemplate two case studies that point to how the position of youths are impacting the political process, and what this portends for the future of Nigeria and its politics.

Crucial to the NTYTR movements argument is that youths have not only played a very significant role in the democratic development of Nigeria, but that if the Constitution recognises the age of eligibility to vote as 18 years, and then the age requirement to be voted for into elective office is 40 years, what the legal grundnorm has enabled is a partial franchise of the youths.

Not Too Young To Run and Re-negotiating Political Participation

An important case study signaling efforts being made for the reemergence of virile political participation by the youths of Nigeria, pertains to the Not Too Young To Run (NTYTR) movement and the amendment to the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999 that it inspired and attained. This has actually been prefigured in the prior section, but it would be elucidated upon presently.

The Not Too Young To Run movement is a coalition of over 100 youth and civil society groups seeking to mainstream youths into the process of electoral politics in Nigeria. Described as Nigerias largest and most successful youth movement in recent times for its highly painstaking, methodical and organised rally of political stakeholders and institutions of governance towards the attainment of its purpose, the movement considered an important entry point to renewed youth participation in electoral politics, as the cutting down of the age requirements for seeking elective offices in Nigeria, to promote greater inclusion.

Preceding 2016 when it commenced its advocacy, the age requirements for candidates to the office of the President was 40 years; for governorship, 40 years; membership of the Senate, 40 years; the federal House of Representatives, 30 years; and the state Houses of Assembly, 30 years also. For the movement, the acceptable age of candidacy allowing for better inclusion of the countrys youths in the political process and structures of decision-making, needed to be: for President, 30 years; State governor, 30 years; Senate, 30 years; the federal and state Houses of Assembly, 25 years.

Crucial to the NTYTR movements argument is that youths have not only played a very significant role in the democratic development of Nigeria, but that if the Constitution recognises the age of eligibility to vote as 18 years, and then the age requirement to be voted for into elective office is 40 years, what the legal grundnorm has enabled is a partial franchise of the youths. And this could only be discriminatory and unjust.

According to the NTYTR, greater youth participation in the electoral process is indicative of the development of the countrys democracy; and it is no longer just about serving as the basis for the electoral victory of others, but being able to participate in and win elections for themselves, and thereby having representation in structures of decision-making.

For the movement, it was about implementation of the fundamental right of political participation of Nigerias youths, who constitute more than 60 per cent of the population and 53 per cent of registered voter.

As it argued in its MEMORANDUM On A Bill seeking to Reduce the Age Qualification for Contesting Elective offices in Nigeria, which the NTYTR presented before the National Assembly:

Nigeria has one of the most youthful populations in the world with over 60% of its 170 million population as youth. According to the Inter-parliamentary Union Report on Youth Participation in National Parliament, 2016, countries with the highest youth population do not have the highest levels of youth representation; an anomaly that can be corrected through the enactment of laws that permit citizens to run for office at a younger age (2018: 1-2).

More so,

Structures of governance must be accessible to youth if they are to contribute to the development of their communities. This access is an enforcement of a right and not a privilege. It is also justifiable on the grounds that democracy thrives on the ability of citizens to enforce their rights to participate in decision-making through the expression of political aspirations and securing party candidature to run for office through democratic means (2).

In justifying the raison detre for the bill it sponsored towards its legislative engagement process at the National Assembly, NTYTR stated that:

The constitutional amendment bill if passed will address the legal challenge posed to young people seeking to run in elections thereby guaranteeing inclusion in our political process. The amendment will not only create a level-playing field for young people, it will enhance the competitiveness of electoral politics in Nigeria due to the innovative, creative, dynamism and resourcefulness that youths bring to the electoral process. Further more, the Bill will deepen intergenerational dialogue, as more youths will gain access to the political process for more adult-youth engagement and partnership (6).

The journey towards the renegotiation of the space for the wider participation of youths in the Nigerian political process, started with the sponsorship of a constitutional amendment bill in May 2016, to remove the age restriction, by YIAGA Africa, a civil society platform run by the redoubtable duo of Samson Itodo and Cynthia Mbamalu, which was subsequently expanded into a mass youth movement, the NTYTR.

After a series of lobbies across actors and stakeholders in the national and state parliaments, and a march on the NTYTR National Day of Action, the National Assembly passed the age reduction bill in July 2017. Following this, 24 out of the 36 state houses of Assembly (a requirement for constitutional amendment in Nigeria) passed the bill on February 15, 2018. By March 1 of that same year, the constitutional amendments of 34 state houses of Assembly had been transmitted to the National Assembly, for onward transmission to the President for the last final stage of the constitutional amendment. On May 31, 2018, President Muhammadu Buhari signed the bill into law. Thereafter, the movement gave rise to another campaign, the Ready to Run, which is to inspire Nigerian youths to seek elective offices, going forward.

Yet, despite having won a very crucial victory for youth inclusion through a review of one of the legal requirements for seeking office, it is clearly still morning on creation day, and not yet Uhuru for the attainment of a climate of that fully enables the participation of youth in Nigerian politics, as there are still a number of stumbling blocks ahead.

The next stage is for the struggle towards the reformation of the political party process to promote internal democracy; to make the selection processes of candidates more transparent; to reduce the impact of money on politics, and to promote independent candidature, as an option for those willing to circumvent the strictures of political parties. There have also been suggestions for youth affirmative action, that political parties should reserve 50 per cent of their tickets young people, and that electoral reform should be expedited towards reducing the costs of securing party nominations and limiting campaign expenditures, which are main ways in which youths are still excluded from the political process, despite having removed the age limitation.

#EndSARS As Metaphor of Struggle for the Future

#EndSARS was an activism that took off as a series of mass protests across the country, in response to a composite of the experiences of Nigerias young people, who had suffered brutality in the hands of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) unit of the Nigerian police.

What the #EndSARS protests have shown is the capacity of the Nigerian youths to now organise for change in society in more resilient ways. It shows that the youths will no longer stay complacent in the face of governmental abuse and dysfunction, as they are aware that change is what has to be struggled for, as it never comes around by mere wish-making or simple rhetoric.

This was a unit of the Nigeria Police Force tasked with launching undercover operations against violent crimes, including kidnapping, armed robbery, etc., but whose operatives arbitrarily resorted to using their force of coercion to profile those, mainly young people, they considered as looking unorthodox  whether in terms of the clothes, hair styles or tattoos they wore; or even the luxurious car models they drove; or the expensive phones, they used, etc.

The people held by this unit for unfounded scrutiny, usually ended up either being extorted by the Police, which ought to protect them, or in worst cases, they got physically harmed, raped or even killed. The rights group, Amnesty International had been documenting the several hundreds of cases of violation by this Police unit since 2016.

This protest against Police brutality started in 2017 as a Twitter campaign, which attracted the hashtag, #EndSARS, calling for the disbandment of the unit, due to its atrocious notoriety, and it gained enormous traction from early October 2020, spilling into protests across major cities and on social media. In addition, there were solidarity rallies for the efforts of the youths in the protests across major capitals of the world.

As the protests spread across the country, the anticipated crackdown on protesters by the security forces started, leading to arrests of many of the activists, who were locked up in Police cells in a number of states of the federation. While the protests still persisted despite these, it began to deeply affect economic activities in many urban centres, inviting the brokerage of negotiations with the #EndSARS movement by concerned citizens and civil society actors.

Issuing from this, a Charter of Demands, known as the 5-for-5, was drawn up by the movement, which if government acceded to, the protests would be terminated. The 5-points raised in the Demands were: (1.) Release of arrested protesters; (2.) Justice for victims of police brutality; (3.) Prosecution of police bad eggs; (4.) Retraining of ex-SARS members; (5.) Police salary increase.

While the government, through its negotiation team, the Presidential Panel on Police Reform, quickly consented to the demands of the youth, as a way of bringing the protests to an end, it however seemed that the youths had gone through a re-think, anchored on two primary reasons: First, the history of government dishonesty in earlier negotiations, whereby after protests are called off, the authorities either back-tracked on the agreements or never did anything to implement the understandings reached. For instance, that was the fourth time that the government was making pretenses at banning the Police unit, as this never happened in the real sense.

Secondly, having realised the potentials of the mass action embarked upon, the youths who were generally and deeply disenchanted with government, and more so the Buhari administration at this point, due to its numerous failings in creating pathways out of widespread, unemployment, hunger, immiseration, and the absence of social provisioning, embraced the #EndSARS protests further as a platform for pressing for the real address of their concerns.

Even, a section of the involved youths were already calling for a transformation of the protests into a political movement that would seek power on behalf of the youths, as others were calling for President Buhari to resign from office, for being unable to execute the mandate given him by the people. Hence, the first Charter of Demand crafted was then upped into a wider demand for good governance and public accountability.

However, the seemingly long-drawn protest now facing an indeterminate end was brought to a tragic denouement with the well-documented shootings at the Lekki Tollgate on the evening of Tuesday, October 20, when the Nigerian Army was unleashed on the protesters, leading to a bloodbath, the casualties or lack of, of which is still creating contestations between the government and many in the public and civil society.

What the #EndSARS protests have shown is the capacity of the Nigerian youths to now organise for change in society in more resilient ways. It shows that the youths will no longer stay complacent in the face of governmental abuse and dysfunction, as they are aware that change is what has to be struggled for, as it never comes around by mere wish-making or simple rhetoric.

Conclusion

The youths of the country are very clear in their understanding of the fact that politics is fate, as shown in the fairly disparate advocacies of the two cases adopted. Yet, the two show different possibilities.

On its part, the Not Too Young To Run campaign, which appears seemingly non-threatening to the system in a fundamental sense, and therefore more amenable to uptake, is appropriately hinged to a political purpose in elections and representation.

The other approach, represented by the #EndSARS protests, is more open-ended in what it is capable of achieving, even if indicative of possibilities, as long as it is not structured in a way that aligns to a political purpose that makes its objectives more attainable, beyond the expression of discontent.

The NTYTR campaign has shown the possibilities of the emergence of a new category of youth leaders and political representatives, from the act of the removal of age restriction for contesting office from our laws.

From the documentation done by YIAGA Africa (2019), following the 2019 general elections, after the age limitation amendment had been carried through in 2018, it shows that youth candidacy in those elections rose to 34.2 per cent, as against 21 per cent in 2015. Also, 13.5 per cent of the candidates vied for the Senate, and 27.4 per cent for the House of Representatives. In addition, whereas only 6.8 per cent of the members-elect in the House of Representatives were youths, 22 out of the 68 of them were beneficiaries of the NTYTR Act in the state houses of assembly.

For the lessons of the #EndSARS protests, many Nigerian youths are now keenly aware of the powers they have as a pressure group, and they appear poised to use this continuously in demanding for change  even despite the gory fallout of October 20. They have the numbers, the skills, including the technological savvy to coordinate sophisticated campaigns. The fund-raising capability exhibited during the protests shows the possibility that they can channel into politics to overcome traditional limitations. While the leaderless nature of #EndSARS protests might have been problematic for some, it equally points at some political sophistication. However, as mentioned, its gains will still be limited when not aligned to a structured political purpose.

From the case studies examined, what have been achieved and what is on track to be achieved, very soon Nigerian youths will be the leaders of today, not tomorrow, in conformity with global best practices and trends.

Bibliography

Afolayan M.S., Youth Participation In Nigeria: Legality, Trends, Dilemmas and Opportunities. In Journal of Law, Policy and Globalization, Vol. 80 (2018). Akinrinde O.O. and Omitola B., The Nigerian Political Culture and Youths P articipation in Grassroots Politics:: A Theoretical Discourse. Downloaded from ResearchGate. Akinyemi A.I. and Isiugo-Abanihe U., Demographic dynamics and development in Nigeria: Issues and Perspectives. In African Population Studies, Vol. 27, 2 Supp (Mar 2014) Amzat J. and Abdullahi A.A., Youth and Political Change in Nigeria: Historical Note and Critical Discourse. In AFFRIKA: Journal of Politics, Economics and Society, Vol. 6, 2, (December 2016) Central Intelligence Agency, The World FactbooK: Nigeria, accessed at: https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/nigeria/ Ibezim E.A.C, The Philosophy of Youth Inclusion in Nigerian Politics: Trend, Challenges and Prospect. In Journal of Religion and Human Relations, Vol. 11, No. 1 (2019). NotTooYoungToRun Movement, MEMORANDUM On A Bill seeking to Reduce the Age Qualification for Contesting Elective offices in Nigeria (2017). NotTooYoungToRun Movement, The Passage, (2018). Omoju E.O. and Abraham T.W, Youth bulge and demographidulc dividend in Nigeria. In African Population Studies, Vol. 27, 2 Sup (March 2014) Soyinka, Wole, A Wasted Generation, (1986). Wikipedia, Demographics of Nigeria. Accessed at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Nigeria YIAGA Africa, How Youth Fared In the 2019 Elections. Accessed at: https://www.yiaga.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/How-youth-fared-in-2019-elections.pdf (2019a). YIAGA Africa, Factsheet on Youths and the 2019 Elections In Nigeria. Accessed at: https://www.yiaga.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Factsheet-on-youth-and-the-2019-elections-in-Nigeria.pdf (2019b)

Ololade Bamidele is Secretary of the Editorial Board of PREMIUM TIMES.

This is the text of the lecture presented to the University of Texas at Austin on Tuesday, February 9, 2021.
Rockfire Resources PLC - Australia-focused gold and base metal exploration company - Announces identification of gold-in-soil anomaly from soil sampling at the Jeddah gold prospect in Queensland, Australia.

The anomaly in question covers an area of 250 metres east-west by 150 metres north-south, and is defined by a low-order zone of 10 parts per billion of gold, with a peak value of 62 ppb.

"Our exploration work continues to generate and upgrade our exploration targets within the Lighthouse tenement. As more exploration is completed, our team assigns a priority ranking to our numerous prospects, enabling efficient and cost-effective exploration. Being so close to Plateau, Jeddah provides an excellent prospect, particularly as epithermal textures in quartz veins have been mapped," said Chief Executive Officer David Price.

Current stock price: 1.20 pence, down 9.4% on Wednesday

Year-to-date change: up 29%

By Dayo Laniyan; dayolaniyan@alliancenews.com

Copyright 2021 Alliance News Limited. All Rights Reserved.
The Vodafone Ghana Foundation in conjunction with the Vodafone Business Unit has donated 200 brand new laptops to the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) to aid in the institutionalization of blended teaching and learning methods across the school.



The donation forms part of a number of philanthropic activities designed to kick-off the Foundations new staff volunteering initiative dubbed Kindred Month which takes place throughout the month of February. It further underscores Vodafone Ghanas dedication to the development of science and technology across the country through innovative interventions and partnerships that also bolster governments national digitalization agenda.



Speaking at the handing-over ceremony, the Vodafone Business Director, Tawa Bolarin, said the donation seeks to democratize access to critical learning tools in an increasingly digital world thereby empowering students to achieve excellence. She reiterated that this has become particularly imperative amid the on-raging COVID-19 pandemic which has necessitated that institutions of learning rethink and restructure their approach to tuition with an emphasis on virtual or contactless class sessions powered by digital platforms.



The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has brought to the fore the reality that in this era, technology has now become an inextricable part of our daily existence and a critical facilitator of progress and success across all sectors and disciplines including education.



In embracing this new normal, however, it is absolutely imperative that we ensure equity of access to the basic digital tools and enablers that will ensure that nobody is left out in the quest for pursuing progress and excellence. It is for this reason that we are here today, subsequent to prior discussions with management of this prestigious University to donate these 200 laptops to ensure everyone is part of the digitalization agenda. As agreed, we believe that the needy students who would benefit from this initiative will be inspired and empowered to achieve greater heights of excellence in their academic pursuits.



Head of Vodafone Ghana Foundation, Amaris Nana A. Perbi who was also present at the brief handing over reiterated that the Foundation remains steadfast and consistent in working towards its goal of digitally connecting communities; leaving no one behind.



Vodafone Ghana Foundation in driving the CSR agenda of Vodafone Ghana will remain committed to dedicating our resources to support communities and create avenues to address key socio-economic concerns of the communities in which we operate. Under Digital Education, the Foundation has sustainable and innovative projects which students can take advantage of. These programmes include Instant Schools, National Coding Programme and ICT Hubs. He also took advantage of the presentation to throw more light on Vodafone Foundations Kindred Month initiative; a staff-led community volunteering drive which would see staff of Vodafone Ghana engage in a plethora of CSR activities throughout the month of February.



The Vice-Chancellor of the KNUST, Professor Rita Akosua Dickson, who received the items on behalf of the school expressed gratitude to Vodafone Ghana Foundation and Vodafone Business for the kind gesture. She noted that the intervention was timely as it had come at a time that the university had taken the bold decision to blend physical class sessions with virtual ones in order to circumnavigate the continued threat of the COVID-19 pandemic.



She averred, Indeed the mandate of churning out the nations new generation of brains cannot be attained without committed partners. Vodafone has over the years proven to be the ideal partner in this pursuit; from your provision of an optimized fibre network accessible to all students, specially designed student data bundle offers to facilitate teaching and learning and now this magnanimous donation that would enable the needy students among us to fully participate in our increasingly virtual class sessions. Wow! All I can say is God bless you and continue to give you the wherewithal to support education in Ghana.

Source: Peacefmonline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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A call by King Abdullah to revisit laws regulating political life in the kingdom has triggered a sense of optimism and hope that long-delayed reforms could finally take place almost a decade after Jordanians took to the streets demanding genuine reforms in what was called Jordans Arab Spring.

In an interview with the Jordan News Agency published Jan. 30 to mark the kings 59th birthday, Abdullah was asked about his aspirations as the kingdom oberserves its centennial. He responded by underlining his belief that Jordan should continue development to promote political participation and increase the participation of political parties and youth in parliament; we must revisit laws regulating political life, such as the election, political parties, and local administration laws, and continue political development efforts.

He went on to say that our goal for many years has been to reach a platform-based political party scene that reflects the ideology and leanings of Jordanians, and carries forward their concerns and national causes, and works towards achieving their aspirations by conveying their voices and bringing their representatives to parliament.

At the center of these reforms is the election law and the political parties law, but critics see a need for a full review of the kingdoms political scene, especially after 2011 when some reforms were introduced only to be rolled back two years later.

The king had alluded to political reforms in his letters of designation to previous governments, including the 4-month-old government of Bisher al-Khasawneh. Calls for the need to engage in a comprehensive review of political and administrative laws had increased following November's legislative elections, whose outcome was disappointing for political parties.

More than 35 political parties contested the elections under an open list system but won only 12 out of 130 seats allotted to the lower house of parliament. The majority of seats went to independent candidates relying on their tribal bases. The National Center for Human Rights issued a report Feb.1 claiming that grave violations had accompanied the recent elections, which saw voter turnout of only 30%. The center called for an elections law that would provide results more representative of the nation.

In a reversal of earlier statements that denied the need to review the election law, the minister of political and parliamentary affairs, Musa al-Maaitah, told a local news station Feb.1 that the election law has failed to deliver what Jordanians had hoped for in the last two elections. He said that the election law and other laws had only cemented individualism and that the next elections must be held under a new law that strengthens political parties.

But as some activists and political parties support the need to review such laws, others are demanding a more comprehensive approach that includes suspending the Defense Law, which was activated in March 2020 following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and which gave the government wide-ranging powers with little or no oversight. Also, activists are demanding that cases related to freedom of expression that are seen as violations of the Cybercrimes Law be tried by civil courts and not the State Security Court, which usually handles terror-related cases. Others go as far as calling for a constitutional monarchy under which the powers of the monarch are checked.

The head of the Center for the Freedom of Journalists in Amman, Nidal Mansour, is not optimistic about the governments willingness to carry out real political reforms. In a Feb. 7 article in Al-Ghad daily he said, The clear problem is with public trust in the sincerity of governments to embrace reforms. He added, For decades these governments have been talking about democracy while political life is regressing and for years laws have been amended only to make matters worse.

The reality is that the ruling political class does not want deep-rooted reforms that would change the rules of the political game and all they do is to claim that Jordanian society is not ready to embrace a new system of government, Mansour said. As a first step he called for an election law that only allows political parties and closed party lists to contest elections under a proportional system.

Earlier, Mansour told Al-Monitor he believes the political reforms file in Jordan may witness a real revival under Joe Bidens administration, which has stressed that democracy and human rights will take priority in his foreign policy approach.

Marwan Muasher, a former deputy prime minister and now vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment, appears to agree, saying the kings comments were made with Biden in mind. Speaking at a forum held by the Center for the Freedom of Journalists in Amman on Feb.1, Muasher said that while Biden is familiar with Arab issues and is a friend of Jordan, that doesnt mean he agrees with its policies. He is going to want to see political reform in Jordan," Muasher said.

Hassan Barrari Ajarmeh, a political scientist at the University of Jordan and a critic of successive governments handling of political reforms, said he believes it all rests with the king. The state talks about reforms but does not mean it since the ruling class is not democratically elected. It serves its own interests and not that of the people and real reforms will put many in jail for corruption, he told Al-Monitor.

Whether we like it or not the solution is in the hands of the king; he alone can launch a white coup that allows the people to rule themselves and produce an elected class. He has always talked about reforms so what is stopping him from putting them into action? he said.
Landlord and tenant law can be confusing. Were here to help.

Weve been breaking down the rules around common landlord and tenant problems. Got a question we havent covered? Email us.

Here are some useful resources about your rights as a tenant:

Reading and understanding a lease can sometimes be daunting. But its important to avoid potential issues with your tenancy. If youre applying for an apartment, heres what you need to look for before you sign.

If you need to move before your lease ends, you may be on the hook for as long as your lease lasts. But there are some situations when you can legally break your lease, and other ways to negotiate with your landlord if you have to move early.

If you have rodents or bugs, whos responsible can be complicated, but if the infestation is because of defects in the structure, your landlord may have to fix the problems. Theres also something called the implied warranty of habitability, which may also come into play. Heres what you need to know.

Your landlord generally cant come into your home whenever they feel like it, though some may believe they have that right. But when can they, and cant they, come into your home? We break it down.

How much can landlords ask for? And when do they have to give you back your money? There are important rules to know about how much money you have to give and when you can get it back.

Withholding rent can be a way to get your landlord to make critical repairs. But you cant just stop paying rent. Heres how to do it legally and what you need to know about the process and what happens if your landlord tries to retaliate.

An eviction notice can be extremely stressful. But if you think you may get one, or already have, there are some programs, and people, who can help. Heres how to get help to stay in your home.

Rent increases are common. But what are the rules? There are no limits on how much your landlord can increase your rent, but there are limits on when they can raise it  and how much notice they have to give you. Heres when your landlord can raise your rent and by how much.

For many renters, its among the worst-case scenarios: Your landlord notifies you that the property has been put up for sale. But what does that mean for your lease? Heres what happens during a sale or foreclosure.

Finding a home or apartment to rent is stressful under most circumstances, but it can be even more difficult if you have a criminal record. Many landlords, after all, perform criminal background checks as part of the application process, and having a criminal record can legally be grounds for denial. Heres what you need to know.

If you have a disability, you have the right to reasonable accommodation, whether youre looking for an apartment or you already live in one. That could mean alterations to the property  like if you need a ramp to help with mobility  or you need an exception to a landlords policy, like paying the rent on a different day to accommodate disability assistance checks, or you need a support animal, and your property has a no-pet policy. But how does it work and what happens if your landlord wont help? Heres what you need to know.

Pennsylvania legalized medical marijuana in 2016. But what does that mean for your housing situation? Its complicated. Because marijuana is still illegal federally, using it could mean youre not eligible for public housing, or that a landlord could evict you or refuse to rent to you in the first place. The essential advice: Check what your lease says, and consider the consequences when youre deciding whether to disclose your status to a new or existing landlord.

If there are bills that are in your landlords name, and they stop paying them, what happens to you? There are rules to help protect tenants if they get a notice that a utility is going to be shut off. Heres what to do if that happens.

 READ MORE: Our best Philly tips: Read our most useful stories
As we all know, an issue of crucial importance in tackling the Covid pandemic is the acquisition, distribution and injection of approved Covid vaccines.

Life will not return to some type of normality until most of the population of our island are fully vaccinated. Normality is likely to continue to require that those travelling into Ireland require a mix of pre-travel Covid testing and quarantining. It is probable that once vaccination programmes are fully rolled out and completed, many countries, including Ireland, will only permit international travellers verifiably vaccinated to enter for family, business or tourist purposes.

Some may permit entry with the continued application of pre-travel testing and quarantine. A number of EU countries are currently considering this issue, others are not and there is no agreed approach across the EU.

When vaccinated, many in Ireland will for a variety of reasons wish to travel abroad. Ultimately, the issue of international travel will have to be addressed both within the EU and globally.

In the meantime, the Government should rapidly make the decisions required to create a non-forgeable vaccination passport or certificate to be issued to all those fully vaccinated with provision to certify booster jabs.

For this to work it will be crucial to maintain an up-to-date national record of all those fully vaccinated.

We should anticipate and constructively address and resolve issues that could otherwise detrimentally impact on and impede peoples lives and freedom after being fully vaccinated and, in dealing with Covid, not constantly play a game of catch-up.

Alan Shatter

Dublin 16

Tale of Neeshas return is cheering story we all need

Thank you for publishing the wonderful story of the safe rescue of Neesha (Pure miracle  pet dog lost for fortnight on snowy peak is carried 10km to safety by hiker, Irish Independent, February 9).

How marvellous that the two doctors rescued her and took the trouble to bring her down off the mountain.

We all need happy, cheering stories at this difficult time and this one, with its happy ending, was perfect. I live in England but I get my copy of the Indo every day.

Helen Penney

Longborough, Gloucestershire, UK

Real jury for impeachment trial is the American public

The real jury for this impeachment trial is not the US Senate but the American people.

And if the people pause for a moment and think, as 12 men and women on a jury might think  about the former presidents reactions to the Covid-19 pandemic, about the 400,000 Americans who had died from the virus as he left office, about his lack of compassion and care for the dead and their families, about his narcissism, his rage  they would surely convict, unanimously.

The US public will know how self-serving this jury of senators is if they do not look in the mirror and see that by acquitting Donald Trump their integrity will match his.

If ever 12 good men were needed it is now.

Alison Hackett

Dun Laoghaire, Co Dublin

Only a fool would fail to heed the experts words of advice

Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, issued a warning on February 8: It is possible the UK variant will become the dominant strain of the virus in the US by March.

At the same time Dr Rochelle Walensky, director of the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a public statement: I would really encourage people not to travel. Theres more gathering that happens at airports.

Only an absolute fool would ignore these serious warnings from these internationally respected specialists in infectious diseases.

Declan Foley

Berwick, Australia

Why Gatland should have been taking notes on Sunday

After Tadhg Beirnes performance in Sundays Wales versus Ireland Six Nations match in Cardiff, what position will Warren Gatland play him in the three tests if the Lions tour of South Africa goes ahead?

Liam Power

Dundalk, Co Louth

New-fangled weather terms are a lot to graupel with

Having endured 70 winters, I thought I knew all there was to know about Irish precipitation. Apparently not.

A man from a neighbouring county, Carlow, tells me I have just been caught in a shower of graupel (soft hail), further denting my self-assuredness in these disquieting times.

Michael Gannon

St Thomass Square, Kilkenny
GOVERNMENT received a total of $7.37 billion from oil, gas and quarrying/mining companies in fiscal 2018, with the largest payment of $2 billion coming from majority State-owned National Gas Company (NGC).

However, for the period 2019 to 2020, unaudited figures indicate a declining trend in revenue.
With President Day just around the corner, locks of George and Martha Washingtons hair and pen that Warren Harding used to end the US involvement in WWI are hitting the auction block. According to Associated Press, a Boston-based RR Auction said that online biddings for quirky pieces of White House history will be underway February 11 to February 18. The items up for auction include John F Kennedys crimson Harvard sweater, a photograph of Lincoln and his son, Tad, signed by the 16th president and Andrew Johnsons order of a national day of mourning after Abraham Lincolns assassination.

Nations founding to modern times

Additionally, there are also a number of documents and personal papers signed by John Quincy Adams, James Monroe, James Madison, Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, James Buchanan, Ulysses S. Grant, James Garfield and other presidents. While speaking to the media outlet, RR Auctions spokesperson Mike Graff said that the collection honours Americas esteemed commanders-in-chief.

READ: Michigan Republican Leader Calls Capitol Riot A Hoax

From the nations founding to modern times, these are the leaders who have guided the United States through times of war and peace, he added.

Further, the auction house informed that the clippings of the Washingtons hair were passed down through their grandnieces family and include documentation. Johnsons order for a day of mourning in Lincolns honour, on the other hand, is dated May 31, 1865. The letter read, Tomorrow June 1 being the day appointed for Special Humiliation and Prayer in consequence of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln late President of the United States, the Executive Office and the Various Departments will be closed during the day.

READ: Senators To Hear Opening Arguments As Trump Fumes Over Trial

Harding used the signing pen on July 2, 1921, to adopt what became known as the Knox-Porter Resolution, which is a joint act of Congress drafted by two Pennsylvania Republicans, Senator Philander Knox and Rep. Stephen Porter, to terminate the U.S. role in WWI. The auction house also informed that JFKs Harvard seater was acquired by Herman Lang, a CBS cameraman who filmed an interview with Jacqueline Kennedy in 1964, the year after JKFs assassination in Dallas. The cameraman had mentioned that he was cold and one of the former first ladys staffers brought him the cardigan. Lang had even said that he even tried to return it but was then told he could keep it as a memento.

(Inputs & Images: AP)

READ: Rep. Jamie Raskin Links Impeachment With Personal Tragedy

READ: Virus Affects Small Businesses As Mardi Gras Nears
Nairobi Metropolitan Services (NMS) and Woodley Estate tenants are headed for a clash over the redevelopment of the old county estate.

This comes after the tenants moved to court seeking to stop the planned redevelopment of the county estate until all issues surrounding ownership of the estate are dealt with.

Consequently, the tenants have said they will not attend a planned public participation forum on the project planned scheduled for Monday.

Last week, NMS called for views from tenants of county rental houses to be affected by the planned redevelopment of 10 old Nairobi County estates with public participation to begin Monday, February 8, 2021 at Joseph Kang'ethe Social Hall in Woodley.

However, the tenants through the Woodley Residents Welfare Society (WRWS), have said they will not attend the said public participation claiming NMS did not follow the correct procedure on public participation.

The tenants also allege that the Major General Mohamed Badi-led administration failed to take into account the adverse effects that the redevelopment would have on residents.

"Further to our earlier communication, the Woodley Residents Welfare Society (WRWS) has now moved to court to seek orders to stay the intended redevelopment planned by the NMS until all issues surrounding ownership are dealt with," read in part communication from the tenants.

"Following consultation with the WRWS appointed legal counsel, led by our internal legal team, they have provided clear guidance that residents should not participate in this meeting as doing so will be sub judice," added the statement.

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The residents' committee further advised its members to refrain from engaging externally on the matter due to the "sensitivities of this matter and the fact that it is currently in court".

"The Woodley Residents Housing Committee is following this matter up and will also be the main contact for all external and media engagement. Any queries may be directed to that team. We therefore wish to advise residents to avoid this meeting."

In a February 5, 2021 letter to Maj-Gen Badi, the tenants complained that the expression of interest advertisement by NMS did not include any element of or an avenue for public participation or involvement by the residents.

"The outlined process totally ignores the question of public participation as there is no reference at all on the issue of involvement either by consultation or an invitation of our client to any meeting to agree of listen to them. This lack of consultation clearly breaches our client's constitutional rights and guarantees," read the letter by S Ndege & Company Advocates.

Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US

Iran ready to help improve the defense capability of Syria

European Parliament head proposes to strengthen sanctions on Russia

UK PM gets married in London

Armenia reports COVID-19 new 81 cases: for people die

EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia

2 people die in Armenia road accident

Nigeria: Students taken hostage a month ago are released

61 quakes recorded in Congo per day

Syrian MFA: EU lost credibility due to blind obedience to US policy

Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack

Mher Grigoryan: Clarification of border points is possible only after withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops from Armenia

Suspicious deal: Whether there was profit from buying DNA IDs?

Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war

4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack

Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities

Kocharyan: I have to ask people how it happened that overwhelming majority elected this leader

Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country

Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia

US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs

Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners

Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions

Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US

Iran intensifies its diplomacy amid Armenia-Azerbaijan border tensions

Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes

Lukashenko accuses West of destabilizing situation in Belarus

Armenia Central Electoral Commission chief on snap elections: No legal basis for postponing, suspending any function

Armenias Pashinyan is met by Yerevan district residents chanting against him

We are ready to be fully engaged in negotiation process to resolve Karabakh issue, says Armenia acting PM

Armenia ex-President Kocharyan gives interview to Russia TV channel

Armenia acting premier: We are ready to start withdrawing troops at any moment

Canada MFA expresses concern over 6 Armenian soldiers capture by Azerbaijan troops

There are omissions in registration documents of political forces that applied to Armenia Central Electoral Commission

Armenia Central Electoral Commission chief: There is activeness in Yerevan for the past day or two

Three new cases of coronavirus reported in Artsakh

Group of US Congress members threaten Azerbaijans Aliyev regime with sanctions

Chicago mayor is sued for allegedly refusing interview with white reporter

Iran exports oil to US for first time after long interval

"Armenia" bloc top 50 MP candidates are announced

42 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia

Sri Lanka public beach is covered in charred plastic pellets due to fire in container ship

US preparing list of targeted sanctions on Belarus authorities

China believes it will own America by 2035, Biden says

15 al-Shabab militants killed in Somalia

Newspaper: Armenia political forces that applied for running in election impatiently await CEC decision

Newspaper: Changes are expected in Artsakh

California prisoner who considers himself Satanist beheads cellmate, dismembers his body

Newspaper: Armenia acting PM's "mutually beneficial" proposal to collapse state system?

Armenia National Security Service Reserve Officers' Union members meet with His Holiness Karekin II

EU is ready to help Armenia and Azerbaijan with border delimitation and demarcation

ARF-D member on Nikol Pashinyan: 103 years ago Armenia's founding fathers would have executed him for treason

Iran President hails brotherly ties with Azerbaijan

Robert Kocharyan on years of his leadership in Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia

Situation on Armenian-Azerbaijani border is still tense, more on COVID-19 in Armenia, May 28 digest

"Armenia" alliance of political parties paying tribute to founder of First Republic Aram Manukyan

Yerevan.today: Armenia acting PM not greeted at ruling party's headquarters, citizens call him 'capitulator'

Russia MOD reports on maintenance of ceasefire regime in Nagorno-Karabakh

Armenia acting MOD meets with Russian counterpart in Moscow

Armenia 2nd President: I see possibility of restoring borders of Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast

We can provide our army with some key, modernized weapons, says Armenia ex-President Kocharyan

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan: Captives issue is not one that any opposition force can resolve

OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs release statement on detention of 6 Armenian servicemen by Azerbaijan

Armenian acting Deputy PM: Discussion on issues possible only after withdrawal of Azeri troops from Armenia's territory

Armenia acting PM on Syunik roads, Russian military posts: This is only place where there are working nuances

Armenia acting PM: Process of return of POWs will intensify after upcoming elections

Putin congratulates Aliyev on Republic Day

Josep Borrell: A group of EU Ministers will visit Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan

Armenia acting PM: We're not going to escalate situation for 30% of Sev Lake

Armenia 3rd President visits Vanadzor, pays tribute to heroes of Battle of Gharakilisa (PHOTOS)

Armenia ex-President Kocharyan lays flowers at Battle of Karakilisa memorial (PHOTOS)

Armenia acting PM: Solution to captives issue is matter of time

Shoygu to Harutyunyan: Russia, Armenia strengthen military cooperation

Armenia acting premier: We are 100% honest toward our country

Artsakh President pays tribute at Stepanakert memorial, Shushi Tank-Monument

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan on Meghri corridor plan: Not beneficial to us now to discuss it as "corridor"

Acting PM: "Cement," "fittings" were stolen while constructing Armenia state "building"

Two new cases of coronavirus reported in Artsakh

Catholicos of All Armenians visits Sardarapat Memorial, again separate from state officials

MOD dismisses Azerbaijan statement on Armenia army firing toward Nakhchivan

Jerusalem Post: Israel prepares for a new war with Hamas

France, UN World Food Programme partner to support displaced people in Armenia

Armenia ex-President Kocharyan: Today we are not full-fledged negotiating party

Norwegian prime minister opposes series of NATO reforms

Armenia deputy FM briefs UN, Red Cross leaders on consequences of Azerbaijan aggression against Artsakh

NATO Secretary-General: Afghans must take full responsibility for peace and stability in their country

104 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia

Armenia acting premier: Our sovereignty, independence cannot be subject of discussion

Karabakh state-finance minister announces resignation

Artsakh MFA: Sardarapat victory has inspired all Armenians for over a century

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan: In contrast to kneeling, disgraceful authorities of the day, we have determination

Armenia President: Today we stand on threshold of Sardarapat of morality, dignity

Catholicos of All Armenians: Our people shall find strength to overcome this ordeal as well

Armenia First Republic Day event is held under very modest conditions

Newspaper: Armenia authorities claiming to be popular close off First Republic Day event to public

Armenia ex-President Sargsyan: Now or never!

Armenia President, then acting premier arrive at Sardarapat Memorial

Newspaper: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan's new "cleverness?"

France ambassador: I wish Armenia to be able to live its independence in peace, prosperity

Bashar al-Assad wins Syria presidential election

Reporters not allowed entering Sardarapat Memorial of Armenia
Additional COVID tests for business travellers in Singapore

Singapore's Multi-Ministry Taskforce noted yesterday that travellers under the Business Travel Pass Scheme (BTP Scheme) are now required to undergo COVID-19 PCR tests on days three, seven and 14 upon their return. An additional serology test will also be required on day three.

Travellers are also to avoid events with more than eight attendees within 14 days of returning to Singapore. Photo courtesy: Changi Airport

These enhanced testing requirements serve to minimise the risk of potential incubating cases leaking into the community, an official statement read.

Travellers are also to avoid events with more than eight attendees within 14 days of returning to Singapore.

The Taskforce stressed, "As compliance to the border measures in this scheme is crucial to safeguarding public health and helping to curb potential transmission of COVID-19 to the community, BTP holders must comply with the border measures in this scheme or risk having their BTPs revoked."

The BTP Scheme was introduced in June 2020 to facilitate essential business travel for senior executives based in Singapore, with regional or international responsibilities, who need to travel regularly for work.

BTP travellers are required to abide by a strict controlled itinerary when travelling. Upon return, BTP travellers will undergo an on-arrival COVID-19 PCR test and are required to be isolated in a single location until they obtain a negative result for their test.

In addition, travellers are required to use TraceTogether, avoid all forms of public transport within 14 days of return, comply with safe management measures at their workplace and abide by all other prevailing measures applicable to local residents.
[February 09, 2021]

Alibaba Group-owned -- Lazada -- chooses Insider to optimize multi-channel experiences led by AI

Lazada, an Alibaba Group company, chose Insider to build an individualized customer experience strategy across channels.

SINGAPORE, Feb. 9, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Lazada, Southeast Asia's leading eCommerce platform, and the Alibaba Group's flagship turns to Insider as the growth marketing partner of choice for its AI-backed segmentation capabilities and individualized journey orchestration features.

Insider is trusted by more than 800 global enterprise brands, including industry powerhouses like UNIQLO, Singapore Airlines, Unilever, Santander, Media Markt, Marks & Spencer, Estee Lauder, Samsung, Toyota, Carrefour, BurgerKing, Puma, GAP, Virgin, AVIS, Avon, Nissan, BBVA, IKEA, and CNN.







Through this strategic partnership with Insider, the Lazada Group will deliver highly personalized online experiences complete with individualized customer journeys. Insider's Growth Management Platform will enable Lazada to optimize their crucial funnel metrics such as average order value (AOV), conversion rate, and return on ad spend (ROAS) across channels. Additionally, Lazada will improve its overall onsite engagement and new customer acquisitions with personalized overlays and engagement features.

"We're proud to power digital experiences for Southeast Asia's biggest eCommerce brand, Lazada. We look forward to helping them re-define individualized cross-channel engagement. In the highly competitive eCommerce marketplace, personalization requires top-notch precision. We're ready to help Lazada optimize their onsite experience with pinpoint accuracy with our AI-backed segmentation capabilities and advanced recommendation strategies," said Hande Cilingir, CEO & Co-founder at Insider.

Founded in 2012, Lazada Group is one of the top eCommerce platforms in the region, with end-to-end logistics and a vast distribution network selling a wide range of products across 18 categories.

About Insider

Leveraging real-time predictive segmentation powered by artificial intelligence, Insider's Growth Management Platform (GMP) empowers marketers to deliver personalized journeys across the web, mobile web, mobile apps, and ad channels. Built on a unified data layer, GMP is easy to implement and simple to use, eliminating complex integrations and dependency on IT teams.

Insider is featured in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Marketing Hubs 2020 and has been the #1 leader on G2's Mobile Marketing Software and Personalization Grids with a 4.7/5 rating based on 100% user reviews, 16 quarters in a row.

SOURCE Insider
Johannesburg  DELAYING the local coronavirus (COVID19) vaccination programme is a dampener to the pomp and fanfare that greeted the arrival of the first batch of vaccines in South Africa.

The government has halted the rollout after confirmation the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, produced by the Serum Institute of India, was ineffective for mild or moderate illness caused by the variant widespread locally.

The doses were for the inoculation of more than 34 000 frontline workers.

"It was merely a week ago that SA's first doses of a COVID-19 vaccine made landfall, to great fanfare," said Siobhan Redford, the Rand Merchant Bank economist, said.

"Sadly, news emerged over the weekend that the AstraZeneca vaccination does not provide statistically significant protection against the 501Y.V2 variant, the strain that is dominant in SA."

The economist said a further concern was that the doses received last week expire in April.

This is about two months earlier than had been expected.

Redford noted nonetheless the rollout of other vaccines, such as the Johnson & Johnson one, would be accelerated "to fill the hole as soon as possible."

The Johnson & Johnson vaccine, as has the Novavax, has been shown to be effective against severe COVID-19 cases stemming from the newer strain, vaccine.

AstraZeneca, among other pharmaceutical companies, is however working on updating its vaccine to be more effective against newer strains of the virus.

"So, hopefully effective coverage will become available soon," Redford said.

The opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) also expressed mixed feelings after Health Minister, Dr Zweli Mkhize, announced that the efficacy of the AstraZeneca vaccine had dropped to 22 percent against the 501.V2 variant.

Close Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox Top Headlines Coronavirus South Africa By submitting above, you agree to our privacy policy. Success! Almost finished... We need to confirm your email address. To complete the process, please follow the instructions in the email we just sent you. Error! Error! There was a problem processing your submission. Please try again later.

Siviwe Gwarube - DA Shadow Minister of Health, said this was "deeply disappointing."

The opposition member warned South Africa could find itself in the throes of a third wave of the pandemic.

"It is inexcusable that we negotiated- at a higher price- the procurement of the vaccine without due diligence and factoring in the expiry date of the vaccines," Gwarube said.

Gwarube assured though that her party stood ready to support the government of Cyril Ramaphosa with "concrete, credible and implementable recommendations" during this crisis.

"This is because an effective vaccine is the only way that we can regain some kind of normality in South Africa and save lives and livelihood," she concluded.
Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi Wednesday urged the new diplomats to maintain a closer look at the geopolitical context to ensure protection of national interests while addressing the contemporary challenges

ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 10th Feb, 2021 ) :Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi Wednesday urged the new diplomats to maintain a closer look at the geopolitical context to ensure protection of national interests while addressing the contemporary challenges.

Addressing at the concluding ceremony of 40th Special Diplomatic Course here at Foreign Service Academy, the foreign minister said the Foreign Service of Pakistan had a rich and honourable legacy of delivery for the country and its interests.

Foreign Secretary Sohail Mahmood, Director General Foreign Service Academy, Additional Secretary Admin Imran Mirza and officers of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs attended the event.

The foreign minister quoted Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu as saying that "A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step." He said though a cliche' but true that Pakistani diplomacy often punches above its weight.

As foreign minister, he said, capacity building including through the Foreign Service academy had been among his foremost priorities.

 He expressed satisfaction that the curriculum of Foreign Service Academy had been upgraded in line with modern requirements, and stressed that "review, reform and renewal must be a continuous process".

Qureshi emphasized on adopting digital technologies, modern means and tools of communication and networking to achieve goals more efficiently and effectively.

He said he wanted the diplomats to be articulate, effective team members who thought outside the box in order to find solutions and deliver results.He said Foreign Office was now speaking differently and with greater effect and mentioned employing images, graphics and videos to better communicate with a wider array of audiences.

The foreign minister mentioned the functioning of specialized cells and divisions, namely, the Strategic Communication Division, the Kashmir Cell and Crisis Management Cell.

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The National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) has intercepted 40 parcels of cocaine weighing 43.11kg, with an estimated street value of over N32 billion at the Tincan Port, Lagos.

The Commander, Tincan Port command, NDLEA, Sumaila Ethan, disclosed this in a statement by the Head of Public Affairs, Jonah Achema, in Abuja.

Mr Ethan noted that the agency had continued its offensive action against drug barons and cartels in Nigeria with the latest seizure in recent times.

He said the consignment containing the illicit drug was put under surveillance by operatives of the Tincan Command of the NDLEA for some days until two clearing agents showed up on Feb. 8, to clear it.

Mr Ethan said the two clearing agents were promptly arrested and the consignment, which was brought into Nigeria from Bazil on board a vessel marked MV SPAR SCORPIO, properly searched.

After a thorough search, we discovered 40 compressed parcels, which after laboratory investigations tested positive to cocaine.

The two clearing agents have been taken into custody while we continue with the investigation.

The seizure is no doubt an attestation to the renewed vigour in the operations of the agency.

We appreciate our Chairman, rtd Brig.-Gen. Buba Marwa, who provided guidance all through the operations, the commander.

Mr Ethan stated that the Tincan port seizure was coming on the heels of similar ones at the Lagos and Abuja airports as well as from the FCT, Edo, Katsina State, Nasarawa State and Benue State Commands in the last three weeks.

He commended the commander, officers and men of the Tincan Port Command for the operation.

Well continue to do our best to motivate the officers and men of the agency, and we expect full commitment, dedication to work and discipline in return so that we can collectively achieve the goal of ridding our nation of illicit drugs, he stated.

(NAN)

[February 10, 2021] Foundation Source Names Sunil Garga President and Chief Executive Officer

FAIRFIELD, Conn., Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Foundation Source, the nation's largest provider of comprehensive support services to private foundations, today announces the appointment of Sunil Garga as President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO). Mr. Garga assumes the position at a pivotal time in which the company is investing heavily in people and technology to increase capabilities for private foundations and the broader philanthropic community. A visionary leader and entrepreneur, Mr. Garga has a 25-year record of helping companies realize their potential. He is the founder of two successful and forward-thinking companies that, like Foundation Source, combine professional services, technology, and consulting. Under his leadership, both firms delivered highly innovative industry-leading solutions to major companies and achieved tremendous growth. "I am excited and humbled to be leading Foundation Source," Mr. Garga said. "The company has an impressive 20-year history of pioneering foundation management and providing expert consulting and technology solutions that help clients pursue their philanthropic vision and establish their legacy. Foundation Source is the recognized leader for private foundations and is well-positioned to deliver innovative solutions and broader expertise o its clients. I look forward to working with the Foundation Source team to make it happen."



Mr. Garga replaces Susan Friedlander Calzone, who led the company for the last five years as CEO. He inherits a company with a deep bench of talent, which will enable a seamless transition and continuity of service excellence. With a focus on growth and innovation, Mr. Garga will oversee Foundation Source's investment in solutions to complement its deep expertise in private foundation administration. Foundation Source will continue to work with individuals, families, and corporations as well as its professional partners, including wealth management, law and accounting firms, and family offices. Joe Choorapuzha, Partner with Incline Equity and speaking on behalf of the Foundation Source board of directors, said: "Sunil Garga is a strategic and inclusive leader who has demonstrated expertise leveraging technology to help companies position and scale for growth. His proven ability makes him the ideal person to maximize Foundation Source's abundant untapped potential. With his leadership, the firm is certain to reach new heights in industry expertise and service excellence. This is a very exciting time for Foundation Source."

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 third decade, Foundation Source provides its services to nearly 2,000 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. View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/foundation-source-names-sunil-garga-president-and-chief-executive-officer-301226056.html SOURCE Foundation Source

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Its almost Fastnacht Day.

Every year on Shrove Tuesday, bakeries, grocery stores and churches stock up on fastnachts in a variety of flavors, from plain to cinnamon sugar. This year, the sweet day falls on Feb. 16.

Fastnachts, unlike typical doughnuts decorated with sprinkles or filled with jelly or cream, are dense and not very sweet.

The tradition of eating fastnachts started with the Pennsylvania Dutch who were looking for recipes to use up fat such as lard in the house before Lent. Fastnacht is a German word meaning night before the fast.

Not every fastnacht is the same and recipes vary. Some fastnachts are square or diamond-shaped, while others are round. Some have holes.

READ MORE: New cafe to bring French twist to Hershey along with hot chocolate bombs, La Colombe Coffee

Authentic fasnachts are made with yeast or baking soda. Some recipes call for mashed potatoes or potato flour. Traditional fastnachts are supposed to be deep-fried in lard.

This year on account of the coronavirus pandemic, some mainstay fastnacht fundraisers including St. Cecilias Catholic Church in Lebanon have been postponed. The church has been making the deep-fried, sugary Lenten treats since the 1930s.

To ensure you dont miss out on the doughnut tradition, heres a list of places in and around the Harrisburg region selling them in the coming days:

Anna Rose Bakery & Coffee Shop

The corner bakery in Harrisburg is selling fastnachts in plain, powdered sugar, granulated sugar and cinnamon sugar for $9 a half dozen and $18 a dozen. Pre-order is recommended.

100 N. Second St., Harrisburg, 717-236-3149

Cornerstone Coffeehouse

The coffee house is selling glazed, powdered sugar and plain sugar for $1.50 a piece and $16 a dozen.

2133 Market St., Camp Hill, 717-737-5026

Desserts Etc.

The bakery in Hershey is carrying glazed, cinnamon sugar, regular sugar, powdered and plain varieties for $2 each, $11 for a half dozen and $22 for a dozen. It is also selling gluten-free cinnamon sugar doughnuts for $2.50 and Keto peanut butter chocolate chip doughnuts for $3.50.

840 E. Chocolate Ave., Hershey, 717-533-7505

The Filling Station

The restaurant is selling granulated sugar, glazed and plain fastnachts for $8.95 a dozen and $5.50 for a half dozen. Pre-order is available through Feb. 13 for larger orders. Customers also can pick up individual fastnachts from the restaurants bakery case starting at 5 a.m. Feb. 16.

320 W. Main St., Palmyra, 717-838-9077

Giant

The grocery stores are selling plain, glazed and powdered sugar doughnuts for $3.99 a half dozen and $5.99 a dozen.

Multiple locations

14 Fastnacht Day 2019: Making the Shrove Tuesday doughnuts

Karns Foods

Karns supermarkets is selling fastnachts in plain, glazed, powdered sugar, cinnamon sugar and granulated sugar. Prices are: $4.29 for a six-pack and $30 for a tray of 48 fastnachts. Pre-orders are being accepted and can be picked up starting at 10 a.m. Feb. 15.

Multiple locations

Maple Donuts

Maple Donuts is selling fastnachts at its four bakeries in York County. If you want three dozen or more fastnachts, you must pre-order them. The bakeries are selling powdered, plain, granulated sugar and glazed for $1.09 cents apiece, $6.39 a half dozen and $9.99 a dozen.

Locations include:

3455 E. Market St. (East York) 717-757-7826 204

St. Charles Way (South York) 717-747-9147

970 Loucks Road (West York) 717-843-4276

50 Robinhood Drive, Goldsboro (North York) 717-938-5544

Oak Grove Farms

The farm market is opening 6 a.m. Feb. 16 for fastnacht sales. Preorders can be picked up starting Feb. 15. They are selling plain, glazed, plain sugar, powdered sugar and cinnamon sugar for $1 per doughnut, $4.99 a half dozen and $8.99 a dozen.

Order in the store or via the markets printable order form.

846 Fisher Road, Monroe Township, 717-766-2216.

The Pennsylvania Bakery

The bakery is selling fastnachts for $13.25 a dozen in plain, powdered sugar, cinnamon sugar, granulated sugar and glazed. King Cakes are selling in various flavors including cinnamon, cream cheese, cherry, raspberry, blueberry, apricot, apple, lemon, pineapple, or nut for $16.25 each. The cakes serve about six people.

Also, pickup fastnacht cupcakes made with buttermilk, cinnamon, and brown sugar cake, topped with a cinnamon sugar buttercream, rolled in sugar and topped with a piece of made-from-scratch fastnacht. They sell for $3.75 apiece.

1713 Market St., Camp Hill, 717-763-7755

Schenks Bakery

Schenks is selling plain, powdered sugar, cinnamon sugar and glazed for $17 a dozen or $1.75 apiece. Pre-orders are encouraged.

1061 N. Mountain Road, Lower Paxton Township, 717-671-5133

SweeTreats Bakery

The stand at the West Shore Farmers Market in Lemoyne is selling plain, glazed, sugared and powdered sugar fastnachts for $10 per dozen. SweeTreats is also selling paczki, a filled Polish pastry, with choice of jelly, apple, lemon, white cream and custard filling. Preorders accepted through Feb. 13. The stand will open at 7 a.m. Feb. 16.

900 Market St., Lemoyne, 717-761-2253

Weis Markets

The stores are selling plain, granulated sugar and glazed for $3 for a half dozen and $5 for a dozen. They also carry Paczki in four-packs filled with choice of Bavarian creme or raspberry filling for $4.

Multiple locations

Wegmans

The grocery store is selling cinnamon sugar, glazed and powdered sugar fastnachts for $1 apiece and $10 for a dozen. King cakes are selling for $15, while paczki is selling for $4.50 for a four-pack.

6416 Carlisle Pike, Silver Spring Township, 717-791-4500
The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
ArLuther Lee, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (TNS)

Feb. 9Authorities in Durham, North Carolina, discovered a body inside a suitcase along the shore of the Neuse River Monday but would not say if the remains belonged to a 28-year-old pregnant woman who vanished in the area last week.

Raleigh police called the Wake County Sheriffs Office to investigate after a passerby made the gruesome find on the Neuse River Trail in Wake County, according to The Herald-Sun.

We do have persons of interest that we are interested in talking to, said Sheriffs spokesman Eric Curry.

The body, located near the 5400 block of Allen Drive, was reportedly unidentifiable. Officials also did not reveal whether the victim was male or female.

Its not every day, its not every morning that you find what could be a persons body in a suitcase, in a river, Sheriff Gerald Baker told WTVD-TV, adding that it was safe to say this was no accident.

Investigators are treating the death as a homicide. Few other details were revealed about the circumstances or manner of death. Curry said the state medical examiners office plans to conduct an autopsy.

Brittany Samone Smith was last seen Thursday in Wendell, where she was reported missing near Fox Run Drive and Hodge Road, according to The News & Observer. By Sunday, the sheriffs department announced they were gathering evidence and searching for her.

Smith is described as 4-foot-11, 115 pounds and noticeably pregnant.

Her family gathered Monday at the crime scene in search for answers, reports said.

Were going to work very hard. Were going to find out who was responsible. I can tell you that, said Baker. Because these things just dont happen. Someone is responsible. If this is, in fact, this young lady that weve been looking for all weekend, someone is responsible for that.

The sheriffs office asked anyone with information on the case to call 919-856-6911.
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The new branding for Aunt Jemima pancake mix and syrup will be Pearl Milling Company, parent company PepsiCo said on Tuesday, eight months after announcing a re-brand over racial concerns about the character.

The new packaging will appear on store shelves in June. Products with the Aunt Jemima name, but without the character's image, will continue to be available until then, the company said.

Last June, at the height of protests over the death of George Floyd, PepsiCo announced that it would drop the name and brand image of Aunt Jemima from its products, following criticism that the character is a racist caricature.

The new name, Pearl Milling Company, honors the company that was founded in 1888 in St. Joseph, Missouri, and was the originator of the self-rising pancake mix that would later become known as Aunt Jemima.

The new branding for Aunt Jemima pancake mix and syrup will be Pearl Milling Company, parent company PepsiCo said on Tuesday

In June, PepsiCo said it would remove the Aunt Jemima image from its products as it explored a new name for the line of pancake mix and syrup

In 1925, the Quaker Oats Company purchased the Aunt Jemima brand, and updated the image of Aunt Jemima periodically due to concerns of offensive racial stereotyping. Quaker Oats was acquired by PepsiCo in 2001.

The Aunt Jemima brand was named after a character in 19th-century minstrel shows, and is rooted in a stereotype of a friendly black 'Mammy' working as a servant for a white family.

The new Pearl Miller Company packaging keeps the red, yellow and white color scheme as the old Aunt Jemima brand, as well as the font used by the old brand.

Instead of Aunt Jemima's face, the packages show a stylized image of an old water-powered mill. At least initially, the packages will display a message reading: 'New Name Same Great Taste - Aunt Jemima'.

PepsiCo said in a statement that Quaker had worked with 'consumers, employees, external cultural and subject-matter experts, and diverse agency partners to gather broad perspectives and ensure the new brand was developed with inclusivity in mind.'

Reactions to the new name were mixed, with some calling the new syrup brand 'boring' and others joking that Aunt Jemima had been 'fired.'

'What a weird name for pancake syrup....' one person tweeted of the new Pearl Milling Company name. 'It sounds like a gravel mining company,' another wrote.

'Pearl Milling Company just doesn't have as much pizzazz as Aunt Jemima,' another complained.

'Applaud that they finally got culturally sensitive, but I think their desire to retain some visual equity has created a watered-down brand experience,' one commented.

'I aint putting no Pearl Milling Company syrup on none of my s**t. Aunt Jemima was coo,' another mused.

Others expressed their relief that the name had been changed due to its offensive origins. 'It should have been changed decades ago. Shouldn't have existed in the first place,' one wrote.

The Aunt Jemima character comes from a vaudeville era song 'Old Aunt Jemima' and is based off the mammy - a black woman who worked for white families, nursing their children.

The Aunt Jemima character comes from the vaudeville song 'Old Aunt Jemima' and is based off the mammie - a black woman who worked for white families, nursing their children. Anna Robinson (pictured) posed as the character in ads

An image of 'Aunt Jemima' arriving at the Denver Post in honor of national pancake day in 1951

Her image has evolved over the years to meet socially acceptable standards of the times, but the brand could not shake its history of racial stereotypes and connections to slavery.

By 1989, Aunt Jemima had lost weight, abandoned her kerchief and looked more like a typical modern housewife. But the image and brand tweaks over the years were apparently not enough.

'The reputation of that brand, now more than 130 years old, was built on a racial and cultural stereotype that is widely regarded as offensive,'said James ORourke, professor of management at the University of Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business.

Aunt Jemima was one of several brands to get the ax last summer, as debates over racial issues raged.

Uncle Ben's rice was renamed Ben's Original, Eskimo Pie became Edy's Pie, and Cream of Wheat removed the image of a back chef from its packaging.

Conagra Brands that it would review the shape of their Mrs. Buttersworth's bottles, as some accused them of being an example of the 'mammy' stereotype.
Lamar CISD will complete a transition toward having its own police department when it begins operations on Feb. 22.

According to a news release, the department was initially approved when the districts board of trustees approved a resolution in February 2020. In the time since the approval, the department has been working with the Rosenberg Police Department to transition and prepare to serve the Lamar CISD community as the districts first police department.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Fort Bend ISD closing, opening campuses amid COVID-19

The department is led by Police Chief Dallis Warren and, according to the district, consists of the districts safety coordinator, 24 school security officers and 18 police officers. The department will align with district policies and procedures, while providing the same level of safety and security at all campuses and facilities.

The creation of the Lamar CISD Police Department is a sign of growth for the District and we will continue to develop meaningful relationships with our students, staff and community, Warren said. As district employees, our officers share the values of Lamar CISD and will ensure all students and staff have a safe and secure learning environment.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Early voting begins Monday for Stafford City Council spot

Before joining Lamar CISD in 2018, Warren served as the Rosenberg police chief and, according to the district, has more than 40 years of experience in law enforcement, including more than 25 years in administration. He also served as a criminal justice instructor at Wharton County Junior College and Texas A&Ms National Emergency Response and Rescue Training Center.

For more than 20 years, Lamar CISD has worked with Rosenberg Police Department to keep campuses safe. Students and staff were served through the School Resource Officer program, which will come to an end with the launch of the Lamar CISD Police Department.

Serving the Lamar CISD community through our School Resource Officer program has been an honor for the Rosenberg Police Department and the city of Rosenberg, Rosenberg Police Chief Jonathan White said in the news release. Through this partnership, relationships have been established to ensure the safety and security of all stakeholders of Lamar CISD and the City of Rosenberg alike. We look forward to continuing this relationship with the newly created Lamar CISD Police Department as we continue to serve alongside them.

Safety measures in Lamar CISD includes security cameras and vestibules at every school; and a visitor registry system.

For more information on safety and security in Lamar CISD, visit the Districts website at https://tinyurl.com/r2ecpqgj. The department can be reached via telephone at 832-223-0700.

rkent@hcnonline.com
February 10, 2021 Something Is Iffy In Myanmar - Only Ten Days After The Coup There Is Already A U.S-Style Color Revolution Countering It On February 1 the military of Myanmar, the Tatmadaw, launched a coup d'etat. President Win Myint and State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi were detained, along with ministers and their deputies and members of the parliament. They were accused of some minor crimes and will be kept off the streets for some time. Aung San Suu Kyi party, the NLD which had widely won the latest election, will be prohibited. All that was not astonishing and is unlikely to make a big difference in the politics within and towards the extremely complex country: Theres no smoking gun, of course, but its virtually impossible that Beijing had not been at least informed, or consulted, by the Tatmadaw on the new dispensation. China, Myanmars top trade partner, is guided by three crucial strategic imperatives in the relationship with its southern neighbor: trade/connectivity via a Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) corridor; full access to energy and minerals; and the necessity of cultivating a key ally within the 10-member ASEAN.

...

None of that will change, whoever runs the politico-economic show in Myanmars capital Naypyidaw. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Aung San Suu Kyi, locally known as Amay Suu (Mother Suu) were discussing the China-Myanmar economic corridor only three weeks before the coup. Beijing and Naypyidaw have clinched no less than 33 economic deals only in 2020.

...

Yet this is not all about China. The Tatmadaw coup is an eminently domestic affair  which involved resorting to the same old school, CIA-style method that installed them as a harsh military dictatorship way back in 1962. The NLD and Suu Kyi had simply become to assertive and threatened to touch the commercial businesses the military runs. That could not be condoned. There are several ethnic insurgencies ongoing in Myanmar. There is are a lot of warlords and off the record drug and weapon business. The NLD did not care about that nor will the military: The [election] end result privileged the NLD, whose support is negligible in all border regions. Myanmars majority ethnic group  and the NLDs electoral base  is the Bamar, Buddhist and concentrated in the central part of the country. The NLD frankly does not care about the 135 ethnic minorities  which represent at least one third of the general population. Its been a long way down since Suu Kyi came to power, when the NLD actually enjoyed a lot of support. Suu Kyis international high profile is essentially due to the power of the Clinton machine. If you talk to a Mon or a Karen, he or she will tell you they had to learn the hard way how much of an intolerant autocrat is the real Suu Kyi. She promised there would be peace in the border regions  eternally mired in a fight between the Tatmadaw and autonomous movements. She could not possibly deliver because she had no power whatsoever over the military. Without any consultation, the electoral commission decided to cancel voting, totally or partially, in 56 cantons of Arakan state, Shan state, Karen state, Mon state and Kachin state, all of them ethnic minorities. Nearly 1.5 million people were deprived of voting. While Suu Kyi once had 'western' support, they gave her a Nobel Peace Prize, that has long been lost: Suu Kyis biggest mistake was believing that she could, through her brand of nationalism, dismiss accusations of genocide directed against the Rohingya. In the process, she lost Western support. From that point, she has been on borrowed time, and the military barely hid its distaste for her. To be sure, the military anticipated the impact and the reaction from the international community and took into consideration the new US administrations preoccupations with domestic issues. Myanmar doesnt even figure in the top 10 priorities of President Joe Bidens foreign policy. Given the above it is astonishing to see that only a few days after the coup happened the country is already experiencing a U.S. style color revolution. Just consider this ABC News 'Explainer' which is typical for color-rev reporting: EXPLAINER: How are the Myanmar protests being organized? For the most part the protests have grown organically. This movement is leaderless  people are getting on the streets in their own way and at their own will, said Thinzar Shunlei Yi, a prominent activist. Activist groups, professional work groups, unions and individuals across Myanmar have all come out in opposition to the coup, as has Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy party.

...

Health care workers also started a protest campaign, wearing red ribbons, holding signs and urging other medical staff to not work at state-operated health facilities. Street protests over the weekend featured the heavy presence of unions, student groups and other groups representing professions as diverse as park rangers and book printers. Yangon residents have voiced dissent by banging pots and pans together across the city at night.

...

Making the rounds have been copies of safety protocol information sheets, some of them originally from Hong Kong, with instructions on how to encrypt communications and how to stay safe during protests. "The movement is leaderless," said one of its longtime leaders who is well known to this 'western' reporter. ... The highlighted points are all standard attributes we have seen in other color revolutions around the world. This type of reporting by Reuters is also quite typical: Myanmar's anti-coup protesters defy crackdown with humour Protesters returned to the streets of Myanmar on Wednesday despite the shooting of a young woman the previous day, with some deploying humour to emphasise their peaceful opposition to this months military takeover.

...

We cannot stay quiet, youth leader Esther Ze Naw told Reuters. If there is blood shed during our peaceful protests, then there will be more if we let them take over the country. There were no reports of violence on Wednesday and in many places protests took on a festive air, with bare-chested body builders, women in ball gowns and wedding dresses, farmers in tractors and people with their pets. Some set up a protest line in inflatable rubber tubs. Thousands joined demonstrations in the main city of Yangon, while in the capital, Naypyitaw, hundreds of government workers marched in support of a growing civil disobedience campaign.

...

Earlier, soldiers took over a clinic that had been treating wounded protesters in Naypyitaw on Tuesday, a doctor there said. The teenager was shot when police fired, mostly into the air, to clear the protesters. Another sign of a color revolution are dedicated protester fan accounts which post pictures of people carrying English language signs. These are clearly color-rev public-relation efforts aimed at a 'western' public.

bigger

bigger So this is evidently a color revolution effort against the military. What is irritating with it is the speed with which it took off. Color revs usually require years of group building and leadership preparation. They need monetary and communication support as well as political directions from 'advisors' in 'western' embassies. Here it took only ten days to launch it. In 2005 the Bush administration cultivated the Myanmar 'civil society' and Suu Kyi, who was then under house arrest. It popped up in the 'Saffron color revolution' in 2007 and with Cyclone Nargis in 2008 when the Bush administration tried to use Responsibility to Protect (R2P) nonsense to get a military foot on the ground. But that all is a long time ago and after Suu Kyi had come to power there was no necessity to keep those efforts alive. Then again - under Myanmar's 2008 constitution the military was still effectively in charge. Together with Suu Kyi's large win in the latest election there may have been an long planned 'western' attempt underway to finally unseat the military from its privileged position and to pull the country out of China's orbit. But the chance for that eventually to happen is practically zero. Some 70% of Myanmar's population lives in rural areas. The protests occur only in the three big cities Yangon, Mandalay and Naypyitaw and are relatively small. The military is ruthless and will have no trouble to take the protesters down. Whoever launched this nonsense should be held responsible for endangering those people. Posted by b on February 10, 2021 at 19:05 UTC | Permalink Comments next page  next page 
NEW YORK, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- February 10, 2021 - Quontic, the adaptive digital bank, announced it has elevated its SVP of Marketing, Aaron Wollner, to serve as the company's Chief Marketing Officer. As a result of the promotion, Aaron will now lead the overall marketing strategy to drive growth and continue to elevate Quontic as a fintech. Aaron first joined Quontic in August, 2020.

Aaron has spent the last 15 years delivering for companies that range from Fortune 50 to startups, igniting high-performing marketing teams that utilized data to drive growth. In his elevated role at Quontic, he is focused on establishing and executing the broader digital marketing strategy, while developing the brand overall. Aaron is responsible for assembling the right people and partners for the marketing organization, building the lead generation engine for the mortgage business, and cementing Quontic as a best-in-class digital bank.

"Quontic is evolving at a rapid pace. We are committed to putting the right people on our team, and Aaron is a reflection of that," said Steve Schnall, CEO & Founder of Quontic. "He is a premier marketing executive with an extensive past driving explosive marketing plans. He has proved to have a steady hand, innovative mindset and great success at implementing results-driven initiatives."

Purchased by Steve Schnall in 2009, Quontic is the adaptive digital bank that stands for financial empowerment for all. With over $2 billion in mortgages provided to date and nearly 70% of those mortgages in low-income neighborhoods or to low-income households, the bank offers adaptive lending and innovative deposit solutions that transcend legacy banking.

"Quontic is redefining the digital bank industry and the opportunity to be a part of the Quontic team is extremely exciting," said Aaron Wollner, Chief Marketing Officer at Quontic. "I've worked in both the big agency and startup world, which has resulted in leading and building high performing teams to drive growth. I'm passionate about growing brands digitally and looking forward to the future at Quontic."

About Quontic:

Quontic is the adaptive digital bank that empowers its customers financially while embracing their diverse circumstances. Quontic's disruptive banking platform reimagines traditional banking with adaptive lending and innovative deposit products that transcend legacy banking inequities. Quontic's mission to break the system for financial empowerment stands in the face of big banks and proves there is a better and more equitable way to put the customer first. The bank focuses on truly understanding and serving the underdogs, entrepreneurs, gig-economy workers, immigrants, and more with a curated banking experience as opposed to a one-size-fits-all banking approach. Quontic is a privately held company based in New York, New York. Learn more at QuonticBank.com . Follow and connect with Quontic on Facebook and Instagram.

CONTACT:

Lindsay Levitts

[email protected]

SOURCE Quontic

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The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
Stock Market S&P 500 Continues To Climb, See What Sectors Are Set to Climb Even Higher

While you may not have been paying attention, some of the strongest sectors are already showing great strength and setting up for new breakout rallies. Over the past 30+ days, sector trends have rotated as the market volatility has increased. Right now, we are seeing strength in some of the same sectors that were leading the markets 60+ days ago: Discretionary, Comm Services, Technology, Energy, Financials, and Real Estate. If you are not paying attention to these trends, you may miss some of the best assets to trade given big sector ETF moves weve seen in early 2021.

Strongest Sectors Lead With Big Trends

Existing trends, investor expectations, and government policies all work together to drive forward trends and expectations in sectors. Looking at the following 30-day sector comparison graph from www.StockCharts.com, we can see that Discretionary, Energy, and Financials have been the strongest sectors over the past 30+ days. Comm Services, Technology, and Real Estate are close behind.

It is important to understand how these sectors and rotational trends within these sectors create opportunity when breakout patterns become evident. With continued strength in these sectors, traders can attempt to take advantage of potentially explosive upside trends before the breakouts take place.

Home Construction Showing Potential  +12% or more

I will start off by illustrating the opportunities in ITB, the US Home Construction ETF. This Daily ITB chart highlights our use of the Fibonacci Extension tool to attempt to pinpoint upside price targets based on past price trends. The recent bottom near $58 suggests an upside price trend is likely to attempt to break above $64 while targeting $64.20 & $68. From the lows of this move, this represents a 17%+ rally where 12%+ of this move has yet to complete. The key to this upside breakout rally is for ITB to rally above $64.

Regional Banking May Breakout Much Higher- +10% or more

Next, we will focus on Regional Banking with KRE, the S&P Regional Banking ETF. This Daily KRE chart, again, highlights our use of the Fibonacci Extension tool to attempt to pinpoint upside price targets based on past price trends. The recent bottom near $54 suggests an upside price trend is likely to attempt to break above $64 while targeting $60.00 & $63.60. From the lows of this move, this represents a 18%+ rally where 10%+ of this move has yet to complete. The key to this upside breakout rally is for KRE to rally above $60.

Be sure to sign up for our free market trend analysis and signals now so you dont miss our next special report!

Take special notice of the recent upside price rally that has recovered nearly all of the recent downside price rotation. KRE appears to be trending higher quite nicely and may attempt a breakout rally very soon.

Energy Sector Still Has Great Potential  +11% or more

Last, we will focus on opportunities in Energy with XLE, the SPDR Energy ETF. This Daily XLE chart highlights our use of the Fibonacci Extension tool to attempt to pinpoint upside price targets based on past price trends. The recent bottom near $39 suggests an upside price trend is likely to attempt to break above $43.80 while targeting $44 & $47. From the lows of this move, this represents a 20%+ rally where 11.5%+ of this move has yet to complete. The key to this upside breakout rally is for XLE to rally above $44.

The similarities of these setups/pending upside breakout trends are not by accident. The strongest market sectors have recently rotated downward and have begun to resume the upward price trends. When this happens, the Fibonacci price extension utility we use to highlight the next most logical upside price targets can become very accurate for trading targets. Additionally, the opportunities of these trends, ranging from 8% to 18% or more based on the current setups, provides some very real opportunities should these breakout trends continue higher.

Sector trends can become a very powerful tool for traders to consistently find and execute profitable trades in bigger trends. 2021 is going to be full of these types of trends and setups. Quite literally, hundreds of these setups and trades will be generated over the next 3 to 6 months in various sectors and our BAN Trader Pro technology can help you find the best setups. The BAN Trader Pro technology does all the work for us.

As traders begin to realize the upward price potential as they watch this rally momentum build, we believe a shift in thinking will take place. Once multiple sector averages break above recent highs and the Transportation Average breaks higher, then a broad sector confirmation of this renewed rally phase will drive traders back into the markets. As some sectors fail, others will begin to trend higher. We watch these sectors to determine what are the best sectors to trade based on relative strength and momentum and then trade their respective ETFs. I call this my Best Asset Now, or BAN, strategy.

My subscribers and I are loving the strategy  we took out three ETF trades in the three hottest sectors and one Index trade and all are moving up nicely after only 2.5 days. We hit our 7%, 15%, and 20% targets for one of our trades within 48 hours, and continue to ride the remainder of our position in that trade up until we are stopped out! This is how we make money while still getting that awesome, excitable feeling from being in an explosive, possibly parabolic, trade!!

Dont miss the opportunities in the broad market sectors over the next 6+ months, which will be an incredible year for traders of the BAN strategy. You can sign up now for my FREE webinar that teaches you how to find, enter, and profit from only those sectors that have the most strength and momentum. As some sectors fail, others will begin to trend higher. Learn how BAN Trader Pro can help you spot the best trade setups; staying ahead of sector trends is going to be key to success in these markets.

For those who believe in the power of trading on relative strength, market cycles, and momentum but dont have the time to do the research every day then my BAN Trader Pro newsletter service does all the work for you. In addition to trade alerts that can be entered into at the end of the day or the following morning, subscribers also receive a 7-10 minute video every morning that walks you through the charts of all the major asset classes. For traders that want more trading than our 20-25 alerts per year, we provide our BAN Trader Pro subscribers with our BAN Hotlist of ETFs that is updated each day. We issued a new trade alert for our subscribers today and all four trades are well on their way to great returns!

Have a great weekend!

Chris Vermeulen

www.TheTechnicalTraders.com

Chris Vermeulen has been involved in the markets since 1997 and is the founder of Technical Traders Ltd. He is an internationally recognized technical analyst, trader, and is the author of the book: 7 Steps to Win With Logic



Through years of research, trading and helping individual traders around the world. He learned that many traders have great trading ideas, but they lack one thing, they struggle to execute trades in a systematic way for consistent results. Chris helps educate traders with a three-hour video course that can change your trading results for the better.



His mission is to help his clients boost their trading performance while reducing market exposure and portfolio volatility.



He is a regular speaker on HoweStreet.com, and the FinancialSurvivorNetwork radio shows. Chris was also featured on the cover of AmalgaTrader Magazine, and contributes articles to several leading financial hubs like MarketOracle.co.uk

Disclaimer: Nothing in this report should be construed as a solicitation to buy or sell any securities mentioned. Technical Traders Ltd., its owners and the author of this report are not registered broker-dealers or financial advisors. Before investing in any securities, you should consult with your financial advisor and a registered broker-dealer. Never make an investment based solely on what you read in an online or printed report, including this report, especially if the investment involves a small, thinly-traded company that isnt well known. Technical Traders Ltd. and the author of this report has been paid by Cardiff Energy Corp. In addition, the author owns shares of Cardiff Energy Corp. and would also benefit from volume and price appreciation of its stock. The information provided here within should not be construed as a financial analysis but rather as an advertisement. The authors views and opinions regarding the companies featured in reports are his own views and are based on information that he has researched independently and has received, which the author assumes to be reliable. Technical Traders Ltd. and the author of this report do not guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any content of this report, nor its fitness for any particular purpose. Lastly, the author does not guarantee that any of the companies mentioned in the reports will perform as expected, and any comparisons made to other companies may not be valid or come into effect.

Chris Vermeulen Archive

 2005-2019 http://www.MarketOracle.co.uk - The Market Oracle is a FREE Daily Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting online publication.




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.
Australians are known to be easy going, fun and adventurous. But that doesn't mean that they don't value safety. Take one recent court case.

According to a report by attorneys Laura Sowden and Anna Ly on law publishing site Lexology, an office manager at a company located near the country's capital of Canberra was "organizing the uniform cupboard" and then, while rushing to the reception to answer the phone  one of her many job duties  she tripped and rolled her ankle.

The accident didn't come as a surprise. Apparently, this employee often found herself running to answer the phone because, due to her other job duties, she found herself in different parts of the office. And although she asked her employer on at least two occasions for a headset so she could answer the calls wherever she was in the office, the request was apparently refused due to the "number of calls being low." Even the court agreed that the situation didnt happen often.

Related: Why Ending Your Price in An Odd Number Will Increase Your Sales

But it still happened. And she told her employer about it on previous occasions. And then  down she went. It makes little difference that, according to testimony, there weren't even any hazards in her path. Nor was it very important that the employee was even wearing flat shoes. In the end  down she went!

And so the judge decided that the employer should have still taken "reasonable precautions" and responded to her multiple requests to provide her with a wireless headset. The result, the court found, is that "even though the risk of harm was foreseeable and not insignificant, it does not mean precautions are disregarded. Therefore, the employer was negligent."

How negligent? In the end, both employer and employee arrived at a settlement of about $91,000. I checked online, and a wireless headset for a phone can cost as little as $27.

You may say, "Hey, that's Australia, and they do things differently down there." And they do. Their summers are our winters and their toilets flush in the opposite direction. But in America we specialize in frivolous lawsuits, and let's agree that this kind of thing could easily happen here.

So what's the takeaway?

According to Sowden and Ly, the case is a good reminder for employers to ensure there are adequate work, health and safety precautions taken and recorded in policies to address potential risks regardless of how unlikely an accident is to occur, and if a relatively inexpensive resource can be provided, it is be best to provide it rather than run the risk of injury.

Related: This Retired Mathematician Won $26 Million From State Lotteries ... Legally

That makes sense. Of course we must all do our best to maintain a safe and clean office, particularly in these pandemic times. But we need to be doing something even more important: listening and taking action when an employee  multiple times  makes suggestions for making their jobs safer and improving our workplace. Theyre the ones on the front lines, and whatever we can be reasonably doing to make their jobs (and lives) better and safer will only serve to improve their happiness and increase their productivity.

If we dont, then like the owner of the company in Canberra, well suffer the consequences. And we cant just say "blimey" when we get the bill.

Related:

Under Pressure: 6 Ways to Be a Good Manager in an Ongoing Crisis

An Employee Is Awarded $91,000 Because Her Employer Wouldn't Buy Her a Headset

Goals Can Be Overrated



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Baldwin County economic development officials, local elected leaders and Gov. Kay Ivey held a ceremonial groundbreaking Wednesday for a huge Loxley project that will spearhead grocery chain Aldis surge into the central Gulf Coast market.

Site preparation work has been under way for about a month on about 150 acres of land north of Interstate 10 near its intersection with Ala. 59. The project has been described as a $100 million investment on Aldis part, and a company official said that included $70 million alone in the building, which will cover more than half a million square feet.

Dan Gavin, vice president for real estate at Aldi USA, said he expects the facility to open in late 2022 as Aldi opens a wave of nearly three dozen new stores between Tallahassee and Baton Rouge in roughly the same timetable. The company already has purchased store sites in Fairhope, Spanish Fort, Daphne and Foley as well as three sites in Mobile County with three to six more to come, he said. In the region, it has purchased 24 sites so far.

Well be opening our first stores in the Gulf early next year, Gavin said. When this facility opens well probably have 24 to 25 stores already open, late next year. The center will also serve some existing stores currently supplied by centers in Nashville, Atlanta and Florida.

Gavin said the regional headquarters and distribution center will be the 26th such facility in the country but only the sixth in the Southeast. Along the central Gulf Coast, he said, Aldi is eyeing a market of 8 million to 10 million people not currently served by the chain.

That regional expansion comes amid a huge national growth drive, he said: Aldis current five-year plan calls for the addition of 650 stores plus expanded e-commerce offerings, and thats atop a $1.6 billion campaign to update and expand existing stores over the last few years.

To say that theres a lot going on right now at Aldi is an understatement, he said.

Lee Lawson, president and CEO of the Baldwin County Economic Development Alliance, said Aldi had looked at many potential sites in the region and that the campaign to win the project for Baldwin County stretched back four years. They looked all over the Gulf Coast, he said.

Location was a critical factor in the win, he said. You look at Tallahassee to Baton Rouge, were smack in the middle of it, he said. Gavin said the sites northward connection to I-65 via Ala. 59 was just as significant as its proximity to I-10.

Aside from that, state and local officials pledged a considerable batch of incentives to sweeten the deal.

As previously reported, according to information released by the Baldwin County Economic Development Alliance, 10-year abatements of non-educational ad valorem property taxes are estimated at $1.3 million for Loxley, $2.09 million for Baldwin County and $770,000 for the state. An additional sales and use tax abatement is estimated at $3 million. The Alliance estimated a net benefit to schools of $8 million on non-abated ad valorem taxes and $1.5 million on sales and use taxes. It also predicts a $15 million direct impact on local tax revenue and a similar payroll impact per year.

Figures provided Wednesday by the Alabama Department of Commerce add to that a jobs credit valued at $463,000 over five years and AIDT training services valued at $777,000. The state estimates its return at $8.3 million in new state revenue over 20 years and $88.3 million in new payroll over 20 years.

Ivey and local officials including Loxley Mayor Richard Teal and Baldwin County Commission member Joe Davis III celebrated the anticipated benefits of the project, including design and construction work being done by local companies and around 200 permanent jobs. (Gavin said hiring likely will start a few months ahead of the distribution centers opening in late 2022.)

Were eager for the new job opportunities for our citizens, and the economic growth and development, not only for Loxley but Baldwin County and the state of Alabama, said Teal. Were ecstatic and grateful that Aldi has chosen Loxley.

Your organization had other places you could have gone, said Davis, thanking Aldi. Were tickled that you chose paradise. He promised other major developments to come.

This site is the start of several things, Davis said. Weve got a lot of irons in the fire, but none of them are more important than this one.

Ivey said the occasion was a proud moment that verifies that Alabama is not only a good place to do business, Alabama is the best place to do business.

Aldi already operates more than two dozen stores in Alabama, but all are located from Montgomery northward. Expansion into Louisiana will make that the 38th state where the chain operates.

Founded in Germany, Aldi is known for small stores with a selection that focuses on high-quality staples rather than the variety typical of American supermarkets. Gavin said this focused approach allows the company to offer its goods at a discount compared to other chains.

You dont need to carry 27 different kind of ketchup, he said, adding that most people could find 90% to 95% of their grocery needs at an Aldi.

The approach has won the chain a strong following, he said.

Our customers are really fanatical, he said. They really love Aldi.
India and Sri Lanka: Indian fishing boat sinks in Sri Lankan water after colliding with country's naval vessel

February 10,2021 | Source: News 18

An Indian fishing boat allegedly trespassing the International Maritime Boundary Line sank in Sri Lankan waters after colliding with a Navy vessel of the island nation and a search and rescue operation was underway for the missing fishermen, the Navy said here on Tuesday. The Indian boat sank in Sri Lankan waters about 8 nautical miles within the International Maritime Boundary Line (IMBL) northwest of Delft Island on Monday. Sri Lanka Navy said it had launched a search and rescue operation for the sunken Indian fishing boat and its fishermen. It said the Navy units on patrol carried out an operation to seize Indian fishing trawlers poaching in Sri Lankan waters trespassing the International Maritime Boundary Line (IMBL)," after observing more than 50 trawlers.



As the operation was going on, one of the Indian fishing trawlers tried to evade the scene, making it collide with a Sri Lankan Navy vessel. "The collision also caused damages to the SLN Fast Attack Craft which was subsequently brought to Kankesanthurai harbour safely for repair work," the statement said. The Navy then commenced a search and rescue operation for the fishermen on the sunken trawler. An unknown number of fishermen were missing. The Navy said that it is quite evident that Indian fishing trawlers poaching in Sri Lankan waters were resisting their arrests. Relevant Indian authorities have also been informed about the development and an investigation into the incident is currently underway. Fishermen from both countries are arrested frequently for inadvertently trespassing into each other's waters. During his five-day visit to India in February last year, Sri Lankan Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa and his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi agreed to resolve the long-festering fishermen issue with a "humane approach".
The 2021 Girl Scout Cookie Program for troops in the Girl Scouts of NYPENN Pathways (GSNYPENN) Council has been extended from Sunday, March 21 to Sunday, March 28. Local girls are getting creative to get their iconic treats safely in the hands of customers during their largest annual fundraiser which powers activities, community service, experiences, programming and more. All funds stay local.

Cookies officially arrive across the councils 26-county footprint this week. Stock fulfills customer pre-orders, drive-thru booths, a new collaboration with Grubhub and National Girl Scout Cookie Weekend (February 19-21) which celebrates the learning, excitement and fun selling cookies has powered for girls for 104 years.

The Girl Scout Cookie Program is the largest girl-led entrepreneurial program in the world. Girls develop important life and leadership skillsgoal setting, decision making, money management, people skills, and business ethicsfor a lifetime of success. This year, girls are flexing their entrepreneurial and leadership skills even further as they overcome challenges to more traditional face-to-face and walk-up sales in light of the pandemic.

Learn how to connect with GSNYPENN troops selling cookies and locate local drive-thru booths by visiting buygirlscoutcookiesnow.com.

Digital Contactless Sales

Girl Scouts use a personal Digital Cookie online order link to connect with friends, family and neighbors. Cookies are delivered no-contact or shipped direct for a fee. Many girls are utilizing platforms like FaceTime and Zoom to host virtual cookie booths. New this year are troop ordering links, which can be searched by zip code on the online Cookie Finder or iOS and Android app to order from a local troop for direct shipment.

Drive-Thru Booths & Community Partners

Cookie Finder allows cookie fans to enter their zip code to locate community drive-thru booths for contactless sales. Troops are partnering with businesses and organizations in their communities to host drive-thrus. Some businesses are also assisting troops with cookie sales through their locations. All proceeds go back to the troop. Most troops accept cash and credit/debit cards at their drive-thrus. A sampling of locations across GSNYPENN (use the Cookie Finder to locate more) includes:

 Binghamton, NY (Broome County) - Troop 30414 partnering with Binghamton Fluorescent; February 13, 20 from 12-4 p.m.

 Central Square, NY (Oswego County)  Troop 60878 partnering with Red Onion Grocery & Pizzeria; February 21 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; and Green Acres Lanes; February 27-28 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

 Chittenango, NY (Madison County)  Troop 60885 partnering with Hamlet Diner; February 20 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. and February 27 from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.

 Jordan, NY (Onondaga County) - Troops 60002 and 10529 partnering with Jordan-Elbridge Community Center; February 21, 28, March 7, 21 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and February 13, March 13 from 12-3 p.m.

 New Hartford, NY (Oneida County)  Utica/Rome/New Hartford area troops partnering with Sangertown Square; February 13 from 3-6 p.m.; February 14, 21, 28, March 7, 14 from 12-6 p.m.; February 19, 26 from 4-7 p.m.; February 20, 27, March 6 from 12-6 p.m.; March 13 from 12-3 p.m.

 Painted Post, NY (Steuben County) - Troop 60470 partnering with United Church of Painted Post; February 20 from 1-5 p.m. and Beartown Peaches n Cream; February 20 from 1-3 p.m.

 Syracuse, NY (Onondaga County) - Service Unit 120 partnering with Onondaga Community College; Saturdays, February 13-March 20 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

 Verona, NY (Oneida County) - Troop 20118 partnering with Verona Fire Department; February 28 from 12-2 p.m.

NYS Fairgrounds Drive-Thru

To further assist troops, GSNYPENN is partnering with the New York State Fairgrounds (581 State Fair Blvd., Syracuse) to host weekend drive-thru booths on Fridays from 4-8 p.m. and Saturdays and Sundays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. beginning this Friday, February 12 and concluding Sunday, March 21. Sales will take place outside of the Tractor Supply Co. Exhibit Center. Credit/debit cards are preferred, but cash will be accepted.

Grubhub Delivery

A new national collaboration between Girl Scouts of the USA and Grubhub allows for contactless cookie delivery in select GSNYPENN areas Thursdays-Sundays from 4-8 p.m. beginning February 11 through March 21. Some days may vary by location. Customers can place orders using the Grubhub website or delivery app. Special discounts on delivery fees will be offered during designated dates. The following areas have Grubhub cookie delivery within a 20-minute driving radius:

 Auburn, NY 13022

 Binghamton, NY 13905

 Canandaigua, NY 14424

 Cicero, NY 13039

 Fayetteville, NY 13066

 Horseheads, NY 14845

 Ithaca, NY 14850

 Syracuse, NY 13204 & 13209

 Utica, NY 13502

 Victor, NY 14564

 Watertown, NY 13601

Cookies Available

GSNYPENNs 2021 cookie lineup offers 8 flavors for just $5 per box. Varieties available:

Lemon-Ups - crispy lemon cookie

Trefoils - traditional shortbread cookie

Do-si-dos - crunchy oatmeal sandwich cookie with creamy peanut butter filling

Tagalongs - crispy cookie layered with peanut butter and covered with chocolate

Toffee-tastic - gluten-free, rich buttery cookie with crunchy toffee bits

Thin Mints - crisp wafer cookie covered in chocolate coating made with natural oil of peppermint, vegan

Samoas - crisp cookie coated with caramel, sprinkled with toasted coconut and striped with dark chocolate

Girl Scout Smores  crunchy graham sandwich cookie with creamy chocolate and marshmallow filling

Donate Cookies to Local Meals on Wheels & First Responders

If you cant eat them, treat them through GSNYPENNs annual Sweet Support Gift of Caring service project. Customers help support local Girl Scouts while giving back to the community. Donated cookie purchases will be gifted to 2021 Sweet Support recipients Meals on Wheels programs and first responders across the councils territory.

Gimme5 Sweepstakes

Each time customers buy five or more boxes of cookies from GSNYPENN Girl Scouts, they have the chance to win a prize: Girl Scout Cookies, Amazon gift cards, even $500 cash. Customers will need the troop number from the girl or troop they purchased cookies from for the online entry form. Complete details are available at gimme5sweeps.com.

If you dont have a connection with a local troop, or need help locating cookies, contact GSNYPENN Customer Engagement at 1.855.213.8555 or info@gsnypenn.org for assistance.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 10)  Supreme Court Associate Justice Alexander Gesmundo on Tuesday said the Anti-Terrorism Act could not be voided for allegedly being vague and overboard unless there "is already an actual prosecution."

Those assailing the measure have questioned the ambiguous definition of terrorism in Section 4. Unlike the Human Security of 2007 it repealed, it doesn't mention or require a predicate crime or related offenses before an act is considered terrorism.

Instead, a person is deemed a terrorist if he engages in acts that "intend to" cause death or serious physical harm to a person, endanger a person's life, or create a serious risk to public safety. Without standards to limit their boundaries, petitioners said citizens may now second-guess whether their actions could be considered by the state as terrorism.

It is this ambiguity, among other reasons, that the law should be scrapped, said human rights lawyer and one of the petitioners' counsels Chel Diokno. He cited the void-for-vagueness doctrine, which holds that "a law is facially invalid if men of common intelligence must necessarily guess as its meaning and differ as to its application." A facial challenge to a law could result in the invalidation of the entire statute.

RELATED: Diokno tells SC: Only the Anti-Terrorism Act punishes based on person's 'state of mind'

However, Gesmundo pointed out that as a rule, the doctrine can only be used as a defense if there is already an actual prosecution.

"In other words, void-for-vagueness could be invoked as a rule either at the time of arrest or after the conviction. Therefore, void-for-vagueness would apply only if there is an actual case," the magistrate said during the interpellation.

On the first day of the oral arguments held last week, Associate Justice Marvic Leonen also said it might be too early for the high court to step in considering that petitioners failed to present an "actual case" that would warrant the SC's abolition of the measure.

READ: Leonen to petitioners vs. Anti-Terrorism Act: We understand your fears, but SC can't be a political department

Right to be informed

Also due to the law's supposed ambiguity, Diokno said the Anti-Terrorism Act effectively violates the right of an individual to be informed of the nature and form of accusation charged against him.

Gesmundo differed, saying this right is not necessarily violated as long as the complaint "is explained to an accused in a language understood by him" and contains all the material elements of the crime.

"And therefore, if the lawyer is able to explain to his client the specific allegations that match the elements of the offense, there is no violation of the right to be informed," the justice said.

"The void-for-vagueness will disappear because the lawyer explained to him why the accused was indicted," he added.

But while the void-for-vagueness and one's right to be informed are connected, Diokno said these are still different concepts. The former "has two different elements. One is fair notice to the citizen and the other is proper standards for law enforcers. That is not found in the right to be informed," he said.

Chilling effect

Petitioners have further argued that the "vague and overbroad" provisions of the law produce a chilling effect, as citizens who are unsure what exactly constitutes terrorism may simply restrain themselves from expressing their views in order to avoid being charged of the crime.

But if this is true, Leonen asked, how come the petitioners did not "cower in fear" and stop their advocacies? The magistrate said that while "there is always discomfort in dissent," it seems critics "are not chilled."

Law professor Alfredo Molo III, also one of the petitioners' counsels, disagreed.

"Chilling effect within the concept of constitutional law does not refer to an absolutely chilled population," he said. "It is the hesitation inside the mind of the speaker... He doesn't know whether the next word he will say will be criminal or in this case, mark him as a terrorist."

While petitioners may not have shrunk in fear, Molo  whose clients include retired SC Senior Associate Justice Antonio Carpio  said it is another thing to suggest that there is no pause or hesitation.

Leonen said the issue is "very subjective" and asked Molo to further explain his argument in the written memoranda the parties will submit to the Supreme Court.

READ: Anti-terror law oral arguments: Gov't critics not silenced but there's 'pause, hesitation'

Terrorist designation 'a preventive measure'

Meanwhile, Associate Justice Ramon Paul Hernando tackled contentions against the Anti-Terrorism Council's power to designate certain individuals or groups as terrorists. Seen by petitioners as violative of due process owing to the lack of parameters for designation, Hernando said this power is actually meant to act as a safeguard against further crimes.

"If you would read the ATA, the designation is only a preventive measure, preparatory to filing a freeze order with the Anti-Money Laundering Council," he said. "It's not meant as an instrument to arrest people."

The justice said this would ensure the assets of designated terrorists are frozen and would no longer be used for future crimes. However, petitioners have also argued that it violates a person's right against unreasonable searches and seizures.

The government earlier said it will publish a list of names of designated terrorists to give those tagged 15 days to file an appeal.

Only the petitioners' counsels were able to present their case during the first two days of the oral arguments which started last week. A total of 37 sets of petitioners have called for the law's abolition, saying its dangerous provisions undermine human rights. The petitions were filed by framers of the Constitution, law experts, and human rights advocates, as well as persons who claim to have been victims of authorities' terrorist-tagging.

READ: Here are the major issues raised against the Anti-Terrorism Act

Solicitor General Jose Calida and the government's lawyers are expected to defend the measure during the resumption of the oral arguments on Feb. 16.

Stocks to watch today: Here is a list of top stocks that are likely to be in focus in Wednesday's trading session based on latest developments. Investors are also awaitingQ3 earnings that are scheduled to be released today. Companies set to announce their earnings are Eicher Motors, Titan Company, GAIL India, Hindalco Industries, Aurobindo Pharma, ABB India among others.

Share Market Live: Sensex rises 100 points, Nifty at 15,109; M&M, Airtel, Titan top gainers

Berger Paints: The company reported higher consolidated profit at Rs 274.8 crore in Q3FY21 as against Rs 182.3 crore in Q3FY20, while its revenue jumped to Rs 2,118.2 crore from Rs 1,696 crore YoY.

Torrent Power: The company's Q3FY21 net profit fell 23% to Rs 321.73 crore from Rs 420.62 crore, while its revenue declined 4% to Rs 2,990.11 crore from Rs 3,115.48 crore, YoY.

Tata Steel: The company reported consolidated profit at Rs 3,989 crore in Q3FY21 against loss of Rs 1,166 crore in Q3FY20, while its revenue increased to Rs 39,594 crore from Rs 35,520 crore YoY.

Interglobe Aviation: The parent firm of the country's largest airline IndiGo, reached a settlement with Sebi in a case pertaining to non-disclosure of related-party transactions (RPTs). The company has paid a settlement amount of Rs 2.13 crore, stated the settlement order issued by the market regulator on February 9.

VST Tillers Tractors: The company has appointed VT Ravindra as Managing Director with effect from 20th February 2021.

Glenmark Pharmaceuticals : The company's board plans to meet later this week to consider the buyback of its Singapore-listed foreign currency convertible bonds (FCCBs).

The Phoenix Mills: The company's subsidiary Mindstone Mall Developers has acquired 7.48 acres of prime land in Alipore, Kolkata for Rs 300 crore.

Mahanagar Gas: The company reported higher profit at Rs 217.2 crore in Q3FY21 against Rs 186 crore in Q3FY20. Its revenue fell to Rs 666.4 crore as against Rs 744 crore YoY.

Earnings today: Eicher Motors, Titan Company, GAIL India, Hindalco Industries, Aurobindo Pharma, ABB India, Asian Granito India, Bank of India, Bata India, BEML, Gujarat State Petronet, Happiest Minds Technologies, Indraprastha Gas, Metropolis Healthcare, NBCC India, RITES, Shalimar Paints, SpiceJet and Ujjivan Financial Services are among others will announce their quarterly earnings.
Digital, tech and telco expert attracted back to former firm by its stature and global capabilities

Boyden, a premier leadership and talent advisory firm with more than 75 offices in over 45 countries, is delighted to announce the return of Mark Soden as Managing Partner of the Technology Practice in Boyden's London Office.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210209006291/en/

Mark Soden Returns to Boyden UK Ireland as Managing Partner, Technology Practice (Photo: Business Wire)

Soden is well known in the market for his digital expertise and commercial insight in helping private equity-owned and listed companies in the TMT sector to transform their businesses. With specialist experience in building leadership teams for companies going through transformation, Soden has been instrumental in finding board and C-suite leaders to steer organisations through digital evolution.

During 20 years in executive search, Soden has held leadership roles as Managing Director, Technology and Digital Practice, and Regional Managing Director for Western Europe. He is very warmly welcomed back into Boyden's global technology practice by colleagues and clients.

"I am delighted to be joining such an inspiring team in London operating in a global context," said Mark Soden, Managing Partner, Boyden UK Ireland. "As advanced technologies impact every industry, they change the way we live and drive solutions to some of the world's greatest challenges. This is a vital time to be part of the evolving landscape and it is a privilege for me to work with the leaders driving it forward".

Commenting on Soden's appointment, Nick Robeson, Managing Partner, Boyden UK Ireland, said, "We have a very experienced and skilful team in London and Mark is an ideal cultural fit. He will bring gravitas and insight to our clients in the tech space and to other clients seeking counsel as their industries evolve".

About Boyden

Boyden is a premier leadership and talent advisory firm with more than 75 offices in over 45 countries. Our global reach enables us to serve client needs anywhere they conduct business. We connect great companies with great leaders through executive search, interim management and leadership consulting solutions. For further information, visit www.boyden.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210209006291/en/

Contacts:

Chris Swee

Global Head of Marketing

T: +1 914 747 0172

E: cswee@boyden.com

Nick Robeson

Managing Partner, UK Ireland

T: 07710 102030

E: nick.robeson@boyden.com

opinion

Can the likes of Amazon, Uber and Instacart engineer solutions that spare workers from bearing the brunt of the pandemic?

The COVID-19 pandemic has wrought unprecedented changes in the economy. With offices across the world shuttered, millions of people are now dutifully working from their homes and isolating themselves from others to reduce contagion. However, anyone who has followed stay-at-home orders has experienced a deep irony: the benefits of home isolation are dependent upon others who don't have the option.

Package and food delivery are the most visible reminders that our comfort and safety comes at the expense of poorly paid and precarious workers (now dubbed "essential"), along with workers in kitchens and warehouses who supply them -- jobs with some of the highest risk for contagion.

In a further irony, many of these physically demanding and dangerous jobs fall under the aegis of tech companies: Amazon, Uber, Instacart. Can these innovators engineer solutions that spare workers from bearing the brunt of pandemic risk?

For years, these companies promised automation as the solution to issues with profitability and unhappy workers; now, the pandemic is the latest problem to be solved with robot armies just over the horizon. But there are reasons to be skeptical. Not only have dreams of full automation repeatedly come up short -- Amazon and Tesla abandoned recent efforts at fully automated facilities, and Uber has given up on autonomous cars -- but increased automation in the forms of digital tracking, machine learning, robots, and algorithmic guidance have already succeeded -- in making work more dangerous.

One of the great misrepresentations in visions of the future of work is the belief that Big Tech's investments in automation, for good or ill, will see machines performing the jobs currently occupied by human beings. Yet for all the hype around artificial intelligence and robots, high-tech companies such as Amazon continue to rely on large numbers of human workers that, while often poorly remunerated, possess manual and mental dexterity that advanced technology struggles to match.

During the pandemic, Amazon increased its human workforce by over 50% in 2020, surpassing a million employees. It tracks every detail of the labour process through its scanners and, increasingly, wearable technology. Workers receive instructions on how fast to walk in warehouses and what order to pick items, and are given continual feedback from managers and machines on their speed, or "rate." Comprehensive AI-driven surveillance is now being rolled out to Amazon's burgeoning fleet of sub-contracted delivery drivers in the name of enhanced safety, though sceptical drivers anticipate further pressures to meet strict deadlines.

The result is efficiency -- at the cost of misery. Amazon boasts an injury rate double the national average, according to media reports, with even more injuries at more automated facilities, where machines set the pace. Some workers complain about anxiety and nightmares over "rate", leaving them likelier to burn out and fuelling turnover in warehouses. One of the rallying cries of Amazon workers advocating for better conditions is "I am not a robot!"

This managerial double pincer movement, of detailed surveillance of the workers tied to increased technological control over the labour process, originates in the experiments in "scientific management" by Frederick W. Taylor over a century ago. While Taylor's methods often fell short of good science, the broad parameters of his project continue today. Tightly monitored work processes give management insight into where efficiencies can be produced, typically by eliminating downtime and speeding up worker activity. The ultimate goal is that work activities are controlled by management and its technological apparatus, rather than the workers themselves.

Amazon's approach to employee safety became a public health issue during the pandemic, with numerous outbreaks at its warehouses. In turn, workers have become more outspoken about their conditions, and strikes are on the rise, with notable actions in Minneapolis, Milan, and a series of work stoppages across Germany during Black Friday. Amazon has heavily publicized its reforms, which include small bonuses for frontline workers and heightened cleanliness standards. Meanwhile it positions itself as the solution to vaccine distribution in the U.S. But allowing Amazon a toehold in the health infrastructure means the spread of a work culture that treats workers as disposable cogs.

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As the pandemic rages on, it's hard to imagine a world without online shopping and home delivery apps. But there is no reason that the essential workers who make them possible should risk life and limb. Workers should be able to organize and to have a say in the conditions of their work. Beyond increased pay and benefits, this might mean limiting the spread of technologies of surveillance and automation, and even reducing the backbreaking pace of work. It might even mean returning to the more humane times before one-day delivery became the norm. If we want to face the crisis together and get the pandemic under control, the conveniences of a few cannot come at the expense of the well-being of the many.

Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Gavin Mueller, a Lecturer in New Media and Digital Culture and the University of Amsterdam and the author of Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Were Right About Why You Hate Your Job.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-11 02:04:17|Editor: huaxia

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UNITED NATIONS, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- Some 20 UN peacekeepers serving with the UN Stabilization Mission in Mali, MINUSMA, were injured on Wednesday, after their temporary base came under attack in the restive central region of the country.

In a statement, MINUSMA said that the "blue helmets" under fire were able to repel the attackers, who fled after delivering a "robust response."

According to UN News, the base was located in Kerena, in the vicinity of Douentza, where peacekeepers have been carrying out numerous security operations in recent months.

It has been a deadly year so far for those putting their lives on the line from the mission. Five peacekeepers died in one week during attacks in mid-January, said UN News, adding that the special representative and MINUSCA chief, Mahamat Saleh Annadif, "strongly condemns this cowardly attack against the peacekeepers."

The Malian Government has been seeking to restore stability and rebuild the volatile country's institutions following a series of setbacks since early 2012 that fractured the country, including a failed coup d'etat, renewed fighting between government forces and Tuareg rebels, and the short-lived seizure of its northern territory by radical extremists, according to UN News.

Last year military leaders staged a coup, and in September, agreed to establish a transitional government for a period of 18 months, promising fresh elections and a return to civilian rule, said UN News.

MINUSMA has over 13,000 troops to contain violence caused by armed groups in the north and center of the country. The mission has recorded about 230 fatalities since 2013, making it the worst-hit of the UN's more than a dozen peacekeeping missions. Enditem
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Its always been known in disease prevention, the safest risk is the one you didnt take. With Covid-19, anything left open to chance is an invitation to catastrophe. So it was hardly a complete shock to hear the UK announce British, or Irish, residents  arriving from 33 countries deemed high risk  must go into quarantine.

The UK is going all out with a swingeing suite of stringent new rules aimed at keeping new variants out. They include jail time for those who break the rules and heavy fines.

So how are we reacting?

The Government is considering a further tightening of restrictions on international travel, Transport Minister Eamon Ryan has said.

Tanaiste Leo Varadkar has said that legislation would be published next week on quarantine hotels in Ireland. The wonder is such moves were not made sooner; but lets be glad a response commensurate to the risk is finally being coordinated.

Read More

A total of 11,901 people flew into Dublin Airport in the first week of February. The figures were released amid warnings about Dublin being used as a back-door into the UK.

As far back as last November, the Norths health minister, Robin Swann, raised a number of concerns with our Government about the Dublin Dodge.

The term applied to a situation whereby people could fly in to Dublin Airport and then head jauntily over the Border without quarantining.

Our first responses to this crisis, it should be recognised, were made under the compulsion to react immediately.

But the past year has taught us much; the outstanding lesson is to not repeat the mistakes made by other countries.

We were told repeatedly that Covid-19 does not respect borders.

Yet this is the first week gardai have imposed fines on people making unwarranted trips across the Border.

Today we reveal the full toll taken on frontline workers in our hospitals. Staff are out on their feet trying to cope with the third wave. Today we also give details of the crippling financial costs. Our country is making the most concerted effort in history to cooperate to get through the pandemic.

Our success depends on swift reactions and being able to adapt to emerging threats instantly.

The pandemic has demonstrated mercilessly, how it pays off so much better if we prepare and prevent, as opposed to slipping into repair and repent scenarios.

Far from being criticised in the UK  for what some would regard as their draconian new travel laws  Mr Johnsons government is under fire for acting too late to restrict the spread of new variants and for not going even further.

There are many doing all they physically can to protect us; but there is a way to go yet.

So often the lowest ebb is before the turn of the tide. We wait in hope for the vaccines that will also be carried by it.

But for now we must take every measure necessary to manage our own horizons.
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.
President Joe Biden has made fighting climate change the cornerstone of his administrations domestic and international policies. This presents Biden with a huge China problem.

Biden believes greenhouse gas emissions are causing dangerous climate change. China is the worlds largest emitter of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions, emitting more than double Americas present emissions and growing. As such, Biden and his policy team, including John Kerry, his climate change envoy, and Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, see cooperation with China as necessary to reduce the threat of global warming.

Early on, the Biden administration talked tough about China. Biden issued a formal invitation to Taiwans representative to his inauguration. In addition, Blinken concurred with his predecessor Mike Pompeos determination that Chinas treatment of its Muslim Uighur minority is genocide. The administration also said previously planned naval exercises in the South China Sea will go forward, as will arms sales to Taiwan. These moves are guaranteed to raise Chinas ire.

Although Biden is talking tough with China in public, his policies are already quietly giving Beijing the upper hand in climate negotiations.

Bidens decision to rejoin the Paris climate agreement puts the United States at a competitive disadvantage with China. The agreement calls for the United States to cut greenhouse gas emissions sharply, which can only realistically be done by reducing the use of our abundant, inexpensive, reliable fossil fuels -- and ultimately by slashing the use of energy overall. The Paris agreement places no restrictions on China, which is building hundreds of coal-fueled power plants that produce reliable, inexpensive electricity.

Bidens retroactive withdrawal of permission for the Keystone XL pipeline, his ban on new oil and gas leases on public lands, and his revocation of 70 existing permits for oil and gas production, undermines U.S. energy independence.

Biden has also quietly rescinded an executive order former President Donald Trump implemented barring utilities from purchasing Chinese-made equipment critical to the U.S. energy distribution system. On its face, Bidens action seems to violate his made in America policy and is likely to make our power system less secure.

And in late January, just a week into Bidens tenure as president, Shandong Xinchao (SX), a Chinese energy company, agreed to purchase U.S. oil and gas assets currently producing 9,000 barrels of oil and gas equivalent per day, with proven reserves of 65 million barrels. Because SX operates subject to the whims of the Chinese government, it is unlikely this sale would have gone through under Trump.

China currently controls the production and refining of many rare earth minerals critical to green energy technologies and military systems. Bidens requirement to shift to an all-electric vehicle fleet and his call for expansion of wind and solar power will likely make the United States even more dependent on China for crucial rare earth minerals.

All of these actions can be seen in bribes intended to entice China to cooperate with the United States on climate change.

On top of all that, China has explicitly linked cooperation with United States on climate change to America abandoning its principled support of human rights and international law. Shortly after Blinken labeled Chinas treatment of its minority Uighur Muslim community genocide, Chinas representative made it clear Chinas cooperation on climate matters would depend on the United States ceasing to interfere in matters the Chinese Communist Party considers internal affairs.

China is ready to cooperate with the United States and the international community on climate change, China's foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said on January 28, the day after Kerry and Blinken talked tough on China. I would like to stress that China-U.S. cooperation in specific areas... is closely linked with bilateral relations as a whole.

China has emphasized time and again that no one should imagine they can ask China to understand and support them in bilateral and global matters when they blatantly interfere in Chinas domestic affairs and undermine Chinas interests, Lijian said, stating the Biden administration should create favorable conditions for climate cooperation.

Despite their tough talk, in their near-monomaniacal focus on fighting climate change, Biden and company are already well down the road to giving China more power over the United States. If, to secure cooperation on climate change, Biden reverses previous administrations positions on Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, the Uighurs, and U.S. patent holders, millions of people will suffer.

Worst of all, Bidens actions will diminish the United States standing as the worlds leader in defending individual liberty and fundamental human rights from political oppression.

H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D. (hburnett@heartland.org) is a senior fellow at The Heartland Institute, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research center headquartered in Arlington Heights, Illinois.

Image: Doron
guest column

Dubai  The conclusion of the African Union (AU) Summit on Sunday was an important moment to reflect on the pace of change across the continent and the friendship that my country, the United Arab Emirates, enjoys with the people of Africa.

The COVID-19 pandemic is the latest reminder that 21st century health and security threats do not respect national borders. We must recognize that the Middle East and Africa are particularly vulnerable to these borderless threats, and greater pan-regional planning, cooperation, and mutual support will be needed to confront the challenges ahead.

Since the founding of the UAE 49 years ago, our country has pursued deep political ties and economic cooperation with African nations.

The UAE is deeply invested in Africas prosperity and security.

The robust relationship between the UAE and the African region is reflected in our partnerships and development projects. Today, my country is deeply invested in the prosperity and security of the entire African continent. We are building ports, investing in critical infrastructure projects, responding to humanitarian crises, and offering political support when it is requested.

For too long, Africas advancement has been inhibited by inadequate and unreliable power generation. Our partnerships on renewable energy projects are helping Africa as it unleashes its unlimited economic potential.

Last month, the UAE co-hosted a ministerial and executive roundtable on the food/energy/climate nexus in preparation for the United Nations Food Systems Summit and the UN High-Level Dialogue on Energy that will be held in September 2021. Here too we are seeking African solutions to our shared challenges: Given that less than 10% of land in Africa is currently irrigated, unlocking Africas agricultural potential will ensure great strides in reducing global food insecurity.

In late 2019, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) hosted the African Investment Summit, bringing together global long-term investors and sovereign funds from 22 African countries to explore opportunities across Africa. The purpose of the Summit, said ADIA managing director, His Highness Sheikh Hamed bin Zayed, was to identify areas of mutual interest and seek ways to overcome barriers that are hindering long-term investment into the continent.

At last years AU summit, we launched the UAE's Consortium for Africa, a new initiative to help fulfill the goal of a turbocharged and interconnected new Africa, driven by its youth. The initiative is a component of our contribution to an optimistic vision for Africas future.

Enabling Africas younger generation through digital technologies

As I told AU members, the Consortium will be a long-term builder of human capital on the continent, with two immediate priorities: digitization and youth. The Consortium aligns our government and private sector's commitment to Africa, combining ambition for progress and the resources to support it into one focused entity to assist development and investment.

While we share this vision for African prosperity, we also know that it depends on security and stability. The crises that preoccupy leaders across Africa and the Middle East are often those that the United Nations and other international organizations seek to address. This is why African and Arab voices on the Security Council are so critical, and why solidarity in confronting our shared challenges is a diplomatic prerogative that must remain a top priority.

Elevating African voices

Despite the frequency of United Nations Security Council discussions on African challenges, the Council often neglects to elevate African voices in that critical dialogue. Decisions that impact millions are made without adequate consultation. Envoys are appointed with insufficient input from African stakeholders, who are critical to helping those same envoys fulfill their missions. As a result, the credibility and effectiveness of the UN is put unnecessarily at risk.

Representation matters in the UN, as it does in other bodies. African governments and regional organizations must have a stronger say in the UNs actions.

The Security Council must be more responsive to the needs and perspectives of its African members [three rotating members called the A3]. This can only be achieved if the Councils non-African elected members actively pursue greater solidarity with the A3. Saint Vincent and the Grenadines partnership with the A3 on the Council during their current term is an excellent example of how countries from outside the region can champion African solutions.

When the UAE joins the UN Security Council next year, we will likewise raise our voice alongside Africa at a time when it is needed most. We will promote African perspectives and proposals when broader support is most critical.

A core focus of the UN Security Councils mandate is the peace and security of Africa. Through our longstanding partnerships with the African Union and throughout the region, we have demonstrated our firm commitment to these crucial priorities. In his remarks before the UN General Assembly last year, His Highness Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAEs Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, reiterated the UAEs longstanding view that the United Nations should involve regional organizations in finding permanent solutions for crises, and the African Union remains a critical partner in these efforts.

Promoting African peacebuilders, addressing the climate crisis

That will also require sufficient resources to sustain peacekeeping and economic development. The need for this is particularly acute in West Africa as the region grapples with destabilizing threats posed by terrorist and criminal groups. Greater support for the G5 Joint Force [a Sahel security initiative], will be necessary to help guarantee peace and security throughout this important region.

The UAE also intends to work with the A3 and other partners in the Security Council to call attention to the linkages between climate change, resource scarcity, and insecurity  the consequences of which are borne disproportionately by African countries. We will seek solutions to solvable problems, such as the dependence of peace missions on diesel fuel when low-cost renewable alternatives could be deployed.

From maintaining international security to mitigating the risks of climate change, multilateralism is the core principle that will enhance the worlds future preparedness for 21st century challenges.

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Vaccine equity  no one is safe from Covid until everyone is safe

Right now, the immediate challenge for most countries around the world is the Covid-19 pandemic. Vaccinating the world will be one of the international communitys top challenges in 2021, and vaccine equity will likely remain a challenge during 2022-2023, the period when the UAE will have a seat on the United Nations Security Council.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said at the fourth annual African Union-UN conference that Africa must be effectively supported to fight the pandemic everywhere. We agree.

As the hosts of Expo, a global convening that will celebrate international collaboration, the UAE has a particular interest in assuring the equitable distribution of vaccines. An Expo in which all cannot participate would not be true to the UAEs vision of resilience and inclusion. We are particularly concerned by reports that many in sub-Saharan Africa will not receive vaccines until 2023. We must do better.

The participation of African nations at Expo, as well as the African Union itself with a dedicated pavilion, will be a monumental opportunity to showcase the rich and vibrant history of the continent and its potential to drive global economic growth following the pandemic.

The world is at a critical juncture. The UAE is ready to play our role as a partner to Africa as we traverse the challenges and opportunities ahead.

Her Excellency Reem Al Hashimy is the Minister of State for International Cooperation for the United Arab Emirates.

From almost 12 million in 2019 to just over 10 million last year. Some provinces report a 30% drop. The failure of the regime's demographic control policies. Over the next 30 years, China will lose 200 million working-age adults and have 300 million more retirees.

Beijing (AsiaNews / Agencies)  Chinas national birth rate continues to plummet according to the latest data issues yesterday by the Ministry of Public Security. In 2020, there were 10.03 million babies born: the previous year the number was 11.79 million.

The data confirms a negative trend year on year. In 2019, the authorities had registered 14.65 million births; 15.23 million in 2018.

The figure is partial and concerns families registered in the "hukou" system, which binds access to social benefits to the place of official residence. Many citizens choose not to register to avoid fines for violating state-imposed birth limits. The National Bureau of Statistics will publish the official fertility rate in April, at the end of the national census.

The drop in births recorded by the ministry is 15%. Data provided by some provinces speak of an even greater drop, around 30%. The industrial zones in the east and south reported the worst numbers.

Analysts say the data confirms the failure of the past one-child policy. Moreover, the extension to two children per family has failed to change the situation.

According to a study by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, beginning in 2027 the working age population will begin to decline, with serious pension problems for the elderly. According to United Nations calculations, Beijing has little chance of reversing this course: in the next 30 years the Asian giant will lose 200 million adults of working age and end up with 300 million more pensioners: an economic and social time bomb.
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GAINES TOWNSHIP, MI -- The family of a Michigan man killed after a cannon explosion is calling the situation a blameless accident.

On the evening of Saturday, Feb. 6, the cannon exploded in the back yard of a home in Genesee Countys Gaines Township, hurling pieces of shrapnel into the air that killed 26-year-old Evan Thomas Silva, of Hartland.

Carolyn Jackson, Silvas sister, sent the following statement Wednesday, Feb. 10 to MLive-The Flint Journal written by the family about the incident:

We would like to clarify, the accident that occurred resulting in Evan Thomas Silvas death on February 6th, 2021 did not happen at the baby shower, it was at a gathering with friends later that evening. No one is at fault, it was a blameless accident and our hearts go out to all that where there. Evan lived his life with vibrance, charisma and one-of-a-kind-humor. His far reaching influence can be attributed to his warm smile, infectious laugh and larger than life personality. Evan will always be loved and remembered by all he touched. A GoFundMe fundraiser has been established by his Cousin to assist with funeral expenses. We thank everyone for their thoughts and prayers.

By the afternoon Wednesday, Feb. 10, the GoFundMe fundraiser has raised nearly $14,000 for Silvas funeral expenses.

On Monday, Michigan State Police Lt. Liz Rich confirmed that the cannon incident was not part of a gender reveal.

Related: Investigation continues into fatal cannon explosion at Michigan baby shower

We suspect that there was too much gunpowder in (the cannon) and if there isnt regular maintenance when youre using explosives, there could be a hairline fracture that you cant see with the naked eye, Rich previously said. It could have been anything like that but (officers) suspect that there was too much powder and it just fractured the entire cannon and thats what made it explode.

Once all information has been gathered and the police report is completed, Rich said the report will be sent to the Genesee County Prosecutors Office to determine any possible charges.

Genesee County Prosecutor David Leyton said his office issued a search warrant over the weekend to gather evidence at the scene. He also said he will not speculate on any possible charges until he sees the full investigation is complete.

It is unclear when the police report will be complete. Police are still reviewing cell phones seized from the event to process if anything was caught on camera, Rich said.

Silva was one of about five people outside the residence where the small cannon-type device was fired to celebrate the babys pending arrival and was the only one hit by shrapnel, according to Michigan State Police.

The cannon blew up upon firing, spreading metal shrapnel that hit Silva, as well as three parked cars and the garage where the baby shower was held.

Related: Man dies after explosion at Michigan baby shower

Silva was standing 10 to 15 feet from the explosion, police said. He was taken to Hurley Medical Center in Flint where he later died from his injuries.

The cannon was designed to fire more like a novelty Signal Cannon, which is intended to emit a big flash, a loud noise and smoke, police said. The homeowner had purchased the cannon from an auction and had fired it several times before the incident took place.

Silva was born on Sept. 8, 1994 in Falls Church, Virginia to parents Kim and Al Silva. He grew up in Springfield, Virginia until the family moved to Brighton when he was 9-year-old, according to Silvas obituary.

He graduated from Hartland High School in 2013. After graduation, Silva worked at multiple companies, the last being at H&M as a field testing technician.

Silva enjoyed spending time with his countless friends and family, off-roading, fishing and making people laugh, the obituary states.

He was a gifted musician in both guitar and piano and had an endless love for music. He took great pride in his collection of firearms and in being an American, reads Silvas obituary. He had the amazing ability of touching the hearts and minds of everyone he met along the way. Evans warm smile, infectious laugh and one of a kind humor will live on in all our memories.

Evan Thomas Silva is preceded in death by his sister, Renee Silva, his grandparents Reginald and Carol Huebner and Neil and Zita Da Silva. He is survived by his parents Kim and Al Silva, his older brother, Phillip Silva, his younger sister Carolyn Jackson and his niece Sawyer Jackson.

Read more on MLive:

Reward offered for information on recent killing of Flint man

Residents invited to virtual meetings of Flint public safety task force

New Genesee County committee charged with tackling equity and inclusion issues
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Im old enough to remember the screeching sound of a modem as it connected to the internet. Now we hold in our pockets more technology than I used with Netscape Navigator and Altavista to explore the World Wide Web, and web browsers have become the portal through which we access most of our critical apps and services. As we enter the era of cloud computing and the end of Adobe Flash, its time for enterprises to not only standardize on a web browser, but to ensure that your settings and deployments are secure as they can be.

Standardizing on the Chromium-based Edge browser

For many years weve had to install multiple browsers because vendors did not support built-in browsers, or they targeted their applications for one browser. With Chrome-based Edge, its possible to go back to a single browser without your application ecosystem suffering ill effects.

Microsoft has released a Security baseline for Microsoft Edge version 85. It has also provided the Microsoft Security Compliance Toolkit 1.0, which includes information and recommendations. With this kit you can use Group Policy or scripts to better harden your Edge browser against threats.
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

The European Commission chief prepared to defend its stumbling vaccine rollout before the EU parliament on Wednesday as the pandemic's grip on the continent forced Greece into tightening a lockdown around its capital.

Europe has logged a third of the more than 2.3 million lives lost globally to the virus, which is spreading rapidly despite the start of vaccinations in many nations and forcing the reimposition of unpopular and economically punishing restrictions.

Leaders of the European Union have been engaged in bitter public rows with pharmaceutical firms over supply shortages, as they faced public anger and scrutiny over slow vaccination rollouts in member states.

Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was due to explain the EU's vaccine strategy to the European Parliament in Brussels on Wednesday, with the bloc's leadership under growing pressure.

Vaccine supply issues have already caused a diplomatic row after AstraZeneca said it would not be able to immediately ship the doses it promised to Britain and the EU.

At the same time, the resurgence of infections across the continent is adding to the pressure on its leadership.

A stricter lockdown will be imposed in Greece from Thursdayin particular in the Athens regionsaid Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, warning that his country was facing a third COVID-19 wave.

Wary of infection numbers exploding again, German Chancellor Angela Merkel will seek to extend strict curbs at least until the end of February as fatigue grows with the partial lockdown in Europe's top economy.

The heaviest snow in years also added to woes in Europe with transport and infrastructure hit in Germany and Britain.

Some coronavirus vaccination centres in England were forced to closeincluding major hubs in Ipswich and Colchester.

No breakthrough on virus origin

A much-anticipated World Health Organization inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus wrapped up its mission in China on Tuesday. They failed to identify which animal may have passed it to humans.

The experts said there was "no indication" the virus was circulating in the ground-zero city of Wuhan before December 2019, when the first official cases were recorded.

WHO expert Peter Ben Embarek also scotched a controversial theory that the virus had leaked from a Wuhan lab, calling it "extremely unlikely".

China has been ramping up efforts to highlight its role in overcoming the pandemic, including the development of COVID-19 vaccines that have helped start shots in many parts of the worldincluding hard-hit South America.

Peru on Tuesday began its immunisation programme with 300,000 doses of the vaccine developed by China's Sinopharm.

Argentina, meanwhile, said it had given emergency authorisation to the Indian-made version of the AstraZeneca vaccine, following its approval of Russia's Sputnik V jab.

Bolivia has also been using Sputnik V as it battles a surge in infections, although health workers in its worst-hit region began a two-day strike Tuesday to demand a lockdown.

And in hard-hit Brazil, businesses and non-profit groups announced a plan to speed up the government's troubled immunisation drive, with the goal of vaccinating the entire country by September.

Valentine's Day worries

Along with mass vaccinations, researchers and engineers around the world are searching for other ways to help end the pandemic and return life to normalespecially international travel.

Tech-savvy Estonia is working on a pilot project with the WHO on how a globally recognised electronic vaccine certificate might work, including addressing concerns about security and privacy.

A more immediate concern for authorities in many countries this week is Valentine's Day, with fears that the upcoming celebrations could lead to a surge in infections.

Authorities in Thailand's capital Bangkok announced the city would not register marriages on Valentine's Day, a popular day for weddings.

In Brussels, however, where restaurants are closed, some hotels have converted rooms into private dining salons for two.

"We're over the moon about being here tonight, just like in a restaurant," said Marine Deroo, a 34-year-old who tried out the concept ahead of Valentine's Day.

Explore further Follow the latest news on the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak

 2021 AFP
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Put simply, a landlocked country is a country with no direct access to the ocean. Today, there are 44 countries that are landlocked. The smallest landlocked country is Vatican City, which is entirely surrounded by Italy. The largest is Kazakhstan, located in Central Asia. There are landlocked countries on every continent, except North America, Australia, and Antarctica.

Were The Landlocked Countries Always Landlocked?

Not all countries that are landlocked today were always landlocked. In many instances, countries have become landlocked due to armed conflict. One example of a country that once had direct access to the ocean, but which no longer has access is Bolivia, located in the central part of South America. Today, Bolivia is a landlocked country, surrounded by Chile, Peru, Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina. Before the Pacific War (1879-1883), however, Bolivia had a coastline on the Pacific Ocean. After the war, its former coastline was annexed by neighboring Chile, leaving Bolivia without an ocean coastline.

Prior to the Eritrean War of Independence, Ethiopia occupied the territory that is now Eritrea and had direct access to the Red Sea coast. Image credit: Skilla1st, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Another example of a country that was not always landlocked is Ethiopia, located in the Horn of Africa. Between 1961 and 1991, the Ethiopian region of Eritrea, located on the coast of the Red Sea, fought a war of independence against the Ethiopian government. The war ultimately climaxed with Eritrea breaking away from Ethiopia, leaving the former without direct access to the Red Sea.

Present day Ethiopia lacks direct access to the coast and exists as a landlocked country.

In some cases, countries that are presently landlocked once had direct access to the ocean as part of multinational empires that included them. Before the Soviet Union broke up, for instance, the currently independent countries of Central Asia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan all had direct, borderless access to maritime ports via the other parts of the Soviet empire that were not landlocked. Today, however, all of the aforementioned countries of Central Asia are landlocked, and must rely on the goodwill of their neighbors in order to access ocean trade routes.

Challenges Faced By Landlocked Countries

A truck with the national flag of Kazakhstan depicted on the back door carries goods to another country along the highway.

The main challenges that landlocked countries must contend with all have to do with trade. Since landlocked countries do not have access to maritime ports, they have no direct access to vital trade routes through which all types of goods pass. Developing countries in particular are vulnerable to their landlocked status. It is no coincidence that both human and economic indicators for landlocked countries are generally worse than for countries that are not landlocked. According to the World Bank, for example, it costs twice as much to ship cargo from a developing landlocked country, as opposed to directly from one of its neighbors that border the ocean or another major body of water that borders an ocean. More expensive shipping costs are routinely passed to the consumer, resulting higher prices for all types of goods.

One essential good affected by price increases due to shipping costs in landlocked countries is food. On average, food costs in landlocked countries are three times as high as in coastal countries. Making the food situation even worse for landlocked countries is the fact that many of them do not have much arable farmland, which means that it is more difficult to grow food, and thus food must be imported. The lack of arable land to grow food is exacerbated further by the effects of climate change.

Being a landlocked country means being dependent on neighboring countries with maritime coastlines on several levels. Firstly, a landlocked country is dependent on other countries for transportation infrastructure, which means if the other country or countries that a landlocked country depends on for the import and export of its goods has bad transportation infrastructure, it will be much more difficult for the landlocked country to conduct trade of any kind.

Landlocked countries are also dependent on countries with maritime borders in terms of political relations. If a landlocked country has poor relations with a country or countries that its imports and exports must pass through, that landlocked country is extremely vulnerable as the transit countries can make it harder or even impossible for goods to travel through their borders. The transit countries can take measures such as raising tariffs or even closing borders, cutting off their landlocked neighbors.

Another level of dependence that landlocked countries face is their dependence on the political stability of their neighbors. If there is civil strife in countries that landlocked states rely on as transit countries for their imports and exports, doing any kind of trade can be extremely difficult. Armed conflict in a neighboring transit country can, for example, lead to the destruction of transportation networks that neighboring landlocked countries rely on for trade, not to mention the fact that transiting through a country experiencing violent internal conflict is extremely dangerous.

Landlocked countries are also dependent on burdensome administrative costs and processes. Crossing international boundaries in order to get goods to and from landlocked countries leads to a lot of onerous paperwork and increased shipping costs. Having to get goods across international borders also leads to lengthy delays, which can severely affect shippers abilities to fulfill contract commitments.

Solutions To Problems

Formation of the European Union helped the landlocked nations of Europe to enhance their economic well-being.

Clearly, countries without maritime borders face special challenges as a result of being landlocked. But there are ways to solve the specific problems that landlocked countries face. One solution is obvious, and involves landlocked countries building and maintaining good relations with countries that have maritime borders and serve as transit countries. If landlocked countries maintain good relations with transit countries, trade will flow more smoothly. Some landlocked countries in Europe, for example, have greatly benefitted from the increased economic and political integration of the continent under the auspices of the European Union, which has lowered administrative and customs barriers so that goods flow more freely around the continent, including to and from EU member states that are landlocked.

For the most part, however, countries around the world, landlocked or not, have not built up the amount of trust amongst each other that would lead to the type of integration apparent in the EU. Nevertheless, landlocked countries do need to find a way of cooperating with transit countries in order to improve their prospects for development. Simply cooperating to improve transportation infrastructure, or standardize administrative and customs procedures, for instance, can go a long way towards making prosperity for landlocked countries easier to achieve.
JUDICIAL officers presiding in anti- corruption courts must demand speedy trials on all cases involving corruption and avoid turning the special courts into theatres of bail hearings, a High Court judge has said.

Justice Kwenda stressed the need to expeditiously deal with corruption cases. He made the remarks in the case involving the Prosecutor-General and gold dealer Ali Mohammed.

The State was seeking to have his bail revoked on appeal. However, the appeal failed to find merit with the court.

"Once a person is arrested on a charge of corruption because all the ingredients have already been ascertained to be present, there is no reason to delay trial," said Justice Kwenda.

The judge expressed his disquite over special anti- corruption courts which he said were slowly being turned into bail courts.

"Instead of dealing with the merits of corruption allegations, courts are inundated with bail applications and variations of bail conditions without the trials taking place," he said.

"The drama associated with the side shows must be resisted by all those involved in the anti-corruption courts if the courts are to be effective in discharging their mandates of quickly dealing with corruption matters."

Special anti-corruption courts have been established throughout the country to give priority to cases of corruption. However, most if not all corruption trials are failing to commence for various reasons, even where evidence is overwhelming.
New Delhi, Feb 10 : He was neither a doctor, nor a foreigner. But Delhi-based conman Divas Rimal allegedly assumed the identity of one Dr Mike Williamson to lure women on social media, said the Delhi Police.

The accused used to send friend requests through Facebook from a fake id by the name of Dr. Mike Williamson.

The police explained his modus operandi. Rimal used to entice women and convinced them to share their Whatsapp numbers and requested them to suggest birthday gifts for their mothers.

Later, he told the victims that while shopping for the mother he had bought a surprise gift and a bag for them. On his continuous requests, the women shared their addresses with Rimal.

After a few days, one of the victims got a call purportedly from the Customs Department saying the victim had to pay Rs 37,300 to receive the courier. As per the request, a gullible victim transferred the said amount in the given Account number.

She was further told since the courier had a large quantity of jewellery she again had to deposit Rs. 3,65,000 in another account.

"On the next day, she received a call from the same number, and was asked to pay Rs 570,000 as penalty to receive the courier. The victim now realised she had been duped through an organised racket," said Urvija Goel, DCP West.

Police said that One of the bank accounts mentioned by the complainant was examined and the linked mobile number traced. Further investigation revealed that the accused had recently purchased a used Honda City car.

Through the concerned transport authority, the previous car owner was approached and subsequently the dealer contacted. The dealer produced a receipt for the delivery of the said vehicle.

The police party finally traced the accused to Chhatarpur, where he was nabbed.

"Further, with the help of technical assistance and local intelligence, another accused namely Ndubuisi Augustine, a Nigerian national, was also arrested. Further investigations are in progress," added the officer.
A federal appeals court refused Wednesday to revive a lawsuit by 21 young people demanding government action against climate change, reaffirming a ruling that judges have no power to order such action.

The suit was filed in 2015 by plaintiffs ranging in age from 8 to 19. Saying some had seen their homes and schools flooded because of warming temperatures and others had been harmed by smoke from wildfires, they argued that the government was violating their constitutional rights to life and liberty by approving continued oil, gas and coal development.

A federal judge in Oregon refused to dismiss the suit but was overruled in January 2020 by the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. Although climate change is potentially catastrophic, the remedy the youths seek  requiring the government to move toward a carbon-free energy system by mid-century  is beyond the powers of the judiciary, the court said in a 2-1 ruling that it described as reluctant.

Lawyers for the youths asked the full appeals court for a new hearing before a larger panel. On Wednesday, the court said the request had failed to gain a majority among the 25 judges taking part in the vote. It did not disclose the vote total but said four judges  M. Margaret McKeown, Daniel Collins, Daniel Bress and Lawrence VanDyke  did not participate, for reasons the court did not specify.

The youths will seek review from the Supreme Court and will also invite President Bidens administration to the negotiating table, their lawyers said. Former President Donald Trump described as a hoax the scientific consensus that humans are responsible for climate change.

But Biden has promised to work toward carbon-free power production by 2035, stopped issuing oil and gas drilling permits on federal land, rejoined the Paris climate accord and named former Secretary of State John Kerry as his envoy on climate change.

The ruling deprives people in the nine states covered by the Ninth Circuit of the ability to seek a resolution of a real controversy with their government, and hear a controversy about harm to the health and safety of children, said attorney Julia Olson of the nonprofit Our Childrens Trust. That travesty cannot stand.

I hope that President Joe Biden will understand the crisis were in, stop fighting our claims and our rights, and will decide to come to the settlement table in our case, one of the youths, Sahara V., said in a statement released by the lawyers.

In last years ruling, Judge Andrew Hurwitz said the changes the lawsuit seeks would require a fundamental transformation of this countrys energy system, if not that of the industrialized world. The youths must instead make their case to the president and Congress, he said.

In dissent, U.S. District Judge Josephine Staton of Santa Ana, temporarily assigned to the appeals court, said the courts may not be able to undo climate change but can require the government to take meaningful action. The Constitution does not condone the nations willful destruction, she said.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @BobEgelko
This month, Hearst Television is celebrating Black history by having courageous conversations. The fight for civil rights and justice goes back generations and has looked different each decade. Were speaking with community leaders, elders  those who have lived through victories and troubled times, to talk about their experiences, and compare them with what we still struggle with today.



Virginia Smith Denton, 82, said she was at home with her mom when she learned about the Supreme Court's milestone Brown v. Board of Education decision.

The court ruled in 1954 that separating children in public schools on the basis of race was unconstitutional.

In the fall of 1954, the then 16-year-old and six other teens became the first Black students to attend Fayetteville High School.

"We weren't scared. We were a little nervous," Smith Denton said.

On the first day of school in September 1954, Smith Denton walked to school with her cousins Roberta Lackey and Elnora Lackey.

It was her first year in high school and one that would make history.

That year, seven Black students joined more than 500 white students, learning together for the first time.

Smith Denton said when she and her cousins arrived, they were not greeted by an angry mob, police or weapons.

Instead, waiting for them at the entrance were Mary Ann Sharp and Sara Trager  two white classmates Smith Denton would later call friends.

"We saw them standing out there. We didn't know what to think. But they were so nice, and they welcomed us," Smith Denton said.

It was a very different scene than some others playing out in the deep south.

Smith Denton said her teachers at Fayetteville High School were welcoming.

"They were nice to me. Yes, they were. Well, except for one. I didn't like her. She didn't like me either," Smith Denton said, with a laugh.

Smith Denton recalled one incident with a classmate.

"In my history class, we had this one guy, and the guy told this little (racist slur) joke. So he got suspended. Yes, but he got to come back. He got suspended for a while. They weren't taking any you know what. They weren't going to start that taking no stuff like that," Smith Denton said when asked how she what she remembers about her classmates during desegregation.

However, Smith Denton says Black students faced a different reality outside of Fayetteville High School. She said Black families avoided going to several nearby cities and towns after dark.

"We couldn't go to Springdale and be there up there after dark. We couldn't go to Bentonville. I mean, I think those towns were still kind of, you know, they weren't ready for us," Smith Denton said. "But, now we can go wherever we want. Yeah, you couldn't be there after sundown."

Ify Egbosimba, an anchor with sister station KHBS/KHOG, asked Smith Denton what would happen if a Black person went to neighboring communities after dark.

"They probably would have shot them," Smith Denton said. "You couldn't be up there after dark, but we went through there. I mean, still, we just didn't stop, you know, in the stores because we were going through there to go to Tulsa and stuff. I just couldn't stop. It was kind of bad back then. Couldn't go to Farmington. It was just terrible back then."

Nearly 70 years later, Smith Denton still calls Fayetteville home.

Her kids and grandkids are also graduates of Fayetteville High School. Soon, her great-grandkids will be, too.

Smith Denton said Northwest Arkansas is not the same community it was in 1954, but there is still more work to be done.

"Some things have changed," Smith Denton said. "I just hope everybody can be as one. We're all God's children. I think that would be a good thing."
The coronavirus-induced economic downturn saw just 12 companies list on the Australian sharemarket in the first part of 2020 but the year finished with 74 new listings, with five posting first-day gains of at least 100 per cent.

One of the striking features of the 2020 initial public offering (IPO) market was an abnormally high number from the retail sector, says Marcus Ohm, partner at HLB Mann Judd Perth and author of the IPO Watch Australia Report.

Managing director Phillip Britt saw shares of Aussie Broadband, the company he co-founded, soar from an IPO issue price of $1 to more than $2.70.

Retail listings tended to be those whose sales have boomed during the pandemic as their customers spent more time at home, Ohm says.

Beauty products supplier Adore Beauty is seeing sales of soap, hand sanitiser and handwash increase through its online-only model.
BVOH Search & Consulting We exist to elevate the industry. We are advocates who listen, truly care, and are deeply committed to exceeding expectations for clients and candidates.

BVOH Search & Consulting, a leading search and staffing firm announced today that they have earned the ClearlyRateds 2021 Best of Staffing Award. This is the sixth consecutive year that BVOH has won this award in the talent category, and the fifth consecutive win in the client category. Presented in partnership with CareerBuilder, Indeed & Talent.com, ClearlyRated's Best of Staffing Award recognizes industry leaders in service quality based entirely on ratings provided by their clients and candidates. BVOH Search & Consulting received satisfaction scores of 9 and 10 out of 10 from 82.2% of its clients, significantly beating the industry average of 38%. The company also received satisfaction scores of 9 and 10 out of 10 from 85.4% of its placed job candidates, which is also significantly higher than the industrys average of 40%.

Providing outstanding service is our mission at BVOH, so we are extremely proud that the award is based on the experience rating of our candidates and clients. Being recognized for this achievement for six years in a row, and especially during such a difficult year, is a testament to the commitment and quality of our recruiters, said Leslie Boudreaux, Senior Managing Partner at BVOH.

After one of the most turbulent years in modern history, winners of the 2021 Best of Staffing award have proven their commitment to go above and beyond in support of their clients and placed talent," said ClearlyRated's CEO and Founder, Eric Gregg. "These service leaders have demonstrated their capacity to be agile, to be precise, and to prioritize the client and talent experience above all else. It is my honor to celebrate and showcase the 2021 Best of Staffing winners alongside feedback from their actual clients and placed talent on ClearlyRated.com!

About BVOH Search & Consulting

We are the premier, Boutique recruiting firm specializing in Accounting & Finance search and consulting services for the San Francisco Bay Areas top companies. Small but impactful, our success comes from our years of experience in finance and accounting, as well as a genuine understanding of the needs of our clients and candidates. Our client and candidate relationships are long-term and ongoing, which underscores our very effective process model. We care, and it shows.

About ClearlyRated

Rooted in satisfaction research for professional service firms, ClearlyRated utilizes a Net Promoter Score survey program to help professional service firms measure their service experience, build online reputation, and differentiate on service quality. Learn more at https://www.clearlyrated.com/solutions/.

About Best of Staffing

ClearlyRated's Best of Staffing Award is the only award in the U.S. and Canada that recognizes staffing agencies that have proven superior service quality based entirely on ratings provided by their clients and placed talent. Award winners are showcased by city and area of expertise on ClearlyRated.coman online business directory that helps buyers of professional services find service leaders and vet prospective firms with the help of validated ratings and testimonials.
Oregons most popular campgrounds were a little less full than usual last summer, while some remote state park sites saw a huge surge in campers.

Thats according to data released Monday by the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department, which tracks the number of camper nights (each night spent by each camper at a campsite) at all state park campgrounds each year.

The numbers from 2020 show a massive decline in camping statewide, falling 34% from more than 2.9 million camper nights in 2019 to just over 1.9 million last year.

Its no surprise that the numbers would fall in 2020. The hectic year saw all campgrounds closed between March and June due to the coronavirus pandemic, with most cabins and yurts closed through December. Wildfires in September also made some campgrounds inaccessible, while smoke made camping unhealthy across the state. Some campgrounds were badly damaged or even destroyed by the fires.

What park officials did find surprising is the degree to which camping decreased in 2020  considering how popular day-use areas remained during the pandemic  as well as the parks that saw influxes of campers.

In addition to its annual data, the state parks department released monthly camping numbers for July and August, typically the busiest season for state park campgrounds. In those two months, all campgrounds at the Oregon coast saw decreases from the previous year, as as did most campgrounds in the Willamette Valley.

The only meaningful year-to-year increases came among a small group of remote campgrounds scattered across central, eastern and southern Oregon, where campers seemed to flock in 2020.

The Pinnacles Trail leads along the John Day River through Cottonwood Canyon State Park in north-central Oregon. Jamie Hale/The Oregonian

That list of newly popular destinations includes names that are usually better known for landing on the list of Oregons least-visited state parks: places like Cottonwood Canyon State Park outside of Wasco, Unity Lake State Recreation Site in eastern Oregon and Jackson F. Kimball State Recreation Site north of Klamath Falls.

At the top of the list is Red Bridge State Wayside, a tiny park in the Blue Mountains, which saw an 82% increase in campers last July and August, going from 700 camper nights in 2019 to 1,277 in 2020.

Mark Miller, state park manager for the Blue Mountain Unit in northeast Oregon, said he saw firsthand the increase in crowds last summer, which he said was driven primarily by people from more urban areas in Oregon, Washington and Idaho looking for a remote escape.

Its obvious, you look at a map, you can tell its an area that doesnt have a whole lot of visitation, Miller said. That seems desirable for folks.

In addition to Red Bridge, Miller also oversees the campground at nearby Hilgard Junction State Park, which saw a 37% increase in campers last year. The remote parks may lack the grandiosity of iconic sites like Smith Rock or Silver Falls, but both are situated along a beautiful stretch of the scenic Grand Ronde River, where people can go fishing by day and enjoy a quiet night under the stars, he said.

And even when filled to capacity, the campgrounds are far less crowded than most others in Oregon, thanks to how few campsites are actually there.

The Red Bridge campground consists of 10 primitive walk-in sites, with another 10 that can accommodate self-contained RVs. Hilgard Junction has only 18 primitive sites. Thats a far cry from the massive campgrounds at big-name parks like Fort Stevens on the Oregon coast, which boasts nearly 500 campsites, including 26 yurts and cabins.

Campers at Red Bridge State Wayside, in the Blue Mountains outside of La Grande.Oregon State Parks

Primitive camping comes with its own challenges, but it may offer a more comfortable experience for those who felt uneasy around crowds during the coronavirus pandemic, as COVID-19 continued to spread among those in sharing living spaces, work environments or public gatherings. So far, no outbreaks of COVID-19 have been traced back to state park campgrounds, parks spokesman Chris Havel said, but that doesnt necessarily allay the fear.

As rural residents skipped traditional vacation destinations for campgrounds close at hand, We saw more people out looking for these out-of-the-way places, Havel said, instead of maybe going to the coast, they were staying home.

He said that any conclusions so far are only educated guesses, based as much on anecdotal evidence as the data itself. Ultimately, he said, there were simply too many variables in 2020 to draw many meaningful conclusions from the annual camping numbers.

Still, the fact that Oregons more remote and rugged campgrounds clearly saw a surge in interest may mean more people will continue to opt for a quieter camping experience in the future.

The lesson from 2020 is yes, tent camping is important, some of these remote sites are important, Havel said. And while farther afield, theyre much more manageable as well. They dont take as much investment or management to get them to operate well.

In fact, Miller said the parks and campgrounds in his district ran smoother than anticipated last year. Park sites that remained closed to the public saw very little in the way of litter or vandalism, he said, and the visitors who stayed at the campgrounds needed little to no help from park rangers.

Thats a relief for the people in charge. Miller said his staff of 13 rangers was cut down to four last year, as the state parks department faced layoffs following a severe budget shortfall due to the pandemic.

Self-sufficient campers allowed him to remain happy just to see more people in the sparsely visited parks, he said, getting to know the rural Oregon camping experience that he already cherishes.

It caters to those visitors that like that primitive experience, Miller said of the more remote campgrounds. Its almost like going back in time in some ways.

--Jamie Hale; jhale@oregonian.com; 503-294-4077; @HaleJamesB
This year's Oscars will be broadcast live and 'in-person' from multiple locations, the Academy said Wednesday, as details of Hollywood's pandemic-delayed big night finally begin to take shape.

The Academy Awards in recent decades have taken place at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles, but with the United States' second largest city still under COVID-19 restrictions, the ceremony is 'adapting to the requirements of the pandemic,' said a spokesperson.

'To create the in-person show our global audience wants to see... the ceremony will broadcast live from multiple locations, including the landmark Dolby Theatre,' they said in a statement to AFP.

Changes: This year's Academy Awards will take place in multiple locations to help combat the spread of coronavirus

The 93rd Academy Awards will be 'an Oscars like none other, while prioritizing the public health and safety of all those who will participate,' the spokesperson added.

No further new details were offered on the ceremony, which caps Hollywood's lengthy award season.

It is not the first time the Oscars will take place at multiple locations. As far back as 1953 -- the first time the ceremony was televised -- proceedings were split between Los Angeles and New York.

This year, other award shows are already experimenting with multiple locations including this month's Golden Globes.

Pushed back: With COVID-19 shuttering movie theaters and wreaking havoc on Hollywood's release calendar, the Academy Awards have been postponed by two months to April 25

Trying new things: The Golden Globes, which are set to be hosted by Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, above 2015, are also said to be experimenting with multiple locations

The Globes will see a 'first-ever bicoastal telecast' in which Tina Fey hosts from New York's Rainbow Room and Amy Poehler from the Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles, organizers said.

Television's Emmys in September were broadcast from a near-empty Los Angeles theater, with nominees and winners dialing in from their homes and socially distanced gatherings via video call.

With Covid-19 shuttering movie theaters and wreaking havoc on Hollywood's release calendar, the all-important Academy Awards have already been postponed by two months to April 25.

One way to do it: Television's Emmys in September were broadcast from a near-empty Los Angeles theater, with nominees and winners dialing in from their homes and socially distanced gatherings via video call

Because many studio blockbusters and indie arthouse movies have been forced to push back their release dates until theaters reopen, the cut-off date for Oscar-eligible films has also been extended by two months, to the end of February.

Contagion director Steven Soderbergh will produce this year's Oscars ceremony, which has been billed as 'the perfect occasion for innovation and for re-envisioning the possibilities for the awards show' by Academy president David Rubin and CEO Dawn Hudson.

'We're thrilled and terrified in equal measure,' said Soderbergh in an earlier joint statement with co-producers Jesse Collins and Stacey Sher of Django Unchained.
Mumbai: Kangana Ranaut told the Bombay High Court on Wednesday that she would file a regularisation application before the Mumbai civic body in connection with alleged irregularities at her residential flats in suburban Khar.

Ranaut's counsel Birendra Saraf sought to withdraw the appeal filed by the actor against a civil court's December 2020 order dismissing her suit challenging notices issued by the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM) for illegally merging three flats in a suburban building.

Bombay High CourtJustice Prithviraj Chavan permitted Ranaut to withdraw the appeal and said no coercive action shall be taken by the civic body until the application for regularisation is heard and decided, and for two weeks thereafter.

"The appellant (Ranaut) is permitted to apply for regularisation before the MCGM within a period of four weeks," Justice Chavan said.

The corporation shall decide the same expeditiously and in accordance with law, the court said.

Kangana Ranaut"In case of any adverse order against the appellant, no coercive action shall be taken thereafter by the BMC to enable the appellant to file appeal," the court said.

The city civic body in March 2018 had issued a notice to Ranaut for alleged illegal merger of three flats owned by her in Orchid Breeze building in suburban Khar.

Ranaut's petition said since she bought the flats in 2013, she had not made any structural changes.

LOS ANGELES, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Brian Kennedy, Founder and long-time CEO of Regency Outdoor Advertising Inc. ("Regency"), has entered into an agreement to acquire 100% of the shares of Regency and all of its assets including hundreds of billboards in key locations throughout Southern California, and numerous strategic properties and buildings.

Kennedy will continue to operate the business under the "Regency" brand name, owning and operating more than 300 billboards and wallscapes in prime locations throughout Los Angeles and Orange Counties, including the highly sought after Sunset Strip.

Brian Kennedy, Founder and CEO of Regency Outdoor Advertising Inc. to acquire 100% of the shares of Regency and assets. Tweet this

"I am pleased to continue to provide some of the best billboard space in Southern California," said Brian Kennedy, "and look forward to continuing our long and successful relationships with our valuable outdoor advertising customers."

Brian Kennedy credits Regency's COO, Philip Berardi, for structuring the successful transaction, as well as running Regency day-to-day operations. Mr. Berardi will be elevated to President of the continuing Regency business, with Brian Kennedy remaining as CEO.

In addition, Brian Kennedy has amicably resolved all existing legal claims with his brother and former co-owner of Regency, Drake Kennedy.

Brian Kennedy was represented by media attorneys Charles Harder and Roger Goff of HARDER LLP (HarderLLP.com) in Beverly Hills, CA.

ABOUT REGENCY OUTDOOR ADVERTISING

Founded in 1974, Regency Outdoor Advertising is Southern California's foremost privately-held out of home media company. Careful location selection and strategic placement has yielded years of unprecedented advertising exposure for our customers. Our commitment to excellence and the national agencies we serve, reflect our promise to deliver inspiring and impactful campaigns that drive results. We understand that billboard space can be a significant investment. Choosing Regency means choosing over 40 years of experience helping Fortune 200 companies as well as local and new businesses, reach their advertising campaign goals. From research, planning and placement, our ultimate goal is to provide brands with the very best opportunity to engage with their consumers. For more information visit: regencyoutdoor.com

SOURCE:

Norah Lawlor | Lawlor Media Group | www.lawlormediagroup.com

[email protected] | Tel: (212) 967-6900

Facebook: LawlorMediaGroup | Instagram: lawlormedia | Twitter: @LawlorMedia

SOURCE Regency Outdoor Advertising

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Health official: 'I am hopeful for the brighter days ahead'
A former care worker who went on the run after pleading guilty to sexually assaulting his 10-year-old neighbour has been jailed for three years.

The Central Criminal Court heard that on St Patricks Day 2000 the victim came to the man's house, who was her next-door neighbour, looking to borrow Sellotape to wrap some gifts.

The victim told gardai that the defendant, who was 30-years-old at the time, went upstairs to look for Sellotape whilst she was playing with his baby on the couch in the sitting room. When he came downstairs, he told her that he did not have Sellotape and pushed her off the couch.

In her complaint to gardai she said the man then took off his trousers, got on top of her and put his penis inside her vagina for five minutes.

In 2002 the man pleaded guilty to sexual assault but he failed to appear for his sentence hearing that year. He was located in the UK in 2019 and was extradited back to Ireland last year.

The defendant, who cannot be named to protect the victim's identity, admitted sexually assaulting the young girl at his home in west Dublin on March 17, 2000.

After the attack the man asked the girl not to tell anyone about what had happened. However, the young girl returned to her house and told her sister and cousin, who alerted her aunt.

Detective Garda Conor Byrne told Kate Egan BL, prosecuting, that the accused went with his wife to the victim's house later that same day and asked for forgiveness for "the mistake" but denied the allegation.

When he was later arrested by gardai he admitted touching the victim in a sexual way but said he had not penetrated her. Det Gda Byrne agreed with Justin McQuade BL, defending, that there was no evidence consistent with penetration but it could not be ruled out.

Passing sentence on Wednesday, Mr Justice Michael White said that whilst this was a "once-off incident", it was "much more serious than touching" as the defendant had removed the child's clothing and ejaculated on her.

Mr McQuade said his client had previously trained as a care worker. He noted that his guilty plea in 2002 was "diluted by his behaviour" of absconding to the UK.

Sentencing the defendant, Mr Justice White said the defendant had visited the child's parents and asked for forgiveness but this was "tempered" by the "diminishing and blatant lack of respect" for the victim, because he had evaded justice for so long.

The judge said the main mitigating factors were his guilty plea, his admissions and the limited remorse he had shown. He backdated a three-year prison sentence to April 19, 2019.
Many countries have started a vaccination drive against coronavirus. Ethiopia which is also facing the virus, has reported 143,566 confirmed cases and 2,158 COVID-19-related deaths as of Tuesday evening. The country needs up to USD 330 million to meet the target of vaccinating 20 percent of the country's population.

The health minister has said that country requires USD 330 million to vaccinate 20 percent of the country's population. Ethiopia expects to cover the cost from government coffers as well as from international financial partners, Lia Tadesse told journalists . She further said that the nation is a large country with a large population, so it will not be limited to one set of vaccines for its population. Ethiopia is also interested in acquiring Chinese and Russian-made corona vaccines... provided they have been proven to be safe for use."

The minister has informed that the nation secured nine million doses of corona vaccines, Ethiopia will be vaccinating its population from April, giving priority to high-risk groups such as the elderly, those with serious pre-existing health problems, health professionals and social workers.

Also Read:

Second phase of Corona vaccination starts in Nepal

Japan to administer Covid-19 vaccination from next week; frontline workers prioritised

A faction of Nepal Communist Party to hold rally against Oli's Parliament dissolution
Re: We earned this

Newsflash Bruce you are not entitled to be a snowbird during a travel ban. Plain and simple you are selfish.

Many snowbirds that have also worked hard for many years have done the right thing and stayed home . Why are you special?

I can only assume that you have earned your pension from some Canadian source or from the Canadian Government. I guess you are entitled to spend that money down in the USA year after year. But, now the government is making you pay $2,000 to quarantine because you have travelled to the country that has the highest amount of Covid 19 in the world you feel hard done by.

When it was made very clear that there was a travel ban, you went anyway. Poor baby.

I have absolutely no sympathy for you or others in your situation. My sympathy lies with the many families that have lost loved ones to Covid 19 . The disrespect that you show to all the health care workers that have worked tirelessly for a year now is appalling. If anyone deserves a vacation its them. Not you.

Cathy Ciardullo


Saludo la decision del Pleno del Congreso de reformar el articulo 40 de la Constitucion para habilitar el doble empleo o cargo publico remunerado del personal medico especialista o asistencial de salud, ante una emergencia sanitaria. (1/2) pic.twitter.com/OFuSenMj3H

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London: Midwives in England have been told to stop using terms including breastfeeding and breastmilk when working with transgender patients as part of a new trans-friendly policy at a National Health Service trust.

Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust is the first in the country to formally implement a gender-inclusive language policy for its maternity services department  which will now be known as perinatal services.

Staff have been told to avoid using the word mothers on its own and have been given a list of alternative terms to use when addressing patients including mothers or birthing parents, breast/chestfeeding and maternal and parental.

The recommended changes are part of a new trans-friendly policy at an NHS trust. Credit:File

Instead of saying breastmilk, they can choose from human milk or breast/chestmilk or milk from the feeding mother or parent.
New Delhi: Bank unions on Tuesday called for a two-day strike starting March 15, against the proposed privatisation of banks.

During a meeting in Hyderabad on Tuesday, the United Forum of Bank Unions also decided to hold a day long 'Dharna' (protest) in all state capitals on February 19 followed by relay 'dharnas' from February 20 to March 10 in all states, districts and towns.

A statement by the All India Bank Employees' Association said that the meeting discussed the various announcements made in the budget regarding reform measures including privatisation of IDBI Bank and two public sector banks and setting up of bad bank.

"The meeting observed that all these measures are retrograde and hence need to be protested and opposed," it said.

After deliberations, the meeting decided that intensive struggle programmes and agitational actions have to be launched to fight back these policies of the government, the AIBEA statement said.

It added that further strikes will be decided looking at developments.

"The Government's announcement to privatise our public sector banks is totally unfortunate and unwarranted. The need of the hour is to strengthen public sector banks," the statement said.

Further, the meeting took note of the continuing agitation by the farmers against the farm laws enacted by the government expressed its solidarity with their struggle, it said.



Live TV

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"The meeting adopted a resolution urging upon the government to reconsider their standpoint and find amicable solutions to the demands of the farmers."
NEW YORK, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Freshly Inc. , the leading fresh-prepared meal delivery service in the U.S., announced today that it will expand its assembly and distribution operations by opening a new facility in Austell, Georgia. Centrally located in the Southeast, the distribution center will reduce order-to-delivery cycle time to consumers and will bring over 250 jobs to the greater Atlanta area.

The 134,000 square foot facility will be Freshly's largest dedicated order-assembly facility to date and will begin operating in mid-February. In the last twelve months, Freshly has surpassed the goal of delivering one million meals per week and continues to grow its customer base and meal offerings month over month. Fueled by renewed consumer demand for at-home convenience, the launch of the new facility is projected to increase assembly and distribution operations capacity by 40 percent this year for an additional 450,000 meals distributed weekly.

"2020 was a year of monumental growth for Freshly. We joined the Nestle USA family, expanded West Coast operations, and launched FreshlyFit, to name a few major milestones," said Mike Wystrach, Freshly Founder and CEO. "Joining Nestle has allowed us to scale bigger and faster, getting us to this next stage of growth. We are thrilled to continue in 2021 by expanding operations in the Southeast and have plans to add even more facilities this year that will help further our mission of delivering nutritious and convenient meals."

During the initial launch phase, the new facility will bring on 150 hires across operations, support staff, warehousing, and maintenance roles, with plans to hire at least 250 by the end of 2021.

"Our new Georgia facility creates opportunities to bring innovation to the direct-to-consumer distribution channel with added capacity for efficient assembly and distribution of fresh prepared meals. We are excited to expand Freshly's footprint and to join the Austell community," said Rick Stoecklein, Freshly's Senior Vice President of Operations.

"It's a pleasure to welcome this rapidly growing meal delivery service brand to the Peach State," said Georgia Governor Brian P. Kemp. "Our robust logistics infrastructure and highly skilled workforce have been critical to attracting new jobs and opportunities, which continue to put hardworking Georgians back to work."

"Americans have changed the way they purchase their food, and our state's logistics network has helped make it seamless for companies to adapt and ramp up their services to meet customers' evolving needs," said Georgia Department of Economic Development Commissioner Pat Wilson. "I look forward to Georgia being a part of Freshly's long-term success and am grateful to all of our economic development partners involved in creating these jobs in our state."

In addition to the Austell, Georgia facility, Freshly also has facilities in Commerce, California, Linden, New Jersey; Savage, Maryland; and Phoenix, Arizona.



For more information about career opportunities visit Freshly's careers page .

About Freshly Inc.:

Freshly is a weekly subscription service delivering fresh, chef-cooked meals directly to customers' doors that can be heated and served in three minutes. All that is needed is a microwave, fork, and plate to get a satisfying lunch or dinner on the table. With a corporate mission to break down the barriers to healthy eating, Freshly believes that taste and health don't need to be compromised for convenience. Freshly's food philosophy is centered on less sugar, less processed, and more nutrients. All meals are gluten-free and single-serve for effortless portion control. Developed by chefs and nutritionists, the menu features better-for-you versions of classic comfort foods with smart ingredient swaps. Freshly makes eating better easier than ever, one box at a time. Headquartered in New York, Freshly has operations in Phoenix, Arizona; Linden, New Jersey; Savage, Maryland; Austell, Georgia; and Commerce, California. To learn more about Freshly, visit www.freshly.com.

SOURCE Freshly Inc.

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Mangrove Lithium announced the successful closing of a $3M financing from BDC Capitals Cleantech Practice.

Mangrove is a developer of a breakthrough modular platform for the most cost-effective production of battery grade lithium hydroxide. Its electrochemical innovation simplifies existing processes and can directly refine input streams from brine, hard-rock, clay and geothermal assets.

Lithium processing is presently concentrated in a small number of regions in the world, says Mangroves CEO Saad Dara. As electrification and decarbonization accelerates, Industry and Governments have recognized the emerging supply risk and the importance of having access to a diverse, secure and low-cost source of the critical raw material.

Mangrove plans to leverage technology platform advancements made possible with $7.1M in previously announced funding from Emissions Reduction Alberta (ERA) and Sustainable Development Technology Canada (SDTC). An additional $3M in funding from BDC will help Mangrove accelerate the deployment of the first commercial systems with upstream lithium producers and cathode and cell manufacturers.

This is a pivotal moment as awareness around environmental challenges rises on a global level. Mangroves technology is truly unique as it addresses a key bottleneck in the lithium supply chain, said Cheri Corbett, Director with BDC Capitals Cleantech Practice. We could not be more excited to support the Mangrove team in their plans for commercialization.

About BDC Capital

BDC Capital is the investment arm of BDC, the bank for Canadian entrepreneurs. With over $3 billion under management, BDC Capital serves as a strategic partner to the countrys most innovative firms. It offers businesses a full spectrum of capital, from seed investments to growth equity, supporting Canadian entrepreneurs who have the ambition to stand out on the world stage. Visit bdc.ca/capital.

About Mangrove Lithium

Mangrove Lithium, a Vancouver based Company, has developed a breakthrough platform for the most cost-effective production of battery grade lithium hydroxide from diverse input streams and assets. Mangroves modular solution can be scaled to any capacity and co-located with upstream lithium producers or cathode and cell manufacturers. The platform technology is also being commercialized for conversion of waste brines to chemicals and desalinated water. Visit www.mangrovelithium.com

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210209005434/en/

AN EARLY years educator in the city has urged government to invest in early years education to aid the retention of staff.

Yvonne Galvin, who is based at the Limerick Social Services Centre in Henry Street, said the early years provision service is at a critical point.

She was speaking a year after more than 30,000 practitioners marched on Dublin in a protest backed by Siptu.

Ms Galvin said: Early years practitioners play a vital role in connecting a three way partnership between the child, parent and early years service. Our youngest children do not understand why their favourite key worker isnt showing up anymore. The sector is at a critical point - government have a responsibility to invest and safeguard high quality services for our youngest citizens, she said.

Siptu carried out a survey of early years professionals, which found that 92% of them felt they were not valued by government as frontline workers during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Only one in ten of them have received additional pay from their employer during this time.

However, the survey shows widespread support for a public funding model with 97% agreeing that wages should be funded by the government, as it does for primary and secondary school teachers. This would allow for a dramatic reduction in fees for parents."

Siptus campaign organiser for the early years Sector Anne Craughwell said: Only 42% of professionals earn the Living Wage of 12.30 and 38% are actively looking to leave their profession, while a devastating 93% say they will leave the sector in the next five years if things stay the same. Even before the pandemic, there was a staffing crisis but we are now on the verge of losing huge numbers of educators unless pay and conditions are addressed.

She added: The government, workers and employers all have a role to play in ending poverty pay. The establishment of a Joint Labour Committee, which can set out standards in wages and conditions of employment across the sector and was promised in the programme for government, is the first step in that process.
Yves here. The US still refused to acknowledge, much the less plan to shutter, the cess pit known as Guantanamo. By Thomas Neuburger. Originally published at Gods Spies

Ill be bold but accurate. In international affairs, America acts like a criminal nation, the biggest bully on the block, a nation that soaks in fear and revels in power. Its hubris and insecurity are so great that it will spend near-infinite dollars to avoid a world in which any other nation stands its equal, or even half its equal.

America is also run by a deeply corrupted Establishment, one so devoted to enriching its swollen defense and security industries  the other reason its constantly at war  that the thought of spending to relieve the pain of its people comes tenth on a list of two.

There is no more poignant reminder of our criminal selves than the prisoners remaining at Guantanamo.

As late as January 2021, more than 18 years since most of them were captured, 40 of the original 780 prisoners remain incarcerated. Stories of at Guantanamo are rampant.

The Marine general who oversaw the building of the prison said in 2013, Even in the earliest days of Guantanamo, I became more and more convinced that many of the detainees should never have been sent in the first place. They had little intelligence value, and there was insufficient evidence linking them to war crimes.

Thats being generous. Most of these prisoners were bought from Afghan warlords, who received a bounty (thats the correct word) for every terrorist they delivered to the American army during the initial years of the Afghan War. Afghan warlords are no less corrupt than our Congress men and women  like the latter, most will do anything for money (search the article for Marianas and look for Ralph Reeds name).

Thus their enemies and often complete strangers were rounded up and sold to American soldiers eager for terrorists to punish. (If you remember the infamous TV program 24, youll appreciate just how eager Americans were and are to mete out punishment.)

The prisoners, of course, are humans, just like the rest of us, with parents, wives, children, friends, careers and former jobs. Picture yourself in Guantanamo for 18 years, legally nowhere, with no evidence against you, no recourse to appeal, no way to confront your accusers, nothing behind you but memories of what you lost, nothing in front but detainment, torture, and death. You live looking forward to your death.

According to the Miami Herald:

Administration officials have through the years described a variety of reasons why the men could not face trial: Evidence against some of the indefinite detainees was too tainted by CIA or other interrogation torture or abuse to be admissible in a court; insufficient evidence to prove an individual detainee had committed a crime; or military intelligence opinions that certain captives had undertaken suicide or other type of terrorist training, and had vowed to engage in an attack on release.

Do you dream of revenge? It would be human to do so. If you were scooped up by, say, the Chinese and held in a torture camp for decades on no evidence, would you not consider an attack if let loose? Its a perfect circle; we created these mens hatred, then cannot let them go because of it.

If there is a hell, the managers of the American Establishment State deserve a place  perhaps, as suits their wish, the center seat  in its deepest, hottest pit.

I offer the following into evidence. This was a statement given just this year by a Guantanamo prisoner named Ahmed Rabbani, Guantanamo ISN 1461, to the human rights organization Reprieve. Its a message and request to President Joe Biden.

He peacefully asks for mercy. Along the way he tells a horrid tale. One part: heres what Rabbani endured after his sale to the Americans and before being taken to Guatanamo:

I was tortured for 540 days in the Dark Prison in Afghanistan without authorization  whether that makes it better or worse, I am still undecided. I can confirm that the torture did take place, although I couldnt have counted the days myself: the days and nights blended into one while I was hung from a bar in a black pit, in agony as my shoulders dislocated. I doubt that President Biden can understand what this torture is like; to hear a woman screaming in the next room and to be told it is your wife, and that if you do not do as they insist, they will rape her or kill her.

Today, hes seven years into a hunger strike. The way the hunger strikers are fed is itself torture.

Note that at the beginning of his piece, Rabbani has to swear off revenge even to be heard. Im not a fan of revenge myself  to quote the Bard, it is twice cursed, it curseth him that gives and him that takes  but affirming the U.S. states monopoly on violence is a requirement for entry into any of these negotiations. (BLM, take note. You too, student debt protestors.)

Now, Rabbani.
EAST LONGMEADOW  Big Y, working with students and staff from the Elms College School of Nursing, is opening COVID-19 vaccination clinics in vacant storefronts near its supermarkets in order to speed distribution of the shots.

The first clinic opened last week and operated Tuesday and runs Wednesday and Thursday at a former Staples near the East Longmeadow store. A second clinic opens Thursday in a former Mattress Firm store adjacent to the Greenfield Big Y on Route 2, said Steve Nordstrom, Big Y center store director and director of pharmacy.

The shots are free, but appointments are still required.

Big Ys website on the shots is here.

Big Y opened this week a COVID-19 vaccination clinic in a former Staples store near its East Longmeadow location.

The family-owned, Springfield-based chain is looking for a third clinic location, also in a vacant storefront near a Big y, but in eastern or central Massachusetts.

The actual vaccination is the easy part, he said. Its the paperwork on the back side that gets lofty and and can take time,

Big Ys been giving vaccines at its 15 Massachusetts locations that have pharmacies since the end of January, part of a partnership with the state and federal governments. Nordstrom estimated that Big y has given about 3,000 shots so far.

But Nordstrom said there isnt enough space inside a busy Big Y World Class Market to have people wait for their shots, receive their shots and spend the required 15-minute to 30 -minute observation period after the shot.

The average in a store is 20 appointments in a day, he said. In the clinics we can do 200 to 300 appointments in a day.

These problems you are seeing at Eastfield Mall, where people are waiting outside, Nordstrom said. For the most part we can fit everybody indoors,

The limiting factor right now is the lack of vaccine. Nordstrom said he makes decisions about when the sites will open and for how long week-by-week based on how many shots Big Y is expecting to get.

As long as we can keep getting the vaccine, we will keep it open and keep it running, he said.

Elms students help provide staffing in order to earn clinical practice times Some of them have been trained to give the injections.

They have been a blessing, he said.

Big Y is giving the vaccine developed by Massachusetts-based Moderna so the requirements for freezing and refrigeration are not as stringent.

Hopefully, well get the Johnson & Johnson vaccine soon so the supply will increase, he said. The federal government is getting more active.

Big Y works through Topco, its wholesale cooperative that supplies much of its pharmacy inventory along with other products.

Nordstrom said each week Big Y puts in a request for does through Topco which in turn works with the Centers for Disease Control and state authorities. ultimately, its the state that decides how many doses each retailer gets, Nordstrom said.

Wednesday, Gov. Charlie Baker announced more mass vaccination site and an update from providers:

CVS Health: 8,064 appointments were posted this week, with an additional 21,000 appointments going live tomorrow, and another 3,000 appointments being posted daily on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

Walgreens: 7,620 appointments this week (over 1,000 released each day).

Topco, wholesaler for Wegmans, Big Y, Price Chopper: 3,100 appointments this week.

Retail Business Services, wholesaler for Stop and Shop, Hannaford: 2,000 appointments this week.

Nordstrom said Connecticut is working with the big pharmacy chains and has not yet made doses available to Big Y stores there.

Deana Nunes, an Elms College assistant clinical nursing professor, said all 200 students in the Elms College nursing program will cycle through the clinics either as part of a clinical rotation, as volunteers or both. Elms is helping with the clinics in East Longmeadow and Greenfield.

What they are absolutely 100% all getting is the opportunity to participate in something that is so beneficial to the community, to health care, she said. The fewer people who get sick, the fewer people we have to treat.

Sophomores on their way to a bachelors degree are getting their first opportunity to work with patients so they are developing interpersonal skills and learning to care with people outside a nursing home, Nunes said

Juniors are further developing their interpersonal skills.

Seniors working at the clinics in East Longmeadow and Greenfield look at the community health aspects of their work through a population health clinical course.

The students are trained to give the injections. But they also work greeting arrivals, helping with paperwork, shepherding recipients from the waiting area to the vaccinations themselves to a post-shot observation periods, she said. The students also monitor the recipients in the observation period and if folks want, take blood pressure and other vital signs.

The students have been unbelievable, they are showing so much initiative, she said. They have been incredibly touched by the response of the public.

For the vaccinations to go quickly and smoothly there needs to be enough people to handle the crowds and there needs to be enough space so people can keep a safe distance from one another, Nunes said.

The gravity of what they are doing, she said Its been monumental.

Related Content:
The head of a Stormont committee has criticised DUP representatives who declined to take part in a meeting on the Northern Ireland Protocol.

The snub came as the Executive Committee heard from Northern Ireland MPs as well as TDs and senators from the Republic of Irelands Committee on the Implementation of the Good Friday Agreement.

Last week the DUP announced it would stop taking part in north-south activities related to the Protocol.

There has been opposition to additional checks at the regions ports under the terms of the protocol, with unionists condemning an Irish Sea border.

Executive Committee chairman Colin McGrath said he had been informed that members of the DUP would not be attending that segment of the meeting.

I do have to say that I find that disappointing, he said.

If youre not prepared to be part of the solution then you stand accused of being part of the problem Colin McGrath

There are many businesses and many groups who will be impacted by the rollout of the protocol in its early days, and I feel that if youre not prepared to be part of the solution then you stand accused of being part of the problem.

I think that is both equally unhelpful and is quite sad.

Sinn Feins Fermanagh MP Michelle Gildernew said it was unfortunate that not all parties were represented.

We have unprecedented challenges on the island of Ireland as a result of Brexit, she said.

The SDLPs South Belfast MP Claire Hanna said: I regret that there are those in the DUP who are not (here). Its 2021, if people cant participate in a video conference about the pressing political, practical and economic issues of our time

Senator Niall Blaney said: Like others, I am disappointed that the DUP have decided not to partake.

He urged that efforts be made to bring the DUP on board with the engagement.

UUP MLA Doug Beattie, the sole unionist representative in attendance, described the DUPs move as their decision.

He warned of frictions and instabilities that cannot be batted away and ignored and could lead to the unravelling of a lot of good work over many years by many good people.

In Northern Ireland we have a fine balance where both communities have a balance as to how we go about our daily lives and we worry about that balance continually and right now, if we had put up a hard border on the island of Ireland, that balance would have been upset. We have put a border in the Irish Sea and that balance has been upset and that will affect north-south co-operation, he said.

I would plead with you all that we cannot ignore that because thats where we are now.

Ms Hanna responded by thanking Mr Beattie for engaging and agreed that Northern Ireland is a delicately balanced place, and that equilibrium has certainly been upset by Brexit but she added the realities of friction in the Irish Sea are considerably more manageable than frictions on land across 300 border crossings.

Meanwhile, Sinn Fein MLA Martina Anderson raised documentation at Dublin Port perhaps taking 24 hours, compared with four hours at Belfast, Larne and Warrenpoint ports.

She urged that members get into solution mode and work collectively to sort out this Brexit mess.

I hope that this is only one of many meetings, that we can have other meetings going forward and that we can start to package solutions, she said.

Speaking outside the meeting, Mr McGrath criticised the DUP for a childish attitude that serves nobody.

He said they missed an important chance to brief political representatives from across the island, branding it a wasted opportunity.
[February 10, 2021] William Blair Investment Management to Acquire Investment Counselors of Maryland

William Blair Investment Management (William Blair), Investment Counselors of Maryland, LLC (ICM), and BrightSphere Investment Group today announced that they have signed a definitive agreement for William Blair to acquire ICM, a $3.2 billion institutional U.S. value equity investment firm. The addition of ICM further underscores William Blair's mission to deliver high-quality investment management expertise and specialized value-added strategies to its global clients. Founded in 1972, ICM has a deep heritage in value investing. The firm and its eight-person seasoned investment team is led by Bill Heaphy, CFA. Averaging 20 years of industry experience, the investment team has worked together for over a decade, delivering strong results for clients across different market environments. "We are thrilled to welcome Bill and the ICM investment team to William Blair as our U.S. value franchise," said Stephanie Braming, CFA, partner, global head of William Blair Investment Management. "ICM's collaborative, rigorous investment process and client-focused culture aligns well with William Blair's culture and mission. Moreover, the team has established deep relationships with sme of the most sophisticated investors over time and has a well-documented track record of success. This team will broaden and deepen William Blair's value expertise and will add another strong pillar to our well-known U.S., international, and emerging markets small-cap franchise."



"William Blair is a perfect strategic fit for ICM and our clients," said Bill Heaphy, CFA, portfolio manager, and managing principal at ICM. "Its investment-led, client-focused private partnership aligns strongly with ICM's culture. In addition, its broad distribution resources and infrastructure backbone will support our current investment process and client engagement, while facilitating future growth. By leveraging the full strength of William Blair, we will be well positioned to continue delivering value to our clients prospectively." William Blair and ICM will work together on a smooth transition for clients, leveraging the combined expertise of the two firms. As part of this transition, it is expected that members of the current William Blair Small Cap Value team will remain with the firm for a period to assist with the transition to ICM.

Subject to customary closing conditions, the transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of this year; terms will not be disclosed. About William Blair William Blair is the premier global boutique with expertise in investment banking, investment management, and private wealth management. We provide advisory services, strategies, and solutions to meet our clients' evolving needs. As an independent and employee-owned firm, together with our strategic partners, we operate in more than 20 offices worldwide.* William Blair Investment Management is a premier global investment management boutique, with a sole focus on active management across equity, fixed income, currency and multi-asset strategies. We are a U.N.-Supported Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) Signatory, Tier-1 U.K. Stewardship Signatory, Investor Stewardship Group Member (Framework for U.S. Stewardship and Governance), and Signatory to the Japan and Korea Stewardship Codes. We work closely with private and public pension funds, insurance companies, endowments, foundations, and sovereign wealth funds, as well as financial advisors. As of 31 December 2020, William Blair Investment Management manages approximately $70 billion in assets. *Includes strategic partnerships with Allier Capital, BDA Partners, and Poalim Capital Markets View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210210005918/en/

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Havana:

Cuban President Raul Castro denounced President Donald Trumps tougher line on relations with Havana on Saturday, calling it a setback but promising to continue working to normalise ties between the former Cold War rivals.

Castros comments to Cubas National Assembly were his first on Trumps June announcement of a partial rollback of the Cuba-US detente achieved by then-President Barack Obama.

They contained echoes of the harsh rhetoric of the past.

Any strategy that seeks to destroy the revolution either through coercion or pressure or through more subtle methods will fail, Cubas president told legislators.

He also rejected any lessons on human rights from the US, saying his country has a lot to be proud about on the issue.

Surrounded by Cuban-American exiles and Cuban dissidents in Miami, Trump announced last month that the US would impose new limits on US travelers to the island and ban any payments to the military-linked conglomerate that controls much of the islands tourism industry.

He said the US would consider lifting those and other restrictions only after Cuba returned fugitives and made a series of other internal changes including freeing political prisoners, allowing freedom of assembly and holding free elections.

Trumps policy retained elements of Obamas reforms but tightened restrictions on travel and employed harsh rhetoric on human rights.

On Friday in Washington, the Trump administration said it was suspending for another six months a provision of the US embargo on Cuba.

The State Department said it told Congress that it will keep suspending a provision of the Helms-Burton Act that deals with property seized from Americans. The provision lets Americans use US courts to sue non-American companies that operate and deal with property confiscated after Fidel Castros revolution.

Speaking to the National Assembly, Castro called the Trump administrations policies a setback, though he reiterated his governments position that it would work to normalize relations with Washington.

Earlier in the legislative session, Economy Minister Ricardo Cabrisas announced that Cubas economy is growing again after a dip last year.

Cabrisas said the economy grew around 1 percent in the first half of 2017. That puts GDP growth on track to hit 2 percent for the year.

The government said the economy shrank last year by 1 per cent amid falling support from troubled Venezuela. That was the first decrease reported in two decades. Cabrisas said that instability in the supply of Venezuelan oil weighs on the country but tourism, construction, transportation and communications were growing.

Foreign media did not have access to the National Assembly session.

For all the Latest World News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
MIDDLETOWN  A distrust of the health care system, as well as perceived inequities in medicine, have led people of color to be wary of the COVID vaccine, officials said Tuesday during a clinic at Cross Street AME Zion Church.

The coronavirus is ravaging the Black community, said state Rep. Quentin Phipps, D-Middletown, a longtime parishioner. Cross Street is at the forefront of making sure our entire community is getting the vaccine, he said, as volunteers milled about the church hall, inoculating some 50 congregants in the 75-and-older population.

The clinic, the first held at the facility, is an example for everyone, especially younger individuals who care for, and look up to, their older family members and friends, Phipps said.

It was pulled together in less than a week, according to Middletown Acting Health Director Kevin Elak.

The elders  thats wisdom and experience, Phipps said. They know what its like when you dont have access to quality health care. Phipps said he looks forward to returning to our true community spirit of being neighbors, being together, congregating, worshiping together. Thats what this is about.

Lacy Flowers, 79, was among those waiting the required 15 minutes to gauge his bodys reaction to receiving his dose. He wasnt nervous to get the shot, he said, adding that he was feeling good.

The event was coordinated by the city, senior center and Middletowns Ministerial Health Fellowship, which advocates in many ways for people of color, said the Rev. Robyn Anderson, president of the association. She termed it a faith-based clinic.

The church is ingrained in the lives of the Black community, she said. They need to come to a place that they trust and feel comfortable. Clergy have always been trusted messengers, said Anderson, who was among those who led an outreach campaign.

People never forget the Tuskegee syphilis study, even more so, how theyre treated when they come into medical facilities. Some of them have felt [doctors and others] didnt have their best interests at heart, Anderson said.

A big part of COVID outreach is meeting people where they are, she said. We have to go where they are in the community. Even those who are not members of the church, they trust the church.

If the church is offering it, it must be safe, Anderson said.

AME Zion also has volunteer COVID-19 crisis workers who visit people at home, Anderson said, sharing information and dispelling myths.

The church has held womens health conferences for years, and supplies information on diabetes, mental health, high blood pressure and other conditions to congregants, Phipps said, and Cross Street has always been a leader in public health.

Anderson already has gathered the names of 70 eligible people interested in getting the vaccine. These clinics will take place on a weekly basis, according to Elak.

Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz stopped by to observe the process. As of Feb. 3, 45 percent of those 75 and older in Connecticut had been vaccinated, she said.

I think were closer to 50 percent by now, if not more, she said.

Connecticut is the fourth best state in the country for the number of vaccine doses given out, Bysiewicz said. Weve gotten 517,081 total doses out, 387,174 first doses and 29,907 second doses.

Weve got a total of over a half a million doses out there, but you seen how massive this effort is, because now that were allowing the 65- to 74-year-old people to get vaccinated, that adds 350,000 people to the pool, Bysiewicz said.

Phipps is urging people to make an appointment as soon as they are eligible. The moment we can get this vaccine, we need to take it, he said.

Registration is done through the online Vaccine Administration Management System. Once that is done, people will receive an email with instructions on how to make an appointment locally.

For information, visit vams.cdc.gov or call Connecticuts Vaccine Appointment Assist Line at 877-918-2224.

The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
The Commandant of the Army War College has been suspended after less than a year on the job and is under investigation for a matter unrelated to his position.

Major General Stephen J. Maranian, who had assumed the role in July 2020, has been replaced by Maj. Gen. David C. Hill, an Army spokeswoman said in a statement.

The Army War College is an educational institution that grants post-graduate degrees to senior officers in all branches of the military and some civilians, typically from agencies such as the Department of Defense and National Security Agency.

Major General Stephen J. Maranian, pictured, has been suspended from his post as Commandant of the Army War College

Maranian, center, previously served as provost of Army University in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas

Maranian, center, is a decorated officer with awards including the Legion of Merit and Bronze Star

The Army War College, pictured, provides post-graduate degrees to members of the military and civilians

'Maj. Gen. Stephen J. Maranian has been suspended from his duties as the Commandant of the U.S. Army War College,' said Army spokeswoman Cynthia Smith in the statement obtained by DailyMail.com.

'This matter is under investigation and unrelated to his current position.'

Hill, the deputy commanding general of the United States Army Corps of Engineers, 'has been assigned as the acting Commandant.'

The Army did not disclose any further details about the investigation or why Maranian has been suspended.

Before his appointment to the Pennsylvania school, Maranian served as the Deputy Commanding General of Education at the United States Army Combined Arms Center and provost of Army University in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

Maranian has served in 11 overseas tours in seven countries, including deployments to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Kuwait, as well as assignments in Greece, Italy, Germany, and the Republic of Korea, according to his official biography.

He holds several degrees, including a Masters of Strategic Studies degree from the Army War College.

Maranian is a decorated officer, with some of his awards including the Legion of Merit and the Bronze Star Medal
| By Deborah Kotz

Researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) have found promising results in preclinical studies for a new experimental vaccine against COVID-19 made by Novavax.

Matthew B. Frieman, PhD

The vaccine was found to generate a robust immune response in animals exposed to the vaccine with strong data indicating safety and efficacy, according to the study published recently in the journal Nature Communications. The results have been used to begin testing the vaccine in human trials in the United States with a Phase 3 trial that recently launched at UMSOMs Center for Vaccine Development and Global Health (CVD).

The vaccine is a stable protein that is manufactured from the genetic sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus spike protein. As with traditional vaccines like the flu shot, the Novavax vaccine uses adjuvants to boost the immune response in those who receive it.

We found this vaccine produces high antibody levels leading to significant protection from SARS-CoV-2 in mice. Together with the non-human primate data, this suggests that the vaccine will be highly protective in humans. Our previous work, with Novavax on a MERS coronavirus vaccine and now SARS-CoV-2, demonstrates that continued support of basic science is essential in the response to pandemics, said study co-author Matthew Frieman, PhD, associate professor of microbiology and immunology at UMSOM.

The vaccine trial is being conducted by researchers in UMSOMs CVD as part of their National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases-funded Vaccine Treatment and Evaluation Unit (VTEU), and the COVID-19 Prevention Network (CoVPN). It adds to the extensive COVID-19 vaccine research that has been underway on campus since early spring. The UMSOM site is in the process of recruiting up to 500 participants out of 30,000 total who will take part in the trial. The aim is to include diverse populations most impacted by COVID-19. They will include people who have increased risk of exposure because of location or circumstance, such as occupation. Individuals 65 and older, African Americans and LatinX populations, as well as individuals at risk of severe COVID-19, will be represented.

The Novavax vaccine candidate, NVX-CoV2373, is a stabilized, prefusion protein antigen derived from the genetic sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus spike (S) protein and is formulated with Novavaxs proprietary adjuvant MatrixM. NVX-CoV2373 contains purified protein antigen and can neither replicate nor can it cause COVID-19.

The vaccine has been in Phase 3 trials in the U.K., with more than 15,000 participants enrolled. Interim data in this event-driven trial are expected as soon as early first quarter of 2021.

Our coronavirus experts at the University of Maryland School of Medicine have been at the forefront of basic research efforts that have helped develop new treatments and vaccines against COVID-19, said E. Albert Reece, MD, PhD, MBA, executive vice president for medical affairs, University of Maryland, Baltimore, and the John Z. and Akiko K. Bowers Distinguished Professor and UMSOM dean. For this new vaccine made by Novavax, our researchers have worked on every aspect of its development from bench studies to Phase 3 clinical trials. It speaks to the broad expertise and collaborative efforts of our faculty. This latest research will lead us a step closer to providing another potentially lifesaving tool in the vaccine arsenal.
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(Natural News) Bill Barr was seen by many as a significant upgrade over Jeff Sessions as the leader of the Trump administrations U.S. Department of Justice, but Peter Navarro has a different opinion.

(Article by Robert Jonathan republished from BIZPACReview.com)

The former White House trade advisor claims that Barr was President Joe Bidens first attorney general based on the way the DOJ under Barr (presumably before he left) allegedly pre-cleared or fast-tracked Bidens blitz of executive orders that went into effect as soon as he was inaugurated. Navarro described the situation as Deep State coup and insisted that Barr should have been fired much sooner than his December 2020 departure.

Navarro was responding to a question from Fox News Channel host Maria Bartiromo who wondered how 17 of Bidens left-wing wish list of executive orders were promptly ready to go on day one. In contrast to the way Bidens edicts were vetted quickly through the federal bureaucracy, Navarro asserted that DOJ lawyers dragged their feet on then-President Donald Trumps directives.

We got slow-walked at the Department of Justice, and this is a problem I told Barr about numerous times. And he should have been fired months before he was. By the last year of this administration, he was really working against this administration in a lot of ways, Navarro said Sunday.

And these executive orders, the bottleneck was at the Department of Justice on so many things that we did. And you can see what President Biden is doing now. Hes just unwinding things that are gonna come back to haunt the American worker big time, Navarro declared on Sunday Morning Futures in the video clips embedded below.

Earlier in the interview, Navarro recalled that while working for Trump, he drafted about 50 executive orders, and the last step in the process was getting the DOJ to sign off on them to validate proper statutory authority.

Heres the news behind the news. Bill Barr, president Trumps attorney general, actually turns out to be also Joe Bidens first attorney general, Navarro continued. Here is what was happening: We had over 30 executive orders cued after Election Day ready to go, but we kept running into all of these roadblocks and hurdles. It turns out that Bill Barrs Office of Legal Counsel was fast-tracking all of these Biden EOs, and basically it was a Deep State coup

Navarro then recalled how he and his colleagues drafted a beautiful executive order that would have prevented the CCP from selling bulk power equipment into our electricity grid and therefore, as a matter of national security, make the U.S. less vulnerable to a cyber attack on the grid. Barr helped Biden unravel that order, Navarro lamented. Bad news there.

Its not a particular revelation perhaps that the Democrat-dominated federal bureaucracy was generally hostile to Trumps America First Agenda, but perhaps the scope of the opposition is receiving greater focus. Leaving Obama holdovers and Never Trumpers in place, for example, constitutes one of the miscues by the Trump administration.

Navarro has separately advised Trump to fire his stodgy impeachment lawyers and hand the defense to U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz.

This is a political trial: Peter Navarro tells Trump to get rid of impeachment lawyers, hire Matt Gaetz https://t.co/e5n6gDHJWW pic.twitter.com/DgpP2rTTzL  Conservative News (@BIZPACReview) February 7, 2021

Read more at: BIZPACReview.com and Trump.news
A tradesman and father-to-be sobbed in court as he was jailed for intimidating, stalking, and exposing himself to dozens of women.

Lindsay Kenneth Moody, 42, will spend up to two-and-a-half years behinds bars after he was sentenced in Manly Local Court on Wednesday.

Moody was originally charged with 39 crimes on Sydney's northern beaches after he was arrested at a worksite in Birchgrove last September.

He was later charged with 13 more crimes after more victims, including a schoolgirl, came forward.

Lindsay Kenneth Moody (pictured) has been sentenced to two-and-a-half years jail

Moody pleaded guilty to 23 counts of stalking or intimidation to cause fear of physical harm, and five counts of carrying out sexual act with another without consent.

Another 20 charges were withdrawn by police on Wednesday, Manly Daily reported.

The court heard Moody terrorised 28 victims over almost two years from December 2018 until last September.

The labourer approached women from behind and asked for the time before making vulgar comments about their breasts and buttocks and suggesting sexual acts he wanted to perform on them.

Moody intimidated and exposed himself to women exercising near Narrabeen and Dee Why lagoons.

He also harrassed women on walking tracks and Belrose, Davidson, North Curl Curl, Allambie Heights, Fairlight, Northbridge, Frenchs Forrest and Cammeray, where he was captured on CCTV, which ultimately led to his arrest.

This CCTV of Lindsay Kenneth Moody harrasing a victim in Cammeray ultimately led to his arrest last September

Some of the victims attended court on Wednesday to come face to face with Moody and hear the verdict.

Many have adjusted their lives following their encounters with Moody with some now too scared to walk in public alone and others changed the way they dress, their route to work, and where they exercise.

'They were all out walking, going about their daily business,' Magistrate Bruce Williams told the court.

'It must have been confronting to have the feeling that someone was following you.'

Outside court, his victims recalled the life-changing impact he has had on their lives. One now suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Lindsay Kenneth Moody's reign of terror spanning almost two years ended with his arrest (pictured) at a worksite at Birchgrove last September

'I'm definitely more wary and if someone walks behind me now, I'm, you know definitely scared,' one woman told reporters.

Another added: 'I'm sending a message to women that if something like this happens to you, come forward. People do believe you.'

A remorseful Moody acknowledged his actions in an apology letter to victims.

'I would like to express my sincere apologies. I'm fully aware I've impacted people's lives, and I feel disgusted in myself.'

Moody wept in the dock as he was sentenced to a minimum 19 months behinds bars.

His pregnant wife wasn't in court to support him.

Ukraine has passed through the economic crisis with minimum losses compared to other European countries, Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal has said.

He said this during an online meeting with Director General of the Confederation of European Business Markus Beyrer and representatives of European companies during his working visit to Brussels on February 10, according to the Ukrainian government's website.

Shmyhal noted that according to investment companies, Ukraine's economy returned to pre-crisis levels at the end of last year.

"Figures from the European Business Association also indicate that Ukraine has passed through the economic crisis with minimum losses compared to other European countries. We lost only 4.5% of GDP. This year, according to forecasts, Ukraine's economy will grow by over 4.6%," he said.

Shmyhal stressed that Ukraine's main strategy was to attract business investment. To this end, the Ukrainian government, together with MPs, experts and analysts, is working to develop a national economic strategy until 2030.

"To date, we have determined key priorities for the strategy. Among those are European and Euro-Atlantic integration, rule of law, protection of private property, gender equality and absolute intolerance of corruption. Economic freedom - fair competition, equal conditions for businesses and free movement of capital. Institutional capacity," Shmyhal said.

He also briefed representatives of European companies on five key areas of the national economic strategy until 2030, which are critical for business and investors.

"The first is the rule of law. We are actively working with the IMF, European institutions on the implementation of updated legislation in the judiciary. Such draft laws have been prepared and will be adopted by Ukraine's parliament this year. The second is investment attractiveness. We are adopting amendments to the law on investment parks. We have approved legislation that introduces investor support at the state level," he said.

Shmyhal said the "green course" was the third key area. According to him, renewable energy sources, modern technologies in production, energy efficiency and energy saving are the areas that will be a cross-cutting issue in the economic development strategy. The fourth vector is the development of small and medium enterprises, and the fifth area is digitalization.

"The Diia project works effectively in this [digitalization] area. More than 60 public services are already provided online, the world's first digital passports and digital driver's licenses have been introduced. We also have the first experience of urgent payment of financial assistance to people and enterprises within three weeks. The tool has attracted the interest of many international organizations that are asking us to share this experience," he said.

Shmyhal noted that the strategy of economic development of Ukraine would also focus on expanding domestic demand for industrial products, developing the agricultural sector, introducing public-private partnership, and processing agricultural raw materials.

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After politically turbulent years, Egypt appears to be regaining its footing as a Middle East leader on the Palestinian-Israeli issue.

The change of guard in Washington and the recent reconciliations in the Gulf, accelerated after former US President Donald Trumps departure, appears to have allowed Egypt, with its standing, geography, history and political alliances, to emerge as a potential kingmaker in the chaotic Palestinian affairs.

The second week of February saw the Egyptian capital host two very important meetings: an emergency meeting of Arab foreign ministers to discuss Palestine and the inter-Palestinian meeting. The first produced a strong pro-Palestinian statement despite the weakening of the Arab peace plan due to the normalization fever of Trump's last months in office.

The Arab foreign ministers affirmed their rejection of any unilateral Israeli projects or steps that negatively affect the rights of the Palestinian people, violate international law and undermine the two-state solution, for which there is no alternative.

The inter-Palestinian dialogue was moved from a Cairo hotel to the Egyptian intelligence headquarters to avoid the intense media presence. It was opened by a statement of encouragement by the head of the Egyptian intelligence service, Abbas Kamel. He spoke about the humanitarian disaster in the besieged Gaza Strip.

While he spoke, it was reported that Egypt had decided to keep the Rafah crossing permanently open, a decision that will contribute to easing tensions and allowing freedom of movement while at the same time reducing corruption at the crossings, where bribes were rampant.

Egypt, which aside from Israel is the only country sharing a land border with Gaza, has always been active on the issue of reconciliation, though results have been elusive. Although Turkey was not a direct sponsor of the meeting at the Palestinian Embassy in Istanbul last September, the breakthrough it produced angered Cairo, which wanted acknowledgement of its role in the reconciliation process.

Egypt was the first Arab country to make peace with Israel and has coordinated closely with the Israelis since Sisi took power. Relations with Israel are not limited to security coordination as Egypt appears to be helping Israel politically by detaining Ramy Shaath, a Palestinian-Egyptian activist with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Shaath has remained in jail since July 2019 despite Amnesty International calling for his release and appeals by Palestinian officials to the Egyptian government. Ramy is the son of Nabil Shaath, a senior adviser to Abbas.

Egypt's alliances with Saudi and other Gulf countries have paid dividends. The recent reconciliation between Saudi Arabia and Qatari also has meant that Egypt can expect the pro-Hamas Qatari government to support its efforts. There is also the recent improvement in ties between Egypt and Jordan, which has close ties to Abbas.

Cairos sponsoring of the Arab League conference for Palestine and the inter-Palestinian talks is being done with an eye on the administration of US President Joe Biden. Egypt, whose president Trump described as his favorite dictator," knows that it needs to do something to show its value to the US leader. Nothing could be more helpful to the Egyptians more than ending the one-party rule in Gaza and and legitimizing the Palestinian elections.

The administration of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has noticed that the Biden administration is not keen on talking to it or to Egypt's Saudi allies, for whom Washington has a list of human rights violations to address. Unwilling to make compromises on the human rights front, the Egyptian government appears to be set on presenting itself as a strong Arab party that can produce a moderate, democratically legitimate and united Palestinian front in any future negotiations. If he can pull it off, it will be Sisis winning card when the US president connects with his Egyptian counterpart.

It is not clear whether the Palestinian card alone will be able to wash away Egypt's many sins but it will surely mean Cairo is a regional factor that cant be ignored.
A three-alarm fire that broke out at a home in Lowell early Wednesday spread to a second residence, news outlets reported.

The blaze started around 3:30 a.m. at the home on Westford Street and made its way to an adjacent residence, according to WCVB.

The American Red Cross is helping the displaced residents, the news outlet reported. It is unclear how many residents were displaced and whether anyone was injured in the fire.

Firefighters were battling the blaze amid freezing temperatures, NBC Boston reported. Temperatures in the neighborhood of the fire were as low as 15 degrees early Wednesday, according to the news outlet.
New Delhi:

Nokia 6 release date in India is confirmed by marketing partner HMD Global, the smartphone will be available from August 23 and is priced at Rs 14,999. In a teaser on Amazon India, Nokia release date is confirmed and the window for registration is open.

Unveiled in June in the country, Nokia 6 is one of the Nokias offering in mid-segment Android smartphone.

Nokia 6 is powered by a Snapdragon 430 SoC coupled with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage. The dual-SIM Nokia 6 smartphone comes with a 3000mAh non-removable battery with fast-charging support.

Nokia chose to launch itself with Windows Operating System and this led to ouster of the then leading phone making company. The main reason of Nokia's downfall was its ignorance of Android software.

Nokia smartphones enthusiasts will have the chance to purchase Nokia 5 and 6 models as the HMD Global said that company is very humbled by the Indian markets response to the Nokia 3, and that it will bring the Nokia 5 and Nokia 6 into the market by mid-August.

Also READ: Nokia 8 with Snapdragon 835 processor: Check specifications and price
President Joe Biden will pay tribute to black service members on Tuesday in his first visit to the Pentagon as commander in chief.

His stopover comes as the president goes about business as usual while the Senate hears House prosecutors make the case to impeach former President Donald Trump on the charge of inciting the January 6th riot on Capitol Hill.

Biden made several record breaking appointments when he put together his Pentagon team, including appointing retired General Lloyd Austin as his defense secretary, the first African American to hold the position. He and Vice President Kamala Harris will meet with Austin before addressing defense department staff.

The president also will tour the African Americans in Service Corridor in the Pentagon - a visit that comes during Black History Month.

President Joe Biden will pay tribute to black service members in his first visit to the Pentagon as commander in chief

Biden's visit comes during Black History Month - he appointed retired General Lloyd Austin as his defense secretary, the first African American to hold the position; above Austin visits National Guard service members at the Capitol

President Biden will 'discuss the vital role of the Department of Defense and our national security, talk about the significance of having the first African American Secretary of Defense in history leading the department,' White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in her briefing on Monday.

'The visit has special resonance coming during Black History Month. Over 40 percent of active-duty forces are men and women of color, and you will hear President Biden pay special tribute to the rich history of black service members,' she added.

She also pointed out Biden feels a special bond with service members as his Beau served in the Delaware National Guard. Beau Biden was an Iraq War veteran. He died in 2015 of brain cancer.

'As the first President in 40 years with a child who served in the military, he has a personal connection to the important work of the military, the men and women who serve,' she noted.

Biden's visit comes after another record-breaking appointment at the Pentagon: Kathleen Hicks is the first woman to be deputy defense secretary. She started her position on Monday after the Senate confirmed her.

Biden also named Kathleen Hicks as the first woman to be deputy defense secretary - she arrived for her first day of work at the Pentagon on Tuesday

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is working to advance an initiative targeting far-right extremism in ranks

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin at a memorial service in the Capitol for Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick

It's his second visit to a Cabinet agency since becoming president. He stopped by the State Department last week.

Austin, a retired four-star Army general, has kept a low profile since his Senate confirmation. He has yet to hold a press briefing or give a major interview. He did visit National Guard troops at the Capitol, to thank them for their service, at the end of January.

And he is working to advance a major initiative targeting far-right extremism in the ranks.

The move comes in the wake of the January 6th MAGA riot on Capitol Hill, which showed the appeal of white-supremacist and anti-government groups among some veterans and, in smaller numbers, currently serving troops. Among the 190 people charged in the siege, at least 30 are veterans. Three are reservists or National Guard members, The Washington Post reported.

'We don't know the full breadth and depth of this,' Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said earlier this month. 'It may be more than we're comfortable feeling and admitting, and probably a lot less than the media attention surrounding it seems to suggest it could be. But where is it? It's just not clear.'

Biden got to know Austin when he served as vice president and led Iraq policy for the Obama administration. Austin was a commander in the Middle East at the time.

Additionally, Austin was close to Beau Biden when Beau served on Austin's staff in Iraq in 2008 and 2009.

The two men, both devout Catholics, attended Mass together, sitting side-by-side almost every Sunday, and they kept in touch after Beau returned from his deployment, Politico reported.
[February 10, 2021] U.S. Air Force Advances Weather Forecasting for Defense Missions with 6.5X Faster Supercomputer Built by Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) today announced that through a strategic partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), HPE has built a new supercomputer for the United States Air Force to support weather modeling and forecasting projects to aid U.S. Army and Air Force missions worldwide. The new system, powered by the HPE Cray EX supercomputers, is now operational at ORNL in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where it is managed by ORNL's high performance computing systems team. Air Force Weather, the Air Force's meteorology division, will leverage the new system to support research and development needs in addition to its operational role. The new system is comprised of two supercomputers that the U.S. Air Force has named "Fawbush" and "Miller" after meteorologists Major Ernest Fawbush and Captain Robert Miller, who predicted the first tornado forecast at the Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma in 1948. Fawbush and Miller, combined, are 6.5 times faster than Air Force Weather's existing system allowing larger computations at a higher resolution, increasing accuracy in global weather simulations from 17 kilometers between model grid points to 10 kilometers. The Air Force Weather uses the weather intelligence, across atmospheric and solar data, when delivering ongoing alerts, analyses and forecasts to U.S. defense missions worldwide to help military aircraft mitigate weather conditions and achieve readiness. U.S. Air Force Begins Use of World's Powerful Supercomputing Technology The Air Force's combined awbush and Miller system is one of the first operational systems to be powered by the HPE Cray EX supercomputer, formerly known as "Cray Shasta", which is a high performance computing (HPC) architecture that was built from the ground-up by Cray to support the magnitude and diverse sets of architectures required for next-generation supercomputing. The HPE Cray EX supercomputer will also power the upcoming three U.S. exascale systems, including Frontier, which is expected to install this year at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.



The HPE Cray EX supercomputers powering Air Force's Fawbush and Miller feature 2nd Gen AMD (News - Alert) EPYC processors to enable significant compute performance to process large and complex volumes of computations necessary to simulate weather data. "We are thrilled to have built the U.S. Air Force a new supercomputer that is one of the first operational systems powered by the latest HPE Cray EX supercomputer and managed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). The end-to-end HPC technologies made possible by the HPE Cray EX supercomputer will enable greater speed and dedicated performance to advance simulations in weather forecasting that were never made possible before," said Bill Mannel, vice president and general manager, HPC at HPE. "We look forward to our continued collaboration with Oak Ridge National Laboratory in supporting a range of complex science and engineering research, which includes powering ORNL's Frontier, one of the nation's upcoming exascale systems."

U.S. Air Force to Introduce New Era of Weather Forecasting Capabilities The system's new levels of performance and combined advancements will enable the U.S. Air Force, in collaboration with ORNL's Computational Earth Sciences Division, to introduce completely new forecasting capabilities over the next several years to make breakthroughs in the following areas: Forecast stream flow, flooding, or inundation to predict how much of a given land will be submerged in water and the level of its depth. Researchers plan to achieve this by creating a global hydrology model that involves simulating hundreds of watershed and drainage basins to eventually increase accuracy in predicting future events. Remote sensing of a cloud-covered area to address how to navigate impacted missions through forecasting the formation, growth and precipitation of atmospheric clouds. Researchers plan to achieve this by using comprehensive cloud physics that are not made possible with existing statistical regression models. About Hewlett Packard Enterprise Hewlett Packard Enterprise is the global edge-to-cloud platform-as-a-service company that helps organizations accelerate outcomes by unlocking value from all of their data, everywhere. Built on decades of reimagining the future and innovating to advance the way we live and work, HPE delivers unique, open and intelligent technology solutions, with a consistent experience across all clouds and edges, to help customers develop new business models, engage in new ways, and increase operational performance. For more information, visit: www.hpe.com. AMD, the AMD Arrow logo, EPYC, and combinations thereof are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices (News - Alert) , Inc. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210210005133/en/

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A TRIAL date in 2023 has being set in the case of a former Limerick-based solicitor who is facing charges in relation to a 1.2m fraud.

Michael Small, 54, is accused of multiple counts of theft, deception and accounting charges relating to offences which are alleged to have taken place over a two-year period while he was in practice as a solicitor in Limerick.

Mr Small, who has an address at Renville, Oranmore, County Galway, previously appeared before Dublin District Court after he was charged with five counts of theft, five counts of deception, five counts of failing to keep accounting records and another two of making or using false accounting documents.

The offences are alleged to have occurred at locations in Limerick and Dublin on dates during 2008 and 2009.

At Dublin Circuit last week, Mr Small's lawyers told Judge Martin Nolan that their client was seeking a trial as he intends pleading not guilty.

Judge Nolan noted this and he fixed a date for trial of January 9, 2023.

Free legal aid was previously granted at the district court when defence solicitor Cahir O'Higgins asked for legal aid to cover senior as well as junior counsel in the circuit court, given the seriousness of the charge, which involved allegations of 1.2m fraud.

At that hearing a State solicitor confirmed the case was "a quite involved and complex matter" and that the allegations against Small involve a considerable" sum of money.
An Abbeyleix man was told not to carry knives at Portlaoise District Court on Thursday.

Elliot Loughnane (19) of 41 Thornberry, Abbeyleix pleaded guilty to possession of a knife at Portlaoise Train Station car park on March 20, 2020.

Sgt JJ Kirby told the court that a man was observed with a knife at Portlaoise train station on the date in question.

When Gardai attended and carried out a search they found a small kitchen knife on Mr Loughnane.

Mr Loughnane told Judge Staines he was carrying the knife because he was jumped before.

He had no previous convictions.

The problem with a knife is that you see what happened to that unfortunate young man in Dublin. You could kill someone, Judge Staines told Mr Loughnane.

Mr Loughnane told the Judge he did not realise it was illegal to carry one at the time.

He said he had been jumped before and had suffered social anxiety. He had not reported the incident at the time.

Giving him the benefit of the Probation Act, Judge Staines told him not to carry knives and suggested he should take self defence classes.
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One of the 20 #EndSARS protesters targeted by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) after the years nationwide demonstrations has threatened to sue the apex bank for unlawfully freezing her account for over 90 days.

Bolatito Oduala, popularly known as Rinu, issued the threat in her tweet reacting to the ruling of an Abuja court setting aside the freezing order on Wednesday.

She said the CBN unlawfully froze their accounts based on suspected involvement in money laundering and terrorism but failed to investigate the allegation for three months.

Its time to sue CBN for the unlawful freeze of my accounts. I was accused of money laundering & terrorism but no investigations were done in the past 3 months.

This was purely an act of intimidation! I have informed my lawyers, Falana and Falana Chambers & we will be suing, she tweeted.

Targeted after #EndSARS protests

The 22-year-old undergraduate is a youth representative on the investigative panel set up by the Lagos State Government in the aftermath of the October 2020 #EndSARS protests to probe cases of police brutality.

Rinu and the 19 others slammed with the freezing order last November, played active roles in the #EndSARS demonstrations against police brutality and bad governance.

The protests led to the proscription of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), a tactical unit of the police, whose unlawful activities triggered the nationwide #EndSARS protests.

A judge of the Federal High Court in Abuja, Ahmed Mohammed, on November 4, granted CBNs ex parte application to freeze the accounts of the 20 protesters for 90 days.

The CBN told the judge it needed the 90 days period to investigate the account holders for money laundering and terrorism offences.

The order expired on February 2 with no investigation done by the CBN throughout the active period of the order.

PREMIUM TIMES had reported on Sunday how the account of the 20 defendants remained frozen despite the expiration of the order.

CBN abandons terrorism allegations

PREMIUM TIMES reported how the judge on Wednesday ordered an immediate unfreezing of the accounts after CBNs lawyer, Michael Aondoakaa, and the defence lawyer, Femi Falana, decided to withdraw their cases concerning the controversial order.

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Lexagene Holdings (CVE: LXG- OTCQB: LXXGF) CEO Dr. Jack Regan joined Steve Darling from Proactive with news the company has been able to successfully configure their MiQLab system to detect both the UK and South African variants of COVID-19.

Regan says this was able to be done in just two days and with the right approvals, these units can be put to use for faster detection.
Massachusetts officials say they will let caregivers taking people ages 75 or older to get vaccinated request their own appointments to get their first dose, even if they dont qualify yet.

Starting Wednesday, caregivers can sign up for a companion appointment as long as they attest to being the caregiver of a person being vaccinated, according to the COVID-19 Command Center. The caregiver has to sign up for a separate appointment, and only one caregiver will be eligible to get vaccinated alongside the person who is 75 years or older.

Health and Human Services Secretary Marylou Sudders plans to make the announcement Wednesday morning at the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel in Danvers, which is home to one of the states mass vaccination sites.

The state defines a companion as a family member, neighbor or any trusted caregiver who is taking the person to the vaccination appointment.

Massachusetts is at the start of Phase 2, which allows for residents ages 75 or older to get the COVID-19 vaccine. Older people with co-morbidities, teachers and other essential workers will also become eligible for the vaccine under Phase 2.

Wednesdays announcement is perhaps the first exception Massachusetts officials have made in who can get vaccinated under its rollout. The state, which lags behinds its neighbors, has vaccinated a little more than a million residents since it started receiving shipments in mid-December.

The state plans to make 74,000 appointments available Thursday for its site, along with another 30,000 or so through local pharmacies.

Massachusetts also plans to launch two more sites, one at the Natick Mall and another at the old Circuit City site in Dartmouth. Both sites will start administering up to 500 doses a day and will plan to scale up to a cap of a few thousand each day.

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Jaipur, Feb 10 : Eastern Rajasthan has become a pain in the neck both for the ruling Congress and the opposition BJP these days, as dissenting leaders from both parties attempt to bolster their respective camps in this region of the desert state that has been battling a leadership crisis for close to three decades.

Recently, former CM Sachin Pilot began organising kisaan mahapanchayats in this belt, attracting huge crowds. The first of such mahapanchayats was organised in Dausa while the second was held in Bharatpur on Tuesday which again drew a huge gathering.

What raised eyebrows of political observers was Pilot loyalist Vishvendra Singh' tweet which referred to Pilot as the 'deputy chief minister' of Rajasthan. Pilot had been stripped of the deputy CM portfolio in July last year when he staged a rebellion against the state leadership.

Vishvendra said in his tweet, "Deputy Chief Minister of the state @SachinPilot addressed the farmers and lodged a protest against the three agrarian black laws brought by the BJP at the Kisan Mahapanchayat organised at Fatehgiri Maharaj Ji in Jaisora, Bharatpur." In another tweet, he mentioned about other Pilot loyalists who also marked their presence at the gathering.

"This gathering also includes former cabinet minister Ramesh Meena, MLA Ved Prakash Solanki, Gajraj Khatana, Amar Singh Jatav and Rajesh Pareek," he tweeted.

All of these leaders are perceived as staunch supporters of Pilot, ever since the rebellion last year.

Several social media users reminded Vishvendra that Pilot is not deputy CM any longer, but he did not remove the tweet. Vishvendra, along with Ramesh Meena, were also stripped of their cabinet portfolios as a penalty for supporting Pilot.

These days, Vishvendra, in his social media profile, does not mention 'Congress' and introduces himself as Rajasthan worker, MLA from Deeg-Kumher, 6 times MP/MLA and ex cabinet minister, Rajasthan government.

With Pilot and his team seemingly busy in a show of strength, the other faction of the Congress is quietly monitoring the situation.

Similarly, BJP is also keeping an eye on the silent dissent of their firebrand leader, former CM Vasundhara Raje, who is reportedly making preparations to start a 'Power Yatra' from Krishna Temple in Bharatpur on her birthday, International Women's Day. Her loyalists are preparing to make this yatra look grand to ensure Raje emerges as the strongest leader in the state.

The BJP has been lying low in this belt with no clear strong face discernible here. So, Raje is trying to cash in on the situation and build her own leadership while ignoring the present BJP leadership in the state. She missed the core committee's meeting and BJP MLAs meet on Tuesday before the start of the assembly session, a BJP worker pointed out.

Even on the Team Vasundhara Raje 2023 Facebook page, clear announcements have been made regarding the Power Yatra to be taken by Raje on her birthday.

Now, political observers are waiting to see whether waves of change emerge from Eastern Rajasthan which comprises Bharatpur, Dausa, Karauli and Sawai Madhopur, among other districts.

Earlier, two leaders from this belt were prominent on the state's political horizon. These were former CM Jagannath Pahadia, who served as CM from June 6 1980 to July 14 1981 and Rajesh Pilot, who became a renowned farmer leader from Dausa after starting his political career from Bharatpur.

While Pahadia was the first Dalit from Rajasthan to hold the CM's position and served as a member of the 2nd, 4th, 5th and 7th Lok Sabha from Sawai Madhopur Lok Sabha Constituency, Pilot won the 1980 Lok Sabha elections from Bharatpur, the 1984 polls from Dausa and served as Union minister with different portfolios.

Since Rajesh Pilot's death in 2000, the eastern belt has been missing a strong leader and the new political equations might see the rise of a new face. In the present circumstances it could prove to be a headache for both the BJP and the Congress.
Steve Coogan, Hugh Quarshie, and Sharlene Whyte will star in a three-part sequel to the groundbreaking 1999 drama, The Murder Of Stephen Lawrence.

Entitled Stephen, the ITV series has been endorsed by the murdered teen's parents Doreen and Neville Lawrence, played in the 1999 original by Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Hugh respectively.

The drama will portray events starting from 2006, 13 years after 18-year-old Stephen's death on the evening of 22 April 1993 in a racially motivated attack whilst waiting for a bus in Well Hall Road, Eltham.

Cast: Steve Coogan, Hugh Quarshie (above), and Sharlene Whyte will star in a three-part sequel to the groundbreaking 1999 drama, The Murder Of Stephen Lawrence

While Hugh, 66, will reprise his role as Neville Lawrence, We Hunt Together star Sharlene will take on the role of Doreen Lawrence in the new drama.

Steve, 55, plays DCI Clive Driscoll who led the murder investigation and worked with the Lawrences to put together an investigation that - more than 18 years after his death  secured the convictions of two of the gang who committed the murder.

Richie Campbell, Jordan Myrie, Sian Brooke and Adil Ray will also take roles in the production which will commence filming later this month in London.

The production team are producing the sequel with the full support of the Lawrence family.

Continuation: The drama will portray events starting from 2006, 13 years after 18-year-old Stephens death on the evening of 22 April 1993 in a racially motivated attack whilst waiting for a bus in Well Hall Road, Eltham [Stephen is pictured]

New role: Sharlene will play Stephen's mother Doreen in the new drama

Executive producer Mark Redhead said: 'It's a privilege to be working with Doreen and Neville Lawrence to tell this chapter of the story of their campaign for justice for Stephen. It's a story that moves and inspires and is ever more resonant and relevant today.'

Director Alrick Riley added: 'The case of Stephen Lawrence is a testament to the fortitude, persistence and determination of the Lawrence family. These films will chart the successes, disappointments and the emotional toll they endured.

'It's also the story of Clive Driscoll, the lead detective, who managed to forge a friendship with the Lawrence's over the years it took to achieve two convictions. It's an honour to have the opportunity to tell their story.'

Even though the Lawrences knew the identity of their son's killers, the original investigation failed to convict those responsible.

Police: Steve will play DCI Clive Driscoll - who worked closely with the Lawrences to put together an investigation that finally  more than 18 years after his death  secured the convictions of two of the gang who committed the murder of Stephen

Their extraordinary campaign for justice led to a public inquiry which branded Metropolitan Police institutionally racist and brought about sweeping changes in the law and police practices and transformed thinking and understanding of racial inequality in the UK.

Yet six years on from the Inquiry no progress had been made into the case.

The drama tells the story of the ongoing struggle by Doreen and Neville to achieve justice with DCI Driscoll.

Producer Madonna Baptiste said: 'The Lawrences' campaign for justice totally transformed attitudes to race and equality in the UK and it's an honour to be able to help tell what is an untold chapter in their story.

Sequel: The groundbreaking drama The Murder Of Stephen Lawrence won a BAFTA for Best Single Drama [pictured are Hugh Quarshie as Neville Lawrence and Marianne Jean-Baptiste as Doreen Lawrence in the 1999 drama]

'Current events only highlight how relevant and important Stephen's case remains and it is such a privilege to work with Hattrick, Frank and Joe Cottrell-Boyce, Alrick Riley and our amazing cast to bring this important story to screen.'

Paul Greengrass, award winning screenwriter and director, who wrote and directed The Murder Of Stephen Lawrence in 1999, will also serve as an Executive Producer, as will Line Of Duty's Jed Mercurio.

Stephen's mother said of commission back in July: 'I am aware that the experience of police racism that we suffered as a family has been the experience of many in the UK.

'I hope that the film and the drama which has been commissioned will provide some insight into what we went through and give some hope to others that justice can eventually prevail.'

His father added: 'I welcome the announcement of this new TV series by ITV, made with members of the same team who wrote and produced the 1999 original drama.

Fight for justice: Doreen and Neville's extraordinary campaign for justice led to a public inquiry which branded Metropolitan Police institutionally racist and brought about sweeping changes in the law and police practices

'That first film was important in telling Stephen's story. It is important that the next part of the story is told, particularly at a time when, thanks to the Black Lives Matter campaign, concerns around institutional racism are so prominent.

'The recent BLM protests have served to remind people that black men and women continue to be subjected to racially motivated attacks. It was true when Stephen was killed and it still happens.

'It has always been my view that the most powerful response to racism is non-violent resistance and I am heartened to see people from all backgrounds who have come together peacefully across the country to show they will not tolerate racist attitudes. I hope this new film will further help raise awareness.'

The original drama won a BAFTA when it originally aired in 1999.

Neville and Doreen fought for justice after charges against her son's killers were at first dropped, with Nelson Mandela even meeting Doreen in London following the murder.

Stephen's death, and the controversial police investigation, became a watershed moment in British race relations and led to the Metropolitan Police being publicly damned as 'institutionally racist'.

It would be four years before an inquest was held into Stephen's death, when a jury returned a verdict of unlawful killing in a completely unprovoked, racist attack.

The gang of five suspects all refused to answer any questions at the inquest, and still the police seemed powerless to prosecute.

Front page: The Mail's front page in 1997 accuses Gary Dobson, Neil Acourt, Jamie Acourt, Luke Knight and David Norris of the killing of Stephen Lawrence

Determined not to let the five escape scot-free, the Mail took an unprecedented step. Their pictures were published on the front page, on 14 February, 1997, under the headline: 'MURDERERS. The Mail accuses these men of killing. If we are wrong, let them sue us.'

None of the five took legal action over that headline. In the public eye, their silence no longer protected them: it was as good as an admission.

The effects of that front page were momentous. A far-reaching inquiry into racism within the Met followed, with the Macpherson Report of 1999. That report also led to changes to the law that ended the ancient legal tradition of double jeopardy, the rule that a suspect could not stand trial twice for the same murder.

Two of the five accused by the Mail, Gary Dobson and David Norris, stood trial for Stephen's murder in 2011, following a 'cold case' review, and in the light of 'new and substantial evidence', they were found guilty and jailed for life.

Norris had been convicted and jailed with another of the five, Neil Acourt, for racially aggravated harassment, in another case.
Married At First Sight star Ning Surasiang has announced she's become a first-time grandmother at 35 years old.

On Wednesday, the proud mother of three confirmed the happy news that her eldest daughter Kia, 17, had given birth to a gorgeous baby girl.

Ning, who appeared on season six of MAFS in 2019, shared several photos to Instagram of Kia with her newborn in hospital, and wrote: 'So very proud of my oldest daughter, who did something I wasn't able to ever do.'

Baby joy! Married At First Sight star Ning Surasiang (left) has become a grandmother at the age of 35, after her daughter Kia, 17, (left) welcomed a baby girl

'Thank you for having me with you to witness the most incredible, beautiful and raw experience called childbirth,' she added.

'Watching your baby have a baby was an emotional experience for all of us, but you kicked a**e!'

She went on to say that Kia, who has yet to reveal the name of her daughter, was 'one tough cookie', then added: 'Words can not describe how proud I am of you.

'You didn't complain, not once you said you couldn't do it. Not even one curse word. You did better than [your] mama.'

'So very proud of my oldest daughter': Ning, who appeared on season six of MAFS in 2019, shared several photos to Instagram on Wednesday of Kia with her newborn in hospital

Sweet: Ning went on to say that Kia, who has yet to reveal the name of her daughter, was 'one tough cookie', then added: 'Words can not describe how proud I am of you'

Ning celebrated Kia's 16th birthday on February 25, 2019, making her eldest child just shy of turning 18 at the time of the little one's arrival.

In addition to Kia, Ning is also a proud mum to Kai, six, and Kobi, nine.

The reality TV favourite appeared on Nine's social experiment in 2019, but failed to find love with her on-screen 'husband' Mark Scrivens.

She is now in a relationship with a heavily tattooed man named Kane Micallef.

Failed romance: The reality TV favourite appeared on Nine's social experiment in 2019, but failed to find love with her on-screen 'husband' Mark Scrivens (right)

Happiness: She is now in a relationship with a heavily tattooed man named Kane Micallef

The couple have been dating since August last year and appear to be smitten, with Kane frequently popping up on his girlfriend's Instagram account.

Meanwhile, Mark has moved on from Ning with another reality star: former netball player Bianca Chatfield, from the 2018 season of The Block.

The pair, who live together in Melbourne's St Kilda, will celebrate their second anniversary of dating in April.
In a victory for journalism and the legal profession, the Constitutional Court has upheld a 2019 high court decision declaring sections of surveillance law unconstitutional.

The Zondo commission of inquiry into state capture has, over the past few weeks, exposed how state intelligence institutions were abused to serve the political ends of those in power. In light of such revelations, a recent ground-breaking judgment by the Constitutional Court is a move towards transparency.

The Constitutional Court declared certain sections of the Regulation of Interception of Communication and Provision of Communication-Related Information Act (Rica) unconstitutional as it violates the right to privacy.

Dario Milo, the legal representative of amaBhungane, the centre for investigative journalism that brought the matter to the court, welcomed the judgment.

"The effects of this judgment would be felt around the world," said Milo. He added that the case aligns South Africa with jurisdictions that have progressive and transparent surveillance laws, such as Germany and Canada.

"In some respect we are now heading the field - we are actually ahead of a number of countries who don't do what they should. I am hoping that this will serve as an international precedent, because it's so well reasoned and is such a wonderfully written judgment and wonderfully argued that I think it's going to be very persuasive around the world."

In 2013, National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden exposed how spy agencies linked to the United States and British governments used bulk surveillance signals to spy on people and create permanent records of everyone.

It took litigation by non-governmental organisations and whistleblowers to have governments acknowledge the existence of these pervasive forms of surveillance. The South African government begrudgingly acknowledged that it was spying on every citizen through bulk interception when amaBhungane took it to court. This form of surveillance was also declared unconstitutional by the Constitutional Court.

Notifying the surveilled person

During the "Spy Tapes" era, amaBhungane's investigative journalist and managing partner, Sam Sole, had his communications intercepted in 2008 without his knowledge. His attempt at confirming his suspicion did not come to any fruition. He was told that Rica prohibited disclosure of information relating to surveillance.

But through court proceedings in 2015, in which Sole did not take part, he came to learn that the state had listened to a conversation between himself and state prosecutor advocate Billy Downer. The telecommunication was in the form of a transcript and attached through an affidavit. It was apparent that indeed the government had spied on Sole in 2008. When he approached the State Security Agency to provide him with the basis of this interception, he was given the transcript but no reasons for having his communication intercepted were furnished.

Sole, together with amaBhungane, approached the high court to declare certain sections of Rica unconstitutional for not having enough safeguards against intrusion on the right to privacy.

In 2019, Judge Ronald Sutherland of the high court in Pretoria found Rica to be unconstitutional and indeed replete with defects. Sutherland ruled that Rica was found wanting in so far as it did not have a provision mandating that the subject of surveillance ever be notified of it after the surveillance has been concluded. The court went on to rule that the subject of surveillance will have to be notified 90 days after the expiry of an instruction to surveil them.

The court also said the judge designated by the minister of justice to authorise surveillance lacked independence and was susceptible to political interference.

It put an end to the widespread abuse by state agents who didn't declare the profession of the subject of surveillance. Mzilikazi wa Afrika and another journalist who were investigating police corruption had their phones tapped by the police's crime intelligence unit. The judge issuing the authorisation to tap their phones was told the two journalists were ATM bombers. The court ruled that there is an obligation on state institutions to declare to the judge if the subject of surveillance is a journalist or a lawyer.

The high court further ruled that Rica safeguards around the retention of archived intercepted communication needed to be improved as they were inadequate and exposed the privacy of those who were subjects of surveillance. Sutherland declared bulk interception or surveillance unlawful and illegal.

Confirmation of victory

The Constitutional Court judgment upholding the 2019 high court decision confirms amaBhungane's victory. It is a victory that has far-reaching effects, even outside the world of law and journalism.

Justice Mbuyiseli Madlanga suspended the order of invalidity for three years, allowing Parliament and the executive to fix the defects and introduce constitutionally compliant legislation.

About this, Milo said: "There are three things that are absolutely critical that happen immediately. The one is, post-surveillance notification will happen in the interim. Within three months of being surveilled, you have to be notified as a general rule.

"The second thing is bulk surveillance is completely outlawed. It is not permitted until the government is able to pass a statute on that.

"And the third is journalists and lawyers - particularly journalists - don't have to be as concerned now that they are going to be victims of a surveillance order, because now it's the duty of the government to tell the judge that one of the targets is a journalist and the judge will ask questions [about] why you need this order."

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Milo added that this is a first step towards dealing with the widespread abuse of Rica. Madlanga, like Milo, strongly believes that post-surveillance notification is a crucial mechanism to ensure there is less abuse of surveillance. People will be able to take legal action against ill-conceived surveillance of their communication.

Though this will not be immediate, Madlanga advised the state to consider automatic review of any surveillance once it has been concluded. "In South Africa, the vast majority of people cannot afford to litigate where they have suffered the infringement of their rights at the hands of the state," said Madlanga.

"For many, therefore, post-surveillance notification will not translate to the vindication of their privacy rights through the exercise of the right of access to court. As a result of financial want, exercising the right will be an impossibility. It seems to me what could give this vulnerable group of South Africans a fair chance of also being in a position to vindicate their privacy right would be if they were to be afforded relatively inexpensive, speedy and effective access to judicial review."

Although the Constitutional Court confirmed the high court's ruling, it did find that the court had misdirected itself when it came to the question of costs. It ordered those who opposed the application at the high court and the Constitutional Court, respectively, to pay amaBhungane's legal costs.

Corporate Counsel Business Journal, published by Law Business Media, is proud to extend their educational product offerings to include CCBJ Perspectives podcast series, providing access to leaders and influencers within the continuously evolving ecosystem of lawyers and legal professionals.

Perspectives will address a broad range of topics on the regulatory landscape, litigation, M&A, legal technology, EDI (equity, diversity & inclusion) and more. Perspectives will be hosted by CCBJ editor & publisher, Kristin Calve.

The goal of the Perspectives is to explore trends within the industry and to consider the why, not just the what, of our current and future legal and business landscapes, said Calve. These thoughtful and inspiring podcasts expand CCBJs editorial and educational offerings to our readers in additional to our webcasts, events and print and digital mediums.

The inaugural episodes include legal trail blazers such as Laura Abrahamson, neutral, JAMS; Carrie Cohen, partner, Morrison Foerster; David Greenberg, special advisor, LRN; and Dan Regard, president and CEO, iDS.

For more information about participating in a Perspectives podcast or to listen to an episode, please visit http://www.ccbjperspectives.com.

About Law Business Media

Law Business Media, publisher of Corporate Counsel Business Journal, is a leading provider of information and insight focused on the corporate legal ecosystem. Through an array of high-quality digital and print publications, live conferences, interactive colloquia, webcasts, bespoke roundtables, and other products and services, LBM continues to focus on understanding and meeting the information and analytics needs of chief legal officers, general counsel and senior legal executives, operations professionals at corporate law departments, corporate executives and board members, and the many elite law firms, technology companies, law companies, academics, consultants and other individuals and organizations whose mission is to help corporate counsel continuously improve the vital services they provide to their organizations.

About Corporate Counsel Business Journal

Corporate Counsel Business Journal was founded more than 25 years ago as Metropolitan Corporate Counsel by Al Driver, the esteemed longtime General Counsel of JC Penney. Al, with his wife Martha Driver, a senior finance executive with TIAA-CREF, developed, launched and operated MCC for 20 years following their retirements from their very successful corporate careers. Law Business Media acquired MCC in 2014 and rebranded as Corporate Counsel Business Journal in 2018.

About Kristin and Joe Calve

Kristin and Joe Calve are the co-founders of Law Business Media. Kristin, a serial entrepreneur with experience in startups, M&A, joint ventures and new product development, serves as publisher and editor of LBMs flagship publication, Corporate Counsel Business Journal. A former publisher with ALM Media and business analyst with A&E Television Networks, she is the founder of Topstone Angels, a private investment group, and the former VP, Revenue, for LiftMetrix, a SaaS platform designed to enable brand marketers to maximize ROI across social media channels. (LiftMetrix was acquired by Hootsuite in 2017.) Kristin has an B.A. in English from Fordham University and an MBA in Finance & Marketing from Fordham Gabelli School of Business. Joe, a former practicing lawyer on Wall Street, has served as Chief Marketing & Business Development for four Am Law 50 law firms. Prior to that, he spent 15 years at ALM Media as an editor, publisher, director of business development and vice president. Joe, along with his J.D. from Western New England College School of Law, has a B.A. in English from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a Masters Degree in Literature from New York University.
The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) on Wednesday told the Rajya Sabha that the National Investigation Agency (NIA) did not send any summons to farmers who are participating in the ongoing farmers' protest in Delhi.

In a written reply in Rajya Sabha, the Union government denied claims that the NIA had summoned agitating farmers.

More to follow...
After tolerating four years of tantrums, mood swings and fits, bad language, and the worst idiotic and overtly racist behaviour when defeated by any US President, the world keenly awaited the change of power in the oldest democracy in the world when Joe Biden took over as the new American President.

Similarly, the world keenly looked forward to understanding the contours of the new administration's internal and external policies, particularly its foreign policy. In a wide-ranging address at the US State Department last week, Biden outlined his new foreign policy vision, reiterating the catch phrase, "America is back".

This stance was reflected in the words that Biden used, such as "re-build" (America's alliances) and "re-engage" (with the world). He also sought to outline a clear vision of what the new administration aims to achieve in order to improve and stabilise international relations. It was a speech designed to re-establish order and global faith in the US; things that Biden clearly feels were lost under his controversial predecessor.

Michelle Bentley, Reader in International Relations at the Royal Holloway University, London, opines that the US foreign policy will now focus more on multilateral diplomacy and working with other nations in a more positive way. But Biden hinted that this should not be considered a "soft approach", insisting that diplomacy would be the best way to get what the US wants. He also tried to highlight the importance, which his administration attaches to democratic values and described it as a key aspect of America's identity and ethos.

During his first year in office, President Biden will bring together the world's democracies to strengthen the global democratic institutions, and forge a common agenda to address threats to common democratic values. Biden has explained that the so-called 'Summit for Democracy' he plans to convene later this year, will focus on fighting corruption and authoritarianism and protect human rights world over.

The Summit will also issue a Call to Action for the private sector, including technology corporations and social media giants, to make their own commitments, recognising their responsibilities and their overwhelming interest in preserving open, democratic societies and protecting free speech.

Indo-US Ties James Traub of the NYU's Center on International Cooperation, opines that in Asia, India has a geopolitical status of all its own. The world's fifth-largest economy, India serves as a bulwark against China, which the Biden administration regards as America's most dangerous adversary. And because China increasingly seeks to export its model of authoritarian, state-run capitalism, China also poses a unique threat to democracy, which the new administration will definitely try to weaken.

The Biden administration has inherited from Trump the premise of an 'Indo-Pacific' region with India at its core. In the recent past, as relations between New Delhi and Beijing soured, India strengthened its commitment to a multilateral partnership with the US, Japan and Australia, known as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad.

China has castigated this forum as an Asian version of the NATO, or one which is directly aimed against it. India, though cautious of formal alliances was initially hesitant to fully engage, as it also didn't want to sour its trade relations with Beijing.

The US considers India as "one of the most important partners in the Indo-Pacific region" and says it welcomes its emergence as leading global power. "India is one of the most important partners in the Indo-Pacific region to us. We welcome India's emergence as a leading global power and its role as a net security provider in the region," US State Department spokesperson Ned Price said during a press briefing earlier this week.

In addition, Kurt Campbell, the China hawk whom Biden recently appointed as the 'Indo-Pacific Coordinator' at the National Security Council, has reportedly proposed forging a new system of alliances binding South and East Asia, and Asia and Europe, as well as of incorporating India, South Korea, and Australia into the G-7 to form a new 'D-10', the 10 great democracies.

This further strengthens the importance which US attaches to India but it will also keep a strict watch on the internal political developments in India, particularly related to minorities. Though the personal equation, which existed between Trump and Modi, might be missing under the new dispensation yet it may not afford to ignore India.

Also, the new administration will not be able to drastically alter its policy toward India as the US needs its help to counter China in the region and also increasingly values India as a military and trade partner.

Biden, who once spoke optimistically of China's emergence "as a great power", has become increasingly tough on Beijing, and some analysts said his administration would most likely use the Quad as a way to ensure that the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific region does not tilt too far toward China.

Still, in New Delhi there is a school of though which feels that the new administration might not be as tough on China as the previous one and that Biden might be forced to adopt a more nuanced and less favourable position toward India.

In addition, the US has been trying unsuccessfully to increase arms sales to India, but the country's history of buying weapons from France, Israel and Russia, has complicated that effort. There is an added US concern that providing military equipment to India might help Russian military or other foreign agents to have access to the US technology.

Other issues, which might have an impact on the relationship, are the visa and climate change issues. The outgoing President had earlier this year suspended H-1B visas for high-skilled workers, a major setback for American IT sector, which employ many Indians. The US will also require the Indian support and cooperation on its initiative on climate change issues and in addition both countries are trying to hammer out a mutually beneficial Trade Agreement, which has eluded the officials so far conducting the talks.

However, there are signs that the next phase of the US-India relations will be based more on substance and less on rhetoric as India, now is able to offer much more to the us, both in military, security, trade and technological terms. The ties might not be personality oriented but focussed more on changing hard realities and individual aspirations, particularly in the post-Covid changed world.

(Asad Mirza is a political commentator. He can be contacted at asad.mirza.nd@gmail.com. The views expressed are personal)
SHANGHAI, Feb. 9, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- eBaoTech Corporation (eBaoTech), announced that Trust Insurance Cyprus, a subsidiary of Trust Holding, successfully launched, on January 17, 2021, eBaoCloud DigitalCoreTM (DigitalCore) in production for end to end life cycle operations of its general insurance business, replacing a legacy system that has been in use for decades. Since its launch, the new platform has been operating smoothly with strong user satisfaction and operation efficiency boost.

Headquartered in Cyprus, Trust Holding, a fully owned entity of Nest Investments Holding, is a leading regional insurance group with business in more than 7 countries across Middle East, North Africa and in Cyprus. Trust Holding selected DigitalCoreTM for system modernization, to increase its business agility, connectivity/innovation capabilities and operation efficiency in the digital age. eBaoCloud DigitalCoreTM is designed for digital insurance with strong connectivity and API orientations. Its successful launch provides a strong platform for Trust Insurance Cyprus to accelerate its digital transformation.

Marwan Bataineh, Group Chief Technology & Information Officer of Nest Investment Holding commented, "We are so excited that the new digital platform went live during these exceptionally circumstances and challenges we are facing from the COVID-19 pandemic. The teams from Trust in Cyprus and Jordan, and eBaoTech in Shanghai and Wuxi had to collaborate and work remotely through the whole year with a 6 hour time difference. I am so glad that with the strong support from our Board of Directors, our management team and the dedication and professionalism of the joint teams, we successfully launched the new digital platform as a backbone to enable our innovations and growth. We look forward to the implementation of DigitalCore to all insurance subsidiary companies of Trust Holding Group".

Christos Christodoulou, CEO of Trust Cyprus added, "We want to express our great appreciation and respect to eBaoTech's team for their professional and methodical approach to make this project a success. Their commitment and dedication was remarkable and beyond our expectations. With the new policy admin platform in place, we are now able to offer a better service to our Agents and Customers. We now have much stronger connectivity capabilities to increase our services and user experience to our agents and policy holders. We feel that with a strong technology partner such as eBaoTech we will maintain and increase our leading position in the new technological era."

Kamel Abunahl, CEO of Trust Holding highlighted, "This is a big success for both organizations and a great team work. We are glad of our decision to choose eBaoTech as our long-term partner for the transformation of our Group Insurance companies into the new digital era. Today, by using eBaoTech's DigitalCore, we have one more tool to enable the Group Companies to advance further faster with better controls. This is the first step of a long journey and future cooperation with eBao".

"We are much honored to be the technology partner of Trust Holding insurance operation and we are very grateful for their management team's continuous support and trust. We look forward to working with Trust Insurance as a long term partner to support their business growth in the Middle East region," added by Woody Mo, CEO of eBaoTech.

About Trust Insurance Cyprus

Trust Insurance Cyprus provides optimum insurance services on an international level for over a decade.

Since August 2009, it has extended its dynamic presence in the Cyprus Market with a capital in excess of  8.000.000, residing in the top tier of the industry. The company's successful growth is a motivation for significant future movements in creating innovative ideas as to become one of the leading insurance companies within the Insurance Industry. For more information, visit: https://www.trustcyprusinsurance.com/

About Trust Holding

Trust Holding was founded in 2007. It has set its vision to focus on growing its role and relationship with its subsidiaries to being an active support hub helping respecting operations to enhance their economic value in their respective markets on local and global views. Trust Holding have presence in the MENA region, North Africa and Europe such as Algeria, Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq and Cyprus.

About eBaoTech

eBaoTech is a technology solution provider for global insurance industry. Our mission from start is to "make insurance easy". We have business in more than 30 countries across all continents, serving numerous insurers, agents, brokers, InsurTech startups and others in the insurance ecosystem. eBaoTech offers two groups of solutions: eBao Cloud including SaaS and PaaS solutions and eBao Software for traditional insurance carriers' core systems. For more information, please visit www.ebaotech.com.

Related Links

http://www.ebaotech.com



SOURCE eBaoTech Corporation
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The controversy surrounding actress-model Gehana Vasisth is getting murkier each passing day. While her publicist say that she has been falsely accused in the case, the Police have a different story to tell.

"She would get struggling actors to work in films and lure them to work for her. An actor working for her was paid Rs 15000-20000 per movie," a police official was quoted as saying by TOI.

koimoi

The report furthermore added that she shot for 87 porn videos and uploaded them on websites that required a subscription worth Rs 2000. Her bank accounts that have Rs 36 lakhs are also under the scanner and are being checked if the she received this money through subscribers.

Twitter

Another report on NDTV suggests that eight people have been arrested in the case for running a porn racket. The group was working with the production house launched by Gehana Vasisth to bank on the growing demand for porn during the lockdown.

"Umesh Kamat used to do liasoning in the country for the foreign-based company he was working in. He would also strike business deals," a police officer told the publication about one of the arrests.



It is said that they lured new and aspiring actors on pretext of giving work in short films and made them work in porn films.

Twitter

Meanwhile, Gehana's publicist Flynn Remedios, which had earlier rubbished the rumours claiming she did erotica videos that are permitted and not porn, released another statement requesting that she should be treated on humanitarian grounds due to her "fragile health".

"Gehana Vasisth has suffered 4 cardiac arrests in the last one year. She is also asthmatic and her health is very fragile. Mumbai police should treat her on humanitarian grounds. She is not a criminal and had only shot erotica. There is no pornography in her work. The State should not interfere in the creative and artistic expression of an actor or director. She is not at all involved in the alleged porn racket run by others," Indian Express quoted the publicist as saying.



Gandi Baat fame Gehana Vasisth was arrested by the Crime Branch of Mumbai Police on Feb 6.
Victoria's Secret Angel Candice Swanepoel showed off her headstand during an invigorating yoga session on Tuesday.

The 32-year-old Lions Model maintains the flexibility and strength of her phenomenal 5ft10in figure by striking several challenging poses.

Candice - who boasts 16.2M Instagram/Twitter followers - Instastoried all of the action from her home workout.

Balance: Victoria's Secret Angel Candice Swanepoel showed off her headstand during an invigorating yoga session on Tuesday

Swanepoel exercised to Julia Zahra's new track Love Reaction.

The South African stunner loved the Dutch 25-year-old's song so much she included the entire lyrics.

It's hard to believe Candice has two sons - Anaca, 4; and Ariel, 2 - from her 13-year romance with ex-fiance Hermann Nicoli.

Swanepoel and the Brazilian 38-year-old model - who met when she was 17 and he was 23 - officially ended their three-year engagement in November 2018.

Bendy: The 32-year-old Lions Model maintains the flexibility and strength of her phenomenal 5ft10in figure by striking several challenging poses

Plank: Candice - who boasts 16.2M Instagram/Twitter followers - Instastoried all of the action from her home workout

New favorite song: Swanepoel exercised to Julia Zahra's new track Love Reaction

'Love this!' The South African stunner loved the Dutch 25-year-old's song so much she included the entire lyrics

The blonde bombshell keeps busy as model and creative director of the eco-conscious swimwear brand Tropic of C, which she founded in February 2018.

Candice has also been modeling for Victoria's Secret ever since she got her 'wings' in 2010.

L Brands announced Thursday they plan on splitting the struggling, 44-year-old lingerie retailer into a separate company by August.

'The light of my life!' It's hard to believe Candice (pictured October 6) has two sons - Anaca, 4; and Ariel, 2 - from her 13-year romance with ex-fiance Hermann Nicoli

Final couple portrait in 2017: Swanepoel and the Brazilian 38-year-old model - who met when she was 17 and he was 23 - officially ended their three-year engagement in November 2018

The San Francisco bra brand is readying a reboot after cutting $400M in expenses by cutting 850 jobs and shutting 250 stores last year.

Low ratings for the annual Victoria's Secret Fashion Show lead to the domination of Rihanna's lingerie label Savage X Fenty and its inclusive, innovative Amazon Prime presentations.

After years of employing only tall, thin, and long-haired models - VS has finally added larger sizes and hired plus-sized models like Candice Huffine and Devyn Garcia.

James H. Binns, a Vietnam War veteran, chaired the congressionally mandated Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans Illnesses from 2002 to 2014.

America's memory of the 1991 Gulf War has faded, but we must remember the 697,000 U.S. veterans who drove the Iraqi army from Kuwait 30 years ago this month -- especially the one in four who lost their health to toxic exposures serving their country. That country refuses to care for them.

The inauguration of a president who personally understands the terrible consequences of toxic wounds to veterans and their families inspires hope that help may finally be coming.

The Gulf War was hailed at the time as a great victory, with U.S. casualties limited to 148 dead and 467 wounded. Today, we know that at least 175,000 American servicemen and women returned home with constant pain; fatigue; and gastrointestinal, memory and chronic neurological problems now referred to as Gulf War Illness. They will not be celebrating this anniversary.

All Americans should remember the Gulf War as these veterans do  just as we should remember that in every major conflict of the past half-century, casualties from toxic wounds have exceeded those from bombs and bullets.

American battle casualties in the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq currently total 5,458 dead and 53,250 wounded. More than 213,000 veterans have reported respiratory diseases, cancers and other protracted health problems to the Department of Veterans Affairs' registry for burn pits, the massive fire pits on U.S. bases where waste was incinerated with jet fuel.

In the Vietnam War, 58,000 U.S. service members died and 153,000 were wounded. But more than 650,000 Vietnam veterans suffer or have died from illnesses related to Agent Orange.

Each of these tragedies has been a case of "friendly fire." Gulf War illness was triggered by anti-nerve gas pills the military ordered troops to take and pesticides sprayed to protect them from insect-borne diseases, according to reports of a congressionally mandated public advisory committee appointed by the secretary of Veterans Affairs. But the VA maintains that current evidence does not support a clear association.

"It never dawned on us that we may have done it to ourselves," acknowledged now-retired Lt. Gen. Dale Vesser, who led a Pentagon investigation. Low-level nerve gas released by U.S. destruction of Iraqi weapons facilities was also a likely factor.

In every instance, the government has resisted admitting responsibility for decades. It denied that Agent Orange exposure caused adverse health effects for 20 years after Vietnam -- 40 years for many illnesses. The VA currently rejects more than 80% of Gulf War illness claims, according to a Government Accountability Office investigation. It also denies 78% of burn pit claims.

This refusal to admit the problem has implications beyond not paying compensation and health care bills. Some toxic wounds such as brain cancer are death sentences. But others, such as debilitating gastrointestinal issues and migraines that never end, are potentially treatable with the right research. A 2010 National Academies of Sciences report called for a renewed national research effort to treat Gulf War illness. The recommendation echoed the 2008 recommendation of the research advisory committee appointed by the VA secretary. The VA ignored both.

Ill veterans have lobbied Congress to create a Gulf War illness treatment research program within the Department of Defense, which shows great promise despite its small budget. But the VA and DoD have spent far more on slanted studies designed to promote fictions that Gulf War illness is psychological and toxic substances arent toxic. Had this money been spent on the right targets, it is likely veterans would have access to effective treatments today.

Instead, the government has followed a policy that veterans call "deny until they die." It becomes a cost issue. When a National Academies of Sciences panel recommended using the term "Gulf War illness," the VAs undersecretary for compensation and benefits objected that it would "imply a causal link between service in the Gulf and poor health which could necessitate  disability compensation for veterans."

VA officials still reject the name.

This immoral policy is doomed to failure. Ultimately, the truth comes out, as the VA had to admit with Agent Orange. The government ends up paying immense compensation anyway, but it is too late to improve veterans' health and save some veterans lives.

There may still be cause to celebrate this anniversary. President Joe Biden has expressed deep concern about burn pit exposures and their likely role in the death of his son Beau. Congress has recently shown bipartisan displeasure with burn pit claims outcomes, encouraged by former VA Secretary David Shulkin.

The time is ripe and long overdue for a total reversal of government attitudes toward toxic wounds.

-- The opinions expressed in this op-ed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Military.com. If you would like to submit your own commentary, please send your article to opinions@military.com for consideration.
Were proud that well be able to help support the high-education institutions in Illinois.

Chicago-based digital forensics firm 4Discovery announced that they have been selected as a vendor for the Illinois Public Higher Education Cooperative, IPHEC. The selection was awarded under solicitation IPHEC2110 to provide Incident Response, Security Assessment, & Digital Forensic Services for IPHECs 13 public institutions of higher education in Illinois.

The award allows 4Discovery to serve as a vendor to respond to cybersecurity and data breaches, security audits and assessments, and digital forensic services for IPHECs members through 2025. The list of IPHEC vendors ranges from Fortune 100 companies like Apple and Hewlett Packard to some of Illinoiss top law firms including Jackson Lewis and Taft Stettinius & Hollister.

Were looking forward to continuing our relationship with IPHEC and their academic institution members, said Chad Gough, Owner and Founder of 4Discovery. Were proud that well be able to help support the high-education institutions in Illinois.

The duration of IPHEC award runs through November 12th, 2025, and has the potential for a one-time, five year renewal. The award also encompasses Illinois 39 public community college districts.

About 4Discovery

4Discovery is an elite B2B digital forensics firm that provides organizations and attorneys with digital forensic, information security, and electronic discovery services. We believe in simple, efficient, and cost-effective solutions that leverage technology to solve complex challenges. We act as a trusted third party for our clients by assisting with case strategy, conducting forensic examinations, reporting critical findings, and providing expert testimony. Learn more about 4Discovery and their team at http://www.4Discovery.com.

About IPHEC

The Illinois Public Higher Education Cooperative, IPHEC is a cooperative organization comprised of all thirteen public institutions of higher education. IPHEC members include University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, University of Illinois Chicago, University of Illinois Springfield, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, Southern Illinois University School of Medicine, Illinois State University, Chicago State University, Northeastern Illinois University, Governors State University, Northern Illinois University, Eastern Illinois University and Western Illinois University. Formed to advance the collective activities of the states public institutions primarily in the cooperative or group purchasing arena. Additionally, IPHEC serves to provide a common and collaborative voice on a wide variety of issues impacting the state universities including legislation, administrative rules, administrative policy and collaborative interaction with the states ethical oversight. IPHEC currently provides over one hundred award opportunities available to the states public higher education institutions, community colleges and the Illinois Math & Science Academy. To learn more about IPHEC, visit http://www.iphec.org.
The death of 78-year-old flute player Dr Maja O'Brien (pictured) - whose body was found floating face-down in a stream four weeks after she went missing - will remain a mystery, an inquest has heard

The death of a 78-year-old flute player whose body was found floating face-down in a stream four weeks after she went missing will remain a mystery, an inquest has heard.

Dr Maja O'Brien was reported missing when she didn't show up to play in an orchestral concert on March 28, 2019.

She was thought to have vanished with her flute which she was taking to a professional musician to have cleaned.

Nearly one month later, the Croatian-born pensioner - who was a regular swimmer - was found dead lying face-down under a tree in Hinksey stream in Oxford by a search and rescue volunteer.

Today, coroner Darren Salter recorded an open verdict - saying there is not sufficient evidence to rule her death a suicide nor an accident.

Dr O'Brien had a 'worrying' fracture to her left superior thyroid cartilage - often associated with strangulation, Home Office pathologist Dr Olaf Biedrzycki discovered.

Police launched an investigation and found that the pensioner had Google-searched 'death by drowning' in October 15, 2018.

However, the police could not rule out the possibility that she was murdered or that she had a medical episode - leaving multiple theories about what could have happened to her.

Detective Chief Inspector James Senior said the force's theories were: Dr O'Brien had left home with the intention of harming herself; that she left home with an unknown intention but came to have a medical episode causing her to fall into the river; she was harmed by someone known to her or she was harmed by an unknown third party.

The night before she went missing from her home Dr O'Brien had gone to the Oxford Academy to practice with the Cowley Orchestra, the coroner heard.

At the end of the session, the pensioner told her fellow musicians she was not going to be available in the coming weeks as she was due to go on holiday to Croatia.

On April 22, 2019, search and rescue volunteer David Woodgate was scouring the River Thames on a boat when he discovered a pair of feet at 7.30am.

Dr O'Brien was expected to play at an orchestral concert before jetting off on a trip to Croatia - but was reported missing when she didn't show up on March 28, 2019. Pictured: Police during the search for her

Rescue teams were called and pulled Dr O'Brien's decomposed body from the water.

Mr Salter said: 'This is a case that has raised questions and there has been a thorough police investigation over a long period of time.

'There are four hypotheses. There are the Google searches in 2018 but that was some time before her death and there could be an innocent explanation.

'There is not sufficient evidence of me to record a verdict of suicide.

'There is no evidence that she was unhappy, perhaps to the contrary. The night before she went missing she was planning to visit Croatia.

'It could have been an accident, there is evidence of recent falls and she was unstable to an extent. She was in the habit of walking by the river, falling after a medical episode or simply tripping is possible.'

The court heard how the Home Office pathologist's examination had been hampered because the body had been in the water for a significant period of time.

The coroner said: 'What worried the pathologist was the fracture of a left superior thyroid cartilage. It is quite a protected structure and it is an injury can be once somebody's neck is forcefully compressed by another person.

Dr O'Brien had a 'worrying' fracture to her left superior thyroid cartilage - often associated with strangulation, Home Office pathologist Dr Olaf Biedrzycki discovered. Pictured: Police during the search for her

'It is also something that can be caused accidentally.

'It is unusual but if someone fell, landing on that part of the neck and striking an edge accidentally - the pathologist has seen that before - which points towards a medical episode.

'We cannot rule out any of these possibilities. It seems more likely to me that we are looking at a fall into the river because that would be more common than someone causing harm to Maja - but I cannot rule that out and the fracture of the cartilage remains a worry.'

Recording an open conclusion, Mr Salter said: 'The evidence does not fully take us in one direction or the other.

'Maja O'Brien left her home address on March 28, 2019. She was reported missing later that day and her body was discovered on April 22 2019. The cause of her death following a post mortem examination, was unascertained.'

Sitting in at the inquest on Oxford was Dr O'Brien's adopted daughter, Petra. Her estranged husband Terence - a teacher - appeared over video link.

The inquest heard that Terence had known Dr O'Brien for 45 years, marrying in 1970 and divorcing 17 years later but they remained 'good friends.'

Dr O'Brien moved to the UK and carved out a successful career teaching at the University of Oxford after having gained her PhD in Psychology from University College, London.

Outside of her professional life, she loved music.

She sang Croatian and British folk songs with her husband and was involved in choirs for most of her life.

On retirement, Dr O'Brien took up the flute and passed every exam with distinction or merit.

She was a member of Oxfordshire Adult Flute Group for several years and first led a group of fellow flautists to Croatia in 2013, which became an annual visit.

She loved the outdoors and swam at Hinksey Pool every morning in the summer and took part in a sponsored bike ride across Vietnam for Oxfordshire Mind when she was in her 60s.

She was a member of a local walking group and also went on annual walking weekends with ex-colleagues in different parts of the UK.
More than 5,000 people spent longer than 12 hours languishing on trolleys in emergency departments across Northern Ireland last December.

Figures released by the Department of Health reveal the effects of the pandemic on the ability of the health service to cope with demand.

While there was a 29.9% reduction in the number of people turning up at emergency departments (EDs) last December compared to December 2019, the number of 12-hour breaches remained constant.

According to the statistics, there were 45,427 attendances at EDs in Northern Ireland in December 2020  19,401 less than in December 2019.

Despite this, between December 2019 and December 2020, the number waiting longer than 12 hours only decreased from 5,272 to 5,150.

The statistics have revealed that the ED at Craigavon Area Hospital struggled the most in December, with 960 people waiting longer than 12 hours.

This was followed by the ED at the Royal Victoria Hospital with 922 12-hour breaches and Antrim Area Hospital with 862 12-hour breaches.

EDs were hard hit last December as the number of Covid-19 cases began to spike in the run up to Christmas.

A high number of inpatients remained in wards as a result of the previous wave, meaning that it was more difficult to admit patients from EDs.

As a result, patients endured lengthy waits for treatment in EDs, with some patients being treated in the back of ambulances.

Meanwhile, medics warned that the conditions were unsafe and undignified.

The Jersey City Public Schools are facing a massive $300 million shortfall for the 2021-2022 school year, but the Education Law Center says that budget gap could widen by tens of millions.

ELC Research Director Danielle Farrie said the school district could lose $83 million in state aid next year, nearly three times the $30 million cut that Superintendent Franklin Walker said he was anticipating.

Walker announced in October that the JCPS would face an estimated $300 million budget shortfall in 2021-2022, caused largely by a change in how state aid is distributed, as well as the COVID-19 pandemic.

But Farrie said her projected state aid cut is based on the funding cuts of recent years. Jersey City lost $3.5 million in state aid in 2018-19, $27.1 million the following year, and $55.3 million in 2020-21. She said the next cut, which would push the budget shortfall to over $350 million, would leave the district with few options to fill that gap.

The expectations for Jersey City are all formulaic and devoid of the reality, said Farrie, whose organization advocates for public school education. The only thing Jersey City can do is raise the tax levy or figure out some other way to have the municipal budget to support the schools.

Aside from that their hands are kind of tied.

Walker was unavailable for comment Tuesday. The state Department of Education did not respond to questions Tuesday surrounding Jersey Citys funding crisis or Farries comments.

Farrie added she is unsure of how the municipality could help or whether it would be legal. She said the only other thing the district could do is make budget cuts or sell assets as it has done before, but that would be a one-year fix.

In 2018, the state began phasing out a form of aid the JCPS had come to rely on. The district is challenging the states funding formula in court.

To help the district offset those cuts, the state permitted Jersey City to establish a payroll tax  a 1% levy on businesses. But it remains unclear if the district will be able to cover the cuts in state aid, as Jersey City never guaranteed it had the payroll tax revenue to cover last years state aid cut, citing the financial uncertainty the coronavirus has unleashed.

The Board of Education approved a $736 million budget last March that raised the school tax levy  the amount of money contributed by local taxpayers  from $136 million to $189 million.

But Farrie said using the local fair share formula  the states estimate of a districts ability to contribute funding towards its local schools  Jersey Citys school tax levy would be $522 million. She said a districts fair share is based on property values and income levels.

So, because Jersey City is becoming wealthier so rapidly, the state is saying you can afford more, Farrie said. The amount of money they are expecting to afford each year is like way more than anyone can actually raise in property taxes in a single year.

Farrie said the city has been maligned by the state because the city has never really raised its school tax levy. But Farrie said the district isnt the only one at fault as the state until recently had a property tax cap only allowing a 2% raise per year.

The states own policy created (JCPSs) problem, Farrie said. This is a problem imposed by the state. The state is creating this issue and it is the states obligation to recognize that the cuts they are asking of this district are just unreasonable.

Addis Ababa  The Government of Ethiopia has expressed its deep concern by the statement the European Union (EU) is issuing regarding the situation in Tigray.

"These statements not only failed to reflect the reality on the ground but also turned a blind eye to the efforts exerted by the Government to address the pressing humanitarian needs of the people in the region," Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement on Tuesday.

In what seems an unchanging tone since the Ethiopian Government has launched the law enforcement operation, the EU Commission's statements have either ignored or failed the need to recognize from the start the overall objective of the operation and continued to project unbalanced and overrated view of the situation, it added.

Below is the full Press Release issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ethiopia on Recent Statements of the European Union Regarding the Humanitarian Assistance Efforts of the FDR of Ethiopia in the Tigray Region.

===========

The Government of Ethiopia is deeply concerned by the statements the European Union is issuing regarding the situation in Tigray. These statements not only failed to reflect the reality on the ground but also turned a blind eye to the efforts exerted by the Government to address the pressing humanitarian needs of the people in the region.

In what seems an unchanging tone since the Ethiopian Government has launched the law enforcement operation, the EU Commission's statements have either ignored or failed the need to recognize from the start the overall objective of the operation and continued to project unbalanced and overrated view of the situation.

Even if the law enforcement measure taken against those who defied the constitutional order and declared war on the Ethiopian National Defense Forces came to a successful completion, and massive efforts in collaboration with our partners have been launched to respond to the needs of the people in the region, the list of demands and conditions have made the task of soliciting the necessary amount of support to swiftly address the humanitarian activities difficult. If at all, constructive engagement from the start could have contributed to expediting the response and helped the Government and partners quickly delve into the colossal task of investing in the development projects to improve the livelihoods of the people in the region.

As has been stated time and again in many of the Government's communications and briefings given to the international community, access to many of the humanitarian actors has been given to many of the places in Tigray under a government-led process. This is critical because it both helps to scale up the provision of humanitarian assistance in a coordinated manner, and enhance results in terms of reaching out to a large number of targeted groups and beneficiaries. These efforts were made apparent for all to see, including governments and UN officials who recently paid a visit to Ethiopia.

While the Government ensures all people in need of humanitarian assistance are properly provided with the necessary supplies, it has never failed in its responsibility to investigate the human rights violations committed during the law enforcement operation against the TPLF and bring those who were involved and perpetrators harboured these criminals to justice. Such investigations have also been carried out by an independent human rights commission in the country whose findings and that of the Government are now made publicly available.

As a country known for hosting close to a million refugees from different countries, Ethiopia's hospitality and support to refugees from Eritrea is reassuring and questions raised in this regard are not and should be of no concern. Regarding the allegations about the Eritrean refugee camps in Shimelba and Hitsats, anyone who has been closely working with the refugees there knows that the Shimelba camp is located 20 KM away from Eritrea, and Hitsats in a very inhospitable area to any human beings.

The Government of Ethiopia had tried to relocate the refugees in these camps to another area had it not been for the stubborn refusal of the TPLF that was administering the region before the beginning of the law enforcement operation. The Ethiopian Government does not think the High Representative of the EU was unaware of this fact. A number of refugees have been relocated to the remaining two camps that host Eritrean refugees while the others are disbursed in Addis Ababa, Tigray and Amhara regions. The High Representative's allegation against Ethiopia in this regard does not take into account Ethiopia's internationally acclaimed commitment to protecting and even expanding the rights of about one million refugees from 27 different countries.

Close Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox Top Headlines Ethiopia Conflict Aid and Assistance By submitting above, you agree to our privacy policy. Success! Almost finished... We need to confirm your email address. To complete the process, please follow the instructions in the email we just sent you. Error! Error! There was a problem processing your submission. Please try again later.

It is the view of the Ethiopian Government that it is of no consequences to pronounce concerns that has been and in the process of being attained to in the Tigray region. It is only through constructive engagement that the aforesaid and other humanitarian and development challenges can effectively be addressed. As a strategic partner, the European Union should continue to stand by and support Ethiopia in its efforts to overcome its development bottlenecks and expedite its march towards achieving sustainable peace and development. Much has been achieved since the political and democratic dispensation have ushered in since the reform began, and the people and Government of Ethiopia stand strong in their resolve to build a democratic and prosperous country. Ethiopia is confident our development partners, including the European Union, join us in this journey and help us achieve to bring these grand objectives to fruition.

Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Spokesperson
Colorado Springs, CO (80903)

Today

Scattered thunderstorms during the morning becoming more widespread this afternoon. High 58F. Winds NNE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 90%..

Tonight

A steady rain this evening. Showers continuing overnight. Low around 45F. Winds N at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 80%.


Automotive aluminum expert to provide strategic, technical leadership to aluminum mobility initiative founded by Constellium and Novelis

ZURICH, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Alumobility, a non-profit organization focused on providing innovative implementation-ready solutions to advance the adoption of aluminum automotive body sheet, announced today that Mark White has been appointed executive director. White will lead the organization, which was recently founded by Constellium and Novelis, providing strategic guidance to the ecosystem's marketing and technical work streams. He will report to the board of directors.

With more than 30 years of automotive experience, predominately at Jaguar Land Rover, White has held a variety of leadership roles in body engineering, design, research, vehicle manufacturing processes and electrification. Throughout his career, he has focused on reducing overall vehicle weight, particularly in the car body and related systems, through the application of lightweight materials and part integration to achieve better performance at a lower cost.

"The opportunity to lead Alumobility and continue to demonstrate that aluminum is the material of choice for not only lightweighting, but also high-strength applications, electrification and a more sustainable mobility future is an exciting chapter for me personally, as well as the aluminum industry," said Mark White, Executive Director, Alumobility. "As the ecosystem continues to grow and new technical work is commissioned, I am confident we will complement the efforts of our industry partners and create new value for OEMs."

Under White's direction, Alumobility will release the results of several technical studies this year and commence new projects that support the adoption of aluminum auto body sheet. The first studies demonstrate the weight savings and performance of aluminum doors and b-pillars. White will also promote the mission of Alumobility and the expansion of the ecosystem through potential new members, including downstream technology partners such as forming and joining experts.

"The appointment of Mark as our executive director brings passion, expertise and credibility to the Alumobility ecosystem," said Pierre Labat, President of Alumobility. "His understanding of the automotive industry, deep technical knowledge of automotive aluminum and ability to engage collaborative teams of engineers, makes him the ideal leader for this initiative."

White received an Honors Degree in Automotive Design from Coventry University and was awarded a Doctor of Engineering in 2011 for work on lightweight structures. He is a Professor at Brunel University London and the Industry Advisory Board Chairman for the Brunel Centre for Advanced Solidification Technology (BCAST).

About Alumobility

Alumobility is a global ecosystem of leading aluminum and downstream technology partners that supports automotive manufacturers in creating lighter, safer, smarter and more sustainable vehicles. The non-profit association was founded to focus on implementation-ready technical solutions to advance the adoption of aluminum automotive body sheet. Working in partnership with global automakers, Alumobility will help fulfill the promise of a lighter, more efficient, more sustainable mobility future. For more information, visit alumobility.com.

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1435989/Mark_White.jpg

Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1427593/Alumobility_Logo.jpg
February 10, 2021 in Illustration (E)

[prMac.com] Odessa, Ukraine - CS Odessa is pleased to announce their new PM Mind Maps and Tables solution for ConceptDraw DIAGRAM and MINDMAP apps, instantly available in ConceptDraw Solutions. The new business solution allows project management professionals to easily document project data that help them organize resources and technologies visually to accomplish the project goals successfully.



Project management activity always includes a chain of challenging processes. Project implementation within the constrained resources, cost, and time facilitate the utilization of various tools and techniques used to capably manage and accomplish them. The practice of using mind maps and graphic tables allows project management professionals to represent complex data clearly, so it becomes easier for businesses and their employees to plan, track, and finally, successfully execute projects.



Professionals engaged to project scope management and project planning can use these graphic tools for ConceptDraw DIAGRAM and ConceptDraw MINDMAP to design some sorts of visual project documents including mind maps, RACI, or RACIQ matrices, tables, and presentations based on pre-designed templates and samples.



The powerful suite of three products found in ConceptDraw OFFICE v7 is designed for knowledge workers, project managers, managers, and academics and retails for $299US per end user license. The combination of diagramming, mind mapping, and project management tools along with no charge dynamic support and ongoing development make ConceptDraw OFFICE v7 a good choice to support the activities that move businesses ahead.



Operating Systems Supported

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Pricing and Availability:

The PM Mind Maps and Tables solution is available at $25 (USD) to users of ConceptDraw DIAGRAM v14, MINDMAP v12, and ConceptDraw OFFICE v7. ConceptDraw DIAGRAM v14 and MINDMAP v12, supported by an ever-growing collection of business solutions, compatible with macOS and Windows. Both apps can be purchased either individually or along with PROJECT v11 as part of ConceptDraw OFFICE v7.

Founded in 1993, Computer Systems Odessa supplies cross-platform productivity tools and graphics technologies to professional and corporate users around the world. With headquarter in Odessa, Ukraine, CS Odessa sells products internationally through resellers in over 150 countries, both directly and through resellers. The ConceptDraw line of products has won numerous awards and is used by hundreds of thousands, including Fortune 500 companies, U.S. Federal Government agencies, small and medium businesses, and students and educators around the globe. ConceptDraw is a registered trademark, and ConceptDraw Office, ConceptDraw Solution Park, ConceptDraw PRO, ConceptDraw MINDMAP, ConceptDraw PROJECT, and ConceptDraw STORE are trademarks of CS Odessa. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are the properties of their respective owners.

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If non-BJP parties emerge victorious, Rao wants to make yet another attempt to bring together a front of non-Congress, non-BJP regional parties before the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.  Twitter

Hyderabad: After his attempts to plunge into national politics after March 2018 failed to materialise due to unfavourable political circumstances, TRS president and Telangana Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao has decided to wait till the first week of May before deciding his next course of action. The reasons being cited by official sources in TRS for this wait are upcoming Assembly polls in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Kerala.

Though Assembly polls are due in five states, also including Assam and Puducherry, it is the results of Bengal, TN and Kerala in April and May that Chandrashekar Rao is keenly watching. These three states are bigger and politically more significant for regional parties, while the national parties  the BJP and the Congress  are playing relatively second fiddle, except for the BJP which fancies its chances in Bengal against Mamata Banerjee.

The Election Commission is likely to release the schedule for assembly polls in these five states by this month-end and election results are expected to be announced by April-end.

Based on the outcome, Chandrashekar Rao wants to take a decision on whether or not to plunge into national politics, around the first week of May. These reports took strong roots within the TRS after Rao took the decision to lay the foundation for a TRS party office in New Delhi after May 4.

Party insiders see Chandrashekar Rao dropping hints at his next course of action on national politics in May first week, coinciding with the TRS office ground breaking ceremony in Delhi. The Centre had allotted 1,100 square metre of land in south Delhis Vasant Vihar for the construction of party office in October 2020. The TRS took possession of the land in November 2020.

Though party leaders announced several times that Rao will lay the foundation for the party office whenever he visits Delhi, it did not happen. Though Rao visited Delhi soon after the GHMC polls in December 2020, the ceremony did not take place. Rao has now taken a firm decision to start construction of office in May and conveyed it to party MPs and other senior leaders.

TRS sources say that Raos next moves in national politics will solely depend on the outcome of the elections. If BJP comes to power in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Kerala either on its own or in alliance, Rao will drop his plans on national politics and stay put in Telangana.

If non-BJP parties emerge victorious, Rao wants to make yet another attempt to bring together a front of non-Congress, non-BJP regional parties before the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.

Rao unveiled his plans of entering national politics first time in March 2018, when he announced a Federal Front would be created against BJP and Congress in 2019 Lok Sabha polls. This did not materialise after Rao dissolved the Telangana Legislative Assembly in September 2018, nine-month before its tenure, forcing early Assembly polls in December 2018.

After winning the assembly polls with a landslide majority and retaining power for a second term, Raos attempts to take forward his Federal Front did not materialise. Rao hoped to enter national politics by winning all 17 seats in Telangana, and was portending that the BJP would get around 170-odd seats.

The federal front, which depended on neither the NDA nor UPA securing or even coming close to a majority, was a stillborn baby; with Narendra Modi leading his party to a massive win by securing over 300 seats. Raos hopes were dashed and subsequently, he kept his plans on national politics on hold and remained confined to state politics.

Recently, during the GHMC polls in December 2020, Rao made another attempt to play up the possibility of playing a role in national politics. Addressing an election meeting at LB Stadium, he announced that he would hold a national conclave with non-BJP parties in Hyderabad, against what he dubbed Modi governments anti-people, anti-farmer, anti-labour policies and disinvestment of PSUs.

But he halted his plans yet again after the TRS performed badly in the GHMC polls and the BJP put up a stupendous performance. He rushed to Delhi soon after to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi and home minister Amit Shah. Post his Delhi meeting, Rao took a U-turn and has neither criticised the BJP nor stood with the other opposition parties against the Modi governments policies or decisions.

Rao is now looking at the upcoming assembly polls in the three states to chart his future course of action.
[February 10, 2021] Reading Plus Announces Webinar on Using Stimulus Funding to Reverse Student Learning Loss

WINOOSKI, Vt., Feb. 10, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Reading Plus, an evidence-based online program that uses personalized instruction to improve students reading proficiency, today announced its upcoming webinar for education professionals, Using Stimulus Funds to Reverse Learning Loss . Led by policy expert Susan Gentz, the session will take place on Wednesday, February 10 at 3:30 p.m. ET. Jenny Eisenman, chief education officer at Reading Plus, will moderate the presentation.

The Coronavirus Recovery and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act (CRRSA) allocates over $82 billion to education, with an emphasis on addressing learning loss associated with interrupted instructional time during the COVID-19 pandemic. During the webinar, Gentz will provide a comprehensive overview of the stimulus package and answer common questions, including: What are allowable uses for stimulus funding?

How will educators receive the funds?

What other kinds of educational funding sources are available?

Many educators are wondering how stimulus funding will impact their schools and what ways the moey can be utilized, said Eisenman. Reading Plus is thrilled to have Susan decode the stimulus package with her vast expertise and explore how to invest in programs that meet the needs of their students.



Gentz is a former staffer in the United States Senate and legislative aide in the Iowa House of Representatives. She also served as the deputy executive director at the Center for Digital Education and worked for a government relations firm in Arlington, Virginia. For three years at the Aurora Institute, Gentz collaborated with lawmakers on federal and state education policy and published reports to help move the field forward with innovative learning models, best practices, and rule recommendations. To learn more or sign up for the Using Stimulus Funds to Reverse Learning Loss webinar, visit the registration page .

ABOUT READING PLUS

Reading Plus is an evidence-based, online program that provides personalized intervention and instruction for students, improving reading proficiency between 2.0 to 2.5 grade levels in a single school year. Reading Plus develops comprehension, fluency, vocabulary, motivation and stamina, while also going beyond the offerings of other literacy programs by addressing silent reading fluency. It supports students with diverse needs, including English learners, students who qualify for special education services, RTI/MTSS tiers 1-3, and advanced readers. Reading Plus provides educators with an easy-to-use management and reporting system, extensive resources to guide differentiated instruction, professional development, and highly-rated customer support. The Reading Plus program is used in more than 5,000 schools nationally, helping over 1 million students become efficient, confident, lifelong readers. For more information visit www.readingplus.com .

Press Contact Jennifer Leckstrom RoseComm for Reading Plus (215) 681-0770 jleckstrom@rosecomm.com

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New Delhi:

India's civil aviation regulator, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), has ordered to reduce the height of 70 tall buildings that come in the flight path of aircrafts that enter and leave the Mumbai airport.

The DGCA order to reduce the heights of buildings is the biggest action against obstacles in the flight path. A notice issued by DGCA in June this year revealed that such obstacles are not just new buildings but they also include some 50-year old two-storey one.

However, most old buildings have the NoCs for heights issued by the then relevant authority. Government controlled Airports Authority of India started giving such certificates only in 1978.

The old buildings have been told to reduce the height by 1 to 6 meters while the new taller ones have to cut short a bigger portion.

The order of the DGCA came after the Bombay high court asked it to submit a list of the obstacles in the flight path of aircrafts. The orders were issued in June and the deadline of would be in august.

MORE NEWS: PM Modi asks states to take stern action against cow vigilantes
It's been almost 27 years since the iconic sitcom first hit the screens.

Yet Friends fans have continued to discover major continuity errors over the years, with the latest one involving Ross and Monica Geller's dad Jack.

One shocked TikTok user asked 'Who is THAT?' after spotting that Jack (played by Elliott Gould) was replaced by an entirely different person in a scene from the episode The One in Massapequa.

The 18th episode of series eight sees the gang attend Jack and Judy's 35th wedding anniversary party, with the couple having told all their friends that Ross and a then pregnant Rachel were married.

Oh dear: Friends fans have continued to discover major continuity errors over the years, with the latest one involving Ross and Monica Geller's dad Jack

The pair (played by Jennifer Aniston and David Schwimmer) then had to keep up the pretence, with Rachel famously coming up with an elaborate lie - featuring blind Belgian nuns - about their big day.

In one scene, the 'happy couple' are seen talking to Ross' parents Jack and Judy, but when the scene cuts to Ross and Rachel, Jack is replaced by someone completely different.

The extra standing in for Jack fails to look anything like him, with the two being different heights, wearing different outfits and the newbie even sporting glasses.

One TikTok user discovered the huge mistake while watching the episode, filming the scene on their TV and captioning it: 'Who is THAT?'

Change: One shock TikTok user was forced to ask 'Who is THAT?' after spotting that Jack (played by Elliott Gould) was replaced by an entirely different person

They added: 'In all my Friends fan years, how have I never noticed this guy before?'

Despite the confusion over the scene, Digital Spy cleared up the fuss by revealing the error was simply down to a change in filming ratio when the popular series was streamed on Netflix.

Friends, which began filming in 1994, was first shot in 4:3 aspect ratio, which was normal at the time.

These days, shows are filmed in the standard 16:9 ratio, meaning that fans are now watching the wide view version of the programme.

Porkies: The 18th episode of series eight sees the gang attend Jack and Judy's 35th wedding anniversary, with the couple having told their friends Ross and a pregnant Rachel were married

Who is THAT? In one scene, the 'happy couple' are seen talking to Ross' parents Jack and Judy, but when the scene cuts to Ross and Rachel, Jack is replaced by someone completely different

Imposter: The extra standing in for Jack fails to look anything like him, with the two being different heights, wearing different outfits and the newbie is even sporting glasses

This means all the secret stand-ins and extras that weren't meant to be seen are now visible.

Last year, another continuity blooper was spotted on the show, this time involving Ross' son Ben.

Season two episode The One With The Lesbian Wedding sees Ross Geller's baby transform from being blond to being dark-haired between two swift shots.

The opening scene of the episode sees Ross chatting to ex-wife Carol (Jane Sibbett) and the woman she left him for Susan (Jessica Hecht) as they pick Ben up from his apartment.

Baffled: One TikTok user discovered the huge mistake while watching the episode, filming the scene on their TV and captioning it: 'Who is THAT?'

Carol and Susan have news for Ross, telling him they're getting married.

Susan holds a carrier with Ben in it - who was played by blond twins Charles Thomas Allen and John Christopher Allen until he was recast in season six - as Carol tells Ross about the impending nuptials.

But as the shot returns back from Ross' reaction, the baby is dark-haired.

The identical twins playing the character were both blond - suggesting a replacement child was temporarily placed in the carrier for some reason, with producers forgetting to switch him back again.

Devout fans have been left stressed out about a number of major character developments, such as Rachel's [Jennifer Aniston] seemingly overly-long pregnancy, to Phoebe [Lisa Kudrow] and Ross' birthdays switching to different months, and the entire cast of characters' ages been altered constantly.

Brunette: Season two episode The One With The Lesbian Wedding sees Ross Geller's baby son Ben transform from being blond to being dark-haired between two swift shots

Spot the difference: Susan holds a carrier with Ben in it, but as the shot returns back from Ross' reaction, the baby is dark-haired

Other blunders have included Ross claiming to be allergic to shellfish, only to be seen tucking into crab cakes in a later episode, as well as him declaring in season 1 that he had only had sex with Carol, before Chandler [Matthew Perry] revealing in season 7 that Ross had slept with their dorm cleaning woman in college.

In terms of physical continuity blunders, a multitude have been spotted over time.

In The One With The Red Sweater, Monica [Courteney Cox] is seen ripping open her and Chandler's wedding gifts, only for them to be magically re-wrapped as the shot changes.

In The One With The Rumour, guest star Brad Pitt's character Will brings a pie to Thanksgiving dinner, only for it to vanish into thin air.

And in season 7's The One Where Rosita Dies, after Joey [Matt Le Blanc] and Chander's barcaloungers are both destroyed, Chandler's miraculously re-appears in Monica's apartment in The One With The Cheap Wedding Dress.

That's a wrap! In The One With The Red Sweater, Monica [Courteney Cox] is seen ripping open her and Chandler's wedding gifts, only for them to be magically re-wrapped as the shot changes
SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The global medical device outsourcing market size is expected to reach USD 227.1 billion by 2028 registering a CAGR of 11.2%, according to a new report by Grand View Research, Inc. Rising demand for advanced medical products is the key factor fueling the market growth. Regulatory bodies are emphasizing the quality of the healthcare devices provided to the public. Thus, to meet the regulatory standards, market players are using various services like regulatory consulting. For example, the European Medical Device Regulation undertakes special spontaneous inspection of outsourced products to test the quality as well as conformity with the standards.

Key suggestions from the report:

The contract manufacturing segment led the market in 2020 with a revenue share of 55.4% and will retain its position throughout the forecast period

This growth is due to the increasing trend of outsourcing by OEMs to third-party manufacturers, especially in emerging countries

The quality assurance services segment is projected to exhibit the fastest CAGR over the forecast period

Asia Pacific was the dominant regional market in 2020 owing to the easy availability of skilled human resources

Read 240 page research report with ToC on "Medical Device Outsourcing Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis Report By Service (Quality Assurance, Contract Manufacturing), By Application (Cardiology, General & Plastic Surgery), And Segment Forecasts, 2021 - 2028'' at:https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/medical-device-outsourcing-market

Contract manufacturers in developed countries like the EU nations comply with the international standards for a quality management system, which makes them a preferred option as compared to the ones in developing countries like India and China. However, the regulatory changes anticipated in the developing countries ensure compliance by contract manufacturers. Demand for regulatory compliance is expected to boost the growth of consulting services, such as remediation, compliance, and QMS, thereby contributing to the growth of the global market.

However, the current pandemic has put the MedTech industry at the center stage with unmatched demand for PPE, diagnostic tests, ventilators, and other critical supplies. Besides the ongoing extraordinary measures to promptly ramp up the manufacturing capacity & capabilities, Medtech leaders are seeking outside their boundaries of the normal sector to explore innovative solutions to supplement the capacity, such as open-source equipment design, as well as partnerships with firms outside the sector.

Grand View Research has segmented the global medical device outsourcing market on the basis of service, application, and region:

Medical Device Outsourcing Service Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2016 - 2028)

Quality Assurance Services



Regulatory Affairs Service



Clinical Trials Applications & Product Registrations



Regulatory Writing & Publishing



Legal Representation



Other

Product Design & Development Services

Designing & Engineering



Machining



Molding



Packaging

Product Testing & Sterilization Services

Product Implementation Services

Product Upgrade Services

Product Maintenance Services

Contract Manufacturing

Accessories Manufacturing



Assembly Manufacturing



Component Manufacturing



Device Manufacturing

Medical Device Outsourcing Application Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2016 - 2028)

Cardiology

Class I



Class II



Class III

Diagnostic Imaging

Class I



Class II



Class III

Orthopedic

Class I



Class II



Class III

IVD

Class I



Class II



Class III

Ophthalmic

Class I



Class II



Class III

General & Plastic Surgery

Class I



Class II



Class III

Drug Delivery

Class I



Class II



Class III

Dental

Class I



Class II



Class III

Endoscopy

Class I



Class II



Class III

Diabetes Care

Class I



Class II



Class III

Others

Class I



Class II



Class III

Medical Device Outsourcing Regional Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2016 - 2028)

North America

U.S.



Canada

Europe

France



U.K.



Germany



Italy



Spain



The Netherlands



Switzerland



Sweden



Belgium



Russia

Asia Pacific

Japan



China



India



Indonesia



Malaysia



Singapore



Korea



Thailand



Taiwan



Australia



Philippines

Latin America

Brazil



Mexico



Argentina



Colombia



Chile

Middle East and Africa (MEA)

and (MEA) Saudi Arabia



South Africa



Israel



UAE



Egypt

List of Key Players of Medical Device Outsourcing Market

SGS SA

IQVIA

Toxikon, Inc.

Eurofins Scientific SE

Pace Analytical Services, Inc.

Intertek Group plc

WuXi AppTec, Inc.

North American Science Associates, Inc.

Charles River Laboratories International, Inc.

PAREXEL International Corp.

Find more research reports on Medical Devices Industry, by Grand View Research:

Healthcare Contract Manufacturing Market  The global healthcare contract manufacturing market size was valued at USD 177.9 billion in 2020 and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7.7% from 2021 to 2028.

 The global healthcare contract manufacturing market size was valued at in 2020 and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7.7% from 2021 to 2028. Regulatory Affairs Outsourcing Market  The global regulatory affairs outsourcing market size was valued at 6.3 billion in 2020 and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.9% from 2021 to 2028.

 The global regulatory affairs outsourcing market size was valued at 6.3 billion in 2020 and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.9% from 2021 to 2028. U.S. Medical Device Outsourcing Market  The U.S. medical device outsourcing market size was valued at USD 13.4 billion in 2014.

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

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SOURCE Grand View Research, Inc.
The stars of Sex Education were spotted out and about on location in Wales as they continue to shoot season three of the Netflix series.

The likes of Aimee Lou Wood and Sami Outalbali picked up sustenance during a food break, with Aimee carrying a selection of take-out coffees and Sami holding a box of lunch.

The stars were sure to mask up, as per COVID-19 health guidelines on film and TV sets.

Refueling: Aimee Lou Wood led the stars of Sex Education as they grabbed snacks on a break filming season 3 in Wales

Aimee strutted along in a cosy grey winter jacket which she wore over jeans, detailed with red patches at the knees.

She added mustard heeled boots and a scarf to the ensemble, her blonde locks falling in a bouncy style around her shoulders.

Sami was in all black, also bracing himself against the cold in a winter coat with a fur hood.

Also with them were Asa Butterfield and Connor Swindells, who wore more colourful ensemlbes.

On location: Asa Butterfield, Connor Swindells and Sami Outalbali were also on set

Sustenance: During a food break, Aimee was seen carrying a selection of take-out coffees

Safety first: The stars were sure to mask up, as per COVID-19 health guidelines on film and TV sets

Food stop: Sami was spotted holding a box of lunch

Caffeine hit: Aimee strutted along in a cosy grey winter jacket

Wintry: She added mustard heeled boots and a scarf to the ensemble, her blonde locks falling in a bouncy style around her shoulders

They too wrapped up in warming jackets and carried food and drinks as they headed to their break.

They were seen heading into the Paget Rooms in Penarth which doubles as Moordale High School's main assembly hall in the show.

Extras were also seen heading into the building, portraying other students at the school.

Sex Education left fans on a cliffhanger at the end of season two, with several potential storylines set up and an unexpected pregnancy.

And lovers of the series hopefully won't have too long to wait to find out what happens next, after the cast confirmed filming had begun last September.

The boys: Sami was in all black, also bracing himself against the cold in a winter coat with a fur hood. Asa and Connor wore more colourful ensemlbes

Assembling: They were seen heading into the Paget Rooms in Penarth which doubles as Moordale High School's main assembly hall in the show

On set: Extras were also seen heading into the building, portraying other students at the school

TBC: Sex Education left fans on a cliffhanger at the end of season two, with several potential storylines set up and an unexpected pregnancy

Coming soon? Lovers of the series hopefully won't have too long to wait to find out what happens next, after the cast confirmed filming had begun last September

In September, Netflix shared a snap of a doodle-covered script on Instagram, while the show's account posted a video of the cast getting prepared to leave lockdown and head back on set.

Jean, played by Gillian Anderson, could be seen struggling with her technology as she prepared to film her preparation to head back to work.

The show also stars Chris Jenks, Jojo Macari, Chinenye Edeudu, Tanya Reynolds, Chaneil Kular and Alistair Petrie.

Last September: Netflix shared a snap of a doodle-covered script on Instagram, while the show's account posted a video of the cast getting prepared to leave lockdown and head back on set

Co-stars: The show also stars Chris Jenks, Jojo Macari, Chinenye Edeudu, Tanya Reynolds, Chaneil Kular and Alistair Petrie

Tease: Emma Mackey, who plays Maeve Wiley, gave a few hints about what we can expect from the upcoming series [an extra is pictured]

Stringent: Speaking to PORTER, the star admitted the set has become 'very regimented', with Covid testing being carried out twice a week to ensure the cast and crew's safety

Emma Mackey, who plays Maeve Wiley, gave a few hints about what we can expect from the upcoming series.

Speaking to PORTER, the star admitted the set has become 'very regimented', with Covid testing being carried out twice a week to ensure the cast and crew's safety.

However she said sex scenes will still be included: 'We're all still, like, hugging and making out and doing intimate scenes.'

Nosey: Sex Education follows the story of teenagers including Otis (Asa Butterfield) and his sex therapist mother Jean (Gillian Anderson)

Aimee recently revealed that she had a 'vulnerability hangover' after filming scenes where she pleasures herself on the show.

The actress, 26, who plays Aimee Gibbs in the hit Netflix series, admitted she worried about about how she looked during the shoot a short time after wrapping.

Speaking on the Make It Reign podcast, Aimee added that the show's intimacy co-ordinator had warned her about the feeling and checked in with her days later.

Aimee said: 'The intimacy co-ordinator said sometimes you'll feel pretty exhilarated after you've just done the sex scene, then a day or two later you get a bit of a vulnerability hangover and you're like, "S**t!"

'So she checks in on us a day or two after we've filmed it to see how we're feeling. With the scene, I was so supported on set. But a couple of days later I was like, "Oh, my god!"

Detailing her thoughts, Aimee said: 'So many worries were ignited. I had a major vulnerability hangover. I was like, "I look hideous, my a*** in the air, so unflattering".'

However she added that now she's pleased nothing was airbrushed, adding: 'Now I look back at that and think, "wow, great!".'

Intimacy co-ordinators help actors and directors plan out their sex scenes, with Netflix also using the role in steamy hit Bridgerton.

Aimee previously spoke to Digital Spy about her hopes of the show making it to screens early in 2021 as she said: 'It looks like it's on track.'

And after having already read a script for the first episode of season three, she teased that it's 'really, really good'.

She went on: 'I'm desperate to see more. I'm so desperate, especially because I feel like the last season left us all in such interesting positions. But where the characters could go now is kind of limitless.'

MYRTLE BEACH  From a young age  8, to be exact  Cookie Goings knew she wanted to be a teacher. She declared this goal to her classmates and teacher as one of the first six African-American children to integrate the third grade at Myrtle Heights Elementary school in 1968.

She hasn't looked back since.

That young girl who knew she was born to be a servant is now 60, and works as the Director of Neighborhood Services for the city of Myrtle Beach after retiring from Horry County Schools in 2018, where she worked as a guidance counselor for more than 30 years.

Service and education is in Goings' DNA  her mother was Mary C. Canty, the first African American to serve on Horry Countys Habitat for Humanitys Family Selection Committee, first African American hired to work on the assembly line at AVX Corporation, the first African American cashier at Santee Cooper and a dedicated public advocate in the preservation of the history of the Black community in Myrtle Beach.

The groundwork for Goings to become an academic servant and counselor was already laid by her mother and other family, solidified when she realized she was a good listener to her friends and when she worked in the guidance counselors office at Myrtle Beach High School.

It was in 8th grade at Myrtle Beach Junior High School, we started a group during break, which was like Bible study, and I just noticed that people confided in me, and they would talk about personal things and I would give advice as best I could being a young believer, Goings said. But then I found my true gift to be in counseling. I had a free period, and I worked in the guidance office as a student assistant, and then again my senior year. That's where it was solidified that Yeah, this is education, still teaching and still helping. This is what I want to do.

Upon graduation in 1978, Goings enrolled at Newbury College where she studied psychology, guidance and counseling. Throughout her four years in Newbury, SC, Goings knew she wanted to come back to Myrtle Beach and invest back into her community  so many others before her had given her so much, so it was a no-brainer to come home.

That was something I always said to my children, my babies, thats what I call my students  but I've always said to them, When you can't go anywhere else, you should be able to come home, Goings said.

When reflecting on a few standout moments of the three decades she worked at Myrtle Beach High School, Goings got emotional, and spoke softly about three babies of hers specifically who were homeless while in high school. She still keeps in contact with them, with one working in restaurant management, another is a businessman and the last an entrepreneur.

Goings said that even though the world and odds were against them, sleeping on friends' couches and just wanting to be able to afford a high school yearbook, they persevered, and Goings is grateful that she and God were able to join forces to give them the tools they needed to succeed.

I always fight for the underdog, Goings said. Those who have risen above standards of the world, and others didn't always give them a fair chance.

Out of this passion for homeless high school students came Nanas Hope House, named fondly after Canty.

Nanas Hope House was founded in 2019 and looks to provide a clean, safe and supportive environment for registered Horry County high school students who are homeless, and who are graduating seniors during the winter or spring semester of the current year. Goings recently renovated the family home that once belonged to her mother to be the Hope House, and has already been able to serve students and offer short-term housing.

One of Goings' students, Rachel Robinson, said that though Goings started as her guidance counselor, she soon became her mother. When Robinson was in the 11th grade in 1988, she transferred to Myrtle Beach High School because her grandmother, who raised her, was sick and needed to move for better care. Because her grandmother was sick, Robinson had to go through her own school transfer process, and was terrified.

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Goings greeted her on her first day, though, and Robinson said it was like a ray of sunshine. Goings introduced Robinson that day to what are now still, 30 years later, her two best friends, Britannia Canty-Wilson, Goings' niece, and LaShonda Baker-Simmons.

The smile, the confidence as a woman, as a person who knew her calling was to assist children and make them feel comfortable and make them know that they are not alone, Robinson said of Goings.

From that point forward, Goings became more than her guidance counselor as Robinson worked full time her senior year and lived on her own. At Robinsons high school graduation, Goings and Canty stood in as her mother figures when her family did not show, and took her out to eat and to graduation parties throughout the day.

Because of me being in that situation of feeling lost, of not having a parent, because my grandmother was ill, I was longing for that direction, and she started filling the void, Robinson said.

Even though she retired from Horry County Schools in 2017, Goings knew her time as a public servant was far from over. Now, as Director of Neighborhood Services in the city of Myrtle Beach, Goings said she really just works as a guidance counselor for all citizens of the city instead of just for the students of Myrtle Beach High School.

It is our responsibility to go into the neighborhoods, but not to change anything. Our role is to enhance their identity, Goings said. We serve as liaison if they have issues, anything that negatively affects their quality of life.

Looking forward at her goals as Director of Neighborhood Services, Goings hopes that the city can receive federal funding again to put into its housing rehabilitation program, and she hopes to continue with Beachside Chats, a program founded in 2020.

Beachside Chats started when a resident approached Neighborhood Services after the murder of George Floyd in May with the idea of providing a space for conversations about race, implicit biases, police and resident relations and more.

These chats have been well-received, Goings said, with the first one bringing together almost 200 people in June.

Some people are scared, Goings said, but she believes that the efforts of herself and others have been able to foster an environment where people listen to one another and their struggles, and actively work to make things better for Grand Strand.

We don't always have answers, but the fact that they feel they are able to share in a safe space, and now we're moving from our space space to a brave space where we do (things), Goings said. Weve shared, we've listened, we've heard, now what can we do individually or collectively to bring and exercise peace, healing and racial reconciliation.

To Robinson, Goings has been and continues to be a beacon of light and a role model for how to live life, and said that Goings embodies everything anyone should want to become.

She's fun, she can go in any setting and just fit in with the old, with the young, with the elite, with the ones standing around on the street, they love her and they respect her, and she can relate because she's just real, and she doesn't forget where she came from."
Pearl Milling Company-branded pancake mixes, syrups, cornmeal, flour, and grits products will start to arrive in market in June 2021. Pearl Milling Company will offer people all their favorite pancake mix and syrup varieties in the same familiar red packaging previously found under the Aunt Jemima brand. Products will continue to be available under the Aunt Jemima name without the character image until June.

Though new to store shelves, Pearl Milling Company was founded in 1888 in St. Joseph, Missouri, and was the originator of the iconic self-rising pancake mix that would later become known as Aunt Jemima.

The Quaker Oats Company signed the contract to purchase the Aunt Jemima brand in 1925. It updated its image over the years in a manner intended to remove racial stereotypes that dated back to the brand origins. In June 2020, the company announced it was transitioning from the Aunt Jemima name and likeness on packaging and pledged a $5 million commitment to support the Black community.

Throughout the effort that led to the new Pearl Milling Company name, Quaker worked with consumers, employees, external cultural and subject-matter experts, and diverse agency partners to gather broad perspectives and ensure the new brand was developed with inclusivity in mind.

In the coming weeks, Pearl Milling Company will also announce the details of a $1 million commitment to empower and uplift Black girls and women, inviting the community to visit its website and nominate non-profit organizations for an opportunity to receive grants to further that mission. This is in addition to PepsiCo's more than $400 million, five-year investment to uplift Black business and communities, and increase Black representation at PepsiCo.

About PepsiCo

PepsiCo products are enjoyed by consumers more than one billion times a day in more than 200 countries and territories around the world. PepsiCo generated more than $67 billion in net revenue in 2019, driven by a complementary food and beverage portfolio that includes Frito-Lay, Gatorade, Pepsi-Cola, Quaker, and Tropicana. PepsiCo's product portfolio includes a wide range of enjoyable foods and beverages, including 23 brands that generate more than $1 billion each in estimated annual retail sales. Guiding PepsiCo is our vision to Be the Global Leader in Convenient Foods and Beverages by Winning with Purpose. "Winning with Purpose" reflects our ambition to win sustainably in the marketplace and embed purpose into all aspects of the business. For more information, visit www.pepsico.com .

Contact: [email protected]

SOURCE PepsiCo, Inc.

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The United Arab Emirates Hope probe has successfully entered Mars orbit after a nail-biting journey that could have ended with the spacecraft crashing into the planet or missing it altogether.

Emirati scientists cheered as news of the success was broadcast. The Hope probe, or Amal in Arabic, is a source of immense national pride for the UAE, which is the first Arab state to launch an interplanetary space mission.

To the people of the UAE, to the Arab and Muslim nations, we announce the successful arrival to Mars orbit. Praise be to God, said Omran Sharaf, the missions project manager.

A man poses for a picture in front of a promotional poster in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Credit:Getty Images

As it approached Mars, the spacecraft fired its main engines for nearly half an hour in an intricate manoeuvre that slowed down the probe so it could be captured by the planets gravitational pull. For several agonising minutes it was unclear whether the mission had succeeded, due to the time delay in relaying signals back to Earth.
As the Rajya Sabha proceedings began on Wednesday, Congress Member of Parliament (MP) said that the time to discuss the should be increased from 10 to 12 hours.

"There is a lot of interest among the members in discussing the Budget. My suggestion is that increase the time to debate the Budget from 10 hours to 12 hours," said Ramesh.

The chairperson M Venkaiah Naidu said that "he will see into it".

The House also gave obituary reference and observed silence in respect of Mahendra Bahadur Singh who represented Madhya Pradesh.

Rajya Sabha proceedings began for the day chaired by M Venkaiah Naidu. The first part of the budget session will conclude on February 13.

The Parliament will again meet on March 8 and the budget session will conclude on April 8.

Presenting the first-ever digital Union Budget, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman earlier this month had said that India's fight against COVID-19 continues into 2021.

(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.)
About 3,000 pupils in special classes in post-primary schools will return to the classroom on February 22.

The leadership of the two second- level teacher unions have agreed to co-operate with the limited reopening.

It means students attending these classes will return for in-person teaching and learning on the same day on which primary school special classes go back.

Read More

The Teachers Union of Ireland (TUI) announced its co-operation earlier this evening and subsequently the Association of Secondary Teachers lreland (ASTI) gave its backing.

The ASTIs support came after a contentious meeting of its Standing Committee, which warned that the overall Framework Plan for a safe return of schools was inadequate.

The ASTI leadership said the plan needs to be substantially reworked in order to ensure a safe phased return of all students in the coming period of time.

The February 22 date was agreed in talks between the Department of Education and the education partners, including teacher unions, parents and school management bodies.

The TUI executive committee also unanimously decided to facilitate the return of Leaving Cert students from some point in the same week, subject to public health advice.

The breakthrough on special classes  and potentially Leaving Cert students - is another small step in the phased re-opening of schools for the first time since the Christmas holidays.

Overall, it means a path has been cleared for up to 20,000 pupils with special needs, across primary and post-primary, to get back to the classroom.

But that represents only a tiny fraction of pupils and there are more than 900,000 awaiting a return date.

Talks have been ongoing between the department and the education partners about a wider return and much will depend on the scale of the improvement in the public health landscape.

High levels of Covid-19 transmission in January left teachers, special needs assistants and many parents nervous about schools re-opening in January forcing the abandonment of plans.

TUI president Martin Marjoram said in taking its decision, the union acknowledges the vital importance of face-to-face provision for this cohort of students and took note of the range of additional supports and measures that have been agreed to protect students and staff.

These measures, which had been sought by TUI, include full contact tracing and fast-track testing, provision of high grade PPE for special education teachers and arrangements for staff in high-risk health categories and pregnant teachers to continue to provide remote learning.

The limited re-opening agreements at primary and post primary do not cover pupils with special needs who are in mainstream classes.

Education Minister Norma Foley said it remained a priority for the Department of Education to agree a shared pathway to in-school learning for children with special needs in mainstream classes in mainstream schools as soon as possible.

She said a five hours a week supplementary programme to support the education and/or care needs of pupils with complex needs - in addition to the remote teaching provided by schools  was in place.

Ms Foley said intensive engagement was continuing with education stakeholders, towards a full return of all students to in-person teaching and learning in primary and post primary schools as soon as possible and when it is safe to do so.
The case against Donald Trump that unfolded before the U.S. Senate on Tuesday consists of cold, hard facts, in the words of the Houses lead impeachment manager: the former presidents endlessly, publicly told lie about the election; his direct and proximate incitement of a mob to march on the Capitol and fight like hell; and the death, destruction and lawlessness that followed in his name. Its no accident that the prosecution led with recorded images and straightforward descriptions of what happened on Jan. 6.

Trumps defense, by contrast, is characteristically empty of any attempt to grapple with that awful truth. Instead, his lawyers have advanced a series of tortured and peripheral arguments that boil down to a claim as absurd as it is familiar from his four years in office: that Trump could say and do whatever he wanted with no prospect of repercussions.

Nothing epitomizes this approach so much as the argument that the Senate cant try Trump for anything because he is no longer president. Its the cornerstone of the case advanced by his lawyers as well as the Republican senators eager to acquit him because it doesnt require them to defend what he did. The Senate rightly voted to dispense with it Tuesday, with six Republicans joining all 50 Democrats to find the proceeding constitutional.

The 44 Republicans in the minority voted to ignore the plain language of the Constitution, which gives the Senate the sole Power to try all Impeachments. Trump was duly impeached  as a sitting president, no less  so his conviction or acquittal is squarely within the exclusive jurisdiction of the Senate. The founding document further contemplates convictions of former presidents and other ex-officials by prescribing the penalty not only of removal from office but also of disqualification from future office.

Theres also the non-trivial matter of the history of impeachment. In 1797, when a treasonous real estate scheme made Tennessee Sen. William Blount the first official to be impeached under the Constitution, the Senate voted to expel him from the chamber and then try him (though it ultimately did not proceed for unclear reasons). The following century, Ulysses S. Grants former war secretary William Belknap was both impeached by the House and tried by the Senate on bribery charges even though he had hurriedly resigned beforehand in an attempt to avoid the proceedings.

The Belknap precedent demonstrates why former officials must be subject to impeachment and conviction. If they arent, any official can avoid the constitutional consequences of high crimes and misdemeanors by simply leaving office. That would leave a corrupt president whose tenure is nearly expired invulnerable to the penalty at the moment when he might be most likely to resort to high crimes to retain power, much as Trump did.

The ex-presidents defenders have advanced other arguments with similarly insupportable implications. They maintain, for instance, that constitutional free-speech rights protect Trumps statements about fighting nonexistent election fraud. But the First Amendment guards individual expression from government restraint, not government officials from accountability for anything they utter. Presidents may be impeached for all sorts of statements that would be unremarkable coming from an ordinary citizen, and indeed every presidential impeachment in history has rested partly on a presidents words.

In the present case, those words and their horrifying consequences are beyond defending. So its no wonder the presidents lawyers, along with his most abject apologists in the Senate, would rather not try.

This commentary is from The Chronicles editorial board. We invite you to express your views in a letter to the editor. Please submit your letter via our online form: SFChronicle.com/letters.
2021 Scoop: Chicken Salad Chick Announces Headquarters Relocation To Atlanta

Georgias capital now home to more food franchises than any other US city*

February 10, 2021 // Franchising.com // ATLANTA - Chicken Salad Chick announced the relocation of its headquarters from Auburn, AL to Atlanta, GA. The move is slated to take place during the first quarter of 2021.

The companys new office will be located in Vinings at the Overlook II building - across the street from its Vinings restaurant - housing the leadership team of approximately 40 current and new employees. Chicken Salad Chick expects 17 Auburn-based corporate employees to transition to the new headquarters in metro-Atlanta January through May, 2021. The remaining 20 positions will be filled by local talent.

Atlanta has always fostered a nurturing business environment for companies to kickstart their growth, said Chicken Salad Chick President and CEO Scott Deviney. This relocation positions Chicken Salad Chick to scale at an accelerated rate and meet aggressive growth goals, while allowing us to broaden our vision for the future. Weve seen increased interest from Atlantas diverse and talented workforce, and the citys airport allows us swift access to prospective vendors and a growing pool of interested franchisees.

Chicken Salad Chick was founded in Auburn, Alabama by Stacy Brown and her late husband Kevin Brown in 2008. Her entrepreneurial spirit and passion for spreading joy, enriching lives and serving others remains the foundation of the brand.

Auburn will forever be the special place in which Chicken Salad Chick was created and its home for the past 13 years. It gives me great joy to know that the loving, welcoming culture that started in our southern, Auburn community has now spread to so many others, far and wide, said Chicken Salad Chick founder and franchise owner Stacy Brown. Moving the headquarters to Atlanta will support the company in achieving long-term growth as we work toward making Chicken Salad Chick better for the future while still allowing our local restaurant teams to provide the same welcoming experience our guests have come to know and love.

Despite industry challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Chicken Salad Chicks growth trajectory is highlighted by the opening of 37 new stores in 2020 (26 since June, 2020). This comes on the heels of 44 new restaurants opened in 2019 and sets the stage for an estimated 40 more openings slated for 2021. The brand will continue its expansion to four more states within the next two years and projects a portfolio of 500 locations by the end of 2025.

Chicken Salad Chick hired nearly a dozen corporate positions locally in Atlanta throughout 2020 that will manage and support the rapid growth of the brand throughout the Southeast and Midwest. Chicken Salad Chick promoted three Atlanta-based executives to its C-suite, including Jim Thompson as chief operating officer, Terry McKee as chief development officer and Tom Carr as chief marketing officer. Most recently, Atlantans Marianna Magee, Jon Musser, Mary Lou Atkins and Kim Bolinger were named director of marketing, director of supply chain, VP of human resources and director of operations for the Atlanta market respectively.

Chicken Salad Chicks decision to expand their Georgia presence by bringing their headquarters to the state is a testament to our diverse talent pipeline and to the states international reputation as a hub for the food and beverage industry, said Georgia Department of Economic Development Commissioner Pat Wilson. Georgia is already home to more Chicken Salad Chick locations than any other state, with several employees in company leadership already here. By bringing their headquarters to Cobb County, Georgia, Im confident they will continue to find greater success to support their growth plans.

Georgia is home to 32 Chicken Salad Chick locations, the largest number in any state across the brands footprint of 17 states. With existing locations in Alpharetta, Buckhead, Carrollton, Cumming, Kennesaw, Marietta, McDonough, Newnan, Peachtree City, Roswell, Stockbridge and Vinings, Chicken Salad Chick continues to rapidly expand throughout the greater Atlanta-area. The brand grew its Georgia presence in early January, 2021 with its newest restaurant in Buford near Mall of Georgia. Last year, Chicken Salad Chick opened three company-owned restaurants in metro-Atlanta - Snellville (December 2020), Johns Creek (August 2020) and Loganville (June 2020).

*More food franchises are headquartered in Atlanta than any other city according to a survey of more than 1,800 brands by franchise research firm FRANdata.

SOURCE Chicken Salad Chick

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CHANGSHA, China, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Zoomlion Heavy Industry Science & Technology Co., Ltd. (Zoomlion) has published an attributable net profit of 7 to 7.5 billion yuan ($US1.08-1.16 billion) in its 2020 performance forecast released on January 20, achieving 60-72 percent year-on-year growth. Profit after deduction of non-recurring gains and losses increased by 74-93.5 percent year-on-year.

Despite the downtrend in the global economy, Zoomlion's sales revenue in international markets saw a strong upward trend in 2020. Li Bin, deputy general manager of Zoomlion Overseas Company, attributed the achievement to the company's core competitiveness, especially big investments in research and development as well as carrying out an integrated localization strategy.

Zoomlion's R&D program for 4.0 intelligent machinery has brought a lineup of industry-leading technologies and products to customers worldwide, and as Chinese employees have been unable to travel abroad due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Zoomlion is hiring more local employees to expand the businesses in international markets.

"We'll continue investing in R&D for international markets, we have more engineers to study the overseas market and develop usable models," said Li. "It's a good time to hire more local employees to assist our business worldwide."

During the pandemic, Zoomlion hired over 200 local employees across different international markets including Indonesia, Thailand, Russia, UAE, Saudi Arabia and more. The company's localization rate in terms of talent has exceeded 85 percent.

For Zoomlion, it is a big challenge to manage international talents from different cultures and religious backgrounds, and the company shows full respect to every employee. Zoomlion uses internet platforms such as Zoom and WeChat for meetings and shares the company's core values and vision through social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

"In 2021, from our estimation, there'll be a recovery in the global economy. It is our plan to extend our global business with more resources. We will continue to collaborate with our partners, colleagues and customers around the world to create a beautiful and sustainable future together," remarked Li.

About Zoomlion

Founded in 1992, Zoomlion Heavy Industry Science & Technology Co., Ltd. (01157.HK) is a high-end equipment manufacturing enterprise that integrates engineering machinery, agricultural machinery, and financial services. The company now sells more than 600 cutting-edge products from 56 product lines covering ten significant categories.

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www.zoomlion.com



SOURCE Zoomlion
Nigerian senators debated the insecurity around the country on Wednesday, with Adamawa lawmaker, Binos Yaroe, saying majority of the kidnappers in the country were of the Fulani ethnic group and they were getting support from the elites of the ethnic group.

The deliberation on general insecurity in Nigeria started as any other activity in the Red Chamber.

It would be the umpteenth time that the Senate will be debating insecurity and insurgency in the country  most of which are borne from recent cases of killings and kidnappings in many states.

Last year, they spent most of their time debating the same issue. On three occasions, they asked President Muhamadu Buhari to sack the former service chiefs whom they said had overstayed their time and were bereft of new ideas to tackle insurgency. They made the first call call in January 2020. A similar call was made in July. And the third call was made in December of the same year.

They also asked the president to either rejig, restructure, remodel or reposition the nations security architecture.

The presidency on January 26, announced the resignation of the former service chiefs and prompted appointed their replacements.

During Wednesdays debate, the Deputy Senate Leader, Ajayi Boroffice, referred to recent reports of killings in nine states in January 2021 alone. They include Ondo, Edo, Oyo, Imo and Kaduna States.

Others are Zamfara, Niger, Nasarawa and Kebbi States.

He said security challenges have led to issuance and counter issuance of eviction notices by some ethnic entrepreneurs and groups posing as ethnic nationalists and champions and that even though many perpetrators of killings, kidnappings and banditry are illegal immigrants, they are harboured and nourished by Nigerian informants, collaborators and arm suppliers.

Lawmakers thereafter, took turns to make their contribution.

When it was the turn of Mr Yaroe, the senator representing Adamawa South on the platform of the PDP, he generated murmurs in the chamber when he started by saying the motion should be titled the menace of Fulani herdsmen in Nigeria.

Every time kidnappers are arrested, he said, seven or eight turn out to be Fulani.

It is so because the Fulani men are being encouraged or allowed to do whatever they like. Recently, a Fulani herder was accused of causing mayhem and kidnapping a district head and in his response, he said, we are not learned, we dont know anything.

The only thing we know is to graze our cows in the bush, it is you learned Fulanis that buy guns and give us and send us on missions. These people are being supported in high places. It must stop.

The Senate President, Ahmad Lawan, was forced to caution him. Mr Lawan warned lawmakers not to stick the conversation to a particular ethnic group.

Distinguished colleagues, I have to say this, lets not stick this kind of case of insecurity to an ethnic group, please.

Many other lawmakers who contributed either faulted the federal government for doing very little to address the security situation in the country. Only Lagos lawmaker, Adeola Olamilekan, commended the president for appointing new service chiefs.

The lawmakers, thereafter, urged the president to direct the National Security Adviser, the Inspector General of Police and the new service chiefs to devise a proposal to rejig the nations security architecture and dispose of forces for more effective counter measures against the current security challenges.

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They also urged the federal government to embark on an operation to checkmate proliferation of firearms and enforce the laws against illegal possession of firearms by arresting, disarming and punishing anyone in illegal possession of arms, and for state governors to implement the National Livestock Transformation Plan  a modern scheme designed to eliminate transhumance in order to prevent farmer-herder conflicts and activate highly productive livestock sector in Nigeria.

In another resolution, they asked the federal government to review the ECOWAS protocol on the free trade agreement to help check the influx of criminals into the country.


Kathleen Hicks, confirmed as the deputy secretary of defense Monday, recently pledged to support a review of the nation's nuclear modernization programs, including plutonium pit production.

In responding to written questions from the Senate Armed Services Committee, Hicks aligned herself with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who in his own exchange with lawmakers promised a sweeping assessment and, further, did not explicitly back a years-old recommendation to produce the nuclear weapon cores in both South Carolina and New Mexico.

"As Secretary Austin testified, maintaining a credible nuclear deterrent is critical to our nation's defense," Hicks wrote. "If confirmed, I will see that the department thoroughly studies all proposed plans and alternatives to ensure we are on the most cost-effective path to modernize U.S. nuclear forces."

The U.S. has long lacked the means to make a great number of pits, a key warhead component. In May 2018, the National Nuclear Security Administration and the Defense Department jointly proposed jumpstarting production using the Savannah River Site and Los Alamos National Laboratory. The multibillion-dollar, unfinished Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at SRS would be repurposed, they counseled, and Plutonium Facility-4 at Los Alamos National Lab would be expanded.

Overhauling the nuclear arsenal, as well as the aging Department of Energy infrastructure that undergirds it, "is a critical national security priority," Hicks wrote in response to another question. "A secure, sustainable, and effective nuclear deterrent remains vital to U.S. national security and that of our allies."

Exactly what the review floated by Hicks and Austin means for South Carolina  Aiken County, namely  is unclear. Some observers, though, forecast greater pit production scrutiny under President Joe Biden.

"I think we can be sure that pit production is going to be more expensive than previously understood. Both sites have, probably, lowballed," said Greg Mello with the Los Alamos Study Group. "One of the questions is: Can the Biden administration and NNSA face another gigantic increase in budget request driven just by pit production?"

Hicks is the first woman confirmed by the Senate to serve as the No. 2 at the Pentagon. She'll handle the department's day-to-day business.

Hicks served as a senior defense official under the Obama administration.

But soon after the Civil War ended, a different question began to be asked that echoed the debates about enslaved Africans humanity: What does it mean to be civilized? This question emerged in the early years of the industrial age and Americas dawning global ambitions, and it reflected an anxiety born of a fading masculinity as men engaged machines to do the heavy work and as the nation sought to flex its muscles.

When it came to Black people, the answer to this question invited the most meanspirited answers that were deployed to justify denying African-Americans the fruits of American citizenship. Politicians routinely declared that Black men were not suited to vote because they were not civilized. The same logic was deployed to keep Black Americans in substandard housing and low-wage jobs, since they were not ready for the rigors of a civilized life. And when all else failed, it was routine to make declarations of jungle savagery when Black men were accused of sexually assaulting white women.

Although African-Americans have had to endure arguments, policies and practices that declared they were not fully human, that they could not be citizens and that they were not civilized, African-Americans have been undaunted in their desire to be considered all of the above.

These desires have not been satisfied, in part because African-Americans contributions to this countrys history have been ignored. The erasure is as stunning as it is thorough. The role of Black labor in building the Southern economic infrastructure has been routinely denied. The contributions that Black scholars have made in the humanities, the life sciences and the natural sciences have been lost because of segregated workplaces. The work of Black creative artists has been disregarded since it became appropriated into the national cultural apparatus.

These denials exact a great psychological toll. The writer James Baldwin understood as much when in 1965 he soberly declared, It comes as a great shock to discover the country which is your birthplace and to which you owe your life and your identity has not in its whole system of reality evolved any place for you.

Mr. Baldwin understood that the ability to rationalize away Black Americans place in the system of reality was due to a powerful commitment to not knowing the Black past. In the same text, he continued with a heartbreaking question: If one has got to prove ones title to the land, isnt 400 years enough? This question, along with the others that are central to the study of the African-American past, is laden with a complexity that tells a story about our own capacity and willingness to ever realize the ideal articulated in the countrys founding document, namely that all people are created equal.

The willful failure to appreciate that many people  the dispossessed, the poor, the enslaved, even the immigrants from less desirable countries  have contributed to an exceptional national experiment leads people like the Proud Boys and a few too many members of Congress away from being the true patriots that they claim to be.

Jonathan Holloway is the president of Rutgers University, a historian and the author, most recently, of The Cause of Freedom: A Concise History of African Americans.

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.

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ARCS Foundation means a great deal to me because they supported me during my graduate education. The support of young scientists is very important to the advancement of science in the US, and more generally, around the world.

At the January National Board Meeting. ARCS Foundation Inc. announced Radio Astronomer and Planetary Scientist F. Peter Schloerb PhD, has been selected as the 2021 inductee into the prestigious ARCS Alumni Hall of Fame.

Hall of Fame Inductees are ARCS Scholar Alumni who have made outstanding contributions to the advancement of science and increased our nations scientific competitiveness. Selection is by a panel comprised of ARCS Foundation national board members and advisors and is based on alumni contributions in the areas of scientific innovation, discovery, economic impact, development of future scientists, and enhancement of US scientific superiority.

Dr. Schloerb is the University of Massachusetts (UMass) Director of the Large Millimeter Telescope (LMT) Alfonso Serrano, a joint project between UMass and Instituto Nacional de Astrofisica, Optica y Electronica in Mexico. He is also a professor and director of the Five College Radio Astronomy Observatory at UMass.

ARCS Foundation has recognized Dr. Schloerb for his leadership and vision for the concept, design, and construction of the LMT, which is a crucial component in a network of eight strategically placed telescopes around the globe known as the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). The international collaboration, which includes hundreds of scientists in twenty countries, forms an Earth-sized virtual telescope with unprecedented sensitivity and resolution.

In April 2019, the EHT partnership, including Dr. Schloerb and the LMT, publicly revealed the first ever image of a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy 55 million light-years awayalso marking a powerful confirmation of Albert Einsteins theory of general relativity.

The image produced prolific honors for Dr. Schloerb and members of the EHT, including the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.

Dr. Schloerb was an ARCS Scholar in 1977 while attending the California Institute of Technology where he received his PhD in planetary science. Upon accepting his induction into the ARCS Alumni Hall of Fame, he thanked ARCS for their encouragement in his scientific studies that culminated into the historic observations he shares with the world today.

ARCS Foundation means a great deal to me because they supported me during my graduate education. The support of young scientists is very important to the advancement of science in the US, and more generally, around the world.

It is truly our pleasure to welcome Dr. F. Peter Schloerb into the distinguished ARCS Alumni Hall of Fame, said Sherry Lundeen, national president of ARCS Foundation. His prolific impact in US planetary space studies embodies ARCS Foundations historic beginnings and our mission to award outstanding scholars who will promote US competitiveness in STEM fields. We are extremely proud of Dr. Schloerbs work, as it continues to provide significant images that will be studied for years to come.

As a member of ARCS Alumni Hall of Fame, Dr. Schloerb joins the company of eleven other outstanding alumni who also received ARCS Foundation funding to support their education in past years.

About ARCS Foundation: ARCS Foundation is a national nonprofit volunteer womens organization that promotes US competitiveness by providing financial awards to academically outstanding US citizens studying to complete degrees in science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM), and health disciplines at 49 of the nations leading research universities. The organization has awarded more than $120 million to more than 10,900 scholars since 1958. ARCS Foundation Scholars have produced thousands of research publications and patents, secured billions in grant funding, started science-related companies, and played a significant role in teaching and mentoring young people in the STEM pipeline. More information is available at arcsfoundation.org.
Bengaluru, Feb 11 : Farmers from Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha, West Bengal, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Sikkim and Andaman and Nicobar Islands on Wednesday interacted with experts from the Bengaluru-based Indian Institute of Horticultural Research (IIHR) and the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) to know about the 'fruit cracking' disorder.

On the third day of the National Horticulture Fair 2021, which is being organised by the IIHR here, the farmers sought to know how to tackle the fruit cracking disorder. Nearly 24,000 farmers from across the country participated in the virtual interaction through 240 Krishi Vigyan Kendras (KVKs).

Fruit cracking disorder mainly occurs due to excess water during the rainy season as well as due to lack of moisture in the hot summer months. To tackle this disorder, one must maintain the right moisture level at all times.

"Fruit cracking disorder occurs mainly due to heavy irrigation or rain after a long dry spell, resulting in cracks on the fruit surface. This may occur due to varietal characters, orchard soil management, inappropriate levels of water at maturity stage, and micro-nutrient deficiency," an expert from ICAR said.

The disorder is generally found in apricot, litchi, cherry, apple, pomegranate, citrus, and nectarine fruits, among others. The average loss caused by fruit cracking disorder ranges from 50-85 per cent.

All cracked fruits lose their value in the fresh market, and are used for processing only (especially for fruit juice) provided they are not affected by fungus.

Cracked fruits are susceptible to storage disease, have shorter storage as well as shelf life. It has been revealed that the shape of the fruit plays an important role in fruit cracking.

Another expert said that temperature plays a very important role in the ratio of fruit cracking. "Arid and semi-arid zones where temperature is more and humidity or rainfall is very low favours cracking. In general, there was a linear increase in cracking with temperature increase from 10 to 40 degree Celsius. Temperature also affects many other factors such as permeability of the cell walls and bio-chemical processes of the cells etc.," he said.

"When hot wind passes from the litchi fruit surface due to water loss, it becomes hard and inelastic and sudden fluctuation in moisture level leads to cracking in litchi fruit. Therefore, maintaining the right moisture level is very important," the experts said.

The experts also suggested that moisture imbalance and heavy rainfall or irrigation after a prolonged dry spell, and sudden and high fluctuation in water supply to plants may cause cracking in fruits such as lemon, litchi and cherry.

Besides, deficiency of boron and calcium are responsible for cracking in cherry, pomegranate and litchi.
Farming organisations in Wales have slammed the devolved government for 'lacking ambition' when developing agricultural policy.

Farming unions along with Wales YFC have written to the Minister for Rural Affairs to express concerns around the future direction of Welsh farming.

They have called upon Lesley Griffiths to 'pause and reconsider' what post-Brexit agricultural policy should look like.

It comes as the Welsh government is set to introduce a nitrate vulnerable zone (NVZ) designation across Wales in a move that has angered farming groups.

The all-Wales NVZ aims to improve water quality in rivers and lakes, but it would mean tougher restrictions on fertiliser and manure spreading.

Numerous farming groups in the country believe the the proposal would not be effective in delivering water quality improvements, instead adding costs and regulations.

In their new letter, NFU Cymru, Farmers' Union of Wales and Wales YFC warn that the 'direction of travel proposed does not appear to reflect the uniqueness of Welsh farming, built around family farms delivering for our economy, our landscape, language and culture.'

They add that 'little has changed' over three consultation processes and there 'remains a lack of ambition for the future of farming in Wales'.

The three groups warn that the Welsh government is instead implementing a policy based on 'a very narrow definition of public goods'.

They go on to say that Welsh policy thinking is 'very similar to what we have seen emanate from elsewhere, rather than a policy 'Made in Wales'.'

In a joint statement, they said: The main opportunity from Brexit was to develop an agricultural policy in Wales for Wales that had its people, the land they farm, and the food they produce at its heart.

"Collectively we are ambitious for Wales and passionately believe that our sector can play a leading role in the major challenges facing society.

"Put simply our ambition is for Wales to be recognised as a world leading country of excellence for climate friendly farming and food production."

Katie Davies, Wales YFC Chairman added: Thousands of young people from across Wales are desperate to forge a career within Welsh agriculture, supporting food and farming.

"It is imperative that we work together to find a way forward that is both ambitious and creates opportunities for the next generation.
SUMMERVILLE  Dorchester District 2 School Board said it wants Gov. Henry McMaster to ensure teachers remain at the top of the list of frontline workers eligible for COVID-19 vaccinations.

DD2 officials are sending a signed resolution to McMaster and local legislators calling for the governor to support making sure that no other groups move ahead of the teachers' current position. This is after an additional 309,000 people age 65 to 69 became eligible for vaccination on Feb. 8.

Prior to then, the age for seniors started at 70.

In South Carolina, teachers sit in Phase 1B of the vaccine distribution plan. Their vaccinations follow health care workers, nursing home staff and residents and people age 65 and older who are up first in Phase 1A.

In the past week, debates have increased over giving teachers vaccine priority. On Feb. 9, the Senate continued a discussion on a proposed measure requiring all K-12 employees to be fully vaccinated within 30 days if they want the shot.

According to the state Department of Health and Environmental Control, taking that step would require putting on hold the task of completing elderly vaccinations and focusing on K-12 employees.

Justin Farnsworth, a DD2 board member, said in a Feb. 8 board meeting some of the pushback school officials have received has been around the belief they are trying to get teachers to jump the vaccination line.

He said he doesn't see that as the case at all.

"We're trying to prioritize our folks that are in these classrooms," he said. "They're going to be in classrooms eight hours a day."

Tanya Robinson, vice chair of the board, clarified the board's resolution isn't to see teachers move up the list. It's to make sure that other groups don't jump in front of teachers.

Nearly 4,000 people are employed with the district.

"It's like the target keeps moving," Robinson said.

DD2 officials said in the meeting a key piece of the safe full return to classrooms is vaccinations. A part of the approved resolution said, "With school districts faced with teacher shortages at the state and national level, it is critical that teachers feel safe to be present in our classrooms for face-to-face instruction."

Ciara Male, the District 23 PTA president and a DD2 parent, said she agrees with the board's statements. She said the vaccine makes some teachers feel safe with making a full-time return to classes.

That return is especially important for students who have been struggling with virtual school work, according to Male.

I feel like a lot more children will be able to catch up with the children that have been doing great," she said.

DD2 isn't the only district to raise concerns to state officials. On the morning of Feb. 4, a teacher-produced video featuring members of the Lexington-Richland 5 board of trustees called on state public health officials to prioritize educators during the second phase of COVID vaccinations.

Officials said the three-minute video was created independently of the district, though all board members and Superintendent Christina Melton agreed to appear in it.

Giving teachers and staff vaccine priority will help keep our schools open as much as possible in South Carolina, and that helps our kids, our families, our businesses and our families, trustee Matt Hogan said.

Fourteen teachers who appear in the video said they wanted to get inoculated as quickly as possible. Among them was Michael Sugar, an Irmo High School history teacher who put the video together.

Teachers work in close proximity to many people every day and need the vaccine to stay safe while on the job, he told The Post and Courier.

In a joint letter, the Palmetto State Teachers Association and the South Carolina Education Association also announced their support of all of the letters sent to McMaster calling for teachers to have priority access to vaccinations.

When asked about his response to the DD2 letter, McMaster's staff pointed to his recent op-ed published in The Post and Courier. In it, he said, "Because our priority must be to save lives, we must first protect those at greatest risk of dying and those who keep them  and the rest of us  alive."

In Dorchester District 2, officials recently announced plans to have students back in school in person five days a week. The district is operating on a hybrid schedule in which students spend half of the week doing school virtually and the other half in person.

DD2 elementary schools will return to a full-time, face-to-face schedule on Feb. 15. Middle and high schools will make that return on Feb. 22.

When teachers are given the opportunity to get vaccinated, DD2 Superintendent Joseph Pye said he would ideally like to make it possible for staff to be vaccinated at school buildings.

At the Feb. 8 meeting, Farnsworth said he equates their educators to first responders. So the vaccine is important, he said.

If it makes them feel more comfortable then think we need to advocate and push for that," he said.

Adam Benson contributed to this report.
As demand for real estate has led to a surge in home sales in Chicago, the industry is one of few to escape the brunt of the pandemic so far. At Chicago-based real estate brokerages, new agents are meeting that demand  and sometimes, that new career is proving to be a lifeline amid a tough economy.
A Central New York man has turned himself in after learning he was on a Top 10 Most Wanted list.

WKTV reports Craig A. Jackson, 36, of Utica, surrendered to the Oneida County Sheriffs Office on Tuesday after seeing himself in media on the Oneida County Sheriffs Office 2021 Top Ten Most Wanted list.

According to the Observer-Dispatch, Jackson had been wanted since September 2020 on a charge of felony third-degree criminal possession of a controlled substance.

Deputies said Jackson consulted with his attorney and made arrangements with the sheriffs office in Oriskany, N.Y., before turning himself in Tuesday morning. He was arraigned virtually in Oneida County Court via Skype and released later Tuesday.

Oneida County Sheriff Robert Maciol announces the arrest of one of Oneida Countys 2021 Top Ten Most Wanted. Craig A.... Posted by Oneida County Sheriff's Office on Tuesday, February 9, 2021

Jackson has a history of legal troubles, according to the Observer-Dispatch. He was arrested while on parole in 2013 after a search by Utica police and the U.S. Marshals Service found cocaine, marijuana, drug scales and a loaded .38 caliber handgun at his home.
MERRITT TWP, MI  A Bay County couple was hospitalized after an extremely high level of carbon monoxide filled their home.

Just before 8 a.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 9, Bay County Sheriffs deputies responded to a house on South Knight Road in Merritt Township after a 62-year-old woman there called 911 saying she and her 64-year-old husband had woken up feeling dizzy and sick, said Sheriff Troy R. Cunningham.

The woman managed to unlock a side door to the house before deputies arrived, the sheriff said.

When deputies arrived, they found the womans husband lying on the floor. Both residents were overcome by carbon monoxide poisoning, deputies determined.

Deputies began airing out the home and managed to get both residents out of the house.

The couple was taken to Ascension St. Marys Hospital in Saginaw for further treatment, though they are expected to survive, the sheriff said.

Two deputies who had entered the house visited McLaren Bay Region hospital for precautionary evaluations and later returned to finish working their shifts, Cunningham said.

The house is heated by propane and there was a possible defect in its furnace, the sheriff said.

Rescue personnel checking the house found it had 1,700 parts per million carbon monoxide, which is extremely high, Cunningham said.

The United States Consumer Product Safety Commission states that when carbon monoxide levels increase beyond 70 parts per million, people may notice headaches, fatigue, and nausea.

At sustained CO concentrations above 150 to 200 ppm, disorientation, unconsciousness, and death are possible, the USCPSC states.

Cunningham said the house did not have any carbon monoxide detectors. He advised Bay County residents to have working detectors in their homes and to frequently check their batteries.

Deputies were assisted at the scene by the Hampton Township Public Safety Department, the Merritt Township Fire Department, and Medstar Ambulance.

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- USD$900,000 In-Kind Investment by Procare Health into Phase I Clinical Study for BVX-0918A in the EU

- Co-Development of Vaccines for Cervical Cancer and HPV

- Right of First Refusal for US Marketing of Papilocare

VANCOUVER, BC and BARCELONA, Spain, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- BioVaxys Technology Corp. (CSE: BIOV) (FRA: 5LB) (OTC:L MNGF) ("BioVaxys"), the world leader in haptenized protein vaccines for antiviral and cancer applications, and Procare Health Iberia, S.L., of Barcelona, Spain ("Procare Health"), a leading privately-held European pharmaceutical company, announced today that they have entered into a broad collaboration for the co-development, joint commercialization, and marketing of BioVaxys vaccines for ovarian cancer, cervical cancer, and human papilloma virus ("HPV"), and the right of first refusal for marketing by BioVaxys in the United States of Procare Health's vaginal gel product, Papilocare, the world's first and only product to prevent and treat HPV-dependent cervical lesions. Left untreated, HPV infection generally leads to cervical cancer (World Health Organization, HPV and Cervical Cancer,11 November 2020). Formed in 2012 as a spin-out from Procter & Gamble Pharmaceuticals, Procare Health is a market leader in the women's health field in the European Union ("EU"), with marketed products including Papilocare, Libicare, Palomacare, Idracare, Pronolis HD and Ovosicare.

Under the terms of the agreement, which was executed on February 9th, 2021, the companies will jointly conduct a Phase I Clinical Study of BVX-0918A in Spain, BioVaxys' autologous haptenized protein vaccine for late-stage ovarian cancer. BioVaxys will be responsible for the core technology and vaccine production, with Procare Health overseeing and making an in-kind investment in the clinical program and regulatory planning, CRO management, patient/clinical center recruitment, marketing, and opinion leader management. Both companies have agreed to equally share costs associated with engaging a European clinical research organization ("CRO") to conduct the study. In return, Procare Health will have exclusive rights to market and distribute BVX-0918A in the European Union ("EU"), and the United Kingdom. Clinical data from the Spanish Phase I study will be used by BioVaxys to support its planned IND for BVX-0918A in the US next year, as well as for all other global markets. The two companies will be working out any remaining details by end of 2Q21.

BioVaxys President and Chief Operating Officer Ken Kovan said "This co-development gives BioVaxys access to Procare Health's clinical development and regulatory expertise in the EU, and to its marketing & sales presence in Europe." Kovan added that "Procare Health has an established portfolio of marketed brands that is focused heavily on the women's health and gynecological oncology markets. As we anticipate that these will be the primary users of our ovarian cancer vaccine, the relationship with Procare Health will give access to key gynecological oncology opinion leaders for patient access, clinical trial recruitment, and a relationship that post-approval will drive vaccine sales. Having a strong EU opinion leader network will also be invaluable for our planned US launch of the vaccine."

The collaboration with BioVaxys will help Procare Health fuel its product offerings in the gynecological oncology field. Yann Gaslain, CEO of Procare Health stated, "We are thrilled to start working the collaboration with BioVaxys as it brings a new hope in the field of gynecological cancer. We have been working for 8 years in the area of cervical cancer and HPV, investigating to understand how the immune response of the host could be stimulated to help defend versus HPV infection and persistency, and we believe that the new haptenized cell platform technology can bring a valid answer to this unmet therapeutical need, mainly when high grade lesions of the cervix or even cervical carcinoma have been characterized. The promising vaccine technology platform of BioVaxys will likely help bringing response in ovarian and cervical cancer

In Phase I and Phase II clinical studies previously conducted by BioVaxys, co-founder and Chief Medical Officer, Dr. David Berd, using an earlier generation of the BioVaxys cancer vaccine on nearly 500 patients with melanoma or ovarian cancer, the haptenized cell platform showed significant clinical promise. BioVaxys has developed its vaccine technology platforms based on the established immunological concept that modifying proteins with simple chemicals called haptens makes them more visible to the immune system. The process of haptenization "teaches" a patient's immune system to recognize and make target proteins more 'visible' as foreign, thereby stimulating an immune response.

Javier Cortes, MD, Specialist in Gynecology and Cytology for the international Academy of Cytology (Chicago, USA), member of the Spanish association against Cancer (AECC) and of the European Cervical Cancer Association (ECCA) stated, "I believe that the planned clinical trial in Phase I is of a very high interest based on my experience in oncology for more than 30 years. The immunotherapy is a line of treatment with very active investigation and promising early results in some cancers (lungs, melanoma and ovarian). That is why, every single line of investigation well based and with consistent criteria of quality in the design of the investigation should be very well received and encouraged."

Leveraging the recent proven ability of its haptenized viral antigen vaccine platform in stimulating both a 96.4% positive immune response and powerful 'memory' T-cell activation against SARS-CoV-2, BioVaxys will use the platform's flexibility to swap in viral antigens for Human Papilloma Virus ("HPV"), with the intent to develop a treatment for adults who are already infected with HPV. There are vaccines to protect against getting HPV, but none to treat someone who already has HPV. BioVaxys and Procare Health will split costs for feasibility, proof-of-concept, and preclinical development for a HPV viral vaccine, as well as a cervical cancer vaccine based on the BioVaxys cancer vaccine platform. In return, Procare Health will have an exclusive right in the EU and UK for a HPV and/or cervical cancer vaccine, with BioVaxys retaining rights to North America and Rest of World. Development milestones, go/no-go decisions, and other details will be finalized in 2Q2021.

In a major step toward transitioning to a revenue-generating company, BioVaxys has agreed to have a right of first refusal to market and distribute Papilocare in the US.

In Procare Health's PALOMA Phase IIb clinical trial, Papilocare showed consistent and significant efficacy in normalizing cervical cytology at 3 months and at 6 months in the total study population with 50% to 70% of High-Risk HPV clearance at 6 months in six different international studies and more than 600 patients. HPV infection causes 528,000 cases of cervical cancer and 266,000 cervical cancer deaths each year.1 Papilocare has a CE mark valid for the entire EU, and is currently marketed as a Class IIa medical device in Spain, France, Portugal, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania. Once the FDA regulatory pathway has been determined for the US, BioVaxys will have a detailed plan in place by 3Q21 to build an appropriate capability to market and support the brand in the US, with BioVaxys providing the funding for such efforts.

James Passin, CEO of BioVaxys, stated, "We are honored to partner with Procare Health, a market leader in gynecological oncology and women's health in the EU; this transformative collaboration leverages all of the innovative work of Dr. David Berd in the field in oncology and novel vaccine development, as well as our recent success with the preclinical development of a viable haptenized viral protein vaccine for Covid-19. We look forward to using our proprietary haptenized vaccine technology to address urgent and large market deficiencies in the area of women's health and to potentially generate a new and material revenue stream for our company."

For greater certainty, BioVaxys is not making any express or implied claims that it has the ability to treat the SAR-CoV-2 virus at this time.

1. WHO. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/sexually-transmitted-infections-(stis)

About BioVaxys Technology Corp.

Based in Vancouver, BioVaxys Technology Corp . is a British Columbia-registered, early stage biotechnology company that is developing viral and oncology vaccine platforms, as well as immuno-diagnostics. The Company is advancing a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine based on its haptenized viral protein technology, and is planning a clinical trial of its haptenized autologous cell vaccine used in combination with anti-PD1 and anti-PDL-1 checkpoint inhibitors that will initially be developed for ovarian cancer. Also in development is a diagnostic for evaluating the presence or absence of a T cell immune response to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. BioVaxys has two issued US patents and two patent applications related to its cancer vaccine, and pending patent applications for its SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) vaccine and diagnostic technologies. BioVaxys common shares are listed on the CSE under the stock symbol "BIOV" and trades on the Frankfurt Bourse (FRA: 5LB) and US OTC: LMNGF.

About Procare Health

Procare Health is a multi-national EU biotechnology company based in Barcelona (Spain) founded in 2012 as a result of the spin-off of executives and employees of Procter & Gamble Pharmaceuticals that is focused primarily to bring innovative solutions in women's health, with a special interest into unmet therapeutical needs. Procare Health invests every year circa 25% of its investments budget into R&D, fundamental research on Cervix ("cervix on a chip" research project) and clinical trials in order bring clinical evidence of its main products in the market. Procare Health develops, investigates and commercializes its own products into more than 50 countries in the world with main focus in EU and in women's genital tract diseases (HPV, cervical lesions, vaginal infections, vaginal dryness, and fertility). Procare Health vision is to become a women's health leader in Europe.

Cautionary Statements Regarding Forward Looking Information

This press release includes certain "forward-looking information" and "forward-looking statements" (collectively "forward-looking statements") within the meaning of applicable Canadian and United States securities legislation including the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, included herein, without limitation, statements relating the future operating or financial performance of the Company, are forward looking statements. 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", or "should" occur or be achieved. Forward-looking statements in this news release relate to, among other things, completion of the murine model study, regulatory approval for a Phase I study of its BVX-0320 Vaccine Candidate in humans and the overall development of BioVaxys' vaccines, including any haptenized SARS-Cov-2 protein vaccine. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate, and actual results and future events could differ materially from those expressed or implied in such forward-looking statements.

These 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, primarily the assumption that BioVaxys will be successful in developing and testing vaccines, that, while considered reasonable by the Company, are inherently subject to significant business, economic, competitive, political and social uncertainties and contingencies including, primarily but without limitation, the risk that BioVayxs' vaccines will not prove to be effective and/ or will not receive the required regulatory approvals. With regards to BioVaxys' business, there are a number of risks that could affect the development of its biotechnology products, including, without limitation, the need for additional capital to fund clinical trials, its lack of operating history, uncertainty about whether its products will complete the long, complex and expensive clinical trial and regulatory approval process for approval of new drugs necessary for marketing approval, uncertainty about whether its autologous cell vaccine immunotherapy can be developed to produce safe and effective products and, if so, whether its vaccine products will be commercially accepted and profitable, the expenses, delays and uncertainties and complications typically encountered by development stage biopharmaceutical businesses, financial and development obligations under license arrangements in order to protect its rights to its products and technologies, obtaining and protecting new intellectual property rights and avoiding infringement to third parties and their dependence on manufacturing by third parties.

The Company does not assume any obligation to update the forward-looking statements of beliefs, opinions, projections, or other factors, should they change, except as required by law.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD

Signed "James Passin"

James Passin, CEO

+1 646 452 7054

Media Contacts BioVaxys Technology Corp.

Nikita Sashdev

Luna PR

info@lunapr.io

Signed "Yann Gaslain"

Yann Gaslain, CEO

Gaslain.y@procarehealth.com

Media Contacts Procare Health

Irene de la Casa

+34 91 577 92 72

irene.delacasa@evercom.es

Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1436186/BIOVAXYS_Corporate_Logo.jpg

Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1436185/Procare_Health.jpg


Khartoum  Prime Minister Abdallah Hamdok announced the members of the transitional government's new cabinet in a press conference in Khartoum yesterday evening. The new cabinet brings in a total of 25 ministers, many of whom are part of the rebel parties that signed the Juba Peace Agreement.

PM Hamdok that the formation was achieved through a political consensus to avoid a governmental 'collapse'.

The formation of a new government provides more agency to the rebel parties that signed the Juba Peace Agreement. The Forces for Freedom and Chance (FFC) presented their list for 17 ministerial positions earlier this month. Last month, there were still disagreements among the members of the FFC regarding the nomination of new ministers.

He explained that an agreement will be signed in the upcoming week to address five key issues. These include a unified vision of the economy, the implementation of the Juba Peace Agreement, and agreements regarding foreign relations, justice, and the structure of military and civil state institutions.

All participating forces will be included in the agreement.

Hamdok further stressed that the ministers were nominated on the basis of strict selection-criteria, including qualification, experience, political awareness, and integrity. He also explained that some ministries were divided into separate ministries so that they could focus more on issues related to the economy.

"We are close to achieving a shift in the economy", Hamdok said.

The PM denied objecting to the nomination of Jibril Ibrahim as Minister of Finance, as suggested on social media. He said that he considered the participation of Jibril Ibrahim and all other parties as beneficial and helpful in overcoming differences.

Hamdok also explained that the establishment of the Legislative Council will open up possibilities to address the issues Sudan currently faces. He called on the FFC to form a Legislative Council that would achieve the goals of the revolution.

In his statement, he also confirmed the plan to appoint the state governors on 15 February and the Legislative Council on 25 February.

Volker Perthes, Head of the United Nations Integrated Transition Assistance Mission in Sudan (UNITAMS), congratulated PM Hamdok on the formation of the new government and the new members on their appointments. He wishes them "courage and success in their common commitment to Sudan's path towards political transition, peace, and economic development".

Perthes further called the inclusion of the Juba peace partners an "important milestone" in Sudan's political transition. He stressed that UNITAMS looks forward to working with the new government and expressed his hope that the Sudanese authorities will establish an 'inclusive' Legislative Council by February 25, with the "meaningsul representation of women" as expressed in the Constitutional Document.

The new cabinet

A few ministers will hold on to their post. Maj Gen Yasin Ibrahim will remain in place as Minister of Defence and Intisar Seghiroun will remain Minister of Higher Education.

The FFC also re-nominated Nasreldin Abdelbari as Minister of Justice and Yasir Abbas as Minister of Irrigation and Water Resources.

The list of new ministers includes Dr Maryam El Sadig El Mahdi, the Co-President of the National Umma Party (NUP) and daughter of the late El Sadig El Mahdi, as Minister of Foreign Affairs, replacing Omar Gamareldin.

The NUP has nominated members for three other ministerial positions. Tahir Ismail Harbi will replace Eisa Osman as Minister of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Nasreldin Mofareh will become Minister of Religious Affairs and Endowments, and Jaden Ali Hassan will become Minister of Energy and Oil.

Khaled Omar Yousef, former Deputy Head of the Sudanese Congress Party (SCP), will become President of the Council of Ministers. Fellow SCP member Ibrahim El Sheikh will become Minister of Industry and Trade.

Former Minister of Federal Government from the Arab Socialist Baath Party, Dr Yousef Adam El Dei, will become Minister of Youth and Sports. Buthina Ibrahim Dinar from the Sudan People's Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N Agar) will replace him as Minister of Federal Government.

Jibril Ibrahim, leader of the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) will replace current acting minister Heba Mohamed as Minister of Finance. Mutasim Ahmed Saleh, another member of the JEM, will become Minister of Social Development.

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Lt Gen Azeledin El Sheikh will replace Lt Gen El Tereifi Idris as Minister of Interior Affairs.

Obeid Ahmed El Najeeb will become Minister of Health, replacing current acting minister Osama Abdelrahim.

Hamza Baloul from the Unionist Alliance will replace Feisal Mohamed Saleh as Minister of Information, Culture, and Tourism. Fellow UA member Hashem Hasab Alrasoul will become Minister of Communications and Digital Transformation.

Hafez Ibrahim Nabi from the Sudan Revolutionary Front (SRF) will become Minister of Livestock and Fisheries.

Dr Mohamed Bashir Abu Nomou from the Sudan Liberation Movement under Minnie Minawi (SLM-Minnawi) will become Minister of Mining.

Mohamed Ibrahim will become Minister of Investment and International Cooperation and Dr Ali Jido Adam will become Minister of Trade.

Taisir El Nourani from the Sudanese Baath Party was appointed as Minister of Labour and Administrative Reform.

Mirghani Mousa Hamad from the Beja Congress will become Minister of Transport.
Facebook (Image: Reuters)

By Kevin Roose and Mark Issac

After inflaming political discourse around the globe, Facebook is trying to turn down the temperature.

The social network announced Wednesday that it had started changing its algorithm to reduce the political content in users news feeds. The less political feed will be tested on a fraction of Facebooks users in Canada, Brazil and Indonesia beginning this week and will be expanded to the United States in the coming weeks, the company said.

During these initial tests well explore a variety of ways to rank political content in peoples feeds using different signals, and then decide on the approaches well use going forward, Aastha Gupta, a Facebook product management director, wrote in a blog post announcing the test.

Facebook previewed the change last month when Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive, said the company was experimenting with ways to tamp down divisive political debates among users.

One of the top pieces of feedback were hearing from our community right now is that people dont want politics and fighting to take over their experience on our services, he said.

Political stories wont disappear from users feeds altogether. Content from official government agencies and services will be exempt from the algorithm change, Facebook said, as will information about COVID-19 from organizations like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization. Last month, Zuckerberg said users would also still be able to discuss politics inside private groups.

They can be ways that people organize grassroots movements, speak out against injustice or learn from people with different perspectives, so we want these discussions to be able to keep happening, Zuckerberg said.

Facebook has been under fire from lawmakers from both parties. Liberals have blamed the company for allowing hate speech and misinformation to spread, while conservatives have claimed that they were censored.

Making Facebook less political could satisfy critics who blame it for increasing partisan polarization. But the move could also cut into the time that users spend on the app. Many of the most-engaged news stories on Facebook are political, and charged political debates often generate the heavy use and repeat visits that are good for the bottom line.

Data released by Facebook last fall showed that during one week in October, seven of the 10 most-engaged pages were primarily political, including those of President Donald Trump, Fox News, Breitbart and Occupy Democrats.

Three years ago, Facebook said it would pull back on the amount of content posted to the site by news publishers and brands, an overhaul that it said put more focus on interaction among friends and family. At the time, Zuckerberg said he wanted to make sure that Facebooks products were not just fun but good for people. He also said the company would take those actions even if it meant hurting the bottom line.

Still, Facebook users have had no problem finding political content. Nongovernmental organizations and political action committees paid to show millions of Americans highly targeted political advertising in the months before Novembers presidential election. Users created vast numbers of private groups to discuss campaign issues, organize protests and support candidates. Until recently, Facebooks own systems frequently suggested new, different political groups that users could join.

Facebook has backtracked on some of this in recent months. After the polls closed on Election Day, the company shut down the ability to buy new political advertising. And after the deadly Capitol riot Jan. 6, Zuckerberg said the company would turn off the ability to recommend political groups to turn down the temperature on global conversations.

Under the new test, a machine-learning model will predict the likelihood that a post  whether it is posted by a major news organization, a political pundit, or your friend or relative  is political. Posts deemed political will appear less often in users feeds.

Its unclear how Facebooks algorithm will define political content, or how significantly the changes will affect peoples feeds. Lauren Svensson, a Facebook spokeswoman, said the company would keep refining this model during the test period to better identify political content, and we may or may not end up using this method longer term.

It is also unclear what will happen if Facebooks tests determine that reducing the political content also reduces peoples use of the site. In the past, the company has shelved or modified algorithm changes that aimed to lower the amount of misleading and divisive content people saw, after determining that the changes caused them to open Facebook less frequently.

Political posts make up only about 6% of what U.S. users see on their feeds, Facebook said. But given the headaches that these posts have caused for the company, its no mystery why it wants to shrink that number.

Even a small percentage of political content can impact someones overall experience, Gupta wrote.

c.2021 The New York Times Company
At 31 cm in height, 18 cm in diameter (at the widest point) and up to 0.8 cm thick, this conch, which bears witness to a colder sea, is thus larger and thicker than more recent ones. Credit:  Carole Fritz et al. 2021.

Almost 80 years after its discovery, a large shell from the ornate Marsoulas Cave in the Pyrenees has been studied by a multidisciplinary team from the CNRS, the Museum de Toulouse, the Universite ToulouseJean Jaures and the Musee du quai BranlyJacques-Chirac. They believe it is the oldest wind instrument of its type. The scientists have revealed how it sounds in a study published in the journal Science Advances on 10 February 2021.

The Marsoulas Cave between Haute-Garonne and Ariege was the first decorated cave to be found in the Pyrenees. Discovered in 1897, the cave bears witness to the beginning of the Magdalenian culture in this region at the end of the Last Glacial Maximum. During an inventory of the material from the archaeological excavations, most of which is kept in the Museum de Toulouse, the scientists examined a large Charonia lampas (sea snail) shell, which had been largely overlooked when discovered in 1931.

The tip of the shell is broken, forming a 3.5 cm diameter opening. As this is the hardest part of the shell, the break is clearly not accidental. At the opposite end, the shell opening shows traces of retouching (cutting) and a tomography scan has revealed that one of the first coils is perforated. Finally, the shell has been decorated with a red pigment, hematite, characteristic of the Marsoulas Cave, which indicates its status as a symbolic object.

To confirm the hypothesis that this conch was used to produce sounds, scientists enlisted the help of a horn player, who managed to produce three sounds close to the notes C, C-sharp and D. As the opening was irregular and covered with an organic coating, the researchers assume that a mouthpiece was also attached, as is the case for more recent conches in collection of the Musee du quai BranlyJacques Chirac. 3-D impressions of the conch will enable this lead to be explored and verify whether it can be used to produce other notes.

Listen to the sound of the Marsoulas conch, as it may have been played 18,000 years ago. Credit:  Carole Fritz et al. 2021 / playing: Jean-Michel Court / recording: Julien Tardieu

The first carbon-14 dating of the cave, carried out on a piece of charcoal and a fragment of bear bone from the same archaeological level as the shell, provided a date of around 18,000 years. This makes the Marsoulas conch the oldest wind instrument of its type: To date, only flutes have been discovered in earlier European Upper Palaeolithic contexts; the conches found outside Europe are much more recent.

Reconstruction of the instrument being played. In the background, a red dotted buffalo decorates the walls of the Marsoulas Cave; similar motifs decorate the instrument. Credit:  Carole Fritz et al. 2021 / drawing: Gilles Tosello

Work in the cave. Study of palaeolithic drawing. Credit: R. Apajou

Releve positioned on the 3D model. Credit: G. Tosello, C. Fritz, M. Willis

In addition to immersing us in the sounds produced by our Magdalenian ancestors, this shell reinforces the idea of exchanges between the Pyrenees and the Atlantic coast, more than 200 kilometers away.

Explore further Naturally perforated shells one of the earliest adornments in the Middle Paleolithic

More information: Fritz el al., "First record of the sound produced by the oldest Upper Paleolithic seashell horn," Science Advances (2021). Journal information: Science Advances Fritz el al., "First record of the sound produced by the oldest Upper Paleolithic seashell horn,"(2021). advances.sciencemag.org/lookup  .1126/sciadv.abe9510
ERIE, Pa., Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- February is the time of year when store shelves are full of chocolate and candy hearts as Valentine's Day approaches. February is also "Insure Your Love Month," by Life Happens. It's a way to remind you that getting life insurance today can ensure your loved ones are protected financially in the future.

Erie Insurance answers eight common questions you may have when considering the right coverage for you and your family.

Whether youre buying your very first life insurance policy or planning for the future, its common to have questions. Erie Family Life can help.

How much life insurance do I need? Your age, debts, monthly expenses and number of children can influence how much life insurance you may need to comfortably plan for your future. A local insurance professional, like an ERIE agent, can give you a free quote based on your unique needs. As a general rule of thumb, the experts at Life Happens recommend purchasing a policy worth 10 to 15 times your gross income. Try out our free life insurance calculator for a private, no-obligation estimate.



Isn't life insurance really expensive? Purchasing an insurance policy worth hundreds of thousands of dollars may sound like an expensive proposition. But the truth is, life insurance is more affordable than you may think. With Erie Family Life, a $250,000 life insurance policy could cost less than $15 a month.



Do I need a medical exam to purchase life insurance? Not always, but do expect to answer certain questions. Generally speaking, it's more likely you'll need an exam as your age and/or the amount of coverage requested increases. For some life insurance policies, your insurer will require a brief medical exam, more commonly referred to as a paramedical exam. Ask your local ERIE agent about ERIExpress Life. If you're between the ages of 18-55, you could get this instant-issue policy by answering several application questions without having to complete a paramedical medical exam.



Why should I think about life insurance if I'm young and healthy? Life insurance is a smart purchase at any age. Even if no one depends on your monthly income, a life insurance policy will cover your funeral expenses and debts  including student loans. And there's another advantage of purchasing a policy at a young age: lower rates. With a Guaranteed Insurability Option you can lock in a lower rate while you are young and healthy, making it possible for you to purchase additional insurance later without having to answer medical underwriting questions  a relief for many.



I have a policy through work. Isn't that enough? As part of an overall benefits package, many employers offer some form of life insurance coverage to their employees. Since this coverage is typically paid for by the employer, it's a great benefit to have. But it's still wise to hold your own personal life insurance policy. The coverage provided by your employer might not be enough, and your coverage will be lost if you take another job or find yourself unemployed.



I don't work outside the home. Why should I think about life insurance? Being a stay-at-home parent is a full-time job. And while your work may not generate an income, it does significantly reduce your household expenses. Think of all the extra costs associated with childcare, transportation and meal preparation that would be incurred if you were no longer around. Just because you don't bring home a paycheck doesn't mean you aren't making a significant contribution to your family's bottom line. Read more about life insurance for stay-at-home parents.



What is a life insurance beneficiary? A beneficiary is a person or entity designated to receive the funds from your life insurance policy in the event of your death. Your beneficiary can be a person, business, trust, charity, church or even a school. An insurance policy can have more than one beneficiary. Read our related article on how to choose a life insurance beneficiary.



I don't have kids. Why should I think about life insurance? The need for life insurance isn't limited to parents. Whether you're entering adulthood or nearing retirement, everyone can benefit from owning a life insurance policy. Beyond providing for children, a life insurance benefit can be used to cover expenses like funeral costs or pay off any outstanding debts.

Planning for the future can feel exciting and scary at the same time. Whether you're buying your very first policy or planning for the next chapter of your life, ERIE is here for you. Your local agent can help you consider the variables, lay out the options and make the process comfortable and efficient.

Learn more about life insurance options from Erie Family Life or talk to your local ERIE agent for a free quote.

Erie Insurance Group

According to A.M. Best Company, Erie Insurance Group, based in Erie, Pennsylvania, is the 11th largest homeowners insurer and 12th largest automobile insurer in the United States based on direct premiums written and the 16th largest property/casualty insurer in the United States based on total lines net premium written. The Group, rated A+ (Superior) by A.M. Best Company, has more than 6 million policies in force and operates in 12 states and the District of Columbia. Erie Family Life Insurance Company is rated A (Excellent) by A.M. Best Company. Life insurance policies not written in New York state. Erie Insurance Group is a FORTUNE 500 company.

News releases and more information about Erie Insurance Group are available at www.erieinsurance.com.

SOURCE Erie Insurance Group

Related Links

http://www.erieinsurance.com


Gold Microsoft Partner This RPA technology enables healthcare teams to focus on patient care and strategic objectives by easing the burden of monotonous and repetitive work

ApexRCM, a Healthcare BPO company specializing in revenue cycle management optimization, and Exelegent, a 6-time Gold Microsoft Partner announced the release of their RPA for Healthcare solution.

For the last decade Exelegent and ApexRCM have worked in parallel, with each company bringing their distinct expertise to support different aspects of the business side of healthcare. With the expansion of the Microsoft Power Automate platform came an opportunity for the two firms to combine resources to launch a revolutionary Robotic Process Automation (RPA).

By combining Exelegents understanding of Microsofts Power Automate and ApexRCMs in-depth understanding of RCM pitfalls, the two companies will roll out their offering in February 2021. Adopters of the solution can expect to reduce the costs of back-office tasks by up to 30% within 12 months, while simultaneously increasing productivity, accuracy and HIPAA compliance.

For a limited time only, Exelegent is offering a 30% discount off of an RPA for Healthcare POC. To request a POC of Exelegent's RPA for Healthcare, please get in touch with us here: https://exelegent.com/contact-us/.

This RPA technology enables healthcare teams to focus on patient care and strategic objectives by easing the burden of monotonous and repetitive work", said Julia Kopko, Director of Healthcare BPO Services, ApexRCM. "Many providers feel overwhelmed by a backlog of administrative work, and we are excited to introduce this technology that will improve healthcare administration drastically in a variety of ways.

According to Gartner, automation is the key to survival for many healthcare organizations. This technology will disrupt current paradigms in healthcare administration while providing adopters with a distinct competitive advantage for the foreseeable future. Microsoft has democratized Robotic Process Automation by allowing providers of any size to utilize a solution, that was previously only accessible to enterprises, for an average of $40/month/user, said Vasil Vykhopen, CEO, Exelegent.

To view our RPA for Healthcare: 2-week POC offer at the Microsoft AppSource Portal, please follow the link: https://appsource.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/consulting-services/exelegent.rpa-healthcare

About ApexRCM

ApexRCM specializes in business process outsourcing (BPO) and revenue cycle management (RCM) for healthcare providers. With offices in the US, ApexRCM brings the efficiencies of a large team together with the feel of a local company that you can trust. We are dedicated to providing the highest level of service possible, and our 100% customer retention rate and stellar testimonials year after year are a testament to our quality of service.

About Exelegent

Exelegent is a cybersecurity and professional services company. Headquartered in Freehold, NJ with supporting offices in Newark, NJ and Lviv, Ukraine, Exelegent has been assisting companies in the East Coast Region for over 10 years. Learn more at exelegent.com.

For more information please visit http://www.Exelegent.com

Press Contact

Lorraine Riley

(973) 732-5230, ext. 2004

Lorraine.Riley(at)Exelegent(dot)com
(Newser)  After Tuesday's 56-44 vote to proceed, Donald Trump's Senate trial resumed Wednesday, with House impeachment managers setting out their case against the former president. Lead impeachment manager Rep. Jamie Raskin warned that "graphic and disturbing" footage of Capitol violence would be shown, the Washington Post reports. "We will be showing relevant clips of the mob's attack on police officers and other innocent people," he said. "We do urge parents and teachers to exercise close review of what young people are watching here." Raskin said the trial wasn't a contest between lawyers or political parties. "It's a moment of truth for America," he said. "We are having a trial on the facts." More:

The "inciter-in-chief." Raskin said Trump was "no innocent bystander" in the Jan. 6 attack. "There was method in the madness that day," Raskin said, per the BBC. "This was an organized attack." Raskin said Trump "surrendered his role as commander-in-chief" to become the "inciter-in-chief." "This was the greatest betrayal of the presidential oath in the history of the United States," he said.

story continues below

First Amendment argument targeted . Raskin targeted arguments made by Trump lawyers Tuesday that Trump's fiery speech before the attack was protected free speech. "This case is much worse than someone who falsely shouts fire in a crowded theater," Raskin said, per the Guardian. "Its more like like a case where the town fire chief, whos paid to put out fires, sends a mob not to yell fire in a crowded theater, but to actually set the theater on fire."

. Raskin targeted arguments made by Trump lawyers Tuesday that Trump's fiery speech before the attack was protected free speech. "This case is much worse than someone who falsely shouts fire in a crowded theater," Raskin said, per the Guardian. "Its more like like a case where the town fire chief, whos paid to put out fires, sends a mob not to yell fire in a crowded theater, but to actually set the theater on fire." "The provocation." Rep. Joe Neguse, another impeachment manager, said the prosecution's case would be broken down into "the provocation," "the attack," and "the harm." He started the "provocation" segment by playing clips of Trump urging supporters to challenge the results of the November election. "People listened. Armed supporters surrounded election officials' homes. The secretary of state for Georgia got death threats," Neguse said, per Politico. "Officials warned the president that his rhetoric was dangerous and it was going to result in deadly violence," Neguse said. "He didn't stop it. He didn't condemn the violence. He incited it further."

Rep. Joe Neguse, another impeachment manager, said the prosecution's case would be broken down into "the provocation," "the attack," and "the harm." He started the "provocation" segment by playing clips of Trump urging supporters to challenge the results of the November election. "People listened. Armed supporters surrounded election officials' homes. The secretary of state for Georgia got death threats," Neguse said, per Politico. "Officials warned the president that his rhetoric was dangerous and it was going to result in deadly violence," Neguse said. "He didn't stop it. He didn't condemn the violence. He incited it further." "Deliberate, planned, and premeditated." Impeachment manager Rep. Eric Swalwell displayed Trump tweets and speeches that he said showed Trump built the "rigged" election claim for months before and after the election, the Post reports. He showed a "save the date" tweet from December, in which Trump said of Jan. 6: "Be there. Will be wild." "The evidence here is overwhelming," Swalwell said. "President Trumps conduct leading up to Jan. 6 was deliberate, planned, and premeditated."

Impeachment manager Rep. Eric Swalwell displayed Trump tweets and speeches that he said showed Trump built the "rigged" election claim for months before and after the election, the Post reports. He showed a "save the date" tweet from December, in which Trump said of Jan. 6: "Be there. Will be wild." "The evidence here is overwhelming," Swalwell said. "President Trumps conduct leading up to Jan. 6 was deliberate, planned, and premeditated." "The actions of a desperate president." Rep. Madeline Dean, another impeachment manager, described Trump's attempt to overturn the election result as "the actions of a desperate president" and played recordings of Trump pressuring officials, including a call in which he urged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to "find" enough votes to change the result.

Rep. Madeline Dean, another impeachment manager, described Trump's attempt to overturn the election result as "the actions of a desperate president" and played recordings of Trump pressuring officials, including a call in which he urged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to "find" enough votes to change the result. Trump "ran out of nonviolent options." Impeachment manager Rep. Ted Lieu told senators that Trump turned to the "violent mob" after he "ran out of nonviolent options to maintain power," the Hill reports. Another impeachment manager, Del. Stacey Plaskett, looked at other violent actions by Trump supporters, including an October incident in Texas where Trump supporters tried to force a Biden campaign bus off the road. She noted that Trump tweeted video of the incident with added music and the comment "I LOVE TEXAS!"

(Read more Trump impeachment stories.)

The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
New Delhi, Feb 10 : Union Minister and former Army chief General V.K. Singh (Retd) on Wednesday said his statement on transgressions by the Indian troops on the Line of Actual Control (LAC) was distorted that gave China a platform to try and "cover their own aggressive tracks".

Singh's comment about Indian troops crossing the LAC had sparked a war of words between the two countries prompting Beijing to blame New Delhi for the military tension at the borders.

The Minister also lashed out at the newspaper 'Indian Express' for carrying out a sustained campaign against him.

"For almost a decade, ever since I was the COAS, the Indian Express has launched a sustained campaign against me. A misinformation campaign that sometimes bordered on the bizarre, as was the case with the now infamous coup story, have repeatedly hit the headlines," he said.

Singh was referring to a news article carried by the daily on April 4, 2012 titled 'The January night Raisina Hill was spooked: Two key Army units moved towards Delhi without notifying Govt' Clarifying his remarks in Madurai on Sunday, the Minister said that he was purported to have said "India has been transgressing the LAC with China, five times to everyone ingress of theirs." "This distortion could not be further from the truth. I had simply stated the established fact that the borders along the LAC have not been demarcated and until that is done there will always be differing perceptions," Singh tweeted.

The Minister also added that the fact is that the People's Republic of China has refused to settle the border as part of the bullying tactics they have adopted.

He said that Indian side is aware of these tactics and any aggression will be responded to with equal or greater level as was the case in Galwan.

Singh pointed out that in the race to create sensational headlines, newspaper editors must verify what was said and what is reported.

"The distortion of my statement/reply has needlessly given the Chinese a platform to try and cover their own aggressive tracks and shift the blame on India," he said.

In Tamil Nadu's Madurai on February 7, Singh, while addressing the media at a Circuit House, had said that China has transgressed into India many times over the years with its own perception of the LAC.

"But none of you come to know how many times we have transgressed, as per our perception. The Indian government does not announce it, while the Chinese media does not cover it," he said.

"Let me assure you, if China has transgressed 10 times, we must have done it at least 50 times," Singh claimed.

China reacted to Singh's statement and its foreign ministry called it "an unwitting confession" According to the statement published on the Chinese foreign ministry's website on February 8, spokesperson Wang Wenbin reacted to Singh's statement and blamed India for the ongoing border conflict along the LAC in eastern Ladakh.

"This is unwitting confession by the Indian side. For a long time, the Indian side has conducted frequent acts of trespass in the border area in an attempt to encroach on China's territory and constantly created disputes and frictions which is the root cause of the tensions at the China-India border," said the Chinese Foreign Ministry.
Microsoft last week gave the green light for Windows 10 2004, signaling to commercial customers that the May 2020 feature upgrade is now reliable enough for them to widely deploy.

"Windows 10, version 2004 is designated for broad deployment," Microsoft stated in a terse message posted to the Windows release health hub. "The recommended servicing status is Semi-Annual Channel."

Microsoft has taken to relying on the phrase "broad deployment" to tell enterprise IT administrators that it's time to roll out a previously-released feature upgrade. It did the same in May 2020, when it vetted Windows 10 1909 as ready for business.

What's remarkable about the declaration was not its appearance but its timing: More than eight months after launching Windows 10 2004 on May 27, 2020.

That lag was the longest yet for Microsoft, easily breaking the prior record of six and a half months set by Windows 10 1909  2004's immediate predecessor. Earlier in Windows 10 life, the gap between launch and enterprise green light was much shorter, on the order of approximately four months.

This last cycle has made Microsoft's recommendation largely meaningless, as by the time it arrived, 45% of Windows 10 2004's 18 months of support had already expired. (Windows 10 2004 exits support on Dec. 14, 2021.) What would be the point of companies deploying 2004 when they would need to replace it in just 10 months?

What, then, is the point of Microsoft's guidance?

As Computerworld has argued before, it may be that Microsoft, although still tied to the habit of endorsing an upgrade's righteousness, decided most commercial customers no longer need the hand-holding these notifications represented. If that's the case, it would be best if Microsoft simply discontinued the practice.

That is clearly what Microsoft would like to do, as evidenced both by its current sluggishness and a back-and-forth two years ago. In February 2019, Microsoft implied that no cues would be given in the future, only to turn around a month later to say it would "continue to communicate for future releases the transition from targeted to broad deployment status."

Also this month, Microsoft retired its Windows release health dashboard, a website launched in 2019, and replaced it with a revamped and renamed "Windows release health hub."

The new hub's layout is an improvement over the earlier dashboard as it focused attention on specific Windows 10 versions, which is likely how most customers will approach the site. The largest section of the page highlighted the latest messages on Windows 10 from Microsoft, as well as links to information on the last six upgrades (or three years' worth).

The new release health hub can be found here.
The U.S. Army used Hueys for various operations, including command and control, air assault, and medevac after close encounters with the enemy.And the UH-1H youre looking at right here is one of the air machines that joined the Vietnam combat as part of the United States Armys special forces.With a documented military history in the Vietnam war, the Huey comes with 7,226 hours of AFTT. The people over at Northwest Helicopters, who are now trying to find a new owner for this little piece of history, claim the look has been specifically restored to the original paint and markings before it joined the combat.It was used in military operations between 1968 and 1971, it seems, after which it was transferred to the Singapore Air Force until 2005, when it was officially retired.It comes with a series of optional equipment, including armor seats, an 11 pax troop interior (which makes sense given it was used in Vietnam), a heater, glass windshields, map lights, and dual controls.Historically, the UH-1H is an improved version of the UH-1D, being capable of carrying up to 13 troops thanks to an upgraded Lycoming T53-L-13B engine. For military operations, the helicopter could be further upgraded with additional equipment, including a landing light plus a pintle-mounted M134 7.62mm gun.Needless to say, not only the Huey itself is a helicopter that so many people are drooling over in standard version, but with Vietnam history, this UH-1H seems to be much more than that. And best of all, you can be the one to fly it back home as long as youre ready to pay $695,000 for it.
With several cases of the highly infectious COVID-19 variant confirmed in Worcester, UMass Medical School researchers have doubled their efforts to track and trace the mutated infections in Central Massachusetts.

Their method? Genomic sequencing, which lets them determine the genetic makeup of virus samples that are collected through local testing efforts. The tracking project is being done in collaboration with the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The UMass researchers and their colleagues proposed the sequencing idea over the summer. They had done it before, originally as a way of trying to understand the role mutations played in the transmission of bacterial infections in hospitals.

We wanted to see how bacteria, such as MRSA, spreads in the hospital, said Dr. Richard Ellison, an epidemiologist at UMass Memorial Medical Center involved in the effort.

After several prominent strains of the COVID-19 emerged in different parts of the world, interest in the project grew. Last month, researchers began collecting COVID samples from routine PCR tests, sending them off to the Department of Public Health for sequencing. Those samples were previously flagged as suspicious by UMass researchers based on an analysis of the viruses genetic codes.

We use an instrument at UMass that looks for three different COVID genes, Ellison said. If you have the U.K. variant, a sample might test positive for two of the genes, but negative for another.

This pro-active targeting of available viral samples from Worcester residents led to the discovery of at least three cases of the B.1.1.7 COVID variant in Worcester, which first emerged in the United Kingdom in November. UMass researchers hope not only to continue identifying the mutated infections in the Worcester area, but work with local officials to determine if theyre clustered in a particular part of the city.

They can do this through contact tracing. Because viruses can pick up several mutations a week, epidemiologists can attempt to trace the samples that have identifiable changes back to the circumstances of transmission based on the likeness of their genome.

If one person gives the virus directly to another person, their sequences are essentially going to be identical, Ellison said.

As of Monday, there are at least 7 cases of B.1.1.7 in Massachusetts. The new strain is thought be caused by a mutation on the viruss spike protein, specifically the receptor-binding domain  the part of the virus that docks onto the host cell. Experts believe that the vaccines are still effective, preventing the new variant from attaching to cells, injecting its genome and replicating.

But uncertainty lingers. Successful viral mutations may threaten the efficacy of the vaccines, and could potentially cause more severe illness, Ellison said.

Federal health officials on Monday reiterated that the U.K. mutation could become the dominant strain in the U.S. as early as March, a prediction based on CDC modeling. Genomic tracking efforts will ultimately be key to getting the pandemic under control, Ellison said.

But in the U.S., genomic sequencing capabilities have been lagging behind that of other countries, like the U.K.

The reason they could identify the variant in the U.K. was because they were routinely sequencing, Ellison said.

Its thanks to genomic sequencing that Broad Institute researchers and others discovered over the summer that more than 80 unique genomes of COVID-19 here in Massachusetts had been imported from other parts of the world. Researchers in that study also stated that the Biogen conference in Boston that took place at the onset of the pandemic was linked to tens of thousands of cases.

Related Content:
It will take six years to vaccinate enough of the worlds population to reduce the threat of COVID-19, but public health experts say vaccines are no silver bullet and hygiene measures and masks will be part of life for years to come.

Infectious diseases expert Associate Professor Sanjaya Senanayake said the SARS-Cov-2 virus could eventually become another seasonal cold or flu-like virus, but there were some major obstacles to that, including the global vaccine rollout.

Associate Professor Sanjaya Senanayake, Professor Mary-Louise McLaws, and Professor Robert Booy discussed the vaccine rollout at the National Press Club on Wednesday. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

Only about 70 nations have started to vaccinate their populations, and at the current rate of vaccination, it is estimated we wont reach global coverage of 75 per cent with vaccines for about six years - not one or two years, but six years, he said.

In addition, Oxfam has said that by the end of this year, there will be 70 poorer nations where only one in 10 people have been vaccinated.
New Delhi: In Kasganj district of Uttar Pradesh, the brother of a liquor mafia kingpin whose associates had allegedly killed a police constable and injured a sub-inspector was gunned down in an encounter on Wednesday (February 10).

Superintendent of Police, Kasganj, Manoj Sonkar told ANI, "Elkar and others were surrounded by a police team on the banks of Kali river and in the exchange of fire, he was injured. He was taken to a CHC in Sidhpur where he died."

Elkar is the brother of Moti, who is main accused in the attack on the policemen. The Kasganj SP said that Elkar's accomplices managed to escape during the encounter. The police have launched a manhunt to trace the assailants.

Earlier on Tuesday evening, a constable was beaten to death and a sub-inspector seriously injured when a police team went to Nagla Dheemar village in Kasganj to serve a warrant to liquor mafia kingpin Moti.

Live TV

The cops were caught by Moti and his associates and severely thrashed, leading to the death of constable Devendra, the report said citing District Magistrate Chandraprakash Singh.

Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath issued instructions on Tuesday for strict action against culprits involved in the alleged hostage of the cops. The CMO had stated that action will be taken against the culprits under the National Security Act (NSA).

CM Yogi also directed for the treatment of the inspector who was injured and announced an ex-gratia of Rs 50,000 and govt job for a family member of the constable who lost his life.

US President on Tuesday (local time) told reporters in the Oval Office that he has no plans to watch former President Donald Trump's impeachment trial in the Senate, adding that he has a job to do in providing assistance to people who are affected due to the COVID-19 pandemic and economic crisis.

"I am not," Biden said when asked if he will watch the trial at the start of a meeting with business leaders, reported The Hill.

"I tell people that I have a job...We have already lost over 450,000 people and we could lose a whole lot more if we don't act and act decisively. A lot of people, as I have said before, children are going to bed hungry. A lot of families are food insecure. They are in trouble. That's my job," the US President further said.

Biden added that the Senate has their job and will conduct themselves well.

Earlier today, Biden met with business CEOs about his COVID-19 relief proposal on Tuesday afternoon.

Meanwhile, Trump's second impeachment trial has officially begun in the Senate, deliberating on his role in inciting the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6. He is the only president in US history to be impeached twice.

The House of Representatives last month delivered the article of impeachment against Trump, accusing him of inciting an insurrection at the US Capitol building on January 6 to stop Congress from verifying President Joe Biden's win in the 2020 election.

Last month, Biden had told CNN that he believed the Senate impeachment trial "has to happen.

(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.)
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Sydney publicist Roxy Jacenko is at the centre of unsubstantiated rumours she makes up to $6,500 for a single sponsored Instagram post.

An anonymous gossip account called influencers_get_influenced shared a screenshot of a direct message from an industry insider who claimed to know Roxy's staggering fee for advertising content.

The influencers_get_influenced account exposes Instagram personalities who endorse products they haven't actually tried. Daily Mail Australia is not suggesting Roxy does this.

Rumour has it! Sydney publicist Roxy Jacenko is at the centre of unsubstantiated rumours she makes up to $6,500 for a single sponsored post

The admin was skeptical about whether Roxy had actually used the clay face mask she was advertising.

'"Using it once a week"... but the jar is full and when smelling it it seems like it is for the first time,' they captioned a screenshot of Roxy's original post.

It seems other users agreed, and commented below the video that the product appeared untouched and the brush dry before application.

'I know that's how much she gets paid': An anonymous gossip account called influencers_get_influenced shared a screenshot of a direct message from an industry insider who claimed to know Roxy's staggering fee for advertising content

Advertising: The influencers_get_influenced account exposes Instagram stars who endorse products they haven't actually tried. Daily Mail Australia is not suggesting Roxy does this

Roxy swiftly hit back in the comments section, writing: 'New jar - theres always one isn't there!'

One Instagram user told influencers_get_influenced that Roxy gets $6,500 'for a video like this'.

The account's admin clarified, however, that the figure was 'not confirmed'.

Daily Mail Australia has contacted Roxy Jacenko for comment.

Influencer: The admin was skeptical about whether Roxy had actually used the clay face mask she was advertising

'There's always one isn't there': It seems other users agreed, and commented below Roxy's video that the product appeared untouched and the brush dry before application

In 2018, Roxy predicted the 'influencer craze' would only grow, saying: 'You have to make hay while the sun shines... Instagram is a serious cash cow.'

She also boasted to Triple M Perth about her own earnings as an influencer.

Roxy said at the time she made up to $3,000 per sponsored post, and that her biggest payday was $12,000 for a single upload.

Her children, Pixie and Hunter, are also influencers with their own endorsement deals.

Laughing all the way to the bank! In 2018, Roxy predicted the 'influencer craze' would only grow, saying: 'You have to make hay while the sun shines... Instagram is a serious cash cow'
ALBANY  An attorney for the Hussain family who owned the limousine that crashed and killed 20 people in Schoharie two years ago, argued before a state appeals court on Wednesday to try and get restrictions lifted on the sale of a motel and several rental properties they own.

Back in 2019, a state supreme court judge agreed to place what's known as an attachment on the Crest Inn Suites, the ramshackle motel the Hussains own in the town of Wilton that was closed down in 2019 by the state Department of Health. Similar attachments were placed on other properties owned by members of the Hussain family. The attachments effectively bar the Hussains from selling the properties.

The legal restrictions were sought by lawyers for the families of the victims of the limo crash, the worst highway disaster in the U.S. in more than a decade. The Hussains appealed the decision. Attachments preserve assets that might be needed to pay future court judgments.

The families are suing Shahed Hussain and his son Nauman in state supreme court seeking compensation for the crash. Insurance proceeds so far only amount to $25,000 per victim. They sought the attachments after the Hussains put the properties, valued at more than $1 million, on the market in mid-2019 but later pulled them off the market. Shahed Hussain left the Capital Region for Pakistan in early 2018 and has not returned. His son Nauman is facing criminal charges of manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide, although his trial was postponed due to the pandemic.

On Wednesday, Marc Kaim, an attorney for the Hussains, argued before a panel of judges that sit on the Appellate Division in Albany. He said that attachments can only be approved under certain conditions, such as suspected fraud or when a defendant has left the country for good and there is a probability that the plaintiffs will win their case.

Nauman Hussain is free on bond pending his trial, although he has to wear an ankle bracelet that monitors his whereabouts.

Although Kaim has not said where Shahed Hussain is living  the Times Union has documentation that he is living in the city of Lahore  he said Shahed Hussain is participating in the lawsuits, and there is no evidence that he and Nauman were trying to deceive anyone by putting the properties up for sale.

Shahed Hussain's other son Haris, who owns his own rental properties, is not named in the civil suits and was not involved in the limo business.

Aimee Greer, an attorney for the family of victim Amanda Halse, told the judges that the Hussains could go back to the state court in Saratoga County to have the attachments vacated or modified.

"They just haven't sought to do that," Greer said.
Ukraines Finance Ministry, Health Ministry and the World Bank are working on the possible implementation of the project "Emergency Response Plan for the Covid-19 Pandemic and Vaccination in Ukraine", which provides for a $90 million loan for Ukraine, the Finance Ministrys press service reports.

"The Finance Ministry supports the World Bank's initiative to implement together with the Health Ministry the joint project Emergency Response Plan for Covid-19 and Vaccination. However, these are credit funds; therefore, their use should be reasonable and rational. In addition, we must fulfill all obligations to improve the investment microclimate in Ukraine," said Deputy Finance Minister Roman Yermolychev.

According to the ministrys press service, representatives of the Finance Ministry, the Health Ministry and the World Bank discussed the issue of healthcare support in terms of vaccination against COVID-19, which provides for replenishment of the general fund of the state budget.

As reported by Ukrinform, Ukraine will receive 8 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine within the COVAX Facility. The delivery of the first batch of 117,000 doses of Pfizer vaccine is expected in mid-February.

Ukraine also signed an agreement to purchase 1.9 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine from the Chinese company Sinovac Biotech.

As reported by Ukrinform, a total of 1,253,055 coronavirus cases were recorded in Ukraine on February 10, including 3,409 new COVID-19 cases registered in the past 24 hours.

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New Delhi, Feb 10 : With the financial uncertainty created by Covid-19 changing who and what to trust to manage finances, 83 percent of Indian consumers and business leaders now trust Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based tools more than humans, said a new study on Wednesday.

A large number of people believe that AI-based tools can help to detect fraud, help reduce spending and make stock market investments.

Interestingly, 73 percent of business leaders trust AI bots more than themselves to manage finances, said the study by Cloud major Oracle and personal finance expert Farnoosh Torabi.

The findings come amid the global pandemic damaging people's relationship with money at home and at work.

"The role of finance teams and financial advisors will never be the same - 90 per cent of business leaders believe robots will replace finance professionals, and more than a third (67 per cent) of Indian respondents believe it'll happen by 2025," Guruprasad Gaonkar, Global SaaS Go-to-Market Leader, Cloud Business Group, Oracle, said in a statement.

"Many forward-looking companies are already creating tomorrow, today. Many of these use cases are already in adoption with AI powered SaaS ERP (enterprise resource planning), with more radical transformation coming from the possibility of bringing together ERP applications with Blockchain." The study of more than 9,000 consumers and business leaders across 14 countries including India found that the Covid-19 pandemic has increased financial anxiety, sadness, and fear among people around the world.

The research shows that the pandemic is reshaping the role and focus areas of corporate finance teams and personal financial advisors.

For Indian business leaders, 95 percent are worried about the impact of Covid-19, with slow economic recovery or recession, budget cuts, and bankruptcy as their main concerns.

Amongst Indian consumers, 90 percent are experiencing financial fears, including job loss, losing savings, and never getting out of debt.

Almost every Indian business leader - 96 per cent - believes that AI bots can improve their work by detecting fraud, creating invoices, and conducting cost/benefit analysis.

"I am not surprised with the study as AI and ML are seeing unprecedented adoption, with the pandemic playing catalyst. I foresee finance as a function undergoing transformation," Kannan Sugantharaman, Chief Financial Officer, Omega Healthcare, told IANS.

"Elements like cost, control and compliance can be more efficiently managed by AI based tools today leaving business leaders and CFOs to tend to more strategic roles facilitating growth, investments, enablement and value creation through digital technologies."
Residents temporarily evacuated from Homestead after fire, no injuries

A Saturday afternoon fire in an apartment at a senior living complex was quickly extinguished and nobody was injured.
Bellatrix Aerospace is the 2nd company in the entire world that is working on building an Orbital Transfer Vehicle (OTV). Bellatrix Aerospace is building a "Space Taxi" and this vehicle will be launched on the "Vikram" rocket of Skyroot Aerospace.

Bellatrix Aerospace, a space-tech startup has recently announced a partnership with Skyroot Aerospace to ship small satellites into various orbits. As per the partnership, Bellatrix Aerospace is building a Space Taxi and this vehicle will be launched on the Vikram rocket of Skyroot Aerospace.

Electric and chemically powered thrusters or engines have been built by Bellatrix Aerospace to manoeuvre satellites in the space. Bellatrix also partnered with SatSure a few days ago to strengthen its remote sensing satellites fleet.

A media agency reported that according to the co-founder of Bellatrix Aerospace, Yashas Karanam, Bellatrix Aerospace aims to launch the space vehicle into the lower orbit of the earth in the year 2023. Yashas added that this taxi in space will offer ridesharing to small satellites and will drop each passenger to their intended slots in the space.

Also read: PM Modi and US Prez Biden discuss climate change, security in Indo-Pacific region

Also read: PM Modi to hold talks with Afghan Prez Ashraf Ghani today; Shehtoot Dam agreement on agenda

Bellatrix Aerospace is the 2nd company in the entire world that is working on building an Orbital Transfer Vehicle (OTV). The first company is US-based Momentus, which is awaiting confirmation from the authorities in the US.

Skyroot Aerospace was founded in 2018 by former Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) scientists. Skyroot Aerospace is expected to launch Vikram rocket by the end of this year.

India recently gave a much-needed boost to its Space sector by allowing private companies into the sector. Currently, over 50 space tech Indian companies are working on such space projects.

Also read: Sandes: Govt officials reportedly switch to indigenous messaging app of India over WhatsApp privacy concerns
NORTH BILLERICA, Mass., Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Curriculum Associates has named Felita Reed of Central High School in Helena, AR to its 2021 class of Extraordinary Educators, an annual program that celebrates and connects exemplar teachers from around the country. Reed is among 44 teachers from 26 states and Washington, DC chosen for this honor that recognizes educators who exhibit best-in-class use of i-Ready and/or Ready, illustrate growth and achievement via formal assessments, demonstrate innovation and engagement practices for students, are evangelists for high standards and student achievement, and have been teaching for at least two years.

"It goes without saying that this has been an unprecedented school year that has challenged educators, students, and families alike," said Rob Waldron, CEO of Curriculum Associates. "However, this group of Extraordinary Educatorslike so many other educators across the countryhas more than risen to the occasion. We are proud to recognize Felita for her hard work, dedication, and innovative best practices that continue to positively impact the students she serves."

This year's Extraordinary Educators, who were chosen from among hundreds of nominations, will have access to a network of peers from around the country to collaborate, connect, and learn from throughout the year, as well as receive unique professional development opportunities from Curriculum Associates. They will also be invited to participate and present at the Extraordinary Educators Leadership Summit, as well as other professional learning events throughout the year.

"Education is not only my job, but it is also my calling," said Reed. "I want to give my students the tools to build successful careers and become the leaders of tomorrow. It is my desire to always encourage, motivate, and inspire them to do their very best. I want my students to believe in themselves and not be afraid to reach for the stars. I tell them, 'Don't let anyone tell you what you cannot doinstead, show everyone that you can do anything that you put your mind to.' I am excited to be selected as an Extraordinary Educator by Curriculum Associates. I truly believe, with effective implementation, i-Ready can significantly increase student achievement and skill mastery in reading and math. i-Ready is a game changer and it takes differentiation of instruction to the next level."

Today, Curriculum Associates' programs are used in over 40% of Arkansas school districts.

To learn more about Curriculum Associates and the 2021 Extraordinary Educators, visit CurriculumAssociates.com/Extraordinary-Educators/2021-Class.

About Curriculum Associates

Founded in 1969, Curriculum Associates, LLC designs research-based print and online instructional materials, screens and assessments, and data management tools. The company's products and outstanding customer service provide teachers and administrators with the resources necessary for teaching diverse student populations and fostering learning for all students.

Contact: Kati Elliott Charlotte Fixler

KEH Communications Curriculum Associates

(410) 975-9638 (978) 901-6066

[email protected] [email protected]

SOURCE Curriculum Associates, LLC

Related Links

www.curriculumassociates.com


Sawfish look something like hedge trimmers with fins and can reach lengths of 17 feet. To Jasmin Graham, president and chief executive of Minorities in Shark Sciences, its sometimes hard to believe such weird fish exist.

They look so intimidating if you look at them from the top down, she said. But from the bottom, they have these cute, adorable little gray mouths that kind of look like theyre smiling.

At least some sawfish truly have something to smile about. The animals, which are a kind of ray, face a variety of threats around the world, including habitat loss and entanglement in fishing nets. But a pair of recent studies, one led by Ms. Graham and colleagues in Florida, reveals glimmers of hope for the species in some parts of the world. But the research also highlights regions where the fish are vanishing, and points to work that is needed to prevent them from disappearing from more places.

Helen Yan, a marine biodiversity and conservation researcher at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, led the other new study, which was published Wednesday in Science Advances. Her project was aimed at overcoming the difficulties of determining the true range of sawfish, which are rare and tend to live in shallow, murky waters.
An oil spill at a Chevron refinery in Northern California dumped hundreds of gallons of fuel into the San Francisco Bay on Tuesday, prompting a public health advisory.

Chevron said it became aware of the spill after a 'sheen' was observed on the water near its Richmond Refinery at about 3pm.

Contra Costa County Supervisor John Gioia said a pipeline began to leak at about 2.40pm and continued until 4.30pm. He estimated that 'up to 600 gallons' of petroleum product escaped, at a rate of five gallons per minute.

The cause of the leak remains unclear. A clean-up effort was launched shortly after the leak was contained.

The Contra Costa County Sheriff's Office issued a public health advisory for parts of Richmond, North Richmond and San Pablo, warning that the smell of the leak could cause eye, skin, nose or throat irritation in people with respiratory sensitivities.

An oil spill at a Chevron refinery in Richmond, California dumped hundreds of gallons of fuel into the San Francisco Bay on Tuesday, prompting a public health advisory

Chevron said it became aware of the spill after a 'sheen' was observed on the water near its Richmond Refinery at about 3pm. The spill is seen above in aerial footage from ABC7

The Contra Costa County Sheriff's Office issued a public health advisory for parts of Richmond, North Richmond and San Pablo (shown in blue above). It warned that the smell of the leak could cause eye, skin, nose or throat irritation in people with respiratory sensitivities

Multiple law enforcement agencies responded to the leak, including the US Coast Guard, Department of Fish & Game, Richmond Fire Department and a hazmat team, along with Chevron Operations.

Region 9 of the National Response Center and Environmental Protection Agency was notified about the incident, the fire department said.

Gioia said a containment boom floating barrier was placed around the spill but didn't stop some product from washing up on shore.

He also expressed concern over the lasting impacts the spill could have on local wildlife, telling ABC7: 'This is unacceptable.'

The East Bay Regional Parks District closed some parks and beaches in the area to avoid swimmers coming in direct contact with the product.

A containment boom floating barrier was placed around the spill to block it from spreading

Some product is seen washed up on a beach near the Richmond Refinery

Chevron released a statement acknowledging the leak but did not mention anything about what may have caused it.

'At approximately 3pm today, the Richmond Refinery observed a sheen on the water near the Richmond Refinery wharf,' the statement read.

'Chevron immediately initiated its response protocol, began working to isolate and contain the release, and notified all applicable agencies.

'Chevron is fully cooperating with authorities, including the U.S. Coast Guard and OSPR.

'We have issued a community notice and ask the public to remain clear of the area so crews can quickly contain and clean up the released volumes.'

The Richmond Refinery processes around 240,000 barrels of crude oil each day. With 1,200 employees, the refinery is the largest employer in Richmond.
The Government has been warned that the majority of women affected by the CervicalCheck scandal will not participate in the proposed tribunal.

Labour leader Alan Kelly said the tribunal is not fit for purpose and the majority of cases will end up in the High Court.

He said the Governments failure to act on promises made to women has created a situation that is not tolerable or fair.

A 2018 review identified at least 221 women diagnosed with cervical cancer who were not previously told about misreported smear tests, and could have been alerted to the early stages of cancer.

The government of the time promised that no woman would have to go to court to settle cases about the mishandling of their smear tests.

Once again @alankellylabour has had to ask the government why women are having to fight in the courts, fight for life saving medication like Pembro and why the government are taking away medical cards from families of the women impacted by #cervicalcheck pic.twitter.com/u6YyrcZF86  The Labour Party (@labour) February 10, 2021

Raising the issue during Leaders Questions in the Dail on Wednesday, Mr Kelly said: The HSE are now primarily liable for these cases where negligence is found.

Why arent they all being dealt with beforehand and quickly?

Why arent these cases being dealt with far quicker than they are? And I can assure you, I know there are a huge amount of cases coming down the line.

The Chief Justice has advised legislators to amend the Civil Liabilities Act to make it easier for terminally ill women and their families to access support.

Mr Kelly asked: Why isnt it a priority on your legislative programme to change the Civil Liabilities Amendment Act, to ensure that women arent faced with a situation where they choose between taking cases or else allowing their families to do so after they pass?

This is not a situation thats tolerable or fair.

He asked why the Taoiseach had pointed to the tribunal as a solution, when nobody has applied to the tribunal because its not fit for purpose.

I think the tribunal does offer a better forum than the High Court. Taoiseach Micheal Martin

Theyre not going to end up at the tribunal. So theyre all going to go to the High Court, the majority are, at the very least he said.

The Taoiseach said the tribunal should be given a chance.

Micheal Martin said: I think the tribunal does offer a better forum than the High Court.

I think it gives a great opportunity for mediation, because it would be more expeditious, and I think it would be more effective, in my view.

It is a forum that, given all of the work thats being put into it, that should be given a chance.

He said the legislation that established the tribunal had the support of all parties at the time.

He added that the issue of negligence on the part of the HSE had to be proven in all situations, be it in a tribunal setting or in a High Court setting.
Jason Franson / Bloomberg

WASHINGTON  Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and 13 state attorneys general are threatening to file a lawsuit against the federal government if it doesn't reopen the construction permit for the Keystone XL pipeline.

In a letter to President Joe Biden, the group of Republican AGs asked he reconsider his decision to cancel the controversial pipeline project, warning it would result in thousands of job losses.
The Indian diaspora which celebrates its 176th Indian Arrival Day in Trinidad and Tobago is not an abstract entity, but one that flowers the socio-economic and cultural growth and development of our peoples.

It remains a proud moment for all of uspoliticians, sociologists, economists, civic, religious and cultural leadersin world history.
England's 'inadequate' pandemic plan left frontline workers 'risking their own and their families' lives' due to a lack of protective equipment, MPs said last night.

A damning report by the Commons public accounts committee said frontline NHS and social care staff experienced PPE shortages overall.

At least 30 per cent of care workers, doctors and nurses reported having insufficient PPE even in high-risk settings, staff surveys found.

Between February and July 2020, the Health Department spent more than 12billion on 32billion items after its initial stockpile proved 'inadequate'. In the process, it 'wasted' hundreds of millions of pounds on PPE which proved unusable.

The report said: 'Many workers at the front line in health and social care were put in the appalling situation of having to care for people with Covid-19 or suspected Covid-19 without sufficient PPE.'

England's 'inadequate' pandemic plan left frontline workers 'risking their own and their families' lives' due to a lack of protective equipment, MPs said last night. Pictured: A medic at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge

Committee chairman Meg Hillier said: 'The Government needs to acknowledge the errors and be better prepared.'

Between March and July 2020, the Department of Health and Care provided NHS trusts with 1.9billion items of PPE - the equivalent to 80 per cent of their estimated need.

In contrast, it supplied the adult social care sector with 331million items - accounting for just 10 per cent of its requirements.

At the same time, about 25,000 patients were discharged to care homes from hospitals without being tested for Covid-19, even after it became clear people could transmit the virus without having any symptoms.

'This contributed significantly to the deaths in care homes during the first wave,' the committee said. 'Social care was only taken seriously after the high mortality rate in care homes became apparent.'

At least 30 per cent of care workers, doctors and nurses reported having insufficient PPE even in high-risk settings, staff surveys found. Pictured: Medical staff wearing PPE tend to a patient outside the Royal London Hospital in London

At the start of the outbreak, the committee said the government had believed it was well placed to cope as it had a stockpile of PPE - but these were only intended for a flu pandemic and proved 'inadequate' for the demands of coronavirus.

Between February and July, the DHSC spent more than 12billion on 32billion items of PPE as it tried to make good the shortfall - and in the process 'wasted' hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers' money on kit which proved unusable.

Staff reported receiving face masks with rotten elastic, goggles had to be recalled as unsafe and, in one case, a box of surgical gowns which was infested with insects.

'Frontline workers were left without adequate supplies, risking their own and their families' lives to provide treatment and care,' the report said.

'We're at a dangerous new phase of the pandemic, in our third national lockdown with no defined end in sight.'

The committee echoed criticisms made by the NAO over the lack of transparency around the procurement process.

In particular, it pointed to concerns over the so-called 'high priority lane' where orders were placed with companies on the basis of recommendations from MPs or other prominent figures rather than those with expertise in the field.

'Leads that were considered more credible were those from government officials, ministers' offices, MPs and members of the House of Lords, but it is not clear why this assumption was made,' it said.
Over 4,000 variants of the CCP virus, also known as SARS-CoV-2 or the novel coronavirus, have been identified across the globe. (Corona Borealis Studio/Shutterstock)

UK Identifies 2 More COVID-19 Variants With Vaccine-Resistant Mutation

British health authorities have identified two more COVID-19 variants with a mutation that makes them resistant to vaccines.

Over 4,000 variants of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, also known as SARS-CoV-2 or the novel coronavirus, have been identified across the globe, most of which are not of concern, the Public Health England (PHE) said.

But the two variants identified by the UKs New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (NERVTAG) contain the E484K spike protein mutation, which has been found to result in weaker neutralisation by antibodies in laboratory experiments.

The E484K mutation is present on a number of variants found around the world, including the South African variant, which has been found to be more resistant to antibodies and reduces the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines.

NERVTAG has named a variant identified in Liverpool last month a variant under investigation (VUI202102/01). It derived from a lineage called A.23, which was seen internationally, but the E484K mutation on this lineage has only been seen within the UK, PHE said.

It was first identified on Jan. 10 during an investigation into a cluster of five cases linked to members of staff from a hospital in Liverpool, PHE said, noting 55 cases of this variant had been found so far.

A variant under investigation can be designated a variant of concern after a risk assessment with the relevant expert committee.

The other recently identified variant, first found in Bristol and southwest England, has been designated as a variant of concern (VOC202102/02). Unlike the Liverpool variant, this strain derived from the variant first detected in southeast England in September 2020, which is commonly referred to the UK variant or the Kent variant.

PHE has so far identified 21 cases of this new variant, which has acquired the E484K mutation.

While we expect that the vaccines will still prevent severe illness and deaths, we are taking public health action on clusters of variants with E484K to reduce the risk of spread in our population, Dr. Susan Hopkins, director of COVID-19 strategic response at PHE, said in a statement.

UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock revealed on Feb. 2 that mutations of concern had been found in Bristol and Liverpool.

The government responded by expanding its door-to-door surge testing programme, initially intended to identify cases of the South African variant, to these two areas.

Hancock said the government was monitoring the efficacy of existing vaccines to see if the jabs need to be modified for new variants of the virus.

A new study publicised last week showed that the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine offers minimal protection against mild and moderate cases of the South African variant, which contains the E484K spike protein mutation.

Tests previously conducted by Johnson & Johnson and Novavax showed that their vaccines were also significantly less effective against the South African variant.

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The National Industrial Court in Abuja Wednesday okayed a suit filed by a retired judge of Adamawa State High Court, Michael Goji, demanding the payment of his salaries for 23 months and release of three vehicles withheld from him.

The trial judge, Sanusi Kado, in a ruling dismissed the preliminary objection filed against Mr Gojis suit by the defendants including the Adamawa State Governor, Ahmadu Fintiri, the Chief Judge and the National Judicial Council (NJC).

The Adamawa State Judicial Service Commission was also among the defendants.

Ruling

Ruling on the defendants preliminary objection, Mr Kado held that the retired judges suit was competent.

He, however, noted the suit raised substantial disputes on facts which could not be resolved by mere affidavit evidence in the originating summons filed by the plaintiff.

The court, therefore, ordered the conversion of the originating summons to a complaint which would require parties to call witnesses to testify orally.

Mr Kado ordered the parties to file pleadings in line with the rules of the court.

He ruled, In view of the above finding, the objection of the claimant/respondent to the preliminary objection of the Adamawa Judicial Service Commission and six others fails because the claimant/respondent has not established any abuse of process, and the said objection is hereby discountenanced.

In the circumstances and in line with Order 3 rule 17(2) of the rules of this court with my finding that the originating Summons raised substantial disputes on facts, I hereby order the conversion of the Originating Summons to complaint.

The parties are hereby ordered to file and exchanged pleadings in line with Order 3 rules 8, 9 and 10 of the rules of this court.

The suit

Mr Goji had filed his suit asking the court to declare that the Adamawa State Chief Judge and the NJC lacked the power to withhold his salaries and the allowances from May 2018 to the end of March 2020 while on suspension.

He also asked the court to order the Adamawa State Judicial Service Commission and the State Governor to supply his remaining three official vehicles which he was entitled to but was not supplied to him during his period of service as a judicial officer.
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A decade ago, Andrew Sannie found himself in a dream spot. His hip-hop group, The Lytics  a family affair with his brothers Anthony and Alex, cousin Mungala and adopted brother DJ Lonnie Ce  suddenly was thrust into the spotlight, with unexpected airtime on local radio stations and a sold-out show at the Pyramid Cabaret. Bigger things were still on the way.

A decade ago, Andrew Sannie found himself in a dream spot. His hip-hop group, The Lytics  a family affair with his brothers Anthony and Alex, cousin Mungala and "adopted" brother DJ Lonnie Ce  suddenly was thrust into the spotlight, with unexpected airtime on local radio stations and a sold-out show at the Pyramid Cabaret. Bigger things were still on the way.

"It felt a bit like a bat out of hell," says Sannie, now 32. Local media attention was buzzing. Labels were reaching out to express interest in signing the group. Making music turned out to be the easy part. It was the rest  the conversations with publicists, lawyers, publishers and bookers  that felt overwhelming.

"We kind of froze in a lot of those situations," says Sannie, now a co-owner of Grape Experiential, a local marketing and consulting firm. "We were still figuring things out. All the things you need to know, well, I knew none of them."

Its tough enough for any music professional getting started, but when you factor in race, says Sannie, who is Black, individuals can encounter glass ceilings, prejudice and racism, lack of resources and connections, and other disadvantages or barriers. Add in language barriers that may exist for newcomers, or financial barriers that might exist, and it gets even tougher. "It wasnt obvious how to break those down and get in on the inside," he adds.

RUTH BONNEVILLE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Andrew Sannie says he never expected to, but hes found himself in a position to help oversee change in the music community.

Its with that experience in mind that Sannie has partnered with Manitoba Music to facilitate BPM: Black Professionals in Music, a program that will offer Black people in the music industry with networking opportunities, mentorship, career tips and professional guidance. Its about not just opening the door, but helping up-and-comers figure out what to do once they find themselves seated at the table with publishers, executives, bookers, and agents; roles Sannie hopes participants will find themselves filling some day.

"When you look at the music industry, and in most industries in general, it might take five years just to figure out what youre supposed to be doing," Sannie says. "Were hoping to cut that time down. Expedite the whole process."

Click to Expand Monthly playlist highlights local Black artists Another element of the BPM program will be a monthly public playlist of local Black artists' music, selected by a rotating cast of curators, available through Manitoba Music's Spotify. Sannie took the first stab, and says he found an overwhelming number of artists to highlight. The inaugural playlist is 43 songs deep, blending genres from rap to funk to jazz and everywhere in between. Highlights include: Francophone hip-hop artist Alpha Toshineza's Chaque jour; indie artist JayWood and Housepanther's Moon Cats; a trio of songs by Nigerian artist Blessoo, notably Akwanga; and What's Good by Cisha and Pay$o. Every song is worth hearing. "I was blown away by how much good music there was," Sannie says. Blown away, but not surprised.

The only prerequisites to join are to be a resident of Manitoba and to identify as a Black musician or music industry professional, though Sannie says people interested in getting started are encouraged to participate as well. To register, email training@manitobamusic.com.

The idea for a program like this had been bouncing around for a while, said Sannie, but over the past year, conversations between himself and Manitoba Music executive director Sean McManus gained traction. "It had been in his heart for a while," Sannie says.

The organization already had several professional development avenues, but by centring this one on Black experiences, Sannie said the program is more deliberately attempting to address structural inequities that exist in the music industry at large.

"As an organization, we must do more to break down barriers, listen to the needs of Black artists and industry, and support and amplify Black voices," McManus said. "Were committed to this work and to building further relationships and partnerships with Black-led organizations and initiatives."

Across North America this past year, systemic racism was a touchstone, brought on most prominently after the May 2020 killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis by a white police officer. Peaceful demonstrations flooded the streets, and in Winnipeg, thousands gathered at the Legislative Building in a rally for Justice4BlackLives and an end to police brutality against racialized people.

The music industry, built on a foundation of sounds and histories created by and in many cases stolen from people of colour, had to reckon with its own structural inequities. ADVANCE, a national Black music business collective, partnered with Music Canada and industry affiliates like Sony, Universal Music, and Warner Music this fall. Sannies a board member of ADVANCE, and with BPM, will look to bridge the same gaps on a localized level.

Sannie says he never expected to, but hes found himself in a position to help oversee change in the music community. Over the past year, "everything came to a crescendo" for him, and he says its perfect timing to help make the long-gestating BPM program a reality.

The plan for now is to build a cohort of participants, and find out what type of guidance and mentorship theyre looking for, meeting over Zoom monthly and building a community there that will eventually move beyond the screen. From there, Sannie says, different Black industry professionals will develop training and information sessions, and along the way, begin an open line of communication with the group.

These people will hopefully get an absolute masterclass.  Andrew Sannie

"These people will hopefully get an absolute masterclass," Sannie says. Down the line, he hopes internships at labels and studios will be established, so when participants hear of a job or an opportunity theyre interested in, theyll have the resume to back them up.

Ten years from now, Sannie says he hopes the program can reach hundreds of people, with participants sharing their knowledge with up-and-comers as they themselves progress in the industry. "It sounds idealistic," he says. "But this is how it always happens (in cities like Toronto, Montreal and more). This is how you build."

Years into his own musical and professional career, Sannie says he still leans on others in his circle for guidance, and has a lot to learn. But a program like BPM has the potential to help newcomers to the music world make sense of it all, with others figuring it out at the same time, making it a less solitary endeavour, and a less intimidating one, than in the past.

"Of course, were building the plane as were flying it, but this is the start," Sannie says.

ben.waldman@freepress.mb.ca
Nancy Shemwell , COO, Trilogy Networks, USA; Young-Kai Chen , program manager, Microsystems Technology Office, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), USA; and Yiqun Cai , vice president, Alibaba Group, China will present compelling technical content on groundbreaking initiatives. The talks will cover edge cloud support and applications in rural territories, advances in photonics and artificial intelligence, and the evolution of networking driven by cloud computing. The plenary program is scheduled for Tuesday, 08 June 2021, 08:00 PDT, UTC-04:00.

"The OFC 2021 plenary will demonstrate the impressive work of leaders in our field who are driving innovations that will inspire our community and benefit society-at-large," said Jun-ichi Kani, OFC General Chair. "Nancy Shemwell, Young-Kai Chen and Yiqun Cai are behind the revolutionary applications of technologies that are rapidly changing communications and computing. We are privileged to have them as headliners for an engaging plenary program, which is always a highly anticipated segment of our international conference and exhibition."

In her presentation titled "Industrial Revolution 4.0  Gone Country," Nancy Shemwell, COO, Trilogy Networks, USA, will describe the Rural Cloud Initiative, the deployment of distributed edge cloud support and applications across rural America to help close the "digital divide." The initiative will bring the technology platforms required to run advanced solutions software and hardware to create an ecosystem.

Young-Kai Chen, program manager, Microsystems Technology Office at DARPA, USA, will discuss the "Symbiotic Perspective of Photonics and Artificial Intelligence" in his talk. Tremendous advances in photonics and artificial intelligence over the past decades have enabled the next generation of communications and computing.

A veteran in the networking industry, Yiqun Cai, vice president, Alibaba Group, China, will explore how cloud computing became the foundation of the company's infrastructure. In his talk titled "Hammers and Nails: How Technologies and Applications Drive the Evolution of Networking in Alibaba," Cai will share the company's experience building networks to enable the transition to this technology.

Registration Information

Conference registration opens in early 2021. Credentialed media and analysts who wish to cover OFC 2021 can find registration and other essential information in the OFC media room.

About OFC

The 2021 Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exhibition (OFC) is the premier conference and exhibition for optical communications and networking professionals. For more than 40 years, OFC has drawn attendees from all corners of the globe to meet and greet, teach and learn, make connections and move business forward.

OFC includes dynamic business programming, an exhibition of global companies, and high impact peer-reviewed research that, combined, showcase the trends and pulse of the entire optical networking and communications industry. OFC is co-sponsored by The Optical Society (OSA), the IEEE Communications Society (IEEE/ComSoc), and the IEEE Photonics Society and managed by OSA. OFC 2021, a blended in-person and virtual event, will take place 06  10 June 2021 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California, USA. Follow @OFCConference, learn more at OFC Community LinkedIn, and watch highlights on OFC YouTube.

About The Optical Society

Founded in 1916, The Optical Society (OSA) is the leading professional organization for scientists, engineers, students and business leaders who fuel discoveries, shape real-life applications and accelerate achievements in the science of light. Through world-renowned publications, meetings and membership initiatives, OSA provides quality research, inspired interactions and dedicated resources for its extensive global network of optics and photonics experts. For more information, visit osa.org.

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STAMFORD  Stamford Health is looking to double the number of COVID vaccinations it can administer with the opening of a new mass vaccination site, the health systems chief executive said Tuesday.

Stamford Health currently operates a single vaccination site on its Bennett Medical Center campus. The site can provide 600 to 1,000 vaccinations per day, depending on vaccine supply and parking availability, Stamford Health President and CEO Kathleen Silard said.

But that is really the max because right now were a full-service hospital with lots of patients coming in for care, and we just cant accommodate more traffic flow safely on our campus, Silard said during a webinar co-hosted by the Stamford Chamber of Commerce.

Information about the precise location would be forthcoming, she said.

We have identified a site in Stamford that we are working to develop a lease on, she said, adding that the health system is working with the city on the issue. We will have an announcement coming out about that shortly, in a couple of weeks.

During a live-streamed news conference Tuesday evening, Mayor David Martin confirmed that another vaccine site would be opened in the city  and possibly another one after that.

We have already secured a second site, which will have the ability to more than double the number of doses, and were actually considering a third site, Martin said.

Martin, who is 67, noted that he is now eligible to receive the COVID vaccine but said he would wait until teachers and other critical Stamford employees are vaccinated.

I do have the ability to control my environment, and Ive ridden this thing out so far, very carefully, as I trust that you will, also, Martin said.

As of last week, 7 percent of Stamfords residents had received the first dose of a COVID vaccine, Martin said, citing data from the state Department of Public Health. Meanwhile, more than 47 percent of Stamford residents over 75 had received one done, according to Martins presentation.

About 48 new cases of COVID are reported in Stamford per day, he said.

Unfortunately, we had a very bad week here in Stamford, with a reported 11 fatalities, Martin said. It could be that some of that is reporting thats leftover from before, but whether its reporting irregularities from previous situations ... or whether its new  either way, this is truly dreadful.

Getting appointments

On Monday, Gov. Ned Lamont announced that residents who are age 65 years old and up could sign up to receive COVID vaccinations starting this week  extending eligibility to about 350,000 people.

We were told that we can open up our site on Thursday, Feb. 11, to those individuals, but we were also advised that if we have the vaccine and we have appointment availability  which we do  that we could open up earlier, Silard said. So we adjusted our website (Monday evening), and now those that are 65 to 74 can register for an appointment to get the vaccine.

In total, Stamford Health opened a ton of appointments on Monday, she said, and they were all taken within 15 minutes. Appointments are mandatory to receive the COVID vaccine.

Were going to open another 500 appointments, so Im sorry, but the best [thing] to tell you is just to keep checking the site, Silard said of residents who are looking to make appointments for the COVID-19 vaccine.

She also pointed out that Stamford Health is using its own scheduling system instead of using the Vaccine Administration Management System after patients and health care workers complained that the system developed by the federal government was difficult to use.

The Stamford Health sign-up can be found at www.stamfordhealth.org/covid-19-update/covid-19-vaccination-information/.

Community Health Center last week opened a mass drive-through COVID-19 vaccination clinic in the parking lot of Lord & Taylor in Stamford. It is expected to administer up to 200 vaccines per day. CHC also operates large vaccine clinics at the former Pratt & Whitney airport in East Hartford and at Wesleyan University in Middletown.

Anyone eligible to get vaccinated must have an appointment for the CHS clinics. Appointments can be made through VAMS, by visiting https://portal.ct.gov/Coronavirus/COVID-19-Vaccinations---VAMS-Support or by calling Connecticuts 211 system.

Expanding eligibility?

Silard noted that front-line essential workers and residents with some underlying medical conditions are expected to be eligible for vaccines next in Connecticut. It is difficult to predict when the general public would be eligible, she said. But Stamford Healths best estimate at this point  and it is an estimate  is April or June, depending on vaccine availability.

Were not the bottleneck. Its the supply chain, Silard said. I think everyone in this country is trying to move as quickly as possible to produce as much vaccine as possible to get it in the arms of our citizens to make sure that they get vaccinated.

Silard added that the Stamford Health system has almost zero wastage of the vaccine.

We look at our supply. We look at our appointments. We look at our storage. And we only defrost what is going to be put in arms, she said. Even if we have a little vaccine leftover at the end of the day, we get to our health care workers, we call up those 75 and older  now 65 and older  and ask them to come over, so we do not waste a drop.

In addition, Silard urged citizens not to put off normal care, such as cancer screenings and colonoscopies, during the pandemic.

If care is delayed, a diagnosis can easily become much worse with a much more intensive intervention that may be necessary and a poorer outcome, she said. And were hearing that from some of our physicians  that theyre seeing people coming in in advanced stages of diseases because they were afraid to come to the hospital.
Long-awaited help for victims of the cladding scandal will be announced by the Government today.

Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick will pledge up to 15billion of state assistance for many of those hit with huge costs to repair their fire-risk homes.

Whitehall sources say under the plan no leaseholders in buildings above 18 metres or six storeys will have to pay for the removal of flammable cladding.

Mr Jenrick will say they will not have to pay a penny directly or indirectly, because freeholders will be banned from clawing back the cost of expensive repairs from leaseholders.

However, last night it was not clear what help would be given to leaseholders in blocks below 18m in height  the vast majority of those affected.

Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick will pledge state assistance for many of those hit with huge costs to repair their fire-risk homes. Pictured: Residents of the Green Quarter development in Manchester city centre

Around four million people are stuck in dangerous buildings, with more than a million flat-owners facing crippling costs for safety measures and special insurance.

The scandal has left families facing repair bills of up to 115,000, and without Government action hundreds of thousands of flats are unsellable.

The announcement comes a week after Boris Johnson told the Commons: We are determined that no leaseholder should have to pay for the unaffordable costs of fixing safety defects that they didnt cause and are no fault of their own.

It is believed the cost of the cladding bailout from the Treasury could top 5billion. Ministers have also discussed a levy on construction firms to help foot the bill.

However, Tory MP Stephen McPartland, who has been campaigning on the issue, said he was concerned that thousands of people in lower-rise blocks will still be forced to take out loans.

It is clear [ministers] dont have a grip on the situation and their incompetence is creating this problem, he said last night.

Last month the Mail also spoke to Lilli Houghton, 26, (pictured) who bought a flat in Leeds with her boyfriend for 145,000 in July 2018. A safety investigation later discovered flammable cladding, forcing her to pay an initial extra 960 in service charges

Millions of leaseholders are facing financial ruin and we will not accept loans to leaseholders. They are not a solution, they are a disgraceful betrayal.

Paul Afshar, of the End Our Cladding Scandal campaign, said: The psychological cost of living in firetrap flats is heavy enough to bear.

Now it looks like we will shortly be saddled with crippling 30-year loans, longer than our mortgages, to fix a problem we didnt cause.

The Government needs to decide where its priorities lie. On the one side you have millions of leaseholders suffering sleepless nights for fear of 40,000 bills landing on their doorstep just to make their homes safe.

On the other, the largest developers who collectively have made more than 10billion in profit since the Grenfell fire. Rishi Sunak can and must do the right thing and properly fund cladding removal to make sure millions of voters can, once and for all, sleep safely at night.

More than a million homeowners have been left unable to sell or remortgage their flats since the Grenfell Tower inferno in Kensington, west London, which killed 72 people in June 2017.

More than a million homeowners have been left unable to sell or remortgage their flats since the Grenfell Tower inferno in Kensington, west London, which killed 72 people in June 2017

Leaseholders face average costs of 40,000 each  and some of up to 115,000  to replace dangerous cladding.

Panels sold without any fire training The manager who sold flammable cladding for Grenfell Tower was given tough sales targets but no training on the products fire safety, an inquiry heard yesterday. Deborah French was hired as the UK cladding sales manager by construction giant Arconic even though she had no knowledge of the product. She sold panels with a combustible polyethylene core to contractors refurbishing the tower block in Kensington, west London. Speaking at the public inquiry into the disaster, Miss French said she attended a week-long induction at Arconics offices in France when she joined the firm. She described being given training on every aspect of sales. However the 54-year-old said she was not given any technical training and instead had to learn on the job. Advertisement

Just 216 out of an estimated 11,760 dangerous buildings have been fixed in the three-and-a-half years since the Grenfell fire.

The Daily Mail has launched a campaign calling on ministers to make homes safe within 18 months and spare leaseholders the cost.

Among those facing huge bills after cladding was deemed to be dangerous were leaseholders in Manchesters Green Quarter, which the Mail highlighted last month.

Our campaign also calls for the companies responsible for the crisis to be made to pay their fair share.

Last week Barratt became the first housing developer to back a levy. Chief executive David Thomas said the industry had a collective responsibility to cover the costs of the crisis.

The housing ministry is understood to be lobbying the Treasury for a 10billion pot, including the levy on developers.

But leaseholders fear the Governments plans do not go far enough and will still lumber many of them with huge long-term loans.

Last month the Mail also spoke to Lilli Houghton, 26, who bought a flat in Leeds with her boyfriend for 145,000 in July 2018.

A safety investigation later discovered flammable cladding, forcing her to pay an initial extra 960 in service charges.

She then faced a bill for almost 3,000 last month  and was told the total cost of works for each flat could be as much as 43,000.

She said: People are taught from a young age to save their money and get a foot on the property ladder.

Now this is just a complete slap in the face.
While most couples mark Valentine's Day with a romantic night out, this year is going to be very different. Thanks to lockdown, there are no pubs, restaurants, shopping trips or nights at the cinema, which is why my husband Martin and I recently ended up marking our pearl wedding anniversary with cheese sandwiches and tins of G&T on a chilly park bench.

Now, as we approach our first (and hopefully last) Valentine's Day in lockdown, I'm desperate to make it special. But despite my best intentions, I'm not an inventive cook and am in need of professional help if I'm to pull off a swanky dinner for two.

Step forward Tatler, which has thrown open its address book to allow the public access to some of the starriest names in haute cuisine. Together with website Learning With Experts, the society glossy has curated The Tatler Menu, an online cookery school led by four top chefs who demonstrate how to create Michelin-standard dishes from the comfort of your home.

Each has prepared sessions guiding home cooks through two of their signature dishes. Chefs include the Michelin-starred Ollie Dabbous of London's Hide, Ormer Mayfair's Kerth Gumbs, Peter Gray from Heston Blumenthal's The Hind's Head in Bray, Berkshire, and Bake Off: The Professionals judge Benoit Blin, who is Chef Patissier at Raymond Blanc's Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons. The videos are all pre-recorded and cost between 29 and 35 a course, though for 430 you can get personal feedback for all four.

Here Angela Epstein (pictured) tries one of The Tatler Menu's online cookery courses for Valentine's Day

I signed up for all the pre-recorded courses at a cost of 120 then baulked at the bizarre ingredients list, which included soybean powder and galangal (me neither).

Sidestepping my usual Tesco for a Waitrose shop, I was surprised to find all the ingredients I needed, even though it cost me 120. I set aside the best part of two days to try to pull off all four courses.

GEM LETTUCE WITH CAMOMILE DIP

I nearly choked on my Chardonnay when Ollie Dabbous proclaimed good cooking isn't about 'complicated processes or methodology'. Clearly, he hasn't tried to make a coffee cup out of chocolate.

His appetiser of gem lettuce served on ice with a camomile dip scattered with caramelised seeds and herbs such as dill and mint was relatively straightforward. Made from garlic oil, lemon dressing, virgin rapeseed oil, mayonnaise and camomile, there were just lots of component parts to produce the finished result.

His style is crisp and cool. He's also easy to keep up with, just as long as you have all the ingredients ready and weighed.

BUTTERNUT SQUASH VELOUTE

Next up was Kerth Gumbs, a smiley chap whose butternut squash veloute, Thai green curry foam and a buttery shortbread biscuit were relatively straightforward.

While I didn't master the curry foam, the soup turned out rich and tasty  and was quite easy to make (though I drew the line at serving it in a hollowed out butternut squash).

For one of the special dishes Angela made duck with beetroot barley (pictured) and says it was a success

DUCK WITH BEETROOT BARLEY

Peter Gray on mains is a different vintage. Explaining how to prepare his duck with beetroot barley and Heston's triple-cooked chips, his tone smacked of a bank manager sorrowfully refusing a mortgage. However, his recipe was easy to follow and he offered lovely morsels of detail.

The duck was a triumph, while Heston's chips were a sensation. You make these by cutting 16mm chips  I used a ruler to check  out of a good potato. The spuds are then boiled, chilled, fried to a light golden brown, chilled and then fried in plastic cup-size portions.

Far more faff than my normal method (i.e. open a bag of McCains) but deliciously crisp on the outside and fluffy on the inside.

LE CAFE CREME (SCULPTED CHOC CUP)

She also made a coffee cup sculpted from chocolate filled with espresso parfaits

The most challenging part was dessert, where Monsieur Blin is on hand to guide us through Le Cafe Creme  a coffee cup sculpted from chocolate filled with espresso parfaits, and topped with kirsch sabayon.

Here, we entered a world of blow torches and food thermometers to recreate a dish Raymond Blanc took six months to perfect.

I managed most of the bits save for the chocolate coffee cup itself, which requires serious technique.

To make the cups you need to spread chocolate thinly over an acetate rectangle and slide into a plastic ring to hold the shape. Then you use a paper piping cornet to make S-shaped cup handles.

Thankfully, on his website Raymond Blanc suggests freezing the parfait in a terrine mould, then slicing to serve. I do as he says and save the broken chocolate shards to snaffle later.

Even by my modest standards, the dishes were riotous to the palate. My presentation was lousy but the symphony of flavours is a universe away from anything I've made before.

However, by the end of the first two courses, the husband was ravenous. 'Any more shortbread biscuits?' he wondered mournfully.

Unless you've got time on your hands and are something of a foodie, making four Michelin-starred dishes is quite an endeavour.

Later, I asked my husband if the meal had been one to remember. He smiled benignly  I couldn't tell if that was a yes  then disappeared to put the kettle on.

learningwithexperts.com/foodanddrink/courses/the-tatler-menu

RIB EYE STEAK, BONE MARROW BUTTER

If you're after a cheaper alternative, Waitrose is the only British supermarket with a dedicated cookery school.

This year its chefs are running a virtual Valentine's Day cookery class to master the perfect rib-eye steak with bone marrow butter. You simply sign up for the 20 course online, buy the ingredients from your local shop or butcher and receive Zoom details and recipe sheets to print out ahead of time.

Unlike the Tatler course, this is done in real time on the evenings of February 12, 13 and 14. I'm offered a specially arranged preview under the tutelage of Rebecca Roberts, who has learned with Michel Roux Jr. Alongside her is Helen Carey, who trained as a pastry chef with Marcus Wareing.

The Tatler Menu is an online cookery school led by four top chefs who offer tips. Pictured: Angela follows the recipe via Zoom

We started by making bone marrow butter by mixing the mushy bits from the middle of cooked bone marrow with butter. Then we placed whole portobello mushrooms on a baking tray and scattered with freshly chopped flat leaf parsley. I was thinking this was a doddle.

Even the delicious peppercorn sauce for the steak is idiot-proof. It's made from brandy, beef stock, whipping cream and Dijon mustard. Along the way, the two chefs offer helpful tips.

When I told Becky and Helen my dry, aged ribeye steak was bleeding so badly it needed to go to A&E, they reassured me it was just the cooking process. I have a long history of ruining steak. This time, I was so keen not to burn the meat, I cooked mine too quickly so that it looked overly raw in the middle. Everyone else's looked better. Helen suggested that after we logged off, I cooked the meat for a few more minutes.

Pictured are the selection of ingredients that Angela had to go out and buy before she started cooking

The suggestion was to serve with a side of fresh watercress and a heap of Waitrose chips, which you just heat up, but we decided to sidestep the carbs.

The result was delicious. The mushrooms, cooked in the oven and, glossy from the bone marrow butter, looked magnificent. After placing back in the pan for a few more minutes, the steaks were gently chewy. The sauce veered cheekily between spiky mustard and peppercorn and the smooth cream and butter.

My husband was impressed. He told me it was the best steak I have ever made and literally scraped the plate clean.

This has been old-fashioned, hand-holding cooking with the enormous benefit of getting feedback immediately. I drained more brandy and said cheers. I felt like a top chef.

experiences.johnlewis.com/events/valentines-day-ribeye-steak-with-bone-marrow -butter-cookery-class--20
The U.S. Consulate General in the Far Eastern Russian city of Vladivostok can be closed by mid-spring 2021, the Russian Foreign Ministrys representative in Vladivostok, Andrei Brovarets, said.

"This [the Consulate Generals closure] was a unilateral decision of the United States, which can be implemented in its final form by mid-spring 2021, with all formalities observed," TASS cited him as saying.

"On a personal note, I can only express hope that the new U.S. presidents administration will review it, especially because this decision runs counter to general objective trends in the development of the Primorye Territorys international cooperation with foreign partners," the Primorye region government quoted Brovarets as saying in a statement.

In December 2020, then U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made the decision to close the U.S. Consulate General in Vladivostok and suspend the work of Consulate General in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg.

COLUMBIA  Charleston's police chief warned South Carolina lawmakers a proposal to let trained gun owners carry their weapons openly could endanger public safety and make the jobs of law enforcement officers more difficult.

Chief Luther Reynolds was one of dozens of South Carolinians who testified Feb. 10 in opposition to the bill, joining several doctors and self-identified gun owners who said they fear the bill could lead to more violence and anxiety on the streets.

The opponents outnumbered the six supporters who testified in favor of the measure by saying they believe the training aspect will ensure guns are handled responsibly and noting that South Carolina is one of only five states that does not have any form of open carry law on the books.

After the public testimony, the House Judiciary subcommittee voted in favor of the bill with no further discussion, as all three Republicans on the panel approved of it and the lone Democrat disapproved.

The measure is expected to get a full committee hearing within the next two weeks, and House GOP leaders are hoping to send it over to the Senate by early March.

Like several other opponents of the bill, Reynolds said he has owned firearms for most of his life and supports Second Amendment rights. But he said he believes the open carry bill would create "a greater potential for disagreements to turn violent."

Reynolds noted that Charleston and several other cities around the country have seen an increase in protests over the past year and the presence of counterprotesters has occasionally led to physical confrontations.

"Adding the open carrying of handguns increases the potential for loss of life and serious bodily injury," Reynolds said. "It also makes it more difficult for law enforcement when large numbers of individuals are openly carrying handguns."

State Law Enforcement Division Chief Mark Keel echoed Reynolds' concerns, telling The Post and Courier he believes it would exacerbate already dangerous situations.

"As if we don't already have enough problems with people with guns, this just presents more of an issue," Keel said.

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State Rep. Bobby Cox, the Greenville Republican who is spearheading the effort to pass the bill, said he understands why law enforcement officials are concerned but believes those concerns are outweighed by the interest citizens have in protecting their right to carry firearms.

"I understand where they're coming from, in terms of their mission, but I also, as a lawmaker, have to pass laws that allow people to exercise their constitutional rights," Cox said.

By requiring gun owners to be trained first in order to carry openly, Cox said he believes they would know how to act responsibly. Cox said he also supports providing more funding and training for law enforcement to be able to adapt.

Keel said those assurances did not assuage his concerns.

"We always are happy to get all the training we can get, but I don't know what additional training we could get that would help us deal with people openly carrying guns on our streets every day," Keel said.

Law enforcement opinions tend to carry significant influence in the South Carolina Statehouse. Keel's opposition to legalizing medical marijuana has long been cited as one of the leading impediments by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle who support that measure.

Other people who testified during the hearing, which lasted about an hour and a half, included several pediatricians who treat gun injuries and said they believe the bill will lead to more of them.

"This body should be working to implement evidence-based solutions to reduce the incidence of these injuries and deaths," said Annie Andrews, a pediatrician from Charleston. "But unfortunately, the bill that is being considered today will not protect our children and is actually a threat to public safety."

A few in-person speakers were supporters of the bill, including Mark Roote, who said he moved to the state in 2015 from Pennsylvania, where he carried openly without issue.

"The only people who ever had a negative reaction to me open carrying were the police because they didn't like me having to rely on them," Roote said. "There's nothing to fear from open carry."

The measure does not go as far as some of the most ardent gun-rights supporters want. Tommy Dimsdale, the legislative director at Palmetto Gun Rights, said he believes lawmakers should instead pass a "constitutional carry" bill to let everyone carry guns openly regardless of whether they have a permit.
The Myanmar-based Chin National Army has asked for asylum for 40 families, Mizoram's Champhai district deputy commissioner Maria CT Zuali said

Aizawl: Myanmar-based armed insurgent group Chin National Army (CNA) has sought asylum for their families in India in the wake of the military coup in the neighbouring country, an official in Mizoram said on Wednesday.

The CNA, the armed wing of the Chin National Front (CNF), has asked for asylum for 40 families, Mizoram's Champhai district deputy commissioner Maria CT Zuali told PTI.

"The CNA has communicated the matter to the village council president of Farkawn, who later informed the Champhai district administration," she said.

Zuali said that she has forwarded the matter to higher authorities.

The district administration has issued an alert against an influx of refugees from Myanmar in the wake of the coup, officials said.

Mizoram shares a 404-km porous international border with Myanmar.

A notification issued by Zuali on Tuesday instructed all villages to inform the district administration if Myanmarese refugees are seen entering their areas.

Thousands of members of the Chin community of Myanmar fled to Mizoram because of the military junta since the late 1980s, officials said.

Though many have returned to Myanmar after democracy was restored in the neighbouring country, thousands of them are still living in the state, they said.

The Chins of Myanmar and the Mizos of India share the same ancestry and culture.

With the Myanmar military taking power, there are apprehensions in the border areas that many Myanmarese from the Chin state and other regions will flee to Mizoram.

Co Down mountaineer Noel Hanna has said he doesn't regret being unable to reach the summit of the world's second highest mountain in winter - but that staying safe was his main priority.

Five climbers who were with Mr Hanna died on the treacherous expedition on K2, a notorious Himalayan peak on the border between Pakistan and China.

Speaking to the Belfast Telegraph after 10 hours of trekking on the way from base camp, Mr Hanna said the expedition is now making its way off the mountain.

He said he's "disappointed" he didn't make the summit but said safety was most important.

"It's the same as climbing any mountain, if you don't make summit you're disappointed," he said. "But getting back off the mountain with all your fingers and toes is number one and getting a summit is a bonus."

The 54-year-old conquered the 8,611-metre mountain in 2018 and was the first Irish person to achieve the feat. He had hoped to be one of the few to say they had completed a winter ascent of the 'Savage Mountain', with fewer than 350 climbers making it up and down its slopes successfully.

Speaking yesterday he said: "There were 19 or 20 on the expedition when we walked in and there's five members walking out because some were thrown out through illness, sickness or frostbite. Then five died on the mountain."

Three of the climbers who died were well known to Mr Hanna. A man from Spain died from a fall on January 16 and two other men, who were Chilean and Pakistani, died on February 5 as they attempted the summit. An Icelandic man also died that day while a fifth, from Bulgaria, died "about 20 feet" in front of Mr Hanna when he fell 2,000 metres to his death.

The deaths have been "difficult", said Mr Hanna. "Probably some could have been avoidable if they had turned around rather than continuing on.

"It's an individual thing, I was up at high camp for summit push and thought it was too cold and the weather window was too short to make summit and be back down safely. It was an easy decision for me just to abort my summit attempt," he said.

"You have to know your ability, the weather, your speed on the mountain. Others in our expedition went up and shouldn't have, and now they're probably looking at losing six or eight toes."

Mr Hanna, who is from Ballynahinch, said when he returned to base camp he had some Hinch whiskey from his hometown to unwind, sharing the three or four bottles he brought with his fellow climbers.

The Co Down man said he will not attempt K2 again but said he would attempt Everest again in winter, saying it was a "personal goal". Mr Hanna and his wife Lynne, CEO of Clarins South Africa, would also like to attempt Everest without oxygen or an unclimbed peak in the Himalayas, he said.

For now, he is focused on the end of the expedition, with only two more nights to spend in the tent. "When you're spending 45 or 50 nights in a tent and it's minus 25 every night, it's not comfortable for seven weeks," he said.

The expedition is heading for Skardu in Pakistan and will then fly to Islamabad on to Doha in Qatar and then back to South Africa after receiving a negative PCR test.

Mr Hanna said he himself hasn't felt any negative side effects from the climb. "I'm feeling excellent," he said.
NEW ORLEANS  The American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana today sued Louisiana State Police (LSP) for the release of public records regarding its use of racist facial recognition technology, after LSP denied requests for the information.

Face recognition systems have been proven to be racially-biased, said ACLU of Louisiana Executive Director Alanah Odoms. This technology is ripe for abuse in the hands of the government and has already resulted in the wrongful arrest and imprisonment of people of color. Its inherent racial bias makes it an unreliable investigatory tool and creates a high risk of wrongful arrests, raising grave civil rights concerns. Police must be accountable to the communities impacted by their harmful practicesour community members have a right to an informed debate before any mass surveillance capable technologies are acquired or utilized. The ACLU of Louisiana demands transparency from Louisiana State Police, beginning with the release of these documents. And our work wont stop there. We will continue to hold Louisiana State Police accountable and defend Louisianans from racially biased surveillance technologies and invasions of privacy by the government. 

In 2019, Odoms learned that LSPs Fusion Center was using the invasive technology without public knowledge. During a criminal proceeding in Orleans Parish Criminal District Court, testimony adduced by a public defender demonstrated that LSP had identified his client by comparing an image to its database using a then-pilot program. During the hearing, an LSP Fusion Center employee testified that he had been working with facial-recognition software for about two years, and the company that created the software program, Idemia, had given a two-day training to LSP.

Odoms became concerned that LSP was using an invasive technology to surveil the public without its knowledge. The ACLU of Louisiana opposes the expansion of government surveillance and seeks an end to racially biased, unreliable technologies that amplify racist policing, including facial recognition.

The ACLU of Louisiana filed a public-records request in September 2019 seeking additional information about LSPs use of facial-recognition technology to better understand its application and share that information with the public. Requested documents include meeting agendas and minutes, public notice, communications between LSP and elected leaders, training documents, and analyses. Louisiana State Police denied the request, responding that it did not maintain some of the requested records and that the rest were exempt from Louisianas Public Records Law.

Last year, following a separate public records request, the ACLU of Louisiana obtained nearly 50 pages of email requests from the New Orleans Police Department to the Louisiana State Police Fusion Center asking LSP to use facial recognition on various photos and video stills. The correspondence surfaced after years of assurances from city officials that facial recognition was not used in New Orleans.
The old Downe Area Hospital building where police are treating a fire on Tuesday evening as arson. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye

A fire at the former Downe Hospital in Downpatrick is being treated as arson.

Fire broke out at the derelict building on the Ardglass Road at around 8pm on Tuesday.

The building, which has been vacant since 2009, has been the scene of several fires over the years.

Nine fire appliances attended the scene with firefighters working into the early hours of the morning to put out the blaze.

SDLP South Down MLA, Colin McGrath condemned the incident describing it as "reckless".

"I was very sad to see the fire and damage to the old Downe hospital building in Downpatrick last night which is under reconstruction at present to become new and much-needed social housing.

It is appalling that this is being treated as arson. For people to cause such reckless damage and waste the time of our emergency services during a pandemic is grossly irresponsible and they should wise up.

He added: "This is an iconic building in Downpatrick and a connection to the rich caring and health service heritage of our town and local people.

There was some anti-social behaviour at this site just last week with a fire set and a security guard at the location assaulted by local youths.

"I urge those involved to wise up and recognise there is no support in the community for these sort of reckless actions.

Sinn Fein MP Chris Hazzard said the community were angered to see another blaze at the site.

The emergency services are under pressure at this time and do not need this type of incident," he said.

I would encourage anyone with information on how this blaze started to come forward to the PSNI.

Police have appealed for information.

Inspector Weatherald said: Shortly before 7.50pm, it was reported that Northern Ireland Fire & Rescue Service were in attendance following a fire in the building. It is believed that a number of rooms inside the property were damaged and the fire extinguished following the incident.

Enquiries are continuing and at this stage, the fire is being treated as deliberate.

We would appeal to anyone who witnessed anything suspicious in the area at the time of the incident, to contact police on 101 quoting reference number 1750 09/02/21. A report can also be made online using our non-emergency reporting form via http://www.psni.police.uk/makeareport/ . You can also contact Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111 or online at http://crimestoppers-uk.org/ .

Small conservative counties don't like this plan because it'll create an even greater pandemic cash crunch. Meanwhile, our progressive pals seem to understand that the end of the unsustainable restrictions are quickly approaching.

Read more . . .
New Jersey should seek a federal waiver for standardized testing this spring to avoid exams that will only tell educators what they already know  students have suffered learning loss in the pandemic, school leaders told a panel of state lawmakers Tuesday.

The push from school superintendents and groups representing teachers and principals comes as 190 districts remain in fully remote instruction and students in many other school systems have been in and out of the classroom because of COVID-19-related closures.

Isnt it obvious that there is going to be a delay in what theyve been able to learn? Millburn Superintendent Christine Burton said during a virtual hearing of the Legislatures Joint Committee on the Public Schools. Does standardized testing students to reveal the obvious pose an even greater detriment to students mental health?

Schools already have data on student performance from course work and benchmark assessments given locally, said Patricia Wright, executive director of the New Jersey Principals and Supervisors Association.

No one test is going to tell us where students are right now, and that is a fallacy and we are falling back on it simply because its what we have always done, Wright said. Now is the not the time to do what we have always done.

Annual standardized testing is a federal requirement, but states were allowed to cancel exams last spring during the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic. President Joe Bidens administration has yet to grant waivers this spring, but several states, including New York, have already sought permission.

New Jersey is waiting to see if the Biden administration allows states to cancel exams, acting Education Commissioner Angelica Allen-McMillan said. State officials have previously said the Department of Education will weigh its options if waivers are possible.

State testing is scheduled to occur anytime between March 15 and June 11 in New Jersey.

It is impossible to accelerate learning if you cannot measure it either with statewide assessment data or with local information on student performance, Allen-McMillan said.

Despite the calls from school leaders, the state Education Department is under pressure from some lawmakers to quickly determine how far behind students have fallen and take sweeping action to address it.

Sen. Teresa Ruiz, the influential chair of the Senate Education Committee, is pursuing legislation that would require the state to compile a learning loss report that identifies and quantifies the pandemics impact on learning.

We need data as soon as possible so we can take action and prevent further learning loss amongst our most vulnerable students, Ruiz, D-Essex, said in December.

However, the states largest teachers union, the New Jersey Education Association, has already called on Gov. Phil Murphy to seek a standardized testing waiver.

The Education Law Center, a law firm representing low-income students, also wrote to Murphy in support of a waiver, saying students are no better equipped to complete standardized testing from home in 2021 than they were in 2020.

Instead of focusing on testing, the state should be preparing a fully-funded, two-year plan to tackle learning loss, Mount Olive Township Superintendent Robert Zywicki told lawmakers. The plan should include money for after-school programs, summer school and additional school counselors, he said.

Please let this be a moonshot that we can get this done, Zywicki said.

In addition to standardized testing, lawmakers questioned Allen-McMillan about summer school. She said the state is considering how it can best support summer options for schools and students.

Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to NJ.com.

Adam Clark may be reached at aclark@njadvancemedia.com. Have a news tip or a story idea about New Jersey schools? Send it here.
The company expects to start selling smoking accessories and hemp-derived CBD to US customers on its website cannmart.com by the end of February

Namaste Technologies says its US expansion fits squarely into its evolution into a wellness company

( ) ( ) (FRA:M5BQ) announced that it has received approval from the TSX Venture Exchange to sell smoking accessories and hemp-derived CBD in the US.

The company noted that it expects the products to be available to US customers on its website www.cannmart.com by the end of February, in collaboration with DankStop and PeakBirch Logic, Inc, as Namaste looks forward to leveraging its VendorLink technology.

The announcement of this expansion in the US underscores Namastes intention to increase its total addressable market and exploration into other verticals as regulation evolves and other adjacent complementary market opportunities present themselves, Namaste Technologies CEO Meni Morim said in a statement.

He added: The expansion also fits squarely into our evolution into a wellness company, connecting consumers to their wellness needs of tomorrow.

The company is encouraged by the recent statements of US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and his colleagues on seeking an end to cannabis prohibition in the US as a legislative priority: We obviously welcome the news.

Morim continued: Its no secret that we intend to use this expansion as a beachhead, applying our VendorLink platform with a view to new US wellness frontiers, including new nutraceutical products, by the end of fiscal 2021, and, if Senator Schumer and friends are successful and legislation permits, maybe one day, cannabis.

Namaste Technologies is a cannabis-focused, e-commerce technology company with a goal of becoming the one-stop-shop for everything a cannabis user needs.

The Toronto-based company, which has been described as the Amazon of cannabis, operates the largest global cannabis e-commerce platform with over 30 websites in more than 20 countries under a variety of brands.

In addition to its product offerings of vaporizers, glassware, accessories, and CBD products, the company also owns subsidiary CannMart Inc, which is a key part of its operations that sells online medical and recreational cannabis.

Contact Sean at sean@proactiveinvestors.com
Impeachment managers walk through the Rotunda to the Senate for the impeachment trial (Alex Brandon/AP)

House Democrats are set to begin two days of arguments in Donald Trumps second impeachment trial, trying to convince sceptical Republicans that the former president alone was responsible for inciting his mob of supporters who broke into the US Capitol on January 6.

The arguments from the nine Democratic impeachment managers for the House, which impeached Mr Trump last month, will come a day after the Senate voted to move ahead with the trial even though Republicans and the former presidents lawyers argued that it was unconstitutional because Mr Trump had already left office.

All Democrats and six Republicans disagreed, arguing that there is legal precedent for the trial and that there should be no exceptions for impeachable behaviour in a presidents last months in office.

While Democrats won Tuesdays vote, it also signalled it is not likely they will have the votes for an eventual conviction, since they would need a minimum of 17 Republicans to vote with them.

Democrats say they know they are arguing the case uphill, but they are holding out hope that they will convert more Republicans by the final vote.

What to watch as the Democrats prosecute their case for incitement of insurrection:

 A devastating case against Trump

The Democrats are trying to take advantage of senators own experiences, tapping into their emotions as they describe in detail  and show on video  what happened as the mob broke through police barriers, injured law enforcement officers, ransacked the Capitol and hunted for politicians.

Democratic aides working on the impeachment team said they think they have a devastating case against the former president, and that they will prosecute it like a criminal trial.

As they argued on Tuesday that the trial was constitutional, they strayed from their arcane arguments about historic precedent to show a video that took senators through a timeline of January 6, starting with Mr Trumps speech to supporters in which he told them to fight like hell to overturn his defeat.

It juxtaposed Mr Trumps words with what was happening inside and outside the building as supporters broke in, showing violence and jeers aimed at police and politicians. The carnage led to five deaths.

Similar video evidence is expected on Wednesday, as they begin arguments on the merits of the case.

 Trumps team gets a redo

Mr Trumps lawyers had a bad day on Tuesday, as the former president fumed at their performance and Republican senators leaving the trial criticised their arguments as random, disorganised and perplexing.

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Mr Trump felt that the team, especially lead lawyer Bruce Castor, came off badly on television and looked weak compared to the Democratic prosecutors, according to a source.

They will get another chance on Friday, starting what is likely to be two days of arguments that last into the weekend.

They plan to argue that Mr Trump did not incite the violence, that rioters acted of their own accord and that the former president is protected by freedom of speech.

While the Democrats have appealed to the senators emotions, Mr Trumps lawyers have tried to tap into raw partisan anger.

Lawyer David Schoen, who spoke after Mr Castor, criticised statements from Democrats that he said were also inciting violence, and told the chamber that the Democratic prosecutors were fuelled by a hatred of Mr Trump and fear that they will lose power.

 Republicans to watch

Six Republican senators voted with Democrats not to dismiss the trial on constitutional grounds on Tuesday. Those senators so far appear the most likely to vote to convict Mr Trump.

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The six senators, most of whom have harshly criticised the former presidents behaviour, are Susan Collins of Maine, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, Mitt Romney of Utah, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana.

Mr Cassidy was the only one who did not side with Democrats in a similar vote two weeks ago. He said after the vote on Tuesday that he thought Democrats had a better argument and that Mr Trumps team had done a terrible job. He said he would watch the additional arguments as an impartial juror and decide whether to convict.

Ohio Senator Rob Portman, who voted on Tuesday to dismiss the trial, is retiring in 2022 and has also said he has an open mind about conviction.

The High Court has made freezing orders preventing a passenger jet from leaving Dublin airport.

The orders were made in respect of a Moldovan Air Airbus A319 aircraft which arrived at the airport late on Tuesday night.

It was due to return to Chisinau International Airport in Moldova, and over 20 passengers as well as the aircraft's crew were stranded in Ireland as result of the order.

The plane was frozen on foot of 4.2m arbitration award made in favour of a Romanian aircraft leasing firm called Just-US Air Srl against Compania Aeriana "Air Moldova" Srl.

The court heard the airline has had assets seized by Moldova's Agency for the recovery of Criminal Assets in 2019 as part of an investigation into alleged criminal activity including money laundering.

Air Moldova is the country's national airline, and was state-owned until it was privatised in 2018.

Represented by Martin Hayden SC and Martin Canny Bl Just-Srl claims that it obtained an international recognised, final and binding award of 4.2m following an arbitration regarding the lease of an aircraft, by a Romanian arbitrator.

Counsel said that the award has not been paid and it has sought to enforce the arbitration against Air Moldova in this jurisdiction where the airlines has a significant asset, namely the airline's Airbus aircraft.

The aircraft operates a passenger and limited cargo service between Moldova and Ireland.

Counsel said the applicant was seeking the freezing type orders against the aircraft because it fears that the airline may seek to remove the asset from the county and beyond the reach of the US Air Slr.

It said it had concerns arising out of several media reports concerning the Moldovan authority's criminal investigation into the airline and 35m asset seizure, which arose after the airline's privatisation.

The applicant has further concerns, about other reports that creditors of the airline have not been paid, and that last September one of the airline's other aircraft was detained in Turkey over an alleged failure to pay a $2m fuel bill.

The airline's owners have denied in media reports any wrongdoing and say that the investigations have not impacted on its commercial activity.

The freezing style orders preventing the aircraft leaving Dublin were granted on an ex-parte basis last week by Mr Justice David Barniville.

The media was prevented from reporting on the matter by the court until the aircraft had been secured, and the court documents were served on relevant parties, including the aircraft's captain.

When the case returned before the court on Wednesday the judge lifted the reporting ban, and said that the various orders previously granted should remain in place.

The judge, in adjourning the case, praised the applicant's solicitors Crowley Millar for providing assistance to passengers and crew affected by the orders.

As well as seeking the freezing orders the applicant is also seeking permission to appoint a receiver over the aircraft, which it says has been leased by another entity to Air Moldova.

The case returns before the court later this month.
A big difference between the second and first impeachment trials of Donald J. Trump is the sound of (relative) silence.

Unlike his first Senate trial, just over a year ago, Mr. Trump has no Twitter feed to provide play-by-play commentary, amplify supporters and attack his political opponents as the proceedings unfold. He also lacks the bully pulpit of the presidency.

Instead, as the trial began on Tuesday afternoon, the former president is expected to be busy with meetings at Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Palm Beach, Fla., while sporadically watching the trial, people close to him said on Tuesday.

Even his allies were putting up only a scattered defense of him in connection to the single charge he faces for his role in inciting the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6. Instead, most focused their comments on the decision by the Senate to hold the trial at all now that Mr. Trump has left office, casting it as an argument over constitutional principles rather than a defense of his behavior.
Germany plans to extend restrictions to curb the spread of the coronavirus until March 14, a draft agreement for talks between Chancellor Angela Merkel and leaders of the 16 federal states on Wednesday showed.

The number of new daily infections in Germany has been falling, leading some regional leaders to push for a timetable to ease the lockdown, but concerns are growing about the impact of more infectious strains of the virus on case numbers.

"We have a highly fragile situation," Winfried Kretschmann, Greens premier of the southern state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, told Spiegel Online. "We can see in other countries, such as Portugal, how quickly the tide can turn."

The draft document for the talks, which start in the afternoon, says that hairdressers could reopen under strict conditions from March 1. The draft is subject to change.

Merkel has made clear that primary schools and nurseries will take priority in any easing. The draft agreement said that individual states can decide on how to re-start classes.

"If the infection figures continue to fall reliably, the highest priority is clearly on the youngest children," said Kretschmann.

Merkel has in the past also made clear she wants a seven-day incidence of 50 cases per 100,000 people to be the benchmark for restrictions to be lifted. That number currently stands at 68, according to data published by the Robert Koch Institute for infectious diseases on Wednesday.

Germany reported 8,072 new coronavirus cases on Wednesday and a further 813 deaths, bringing the total death toll to 62,969.

Also Read: Germany prohibits AstraZeneca's COVID-19 vaccine for people under 65
Sinovac is seeking emergency use authorization for its coronavirus vaccine in Ukraine.

The Chinese company Sinovac has applied for the registration of its COVID-19 vaccine in Ukraine.

This is announced by the Ukrainian Health Ministry on its website.

"Emergency use authorization for Sinovac's COVID-19 vaccine has already been granted by the competent authorities of Turkey, Brazil, China, and Indonesia," it said.

The ministry added that in total, Ukraine had already received confirmation for the supply of 22 million doses of different COVID-19 vaccines.

Read alsoUkraine bans use of Russian vaccine against COVID-19

Sinovac vaccine: Known facts

On December 30, Ukraine signed a contract for the supply of 1.9 million doses of a COVID-19 vaccine produced by the Chinese company Sinovac Biotech. It stipulates the procurement of 1,913,316 doses at a price of UAH 504 (US$18.15) per dose. The contract for shipments into Ukrainian territory was signed with the Ukrainian pharmaceutical company Lekhim JSC, which, according to the official confirmation of Sinovac, is the only authorized representative of the Chinese vaccine producer in Ukraine.

Under the terms of the contract, the first batch with 700,000 doses of the vaccine will be delivered to Ukraine within 30 days after official registration in China, or by one of the competent authorities of the United States, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Japan, Australia, Canada, Israel, India, Mexico, Brazil, or in keeping with a centralized procedure by the competent authority of the European Union.

On January 13, Ukrainian Health Minister Maksym Stepanov said that his ministry, when contracting the supply of the Chinese vaccine Sinovac, laid down the requirement that its effectiveness should be at least 70%.

Reporting by UNIAN
Rivian and Lucid Motors are out to hunt for new markets in various locations outside of the area in which they established their companies, as both are fairly newbies in the scene, aiming to compete against Tesla. The electric vehicle showdown and dominance of 2021 would center on these three companies, particularly with the newbies that would soon debut their EVs.

2021 is a massive year of Rivian and Lucid Motors as both electric vehicle companies aim to make their presence known to the rest of the country, despite having no wide-public release of their electric vehicles. However, these EVs are soon coming as Rivian aims to debut the R1T electric pickup truck this year, while Lucid Motors aims to release a prototype of the luxury sedan, called "Air."

Indeed, Lucid Motors' Air electric car would not be out until 2022, but that would not stop the company from pushing forth with its plans to expand its territory and showrooms for people to discover the brand. Both companies are aiming to expand outside their areas and venture into the unknown, aiming to dethrone or match up against Tesla.

Read Also: Lucid Motors 'Air' EV with Impressive 517 Range and 1,080 HP Will Hit the Market in 2022

Rivian New Location: The Windy City of Chicago

According to Electrek's report, Rivian has unveiled the next locations of its expansion in the country, hailing from Michigan and making its business known more on the East Coast. In 2021, there would be ten locations that would open up and be the center of Rivian's electric vehicle production, and the second one would be in Chicago, IL.

The other location would be in Laguna Beach, California, and would be in the turf where Tesla has already established its grounds and presence on, particularly, in the Sunny State. Chicago is ideal for Rivian as its factory is nearby, coming from Normal, Illinois, which is only 130 miles off the south of the windy city.

The Rivian R1T and R1S would be the first products of the company, mainly focusing on the electric pickup venture to go against Tesla's Cybertruck, which still does not have a definite date. No other locations were disclosed by Rivian regarding eight of its other locations.

Lucid Motors New Location: The Big Apple NYC

On the other hand, Jeff Curry (@jcurry), the Interim Head of Marketing in Lucid Motors, shared on social media of the new location of Lucid that would soon setup and rise on The Big Apple, New York City, New York. The flagship studio and dealership would open in Spring this year, featuring the early electric vehicles that would be on sale by 2022.

Construction barriers are  pic.twitter.com/1GajYFcpz6  Jeff Curry (@jcurry) February 6, 2021

Tesla's Locations

Tesla has moved from its original base of Palo Alto, CA, down to Texas, focusing on the new location's latest Gigafactory in Austin and the Boca Chica launch pad of SpaceX. Tesla has already established itself in California and popularized EVs in the state, gaining support from the governor for electric mobility.

Rivian and Lucid Motors need to establish their electric vehicle presence and popularity in their chosen areas to match up and potentially beat Tesla to assert electric vehicle dominance this 2021.

Related Article: Tesla: $25,000 China-Style EV Soon to be Built in Shanghai R&D Center





This article is owned by Tech Times





Written by Isaiah Alonzo

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PHOENIX  Two Republican lawmakers are asking the Arizona attorney general to block an eviction moratorium that Pima County supervisors approved earlier this month.

Sen. Vince Leach and Rep. Bret Roberts allege the move violates state law and the state constitution because it blocks evictions that arent covered under a federal eviction moratorium.

Leach and Roberts requested the attorney general look into the ban on Tuesday under a 2016 law allowing a single lawmaker to trigger an investigation if they believe a city or town is violating a state law.

Supervisor Matt Heinz said at the Feb. 2 meeting that some landlords are getting around a federal eviction moratorium by finding loopholes to evict tenants who should be covered.

County spokesman Mark Evans said the county has not seen the complaint and could not immediately comment.

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The county ban is an emergency public health regulation and would be broader than the CDC moratorium, which only applies to evictions due to non-payment of rent. Both the federal and county bans expire March 31.

County supervisors discussed the possibility that their action could bring a legal challenge but approved it on a 4-1 vote. Heinz later issued a statement explaining that evictions for material breach of contract as opposed to non-payment of rent have gone from 6% of evictions before the pandemic to 21% now.

If the attorney general determines the policy conflicts with state law, the municipality has 30 days to eliminate it or face loss of state tax revenue. If he decides it may be breaking the law, the attorney general can ask the state Supreme Court to decide the matter.

Attorney General Mark Brnovichs office has 30 days to investigate the complaint.
Kampala  Internet and social media services have been fully restored, ICT State minister of Uganda Ogwang Ogwang has just announced. It was switched off on the eve of the elections held on January 14, and Ugandans have been using Virtual Private Networks (VPN) to get around the blockage since.

We apologize for the inconveniences caused, but it was for the security of our country. Lets be constructive, NOT destructive consumers/users of social media, he said in a tweet.

The development comes a day after the elections petition filed by Robert Kyagulanyi, one of the candidates, started at the Supreme Court.

Last week, when his lawyers filed their response to the presidential petition, President Yoweri Museveni defended his governments decision to shut down the internet, days before the January 14 general election.

This is in the affidavit filed in response to a petition by Kyagulanyi Robert Ssentamu, his main challenger in the just concluded elections.

In his petition filed on Monday this week, Kyagulanyi said Museveni was declared winner fraudulently after the Electoral Commission, Museveni himself and the Attorney General engaged in acts that offended the laws governing elections in Uganda.

The total shutdown of the internet, that took at least five days, is one of the grounds on which Kyagulanyi wants Musevenis victory annulled. He said that the shutdown which persists for Social Media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram among others, not only denied Ugandans their right to communication and association, but also crippled his ability to gather and transmit Declaration of Results Forms from his agents across the country.

Musevenis lawyers of K&K Advocates and Byenkya, Kihika & Co. Advocates filed their response to a presidential petition by Kyagulanyi seeking to overturn the victory of Museveni who was declared president-elect by the Electoral Commission on January 16.

Museveni, the candidate for the National Resistance Movement-NRM said that it was important to shut down the internet because some people were hell-bent at using it to destabilize the country. He adds that switching off the internet did not affect any freedom and fairness during the election as it didnt curtail the free flow of information to the electorate.

I know the internet was shut down on January 13, 2021, after official campaigns had closed. I also know that this was necessary to curb the continued spread of false news and incitement to violence to ensure a peaceful polling day, Musevenis affidavit reads.

Museveni also denies any claims that the Electoral Commission falsified results in his favour. He says even if there were some discrepancies in the voters register, they would not make the presidential results false. Museveni also denies ever ordering any security personnel to arrest, harass or intimidate Kyagulanyi or his supporters or agents across the country as was alleged.

I have no knowledge of any discrimination against the petitioner or any of his supporters nor any subjection of the petitioner to violence and persecution. The petitioners statement is falseI have not been accorded any preferential treatment by the Electoral Commission, public servants or members of the UPF and UPDF as alleged, Musevenis affidavit reads further.

Museveni adds that its wrong to attribute actions of some state actors like the Police and the UPDF to him. He says most of the things, that he denies if they happened, never did so with his approval, direction or consent. He, however, maintains that the riots that broke out in November last year after Kyagulanyis arrest were premeditated with a central command, control and coordination.

These riots were characterized by setting up of roadblocks, burning of tires, destruction of buildings and property, looting, extortion, attacks on security personnel, undressing and harassing members of the public creating a general apprehension that necessitated the intervention of the security forces to restore law and order, Museveni says.

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He adds that in his capacity as President, he directed that investigations be carried out to establish the exact circumstances of the death of all the 54 people and to establish if any security personnel acted illegally. Just like the Electoral Commission and the Attorney General who are the second and third respondents respectively, Museveni too wants Kyagulanyis petition to be dismissed beforehand with costs for filing it out of the legally acceptable 15 days after the declaration of presidential results.

Next week, the Supreme Court which has the original jurisdiction over presidential petitions is expected to hold a conferencing session for the parties to agree on the issues that will be determined by the court. The case will be heard from the parking lot of the Supreme Court where currently mega tents are being erected as a means to control the spread of COVID-19.

THE INDEPENDENT & URN
New Jersey wont ask the more than 175,000 businesses that received Paycheck Protection Program funds over the past year to pay income taxes on their forgiven loans, Gov. Phil Murphy announced Tuesday.

The state will match the federal governments handling of the loans, exempting the portion of a PPP loan that is forgiven from state gross income and corporation business taxes and even allowing businesses to deduct expenses paid for with a forgiven loans proceeds.

This decision is designed to help already beleaguered small businesses, which are the majority of recipients of these loans, Murphy said in a statement. Its no secret that New Jersey has been one of the hardest hit states by COVID-19 and our small businesses have shouldered the brunt of it. PPP loans helped many stay afloat and this move will provide added benefit to help them weather this storm.

Christopher Emigholz, vice president of government affairs for the New Jersey Business and Industry Association, said PPP loans have been a lifeline for New Jerseys small businesses.

Increasing state taxes on the back of that federal aid would have gone against the intent of that aid and caused further financial duress for those employers, he said in a statement. We are pleased to see the state follow the federal lead.

The Paycheck Protection Program made available low-interest, forgivable loans to businesses across the U.S. slammed by the pandemic and restrictions put in place to slow its spread. It was meant to help employers pay salaries, rent, mortgage interest and utilities and buy personal protective equipment amid the crisis.

Businesses that used the money to meet payroll can see some or all of their loans forgiven.

Nearly 178,000 New Jersey businesses received a total of $19.4 billion in loans through January, according to the Small Business Administration.

Congress included tax breaks on PPPs loans in the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021. Forgiven loans are otherwise generally taxable.

Murphy said in a statement he can conform with the federal governments practice without legislative approval under existing authority.

The state Senate passed a bill (S3234) 33-0 in January that likewise would have exempted forgiven loans from state taxes and allowing businesses to take deductions for business expenses paid with a loan.

The nonpartisan Office of Legislative Services, in a fiscal note, said the tax changes in the bill could reduce state tax collections in this fiscal year and next by up to $688 million.

OLS noted New Jersey typically wouldnt tax forgiven PPP loans anyway because New Jersey generally follows the federal treatment of income when determining income of C Corporations and S Corporations. But owners of pass-through businesses awarded loans that are forgiven could have been liable through their gross income taxes.

Thank you for relying on us to provide the journalism you can trust. Please consider supporting NJ.com with a subscription.

Samantha Marcus may be reached at smarcus@njadvancemedia.com.
The Namibia National Students Organisation (Nanso) has expressed concern over Unam's reluctance on admitting learners who exited school at Grade 11 through the new Namibia Senior Secondary Certificate Ordinary level (NSSCO) curriculum.

The new curriculum was officially rolled out during the 2020 academic year.

"We are highly disappointed in Unam for refusing grade 11 learners. After 12 years of the implementation of the curriculum, why are they only informing us now that they are only considering grade 12," Nanso president Simon Taapopi questioned.

Taapopi also accused the ministry of basic education and that of higher learning of lacking planning and coordination.

"We have learned that the University of Namibia received a total of 27 000 applications and was only able to provide provisional admission for about 5 000 students. This is an indication that there will be a serious challenge in terms of accessing education for many learners - and this is worrisome. This is also an indication that there has been a lack of planning and coordination between basic education and higher education. The curriculum was implemented 12 years ago," he further argued.

In an interview with New Era, Taapopi said the organisation will be facilitating a high-level engagement with the ministry of basic education, higher education and Unam.

"This engagement will iron out issues that the university might have and what support mechanisms they will need to ensure that a favourable outcome is realised," Taapopi said.

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Speaking about the re-opening of institutions of higher learning at the Covid-19 communication centre in Windhoek, the acting communications and marketing director at Unam, John Haufiku, said it is doubtful the candidates who exited school in grade 11 will be admitted at Unam this year, as the university received over 21 000 applications for this academic year.

Haufiku said although the NSSCO grade 11 candidates are eligible to apply to university when it comes to admission, Unam is sloping more towards the grade 12 candidates, who are the majority.

"If we don't take that principle decision, where do the grade 12 learners go? Because these are huge numbers," he stated.

Although Unam is unlikely to admit these learners, the Namibia University of Science and Technology (NUST) and the International University of Management confirmed that the grade 11 matriculants are eligible to apply for admission.

Education executive director Sanet Steenkamp could not be reached for comment, while the minister of higher education, Itah Kandjii-Murangi asked Youth Corner to wait for a statement.
This week, the New York Times documentary Framing Britney Spears premiered on Hulu and sparked new conversations about the harassment that female celebrities in the late 90s and early aughts suffered at the hands of the media  and society in general, really. There are plenty of cringe-worthy moments that highlight this throughout the film, including clips of reporters asking Spears (who, its worth noting, was an underage teen girl during the early part of her career) about her breasts or whether shes still a virgin, and magazine covers patting Justin Timberlake on the back for getting into [her] pants. But perhaps most striking is the way the doc reminds us how pervasive and accepted it was for paparazzi to harass famous people like Spears.

To get a sense of just how massive the market for tabloid shots of young, vulnerable celebrities was back then, Framing Britney Spears brings on Brittain Stone, the photo director of Us Weekly from 2001 to 2011, to reveal just how much money he was able to devote to paparazzi photos.

When I had a really healthy budget, itd be about $140,000 a week on imagery, Stone says in the film. Extrapolate that over the year, you know, $7 to $8 million, but spending millions of dollars a year on pictures that just quintupled the amount of money that was out there, which meant there were a lot more photographers coming in and doing it.

These days, with most print media struggling to stay afloat, its unfathomable that a publication would have millions of dollars to spend solely on images of famous people walking to and from their cars. But as Stone points out, it was big business back then. The slimy, voyeuristic behavior of many paparazzi was seen simply as the price of fame, and Framing Britney Spears brings on Daniel Ramos (the paparazzo who famously provoked Spears  then in the midst of a mental health crisis  into attacking his SUV with an umbrella) on to illustrate the mental gymnastics these creeps did to feel okay about the exploitative nature of their gig.

In the beginning when paparazzis were following Britney, you could tell she enjoyed it, Ramos said in the film. She would give up the shots, waving. She was very friendly, a sweetheart of a girl. It was like she needed us and we needed her. We both needed each other. It was a great kind of a relationship.

Of course, its obvious just from the few clips shown in the doc that Spears did not enjoy it. She frequently appeared scared as swarms of men with cameras surrounded her to a point where she couldnt move or walk away, and in an interview with Matt Lauer, she cried as she said it was her greatest wish in life for the paparazzi to leave her alone. Lets not forget that in addition to being routinely objectified and harassed, she was also suffering from a serious mental illness. But, naturally, that didnt stop the paps from poking and prodding. That night was not a good night for her, Ramos recalls of the infamous umbrella fiasco. It was not a good night for us. But it was a good night for us cause it was a money shot.

Even with all that, Ramos still has deluded himself into thinking that Spears was somehow asking for this, that it didnt bother her, or worse, exacerbate her mental health issues. He insisted in the film that she never gave any indication she wanted to be left alone.

What about when she said, Leave me alone?, an off-camera interviewer responded. There were times when she [was] like, Can you leave me alone for the day?, he claimed. But it wasnt like, Leave me alone forever. You know what I mean?

Its all thoroughly depressing, and a harrowing reminder of a culture of harassment that was entirely acceptable not too long ago. Female celebrities were expected to constantly look perfect, even on their way to the grocery store, and when they happened to be captured in an unflattering photo by the hordes of men harassing them, it was somehow their fault. There were multiple scandals in which paparazzi would take upskirt photos of female celebs as they exited cars, and instead of arresting the photographers for a sex crime, the women were dubbed slutty and made to publicly defend themselves. Take, for example, this incredibly creepy interview with Anne Hathaway and Lauer from 2012, which he kicks off with a gross, winking, Seen a lot of you lately before asking her Whats the lesson learned from something like that? as if its somehow her fault that someone stuck a camera up her crotch and sold a photo of her genitals without her consent.

Thankfully, weve made some progress when it comes to societys treatment of women in general since then (Lauer is no longer employed), and there are now laws in place that prevent paparazzi from selling photos of celebrities children. But, even as smart phones and social media have essentially turned everyone into paparazzi  thus cutting down on the demand for the professionals  we still have a long way to go.

Leave Britney alone, absolutely. But how about just leaving everyone alone?

The post The Britney Spears Doc Reveals the Staggering Profitability of the Paparazzi appeared first on InsideHook.
TEHRAN, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif on Wednesday urged the U.S. administration to seize opportunity for adoption of new approaches toward mutual issues, official IRNA news agency reported.

"With the presence of the new government in Washington, there is a chance to try a new approach" toward dealing with mutual issues, Zarif was quoted as saying.

He urged the White House to seize the time before the current window would "close quickly."

Otherwise, "the (Iranian) government will soon have to take new compensatory measures," he said, alluding to his country's successive reactions over the past months to the U.S. 2018 unilateral withdrawal from the Iranian nuclear deal, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

He urged the United States and the European signatories to the JCPOA to comply with their obligations to safeguard Iran's interests enshrined under the deal.

Iran has threatened that if the parties to the JCPOA do not adhere to their commitments, Iran would stop implementing the Additional Protocol of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Iran launched 20-percent uranium enrichment process in Jan. as part of Iran's Strategic Action Plan to Counter Sanctions, which was approved by the parliament in December 2020.

In response to the U.S. withdrawal from the nuclear deal in 2018 and re-imposition of sanctions, Iran has stopped implementing parts of its obligations under the deal.

Iran's senior officials have insisted on removal of sanctions imposed by former U.S. president Donald Trump, before the country re-embraces its nuclear commitments.
The European Commission said Wednesday it had forced South African drugs giant Aspen to slash prices on six cancer drugs after finding it abused its market dominance to hike charges.

The firm agreed to cut the cost of the medicines, used for the treatment of some forms of blood cancer including leukaemia, by some 73 percent inside the EU, after a years-long probe.

"Aspen's commitments will save European health systems many dozens of million euros and will ensure that these crucial medicines remain available," European Commission competition chief Margrethe Vestager said.

"Today's decision gives a strong signal to other dominant pharmaceutical companies not to engage in abusive pricing practices to exploit our health systems."

The European Commission, the EU's executive arm, launched an investigation back in 2017 after Aspen increased prices of some of its medicines by several hundred percent.

The case was the Commission's first investigation into allegations of excessive pricing practices in the pharmaceutical industry.

The Commission said it "found serious concerns that Aspen's behaviour may be in breach of EU competition rules" after no "legitimate reasons" were provided for the firm's high profits.

"Aspen could achieve these price increases, because patients and doctors had mostly no alternatives to using these particular cancer medicines," the statement said.

"When national authorities tried to resist Aspen's requests for price increases, Aspen went as far as threatening to withdraw the medicines from the national list of reimbursable medicines and in some cases was ready to even withdraw from normal supply in the market."

Vestager said the prices for the drugsused by thousands of patients, including young childrenwould now return to pre-2012 levels before the increases started.

The reduced prices will remain in force for 10 years and the company has committed to maintain the supply of drugs, the Commission said.

Explore further S.Africa probes 3 drug giants over cancer meds pricing

 2021 AFP
New Delhi, Feb 10 : In a massive action against the Maoists in Jharkhand, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) on Wednesday carried out searches in the dense forest in the state's Khunti district and recovered high-grade explosives and cordtex wire, which were meant to be used against security forces.

An NIA spokesperson here said that the team of the anti-terror probe agency conducted searches in the forests of Korangburu hillock in Khunti and recovered 100 metre cordtex wire and 126 gelatin sticks (15 kg).

The official said the searches were carried out at the instance of arrested armed cadre of banned CPI-Maoist Naina aka Birsa Munda.

"The explosives were planned to be used against the security forces by CPI-Maoist." The official said that the case pertains to the attack on a police party by the cadres of CPI-Maoist at Kukru Haat in Saraikela-Kherswan district on June 14, 2019 in which five police personnel were killed and their arms and ammunition looted.

The Jharkhand Police registered a case on June 15, 2019 and had arrested a total of 11 accused and filed two charge sheets against them.

The NIA re-registered the case on December 9, 2020 and during the course of investigation, arrested five more accused, who are the armed cadres of CPI-Maoist.

The official said, "During the examination of accused Naina, it was revealed that explosives procured by the cadres of CPI (Maoist) are hidden at the Korangburu hillock, in Jilingkel. NIA team, with the help of local police and SSB, conducted searches during late hours and recovered Cordtex wire and 126 gelatin sticks."
Samsung has only just launched the Galaxy S21 flagship phone series. Nevertheless, it has discounted these 3 devices by at least US$100 on Amazon and Best Buy. The Galaxy Note 20 Ultra is also now down by $200 or more, while the Galaxy Z Fold2 is up to $250 cheaper.

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Samsung unveiled the Galaxy S21, S21+ and S21 Ultra less than a month ago. It started at just US$799 for the 128GB base model; however, it can now be had for the new price of $699 on Amazon  or, better yet, $649 on Best Buy.

Similarly, the S21+, S21 Ultra and Galaxy Note 20 Ultra are now cheaper by $200 and $250 on Amazon and Best Buy respectively. The Galaxy Z Fold2 can also be bought at the same discounts on either store, making it, if no kind of steal, at least less expensive than normal.

Speaking of Samsungs premium foldables, their latest leaks suggest they will launch in July 2021, a new indication that the Z Fold3 might supersede the Galaxy Note line this year.

In newer rumors, it is said to start with 256GB of internal storage, whereas the Galaxy Z Flip3 will have 128GB or 256GB, contradicting an earlier report that it could go up to 512GB in 2021. These tips suggest they will not be exactly bargains themselves on their launch.
10 February 2021

One Media iP Group Plc

("One Media" or the "Company")

Acquisition of 21 Vision catalogue royalties

One Media iP Group Plc (AIM: OMIP), the digital music rights acquirer, publisher and distributor, is pleased to announce that it has acquired the licensor's share of the royalties to the 21 Vision catalogue of rights ('the Catalogue'), which contains over 2,000 recordings from some of the all-time music greats from over the last seven decades.

Since 2009, the 21 Vision catalogue has been licensed to One Media on a royalty-sharing basis. As part of the deal, One Media has acquired the licensor's royalty share of the catalogue on an in perpetuity basis, which allows the Company to continue to exploit the catalogue via all of its digital mediums and collect all revenues associated with the licence.

The Catalogue includes rare music concerts and live recordings performed by over 70 artists who, since the digital era began, have a renewed popularity as they are rediscovered by growing global audiences. Such performers include Glenn Millar, The Andrews Sisters, The Ink Spots, Vera Lynn, Count Basie, Flanagan & Allen and Cole Porter, music reminiscent of the Dads Army generation (over 60+) whose age group now form 29% of digital streaming consumers according to Statista.

The acquisition, which was in the normal course of business, was completed through One Media's Harmony IP asset release programme. Harmony IP allows music rights holders advanced access to the future earnings of their intellectual property by purchasing a portion of their rights upfront. www.harmonyip.com

Michael Infante, CEO of One Media iP, commented: "We have worked with 21 Vision for 12 years, marketing their music catalogue on a royalty sharing basis. By buying out the licensor's royalty share, One Media secures the rights to the catalogue on an in-perpetuity basis, whilst also increasing its margin by taking a bigger share of the royalty.

The Harmony IP initiative is open to all of our existing licensors, and allows One Media to increase its profitability using its cash resource to acquire our partners' royalty streams. We look forward to keeping the market updated on our progress."

-Ends-

This announcement contains inside information for the purposes of Article 7 of EU Regulation 596/2014. The person who arranged the release of this information is Michael Infante, Chief Executive Officer of the Company.

One Media iP Group Plc

Michael Infante - CEO

Claire Blunt - Chairman +44 (0)175 378 5500



+44 (0)175 378 5501 Cairn Financial Advisers LLP (Nominated Adviser)

Liam Murray

Jo Turner

Ludovico Lazzaretti +44 (0)20 7213 0880

Cenkos Securities plc (Broker)

Max Hartley

Max Gould

Michael Johnson (Sales) +44 (0)20 7397 8900 Yellow Jersey PR (PR & IR)

Felicity Winkles +44 (0)20 3004 9512

About One Media iP Group Plc

One Media is a digital music rights acquirer, publisher and distributor. The Group specialises in purchasing and monetising intellectual property rights with proven, repeat income streams. One Media adds value to its content by maximising its availability in over 600 digital stores globally, including Apple Music, YouTube, Amazon and Spotify.

One Media's music is also widely used for synchronisation in film, TV and digital gaming whilst its video content is primarily viewed on YouTube where One Media operates over 20 YouTube channels as a certified partner. Additionally the Company's Men & Motors TV series is now available on Kepang connect TV. www.menandmotors.com

One Media is listed on the London Stock Exchange on the AIM index, under the symbol 'OMIP'.

For further information, please visit www.omip.co.uk and http://www.harmonyip.com/
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opinion

The Magh Mela, an annual pilgrimage to Prayagraj, India, which usually attracts over 100 million visitors, is not only the greatest Hindu religious festival but also the world's largest gathering of people.

Declared by Unesco as an intangible cultural heritage in 2017, the 45-day festival which usually begins in mid-January, is a mixture of religious ceremonies and elaborate rituals carried out on the confluence of three holy rivers -- Ganga, Yamuna and Saraswati.

The pilgrims bathe in the sacred waters every day to cleanse themselves from their sins and get a liberation, which gives them a re-birth.

In mid-December 2008, two wealthy Kenyans flew from Nairobi to Prayagraj, hoping to cleanse themselves from their sins.

Massive fuel shortage

A combination of greed, mischief and corruption orchestrated by their company, in collusion with government officials over eight months, had created a massive fuel shortage, prompting complaints by oil marketers and banks.

Yagnesh Mohanlal Devani and Mahendra Pathak needed not just spiritual cleansing but they were also looking to buy time as they negotiated their way out of the scandal. Their company, Triton, had been placed under receivership for non-payment of debt but there was more coming.

The grand coalition government, which was eight months old, was just about to face its third scandal after the Grand Regency and maize scams. The two architects of the scam somehow knew what was coming. Some 126 million litres of fuel worth Sh9 billion had disappeared into thin air during the short time the grand coalition government had been in power. Donors were fuming and the government was about to be plunged into a political and economic crisis.

Fuel supply contract

There had been a drought, which increased the reliance on thermal plants by KenGen to generate electricity. KenGen's main oil supplier, Total Kenya Limited, had a contract with Triton Petroleum Limited for supply of fuel, which it in turn sold to the government's main power producer.

"We have a contract with Triton to supply us with fuel, which we then supply to KenGen," Felix Majekodunmi, Total Kenya managing director, had told the media at the time.

"We gave them three months' notice after sensing the danger of not meeting the contract," said Mr Majekodunmi.

With the contract between Total Kenya and Triton being terminated, the nation was heading back to the power rationing days experienced during the Moi regime unless KenGen found a new fuel supplier. And time was running out.

Worse, an internal audit ordered by the Kenya Pipeline Company (KPC) into the disappearance of the fuel was about to be released to investigators. It had more shocking details on how the scandal was executed. Yagnesh Devani and Mahendra Pathak knew they had to be as far away as possible.

Yet to face justice

Whether they had been tipped about their impending arrest or not remains a mystery, 13 years later. But while Mr Pathak, who was Devani's right-hand man, did return to Kenya and is facing charges with regards to the scandal, Devani is yet to face justice.

Devani, 56, is Kenya's most wanted fugitive.

On May 26, 2011, he was arrested in London. However, for 10 years, Kenya has unsuccessfully tried to have him extradited to Nairobi.

There was a glimmer of hope that the extradition was finally happening last month but Devani, a proverbial cat with nine lives, appealed for the umpteenth time. But as he continues to hide in the UK, thousands of pages from confidential investigation files perused by the Nation show that the Triton scandal had all the ingredients that would make it almost impossible to bring Devani to book even if he was extradited to Kenya.

He was not only smart but he had an entry, operation and exit strategy from the time he registered Triton in 2000, eight years before the scandal.

The first thing that forensic auditors noticed was that despite running a multibillion-shilling business that had several subsidiaries, Triton rarely kept records, or they just vanished like the millions of litres of petroleum the company was accused of stealing.

"Our high review of Triton files revealed a lot of information gaps. There appears to have been no filing system, hence making it difficult to identify relevant information," says a confidential forensic audit dubbed Project Bahari done by Price Water House Coopers (PWC), which investigators relied on.

"Most of their documents could not be traced at all, while others had not been properly filed hence making the verification exercise very difficult," states the audit report that we have obtained.

KCB Bank, which also lost billions of shillings as Triton's main financer, also refused to cooperate with auditors, citing client confidentiality. The bank said the matter was already in court at the time.

In the absence of crucial information from the main players and victims of the scandal, the causalities of the scam turned out to be junior officers at Kenya Pipeline Corporation.

That was how the scandal was designed and it began with the registration of Triton with Devani as its executive chairman. At the time of registration, he held 4,999,500 of the total share capital of five million shares. The remaining 500 shares were held by a company called Triton Business Solutions.

Multiply his fortunes

At the time, the petroleum importation and marketing business was controlled by multinationals. The entry of Triton, a local company, was seen as a step in the right direction and Devani - a flamboyant businessman - was just about to multiply his fortunes.

Before that, he had been involved in the running of Triton Bulk Storage, Triton Gas Stations Limited, Triton Service Stations and Triton Network Solutions Limited, which had shares in Triton Petroleum Company Limited. Like all the businessmen who want to hide their wealth, all these businesses owned by Devani had some form of cross ownership with each other.

Apart from being a skilled businessman, Devani was also a shrewd political operator who maximised on the Moi regime's love for Indian businesses. This enabled his companies to continuously win lucrative tenders to supply petroleum products to Kenya Power and Lighting Company for several years until President Moi left office in 2002.

So good were his fortunes that at some point, Devani was the local partner of The Reliance Consortium (led by India's largest private telecom service provider, Reliance Telecoms), which at one point was said to have bid to buy a stake in Telkom Kenya for Sh12 billion.

But in a country where all the richest people are players in either logistics, government tenders or oil importation, it was Triton Petroleum Company Limited that pushed Devani into the big league. Kenya imports about Sh6 billion worth of petroleum products per month through an industry controlled by a few players.

Soon, politicians were scrambling for Devani's attention. So influential was he that a 2006 ceremony to open Triton's LPG depot in Nairobi was attended by then Vice-President Moody Awori and several Cabinet ministers, including Mr Raila Odinga and then-opposition leader Uhuru Kenyatta.

Painful reminder

A widely circulated photo of Devani, Mr Odinga, Mr Kenyatta and Mr Awori toasting to champagne during the event remains a painful reminder of the event, which was organised by a person who would in later years turn out to be the nation's most wanted fugitive. But with such political connections, it was not difficult for Triton to convince KPC to allow it to use its facilities to receive, store, transport and deliver petroleum products that it imported to Kenya.

"The agreement was known as 'Transport and Storage Agreement' (or TSA). It was replaced by a further TSA dated March 2, 2007," reads court papers filed in London in the decade long saga.

The deal was first signed on December 8, 2001 less than a year after Triton Petroleum Limited was formed. With no infrastructure of its own, Triton would for the next four years use KPC facilities to import petroleum which it mostly re-sold to Kenya Power.

Why Kenya Power opted to purchase fuel from a third party supplier instead of directly importing from oil marketers is still an unanswered question. What is clear is that Triton Petroleum Limited did make billions of shillings from this arrangement during the final years of the Moi government.

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With proceeds rolling from such a lucrative arrangement, the Devani family grew its business empire, raking in dozens of properties and companies. Apart from the petroleum business, they also started Shimmers Boutique Limited, Simkan Investments Group, Shimmers Group Limited, Shimmers Investments Limited, Sasha Holdings Limited, Jade Petroleum and Adra International.

Many thought Moi's exit from power in 2002 would dim the Devani empire like it did to other Indian-owned businesses, which controlled the economy during the '80s and '90s. It did not. A skilled tenderpreneur and political operative, Devani waited on the side-lines for his next big chance and it came just two years after President Mwai Kibaki was sworn in.

An improving economy under the National Rainbow Coalition (Narc) government meant a sharp increase in the demand for petroleum products. The Kenya Petroleum Refinery in Mombasa, which was providing 40 per cent of the local demand, was finding it hard to meet the eight million litres of petrol that it was supposed to produce daily.

To address the frequent shortages attributed to inefficiencies at the refinery, the Narc administration decided to shift towards complete importation of refined fuel. While it sorted the issue of availability of fuel, this policy handed oil marketers a free range to push prices up any how they wanted.

This called for the introduction of another policy that would create price controls. This new policy called Open Tender System (OTS) was to enable indigenous oil companies compete for a tender that would allow them to access petroleum products at the same price from the international market. They would then sell the product to other companies.

Devani, who had been waiting on the side-lines as he managed his petrol stations, having lost the Kenya Power tender, finally got his chance. He would orchestrate the biggest petroleum scandal Kenya had ever seen.
A delegate from Somaliland votes during the electoral process to choose Somaliland's representatives to the Upper House of the Federal Parliament in Mogadishu, Somalia, on January 8, 2017.

As the Horn of Africa nation struggles to reach a consensus on this year's general election, the country's controversial clan-based indirect voting system is under scrutiny.

Plans to proceed with Somalia's 2021 general election have fallen into further disarray, as the ongoing power vacuum and divisions between political leaders threaten to steer the country into a protracted political crisis.

President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed's term officially expired on Monday, prompting an alliance of opposition parties to claim it no longer recognized the president, and propose the creation of a national council of lawmakers, opposition leaders and members of civil society to lead the Horn of Africa nation.

Somalia's deadline to hold elections by February 8 was missed after the central government and federal states were unable to break an impasse on how to proceed with the vote.

Further complicating matters is the country's unique electoral system which has long centered around a clan-based model.

The indirect system sees representatives from various clans across the country choose members of parliament.

The chosen lawmakers in both the lower and upper houses then come together to select a president.

The system has been widely criticized by both ordinary citizens and the international community alike. Somalia's last direct popular vote took place in 1969.

Navigating an obstinate system

Particular sticking points of the electoral process deadlock included where the vote would take place, which and how many security forces should be present, who would be appointed to the electoral commission at the federal and state level, and who should oversee the entire process.

Hopes of Somalia hosting a one-person, one-vote ballot were abandoned over political and security issues, meaning this year's election would follow a complex indirect system in which special delegates chosen by Somalia's clan elders would select lawmakers.

Many Somalis believe it is unlikely the country will ever experience a direct-vote election due to the strength and influence of the clan system.

Mogadishu-based university lecturer and political analyst Najib Abdukadir said it is troubling that just a few individuals can decide the future of the Somali people every four years.

"It is not a typical election, but a selection," he told DW.

"We have been using this clan system for many years and the politicians are not willing to move from this system and conduct popular elections. The people of Somalia have the right and want their voices to be heard through one-person one-vote elections."

Gaps in the constitution

Somalia's provisional constitution sets out the legal foundations for the existence of the country, the rights and duties of its citizens and the structure of its government.

Political analyst and Horn of Africa expert Matthew Bryden said there are still three main gaps to be filled in the constitution if Somalia hopes to move forward with political stability.

"One is a review and amendment of the constitution to make it complete, another is to elaborate on the architecture of the federation which is still undefined, and the last is to come up with a new electoral system," he told DW.

Bryden said the current clan-based system does not equally distribute power and influence.

"The system, which is called the 4.5 [formula], gives each of the four major clan groups an equal share in parliament and half a share to minority groups. That sharing also extends to a certain extent throughout the executive and other branches of government."

A new addition to a series of crises

Somalia's electoral and political crisis is emerging from the shadow of a number of other serious problems facing the country, including food shortages, a locust invasion and the ongoing insurgency by the armed Islamist group al-Shabab.

At least 12 security agents were killed be a roadside bomb near the town of Dhusamareb on Sunday, where leaders had gathered to try and resolve the election despite.

Somali Economist Mohamud Ibahim said these issues combined could push Somalia into uncharted territory and undo years of development.

"There are challenges in terms of humanitarian issues and the locust invasion, as well as political unrest in the country," he told DW.

"All of these things could undermine the progress that has been made over the years and that is not good news for the people of Somalia at this time."

However, Ibahim also said that, despite the setbacks, there have been some improvements on several fronts, particularly from an economic standpoint.

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"There have been economic improvements due to security improvements in many parts of the country, including the capital Mogadishu," he explained.

International community pushes for swift resolution

International actors, including the US and the United Nations have warned Somali leaders against holding partial elections or pursuing any other actions that lack a broad consensus. They favor further constructive dialogue until an agreement can be reached.

The European Union on Monday said Somalia's inability to reach a deal regarding the next general election was damaging international community's confidence in the country's political development.

"Any parallel or partial process or an extension of the current mandate of the institutions, which is not technical in nature, would be considered as a severe setback," said EU foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, in a statement.

While the president's term has officially ended, Parliament adopted a resolution in October last year which would allow the sitting president and legislators to remain in place, despite the expiry of their mandate, until successors are elected.
This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.

On Monday, Representative Ron Wright became the first sitting member of Congress to succumb to Covid-19. He died in a hospital in Dallas. He was 67.

He tested positive for Covid-19 soon after returning to his home in Arlington, Texas, after the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, Micah Cavanaugh, his former chief of staff, said. Mr. Cavanaugh added that lung cancer contributed to the death.

Another Republican elected to the House, Luke Letlow, died of Covid-19 in December, days before he was scheduled to take office.
Press Release

February 10, 2021 HONTIVEROS: Postponement of SSS rate hike must not jeopardize maternity, other benefits Senator Risa Hontiveros has sought assurance that the postponement of Social Security System's (SSS) contribution rate hike should not compromise the benefits that workers in the formal economy are currently enjoying. "Sa panahon ngayon, kailangang-kailangan ng bawat manggagawa na may sasalo sa kanila. I understand why we need this measure, but I also want us to be sure that the benefits for the workers in the formal economy will not be jeopardized if the new contribution rates are deferred," she said,l during the period of interpellation on Republic Act No. 11199 or the Social Security Act of 2018. The state-run social insurance program is set to implement its 1 percentage point hike this year, increasing the previous 12% deduction from the members salaries to 13% this year. The proposed amendment, however, seeks to grant power to the president to defer increases in contributions during national emergency or state of calamity. Hontiveros said that while she supports the measure, there must be funding enough to support benefits and loans that may be given to its members, such as the maternity package, as well as the additional P1,000 for social pension for retired members. "Bilang author ng Expanded Maternity Leave Law, gusto kong siguraduhin na hindi masasakripisyo ang makukuhang cash benefit ng mga kababaihang nagdadalang-tao. May assurance din po ba tayo na ang maternity benefits ay patuloy pa ring maibibigay ng SSS?," she asked. "May assurance din ba tayo na matatanggap pa rin ang naunang dagdag na P1000 na pension kahit mayroon tayong ganitong deferment ng bagong rates? Kakayanin din bang matupad ang pangako ng administrasyon sa ating mga pensioners na ang second tranch na P1,000 na pension increase ay maiaabot sa kanila bago matapos ang termino ng Presidente?," Hontiveros added. Hontiveros also highlighted the importance of granting the unemployment cash benefit that will serve as income security for displaced and retrenched employees. "Around 420,000 workers were laid off in 2020. If, say, half of them are entitled to unemployment benefit and another 100,000 eligible members will lose their jobs this 2021, will the SSS be able to pay what is due them? Can they assure that they would have no problem settling claims of this magnitude?" Hontiveros asked. "Iba ang naging projection noong ginagawa pa lang ang Implementing Rules and Regulations ng 2018 SSS Law. Now, a reduction in their projected revenues could really create the fear of a strain on the cash of the SSS, lalo na ngayon at napakaraming nawalan ng trabaho dahil sa pandemya," she added. "I wish to support the bill, because we all know that our workers are facing rising food and transport costs. But our workers and our pensioners also need the SSS today, perhaps more than ever. At the end of the day, dapat matibay ang safety net na sasalo sa mga manggagawa sa panahong ito," she concluded.

Wintertime outbreaks of COVID-19 have been largely driven by whether people adhere to control measures such as mask wearing and social distancing, according to a study published Feb. 8 in Nature Communications by Princeton University researchers. Climate and population immunity are playing smaller roles during the current pandemic phase of the virus, the researchers found.

The researchers -- working in summer 2020 -- ran simulations of a wintertime coronavirus outbreak in New York City to identify key factors that would allow the virus to proliferate. They found that relaxing control measures in the summer months led to an outbreak in the winter regardless of climate factors.

"Our results implied that lax control measures -- and likely fatigue with complying with control measures -- would fuel wintertime outbreaks," said first author Rachel Baker, an associate research scholar in Princeton's High Meadows Environmental Institute (HMEI). Baker and her co-authors are all affiliated with the HMEI Climate Change and Infectious Disease initiative.

Although we have witnessed a substantial number of COVID-19 cases, population-level immunity remains low in many locations. This means that if you roll back enforcement or adherence to control measures, you can still expect a large outbreak. Climate factors including winter weather play a secondary role and certainly don't help." Rachel Baker, Study First Author and Associate Research Scholar, High Meadows Environmental Institute (HMEI), Princeton University

The researchers found that even maintaining rigid control measures through the summer can lead to a wintertime outbreak if climate factors provided enough of a boost to viral transmission. "If summertime controls are holding the transmissibility of coronavirus at a level that only just mitigates an outbreak, then winter climate conditions can push you over the edge," Baker said. "Nonetheless, having effective control measures in place last summer could have limited the winter outbreaks we're now experiencing."

Cases have climbed in many northern hemisphere locations since November. In the United States, spikes in COVID-19 cases are thought to be tied to increased travel and gatherings for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Notably, outbreaks were recorded in temperate locations such as Los Angeles in addition to regions with much colder conditions, Baker said. At the same time, large outbreaks were observed in South Africa from November to January, which are that country's summer months.

"The greater incidence of COVID-19 in various environs really speaks to the climate's limited role at this stage," Baker said.

In May, the same authors published a paper in the journal Science suggesting that local climate variations would be unlikely to affect the coronavirus pandemic. The paper suggested that hopes that the warmer conditions of summer would slow the transmission of the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, in the northern hemisphere were unrealistic.

Gabriel Vecchi, a professor of geosciences and the High Meadows Environmental Institute and co-author of both studies, said that the virus currently spreads too quickly and that people are too susceptible for climate to be a determining factor.

"The influence of climate and weather on infection rates should become more evident -- and thus a potentially useful source of information for disease prediction -- as growing immunity moves the disease into endemic phases from the present epidemic stage," Vecchi said.

The most recent study provides insight on how scientists can determine the impact of various factors on the virus at various times, said co-author C. Jessica Metcalf, associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and public affairs and an HMEI associated faculty member.

"An important challenge that we tackle here is balancing the role of many potential factors on the trajectory of the epidemic," Metcalf said. "As the pandemic progresses, both natural and vaccinal immunity will play an increasing role, underscoring the importance of developing a handle on the landscape of immunity."

Critical factors to consider when projecting the future of COVID-19 are emerging variants of the virus, as well as how efforts to contain coronavirus have changed other diseases, said co-author Bryan Grenfell, the Kathryn Briger and Sarah Fenton Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Public Affairs and associated faculty in HMEI.

In November, Grenfell and his co-authors in the Climate Change and Infectious Disease initiative published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) such as mask wearing and social distancing could result in large, delayed outbreaks of endemic diseases such as influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).

"The interaction between NPIs and immunity will become even more complex as a variety of vaccines are deployed and new viral variants arise," Grenfell said. "Understanding the impact of these variables underlines the importance of immune surveillance and greatly expanded viral sequencing."
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The risk of an entrenched political and security crisis remains high in the Central African Republic following December's contested elections. In this excerpt from our Watch List 2021 for European policy makers, Crisis Group urges the EU and France to press the government and opposition to halt heated rhetoric and nudge the many parties toward talks.

Hopes that the Central African Republic (CAR)'s 27 December 2020 presidential and parliamentary elections could reinforce state authority and provide a basis for political consensus were dashed as a new coalition of armed groups began advancing on the capital Bangui. Turnout was low, partly as a result of insecurity, with only 35 per cent of the country's 1.85 million registered voters casting their ballot in presidential and legislative elections, according to official figures, leading much of the country's political opposition to say the polls lacked credibility. Also due to insecurity, the vote could not be held for roughly 40 per cent of the 140 National Assembly seats up for grabs. Nevertheless, the National Elections Agency on 4 January declared incumbent Faustin Touadera the winner with over 53 per cent of the vote, obviating the requirement for any run-off. The opposition, furious about alleged fraud as well as disenfranchisement, took its complaints to the Constitutional Court, which rejected its call for a rerun, confirming Touadera's victory on 18 January. The largest opposition coalition, COD2020, rejects the court's decision and refuses to recognise Touadera's re-election. Other opposition leaders criticise the court but have passively accepted its decision.

Trouble started in early December when the court rejected the candidacy of former President Francois Bozize, who seized power in a coup in 2003 but was deposed by a coalition of rebels, known as the Seleka, in 2013. The court cited the government's international arrest warrant and UN sanctions against Bozize for alleged assassinations, torture and other crimes. An opportunistic coalition of armed groups, made up of six of the fourteen signatories to a 2019 peace deal comprising ex-Seleka factions as well as "anti-Balaka" militia that had formed to resist the Seleka, then declared its intention to disrupt elections. Bozize later confirmed that he was behind the new grouping. Many fear that he is committed to overthrowing the government. As fighting spread to the Bangui outskirts in late December and early January, the government has relied on assistance from UN peacekeepers and troops deployed from Russia and Rwanda to keep the rebels at bay. Authorities have meanwhile started to arrest opponents and perceived allies of the rebellion.

The Constitutional Court's confirmation of Touadera's victory has done little to cool things down. Both the government and opposition politicians, many of whom had for months prior to the elections been increasingly strident about their ambitions to unseat Touadera, feel aggrieved, reducing the chances of compromise. Yet the parties will have to find some common ground to avoid the outcome of the elections giving birth to an entrenched political and security crisis.

The European Union is deeply engaged in CAR. It provides much humanitarian and development aid. It has a longstanding mission in the country, tasked with training the national army, and a newer civilian mission, formally set up in December 2019, that advises on security sector reform. It is also the largest donor for the elections. The EU, and its member state France, have extensive and longstanding contacts with government and opposition figures, which makes them well placed to nudge the parties toward compromise.

The EU and its member states should consider the following steps:

Pressure government and opposition to cool down the heated rhetoric and desist from violent behaviour. In particular, the EU should seek to persuade the opposition to clearly condemn Francois Bozize's actions, while pressuring the government to rein in abuses by security forces and allied militias against civilians or the government's political opponents.

Nudge the government and political opposition toward talks and help find compromise positions. The talks should ideally be overseen by the African Union (AU) and the regional body Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS), as the latter has already made some attempts to build bridges, but the EU could support any mediation through its diplomatic engagement, and be ready to provide technical support for talks if required. The EU could usefully also eventually support AU-mediated talks with armed groups.

Support the holding of legislative elections for those seats for which no voting took place by making sure funds are available if needed. The EU should advocate for additional time to hold these elections so that mediation efforts have a chance to persuade political parties to support the process, improve security and allow more citizens to vote.

Bozize and Armed Groups Sow Electoral Chaos, Continue Attacking

Tentative hopes elections could improve the lot of CAR's people who have faced nearly a decade of on-off civil war were seemingly dashed in December as violence escalated. With one month to go, election preparations, while far from perfect, had been more or less on track, with 1.85 million citizens registered to vote. But former President Bozize's ambitions to return to power ultimately stirred political tensions until they descended into conflict. Returning from exile in late 2019 despite an arrest warrant against him, he had met with President Touadera, who once served as Bozize's prime minister, in what many diplomats took to be a sign of cordiality between them. His presidential ambitions and opposition to Touadera soon became clear, however. Tensions spiked when on 4 December, the Constitutional Court rejected Bozize's application to contest the presidential election, arguing that he failed the moral person test due to a national arrest warrant and UN sanctions against him.

On 15 December, a new armed coalition emerged that seemed intent on disrupting the vote. The Coalition of Patriots for Change (CPC) criticised what they said were elections that had been poorly prepared while denouncing the lack of implementation of the February 2019 peace agreement, of which they were all signatories. Some of the six members of the CPC were part of the Seleka coalition that overthrew President Bozize in 2013, while others are drawn from the anti-Balaka militia that grew up in reaction to the growing violence. Starting just days before the polls were due to be held, they began taking on the national army and UN forces in several towns in the west and centre of the country. Shortly before the 27 December vote, Bozize confirmed what everyone suspected: that he was behind the opportunistic alliance.

In early January, after election results were announced, rebels continued to attack, finding their way into the outskirts of the heavily defended capital, although this seemed more to demonstrate their disruptive capacity than a serious attempt to capture Bangui and overthrow the government. They were repelled by a combination of UN forces and troops or military advisers flown in from Russia and Rwanda at President Touadera's request.

Electoral Results Marred and Ever Deeper Political Divisions

Election turnout has been badly disrupted by the insecurity. Crowds of enthusiastic voters lining up in Bangui were not matched by those voting in the provinces: nationally, over half of polling stations could not open. The National Elections Authority put the turnout at merely 37 per cent of the 1.85 million registered voters. Elections for National Assembly seats were also significantly disrupted: the vote did not take place for 58 of the 140 seats. The first round of voting delivered results for 21 seats, with five seats going to Touadera's party, while second-round voting is in principle scheduled on 7 February for 61 seats which could not produce a first-round winner. Nothing is yet planned, however, for the 58 empty seats for which no voting took place. On 4 January, the National Elections Agency declared Touadera the winner of the presidential poll with over 53 per cent of the vote, making a second-round run-off unnecessary. Violence did not prevent the Constitutional Court from proclaiming Touadera's victory on 19 January.

The vote has left government and opposition sharply divided. The government is deeply aggrieved at the perceived failure of some opposition leaders to clearly distance themselves from the coup attempt mounted by Bozize. The authorities have arrested civilians and military officers seen as close to Bozize and barred at least one political opponent from leaving the country. Touadera has also called on allies in the region (Rwanda, Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo) and on Russia to back him militarily. He seems in little mood to compromise with an opposition he sees as allied with insurgents. For its part, the opposition argues that electoral preparations were already insufficient long before the new rebellion and that their inability to campaign due to previously prevailing insecurity, along with multiple other irregularities and the low turnout, should invalidate the whole exercise. They are also angry at the increasingly heavy hand used by government security forces and pro-government militias inside Bangui. For them, swearing in a new president in such conditions will do nothing for the country's long-term stability.

Both government and opposition are aggrieved, but it is in their long-term interests to strike a deal. Without one, the country could see a prolonged period of instability. Touadera runs the risk that such a crisis could undermine his second and final term in office, with his agenda possibly blocked by a hostile National Assembly. Meanwhile, opposition politicians risk losing public support if they are seen to be complicit in or condoning any prolonged rebellion by Bozize, which is likely to lead to a heavy loss of civilian life.

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What the EU Should Do

The EU and France, the only member state with an embassy in Bangui, along with African partners should push the opposition to recognise the results of the elections. Building on a joint statement the EU made with the AU, UN and ECCAS on 19 January, and more widely on the technical and financial support it has offered to mediation efforts over the last two years, it should, together with those partners, hold consultations with opposition politicians to persuade them not to condone Bozize's rebellion. The EU should also use its good offices to persuade the government that talks with the opposition are the only way to repair relations. It should offer diplomatic support to the AU, ECCAS and the UN as they seek to repair the damage done to the 2019 agreement and move toward new talks with armed groups. Reducing fighting between the government and those groups is a priority, to facilitate preparations for legislative elections and possibly to pave the way for African actors to convene talks. The EU, working with others, should do what it can to push for a ceasefire.

The EU should also push Touadera to agree to rapidly create the conditions needed for inclusive National Assembly elections, which may include rerunning first-round votes in the constituencies where no vote took place and potentially even, if the parties all agree on the parameters, in those with very low turnouts due to insecurity. Brussels should be ready to finance these polls to bolster the credibility of the overall election. At the same time, the EU should do whatever it can, again working with others, to help persuade Bozize's party to disassociate itself from the actions of the former president and take part in legislative elections, to ensure inclusion of its large constituency in the west of the country. The EU could also offer to work with the government to improve the overall electoral system before the local elections take place at the end of 2021, including on issues related to refugees' voting or the National Elections Agency's perceived lack of neutrality.
According to a press release published on February 10, 2021, BAE Systems has been selected to supply 12 Bofors 40 Mk4 naval guns to the Belgian and Dutch navies as part of the Mine Counter Measures Vessels (MCMV) program.

According to a press release on February 10, 2021, BAE Systems has been selected to supply 12 Bofors 40 Mk4 naval guns to the Belgian and Dutch navies as part of the Mine Counter Measures Vessels (MCMV) program.

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BAE Systems Bofors 40 Mk4 40mm naval gun system (Picture source: BAE Systems)

The shipbuilding company Kership will install the guns on the fleet of 12 mine hunting vessels  six for Belgium, six for the Netherlands  with the first ship scheduled for delivery to the Belgian Navy in 2024.

The Bofors 40 Mk4 is a flexible, highly versatile gun system designed to react quickly in coastal environments. Lightweight and compact, the naval gun system combines long range and a high rate of fire, giving the mine hunting vessels a greater level of defense against surface, air, and shore-based threats.

Offering high survivability and tactical freedom at all levels of conflict, the Bofors 40 Mk4 also provides optimized ammunition types, including the cost-efficient programmable 3P ammunition. The ability to automatically switch between different types of ammunition gives a high level of combat flexibility in the face of new threats such as UAVs.



The Bofors 40 Mk4 naval gun is the latest generation in the 40mm family and is used by numerous navies and coast guards around the world. The system was most recently selected by Finland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.
A Sydney university may hold graduation ceremonies with no families, certificates, or walking across the stage due to coronavirus.

Incensed students comparing the cut-down event to a 'school assembly' that unnecessarily robbed them of a critical moment in their education.

University of NSW sent students an email stating they were 'not yet able to confirm' if regular graduation ceremonies could be held in May.

'We are looking at our options with the current NSW Health Covid restrictions, and we do want to give you the best experience possible,' the email read.

UNSW sent students an email stating they were 'not yet able to confirm' if regular graduation ceremonies could be held in May (stock image of UNSW pictured)

'We are looking at our options with the current NSW Health Covid restrictions, and we do want to give you the best experience possible,' the email read (pictured)

On its website, UNSW promotes a 'vibrant campus experience we enjoyed before Covid-19' for O-Week, which starts in February.

It also encourages all students who are able to attend face-to-face classes to do so amid 24 consecutive days with no Covid cases in NSW.

Despite the lack of cases, the university asked graduates to fill put a survey on whether they would attend the ceremony with such major changes - citing coronavirus as the reason.

Students were asked if they would still attend the ceremony if it meant they could not invite guests, if they were not allowed to cross the stage, and if they did not receive their degree on the day.

NSW has only had one locally-acquired case of coronavirus in the past 24 days since the Sydney outbreak was squashed.

The sole case was a returned Australian who tested positive two days after leaving hotel quarantine and all his contacts have tested negative.

One male student posted the survey, with his answers, in a private Facebook group on Saturday (pictured)

His answers said he would like to attend the ceremony, but not if he couldn't go on stage and collect his degree in front of his friends and family (pictured)

One male student posted the survey, with his answers, in a university Facebook group on Saturday.

'Would you attend your graduation ceremony if we take out the things that make your ceremony memorable,' he wrote.

'Nice survey bro!'

His answers said he would like to attend the ceremony, but not if he couldn't go on stage and collect his degree in front of his friends and family.

Other shocked students commented on the post.

'[The f**k] is getting everyone there but not crossing the stage and getting that certificate?' one woman asked (pictured)

NSW Covid restrictions state that function centres can be filled to a capacity of one person per four square metres, or 75 per cent capacity (stock image)

'[The f**k] is getting everyone there but not crossing the stage and getting that certificate?' one woman asked.

'Gonna hold my own grad at this rate,' another wrote.

'This ain't a graduation, this is a school assembly,' another said.

NSW Covid restrictions state that function centres can be filled to a capacity of one person per four square metres, or 75 per cent capacity.
The support includes help to maritime forces, including the coast guards.

Secretary General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Jens Stoltenberg says the Alliance has increased its military presence in the Black Sea region and is stepping up support of Ukraine there.

"NATO has increased its military presence in the Black Sea region, because we recognise the great strategic importance of this region for all NATO allies but also of course for our close partner, Ukraine," he announced at a joint press conference with Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal in Brussels on February 9, according to an UNIAN correspondent.

Read alsoPM Shmyhal hopes Ukraine will get NATO MAP simultaneously with Georgia

Stoltenberg said that one should understand that the Black Sea is of strategic importance for NATO and the NATO allies, namely the littoral states, Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania, and "two close and highly valued partners" in the region  Ukraine and Georgia.

"At the same time, we have seen a significant Russian buildup in the Black Sea, not least with the illegal annexation of Crimea, and also with more naval presence in the year," he said.

According to him, NATO has increased its presence in the Black Sea region with more naval presence, just over the last few weeks the Alliance had actually three U.S. naval ships deployed in the Black Sea, and also some of them exercising and training with the Ukrainian Navy.

"We have more air policing presence in the air, and also on land with more NATO troops, training, and being active in the region," he said.

"We have a Romanian led Multinational Brigade, based in Craiova, in Romania. And we are also stepping up our support for our partners, Ukraine and Georgia, including with some support, help to their different maritime forces, including the coast guards," he said.

"So, NATO is present in the Black Sea region. We work with Ukraine. And we are constantly looking into the need to adjust our presence there and because we need to make sure that there is no doubt that the Black Sea is something which is not dominated by one country, Russia, but actually, where we see freedom of navigation, and international law applies," he said.

Ukraine-NATO: Previous developments

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in an interview for Axios on the U.S.-based HBO channel that Ukraine wants to be an equal member of NATO. "We are grateful for everything, but Ukraine is not just saying in words that it wants to be an equal member of the Alliance, an equal member of NATO, because this is one of the most important security points  the same security that President [of the United States Joe] Biden is speaking about. How should we further state the desire to accede, if it is enshrined in the Constitution of Ukraine  the movement towards the European Union, European integration, as well as accession to NATO? Therefore, I have a very simple question  why is Ukraine still not in NATO? Putting away these phrases that we will all contemplate and communicate, the first simple question from me would be: 'Mr. President, why are we not in NATO yet?'" he said then.

Zelensky expressed the hope that during Biden's presidency, Ukraine and the United States would enter a new stage of security enhancing relations.

Reporting by UNIAN
(@ChaudhryMAli88)

BUENOS AIRES (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 10th February, 2021) The Ecuadorian authorities will payout a COVID-19-relief sum of $500, five times more than previously planned, to people who lost their jobs in 2020 over the pandemic, media reported, citing the Ministry of Labor.

According to El Universo, in February-March, the government will allocate $286 million to compensateabout 570,000 families for job losses suffered during the pandemic.

Estimates of the number of qualified recipients of the compensation are currently being conducted.
Vietnams Ambassador to India Pham Sanh Chau

Even though the Indian government has already begun its large-scale COVID-19 vaccine campaign, Vietnams Ambassador to India, Pham Sanh Chau, did not have the opportunity to preside over the marriage ceremony for his only daughter.

Sadly, the most memorable thing for Ambassador Chau was the moment when he learnt that 22 officials and staff of the embassies of Vietnam and India, as well as 18 of their relatives, tested positive for the virus after their repatriation. Despite this complication, the ambassador carried on fulfilling his responsibilities as best he could.

Repatriation charity

India reported its first COVID-19 case last January, and the government almost immediately shut down all schools, public services, and subways in the cities, as well as suspended international flights. After coping with the lockdown for three gruelling months, Buddhist nun Huyen Tam decided to return to Vietnam.

As with Tam, the pandemic moved tens of thousands of overseas Vietnamese to try to return to their home country, but only a handful of flights were available as the Vietnamese government decided to close borders and adopt social distancing measures. Later, the government allowed some citizens from India to return home, on a registration and selection basis.

Several other monks and nuns who came earlier to India from Buddhist temples and institutes across Vietnam could not afford the tickets to return, leaving them to rely on good will rather than money. One of them was reported to have only VND1.5 million ($65) in his pocket, as well as another $50 from a loving supporter.

With tickets to Vietnam costing up to $1,000, many were forced to pinch every penny if they decided to return home. Fares for flights operated by the embassy continue to fluctuate, depending on the number of passengers, leaving many stranded and desperate.

The pandemic is bad, no question, but there is one good thing I can take from it, said Ambassador Chau. It helped me to better grasp the picture of Vietnamese living in India, or more precisely, being neglected in India.

The ambassador referred to the stark difference in the lives of Vietnamese in India compared to other communities like in France or Belgium, where he used to work before. It is also very different from the Vietnamese community in Eastern Europe, which Chau also knows quite well as his sister and nephew are living there.

The ambassador and his colleagues at the embassy witnessed the concerns of Vietnamese in extremely difficult circumstances. If they stay in India, they will have no jobs, no accommodation, and no food as India has just been hit by a fourth wave of infections, with an average of 5,000 people being tested positive each day.

Although Ambassador Chau can look back on nearly 40 years of diplomatic work in foreign countries, he said he had probably never been more associated with consular work and citizen protection than now as he feels personally responsible for the fates of many.

The ambassador decided to organise a small charity within the diplomatic missions in India to gather enough money for 15 domestic and five international plane tickets, as well as offset part of the airfare for an additional 15 tickets to support some of the people who have been desperately wanting to return home.

Chau recalled, On the first day of the repatriation, Vietnam Airlines sold 300 tickets to special customers who needed to return home according to a list approved by the government.

The embassy requested authorisation for more people to return and received permission to sell an additional 30 tickets, with the last 14 meant for a delegation returning from Nepal to Vietnam, under the condition that India would issue last-minute transits for these people.

However, despite the efforts of the ambassador and the Vietnamese embassy in India, difficulties abounded. With only two days before take-off, the embassy was still waiting for permission for the plane to fly through the airspace of Myanmar and Bangladesh. Meanwhile, the embassy had signed a contract to lease three domestic flights from local low-cost airline IndiGo but had yet to receive permission from the Indian authorities to proceed with these flights.

The repatriation from India amid the pandemic was a particularly complicated journey, involving around 340 people who travelled tens of thousands of kilometres across 15 states with 66 cars and three special jets to reach their final destination, the New Delhi airport. On the afternoon of May 19, 2020, they touched down in Vietnam, where the pandemic was largely under control to restart their lives.

According to Nguyen Quang Thieu, chairman of the Vietnam Writers Association, people in the country sympathise with the difficulties of Vietnamese in pandemic-stricken areas who are trying to return home. When I read ambassador Chaus notes, I realised the complexity and scope of this wonderful rescue, which he now calls repatriation charity.

To Thieu, phone calls and urgent letters from Vietnamese people stuck abroad are cries for help. Pham Sanh Chau responded to those calls, and he and his employees showed great sympathy and strong will with their responsibility, Thieu said.

Since the pandemic took hold, Vietnam has worked to repatriate nationals who were living, working, and travelling in other countries. Photo: Le Toan

Sticking together

India became the third-largest pandemic region in the world at the beginning of last July, with nearly 700,000 cases, while it was gradually loosening a strict blockade that was enforced at the end of March.

The number of infections has since then risen to more than 10.5 million. Since the first case last January, India has recorded over 150,000 casualties related to COVID-19. Meanwhile, Vietnam managed to keep recorded infections at a little over 1,770, with merely 35 casualties.

As 40 people within and related to the Vietnamese Embassy in India tested positive for COVID-19, the ambassador said he would take full responsibility as he was unable to protect his employees, despite intense efforts during the first seven months of the pandemic.

There was a time when the ambassador thought that it was possible to guide the embassy through the pandemic uscathed. This was not possible as India became the largest pandemic hub in the world for a while, and its government and people could no longer pay attention to preventing the pandemic but were focused on fighting it instead.

The embassy activated its emergency protocol to support officials and employees. A lot of work had to be done, both for the people to recover and for managing the general affairs of the embassy. These hardshiups brought us closer to each other. We have tried everything to keep up the good spirit and avoid the scythe of death, said Chau, adding that afterwards, he understood the value of life and human love much more.

On January 16, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the start of the worlds largest campaign for COVID-19 vaccination, with the first two vaccines produced in the country, while at the same time increasing screening and testing.
Several of the former presidents advisers and associates said they cringed at the performance by Mr. Castor, a former prosecutor from Pennsylvania who spoke first after the House Democratic managers presented their impeachment case using graphic videos of the Jan. 6 attack, delivering a meandering defense.

An adviser to Mr. Trump, speaking on background as the lawyer was making his defense, insisted that Mr. Castor had always planned to try to reduce the temperature in the chamber because the former president and his aides anticipated an emotional presentation by the Democrats.

But Mr. Castor undercut that by declaring at the outset that he and Mr. Schoen had switched their presentation order because the Democrats case had been so good.

That one of his own lawyers praised the prosecutors surprised and infuriated Mr. Trump, people familiar with his reaction said. And other Trump allies said privately that some members of the legal team seemed surprised by the raw clips from the riot that the Democrats showed, even though the House managers had signaled for days that was their plan.

Mr. Schoen presented a more forceful argument, with the type of intensity that Mr. Trump prefers. Mr. Schoen, who is based in Atlanta, argued that the trial itself was unconstitutional because the former president is no longer in office, and that the effort sought to undermine Mr. Trumps First Amendment rights.

But even with his acquittal all but certain, Mr. Trump was far from satisfied with the arguments made on his behalf.

The presidents advisers distributed more pointed talking points in the morning and the afternoon, excoriating Democrats later in the day for opening the case exactly as we all expected them to: by glorifying violence and intentionally misleading on the Constitution.
Democrats, led by Raskin, promised compelling video footage of the events of Jan. 6, and they delivered.

In a 13-minute video of scenes from the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, the lead House impeachment manager, Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland presented a graphic visual record of the attack, including rioters explicit language and rally cries, as well as clips of Mr. Trumps comments during the day  like his speech to supporters before some of them stormed the Capitol and a Twitter post, hours after the attacks, in which he wrote, Remember this day forever.

The scenes of chaos in the video showed a mob of protesters violently pushing past security barricades, and footage from inside the building included an officer screaming as he was being crushed by a door. The footage delivered different vantage points from that day than what many of the senators experienced firsthand, as they were rushed out of the very same Senate chamber in shock and fear.

The expected outcome of this Senate trial is the same as Mr. Trumps first.

The Democrats would need 17 Republicans to break with the former president and vote with them to have the two-thirds necessary to convict Mr. Trump. If the six Republican senators who voted with Democrats on Tuesday also vote to convict Mr. Trump, Democrats would still need the support of 11 more Republicans to secure a conviction.

Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, is a witness, a juror and the judge.

As the longest serving Democrat in the Senate, Mr. Leahy, 80, is the presiding officer in the Senates trial of Mr. Trump. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Vice President Kamala Harris declined to assume the role, and because the Constitution does not stipulate who should oversee the trial of a former president, it fell to Mr. Leahy, giving him the authority to rule on key questions like what evidence is admissible.
While various researches are ongoing to investigate the origin and transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in China, a new study has warned that SARS-CoV-2-related coronaviruses (SC2r-CoVs) are circulating in animals such as bats and pangolins as far away as Thailand and are likely in other parts of Southeast Asia.

The research holds significance for India and neighbouring countries since Southeast Asia with its large and diverse bat populations may be a more likely hotspot for such viruses. As the covid-19 pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2 has already claimed over 1.6 lakh lives and sickened more than 1.8 crores persons in India, the country had recently brushed with viruses in bats such as Nipah Virus in Kerala.

Also Read | Inside the third front of the farm agitation

This study led by scientists from Duke-NUS Medical School, Singapore, and Chulalongkorn University, Thailand, and published in Nature Communications, reported that high levels of neutralizing antibodies against the virus were present in both bats and pangolins found in the Southeast Asian country. The study further indicates that more SC2r-CoVs are likely to be discovered in the region.

"This is an important discovery in the search for the origin of SARS-CoV-2, which was made possible by rapid application of cutting-edge technology through transparent international collaboration," said Dr Supaporn Wacharapluesadee, from Thai Red Cross Emerging Infectious Diseases Health Science Centre, Faculty of Medicine, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok Thailand.

In the study, the team examined Rhinolophus bats in a Thai cave. SARS-CoV-2 neutralizing antibodies were detected in bats of the same colony and in a pangolin at a wildlife checkpoint in Southern Thailand.

"Our study extended the geographic distribution of genetically diverse SARS-CoV-2-related coronaviruses from Japan and China to Thailand over a 4,800-km range. Cross-border surveillance is urgently needed to find the immediate progenitor virus of SARS-CoV-2," said Dr Chee Wah Tan, senior research fellow with Duke-NUS' Emerging Infectious Diseases (EID) programme and co-author of this study. The team conducted serological investigations using the SARS-CoV-2 surrogate virus neutralization test (sVNT) developed at Duke-NUS in early 2020.

"Our study demonstrates that our SARS-CoV-2 surrogate virus neutralisation test, developed mainly for determining neutralising antibodies in humans to monitor vaccine efficacy and detect past infections, can also be critical for tracing the animal origin and animal-human spill over events," said Professor Wang Linfa from Duke-NUS' EID programme and corresponding author of this study.

Prof Wang's team invented the sVNT assay, trade named cPass, which has been granted Emergency Use Authorisation by the US FDA to determine SARS-CoV-2-neutralising antibodies in human sera, due to its good performance concordance with live virus-based assays.

"Studies like this are crucial in furthering our understanding of the many SARS-CoV-2-related viruses that exist in the wild. This work is also timely as investigations into the origins of SARS-CoV-2 are ongoing and may provide further leads on the origin of this outbreak. Such studies also play a key role in helping us be better prepared against future pandemics as they provide a more detailed map of zoonotic threats, " said Professor Patrick Casey, Senior Vice Dean for Research at Duke-NUS.

On 19 May 2018, a Nipah virus disease (NiV) outbreak was reported from Kozhikode district of Kerala, India. This is the first NiV outbreak in South India. There have been 17 deaths and 18 confirmed cases as of 1 June 2018. The two affected districts are Kozhikode and Mallapuram. The virus normally circulates among specific types of fruit bats. It can both spread between people and from other animals to people. Spread typically requires direct contact with an infected source.

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Demonstrators in Yangon took their protest to the gates of foreign embassies on Wednesday to beg international pressure against last week's seizure of power by the military. Outside the Japanese embassy a small group held signs and chanted "we want democracy, we get dictators!"

They sat in a series of children's inflatable paddling pools, with a maximum of three per pool. It appeared to be a tongue-in-cheek way of showing they were complying with an emergency law, covering Yangon and other areas, that makes a gathering of five or more people illegal.

Protesters also thronged the streets in central Yangon, marching and waving flags of Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD). In recent days the new military government has stepped up action to back its authority. On Tuesday it used water cannon in several cities and shots were fired in the capital Naypyitaw. The NLD said on Tuesday night that their Yangon headquarters was raided by the army, who took away computers and documents.

(Disclaimer: This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed; only the image & headline may have been reworked by www.republicworld.com)


Manama, Feb 10 (UNI) Bahrain approved Russia's Sputnik V Covid-19 vaccine for use in the country under the emergency procedure, the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) said on Wednesday.

"The Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF, Russias sovereign wealth fund) announces the approval of the Russian Sputnik V vaccine against coronavirus by the National Health Regulatory Authority (NHRA) of the Kingdom of Bahrain.

The vaccine was approved under the emergency use authorization procedure without additional clinical trials in the country," the RDIF said in a press release.

Bahrain is the 24th country to have registered Sputnik V.

UNI XC-GNK

On Monday, February 8, a press conference hosted by Pinellas County, Florida, sheriff Bob Gualtieri dropped an industrial cybersecurity bombshell that reverberated worldwide. Gualtieri, along with the mayor and city manager of Oldsmar (population 15,000), revealed that a hacker had infiltrated the Oldsmar water treatment system to change the citys water supply levels of sodium hydroxide from 100 parts per million to 11,100 parts per million. Sodium hydroxide, also called lye, is a highly caustic chemical that is a key ingredient in liquid drain cleaners.

The hackers gained unauthorized access to an internal industrial control system (ICS), likely using stolen or lost credentials, via TeamViewer, a remote desktop application that allows users to log into systems from afar, a ubiquity across many organizations during the COVID-19 crisis. Gualtieri and the city officials offered only a few other details of the disturbing breach.

The attacker was caught in the act by a water utility employee who happened to see the cursor moving on the screen executing commands which were discovered hours later to be the malicious chemical composition changes. When the changes were discovered, the sodium hydroxide levels were restored to their original levels and no harm was done to the water supply. System checks and redundancies would have caught the deadly changes anyway, the officials maintained.

No one has yet determined whether the hacker was domestic or originated outside the United States. The FBI and the Secret Service are working on an investigation.

Attacker likely not a nation-state

As much as this hack resembles a similar incident last May in which Iranian state threat actors attempted to alter chlorine levels in a major attempted cyberattack against the Israeli water infrastructure, ICS cybersecurity experts say that the Oldsmar attack looks to be an amateur operation thats likely a crime of opportunity.

This incident did not seem to include any characteristics that indicate thorough planning and did not show the level of complexity we often observe from sophisticated actors such as nation-state sponsored groups, Daniel Kapellmann Zafra, manager of analysis, Mandiant Threat Intelligence, tells CSO. The attacker seemingly used a fairly common technique, accessing an internet-exposed human-machine interface (HMI), and performed modifications on the process that were unlikely to remain unnoticed.

Lesley Carhart, principal threat analyst at industrial cybersecurity company Dragos, agrees. They wanted to do something bad to that water utility, but they did something so drastic, she tells CSO. It probably would have gotten rapidly picked up. Smart state-style adversaries don't make mistakes like that. They don't want to get caught right away. It feels like a low-tier adversary who was either poking at something that looked like fun, or they just didn't have a lot of aptitude in launching cyberattacks.

A nation-state probably would have taken out some of the monitors, Matt Lampe, former CIO for Los Angeles Water and Power and now a partner in critical infrastructure cybersecurity advisory firm Fortium Partners, tells CSO. If you think about it, Stuxnet was so effective, not only because it took over the machines, but it also took over the monitors. A more sophisticated attacker would have gone after some of those sensors, like the pH sensors, and made sure that they could show that those signals were normal, even though the pH changed radically,

TeamViewer may have been a necessary evil

Many cybersecurity experts believe that the Oldsmar utilitys use of TeamViewer is a poor choice but perhaps a necessary evil. Clearly, clearly the cybersecurity on that system was terrible. TeamViewer has years of acknowledgment of being a fairly insecure application. And it's been known to be used as an attack surface multiple times, Lampe said.

Carhart defends the choice of TeamViewer given its low cost and usefulness, an important factor for cash-strapped water utilities. They're doing things like using TeamViewer because they have no money and no people. It's not because they don't care about cybersecurity. It's because there's a pandemic going on and they have to have remote access.

Ensuring that water utilities have enough funds to operate their systems with the latest and most secure technologies is a perpetual balancing act, according to Commissioner Maria S. Bocanegra of the Illinois Commerce Commission and Chair of the Water Committee at the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners. From the regulatory standpoint, we're constantly asking ourselves who pays for those upgrades and how can we ensure that folks have access to safe, reliable drinking water but making sure that it's affordable, she says.

Questions of scope and time frame need answers

In the meantime, the Oldsmar utility should be searching for answers to some basic questions in the aftermath of the attack. What was the scope of what they did? What did they tamper with? Was this a momentary thing, or have they been there for weeks? Those are the kind of questions that they need to have answered immediately because that kind of scoping things down is going to help them identify how much remediation they need to do now, Carhart says.

Mandiants Zafra echoes her assessment and says that the utility should search for other vulnerabilities, too. The first step should be to identify any other assets that the organization has exposed to the internet and remove them from public networks or implement alternative mitigations to account for similar attacks in the future. In fact, all water utilities should routinely use scanners to identify internet-connected assets within their organizations, Zafra says. In the case they have to expose these assets to external networks, they should prioritize hardening externally facing systems and securing remote access methods with configurations that use multi-factor authentication.

Water utilities need security assessments and training

To posture themselves more securely for the future, water utilities, which are mostly small and lacking in cybersecurity expertise, should pull in outside experts for overall security assessments that help spot internet exposures and other cybersecurity vulnerabilities. I think a lot of these things can be significantly improved at a relatively low cost, Lampe says. You just need to have somebody take a look at it and say, these are some things you could do to improve your risk posture significantly.

We need to ensure that our people are fully trained and ready to identify and prevent or remediate stuff like this when it does happen, Illinois Bocanegra says.

Michael Arceneaux, Managing Director of the Water Information Sharing and Analysis Center (WaterISAC), also stresses training importance. There needs to be more security training across the sector, not just for those who get to fly to a conference, he tells CSO.

WaterISACs Cybersecurity Analyst Jennifer Lyn Walker hopes the Oldsmar incident motivates water utilities to seek out training, including freely available training from DHSs Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

CISA is stretched thin, Arceneaux says, and is staffed to conduct only a handful of trainings every year. They do a wonderful job, and we appreciate them very much, but it would be great if Congress gave them a lot more money.
PONTOISE, France  In the town of Pontoise, which gently slopes upward from the Oise River about 15 miles northwest of Paris, Mayor Stephanie Von Euw is laser-focused on her new vaccination center  a blocky, sand-colored recreational facility where up to 450 shots are administered daily to those over 75 or otherwise at high risk.

Ms. Von Euw was energetic on a recent visit, chatting with doctors and vaccine recipients. But here in Pontoise, as in many other parts of France, there is no hiding that a winter of pandemic doldrums has set in.

To keep my chin up, I try to follow this rule: I take one day at a time, Ms. Von Euw said across a table covered with chocolate boxes left by recent vaccine recipients. If I look to the future, I lose myself.
A controversial plan put forward by an Egyptian member of parliament to round up street children and place them in training and rehabilitation camps overseen by retired army officers has alarmed children's rights advocates.

"The phenomenon of street children is a serious challenge that, if left unchecked, can become a ticking time bomb," lawmaker Ayat El Haddad warned during a parliamentary hearing with Minister of Social Solidarity Nevine Kabbaj in early February.

El Haddad's idea of placing street children in rehabilitation camps was inspired by a similar initiative undertaken by Mohamed Ali (considered the founder of modern Egypt) two centuries ago. The Albanian Ottoman governor, who ruled the country from 1805 to 1848, reportedly gathered some 300,000 street children and placed them in a desert camp in the south of the country where they were trained by master craftsmen.

"The proposed camp would not only help build the capacities of street children, it would also deepen their sense of belonging in their communities, helping counter the threat they pose to society," she said.

El Haddad also suggested that the camp be managed by retired army officers and that the (older) children be recruited into the army. "We ought to make use of the extraordinary capabilities these children have such as their ability to tolerate cold weather."

Some activists on social media were dismayed by the comments, viewing them as intolerant; skeptics expressed doubt that street children would learn anything "in such institutions." Others welcomed El Haddad's remarks, agreeing that street children represent a real danger to society.

The negative perception of some Egyptians toward street children stems from the children's stigmatization by the media, which often portrays them as "criminals" and "thugs." While it is not uncommon for these minors to engage in petty theft, street brawls and substance abuse, some children's rights advocates argue that the homeless children living on the streets are, in fact, victims of "a collective failure by society."

Manal Shaheen, a child development consultant and former Child Helpline director at the National Council for Childhood and Motherhood, dismissed the lawmaker's idea as "outrageous."

"To understand the real needs of street children, we must first determine what the term means," she told Al-Monitor. "Some of the children we see on the streets are working children who earn a livelihood selling Kleenex or other items to help sustain their families; they return home at the end of each day."

"Others are migrants from rural communities who believe they can earn some money doing odd jobs in cities like Cairo and Alexandria; they return to their rural villages at the end of the week," she said. "Street children are in fact, the homeless children who have made the street their home and who are without adequate protection and aren't supervised by responsible adults."

Iman Bibars, a co-founder and chairperson of the Association for the Development and Enhancement of Women, an Egyptian nongovernmental organization providing credit and legal aid to impoverished women also rejected the legislator's idea, describing it as "tantamount to putting homeless children in prison and treating them as villains and criminals when they are in fact, vulnerable victims."

Data on street children is scanty and the exact number of children that have made the street their home is unknown. The 2014 Population Council survey puts the total number of street children at 16,000 but that figure has been disputed by the United Nations Children's Fund, or UNICEF, which insists the actual numbers are much higher.

Bibars told Al-Monitor that through her work over the years, she has found that children from large underprivileged families often leave home to earn a living on the streets. "Others are from broken families or leave home to escape violence at the hands of abusive parents or a stepparent."

Those children often wake up to the harsh reality that life on the streets is even tougher as it subjects them to exploitation and violence, sometimes at the hands of police whose duty is to protect them. "The minors also experience violence at the hands of ordinary citizens and other street children; they often succumb to peer pressure, learning street behavior and survival tactics from each other," Bibars said.

Although Egypt's Child Law No. 176 of 2008 includes provisions that require the state to be responsible for the welfare of children and ensure their protection from all forms of discrimination and violence, "There remains a vast gap between the existing legislation and the reality on the ground for street children," Shaheen lamented.

The government has in recent years stepped up efforts to protect children at risk, including street children. "The overall approach of the government focuses on reducing the risk factors that are known to trigger children leaving their homes," said Jonathan Crickx, the chief of communication at UNICEF Egypt. "This is done by strengthening child protection systems and expanding anti-poverty and social protection interventions such as the national cash transfer program Takaful and Karama," he told Al-Monitor.

Initiatives undertaken by the Ministry of Social Solidarity to address the needs of vulnerable children include the "Children Without Shelter" program, which is being carried out in collaboration with Long Live Egypt (Tahya Misr Fund) and civil society organizations such as Caritas. The program entails dispatching mobile vans to areas where there are large numbers of street children in governorates such as Qalyubia, Cairo and Alexandria. First aid kits are distributed among the homeless minors, who are trained to use the kits to deal with minor accidents and injuries, according to Maged Zaki, a project manager with Caritas.

Ministry representatives also try to collect official documents such as birth certificates without which the homeless children are unable to seek refuge in shelters. A ministry source who spoke to Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to speak to the press said most street children have no documents as they hail from second- or third-generation homeless families.

"We try to help the children transition from street life to full integration into a supportive family system  be it their own family, the extended family or an alternative family; we do this by helping them give up the habits and attitudes they have picked up while living on the streets, including violence and by settling family disputes so that the homeless child may return home," Zaki said.

He continued, "We deal with the children case by case through case management units that seek to identify the reason why the child left home before providing him or her with tailor-made services that fit their needs, be it psychological, medical or social support, to help the child eventually reunite with his/her family."

The rehabilitation process may take from six months to two years to complete during which time the children, many of whom are school dropouts, may be persuaded to return to school. If that is not possible, they attend literacy classes or are sent to community schools in their districts, according to Zaki. These one-classroom schools target out-of-school children (especially girls) in deprived areas and use interactive learning techniques to teach children essential life skills.

The Child Helpline launched by the National Council for Childhood and Motherhood in 2005 enables children to file complaints and seek help if threatened with violence or abuse. According to Zaki, whose organization is collaborating with the council on operating the Child Helpline in four governorates (Cairo, Giza, Assiut and Minya), many of the complaints come from witnesses who report incidents of violence, including sexual assault or abuse of children living on the streets.

Shaheen said that one the council staff receive a complaint, "They immediately reach out to the child, who very often is traumatized." said Shaheen. She said that the "children cannot be forced to move into shelters," the council connects them with nongovernmental organizations "such as the Hope Village Society and Ana El Masry that can help them recover from their traumas."

The Ministry of Social Solidarity continues to follow up on the cases even after the homeless child has been reunited with his/her family, offering financial support to those families to ensure the child's safety and well-being,

UNICEF is collaborating with the ministry to activate child protection committees (whose formation was mandated by the 2008 Child Law), which Crickx said "play an important role as a child protection network." He added, "We are also enhancing the capacity of social workers," a move hailed by Shaheen as crucial in addressing the needs of vulnerable children.:.

"Many of the existing shelters lack experienced, well-trained staff and this may drive some children back on the street, leaving us where we started, she lamented.

New Delhi, Feb 10 : Downplaying the outburst of a group of BJP leaders, considered loyalists of former Rajasthan chief minister Vasundhara Raje, Rajasthan BJP chief Satish Poonia told IANS that the party's performance has improved in local bodies polls despite being in the opposition ranks.

In a joint statement yesterday, Chhabra MLA Pratap Singh Singhvi and others said that the state organisation, on the behest of a individual has worked for decimating the BJP in its stronghold in recent civic polls and if the situation remains the same, then no force can save the party's boat from sinking.

Singhvi is considered close to Raje.

Poonia stated that it was a political statement made by followers of a leader with no ground level support. "It is an emotional outburst of followers of a leader. There is nothing which shows the party has been weakened after the civic polls result," he said.

Poonia said that people generally vote for the party in power in the state during local body polls and despite that the Congress is able to win only 50 seats more than BJP. "Congress won 1,190 civic wards, while BJP won 1,146. This shows that BJP has performed well but due to their management and support from independent Congress may come in power in several local bodies," he said.

He stated that Congress won only 19 local bodies out of 90 and the rest are managed with the help of independents.

"We won 39 local bodies being in opposition but Congress won only 25 local bodies when they were in opposition. When the BJP government was in power, we won 60 local bodies and Congress has managed only to win 48 local bodies with the help of independents. We have performed better than the Congress in both situations," Poonia said.

Referring to the statement by Raje loyalists, the BJP Rajasthan chief said that he came to know about it through the media and the group did not approach him with their concerns.

"They have raised their concerns at a party platform instead of in the media. Whatever they are saying will be discussed. Party will analyse the poll results," he said.A Denying allegations of ignoring Raje in civic polls, Poonia said that the national leader (Raje, party national vice president) never participate in the local polls.

Poonia said that there are many reasons for the defeat in civic polls and it will be analysed. "We will work to overcome the shortcomings," Poonia said.

Singhvi, however, said that it will be difficult for party to win next assembly polls by ignoring Raje. "She (Raje) is the most popular leader of our party and people. It will be impossible to return to power without her. The state unit must rally behind her," Singhvi said.

There are reports of a growing rift between Raje loyalists and the state leadership. Last month in a meeting in the national capital, Raje was not invited in which top leadership of Rajasthan BJP participated. Last week, Raje met Union Home Minister Amit Shah in the Delhi.
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I began my career as a family physician in Buffalo, MN in 2002. I have been an extremely productive doctor for 20 years. For context, I can assure the reader that my ratings and reviews are excellent, and I speak to the common primary care experience. I was a very green attending when I showed up in Buffalo for my first attending job. I experienced universally superb physicians with excellent mentorship and caring staff who went the extra mile for patients. I also now work at a different organization. It is full of fair-minded leaders who participate in whole-person care and emphasize quality. It is not a malignant organization in any form. So why are people being gunned down in clinic lobbies? I can tell you what got us to this point.

1. Lets talk about controlled substances. They are bad. We get it. Full agreement. Road to nowhere. Get everybody off. Great idea. But now what? Is there a plan? Chemical dependency programs are prohibitively expensive. The people who need them dont have the insurance or money to cover them. Consequently, primary care physicians are left on the front lines alone to wean people off medications that they have been on for years which we often did not prescribe in the first place. And we offer what instead? NSAIDs? Acupuncture? We dont provide any great cost-effective alternatives. Integrative medicine is a powerful and awesome completely non covered option. So, unless you are exceptional at communication and have a really reasonable patient base, there are endless stressful encounters happening in offices. We now have a lot of angry people in pain and nothing good to offer them. I can see that not ending well.

2. Lets talk about mental health. Where is it? I cant find it outside of an e-consult. I have multiple teenagers right now that I cannot even get into a psychiatrist. I spend sleepless nights hoping that they dont get suicidal. Patients that are on medical assistance? The private psychiatrists wont touch them. So here I am again  doing my best with limited resources and no specialty help. The coverage for psychology and therapy is better but not fantastic. Add to the mix a global pandemic, during the winter in the Midwest, and throw in social isolation with job loss. Lets keep the kids home from school too. Why not add an attack on the capital and general rioting through the summer. We just got ourselves a lot of people at the breaking point. When people are hopeless, they typically pick from two choices. Self-harm versus harm to others. A gun can get you either or both. And those seem awfully abundant in the U.S. right now. Add in a president who incites a riot with no accountability and deep political divide. I am fairly surprised this scenario is not happening more often.

3. Yes, you do work at Burger King. It is not McDonalds because their fries are better. People want what they want, and they want it now. With a smile please. And they usually get it. Because if they dont get it, they might leave a nasty review about you that impacts your pay or reputation. Here is the truth. It hurts us when our neighbors and friends can see a terrible review about us on social media that was likely left by a patient whom we refused to provide narcotics. This is made worse because we do not have the ability to refute bad reviews that last forever on social media. It makes a provider think twice before saying no. Is that good medicine? No. Patient reviews need to go. There are other measurement tools we can utilize to make us accountable. This isnt it.

4. Welcome to medical messaging. As a patient, I can now demand immediate care for free. Just watch. I send a message to my family physician and tell her or him what is wrong with me and what I need. I then demand the labs or prescription that I want and dictate my care. I may have gotten that information from a friend or google or my aunt who is in health care. What! I need to make an appointment! But I know what I need because I know my body. Why would I pay for an assessment when I can demand care for free? We have set quite a precedent for patient satisfaction and demand culture. It is also way easier to send an abusive message than tell me to my face. It is not easier to read it, though. Where is the line drawn? What is reasonable care?

I fear this is just the beginning for health care.

The author is an anonymous physician.

Image credit: Shutterstock.com
Three socio-political groups, The Nigeria Project Initiative (TNPI), Initiative to Save Democracy (ISD) and Global Economic Policy Initiative (GEPI), have replied Governor Samuel Ortom of Benue State over his allegation that President Muhammadu Buhari is "lenient" with criminal herdsmen.

In a statement issued on Tuesday and jointly signed by the chairmen of the groups, Mohammed Salihu (TNPI), Akinloye James (ISD) and Chief Bernard Okri (GEPI), they said Governor Ortom "is the problem and not President Buhari."

They further said contrary to the wrong assertion of the governor, President Buhari remained a patriotic, nationalistic and fair-minded leader always ready to defend the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, adding that he remained a leader committed to the defence of the rights of all citizens, majority and minority, including ethnic and religious minorities; meting out justice without fear or favour when crimes were committed.

The statement further read: "Governor Ortom is himself a witness to this when Benue State suffered attacks by criminal herdsmen and bandits. President Buhari travelled to Makurdi, addressed communities, offered sympathy and support and ordered law enforcement agencies to take action against the criminals.

"Governor Ortom needs to do better in addressing issues of violence between farmers and herds; he must do better on the issues of violence against women, extra-judicial killing and the mayhem. The governor needs to be more responsive to the feelings and yearnings of his people.

"A governor who collects monthly subventions from the centre, collects bailout funds from Buhari as do many other governors, but fails to pay workers and pensioners should look at himself in the mirror to determine where his problems lie.

"It is cheap and sensational to blame President Buhari for the ills of his government and the state; for the truth is that Ortom is Ortom's problem, not anyone else."
The UK government has refused calls to end arms sales to Saudi Arabia and bring its policy towards the Gulf Kingdom in line with its major ally, the US, Middle East Monitor reported.

In one of his many policy reversals from the Trump era, the new administration of President Joe Biden suspended arms sales to Riyadh and the United Arab Emirates due to concerns over human rights abuse and alleged war crimes in Yemen.

Speaking in the Commons, Tobias Ellwood, the Conservative chair of the defense committee, urged the UK "to align itself fully with its closest security ally and end similar arms exports connected to the war  The US reset is very much to be welcomed and poses our first big test as to what global Britain means in practice." Ellwood said that the US suspension of arms sales was necessary to create the conditions for peace talks.

Rejecting calls to end arms sales to Riyadh UK Foreign Office minister, James Cleverly said: "The decisions the US takes on matters of arms sales are decisions for the US. The UK takes its own arms export responsibilities very seriously, and we continue to assess all arms export licenses in accordance with strict licensing criteria." Cleverly argued that British arms sales licenses were issued with great care to ensure they did not lead to any breach of humanitarian law.

Between 2010 and 2019, 40 per cent of UK arms exports went to Saudi Arabia. According to the UK-based rights group Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) 11 billion ($15.5 billion) worth of arms has been sold by the UK to Riyadh since 2008. The largest increase in arms export was in 2015 at the start of the Saudi-led campaign in Yemen.

The devastating humanitarian consequences of the war prompted questions about Britain's role in what the UN has described as the worst humanitarian crisis since the Second World War. Insisting that arms sales to the Gulf states were illegal in light of evidence that the UK made weapons were being used to carry out alleged war crimes, campaign groups challenged the Tory government in court. In 2019, a court ruled that UK arms exports to Saudi Arabia were indeed unlawful, prompting the government to tighten its export license to the Gulf states.
New Delhi, Feb 10 : Delhi Police Special Cell has arrested Ikbal Singh, a wanted in the Red Fort Republic Day case, from Hoshiarpur in Punjab.

Singh carrying a bounty of Rs 50,000 on his head, was arrest on Tuesday night. It comes a day after key accused Deep Sidhu's arrest, who has been sent on a seven-day police custody.

Foty-five-year-old Singh hails from Ludhiana. He along with sidhu and others were part of the R-Day tractor rally that breached course and created ruckus in the national capital. His videos went viral on social media where he was purportedly heard threatening cops on duty and inciting protesters to go on a rampage.

Following the rampage, the Delhi Police announced cash reward of Rs 1 lakh each on Deep Sidhu, Jugraj Singh, Gurjot Singh and Gurjant Singh; and Rs 50,000 each on Jajbir Singh, Buta Singh, Sukhdev Singh and Iqbal Singh for their alleged involvement in the violence that saw at least one person die and several injured, including policemen.

Police will now probe where Ikbal Singh got after January 26 and who all provided it. Those who provided shelter to him and others could also face legal action.

Punjabi actor-cum-activist Deep Sidhu was arrested from Karnal in Haryana. Another co-accused Sukhdev Singh was earlier arrested from Chandigarh.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
In the shadow of Minute Maid Park stands a little blue Victorian, dwarfed like the house in Up by the massive scale of the buildings surrounding it  three sports stadiums, the convention center and its nearby hotels and skyscrapers. But not for long.

The Houston Astros purchased the 1.738 acres where it and a historic locomotive sits through an affiliate for $17 million in 2019 and broke ground this week on what will eventually become a retail and residential development. Meantime, the storied home and train will be relocated; an excavator dismantled the small retail strip where HTX Fan Tavern and Home Plate Bar & Grill once stood Tuesday afternoon. The plan short term is to use the land as a parking lot, said Anita Sehgal, Astros senior vice president of marketing and communications.

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The design for the mixed-use development has not been finalized.

The City of Houston will pay for moving the blue-and-white wooden home, known as the Cohn House, one block north of Minute Maid. Arthur Cohn, its first resident, helped found what is now Rice University.

The two-story home, built in 1905, is a symbol of the neighborhoods previous incarnation as a high-end neighborhood called Quality Hill. It is now listed in the National Register of Historic Places and was once the headquarters for St. Francis Charities.

Its upcoming move will not be its first  it first resided at 1711 Rusk St. After nearly a century, during which it watched the stylish residential community turn into an urban center for business and tourism, it was moved to 1720 Texas Ave. to make way for the expansion of the Avenida de las Americas between the convention center and Minute Maid Park. Catholic clergy sprinkled the home with holy water and blessed the structure before its move in 2003, in honor of its decades as a center for Christian charity.

Now, the home has once again been set on steel girders in preparation for travel  and its coming move probably wont be its last. The house will likely be moved to a city park east of U.S. 59, said Mary Benton, director of communications for Mayor Sylvester Turner.

The fate of the train, a steam locomotive known as the Southern Pacific 982, is still under discussions, said Bill Capdevielle, president of the Texas Railroading Heritage Museum.

Were thrilled to help find a home for the 982 that serves the people of Houston and honors its heritage, having been built in 1913, he said. We dont know yet what the final picture is going to look like.  We are discussing a potential location in Tony Marron Park.

Many Houstonians have fond memories of playing on the train from when it was located in Hermann Park starting in 1957. Kids used to crawl all over it, Capdevielle said.

Prior to that, Engine 982 used to shuttle throughout the Southeast, was called into national service during World War II and was afterward used mostly on the Houston-to-Shreveport line, where it was nicknamed the Rabbit by its crewmen. The train traveled an estimated 3.5 million miles over its career, according to Chronicle archives.

By the 1950s, as diesel-powered engines became more popular, steam engines were retiring from service. Local rail buffs saved the 982 from the scrapyard by convincing the city to provide a home for it. It is one of only two historic steam engines of its kind, according to Chronicle archives, and resided at Hermann Park until it was moved in front of Minute Maid Park, on the former site of Union Station, Houstons main train terminal. (The sites history is also why the Astros celebrate home runs with a whistle from a train perched high above the field.)

When city council approved of some of the plans for the land in May of 2020, said Benton, the Astros agreed it would begin its mixed-use development within four years and bring the plans to the city for review.

rebecca.schuetz@chron.com;

twitter.com/raschuetz
The Indian and Chinese troops began 'slight' disengagement on the northern bank of Pangong Tso in Ladakh to clear the 'Finger 4' area as per the consensus reached between the armies from both sides during the ninth round of military commander-level talks.

The Indian and Chinese troops have been involved in a tense border stand-off in eastern Ladakh for over nine months, with Pangong Tso being the main focus of the tussle.

"As per the plan, China will move back to Finger 8 and Indian troops will pull back to the Dhan Singh Thapa post between Finger 2 and 3. No patrolling will take place by both sides till Finger 4. This will be done in a phased manner," India Today reported quoting sources in Indian security establishment. There has been a marginal thinning of troops, and removal of tanks and weapons is also on the agenda.

The mountain spurs jutting out from the mountains to the lake are called as 'fingers'.

Also read: Ladakh standoff: India, China hold 9th round of Corps Commander-level talks

In a tweet, Chinese government affiliated Global Times said that Chinese and Indian armies have started disengagement.

The Chinese and Indian armies started to disengage simultaneously on Wednesday after a months-long border standoff, as Chinese experts hailed the move as a key breakthrough that will ease border tensions and hopefully lead to peace and stability. https://t.co/kOtWAnA0jTpic.twitter.com/iWfcYil7kh - Global Times (@globaltimesnews) February 10, 2021

Chinese Ministry of National Defence spokesperson Wu Qian said frontline troops of the two sides started "synchronised and organised disengagement at the southern and northern banks of the Pangong Tso Lake".

Meanwhile, the Office of Defence Minister Rajnath Singh tweeted that the minister will make a statement in the Rajya Sabha on Thursday regarding the present situation in eastern Ladakh.

Raksha Mantri Shri @rajnathsingh will make a statement in Rajya Sabha tomorrow regarding 'Present Situation in Eastern Ladakh'. -   / RMO India (@DefenceMinIndia) February 10, 2021

Violent clashes between both the sides in June last year in Galwan Valley had led to death of 20 Indian soldiers, while there were unconfirmed number of casualties on the Chinese side as well.

Also read: China gets new military commander amid standoff in Ladakh

Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-11 03:56:29|Editor: huaxia

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CAIRO, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi said on Wednesday that Egypt is keen on promoting the mutual relations with Libya to restore stability in the war-torn country.

"Egypt is keen to continue meeting all the needs of the Libyans to restore the country's stability, and (help) complete the governance mechanisms for the country," said Bassam Rady, spokesperson of the Egyptian presidency, according to two separate statements posted on the official Facebook page of the presidential office.

In his phone call with Abdul Hamid Mohammed Dbeibah who was voted as the new Libyan prime minister, Sisi hailed "the excellent relations established between Egypt and Libya," wishing Dbeibah and the Libyans to succeed in the light of the transitional authority's readiness to pave the way for development.

For his part, Dbeibah highlighted the importance of boosting the Egyptian-Libyan ties and continuing cooperation and coordination between the two countries at all levels in the coming period with regards to different regional issues.

In another phone conversation with Mohammad Younes Menfi, new president of the Libyan Presidency Council, Sisi said he expects the new Libyan leadership to usher in a new era in which all the state institutions will work in harmony for the national interest of the country.

Meanwhile, Menfi welcomed Egypt's contributions to settling the Libyan crisis in the political, military and economic fields and its role in ending the political divisions between different Libyan factions through the Cairo Declaration.

Libya has been mired in violence and political instability ever since the fall of the late leader Muammar Gaddafi's regime in 2011.

Egypt has been trying to broker a political settlement for the conflict in Libya as the neighbor's instability poses a threat to the security of the 1,200-km-long borders between the two countries.

Through the Cairo Declaration, Egypt proposed implementing a cease-fire between Libyan warring parties from June 8, 2020, disbanding militias, pulling out foreign troops, electing a presidential council representing all Libyans, and drafting a constitutional declaration for the later elections.

On Tuesday, delegations of the Libyan Parliament and the Supreme Council met in Egypt's Red Sea resort of Hurghada over a mechanism for running a referendum on the Libyan constitution.

This third round of the Libyan constitutional talks aimed at finding a legal and a constitutional base for the Libyan parliamentary and presidential elections scheduled for December.

On Feb. 5, members of the Libyan Political Dialogue Forum elected a new prime minister and a new presidency council during a voting session in Geneva. Enditem
New Delhi, Feb 10 : China and India on Wednesday began their simultaneous withdrawal of troops along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in Ladakh, according to an official statement issued by the Chinese government.

If the Chinese official statement is to be believed, the nine month-long stand-off between the two Asian giants has come to an end.

The Ministry of External Affairs in New Delhi has not issued any statement yet.

The spokesperson of China's Ministry of National Defense, Wu Qian said: "According to the consensus reached by the 9th round of the military commander-level talks between China and India, the frontline units of the Chinese and Indian armed forces in Pangong Hunan and North Coast began to simultaneously and systematically organize disengagement on February 10." Since May last year, Indian and Chinese troops were engaged in skirmishes along the LAC near Pangong lake in Ladakh and the Tibet Autonomous region. In one of the violent clashes, 20 Indian soldiers and over 40 Chinese troops were killed in the Galwan valley on June 15-16. Amid the face-off, India sent massive deployments to Ladakh.

Though both sides disengaged in the Galwan valley of Ladakh in July but the stand-off continued at critical points at Pangong and PP17A. In August, Indian troops regained multiple strategic heights in Chushul sector along the LAC.

However, both the countries remained engaged in talks through established institutions and mechanisms like 'Working Mechanism for Consultation and Coordination on China-India Border Affairs' (WMCC). Several rounds of talks were held at diplomatic and military levels.

On January 24, the ninth round of the Corps Commander level meeting was held.

The tensions between the two Asian economies resulted in Indian people threatening to boycott Chinese products. The accusations that Chinese smartphone apps were stealing Indian data, led to the government banning over 200 Chinese apps.

However, the bilateral trade continued through the hostility and during the coronavirus pandemic, which had originated in Wuhan city of Hubei province in China.
Following a breakthrough in the ninth round of military commander-level talks, Indian and Chinese troops along the border in Ladakh have initiated the process of disengagement, Chinese media said on on Wednesday.

Quoting defence ministry spokesperson Colonel Wu Qian, the Chinese media reported that troops of both countries stationed at the northern and southern shores of Pangong Lake in Ladakh began disengagement according to the consensus reached during the talks.

Defence Minister Rajnath Singh will make a statement in Rajya Sabha on Thursday morning on the "present situation in eastern Ladakh".

Raksha Mantri Shri @rajnathsingh will make a statement in Rajya Sabha tomorrow regarding Present Situation in Eastern Ladakh.   / RMO India (@DefenceMinIndia) February 10, 2021

Sources confirmed to CNN-News18 that disengagement has started in the two banks. The process will take place in phases and will be verified at every step, they said, adding troops will be disengaged first in the lake's north bank and then the south bank. Tanks are being moved out of the south bank, and the strength of Indian troops deployed there will also be reduced, they said.

"First the armoured component will be moved out, then the troops at the rear will be thinned out. We continue to hold strategic heights. Frontline troops will not be disengaged at the moment. We are looking at early days and a long road ahead," sources said.

The central government, referring to the friction along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) with China, said in a written reply in the Lok Sabha, "Government will continue discussions with the Chinese side to achieve the objective of disengagement from all friction points and restoration of peace and tranquility in the India-China Border Areas at an early date."

Nearly 50,000 Indian Army troops are currently deployed in a high state of combat readiness in eastern Ladakh. Multiple rounds of talks between the two sides had so far not yielded any concrete outcome to resolve the standoff. China has also deployed an equal number of troops, according to officials. The standoff between the two sides erupted in early May.

Kangana Ranaut, the queen of controversies, is showing no signs of holding back when it comes to stirring a storm on social media.



On Wednesday, the Queen actor took to her Twitter account to warn the very same social media platform she was using and wrote, your time is up.

The 33-year-old actor wrote, Your time is up @Twitter time to shift to #kooapp will inform everyone soon about my account details there. Absolutely thrilled to experience home grown #kooapp (sic)

Your time is up @Twitter time to shift to #kooapp will inform everyone soon about my account details there.

Absolutely thrilled to experience home grown #kooapp https://t.co/Kdm0TISCmR  Kangana Ranaut (@KanganaTeam) February 10, 2021

Heres how people on Twitter reacted to this development:

Yes pls do leave  Ayush (@AyushForIndia) February 10, 2021

      Kunwar Viru Thenua (@thenua_viru) February 10, 2021

Praise the lord! Our prayers have been heard  Aymano (@aymxno) February 10, 2021

Thanks for leaving

Twitter will be a better place now  AMAT (@stfulady) February 10, 2021

Now goo is shifting to koo!!

Twitter would be thankful!  Greeshma Shukla (@GreeshmaShukla) February 10, 2021

Good Riddance to bad vibes  Punit Pania (@Punit_Pania) February 10, 2021

Yayyyy we want Koo to become internationally available please so all of us can stay connected  Mads is Sushant JeeviJustSSR (@MadsSSRJeevi) February 10, 2021

Kanganas tweet comes at a time when recently, some of her tweets were deleted by Twitter, which said the posts were in violation of the platform's rules on hate speech.

Three tweets by the actor have been deleted - related to the farmer protests and the backlash on the world stage after tweets by international celebrities.

"We have taken action on Tweets that were in violation of the Twitter Rules in line with our range of enforcement options," Twitter said in a statement.

For the uninitiated, Kangana Ranaut attacked pop star Rihanna over her recent post on the farmer protests at the Singhu border in Delhi. She also called climate activist Greta Thunberg a "rat" for her comments on the protests.

We stand in solidarity with the #FarmersProtest in India.

https://t.co/tqvR0oHgo0  Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) February 2, 2021

Have you downloaded the Koo app? What do you think about Kanganas warning to Twitter?
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The conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the Nagorno-Karabakh region in October was simply the latest in a long history of tension and conflict between the two neighbors, and the scars and devastation wrought by this long history still remains today, an Israeli-raised rabbi found out when he was allowed to tour part of the area Azerbaijan liberated in the conflict, The Jerusalem Post writes. Born in the Azeri capital of Baku, Rabbi Zamir Isayev was raised in Israel, but moved back to the city of his birth and became director of the capital's Jewish School, whose many graduates took part in the conflict against Armenia. This was his primary motivation for visiting the liberated areas.

It was important for me to be able to see firsthand the places my former students fought to liberate, he said in a statement. Jews that fight in the Azeri army are the pride of our community and the entire country.

The most important stop on the tour was Zangilan, a city on the Azeri-Iranian border that is the administrative center of the district of the same name. The city had been in Armenian hands since 1993 after the first Nagorno-Karabakh War, though de facto control was in the hands of the unrecognized nation known as the Republic of Artsakh, also known as the Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh.In the October 2020 conflict, Azerbaijan was able to liberate the territory  which, unlike many other areas that had been contested between Armenia and Azerbaijan, was never historically part of Nagonro-Karabakh. Now, its nearly 43,000 former residents can at last return home after a nearly 30-year absence.

But as Isayev found out, there isn't exactly much to return to, as nearly the entire city was destroyed by the Armenian army in 1993. I came to witness a virtual ghost town, a completely destroyed city that lay in ruins for nearly 30 years, he explained. Most of its structures have essentially been demolished. The Armenian occupiers clearly had no plans to settle here and only sought to destroy the site, proving that they never regarded this land as their own. Isayev detailed his tour in a short film, which he uploaded to Twitter featuring subtitles in English, Hebrew and Russian.

Azerbaijan has gotten to work reconstructing the newly-liberated territories.
A man who collects valuable whale waste with a similar market price to gold claims he has amassed 45kg of the rare substance.

Duncan Payne, 61, from Southland in New Zealand has collected ambergris from beaches since 2018.

The market price of ambergris can be up to $45 a gram, meaning Mr Payne could make a small fortune selling his collection.

Collector Duncan Payne believes this substance (pictured) is ambergris which could be 170-year-old

Mr Payne told Daily Mail Australia he travels to the beach four or five times a month to look for ambergris, taking it home to dry out for a few months and to clean seaweed or coral from the rock.

'I picked up this piece of white stuff that I thought was clay, but I thought no it's not waxy and it doesn't smell, I thought I'd break it open', he told Stuff.

Mr Payne said he could identify the smell of the rock from his time spent with a family friend on Stewart Island, who kept ambergris in their home.

'You could smell it when you walked in the room.'

The unique smell of the rare commodity has been sought after for use in perfumes and medicines for centuries.

Only 1% of the 350,000 sperm whales on earth produce Ambergris, making the substance extremely rare

Mr Payne has sent five grams of his ambergris to a perfumer in Australia who plans to use it to create a scent, but says the process can take up to two or three years.

He said he owed his substantial collection to days of extended southerly winds that pull the ambergris from the depths of the Southern Ocean and pushes it to shore.

'The secret is in knowing what it is you're picking up, most people around here think they're picking up pumice', he explained.

Mr Payne has been collecting ambergris since 2018

Ambergris can be described as a wax-like substance, made to protect the intestines of a sperm whale when they ingest hard substances like squid beaks.

The whale waste has to float in the ocean for decades before it hardens, only then does the substance become valuable.

Mr Payne believes some pieces of his collection could have been floating in the ocean for more than 200 years.

A buyer from Singapore paid $20,000 for 2 kilograms of Mr Payne's ambergris, including return flights so the collector could hand deliver the rocks.

But after inspecting the ambergris the buyer doubted the legitimacy of the product, despite Mr Payne demonstrating with a lighter that the pumice, actually oxidised ambergris, exploded when it was lit.

Mr Payne has started his own online market after being blacklisted by the ambergris industry

Reporters from Stuff took Mr Payne's ambergris to Otago Museum to be identified, with the samples later confirmed as sandstone and pumice.

Mr Payne said pumice and ambergris can be easily confused, and that pumice only came to New Zealand's shores in cooler months during Winter.

The ambergris enthusiast has recently launched his own market on Facebook, after being blacklisted by the industry.

Mr Payne said he has been informed by friends and perfumers that he has been 'run down globally' in the industry.

'It's a journey I'm not about to give up, everyone has a right to pick something up off the beach and sell it, not just me, everybody.'

Mr Payne said he's still on a learning curve when it comes to collecting ambergris.

'I'm not a expert, I'm not a chemist, I've learnt to do as much as I need to know with what I've got, and how to treat it.'

WHAT IS AMBERGRIS? Ambergris is hardened whale waste, a fatty substance that is light-weight with a faint waxy texture Ambergris is an incredibly rare substance because only 1% of the 350,000 sperm whales on earth can produce it The fatty substance protects the whales intestines while they ingest rough materials like the beaks of squids Occasionally sperm whales will excrete thousands of pounds of waste This waste then floats in the ocean for decades where it has to harden to become valuable A few ounces of Ambergris can sell for a few thousand dollars, earning it the nickname 'floating gold' Source: The Week Advertisement
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that under current conditions he supports Israel controlling the Golan Heights, but appeared to question the legality of the Trump administrations decision regarding the strategic plateau.

During his interview, Blinken was asked if the Biden administration would continue to "see the Golan Heights as part of Israel." "Look, leaving aside the legalities of that question, as a practical matter, the Golan is very important to Israels security," Blinken said.

"As long as Assad is in power in Syria, as long as Iran is present in Syria, militia groups backed by Iran, the Assad regime itself  all of these pose a significant security threat to Israel, and as a practical matter, the control of the Golan in that situation I think remains of real importance to Israels security," he told CNN.

However, he indicated that in the future U.S. could be open to reexamining that position. "Legal questions are something else. And over time, if the situation were to change in Syria, thats something wed look at. But we are nowhere near as that," Blinken said.

In 2019, then-U.S. President Donald Trump parted with other world powers by recognising the Golan Heights as Israeli. Israel occupied the strategic plateau in a 1967 war with Syria and annexed it in 1981.
5 churches burned down in a village in Kenya

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An association of churches and Christian clergy has demanded an investigation after unidentified arsonists destroyed five churches and threw human feces onto the buildings in one village in western Kenya, according to reports.

St. Monica Church in Otamba village in Nyaribari Chache area of Kisii County was burned on Jan. 20, followed by similar attacks on three other churches  100-member Worldwide Church, Seventh Day Adventist and Legio Maria  the following day, Morning Star News reported.

The fifth church, 250-member Kenya Assemblies of God, was burned down on Jan. 24, the U.S.-based Christian persecution news website said.

Apart from setting the churches ablaze, the arsonists also committed the heinous acts of scooping human feces onto the buildings to discourage the faithful from attending their ruined churches, a source was quoted as saying. A majority of the church members were afraid to attend services [in or near the ruins] in the aftermath of the burning of the churches, fearing that the arsonists might follow them right into their homes, risking the lives of their families.

The Church and Clergy Association of Kenya has demanded an investigation. We demand the investigating authorities to get to the bottom of the matter and expose the agents of such heinous acts. What is the motive behind this and who are these mercenaries acting for? it said in a statement, according to The Standard.

The churches will need to spend millions of Kenyan shillings to rebuild.

Kenya was ranked 49th on Christian support organization Open Doors 2021 World Watch List of countries where it is most difficult to be a Christian.

While its a Christian-majority country, persecution has spread in Kenya, Open Doors says. Particularly, Christians with a Muslim background in the northeast and coastal regions live under constant threat of attackeven from their closest relatives. Our research revealed that Christians were attacked and forced to flee their villages, and Islamic extremist group al-Shabab has infiltrated the local population to monitor the activities of Christians in those areas.

Organized crime is also a serious problem in the country, Open Doors adds. Corrupt officials often fail to take measures against persecutorsincreasing the potential for further incidents against Christians.

In the countrys northeast, the al-Shabab terrorist group is a constant threat.

Al-Shabaab has fought for years to overthrow the Somali government. The group has been responsible for attacks on both sides of the Somalia and Kenya border as it has long vowed to retaliate against Kenya for sending in troops to Somalia to fight the group.

In April 2015, al-Shabaab carried out one of its deadliest attacks when it stormed the campus of Garissa University. On that occasion, militants were said to have separated Muslims from non-Muslims and proceeded to execute all non-Muslim students. At least 148 people were killed in the attack.
Allaying fears that the Major Ports Authority Bill, 2020 aims at privatisation of the country's top 12 major ports, Ports, Shipping and Waterways Minister Mansukh Mandaviya on Wednesday said it seeks to provide autonomy to these ports and boost their decision-making powers in order to compete with private ports.

The Major Ports Authority Bill, 2020 was passed through ballot votes in the Rajya Sabha on Wednesday with 84 votes in its favour and 44 against it. The Lok Sabha had passed the bill on September23 last year.

Taking a strong objection to some members' remarks that it is intended to benefit big corporate houses and would result in the ruining of the ports and their plunder, Mandaviya, in his reply to the debate on the bill, said rather, it would turn these ports into world-class ports and enable their boards to take decisions on their own.

"Would a patriot oppose this bill? This bill is not for privatisation of ports.... The bill has nothing to do with privatisation. Former finance minister Arun Jaitley and former shipping minister Nitin Gadkari had also specified that there will not be privatisation of ports.... The bill is not to sell ports," he said.

Various opposition parties, including the Congress, TMC, SP, RJD, DMK, AAP, CPI(M) and CPI raised objections on the bill in the Upper House of and alleged that it is aimed at privatising the ports and diluting the powers of the states on land use. However, the BJD, JD(U), YSRCP supported it, saying it is a welcome move to expand the port development infrastructure.

Mandaviya questioned: "Have Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra governments not given ports to private companies for development? Did that happen in the tenure of Narendra Modi?"



He said the government, led by Prime Minister Modi, believes in the federal structure and assured the Upper House that "state government representatives will not be removed".

The minister said: "We developed the Kolkata port on the Public-Private Partnership (PPP) model. We paid the liabilities for all pensioners. The loss-making ports are now profitable. This is because of the reforms."



He said disputes with private companies and PPP operators are cropping up, but the existing law has no provisions to deal with such issues and the new law will also help improve infrastructure.

Taking a dig at the Opposition for opposing the bill, Mandaviya said "the sky has not fallen" and the bill was introduced after taking into account the major recommendations of the standing committee.

Assuring the House to protect the interests of labourers, he said earlier, in the name of labourers, such people were made trustees who had nothing to do with labourers.

No port is in operational loss for the last six years, the minister asserted and took a swipe at the Opposition, saying "Narendra Modi has 123 crore friends".

He also alleged that earlier, no one knew what happened in the name of dredging and digging sea.

Recalling the country's rich maritime history, where it traded with the world through the sea route in ancient times, Mandaviya said now, 4,000 km of inland waterways have been developed and made operational.

As many as 300 projects are underway for modernisation of ports while coastal cargo has increased, the total cargo traffic has reached over 700 million tonnes and there has been overall efficiency in port operations.

The bill was passed through ballot votes after Deputy Chairman Harivansh ordered the lobbies to be cleared for a division vote.

Secetary General of the Rajya Sabha Desh Deepak Verma explained to the members the changed procedure of voting, owing to the change in the seating arrangements in view of the COVID-19 pandemic. Voting was done through division slips and not through the electronic system.

The electronic voting system could not be used as the members were not seated in their usual seats due to social distancing.

Earlier, participating in the debate, Sukhendu Sekhar Ray of the Trinamool Congress (TMC) said it follows the Singapore model of corporatisation and the next step in the offing is privatisation.

P Wilson of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) alleged that the bill has only been brought to serve the interests of private players and will lead to the mushrooming of private ports.

Opposing the bill, Ram Gopal Yadav of the Samajwadi Party (SP) said the government is trying to sell the assets of the country, while Elamaran Kareem of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) alleged that the bill proposes to convert the port authority into a corporate entity and the assets of the ports will be sold off to private players.

Manoj Jha of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), Binoy Viswam of the Communist Party of India (CPI) and Narain Dass Gupta of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) also opposed the bill.

Shaktisinh Gohil of the Congress alleged that it would facilitate the entry of private sector entities into the management of ports.

"Like all airports have gone to a friend, this bill has been drafted in such a way to give away these 12 major ports to another friend," he said.

Anil Desai (Shiv Sena) expressed apprehensions of discontent among the employees of the ports while Viswam saw "unseen hands...unseen brain behind the bill".

Those supporting the bill included BJD's Subhash Chandra Singh, BJP's Suresh Prabhu and Ram Chandra Prasad Singh of the JD(U).

(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.)
San Francisco's

San Francisco

San Francisco

San Francisco's

Gap Inc.

San Francisco

Old Navy

Mission Bay

San Francisco

Cushman & Wakefield

Vir Biotechnology

Salesforce Tower

50 Fremont St.

350 Mission St.

546 Howard St.

500 Howard St.

Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg

Brent Hyder

Jennifer Stojkovic

San Francisco

(TNS)  Salesforce,largest private employer, will permanently allow most workers to stay home for two or more days a week, a major shift that could dampen downtown's economic recovery well beyond the coronavirus pandemic.The cloud software company, which has over 9,000workers, said most staff will be in the office for one to three days per week. Workers who don't need to be in an office can be fully remote, while a minority of workers will be at desks four or five days a week.The move could lead to a reduction in its office space, but the company said it didn't have immediate details on that. It's a sharp reversal from the years of real estate growth both inand around the world. Salesforce and many of its tech peers pushedoffice prices to record highs, with many cramming employees into densely filled benches and desks.With numerous tech companies like Twitter, Pinterest, Dropbox, Yelp and now Salesforce embracing remote work programs beyond the pandemic, the Bay Area's status as the premier tech hub, along with its urban economic vitality, is in doubt. Empty streets and shuttered storefronts may linger even as some workers are vaccinated and return to offices if others stay home or leave the region entirely.The reassessment of office-space needs is broader than tech.told employees Monday that it would consolidate itsoffices and close a separate headquarters building forinoffice vacancy rose to a 16-year high of 17.8% in January, according to real estate brokerage. The only significant new lease signed last year was an expansion by life sciences firm, which took a portion of Dropbox's headquarters.Salesforce is one of the city's biggest office tenants. It leases nearly two-thirds of its namesake, the Bay Area's tallest building. It also ownsand leases all of, along with, an unbuilt tower a few blocks away. Salesforce is buying Slack, which is headquartered at nearbySalesforce said it was rethinking its workplaces and culture to give employees more flexibility and attract new hires from a broader geographic area.CEOhas also said that the tech giant will be able to recruit from more diverse areas as it increases remote work. Google is also testing a flexible policy that requires employees to be in the office only three days a week."This work-from-anywhere model will unlock new growth opportunities that will help us drive greater equality. Our talent strategy is no longer bound by barriers like location, so we can broaden our search beyond traditional city centers and welcome untapped talent from new communities and geographies,", Salesforce's chief people officer, wrote in a blog post.Employee surveys show that nearly half of workers wanted to come into an office only a few times a month, but the vast majority wanted to have the option. Salesforce has 54,000 total employees and a market capitalization of $218 billion."The majority of our employees will go back to the office at least some of the time. And we've learned that 80% of our employees are hungry for the connection, camaraderie and innovation that come from gathering in person," Hyder wrote."To start, we'll be redesigning our workspaces over time as community hubs to accommodate a more hybrid workstyle. Gone are the days of a sea of desks  we'll create more collaboration and breakout spaces to foster the human connection that can't be replicated remotely," he added.Business groups have warned that the corporate shift to remote work will lure people out of the Bay Area and hurt local government budgets and job growth. Some have argued that a slew of new taxes, many passed at the ballot, and high housing costs are crippling the region's competitiveness."We need to face reality: the workplace has fundamentally changed," said, executive director of SF.citi  the city's main tech industry trade group  in a statement. "As we think through the future of work and what it means for, I implore our city leadership to consider the policies we are putting in place today  and whether or not these policies will help us grow the next Salesforce and remain competitive as the world's capital of innovation."
The market witnessed volatility throughout the session and continued to see flat closing for second consecutive day on February 10 as it is looking for triggers for further directional move. The selling in banks weighed on sentiment, while auto, select IT and pharma stocks aided the market.

The S&P BSE Sensex was down 19.69 points at 51,309.39, while the Nifty50 fell 2.80 points to 15,106.50 and formed Doji kind of indecisive pattern on the daily charts.

"Another high wave-type candle was formed with minor upper and long lower shadow. Technically, this pattern again signals confusion among participants at the highs, which is now leading to volatility. But the formation of long lower shadow could signal the emergence of sharp buying on dips," Nagaraj Shetti, Technical Research Analyst at HDFC Securities told Moneycontrol.

As long as Nifty shows similar consolidation for the next 1-2 sessions, the odds of sharp upside bounce can't be ruled out, he feels.

He believes the underlying trend of Nifty is volatile with positive bias. "The market action like lack of sustainable selling from the highs and emergence of sharp buying from the lows could eventually result in a strong comeback of bulls in the next few sessions. This expectation could alive, as long as the support of 15,000-14,950 holds firmly," he said.

The broader markets outperformed frontliners with the Nifty Midcap and Smallcap indices rising more than 0.7 percent each, but the market breadth was negative.

We have collated 15 data points to help you spot profitable trades:

Note: The open interest (OI) and volume data of stocks given in this story are the aggregates of three- month data and not of the current month only.

Key support and resistance levels on the Nifty

According to pivot charts, the key support levels for the Nifty are placed at 14,999.73, followed by 14,892.97. If the index moves up, the key resistance levels to watch out for are 15,190.73 and 15,274.97.

Nifty Bank

The Nifty Bank fell 273.40 points to 35,783.10 on February 10. The important pivot level, which will act as crucial support for the index, is placed at 35,398.4, followed by 35,013.7. On the upside, key resistance levels are placed at 36,197.5 and 36,611.9.

Call option data

Maximum Call open interest of 19.66 lakh contracts was seen at 16,000 strike, which will act as a crucial resistance level in the February series.

This is followed by 15,500 strike, which holds 19.15 lakh contracts, and 15,000 strike, which has accumulated 12.28 lakh contracts.

Call writing was seen at 15,200 strike, which added 1.74 lakh contracts, followed by 15,900 strike which added 1.32 lakh contracts and 16,000 strike which added 1.22 lakh contracts.

Call unwinding was seen at 15,100 strike, which shed 1.05 lakh contracts, followed by 15,600 strike which shed 50,625 contracts and 15,400 strike which shed 38,550 contracts.

Put option data

Maximum Put open interest of 17.90 lakh contracts was seen at 14,500 strike, which will act as crucial support level in the February series.

This is followed by 15,000 strike, which holds 14.30 lakh contracts, and 14,200 strike, which has accumulated 14.05 lakh contracts.

Put writing was seen at 14,300 strike, which added 64,425 contracts, followed by 14,500 strike, which added 47,250 contracts and 15,000 strike which added 43,275 contracts.

Put unwinding was seen at 14,600 strike, which shed 1.53 lakh contracts, followed by 15,200 strike which shed 1.33 lakh contracts and 14,200 strike which shed 1.07 lakh contracts.

Stocks with a high delivery percentage

A high delivery percentage suggests that investors are showing interest in these stocks.

40 stocks saw long build-up

Based on the open interest future percentage, here are the top 10 stocks in which a long build-up was seen.

30 stocks saw long unwinding

Based on the open interest future percentage, here are the top 10 stocks in which long unwinding was seen.

22 stocks saw short build-up

An increase in open interest, along with a decrease in price, mostly indicates a build-up of short positions. Based on the open interest future percentage, here are the top 10 stocks in which a short build-up was seen.

49 stocks witnessed short-covering

A decrease in open interest, along with an increase in price, mostly indicates a short-covering. Based on the open interest future percentage, here are the top 10 stocks in which short-covering was seen.

Bulk deals

(For more bulk deals, click here)

Results on February 11

ITC, Coal India, Power Grid Corporation, ACC, Ashok Leyland, Ashapura Minechem, Atul Auto, Bajaj Hindusthan Sugar, Bayer Cropscience, Bosch, Capacite Infraprojects, CRISIL, General Insurance Corporation of India, Gujarat Pipavav Port, Graphite India, HUDCO, Infibeam Avenues, ITDC, ITD Cementation, Jaypee Infratech, KNR Constructions, MRF, Natco Pharma, NCC, NHPC, Oil India, Petronet LNG, Power Finance Corporation, Prestige Estates Projects, Spencers Retail, VA Tech Wabag and Zee Media Corporation are among 442 companies to announce their quarterly earnings on February 11.

Stocks in the news

Aurobindo Pharma: The company reported a sharp rise in profit at Rs 2,946.3 crore in Q3FY21 against Rs 705.3 crore in Q3FY20, revenue rose to Rs 6,364.9 crore from Rs 5,895 crore YoY.

Bata India: The company reported lower profit at Rs 26.4 crore in Q3FY21 against Rs 118.2 crore in Q3FY20, revenue fell to Rs 615.6 crore from Rs 830.8 crore YoY.

Indraprastha Gas: The company reported a higher profit at Rs 381.8 crore in Q3FY21 against Rs 297.4 crore in Q3FY20, revenue declined to Rs 1,446.2 crore from Rs 1,664.2 crore YoY.

Bank of India: The Competition Commission of India approved acquisition of BOI AXA Invst Managers & BOI AXA Trustee Services by Bank of India.

Titan Company: The company reported lower standalone profit at Rs 419 crore in Q3FY21 against Rs 470 crore in Q3FY20, revenue rose to Rs 7,287 crore from Rs 6,206.2 crore YoY.

Magma Fincorp: Rising Sun Holdings, a company controlled by Mr. Adar Poonawalla, to acquire a controlling stake in Magma Fincorp, through a preferential allotment and open offer route.

Fund flow

FII and DII data

Foreign institutional investors (FIIs) net bought shares worth Rs 1,786.97 crore, whereas domestic institutional investors (DIIs) net sold shares worth Rs 2,075.68 crore in the Indian equity market on February 10, as per provisional data available on the NSE.

Stocks under F&O ban on NSE

Three stocks - BHEL, SAIL and Sun TV Network - are under the F&O ban for February 11. Securities in the ban period under the F&O segment include companies in which the security has crossed 95 percent of the market-wide position limit.
WASHINGTON - Sen. Bill Cassidy has been signaling for a few months that he wants to be a more independent force. After the November elections, in which the Louisiana Republican easily won a second term, Cassidy joined a bipartisan group that broke a negotiating logjam and paved the way for a $900 billion pandemic relief bill.

And on Jan. 6, as rioters supporting President Donald Trump were still being ejected from the Capitol, Cassidy condemned the attack in strong terms and demanded that Trump order the mob to stand down. "He needs to speak, because the president can speak as no one else can to these folks," Cassidy told a Louisiana TV station that day.

But few expected Cassidy's next bold, independent step - breaking GOP ranks and voting to declare that Trump's second impeachment trial is constitutional and should proceed - particularly after he initially voted to essentially dismiss the case.

Yet Tuesday evening, the gastroenterologist called the previous four hours of arguments about the case against Trump, charged with inciting the attack on the Capitol, as a clear instance of one side presenting an overwhelming argument while the other side lacked any clarity.

"Now I'm an impartial juror, and one side is doing a great job and the other side is doing a terrible job on the issue at hand, Cassidy told reporters after being the only senator to switch his position from the initial Jan. 26 procedural vote. "As an impartial juror, I'm going to vote for the side that did the good job."

His reversal gave a short-term burst of momentum for the House Democrats presenting the case against the ex-president, but it also suggested that Cassidy is ready to take a more aggressive approach to being a bipartisan dealmaker, willing to break away from the powerful grip of Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

On Wednesday morning, during a background-only call, aides to the managers said Democrats held out hope that they can find other converts like Cassidy, believing that previously unseen security footage of the rampage to be presented Wednesday will be another jolt to senators.

Republicans, according to one Democratic aide, "are just now waking up from the grip of the former president."

Other Republicans contend that 44 GOP senators have now voted twice to declare that the trial of an ex-president is unconstitutional, making it unlikely that a Republican would then switch his or her vote, unless some shocking new discovery emerges.

That means the votes are pretty well set in stone after Tuesday's 56-to-44 roll call, still 11 votes shy of the two-thirds majority needed to convict Trump and move to the sentencing portion of the trial that would ban him from running for federal office again.

"I don't think anyone expects it to be much different," Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said after Tuesday's presentation. "I think we've had a lot of time to think over the last eight weeks about what happened, why it happened, why it shouldn't have happened and, more importantly, what role the president played."

If Rubio is right, that makes Cassidy's vote all the more politically brave, for Trump will be acquitted and Cassidy will have angered Trump's most fervent supporters, even if he eventually votes to acquit at the end of the trial.

"Very honest, very candid and very controversial among Louisiana Republicans," Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin, D-Ill., said Wednesday, just before the day's trial session began.

Indeed, one of Trump's defenders, Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., lashed out at his home-state senator minutes after Tuesday's vote, suggesting it will not sit well in a state that Trump won by about 19 percentage points in November.

"I was surprised by that," Johnson told reporters. "I have not spoken to him, but I can tell you a lot of people from back home are calling me about it right now."

The Louisiana Republican Party on Tuesday rebuked Cassidy for his vote.

Cassidy, 63, became a liver specialist after graduating from the Louisiana State University School of Medicine, eventually opening a community health clinic to help the uninsured in the Baton Rouge area. He won a House seat in 2008, and in 2014 Cassidy defeated a veteran Democratic Senate incumbent as part of a GOP wave.

Now, with a new six-year lease on his political life, Cassidy is starting to resemble a Republican version of John Breaux, a Louisiana Democrat who served three terms in the Senate and frequently angered both parties with his bipartisan dealmaking.

Breaux, who retired in 2004, represents a bygone era when Senate leaders were much less powerful than in the past decade, during which McConnell and his Democratic predecessor, Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, consolidated power in the majority leader's office.

After helping force the December pandemic deal, Cassidy now sees an opportunity for the power dynamics to shift.

"We don't necessarily have to wait for something to come down from on high but can actually negotiate among ourselves and bridge differences that others would prefer to be unbridgeable," Cassidy told reporters last week. He called it "very bracing" to rank-and-file senators to help push the $900 billion deal toward the finish line.

"So there's a feeling that this is the way that we should operate," he said. "It's not been the way the Senate has operated, but it should operate that way."

[As Senate prepares for a speedy impeachment trial, some are urging a slower, more deliberative approach]

Last week he joined nine other Republicans at the first White House meeting President Joe Biden convened with members of Congress, telling reporters afterward that the new president was "very gracious" to the GOP group.

The centrist Republicans appear to have lost in this initial round of negotiations - Biden has sided with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to push through, solely with Democratic votes, a $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package.

Cassidy compared the breakdown in bipartisanship to marriage when reporters asked about the go-it-alone approach by Democrats. "Obviously the essence of any relationship is talking," he said last week.

In the next few days, Cassidy must decide what his prescription is for Trump's behavior. He said that while sitting next to Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tex., on Tuesday, he took notes and asked whether Trump's attorneys were as bad as he thought.

They were.

So no one should be that surprised by his vote, he said. "It speaks for itself."

More and more, Cassidy is doing just that, speaking for himself.
Highlights HMD is set to launch the Nokia 5.4 and Nokia 3.4 smartphones in India soon.

Both Nokia 5.4 and Nokia 3.4 will go against Realme, Redmi phones.

The two phones offer clean Android software with promised updates.

Nokia 5.4 and Nokia 3.4 are going to be launched in India soon. HMD has been teasing the two smartphones through Nokia Mobile India's Twitter account for a while now but it has not shared a date so far. We do not know when the two hot Nokia phones are coming but it will not take long. HMD's renewed push into India's smartphone market paints a bright picture of what the company's future is going to look like in India, especially when the market share of Nokia is reasonably small. The reason behind HMD's pending success is the onslaught by the Chinese smartphone players that go all out to attract Indian customers.

The Chinese brands such as Xiaomi, Redmi, and Realme thrive on one thing and that is their ability to pack genuinely good and above par specifications on their phones. Not only do they imbue the smartphone market with the sense of price aggression, but they also make customers realise what they can get for a particular price. For instance, Realme sells a Rs 14,000 phone, 7i, with support for 65W fast charging. This technology used to be available on high-end devices about a year back. Then, you have Redmi Note 9 Pro Max that brings a fast processor for impressive gaming in under Rs 20,000.

Nokia has stayed astray from the specifications war. It has explicitly said it believes in offering a comprehensive Android experience rather than delving into the chatter about how big its phone's display is or how fast the processor is. This argument somewhat makes sense. Nokia is among the brands that ships Android One software on its smartphones.

This means a clean software, much like how you would expect on the Google Pixel phones, and regular updates. The Android upgrade cycle is still not the best, with custom ROM makers delaying rollout for as long as six months. Nokia is fast. It pushes out security updates every month to its phones to keep the phone's defence against malicious elements intact. Unlike custom ROMs, such as Realme UI and MIUI, this software is rid of bloatware.

All of these software goodies will be available on the Nokia 5.4 and Nokia 3.4 smartphones. You will have two years of promised Android upgrades and three years of Android security updates. Moreover, the interface will be clean. But at the same time, the specifications of these smartphones are not powerful enough. They lack 90Hz displays, 65W fast charging, 64MP quad-cameras, which you get on Realme phones. And that is the compromise you will have to make for Nokia's seamless Android experience.

In the sea of Realme and Redmi phones, Nokia 5.4 and Nokia 3.4 have a lot to prove. And if you, as a customer, set your priorities right, Nokia phones will not disappoint you.

OAKLAND, Calif., Feb. 9, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The Clorox Company (NYSE: CLX) announced today that its board of directors has declared a quarterly dividend of $1.11 per share on the company's common stock. The dividend is payable May 7, 2021, to stockholders of record as of the close of business on April 21, 2021.

Clorox has a long history of providing value to its shareholders through regular dividend increases. This is the 52nd consecutive year Clorox has paid an annual dividend  ever since it became independent again following a decade of outside ownership.

The Clorox Company

The Clorox Company (NYSE: CLX) is a leading multinational manufacturer and marketer of consumer and professional products with about 8,800 employees worldwide and fiscal year 2020 sales of $6.7 billion. Clorox markets some of the most trusted and recognized consumer brand names, including its namesake bleach and cleaning products; Pine-Sol cleaners; Liquid-Plumr clog removers; Poett home care products; Fresh Step cat litter; Glad bags and wraps; Kingsford grilling products; Hidden Valley dressings and sauces; Brita water-filtration products; Burt's Bees natural personal care products; and RenewLife, Rainbow Light, Natural Vitality Calm, NeoCell and Stop Aging Now vitamins, minerals and supplements. The company also markets industry-leading products and technologies for professional customers, including those sold under the CloroxPro and Clorox Healthcare brand names. More than 80% of the company's sales are generated from brands that hold the No. 1 or No. 2 market share positions in their categories.

Clorox is a signatory of the United Nations Global Compact and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation's New Plastics Economy Global Commitment. The company has been broadly recognized for its corporate responsibility efforts, listed No. 1 on the 2020 Axios Harris Poll 100 reputation rankings and included on the Barron's 2020 100 Most Sustainable Companies list, 2021 Bloomberg Gender-Equality Index and the Human Rights Campaign's 2021 Corporate Equality Index, among others. In support of its communities, The Clorox Company and its foundations contributed more than $25 million in combined cash grants, product donations and cause marketing in fiscal year 2020. For more information, visit TheCloroxCompany.com, including the Good Growth blog, and follow the company on Twitter at @CloroxCo.

CLX-F

SOURCE The Clorox Company
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To All The Boys: Always and Forever is the final installment of the Netflix film series. Stars Noah Centineo and Lana Condor have been working on the movies for nearly three years. And Centineo recently admitted that it feels like the two are married.

Noah Centineo and Lana Condor in To All The Boys Ive Ever Loved: Always and Forever | Katie Yu/Netflix

To All The Boys: Always and Forever hits Netflix in February

The third and final movie in the series, To All The Boys: Always and Forever premieres on Netflix on Feb. 12. The film picks up with Lara Jean (Lana Condor) as a high school senior, still trying to work through her romantic feelings for Peter Kavinsky (Noah Centineo).

In the trailer for the new film, Lara Jean is on a family vacation in Seoul, South Korea. Then when shes back home having dinner with Peter, he asks her to the senior prom. The two then reveal that theyll be attending Stanford University together in the fall.

RELATED: To All the Boys Ive Loved Before: Lana Condor and Noah Centineo Had a Serious Mutual Crush

But when she takes a class trip to New York City, Lara Jean finds herself in awe of the city. She suggests she might change her mind and go to college in New York. But Peter questions what that would mean for their relationship.

We both know what 3,000 miles would do to us, Peter says.

By the end of the trailer, Lara Jean discovers that she did not get into Stanford. She is left with a lot to think about, with no clear picture of her academic and romantic future.

Noah Centineo and Lana Condor filmed To All The Boys: Always and Forever in 2019

Production on To All The Boys: Always and Forever picked up right after the second movie, To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You. It was filmed a few months before the pandemic started. And when the film wrapped, both Condor and Centineo shared their love for the series and each other on social media.

february 12th can't come soon enough pic.twitter.com/bC0m5HSn89  To All The Boys: Always and Forever (@toalltheboys) January 29, 2021

RELATED: The White Tiger: The Unusual Way Adarsh Gourav Prepared for His Role As Balram

Tonight was my last night as Peter Kavinsky, Centineo wrote in an August 2019 tweet. I hope you all love these last installments as much as we do. Forever grateful for the opportunity to be yours. Thank you Lana, thank you, Michael, Thank you, Matt, Thank you Netflix, grateful to every person who told this story with us.

Noah Centineo says he and Lana Condor feel like theyre married

In a recent chat with Extra TV, Centineo was asked how he and Condor kept their chemistry going on-screen. He noted that by now, they are so comfortable with each other that it feels like theyre hitched.

It feels like were a married couple, Centineo laughed. Its great.

The actor also revealed he felt nervous about playing Peter in the first movie. But by the third, he felt a lot more confident in his performance.

how it started pic.twitter.com/PmpXCHbb11  To All The Boys: Always and Forever (@toalltheboys) February 8, 2021

RELATED: Cobra Kai: Will Jaden Smith and Jackie Chan Make Cameos in Season 4?

There was a lot of pressure in the first film to lock in the character, Centineo added. But once we locked in the character, it was pretty simple. Show up as that character. It was knowing that

little voice saying, Well, this is the last one  It wasnt more stress or pressure by any means. it was just like, were doing this on a fun level.

Centineo and Condors first two movies  To All the Boys Ive Ever Loved and To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You  are currently streaming on Netflix. To All The Boys: Always and Forever hits the streamer on Feb. 12.
Michelle Kingston has been working as a nurse in an emergency department for 30 years, but the tiredness she feels at the end of a shift nowadays is like nothing she experienced before.

Its a different kind of tired as its a lot more psychological. When youre watching young, fit patients in their 40s trying to catch a breath, its hard to understand. When you have a patient who is dying and only one family member can come in, it is heartbreaking and its something that will never leave you.

Frontline workers have spoken out about the impact of the pandemic on their health and personal relationships after the Oireachtas Health Committee heard how staff are suffering from burnout.

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Ms Kingston (50) works at Cork University Hospital (CUH), one of the hospitals which has been worst hit during the third coronavirus wave.

Long hours are something she is accustomed to, but whats draining about the pandemic is how you feel absolutely helpless.

Before, we had a family room and you could lay out the body and the family could grieve for a while  but thats gone now, she told the Irish Independent.

That is one of the hardest things  no, actually it is the hardest. You feel youre to blame, you feel its your fault that you cant let people in to be with loved ones and you do take it home with you. How I take things home with me is that I stay quiet, and the knock-on effect is that my husband and son know to stay away from me. I would come home at night time, get a shower, come downstairs and fall asleep on the couch and be no good to anybody.

She praised management at the hospital for their handling of a difficult situation. At one point, 135 patients were being treated at CUH for Covid. Dozens of staff also contracted the virus.

We kept going with overtime. We would do extra shifts to help out but I never worked more than two days in a row. We have had a good few nurses in our department who contracted it. We have nurses who were out as they were in contact and thats where the absenteeism would come in, as one person could have been in contact with 10 others. Were lucky in that we have a department of young, very skilled nurses, but it does take its toll.

The thing with lockdown is theres nothing else to do. When you come home, you cant visit friends and its as if youre living separately from your family. I havent seen my father-in-law in nearly a year.

Widespread vacancies, excessive workloads and a high Covid-19 infection rate among healthcare staff have also been flagged by unions.

Theres a pause on the end of the phone as Dr Mick Molloy tries to recall when he last had substantial time off from work. I cant actually remember, to be honest with you.

The consultant in emergency medicine at Wexford General Hospital works between 80 and 100 hours a week. He doesnt complain or seek sympathy, but like most healthcare workers he is exhausted.

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People are tired in their jobs at the moment and they cant take leave as hospitals are under pressure. The number of vacancies among consultants are increasing, junior doctors are being recruited from overseas as our own graduates are leaving the country and some staff are wanting to move to areas where they dont have the same risk of catching Covid, Dr Molloy said.

Working such long hours means theres very little time for anything else.

I know personally I havent been doing as much exercise as the workload has increased so dramatically. I need to do more than just walking and now that gyms are closed, its hard. Wexfords emergency department has always been busy, treating up to 40,000 patients each year, according to Dr Molloy.

Hes used to a heavy workload but the pandemic, particularly the third wave, has been on another level.

Its difficult working at the moment as were seeing a lot of patients present to the emergency department with post-Covid issues such as cardiac and respiratory problems. Every day we have people coming who were Covid positive two, three or four weeks ago and they are having ongoing chest pains. While the health system as a whole had a lot of people on waiting lists, we now have a whole new group of people for a new waiting list for complications from a disease were still trying to figure out.

The Irish Hospital Consultants Association (IHCA) told the committee that there is a severe shortage of public hospital consultants which has resulted in excessive workloads being carried by understaffed medical and surgical teams to the detriment of patients.

Dr Imran Sulaiman, a respiratory consultant at Beaumont Hospital in Dublin, returned to Ireland last March after four years in New York.

He previously worked on a Covid ward at NYU Langone Health in the US before responding to the Government call-out for healthcare workers to come home.

Ive been exhausted since I moved back, even before. We were working seven days a week at NYU, crazy hours. On top of that, the isolation from the lockdown doesnt allow you to do anything outside of work, so it has been extremely exhausting.

Its been a difficult year. My wife and I were apart while I was living in America, then I came back and Ive been in work most of the time.

Dr Sulaiman contracted Covid-19 last April, shortly after starting work at Beaumont.

I was fortunate that I wasnt admitted to hospital. My main symptoms were extreme lethargy, difficulty concentrating, sleeping quite a lot for those two weeks. It took the full two weeks out of me. I thought after a week I would be seeing an improvement, but for a full two weeks I was symptomatic.

There is an issue with exhaustion and mental health now. We brought in some psychology services in the hospital to talk to our department about stress relief, different ways of relaxing, trying to find outlets for exhaustion. I cycle in and out to work every day to try get some exercise, started a book club with friends and try spend as much time with my wife as I can.

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United Nations: North Korea has modernised its nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles by flaunting United Nations sanctions, using cyberattacks to help finance its programmes and continuing to seek material and technology overseas for its arsenal, UN experts have claimed.

The panel of experts monitoring sanctions on the Northeast Asian nation said in a report sent to UN Security Council members on Monday that North Korea's total theft of virtual assets from 2019 to November 2020 is valued at approximately USD 316.4 million, according to one unidentified country.

The panel said its investigations found that North Korean-linked cyber actors continued to conduct operations in 2020 against financial institutions and virtual currency exchange houses to generate money to support its weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programmes.

In its weapons development, the experts said, Kim Jong-Un's government has also produced fissile material, an essential ingredient for producing nuclear weapons, and maintained its nuclear facilities.

It displayed new short-range, medium-range, submarine-launched and intercontinental ballistic missile systems at military parades, they said. It announced preparation for testing and production of new ballistic missile warheads and, development of tactical nuclear weapons ... And upgraded its ballistic missile infrastructure. The panel recommended that the Security Council impose sanctions on four North Korean men: Choe Song Chol, Im Song Sun, Pak Hwa Song, and Hwang Kil Su.

The Security Council has imposed increasingly tough sanctions on North Korea since its first test explosion of a nuclear device in 2006. It has banned most of the country's exports and severely limited its imports, trying to pressure Pyongyang into abandoning its nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

But the report's summary and some key findings and recommendations, make it clear that North Korea remains able to evade sanctions and develop its weapons and to illicitly import refined petroleum, access international banking channels and carry out malicious cyber activities.

North Korea's arsenal escalated to a major threat to the United States following tests in 2017 that included a detonation of a purported thermonuclear warhead and flight tests demonstrating its ICBMs could reach deep in the American mainland.

A year later, Kim initiated diplomacy with South Korea and then-US President Donald Trump that derailed in 2019 when the Americans rejected North Korea's demands for major sanctions relief in exchange for a piecemeal deal partially surrendering its nuclear weapons capabilities.

Last year, North Korea's already battered economy decayed further amid the COVID-19 pandemic, which led Kim to close the country's borders. That severely limited the legal and illegal transfer of goods and movement of people, according to the experts.

At a North Korean political conference, Kim sharply criticized his government's economic agencies for unspecified passiveness and self-protecting tendencies, the North's state media reported Tuesday.

His remarks follow a ruling party congress last month where he called for greater state control over the economy while also vowing to continue all-out efforts to boost his nuclear program, which North Korea sees as a deterrent to the U.S. And thus an assurance of the Kim dynasty's continued existence.

With his diplomatic efforts stalemated, Kim must start all over again with President Joe Biden, who previously called him a thug and criticized Trump for summit spectacles instead of significant nuclear reductions.

In August 2019, the UN Panel said North Korean cyber experts illegally obtained proceeds estimated at up to $2 billion to fund its weapons programmes. The panel said in the new report that it investigated malicious activities by the Reconnaissance General Bureau North Korea's primary intelligence agency, which is on the UN Sanctions blacklist including the targeting of virtual assets and virtual asset service providers, and attacks on defense companies.

North Korea continues to launder stolen cryptocurrencies especially through over-the-counter virtual asset brokers in China to acquire fiat currency which is government-backed, like the US Dollar, the experts said.

The panel said it is investigating a September 2020 hack against a cryptocurrency exchange that resulted in approximately $281 million worth of cryptocurrencies being stolen, and transactions on the blockchain indicating the $281 million hack is related to a USD 23 million second hack in October 2020.

Preliminary analysis, based on the attack vectors and subsequent efforts to launder the illicit proceeds strongly suggests links to the DPRK, the experts said, using the initials of the country's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

According to one unnamed country, North Korea also continues to generate illegal revenue by exploiting freelance information technology platforms using the same methods it does to access the global financial system - false identification, use of virtual private network services, and establishing front companies in Hong Kong, the panel said.

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1. Roads. The citys roads are a mess. Significant resources are needed to fix them.

2. Public safety. The crime rate is too high. Police pay and resources come first.

3. More city programs. The city must invest more in city programs and services.

4. Comprehensive plan. The city needs to focus on rebuilding and rebranding.

5. Cut city spending. City officials must get serious about trimming the budget.

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Britain has made 'great strides' in its vaccination programme, Boris Johnson said today as he urged all unvaccinated over-70s to come forward so the UK can hit its target to reach 15million people by Monday.

Despite its small population in the global standings, the UK has administered a whopping 13.5million out of 146million doses given out internationally  almost 10 per cent of all the world's jabs so far.

The Prime Minister, speaking from a Downing Street press conference tonight, said: 'With less than a week to go until the target date of Monday the 15th, there's no doubt weve made great strides, with just over 13 million people now vaccinated in our United Kingdom, including one in four adults in England, over 90 per cent of everyone over 75 and over 90 per cent of eligible residents of care homes for the elderly.

'But that still leaves nearly two million people  a population roughly twice the size of Birmingham  that we still hope to reach. Now is the moment to do it.'

According to the statistics compiled by the Oxford University-based research platform Our World in Data, this puts Britain in third place behind only the US and China, which have far larger populations.

The figures also show more doses have been dished out here than in France, Germany, Italy and Spain combined. European commission president Ursula von der Leyen today issued a grovelling apology for the EU's jab shambles, admitting the bloc acted 'late' and was 'over-confident'.

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair today said the speed with which Covid jabs were developed and rolled out was an 'inspiration' but added that it was 'unfair' poorer countries were missing out due to a lack of a global strategy.

Number 10's pandemic response has come in for widespread criticism on the whole, although ministers have been roundly praised for their vaccine rollout being one step ahead of the rest of the world. Ministers spent more than 6billion developing and procuring the jabs  a fraction of the 200-plus billion spent on supporting businesses during the economically-crippling lockdowns  despite no guarantees any would work.

The UK Vaccines Taskforce, run by venture capitalist Kate Bingham, played a key role in secure huge numbers of doses of vaccines ahead of international competition. And the running of the Covid vaccine programme through the NHS, which operates a successful national flu vaccination scheme every year, has smoothed over the rollout.

But critics have warned against getting too complacent as latest figures from the Department of Health suggest the Covid drive has plateaued. The number of doses given to Brits on Monday rose by just one per cent compared to the same time last week, hovering at around 350,000.

The Adam Smith Institute think-tank told MailOnline that while the programme had been a success so far, there was 'no excuse' for blips, because 'the virus doesn't sleep - the virus keeps spreading'. Despite concerns, Britain is within touching distance of delivering on its goal of vaccinating 15million of the most vulnerable by mid-February, which paves the way for the UK become one of the first countries to drop lockdowns completely.

Another 414,973 Britons received their first or second dose of the Covid-19 vaccine yesterday, figures published today reveal, up 10 per cent on the 376,922 jabs recorded the same time last week. But this was a marked slowdown from the week before when the number administered jumped by 20 per cent.

It comes Department of Health figures today suggested the UK's second wave is still shrinking. They announced another 13,013 cases, 32 per cent lower than the same time last week. A further 1,001 deaths from the virus were also reported, 24 per cent lower than last Wednesday. This took the total number of Covid deaths to 114,851.

Boris Johnson said at a Downing Street press conference tonight that Britain had made 'great strides' in its vaccination programme but that there were still 2million more people to reach by next Monday to hit the February 15 target of 15million

The top 30 countries where the highest number of doses of the Covid-19 vaccine have been administered, with the UK in third place. The data was from Our World in Data, which monitors the vaccines rollout across the world

And this is the number of doses administered as a percentage of the population covered. Experts have said to achieve 'herd immunity', where the virus stops spreading', around 85 per cent need to be vaccinated. The data is from Our World in Data

Ursula von der Leyen issues grovelling apology over EU's vaccine shambles Ursula von der Leyen today issued a grovelling apology for the EU's vaccine shambles, admitting the bloc acted 'late' and was 'over-confident'. The European commission president also conceded its rollout was still not 'where we want to be' in a humbling speech in Brussels. However, she defended trying to thrash out at unified approach for the 27 member states, even though she has likened it to a 'tanker' compared to the UK's 'speedboat'. UK government figures last night showed 12,646,486 people have now received initial jabs, with another 516,392 having had their booster. By contrast the EU as a whole has administered fewer than 18million doses to its population of around 450million people. Globally there are around 4.6million jabs being given every day, with around one in 10 of those happening in the UK. Speaking at an EU Parliament plenary session, Ms von der Leyen said: 'We are still not where we want to be. We were late to authorise. 'We were too optimistic when it came to massive production and perhaps we were too confident that, what we ordered, would actually be delivered on time.' Advertisement

In other coronavirus developments today:

Oxford University and AstraZeneca's coronavirus vaccine is safe and 'likely effective' for people over the age of 65, the World Health Organization said today as it officially recommended the jab 'without an upper age limit';

The South African government could sell off its stockpiles of the Oxford vaccine, the country's health minister has admitted, after a controversial study claimed it wouldn't be able to stop mild or moderate Covid cases;

Nicola Sturgeon was accused of trying to extend Scottish laws south of the border after her Government demanded English authorities quarantine all travellers flying into England if they were planning to go to Scotland;

Matt Hancock faced a furious backlash over his blood-curdling threat of 10 years in jail for travellers who lie about visiting mutant Covid hotspots;

Grant Shapps revealed he has had talks with foreign politicians about an 'internationally recognised system' of allowing travellers to prove they have had a Covid jab.

Speaking at tonight's Downing Street briefing, chief scientist Sir Patrick Vallance said it was 'really critical' that everyone who is offered a vaccine accepted it.

Boris Johnson said that if the speed of vaccination the supplies can be kept consistent, the Government planned to have reached everyone over the age of 55 by the end of April.

James Lawson, author of the study Worth a Shot: Accelerating Covid-19 Vaccinations, and fellow at think-tank the Adam Smith Institute, today urged ministers not to be complacent because of early success.

'While the Government has made significant progress since January in boosting the amount of daily doses we can't be complacent,' he told MailOnline.

'We need to keep up the pace, keep accelerating and ultimately should be aiming to even double or triple the number of doses that we are doing compared with today.

'There is ultimately no excuse for slowing down. We can't use the excuse of weekends and weather because ultimately the virus doesn't stop for weekends, the virus doesn't sleep - the virus keeps spreading so we do need to accelerate.'

He added that ministers must make the most of the time before second doses need to be delivered, which will mean vaccinators can reach fewer Britons with first doses every day.

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair (left) said the speed with which Covid jabs were developed and rolled out was an 'inspiration' but added that poorer countries were missing out due to a lack of a global strategy. Ursula von der Leyen (right) today issued a grovelling apology for the EU's vaccine shambles, admitting the bloc acted 'late' and was 'over-confident'

Surge testing has been set up in parts of the country where the South African variant of the coronavirus has been found, or variants with similar concerning mutations that could reduce the efficacy of vaccines

Oxford Covid vaccine IS safe and 'likely effective' for over-65s, World Health Organization rules Oxford University and AstraZeneca's vaccine is safe and 'likely effective' for people over the age of 65, the World Health Organization said today. The WHO has officially recommended the use of the vaccine in adults of all ages and said that doses should ideally be spaced by between eight and 12 weeks. The statement is a hit back against European countries that criticised the jab and refused to use it among their older populations, claiming there was not enough proof it worked. Countries including Germany, France, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Spain, Poland and Italy decided not to roll out the vaccine to older people. News reports from Germany in January sensationally claimed that the vaccine was only eight per cent effective among over-65s, but it later emerged that ministers had put an inaccurate percentage on clinical data that was so vague it was meaningless. However today, Dr Alejandro Cravioto, a director at the WHO, said in a briefing that the jab could be given 'without an upper age limit'. Dr Cravioto said there was 'no reason' that places with the South African variant of the virus should not use the vaccine to keep down hospital admissions and deaths with the virus, in the wake of a study suggesting it may be less effective against it. Advertisement

'The intent behind doing the first dose is to get the maximum coverage of vulnerable groups and that is something we are supportive of - at the same time they should be extending to a wider audience,' he said.

'The worry we have got is without the number of doses increasing on a daily basis you are going to see a slowdown in the number of new doses being given out or first doses being given out as we catch up on second doses.

'For every person we give a second dose to we can't give another first dose out. We do have a worry that if they don't increase the capacity to distribute doses then we are going to see a slowdown either in the number of people who get their second dose or in the people who get a first dose - neither of which is ideal.'

Department of Health figures show the vaccination drive ramped up by at least 25 per cent every week over the first three weeks it was opened  as nurses and volunteers rushed to get Britain moving again.

But it ticked up by just one per cent on February 8, the latest day data is available, when 356,291 doses were administered compared to 352,935 on Monday last week.

Our World in Health data shows Britain has dished out 35 times more doses of Covid vaccines than Germany, which is leading the jabs drive in the EU. Germany has managed 337,000 doses so far, followed by Italy at 270,000, France at 222,000 and Spain's 217,000.

The figures also reveal a sharp disparity between the drive in different continents, with the whole of Africa having given out 17,600 doses so far.

Tony Blair today called on countries around the world to co-ordinate their vaccine strategy saying they have an 'opportunity to learn the lessons from the early vaccine rollout'.

'The speed with which Covid-19 vaccines were developed and are being rolled out has been an inspiration,' he said.

'In just six weeks, the world has already administered 134million shots, with a current rolling average of over 4.5million doses per day. But the unequal distribution of those vaccines is both unfair and unsustainable.

Elderly people and patients with underlying health conditions are among the top four priority groups which make up 15million set to be vaccinated by February 15

'The main challenge has been the lack of any global strategy to co-ordinate and maximise production, and then ensure their swift and equitable distribution to every country in the world.

Nicola Sturgeon branded 'ridiculous' over demand that England quarantines ALL international arrivals heading to Scotland Nicola Sturgeon was facing fury today after her Government demanded English authorities quarantine all travellers flying into England if they were planning to go to Scotland. The First Minister was accused of trying to extend Scottish laws south of the border with the demand that would force England to lock people up in hotels for 10 days even if local rules said they did not need to. Under plans unveiled by Health Secretary Matt Hancock last night, only arrivals from 33 Red List nations would be required to stay locked in a hotel for 10 days in England. Scotland however, is forcing all international arrivals into its airports to undergo the stay at a cost of 1,750. Scots Transport Secretary Michael Matheson last night confirmed the SNP government in Edinburgh wants Boris Johnson to adhere to Scotland's policy for travellers heading north of the border via England. Tory MP Peter Bone said Ms Sturgeon needed to clarify what her government was demanding. 'If someone arrives in England and then travels to Scotland they have to abide by the Scottish laws but it is wrong for the First Minister of Scotland to try and impose her laws on English airports,' he told MailOnline. 'Thats ridiculous and bears no logic. If that is what she means I think the UK Government should firmly reject that idea. 'She should clarify ... and make it clear that quarantine rules will apply once someone goes into Scotland.' Passengers arriving at UK airports have to fill out a 'passenger locator form' in the 48 hours before arriving in Great Britain. Advertisement

'Given the potential for vaccine resistant strains to develop in any part of the word and then spread globally, the whole world is in peril if we allow this situation to persist.

'As more vaccines achieve regulatory approval and new vaccines to deal with new variants arrive, the world must be prepared. Closed borders are not sustainable in the medium or long term.

'We need to create a globally co-ordinated vaccine strategy now, bringing together representatives from science, medicine, the pharmaceutical industry, manufacturing, financiers, distribution and logistics to consider how to accelerate vaccine production and oversee allocation and procurement processes with governments.'

It comes after Ms von der Leyen today issued a grovelling apology for the EU's vaccine shambles, admitting the bloc acted 'late' and was 'over-confident'.

The European commission president also conceded its rollout was still not 'where we want to be' in a humbling speech in Brussels.

However, she defended trying to thrash out at unified approach for the 27 member states, even though she has likened it to a 'tanker' compared to the UK's 'speedboat'.

Globally there are around 4.6million jabs being given every day, with around one in 10 of those happening in the UK.

Speaking at an EU Parliament plenary session, Ms von der Leyen said: 'We are still not where we want to be. We were late to authorise.

'We were too optimistic when it came to massive production and perhaps we were too confident that, what we ordered, would actually be delivered on time.'

Ms von der Leyen also said she was sorry for the confusion over the threat to suspend the Northern Ireland protocol in order to block vaccine exports - which was humiliatingly dropped.

'The bottom line is that mistakes were made in the process leading up to the decision,' Ms von der Leyen said.

'And I deeply regret that. But in the end we got it right.'

Ms von der Leyen said she still believes that 70 per cent of the EU's adult population can be vaccinated by the end of summer, swiping at pharmaceutical companies for not keeping pace with scientific advances.

'Industry has to match the groundbreaking pace of science,' Ms von der Leyen said.

'We fully understand that difficulties will arise in the mass production of vaccines.

'But Europe has invested billions of euros in capacities in advance, and we urged the member states to plan the vaccine rollout. So now we all need predictability.'

Despite the chaos, the three groups of MEPs stuck with Ms von der Leyen's approach of member states moving together.

'The key decisions were right,' Manfred Weber, leader of the Christian Democrat European People's Party, said.

The Socialists and Democrats party leader Iratxe Garcia said: 'Fiasco, catastrophe, disaster: they ring very true to our citizens.'

But she added that her party would stick with Ms von der Leyen on the bloc moving together. 'Criticism is necessary but with a constructive spirit,' she said.
Highlights Sony launched the FE 35mm F1.4 GM lens in India in the first week of February.

Sony Japan has now published the notice stating that the release date of the product has been postponed.

Sony FE 35mm F1.4 GM lens is priced at Rs 1,64,990.

Sony introduced its latest member of G Master lens series, the Sony FE 35mm F1.4 GM, in the United States in January. The shipment of the lens was supposed to begin from mid-February. However, the company has put out an official notice of postponement of release of the product.

Sony Japan published the notice stating that the release date of the FE 35mm F1.4 GM lens has been postponed due to "production reasons." The lens supports Sony E-mount systems. The company also writes that "the lens hood ALC-SH164 will also be postponed."

The next release date of the new optic is undecided. Sony writes, "The release date will be announced again as soon as it is confirmed. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you as we are looking forward to your release."

The FE 35mm F1.4 GM lens was launched in India a week ago. The lens is priced at Rs 1,64,990 but users cannot grab their hands on the product due to its unavailability. When a user clicks on an option to 'Buy' the product, it says "We are sorry, but this model is currently not available from any of our retail partners."

For the specifications, the optic comprises 14 elements arranged in 10 groups. It has two XA (extreme aspherical) elements, a single ED glass element, and Nano AR Coating II. The lens autofocus capabilities are good for shooting landscapes, portraits and street photography. Going by the signature characteristic of Sony's G Master lens line-up, the new lens can produce beautiful bokehs.

As Sony puts it, "The FE 35mm F1.4 GM delivers an almost circular aperture thanks to its 11-blade construction, a rare level of quality for a compact lens. Spherical aberration control at both the design and the manufacturing stages contributes to beautiful bokeh."

Other features of the lens include an aperture ring with switchable click stops and a customizable focus hold button for easy operation. The focus hold button can be assigned to several other functions via menu. The FE 35mm F1.4 GM lens is also dust and moisture resistant.
A maths professor has delivered a two-hour Zoom lecture only to be told by students that he was on mute the entire time.

Dong Wang's screen froze within minutes of the presentation and students were unable to contact him as he ploughed on with his silent lecture at the National University of Singapore.

A recording of the incident shows the end of the class, when Prof. Wang somehow unmutes himself as he asks the students: 'Do you have any questions?'

There are nervous murmurings before one young man pipes up: 'Hi Prof, actually you were muted all the while so we cannot hear anything from you since 6.08.'

Video shows the maths tutor exhaling rapidly and squinting as it dawns upon him that he's just wasted two hours of his Thursday evening giving a silent lecture

The professor exhales, almost snorting, as he is informed that he has been on mute by his maths students at the National University of Singapore

'Uh from what?!' Prof. Wang exclaimed  it being after 8pm on February 4. 'From how long did you hear?'

The students told him that they only heard the first few minutes of the lecture before the professor's screen froze and he went silent.

Video shows the maths tutor exhaling rapidly and squinting as it dawns upon him that he's just wasted two hours of his Thursday evening.

But rather than question his students over why nobody had let him know that they couldn't hear him, Prof. Wang made apologies and said he would repeat the lecture another time.

'OK, so maybe I have to redo this class sometime,' Prof. Wang said.

Azusa Chan, who attended the silent lecture, told The Independent: 'Students tried all sorts of things to get his attention by unmuting and even calling his phone number. However, he did not respond and continued with the lesson.

'The participant count dwindled as time went on, as students could not contact the prof and had no other recourse. What you see here are 20 plus students who waited patiently for two hours for the prof to come back.'

The footage of Prof. Wang was uploaded to TikTok where some extra effects were added in post production by the user

Following the incident, Prof. Wang said he would endeavour to keep his mobile phone with him during future lectures.

Most students around the world are studying remotely due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Singapore has managed to bring the virus under control to the extent that it has been under only a semi-lockdown for most of the last year.

However, many restrictions remain in place and people are encouraged to work from home where possible.
Selbyville, Delaware, Feb. 10, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- According seasoned forecasters and industry experts, worldwide automotive autonomous emergency braking system market size was valued USD 3 billion in 2019 and is projected to expand at a y-o-y growth rate of 8.1% over 2020-2027. Increasing sales of commercial vehicles and passenger vehicles, coupled with growing concerns regarding road safety due to rising number of road accidents are fostering the industry growth.

Proceeding further, the research literature fragments industry into various segments and provides a granular analysis of the same to uncover the top revenue prospects. Moreover, it also profiles the leading players as well as emerging contenders and new entrants to offer a holistic view of the competitive arena.

For the uninitiated, autonomous emergency braking system (AEBS) is an advanced secure technology which is increasingly being integrated in vehicles, which supervises traffic conditions ahead and automatically applies the vehicle brakes in emergency case such as when the driver collapses. This system is being considered an integral component for detecting a forward crash with other another vehicle in time to mitigate or prevent crash. Besides this, AEBS works in conjunction with advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) to make a vehicle better and safer for drivers, further elevating the importance of these technology.

Request Sample copy of this Report @ https://www.marketstudyreport.com/request-a-sample/3142790/

Despite the positive outlook of global automotive autonomous emergency braking system industry, factors such as high installation cost and low spending capacity in underdeveloped economies are negatively impacting the business dynamics.

Geographical outlook:

North America, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Europe are the key contributors to the overall automotive autonomous emergency braking systems market remuneration. Europe currently accounts for majority of the industry share, largely due rising penetration of SUVs and luxury vehicles, along with a high concentration of market vendors in the region.

Meanwhile, factors such as growing sales of passenger cars and commercial vehicles, and increasing government initiatives for road safety in emerging economies like India and China will drastically enhance the growth of Asia Pacific automotive autonomous emergency braking systems over the forecast timeframe. Moreover, concerning number of road fatalities in accelerating the adoption of AEBS and ADAS technologies in the region. In fact, the 2018 WHO Global Report on Road Safety states that India accounts for about 11% of the road accident-related deaths worldwide. The number of incidences in China is also considerably high, with 244,937 road traffic accidents in 2018, causing 258,532 injuries, 63,194 fatalities, and direct economic loss of approximately USD 200 million, confirmed the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.

To access a sample copy or view this report in detail along with the table of contents, please click the link below:

https://www.marketstudyreport.com/reports/global-automotive-autonomous-emergency-braking-system-market-size-research

Automotive Autonomous Emergency Braking System Market Type Sub-Segments (Revenue, USD Billion, 2017-2027)

Disc

Drum

Automotive Autonomous Emergency Braking System Market Technology Sub-Segments (Revenue, USD Billion, 2017-2027)

Crash Imminent Braking

Dynamic Breaking Support

Automotive Autonomous Emergency Braking System Market Vehicle Type Sub-Segments (Revenue, USD Billion, 2017-2027)

Commercial Vehicles

Passenger Vehicles

Automotive Autonomous Emergency Braking System Market Geographical Bifurcation (Revenue, USD Billion, 2017-2027)

North America

United States

Canada

Europe

United Kingdom

France

Germany

Italy

Spain

Rest of Europe

Asia Pacific

China

Japan

India

Australia

South Korea

Rest of APAC

Latin America

Brazil

Mexico

Rest of the World

Automotive Autonomous Emergency Braking System Market Company Profiles (Revenue, USD Billion, 2017-2027)

Valeo SA

NetraDyne, Inc.

Mando Corp.

Hitachi Automotive Systems Ltd.

Aisin Seiki Co. Ltd.

Hyundai Mobus

ZF Friedrichafen AG

Continental AG

Delphi Technologies (Borgwarner, Inc.)

Robert Bosch GmbH.

Table of content:

Chapter 1. Executive Summary

1.1. Market Snapshot

1.2. Global & Segmental Market Estimates & Forecasts, 2018-2027 (USD Billion)

1.2.1. Automotive Autonomous Emergency Braking System Market, by Region, 2018-2027 (USD Billion)

1.2.2. Automotive Autonomous Emergency Braking System Market, by Brake Type, 2018-2027 (USD Billion)

1.2.3. Automotive Autonomous Emergency Braking System Market, by Technology Type, 2018-2027 (USD Billion)

1.2.4. Automotive Autonomous Emergency Braking System Market, by Vehicle Type, 2018-2027 (USD Billion)

1.3. Key Trends

1.4. Estimation Methodology

1.5. Research Assumption

Chapter 2. Global Automotive Autonomous Emergency Braking System Market Definition and Scope

2.1. Objective of the Study

2.2. Market Definition & Scope

2.2.1. Scope of the Study

2.2.2. Industry Evolution

2.3. Years Considered for the Study

2.4. Currency Conversion Rates

Chapter 3. Global Automotive Autonomous Emergency Braking System Market Dynamics

3.1. Automotive Autonomous Emergency Braking System Market Impact Analysis (2018-2027)

3.1.1. Market Drivers

3.1.2. Market Challenges

3.1.3. Market Opportunities

Chapter 4. Global Automotive Autonomous Emergency Braking System Market Industry Analysis

4.1. Porter's 5 Force Model

4.1.1. Bargaining Power of Suppliers

4.1.2. Bargaining Power of Buyers

4.1.3. Threat of New Entrants

4.1.4. Threat of Substitutes

4.1.5. Competitive Rivalry

4.1.6. Futuristic Approach to Porter's 5 Force Model (2017-2027)

4.2. PEST Analysis

4.3. Investment Adoption Model

4.4. Analyst Recommendation & Conclusion

Chapter 5. Global Automotive Autonomous Emergency Braking System Market, by Brake Type

5.1. Market Snapshot

5.2. Global Automotive Autonomous Emergency Braking System Market by Brake Type, Performance - Potential Analysis

5.3. Global Automotive Autonomous Emergency Braking System Market Estimates & Forecasts by Brake Type 2017-2027 (USD Billion)

5.4. Automotive Autonomous Emergency Braking System Market, Sub Segment Analysis

5.4.1. Disc

5.4.2. Drum

Chapter 6. Global Automotive Autonomous Emergency Braking System Market, by Technology Type

6.1. Market Snapshot

6.2. Global Automotive Autonomous Emergency Braking System Market by Technology Type, Performance - Potential Analysis

6.3. Global Automotive Autonomous Emergency Braking System Market Estimates & Forecasts by Technology Type 2017-2027 (USD Billion)

6.4. Automotive Autonomous Emergency Braking System Market, Sub Segment Analysis

6.4.1. Crash Imminent Braking

6.4.2. Dynamic Breaking Support

Chapter 7. Global Automotive Autonomous Emergency Braking System Market, by Vehicle Type

7.1. Market Snapshot

7.2. Global Automotive Autonomous Emergency Braking System Market by Vehicle Type - Potential Analysis

7.3. Global Automotive Autonomous Emergency Braking System Market Estimates & Forecasts by Vehicle Type 2017-2027 (USD Billion)

7.4. Automotive Autonomous Emergency Braking System Market, Sub Segment Analysis

7.4.1. Passenger Car

7.4.2. Commercial Vehicles

Chapter 8. Global Automotive Autonomous Emergency Braking System Market, Regional Analysis

Related Report:

Automotive Regenerative Braking Market, Industry Analysis Report, Regional Outlook, Growth Potential, Price Trends, Competitive Market Share & Forecast, 2019  2026

The automotive regenerative braking market is anticipated to witness significant growth over the coming time period owing to ongoing technological advancements and widescale adoption in hybrid and electric vehicles. Automotive regenerative braking is a process where the electric motor which generally drives a pure electric or hybrid vehicle is mainly operated in reverse during the time of coasting or braking. From a regional frame of reference, the Europe automotive regenerative braking market held over 8% share in 2019 owing to presence of multiple manufacturers that escalates the availability of electric vehicles. The Middle East & Africa region is at a nascent stage and will witness significant growth over the forecast timeframe to reduce the regions dependency on conventional fuel.

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New Delhi:

Pakistan on Saturday resorted to shelling along the Line of Control in Rajouris Manjakote. As per reports, soldier, Lance Naik Mohammed Naseer was martyred in unprovoked ceasefire violation by Pakistan in Rajouri sector.

Lance Naik Mohammed Naseer, 35-year-old from border district of Poonch in J&K, was hit during the firing and shelling by the Pakistani troops on the Indian forward posts, the spokesman said.

Pakistan Army initiated unprovoked firing on Indian Army posts in Rajouri sector at around 1330 hours today. Indian Army retaliated strongly and effectively, he said.

There was Pakistani firing and shelling along the LoC in Balakote, Panjgrian, Naika and Manjakote areas.

In the fire exchange, Lance Naik Mohammed Naseer was grievously injured and succumbed to his injuries, he said.

Naseer, who belonged to Ajout village of Poonch district, leaves behind wife Wasim Akhtar, he said.

Paying tributes to Naseer, the spokesman said he was a brave and sincere soldier who loved his job to the core.

The nation will always remain indebted to him for the supreme sacrifice and devotion to duty, the spokesman added.

Earlier on Wednesday, two Army jawans were killed on Wednesday as Pakistani troops violated the ceasefire in the Keran sector of Line of Control (LoC) in Kashmir.

On Tuesday, three militants were killed in an overnight encounter with security forces in central Kashmir's Budgam district.

On June 22, the Indian Army gunned down two terrorists and foiled an infiltration bid in Kupwara's Keran sector of Jammu and Kashmir along the LoC.

With PTI inputs

#WATCH: Shelling by Pakistan along the Line of Control in Rajouri's Manjakote in Jammu and Kashmir. pic.twitter.com/YxPTrdxvoF  ANI (@ANI_news) July 15, 2017

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MINNEAPOLIS  It was three days after George Floyd died in police custody last May, and businesses in the Twin Cities were on fire. Police officers were shooting rubber bullets and tear gas to hold back protesters, their anger fueled by a cellphone video of Mr. Floyd, a Black man, gasping for breath under the knee of a white officer.

As soldiers prepared to take to the streets, the officer, Derek Chauvin, believed that the case against him was so devastating that he agreed to plead guilty to third-degree murder. As part of the deal, officials now say, he was willing to go to prison for more than 10 years. Local officials, scrambling to end the communitys swelling anger, scheduled a news conference to announce the deal.

But at the last minute, according to new details laid out by three law enforcement officials, the deal fell apart after William P. Barr, the attorney general at the time, rejected the arrangement. The deal was contingent on the federal governments approval because Mr. Chauvin, who had asked to serve his time in a federal prison, wanted assurance he would not face federal civil rights charges.

An official said Mr. Barr worried that a plea deal, so early in the process and before a full investigation had concluded, would be perceived as too lenient by the growing number of protesters across America. At the same time, Mr. Barr wanted to allow state officials, who were about to take over the case from the county prosecutor who has had tense relations with Minneapoliss Black community, to make their own decisions about how to proceed.
SHELBURNE, Vt., Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Community Heart & Soul today announced its new Community Heart & Soul Seed Grant Program, a funding opportunity for small cities and towns nationwide. The Community Heart & Soul Seed Grant Program provides startup funding of $10,000 for resident-driven groups in communities with populations of 2,500 to 30,000 to implement the Community Heart & Soul model. The Community Heart & Soul model engages the entire population of a town in identifying what they love most about their community, what future they want for it, and how to achieve it.

"Small cities and towns across the U.S. have opportunities to build a brighter, more prosperous future but often need an initial boost to get started," said Mark Sherman, Community Heart & Soul Executive Director. "With the Community Heart & Soul Seed Grant Program, we are working to accelerate the growth and adoption of Community Heart & Soul so that even more communities can make use of the proven model."

Community Heart & Soul is a nonpartisan, community engagement process that brings residents together to chart a better future based on what matters most in their communities. A highly inclusive process, Community Heart & Soul reaches deep into communities to ensure all voices, including those that are often hidden or missing, are represented in determining a town's future. Grant recipients will have the potential to transform their community through Community Heart & Soul, leading to increased local pride, more viable economic development projects, and stronger community connections.

According to Lyman Orton, Founder and Chair, "When residents get closer, the differences tend to fade and the things they care most about replace the differences. Trust is built and residents become more collaborative in their decision-making and stronger believers in their communities. People continue to stay in their communities, new people move in, and investment in towns increases."

The Community Heart & Soul Seed Grant program is accepting applications on a rolling basis beginning February 10, 2021 until grant funds are exhausted. Interested communities are encouraged to attend an informational webinar on February 17, 2021. For more information visit www.communityheartandsoul.org/seed-grants.

About Community Heart & Soul

Founded by Lyman Orton, proprietor of The Vermont Country Store, Community Heart & Soul is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to establish and promote a community practice that engages all residents within a community in determining what matters most to the people who live there and uses their ideas and aspirations as the blueprint for a better future. The Community Heart & Soul model has been field-tested in over 90 communities across the U.S. Orton established Community Heart & Soul after serving on his town's planning commission and growing frustrated that decisions being made that would shape the town's future were without guidance from the majority of the residents.

SOURCE Community Heart & Soul

Related Links

https://www.communityheartandsoul.org



A team at the University of Colorado Boulder has designed new kinds of liquid crystals that mirror the complex structures of some solid crystals--a major step forward in building flowing materials that can match the colorful diversity of forms seen in minerals and gems, from lazulite to topaz.

The group's findings, published today in the journal Nature, may one day lead to new types of smart windows and television or computer displays that can bend and control light like never before.

The results come down to a property of solid crystals that will be familiar to many chemists and gemologists: Symmetry.

Ivan Smalyukh, a professor in the Department of Physics at CU Boulder, explained that scientists categorize all known crystals into seven main classes, plus many more sub-classes--in part based on the "symmetry operations" of their internal atoms. In other words, how many ways can you stick an imaginary mirror inside of a crystal or rotate it and still see the same structure? Think of this classification system as Baskin-Robbins' 32 flavors but for minerals.

To date, however, scientists haven't been able to create liquid crystals--flowing materials that are found in most modern display technologies--that come in those same many flavors.

"We know everything about all the possible symmetries of solid crystals that we can make. There are 230 of them," said Smalyukh, senior author of the new study who is also a fellow of the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute (RASEI) at CU Boulder. "When it comes to nematic liquid crystals, the kind in most displays, we only have a few that have been demonstrated so far."

That is, until now.

In their latest findings, Smalyukh and his colleagues came up with a way to design the first liquid crystals that resemble monoclinic and orthorhombic crystals--two of those seven main classes of solid crystals. The findings, he said, bring a bit more of order to the chaotic world of fluids.

"There are a lot of possible types of liquid crystals, but, so far, very few have been discovered," Smalyukh said. "That is great news for students because there's a lot more to find."

Symmetry in action

To understand symmetry in crystals, first picture your body. If you place a giant mirror running down the middle of your face, you'll see a reflection that looks (more or less) like the same person.

Solid crystals have similar properties. Cubic crystals, which include diamonds and pyrite, for example, are made up of atoms arranged in the shape of a perfect cube. They have a lot of symmetry operations.

"If you rotate those crystals by 90 or 180 degrees around many special axes, for example, all of the atoms stay in the right places," Smalyukh said.

But there are other types of crystals, too. The atoms inside monoclinic crystals, which include gypsum or lazulite, are arranged in a shape that looks like a slanted column. Flip or rotate these crystals all you want, and they still have only two distinct symmetries--one mirror plane and one axis of 180-degree rotation, or the symmetry that you can see by spinning a crystal around an axis and noticing that it looks the same every 180 degrees. Scientists call that a "low-symmetry" state.

Traditional liquid crystals, however, don't display those kinds of complex structures. The most common liquid crystals, for example, are made up of tiny rod-shaped molecules. Under the microscope, they tend to line up like dry pasta noodles tossed into a pot, Smalyukh said.

"When things can flow they don't usually exhibit such low symmetries," Smalyukh said.

Order in liquids

He and his colleagues wanted to see if they could change that. To begin, the team mixed together two different kinds of liquid crystals. The first was the common class made up of rod-shaped molecules. The second was made up of particles shaped like ultra-thin disks.

When the researchers brought them together, they noticed something strange: Under the right conditions in the lab, those two types of crystals pushed and squeezed each other, changing their orientation and arrangement. The end result was a nematic liquid crystal fluid with symmetry that looks a lot like that of a solid monoclinic crystal. The molecules inside displayed some symmetry, but only one mirror plane and one axis of 180-degree rotation.

The group had created, in other words, a material with the mathematical properties of a lazulite or gypsum crystal--but theirs could flow like a fluid.

"We're asking a very fundamental question: What are the ways that you can combine order and fluidity in a single material?" Smalyukh said.

And, the team's creations are dynamic: If you heat the liquid crystals up or cool them down, for example, you can morph them into a rainbow of different structures, each with their own properties, said Haridas Mundoor, lead author of the new paper. That's pretty handy for engineers.

"This offers different avenues that can modify display technologies, which may enhance the energy efficiency in performance of devices like smart phones," said Mundoor, a postdoctoral research associate at CU Boulder.

He and his colleagues are still nowhere near making liquid crystals that can replicate the full spectrum of solid crystals. But the new paper gets them closer than ever before--good news for fans of shiny things everywhere.

###

Other coauthors on the new paper include Jin-Sheng (Jason) Wu, a graduate student at CU Boulder, and Henricus Wensink of the Universite Paris-Saclay.
Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. has acquired Ormond Beach, Fla.-based Air-Sur, Inc. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Founded in 1976, Air-Sur is a retail insurance broker serving clients in the aviation and aerospace industry. Its clients include air transport operators, service companies, component manufacturers, engine/airframe overhaul and modification centers, as well as general aviation operators. Thomas K. Coughlin and his associates will continue to operate from their current location under the direction of Scott Firestone, head of Gallaghers Southwest region retail property/casualty brokerage operations.

J. Patrick Gallagher, Jr., Chairman, president and CEO of Arthur J. Gallagher, said the acquisition expands its aerospace capabilities across Florida and the Southeast.

Arthur J. Gallagher & Co., a global insurance brokerage, risk management and consulting services firm, is headquartered in Rolling Meadows, Illinois. The company has operations in 49 countries and offers client service capabilities in more than 150 countries around the world through a network of correspondent brokers and consultants.

Topics Mergers Florida A.J. Gallagher
Yenagoa  Fear has heightened among indigenes of the coastal area of Nembe, Brass and Akassa in Nembe and Brass Local Government Areas of Bayelsa State as suspected sea pirates terrorise commercial boats and abduction of a 64year old chief and three others.

The development, it was learned, has forced maritime workers to down tools in the troubled axis.

The State Chairman of the Nigerian Maritime Union, Comrade Ogoniba Ibingansi confirmed on the telephone that the waterways are no longer safe and all boats operating along Odioma, Akassa, Brass and Nembe are no longer loading with passengers told to stay away.

Ibingansi, who also confirmed that the security agencies including the Special Adviser on Security Matters to the Bayelsa State Government are battling on ways to counter the pirates, "the boys have taken over the water routes."

Suspected sea pirates have been operating along the waters since last Sunday, "it is funny. They attack some boats and rob all the passengers Monday evening.

Also read: APC urges security agencies to investigate killing of its ward chairman in Benue

"They abducted three persons, they attacked another boat and kidnapped four. They used the earlier boat to release the first three persons," a source who spoke under anonymity.

It was also learned that on Monday evening, along the Yenagoa-Akassa in Brass Local Government route, a businessman was stripped naked and taken away by the heavily armed sea pirates.

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The rampaging sea robbers reportedly surfaced along Odioma Creek and attacked a boat heading to Nembe around 2 pm and took Away one person. They attacked another boat heading to Brass from Nembe and abducted three persons.

Meanwhile, the Commissioner of Police Bayelsa State Command, CP Mike Okoli, has ordered an immediate manhunt for the kidnappers who attacked speedboats and Kidnapped passengers on the Okpoma/Odioma and Nembe/ Brass waterways on Tuesday.

In a statement to confirm the attacked on the passenger boats, the Spokesman of the Command, SP Asinim Butswat, said the two separate incidents occurred simultaneously and six passengers were allegedly kidnapped by unknown gunmen suspected to be sea pirates.

He said: "In a joint operation, operatives from the Marine Police, Navy and Joint Task Force 'Operation Delta Safe' are combing the creeks to rescue the kidnapped victims and apprehend the kidnappers.

"The Command appeals to the good people of Bayelsa State to remain calm and volunteer useful information to enable the security agencies to fish out these hoodlums."
Voter rolls often change after presidential elections, when registrations sometimes shift toward the winners party or people update their old affiliations to correspond to their current party preferences, often at a department of motor vehicles. Other states remove voters who are inactive or who have died, or those who have moved out of state from all parties, and lump those people together with voters who changed their own registrations. Of the 25 states surveyed by The Times, Nevada, Kansas, Utah and Oklahoma had combined such voter list maintenance with registration changes, so their overall totals would not be limited to changes that voters made themselves. Other states may have done so, as well, but did not indicate in their public data.
Few modern military aircraft have held the publics attention like the Grumman F-14 Tomcat, so while this news is a little old, we thought our readers would enjoy hearing details about the unveiling late last year of a new monument celebrating the Tomcats heritage at the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, Florida. It also pays homage to the memory of 68 aviators who lost their lives flying the legendary aircraft.

Members of the F-14 Tomcat Association sponsored the new monument, one of three around the nation, the others being at major Tomcat air stations in Virginia Beach, Virginia and San Diego, California. The unveiling ceremony took place on November 18th, 2020 just three days shy of that dramatic day 50 years ago when the first Tomcat took flight. The monument is sure to grab peoples attention, especially given its location just beneath the nose of YF-14A Bu.157984, the types fifth prototype, which has been poised dramatically on its plinth at the museums entrance since 1990.

The following news clip features the unveiling:

The Tomcat is well represented inside the museum too, with the forward fuselage of F-14A Bu.159825 on show, as well as F-14D Bu.161159. The latter aircraft flew the very last U.S. Tomcat combat mission when she trapped aboard U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71) following a sortie over Iraq on February 8, 2006. This aircraft flew a total of 224 combat missions over Afghanistan and Iraq during its career!
Democratic House impeachment managers on Wednesday began formally laying out their case that President Donald Trump incited the rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. They are allowed 16 hours, spread over two days, to make their arguments.

Below are some takeaways from Day 2 of the Senate impeachment trial.

- - -

1. The new video

Before Tuesday's proceedings, the House impeachment team sent word that its presentation would include never-before-seen video.

What they showed was harrowing, illustrating how close several lawmakers came to disaster. Vice President Mike Pence, Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., and Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, were all shown to have come very near harm's way.

Pence was shown evacuating just across from where the Capitol rioters had penetrated. Schumer was shown heading one way and then quickly running in the other at the direction of law enforcement. Romney was walking through a rope line when he too was told to run by Eugene Goodman of the Capitol Police.

Other lawmakers were also shown evacuating just feet from a rioter being held at gunpoint on the floor.

We already knew that the rioters targeted lawmakers and chanted threats about Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. We also knew that people died that day and in the aftermath. But until Wednesday, we didn't have a full picture of how close some high-profile lawmakers came to the mob.

Whether that makes Trump's conviction any more likely is yet to be seen. But it became clearer that Jan. 6 could have been much worse if events shifted by just a few seconds or a few feet.

- - -

2. Raskin's extended fire-in-a-theater metaphor

It's one thing to remind viewers that bad stuff happened, as Democrats did Tuesday. But to prove incitement, you need to show Trump actually caused what happened.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., the lead impeachment manager, sought to do that early. Trump's team has broadly referred to Trump's claims of free speech while ignoring the established limits on it, which include incitement and defamation. The generic example is shouting fire in a crowded theater.

Raskin rode that metaphor:

"This case is much worse than someone who falsely shouts 'Fire!' in a crowded theater. It's more like a case where the town fire chief who's paid to put out fires sends a mob not to yell 'Fire!' in a crowded theater but to actually set the theater on fire, and who then when the fire alarms go off and the calls start flooding into the fire department asking for help, does nothing but sit back, encourage the mob to continue its rampage and watch the fire spread on TV with glee and delight.

"So then we say this fire chief should never be allowed to hold this public job again, and you're fired and you're permanently disqualified."

There are limits to the metaphor. Trump's response was delayed, even by the accounts of GOP senators and some former White House aides. He also offered words of praise for the rioters, expressing "love" for them as it was happening and later saying it would be a day for them to remember. But he did, in the same "love" video, tell them to go home peacefully.

Trump often mixes his messages like this, giving himself plausible deniability while seeming to send a deliberate message. His team will focus on the "go home" stuff rather than the "We love you" stuff. It's up to Democrats to argue that his encouragement and negligence outweighed those messages.

- - -

3. Connecting the dots on Trump's actions

Democrats' impeachment article focused mostly on one event: Trump's Jan. 6 speech. It also mentioned Trump's call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, in which he asked him to "find" enough votes to flip the state (which, as of Wednesday, is the subject of a criminal investigation), as well as a broad reference to Trump's "prior efforts to subvert and obstruct the certification of" election results.

Given that, there was a real question about how far back in history they would go to prove incitement - including whether and how much they would lump in Trump's past references to violence by his supporters.

Early on, they did go through some of that history, while focusing more on Trump's subversion of the election.

Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, laid out a timeline of events dating to the spring, noting Trump laid a predicate for claiming the election was stolen as far back as May.

"The evidence shows clearly that this mob was provoked over many months by Donald J. Trump," Castro said. "And if you look at the evidence, his purposeful conduct, you'll see that the attack was foreseeable and preventable."

Castro pointed to Trump's tweets and comments saying that the only way he would lose the election was if it was rigged - despite polls at the time repeatedly showing his loss was likely. He played clips of Trump supporters who took that at face value. He also played clips of people, even as the votes were being counted, rising up in protest.

Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., said Trump sought to "prime" his supporters for Jan. 6 for months.

"That took time," Swalwell said, revisiting the fire metaphor. "Just like to build a fire, it doesn't just start with the flames. Donald Trump for months and months assembled the tinder, the kindling, threw on logs for fuel to have his supporters believe that the only way their victory would be lost was if it was stolen - so that way President Trump was ready, if he lost the election, to light the match."

There is no question that Trump's claims about the election have been routinely bogus; the courts have ruled as such. Claiming an election will be stolen months before it's held also speaks to the idea that he was planning for a specific eventuality.

The challenge for Democrats, from there, is to argue that this wasn't just an effort by Trump to save face - to pretend he never lost when that seemed likely. To continue the fire metaphor, playing with it is different from deliberately lighting it.

- - -

4. Making the case on Trump and violence

Democrats highlighted Trump's past rhetoric encouraging and suggesting violence by his supporters, while keeping it focused on events surrounding the election. Del. Stacey Plaskett, D-Virgin Islands, was given an unusually large platform for a nonvoting member of Congress to make the case.

She noted that Trump endorsed his supporters surrounding a Biden campaign bus on a Texas highway just before the election, leading to a collision. According to some accounts, they attempted to drive the bus off the road. Trump tweeted a video with fight music behind it and said at the time, "These patriots did nothing wrong."

An organizer of that caravan was later involved in encouraging people to storm the Capitol, pointing out flimsy fencing around it and using a bullhorn to urge people to enter.

The second major event Plaskett spotlighted was Trump being asked at a September presidential debate to repudiate extreme elements of the conservative movement, prompting him to tell the Proud Boys, a far-right group with a history of violence, to "stand back and stand by." The comment was criticized at the time as promoting potential violence. The Proud Boys adopted it as a mantra. They figured prominently in the storming of the Capitol.

Rep. Madeleine Dean, D-Pa., said in her presentation later: "This was not just one reference or a message to supporters by a politician to fight for a cause. He'd assembled thousands of violent people, people he knew were capable of violence, people he had seen be violent. They were standing now in front of him. And then he pointed to us [in Congress], lit the fuse and sent an angry mob."

- - -

5. The deliberate-negligence argument

One way to drive home the above point is to note that Trump didn't just light the fire - he declined to snuff it once it started burning. That shows that, at the very least, this was an outcome he was okay with.

Democrats made that deliberate-negligence argument Tuesday.

Beyond Raskin's allusion to Trump deciding to "sit back" and let it happen, Castro and Swalwell noted that some officials had warned about the possibility of such scenes weeks beforehand, but Trump did little.

"'Stop the count.' 'Stop the steal,'" Swalwell said, referring to Trump's post-election tweets alleging fraud. "President Trump was never shy about using his platforms to try and stop something. He could have very easily told his supporters: Stop threatening officials. Stop going to their homes. Stop it with the threats. But each time he didn't. Instead, in the face of escalating violence, he incited them further."

Democrats signaled this will be a focal point of the case against Trump, including Trump's tweet attacking Pence.

"You will see his relentless attack on Vice President Pence, who was, at that very moment, hiding with his family as armed extremists were chanting, 'Hang Mike Pence!' calling him a traitor," said Rep. Joe Neguse (D-Colo.), another impeachment manager. He added: "If as soon as this had started, President Trump had simply gone on to TV, just logged on to Twitter and said, 'Stop the attack,' if he had done so with even half as much force as he said, 'Stop the steal,' how many lives would we have saved? Sadly, he didn't do that."
The second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump began Tuesday with the House impeachment managers showing how rioters violently breached the US Capitol and attacked police officers, invoking Trump's name as they tried to disrupt the certification of the November election.

Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the lead impeachment manager, opened his presentation with a video showing disturbing footage of how protesters overran police and ransacked the Capitol, forcing lawmakers in the House and Senate to flee their chambers. The video was spliced with Trump's speech on January 6 ahead of the riots, showing the crowd's reaction to Trump as he urged them to head to the Capitol.

LIVE UPDATES - Trump's second impeachment trial: Day 1

The video was an early sign about how the House impeachment managers intend to confront senators with the violent events of the riot and charge that Trump is culpable for inciting the insurrectionists that attacked the Capitol and placed their lives in danger. The opening session of the trial was a debate on the constitutionality of the trial itself, but Democrats quickly turned their attention to the harrowing attack on the Capitol.

The Democrats' 13-minute video concluded with Trump's deleted tweet on January 6, saying that "these are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away."

Senators on both sides turned away from the video from time to time as it played on monitors, the yelling of the mob echoing in the chamber that rioters had breached. When the video ended, there was silence in the chamber before Raskin spoke again.

"If that's not an impeachable offense, then there's no such thing," Raskin argued.

Arguments on constitutionality on Tuesday's docket

Trump's team will have two hours to respond to the managers before the Senate will vote later Tuesday on the constitutionality of the trial for a former president. Trump's lawyers have countered that he did not incite the riot, and that his speech about the election was protected by the First Amendment.

After the video opening, Raskin and Democratic managers Reps. Joe Neguse of Colorado and David Cicilline of Rhode Island walked through the history of impeachment and how it was written in the Constitution, arguing there was sufficient precedent to hold a trial for Trump. Raskin used a series of writings to argue the Framers indeed intended impeachment to be a tool that could be used even after an official left office. Raskin said that in fact, one of the Founders' key concerns was protecting against politicians who came into office as "demagogues" and left as "tyrants."

"President Trump may not know a lot about the framers, but they certainly knew a lot about him," Raskin said. "Given the framers' intense focus on dangers to elections and the peaceful transfer of power, it is inconceivable they designed impeachment to be a dead letter in a president's final days in office."

The Democrats argued that Trump's team was trying to create a "January exception" that would create a loophole for presidents to commit impeachable offenses just before leaving office.

"Presidents can't inflame insurrection in their final weeks and then walk away like nothing happened," Neguse said. "And yet that is the rule that President Trump asks you to adopt."

Raskin closed the Democrats' opening argument with a personal plea to senators, choking up as he described how his daughter was in the Capitol when the riot unfolded, one day after his family had buried his 25-year-old son. When he was reunited with his daughter, who had been in hiding off the floor, Raskin apologized, saying he promised it wouldn't be like this the next time she visited. His daughter responded she didn't want to come back.

"Senators, this cannot be our future," Raskin said.

Trial schedule comes into focus

The historic impeachment trial has a number of firsts: It's the first time in US history a president will be tried in the Senate court of impeachment for a second time. And it's the first time that a former president will face the prospect of conviction and disbarment from office.

The Senate plans to continue the trial every day until it concludes, including the weekend, after an initial planned break for the Shabbat holiday on Friday evening was scrapped. Democratic senators came away from a conference call Tuesday morning with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer under the belief that a final vote on conviction could occur Sunday or Monday if there are no witnesses, according to multiple senators on the call. Republican senators discussed the possibility the trial could wrap up by Saturday evening if there are no witnesses, according to two senators.

House managers have not yet requested witnesses but are preserving that option in case they need witnesses' testimony to rebut an argument made by the Trump team, which would extend the length of the trial into at least next week. The timing is also a bit uncertain because it's unclear how much time the Trump team will use, though they're not expected to use their full 16 hours.

After the House managers and Trump' team make their presentation Tuesday, the Senate will vote on whether the trial is constitutional. While that vote could halt the trial if the Senate voted it was unconstitutional, a similar procedural vote forced by GOP Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky failed 55-45 last month.

Senior House aides on the impeachment team argued Tuesday that once the Senate votes on the constitutional question, which only needs a majority vote, it should be considered settled like any other trial motion.

But while Democrats are sure to win this vote, the constitutionality question looms over the entirety of the trial, because Republicans have coalesced around the argument as a reason to acquit Trump. Conviction requires two-thirds majority, or at least 17 Republican senators, to join all members of the Democratic caucus.

Last month, five Republican senators voted against Paul's motion to dismiss the trial, and it's not clear if there have been any shifts.

Sen. Roger Wicker, a Mississippi Republican, told CNN Tuesday that "Democrats sent a better team" this time, calling them "very eloquent." But he said "no," nothing had changed his mind on the constitutionality question.

"I think the constitutional defects of this -- both in the House and the Senate are overwhelming," said Sen. John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican.

Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who previously voted the trial was unconstitutional, said he was impressed by the Democrats' opening arguments, and he is keeping an open mind about his vote on the question of whether the trial is constitutional.

"It was a very good opening," Cassidy said. "Again I'm trying to digest facts. And I thought the arguments they gave were strong arguments. Clearly we have to hear the opposition, but they presented very good arguments."

A different kind of trial

Unlike the last trial, senators will not be required to sit at their desk throughout the proceedings, due to the Covid-19 pandemic. They will be able to instead watch from the gallery above the Senate chamber or in a room off the floor that will show the trial on television. Masks will not be required on the floor, unlike on the House floor, but the expectation is the managers and Trump's lawyers will wear masks unless they are speaking.

As the trial got underway, all senators were wearing masks except Paul, who has long argued that he's immune after having Covid early last year. It's still unclear if those who have had coronavirus remain immune to the virus. Other senators, however, who have had coronavirus or been vaccinated for the disease, still wear masks.

Senators are not allowed to speak during the trial as jurors.

After Tuesday's debate and vote, the House managers will have 16 hours over two days to make their presentation beginning Wednesday, followed by two days for Trump's lawyers. Senators will then have four hours to ask questions submitted in writing to both sides, and the Senate could debate and vote on whether to subpoena witnesses, though it remains unclear whether any will be sought at trial.

The Senate was initially going to recess for Shabbat on Friday evening, but Trump's lawyer David Schoen withdrew that request, and the trial will not break on Friday evening and Saturday. The Senate has also scheduled a session for Sunday afternoon, if the trial is still going.

This story and headline have been updated with additional developments Tuesday.
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We called Samsungs Galaxy S21 the best Android phone for the money thanks to the attractive new design, brilliant display and versatile cameras. The lower prices help a lot too, but $800 for the base model is still a lot for most folks. Now, Amazon is making them more interesting with a new deal, with prices of $700 for the Galaxy S21, the S21 Plus for $800 and $1,000 for the flagship S21 Ultra  discounts of $100, $200 and $200, respectively.

Buy the Samsung Galaxy S21 at Amazon - $700 Buy the Samsung Galaxy S21 Plus at Amazon - $800Buy the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra at Amazon - $1,000

The retailer is also offering a 50 percent discount on Samsungs newest AirPods rival, the excellent Galaxy Buds Pro, when purchasing one of Samsungs latest flagship models. Simply add the Galaxy Buds Pro in Black  which normally retail for $200  to your basket alongside a Samsung phone and itll automatically apply the $100 saving.

The Galaxy S21 and S21 Plus are largely similar 5G phones with high-end specs including beautiful 6.2-inch AMOLED displays with up to 120 Hz refresh rates, the latest Snapdragon 888 processors, 8GB of RAM and 4,000 mAh batteries that delivered 15 hours on a charge in our video rundown tests. You also get a versatile four-camera setup with a 64-megapixel telephoto sensor, a 12-megapixel primary camera and a 12-megapixel ultra-wide sensor. If you prefer large screens, the S21 Plus has a 6.7-inch display, compared to the 6.2-inch display on the S21.

The Galaxy S21 Ultra, meanwhile, is Samsungs top-flight 5G smartphone that we called capable but costly. It comes with a 6.8-inch AMOLED 2X 1,440 x 3,200 display, 108-megapixel main camera, 12-megapixel ultra-wide sensor, 10-megapixel f/2.4 telephoto camera with 3x optical zoom and a 10-megpixel f/4.9 camera with 10x optical zoom and laser autofocus. Naturally, you get a Snapdragon 888 processor and 12GB of RAM as well, along with a huge 5,000 mAh battery.

There are few downsides to any of the models, though the S21 has less resolution than the S20 and can deliver lower quality zoomed-in photos. The Galaxy S21 Ultras main issue is the lack of expandable storage and $1,200 price tag. However, its a lot more palatable at $1,000 if youre looking for the ultimate Android smartphone experience.

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.
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US special envoy for Yemen Timothy Lenderking met Saudi Arabia's Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud in Riyadh, Saudi state news agency SPA said on Wednesday

"Developments concerning Yemen were discussed, and joint efforts to support reaching a comprehensive political solution to the Yemen crisis were reviewed," the SPA report said.

Saudi Arabia's ambassador to Yemen was also at the meeting, it said.

US President Joe Biden last week named veteran U.S. diplomat Lenderking as a special envoy in a bid to step up American diplomacy to try to end the war which has created what the UN calls the world's largest humanitarian crisis.

Saudi Arabia leads a military coalition which intervened in Yemen in 2015, backing government forces fighting the Houthis.

UN officials are trying to revive peace talks to end the war.

The new administration in Washington has also announced an end to its support for Saudi-led military operations in Yemen.

Short link:






Haiti - Politic : The Senate condemns and deplores...





On Wednesday, Senator Joseph Lambert President of the Upper House informed the public in general and political protagonists in particular, that the Senate is "very seriously concerned by the situation which has prevailed in Haiti for some time and which took at the beginning of the month of February an acceleration that risks leading to a break-up and disintegration of the Haitian Nation."



"[...] The Senate deplores the escalation of hateful and polarizing speeches which tear apart the national fabric on subjects concerning the future of the Common Fatherland. It condemns any attempt to seize political power by violence or by any other means contrary to democratic rules. Likewise, it condemns any excess of the Government and the Police forces in the control of security and the maintenance of public order."



For Senator Lambert, "the Constitution must remain the sole compass of the political game. In this sense, the Senate invites everyone, whether in power or in the opposition, to strictly respect the prescriptions of the Fundamental Charter with regard to the consensual rules of conquest, exercise and transmission of power."



In this particular time of crisis, Senator Lambert reiterates his call for dialogue, in search of an agreement for a way out of the crisis that will bring harmony and peace to the Haitian community."



HH/ HaitiLibre


















[February 10, 2021] Etesevimab (JS016) Administered with Bamlanivimab Receives FDA Emergency Use Authorization for COVID-19

Etesevimab and bamlanivimab administered together is authorized for treatment of recently diagnosed, mild to moderate COVID-19 in patients who are high risk for progression to severe COVID-19

More than 250,000 doses manufactured throughout Q1 2021; up to 1 million doses by mid-2021

FDA authorizes shortened infusion time for this neutralizing antibody therapy authorized for emergency use

SHANGHAI, China, Feb. 10, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Junshi Biosciences (HKEX: 1877; SSE: 688180), a leading innovation-driven biopharmaceutical company dedicated to the discovery, development and commercialization of novel therapies, announced today that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for investigational etesevimab (JS016 or LY-CoV016) 1400 mg and bamlanivimab (LY-CoV555) 700 mg together, according to the companys global partner Eli Lilly and Company (NYSE: LLY). This therapy is authorized for the treatment of mild to moderate COVID-19 in patients aged 12 and older who are at high risk for progressing to severe COVID-19 and/or hospitalization. Etesevimab and bamlanivimab should be administered together via a single intravenous infusion as soon as possible after a positive COVID-19 test and within 10 days of symptom onset. In addition, the FDA has authorized infusion times for bamlanivimab alone and bamlanivimab and etesevimab together to be as short as 16 or 21 minutes, respectively  a significant reduction from the previously authorized time of 60 minutes. This change has been made in response to feedback received from front-line nurses and doctors administering these infusions and is aimed at reducing the burden on the healthcare system. The EUA is based on Phase 3 data from the BLAZE-1 trial, announced on January 26, 2021, which demonstrated that etesevimab and bamlanivimab together reduced the risk of COVID-19 hospitalizations and death by 70 percent. These data replicate earlier results, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association (IF=45.54), in a much larger group of patients. The most common adverse event more often reported for patients receiving etesevimab and bamlanivimab together versus placebo was nausea on the day of infusion. While Phase 2 and Phase 3 trials evaluated a range of doses of bamlanivimab alone and etesevimab and bamlanivimab together, data demonstrated consistent and similar clinical effects among all doses studied. Additionally, initial results from an ongoing Phase 2 study provided viral load and pharmacodynamic/pharmacokinetic data which demonstrated etesevimab 1400 mg and bamlanivimab 700 mg together produced similar effects to those observed in the Phase 3 trial with etesevimab 2800 and bamlanivimab 2800 together. Together, these data provide confidence in the authorized dose, which expands available supply to help more patients without sacrificing potential efficacy. The FDA grants EUA to provide availability of a medicine that may help diagnose, treat or prevent a life-threatening disease when no adequate and approved alternatives are available. This administration of etesevimab and bamlanivimab together is authorized only for the duration of the declaration, unless the authorization is terminated or revoked sooner. The authorization is temporary and does not replace the formal review and approval process. The administration of etesevimab and bamlanivimab together remains investigational and has not been approved under a Biologics License Application (BLA). Evaluation of its safety and efficacy is ongoing in clinical trials. Data from these studies will be used to support a future BLA submission for the treatment. Bamlanivimab alone is authorized in numerous countries, while bamlanivimab and etesevimab together is currently authorized in the U.S. and Italy. Lilly will continue working with global regulators to make these therapies available around the world. In an effort to help as many patients as possible, Lilly will continue to accelerate manufacturing of etesevimab for use around the world. Lilly, in collaboration with Amgen, plans to manufacture up to 1 million doses of etesevimab for administration with bamlanivimab by mid-2021. There are 100,000 doses ready immediately and an additional 150,000 doses will be available throughout the first quarter. Lilly anticipates procurement and allocation of etesevimab and bamlanivimab together will mirror the process followed for bamlanivimab alone  making the therapy available directly to governments for allocation based on unmet needs. Global allocation will aim to ensure access for patients with high unmet need, no matter where they live. Dr. Ning LI, CEO of Junshi Biosciences said: Since the outbreak of the pandemic, Junshi Biosciences and the IMCAS have been dedicated to the co-development of neutralizing antibodies. Now, with Lilly, our global partners participation, the innovative therapy is authorized for use in the U.S. and Italy, while unremitting endeavors to meet the extensive anti-COVID-19 needs are made by the local and oversea medical industry. The data of etesevimab and bamlanivimab together provides strong evidence for the safety and efficacy of JS016, thus giving us confidence to proceed with the clinical trial of JS016, which is ongoing in several countries and regions, including Mainland China, Hong Kong, the Philippines, etc."



About etesevimab(JS016)

Etesevimab (JS016 or LY-CoV016) is a recombinant fully human monoclonal neutralizing antibody, which specifically binds to the SARS-CoV-2 surface spike protein receptor binding domain with high affinity and can block the binding of the virus to the ACE2 host cell surface receptor. Point mutations were introduced into the native human IgG1 antibody to mitigate effector function. Lilly licensed etesevimab from Junshi Biosciences after it was jointly developed by Junshi Biosciences and the Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Science (IMCAS). Junshi Biosciences leads development in Greater China, while Lilly leads development in the rest of the world. Lilly has successfully completed a Phase 1 study (NCT04441931) of etesevimab in healthy U.S. volunteers to evaluate the safety, tolerability, pharmacokinetics and immunogenicity. A Phase 2/3 study in people recently diagnosed with COVID-19 in the ambulatory setting (BLAZE-1, NCT04427501) is ongoing. Junshi Biosciences has completed a similar Phase 1 study in healthy volunteers in China and has initiated Phase 1b/2 trials in COVID-19 patients globally.

About bamlanivimab(LY-CoV555)

Bamlanivimab (LY-CoV555) is a recombinant, neutralizing human IgG1 monoclonal antibody (mAb) directed against the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2. It is designed to block viral attachment and entry into human cells, thus neutralizing the virus, potentially treating COVID-19. Bamlanivimab emerged from the collaboration between Lilly and AbCellera to create antibody therapies for the prevention and treatment of COVID-19. Lilly scientists rapidly developed the antibody in less than three months after it was discovered by AbCellera and the scientists at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Vaccine Research Center. It was identified from a blood sample taken from one of the first U.S. patients who recovered from COVID-19. Lilly has successfully completed a Phase 1 study of bamlanivimab in hospitalized patients with COVID-19 (NCT04411628). A Phase 2/3 study in people recently diagnosed with COVID-19 in the ambulatory setting (BLAZE-1, NCT04427501) is ongoing. A Phase 3 study of bamlanivimab for the prevention of COVID-19 in residents and staff at long-term care facilities (BLAZE-2, NCT04497987) is also ongoing. In addition, bamlanivimab is being tested in the National Institutes of Health-led ACTIV-2 study in ambulatory COVID-19 patients. About BLAZE-1

BLAZE-1 (NCT04427501) is a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled Phase 2/3 study designed to assess the efficacy and safety of bamlanivimab alone or together with etesevimab for the treatment of symptomatic COVID-19 in the outpatient setting. To be eligible, patients were required to have mild or moderate symptoms of COVID-19 as well as a positive SARS-CoV-2 test based on a sample collected no more than three days prior to drug infusion. In the Phase 2 portion of BLAZE-1, cohorts of mild to moderate, recently diagnosed COVID-19 patients, were randomized to one of three doses of bamlanivimab (700 mg, 2800 mg, and 7000 mg), etesevimab 2800 mg plus bamlanivimab 2800 mg, or placebo. Results from the Phase 2 cohorts of BLAZE-1 were published in the New England Journal of Medicine and The Journal of the American Medical Association. In the Phase 3 portion of BLAZE-1, the combination therapy arms enrolled mild to moderate, recently diagnosed COVID-19 patients who are at high risk for progressing to severe COVID-19 and/or hospitalization, studying etesevimab 2800 mg plus bamlanivimab 2800 mg versus placebo. The primary outcome measure for the Phase 3 portion of the BLAZE-1 trial was the percentage of participants who experience COVID-related hospitalizations or death from any cause by day 29. The key secondary endpoints were change from baseline to day 7 in SARS-CoV-2 viral load, persistently high SARS-CoV-2 viral load on day 7, time to sustained symptom resolution, and COVID-related hospitalization, ER visit or death from any cause from baseline by day 29. Additional endpoints include change from baseline in viral load at other time points, symptom improvement, symptom resolution, as well as safety. The study is ongoing with additional treatment arms. Across all treatment arms, the trial will enroll up to 3,300 participants. About BLAZE-4

BLAZE-4 (NCT04634409) is a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial designed to assess the efficacy and safety of bamlanivimab alone, and bamlanivimab and etesevimab together, at various doses, versus placebo for the treatment of symptomatic COVID-19 in the outpatient setting. Across all treatment arms, the trial will enroll an estimated 1,000 participants in the United States and Puerto Rico. The primary outcome measure is percentage of participants who have a viral load greater than 5.27 at day 7. Additional endpoints include change from baseline to Day 7 in SARS-CoV-2 viral load, percentage of participants who experience COVID-related hospitalization, ER visit or death from baseline through Day 29, as well as safety. About Junshi Biosciences

Founded in December 2012, Junshi Biosciences (HK: 1877; SH: 688180) is an innovation-driven biopharmaceutical company dedicated to the discovery, development and commercialization of innovative therapeutics. The company has established a diversified R & D pipeline comprising 27 innovative drug candidates and 2 biosimilars, with five therapeutic focus areas covering cancer, autoimmune, metabolic, neurological, and infectious diseases. Junshi Biosciences was the first Chinese pharmaceutical company that obtained marketing approval for anti-PD-1 monoclonal antibody in China. Its first-in-human anti-BTLA antibody for solid tumors was the first in the world to be approved for clinical trials by the FDA and NMPA and its anti-PCSK9 monoclonal antibody was the first in China to be approved for clinical trials by the NMPA. In early 2020, Junshi Biosciences joined forces with the Institute of Microbiology Chinese Academy of Science and Eli Lilly to co-develop JS016, Chinas first neutralizing fully human monoclonal antibody against SARS-CoV-2, which has entered clinical trials and is now a part of our continuous innovation for disease control and prevention of the global pandemic. Junshi Biosciences has over 2,000 employees in the United States (San Francisco and Maryland) and China (Shanghai, Suzhou, Beijing and Guangzhou). For more information, please visit: http://junshipharma.com. About Eli Lilly and Company

Lilly is a global healthcare leader that unites caring with discovery to create medicines that make life better for people around the world. We were founded more than a century ago by a man committed to creating high-quality medicines that meet real needs, and today we remain true to that mission in all our work. Across the globe, Lilly employees work to discover and bring life-changing medicines to those who need them, improve the understanding and management of disease, and give back to communities through philanthropy and volunteerism. To learn more about Lilly, please visit us at? www.lilly.com ?and? www.lilly.com/news .?P-LLY Contact Information

IR Team:

Junshi Biosciences

info@junshipharma.com

+ 86 021-2250 0300 Solebury Trout

Bob Ai

bai@soleburytrout.com

+ 1 646-389-6658 PR Team:

Junshi Biosciences

Zhi Li

zhi_li@junshipharma.com

+ 86 021-6105 8800



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New Delhi, Feb 10 : Canada Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called up Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday, requesting for Covid-19 vaccines, which India has generously gifted to 20 countries under its vaccine diplomacy.

An official statement from the Prime Minister's Office said that Trudeau informed Modi about Canada's requirement for Covid-19 vaccines from India. Modi on his part assured the Canadian PM that India would do its best to support Canada's vaccination efforts, just as it had done for many other countries already.

Expressing his appreciation, Trudeau said that if the world manages to conquer Covid-19, it would be significantly because of India's tremendous pharmaceutical capacity, and Prime Minister Modi's leadership in sharing this capacity with the rest of the world. The Indian Prime Minister thanked Trudeau for his sentiments.

The two leaders also reiterated the common perspective shared by India and Canada on many important geo-political issues. They agreed to continue the close collaboration between both the countries in fighting global challenges like climate change and the economic impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The leaders looked forward to meeting each other in various important international fora later this year, and continue their discussions on all issues of mutual interest.
Photo: The Canadian Press FILE - This Nov. 30, 2014 image made from video released by Loujain al-Hathloul, shows her driving towards the United Arab Emirates - Saudi Arabia border before her arrest on Dec. 1, 2014, in Saudi Arabia. The family of the leading Saudi womens rights activist says she has been released from prison after nearly three years behind bars. The sisters of Loujain al-Hathloul tweeted the news on Wednesday, Feb. 10, 2021. (AP Photo/Loujain al-Hathloul, File)

One of Saudi Arabias most prominent political activists and graduate of UBC was released from prison Wednesday, her family said, after serving nearly three years on charges that sparked an international uproar over the kingdoms human rights record.

Loujain al-Hathloul, who pushed to end a ban on women driving in Saudi Arabia, was arrested in 2018 and sentenced to almost six years in prison last December under a broad counterterrorism law. Held for 1001 days, with time in pre-trial detention and solitary confinement, she was accused of crimes such as agitating for change, using the internet to cause disorder and pursuing a foreign agenda  charges that rights groups describe as politically motivated.

Loujain is at home!!!!!!" her sister Lina al-Hathloul declared on Twitter alongside a screenshot showing a flushed Loujain beaming on a family video call.

There was no immediate comment from Saudi authorities on her release.

Her release this year was widely expected as the judge suspended two years and 10 months of her sentence and gave her credit for time already served, putting her release date sometime in March.

The release Wednesday, earlier than anticipated, comes as Saudi Arabia faces new scrutiny from the United States, where President Joe Biden has vowed to reassess the U.S.-Saudi partnership and stand up for human rights and democratic principles.

I have some welcome news that the Saudi government has released a prominent human rights activist," Biden said in a speech at the Pentagon. "She was a powerful activist for womens rights and releasing her was the right thing to do.

Biden had labeled Saudi Arabia a pariah on the campaign trial and promised to reverse former President Donald Trumps policy of giving the country a blank check to pursue a disastrous set of policies, including the targeting of female activists.

The harsh crackdown against women who had pressed for the right to drive before the kingdom lifted the ban in mid-2018 came to symbolize the dual strategy of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The young, ambitious prince has sought to portray himself as a liberalizing reformer while also silencing and detaining activists who long had pushed for change.

Prince Mohammed cultivated close relations with the Trump administration, which members of Congress say largely shielded the kingdom from censure over its human rights record and instead sought to prioritize lucrative weapons deals.

The suppression of perceived critics and potential rivals has intensified under Prince Mohammed, increasingly attracting international ire since the killing of Saudi critic Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul at the hands of Saudi agents in late 2018.

Although released, al-Hathloul will remain free under strict conditions, her family has said, including a five-year travel ban and three years of probation.

Loujain is at home, but she is not free. The fight is not over, her sister Lina wrote on Twitter. I am not fully happy without the release of all political prisoners.

Many human rights activists applauded al-Hathlouls release from prison but urged caution amid the remaining restrictions on her freedom.

If she is not allowed to leave Saudi Arabia, or is forced to remain on probation, there is no reason to believe she will not be arrested again or forced to remain subject to her countrys draconian laws that prevent her from speaking out and demanding her basic rights, said Abdullah Alaoudh, Gulf research director at Democracy for the Arab World Now, the organization founded by Khashoggi.

The 31-year-old Saudi activist rocketed to prominence in Saudi Arabia for her criticism of the kingdom's guardianship system, which bars women from travel without a male relative, and her outspokenness on human rights issues. She was first detained in 2014 for 70 days when, in an act of defiance, she posted a video online of herself attempting to drive from the United Arab Emirates into the kingdom.

From behind bars al-Hathloul launched hunger strikes to protest her prison conditions and joined other female activists in testifying to judges that she was tortured and sexually assaulted by masked men during interrogations. The women reported that they were caned, electrocuted and waterboarded. Some said they were groped and threatened with rape. Saudi Arabia denies that any were mistreated.

Al-Hathloul's family said that an appeals court Tuesday rejected her claims of torture, citing a lack of evidence. While some activists and their families have been pressured into silence, al-Hathlouls siblings, who reside in the U.S. and Europe, have launched a high-profile campaign calling for her release.

Al-Hathlouls release follows that of two dual Saudi-U.S. citizens who had been detained since 2019: Badr al-Ibrahim, a writer and physician, and Salah al-Haidar, the son of a prominent womens rights activist.

Following intense pressure from Congress, they were both set free, the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee announced last Friday, calling it a positive, but long overdue step.

Al-Haidar, who has a family home in Vienna, Virginia, had faced up to 33 years in prison for alleged Twitter posts criticizing the Saudi government. The Freedom Initiative, a prisoners' rights group, stressed that the release of the men was temporary, pending trial on what it described as unsubstantiated terrorism charges.
Johnson & Johnson's CEO says it is possible that Americans will need to get vaccinated against the coronavirus annually over the next several years.

In an interview on CNBC on Tuesday,Alex Gorsky discussed how the virus has kept mutating, with variants popping up in the UK, South Africa and Brazil.

So far, vaccines have been proven to be largely effective at preventing infection by the variants, including J&J's own vaccine, which was found to be 66 percent effective.

However, Gorsky warned that if the virus keeps mutating, and new variants keep getting discovered, the COVID-19 vaccine may become like a seasonal flu shot that is administered every year.

Johnson & Johnson's CEO Alex Gorsky (pictured) said in an interview on Tuesday that if the coronavirus continues to mutate, he believes it's possible Americans will have to get a vaccine against COVID-19 every year like a seasonal flu shot

It comes days after J&J applied emergency use authorization of its single-dose shot, which was found to be 66% effective. Pictured: Vials of J&J's vaccine in the U.S.

If J&J is able to deliver 100 million doses by the end of June, it could help could help President Joe Biden reach his goal of delivering 150 million shots in his first 100 days in office. The seven-day rolling average is currently 1.4 million per day

'Unfortunately, as [the virus] spreads it can also mutate,' Gorsky told CNBC's Meg Tirrell during a Healthy Returns Spotlight event.

'Every time it mutates, it's almost like another click of the dial so to speak where we can see another variant, another mutation that can have an impact on its ability to fend off antibodies or to have a different kind of response not only to a therapeutic but also to a vaccine.'

Public health experts have stated that they believe COVID-19 is going to become an endemic disease.

This means it will always present in the population but circulating at low rates.

Gorsky's comments came after J&J announced it had applied for an emergency use authorization of its coronavirus vaccine from the Food and Drug Administration.

Unlike the two currently authorized vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna, J&J's does not require a second shot or need to be shipped frozen.

It also does not use new mRNA technology but rather combines genetic material from the new virus with the genes of the adenovirus - which causes the common cold - to induce an immune response.

It is the same technology the company used to make an experimental Ebola vaccine for people in the Democratic Republic of Congo in late 2019.

Regulators will now need time to analyze the data and an advisory committee will need to meet.

Because the vaccine is just one dose, it could help bring President Joe Biden closer to his goal of 150 million shots in arms in the first 100 days of his term.

So far, more than 62 million doses have been delivered and at least 43.2 million people have received at least one shot (above)

The US has an agreement to buy 100 million doses of J&J's vaccine for $1 billion, and the option of purchasing an additional 200 million doses.

This prices the vaccine at around $10 per dose, but the New-Jersey drugmaker has pledged not to price its inoculations for profit.

Gorsky told CNBC that the company's has ramped up manufacturing capabilities and said he is 'extremely confident' J&J will be able to deliver 100 million doses by the end of June.

'We will meet our commitments and at the same time we're doing everything we possibly can to safely and effectively accelerate' production, he said.
GRAND RAPIDS, MI  Shatawn Brigham wants to change the conversation about wine.

Growing up in Benton Harbor, he lived just a short drive from some of the many vineyards sprinkled throughout Southwest Michigan. But he says wine was not a part of life in his community, and the drink had a reputation of being snooty.

It wasnt until his mid-30s, after Brigham graduated from college and was living in Grand Rapids, that he had his first glass.

I grew up one exit away from wine vineyards, but at the time it didnt feel like people who looked like me had access, said Brigham, who is Black. No one ever came into our neighborhood and said, Is anyone interested in learning about wine?

Brigham hopes to change that with his new wine and jazz bar, GRNoir.

He started the business with his wife, Nadia, of making wine fun and accessible.

I think sometimes it has a reputation of being off-putting and snooty, like you have to look a certain way, you have to come from a certain socioeconomic status or background, said Brigham, 43. We didnt want that.

GrNoir is located on the ground floor of a newly constructed multi-story building at 35 S. Division Ave.

Inside, customers will find a sleek interior with hardwood floors, plush chairs, a fireplace, and candles at every tables. A series of wine dispensing machines, capable of measuring the perfect pour, sit behind the counter. Photos of jazz icons Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Sarah Vaughan hang above a drum set and piano available for live performances.

The goal, Brigham said, was to have the space resemble the classic jazz clubs found in New York City and Harlem in the 1950s and 1960s. He also wants to create a beautiful connection between wine and jazz, two of his passions that he says pair well with one another.

When people come in here, we want them to just get lost in the music, he said, but also, for sure, get lost in the wine and have a really good time.

Customers can find more than 100 varieties of wine at GRNoir, Brigham said, and live music is planned for Wednesdays and Saturdays.

The wine and jazz bar represents a new path for the couple.

Brigham has worked in the education sector for years, including as a community school coordinator for the Kent School Services Network, a program designed to provide additional social services in schools with a goal of boosting student achievement.

His wife, Nadia, is working on her PhD in race relations, owns a consulting firm focusing on racial equity and leadership, and spent about 14 years at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Brigham said he and his wife are passionate about working with people, and that theyre excited to bring that to their new business and being able to connect and relate to people around wine and jazz.

Getting the business off the ground hasnt been an easy task amid the coronavirus pandemic.

GRNoir was originally scheduled to open in April. But the global health crisis, which brought a good chunk of the food and hospitality industry to a near standstill, forced them to delay their opening. The wine and jazz bar, which also sells wine to-go, opened for curbside pickup in December.

That forced us to go back and tweak and make adjustments that we needed to make to be prepared for this moment right here, Brigham said, referencing the delays his business faced because of the coronavirus pandemic.

GRNoir hosted an official grand opening last week, after restrictions on indoor dining put in place by Gov. Gretchen Whitmers administration were partially lifted. The business is now open from 3 p.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Saturday.

GRNoir sells one-ounce, three-ounce and five-ounce pours, as well as full bottles of wine. Customers can find an array of red, white, rose and sparkling wines on the menu, with bottle prices ranging from $19 for a bottle of 2016 Klinker Brick Farrah to $61 for a bottle of 2015 Linne Calodo Rising Tides.

Customer can also try a wine flight, which consists of four, two-ounce pours of various reds, whites and sparkling varieties.

While GRNoir doesnt sell full meals, customers can try a series of appetizers and desserts, including smoked salmon tartine, brisket sliders, panko fried shrimp, cheese, chocolate cake and more.

Brigham said GRNoir has room for about 80 people, and that the business was designed to provide an intimate setting where friends and family can gather for wine, music and good conversation.

We want people to come in here no matter where you are I the Spectrum of wine, he said. You could have never tasted a glass of wine in your life or you can be a master sommelier . We want you to be able to come into GRNoir and feel comfortable.

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The Bank of England told insurers on Wednesday not to expect any big reduction in capital requirements after Brexit, adding that more capital could be "part of the answer" to meeting a 1.7 billion pound bill for COVID-19 claims. Britain is reviewing the "Solvency II" rules for firms like Aviva, RSA and Lloyd's of London insurance market that it inherited from the European Union amid calls from insurers and lawmakers for changes to keep the sector competitive. "We are committed to upholding the principles of Solvency II a they ...
analysis

The government has been slow but, more importantly, its been left vulnerable by the competitive procurement strategies of richer countries.

Kenya's response to the global pandemic has so far been marked by two phases. The first was a rapid but coercive and badly thought-out lockdown that was challenged in court for infringing civil and political liberties.

The second has been the much slower move to procure and distribute vaccines. This current phase also has human rights implications. Both Kenya's constitution and international law require the state to take effective and prompt steps to protect and promote health. In relation to COVID-19, this includes ensuring vaccines are available, accessible without geographic or economic barriers, culturally acceptable within reason, and of sufficient quality.

This may be an uphill challenge. According to the World Health Organisation's (WHO) Vaccine Introduction Readiness Assessment Tool, African countries overall record an average score of 33% preparedness for COVID-19 vaccine roll-out against a recommended rate of 80%.

How is Kenya faring, in terms of procurement ("availability"), distribution ("accessibility") and uptake ("acceptability")?

Procurement

Kenya requires 30 million doses to vaccinate 60% of its population, as recommended by the global public-private health partnership GAVI. Efforts at procurement, however, have been hindered, first by the Cabinet Secretary for Health's doubts about the effectiveness of vaccines, and then by the delay in establishing a national taskforce for vaccine deployment until December 2020.

Nonetheless, some progress has been made. Kenya is due to get 24 million doses of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine through the joint WHO-GAVI COVAX facility, and a further 12 million through bilateral engagements. It also stands to receive 10.8 million of the 270 million doses the African Union (AU) acquired through its African Vaccine Acquisition Task Team (AVATT), though this will be slowed by the need for WHO approval. (A further 400 million doses has been received by the AU but the structure for allocating them between countries has not yet been determined.)

COVAX has promised to deliver the first 4 million doses by the end of February, but beyond that, Kenya has no clear timelines for the delivery of its vaccines. It was set to start receiving the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccines this month, but that plan has been thrown into disarray after the EU banned the export of vaccines produced within its member states. The situation of scarcity is worsened by the fact that the UK pre-signed contracts that prohibited exports until its domestic needs are met. This vaccine nationalism has given no regard to Kenya's role in hosting trials of the vaccine. India has similarly blocked exports from its Serum Institute until at least 100 million doses are available for domestic use.

These challenges in accessing the procured Oxford/Astrazeneca vaccines cannot be made up by the Pfizer/BioNTech or the Moderna vaccines as they require storage at -70 degrees Celsius which is not feasible on a mass scale in Kenya.

Distribution

Planning for distribution has been marked by similar delays. It was only on 29 January that Kenya's Ministry of Health outlined the three phases of its vaccine roll-out. Phase one (February to June 2021) will target 1.25 million health workers, security and immigration officials. Phase two (July 2021 to June 2022) will cover 9.7 million over-50s and over-18s with underlying health conditions. Phase three, run concurrently with phase two, will target 4.9 million vulnerable people such as those in informal settlements.

This broadly reflects WHO guidelines which prioritise groups most at risk. What it neglects are the realities of caring for vulnerable people, which is often done within families and by unpaid women.

The Kenya-Gavi Technical Assistance Plan for 2021 sets out goals for several aspects of the vaccine delivery, but it remains aspirational. Experts warn in particular that failure to prepare for the vaccines' transport to more remote counties as well as poor storage and administration could undermine preparation efforts.

Inadequacy of personnel and training is also likely to pose a challenge. At the onset of the pandemic, Kenya's response was led by "Ebola Champions": 155 medical practitioners sent to West Africa during the 2016 outbreak there. While this cadre, along with those experienced in the administration of other vaccines, will be invaluable, there has been no specific training in administering the COVID-19 vaccine to date. These shortcomings are compounded by an ongoing strike of healthcare workers in some counties. The unequal distribution of healthcare facilities in the country may also undermine distribution efforts in marginalised areas.

Uptake

These challenges may be compounded by the inability or unwillingness of certain population groups to attend vaccination centres. Poor terrain for travel, a suspicion of state-backed interventions, and the nomadic practices of some rural communities has inhibited the uptake of other vaccines and may do so again. Pastoralists' movement across international borders may lead them to miss out, while people in areas with high poverty levels may feel they cannot prioritise accessing the vaccine.

Vaccine scepticism is also evident, as it is around the world. In Kenya, faith groups like Kavonokoya and Wakorino have long rejected modern medicine either on grounds of their religious beliefs and their preference for traditional medicine. These communities have resisted strategies such as wearing masks and are likely to refuse the COVID-19 vaccination as they have done with the polio vaccine.

Kenya in the international context

Kenya is not yet ready to deliver vaccines in sufficient quantity to those most at risk or to the population as a whole. While important steps have been taken, earlier government inaction, enduring structural discrimination, and widespread distrust of the state present major challenges.

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At the same time, Kenya's fate has been crucially shaped by the decisions of states and corporate actors in the Global North. The UK, EU and US have all engaged in competitive national procurement strategies with little regard for the needs of vulnerable populations in the Global South. This is not simply a question of realpolitik, tempered by occasional charity in the interests of soft-power and diplomacy. It violates the legal obligation on states to allow each other to realise the right to health in their own territories, as the UN committee has recently emphasised.

Put simply, buying up available supplies and barring their export, as well as enforcing applicable patents in a time of global emergency, amount to vaccine imperialism, inconsistent with a just international order based on human rights.

This article draws from COVID-19 in Kenya: Global Health, Human Rights and the State in a time of Pandemic, a collaborative project involving Cardiff Law and Global Justice, the African Population and Health Research Centre, and the Katiba Institute, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK).

Prof John Harrington is a Professor of Law and Politics at Cardiff University. Dr David Ngira is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Cardiff University School of Law and Politics.
Remember Joe Bidens pledge to administer 1.5 million vaccines per day within his first 100 days in office?

The good news: Hes nearly hit that goalpost with just shy of 1.5 million doses finding their way into arms across the country each day last week.

The bad news, as many experts pointed out at the time, is that original goal was a fairly modest one.

And the emergence of new variants circulating within the United States  even as we lack the gene sequencing capacity to closely monitor them  raises concern that the existing vaccination regime may prove inadequate to get out ahead of new waves of infection.

On Monday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nations top infectious disease expert, said he expects the variant first detected in the United Kingdom to become the dominant strain nationwide in a matter of weeks.

That strain is, according to two studies from the U.K., between 47% and 70% more transmissible than the preexisting strains. Another way to think about this is how it would impact the virus R-naught, a measure of how many people a single infected person could be expected to pass the virus to. The current R-naught in Pennsylvania is 0.88, indicating a gradual ebb of infection. A worst-case scenario could see that increase to 1.5, based on the U.K. projections.

Fauci said the danger of increased transmission increases the need to expedite vaccinations of the two FDA-approved vaccines by Modern and Pfizer. Of course, both of those vaccines require two doses, with the second dose bringing enhanced protection.

The two things that we can do is: A, make sure we adhere to the public health measures, Fauci said, at a White House press briefing Monday, and, B, get as many people vaccinated as quickly as we possibly can. Thats the best defense against the evolution of variants.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, listens during an event with President Joe Biden on the coronavirus in the State Dinning Room of the White House, Thursday, Jan. 21, 2021, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)AP

Each new person whos infected offers the virus a new opportunity to mutate due to small copying errors made during its replication. Some mutations have no effect whatsoever. Others, such as a change in the spike protein the virus uses to latch onto human cells, improve (at least from the perspective of the virus) its ability to infect a person or pass from one person to the next.

Through the process of natural selection, mutations that improve the virus transmissibility will eventually be passed down from one generation to the next while less advantageous mutations fall away.

This process of constant evolution makes it difficult for any single vaccine to be 100 percent effective against all possible variants. This evolution is one reason the general public is encouraged to get a seasonal flu vaccine each fall: From one year to the next, a different strain is likely to be the dominant one. That principle could also be true of the coronavirus.

In the U.K., the National Health Service is already planning to do just that, with a rollout of booster shots against new variants in the fall.

Nadhim Zahawi, that countrys vaccines minister, told the BBC that it would be done in the way we do with flu vaccinations, where you look at what variant of virus is spreading around the world, you rapidly produce a variant of vaccine, and then begin to vaccinate and protect the nation.

Fauci has also referred to that possibility. However, with all vaccines in short supply, its a matter of priorities: The U.S. needs to vaccinate as many people as possible now.

The science, as always, is in flux as researchers develop a coterie of vaccines that have different levels of effectiveness in protecting against the various strains.

READ MORE: Pa.s teachers, schools struggle amid ongoing COVID-19 crisis

Heres an overview of what we know right now, according to the Centers for Disease Control and other authorities:

B.1.1.7, or the U.K. strain, was first discovered in its namesake country in September and soon cropped up all over the world. So far, the existing vaccines appear to be about as effective against B.1.1.7 as the preexisting strains. The real danger, however, is that this new strain is significantly more transmissible. One recent study indicated that case numbers are doubling about every 10 days in the United States, leading Fauci and others to conclude that it will become the dominant strain here by March. So, while the variant may not undermine vaccine effectiveness, it could still move much more swiftly through unvaccinated populations, put additional strain on health systems and lead to an increase in COVID-related deaths.

B.1.351, or the South African strain, was first discovered in samples collected in October 2020 and has since spread across the globe, including inside the United States. So far, theres no evidence that this variant is more severe but the mutation to its spike proteins makes virtually all current vaccines less effective against it. A preliminary Pfizer test showed 81% effectiveness versus 95% against the previous strain. A new AstraZeneca vaccine not yet approved in the U.S. offered as little as 10 percent protection. Another new vaccine, from Novavax, was 50% effective. And the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine provided less protection against infection but still warded off severe cases of the disease. Moderna hasnt made test results public but indicated it was working on a booster shot for the variant.

P.1, a strain that was discovered among Japanese travelers whod recently visited Brazil, was first discovered in December and made its way to America by late January. This strains mutation to its spike protein make it both more transmissible and more likely to reinfect people whove had COVID-19 before. That could make the existing vaccines less effective but, so far, Moderna and Pfizer reported that initial testing showed no significant changes. As with the other variants, theres a danger that increased transmissibility could lead to increased deaths, even if the symptoms are no more severe than the preexisting strain.

The more people that get sick, the more people that will be hospitalized, Fauci said. And the more people that are hospitalized, youll likely get more deaths.

Its also useful to remember that all of these vaccines are on an accelerated development path already. Normally, it would take several years to get to this point with a single strain; instead, a plethora of vaccines are being tested against multiple iterations of the virus.

Well just have to continue to observe, which we do, he said. You know, the vaccine trials, they ended and came up with an efficacy of 94 to 95 percent, but the trials go on for two years. So well learn a lot more over the next couple of years.

Wallace McKelvey may be reached at wmckelvey@pennlive.com. Follow him on Twitter @wjmckelvey. Find PennLive on Facebook.

Read the The hunt for Ray Gricar.
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Imperial Valley News Center

Stolen Vehicle recovered firearm and ammunition seized

El Centro, California - On Sunday, at approximately 9:11 a.m., officers took a report of a vehicle stolen from the 1600 block of Barbara Worth Drive in El Centro, California. The vehicle was described as a red Pontiac Grand Am. At 11:50 a.m., officers actively patrolling the 400 block of Wake Avenue located the stolen Pontiac.

Officers quickly detained two individuals, Roberto Avila (a 30-year-old resident of El Centro) and Alexis Flores (a 23-year-old resident of El Centro), leaving a local motel room carrying numerous bags of property. Officers detained Avila and Flores to investigate their potential involvement with the stolen vehicle. As this was occurring, motel staff approached officers and notified them of a military-type ordinance in the motel room. Officers evacuated the immediate area and contacted the El Centro Fire Department and Imperial County Bomb Squad, who responded to assist.

Once the ordinance was deemed safe by the Bomb Squad, officers conducted a probation compliance check of Avilas property and the associated motel room. Officers located the keys to the stolen vehicle, stolen checks, and other miscellaneous items. A search of Flores person and property led to the discovery of methamphetamine. Officers searched the stolen Pontiac and located an illegally modified shotgun and ammunition.

Flores was arrested and issued a citation for possession of methamphetamine and a stolen vehicle. Avila was arrested and booked at the county jail for felon in possession of a firearm, possession of stolen checks, and possession of a stolen vehicle. Officers are actively investigating the origin of the recovered ordinance.

We encourage anyone with information about this investigation to call El Centro Detective Adrian Chilpa at (760) 335-4662 or the Detective Bureau at (760) 337-4502.
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Barcelona  UN chief urges countries to prepare for the COP26 conference through online talks, but the preferred plan is still to hold the November summit in person

U.N. chief says COP26 preparations will have to go online

Officials insist climate action cannot be delayed further

Developing nations worry pandemic will hamper participation

As the COVID-19 pandemic shows little sign of easing worldwide, the organisers of November's U.N. climate summit are considering new ways to advance work ahead of the conference, despite some poorer nations' reluctance to hold virtual negotiations.

At a briefing for governments this week on the "COP26" climate summit, the U.N. chief and Britain, which is due to host the gathering in Glasgow, emphasised the urgency of making progress this year on the already delayed climate process.

Advances need to happen ahead of COP26, even though the coronavirus crisis will make it hard to meet in person, they said.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Monday that he could not "overestimate the importance of the negotiations in the months ahead of Glasgow" - but added those preparatory talks would need to take place virtually because of COVID-19.

"We simply cannot allow the pandemic to keep us from working together on the crucial pathway to Glasgow," he added in a speech. "Although there will be challenges, we must adapt. The stakes are too high to do otherwise."

With the world already suffering the effects of wild weather and rising seas, COP26 is seen by many climate experts as a critical moment to make key decisions that would give the world a chance of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

That is the lowest temperature goal set in the 2015 Paris Agreement. Global temperatures have already risen by about 1.2C.

By the end of 2020, countries were due to submit stepped-up national plans to curb planet-warming emissions this decade.

But more than half have yet to do so. For some, the pandemic has slowed work, while others are waiting for U.S. President Joe Biden's new government to announce a U.S. target for 2030, due in April.

Other key aims for COP26 are to finalise rules for international carbon markets and deliver on a longstanding but unmet pledge of climate finance for vulnerable countries to adopt renewable energy and adapt to climate change impacts.

Before the pandemic, the run-up to the annual U.N. climate conference late in the year involved a key round of interim talks, usually held in June in Bonn.

But those are unlikely to be able to happen face-to-face this year, not least because the usual venue for the meeting is being used as a centre for COVID-19 vaccinations, which started at the site this week.

Slow immunisation rollouts globally and international travel restrictions are other roadblocks.

A spokesman for the U.N. climate change secretariat told the Thomson Reuters Foundation that a meeting of the COP bureau - a committee with a dozen members from different regions that decides on summit logistics - is scheduled for late February.

It will consider a range of options, both for the June talks and COP26. A decision on how to organise the mid-year negotiations could be taken in March after consultations in capitals, he added.

For now, Britain has said clearly it wants the COP26 conference to happen in-person in Glasgow, although the senior official presiding over the talks, Alok Sharma, noted this week that the government would continue to look at what is possible and plan for different scenarios.

"We may not be able to meet in person for some months, but we know that we need to make progress faster," he said. "And so we need to see creative ways of conducting our discussions that have inclusivity at their very heart."

Sharma said he was consulting with the chairs of the different negotiating groups and meeting "international partners" to understand their positions.

VACCINES AND HOTELS

In late January, the Scotsman newspaper reported that travel restrictions in Scotland and the potential introduction of border controls to prevent new COVID-19 strains being imported could force organisers to cancel or downsize COP26.

Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said then she hoped the Nov. 1-12 meeting - which had been expected to attract about 30,000 attendees from governments, business and green groups - could go ahead but "clearly we will all need to consider the position".

Some developing countries, in particular, are concerned about the logistics of how they will be able to attend COP26, if coronavirus restrictions remain tight.

On Monday, Antigua and Barbuda's U.N. ambassador Walton Webson, who also chairs the Alliance of Small Island States, said delegates from developing nations would need an "equitable" opportunity to get a COVID-19 vaccine so they could participate.

And Brazil's U.N. ambassador, Ronaldo Costa Filho, called for flexibility in the common practice of hotels in cities hosting COP conferences demanding full payment upfront, often at elevated prices - a financial risk in case of non-attendance.

India, for its part, insisted that virtual negotiations should not replace in-person political discussions, even for the June round of talks, noting that shifting them online could bring "disadvantages to many, many developing nations".

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Some government officials expressed specific concerns about the reliability of internet access and the difficulty of arranging global meetings that can accommodate different time zones.

Some ideas being floated to ease the process during the pandemic include holding regional meetings and bringing key officials to nearby cities or buildings with good online connections to enable them to join global talks.

Guterres said he had directed U.N. officials around the world to make their offices and venues available to allow all countries to participate in virtual negotiations.

"We will support this process in every way possible to ensure its success," he added.

U.N. climate chief Patricia Espinosa said her secretariat would work to ensure the least-developed nations and small island developing states could participate in any negotiations held online on the same terms as wealthy governments.

Technical work to prepare the outcomes for Glasgow could be done virtually, she said, but formal decisions would have to be taken in person.

COP26 has a "huge agenda", she added, which "means we need to start working as soon as possible".
Despite the government heaping blame on the use of a nebuliser as a source of the outbreak, Professor Rait said the fact a small aerosol cloud could linger in the air or be swept down a hotel corridor infecting staff and guests suggested worryingly inadequate ventilation controls. It also doesnt explain the recent cases at the Grand Hyatt or the Park Royal, Professor Rait said. Professor Rait added it was concerning a nebuliser was allowed to get into hotel quarantine in the first place, despite the government insisting such medical devices were banned. Last year, the Health Departments healthcare worker taskforce investigated transmission in hospital settings, and made several recommendations in relation to strict personal protective equipment standards for healthcare staff and proper ventilation of wards to minimise the risk of aerosol transmission. Experts have recommended similar standards for hotel quarantine.

Speaking to the media on Wednesday morning, Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton said the working hypothesis for the growing outbreak at the Holiday Inn was that a man, who later tested positive to the British variant of the virus and is now in intensive care, had used a nebuliser to treat his asthma. [A nebuliser] vaporises medication or liquid into a fine mist and especially when it is used as medication and someone is infectious or later tests positive, that virus mist can be suspended in the air, Professor Sutton said. The man who was using the nebuliser is a member of the family who were staying at the Holiday Inn. The aerosol-based medical device, commonly used by asthma sufferers, was banned for use outside of negative pressure rooms in Victorian hospitals last year after it was believed to have helped fuel transmission in a serious COVID-19 outbreak at a Melbourne hospital.

Vaporiser machines, including sleep apnoea machines, will be banned from standard quarantine hotels and bags thoroughly searched. In light of the hotel outbreaks, Victoria will not increase its intake of overseas arrivals to 1310 on Monday as planned. Nebulisers are used to change liquid medication into a fine mist, which can be breathed in through a mask or mouthpiece but can also quickly fill a room. It is likely when the door of the familys room at the Holiday Inn was opened particles were blown into the hotel corridor and infected staff. Burnet Institute epidemiologist Mike Toole said if Holiday Inn hotel workers had been wearing fitted N95 respirators and face shields they would have been unlikely to get infected. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video Investigations into outbreaks in the states hospitals after the second wave have found coronavirus particles probably travelled through the air through poor ventilation systems infecting hospital workers who had no close contact with sick patients.

A family of five and a woman in her 60s staying at the Park Royal Hotel returned genome testing results for the British strain on different days last week, suggesting the virus had spread between their hotel rooms. A 26-year-old man who was working at Grand Hyatt in the Australian Open quarantine program also tested positive to the virus, but no direct link has been found between him and any other case yet. President-elect of the Australian Institute of Occupational Hygienists Kate Cole has called for independent review of hotels being used for quarantine by ventilation engineers. She questioned why occupational hygienists  experts in respiratory protection  were yet to be included in panels of specialists advising governments.

Fit-tested N95 respirators should ... be mandated for all workers and are the minimum level of respiratory protection required for the virus in those facilities, Ms Cole said. Loading But what underpins all of this is that we need to recognise the importance of aerosol spread or airborne transmission because until we do that these outbreaks are going to continue to happen Fit-testing  which ensures a mask seals to the face  is mandatory for workers dealing with asbestos and silica, but not for all hotel quarantine workers. Professor Toole wants to see all hotel quarantine workers, regardless of whether they work in a hot hotel  which deals solely with people infected with the virus  or a cold hotel, given high protection, fit-tested N95 face masks, face shields and protective goggles.

COVID-19 Quarantine Victoria Commissioner Emma Cassar said the two infected workers were wearing surgical masks and goggles when they dealt with guests, but all Victorian hotel quarantine workers would now be provided with N95 masks. Premier Daniel Andrews insisted Victoria had the countrys strongest hotel quarantine system and that other jurisdictions were copying his governments model, drawing the ire of NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian. Hes pretty good at spin and thats all Ill say, Ms Berejiklian told radio station 2GB on Wednesday morning. Mr Andrews later said he was not interested in having an argument with Gladys. Ill somehow find a way to recover from that barb, he said. Im focused on keeping Victorians safe as Im sure shes focused on keeping the people of NSW safe.
With schools opening in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, not every child has returned to class.

Some pupils at the JP Brand primary school at Utuseb village, situated about 45 km from Walvis Bay in the Namib Desert will only return to the rural boarding school in the second week of March.

These children were last in school on 16 March 2020 when learning was halted due to the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The principal, Anna-Maldrid Josti said although they wish to have the pupils back at school they too have to adhere to the Covid-19 regulations of social distancing especially in the already overcrowded hostel.

"If only we can have extra accommodation as the hostel can only accommodate 180 to 200 pupils. Before the pandemic the hostel catered for 319 learners with some sharing beds, which was not a problem then. But with the current situation everything has changed," said Josti.

Because of logistics and the health regulations, the school cannot afford the proposed weekly rotation schedule and has opted to divide pupils into two groups.

One group attends school for six weeks and the school is fumigated over a weekend before the next group comes. This has left some learners to be home while learning is happening.

"Our learners have a huge backlog and with the current system we are losing out on time. It means we will always be five steps back that the rest of the region's schools," said Josti.

Apart from accommodation challenges the school also started during the first week of February because of renovations to the ablution facilities to conform with the Covid-19 regulations.

JP Brand primary school was built in 1979 for the Topnaar community, by the pioneer of the Namibian grid electricity, JP Brand. Over the years the school started enrolling children of fishing industry workers.
According to the report, the fabric, which is named Nano-VTS, is treated with a special biopolysaccharide material, and able to kill 100% of the COVID-19 virus (SARS-CoV-2) under experimental conditions. This specially designed fabric can provide a long-term and effective prevention against COVID-19 virus infection and is currently being used to mass-produce masks and other personal protective equipment.

Recently in Jinan, an appraisal meeting was held to discuss the scientific and technological achievements of SQ Group's Nano-VTC antibacterial, antiviral material. Jiang Shicheng, academician from the Chinese Academy of Engineering, Sun Gang, director of the Heilongjiang Animal Disease Prevention and Control Center, and Guan Yuntao, biosafety review expert with the National Health Commission of the People's Republic of China, attended the meeting and concurred that the breakthrough as being a positive step forward in combatting the COVID-19 pandemic both domestically and abroad. Given the absence of such fabrics being used around the world, the attendees concluded that this fabric has extensive application value and recommended its accelerating production and distribution.

The antiviral effectivity of Nano-VTS has been verified by international and third party institutes. So far, the fabric has passed international standard antiviral and safety tests in US Microbac, British Intertek, Swiss SGS, Guangdong Detection Centre of Microbiology, CNTAC Testing Centre, and German Hohenstein. Patents have been filed around the world to protect its intellectual property.

The newly developed Nano-VTS antibacterial and antiviral fabric effectively kills 3 of the 7 currently known coronaviruses that can infect humans, COVID-19, SARS, and HCoV-229E. Test data from Chinese high-level biosafety laboratories confirm that the fabric can kill 100% of the COVID-19 virus within 60 minutes. The British Virology Research Services (VRS) , an independent third-part testing agency, confirmed the findings that the virus was reduced by 90% within 5 minutes of contact with the fabric and 99.99% after 120 minutes.

According to reports, the biopolysaccharide polymer structure in the fabric can actively adsorb and capture bacteria and viruses by contacting, then kills them through biological activity. As it is the structure of the fabric that make it effective, even after 30 washes, it is still able to kill over 99% of the viruses. This resilience means the Nano-VTS antiviral, antibacterial fabric is ideal for daily use without frequent replacement. Currently, SQ Group masks produced with this fabric have already passed the EU mask standard CWA17553-2020 test and entered the market. In the future, this fabric could also be used in gloves, PPE, hospital bed sheets, and public transportation seat covers.

Experts believe that in terms of epidemic-prevention, anything that can limit the infectivity of surfaces in high-population and high-risk areas will be of great value. SQ Group's Nano-VTS antiviral, antibacterial fabric is a positive achievement in combatting the COVID-19 coronavirus epidemic and saving lives.

For more information, please visit http://e.shengquan.com/index.php

About SQ Group

Jinan Shengquan Group Share Holding Co., Ltd. was founded in 1979 and is located in Shandong province, Zhangqiu City. With 3,600 employees, SQ Group focuses on R&D, and application in biomass materials, and pharmaceuticals. Innovation is at the heart of SQ Group and the company firmly holds respect for labor, knowledge, talent, and creative ideas. Every year, SQ Group invests more than RMB 150 million into research in pursuit of its vision to 'take from nature, serve society, and benefit mankind'.

http://e.shengquan.com/index.php?m=content&c=index&a=show&catid=193&id=238

SOURCE JINAN SHENGQUAN GROUP SHARE HOLDING CO.,LTD

Related Links

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FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP)  Two men and a woman who said they had been stranded on a deserted island for 33 days were rescued after they waved flags to get the attention of a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter crew as they flew over while on a routine mission off the Florida Keys, the agency said.

We were alerted to them by the flags that they actually had in addition to a large cross that they put out there for themselves, helicopter pilot Mike Allert told WPLG.

Allert said he decided to fly back around Anguilla Cay to investigate, and a crew returned to the island later Monday to drop water, food and a radio.

This photo provided by the U.S. Coast Guard shows three Cuban nationals being rescued from a deserted island between Florida and Cuba, Monday, Feb. 9, 2021. They waved flags to catch the attention of a Coast Guard helicopter crew that flew over the island while on a routine mission Monday. (U.S. Coast Guard via AP)AP

The trio was stranded on an uninhabited Bahamian island between Key West and Cuba, the agency posted on Twitter.

A helicopter crew returned Tuesday to pick them up.

Coast Guard officials tweeted that the trio was from Cuba. They told officials their boat had capsized in rough waters and they were able to swim to the island.

The trio told the crew they had survived on coconuts, conchs and rats, news outlets reported.

It was not immediately clear whether they were migrants attempting to come to the United States, or if they were just lost at sea, U.S. Coast Guard Petty Officer 2nd Class Brandon Murray told the South Florida SunSentinel.

They were taken to the Lower Keys Medical Center, where none appeared to have serious injuries.

I cannot recall a time that we saved people who were stranded for over a month on an island, he told the newspaper. That is a new one for me.
She is not one to shy away from flaunting her incredible sense of style and expensive taste on social media.

So it was unsurprising when Phoebe Burgess, 31, decked herself out in $42,450 worth of designer goods on Wednesday as she enjoyed a day out at her parent's property in Bowral, New South Wales.

In a series of pictures to Instagram, the former NRL WAG looked effortlessly stylish in a $678 all-white ensemble from clothing labels Jac+Jack and Lee Mathews.

She's got expensive taste! Former NRL WAG Phoebe Burgess [pictured] posed on her parent's Bowral estate in an eye-watering outfit worth $42,450 on Wednesday

She teamed her stark outfit with $2,020 Chanel sandals and a Christian Dior book tote, which retails online for an average of $4,500.

Phoebe accessorised with two diamond encrusted love bracelets from Cartier on her left wrist, which have a combined price of $32,000.

The mother-of-two also wore a $175 Lucy Folk pearl bracelet, $359 gold flat chain from Mode Sportif and $98 Arms of Eve pearl necklace; as well as multiple unknown rings and earrings.

What was she wearing? In a series of pictures to Instagram, the former NRL WAG looked effortlessly stylish in a $678 all-white ensemble from clothing labels Jac+Jack and Lee Mathews

What brands was she flaunting? Phoebe teamed her stark outfit with $2,020 Chanel sandals and a Christian Dior book tote, which retails online for an average of $4,500

WOW! Phoebe accessorised with two diamond encrusted love bracelets from Cartier on her left wrist, which have a combined price of $32,000

What about other jewellery? The mother-of-two also wore a $175 Lucy Folk pearl bracelet, $359 gold flat chain from Mode Sportif and $98 Arms of Eve pearl necklace

Phoebe swapped bags halfway through the photo shoot to flaunt the $1,720 Bottega Veneta bag around her waist to zhuzh up the outfit.

The stylish fashionista captioned her stylish post: 'Forever in love with the simplicity of the white shirt: 1 outfit... 2 ways...'

After modelling her outfit on the grass, with more than a hint of cleavage on show, Phoebe posed on a pot plant, before moving onto a gravel driveway and an outdoor chair to flaunt her pricey ensemble.

Outfit change: Phoebe swapped bags halfway through the photo shoot to flaunt the $1,720 Bottega Veneta bag around her waist to zhuzh up the outfit.

'Forever in love with the simplicity of the white shirt: 1 outfit... 2 ways...' she captioned the post

So versatile: After modelling her outfit on the grass, with more than a hint of cleavage on show, Phoebe posed on a pot plant, before moving onto a gravel driveway and an outdoor chair to flaunt her pricey ensemble

Style icon: Phoebe also teamed her outfit with a number of gold rings and earrings, which were unrecognisable in terms of branding

What is Phoebe known for? The beauty is known for flaunting her incredible sense of style and expensive taste on social media

Phoebe's post comes just days after she treated herself to a pampering session.

On Monday, the former WAG shared a short clip to her Instagram Stories of herself smiling as she got her hair done at a salon.

The former WAG shared a short clip to her Instagram Stories of herself smiling as she got her hair done at a salon.

No worries! Phoebe Burgess treated herself to a pampering session on Monday, just days after her father and ex-husband Sam Burgess battled it out in court

On Friday, February 5, Phoebe's former husband Sam Burgess, 32, was found guilty of intimidating Phoebe's father, Mitchell Hooke, at his home near Bowral, more than a year ago.

The court heard that a furious argument erupted between the pair as it came time for Sam to leave the home after visiting his two children as per the terms of his split with Phoebe, which had been finalised just a week earlier.

During the row, Sam had told Mitchell 'you're a f**king piece of s**t [and] I'm going to get you', which left the older man 'pale, shaken and unsteady on his feet'.

Sam was sentenced to a two-year community correction order and a two-year apprehended violence order, but his lawyers immediately said he would appeal.
PARIS and BOSTON, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Cardiologs, a global leader in artificial intelligence (AI) cardiology diagnostics, today announced that results of a clinical study the company conducted in collaboration with Valley Health System have been published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology Clinical Electrophysiology ("JACC Clinical EP"). The findings show that Cardiologs' AI-based ECG analysis solution significantly reduces the rate of false positive atrial fibrillation (AFib) detection in remote cardiac monitoring of patients with implantable loop recorders (ILRs).

Cardiologs and Valley Health tracked a cohort of 425 patients who received an ILR for known AFib or cryptogenic stroke. All applicable ECG readings were uploaded into Cardiologs' cloud-based solution for analysis by the company's deep learning algorithm. In total, 1,500 AFib episodes were evaluated. Overall, the research showed Cardiologs' AI model eliminated the incidence of false-positives by as much as 66% and had a positive predictive value (PPV) as high as 75%  demonstrating the solution is highly effective at identifying true AFib episodes.

"The high false positive rate of AFib detected by ILRs has created a significant clinical burden. Since ILRs transmit data daily, these false positives are one of the Achilles heels of remote cardiac monitoring. This study validates that Cardiologs' advanced AI can filter 2/3 of false positive AF episodes, which should improve clinical efficiency," said Dr. Suneet Mittal, Director of Electrophysiology and Snyder Center for Comprehensive Atrial Fibrillation at Valley Health System, and lead investigator of the study.

According to the American Heart Association, more than 2.7 million Americans are living with AFib, and that number continues to grow. ILRs play a critical role in the management of these patients. Devices with wireless capabilities are programmed to automatically transmit ECG data to a secure website for review by cardiology staff. However, the large volume of recordings can present challenges  in particular, the substantial number of false-positives alerts that electrophysiologists must review to avoid misdiagnosis and potential errors in clinical management.

"The need for reliable and efficient remote patient management is stronger than ever before and will only increase in the future. Publication of our successful trial results in JACC EP further validates the considerable promise of our solution for the clinical community. We have demonstrated that we can offer an extremely reliable solution that will reduce the clinical burden of managing ILR patients remotely," said Yann Fleureau, Cardiologs' Co-Founder and CEO.

A complete copy of the study can be found here: AI Filter Improves Positive Predictive Value of Atrial Fibrillation Detection by an Implantable Loop Recorder

About Cardiologs

Cardiologs is a medical technology company committed to transforming cardiac diagnostics using medical-grade artificial intelligence and cloud technology. Developed in partnership with leading physicians, the Cardiologs ECG Analysis Solution empowers clinicians worldwide to deliver expert cardiac care faster and more efficiently. CE-Marked and FDA cleared for detection of 14 cardiac arrhythmias, the Cardiologs ECG Analysis Solution is built on a growing database of more than 1.4 million ECG recordings and is supported by a number of clinical publications.

Media Contact:

Andrea LePain

eMedia Junction

[email protected]

617-275-8112

SOURCE Cardiologs
New Delhi, Feb 10 : Initiating the debate on the general budget in the Rajya Sabha on Wednesday, Congress leader Kapil Sibal said there are no more excuses as you (BJP) have been in power for 6 years now. He alleged that the government was giving all the assets to four-five big boys.

Sibal said without naming anybody, "Classic case of crony capitalism, one big boy has footprint everywhere." He alleged that the BJP is doing vote bank politics as Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced in the budget the proposed construction of 8,500 kilometres of highways by March 2022. With the focus on the Assembly poll-bound states, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, West Bengal and Assam got a major chunk of the proposed new highway projects.

In Assam, where the BJP is seeking a second consecutive term, Sitharaman proposed 1,300 km of highways that will be constructed in the next three years.

The Congress leader also took critical stock of AtmaNirbhar Bharat and asked, "Have SC, ST minorities, MSME and small industries become self reliant." The Congress leader said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself said that 86 percent farmers are small, "are they sitting at Delhi borders as self reliant?" he asked.

Sibal charged that in the last five years the mismanagement of the economy is going on.

He said the current year's disinvestment target was not met, only 15 percent was achieved.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had said that the government will privatise two public sector banks other than IDBI Bank. One general insurance company will also be privatised in the coming fiscal, the disinvestment target for the current fiscal is Rs 2.10 lakh crore while the revenue collected through disinvestment is only Rs 19,499 crore, he added.

The Congress leader said there is no focus on checking job losses. In the Covid-19 pandemic 120 million jobs were lost but the allocation for MNREGA has been reduced.

There is no relief to the telecom sector which is reeling under a debt of Rs 8.55 lakh crore. He said that the funds for the PM Kisan Samman Nidhi have been cut by Rs 10000 crore.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Its a weekend for love and to celebrate it, the Landmark Loews Jersey Theatre in Journal Square will show two classic love stories, one more familiar to audiences than the other.

The films, The Americanization of Emily, and the all-time classic, Casablanca, will be screened at the theater on Saturday, Feb. 13, with Emily shown from 6 to 8 p.m., and Casablanca from 8:30 to 10:30 p.m.

The Americanization of Emily is an anti-war movie made in 1964 and stars Julie Andrews as a British war widow who works as a military driver, and James Garner, as an aide to an American admiral, played by Melvin Douglas. The screenplay, by Paddy Chayefsky, was controversial for its depiction of World War II at a time before anti-war movies were acceptable. Garner wasnt a hero. He would do anything to avoid combat, and his job to was to provide the pleasures of life for the admiral and his staff. He and Andrews meet unceremoniously, but eventually develop a relationship.

Publicity for the film says everything seems remarkably good for the two surrounded by the storm of war . . . until something completely unforeseen raises the specter that Garner might find himself in battle after all. On one level what happens next is a withering depiction of the horror and insanity of war, yet also with a nod to the bravery and sacrifice of those called to fight in it.

Andrews has said it is her favorite of all the films she has made.

Casablanca has long been recognized as one of the best films of all time. Starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, the film has contributed many lines to the American lecixon. Heres looking at you kid, and Louie, I think this is the start of a beautiful friendship, and Play it again, Sam. Play As Time Goes By.

Its the story of Rick and Ilsa, who meet in Paris and fall in love as the Nazis are invading the City of Light. They make plans to flee the city, but Ilsa disappears and Rick is left at the train station, devastated. Flash forward. Rick owns Ricks Place, a popular bar and gambling joint in Vichy-controlled Casablanca. Into his bar walks Ilsa and her husband, a leader of the resistance. In Paris, she thought he was dead, but he escaped a Nazi prison camp at the last minute. Rick and Ilsa meet again and the rest of the story unfolds.

Publicity for the film says as much, if not more, than any other work in any medium, it captures the power and desperation of romance, and how events can sweep beyond the control of lovers.

Tickets for each film are $8 for adults /$6 seniors and kids or $14 / $10 to see both films. Get tickets only on line at https://loewsjersey.org/event/ The Landmark Loews is located at 54 Journal Square in Jersey City, across the street from the PATH station.
Wednesdays sole imported case, "Patient 2071," is a 31-year-old Indonesian male expert who landed February 7 in Ho Chi Minh City on Singapore Airlines flight SQ178. He was quarantined on arrival.

Of the 20 local cases, one was reported in HCMC, one in the northern province of Quang Ninh, four in the Central Highlands province of Gia Lai and 14 in the northern Hai Duong Province.

"Patient 2072" is a 29-year-old resident of HCMCs Tan Binh District who works as a baggage handler for the Vietnam Airport Ground Services Company Limited (VIAGS) at the Tan Son Nhat International Airport, in the same department as another man who tested coronavirus positive earlier.

"Patient 2073" is a 30-year-old woman from Ha Long Town in Quang Ninh.

Four patients, 2074-2077, are women aged 27-39 from Ia Pa District in Gia Lai who already spent more than a week in quarantine.

Thirteen other patients, 2078-2085 and 2087-2091, are also already quarantined residents of Hai Duong.

"Patient 2086," whose gender and age was unavailable at the time of publishing, tested positive Wednesday after visiting a Hai Duong hospital with fever and cough.

With a new case confirmed in the northern province of Bac Giang in the morning, Vietnams Covid-19 community cases for Wednesday reached 21.

Of the 504 domestic transmissions recorded since January 28, Hai Duong has 341, followed by Quang Ninh (54), HCMC (34) and Hanoi (28).

The national Covid-19 tally stands at 2,091 with 1,480 recoveries and 35 deaths. Most of the active patients are in stable health with 33 having tested negative at least once for the novel coronavirus.

Over 114,000 people are in quarantine  19,000 in centralized facilities, over 700 in hospitals and the rest at home or other designated accommodations.

Globally, Covid-19 has claimed more than 2.3 million lives.
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A catheter used in angiography with the help of X-ray imaging guidance. The use of a catheter makes it possible to combine treatment and diagnosis in a single procedure. Various catheters available for angiography include coronary catheters, renal catheters, and microcatheters.

However, coronary catheters are the most-used product due to increasing incidence of cardiovascular disease. Since the past few years, cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are the leading cause of death, worldwide, taking approximately 18 million lives each year. This factor will propel the growth of the angiography catheters market during the forecast period.

Furthermore, technological advancements in cardiovascular procedures and development in healthcare infrastructure are some other factors that will boost the angiography catheters market in the future.

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Companies covered in Angiography Catheters Market Report Cordis, a Cardinal Health company

Medtronic

Boston Scientific Corporation

AngioDynamics

Cook Medical

Merit Medical Systems, Inc.

Cook Medical

Terumo Interventional Systems

Abbott Laboratories

Alvimedica Medical Device

Get To Know Methodology of Report @ https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/methodology/31549

According to a latest report published by PMR, the global angiography catheters market is expected to witness a CAGR of nearly 7% during the forecast period (20202030).

Key Takeaways from Angiography Catheters Market Study

The coronary catheters segment, under product, is expected to contribute more than 53% revenue share in the angiography catheters market.

revenue share in the angiography catheters market. Various product launches by key players along with advanced technology are expected to dominate the demand for angiography catheters.

Increasing heart healthcare programs are spreading awareness, which is creating significant demand for angiography catheters.

Leading players in the angiography catheters market are collaborating with various other players to strengthen their market position.

North America is dominating the global angiography catheters market, while East Asia is expected to offer lucrative opportunities, owing to increasing healthcare programs and industrialization.

Manufacturing challenges as a result of various COVID-19 -pandemic-related restrictions will stunt the growth of the angiography catheters market in the near-term.

"Rise in the prevalence of vascular disorders, owing to sedentary lifestyle, and increase in obesity and hypertension across the world, will boost the growth of the global angiographic catheter market over the next decade," says a PMR analyst.

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Acquisitions and Partnerships - Key Strategy amongst Market Players

Key players in the angiography catheters market are looking forward to strengthening their product portfolios through the launch of new products. For instance, in 2019 , Medtronic launched a telescope-guided extension catheter to support complex coronary cases. In 2018 , Cook announced the re-launch of the Beacon Tip Torcon NB Advantage 5 Fr Catheter in the United States.

Various players in the angiography catheters market are focusing on growth strategies such as acquisitions and partnerships. For example, in 2019 , Boston Scientific Corporation announced the acquisition of BTG plc.

What Does the Report Cover?

Persistence Market Research offers a unique perspective and actionable insights on the angiography catheters market in its latest study, presenting historical demand assessment of 20152019 and projections for 2020 2030 , on the basis of product (cerebral catheters, visceral catheters, coronary catheters, renal catheters, microcatheter, and pigtail catheters), application (coronary, endovascular, neurology, and oncology), and end user (hospitals, ambulatory surgical centers, and cardiac catheterization laboratories), across seven key regions.
The New Orleans Hospitality Workers Alliance sharply criticized Mayor LaToya Cantrell and other city officials Tuesday, slamming them over what the group said were inadequate efforts to protect bar, restaurant and hotel workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

During a press conference Tuesday, the organization was particularly critical of Cantrells refusal to limit tourists and other visitors from coming to the city and called on the mayor to make it clear that tourists are not welcome for Mardi Gras and to shut down all restaurants on Mardi Gras weekend following her announcement that bars would have to close then.

The group repeatedly called for the city to prioritize workers over profits and railed against Cantrell, New Orleans & Company CEO Stephen Perry and the City Council for "blatantly ignoring their demands.

Over the weekend, a letter by Perry, who heads the tax-funded tourism marketing organization, circulated online in which he blamed residents and college students for recent large gatherings, not the small number of responsible tourists we have been hosting or the majority of our citizens and businesses.

They like to refer to hospitality workers as unskilled labor, said one French Quarter bartender, who went by MG.

I would like to see Stephen Perry short staffed at the five-table section that just got triple sat ... I'd like to see [City Council President] Helena Moreno with six drink tickets while on two bar tables, having to answer the phone as well. I would like to see [Council member] Kristin Palmer having to clean 50 hotel rooms a day during a pandemic.

The group echoed many of the same demands they have had since the city announced its first local Covid cases last March, including hazard pay and paid sick leave. They made headlines then when they disrupted Cantrells press conference.

We've been saying this since the first COVID case, and we're serious, said Mickey Davis, an organizer with the alliance. This is our livelihood. We're risking our lives every day, and we can't even get respect.

Davis said Cantrell has not reached out to the Hospitality Workers Alliance throughout the pandemic.

As much as [Cantrell] says she's representing us, she's not, Davis added. Shes killing us, and the blood is on her hands.

Workers also raised concerns over the feasibility of bar owners and employees filing for unemployment for the period of Feb. 12 through Feb. 16, when all bars in the city will have to close according to citywide restrictions aimed at preventing another surge in Covid cases. MG said she had to wait five weeks to receive any benefits from the Louisiana Workforce Commission  after spending hours on hold with the office and emailing state representatives.

When the mayor said, Do not wait and just file for unemployment now, I could hear a collective scoff from workers around the city, she said. The unemployment system is so beyond broken that if workers who haven't been filing previously tried to file that week, it would be a miracle if they saw a dime within a month.

Tourism marketing board CEO Stephen Perry blames locals for Cantrells new COVID-19 restrictions New Orleans' tax-funded tourism marketing organization is shifting blame for repeated violations of COVID-19 safety rules on Bourbon Street an
The award recognizes Spielberg's outstanding achievement as one the most influential filmmakers in the history of cinema; his social activism and prolific philanthropy; and his principled stance against anti-Semitism and all forms of intolerance. The Prize also recognizes his extraordinary work to preserve the memory of the Holocaust and prevent future genocides through film, public advocacy and philanthropy.

For the first time in the history of the Genesis Prize, the voice of global Jewry was a major factor in Laureate selection. Two hundred thousand Jews on six continents cast their votes for the 2021 Laureate; millions more engaged on social media. While the Prize Committee had the ultimate discretion about the selection of the recipient of this prestigious award, the fact Spielberg received the most votes was a major determining factor.

"The Genesis Prize celebrates Steven Spielberg's unique talent, his commitment to making the world a better place, and his unparalleled contribution to teaching the post-war generations about the horrors of the Holocaust," said Stan Polovets, Co-Founder and Chairman of GPF. "We are delighted to welcome Steven Spielberg to the distinguished family of Genesis Prize honorees, which includes such luminaries as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Natan Sharansky, and Michael Bloomberg."

This is the latest in a series of prominent awards bestowed on Spielberg, which among others include the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award of the United States; Legion d'Honneur, the highest order of the French Republic, and Germany's Federal Cross of Merit.

"Spielberg is a great Jewish visionary and storyteller," said the legendary human rights activist Natan Sharansky, who was awarded the Genesis Prize in 2020. "Key Jewish themes are often woven into his narratives: importance of identity and belonging, maintaining humanity in a ruthless world, caring for the other, and honoring the moral obligation to do the right thing. His talent makes them universal: told by Spielberg, these stories come alive in people's hearts across the globe."

Steven Spielberg becomes the 9th Genesis Prize honoree. All previous Laureates chose to direct the $1 million Prize award to philanthropic causes about which they were passionate. Sharansky, who preceded Spielberg as the Genesis Prize Laureate, directed his $1 million award to support individuals and organizations working to alleviate the Covid-19 health crisis and prevent future pandemics.

"Congratulations to Steven Spielberg on this important Jewish award," said Isaac Herzog, Chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel and Chairman of the Genesis Prize Selection Committee. "He is an example of great Jewish talent, whose extraordinary work in film and philanthropy is infused with the values of his people  a quest for justice, compassion, humanism, and a heartfelt desire to make the world a better place."

About the 2021 Genesis Prize Laureate

Steven Spielberg is widely considered to be the most successful film director in the history of cinema. His films grossed $10bn and his imagination has captivated tens of millions of people around the world. After establishing his reputation with blockbuster films such as Jaws, ET, Jurassic Park and Indiana Jones, he began to explore serious topics such as justice, slavery, women's rights, corruption, and morality of war in films such as Saving Private Ryan, Lincoln, The Color Purple, The Post, Munich and Bridge of Spies.

His films also have delivered compelling narratives of Jewish history and present day events  the Holocaust, terrorism, and the maturing of the State of Israel. Spielberg's 1993 masterpiece Schindler's List has had a profound impact on humanity's perception and awareness of the Holocaust. Fifty years after the Shoah, Spielberg's film fostered a strong emotional connection with this tragedy for a vast, global audience  touching the post-war generations in a way that no other medium could. Spielberg channeled all of his proceeds from Schindler's List to fund philanthropic causes  both Jewish and non-Jewish. In 1994, he established the USC Shoah Foundation, dedicated to preserving Holocaust survivor testimonies. Concerned with prevention of genocide, the Foundation also works to preserve the memory of other 20th century genocides  in Cambodia, Armenia and Rwanda. Over 55,000 survivor testimonies have been recorded to-date.

Spielberg and his wife Kate Capshaw founded the Righteous Persons Foundation, which has made more than $100 million in grants to various Jewish organizations. Through the Wunderkinder Foundation, Spielberg has given extensively to health, arts, youth and education.

About the Genesis Prize and Prior Laureates

The Genesis Prize is a global award that celebrates Jewish achievement and contribution to humanity. Launched in 2013, the Prize is financed through a permanent endowment of $100 million established by The Genesis Prize Foundation.

Previous Genesis Prize laureates are former New York City Mayor and philanthropist Michael Bloomberg (2014); actor, producer and peace activist Michael Douglas (2015); Itzhak Perlman, virtuoso violinist and advocate for individuals with special needs (2016); sculptor and advocate for the rights of refugees Sir Anish Kapoor (2017); Oscar-winning actress and social activist Natalie Portman (2018); owner of New England Patriots and founder of the leading foundation to combat anti-Semitism Robert Kraft (2019); and legendary Jewish leader and human rights activist Natan Sharansky (2020). In 2018, the Genesis Prize Foundation honored U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg with its inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award for her contribution to social justice and equal rights.

SOURCE The Genesis Prize Foundation

Related Links

http://www.genesisprize.org



ALBANY  The citys Police Reform and Reinvention Collaborative created a 102-page document chock-full of suggestions and ideas for how the city can overhaul its police department.

It includes small changes, such as asking the department to use the word background instead of pedigree when referring to personal information about citizens in radio calls or on reports. Larger changes would include overhauling the citys Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion program and removing resource officers from city schools.

Noticeably absent, however, was a structured plan with goals, benchmarks, proposed legislation and timelines that would allow the Common Council to meet a state deadline of April 1 to pass a police reform plan.

The council was asked to adopt the report as-is, but several council members said that is not a possibility.

I think people want to know, 'Whats going to come out of these (102) pages?'  Councilman Joe Igoe asked at a Monday public safety committee meeting. Theres a lot of great suggestions  who is going to put it to what kind of format?

Councilman Kelly Kimbrough agreed and said there were already discussions with Mayor Kathy Sheehans office on the next steps.

Its a report with a bunch of excellent suggestions but its not a plan, he said.

Sheehans director of operations, Brian Shea, said Tuesday the administration is going through the report to build out a more structured plan, including timelines and benchmarks to meet.

Alice Green, executive director of the Center for Law and Justice, said the collaborative's volunteers, who spent months developing the suggestions, should be able to review and revise the plan before it is sent to the council for a vote.

"The governors mandate requires Albany to produce a reinvented policing plan for the city; the Public Safety Committee should not vote on anything less," she told the committee.

Not all of the suggestions are within the administration's or councils control. Some will require state action or need other organizations, such as the city school board, to adopt them.

The councils public safety committee may have several more meetings on the suggested reforms, including some with the head of the collaboratives five working groups.

Several council members expressed concern that the city might not have a solid plan to pass in time to meet the April 1 deadline set by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.

Last year, Cuomo issued an executive order requiring local governments to pass reforms for local police departments by that date or risk losing state funding.

Kimbrough assured the committee that the council would meet its deadline and obligations. The councils last regularly scheduled meeting before the deadline is March 15. Kimbrough said they would hold special meetings if needed.

Were going to get it done, he said.

Ava Ayers, director of the Government Law Center at Albany Law School, noted that while the citys process isnt complete, its farther along than many other local governments and the process has been more thorough. The Government Law Center has started collecting draft plans from cities around the state as they are published.

Both Troy and Schenectady have only recently started holding public meetings on their reform process.

If the governors office is going to start defunding people, they shouldnt come to Albany first, thats my view, she told the committee.
ALBANY, N.Y., Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The escalating geriatric population coupled with the growing incidences of chronic conditions is expected to generate extensive growth prospects across the assessment period of 2019-2027. The heightening popularity of non-invasive ventilators to eliminate the fear of lung injury may further bring tremendous growth opportunities for the non-invasive ventilators market.

A ventilator is a life-supporting system used for inhaling oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide from the body. Non-invasive ventilators date their origins back to the 20th century. In the initial years, these ventilators were used extensively for treating patients with acute respiratory failure. Over the last decade, the use of non-invasive ventilators has increased exponentially and is gaining immense popularity. Thus, these aspects have influenced the growth of the non-invasive ventilators market to a great extent.

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According to the experts at Transparency Market Research (TMR), the global non-invasive ventilators market is extrapolated to record a CAGR of ~6 percent during the assessment period of 2019-2027.

The growing technological advancements across the non-invasive ventilators market is expected to attract considerable revenue from the end-users. The growing prevalence of respiratory diseases may also have a positive effect on the growth of the non-invasive ventilators market. Unhealthy habits like alcohol consumption and smoking among a considerable chunk of the populace has increased the emergence of various diseases and disorders on a large scale. Thus, all these factors are expected to influence the growth of the non-invasive ventilators market during the forecast period of 2019-2027.

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Non-Invasive Ventilators Market: Analysts Perspective

The analysts at TMR expect the non-invasive ventilators market to grow on the back of the improved healthcare policies across the globe. The analysts further state that the entry of new players in the non-invasive ventilators market will intensify the completion, thus leading to new developments and eventually increasing the demand for non-invasive ventilators.

Explore 239 pages of superlative research, current market scenario, and extensive geographical projections. Gain insights into the Non-invasive Ventilators Market (Product: Systems (Non-invasive PPV, High Flow Nasal Cannula O2 Delivery, and Others) and Consumables (Masks, Humidifiers, PEEP Valves, and Others); Application: Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, Asthma, Respiratory Distress Syndrome, Pneumonia, and Others; End Use: Critical Care, NICU Care, Transport (Ambulances), and Home Care Settings) - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast, 2019 - 2027 at https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/report-toc/54720

Key Findings of the Report

Government Policies on Development of Healthcare Infrastructure to Boost Growth of Non-Invasive Ventilators Market

Governments of various countries, especially in developing economies like India and China are taking considerable measures to improve healthcare infrastructure. Recently, the Indian government, during the annual budget announced Rs 64,180 cr under the 'PM Atmanirbhar Swasth Bharat Yojana'. Such investments through the governments will propel the growth rate of the non-invasive ventilators market to a certain extent.

Strategic Collaborations to Influence Growth of Non-Invasive Ventilators Market

The players in the non-invasive ventilators market are constantly involved in strategic collaborations like mergers, acquisitions, partnerships and joint ventures. These activities help the players to strengthen their foothold and eventually increase the growth prospects of the non-invasive ventilators market.

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Increased Demand during COVID-19 to Accelerate Growth

The demand for non-invasive ventilators has increased substantially during the COVID-19 pandemic. These ventilators are used for critical COVID-19 patients. They decrease lung damage and reduce pressure on intensive care units across hospitals. Thus, all these factors assure profitable growth for the non-invasive ventilators market during the assessment period.

Speedy Regulatory Approvals to Propel Growth of Non-Invasive Ventilators Market

Quick approvals for non-invasive ventilators by the regulators of numerous countries will assure extensive growth for the non-invasive ventilators market. The growing shortage of ventilators due to the rising COVID-19 pandemic has led to large number of approvals related to non-invasive ventilators. For instance, a non-invasive ventilator developed by CSIR-NAL, SwasthVayu recently bagged an approval from the regulatory authorities.

Explore Transparency Market Research's award-winning coverage of the global Healthcare Industry:

Mechanical Ventilators Market: https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/mechanical-ventilators-market.html

Operating Room Equipment Market: https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/operating-room-equipment-market.html

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Our reports are single-point solutions for businesses to grow, evolve, and mature. Our real-time data collection methods along with ability to track more than one million high growth niche products are aligned with your aims. The detailed and proprietary statistical models used by our analysts offer insights for making right decision in the shortest span of time. For organizations that require specific but comprehensive information we offer customized solutions through adhoc reports. These requests are delivered with the perfect combination of right sense of fact-oriented problem solving methodologies and leveraging existing data repositories.

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OTTAWA - Conservative Leader Erin O'Toole scripted more of his party's electoral strategy Wednesday, creating new critic portfolios to signal where his focus will be when Canadians go to the polls: a plan for economic recovery.

Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre rises during Question Period in the House of Commons Thursday December 3, 2020 in Ottawa. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld

OTTAWA - Conservative Leader Erin O'Toole scripted more of his party's electoral strategy Wednesday, creating new critic portfolios to signal where his focus will be when Canadians go to the polls: a plan for economic recovery.

His move to shuffle his front benches included punting longtime Tory finance critic Pierre Poilievre out of the marquee role and replacing him with B.C. MP Ed Fast.

Poilievre will still be tasked with an economic portfolio  he's been named the so-called "shadow minister" for jobs and industry  a new post that is one of several that don't explicitly line up in name with actual cabinet positions in the Liberal government.

Others include a position focused on COVID-19 economic recovery, being given to Edmonton MP James Cumming, and one called "future workforce development and disability inclusion," that will be helmed by Winnipeg's Raquel Dancho.

Our team is relentlessly focused on rounding the corner in this pandemic and getting Canadians back to work, OToole said in a statement.

We cant afford a Liberal economic experiment that has failed wherever it's been tried before and will put untold Canadians out of work."

Poilievre has delighted the grassroots of the party for years with his ability to be a thorn in the Liberal government's side.

A common refrain about him in party circles is that "he does his homework," and his efforts to master the nuances of government spending and attack deficits, along with his zingers in debates, have seen his popularity steadily rise within the party.

Many had hoped he'd run for leadership last year, and while he got as far as building a team and booking a hall to make that formal, in the end he bowed out, citing his young family.

A spokeswoman for O'Toole said the move ought not be seen as a demotion but rather a reflection of the party making job creation the centrepiece of its coming electoral strategy.

"Its crucial that this issue be spearheaded by a top performer," Chelsea Tucker said in an email.

"Pierre Poilievre is one of the smartest and most capable communicators in our party. Were thankful that he has agreed to take on this vital role."

Poilievre did not return a request for comment.

Setting him among a number of critics tasked with taking on the government's economic agenda will potentially see Poilievre less in the spotlight, a move that comes as O'Toole is actively trying to grab more of that for himself.

His party recently launched a new ad to bolster their efforts to introduce him to Canadians. He's begun taking a more proactive media strategy in national outlets, as opposed to those catering exclusively to conservative audiences, and he continues to do online town halls and roundtables to get better known.

His decision to bump Poilievre from such a high-profile job set off bombshells among the party's grassroots at a time when many are already agitated over the potential dynamics of the coming policy convention.

Many attribute Poilievre's efforts to tarnish the Liberal brand over the WE Charity affair the sole reason the party's poll numbers were as high as they were when O'Toole won leadership in August.

Poilievre's clips routinely attract more attention online than O'Toole's. At a time where the party is struggling in the polls, blunting someone seen as one of the party's sharpest weapons is raising questions about the overall direction O'Toole wants to take and whether it jibes with the demands of the base.

Those demands will be on full display at the March policy convention, as riding associations have been jockeying to see their ideas placed into the party's policy handbook and in turn the eventual campaign platform.

Among those going full tilt are the well-organized social conservative factions hoping to advance a number of causes dear to them, including erasing the party's stated policy that a Conservative government will never regulate abortion.

Anti-abortion groups are now actively campaigning to have their delegates selected by riding associations to attend the convention, sending out lists to party members telling them who to vote for to attend.

At the same time, some more moderate MPs are trying to counter that by sending out their own lists, frustrated by what some see as efforts to undermine them in their own ridings.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 10, 2021.

A wife was heard sobbing as paedophile hunters filmed the moment they confronted her husband after he sent sexually explicit messages online to an investigator posing as a 13-year-old girl.

Vincent Allott, 64, was cornered by the group, Justice4Kids, at his Manchester home following an undercover sting operation.

Allott's wife of 38 years, Dorothy, opened the door to the group and broke down in tears as she was told details of her husband's sordid double life.

The video went viral on Facebook with two members of the group comforting Mrs Allott's wife as she sobbed 'No, no, no!' whilst her husband in a chair outside and admitted to indulging in 'fantasy paedophile' chat online.

A wife was heard sobbing as paedophile hunters filmed the moment they confronted her husband after he sent sexually explicit messages online to an investigator posing as a 13-year-old girl. Vincent Allott, 64, was cornered by the group, Justice4Kids, at his Manchester home following an undercover sting operation

The couple have since moved home for fear of being attacked by vigilantes - but she is still standing by her husband.

It is feared he had been chatting to up to 15 girls online.

Details of the sting emerged at Manchester Crown Court as Allott pleaded guilty to attempting to engage in sexual communication with a child and attempting to cause a child to look at an image of sexual activity.

He was sentenced to a three-year community order.

He was caught in January 2018 after he began communicating over a nine-day period on an adult dating website with a bogus profile called Kara which had been set up to trap paedophiles.

Using the username 'DaddyVincent36' married Allott, who had no children of his own, falsely claimed he was single and ran a local bakery.

When the investigator said she was 13, Allott asked her about her breasts and sent pornographic pictures of a couple having sex.

In one message he said: 'Have you found some friends on here - I have 15 girls aged from 11 to 14 in my WhatsApp group that chat with me.

Details of the sting emerged at Manchester Crown Court as Allott pleaded guilty to attempting to engage in sexual communication with a child and attempting to cause a child to look at an image of sexual activity. He was sentenced to a three-year community order

'Would you like me to be your daddy?'

In further messages he said he would 'love' Kara 'like a daughter' and asked about her pyjamas and whether she wore underwear in bed.

He also asked about her parents and whether she had started puberty, while also suggesting she get drunk 'to have a good time.'

When asked why he sent the messages, Allott claimed he was 'unaware' he might be speaking to a 13-year old girl and denied having a WhatsApp group for youngsters.

He showed no emotion as his wife sobbed and urged the paedophile hunter group to stop filming.

One member of the group told Allott: 'We didn't want to have to put your wife through this.

'We were actually unaware you even had a wife because you professed to be single. I just hope she now sees the truth of what you've been doing behind her back.'

When asked why he sent the messages, Allott claimed he was 'unaware' he might be speaking to a 13-year old girl and denied having a WhatsApp group for youngsters. Above: Allott walking to the police van near his home after being arrested

As Mrs Allott wailed in the background, the group member added: 'Do you see what you're putting your wife through and what she's having to hear.

'My worry is you were talking to real children as well.

'I'm lost for words that I've had to come here and break this to your wife.. The last thing she needs is consoling from you - she's heartbroken and distraught.'

In court prosecutor Mr Saul Brody said: 'The group used an adult decoy to engage with the defendant on a website, with the decoy pretending to be a 13-year-old girl called "Kara".

During the early stages, the talking was polite and friendly but soon the defendant began asking questions of a sexual nature.

'He then went on to send "Kara" an explicit photograph of a naked female and naked male.

'He was arrested and admitted the person who was talking to 'Kara' was him.

He said he thought she was 16 or 17 and he went on to admit he sent the picture to her.'

In mitigation defence lawyer Clare Ashcroft said her client had anxiety and physical health issues.

She added: 'This offending was borne out of a degree of boredom and some degree of fantasy.

'He told the girls he was a baker and owned a bakery and but he says when one of the girls went to search for the address of the bakery on Google he said 'don't, I've made it up'.

'He is remorseful. He has a wife and a long standing marriage. She unfortunately opened the door to the group when they came to confront him.

'She has been suffering a lot because of that and she felt in fear in their own home. They had to move but she is supportive of him.'

Sentencing Allott, Judge Elizabeth Nicholls told him: 'This vigilante group attended your home address and the person who had to deal with this was not you, but your wife. She felt terrified by this and has since been forced to move out of your house. There was no victim in this case, but there was potential grooming.'

Allott, who now lives in Withington, Manchester was also ordered to complete the Horizon Programme for convicted sex offenders and was ordered to abide by the terms of Sexual Harm Prevention Order and sign the Sex Offender Register for five years.
Education Research

New Tools Will Measure Impact of Play on Child Development

An international effort is setting out to come up with new ways to help educators and others measure the impact of play on learning and child development. According to the organizers, the tools will be "open source, user friendly, cost effective and designed to be adopted across contexts by local governments, researchers, civil society and other stakeholders." The focus will be on children aged zero to 12, and the toolkit will include resources to support training, piloting, contextualization and analysis.

The project is being undertaken by three collaborators: RTI International, a nonprofit research institute; New York University's Global TIES for Children Center (NYU-TIES), a research center within NYU's Institute of Human Development and Social Change; and the LEGO Foundation, which is funding the work.

"RTI is very excited to be working with NYU-TIES, funded by the LEGO Foundation, to develop tools to help us better understand the benefits of play and how it can be promoted at home and at school for children of all ages," said Melinda Taylor, senior vice president of international education at RTI, in a statement.

According to RTI, the toolkit will be tested in Kenya, Jordan, Bangladesh and Ghana, with local institutions and experts in each country providing input on their development.
Real estate agent Karl Howard (pictured) has been charged with attempted murder over an alleged attack on two women on Monday

A real estate agent with a sparkling smile allegedly tried to forcibly kiss a woman at the end of a lengthy drinking session, before using a samurai sword to attack her friend who tried to intervene, a court has heard.

Karl Adon Howard, 44, allegedly carried out what friends are describing as an 'out of character' attack on his new 27-year-old love interest and her mate, 29, about 5am on Monday.

Howard - the principal at Ray White Balmain - is believed to have been drinking with the two women at his home on Ferris Street in Annandale, in Sydney's inner-west, on Sunday evening.

The boozing continued into the early hours of the next morning, when an argument is understood to have broken out.

Police allege Howard tried to forcibly kiss the 27-year-old, before punching her in the face and then using a samurai sword on her friend as she tried to intervene.

Howard was due to appear in Newtown Local Court on Wednesday, but he remains in Royal Prince Alfred Hospital with a dislocated shoulder he suffered during his arrest.

Howard was due to appear in Newtown Local Court on Wednesday, but he remains in Royal Prince Alfred Hospital with a dislocated shoulder he suffered during his arrest

NSW Police returned to Howard's home on Tuesday to seize two cars - including a BMW with a Ray White Balmain logo - which will now be forensically examined as part of the investigation

The real estate agent's lawyer John Sutton fronted court on his behalf and did not apply for bail, with Howard remanded in custody until at least April 8.

Outside court Mr Sutton told reporters his client's situation was 'very unfortunate'.

'He's got various physical injuries of his own, he's undergone surgery and we're just awaiting outcomes to understand what the doctors say,' Mr Sutton said.

'I think he's worried about more than just losing his job.

'It's a very unfortunate circumstance.'

In the aftermath of the alleged attack the two women fled to a neighbouring house.

When NSW police arrived Howard allegedly tried to flee the scene, but officers found him hiding next to a car just a street away.

During his arrest he suffered a dislocated shoulder and was taken to hospital.

Late on Tuesday night he was charged with wounding with intent to murder, assault occasioning actual bodily harm and trespassing.

Police have also taken out apprehended violence orders (AVOs) on behalf of both women.

Daily Mail Australia understands Howard had broken up with his long-term girlfriend - a fellow real estate agent - between 18 months and two years ago.

NSW Police detectives watched on as the two vehicles were towed away from Howard's garage

Police tape remains wrapped around a skip bin at a building site on Ferris Street - just some 50 metres from the scene of the alleged attack - where Howard's wallet and phone were allegedly found

He had recently met his newest love interest - a nurse and aspiring radio presenter - through an online dating app and she attended his home on Sunday with her friend.

A friend of Howard said he had owned the samurai sword for many years and it was a collector's item, that usual remained stored away in a box.

'He's had the samurai sword for a long time, but it never comes out of the cupboard,' his friend said.

'It's a collectors item, it's not like he used it for protection or in case of intruders.

'The saddest part is that his whole business and reputation is ruined. It's very sad.'

Detectives returned to his home on Tuesday to seize two cars - including a BMW with a Ray White logo on the side - which will now be forensically examined as part of the investigation.

Blood can be seen on the footpath directly opposite Howard's home, where his girlfriend and a friend ran for help after the alleged attack

Howard was eventually arrested on nearby Macquarie Street (pictured) and suffered an injury to his elbow during his arrest

In a statement, Ray White said they had decided to stand down Howard until the end of any criminal proceedings.

'The Ray White Group is an Australian family owned and led business and it expects a high standard of personal conduct from all its members in representing the brand,' a spokesperson for the real estate giant said.

Neighbours on the normally quiet street described the incident as 'shocking'.

'I got woken up early yesterday morning and saw the flashing lights from the police car, but didn't realise just what had happened until I saw the news,'

'It's a really nice, quiet, leafy street. You don't expect something so shocking to happen here.'
Opinion Article

10 February 2021

The Human Resources department is notorious for making, or breaking, a company. The culture, employee extrinsic motivation, and more- is all on HR. No truer words have been spoken for Bob Holland, Associate Partner at Strategic Solution Partners, who has previous first-hand experience dealing with the effects of an underperforming HR discipline.

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The *key* to restoration? Bringing in a trusted, experienced, and reputable outside resource with objective, fresh eyes.

THE PROBLEM: PERFORMANCE METRICS DID NOT ALIGN WITH CORPORATE EXPECTATIONS

Company A was experiencing a large disconnect between their HR discipline and their hotels' operations teams. Based on a large amount of negative feedback, lack of responsiveness, and a general level of inferior performance, in a nutshell, HR was perceived as out of touch with the real needs of their "customers" - the operations team.

From the onset, much of the negative perception appeared to be based on the poor alignment of many programs, processes and tactics with the overarching corporate strategy and values. From within HR, "success" was seen as compliance and adherence with processes - many of which had no meaningful purpose - to the traditional execution of feel good activities like the "3 Ps" - posters, picnics, and parties. Measuring the impact of providing targeted operational support and how it directly affects the P&L was a completely foreign concept to many of the property HRDs.

To ensure credibility AND trust, Company A brought in an outside resource to:

Identify /Validate / prioritize root causes creating the current environment

Eliminate the culture of "status quo is acceptable"

Through collaboration with respective discipline leaders, develop and implement a detailed plan to address deficiencies and align HR with the overall corporate strategy, mission, and values

THE SHIFT IN STRATEGY

With meaningful and relevant metrics as an integral component of the plan, Company A was able to quantifiably and qualitatively see a positive improvement amongst property human resource leaders, the impact of their efforts on the P&L, and perception of the discipline as a true business partner.

See below for how effectiveness and value changes were measured:

Developed and implemented

an objective Talent Assessment Tool , administered to all property based HRDs/HRMs; based on a skill set aligned with corporate strategy and goals. Targeted baseline for success Provided Current Aptitude Score for HR Leaders HR Leaders with Low Aptitude Scores were paired with Mentors.

Over an extended period of time, approximately 25% of existing HR Leaders were replaced due to the inability to achieve at baseline performance levels.

Impact on Human Resources Infrastructure

Revamped SOPs: With fresh eyes and perspective in place, standard operating procedures (SOPs) were completely updated with current governmental requirements as well as to address critical issues - effectively eliminating a significant number of SOPs identified as outdated or hampering ability to perform / thrive in the new environment.

With fresh eyes and perspective in place, standard operating procedures (SOPs) were completely updated with current governmental requirements as well as to address critical issues - effectively eliminating a significant number of SOPs identified as outdated or hampering ability to perform / thrive in the new environment. Implemented Dashboard System: A dashboard system was put in place to track progress of key metrics on a monthly basis- reviewed with EC, Corp, and included as part of the month end package & P&L call.

A dashboard system was put in place to track progress of key metrics on a monthly basis- reviewed with EC, Corp, and included as part of the month end package & P&L call. Change from the top: Corporate Communications consistently socialized change in direction / philosophy and successes / challenges.

IN CONCLUSION

After 18 months, credibility of discipline was greatly restored . Utilizing an outside source ensured the issues were seen from a fair point of view to (1) align with Corporate and property goals, (2) support Leadership and Management needs, and (3) serve as an advocate for the associates- all measured through associate & management opinion surveys, turnover/speed to fill open positions, and numerous other impactful P&L metrics.

*This article was originally published by eHotelier on 11/25.


To anyone keeping score, it appears that insurers are crushing policyholders who sued for business income lost because of COVID-19 restrictions.

As of Tuesday, insurers had won 147 motions for dismal or summary judgment in state and federal courts, according to a litigation tracker maintained by the University of Pennsylvanias Carey Law School. Policyholders had won only 34 cases in early rounds  less than one out of five.

But if you look closer, glaring outliers emerge.

In Ohio, insurers had won only two of 11 motions to dismiss or for summary judgment, as of Tuesday. In one case, Henderson Road Restaurant Systems et al v. Zurich American Insurance Co., a federal judge actually granted summary judgment in favor of the policyholder.

On the other end of the spectrum, insurers have won all 10 early rounds in Illinois so far, and 30 out 31 cases in Florida.

Counting wins and losses, that doesnt give you a reliable source to look at the issues, said Mark A. Wilner, a partner with Gordon Tilden Thomas & Cordell in Seattle. Each state has its own law, and thats whats being applied so far.

Wilners law firm represented two policyholders who won early rounds in COVID-19 business-interruption litigation. In fact, the rulings in those two cases were the only decisions on the issue made by Washington courts so far.

In Perry Street Brewing Co. v. Mutual of Enumclaw, the Spokane County Superior Court ruled that because a restaurants insurance policy covered physical loss of property as well as physical damage, a reasonable person could interpret that to include income lost because of government COVID-19 restrictions. Judge Michelle Szambelan said if terms are not defined, Washington state law requires any reasonable interpretation of policy language that favors the policyholder to be accepted. She granted summary judgment to Perry Street on the question of coverage.

In Hill and Stout PLLC v. Mutual of Enumclaw, the King County Superior Court denied an insurers motion to dismiss a coverage lawsuit filed by a dental practice. Judge Susan Amini said in her order that physical loss can be interpreted to mean the same thing as deprivation of property, which would be covered because the dental practices were forced to close for all services other than emergencies.

Hill and Stouts insurance policy, however, had a virus exclusion. Wilner is arguing that coverage is still owed because no virus was found on the property. The question will be decided during a trial set to begin on April 19.

Wilner said relatively few cases in Washington state have been decided in early motions because many of the lawsuits filed against insurers have been consolidated in a class-action lawsuit before U.S. District Judge Barbara J. Rothstein. The case is titled Kara McCulloch DMD MSD PLLC v. Valley Forge Insurance Co.

National Fire Insurance Co. of Hartford, Transportation Insurance Co. and Valley Forge Insurance Co. on Jan. 15 filed a joint motion to dismiss the cases filed against them.

Wilner said a long line of Washington state cases favors policyholders in the coverage question, but those precedents may not exist elsewhere. While a large number of cases may have gone in favor of insurers in other states, he said that has no bearing on insurance contracts formed under Washington state law.

That just the reality as each state gets to decide this on their own, he said. Theres no federal insurance coverage law that applies everywhere. Its up to the states.

A policyholder winning streak in Ohio continued Tuesday when Stark County Judge Frank G. Forchione denied a motion to dismiss a business-interruption lawsuit filed by McKinley Development Leasing Co. Ltd. against Westfield Insurance Co., the Tzangas Plakas Mannos law firm said in a press release. The developer owns commercial properties in North Canton, Ohio that housed a day-care center, restaurants, medical offices, clothing outlets, office spaces and beauty shops that had to shut down because of public health orders.

Forchione ruled that the language in the policy issued by Westfield was ambiguous because it did not define loss of property.

At the motion to dismiss state, these allegations plausibly allege that access was prohibited to such a degree as to trigger the Civil Authority coverage, Forchione said in his order.

Ohio case law is also reasonably friendly to policyholders, said K. James Sullivan, a partner with the Calfee law firm in Cleveland.

Sullivan said the large number of early dismissals outside of Ohio doesnt mean the tide wont turn. He said a large number of the early cases were filed by personal injury law firms who work on contingency. He said his law firm charges hourly rates and hasnt filed a single lawsuit so far.

Sullivan said he has advised his clients to be aware of policy language that may establish filing deadlines and ensure that notice of losses are filed timely. But he said as of now he and his colleagues at Calfee are in no hurry to start litigating.

All of our clients have the luxury of more time before investing large sums into coverage fights, he said.

Insurers are well aware that they are winning 80% of cases in initial motions, Sullivan said. We are not seeing insurance companies that are willing to negotiate.

That is true even for Ohio policyholders despite the 10 rulings against insurers so far. Sullivan said many of those early victories were scored against Cincinnati Insurance Co., which uses policy language that varies from the standard forms used by many national insurers.

Sullivan said insurers may start softening once the Ohio Supreme Court answers a certified question put before it by U.S. District Judge Benita Y. Pearson for the Northern District of Ohio. Rather than ruling in a lawsuit filed by Neuro-Communication Services against Cincinnati Insurance, Pearson asked the Supreme Court rule on whether the presence of the coronavirus in a community, or a person who was present on a property, constitutes a loss as defined by the audiology practices insurance policy.

When oral arguments occur before the Ohio Supreme Court, we may spring into action and try to negotiate claims, Sullivan said.

Sullivan said he is an advocate for policyholders and believes generally that COVID-related business-interruption costs should be covered.

I also like to think Im a pragmatist, he said. When the dust settles, I think you are going to have more states than not come down on the side of insurance companies on these issues. On the other hand, I think you will have a patchwork of states that come down in favor of policyholders.

About the photo: Perry Street Brewing in Spokane was an early winner in a COVID-19 business-interruption lawsuit against its insurer. Photo courtesy of TripAdvisor.com.
Chief Court Reporter

The prosecution bid to reverse the decision by a Harare magistrate to grant gold dealer Ali Mohammed bail has failed, although the High Court agreed errors had been made, but the businessman now has to include the title deeds of a Hatfield house, already part of the temporary surety for a trip, as part of the bail until trial.

Mohammed is already out of custody on $100 000 bail coupled with stiff conditions and last week was granted permission to travel to South Africa for two weeks to attend an investors conference with the magistrates court accepting his offer of a $2 million top up of the bail and the Hatfield title deeds.

He is facing charges of allegedly attempting to smuggle 6kg of gold to Dubai using co-accused Henrietta Rushwaya, who also finally made $100 000 bail recently.

Appealing against the granting of bail to Mohammed, the Prosecutor-General's Office said several errors were committed by the remand court and it wanted Mohammed locked up pending trial.

Justice Pisirayi Kwenda agreed there had been misdirection by the lower court but still found bail was appropriate. Although Mohammed was a foreigner, that would not necessarily induce him to evade trial as stiffer conditions could be imposed to ensure that he remained in the country until his trial is concluded.

"The misdirections leave the court at large. I am of the view that the fears of abscondment can be adequately allayed by the imposition of conditions which will be combined to make it unlikely for the respondent to leave the jurisdiction of this court," he said.

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To this end, the court tightened the bail conditions by ordering Mohammed to provide as surety, the deeds to a Hatfield property of 4 267 square metres not later than close of business yesterday.

Last week on Friday Mohammed successfully applied to have his passport back to enable him travel to South Africa on a business trip for two weeks.

He appeared before regional magistrate Ngoni Nduna on Friday seeking the release of his passport and scrapping of reporting conditions for the required time to allow him to travel and he volunteered to deposit a further $2 million on top of his bail and title deeds to the Hatfield property as surety for his return, the same property now being used as surety right up to his trial.

But the court did not agree with the two months period he asked for and granted him 14 days.

Prosecutor Mrs Netsai Mushayabasa had opposed the application for the passport, arguing that the court saw it necessary that he surrendered his passport so that he could stand trial. Mr Admire Rubaya of Rubaya and Chatambudza law firm represented Mohammed.
Donald Trump was impeached by the House for a second time on 13 January on the charge of "incitement to insurrection" after his supporters breached the US Capitol during a joint session of Congress confirming the presidential election results.

The riot came on 6 January after a "Save America Rally" in the Ellipse, a park near the White House, in which Mr Trump spoke for more than an hour in an airing of grievances against the election, the media, the Democrats and more.

President Trump gravely endangered the security of the United States and its institutions of Government, reads the four-page impeachment article. He will remain a threat to national security, democracy, and the Constitution if allowed to remain in office.

This is what happens next.

The Senate

The Senate impeachment trial began on 9 February and it is currently unclear how long it will last. However, it is expected to take less than the nearly three weeks that were used for Mr Trump's first impeachment trial in 2020.

Senate rules dictate that the chamber must be transformed into a court of impeachment almost immediately and remain that way until a verdict is reached.

Mr Trump will not be attending any of the sessions, and will be represented by lawyers David Schoen and Bruce Castor, who lead his legal team.

Read more: Follow all the latest Trump impeachment news live

The Trial

House members act as prosecutors during the trial, while senators sit as jurors, with Patrick Leahy, the president pro tempore of the US Senate, presiding over the proceedings.

Chief Justice John Roberts, who presided over Mr Trump's first impeachment, was originally supposed to serve in the same role for the second trial, but declined as he is not constitutionally obliged now that the former president has left office.

If senators vote that the trial is constitutional, then both the prosecutors and Mr Trump's defence will have 16 hours each to make their case.

Senators will then have four hours to question both sides, before each will have the same amount of time to argue whether motions to subpoena witnesses should be heard.

If they are issued, then both sides will depose witnesses, before they each have four hours to make their closing arguments.

Following that, the Senate will vote on the article of impeachment.

Read more: Can Trump run again in 2024?

The Vote

In his first impeachment, the Senate largely voted along party lines to clear the president.

The Senate needs a two-thirds majority to achieve a conviction. With the chamber split at 50-50, even the vice president's tie-breaking vote will not be enough for Mr Trump to be impeached.

That means about 17 Republicans will need to join Democrats in turning on the GOP's former leader. In the House, 10 Republicans voted to impeach. And at least four Senators have indicated they are either undecided or leaning toward impeachment, including Mitch McConnell, Lisa Murkowski, Ben Sasse, and Pat Toomey.

Read more: What does impeachment mean for Trump?

The Result

Impeachment is a process encoded in the US Constitution for the specific purpose of removing a sitting president from office for "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanours".

What, then, is the motivation for impeaching a civilian no longer sitting in the office of president? There are a few reasons, first among them preventing Mr Trump running for a second term in 2024.

While impeachment may not automatically bar him from running for office a second time, a second vote in the Senate to do so would only need a simple majority and not the two-thirds majority required for conviction, with the vice president currently holding the tie-breaking vote.

The impeachment could also precede a criminal investigation, with the Constitution saying a president convicted in the Senate is nevertheless "liable and subject to indictment, trial, judgment and punishment, according to law".

If it could be proven in a civilian court that Mr Trump broke the law, however, he wouldn't need to first be impeached before facing criminal charges.

Other outcomes include losing the former president's $1m travel allowance, lifelong pension, Secret Service detail, and the right to be buried with honours.

Read more: Which US presidents have been impeached?
Early September, the head of New Jerseys prison system told state lawmakers that the federal government had just given him a list of suggested reforms for the states only womens prison.

Since then, 152 days have passed. Six female inmates said they were severely beaten by staff. Three officers face criminal charges.

There is still no agreement on how to reform the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility in Hunterdon County. But a growing number of lawmakers do agree on thing: state Corrections Commissioner Marcus Hicks should lose his job.

This is completely unacceptable, and it starts at the top, state Senate President Stephen Sweeney, D-Gloucester, told NJ Advance Media on Tuesday, after joining every other Democratic state senator to call for Hicks ouster. The department has regressed, not improved, under his leadership.

Legislative sources said they didnt know why Gov. Phil Murphy was standing by the prison commissioner, although one thought the Democratic governor was waiting for the results of an independent investigation into the alleged beatings last month. Some sources spoke on condition of anonymity to talk candidly about discussions related to the governors office.

Advocates and legislators gathered virtually Tuesday to ramp up pressure. Participants asked residents to call the governors office, and more lawmakers signaled they would be open to impeaching Hicks after state Assemblywoman Jean Stanfield, R-Burlington, said last week shed introduce a resolution charging Hicks with official misconduct for failing to protect prisoners from serious harm.

I would hope we have a governor who can act on this instantly, state Senate Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg, D-Bergen, said, because both the department and the womens prison needed careful, new, appropriate leadership.

While some Republican and Democratic legislators have said theyd vote for impeachment, it was not immediately clear if leaders in the state Assembly would support a vote.

A Murphy spokesman declined comment. A representative for Hicks did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but she previously defended changes the commissioner has made, including expanding the use of cameras and increasing oversight of how officers use force.

While culture doesnt change overnight, Hicks has taken unprecedented actions to move the department in the right direction, Liz Velez wrote in an email Jan. 27.

Six women have said they were attacked by staff Jan. 11, and at least one said she was sexually assaulted by an officer.

The U.S. Department of Justice previously found evidence of rampant sexual abuse behind bars, and the states top federal prosecutor said Monday they were still negotiating reforms.

We are hopeful we can resolve this matter with the state, acting U.S. Attorney Rachael A. Honig said Monday. When we do, the resolution will be publicly announced.

Weinberg, the Senate majority leader, said Tuesday the commissioner had led her to believe an agreement had been reached.

If that is not true, then I will add that to the very long line of fictions that have been shared with those of us in the Legislature, she said.

A settlement with federal investigators should have taken place already, said state Sen. Linda Greenstein, D-Middlesex, and she slammed prison leaders for keeping details of the potential reforms from lawmakers.

The prison system previously denied an NJ Advance Media records request for a draft of the proposed reforms.

Lawmakers and advocates also said any changes needed to go far beyond a change in leadership, and cited the need for a federal takeover of the womens prison, an outside board that could receive complaints and better training for officers.

The commissioner also needed to be replaced with someone prepared to challenge an entrenched status quo, said Bonnie Kerness, director for the nonprofit American Friends Service Committees prison program.

Tia Ryans, a former Edna Mahan prisoner who now advocates for inmates, said the cost of inaction was high.

The vast majority of women inside will get out, and many now face a future with post-traumatic stress disorder, rape trauma syndrome, unresolved anger, self-mutilation and drug addiction because of abuse by officers, she said.

NJ Advance Media staff writer S.P. Sullivan contributed to this report.

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Blake Nelson can be reached at bnelson@njadvancemedia.com.

Brent Johnson may be reached at bjohnson@njadvancemedia.com.

Joe Atmonavage may be reached at jatmonavage@njadvancemedia.com.

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Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-10 17:11:33|Editor: huaxia

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Chinese President Xi Jinping's keynote speech at the Summit of China and Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs) has charted the course for both sides to achieve common development and mutual benefit at a higher level and injected impetus into the joint efforts to build a community with a shared future for mankind, experts have said.

The summit, held via video link, called on relevant countries to keep up the momentum and work together for a new chapter in China-CEEC cooperation.

The China-CEEC cooperation has become an important part of China-Europe cooperation, said Piotr Gadzinowski, editor-in-chief of the Polish newspaper Trybuna. "I believe that other member states will work with China to further safeguard multilateralism, promote free trade, deepen mutually beneficial cooperation between China and Europe ... as well as build an open world economy," he said.

Gadzinowski added that China has joined hands with the CEECs in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, providing each other with much-needed medical supplies, actively cooperating to resume production, and working together to promote economic recovery, which shows the adherence to the concept of a community with a shared future for mankind.

Milan Bandic, mayor of Croatia's capital Zagreb, believed that cooperation with China is needed for "all European Union countries," noting it is positive that trade between China and the CEECs is growing.

"More intensive cooperation between Europe and China in the field of science and research should continue, primarily to ensure larger quantities of COVID-19 vaccines," he said, adding that the Chinese experience in the field of ecology and sustainable development "will be valuable to everyone in Europe."

Jelena Begovic, director of the Institute of Molecular Genetics and Genetic Engineering of University of Belgrade, Serbia, said China's initiative to "gather these countries and make a wall, a battlefield to beat this pandemic" is a great idea, adding that "I think it's the only way if we want to win this war."

If the international community can strengthen ties between countries and try to find more countries to involve, Begovic said, "it would be great and we have to come to some mutual solutions on the global level or just start at a regional level."

Andrey Shvedov, editor-in-chief of Latvia's Russian-language newspaper Segodnya, said Xi's remarks that all countries involved, regardless of size, are equal partners in a cooperation mechanism, is especially important to Latvia.

Produced by Xinhua Global Service
[February 10, 2021] Mining Bitcoin in the New Technology Frontier

PHILADELPHIA, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- VBit Technologies, one of the only U.S.-based companies developing and hosting Bitcoin mining operations, based out of Philadelphia is expanding its mining business into Montana. Known as the "Known Technology Frontier", Montana provides access to cheap electricity plus cooler conditions making it an ideal place to turn dormant manufacturing plants into server farms to mine Bitcoin. Yesterday, CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk, announced that it had bought $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin, and would start accepting Bitcoin as a payment method for its products. Some are crediting Musk with raising the price of cryptocurrencies. As of today, Bitcoin has broken another all-time high at $48,200 per Coinable price index, so as the market is growing, Bitcoin mining is too. VBit already has existing mining locations in Calgary and Colorado and is expanding into Montana while actively looking for new locations in Western Pennsylvania as well. Montana with its inexpensive and vast amounts of hydroelectric power and large vacant facilities that have their own power substations and is a prime location for expansion to mine Bitcoin. VBit will deploy its new mining hardware in a data center that is 100% powered by hydroelectricity. According to bitcoinenergyconsumption.com, the total power consumption of Bitcoin mining in 2020 is estimated at 77.8 TWh per year which is the equivalent of the entire country of Chile. A single mining transaction uses 686.5 kWh which equates to 23.3 days of power for an average US household (Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index - Digiconomist). This amount of power generation is estimated to add over 36.9 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere which is the same as New Zealand in a year.



Don Vo, CEO and founder of VBit Technologies, said, "Crypto as an industry has now come of age, and is now firmly in the mainstream - it is here to stay, and so is VBit Technologies. From an environmental standpoint, it's therefore important for Bitcoin mining to move to a more eco-friendly energy source that not only reduces the cost of electricity consumption but also generates it from renewable sources making it environmentally friendly. In addition, VBit is exploring new liquid immersion cooling technology that will allow for a more reliable mining environment with less failure. If there's an hour of downtime from a failure, it means we're losing money, so we need to keep the equipment optimized for profitability and customer satisfaction." VBit Technologies has a brand called VBit Mining that provides Bitcoin mining services to thousands of people worldwide, and is on its way to becoming one of the largest Bitcoin mining operations in the world.

Contact: marketing@vbitmining.com Related Images vbit-mining-montana.jpg

VBit Mining Montana Related Links www.vbitmining.com View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mining-bitcoin-in-the-new-technology-frontier-301226292.html SOURCE VBit Technologies

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Feb. 5

Accellion

(TNS)  Reacting to the unemployment-claims data breach that exposed the personal information of those affected, lawmakers are looking to beef up the state's cybersecurity practices.At the request of Gov., they've introduced legislation giving the state(OCS) more authority to direct state agencies on "best practices" for safely storing sensitive data.That includes agencies run by independently elected officials like State Auditor, whose office last week disclosed the massive breach involving thenumbers, bank account numbers and other personal information of an estimated 1.4 million people.Senate Bill 5432, quickly drafted after the breach, was supported by McCarthy's office and by the state's chief information officerat a virtual public hearing before a statecommittee Tuesday.The bill would formalize some of what the cybersecurity office already says it does, while also giving it more power  essentially trying to centralize what some say has been a scattershot, agency-by-agency approach to protecting data.has a ferocious addiction to decentralization," said the bill's chief sponsor, state Sen., D-, in an interview."There is a time and place for decentralization, but IT security is just not that place," added Carlyle, who chairs the state, which held the hearing on the bill Tuesday., a policy adviser to Inslee, testified at the hearing that the events of the past year have shown "cyberthreats are painfully real and cyberattacks are on the rise." She said while agencies have tried to be diligent, "we have some work to do."The compromised data had been collected as part of the auditor's investigations into how the state(ESD) lost $600 million to fraudulent unemployment claims.In conducting its probe, the auditor gathered the detailed records on more than 1 million unemployment claims filedof 2020. The breach left all of them exposed when an "unauthorized person" gained access to the data in late December.McCarthy has blamed, thetech company whose aging data-transfer service was compromised by hackers. Her office had relied on the service for more than a decade.executives say they'd long been urging customers to upgrade to the firm's newer, more secure file-transfer service. The auditor's office was in the process of doing that when the breach occurred in late December.McCarthy did not appear at the hearing Tuesday. A representative of her office,, briefly testified that the auditor supports the proposed legislation, but is "anxious" to ensure it does not interfere with her office's audit authority.Weaver, the state's CIO, who runs the central tech-services agency known as, said the legislation would "solidify" the role of the state cybersecurity office and allow a "whole of government approach" to warding off threats by hackers.The legislation would require state agencies to report major cybersecurity incidents to the OCS within 24 hours of discovery. The OCS would be required to investigate such breaches and serve as the state's "point of contact" for all such incidents.The bill also would require, along with the state, to research best practices for data protection and submit a report to the Legislature bySawyer said work is ongoing to further strengthen the legislation as it moves forward.Carlyle said, which is home to a vast array of tech companies and talent, should be in the "top tier" of cybersecurity nationally. "We are not meeting that standard today," he said at the hearing.While state lawmakers scramble to fix gaps in the data security, the auditor's office data breach already is spawning potentially massive legal actions, with two class-action lawsuits filed last week inThe first, filed on, namesas a defendant. The second, filed, names bothand the state auditor's office. Both seek monetary damages and attorney's fees on behalf of anyone harmed by the data breach.



ISIS have killed 26 regime fighters in an ambush in Deir-ez-Zor, reports Al-Araby Al-Jadeed.

The Islamic State (ISIS) group on Monday ambushed a regime convoy in eastern Syria, killing at least 26 fighters, including seven Syrian troops, a war monitor said.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the early morning ambush in the province of Deir-ez-Zor came as the convoy combed the area for jihadists, after a string of recent attacks.

Violent clashes between the two sides led to large human losses, it said, calling the toll from fighting the largest since the start of the year.

Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman said at least seven of the 26 killed were Syrian troops, while the remaining casualties were mostly Syrian militia fighters.

At least 11 ISIS jihadists were also killed, the Observatory added.

The jihadist group overran large parts of Syria and Iraq and proclaimed a cross-border caliphate in 2014, before multiple offensives in the two countries led to its territorial defeat.

The group lost its last scrap of territory in Syria in March 2019, but in recent months it has ramped up attacks against regime forces, especially in the east of the country bordering Iraq.

Last week, ISIS jihadists killed 19 Syrian regime fighters and allied militia forces in central Syria.

And in December, nearly 40 Syrian troops were killed when ISIS ambushed a bus carrying soldiers travelling home for the holidays.

The desert area in Deir-Ez-Zor province provides a safe haven for jihadists planning attacks on regime forces and other rivals, the United Nations said in a report published this month.

ISIS retains some 10,000 active fighters in Iraq and Syria, although the majority are reported to be in Iraq, the UN has said.

The war in Syria has killed more than 387,000 people since it started in 2011, the Observatory says.

The Syrian Observer has not verified the content of this story. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author.
SpyBiotech has raised $32.5M from leading investors to advance development of its novel "plug and display" vaccine platform technology



Braavos Investment Advisers led the round, joined by new investor Oxford Investment Consultants; founding investors Oxford Sciences Innovation and GV also participated

Lutz B. Giebel joins as Chairman, strengthening governance as company expands clinical development and builds operational resource



OXFORD, United Kingdom, Feb. 10, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- SpyBiotech, a British biotechnology company with a novel vaccine platform technology targeting infectious diseases, cancer and chronic diseases, today announces it has raised $32.5 million in Series A equity financing and appointed Lutz B. Giebel as Chairman.

The round was led by new investor Braavos Investment Advisers and joined by new investor Oxford Investment Consultants. Founding investors Oxford Sciences Innovation and GV also participated, alongside the UK Government's Future Fund, converting a prior convertible loan into equity.

Proceeds will advance the clinical development of SpyBiotech's novel vaccine technology platform, based on its proprietary SpyCatcher/SpyTag protein "superglue" technology. SpyBiotech plans to begin a Phase I clinical study of its internal lead candidate, targeting human cytomegalovirus (HCMV), in early 2022.

The company believes the platform technology has broad applicability across a number of other infectious diseases, and in a range of other areas, such as oncology, which it also plans to explore in clinical development.

SpyBiotech will now build out the required scientific and operational resources. The appointment of Lutz B. Giebel as Chairman of the Board is the first step on this journey, providing strengthened governance and oversight as the company expands.

Lutz has significant operational, governance and investment experience gained over the course of a 30 plus year career in biopharma in the US. He has served on the Boards of 16 biopharma companies and held several executive positions, including Managing Partner at SV Life Sciences, an international healthcare focused venture capital firm, based in San Francisco. SpyBiotech further strengthens its Board through the appointment of Andre Crawford-Brunt, General Partner, Braavos Investment Advisers.

These developments follow a pivotal year for SpyBiotech, which in September 2020 signed an exclusive global licensing agreement with the Serum Institute of India (SII) for the development of a novel virus-like particle (VLP) vaccine targeting COVID-19. The vaccine candidate uses the SpyCatcher/SpyTag protein "superglue" technology to display the coronavirus spike protein on the surface of Hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg) VLPs. SII, the world's largest vaccine manufacturer, initiated clinical trials of the RBD vaccine candidate in September 2020, providing initial clinical validation for SpyBiotech's platform technology.

The Series A round brings SpyBiotech's total funding since its spin-out in 2017 from the University of Oxford, in collaboration with Oxford University Innovation, to $39 million.

Lutz B. Giebel, Chairman, SpyBiotech, said:

"I've been involved with many biopharma companies over the course of my career but this is one of the most exciting ones I have encountered. SpyBiotech has a unique platform technology based on decades of vaccine scientific excellence. The COVID-19 vaccine development programme has shifted the company into an accelerated phase of development. I'm looking forward to supporting Sumi and the team and working with our incoming and existing investors to move this exciting vaccine platform through clinical development."

Professor Sumi Biswas, Chief Executive Officer and co-Founder of SpyBiotech, commented:

"SpyBiotech is delighted to welcome our new investors and Chairman. Braavos and OIC complement our existing register of supportive and sophisticated investors and Lutz Giebel brings years of governance experience and expertise. These developments position us well as we accelerate our clinical development programme."

Andre Crawford-Brunt, General Partner, Braavos Investment Advisers, commented:

"SpyBiotech is built on decades of ground-breaking vaccine research. The potential of its platform technology offers significant scope to tackle some of the biggest challenges in medicine. Braavos Investment Advisers is thrilled to be on board as the company reaches a critical inflection point in its clinical development plans and we are delighted that Lutz Giebel will support with governance."

James Wong, Principal, Oxford Sciences Innovation and Board Member, SpyBiotech, said:

"We are proud to have invested in SpyBiotech since its inception, backing a mission-driven team from the University of Oxford focused on developing safe and effective vaccines that address global unmet medical needs. We're delighted to have worked with GV to support Sumi and the team to attract a high-quality investor syndicate led by Braavos and an experienced Chair in Lutz."

Dr Jane Smit, Oxford Investment Consultants, said:

"We are thrilled to invest in SpyBiotech. The founders' Jenner Institute vaccinology pedigree, together with their commitment to develop safe, low-cost, rapid deployment vaccines for unmet needs makes this a compelling investment."





For further information contact:

Powerscourt (Public Relations)

Sarah MacLeod 07747 602739 Jessica Hodgson 07561 424788

spybiotech@powerscourt-group.com

Notes for editors

About SpyBiotech

SpyBiotech is a British biotechnology company with a novel vaccine platform technology to target infectious diseases, cancer and chronic diseases.

Based on science developed at the University of Oxford, SpyBiotech's novel vaccine platform is based on a proprietary protein "superglue" technology which binds antigens to vaccine delivery platforms in a way which minimises delivery risk and enhances immunogenicity and efficacy.

The technology is one of the safest and most effective ways to create vaccines: cost-effective and highly scalable. This makes it ideal for use against infectious diseases in challenging environments, such as in the developing world, but also with potential application in non-infectious disease settings such as cancer.

SpyBiotech has the exclusive rights from the University of Oxford to apply, commercialise and sub-license the SpyTag/SpyCatcher technology in vaccine development.

The company's lead candidate is against human cytomegalovirus (HCMV), with clinical studies planned for 2022 and the company sees a range of development opportunities in infectious diseases and beyond. In 2020, SpyBiotech signed an exclusive global licensing agreement with the Serum Institute of India for the development of a novel virus-like-particle (VLP) vaccine targeting COVID-19.

SpyBiotech is supported by high quality investors including Braavos Investment Advisers, Oxford Sciences Innovation
New Delhi: The Centre on Wednesday (February 10, 2021) held a meeting with the micro-blogging platform Twitter over the removal of tweets and accounts using hashtag related to 'farmer genocide'.

During a virtual interaction, the Union Secretary of Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, told Twitter representatives, "In India, we value freedom and we value criticism because it is part of our democracy. India has a robust mechanism for protection of freedom of speech and expression that is very elaborately explained as Fundamental Rights under Article 19 (1) of the Constitution of India. But freedom of expression is not absolute and it is subject to reasonable restrictions as mentioned in Article 19 (2) of the Constitution of India. Various judgments of the Supreme Court have also upheld this from time to time."

The Secretary held the virtual meeting with Monique Meche, Vice President Global Public Policy and Jim Baker Deputy General Counsel and Vice President Legal.

It was in view of the order issued by the Centre directing Twitter to remove tweets and accounts using hashtag related to farmer genocide and accounts supported by Khalistan sympathizers and backed by Pakistan and blog post issued by Twitter on Wednesday morning.

The Secretary further highlighted that Twitter is welcome to do business in India. However, Twitter, as a business entity working in India, must also respect the Indian laws and democratic institutions.

"Twitter is free to formulate its own rules and guidelines like any other business entity does, but Indian laws which are enacted by the Parliament of India must be followed irrespective of Twitters own rules and guidelines," the official release by the Ministry of Electronics & IT said.

The statement added that due to India's conducive business environment, open Internet and a firm commitment to the freedom of expression Twitter as a platform has grown significantly in India in the last few years.

Secretary took up the issue of using a hashtag on 'farmer genocide' with Twitter executives and expressed strong displeasure on the way Twitter acted after an emergency order was issued to remove this hashtag and content related to that.

"Spreading misinformation using an incendiary and baseless hashtag referring to 'farmer genocide' at a time when such irresponsible content can provoke and inflame the situation is neither journalistic freedom nor freedom of expression as envisaged under Article 19 of the Constitution of India," said the official statement.

It added, "Despite the attention of Twitter being drawn to such content by the Government through a lawful process, the platform allowed the content with this hashtag to continue, which was extremely unfortunate."

The Secretary also reminded Twitter about the action taken by the micro-blogging platform during the Capitol Hill episode in the United States and compared that with the disturbance in Red Fort in India and its aftermath.

He expressed dissatisfaction over Twitter's differential treatment in the two incidents.

"A deep sense of disappointment at seeing Twitter side not with 'freedom of expression' but rather with those who seek to abuse such freedom and provoke disturbance to public order, was conveyed to the Twitter representative," added the official statement.

Secretary also mentioned that revelations around a certain 'Toolkit' has made it evident that a strong social media campaign was planned in a foreign country around farmers' protest.

"Misuse of Twitter's platform for execution of such campaigns designed to create disharmony and unrest in India is unacceptable and Twitter must take strong action against such well-coordinated campaigns against India, through compliance with the applicable law of the land," said the Ministry of Electronics & IT.

It added, "Lawfully passed orders are binding on any business entity. They must be obeyed immediately. If they are executed days later, it becomes meaningless. Secretary expressed his deep disappointment to Twitter leadership about the manner in which Twitter has unwillingly, grudgingly and with great delay complied with the substantial parts of the order. He took this opportunity to remind Twitter that in India, its Constitution and laws are supreme. It is expected that responsible entities not only reaffirm but remain committed to compliance with the law of land."

The Centre also conveyed to the Twitter leadership that the manner in which Twitter officially allows fake, unverified, anonymous and automated bot accounts to be operated on its platform, raises doubts about its commitment to transparency and healthy conversation on this platform.

"Twitter leadership affirmed their commitment towards following Indian laws and rules. They also expressed their continuing commitment towards building their services in India. They have also requested for better engagement between Government of India and Twitters global team," the Ministry of Electronics & IT said.

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Chicory Finn and the Places Hes Been: an enthralling story that will have the readers falling in love with a dog who loves going out to places and having fun. Chicory Finn and the Places Hes Been is the creation of published author Angie Glieden, a writer who loves spending time with her family and pets. She has had a love for Saint Bernards since she was twelve years old, and this book is all about her very own.

Glieden writes, Chicory Finn is a very slobbery but very lovable Saint Bernard that loves to travel.

By plane or car, he adventures many places with his furry friends.

He loves to see new things! Where will he go next?

Published by Christian Faith Publishing, Angie Gliedens new book is a captivating story that revolves around a Saint Bernard who never stops going on trips, either alone or with friends, to appreciate the gift of nature. Join Chicory Finn on his adventures in exploring nature, which will allow children to imagine what it is like to be in other places.

View a synopsis of Chicory Finn and the Places Hes Been on YouTube.

Consumers can purchase Chicory Finn and the Places Hes Been at traditional brick & mortar bookstores, or online at Amazon.com, Apple iTunes store, or Barnes and Noble.

For additional information or inquiries about Chicory Finn and the Places Hes Been, contact the Christian Faith Publishing media department at 866-554-0919.
The Flight Safety Foundations report on the completion of an additional inquiry into the airspace closure above and around eastern Ukraine in relation to the downing of Flight MH17 has finally clarified the issue regarding the airspace closure on the day of the tragedy.

Ambassador of Ukraine to the Netherlands Vsevolod Chentsov said this in an exclusive comment to an Ukrinform correspondent in The Hague.

The additional inquiry of the facts, which is important, in particular, for the relatives of the victims, was intended to dot the i's in the issue of airspace closure on the day of the tragedy. Ukraine was receptive to this sensitive topic and cooperated in the additional fact-finding in full, although it had already provided relevant information on this issue as part of the technical investigation. The results presented in the report confirm the previous conclusions. This is reflected in the cover letter of Foreign Minister of Netherlands Stef Blok to parliament. Accordingly, for Ukraine and the entire world community, this is a confirmation that our state complied with the norms and rules existing at that time, and also acted in accordance with the information available to the competent authorities. The position of the Dutch government on the absence of grounds for bringing Ukraine to justice was expressed earlier following the results of a technical investigation and has now been confirmed. The February 5 report allows us to dispel doubts - if they still exist - and to move forward in bringing the perpetrators to justice," Chentsov said.

He also noted that this report was prepared in addition to a technical investigation, which also covered the issue of airspace closure, and the results of which were presented by the Dutch Safety Board in October 2015.

As Ukrinform reported, the Dutch parliament released a report on the completion of an additional inquiry into the airspace closure above and around eastern Ukraine in relation to the downing of Flight MH17.

The Flight Safety Foundations report notes that the inquiry did not find sufficient facts that Ukrainian authorities responsible for analysing security risk levels in civil aviation airspace and those establishing restriction of airspace in a conflict zone were aware of a threat to civil aviation before the downing of Flight MH17.

Therefore, the Dutch government sees no reason to review its previous position, namely the lack of convincing legal evidence to hold Ukraine accountable for its decision not to close airspace over the war zone.

In October 2019, the Dutch parliament supported the MPs' proposal for an additional study of the circumstances of airspace closure over Donbas at the time when flight MH17 was shot down.

Ukrainian officials repeatedly stated that Ukraine had acted in accordance with the ICAO rules in force at that time and, based on an analysis of the existing risks, reported on the armed conflict and imposed bans on civil aviation flights.

Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, was shot down over conflict-hit Donbas in July 2014. There were 283 passengers and 15 crew members on board. All of them died.

The international Joint Investigation Team reported that the plane had been shot down from a Buk missile system that belongs to the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade of the Russian Armed Forces stationed in Kursk.

In May 2018, the Netherlands and Australia officially accused Russia of involvement in the MH17 crash.

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New Zealand is suspending political and military contact with Myanmar, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced Tuesday.

Speaking at a news conference in Wellington, Ardern said Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta has instructed that any New Zealand aid should not go to Myanmars military government or benefit them.

The announcement came as demonstrators opposing Myanmar's military coup gathered in various cities in defiance of rules making protests illegal.

The protesters are demanding that power be restored to the deposed civilian government and are seeking freedom for ousted leader Aung San Suu Kyi and other governing party members detained since the military took over on February 1.

The growing defiance is striking in a country where past demonstrations have been met with deadly force and are a reminder of previous movements in the Southeast Asian country's long and bloody struggle for democracy.

The military used deadly force to quash a massive 1988 uprising against military dictatorship and a 2007 revolt led by Buddhist monks.

(Disclaimer: This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed; only the image & headline may have been reworked by www.republicworld.com)
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla., Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Oasis, a Paychex Company, today released their Priorities for Business Leaders annual survey findings. Ensuring a safe work environment during the COVID-19 pandemic is the top priority among the 300 leaders of small and mid-size U.S. businesses surveyed. Shifting priorities due to COVID-19 has pushed attracting talent from the top of the list, a spot it has held for the past two years. Employee safety and well-being are now top priorities in the year ahead.

"2021 will be challenging as businesses, in particular small and mid-size businesses, navigate safely bringing employees back to work and adjust to the long-term impact of the pandemic," said Teresa Carroll, president, Oasis. "No matter the industry they serve, all businesses have had to adapt to new regulations and local and state mandates as the pandemic evolves. Likewise, whether employees have faced cutbacks or mental health challenges brought on by the pandemic, all workers have been impacted. In turn, this has brought workforce management and overall physical, financial, mental, and social employee wellness front and center among business leaders' list of priorities. As we see businesses recover from the pandemic and get back to work, Oasis is prepared to support clients through the unchartered territory that lies ahead."

When asked which human resource (HR) administration issues will become more challenging over the next 12 months compared to the past year, respondents replied:

Ensuring a safe workplace in light of COVID-19: 36 percent

Offering competitive compensation and benefits (including Employee Assistance Programs): 31 percent

Developing employees and future leaders for succession: 29 percent

Attracting strong, competent management and dedicated, capable staff: 28 percent

Maintaining ongoing regulatory compliance: 28 percent

Other key findings from the survey include:

General stress levels are higher than before the COVID-19 pandemic, with 21 percent of business leaders feeling "much more stressed." Furthermore, 54 percent of business leaders say that they are more aware of their employees' stress level than before COVID-19.

Keeping employees engaged and productive is a higher priority now than it was at the start of 2020, with 16 percent reporting it is a "much higher priority now."

Thirty-six percent of business leaders want to make employee benefits easier to access and more affordable. Thirty-three percent want to improve the overall benefits that they offer in order to remain competitive when recruiting and retaining top talent.

Looking at how employers communicate, 66 percent of business leaders said they use videoconferencing more now than prior to the pandemic, and 39 percent believe they will continue to use it with their customers and employees after the pandemic.

Sixty-seven percent of small and mid-size business leaders reported spending up to 10 hours a week on HR duties, with 23 percent spending 11 to 20 hours a week.

Forty-two percent of business leaders said they are "very or somewhat likely" to outsource HR administration in the next 12 months.

With employee stress levels on the rise and employers in search of strategies to better engage their workforce, Oasis is committed to supporting businesses as they navigate these, and the many other challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. As a Professional Employer Organization (PEO) leader, providing HR outsourcing services to businesses, Oasis is unique in its ability to deliver this assistance. Oasis lends this support through resources available on its COVID-19 Help Center, expert HR support available to clients, a robust benefit offering, risk management services, and much more. For more information on how Oasis is supporting businesses throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, visit Oasis' COVID-19 Help Center.

"Savvy leaders outsource HR administration to focus on driving growth. This helps lead to strong relationships with their teams and building an exceptional workforce," said Donna Meek, Senior Manager PEO Service, Oasis. "The demands on HR are greater now than ever before. Our employee-centric HR solutions provide support throughout the entire employee lifecycle, addressing areas of critical concern particularly in today's workplace landscape. From helping businesses maintain compliance with new COVID-19 laws and regulations to helping them maintain employee safety with our HR services and risk management solutions, in this time of intense uncertainty, Oasis serves as a trusted expert that businesses can rely on to help support human resources as they adapt to changing priorities."

For full access to the results of the survey, please download 2021 Priorities for Business Leaders  A U.S. Survey.

Methodology

This national survey was conducted with 300 business leaders who employed between 5 to 99 employees from a broad cross-section of industries. From December 2 to 8, 2020, the online interviews took place by Bredin, an independent market research company located in Boston, MA. The 2019 and 2018 surveys were completed during similar periods and were conducted online using a National Web Panel by SSRS, an independent market research company located in Glen Mills, PA.

About Oasis, a Paychex Company:

Oasis is a national Professional Employer Organization (PEO) specializing in providing HR services, employee benefits administration, payroll and tax administration, risk management services and staffing solutions to businesses throughout the United States. Oasis is accredited by the Employer Services Assurance Corporation (ESAC) and the IRS has certified subsidiaries of Oasis to provide PEO services under the Small Business Efficiency Act (SBEA). For more information about Oasis, visit www.oasisadvantage.com.

Professional employer organization (PEO) services provided by Oasis Outsourcing, LLC. (Florida employee leasing license GL42) and its affiliates, which are licensed or registered to provide PEO services where required by law.

CONTACT: Laura Burns, [email protected]

SOURCE Oasis, a Paychex Company
Texas lawyer, trapped by cat filter on Zoom call, informs judge he is not a cat Guardian

Conundrum over what to do with growing population of Pablo Escobars hippos Euronews

Blue glass beads in Alaskas tundra Polarjournal

Decentralized Finance: On Blockchain- and Smart Contract-Based Financial Markets Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis

Fossil fuel pollution causes one in five premature deaths globally: study Reuters (pre-proof).

#COVID19

Conspiracy theory doctor surrenders medical license Cal Matters

China?

The best course for Biden is to help Taiwan help itself Reponsible Statecraft

Myanmar

Vaccine Diplomacy Is Bidens First Test in Southeast Asia Center for Strategic and International Studies. Its madness that the US is not doing this.

The Koreas

India

Syraqistan

Bolsonaros Neoliberal Disaster: An Interview With Esther Dweck Brasilwire

UK/EU

New Cold War

Say hello to Alexei Navalnys libertarian multimillionaire backer Yasha Levine, Immigrants as a Weapon

Impeachment

Biden Transition

Our Famously Free Press

Realignment and Legitimacy

Trumpian conspiracy theories come from unresolved issues of the Civil War: Matthew Dowd USA Today

Class Warfare

Who Spent Their Last Stimulus Checks? NYT. Are the checks for stimulus? Or relief? If the latter, is it so very bad that the working class might end up with a little money in the bank, for once?

Can human judgment handle avalanches? High Country News

Tom Brady and the vindication of age over youth FT

Antidote du jour (via):

See yesterdays Links and Antidote du Jour here.
NASA has been ranked in the top 25 of Forbes America's Best Large Employers for 2021.

This year has been a banner one for NASA so far, with cutting edge technology, breakthrough research and future Mars exploration. It's no surprise the space agency would land at No. 12 on the list.

MARS SURVIVAL: Map of Martian water ice could help guide future astronauts

Forbes partnered with marketing research company Statista to put together a list from 50,000 Americans surveyed from various industries.

Participants from companies with at least 1,000 employees were asked how willing they would be to rate their employer and nominate other businesses besides their own, according to Forbes.com.

NASA along with MD Anderson Cancer Center were among the companies in the top 25 of the 500 companies chosen for the annual list. NASA clocks in with 17,000 employees on the list.

"NASA is honored to be recognized by @Forbes as one of Americas Best Large Employers in its 2021 ranking & the highest ranked in the aerospace industry!" the organization said in a tweet.

NASA also shined in other areas for 2020, coming in at No. 46 for Best Employers for Veterans; No. 38 for Best Employers for New Grads; and No. 365 for Best Employers for Diversity, among other rankings.

"Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S. economy has lost nearly 10 million jobs and the unemployment rate has reached 6.3%. But the companies featured on our list of Americas Best Large Employers are trying hard to attract and retain top talentmany while trying to keep the country safe," Forbes said.

By Alex Brown/Stateline.org

When the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma began receiving its first doses of COVID-19 vaccines in December, tribal leaders knew exactly who would be getting the first shots.

We put Cherokee-fluent speakers at the front of the line, said Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. Saving the language is in our national interest.

During the pandemic, the tribe has lost 35 fluent language speakers out of just 2,000 remaining  many of whom are Elders. In many tribes, Elder is an official title reserved for older members who pass on cultural knowledge, oral histories and traditional practices. The deaths of such members represent lost libraries of lifeways, culture, stories and language, Hoskin said. To lessen the toll, the tribe is working doggedly to give out shots as soon as it gets vaccines. The only thing slowing the process is the federal supply.

Our doses have been administered without any lag time, Hoskin said. The only question is whether the United States can keep up with the Cherokee Nation.

The Cherokee Nation has 385,000 citizens, with 140,000 living on its reservation. So far, 14,000 members have been vaccinated  about 10% of the tribal reservation population. The tribe has vaccinated its Elders and health care workforce, and its now offering vaccines to members 55 and older, as well as teachers and tribal government employees.

COVID-19 has killed Native Americans at a faster rate than any other group in the United States, nearly double the per capita death toll for White Americans and more than a third higher than that for Black residents, who also have suffered disproportionately. Recent data shows Native deaths are increasing faster than those of other groups, worsening the disparity. But among Native Americans, the vaccine rollout so far has been a success story.

As Americans have struggled to navigate confusing new online systems to schedule appointments and check eligibility, many tribes have taken a different approach: working the phones. Across Indian Country, tribal leaders say theyve set up call centers  often staffed by fluent Native language speakers  to answer inquiries, book appointments and reach out to citizens. Theyve also gotten the word out through existing outreach programs, newsletters, social media, radio announcements and direct mail.

Tribal nations have used familiar community gathering places to give out shots, and theyre drawing from years of experience bringing medical care to more remote areas.

The result: Several of the states with the highest vaccination rates  including Alaska, Oklahoma and South Dakota  are ones with large Native American populations.

The cool thing about our community is we all know each other, said Alicia Mousseau, vice president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe in South Dakota. Thats one of the defining features of our response. Our community figures things out fairly well with limited resources.

Out of a population of about 30,000 on its reservation, the Oglala Sioux Tribe has vaccinated more than 4,000 people. The tribe has had Elders fluent in Lakota offering vaccine information on the radio. Health officials are now offering shots to Elders who are 60 and over, as well as any members with medical conditions.

This is a ray of hope, and our community has been waiting for it, said Mousseau.

The United States recognizes 574 tribal nations, which have roughly 2.6 million enrolled members. Based on treaties that many tribes signed when they ceded their land, the U.S. government has a legal trust responsibility to provide health care to tribal citizens. The federally funded Indian Health Service provides care on many reservations, while also distributing money to tribes that run their own health programs. Urban Indian Organizations provide care to the Native American populations in some cities.

When tribes began preparing for the vaccine rollout, they were given the choice to receive their doses either from their states allotment or directly from the Indian Health Service. Many tribes that chose IHS have been pleased with the distribution so far, saying the centralized health care system has been more effective than the fragmented approach seen in many states. Some state governments, including those of Alaska and Washington, also have drawn praise for their vaccine coordination efforts with tribes.

The Indian Health Service says it has distributed 493,000 vaccine doses to its own facilities, tribal health systems and Urban Indian Organizations. Its unclear how many additional doses have been distributed by states.

In northeast Oregon, leaders of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation expect to reach more than a thousand vaccinations by the end of the month. With roughly 2,000 citizens living on the reservation, the tribe has opened eligibility to anyone 16 and older. Chuck Sams, the tribes COVID-19 incident commander, credits health care staff for the aggressive outreach campaign and a phone bank that enabled anyone looking to schedule an appointment or ask questions to talk to a live human.

Our genetic memory of past epidemics is very strong, he said. Epidemics that came through between 1780 to 1860 wiped out nearly 95% of our population. Were the descendants of the 5% that survived.

That memory, said Sams, has motivated tribal members to take the pandemic seriously. Lockdowns forced citizens to miss important religious practices such as sweathouses and seasonal feasts.

Our religious leaders said its not a time to be selfish, Sams said. Were going to have to give things up so that we can continue to practice them after the disease has moved away.

Michigans Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians reached members with text messages, postcards and phone tag, said Chairman David Arroyo. The tribe has about 1,800 members living in the area, and its vaccinated nearly 600 so far. Tribal citizens are eagerly awaiting the day they can gather and Elders can emerge from isolation.

We cant wait, Arroyo said. The social interaction with our community events, whether it be powwow or feast, thats a key part of who we are. Once this vaccine becomes more prevalent, we can return to the way things were.

In Alaska, nearly half of the states 110,000 vaccinations have been conducted by tribal health systems. State and federal officials have distributed vaccines to 27 tribal health organizations that are responsible for reaching the states 229 tribesmany in isolated villages. The hub-and-spoke model has worked well for those groups, which have plenty of experience bringing medical care to far-flung places.

If this was a top-down deployment, it would have been a disaster, said Dr. Robert Onders, an administrator with the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium. But these communities are really creative in getting it where it needs to be and not wasting a dose. Theyre doing vaccines on the tarmac inside small planes because the vaccine was freezing in the needle outside. Sometimes theres a desire to picture rural Alaska as vulnerable, but the flip side is its incredibly strong.

One such community, the Seldovia Village Tribe, has administered about 450 doses to the areas it serves on the Kenai Peninsula. Medical staffers already made regular trips to clinics by plane and boat, but in December they began bringing vaccines along for the ride.

This is a people group that has had so many things happen to them, and here they are being the leaders saying, Were going to take care of our people and were going to take care of the people around us, said Laurel Hilts, a spokesperson for the tribe.

In North Carolina, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians has reduced some services to dedicate more staff and space to getting shots in arms. Tribal leaders have prioritized Elders and Cherokee language speakers, administering 2,700 doses so far.

Because tribes are sovereign nations, they can establish their own eligibility requirements for the doses they receive from the federal government (some tribes that are receiving doses from a state say theyre following local phasing guidelines). Many tribes have moved to prioritize Elders, though some are sticking to guidelines issued by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which put health care and frontline workers before some older groups.

Dean Seneca, an epidemiologist who spent years working for the CDC, said tribes should put Elders first with no exceptions.

We need to vaccinate people who know our cultural traditions, oral histories, medicines and ways of sustainability, said Seneca, a member of the Seneca Nation who now runs his own private firm. We need to vaccinate our language speakers, because our language has been lost dramatically in the last 50 years. These are our cultural resources.

Seneca noted that Native people carry the memory of past epidemics that killed about 90% of the Indigenous people in the Americas after Europeans arrived  including smallpox spread deliberately as a form of bioterrorism.

Many Native Americans also have a traumatic relationship with the medical community. In the 1970s, federal law led to the mass sterilization of roughly a quarter of Native women of childbearing age. Following the passage of the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act in 1970, which subsidized such procedures for Indian Health Service patients, many were coerced into sterilizations or had them performed without their understanding. That practice continued until the end of the decade, when activist groups forced the government to adopt new regulations with protections for women.

Despite that justifiable mistrust, a recent survey found that 75% of American Indians and Alaska Natives were willing to receive a vaccine  a higher percentage than the general population. Nearly all those willing to get vaccinated said it was their responsibility to their community.

Tribal leaders say theyve heard skepticism about vaccines, just like anywhere else, but most members are eager to do their part to end the pandemic. Elders have set the example, while young leaders who have gotten vaccinated have taken to social media to share their pride and encourage others.

Not all Indigenous Americans are part of the vaccine success story. Some 245 tribes are not legally recognized by the federal government, leaving them without health care rights. More than 600,000 Native Hawaiian residents also lack that standingthough the community is divided on whether to seek federal recognition. While members of these groups are included in statistics about the pandemics deadly toll among Native people, theyre not included in the Indian Health Service vaccine supply and must seek inoculations along with the general public.

The United Houma Nation, which counts nearly 19,000 members, has been recognized by the state of Louisiana but not the federal government.

Because were not federally recognized, we have no health service, said Principal Chief August Creppel. We have nothing for our Native people. Whatever parishes have sites distributing the shots, they have to wait just like everybody else.

Creppel said the lack of federal recognition has hampered the tribes response to the pandemic, and it has lost several Elders to COVID-19. The tribe is hopeful that the Biden administration could change that designation. For now, the tribes role is limited to helping Elders coordinate appointments and providing transportation when possible.

Native Hawaiians have been one of the hardest hit groups from the pandemic, but the state of Hawaii has not factored that into vaccine eligibility.

They do not want to use race or ethnicity as a means for prioritizing vaccinations, said Sheri Daniels, executive director of Papa Ola Lokahi, a Honolulu-based public health program. We fall into other categories that make us vulnerable, but having us vaccinated as a priority group would be the smartest thing to do.

Tribes arent the only entities getting vaccines to Native people. Roughly 70% of Native Americans live in cities, and 41 Urban Indian Organizations serving 22 states provide care to some of those populations.

Most Urban Indian Organizations have received their vaccines through the Indian Health Service. Those providers have administered 9,000 doses so far and have another 7,000 on hand. Theyre hoping to eventually vaccinate 99,000 people across the country. But some will still be left out. Many cities, including Washington, D.C., dont have any American Indian health providers.

Theres a Native population who have a federal right to health care but no system or mechanism in place to get vaccinated as a priority population, said Meredith Raimondi, director of congressional relations at the National Council of Urban Indian Health, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit.

The Seattle Indian Health Board has distributed 2,000 doses to Elders, homeless clients and frontline workers at partner service organizations, said Esther Lucero, a Navajo Nation member and the organizations CEO. It has doubled its number of phone lines and hired three additional staffers to work the call center.

Our members are willing to get vaccinated, Lucero said, not for themselves, but for the protection of our community.

--Alex Brown/Stateline.org/Tribune News Service
South Africa: Condolences for UIF claimant who died at labour centre

The Department of Employment and Labour has extended condolences to the family of a 63-year-old man, who collapsed and died at the Kempton Park Labour Centre on Monday.

In a statement, the department said the client had come to the labour centre for a follow-up on the Unemployment Insurance benefits.

It is reported that while waiting, the 63-year-old client started complaining about shortness of breath before he collapsed, the department said.

The department said the officials at the centre tried in vain to resuscitate the client, while the manager called an ambulance. On arrival, paramedics declared him dead at the scene. The department notified the family and South African Police Service (SAPS).

"The death of a client is tragic and as the department, we have conveyed our condolences to the family. Both his wife and daughter came to the scene after being notified of the events. The department will ensure that the remaining benefits are paid over as soon as possible," said Tshepo Mokomatsidi, the Gauteng Provincial Head.

The department also extended thanks to its visibly traumatised labour centre officials for their speedy response and doing everything in their power to keep the deceased alive and helping the family to the extent possible in their hour of need.

"We would like to ask the public to keep the family in their thoughts and prayers and to give them the privacy and space to deal with his tragedy," said Mokomatsidi.  SAnews.gov.za

This story has been published on: 2021-02-10. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.

Meet Amede Bennett, a Strawberry Mansion resident whos rehabbing a 1974 cement sailboat docked in the Delaware River that they got for free from Craigslist.

 From trash to treasure: A lot of people dump illegally in Strawberry Mansion so Im using things I find on the street for the boat, too. I often call it a trash boat for a reason.

 Unforeseen challenges: I forgot tide was a thing.

Amede Bennett was on Craigslist looking for a cheap, aluminum boat last summer when they saw a post for a 43-foot 1974 cement sailboat that had sat abandoned at a marina on the Delaware River for seven years.

The price: Free.

It didnt matter to Bennett that the boats hull was rusted, the cabin roof leaked, the engine didnt work, Bennett had no sail boating experience, and the boat was made out of cement.

To be honest with you, I looked into it and saw it wasnt filled with crap and I was like blank canvas! Bennett said.

Since taking ownership of the boat in June, Bennett, 27, has been rehabbing it (with the help of some friends) and documenting the project through a video series on YouTube called Float Jawn.

If you happen to know what Im cleaning right now, please drop it in the comments below. I really dont know, Bennett says in one video.

Since becoming an unexpected sailboat owner, Bennett, who was first profiled by Michaela Winberg for Billy Penn, has had many dreams for their craft, from sailing it around North America to turning it into a floating drag show venue on the Delaware River.

Bennett isnt sure which one of those dreams will come to pass, given the enormous amount of work and the costs involved ( an estimated $10,000 worth of repairs will be needed to get it moving), but one thing is certain, they plan to make the boat their permanent home within the next few months.

My ultimate goal is to have housing security, Bennett said. I live in Strawberry Mansion and it is gentrifying very quickly.

Born in Vancouver, Canada, Bennett moved with family to Delaware County when they were in middle school. After graduating from Academy Park High in 2011, Bennett went to Temple University, graduating with degrees in public relations and communications.

Since 2017, Bennett has worked as an event coordinator with the Mazzoni Center. Outside of work, Bennetts interests include bartending, glass blowing, botany, sewing, cooking, gaming, digital design, music festivals, wood working, and jewelry making, to name a few.

I often joke and say I have a taste I cant afford, Bennett said. Sewing comes from the fact that I like clothes but I cant afford them so I make them myself. With botany, I cant afford an expensive plant, but I can take a clipping and grow it on my own.

 MORE WE THE PEOPLE: This 91-year-old hostess with orange hair couldnt care less what you think

But when COVID-19 and quarantine struck last year, Bennett hit an inspirational rut.

I felt I had wasted time on COVID, everybody around me was learning languages and making bread and I wondered, What I have done? they said.

Bennetts mind wandered to Peters Island, a tiny, uninhabited island in the Schuylkill that theyd see when walking in Fairmount Park. What if, Bennett thought, they could buy a small aluminum boat and finally check out that island in person?

Thats how Bennett landed in the boats section of Craigslist. Bennett never did get to see that island but did end up with a free cement sailboat, which had been put up by the owners of D & S Marina in Tullytown, Bucks County, where it had been abandoned by its previous owner.

Ferro-cement boats, made from a wire mesh frame covered with sand and cement plaster, have been around for more than 150 years. Sometimes called concrete boats, theyre popular with amateur backyard builders, given the cheap costs of construction. That makes them either really, really bad or really, really good, depending on who built them, Bennett said.

Bennett saw the boat twice and decided it was one of the good ones before agreeing to become its owner and taking over the docking fees so it could be kept at D & S Marina.

There are two things that were a sign for me. The boat was made in the same province of Canada that I was from, and my initials are low-key on the boat: On the steering wheel, there are the letters AB, Bennett said.

 MORE WE THE PEOPLE: This Delco man catches marshmallows with his mouth, thrown from the Ben Franklin Bridge

Bennett gets to the marina as much as they can, usually taking SEPTA. So far theyve replaced half of the cabin roof, removed all of the mold, installed a 100-watt solar kit, added LED lights to the interior, replaced six windows, and are replacing the floor boards.

Melissa Carson, the office manager at D & S Marina, said Bennett came with no boating knowledge and just a single tool when they began the rehab.

Amede started off with a flat head screwdriver and theyve built up to power tools. Look at Amede go! Carson said. Im really impressed at the initiative Amede has taken, and we cant wait to see the finished product.

Bennett, whos put their stimulus check and savings into the boat, created the Float Jawn video series to help raise funds for the boats rehabilitation through their Patreon page, where they currently receive about $80 a month in donations.

While the boat came with the given name Paix, or Peace in French, Bennett hopes to officially rename it Float Jawn  someday. Bennetts recent study of maritime customs has revealed that renaming a boat without going through the proper ceremonies may bring about the wrath of Poseidon, the god of the sea.

Im not the most spiritual person, but Im not going to mess with that, Bennett said.

Want more We the People?

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 Check out the full We the People archive here.
New Delhi, Feb 10 : The 'Question Hour' will again not feature in the Lok Sabha proceedings on Wednesday for the second consecutive day as the Lower House is in hurry to complete discussion on Motion of Thanks on President's address with Prime Minister Narendra Modi expected to speak during the traditional debate organised at the beginning of the Budget Session.

However, papers from 13 ministries related to Law and Justice, Railways, External Affairs and Defence will be tabled by various Cabinet Ministers soon after the House assembles for the day at 4 p.m.

Besides, three Standing Committee reports will also be tabled by members of parliament.

"There will be no Question Hour," mentions Lok Sabha's revised list of Business on Wednesday.

Question Hour is generally held in the first hour of the sitting of the Lok Sabha. It is devoted to questions asked by parliamentarians directly to government, and minister concerned reply to queries. It has a special significance in Parliament proceedings. Asking question is an inherent and unfettered parliamentary right of members.

Ministers concerned that will lay papers on the table are Ministry of Law and Justice, Ministry of External Affairs, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Ministry of Railways, Ministry of Coal and Mines, Ministry of Planning and Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, Ministry of Defence, Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions, Department of Space and Department of Atomic Energy.

Papers will also be laid from Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs, Ministry of Communications; and Ministry of Commerce and Industry.

The three Standing Committee reports listed to be tabled in the Lower House are related to Food, Consumer Affairs and Public distribution; Petroleum and Natural Gas; and Commerce.

After completing these Business listed for the day in its first one hour proceedings, the House will resume ongoing discussion on Motion of Thanks on the President's address which began on Monday with initial speech of BJP's West Bengal MP Locket Chatterjee.

As the discussion on Motion of Thanks was started after a week long uproar in the House with opposition demonstrating on three contentious farm laws, seeking a separate debate on the issue, it was decided to be completed in 15 hours.

Majority of members have given their speech in the House on the motion that has now completed almost 13 hours proceedings over the past two days' late night sittings.

Modi will speak at the end after other parliamentarians complete their turn in the Motion of Thanks.

Senior Congress leader and former Finance Minister P Chidambaram said he was a proud andolan jeevi (someone who thrives on protests) after Prime Minister Narendra Modi's recent remarks in the Rajya Sabha. He accepted the term as a badge of honour and tweeted, "I am a proud andolan jeevi. The quintessential andolan jeevi was Mahatma Gandhi."





I am a proud andolan jeevi. The quintessential andolan jeevi was Mahatma Gandhi.#iamanandolanjeevi  P. Chidambaram (@PChidambaram_IN) February 10, 2021

Not only Chidambaram, advocate Meena Kandasamy and Congress' social media coordinator Gaurav Pandhi also expressed pride in being andolan jeevis and changed their profile names to andolanjeevi dr. meena kandasamy and Gaurav Pandhi-Andolanjeevi. Former diplomat KC Singh took a jibe at the Prime Minister via a tweet.

PM Modi concedes his parent organisation RSS werent #Andolanjeevi during freedom struggle. Thats what opposition has alleged. Main Ldrs of BJP were arrested during emergency. But true non-believer in non-violent protest grew a beard, tied turban & hid.  K. C. Singh (@ambkcsingh) February 8, 2021

Samajwadi Party chief and former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav attacked PM Modi on his 'andolan jeevi' remark and went onto call the leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party as 'chanda jeevis', meaning those who survive on donations. Yadav said in Parliament, "That 'andolans' or protests have given India several rights and several leaders. In fact, India gained independence due to protests. If people who protest are 'andolan jeevis', then BJP leaders are 'chanda jeevis', who brandish their flag to collect donations ever so often."

The new term coined by the Prime Minister was welcomed by some people such as BJP MP from Bengaluru Central PC Mohan, entrepreneur Nikhil Nanda and Former Governor of Tripura and Meghalaya Tathagata Roy.

Word of the year

Feb 08, 2021



Andolanjeevi

Adjective [ Aandolanjeevi ]



One who cannot live without protests and its members continually keep finding ways to stoke protests.



Eg: He's been an Andolanjeevi for many years!@ShefVaidya#PMinRajyaSabha#andolanjivipic.twitter.com/ySniNu4u0p  P C Mohan (@PCMohanMP) February 8, 2021

#andolanjivi we now have a name for the same set of people seen doing forum shopping at various protest sites, cant do anything on their own but join the bandwagon for their 5 minutes of footage, and cause whatever disruption possible. #PMinRajyaSabha#andolanjeevipic.twitter.com/7iifU2ML3u  Nikhil Nanda  (@iamnikhilnanda) February 8, 2021

Brilliant coinage by @narendramodi Reminds me of an incident when I was Governor of Tripura. #Andolanjeevi

When the Broad Gauge railway connection to Agartala was being inaugurated,in the public meeting the then Chief Minister Manik Sarkar said,all this was made possible by  Tathagata Roy (@tathagata2) February 8, 2021

PM Modi said while replying to The Motion of Thanks on President's address in the Rajya Sabha, "We are well aware of some terms like 'shram jeevi' and 'buddhi jeevi'. But I am seeing that for some time a new entity has come up in this country- andolan jeevi. This community can be spotted wherever there is a protest, be it agitation by lawyers, students, or labourers, sometimes at the forefront and sometimes from behind. They cannot live without protests. We have to identify such people and protect the nation from them. They are parasites."

Also read: Over 500 accounts suspended, no action on accounts of journalists, activists, politicians: Twitter
Irvine City Council Backs Proposal for Hero Pay Wage Hikes at Grocery Stores

A proposed city ordinance that would force grocery and drug store chains in Irvine, California, to pay their workers an extra $4 an hour in hazard pay for the next four months has cleared its first hurdle.

On Feb. 9, the Irvine City Council passed the first reading of Mayor Farrah Khans proposal by a 32 vote. Councilmembers Mike Carroll and Anthony Kuo, both Republicans, opposed the measure, while Councilmembers Larry Agran and Tammy Kim joined Khan by voting in favor.

According to Khan, a substantial increase in grocery chain profits last year is more than enough to cover the costs of hero pay for essential workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the beginning, grocery stores offered hazard pay, and after a few months revoked ityet the work and the risk of contracting the virus continues, Khan said. Just in Irvine, we have had over 83 workers contract the virus at work, including one death.

Irvines ordinance would require big box retailers, grocery stores, and pharmaciesincluding Ralphs, Food 4 Less, Target, Walmart, CVS, and Rite-Aidto pay an extra $4 per hour to their workers for 120 days.

A view of a Walmart store in Irvine, Calif., on Feb. 5, 2021. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

The citywide mandate would apply to stores with 20 or more employees, or more than 500 workers nationwide. It would also apply to stores that are 85,000 square feet or more in size, and stores less than 15,000 square feet would be exempt.

The plan has been met with resistance from the California Grocers Association and Kroger Co., which owns the Ralphs and Food 4 Less grocery store chains in Southern California, while the United Food and Commercial Workers International (UFCW) supports it.

Proponents say the grocery chains can afford to pay more to their front-line, essential workers; opponents argue the wage rates of grocery store employees are not for the city to decide, and they say some stores could close as a result.

The Council Debate

Councilman Larry Agran said the measure was justified.

At the start of this pandemic and for some time, theres been a lot of talk about shared sacrifice, Agran said. Well, the fact of the matter is the risk, the sacrifice, is not shared. Its not shared equally. Its very disproportionately falling upon the poorthe front line workerswho happen to be, incidentally, disproportionately non-white.

But Councilmember Carroll, a lawyer, said grocery store chains could potentially sue the city for meddling in a private business. He said the ordinance was setting a date to litigate, and could end up being a costly endeavor for the city and taxpayers.

Just philosophically, I do have some concerns regarding what would essentially be moving into [the] free market economy and changing the economics of grocery stores, Carroll said.

Giving workers temporary extra pay wont address their concerns about health and safety, he said. We dont have a payroll problem as much as we have a vaccine problem.

Agran said, I would suggest that these big box grocers and others take a good hard look at themselves, and a good hard look at what we would think of them in Irvine, if they would force us to defend this ordinance.

Several UFCW workers and Irvine residents also called in to the meeting to comment on the proposal.

UFCW Local 324, which represents 16,000 workers in Orange County and Los Angeles, said workers deserve the extra hazard pay, adding that more than 10 percent of their union members have tested positive for COVID since the pandemic started.

The union, which represents more than 1.3 million grocery and meatpacking workers, has pushed the U.S. Congress to pass federal hazard pay legislation to benefit essential workers nationwide.

A worker at Ralphs returns a shopping cart to the store in Irvine, Calif., on Feb. 5, 2021. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

Irvine resident John Park called Khans proposal an infringement on free enterprise and an overreach of city council authority.

While I can respect the sympathy for the workers  councilmembers should not place their thumbs on the scale to favor special interests, whether they be unions or corporations, said Park, who unsuccessfully ran for a council seat in November. You have no business telling an industry what they should pay their employees, above what is required by state and federal law.

Christina Shea, the former mayor of Irvine, also told The Epoch Times she opposes the ordinance because she doesnt believe city governments should set wages for private businesses.

We are all sympathetic to our business community and our essential workers during these difficult times, but tonights City Council proposal by our new mayor is to usher in a socialistic platform to take from the rich and give to the poor, Shea said via email. Her plan isnt equitable or fair to all businesses in our community.

Unintended Consequences

A recent study commissioned by the California Grocers Association (CGA) found that grocery costs could rise $400 a year for a family of four based on $5 per hour pay hikes, according to a recent CGA media release.

Extra pay mandates will have severe unintended consequences on not only grocers, but on their workers and their customers. A 28 percent increase in labor costs is huge. Grocers will not be able to absorb those costs and negative repercussions are unavoidable, CGA President and CEO Ron Fong said in the release.

The release said these types of ordinances could lead to store closures and force grocers to find other ways to reduce operational costs, including a reduction in work hours, hurting the very workers these proposals aim to help.

Kroger recently said it would close two stores in Long Beach in response to a similar citywide ordinance. A company spokesman on Feb. 9 confirmed in an email to The Epoch Times that two stores, one Food 4 Less and one Ralphs, are slated to close April 17.

The two long-struggling stores were forced to shutter following the Long Beach City Council ordinance imposing extra pay for some, but not all grocery workers in the city, according to a recent Kroger media release.

We are truly saddened that our associates and customers will ultimately be the real victims of the city councils actions, a company spokesperson stated in the release.

Irvines measure requires three readings to become official. The amended ordinance is expected to pass a second reading within the next two weeks, and a final third reading 30 days later.
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Two armed herdsmen and at least 200 cows have been arrested by the Ondo State Security Network Agency, also known as Operation Amotekun.

The herdsmen were arrested with their cows on Tuesday along Ijare-Irese Road in the Ifedore Local Government Area of the State.

According to the state Commander of the Amotekun, Adetunji Adeleye, the herdsmen allegedly destroyed crops of farmers in the area when Amotekun was notified.

We arrested two herdsmen and seized about 200 cows. It was the villagers that invited us when the cows had destroyed their crops on their farms, Mr Adeleye told journalists in Akure on Tuesday evening.

He also said the herdsmen attacked some Amotekun officials during the raid by opening fire on them.

When we arrived there and wanted to resolve the matter, the herders just opened fire on us. Thank God for the bullet-proof vests we put on; they would have killed our men today. But none of our men was injured in the attack.

ALSO READ: Amotekun arrests illegal gold miners in Ondo

He told journalists that the suspects have been handed over to the police for proper investigation and prosecution.

The state police spokesperson, Sunday Abutu, did not respond to PREMIUM TIMES calls and text messages on the incident.

The state chairman of the Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association of Nigeria, Garuba Bello, said the matter has not been brought to his notice.

The latest incident occurred two weeks after Governor Rotimi Akeredolu and other southwest states banned under-aged grazing, night grazing and movement of cattle along the highways.
Fortuny CEO Mauri Riad said, Clive Daniel is synonymous with home luxury in South Florida. When choosing a home for our historic brand, we look for that level of notoriety and commitment to customer experience.

Naples largest Interior design firm and luxury high-end furniture retailer Clive Daniel Home (CDH) has added the exclusive Italian luxury brand Fortuny, famous for their legendary textiles and furnishings, to their offerings. Highly regarded in the global design industry, Fortuny creations are of the finest quality, with a rich history and tradition.

Established in early 20th century Venice by noted artist, inventor, and designer Mariano Fortuny, the company that bears his name and legacy continues to produce some of the finest printed fabrics in the world in the very factory where it began, on the same machines, using the same secret process and techniques developed by Fortuny himself, passed down from generation to generation. Fortunys patented printing technique, a well-kept secret since its development over a century ago, has resulted in a line of highly sought after traditional and modern designs in floral, geometric, damask, and tribal motifs. Many of these patterns were drawn by Fortuny himself and are a preferred choice by discerning clients today in luxury high end homes worldwide. Clive Daniel Home is proud to now feature the Fortuny line in their Naples, Florida showroom.

Fortuny CEO Mauri Riad said, Clive Daniel is synonymous with home luxury in South Florida. When choosing a home for our historic brand, we look for that level of notoriety and commitment to customer experience. Fortunys legacy isnt just built on handcrafted artisanship and our world-renowned product, its also about our customer experience. Fortunys customers are discerning and demand the very best in every facet of the luxury home experience. Clive Daniel shares our passion for delivering that and has led the way in their market for decades. They operate with the same fundamentals and thats why we knew this would be our home in South Florida.

Clive Daniel CEO Daniel Lubner added, We are honored and thrilled that our Naples showroom will be the areas exclusive home for the luxurious Fortuny line. The match of such a revered name with the skill level of our award-winning design team will surely take our clients luxury high-end home interiors to the next level.

For more information about Clive Daniel Home, please visit them online, contact Madeline Tracy, Naples showroom Director of Business Development, at 239-776-0868 or email Mtracy@clivedaniel.com.

ABOUT CLIVE DANIEL HOME

Clive Daniel Home is located on U.S. 41 in Naples and has won over 360 awards for excellence in creative design since opening in 2011. A second store is located in Boca Raton, Florida.
An east Alabama man is behind bars after authorities say he attacked his wife at their Wedowee property and used a circular saw to cut her neck and throat.

Kyle Young Waters, 35, is charged with attempted murder and domestic violence.

Court records made public this week chronicle the attack that happened on Feb. 3 in Randolph County.

Charging documents state that the couple on that night went out to dinner together. Afterward, they went to a storage building behind their home where they had consensual sex on a mattress in a loft, according to the documents.

While the woman was looking over the loft at the ground below, investigators stated, Waters pushed her out of the loft. She fell eight feet and landed on the cement floor.

Waters then jumped on his wife, according to authorities.

He allegedly banged her head repeatedly into the cement floor and then started stabbing her with shards of broken glass, records state. The victim tried to fight back and was able to get the glass shards from him, records say.

That, police say, is when Waters grabbed a Ryobi circular saw, placed the blade on her neck and cut her throat. There was an excessive amount of blood at the scene and on the saw,' according to the criminal complaint.

Investigators recovered the glass shards, which also were covered in blood. Waters, police said, had numerous injuries to his hands when he was taken into custody.

Randolph County sheriffs investigators on Tuesday said the victim was hospitalized with life-threatening injuries. She underwent surgery and is expected to survive.

Waters is being held in the Randolph County Jail with cash bonds totaling $110,000.

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[February 10, 2021] SHAREit grabs the second rank globally among SEA headquartered publishers

SINGAPORE, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- SHAREit, the global content streaming, gaming, and file sharing application, has been recognized as the second top Southeast Asia headquartered media publisher worldwide by downloads in the App Annie Level Up Top Publishers Awards of 2021. The prestigious Top Publisher Awards by App Annie is an annual celebration of the leading publishers and brands, for the purpose of recognizing the most innovative and successful companies in mobile from around the world. SHAREit's global achievements led by its strong performance establish its proficiency as a vernacular and personalized content platform while reinforcing its constant efforts towards transforming SHAREit into a holistic etertainment provider. SHAREit's unique product offering accompanied by a wide array of user-centric features doesn't just make it hugely popular amongst customers but also provides marketers with a highly effective mobile marketing platform. As mobile devices become an integral part of our lives, mobile marketing will become the norm and marketers would require a platform that can seamlessly blend mobile marketing into what we know as just regular marketing.



As stated in the recently published report 'the State of Mobile in 2021' by App Annie, the Mobile application industry bolstered the ad industry in 2020  growing to $240 billion in mobile ad spend and set to top $290 billion in 2021. SHAREit's exceptional reach across the globe and its ability to deliver differential advertising solutions in tandem with various marketing objectives make it the preferred choice for marketers the world over. Commenting on SHAREit's success, Mr. Karam Malhotra, Partner & Global VP, SHAREit said, "The team at SHAREit is tremendously thrilled by the various accolades that their efforts are earning the application. We have always strived to provide the best content and gaming services to our users and would continue to push the bar in that respect. The mobile application industry is growing at an exceptional pace and we look forward to fostering the journey while growing with it."

About SHAREit: SHAREit is one of the world's largest offline and online platforms that provides file sharing, gaming, and content streaming service. It has 1.8 billion users and more than 500 million MAU globally with a strong market presence in APAC, Middle East, Africa, etc. SHAREit was recognized as the fastest-growing media publisher globally in H1'2020 by AppsFlyer. The app is owned by Smart Media4U Technology Pte. Ltd headquartered in Singapore. SOURCE SHAREit

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Hyde follows family tradition, takes home PIAA gold in shot put

"It's awesome," Hyde said. "It really feels like a tradition, now. It will be cool to see our names next to each other in the record books."
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India's largest airline IndiGo has appointed Jiten Chopra as its chief financial officer, effective February 21.

He replaces Aditya Pande "who is leaving IndiGo to pursue other interests," the airline said.

Pande took over the CFO role in September 2019.

Chopra will report to CEO Ronojoy Dutta. He joined the airline in February 2020 as head of governance, risk and compliance.

"Prior to joining IndiGo, Jiten had about 25 years of working experience at BSR & Co (KPMG) in audit and risk management, business development, operations and transaction services," the airline said.

"His enormous expertise prior to IndiGo and his experience since February 2020 when he joined us, will greatly strengthen our team as we continue to build a world class national air transportation network," Dutta added.

The airline, in January, reported a consolidated net loss of Rs 620 crore for the quarter ended December 31, 2020, against a profit of Rs 496 crore in the corresponding quarter a year ago.


[February 10, 2021] First Patient Enrolled in SELUTION SLR SUCCESS PTA Study

NYON, Switzerland, Feb. 10, 2021 /CNW/ -- MedAlliance has announced enrolment of the first patient in SUCCESS PTA, its large post-market study with the drug-eluting balloon SELUTION SLR for the treatment of patients with peripheral artery disease (PAD). SELUTION SLR is a novel sirolimus-eluting balloon that provides a controlled sustained release of drug, similar to that of a drug-eluting stent (DES). The objective of the study is to collect 'real-world' safety, efficacy, health economics and patient reported quality-of-life data in over 700 patients with PAD treated with SELUTION SLR. It is a single arm all-comers study including all lower limb indications (SFA; BTK; Foot) and will cover at least 50 sites in Europe, Asia and South America. Patients will be followed-up at 30 days; six months; then every year out to five years. The primary endpoint of the study is Clinically Driven Target Lesion Revascularization (CD-TLR) at 12 months. Secondary endpoints include device success and procedure success; Major Adverse Limb Events (MALE); and Target Limb Revascularization (TLR). "Given the impressive performance of this novel device in earlier studies, we are very excited to see how SELUTION SLR will perform in a larger group of patients in a rel world setting," commented the study's Principal Investigator Michael Lichtenberg, Arnsberg, Germany.



"SUCCESS PTA is part of the SUCCESS post-market study family, designed to show patient benefits in real world use of our technology," added Chairman and CEO Jeffrey B. Jump. "This is the largest study we have ever undertaken with SELUTION SLR, involving the most diverse group of patients. We are confident that the results will confirm the safety, efficacy and cost-effectiveness of our sirolimus-eluting balloon." In February 2020 MedAlliance received CE Mark approval for SELUTION SLR in the treatment of PAD. This award was supported by results from the First-in-Human study.

Data from the SUCCESS PTA study will be part of the clinical evidence supporting CE Mark renewal in 2023/2024 under the new European Medical Device Directive (MDR). SELUTION SLR has also received US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Breakthrough Device Designation Status for peripheral below-the-knee lesions as well as for the treatment of AV-Fistula. SELUTION SLR's technology involves unique MicroReservoirs made from biodegradable polymer intermixed with the anti-restenotic drug sirolimus. These MicroReservoirs provide controlled and sustained release of the drug. Extended release of sirolimus from stents has been proven highly efficacious in both coronary and peripheral vasculatures. MedAlliance's proprietary CAT (Cell Adherent Technology) enables the MicroReservoirs to be coated onto balloons and adhere to the vessel lumen when delivered via an angioplasty balloon. Media Contact:

Richard Kenyon

rkenyon@medalliance.com

+44 7831 569940 About MedAlliance Founded in 2008, MedAlliance is a privately-owned medical technology company. It is headquartered in Switzerland, with facilities in Irvine, California; Glasgow, UK; and Singapore. MedAlliance specializes in the development of ground-breaking technology and commercialization of advanced drug device combination products for the treatment of coronary and peripheral artery disease. For further information visit: https://medalliance.com/ View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/first-patient-enrolled-in-selution-slr-success-pta-study-301226027.html SOURCE MedAlliance

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A homeowner in his boxers has chased away two armed would-be burglars who broke into his home in the middle of the night.

Home surveillance footage captured two hooded intruders armed with a hammer rummaging through the Burleigh Waters home on the Gold Coast in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

The pair snooping around with torches can be seen picking up the keys to the homeowners Range Rover which is parked in the driveway outside.

Two intruders can be seen snooping around a home in Burleigh Waters home on the Gold Coast

But as the duo move through to the front door a man in his underwear comes into frame.

He is seen chasing the two away as his trusty pet dog trails behind.

The creak of the front door alerted the homeowner that something was wrong.

The man chased the home invaders into the street where they made their getaway in a stolen car waiting nearby, Nine News reported.

Queensland Police told Daily Mail Australia the investigation is ongoing and that no arrests have been made.

They are urging anyone in the area who may have caught a glimpse of the pair to contact police immediately.

They are chased away by a homeowner in his underwear who leaped out of bed
Over the past decade, streaming services have gained momentum. Aside from YouTube, Netflix is the number one platform. More recently, Netflix has released a number of popular original shows and movies, including sensations like Stranger Things, Ozark, Mindhunter, and The Crown. To All the Boys Ive Loved Before is a series of teenage romance films and another one of Netflixs proteges. The series is based on the trilogy of novels written by Jenny Han, and Lana Condor is the talented actor who plays the main character. However, as Netflix gets ready to release the final film of the series, Condor has been opening up about her experiences and what the talented actor hopes to work on in the future.

Lana Condor | Mary Clavering/Getty Images

Lana Condors journey in the spotlight

RELATED: Lana Condor From To All the Boys Ive Loved Before Just Adopted the Most Adorable Puppy

According to IMDb, in May 1997 Condor was born in Can Tho, Vietnam. Soon after her birth, at four months old, Condor was adopted to Mary Carol and Robert Candor. The family spent the early years of Condors life in Chicago before moving to Whidbey Island, Washington. This is where Condor began practicing ballet, and though she did seem to enjoy it, ultimately, down the line, it would end up playing a role in Candors battle against body dysmorphia.

Candors family moved once again, and this time they headed to New York City. Candors parents encouraged her to explore acting, and the rest is seemingly history. Another move to Los Angeles seemed to be exactly what Candor needed to get her name out there. In 2016 the talented actor made her debut appearance on-screen in X-Men: Apocalypse. Just two years later and Candor was cast as Lara Jean in To All the Boys Ive Loved Before. From there, Candors career and life blew up for the better.

Lana Condor wants more Asian representation in Hollywood

RELATED: To All the Boys Ive Loved Before: Lana Condor and Noah Centineo Had a Serious Mutual Crush

Condor has been extremely honest and open about her experiences in Hollywood and casting. Though saying goodbye to her beloved character Lara Jean on All the Boys Ive Loved Before was an emotional process, Condor has shared how incredibly grateful she has been for the opportunity and how this has changed her life. Being Asian in Hollywood isnt always easy. In her interview with Self, Condor revealed, Ive had times where I will be in a [casting] room, and all the girls are blonde and blue-eyed, and [Im] the only Asian girl there. And youre like, What am I doing? Do you have me here to fill a quota?. That can feel very obviously limiting. Condor went on to explain how one of her goals is to help people of Asian descent gain more representation in Hollywood, and she is looking forward to doing whatever it takes.

Lana Condor dropped a hint that she is ready to join the MCU

To All The Boys' Lana Condor has her next #Netflix project lined up https://t.co/93h3yjSbyw  Monsters and Critics (@monstersandcrit) February 5, 2021

RELATED:Michelle Obama Gave Lana Condor Powerful Advice About Imposter Syndrome

With the popular Netflix film series officially coming to an end, many of Candors fans and followers are probably wondering what the actor has planned for next. Many people will be excited to hear that it seems like Candor has dropped some hints about wanting to join the infamous Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Taika Waititi is one of the many iconic professionals Candor is dying to work. Waiti is known for skills and craft as a producer and director and has received a lot of praise and attention for MCUs Thor: Ragnarok. Currently, Waiti is working on Thor: Love and Thunder. Considering his recent fame with Marvel fans, it seems Condor is hinting at the possibility of joining the MCU in the future. Marvel fans are known for loving Waitis work, and, hopefully, with time, that might include Candor.
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Officials from the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force (MSDF) said Tuesday that one of their submarines that collided on Monday with a commercial vessel off the western coast of the country was damaged more than initially thought, with sources saying human error may have been the cause.

According to the officials, the 84-meter-long Souryu class submarine sustained damage to its conning tower and its hydroplane in the collision in the Pacific Ocean, off the western main island of Shikoku.

Damage was also caused to the sub's communications equipment in the collision, leading to a more than three-hour delay in the collision being reported after it occurred at 10:55 a.m. local time off Cape Ashizuri in Kochi Prefecture.

Japan's top government spokesperson Chief Cabinet Secretary Katsunobu Kato told a press briefing on the matter that steps by the MSDF should be taken to ensure that such communications delays do not occur again.

MSDF Chief of Staff Adm. Hiroshi Yamamura offered his apologies and said the communications delay was inexcusable.

Japan's Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi on Tuesday also apologized for the incident in which three crew members on the submarine were injured, saying that he was sorry for the worry caused to the general public.

On Monday, Kishi said that despite the commercial vessels being visible in the sub's periscope, it was unable to avoid the collision.

But, according to informed sources within the Defense Ministry, the collision may have been a result of human error on the MSDF's part, with personnel on the sub failing to properly check the surroundings using sonar before surfacing.

Kishi also said that the Japan Coast Guard has launched a probe into the collision with the full cooperation of the MSDF and the Defense Ministry.

The investigation was launched Tuesday morning by the 5th Regional Coast Guard Headquarter at Kochi Port, where the submarine arrived late Monday after it had been conducting routine exercises.

Japan's Transport Minister Kazuyoshi Akaba said Tuesday that no one aboard the commercial vessel was injured and it was able to navigate away from the collision with no problem.

He also said the Japan Transport Safety Board will conduct an independent investigation into the incident.
JOHANNESBURG - South Africa will start vaccinating front-line health workers next week with a shot that is still in testing  an unorthodox strategy announced Wednesday after officials abandoned plans to use another vaccine that a small study suggests is only minimally effective against the variant dominant in the country.

JOHANNESBURG - South Africa will start vaccinating front-line health workers next week with a shot that is still in testing  an unorthodox strategy announced Wednesday after officials abandoned plans to use another vaccine that a small study suggests is only minimally effective against the variant dominant in the country.

Health Minister Zweli Mkhize said South Africa would switch to the Johnson & Johnson vaccine and, at least for now, not use Oxford-AstraZeneca's  which has been heralded as one of the most promising for the developing world because it's cheaper and does not require freezer storage like some other leading vaccines.

Funeral workers move the coffin of a COVID-19 victim to ahead of a funeral in Vereeniging, east of Johannesburg, South Africa, Saturday, Feb. 6, 2021. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe)

The world is watching South Africa's vaccination strategy intently since there are increasing concerns that new variants  not just the one first detected here  might evade vaccines, making it harder to bring an eventual end to the pandemic. The variant now dominant in South Africa is more contagious, experts say, and it recently drove a devastating resurgence of cases.

A small study that suggested the AstraZeneca vaccine was poor at preventing mild to moderate disease caused by that variant threw the country's vaccination campaign into disarray this week just as it was about to start. Experts say the vaccine  the only one authorized for general use in South Africa  may still prevent severe disease.

But officials quickly turned their focus to the one-shot J&J vaccine  which has only been approved for use in studies in South Africa and, in fact, hasn't yet been authorized for general use in any country. The company has applied for emergency use permission from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and South Africa's regulatory authority.

Mkhize, in a nationally broadcast address, assured the public that the J&J vaccine is safe, pointing to the fact that it has been tested in 44,000 people so far. It will now be used to launch a drive to inoculate the country's 1.25 million health workers, he said.

A clinical study of the vaccine in South Africa, part of international trials, showed it was 57% effective at preventing moderate to severe COVID-19 in a test conducted when the variant was dominant. It provides even better protection against severe disease, with 85% efficacy after 28 days.

A woman wears a mask to protect against coronavirus as the passes a wall mural depicting a syringe , n Cape Town, South Africa, Thursday, Jan. 21, 2021. South Africa is preparing a heroAos welcome Monday, Feb. 1, 2021 for the delivery of its first COVID-19 vaccines Ai 1 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine produced by the Serum Institute of India. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa will be part of the red-carpet welcome at JohannesburgAos O.R. Tambo International Airport for the shipment of the vaccines, which will be followed up later this month by another 500,000 doses of the vaccine. (AP Photo/Nardus Engelbrecht)

But one nurse at a Soweto hospital said the switch made him and some of his colleagues feel like they were being used as guinea pigs.

I think what happened with the AstraZeneca vaccine has affected the trust that we had in the government to do a proper vaccination program, said Sipho Dinabantu, who works at Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital. We were given assurances that it was ready to go but now it has been put on hold. It makes me wonder a lot about the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which is yet to be approved.

Still, a leading vaccine specialist, Professor Willem Hanekom, praised the government's swift action.

It was the right decision to move to a vaccine thats been shown in South Africa to protect against the new variant that is circulating here, said Hanekom, director of the Africa Health Research Institute. The entire situation is unprecedented. Weve never been in such a situation. Every day things change, and we need to adapt to these changes.

FILE - In this Nov. 30, 2020 file photo, volunteers wait to be checked at a vaccine trial facility set at Soweto's Chris Sani Baragwanath Hospital outside Johannesburg, South Africa. South Africa suspended plans Sunday Feb. 7, 2021 to inoculate its front-line health care workers with the AstraZeneca vaccine after a small clinical trial suggested that it isn't effective in preventing mild to moderate illness from the variant dominant in the country. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay, File)

South Africa will begin administering the first shots next week, said Mkhize. The first doses will come from vaccine sent to the country for testing purposes, and more are expected in March, when a South African pharmaceutical company begins bottling the vaccine here, he told a parliamentary committee Wednesday.

In all, the country hopes to vaccinate an estimated 40 million people by the end of the year  or about two-thirds of its population. South Africa also plans to use the Pfizer vaccine  though it's not yet authorized  and is considering others, including Russia's Sputnik V, China's Sinopharm and the Moderna one, Mkhize said. Unlike the J&J shot, none of those vaccines has been clinically tested against the variant prevalent in South Africa, although Pfizer has tested blood samples of people exposed to the variant.

The change of course came just one week after South Africa received its first vaccines  1 million AstraZeneca doses, produced by the Serum Institute of India. But after results of the preliminary study, which has not been peer reviewed, were announced Sunday, South African officials quickly halted the planned rollout.

Mkhize said scientists were still discussing what to do with the AstraZeneca doses, and one possibility was that they would be swapped for another kind; an expert also suggested they could be used in a study. An added complication, though, is that the shots have an April 30 expiration date.

Funeral workers inside a refrigerated container at AVBOB's funeral parlour in Bellville, Cape Town, South Africa, Wednesday, Feb. 10, 2021. South Africa's health minister announced the country will begin administering the unapproved Johnson & Johnson vaccine to its front-line healthcare workers next week. (AP Photo/Nardus Engelbrecht)

South Africas abrupt move may reduce enthusiasm for the vaccine, which had offered hope to many poorer countries, since it is being produced in large quantities in India and the international COVAX facility has purchased it in large numbers for distribution around the world.

But Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, the World Health Organization's chief scientist, said people shouldnt conclude from South Africas decision that the AstraZeneca vaccine doesnt work. She said all of the available evidence to date shows the vaccines developed so far reduce deaths, hospitalizations and severe disease. In fact, on Wednesday, independent experts advising the WHO recommended the vaccine's use, even in countries with variants.

South Africa by far has the largest number of COVID-19 cases on the African continent with nearly 1.5 million confirmed, including almost 47,000 deaths. After a resurgence that spiked in early January, cases and deaths are now declining, but medical experts are already warning that South Africa should prepare for another upsurge in May or June, the start of the Southern Hemisphere's winter.

Associated Press journalists Mogomotsi Magome in Johannesburg; Gerald Imray in Cape Town, South Africa; Danica Kirka in London; and Jamey Keaten in Geneva contributed.

Follow all of APs pandemic coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic, https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak.
Sydney commuters will be forced to play spot the difference after the City of Sydney council decided to rip out bus shelters, public toilets, kiosks and billboards  and replace them with items that look eerily similar at a total cost of about $100 million.

Street furniture in areas such as Paddington, Zetland, Glebe and the CBD will be removed and replaced by new assets from billboard company QMS Media as early as July under plans submitted to the City of Sydney council for approval.

Businesses like cafe Diggy Doos, which operates from a JCDecaux kiosk, will be forced to move. Credit:Steven Siewert

Most of the existing furniture, which owner JCDecaux offered to sell to the council, is expected to be turned into landfill, despite the councils 2030 sustainability vision, which is focused on reducing carbon emissions.

Media industry sources familiar with the refurbishment said it will cost about $100 million for QMS and global advertising giant JCDecaux to complete the changeover. QMS, which was bought by private equity firm Quadrant last year, was confirmed as the successful bidder for the advertising signage rights for the council after a bitter struggle against JCDecaux, which won the contract in the late 1990s before the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games.
Zakharova Unveils Wests Powerful Structures Behind Navalnys Actions

Feb. 9 , 2021 (EIRNS)In a long interview with TASS on Feb. 8, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova blasted the powerful structure targeting Russia including those behind so-called dissident Alexey Navalny.

Referring to the Feb. 1 revelations by RT regarding the 2012 meeting that Vladimir Ashurkov, then head of Navalnys phony Anti-Corruption Foundation, held with an official of the British embassy, suspected of being an MI6 agent, Zakharova said we used to be told that this is exclusively a domestic story and no foreign forces are masterminding it, but now we can see that this is not true, it is yet another lie. And the forces and finances behind it are powerful, which is proven by the video footage that was recently disseminated, showing one of the members of these cells affiliated with Navalny meeting with an alleged British diplomat to discuss financing of their activities in Russia, explaining they discussed huge sums of money to invest in destabilizing Russia.

Whats most bewildering, abominable and impossible from the point of view of Western mentality is that they were speaking about direct aggression against Russian banks, Zakharova asserted. Can you imagine what it means to spread defamatory materials about Russian banks? To the benefit of British banks and the British financial system? And allocation of relevant amounts of money was discussed, she pointed out.

Zakharova also revealed the role of the large U.S. internet giants and platforms in this plot to destabilize the Russian banking system. These conglomerates are deeply involved in supporting illegal activities against Russia, she charged, and saying, We just got the evidence now; the whole world received evidence that [they are] interfering in our affairs from abroad in a whole range of spheres.

The Foreign Ministry spokeswoman also had choice words for the European Commission Vice President and High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell, who made a set of statements during his recent visit to Moscow, which he then contradicted on his return to Brussels. Borrells talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Feb. 5 were held in an atmosphere of trust in which both sides acknowledged problems in the relations and ways of resolving them, she said. Nonetheless Borrell sang a different tune as soon as he returned to Brussels. Just one day later, when Mr. Borrell is back in his EU structures, we see a post in his blog ...about how bad everything was and that things would be still worse in the future. What can it mean? Where was the real Borrell: either in Moscow or when back in the EU structures? According to a Feb. 6 TASS report, citing a press release the same day by the European External Action Service, while Borrell was in Moscow, members of his team contacted Navalnys lawyers. During his Moscow visit, Borrell delivered an ultimatum that the EU expects Navalnys immediate and unconditional release, along with those arbitrarily detained in recent demonstrations.


EXCLUSIVE: The Grammy Award-winning singer/actress recalls Natalie Desselle-Reid as vibrant and energetic on the set of the 1997 film

Nearly 25 years ago, Rodgers & Hammersteins Cinderella made history with its first Black Cinderella and a first-of-its-kind multiculturally diverse cast.

The 1997 film version of Cinderella  which starred Brandy Norwood as Cinderella, Whitney Houston as her fairy godmother and Whoopi Goldberg  became an instant classic and was viewed by more than 60 million people.

Read More: Billy Porter says hell bring genderless magic to Cinderella remake

Now, Cinderella will be introduced to a whole new generation as its headed to Disney+ on Feb. 12.

Movie poster for Rodgers & Hammersteins Cinderella. (Photo: Walt Disney Television)

In an exclusive interview with theGrios Managing Editor, Gerren Keith Gaynor, Brandy reflected on the history-making project and its impact on her life and career.

Im very blessed to have experienced what I experienced in 97 with Cinderella, with a multicultural cast, diverse artists from Whitney Houston to Whoopi Goldberg, Jason Alexander, all of these amazing people  just to have that experience is just something I can keep with me forever, Brandy told theGrio.

And then to share it with my daughter now and this new generation, I just think its going to touch them. Its going to inspire them to dream big dreams  theyre going to love it. Its going to bring joy to so many families.

Brandy says Cinderellas arrival to Disney+ is also perfect timing as its also Black History Month and comes only one day after her 42nd birthday. Its very magical, said the Grammy Award-winning artist.

As the story goes, Whitney Houston, who served as executive producer of the 1997 project, handpicked Brandy to play Cinderella. Last year, Brandy told theGrio that being able to work with her idol and mentor was in itself a real-life Cinderella moment.

Brandy Norwood and Whitney Houston star in Rodgers & Hammersteins Cinderella. (Photo: Walt Disney Television)

Read More: Brandy talks new album B7 and overcoming severe depression

Im so proud of that. I can look back and see it and experience it. Even moments outside of Cinderella  just being in the studio [and] when I first met her  all of that footage, I can go back and see and keep that, said Brandy. I feel her presence. It means everything to me.

Story continues

Brandy also remembered her late Cinderella co-star Natalie Desselle-Reid, who played Cinderellas step-sister. Desselle-Reid tragically died of colon cancer in December 2020.

Brandy remembered Natalie as vibrant and energetic on the set of Cinderella.

Left to right: Brandy Norwood, Natalie Desselle-Reid and Veanne Cox star in Rodgers & Hammersteins Cinderella. (Photo: Walt Disney Television)

Her spirit was just energetic, very funny, very down to earth. I just remember always annoying her and Veanne [Cox] because I just wanted to be everywhere they were  even scenes that I [was] not in  I just wanted to be around their energy, Brandy recalled.

Natalie was just so inspirational  I hadnt spoken to her in years and I feel horrible that I didnt get a chance to say anything to her.

But Brandy said shes happy audiences will again witness the comedic brilliance of Desselle-Reid.

I know that shes with us in spirit and I know that she is going to shine so bright in this film. And for people to see her, its going to be amazing, she said. She did that. She really did that.

Natalie Desselle-Reid stars in Rodgers & Hammersteins Cinderella. (Photo: Walt Disney Television)

The story of Cinderella has been around for decades, but its overarching message of dreams coming true has continued to resonate through generations. What I love most about the Cinderella story is that she used her imagination to see herself in a better circumstance than what she was in, said Brandy.

And I love the fact that no matter how she was treated, she remained calm, she remained humble. And I think thats why so much magic was able to happen to her, because no matter what she went through, she was kind and she was able to use her imagination to see herself at the ball and see herself in better places.

Another strong theme in the Cinderella story is the idea of dreams coming true. For Brandy, whose latest album B7 was recently nominated for an NAACP Image Award, her dream is to continue making music  more specifically, she wants to do more musicals.

Read More: Hosea Chanchez pays tribute to Brandy: You are the Grammy

Brandy performs at Dick Clarks New Years Rockin Eve with Ryan Seacrest 2021 broadcast on December 31, 2020 and January 1, 2021. (Photo by Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images for dick clark productions)

I have so many dreams; I dream for more music, more musicals, just more creativity, just things that I have never done before, said Brandy. I want to do those things and I want to go into that field of musical theater and try to bring that to television.

As for Cinderellas new home on Disney+, Brandy said she hopes it brings joy and love to the world.

Everyone can feel like their dreams are possible after this film because its really true. Its so magical, she said.

I just hope everybody watches it over and over and over . [Disney+] is the perfect home for Cinderella.

Have you subscribed to theGrios podcast Dear Culture? Download our newest episodes now!

TheGrio is now on Apple TV, Amazon Fire, and Roku. Download theGrio today!

The post Brandy reacts to Cinderella going to Disney+, remembers co-star Natalie Desselle-Reid appeared first on TheGrio.
The Vietnamese government introduced Decree 152/2020/ND-CP (Decree 152) guiding the implementation of the labor code overlooking the hiring and management of foreign employees in Vietnam.

Decree 152 came into effect on February 15 and replaces other decrees including Decree 11.

Employers should study the new Decree carefully to ensure they are in compliance or risk strict penalties.

The Vietnamese government introduced Decree 152/2020/ND-CP (Decree 152), which came into effect on February 15. The Decree overlooks the management of foreign workers in Vietnam as well as the hiring of Vietnamese employees that work for foreign businesses. Decree 152 replaces Decree 11 and Decree 75 and states how businesses can employ foreign individuals. The new regulations appear to be stricter compared to previous decrees. Vietnam Briefing highlights the key points.

Decree 152 highlights

Employers that require hiring a foreign employee must submit a written request to the Ministry of Labor, War Invalids and Social Affairs (MoLISA), 30 days before the commencement of employment. A response is typically received within 10 days after submission.

The employer should then request a work permit from the MoLISA. This should ideally be applied 15 days before the foreign worker commences their employment. Work permit processing times take up to 10 business days. A work permit cannot be applied directly by the workers/foreigners, but with the assistance of their employers from Vietnam.

Work permit requirements

As per Decree 152, a foreign expert is defined as:

Having a bachelors degree or higher and having at least three years of experience working in the relevant field to the job position that the foreign employee has been hired for;

Have at least five years of experience with a practice certificate relevant to the job that the foreign employee has been hired for;

Special cases that fall under the discretion of the Prime Minister as per the MoLISA.

A manager is defined as:

A person in charge of the organization.

An executive is defined as:

An employee directly administering affiliated entities of the employer.

A technical worker is defined as:

An individual that has been training in a technical field or another major for at least one year and has been working for at least three years in their trained field; or

Has at least five years experience related to the job for which they will be employed in Vietnam.

Decree 152 requires several documents required for a work permit application. These include:

Application form;

Health certificate issued in the past year as per guidelines by the Ministry of Health;

Police or criminal clearance certificate, no less than six months old;

Proof as a manager or executive;

Proof as an expert or technical worker; and

Acceptance from MoLISA for the demand for foreign employees.

Work permit exemptions

Decree 152 lists several cases for work permit exemptions. As such, foreigners can only be exempt from a work permit if their capital contribution to the company is at least US$130,400 (VND 3 billion).

Experts, managers, or technicians that enter Vietnam for up to 30 days no more than three times in a year may be exempted from a work permit. Foreign workers married to Vietnamese citizens and living in Vietnam are also exempted from work permits.

In addition, businesses that employ foreign personal that are exempted from a work permit must inform MoLISA at least three days before the employee start working in Vietnam.

Work permit renewals

Work permits should be renewed at least five days but not more than 45 days before the expiry date with an application to MoLISA.

Vietnamese employees

As per the new Decree, foreign businesses can now directly recruit Vietnamese employees without having to use a competent authority for recruitment.

Stricter criteria for foreign workers

As mentioned earlier, Decree 152 requires foreigners to have a practicing certificate with at least five years of work experience in the job that they will be hired for in Vietnam. The Decree also does not specify what the practicing certificate should entail leaving largely the local MoLISA to decide. Alternatively, an expert needs to have a relevant bachelors degree or higher relevant to their job position in Vietnam and a minimum of three years of work experience. In addition, the practicing certificate must be confirmed by an overseas company or organization.

Several businesses have expressed concerns regarding the new regulations and have stated that not all degrees that foreigners obtain are relevant to their current jobs while the employee may be highly experienced.

Employers should ensure they are compliant

Decree 152 shows that the government is getting stricter on hiring foreign nationals in Vietnam. Businesses are therefore advised to take note and study the new Decree carefully to ensure they are in compliance of the new regulations. Businesses and employees that are not in compliance face strict penalties and even deportation if they are found without a work permit, flouting labor rules.

Note this article was first published in February 2021 and has been updated to include the latest developments.
We are excited about the opportunity to bring our CSI Paysystems technology assets and B2B payments expertise to bear in collaboration with Bank of the West to create the V-PAYO integrated payables solution and provide efficiency and cost savings to the banks commercial customers.

Corporate Spending Innovations (CSI), a leader in electronic B2B payment solutions, announced today that they have teamed up with Bank of the West, a subsidiary of BNP Paribas, to launch V-PAYO, an evolution of their ePayables products and services that provides a unique payment experience for commercial customers and their vendors. This product offers clients greater automation, process efficiency, and digitization through an integrated payables experience utilizing a virtual card optimization process for B2B payments.

Virtual cards streamline operations enabling corporate clients to work more efficiently. They replace paper checks with digitized B2B payments, making them more effective than traditional ACH. Expenses are greatly reduced, and the buyer and supplier portals provide payment visibility and status with faster and more comprehensive reconciliation. In addition, virtual cards allow for an increased float period, up to 55 days, which can help improve cash flow.

V-PAYO features:



Single file for all payment methods including virtual card, ACH or check print and delivery

File Transfer Protocol (FTP) with flexible file formats and Application Programming Interface (API) capabilities

Card payment optimization, increasing usage from the industry average of 15% to 25%+ of total payments

Buyer and supplier portals providing full visibility of payment status and automated reconciliation capabilities

Centralized database with comprehensive vendor information and high success rate of vendor on-boarding

The integration with the state-of-the-art software will mostly be through an API into a companys Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)  system  making the accounts payable process automated, efficient, and easy to reconcile.

"Applying a unique method to each payment based on an algorithm that optimizes for cards or ACH, is the next generation of ePayables, said Dominique Fracchia, Head of Commercial Card and Managing Director at Bank of the West. V-PAYO will help our customers save money, increase controls, provide greater fraud protection, and allow for extended float and rebates.

The challenges created by the pandemic have accelerated the market need for corporate AP automation and invoice payment digitization and Bank of the West recognized this early on, said Jim Foster, EVP Payment Partners & Financial Institutions at CSI. We are excited about the opportunity to bring our CSI Paysystems technology assets and B2B payments expertise to bear in collaboration with Bank of the West to create the V-PAYO integrated payables solution and provide efficiency and cost savings to the banks commercial customers.

About CSI

Corporate Spending Innovations (CSI) provides cloud-based payment solutions to world-leading brands with our highly secure corporate payment solutions that include CSI Paysystems, CSI Travel, and global-fleet fuel cards. CSI customers can automate 100% of B2B payables including virtual credit card, proprietary network, ACH, check, or foreign exchange with cross-border payments settled in local currency. CSI is a certified Mastercard processor and has obtained Visa Ready for Business Solutions approval. CSI is part of Edenred, the global leader in payment solutions for the working world, EDEN:PA

About Bank of the West

At Bank of the West, we know money deposited in a bank has the power to finance positive change. So we are taking action to ensure our activities help protect the planet, improve peoples lives, and strengthen communities. We are redefining banking for a better future by focusing on areas where we believe 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.

 2021 Bank of the West. Member FDIC. Equal Housing Lender. Doing business in South Dakota as Bank of the West California.

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After the canceling of the Keystone XL oil pipeline the previous week, a new Executive Order dominated the oil and gas headlines the last week of January. President Biden has halted new leasing and drilling permits on U.S. lands and waters for 60 days. The order will impact Wyoming and New Mexico the most but a number of legal challenges are forthcoming, especially if the administration tries a permanent ban and/or goes after already existing leases. Currently, the U.S. gets around 20-22% of its oil and 10-12% of its natural gas from federal areas.

Americans should realize that oil and gas account for 70% of our energy supply. The reality is that blocking pipelines and development does nothing to lower demand, it just makes getting access to these irreplaceable products more difficult - and more costly. Oil in particular has no material substitute, with still niche market electric cars being far more expensive and much less convenient. In addition, oil and gas revenues offer states billions of dollars to pay for schools, hospitals, roads, bridges, and other critical infrastructure - explaining why "blue state" New Mexico might already be fraught with buyer's remorse.

Not just easily the world's largest oil and gas producer, the U.S. is quickly becoming a major exporter of these essentials, rivaling Russia and Saudi Arabia for oil and Russia, Qatar, and Australia for natural gas. Even though global oil demand fell 8% in 2020 through the pandemic to ~92 million b/d, U.S. oil exports stayed the course and remained much stronger than one might suspect (Figure). Demand this year should increase to 97 million b/d as travel normalizes, with still the potential to rise to 109 million b/d by 2040. There is simply no evidence that global oil demand is in structural decline: "Goldman Expects Oil Demand To Rebound To 100 Million Bpd By August."

U.S. natural gas exports have also remained very high through perhaps the worst energy demand destruction in centuries (Figure). Global gas demand fell 3-4% in 2020, for instance, the first yearly decline on record. U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports did drop in summer when many industrial facilities were closed, but they have quickly rebounded since and been setting records at over 11 Bcf/d.

Kicking off as big business in February 2016, the U.S. has been exporting LNG to over 40 countries. Our supply is absolutely essential to buffer the extending influence of heavily-resourced Russia, with Vladimir Putin aiming to boom his country's market share of global LNG supply five-fold to 25% over the next 10 years. And the Biden administration must realize that we have a chance to supply a clean, modern fuel like natural gas to an energy-deprived world, where 85% of humanity resides in still developing nations.

Too many environmental groups have seemingly ignored: our OECD energy advisor, the International Energy Agency, has directly credited the use of natural gas as to why the CO2 reductions in the U.S. have been "the largest in the history of energy." Globally, there are 500,000 MW of higher emission coal generation in the works, which would be a 25% expansion of the current global fleet. Natural gas emits 50% less CO2 than coal when combusted, explaining "DOE pick Granholm signals support for LNG exports."

The appetite for gas will surely be there. Global gas demand is expected to rebound and grow 3-5% this year. Longer term, LNG demand alone is projected to about double to 100 Bcf/d by 2040, with more gas a centerpiece strategy of decarbonization goals. California is actually the best example of this, where the state has used decades of mandates and tens of billions of dollars to force as much wind and solar onto the grid as possible, yet natural gas still generated 46% of the state's electricity in 2020.

Jude Clemente is Editor at RealClearEnergy.
Wealthy Indians are exploring golden visa programmes, which confer residency and even citizenship in exchange for a large investment, as they look for an attractive and stable residential option for their families, visa consultants said.

The number of Indians seeking to emigrate through the investment route has more than doubled during the pandemic from the previous year, outpacing the global average growth of 50%, consultants said.

Demand from Indian clients has always been very strong, but since the pandemic, demand has increased from all over the world, including Indians," said Elizabeth Edwards, marketing manager at La Vida Golden Visas, the UK.

Also Read | Inside the third front of the farm agitation

The golden visa caters to high net worth individuals (HNIs) who want to acquire residency in a foreign country by investing in a business or by purchasing property.

Portugals golden visa residency programme is the most popular among Indians seeking to emigrate to Europe.

For many Indians, global business links and childrens education in top schools or universities in Europe, the UK or the US, are some of the key factors driving their decisions to opt for the investment visa programmes.

India is a big market for golden visa schemes with a large number of rich Indian millionaires looking to immigrate in search of new opportunities," said Jayalalitha Akurathi, director at Y-Axis Overseas Careers, which advises clients on immigration.

India saw the third highest outflow of wealthy individuals last year. Nearly 5,000 millionaires, or 2% of the total number of high net worth individuals in India, left the country in 2020, according to Global Wealth Migration Review report.

Immigration consultants said passports have become the new safe haven, offering safety and asset protection for families.

A second passport, giving dual citizenship status, is a must for any high net worth individual investor in their investment portfolio to cover against global crisis and uncertainties.

In terms of cost, Caribbean programmes are the most cost-effective. Single applicants need to spend a total of $140,000 (around 1 crore), including fees, and a family of four can apply from around $180,000 upwards.

European programmes are more expensive. The entry-level for a golden visa real estate purchase in Portugal is $280,000.

Additionally, Indians looking to simply increase their visa-free travel options are also investing in Grenadas citizen by investment or donation programmes.

For many, investment in real estate to obtain a golden visa is often an attractive option and allows freedom of travel throughout the EU Schengen zone through a residency card.

There are a number of countries in Europe and in the Caribbean offering residency programmes or a second passport and citizenship.

Preferred countries are New Zealand, the Caribbean Islands, Portugal, Malta, Spain, Cyprus and Greece.

Countries such as Malta, Cyprus and the Caribbean nations of St. Kitts, Antigua, Grenada and Dominica, all allow Indian citizens to apply for a second passport.

With economies across the globe suffering from the ongoing fallout of the pandemic, some governments have also expanded their visa offerings over the past year to make up for lost tax revenue, a phenomenon also seen in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis," adds Akurathi of Y-Axis Overseas Careers.

Citizenship, however, is not guaranteed even if you receive a golden visa. In order to receive citizenship in a certain EU state through a golden visa, the applicant must spend a specific amount of time living there.

Requirements for citizenship by investment differ from country to country but is usually about 10 years of continuous residency.

Some countries offer citizenship after a shorter period (such as Greece, after seven years) or even without any stay requirements at all.

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Bengaluru, Feb 10 : A day after Janata Dal (S) forged an alliance with the ruling BJP wrest the Karnataka Legislative Council chairman's post from Congress party, JD(S) supremo, H. D. Deve Gowda on Wednesday said his party will not contest the forthcoming by-elections in the state due to 'lack of resources' at their command.

The bypoll schedule is yet to be announced by the Election Commission for Maski, Basavakalyan and Sindagi Assembly seats and Belagavi Lok Sabha seat.

According to a statement released by the former Prime Minister's office here, addressing a press conference in Raichur, he said, "We are a regional party. We do not have required resources to field our candidates, therefore, we are not contesting in the forthcoming by-elections." He quickly added that instead of focussing on by-elections, he would rather be happy to build his party from scratch and get it equipped to face Assembly elections in 2023. "As long as I am breathing, I will be working hard to build my party, there is no question about that. I am fully involved in building my party," he declared.

While by-elections to Basavakalyan Assembly seat and Belagavi Lok Sabha are necessitated following the death of Congress MLA B. Narayan Rao and Union railway minister of state, Suresh Angadi respectively due to Covid-19 in September last year, senior JD(S) leader and Sindagi MLA M. C. Managuli died last month, due to age related ailments and has necessitated the bypolls there.

The Maski Assembly seat fell vacant after its MLA Pratapgouda Patil defected along with 17 other MLAs in 2019 and joined the BJP which brought down the coalition government headed by H. D. Kumarswamy.

Patil had won the Maski assembly seat in 2018 from Congress and is now with the BJP.

In a bid to win these seats, the ruling BJP and opposition Congress have already begun the process of shortlisting candidates. The Congress has already inducted BJP leader Basana Gouda Turvihal, who lost to Pratapgouda by a wafer-thin margin of 213 votes in 2018, while the ruling BJP has appointed BJP vice president and Yediyurappa's son, B. Y. Vijayendra as poll in-charge of this constituency.
New Delhi, Feb 10 : AN NIA special court in Kolkata on Wednesday sentenced Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) chief Kausar to 29 years imprisonment with a fine of Rs 35,000 in connection with the Burdwan blast case, an NIA official said here.

An NIA spokesperson said that Kausar aka Boma Mizan, a resident of Bangladesh, was convicted under several sections of the Indian Penal Code, the Unlawful Activities Prevention Activities (UAPA), the Arms Act and the Foreigners Act.

The official said that Kausar was the head of the proscribed JMB in India, and was also charge-sheeted in another NIA case related to Bodh Gaya blast in Bihar in January 2018.

The case relates to a powerful IED blast on October 2, 2014 at the first floor of a rented house in the busy Khagragarh locality of Burdwan district of West Bengal.

The IED had accidentally gone off at the time of its fabrication by the members of banned terrorist organisation and the two terrorists had succumbed to their injuries.

The West Bengal Police initially registered a case, but the NIA had taken over the investigation on October 10, 2014.

The spokesperson said that the NIA probe revealed a conspiracy by JMB to radicalise, recruit and provide training in arms and explosives to its members in India for committing terrorist acts and waging war against the democratically established governments of India and Bangladesh.

"A large number of IEDs, explosives, hand grenades, training videos were recovered during the investigation of the case," the official said.

"After extensive investigation, a total of 33 accused were charge sheeted by NIA for commission of various offences in this case. Out of 33 accused, 31 were arrested. Earlier, 30 accused persons were convicted and sentenced, to various terms, by the NIA Special Court, Kolkata," the official said.

The trial against the remaining two absconding charge sheeted accused continues.
A team of Melbourne-based researchers believe they have taken a significant step towards unlocking the regenerative power of the stem cells in our muscles, after six years of experiments on fish isolated a signal that turns on the cells.

In mice, a dose of the signalling chemical prompts stem cells to begin knitting together otherwise-unrepairable wounds.

Peter Currie in the fish lab at Monash Universitys Clayton campus. Credit:Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute / Supplied

The teams discovery is published on Thursday in Nature, and talks are already under way with pharma companies to test it as a treatment for muscular dystrophy  and ageing.

It fully restored the architecture of the muscle, it was remarkable, said Peter Currie, director of Monash Universitys Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute.
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Although it is still challenging to prevent the transmission of COVID-19, researchers at the University of Miami are using all the strategies they can to fend off the spread.

That includes using cutting-edge research to detect SARS-CoV-2--the virus that causes COVID-19--in wastewater. Detecting traces of the virus in sewage flowing from campus buildings may provide up to a week's notice ahead of positive COVID-19 test results to warn students and faculty that they should get tested and self-isolate before the illness spreads.

Research has shown that people will start excreting the virus in their feces and urine before showing symptoms of COVID-19, so the idea is to use wastewater measurements as an early warning for a potential COVID-19 outbreak in the community." Helena Solo-Gabriele, Professor, Environmental engineering, Associate Dean, Research, College of Engineering

Solo-Gabriele has been studying beach and water contamination in South Florida for more than a decade, so she was supported by University leadership to lead the group effort.

And just a few weeks ago, this team of 40 faculty and staff members and students--including Solo-Gabriele's co-investigators Stephan Schurer, a professor of molecular and cellular pharmacology at the Miller School of Medicine; and Christopher Mason, an associate professor of physiology and biophysics and of computational genomics in computational biomedicine, as well as co-director of the WorldQuant Initiative for Quantitative Prediction at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City--were buoyed by the news that they had received a major grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), with funding starting this month.

The two-year, $5 million grant will help broaden the University's own pilot program to detect the virus in wastewater.

With this new funding, the team will also join a consortium organized by the NIH to collect and standardize data from institutions across the United States that are testing wastewater for the virus, Schurer said. Therefore, Schurer will work to create data criteria and software tools, so that the wastewater figures and associated information can be seamlessly stored, compiled, and analyzed. This will help scientists correlate information from a range of sources more efficiently, she added.

The researchers are grateful for the boost in funding because the team will now be able expand and further evaluate innovative technologies for collecting, concentrating, and detecting the virus in wastewater. They will also explore the relationship between the environmental concentration of the virus and the results of human testing to create models that can predict COVID-19 outbreaks. Finally, led by Mason, they will utilize next-generation sequencing technology to characterize SARS-CoV-2 genetic variations, look for novel viruses, and link this data to national and global efforts to track emerging pathogens.

Starting in August 2020, the University began regularly testing students who were taking in-person classes to get a comprehensive view of any COVID-19 transmissions and to help keep the virus' spread as low as possible. At the same time, a program was also established for environmental surveillance of the virus using surface, air, and wastewater sampling, led by George Grills, associate director for shared resources at the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center.

As part of this effort, Solo-Gabriele's team began regularly gathering and analyzing the wastewater samples from all three of the University's campuses. Now that this team can ramp up their efforts, Erin Kobetz, who has been leading the University's testing, tracking, and tracing efforts, said the data will likely become even more useful. According to Kobetz, the University hopes to randomly test students in the buildings where they are seeing an increased presence of the virus in the wastewater to help head off any potential COVID-19 outbreaks.

"This is another tool in our armory that will provide critical information to manage the risk of exposure and outbreak," said Kobetz, a trained epidemiologist who is also the University's vice provost for research and scholarship. "It's also incredible this team was able to leverage something that they were establishing to support the University's management of COVID-19 for a broader scientific impact."

Ultimately, Solo-Gabriele hopes to create a primer they can share with leaders across the nation about the best ways to identify the virus in wastewater and how it can be used to quickly warn individuals of potential infection. They also hope to offer strategies that communities can use to reduce imminent transmissions when they detect a spike in wastewater, she added.

The COVID-19 wastewater team at the University includes students and faculty and staff members from the College of Engineering, the Miller School of Medicine, Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, Rosenstiel School for Marine and Atmospheric Science, University Facilities and Operations, Risk Management, Environmental Health and Safety, the Institute for Data Science and Computing, and the Miller School's Safety and Compliance Office. The research team also includes students and faculty and staff members from the Department of Physiology and Biophysics and the HRH Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud Institute for Computational Biomedicine at Weill Cornell Medicine.

To identify the level of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater, Brian Reding, environmental health and safety officer, assisted by a rotation of students and research staff from the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center's Behavioral and Community-Based Research Shared Resource, will collect samples from 13 locations at the University each week.

Solo-Gabriele's team will then divide the sample and send a portion for sequencing and analysis to Mason--who has established an international consortium for these studies--at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City. The other portion is analyzed at the University. To prep the wastewater for analysis, samples are concentrated down to a few microliters. Then, Solo-

Gabriele delivers the concentrate to Mark Sharkey, a research assistant professor of infectious diseases, who uses an innovative polymerase chain reaction (PCR) method he developed to determine whether the virus is present in a sample.

Sharkey's method can produce results more rapidly and efficiently than other methods, Solo-Gabriele noted. Wastewater samples that are positive for the virus will be analyzed at the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center Onco-Genomics Shared Resource to detect and identify the viral strain, which can help determine how fast the disease may spread, Grills added.

While the team got its bearings in the fall, it is now accelerating operation by collecting more samples, more frequently, and at a greater number of locations. This will help get a better representation of where the virus may be located, and how it may be spreading, Solo-Gabriele said.

Simultaneously, another member of the team, Naresh Kumar, an associate professor of environmental health, is working with Alejandro Mantero, a biostatics research analyst at the University's Clinical and Translational Science Institute, as well as Mason, to create an infectious disease model that could anticipate potential COVID-19 outbreaks, based on wastewater surveillance, human test results, and local hospitalization figures.

The results from this project could help guide University and local leaders to make decisions in a timely way and improve disease transmission control efforts across the globe.

"We are learning that measuring wastewater is a powerful tool to understand what illnesses are in a community and how humans are contributing to these diseases, not only for COVID-19, but for public health in general. Because we can use it to monitor many different [pathogenic] organisms," Solo-Gabriele said.

Antibodies that react to both ordinary coronaviruses and SARS-CoV-2 are common in the population but don't neutralize the COVID-19-causing virus

PHILADELPHIA -- Past exposure to seasonal coronaviruses (CoVs), which cause the common cold, does not result in the production of antibodies that protect against the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, according to a study led by Scott Hensley, PhD, an associate professor of Microbiology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

Prior studies have suggested that recent exposure to seasonal CoVs protects against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. However, research from Hensley's team, published in Cell, suggests that if there is such protection, it does not come from antibodies.

"We found that many people possessed antibodies that could bind to SARS-CoV-2 before the pandemic, but these antibodies could not prevent infections," Hensley said. "Although antibodies from prior coronavirus infections cannot prevent SARS-CoV-2 infections, it is possible that pre-existing memory B cells and T cells could potentially provide some level of protection or at least reduce the disease severity of COVID-19. Studies need to be completed to test that hypothesis."

The researchers examined blood samples banked before the pandemic from hundreds of people. They found that more than 20 percent of these pre-pandemic samples carried "cross reactive" anti-CoV antibodies that could bind not only to ordinary cold-causing CoVs but also to key sites on SARS-CoV-2. However, these cross-reactive antibodies could not neutralize the infectivity of SARS-CoV-2, and were not associated with better outcomes in people who later went on to get COVID-19.

The scientists also found from blood testing in different groups that both children and adults on average tend to have similar levels of cross-reactive anti-CoV antibodies -- implying that these antibodies are not the factor that confers protection against severe COVID-19 among most children.

The COVID-19 pandemic, after more than a year of global spread, has resulted in more than 100 million reported infections, of which more than two million have been fatal. Although some risk factors, such as age, are clear enough, scientists still don't fully understand why some people become deathly sick with COVID-19 while others escape with mild illness or even no symptoms.

Antibodies have been considered one possible explanation. Ordinary seasonal coronaviruses, of the type that cause colds, have long circulated in the human population. An obvious hypothesis is that some of the antibodies elicited by these common infections cross-react with the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, providing some measure of protection, at least against severe COVID-19 illness.

In one set of analyses that Hensley and colleagues conducted, they examined blood samples collected from 263 children at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, and from 168 adults at the Penn Medicine Biobank. The samples had been taken in 2017, more than two years before the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic started.

The researchers found that most of the 431 samples contained antibodies to ordinary, seasonal CoVs. Some samples, about 20 percent, contained anti-CoV antibodies that were "cross reactive" with SARS-CoV-2, binding tightly to sites on its outer spike protein and/or its nucleocapsid protein -- the two coronavirus proteins that are most accessible to the immune system of infected hosts.

Hensley and colleagues separately analyzed blood samples banked before the pandemic from 251 people who later went on to test positive for SARS-CoV-2, and a control group of 251 people -- matched for age and other relevant characteristics -- who did not test positive for the novel coronavirus. Again, they found that greater than 20 percent of the pre-pandemic samples contained anti-CoV antibodies that could cross-react with the SARS-CoV-2 spike and/or nucleocapsid proteins. Yet similar proportions of the infected and uninfected groups had these cross-reactive antibodies, implying that they provided no protection against SARS-CoV-2 infection. Moreover, in the group that later went on to be infected with SARS-CoV-2, levels of cross-reactive anti-CoV antibodies in their pre-pandemic blood samples did not correlate with measures of COVID-19 severity such as the need for hospitalization or ICU care.

In a third set of tests, the researchers analyzed blood samples from 27 hospitalized COVID-19 patients, and found that levels of these cross-reactive anti-CoV antibodies were strongly boosted during the course of COVID-19 illness.

The researchers recommend that larger studies be done to definitively resolve the question of whether pre-existing anti-CoV antibodies can protect against SARS-CoV-2 viruses. They also suggest that further studies examine other types of immune response, such as the T cell response, to see if these provide a measure of cross-reactive protection following seasonal CoV infection.

In the meantime, though, they say their results suggest that the shared sites where some antibodies bind both to seasonal coronaviruses and to SARS-CoV-2 are generally not vulnerable sites where SARS-CoV-2 can be neutralized.

###

The co-first authors of the study were Elizabeth Anderson, Eileen Goodwin, and Anurag Verma. The study was a collaboration including not only Hensley's laboratory but also the Penn Medicine laboratories of Paul Bates PhD, a professor of Microbiology, Michael Betts, PhD, a professor of Microbiology, Sara Cherry PhD, a professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Alex Huang, MD, an instructor of Hematology-Oncology, Nuala Meyer, MD, MS, an associate professor of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, Daniel Rader MD, the Seymour Gray Professor of Molecular Medicine and chair of the Department of Genetics, and E. John Wherry, PhD, chair of Systems Pharmacology and Translational Therapeutics and director of the Penn Institute of Immunology.

Funding was provided by the National Institutes of Health and philanthropic support from Philadelphia 76ers star player Joel Embiid and managing partners Josh Harris and David Blitzer, and Philadelphia Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie.

Penn Medicine is one of the world's leading academic medical centers, dedicated to the related missions of medical education, biomedical research, and excellence in patient care. Penn Medicine consists of the Raymond and Ruth Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania (founded in 1765 as the nation's first medical school) and the University of Pennsylvania Health System, which together form a $8.6 billion enterprise.

The Perelman School of Medicine has been ranked among the top medical schools in the United States for more than 20 years, according to U.S. News & World Report's survey of research-oriented medical schools. The School is consistently among the nation's top recipients of funding from the National Institutes of Health, with $494 million awarded in the 2019 fiscal year.

The University of Pennsylvania Health System's patient care facilities include: the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and Penn Presbyterian Medical Center--which are recognized as one of the nation's top "Honor Roll" hospitals by U.S. News & World Report--Chester County Hospital; Lancaster General Health; Penn Medicine Princeton Health; and Pennsylvania Hospital, the nation's first hospital, founded in 1751. Additional facilities and enterprises include Good Shepherd Penn Partners, Penn Medicine at Home, Lancaster Behavioral Health Hospital, and Princeton House Behavioral Health, among others.

Penn Medicine is powered by a talented and dedicated workforce of more than 43,900 people. The organization also has alliances with top community health systems across both Southeastern Pennsylvania and Southern New Jersey, creating more options for patients no matter where they live.

Penn Medicine is committed to improving lives and health through a variety of community-based programs and activities. In fiscal year 2019, Penn Medicine provided more than $583 million to benefit our community.
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Lendleases new boss Tony Lombardo will have the task of simplifying a sprawling $8.24 billion global business when he takes over the top job from long-serving chief executive Steve McCann at the end of May.

Mr McCann said on Wednesday he would retire after a dozen years at the helm of Lendlease and hand over to the former accountant Mr Lombardo, the groups Asia head.

Tony will commence in his new role as the group pursues its revised strategy focusing on leveraging its competitive edge in the development and delivery of large-scale, mixed-use urbanisation projects and growing the investments platform, Lendlease chairman Michael Ullmer said.

Lendlease CEO Steve McCann will leave the company at the end of May. Credit:Peter Rae

Tonys time as CEO Asia, as well as prior roles including group CFO, make him eminently qualified to lead Lendlease into the future, he said.
AGL, Australias largest greenhouse gas emitter, is also the most prolific violator of environmental regulations for coal-fired power plants, collecting twice the rate of breaches as its market share in NSW and Victoria, analysis shows.

Data gathered by the Australia Beyond Coal alliance and published on the Coal Impacts Index website, also found AGL was responsible for the highest number of power failures at its plants.

AGLs Bayswater coal-fired power plant in the NSW Hunter Valley led other power stations in the numbers of breaches, including a water pollution incident that cost the company more than $1 million in fines. Credit:Dominic Lorrimer

AGL operates the Bayswater and Liddell plants in the NSW Hunter Valley and the Loy Yang A plant in Victorias Latrobe Valley.

The three power stations were found to have breached their licences 111 times since 2015, accounting for about three quarters of all violations  more than twice the roughly one-third market share these coal-fired plants command, the alliance said.
Hyundai Tucson sales highlight the incentives available this month at Earnhardt Hyundai North Scottsdale.

The Hyundai Big Deal Event is going on now at Earnhardt Hyundai North Scottsdale near Phoenix, AZ. The dealership is offering lease and finance incentives that are hard to ignore, including available opportunities for select 2021 Hyundai Tucson models.

Earnhardt Hyundai North Scottsdale is highlighting the savings available on select 2021 Tucson models on the dealerships lot. Well-qualified lessees may be eligible to enter a 36-month lease on select Tucson SE models with $3,705 due at signing and payments of $175 per month.

Shoppers leaning towards purchasing over leasing may qualify for a 0% Annual Percentage Rate (APR) for up to 60 months on select Tucson models. Individuals who are looking to finance may also qualify for up to $500 in Hyundai Motor Finance Bonus Cash at the time of signing.

The 2021 Hyundai Tucson will check all of the boxes on shoppers lists thanks to its noteworthy lineup of amenities and features. Tucson models are able to deliver up to 181 horsepower on Phoenix and Scottsdale streets while earning up to 28 miles per gallon on the highway. Shoppers at Earnhardt Hyundai North Scottsdale will find all of the latest features in the Hyundai Tucson model lineup, including top-rated favorites such as a 7-inch color touch-screen display, Android Auto and Apple CarPlay, Driver Attention Warning, Lane Keeping Assist and Forward Collision-Avoidance Assist.

Anyone can view the lineup of available Hyundai Tucson models at Earnhardt Hyundai North Scottsdale by visiting the dealership online, northscottsdalehyundai.com. Earnhardt Hyundai North Scottsdale is located at 8445 E Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard in Scottsdale, AZ, and is open seven days a week. Members of the dealership sales team are available by phone at 888-316-9966 to offer any assistance to prospective buyers.
[February 10, 2021] Malcolm Gladwell to headline SocialChorus' Attune Digital Employee Experience Summit

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- SocialChorus, creator of the FirstUp digital employee experience platform, has announced that author, journalist and culture analyst Malcom Gladwell will be the keynote speaker for the company's first annual Attune Digital Employee Experience Summit. The two-day virtual event will delve into the dramatic changes to work that are happening post-2020, and explore how employees and companies can thrive in this brave new digital world. When it comes to reexamining how people, cultures and companies work, there's no one more compelling than Malcolm Gladwell . - SocialChorus CMO Andrew Nester.

"The hybrid, work-from-anywhere environment is here to stay, which is complicating employee engagement and creating friction for workers." explained Nicole Alvino, co-founder and chief strategy officer at SocialChorus. "Although it's more challenging, it's more important than ever to provide a modern, intuitive digital employee experience that enables both desk and frontline workers. This is the single most impactful factor in today's new working model." A recent survey by the company found that as many as 72% of essential frontline workers aren't as digitally enabled as desk workers, so equipping them with the right technology will likely be a top priority in 2021. To help IT, HR and communications professionals navigate successfully in this rapidly evolving climate, SocialChorus has developed a variety of sessions at Attune to address critical topics. Sessions will feature a who's who of experts including leaders from the world's largest employers to visionaries charting new paths for industry. As a technology company that shapes empoyee experience and employee communications, SocialChorus has long sought to change how organizations think about connecting with their people. Gladwell, known for challenging common thinking and turning assumptions about the business world upside down, was a natural fit as the event's headliner.



"When it comes to reexamining how people, cultures and companies work, there's no one more compelling than Malcolm Gladwell," said SocialChorus CMO Andrew Nester. "We are thrilled that he accepted our invitation to headline Attune, and we're looking forward to a thought-provoking keynote address." In addition, the virtual conference will offer two full days of content on Tuesday April 13 and Wednesday, April 14. In light of the challenges of the post-COVID era, SocialChorus is giving access to the event to as many professionals and organizations as possible. This year's Attune summit is free of charge to all, though attendees must still register in advance.

Attendees will learn how to: Use technology to create a more flexible workforce that can quickly move between tasks and pivot to new priorities

Digitally enable essential frontline employees and workers in the field

Increase equity by creating a 2-way conversation between workers and companies

Build an actionable feedback loop for continuous improvement of the organization

Empower employees and give them a voice through content creation

Create relevance for every worker using targeting, personalization and communications best practices

Use agile listening and workforce intelligence to measure initiative performance

Build a seamless, personalized digital employee experience

Increase employee engagement using behavioral science

Foster cross-functional collaboration between IT, HR and communicators In addition, the conference will cover timely topics, including remote work and DEI, and offer opportunities for Q&A and peer engagement. The first annual Attune will be fully virtual, but future years will offer a blend of digital and in-person sessions. For an up-to-date schedule of events,and to register, prospective attendees should visit https://attune-summit.com/ . About Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell is the author of six New York Times bestsellers  The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw, David and Goliath and Talking to Strangers. He is also the co-founder of Pushkin Industries, an audio content company that produces the podcasts Revisionist History, and Broken Record, where he, Rick Rubin, and Bruce Headlam interview musicians across a wide range of genres. Gladwell is a staff writer at The New Yorker, has been included in the TIME 100 Most Influential People list, and was touted as one of Foreign Policy's Top Global Thinkers. About SocialChorus

SocialChorus is the creator of FirstUp, the platform that makes the digital employee experience work for every worker. Using a powerful orchestration engine, we bring personalized information and systems access to every employee where they are  on any endpoint or device in any language, anywhere in the world. Whether they're wired, mobile, frontline, distributed or essential, FirstUp gives employees what they need to do their jobs efficiently and companies what they need to achieve agility. That's how SocialChorus helps enterprise companies like Amazon, ABInBev, Ford and GSK continue to transform their businesses. Learn more at socialchorus.com. View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/malcolm-gladwell-to-headline-socialchorus-attune-digital-employee-experience-summit-301225488.html SOURCE SocialChorus

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Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US

Iran ready to help improve the defense capability of Syria

European Parliament head proposes to strengthen sanctions on Russia

UK PM gets married in London

Armenia reports COVID-19 new 81 cases: for people die

EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia

2 people die in Armenia road accident

Nigeria: Students taken hostage a month ago are released

61 quakes recorded in Congo per day

Syrian MFA: EU lost credibility due to blind obedience to US policy

Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack

Mher Grigoryan: Clarification of border points is possible only after withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops from Armenia

Suspicious deal: Whether there was profit from buying DNA IDs?

Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war

4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack

Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities

Kocharyan: I have to ask people how it happened that overwhelming majority elected this leader

Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country

Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia

US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs

Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners

Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions

Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US

Iran intensifies its diplomacy amid Armenia-Azerbaijan border tensions

Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes

Lukashenko accuses West of destabilizing situation in Belarus

Armenia Central Electoral Commission chief on snap elections: No legal basis for postponing, suspending any function

Armenias Pashinyan is met by Yerevan district residents chanting against him

We are ready to be fully engaged in negotiation process to resolve Karabakh issue, says Armenia acting PM

Armenia ex-President Kocharyan gives interview to Russia TV channel

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Canada MFA expresses concern over 6 Armenian soldiers capture by Azerbaijan troops

There are omissions in registration documents of political forces that applied to Armenia Central Electoral Commission

Armenia Central Electoral Commission chief: There is activeness in Yerevan for the past day or two

Three new cases of coronavirus reported in Artsakh

Group of US Congress members threaten Azerbaijans Aliyev regime with sanctions

Chicago mayor is sued for allegedly refusing interview with white reporter

Iran exports oil to US for first time after long interval

"Armenia" bloc top 50 MP candidates are announced

42 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia

Sri Lanka public beach is covered in charred plastic pellets due to fire in container ship

US preparing list of targeted sanctions on Belarus authorities

China believes it will own America by 2035, Biden says

15 al-Shabab militants killed in Somalia

Newspaper: Armenia political forces that applied for running in election impatiently await CEC decision

Newspaper: Changes are expected in Artsakh

California prisoner who considers himself Satanist beheads cellmate, dismembers his body

Newspaper: Armenia acting PM's "mutually beneficial" proposal to collapse state system?

Armenia National Security Service Reserve Officers' Union members meet with His Holiness Karekin II

EU is ready to help Armenia and Azerbaijan with border delimitation and demarcation

ARF-D member on Nikol Pashinyan: 103 years ago Armenia's founding fathers would have executed him for treason

Iran President hails brotherly ties with Azerbaijan

Robert Kocharyan on years of his leadership in Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia

Situation on Armenian-Azerbaijani border is still tense, more on COVID-19 in Armenia, May 28 digest

"Armenia" alliance of political parties paying tribute to founder of First Republic Aram Manukyan

Yerevan.today: Armenia acting PM not greeted at ruling party's headquarters, citizens call him 'capitulator'

Russia MOD reports on maintenance of ceasefire regime in Nagorno-Karabakh

Armenia acting MOD meets with Russian counterpart in Moscow

Armenia 2nd President: I see possibility of restoring borders of Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast

We can provide our army with some key, modernized weapons, says Armenia ex-President Kocharyan

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Vancouver, British Columbia, Feb. 10, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The global PEEK is projected to be worth USD 1,225.7 Million by 2027 growing at a CAGR OF 6.8%, according to a current analysis by Emergen Research. The PEEK (Polyether Ether Ketone) market is observing a high demand attributed to its increasing demand from the aerospace industry. It has been estimated that by 2035 the aerospace industry would require a total of about 41,000 aircraft, including new and replacement planes.

The surging need to cater to the massive requirement pushes the demand for composite materials comprising thermoplastics such as PEEK, which, in turn, would drive the product demand in aircraft construction. The PEEK composites can offer weight reduction up to 60.0% than metals, leading to improved fuel efficiency and reduced carbon-dioxide emission, offering both cost and eco-friendly benefits and reduced maintenance and improved uptime.

Claim Your FREE Sample Copy with Table of content@ https://www.emergenresearch.com/request-sample-form/297

Top Companies Profiled in PEEK Market Report are:

Celanese Corporation, Solvay SA, Darter Plastics Inc., Evonik Industries, Prototype & Plastic Mold Co. Inc., SABIC, Victrex PLC, Panjin Zhongrun High Performance Polymers Co. Ltd., Jrlon Inc., and Quadrant Epp Surlon India Ltd., among others.

Key Highlights From The Report

In May 2020, Evonik introduced 3D-printable PEEK filament for use in medical implants. Thus, customized plastic implants can be manufactured, deploying 3D printing processes to comply with the requirements of ASTM F2026.

PEEK, a high-performance plastic, provide several benefits in the oil & gas sector, including corrosion resistance, weight reductions, minimized noise emissions, and thermal decoupling.

The application of PEEK plastic in the electrical & electronics parts aids in the reduction of noise, vibration, and harshness in home appliances.

The PEEK market in the Asia Pacific region is estimated to grow at the fastest rate in the forecast period due to a growing demand for the product in countries like China, India, and South Korea. The APAC region's high growth rate is due to a rise in the level of disposable income, swift industrialization, and growth of the automotive and healthcare sector.

Check Our Prices@ https://www.emergenresearch.com/select-license/297

Emergen Research has segmented the global PEEK market on the basis of product type, distribution channel, industry vertical, and region:

Product Type Outlook (Revenue, USD Billion; 2017-2027) Glass Filled Carbon Filled Unfilled Others

Distribution Channel Outlook (Revenue, USD Billion; 2017-2027) Online Offline

Industry Vertical Outlook (Revenue, USD Billion; 2017-2027) Electrical & Electronics Aerospace Automotive Medical Oil & Gas Others



Click to access the Report Study, Read key highlights of the Report and Look at Projected Trends: https://www.emergenresearch.com/industry-report/polyether-ether-ketone-market

Regional Outlook (Revenue, USD Billion; 2017-2027) North America U.S. Canada Mexico Europe Germany UK France BENELUX Rest of Europe Asia Pacific China Japan South Korea Rest of APAC Latin America Brazil Rest of LATAM MEA Saudi Arabia UAE Rest of MEA



Take a Look at our Related Reports:

Spherical graphite market size was valued at USD 2,435.8 Million in 2019 and is forecasted to reach USD 9,598.8 Million by 2027 at a CAGR of 18.6%. The spherical graphite market is observing a double-digit growth attributed to its increasing usage in lithium-ion battery production.

Sodium dichromate market size was valued at USD 759.2 Million in 2019 and is forecasted to reach USD 1,242.4 Million by 2027 at a CAGR of 6.3%. The sodium dichromate market is observing high demand attributed to its increasing application in pigment, metal finishing, chromium compounds preparation, leather tanning, and wood preservative.

Acoustic insulation market size was valued at USD 12.94 Billion in 2019 and is forecasted to reach USD 19.64 Billion by 2027 at a CAGR of 5.3%. The acoustic insulation market is observing high demand attributed to its increasing application in building & construction, automotive, aerospace, and manufacturing.

About Emergen Research

Emergen Research 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 smarter business decisions. We offer market intelligence studies ensuring relevant and fact-based research across multiple industries, including Healthcare, Touch Points, Chemicals, Types, and Energy. We consistently update our research offerings to ensure our clients are aware of the latest trends existent in the market. Emergen Research has a strong base of experienced analysts from varied areas of expertise. Our industry experience and ability to develop a concrete solution to any research problems provides our clients with the ability to secure an edge over their respective competitors.

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The COVID-19 pandemic has taken a profound toll on human life and the global economy, along with a devastating social and psychological impact due to the recurrent lockdown situations. Recently initiated COVID-19 vaccination programs are intended to prevent deaths and reduce peaks in hospitalizations to avoid the collapse of healthcare systems. Since many infected people develop severe disease and debilitating long-term symptoms, limiting the cumulative number of cases is a priority.

Another primary goal of vaccination is to allow the safe reopening of businesses, schools, and public spaces. Prior to implementing vaccination, several strategies such as mask usage, testing and tracing, and social distancing were in place to prevent a surge in cases and subsequent shutdowns. While these measures helped control the transmission of the virus, they were insufficient to prevent the recurring waves of infection in many countries.

Another major concern is the emergence of more infectious variants of the virus in many countries such as the UK, Brazil, and South Africa. The UK variant or B.1.1.7 variant is believed to be significantly more contagious and is overwhelming health care systems in the UK as well as spreading across the globe.

While the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions on new SARS-CoV-2 variants is still not clear, these interventions come at a significant cost. School and business closures disproportionately impact people of color and socioeconomically backward regions. A key goal of vaccination plans should be to limit the intensity and duration of lockdowns this year.

Analyzing the complexities of vaccine implementation using mathematical models

Recently, researchers from France and the USA analyzed the complexities of vaccine implementation during the 3rd wave of SARS-CoV-2 infections and potentially future waves, using a mathematical model calibrated to data from King County, Washington. The researchers' goal was to understand which of the variables have the greatest impact on infections and mortality to help limit them while decreasing time under lockdown. The study is published on the preprint server medRxiv*.

The model used by the team allows for projections in other states with lower or higher incidence at the time of initiation of local vaccination programs. The researchers simulated various scenarios with different vaccination rates, vaccine efficacy profiles, and case thresholds for implementing and relaxing partial lockdowns and assumed that a more contagious variant is currently present at mild levels.

"Our model projects that with the new more infectious variants, higher case thresholds for triggering partial lockdown will result in greater numbers of total infections and deaths per capita."

High vaccination rate and low case threshold for triggering partial lockdown are the key variables for limiting total infections and deaths regardless of vaccine efficacy profile. Heat maps demonstrating joint effects of vaccination rate (x-axis) and case threshold for triggering partial lockdown (y-axis) are shown for four plausible vaccine profiles. a. VESUSC=90% / VESYMP=10% / VEINF=10%, b. VESUSC=50% / VESYMP=10% / VEINF=10%, c. VESUSC=10% / VESYMP=90% / VEINF=10%, d. VESUSC=10% / VESYMP=50% / VEINF=10%. Outcomes are total infections (top row), total deaths (middle row) and days under partial lockdown after vaccination initiation (bottom row). Increasing vaccination rate lowers infections and deaths across all scenarios. Increasing vaccination rate substantially lowers total days under lockdown, particularly when case threshold trigger for partial lockdown is low. Lowering case thresholds for triggering partial lockdown decreases total infections and deaths but results in higher number of days under partial lockdown in many scenarios. A decrease in VESUSC (a to b) results in more infections and deaths with only slight impact on time under lockdown. A decrease in VESYMP (c to d) results in more infections and deaths with only slight impact on time under lockdown. VESUSC provides a substantial reduction in infections but slight reduction in deaths relative to an equivalent VESYMP (a to c and c to d).

Increase in vaccination rate decreases the number of cases and deaths, and the number of lockdown days

In all the scenarios, the new variant rapidly became dominant by early summer. Low case thresholds for partial lockdowns during current and future waves strongly predict lower numbers of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths in 2021. However, there is a predicted delay in the onset of a surge in new variant-related infections in places with relatively higher seroprevalence. For all vaccine efficacy profiles considered in this study, increasing the vaccination rate decreases the number of infections and deaths and the number of days under partial lockdown.

"High efficacy of vaccines against new more contagious variants, and in particular their ability to block ongoing transmission rather than simply preventing symptoms, will potentially prevent thousands of infections and save hundreds of lives in King County."

The researchers project significant uncertainty in future waves' timing and intensity due to variable estimates of infectiousness of newly emerging variants, the efficacy of vaccines against these new variants, refusal of vaccine, and future adherence to masking and social distancing of SARS-CoV-2 infection. Nevertheless, in all plausible scenarios considered in this work, rapid vaccination and early implementation of lockdown are the most crucial variables that help save the most number lives.

"It is often stated that vaccines do not save lives, vaccinations do. Our modeling strongly reinforces this point."

*Important Notice

medRxiv publishes preliminary scientific reports that are not peer-reviewed and, therefore, should not be regarded as conclusive, guide clinical practice/health-related behavior, or treated as established information.
The Lancaster County District Attorneys Office cannot withhold the names of bidders who bought seized property auctioned off by the countys drug task force, a Commonwealth Court panel ruled Wednesday.

That decision, outlined in an opinion by President Judge Mary Hannah Leavitt, overturns a ruling by a county judge and could clear the way for reported for LNP/Lancaster Online to secure that information for an investigation. The DAs office could, however, appeal the Commonwealth Court ruling to the state Supreme Court.

The dispute over the bidder names centers on a request reporter Carter Walker filed in 2018 under the states Right to Know Act.

Walker sought all records from the DAs office regarding drug forfeitures and how that property was sold or otherwise disposed of. The DAs office denied that request, contending that the data was confidential.

When the state Office of Open Records disagreed and ordered the disclosure of the information, the DAs office appealed to the county court. The prosecutors office also released forfeiture records, minus the identities of bidders and purchases of forfeited items, Leavitt noted.

Then-DA Craig Stedman argued before the county judge that bidders at the annual auctions of forfeited property would be subject to privacy violations if their names were released because they were not told they could be identified publicly, Leavitt wrote. She noted that Stedman, who is now a county judge, also contended the information Walker sought would let vengeful drug dealers know who had the property that was seized from them.

Walker and LNP noted the records Stedmans office refused to release were readily provided by officials in Berks, Centre, Chester, Dauphin, Delaware, Lebanon and York counties, Leavitt noted. She cited Walkers argument that these records are important because they can be used to determine whether forfeited property has been handled in accordance with the law.

County Judge Leonard G. Brown III sided with Stedman. Brown found that Walkers right to know request didnt specifically ask for the bidders identities. The county judge also agreed Stedmans privacy argument.

The requested disclosure of the names and home addresses of private bidders at the yearly auction is not closely related to the official duties of the [district attorneys) 0ffice and does not provide insight into its official actions, Brown concluded.

In disagreeing, Leavitt found Walkers request was specific enough to include the release of bidder names. Nor did she accept the privacy argument.

No one participating in a public auction can expect their identity to remain confidential, Leavitt found.

On the other hand, there is a significant public interest in ensuring that law enforcement officials not participate as bidders in the auction to their personal benefit, she wrote. Disclosure of names of successful bidders at public auctions of forfeited items advances the accountability of the law enforcement authorities responsible for the civil forfeiture of property.
Joe Biden's White House discouraged on Wednesday migrants traveling to the southern border seeking asylum in the U.S. because they will be 'turned away' at this time.

'Due to the pandemic and the fact that we have not had the time as an administration to put in place a humane, comprehensive process for processing individuals who are coming to the border, now is not the time to come,' White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters on Wednesday.

She added: 'The vast majority of people will be turned away.'

When Biden was elected, a massive caravan of migrants from Central America began marching to the U.S.-Mexico border to hold the president accountable for his promise to accept all those seeking asylum into the U.S.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki warned illegal immigrants Wednesday that 'now is not the time' to seek asylum at the U.S. southern border

When Joe Biden was elected, a massive caravan from Central America began migrating north to the U.S.-Mexico border with promises of asylum

'Due to the pandemic and the fact that we have not had the time as an administration to put in place a humane, comprehensive process for processing individuals who are coming to the border, now is not the time to come. The vast majority of people will be turned away' she said

Notably, Biden made this promise in contract to Donald Trump's hard-line immigration politics - including the construction of a southern border wall.

On Biden's first day in office last month, one of the more than a dozen executive orders he signed immediately stopped construction of Trump's famed wall.

'Asylum processes at the border will not occur immediately  it will take time to implement,' Psaki admitted.

She added that while 'the vast majority have been turned away', some who have reached the border since Biden took office and are seeking asylum have made it through and are still sitting in limbo awaiting their hearing.

'So this is not the time to come, and this is obviously an emotional issue for many of us,' Biden's press secretary continued during a briefing at the White House Wednesday.

Psaki urged patience, claiming it would take time to get a new process in place for asylum seekers as well as allowing those immigrants already in the U.S. an easier path to citizenship.
The company's unique approach to community building is now helping shelter and foster pets find their forever homes. As part of a free partnership program, rescues and shelters can seamlessly promote their potential adoptees directly (and via their foster networks) to the broader purrch community. The platform's easy-to-use marketing platform plays matchmaker by embedding the content of these prospective adoptees into the feeds of prospective pet parents.

"Our original vision for purrch was pretty simple  to give the growing pet community a safe place to make meaningful connections, engage in authentic conversations and of course, seek out a good laugh," said Vail Weymann, Co-Founder and CEO of purrch. "As our community has grown, we've recognized how important animal advocacy and pet welfare is to our members. It was a natural next step for us to provide those organizations with a prominent home on our platform."

Rescues and shelters have found themselves resource-constrained in the last year given the massive acceleration of pet adoptions due to the pandemic. The ability for these non-profits to keep up with this growing demand and maintain their on-going fundraising campaigns, all while staying in touch with their donors, foster network and alumni, has been a real challenge. The purrch platform provides these organizations with a much-needed turnkey solution, delivering community, and providing a deeper, more authentic way to engage with these networks.

"Purrch offers a unique space for pet people everywhere to come together and build a strong sense of community. At Rescue City we are always looking for new ways to reach more dog lovers and educate them on animal welfare," says Dana Kats, Executive Director at Rescue City. "We are very excited to be a part of purrch's platform, to share our work with a larger network of people, and to create meaningful connections with those looking to foster or adopt in our area."

"During our initial meeting with purrch it was clear how much love, passion and thought was put into creating this app," says Kristen Gerali, Founder of ALIVE Rescue. "ALIVE Rescue knew we needed to partner with purrch in order to help us network our hard-to-place animals and to connect with like-minded individuals. ALIVE Rescue is honored to be a part of this launch."

These partnerships are just the start of a dedicated effort that the company is focused on as part of its recent app relaunch. "We couldn't be more excited about the new branding, user experience and feature set on the new purrch app," said Ken Herbert, Co-Founder and CTO. "Being able to partner with such important organizations only makes our offering that much more valuable to our purrch community. We are excited about what the future holds."

purrch is available for free on the App Store.

About purrch

Purrch is a data-driven mobile app and online community designed to bring pet people of all types and locales together to meet, interact and share all of life's special pet moments in a safe and private environment. Through its pet-centered approach, purrch curates personalized content feeds for its members based on their pets' most important attributes. Purrch also provides a free marketing platform to pet rescues, adoption and advocacy groups, who are seeking a safe way to reach and interact with their respective communities.

About purrch's Partners:

About Adopt-A-Dog

Adopt-A-Dog, founded in 1981 by a group of three friends in Greenwich, CT. Adopt-A-Dog's mission is to save, socialize and secure loving homes for unwanted or abandoned dogs. We accomplish this by providing the highest standard of care for dogs in need with a particular focus on ensuring that all aspects of their overall health and well-being are addressed.

About PAWS

PAWS, the Progressive Animal Welfare Society, was started in 1967 by a dedicated group of friends. What started as a small rescue in Lynwood, WA has grown with a focus on education and advocacy, rehabilitating wild animals and finding homes for companion animals. In addition to adopting homeless cats and dogs into loving homes from shelters in Lynwood and Seattle, PAWS provides emergency care and rehabilitation services to orphaned and injured wild animals with the goal of restoring them into full health and returning them back to the wild. To date, they have cared for over 140,000 wild animals of 260 species. The organization has also made it their mission to educate youth and inspire compassionate action for animals.

About ALIVE Rescue

ALIVE Rescue is a Chicago-based no-kill animal rescue specializing in the old, unwanted, the sick, and forgotten. Founded in March 2008 as a rescue and safe haven for animals through the sole use of foster homes, ALIVE is now months away from opening a new shelter and sanctuary that will allow them to double the number of animals they are able to save. Believing that every animal has the right to a well-balanced, socialized and fulfilled life, ALIVE Rescue provides medical, behavioral, and physical support for animals despite their age, health and/or breed. They also promote sustainable living and caregiving within their communities by building awareness, appreciation, and respect for all animals and the environment.

About Rescue City

Rescue City is a foster-based dog rescue based in Brooklyn, NY. They are committed to saving the lives of dogs in need from underserved shelters. By conducting lifesaving rescue transport from open intake shelters they are able to save a large percentage of animals. Their dedicated foster network helps provide temporary safe homes for these dogs while Rescue City finds permanent, well matched homes.

purrch, Inc Contact: Shannon Lorraine Email: [email protected]

SOURCE purrch

Related Links

https://www.purrchpets.com/


Army to finally wind down its cattle farms

Wife of soldier who martyred in Pulwama, joins Indian Army

18 Indian sailors stuck in China to return to India on Feb 14

India

oi-Deepika S

New Delhi, Feb 10: Eighteen Indian sailors stuck in China will return to India on February 14, union minister Mansukh Mandaviya said on Wednesday.

The stuck crew will sign off from Japan on Wednesday and will be reunited with their families on reaching India.

"Our 18 stranded seafarers of MV Anastasia stuck in China are coming to India. The crew will sign off from Japan today and will reach India on February 14," Ports Shipping and Waterways Minister Mandaviya told PTI.

The Minister said they will be reunited with their families soon.

Mandaviya appreciated the efforts of Indian embassy in China and the Mediterranean Ship Company for arranging the repatriation.

Cargo vessel MV Anastasia was stuck off the coast of China since September 2020, an official said.

Twitter blocks portion of accounts, cites free speech | OneIndia News

Earlier, as many as 23 seafarers of Ship MV Jag Anand were stuck in China had reached India on January 14.

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Story first published: Wednesday, February 10, 2021, 12:38 [IST]
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 10) The Philippines should wait for China to apply its controversial Coast Guard law against the country before running to a tribunal under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea or UNCLOS, retired Senior Associate Justice Antonio Carpio said Wednesday.

In an interview with CNN Philippines, Carpio explained that waiting for an actual incident or violation in the implementation of the measure will strengthen the Philippines position should it decide to bring the case to the global body.

Lets wait for China to apply that law to us and then bring that incident, that violation before an UNCLOS tribunal, Carpio, who was part of the team that argued for and won the South China Sea arbitration case for the Philippines, told The Source.

China can always say, oh, we are not applying the law against you. So we have to wait for an actual case. That will strengthen our position, he added.

Carpio, however, advised the government to prepare early on  including discussing with lawyers  so that they could immediately run to the tribunal if such incident happens.

Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro Teddy Boy Locsin Jr., in an earlier television interview, vowed there will be more than just a protest in case of an incident due to the law.

Chinas newly-implemented measure authorizes its Coast Guard to fire on foreign vessels, demolish foreign structures built on Chinese-claimed reefs and islands, as well set up exclusion zones to keep foreign ships out.

These provisions raised an uproar among Philippine advocacy groups, lawmakers, and security officials, with Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana raising concern over the heightened chances of accidents and miscalculations in the disputed waters.

Beijings Ambassador to the Philippines Huang Xilian earlier allayed fears over the legislation, saying it was only meant to crack down on vicious crimes and will not target any fishermen.

But Carpio insisted the East Asian giants measure violates the UNCLOS and even the United Nations charter, noting that armed force cannot be used to settle maritime disputes.

And firing at the vessels of other countries is use of armed force, which is prohibited by international law to settle disputes among states, Carpio said.

ASEAN, world should oppose

The former magistrate likewise called on other claimant countries within the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations, as well as other nations in the world, to oppose the measure, reiterating that China cannot enforce the law outside of their jurisdiction.

Its only China, among all countries in the world, that is saying that they can use their domestic law in the exclusive economic zone of other countries, Carpio pointed out.

The Chinese [are] trying to change international law so that its hegemonic ambitions can be realized. So all countries in ASEAN and all over the world should oppose this. Because if China succeeds in saying that their domestic law can apply in the EEZ of the Philippines, in the EEZ of Indonesia, Brunei, Malaysia, and Vietnam, then UNCLOS will collapse. There will be no UNCLOS anymore, he argued.

China claims almost the entire South China Sea, and has repeatedly rejected the 2016 arbitral ruling that recognized Manila's sovereign rights in areas of its exclusive economic zone that Beijing contests.

Carpio, meanwhile, assured that a possible move to challenge the measure before the UNCLOS will not affect the Hague ruling.
Joyce Odame, the Child Protection Officer, at the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) has lauded the government for living up to its responsibility of protecting children from illicit internet activities.



She stated that the government has shown a lot of commitment in the area of online child protection and that as far back as 2015 the government started engaging stakeholders around this topic.



This gesture Madam Odame said motivated UNICEF to conduct research just to find out within the landscape threats which has informed the interventions put in place to address the issue.



Speaking to journalists on the sidelines of the Africa Safer Internet Day (SID) Celebration in Accra, the UNICEF Child protection officer disclosed that government's commitment has also been brought to the fore with the passage of the Cyber Security Act.



"The Cyber Security Act has been passed and this law has some provision on child online protection making provision for offences that are punishable by law like online grooming, sextortion and Online Child Sexual Abuse"



Madam Odame noted that the Ministry of Communication through the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has also put in place some programmes to support awareness creation around the issue, stressing that UNICEF is also working with the Ministry of Education to develop a Digital Literacy Package that can be integrated into the school's curricula.



She argued that it is not enough to teach children the parts of the computer or software but also there is the need to integrate some online safety lessons into their studies.



Madam Odame was, however, quick to add that the task is too much for the government to do all, the reason why other stakeholders must come on board.



The UNICEF Child Protection Officer, for this reason, urges parents to be concerned about the contents their wards are exposed to on the internet.



"it is very important for parents to supervise the online activities of their children, it is not just enough to buy an internet-enabled device and give to your child, is important to get involved and know what the child is using that tool for so that you can support the child to use this tool more responsibly and safely".



According to her, it is important for parents and caregivers or people who have the responsibility to take care of children to really brief them about the threats online."



She explained that every threat that children are exposed to in the physical world are replicated in the online world.

SID is an international event that takes place in February every year, to promote a safe and more responsible use of online technology by children and young people across the world.



On Safer Internet Day, the world comes together with a shared vision of making online experiences better for everyone.

This years event, which is the 18th edition, will see a repeat of the 2020 theme Together for a Better Internet across the globe.



It aims among other things to promote the safe and positive use of technology by children and young people.

Source: Ghanaian Publisher









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VICTORIA - The head of a health authority in British Columbia is no longer with the organization following allegations related to misspending on various items including $7 million for respirators that didn't meet provincial standards.

Health Minister Adrian Dix at a news conference in the rotunda at legislature in Victoria on Wednesday May 6, 2020. The head of a health authority in British Columbia has stepped down following allegations related to misspending on various items including $7 million for respirators that didn't meet provincial standards. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chad Hipolito

VICTORIA - The head of a health authority in British Columbia is no longer with the organization following allegations related to misspending on various items including $7 million for respirators that didn't meet provincial standards.

Benoit Morin's departure was announced by the Provincial Health Services Authority on Tuesday, hours after the government released a report it commissioned by Ernst & Young.

Health Minister Adrian Dix said Morin was dismissed without cause and will get nine months' severance pay in keeping with his contract, adding that interim CEO David Byers has been appointed to the position.

Dix said he received a report from his deputy health minister about allegations of misspending late last year and a series of recommendations were made about those concerns, especially related to renovations of executive offices.

"On Dec. 3 we made strong recommendations about what needed to happen about spending that I considered to be not appropriate and that action was taken. And now we've had this report that lays out other concerns. It puts some concerns to rest, it should be said very clearly with respect to Mr. Morin, but raises some other concerns."

The Provincial Health Services Authority is in charge of several health-care programs including BC Cancer and the B.C. Centre for Disease Control, which Dix noted plays a key role in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Ernst & Young says in its report that it looked into allegations of a conflict of interest due to a possible relationship between Morin and a Montreal company that sold respirators last spring.

It says some of the respirators were deemed "counterfeit" but its findings suggested there was no pre-existing relationship between Morin or anyone at the company, identified by the Health Ministry as Luminarie, which could not be reached for comment.

The original order for personal protective equipment last March was outside of the health authority's normal practices, which would have included due diligence procedures on the vendor, the report says.

"The unusual nature of the procurement resulted from global challenges in sourcing (personal protective equipment) at the time and the CEO's involvement in the original purchase, including directing staff to issue a multimillion-dollar deposit to the Montreal vendor."

After the orders were placed, a document within the health authority identified an individual with the same name as the CEO and the name of the founder of the company that sold the respirators, leading to rumours within the health authority about a conflict of interest, the report says.

Staff attempted to negotiate with the supplier and wanted to start legal action shortly after problems with the respirators were discovered but the health authority's board and Morin supported negotiations instead, it says.

But when negotiations failed, other executives decided to pursue legal action without informing Morin or the board of directors, the report says, adding the company filed for bankruptcy in January.

The report says Morin did not agree with his finance staff on whether a writeoff of about $7 million should be recorded in its financial statements for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2020.

He decided to dismiss three members of the executive team and the chief internal auditor last year because they raised concerns about the failed transaction with the company, it says.

"All of the employees' departures were at least in part related to a perceived lack of loyalty to and/or friction with the CEO," the report says.

 By Camille Bains in Vancouver.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 9, 2021.
ZANZIBAR is set to fully exploit blue economy resources, as part of the government's efforts to create jobs and drive economic growth in the Isles.

President Hussein Mwinyi said recently in an exclusive interview that the country is yet to fully exploit the multi-billion shillings sector, revealing that his government is all out to utilise this untapped potential.

Dr Mwinyi noted that for a long time, only one aspect of the blue economy-tourism was being utilised and having realised how lucrative the sector is, his government has mapped out plans that will guarantee sustainable use of ocean resources for economic growth, improved livelihoods and creating jobs.

Dr Mwinyi noted that being economically significant, the eighth phase government is determined to put more focus on this area and looks forward to building a new and vibrant economy aimed at reducing unemployment and poverty among Zanzibaris.

He said at the moment, tourism is a significant source of income in Zanzibar's economy and it is the largest source of foreign exchange.

Currently, tourism contributes 30 per cent to the Islands' GDP, agriculture 20 per cent, Industry 18 per cent and other sectors carry 12 per cent.

According to the Zanzibar Investment Promotion Authority (ZIPA), tourism is one of the fastest growing industries in the Isles, attracting more than 68 per cent of investment projects, 80 per cent of foreign earnings and provides 60,000 direct employment opportunities.

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Recalling how the sector was affected last year by the outbreak of Covid-19, which ravaged economies all over the world, Dr Mwinyi said there was a need to have other reliable sectors so that they do not continue relying on only one sector as final.

"Though tourism will still remain the leading sector of the GDP, we must see how to utilise other areas so that when tourism does not do well, we don't get much affected...tourism is just one aspect of the blue economy," he noted.

President Mwinyi noted that the government has started taking initiative to set up needed infrastructure that will see other economic structures operating outside of the traditional economy.

"We are focusing now on building modern infrastructure such as fishing ports, pushing for modern and deep sea fishing, exploration of oil and gas...all these are aimed at building a vibrant economy," he noted.

Efforts to promote blue economy received a huge boost last week after the Isles government signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for conducting a feasibility study for the construction of a multimillion dollars fishing port, which is expected to bring major changes in the sector.

President Mwinyi witnessed the signing of the deal and urged the public to utilize various opportunities that would emerge during and after the implementation of the grand project.

He said the signing of the MoU was the curtain raiser for the bright future in the Indian Ocean semi-autonomous archipelago.

As set out by the African Union's Agenda 2063, the Blue Economy is perceived as the continent's future because its benefits extend beyond the shores of coastal states and create opportunities for adjacent landlocked communities and countries.
These monsters, maidens, and heroes have watched history unfold from high above the streets of the Hungarian capital.

Kossuth was a lawyer and politician who played an instrumental role in the Hungarian Revolution of 1848. The "father of Hungarian democracy" is one of only a few non-Americans honored with a bust inside Washington's Capitol building.

The building was completed in 1913 as the headquarters of a Hungarian bank.

Little is known about the stone carving, but one local expert believes it may have advertised a King Restaurant that once existed in the ancient hilltop neighborhood.

Little is known about the figure except its inauspicious date of completion in 1939. The world war that broke out that year, which devastated much of Budapest, apparently left the sculpture untouched.

The building once boasted a spectacular cupola ringed with giant griffins. After it was heavily damaged during World War II, the cupola was demolished.

The 1947 ensemble initially honored the Soviet soldiers who died fighting their way into Budapest during World War II. After Hungary's 1989 anti-communist revolution, the monument had its inscription changed to commemorate all of those who have died for the country's freedom.

The building was constructed in 1894 as the head office of the New York Life Insurance Company and featured the "most beautiful coffeehouse in the world" on its ground floor. Today, the landmark operates as a luxury hotel.

The rooftop monument captures one of the miracles of the 13th-century saint's life, when she was said to be sneaking bread from the castle to give to the poor. When challenged by her husband, she opened her cloak to reveal roses that had appeared in place of the stolen bread.

The building conceals a spectacular luxury apartment but is infamous for its rundown exterior.

Steam-powered trains ruled the rails when the sculpture was made in 1884.

The 15th-century King Matthias was known as the "Raven King" for the bird depicted on his coat of arms. According to one legend, Matthias became associated with ravens early in life when one of the birds stole his ring and the young royal chased it down "and slew him, retrieving the ring."

Today, the building houses a school belonging to Hungary's Technical Vocational Training Center.

The bridge was inaugurated in 1876 and a year later Hungarian poet Janos Arany penned a verse about a spate of suicides that took place at the new structure.

A local historian wrote that Roland's presence above the building's entrance warns those entering "that in this building regulations designed to protect the citizens must be observed at all times."

The 6.5-meter-tall figure was emplaced in 2003 in honor of the so-called Apparitions of Fatima, when three Portuguese shepherd children claimed to have seen Mary appear before them shining "brighter than the sun" in 1917.

The small cross atop the crown is bent in imitation of the real crown, which is currently kept in the parliament building.
NEW YORK, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Award winning market research company Fact.MR has recently published an extensive report on the global concrete floor coatings market. As per its analysis, Fact.MR forecasts a positive outlook for FY2021-22, as the global construction industry witnesses a resurgence from the doldrums of the coronavirus pandemic. Eventually, long-term prospects are likely to remain bright, poised to register a CAGR close to 6% through the forthcoming decade.

The market has made credible progress in the historical period, as surging commercial and residential building construction has acquired major prominence, expanding at a value CAGR of approximately 4% from 2016-2020. While key projects came to a standstill in the previous year, lifting of lockdown restrictions have permitted the resumption of some critical projects- including the Harlow Public Health England campus worth 60 million and the Battersea Power Station, expected to become Apple's new headquarters across the United Kingdom.

Similarly, Balfour Betty, which secured a US$ 1.6 billion contract to expand Hong Kong Airport's Terminal 2 in August 2020, is likely to resume its trajectory, generating demand for high-quality concrete floor coatings. A plethora of such massive construction projects across Asia, Europe and the Americas are expected to create profitable opportunities for prominent concrete floor coatings manufacturers in the near future, prompting them to introduce a slew of innovative product offerings.

Governments are lending active support to provide a leverage to domestic construction industries. For instance, India's National Infrastructure Pipeline (NIP) is entrusted with provision of a positive and enabling environment to facilitate private investments in infrastructure projects, including public infrastructure networks such as railways and roadways. This is likely to broaden the manufacturing prospects of key concrete floor coatings providers in the long-run.

"Manufacturers are capitalizing on epoxy-based coatings, attributed to their ability to provide optimum protection against abrasion, turbulence, corrosive fluids and extreme temperatures, thus enhancing the longevity of existing infrastructure," remarks the Fact.MR analyst.

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Key Takeaways from Fact.MR's Concrete Floor Coatings Market Study

Outdoor applications to remain lucrative, indoor coatings surging in popularity

By product, epoxy-based concrete floor coatings are poised to witness high demand

U.S to emerge as a highly attractive market, with prolific developments in store across the architectural coatings segment

U.K to experience steady expansion amid resumption of critical infrastructure projects in the post-pandemic era

Germany and France market shares to aggrandize; development of affordable housing and renewable energy infrastructure to be growth beacons

and market shares to aggrandize; development of affordable housing and renewable energy infrastructure to be growth beacons Massive population expansion to bolster construction projects across China , providing high traction to the concrete floor coatings market

Competitive Landscape

BASF SE, Behr Process Corporation, DAW SE, Nippon Paint Co. Ltd., PPG Industries Inc., The Sherwin Williams Company and Valspar Corporation are among the most prominent concrete floor coatings manufacturers as profiled by Fact.MR. These manufacturers are widening their operations by diversifying product portfolios combined with heightened investments in collaborations, partnerships and acquisitions.

In January 2021, PPG Industries Inc. announced a definitive agreement to acquire global industrial and automotive coatings manufacturer Worwag, which will assist PPGs waterborne, direct-to-metal, liquid and powder coatings offerings across key geographies. This is anticipated to heighten the company's concrete floor coatings portfolio as well.

Also, Sherwin Williams announced the unveiling of its Colormix Forecast palettes for the upcoming year, offering a diverse range of concrete buildings colors spectrum, including the Sanctuary Palette, Encounter Palette, Tapestry Palette and Continuum Palette among others.

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In its latest report, Fact.MR offers an unbiased analysis of the global concrete floor coatings market, providing historical data for the period of 2016-2020 and forecast statistics for the period of 2021-2031. In order to understand the global market potential, its growth, and scope, the market is segmented on the basis of application (indoor and outdoor) and product (epoxy-based, polyaspartic, and other products), across seven major regions of the world (North America, Latin America, Europe, East Asia, South Asia, Oceania, and MEA).

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The outgoing Australian High Commissioner to Nigeria, Claire Ireland, speaks in this interview with PREMIUM TIMES Publisher Dapo Olorunyomi, Taiwo Hassan Adebayo, Busayo Agbola and Adebimpe Abodunde on how Nigeria can attract big multinational corporations into its mining sector, and other issues.

Excerpts:

PT: What are your impressions about this country, which you now have to leave?

High Commissioner: I have only been here for 18 months, which is a lot shorter than I had intended. But I think as many of us have been affected by the COVID-19 crisis, I have been too. Very sadly, my family hasnt been with me and I have three young children; 15, 13 and 9. Theyre not here at the moment and so now, with the COVID crisis, you have to do quarantine every time you travel, so I cant see them as much as I could before. So it is with a very heavy heart that I made the decision to leave the posting early so that I could be with my family.

I work for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in Australia and over the last five years, they have had a really strong commitment to women leadership and to supporting women to take more leadership roles and to be much more engaged across the agencies. We set a target about four or five years ago to have 40 per cent of ambassadors to be female by 2020.

At the time they made that target, it was only 25 per cent of Australian ambassadors around the world that were female and so in a very short period of time theyve managed to achieve that target and Im definitely one of those people who have benefited from that. I was very well supported to take on this role to come here, and when I found, as a woman in a leadership role, that I was faced with this challenge of my family and my career, I was given a huge amount of support by Canberra to step down.

I havent been penalised at all, theyve given me some time out to stay with my family so I can reconnect with them, having been separated for almost nine months now. And so theyve really supported me to do that and given me the time off. And then I will be welcomed back into the department. Theyre very keen for me to carry on and take further roles in Africa down the line. So whilst Im very sad to be leaving here, Im also very proud of the Australian government for its commitment to women leadership and it has enabled me to make what has been a very tough decision in a positive way with a huge amount of support.

The Australian government really does prioritise Nigeria as a country. So, even though Im leaving, they have already identified someone to replace me. They have gone through the process very quickly, weve submitted all the necessary paperwork to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and, hopefully, my replacement will be here very soon so we wont have a big gap between me and the next person. And I think thats really indicative of the commitment that the Australian government has to filling the role.

PT: With regards to Nigeria, what are the Australian foreign policy goals?

High Commissioner: I arrived at a time when we were going through change. We had moved to our current embassy location and we had bought a new piece of land, which is where we are today. And there was a commitment to invest in building a new high commission premises and that really demonstrated our longevity that we saw in terms of our relationship here in Nigeria and the region more broadly.

We have invested a significant amount of money in purchasing this piece of land and we have just completed the first phase of this building. There will be another phase to do another part to this building. So were in this transition of scaling our presence up. But in so doing, we had to scale down our people on the ground at that moment, and so a lot of focus came on to getting the High Commission up and running and so there was less focus at that time on our policy work.

Once we got the embassy back up and running in December last year, one of the first things we did was to have one of our senior official talks with the government of Nigeria. It had been eight years since we had our last senior official talks.

But the team and I really prioritised that as a first priority for us to be able to answer that very question that you just asked me. What are our priorities here, where are we focused, what are we going to do?

So we had the senior official talks. We had a very senior representative come from the Australian government, with the Nigerian High Commissioner who came from Canberra, and we had the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. And I think during those talks, we really acknowledged that we have a modest but a focused engagement here in Nigeria.

While we dont have a huge amount of investment or two-way trade, we have a very long historical relationship that dates back to the 1960s. Just before Nigeria had its independence, the Australian government had a representative here who became the High Commissioner as soon as Nigeria got its independence. And so for the last 60 years, we have had a very enduring relationship built in the Commonwealth.

But perhaps at this moment in time, there wasnt a very deep trade relationship particularly or a very deep political relationship. So the senior official talk was a chance to really regroup and say where our priorities are.

Following the senior official talks, what the team and I have done is to develop an internal think-piece to guide us on where our priorities are for the next five years. We wanted to make sure the outcome of the senior official talks was really embedded in our engagement and we identified four main areas where we are going to work. The first area is our economic relationship. Like I said, we dont have a big two-way trade between our countries. Australia buys oil from Nigeria and we used to sell wheat but it is not (in) huge numbers.

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What we do have, though, is a big intellectual investment in the mining sector. Since 2003, the Australian government has been working very closely with the Nigerian government to support the development of the mining sector, and that was really starting from the basics, in terms of getting the mining legislation in place. The legislation that is in place in Nigeria now is very similar and mirrored on the mining legislation in place in West Australia, for example.

And so weve shared intellectual knowledge and capability of our own experience of 150 years in the mining sector to make sure weve enabled Nigeria the opportunity to develop its mining sector and get that legal framework in place, which is really critical and a foundation for it. So thats happened and the sector is developing.

There is still a lot for the sector to develop in terms of being able to be competitive, compared to the rest of West Africa like Ghana, Senegal, whove got much further advanced mining sectors. But what Nigeria is doing, and it has had support from the World Bank through a project called Mcdyver, is in terms of mapping and geology.

For example, to be enabled to get mining leases transparently and for the private sector to purchase, they need to know whats in the ground, they need to have the geological data and that needs to be open and transparently available. Thats what the mining industry is working on and the Mcdyver project has been helping them to do.

Australia has been very much supporting that in the background, sharing our technology, experience and skills. We have a couple of Australian mining companies here working on the ground to develop projects and have mining leases. And so theyre very much looking forward to the day when they can begin extracting minerals. For the moment, theyre not there yet, theyre still taking their analysis before getting to that point.

I think whats exciting when I talk to them is we are really excited that if Nigeria is able to get an internationally recognised company to have a successful mining operation in the ground. It would really demonstrate to the rest of the world the transparency and the good systems because Australian companies, they have to operate with good environmental due diligence, good social due diligence. If all those things are in place and you have an international company like an Australian company in place, you know then you have world-class standard.

At the moment Nigeria has a Canadian company, Thor, whos doing some gold mining and that has been the first one to really hit off. I keep my fingers crossed and hope that Australia could be the next country to have a successful relationship and partnership with Nigeria in terms of the mining sector.

And I think, what I said to the mining minister, that is what would really show to the rest of the world that Nigeria is open for business and is a credible country to do business in when it comes to the mining sector. We are not there yet but we are getting close and there is a lot of people working very hard to make that happen. Australia will stay fully engaged in that sector and fully supporting, where we can.

And then, just recently, we had a very successful engagement with Premium Times itself, in terms of the women in mining monograph that was done. And I think going back to my earlier point on women in leadership, and from my own experience with women engaging in the mining sector, we see that also as critical. So to be able to work on those areas is really the whole package when it comes to supporting the mining sector.

So mining is probably the biggest area that were engaged in. The other main area is the education sector. We have had over the years something called the Australian Awards. The Australian government had a scholarship programme for Nigerians to study in Australia. But at the moment, with the COVID crisis, our borders are closed and so weve had to put a pause on that programme. I know it is a challenge for international students right now.

But in Australia, our universities are world-class and it is a big destination for international students in the world. I really hope that, once the COVID crisis is over and people are able to travel again, that we would be in that situation where we would be able to promote the education sector in Australia. Over the last five years, we have seen the number of Nigerian students who are studying in Australia has gone up quite a lot. It is still not a lot of people, it is still only around 3,000. But a few years ago, that was only 500 students.

And I think there is that recognition that Australia is a real gateway to South-east Asia and the Pacific. So when you come to study in Australia, its not just a fantastic Australian education youre getting, its also a gateway to networks, to other students. Particularly, there are Chinese students, Pacific students studying in our universities. And so those networks are formed and enable Nigerians to broaden their own networks into an area that perhaps they havent historically had those relationships. So the mining and the education are really, from a sectoral perspective, the areas that we are actively engaged in.

Agriculture is an area that we feel is, perhaps, underexplored. But there is raw potential, given the similarities in our climates. At the moment, we are not doing a huge amount in that area. Were doing some light exchange in the dairy sector but we are not doing a huge amount. Like I said, our analysis and research show that given the similarity in climate, given that Nigeria wants to become more productive in its own country, and that we have the technology and capabilities that could be worth sharing, I think over the next five years, I think wed like to explore that more. But our priorities remain the mining sector and the education sector.

PT: Is there something you are doing regarding supporting Nigeria to develop local capacity in the education sector, especially basic education?

High Commissioner: Our relationship is an economic partnership, so we dont have a bilateral aid programme in Nigeria. We do give aid financing but through the multilaterals. I am very conscious that we give our bilateral aid assistance to the Pacific and Asian Pacific countries who are our neighbours. It is the Europeans, Americans who give a lot of bilateral aid assistance here in Africa and in Nigeria particularly.

To answer your question, the last thing we think Nigeria needs is Australia to come here with another basic education project. So we give our money to the multilaterals and we trust the multi-laterals to prioritise investment in this country. For example, we put a lot of money into UNICEF who work here, we put a lot of money into UNDP and the World Bank. We are believers in the multi-lateral system and the global rules-based system, and so we feel the better way to get aid investment to support basic education, like youre talking about, is through the experts like the World Bank and the UN system. That is how our money comes through for that. We dont have any separate bilateral programmes, to answer your question directly.

PT: When you started, you mentioned the historic relationship between Nigeria and Australia. How do you assess the current relationship, with regards to shared commitment to international public good like climate change and fighting terrorism?

High Commissioner: This is something I have really been thinking about during my time here. Because when you come here as a high commissioner, youre here to promote the relationship between two countries and you want to see a really strong bilateral relationship. And one thing I have really tried to understand is, where is the added value in that relationship and what can we bring?

And I really have landed back to that point, multilateralism. Those kind of shared values is something we really have in common. Back in 1960 when our relationship first started, it was very much off Nigeria being a member of the Commonwealth and we were members of the Commonwealth, so that partnership organisation brought us together. And that was the basis of our relationship then.

I think the distance between the two countries makes a bilateral relationship very different to what you would have with a European country. So it is where can we really add that value?

So for example, right now, Nigeria and Australia are both in the Human Rights Council. We are working in the UN on the human rights council, both of us pushing for those issues to become mainstream and institutionalised in our partner countries. And I think where our added value comes, and where our relationship with Nigeria particularly comes, is to work on those shared values. The global dynamics are changing and the power dynamics are changing and understandably for Australia, weve really focused on our backyard in terms of the Asian Pacific, and thats our priority in terms of our neighbours.

And I hear a very similar story when I hear the Nigerian Foreign Minister talk about your background in terms of the ECOWAS community. So I think were really like-minded in our approach. While we have different focus areas, the approach to focus in our immediate neighbours and surrounding. For us, it is the Pacific, Asian Pacific, the Asean community. For us, were part and parcel of that. When I hear Nigeria talk about its foreign policy, it is about its immediate neighbours Cameroon or Benin, then the Chad Basin, then the ECOWAS and the African Union.

So our approach is actually very similar and I think what is interesting is where we can help potentially bring the two together. The more that we can help share in the Asian Pacific whats happening, the more we can learn from Nigeria about whats happening in Africa. And it is at that higher level where I think theres a real potential for working together, and it is those shared values like human rights and climate change. In the Commonwealth still we have those forums where we can work together.

PT: Do you have any running programme with Nigeria on climate change?

High Commissioner: No, I dont think we do.

PT: You should, because Nigeria is considerably affected by the climate change. You are aware of the farmers and herdsmen crisis and it has a link with climate change.

High Commissioner: Absolutely. When I presented my credentials to President (Muhammadu) Buhari, one thing he spoke to me about was the climate change issue and the Lake Chad Basin. And he was really concerned about it. We did talk about the fact that, while we dont have a programme particularly between the two countries, we have a lot of shared experience.

So obviously in Australia you know our climate is very harsh. Fires. Drought is also something weve struggled with. And the Murray-Darling basin is a big trans-boundary water resource that has really suffered over the years of drought. Our water sources have dried up and weve had to work together collectively across states to be able to reinvigorate the climate and support farmers who depend on the water resource for it.

So we have a lot of experience that we can share and thats something we are very committed to. And obviously, we will be at the Cup 21 in Glasgow. It is disappointing that it wont be this year and had to be postponed till next year. But Australia stands firmly committed to that agenda. So again, working at the multi-lateral level and we would be working with Nigeria. But on a bilateral level, we dont have a programme.

PT: How optimistic are you that the support you have given Nigeria to develop this legal framework in the mining sector will translate to something that will encourage companies from your country to operate here? And how optimistic are you about Nigerias business environment to encourage investment from abroad?

High Commissioner: My background, before I got into the foreign policy side, I worked in aid for 25 years and Im very passionate about it. But Im also very passionate about the fact that you have just touched on, that you actually need a trade relationship and trade is a really important part of it.

To get to sustainable economic development, I am a firm believer that we need to move away from lots of small-scale projects and we need to focus on positive change and institutionalised change. I am often having debates with my colleagues who work on the aid programme here about when that kind of mining company finally takes off that will be potentially 100-150 year mine? A really long duration in terms of economic engagement, which will in turn employ up to 5000 people down the value chain for a sustained number of years. And how much more transformation that will be to the economy than another project which perhaps doesnt have that sustainability?

So Im a real believer that you need to get that proper sort of engagement and you need to have that trade to be able to sustain the economy. But I do believe, (my background is in environmental management), that you have to do it sustainably, so environmentally sustainable development is critical.

So whilst Im passionate about the mining sector, it has to be done right, it has to be done with the communitys engagement, it has to be done in a way which isnt going to negatively impact the environment. So if you get that all right, I really believe that is much more beneficial long-term for a countrys development than small aid projects which potentially dont have the sustainability.

To answer the second part of your question, how optimistic am I about that happening anytime soon? I think Ive realised that its going to take longer than I imagined when I first arrived. I would love to be leaving here to say that the Australian Mining Company is now at the extraction stage. But it is not and there are still these roadblocks that the companies come across. And I think what we have here is that the Australian government kind of convey what those policies are.

Why is it that the international company isnt yet at the extraction stage? One of the things that we have discovered with our private sector companies is the alignment of community development agreements with the mining leases. That presents a sort of challenge. Getting access to information on the geology has been a challenge. And so, I think thats where we can bring the conversation to the mining minister, about what those challenges are which are preventing the companies to be exploring or further extracting at the moment.

So its not happening yet. I think there are still a few hurdles to get through. But we are certainly passionate and will advocate to try and make it happen. We certainly see the potential. There are a lot of phenomenal resources here in Nigeria to make it happen but it is going to take sustained commitment by the Nigerian government to make it a reality.

PT: Does Australia have any local laws that prevent multi-nationals from using products produced by children or from using children in their factories or mines?

High Commissioner: Yes we do actually. There are a couple of things to note here. One, we have members signed up to the EITI, Extraction Industry Transparency Initiative. Australia is committed to that and that is part of the process, you know, having that transparency out there. Linked to that is also another initiative called the Voluntary Principles Initiative (VPI) and thats about making sure companies and governments sign up to exactly what youre saying, that commitment to social due diligence, environmental due diligence.

Australia was taking on the chair of the VPI this year and Nigeria is also a member of that, engaged in that. And that was something we were hoping to really take forward this year but perhaps got a bit slowed down because of the COVID crisis.

But certainly, this is where I mean we are real advocates of free trade system, a global laws-based system. And WTO, as you know, is a system we are really passionate about. We want to see a real trading system with the rules in place that we all kind of follow and commit to. So we really do it into those values and ensuring that environmental standards and social standards are committed to. So yeah, weve signed up to those agreements, we advocate for those agreements in the UN, we advocate for them in the WTO and we certainly implement them in our own country.

PT: What priorities does Australia have for Africa?

High Commissioner: Can I answer that in two ways, personally and professionally?

I first worked in Africa, in Kenya in 1995, so Ive worked in Africa for a number of years. I have lived in Kenya, I have lived in Uganda, I have lived in South Africa, I have worked across most of Sub-Saharan Africa. But it was the first time I have lived and worked in a West African country, and its been such a different experience to my East African experience. But it is one I have really loved. It is so different to any country in Africa that I have worked in before.

Whilst there were a lot of frustrations, as with any country, it is a country that really gets under your skin in a positive way. I think I feel for Nigeria because as soon as you say the word, Nigeria, people have this negative impression of Nigeria. But when you get here, and you live and work here, your mind is opened up in the most incredible way.

The potential for Nigeria is phenomenal. The education of so many Nigerians is superior, I often feel uneducated and under-qualified when I am talking to people like you. People have studied in Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge. Nigerians value education in a way which I have seen in no other country and are really so well educated, so the potential is phenomenal.

I see lots of frustrations, both from my own day to day experiences and from fellow Nigerians who are frustrated. But also, what I see is a phenomenal commitment. Both from Nigerians in Nigeria and also the diaspora, the commitment to this country is so inspirational and so motivating.

To answer the second part of your question, I think Australia, were honest about our relationship. It is not huge, but it is a relationship we are committed to. And like I said, we have invested in this new high commission residence and we see ourselves here for the long term. We are commitment in terms of our engagement on a global platform and in the UN, in the Commonwealth, and we see the relationship as one we would want to continue at that kind of global, multi-lateral level.

I hope that in 5-10 years time I come back and I see the Australian Mining Company in the ground and I meet a lot more Nigerians who have studied in Australia. If I come back in 5-10 years time, that would be what success looks like to me. I will leave here an absolute advocate for Nigeria and I will tell people a positive story about the potential of Nigeria and particularly the youth of Nigeria.

PT: Do you have any sleepless nights over the conduct of Nigerians in your country?

High Commissioner: I know that today, there was a petition of about 200,000 people in the UK to have an investigation and a parliamentary debate about what happened in Lekki (tollgate shooting). So it is fascinating to see you have that many Nigerians represented in the UK that can have that kind of positive impact on government.

To answer that question, we dont have a huge diaspora in Australia. Its only about 8,000 Nigerians who are registered in Australia. But what you do have are 8,000 really well-educated Nigerians. They are doctors, professors, legal practitioners. They are a very smart, well-educated diaspora who do engage and engage regularly with me.

So what we try to do as the High Commission here and also as the diaspora back in Australia is to help promote a more positive image of Africa back in Australia. Theres an African music festival that a Nigerian organises in Melbourne each year and we try to sort of promote that positive image.

But just like youve had Nigerian citizens in the UK raise concerns over the EndSARS, youve had in Australia. And Im aware that the Nigerian diaspora in Australia have written to the prime minister with their concerns about what is happening. I think it is incredible to see that breadth of support for what is happening in Nigeria by the diaspora in other countries.

I dont think I have quite as big a headache as my counterparts in America or in the UK. But Nigerians are really vocal and theyre really committed to their country and thats what I have seen. Even in Australia, we see that.

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Police in Arizona have arrested a 74-year-old woman who they say struck her sleeping boyfriend in the head with a hammer and then pulled a gun on him.

According to the Bullhead City Police Department, Marilyn Kepler told officers she was upset with her boyfriend, also age 74, because he refused to switch the TV off so she could sleep.

Kepler was booked into the Mohave County Jail on suspicion of aggravated assault and domestic violence, according to police.

Marilyn Kepler, 74, has been charged with aggravated assault and domestic violence. Kepler is accused of hitting her sleeping boyfriend in the head with a hammer

Police learned of the incident on Monday when they got a call from law enforcement in Kingman, reporting that Bullhead City man was being treated at Kingman Regional Medical Center for injuries to his head.

The victim told medical staff that he was asleep at home when he woke up to his girlfriend, Kepler, hitting him in the head with a hammer.

The man was able to convince Kepler to take him to the hospital for treatment, but he said that she drove past the medical facility and pulled a gun on him while operating the car.

'The victim reported he was able to wrestle the gun away and get out of the vehicle. Kepler then drove away,' according to police. 'Some people driving by took him to the closest hospital for treatment.'

On the drive to the Kingsman Regional Medical Center in Arizona (pictured), the victim said Kepler pulled a gun on him, but he managed to wrestle it away from her

Kepler told police she was upset with her boyfriend because he had left the television on during the night and she couldnt sleep

Police then went to the 1800 block of Arcadia Plaza in Bullhead City and took Kepler into custody.

During an interview, the gun-toting septuagenarian 'explained that she was upset with her boyfriend because he had left the television on during the night and she couldnt sleep,' according to the police.

Mohave Valley Daily News reported that the couple had a history of domestic violence, including an incident that took place in March 2020, during which Kepler called the police claiming that her boyfriend had yelled at her and thrown her to the ground. She ultimately declined to press charges against him.

The boyfriend accused Kepler of being verbally abusive and harassing him, and he also claimed that the woman had poured Clorox in his coffee.
At issue in the Senate chamber will be many of the fundamental aspects that defined Trumps years in power: relentless assaults on truth, deliberate efforts to foment divisions, shattering of norms and undermining of a democratic election

This was no phone call transcript, no dry words on a page open to interpretation. This was a horde of extremists pushing over barricades and beating police officers. This was a mob smashing windows and pounding on doors. This was a mass of marauders setting up a gallows and shouting, Take the building! and Fight for Trump!

As the United States Senate opened an unprecedented second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump on Tuesday amid the echoes of history, the House managers prosecuting him played powerful video images of last months deadly assault on the Capitol that made abundantly clear how different this proceeding will be from the first.

Where the case against Trump a year ago turned on what might have seemed like an abstract or narrow argument about his behind-the-scenes interactions with a far-off country, Ukraine, the case this year turns on an eruption of violence that Americans saw on television with their own eyes  and that the senators serving as jurors experienced personally when they fled for their lives.

Rather than a judgment of where foreign policy turns into political excess, this sequel trial amounts to a reckoning over Trumps very presidency. At issue in the Senate chamber over the coming days will be many of the fundamental aspects that defined Trumps four years in power: his relentless assaults on truth, his deliberate efforts to foment divisions in society, his shattering of norms and his undermining of a democratic election.

Still, this trial may end up with the same verdict as the last one. On a test vote on the constitutionality of prosecuting a president after he leaves office, 44 Republicans on Tuesday stood by Trump, a measure of his enduring sway within his party and a signal that he most likely will win the 34 votes he needs for acquittal given the two-thirds supermajority required for conviction.

But if the six Republicans who voted to proceed also vote to convict him for inciting an insurrection, it will be the most senators to break from a president of their own party in any impeachment trial in US history.

I would not have thought it when I was sitting on the Senate floor trying the first impeachment  it turns out that was just the opening act, said Norman L Eisen, a lawyer for House Democrats during last years trial on Trumps pressure on Ukraine for political help. The second one crystallizes all the anti-democratic elements that characterised Trumps tenure and his Ukraine high crimes but brings them to an even higher pitch.

The emotional punch of this case was evident on the Senate floor Tuesday.

Sitting in what amounted to the crime scene, the same chamber they evacuated just a month ago moments before Trumps supporters stormed in, some of the senators watched raptly as the scenes of violence played out on the screens before them. Others turned away.

The lead House manager, Represntative Jamie Raskin, choked up as he recounted bringing his daughter and son-in-law to the Capitol that day, just a day after burying his 25-year-old son, only to have them sending farewell texts and making whispered goodbye phone calls because they thought they were going to die.

Make no mistake about it, as you think about that day, things could have been much worse, said Representative David Cicilline, another of the managers. As one senator said, they could have killed all of us.

Trumps defence team recognised the power of the other sides presentation, with one of his lawyers, Bruce L Castor Jr., admitting that the managers had done a good job in offering their case and even acknowledging that voters rejected Trump.

But they complained that the House team was playing to emotions rather than law or reason, trying to rile up senators with inflammatory images and then twisting his words to unfairly blame the violence on Trump.

David I Schoen, another of the former presidents lawyers, said the videotape was designed by experts to chill and horrify you and our fellow Americans as if an impeachment trial were some sort of blood sport.

It is again for pure, raw, misguided partisanship, Schoen added. They do not need to show you movies to show you that the riot happened here. We will stipulate that it happened and you know all about it.

There is, of course, a certain paradox in a lawyer for a reality-show president complaining about the power of visual images. The longtime star of The Apprentice appreciates better than most how to tell a story on television.

There was no compelling video in the Ukraine case, just recordings of people testifying to events the viewers could not watch themselves. None of the senators who rendered last years verdict felt physically threatened by Trumps telephone call with Ukraines president seeking help smearing his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden.

This impeachment is a more of a made-for-television event, which is something the former president surely understands, said Michael DAntonio, a Trump biographer. Where the previous one involved many narrative strands, a long span of time and very little action, this one offers a compact story with escalating tensions and a violent conclusion.

It also raises a broader indictment of Trump, one that may not seem quite so removed to everyday Americans who had little interest in Ukraine or saw Trumps interventions there as politics as usual.

When House Democrats moved to impeach Trump the first time, they debated whether to advance as many as 10 articles of impeachment charging him with all sorts of crimes, including obstructing the Russia investigation, authorising hush money for women to cover up sexual affairs, illegally diverting money to his border wall and profiting personally from his office.

Instead, they opted for the more circumscribed case involving Ukraine because they thought it was easiest to prove.

Even some Republican senators agreed by the end of last years trial that Democrats had proved the case  they just did not deem it significant enough to merit conviction and removal from office.

As a result, Trump emerged emboldened by his acquittal.

This time, other than his staunchest allies, most Republican lawmakers are not defending Trumps actions nor arguing that they were not impeachable. Instead, they have focused on process or politics, maintaining that it is unconstitutional to try a former president or a distraction from serious issues like fighting the coronavirus pandemic.

But the case that will play out over the next week will put the most aberrant elements of Trumps presidency on display. For four years, he played to the crowd, stirring anger, whipping up us-against-them conflicts and at times encouraging violence. He peddled dishonest versions of reality to suit his political needs and told supporters not to believe anyone but him. He undercut faith in democratic institutions and pushed boundaries other presidents would not have.

All of which played out in the months that led to the election on 3 November and the Capitol siege on 6 January and will now be scrutinised  how he promoted flagrantly bogus fraud complaints to try to cling to power even after voters rejected him, how he pressured state and local officials to subvert election results in his favour, how he revved up supporters to march on the Capitol by telling them their country was at stake.

Michael W McConnell, a conservative former appeals court judge and author of The President Who Would Not Be King, said the impeachment articles in the Ukraine case were weak. The abuse of power charge stated a plausible ground for removal but was not so compelling, while the obstruction of Congress article was not legally sound on its face.

This time, although the articles of impeachment were badly drafted, the charges are significantly more serious, unquestionably amounting to high crimes and misdemeanors, he said. I suspect that is why Mr Trumps defenders are desperately searching for a rationale for voting not to convict that is not based on defending or excusing what he did.

Trump benefits from the tribal nature of todays politics. Much as they may not like him, most Republican lawmakers have stuck to their side of the fence  criticising Trumps actions was one thing, but joining hands with Democrats in a politically charged up-or-down verdict on his presidency is another.

Similarly, polls show broad condemnation of Trumps actions but only somewhat more support for conviction this time than last time.

That is why Trumps defense team played its own videos Tuesday showing some Democrats calling for his impeachment almost from the minute he took office, arguing that their current drive is just the latest chapter in a campaign of retribution, a point intended to rally Republicans behind him again.

And so while the Trump presidency is over, the struggle over the Trump presidency is not. For the next week, it will play out in gritty, angry, ugly words and images until its destined denouement.

Peter Baker c.2021 The New York Times Company

ATLANTA, Feb. 9, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Georgia Power signed on to the Metro Atlanta Chamber's (MAC's) "Atl Action for Racial Equity" initiative to elevate diversity, equity and inclusion in the business community, while honoring the city's civil rights history.

Through today's initiative announcement, Georgia Power joins more than 150 companies across the region including Newell Brands, Cox, Coca-Cola, UPS, Truist, AT&T, Delta Airlines, The Home Depot and Chick-fil-A to address the effects of systemic racism in the community and workplace.

"At Georgia Power, we deeply value the diversity of our team and the communities we serve. That's why we are committed to creating an environment where employees and customers feel a sense of belonging and can be their true authentic selves. We're proud to be a part of the Metro Atlanta Chamber's Atl Action for Racial Equity efforts to do the same here in Atlanta. We believe businesses working together to ensure equality is how we can make a collective impact, and we're thankful for all of the Chamber's hard work to bring us together," said Paul Bowers, Chairman and CEO and Chris Womack, president of Georgia Power.

Last year, MAC announced four key areas to drive collective impact to address the region's racial equity challenges including advancing black talent, championing inclusive economic development, expanding access to quality education, and investing in workforce development.

In 2020, Georgia Power, along with a coalition of leading Georgia businesses, signed a letter asking the Georgia General Assembly to support, approve and sign into law a comprehensive, specific and clear bill against hate crimes.

House Bill 426, also known as the Georgia Hate Crimes Act, was signed into law by Governor Brian Kemp following bipartisan support to extend protections to individuals targeted based on biases.

About Georgia Power

Georgia Power is the largest electric subsidiary of Southern Company (NYSE: SO), America's premier energy company. Value, Reliability, Customer Service and Stewardship are the cornerstones of the company's promise to 2.6 million customers in all but four of Georgia's 159 counties. Committed to delivering clean, safe, reliable and affordable energy at rates below the national average, Georgia Power maintains a diverse, innovative generation mix that includes nuclear, coal and natural gas, as well as renewables such as solar, hydroelectric and wind. Georgia Power focuses on delivering world-class service to its customers every day and the company is recognized by J.D. Power as an industry leader in customer satisfaction. For more information, visit www.GeorgiaPower.com and connect with the company on Facebook (Facebook.com/GeorgiaPower), Twitter (Twitter.com/GeorgiaPower) and Instagram (Instagram.com/ga_power).

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PHILIPSBURG: --- Prime Minister Silveria Jacobs made clear on Wednesday when questioned about the ongoing dismissal saga at the Princess Juliana International Airport (PJIAE) that the government of St. Maarten did not interfere in the dismissal process that was undertaken by PJIAE Holding Company. Jacobs said that while she has been receiving many letters she found it quite uncanny that the letter sent to her by the World Bank was leaked to the media before the Government of St. Maarten had the opportunity to handle it.

Prime Minister Jacobs confirmed that the letter was sent to her cabinet while she was reporting to Parliament last week, she said she was not even aware of the letter, and when she was informed, she still had to attend parliament the said day.

Jacobs said so far, the government of St. Maarten did not deliberate on the letter as yet but assured that it will be handled including other aspects relating to the agreements made with their donors and those funding the reconstruction of PJIAE and all of those that are now interested in the corporate governance and who should have a say in the corporate governance of the government-owned company namely Princess Juliana International Airport (PJIAE).

Jacobs said the World Bank letter is not the first to be leaked to the media, however, she prefers to deal with confidential matters in a confidential way, until the government of St. Maarten is ready to divulge what is necessary to the general public.

Prime Minister Jacobs further explained when questioned said that as a shareholder of PJIAE, the government asked for reports which still has to be perused. The Prime Minister said while its the governments role to hold the holding company responsible, it is also the holding company that has to hold the management for whatever is going on within the company. Jacobs made clear that the government of St. Maarten cannot interfere with whatever the Holding Company is doing and deems fit and the same goes for outside governments and entities.
The head of a Stormont committee has criticised DUP representatives who declined to take part in a meeting on the Northern Ireland Protocol.

The snub came as the Executive Committee heard from Northern Ireland MPs as well as TDs and senators from the Republic of Irelands Committee on the Implementation of the Good Friday Agreement.

Last week the DUP announced it would stop taking part in north-south activities related to the Protocol.

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There has been opposition to additional checks at the regions ports under the terms of the protocol, with unionists condemning an Irish Sea border.

Executive Committee chairman Colin McGrath said he had been informed that members of the DUP would not be attending that segment of the meeting.

I do have to say that I find that disappointing, he said.

If youre not prepared to be part of the solution then you stand accused of being part of the problem Colin McGrath

There are many businesses and many groups who will be impacted by the rollout of the protocol in its early days, and I feel that if youre not prepared to be part of the solution then you stand accused of being part of the problem.

I think that is both equally unhelpful and is quite sad.

Sinn Feins Fermanagh MP Michelle Gildernew said it was unfortunate that not all parties were represented.

We have unprecedented challenges on the island of Ireland as a result of Brexit, she said.

The SDLPs South Belfast MP Claire Hanna said: I regret that there are those in the DUP who are not (here). Its 2021, if people cant participate in a video conference about the pressing political, practical and economic issues of our time

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Senator Niall Blaney said: Like others, I am disappointed that the DUP have decided not to partake.

He urged that efforts be made to bring the DUP on board with the engagement.

UUP MLA Doug Beattie, the sole unionist representative in attendance, described the DUPs move as their decision.

He warned of frictions and instabilities that cannot be batted away and ignored and could lead to the unravelling of a lot of good work over many years by many good people.

In Northern Ireland we have a fine balance where both communities have a balance as to how we go about our daily lives and we worry about that balance continually and right now, if we had put up a hard border on the island of Ireland, that balance would have been upset. We have put a border in the Irish Sea and that balance has been upset and that will affect north-south co-operation, he said.

I would plead with you all that we cannot ignore that because thats where we are now.

Ms Hanna responded by thanking Mr Beattie for engaging and agreed that Northern Ireland is a delicately balanced place, and that equilibrium has certainly been upset by Brexit but she added the realities of friction in the Irish Sea are considerably more manageable than frictions on land across 300 border crossings.

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Meanwhile, Sinn Fein MLA Martina Anderson raised documentation at Dublin Port perhaps taking 24 hours, compared with four hours at Belfast, Larne and Warrenpoint ports.

She urged that members get into solution mode and work collectively to sort out this Brexit mess.

I hope that this is only one of many meetings, that we can have other meetings going forward and that we can start to package solutions, she said.

Speaking outside the meeting, Mr McGrath criticised the DUP for a childish attitude that serves nobody.

He said they missed an important chance to brief political representatives from across the island, branding it a wasted opportunity.
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Upright Brewing, the highly acclaimed but subterranean brewery near Portlands Rose Quarter, is planning two expansion projects that would haul it out of a longtime basement home thats quaint and cozy  but cramped and locationally confusing.

At the same time, founder and owner Alex Ganum said, Upright will also continue to branch out its offerings  accelerating a shift in focus from farmhouse ales to other traditional Old World styles.

Upright will close its current taproom and open a cafe and taproom on the first floor of its current Leftbank Building, 240 N. Broadway, taking over the space previously occupied by the Sting Ray Cafe, which gave up its lease. The ground-floor space will be a partnership with Sellwoods The Portland Bottle Shop, which will oversee food and coffee service.

And Upright will open a second taproom in a vacant former Northeast Portland gas station. Ganum said the satellite bar, at 7151 N.E. Prescott St., would be a neighborhood spot. Really low key and modest, with a TV for Blazer games, a couple food carts onsite and possibly operating as a coffeehouse during the day.

Both locations will include the farmhouse ales Upright built its name on, but will also include two cask taps. The cask offerings reflect a shift: Upright has specialized in mixed- and wild-fermentation beers with a French and Belgian influence, but those will give some ground to an array of traditional pub styles drawing from places like Germany and the United Kingdom, Ganum said.

Weve been focused on farmhouse (beers) for so long, but we have been making less over the years and branching out into more traditional beers, he said during an interview with The Oregonian/OregonLive. Were going to keep doing that, so Im hoping that as time goes on people wont just associate us with farmhouse but more with traditional beers.

Upright will also continue to produce a handful of IPAs, a style that has become more common in the taproom in recent years.

The move up one floor is likely to be the first expansion project to open. Ganum said work has begun to clear out the space, which will then be revamped and updated. He expects the taproom  whose windows will face the east end of the Broadway Bridge at the Broadway and Weidler merge  will give Upright a much higher profile and draw more customers.

Its a huge change for us because weve been in the basement forever, Ganum said. Theres two huge garage doors there, so in summer well have a ton of light and air. We will be on the sidewalk and dont have to just hope people can find us.

Ganum said the new locations will allow Upright to remain focused on low-volume brewing with tap and bottle sales inhouse. The brewery will remain in the basement, which, even with the taproom gone, isnt big enough for a canning line, he said, so canning is not being considered.

And even if he did have room, canning and distribution wouldnt be in the future, anyway.

I dont want to do that, Ganum said. I just want to get back to making our 1,000 barrels a year like we were prepandemic and survive and thrive on that.

Its less fun to run a brewery that way, anyway, Ganum said. Plus, I just dont want to walk into a store and see (Upright beer) at the end of the aisle at room temperature. That stuff kills me.

Ganum has no set opening date yet for the new upstairs space.

I dont expect it to take forever, but were not feeling rushed either, he said. Im not sure when it will come together, but as soon as were ready to relocate up there, we will.

And if the pandemic is still going, well still do our tasting room (to-go) stuff then reopen when we can.

The new Cully neighborhood location is awaiting permits, Ganum said. He has no idea when he will get the permits, but once he does, it shouldnt take too long to put it together.

Whenever the new spaces open, and as Upright moves farther down the road of U.K.-inspired bitters, milds, pale ales and dry stouts and German-inspired dunkels, schwartzbiers and altbiers, to name a few, Ganum said hes excited to continue the brewerys evolution and growth, both physically and philosophically.

Id love for folks to view Upright as an unfussy brewery thats focused, he said, but still playful and not shy about expressing our character.

-- Andre Meunier; ameunier@oregonian.com

Subscribe to Andres text service and get ongoing alerts about beer releases and news from the Portland and Oregon beer scene. And check out Andres beer reviews on Untappd, where hes andremeunier13, and follow him on Instagram, where hes @oregonianbeerguy.
New York:

US Congressman Tulsi Gabbard has said, a sister-state partnership will soon be announced between Hawaii and Goa, underlining the many similarities shared between them in the economic, agriculture and education sectors.

She said such a partnership is just one example of where there is a lot of "unexplored opportunities" for the 50 American states to be able to build upon the India-US relationship on a state-to-state level and increase awareness in both countries.

Gabbard, the first Hindu lawmaker in the US Congress, said a sister-state partnership will soon be announced between Hawaii and Goa.

Read more: Muslim ban makes Indian students in US worry for their physical safety

"In a few months, we will be announcing the sister-state partnership between my home state of Hawaii and Goa, two states that have many many similarities both in economy, agriculture and education", Gabbard said at the FICCI-IIFA Global Business Forum organised on Friday in partnership with the Asia Society Policy Institute.

The day-long business forum, with the theme 'India and the United States: Partners in Progress' was held on the sidelines of the IIFA Awards 2017 that will be held in the city on Saturday.

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
Port Elizabeth  Workers want a R7,000 Covid-19 compensation allowance

Municipal workers across Nelson Mandela Bay downed tools on Tuesday.

Their main demand is for a R7,000 Covid-19 compensation allowance.

The City says it is in a closed meeting with the unions.

Members of the South African Municipal Workers Union (SAMWU) downed tools at depots across Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality on Tuesday morning.

The workers are demanding R7,000 per employee, saying it's a "Covid-19 compensation allowance".

Other demands include the filling of vacancies, discount on electricity and water accounts for municipal workers, insourcing of services, a scarce skills payment, and the full employment of all contract workers.

About 200 protesting workers sang "Amabhulamnyama andenzi wari" ("Black boers make me worried)" on busy Govan Mbeki Avenue, in front of the Mfanasekhaya Gqobose and Lillian Diedricks Buildings, which closed their doors.

A convoy of police and defence force members drove past the protesters.

Siphiwo Nxangane, full time SAMWU shop steward, said workers at depots in Despatch, Uitenhage and Port Elizabeth had all downed tools.

According to SAMWU regional chairperson Enoch Gcula, "The allowance is for our workers who have been working during Covid-19 pandemic."

SAMWU regional secretary Melikhaya Kortjan, said, "In the first week that Mayor Nqaba Bhanga was elected ... he said he is here to cut down overtime usage, instil discipline and professionalism ... saying that the municipality is overspending on overtime."

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"He accused us of not working in the first eight hours of the day, saying we fold arms for the first 8 hours and start to work after 4pm, when there is overtime opportunity."

"We told him to rather do an audit on vacancies because overtime is as a result of many vacancies that have not been filled".

"We are also demanding the removal of acting City manager Mandla George, because he issued a directive that all workers must return to work, effective from 1 of February, whilst the municipal buildings are not complying with Covid-19 health and safety standards," said Kortjan.

Nelson Mandela Bay Municipal spokesperson Mamela Ndamase said, "A meeting is currently taking place between our Corporate Services Department and the unions. It's a closed session. We'll update you after the meeting."

The mayor's office had not replied at the time of publication.

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BioNTech said it has started production of Pfizer-BioNTech's Covid-19 vaccine candidate at a new vaccine factory in Germany's Marburg site, moving closer to its goal of boosting output in Europe by some 750 million doses a year.

The first batch produced at Marburg, north of Frankfurt, enough for 8 million doses, is scheduled for distribution in early April, BioNTech said in a statement.

"This new BioNTech site will become one of the largest mRNA manufacturing sites in Europe with an annual production capacity of up to 750 million doses of our COVID-19 vaccine, once fully operational," the company said.

BioNTech plans to be able to produce up to 250 million doses of BNT162b2 in the first half of 2021. The first vaccines manufactured at the Marburg site are scheduled for distribution in early April.

It takes only a few days to produce messenger RNA, the key ingredient in the vaccine developed by BioNTech with partner Pfizer Inc.

After initial production of the mRNA, it will be purified and concentrated. After completion of mRNA production, Lipid Nanoparticles (LNP) are formed by combining mRNA and a mixture of lipids. Following further purification, the newly created drug product will then be transported to a partner site for fill and finish under sterile conditions. In addition, a panel of quality tests will be performed to confirm the quality of the product prior to release.

The quality of the final product is analyzed by two independent laboratories: BioNTechs quality control laboratory in Idar-Oberstein and the official medicinal batch laboratory (Paul-Ehrlich-Institute in Germany), the company said in a statement.

The product will also need to clear the European Medicines Agencys quality controls before it can be shipped to customers.

The Marburg factory is a key piece of a plan by BioNTech and Pfizer to boost production of their shot to 2 billion doses this year.

Pressure is mounting on vaccine makers to produce more, in particular as the European Union moves more slowly on vaccinations than the U.S. or U.K.

BioNTech bought the Marburg site from Swiss pharma giant Novartis AG last year and plans to use it to supply the world outside the U.S. the plant is on track to produce as many as 250 million doses of Covid vaccine in the first half of this year, BioNTech said.

Meanwhile, a Pfizer factory in Puurs, Belgium, that had slowed production due to renovations is also back to full capacity.

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On Thursday Epstein Victims Compensation Fund announced it was suspending payments 'effectively immediately' The late pedophile's estate informed officials it did not have 'sufficient liquidity' to satisfy requests and that it couldn't predict when funds would be secured

How can Jeffrey Epstein's estate be worth $240million and yet have no money?

That is the issue which caused the compensation fund for his victims to abruptly stop paying out money, throwing the future of the scheme into doubt.

Despite having $49million cash in hand, according to the latest financial statements, the estate claimed it was unable to top up the account used by the fund to pay victims.

At the same time the estate is paying a fortune to maintain Epstein's properties and paying for groceries such as $55.07 for steaks and $21.51 for Fiji Artesian Water.

Another expense for the estate was the $86,372 in cemetery and funeral home expenses for Epstein's death.

Lawyers for Epstein's victims told DailyMail.com that it was 'another slap in the face' to women who had chased the financier for two decades only for him to hang himself while awaiting trial in 2019.

Victims feel 'betrayed once again' and it's as if Epstein is 'continuing to torture them, even after his death.'

DailyMail.com has learned that problems with the sale of Epstein's $22million Palm Beach, Florida, home brought matters to a head.

A bizarre row with a Christian nonprofit that claims to own the property ended up in court and could hold up the sale for months.

That led the estate to tell the Epstein Victims' Compensation Program (EVCP) that there were 'liquidity' problems and forced the administrators to go public and stop making payments immediately.

Whether or not this is a short term cash crunch or something more sinister remains to be seen.

But given Epstein's history of financial secrecy it has set off alarm bells among his victims.

Lawyers for Epstein's victims told DailyMail.com that it was 'another slap in the face' to women who had chased the financier only for him to hang himself

The Epstein compensation fund started accepting applicants last June and was a compromise to resolve all legal liability against his estate and give his victims reparations.

So far, more than $55million has been paid out and the fund has received over 150 applications.

Under the terms of the fund, the estate promised that there would be enough money to pay for the awards and agreed not to question the amounts which were determined by the independent administrators.

For months there were no problems and the estate regularly topped up a bank account the administrators used to pay victims.

The process required the approval of the Attorney General of the US Virgin Islands, Denise George, who sued Epstein's estate for trafficking of minors and placed a lien on the whole estate.

In response Daniel Weiner, a lawyer representing the estate, said George's claims were 'factually and legally unsupportable' and claimed she had refused to release liens on Epstein's islands which would make it easier to sell them.

Epstein continues to be billed by Xfinity from Comcast, with this $161.90 bill dates May 3, 2020 - nearly a year after his death

An itemized bill goes on for dozens of pages and includes billing $630 an hour with his lawyers

The Whole Foods receipt shows $8.97 spent on three slices of Key Lime pie, $55.07 on New York strip steak, $5.24 on guacamole, and nine bottles of Fiji Artesian Water for a total of $21.51

Another receipt for the same visit from grocery chain Smith's comes to $320.60 and includes multiple chobani yogurts and four large bottles of Fiji water at $12.99 each

Weiner said in a statement: 'Both the Attorney General and the US Virgin Islands court have previously reviewed in detail all of the expenses paid by the Estate.

'Many of the expenses the Attorney General now challenges  including for the required upkeep of aircraft and residences  are essential to maximizing their market value; as but one example, the Estate would not have been able to successfully sell its G550 aircraft without first performing required maintenance to keep that plane airworthy.'

But things broke down last week due to 'uncertainty about the liquidity of estate assets to fund the program', as administrators put it.

In a statement they said: 'On February 3, 2021, the estate informed (us) that it did not have sufficient liquidity to fully satisfy the most recent request for replenishment and that it could not predict when additional liquidity would be secured.

'The estate has advised the program that it is working to secure additional liquidity to continue to fund the program and that it is committed to paying all eligible claims in accordance with the protocol.'

That brings us back to our central question about an estate being worth $240.8million claiming to be broke.

As with anything related to Epstein, especially when it comes to money, things don't add up and that is certainly the case here.

Epstein's estate was originally valued at $630million when he died in August 2019 and that went down to $446million at the end of September last year, according to probate filings.

Dozens of assets have been sold off including a 2018 Bentley for $195,000 and a 2019 Mercedes-Benz for $133,000.

Epstein's 2008 Gulfstream G550 private jet, known as the 'Lolita Express', sold late last year for $10.6million and a Bell 430 Helicopter went for just over $1million.

The biggest payment was $190milion to the IRS in what amounted to death taxes.

Epstein's 2008 Gulfstream G550 private jet, known as the 'Lolita Express', sold late last year for $10.6million and a Bell 430 Helicopter went for just over $1million

Great St. James is valued at $22.4million and Little St. James, known by locals as 'pedo island', will set the new buyer back $63.8million, though buyers have toured it, according to the Miami Herald

Dozens of assets have been sold off including a 2018 Bentley for $195,000 and a 2019 Mercedes-Benz for $133,000

His mansion in New York, the biggest single family home in the city, still doesn't have a buyer despite slashing $23million off its asking price and is now $65million

That still leaves Epstein's massive property portfolio which seems to be the cause of the cash crunch.

None of the homes have been sold because of Epstein's notoriety, the high prices and the coronavirus pandemic destroying the luxury real estate market.

His mansion in New York, the biggest single family home in the city, still doesn't have a buyer despite slashing $23million off its asking price and is now $65million.

The listing, with real estate agents Modlin Group, calls the seven floor, 10 bedroom mansion a 'once in a lifetime opportunity' and makes no mention of its current owner or its history.

Instead it talks about its 'gargantuan size and opulence' and 'commanding authority in a neighborhood steeped in New York's richest history' close to galleries and Central Park.

Epstein still owns his apartment in Paris, which is valued at $8.6m, his ranch in New Mexico which is worth around $17million and his two islands is the Caribbean where the worst of his abuse is said to have occurred.

Great St. James is valued at $22.4million and Little St. James, known by locals as 'pedo island', will set the new buyer back $63.8million, though buyers have toured it, according to the Miami Herald

The Palm Beach property is currently listed for $22million and is in contract with local developer Todd Michael Glaser who plans to demolish it.

But a dispute over the title, or ownership, with nonprofit Love & Bliss Inc. meant that the sale has not gone through yet.

Laurel Inc, the Epstein company which owns the property, sued Love & Bliss Inc. and claimed that it created a false 'quiet title' that Epstein signed four months before his arrest transferring the property to the nonprofit.

The deed was supposedly created on March 9 2019 but wasn't filed with the Palm Beach County Court until October 23 last year.

Love & Bliss Inc. was founded in 2018 by Alexander Leszczynski, 22, and tax documents give little indication about what it does, other than calling itself a church.

When called by DailyMail.com, Glaser said, 'my lawyer is handling this, I don't know, I'm just a real estate guy.'

He admitted that 'I was supposed to buy it two months ago' but said he didn't know what the reason for the holdup was and refused to reveal who his lawyer was.

What is likely to enrage Epstein's victims further is that while they have been unable to get their money, tens of millions of dollars has been paid out to lawyers.

A motion filed in January last year requested $581,000 in legal fees for Virgin Islands law firm Kellerhals, Ferguson Kroblin PLLC, which has been working with the estate, for just two months' work.

The itemized bill goes on for dozens of pages and includes billing $630 an hour for sending emails.

Troutman Sanders, a New York law firm which also represents Epstein's estate, billed $805,821.35 for work between March 1st 2020 and April 30th the same year, a period of two months.

Epstein's estates are costing tens of thousands of dollars a month to maintain, money which his victims no doubt feel should be going to them.

Epstein's Palm Beach property is currently listed for $22million and is in contract with local developer Todd Michael Glaser who plans to demolish it

Epstein still owns his apartment in Paris, which is valued at $8.6m, his ranch in New Mexico which is worth around $17million and his two islands is the Caribbean where the worst of his abuse is said to have occurred. Epstein's estate on Little Saint James is pictured

Receipts filed with quarterly financial disclosures to the probate court include cable bills, pool cleaning fees, air conditioner repairs, even pest control which cost $566.59 for a treatment at Epstein's New Mexico ranch.

Epstein's estate even filed receipts for grocery shopping for the New Mexico home by claiming they were for the visit of an art appraiser.

Lisa Bloom, an attorney who represents a number of Epstein victims, said: 'It's outrageous and offensive'

The Whole Foods receipt shows $8.97 spent on three slices of Key Lime pie, $55.07 on New York strip steak, $5.24 on guacamole, and nine bottles of Fiji Artesian Water for a total of $21.51.

Another receipt for the same visit from grocery chain Smith's comes to $320.60 and includes multiple chobani yogurts and four large bottles of Fiji water at $12.99 each.

Among the most mysterious outgoings highlighted by the financial disclosures is Epstein's Virgin Islands financial company Southern Trust Co. Inc.

The company lost more than half its value between September and December last year $128million to $61million - with no explanation as to why.

Gloria Allred, who represents 20 Epstein victims, said her clients were appalled at the compensation payments being stopped.

She said: 'Because of the promises made to the victims, many of my clients found the courage in this confidential process to bare their souls to us and the administrators of the fund and recount the details of what was done to them, even though it was very painful for them to recall what they were forced to suffer.

'Now many of my clients feel betrayed once again by Jeffrey Epstein's representatives.

'This news has been devastating to many of our clients...if the estate has mismanaged the finances of the estate, or seeks to ignore or avoid their promises to victims they will find that they will face appropriate legal action.'

Sarah Ransome (right) a South African native who says she was abused by Epstein in her early 20s, adn Annie Farmer (left) could get millions from the late pedophile's estate

Jennifer Araoz says Epstein's recruiters lured her when she was a teenager by approaching her outside her school. She is believed to be eligible for compensations

Victims Chauntae Davies (left) and Virginia Giuffre (right) are likely to receive money from the fund. Victims feel 'betrayed once again' and as if Epstein is 'continuing to torture them, even after his death'

Lisa Bloom, an attorney who represents a number of Epstein victims, said: 'It's outrageous and offensive.

'Another slap in the face to the victims. It's as if Epstein is continuing to torture them, even after his death.'

Brad Edwards, a Florida attorney who represents the group of alleged victims, told ABC News: 'It is clear to anyone alive that Jeffrey Epstein caused damages far greater than the wealth he amassed.

The compensation fund for Jeffrey Epstein's victims was approved last year with about 150 applicants and $55million awarded

'Therefore, any reasonable and moral human being recognizes that all of his assets should go to the victims he abused.'

If the compensation fund collapses it will not only leave Epstein's victims short changed, it could expose his associates to legal jeopardy.

In order to receive compensation, victims have to give up their right to sue anyone who was employed by Epstein and that includes Ghislaine Maxwell, his former girlfriend and alleged chief recruiter.

A number of Epstein victims have stayed their civil lawsuits which name her but they could be reactivated if the accusers do not get a payout.

Maxwell is currently being held in prison on charges she recruited underage girls for Epstein and took part in the abuse.

The 59-year-old British socialite is also accused of perjury in a separate civil case and denies all the allegations.

Shortly after the fund announced it was stopping further payments the Attorney General of the Virgin Islands and a number of victims filed an emergency motion demanding a freeze on all assets and cash in hand owned by the estate.

In a statement US Virgin Islands Attorney General George said: 'My office's worst fears have been realized as we learned the Epstein Estate will not make its currently owed payment to the fund it claimed to have set up to compensate sexual abuse survivors and victims of Jeffrey Epstein

'The Estate has found its way to pay for lawyers, landscaping, and helicopter fees, but not the brave women who have stepped forward to participate in the compensation fund. It is, unconscionably, another promise made and broken by Epstein and, now, his Estate.'

Victims had until Monday this week to file new applications with the compensation fund and no new payouts until March 25th with the hope that by then some of Epstein's properties will have been sold

In that sense, the fate of the fund could depend on whether a wealthy buyer steps forward to scoop up one of Epstein's properties.

How ironic that the fate of his survivors once again rests in the hands of shadowy and ultra-wealthy individuals - with little say of their own.
San Francisco, Feb 10 : Twitter ended 2020 with 192 million daily users, up 27 per cent (year-over-year) with growth from product improvements reaching an all-time high in 2020, the company has announced.

The micro-blogging platform reported a record revenue of $1.3 billion in the 2020 holiday quarter, up 28 per cent year-over-year.

"We are a platform that is obviously much larger than any one topic or any one account. Eighty per cent of our audience is outside the United States and we have more than 50 accounts with over 25 million followers," said Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.

The company reported 31 per cent (YoY) growth in total ad revenue and greater than 50 per cent (YoY) growth in MAP revenue in Q4.

"We made significant progress with new ad formats, stronger attribution and improved targeting in Q4 and that momentum continues in Q1 with the launch of our rebuilt MAP offering and website clicks objective," Dorsey said in the investors' call late on Tuesday.

Twitter's stock was up slightly in after-hours trading on Tuesday.

Average monetizable DAU (mDAU) reached to 192 million in Q4, said the company.

The increase in average absolute mDAU through the end of January was above the historical average from the last four years.

"We expect to see mDAU growth of approximately 20 per cent year-over-year in Q1. Looking ahead, we have a strong product road map, designed to deliver even more daily utility for new and existing customers," Dorsey noted.

The company said it expects headcount growth of more than 20 per cent this year, with overall expenses increasing more than 25 per cent.

"I'm really proud of how we navigated 2020 and our remarkable finish in Q4," the Twitter CEO said.
Reporter

Mary Schenk is a reporter covering police, courts and breaking news at The News-Gazette. Her email is mschenk@news-gazette.com, and you can follow her on Twitter (@schenk).
Moscow has issued an international arrest warrant for one of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalnys allies, Leonid Volkov, who is currently based outside Russia, according to Interfax news agency. Volkov oversees Kremlin critics regional headquarters and he has angered the authorities by organising protests from his base in Lithuania, demanding the release of Navalny, who was detained last month. He is suspected of calling on minors take part in unsanctioned mass rallies in late January.

Volkov has even urged Russians to gather near their homes for a brief Valentines Day protest, this Sunday, shining their mobile phone torches and lighting candles in heart shapes to flood social media. A Moscow court on February 10 said that Volkov would be held in Russia for two months if and when he is detained or extradited. Volkov, on the other hand, wrote on his Telegram channel that he would continue working and ignore the arrest warrant.

Russia has accused allies of Navalny of treason, alleging they discussed possible sanctions against Moscow with Western nations. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Tuesday accused Navalny's allies of treachery for discussing sanctions against Russia with foreign governments. After Russia arrested Navalny and sentenced him to two and a half years in prison, the world leaders threatened Russia with sanctions and demanded an immediate release of the Kremlin critic.

READ: Top EU Diplomat To Propose New Sanctions Against Russia

READ: Russia Calls Alexei Navalny Allies 'traitors', Accuses Them Of Talking Sanctions

Aftermath of Navalnys arrest

Navalny was arrested soon after returning from Germany last month following which he was sentenced to serve his remaining suspended jail term in prison. Navalny's arrest sparked nationwide protests with tens of thousands of demonstrators storming the streets of Moscow demanding the opposition politician's release. Russian authorities put thousands of protesters in jail citing violations of COVID-19 precautionary measures. The crackdown on peaceful protesters garnered a lot of international criticism, which has since put Moscow under a lot of pressure.

Moscow has been allegedly using this technique to label Navalny's supporters as anti-nationals in order to influence the views of the general public in the country. Navalny was also dubbed a "traitor" while he was away in Germany and was continuing his attack against Russian President Vladimir Putin. While Navalny was in Berlin for treatment, he was warned by the Russian prison authorities to return as quickly as possible or he could face jail time for allegedly violating suspended prison term from 2014 when he was found guilty of financial misappropriations and had already served 10 months of his 3.5 year-sentence under house arrest.

READ: Josep Borrell Says Russia 'does Not Want' Constructive Dialogue With Europe

READ: Russia To Launch 40 Discreet Satellites From Across The World In March
The mother of a dead Virginia police informant is alleging in a pair of lawsuits that authorities are responsible for her sons fatal overdose on opiates that he was coerced to purchase while undercover.

Donna Watson, the administrator of Troy Howletts estate, is seeking $10 million in general damages plus $350,000 in punitive damages for what she claims was his wrongful death by Hopewell police because of a fentanyl-laced heroin overdose in July 2018, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported Monday. Her complaint also says police and the citys commonwealths attorney knew Howlett was addicted to opiates and that he ingested some of the illegal drugs he was forced to buy as an informant.

A companion lawsuit seeks $3 million in general damages and $350,000 in punitive damages after police gathered on Aug. 3, 2018, at the memorial service for Howlett and arrested and handcuffed his best friend in front of mourners.

Both lawsuits, filed in Chesterfield County Circuit Court, name as defendants the Hopewell Police Department, retired Police Chief John Keohane, Hopewell Commonwealths Attorney Richard Newman and ten individual officers.

Newman said he could not comment until he spoke to his attorney. Keohane did not immediately return a message seeking comment.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Lawsuits Law Enforcement Virginia

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Copyright  2021 Albuquerque Journal

SANTA FE  The chairman of a Senate committee said Tuesday that a bill that would change the procedures for filling congressional vacancies in New Mexico will be voted on, a day after a Democratic sponsor of the bill expressed concern about it being intentionally delayed.

Interest in how U.S. House vacancies are filled has surged after U.S. Rep. Deb Haaland, D-N.M., was nominated by President Joe Biden as interior secretary.

Haaland is awaiting a U.S. Senate confirmation hearing and has not stepped down, and about a dozen candidates have already launched campaigns for her Albuquerque-based 1st Congressional District seat.

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Given that backdrop, Rep. Daymon Ely, D-Corrales, and Sen. Mark Moores, R-Albuquerque, have filed legislation that would require Democrats, Republicans and other major political parties to pick their candidates for a vacant congressional seat in a special primary election.

Under the bill, Senate Bill 254, winning candidates in the primary election would then face off in a general election, which would be held at least 63 days later.

However, the bill would need to be approved by a two-thirds vote in both the House and Senate and signed into law by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham to be implemented in time for the looming congressional vacancy.

It was not debated Monday despite it being on the Senate Rules Committees agenda, causing Ely to express concern the bill would be killed by delay.

They should be taking a hard vote on this bill right now, Ely said in an interview, citing local-level political party elections happening this weekend.

However, Sen. Daniel Ivey-Soto, D-Albuquerque, the Senate Rules Committees chairman, said those elections would be occurring even without the potential for a vacant congressional seat.

He also told the Journal he is not trying to stall the bill, saying, Were going to give it a hearing.

Under New Mexicos current law, Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver would have to call a special election to fill Haalands seat no later than 91 days after it is vacated.

The states major political parties would hold central committee meetings behind closed doors to nominate their own candidates before such an election.

Four Democratic legislators  Sen. Anoinette Sedillo-Lopez and Reps. Georgene Louis, Melanie Stansbury and Patricia Roybal-Caballero are among the candidates who have launched campaigns for the congressional seat.

A recent state Ethics Commission advisory opinion concluded that state legislators running for U.S. House seats are not subject to a prohibition on soliciting campaign contributions during a legislative session.
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.

CE marking in the bridge to transplant indication received in December 2020

Operating expenses under control at 36m

Financial resources including cash position of 36m at December 31, 2020, providing financial visibility until Q3 2021

Company actively reviewing options to fund its development beyond Q3 2021

Regulatory News:

CARMAT (Paris:ALCAR)(FR0010907956, ALCAR,), the designer and developer of the world's most advanced total artificial heart, aiming to fulfill an unmet medical need by providing a therapeutic alternative to people suffering from end-stage biventricular heart failure, today announces its annual results for the year ending December 31, 20201 and confirms its prospects for 2021.

Stephane Piat, Chief Executive Officer of CARMAT, commented:

"I am very proud of all that has been accomplished at CARMAT in 2020, despite the global pandemic. 2020 opens a new chapter for CARMAT. The CE marking received on December 22 has paved the way to the commercialization of our artificial heart in Europe under the brand name Aeson. This event materializes the efforts undertaken by all our employees and everyone involved in the CARMAT project since its inception. This unique device the brainchild of Professor Carpentier will become accessible to patients who currently have no therapeutic options.

CARMAT also achieved in 2020 many other major clinical and regulatory milestones. Firstly, in France, we obtained HAS approval to undertake EFICAS, a broad clinical study, two-thirds of whose costs will be covered by the French State. Secondly, the number of patients enrolled in the PIVOTAL study has increased to fifteen with the first implantation performed in Denmark and the resumption of implantations in France. Within this framework, our bioprosthesis has notably demonstrated a high level of reliability by providing a patient with 2 years of continuous support. Lastly, in the United States, thanks to the constructive talks undertaken with the FDA over the last year, we hope to soon perform the first implantations within the framework of an early feasibility study for which the CMS has approved the reimbursement of our product.

In 2021, we will continue this momentum by focusing our efforts primarily on the commercial launch of Aeson in Germany during the second quarter of 2021, but also on the implementation of our clinical plan and the ramping up of production activity to accommodate long term demand. We have the financial resources we need to support this ramping up until the third quarter of 2021 and are exploring various options to extend our financial visibility beyond that horizon

2020 annual results

Simplified income statement ( millions) 2020 2019 Sales 0.0 0.0 Operating profit/loss -36.4 -42.4 Financial profit/loss -2.5 -1.8 Non-recurring items +0.2 -0.1 Research and Innovation tax credit +1.7 +1.6 Net profit/loss -37.0 -42.6

CARMAT did not generate revenues in 2020. The first sales are expected in the second quarter of 2021, following the CE marking received on December 22, 2020.

The annual operating loss amounted to 36.4m, a 6.0m improvement on the previous year. This improvement in the Company's operating loss vs 2019 reflects its efforts to control spending, it being specified that, for the first time, the Company has booked the net value of its inventories (i.e. 9.9 million) as assets on its balance sheet2 at December 31, 2020.

In 2020, operating expenses of 36m were mainly dedicated to:

its production activities: ramping-up of production and further work to enhance the reliability of production processes at the Bois-d'Arcy plant, continued actions to secure supplies and inventory building;

the finalization of the commercial configuration of the bioprosthesis, including improvements identified during the research and clinical development phases;

launch preparation in Europe from a regulatory (CE marking process), marketing and commercial as well as operational (logistics, IT systems, sales administration, etc.) perspective;

pursuing its clinical activities: ongoing PIVOTAL study in Europe, but also preparation for the initiation of the Early Feasibility Study (EFS) in the United States and the EFICAS clinical study in France in 2021.

The increase of the financial loss to -2.5m was mainly driven by loan interests, as the Company drew down in May 2020 the second tranche (10m) of the conditional loan granted by EIB (European Investment Bank) in December 2018.

Net loss of 37.0 million in 2020 included Research and Innovation tax credits of +1.7m and non-recurring items of +0.2m.

Financial structure

The Company had a cash position of 36.0 million at December 31, 2020, versus 55.5 million at December 31, 2019. This 19.5 million decrease compared to December 31, 2019 results from the following cash flows:

( millions) FY 2020 FY 2019 Cash flow from operating activities -43.0 -40.2 Cash flow from investment activities -2.3 -0.6 Cash flow from financing activities 25.8 71.1 Change in cash position -19.5 30.2

Cash generated by financing activities included:

the 10m second tranche of the conditional loan granted by EIB,

the 10m State-Guaranteed Loan contracted with BNP Paribas and Bpifrance,

the 5.8m use of the contingent equity line with Kepler-Cheuvreux, in November and December.

Net debt amounted to 2.9m at December 31, 2020, as shown below:

( millions) 31.12.2020 Long-term financial liabilities3 38.8 Short-term financial liabilities 0.1 Cash position -36.0 Net financial debt 2.9

The available financial resources will enable CARMAT to finance its activities, according to its current development plan, until the third quarter of 2021.

These resources notably include:

the 36m cash position as of December 31, 2020,

the 10m final tranche of the EIB loan that CARMAT can draw down at any time until December 17, 2021, since the Company already fulfilled all criteria to draw down this tranche,

the 13m financing from the French State in connection with partial funding of EFICAS study.4

Furthermore, until September 27, 2021, CARMAT has the possibility to use the remaining balance (16m as of December 31, 2020) of the Kepler Cheuvreux contingent equity line. Full use of this balance would allow the Company to finance its activities until November 2021. CARMAT is actively reviewing all options to finance its development beyond that horizon.

2020 highlights

CE marking granted to the artificial heart as a bridge to transplant

On December 22, 2020, the CARMAT artificial heart was granted CE marking as a bridge to transplant (BTT) for patients suffering from end-stage biventricular heart failure (INTERMACS classes 1-4) who are not amenable to maximal medical therapy or a Left Ventricular Assist Device (LVAD) and who are likely to undergo a heart transplant within 180 days of the implantation.

CE marking represents a major milestone for CARMAT, as it allows the Company to market its total artificial heart system in all countries that recognize this certification, including every country within the European Union.

Continuation of the PIVOTAL study

The positive interim results of the PIVOTAL study, which is still underway, contributed to the granting of CE marking. During 2020, 3 patients were implanted within the framework of this study (1 in Denmark and 2 in France, where the study resumed in the second half of 2020), thus taking the total number of patients implanted within the framework of this study to 15.5

Preparation for the initiation of the Early Feasibility Study (EFS) in the United States

The EFS was fully approved by the American Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in February 2020, and the Centers for Medicare Medicaid Services (CMS) approved coverage of the CARMAT device, routine care items and associated services supplied to patients within the framework of this study in May 2020.

The various steps (ethics committee approval, signing of contracts with centers participating in the study, logistical arrangements, etc.) enabling the study to begin progressed well over the year so that, to date, three centers (VCU Health Pauley Heart Center, Richmond, Virginia; University of Louisville Jewish Hospital, Louisville, Kentucky; and Baylor University Medical Center, Dallas, Texas) are already in a position to enroll patients in this study.

However, in order to be able to use the most recent configuration of its artificial heart for the EFS, CARMAT has submitted a certain number of amendments to the FDA. The last of these amendments is likely to be approved shortly, and the first implantation within the framework of the EFS is thus expected during the first quarter of 2021.

EFICAS study and financing approved within the framework of the Forfait Innovation program

In April 2020, the French National Authority for Health (HAS) definitively confirmed its positive opinion regarding the financing by special exemption of the CARMAT total artificial heart within the framework of the EFICAS multicenter study to be undertaken on 52 patients in France.

In October 2020, the Ministry of Health and Solidarity validated funding of 13 million, enabling two-thirds of the costs of the study to be covered. This sum will be progressively received as implantations are performed.

CARMAT expects implantations within the framework of the EFICAS study to begin during the second quarter of 2021.

Commercial launch preparation

CE marking for the device as a bridge to transplant represents a major market opportunity, with more than 2,000 patients currently on waiting lists for a heart transplant in the five main European countries6

Ahead of the granting of CE marking, CARMAT had taken the necessary steps to begin the commercialization of its total artificial heart in the second quarter of 2021, notably with:

the acceleration of the ramping up of production activities;

proactive targeting of clients and early support to hospitals with their reimbursement process;

the positioning of the product that will be marketed under the brand name Aeson;

the set-up of logistic arrangements, sales administration and IT systems, and strengthening of the teams required for the commercialization.

In 2021, the Company is planning to focus the device's commercialization on Germany and France, which account for 55% of the Mechanical Circulatory Support (MCS) device market in the European Union7

Aeson will be launched commercially in Germany during the second quarter of 2021;

the French market will initially be addressed via the EFICAS study.

Impact of the Covid-19 pandemic

In 2020, the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic could be experienced with, in particular, a lengthening of timeframes within the framework of talks with the regulatory authorities regarding the EFICAS study. The Company also experienced supply issues that slowed the pace of production and the building up of prosthesis inventories, as well as difficulties accessing hospitals that slowed patient enrollment in the PIVOTAL study. Despite these problems, at no time during the year did the Company halt production.

Recent events, 2021 priorities and outlook

Professor Christian Latremouille joins the Management Team

In January 2021, CARMAT announced the appointment of Professor Christian Latremouille as Director of Surgical Affairs. Doctor of Medicine, Christian Latremouille is the only heart surgeon in the world who has participated in the CARMAT heart's entire clinical assessment process. He will be in charge of supporting and supervising hospitals from the training of surgical teams to the treatment of patients.

2021 outlook

In 2021, CARMAT intends to pursue its development via its three major strategic priorities:

commercial launch of its prosthesis in Europe, scheduled for the second quarter of the year;

implementation of a robust clinical plan with the aim of supporting the adoption of its artificial heart and its value proposition, and eventually obtaining the destination therapy (DT) indication. This plan notably includes:

- the launch of the EFS in the United States in the first quarter,

- the launch of the EFICAS study in France in the second quarter,

- the initiation of extensive post market clinical follow-up (PMCF);

- the launch of the EFS in the United States in the first quarter, - the launch of the EFICAS study in France in the second quarter, - the initiation of extensive post market clinical follow-up (PMCF); ramping up of its production capacity and further actions to secure industrial supplies.

Moreover, CARMAT is continuing to closely monitor the Covid-19 situation in France and abroad and, depending on its evolution, may need to reassess its impact and adjust the Company's prospects.

About CARMAT: the world's most advanced total artificial heart project

A credible response to end-stage heart failure: CARMAT aims to eventually provide a response to a major public health issue associated with heart disease, the world's leading cause of death: chronic and acute heart failure. By pursuing the development of its total artificial heart, composed of the implantable bioprosthesis and its portable external power supply system to which it is continuously connected, CARMAT intends to overcome the well-known shortfall in heart transplants for the tens of thousands of people suffering from irreversible end-stage heart failure, the most seriously affected of the 20 million patients with this progressive disease in Europe and the United States.

The result of combining two types of unique expertise: the medical expertise of Professor Carpentier, known throughout the world for inventing Carpentier-Edwards heart valves, which are the most used in the world, and the technological expertise of Airbus Group, world aerospace leader.

The first physiologic heart replacement therapy: given the use of highly biocompatible materials, its unique self-regulation system and its pulsatile nature, the CARMAT total artificial heart could, assuming a successful clinical development, potentially save the lives of thousands of patients each year with no risk of rejection and with an enhanced quality of life.

A project leader acknowledged at a European level: with the backing of the European Commission, CARMAT has been granted the largest subsidy ever given to an SME by Bpifrance; a total of 33 million.

Strongly committed, prestigious founders and shareholders: Matra Defense SAS (subsidiary of the Airbus Group), Professor Alain Carpentier, the Centre Chirurgical Marie Lannelongue, Truffle Capital, a leading European venture capital firm, ALIAD (Air Liquide's venture capital investor), CorNovum (an investment holding company held 50-50 by Bpifrance and the French State), the family offices of Pierre Bastid (Lohas), of Dr. Antonino Ligresti (Sante Holdings S.R.L.), of the Gaspard family (Corely Belgium SPRL and Bratya SPRL) and of M. Pierre-Edouard Sterin (BAD 21 SPRL), Groupe Therabel as well as the thousands of institutional and individual shareholders who have placed their trust in CARMAT.

For more information: www.carmatsa.com

Name: CARMAT

ISIN code: FR0010907956

Ticker: ALCAR

Disclaimer

This press release and the information contained herein do not constitute an offer to sell or subscribe to, or a solicitation of an offer to buy or subscribe to, shares in CARMAT ("the Company") in any country. This press release contains forward-looking statements that relate to the Company's objectives. Such forward-looking statements are based solely on the current expectations and assumptions of the Company's management and involve risk and uncertainties. Potential risks and uncertainties include, without limitation, whether the Company will be successful in implementing its strategies, whether there will be continued growth in the relevant market and demand for the Company's products, new products or technological developments introduced by competitors, and risks associated with managing growth. The Company's objectives as mentioned in this press release may not be achieved for any of these reasons or due to other risks and uncertainties.

No guarantee can be given as to any of the events anticipated by the forward-looking statements, which are subject to inherent risks, including those described in the Universal registration document filed with the Autorite des Marches Financiers on March 13, 2020 under number D.20-0126 as well as changes in economic conditions, the financial markets or the markets in which CARMAT operates. In particular, no guarantee can be given concerning the Company's ability to finalize the development, validation and industrialization of the prosthesis and the equipment required for its use, to manufacture the prostheses, satisfy the requirements of competent authorities, enroll patients, obtain satisfactory clinical results, perform the clinical trials and achieve commercial objectives.

Aeson is an active implantable medical device commercially available in Europe ONLY, CARMAT SA., CE0344. The Aeson TAH is intended to replace ventricles of native heart and is indicated as a bridge to transplant in patients suffering from end-stage biventricular heart failure (INTERMACS classes 1-4) who are not amenable to maximal medical therapy or LVAD and are likely to undergo heart transplant in the 180 days following device implantation. The decision to implant and the surgical procedure must be executed by Health Care professionals trained by the manufacturer. Carefully read the documentation (clinician manual, patient manual alarm booklet) for characteristics and information necessary for patient selection and good use (contraindications, precautions, side effects).

In the USA, Aeson is currently exclusively available within the framework of clinical trials.

___________________________

1 Annual accounts were approved by the Board of Directors on February 8, 2021. Audit procedures relative to these accounts have been carried out, and the auditor's report is currently being prepared.

2 Previously, inventories were directly booked as expenses of year during which they were purchased or produced, due to the lack of immediate prospect of generating future economic benefits from them.

3 Financial liabilities include the principal (20m) and interest due on the EIB loan, the principal (10m) and interest due on the State-Guaranteed Loan and interest pertaining to the 14.5m repayable advance obtained from Bpifrance. The characteristics and conditions of the EIB loan and the Bpifrance repayable advance are described in Section 3 of the Company's universal registration document. Long-term financial liabilities correspond to those with a maturity exceeding 12 months.

4 This funding will be progressively received as implants within the framework of the study are performed, over an estimated timeframe of 2 years. Implantations are expected to begin during the second quarter of 2021.

5 The initial enrollment target for this study was 20 patients, a figure that can be revised up or down during the study. The primary endpoint of this study is 6-month survival with the CARMAT heart or a successful heart transplant within 6 months of the device being implanted. For the first 11 patients in the study (the latest results published by CARMAT), the success rate is 73% (6 patients having survived for over 6 months with the CARMAT heart and 2 having been successfully transplanted within 6 months of the implantation). The granting of CE marking did not a priori require a specific number of implantations and/or a predetermined success rate. In accordance with good clinical practice and subject to regulatory obligations or special circumstances, CARMAT does not provide individual details of implantations or patients' condition; and will only communicate when significant milestones are achieved. The next publication on the results of the ongoing PIVOTAL study is expected once this study is completed.

6 statistics.eurotransplant.org: 9023P_2019; https://rams.agence-biomedecine.fr; Five main European countries: France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom.

7 GlobalData: EU5 Cardiac Assist Devices Market Outlook To 2025 Intra-Aortic Balloon Pumps, Mechanical Circulatory Support Devices And Short-Term Circulatory Support Devices (Report GDMECR1561DB)

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210209006083/en/

Contacts:

CARMAT

Stephane Piat

Chief Executive Officer

Pascale d'Arbonneau

Chief Financial Officer

Tel.: +33 1 39 45 64 50

contact@carmatsas.com

Alize RP

Press Relations

Caroline Carmagnol

Tel.: +33 6 64 18 99 59

carmat@alizerp.com

NewCap

Investor Relations

Strategic Communication

Dusan Oresansky

Quentin Masse

Tel.: +33 1 44 71 94 94

carmat@newcap.eu
SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Celo, an open-source blockchain ecosystem focused on making decentralized financial (DeFi) systems and tools accessible to anyone with a smartphone, today announced $20 million in new backing from purchasers and partners including Andreessen Horowitz, Greenfield One, and Electric Capital. To date, Celo has garnered more than $65 million from backers including Polychain Capital, Reid Hoffman, Jack Dorsey, Coinbase Ventures, Social Capital, Dragonfly Capital, Version One Ventures, SV Angel, and Valor Capital, among others.

"We now have the technology to create a better financial system - a rich ecology of digital assets and products that allow individuals and organizations to more seamlessly transact and manage risk," said Rene Reinsberg, co-founder of Celo. "It's been great to work alongside hundreds of like-minded, mission-driven organizations and entrepreneurs all over the world to bring this technology to life."

Since the initial development of the Celo Platform in 2017, the Celo community has developed and launched a Mainnet, a native asset (CELO), a stablecoin (cUSD), a mobile payments app, and has been listed on major exchanges including Coinbase and Binance. To date, more than 2M transactions have run across the Celo network, making it one of the most actively used decentralized payments platforms on the market today.

"When we first began supporting Celo two years ago, we saw the opportunity to build a 'full stack' global payments platform that anyone with a smartphone could use to send, receive, and store money," said Katie Haun, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. "Celo can dramatically reduce fees and fraud while also making payments instantaneous and global."

"Celo's mobile-first approach combined with cross-chain interoperability is truly unique," said Avichal Garg, Managing Partner at Electric Capital. "A mobile-first philosophy means anyone can onboard into the Celo ecosystem quickly and with just a mobile phone number. Combined with the interoperability bridges that the Celo community is building, people anywhere in the world will soon be able to send Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other digital assets using only their smartphones. We are quickly moving to a world where cryptocurrencies and digital assets are accessible to anyone, globally."

Valora Enters Global Remittance and Payments Arena with Fees as low as $0.01

Today also marks the launch of Valora, the first mobile remittance and peer-to-peer payments app built on the Celo platform. Following significant testing and a successful pilot program late last year, Valora is now globally available for download by virtually anyone with a smartphone.

Currently there are over $500B in global remittances, with traditional money transfer fees costing as much as 15%, sometimes taking several days to settle. With Valora, users can send and receive funds from virtually anywhere around the world within seconds. Because transactions run on the Celo Platform, the cost to transfer funds is minimal, typically costing as little as $0.01 per transaction.

"The fact that Valora has already found so much acceptance in practice is really impressive," said Sebastian Blum, Managing Partner at Greenfield One. "This is the reason we all got interested in this space in the first place. We are currently seeing crypto come to life and being used like any other currency. Valora is the perfect example of crypto innovation and how to develop on the Celo platform to put crypto in the hands of millions of users."

Since its beta launch in September 2020, Valora has seen exponential growth and adoption, with tens of thousands of users, most of them active on a daily or weekly basis, across more than 100 countries with hundreds of thousands of cUSD transactions across the platform.

How it Works:

Download Valora from the Google Play or App Store

Sign up for an account using your phone number

Fund your Valora app with Celo Dollars (cUSD)

Save or send cUSD to anyone in your contact list

Your recipient receives a text message to redeem their cUSD

Valora users can choose to securely save their cUSD in Valora, pay for goods with select merchants that accept cUSD directly, cash out to local fiat currency, transfer funds to a crypto exchange or convert cUSD to gift cards at major retailers around the world such as Amazon, Starbucks and Walmart. To download Valora, please visit https://vlra.app/live .

Valora was built by cLabs, one of the many organizations that supports the Celo ecosystem. To help early adopters get up and running on Valora, the Celo community is funding a rewards program that will offer CELO to confirmed addresses that maintain savings in cUSD, with higher gifts of CELO for those who save more cUSD. Learn more at https://valoraapp.co/3tkhFFA .

Grameen Foundation Leverages Valora to Deliver COVID Relief to Thousands Impacted by COVID-19

The Grameen Foundation and the Celo Alliance for Prosperity today announced the conclusion of a successful program that leveraged the Valora app to facilitate the distribution of aid to more than 3,500 women entrepreneurs impacted by COVID-19 across the Philippines. The Grameen Foundation and other Celo Alliance for Prosperity members leveraged their crypto and blockchain expertise to create a program that allowed recipients to download Valora, use cUSD to meet basic critical needssuch as purchasing food and medicineand collect aid in a secure way.

"As with nearly every region across the globe, those most in need across the Philippines suffered dramatically amid the pandemic," said Steve Hollingworth, President and CEO of the Grameen Foundation. "Cross-border efforts to provide aid during the pandemic have been even more complicated given the increased restrictions and health concerns. The Celo Alliance for Prosperity was able to move quickly to create a system to distribute cUSD through the Valora app to thousands of women across the Philippines through their smartphones. Almost none of the aid recipients had heard of cryptocurrency before, yet were able to easily download the Valora app, receive and use cUSD to pay for their basic needs, and paid almost no fees to do so. We are exceptionally pleased with the outcome of this project, as it was the first time we embraced blockchain technology and the results were far superior to anything we could have imagined."

See also: Grameen Foundation, J.P. Morgan Deliver COVID-19 Relief in the Philippines

About Celo

Celo is a mobile-first, open-source ecosystem of technologies, organizations and individuals that all share a common mission of building a financial system that creates the conditions for prosperity for everyone. The Celo ecosystem includes a decentralized, proof-of-stake blockchain technology stack (Celo Platform), a native asset (CELO), a stablecoin (cUSD) and the Celo Alliance for Prosperity, with over 100 organizations around the world, including Andreesen Horowitz, Anchorage, Coinbase, GSMA, Mercy Corps, Grameen Foundation, Prosegur, Abra, and cLabs, a service organization dedicated to growing and developing the Celo ecosystem. For more information on Celo, please visit celo.org.

About Grameen Foundation

Grameen Foundation is a global nonprofit whose mission is to enable the poor, especially women, to create a world without poverty and hunger. In collaboration with our partners, we harness the power of digital data to create tech-forward tools for self-sufficiency and deliver them through local Community Agent networks. The Grameen Foundation Model is transformative regardless of Internet access, smartphone ownership or the ability to read.

Media Contacts

Carissa Felger

Gasthalter & Co. (for Celo)

[email protected]

Sonya Merrill

cLabs, working on Celo

[email protected]

Terri Hurd

Grameen Foundation

[email protected]

SOURCE Celo
EUGENE, Ore.  A man accused of attacking a Dutch Bros employee Monday morning has been arrested, police say.

Jesus Martinez-Escudero, 25, was taken to the Lane County Jail on charges of burglary and second-degree assault.

The assault of a young woman, working as a barista, by a stranger, near campus, is both alarming and shocking, said Investigations Captain Shawn Adams.

The assault happened at about 5:45 a.m. at 2115 Franklin Boulevard.

Martinez-Escudero is accused of coming through the window, trying to grab the employee, and hitting her with a stick.

The woman escaped through the back door and called 911, and the man ran off.

The detectives assigned to this case understood the community impact and, within 16 hours of the reported incident, had an individual in custody for the crime. This was a true whodunnit as all the detectives had to work with, initially, was a physical description, Adams said.


The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
Mayor London Breed expressed doubt Tuesday that San Franciscos classrooms will reopen this school year, even as she pledged to begin vaccinating educators by the end of the month and the San Francisco Unified School District reached a tentative deal with the unions to return students to the classroom.

That deal says classrooms may open once the citys case count enters the less-restrictive red tier, and vaccinations are available for on-site school staff. Teachers and other staff would return to the classroom without demanding vaccines if cases fall even further and the city enters the orange tier.

But absent from Sundays agreement was clarity on the most critical questions for families, students, city officials and educators: When will children return to school? And how many hours a week will they return in person?

We have to do better, Breed said at a Tuesday press conference, where she urged the district to open schools as soon as possible.

While the mayor has no direct control over the citys public schools, she has prominently inserted herself into the fraught debate about when in-person learning should resume. She has slammed the district for spending time on a controversial and expensive proposal to rename 44 public schools, while children havent seen the inside of the classroom in nearly a year.

She also supports a lawsuit by City Attorney Dennis Herrera, who is suing the school board and the district over their failure to safely open schools during the pandemic.

Breed often echoes public health officials, frustrated families and pediatricians who have warned about the widening achievement gap and increased mental health issues in children who are stuck trying to learn behind a computer screen.

At a press conference last week, she made an impassioned, tearful plea to reopen schools as she stood in front of forlorn and masked children, who held signs that said I miss my friends and I miss my school.

About 15,000 kids are attending in-person classes at 113 private and parochial schools.

Meanwhile, the public school district, which has about 52,000 students, has applied to reopen only six of 64 elementary schools. Breed said that the Department of Public Health has cleared all six of those schools  Alvarado, Glen Park, John Muir, Lawton, Sunset and Cobb elementary schools  to open based on their safety measures.

There is no way they would have cleared our ability to open public or private schools if it were not for the need to keep our students and our parents and our teachers and everyone safe, she said. So I trust them, and Im asking the school district to trust them.

In a statement, district officials said they wholeheartedly agree that students are better served with in-person learning.

Bringing students back to school in a large public school district is very complex and requires partnership, said district spokeswoman Gentle Blythe.We are eager for the city to make vaccines available to our staff who will be on-site and to bring their resources to support the major new state requirements around both staff and student surveillance testing.

The Department of Public Health has said that schools can open without teachers being vaccinated. Still, Breed said, we realize there are people who want that assurance.

At the Tuesday press conference, Breed announced that essential workers  like teachers  will be eligible for vaccinations beginning Feb. 24. Other workers that will be eligible at the end of the month are those in tier 1B, which includes emergency services workers, police officers, and food and agriculture workers.

Im truly looking forward to that day, Breed said.

Superintendent Vincent Matthews said the district is continuing to talk with the teachers union to iron out the details of what in-person learning will look like when classrooms finally do open. But he offered no timeline on the agreement.

Right now, what were ramping up to do is nail down the details, Matthews said.

Though on Monday, the district said the goal is to give students at least six weeks of in-person instruction before the academic year ends on June 2.

In the meantime, Breed said that the citys children are suffering and families need a clear plan and timeline for when they can return to the classroom.

Breed spoke just after the city attorney announced that he had expanded a lawsuit against the school district, adding allegations that school officials violated the state Constitution and equal rights laws by not providing in-person instruction despite the ability to do so.

The mayor said she would not have supported the lawsuit if she thought there was another way to get schools open quickly.

Theres no way I would have ever supported using the legal system to try and get our schools open if we were on a path of moving it forward, and if it werent for the Department of Public Health telling us that it is safe to do so, she said. We have to think about these children.

Chronicle staff writer Jill Tucker contributed to this report.

Trisha Thadani is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: tthadani@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @trishathadani
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Gunmen on Wednesday killed three persons in Nkpor, Idemili North Local Government Area of Anambra State.

The slain men were said to have been trailed to a meeting in the community town hall by the gunmen, who were about five in number.

It was gathered that three of the gun-wielding men on arrival moved straight to each of their targets and gunned them down at a close range.

The incident caused a stampede as people scampered for safety.

What happened here this afternoon took everybody by surprise and as you can see everybody is in fear. The assassins planned this operation very well that they killed all their targets, a witness said.

Their corpses are still lying there and nobody is ready to (go) near the scene, even the police have not come, he added.

The witness said two of the deceased were from the area while the other was from the neighbouring community.

Police spokesperson in the state, Haruna Mohammed, confirmed the killing.

He gave the name of the deceased as Izuchukwu Idemili, 32, Chidi Oforma, 31, both from Nkpor and Bongo Muoghalu, 45, from Umouji.

Police statement

Mr Haruna said, Police detectives attached to Ogidi Division led by the DPO CSP Ekuri Remigius visited the scene and rushed three victims who sustained gunshot injuries to Crown Hospital along Nkpor-Umuoji road for medical attention where all the three victims were certified dead by the medical doctor.

The police spokesperson said two expended ammunition were recovered at the scene. He said the police have commenced investigation to unravel the circumstances surrounding the killing.

Efforts are being intensified to apprehend perpetrators of the heinous act in order to bring them to justice, he added.
[February 10, 2021] TomoCredit Raises $7 Million in Seed Funding to Open Access to Credit for "Cash Rich, Credit Poor" Individuals and Help Build and Boost Credit Scores

TomoCredit, a fintech startup offering a credit card designed to build credit history for first-time borrowers, today announced a $7 million seed funding round, with participation from KB Investment Inc. (KBIC), a subsidiary of South Korea's leading consumer bank, Kookmin Bank, along with Barclays, Knollwood Investment Advisory, BAM Ventures, Passport Capital, Ulu Ventures, and Strong Ventures. Notable angel investors also participating in the round include: Arlan Hamilton, founder of Backstage Capital, Michael Vaughan, former COO of Venmo, and James Kim, former head of finance at Tinder. The capital will further accelerate TomoCredit's rapid growth through hiring and product development. The company also appointed LendingClub senior executive, Chaomei Chen, as its acting Chief Risk Officer. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210210005220/en/ TomoCredit Co-founders Kristy Kim (CEO) and Dmitry Kashlev (CTO) (Photo: Business Wire) According to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, more than 30 million young adults are considered "cash rich" but with limited credit histories, making their only option to use debit cards. TomoCredit offers the chance for these individuals to obtain credit cards based not on their FICO ratings, but on their cash flow, so they can begin building their credit history. "We set out to build something that wasn't just more inclusive, but fundamentally different from existing consumer credit card offerings," said TomoCredit's Founder and CEO, Kristy Kim. "We believe you can be financially sound, even without a credit history. We buil the model so we are paid by the merchants, not the consumers. Unlike incumbent credit card issuers, we aren't incentivized by slapping hidden fees on borrowers - we make money as our cardholders spend - so we grow as you grow."



Unmet Credit Needs, Significant Demand TomoCredit provides credit to the millions of individuals that lack a credit score; most commonly young adults or internationals. Consumers early in their credit history can use TomoCredit to help boost credit scores and position themselves well as qualified candidates for mortgages, auto loans and lower insurance rates.

TomoCredit cards became available in late Summer 2020 and the company received more than 300,000 applicants at launch. Nearly half were immediately pre-approved, leading to more than 10,000 active users today and cards will be issued to the remaining applicants by Summer 2021. Start, Fix or Grow Credit Scores TomoCredit is a credit card that operates with a debit card model: payments are made on a 7-day automatic payment schedule and no fees or APR are applied. Applications are screened based on real-time cash flow, not FICO or credit scores. Credit limits on average are $3,000, but can scale to a maximum of $10,000. Borrowers can link to their investment accounts to increase their credit limits. The company's model helps consumers build credit faster by having a more robust repayment history. TomoCredit reports to the major credit bureaus. Its limits are set higher so consumers can keep their utilization levels low at all times. TomoCredit cards are issued by Community Federal Savings Bank, member FDIC. Sympathetic Immigrant Founders, Industry-leading Advisors TomoCredit, short for "Tomorrow's Credit," was co-founded by Kristy Kim (CEO), a South Korean immigrant and Dmitry Kashlev (CTO), a Russian immigrant. Kim, who immigrated to the U.S. as a child, conceived of TomoCredit in her early 20s when she was turned down for an auto loan, despite being employed and having a positive cash flow to cover the cost. Kim and Kashlev created TomoCredit in early 2019 to provide a solution for the many other foreign-born individuals and young adults who face the same credit challenges they did. In 2019, the startup was accepted into the Barclays' Accelerator, powered by TechStars, and the exposure led to securing its seed financing from early-stage venture firms. TomoCredit's Advisory Board includes current and past senior executives from LendingClub, Mastercard, Chime, Providian Financial, SoFi and Venmo. The company intends to triple its headcount over the next 12 months, with hiring predominantly for full stack and data engineers. The capital will also fuel product development plans, which include adding more interactive features to help consumers track and grow their credit. ABOUT TOMOCREDIT TomoCredit is a next-generation credit card, catering to young adults, international working professionals, students, and immigrants looking to build a better financial future in the U.S. Headquartered in San Francisco, TomoCredit processes millions of dollars in transactions monthly and is FDIC-insured through its partner bank, Community Federal Savings Bank. TomoCredit is backed by investors including: KB Investment, Barclays Ventures, Knollwood Investment Advisory, BAM Ventures, Passport Capital, Ulu Ventures, and Strong Ventures. More information is available at: www.tomocredit.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210210005220/en/

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Last year council steered the motion away from the Inspector General commission and towards Finance and Administration which, chaired by the opposition, recommended against the proposal of the Official Opposition leader.
The government and Parliament have great respect for farmers who are voicing their views on the three farm bills, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Wednesday and made it clear that those who want to continue with the old agriculture marketing system can continue doing so.

READ | MSP hasn't stopped after three farm laws enacted, you can't deny truth: PM Modi

During his over 90-minute address, the Prime Minister slammed the Congress as a "divided and confused party" for its different stands in Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha on the debate. The Congress walked out of Lok Sabha as PM Modi explained the government's stand on the three farm laws.

READ | Public sector essential but private sector's role also vital: PM Modi

Here are the top points from PM Modi's speech in Lok Sabha:

* Replying in Lok Sabha to the discussion on the motion of thanks to the President's address to the joint sitting of Parliament, PM Modi staunchly defended the three contentious farms laws and attacked the opposition for "misleading" farmers, saying those who are disrupting the House are doing so as per a "well-planned strategy" as they are unable to digest that people can see the truth. "Through their games, the trust of the people can never be won," he said, amidst protests by the opposition members.

READ | Govt, Parliament have great respect for farmers, says PM Narendra Modi in Lok Sabha

* Seeking to allay apprehensions on the farm laws, PM Modi said neither any agriculture 'mandi' (market) has shut down after the three laws were enacted nor has the MSP stopped, rather the MSP has only increased which no one can deny. The Prime Minister also said the government has offered to discuss clause by clause of the three farm laws and if there are any shortcomings it was ready to make changes.

READ | PM Modi concludes speech in Lok Sabha with this appeal to protesting farmers

* "This House, our government and we all respect farmers who are voicing their views on the farm bills. This is the reason why topmost ministers of the government are constantly talking to them. There is great respect for farmers. "After the laws relating to agriculture were passed by Parliament, no 'mandi' has shut. Likewise, MSP has remained. Procurement on MSP has remained. These facts can't be ignored," he said.

READ | Ab zyada ho raha hai: PM Narendra Modi takes jibe at Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury

* PM Modi said the Congress has taken different stands in Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha. "A divided and confused party like this can do no good to the country," he said. He said the old agriculture marketing system will continue and those who don't want the new system can continue with the old system.

READ | India needs to differentiate between 'Andolankari' and 'Andolanjeevi', says PM Narendra Modi

* "Our farmer should become self-reliant, he should get the freedom to sell his produce. There is a need to work in that direction," he said, adding agriculture has been a part of India's culture and the festivals have all been associated with planting and reaping of crops. Noting that the kind of investment farming needs was not happening, PM Modi said there is a need to bring investment and modernise agriculture to empower the sector.

* "I am surprised for the first time a new argument has come --we did not ask, so why did you give. Be it issue of dowry or triple talaq, no one had demanded laws to deal with them, but the laws were made as they were necessary for a progressive society," he said. The Prime Minister said the NDA government has tried everything to bring changes in the country and asserted that "if the intention is good, then the results will also be good".

* Referring to the COVID-19 pandemic, PM Modi said India has managed the crisis successfully despite adverse predictions and the country has now become a ray of hope for the world. He said the world post-COVID19 is turning out to be very different and in such times remaining isolated from the global trends will be counter-productive. "That is why India is working towards building an 'Aatmanirbhar Bharat' (self-reliant India), which seeks to further global good.

* "Predictions were made India cannot survive as a nation, but people of our country proved them wrong and we are now a ray of hope for the world," he said. Complimenting healthcare and frontline workers for their relentless work during the pandemic, the Prime Minister said the way India has managed the coronavirus crisis is a turning point and the world has seen its success.

* The address of the President has showcased India's 'Sankalp Shakti' and his words have boosted the spirit of confidence among the people of India, infused new confidence and inspired every heart "During the discussion on the President's speech, a large number of women MPs took part. This is a great sign. I want to congratulate the women MPs who enriched the House proceedings with their thoughts," he said.
Cairo Tower, the tallest structure in Egypt and North Africa, was lit up in red on Tuesday evening to celebrate the arrival of the United Arab Emirates Hope Probe to Mars, making it the first Arab country to reach the red planet.

Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi hailed the step, describing it as an unprecedented step in scientific research, according to a statement released by the Presidential Spokesperson, Bassam Rady, late on Tuesday.

[The step] heralds a major scientific boom in the Arab region, El-Sisi added.

He congratulated the UAEs leadership and people for the successful scientific experience that aims to explore new horizons in space.

A spacecraft from the United Arab Emirates swung into orbit around Mars on Tuesday, ending its seven-month long, 300-million-mile journey.

The spacecrafts mission is to gather detailed data on Mars atmosphere.

The UAE has become the fifth country in history to reach Mars, an international and Arab breakthrough, as the planet has been the graveyard for a multitude of missions from various countries.

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PARIS, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- ENTEROME SA, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on the discovery and development of novel microbiome driven therapeutics based on the unrivalled understanding of the gut microbiome's interaction with the human immune system, today announced that the company's management will participate in the upcoming (virtual) investor events:

Chardan Virtual Microbiome Medicines Summit: March 8

H.C. Wainwright Global Life Sciences Conference: March 9-10

Pierre Belichard, Enterome's CEO, will present the Company and take part in 1-on-1 meetings with institutional investors.

Mr Belichard will also take part in a panel discussion on the Microbiome & Cancer at:

USF Microbiome Virtual Corporate Forum Series, a free-to-register event (click here), on March 10 from 10:00-12:00 EST .

About Enterome

Enterome is a world leader in the discovery and development of novel pharmaceuticals based on its unrivalled understanding of the interaction between the gut microbiome and the immune system (the 'microbiome-immunoinflammation axis'). Enterome is leveraging this expertise to develop a pipeline of clinical and pre-clinical candidates (small molecules, proteins and peptides) with a focus on cancer, autoimmune, inflammatory and metabolic diseases.

Enterome has two unique pipeline of highly promising drug candidates:

OncoMimics : highly effective, off-the-shelf immunotherapies against cancers (EO2401, EO2463). EO2401 is in Phase 1/2 clinical trials in patients with glioblastoma and adrenal tumors. EO2463, is being prepared as a clinical candidate for B-cell malignancies (lymphomas and leukemias).

: highly effective, off-the-shelf immunotherapies against cancers (EO2401, EO2463). EO2401 is in Phase 1/2 clinical trials in patients with glioblastoma and adrenal tumors. EO2463, is being prepared as a clinical candidate for B-cell malignancies (lymphomas and leukemias). EndoMimics: a new generation of biologics for inflammatory diseases (EM101), Type 2 diabetes and inflammatory bowel disease.

These highly novel pipelines have been created using Enterome's world-leading Metasecretome technology, which gives it an unrivalled ability to generate precision drugs by using the natural reservoir of thousands of safe and tolerized effector proteins that are produced by the gut bacteria.

In addition, Enterome's clinical candidate Sibofimloc (also referred to as TAK-018), which selectively blocks the virulence factor FimH, is advancing through Phase 2 clinical trials in Crohn's disease. EB8018 has been partnered with Takeda globally, with Enterome retaining a significant profit share in the US.

Enterome is headquartered in Paris (France) with operations in Boston (US) and is backed by leading venture capital investors.

For more information, please visit the company's website at: www.enterome.com

Contacts

Enterome

Marine Perrier

Head of External Communications and Investor Relations

investorrelations@enterome.com



Media Relations

Mark Swallow / Sylvie Berrebi / David Dible

Citigate Dewe Rogerson

Tel. +44 207 638 9571 / enterome@citigatedewerogerson.com

Boy meets girl at UC, they fall in love pulling all-nighters in the DAAP studio, and the rest is history, right? Well, kind of.

For alumni Joe Stitzlein, BSDE 95, and Leslie (Loftus) Stitzlein, BSDE 92, it's a longer story.

I knew Leslie when I was in college at DAAP, but she was so much cooler than me I didnt get to talk to her that much. She was a senior, I was a sophomore, Joe says, laughing. Leslie says she remembers noticing him but since it was her senior year, she was focused on other things  like graduating, landing a job and figuring out whats next.

She worked at this breakfast stand in Tangeman and I would go and buy two 50-cent muffins, which was a lot of money at the time for me, so I could see her," Joe recalls. "I dont even think I would talk to her  I would just buy muffins.

Their official meet-cute happened a few years later in the fall of 1995 while they were both living in San Francisco, introduced by a mutual DAAP friend. From there, their love story took off: Dating, marriage, a quick stint back in Cincinnati, kids and some seriously cool design work.
In 1952 my grandmother, Audrey, was 20 years old. She had recently married my grandfather and they were living in Connecticut while he finished school. A few weeks into her first pregnancy, she contracted German measles (rubella)  a condition that put her pregnancy at great risk for complications and severe birth defects. Far away from family and support, my grandparents struggled to determine the right thing to do.

Finally, a doctor looked her in the eyes and said, If you were my daughter, I would not let you carry this pregnancy to term.

Now 70 years later, Audrey can still remember the certainty and clarity the doctor gave her on that day. They were referred to a doctor in Boston who would perform the procedure. He admitted her to the hospital under the guise that she had already miscarried. Though she had fears, she tells me she never had any regret over the decision to terminate that first pregnancy. And she never hesitated to tell that story, in the hopes that it would make a difference.

As her grandson, I grew up hearing hear story. As a congregational rabbi, I feel a responsibility to tell this story from our pulpit. As a religious leader, I believe I have an obligation to speak truth in our sacred spaces that resonates with the stories of peoples lives.

One in four Americans who can become pregnant will have an abortion by age 45.

Audreys story still resonates for many in my congregation. Some people who have abortions tell family and friends. Others, like my grandmother, share the story even more broadly. But too many have been forced to feel a sense of shame over their decision to end a pregnancy and told almost no one.

On Friday night, I will participate in National Council of Jewish Womens Repro Shabbat initiative by sharing my grandmothers story, along with my own views on abortion in the Jewish tradition. It is my hope that this sermon will help to destigmatize this sacred and life-affirming decision and encourage others to share their stories as well.

Judaism not only permits abortion, but even requires it when life is at stake. As a rabbi in the Reform Jewish movement, I also preach that our power and responsibility to make ethical choices is a gift from God. Moreover, building a just society is ultimately a Jewish concern. We must not remain quiet while barriers to health care place any individuals health, well-being, autonomy or economic security at risk.

As a participant in the Rabbis for Repro initiative and president of the Faith Leaders Coalition of Greater Houston, I advocate for the protection of all people of faith in Houston to practice their religions freely. Any law that limits a persons ability to access abortion or reproductive health services limits their ability to practice their faith, and thus violates the First Amendments protections of separation of church and state.

Leaders of all faiths have a powerful platform to use in speaking out in support of reproductive health, rights and justice. It is vital that our elected officials hear from people of all backgrounds and beliefs to show that people of faith are against the sustained and coordinated attack against these constitutional rights.

As we enter into this new legislative session, I call on our state elected officials to legislate in a way that protects the rights of all Texans to practice their faith and make decisions about their bodies without fear of government intrusion or coercion. And I call on all Texans to speak out in support of reproductive justice.

Through her openness, my grandmother modeled for me the divine power that comes when people share their truth. As a faith leader I will continue to find ways to empower others to share their own sacred stories of birth, loss, abortion and infertility. I truly believe that when we can affirm these stories as natural, human, love-filled experiences, we can begin to transform our lives as we work to build a city, state and country that demonstrates the values of liberty and justice for all.

Fixler is an associate rabbi at Congregation Emanu El in Houston, president of the Faith Leaders Coalition of Greater Houston and a participant in National Council of Jewish Womens Repro Shabbat initiative.
A dad who was high on meth when he savagely bashed a policewoman who bought him a cup of tea while he was in custody has been jailed for at least four years.

Aaron Heather was having a drug-induced psychotic episode when he grabbed Sergeant Rachael Robins by the ponytail and kneed her four times in the head and punched her twice in the face.

Judge David Wilson jailed the 43-year-old for eight years with a non-parole period of four years at the District Court in Sydney on Tuesday.

Father Aaron Heather (right) was having a drug-induced psychotic episode when he grabbed Sergeant Rachael Robins by the ponytail and kneed her four times in the head and punched her twice in the face in the cells at Wyong Police Station, on the Central Coast

Sergeant Robins suffered a broken nose and cuts to her face during the attack in the cells at Wyong Police Station, on the Central Coast.

Heather was in custody after his arrest in March 2019 at a home in Halekulani, north of Gosford, following reports of an assault.

He ate three grams of ice and shaved his head before driving to the Halekulani home, where he grabbed a young boy by the arm and said the child was 'his leader', according to The Daily Telegraph.

The 43-year-old told arresting officers that police were 'demonic people' and 'demons that go live in the underworld'.

Sergeant Rachael Robins (pictured) was left bloodied after Heather attacked her

Heather pleaded guilty to causing grievous bodily harm to a police officer, assaulting a police officer and resisting arrest.

He also admitted to other charges including stalking, wilful and obscene exposure, common assault, negligent driving, animal cruelty, trespassing, and break and enter.

He told his 2020 sentence hearing it took between two to three months in prison after his arrest to realise what he had done after the drug left his system.

He was on antidepressants when his best friend died and stopped taking his medication before turning to marijuana, cocaine and meth to help him block out the pain of losing his mate.

Heather told the court he was 'disgusted in myself' and 'eternally sorry' for what he did to Sergeant Robins and his family, but had no memory of his actions.

Questioned by the judge, Heather admitted telling a psychologist after his arrest how he believed his dead friend had been taken by the devil.

'I started to think the devil was going to take me and my family as well,' Heather told the psychologist.

'I believed it 100 per cent at the time.'

Heather pleaded guilty to a number of charges and was sentenced to eight years with a non-parole period of four years. He will become eligible for parole on March 17, 2023

The night before his arrest, Heather's wife told him he was saying bizarre things and he needed to get rid of the drugs, so he decided to eat the three grams he had left, causing him to hallucinate about the devil chasing him.

Asked by the judge why he had continued to take ice, Heather replied: 'I was weak, Your Honour.'

Heather claimed he had no idea of the consequences of taking the drug 'otherwise I would have stayed away from it'.

He said it wasn't until he was no longer in a drug-induced psychotic state that he realised how ridiculous his thoughts had been.

Judge Wilson found Heather to be an impressive and honest witness who had shown genuine remorse.

The case was a difficult sentencing exercise as it appeared Heather had previously been a person of good character before 'this extraordinary behaviour'.

He will become eligible for parole on March 17, 2023.
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A Sunnyvale business owner who waded into the national conversation about raising the federal minimum wage on social media went viral on Twitter after sharing that his employees are already paid more than $15 per hour  and castigating the notion that big businesses cant do the same.

Ryan Higgins on Tuesday tweeted that the minimum wage at his Sunnyvale comic book store, Comics Conspiracy, is at $16.30 per hour. Higgins said he has always paid his two employees above the minimum wage in Sunnyvale, which city council officials increased to $16.30 on Jan. 1 per an ordinance passed in 2016.

Want to see a store with a $16.30 minimum wage? Its my store. Get the (expletive) out of here that billion dollar corporations cant afford $15, Higgins, of San Jose, wrote in a tweet that has gone viral.

Higgins tweet has been retweeted by more than 23,000 people and liked by over 200,000 users.

Higgins told The Chronicle he tweeted after seeing a comment on a since-deleted tweet by a Washington Times columnist that suggested grocery stores would solely depend on automated self-checkouts if the minimum wage was $15 per hour.

The remark echoed the sentiments of many critics opposed to raising the minimum wage, who broadly argue that businesses will be forced to cut jobs to avoid going under if compelled to raise wages.

Higgins attempted to skewer that line of thinking in his tweet, particularly when it came to the notion that big businesses couldnt afford a minimum wage increase.

If companies can afford million dollars of salaries for CEOs and they can afford yachts and they can afford all the lifestyle of being a millionaire, pay a little bit more to your employees, Higgins said.

Some Twitter users challenged Higgins by explaining that some businesses cant afford to pay $15 an hour. What about the (up and coming) business that cant afford a $15 minimum wage? And if your store could afford it good. but not every store can and Im not talking just about billion dollar corporations, one user wrote. Others applauded Higgins, suggesting that owning a business is not an excuse to pay people a crappy wage.

Higgins said the comic book store has managed to stay afloat during the coronavirus pandemic because many of his customers work at Apple, Facebook and Google.

The minimum wage across the Bay Area went up in July of last year, despite restaurants and businesses shutting down during the coronavirus pandemic. Some business owners said the increase would affect their cash flow while others are not worried about it.

In California, the minimum wage is $13 per hour for employers with less than 25 employees and $14 per hour for business with more than 26 employees, according to the California Labor Commissioners Office. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

A House committee on Wednesday approved a part of Democrats $1.9 trillion relief plan that includes a proposal to increase the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2025, CNBC reported.

Jessica Flores is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jessica.flores@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jesssmflores
The number of people in hospital in Ireland with Covid-19 remains three times higher than at the peak of the second wave in October, a senior Government official has said.

Liz Canavan, assistant secretary at Department of the Taoiseach, warned that while numbers are falling the country cannot afford them to level out at this point.

She urged people to remember the health system is continuing to operate under intense pressure.

Hospital numbers are still at peak levels of wave two and were still using surge capacity, she said.

Expand Close Liz Canavan (Brian Lawless/PA) / Facebook

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We will have three times the number in hospital today as we had at the peak of wave two. We need to remember that.

While the numbers are falling we cant plateau at this point. We havent come this far to only come this far.

For now the virus is still with us and with the new variant it is potentially more transmissible than ever and we must continue to keep our guard up.

Ms Canavan made the comments at a briefing in Government Buildings on Wednesday where she outlined that 1.7% of the population is fully vaccinated against Covid-19.

Were now 50 days into the rollout of the largest vaccination programme in the history of the state, she said.

We have delivered 4.9 vaccine doses per 100 people and 1.7% of our population is fully vaccinated.

Ireland is progressing well with our programme compared to EU states and vaccines are being administered very quickly after their arrival in the country.

Ms Canavan cautioned against people leaving the country for non-essential reasons as it is a breach of Level 5 restrictions, highlighting that the fine had increased from 100 to 500 euro.

Despite the restrictions, she said more than half of the passengers arriving in the country are Irish residents, and two-thirds of those are returning from holiday.

This is a very concerning statistic, she said.

While we would all love and need a holiday, now is not the time to travel. Unless you are travelling for a specific essential purpose, please stay at home and follow the guidance.

She said people who arrive in the country must quarantine but they can end the period of quarantine earlier than 14 days if they take a PCR test after five days.

Regulations requiring a pre-departure negative PCR test for all passengers arriving from overseas have been extended so anyone who arrives without a test is obliged to take one on arrival.

Some simple things you can do to #protectyourself right now - have a list of your medicines handy and keep your prescriptions up-to-date: https://t.co/It3w7FXpXv #StaySafe pic.twitter.com/6gAhnUZipS  HSE Ireland (@HSELive) February 10, 2021

Ms Canavan said the same rules and obligations on testing and quarantine apply to people who arrive from overseas via Northern Ireland.

She added that visa-free travel from Brazil and South Africa had been suspended, as had issuing of visas other than in exceptional circumstances.

Ms Canavan told the briefing that that 481,000 people received the Pandemic Unemployment Payment (PUP) this week, up 1,698 on last week and at a cost of 144.6 million euro.

She said around 5.8 billion euro had been paid under the scheme since last March.

Since the last payment 11,000 people had closed their PUP claim, with 8,000 saying they were returning to work.

A further 54 deaths with Covid-19 and another 1,006 confirmed cases of the virus were announced on Wednesday.

As of 8am, 1,032 patients with Covid-19 were in hospitals, of whom 173 were in ICU.

By February 7, 240,487 doses of coronavirus vaccines had been administered, comprising 153,654 first doses and 86,833 second doses.
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Vodacoms latest trading update revealed it spent R2.7 billion on its network over the last three months, which sends a signal to MTN that it is gunning for the top spot in network quality.

Network quality is closely related to how much money an operator spends on its network, referred to as capital expenditure (Capex) in financial reports.

It costs billions to roll out new sites and deploy the latest mobile network technologies  like 5G, 44 MIMO, 3CC (3 Carrier Combining), and 256QAM  on existing sites.

Unless a mobile network consistently invests in its network and the latest technologies, its performance will start to lag its competitors.

Vodacom used to dominate network quality rankings in South Africa thanks to its higher capital expenditure in South Africa.

While MTN focused its resources on its international expansion, Vodacom spent most of its money on its local operations.

Between 2000 and 2014 Vodacom consistently outspent MTN. This changed in 2015, when MTN doubled its Capex to R10.9 billion in South Africa.

Over the next five years, MTN spent around R54 billion on network improvements in South Africa  much higher than Vodacoms R46 billion.

It took two years for MTN to catch up to Vodacom in network performance because it had to make up for many years of lower investments.

When it happened, however, MTN quickly pulled away from its competitors.

The gap between MTN and Vodacoms network performance increased rapidly since 2019 and its network is now by far the best in South Africa.

In Q4 2020, MyBroadband Insights report showed the average download speed on MTNs network was 64Mbps, much higher than Vodacom, which ranked second with 34Mbps. It is even further ahead of Telkom, Cell C, and Rain.

The chart below shows the average download speed on South Africas mobile networks over the past three years.

It is not easy for mobile operators to convince shareholders to spend more money on their network if there is not a clear path to recover this investment.

Luckily the fierce rivalry between Vodacom and MTN means they continue to invest billions in their networks each year. South Africans, in turn, enjoy two world-class mobile networks.

The beauty of competition is that they dont have much of a choice. If their network quality starts to lag too far behind their main rival, users will simply start to migrate to the better network.

Vodacom realises this and started to ramp up its Capex. Its latest trading update showed it invested R2.7 billion in its network over the last three months  up 12.3% from the prior period.

Vodacom sidestepped questions as to whether the increased Capex is aimed at taking back the top spot in network quality from MTN.

It can, however, be assumed Vodacom is not happy with second place. For years it used the payoff line South Africas best network, and it would love to claim it again.

For now, Vodacom was only willing to say it is investing significantly in its network to accommodate changing customer behaviour and to enhance its overall customer experience.

Vodacom said it is investing billions in its network to expand its 4G coverage and increase its speed and network capacity.

We also continue to expand our national 5G network coverage, with 156 live 5G sites recently introduced in KwaZulu-Natal province, a Vodacom spokesperson said.

We are confident that South Africans will continue to enjoy a superior customer experience on the Vodacom network, it said.

Now read: The best and worst mobile networks in South Africa
The Centre on Tuesday said frontline workers who do not get inoculated against COVID-19 in the scheduled or mop-up rounds of the vaccination drive will have to be relegated to the age-specific batches as it advised the states and Union territories to conclude the first-dose administration of all frontline workers by March 6.

Addressing a press conference, Union Health Secretary Rajesh Bhushan said all states and Union territories have been asked to schedule vaccination for all the healthcare workers listed on the CoWIN mobile application by March 1.

"We have further advised the states and Union territories that all frontline workers must be given the opportunity of getting vaccinated in the mop-up rounds by March 6. Those frontline workers who do not get vaccinated in the scheduled vaccination rounds or in the mop-up rounds will have to be relegated to the age-specific vaccination rounds," he said.

The COVID-19 inoculation process for people aged above 50 is scheduled to start in March.

Speaking about the pandemic situation in the country, Member (Health), NITI Aayog, Dr V K Paul said protecting the healthcare system, the frontline workers and also the larger population from not being a candidate for mortality even if they get infected with COVID-19 is the priority.

He also said it might be a few months before vaccines become available through emergency use authorisation."The country is fortunate to have two made in India vaccines and as many as six-seven in the pipeline," Paul said.

"First and foremost, the comprehensive goal is to achieve the public health objective of vaccinating 30 crore people. That is where the vaccine stockpile will be channelled on priority. If the availability is over and above that requirement...we still have to wait for a few months before any of these (other) vaccines becomes available through emergency use authorisation," he said.

Also read: Godrej launches ultra-low temperature refrigerators, mobile freezers for COVID-19 vaccines

Also read: 84% willing to get vaccinated for COVID-19 but many fear side-effects: survey
Describing India as one of the most important partners of the US in the Indo-Pacific region, the Biden Administration on Tuesday said that it welcomes India's emergence as a leading global power and its role as a net security provider in the region.

"India is one of the most important partners in the Indo-Pacific region to us. We welcome India's emergence as a leading global power and its role as a net security provider in the region," State Department Spokesperson Ned Price told reporters at his daily news conference.

Earlier in the day, he said, Secretary of State Tony Blinken spoke with his Indian counterpart, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, for the second time in less than a fortnight. During the call, the two leaders reaffirm the strength of the US-India partnership and discussed issues of mutual concern, including the situation in Myanmar.

Blinken expressed concern over the military coup and the importance of rule of law and the democratic process in Myanmar.

They also discussed regional developments, including the value of US-India cooperation across the Indo-Pacific. "Both sides look forward to expanded regional cooperation, including through the Quad, and to address the challenges of COVID and climate change," Price said.

Responding to a question, Price said the US-India Comprehensive Global Strategic Partnership is both broad as well as multi-faceted.

"We'll continue to engage at the highest levels of our government to deepen cooperation on many fronts, and we are confident that the strong and upward trajectory of our partnership will, in fact, continue," he told reporters.

India and the US, he said, cooperate on a wide range of diplomatic and security issues, including defence, nonproliferation, regional cooperation in the Indo-Pacific, counterterrorism, peacekeeping, the environment, health, education, technology, agriculture, space and oceans.

"We also work closely in international organisations, and we welcome India joining the Security Council in last month of this year for a two-year term," Price said.

The United States, he noted, also remains India's largest and most important trading partner, with total bilateral trade increasing to USD146 billion in 2019.

US companies, of course, are a large source of India's foreign direct investment, he said.

Price also highlighted the people-to-people ties which he said are broad and important. "Across this country, nearly four million Indian Americans call the United States home, contributing in their communities and proudly serving their country in uniform," he said.

This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text. Only the headline has been changed.

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LONDON, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- For those with a significant stake or role in a Data Centre business, whether it's for their own organisation or for others, here is a burning question:

'Does the Cyber Security for your Data Centre Operational Technology get overlooked because it falls between your IT, Security and Engineering teams?'

Throughout industry, Industrial Control Systems (ICS) have long been targeted with Cyber Crime. Now, however, more malicious and sophisticated strains of Malware and Ransomware are specifically targeting Operational Technology (OT) environments. As the Data Centre industry develops, forward-thinking operators are using techniques and approaches typical of more complex industrial facilities to drive innovation.

It is time to reclassify the Data Centre Operational Technology (DCOT) environments, ensuring they are treated separately.

The risks for Data Centres are growing

Data Centre stakeholders should be seriously concerned about the impact of Cyber Attack on their DCOT, an impact which is compounded by a combination of downtime and severe financial hits.

Dan Coats, the US director of National Intelligence warned of the danger of a crippling Cyber Attack in a speech in 2019, drawing a parallel with the increased Cyber Chatter detected amongst terrorist groups ahead of the World Trade Centre attack in 2001. "Here we are nearly two decades later, and I'm here to say that the warning lights are blinking red again. Today the digital infrastructureis literally under attack."

In the Data Centre Industry, downtime is measured in seconds, minutes and for a serious outage, hours. When it comes to recovery from a Cyber breach, though, it is measured in days, weeks and months - a totally different landscape.

Financial impacts are similarly compounded. The Uptime Institute reported that one in ten major outages at a Data Centre costs over 1m, and cited examples of substantially greater financial impact.

It is clear, however that the average cost of downtime is dwarfed when we start to look at the costs associated with a Cyber breach. In April 2020, IT services and Data Centre provider Cognizant was hit by a ransomware attack that, it forewarned investors in July, could cost it between $50m and $70m.

Data Centre owners in countries such as the UK are mistaken if they think it is really only US companies that are at risk; this is not true. Whilst the US has most attacks and suffers the highest losses, in the UK the average loss was slightly higher than the global average of $3.9m.

And research shows that Data Centres are at a particular risk, with the average loss to a technology company being much higher than the average, standing at $5.04m, the fifth most 'at risk' industry after Healthcare, Energy, Financial and Pharma.

Mike West, CEO of Digital Infrastructure Advisers, a company specialising in Data Centres asks, "Do you see the Cyber threat being a risk for your customers' or your company's data rather than for you, the building operator?

"As a building operator, it's your Operational Technology that is at risk. There are scores of vulnerabilities in and around the Data Centre facility itself, where increasingly clever hackers are able to get in and cause devastation, and where there is grave doubt that you are protected."

Mike explains: "Your DCOT comprises all the equipment and services embedded in your building, from your biometric, security and CCTV to your critical power and cooling, Internet of Things (IoT) devices and sensors, fire & life safety systems, remote monitoring tools, building management systems as well as control systems on multiple networks, which have many protocols and platforms such as BacNet, ModBus, SCADA, TCPIP, Distributed Control Systems (DCS), Remote Terminal Units (RTU) and Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC).

"These terms are well-known and catered for throughout major industries, but they are still not widely recognised in the world of Data Centres.

"The equipment that keeps your building running is very similar, if not the same, as the equipment that keeps a Power Station or car manufacturing plant such as Honda going.

"Exactly as in these industries, your building's equipment will be at least partly maintained and serviced by external suppliers. They employ people who come in from outside with laptops, tablets and phones, and log naively into your systems, just doing their jobs. Increasingly, thanks to IoT, they maintain your systems remotely."

Mike argues that the Data Centre operator is not only responsible for their own building's security, but are suddenly at the mercy of their security. He says, "You might be right in thinking that this area is beneath your notice, but your own DCOT is bringing a potentially devastating threat right there, beneath your nose."

The burgeoning costs of Cyber crime in the Data Centre world

Where a ransom demand is made, it is only the start of the financial cost of a Cyber Attack. In the well-documented Equinix case for example, attackers reportedly asked for $4.5m USD, but the additional financial consequence of this attack and the potential unseen long-term effect on its business were much greater.

To ransoms and operational recovery costs may be added the severe fines imposed as a result of subsequent regulatory investigation. For example, the EU GDPR sets a maximum fine of 20 million or 4% of annual global turnover - whichever is greater - for infringements. This type of regulation is already extending beyond personal data theft, and considering the impact to safety and disruption to national critical infrastructure.

Our connected world has become a lucrative playground for criminals who can launch attacks on victims in multiple countries and jurisdictions, with little fear of being caught.

Cyber criminals steal an estimated $600 billion per year from governments, companies and individuals, while the overall loss of company revenues over the course of five years from 2019 to 2023 will reach $5.2 trillion. In fact, Cyber crime is one of the most disruptive and economically damaging criminal activities in the world today.

Supply chain attacks which include the SME sector

Whilst those in Data Centres are fortunate enough to be working in a growing industry in that Data Centres are now essential to the fabric of society, and one of the foundations of our increasingly digital lives, we must recognise that an attack on the Data Centre infrastructure is an attack on all the businesses it supports, irrespective of the size, scale or location of the facility.

This isn't about data security, it's about being a core component of the technology supply chain, which increasingly contains SME's as well as major corporates. Data Centre operators could be forgiven for thinking that it's the larger companies that are at risk of Cyber Attack; this simply is not true. Mid-sized organisations are essential components in any supply chain; they experienced the biggest increase in average breach cost, and smaller organisations had higher than average costs per employee. These are possibly the organisations that have take fewer steps to protect themselves.

As an example, the UK MOD's Small and Medium-sized Enterprise Action Plan 2019-2022 aims to spend 25% of its 186b budget away from its 19 Strategic Suppliers, and with SME's, bringing a considerable number of additional players into the Cyber attackers' crosshairs.

"The biggest loss to a Data Centre in the end, is that of trust," says Mike West. "If the very company that houses its customers' precious IT assets, has allowed a data breach in its own systems or facility infrastructure, the resultant loss in confidence can be difficult to recover from. With technology companies standing to lose more than the average in terms both of money and reputation, it is not a situation that a responsible stakeholder can ignore."

The widely-reported SolarWinds attack clearly demonstrates the impact of a supply chain strike, and how Cyber gangs are becoming more sophisticated in approach as well as in the use of technology. No doubt there is more to come from this incident, because it highlights the disastrous and widespread impact of embedded Cyber infection or hacking at source.

Why Data Centres may not be 'the most secure facilities in the world'

Whilst some may hide behind the veil of physical security, (certain Data Centres mention being 'the most secure facilities in the world', with sophisticated multi-layer protection zones and high-end systems), ironically the IoT devices used on these networks can be used by Cyber criminals to get access to the broader DCOT network.

We are all aware of the almost unthinkably destructive actions a malicious insider could take, but perhaps the real risk is latent, hiding in the code of an electronic IoT device, waiting to be activated, as the hack on the Scheider Triconex Safety systems demonstrates. In this incident, the hackers' software gave them remote control over the plant's safety instrumented systems, designed to defend against life-threatening disasters.

As the sophistication of the Data Centre infrastructure develops, and many smart building techniques integrated with control and automation systems are adopted, there is further risk that attackers will use evermore imaginative ways to find a back door even to the most highly secure, so-called 'dark' sites.

With so many engineers, from both operator and client teams, entering the facilities with uncontrolled hardware, and the prolific use of IoT devices and out-of-band network facilities on plant and equipment, a clear plan of defence measures have been compromised.

Our world is now about novel and new Cyber Attacks and never-before-seen events, and so the landscape has become massively challenging for security teams to defend. With low and slow, hard-to-detect techniques, through to machine speed attacks, where criminals weaponize AI, it is clear that human speed responses are no longer adequate.

Cyber criminals are taking an ecosystem approach

Cyber crime is becoming evermore lucrative, and we are seeing Cyber gangs operate in concert, using Ransomware-as-a-service from the dark web, to conduct malicious attacks at scale, as the widely publicised case of WannaCry demonstrated; it is clear that traditional security approaches are inadequate.

Of all the types of crime, Cyber continues to increase at the fastest rate. According to INTERPOL, as quoted within the World Economic Forum (WEF) Future Series:

"'Cybersecurity, emerging technology and systemic risk', is an insight report published in November 2020, citing 'In less than a decade since cybersecurity first featured in the Global Risks report, it has emerged as one of the most important systemic issues for the global economy."

Solutions for Data Centres to consider

The WEF report comes to three conclusions, the third of which is Leadership action: "Business leaders need the ability to plan more strategically for emerging risk, so they can ensure that the organisations delivering the most critical infrastructures do not suffer failures that are catastrophic for societies."

Mike West agrees. "Given the Data Centre industry is a strategic part of the world's technology infrastructure, and Industry has demonstrated high levels of collaboration tackling key challenges, there is no doubt that Cyber resilience and security are a shared responsibility that involves everyone and, as such, require an ongoing holistic, systematic and coordinated approach."

Decide where the responsibility lies for the Cyber risk at DCOT level

Because the infrastructure in a Data Centre is focused on keeping the computers going, there is usually little or no focus on the security around the Operational Technology. Mike West asks: "Whose responsibility are these networks? Is it the engineering department because it's to do with the mechanics of the building? Is it the IT department because it's got Cyber written on it? Or is it security, because they are in charge of protecting the building? This question must be answered at the top, where the key stakeholders sit.

"It's an abnormal, overlooked risk and if you are leading a Data Centre business, it's time you got involved. You need to ensure it's clear where the overall responsibility for your systematic, coordinated approach lies."

Don't be tempted to kick this can down the road

The threats to a Data Centre business via its Operational Technology is urgent, and whilst it's understandable to consider this as a problem that can be dealt with 'later', it is alive and ready to kick right now.

Mike West says, "We would argue that Data Centres are amongst the most critical infrastructures in society, because the data held in these facilities is increasingly vital to the way communities run. Tomorrow is too late to start looking at the risk to DCOT, which underpins the facilities."

Data Centres are used to support utilities, hospitals & healthcare, food manufacturers, the logistics and transport industries, education, defence and communications - all examples of key sectors that affect the very fabric of how the world runs.

Consider specialist DCOT Cyber protection

Mike West has spent his career in Data Centres, and his company, Digital Infrastructure Advisors, has a unique awareness of where and how this new threat can devastate not only the Data Centre business, but also that of its customers. The organisation's deep knowledge of how Data Centres are built, how they operate and how they are maintained means that they can see things that most people overlook.

Its Data Centre advisory and technical services extend to specific Cyber services including compliance, audit, testing and technology solutions.

An opportunity to take protective action against Cyber in the DCOT

Digital Infrastructure Advisors has partnered with one of the world's most powerful providers of Cyber AI security, and the creator of Autonomous Response Technology, Darktrace.

Because Darktrace's AI technology doesn't look at yesterday's attack to predict that of tomorrow, it has the unique ability to find potential threats that have never been seen before.

Every three seconds, Darktrace AI fights back against a Cyber-threat, preventing it from causing damage.

With Digital Infrastructure Advisors' intimate knowledge of the potential risks to Data Centres and specifically their Operational Technology, the partnership between the two organisations is a powerful ally to the Data Centre stakeholder.

The Darktrace technology with Digital Infrastructure Advisors' insight is uniquely positioned to support both the Industrial and DCOT environments as well as corporate networks including cloud, SaaS and email, providing a single unified platform to protect 'every corner of the network' for Data Centre business from Cyber threat.

Case Study: Protection against one of the world's most notorious Cyber Attackers

Shamoon is a highly destructive malware, which has been associated with the interests of the Iranian state. Shamoon 3 is so called because it seems to be a new version of the malware.

At a global energy company, Darktrace's Industrial Immune system detected Shamoon 3 in its earliest stages, flagging the threat to the security team as soon as it detected the initial intrusion. Read more about this incident, and the indicators of compromise that most likely represent lateral movement activity in the weeks prior to the 'detonation'.

Proof of value to the Data Centre

As a way of enabling organisations to carry out due diligence on this collaborative solution, Digital Infrastructure Advisors and Darktrace have developed a two-step 'Proof of Value' opportunity, for no financial outlay to the Data Centre operator.

Because of the self-learning nature of the technology, there is very little configuration needed, and it may be set up in under one hour.

Virtual presentation to all relevant personnel in the Data Centre organisation

- This includes the opportunity for stakeholders to interrogate the solution

- This includes the opportunity for stakeholders to interrogate the solution Set of reports on the participating Data Centre's network, after a 30-day trial of the solution

Reports include identification of vulnerabilities

No financial outlay to the Data Centre operator

To set up the initial virtual presentation of around an hour, please contact mike.west@digitalinfrastructureadvisors.com or call +44 (1) 7768 557 191

https://www.digitalinfrastructureadvisors.com/



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Turkey says it has netted a high-level Kurdish militant in a covert operation mounted by its national intelligence organization in Iraqs Yazidi-dominated Sinjar region. Ibrahim Parim of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), who went by the codename Lazer, was responsible for logistics, according to Turkeys state-run Anadolu news agency.

Sitting on the border of Kurdish-governed northeast Syria, Sinjar serves as a critical link for PKK rebels moving between Iraq and Syria, according to Turkish authorities. Turkey has targeted the area on several occasions, killing what it claims were high-value PKK targets. The Turkish attacks have sowed panic among the civilian population already traumatized by the Islamic States genocidal campaign against the Yazidis in 2014.

On Feb. 8, Sinjar Mayor Mahma Khalil called on the Iraqi government to assert full control over the area, saying this would head off a Turkish invasion. He said Sinjar should be demilitarized. Neither the [PKK] nor Turkey should be allowed to attack, he said.

PKK sources say the call by Khalil, who was installed as mayor in line with a recent UN-backed security deal signed in October 2020 between Baghdad and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) that is allied with Turkey, is part of a coordinated plan to oust the PKK from Sinjar.

Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar traveled to Baghdad and Erbil last month to discuss joint cooperation against the PKK, and it's widely believed he was seeking approval for a joint military offensive against the PKK in Sinjar. However, its unlikely Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi would greenlight further intervention by Turkey, whose decadeslong military presence in northern Iraq is a source of tension between the two neighbors.

The PKK played a critical role in rescuing thousands of Yazidis from the Islamic State in August 2014 after KRG peshmerga forces fled from Sinjar without even leaving the Yazidis weapons with which to defend themselves. As a result, the majority of Yazidis no longer trust the KRG but are divided over the role of the PKK because of the Turkish aggression the fighters presence attracts.

KRG Prime Minister Masrour Barzani noted today via Twitter that the Sinjar agreement has not been implemented in accordance with the terms. Forces that were supposed to withdraw remain in the area.

It was unclear whether he was referring to the PKK or a local Yazidi militia it helped establish and train, the Sinjar Protection Units, which also has links to Iraqs Popular Mobilization Units operating in the area. Sinjar is among the so-called disputed territories that the KRG claims should be under Kurdish control.

In a related development, Turkeys Ministry of Defense said in a statement today it had launched a new operation against the PKK near Gare Mountain northeast of Dahuk.

Gare is a transit point for PKK militants crossing into Turkey. The PKKs military wing, the People's Defense Forces, confirmed in a statement that the Turkish army had launched a major operation against its forces in Gare, deploying attack helicopters and fighter jets. Saban Xelil, a local mayor, told the Kurdistan 24 news outlet that Turkish military aircraft had bombed six villages in the area since the early hours of Feb. 10 and the assault had continued until 8 p.m. local time. No casualties were reported, but vineyards and agricultural lands were severely damaged, he said.
YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 10, ARMENPRESS. The Economy Minister Vahan Kerobyan says that many European and American companies are in the process of making investments in Armenia.

In an interview for Herankar about attracting investments in the post-war period, Kerobyan revealed that a major Swedish company plans to open more than 1000 jobs in Armenia in 2021.

Its an IT company with 20-22 billion dollar capitalization. Its one of the most major companies globally in its area. It has offices in Georgia and in several other countries, and now its planning to open an office in Armenia, he said, without disclosing further details. Kerobyan said there are many similar investments underway and the Swedish company is only one example.

Speaking about domestic investors, Kerobyan praised the many-many patriotic Armenian investors who are making their share in restoring the economic capacity of their country, hurrying to make investments. The basis for the investment is the business idea, but Kerobyan says now a new and important factor is adding to this  patriotism. This doesnt mean that the businessman doesnt want to gain profit, on the contrary, given the risks they will try to gain more profit, but the motivation to make investments in this situation increases with their love for country.

The minister underscored that the government must be able to correctly speak with the investors. He admitted that just like in the past, this isnt done properly now as well. Instead of us going and asking investors, persuading them to come to us and make investments, we are actually shunning them. This is still seen in numerous circles of public administration system, he said, presenting his solutions to the problem.

He described the state of the countrys economy in one word  crisis  which happened because the economy went through a double disaster in 2020, first the pandemic and then the war.

Asked how he would assess the theoretical return to the 2019s economic results this year, Kerobyan said that would be the double-digit growth which he has previously talked about. Id find that to be a normal result, but certainly we must aim higher. But that itself would be a good result, it is considered a more than optimistic projection today. But surely we have our toolbox for solving this issue, he said.

Editing and Translating by Stepan Kocharyan
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The logo of U.S. social network Twitter displayed on the screen of a smartphone and a tablet in Toulouse, southern France, on Oct. 26, 2020. (Lionel Bonaventure/AFP via Getty Images)

Trump Wont Be Allowed Back on Twitter Again, CFO Confirms

Former President Donald Trump wont be allowed on Twitter again after his account was banned last month, according to a company executive on Feb. 10.

If you are removed from the platform, you are removed from the platform, Twitter CFO Ned Segal said, adding that the ban applies whether youre a commentator, youre a CFO, or whether you are a former or current public official.

Twitter permanently suspended Trump from the platform on Jan. 8, soon after the breach of the Capitol building. The social media website alleged that the former presidents final tweets had incited violence, although no criminal charges have been filed against him.

Currently, the former president is defending himself in the Senates impeachment trial, although the upper chamber isnt likely to convict him. The Senate requires a 67-vote threshold to convict a president.

Days after Trumps Twitter ban, CEO Jack Dorsey said that the San Francisco-based companys decision to remove the former president caused division and set a dangerous precedent.

Having to take these actions fragment [sic] the public conversation. They divide us. They limit the potential for clarification, redemption, and learning. And sets a precedent I feel is dangerous: the power an individual or corporation has over a part of the global public conversation, Dorsey wrote on Twitter.

In addition to Twitter, Facebook, Google, and several more Big Tech firms suspended Trump around the same time. Meanwhile, free speech social media platform Parler was taken down from Apples App Store and the Google Play store around the same time; days later, Amazon Web Services removed Parler and essentially took the entire site down.

The collective actions against Trump prompted warnings from conservatives, civil liberties groups, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Emmanuel Macron, and Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

I do not celebrate or feel pride in our having to ban [Trump] from Twitter, or how we got here. After a clear warning wed take this action, we made a decision with the best information we had based on threats to physical safety both on and off Twitter. Was this correct? Dorsey also wrote on Twitter around the same time Trumps account was banned.

He added: I believe this was the right decision for Twitter. We faced an extraordinary and untenable circumstance, forcing us to focus all of our actions on public safety. Offline harm as a result of online speech is demonstrably real, and what drives our policy and enforcement above all.
ALAMEDA, Calif., Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Penumbra, Inc. (NYSE: PEN) today announced that its management team is scheduled to present at Citi's 2021 Healthcare Services, Medtech, Tools, & HCIT Virtual Conference on Wednesday, February 24, 2021.

Event: Citi's 2021 Healthcare Services, Medtech, Tools, & HCIT Virtual Conference

Date: Wednesday, February 24, 2021

Time: 3:20pm ET / 12:20pm PT

A webcast of the presentation will be available by visiting the investors' section of the company's website at www.penumbrainc.com. The webcast will be available on the company's website for at least two weeks following the event.

About Penumbra

Penumbra, Inc., headquartered in Alameda, California, is a global healthcare company focused on innovative therapies. Penumbra designs, develops, manufactures and markets novel products and has a broad portfolio that addresses challenging medical conditions in markets with significant unmet need. Penumbra sells its products to hospitals and healthcare providers primarily through its direct sales organization in the United States, most of Europe, Canada and Australia, and through distributors in select international markets. The Penumbra logo is a trademark of Penumbra, Inc. For more information, visit www.penumbrainc.com .

Investor Relations

Penumbra, Inc.

510-995-2461

[email protected]

SOURCE Penumbra, Inc.

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The Auburn Enlarged City School District's primary financial official gave a presentation on the capital and executive components of its 2021-22 budget.

Lisa Green, the district's business official spoke on Tuesday to the board of education at its meeting at the Auburn High School library. This was the first board meeting in a couple of months to be open to the public after they were closed and conducted via Zoom because of COVID-19.

The budget's capital element is down from the current year by $63,000, Green said in an email after the meeting. The capital element of the budget includes all debt service payments, she said, plus budgets for operations and maintenance, so essentially buildings and grounds.

Debt service would be down by $225,000, offset by increases in operations and maintenance. Health insurance costs are down about $165,000 due to a prescription savings program the district has adopted.

The administrative component would see an $395,000 increase, with the biggest hike being school resource officer costs, Green said. She talked about that during the meeting.

"The SRO (costs) are going up primarily because people have left and they replaced them with different officers who have higher salaries," she said.

Police in riot gear march to take a position to block demonstrators at an intersection during a protest in Mandalay, Burma, on Feb. 9, 2021. (AP Photo)

No Leverage With Burma Military Junta, Former Foreign Minister Says

Following the arrest of an Australian advisor to Aung San Suu Kyi by the Burma (also known as Myanmar) military junta, former foreign minister Alexander Downer believes there is little the Australian government can do to secure his release.

Sean Turnell, a professor of economics from Macquarie University in Sydney, was the first foreign national confirmed arrested after the military coup occurred on Feb.1.

Downer said the current foreign affairs minister Marise Payne would be making representations to the junta. However, it wouldnt be easy.

Its not easy to make representations to the Myanmar military, I know from experience, Downer told the ABC.

I think we would have almost no leverage, he said. It would depend on personal relationships that the ambassador has developed, and other staff in the Australian Embassy.

Turnell is a director of the Myanmar Development Institute and has served as special consultant to Aung San Suu Kyi since Dec. 2017.

Suu Kyi prior to the coup held the position of State Counsellor of Myanmar, which is equal to the position of prime minister, and is the head of the National League of Democracy, Burmas former ruling political party.

I guess you will soon hear of it, but I am being detained, Turnell told Reuters on Saturday. Being charged with something, but not sure what. I am fine and strong and not guilty of anything.

Turnell had previously written in a post on Twitter that he was safe. But that he was heartbroken for what the coup meant for Burma.

Thanks everyone for your concern yesterday. Safe for now but heartbroken for what all this means for the people of Myanmar. The bravest, kindest people I know. They deserve so much better. pic.twitter.com/RA2YvCOEF7  sean turnell (@SeanTurnell) February 1, 2021

Turnells live interview with BBC radio on the following day was cut short after authorities entered his room during the call.

Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne has called for the immediate release of the Turnell from detention in Burma.

He is a highly regarded advisor and a highly regarded member of the academic community in Australia, Payne said on Monday.

But Turnell has been critical of the countrys military in the past, saying they continued to resist change.

Following the end of the military dictatorship, many ex-military were found places in the public service, which is inhibiting the countrys opportunities to rebuild, he said in 2019.

The military will not easily eschew the power they have held on to for decades; the military budget remains completely separate from the national budget, and the civilian arm of government has no say on the militarys spending decisions.

Tim Harcourt, a friend of Turnell and economist at the University of New South Wales, speculated that Turnells arrest maybe not just be related to his connection to the Suu Kyi.

Harcourt believes it could have something to do with Turnells knowledge of classified information.

Theres some speculation he may know things that the generals may not want people to know, Harcourt told Sky News. Maybe where they keep their Swiss bank accounts, Im not sure.
One of Donald Trump's three impeachment lawyers described the former president as a 'f****** crook' and sued him last year for attempting to disenfranchise Pennsylvania votes through baseless claims of mail-in voter fraud.

Michael van der Veen, 57, was one of three lawyers drafted a week ago to represent Trump in his trial, and on Monday signed Trump's response to the House article of impeachment, alongside Bruce Castor and David Schoen.

Castor and Schoen are his lead defense lawyers. All were hired last Sunday, after his five previous lawyers quit.

Michael van der Veen is one of three lawyers defending Trump, alongside Castor and Schoen

Trump, pictured in November, hired Castor, Schoen and van der Veen only a week ago

The impeachment trial of Donald Trump on charges of insurrection began on Tuesday

But van der Veen's previous remarks and cases are certain to raise eyebrows - especially given Trump's infamous demand for unswerving loyalty, and previous purges of anyone critical of him.

Van der Veen, based in Philadelphia, is best known for his personal injury, pro bono and criminal defense litigation. Castor, the former Montgomery County district attorney who famously declined to prosecute Bill Cosby, joined his firm in December.

Van der Veen represented Justin Hiemstra in 2019 when Hiemstra, a student at the time, was accused of attempting to hack into the IRS to obtain Trump's tax returns. Van der Veen said his client had engaged in a 'schoolboy prank', and Hiemstra pleaded guilty and was sentenced to probation.

During one conversation, Hiemstra told The Philadelphia Inquirer he recalled van der Veen calling the then-president 'a f****** crook'.

'I'm not sure if [those comments] were made to make me feel more comfortable, or if they were his actual opinions,' Hiemstra told The Philadelphia Inquirer.

'He definitely came off as fairly anti-Trump in the context that I knew him.'

Van der Veen has denied making the remarks.

Justin Hiemstra described van der Veen as being 'fairly anti-Trump' when he knew him

The Washington Post reported that, during Trump's first two years as president, van der Veen donated to prominent Pennsylvania Democrats, including Senator Robert P. Casey Jr., one of the former president's most vocal critics in the chamber.

A year after the Hiemstra case, van der Veen represented Melvin Johnakin, an independent candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives, when Johnakin sued Trump and Postmaster General Louis DeJoy over mail-in voting.

In the suit, filed in August, van der Veen sued 'to preserve and protect the essential right to vote and prevent large-scale disenfranchisement'.

He accused Trump and DeJoy of plotting to slow mail delivery, in particular to disenfranchise urban voters living in minority-populated, largely Democrat districts.

'These actions also arise in an environment subject to repeated claims by President Donald J. Trump that voting by mail is ripe with fraud, despite having no evidence in support of these claims, and lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign to stop mail-in voting in states such as Nevada and Pennsylvania,' van der Veen wrote.

The lawsuit was settled as part of an agreement preventing the postal service from implementing many of the proposed changes that could have affected mail delivery.

Van der Veen said politics had nothing to do with his decision now to represent Trump at his impeachment trial, and insisted his previous cases had no bearing on the trial.

'My firm treats all of its clients the same,' he told The Philadelphia Inquirer.

'Whether they're in a trial on a national stage, or whether they're in the Court of Common Pleas. They all get our best representation.'

The company said it plans to treat up to 16 pancreatic cancer patients with rintatolimod (Ampligen)

The treatments are part of a new, follow-up Early Access Program at Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands

(NYSEAMERICAN:AIM) announced Wednesday that the Dutch Health and Youth Care Inspectorate (IGJ) has approved use of its treatment for six pancreatic cancer patients as part of a new, follow-up Early Access Program (EAP) at Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands.

Subject to further authorization, AIM ImmunoTech said it plans to treat up to 16 pancreatic cancer patients with rintatolimod (Ampligen) under the EAP, which follows the success of a previous multi-year Ampligen EAP for pancreatic cancer patients at Erasmus.

The new approval was designed to include several patients treated under the previous EAP, who are still alive despite their diagnoses several years ago of locally advanced or metastatic pancreatic cancer, the company noted.

AIM ImmunoTech announced on September 22, 2020, that the initial EAP had demonstrated statistically significant positive pancreatic cancer survival benefits in its Ampligen arm, as compared to a historical control cohort. The use of Ampligen, following the current standard of care for pancreatic cancer (FOLFIRINOX), yielded an overall survival of 19 months, or 7.9 months greater than FOLFIRINOX treatment alone. This new group will help focus on immunological markers which will aid in identifying high-level Ampligen responders.

We are extremely pleased to continue our study in pancreatic cancer patients with Ampligen, given the hopeful previous results, said Dr Casper van Eijck, the lead investigator for the EAP at Erasmus in a statement.

By more selectively including patients for this treatment, we hope to better define the ultimate application area. We are grateful to AIM ImmunoTech Inc. for their constructive contribution to enabling this treatment in this aggressive cancer.

AIM ImmunoTech said its announcement is an important step in its ongoing efforts to expand its pancreatic cancer treatment program, as data gathered in the new study may assist in the companys plans to transition into a clinical trial with clinical sites in the EU and the US. Both Erasmus and the Buffett Cancer Center at the University of Nebraska Medical Center have tentatively agreed to serve as clinical trial sites.

FDA moves

Additionally, AIM ImmunoTech announced in December 2020 that the US Food and Drug Administration had granted Orphan Drug Designation to Ampligen as a treatment for pancreatic cancer. Also, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) recently recommended to the European Commission (EC) that AIM ImmunoTechs wholly-owned subsidiary  Hemispherx Biopharma Europe  receive a similar designation in the EU for Ampligen in pancreatic cancer, and the company awaits a final EC decision.

AIM ImmunoTech said its planned next steps in its pancreatic cancer program include filing an Investigational New Drug (IND) application in the US and a Clinical Trial Application (CTA) in the EU to move forward the study of Ampligen for treating this disease.

The company is also exploring the possibility of applying for Fast Track status to assist in the swift advance of Ampligen as a potential treatment for this unmet medical need. Fast Track designation would give AIM ImmunoTech the opportunity to meet more often with the FDA to quickly advance Ampligen through the different phases of the IND, potentially accelerating approval.

The benefits of having an orphan-designated medication with commercial approval in the EU include up to 10 years of protection from market competition from similar medicines with similar active components, and indication for use that are not shown to be clinically superior.

Contact the author: patrick@proactiveinvestors.com

Follow him on Twitter @PatrickMGraham

Back in 2018 American troops began receiving a new pistol and most users have been satisfied with the choice of a Sig Sauer design, which the U.S. Navy SEALs had already been issued since the 1980s. SEALs and other components of SOCOM (Special Operations Command) are free to try other weapons and that is often how the rest of the military finds out which new weapons are worth considering. Back in the 1980s the SEALs preferred the Glock 19 but despite its advantages, the navy insisted that the Sig Sauer was more reliable. Now the SEALs are switching to the Glock 19 for very practical reasons that may appeal to the rest of the military. Part of the reason is the regular upgrades Glock carries out on its pistols, usually in response to user requests or complaints. The original Glock 19 Gen (Generation) 1 appeared in 1982. Gen 2 appeared in 1989, with some additional features added in 1991. In 1998 Gen 3 showed up in 1998 and like Gen 2 added more upgrades before being superseded by Gen 4 in 2010 and in 2017 Gen 5 appeared. While all pistol manufacturers upgrade and fix their pistol designs over the year, Glock is much more active in this area. Thats one reason why Glock is so common with police agencies and armed forces worldwide. Whatever complaints the navy had about the Gen 1 Glock have disappeared since encountering the current Gen 5 model.

Navy personnel have often encountered the Glock because it is so popular with other navies and sailors talk to each other more since the Internet became widely available, even for those in combat zones or aboard ships at sea, during the last decade. There is a lot more exchanging of useful information and Glock was often mentioned when combat personnel discussed small arms. Navy SEALS received their first Gen 4 Glocks in 2015, as replacements for worn out or damaged Sig Sauer pistols. Now they are getting Gen 5s and other components of SOCOM as well as soldiers and marines are noticing. Now the Department of Defense is considering doing what the SEALs did and buy Glocks to replace worn-out Sig Sauer pistols. Despite the 2017 adoption of the Sig Sauer to replace the Beretta a lot of troops are still bring their own Glocks with them because they have lots of experience with personally owned Glocks and dont want to switch. Sig Sauer never attracted that degree of user loyalty.

Glock pioneered the use of polymer (a form of plastic) components as well as a superior striker-fired system to hit the rear of the pistol round to ignite the propellent. Other pistols, including the Sig Sauer use the hammer-fired mechanism which employs a visible hammer that is cocked before the trigger can be pulled. The striker design uses a smaller internal hammer that causes less recoil that causes the back portion of the pistol to slide back to eject the empty cartridge and reset the hammer. The striker mechanism also ejects the empty cartridge and resets the hammer but allows for more flexibility in trigger pull as well as less movement of the pistol because of the recoil. That recoil disrupts aiming. But the most attractive feature of the Glock is extensive use of polymer components means that the pistol is less prone to water, especially salt-water, corrosion. The Glock 19 is eight percent lighter than the Sig Sauer currently in use by the U.S. military. The SEAL experience with the Glock 19 is being followed by the other services, especially other components of SOCOM.

All this follows in the wake of the early 2017 announcement that the U.S. Department of Defense, after a ten-year search, had decided on a new standard pistol, to replace the elderly and unpopular Beretta M9. The new M17 pistol is a variant of the SIG Sauer P320, which lost out to the Beretta in 1985 because the Beretta 9mm was a little cheaper. The M9 replaced the M1911 11.4mm (.45 caliber) pistol. The M9 replacement first appeared in 2014 as a civilian/police weapon modified to compete to replace the M9. The basic characteristics of the military and civilian versions are the same. Both are 836 g (29 ounce) weapons that are 203mm (8 inches) long and have a 17-round magazine (with an optional 21 round extended magazine). There is a compact version (M18) with a shorter (by 20mm/.8 inch) barrel making it more useful for concealed carry.

Combat zone testing in Afghanistan during late 2017 discovered a few problems with the militarized P320 and SIG quickly fixed these by making a few component modifications. This quick response was part of the contract for the new pistol and is expected to continue if more problems are encountered. The Beretta was notorious for having problems that took a long time to verify and even longer (if ever) to fix. SIG has a reputation for moving faster in this area and demonstrated it right away.

To help with the user testing and debugging SIG released 5,000 M18s to the commercial market, selling for $650 each. The military buys them in large quantities for less than half that price. While most civilian owners wont treat their M18s as roughly as troops or use them under harsh conditions for extended periods, these civilian users tend to be more experienced, often ex-military and another source of insightful user feedback.

The Department of Defense is buying 421,000 M17/M18 pistols. Most, 195,000 are for the army while 130,000 are for the Air Force, 61,000 (M18 only) for the navy and 35,000 for the marines. The army and marines are issuing more pistols to infantry units, recognizing that there are a lot of situations where several troops should be armed with pistols. This includes clearing caves, tunnels or other confined spaces. The M17 and the new holster were selected with this in mind and using a lot of feedback from combat experienced soldiers and marines. This feedback led to the few modifications that turned the SIG P320 into the M17 and made it much easier to train troops to quickly become quite effective (and accurate) with the M17.

Since the 1980s, when the M9 appeared, there have been numerous new accessories for pistols, many of them used a lot by special operations and police (SWAT and the like) forces. Many troops bought their own 9mm pistols (SIG and Glock were common) equipped with these accessories and used them in combat. SOCOM would pay for any successful (in combat) pistols and accessories. A key factor in selecting SIG was its history of firing a large number of rounds without any jams or malfunctions. That is a crucial factor for combat troops who now have a pistol that is recognized as an offensive weapon and when it is needed must be reliable. Users noticed Glock gradually reduced the reliability edge Sig Sauer had and now believes the Sig advantage no longer exists.

Experienced military and civilian pistol users agree that the P320 was the best choice although the Glock was a strong alternative choice. The militarized P320 has modifications to improve performance in combat conditions. That meant tweaks that make it more reliable when exposed to mud, sand and all manner of crap associated with combat zone operations. Other modifications made it easier to take apart for cleaning under field (outside, cramped quarters, low light) conditions. Other modifications for military use included improved single hand performance, easier use with either hand, able to easily install military type night and day sights and improved accuracy. The M17 also has the modification to allow a silencer to be attached.

The M17 decision came after the U.S. Army and the U.S. Air Force joined forces in 2014 to speed up the seemingly unending selection process. Another development that speeded things up was the fact the SOCOM had already adopted a number of other pistols to replace the M9. For example, in 2011 the U.S. Navy SEALS adopted the SIG Sauer P226 9mm pistol as their Mk25 standard sidearm. This pistol was actually the same Sig Sauer P226 the SEALS have been using since the 1980s, but with a better accessory rail, a few other minor changes, and a new name. The Sig Sauer P320 is, to most users, an updated version of the P226. This is ironic because back in the early 1980s the Berretta and Sig Sauer pistols had both scored about the same on the American evaluation tests and the Beretta won mainly on the basis of price. The P320 is cheaper than the P226 but the contract to replace as many as 500,000 army M9s is worth over half a billion dollars.

The selection of the P320 was criticized mainly because it took the Department of Defense (mainly the army) a decade to select what their own evaluation team approved of back in the early 1980s and that SOCOM user experience confirmed before the 1980s were over. SOCOM came into being a few years after the M9 was adopted and immediately began planning to bring back .45 caliber pistols for its commandos while also allowing the use of alternative 9mm pistols as needed. SOCOM always had the right to do that and the army and marines often pay close attention to, and adopt, new weapons and equipment SOCOM has selected and then used successfully in action. Many SOCOM operators never gave up using the original army .45, as it was the ideal pistol for many commando operations.

As the U.S. Army Special Forces discovered, if you are well trained and know what you are doing, you should carry a pistol in addition to your rifle. Not the official issue M9 pistol but something with a bit more stopping power. The SOCOM operators more frequently operate in small groups and fight up close. The Special Forces prefer new model 11.4mm (.45 caliber) pistols, although 10mm weapons are also popular. The reason for this is that you are most likely to be using the pistol indoors, where your target is going to be really close. You want to knock the enemy down quickly before he can get at you with a knife or even his hands. In Iraq and Afghanistan, soldiers and Marines brought their own pistols and most commanders have been lenient on this issue.

The army and air force do not have the same needs as SOCOM and simply want a 9mm pistol with fewer flaws and more of the latest pistol tech than the existing M9. The air force tried to replace the M9 in 2007 and was ordered by the Department of Defense to back off. The M9 is a 914 g (33 ounces empty), 217mm (8.5 inch) long weapon with a 125mm (4.9 inch) barrel and a magazine that holds 15 rounds. It replaced the World War I era M1911 .45 (11.4mm) caliber ACP. This is a 1.1 kg (39 ounce empty), 210mm (8.25 inch) long weapon with a 127mm (5 inch) barrel and a 7-round magazine. Both pistols were only accurate at up to about 50 meters, which is fine for a pistol. The M1911 had more hitting power, while the M9 was a bit more accurate. Loaded, each pistol weighs about 230 g (half a pound) more. The M17 is more accurate than the M9 and uses a new pistol round that has more stopping power than most other 9mm rounds.

By 2014 the army and air force had a very compelling case for change. The army, in particular, found that many of its oldest M9s were, literally, falling apart from old age. Some components (especially the barrels, frames and locking blocks) tend to break on older, especially heavily used, weapons. Since September 11, 2001, the army has used its M9s a lot, much more than originally expected. There are also a host of other problems, like the shape (too awkward for some users), trigger pull (too heavy) and lack of a Picatinny rail for easy mounting accessories. The safety switch is in an awkward position and troops in combat often accidentally put the safety on when cocking the pistol. That can be fatal (for the user) in combat. More modern designs (like SIG Sauer) have something more efficient (and less of a dirt catcher) than the open-slide and spent cartridge ejection system of the M9. Another sign of the times is that the M9 is not equipped to screw on a silencer, an accessory that is more commonly used these days.

Indeed, most of the problems with the M9 result from it being a design that is over three decades old. Pistol technology has improved a lot since the late 1970s and that can be seen in the pistols that are popular with police forces. Cops can often buy their own pistols and tend to get the most modern, but proven in action, models. Many troops in the combat zone left the M9 they were issued back at the base and go into the field with a 9mm pistol they bought themselves and will continue to use when they leave the military. This is often a Glock 19, which is a police favorite and popular with troops in other countries. Many armies do not replace pistols as frequently as police forces, or special operations troops. But in Afghanistan and Iraq regular combat troops used pistols a lot, and the M9 was not only old but, as far as features went, the design was obsolete. As you can see, its not just the wear and tear, its also obsolescence in the face of advances in pistol design.

In 2012 the army had to order another 100,000 M9 9mm pistols, each costing $640. This was just to replace the M9s that were falling apart. The U.S. military (mostly the army) already has over 600,000 M9s and that purchase keeps the M9 in service at least until the end of the decade. The U.S. military adopted the 9mm pistol in 1985 largely to standardize ammunition with NATO and to replace the M911 .45 caliber (11.4mm) pistol with something smaller and lighter. All other NATO states used 9mm for pistols. At the time it was noted that most 9mm pistols were carried by officers and support personnel, who rarely used them, in combat or otherwise. Many American combat veterans disagreed with the switch to a 9mm pistol but that advice was ignored, except in SOCOM.

But times have changed. Since 2002 American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan discovered, through combat experience, what types of weapons worked best at close range to take down the enemy. It was the same with SWAT teams and commandos all over the world. When conducting a raid and finding yourself up close and personal with someone trying to kill you, there is a need for a heavy caliber pistol or a shotgun (firing 00 shot or slugs). The premier pistol for ensuring you take down someone is still the .45 caliber (11.4mm) or .40 caliber (10mm, but only with a heavy bullet) pistols. There is also a .50 caliber (12.7mm) pistol, but only very large people can handle this one. The 11.4 and 10mm pistols are light and handy, compared to assault rifles or shotguns, and have a long history of quickly taking down an armed and determined foe. An acceptable alternative is a modern 9mm pistol design that is reliable, has the right accessories and uses a round with more stopping power.
Jacksonville Police

ARRESTS, CITATIONS

 Ryan M. Hofmeister, 33, of 2976 Illinois Route 104, Franklin, was arrested at 2:29 a.m. Monday on charges of possession of drug paraphernalia and possession of adult-use cannabis and cited on a charge of having an obstructed registration plate after the car he was driving was stopped at North East and State streets.

A passenger in his car, Samantha G. Talkington, 30, of 224 S. Pearl St., Palmyra, was arrested on charges of possession of methamphetamine and possession of a controlled substance, according to police reports.

 Toney L. Prather, 23, of 650 S. Prairie St. was arrested at 9:06 a.m. Sunday on a domestic battery charge after being accused of hitting someone in the face several times.



Pike County

State Police

ACCIDENTS

 Karl Hillman, 60, of Wentzville, Missouri, was cited on a charge of driving too fast for conditions after the tractor-trailer truck he was driving went off the road and overturned about 1 p.m. Monday on the Interstate 72 northbound ramp in Pike County.

According to Illinois State Police, Hillman was driving around a curve on I-72 to the Interstate 172 interchange when he lost control of the vehicle on the ice- and snow-packed road.

He was taken to a local hospital for treatment, police said. His condition was unavailable late Monday.

Compiled by David C.L. Bauer
Researchers say their clinical trial using a cheap asthma inhaler to prevent COVID-19 patients developing severe symptoms has produced incredible results.

The results give hope the worst effects of the virus can be contained by the easily accessible medication, as the world waits for viable vaccines to be rolled out.

QUT associate professor Dan Nicolau has been investigating whether a common steroid inhaler can reduce the effects of COVID-19. Credit:QUT

Patients in the trial, conducted in Britain and led by researchers from Australia, were given simple steroid inhalers* when they presented at hospital with symptoms of the disease.

QUT associate professor Dan Nicolau, one of the lead researchers on the trial at the University of Oxford, said the results showed the method was extremely effective at preventing severe COVID-19 symptoms.

Multiple-cation and mixed-halide (FAMACs) perovskites, which are formed by incorporating Cs/MA/Br ions into the FAPbI3 perovskites, are considered as the best compositions for applications in high-efficiency photovoltaic and photoelectronic devices owing to their enhanced stability, suppressed ion migration, and reduced hysteresis. However, the actual composition, especially the content of Cs in FAMACs perovskites, for the state-of-the-art devices reported by different research groups has been inconsistent.

Furthermore, phase segregation into yellow non-perovskite phase is often observed during the crystallization process. This undesirable yellow phase acts as trapping states or scattering centers, which has a negative impact on the charge carrier mobility and carrier recombination dynamics, thereby deteriorating the device performance.

Recently, a research group led by Prof. LIU Shengzhong from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), in collaboration with Prof. LIU Yucheng from Shaanxi Normal University, and Prof. Mercouri G. Kanatzidis from Northwestern University (Evanston), proposed an efficient strategy for obtaining high-quality perovskite single crystals with size up to 5 in. The large and pure phase single crystals were used to design high-performance self-powered integrated-circuit photodetectors.

This work was published in Science Advanced.

The researchers selected a reducing agent (formic acid) for suppressing phase segregation during the crystallization process to obtain very large triple-cation mixed-halide perovskite single crystals. This strategy yielded state-of-the-art perovskite single crystals with long carrier lifetime, high charge mobility, long carrier diffusion distance, superior uniformity, and long-term stability, thereby facilitating the design of high-performance self-powered integrated-circuit type photodetectors.

Moreover, since the photodetector comprising the crystal exhibited large responsivity, high photoconductive gain, excellent detectivity, and fast response speed, an integrated imaging system with uniform photo-response was fabricated based on a 12  12 pixelated matrix of single crystal photodetectors.

For example, a 2  2 pixel matrix showed good discrimination between pixels upon selective illumination.

"We believe that such a novel design will open new avenues for the applications of perovskite self-powered integrated circuits in devices relevant to imaging applications," said Prof. LIU.

###
If you were looking for the Charlestown Democratic Town Committee website and ended up here, try this





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(Newser)  After setting out their case against Donald Trump for inciting supporters in the months before the Capitol attack, House impeachment managers turned to the day of the attack itself. Impeachment manager Rep. Madeline Dean choked up as she recounted the terror of when rioters started banging on the House chamber doors, the Guardian reports. "They came, draped in Trump's flag, and used our flag, the American flag, to batter and to bludgeon," Dean said. She noted that during Trump's speech to supporters immediately before the attack, he used the word "peaceful" once and referred to "fight" or "fighting" 20 times. Dean said Trump had spent 40 minutes before the attack stoking the anger of supporters, the Washington Post reports.

story continues below

"And then he pointed to us, lit the fuse and sent an angry mob to fight the perceived enemy, his own vice president and the members of Congress as we certified an election," Dean said. After a break, impeachment manager Del. Stacey Plaskett played previously unheard police audio from the day of the riot. "They're throwing metal poles at us!" a DC police officer said, requesting backup as the mob moved toward the capitol. "Theyre starting to throw explosives." "This is now officially a riot," the responding officer said at 1:49pm. (Read more Trump impeachment stories.)
Cambodia carried out its first COVID-19 vaccinations on Wednesday, three days after the first doses arrived from China, the country's closet political ally.

The three sons of long-serving Prime Minister Hun Sen were among the first people to be vaccinated, along with his two sons-in-law, the ministers, government officials and an army general.

China agreed to donate 1 million doses of Chinese-made Sinopharm vaccine to Cambodia.

The first shipment of 600,000 doses arrived Sunday with a reception ceremony at Phnom Penh International Airport attended by Hun Sen, his senior Cabinet ministers and Chinese Ambassador to Cambodia Wang Wentian.

(Image credit: AP)

(Disclaimer: This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed; only the image & headline may have been reworked by www.republicworld.com)
[February 10, 2021] Tauriga Sciences Inc. Commences the Largest Tauri-Gum Production Run in Company History in Response to Substantially Improved Macro-Industry Outlook

The Tauri-Gum Product Line has Increased its Cannabidiol (CBD) and Cannabigerol (CBG) Infusion Concentrations to 20mg per Each Piece of Chewing Gum NEW YORK, NY, Feb. 10, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via NewMediaWire -- Tauriga Sciences, Inc. (OTCQB: TAUG) (Tauriga or the Company), a revenue generating, diversified life sciences company, with a proprietary line of CBD & CBG infused Supplement chewing gums (Flavors: Pomegranate, Blood Orange, Peach-Lemon, Pear Bellini, Mint, Black Currant) as well as an ongoing Pharmaceutical Development initiative, today announced that it has commenced the largest Tauri-Gum production run in Company history, in response to substantially improved macro-industry outlook. Additionally, the Company continues to experience increasingly strong levels of interest  from a broad array of prospective retail & wholesale customers. When completed, this above-referenced production run will yield Tauri-Gum product inventory  worth in terms of retail value  well in excess of $1,000,000 USD. There has also been an important formulation modification, applicable to this production run. The Company has made the strategic decision to increase the CBD and CBG infusion concentrations to 20mg per each piece of chewing gum. Accordingly  Mint, Blood Orange, Pomegranate Tauri-Gum flavors (20mg CBD / each piece of chewing gum) and Peach-Lemon, Black Currant Tauri-Gum flavors (20mg CBG / each piece of chewing gum). The Packaging will also be updated to reflect all of the certifications (i.e. Kosher, Halal) and compliance features (i.e. QR codes, UPCs). Moving forward, the Company is confident about its growth prospects for the remainder of Calendar Year 2021. The Companys highest margin E-Commerce business segment continues to show overall strength and there has been an acceleration in online customer acquisition. Lastly, the Company has worked with great diligence to enhance its existing infrastructure and increase its production capacity  to strengthen its ability to meet potential increases in demand. ABOUT TAURIGA SCIENCES INC. Tauriga Sciences, Inc. (TAUG) is a revenue generating, diversified life sciences company, engaged in several major business activities and initiatives. The company manufactures and distributes several proprietary retail products and product lines, mainly focused on the Cannabidiol (CBD) and Cannabigerol (CBG) Edibles maket segment. The main product line, branded as Tauri-Gum, consists of a proprietary supplement chewing gum that is Kosher certified, Halal certified, and Vegan Formulated (CBD Infused Tauri-Gum Flavors: Mint, Blood Orange, Pomegranate), (CBG Infused Tauri-Gum Flavors: Peach-Lemon, Black Currant) & (Vitamin C + Zinc Immune Booster Flavor: Pear Bellini). The Companys commercialization strategy consists of a broad array of retail customers, distributors, and a fast-growing E-Commerce business segment (E-Commerce website: www.taurigum.com ). Please visit our corporate website, for additional information, as well as inquiries, at http://www.tauriga.com



Complementary to the Companys retail business, is its ongoing Pharmaceutical Development initiative. This relates to the development of a proposed Pharmaceutical grade version of Tauri-Gum, for nausea regulation (specifically designed for the following indication: Patients Subjected to Ongoing Chemotherapy Treatment). On March 18, 2020, the Company announced that it had filed a provisional U.S. patent application covering its pharmaceutical grade version of Tauri-Gum. The Patent, filed with the U.S.P.T.O. is Titled MEDICATED CBD COMPOSITIONS, METHODS OF MANUFACTURING, AND METHODS OF TREATMENT. On December 18, 2020 the Company disclosed that it had entered into a Master Services Agreement with CSTI to lead the Company's clinical development efforts. On October 6, 2020, the Company announced that it has been approved to operate as a U.S. Government Vendor (CAGE CODE # 8QXV4).

The Company is headquartered in Wappingers Falls, New York. In addition, the Company operates a full time E-Commerce fulfillment center located in LaGrangeville, New York. DISCLAIMER -- Forward-Looking Statements This press release contains certain forward-looking statements as defined by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 which represent managements beliefs and assumptions concerning future events. These forward-looking statements are often indicated by using words such as may, will, expects, anticipates, believes, hopes, believes, or plans, and may include statements regarding corporate objectives as well as the attainment of certain corporate goals and milestones. Forward-looking statements are based on present circumstances and on managements present beliefs with respect to events that have not occurred, that may not occur, or that may occur with different consequences or timing than those now assumed or anticipated. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed in forward looking statements due to known and unknown risks and uncertainties, such as are not guarantees of general economic and business conditions, the ability to successfully develop and market products, consumer and business consumption habits, the ability to consummate successful acquisition and licensing transactions, fluctuations in exchange rates, and other factors over which Tauriga has little or no control. Many of these risks and uncertainties are discussed in greater detail in the Risk Factors section of Taurigas Form 10-K and other filings made from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Such forward-looking statements are made only as of the date of this release, and Tauriga assumes no obligation to update forward-looking statements to reflect subsequent events or circumstances. You should not place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements. Contact: Tauriga Sciences, Inc.

4 Nancy Court, Suite 4

Wappingers Falls, NY 12590

Chief Executive Officer

Mr. Seth M. Shaw

Email: sshaw@tauriga.com

cell # (917) 796 9926

Company Instagram: @taurigum

Personal Instagram: @sethsms47

Twitter: @SethMShaw

Corp. Website: www.tauriga.com

E-Commerce Website: www.taurigum.com Attachment Tauriga 02-10-2021



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He and his wife, Sally Gill, who works with costume design at the College of Lake County, agree that period attire is necessary for the play. But shes created some ingenious ways not to encumber the actors who are stuck in small rooms at home and have no dressing room. For example, the female characters wont be required to wear corsets, which were fashionable during the Victorian age, but Sally Gill has found a way to make it look as if thats just what theyre wearing, according to her husband.



Despite the government heaping blame on the use of a nebuliser as a source of the outbreak, Professor Rait said the fact a small aerosol cloud could linger in the air or be swept down a hotel corridor infecting staff and guests suggested worryingly inadequate ventilation controls. It also doesnt explain the recent cases at the Grand Hyatt or the Park Royal, Professor Rait said. Professor Rait added it was concerning a nebuliser was allowed to get into hotel quarantine in the first place, despite the government insisting such medical devices were banned. Last year, the Health Departments healthcare worker taskforce investigated transmission in hospital settings, and made several recommendations in relation to strict personal protective equipment standards for healthcare staff and proper ventilation of wards to minimise the risk of aerosol transmission. Experts have recommended similar standards for hotel quarantine.

Speaking to the media on Wednesday morning, Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton said the working hypothesis for the growing outbreak at the Holiday Inn was that a man, who later tested positive to the British variant of the virus and is now in intensive care, had used a nebuliser to treat his asthma. [A nebuliser] vaporises medication or liquid into a fine mist and especially when it is used as medication and someone is infectious or later tests positive, that virus mist can be suspended in the air, Professor Sutton said. The man who was using the nebuliser is a member of the family who were staying at the Holiday Inn. The aerosol-based medical device, commonly used by asthma sufferers, was banned for use outside of negative pressure rooms in Victorian hospitals last year after it was believed to have helped fuel transmission in a serious COVID-19 outbreak at a Melbourne hospital.

Vaporiser machines, including sleep apnoea machines, will be banned from standard quarantine hotels and bags thoroughly searched. In light of the hotel outbreaks, Victoria will not increase its intake of overseas arrivals to 1310 on Monday as planned. Nebulisers are used to change liquid medication into a fine mist, which can be breathed in through a mask or mouthpiece but can also quickly fill a room. It is likely when the door of the familys room at the Holiday Inn was opened particles were blown into the hotel corridor and infected staff. Burnet Institute epidemiologist Mike Toole said if Holiday Inn hotel workers had been wearing fitted N95 respirators and face shields they would have been unlikely to get infected. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video Investigations into outbreaks in the states hospitals after the second wave have found coronavirus particles probably travelled through the air through poor ventilation systems infecting hospital workers who had no close contact with sick patients.

A family of five and a woman in her 60s staying at the Park Royal Hotel returned genome testing results for the British strain on different days last week, suggesting the virus had spread between their hotel rooms. A 26-year-old man who was working at Grand Hyatt in the Australian Open quarantine program also tested positive to the virus, but no direct link has been found between him and any other case yet. President-elect of the Australian Institute of Occupational Hygienists Kate Cole has called for independent review of hotels being used for quarantine by ventilation engineers. She questioned why occupational hygienists  experts in respiratory protection  were yet to be included in panels of specialists advising governments.

Fit-tested N95 respirators should ... be mandated for all workers and are the minimum level of respiratory protection required for the virus in those facilities, Ms Cole said. Loading But what underpins all of this is that we need to recognise the importance of aerosol spread or airborne transmission because until we do that these outbreaks are going to continue to happen Fit-testing  which ensures a mask seals to the face  is mandatory for workers dealing with asbestos and silica, but not for all hotel quarantine workers. Professor Toole wants to see all hotel quarantine workers, regardless of whether they work in a hot hotel  which deals solely with people infected with the virus  or a cold hotel, given high protection, fit-tested N95 face masks, face shields and protective goggles.

COVID-19 Quarantine Victoria Commissioner Emma Cassar said the two infected workers were wearing surgical masks and goggles when they dealt with guests, but all Victorian hotel quarantine workers would now be provided with N95 masks. Premier Daniel Andrews insisted Victoria had the countrys strongest hotel quarantine system and that other jurisdictions were copying his governments model, drawing the ire of NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian. Hes pretty good at spin and thats all Ill say, Ms Berejiklian told radio station 2GB on Wednesday morning. Mr Andrews later said he was not interested in having an argument with Gladys. Ill somehow find a way to recover from that barb, he said. Im focused on keeping Victorians safe as Im sure shes focused on keeping the people of NSW safe.
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Political divisions are high in the United States as former President Donald Trumps second impeachment trial began Tuesday. And those divisions are felt in the Gateway City as well.

Both of the Webb County Party Chairs have different views of what the second impeachment of the former president means, why it is ongoing and what would ultimately happen in the end as they acknowledge that one of the few things they can agree on is the fact that the nation is highly divided. Both local leaders also argue how the impeachment trial is all about politics while the other argues that it is all about justice.

I believe that the second impeachment trial of President Trump is a pure political stunt that we all know will fail, Webb County Republican Party Chair Tyler Kraus said. The vast majority of Senate Republicans will vote to acquit President Trump. They have made their stance clear.

The local Democratic Party Chair has a very different view, as she states that the trial was needed to ultimately bring justice for the Jan. 6 siege of the Capitol by pro-Trump rioters that led to several deaths, including a Capitol police officer.

I grew up in a home in a time when I clearly understood that actions carried consequences, Webb County Democratic Party Chair Sylvia Bruni said. This second impeachment trial of the former president is no exception. As difficult as it might be to realize justice for what he instigated, I believe it is absolutely necessary to bring him to trial, to bear witness to what he planned and directed  not only an assault on our Capitol but an assault on our Democracy.

Meanwhile, Kraus wonders what the point of the trial is. He cites taxpayer money and Trump already being out of office.

It is time to move on, he said. Why are they still attempting to convict President Trump of a crime that he did not commit? Furthermore, President Trump is no longer a sitting president, so what is the point of this? At the end of the day, us taxpayers are footing the bill for this charade. Remember that next time you go vote.

Impeachment does impact more than kicking a president out of office. If Trump were found guilty, he would not only be barred from ever serving in public office again, he would also lose post-presidential perks including a pension equal to the annual pay of a cabinet member ($221,440 in 2021), a $1 million yearly travel allowance, lifetime security services by the Secret Service, and more.

Another area where the political party chairs also differ is in terms of the president testifying. Trump reportedly has no intention of testifying under oath at his impeachment trial, and Kraus agrees with the decision.

President Trump has no duty to testify in an unconstitutional trial, Kraus said. I believe he is right to not testify.

Bruni is not surprised that the president will not testify. She states that it is that type of behavior which he has always shown as president, and that the former presidents pattern of behavior essentially set the stage for this latest impeachment.

The local party chairs also differ in terms of their beliefs on how the impeachment trial will further divide the country as Kraus states that the continued impeachment process does not help unite the country, while Bruni states that the process might actually help if justice prevails.

This impeachment trial will further divide our country, Kraus said. It is a baseless trial. It will only inflame the existing tensions.

Bruni states that nothing else can be done to unite the country other than putting justice before anything else, and she states that this impeachment trial could be the solution.

The nation is already divided. The history of fake news and propaganda spread by the former president and enabled by Fox News and others have done that for us already, Bruni said. My hope is that the rest of us  those of us who are thoughtful, who will listen to the facts, to the testimony of the hundreds who survived the insurrection, to the undeniable evidence of those who were implicated in its planning and execution  will make a difference. Essentially, it is the conscience of our nation that is on the line, personified by the senators who are the living jurors in this trial. And if justice prevails, then perhaps this will be the final atrocity that wakes up the national conscience and finally brings us all together.

Ultimately, both party chairs may agree on one thing  the eventual outcome of the impeachment. Although Bruni is still holding out hope it will be successful.

Frankly, given the chronic behavior of the GOP majority and their apparent fear of the base which apparently has become more important than service to our country, I have no idea how this will end, Bruni said. Again, my hope that there will be enough courageous members of the Senate who will vote their conscience rather than their personal gain.

jorge.vela@lmtonline.com
The Australian scientist on the small team of World Health Organisation experts investigating the origins of COVID-19 says he believes the virus began in China, despite WHOs official findings remaining inconclusive.

Professor Dominic Dwyer, a microbiologist and infectious diseases expert with NSW Health, was the sole Australian among a 14-strong WHO team in Wuhan that worked to identify the source of the coronavirus pandemic.

I think it started in China, Professor Dwyer told Nine News. I think the evidence for it starting elsewhere in the world is actually very limited. There is some evidence but its not really very good.

Professor Dwyer waves at journalists from a hotel room balcony in Wuhan on January 29. Credit:AP

Professor Dwyer, who is in hotel quarantine in Sydney after flying back from China on Wednesday, said the most likely source of the virus was bats, before another animal such as a cat passed it on to humans.
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The World Trade Organisation (WTO) will ratify the appointment of Nigeria's former Finance Minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, next week.

The global body made this known in a statement posted on its website on Tuesday.

"The WTO's General Council will hold a special meeting on 15 February at 15:00 Geneva time to consider the appointment of the next Director-General. The meeting will take place in virtual form," the brief statement read.

The development comes after South Korean Trade Minister Yoo Myung-hee, who was Okonjo-Iweala's main opponent, withdrew from the race.

After Myung-hee stepped down on Friday, the US endorsed Okonjo-Iweala, paving way for the Nigerian who will make history as the first African to lead the WTO.

In a tweet on Friday, Okonjo-Iweala commended her opponent for the "hard fought race".

"Grateful for the expression of support from the US today for DG @WTO. Congratulations to Madam Yoo of Rep. Korea for a hard fought campaign. Thank You President Muhammadu Buhari @MBuhari &all Nigerians for your unflinching support. Thank you friends. Love to my family. Glory to God," she tweeted.

President Muhammadu Buhari has expressed appreciation to Joe Biden, his US counterpart, for supporting the Nigerian to get the plum job.
ExxonMobil Corp. said it planned to increase drilling for natural gas in various regions in the United States. (Scott Olsen/Getty Images)

Aussie Jobs Gone as ExxonMobil Closes Refinery in Altona

MELBOURNE, Australia  Over 300 jobs in Victoria will be lost as ExxonMobil closes one of the last of its remaining oil refineries in Australia after it was deemed it no longer economically viable.

The Altona refinery in the southwest of Melbourne has been in operation since 1949 and supplies around half of Victorias refined fuel.

However, after extensive review of operations, the U.S. company has decided to pull the plug.

This announcement comes several months after BP shut down its last remaining oil refinery in Australia in October last year and converted the site to an import terminal.

Altona will also be converted to an import terminal that manages the import of liquified natural gas. It will remain in operation while transition work is done, however, no closure date has been given.

We are grateful for the tremendous efforts by our employees to improve the viability of the operation, ExxonMobil Australia Chairman Nathan Fay said. We extend our thanks to the federal government for the significant support offered to Altona and other refineries. Our decision to convert our facility to a terminal is not a reflection of those efforts.

A general view of Exxonmobil refinery in the Port of Rotterdam on April 23, 2020 in Rotterdam, Netherlands. (Dean Mouhtaropoulos/Getty Images)

Energy Minister Angus Taylor said the decision was extremely disappointing.

Our thoughts are with all of the refinerys workers, their families, and the local community businesses that will be impacted by this decision, Taylor said. The Government will continue to work with the sector to support Australias refining capability and fuel security, which will support our farmers, miners and truckies into the future.

United Workers Union (UWU) criticised the government saying in a statement that the lack of clear plans for the future of Australias energy supply and manufacturing were causing multinational corporations to pull out of the country.

The closure of the Altona site, without any plan to repurpose these workers skills for future industries, is a terrible missed opportunity, UWU national secretary Tim Kennedy said.

The Morrison government has a fuel security package available with the goal of increasing domestic storage and to hold a sovereign refining capability that meets the nations needs during an emergency but ExxonMobile hasnt taken it up.

From what I can tell, they havent taken the six-month government support, so [it] feels inevitable they close it, MST Marquee energy analyst Mark Samter told the Australian Financial Review prior to the closure announcement.

ExxonMobil said it would remain a major supplier of energy through its operation of the Gippsland Basin joint venture with BHP Billiton, which supplies 40 percent of eastern Australias energy needs.
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Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-10 21:30:53|Editor: huaxia

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Chinese President Xi Jinping chairs the China-Central and Eastern European Countries (CEEC) Summit and delivers a keynote speech via video link in Beijing, capital of China, Feb. 9, 2021. (Xinhua/Liu Weibing)

BEIJING, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- The China-Central and Eastern European Countries (CEEC) Summit has gathered new consensus and provided momentum for further cooperation, Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi has told the press.

The summit held on Tuesday via video link, the first diplomatic event hosted by China this year, is the highest-level leaders' meeting since the establishment of the China-CEEC cooperation mechanism, and an important multilateral event held against the backdrop of the global response to COVID-19.

The summit has rallied global consensus concerning the joint response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Wang said, adding many CEE countries see China's proposals for enhancing cooperation in combating the pandemic as a demonstration of China shouldering responsibility as a major country, and have expressed the readiness to deepen cooperation with China in vaccine research and the resumption of work and production.

A China-Europe freight train heading for Belgrade prepares to depart from Wujiashan railway container center station in Wuhan, central China's Hubei Province, May 9, 2020. (Xinhua/Xiao Yijiu)

Wang pointed out the summit has also injected positive energy into cooperation between China and Europe.

Calling the summit an example of multilateralism in action, Wang said leaders of CEE countries have expressed their clear desire to uphold multilateralism and support free trade.

Vice Foreign Minister Qin Gang has said the summit, held at an opportune moment, has reached fruitful outcomes and produced a far-reaching impact.

The summit has offered a valuable opportunity for China and CEE countries to jointly tide over difficulties and seek development, and is a milestone in the development of China-CEEC cooperation and a vivid example of China jointly building a community with a shared future for mankind with CEE and other countries, said Qin. 
A police commissioner has hit out at Valentine's Day cards that joke about stalkers, saying they 'normalise' a crime which destroys lives.

Katy Bourne called on online marketplaces such as Etsy to remove the designs.

She criticised artworks based on Netflix show You, which features a murderous and pathological stalker Joe, one of which read: 'Happy Valentine's from your favourite stalker'. It is no longer available on the site.

Another card Mrs Bourne blasted on Twitter showed someone's location pinned on a map and quipped: 'You say stalker, I say devoted.'

Police commissioner Katy Bourne has hit out at Valentine's Day cards that joke about stalkers, saying they 'normalise' a crime which destroys lives

The Sussex police and crime commissioner has long campaigned to change attitudes to the crime after she was harassed by a man who followed and filmed her before she was elected to the role.

She said: 'By normalising stalking in this way we are risking taking ten steps back in terms of public perception of this all-consuming, truly devastating crime.

'Stalkers have deep rooted and complex psychological problems and their display of fixated, obsessive, unwanted and repeated behaviours takes over and destroys the lives of their victims.

'We have seen how this crime can fatally escalate and it should never be treated as some sort of joke.

'I hope that all retailers will now appropriately censor the products that they stock and remove any of these types of cards from their websites and shelves.'

Claudia Ortiz, co-founder of stalking support service Veritas Justice, said: 'Absolutely inappropriate to trivialise a crime that destroys lives and sometimes even takes lives.'

She criticised artworks based on Netflix show You, which features a murderous and pathological stalker Joe, one of which read: 'Happy Valentine's from your favourite stalker'. It is no longer available on the site

Mrs Bourne, who is the main spokesman on stalking for the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners, faced years of torment from her stalker, which led to the courts imposing a civil injunction to prevent him from contacting or writing about her. He later received a suspended prison sentence.

Yesterday Etsy declined to comment but Thortful, another online marketplace, said it would be delisting a card which read 'Stalker? I prefer to say, future husband'.

A spokesman said: 'We can see that this card is upsetting and we have removed it from our catalogue with immediate effect.'

Lucy Maggie Designs, which made the 'pinned location' card, removed it from sale on all sites. It said: 'Lucy Maggie Designs stands in solidarity with all victims of abuse, including those who have endured the terrible distress of stalking and harassment.

'The card in question was only ever intended as a playful greeting between two loving, consenting parties and we apologise unreservedly for any unintended offence caused.'

Dr Sue Hills, of the Alice Ruggles Trust, set up in memory of a woman murdered by an obsessive ex-boyfriend, said: 'Stalking is never romantic and the people who make light of it put victims in greater danger, because it encourages everyone, victims, their friends and some agencies who should be helping, to treat it as a joke.'

The Ministry of Infrastructure of Ukraine plans to begin consultations on mutual recognition of documents between Ukraine and the EU Agency for Railways (ERA), according to a statement on the ministry's website on Tuesday evening.

"We will be grateful to ERA for possible assistance and support in European integration processes on the Ukrainian railway, in particular, with regard to interoperability and the introduction of registers of railway subsystems. After the implementation of the EU legislation defined by the Association Agreement, we will continue to update our legal framework in accordance with the 4th Railway Package, as well as start consultations on mutual recognition of documents between Ukraine and ERA," the press service of the ministry said, citing Minister of Infrastructure of Ukraine Vladyslav Krykliy.

According to the ministry, on February 9, Krykliy held a working meeting with Executive Director of ERA Josef Doppelbauer during a working visit of an official delegation of Prime Minister of Ukraine Denys Shmyhal to Brussels.

The Ministry of Infrastructure said that Doppelbauer noted the high level of cooperation with the Ukrainian side and expressed interest in further deepening this cooperation. According to him, Ukraine plays an important role in the development of EU rail transport.

The parties also agreed on Ukraine's participation in ERA activities.

The EU Agency for Railways is mandated to issue single safety certificates and vehicle (type) authorisations valid in multiple European countries and to ensure an interoperable European Rail Traffic Management System, in the development and implementation of the Single European Railway Area.
BCW Africa announces management changes

BCW Africa has announced that Robyn de Villiers will be stepping down from her CEO role later this year after more than 32 years with the business she founded. De Villiers will, however, remain in her role as chair of the board of BCW Africa and continue to support clients and the management team as part of the transition, and retain her shareholding in the company.



As part of the transition, business directors Bridget von Holdt and Karl Haechler are promoted to the roles of co-market leaders for BCW South Africa, effective 1 March, while Melissa Naidoo, who was promoted to the position of finance director in July 2020, will join the company's Exco.

Hi, my name is Scott C. Waring and I wrote a few books and am currently a ESL School Owner in Taiwan. I have had my own UFO sighting up close and personal, but that's how it works right? A non believer becomes a believer when they experience their first sighting. You witnessed it, your perceptual field changes, so now you need to share it.





I created this site to help the UFO community get a little bit organized. I noticed that there was a lot of chaos when searching for UFO sighting reports, so I hope this site helps. I wanted to support those eyewitnesses who have tried to tell others about what they have seen, yet were laughed at by even closest of friends.





More and more each day the governments of the world leak bits and pieces of UFO information to the public. They have a trickle down theory in hopes of slowly getting citizens use to the idea that we are not alone in universe and never have been. The truth is being leaked drop by drop until one day we look around and find ourselves neck high in it.





The discovery of alien species in existence is the most monumental scientific event in human history, suppression of that information is a crime against humanity.





About me:

I live in Taiwan. I OWN MY OWN ENGLISH SCHOOL, AND ONCE HAD 5 SCHOOLS.

Am Former USAF at SAC base (flight line).

Age: 42

Educ: BA in Elem ed. Masters in Counseling ed.





I had two UFO sightings, (30+bus size orbs) in military and in 2012 personally saw the UFO over Taipei 101 building on New Years Day (and recored it).
Multimedia Specialist

Anthony Zilis is a multimedia specialist at The News-Gazette. His email is azilis@news-gazette.com, and you can follow him on Twitter (@adzilis).
An individual is heard saying on the recording that there are a "thousand possibilities" to explain the downing of the jet.

The Canadian government and security agencies are reviewing an audio recording in which a man  identified by sources as Iran's foreign affairs minister  discusses the possibility that the destruction of Flight PS752 was an intentional act.

CBC News has listened to the recording of the private conversation, which took place in the months immediately following the destruction of Flight PS752. CBC had three people translate the recording from Farsi to English to capture nuances in the language.

The individual, identified by sources as Minister of Foreign Affairs Mohammad Javad Zarif, is heard saying on the recording that there are a "thousand possibilities" to explain the downing of the jet, including a deliberate attack involving two or three "infiltrators"  a scenario he said was "not at all unlikely."

Read alsoPS752 downing: Canada releases report on crash of Ukraine plane in IranHe is also heard saying the truth will never be revealed by the highest levels of Iran's government and military.

"There are reasons that they will never be revealed," he says in Farsi. "They won't tell us, nor anyone else, because if they do it will open some doors into the defense systems of the country that will not be in the interest of the nation to publicly say."

Ralph Goodale, the prime minister's special adviser on the Flight PS752 file, said the government is aware of the recording. Canada's forensic examination and assessment team obtained a copy in November, he said.

He said the RCMP, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the Communications Security Establishment are evaluating the recording's authenticity.

Goodale said the audio file contains sensitive information and commenting publicly on its details could put lives at risk.

Ukraine's Ambassador to Canada Andriy Shevchenko told CBC News that this is the first time Ukraine has heard about this recording, although the RCMP has been helping Ukraine with its own criminal investigation. He said he wants Ukraine to study this information carefully.

"I think it's another reason for us not to accept anything smaller than the truth," Shevchenko said. "We do not want to see any scapegoats instead of real wrongdoers. We do not want to see the truth being hidden behind state secrecy. We want to get to the bottom of this."

When asked if he thinks the downing of the plane was intentional, Shevchenko wouldn't rule it out.

"At this stage, we cannot exclude any possibilities," he said.

"I think we are still so far away from having a clear picture on what happened ... We obviously lack trust in our conversation with Iran. I think we have a feeling that Iran shares as little information as possible."

PS752 downing in Iran: Background

On January 8, 2020, Kyiv-bound Boeing 737 passenger jet flight PS752, operated by Ukraine International Airlines, crashed in Iran shortly after takeoff from Tehran Airport.

All 176 people on board, including 11 Ukrainian nationals  nine crew and two passengers  were killed. Among victims are also citizens of Iran, Canada, Sweden, Afghanistan, Germany, and the UK.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani admitted that the Ukrainian liner had been shot down as a result of an unintentional "human error," and promised to bring those responsible to justice.

On June 9, media reports said Iran had accused six persons in the PS752 downing case.

On July 20, the flight recorders were delivered to Paris and decrypted on July 21.

On July 24, it was reported that data from the black boxes had confirmed external interference with the aircraft's operation.

On October 23, Ukrainian Deputy Foreign Minister Yevhen Yenin said Iran would pay compensation to the relatives of victims of the UIA flight PS752 crash, but the process might last up to two years.

On December 9, however, Yenin said that Iran had withdrawn the offer to handle the payments to the families of those killed in the UIA plane crash.

In the middle of December, Canada expressed its position on the Iranian investigation into the downing of the Ukrainian plane, saying it is not credible.

On December 22, the Iranian news agency Tasnim reported that Iranian investigators, during a video conference, had provided representatives of other countries whose citizens were victims of the crash with a technical report on the UIA downing.

On December 23, Yenin said Ukraine had not received the report.

On December 24, Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba expressed concern that Iran was delaying the negotiation process on the case of the downed Ukraine International Airlines plane. He noted that Ukraine had not received a technical report from Iran on the plane downed almost a year ago.

On December 30, Iranian cabinet members reportedly agreed at a session to allocate US$150,000 or its equivalent in euros to each family of the victims of the Ukrainian plane crash in January 2020.

On January 7, 2021, Rouhani said all those responsible for the downing of the plane would be brought to justice.

Reporting by UNIAN
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Rudenko said the issue of resuming flights between Russia and Georgia still depends on the situation with the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as on the fulfillment of the conditions by the Georgian side to ensure the safety of Russians on the territory of the republic.



"The Russian President's decree of June 21, 2019 No. 287 'On Certain Measures to Ensure the National Security of the Russian Federation from Criminal and Other Counteractions' is still in force, TASS cited him as saying.



The Deputy Foreign Minister recalled that the document came into force due to the provocation of "Georgian radicals", and the conditions for its cancellation "were repeatedly voiced by Russian officials."



According to the decree, from July 8, 2019, Russian airlines are temporarily prohibited from carrying out air transportation to Georgia. On the same date, the decision of the Russian Ministry of Transport to suspend flights of Georgian airlines to Russia came into force.

The Russian authorities made this decision after several thousand protesters gathered near the building of the national parliament in Tbilisi on June 20, 2019. The protests were sparked by an uproar over a Russian State Duma delegations participation in the 26th session of the Inter-parliamentary Assembly on Orthodoxy (IAO).
Actor-activist Deep Sidhu, who was arrested for the violence at the on Republic Day, has told police that he had no "bad intentions" and went to the historic monument as everybody was going there, officials said on Wednesday.

The Delhi Police's Crime Branch questioned Sidhu on Wednesday about his whereabouts and acts at the on January 26, officials said.

The actor-activist was sent to seven-day police custody on Tuesday by a court here following his arrest a day earlier from Karnal bypass in connection with the violence at the

Sidhu, according to police, was "a prominent player" behind the January 26 incident.

Following his arrest by the Delhi Police, he was handed over to the Crime Branch, which is probing the case in connection with the violence and vandalism at the historic fort.

On first day of police remand, the focus of investigation remained on how Sidhu reached the Red Fort and his activities there on the day of incident, a senior police officer said.

Sidhu initially denied being present at Singhu border on January 25 but after the police presented evidence, he admitted that he was present at the farmers' protest site but slept at a spot a bit away from there.

The actor-activist claimed that when he woke up on January 26, there were two-three missed calls and messages on his mobile phone about people heading to the Red Fort, so he too reached there with his three friends using his mobile phone to navigate.

Sidhu and his friends left Singhu border at around 11 am in a vehicle and after violence broke out at the fort, they fled to Singhu border in the same vehicle and reached there at around 1 pm, he said.

When questioned about his role in the flag hoisting incident at the fort, he denied his involvement and claimed that he did not gather or instigate the crowd, the officer said.

According to the officer, when asked why he went to the Red Fort when it did not figure in the route approved by authorities for the tractor parade, Sidhu claimed that since everybody was going, he too went there but had no "bad intentions".

While on the run, Sidhu kept switching his locations between Haryana and Punjab, police said, adding that the hunt for his three friends is on.

Police are now trying to recover his mobile phone and probing the exact locations where he hid while also verifying whatever he revealed during the interrogation, the officer said.

Police had announced a cash reward of Rs 1 lakh for information leading to Sidhu's arrest.

After the January 26 violence, which had left over 500 security personnel injured and one protester dead, the 36-year-old actor-activist was posting videos on social media.

However, Sidhu's counsel had on Tuesday claimed that he had nothing to do with the violence and was at the wrong place at the wrong time.

The violence took place when tens of thousands of farmers broke barriers to storm the capital on January 26 during their tractor parade to highlight their demand for repealing the new agri laws.

However, their parade dissolved into unprecedented scenes of anarchy as they fought with police, overturned vehicles and delivered a insult hoisting a religious flag from the ramparts of the Red Fort, a privilege reserved for India''s tricolour.

Thousands of protesting farmers who reached ITO from the Ghazipur border clashed with police.

Many of them driving tractors reached the Red Fort and entered the monument, where the religious flag was also hoisted. Over 500 police personnel were injured and one protestors died.

(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.)
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New Delhi: There is no proposal to bring in changes in FDI (foreign direct investment) norms for the e-commerce sector, Parliament was informed on Wednesday. In a written reply to the Lok Sabha, Minister of State for Commerce and Industry Som Parkash also said there is no proposal at present to establish an e-commerce regulator. "There is no proposal to bring in changes to FDI investment rules for e-commerce sector in India, at present," he said.

To a query on prices of steel and cement, Parkash said complaints regarding cartelisation by cement companies have been received and Competition Commission of India (CCI) is the appropriate authority to deal with such types of complaints. CCI has received seven complaints related to the steel sector, which are under examination. "There is no proposal under consideration at present for setting up of a regulating authority for steel or cement sectors," he added.

Further replying to a question, Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal said the government on August 28, 2018 had published the draft e-pharmacy rules and those are under stakeholder consultations.

.

The crux of Ramani's arguments in court was that she was not the sole person who had made allegations of sexual harassment against Akbar, but he had selectively targetted her due to her vulnerability

A Delhi Court on Wednesday deferred to 17 February the pronouncement of verdict in the criminal defamation filed by MJ Akbar against journalist Priya Ramani for her allegations of sexual harassment against him.

The court of Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Ravindra Kumar had concluded the hearing and decided to reserve the verdict on 1 February after Akbar, as well as Ramani, completed their arguments. The Rouse Avenue Court had also allowed both the parties to file their written submissions, if any, within five days. The submissions, however, got delayed because of which the pronouncement of the verdict had to be further pushed to 17 February.

Ramani's Arguments

The crux of Ramani's arguments in court has been that she was not the sole person who had made allegations of sexual harassment against Akbar, but he had selectively targetted her due to her vulnerability and to intimidate other survivors through her.

In her concluding statement on 1 February, senior advocate Rebecca John, appearing for Ramani, said that Akbar should not get any relief as he chose to target Ramani to target other women.

"Why was Akbar not aggrieved by graver allegations made by Ghazala Wahab and Pallavi Gogoi. As charges became graver, Akbar became unsure. Wahab's allegations were of six months of sexual assault and harassment. Akbar opposed Gogoi's statement saying it was not rape but a consensual relationship," John said.

She said Akbar did not give any reason as to why he chose to file a case against Ramani and not others.

"When you pick and choose, one has to say the reason for not choosing others was for X or Y, which was not done in the present case. Akbar went after Ramani because she was a soft and vulnerable target.

"The object is to harass. That is the consequence. Selective prosecution must be deprecated. The prosecution that chooses to target Ramani to target other women should get no relief," she said.

John further refuted Akbar's claim that Ramani's tweet instigated and ignited the first flame when she accused him of sexual misconduct, saying that journalist Wahab tweeted on 6 October, 2018, and after that journalist Shunali Kullar Shroff made the allegations of sexual misconduct.

"I (Ramani) tweeted on 8 October," John said.

The counsel added that Akbar's argument asking phone records, CCTV footage or hotel record of the alleged meeting was of no use because there would be no such evidence since the incident took place 20 years ago.

"They argued I could have brought on record CCTV footage, call records. The burden on me is not of proof beyond ready doubt. Why didn't you (Akbar) disprove the allegations? What stopped you from bringing the hotel records and CCTV footage?

"After 20 years, there will be no phone records, CCTV footage, or hotel record. I would have if I could have," she said.

Ramani's counsel said that Akbar's argument that by deactivating her Twitter account, Ramani destroyed and tempered with the primary evidence was absurd and fallacious.

"She has not deleted any tweets. Ramani has deactivated her Twitter account for personal reasons. I (Ramani) have not deleted (it). What are the consequences in relation to the complaint against me? Have I denied making these tweets? From the time I was summoned, I have taken on consistent plea with integrity and honesty. I have not feigned ignorance. I don't suffer from memory losses," she said.

John further questioned why Akbar did not move an application seeking to reactivate Ramani's Twitter account.

"Twitter should have proved these tweets but I admitted. No evidence has been destroyed. Whether I deactivate or remain or Twitter is a private relationship between Twitter and me.

"Did they move a single application asking this court to direct me to reactivate my Twitter account? Very often counsel move applications for the presentation of call data records, bank account, etc. Did they move any such application? Why is the onus on me," she said.

John further added that if the court directs, the Twitter account can be activated even today.

"I reactivated when they asked me to check for corrigendum. I deactivated (it) again. There is not a single direction from the court. I have admitted the primary evidence. They had ample time to examine my Twitter account when they filed the case. You didn't work. It's not my fault. I'm not obliged to help you to make a case against me.

"If the court directs, it can be activated even today. The account is not the subject matter of this case. Nothing stopped them from asking for preservation of account at the start of the trial," she said, adding that she had a constitutional right to privacy.

She added that the trial was not a fishing and roving inquiry and that even during cross-examination, the court did not ask Ramani to reactivate her Twitter account.

During earlier hearings, Ramani had also explained and sought to justify the usage of the word 'predator' in her allegations  something that Akbar has taken serious objection to in his defamation lawsuit.

Ramani said, "A predator is more powerful than his prey."

"I used the word 'predator' to emphasise and highlight the difference in age, influence and power between Mr Akbar and myself. I was a young journalist, he was a famous editor, 20 years older than me who called me to his bedroom in a hotel for a job interview."

Recounting the events on the evening in 1993, she said, "This is not what I expected. I thought the interview would be in the coffee shop or in the lobby. But I was 23. I didn't have the confidence to say "no, I'll wait for you in the lobby".

During the interview, the journalist noted that she was asked several "inappropriate personal questions" and feeling unnerved, she had decided "never be alone with him in a room [with him] ever again".

Akbar's Arguments

Akbar has countered Ramani's claim that besides her many women journalists have accused him of sexual miscount by stating that she was the first among many to have started a trend of maligning a person of repute without due proof.

Akbar told the Delhi court on 18 January that harm to his reputation was done by journalist Priya Ramani as she instigated and ignited the flame first when she accused him of sexual misconduct that allegedly took place decades ago.

"It doesn't matter what people say post facto. Harm is done by the man who instigates and ignites the flame first," Akbar's counsel Geeta Luthra told the court.

She said there was no public interest in Ramani's allegation.

"There is no public interest. There is no good faith. There is just some other motive. It is not for me to state it," she said. "It is vindictive and actuated out of malice. The fact is you can just spoil a person's reputation," she added.

Akbar had filed the criminal defamation complaint against Ramani on 15 October, 2018. He resigned as Union minister on 17 October, 2018.

Akbar had earlier told the court that Ramani had defamed him by calling him with adjectives such as "media's biggest predator" that harmed his reputation.

He has denied all the allegations of sexual harassment made by over 20 women who came forward during the #MeToo campaign against him. He termed the allegations false, fabricated, and deeply distressing and said he was taking appropriate legal action against them.

With inputs from PTI
With the Indian pharmaceutical sector expected to grow to US$ 100 billion by 2025 and the Indian government allocating Rs 2,23,846 crore in the recent budget to healthcare, Frank Ross, the pharmacy retail arm of Emami Group is penetrating further into the existing geographies of West Bengal and expanding to newer territories. To make this possible Frank Ross has partnered with Franchise India, the World's largest franchising company.

Globally, India is the largest provider of generic drugs. Indias domestic pharmaceutical market turnover reached Rs 1.4 lakh crore (US$ 20.03 billion) in 2019, up 9.8% y-o-y from Rs 129,015 crore (US$ 18.12 billion) in 2018. It is expected that medicine spending in India would grow 12% over the next five years, leading India to become one of the top 10 countries in terms of medical spending.

At present, Frank Ross has 200+ pharmacy stores in West Bengal, Bengaluru, Bhubaneshwar, and Chennai. The brand established in 1906 holds the legacy of serving prescriptions since the British era and has its presence for over 100 years now. This modern face of Indias pharmacy retail chain serves15 Lakh+ customers, 80+ corporate clients, nursing homes, NGOs, and reputed hospitals by delivering quality pharma and healthcare products and services.

Frank Ross was acquired by the Emami Group in 1993 and has been a part of this conglomerate for over 25 years now. Located in Kolkata, Emami Group was established in the 1970s and has become one of the leading FMCG giants in India that also has its presence in real estate, edible oil, paper, healthcare, , leisure retail amongst many others. Some of the famous personal care brands owned by Emami are Boro Plus, Navratna and Kesh King.

Frank Ross functions through an omnichannel approach where a satisfactory customer journey is extremely critical. Some of the promises made by Frank Ross are free home delivery, 24 hours serviceable, computerized invoicing, digital payments, issuing monthly medicine reminders, and many others. To avail a franchise one needs a store size of 300 sqft and roughly 14.15 lakh of investment. Frank Ross will help the franchisee to procure licenses, staff training, the supply of products, IT infrastructure, and facilitate marketing and promotion.

Gautam Jatia, CEO, Emami Frank Ross Limited said, This pandemic has taught Indians the importance of good health and well-being. We believe that Frank Rosss legacy and value propositions will be helpful for the franchisee. Our stronghold in the West Bengal markets accompanied with unmatched pricing will enable the brand to gain momentum in no time. This year we are aiming to open 50 new stores and clock over Rs. 500 Cr. of business. We are hopeful that through this association, we will be able to achieve our set targets.

Adding to the conversation, Prateek Agarwal, Senior Manager  Business Development, Emami Frank Ross Limited said, We are delighted to partner with Franchise India as they have a huge presence in the market. Through this association, we are expecting Frank Ross to grow twofold. By utilizing their resources, we are hoping to achieve our goal of acquiring franchises in no time.

On the collaboration, Gaurav Marya, Chairman, Franchise India Holdings Limited said, The Indian healthcare market is expected to reach US$ 193.83 billion by 2020 and US$ 372 billion by 2022. The Indian government is taking all necessary initiatives to cater to this largest revenue yielding sector. This further opens up opportunities for the pharmaceutical sector, especially for the brands riding high on the digital wave. Frank Ross ticks all the boxes for being a market leader in this sector. We are extremely thrilled to be working with the team at Frank Ross and are certain that together we will have more success stories to share.
Gilbert Apaabe, a soap-maker based in Navrongo has narrated how SafeNet, Vodafones all-inclusive mobile insurance product, came to his rescue after being involved in a motor accident in November, last year.



He explained that the insurance package aided him pay his medical costs and daily expenses after the unfortunate incident. He added that the package brought great relief to him and his family during a period he was hard up and the daily profits accrued from his business was not enough to meet his expenses.



While pondering how to resolve my predicament, I remembered that I had signed up for SafeNet Insurance with Vodafone. I called MicroEnsure on the day I was discharged from the hospital and I was advised to compile and submit my receipts, which I did. I received payment within 72 hours, which was a surprise. I was elated, knowing that through Vodafone SafeNet insurance I would be able to afford the medications I needed. For me, it was a miracle! he recalls.



Gilbert thanked Vodafone Ghana for introducing this innovative product and urged Vodafone customers to sign onto the insurance package.



I have since signed up my wife, and have shared the news with neighbours as well. To small business owners like myself, you cant afford to miss out on a golden opportunity like this! I think we all need to take advantage of the SafeNet Insurance package so that should anything happen, you can have a fallback plan, he admonished.



SafeNet is Vodafone Ghanas flagship mobile insurance product. It is borne out of a strategic partnership with MicroEnsure, Prudential Life and Enterprise Life, and is aimed at cushioning customers when unforeseen upheavals come their way.



SafeNet offer customers various insurance benefits including hospital cash compensations, accidental injuries and disability cover as well as life insurance.



The product provides simple, easy and convenient insurance options that allow customers to pay as little as 50 Pesewas in monthly insurance premiums. Customers can access SafeNet by dialing the short code *592# or by sending Yes to the shortcode 592 to activate the offer.



Vodafone and MicroEnsure are offering new subscribers free insurance cover for six months, as part of interventions to lessen the burden on customers as the COVID-19 pandemic rages on.





Source: Peacefmonline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Bernadine Sewell still has a little bit of the pink hair that brought on her nickname, Pinky, as well as the name of her Berkeley restaurant, Pinky & Reds.

Hair loss, however, is likely as Sewell undergoes chemotherapy over the next eight months. Last summer, she was diagnosed with colon cancer. Initially, Sewell avoided even telling her children about her diagnosis.

It sends you into a secretive mode. You dont want anyone to know, she said. I felt like I didnt want people carrying around that burden for me because there was so much going on in the world.

But after three surgeries, Sewell, 60, realized she needed help from wherever she could get it as medical expenses mounted, months of chemotherapy became a reality, and the pandemic kept her restaurant shuttered. She launched a GoFundMe campaign in January, hoping to eventually raise $250,000 to help pay for her rent, hospital bills, food and other medical supplies. So far, people have donated almost $30,000.

GoFundMe campaigns to help sick members of the restaurant industry have been circulating lately for similar reasons. As the pandemic has forced many restaurants to close or lay off staff, workers and owners have been left with little to no income and often no health insurance.

Mike Burt, a beloved San Francisco bouncer recently at temporarily closed dive bar Docs Clock, received almost $8,000 from a GoFundMe campaign as he recovers from a blood clot in his lungs. Another campaign is ongoing for the family behind recently closed San Francisco Japantown restaurant OzaOza, whose chef Tetsuro Ozawa is battling pancreatic cancer.

While San Francisco requires businesses with more than 20 employees to provide health care  hence the surcharge on many restaurant bills  smaller restaurants can fall under that threshold and other Bay Area counties dont have such a mandate. Thats why Sewell was uninsured when she received her diagnosis, and while she now has Medi-Cal, her bills are high because she had a pre-existing condition when she signed up.

Pinky and Reds, known for fried chicken sandwiches and other comforting fare, opened in the UC Berkeley student union building in 2018 as part of a group of casual La Cocina-bred restaurants. But the on-campus location meant the restaurant closed in March and has remained that way. It only received $5,000 in federal loans through the Paycheck Protection Program and about $13,000 from a different GoFundMe campaign  not enough to justify reopening, even for delivery

Then the diagnosis came in August, followed two days later by surgery to remove a large tumor. Sewell spent four weeks in the hospital, then two weeks in a nursing home for rehab. When she returned home, she had a sinking feeling that something still wasnt right. Pressure lingered on her stomach. She remained constipated.

In December, she returned to the hospital so surgeons could implant a drain in her stomach because of suspected fluid build-up. The pain remained severe though, causing Sewell to pass out several times. Doctors recommended another surgery  and found another tumor.

The second time, they said the tumor was the size of a 16-week fetus. The first one was larger than that, Sewell said. Both felt like life-and-death times.

Because the hospital was full of COVID-19 patients, Sewell was discharged after just one week, with staples still keeping her stomach together. Unlike the first surgery, she couldnt slowly heal with the aid of an adjustable hospital bed. Instead, she struggles each morning to lift herself out of bed at home. Luckily, she has family to help.

Food Guide Top 25 Restaurants Where to eat in the Bay Area. Find spots near you, create a dining wishlist, and more.

Her son shops for groceries every other day. Without a working colon, she cant eat anything processed. No bread, no potatoes, no butter. Everything goes into the oven unseasoned  a far cry from her food at Pinky and Reds, which she hopes to reopen one day for coffee and breakfast. She cant wait to greet students once its safe again, pink hair and all.

Some days I dont want to eat because it seems like Im just eating the same thing with no taste, she said. But I know its for me to live.

Sewell has enjoyed reading the comments on her GoFundMe from donors, many of them UC Berkeley students and faculty who used to frequent Pinky and Reds.

Its so amazing when you get past the embarrassment that you need this, that you really really need this, she said. It seems so public now, but its beautiful and heartwarming.

Pinky and Reds. Temporarily closed. 2495 Bancroft Way, Berkeley. pinkyandreds.com; Sewells GoFundMe: gofundme.com/f/pinkys-cancer-fund

Janelle Bitker is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: janelle.bitker@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @janellebitker
YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 10, ARMENPRESS. Head of the World Health Organization Armenia Country Office Egor Zaitsev assess their activities conducted in 2020 as effective.

Mr. Zaitsev gave an interview to ARMENPRESS, talking about the fight against COVID-19, the activities done during the recent Artsakh War, the vaccines and other issues.

-Mr. Zaitsev, last year the whole world was full of many challenges and difficulties, conditioned in particular by COVID-19. Armenias healthcare system as well had to overcome that virus. In your opinion, what lessons we have learnt within that one year?

-We have learnt quite serious lessons at that period. I think that communication and risk assessment were important. The second lesson was that we learnt to follow the elementary safety rules, such as we wear face masks, disinfect our hands, keep social distancing and so on. I think there have been numerous lessons, one of them is that the disease was something new, a quick exchange of information was needed, which we also managed to solve. WHO is an organization which quickly collects all information, distributes it between the countries and its important for these countries to use that. The fourth lesson we have learnt is that many countries, including Armenia must have a powerful healthcare system. The talk is about various functions of that system.

-In your view, how is Armenia overcoming the current situation?

-Each country has its capacities and responds to such cases based on its own capacities. In general, we see that the situation has relatively stabilized, but its still early to talk about the final outcome because the disease has not disappeared in the whole world yet. As an organization we are trying to help Armenia with different ways. We have conducted 2 missions, specialized groups from different countries have arrived in Armenia in order to help at the critical moments either with consulting or just providing help.

-Last year, in line with the pandemic, a war has launched by Azerbaijan against Artsakh, and the situation further escalated in Armenia. What were the challenges that time? What steps did the WHO take on that path, how did it support Armenia?

-Both the civilians and the servicemen sustained many injuries during the war. This was a great challenge for Armenias healthcare system and doctors especially in that situation. One of the difficulties was that the war erupted during the pandemic which further complicated the work. That great flow of the people, the mobilization further complicated the maintenance of safety rules from healthcare perspective. Armenia was under a double burden  the pandemic and the war. At that period we assisted the ministry of healthcare in acquiring emergency kits. Now as well we continue assisting, there are projects for rehabilitation treatment, such as for psychological health recovery.

-Can the WHO assist Armenia in acquiring vaccines more quickly and in larger doses?

-At this moment active works are underway between the WHO and the government, as well as with other interested agencies, such as UNICEF, World Bank, etc. The works are being conducted through a platform which is called COVAX Facility, which is associated with the WHO. According to this program, Armenia and many other countries will receive vaccines. WHO is also working with other countries at a global level.

-On the sidelines of the fight against COVID-19 ambulance brigades arrived Armenia which has been organized as a result of the cooperation with the European Union and the governments of respective countries. What is the experience as a result of these visits?

-Emergency medical teams arrived in Armenia from Germany, Italy, Poland and UK. These teams are under the auspices of the WHO, they are licensed groups who visit other countries and provide help, share their experience. The important part was that these medical teams were providing care not only to patients, but they were also holding trainings for doctors and nurses.

-Are new cooperation, new deliveries expected in the future?

-Our cooperation has been around the EU DG NEAR project, within the frames of which assistance has been sent and is being sent to Armenia. Different types of equipment, personal protective items directed for the COVID-19 treatment have been delivered here. This year as well we will continue this project.

-Do you consider your policy adopted at this whole period as effective?

-This issue must be analyzed, studied at the final stage of this disease when everything is over. I think our organization should critically view its actions done so far in order to understand the weak and strong sides. In general, our activities in 2020 have been quite effective, however, of course, there are and have been some problems.

Interview by Lilit Demuryan

Photos by Tatev Duryan

Editing and Translating by Aneta Harutyunyan
The University of Houston College of Medicine has become the Texas Medical Centers 63rd member institution, according to a university release.

The new partnership is a gain for UHs medical school, the first new medical institution in Houston in nearly 50 years.

The College of Medicine, which welcomed its inaugural class of 30 students in the fall, has emphasized its goal of aiding underserved communities and addressing a shortage of primary care physicians throughout Houston and greater Texas. TMCs network, which sees more than 10 million patients a year, is home to MD Anderson Cancer Center and Texas Childrens Hospital, the largest childrens hospital in the world.

We are elated to join the Texas Medical Center as a member institution and look forward to engaging with colleagues at other institutions to advance clinical issues and best practices, and further joint research endeavors, said Dr. Stephen Spann, founding dean of the medical school.

Spann, who also recently joined TMCs advisory board, said the medical school can assist with the coronavirus pandemic. The tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic has paradoxically produced an opportunity to address larger issues facing our health care systems, such as health equity, he said. Together with our TMC partners, we can help be part of the solution.

As a member institution, the medical school will also have the opportunity to collaborate with TMCs University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, Baylor College of Medicine, the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and Texas A&M College of Medicine.

On HoustonChronicle.com: UH College of Medicine launches program to address social obstacles to health

The medical school continues to expand its services and initiatives. Last semester, the college virtually launched a Household-Centered Care program, which teams social workers with healthcare professionals to create a network to aid communities in hopes of improving their health. And more recently the college announced its use of Unite Us, a newly launched electronic platform that provides a network of resources, partners and service providers for patients.

A new building for the college is under construction on the campus and is slated to open next summer. The three-story, 130,000 square-foot building will feature modern classrooms and meeting spaces and anatomy and simulation suites.

brittany.britto@chron.com
The law that governs legal wiretapping in South Africa  the Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication-related Information Act (RICA)  was declared unconstitutional last week.

Anyone with a cellphone in South Africa has interacted with RICA, to the extent that it has become a verb that most of us understand.

Tell someone that you had to RICA your SIM card or mention a pre-RICAed SIM and chances are they will know exactly what you mean.

For those who might not be up-to-speed on the lingo, RICAing a SIM means to provide documents verifying your personally identifying information  a copy of your ID book or card, and a proof of address  which are registered against the SIM.

What is perhaps lost in this use of RICA as a verb is that the ultimate goal of the law is to establish the framework for legal interception.

RICA states that authorities must first apply for an interception direction from a judge, who was designated by the Minister of Justice to grant such requests, before they can execute a surveillance operation.

Surveillance operations include getting call records, listening in on calls, obtaining emails, and the interception of other electronic communications.

Post-surveillance notification

While RICA imposes some strict requirements for legal wiretapping in South Africa, the Constitutional Court has identified several problems with the Act and has given Parliament three years to fix it.

Among the problems, the court ruled on was the issue that your private communications could be intercepted and that you might not ever be told about it.

Vodacom CEO Shameel Joosub explained in 2018 that in the case of mobile networks, the government can intercept cellular communications without the operators even knowing about it.

This is thanks to interception and monitoring centres built in the early 2000s specifically to comply with RICA.

Rather than allow this to continue for the next three years while RICA is amended by Parliament, the Constitutional Court has injected two additional sections into the law as a stop-gap.

The provision dealing with what has been termed post-surveillance notification was written as follows:

Section 25A Post-surveillance notification (1) Within 90 days of the date of expiry of a direction or extension thereof issued in terms of sections 16, 17, 18, 20, 21 or 23, whichever is applicable, the applicant that obtained the direction or, if not available, any other law enforcement officer within the law enforcement agency concerned must notify in writing the person who was the subject of the direction and, within 15 days of doing so, certify in writing to the designated Judge, Judge of a High Court, Regional Court Magistrate or Magistrate that the person has been so notified. (2) If the notification referred to in subsection (1) cannot be given without jeopardising the purpose of the surveillance, the designated Judge, Judge of a High Court, Regional Court Magistrate or Magistrate may, upon application by a law enforcement officer, direct that the giving of notification in that subsection be withheld for a period which shall not exceed 90 days at a time or two years in aggregate.

It essentially states that the law enforcement agency that applied for an interception direction must inform the target 90 days after the surveillance operation ends.

To protect their investigation, officers can apply for extensions  90 days at a time, to a maximum of two years.

Can your cellular or Internet provider send the post-surveillance notice?

MyBroadband asked Vodacom, MTN, Cell C, Telkom, and the Internet Service Providers Association (ISPA) whether they could send the post-surveillance notification as now mandated by the Constitutional Court.

The answers from Vodacom, MTN and Cell C were nearly identical:

Mobile operators are prohibited in terms of Section 42(3) from divulging the fact that an interception direction has been received, the networks explained.

By implication, mobile operators cannot provide a subscriber with a notification of the existence of an interception direction.

ISPA regulatory advisor Dominic Cull agreed with the mobile networks.

However, could the officer responsible for notifying the target of a surveillance order not ask their mobile network or Internet provider to inform them about the wiretap?

Cull said that Internet service providers are extremely careful to act in accordance with the applicable framework under RICA and that there is nothing in the Constitutional Court judgement which authorises an electronic communications service provider to disclose the fact of interception to anyone.

Rather, the new section 25A puts this obligation on the person who applied for the interception direction to make the disclosure in writing.

It remains to be seen how the Constitutional Courts directives will be implemented.

Now read: Big legal problem that let South African policeman get cellphone records from operators
Freedom is Never Voluntarily Given: Palestinian Boycott of Israel is Not Racist, It is Anti-Racist

By Ramzy Baroud

February 09, 2021 " Information Clearing House " - Claims made by Democratic New York City mayoral candidate, Andrew Yang, in a recent op-ed in the Jewish weekly, The Forward, point to the prevailing ignorance that continues to dominate the US discourse on Palestine and Israel.

Yang, a former Democratic Presidential candidate, is vying for the Jewish vote in New York City. According to the reductionist assumption that all Jews must naturally support Israel and Zionism, Yang constructed an argument that is entirely based on a tired and false mantra equating criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism.

Yangs pro-Israel logic is not only unfounded, but confused as well. A Yang administration will push back against the BDS movement which singles out Israel for unfair economic punishment, he wrote, referring to the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.

Yang compared the BDS movement to the fascist boycotts of Jewish businesses, most likely a reference to the infamous Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses in Germany, starting in April 1933.

Not only does Yang fail to construct his argument in any historically defensible fashion, he claims that BDS is rooted in anti-Semitic thought and history.

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BDS is, in fact, rooted in history, not that of Nazi Germany, but of the Palestinian General Strike of 1936, when the Palestinian Arab population took collective action to hold colonial Britain accountable for its unfair and violent treatment of Palestinian Muslims and Christians. Instead of helping Palestine achieve full sovereignty, colonial Britain backed the political aspirations of White European Zionists who aimed to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

Sadly, the efforts of the Palestinian natives failed, and the new State of Israel became a reality in 1948, after nearly one million Palestinian refugees were uprooted and ethnically cleansed as a result of a decidedly violent campaign, the aftershocks of which continue to this day. Indeed, todays ongoing military occupation and apartheid are all rooted in that tragic history.

This is the reality that the boycott movement is fighting to change. No anti-Semitic, Nazi  or, according to Yangs ahistorical account, fascist  love affair is at work here; just a beleaguered and oppressed nation fighting for its most basic human rights.

Yangs ignorant and self-serving comments were duly answered most appropriately, including by many anti-Zionist Jewish intellectuals and activists throughout the US and the world. Alex Kane, a writer in Jewish Currents tweeted that Yang made a messed up, wrong comparison, and that the politician comes across as deeply ignorant about Palestine, Palestinians and BDS. US Muslim Congresswoman, Ilhan Omar, and the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) added their voices to numerous others, all pointing to Yangs opportunism, lack of understanding of history and distorted logic.

But this goes beyond Yang, as the debate over BDS in the US is almost entirely rooted in fallacious comparisons and ignorance of history.

Those who had hoped that the unceremonious end of the Donald Trump Administration would bring about a measure of justice for the Palestinian people will surely be disappointed, as the American discourse on Palestine and Israel rarely changes, regardless which President resides in the White House and what political party dominates the Congress.

So, reducing the boycott debate to Yangs confused account of history and reality is, itself, a reductionist understanding of US politics. Indeed, similar language is regularly infused, like that used by President Joe Bidens nominee for United Nations envoy, Linda Thomas-Greenfield while addressing her confirmation hearing at the Senates Foreign Relations Committee on January 27. Like Yang, Thomas-Greenfield also found boycotting Israel an unacceptable act that verges on anti-Semitism.

While the presumptive envoy supported the return of the US to the Human Rights Council, UNESCO and other UN-affiliated organizations, her reasoning for such a move is merely to ensure the US has a place at the table so that Washington may monitor and discourage any criticism of Israel.

Yang, Thomas-Greenfield and others perpetuate such inaccurate comparisons with full confidence that they have strong support among the countrys ruling elites from the two dominant political parties. Indeed, according to the latest count produced by the pro-Israel Jewish Virtual Library website, 32 states have adopted laws, executive orders or resolutions that are designed to discourage boycotts against Israel.

In fact, the criminalization of the boycott movement has taken center stage of the federal government in Washington DC. Anti-boycott legislation was passed with overwhelming majorities in both the Senate and the House of Representatives in recent years and more are expected to follow.

The popularity of such measures prompted former Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, to declare the Israel boycott movement to be anti-Semitic, describing it at as a cancer at a press conference in November, alongside Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, while in the illegal settlement of Psagot.

While Pompeos position is unsurprising, it behooves Yang and Thomas-Greenfield, both members of minority groups that suffered immense historical racism and discrimination, to brush up on the history of popular boycott movements in their own country. The weapon of boycott was, indeed, a most effective platform to translate political dissent into tangible achievements for oppressed Black people in the US during the civil rights movement in the mid-20th century. Most memorable, and consequential of these boycotts was the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955.

Moreover, outside the US, numerous volumes have been written about how the boycott of the White supremacist apartheid government in South Africa ignited a global movement which, combined with the sacrifices of Black South Africans, brought apartheid to an end in the early 1990s.

The Palestinian people do not learn history from Yang and others, but from the collective experiences of oppressed peoples and nations throughout the world. They are guided by the wisdom of Martin Luther King Jr., who once said that We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor, it must be demanded by the oppressed.

The boycott movement aims at holding the oppressor accountable as it places a price tag on military occupation and apartheid. Not only is the Palestinian boycott movement not racist, it is essentially a rallying cry against racism and oppression.

 Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons (Clarity Press). Dr. Baroud is a non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA) and also at the Afro-Middle East Center (AMEC). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net


Residents shop for Chinese Lunar New Year decorations at a market in Hefei, eastern China's Anhui Province, Jan. 30, 2021. (Xinhua/Huang Bohan)

Chinese people are about to usher in the Year of the Ox, starting from Feb. 12, 2021, and lasting until Jan. 31, 2022. Why is 2021 the year of the Ox? What does the ox mean for Chinese people? And what is the spirit of the ox? Keep reading below to find the answers.

The Ox and Twelve Chinese Zodiacs

As an essential part of Chinese folk culture, the Twelve Chinese Zodiacs, a classification system based on the Chinese lunar calendar, assigns an animal and its reputed attributes to each year in a repeating 12-year cycle. These twelve animal signs are the Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Goat, Monkey, Rooster, Dog and Pig.

The order of the Twelve Chinese Zodiacs was decided by the final rankings in a race between the 12 animals as revealed in a Chinese legend. To win the race, the hardworking Ox sets off earlier than the other animals, and gives a free ride to one of his rivals, the Rat, who is unable to pass a river along the way. Near the end of the race, the Rat jumped out of the Ox's ear and dashed towards the finish line. In the end, the warm-hearted Ox was defeated by his fellow Rat, having placed second place in the race. Hence, the Ox became the second animal in the Chinese Zodiac.

This widely known legend of the Chinese Zodiac also demonstrated that the ox is both hardy and kind in the Chinese people's eyes.

This photo shows one of the sides of a commemorative coin for the Year of the Ox, in Hangzhou, eastern China's Zhejiang Province, Jan 29, 2021. (Xinhua/Long Wei)

The Ox and its Roles in China

One of the first animals to be domesticated, the ox played an important role in ancient China. Farmers trained oxen to plow the fields and replace human labor, which vastly improved production capacities since oxen are much more powerful than human beings. Besides agriculture, oxen contributed to the development of transportation and military. In the Song Dynasty (960-1279 CE), the authorities used "ox carriages" to transport supplies during wartimes when pressures on transportation had become increasingly mounting. Serving as a powerful weapon, oxen were rigged to carry torches and were deployed to fight against enemy forces in wars during the Warring States Period (475-221 BC).

The ox's image has penetrated into Chinese culture due to its fundamental role in almost every aspect of life. The ox is crowned as the God of Sheji (which means the god of soil and food), who stole seeds from Heaven to free earthly dwellers below from hunger. According to the legend, Yu the Great, an emperor of the Xia Dynasty (c.2070-1600 BC), always threw an ox-shaped sculpture into the river near an area where he sought to control the floods, praying the sacred Ox would protect residents from harm.

The affection and reverence afforded to the Ox have extended to everyday life as well, with traditions having regularly been held to worship the animal. During Lichun, the first solar term of the traditional Chinese lunar calendar, Chinese people would craft a clay ox stuffed with grain and whip it, expressing their hopes for a bumper harvest in the upcoming new year. Paper cuttings of the Ox are very popular in local markets this year, with Chinese people scrambling to buy their own unique paper designs. Decorating houses with these festive decorations shows people's good wishes in welcoming a new year.

People walk on a street decorated with sculptures for the upcoming Chinese Lunar New Year in Shenyang, northeast China's Liaoning Province, Feb. 1, 2021. (Xinhua/Yang Qing)

The Ox and its Spirit

From paintings to poems, artists are keen on burnishing the spirit of the Ox in their work. Li Gang, a brilliant poet in the Song Dynasty, complimented the ox's temperament to work hard without any complaints in his poem. In the ink and wash painting of Qi Baishi, a distinguished painter in China, vivid images of the self-sacrificing animal come alive. Lu Xun, a famed Chinese writer, associated himself with the ox, saying that "fierce-browed, I coolly defy a thousand pointing fingers, head bowed like a willing ox I serve the people." Since then, the willing and able Ox has become a metaphor to describe those who are willing to sacrifice for the benefit of others.

The Ox's spirit, symbolizing diligence, steadfastness and tenacity, was inherited from generations of Chinese tradition and has evolved over time. With society stepping into a new era, the Ox's spirit has continued to take on new meaning.

Chinese President Xi Jinping addressed the New Years gathering of the CPPCC National Committee on Dec.31, 2020, encouraging the Chinese people to promote the spirit of the ox in serving the people, driving innovative development and working tirelessly. The unique characteristics of the ox vividly personifies the outstanding qualities that Chinese people continue to aspire for.

Deeply rooted in Chinese culture, the Ox's various images and its singular spirit has become a distinct mark of Chinese people's embrace of hard work and their aspiration for the good life.

Hong Kong's newly issued stamps, in staying true to tradition, are based on artefacts modelled after this year's zodiac animal and offer festive designs. (Photo courtesy of Hong Kong Post)
Do you still have concerns and questions about living in Spain and what your citizen rights are?

Here is a useful guide that covers the following:

Living and working

If you were legally living in Spain before 1 January 2021, your right to remain living and

working here is protected. You do not need a work visa and you have the right to be treated on an equal basis to Spanish nationals when applying for jobs. You have the right to be joined by close family members on the basis of EU rules, as long as your family relationship existed by 31 December 2020. If you have a green certificate, this remains valid proof of both your residency and other rights under the Withdrawal Agreement. However, the Spanish government recommends you exchange it for a TIE.

Healthcare

If you were legally living in Spain before 1 January 2021, the way you access healthcare will not change. If you are working here, you are entitled to state healthcare and a Spanish issued TSE (EHIC) which you can use for short stays when travelling to the UK and within Europe. UK state pensioners (S1 form holders) will continue to access healthcare in the same way. S1 holders are entitled to a UK EHIC for use when travelling in Europe - apply at nhs.uk/ehic. If you are not working and do not claim a state pension, there are alternative ways to access healthcare in Spain. Remember that if you are a resident in Spain, you should not be using a UK issued EHIC to access healthcare here, unless you are a posted worker or a student

Driving

If you are resident in Spain and have not exchanged your UK licence for a Spanish one, your valid UK licence will continue to be recognised in Spain until 30 June 2021. If you were resident in Spain before 1 January 2021 and registered your details with the DGT (Spanish Traffic Authority) before 30 December 2020, you must make an appointment with the DGT to complete the exchange of your UK licence by 30 June 2021.

Education

UK nationals who were legally resident in Spain before 1 January 2021 will be able to continue to access Spanish university. If you need to have your non- Spanish education and professional qualifications recognised in Spain you can apply for this, known as homologacion.

Voting

If you were legally living in Spain before 1 January 2021, you can vote and mstand in local elections in Spain, when you have been resident for 3 years. Once you are registered on the padron, you will need to re-confirm your registration on the electoral roll for every local election.

Travel

If you were legally living in Spain before 1 January 2021, you will be able to travel to other countries within the Schengen area for a maximum of 90 days in a rolling 180-day period. Ensure you carry your residency document (green certificate or TIE) with you when you travel. As a beneficiary of the Withdrawal Agreement, when you travel outside Spain within the EU, you will not need any additional months of validity on your passport, but it must be valid for your whole trip. From 1 January 2021, pet passports issued in Spain or another EU member state continue to be valid for travel to Great Britain and the EU, but those with UK pet passports will need to update their documentation.

Pensions

If you were legally living in Spain before 1 January 2021, your UK state pension will continue to be uprated every year for as long as you remain resident in Spain. This applies now and when you come to claim it in the future, as long as you meet the qualifying conditions. If you have worked and paid contributions in Spain, declare all periods of work in the UK, Spain and any other member state when applying for a pension or benefit. They could all count towards your final entitlement.




Crown Casino being found unfit to hold a gambling licence in NSW is one of the most extraordinary shifts in gambling reform in Australia. This momentous finding by former Supreme Court judge Patricia Bergin, SC, draws a line in the sand regarding the frequently unethical, often borderline and sometimes illegal operations of the gambling industry in this country.

For far too long gambling industry players have been given a free pass to operate as they please in Australia, with minimal oversight from the governments that license them.

Crowns Barangaroo development in Sydney and major shareholder James Packer (inset). Credit:Nick Moir, Getty

Crown has undoubtedly worked in the shadows for a long time, effectively aided and abetted by the Victorian governments unwillingness to properly resource the Victorian Commission for Gambling and Liquor Regulation.

I was appalled when there was next to no action from the Victorian government when video evidence emerged of actual shopping bags of money being laundered at Crown. The review announced in December was too little, too late.

Improving the safety of maternity units and implementing recommendations made as part of an inquiry into baby deaths will reportedly cost 400 million per year.

The Ockenden Review into baby deaths at a scandal-hit NHS trust said maternity staff had caused distress to patients by using 'inappropriate language' and blaming grieving mothers for their loss.

The inquiry into deaths and allegations of poor care at Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust (SaTH), set up in 2017, identified seven 'immediate and essential actions' needed to improve maternity services in England.

Between 2000 and 2019 42 babies and 13 mothers died during or shortly after childbirth at the trust but the inquiry continues to examine cases of 1,862 families.

Led by senior midwife Donna Ockenden, the review into the deaths said risk assessments throughout pregnancy and the monitoring of foetal wellbeing needed to be ensured, along with enhanced safety, listening to women and families, managing complex pregnancy and staff training.

In the wake of the interim report, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and Royal College of Midwives said ensuring safer care will require investment and 'increasing workforce numbers to address the serious shortage of midwives and obstetricians'.

Now, Chris Hopson, chief executive of NHS Providers, an organisation representing NHS trusts, said at least 250 million would be needed annually to achieve the required increase in workforce numbers.

'If we include shortfalls in neonatal nurses, maternity support workers and anaesthetists, for example, the total annual extra recurrent funding required could be as high as 400m or more', he wrote in a letter to health select committee chairman Jeremy Hunt, according to The Independent.

Improving the safety of maternity units and implementing recommendations made as part of an inquiry into baby deaths at Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust (SaTH)will reportedly cost 400 million per year. Pictured: Richard Stanton and Rhiannon Davies helped raise awareness of the scandal, following the death of their baby, Kate (pictured with Rhiannon), in 2009. Dozens of newborns died or suffered brain damage at two hospitals run by the trust

The 'emerging findings' report was published in December, based on a review of a selection of 250 cases of concern, which include the original 23 cases which initiated the inquiry.

A fuller review will take in the cases of 1,862 families.

Babies whose lives should have been saved: Ella and Lola Jones Twins Ella and Lola were starved of oxygen to the brain In 2014, Kelly Jones, a mother of two, discovered she was pregnant with twin girls. During the pregnancy, she felt pain but despite repeatedly asking staff at the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital to assess her properly, she was ignored. By the time medics had eventually taken her seriously, her twin girls, Ella and Lola were stillborn. A letter from the Trust to Mrs Jones said that its investigation showed 'that both babies had died from severe hypoxic ischemia (oxygen starvation to the brain) contributed to by delay in recognising deterioration in the foetal heart traces and missed opportunities for earlier delivery.' The midwife came in crying, saying: 'I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry,' Mrs Jones said at the time. 'My girls are gone because they couldn't be bothered to do their jobs.' Although the letter, dated June 2015, promised improvements in heart rate monitoring, two months later another baby died in similar circumstances. Advertisement

Mr Hopson told The Independent: 'Trust chief executives feel strongly that this is a really important agenda but they can't implement the recommendations from the Ockenden Review in full unless there is more funding made available.

'This clearly depends on the government making the funding available or NHS England making this a priority, but that would mean deprioritising something else. We need one of these two solutions to come through.'

Speaking following the publication of the emerging findings report, Louise Barnett, chief executive at SaTH, said: 'I would like to thank Donna Ockenden for this report but more importantly the families for coming forward.

'As the chief executive now and on behalf of the whole trust, I want to say how very sorry we are for the pain and distress that has been caused to mothers and their families due to poor maternity care at our trust.

'We commit to implementing all of the actions in this report and I can assure the women and families who use our service that if they raise any concerns about their care, they will be listened to and action will be taken.'

Last year, bereaved families slammed the SaTH after the inquiry laid bare a catalogue of 'shocking' failings in its maternity care.

A review by former senior midwife Donna Ockenden also found women were 'blamed for their loss', while other families' concerns were 'dismissed or not listened to at all.'

Richard Stanton and Rhiannon Davies, who lost their daughter Kate hours after she was born with anaemia in 2009, said SaTH 'should hang their heads in shame' and stop 'victim-blaming'.

The scandal came to light following campaigning from bereaved families, notably Mr Stanton and Ms Davies - the mother of his daughter Kate.

The report acknowledged the efforts of Ms Davies and her husband, and those of Kayleigh and Colin Griffiths, whose daughter Pippa died in 2016, for their 'unrelenting commitment' to preventing similar deaths.

Mr Stanton, 50, tweeted after the release of the report: 'Where they have lied, we have exposed the truth. Where they have bullied, we have been dignified.

'When they have been in denial, we have exposed the facts. They should hang their heads in shame.'

Ms Davies, 46, said she believed the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust (SaTH) used 'victim-blaming' as a way of distracting attention away from staff failings.

She said she had felt physically sick while reading about the repeated lack of care and compassion found by the Ockenden report.

Commenting on the review, Ms Davies said: 'Obviously these are critical recommendations. When Donna (Ockenden) launched the review this morning, she mentioned that she is working with a team of over 50 professionals.

Kate and Andrew Barnett from Newtown lost their son Jenson two days after his birth in June 2013, after he suffered brain trauma during an unsuccessful forceps delivery

Richard Stanton and Rhiannon Davies, who lost their daughter Kate hours after she was born with anaemia in 2009, said SaTH 'should hang their heads in shame' and stop 'victim-blaming'. Pictured: Rhiannon Davies

'Clearly these professionals know what needs to happen, what needs to change and I feel confident that they've made strong recommendations for immediate change that will have a positive impact on the wellbeing of future mothers-to-be and their babies.

'I am impressed with the findings - my only concern is we've had reviews, we've had reports in the past - not just at SaTH, we've had Morecambe Bay.

Seven essential actions report recommends Safety in maternity units across England must be strengthened Maternity services must ensure that women and their families are listened to Staff who work together must train together There must be robust pathways in place for managing women with complex pregnancies Staff must ensure that women undergo a risk assessment at each contact throughout the pregnancy pathway All maternity services must appoint a dedicated Lead Midwife and Lead Obstetrician All Trusts must ensure women have ready access to accurate information to enable their informed choice of intended place of birth and mode of birth Advertisement

'What will change? Who will scrutinise these recommendations? Who will ensure they are embedded not just at this failing hospital trust in Shrewsbury and Telford, but across the UK?

'That has to come from the Secretary of State for Health - that has to come from the top down.'

Explaining how she and others had campaigned to protect other families in the future, Rhiannon said: 'Kayleigh and I worked very closely together following the deaths of our daughters, Kate and Pippa.

'We identified through talking to each other that there were such common themes between what had happened to cause the avoidable deaths of our babies.

'We spent some time going through death records, inquest records and we identified 23 cases which we put to Jeremy Hunt to ask him to instigate an independent review, which of course he did.

'The point was we knew we were not the only families and when the number grew to 60, the hospital trust put out a public statement saying that that was scaremongering.

'We are now at 1,862 incredibly brave families that have chosen to come forward and speak to the review.

'Yes, we did the initial ground work and it was hard, very hard. But it's testimony to all these other families who have come forward and whose own cases will enable positive change.'

Describing the conduct of some staff towards grieving families identified by the report, Ms Davies added: 'Victim-blaming, mother-blaming, I think, is a very convenient approach for this hospital trust - they would find any reason to cast doubt on what may have happened.

'In my own case I wanted to lie down and die to be quite frank with you - and they blamed me.

'Clearly this has happened to other families and other mothers and it's obviously a method that they used - because it would close you down, it would make you question yourself, not them.

'I am sure in many, many cases, that's what happened. Families were so crushed.

'The effect on me initially was hugely devastating.

'Fortunately, the post-mortem came out and we had the inquest and it was absolutely clear that Kate died as a result of a catalogue of catastrophic failings by the healthcare professionals who handled her.'

She said of the staff behaviour identified by the report: 'To do that to a family is disgusting - a core theme in this report is the lack of compassion, the lack of care.

Babies whose lives should have been saved: Pippa Griffiths In photographs Colin and Kayleigh Griffiths look delighted as they show off their new arrival. Cradled on mum's lap, shortly after being born in a planned home birth in north Shropshire, is Pippa next to her big sister Brooke. All the family delighted. But a day later, on April 27, 2016, Pippa died from an infection she contracted during her birth. A midwife said she would return in the afternoon after the baby was born  but never turned up, the inquest was told. Pippa died at 4.09pm on April 27. Pippa, with parents Colin and Kayleigh and sister Brooke, died at one day old Colin and Kayleigh were concerned about Pippa's feeding and contacted midwives shortly after her birth, who reassured them. But in the early hours of the following day, Kayleigh noticed her daughter had vomited brown mucus. Later that morning, the baby's condition worsened. She developed a purple rash and then stopped breathing. Emergency services managed to get her breathing again, but she later died. The inquest was told that the trust accepts it should have given Pippa's mother a leaflet explaining trigger words so she could have accessed help and accepts a midwife should have returned to see her within 24 hours. It is also accepts that during a phone call, if they had asked the right questions and got the right responses, the baby would have survived at that point. There was also a possibly that the baby could have survived if she had gone to the hospital. Advertisement

'There are obstetricians calling mothers lazy, women lying there screaming in agony for hours because they need an intervention and people doing nothing.

'This is the 21st century. This is not Victorian England. How did this happen? How, why did no one speak out at the hospital trust?'

She added: 'I think it's critical that questions are now asked of all of the bodies that oversaw what was going on - the coroner, the clinical commissioning group, the Care Quality Commission, the governing bodies of the midwives and the doctors.

'I am sure we were not the only families raising our concerns over and over again with these bodies.

'I wrote to the coroner so many times he asked me to stop writing to him - so I wrote to the Chief Coroner and yet nothing was done.

'One absolutely critical question should go to the Health and Safety Executive - I spent months, and it felt like I was banging my head against a wall, presenting and representing absolutely unequivocal evidence that this hospital trust had caused the avoidable death of my daughter. And they did nothing.'

In June last year, police opened an investigation into failings at the two hospitals where dozens of babies died or suffered brain damage.

Examples of 'shocking failings' at scandal-hit NHS trust The findings of the Ockenden Review have detailed a number of 'shocking' examples of maternity care failings by Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust. Here are some of the most high-profile findings from the review: - Compassion and kindness One patient said staff were 'dismissive' and the obstetrician 'flippant' and 'abrupt' after they described the woman as 'lazy'. Another woman was left 'screaming for hours' before problems that required intervention were identified. The attitude of the midwives reportedly made the situation worse. - Place of birth: Assessment of risk One woman who delivered in a stand-alone birth centre suffered a catastrophic haemorrhage requiring transfer to the consultant unit, where she died. The family said they were not informed of the risks of birth in a midwifery unit. Another patient who laboured at the birth centre was not adequately monitored as 'the unit was busy'. There was a delay in transferring the mother to the labour ward and the baby was delivered in a poor condition having suffered a brain injury. - Clinical care and competency: Management of the complex There was a delay in treating a woman's severe high blood pressure and, following delivery, there was a further delay in seeking senior clinical advice. She died later in another hospital. - Escalation of concerns One woman who was admitted with contractions and early signs of infection late in her second trimester of pregnancy was seen by a junior doctor and discharged without higher level assessment. Several hours later she was readmitted and her baby was born premature. - Management of labour: Monitoring of fetal wellbeing, use of oxytocin Some mothers were regularly given the drug oxytocin which increases contractions. One woman was in labour and there were fetal heart rate concerns. Despite the abnormal cardiotocograph (CTG), oxytocin use was continued throughout the labour. At the caesarean section, there was evidence that there had been an obstructed labour. The baby suffered from hypoxic brain injury and died some months after birth. Another patient who was admitted in normal labour had CTG abnormalities in the second stage which were not recognised, it was also not recognised that the maternal heart rate was being recorded rather than the fetal heart rate. The baby was born in poor condition, developed hypoxic brain injury and died several months later. For other mothers, the medication was used where babies had already demonstrated a dangerous heart rate and long delays meant some babies were left with brain injuries such as cerebral palsy. - Traumatic birth One patient had repeated attempts at forceps delivery. The baby sustained multiple skull fractures and subsequently died. Another woman had repeated attempts to deliver the baby using forceps. The infant was found to have skull fractures after birth and subsequently developed cerebral palsy. There was no investigation. - Bereavement care A woman whose baby died after a particularly traumatic delivery was seen by the consultant afterwards. The consultant was described as having 'no compassion or understanding of the trauma experienced'. A mother whose baby died 17 hours after birth said she and her partner were offered 'no support' and hospital staff were 'lacking in compassion and actually making it so many times worse'. Advertisement

The 'emerging finds' report, based on 250 of the 1,800 cases, made seven urgent recommendations for maternity wards across England.

A full report into all cases brought to the independent review will be published later this year.

The review said when completed it 'will be the largest number of clinical reviews undertaken relating to a single service, as part of an inquiry, in the history of the NHS'.

Former senior midwife Ms Ockenden's report said 'one of the most disappointing and deeply worrying themes' was the 'reported lack of kindness and compassion from some members of the maternity team at the trust'.

Ms Ockenden said: 'Many families have suffered long-term mental health problems,' as a result of the deaths.

She added: 'They say their suffering has been made worse by the handling of their cases by the trust.'

The chair of the independent maternity review said the initial recommendations were 'must dos' and should be brought in immediately.

The report 'identified missed opportunities to learn in order to prevent serious harm to mothers and babies'.

It added: 'However, we are unable to comment any further on any individual family cases until the full review of all cases is completed.'

The report said it was 'indebted' to the efforts of parents who raised awareness of the 'avoidable,' deaths of their children.

They included Mr Stanton and Ms Davies, as well as Kayleigh and Colin Griffiths, whose daughter Pippa died in 2016.

Speaking to the BBC, the Griffiths said the trust 'need to own the failure, instead of saying ''we're sorry,'' and putting the same ''I'm sorry'' statement out and then saying ''but we do deliver all these health babies''. That's not acceptable'.

Ms Davies added: 'We campaigned after Kate's death for them to learn from Kate's death.

'If they had learnt, Pippa would not have died. I feel a huge weight of responsibility that we didn't fight hard enough.'

Speaking of the lack of compassion and kindness shown by staff, the report said: 'Many of the cases reviewed have tragic outcomes where kindness and compassion is even more essential.

'The fact that this has (been) found to be lacking on many occasions is unacceptable and deeply concerning.

'Evidence for this theme was found in the women's medical records, in documentation provided by the trust and families, in letters sent to families by the trust and from through the families' voices heard through the interviews with the review team.

'Inappropriate language had been used at times causing distress. There have been cases where women were blamed for their loss and this further compounded their grief.

'There have also been cases where women and their families raised concerns about their care and were dismissed or not listened to at all.'

The review team had also found 'inconsistent multi-professional engagement' with the investigations into serious incidents in the trust's maternity services.

The report stated: 'There is evidence that when cases were reviewed the process was sometimes cursory. In some serious incident reports the findings and conclusions failed to identify the underlying failings in maternity care.

'The review team has also seen correspondence and documentation which often focused on blaming the mothers rather than considering objectively the systems, structures and processes underpinning maternity services at the trust.'

West Mercia Police has also launched its own investigation to establish if there are any grounds for criminal proceedings.

The 27 local actions for learning involve recommendations around general maternity care, maternal deaths, obstetric anaesthesia and neonatal care.

The report also found the trust had 10 chief executives since the year 2000.

In 2014, Kelly Jones, a mother of two, discovered she was pregnant with twin girls.

During the pregnancy, she felt pain but despite repeatedly asking staff at the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital to assess her properly, she was ignored.

By the time medics had eventually taken her seriously, her twin girls, Ella and Lola were stillborn.

Kate and Andrew Barnett from Newtown lost their son Jenson two days after his birth in June 2013, after he suffered brain trauma during an unsuccessful forceps delivery.

Mrs Barnett, 35, told the Daily Mail in June how consultants had to use forceps during the delivery.

But they said they 'could not work out which way his (Jenson's) head was to apply them, so they applied them incorrectly.

'When they went to pull him the bed shunted back and the forceps slipped off his head. I then got rushed for an emergency caesarean section.'

Jenson's inquest was held the following year in March 2014, where a coroner ruled that the injuries he suffered during birth were 'avoidable'.
Owns 80% of Pharmadrug GmbH, a German medical cannabis distributor

Owns 100% of Super Smart, a Dutch company building a modern adult-use psychedelic retail business

Recently acquired Sairiyo Therapeutics, biotech firm specializing in researching and reformulating established natural medicines

What Pharmadrug does:

PharmaDrug Inc. ( ) (OTCPINK:LMLLF) is a specialty pharmaceutical company focused on the research, development and commercialization of controlled-substances and natural medicines such as psychedelics, cannabis and naturally-derived approved drugs.

In Medical Cannabis, the company currently sources and wholesales product to pharmacies in Germany with a strategy to launch and develop its own brand of cannabis for distribution in Germany and other legal jurisdictions in the European Union. The company owns 80% of Pharmadrug GmbH, a German medical cannabis distributor, with a Schedule I European Union narcotics license and German EuGMP certification.

In psychedelics, the company has said it intends to utilize a unique two-pronged approach. The first will be to capitalize on markets in The Netherlands through consolidation of legal adult-use psychedelic dispensaries. Secondly, as products get developed and achieve regulatory approval or get legalized in jurisdictions across the Eurozone, the company will seek to utilize the companys controlled substance important and distribution license to establish a pharmaceutical psychedelic business.

The firm owns 100% of Super Smart, a Dutch company building a modern adult-use psychedelic retail business with an elevated and educational focus.

PharmaDrug recently acquired Sairiyo Therapeutics, a Japanese biotech company that specializes in researching and reformulating established natural medicines with a goal of bringing them through regulatory and research-driven clinical trials.

Sairiyo is focused on repurposing and developing improved formulations of naturally derived compounds for serious, rare, and life-threatening diseases with the aim to obtain European Medicines Evaluation Agency and US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval.

How is it doing:

PharmaDrug has had a busy start to 2021.

At the start of February completed its acquisition of Sairiyo Therapeutics. Sairiyo is advancing the clinical development of its lead drug candidate, Cepharanthine, a repurposed and reformulated naturally derived compound for the potential treatment of cancer, neurological, inflammatory and infectious diseases. The company is also developing a strategy to commence research activities in the psychedelic space.

Also in February, PharmaDrug revealed that it entered into a supply agreement on January 4, 2021, with a Canadian-based multinational cannabis company for EU-GMP certified medical cannabis, with the supply already registered and approved for sale in the German market.

Under the agreement, the company's licensed German distributor, Pharmadrug Production GmbH will purchase branded medical cannabis from the supplier's German subsidiary. Pharmadrug Production has already received regulatory approval to distribute the cannabis and the product has been added to their license.

The group said the flower will be imported into Germany by the global supplier and sold under the supplier's medical cannabis brand.

The company noted that it expects to begin receiving shipments of cannabis shortly with the goal of commencing distribution to its pharmacy network in the current quarter of 2021.

At the same time, PharmaDrug said it had also made significant advancements towards launching a CBD line. The CBD business model will differ from PharmaDrug's Medical Cannabis business as it will seek to be a supplier of branded product to be sold via distributors and e-commerce platforms.

A quality supplier has been sourced and Pharmadrug Production is already in possession of its first shipment of bulk inventory. The product has been tested by several potential distribution partners and the feedback has been positive, and the company's management is in the process of registering the product for approval with the applicable state regulator.

Once approval has been obtained, the company will finalize distribution agreements and begin to package the product for retail sale under a proprietary Pharmadrug brand.

PharmaDrug also revealed in February that its balance sheet had undergone a significant improvement since it reported its third-quarter numbers.

Firstly, the selling of marketable securities and the exercising of the company's warrants have contributed to an increase of cash on the balance sheet, now equaling approximately $3.5 million. Secondly, the Interrobang debentures have been converted into equity resulting in approximately $2.5 million in debt being eliminated.

The company said it still holds marketable securities with a current value of over $1 million dollars and PharmaDrug has "in the money warrants" outstanding which can potentially bring in approximately $1 million in additional cash.

The group said its management believes it has more than enough cash on hand to fund all its activities in 2021.

In the boardroom, on February 8, PharmaDrug announced the appointment of world-renowned chemist and neuroscientist Dr Steven Barker to the company's newly formed scientific advisory board for psychedelic pharmaceuticals.

The company said Dr Barker will lead the research and development initiatives of N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) for mental health, neurological, and inflammatory disorders. He is professor emeritus at Louisiana State University in the Department of Comparative Biomedical Sciences at the School of Veterinary Medicine.

Dr Barker has been actively involved in the research of psychedelics, with a primary focus on DMT since 1976 and appeared in the 2010 documentary "DMT: The Spirit Molecule," which was hosted by actor and commentator Joe Rogan, the company noted.

Inflection points:

Further expand its supply channels

News on discussions with Eurozone emerging extractors to supply white label product

Register own cannabis strain from offerings

What the boss says:

In Februarys statement, PharmaDrug chairman and CEO Daniel Cohen said: "We will continue to work to expand our supply channels with the aim of supplying several key brands as well as developing our own. Our goal is to be a one-stop-shop for pharmacies seeking medical cannabis.

To this end, we also continue to work with Incorporated to register our own strain from Eve's offerings, and much progress has been made in this regard. We are also in advanced discussions with emerging extractors within the Eurozone to supply us with a white label product that we can sell under our own brand."

Contact the author at jon.hopkins@proactiveinvestors.com

What the analyst says:

Click here to read Proactive analyst Ed Stacey's initiation report
Nifty futures on the Singapore Exchange traded 45 points higher at 15,162 around 8 am, indicating a firm start for benchmark indices on Wednesday.

Here are the top stocks to track in today's session:

Tata Steel: The firm reported a consolidated net profit of Rs 3,698 crore in the December quarter as against a loss of Rs 1,029 crore in the corresponding period last year on the back of increased revenue, which was aided by both higher steel prices and volumes.

InterGlobe Aviation: The parent company of the country's largest airline has settled with Sebi a case of alleged corporate governance lapses and listing norms violations that were raised by the company's co-promoter Rakesh Gangwal. Meanwhile, the company appointed Jiten Chopra as its chief financial officer (CFO), effective February 21, 2021.

Q3 earnings: Eicher Motors, Company, GAIL India and Hindalco Industries are 4 Nifty companies among 330 firms that are slated to post their quarterly results today.

Glenmark Pharmaceuticals: The firm on Tuesday said its board will meet later this week to consider buyback of its Singapore-listed foreign currency convertible bonds.

Airtel, RIL, Voda Idea: Telecom operators Bharti Airtel, Reliance Jio and Vodafone Idea on Tuesday submitted applications to participate in the Rs 3.92 lakh crore spectrum auction scheduled to start from March 1, according to official sources.

Berger Paints: The firm's Q3 profit jumped 51 per cent YoY to Rs 274.8 crore against Rs 182.3 crore posted in the same period last year.

India: The company's net loss widened to Rs 29 crore against Rs 21.7 crore posted in the same period last year. Meanwhile, the revenues were down 28 per cent YoY at Rs 163.1 crore.

F&O Inclusion: Alembic Pharma, City Union Bank, Granules India, Gujarat Gas, L&T Technology Services and Mphasis will be part of F&O From March Series.

NHPC: National Hydro Power Corporation (NHPC) is raising up to Rs 2,000 crore in a bond sale, as it braces for a large capacity expansion plan amid the governments thrust on hydroelectric energy.

Coffee Day Enterprises: The firm reported narrowing of consolidated net loss to Rs 97.11 crore for the three months ended December 2020 against a net loss of Rs 184.94 crore in the same period last year.

Century Ply: Century Plyboards India will pump in Rs 200 crore to expand the medium density fiber (MDF) board unit located at Hoshiarpur in Punjab, following rising demand in domestic and international Meanwhile, the company's profit nearly doubled to Rs 65.79 crore during the December quarter as against a profit of Rs 37 lakh in the corresponding period a year ago.

Raymond: Raymond reported an 88.7 per cent YoY plunge in its consolidated net profit to Rs 22.18 crore for the quarter ending December 2020. The company had posted a net profit of Rs 196.83 crore in the year-ago quarter.

Torrent Power: Torrent Power reported an over 23 per cent YoY decline in consolidated net profit at Rs 321.73 crore for the December quarter, mainly due to a one-off gain in the year-ago period.

Lemon Tree Hotels: The firm posted a net loss of Rs 45.72 crore as against a net profit of Rs 11.08 crore posted in the same period last year. The revenue plunged 66 per cent YoY to Rs 68.37 crore.
Burma Myanmars Ethnic States Rise Up in Protest Against Military Coup

Anti-coup protesters march in Taunggyi, the capital of Shan State, on Wednesday. / TH

YANGONOne day after protesters rejecting Myanmars military regime held mass rallies in Myanmars biggest cities including Yangon, tens of thousands of people in all the ethnic dominated states also took to the streets, trying to bring down the generals who seized power on Feb 1.

Residents in Kachin, Kayah, Karen, Chin, Rakhine, Mon and Shan States have joined anti-coup nationwide rallies beginning this week, facing off against police officers and military personnel day after day.

In the past, the crucial demand from Myanmars ethnic regions was the formation of a federal state, but now their demands are the same as those in Burman-dominated areas.

They called for military to stop the coup, release the national civilian leader State Counselor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and other politicians from National League for Democracy (NLD), restore power to elected government and abolish the 2008 military-drafted constitution.

In Myitkyina, the capital of Kachin State in northern Myanmar, thousands of people have joined protests against the coup despite the fact that most of them had previously criticized the NLD-led governments failure to amend 2008 military-drafted constitution and address ethnic rights.

Many of the protesters in those states dressed in their own ethnic attire, holding the flags of each ethnic group, and their demands reflect those around the country.

They shouted slogans: We want Democracy, We reject the military coup, Free Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and President U Win Myint! In Kachin states capital Myitkyina, protesters also expressed their desire to a new charter, urging Abolish the 2008 Constitution. Later, the protests spread across the state from the capital to northernmost part of the state, Putao township.

A young Kachin woman activist, who is leading the anti-coup protests in Myitkyina, Sut Seng Htoi told The Irrawaddy, Rejecting the military coup is a matter for the future of our country, so I am actively involved in the demonstrations.

It is our responsibility to [protest] against the dictatorshipfor our future, Sut Seng Htoi said.

Sut Seng Htoi said that Kachin people are also demanding the 2008 military-drafted constitution be abolished to remove the role of the military in politics.

Myanmar police began to crack down on the demonstrations on Tuesday, using water cannons and opening fire, however anti-coup protests strongly continue across the country, on the fifth day of nationwide demonstrations.

We all know that violent crackdowns could come anytime, but we want to do whatever we can.to overthrow the dictatorship, Sut Seng Htoi added.

In Myitkyina, hundreds of civil servants from education, general administration departments, and Myitkyina University also joined the growing civil disobedience campaigns, refusing to go their offices to show disapproval of military regimes cabinet.

They also participated in the protests and called for other civil servants to join them, shouting a slogan: Dont go to work, leave the office!

Residents in several cities across the Shan statefrom Taunggyi in Shans south to Muse in the northhave joined the nationwide protest to reject the military coup.

A 30-year-old engineer, Ko Arkar who has been participating in protests in Taunggyi, the capital of Shan state, told The Irrawaddy, The government I voted for in the 2020 election, has been toppled by the military. At least they need to respect our votes. I grew up under the military dictatorship. We just got democracy the past few years. I do not want the next generation to grow up under a dark age like I had to go through.

As a citizen of this country, I will do whatever I can to denounce the coup. We will keep demanding until we get what we want, Ko Arkar said.

Sao Haymar Thaike, the daughter of Myanmars first presidentSao Shwe Thaike who was killed following Ne Wins military coup in 1962 told The Irrawaddy the military coup is totally unacceptable.

I stand with the people who are demanding to bring down the military, she said.

Sao Haymar Thaike, a 75-year-old, demands that military release democratic leaders including Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and return power to a civilian government as soon as possible.

I pray every day for the protesters to be safe and that we would get what we demand, Sao Haymar Thaike said.

In Kayah state (located south of Shan State), the NLD and a local popular party Kayah State Democractic party (KySDP) issued a joint statement to condemn the military coup, despite the fact that both parties competed against each other in the 2020 election. KySDP even has fired its number-two vice president from the party after he accepted the military regimes offer to take a position in the State Administrative Council (SAC), set up by the coup leader Senior General Min Aung Hlaing.

Maw Moe Myar, an elected lower house lawmaker from KySDP who is also leading the protest movement in Shardaw township in Kayah state, told The Irrawaddy, We do not want a military dictatorship. We want a democracy. I believe that only with true democracy, can we establish the federal union that we have been longing for so long.

I think the most important thing right now is to get back to civilian rule, Maw Moe Myar said.

In the countrys west, anti-coup protesters join the nationwide demonstrations this week, despite the Arakan National Party joining hands with the regime.

The most popular Rakhine party, Arakan National Party (ANP) has been strongly criticized by civil society organizations (CSOs) after its spokesperson accepted the position in military-led SAC.

On Feb.9, eight anti-coup protesters were detained by the police in Rakhine State after protests against the military coup in five townships in central and southern Rakhine. Among them, two of the protesters are ethnically Chin students from the organization Chin University Students in Rakhine State.

A lawyer from Ann Township in Rakhines south, Ko Khaing Myat said,I voted for the NLD. The military must respect my vote.

We will keep demanding until they hear our voices. We believe that our people deserve better. Ko Khaing Myat said.

You may also like these stories:

Myanmars Coup Leaders Name a New Union Election Commission

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Myanmar Coup Means Huge Losses for Thailands Border Trade
Commentators cant be held liable even for erroneous accusations unless they deliberately lied or showed a reckless disregard for the truth. Accurate claims  what Trump has the most reason to fear  are fully protected. If a news organization had indeed published articles about him that were purposely false, it would be at high risk of ruinous judgments. Trump has filed or threatened to file a host of libel suits  but has never won one.
Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US

Iran ready to help improve the defense capability of Syria

European Parliament head proposes to strengthen sanctions on Russia

UK PM gets married in London

Armenia reports COVID-19 new 81 cases: for people die

EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia

2 people die in Armenia road accident

Nigeria: Students taken hostage a month ago are released

61 quakes recorded in Congo per day

Syrian MFA: EU lost credibility due to blind obedience to US policy

Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack

Mher Grigoryan: Clarification of border points is possible only after withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops from Armenia

Suspicious deal: Whether there was profit from buying DNA IDs?

Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war

4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack

Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities

Kocharyan: I have to ask people how it happened that overwhelming majority elected this leader

Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country

Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia

US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs

Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners

Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions

Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US

Iran intensifies its diplomacy amid Armenia-Azerbaijan border tensions

Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes

Lukashenko accuses West of destabilizing situation in Belarus

Armenia Central Electoral Commission chief on snap elections: No legal basis for postponing, suspending any function

Armenias Pashinyan is met by Yerevan district residents chanting against him

We are ready to be fully engaged in negotiation process to resolve Karabakh issue, says Armenia acting PM

Armenia ex-President Kocharyan gives interview to Russia TV channel

Armenia acting premier: We are ready to start withdrawing troops at any moment

Canada MFA expresses concern over 6 Armenian soldiers capture by Azerbaijan troops

There are omissions in registration documents of political forces that applied to Armenia Central Electoral Commission

Armenia Central Electoral Commission chief: There is activeness in Yerevan for the past day or two

Three new cases of coronavirus reported in Artsakh

Group of US Congress members threaten Azerbaijans Aliyev regime with sanctions

Chicago mayor is sued for allegedly refusing interview with white reporter

Iran exports oil to US for first time after long interval

"Armenia" bloc top 50 MP candidates are announced

42 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia

Sri Lanka public beach is covered in charred plastic pellets due to fire in container ship

US preparing list of targeted sanctions on Belarus authorities

China believes it will own America by 2035, Biden says

15 al-Shabab militants killed in Somalia

Newspaper: Armenia political forces that applied for running in election impatiently await CEC decision

Newspaper: Changes are expected in Artsakh

California prisoner who considers himself Satanist beheads cellmate, dismembers his body

Newspaper: Armenia acting PM's "mutually beneficial" proposal to collapse state system?

Armenia National Security Service Reserve Officers' Union members meet with His Holiness Karekin II

EU is ready to help Armenia and Azerbaijan with border delimitation and demarcation

ARF-D member on Nikol Pashinyan: 103 years ago Armenia's founding fathers would have executed him for treason

Iran President hails brotherly ties with Azerbaijan

Robert Kocharyan on years of his leadership in Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia

Situation on Armenian-Azerbaijani border is still tense, more on COVID-19 in Armenia, May 28 digest

"Armenia" alliance of political parties paying tribute to founder of First Republic Aram Manukyan

Yerevan.today: Armenia acting PM not greeted at ruling party's headquarters, citizens call him 'capitulator'

Russia MOD reports on maintenance of ceasefire regime in Nagorno-Karabakh

Armenia acting MOD meets with Russian counterpart in Moscow

Armenia 2nd President: I see possibility of restoring borders of Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast

We can provide our army with some key, modernized weapons, says Armenia ex-President Kocharyan

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan: Captives issue is not one that any opposition force can resolve

OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs release statement on detention of 6 Armenian servicemen by Azerbaijan

Armenian acting Deputy PM: Discussion on issues possible only after withdrawal of Azeri troops from Armenia's territory

Armenia acting PM on Syunik roads, Russian military posts: This is only place where there are working nuances

Armenia acting PM: Process of return of POWs will intensify after upcoming elections

Putin congratulates Aliyev on Republic Day

Josep Borrell: A group of EU Ministers will visit Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan

Armenia acting PM: We're not going to escalate situation for 30% of Sev Lake

Armenia 3rd President visits Vanadzor, pays tribute to heroes of Battle of Gharakilisa (PHOTOS)

Armenia ex-President Kocharyan lays flowers at Battle of Karakilisa memorial (PHOTOS)

Armenia acting PM: Solution to captives issue is matter of time

Shoygu to Harutyunyan: Russia, Armenia strengthen military cooperation

Armenia acting premier: We are 100% honest toward our country

Artsakh President pays tribute at Stepanakert memorial, Shushi Tank-Monument

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan on Meghri corridor plan: Not beneficial to us now to discuss it as "corridor"

Acting PM: "Cement," "fittings" were stolen while constructing Armenia state "building"

Two new cases of coronavirus reported in Artsakh

Catholicos of All Armenians visits Sardarapat Memorial, again separate from state officials

MOD dismisses Azerbaijan statement on Armenia army firing toward Nakhchivan

Jerusalem Post: Israel prepares for a new war with Hamas

France, UN World Food Programme partner to support displaced people in Armenia

Armenia ex-President Kocharyan: Today we are not full-fledged negotiating party

Norwegian prime minister opposes series of NATO reforms

Armenia deputy FM briefs UN, Red Cross leaders on consequences of Azerbaijan aggression against Artsakh

NATO Secretary-General: Afghans must take full responsibility for peace and stability in their country

104 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia

Armenia acting premier: Our sovereignty, independence cannot be subject of discussion

Karabakh state-finance minister announces resignation

Artsakh MFA: Sardarapat victory has inspired all Armenians for over a century

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan: In contrast to kneeling, disgraceful authorities of the day, we have determination

Armenia President: Today we stand on threshold of Sardarapat of morality, dignity

Catholicos of All Armenians: Our people shall find strength to overcome this ordeal as well

Armenia First Republic Day event is held under very modest conditions

Newspaper: Armenia authorities claiming to be popular close off First Republic Day event to public

Armenia ex-President Sargsyan: Now or never!

Armenia President, then acting premier arrive at Sardarapat Memorial

Newspaper: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan's new "cleverness?"

France ambassador: I wish Armenia to be able to live its independence in peace, prosperity

Bashar al-Assad wins Syria presidential election

Reporters not allowed entering Sardarapat Memorial of Armenia
Australia will push back against Britains bid to use the worlds most exclusive leaders summit to establish climate tariffs, arguing the sanctions would be a new form of protectionism designed to shield local industries from free trade.

The issue could come to a head at the G7 summit in Britain in June, which Prime Minister Scott Morrison has been invited to attend, after British Prime Minister Boris Johnson indicated it would be a key priority at the meeting of the worlds leading economies.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has invited Scott Morrison to this years G7. Credit:PA

Mr Johnson has directed British government departments to come up with options for carbon border levies ahead of several major international summits, which he believes could act as a global emissions trading scheme as the world strives to hit net-zero emissions by 2050.

The British Prime Minister, riding a new wave of environmental momentum following the election of US President Joe Biden, has told aides the United Nations climate change conference in Glasgow in November is his number one initiative and passion project for the year.
[February 10, 2021] Amentum and Kupono form Joint Venture, Awarded $854 Million Contract for Range Operations Support

A joint venture formed by Amentum and Kupono, one of its protege partners and an Alaka'ina Foundation company, was recently selected to perform range and base operations for the U.S. Navy under a single-award, hybrid contract. Koa Lani JV LLC, the new joint venture, will provide range and base operations support services at the Pacific Missile Range Facility (PMRF) on the islands of Kauai and Oahu in Hawaii. The contract has a maximum value of $854 million over 10 years if all options are exercised. "Amentum is excited to support our 8(a) mentor-protege Kupono as a partner in the Koa Lani JV in support of the U.S. Navy's critical mission at PMRF," said John Bozarth, senior vice president of business development for Amentum's Mission Readiness Strategi Business Unit. "As the leading Air Force and Navy open air / sea range operations and maintenance provider, Amentum is poised and ready to leverage our decades of expertise in support of this essential test and training mission."



The joint venture will draw from Amentum's experience and have access to "best in class" tools, processes and procedures from its Range Center of Excellence in Las Vegas, Nev., in support of the Navy's diverse set of requirements. ABOUT AMENTUM

Amentum is a premier global technical and engineering services partner supporting critical programs of national significance across defense, security, intelligence, energy, and environment. We draw from a century-old heritage of operational excellence, mission focus, and successful execution underpinned by a strong culture of safety and ethics. Headquartered in Germantown, Md., we employ more than 34,000 people in all 50 states and perform work in 105 foreign countries and territories. Visit us at amentum.com to explore how we deliver excellence for our customers' most vital missions. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210210005527/en/

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opinion

Dear Tingasiga;

Dr David Sengendo Sennoga, a Ugandan-born paediatrician, died in Durban, South Africa, last week. His life was claimed by an acute illness that he had valiantly fought for several weeks under the care of professional colleagues who continue to risk their lives to help fellow humans in this terrible global crisis. Dr Sennoga was my classmate at Makerere Medical School.

Together with many other classmates who continue to serve humanity in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Botswana, South Africa, Nigeria, Australia, USA and Canada, we forged a siblings' bond that endures.

A group of us who are in almost daily communication via our class WhatsApp forum, were kept informed of our classmate's struggle. However, news of his death hit us as though we were unprepared for it. Death is always shocking.

My colleagues who have shared their reaction to Dr Sennoga's premature death are Dr Christina Mugwanya Kadama and Dr Jane Nannono Kavuma-Kayonga in Kampala; Dr. Apollo Ikbo in Tororo; Dr Crispus Tegu in Mbale; Prof Valentino Lema in Nairobi; Prof Thabiso Lebona in Pretoria; Dr Dunstan Kibuuka Lumu in Johannesburg; Dr Geoffrey Mukasa Mukwaya in Philadelphia; and Dr Sam Mwesezi Kigongo in New York City - are deeply saddened.

We have lost a brother, one whose distinguished career, achievements and well-earned accolades reflected the excellence of the men and women who gave us an outstanding education at Makerere.

Dr Sennoga had dedicated his post-specialisation years to teaching paediatrics to younger colleagues and to caring for children and their families. He helped establish and led the paediatrics service at Netcare Kingsway Hospital in Durban, South Africa for many years. He was a very highly respected and loved paediatrician.

Very many parents whose children benefitted from his professional excellence and obuntu (humaneness) have shared their thoughts and memories in written tributes. Reading through nearly 1,000 messages on a Facebook Page dedicated to Dr Sennoga, which was started on January 14 when the community learnt that he was critically ill, had me in tears and joy. My classmate fulfilled the constant exhortation of Prof Latimer K Musoke: "It is about the child, remember?"

The frequent words used to describe Dr Sennoga in the Facebook posts include hero, legend, humble, awesome, gentleman, jovial, amazing, brilliant, treasure, hard-working, dedicated, kindest, listener, empathetic and selfless.

Numerous parents wrote about his diagnostic excellence, his willingness to meet them at the hospital emergency room deep in the night, and his calm reassurance to incredulous parents that all would be well. Many called him the best doctor, and some judged him to be the best paediatrician in South Africa.

The testimonials of the parents and some of his former patients showed that Dr Sennoga tirelessly strove to achieve the ultimate goal of becoming "the complete paediatrician."

This is a station that one does not reach simply because one has passed difficult specialist examinations and attained fancy titles after one's name. The label consultant or professor does not a complete paediatrician make.

There are certain attributes that form the foundation of excellent provision of healthcare to children. First, the paediatrician must put the child and their family at the centre of his practice. It must never be about the doctor's interests, but those of the child and the family.

Second, the paediatrician must look beyond the obvious.

She does not see a child as "a case" or a set of interesting symptoms and signs that flag the presence of a disease. The child is a wholesome human being, not a diseased organ.

To that end, the complete paediatrician combines traditional diagnostic tools such as thorough history-taking, physical examination, judicious tests through the laboratory and other modern technological tools, with an awareness and thorough understanding of the whole child.

A child's life is shaped and impacted by physical, mental, spiritual, social, economic, family, community, cultural and political factors.

Third, the paediatrician must be a good teacher, with skills for effective communication and listening to patients, families and colleagues.

As always, a good teacher is an enthusiastic learner from patients, families, students and colleagues from all disciplines.

Fourth, the complete paediatrician strives to maintain the high standards of the profession, consistent with the practical resources and other realities of the society in which she is serving. This includes a realistic appraisal of what can be safely and effectively done in one's centre.

The non-negotiable principle of primum non nocere (above all do no harm) must apply at all times.

One of the essential strategies for maintaining high standards is constant reading of the latest evidence-based literature, participating in formal continuing medical education programs and, where possible, visiting other centres to see the world beyond one's professional comfort zone.

Fifth, the complete paediatrician engages in constant evaluation of self, of his practice, of the program and health care system in which he works.

Yesterday's successes and glowing testimonials by one's patients, students and colleagues must not lull one into a state of overconfidence.

Finally, the complete paediatrician must remain firmly rooted in his family, enjoying them and setting aside time to engage in self-care and restoration.

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Pursuits of pleasurable hobbies and restorative time off work is an essential part of healthy living - even for the most hardworking doctor.

The testimonials of parents, patients and his colleagues suggest that Dr. Sennoga actively lived towards these goals. Space does not allow us to quote the beautiful messages that were written before and after his death. Two encapsulate his legacy.

Taryn Lisa Andrew wrote: "Dr Sennoga changed my life. After 18 months of other doctors looking at me like I was a crazy person (sometimes even telling me so), I had given up on finding a paediatrician for my baby.

I think fate intervened and led me to Dr Sennoga. He was the only person that saw me, listened, understood and helped me. I don't know where my family would be today if our paths had not crossed. My heart is truly broken."

Hlengiwe Hlabisa wrote: "My daughter is determined to be a doctor because of Dr. Sennoga. He was such a good doctor."

To his widow Christine and their children, heartfelt condolences from his medical school classmates.

May the Lord's presence among you help you to navigate through the deep pain of loss. May the good memories of David and the esteem in which he was held by those whom he served and lived with shine a bright light in the present darkness.

muniini@mulerasfireplace.com
One question raised by the OpenLux investigation is to what extent the Luxembourg Business Registers (RBE) actually contribute to the transparency and control of Luxembourg's financial centre.

Since 2019, the RBE's main missions include managing the registers, checking the information submitted by companies, and making this information available to the public, professionals, and the authorities.

According to Yves Gonner, the director of the RBE, about 300,000 people are listed in the registers. When it comes to doing background checks on these individuals, Gonner explains that if possible, the RBE uses databases based in Luxembourg. If this is not an option, the respective individuals have to submit additional proof of identity, for instance a copy of their passport or ID card. The RBE then verifies the submitted data.

Those making the declaration must once again confirm their information before it is internally checked and validated by the RBE. Gonner points out that as this process is based on manual input; mistakes can always occur.

Nonetheless, Gonner stresses that the checks carried out by the Registers are effective. The law also stipulates that people who are consulting the information made available by the Registers have to flag any discrepancies they may find. When the RBE receives such an alert, they contact the company and ask them to correct their information.

According to Gonner, the RBE fulfils its checks and missions as stipulated by law. The Registers check up on data that is provided to them, basically doing material testing. It is not part of the RBE's mission to launch investigations or do extensive research on the beneficial owners, the director argues.

However, Gonner also adds that the RBE is constantly working on improving its infrastructure.

Read also: Government refutes claims made in international anti-money laundering investigation

The Transport Secretary has revealed that his father is on a coronavirus ward in hospital as he praised NHS staff working under relentless pressure.

Grant Shapps said that his 89-year-old father has been on a coronavirus ward for quite some time after contracting the virus in hospital.

Appearing on Good Morning Britain following an interview with a doctor at Whiston Hospital on Merseyside, Mr Shapps paid tribute to healthcare staff caring for his father.

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The work they (NHS staff) do is incredible, I speak to them every single day, of course, we have not been able to visit my dad for two months now, he said.

What they have been doing for nearly a year now has been extraordinary and, as you said, it has of course been worse now, even though numbers are coming down in hospital.

Talking to the ITV programme on Wednesday, the Welwyn Hatfield MP said his father had been moved to a smaller coronavirus ward the day prior due to the hospital starting to see a reduction in patients.

He added: But even now, even with that reduction, its still higher than it was in the first peak so we are not out of this yet, we just need to adhere to the lockdown and to the rules to stop more people ending up in those hospitals.

Asked about carrying out the role of Cabinet minister while his father is unwell, he said: It is very difficult. I know that quite often people think that people in authority or power or in public service live a different, gilded life.

The truth is, you live the same life as everyone else, and coronavirus, that gets everybody, got my dad.

It wasnt the reason he went into hospital originally but unfortunately he did pick it up and were all very worried.

Mr Shapps said that he had been speaking to nurses about his fathers condition when possible, but said staff were very, very pressed and that hospitals remained under immense pressure.

I do just pay tribute to their extraordinary patience, he added.

Not only with the patients themselves, who sometimes can be quite distressed as my dad has been, but also just the relentless pressure of this and the hours that they have been working.

Reporter

Ben Zigterman is a reporter covering business at The News-Gazette. His email is bzigterman@news-gazette.com, and you can follow him on Twitter (@bzigterman).
Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine Arsen Avakov and U.S. Charge d'Affaires in Ukraine Kristina Kvien discussed the current state of cooperation between the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine and the U.S. government during the meeting.

According to the Communications Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, the parties paid special attention to the successful implementation of the Community Police Officer project.

Thus, Avakov said that this project would become a new level of provision of high-quality police services and protection systems.

"Every Ukrainian in a remote village should feel safe. A police officer is focused on solving the security problems of his own territorial community. He is reachable for the population, since he is constantly close to people," the minister said.

In turn, Kristina Kvien expressed her readiness to continue to support its implementation and other projects that are now being implemented jointly with the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine.

The Community Police Officer project has been implemented since May 2019. Today it is being implemented in 16 regions of Ukraine, where 444 police officers are serving in 273 communities. The project is aimed at improving public perception of the National Police of Ukraine in small towns and villages, providing opportunities for citizens living in remote areas to receive high-quality police services.
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues and cases rise, the number of short-term rentals available in Hawaii has seen a significant decrease, with one island seeing about half as many vacation rentals as in 2019.

Hawaii Public Radio reported Thursday that the supply of vacation rentals had declined on all islands. Oahu had the biggest decrease at about 49%, half as many vacation rentals as 2019, Erik Kloninger, a visitor industry analyst, told Hawaii Public Radio. The island of Hawaii's rental supply decreased about 43%, he added.

Kloninger also said that the higher loss of rental business in Oahu and Hawaii compared with other islands is likely due to government restrictions put in place amid the pandemic, as well as the legal restrictions on short-term rentals and penalties for violators in both Oahu and Hawaii that were put in place in 2018 by county officials.

Although Hawaii has reopened to tourism, experts have said that it could take years for the tourism industry to recover. November 2020 saw less than a quarter of usual arrivals compared to 2019, the University of Hawaiis Economic Research Organization noted in a report. The lack of travellers has impacted the normally lucrative holiday season: Hotel operators were left with 75% of their rooms vacant in December.

That decline in occupancy for hotels was echoed in vacation rentals, where 40% of vacation rentals had tenants, Hawaii Public Radio reported. It too represented "a substantial decline from the 2019-2020 holiday season."

But there's one bright spot for the industry: Despite the lower number of visitors and amounts of short-term rentals, visitors are staying longer, which could potentially skew the data on short-term rentals, which is collected from listing websites like Airbnb and VRBO, Kloninger said.

Some vacation rentals could also be circumventing the listing process and be rented out without being listed on booking sites.

A particular house might have been removed from Airbnb or VRBO, but there could very well be someone renting that house right now and theyre not staying there for a week, theyre staying there for three months or six months, said Kloninger.

Airbnb and VRBO did not respond to SFGATE's requests for comment.
A Native American artist has accused an executive at Montclair State University of verbally abusing her after she outlined her requirements that the college help the Lenape people.

In a letter to the National Endowment for the Arts, Emily Johnson accuses Jedidiah Wheeler, executive director of the universitys Office of Arts and Cultural Programming, of being a violent and oppressive person.

As a result, Johnson says she felt compelled to forfeit a $25,000 grant and sever ties with Montclair State.

Johnson is an indigenous dance choreographer who in 2019 was approached by the universitys Office of Arts and Cultural Programming and invited to discuss a possible collaboration, according to Montclair State officials.

Wheeler wanted to explore the possibility of a two-year residency with Johnson that would give her funding to develop an original work of art and provide the opportunity to work with faculty and students, the college said in a statement on its website.

Johnson says Wheelers tone changed when she outlined her contract requirements  an acknowledgment that the university is built on land once inhabited by the Lenape people; that the college set up a rental fund for the indigenous group; and engage in a process of decolonization.

According to Johnson, Wheelers comments were specifically aimed to demean and make lesser  in the presence of himself, his staff, and my producer  me, my work, my heritage, and my ethics.

The university said in its statement that Wheeler acknowledges that he spoke forcefully and in frustration at one point during a difficult contract negotiation session.

Wheeler tried several times to help Johnson and her manager understand why their requirements could not be met, the university said.

Wheeler did not use inappropriate language, and he never denigrated Ms. Johnson. Nevertheless, he regrets the ill feelings that resulted from the inability to reach agreement, the university said.

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Anthony G. Attrino may be reached at tattrino@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @TonyAttrino. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
Dolly Parton calls for support of indie live music venues

Dolly Parton has called on her fans to support Americas independent live music venues as they try to weather the extended shutdown of the coronavirus pandemic.

As part of the support effort, Parton recorded a video highlighting the importance of independent music venues for both established and rising artists.

In the video, she encouraged her fans to learn more about how they can help struggling venues to survive by going to SaveOurStages.com.

Parton joins a growing list of more than 1,000 who have supported the efforts of groups such as the National Independent Venue Association and NITO in their efforts to secure the future of independent live music. Support measures include writing letters to Congress and encouraging fans to learn more about NIVA Emergency Relief Fund which is raising money for our most vulnerable venues, to keep them afloat while federal aid from the recently passed Shuttered Venue Operator Grants starts to flow.

According to NIVA, the fund has distributed more than $3 million in grants to more than 150 venues and promoters. $11 million more needs to be raised to fulfill all of the requests received.

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-summons security apparatus

The plenary of the Liberian Senate has summoned the Ministry of Justice and the national security apparatus over three males who went missing last years after they were reportedly hired by the proprietor of the St. Moses Funeral Parlous along Somalia Drive.

The plenary of the Liberian Senate has invited the Ministry and the security apparatus to appear next Tuesday, February 16, 2021.

Discussion over the situation which was brought on the Senate floor by Montserrado County Senator Abraham Darius Dillon, has drawn the attention of the Liberian Senate.

In his deliberation, Senator Dillon said it has been about four months since those three boys got missing and there's no account whether they are dead or not.

"Moses was my boss man; I know him very well, I played on his band for funeral, wedding and other events. I have to close my eyes on this to seek the welfare of our Liberian citizens [who] no one knows their whereabouts", he said.

According to Dillon, since the boys went missing, Moses, who is person of interest in the matter walks about freely and moreover,the government still does business with him, carrying bodies of officials at his funeral home, something, he terms as insensitivity.

He noted that people get missing, women and girls get raped on a daily basis and there's no justice given to the families, recalling that families of the three missing boys who went at the funeral home to request for their children, were beaten up, brutalized and driven away by teargas.

Maryland county Senator J. Gleh-bo Brown said these allegations are grave and the matter needs to be handled properly, saying that Senator Dillon should make it as an official communication to plenary in order to enable the committee on National Security, Defense and Intelligence to investigate the matter.

But Senator Nyonblee Karnga Lawrence of Grand Bassa County rejected Senator Brown's input, noting that the issue was placed on the agenda as Any Other Business (AOB) in which senators had an opportunity to make necessary changes from the beginning but they accepted the agenda as official working tool of the Liberian Senate.However, she concurred that the security apparatus must appear before plenary next Tuesday.

The lone female senator added that whilst the security apparatus will appear on Tuesday, Senator Dillon should write an official communication and copies be distributed among all senators before Tuesday so they can abreast themselves of the issue and be prepared to question the authorities that are in charge.

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Family members of the victims now feared dead besieged the funeral parlor last October, demanding that its proprietor, Mr. Moses Ahoussouhe, to produce their living bodies, but according to the police, they are already dead.

Spokesperson of the aggrieved party Lovettee Johnson said their friends and brothers in persons of Robert Blamo, Jr., 29, Siafa and Blama were all motorcycle technicians specialized in heavy duty motor bikes. She narrated the three men were working with Robert Blamo Sr., the father of one of the victims.

According to Lovettee, since Saturday, 15 October 2020 Mr. Ahoussouhe who popularly is called by the name of his funeral home St. Moses, allegedly called the father of the late Blamo, Jr., asking him to allow his son Blamo, Jr. to go to Bomi Hill at the Jungle James Diamond Creek to help fix his motorbike.

But while preparing for service on Sunday morning, Lovettee Johnson narrated further that they were surprised to receive a call, informing them that their children got drowned in the river and since then, their bodies are yet to be found.
President Volodymyr Zelensky has signed a law to address conflicts over the appointment and dismissal of members of the Supervisory Board of the National Public Broadcasting Company of Ukraine (PBC) by parliamentary factions and groups, the presidents press service reports.

"President Volodymyr Zelensky signed the Law On Amendments to Article 8 of the Law of Ukraine On Public Television and Radio Broadcasting of Ukraine to address conflicts in the appointment and dismissal of members of the Supervisory Board of the National Public Broadcasting Company of Ukraine by parliamentary factions and groups, No.1166- , which was approved by the Verkhovna Rada on February 2, 2021, reads the report.

The law stipulates that the term of office of members of the PBC Supervisory Board is five years from the date of official publication of the relevant decision by the National Television and Radio Broadcasting Council of Ukraine.

In case of early termination of powers of a member of the PBC Supervisory Board elected from a parliamentary faction or a group, such faction or group, if not disbanded, decides to delegate a new member of the Supervisory Board for the remaining term until the expiration of the term of the Supervisory Board member.

The law stipulates that deputy factions or groups cannot elect members of the PBC Supervisory Board if there are less than 180 days left before the election of a new composition of the Verkhovna Rada.

iy

Most of Indiana is now yellow for moderate spread of COVID-19, with DeKalb and LaGrange counties improving to that rating and Steuben staying there for a second week. Noble County backslid to orange, although by a narrow margin.
Lottie Ryan has appeared to announce that she is having a baby.

The RTE 2FM star took to social media today to share the news by posting a photo of a babygrow.

The white babygrow has writing on it which reads: I guess quarantine wasnt that boring after all. #comingsoon.

The daughter of the late broadcaster Gerry Ryan captioned the image: Surprise!!!

Her 2FM colleagues Doireann Garrihy, Jenny Greene and Louise McSharry all congratulated her on the exciting news.

Doireann wrote: Lottie The most gorgeous gorgeous news Massive congratulations girl

While Louise commented: Ah congratulations Lottie!

Read More

Internet star James Patrice also congratulated Lottie, writing Congraaaats followed by some love heart emojis.

Lotties sister Bonnie commented: its just the best news of my life xxxx along with crying faces and baby related emojis.

The 35-year-old married her husband Fabio in 2017 with a ceremony in his home country, Italy.

The 2020 Dancing with the Stars winner has previously spoken about how society made her feel pressured to start a family and that she was sick of people asking her when she was going to have a baby.

Speaking two years ago to Jennifer Zamparelli on 2FM, Lottie said she would consider freezing her eggs.

I love the topic of freezing embryos because its something I think I probably want to do myself, she said.

"To be honest with you, Im 33. I dont think I want kids anytime soon. I definitely feel pressure from society about it.

I just started thinking that gene hasnt kicked in for me and I dont know how long its going to take to kick in so I should probably investigate freezing my eggs.

Its really expensive to do but to be honest with you I think its something worth investing in so Im going to look into it.

She added that little comments from people asking when she and her husband were going to start a family got to her.

"I dont know if people mean it but little comments constantly do end up getting into your head and you cant help but start to worry oh God is there something wrong with me that I havent decided this is exactly what I want to do right now.
Only around 8,000 cars were made in a little over four decades of the originals brand existence, but each and every one of them left footprints that last until this day, cementing the Bugatti name in the history books.The carmaker was briefly resurrected in 1987 by an Italian lawyer called Romano Artioli, and that is when Bugatti started its modern age of making hypercars. Fast forward to 2019, the brands 110-year anniversary, and the carmaker now belongs to the Volkswagen Group, which saw fit to celebrate the jubilee by unveiling the Bugatti Centodieci Italian for 110, the Centodieci not only celebrated the anniversary but also harked back to the Bugatti EB110 , the car that restarted the brand in the late 80s and early 90s, before the Volkswagen takeover.Initially just a concept car, the Centodieci is now heading into a limited production run, with only ten units to be manufactured in the next few months.Despite each unit costing a mouth-watering 8 million ($9,7 million), all cars were spoken for in less than half a day, and Bugatti has just started manufacturing the first pre-production prototype ahead of next years delivery.Technically based on the Chiron but with improved performance, the Centodieci uses an entirely new exterior shell that reminds of the EB110 and EB110 Super Sport, both being the epitome of Bugatti performance back in the 1990s.The challenge for us was not to get caught up in the design of the legendary EB 110 itself and avoid focusing solely on a retrospective approach. Our aim was to create a modern interpretation of the shape and technology of that time: but at the same time, we didn't want to lose the charm and character of the EB 110. After all, the super sports car is still fascinating today with its distinctive design and technology, said Achim Anscheidt, Design Director at Bugatti.The quad-turbocharged W16-cylinder engine of the Chiron delivers 1,600 metric horsepower in the Centodieci, which also weighs 20 kilograms (44 lbs) less and features all-new aerodynamics, meaning that engineers had to put a lot of work in the developments of the state-of-the-art model.Making a 400+ kph (248 mph) road car is no easy feat, and the photos showing what goes on underneath the carbon body shell only make us think of space age materials and technology.
A University of Arizona Health Sciences study that is examining COVID-19 immunity and re-infection among frontline workers is expanding to include some Arizona college students while broadening its research focus to include COVID-19 vaccination effectiveness.

"This new vaccine effectiveness aspect of the study will become even more important as COVID-19 variants with increased transmissibility emerge and expand globally," said Jeff Burgess, MD, MPH, MS, principal investigator of the Arizona Healthcare, Emergency Response, and Other Essential Workers Surveillance study, or AZ HEROES, associate dean for research and a professor at the UArizona Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health, and a member of the BIO5 Institute.

Serologic and cellular immune response testing will be performed on pre- and post-vaccination blood samples. Different vaccine exposures, including different vaccine types and adherence to recommended vaccine doses and timing, will be examined. Researchers will investigate whether vaccine efficacy is modified by socio-demographic characteristics, occupation or health status.

They also will examine:

whether vaccines modify illness severity, duration and infectiousness, or viral shedding, among essential workers who come into contact with the virus after they have been vaccinated;

the effectiveness of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines in preventing SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 illness; and,

knowledge, attitudes and practices related to new COVID-19 vaccines among essential workers, and the impact of those factors on subsequent vaccination behaviors, including vaccine refusal, hesitancy or incomplete adherence to vaccination recommendations.

College Students Included

College students can be at higher risk of COVID-19 exposure due to living situations that often include roommates, as well as social activities and work, volunteer or internship obligations. The study hopes to enroll 500-1,000 undergraduate and graduate students from Arizona universities and colleges by June 2021.

The current AZ HEROES study eligibility criteria for college students are as follows:

Previously COVID-19 positive via polymerase chain reaction (PCR), rapid antigen or antibody test

Enrolled as a student at least part-time (at least six units)

Working at least 10 hours per week

Have not yet received the COVID-19 vaccine

The AZ HEROES team invites all eligible college students to sign up for the study on the AZ HEROES website: https:/ / azheroes. arizona. edu/

AZ HEROES was started last year by researchers in the Zuckerman College of Public Health and the UArizona College of Medicine - Tucson thanks to a $7.7 million grant from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The study's initial goals were to evaluate incidence of asymptomatic and symptomatic COVID-19 re-infection among the state's frontline workers (health care personnel, first responders and other essential workers) and to establish patterns of COVID-19 immunity over time in individuals who previously tested positive for COVID-19.

###

In addition to Dr. Burgess, the AZ HEROES research team includes: Bonnie LaFleur, PhD, MPH, a research professor of biostatistics and member of the BIO5 Institute; Janko Nikolich-Zugich, MD, PhD, head of the College of Medicine - Tucson's Department of Immunobiology, co-director of the Center on Aging and member of the BIO5 Institute, Karen Lutrick, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the College of Medicine - Tucson, and Kate Ellingson, PhD, assistant professor, and Joe Gerald, MD, PhD, associate professor, in the Zuckerman College of Public Health.
Regulatory News:

Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. (LN:PSH) (LN:PSHD) (NA:PSH) today released its regular weekly Net Asset Value ("NAV") and performance returns on its website, https://www.pershingsquareholdings.com/company-reports/weekly-navs/. The NAV and returns were computed as of the close of business on Tuesday, 9 February 2021.

PSH NAV per share as of close of business on 9 February 2021 was 47.87 USD 34.65 GBP and year-to-date performance was 5.3%.

Weekly net asset value ("NAV") is calculated as of the close of business on each Tuesday and posted on the following business day. In the event that Tuesday is not a business day, the Company will calculate the close-of-business NAV as of the business day immediately preceding that Tuesday. The end-of-month NAV is calculated as of the close of business on the last day of the month and posted on the following business day. For weeks that include a month-end NAV report, PSH will provide only the month-end NAV and not report the Tuesday NAV. Monthly NAVs are published in accordance with the Decree on Conduct of Business Supervision of Financial Undertakings under the Wft (Besluit Gedragstoezicht financiele ondernemingen Wft).

Performance is presented on a net-of-fees basis and reflects the deduction of, among other expenses: management fees, brokerage commissions, administrative fees and accrued performance fees, if any. The performance figure includes the reinvestment of all dividends, interest and capital gains. Depending on the timing of a specific investment, net performance for an individual investor may vary from the net performance as stated herein. Net performance is a geometrically linked time weighted calculation.

Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results. All investments involve risk including the loss of principal.

About Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd.

Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. (LN:PSH) (LN:PSHD) (NA:PSH) is an investment holding company structured as a closed-ended fund that makes concentrated investments principally in North American domiciled companies.

Category: (PSH:WeeklyNAV)

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210210005960/en/

Contacts:

Media

Camarco

Ed Gascoigne-Pees Hazel Stevenson +44 020 3757 4989, media-pershingsquareholdings@camarco.co.uk
Airlines that fail to present PCR test results of their passengers before disembarkation at the Kotoka International Airport (KIA) will pay a fine of $3,500 per passenger.



Also, non-ECOWAS citizens are required to pay $150 for COVID-19 testing at the KIA, while Ghanaians and ECOWAS citizens are to pay $50 each, effective February 8, 2021.



Information Minister-designate Kojo Oppong Nkrumah, who announced the charges during a COVID-19 Media Updates in Accra on Tuesday, said the new rates formed part of the Enhanced Amendment made on the COVID-19 Safety Guidelines at the country's airport.



The Minister-designate said Ghanaian residents departing the country and return within a week will no longer be required to present COVID-19 report, but would be required to undergo COVID-19 testing upon arrival back in Ghana at their own cost.



He said non-Ghanaian citizens may be refused entry at the country's airport and returned to their point of departure at the cost of the airline if there is no proof of adherence to COVID-19 safety guidelines.



Mr Oppong Nkrumah said all arriving passengers who test positive for COVID-19 would undergo mandatory isolation and treatment at designated health facility at their own cost, except Ghanaian citizens.



He said transit passengers through Ghana would not be required to undergo COVID-19 testing, but would be required to take the COVID-19 Test of the country of destination.



He said passengers arriving in the country under emergency circumstances due to flight diversion would not be required to undergo COVID-19 testing but would not leave the enclave of the airport unless the person is being isolated.



Mr Oppong Nkrumah urged Ghanaians travelling outside to get to the airport four hours before departure for the necessary COVID-19 checks before the scheduled departure time.



He said children under five years would not be required to undergo COVID-19 testing at the country's airport.

Source: GNA









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Location of attacks, striking on or near civilian structures in Tigray

Addis Ababa  Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Affairs Minister Demeke Mekonnen has briefed today resident ambassadors and diplomats of African countries based in Addis Ababa about the current situation in Ethiopia.

The briefing focused on the on-going humanitarian operation in Tigray, negotiations being held on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), preparations for the upcoming general elections, and the Ethio-Sudan border dispute.

During the occasion Demeke said about 26 international humanitarian organizations are working on the ground in Tigray by getting all the necessary access that they need to properly function.

According to him, the government has not been willing to accept questions to access the region without proper notifications, documents, and contrary to the agreement that the Ethiopian government has already consented to.

He said salary has started to be properly being paid to civil servants, financial access through banks is improving and markets in the region are gradually opening up to make life back to normalcy.

Reconstruction, rehabilitation works coupled with the government plan to smooth up the post-conflict normalization process with continuous dialogues with elders, the interim government, and political parties are going well too, he added.

Regarding the Eritrean refugees in Tigray, Demeke said, the government is trying to gather scattered refugees from the already plundered and destroyed Hitsats and Shimelba camps and relocate them to safer camps.

In his briefing about the upcoming election, the Minister recalled the resilience and shock-absorbing capacity of the Ethiopian government and its preparations to have fair, free, and democratic elections withstanding all the critical issues that it is facing today.

Along with Demeke, Minister of Water, Irrigation and Energy of Ethiopia, Seleshi Bekele and Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ethiopia, Ambassador Woineshet Taddesse has also delivered briefings on the current status of the GERD negotiations and the Ethiopia-Sudan Border dispute respectively.

Explaining pivotal issues regarding GERD, Sileshi said the construction of the dam is going on as planned and there is no way that the filling of the dam's reservoir in the coming July could be escaped.

He appreciated the government of South Africa and its leaders for tirelessly trying to bridge the gaps between the negotiating parties.

Sileshi also reiterated the Ethiopian government's unparalleled political will and commitment to give the issue a viable solution by sticking to the principles of equitable and reasonable utilization of the river basin without causing significant harm to downstream countries.

Ambassador Woinshet Tadesse, on her part, stated how the Sudanese army encroached into the Ethiopian borders while Ethiopia was deploying its military force in Tigray for the law enforcement operation.

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She reiterated the Ethiopian government position to solve the Ethiopia-Sudan border dispute amicably through applying existing mechanisms between the two countries.

Woinshet specifically raised the 1972 Exchange of Notes between the two countries that clearly stated the agreement between the two to keep the status quo until an amicable solution is reached to solve the dispute.

The Ambassador called on the Sudanese government to respect the agreement and leave the area that it has forcefully occupied by displacing Ethiopian farmers.

The ambassadors appreciated the Ethiopian government's initiative to brief them on crucial issues of the country which will enable them to understand the matters clearly and better communicate with the leaders of their respective countries.
Assemblies of God Church in Zomba has donated personal protective equipment (PPE) to Zomba General Hospital.

Some of the items donated are buckets, hand sanitisers and hand washing soap worth over K200,000.

Speaking during the donation , Bishop MacDonald Chiudza Banda, head for the Zomba Assemblies of God (ZAG), said they made a donation to support government effort in ensuring that both medical attention seekers and health personnel's at the facility are Covid 19 free.

"We made this donation to ensure that health workers and others who visit the facility for medical attention are in a safe environment, free from Covid 19," he said.

Chiudza said they also noted with concern how health workers are overwhelmed with the pandemic and other diseases that they are still treating at the hospital.

In her remarks , Matron for Zomba Central Hospital Grace Chasweka commended the church for the donation, saying the items will indeed go a long way in meeting some of the challenges the hospital is already facing in as far as Corona virus is concerned.

She added that the items will be useful for both the health workers and patients the hospital is serving.
Residents temporarily evacuated from Homestead after fire, no injuries

A Saturday afternoon fire in an apartment at a senior living complex was quickly extinguished and nobody was injured.
Former Minister of Labour and Social Welfare Petronella Kagonye is expected in court today to answer fraud allegations relating to the illegal sale of State land in Harare and Mashonaland East Provinces.

She was arrested on Sunday in a coordinated operation by the Police Anti-Corruption Unit and the Special Anti-Corruption Unit (SACU).

Kagonye becomes the third former minister to be asked to account for charges relating to land allocations, and the eleventh on corruption-related charges, although four have fled the country.

National police spokesperson Assistant Commissioner Paul Nyathi confirmed that Kagonye's arrest was coordinated by the Police Anti-Corruption Unit and SACU.

"Kagonye was arrested on fraud allegations related to illegal land sales in and around Harare and Mashonaland East provinces," he said.

Sometime in 2015, Kagonye -- through her company Glorious Properties -- was sucked into Goromonzi South land disputes where she was accused of swindling cooperatives, among them Shingiriro Housing Cooperative.
TERRE HAUTE, Ind. (WTHI) - Hoosier schools are operating under different COVID-19 quarantine protocols. They went into effect this week.

The State of Indiana no longer requires quarantine or contact tracing. Thats if students or teachers remain at least three feet apart and are wearing masks at all times.

The state also allows for shorter quarantines for asymptomatic individuals with a negative PCR nasal test. Vigo County School Corporation wants to be very careful with the shorter quarantine option.

The district is still requiring a negative PCR nasal test after the fifth day of quarantine in order to return to school. The district received rapid tests from the state. Those will be used for symptomatic staff to get quicker results, but the rapid tests still wont be the gold standard of allowing students or staff to return to school quicker.

Communications Director Bill Riley says over 90% of cases in the Vigo County School Corporation come from outside of school, so low community spread is the key to eliminating interruptions.

No amount of changes in the quarantine guidelines from a state level will substitute for low community spread, Riley said, We need everyones help to keep that up.

Indiana State Health Commissioner Dr. Kristina Box said that these changes were made to eliminate interruptions in school. Riley anticipates numbers to keep being favorable as the school year continues.
DECORAH, IA - Four Luther College students who call Myanmar home are hosting a virtual panel discussion on Wednesday to share their fears about the current situation in their home country, and their hopes for peace and democracy.

The country has a long history of turmoil and military rule. From 1962 until 2011, successive military regimes ruled the country with an iron first, asserting their power through fear and brutality. In 2011, a new government pushed for civilian rule.

At the beginning of the month, a military junta overturned the results of a democratic election, crying election fraud, and took power.

Curfews are in place and citizens are prohibited from gathering in groups, marching, or making political speeches. After living most of their lives under political turbulence, Myanmar's young people are pushing for peaceful and just rule.

Luther College senior Thawdar Zin tells KIMT he hopes the presentation will help the community see Myanmar as more than a country of political turmoil, and as a country of resilient people. "I dont want my country to fall back into those dark times again and this is a chance to fight against the dictatorship and we can win if there's big support. We are fighting dictatorships all over the world," he says.

The military coup has been blacking out the internet and stopping flights. This makes it more challenging for Myanmar's citizens to speak out, and more difficult for the four Luther students to reach their families.

"I'm very hopeful because a lot of people are informed, but at the same time I'm very worried because if the military started opening fire, there's no way for the public to defend," explains Zin.

Click here to view the event page for the panel discussion.
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A popular Sydney rapper has made a desperate plea to fans to help free his uncle detained in a military coup in Myanmar.

Rapper Blake James Turnell, who performs as ChillinIT, asked his 270,000 Instagram followers to lobby the Australian government to release Dr Sean Turnell.

Professor Turnell, an Australian academic and economic policy adviser, had returned to Myanmar in early January ahead of parliament reopening on February 1.

Rapper ChillinIT (pictured in front of car) has pleaded with his fans on Instagram to help lobby the Australian government to release his uncle from Myanmar

Australian academic and economic policy adviser Professor Turnell (pictured right) had returned to Myanmar in early January as the military overthrew the democratic government

But the military seized power before the opening of parliament, and Professor Turnell was put under house arrest at a hotel in the city of Yangon.

He was later sent for questioning at a police station on Saturday.

In an official statement, the 25-year-old rapper's family described the professor as a 'dedicated family man'.

'Sean has read voraciously since his youth and has always shown a thirst for knowledge.'

The 25-year-old rapper (pictured) described his uncle as a 'dedicated family man' in a joint family statement on Instagram

'He is a practical economist who has and will always use his expertise and experience for a good cause', the statement read.

The statement also called for the 'generous and kind-hearted' professor's immediate release.

The Turnell family are currently working with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trading to 'finally bring Sean home'.

'The Australian embassy in Yangon has provided strong support to Sean in very challenging circumstances'.

Despite the circumstances, the family said Mr Turnell had 'fallen in love with' Mynamar.

Professor Turnell (pictured, left, with Burmese politician Aung San Suu Kyi) was put under house arrest at a Yangon hotel and was later sent for questioning at a police station

Protests continue in Mandalay, Myanmar as the country's new military rulers ban public gatherings of more than five people (pictured)

'He brought jobs, investment and hope to many of the poorest people there without thought or reward or concern for his own advantage.'

Foreign affairs minister Marise Payne, has described the political unrest in Mynamar as 'deeply disturbing'.

'We called in the Myanmar ambassador into the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to raise our concerns in relation to this, and we will continue to do that and press strongly for Professor Turnell's release,' she said.

The Myanmar military overthrew the country's democratically elected government last Monday, causing mass political unrest across the country.
Is there an ordinance in Norwegian Township about barking dogs almost 24/7? If there isnt, I think there should be. Its disturbing the peace, I think.

Pottsville



To the caller from Schuylkill Haven who said Donald Trump was the best president we ever had, you must be thinking of a different Donald Trump than I am thinking of. The Donald Trump that I view as president was a bigot, a racist, degraded women, completely ignored a global pandemic, never followed regulations, never wore a mask, held gigantic campaign rallies with hundreds of maskless people, called it a hoax after 400,000 people have died and incited people to destroy the Capitol building. Thats the Donald Trump I know.

Pottsville



Kate Potter, excellent article. The President of the United States summoned the mob, assembled the mob and lit the flame of this attack. Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney, you forgot to add Dan Meuser to who should resign. Hes an embarrassment to Schuylkill County.

Pottsville



How about our leader in Harrisburg, Wolf? He blames the feds for the short supply of vaccines. He got his. I dont think he is worried about anybody else. I guess he is playing the role because the Democrats are in there. He aint no better than the rest of them.

Minersville



The insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 was an absolute atrocity. The more we see videos of the violence, it becomes more horrendous every time. The level of violence there was unthinkable. We have to do something to stop these hate mongers, white supremacists, Holocaust deniers, just hateful, horrible people from ever, ever doing this again. We have to stop Trump from ever holding office anywhere again. These people believe nothing but lies and they believe all Trumps lies. Thats what got us that horrible day that will live in infamy.

Girardville



Hey, Pottsville, you just got done watching CNN, MSNBC with the memorial but nothing on Fox. Where was CNN and MSNBC over the summer when we had the Antifa and Black Lives Matter all the looting and burning and shooting? Nothing on there. Not even your friend Don Lemon had it on. Fake news.

Pottsville



With all the uncertainty in the world and in our country, there is one thing for sure: If you pray, all your needs will be met. Not your wants, your needs.

Frackville



Black Lives Matter nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize? You have got to be kidding me. They go down the street yelling, What do we want? Dead cops. When do we want it? Now. They burn buildings down, they smash and loot properties and they are nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. What in Gods name is going on in this world? Next thing you know they will be giving one to Joe Biden.

Frackville



It is very reassuring to get a president with a proud record of support for law and order and not incite riots and one who will accept good advice from our professional Navy, Army and Air Force leaders. What a contrast.

Minersville



As a Democrat, I want to know who is writing these executive orders for President Biden. I am changing my political position to Republican and so is my family. What he is trying to do will bring this country down. I am a staunch Democrat and we are all changing to Republican. God bless America.

McAdoo



I see in the paper today that Kohls pulled MyPillows made by Mike Lindell just because he supported Donald Trump. Are these head CEOs acting like 2-year-olds? You can support who you want. I think we still have freedom in this country. I wont be shopping at Kohls and neither will my friends and family because we are all disgusted with it.

Schuylkill Haven



Ship all those Trump fans over to North Korea and then they will know what democracy is. Shame.

Pine Grove

SACRAMENTO  President Biden has tapped Julie Su, head of Californias Labor and Workforce Development Agency, to serve as his deputy labor secretary, a potentially critical role as his administration confronts widespread job losses and unsafe working conditions fueled by the coronavirus pandemic.

If confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Su would help oversee a department that regulates workplace safety, wage and hour standards, unemployment insurance benefits, workers compensation and job training.

In a statement Wednesday, the White House said Su would be a partner to the president in building a stronger, more resilient and more inclusive economy that delivers every American a fair return for their work and an equal chance to get ahead.

But Sus nomination could face obstacles because of problems at Californias Employment Development Department, which has struggled to keep up with demand for unemployment benefits and crack down on fraud over the past year.

Some Republican officials and business groups have raised vocal objections to Su, who was floated last fall as a contender for labor secretary. They cited the unfolding scandal at EDD, a department in the Labor and Workforce Development Agency.

Officials now estimate that more than a quarter of all unemployment payments during the pandemic could be fraudulent, even as hundreds of thousands of Californians continue to struggle to access benefits.

The California Business and Industrial Alliance, a trade group formed to fight a state law that allows workers to sue their employers over labor code violations, recently ran a full-page ad in USA Today asking, Would You Hire Julie Su?

If Su plans to export Californias broken bureaucracy to other places in the country, the outcome could be disastrous for employers and workers alike, Tom Manzo, president and founder of the group, said in a statement.

Su, 51, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, gained a national reputation as an advocate for low-income and immigrant workers. After graduating from Stanford University and Harvard Law School, she rescued dozens of Thai garment workers from a Los Angeles County sweatshop in 1995. Her work on that case, which set legal precedent expanding employer responsibility in the fashion industry and won the undocumented workers legal immigrant status, earned her a MacArthur Fellowship grant in 2001.

Su later became litigation director for the civil rights organization Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Los Angeles, before then-Gov. Jerry Brown appointed her California labor commissioner in 2011. Gov. Gavin Newsom named Su his labor secretary in 2019.

Over the past decade, she ramped up enforcement of Californias labor laws and launched a state campaign against wage theft. Her labor commissioner filed wage theft lawsuits against Uber and Lyft last year, arguing they misclassified their drivers.

In a statement, Newsom called Su a tireless fighter for working Americans and a voice for the voiceless who embodies the spirit of California.

Labor unions and Asian American groups have been among the strongest advocates for Su to join the Biden administration, which does not have an Asian American Cabinet-level secretary. Vice President Kamala Harris mother was Indian.

The Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus urged Biden last fall to choose Su as labor secretary and continued to speak out on her behalf after the president instead chose Boston Mayor Marty Walsh for the role.

As both a woman of color and the daughter of immigrants, Secretary Su would bring a diversity of thought and experience to the Cabinet, the caucus said in a December statement. President-elect Biden promised to build an inclusive government that reflects the full diversity of our nation and that must include Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.

Alexei Koseff is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: alexei.koseff@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @akoseff
First Nation traditional healers and knowledge keepers, as well as health workers, have the opportunity this week to receive their coronavirus vaccines at a Winnipeg pop-up clinic set up for them.

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First Nation traditional healers and knowledge keepers, as well as health workers, have the opportunity this week to receive their coronavirus vaccines at a Winnipeg pop-up clinic set up for them.

That news came Tuesday afternoon, after one day of the clinics operation, when two knowledge keepers shared their experiences of being vaccinated.

David Blacksmith is a knowledge keeper from Pimicikamak Cree Nation, also known as Cross Lake Cree Nation.

"Six months ago, I had a dream of the vaccine, and I take my dreams very seriously. The chiefs were there. And, in my dream, this old man come to me and he said there would be four vaccines by summer," said Blacksmith.

"I wasnt sure if I trusted the vaccine. But after that, Ive been promoting it. Ive been telling traditional people that they have to get vaccinated because of my dream. And as a spiritual worker, that is important."

Blacksmith had his first dose of vaccine Monday. The pop-up clinic will provide a second dose in a few weeks. Though afraid of needles, he went ahead. He said he experienced no side-effects, but did have a bit of a sore arm Monday night.

"I looked at the needle, I almost fainted," he said.

"This morning, I thought, I think they saved my life from COVID. And, thats the bottom line. All traditional, all Aboriginal people need to get vaccinated. It is your responsibility to make sure that they do. That is your responsibility, to save our people. I had a dream about it."

As Dr. Barry Lavallee, chief executive officer with Keewatinohk Inniniw Minoayawin, explained later during the news conference, an understanding of the historical nature of medical interventions with First Nations is important.

"The history between health-care systems and First Nations has always not been positive. We still have elders and older people who were imprisoned in residential schools, under orders of this state government," said Lavallee.

"As well, there were experimentations up until the 50s, and I had patients who were actually experimented on while they were starving in residential schools. So, the background, one would imagine in our communities, is not to trust."

For the Tuesday afternoon news conference, Blacksmith and Lavallee were part of a panel that included Grand Chief Arlen Dumas of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, Grand Chief Jerry Daniels of the Southern Chiefs Organization, Dr. Marcia Anderson, who is the public health lead for Manitoba First Nations COVID-19 Pandemic Response Co-ordination Team, and Dr. Joss Reimer, the medical lead for the provinces vaccination task force.

Together, they sought to assure First Nation citizens that the vaccine is safe. Especially, they sought to ensure valued members of their communities can be protected from the coronavirus.

Dumas said if it werent for the work of First Nations leaders, doctors and healers  who are front-line workers  the vaccination program for First Nations, as planned by First Nations, wouldnt be taking place.

"This is a celebratory announcement, and it comes from a very positive place. Thats why were doing it. It wasnt because of hesitancy or any of those things. Its because we feel our traditional healers, all these people who are here today, are worthy and are very much a part of our front-line force to address the pandemic," he said.

Parry Francois, a knowledge keeper, traditional healer and cultural adviser with the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, also had his first dose of vaccine Monday.

"I remember years ago, my teacher told me, you know, my boy, things change. We need to change. At times you may not agree what were given. But we have to learn. We have to give people chances. We have to open our arms ..." said Francois.

"Hard times are coming, he says, so we need to work together. To bring that medicine back. We have to help our people, even the ones that dont understand. So thats one of the reasons why I took that vaccine  because of the words that I remember my teacher taught me. To remember my grandchildren and children  Im doing it for them."

He said he was thankful for the vaccine, and he wasnt afraid of getting the shot despite all the different opinions and confusion about it.

Meanwhile, just as with other First Nations in the province, First Nations in the southwestern region of Manitoba have received Moderna doses to vaccinate their front-line health workers and elders over the age of 70.

The pop-up site in Winnipeg is primarily intended for First Nation health-care workers, traditional healers and knowledge keepers living off-reserve who were not already eligible with the first round of doses sent directly to First Nations. But many First Nations from the Westman area did present some people for an appointment at the pop-up site.

Behind the scenes, work continues via established networks to ensure all who are eligible are added to the list for this first round of roughly 900 vaccine doses.

"The survival of our communities relies upon the health and wellness of our precious traditional healers and knowledge keepers," said Daniels.

"That is why the opening of this First Nation vaccination site is so essential for our people. I want to thank the First Nation health experts and front-line workers who have put in many hours of tireless work to make this site a reality. The best defence against COVID-19 that we have right now is the vaccine. I encourage everyone to get vaccinated as soon as they are eligible."

 mletourneau@brandonsun.com

 Michele LeTourneau covers Indigenous matters for The Brandon Sun under the Local Journalism Initiative, a federally funded program that supports the creation of original civic journalism.

Detroit Public Schools Community District (DPSCD) superintendent Nikolai Vitti and the Detroit School Board took a major step toward restarting in-person education, announcing plans last week to reopen Learning Centers February 24. In an email to staff, and a robocall to families, Vitti announced that Detroit Public Schools will reopen Learning Centers at all schools throughout the district on that date. Learning Centers provide supervision on site by school staff.

The reopening of Learning Centers is a wedge designed to get schools opened and teachers back into the buildings.

Michigan Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer, in line with the demands of the Biden administration, has pledged to get all schools in the state operating with a face-to-face option by March. Statewide, more schools now have some form of in-person learning since the New Year holiday and Governor Whitmer has already allowed the resumption of indoor contact sports.

Support workers, who make up a large portion of the total Detroit school staff, were told to report back to work on February 22 following the mid-winter break. This includes principals, assistant principals, deans, clerical staff, para-educators, school service assistants, noon hour aides and others. The announcement of the reopening came the same day that in-person dining at Michigan restaurants resumed after more than two months.

Detroit teachers in 2016 protest over school conditions

Last fall teachers in Detroit voted 91 percent not to resume in-person instruction. The Detroit Federation of Teachers (DFT) then assisted DPSCD in pushing some teachers back into the buildings with a promise of a $750 per quarter bonus. The small number of teachers who agreed to go back manned the Learning Centers and schools for the small fraction of students whose parents opted for in-person instruction.

Teachers who worked online elected to increase their workload rather than risk infection or death. Those teaching online have student loads that can be as large as 80 students, compared to teachers doing in-person instruction who have as few as 11 students.

Nevertheless, as cases skyrocketed, all DPSCD classes had to be moved back to online instruction in mid-November. The same happened in other districts across Michigan that had opened either for all in person instruction or sought to lower classroom density by offering a hybrid form of education.

The DPSCD website alleges its policies are motivated by sympathy for families. It states, The reopening of Learning Centers will provide direct support to DPSCD families who need schools to be open in some capacity so their children can benefit from supervised in person support.

In reality, a major driving force behind the school reopenings are the demands of the auto companies, which complained as early as October of a 10-15 percent absentee rate due to COVID-related illnesses and parents staying home to care for children.

According to thedetroitbureau.com, which bills itself as the Voice of the Automotive World, the automakers are sounding alarms about the worker shortage. They wrote in late December that after the resumption of auto production in May the tempo of production was slowed by absenteeism and parts shortages created by the pandemic.

The labor shortage has been exacerbated by the fact that many workers are opting to retire rather than work in unsafe auto plants. Meanwhile, temporary workers have been harder to find. As a result, auto companies have been lobbying to have their employees designated essential workers.

Bowing to the demands of the Biden administration and big business, the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is pushing for teachers to return to classrooms. Just a few days ago Bidens new CDC director, Rochelle Walensky, insisted teachers return even if they cannot get vaccinated.

At a February 2 meeting of the Detroit school board, the widespread technological problems with the poorly made and cheap computer tablet devices donated by the Skillman Foundation and DTE were exposed. Those families who could afford it purchased other devices, while many students simply use their mobile phones. This is despite the districts promotion of Technology Hubs.

Speaking at the board meeting, Lakia Wilson, Executive Vice President of the DFT said absolutely nothing about the ongoing pandemic or the districts plans for reopening in-person instruction in March. Instead, she merely made a proposal to suspend teacher evaluations for the year.

James, a lifelong Detroit resident and leading member of the International Youth and Students for Social Equality, spoke at the school board meeting about the districts plans to force teachers back into schools: There is no such thing as a safe return as the pandemic reaches a new more deadly phase. Chicago teachers are leading the fight and we need to unite educators and all workers across the country to prepare a general strike to close schools and nonessential production and fully compensate workers. This is a fight against Biden and the Democratic Party, which like Trump, want children back in schools, not to address their needs, but to get their parents back to work making corporate profits.

The DFT and American Federation of Teachers (AFT), which are aligned with Biden and the Democrats, claim that a compromise can be reached that will protect teachers while meeting the demands for an early reopening of schools. However, this is impossible under conditions of the unchecked spread of the virus.

Contrary to the false claim that children are not susceptible to COVID-19, many children have been crippled or have even lost their lives from the virus in Michigan. For example, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, an asymptomatic carrier of COVID-19, 10-year-old Daeshun Jamison, was hospitalized for over a month after developing MIS-C, a severe disease primarily seen in children, that develops after a COVID-19 infection. He had his right leg amputated due to the complications. Due to the states back-to-school and back-to-work policies 1,400 children in Michigans Upper Peninsula contracted the virus.

According to data released Monday, February 8 by the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) 116 students and staff were infected in new coronavirus school outbreaks at 29 locations among the states pre-K-12 schools. By definition, the outbreaks are related to school attendance.

Although MDHHS releases this information, they have not, to date, released the numbers of children who have died in Michigan from the coronavirus. The Detroit Free Press reported that MDHHS acknowledged five COVID-19-related deaths last October, but would not release anything further. Those five include a two-month-old baby and a five-year-old kindergarten student from Detroit, Skylar Herbert, whose parents were first responders in the city.

Across the US, there has been a growth in the rate of pediatric hospitalizations in recent months. According to a study published in JAMA Pediatrics, hospitalization rates among children in 22 states rose from 2 per 100,000 to 17.2 per 100,000, or almost nine times, between May 15 and November 15, 2020.

As some schools in the state reopened after the New Year holiday, the number of outbreaks and the resulting persons infected are approaching the peak seen in schools at the height of the infections and death rates in the wave that swept the state in November. More than 100 school locations and just over 600 cases among staff and students were reported connected to new and ongoing outbreaks at pre-K to 12th grade school locations by state officials on February 8. These rates compare to cases found in schools in early November, as a fall wave peaked with exploding numbers of cases and deaths in the general population.

To reiterate, there is no such thing as a safe return under conditions where the pandemic is entering a new, more deadly phase with the emergence of more virulent strains and the disorganized and inept distribution of vaccines.

The DFT and AFT, which are aligned with Biden and the Democrats, claim a compromise can be reached to protect everyones interests. There is nothing to negotiate; the teachers are standing up for all workers and their families. The Democrats, unions and corporations want schools open regardless of the human toll. The struggle must be taken out of the hands of unions. We urge teachers to join the Michigan Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee to unite workers to stop this reckless policy. Join us at wsws.org/edsafety.
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An online map of surveillance cameras in New York City is in the works.

The map project is part of a larger campaign called "Ban the Scan," sponsored by Amnesty International, which is partnering on the initiative with several other tech advocacy, privacy, and civil liberties groups.

"We need a map so citizens can have a sense where they are being observed by the NYPD as they go about their everyday lives," explained Michael Kleinman, director of Amnesty USA's Silicon Valley Initiative.

"It also gives the citizens of New York, and more broadly people who are concerned about the issue of facial recognition, a sense of just how pervasive this kind of surveillance is," he told TechNewsWorld.

Data for the map will be "crowdsourced" by volunteers. This spring the volunteers will be able to roam the streets of Gotham and identify surveillance cameras using a software tool that runs in a Web browser. Data gathered by the tool is integrated with Google Street View and Google Earth to create the map.

"To surveil the population as a whole, you don't need a special facial recognition camera," Kleinman explained. "As long as law enforcement has the imagery from that camera, they can conduct facial recognition at the back end."

"That's why we say that in any city you can think of, facial recognition is just one software upgrade away," he continued.

"It's not an issue of I'm going to reroute my daily commute away from facial recognition cameras," he added. "We can push the New York City Council to ban police use of this technology."

Measures banning or restricting the use of facial recognition have already been adopted in Boston, San Francisco and Portland, Ore.

Game Changing Technology

Yuanyuan Feng, a researcher at the Institute for Software Research at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh explained that there's a transparency problem with the way the technology is used now.

"There's no transparency about the retention time of the data, what it's being used for, and what are the sharing practices," she told TechNewsWorld.

Most police departments are secretive about this, not only to the public, but to individuals that are arrested, added Jake Laperruque, senior counsel for the Project on Government Oversight, a government watchdog group in Washington, D.C.

"Most departments take the position that if it isn't introduced as evidence in a court case, they don't have to talk about it at all," he told TechNewsWorld.

That stance seems to belie the significance of the technology to law enforcement.

"This isn't just the latest model of car or walkie talkie," Laperruque said. "This is game-changing technology for how policing works."

Politicized Technology

Karen Gullo, an analyst with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based online rights advocacy group, explained that facial recognition is one of the most pervasive and intrusive of all surveillance technologies.

"It's being utilized by law enforcement and government entities with little to no oversight and limitations," she told TechNewsWorld.

"Face surveillance is becoming an all-encompassing tool for government to track where we are, what we are doing, and who we are with, regardless of whether we're suspected of a crime or not," she continued.

"Programs that provide the public with information about how and where surveillance tools are being used to spy on people...are an important check on law enforcement and give citizens knowledge to demand accountability and public input," she added.

Facial recognition has become a politicized technology, argued George Brostoff, CEO of Sensible Vision, a face authentication company in Cape Coral, Fla.

"When something becomes politicized, everything becomes black and white," he told TechNewsWorld. "There are few things in this world that are black and white."

"People don't want to be tracked," he said. "That's what should be discussed, not just facial recognition. What does the government know about me? How does the government use my information, including my face? Those are things that should be discussed in general."

Racial Bias

One of the chief criticisms of facial recognition systems is not only are they inaccurate, but biased.

Gullo noted that there are studies and research that show facial recognition is prone to errors, especially for Black Americans.

A 2012 study co-authored by the FBI, for example, showed that accuracy rates for African Americans were lower than for other demographics.

In fact, Gullo continued, the FBI admitted in its privacy impact assessment that its system "may not be sufficiently reliable to accurately locate other photos of the same identity, resulting in an increased percentage of misidentifications."

In another study by MIT, she added, there were error rates of 34 percent for dark women compared to light-skinned men in commercially available facial recognition systems.

Gender Shades study: How well do IBM, Microsoft, and Face++ AI services guess the gender of a face?

"This means that face recognition has an unfair discriminatory impact," Gullo said.

She added that cameras are also over-deployed in neighborhoods with immigrants and people of color, and new spying technologies like face surveillance amplify existing disparities in the criminal justice system.

Hampering Law Enforcement?

Since those studies were performed, facial recognition technology has improved, Brostoff countered, but added that even better technology can be misused. "The question is not is facial recognition biased, it's is the implementation biased?" he asked.

He added that not all facial recognition algorithms are biased. "The ones tested had an issue," he said.

"Even in those tested," he continued, "not all of them had inaccuracies solely due to a bias. They were also due to their settings. The percentage for a match was set too low. If a match is set too low, the software will identify multiple people as potentially the same person."

"Some of it was the quality of images in the database," he added. "If an algorithm doesn't have a filter to say this image is too poor to be accurate, then a bad match will result. Now, 3D cameras can be used to generate depth information on a face to produce more detail and better accuracy."

When facial recognition bans are proposed, law enforcement's response is that removing the technology from its toolbox will hamper their efforts to keep the public safe. Critics of the technology disagree.

"They can use other tools to track down criminal suspects," observed Mutale Nkonde, CEO of AI For the People, a nonprofit communications agency and part of Ban the Scan Coalition.

"For example, during the riot at the Capitol, the FBI used cell phone data to find out who was there and to create a no fly list," she told TechNewsWorld.

"The idea that by not using facial recognition, law enforcement will not be able to do their job requires quite a leap of faith when you consider all the power and all the resources law enforcement already has," Kleinman added.

"Our concern should not be that law enforcement has too little power," he continued. "Our concern should be what does the expansion of the power of law enforcement mean to all of us?"

"The argument that if we can't do X, then we will be crippled is an argument that can be used to justify an endless expansion of law enforcement power to surveil us," he added.

John P. Mello Jr. has been an ECT News Network reporter since 2003. His areas of focus include cybersecurity, IT issues, privacy, e-commerce, social media, artificial intelligence, big data and consumer electronics. He has written and edited for numerous publications, including the Boston Business Journal, the Boston Phoenix, Megapixel.Net and Government Security News. Email John.



(CNN)  Just over a month ago, I packed my life in Hong Kong into two suitcases and moved 16,000 kilometers to Barbados.

I'd never even been to the island before or traveled anywhere else in the Caribbean region for that matter.

Barbados is so far away from Hong Kong -- the shortest travel time is 24 hours -- that I wasn't sure I'd ever get the chance to visit.

But the popular destination, which resumed accepting international travel on July 12 last year, released a special visa called the Welcome Stamp in the same month. It offered the chance for people to work there remotely for a year. I thought, "Why not?"

As countries around the world continued to impose lockdowns and travel restrictions in a bid to contain Covid-19 in mid-2020, Barbados -- and many other nations in the Caribbean -- seemed to have the virus under control and was reopening to the world.

What Barbados requires to work there

Open to all remote workers who earn at least $50,000 annually, the visa scheme has a fee of $2,000 for individuals or $3,000 for families, which is payable after applications have been approved.

Applicants are required to fill out an online form, submit an income declaration and details of the work they'll be conducting during their time on the island

Those who are accepted continue to pay tax in their home country and are not liable for income tax in Barbados.

"Covid-19 has changed the global business landscape as a larger number of people continue to work from home," Barbados Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley said when the scheme was launched.

"With this new visa, we can provide workers with an opportunity to spend the next 12 months working remotely from paradise, here in Barbados."

Welcome Stamp was just the ticket

The scheme would also help to drive Barbados' economy, which relies heavily on tourism and has been hit hard by the effects of the pandemic.

In Hong Kong, reality was looking grim for me when I first learned of the scheme. As a freelance journalist specializing in lifestyle topics, I'd lost most of my work in 2020.

The pandemic had compounded the city's politically volatile situation. It felt like my hometown was becoming a shell of its former self.

Still, I wasn't ready to cut ties with Hong Kong entirely. I just wanted to go somewhere else for a while. Barbados' Welcome Stamp was just the ticket, and it also offered the opportunity to expand my scope of work.

After learning that my application had been approved within a few days and taking some time to think it through, I completed payment in October and prepared to move in November.

Relocating during COVID-19: First, pick a route

Planning an itinerary that involves three days of voyage, at a time when international travel is highly disrupted, was a challenge.

There is no direct flight from Hong Kong to Bridgetown, the capital of Barbados.

Traveling, of course, isn't the most responsible thing to be doing at this time. But as I'd be staying in Barbados for an extended period, I was willing to take the risk.

Because I am a dual British-Canadian citizen, I thought my safest bet was to do my layover in either of those countries.

That would eliminate any chance of being turned away in a layover country where I am not a citizen should border rules suddenly change.

A London layover was a no-brainer. At the time, Hong Kong was on the UK's list of travel corridors, meaning I wouldn't have to quarantine on arrival. Passenger arrival forms are required for both London and Bridgetown.

I booked to fly from Hong Kong to London, with a one-night layover, and then a morning flight the next day to Bridgetown.

Next, find a COVID-19 test site

Barbados requires passengers to present negative Covid-19 PCR test results taken three days before arrival, and only those taken by nasopharyngeal or oropharyngeal samples, rather than nasal swabs or deep throat saliva samples.

Self-administered at-home tests are also not accepted. My family doctor also warned me about Covid-19 clinics that were not accredited.

It took me some time before I was able to find a clinic that satisfied all my requirements, which needed to present results with a pretty quick turnaround considering the time between testing and arriving in Barbados.

On November 28, I set off for the airport in Hong Kong for my big move.

Unfortunately, while checking in for my Virgin Atlantic flight, I was told the London to Bridgetown leg of the journey had been canceled weeks ago -- I'd received no prior notification on this. There would be no flight for another two weeks.

So I ended up unexpectedly remaining in Hong Kong for a fortnight. Paranoid about the rising number of cases in Hong Kong and conscious of the fact that I had to take another Covid-19 test before my new travel date, I spent most of the two weeks -- including my 30th birthday in early December -- at home.

Finally, on December 12, I got on the plane to London for the first leg of my journey.

Arriving and quarantining

London was in lockdown at the time. I had over 24 hours there, and I spent all of it in my room at an airport hotel.

The next day, I was surprised by how busy Heathrow Airport's departure area was -- a stark contrast to the ghost town that Hong Kong International Airport had become.

I'd been traveling for so long by this point that the nine-hour journey to Barbados felt like an eternity. But I felt my fatigue instantly fade away when greeted with the sight of the deep blue Caribbean sea as we circled above Grantley Adams International Airport.

I soon found myself basking in the sun as we were asked to form lines to present our test results to staff.

Clearing immigration was much quicker than I thought -- and people seemed genuinely excited to see another Welcome Stamper arrive.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the lines for interviews with health officers took the longest. I was given paperwork that explained I was to take my temperature and submit them to the authorities via WhatsApp twice a day for seven days.

In addition, I would need to undergo a mandatory test four to five days after the date I'd taken a test in my home country. After that, I'd be free to roam around Barbados.

At my hotel in Holetown on the west coast -- one of the government's designated quarantine accommodations -- I was pleasantly surprised to find that I was allowed to go out on the room's patio area during quarantine.

The next day, the front desk helped me to arrange to take the test at a government clinic. Travelers also have the option to take it done in your room by a doctor or nurse, but at cost. Getting it done at a government clinic is free, though you'll need to pay for a taxi to and back.

The taxi journey was an exciting chance to soak in the sights of Barbados before I could venture out.

Next to an array of colorful bungalow-style homes, I spotted a sign, issued by the local health authorities, in Bajan creole urging residents to stay home and "protect yuh family."

At the time, visitors were told to expect their results within 24 to 48 hours. I'd taken my test at noon Tuesday and received my negative results in the early evening on Thursday.

Three or so days in quarantine seemed relatively minor when compared with the 14-day standard countries such as Canada adopted.

Working from paradise

With quarantine behind me, it was time to explore my new home. I moved out of my hotel and into an AirBnb in Hastings on the south coast while looking for a place to live.

Adjusting to my new working hours was not as challenging as I thought it would be. I had already anticipated that changes would be necessary after moving to the other side of the world. Barbados is exactly 12 hours behind Hong Kong.

Since most of my work is based in Asia, I work during the evenings -- Asia's morning. Working into the early hours is done when necessary.

That also means I typically take Fridays off -- when I wake up, it's already the beginning of the weekend in Hong Kong. But on the flip side, I also work Sunday late afternoons and evenings, which is Monday morning in Hong Kong.

The beauty in working remotely, and as a freelancer, is that I have tons of flexibility.

Curfew imposed

Around the time I arrived in Barbados, reports of misbehaving tourists who were breaking quarantine rules began to emerge. The country had had single-digit new numbers for months -- but it had seemed like a series of quarantine breaches meant a community spread could be imminent.

On January 2, following the discovery of a cluster of new cases, the government imposed a curfew between 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. The following day, there were 161 new cases -- a major increase from zero cases the day before.

The curfew continued through the month, while case numbers continued to fluctuate. Travel rules changed -- now visitors can expect to remain longer in quarantine compared with what I experienced back in December.

I've still been able to visit the beautiful beaches for which Barbados is famous -- many of them are pretty empty, providing ample space for social distancing -- though I noticed that many businesses had chosen to limit their services or operating hours, even without official guidance to do so.

St. Lawrence Gap, an area on the south coast famous for its dining and nightlife, was empty.

On January 27, the government announced a shutdown period from February 3 to 17. Most businesses are set to be closed, with only supermarkets and gas stations operating in limited hours. The curfew is also being extended to 7 p.m. to 6 a.m.

Being in lockdown while in paradise is probably not anyone's idea of fun, but I keep reminding myself that I'll have the rest of the year to explore this beautiful island.

For now, we'll just have to prepare to enter what Mottley has described as "a period of national pause."

This story was first published on CNN.com, "I moved from Hong Kong to Barbados during the pandemic."
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The police in Lagos State have arrested 58 suspects in its effort to restore normalcy to the Agarawu, Ita Faaji, Igbosere and other areas on the Lagos Island.

The Commissioner of Police, Lagos State, Hakeem Odumosu, said this in a statement signed on Tuesday by the commands Public Relations Officer, Olumuyiwa Adejobi.

Mr Odumosu said the suspects comprised four elderly persons, five females and 39 males.

He said Lagos Island had been under the siege of miscreants and gangsters which led the command to dispatch a team comprising the police and other security outfits to put a stop to it.

The team comprises of Rapid Response Squad (RRS), Taskforce, Police Mobile Force and the Lagos State Neighborhood Safety Corps under the command of ACP Bode Ojajuni, the Area Commander, Area A and Lion Building.

They went after the bad boys in the areas which eventually led to the arrest of 58 suspects on Monday.

The miscreants and gangsters in the areas have severally attacked and damaged peoples properties while some have allegedly lost their lives to their various criminal activities, the police boss said.

Mr Odumosu said he had directed that the suspects be transferred to the State Criminal Investigation Department, Panti, Yaba, for proper investigation and prosecution.

He also assured that the command will not rest on its oars in making sure that Lagos Island and the state generally are rid of gangsterism, hooliganism and crimes.

(NAN)
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(TNS)  If it wasn't obvious before, the coronavirus pandemic makes clear the need for an open internet with broadband access for all Americans.Thetook a major step in that direction Monday when it dropped its legal challenge to2018 model net neutrality law. The action, under the new Biden administration, mirrors the DOJ'sdecision to end the court fight to blockauthority to set its own auto emission standards. On both issues,is once again a policy leader.The dropping of the fuel-standards challenge came as the legacy auto industry signaled it would get serious about fighting climate change. But don't hold your breath waiting for the broadband industry to see the light on control of the internet., Comcast, Verizon, T-Mobile and other major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) aren't backing away from their goal of raking in billions by charging web sites more for priority access to the internet. The providers are hopingwill regain thein 2024 and once again roll back net neutrality provisions.Network neutrality is the principle that all internet traffic should be treated equally. Tech pioneers includingandhave long advocated that internet service providers shouldn't be able to pick winners and losers online, creating an internet that resembles the cable TV industry. Consumer advocates argue that providers should be required to offer equal access to all sites and applications at the same speed.Formerchair,, a former Verizon lawyer, gave ISPs the ability to slow down or even block traffic from web sites. That sparkedto pass state Sen.SB 822, the legislation that gave the state the strongest net neutrality protections in the nation.The law would protect consumers and ensure that small businesses and startups would be able to compete with tech's biggest companies. Thelawsuit during the Trump administration had blocked the bill from being enforced for the past two years.Pai stepped down from theon, leaving the five-member commission deadlocked with twoand twocontrol of theshould enable Biden to appoint a newcommissioner who will defend net neutrality principles.Biden chose Democratic Commissioneras the interimchair. She has pledged to fight for net neutrality and close the "homework gap" by extending broadband access to every child inlaw professorcoined the term net neutrality in 2003, when the debate blossomed over whether ISPs could block some internet sites. Two years later, theadopted its first net neutrality principles, working "to preserve and promote the vibrant and open character of the internet as the telecommunications marketplace enters the broadband age." But Pai rolled back all previous efforts to protect net neutrality.should act to strengthen net neutrality and end the policy swings from one presidential administration to the next. But that isn't likely as long aslack enough votes to block afilibuster and the broadband industry, which has spent more than $1 billion lobbying members ofin the last 10 years, remains a potent political force.So that leaves it up to theand, thanks to theaction Monday, states such asto protect consumers and small businesses from being controlled by a small group of broadband companies that put profits before the needs of internet users.


Bradley Cooper emerged from lockdown on Wednesday to enjoy a stroll with his three-year-old daughter Lea De Seine.

The 46-year-old wore a red and black flannel shirt over a T-shirt with Breton stripes, accessorizing with a brown beanie but going without a coat.

He could be seen sweetly holding both his daughter's hands as they carefully walked over one of the mounds of snow lining the sidewalk.

Baby mine: Bradley Cooper emerged from lockdown on Wednesday to enjoy a stroll with his three-year-old daughter Lea De Seine

Bradley was seen in Manhattan just two days prior cradling his three-year-old daughter Lea De Seine whom he shares with his ex-girlfriend Irina Shayk.

Irina and Bradley were on friendly co-parenting terms and were even seen sharing a hug while their little girl sat in her stroller.

Last February before the coronavirus lockdowns they were seen arm in arm at the Fashion And Film Party thrown by Tiffany & Co and British Vogue at Annabel's.

They were first linked in 2015 before going public as a couple in 2016, welcoming their little girl in 2017 and then going their separate ways in 2019.

Family time: He could be seen sweetly holding both his daughter's hands as they carefully walked over one of the mounds of snow lining the sidewalk

On the go: Bradley Cooper was hipster chic for his latest outing

Shortly after their breakup TMZ reported they had decided to split custody and to both remain based in New York in order to make joint parenting easier.

In last year's September issue of Interview Bradley shared he was self-isolating with his mother Gloria Campano and Lea.

'Im with my daughter and my mother and my two dogs, and we have not left the house,' said Bradley, who took both Irina and Gloria to the 2019 Oscars.

'My mother is going to be 80, and she has a colostomy bag, so I cant let anybody in the house. And I cant leave the house, because if she gets it, its over.'

Off he goes: The 46-year-old wore a red and black flannel shirt over a T-shirt with Breton stripes, accessorizing with a brown beanie

Legging it: He was surrounded by heaps of snow as he sauntered down the sidewalk, making sure to keep his mask on amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic

He added: 'We live in a little townhouse, thankfully theres a backyard. Im running a one-man preschool. We get up, we do swim class in the bathtub.'

The actor broke into a new phase in his Hollywood career when he directed the 2018 remake of A Star Is Born starring himself opposite Lady Gaga, who played a role previously taken on by Janet Gaynor, Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand.

Bradley and Gaga shocked fans when they performed the film's hit song Shallow at the Oscars, and a rash of romance rumors resulted.

With his little girl: Cooper and daughter Lea are seen on Monday in New York City

Gaga denied the conjecture, saying on Jimmy Kimmel Live! that the onstage chemistry was 'what we wanted you to see' while playing characters.

Bradley's next directorial venture will be a biopic of Leonard Bernstein, the Broadway composer of such legendary shows as West Side Story, Candide and On The Town.

Leonard was married to Chilean actress Felicia Montealegre from 1951 until her death of cancer in 1978 in spite of the fact she knew he was gay.

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The President of the African Development Bank, Akinwumi Adesina, has called for fair access to COVID-19 vaccines for Africans and said debt relief would help African economies recover faster and better from the pandemic.

Speaking on February 8 at a virtual event held in his honour as the outgoing African of the Year of African Leadership Magazine, the bank president warned that so long as the coronavirus was unchecked in any part of the world, no one would be safe.

There is light at the end of the tunnel  it just happens to be a very long tunnel. I am very positive that African economies will bounce back over the next two years, but the speed of recovery will depend on ensuring that Africa gets enough vaccines for its population, Mr Adesina said.

The world must not short-change Africa on access to vaccines, he added.

He also said significant debt relief would be key to accelerating African economies recovery from the COVID-19 crisis.

To recover faster, Africa will need significant debt forgiveness from bilateral and official creditors, he said during the virtual event attended by Douye Diri, the Governor of the Nigerian state of Bayelsa, and Benoy Berry, Chairman of Contec Global Worldwide.

Mr Adesina added: While developed countries have been spending trillions of dollars for fiscal stimulus, Africa does not have such resources. The payment for vaccines is already adding to the already high debt burden.

A highlight of the conversation was Mr Adesinas induction into the magazines African Leadership Hall of Fame for raising the performance bar in Africa.

African Leadership Magazine Chairman Ken Giami said the African Development Bank had scored some outstanding achievements in 2020 under President Adesina and had infected Africa with optimism.

Mr Giami said: ALM feels very proud of the Presidents contribution as he has raised the performance bar for future African of the Year winners. Indeed, his award was a call for greater service to the people, especially at a time when Africa needed true leadership.

Mr Adesina vowed that the African Development Bank, in collaboration with its partners, would continue to lead Africas recovery and development after the pandemic, with a focus on youth, women and healthcare.

Together, we will create new opportunities for African youth and trigger a youth-based wealth system for Africa. Together, we will ensure that we deliver financing for African women, he said in his concluding remarks.

He stressed: Together, we will support Africa to build world-class, quality healthcare infrastructure, while ensuring also that the continent builds its pharmaceutical and vaccine industrial production.

African leaders who have previously won the African Leadership Magazine African of the Year award include former Liberian President and Nobel Peace Prize winner Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (2011); Sudanese businessman Mo Ibrahim (2012); former Vice President of Nigeria Atiku Abubakar (2013); former President of Tanzania Jakaya Kikwete (2014); Tanzanian businessman and philanthropist Mo Dewji (2016); and President of Rwanda, Paul Kagame (2017).
The Lagos State Police Command has arrested one Ms Tina Essi, for the alleged murder of 49-year-old Christian Akparie in Ikorodu area of L...

The Lagos State Police Command has arrested one Ms Tina Essi, for the alleged murder of 49-year-old Christian Akparie in Ikorodu area of Lagos, Southwest Nigeria.

The incident occurred at No. 26 Orijamogun Street, Oreyo, Ikorodu, Lagos.

A statement issued on Wednesday by Police Public Relations Officer, PPRO, Muyiwa Adejobi, said Police preliminary investigation revealed that on 31st January 2021, an argument, over the payment of NEPA Bill ensued between the Landladys daughter, Essi and the deceased, both of the same address, which led to a fight, with the deceased sustaining injuries.

After the fight, the deceased had continually suffered severe pains but unfortunately, on Saturday 6th February, 2021 at about 7am while the deceased was being rushed to the General Hospital, Ikorodu, he gave up the ghost.

The police operatives attached to Ikorodu Division of the command were contacted and arrested the suspect immediately.

The Commissioner of Police has ordered that the suspect be transferred to the State Criminal Investigation and Intelligence Departmet, SCIID, Panti for thorough investigation. The suspect is presently cooling her feet at the State CID, Panti, Yaba, the statement said.

The statement added that the Commissioner of Police, Lagos State, CP Hakeem Odumosu has, however, urged the relatives of the deceased to remain calm as the command would do the needful to have justice done in the matter.

The police boss also appealed to Lagosians to always manage their differences and conflicts with maturity and seek police intervention where necessary to avoid untimely deaths and running into troubles, it said.
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A former Nazi guard was charged for the murders of Jews as an accessory. Many Jews were gassed or killed by several means, especially during the last days of the Third Reich. He is 100 years old.

Nazi Germany employed concentration camps to imprison Jews and later on became charnel houses where numerous prisoners were executed. Many prisoners were watched by guards who made sure any executions went on smoothly.

Former Nazi Guard charged for murder

In Berlin, an ex-Nazi guard was charged with 3,518 counts for helping to murder the prisoners in one of the concentration camps.

He was one of many guards who served in the SS guard, responsible for keeping prisoners in line, reported the Epoch Times.

He was placed in one of these death camps outside Berlin.

The ex-guard was supposed to be stationed at the Sachsenhausen camp from 1942 to 1945, part of the Nazi party's paramilitary unit, identified by Cyrill Klement, who investigated the 100-year-old man, on behalf of the Neuruppin prosecutors' office.

The man's identity was not published as it should be kept secret under privacy laws in Germany. Though the man is a century old, authorities have found him fit to sit for trial. But the court has to limit the trial time as an accommodation for the man's age. This was according to the report given to the Associated Press.

This case was given to the Neuruppin office in 2019 through the special federal prosecutors' office in Ludwigsburg. It is tasked with investigating crimes committed by the former SS guard, said Klement.

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Several ex-Nazi's prosecuted as well.

In the northern town of Itzehoe, their prosecutors mentioned another accessory to murder charges against a 95-year-old woman. She used to be the secretary of the SS commandant in the Stutthof concentration camp.

According to Klement, filing the case is the legal reasons that support the claim against the Sachsenhausen camp. These developments dictate that any individual proven to have assisted in any Nazi concentration camp can be prosecuted as accessories to murder.

Efraim Zuroff, a Nazi hunter, said the two recent cases show as reminders of anti-Semitism, racism, and xenophobia as byproducts of that era.

He added their age is no excuse to exempt them from their action; they should not live peaceful lives denied in their victims.

They were established as a new legal precedent with the conviction of former Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk, who also served in the Sobibor death camp in occupied Poland. The defendant never admitted to the charges until his death.

Next, another federal court kept the 2015 conviction of former Auschwitz guard Oskar Groening using the same legal precedent. Until the new legal ruling, German courts needed more to convict them who are hard to identify with their crimes. Most of the time, prosecutors will have a hard time in their jobs of convicting.

Klement cited the Demjanjuk and Groening decisions determined these people were part of the death camp. They are determined as accessories to lead to a murder conviction.

To start the trial, the Neuruppin court in the northwest of Oranienburg, where the Sachsenhausen has several tasks to check the case, and if the defendant is fit, the date for the trial is next.

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In addition to plays, teleplays and now novels, Silverman also writes poems, essays and short stories. (She denies being prolific, which is funny.) Across genres, her style is mutable, her word choice precise, her interest piqued by tales of transformation and how people do and dont resist it. The director Mike Donahue, a frequent collaborator, said that he admires her work because he never knows the form it will take. Its always an entirely new world to try to crack and a new language to understand, he said.

Speaking from the Upper Manhattan apartment that she shares with her partner, the set designer Dane Laffrey, Silverman discussed art, autobiography and what it means for the book to arrive in a world without theater. Its hard because I want so desperately to be back in a theater, she said. But when I think about hearing somebody three rows behind me cough, like, I feel this cold panic. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Hows your pandemic going?

Its the best pandemic Ive ever had. Ive been working on the book. I got galleys for it in April. It felt a little crazy, because the world was on fire and Im trying to decide between a semicolon and a comma. And Ive been reading a lot. Thats saving my sanity. Maybe.

How did this book come about?

I had been writing a different book. But something about being in L.A. and being plunged into a different medium, I longed for theater, like in a visceral, full-body way. And I found that when I would sit down to write, I would just start writing about theater. I ended up calling my editor and saying, Im writing a completely different novel. I hope thats OK.
WASHINGTON - Federal health officials Wednesday urged Americans to consider wearing two masks as one of several strategies to better protect themselves against the threat of more contagious variants of the coronavirus.

"We know that universal masking works," said John Brooks, medical officer for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's covid-19 response. "And now these variants are circulating . . . whatever we can do to improve the fit of a mask to make it work better, the faster we can end this pandemic."

Two methods substantially boost fit and protection, according to a CDC report and updated guidance on its website. One is wearing a cloth mask over a disposable surgical mask. The second is improving the fit of a single surgical mask by knotting the ear loops and tucking in the sides close to the face to prevent air from leaking out around the edges and toform a closer fit.

Both of those methods reduced exposure to potentially infectious aerosols by more than 95% in a laboratory experiment using dummies, the report said.

A year after the coronavirus's arrival in the United States - with the death toll approaching 500,000 - the updated guidance stresses the importance of mask-wearing as one of the best defenses against more transmissible variants, along with social distancing, avoiding crowds and poorly ventilated indoor spaces, and practicing frequent hand-washing.

The guidance comes at a potentially perilous moment, as health officials race to vaccinate tens of millions of people to protect them from more transmissible and possibly more lethal variants but remain hampered by a limited vaccine supply.

It also represents a new administration's effort to present clear masking guidelines after mixed messaging and the politicization of the issue appear to have bewildered many Americans. Early last year, health officials did not urge their use because of concerns health workers would be unable to get them. Even after health officials reversed course last April after realizing that people without symptoms were driving the virus's spread, President Donald Trump refused to wear a mask and ridiculed those who did.In part as a result, many Americans still disdain them.

Washington Post photo by Sarah L. Voisin

CDC Director Rochelle Walensky acknowledged at a White House briefing Wednesday that some people may be "both tired of hearing about masks as well as tired of wearing them." She noted that "masks can be cumbersome, they can be inconvenient."

Conceding the changing guidance since the start of the pandemic, Walensky said that knowledge about the virus has evolved over time.

"The science is clear," she said. "Everyone needs to be wearing a mask when they're in public or when they are in their own home but with people who do not live in their household. This is especially true with our ongoing concern about new variants spreading in the United States."

Walensky said that research shows that coronavirus infections and deaths have decreased when policies mandating masks are implemented. "With cases, hospitalizations and deaths still very high, now is not the time to roll back mask requirements," she said.

The bottom line, she said, is that wearing any type of mask is better than not wearing one at all.

Until now, the CDC's recommendation has focused on cloth masks because of worries about a shortage of surgical masks and N95 respirators masks for health-care personnel.But as supply has improved, the agency is providing information about the pros and cons of different masks "so consumers can make an informed choice about what they want to use," Brooks said. The agency is still not recommending that consumers wear N95 respirators.

President Joe Biden has urged all Americans to wear masks for his first 100 days, and signed executive orders requiring their use on federal property and on planes, trains and buses. Thirty-six state governments currently require people to wear face coverings in public to curb the spread of the coronavirus, according to a tally by AARP. The District of Columbia and Puerto Rico also have mask orders. Three states - Iowa, North Dakota and Mississippi - have lifted such mandates.

Several European nations have also tightened mask regulations: Germany and Austria last month required people riding on public transportation or going to supermarkets to wear more-protective masks, including N95s that filter 95% of airborne particles. France has mandated its citizens wear masks that block more than 90% of airborne particles in public places. The World Health Organization recommends the public use fabric masks, ideally with three layers.

Brooks and other public health experts say the key takeaway of the new CDC guidelinesis mask fit, which improves filtration, or the ability of material to block tiny particles.

"Double masking is one way you can do it," he said, noting that double masking does not mean double protection. "It may not be the right solution for everybody,"he added. For some people, wearing two masks can impede breathing or obstruct peripheral vision that could lead to a fall and result in injury.

Surgical masks can also be adjusted to make them better fit the contours of the face, Brooks said. The three-ply masks, which may be flat pleated or cone shaped, are not designed to protect against infections from viruses and bacteria but rather to prevent contamination of sterile surgical sites and to prevent blood and other fluids from splashing onto the wearer's mouth and nose.

Knotting the medical procedure mask where the loops attach to the face helps the mask fit closer to your face, but it also slightly reduces mask size, he said.

"People with big faces may have difficulty getting the mask to cover their nose and mouth completely when they do the knot, so you really have to look around and find a technique that works well for you," Brooks said.

Studies have shown that fit also can be improved using simple materials, including nylon hosiery around the neck and over either a cloth or surgical mask, and the use of mask fitters - small reusable and adjustable frames or braces worn either as ear loops or behind the head to secure face-coverings tightly on noses.

The CDC conducted experiments last month to test the effectiveness of mask combinations: A three-ply surgical mask blocked 42% of particles from a simulated cough, and a three-ply cloth mask blocked 44%. But a cloth mask covering a medical mask blocked 92% of the particles, the report said.

In a second experiment simulating someone releasing particles during breathing, a dummy wearing double masks and one wearing a knotted/tucked medical mask reduced exposure for an unmasked dummy by 82% and 62%, respectively. When one dummy was not wearing any masks and the one acting as the bystander wore a double mask or a knotted/tucked medical mask, the bystander's exposure was reduced by 83 and 64.5%, respectively.

But when both dummies wore double masks or knotted/tucked medical masks, the bystander's exposure was reduced by more than 95% in both situations.

Brooks cautioned against generalizing the numeric findings of the studies, however. The experiments used one type of cotton mask and one type of medical mask in a laboratory, "not with human beings,"he said.

Other experts expressed concern that double masking could discourage mask-wearing.

"I would rather people focus on finding one quality mask that meets the mark, versus trying to layer masks and create discomfort, difficulty breathing . . . or frustration that might lead to no mask at all," said Saskia Popescu, an infectious-disease epidemiologist and assistant professor at George Mason University.

David Rothamer, an engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has experimented with masks on mannequins in classrooms while studying the best ways to prevent the spread of the virus in college classes. He said he is not a proponent of double masking because it consumes more masks and can also lead to more air leakage.

"The only reason to [wear two masks] is if you can get better fit," he said.

Linsey Marr, an engineering professor at Virginia Tech who has studied how to maximize mask efficiency, offered these tips for ensuring the best mask fit:

"You should not be able to see or feel any kind of open spots around the edges of your mask, especially around your nose, which is why a metal bridge is so important for fitting tightly around the nose," she said.

"You don't want gaps around the cheek or chin, really anywhere," Marr continued. "One way you can check for that is when you are breathing through it, does it feel like air is leaking out of the side? Put your hand on the edge to see if you feel anything. When you breathe in, you should feel suction up against your face."

Other signs of leakage include eyeglasses fogging up or cold breath coming from the sides of masks while outside, she said.

Another test involves breathing hard in front of a mirror to see if you blink while wearing a mask, which would indicate leakage from the top of the mask.

If masks fail these tests, Marr said, you should try a different kind of mask. "Peoples' faces have such different shapes that you can try to find something that can work better for your face," she advised.
Children in Amber Alert found safe near Mitchell

The missing children were recovered and are safe, according to the Davison County Sheriff's Office.
A Texas lawyer has said he is happy to have 'provided a good laugh' after becoming an internet sensation for accidentally leaving a kitten filter on during a Zoom hearing.

'I did not know that Zoom could turn me into a cat, and I did not know that a cat Zoom could turn me into an internet celebrity but it all happened in just a matter of hours,' Ponton told BBC Radio 4's Today program on Wednesday.

'It turns out it provided a good laugh for the country,' he said.

In the now-viral video, Presidio County attorney Rod Ponton hilariously tells the judge 'I'm not a cat' as he frantically tries to remove the animated image during the Tuesday call.

The video has been viewed at least 20million times as of Wednesday morning, with the amusing mishap apparently striking a chord with the millions around the world who have had to get to grips with remote working during the coronavirus pandemic.

'I think that anybody who's ever struggled with a computer or with Zoom could recognize that those kind of things could happen and it certainly did happen to me,' Ponton said.

The video begins with presiding judge Roy Ferguson telling Ponton: 'I believe you have a filter turned on in video settings and you might want to turn it off.'

Ponton, 69, is then heard letting out a panicked 'aghh', as the fluffy white kitten filter over his face begins shifting its eyes back-and-forth and moving its mouth in unison with his voice.

'Can you hear me judge?' the feline-emblazoned Ponto is heard asking, his voice quivering.

Ferguson confirms that he can hear Ponton and reiterates that he believes he has a filter switched on.

'It is [a filter]', Ponton hastily interjects. 'And I don't know how to remove it. I've got my assistant here, she's trying to, but ahhh I'm prepared to go forward with it I'm here live, I'm not a cat.'

At this point, the two other people present at the 394th Judicial District Court of Brewster hearing - H. Gibbs Bauer and Jerry L. Phillips - begin to laugh.

Judge Ferguson, however, manages to keep a straight face, offering a deadpan response of, 'I can see that.'

The judge then begins calmly offering Ponton a step-by-step guide for how to remove the kitten filter, before the video abruptly cuts out.

Ponton has since revealed that he was using his secretary's computer at a remote office in Presidio, telling the San Antonio Express that this is the first time something like this has happened in the eight months he's been using Zoom amid the pandemic.

'It was certainly not an intentional thing to put the cat image up there but s*** happens,' he laughed. 'If I can make everybody laugh for a moment at my expense, I'll take it.'

Ponton said the filter was eventually removed and the hearing was able to continue as normal, though his secretary was 'mortified.'

He told the BBC that he was originally taken aback by the 'deluge of phone calls and emails' that came in following the video's publication as he is not on Twitter and was unaware of his newfound fame.

He said he had since decided to take it all in his stride.

'The Texans have a phrase 'You can't put toothpaste back in the tube' and I finally realised that this was gonna become an internet sensation,' he said.

'I just had to laugh at myself along with everybody else doing so and roll with it.'

Speaking to Vice on Tuesday, Ponton revealed that the hearing was being held for a man who was attempting to exit the US with contraband and illicitly-obtained cash.

The amusing mishap happened to attorney Rod Ponton during a live streamed hearing this morning for the 394th Judicial District Court of Brewster

Judge Ferguson released the video, which has been viewed at least 20million times as of Wednesday morning, saying it showed the 'legal profession's dedication'.

'IMPORTANT ZOOM TIP: If a child used your computer, before you join a virtual hearing check the Zoom Video Options to be sure filters are off. This kitten just made a formal announcement on a case in the 394th,' Ferguson wrote on Twitter after the call.

He continued in a second post: 'These fun moments are a by-product of the legal profession's dedication to ensuring that the justice system continues to function in these tough times. Everyone involved handled it with dignity, and the filtered lawyer showed incredible grace. True professionalism all around!'

Ponton is then heard letting out a panicked 'aghh', as the cat filter over his face begins shifting its eyes back-and-forth and moving its mouth in unison with his voice

Judge Ferguson (above in different hearing) managed to keep a straight face throughout the ordeal

Reaction among legal colleagues in the region began cropping up on Twitter in the hours since the video was shared online.

Kendyl Hanks called the exchange 'one of the funniest things I've ever seen'.

'The poor lawyer can't figure out how to turn off the filter so offers to proceed anyway, promising the judge he's not a cat. And kudos to [Judge Ferguson] for walking him through it calmly without bursting into giggles.'

Harold Cook added: 'Well we all suspected Rod Ponton would one day become accidentally famous for something. But I didn't have this on my bingo card.'

Ponton was formerly the District Attorney in the Big Bend region and was once the city attorney for Presidio.

He also appeared in the Netflix documentary The Confession Killer in 2019 about the infamous convicted murderer Henry Lee Lucas, whom he represented in his 1986 capital murder prosecution.
YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 10, ARMENPRESS. Chief of the General Staff of the Armenian Armed Forces, Colonel-General Onik Gasparyan paid a working visit to the third military formation on February 9, the defense ministry told Armenpress.

The Chief of the General Staff held a consultation there which was attended by the commanders of the military units, their deputies and others.

Onik Gasparyan was reported on the existing problems, the border situation and the process of works aimed at raising the combat preparedness level. He gave respective tasks over the organization of future service and solution of the existing problems.

Editing and Translating by Aneta Harutyunyan
Maori ward campaigners are thrilled the Labour Government is using urgency to push through a bill to get rid of a public veto on Maori wards.

Whakatane women Toni Boynton and Danae Lee of Te Ropu Tautoko Maori were at the forefront of Whakatanes own battle to have Maori wards instated on the district council in 2018 but lost out through a binding poll in which less than 50 percent of the voting population took part.

Maori wards are the only wards in which five percent of voters can call for a binding poll to overturn a council decision to implement them.

There are no sections within the Local Electoral Act that give voters the same rights to demand a similar poll when a decision is made to create other wards, such as rural.

Labours bill, which had its first reading yesterday, seeks to remove this poll provision.

If the bill passes it would mean the nine councils seeking to install Maori wards before the next elections would not be subject to a poll.

Boynton says the law change will ensure there is Maori representation on councils, which could create a legacy for future Maori leaders.

Because those nine councils will not be subjected to a poll, the community will not be subjected to or suffer through a prolonged campaign of racism from lobby groups like Hobsons Pledge.

Im relieved for those communities that they will not have to go through what we went through.

Following the defeat of Maori wards in Whakatane, the group set out to force a law change and presented Minister of Local Government Nanaia Mahuta with a petition late last year.

A lot of this had been driven by the community and Boynton says there has been an evolution and shift in thinking from the community since.

She says as the bill is being passed under urgency there wasnt much time for unhappy people to make noise, however, she and the rest of the group would be doing some mahi to lessen that noise.

Its really, really exciting but there is still some work to be done.

Its time to turn to councils and iwi to have conversations and see if we can have Maori wards on the Whakatane council for the next elections. So, we are gearing up for that and looking at how the community can support us in doing so.

Whakatane mayor Judy Turner says although she will like to see Maori wards installed on the Whakatane District Council, it's something the council will need to work through.

We know we have some very keen activists in Whakatane who would like to see this advance and be responded to quickly so we will need to look at it this year.

Because of the current law we thought we wouldnt be able to look at it again until after the next election, but this is a game changer, and we are obviously keen to hear from all interested parties.

Turner says if council was to install Maori wards before the next election it will have to resolve to do so by May.

People are keen to get cracking, but we need to get our heads around the look and feel of what that would mean, how many seats and so on. A lot of that is a bit of an unknown at present.

Absolutely we are expecting it to be an issue we will need to front up to and address and listen and consider what people want. But first, we need to get our heads around the legislation.

Before Mahuta indicated the Government would be changing the law surrounding Maori wards, Opotiki District Council had resolved to include a poll at its next election asking if the community would like to see Maori wards installed.

Opotiki Mayor Lyn Riesterer says this is something she personally will still like to see happen.

I still think thats the right way through for us to gauge the communitys thinking around this."

Riesterer, who is Maori, says Opotiki is in a unique situation in that most of its population is Maori.

She says the council is planning to run information and education campaigns on Maori wards ahead of the election next year and thinks this should still go ahead.

We need to let people know what it might look like and how it might enhance, or not, representation in local government.

We have very even representation now, but that doesnt necessarily mean it will stay like that. I know our council needs to have a thorough look at what Maori wards would mean for us. What it might look like; we havent worked that out.
Lecturers at ZAOGA owned Zimbabwe Ezekiel Guti University (ZEGU) have stopped conducting online lectures demanding salaries and COVID-19 allowances equivalent to the ones paid State run Universities.

A lecturer who spoke to 263Chat on condition of anonymity said they have stopped conducting lectures owing to poor remuneration and dishonesty from authorities at the institution.

"We are fed up with the administration, they are not honouring on their promises. Last year we embarked on a similar strike and we had three meetings that culminated in our salaries being pegged equivalent to our colleagues at State Universities," said the lecturer.

The lecturer said they have tried everything to have their grievances addressed by the University's Chancellor and founder Professor Ezekiel Guti and they have been hitting the brick wall.

"We have tried to engage the administration but without any success and we have also written to the Chancellor Prof. Guti but it seems our letters are not reaching him. We feel that someone is blocking our efforts to reach the Chancellor," he said.

The industrial action has disadvantaged online lectures prompting students to petition the institution's Registrar. In a petition gleaned by 263Chat, SRC secretary general Takudzwa Mukove pleaded with the ZEGU authorities to reward the striking lecturers.

"Reference is made to the notice of industrial action which was served to you by ZEGU Lectures this year. In my capacity as the undersigned and as a student, we feel the strong chains of incapacitation that your administration has caused to our beloved Lecturers, depriving them of the means and motivation to discharge their duties efficiently.

"You have tied a heavy albatross around their necks and the resultant effect is injurious to student learning. From whence shall we drink, when our fountains of knowledge are drained dry? There is need for expediency in addressing Lecturers' grievances to ameliorate the status of the institution gradually inclining into disrepute. We are cognisant of your Agreement with Lecturers in 2020 wherein you undertook to equate their salaries with those serving in state universities.

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"You had a noble idea of cushioning them from the intense heatwave of the crippling economy exacerbated by daily price skyrocketing. We stand solid and in solidarity to support the Lecturer cause. For Christ's sake, invoke your Christian values to see to it that he who works should be rewarded accordingly." read Mukove's letter.

He added "That is the ration aloof your existence as administrators to attend to genuine issues that threaten the credibility of the institution. We also further and politely advise that if the management remain mum and antagonistic to the cause, like they usually do, resulting in any deprivation of our Academic interests, surely and obviously do expect an organised democratic response from all angles in the soonest time. Acknowledge by acting accordingly with expediency and in good faith."

Efforts to get a comment from ZEGU Deputy Registrar, Ms Mukosi were unsuccessful as her mobile number was continuously engaged.
Sixty female recruits have arrived at the Marine Corps' all-male training site, where they'll complete boot camp in a coed company for the first time in the base's 100-year history.

About 450 men and women will spend the next three months training together at Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego as part of Lima Company, 3rd Recruit Training Battalion, said Capt. Martin Harris, a spokesman for the training depot. The Marine Corps traditionally has trained women only at its East Coast training base in Parris Island, South Carolina.

The women arrived in San Diego on Wednesday, stepping off white buses and onto the iconic yellow footprints that mark the start of the training that transforms new recruits from civilians into Marines. Male and female drill instructors were there when the women and men arrived at the base.

Read Next: Top Enlisted Airman Says She'll Keep Connecting Online After Social Media Blunder

Anne Margret Frazier, one of the female recruits, told NBC 7 San Diego that being among the first women to train at the historically all-male base felt empowering. The 19-year-old recruit's father served in the Marine Corps.

"I feel like it's ... a sign of change," Frazier told the station.

The Marine Corps has been directed by Congress to make both of its entry-level training sites coed in the next five to eight years. Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island has been training coed recruit companies for two years. Now, recruits at San Diego are following the same model, with the female platoon being trained by women drill instructors, Harris said.

"While platoon drill instructors will remain the same gender as their recruits, recruits in like-gender platoons learn the teamwork, discipline and esprit de corps required to win our nation's battles as part of an integrated company," he said.

The Marine Corps announced in December that three women graduated from the West Coast drill instructor school to train the incoming female recruits. A female drill instructor who was assigned to the San Diego recruit depot in the past said women's training roles were limited once they arrived.

The service has been slow to embrace coed training at boot camp, even after military combat jobs opened to women in 2016. Women are serving in the infantry and have attempted to become special operators, but Marine leaders have still pushed to keep training for new enlistees segregated by gender at the platoon level.

The women training in San Diego are from the Marine Corps' Western Recruiting Region, Harris said. The service typically ships men from west of the Mississippi River to San Diego and those from states east of the river -- along with all women -- to Parris Island.

The service has been experimenting with how best to meet a new law that requires both boot camp sites to be coed within the next eight years.

The Marine Corps is also studying the possibility of shutting both recruit depots down and creating a new training site where all recruits -- men and women -- would train together. That concept has faced pushback from lawmakers.

-- Gina Harkins can be reached at gina.harkins@military.com. Follow her on Twitter @ginaaharkins.

Related: Female Recruits to Train at Marines' All-Male San Diego Boot Camp in Historic First

From todays Down in Alabama podcast:

Another Alabama Cracker Barrel had its liquor license approved.

Im not sure what Uncle Herschels Favorite brand of cold beer is, but if he leaves more than two pegs in that little triangle peg game then Im taking his keys away.

(If you dont understand any of that, just ask the nearest Cracker Barrel enthusiast.)

On todays briefing well talk Cracker Barrel alcohol, Alabama liquor sales, a gambling proposal and a llama rescue.

The Down in Alabama podcast is short and free. Listen to it by clicking on the player above or subscribe by looking for Down in Alabama on the device of your choosing. Get this and other AL.com newsletters here.

Click here for the Spotify podcast page

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New Delhi, Feb 10 : The disengagement by Indian and Chinese frontline troops from the flashpoints at Pangong Lake in eastern Ladakh began on Wednesday, with officials claiming that the process is taking place in a step-by-step manner.

Soldiers of both the countries were battling minus 30-degree Celsius temperature in some parts of the disputed India-China border. The two countries had deployed thousands of troopers along the disputed Line of Actual Control (LAC) in eastern Ladakh.

The disengagement plan on the northern and southern banks of Pangong Lake in eastern Ladakh is based on a consensus reached during the ninth round of Corps Commander level meeting held between the two sides on January 24.

After the ninth round of military talks, follow-up meetings between the ground level commanders happened, leading to the initiation of the disengagement process with thinning of troops from Wednesday.

Sources said that after the thinning of troops, tanks and weapons removal from the southern part of the lake will happen.

China issued a statement saying that frontline troops at the southern and northern banks of Pangong Lake have started synchronised disengagement. India has not issued any statement in this regard so far.

The proposals for disengagement include China moving back to Finger 8 and Indian troops pulling back to the Dhan Singh Thapa post between Finger 2 and 3. This will make Finger 4 a 'no go' zone for some time for both the sides.

The north bank of the lake is divided into 8 Fingers. The mountain spur jutting into the lake are referred to as Finger in military parlance.

India claims Line of Actual Control at Finger 8 and had been holding on to the area till Finger 4, but in a clear alteration of status quo, the Chinese have been camping at Finger 4, setting up fortifications between Finger 5 and 8.

There have been regular face-offs between the two armies between Finger 4 and Finger 8, a distance of 8 km, on the northern bank of the lake. Turning the Finger area into a no patrolling zone is part of the three-step disengagement roadmap that is under consideration.

The first step of disengagement is thinning of troops and withdrawal of tanks from the forward locations along the LAC in eastern Ladakh.

In the second step, Indian troops will come back to the Dhan Singh Thapa post located on Finger 3, one of the spurs along the Pangong Lake, and the Chinese troops to Finger 8.

In the third step, the Indian Army will withdraw from all the 13 critical heights and territories, including Rezang La, along the southern bank of Pangong Lake which gave India an edge over China.

On August 30 last year, India had occupied critical mountain heights on the southern bank of the Pangong Lake like Rechin La, Rezang La, Mukpari and Tabletop that were unmanned till now. India has also made some deployments near Blacktop. The movement was carried out after the Chinese tried to make a provocative military move.

The dominance at peaks allows India to dominate the Spanggur Gap under Chinese control and also the Moldo garrison on the Chinese side If things work out, India would leave the heights occupied on the south of the lake in August-end, as per the disengagement proposal.

Thereafter, withdrawal of troops from several friction points is also proposed and these include the Depsang plains and heights around Gogra, among some other locations.

In the Depsang, China has strengthened its positions in the last five to six years.

China's statement on disengagement: China on Wednesday said that frontline troops of India and China at the southern and northern banks of the Pangong Lake at the Line of Actual Control have started the disengagement process.

Senior Colonel Wu Qian, spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of National Defence, said in a written statement, "The Chinese and Indian frontline troops at the southern and northern banks of Pangong Tso Lake start synchronised and organised disengagement from February 10." The spokesperson further stated that the move is in accordance with the consensus reached by both the sides at the ninth round of China-India Corps Commander level meeting.

Joint statement after ninth round of talks: On January 24, after a 16-hour-long ninth round of dialogue at Moldo, both the countries issued a joint statement wherein it was stated that they have agreed to push for an early disengagement of the frontline troops at the disputed border areas along the LAC.

"The two sides agreed that this round of meeting was positive, practical and constructive, which further enhanced mutual trust and understanding. The two sides agreed to push for an early disengagement of the frontline troops," the joint statement stated.

It also said that both the countries have also agreed to follow the important consensus of their state leaders, maintain the good momentum of dialogue and negotiation, and hold the 10th round of the Corps Commander Level Meeting at an early date to jointly advance de-escalation.

"The two sides agreed to continue their effective efforts in ensuring the restraint of the frontline troops, stabilise and control the situation along the LAC in the Western Sector of the China-India border, and jointly maintain peace and tranquillity," said the statement.

(Sumit Kumar Singh can be reached at sumit.k@ians.in)
Expo Dubai India pavilion delegation, led by Indian Ambassador to the UAE and Consul General, visited the headquarters and manufacturing plants of Conares, the regions second-largest steel manufacturer at Jebel Ali Free Zone Authority (Jafza), Dubai.

The plant is owned by UAEs top Indian industrialist, Bharat Bhatia.

The delegation included Pavan Kapoor, Ambassador of India in the UAE; Dr Aman Puri, Consul General of India in Dubai; Dilip Chenoy, Secretary General, Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry (FICCI), Gunveena Chadha, Assistant Secretary General of FICCI, Praveen Mittal, Director of FICCI, and Pankaj Bodkhe of Consul at CGI Dubai.

FICCI is the industry partner of the Indian government for its participation in the World Expo, and the delegation is seeking support of Indian business leaders to make Expo Dubais India Pavilion a huge success, said a statement.

Kapoor said: We are glad to visit the headquarters of Conares, which is among the tier-1 organisations led by top Indian business leaders. We are seeking the support of Conares to make India Pavilion at the Expo Dubai a resounding success. We have planned to showcase some great activities and programmes as our countrys achievements and diversity at the Expo. The India Pavilion will also play a key role to make significant progress in several existing areas of cooperation between India and the UAE in addition to exploring new opportunities.

Historically, the UAE and India share a special bond. The Indo-UAE bilateral relationship will witness another phase of development with Indias massive presence in the Expo. Both the nations are moving in positive directions. The UAE looks at India seriously, and positive interactions will benefit both the countries and the people, he added.

Welcoming the delegation, Bhatia, said: We are happy to receive the honourable Indian Ambassador His Excellency Pavan Kapoor and the India Pavilion

delegation to our headquarters. We have plans to be part of the pavilion as the Expo is expected to be a key driver of the UAE-India trade in the new decade and beyond. We will extend our full support to make the presence and engagement of the Indian Pavilion a huge success. This is the best opportunity for India to tell its extraordinary stories of diversity and economic growth to the world. We all are proud of being part of this journey. Moreover, India will bring its popular industry events to the show, and together will make the best of India at the World Expo in Dubai.

Chenoy said: The India Pavilion at the World Expo in Dubai will showcase the best of India at a greater level. It will open up huge opportunities for the world to engage with India as a nation of multiple resources and innovations in arts and cultures, industrial manufacturing, knowledge-based capabilities, economic growth, traditional properties and the great Indian cuisine. The Pavilion also will initiate seamless possibilities of investing in India for visitors of the Expo and investors from around the world.

The pavilion will be unique in terms of its architecture, quality and content. A myriad of extraordinary stories of Indian success and innovation will be staged in the pavilion for the world. We are here because Conares is also a big story. Construction of the Pavilion will be completed by March 31. The pavilion will be inaugurated in line with the certification by the authorities in Dubai, he added.

The India pavilion will also conduct some of its prestigious and signature events such as FRAMES and HEAL in Dubai during the global event.

Conares is the leading producer of steel pipes and rebars within the region, and the only private manufacturer in the UAE. The company is also amongst the top three steel rebar mills operating 24x7 to serve the country's upcoming projects. -TradeArabia News Service
According to the Chinese lunar calendar, 2021 is the Year of Xinchou, or Year of the Ox. With the theme of "Gathering up all the power, striving to be strong," the Academy of Arts & Design of Tsinghua University has just completed the designs of the mascot and some merchandise for the 2021 Spring Festival Gala to be broadcast on China Central Television (CCTV).

The mascot Xiao Ang created by the academy has not only been presented in a New Year animation released by CCTV Animation and the online multi-screen cross-border Chinese Zodiac shows, but also appeared on landmarks in Beijing such as the Temple of Heaven, the Summer Palace, Beihai Park, Zhongshan Park, Beijing Zoo and Xidan Books Building. Xiao Ang will also be displayed in cities throughout the country, such as Hangzhou, Guangzhou, Harbin and Changzhou, etc., to add more colorful features to New Year celebration.

The images of ox mascot of the 2021 Spring Festival Gala [Photo courtesy of the Academy of Arts & Design, Tsinghua University]

According to the academy, the design concept of Xiao Ang originated from the "Five-colored Celestial Ox," a mythical creature in the classic ancient fantasy novel "Investiture of the Gods." The mighty Ox has no fear of vicious beasts and can fly high in the sky. As the most typical representative of the Chinese agricultural civilization, the ox well matches with the legendary image of cattle. The two designs, therefore, are based on the prototype of a strong and healthy ox, conveying the massage that Chinese people are hard-working, steady and brave enough to forge ahead against all hardships and difficulties. It also extends the best wishes to people for the coming year.

The CCTV Spring Festival Gala is an indispensable feast for Chinese New Year's Eve. For this reason, the Academy of Arts & Design of Tsinghua University has also designed the 2021 Spring Festival Gala limited edition "Lucky Ox Spring Bowl."

The 2021 Spring Festival Gala limited edition "Lucky Ox Spring Bowl" [Photo courtesy of Hongwei Design]

The image of the Lucky Ox is taken from the traditional form of the old ox and represents diligence and determination. The shapes of Ruyi, auspicious clouds, gourds and copper cashes are finely integrated into the graphic design. The colors are taken from the Mashao facial makeups in a shehuo show (a folk show marking the customs of traditional Chinese festivals) in Shaanxi province. The overall design of the bowl symbolizes good luck and happiness, which is a kind of inheritance and innovation of traditional Chinese culture and folk art.

Every Spring Bowl has been produced throughout six stages, baked five times at a high temperature, and painted and inlaid with gold by hands. It totally takes 116 hours to get the final ceramic product.

The Gift Plates Sets for "I Want to Perform at Spring Festival Gala" [Photo courtesy of Hongwei Design]

Besides the Spring Bowl, the cooperative design and the production of the Gift Plates Sets for the CCTV Program "I Want to Perform at Spring Festival Gala" have been carried out during the same period of time.

Integrated with the inscriptions on ancient bronze objects and patterns on bronzes, the design of the Lucky Ox creates the flower pattern with Ruyi, auspicious clouds, and the inscriptions of Ri (sun), He (millets), Shan (mountains) and Shui (water), symbolizing happiness, reunion and good fortunes.

In addition, a particular collection of stamps specially designed for greeting the Year of the Ox issued by China Post on Nov. 5, 2020, is also designed by the Academy of Arts & Design of Tsinghua University, which includes two special stamps "National Prosperity and Families' Health" and "Blessings for the Spring Festival" respectively and one souvenir sheet.

New Year Stamps "National Prosperity and Families' Health" and "Blessings for the Spring Festival" were issued by China Post on Nov. 5, 2020. [Photo courtesy of the Academy of Arts & Design, Tsinghua University]

China Post has annually issued New Year special stamps to extend New Year greetings since 2006, becoming an important modern tradition for the Chinese New Year. "Blessings for the Spring Festival" designed by the Academy of Arts & Design of Tsinghua University this time has replaced the "Happy New Year" design, which had been used for 14 years, and officially stepped onto the historical stage, and became a visual memory to initiate a new year.

Inspired by the Chinese characters, the stamps creatively integrate Chinese character "Happiness," oracle-bone script "Door" and the element of "Doufang" (a format for Chinese painting and calligraphy). The stamps employ red and gold as their main colors, connoting the best blessings for the coming of the Chinese New Year.

According to the Academy, their teachers and students will introduce more designs during the Spring Festival through the Academy's official website: http://www.enad.tsinghua.edu.cn/.
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In the majority of Southern California, the people eligible to receive a Covid-19 vaccine are an exclusive group. Phase 1A -- seniors and health care workers only.

A few places, however, are already vaccinating the second group, Phase 1B, which includes essential workers in education, emergency services, and the food industry.

One such place is the city of Long Beach (Riverside County is also ahead).

In early February, thousands of food service workers lined up at the Long Beach convention center to get their first shots, while firefighters, 911 dispatchers and other emergency service personnel headed to fire stations to get their doses of the vaccine.

Meanwhile, some 5,000 campus faculty and other employees at Cal State Long Beach have begun getting vaccinated at an open-air clinic that opened in a large parking structure on campus. It's what they call a "closed pod," open only to campus workers. It's able to give about 300 vaccinations per day right now, assuming the vaccine supply continues to arrive.

CSULB employee Fatou Olshanski confers with nurse Erica Olauge about a vaccine at a drive-through clinic in a parking structure at Cal State Long Beach. (Sharon McNary/LAist)

Fatou Olshanski is the director for student housing and resident life at Cal State Long Beach.

"I'm ready to get it done," she said with an exhausted-sounding laugh from the passenger seat of her black SUV, as she checked in to the vaccine center. The housing she oversees has been mostly empty since March, when the pandemic forced most classes online.

A campus staffer directed Olshanski to drive up the parking ramp and to pull into a stall to get her vaccine. A quick consultation with a nurse, and then with the on-site doctor about an allergy, and she was cleared to get the shot.

IMMENSE JOY

If Olshanski worked in just about any other city in California, she would still have to wait a month or more to get vaccinated. But Long Beach has its own health department, robust enough to serve a city of nearly a half-million residents, and nimble enough to change gears quickly to accommodate variations in the vaccine supply.

Long Beach Mayor Robert Garcia at a news conference as Long Beach city officials give an update on COVID-19 issues (Thomas R. Cordova for The Long Beach Post)

"I get immense joy watching people get vaccinated. I love it," said Long Beach Mayor Robert Garcia.

"People also sometimes don't realize how big the city is," Garcia said. "We're roughly the same size as Atlanta, Georgia. So this is a huge city. It's a huge health department, and it's allowed us to make decisions faster, quicker, fix problems."

The city's health officials worked from an assumption of abundance of vaccine, not scarcity, when deciding how to use the supply of vaccine allocated to the health department.

"We made some decisions early on to not hold on to supply, but to run out as fast as possible. And that's helped us move along really quickly," Garcia said.

TAKING A RISK

He acknowledges that it was a somewhat risky decision. People who got their first shots might be at risk of not getting that second shot at the correct time weeks later if the vaccine supply dried up. But so far, the supply has been coming in.

Garcia said it would have been riskier to wait. Long Beach's 700 COVID-19 deaths include his own mother and stepfather who died before a vaccine became available.

"Because I've also lost both my parents, I certainly feel like every vaccine that we get out is a potential life saving opportunity," Garcia said. "I also think my mom would have been one of the first ones to get vaccinated because she was a health care worker."

So far, about 50,000 Long Beach residents and people who work in eligible Phase 1A and 1B jobs in Long Beach have been vaccinated, either at city clinics or other medical offices within the city.

The next group in line under California's vaccine rollout plan are other frontline essential workers, including those in manufacturing, transportation, facilities and services. It also includes jail and prison inmates, and people who are unhoused.

MORE ON VACCINES

SOMERVILLE, Mass., Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Greentown Labs, the largest climatetech startup incubator in North America, today announced Stanley Black & Decker (NYSE: SWK) as its newest Terawatt Partnerthe highest level of engagement with the incubator. Stanley Black & Decker is a diversified global provider of hand tools, power tools and related accessories, electronic security solutions, healthcare solutions, engineered fastening systems, and more.

Recognized as an industrial leader, Stanley Black & Decker's suite of iconic brands play a critical role in people's livesfrom tools for homes and everyday projects to major infrastructure equipment and solutions. Stanley Black & Decker's partnership with Greentown directly aligns with its organizational purposeFor Those Who Make The Worldand the pillars of its corporate social responsibility strategy: to empower makers, innovate with purpose, and create a more sustainable world. Stanley Black & Decker has a firm belief that corporations have a broader role to play in society including helping solve the world's biggest challenges, such as climate change, income inequality and workforce development. In short, they are working to be a force for good.

"Our vision is to inspire makers and innovators to create a more sustainable world," said Stanley Black & Decker Corporate Responsibility Officer, Deb Geyer. "That vision becomes infinitely more attainable with the right partnerships. By collaborating with Greentown Labs, we're confident that we'll have the right players together to make tangible impacts toward climate change."

Through its partnership with Greentown Labs, Stanley Black & Decker will deepen its ties with the incubator's community of climatetech startups, gain access to curated startup pitch days with innovations from emerging technology sectors, and obtain a seat on Greentown's Advisory Board which provides strategic guidance and input to the incubator throughout the year. Dina Routhier, President of Stanley Ventures, will serve on the Advisory Board for 2021.

A unique element of their partnershipand an impressive addition to the Greentown communityis the Stanley Black & Decker Tool Shop that Stanley Black & Decker will establish onsite at Greentown's headquarters in Somerville, Mass. The Stanley Black & Decker Tool Shop will feature $25,000 worth of donated tools and equipment that will be made available to Greentown's community of more than 100 climatetech startups at its Boston location. As part of its commitment to safety and outstanding performance, Stanley Black & Decker will provide training sessions to Greentown's entrepreneurs to ensure a seamless usage experience.

"Greentown Labs believes corporations willand mustplay an essential role in solving the climate crisis and we're proud to partner with Stanley Black & Decker because we share this vision," said Dr. Emily Reichert, CEO of Greentown Labs. "Stanley Black & Decker is not only working to improve the life cycle impact of its own products and sourcing, and to reduce supply chain greenhouse gas emissions, but to also positively impact the environment through its operations. I believe they're setting an example for other corporations to follow."

Stanley Black & Decker and Greentown first collaborated in 2019 on The Greentown Labs Circularity Challengea six-month accelerator program for startups developed in partnership with BASF, one of the world's leading chemical companies. The Challenge sought out battery, plastic, and digital solutions to enable the circular economy and improve sustainability across value chains. The Challenge successfully concluded in March 2020; learn more about it by watching this video .

About Greentown Labs:

Greentown Labs is a community of climatetech and cleantech pioneers working to design a more sustainable world. As the largest climatetech startup incubator in North America, Greentown brings together startups, corporates, investors, policymakers, and many others with a focus on scaling climate solutions. Driven by the mission of providing groundbreaking startups the resources, knowledge, connections, and equipment they need to thrive, Greentown offers lab and office space, software and business resources, and a large network of corporate partners, investors, industry experts, and fellow entrepreneurs. Greentown is headquartered in Somerville, MA and has supported more than 300 startups since its founding in 2011. These startups have collectively created more than 6,500 direct jobs and have raised more than $1 billion in funding. Greentown's second-ever location will open in Houston, TX, in spring 2021. For more information, please visit www.greentownlabs.com , Twitter or LinkedIn.

About Stanley Black & Decker:

Stanley Black & Decker is a purpose-driven, $14.5 billion revenue industrial organization. Stanley Black & Decker has 53,000 employees in more than 60 countries and operates the world's largest tools and storage business, the world's second-largest commercial electronic security services company, a leading engineered fastening business as well as Oil & Gas and Infrastructure businesses. The company's iconic brands include BLACK+DECKER, Bostitch, CRAFTSMAN, DEWALT, FACOM, IRWIN, LENOX, Porter Cable and STANLEY. Stanley Black & Decker is a company for the makers and innovators, the craftsmen and the caregivers, and those doing the hard work to make the world a better place. Learn more at www.stanleyblackanddecker.com.

Greentown Labs Media Contact:

Julia Travaglini

[email protected]

603-867-3657

Stanley Black & Decker Media Contact:

Abigail Dreher

[email protected]

860-922-4598

SOURCE Greentown Labs

Related Links

www.greentownlabs.org


Expedia: Americans Plan to Take More Vacations in 2021



According to Expedia, people worldwide are more determined than ever this year to use up all the vacation days they've earned, and Puerto Vallarta is on their list of places to visit this spring. Seattle - Following a year where, for many, every aspect of life - from work, school, daycare and even vacations - was spent under one roof, people worldwide are more determined than ever this year to use up all the vacation days they've earned.



According to the annual



Expedia first launched the annual study more than 2 decades ago to illustrate the benefits of vacation and encourage working adults to regularly unplug. In recent years, the benefits of vacation are well-known and undisputed, yet vacation deprivation is on the rise in most nations.



This year's findings point to yet another shift, one in which workers agree they will never take their vacation days for granted again. In fact, many Americans are optimistic about travel this year, with 36% planning to resume taking regular vacations, and another third (32%) vowing to take more vacations than usual to make up for lost time in 2020.



"The longer the pandemic, the larger the vacation bucket list and the greater the yearning to travel," said Shiv Singh, SVP/general manager of Brand Expedia. "Globally, 81% of working adults are placing more value on vacation and 66% of them have been inspired to create a bucket list. Whether it's inspiring memorable experiences to add to the bucket list, sharing helpful travel tips or spotlighting flexible deals, Expedia will be here to help travelers discover new destinations - smartly and confidently."



U.S. Vacation Deprivation At-a-Glance



The study found that the U.S. reported the fewest number of vacation days taken in 2020 out of the 16 countries surveyed. Considering the impact of the pandemic on travel, feelings of vacation deprivation were unsurprisingly higher than in years past, with 64% of U.S. respondents reporting they felt vacation deprived, a 3% increase from 2020 and 11% increase compared to five years ago. The study also found:



a Not only did U.S. employees take the fewest vacation days (8) in 2020, along with Thailand the U.S. also received the fewest vacation days (13) when compared to other countries surveyed.



a One in four (26%) U.S. respondents noted they haven't taken a vacation in more than a year, compared to 16% in 2019.



a 47 percent used at least one vacation day in 2020 to care for a sick family member or in lieu of childcare.



a 42% canceled one or more trips last year due to COVID-19.



It's not all bad news, however. With Americans planning to take 13 vacation days this year, up from just eight days taken in 2020, work-life balance is bound to improve.



Cue the Bucket Lists



Though the pandemic put a damper on vacation plans, the study results show that the desire for travel has not diminished. In fact, 66% of people globally were inspired to create a travel bucket list, and the longer the pandemic has waged on, the longer bucket lists have become - 60% of respondents said they continue to add to their lists.



Expedia's study also found that people are willing to put more budget into their bucket list vacations in 2021 than originally planned (61%). Whether it's trying a new activity, seeking out a place untraveled, reuniting with loved ones separated by distance - 64 percent find vacation time more valuable when spending quality time with family or simply having time to recharge, while 54 percent think having the time to relax and do nothing is what makes them happiest on vacation - travelers want to make the most of their time.



2021 on Track to be Year People Take Back Their Days



As the hope for future travel in 2021 grows, Expedia is already seeing an uptick in people searching for their next bucket list location. For spring getaways, Expedia.com data shows that Americans are searching for warm weather and beaches. These are the destinations garnering the most interest for March and April escapes:



Top-searched: Riviera Maya/Playa del Carmen/Tulum; Cancun; Isla Mujeres (all in Mexico); Las Vegas; Orlando, FL; Puerto Vallarta/Riviera Nayarit, Mexico; Los Cabos, Mexico; Miami; Oahu, HI; Maui, HI.



Meanwhile, the destinations trending for spring show similar themes to those highlighted in the 2021 Trends Report, primarily outdoorsy, small towns or off the beaten path:



Trending: North Georgia Mountains, GA; The Hamptons, NY; Front Royal, VA; Southwest Colorado, CO; Hagerstown, MD; Upper Peninsula, MI; South Shore, MA; Boone, NC; Lake Placid, NY; Dahlonega, GA



Original article - Following a year where, for many, every aspect of life - from work, school, daycare and even vacations - was spent under one roof, people worldwide are more determined than ever this year to use up all the vacation days they've earned.According to the annual Vacation Deprivation study from Expedia , Americans plan to take an extra week (five days) of vacation this year. With this new "no days left behind" mindset, Vacation Deprivation is well on its way to becoming a thing of the past.Expedia first launched the annual study more than 2 decades ago to illustrate the benefits of vacation and encourage working adults to regularly unplug. In recent years, the benefits of vacation are well-known and undisputed, yet vacation deprivation is on the rise in most nations.This year's findings point to yet another shift, one in which workers agree they will never take their vacation days for granted again. In fact, many Americans are optimistic about travel this year, with 36% planning to resume taking regular vacations, and another third (32%) vowing to take more vacations than usual to make up for lost time in 2020."The longer the pandemic, the larger the vacation bucket list and the greater the yearning to travel," said Shiv Singh, SVP/general manager of Brand Expedia. "Globally, 81% of working adults are placing more value on vacation and 66% of them have been inspired to create a bucket list. Whether it's inspiring memorable experiences to add to the bucket list, sharing helpful travel tips or spotlighting flexible deals, Expedia will be here to help travelers discover new destinations - smartly and confidently."The study found that the U.S. reported the fewest number of vacation days taken in 2020 out of the 16 countries surveyed. Considering the impact of the pandemic on travel, feelings of vacation deprivation were unsurprisingly higher than in years past, with 64% of U.S. respondents reporting they felt vacation deprived, a 3% increase from 2020 and 11% increase compared to five years ago. The study also found:a Not only did U.S. employees take the fewest vacation days (8) in 2020, along with Thailand the U.S. also received the fewest vacation days (13) when compared to other countries surveyed.a One in four (26%) U.S. respondents noted they haven't taken a vacation in more than a year, compared to 16% in 2019.a 47 percent used at least one vacation day in 2020 to care for a sick family member or in lieu of childcare.a 42% canceled one or more trips last year due to COVID-19.It's not all bad news, however. With Americans planning to take 13 vacation days this year, up from just eight days taken in 2020, work-life balance is bound to improve.Though the pandemic put a damper on vacation plans, the study results show that the desire for travel has not diminished. In fact, 66% of people globally were inspired to create a travel bucket list, and the longer the pandemic has waged on, the longer bucket lists have become - 60% of respondents said they continue to add to their lists.Expedia's study also found that people are willing to put more budget into their bucket list vacations in 2021 than originally planned (61%). Whether it's trying a new activity, seeking out a place untraveled, reuniting with loved ones separated by distance - 64 percent find vacation time more valuable when spending quality time with family or simply having time to recharge, while 54 percent think having the time to relax and do nothing is what makes them happiest on vacation - travelers want to make the most of their time.As the hope for future travel in 2021 grows, Expedia is already seeing an uptick in people searching for their next bucket list location. For spring getaways, Expedia.com data shows that Americans are searching for warm weather and beaches. These are the destinations garnering the most interest for March and April escapes:Top-searched: Riviera Maya/Playa del Carmen/Tulum; Cancun; Isla Mujeres (all in Mexico); Las Vegas; Orlando, FL; Puerto Vallarta/Riviera Nayarit, Mexico; Los Cabos, Mexico; Miami; Oahu, HI; Maui, HI.Meanwhile, the destinations trending for spring show similar themes to those highlighted in the 2021 Trends Report, primarily outdoorsy, small towns or off the beaten path:Trending: North Georgia Mountains, GA; The Hamptons, NY; Front Royal, VA; Southwest Colorado, CO; Hagerstown, MD; Upper Peninsula, MI; South Shore, MA; Boone, NC; Lake Placid, NY; Dahlonega, GA

The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
Bobi Wine addresses journalists at his home in Magere, Wakiso District on January 26, 2021.

Former presidential candidate Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, alias Bobi Wine, yesterday suffered an early setback in his petition challenging President Museveni's victory when the Supreme Court dismissed his application to amend the suit and include new grounds.

After the hearing of submissions by both Kyagulanyi and Museveni lawyers, the court adjourned for a few hours to give a ruling on the application.

When court resumed at 4pm, Justice Stella Arach Amoko who read the unanimous ruling, dismissed Mr Kyagulanyi's application on grounds that the issues he intended to add to the petition had already been included in the original petition.

The justices advised Mr Kyagulanyi's legal team led by Mr Medard Lubega Sseggona to file evidence by affidavits to prove the grounds they raised in the original petition.

Other justices on the panel are Chief Justice Alfonse Owiny Dollo, justices Rubby Opio Aweri, Esther Kisaakye, Faith Mwondha, Paul Mugamba, Mike Chibita, Ezekiel Muhanguzi and Night Percy Tuhaise.

The justices said they could not allow Mr Kyagulanyi's new ground in the intended amended petition which indicated that Mr Museveni was illegally nominated in the presidential race. Kyagulanyi had argued that Museveni was illegally nominated for presidential elections since he is the head of state, head of government, commander in chief and chairperson of the National Security Council.

Mr Kyagulanyi's legal team had pleaded that articles 102 (2) (b) and 219 of the Constitution bar a person holding such positions from running for president.

The court reasoned that the amendment of the petition was a new issue brought up after the lapse of the mandatory 15 days within which a petitioner can challenge a presidential election from the date results are declared by Electoral Commission (EC).

Court has set tomorrow for the pre-hearing session on the petition where both parties will agree on the issues to be determined by the judges.

Submissions at the hearing

During the hearing earlier in the day, Kyagulanyi's lead counsel Mr Sseggona asked court to allow the amendment of the petition, saying it would enable the judges effectively probe the alleged issues in interest of justice.

Mr Sseggona argued that immediately after the election, Mr Kyagulanyi was placed under house arrest and released only five days to the deadline for filing a presidential election petition.

He said the confinement constrained Kyagulanyi and denied him enough time to gather more evidence.

"If allowed, the respondents (accused parties) will be allowed to respond on all matters in controversy and it would enable the court to adjudicate on all matters effectively and arrive at a just decision," Mr Sseggona submitted, adding that they were aware of the need for a speedy hearing of the petition required by law but it should be the undertaking of all parties.

He had also asked court to strike out a sworn statement by Museveni lawyer, Mr Oscar Kihika, which objected to the application.

Ssegona reasoned that no authority had been attached as proof that he was allowed to swear it on behalf of Mr Museveni.

He reasoned that Mr Kihika, a director of legal affairs at the National Resistance Movement secretariat did not follow the rules.

He added that Mr Museveni is a not corporation to have another person swear an affidavit in his name.

Museveni team

However, Mr Museveni's lead lawyer, Mr Ebert Byenkya objected to Mr Sseggona's assertions saying they were misconceived because Mr Kihika swore the affidavit in his capacity as a director of NRM, a party which sponsored Mr Museveni in the election.

He asked court to dismiss Mr Kyagulanyi's application for amendment of the petition on account that it is time-barred and the law governing presidential election petitions does not provide for amendments.

"There are rules governing determination of presidential election petitions and provide for fixed number of events; that is filing, service in two days, answer in three days and hearing in a very fixed timeframe. The time for hearing is upon us as of tomorrow," Mr Byenkya submitted.

Electoral Commission

The EC, counsel, Mr Joseph Matsiko, argued that the amendments presented by Mr Kyagulanyi raised new cause of action which is untenable under the law.

He said: "The amendment introduces new grounds which is not permissible in the Presidential Elections Act. The proposed amendments are fresh grounds brought after 15 days laid out in the law."

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Attorney General (AG)

AG William Byaruhanga asked court to throw out Mr Kyagulanyi's application with costs, reasoning that the amendment sought to defeat their defence.

"In consideration of the application, consider the reality that the country is waiting for confirmation of the president. The court should also consider the 45 days within which it must deliver its decision," said Mr Byaruhanga, adding that the amendments cannot be brought at the expiry of the stipulated time.

Legal representation

Mr Kyagulanyi was represented by Medard Seggona, Samuel Muyizi, Anthony Wameli, Frederick Kalule, Abudalla Kiwanuka and Suleiman Kakaire.

Mr Museveni was represented by Ebert Byenkya, Kiryowa Kiwanuka, Edwin Karugire and Osama Ssebuufu.

The Electoral Commission was represented by Joseph Matsiko, Alfred Okello Oryem, Elison Karuhanga, Eric Sabiiti and Jet Tumwebaze.

The Attorney General William Byaruhanga was assisted by Solicitor General Francis Atoke and senior attorneys Martin Mwambutsya, Christine Kahwa and George Karemeera.

Compiled by Ephraim Kasozi, Derrick Kiyonga & Juliet Kigongo
Reading Life is a monthly column where writers talk about the books they've read  good or bad.

Like many of you, I had hoped that the insane amount of indoor time during the pandemic would mean that my tsundoku pile would finally shrink and my small bedroom would finally be free of some books. Alas, it was not quite. The pandemic has affected the way we read, and along with the numerous cultural shifts that happened, there was a reckoning to be had with our habits and choices. I found myself looking for more books written by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) during the George Floyd protests and as the cultural consumption of my part of the Twittersphere tended towards K-pop and Boys Love (and, eventually, pop music) from Thailand and, motivated me to look for more Southeast Asian books. In bookshops here, books from Japan, South Korea, and China were plenty. You have your Haruki Murakamis, Han Kangs, and Cixin Lius. Books from our neighbors like Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia were few. It took a constant scouring of secondhand bookstores on Facebook and Instagram to get the titles that I wanted.

Two of the books I recently read are among the few carried by one of the bookstores here: This Earth of Mankind (Bumi Manusia) by Pramoedya Anata Toer and The Blood Prince of Langkasuka'' by Tutti Dutta. Toers book is widely considered a classic since it was published in the 80s and has been published in 33 languages. Duttas book is under the Singapore-based Penguin Southeast Asia, a relatively new imprint which also published a few Filipino titles. The Blood Prince of Langkasuka was only published in September last year.

Rounding up my last two books of the month are Julius Villanuevas new Ella Arcangel'' book Basbas ng Apoy: Chapter 1, and Susanna Clarkes massive 782-page Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. I read half of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell many years ago and stopped since I enjoyed the book so much I didnt want it to be over. In 2020, Clarke finally released her second novel Piranesi so I took it as a signal to finish Strange and Norrell. The whole endeavor  half re-read, half new read  became an eight-month excursion that involved several editions of the book and an hour of audiobook listening. Were all stuck at home so why not attempt to finish a doorstop? But it turns out, its not that easy.

Photo by JL JAVIER

This Earth of Mankind

This Earth of Mankind is the first book of Pramoedya Ananta Toers Buru Quartet, a 1500-page literary series that depicts the tumultuous life of Minke in Java, Indonesia during Dutch colonial rule up to the turn of the century. This Earth of Mankind finds Minkes walk towards awakening: as an intellectual native he is dismissed by the white ruling class as a monkey (hence his racist name), despite doing better than most of his European or mixed-race peers in school. His stature makes him both a curiosity and an aberration. Dutch leaders think of him as the future of Java (to help them hold up colonial rule) while others, such as his classmates, look at him in disdain. He is of privileged Javanese descent not privileged enough to afford him full rights like his elite peers. While in school, Minke becomes an acclaimed writer though he hides behind a European-sounding pseudonym Max Tollenaar, in order to sound credible and respectable.

This Earth of Mankind chronicles Minkes entanglement with the family of Nyai Ontosoroh, a Dutch mans concubine who has managed to run a successful business. Nyai and Minke both command a certain degree of respect and have risen from their native status. Minke becomes enamored with the Nyai, but more so by her mixed blood daughter Annelies and is antagonized by her brother Robert, who has a frayed relationship with his mother. Minkes complex relationship with the Mellema family becomes the spark that triggers his political awakening in the following novels. But first, Minke has to experience crushing heartbreak and disappointment.

Toer's book affords us a view of Indonesias history in devastating detail as Minke realizes how brutal the much-romanticized rule of the Dutch is. Toer outlines anti-colonial arguments through the eyes of a boy whos only starting to come to terms with how society works outside the confines of his books and classroom. As Nyai says in discussion about the power of stories, Stories about happy things are never interesting. They are not stories about people and their lives, but about heaven and clearly do not take place on this earth of ours.

This Earth of Mankind is ultimately a coming of age, though bittersweet one considering how young Minke is and how tender his relationship is with Nyai Ontosoroh and her daughter. But like Ibarra in Noli Me Tangere (Toer and Rizals lives have many parallels), it is a necessary step towards his radical awakening. The rest of the Buru Quartet continues his story. The 2019 film adaptation of the book is available on Netflix.

Available at Fully Booked.

Photo by JL JAVIER

The Blood Prince of Langkasuka

Tutu Duttas retelling of the myth of the Fanged King, Raja Bersiong plays out like a folktale updated with romantic stuffing and a little bit of politics. In Duttas version (as there are many versions of the Raja Bersiong legend itself), Raja Perita Derias vampiric tendencies werent just a result of a dish accidentally prepared with a drop of blood. Here, the mischievous prince is cursed by a pontianak, a vengeful female spirit that, in certain variations of her myth, turns out to be a blood-sucking creature as well.

Dutta clearly intended her book to be focused on Raja Peritas struggle with his curse but there are many elements at play here that hint at how the story could have gone into something of a more epic scope, particularly the political tension between the empires surrounding Langkasuka: the powerful Srivijaya and the aloof Khmer. Perita is set to marry a Srivijayan princess in order to strengthen the ties between the two kingdoms but the princes deadly secret threatens to upend the arrangement  and the whole kingdom itself.

There are many things to love in The Blood Prince of Langkasuka. If youre unfamiliar with Malaysian history or its legends, this will set you off a path towards Wiki sources and YouTube explainers, like an eager explorer setting foot on a new land  without the intention to colonize it, of course.

Langkasuka is also a fusion of Malay and Hindu myths and Dutta mixes a potent brew of these worlds, which have interacted with each other historically anyway (for example, the word Langkasuka is believed to be of Sanskrit origin). As books about Greek and Norse Myths populate local bookshelves, maybe its about time we familiarize ourselves with legends from Southeast Asia as well. Dutta said so herself in an interview with Malaysias The Star, I find it jarring that younger readers seem more familiar with Norse and Greek myths, rather than the folk tales of this country and this region. This will only become obvious when you talk to people from other countries and cultures and they ask you about the books and stories from your culture. Believe me, I know. Ive lived in nine different countries. People will realise you have a [colonized] mind.

Available at Fully Booked.

Photo by JL JAVIER

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell

There have been many wonderful things written about Susanna Clarkes marvelous first novel so I will only add a few, perhaps to act as a guide to those who have finished the new Brandon Sanderson book or those looking for another fantasy realm on their way out of Harry Potters London. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is, so far, only one book and a short story collection (the stories though are only tangentially related to the main events of the novel) but in the eight months Ive lived in it, Clarkes alternate London, where two foolish English gentleman magicians  meaning they only practice to help and not to hurt anybody  attempt to restore the glory of English magic. Reading it in 2021 feels like its taken on a whole new context, where selfish men carve their own paths into self-destruction while thinking that what theyre doing is for the greater good.

What amazed me with Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is the multi-pronged route that it took to tell the story of English magic using two magicians: one who has devoted all his life to practice magic and hoard all knowledge, and one who has almost literally stumbled upon it and taken up casting spells on a whim. At 782 pages and in a large hardcover format, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell floats on gracefully, never predictable, and is often hilarious, particularly in Clarkes astute use of 19th century English with obsolete spellings like chuse (choose), surprize (surprise), and shew. It is also riddled with footnotes, which are short stories themselves.

If you find a large 782-page book daunting, the novel has been adapted into an excellent BBC drama in 2014. But then youll miss many things that have made Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell the finest English novel of the fantastic written in the last seventy years. Profuse praise not by me but by master storyteller Neil Gaiman.

Available in National Book Store and Fully Booked.

Photo by JL JAVIER

Ella Arcangel: Basbas ng Apoy 1

Its amazing how Julius Villanueva is able to conjure a distinct yet familiar world in Ella Arcangels Barangay Masikap. As Filipino mythology expands its pop cultural reach, its easy to dilute age old legends  stories that have been with us since weve heard them as tales passed on by our parents, kapitbahay, or kalaro. Villanueva somehow manages to make a world so lived-in, it practically exists next door or in that vacant lot down the street. Part of the reason why is because Villanueva uses everyday magic to discuss social injustices. Issues of land grabbing, poverty, extrajudicial killings, and domestic abuse are rife in Barangay Masikap. Ella doesnt deal with them directly, but the creatures that she encounters have motivations that are rooted in the corrupt practices of humans.

In Basbas ng Apoy 1, Ella slips into a shadow realm behind Barangay Masikap to investigate recent anomalies. She assists humans and engkantos alike, both displaced and trying their best to survive heat and hunger. Theres an undercurrent of environmentalism that grounds Ellas adventures, whether it's with the massive creatures that attempt to take her life or the great lord of the land decrying the loss of his forest due to overpopulation and overdevelopment. As portals between worlds close, engkantos and creatures are starting to move out of their natural habitats, forcing them to protect themselves. Ella offers her help but she is dismissed. Kung kayo nga lang mga tao, hindi ninyo kayang mabuhay nang payapa madadamay lang kami sa gulo ninyo, one of the creatures tells her.

In the background is a wicked diwata, who has captured a man to be her king. The story ends as she finds a way to free herself from the other realm, poised to wreak havoc in Barangay Masikap. Well have to wait for the second volume to see what shell do.

Basbas ng Apoy 1 is currently sold out (the first outing is a gorgeous piece of work with its black cover and gold foil stamp) but check the creators pages on Facebook for announcements. The previous two books are available on mervstore.com.
SAN JOSE (BCN)

The Santa Clara County District Attorney's Office has charged a San Jose man for repeatedly breaking into a preschool and for an attack on a pet tortoise at the school.

Prosecutors charged George Robles, 40, with felony animal abuse, commercial burglary and vandalism. He is being held without bail with an arraignment scheduled for Wednesday afternoon in San Jose.

Police first arrested Robles on Jan. 30 after a concerned citizen called police about 11:30 a.m. to report hearing glass breaking at the Play 'N' Learn preschool in the 500 block of Massar Avenue. The owner of the preschool discovered the tortoise impaled with a stick and when police arrived, they found Robles nearby.

The arrest followed a Jan. 27 break-in police say was captured on security cameras and also involved Robles.

Authorities say security footage showed that Robles broke into the school through an unlocked door around 5 a.m., stealing about $1,800 worth of computers and other electronics.

Robles was released from custody on bail, however, according to the district attorney's office.

An arresting officer filed a request for the magistrate to review bail, because the suspect in the alleged crime was eligible under emergency COVID-19 rules for immediate release. The request was denied, and the defendant was released.

Police allege that the suspect broke into the school again the next day, Jan. 31, this time spending the night in the school and stealing about $1,000 more of electronics and groceries.

The crime was again captured on security cameras.

When the owner arrived that morning, the suspect allegedly fled. Police arrested him at 4 p.m. near the school.

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[February 10, 2021] Semperis Taps Former HPE Chief Technologist, Guido Grillenmeier, to Support the Company's Global Expansion

Semperis, the pioneer of identity-driven cyber resilience for enterprises, today announced the appointment of Guido Grillenmeier as chief technologist. In this role, Germany-based Grillenmeier will apply his domain expertise to help scale the company's rapid expansion, enabling more organizations across EMEA and around the globe to protect their identity infrastructure and enhance cyber resiliency of hybrid identity stores. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210210005267/en/ Guido Grillenmeier, Chief Technologist, Semperis (Photo: Business Wire) "Guido brings unmatched domain expertise to his role at Semperis. Our global network of customers, partners, and technology alliances will benefit greatly from his appointment to the Semperis leadership team," said Mickey Bresman, CEO of Semperis. "There's a very limited number of people with Guido's skill set and experience designing and protecting some of the largest and most complex identity environments in the world. He will play a key role at Semperis as we continue to deliver identity-driven security solutions designed to meet today's and tomorrow's challenges." The 14-year Microsoft Directory Services MVP is one of the world's foremost experts on Active Directory (AD) recovery and co-authored "A Definitive Guide to Active Directory Disaster Recovery" with Gil Kirkpatrick, chief architect at Semperis. With today's news, the Semperis team now has more than 60 years of collective Microsoft MVP experience, including 16-year Microsoft MVP, Kirkpatrick; 15-year Microsoft MVP, Sean Deuby, director of services; and 14-year Microsoft MVP, Darren Mar-Elia, vice president of products, among others. A well-established industry veteran, Grillenmeier previously worked as chief engineer at HP (now HPE and HP, Inc.) for nearly 20 years, where he was a member of the company's Advanced Technology Group (News - Alert) . While he was there, Grillenmeier led the development and delivery of HP's Windows Server 2008 Academies to HP's Services division. Grillenmeier later on served as chief engineer at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). Most recently, Grillenmeier held the position of chif technologist within the Enterprise Services Group at DXC Technology, a spinoff company from the Enterprise Services division of HPE and CSC. Throughout his career, Grillenmeier has helped some of the largest and most complex organizations in the world secure their AD and supported them along their transformation to Windows 10/m365 and Azure cloud services. His customers have spanned a variety of industries, including automotive, financial, government, manufacturing and telecommunications, among others.



In addition, Grillenmeier is a Microsoft certified architect and co-author of Microsoft Windows Security Fundamentals. He has authored numerous articles in leading technical magazines and has spoken at leading Microsoft conferences, including Microsoft Tech-ED, IT Forum, Windows Connections and the Hybrid Identity Protection conference. "I am thrilled to be at Semperis and working alongside many industry experts who I know well and respect greatly," said Grillenmeier. "I am fortunate to have been given many great opportunities in my career, including working with truly incredible customers - from government agencies with strict privacy requirements, to global enterprises with sophisticated hybrid environments. I look forward to applying what I've learned throughout my career to help the Semperis team deliver AD security that's built for today's fast-changing technology landscape and enable organizations to get back in business as fast as possible following an incident."

Grillenmeier's appointment continues the expansion of the company's senior leadership team, closely following the appointment of its Chief Scientist Igor Baikalov, Chief Financial Officer Rob Porell, and Vice President, Global Channels and Alliances, Richard A. Weeks. About Semperis Semperis is the pioneer of identity-driven cyber resilience for cross-cloud and hybrid environments. The company provides cyber preparedness, incident response, and disaster recovery solutions for enterprise directory services-the keys to the kingdom. Semperis' patented technology for Microsoft Active Directory protects over 40 million identities from cyberattacks, data breaches, and operational errors. Semperis is headquartered in New Jersey and operates internationally, with its research and development team distributed between San Francisco and Tel Aviv. Semperis hosts the award-winning Hybrid Identity Protection conference (www.hipconf.com). The company has received the highest level of industry accolades and was recently ranked the fourth fastest-growing company in the tri-state area and 35th overall in Deloitte's 2020 Technology Fast 500. It is accredited by Microsoft and recognized by Gartner. Twitter (News - Alert) https://twitter.com/SemperisTech LinkedIn (News - Alert) https://www.linkedin.com/company/semperis Facebook (News - Alert) https://www.facebook.com/SemperisTech YouTube (News - Alert) https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCycrWXhxOTaUQ0sidlyN9SA View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210210005267/en/

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AGL, Australias largest greenhouse gas emitter, is also the most prolific violator of environmental regulations for coal-fired power plants, collecting twice the rate of breaches as its market share in NSW and Victoria, analysis shows.

Data gathered by the Australia Beyond Coal alliance and published on the Coal Impacts Index website, also found AGL was responsible for the highest number of power failures at its plants.

AGLs Bayswater coal-fired power plant in the NSW Hunter Valley led other power stations in the numbers of breaches, including a water pollution incident that cost the company more than $1 million in fines. Credit:Dominic Lorrimer

AGL operates the Bayswater and Liddell plants in the NSW Hunter Valley and the Loy Yang A plant in Victorias Latrobe Valley.

The three power stations were found to have breached their licences 111 times since 2015, accounting for about three quarters of all violations  more than twice the roughly one-third market share these coal-fired plants command, the alliance said.

The first to receive the dose was the Minister of Healths son. A way to dispel doubts and uncertainties among the population, reluctant to administer the Russian product. President of the Parliamentary Health Commission also against the Russian vaccine. The Islamic Republic intends to immunize at least 70% of the population.

Tehran (AsiaNews / Agencies) - Tehran has launched the vaccination campaign against Covid-19 at Imam Khomeini Hospital, using the Russian product Sputnik V. With a ceremony broadcast on state TV, the Minister of Health Saeed Namaki stressed that "the first person to receive the Russian Sputnik vaccine is my son".

The inaugural, and symbolic, day of vaccination was held on 8 February, but the campaign will be fully operational only in the next few days. Among the first to receive the dose will be health professionals in contact with patients positive for the new coronavirus, the elderly, the disabled and veterans.

The first supply of Sputnik V arrived in Tehran on February 4 and the Iranian authorities have assured that two more shipments are scheduled for February 18 and 28. Health Ministry spokesman Kianoush Jahanpour explained that the Islamic Republic has purchased 2 million doses of the Russian vaccine so far.

The medical journal Lancet recently published a study on the effectiveness of Sputink V against the symptomatic evolution of Covid-19 registering it at 91.6%. However, part of the scientific community has doubts about the transparency and accuracy of the review.

Nevertheless, a fierce controversy has arisen in recent days around the Russian product, with the president of the Parliamentary Commission on Health refusing to receive the dose. Minister Namaki then added that the country will receive 4.2 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, purchased through the COVAX mechanism supported by the World Health Organization (WHO). The Islamic Republic is also working on the domestic production of a vaccine to immunize the entire population.

Tehran intends to vaccinate at least 70% of the population (over 80 million people in total); the goal by the end of the Iranian year, which ends on March 20, is to inoculate at least 1.4 million doses despite evident shortages of supplies on a global scale. Vaccines in Iran are administered free of charge to its citizens.

The new coronavirus has infected over 1.4 million people in Iran, the country most affected by the pandemic in the Middle East, and has killed nearly 59,000.
New York, Feb 10 : Warren Hastings, the 18th Century British Governor-General of Bengal, made an appearance in the Senate trial when the prosecutors cited his impeachment by the British House of Commons after he had left office as a precedent for trying Donald Trump who is no longer the President.

During the arguments on Tuesday on the constitutionality of holding the impeachment trial of Trump when he has already left office, Jamie Raskin, a Democratic member of the House of Representatives who is the lead prosecutor, gave the precedent of the impeachment trial of Hastings that began 233 years ago this month, nearly four years after his governor-generalship ended and he returned to England.

Raskin suggested that the Hastings impeachment in 1787 was a model for framers of the US Constitution who drafted it the same year.

He said, said that there were several impeachments of people who had left office during the lifetime of the drafters of the Constitution and "indeed, the most famous of these impeachments occurred while the framers gathered in Philadelphia to write the Constitution. It was the impeachment of Warren Hastings, the former governor-general of the British colony of Bengal." Another prosecutor, Democratic Joe Neguse, also mentioned the impeachment of Hastings.

Trump's lead lawyer Bruce Castor countered that it had no relevance to the US: "We left the British system." If the history of Britain is to be used, he said, "then the question is, (should) we have a parliament and we have a king?"

He asked, "Is that what we are headed for?"

The framers of the Constitution rejected the British model that allowed for the impeachment of anyone except the king and narrowed it to only those holding office, another defence lawyer, David Schoen said.

Hastings was ultimately acquitted by the House of Lords in 1795, eight years after he was impeached.

He had been charged with corruption, misuse of authority and mistreatment and improper execution of Indians.

At the start of the trial, the Senate had to resolve the question of whether Trump can be impeached after he has left office.

While the Republicans focused narrowly on the penalty for those found guilty to "be removed from office," which is not possible since Trump is no longer president, the Democrats pointed out that the Constitution also provides the penalty of "disqualification to hold and enjoy office" which can be handed to someone already out of office.

Ultimately, the Senate voted 56-44 that under the Constitution it had the power to try Trump even after he left office.

(Arul Louis can be reached at arul.l@ians.in and followed on Twitter at @arulouis)

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
By William Schwartz | Published on 2021/02/09

On February 8th the "Space Sweepers" webtoon made its worldwide debut on four platforms, having premiered on Kakao Webtoons in Korea last May. The "Space Sweepers" webtoon adaptation is appearing on Piccoma in Japan, Tapas in North America, Kakao Page Indonesia in Indonesia, and Delitoon in France. The timing was specifically designed to coincide with the release of the "Space Sweepers" movie on Netflix, which debuted worldwide on February 5th.

Plans are also underway to release the "Space Sweepers" webcomic in other territories, including Taiwan and Thailand. The "Space Sweepers" webtoon is currently up to thirty nine chapters, although only twenty of them are currently available to read for free in South Korea. Eight chapters are currently available to read without restriction in English on Tapas with more to come.

The "Space Sweepers" webtoon has had 5.5 million cumulative confirmed views. It comes from Writer Hong, whose many webtoon credits also include "The Cat Funeral" which was adapted into a film which also credits Writer Hong as the screenwriter. Writer Hong has spoken about he worried regarding how a blockbuster sci-fi webtoon could properly be adapted. Writer Hong has expressed interest in viewer reaction to the multi-genre mix which focuses on a spaceship crew that deals in space junk.

Written by William Schwartz
FOREST CITY, Iowa  Methamphetamine means probation for a Lake Mills man.

Caleb Robert Angel, 31, has been sentenced to three to five years of supervised probation and ordered to pay a $430 fine. Angel pleaded guilty to possession with intent to deliver meth and possession of marijuana-2nd offense.

Angel was arrested on July 18, 2020. Law enforcement says they were picking up two other people in Lake Mills on outstanding warrants when Angel walked by with a drug pipe in his mouth. Court documents state a search of his home found 6.79 grams of methamphetamine, multiple plastic baggies, a digital scale, meth pipes, marijuana, and a prescription medication.
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Molecular interactions of the receptor blocker JNJ-31020028 (light green; nitrogen atoms highlighted in blue, oxygen atoms in red) at the human Y2 receptor (grey). With seven helices, the receptor sits in the cell membrane and is accessible to its ligands from the outer side. Credit: Dr Anette Kaiser

In order for a drug to be effective at the right places in the body, it helps if scientists can predict as accurately as possible how the molecules of that drug will interact with human cells. In a joint research project, scientists from Collaborative Research Centre 1423 at Leipzig University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai have succeeded in elucidating such a structure, namely that of the neuropeptide Y receptor Y2 with one of its ligands. This is the first time that a molecular blueprint for this receptor is available, which will enable the development of tailor-made new drugs, for example to treat epilepsy or cardiovascular diseases. The researchers' findings have now been published in Nature Communications.

The Y2 receptor plays an important role, especially in the peripheral nervous system and in the brain, as it is considered one of the 'satiety receptors.' It also plays a role in epilepsy as well as in cardiovascular diseases. If these diseases are to be treated with drugs that block the Y2 receptor, it is important to ensure that the drug can target this receptor precisely and exclusively, because some closely related receptors would have exactly the opposite effect. When developing novel drugs, it is therefore essential to obtain highly targeted compounds and to have precise knowledge of their molecular properties.

Researchers led by Professor Annette Beck-Sickinger and Dr. Anette Kaiser at Leipzig University have succeeded in showing on the molecular level how substances can block the Y2 receptor. Working with their colleagues in Shanghai, they were able to explain the crystal structure with a bound ligand, validate it by means of numerous biochemical investigations, and transfer it to other systems. The new study also reveals that Y2 receptor blockers bind differently than comparable molecules at the closely related Y1 subtype. This will facilitate further knowledge-based development of selective compounds at both receptors.

The investigation of this receptor family with its endogenous ligands as well as other clinically relevant compounds is one focus of Collaborative Research Centre 1423. The CRC 1423 is a research project being funded for four years by the German Research Foundation (DFG), in which four funding institutions are involved: Leipzig University, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Charite - Universitatsmedizin Berlin and the Max Delbruck Center for Molecular Medicine. Researchers from these institutions with backgrounds in biochemistry, biomedicine and computational science are collaborating on an interdisciplinary basis to gain a comprehensive understanding of the effects of structural dynamics on the function of G protein-coupled receptors. The Collaborative Research Centre comprises a total of 19 sub-projects.

Explore further Inactivated human muscarinic receptors help researchers find paths to effective drugs

More information: Tingting Tang et al, Structural basis for ligand recognition of the neuropeptide Y Y2 receptor, Nature Communications (2021). Journal information: Nature Communications Tingting Tang et al, Structural basis for ligand recognition of the neuropeptide Y Y2 receptor,(2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-21030-9

Provided by Universitat Leipzig
Australia has to upend the way water is supplied if it is to cope with climate change and an extra 11 million people in capital cities, the Productivity Commission says as it demands greater scrutiny of government spending on projects that promise illusory new water to parched communities.

In a draft report into national water reform, the commission raised serious concerns about the Morrison governments new National Water Grid, warning without changes to its remit the agency could end up subsidising the private sector with taxpayers cash.

Drought led Scott Morrison and Michael McCormack to promise the National Water Grid in 2019, but the Productivity Commission says the agency could end up subsidising the private sector with taxpayers cash. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

The commission said governments at all levels had failed to remain focused on the challenges facing water policy despite the near disaster of recent droughts which had left regional towns without water.

The report was started in 2019 in response to a previous Productivity Commission inquiry into national water reform. The new report canvasses the National Water Initiative, a policy in place since 2004 to improve water allocation across the country that itself was in response to the devastating Millennium drought.
Vietnam has applied an anti-dumping and anti-subsidy duty of 33.88 percent on raw sugar from Thailand to protect domestic producers.

The Ministry of Industry and Trade said that although its preliminary investigation found Thai sugar exporters have a dumping margin of 48.88 percent, it decided to collect 15 percentage points less after taking into account the socio-economic impacts of the duty and the benefits of farmers, manufacturers and consumers.

The ministry began its investigation in September last year upon requests by Vietnamese sugar producers who claimed they were being hurt by the low-priced Thai product.

Its data showed that Vietnam's sugar imports from Thailand rose 330 percent from 2019 to 1.3 million tonnes last year.

This resulted in 3,300 people losing their jobs as many factories had to close and more than 93,200 farmers were affected.

The final decision on the duties will be determined in the second quarter this year.
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A Neolithic settlement dating back nearly 5,000 years has been discovered in Scotland and it could be on par with the world famous 'Skara Brae', experts predict.

Archaeologists discovered signs of the Neolithic village at the north end of the Bay of Skaill, Orkney after costal erosion unearth animal bones and a carved stone.

It is on the same island as Skara Brae which is considered the best preserved Neolithic settlement in Western Europe - dating back to 3,100 BC.

Sigurd Towrie from the University of the Highlands and Islands discovered a badly damaged wall that had been exposed by pounding tides and pouring rain.

Deer antlers, a boar tooth, a cattle jawbone and a large decorated stone have also been discovered at the site - said to date back nearly 5,000 years.

However, experts warned the new Neolithic site is 'disappearing at an alarming rate', so action needs to be taken to record details of the site for the future.

Eroding wall running out from an eroding section on to the beach. The dark material in the foreground is a layer of peat. Sigurd Towrie from the University of the Highlands and Islands discovered a badly damaged wall that had been exposed by pounding tides and pouring rain

Towrie discovered the stone while visiting the Bay of Bay Skaill after she noticed animal remains falling from an eroding section of shoreline.

'The finds suggest there is another settlement at the Bay of Skaill - one that, from previous environmental sampling, is likely to be 4,000 to 5,000 years old,' she said.

'If this is the case, and based on the scale of the eroded section, we may well be looking at a Neolithic/Bronze Age site on a par with Skara Brae - albeit one that is now disappearing at an alarming rate.'

Closer inspection found the stone marked with a pair of incised triangles and a series of rectangular bands running across the surface

Deer antlers, a boar tooth (pictured), a cattle jawbone and a large decorated stone have also been discovered at the site - said to date back nearly 5,000 years

Archaeologists discovered signs of the Neolithic village at the north end of the Bay of Skaill, Orkney after costal erosion unearth animal bones and a carved stone

Dr Antonia Thomas, the Archaeology Institute's rock art specialist, confirmed the find was potentially a carved stone - with designs similar to those seen at Skara Brae.

Skara Brae is one of the largest and most complete Neolithic developments ever found, and given the title 'Scotland's Pompeii' due to it being so well preserved.

It has long been thought that more Neolithic settlements may have dotted the bay surrounding Skara Brae - all of a similar age and size.

During building work in the 1930s, a wall was discovered to the north of the bay along with midden material, animal bone and four burials, which were later moved.

The new finds have refreshed interest in who may have lived around the bay during the New Stone Age period and what life was like 5,000 years ago.

Incised rock surface at the Bay of Skaill, Orkney. Closer inspection found the stone marked with a pair of incised triangles and a series of rectangular bands running across the surface

The faint incisions on the rock face became clearer as the sun broke through the cloud cover

The cow mandible recovered from the eroding shoreline section. Towrie discovered the stone while visiting the Bay of Bay Skaill after she noticed animal remains falling from an eroding section of shoreline

The discovery of deer remains is an unusual find for a Neolithic site on Orkney, with the animal perhaps used for rituals rather than food, researchers explained.

The Bay of Skaill is now under close observation from the archaeology institute, although an excavation is unlikely in the near future given coronavirus restrictions.

Towrie said: 'UHI Archaeology Institute will continue to carefully monitor the extent of the coastal erosion and act as and when necessary.'

Skara Brae is considered the best preserved prehistoric settlement of any period in the British Isles, leaving a vivid impression of prehistoric life.

An 'exceptional' collection of artefacts recovered from the site tell a story of farming and fishing among its inhabitants, as well as jewellery making and crafts.
A real estate agent accused of attacking two women in Sydneys inner west allegedly took four Viagra tablets, strangled one of the women and forced her to kiss him before he king hit her four times on the head, a court has heard.

Karl Howard, 44, the principal of Ray White in Balmain, was arrested and charged with assault occasioning actual bodily harm, wounding with intent to murder and trespassing after he allegedly attacked the women at Annandale in the early hours of February 8.

Karl Howard has been charged with attempted murder.

Police allege Mr Howard punched a 27-year-old woman to the head, before a 29-year-old woman attempted to intervene and was hit with a weapon believed to be a samurai sword. Emergency services were called to Ferris Street in Annandale about 5am and the women were taken to hospital.

Mr Howards case was briefly mentioned at Newtown Local Court on Wednesday. He did not apply for bail and it was formally refused.
Patna, Feb 10 : Leaving behind the days of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) veterans L.K. Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi at the national level, the saffron party in Bihar seems to be taking a new turn after emerging as the single-largest party in the Assembly elections.

In the state, the BJP has given indications of giving a platform to young leaders, sidelining veterans. In the Assembly elections held in 2020, although the party gave tickets to veteran leaders, they were, however, denied ministerial berths.

With the formation of the Nitish Kumar-led government's cabinet, the BJP handed over the responsibility of Deputy Chief Minister to Tarkishore Prasad and Renu Devi instead of former Deputy Chief Minister Sushil Kumar Modi, who has been elevated to the Rajya Sabha seat.

During the cabinet expansion on Tuesday, the veteran leaders were expected to get ministerial posts but were marginalised instead. Veterans such as Nand Kishore Yadav, Prem Kumar and Vinod Narayan Jha were shunted to send out a strong message of change.

The BJP, however, not just brought the party's Muslim face Shahnawaz Hussain into Bihar politics, but he was made a minister, sending out a strong message to the party's veteran leaders.

The BJP has tried to sideline all those leaders who were seen as the party's face in the state. Looking at statistics, there are 16 ministers from the BJP in Bihar, of which 12 are newly inducted faces. During the state cabinet expansion, out of the nine ministers from the BJP camp, seven are new faces.

BJP has once again reposed faith in former Minister Pramod Kumar while Samrat Chaudhary has been given a chance to become a minister again. However, Chaudhary is a new entrant to the BJP. He served as a minister in the Nitish government when he was part of the JD(U).

After the cabinet expansion , rebellion has started brewing within the BJP it appears. Senior BJP leader and Barh MLA Gyanendra Singh Gyanu has criticised the party's decision to elevate newly inducted leaders to the post of ministers. During the cabinet expansion, the BJP did not even take care of caste, region and reputation, he said. Experienced leaders and forward castes have been ignored, he further alleged.

Gyanu said as many as three ministers have been chosen from certain districts while many districts have been completely left out.

Meanwhile, congratulations and good wishes poured in for the new ministers after the formation of the new cabinet. BJP Bihar unit in-charge and MP Bhupendra Yadav also congratulated the newly appointed cabinet ministers, saying, "Many congratulations and best wishes to all the newly appointed ministers who took oath. Bihar is moving forward on the path of development under the leadership of the NDA government. The government is continuously working with determination to make Bihar 'Aatmanirbhar'."
Memery Crystal is the city law firm instrumental in opening up the London market to medicinal cannabis companies, having recently steered the listing of MGC Pharma ( ).

CEO Nick Davis joins Proactive London's Katie Pilbeam to explain the growing interest in life science companies and why now is the time for this sector to list. Davis explains that he has been waiting for the 'right quality' medical cannabis companies to come along.

In general, he says 'the London capital markets have been very strong' and supportive of life sciences firms.
Nepal Communist Party (NCP) faction to hold a "mass rally" on Wednesday in Kathmandu against Nepal's caretaker Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli's decision of Parliament dissolution. The faction will take out rallies against the dissolution of the House of Representatives (HoR) from five different places prior to converging into a mass meeting at Bhrikuti Mandap.

The spokesperson of the NCP, Narayan Kaji Shrestha informed that the rallies will be taken out from Pulchowk, Tripureshwor, Maitighar Mandala, Kaiser Mahal, and Jamal and a huge mass assembly will be held at Bhrikuti Mandap, Khabarhub. The protest started after Nepal President Bidya Devi Bhandari dissolved the Lower House on Oli's recommendation on December 20. After dissolving the Parliament, Oli also proposed elections on April 30 and May 10, 2021.

Meanwhile, over a dozen cases filed in Nepal's Supreme Court against the decision of dissolution of Parliament whose verdicts are expected by the end of this month.

Oli became the first Prime Minister of the Federal Republic of Nepal in 2017 after the communist alliance of the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist) CPN-UML and CPN (Maoist Center) secured nearly two-third majorities in the lower house.

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The five-day lockdown brought on by a COVID-19 scare in Western Australia had an estimated $120 million impact on the states economy, according to Treasury.

The figure is based off the mining, construction, and other essential services being largely unaffected by the sudden stop but WA Treasurer Ben Wyatt said the government realised small businesses and other sectors had still done it tough.

WA Treasurer Ben Wyatt said the lockdown was expected to have a negligible impact on economic growth in the state. Credit:Peter de Kruijff

Treasurys 2020-21 pre-election financial projections statement on Monday revealed a better-than-expected iron ore price and heating real estate market would see the surplus hit $3.1 billion rather than the $2.2 billion estimated in the mid-year review.

The pre-election statement was finalised just before the lockdown started but new analysis from Treasury estimates the impact on gross state product being less than 0.05 per cent.
Mumbai, Feb 10 : Actor Sonu Sood has been roped in for a People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) India ad that encourages meat-free eating habits. Sonu appears with a pair of chicks on his shoulder in the new campaign for PETA India.

The actor said: "This Valentine's Day, I encourage everyone to show some love to chicks - and cows, buffaloes, goats, pigs, and fish. There's nothing more attractive than kindness, and we can all be kind to animals, our planet, and our bodies by keeping animals off our plates." Sonu, who was named PETA India's Hottest Vegetarian in 2020, has appeared in a previous pro-vegetarian PETA India ad campaign, participated in the group's "Hug A Vegetarian Day" and supported a social media appeal to push McDonald's India to add a McVegan burger to its menu.

During the pandemic, he helped thousands of stranded migrant workers and students return to their homes, among other actions to help people in need.

He is part of a long list of celebrities including Anushka Sharma, Shahid Kapoor, Hema Malini, and R. Madhavan who have teamed up with PETA India to promote meat-free meals.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

As a second, deadly wave of COVID-19 batters Latin America, images have emerged from country after country of desperate people lining up for days to buy oxygen to ease the suffering of infected loved ones fighting for breath.

As demand soars, prices have skyrocketed and families have had to scrape together their last cents to pay for supplies of the essential gas.

On January 14 alone, a researcher estimates more than 100 people died of asphyxiation at hospitals in Brazil's northern Amazonas state.

One of them, according to his widow, was Henrique Marques, 52, who ran out of breath in a hospital in Manaus.

"When we learnt that the hospital lacked oxygen and beds we asked for help from the church, but the pastor did not manage to bring the cylinders in time," 58-year-old Ana Marques recounted.

According to the World Health Organization, about one in five people with COVID-19 requires oxygen therapy to relieve respiratory distress.

With more 19 million recorded infections to datelikely an undercount, according to expertsthis means almost four million people in Latin America have required oxygen therapy since the outbreak began.

Public health NGO PATH, which compiles a "COVID-19 Oxygen Needs Tracker", says more than half of hospitals in low- and middle-income countriesa category that includes most of Latin Americahave an inconsistent supply of medical oxygen, or lack it entirely.

Disproportionate impact

On a world map produced by PATH to show daily oxygen need, Brazil is marked with a large, bright orange dot indicating demand for some 327,000 cylinders, followed by Mexico with 89,700 cylinders, Colombia with 76,700, Argentina 56,200 and Peru 36,700.

"Countries with less access going into the pandemic are disproportionately impacted by spikes in demand due to COVID-19," Lisa Smith of PATH told AFP by email.

Access can be thwarted by shortages in everything from money to buy the oxygen to clinics to administer it, electricity to produce it, and navigable roads by which to transport the cylinders, she said.

Latin America's death toll of more than 610,000 is second only to that of Europe, with about 762,000.

Brazil and Mexico account for more than half of the region's deaths, with 228,000 and 162,000 respectively, and rank second and third in terms of mortality worldwide.

Peru is proportionally the hardest hit with 125 deaths per 100,000 of its population of 33 million.

Amazonas state and its capital, Manaus, were particularly assailed by the second wave this year, quickly running out of hospital beds, oxygen and burial space.

By mid-January, daily demand for oxygen in Amazonas was about 76,000 cubic meters (around 20 million US fluid gallons) and supply at a mere 28,200 cubic meters.

Price hikes

In Lima, July Blanco and her brother Juan Carlos were among hundreds to have lined up for days at a time, sleeping outdoors, to obtain an oxygen refill for their ailing father.

They waited patiently with others outside the Criogas factory, famed for keeping its prices stable while other producers hiked theirs by as much as 300 percent.

"My brother and I take turns... he sleeps here, out in the open, on the grass, so I am the one who has to bring him breakfast, lunch, dinner," Blanco told AFP on day four of their wait.

Criogas boss Jose Luis Barsallo, nicknamed the "Angel of Oxygen", has had to bring in police to ensure that profit-seeking vendors are removed from the waiting line.

The price for a 10 cubic-meter tank varies widely in Perubetween $330 and $690while a cubic meter of oxygen sells for anything between $5 and $13.

Oxygen, but no tanks

In Mexico, the authorities say they have not detected any shortage or hoarding of oxygen. However, there has been a 700-percent increase in demand between 20 December and 20 January, and a shortage of cylinders.

"There is enough product, but not tanks," Jesus Montano, spokesman for the government's consumer agency, told AFP.

On the Mexican black market, consumers say they are paying 45,000 pesos ($2,230) for a 9,500-liter tank and 32,000 pesos for a 6,000-liter tanktriple the normal price.

In impoverished Nicaragua, the price for a tank of oxygen could be as high as $1,000 or $1,500, according to Roger Pasquier, president of the Nicaraguan Anesthesiology Association.

"This generated a higher mortality rate because not everyone had the means" to buy at this price, he told AFP.

Sylvain Aldighieri, COVID-19 incident manager for the Pan-American Health Organization, said this week there was no "regional oxygen crisis" in Latin America, but conceded "some countries have been significantly challenged in the last few months."

The PAHO has distributed more than 600 oxygen concentrators in the region. These, unlike tanks that need refilling, can produce oxygen from a gas supply for as long as they are connected to a power source.

Explore further Follow the latest news on the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak

 2021 AFP
On a consolidated basis, the steel major reported net profit at Rs 4,010.94 crore in Q3 December 2020 compared with net loss of Rs 1,228.53 crore in Q3 December 2019.

Net sales jumped 11.6% to Rs 38,805.91 crore in Q3 FY21 over Q3 FY20. Pre-tax profit during Q3 FY21 was at 5,582.60 crore as against pre-tax loss of Rs 607.49 crore in Q3 FY20. Tax expense for the quarter soared 572.70% to Rs 1,320.71 crore as against Rs 196.32 crore in Q3 December 2019. The Q3 result was declared post trading hours yesterday, 9 February 2021.

Consolidated EBITDA improved 53% QoQ and 161% YoY to Rs 9,540 crore, with improved realization across key entities. The company generated free cash flow of Rs 12,078 crore in Q3FY21, driven by strong operating performance and better working capital management. The company said it continues to prioritize on capital expenditure. It spent Rs 1,394 crore on capex during the quarter. The company has decided to restart work on Pellet plant and Cold Roll Mill complex at Tata Steel Kalinganagar. Both the Pellet plant and Cold Roll Mill complex, once completed, will expand margin.

As part of the enterprise deleveraging plan, Tata Steel has completed reduction of net debt by Rs 18,609 crore in the first nine months of the current financial year. During the third quarter, the company reduced the leverage by Rs 10,325 crore. As part of the continued de-leveraging strategy further deleveraging is being undertaken in Q4 FY21.

Consolidated production grew 3% to 7.20 million tonnes in Q3 December 2020 from 6.99 million tonnes in Q3 December 2019.

In India, crude steel production stood at 4.60 million tons in Q3 FY21, registering a 3% Y-o-Y (year-on-year) growth from 4.47 million tons in Q3 FY20. Domestic deliveries grew 8% Q-o-Q (quarter-on-quarter) and 4% Y-o-Y to 4.16 million tons. Exports shrank below 11% of overall deliveries. Sales witnessed strong momentum but was constrained by lower opening inventory. Tata Steel achieved the highest ever quarterly EBITDA of Rs 8,811 crore with 46% Q-o-Q and 114.32% Y-o-Y growth, driven by higher prices, better product mix, lower exports and operating efficiency initiatives. This translates into an EBITDA per ton of Rs 18,931 and an EBITDA margin of 34.9%.

T V Narendran, the chief executive officer (CEO) & managing director (MD) of Tata Steel, said that: "The recovery in the global and Indian economy has led to sharp improvement in steel demand in India. We pivoted our deliveries to domestic markets, to cater to the requirements of our local customers by reducing exports. All the segments, especially automotive, have performed extremely well supported by our continuous focus on strong customer relationships, superior distribution network, brands and new product developments. We are also making good progress on our various initiatives to de-risk the business while our digital marketing platforms are helping us reach new markets and be future ready. The investments in infrastructure and recent policy developments, to drive economic growth, should drive steel demand in India. Given strong market conditions and our success with deleveraging, we have restarted work on the pellet plant and the CRM complex at Kalinganagar which will help in reducing costs and improving revenues."

"In Europe, our underlying performance has improved quarter on quarter while the reported EBIDTA was negatively impacted by few one offs. We remain committed to arrive at a strategic and sustainable solution for Tata Steel Europe, though in the immediate term, we will focus upon business performance and cash flows," he added.

Koushik Chatterjee, executive director and CFO, said: Continuing with the recovery from the deep impact of the pandemic in the first quarter of the financial year, Tata Steel has delivered one of the best financial performance during this quarter with the highest ever consolidated EBITDA of Rs.9,540 crores and free cash flows of over Rs 12,000 crores on the back of strong underlying operating performance of the India business, sharp focus on capital allocation and working capital management. All our operating hubs in India have performed exceptionally well with the stand alone EBIDTA margin at 37.5%. Our key subsidiaries Tata Steel BSL and Tata Steel Long Products have also reported the highest ever profitability in recent years.

Tata Steel group is among the top global steel companies with an annual crude steel capacity of 34 million tonnes per annum. It is one of the world's most geographically-diversified steel producers, with operations and commercial presence across the world.

Shares of Tata Steel were down 0.83% at Rs 693.75. The stock hit a high of Rs 724.40 and a low of Rs 692.60 in early trade.

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
By William Schwartz | Published on 2021/02/09

Netflix recently released new still shots depicting how "Space Sweepers" was shot behind the scenes. "Space Sweepers" is a futuristic science fiction story, that deals with the crew of a spaceship that cleans up space junk. The photos emphasize the rustic quality of the sets, showing the cast and crew interacting behind the scenes and also giving a glimpse of the motion capture suit used for Yoo Hae-in's mannerisms.

Other scenes captured in the still shots include a celebratory cake prevented to Richard Armitage for his first appearance in a South Korean film. The pictures also provide confirmation of the sheer scale of crew members that had to be used for the movie, which had been mentioned at the February 2nd conference held by Netflix to promote the film. Purportedly a large number of chroma key green mattes were used for special effects, though these do not appear in the still images.

Written by William Schwartz

___________



"Space Sweepers" is directed by Jo Sung-hee, and features Song Joong-ki, Kim Tae-ri, Jin Seon-kyu, Yoo Hae-jin, Oh Yoon-soo, Kim Dae-han. Release date in Korea: 2021/02/05.

The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company

Washington, Feb 11 : US President Joe Biden on Wednesday announced sanctions against military leaders in Myanmar.

Biden said his administration was taking steps to prevent Myanmar's generals from having access to $1 billion of government funds held in the US, the Xinhua news agency reported.

The US would identify the first round of sanctions targets this week and impose export controls, Biden said.

He also called on the Myanmar military to immediately release detainees, including President U Win Myint and State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi.

A one-year state of emergency was declared in Myanmar after U Win Myint and Aung San Suu Kyi were detained by the military on February 1.

The military had demanded the postponement of new parliamentary sessions, alleging massive voting fraud in the November 2020 general elections, which saw the National League for Democracy win a majority of seats in both houses of Parliament. Myanmar's Union Election Commission dismissed the allegation.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Lockdown orders and other pandemic restrictions have been issued by the provinces chief public health officer with no scientific support, and they violate the charter rights of Manitobans, a judge was told Tuesday.

Lockdown orders and other pandemic restrictions have been issued by the provinces chief public health officer with no scientific support, and they violate the charter rights of Manitobans, a judge was told Tuesday.

"Today we have to wear a mask; is Dr. (Brent) Roussin going to go out tomorrow and say we have to wear five?" said Allison Pejovic, a lawyer with the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, during a hearing before Court of Queens Bench Justice Glenn Joyal.

"All he needs to say is this is reasonably necessary and there is no requirement to provide any science," Pejovic said. "There needs to be some checks on his power."

The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, a Calgary-based advocacy group, represents seven Manitoba churches in their fight against pandemic orders that restrict church gatherings: Gateway Bible Baptist Church, Pembina Valley Baptist Church, Redeeming Grace Bible Church, Grace Covenant Church, Slavic Baptist Church, Christian Church of Morden , and Bible Baptist Church. Three individual applicants on the lawsuit include a minister, a deacon, and a man fined for attending a Steinbach protest rally.

The justice centre argues Manitobas Public Health Act transfers sweeping lawmaking power to Roussin, with little or no legislative oversight. The justice centre, which has filed similar legal action in B.C. and Alberta, wants sections of the Public Health Act that authorize those powers to be struck down.

Under the act, the chief public health officer may take certain measures if they "reasonably believe" they are necessary, Pejovic said.

"Somebody needs to scrutinize whether Dr. Roussin is reasonable with respect to his reasonable belief," she said. "There is no criteria to decide whether an order of Dr. Roussin is necessary."

Roussins health orders are issued with no reference to the latest science, Pejovic said, noting a recent study that she said "called into question" the frequency of COVID-19 transmission by people who are asymptomatic.

"If the science doesnt matter, why are we doing it?" Pejovic said. "People are going bankrupt, businesses are closing peoples lives are being destroyed by these orders.

"Were challenging the government: show us this is justified. Show us the science. And if the science is there, maybe there will be fewer conflicts. The problem is, there is silence."

Joyal said the subtext of Pejovics argument appeared to be that there is a deliberate effort to keep scientific evidence from the public.

"Im not sure the democratic principle is being affronted in the manner you are alleging," Joyal said.

Justice centre lawyer Jay Cameron said they dont take issue with the science behind Roussins decisions, but with the authority he has been given to make them.

Cameron said Roussin should be required to report his decisions to the health minister, with supporting reports and studies.

"The minister is not being informed (about) what underscores the decision, so how can he go back to the legislature and say this is why a decision was made?" Cameron said.

Lawyer Michael Conner, who represents the province, said Roussins orders are subject to "several layers" of checks and balances, with all levels of government "deeply involved" in decision-making.

Delegating authority to Roussin "makes sense" when dealing with a "rapidly evolving pandemic," but ministerial approval "is not a rubber stamp," Conner said.

A second eight-day hearing in the court action, which will focus on arguments that lockdown measures violate freedoms of conscience, religion, expression and association, is set to begin April 19.

dean.pritchard@freepress.mb.ca
Minister of Education and Science of Ukraine Serhiy Shkarlet says that former Deputy Chief of Staff of President Viktor Yanukovych Andriy Portnov and MP Vadim Novinsky (non-factional) have the right to serve at the supervisory board of the Odesa Law Academy National University.

"Each higher education institution has autonomy, and solely on the proposal of the higher education institution, an order is formed to form a supervisory board. Tell me, the names of Portnov, Novinsky, someone else, they are convicts, criminals, or they have no right, or have things, because of which it is prohibited by law to be on the supervisory board?" Shkarlet said at a press conference during the All-Ukrainian forum "Ukraine 30. Coronavirus: Challenges and Answers"on Tuesday.

The Minister said that the Odesa Law Academy submitted this submission and the Ministry of Education agreed on it.

"If this is a criminal, if a person in some way cannot be on the supervisory board, then the ministry will not agree on him," he said.

As reported, in January 2021, Portnov and Novinsky joined the supervisory board of the Odesa Law Academy National University.

DECORAH, Iowa  Stolen property and a dangerous car chase is sending a Minnesota man to prison.

Thomas James Yennie, 42 of Rochester, has pleaded guilty to eluding, 2nd degree theft, and possession of THC-1st offense. He was arrested after leading law enforcement on a chase in Winneshiek County on June 9, 2020. Authorities say Yennie crossed the center line and nearly crashed into another vehicle, then led sheriffs deputies on a pursuit down Highway 52.

Yennies vehicle was eventually found in a ditch and he was found and arrested on June 10. Law enforcement says Yennie was also connected to over $1,500 in items stolen from Sleepy Eye Bus Service and Schieffert Farms.

Hes been sentenced to five years in prison, with credit for time served.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel wants a gradual reopening of shuttered stores and hotels next month as long as the coronavirus infection rate continues to fall in Europes biggest economy.

Passengers traveling to the UK will face tougher quarantine measures, including enforced stays in hotels, repeated tests and the threat of fines as authorities seek to get a grip on the coronavirus pandemic.

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Hong Kongs government will hold a press conference on the Covid-19 situation later Wednesday. South Korea cleared AstraZeneca Plcs and the University of Oxfords vaccine for all adults, including the elderly.

BioNTechs New Factory Starts Production (3:51 p.m. HK)

BioNTech started producing messenger RNA, the active ingredient for the Covid-19 vaccine sold with Pfizer, at its new factory in Marburg, Germany, moving closer to being able to boost production in Europe by some 750 million doses a year.

The first vaccine batch produced at the site, enough for 8 million doses, is scheduled for distribution in early April, BioNTech said. Though it takes only a few days to produce mRNA, the test batch made this week will need to be purified, concentrated, mixed with lipids and taken to another site to be put into vials.

Merkel Proposes Gradual Shop Openings (3:29 p.m. HK)

Germanys Angela Merkel will propose a gradual reopening to the countrys 16 state premiers later on Wednesday while arguing for the current restrictions -- including the closing of schools and non-essential stores -- to remain in place until early March, according to a chancellery briefing document seen by Bloomberg.

According to Merkels plan, stores could reopen in regions with a seven-day incidence rate of less than 35 per 100,000 people and hotels in areas where the rate is less than 20. For Germany as a whole, the rate has been declining steadily since a peak of close to 200 before Christmas.

Etihad Says Traffic to Return in 2023 (2:45 p.m. HK)

A recovery from the crisis is taking longer than planned, but should take place in two years, Etihad CEO Tony Douglas said in interview with Bloomberg TV. Proof of vaccination will be a key part of future travel. Etihad is first airline to have a fully inoculated crew to operate jets.

Virus Wont be Eradicated, Virologist Says (2:40 p.m. HK)

We are only at the start of this epidemic, unfortunately," said Belgian microbiologist Peter Piot. We have to start thinking in terms of society living with Covid." While vaccines will likely allow a return to a semblance of normalcy, there will be flare ups from time to time, the director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine said in an interview with LEcho newspaper.

We must also continue the distancing measures for a period long enough for there to be a good suppression of the virus," said Piot, who helped isolated the Ebola virus in 1976 and now advises European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

South Africas Vaccine Rollout (2:08 p.m. HK)

Approval processes for Johnson & Johnson inoculation are underway, South Africas Health Minister Zweli Mkhize said. Roll out of vaccination will proceed in form of implementation study" in partnership with the Medical Research Council. A review of Russias Sputnik vaccine is also in advanced stages," the government said.

South Korea Approves First Vaccine (1:21 p.m. HK)

South Koreas drug-safety agency approved AstraZenecas and the university of Oxfords vaccine under the condition that the partners submit results of additional clinical trials. The vaccine will be used for people aged 18 years and over, including the elderly.

Hong Kong Meeting (11:49 a.m. HK)

Hong Kong will hold a briefing on virus measures later Wednesday after a meeting of its expert committee on Sinovacs vaccine. Sinovac has yet to publish phase 3 clinical-trial results but submitted some data to Hong Kongs government.

Hong Kong is expected to also announce planned changes to social-distancing measures after the Lunar New Year holiday, the South China Morning Post reported, citing an unidentified government source. Currently, restaurant dine-in services are banned after 6 p.m., public gatherings are limited to two, and venues such as gyms, beauty parlors, bars and clubs remain closed.

Japan Wont Lift Emergency (10:51 a.m. HK)

The Japanese government is planning to keep the state of emergency in the 10 prefectures despite earlier reports that it was considering lifting it in some areas, broadcaster FNN reported. Officials see the need to keep the emergency in place to ease pressure on the medical system, it said.

Japan will start vaccinations by the middle of next week, Jiji reported.

Lilly Antibody Combo Gets Approval (8.30 a.m. HK)

Eli Lillys combination antibody drug was cleared for emergency use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, providing doctors with a treatment option that is expected to be better able to combat new mutations.

The FDA authorized the treatment for use in Covid-positive adults and children 12 and older who are at high risk of developing severe forms of the disease or progressing to the hospital, according to a fact sheet posted Tuesday by the agency.

Pfizer Shot Gives Two-Thirds Protection (8:20 a.m. HK)

Early findings from the U.K.s vaccination program, due to be released within days, show that the first dose reduced the symptomatic infection risk among patients by 65% in younger adults and 64% in over-80s, a person familiar with the matter said. The data, first reported by The Sun newspaper, showed that two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine saw protection rise to between 79% and 84%, depending on age. The AstraZeneca vaccine offers similar protection, according to the newspaper.

WHO Rules Out Lab Theory on Virus (8:15 a.m. HK)

A World Health Organization-led investigation in China found that the coronavirus most likely jumped to humans through an animal host or frozen wildlife products, concluding that its extremely unlikely" it came from a laboratory leak. No further research is needed to look into the theory about a leak, Peter Ben Embarek, a WHO food-safety scientist, told reporters Tuesday at a joint briefing with China in Wuhan, the city where Covid-19 first mushroomed at the end of 2019. That speculation about a lab escape has been promulgated by former U.S. President Donald Trump, among others.

The virus could have been introduced to the Huanan wet market in Wuhan, which many of the first Covid patients were linked to, by a person who was infected or by a product that was sold there, Ben Embarek said.

Australian Quarantine Hotel Closed (8:11 a.m. HK)

A hotel in Melbourne being used to quarantine overseas arrivals has been closed after new coronavirus cases were linked to it. The Holiday Inn at Melbourne Airport will close until further notice, Victoria state quarantine authorities said. About 135 staff and 48 residents who were in the hotel between Jan. 7 and Feb. 9 will need to enter a 14-day quarantine, while two schools located in the suburb thats recorded seven new exposure sites have closed as a precaution.

Jakartas Coronavirus Cemeteries (7:01 a.m. HK)

Indonesias capital is racing to open more cemeteries to cope with the coronavirus death toll that has doubled in less than three months despite vaccination efforts.

Jakartas government bought more than three hectares (7.4 acres) of land to use as dedicated cemeteries for those who have died from Covid-19, said Suzi Marsitawati, who heads the provinces park and forest service. The new sites will accommodate at least 8,000 burial plots, after the existing two cemeteries hit capacity.

Astra Vaccine Urged for South Africa (4:30 p.m. NY)

The lead researcher of the South African trial of AstraZenecas and Oxfords coronavirus vaccine urged authorities in the country to continue using the shot to cut death and hospitalization rates and the chance of further virus mutations.

Early data of a small phase trial showed that AstraZenecas vaccine has limited efficacy against mild disease caused by the B.1.351 variant thats now dominant in South Africa, prompting the government to suspend plans to give it to health workers. The study didnt determine whether it protects against severe Covid-19 cases and deaths because most participants were young healthy adults," according to the company.

Pfizer Plant in Belgium Resumes Production (2 p.m. NY)

Pfizer said it has resumed manufacturing the Covid-19 vaccine it developed with BioNTech at its plant in Belgium after temporarily reducing production to upgrade the facilitys production lines, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The changes in Puurs, Belgium, have finished, and during the week of Jan. 25 the company resumed its original delivery schedule of doses to the European Union, the Journal said, citing a Pfizer spokeswoman. Pfizer also plans to increase deliveries next week to meet its contractual obligations for the first quarter, she told the paper.

U.K. Advisers Raise New Variant Concerns (1:40 p.m. NY)

A U.K. government advisory panel raised concerns over a further mutation of the so-called Kent variant, while reassuring the public that vaccines should still provide protection.

The New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group said the additional E484K mutation of the British strain called B.1.1.7 has been designated a variant of concern," according to a government statement. The mutation was first identified in Bristol, England. The same mutation has been seen in a number of variants, including those from South Africa and Brazil.

Greece Imposes Stricter Lockdown (1:05 p.m. NY)

The Greek government has reintroduced a stricter lockdown in Athens and the surrounding Attica region in a bid to curb a recent spike in new coronavirus cases and hospitalizations. The area accounts for around half of Greeces population of almost 11 million.

Astra CEO Defends Vaccine for Severe Covid (12 p.m. NY)

AstraZenecas vaccine should protect people against severe disease from the South Africa strain of the virus, according to the companys chief executive officer.

Speaking at a World Health Organization meeting Tuesday, CEO Pascal Soriot said that while a recent study showing the vaccine developed with Oxford University may not prevent mild disease was concerning, that didnt mean more serious illness wouldnt be stopped.

Soriot also said the company had capacity to deliver 100 million vaccine doses in February globally. That should increase to 200 million doses a month from April, he said.

NYC Surpasses 1 Million Doses (10:55 a.m. NY)

New York City has surpassed 1 million vaccine doses, a major milestone but missing a goal that Mayor Bill de Blasio had hoped to reach by the end of January.

The challenge for us constantly is the lack of supply," he said in a briefing on Tuesday. This is a really good sign of what we could do in this city, but we could be doing a lot more."





This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text. Only the headline has been changed.

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ISTANBUL  Ever since the first batch of S-400 missiles landed just outside Ankara in 2019, Turkeys acquisition of the Russian-made air defense system has been a central friction point in its relations with the United States.

Washington has repeatedly called on Turkey to remove the S-400s from its territory, citing concerns that their radars pose a threat to NATO defense infrastructure. Leading Turkish officials, however, maintained the missiles were necessary to bolster domestic security. This stance initially led to the nation's suspension from NATOs F-35 fighter jet program and later, in December 2020, saw the imposition of US sanctions on Turkey over the purchase.

Throughout the discord, a top security concern for Ankara has been Washingtons cooperation with Kurdish forces in Syria known as the Peoples Protection Units (YPG), which Turkish officials view as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a militant insurgency that has been at war with the Turkish state since the 1980s. Since 2014, the United States has worked with YPG forces to eradicate the Islamic State from northeast Syria.

Now, nearly three weeks into US President Joe Bidens tenure, a top Turkish figure has hinted at a possible opening to settle the long-standing S-400 issue by linking it with Ankaras concerns over Kurdish forces in Syria. In an interview with the Hurriyet newspaper published Tuesday, Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar signaled that Ankara might be willing to compromise on the Russian missiles if Washington reevaluates its support to the YPG.

The most sensitive issue in our relations with the US is the countrys support to the YPG, the PKKs arm in Syria, Akar told Hurriyet. We can find a solution for the S-400s in our negotiations with the US but we expect them to see the facts about the YPG. If we cannot find a solution [regarding the YPG], we cannot go anywhere in relations with the US.

The statement was the first of its kind since Ankara acquired the S-400s and prompted speculation as to whether such negotiations might offer an avenue to defuse grievances on a range of issues. Turkey expert Aaron Stein, however, told Al-Monitor that Ankara would need to offer more to satisfy a very angry Congress.

The statement is noteworthy and clearly a budge off the maximalist rhetoric we have been hearing, said Stein, the research director at the US-based Foreign Policy Research Institute. However, I would temper expectations of a quick reset. First, we need to hear this from [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan. He is the only one that really matters.

Erdogan said Jan. 15 that he hoped the incoming Biden administration would take positive steps in negotiations regarding the S-400s and Turkeys suspension from the F-35 fighter jet program.

Despite having paid a serious fee on the F-35s, the F-35s still have not been given to us. This is a serious wrong the United States did against us as a NATO ally, Erdogan said.

But Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said Feb. 5 that the United States would not lift the F-35 ban on Turkey. Kirby said the S-400 purchase was inconsistent with Turkeys commitments as a US and NATO ally before urging Ankara not to retain the S-400 systems.

In his comments to Hurriyet, Akar said no other NATO-allied countries had raised the S-400 issue with Turkey. He also noted that several former Warsaw Pact countries in Europe that have since joined NATO retained Soviet-era weapons systems without coming under similar punitive measures.

Seeking a possible middle road, Akar said the 1998 transfer of Russian-made S-300 missiles from the Republic of Cyprus to the Greek island of Crete could serve as a model. He said the S-300s in Crete are rarely operational and remain mostly in storage, similar to Ankaras current plans for its S-400s.

These systems are used according to the threat situation. We decide that, Akar told Hurriyet.

Though referencing the Crete model might signal flexibility on Ankaras part, Ozgur Unluhisarcikli, Ankara director for the German Marshall Fund, noted the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act  the CAATSA framework under which the United States sanctioned Turkey for its S-400 purchase  did not exist at the time of the S-300 crisis.

Unluhisarcikli told Al-Monitor that a possible settlement could hinge on whether or not Turkeys S-400s remain operational.

Does this mean Turkey will keep the S-400s boxed up, or does it mean Turkey is willing to turn them on and off? Unluhisarcikli asked. While the former is likely to lead to a solution the US may also agree to, the latter is unlikely to do so.

The developments come after Erdogan said in January that Turkish officials were in ongoing discussions with Russian counterparts regarding the possible purchase of a second batch of S-400s.

It hasn't helped that on Feb. 3, Turkish Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu accused the United States of supporting a 2016 coup attempt in Turkey. The US State Department condemned the statement as unfounded the same day.

Two days before that exchange, the Biden administration held its first call with an Turkish official. During a nearly one-hour discussion, US national security adviser Jake Sullivan and Turkish presidential spokesperson Ibrahim Kalin discussed US-Turkish relations and pathways to managing disagreements effectively, according to a White House press release.
On Feb. 5, members of the UN-led Libyan Political Dialogue Forum (LPDF) voted on interim leadership for its executive council, selecting Mohammad Younes Menfi as chairman of the Presidency Council and Abdul Hamid Mohammed Dbeibah as interim prime minister. The outcome of the vote by the 74-member forum came as a big surprise to external sponsors of the Libyan peace process  and Russia was no exception here. Moscow believed that a list it had agreed upon with Ankara and Cairo, led by Interior Minister Fathi Bashagha and Chairman of the House of Representatives Aquila Saleh, should have claimed the victory.

On the other hand, for Russia in Libya, by and large nothing has changed after the vote. Moscow still expects that its favorite figures will retain their positions, both in the new interim government of Libya  possibly receiving ministerial portfolios there  and following the national elections set for Dec. 24, 2021.

It is significant that precisely a week before the LPDF vote, Moscow received delegations from the opposing sides from the west and east of the country.

On Jan. 29, Deputy Prime Minister of the Tripoli-based Government of National Accord (GNA) Ahmed Maiteeq met in Moscow with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. A day earlier, Maiteeq also held talks with Russian Minister of Industry and Trade Denis Manturov.

At the same time, a delegation from Libyas eastern-based government headed by Minister of Foreign Affairs and the International Cooperation of the eastern-based government Abdelhadi Khuweij was in Moscow. In particular, he met with Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov. Khuweij spoke to the Russian newspaper Kommersant about the economic part of the talks in Moscow, saying the two sides had discussed projects for railway construction, electricity, education and health, including the possibility of supplying the Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine to Libya.

And on Jan. 25, Bogdanov received in Moscow a member of the Libyan House of Representatives  also known as the Tobruk government  Abdul Nasser Ben Nafi.

Moscow believes Washington organized the current stage of the peace process in Libya in its own interests while US diplomat Stephanie Williams was the interim head of the United Nations Support Mission in Libya. At the same time, Russia does not consider it expedient to openly oppose these steps by the United States, which may be beneficial to the Kremlin to a certain extent.

The Kremlin expects that certain figures with whom the Russian side was able to establish constructive interaction will retain their positions and influence in the country. It also cannot be ruled out that in the event of the failure of the current stage of a political settlement in Libya, Moscow  which actively receives representatives from both the west and the east of the country  will be ready to support an alternative unofficial format of the inter-Libyan dialogue. Such a format could be conducted during a joint visit of the delegations from the east and west in Moscow.

Maiteeq is one of the politicians in western Libya with whom Moscow works most actively and on whom it counts as a conductor of its interests. He retains some chances of getting a ministerial portfolio in the new government, and he will likely remain in the highest echelons of power after the December elections. He has been a frequent visitor to the Russian capital since 2017 and also visited Moscow with GNA Foreign Minister Mohammed Siyala in June 2020.

In September 2020, Maiteeq held important negotiations in Sochi, where he signed an agreement with one of eastern Libyan strongman Khalifa Hifters sons to unblock Libyan oil exports. This was a landmark event that confirmed Moscow's role in Libyan affairs and demonstrated its ability to find a common language with the Libyans, bringing the warring parties to the negotiating table on its territory. Then, at the end of December 2020, Maiteeq together with Siyala again arrived in the Russian capital.

At the same time, Saleh, who although unable to become chairman of the Presidential Council retained the post of head of the House of Representatives, is still the Kremlin's favorite among political leaders in eastern Libya. This happened after the Russian side once again became convinced that it could no longer trust Hifter, who finally discredited himself in front of his external sponsors against the backdrop of the collapse of the operation to conquer Tripoli. It is important to recall that it was Russian experts who prepared for Saleh a project to reform the presidential council and the GNA, some provisions of which are still in use.

At the same time, the Russian side has not yet developed relations with the influential Minister of Internal Affairs in the government of Fayez al-Sarraj, Fathi Bashagha, who has very close ties not only with Turkey but also with Western countries.

The head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the GNA would like to visit Moscow in order to hold talks and establish a constructive dialogue. In particular, it was planned that on Jan. 28, Russia was not supposed to meet Maiteeq, but Bashagha, who received an invitation from Bogdanov.

There are two factors to consider here. An informed Russian source working on the Libyan file told Al-Monitor that work on organizing Bashaghas visit to Moscow was carried out in the spring and summer of 2020, and possibly started even earlier. But then the official Russian side was pressured by various influential nongovernmental structures, including, for example, the Foundation for the Protection of Traditional Values, to cancel the visit. The latter is a Moscow-based organization with links to an infamous Russian troll farm. Two of its employees  Maxim Shugaley and Samer Sueyfan  were being held in Libya at the time Bashaghas visit was being prepared, after having been detained on charges of working for Seif al-Islam Gadhafi, son of ousted leader Moammar Gadhafi. The head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the GNA was directly accused of their capture.

Therefore, at that time, negotiations could not take place. Bashagha was also extremely negatively presented in a Russian feature film about the fate of the two men held in Libya, which aired on the Russian federal channel NTV. And in a number of Russian media outlets, the head of the Libyan Interior Ministry is referred to as "the leader of the terrorists." Accordingly, when Moscow itself began to express its interest in developing ties with Bashagha, this negative background hindered the development of any dialogue.

In fact, many politicians in western Libya, including those related to the GNA, have tried to compete with each other to become Russia's favorites. So the process of freeing the Russian nationals was delayed precisely because of the competition between the most influential players in the Libyan GNA, such as Sarraj, Maiteeq and Bashagha.

The decision to release the pair was made at the end of October, and Sarraj supported this decision. But when the interior minister and the prosecutor general wanted to release them and present their release as their own initiative, then there was a delay. The GNA chairman did not want the decision to release them to be made behind his back or through bypassing him. Sarraj feared that Bashagha would look good in the face of Moscow, so he postponed the release to try to prevent any rapprochement between Bashagha and Russia, as this could strengthen the position of the interior minister. The Russians were only released in December 2020.

Therefore, the arrival of Maiteeq instead of Bashagha to Moscow can also be seen as a reflection of internal competition.

Also, Moscow does not discount the possibility of negotiating with alternative candidates who generally oppose the current format of the inter-Libyan dialogue and, if it fails, may play a role. In September 2020, former head of the General National Congress of Libya and now head of the Ya Biladi Party Nouri Abusahmain visited Moscow, where he held talks with Bogdanov and representatives of the Russian security agencies.

It is also important to pay attention to the presence at the January talks in Moscow  among the delegation from Benghazi  of head of the General Commander's Office of the Libyan National Army (LNA) Hayri al-Tamimi. Within the framework of the military block of contacts, his presence could hint at Russia's plans to maintain its military presence in Libya and find legitimate grounds for this. This becomes especially important against the backdrop of increasing pressure from Washington after the arrival of President Joe Bidens administration over the presence of Russian mercenaries from the Wagner group.

It cannot be ruled out that Russia would like to create its own permanent military bases in Libya, primarily where Russian mercenaries are already present. Thus, a naval base could be created in Sirte, or an air force installation in Jufra. The problem is that Sirte is named as the city planned to house the new authorities  the GNA and the Presidential Council  and the city itself should be demilitarized. The withdrawal of mercenaries is the first stage of this process.

However, a possible option for maintaining the Russian presence in Sirte and Jufra could be the deployment of an official Russian mission of the Ministry of Defense at these bases, which could assist the new Libyan authorities in creating a unified armed force, and Russian mercenaries could be withdrawn from the country. To do this, Russia will need to obtain the consent of the officially recognized new authorities in Libya, and for this Moscow can use "its own figures" in the Libyan field.

Also, on this issue, Russia and Turkey could probably reach a mutual understanding. It should be borne in mind that Ankara is already creating two bases for itself in the country  an air base in al-Watiya and a naval base in Misrata. A rapprochement of the positions of Moscow and Ankara on the Libyan track is also to be expected in view of the plans announced by the United States about the need to free Libya from a foreign military presence  not only Russian but also Turkish or Emirati  which was directly stated by US Ambassador to the UN Security Council Richard Mills. This US position contradicts the interests of these states, which on the contrary are seeking to gain a foothold in Libya. They will now be ready to make mutual concessions and compromises to realize plans to deploy military contingents in this country.
CATANIA, FEB 10 - Italian police on Wednesday made 26 arrests in a probe into the business interests of a Cosa Nostra clan from the Sicilian city of Catania. Police seized some 50 million euros in allegedly laundered investments in businsses in Sicily, Lombardy and Veneto. The probe hit the investments of the Scalisi-Laudani clan. Some 17 companies and 48 pieces of property were seized. The Follow The Money operation employed over 100 finance guard tax police. The clan was said to have successfully infiltrated legitimate businesses in the affluent northern regions of Veneto and Lombardy. (ANSA).
Isn't part of child support also supposed to be about giving the child a fairly equal life at both homes? So if Halle is living a super fancy life, they want the other parent to be able to provide something that isn't drastically different?

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That's what I was thinking.

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Pretty much, yeah. It can also depend on who makes more money and does most of the child rearing.

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Yeah. If the child is living in luxury with one parent and just getting by with the other, they might not want to spend time with the parent who can't give them a big room with new furniture, the latest gaming system, the best food, expensive hobbies, brand-everything, etc. Though I can see how it is bound to be frustrating because you inevitably also finance that kind of lifestyle for the ex.

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Yeah I can understand that bitterness about the ex but ultimately they should just want their kid to be as comfortable as possible and let the petty shit go imo.



I mean if she were to find out he used all of that money on himself thats one thing but if it actually does make your childs life better then just deal with it sis.



Edited at 2021-02-10 05:17 pm (UTC)

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Thats the reasoning for the provisions, yes

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The problem with people who work as contractors (like actors), their yearly earnings can fluctuate wildly and getting the payments reduced doesn't always work for whatever reason.



Look at Brendan Fraser. He had to pay $75,000 a month to his ex, even though the movie roles stopped coming in.



ETA: That being said, Halle is worth $90 million so I doubt she's actually hurting for cash. But an average person who has a good year as a contractor can get really fucked by these formulas.



Edited at 2021-02-10 03:53 pm (UTC)

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No sis. If the child is with both of you, they need to experience the same standard of living at both homes. They shouldnt have a rich parent and a broke parent, and that can be easily prevented here.

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How red pill of her.

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Be careful who you have kids with  I feel the same way when male athletes and musicians complain about paying child support, just ride out the 18 years and be more selective next time

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I feel like people who are in love refuse to think about the reality that relationships often end. Like we know this is what happens when you have kids with someone and it doesn't work out, but people refuse to consider that because everyone thinks they'll be the exception.

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This is how I felt when I read in another post that Halsey wanted a baby so she was always trying to get pregnant no matter who she was with?? Girl just get a donor!

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Yup. She wanted this guy to get her pregnant, then dip so she could have the baby to herself. She has spent the last 12 years throwing a fit about the tragedy of her daughter having an active father in her life.



Edited at 2021-02-10 11:00 pm (UTC)

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Yeah if anything, you should be even more discerning about who you breed with than who you marry. If things sour, having kids with someone can fuck you way more than a bad marriage.



Edited at 2021-02-10 04:37 pm (UTC)

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I get her point, but it's impossible for me to sympathize with anything rich people go through. Especially growing up with a single dad who got zero help from the government and my mom never contributed a cent.



Again, I get the principal of the matter, but idk, man. So much about this sounds so fucking out of touch to me.

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I feel like for rich people in general money just doesn't mean a cozy lifestile but also control and being above rules. so being ordered what to do with part of your money seems to often be the. worst. thing. even tho the specific amount might not even hurt them all that much (though idk how much 16K/mo is relative to her income or net worth). That's probs why any amount of taxes are probably the worst to a lot of them too even though they'll spend more on designer shit or fancy cars without even thinking about it too much.

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If aubrey called her the n word, FUCK HIM



But really, why do these people make child support sound like punishment? That's your fucking child that you are spending on.

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Because he's probably not spending $16k on their child every month. That's usually the issue people have, even when they're not wealthy. People can literally be homeless and still have their wages garnished or not get stimulus relief because they owe. It is used as punishment all the time. The lifestyle thing mostly applies to the rich, and even that is wonky.

If your ex is literally living off of you while you're working, you probably cant spend as much time with your child, especially quality time.

It's wrong to act like the material bonuses in one relationship are a requirement for them all, as if children really work that way or should be encouraged to.

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That's the way it works, Halle. The kid deserves to have the same quality of life with both parents, that's where these laws come from - the physical and emotional wellbeing of the child you share.



Be careful who you have a child with.

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LMAO cry me a river, Halle.

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I wouldnt want to pay money to someone who called me that either sis but :/

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But she's paying CHILD support, not alimony. She is supporting keeping the child in the lifestyle they are accustomed to. Is she ok with the daughter living in a mansion with her and a one bedroom apartment with her dad?



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Yes! because I would want my child to know how pathetic their loser dad is compared to moi!

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It would be awful if that's what she wanted. You have to let the kids make up their own mind about their parent. So many fucked up relationships all over the place because parents poison their kids' minds. Unless the child could come into straight up harm, kids are good at deducing who is an asshole.

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I looked at Gabriels Instagram and it looks like he does spend time with Nahla, at least pre-pandemic.



It also seems like Nahla has only been with Halle since the pandemic started so maybe this is why she said that. It probably feels like an alimony for her more than child support atm. I would have not made this statement publicly tho if I were her.



Also, damn, Gabriel still looks fiiiine as hell after all these years.

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At the same time, he can't just eliminate all his expenses when Nahla is with Halle. Maintaining the home doesn't stop just because Nahla can't be there for now. He can't be expected to move somewhere smaller and then move back when the pandemic is over. Without knowing their child support agreement, he could be paying in part of in full for school or braces or into a college fund etc. Just because they can't be together right now doesn't mean he isn't supporting his child.



I don't doubt he's racist trash, but child support works the way it does for good reasons.

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I agree.

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Thanks for alerting me to the fact he has an instagram.



He's still super hot.

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Damn, we need pics of him and the daughter!

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12 years old? Time sure does fly. I mean this is why people prefer to marry someone on their same social status.

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I cannot BELIEVE their daughter is 12

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"She can understand if a parent needs help, but in today's society, Halle believes parents should do what it takes to financially provide for their children."



Her own relationship aside, this is an insanely tone deaf thing to say. Many parents (especially single mothers) are "doing what it takes", having a job and "side hustles" and are still having a hard time making the ends meet (especially in a pandemic). And they end up spending less time with the child, because they're always working, which is not great for their relationship and the child's development.





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This is giving me such big iF tHe GeNdErS wErE rEvErSeD vibes even tho that isnt what shes saying at all. It just feels exactly like something a pick me on Reddit would say in a post about how terrible women are.

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RTHK: Fresh anti-coup protests rock Myanmar

Protesters took to the streets of Myanmar for a fifth day on Wednesday, vowing to keep up demonstrations against last week's military coup even after a woman was shot and critically wounded during clashes the previous day.

The United States and United Nations condemned Tuesday's use of force against the protesters who are demanding the reversal of the February 1 coup and the release of deposed leader Aung San Suu Kyi, and other leaders of her National League for Democracy (NLD).

"We cannot stay quiet," youth leader Esther Ze Naw told Reuters. "If there is bloodshed during our peaceful protests, then there will be more if we let them take over the country."

Thousands of people joined demonstrations in the main city of Yangon.

In the capital, Naypyitaw, hundreds of government workers marched in support of a growing civil disobedience campaign.

A group of police in Kayah state in the east joined the protesters and marched in uniform with a sign that said "We don't want dictatorship", according to pictures published in the media.

There were no reports of violence on Wednesday but soldiers took over a clinic that had been treating wounded protesters in Naypyitaw on Tuesday, a doctor there said.

Another doctor said a woman protester was expected to die from a gunshot wound to the head sustained during a Tuesday confrontation with police in Naypyitaw.

She was wounded when police fired, mostly into the air, to clear the protesters. Three other people were being treated for wounds from suspected rubber bullets, doctors said.

Protesters were also hurt in Mandalay and other cities, where security forces used water cannon and arrested dozens.

Four policemen were injured on Tuesday as they tried to disperse protesters, some of whom threw stones and bricks, the military said.

The military has imposed restrictions on gatherings and a night curfew in the biggest cities.

The protests are the largest in Myanmar in more than a decade, reviving memories of almost half a century of direct army rule and spasms of bloody uprisings until the military began relinquishing some power in 2011.

The military justified its takeover on the grounds of fraud in a November 8 election that Suu Kyi's NLD party won by a landslide, as expected. The electoral commission dismissed the army's complaints.

Western countries have condemned the coup but taken little concrete action to press for the restoration of democracy.

The US State Department said it was reviewing assistance to Myanmar to ensure those responsible for the coup faced "significant consequences".

"We repeat our calls for the military to relinquish power, restore democratically elected government, release those detained and lift all telecommunication restrictions and to refrain from violence," spokesman Ned Price said in Washington.

The United Nations called on Myanmar's security forces to respect people's right to protest peacefully.

"The use of disproportionate force against demonstrators is unacceptable," Ola Almgren, the UN representative in Myanmar, said.

Avinash Paliwal, a senior lecturer in international relations at London University's School of Oriental and African Studies, said Myanmar will not be as isolated now as it was in the past, with China, India, Southeast Asian neighbours and Japan unlikely to cut ties.

"The country is too important geo-strategically for that to happen. The US and other Western countries will put sanctions, but this coup and its ramifications will be an Asian story, not a Western one," Paliwal said.

A doctor in Naypyitaw said the woman who was shot in the head was in a critical condition and not expected to survive. Social media video verified by Reuters showed her with other protesters some distance from a row of riot police as a water cannon sprayed and several shots could be heard.

The woman, wearing a motorcycle helmet, suddenly collapsed. Pictures of her helmet showed what appeared to be a bullet hole.

"Now we see the military takes brutal action against us," said Htet Shar Ko, an interpreter. "But we young people will keep fighting against the regime under our motto  military dictatorship must fail."

Alongside the protests, a civil disobedience movement has affected hospitals, schools and government offices.

Veteran activist Min Ko Naing called in a Facebook post on all government workers to join the disobedience campaign and for people to take note of those who didn't.

Protesters are also seeking the abolition of a 2008 constitution drawn up under military supervision that gave the generals a veto in parliament and control of several ministries, and for a federal system in ethnically diverse Myanmar.

Suu Kyi, 75, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 for campaigning for democracy and spent nearly 15 years under house arrest. She faces charges of illegally importing six walkie-talkies and her lawyer said he has not been allowed to see her.

Suu Kyi remains hugely popular at home despite damage to her international reputation over the plight of the Muslim Rohingya minority. (Reuters)

This story has been published on: 2021-02-10. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
New Delhi:

A court in nearby Angamaly on Saturday refused bail to popular Malayalam actor Dileep, arrested in connection with the alleged abduction and assault of a South Indian actress, and sent him to judicial custody till July 25.

Opposing the bail plea moved by the actors counsel, the prosecution informed the judicial magistrate court that there is strong evidence against Dileep and expressed apprehension that granting bail would lead to tampering of evidence and influencing witnesses as he is very influential.

It would also adversely affect the ongoing probe into the conspiracy behind the sensational case, the prosecution said.

Special prosecutor A Sureshan alleged that supporters of Dileep have launched a strong campaign through social media hailing the actor, who is a prime suspect in the case.

If the actor is let out on bail, such campaigns, which have also targeted police, would be further strengthened, affecting the investigation, he said.

The prosecution alleged that the accused, charged under various sections of IPC, including Section 120(B) (punishment of criminal conspiracy) has spoken to the media against the actress who was subjected to brutal assault in a moving car on February 17 and that if he was out on bail that would be a threat to the victim.

The government lawyer also pointed out that no accused arrested in connection with the case had been granted bail.

Moreover, police are looking for two other persons

Dileeps manager and a lawyerwho are also suspected to have links with the key accused in the case, Pulsar Suni.

The prosecution also submitted a case diary in the court in a sealed cover to strengthen its argument.

Considering the arguments of the prosecution, the court denied bail to Dileep and sent the actor to judicial custody till July 25.

Dileeps counsel said they would move a higher court seeking bail.

The actor, brought to the court amid tight security on completion of three-day police custody, was later sent to a sub-jail in Aluva, which is also his home town.

The actors counsel argued that his client was made an accused in the case merely on statements given by the first accused Pulsar Suni, who is a habitual offender.

He alleged that there was no evidence against Dileep and he was being framed in the case.

Counsel also submitted a sealed cover with two mobile phones of Dileep to the court, with a plea to conduct a scientific examination of them without handing them over to police, as they would then be tampered with.

This move came even as police claimed that the phone used by the prime accused to take a video of assault of the actress reached Dileep through a?lawyer allegedly connected with Pulsar Suni.

Police reportedly conducted a search in the house of Dileep in search of the mobile phones.

Police had taken the 48-year-old actor, arrested on July 10, to various places in Kochi, Thrissur and Thodupuzha to carry out their investigation.

Initially the court had remanded the actor to 14 days judicial custody.

Police have claimed that the conspiracy to abduct and assault the actress and film the dastardly act was hatched by Dileep and Pulsar Suni, the prime accused in the case.

Police in its remand report had claimed that Dileep had developed a grudge against the actress for letting his former wife know about his alleged affairs and hatched a conspiracy to take revenge way back in 2013.

The popular actress, who has worked in Tamil and Telugu films, was abducted and allegedly molested inside her car for two hours by the accused, who had forced their way into the vehicle on February 17 and later escaped in a busy area here.

Six persons, including Pulsar Suni, have been arrested in connection with the incident.

After his arrest on the charge of conspiracy, Dileep has been expelled from various film forums, including the Association of Malayalam Movie Artistes (AMMA), as the industry rallied behind the actress.

Breaking her silence on July 13, the actress had expressed the hope that truth would come out in the case.

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Any number of forces are at work making modern New Orleans the city it is.

Theres a fierce civic pride. Theres an appetite for community. Theres the most aggressive brand of leisure youre ever likely to see.

But one force supersedes all of those: tradition.

New Orleanians might not always know why they do certain things, but if theres something theyve always done, theyre not likely to stop.

And so, while the COVID-19 pandemic has stolen Mardi Gras from us this year, you can bet your Moon Pie that at least one thing will remain unchanged once the plague finally abates: Gallier Hall will still be the ceremonial epicenter of our Mardi Gras celebrations.

Its been that way since the first Rex parade in 1872, which was notably attended by Grand Duke Alexis of Russia  and which is also when the tradition of a mayoral toast from the steps of Gallier Hall started.

Over the years, Mardi Gras  and its Gallier Hall tradition  were paused a few times, for world wars, for the 1979 police strike. For a couple of years after construction of the new City Hall on Loyola Avenue, the traditional toast was held there. But it returned to Gallier Hall.

The funny thing is, as solid and reliable as it appears today, Gallier Hall suffered through a difficult birth 176 years ago. Originally expected to take 14 months, construction would stretch out for more than 5 years.

Work started in 1845 on what was then called Municipal Hall and which was built as the governmental seat of the Second Municipality in the citys eventually scrapped three-municipality system.

Brimming with both cash reserves and civic pride, leaders of the municipality wanted it to be something grand, something to make a statement  something to make those other municipalities jealous.

So, they hired architect James Gallier. He delivered, with a design inspired by classic Greek temples. That includes a prominent pediment emblazoned with three female figures representing Justice, Liberty and Commerce, and supported by six fluted Ionic columns with capitals said to be copied from the Acropolis.

The design of the roof is peculiar, Gallier wrote in describing the design of the new hall in his 1864 autobiography. It is partly of wood and partly of iron, confined to a very flat pitch, spanning over a width of eighty-six feet, and having an arched ceiling and galleries suspended from it underneath. The portico and ashlar of the front are of white marble, procured from quarries near New York; the basement and steps are of granite, the style of the architecture is Grecian Ionic, and the portico is considered as a very chaste and highly finished example of that style.

Two years after construction started, however, things hit a snag.

The work on the municipal hall has been abandoned because the bonds of the Municipality are not negotiable except at an exorbitant discount, and the contractor cannot go on without funds, The Daily Picayune reported in September 1846.

That contractor, Robert Seaton, filed suit against the city for breach of contract, ending his involvement with the project.

The building then consisted of little more than a basement and fragments of brick wall. A temporary roof was slapped on, and the Police Department occupied it for a couple of years.

Eventually, money for completion of the building was raised through a time-tested method: taxes. Work finally resumed, with Gallier in charge.

By November 1849, although the building wasnt exactly finished  the eye-catching columns out front werent installed yet, for example  municipal offices began moving in.

The ground or basement floor will be occupied as offices for the Treasurer, Comptroller, Surveyor and other municipal officers, besides furnishing a large apartment for holding the Recorders Court and another for the Chief of Police, The Picayune reported on Oct. 13 of that year. The main floor will be used as a library, Council chamber, United States Courts and other purposes.

Above that was the largest and what the newspaper described as the most beautiful room: the lyceum lecture hall.

The whole edifice is finished in the most substantial manner, the paper wrote. The stairs in the basement are granite and the pavements of brown free stone, while on the upper stories the stairs are white marble and the pavement mosaic.  The rooms are supplied with splendid Egyptian marble mantle pieces, and the locks, grates and other iron and brass work are of the best material and finish.

It went on to declare the building the handsomest municipal hall in the United States. City leaders apparently agreed. When the three-municipality system was scrapped in 1852, they moved City Hall from the Cabildo to Galliers grand hall.

Now a city-run event center renamed after the man who built it, Gallier Hall has over the years hosted everyone from music royalty  including Ernie K-Doe, whose body lay in state there in 2001  to U.S. presidents including Millard Filmore, Grover Cleveland, William McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt, Warren G. Harding and Herbert Hoover.

More important, though, are the kings it has hosted every Mardi Gras  and which it is likely to host again on Fat Tuesday 2022, just 378 days after this years noncelebration.

Know of a New Orleans building worth profiling in this column, or just curious about one? Contact Mike Scott at moviegoermike@gmail.com.

Sources: The Times-Picayune archives; The Autobiography of James Gallier, Architect

+5 Remembering Krauss, the huge Canal Street department store that had everything From the beginning, it was something of a gamble. But it paid off well for everyone.
Welcome to City & States Campaign Confidential newsletter, where Senior Reporter Jeff Coltin is covering the run-up to New York Citys hugely consequential 2021 municipal elections for mayor, City Council and more.

Weekly, on Tuesdays. Sign up here.

DA candidates expect to inherit Vances Trump case

Whoever wins the election to be the next Manhattan district attorney will inherit an office that processes tens of thousands of low-level misdemeanors each year. The next district attorney will also, most likely, inherit what may be the most high-profile and closely watched court case in the entire country, where more than 159 million voters on either side of the 2020 presidential race have a rooting interest: the anticipated prosecution of Donald Trump for financial crimes.

As long as the work of the DAs office and the current DA is pending, these are going to be things that we inherit, said Tahanie Aboushi, one of eight candidates competing in the Democratic primary for Manhattan district attorney. So if the investigation is still open, were not just going to come in and interfere with that, but were going to have an opportunity to actually have that inside information, assess (the case) and make a decision there.

The stakes are high, but information about the case is limited. Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr.s office reportedly intensified its criminal investigation of Trumps personal and business finances once it became clear that the former president had lost his reelection bid and would no longer have the legal protections of the White House.

Which candidates say they have the experience to take on Trump? Read more here.

By the Numbers

414,000

The number of Instagram accounts following Lamor Miller Whitehead, whos running for Brooklyn borough president. Thats huge. To contextualize with fellow Brooklynites, Public Advocate Jumaane Williams has more than 94,000 followers, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries has 141,000, and the Rev. Al Sharpton has 389,000. Miller Whiteheads follower count may be artificially inflated  some of the accounts following him appear to be fake, and his account has gained more than 110,000 followers in just the past week. His campaign says his embrace from New Yorks Hip Hop community accounts for the rapid growth, and sure enough, Miller Whitehead announced endorsements this week from Fabolous, Maino, Dame Dash and Foxy Brown  who is reportedly Miller Whiteheads cousin. Could 414,000 Insta followers propel him to victory? Unlikely. His fundraising has been really weak, and Miller Whitehead, a Christian pastor and ally of Brooklyn borough president Eric Adams, served time in prison on identity fraud charges and was chastised by the Brooklyn district attorneys office in 2014 for fundraising off a nonexistent initiative with the DAs office.

Stringer the comptroller vs. Stringer the candidate

Gov. Andrew Cuomo criticized both Scott Stringer and Eric Adams last week for not talking enough about police reform. You want to be mayor, what would you do about this? he asked. In concrete terms. A few months from a mayoral election, I dont know what their positions are. Cant blame Cuomo for being confused. Stringer released a detailed policing plan this week  but on his government website as comptroller, rather than his campaign website. One rivals staffer texted: This is so transparently using govt resources to campaign. I legit had to double take. Sure enough, adding any part of the plan to his campaign site might violate conflict of interest rules since it was compiled by government employees  but Stringer is avoiding controversy for now by simply not having any clearly accessible list of plans and policy positions on his campaign site.

Groundhog predicted an early oppo season

The get to know the candidates season is ending, and news outlets are starting to drop some pretty critical pieces on the leading mayoral candidates. Politico New York pushed a well-researched piece on Scott Stringer having it both ways with real estate developers. And the Daily News delivered a classic oppo dump on Eric Adams overseas trips sponsored by sketchy governments like China and Azerbaijan. But Andrew Yang seemed to dodge a Business Insider bullet. The Jan. 30 piece on the sexism and bro culture of his presidential campaign was kept behind a strict paywall. And soon after publishing, Business Insider added a lengthy editors note about sloppy sourcing, overstated evidence and uncorroborated anecdotes. Journalists: keep em coming. But keep your standards high.

Draw your own conclusions

While the state campaign finance disclosure website continues to be entirely unusable, a couple of activists have taken the citys campaign finance data and highlighted only the political insiders. Its called Project Red String, and it tracks donations to and from elected officials, staff, club members, journalists and more  basically, anyone who might read City & State. It was co-founded by two Very Online Gen Z operatives: Michael Sutherland, whos a researcher at the Housing Rights Initiative, and Lucy Merriam, a CUNY Graduate Center student. And though its still in the beta stage, its an endlessly interesting tool for any donation detectives.

Gales Brew-haha

A stronger Gale blew into the Jim Owles Liberal Democratic Clubs meeting Thursday night, but members withstood the Lind  er, wind  and did not vote to revoke their endorsement of Sara Lind for City Council District 6 following Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewers complaints. Some big names showed up in the virtual meeting to support Brewer  New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, Manhattan Democratic Party boss Keith Wright, RWDSU President Stuart Appelbaum and former Council Members Rafael Espinal and Rosie Mendez among them, per a tipster. But Brewers effort failed, and Lind kept the endorsement. Too early to start tearing up Broadway?

Endorsement Watch

Assembly Member Jessica Gonzalez-Rojas endorsed Dianne Morales for mayor  Morales first endorsement as someones top choice  City Council Member Farah Louis endorsed Eric Adams for mayor  United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1500 backed Scott Stringer for mayor  comedian Amy Schumer endorsed Andrew Yang and is hosting a fundraiser with his campaign  Carlos Menchaca picked up his first two mayoral endorsements from City Council candidates Hailie Kim, who is running in District 26 in Queens, and Chris Sosa, who is running in District 5 in Manhattan  Menchaca also endorsed their council campaigns  Assembly Member N. Nick Perry endorsed Khari Edwards for Brooklyn borough president over his fellow Assembly Member Jo Anne Simon  the Professional Staff Congress union at CUNY endorsed a slate of council candidates, including Amit Bagga in District 26  Bagga was also endorsed by state Sen. Jessica Ramos and former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon  CWA District 1 endorsed a slate of council candidates, including Mino Lora in the District 11 special election in the Bronx and Elisa Crespo in the District 15 special election in the Bronx  District Council 37 also endorsed a slate, including Eric Dinowitz in District 11 and Ischia Bravo in District 15  RWDSU also endorsed Dinowitz  and Council Member Jimmy Van Bramer endorsed Lora  Council Member Mark Treyger endorsed Ari Kagan to succeed him in District 47 in Brooklyn  and the Bronx Democratic Party endorsed Althea Stevens over the partys former political director, Yves Filius.

Poll Sight

The Hells Kitchen Democrats didnt make their primary endorsements in a smoke-filled room  instead, 105 of their members voted online using ranked-choice voting, and shared the full results! Check that link for great visualizations of instant-runoff voting across eight races. In the mayoral race, notice that all of the voters who had Dianne Morales as their top pick had Maya Wiley ranked on their ballot too. Kathryn Garcia outperformed expectations with a second-place finish, and nobody was surprised to see Manhattans own Scott Stringer win the clubs backing. And for the data nerds  some rounds do not add up to 100% because of no endorsement votes.

020821-Polls-01.png Alt Text: The Hells Kitchen Democrats primary endorsement votes Title Text: The Hells Kitchen Democrats primary endorsement votes Caption: The Hells Kitchen Democrats primary endorsement votes Description: The Hells Kitchen Democrats primary endorsement votes Image Credit: Alex Law/City & State

Staffing Up

Lindsey Green has joined Kathryn Garcias mayoral campaign as communications director  Julia Savel has joined Maya Wileys mayoral campaign as director of rapid response  Ray McGuires mayoral campaign has hired Ny Whitaker as campaign operative, Rod Townsend as constituency liaison and Vinuri Ranaweera as policy associate  Katie Shane, deputy political director of the New York City District Council of Carpenters, is serving as campaign manager for Crystal Hudsons City Council campaign in District 35 in Brooklyn  Ansley Pentz has joined Alexa Aviles council campaign in District 38 in Brooklyn as deputy campaign manager  Maria Di Franco Quinonez is joining Sandy Nurses council campaign in District 37 in Brooklyn as field director  Saman Mahmood, former deputy district director for Rep. Max Rose, will be campaign manager for Mike Schnall for City Council in District 49 on Staten Island.

Got tips? Email JColtin@CityandStateNY.com or DM me @JCColtin

District Data

010420-districtmap-01.png Alt Text: City Council District 1 Title Text: City Council District 1 Caption: City Council District 1 Description: City Council District 1 Image Credit: Alex Law/City & State

City Council District 1 in lower Manhattan, covering neighborhoods including SoHo, Chinatown, the Financial District and the Brooklyn Bridge Park piers

Current council member: Margaret Chin, since 2010, who is term-limited at the end of this year

2010 census demographics: 45.1% white, 36% Asian, 12.4% Hispanic, 4% Black

Housing: 78.8% renter-occupied, 21.2% owner-occupied

2013 primary election results: Chin: 58.9%, Jenifer Rajkumar: 41.1%

2017 primary election results: Chin: 45.8%, Christopher Marte: 43.9%, Aaron Foldenaur: 6.3%, Dashia Imperiale: 3.9%

Whos running: Susan Damplo, Jacqueline Gross, Susan Lee, Gigi Li, Jenny Low, Maud Maron, Christopher Marte, Denny Salas and Tiffany Winbush. Low is a longtime local power broker who works for Council Speaker Corey Johnson and has grabbed major endorsements from Rep. Nydia Velazquez, the New York City Central Labor Council and the United Federation of Teachers. A progressive in the field, Marte is leading in fundraising and has devoted supporters who almost helped him unseat Chin four years ago. Li, whos currently Chins chief of staff, has the current members support, and recently got a boost from mayoral candidate Andrew Yang. And Maron, an education activist, has raised a lot of money while appealing to more conservative voters in the district.

Twitter Posting
Students in the University of Jos have said the strike action by the Senior Staff Association of Nigerian Universities (SSANU) and NASU, is affecting their lectures.

They also said the strike affects their wellbeing, concerning the COVID-19 pandemic, as staff manning the gates to ensure COVID-19 protocols compliance were no longer there.

Hommualak Shinman, a student of Criminology called on government and the university staff to resolve the issue before the strike takes a greater toll on students.

A 200 level student of economics, Abigail Adama, said their toilets, both in the hostels and the classes were dirty and a health risk.

At Plateau State University (PLASU) Bokkos, Ezekiel Dajen Luatei, said SSANU/NASU members in the school were yet to embark on strike.

Luatei, who is the Student Union Government (SUG) President, said the staff were attending to students doing their registration.

'Threat to destiny'

From the University of Ibadan, A 300L student of Anthropology who simply identified himself as Olusegun described the strike as "a threat to destiny".

"We have wasted time with the ASUU strike. Now, instead of starting work in earnest, SSANU and NASU have embarked on theirs. Where is the future," he said.

At the University of Lagos (UNILAG), physical classes have not been held since January 25 when it commenced its first semester with online lectures against the COVID-19.

The ongoing strike action may therefore not have a significant impact on academic activities.

Exams postponed

However, the industrial action has disrupted the ongoing first semester examination at the Lagos State University (LASU).

The Acting Vice Chancellor, Professor Oyedamola Oke, on Tuesday, approved the postponement of all outstanding 2019/2020 first semester examinations until further notice.

However, in Rivers State University, academic works are unaffected despite the strike by SANU and NASU across the country.

Also at Ignatius Ajuru University, academic work was ongoing despite the nationwide senior non-academic staff strike action.

A student of Rivers State University, Izuchukwu Oforji, said they have been attending lectures and other academic activities in the school.

Another student of the university, Barrinee Jona, said "I went to the bursary to pay some fees and I was attended to.

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"All the lightning systems are on and we have been attending lectures and going to classes to read in the night with lights on," he said.

Meanwhile, the Senior Staff Association of Nigerian Universities (SSANU), has appealed to students, parents and guardians not to see their strike as something done in bad faith.

President of SSANU, Mohammed Haruna Ibrahim, in an exclusive interview with Daily Trust in Abuja, said members of the union were worried that the students who just returned to school after staying at home for 10 months would likely return home until government did the needful.

He maintained that the strike by the unions was to get the "best for the students" in terms of character moulding and environment.

Daily Trust reports that SSANU and NASU under the auspices of the Joint Action Committee (JAC), on February 5 directed all its branches to commence an indefinite strike to press home their demands bordering on alleged injustice on sharing formula of N40bn Earned Allowance and non-payment minimum wage arrears.

Other issues raised include: inconsistencies in the implementation of the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS), delay in renegotiation of FG/NASU and SSANU 2009 agreement, non-payment of retirement benefits of outgone members among others.

From Dickson S. Adama (Jos), Jeremiah Oke (Ibadan), Christiana T. Alabi (Lagos), Idowu Isamotu (Abuja), Victor Edozie (Port Harcourt)
More than 80 high risk Chinese students were last year working in sensitive fields with potential military applications at Oxford University, a think-tank has claimed.

They had all previously attended institutions closely linked with the Peoples Liberation Army and Chinese intelligence services, it said.

The Henry Jackson Societys survey  which covers Britains 35 top-ranked universities  found that there were 669 Chinese nationals who attended army-linked universities in their homeland who are now pursuing subjects such as nuclear physics, aerospace engineering, high-tech material science and quantum computing in the UK.

More than 80 high risk Chinese students were last year working in sensitive fields with potential military applications at Oxford University, a think-tank has claimed. Pictured: Ling Ge, Tencents chief European representative, who earned a PhD from Oxford

Some attended elite universities in China known as the Seven Sons of National Defence, because of their closeness to the military, and the scale of their military research projects. Other universities have also been classified as very high risk or high risk over security fears, by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a research unit.

All have military-funded laboratories and research projects, and some have been publicly cited in espionage cases in courts abroad.

The disclosure comes after the Daily Mail revealed yesterday that Oxford has agreed to rename the prestigious Wykeham professorship of physics the Tencent-Wykeham chair, for a donation of 700,000 from the Chinese gaming, internet and software giant Tencent.

The technology giant is said to have a close relationship with Chinas intelligence services.

Ling Ge, Tencents chief European representative, has a PhD in quantum computing research from Oxford. She has declined to comment on why her company is sponsoring the Oxford chair. It is not known whether she played a part in negotiating the grant.

The Henry Jackson Societys survey  which covers Britains 35 top-ranked universities  found that there were 669 Chinese nationals who attended army-linked universities in their homeland who are now pursuing subjects such as nuclear physics, aerospace engineering, high-tech material science and quantum computing in the UK (stock image)

The think-tank study was based on Freedom of Information requests. It found that at Oxford, there were 16 Chinese nationals working in highly sensitive fields who went to one of the Seven Sons universities. A further 22 went to the very high risk institutions and 44 to high risk ones.

In all, the report said there were 100 Chinese nationals working in sensitive fields at Oxford  far more than at any other university. Second was Manchester with 56. There were 50 at Cambridge.

An Oxford University spokesman said: The university has a rigorous due diligence process and Tencent has been approved as an appropriate donor by our independent committee to review donations, which includes independent, external representatives.

A spokesman for Tencent said: 'Tencent seeks to be a good corporate citizen wherever it operates, including through philanthropic efforts. Our philanthropic efforts are just that, and are conducted transparently, in good faith and without conditions.

'We have deep respect for the rich history and innovative future of the UKs higher education establishments, and are pleased to support their missions of learning, teaching and research.

'We are also proud of our long-standing and strategic partnerships with a wide range of UK innovators, businesses, and creative and cultural leaders. We look forward to working together with them to innovate, grow - including in China - and fulfil their global aspirations.

Boris Johnson suffered a backbench rebellion last night over his refusal to let judges rule on whether Britains trade partners are guilty of genocide amid growing concerns over Chinese human rights abuses, including its treatment of its Uighur Muslim minority.

The Commons narrowly rejected an amendment to the Trade Bill which would have forced ministers to withdraw from a free trade agreement with any country that the High Court rules is committing genocide.
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Prime Minister Florin Citu welcomed on Wednesday the vote in the European Parliament on the Recovery and Resilience Facility, according to AGERPRES.

In a message posted on the Government's Facebook page, the Prime Minister emphasizes that, through this mechanism, Romania will be able to attract over 30 billion euros, money that would be used to finance investments in infrastructure, digitization, green economy, structural reforms, as well as for the construction of new hospitals and the modernization of existing ones.

"I welcome the vote in the European Parliament on the Recovery and Resilience Facility, through which Romania will be able to attract over 30 billion euros. These are important funds for the recovery of the economy affected by the health crisis. We will use them carefully to finance investments in infrastructure, digitization, the green economy and structural reforms. From the money to which Romania will have access through this European financial mechanism, we will finance the construction of new hospitals, as well as the modernization and expansion of existing ones. We want to finalize in the Government the National Recovery and Resilience Plan as soon as possible, so that Romania has access in the shortest possible time to this European financing," Florin Citu said.

New Yorks 10 p.m. curfew for bars and restaurants is back in place statewide after Gov. Andrew Cuomos order scored two court victories this week.

Today, a state appeals court reversed a ruling that had lifted the curfew for 91 bars and restaurants who sued Cuomo over the order in western New York. The appeals court temporarily overturned last weeks injunction by a state Supreme Court judge in Erie County who had found the curfew likely unconstitutional.

The Appellate Division ruling came a day after a federal court judge in New York City upheld the curfew. In that case, the judge found that Cuomo is within his rights to issue such orders to contain public health emergencies like Covid-19.

What all that means is that the 10 p.m. curfew once again applies to all bars and restaurants in the state, at least pending further appeals. The next hearing in the state appeals court is scheduled for Feb. 16. The Erie County case had only applied to the plaintiffs, and was not effective statewide.

Cuomo imposed the 10 p.m. curfew statewide in November, just ahead of Thanksgiving. The reasoning was that it would help prevent the spread of the coronavirus by limiting the time people spent hanging out and drinking. The rule, which applies to any businesses with alcohol licenses, requires all patrons to be out of the establishment by 10 p.m.

Bars across the state have complained about the curfew because it eliminates some of their most lucrative hours, causing substantial loss of revenue. Some have closed altogether while the curfew is in place. In Syracuse, for example, that includes places like Als Wine & Whiskey Lounge, Benjamins on Franklin and Mulrooneys, all in Armory Square.

To preserve the public health and mitigate further needless death, Governor Cuomo took drastic steps aimed at stopping the spread of the COVID-19 virus, U.S. District Court Judge Paul Crotty wrote in the decision issued in New York City Tuesday. He was entitled to take these measures pursuant to the police powers delegated to the legislative and executive branches.

Related:

New federal court ruling upholds Cuomos 10 p.m. bar and restaurant curfew

Closing bars at 10 p.m.? This has taken a fun business and made it not so fun

Dave & Busters sues Cuomo for continued closure

Judge lifts Cuomos 10 p.m. bar curfew in Buffalo, Rochester: What about CNY?

Syracuse restaurants took a $170 million hit in pandemic and other shocking economic stats (analysis)

Don Cazentre writes for NYup.com, syracuse.com and The Post-Standard. Reach him at dcazentre@nyup.com, or follow him at NYup.com, on Twitter or Facebook.




According to Minsa's National Center for Supply of Strategic Resources in Health (Cenares) , 67 boxes of COVID-19 vaccines from China's Sinopharm laboratory have been sent in total.





The cities that received the vaccines are Chachapoyas, Bagua, and Utcubamba in Amazonas region; Cajamarca, Chota, Cutervo, and Jaen in Cajamarca region; as well as Anta and Chimbote in Ancash region.





The list of cities also includes Cerro de Pasco and Oxapampa in Pasco region; as well as Abancay and Andahuaylas in Apurimac region.





Additionally, the vaccines were delivered to Huanuco, Cusco, Ayacucho, Huancavelica, Junin, and Ica.





Moreover, boxes of vaccines were sent by land to the city of Huacho in Lima region.





On the other hand, Cenares speeds up the work required to ship the boxes of vaccines to Arequipa, Moquegua, Tacna, La Libertad, Lambayeque, Piura, Tumbes, Loreto, San Martin, Ucayali, Madre de Dios, and Puno regions.





Invisible and deadly enemy





Coronaviruses are a family of viruses that cause illnesses ranging from the common cold to more severe diseases such as the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) or the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). These viruses can be transmitted between animals and people.





The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) is a new strain that had not been previously identified in humans. It is transmitted from human to human through respiratory droplets from coughing and sneezing. COVID-19 is also transmitted by close contact with people infected by the virus.





People are encouraged to keep a distance from others, wear a face mask or a face shield when using public transportation, wash hands often with soap and water for at least 20 seconds, among other measures.





(END) NDP/JOT/RMB/MVB

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The COVID-19 vaccines aimed at protecting healthcare workers on the frontline of the battle were sent to different cities on Tuesday morning, with the support of the Armed Forces and the private sector, the Ministry of Health (Minsa) has reported.Publicado: 10/2/2021


The initial court order freezing the accounts of the activists was widely condemned as an attack on democracy.

The Federal High Court in Abuja, on Wednesday, ordered the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to unfreeze the accounts of 20 #EndSARS campaigners targeted by the apex bank after last year's anti-police brutality demonstrations.

PREMIUM TIMES reported on Sunday how the accounts of the protesters remained frozen despite the expiration of the 90-day order on February 2.

The judge, Ahmed Mohammed, issued the order unfreezing the accounts after the legal teams of both the CBN and the 20 defendants decided to end the case on Wednesday.

The judge commended the two lawyers for their "commitment to ensure justice" after they announced their decision to withdraw all pending applications and the entire suit.

"In the light of this, the ex parte order issued on November 4, 2022 freezing the accounts of the defendants pending the investigation by the Central Bank of Nigeria is here by set aside.

"An order is also made unfreezing the accounts of the defendants," Mr Mohammed ruled on Wednesday.

Hearing

Earlier, CBN's lawyer, Michael Aondoakaa, a former Attorney-General of the Federation, told the judge he filed an ex parte application for the extension of the expired order on Tuesday, but later got instruction from the CBN Governor, Godwin Emefiele, to withdraw the case.

Mr Aondoakaa, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, said he was withdrawing the suit in the spirit of reconciliation behind the setting up of the various Judicial Panels of Inquiry set up to probe cases of police brutality in the aftermath of the #EndSARS protests.

He said, "This matter involves young people. I talked to my colleagues and I advised, let us discard all the processes. I will withdraw my processes and they will withdraw theirs.

"By implication, the order goes, the accounts will be unfrozen, and nobody will be indicted.

"The government has set up reconciliation panels. We should give room for a rethink on this matter.

"We have the instruction form my client, the Governor of CBN, that in the spirit of reconciliation, we should not apply for the extension of the order.

"So we are withdrawing our ex parte motion. We should allow reconciliation and peace to reign."

'Freezing order expired last week'

Responding, the defendants' lawyer, Femi Falana, also a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, confirmed that he had discussed with Mr Aondoakaa "on the way forward in this matter."

He, however, insisted that "the order ex parte made by this court expired last week."

He said he had filed "a motion to have the order quashed" but "has been overtaken by event, since the order has expired."

After hearing the two lawyers, the judge set aside the order and struck out the suit.

Mr Aondokaa promised to ensure that that "the accounts are unfrozen" as soon as the court's written order is issued.

The #EndSARS protesters and promoters targeted in the case by the CBN included Bolatito Oduala, Chima Ibebunjoh, Mary Kpengwa, Gatefield Nigeria Limited, Saadat Bibi, Bassey Israel, Wisdom Obi, Nicholas Osazele, Ebere Idibie, Akintomide Yusuf, Uhuo Promise, Mosopefoluwa Odeseye and Adegoke Emmanuel.

The rest are, Umoh Ekanem, Babatunde Segun, Mulu Teghenan, Mary Oshifowora, Winifred Jacob, Victor Solomon, and Idunu Williams.

Background

The 20 account holders affected by the freezing order had participated in or contributed to the #EndSARS protests which were triggered by grievances arising from years of harassment and rights violations by operatives of the defunct Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS).

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The protests led to the disbandment of the police tactical squad in October last year.

In the twilight of the protests, the CBN governor, Godwin Emefiele, on October 15, 2020, directed various banks to place a Post-No-Debit order on the accounts linked to the 20 #EndSARS campaigners.

About three weeks after, the CBN, through its lawyer, Mr Aondoakaa, on November 4, 2020, obtained an ex parte order of the Federal High Court in Abuja freezing their bank accounts for 90 days.

The judge gave the order based on CBN's allegation that the 20 defendants were suspected of terrorism financing.

PREMIUM TIMES reported how the court order was widely condemned as an attack on democracy.

The protesters challenged the order but the judge, who kept adjourning the case, did not conclude hearing on the matter until Wednesday.

The New York Times, February 6, 2021

By Adam Nossiter and Najim Rahim

HERAT, Afghanistan  Amid the bustle of beggars and patients outside the crowded hospital here, there are sellers and buyers, casting wary eyes at one another: The poor, seeking cash for their vital organs, and the gravely ill or their surrogates, looking to buy.

The illegal kidney business is booming in the western city of Herat, fueled by sprawling slums, the surrounding lands poverty and unending war, an entrepreneurial hospital that advertises itself as the countrys first kidney transplantation center, and officials and doctors who turn a blind eye to organ trafficking.

In Afghanistan, as in most countries, the sale and purchase of organs is illegal, and so is the implanting of purchased organs by physicians. But the practice remains a worldwide problem, particularly when it comes to kidneys, since most donors can live with just one.

These people, they need the money, said Ahmed Zain Faqiri, a teacher seeking a kidney for his gravely ill father outside Loqman Hakim Hospital. He was eyed uneasily by a strapping young farmer, Haleem Ahmad, 21, who had heard of the kidney market and was looking to sell after his harvest had failed.

The consequences will be grim for him. For the impoverished kidney sellers who recover in frigid, unlit Herat apartments of peeling paint and concrete floors, temporarily delivered from crushing debt but too weak to work, in pain and unable to afford medication, the deal is a portal to new misery. In one such dwelling, a half-sack of flour and a modest container of rice was the only food last week for a family with eight children.

For Loqman Hakim Hospital, transplants are big business. Officials boast it has performed more than 1,000 kidney transplants in five years, drawing in patients from all over Afghanistan and the global Afghan diaspora. It offers them bargain-basement operations at one-twentieth the cost of such procedures in the United States, in a city with a seemingly unending supply of fresh organs.

Asked if the hospital made good money from the operations, Masood Ghafoori, a senior finance manager, said: You could say that.

The hospital handles the removal, transplant and initial recovery of both patients, without asking questions. Sellers say their hospital fees are covered by the buyers, and after a few days in the recovery ward, they are sent home.

How the organ recipient gets the donor to agree to the procedure is not the hospitals concern, the doctors say.

Its not our business, said Dr. Farid Ahmad Ejaz, a hospital physician whose business card reads Founder of Kidney Transplantation in Afghanistan in English.

Dr. Ejaz at first contended that more than a dozen impoverished Herat residents were lying when they told The Times of selling their kidneys for cash. Later, he conceded that maybe they were not. Interviews with other health officials here followed the same arc: initial denials, followed by grudging acknowledgment.

In Afghanistan everything has a value, except human life, said Dr. Mahdi Hadid, a member of Herats provincial council.

Accounts of organ selling date back to the 1980s in India, according to the United Nations, and today the practice accounts for roughly 10 percent of all global transplants. Iran, less than 80 miles from Herat, is the only country where selling kidneys is not illegal, as long as the parties are Iranian.

Theres always a gap between international guidelines and what governments do in practice, said Asif Efrat, a faculty member at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, a university in Israel, pointing out that Afghanistan is a new player compared to the countries where the organ trade is most prolific: China, Pakistan, and the Philippines. The current international consensus is on the side of prohibiting, but governments have incentives not to follow it, he said.

The moral scruples that keep the business underground elsewhere are hardly evident in Herat. Dr. Ejaz and health officials point to povertys harsh logic. The people of Afghanistan sell their sons and daughters for money. How can you compare that to selling kidneys? he asked. We have to do this because someone is dying.

Dr. Ejaz seemed unfazed when shown the business card of a kidney broker, saying, In Afghanistan you find business cards for people to assassinate others.

On the fourth floor of the hospital, three out of four patients in recovery said they had bought their kidneys.

I feel fine now, said Gulabuddin, a 36-year-old imam an kidney recipient from Kabul. No pain at all. He said he had paid about $3,500 for his kidney, bought from a complete stranger, with an $80 commission to the broker. He got a good deal: Kidneys can cost as much as $4,500.

If there is consent, Islam has no problem with it, Gulabuddin said.

Dr. Abdul Hakim Tamanna, Herat Provinces public health director, acknowledged the rise of the kidney black market in Afghanistan, but said there was little the government could do.

Unfortunately, this is common in poor countries, he said. Theres a lack of rule of law, and a lack of regulation surrounding this process.

Afghanistans poverty rate was expected to reach over 70 percent in 2020, according to the World Bank, and the country remains largely dependent on foreign aid; domestic revenues finance only about half the government budget. Without any substantive public safety net, health care is just another opportunity to exploit the countrys most vulnerable.

Deep inside the warren of sandy streets in Herats slums, Mir Gul Ataye, 28, regrets every second of his decision to sell his kidney. A construction worker who had earned up to $5 a day before his operation last November, he is now unable to lift more than 10 pounds, and barely that.

Im in pain, and weak, he said. Ive been sick, and I cant control my pee. Four children huddled in front of him on the concrete floor in the bare unlit room. He said he supports 13 family members in all, and had accumulated some $4,000 of debt.

It was difficult, but I had no choice. Nobody wants to give up a part of his body to someone else, he said. It was very shameful for me.

For his kidney, Mr. Ataye received $3,800. That was barely three months ago. He is still in debt, unable to pay his rent or his electricity bill.

He said he feels sadness, desperation, anger and loneliness. One night he was in such severe pain, he banged his head against the wall and fractured his skull.

Others around Herat cited similar reasons for selling a kidney: outstanding debt, sick parents, a marriage that would otherwise have been unaffordable.

My father would have died if we had not sold, said Jamila Jamshidi, 25, sitting on the floor across from her brother, Omid, 18, in a frigid apartment near the citys edge. Both had sold their kidneys  she, five years ago, and he, one year ago  and both were weak and in pain.

At a mud-walled camp just outside Herat, a vortex of sun, wind and dust filled with war refugees from other provinces, Mohammed Zaman, a tribal elder in a white turban, spoke of the irresistible attraction of Loqman Hakims kidney operation. More than 20 from his village, now chased from their homes, had sold their kidneys.

My people are hungry. We dont have land. We cant be shopkeepers. Weve got no money, he said. I cant stop it.

At a local restaurant, five brothers spoke of being forced off their land in Badghis Province by constant Taliban attacks. In Herat, all had sold their kidneys. The youngest was 18, the oldest 32.

We had no choice, said Abdul Samir, one of the brothers. We were forced to sell. Otherwise, we would not have sold a fingernail.
Aerial photo taken on Aug. 19, 2020 shows wind turbines in Jiucaiping scenic spot in southwest China's Guizhou Province. (Xinhua/Liu Xu)

BEIJING, Feb. 9 (Xinhua) -- It has been nine years since cooperation between China and Central and Eastern European Countries (CEEC) began. This cooperation covers a wide range of sectors, including a "green consensus."

Considerable work can be done to advance international cooperation on climate change, jointly implement the Paris Agreement and contribute to the success of COP26 of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and COP15 of the Convention on Biological Diversity, both to be held this year.

China and the European Union (EU) have both committed to achieving net-zero carbon dioxide emissions and have launched a partnership for green cooperation, to which China-CEEC cooperation can make an important contribution.

China has vowed to peak its carbon dioxide emissions by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. It resists the old way of developing the economy at the cost of the environment. For their part, the CEE countries see the post-pandemic era as an important period to develop a green economy. To double CEE countries' agricultural exports to China and develop more tourism products with local features, for instance, deeper exchanges and cooperation in terms of the green economy are required.

Aerial photo taken on Aug. 17, 2020 shows a photovoltaic power station at a green industrial development park in the Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of Hainan, northwest China's Qinghai Province. (Xinhua/Zhang Long)

Healthy and sustainable development for both sides will inject new momentum into China-CEEC cooperation in many other domains, including but not limited to coordination and cooperation in COVID-19 response, energy, innovation and cultural exchange.

China-CEEC cooperation arises from the shared interests of China and the CEEC. As part of China-EU cooperation, the cooperation between the two sides has always been open and transparent, contributing to the development of the CEEC as well as Europe's integration process.

The cooperation is in no way intended to start all over again, let alone to divide Europe, as some Western skeptics groundlessly conjectured. The EU and other interested parties are invited to observe every conference within the China-CEEC framework, and the consensus reached under the cooperation mechanism is open and beneficial to all sides. This partnership is a helpful complement to China's cooperation with the EU.

The cooperation between China and the CEEC has supported the development of all parties involved and bettered people's lives. With shared commitment and efforts, the two sides will achieve more solid, substantive and enduring progress, setting an example of practical trans-regional cooperation for the world community.
Students from Agoura Hills take part in a rally asking for the option to return to in-person learning on Feb. 8. (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

President Bidens push to reopen schools nationwide could become bogged down in California, where powerful unions are demanding teachers receive COVID-19 vaccinations before returning to the classroom.

Although dates have been set in New York City and Chicago to send children back to elementary and middle schools, there are no such agreements in Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco, dragging out the process nearly a year after students began learning remotely.

Its a thorny political problem for Biden, who pledged to reopen the majority of schools serving kindergarten through eighth grade by April 30, coinciding with his 100th day in office. The president is intensely proud of his support from organized labor, but he has also pledged to let science guide his approach to the pandemic, and a growing body of research shows that schools can be safe even without vaccinations.

Failing to get students back into classrooms would undermine Bidens efforts to boost the economy by freeing parents to return more fully to work and derail one of his administrations earliest promises.

Bidens biggest roadblock appears to be in deep-blue California, where teachers unions are one of the strongest political forces and fear of the coronavirus remains high after a deadly winter turned the state into the countrys epicenter of infection. If labor leaders remain unbending on their inoculation requirements, getting students back into classrooms on Bidens timeline will be difficult because the vaccine supply has failed to meet demand.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom said Tuesday that a deal on a framework for reopening the states schools could be reached this week.

A plan not to open is not a plan, he said. We need a plan to safely reopen this school year.

Los Angeles, the countrys second-largest district, remains stalled as teachers wait for vaccines.

Supt. Austin Beutner recently described inoculations as a critical piece to this reopening puzzle. He said vaccinating 25,000 people  including teachers, principals, bus drivers and other staff  could help get 250,000 children back into elementary schools.

Story continues

Theres no clear timeline to get San Diegos children back into classrooms, nor in San Francisco, where district officials are working out an agreement with union leaders to make school reopening contingent on a drop in the citys infection rate and the availability of vaccines.

A classroom at the Alta Vista Elementary School in Redondo Beach, pictured here on Feb. 2, has been reorganized for social distancing. Some of the district's youngest students have returned to in-person classes. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)

Since pledging on his second day in office to reopen K-8 classes, Biden has mostly steered clear of the school debate as he focuses on pushing a $1.9-trillion stimulus package on Capitol Hill, but an inflection point may be around the corner as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention prepares to release its official guidance on how to safely reopen schools.

A glimpse of how sensitive the issue has become arrived last week, when the agencys director, Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, said vaccines should not be a prerequisite to returning to in-person instruction.

I also want to be clear that there is increasing data to suggest that schools can safely reopen and that that safe reopening does not suggest that teachers need to be vaccinated in order to reopen safely, Walensky said Feb. 3.

The White House slammed on the brakes the next day, with Press Secretary Jen Psaki making the puzzling assertion that Walensky spoke to this in her personal capacity even though she was participating in an official administration briefing.

The final guidance, Psaki said, wasnt ready yet, even though there had already been some reassuring signs about school safety.

Last month, scientists at the CDC wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. that the preponderance of available evidence shows that classrooms do not become viral hot spots. They said it was important to continue driving down the transmission rates in the surrounding communities, by restricting indoor dining at restaurants, and requiring mitigation measures inside schools, including face masks and social distancing.

Measuring success is another sticking point. Psaki said Tuesday that hybrid models  a mix of remote and in-person instruction  would count toward the goal. The target, she said, is teaching at least one day a week in the majority of schools by Day 100.

However, administration officials havent said how many schools are considered open now, making it difficult to determine how much progress still needs to be made.

The Department of Education announced last week that it would be conducting a survey to gather data on schools opening status and how students have been learning during the pandemic.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the federal governments top expert on infectious diseases, warned last month that the country could fall short of Bidens objective.

That may not happen because there may be mitigating circumstances, but what he really wants to do is everything within his power to help get to that, he said during a virtual round-table hosted by teachers unions on Jan. 28.

Republicans are already trying to drive a wedge between Biden and parents, attacking Democrats as being beholden to organized labor at the expense of children.

The obstacle is a lack of willpower, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said last week. Not among students. Not among parents. Just among the rich, powerful unions that donate huge sums to Democrats and get a stranglehold over education in many communities.

Nearly 40% of students from kindergarten through 12th grade were attending classes in person every day as of Feb. 1, according to Burbio, which tracks local community calendars and school reopenings. Roughly the same amount are learning only remotely, and the rest are following a hybrid model.

Schools are far more likely to be open in rural communities, while urban areas are lagging behind.

We have to figure out how we get the cities operating again, said Betheny Gross, associate director for the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington. They serve the largest numbers of kids, they have the largest numbers of schools, and theyre the ones that are in remote now.

The countrys first- and third-largest school districts  New York City and Chicago, respectively  have announced agreements for children to return to classrooms.

Elementary schools in New York have been open since December, and middle schools are scheduled to open the week of Feb. 25.

In Chicago, a tentative deal has pre-K students starting class on Thursday, with higher grades gradually returning over the following three weeks.

Theres only so much Biden can do to push education officials to reopen because schools are run by states, cities and local district officials.

But Biden has used little of the authority that he does have.

He has not proposed attaching strings to federal funding to prod schools to reopen, nor has he harnessed the bully pulpit to press the issue.

It really seems like its not clear that the administrations heart is in it, said Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.





This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

The gunman who allegedly shot five people at a Minnesota health clinic received back surgery there several years ago, it has been revealed.

Gregory Paul Ulrich, 67, from Buffalo, was arrested and is currently being held in the Wright County Jail over the mass shooting that took place at the Allina Health Clinic on Crossroads Campus Drive in Buffalo late Tuesday morning.

At least five people were wounded after the gunman entered the facility not long before 11am and opened fire.

One of the victims died after being transported to the Hennepin County Medical Center.

Richard Ulrich, the suspect's younger brother, told The New York Times that Ulrich worked in construction for some years and had possibly injured his back on the job.

He had back surgery about two years ago and became dependent on opioids he had been prescribed, Richard Ulrich said. His brother was angry when doctors refused to prescribe more of them to him.

'He would call me once in a while, but that's usually what he would talk about, that he was mad at the doctors for not giving him opioids and that they should open up the gates on the opioids. It didn't make a lot of sense to me.'

Ulrich was banned in 2018 from entering Allina Clinic and Buffalo Hospital and was also not allowed to have contact with a doctor at the clinic, KSTP reported.

Police revealing they found suspicious devices at both the medical center and at a nearby Super 8 motel and have been 'familiar' with Ulrich since 2003.

Authorities have not confirmed if the victims are staff or patients at the facility which is based in the small community of around 15,000 people.

Gregory Paul Ulrich, 67, was identified as the suspected gunman who allegedly shot five people at a Minnesota health clinic Tuesday

Police said Ulrich had been known to law enforcement for some time and they believe he targeted the Allina Health Clinic on Crossroads Campus Drive in Wright County, Buffalo, (above) and its staff

Buffalo Police Chief Pat Budke confirmed the suspect's identity at a press conference Tuesday afternoon where he said earlier reports that four homemade bombs had been detonated at the center are now known to be incorrect.

He said that 'suspicious packages' had been located at both the clinic and the nearby Super 8 motel - roughly one mile from the center - where Ulrich was known to have been staying.

Both sites were evacuated and bomb squads remained on the scene.

Budke said it was not yet clear if any of the devices had detonated and if the damage to the building was from gunfire or an explosive.

Police said Ulrich has been known to law enforcement for some time.

Police were first called to reports of shots being fired at the clinic at 10:54 am.

Officers responded to the scene and found several people injured inside the clinic, who they immediately administered aid to.

They located the suspect and he was taken into custody, police said.

During a secondary search of the building, officers found what they described as a 'suspicious package' in the lobby.

The clinic was evacuated and the Minneapolis bomb squad was called to the scene. They were still on the scene at 3pm.

Authorities then received information that Ulrich was staying at the Super 8.

Officers went to the motel where they found 'additional suspicious devices' and also evacuated the building.

A search warrant was obtained and officers continue to be investigating the scene.

Budke said the situation was contained by 11:42 am.

Authorities said there is no indication that Ulrich was connected to any type of domestic terrorism.

Instead, Budke said they believe the 67-year-old 'targeted the facility or someone at the facility' because he was unhappy with the care he'd received there.

Buffalo Police Chief Pat Budke (center) confirmed the suspect's identity at a press conference Tuesday afternoon where he said earlier reports that four homemade bombs had been detonated at the center are now known to be incorrect

One of the broken windows following the mass shooting and explosion at the clinic

Law enforcement personnel and first responders gathered on the scene outside the clinic

Five people were wounded after the gunman opened fire at the urgent care clinic in Buffalo

'All I can say is, it's a history that spans several years and there's certainly a history of him being unhappy with health care... with the health care that he'd received,' Budke said.

'None of the information that we have from our past contact with him would indicate that he was unhappy with, or would direct his anger at, anyone other than people within the facilities where he had been treated or where they had attempted to give treatment.'

Ulrich has lived in the community for some time and has been in contact with healthcare professionals at the clinic for 'quite some time',' authorities said.

'None of the information we have at this time suggests he would focus on any other individual or clinic.'

Police said they believe he acted alone and they are not looking for any further suspects involved in the shooting.

Both the Buffalo Police Department and the Wright County Sheriff's Department were 'very familiar' with the suspect and had received 'several calls for service [regarding Ulrich] dating back to 2003,' Sheriff Sean Deringer said at the press conference.

'He is no stranger to law enforcement,' authorities said.

Authorities did not go into detail about what type of treatment Ulrich had been receiving at the clinic.

A map of the Allina Health Clinic which is just one mile from the Super 8 Motel. Suspicious packages were found at both locations

Five victims were rushed to hospital following the shooting.

Four patients are currently at North Memorial Health Hospital in Robbinsdale and the fifth is at Hennepin County Medical Center.

Two of the victims had initially been taken to the Allina-operated Buffalo Hospital before being transferred.

No update was given about their conditions during the press conference.

The North Memorial hospital is known for dealing with the most severe of critical incident injuries.

Budke choked back tears as he said: 'This is a day that no community would want to go through - especially those staff that were there and families of those that were injured.'

Police revealed they found suspicious devices at both the medical center (above) and at a nearby Super 8 motel and have been 'familiar' with the suspect since 2003

Aerial footage from the scene shows at least two windows in the facility blown out by the blast while an empty wheelchair is seen outside the front entrance

The police dispatch audio reported that '15 shots were fired' and 'that somebody came in and started shooting.'

At least five were said to be critically injured with voices later saying there was 'one down' and that there were 'several victims with one [victim's condition being] critical if not fatal.'

Three female victims were said to be by the front entrance with gunshot wounds - with at least one critical and one shot in the abdomen.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz said at a press conference the suspect was in custody and that the incident appeared to be the work of a single individual

Local schools were placed on lockdown and a flight ban was issued over the area

At least five people were wounded after the gunman entered the facility not long before 11am and opened fire

A local woman told Fox9 she was dropping her mom off for an appointment when she saw two nurses come running out the front of the building.

'I pulled in and was getting ready to drop her off at the door and two of the nurses came running out and they got in and said they heard about 11 shots within a minute,' she said.

She said the nurses told her they didn't see a shooter.

They then saw the front windows 'be shot out' about two minutes later so they drove away from the scene, she said.

Another local resident Jim Rich told Fox 9 the incident was 'very out of the norm for the area' where everyone knows each other.

A law enforcement source told the outlet the incident was a 'disaster.'

Multiple law enforcement teams were drafted in to the scene with the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearm and Hennepin County all sending in teams to assist Buffalo Police and Wright County Sheriff's Department.

The State Patrol reported that it was flying six boxes of blood from the Red Cross to Buffalo Hospital for the victims.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey called the situation an 'unspeakable depravity' and said the city was also sending in emergency responders to assist Buffalo.

'There is an unspeakable depravity in doing harm to those who work to heal us. Those who have stepped up and risked their own health for ours,' he tweeted.

'Our first responders are on their way to the scene to help. Today Minneapolis stands with our neighbors in Buffalo.'

The conditions of the victims is still not known and authorities have not confirmed if they are staff or patients at the facility (pictured before the shooting)

Local schools went into lockdown and a flight ban was issued over the area Tuesday morning while the investigation was underway.

Buffalo-Hanover-Montrose public schools sent a memo to students' parents saying local schools had gone into lockdown with everyone evacuated from the two closest schools to the facility.

'Today there was an emergency situation at Allina Crossroads Clinic that prompted schools in Buffalo to be in lock-down and, at the direction of the Buffalo Police Department, we evacuated students from the two closest schools [Tatanka Elementary STEM School and PRIDE Transitions] to Buffalo High School,' they said.

'All other schools will dismiss today at their regularly scheduled time. All KidKare sites will be open until 6:30 p.m. Tatanka KidKare students will remain at Buffalo High School until picked up by parents.

'The district acted quickly with the help of the Buffalo Police Department and Wright County Sheriff's Department to make sure that our students are safe and secure. Our thoughts go out to those directly involved with the situation.'

Allina Health owns or operates 12 hospitals and more than 90 clinics across Minnesota.

At the Allina Health Clinic in Buffalo, 11 practitioners are listed on the website.

Buffalo is a city of about 15,000 people based around 40 miles northwest of Minneapolis.
Meal kit products of traditional foods are popular ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday, which falls on Feb. 11 to 14, as many people plan to prepare small amounts of food following a ban on large family gatherings to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Korea Times file



By Bahk Eun-ji



It is a tradition for people to visit their hometowns for the Lunar New Year holiday and cook lots of food to offer ancestral rites and share with relatives.



But fear of COVID-19 and the government's ban on gatherings of groups of five or more people have forced many to cancel visits to their hometowns, and this has made people seek smaller amounts of food for their own immediate family and choose easier ways to prepare it while staying at home.



Jo Yong-soon, a 58-year-old homemaker living in Guri, Gyeonggi Province, said she didn't invite relatives over for this holiday, but plans to prepare some food for her family.






Another patient who was in Pavilion V of the "Matei Bals" Institute during the fire on January 29 has died, the death toll reaching thus 18 in this case.

"The Ministry of Health was informed today about a death among the patients who were in Pavilion V of the National Institute of Infectious Diseases "Matei Bals" in Bucharest during the fire of January 29, 2021," the Ministry of Health informs.

According to the same source, the person was a 68-year-old man, transferred after the fire to the "St. Pantelimon" Emergency Clinical Hospital in Bucharest."The patient was diagnosed with a severe form of SARS Cov-2 and had comorbidities. The forensic investigation will determine the causes of death," says the Ministry of Health.

AGERPRES
Deaths of Elderly Who Recovered From COVID-19, but Died After Vaccine, Raise Questions

Two small clusters of deaths after COVID-19 vaccination have been reported among nursing homes in Kentucky and Arkansas.

In Kentucky, four seniors died the same day of their vaccination on Dec. 30, 2020; three of the four reportedly already had had coronavirus prior to getting vaccinated.

In Arkansas, four seniors died at a long-term care facility about a week after their vaccination. All tested positive for COVID-19 after vaccination.

The deaths are reported in a federal database called VAERS, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System.

A death after vaccination doesnt necessarily mean the vaccine is to blame. Of those receiving coronavirus vaccines, many are elderly and frail, or already suffering from serious illnesses. That makes it difficult to know whether theres a connection.

Kentucky Nursing Home Deaths

According to VAERS reports, the Kentucky deaths occurred after vaccinations with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. An ill 88-year-old woman who was 14 + days post covid was given the Pfizer-BioNTech shot while she was unresponsive in [her] room. She died within an hour and a half (914961-1). An 88-year-old who was 15 days post covid got the shot, was monitored for 15 minutes afterward, and died within 90 minutes (914994-1). A third report says an 88-year-old woman who was 14 + days post covid vomited four minutes after receiving her shot, became short of breath, and died that night (915562-1). And an 85-year-old woman vaccinated at 5 p.m. was found unresponsive less than two hours later and died shortly after (915682-1).

In response to questions about the Kentucky cluster, a spokesman for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said its experts noted no pattern  among the [Kentucky] cases that would indicate a concern for the safety of the COVID-19 vaccine.

Scientists differ on whether people who have had coronavirus, such as the Kentucky patients, should receive the COVID-19 vaccination at all. The CDC insists its safe for people who have recovered from COVID-19 to get vaccinated and that theres no minimum interval recommended between infection and vaccination.

Vaccination should be offered to persons regardless of history of prior symptomatic or asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 [the virus that causes COVID-19] infection, it states.

But other scientists say vaccinating people who are already considered immune after a natural COVID-19 infection wastes valuable doses of vaccines when there are shortages. And neither Pfizers nor Modernas studies showed any benefit to vaccinating previously infected patients.

The Kentucky patients were vaccinated shortly after the CDC disseminated false information on this point. The CDC claimed studies showed that vaccines are effective for people who have had COVID-19. The disinformation was given on the agencys website, in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, and in a webinar instruction to medical professionals.

In the webinar, the CDCs Dr. Sarah Oliver falsely stated, Data from both clinical trials suggests that people with prior infection are still likely to benefit from vaccination.

Under pressure from Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who first flagged the CDCs incorrect information in December, the agency recently issued a correction but used wording that still falsely implies studies showed that the vaccines helped people previously infected with COVID-19.

Meanwhile, preliminary results from a study co-authored by a team of more than two dozen researchers noted that people infected with COVID-19 in the past experience systemic side effects with a significantly higher frequency after vaccination than others.

The CDC confirms that its monitoring reports that people whove already had COVID-19 seem to be suffering significantly more frequent or more severe reactions after vaccination, or reactogenicity, than those who didnt have COVID-19.

CDC is aware of reports of increased reactogenicity (such as fever, chills, and muscle aches) in persons who have had COVID-19, said a spokesman.

Arkansas Nursing Home Deaths

Four nursing home deaths in Arkansas occurred after vaccination with the Moderna-manufactured vaccine. All four patients tested positive for COVID-19 after vaccination, according to the VAERS reports. But theres no indication as to whether they had coronavirus at the time of their vaccination or acquired it after their shot.

A 65-year-old man (921547-1) who received the Moderna vaccine on Jan. 2, 2021, died two days later, with the VAERS report noting that he tested positive for COVID-19. Three other Arkansas seniors died about a week after receiving the Moderna vaccine on Dec. 22, 2020. The person reporting the death of an 82-year-old man (917117-1) six days after his shot said he was vaccinated in an attempt to mitigate his risk and that this was unsuccessful and [the] patient died. The VAERS report notes, After vaccination, patient tested positive for COVID-19.

Two elderly women, ages 90 (917790-1) and 78 (917793-1), were vaccinated the same day as the 65-year-old man and also tested positive for COVID-19 about a week after their shots and died. According to the unnamed person who reported the 90-year-olds death, the vaccine did not have enough time to prevent COVID 19 and There is no evidence that the vaccination caused patients death. It simply didnt have time to save her life.

The person who reported the 78-year-olds death claimed she died as a result of COVID-19 and her underlying health conditions and not as a result of the vaccine.

In response to questions about the Arkansas cluster, the CDC said, Surveillance data to date do not indicate excess deaths among elderly patients receiving COVID-19 vaccinations. Overall, the agency says, the number of deaths at long-term care facilities after COVID-19 vaccinations is no higher than what would be expected to occur naturally.

Frail Patients

Separately, the CDC is monitoring the impact of the vaccines on already-frail patients such as the chronically ill in nursing homes.

In Norway, alarm bells sounded when 23 people died shortly after vaccination. After investigating 13 of the deaths, Norways medical agency has concluded side effects that are common with the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, such as fever, nausea, and diarrhea, may have contributed to fatal outcomes in some of the frail patients.

There is a possibility that these common adverse reactions, that are not dangerous in fitter, younger patients and are not unusual with vaccines, may aggravate underlying disease in the elderly, said Steinar Madsen, medical director of the Norwegian Medicines Agency.

A World Health Organization (WHO) expert panel disagrees. It says the deaths are in line with the expected, all-cause mortality rates and causes of death in the sub-population of frail, elderly individuals, and the available information does not confirm a contributory role for the vaccine in the reported fatal events.

But one unanswered question is whether patients who are both frail and have already had COVID-19 might suffer a double-whammy that puts them at greater risk when vaccinated. First, those with a previous COVID-19 infection might be more likely to suffer adverse events upon vaccination, according to scientific reports. Second, their frailty may make them less able to handle the adverse events, as Norways medical agency found with some patients.

In the United States, VAERS reports contain numerous other cases of elderly, frail people whod had COVID-19, got vaccinated, and died.

A 96-year-old Ohio woman tested positive for COVID-19 in November, got the Pfizer vaccine on Dec. 28, 2020, in a rehab facility after a fall, and died that afternoon (915920-1).

A 94-year-old Michigan man at a senior living facility who had COVID-19 and other illnesses received the Moderna vaccine on Jan. 2 and died of cardiac arrest two days later (918487-1).

A 91-year-old Michigan woman with Alzheimers and other illnesses at a senior living facility who had tested positive for COVID-19 received the Moderna vaccine on Dec. 30, 2020. She died four days later (924186-1).

And an 85-year-old California woman with Alzheimers and other disorders at a senior living facility received the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine on Jan. 5 and was found dead the same day. After her vaccination, an earlier COVID-19 test from Jan. 3 returned positive, though shed had no symptoms (924456-1).

In other cases, elderly, frail patients tested positive for COVID-19 shortly after vaccination.

A 104-year-old woman in New York received the Pfizer vaccine on Dec. 30, 2020. The next day, a COVID-19 test was done and came back positive. She became ill the following day and died on Jan. 4. (920832-1).

And a 71-year-old New York man received the Moderna vaccine on Dec. 21, 2020, developed a fever and respiratory distress, and tested positive for COVID-19. He was given Remdesivir. He died after six days (922977-1).

A WHO vaccine safety subcommittee reviewed reports of deaths among the frail, elderly after the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. The members determined, two weeks ago, theres no cause for concern.

The benefit-risk balance of [Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine] BNT162b2 remains favorable in the elderly, and does not suggest any revision, at present, to the recommendations around the safety of this vaccine, said the WHO officials.

Pfizer, Moderna, and CDC Responses

In response to questions for this report, Pfizer issued a statement saying: We take adverse events that are potentially associated with our COVID-19 vaccine, BNT162b2, very seriously. We closely monitor all such events and collect relevant information to share with global regulatory authorities. Based on ongoing safety reviews performed by Pfizer, BioNTech, and health authorities, BNT162b2 retains a positive benefit-risk profile for the prevention of COVID-19 infections.

Pfizer said that millions of people have been vaccinated and that serious adverse events, including deaths that are unrelated to the vaccine, are unfortunately likely to occur at a similar rate as they would in the general population.

Pfizer didnt answer whether it has concluded that any deaths might be linked to vaccination. It also wouldnt answer whether it has looked at any clusters of deaths, or noted any patterns or areas of concern. And the company wouldnt say whether it recommends that those recently or currently infected with COVID-19 get vaccinated.

Moderna didnt answer our questions or respond to a request for information and comment by press time.

Currently, the CDC recommends vaccination for people whove already had coronavirus.

The agency didnt directly answer the question of whether its safe for people to get vaccinated while they have an active COVID-19 infection. A CDC spokesman said that deferring vaccination is recommended in those instances, but didnt say whether it was due to a safety issue.

Vaccination of persons with known current SARS-CoV-2 infection should be deferred until the person has recovered from the acute illness (if the person had symptoms) and criteria have been met for them to discontinue isolation, says the CDC. This recommendation applies to persons who develop SARS-CoV-2 infection before receiving any vaccine doses as well as those who develop SARS-CoV-2 infection after the first dose but before receipt of the second dose.

Sharyl Attkisson is the New York Times bestselling author of Stonewalled, a five-time Emmy Award winner, and the host of Sinclairs national investigative television program Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 10)  House Speaker Lord Allan Velasco on Wednesday discussed a bill that seeks to expedite the purchase of COVID-19 vaccines, during a meeting with Vaccine Czar Carlito Galvez, Jr. and Health Secretary Francisco Duque III.

Velasco, Leyte Rep. Martin Romualdez and Abang Lingkod Rep. Joseph Paduano have filed House Bill 8648, which would authorize local government units to procure their own vaccines without public bidding, as long as they are registered or allowed emergency use by the Food and Drug Administration.

The current arrangement requires LGUs to enter a tripartite agreement with the pharmaceutical company and the national government.

The bill also proposes to exempt local government units from import duties, taxes and other fees as earlier suggested by Muntinlupa Rep. Ruffy Biazon.

Velasco posted photos of the meeting with Galvez and Duque, saying they also discussed the simulation exercises of the vaccine rollout, a centralized database and monitoring system, and a "passport" system for Filipinos to show proof that they were vaccinated.

Galvez, the Department of Health and the FDA earlier emphasized that the tripartite setup must be followed to align national and local vaccination efforts. Malacanang also warned against breaching the agreement. Galvez earlier said the country was able to save $700 million in deals through the national government's negotiation efforts.

Galvez and Duque have yet to issue statements about the meeting with Velasco.

Vaccines are expected to arrive in the country within the month.
After a full year of being pulled down by the pandemic, global oil prices are roaring back.

Here's what you need to know to Get Up to Speed and On with Your Day.

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1. Impeachment

The second impeachment trial of former President Trump begins today. Here's how it will go: Things will get going in the afternoon with up to four hours of debate, followed by a vote on the constitutionality of the trial (it needs just a simple majority to pass). Then, we'll see up to a few days of arguments, followed by a period when senators can question the legal teams. Then, there will be more debate, closing arguments and deliberation. During the trial, senators and witnesses will revisit the events of the Capitol riot on January 6, so things may get emotional. Sen. Patrick Leahy, president pro tempore of the Senate, will preside over the trial. Security around the Capitol is being beefed up ahead of the proceedings, with razor wire-topped fences looming and National Guard members standing by.

2. Coronavirus

School districts across the US are considering plans to restart in-person learning, including at some middle schools in New York City. But experts warn that it's extremely risky for local and state leaders to lift Covid-19 restrictions right now because of the rising threat of coronavirus variants. In fact, the Biden administration is considering more restrictions, like a Covid-19 testing requirement for domestic air travel. Meanwhile, other countries are seeing some improvements: Germany is seeing a drop in Covid-19 incidence rates, and Iran and Peru are rolling out new vaccine initiatives. Drugmaker Pfizer says it's hiked its production rate to double vaccine output and keep up with demand. In the US, coronavirus has claimed the life of GOP Rep. Ron Wright, the first sitting member of Congress to die after contracting the virus.

3. Stimulus

March 14. That's the date by which Democratic lawmakers hope to finally pass the long-awaited coronavirus relief bill. There's a lot to do before then, though. House committees are aiming to get their parts of the bill over to the Budget Committee by February 16. Then in the Senate, Democrats need the support of legislators who may be on the fence about some provisions, like moderate Sen. Joe Manchin, who has argued against the $15 minimum wage hike included in the bill and disagrees with some proposed income thresholds for that all-important $1,400 stimulus check.

4. Myanmar

Myanmar's new military junta has warned the public not to "destroy" democracy, despite overturning the results of democratic elections when it seized power last week. In the last four days, tens of thousands of people have taken part in protests against the February 1 coup. In response, the military imposed new restrictions on public gatherings and instituted a curfew for major towns and cities. It also warned that those who break these rules or continue to protest could face consequences. A United Nations spokesperson called the Myanmar junta's new measures "concerning."

5. North Korea

North Korean hackers stole hundreds of millions of dollars in 2020 to fund the country's nuclear and ballistic missile programs, according to a confidential United Nations report. The report says North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's regime encouraged these operations to pay for weapons in violation of international law and to help the country's economy stay afloat. By some estimates, hackers stole virtual assets worth $316.4 million dollars between 2019 and last November. Now, at least one unnamed country has said it is "highly likely" North Korea could mount a nuclear device to a ballistic missile of any range. The report containing this information has yet to be released, and it's unclear how North Korea and other countries will respond to the leak.

BREAKFAST BROWSE

Tom Brady's GOAT status is capturing the world's imagination

Who would have thought the unassuming kid from Michigan would end up a seven-time Super Bowl champ?

This Mississippi city will pay you a monthly stipend and relocation costs to move there

River views, Southern sunsets and minimal living costs? Sounds pretty nice.

This woman used Gorilla Glue instead of hair spray. She ended up in the hospital

Oh no no no no nooo!

A woman won a 6-figure lottery prize. The next day, she won again

Some people, quite literally, have all the luck.

Chris Hemsworth's stunt double says he's struggling to keep up with the star's muscular bulking

Imagine trying to match the fitness routine of a guy who plays a literal god.

IN MEMORIAM

Mary Wilson, a founding member of "The Supremes," has died at the age of 76. Aside from breaking gender, racial and social barriers with the legendary Motown group, Wilson was also a best-selling author, motivational speaker, businesswoman and US Cultural Ambassador.

PROFILES IN PERSEVERANCE

February is Black History Month, and every day we're highlighting Black pioneers in American history. Learn more here.

Charles Richard Drew, scientist, 1904-1950

Drew is known as the "father of the blood bank" for his hand in developing America's first large-scale blood bank program in the 1940s. Before that, Drew was the first Black student to earn a medical doctorate from Columbia University, where his interest in the science of blood transfusions led to groundbreaking work separating plasma from blood. This made it possible to store blood for a week -- a huge breakthrough for doctors treating wounded soldiers in World War II.

TODAY'S NUMBER

14

That's how many people died last week in avalanches in the US, setting a tragic and unusual record.

TODAY'S QUOTE

"It is very sad where we are as a country, but we will continue to fight to save our country from this wannabe dictator."

Velina Elysees Charlier, a Haitian activist, who is one of many criticizing Haitian President Jovenel Moise and calling for his removal. Moise was due to step down over the weekend in line with constitutional term limits, but Moise has argued he gets another year in office due to a time technicality. People are now calling on the Haitian Supreme Court to install a transitional government and force Moise to leave.

TODAY'S WEATHER

Check your local forecast here>>>

AND FINALLY

Pittypittypat

Everyone deserves something that makes them as happy as this drum makes this bird. (Click here to view.)

For centuries, people have burned waste to create energy, sending carbon billowing into the atmosphere. Transforming garbage into clean fuel, however, was an alchemy confined to fiction, like the movie Back to the Future." Now, a handful of companies want to turn household trash into low-emissions fuels for planes, trains and trucks.

The newer, cleaner process, known as waste gasification or pyrolysis, involves cutting and drying non-recyclable trash from homes and offices, such as packaging and bottles, before blasting it with 4,000-degree-Fahrenheit steam and oxygen to break it down into hydrogen and carbon monoxide. The solids left behind are sold as road materials, and the gases produced can then be synthesizedusing processes developed a hundred years agoand refined into greener fuels, including biofuels and emissions-free hydrogen.

Sierra Energy, originally set up to provide low-carbon locomotive fuel for its parent company, Sierra Railroad Corp., has a prototype of a trash refinery in Monterey County, Calif. Canadas Omni Conversion Technologies says it is on the verge of commercializing its waste gasifiers. In the U.K., the sustainable-fuel startup Velocys and aviation giant International Airlines Group SA aim to create Europes first garbage-to-jet-fuel plant and have received funding from Royal Dutch Shell PLC, while the European oil giant Repsol SA is also investing in the technology in the Spanish city of Bilbao.

When you throw garbage into a hole in the ground, what happens is you get an enormous amount of methane coming out," says Mike Hart, chief executive of Sierra Energy. Methane comprises 20% of global greenhouse-gas emissions and is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide in trapping the earths heat, the Environmental Protection Agency says.

Youre preventing that if you can take that waste, and turn it into something valuable," Mr. Hart says.

Efforts to transform household waste, along with waste cooking oils and animal fats, come as the transportation sector fights an uphill battle to slash emissions. While the electricity industry is well on its way to decarbonizing, transportation accounted for almost a quarter of global carbon dioxide emissions in 2019, according to the International Energy Agency.

The European Union last year bailed out the continents airline sector after the coronavirus pandemic hit, tying some of that money to airlines increasing their use of biofuels, which includes fuels made from household waste, as well as cooking oil and agricultural crops. Airlines and shipping firms have signed up to emissions reductions pledges that are tied to the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris climate agreement.

Replacing the cheap and dirty fuels like kerosene and diesel that power the worlds largest vehicles has proven difficult.

It costs $0.45 to produce a liter of kerosene, less than half what it costs to produce commercial biofuel and a quarter of the cost of advanced biofuels, according to the IEA.

Transportation companies hope that one day emissions-free hydrogen fuel cells will power the sector, but they are currently heavy and too low in energy density for long-haul aviation or shipping journeys that dont regularly pass refueling hubs.

Biofuels, including those produced from waste or other materials, produce emissions, but they release less carbon than conventional fossil fuels. Starting with trash avoids one of the longstanding criticisms of biofuels: that the land needed for the organic material from which they are made can lead to deforestation or higher food prices.

Waste gasification companies are aiming to make their fuel production economic. In doing so, they hope to recoup their considerable research and development costs, although when that will be possible remains uncertain. Many of the companies in the sector are still building prototypes or just taking their first commercial orders.

Some environmental groups, however, argue pyrolysis amounts to a greenwashing" loophole for waste producers if they can simply gasify it. Gasifying plastic waste could allow oil companies a perfunctory offset" to continue producing plastics, says nonprofit Greenpeace, which argues that the time and money spent on pyrolysis could be better spent elsewhere, including on battery storage research and phasing out internal combustion engines altogether.

Even so, companies have plowed money into pyrolysis, with demonstration models running over budgets and deadlines. Clean-energy technology typically requires long research and development periods, and investing in the sector has historically proven risky. A lot of people had been burned the first time around" investing in clean-tech, says Eric Toone, co-chairman of the investment committee at Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the clean-tech venture capital fund led by Bill Gates.

Sierra Energy was set up in 2004 and its railway-operating parent company has poured more than $50 million from investors like the U.S. military, the California Energy Commission and Breakthrough Energy Ventures into research and development.

At U.S. Army base Fort Hunter Liggett, the company last year began operating its demonstration model, which can process 10 tons of garbage and produce a ton of hydrogen a day, enough to power six cars for a year, according to the IEA. The model is meant to power the base and create low-sulphur diesel for the California Energy Commission. Future units will be 10 times the size, the company says. Sierra Energy says it will turn a profit when it can produce its fuel on a mass scale.

In Ottawa, Omni has spent a similar amount of time and more than $400 million developing its own system. Initially conceived to produce synthetic natural gas for the power sector before fuel standards were improved, the company pivoted in 2015 to building a $30 million machine to allow its customers to produce fuels from trash.

Omni has been taking orders for around a year. Its system shreds feedstock to 4-inch blocks. Its customers will convert the synthetic gas that comes out of the other end into biodiesel, biogasoline and hydrogen. The system can take 200 tons of trash a day, but it can also take wood chips and other waste materials. The company says it has received interest from various cities considering fueling city buses with trash. Omni says it can use its gasification machines to produce emissions-free hydrogen at $2.40 a kilogram. Such fuel currently costs between $9 and $19 a kilogram to produce, according to the International Council on Clean Transportation.

With common biofuel feedstocks like used cooking oils limited in supply, the ability to take unsorted urban waste and make that into a quality syngas that can be used to make biofuelsis a very substantial advantage," says Omni CEO Rod Bryden.

Meanwhile, in the U.K., Velocys has joined with British Airways in its quest to create Europes first waste-to-sustainable-jet-fuel plant near the U.K. port of Hull. Velocys says the emissions of its renewable jet fuel are 70% lower than regular jet fuel and by installing carbon-capture technology at its plant, it can make the production of the fuel carbon neutral.

The company aims to produce 60 million liters of sustainable jet and road fuel each year when it begins commercial operation, slated for late 2025.

The plant also received funding from the U.K. government and Shellinitially a partner before recently pulling out of the project. Shells head of new fuels, Matthew Tipper, says the company was pursuing its own emissions reducing technologies.

Repsol is investing $24 million into building a pyrolysis demonstration plant in Bilbao. The company says it will initially reduce the emissions of the adjoining refinery, before eventually producing hydrogen and biomethane for the aviation, marine and heavy duty transport industries.

Neste Oyj, the refiner and world leader in sustainable fuels, is also exploring making fuel from trash. That could make the Finnish company a market player in five to seven years, according to CEO Peter Vanacker.

Pilot plants will have to be built up," he says, then later scaled up so that the economics make it feasible."

This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text.

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Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, IKEA Canada has prioritized the health and safety and livelihoods of its 7900 co-workers nationwide. Over the past year the retailer is proud to have maintained all co-worker employment throughout its temporary closures. IKEA has also introduced relevant, enhanced co-worker programs for both physical and mental health and well-being, new development opportunities, flexible Wellness Days and a [email protected] initiative to build skills and competency for those working from home. All the while, the retailer continued to make long-term commitments to support its equality, diversity and inclusion platform.

"At IKEA, we strive to create a welcoming and inclusive environment that values every individual's unique differences and contributions," said Tanja Fratangeli, Head of People and Culture, IKEA Canada. "We remain committed to ensuring that IKEA continues to be a great place to work, always supporting a better everyday life for our co-workers."

Here are a few, of the many reasons, why IKEA is a Great Place to Work:

Equality remains a key focus at IKEA with the goal to reflect the diversity of Canada and create an inclusive work environment where every co-worker can be themselves.

The retailer is committed to supporting greater ethnic and racial equity and inclusion for Black people, Indigenous peoples and people of colour (BIPOC communities) through partnerships, community donations, leadership training, resources and co-worker support circles.



Strong continued focus on gender equality - 51 per cent of co-workers and managers are women and the IKEA Canada management team is gender equal. The retailer is a founding member of the Gender Equality Leadership Project, a Global Compact Network Canada venture to eliminate barriers faced by women in the workplace.



Committed to creating a welcoming, safe and accepting environment for LGBTQ+ co-workers and communities. This includes raising the Pride flag nationwide for IDAHOT, participating in Pride celebrations and partnering with organizations like Pride at Work.



Support for those with lived refugee experiences through its Refugee Skills for Employment Initiative.

In 2020, IKEA evolved its traditional Sick Pay program to introduce Wellness Days, offering more flexibility for co-workers to manage responsibilities outside of work.

The IKEA benefits program was developed together with co-workers from across the country, with a strong focus on health and well-being. In 2020, IKEA Canada enhanced benefit eligibility as part of its Caring for Co-workers initiative.

Co-worker Total Rewards include a competitive RRSP program, the Tack! Ingka loyalty program, a performance-driven bonus program, subsidized meals, a co-worker discount, paid uniform and safety boots subsidy.

IKEA Canada supports its co-workers in living a more sustainable life at home through challenges like the Better Living App and ongoing education and tools.

Ongoing opportunities for co-workers to give back to the local community and volunteer through #TogetherwithKindness COVID-19 relief efforts and long-term community partnerships with Tree Canada and Habitat for Humanity.

In collaboration with analytics firm Statista, Forbes selected Canada's Best Employers based on an independent survey from a sample of more than 8,000 Canadian employees who work for companies that employ at least 500 people in their Canadian operations. The surveys were anonymous and administered in a series of online panels and provide a representative sample of the Canadian workforce. The resulting list included 300 employers that received the most recommendation. View the full list at http://www.forbes.com/canada-best-employers/list

About IKEA Canada

Founded in 1943 in Sweden, IKEA is a leading home furnishing retailer, offering a wide range of well-designed, functional home furnishing products at prices so low that as many people as possible can afford them. IKEA Canada is part of Ingka Group which operates 374 IKEA stores in 30 countries, including 14 in Canada. Last year, IKEA Canada welcomed 22.9 million visitors to its stores and 178.4 million visitors to IKEA.ca and the IKEA app. IKEA Canada operates business through the IKEA vision - to create a better everyday life for the many people and does so through its local community efforts and sustainability initiatives. For more information on IKEA Canada, please visit IKEA.ca .

SOURCE IKEA Canada

For further information: IKEA Canada, Kristin Newbigging, [email protected]

Related Links

http://www.ikea.ca


Opposition chief Raila Odinga has moved to put his house in order ahead of the presidential elections in 2022 and rallied his supporters to vote in only ODM candidates in various positions in next year's General Election.

In a meeting characterised by a stinging rebuke of his critics in the region and an explanation of his 'Handshake' with President Kenyatta, Mr Odinga rallied his troops and put on notice any opposition within his ranks.

Mr Odinga said ODM will benefit from the 'Handshake' as it will give the party a bargaining chip and say in both Houses of Parliament.

There was an awkward moment after Mr Odinga ejected Siaya Governor Cornel Rasanga, Migori Governor Okoth Obado and Kisumu Senator Fred Outa from the VIP podium for coming late to the meeting and occupying seats "meant for elders".

The crowd booed the leaders as they left the stage to sit with the rest of the delegates.

Handshake partner

Mr Odinga dismissed talks that his 'handshake' partner, President Uhuru Kenyatta, was "fattening him" and would later ditch him in 2022.

He termed such claims as cheap talk peddled by those out to cause disunity in the country. Kenyans, he said, should elect leaders who will be able to implement what is passed in the BBI.

During the forum in Kisumu, the delegates lauded Mr Odinga and Mr Kenyatta for their decision to put aside their differences to join hands in addressing age-old problems that have held the country back over the years.

Mr Odinga's sentiments came following unease by some of his supporters and critics, who have repeatedly claimed that the President is "using him and will betray him just as he did to his Deputy William Ruto".

However, after narrating the journey of the Building Bridges Initiative and the 'Handshake' that started at the steps of the Harambee House on March 9, 2018, Mr Odinga assured his supporters that the President meant well and would not betray him.

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Five-hour discussion

"Many people have been saying that Uhuru is not sincere and that I'm being lied to by the President. This is not the case and I know he won't betray me, and I, Raila too, will not betray him," Mr Odinga said.

He was addressing elected leaders from the Luo Nyanza region as well as other stakeholders during a meeting called to discuss and chart the way forward for the BBI and solidify the party's grassroots support ahead of 2022.

The meeting was attended by all the four governors from Luo Nyanza -- Anyang' Nyong'o (Kisumu), Cornel Rasanga (Siaya), Cyprian Awiti (Homa Bay), Zachary Obado (Migori), their deputies and at least 40 elected MPs and senators.

Panellists, including experts such as Adams Oloo and Senate Minority Leader James Orengo, explained to the delegates the contents of the BBI.

The five-hour discussion among the more than 2,000 delegates who also included the clergy and civil society representatives, buttressed Mr Odinga's sentiments by resolving that he continues to support Mr Kenyatta to help him deliver on the development agenda for the country.

The Bombay High Court on Tuesday said it would hear a plea seeking either suspension or termination of the Twitter account of Kangana Ranaut on March 9 though the petitioner sought an urgent hearing claiming the actor recently posted a tweet calling the protesting farmers as terrorists. The petitioner Ali Kashif Khan Deshmukh, who is an advocate, on Tuesday moved an application before a division bench of Justices S S Shinde and Manish Pitale seeking urgent hearing on his petition, filed in December last year, seeking termination of Ranauts Twitter account.

In his application, Deshmukh cited certain tweets posted by Ranaut on Twitter in which she allegedly called the farmers, who are protesting at Delhis borders against the three new farm laws, as terrorists. The bench said it would be able to hear the plea only on March 9.

In his petition, Deshmukh had claimed that Ranauts posts on Twitter were spreading hatred among different religious communities. The Maharashtra government had, however, opposed the plea, saying it was vague.

Last week, Twitter India had removed two of the tweets by Ranaut, citing a violation of the platforms rules. The actor has been criticising protesting farmers over their agitations against the Centres three farm laws.

Ranaut has been actively posting on Twitter since last Tuesday when international pop star Rihanna came out in support of the farmers agitations. On February 5, a magistrates court in Mumbai directed the police to submit a progress report on the inquiry it had ordered into a complaint filed by Deshmukh against Ranaut and her sister for posting alleged hateful messages on social media.
An urgent health warning has been issued to shoppers after a Covid-infected person wandered around a Melbourne mall.

Coronavirus could be on the move in the Victorian community, with more exposure sites identified overnight as a hotel quarantine outbreak continues to grow.

A third worker and second former guest of the Holiday Inn at Melbourne Airport returned positive coronavirus test results on Wednesday.

The latest two infections will be included in Thursday's case tally.

Two banks at Glen Waverley in Melbourne's southeast have been added to the list of potential exposure sites, which are spread across the city.

It is unclear whether the banks were visited by either the hotel worker, former guest or other previously announced cases.

An urgent health warning has been issued to shoppers after a Covid-infected person wandered around Sunbury Square Shopping Centre

Coronavirus could be on the move in the Victorian community, with more exposure sites identified overnight as a hotel quarantine outbreak continues to grow. Pictured: Health workers are seen testing people for Covid at Royal Melbourne Showgrounds on Monday

The Commonwealth Bank and HSBC Bank were visited by a positive Covid case on Tuesday afternoon.

The Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) has also strongly urged anyone who attended Sunbury Square Shopping Centre on Friday February 5 between 3.40pm and 4.30pm to urgently get tested and isolate until receiving negative result.

'Individuals who attended the shopping centre outside of this timeframe are not considered at risk, but should monitor for symptoms and immediately present for testing if they become unwell,' DHHS said.

The Holiday Inn outbreak now encompasses three workers, two released guests and a family of three who contracted the virus overseas.

It has forced the hotel's closure until further notice, while plans to increase the state's weekly cap on international arrivals from 1120 to 1310 from next week have been put on hold.

Authorities suspect a nebuliser, which vaporises medications or liquids into a fine mist, may be to blame for the outbreak.

Two banks at Glen Waverley in Melbourne's southeast have been added to the list of potential exposure sites, which are spread across the city (stock)

Salesian College Sunbury (pictured) was shut on Wednesday after seven venues in the surrounding area were added to to the Victoria Department and Health and Human Services venue alert list of Covid exposure sites

NEW EXPOSURE SITES Commonwealth Bank, 28-32 Kingsway, Glen Waverley 1.30pm to 2.45pm on February 9 HSBC Bank, 38 Kingsway, Glen Waverley 2.15pm to 3.30pm on February 9 Sunbury Square Shopping Centre, 2-28 Evans street, Sunbury 3.40pm to 4.30pm on February 5 Advertisement

The medical device was not declared by one of the family members in quarantine, who has an underlying health condition and was taken to intensive care on Tuesday.

Covid-19 Quarantine Victoria Commissioner Emma Cassar said the guest would have been taken to a medi-hotel if they had reported it.

More than 135 hotel staff were stood down and told to get tested and isolate at home for 14 days, while 48 guests were moved to the Pullman Melbourne to quarantine for at least another three days.

Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton said it was possible everyone on that hotel floor had been exposed to the virus through the air and warned more cases would likely be unearthed.

The latest venue warnings come after two Melbourne schools were closed because a confirmed case of Covid visited multiple venues nearby.

Salesian College Sunbury and St Anne's Catholic Primary School in Sunbury, in the city's northwest, shut their gates to teachers and parents on Wednesday.

St Anne's Catholic Primary School in Sunbury (pictured) was also shut on Wednesday as a 'precautionary measure'

EXPOSURE SITES ADDED TO LIST ON TUESDAY NIGHT Cellarbrations, Sunbury - 5:44pm to 6:19pm on February 7 and 6:17pm to 7:02pm on February 6 Sunny Life Massage - Sunbury Square Shopping Centre, Sunbury - 4:30pm to 6:30pm on February 6 PJ's Pet Warehouse, Sunbury - 3:37pm to 4:10pm on February 5 Bakers Delight - Sunbury Square Shopping Centre, Sunbury - 3:40pm to 4:15pm on February 5 Aldente Deli - Sunbury Square Shopping Centre, Sunbury - 3:45pm to 4:23pm on February 5 Sushi Sushi - Sunbury Square Shopping Centre, Sunbury - 3:53pm to 4:28pm on February 5 Asian Star - Sunbury Square Shopping Centre, Sunbury - 3:57pm to 4:30pm on February 5 Advertisement

The schools have not been listed as public exposure sites but have been closed as 'precautionary measures'.

Seven venues in Sunbury were added to the Victoria Department and Health and Human Services alert list of venue exposure sites on Tuesday night.

'Some members of our community have been in close contact with a confirmed case, the only sensible thing to do is not take any risks,' Salesian principal Mark Brockhus wrote to parents on Tuesday.

'I know this will come as a shock to many. However I hope that you can appreciate that we don't want to take risks with this very transmissible virus.'

Parents with children at St Anne's have been told to await further advice from the school.

A spokesman for the Melbourne Archdiocese Catholic Schools said the schools were closed following advice from health authorities as there were 'numbers of potential secondary contacts'.

The venues added to the list of exposure sites include Sunny Life Massage, Bakers Delight, Aldente Deli, Sushi Sushi and Asian Star - all in Sunbury Square Shopping Centre in Sunbury - as well as Cellarbrations and PJ's Pet Warehouse also in Sunbury.

Anyone who visited the venues during published times must immediately isolate, get tested and remain isolated for 14 days.

Cellabrations in Sunbury (pictured) has been listed as an exposure site during the time of 5:44pm to 6:19pm on February 7 and 6:17pm to 7:02pm on February 6

PJ's Pet Warehouse, Sunbury (pictured) has been listed as an exposure site for the time of 3:37pm to 4:10pm on February 5
Page Industries surged 5.47% to Rs 31,995.85 after the apparel maker's net profit jumped 76.65% to Rs 153.7 crore on a 16.78% rise in net sales to Rs 927.06 crore in Q3 FY21 over Q3 FY20.

Page Industries said it saw resilient performance as the economy started to show signs of recovery. As of now, more than 94% of multi brand outlets, 100% of EBOs and 93% of the company's large format stores are fully functional.

Profit before tax grew by 77.3% to Rs 207.26 crore in Q3 FY21 from Rs 116.9 crore in Q3 FY20. Total tax expense spiked 79% year on year to Rs 53.56 crore in Q3 FY21 over Q3 FY20.

EBITDA spurted 63% to Rs 226.10 crore in Q3 FY21 over Q3 FY20. EBITDA margins improved to 24.4% in Q3 FY21, higher than 17.5% in Q3 FY20.

Commenting on the results, Sunder Genomal, MD of Page Industries said, "I am delighted to share that we have registered all-time high Revenue and Profit in third quarter. We are encouraged by the strong demand in all our product categories in all channels. The Athleisure and Kids categories have particularly shown very promising growth and acceptance. We continue to strengthen management with the best talent and invest in digital transformation, technology and innovation in product design and development, marketing and brand building. There is also renewed focus in becoming more efficient and optimal in all aspects of the business, while at the same time taking care to eliminate any wasteful spend or activity. Given our strong and proven business model, wide product portfolio, efficient financial management and a very loyal customer base, we continue to remain very confident of our medium to long term prospects."

The company said it repaid all outstanding borrowings during the quarter and it is completely debt-free. The cash & cash equivalent has increased by 23% quarter on quarter to Rs 494.10 crore.

Meanwhile, the company has announced a second interim dividend of Rs 150 per share. The record date is set on 19 February 2021.

Page Industries is the exclusive licensee of JOCKEY International Inc. (USA) for manufacture, distribution and marketing of the JOCKEY brand in India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and the UAE.

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WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Hickory Harvest Foods is recalling Vanilla Flavored Yogurt Covered Cranberries citing the possible presence of undeclared almonds, an allergen, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said. The affected product is packaged in 12 oz bags under the Sprouts Farmers Market brand with Best By Date of 5/28/21 and UPC code of 646670463778. The product was sold by select Spouts Stores in around 16 states between June 2, 2020 to February 2, 2021. These states include Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, California, Colorado, Alabama, Tennessee, Nevada, Utah, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Florida. The recall was initiated after it was discovered that the product containing Almonds may have been distributed in packaging that did not reveal the presence of Almonds. According to the agency, people who have an allergy or severe sensitivity to almonds may get serious or life- threatening allergic reaction if they consume these products. However, the Akron, Ohio-based company has not received any reports of illness to date. Consumers who have purchased the product are urged to return it to the place of purchase for a refund. In similar recalls involving undeclared allergens, Ocean Beauty Seafood LLC this week called back 8450 packages of Publix brand Parmesan-Crusted Wild Alaskan Salmon Fillets that may contain undeclared soy due to mis-packaging. Hong Thai Foods Corp. last week recalled certain Golden Boy Custard Muffin Banana for the possible presence of undeclared milk allergens. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

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.
Washington, Feb 10 (UNI) A day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke to US President Joe Biden, their first conversation after his inauguration, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday held discussion on the Indo-Pacific developments, coup in Myanmar and the Quad cooperation.

During the telephonic conversation, Mr Jaishankar and Mr Blinken talked to reaffirm the strength of the US-India partnership and also discussed issues of mutual concern, including the situation in Burma (Myanmar), the US State Department Spokesperson Ned Price said.

Secretary Blinken expressed concern over the military coup and the importance of rule of law and the democratic process in Burma, Mr Price further added.

In Myanmar, the military took control and imposed state of emergency for one year after staging coup against State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi and Myanmar president Win Myint, citing 'election fraud in last year's elections, in which Nobel Laureate Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) party secured the majority.

The Secretary and the Minister also discussed regional developments, including the value of US-India cooperation across the Indo-Pacific. Both sides look forward to expanded regional cooperation, including through the Quad, and to address the challenges of COVID and climate change.

On January 29, both held their first telephonic conversation. During the talk, they had resolved to strengthen and expand the India-US strategic partnership.

Earlier in the day, Mr Jaishankar took to twitter to inform that he held discussion with Secretary Blinken on Myanmar, Indo-Pacific and the Quad.

"Welcomed the comprehensive discussion today with @SecBlinken. Reviewed Indo-Pacific developments and the Quad cooperation. Exchanged views on the situation in Myanmar. Look forward to remaining in touch," the Minister tweeted.

Both India and US have been expanding cooperation bilaterally as well as under the framework of the Quad to promote a free and open Indo-Pacific region. The Quad is group of India, Australia, Japan and the US.

These issues also figured in the PM Modi and President Biden's telephonic conversation.

UNI XC GK 0421/0832
One of the victims of the doomed Manx2 Belfast-Cork flight in 2011 has been described as a "valued and respected colleague and friend" who is still remembered by his workmates at Belfast port.

Today marks the 10th anniversary of the tragedy, which saw four passengers and two pilots lose their lives when a 19-seater Manx2 turboprop aircraft crashed on its third attempt at landing in heavy fog at Cork Airport.

The families of the victims - Michael Evans, Brendan McAleese, Pat Cullinan, Richard Noble, Jordi Gola Lopez and Andy Cantle - will be quietly remembering their loved ones and ensuring their memories live on.

Emergency services rushed to the scene of the wreckage near runway 17 on February 10 2011, and heroically saved six passengers as the ensuing blaze took hold.

Flight 7100 departed George Best Belfast City Airport at 8.10am before crashing almost two hours later.

The late former Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness said he had considered taking the flight during his campaign trail for the Irish presidential elections but his plans changed due to other circumstances.

In 2014, the final report of Ireland's Air Accident Investigation Unit said there were systemic deficiencies in areas such as pilot training, scheduling of crews and maintenance, as well as inadequate oversight of the service.

It made 11 safety recommendations to the Spanish and European air safety authorities including one about the number of successive approaches that can be made in certain weather.

The service was operated by Flightline BCN and the plane and crew was leased by Spanish company Airlada.

Legal action was later taken by relatives of those who perished and the six survivors, while an inquest in 2014 ruled that the crash was accidental.

The jury of six men and one woman took just over 40 minutes to return the verdict.

The funeral of Belfast port's deputy harbour master Captain Michael Evans heard how he and his wife Andrea were "soulmates".

In a heartfelt eulogy, Mrs Evans described the pain of the sudden loss of her husband as "hard to bear".

Harbour master Captain Kevin Allen told mourners at his colleague's funeral that the father-of-four "worked tirelessly to ensure every marine aspect was right".

"He did it his way with a tenacity, enthusiasm, a huge energy - and through that work he gained the respect of all the organisations he came in contact with," he said.

Among the mourners were Donal Walsh from Waterford and Laurence Wilson from Co Antrim, who both survived the crash.

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Looking back at the tragedy 10 years ago, Mr Allen said there aren't many days that go by where the situation doesn't feel "current".

Mr Evans had travelled to Cork for business purposes and in a fitting tribute in 2015, the staff at Belfast port named a pilot boat after him in his memory.

"Michael was part of the harbour family and the Seaman's Church is where his funeral service was," Mr Allen told the Belfast Telegraph. "It was very well attended by people we had gone to sea with.

"Most of the harbour masters from all over Ireland - Cork, Dublin and Limerick - were all in attendance.

"Michael had been at sea for 20-odd years and in the port for six years."

He added: "He is certainly remembered here. In 2012 we bought two boats and once the first boat was delivered in 2015, we invited Andrea and his daughters to a naming ceremony.

"The harbour was very sympathetic towards his family. He was a valued and respected colleague and friend, who is remembered."

Meanwhile, the funeral of Belfast businessman Richard Noble was attended by Mr McGuinness and former First Minister Peter Robinson and mourners heard how the father-of-one was a devoted husband to his wife Allison, and daughter Charlotte.

Brendan McAleese, who was originally from Tannaghmore in Co Antrim and a relative of former Irish President Mary McAleese, and Pat Cullinan from Omagh were also laid to rest.

A McAleese family statement at the time of Brendan's death said: "The impact of the tragedy has yet to sink in.

"Brendan was such a special character, a doting father, loving husband, son and brother, and a true gentleman to all who knew him."

Jordi Gola Lopez's funeral was held in Spain, while his British co-pilot Andy Cantle was buried in his home town of Sunderland.

Mr Cantle's mother, Ann, described her son as an "all-action hero" devoted to a flying career.

He had only been with Manx2 for a fortnight before the plane he was flying crashed.

The survivors of the tragedy were Mr Walsh, Mr Wilson, Mark Dickens, Heather Elliot, Peter Cowley and Brendan Mallon.

Speaking to the Belfast Telegraph in 2016, Mr Mallon, from Bangor, admitted that he was still trying to come to terms with how he got out of the plane alive.

He expressed his feelings of guilt when he thought of the families of those who perished.

The father-of-two said he would never be able to fully grasp how he survived, or why he twice opted against taking seats that were ultimately occupied by passengers who didn't make it.

He knew his final thoughts before the ill-fated aircraft slammed into the ground and flipped over were of his wife Heather and children Jonathan and Matthew, although he couldn't actually remember having those thoughts.

He told one of his work colleagues about them that day shortly after being hospitalised with severe head and neck injuries, and this conversation was later relayed to him.

"For whatever reason my mind has decided to throw Tippex at the crash," he said at the fifth anniversary of the tragedy.

"I only recall looking out the window while we were coming into land and seeing grass... one millisecond of seeing grass, that's the last thing I remember."

Expand Close Tragedy: The wreckage of the Manx2 plane in which six people where killed in a crash in February 2011 is removed from the runway at Cork Airport / Facebook

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Mr Mallon was cut free from the wreckage by the emergency services and hospitalised for three weeks.

Had it not been for a quirk of fate that led to his choice of seat on the plane, Mr Mallon might not have survived at all.

He said it was a small plane with seats on both sides and an aisle down the middle. "I was the second person to board," he said.

"The man ahead of me had taken the first seat on the right hand side.

"I considered the seat opposite him but it was too close to the cockpit.

"I was about to sit on another seat in the third row but one on the left had more legroom, so I chose that one.

"Over time I realised that the men in those other seats didn't make it. That's always on my mind."

Another stroke of fortune came when one of the Cork Airport rescue team "went with his gut" ahead of normal procedure and got to the plane quicker - a decision Mr Mallon believes also contributed to his survival.

That fact only emerged two-and-a-half years later when he visited Cork Airport and spoke to members of the rescue team.

"They heard the crash but they couldn't see the plane because of the fog," Mr Mallon said.

"The guy who drove on to the tarmac turned left instead of right, so he reached the plane sooner, the fire engine got to us sooner and the fire was put out sooner.

"If that hadn't happened, who knows... in another two or three minutes the fire could have caught. He probably saved our lives."

Mr Mallon added that, for him personally, each anniversary stirs up a "mixed bag of emotions".

"I'm grateful I see my family every day, but I always think about the families of those who weren't so lucky," he said.


Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-11 02:09:43|Editor: huaxia

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STOCKHOLM, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- The Swedish authorities' goal of vaccinating all adults in the country against COVID-19 by the end of June might prove to be difficult to achieve, State Epidemiologist Anders Tegnell said here on Wednesday.

To date, slightly less than 317,000 adults -- or 3.86 percent of Sweden's population -- have received at least the first coronavirus vaccine dose, the Public Health Agency said.

This is an increase of 52,000 compared with the previous week. However, several vaccine shipments have been delayed or were smaller than agreed, which hampers the country's efforts to ramp up vaccine rollout, Tegnell told the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter.

"It is becoming increasingly tough. The more the deliveries are postponed, the more you will need to do in a fairly short time at the end of April and May," he said.

"The question is whether we have time for this considering the time pressure. It will get tougher and tougher."

Following smaller than anticipated deliveries from vaccine manufacturers AstraZeneca and Pfizer, a shipment containing 31,200 doses of Moderna's vaccine has also been delayed until the last week of February due to a factory upgrade that is done to increase production. This shipment will also be "half the amount originally planned," the Public Health Agency told Dagens Nyheter.

The news has left Sweden's counties in despair.

"We have the material, we have the personnel and we have a very high capacity, but where is the vaccine?" Alf Jonsson, regional executive officer in Skane County, told journalists.

As the world is struggling to contain the pandemic, vaccination is underway in some countries with the already-authorized coronavirus vaccines.

Meanwhile, 242 candidate vaccines are still being developed worldwide -- 63 of them in clinical trials -- in countries including Germany, China, Russia, Britain and the United States, according to information released by the World Health Organization on Feb. 9. Enditem
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Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 10)  The Department of Health on Wednesday said the Province of Cebu is seeing an upward trend in its coronavirus cases, but the hospitals are still able to manage the number of COVID-19 patients.

Health spokesperson Maria Rosario Vergeire said the average daily attack rate and two-week growth rate in the province is going up, but the healthcare utilization is only at moderate risk. She said healthcare workers in the province are not yet burdened by the number of patients seeking care.

"Hindi pa natin nakikita sa ngayon dahil nakikita natin that we are able to manage. But sana hindi magtuloy-tuloy ang kanilang pagtaas ng kaso so we can still manage," she said in a media briefing.

[Translation: We are able to manage. Hopefully the increase in cases does not continue so we can manage.]

However, the official said Cebu City and Lapu-Lapu City are seeing a rise in the occupation of beds dedicated for COVID-19 patients. The OCTA Research group warned that the occupancy rate in Cebu City hospitals may hit critical level in two to three weeks if COVID-19 cases there continue to rise.

Vergeire said the surge may be attributed to the transmission during the holidays and aggravated by the delayed consultation of infected patients. She added the new COVID-19 variant first detected in UK could also be one of the factors.

"Hindi natin masasabi na variant lang ang cause . It might be addition or naka-aggravate. Maaari na kasama siya sa factors," she said in a media briefing.

[Translation: We cannot say that the variant is the only cause. It might be adding to or aggravating the rise in cases. It might be among the factors]

Meanwhile, the DOH asked the National Bureau of Investigation to help in tracing the 35-year-old man from Liloan, Cebu who recently tested positive for the new variant.

Big Brother star Hughie Maughan is set to appear on the new series of First Dates Ireland.

The Dancing with the Stars celeb will be appearing on our screens in the First Dates restaurant this spring.



Hughie is matched with Glasgow man Paul on the show just months after split from fellow Big Brother housemate Ryan Rutlidge.

The reality TV couple called off their relationship after four years together last August.



First Dates Ireland returns to RTE 2 tomorrow for its sixth series just in time for Valentines Day with a new cohort of hopeful singles looking for love.

Set in the Gibson Hotel, this will be the first socially distanced edition of First Dates Ireland.



The trailer shows the new precautions taken to adhere to social distancing. As per Government guidelines, the daters will wear masks inside the restaurant and sit at appropriately distanced dining tables. T

There will also be no opportunity to mingle at the bar before the date and receive a pep talk from in-house mixologist Ethan.

Joining Ethan on our screens is maitre d' Mateo Saina, as well as waiters-turned-Cupids Alice, Pete, and Libby.

The gang are excited to return tot he dating show, with Mateo telling the Sunday World that there a lot of great characters on this series, there is a lot to look forward to.

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While the new Covid restrictions mean that the First Dates restaurant looks a little different, the singletons on the show are still determined to find romance and have fun.

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As seen in the trailer, newly matched couples quickly adapt to socially distanced dating by creating new methods of intimacy from kissing through a Perspex partition to creating an old-school cup and string phone to communicate across the table.



First Dates Ireland returns to RTE 2 this Thursday 11th February at 9.30pm.

[February 10, 2021] Hehmeyer to Merge with Nortide, Creating Hehmeyer Nortide AG

Hehmeyer LLC, a Chicago-based market maker in digital assets, today announced its agreement to merge its electronic liquidity provision business with Nortide Capital AG (with its operational subsidiaries Nortide Trading AG and Nortide Brokerage AG), a Swiss-based market maker in digital assets. The new firm, Hehmeyer Nortide AG, will dedicate itself to serving users of cryptocurrencies globally and will be headquartered in Zug, Switzerland. Drawing on the strengths of each firm - including Nortide's state-of-the-art trading platform and Hehmeyer's globally established brand, extensive relationships, and developed compliance and risk management departments - Hehmeyer Nortide AG will enjoy broader market access while providing its counterparties with a deeper roster of digital assets at competitive prices. "This rapidly growing industry is global in its nature, and this merger will allow us to service our counterparties on a global scale," said Chris Hehmeyer, CEO and founder of Hehmeyer. "The skills, talents and expertise of the two companies are very complementary, and headquartering in Zug, known colloquially as 'crypto valley,' will put us in the middle of a vibrant crypto community that is innovating and creating new service offerings every day." Johan Wattenstrom, co-founder and Director of Nortide Capital AG, added, "This merger allows us to combine our operational efficiencies and provideimproved pricing for a global community of crypto users. It was a natural fit for us to join forces with Hehmeyer, a brand that exemplifies trust in the crypto space."



Hehmeyer Nortide AG will serve as a parent company for a number of operational subsidiaries, including Nortide's current brokerage and trading businesses, and Hehmeyer's businesses in the U.S., Canada, and the United Kingdom. The company will utilize the Hehmeyer brand. The deal is scheduled to close in Q1 2021 and the terms have not been and will not be disclosed.

About Hehmeyer, LLC Hehmeyer is a global market maker in digital assets and streams prices electronically, operates on numerous request-for-quote platforms, and accommodates over-the-counter markets with FIX API, REST API, GUI and other mediums. Headquartered in Chicago, Hehmeyer is dedicated to liberating transactions and the future that digital assets promise. To learn more about Hehmeyer, visit www.hehmeyer.com or follow on Twitter (News - Alert) @HehmeyerLLC. About Nortide Capital AG Nortide offers market making services for digital assets on global exchanges. Headquartered in Zug, Switzerland, Nortide is a Swiss based brokerage in foreign exchange and cryptocurrencies, specializing in block over-the-counter trading and integrating client platforms with Nortide's trading technology for automated trading on Nortide's aggregated order books on 25+ underlying crypto exchanges. To learn more about Nortide, visit www.nortidecapital.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210210005112/en/

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China's Tianwen-1 Dual Spacecraft has taken a snap of its first Mars sight as the mission will make its orbit entry today on the Red Planet.

The China National Space Administration (CNSA) has released a greyscale image of Mars last February 5 to test that the footage of Tianwen-1 produces high-resolution images. The image was shot from a 1.36 million mile distance, which is about 2.2 million kilometers.

Tianwen-1's First Snap of Mars Shows Different Area Features

According to Live Science the image above shows the different areas of Mars' topographical features. It has the area marked with (1) which is the Acidalia Planitia,( 2) as the Chryse Planitia, (3) as the Meridiani Planum (4) as the Schiaparelli Crater and (5) as the Valles Marineris.

Last Friday, the Tianwen 1 which is a dual orbiter as well as a rover has been in close proximity to the red planet at just a 683,000 miles or about 1.1 million km. The probe is expected to land on the red planet today on February 10. As it approaches Mars'

CNSA ensured the secured entry of the Tianwen-1 on the Red planet today by accomplishing a fourth fourth trajectory correction maneuver last Saturday. This was done make sure that the probe is ready on its course of entering the planet.

During the trajectory correction maneuver, the Tianwen-1 has been about 114 million miles or 184 milion kilometers away from Earth. Moreover, it has spent about 197 days in space and has completed a traveling distane of about 289 million miles or 465 kilometers. After the maneuver, the Tianwen-1 was assessed as all in good condition and ready for entry.

China Prepares Huge Antenna to Support Tianwen-1's Challenging Entry to Mars

Because of the great distance between China's rover and the planet Earth where communication signals are coming from, there will have to be a delay in communication of about 10 minutes.

As a result, Tianwen-1 will have to start its initial commands for braking the burn and landing by itself without any help from the Beijing Aerospace Control Center from Earth. This is both an exhilarating yet ambiguous journey that has been carried out thankfully thanks to the instructions sent in advance by the Control center before the communication delay.

Read more: Three Robotic Visitors are Ready to Hit Mars

Moreover, China has set up a huge movable antenna that is sensitive enough to collect information from Mars as well as to track the planet's position even amidst the sky changes. The huge diameter dish will be collecting enough energy to track from the Earth.

"With the distance [getting farther], the [signal's] energy will become attenuated and denser, and that is to say, the less energy we will receive per unit area. So we need [an antenna] with a large area in order to collect enough energy," Li Chunlai, deputy chief designer of China's first Mars exploration project said in an interview via Space Co.

"The construction of the antenna is intended to receive weak scientific exploration data from Mars which is 400 million kilometers away from the Earth."he added.

Tianwen-1's Landing on Mars' Surface

Upon entry to the orbit, China's rover will begin to position itself and prepare measures for landing. Tianwen-1's target landing site will be the Utopia Pkantita which is located below the landing site of NASA's Viking 2 rover which will be landing on Mars around May as well. Tianwen-1 will use an image sensing system to secure the spot for landing.

As the solar-powered spacecraft hits Mars' land, it will begin studying the spol characteristics of the planet's surface. Moreover, it will investigate Mars' water existence, supply, and distribution using the Subsurface Exploration Radar instrument. With the help of Tianwen 1's panoramic and multispectral cameras, it will understand the nature and composition of rocks that are in the surface of Mars.

Related Article: UAE Mars Mission: Hope Probe First to Reach the Red Planet, Giving Arab Youths 'Moonshot Moment'

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Written by Nikki D

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
CALHOUN, Ga., Feb. 10, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Mohawk Industries, Inc. (NYSE: MHK) today announced the appointment of James F. Brunk as chief financial officer, effective April 1, 2021.

"I have worked with Jim for many years, and I am confident that he will do an excellent job as our chief financial officer," said Jeff Lorberbaum, Mohawk's chairman and chief executive officer. "He has a deep understanding of our global operations and will positively influence our performance. His expertise in financial planning and analysis, mergers and acquisitions, accounting and investor relations has been exhibited throughout his three-decade career."

Since May 2009, Brunk, 55, has served as Mohawk's corporate controller and chief accounting officer. He joined the Company in 2006 as chief financial officer of the Mohawk Home division. Before becoming part of the Company, Brunk held finance and operations roles of progressively greater responsibility with major manufacturing companies.

"I'm honored to take on the CFO position at Mohawk, where I've had the opportunity to grow personally and professionally over the past fifteen years," said Brunk. "I've had the privilege to partner with a finance team comprised of talented experts in many disciplines, focused both on protecting and delivering results for the business. I look forward to leading our finance team and partnering with our management team and board of directors as we identify new initiatives to strengthen the Company."

Since returning to Mohawk as chief financial officer in April 2020, Frank H. Boykin has worked closely with Brunk to ensure a smooth transition and will retire as planned in April this year. Boykin previously served as Mohawk's chief financial officer from January 2005.

Frank Boykin 706-624-2695




Sam Mac has shared a little-known fact about his rise to fame.

Posting to Instagram on Tuesday, the Sunrise weatherman, 38, revealed that he was once named the '43rd most eligible bachelor in Adelaide' by a women's magazine in the early 2000s.

Sam uploaded a photo of his glossy magazine spread, which included a brooding glamour shot accompanied by a short interview.

Blast from the past: Sunrise weatherman Sam Mac, 38, revealed he was once the '43rd most eligible bachelor in Adelaide' on Tuesday by uploading this cringeworthy magazine spread from the early 2000s

Sam, who was 23 at the time and still working as a radio host, told the publication that his favourite film was Silence Of The Lambs and that his ideal woman was Australian actress Claudia Karvan.

Bizarrely, when asked what his 'best' and 'worst' body parts were, Sam simply replied both times with 'tongue'.

Sam accompanied the post with a playful caption that poked fun at his decision to wear a shell necklace for his magazine photo shoot.

Unique taste: Sam, who was 23 at the time and still working as a radio host, told the publication that his favourite film was Silence Of The Lambs and that his ideal woman was Australian actress Claudia Karvan

'On first glance it may appear to be a mysteriously pensive pose... but I was actually just thinking about how timeless my men's Hawaiian shell necklace was (in Adelaide, in winter),' he mused.

Sam completed his post with the hashtag 'KarvanItUp' - a cheeky homage to his former crush Claudia.

'Surf culture's actually always been a part of who I am, OK?' The comedian also took to Instagram Stories to make fun of his shell necklace

The comedian continued to make fun of the photo in his Instagram Stories, jokingly told fans: 'I know some of you are mocking me, [saying], 'Oh, whats with the shell necklace? You grew up in the suburbs of Adelaide!''

'Surf culture's actually always been a part of who I am, OK?' he said in mock outrage.

He went on to jokingly proclaim his love for 'fangin' it on the frothy express' - a colloquial term used to describe surfing.

Whatever you say! He went on to jokingly proclaim his love for 'fangin' it on the frothy express' - a colloquial term used to describe surfing

Several Channel Seven stars have since poked fun at Sam on his Instagram page, with Sunrise's Edwina Bartholomew commenting: 'Did naming 'Silence of the Lambs' as your favourite movie land you any ladies?'

Elsewhere, The Morning Show's Larry Emdur mused: 'Nothing said 'I'm sexy and I know it' like a puku shell necklace.'

Samantha Armytage, who recently dispelled rumours of a feud with Sam Mac, simply commented, 'tongue' alongside a vomiting emoji.

Born in Adelaide, Sam worked in radio and for Channel 10's The Project before replacing Edwina Bartholomew as Sunrise's roving weather presenter in early 2016.
New Delhi: In the aftermath of the devastating floods that wreaked havoc in Chamoli district in Uttarakhand on Sunday, the state government has said that its officials will be collecting DNA samples of the unattended recovered bodies.

"Till 7:30 PM on Tuesday, 32 bodies have been recovered, while 174 are yet to be traced. The DNA samples will be kept safe and on the basis of that, the bodies will be identified," the state government said in a statement.

About 600 rescue workers are involved in the operation, two days after the sudden flood in the Alaknanda river system in Chamoli district that was possibly triggered by an avalanche or glacier burst.

In Parliament, Union Home Minister Amit Shah said the Centre is working in close coordination with the Uttarakhand government. "Rescue operation to evacuate these people is going on a war-footing and all-out efforts are being made for searching missing persons, he said.

Of the 32 bodies, 25 have been identified, while 7 remain unattended. The rescue operation is underway to trace 174 more people, the state government said. Uttarakhand Chief Minister Trivendra Singh Rawat said, "Multi-agency operation is on at multiple sites of the state to trace the missing persons. From the Kedarnath disaster of 2013, the experience that we have gathered is that the DNA samples of the bodies` have to be kept safe for their identification in the future."

The Uttarakhand government said that at the Tapovan Vishnugad hydroelectric project, rescuers have dug in and moved about 100 metres into a blocked tunnel in an effort to reach the persons feared trapped inside.

During the relief and rescue operations, 12 NTPC employees were rescued safely, while six others who sustained injuries have also been saved by the rescuers. Meanwhile, the state government has reported that there is no danger of downstream flooding and the rise in water level has been contained, adding that the Centre and the state government are keeping a strict vigil on the situation.

The Chief Minister reviewed the relief and rescue operations in the disaster-hit Lata village on Tuesday. He also inquired about the joint operation by other agencies, including the NDRF and the ITBP in the Tapovan tunnel.

One column of the Engineering Task Force (ETF) of the Army along with rescue equipment has also been deployed in the area. The Army men along with ETF personnel opened the tunnel mouth at Tapovan. Besides, a team of scientists flown to Dehradun on Sunday night also visited the spot.

A state control room at Haridwar has been set up to coordinate with Uttarakhand government about the rescue and relief operations. The missing people include those working at NTPC's 480 MW Tapovan-Vishnugad project and the 13.2 MW Rishiganga Hydel Project and villagers whose homes nearby were washed away.

Some family members of the missing workers are camping at Tapovan, waiting for some news about them. About 70 missing workers are from Uttar Pradesh, an official said in Lucknow. Among them, 34 are from Lakhimpur Kheri district alone.

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(With Agency Inputs)
Hyderabad: The cash-starved government of Telangana will be richer by over Rs 150 crore with the setting up of 159 new bars across the state. The revenues earned through application fees and licence fees to set up the new bars is expected to cross Rs 135 crore in a week. Of this, the government has already earned over Rs 73 crore through application fees alone.

As per norms, the applicants need to pay Rs 1 lakh (non-refundable) deposit to the government to submit applications. Such was the rush to set up new bars that the government received 7,360 applications for setting up 159 bars, when the deadline to submit applications ended on Monday. Of this, 5,311 applications came on the last day alone.

Following the huge response, the government late on Tuesday issued orders extending the application deadline by a week until February 16. The government hopes to earn nearly Rs 100 crore towards application fees.

The government had on January 25 issued a notification seeking applications to set up 159 bars. Of this, 55 will be permitted in GHMC limits, while 19 in GHMC periphery and the rest in districts. Telangana already has 800 bars and 27 clubs that serve liquor besides 2,144 liquor shops that sell various liquor brands.

The licence fee varies from Rs 30 lakh to Rs 49 lakh, depending on the population in municipalities and municipal corporations. In the GHMC limits, the licence fees is Rs 49 lakh. The excise department hopes to earn over Rs 63 crore through licence fees alone, at an average of Rs 40 lakh per bar.

The bars will be allocated through a draw of lots, organised by the collector concerned in districts on February 18, while the excise director will preside over it for the GHMC limits on February 19.

The state governments earnings through liquor has more than doubled since the formation of Telangana as a separate state in 2014. In the first year of formation of state, the government earned excise revenue of Rs 10,813 crore in 2014-15, an increase of Rs 1,000 crore compared with Rs 9,800 crore earned in 2013-14, a year before the formation of the state.

It further increased to Rs 20,000 crore in 2018 and Rs 25,000 crore in 2019. The figures for 2020 are yet to be released and it is expected that the excise revenue will touch Rs 30,000 crore.

The excise revenue contribution to the overall state revenue was just 26 per cent in 2013-14 in undivided AP, a year prior to formation of TS. It rose sharply by 65 per cent after the formation of Telangana, clearly reflecting how the TS government was encouraging people to spend on liquor.
Rajasthan Chief Minister on Wednesday targeted Prime Minister Narendra Modi over the farmers' issues, saying the government should give up its stubborn stand.

In democracy, voters can be stubborn but not the government. Whatever is happening today is unfortunate, Gehlot said while addressing the Congress Legislature Party meeting at his residence here on Wednesday night.

He condemned Modi for his 'andolanjivi' (professional protesters) remark.

It is the duty of the ruling dispensation to respect the opposition but look at what the Modi government is doing. They talk about Congress-free India. PM uses words like andolanjivi in parliament, he said.

A government can reverse its decision in the larger interest of the people but the prime minister is adamant on not addressing the farmers' issues.

A strategy for the state assembly's budget session, which began on Wednesday with the Governor's address, was discussed during the meeting.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

A NSW council twice unsuccessfully sought government funding for a regional skydiving and adventure sports facility before it was eventually awarded $11 million from a bushfire economic relief fund.

The funding for the Macleay Valley Skydiving Adventure Park was announced by the NSW Nationals in October 2020, under a fast-tracked $177 million state and federal Bushfire Local Economic Recovery Fund now at the centre of an inquiry into government grants.

Firefighters combat a blaze on the NSW Mid North Coast in November 2019. Credit:Nick Moir

Months before the states bushfires, the council released the Macleay Valley Coast Destination Plan in July 2019, which identified the adventure park as a game changer project and outlined a plan to leverage the NSW governments support for adventure sports tourism.

The council in December applied for the federal governments Building Better Regions Fund grant program, which was rejected in May 2020, having fallen short of co-contribution criteria.
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The administration of President George W. Bush significantly expanded aid which began in the Clinton administration, but also tried to minimize media attention. This effort was eerily reminiscent of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, which endeavored before 1965 to deflect Vietnam from the news even as U.S. involvement increased. Then, violence in Colombia began to decline, in great contrast to the evolution of the war in Southeast Asia.
Ebonyi State Governor, David Umahi on Wednesday met with the National Chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC) Caretaker Committee (C...





Ebonyi State Governor, David Umahi on Wednesday met with the National Chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC) Caretaker Committee (CECPC), Mai Mala Buni.

The meeting was held at the partys national secretariat in Abuja.

On the clamour for South-East 2023 presidency, Umahi told newsmen that the APC leadership will decide.

It is a party affair. Party discipline requires that you sit down and discuss issues. You advance your reasons and another person will also advance his.

And then the party as a family will take a position. Not even as a new member. Even if I am an old member I will not like to comment, he said.

Umahi said he had not visited the APC headquarters since he joined the ruling party last November.

He noted that his presence was not just about a visit but to also appreciate the beautiful work the Chairman, my dear brother and colleague, Governor of Yobe State, is doing for our party, making it to be more digital.

New Delhi: Amid the ongoing farmers' protests against Centre's new farm laws, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday (February 10, 2021) said that India needs to differentiate between 'Andolankari' and 'Andolanjeevi'.

PM Narendra Modi, during his address in the Lok Sabha, said, "It is very important for the country to differentiate between Andolankari and Andolanjeevi."

PM Modi had first coined the 'Andolanjeevi' term during his address in the Rajya Sabha on Monday. He said, "We are familiar with the words sharamjeevi and buddhijeevi? But a new "breed" of agitators called "andolanjeevi" has emerged in the country, who cannot live without an agitation and the nation should guard against them."

Reacting to the PM's address, the Samyukt Kisan Morcha (SKM) said, "We condemn the charge made by the PM and we would like to remind him that it was andolanejeevis who helped India break free from colonial rulers and so we are proud of being andolanjeevis."

They added, "It is the BJP and its forefathers who have never participated in an agitation against the British. They were always afraid of people`s movements and that is why they are afraid of people`s movements even now."

Earlier on the day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi stated that there is respect for the farmers who are voicing their views on the agriculture bills and reiterated Centre's stand on the Minimum Support Price (MSP).

Replying in the lower house to the Motion of Thanks on the Presidents address, PM Modi said that this is the reason why senior ministers of the government are 'constantly talking' to farmers' representatives.

PM said, "This House, our Government and we all respect the farmers who are voicing their views on the farm bills. This is the reason why topmost Ministers of the Government are constantly talking to them. There is great respect for the farmers."



This House, our Government and we all respect the farmers who are voicing their views on the farm bills. This is the reason why topmost Ministers of the Government are constantly talking to them. There is great respect for the farmers: PM @narendramodi #PMInLokSabha  PMO India (@PMOIndia) February 10, 2021

PM Modi also stated that the farm laws were passed through an Ordinance and later by Parliament and asserted that no mandis were shut after the implementation of these laws, adding that the MSP did not end anywhere in the nation.

"After the Laws relating to agriculture were passed by Parliament - no Mandi has shut. Likewise, MSP has remained. Procurement on MSP has remained. These facts can't be ignored," PM said.

After the Laws relating to agriculture were passed by Parliament - no Mandi has shut. Likewise, MSP has remained. Procurement on MSP has remained. These facts can't be ignored: PM @narendramodi #PMInLokSabha  PMO India (@PMOIndia) February 10, 2021

This is to be noted that thousands of farmers have camped at Delhi's borders and are protesting since late November 2020 against the three newly enacted farm laws namely Farmers` Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, 2020; the Farmers Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and farm Services Act 2020 and the Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act, 2020.

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Extends digital payment capabilities to growing number of Latin American students studying abroad

Helps universities in Latin America attract more international students

Partners with local agents to help connect students and schools worldwide

BOSTON and SAO PAULO, Brazil, Feb. 10, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Flywire Corporation (Flywire), a global payments-enablement and software company, today announced the expansion of its digital education payments business to key countries in Latin America, including Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Chile. Flywire has invested in dedicated resources in the region for client support, payment management, business development and sales.

As schools in North America, Europe and Australia look to diversify their student base, Latin America's growing middle-class and the demand for global educational experiences has made the region an increasingly important market from which to recruit. Likewise, Latin America has also become an important destination market for international students, with many schools attracting students from North America and Europe as well as from other countries within the region.

Flywire's education payments platform enables schools to offer a highly-tailored, convenient and secure digital payment experience, which can be customized by school, country, and currency. This customized payment platform is designed to accelerate funds flow, ease reconciliation and streamline operational expenses. In Latin America, Flywire currently supports 32 different local currencies and a variety of different local payment methods.

"Latin America represents an exciting opportunity for Flywire as both a source market for schools abroad and as an increasingly popular destination for students traveling from North America and Europe," said Rafael Ayala, Managing Director of Latin America at Flywire. "We believe the combination of our technology and robust payment network, together with our partner ecosystem and deep knowledge of the higher education vertical and local cultures makes us well suited to build our footprint in this region at scale."

Education agents also play a key role in the market. The majority of Latin American students studying abroad work through an education agency to source and select their educational programs. Flywire's payments platform offers specific capabilities to help agents better manage student information and streamline payment tracking, while also enabling education institutions to optimize agent relationships and minimize potential fraud. Flywire has a long history of working with education agents around the world and is currently working with BELTA in Brazil .

Resources

Learn more about Flywire's digital education payments platform, trusted by more than 2,000 institutions and millions of students worldwide: Flywire's Digital Payments Platform (https://www.flywire.com/industries/education)

(https://www.flywire.com/industries/education) Learn more about how Flywire's agent platform connects agents, students and schools to simplify the payment process and provide real-time visibility: Flywire's Agent Platform (https://www.flywire.com/industries/education/agents)

About Flywire

Flywire is a global payments-enablement and software company trusted by organizations around the world to deliver on their customers' most important moments. Flywire combines its own network, platform and integrated software to solve vertical-specific payment and receivable problems for global organizations.

Flywire leverages its vertical-specific software and payments technology to deeply embed within the existing A/R workflows for its clients across the education, healthcare and travel vertical markets, as well as in key B2B industries. Flywire also integrates with leading ERP systems, such as NetSuite, so organizations can optimize the payment experience for their customers while eliminating operational challenges.

Flywire offers its 2,000+ clients more than 250 payment methods and processes payments in more than 240 countries and territories around the world. The company is headquartered in Boston, MA, USA with global offices. For more information, visit www.flywire.com . Follow Flywire on Twitter, LinkedInand Facebook.

Media Contacts

Prosek Partners

pro-flywire@prosek.com

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has once again signaled to fellow Senate Republicans that Donald Trumps impeachment trial is a 'vote of conscience.'

McConnell has reportedly indicated that senators who disputed the constitutionality of the trial could still vote to convict the former president, three sources told Bloomberg News.

Despite having voted on Tuesday to declare it unconstitutional for the Senate to hear the case, McConnell also suggested that he has not yet determined how he will vote regarding finding Trump guilty, the outlet reported.

Only six Republicans voted against party lines, in favor of the constitutionality of the trial in the Senate, on Tuesday.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, center, has once again indicated that Republicans can vote to convict Trump

McConnell indicated senators who disputed the constitutionality of the impeachment trial could still vote to convict Trump, pictured

On January 11, the House introduced just one article of impeachment against Trump for his role in allegedly inciting the violent mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6. The article of impeachment passed in the lower chamber on January 13.

Just days after the House vote, it was revealed that McConnell was telling his Republican colleagues President Trump's impeachment trial will be a 'vote of conscience'  an absence of pressure that effectively allows them to vote guilty.

'His message to me was this would clearly be a vote of conscience,' North Dakota Republican Sen. Kevin Cramer said at the time.

'He's always been respectful of members that way.'

House leaders also called the House impeachment a 'vote of conscience'  and 10 Republicans including Conference Chair Rep. Liz Cheney joined Democrats, with 232 voting to impeach Trump.

In the Senate, Democrats would need at least 17 and possibly 18 Republicans to convict  putting individual senators to weigh their feelings as well as the views of some of their angry constituents - or some to simply not turn up at all; conviction is by a two-thirds majority of those who vote.

Currently the Republican base is strongly pro-Trump and senators with upcoming elections in 2022 and 2024 would fear being primaried by Trump loyalists if they vote to convict.

On January 19, McConnell denounced Trump, saying that the former president was responsible for 'provoking' the MAGA mob that stormed the Capitol and murdered a police officer.

On Tuesday, six senators voted for the constitutionality of the impeachment trial, which McConnell voted against

Violent insurrectionists loyal to former President Donald Trump supporters try to break through a police barrier at the Capitol on January 6

Trump, not pictured, has been accused by a House impeachment vote of inciting the insurrection at the Capitol

'The mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the president and other powerful people,' the majority leader said on the Senate floor.

'They tried to use fear and violence to stop a specific proceeding of the first branch of the federal government, which they did not like,' McConnell continued.

'But we pressed on. We stood together and said an angry mob would not get veto power over the rule of law in our nation.'

The dramatic and unprompted intervention by the man who became Republicans' most senior leader when Trump left office came with less than 24 hours of his presidency remaining.

That speech is one of McConnell's last acts of his time as Republican majority leader, as he became the minority leader when the two new Georgia Democratic senators were sworn in after winning their runoff elections.
Housebuilder Redrow revealed that a growing number of self-isolating workers is affecting construction as it posted higher half-year profits on record revenues (PA)

Housebuilder Redrow has revealed that a growing number of self-isolating workers is affecting construction, as it posted higher half-year profits on record revenues.

The group said it is seeing some impact on work due to self-isolating sub-contractors who are unable to work on building sites amid the second wave of the pandemic.

Its comments came as it posted an 11% rise in pre-tax profits to 174 million for the six months to December 27, as revenues topped 1 billion, up 20%.

Matthew Pratt, group chief executive of Redrow, said: Operating within a further national lockdown continues to present challenges.

He added: There has been some impact on build as an increasing number of sub-contractor colleagues are unable to work whilst self-isolating.

Demand in the regions for our heritage homes has been particularly high as more buyers reflect on their lockdown experiences and prioritise space in their homes and access to green areas Redrow

We expect to see this situation improve as the countrys overall Covid-19 infection rate decreases, Redrow said.

The company said its sales centres were open on an appointment-only basis, with comprehensive Covid-19 measures in place, while most office-based staff were working from home.

The group saw legal completions jump 20% to 3,065 over its first half as its refocus away from London towards the regions pays off.

Last year Redrow scaled back operations in the capital, and has now exited four of six sites it had planned to develop, due to shifting homebuyer demands.

It expects to quit the remaining two before the end of its financial year in June.

Many homeowners are now looking for bigger properties as lockdowns and the pandemic force more people to stay at home.

The switch in demand, together with a stamp duty holiday that is due to end in March, has sparked a mini-boom in the housing market that has helped hold up the UKs struggling economy.

Redrow said the changing buyer trends are completely aligned to Redrows strategy.

Demand in the regions for our heritage homes has been particularly high as more buyers reflect on their lockdown experiences and prioritise space in their homes and access to green areas, it added.

The group said its order book stood at 1.3 billion, up from 1.2 billion a year ago.

It restarted shareholder dividends thanks to the robust results, announcing a 6p interim payout, although shares slipped 4%.

But Redrow signalled activity may be easing back with the average weekly value of private sales reservations edging lower since the end of 2020 to 265,000 per outlet, down from strong comparatives of 298,000 a year ago.

The weekly private sales rate has also fallen to 0.67 per outlet from 0.78 a year earlier, although it said this was in line with a more normal market.
Sports lie at the margins of our culture, different from how it is elsewhere in the world, and from how it used to be. This is one of the reasons why criminality among youth proceeds unchecked. There is no youth labour market, and the school system ruthlessly triages youth.

WASHINGTON  Searing images of lawmakers ducking behind chairs in fear for their lives, fleeing the House chamber as rioters closed in, and a police officer crying out in pain played Tuesday in the U.S. Senate, where lawmakers began an unprecedented second impeachment trial of Donald Trump.

The former president, Democratic impeachment managers argued, must be held accountable for the months of incitement that led to those violent scenes of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol, and cant escape responsibility simply because he is no longer in office. Trumps attorneys countered that it is vindictive and against the Constitution to try him now that he is out of office.

Allowing former officials to escape impeachment and conviction would give congressional approval to future attempts to subvert elections, said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D., Md.), adding that presidents are bound by their oaths for every day they serve. If presidents are allowed to escape punishment because they commit misdeeds just before leaving office, he said, days like Jan. 6 will become our future.

Its an invitation to the president to take his best shot at anything he may want to do on his way out the door, including using violent means to lock that door, to hang on to the Oval Office at all costs, and to block the peaceful transfer of power, said Raskin, the lead impeachment manager prosecuting the House case against Trump. In other words, the January exception is an invitation to our founders worst nightmare.

Trumps attorneys, in an often rambling response that went long stretches without touching on the substance of the case, said impeachment was based simply on Democrats disdain for Trump and his voters, and also raised concerns about due process.

This is a process fueled irresponsibly by base hatred, said David Schoen, one of Trumps lead attorneys, and they are willing to sacrifice our national character to advance their hatred and their fear that one day they might not be the party in power.

He said a conviction would disenfranchise Trump voters by barring Trump from running for office again, and would tear this country apart, perhaps like we have only seen once before in our history.

 READ MORE: First it was fraud, then they just didnt like the rules: How Pa. Republicans justified trying to overturn an election

(Trump and his GOP allies had actively sought to disenfranchise the entire electorate in several states, including Pennsylvania, by leveling false fraud claims and attempting to throw out those states Electoral College votes).

The arguments around constitutionality made up the opening act as the Senate began the fourth presidential impeachment trial in American history, the first of a former president, and the first of a president who had been impeached twice. It marked yet another chapter in Trumps grip on the countrys attention and politics.

Democrats and six Republicans voted 56-44 to proceed with the trial, with Sen. Pat Toomey (R., Pa.) among the GOP lawmakers to support moving forward. One Republican, Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, changed his stance after hearing the arguments from both sides and voted to support the trials legality.

But the vote also signaled that Democrats face almost impossible odds to secure the 67 votes needed to convict Trump. It would take 17 Republicans joining every Democrat to do so.

The result of this trial is preordained, Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) said. President Trump will be acquitted.

Schoens presentation followed an opening argument from Bruce Castor, another Trump attorney and a former Montgomery County commissioner and district attorney. Castors opening drew criticism and ridicule from even GOP senators who oppose the trial and intend to acquit Trump.

 READ MORE: Bruce Castor had a big spotlight to open Trumps impeachment defense. It didnt go well.

I thought the house impeachment managers made very strong arguments. It was persuasive and well-grounded in the Constitution and precedent, said Toomey, who has signaled he is open to voting to convict. As for the defense, he said: I think they had a weaker case to start with, and I dont think it was very persuasive.

The 100 senators sat quietly throughout most of the proceedings, many rapidly scribbling notes as they reprised an exercise most went through early last year when Trump was acquitted after his first impeachment. Outside, uniformed National Guard troops carrying high-powered rifles continued guarding the Capitol, barely a month after the deadly attack by a pro-Trump mob left five dead.

Democrats argued that impeachment is necessary to hold Trump accountable for one of the darkest moments in recent American history.

Raskin and his fellow Democrats quoted numerous legal scholars, some of them conservative and long tied to Republican politics, who argued that precedent and a plain reading of the Constitution show that a former president can, in fact, stand trial. They pointed to statements made during the writing of the Constitution, and to past impeachment trials of former office holders (though not presidents) to support their case.

But they also appealed to raw emotion, showing a 13-minute video of the insurrection, splicing together Trumps words with horrific scenes of the violence, including the moment when a Capitol police officer shot and killed a rioter trying to climb through a door outside the House chamber.

 READ MORE: Montcos Bruce Castor and Madeleine Dean bring very different approaches to Trumps impeachment trial

You ask what a high crime and misdemeanor is under our Constitution, Raskin said after the video. Thats a high crime and misdemeanor. If thats not an impeachable offense, then theres no such thing.

Most senators watched with tensed brows, though with one screen set up in each corner, Democrats turned to their left, Republicans to their right  each literally looking at the scene in opposing directions. Several Republicans, including Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Tom Cotton of Arkansas, largely looked away from the violence, keeping their focus on papers in front of them.

Raskin closed by recounting how colleagues and aides placed phone calls and texts on Jan. 6 saying goodbye to loved ones. It was just days after a funeral for one of his sons, who had died by suicide, and his daughter and her husband hid under desks in the Capitol complex, believing they might now die, Raskin recalled. He broke into tears when describing how his daughter told him she wouldnt want to return to the building.

This cannot be the future of America, he said.

Even Cruz praised Raskins presentation, though other Republicans dismissed appeals to emotion, and said they would rule based on their readings of the law.

Republican senators had few kind words for Castor, who worked off a handwritten legal pad and said the Trump team changed its plans at the last minute because the Democrats opening had been so strong.

Cassidy said that as a juror, after hearing the arguments he had no choice but to change his stand on the constitutionality of the trial.

President Trumps team was disorganized, they did everything they could but to talk about the question at hand, Cassidy said shortly after voting to proceed with the trial.

 READ MORE: Bruce Castors impeachment trial speech spawns memes and confusion

Yet most Republicans, even those who joined that criticism, still made clear they would not vote to convict Trump, hewing to the argument that the Senate cant convict a former president.

This isnt just about Donald Trump, this is about setting a precedent, said Sen. John Cornyn (R., Texas).

Schoen, after blasting the Democrats motives, turned to more legalistic arguments, making the case that the House rushed its impeachment without hearings or a full investigation.

God forbid we should ever lower our vigilance to the principle of due process, Schoen said.

Even as he chided Democrats for moving too fast, however, he also argued that the language of the Constitution shows that its now too late to try Trump, since he is out of office.

 READ MORE: Fact-checking Trumps false claims about Pennsylvanias election before his supporters attacked the Capitol

While the arguments Tuesday largely centered on the constitutionality of the case, its origins are tied to the political fight for Pennsylvania, one of the most hotly contested presidential battlegrounds, and one where Trump falsely claimed that fraud caused his defeat. Pennsylvania was one of just two states, along with Arizona, whose electors faced a debate and vote on Jan. 6, the day Trump staged his rally and urged his supporters to fight like hell before they rampaged through the Capitol, in some cases chanting to hang then-Vice President Mike Pence.

Republicans have mostly refused to defend Trumps conduct leading up to the attack, but the vast majority have also signaled that they are highly unlikely to convict him.

Both parties appeared eager to quickly put the trial behind them. Democrats, realizing they are highly unlikely to convict Trump, want to keep approving President Joe Bidens nominees and advancing his agenda as he seeks to take advantage of his opening months in office.

Republicans appeared loath to dwell on the riot and Trumps actions.
It's been four days since the Zargar family heard from Basharat, a senior engineer from Kashmir, who has been missing since the Nandadevi glacier burst in Uttarakhand's Chamoli district on Sunday triggering a flash flood in the Alaknanda river. At least 32 people have died, and over 170 others are still missing as multiple rescue agencies race against time to bring closure to anxious families.

Six members of the Zargar family are camping at the Rishiganga hydel project site, where teams of ITBP, SDRF, NDRF and the Indian Army are drilling through massive boulders and ploughing through heaps of sludge to reach over 30 workers trapped inside a flooded tunnel. Basharat, 53, was reportedly conducting a site inspection in the tunnel when, minutes after the glacier broke, water gushed inside blocking their exit.

"It will take at least two more days to clear the rubble,'' Rouf Ahmad, Zargar's brother-in-law told News18. Apart from Ahmad, his wife, son and daughter are also camping at the project.

''We made enquiries about him and came to know he was inside the project when the water flooded into it,'' Ahmad said, sounding dejected. He said the family was hoping against hope to find him.

''We are being helped by rescue officials on the ground.''

Basharat, an accomplished civil engineer who has designed many hydropower projects across north India, is a general manager at Kundan Group of Companies. Ahmad said Basharat had been sent to troubleshoot tiny glitches in the project and was supposed to come back to Delhi in a week's time.

In Srinagar, the Zargar family lives in Elahi Bagh locality of Soura, Srinagar.

Family and friends said Basharat had been at the Rishiganga power project, located on the upper stream of the Alaknanda, for the last one year. Basharat's acquaintances told News18 that he has been designing hydro-electric projects for 35 years. He worked with a local company for three decades before being recruited by a US-based company for five years that put him in charge of half a dozen power projects in Himachal Pradesh. He later set up his own company named ENCON which was responsible for designing several mini and medium hydropower projects. ''I have the privilege of working with Basharat sahib for many years. He is an efficient, honest and passionate engineer. He is considered to be one of the best in northern India,'' Hilal Ahmad Dar, his colleague told News18. ''His research of locating 180 odd potential mini-hydropower points or locations across the three main rivers of Jammu and Kashmir is a huge give-away to administration,'' recalls Dar, his former subordinate.

The death toll in the disaster rose to 32 on Tuesday with six more bodies being recovered during the day. The missing people include those working at NTPC's 480-MW Tapovan-Vishnugad project and the 13.2-MW Rishiganga Hydel Project and villagers whose homes nearby were washed away.

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) released first images of the glacier burst shedding light on the damage to infrastructure at the Tapovan hydroelectric plant.

ALSO READ | ISRO Releases First Images of Glacier Burst at Raini, Tapovan as Toll Rises to 32 in Uttarakhand

The images show at least two bridges that were washed away in the flood. Two other structures, along with damaged infrastructure at Raini village, where a bridge and a road were washed away by the Rishiganga river were also seen. Another power plant, located in the village, also suffered severe damage.
The last time I floated the idea of starting a GoFundMe was in 2017 to finance a trip that readers insisted I take every time they called for me to go back to places that never quite landed on the actual country, city, or even New York City borough where Im from.

If readers were so keen on getting me out of the United States, I argued, they should at least kick in.

Buzzkill editors nixed the idea  journalistic ethics and all that  so Im guessing theyd deny my latest request, even though this time its not even for me.

Im suggesting a fund-raising campaign for the kind of cold, hard cash that might entice Mayor Jim Kenney to speak to a constituent who is (literally) starving to have a conversation with him about a resolution to declare gun violence a citywide emergency. Jamal Johnson is now three weeks into his one-man hunger strike.

Does that sound crazy  the hunger strike, sure, but also the idea of paying a public servant to do their actual j-o-b?

Well, only if youre incapable of bending logic or feeling shame, just as our local Fraternal Order of Police was when it proposed the idea of a 5 percent accountability bonus in the next police contract for officers wearing body cameras.

Curious: Is there a 10% boost if officers dont use excessive force, or is that more of You just won a new car! territory?

Of course, this got me thinking about how a concept like this might translate to other fields. In mine, I could be up for a bonus any time I spelled someones name correctly or brought a pen or a recorder to an interview.

Doctors, nurses: Have you refrained from harming your patients today? Come on down 

Contractors, did the structure you built stay upright? Get these guys their own house!

Lawyers, did you show up to court with the goods to defend your client? Did you at least practice your opening statement in front of a mirror or loved one? (Sorry Bruce Castor, no bonus for you!)

When I suggested the idea on Twitter of starting a GoFundMe to lure the mayor to Johnson, Councilwoman Jamie Gauthier, who introduced the resolution in September, responded that she didnt know whether to laugh or cry. (Other than mischaracterizations of the resolution by the Kenney administration, it hasnt gone anywhere.)

Come sit by me, Councilwoman, because as I listened to police this week address a startling rise in homicides, I felt the same way.

Seven people were killed within 24 hours on Monday, including a 15-year-old mistakenly targeted and a mental-health counselor.

More than 60 people were killed in Philadelphia during the first five weeks of 2021, an increase of 55% over last year, where nearly 500 people lost their lives.

During a news conference on Tuesday, police said theyre making progress on the latest cases and have added more investigators to the homicide division, which on its face sounds great if it leads to cops solving more of the citys unsolved murders.

But like clockwork, the conversation turned to how residents arent doing enough.

Were asked, What are you doing, what are you doing, what are you doing? Well, what is everybody else doing as well? Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw told WHYY.

Well continue to do what we can. Its not a finger-pointing game, she continued, while finger pointing at residents, who every day I see routinely step up and show up. These days you can find Johnson in the cold outside City Hall hoping to talk to the mayor about an epidemic that crushed our communities long before COVID-19.

So, what else are we left to do but think of new ways to entice our leaders to step up? If the GoFundMe is out of the question, what about a community beef and beer fund-raiser?

Oh, wait. On Saturday, allegedly intoxicated Philadelphia Police Officer Gregory Campbell left the headquarters of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 5 and nearly killed a woman when he blew past a stop sign and slammed his speeding car into her house.

Multiple law enforcement sources told my colleagues that the off-duty officer attended a beef and beer fund-raiser for the family of a fallen officer before ending up at the 7C Lounge, a bar and restaurant inside the FOPs headquarters.

True to form, FOP President John McNesby played all kinds of confused about the particulars he said he was still looking into.

But if its confirmed that Officer Campbell was coming from the FOP bar, Im wondering when we might finally declare the 7C Lounge, also visited by the Proud Boys this summer, a city nuisance? Drunk cop. Hate group. Do we need a trifecta of train wrecks to pull the plug on this place?

Youd hope that the officer, who was released on bail after being charged with driving under the influence and aggravated assault, and was later suspended with the intent to dismiss, will be off the force for good. But bad behavior has never been much of a deal breaker for the Police Department.

Plus, that would mean we arent living in this upside down world, where right is wrong, wrong is right, and doing the right thing, the very thing youre sworn and paid to do, is considered a bonus.
Queen's University campus in Kingston, Ontario, on Wednesday March 18, 2020. Ontario will begin to gradually reopen its economy today starting with three public health units. Health units in Hastings Prince Edward; Kingston, Frontenac and Lennox and Addington; and Renfrew County will move into the least-restrictive green category today. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Lars Hagberg
Thandie Newton and Chris Pine were seen on the streets of London on Tuesday shooting scenes for new thriller All The Old Knives.

The pair braved the snowy weather, with Thandie, 48, looking strained as strolled along the path. Chris, 40, chased her, looking tense.

Thandie wrapped up in chocolate trench coat and blue Ugg boots, her raven locks tied back from her features.

The thrill of the chase: Thandie Newton and Chris Pine were seen on the streets of London on Tuesday shooting scenes for new thriller All The Old Knives

She looked sad as she gazed at the pavement before her, the snow falling around her.

Chris jogged along behind her in a blue shirt and slacks, a long coat and scarf.

All The Old Knives is an Amazon TV production, directed by Janus Metz.

Based on the novel of the same name by Olen Steinhauer, Thandie and Chris play ex-lovers Celia and Henry, who are also spies.

Chill: The pair braved the snowy weather, with Thandie, 48, looking strained as strolled along the path

On the run: Chris, 40, chased her, looking tense

Deep freeze: Thandie wrapped up in chocolate trench coat and blue Ugg boots, her raven locks tied back from her features

Strained: She looked sad as she gazed at the pavement before her, the snow falling around her

On her heels: Chris jogged along behind her in a blue shirt and slacks, a long coat and scarf

The plot sees the duo meet over dinner to reminisce on their time together.

They end up discussing the disastrous hijacking of Royal Jordanian Flight 127, a catastrophe ending in the deaths of all on board.

While this failure haunts the CIA still, Henry seeks to close the book on it.

However, it becomes clear that during their dinner, either Celia or Henry will end up dead by the end of the meal.

New project: All The Old Knives is an Amazon TV production, directed by Janus Metz. Based on the novel of the same name by Olen Steinhauer, Thandie and Chris play ex-lovers Celia and Henry, who are also spies

Story: The plot sees the duo meet over dinner to reminisce on their time together

Tense: They end up discussing the disastrous hijacking of Royal Jordanian Flight 127, a catastrophe ending in the deaths of all on board

Doomed: While this failure haunts the CIA still, Henry seeks to close the book on it. However, it becomes clear that during their dinner, either Celia or Henry will end up dead by the end of the meal

Filming on the project began in December 2020.

The movie has been in development since 2017, with Michelle Williams originally tipped to star in Thandie's role, with James Marsh supposed to direct.

Thandie and director Januz came aboard in 2020 when production finally commenced.

Jonathan Pryce and Laurence Fishburne are also set to appear in the movie which is presumed to be released later this year.
The company is delighted with the share placement which closed within 24 hours of opening and attracted strong support from existing Australian and overseas shareholders.

Funds raised will be used to advance the companys projects in the USA.

( ) (FRA:PX0) has accepted firm commitments from sophisticated and professional investors to subscribe for 125 million shares at an issue price of A$0.04 per share in a well-supported share placement to raise A$5 million.

The share placement was closed within 24 hours of opening and was strongly supported by existing Australian and overseas shareholders.

It is expected to settle on or around Wednesday, February 17, 2021.

Delighted with response

PolarX managing director Frazer Tabeart said: We are delighted with the response to our capital raising, particularly the strong support from our existing shareholders, and we welcome the new shareholders to our register.

These funds allow us to commence our exploration programs in Nevada and Alaska with a high degree of confidence, and we look forward to providing progress updates.

The company is pleased by the interest received, demonstrating strong support from existing and new shareholders for ongoing exploration, and pre-development activities at the Alaska Range Project and the new, highly prospective Humboldt Range Project.

Use of funds

Funds raised will be used to advance the companys projects in the USA including:

Completing due diligence and follow-up fieldwork in Nevada to advance the Humboldt Range Gold-Silver Project to drill-ready status by the end of the third quarter of 2021;

Conducting technical studies, including metallurgical test-work at the Alaska Range Copper-Gold Project and a subsequent scoping study and;

Carrying out advanced exploration drilling in Alaska.

Placement details

The placement is being undertaken within the companys existing capacity under ASX Listing Rules 7.1 and 7.1A.

Viriathus Capital acted as sole lead manager to the placement and was assisted by Fresh Equities as lead arranger.

Planned exploration

The companys proposed exploration plans at Humboldt Range include:

Completion of due diligence and exercise option to acquire a Mine Lease Agreement;

Geological mapping and channel sampling to delineate and evaluate zones of intense quartz veining and alteration (silicification) and assess bonanza vein potential and bulk mineable potential. This work will commence in April 2021; and

Ground geophysics (IP) to help map out zones of silicification (resistive zones) with bulk mining potential.

The program is aimed at generating drill-ready targets by the end of the third quarter of 2021.

Alaska Range

PolarXs proposed program for Alaska Range comprises:

Metallurgical test-work program in quarters one and two of 2021 to evaluate processing options for the Zackly gold-copper-silver mineralisation and the potential for co-processing with Caribou Dome copper mineralisation;

An initial scoping study is being considered for commencement in Q3 2021 to evaluate combined mining and processing of Zackly East, Caribou Dome and Zackly Main mineralisation to help determine minimum resource size required for a viable project and whether Caribou Dome can be mined on a campaign basis and processed at Zackly; and

Drilling program in Q2/Q3 of 2021.

This drilling is aimed at:
Xiaomi has already increased the price of the Mi 11 in Germany and Italy, just a day after it announced that the smartphone would start at 749. Now, the Mi 11 costs at least 799 for 128 GB of storage, while the 256 GB edition has seen a 100 jump to 899. Xiaomi has not explained the price increases.

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The global edition of the Mi 11 launched yesterday, with Xiaomi pricing its latest flagship at 749 with 128 GB of storage and 8 GB of RAM. Meanwhile, the company will charge an additional 50 for 256 GB of storage, but there is no 12 GB RAM variant outside of China. While the lack of a high RAM variant may put the Mi 11 at a disadvantage compared to its peers, the device is significantly cheaper than other flagships.

Similarly, the Mi 11 starts at 50 less than its leaked pricing suggested it would do. The Mi 11 comes with a 55 W GaN charger too, and at a time when Apple and Samsung have stopped including chargers with their flagship smartphones.

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JINAN, China, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Jinan Shengquan Group Share Holding Co., Ltd. (SQ Group) in collaboration with Hong Kong Nano and Advanced Materials Institute (NAMI) released its latest scientific research result, a newly unveiled antiviral, antibacterial fabric.

According to the report, the fabric, which is named Nano-VTS, is treated with a special biopolysaccharide material, and able to kill 100% of the COVID-19 virus (SARS-CoV-2) under experimental conditions. This specially designed fabric can provide a long-term and effective prevention against COVID-19 virus infection and is currently being used to mass-produce masks and other personal protective equipment.

Recently in Jinan, an appraisal meeting was held to discuss the scientific and technological achievements of SQ Group's Nano-VTC antibacterial, antiviral material. Jiang Shicheng, academician from the Chinese Academy of Engineering, Sun Gang, director of the Heilongjiang Animal Disease Prevention and Control Center, and Guan Yuntao, biosafety review expert with the National Health Commission of the People's Republic of China, attended the meeting and concurred that the breakthrough as being a positive step forward in combatting the COVID-19 pandemic both domestically and abroad. Given the absence of such fabrics being used around the world, the attendees concluded that this fabric has extensive application value and recommended its accelerating production and distribution.

The antiviral effectivity of Nano-VTS has been verified by international and third party institutes. So far, the fabric has passed international standard antiviral and safety tests in US Microbac, British Intertek, Swiss SGS, Guangdong Detection Centre of Microbiology, CNTAC Testing Centre, and German Hohenstein. Patents have been filed around the world to protect its intellectual property.

The newly developed Nano-VTS antibacterial and antiviral fabric effectively kills 3 of the 7 currently known coronaviruses that can infect humans, COVID-19, SARS, and HCoV-229E. Test data from Chinese high-level biosafety laboratories confirm that the fabric can kill 100% of the COVID-19 virus within 60 minutes. The British Virology Research Services (VRS) , an independent third-part testing agency, confirmed the findings that the virus was reduced by 90% within 5 minutes of contact with the fabric and 99.99% after 120 minutes.

According to reports, the biopolysaccharide polymer structure in the fabric can actively adsorb and capture bacteria and viruses by contacting, then kills them through biological activity. As it is the structure of the fabric that make it effective, even after 30 washes, it is still able to kill over 99% of the viruses. This resilience means the Nano-VTS antiviral, antibacterial fabric is ideal for daily use without frequent replacement. Currently, SQ Group masks produced with this fabric have already passed the EU mask standard CWA17553-2020 test and entered the market. In the future, this fabric could also be used in gloves, PPE, hospital bed sheets, and public transportation seat covers.

Experts believe that in terms of epidemic-prevention, anything that can limit the infectivity of surfaces in high-population and high-risk areas will be of great value. SQ Group's Nano-VTS antiviral, antibacterial fabric is a positive achievement in combatting the COVID-19 coronavirus epidemic and saving lives.

For more information, please visit http://e.shengquan.com/index.php

About SQ Group

Jinan Shengquan Group Share Holding Co., Ltd. was founded in 1979 and is located in Shandong province, Zhangqiu City. With 3,600 employees, SQ Group focuses on R&D, and application in biomass materials, and pharmaceuticals. Innovation is at the heart of SQ Group and the company firmly holds respect for labor, knowledge, talent, and creative ideas. Every year, SQ Group invests more than RMB 150 million into research in pursuit of its vision to 'take from nature, serve society, and benefit mankind'.

http://e.shengquan.com/index.php?m=content&c=index&a=show&catid=193&id=238

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INDIANAPOLIS (AP)  Indiana legislators have advanced a weakened version of a requirement sought by the governor for workplace accommodations for pregnant women such as longer breaks or transfers to less physical work.

An Indiana House committee on Tuesday endorsed a bill that would require responses from businesses to employees who ask for accommodations but would not mandate meeting any of the requests, the Indianapolis Business Journal reported.

A tougher proposal backed by Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb failed in the state Senate last year following opposition from some business groups.

Bill sponsor Republican Rep. Karen Engleman of Georgetown argued her new proposal would be effective because it would lead to employees and employers talking about the requests.

Eva Bell of advocacy group Hoosier Action was among those who said it wouldnt improve pregnant women's working conditions. Bell described some businesses refusing stools to sit on or more frequent bathroom breaks.

Holcomb isnt objecting to the committee-approved proposal.

While I have pushed for different language to become law in each of the last two sessions, I agree with members from both sides of the aisle that voted in favor of the bill today as a step forward in assisting pregnant women in the workforce, Holcomb said in statement.

Some parents in Accra have pleaded with government and education authorities not to shut down schools again over increasing cases of COVID-19 in the country.



They held that if necessary precautions were taken, the cases could reduce for children to continue their education.



The plea followed calls from the Ghana Medical Association for government to shut down schools the second time, after some cases of COVID-19 were recorded in some schools across the country.



Madam Hawa Abdul Khadil, 45, a trader and a parent, said with the provision of Personnel Protective Equipment (PPE) and strict observance of the COVID-19 safety protocols, children could be safer in schools than homes.



My husband and I are always busy working and return home late. During the shutdown of schools, taking care of our kids was not easy, so they being in school under the protection of their teachers would be safer, she said.



Madam Sackley Armah, another mother, 43, said some schools were adhering to the safety guidelines and presented a COVID-19 free environment for children.



Some schools and teachers are doing better than us. The kids come home to teach us what to do so we dont have to close schools again. The children will worry us at home. Lets just make the schools better for them, she said.



I have relatives who are teachers and going back to School is not only for the kids, but for the teachers too. Some dont have any work to do, Madam Sandra Dery, a mother of two, said.



Mr. Razak Mohammed Aboagye, 47, a single parent, said they had already paid school fees and that there was no reason for schools to shut down.



He said what was needed was for the schools to ensure adherence to the protocols strictly.



Mr Aboagye also called on education authorities to monitor schools to ensure that they went by the Ghana Education Service Schools Reopening Guidelines, especially reduced class sizes.

Source: GNA









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ROCHESTER, Minn. - Two people were arrested with around 6,000 oxycodone pills Tuesday that could be related to recent overdose deaths in Olmsted County.

Rochester police said Dahir Dahir, 25, and Abdullahi Islaw, 25, are both facing charges of first-degree possession of a controlled substance.

The pills, which will be tested to see if theyre laced with fentanyl, could have a street value of around $180,000.

The two were arrested after a traffic stop in the 800 block of Elton Hills Dr. NW.

Both men could be seen making movements into the backseat of the vehicle when they were pulled over.

The pills were not for personal use, by any means, police said. These pills resemble those that have been involved in recent overdose deaths.

Police added that these types of pills are coming up from Mexico and are getting dispersed all over the country.

The city of Boerne will open registration for its first vaccination hub at 9 a.m. Wednesday  but all available appointments are expected to be filled within minutes for the 500 doses of the Moderna vaccine the city has received.

The vaccines will be given Friday to those with appointments.

A link to the registration forms will be posted on the citys website Wednesday morning and registrants will have the option of switching to Spanish translation. Once a reservation is confirmed, the registrant will receive a follow-up email with appointment information.

Boerne Mayor Tim Handren urged families and friends to help those who might not be computer savvy to register for an appointment if they need a vaccine.

If you have parents or grandparents who might need help technologically to get registered, and if you can help them at 9 (a.m.), that would be great, Handren said.

On ExpressNews.com: Get the latest update on coronavirus and a tracking map of U.S. cases

Two groups of people are currently eligible to receive the vaccine  group 1A, which includes certain health care workers, and group 1B, which includes seniors 65 and older, pregnant women and anyone 16 or older with certain pre-existing medical conditions. The conditions include cancer, heart issues such as heart failure or coronary artery disease, chronic kidney disease, solid organ transplant, obesity or severe obesity, sickle cell disease or Type 2 diabetes mellitus.

The vaccines will be given at St. Peter the Apostle Catholic Church in the Cana Ballroom. Those registered to receive a vaccine shouldnt show up any earlier than 15 minutes before their appointment.

Boernes vaccination hub wont be open to people without appointments and wont offer onsite registration.

pohare@express-news.net | Twitter: Peggy_OHare
She can currently be seen in the Netflix movie Malcolm & Marie.

And on Tuesday, Zendaya shared a behind-the-scenes selfie to her Instagram.

In the photo, she's seen taking her picture in a mirror while wearing a sexy gold outfit that she wears in the movie.

Sexy star: Zendaya shared a sizzling mirror selfie taken on the set of her Netflix movie Malcolm & Marie to Instagram on Tuesday, in which she posed in a sexy gold outfit she wears in the film

The outfit features a cross-over bodice and a split skirt that reveals plenty of skin along with her long legs.

She's wearing black tights and black stiletto heels and her long hair tumbles down as she snaps the pic with her head tilted to one side.

She is posed with her knees touching as she sits on a bed with a colorful poster on the wall above it.

In Malcolm & Marie, Zendaya plays the girlfriend of a filmmaker, played by John David Washington, and the intimate drama follows the couple as they examine their relationship.

On screen couple: The outfit featured a cross-over bodice and a split skirt that revealed plenty of skin for her role opposite John David Washington

Intense: In Malcolm & Marie, Zendaya plays the girlfriend of a filmmaker, played by Washington, and the intimate drama follows the couple as they examine their relationship

The actress, 24, recently appeared on GMA to talk about the movie by her Euphoria director Sam Levinson.

Zendaya explained that it had been shot in black and white in tribute to an era where black actors were not as common on screen.

'It's beautiful, it adds timelessness to it there was a thought also about reclaiming the narrative of black and white Hollywood and Black actors really having their moment at that time,' she said on the ABC morning show.

'A lot of filmmakers have already done this before, a lot of Black filmmakers, so it's not necessarily a new idea, but we did want to pay tribute to that era and reclaim that beauty and that elegance with these two Black actors,' she added.

Meaningful: The actress, 24, recently appeared on GMA to talk about the movie by her Euphoria director Sam Levinson and she explained it had been shot in black and white in tribute to an era where black actors were not as common on screen

Had input: The Spider-Man: Far From Home star also served as a producer on Malcolm & Marie and shared that she considered that a milestone in her career

The Spider-Man: Far From Home star also served as a producer on Malcolm & Marie and shared that she considered that a milestone in her career.

'This is really my first time believing that maybe I could,' she said on GMA.

'This is my first time being a leading lady, but also my first time being this creatively involved in something, producing something, co-financing something, owning something and sharing it all with my crew.'

The Emmy winner explained the intimate production process as the film was made during the pandemic in June and July, amid strict COVID-19 protocols.

'We made this as a family, shot it in 14 days with a 22 person crew I am eternally grateful for,' she said. 'For their talent, their time, their hard work, and their willingness to believe in this film.'

Zendaya went on: 'If there's anything to learn from this year, and I hope from our little movie it's gratitude for every moment and every person we get to love. To stop and acknowledge the people in our lives who make it possible to do the work we do and honestly, make life worth living.'

The Euphoria star said that she had a number of professional milestones on the romantic drama, as she's a producer on the project
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TORONTO, Feb. 10, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Montero Mining and Exploration Ltd. (TSX-V: MON) (Montero or the Company) has received confirmation of issuance of exploration licenses east and contiguous to the currently held Isabella claims. The new claims cover an additional 7 km of granite-sediment contact with reported granite-hosted quartz veins similar to those defined within Monteros Isabella East and Isabella West property blocks. The Isabella Properties are located approximately 200 km south of Santiago and 125 km south of Yamanas Minera Florida mine in the Southern Coastal Range of Chile.



Dr Tony Harwood, President of Montero commented: Montero has secured additional claims covering a further 7 km strike length along the granite sedimentary contact to the east of the existing Isabella claims. At Isabella, the Company is currently completing a maiden drill program to test 4 priority gold silver vein targets and a sedimentary geophysical target. Further mapping and sampling of these newly acquired claims is underway.

New Exploration License Applications

Montero expanded its land holdings in the Isabella district based on prior geological mapping and surface rocks sampling carried out by the previous property owner. The new claims cover a 21 km2 area immediately east and contiguous to the current Isabella property holdings. Under the regulatory process the licenses will be constituted during Q2 2021 and will be 100% owned by Montero. The new licenses cover an additional 7 km of granite-sediment contact containing numerous, structurally controlled quartz veins within the granite. Previous reconnaissance chip sampling returned values up to 0.85 g/t Au, 23 g/t Ag in exposed veins which ranged up to 4 m in width.

Figure 1: https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/c3979f3c-ca5f-478d-a6cd-a19aad8353a2

Qualified Person Statement

This press release was reviewed and approved by Mr. Mike Evans, M.Sc. Pr. Sci. Nat., who is a qualified person for the purpose of National Instrument 43-101 and a Consulting Geologist to Montero. A review was also undertaken by Sr. Marcial Vergara B.Sc. who is resident of Chile and a Qualified Person for the purpose of National Instrument 43-101 and a technical advisor to Montero. Sr. Vergara has extensive experience in gold exploration in Chile.

About Montero

Montero is a junior exploration company focused on finding, exploring, and advancing globally significant gold deposits in Chile. The Company is in the process of relinquishing its portfolio of battery metal projects in Africa to focus on gold opportunities in Chile. Monteros board of directors and management have an impressive track record of successfully discovering and advancing precious metal projects. Montero trades on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol MON and has 38,647,485 shares outstanding.

For more information, contact:

Montero Mining and Exploration Ltd.

Dr. Tony Harwood, President and Chief Executive Officer

E-mail: ir@monteromining.com Tel: +1 416 840 9197 | Fax: +1 866 688 4671 www.monteromining.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 release.

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The recruitment drive is being conducted for the recruitment of as many as 2,391 Constable (UB) and 4,271 Constable (AB) posts.

The State Level Police Recruitment Board (SLPRB), Assam has released the admit cards for the Constable (AB/UB) Physical Endurance Test (PET) and Physical Standard Test (PST) on its official website.

Candidates set to appear in the recruitment exams are advised to visit the official website of SLPRB at slprbassam.in in order to download the Assam Police hall tickets.

According to a report by The Times of India, the recruitment drive is being conducted for the recruitment of as many as 2,391 Constable (UB) and 4,271 Constable (AB) posts.

The recruitment exams are going to start from 15 February and continue till 22 February. The exams will be held in separate districts of the state.

Follow these steps to download the Assam Police Constable Admit Card 2021:

Step 1: Visit the official site of Assam SLPRB at slprbassam.in

Step 2: Go to the link on the homepage that says: Download the Admit Card of first 15 Districts for the post of Constable AB/ UB

Step 3: You will be redirected to another page

Step 4: Enter your Phone Number/ Email ID/ Application ID in the given space

Step 5: Once you have successfully logged in, the SLPRB Constable Admit Card 2021 will appear on the screen

Step 6: View the hall ticket, download the admit card and take a print out for future use

Here is the direct link to download the admit card (https://constablerecruitment.com/?auth=1).

As per a report by Jagran Josh, the PST round will carry no marks. The height, weight and chest (only males) will be measured and the candidates will be sent for an examination by the medical officer. Check-ups will be conducted for various things such as knock knee, vision, colour blindness, flat foot, varicose vein, and physical deformities. If a candidate manages to pass the PST, they will be sent forward towards the PET. This test will consist of a race and long jump exercise. The candidates who clear the PET will have to then appear in a written exam thereafter.
The Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine is ready to deepen the Ukrainian-British inter-parliamentary dialogue, Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada Dmytro Razumkov has said.

"Despite the obstacles associated with COVID-19 that exist today, I would like to invite you to intensify the Ukrainian-British inter-parliamentary relations," Razumkov said during an online conversation with Speaker of the House of Commons of the British Parliament Lindsay Hoyle. According to the website of the Ukrainian parliament, it is important to discuss many aspects of international cooperation at the inter-parliamentary level.

Razumkov also expressed his hope for understanding and assistance of British partners in simplifying the travel regime for Ukrainian citizens to the UK.

In addition, the chairman of the Verkhovna Rada noted the well-coordinated work of the friendship groups of the parliaments of the two countries. According to Razumkov, Great Britain is one of the most consistent countries in supporting the territorial integrity of Ukraine.

"The de-occupation of Crimea and the occupied territories of Donetsk and Luhansk regions is a serious challenge for Ukraine," Razumkov said. According to him, due to the position of Great Britain and sanctions pressure on the Russian Federation, Ukraine continues to resist Russian aggression.

Razumkov invited Hoyle to visit Ukraine. "The last visit of the Speaker of the House of Commons to Ukraine took place 20 years ago. I think this trend should be changed," he said.
A Delhi court Wednesday sent a man, arrested from Punjab, to 7-day police custody in connection with the Red Fort violence on during farmers' tractor parade against the Centre's three new agri laws.

Iqbal Singh, carrying a reward of Rs 50,000 on his arrest, was nabbed from Hoshiarpur by the Delhi Police's Special Cell and brought to the capital today.

He was produced before Metropolitan Magistrate Poorva Mehra who sent him for custodial interrogation after the police said his interrogation was required to confront him with several videos and identify other accused persons.

The police sought his custody for 10 days saying Singh was allegedly one of the main conspirators of the violence and there was a need to establish where his funding was coming from.

The investigating officer said Singh's alleged link to actor-activist Deep Sidhu, who was arrested on Tuesday in the case, needed to be ascertained.

Police alleged the events leading to the violence were allegedly well planned and not a random occurrence.

There are hundreds of videos. We need to confront him with all these. We need to find out who are the people who came with him and who are they affiliated with. He was one of the main instigators. This was a conspiracy, the police alleged.

The investigating officer alleged that Singh did a live video for over an hour on a news channel in which he can be seen instigating the crowd to violence.

We need to go to Punjab and look into his news channel. We need to establish where his funding is coming from. He (Singh)told us during interrogation that he ran that news channel on which there was a live video for 1.15 hr, IO alleged.

Singh, however, claimed he did not go to Red Fort to cause violence and whatever he did or said was in the heat of the moment.

I did not come to cause violence. I reached Red Fort just like that and had not planned to go there. When I reached emotions flared up. Whatever I did is on my live video. I did not instigate anyone, he claimed.

The police had announced a cash reward of Rs 50,000 for information leading to Singh's arrest.

Thousands of farmers protesting the Centre's new agriculture laws had clashed with the police during their tractor parade on January 26. Over 500 police personnel were injured and one protestor died.

(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.)

Let's rodeo San Antonio, but at Santikos Palladium.

The Santikos Entertainment theater is the official watch party location for the San Antonio Stock Show and Rodeo, the local cinema company told MySA.com on Wednesday. The Palladium, located at The Rim, will be hosting live rodeo stock show performances in three auditoriums from Feb. 12-27. Guests can watch the rodeo events for free.

Santikos is also bringing in Miss Rodeo Texas to take pictures and sign autographs with their guests from noon to 2 p.m. on Feb. 13 and Feb. 20. Other contestants and rodeo officials may also join the events.

RELATED: San Antonio Stock Show & Rodeo going ahead with these safety measures

Santikos said it is screening the live events due to the limited seating at the rodeo, which had to downsize its capacity in response to the coronavirus pandemic. The local rodeo will be from Feb. 11-28, despite an online petition calling for the 14-day event to be canceled.

At the Palladium, there will be safety protocols for the watch parties, with seating capped at 50 percent capacity.

The company advises guests to show up early to snag the best seats in the house. Seats can be reserved the day of the event only at Santikos Palladium Guest Services. Managers will be manually assigning seats to insure physical distancing remains in place, according to Santikos.

"We look forward to sharing this special rodeo experience with our fellow rodeo fans in a safe and fun environment," the company said. "Come grab the best seats in the house and let's rodeo San Antonio."

For more on the events, visit santikos.com/rodeo/.

Priscilla Aguirre is a general assignment reporter for MySA.com | priscilla.aguirre@express-news.net | @CillaAguirre
Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-11 01:24:53|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- Peng Liyuan, wife of Chinese President Xi Jinping, on Tuesday sent a letter to the teachers and students of the Burg Gymnasium, a German high school, encouraging them to make new contributions to enhancing the friendship between the peoples of China and Germany.

Noting that she has attentively watched the video in which four students of the school choir sang the Chinese song After the Pandemic, Peng said they have expressed the beautiful wish of supporting people in all countries to prevail over the COVID-19 pandemic on an early date.

One year ago, the students supported China's anti-pandemic fight with the song Let the World Filled with Love, rendering their amity to the Chinese people, Peng recalled.

Now the pandemic is still raging across the world, thus she is very concerned about the students' health and hopes the students and their families take effective prevention measures, Peng added.

Peng said she believes that the ice is thawing and spring is on the way. The pandemic will be defeated as long as people in all the countries join their efforts, she said.

The teachers and students are welcomed to China for another exchange after the pandemic, which will enhance the friendship between the Chinese and German peoples, especially the youth, she said.

Burg Gymnasium, located in Essen, Nordrhein-Westfalen, is one of the 12 oldest public middle schools in Germany. It has been offering Chinese language courses since 1994, and has organized several visits to China for exchanges in recent years.

In March 2014, Peng visited the school and joined a Chinese class there during President Xi's state visit to Germany. In October 2016, Peng met with the teachers and students of the school in Beijing. Enditem
Tunisian film 'The Man Who Sold His Skin' at Oscars By Kaouther Ben Hania, awarded Edipo Re at Venice Fest

(ANSAmed) - TUNIS, FEBRUARY 10 - "The Man Who Sold His Skin", by the well known Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania has been selected to represent Tunisia at the 93rd edition of the Oscars in the Best Foreign Language Film section.



The ceremony is currently slated for April 25, 2021 at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles but may be postponed depending on how the COVID-19 pandemic develops in the next few weeks.



The film has won several awards including for the best Arabic feature film at the El Gouna film festival in Egypt in October and the Edipo Re at the last Venice film festival.



The film tells the story of Sam Ali, a sensitive and impulsive young Syrian who flees from war in his home country to Lebanon. Lacking legal status, he cannot get a visa to Europe, where his beloved Abeer is.



To be able to get to Europe and be with the love of his life, he agrees to allow a famous artist to tattoo his back.



Transforming his body into a prestigious work of art, Sam realizes that his decision may not mean freedom.



Monica Bellucci is among the actors in the film. (ANSAmed).




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Washington, February 10, 2021--After the COVID-19 crisis hit last March, federal student aid applications among potential college freshmen in California dropped 14 percent between mid-March and mid-August, relative to prior years. While there were also initial declines in applications among current undergraduates and graduate students, these quickly recovered and ended 8 percent higher relative to prior years. The findings, published today in Educational Researcher, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association, are from the first academic study conducted on this topic.

Using data from the California Student Aid Commission and the American Community Survey, study authors Oded Gurantz and Christopher Wielga, both at the University of Missouri, compared trends in the total volume and characteristics of submissions of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) across California from mid-March through mid-August 2020, relative to three prior submission cycles, and analyzed individuals' background information to identify neighborhood income and ethnic characteristics.

The authors found a 21 percent decline in submissions among incoming first-year undergraduates with no prior college experience and a 7 percent decline among those with some prior experience. Increases in submissions among continuing students were directly tied to grade level, being the smallest for incoming sophomores (1.9 percent) and largest for students entering graduate programs (34.1 percent).

"COVID is tough and it makes sense that it may make potential first-year students feel they can't go to college, due to either overwhelming commitments or an understandable judgment that online education may not suit them in the short-term," said Gurantz, an assistant professor at the University of Missouri. "But we know that short-term stop-outs often harm long-term outcomes, and in the long run it's important that these students earn their degrees."

The authors noted that their findings parallel enrollment figures reported by the National Student Clearinghouse last fall that showed a decline in 2020 undergraduate enrollments nationally, and in California, driven by first-time students. The clearinghouse also found that the deepest enrollment drops were at two-year institutions--the type of institution chosen by most students who submitted FAFSAs during March through August in prior years, according to Gurantz.

When comparing neighborhood characteristics for FAFSA filers, Gurantz and Wielga found a 5 percent drop in applications from zip codes in the top third in terms of percentage of Black and Hispanic residents. In contrast, neighborhoods in the middle third for Black and Hispanic residents saw applications rise 4 percent. Neighborhoods in the lowest third for Black and Hispanic residents saw applications rise 10 percent.

Gurantz and Wielga found similar results with year-over-year declines in low-income zip codes and increases in high-income zip codes.

"Our results paint a bleak portrait, suggesting that without immediate investments in outreach and support, traditionally underrepresented students will be less likely to attend college and more likely to take on debt," Gurantz said. "More outreach is needed to make sure that missing students find their way to college, and that current students who are struggling get the support they need."

"The turmoil and economic uncertainty of the pandemic are creating substantial barriers to college entry, and the trend in FAFSA applications is likely to exacerbate enrollment gaps by income, race, and ethnicity," said Gurantz.

According to the authors, states could help increase FAFSA submissions by improving their early outreach to students, providing reminders, and flagging students who have not submitted by a specific date. The authors also suggest the federal government could consider simplifying the FAFSA process, reducing the number of individuals who are asked to verify their income through additional documentation after they submit their applications, or simplifying the appeals process. Extending deadlines for FAFSA submissions and college applications could also help to facilitate greater access. In January, the Education Department issued guidance to college financial aid administrators encouraging them to exercise their professional judgment to adjust financial aid eligibility based on a student's special circumstances.

"Providing additional funding to community colleges, which are experiencing the largest downturns in enrollment, may also be necessary," Gurantz said. "These institutions will be central to promoting the kinds of programs and resources needed to ensure that more of these missing students are successful over the coming years, should they choose to return."

###

Study citation: Gurantz, O., & Wielga, C. (2021). How have FAFSA submissions differed during COVID-19? Educational Researcher. Prepublished February 10, 2021. http://doi. org/ 10. 3102/ 0013189X21992059

About AERA

The American Educational Research Association (AERA) is the largest national interdisciplinary research association devoted to the scientific study of education and learning. Founded in 1916, AERA advances knowledge about education, encourages scholarly inquiry related to education, and promotes the use of research to improve education and serve the public good. Find AERA on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
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Ben Zigterman is a reporter covering business at The News-Gazette. His email is bzigterman@news-gazette.com, and you can follow him on Twitter (@bzigterman).
(Newser)  Surveillance video last month captured a very disturbing incident in Oakland, California's Chinatown, where a man walking down the sidewalk came up behind an elderly Asian man and pushed him over, violently and unprovoked. (Watch the video here, but note that it is disturbing.) Now, a suspect has been arrested, the Guardian reports. Yahya Muslim, 28, is accused of three attacks in Chinatown on Jan. 31 and has been charged with assault and battery and elder abuse; the other alleged victims were a 60-year-old man and a 55-year-old woman, who was knocked unconscious. All three were treated at local hospitals. Authorities say hate crime charges could be added if the attacks are found to have been racially motivated, CBS San Francisco reports.

story continues below

"The skyrocketing number of hate crimes against Asian Americans continues to grow, despite our repeated pleas for help. The crimes ignored and even excused," tweeted actor Daniel Dae Kim, who, along with Daniel Wu, offered a $25,000 reward for information leading to an arrest in the case. The shocking video sparked outrage across the nation, particularly because it is just one in a number of similar attacks on Asians amid the coronavirus pandemic. In a tragic case last month in San Francisco, an 84-year-old Thai man was run down in a similar fashion, knocked to the ground, and ultimately died of his injuries. Antoine Watson, 19, and Malaysia Goo, 20, are charged in that attack. A group of citizens has started patrolling Chinatown in an effort to protect potential targets, KTVU reports. Bay Area reporter Dion Lim is documenting incidents on Instagram. (Read more Oakland stories.)
The climatistas are urging President Biden to declare climate change to be a national emergency, thereby tripping enhanced presidential powers under the profligate National Emergencies Act. Trump employed the NEA to divert defense funds to build some of the border wall that Congress refused to fund, and Biden might well raid the defense budget for more windmills or something. My guess is Biden is holding back this step in case Congress doesnt give him a big down payment on the Green New Deal in the stimulus billa down payment that Bidens own people are apparently struggling to figure out how to spend. Politico:

People at the highest levels of the administration are huddling to try to meet the 120-day deadline Biden set out in his executive order on climate change to issue recommendations for spending that money. The administration will have to figure out the details while avoiding the blunders that could undermine confidence in the program  something former President Barack Obama struggled to do with his 2009 stimulus package. Environmental organizers from low-income and communities of color across the U.S. are linking up with mainstream green groups to identify their needs  and the list goes far beyond traditional environmental concerns to include things like personal protective equipment, community health centers and affordable housing.

Im betting the blunders line at the Vegas sportsbook.

Meanwhile, for a problem that the climatistas keep declaring is a clear and present crisis, it is notable how many recent findings in the mainstream science literature continue to unsettle the matter. I dont bother much trying to keep up with the literature on a regular basis any more, but sometimes it lands on my desk willy-nilly.

Start with this story from the South China Morning Post: reporting on a new study in Quaternary Science:

Studies of coral reefs in the Paracel Islands suggest that the South China Sea started warming up in 1825, at the start of the industrial revolution, according to a study by Chinese scientists. That was the year the worlds first railway began operating in England and most ocean-going ships still used wind power.

Man-made carbon dioxide emissions could not fully explain such an early rise in the warming trend, they said in a peer-reviewed paper published in Quaternary Sciences on Friday.

But but butthe ice is melting in Antarctica! Oh, waittheres this new study in Climate and Atmospheric Science, which labors mightily to couch its main finding inside the conventional climate narrative, which is probably necessary in scientific publishing these days:

Low Antarctic continental climate sensitivity due to high ice sheet orography Abstract

The Antarctic continent has not warmed in the last seven decades, despite a monotonic increase in the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases. In this paper, we investigate whether the high orography of the Antarctic ice sheet (AIS) has helped delay warming over the continent. To that end, we contrast the Antarctic climate response to CO 2 -doubling with present-day orography to the response with a flattened AIS. To corroborate our findings, we perform this exercise with two different climate models. We find that, with a flattened AIS, CO 2 -doubling induces more latent heat transport toward the Antarctic continent, greater moisture convergence over the continent and, as a result, more surface-amplified condensational heating. Greater moisture convergence over the continent is made possible by flattening of moist isentropic surfaces, which decreases humidity gradients along the trajectories on which extratropical poleward moisture transport predominantly occurs, thereby enabling more moisture to reach the pole. Furthermore, the polar meridional cell disappears when the AIS is flattened, permitting greater CO 2 -forced warm temperature advection toward the Antarctic continent. Our results suggest that the high elevation of the present AIS plays a significant role in decreasing the susceptibility of the Antarctic continent to CO 2 -forced warming.

Translation: the feedback effects to greenhouse gases in the continent of Antarctica may be negative (meaning cooling or at least offsetting warming) or neutral.

But but buthurricanes and extreme weather! Oh, waittheres this preprint study in Nature Portfolio:

Changes in Atlantic Major Hurricane Frequency Since the Late-19th Century Abstract

Atlantic hurricanes are a major hazard to life and property, and a topic of intense scientific interest. Historical changes in observing practices limit the utility of century-scale records of Atlantic major hurricane frequency. To evaluate past changes in frequency, we have here developed a homogenization method for Atlantic hurricane and major hurricane frequency over 1851-2019. We find that recorded century-scale increases in Atlantic hurricane and major hurricane frequency, and associated decrease in USA hurricanes strike fraction, are consistent with changes in observing practices and not likely a true climate trend. After homogenization, increases in basin-wide hurricane and major hurricane activity since the 1970s are not part of a century-scale increase, but a recovery from a deep minimum in the 1960s-1980s. These results support the notion that internal climate variability and aerosol-induced mid-to-late-20th century major hurricane frequency reductions have probably masked century-scale greenhouse-gas warming contributions to North Atlantic major hurricane frequency. Translation: Many of the claims of increasing hurricane strength and frequency are artifacts of our improving observational technology (especially satellites), and the main body of the study suggests we underestimated hurricane activity in the early and middle decades of the 20th century. The conclusion is worth noting: Caution should be taken in connecting recent changes in Atlantic hurricane activity to the century-scale warming of our planet. . . . Given the uncertainties that presently exist in understanding multi-decadal climate variability, the climate response to aerosols and impact of greenhouse gas warming on NA [northern Atlantic] TC [tropical cyclone] activity, care must be exercised in not over-interpreting the implications of, and causes behind, these recent NA MH increases. But whats the fun of not over-interpreting weather events? But but but, Wall Street is telling us climate change is a financial risk we must incorporate into our financial planning now now now! Oh, wait: Nature Climate Change says not so fast: Scientists warn over misuse of climate models in financial markets LONDON (Reuters)  Misuse of climate models could pose a growing risk to financial markets by giving investors a false sense of certainty over how the physical impacts of climate change will play out, according to the authors of a paper published on Monday. With heat waves, wildfires, massive storms and sea-level rises projected to intensify as the planet warms, companies are under growing pressure to disclose how the disruption could affect their businesses. But the authors of a peer-reviewed article t.co/oVO3rI6YyT?ssr=true in Nature Climate Change warned that the drive to integrate global warming into financial decision-making had leap-frogged the models used to simulate the climate by at least a decade. Lets see if Wall Street climatistas like Larry Fink at Black Rock follow this science this time.

Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-10 02:37:02|Editor: huaxia

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BAGHDAD, Feb. 9 (Xinhua) -- Iraq is determined to recover all antiquities that were stolen after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, official al-Sabah newspaper reported Tuesday, citing a senior Iraqi official.

"The board is determined to recover the first and last Iraqi artifact smuggled abroad, and we will not give up a single piece of it, regardless of its size and importance," Laith Hussein, head of the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage of the Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Antiquities, told al-Sabah.

There is international cooperation in recovering the antiquities that were looted and stolen from the archaeological sites as well as the Iraq Museum in the capital Baghdad, he said.

Hundreds of lawsuits are filed by the ministry outside Iraq on stolen artifacts, Hussein added.

According to the Iraqi official, the Iraqi authorities have great difficulty in protecting archaeological sites in Iraq as the country is "like a museum," where "thousands of archaeological sites spread widely across its land from north to south."

"Nevertheless, the board continues to intensify monitoring of archaeological sites by fencing them with wires and increasing the number of guards to prevent their damage," Hussein noted.

According to official statistics, about 15,000 pieces of cultural relics from the Stone Age through the Babylonian, Assyrian, and Islamic periods were stolen or destroyed by looters, mainly in the Iraq Museum, after Saddam Hussein's regime was toppled by U.S.-led troops in 2003.

Then after the Islamic State (IS) militants took control of large territories in northern and western Iraq in 2014, the museum of Mosul as well as the ancient cities of Hatra and Nimrud were destroyed, with large numbers of antiquities smuggled.

Statistics show that more than 10,000 sites in Iraq are officially recognized as archaeological sites, but most of them are not safeguarded and many are still being looted. Enditem
With state and municipal governments trying to force through the reopening of schools throughout Brazil in the face of a raging COVID-19 pandemic, Brazilian teachers and students have hailed the struggle of teachers in Chicago against the deadly reopening of schools in Americas third-largest city.

The WSWS Perspective, Chicago teachers take a stand to save lives over profits was liked and shared on teacher Facebook groups, from the southernmost state of Brazil, Rio Grande do Sul, to one of the northernmost, Amazonas. This is a measure of the widespread opposition among teachers in Brazil to the reopening of schools, and their recognition of the international character of this struggle.

Teachers striking against pension cuts march in Sao Paulo last year.

Elza, a teacher from Sao Paulo, wrote in response to the report on the Chicago teachers struggle: Be strong! Go on, because life is more important! Miriam, a teacher from Rio Grande do Sul, said, This is a struggle of all educators! For Luceli, a teacher from Parana, even though distant, the struggle is the same. The human concern with lives ... needs our support. Always fight, never give up.

They are examples of struggle and unity, wrote Eliane, from the industrial city of Osasco, in Greater Sao Paulo. Showing the international character of the long history of betrayal by the teachers unions, which in Chicago is supporting the efforts of the Democratic mayor and the Biden administration to reopen schools, she denounced the local union, saying that the teachers struggles take place without the support of the union, which does not do what the teachers really need.

For Joao, a sociology student at the Federal University of Sao Paulo, The struggle of Chicago teachers is for the preservation of the lives of students and their families in the midst of a global pandemic, especially in the country with the highest number of deaths and cases in the world.

Contrary to the allegations by state officials and the corporate media in the US and Brazil, Joao believes that The return of students to schools is not primarily aimed at recovering the [educational] damage caused by the pandemic, but the interest behind it is much more economic.

He continued: The struggle of Chicago teachers is against the interests of the bourgeoisie. It is clear that the state wants economic activity to be completely re-established after a long pandemic, and the reopening of schools is essential to make the wheel of capitalism turn completely again.

Rafael, a teacher from Manaus, the capital of Amazonas and the epicenter of a deadly new variant of the coronavirus, said that the struggle of Chicago teachers is important. I hope they have the strength to maintain this position and that it can serve as a positive influence and help teachers in major capitals to maintain the same position. In overpopulated cities like Manaus and Sao Paulo, teachers need to position themselves in the same way as their colleagues in Chicago. Life must always be ahead of profit, always.

Comparing the betrayals of the Chicago Teachers Union with those carried out by the unions in Amazonas, which are controlled by the Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB) and the Workers Party (PT), he said, The union there is doing what often happens here to us, of not feeling represented or adequately protected.

Rafael believes there was a relationship between the reopening of schools in Manaus at the end of last year and the explosion of cases and deaths that the city witnessed in December and January. According to him, As soon as the school year ended, the numbers in Manaus grew again ... [and] went into an unending whirlwind. ... Many teachers were affected, just open any social media and you see calls for donations, and most people are dying at home. In January alone, 64 public school teachers in Amazonas died of COVID-19.

For Ana, who just finished high school in a state public school in Sao Paulo, the struggle of Chicago teachers is important, because it is their lives and the lives of the entire community that are being put at risk. She believes that with the reopening of schools, COVID-19 cases and deaths will increase considerably.

Ana has also just taken the national exam for university admission (ENEM). According to her, the reopening of schools and the holding of ENEM exams in Brazil are putting Brazilian youth and the people in contact with them at great risk.  Besides worsening the pandemic, this helps in the evolution of the virus and the emergence of new strains that are more contagious and lethal forms of the coronavirus.

For Marli, a retired teacher from Sao Paulo, What we see at the moment is an out-of-control pandemic, insufficient vaccine, with even more contagious variants. It is under this scenario that a return to school is imposed in Chicago and in several other countries around the world.

She also urged: The return to school requires workers in education and the working class as a whole to fight for life in an unprecedented way. The capitalist interests of genocidal elites cannot take precedence over life. It is a global struggle against governments that meet the interests of these elites. It is only the workers of the whole world who are responsible for coordinating this great mobilization for life. All support to the struggle of teachers in Chicago, Brazil and the world!



The research is discussed in full detail in a just released on-demand webinar, "Leveraging Chat to Manage & Evolve a Customer-First Digital Transformation Program," which is available here.

In the global multi-industry survey of 405 companies, Aberdeen found that at least two-thirds of firms use chat and that those that use chat in commerce achieve superior financial results while delivering a better customer experience. Highlights of the research indicate that companies using chat in commerce experience a:

75% improvement in annual revenue growth

48% bump in customer retention rates

27% improvement in ability to reduce service costs

21x improvement in marketing ROI

The research also shows that many forms of chatincluding WhatsApp, live chat, and mobile in-app messagingrank high in terms of planned adoption as companies seek more connection with consumers. Forty six percent of businesses have implemented messaging apps or plan to do so in the next 12 months.

"We are on the cusp of mass adoption of chat in commerce, and smart brands will create one holistic customer experience across all customer channels, including chat, the interactive channel of choice," says Jeppe Dorff, Clickatell Chief Product and Technology Officer.

While many companies have pursued digital transformation efforts, many have fallen short of goals. By deploying chatwhich is now used daily by eight in 10 adults, the research showscompanies can more quickly respond to changing consumer needs and preferences as they pursue their digital initiatives. This is especially critical in the wake of COVID-19, which hastened digital commerce around the world.

Chat-enabled data and insights

Chat also enables companies to gather more data and insight, more quickly, into the customer experience so companies can respond more readily. Lack of visibility into customer data was cited by eight in 10 companies as a key challenge, the research shows.

"Chat enables customer-friendly digital transformation and best practices are applicable in all industries," says Omer Minkara, Aberdeen VP and Principal Analyst. "By making digital transformation efforts customer first, not business first and focused on internal needs, companies will see greater success in satisfying and delighting their customers."

Companies who used chat in commerce, when compared to those who didn't, were 84% more likely to improve the number of positive social media mentions for their brand, the research shows.

In the webinar, Minkara and Dorff also discuss how a brand may use chat to take a customer-first approach to digital transformation, including key first steps such as: focusing on frequent customer issues; devising metrics to measure success; iterating and improving chat initiatives as you go; and expanding use cases over time. The webinar also discusses issues such as key building blocks to use chat in customer-first initiatives and roadblocks and pitfalls to digital transformation.

To view the webinar, "Leveraging Chat to Manage & Evolve a Customer-First Digital Transformation Program," click here.

About Clickatell

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Justice Department Asks Trump-Appointed US Attorneys to Resign

The Justice Department (DOJ) said on Feb. 9 that it is beginning the process of replacing top federal prosecutors who were appointed by former President Donald Trump.

The practice, which the department stated is commonplace for new administrations, would allow President Joe Biden to install his own nominees to lead U.S. attorney offices across the country. The department stated that approximately one-third of U.S. attorney offices are already led by acting or interim leadership.

We are committed to ensuring a seamless transition. Until U.S. Attorney nominees are confirmed, the interim and acting leaders in the U.S. Attorneys Offices will make sure that the department continues to accomplish its critical law enforcement mission, vigorously defend the rule of law and pursue the fair and impartial administration of justice for all, Acting Attorney General Monty Wilkinson said in a statement.

While most U.S. attorneys have been asked to hand in their resignation, Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, who is overseeing the tax probe of Hunter Biden, and John Durham, who has been appointed as special counsel to investigate the origins of the counterintelligence probe into Trump and Russia, will remain in office, Reuters reported, citing an anonymous department official.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki confirmed the transition during a Feb. 9 press conference, saying that Biden is looking forward to working with the Senate to quickly fill the vacancies in the coming weeks. She also confirmed that Weiss and Durham will remain in office.

The president has also made clear that he wants to restore the independence of the Department of Justice and to ensure it remains free of any undue political influence. That will be helped when our attorney general is of course confirmed. But the decision to leave two U.S. attorneys in their roles is a reflection of that commitment, Psaki said.

The DOJs announcement came on the same day the Senate Judiciary Committee announced that they have set a schedule for the confirmation hearing of Merrick Garland, Bidens pick to lead the department.

The hearing, which will run over two days, is scheduled to begin on Feb. 22. Garlands testimony will be held on the first day, and external witnesses will be invited to testify on day two, according to the committee leaders.

Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said on Jan. 21 that he had met with Garland and discussed priorities at the Justice Department, including implementing the First Step Act, addressing CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus outbreaks in federal prisons, reducing gun violence, and reinvigorating the DOJs role in civil rights and voting rights.

Garlands previous experience in the Justice Department, his understanding of the Departments proper role, his deep respect for the Departments career workforce, and, of course, his Illinois roots make him an excellent nominee for Attorney General, Durbin said.

Former presidents have also asked U.S. attorneys to resign although some have done so over a broader time period. The practice of removing U.S. attorneys has repeatedly garnered widespread scrutiny, but previous administrations have defended the move saying that it is a tradition for new presidents.

President Bill Clinton demanded the resignation of all 93 attorneys after he took office in 1993. Similarly, Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama also replaced top federal prosecutors but over a longer period of time. Trump also asked 46 to resign in 2017.
Le National Committee on Corporate Governance (NCCG) a lance aujourdhui une serie de consultations sur la Corporate Governance Scorecard for Mauritius (CGSM), un nouveau barometre national qui permettra aux entreprises et aux institutions publiques a evaluer leur niveau dadherence aux pratiques de bonne gouvernance.

En amont des consultations, une presentation de la CGSM a ete effectuee en presence de lHonorable Mahen Kumar Seeruttun, ministre des Services Financiers et de la Bonne Gouvernance, et du Pr Dhanjay Jhurry, Vice-Chancelier de lUniversite de Maurice (UoM).

Le NCCG travaille a lelaboration de la CGSM depuis de longs mois. Cet outil a ete developpe en partenariat etroit avec une equipe danalystes du departement Finance et Comptabilite de lUniversite de Maurice. Les consultations sur la CGSM ont dailleurs debute ce mardi 9 fevrier, avec la signature dun Research Collaborative Agreement entre le NCCG et lUniversite de Maurice pour renforcer la collaboration entre les deux institutions.

Concu sur le modele de plusieurs outils internationaux de meme type que le UK IoD Index, le Bombay SEMSI Scorecard et les OECD Principles, la CGSM a pour objectif principal didentifier les lacunes en matiere de bonne gouvernance et daider a les resoudre. Le premier atelier etait preside par Aruna Radhakeesoon, presidente du NCCG.

 Il sagit du tout premier instrument de mesure de gouvernance pour les entreprises ou institutions publiques a Maurice. A travers les consultations commencees aujourdhui, nous souhaitons impliquer des representants de tous les partenaires de la societe mauricienne, quils proviennent du secteur des affaires ou du secteur public. Nous avons aussi voulu tenir des consultations avec les membres des medias, qui, souvent, font office de garde-fous de la democratie et des bonnes pratiques de gouvernance , souligne-t-elle.

Lors de son allocution, lHonorable Mahen Seeruttun a souligne quil sagit pour lui dun  honneur detre temoin de la naissance dun instrument tel que la CGSM, qui represente une etape cruciale pour le developpement dune meilleure gouvernance au sein de nos entreprises et institutions. Ce sujet est extremement important pour le gouvernement, qui a dailleurs lance le ministere de la Bonne Gouvernance en 2014 dans ce but. Nous croyons fermement que nous devons viser tres haut a ce propos, et le NCCG a realise un excellent travail en promouvant cela. Le partenariat constructif entre le NCCG et lUoM permettra desormais a tous de suivre concretement les progres de nos entreprises au niveau de la bonne gouvernance .

Prenant la parole a son tour, le Pr Dhanjay Jhurry est revenu sur le partenariat entre le NCCG et lUoM sur ce projet :  Lorsque Aruna Radhakeesoon ma presente lidee de developper une Scorecard lan dernier, cela lui a pris environ 15 minutes pour me convaincre de participer a cette aventure. Le developpement de partenariats entre les secteurs prive et public ma interpelle, car ceci reflete notre mission en tant quuniversite. En effet, construire des ponts, des connexions, est au cur de nos valeurs. Cette Scorecard permettra un developpement plus equitable et durable au sein de nos entreprises. De plus, il rendra nos industries plus competitives, tout en les aidant a mieux apprehender la complexite des differents marches et du monde .

Lobjectif de cette serie dateliers de consultation est de presenter le concept et la methodologie de la CGSM, mais aussi dimpliquer davantage dacteurs-cles locaux dans le projet et en faire des participants actifs. En vue de peaufiner cet outil, le NCCG a aussi obtenu lappui dexperts internationaux. La Scorecard finalisee devrait etre lancee dici mars 2021.

Comme la indique Matthew Lamport, Senior Lecturer a lUoM qui a participe a lelaboration du Scorecard,  il sagit dun outil dynamique, qui peut etre sujet a des changements. Cest dailleurs la raison pour laquelle nous avons lance des consultations a ce propos . Une fois la CGSM finalisee, les entreprises du prive et du public seront invitees a prendre part, de maniere volontaire, a un exercice devaluation. Le premier rapport devaluation devrait etre publie des juillet 2021.

Les criteres de notation de la CGSM sont multidimensionnels et incluent notamment la transparence, la gestion financiere, lintegrite, les relations avec les employes, le developpement durable, la creation demplois, ou encore la conformite aux reglementations nationales et internationales.  Le but est daider les compagnies a creer de la valeur, pas seulement pour elles-memes, mais aussi pour la societe en general , a soutenu Matthew Lamport.

La Scorecard a ainsi vocation a devenir un outil important dans la mise en uvre des principes et regles du Code de Bonne Gouvernance. En effet, les compagnies ayant obtenu des scores en-deca de la moyenne sur certains criteres pourront utiliser les indicateurs de performance de cet outil pour ameliorer leurs pratiques, tout en beneficiant de lencadrement et des formations prodiguees par le NCCG.

Les entreprises et institutions publiques seront invitees chaque annee a participer a lexercice sur une base volontaire. Dans un premier temps, le rapport annuel de la CGSM, realise par un jury independant, effectuera un etat des lieux des compagnies mauriciennes en matiere de bonne gouvernance et identifiera deventuelles lacunes a pallier. Dans quelques annees, le rapport aura pour vocation dattribuer des notes precises a chaque entite ayant accepte detre evaluee selon les criteres de la Scorecard.

Les rapports annuels detailles de la CGSM permettront egalement aux partenaires internationaux de Maurice, y compris des agences multilaterales et bailleurs de fonds, devaluer avec efficacite la performance actuelle et les progres a venir en matiere de bonne gouvernance et de transparence a Maurice. En effet, la CGSM utilise les memes indicateurs de performance et methodes devaluation que les scorecards du meme type adoptes dans dautres juridictions internationales.

 Sil y a eu des progres dans lapplication des principes de la bonne gouvernance durant ces dernieres annees, levolution de ce progres est restee largement qualitative. La Corporate Governance Scorecard doit donc devenir un outil cle pour lavancement de la bonne gouvernance a Maurice, de facon quantitative , estime Aruna Radhakeesoon.

Discours du minsitre de la Bonne Gouvernance, Mahen Seeruttun:;

Ladies and Gentlemen Good morning It is an honour and privilege for me to be with you this morning and be witness to this event which is indeed a significant milestone and even more. I sincerely believe that 09 February 2021 will go down in the countrys memoirs as a historic date in the advancement of Corporate Governance. At the very outset, I wish to extend a very warm welcome and acknowledge with gratitude and respect the distinguished presence of Ambassadors of countries with which we have very close ties. Thank you for taking time off your busy schedules to share a landmark in the journey of Corporate Governance in Mauritius. Your presence this morning means a lot to us. I am particularly honoured to be here as it is the very first time in Mauritius that such a scorecard is being introduced to measure the quality of governance in our corporate world. Corporate governance has attracted an extraordinary degree of public attention and awareness cutting across sectors of the economy. Our distinguished audience this morning bears testimony to the importance that you give to the pursuit of Governance. Ladies and Gentlemen This Government has placed Corporate Governance high on its agenda and created the Ministry of Good Governance when it came to power in December 2014. We believe that for companies to be successful, competitive and sustainable in the long term, a high standard of governance is necessary. A key issue pertaining to good corporate governance is information disclosure and transparency. I must say that the National Committee on Corporate Governance, which falls within the portfolio of my Ministry, has been doing excellent work in taking this agenda forward. The NCCG and the University of Mauritius have forged a productive partnership and they conceptualised and developed a formidable barometer to test the state of health of corporate governance in Mauritius and provide insights into how companies are progressing in their pursuit of excellence in corporate governance. I have had the opportunity of going through the questionnaire and I must say that I am impressed by the depth and thoroughness of the questions. I take the opportunity to commend all those who have worked on this project under the able leadership of the Chairperson of the NCCG, Me Aruna Radhakeesoon. She shared with me that the work, commitment and effort of the University of Mauritius in the design and conceptualisation of this document has been remarkable. I take the opportunity to thank Prof. Jhurry for extending much-needed support of the academia. I would like to say that I am proud, incredibly proud, that we are presenting for public consultation a document which is Made in Moris. It is a pure Mauritius product conceptualised from thought to finish to respond to the specificities of a local audience. To all those who have been directly and indirectly involved in the elaboration of the scorecard, I say thank you for a job well done. Ladies and Gentlemen I have said in various public addresses, that we can have in place the best of laws, stewardship codes and guidelines to sustain a sound financial system yet, success only lies in effective implementation and monitoring. The Scorecard project comes as a logical sequence after the implementation of the Code on Corporate Governance to ensure effective application of the principles which it endorses. Ladies and Gentlemen In addition to what the Vice Chancellor and the Chairperson of the NCCG have already talked about, I would wish to very simply share with you some thoughts as to why I am proud and confident of this project. I see benefits for one and all and will mention a few. (i) Firstly, it is good for Policymakers and Regulators Primarily, I see this project as invaluable for the Ministry of Good Governance to promote the study, research and development of corporate governance in Mauritius. For instance, the assessments of participating companies will act as a reference threshold and represent an invaluable guide for Regulators and Policymakers to identify strengths and weaknesses in Corporate Governance practices and accordingly, design new policies and reform existing ones in order to improve the efficiency of our countrys corporate governance framework. Ladies and Gentlemen, the Dalai Lama said, and I quote, Lack of Transparency leads to distrust and a deep sense of insecurity. End of quote Our priority as policymaker is keeping our standards of corporate governance and transparency high in order to enhance the credibility and trust in the Mauritius International Financial Centre. I take the opportunity to highlight here that the re-vamped website of the NCCG which came live only a few days ago has been conceptualised to drive forward this transparency agenda. Moreover, this project will definitely supplement the arsenal of measures being taken by Government to egress from the unfavourable listings of the Financial Action Taskforce and the European Union. This morning, we are showcasing to the world that we are committed to put securely in place such international benchmarks and ratings that will enhance perception and trust in the Mauritian jurisdiction. (ii) Secondly, it will be good for Institutional and Individual Investors Governance and transparency standards are key strategic priorities for companies to maintain the confidence of their investors and stakeholders. With enhanced corporate transparency and additional disclosures, investors can more easily analyse the risk profiles and investment potential of companies, monitor their progress and performance. Accordingly, investors will use scorecard ratings as an important tool to complement their investment decisions. In a world driven by technology, information flow, and a more empowered investor base, strong corporate governance is more than just a sensible business practice. Those companies which invest time and energy in adopting sound Governance principles will ultimately see their efforts reflected in financial performance. (iii) Thirdly, it will be good for Participating Companies The ultimate beneficiaries of the scorecard project are companies. Companies are increasingly aware that the adoption of sound corporate governance practices helps companies improve performance through better strategy, decision making, risk management and control. I am confident that year after year, we shall see better quality disclosures on Corporate Governance practices. You may have heard the famous words of late Kofi Annan, former UN Secretary General, who said, and I quote If corruption is the disease, then transparency is an essential part of its treatment. End of quote. I am confident, Ladies and Gentlemen, that year after year we shall see more and more companies joining the pursuit of transparency. It is my sincere wish that more and more Boards of Directors will embrace the Scorecard project and make it a regular agenda item so that Directors may discuss in a more structured and regular manner how well their companys system of direction and control is performing. After all, is it not true that economic progress lies in the hands of Board Directors? This leads me to my fourth point. (iv) Fourthly, the scorecard is good for Sound and Balanced Economic Development Among the many benefits, banks and finance institutions, whether local or international, will be able to consult the Scorecard Yearly Report as a basis to support requests to finance expansion projects. Excellencies Distinguished Audience, The trust and reputation which our corporate governance regime now enjoys is the result of combined and relentless efforts of government, regulators, company directors, company executives, investors, auditors, journalists and all other relevant stakeholders. I take the opportunity to thank all those who share our commitment and efforts in raising the level of Corporate Governance in Mauritius and look forward to your continued support. As we sign the Research Collaborative Agreement this morning and take an important step forward for Mauritius, let us take the pledge that irrespective of challenges, we shall make good governance an imperative. I look forward to the long and enduring success of the collaboration between the University of Mauritius and the Ministry through its National Committee on Corporate Governance. I thank you for your attention.



A propos du National Committee on Corporate Governance

Le NCCG a ete mis sur pied en 2003 par le departement Financial Services du ministere des Finances dalors. Il a pour mission de contribuer a l'amelioration des pratiques et de la bonne gouvernance au sein des institutions publiques et des entreprises, en favorisant le dialogue, l'ecoute et le debat. Les onze membres du comite ainsi que son president sont nommes par le ministre de la Bonne Gouvernance. Ils proviennent aussi bien du secteur public que de la communaute des affaires et sont nommes pour une duree de trois ans. Le comite se reunit tous les deux mois.

En 2020, le comite a change de statut, devenant un Body Corporate du ministere de la Bonne Gouvernance avec un champ daction elargi et des moyens renforces. Les deux sous-comites du NCCG charges des questions techniques ainsi que de la formation et de la communication travaillent sur trois axes principaux : lelaboration de la Corporate Governance Scorecard for Mauritius (CGSM), la promotion de la diversite et de linclusion au sein des conseils dadministration, ainsi que ladoption de regles favorisant la deontologie, lintegrite et la lutte contre la corruption.

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KABUL  Afghan officials say a district police chief and his bodyguards were killed after multiple bomb blasts rocked Kabul early on February 10.

One of the attacks struck a police car in a western Kabul neighborhood, killing the city's Police District 5 chief and his three bodyguards, a police source told RFE/RL.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the blasts, but First Vice President Amrullah Saleh blamed the Taliban for the killing of the local police chief, named Mohammadzai Zai Kochi.

Kabul police spokesman Ferdaws Faramarz said four civilians were wounded in another blast in the Afghan capital.

There were no casualties reported in a third blast that targeted a police vehicle in another part of the city.

All three explosions were reportedly caused by so-called sticky bombs, explosive devices attached to vehicles that are remotely detonated or set off by timers.

The bombings follow a pattern of attacks during morning rush-hour traffic targeting government officials, politicians, journalists, and activists as peace negotiations in Qatar between the Taliban and the Afghan government have stalled.

The local affiliate of the Islamic State extremist group has claimed responsibility for some of the attacks, but many have gone unclaimed.

Afghan and U.S. officials have blamed the Taliban for the wave of violence, although the militant group has rejected the charge.

On February 9, unidentified gunmenshot dead four government employees in an ambush in Kabul that no one has so far claimed responsibility for.

With reporting by AP


Britain locked down 'too late' to prevent spiralling coronavirus deaths in the autumn, according to the scientist whose grisly predictions led to the first shutdown.

'Professor Lockdown' Neil Ferguson  a Government adviser and Imperial College London epidemiologist also accused ministers of failing to learn the lessons from the first wave last spring.

He added that face masks and social distancing measures are likely to stay in place for the rest of the year because of the risk from mutant variants.

Professor Ferguson's scary modelling spooked ministers into the first lockdown in March, after his expert team predicted the virus could kill hundreds of thousands of Brits without tough action.

He stood down from SAGE in the spring after it emerged he had flouted stay at home rules to have secret trysts with his married mistress.

But he still holds a key role as a member of the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (NERVTAG), which feeds into SAGE.

Neil Ferguson, an epidemiologist at Imperial College London, said ministers were too slow to learn the lessons from the first wave of the pandemic

He said locking down earlier in the autumn would have prevented deaths spiralling as high

CALL FOR PROBE INTO SPIKE IN CARE HOME DEATHS DURING THE PANDEMIC Campaigners have ramped up their demands for a public inquiry into Britain's care home Covid crisis because deaths are still spiralling. Coronavirus fatalities in care homes have hit the highest levels since May, official figures revealed yesterday. More than 2,500 residents had the virus mentioned on their death certificates in England and Wales over the seven days to January 29. In the week ending May 1, 2020, 3,082 residents died with Covid-19, and a total of 3,679 were killed the week earlier at the outbreak's peak. This week's tally took the total to 35,720 since the pandemic began  with care homes accounting for about a third of all deaths from the virus in the UK, according to the Office for National Statistics. Care home deaths rose again in the second wave despite the Government's promise to throw a 'protective ring' around the vulnerable residents and the introduction of regular swab testing for the elderly and their carers. Advertisement

Professor Ferguson told Sky News the UK and other European countries would have been in a 'better position' this winter if they had locked down earlier.

He said: 'By September we knew exactly what this virus could do and unfortunately, because in some sense the political consensus had fragmented in Government's across Europe... we reacted too late.

'So it was only in October that we really tightened up measures and only in November that we locked down again and then not really for long enough.

'Had we learned the lessons properly from the first wave then we would have been in a much better situation coming into Christmas, with a much lower infection rate and fewer deaths.'

He added that the Department of Health data already showed well over half of all fatalities from the virus took place in the last eight weeks.

'If you lock down earlier, you don't suffer the same deaths and paradoxically there isn't a trade off with the economy because you probably can lift lockdown measures earlier too  you just keep infection levels low,' he added.

'There will be new things we can't predict precisely, like the waning immunity, like the new variants coming up, which means there will be some residual need to maintain some social distancing, mask wearing, probably for much of this year.'

Department of Health figures show 49,390 people died from the virus in the past eight weeks alone, almost 45 per cent of the 110,000 total fatalities.

Ministers have refused to reveal when the current lockdown will be lifted in England, but they suggest it will be a gradual lifting with schools first to open on March 8.

They also have not confirmed what level of infections would be considered safe for relaxing measures, although the ex-Health Secretary has called for them to get infections below 1,000 first.

The latest figures show there were another 12,364 cases identified yesterday, which was three quarters of the levels seen the same time last week.

Care Campaign for the Vulnerable today blasted the number of deaths in care homes - about a third of the UK total - as heartbreaking and called on Boris Johnson to launch an inquiry

The vaccine offers the only glimmer of hope for exiting restrictions because it can stop people getting seriously ill if they become infected.

Pfizer and Oxford University's Covid vaccines both cut the risk of falling ill with the disease by 65 per cent after just one dose, data released today revealed.

In the most concrete proof yet that the NHS inoculation drive is working, data shows the Pfizer/BioNTech jab kicks in within two weeks and is just as effective at blocking symptoms in the elderly as it is in the young. The Oxford/AstraZeneca jab is similarly robust.

The first Pfizer dose reportedly cuts the risk of getting symptoms by 64 per cent in over-80s and by 65 per cent in younger adults, the first data from the UK immunisation programme has found.

Protection soars to between 79 and 84 per cent after the second dose for all ages. Similar results have been seen in Israel.

Number 10 sources told The Sun hospitalisation rates among the 12.6million Britons who've been vaccinated have also reportedly starting falling to a 'fraction of previous levels'.
Union Minister for Road Transport and Highways Nitin Gadkari has said there is a cartel in the cement and steel industries, and cement manufacturers are exploiting the situation in the real estate sector, as prices of the two commodities rise. File Photo

The fight between manufacturers of inputs like cement and steel, and their users is intensifying, with both sides trading charges of faulty trade practices.

In the latest chapter of the tussle, the South India Cement Manufacturers Association (SICMA) has issued a statement strongly condemning the strike called by the Builders Association of India (BAI) for February 12, against rising input costs.

The builders have alleged that cement prices have been increased from Rs 280 a bag to Rs 420, forcing them to stop many of their projects. Nearly 60,000 builders and construction workers are expected to participate in the strike slated for February 12.

The cement industry association, however, said all the allegations were a 'misinformation.' In a statement on February 10, the cement industry association said it strongly condemns the strike for two reasons  spreading misinformation among common public and for their intent to take advantage of the economic recovery to further increase prices of real estate, which is already at unaffordable levels.

SICMA has also written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman to look into profiteering being done by builders.

The allegations come just a day after Moneycontrol reported that the Competition Commission of India has began an investigation against steel companies for alleged price cartelisation. The probe followed a demand voiced from several quarters, including auto and real estate industries that use steel.

Steel prices have increased by nearly half since June 2020, when the government imposed anti-dumping duty on some steel products.

Union Minister for Road Transport and Highways Nitin Gadkari has said there is a cartel in the cement and steel industries, and cement manufacturers are exploiting the situation in the real estate sector, as prices of the two commodities rise.

"Cement factories are exploiting the situation. It's not in national interests. We are planning to implement infrastructure projects worth Rs 111 lakh crore in the next five years. If rates of steel and cement continue like this, it'll be very difficult for us," Gadkari was quoted as saying.

But the cement association doesn't agree to the charges.

What SICMA said

BAI has a lot of explanation to do, the statement said, listing a series of questions which remain unanswered as follows:

1) Citing cement costs increase flat construction cost when cement rate for builders across markets remains Rs 6,000/mt. That means only Rs 150/sq. ft of built up area constitutes cement costs. The amount being so low  is this not hoodwinking gullible consumers?

2) CAGR of cement has over the past five years remained unchanged, yet they claim that price of cement has gone up by Rs 100/bag. Is it their intent to take higher input credit of goods and services tax (GST) by giving non-genuine bills?

3) SICMA claimed to have conducted detailed cost accounting of flat construction and said that the total cost of a flat is not even 50 percent of their sale price. Why should the Government not intervene and ask them to reduce prices, so that consumers at large, benefit?

It also questioned why builders are not reducing prices to sell off inventory instead of holding on to finished or semi-finished flats in a cartelised manner.

5) It further asked for details on actions BAI has taken against unscrupulous builders who have duped buyers by either delaying or abandoning projects after taking money from them, adding that the litigations in various courts and the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT) doesn't put the builders lobby in a very good light.

We believe that instead of supporting initiatives by states and Centre to bring economy back on growth trajectory, BAI is trying to take advantage of the situation by citing unfounded reasons to increase the realty prices, instead of reducing it drastically and help common consumers who is looking for a roof over their head, the statement read.

CCI actions

The cement industry is striking back strongly because it understands the risks involved.

The Competition Commission of India had come down heavily on cement companies, many of whom saw their offices being raided in December 2020. In 2016, the CCI had slapped a fine of Rs 6,700 crore on 11 cement makers, including UltraTech, Ramco, ACC and Lafarge.

Offices of some of these companies were raised in December 2020, as part of a fresh probe against price cartelisation.

Steel companies too have maintained that domestic prices, despite the hikes, remained lower than international rates. Prices in China, Europe and the US - the three biggest markets - were higher than those in India.
Damning Report Names Mnangagwa as 'Cartel Leader' in Zimbabwe

The social and economic cost of harm caused by cartels in Zimbabwe is evident in high unemployment, disease, and hunger although it is difficult to measure how much wealth Zimbabwe has lost because of these illicit activities. This is contained in a damning report, 'Cartel Power Dynamics in Zimbabwe', published by South Africa's Maverick Citizen. The report points out that although normally cartels work to undermine the state, in Zimbabwe, however, they are in league with the highest people in the land. Ironically, President Emmerson Mnangagwa, who has been a public critic of illicit financial transfers, is identified by the report as one of the cartel bosses whose alleged patronage and protection keep cartels operating.
ARLINGTON, Va., Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- WireWheel , a leader in data privacy technology, today announced $20 million in Series B financing led by ForgePoint Capital. Existing investors New Enterprise Associates, Revolution's Rise of the Rest Fund, PSP Growth, Grotech and Sands Capital Ventures also participated in the round, bringing total capital raised by the company to $45 million. The funding will enable WireWheel to speed its go-to-market plans and extend its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform's leadership as the only solution built specifically for ease of use by privacy professionals and tailored to the needs of engineering and data governance teams. Andrew McClure of ForgePoint Capital will join WireWheel's board of directors.

"We are proudly delivering a cloud-based, technology-first privacy platform to some of the biggest brands in the world," said Justin Antonipillai, Founder and CEO of WireWheel. "Our mission is to make this enterprise-grade privacy infrastructure available to every company, so that everyone can responsibly protect personal data and ethically use it to solve their business problems. ForgePoint is the perfect partner for the next stage of our growth, and we are proud to partner with this team on our journey."

WireWheel's SaaS Platform supports full cycle global privacy management for organizations large and small. The Company's Privacy Operations Manager automates data discovery, inventories, privacy assessments, incident management, and privacy compliance throughout a company and its partner and vendor ecosystem. The Trust Access and Consent product enables consumer controls and access to their data. Through these offerings, companies not only comply more quickly with global privacy laws, like the European GDPR and California CCPA, but can enable greater, more responsible use of personal data by bridging between compliance and governance systems.

"WireWheel's best-in-class software orchestrates trust for privacy teams who don't just want to check a box," said Andrew McClure, Principal at ForgePoint Capital. "That's why some of the most privacy-mature organizations look to the team at WireWheel not only for domain expertise, but also for unmatched product sophistication. Customers leverage WireWheel's core privacy platform to get in compliance fast, and build privacy protection directly into their DevOps pipelines, their products, and their data use and governance programs. We're excited to work with the team at WireWheel to advance the company's leadership in this fast-growing market."

In the last year, WireWheel released the WireWheel Developer Portal to enable technology-driven companies to build privacy and data protection directly into their products; launched the WireWheel's Spokes Privacy Technology Conference, now one of the largest privacy conferences in the world, to offer free access to the best privacy knowledge and training; and made its enterprise-grade privacy and data protection infrastructure available for every startup and SMB through its " Essentials " offering.

"From the beginning, we recognized WireWheel as a company that will act as a catalyst for privacy protection and innovation," said Penny Pritzker, Chairman and Founder of PSP Partners. "The key has been that WireWheel is focused both on helping companies comply with privacy laws around the world, and on helping them ethically use data to solve customer problems. Just think of how much can be accomplished with greater trust and transparency regarding data between companies and their valued customers  WireWheel can help drive that change."

"WireWheel's leadership team truly understands privacy and they're doing industry-leading work to help innovators build trusted products and services," said Michael Graninger, Partner, Sands Capital Ventures. "Building trust in tech requires a seamless way to incorporate privacy into products from day one and WireWheel is leading that effort."

Justin Antonipillai, Founder and CEO of WireWheel, is recognized as one of the leading experts on privacy and data protection, having led a number of high-priority international efforts around privacy and security as Acting Under Secretary for Economic Affairs at the U.S. Department of Commerce during the Obama Administration. The WireWheel team also comprises privacy experts, data scientists, cloud architects, PhDs, policy experts and others with deep domain expertise around data, privacy and building trust in the digital era.

"Every member of our team is truly passionate about our mission and our vision doesn't stop at assuring compliance for the sake of it," said Antonipillai. "We believe privacy is a fundamental human right and we want every organization in the world to succeed at it."

About WireWheel

Based in Arlington, Virginia, WireWheel's intuitive privacy management SaaS platform delivers privacy programs at scale, enabling collaboration and leveraging integrations into cloud infrastructure and on-premises and cloud data stores. With WireWheel, organizations can support all phases of a privacy management program  including collaboration and vendor risk management  and more effectively comply with privacy regulations around the world, including the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and the new California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA). Learn more at wirewheel.io.

About ForgePoint Capital

ForgePoint Capital is the premier cybersecurity venture fund investing in transformative companies protecting the digital world. The firm is one of the most prolific investors in early and growth stage cybersecurity companies with over 40 global cybersecurity investments. The team brings more than eight decades of company building, value creation experience and draws upon the largest network of trusted cybersecurity industry experts and customers to support entrepreneurs who are building great companies. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, the firm partners with exceptional cybersecurity entrepreneurs worldwide. For more information, please visit www.forgepointcap.com or follow us @ForgePointCap.



About PSP Partners and PSP Growth

PSP Partners is a Chicago-based private investment firm founded by its Chairman Penny Pritzker, an entrepreneur, civic leader, and philanthropist, and former U.S. Secretary of Commerce. The firm is comprised of a highly experienced team of investment professionals and business builders focused on partnering with entrepreneurs, business owners, and management teams to build market-leading businesses and develop valuable assets. With investment strategies focused on established businesses (PSP Capital), emerging/growth companies (PSP Growth) and real assets (Pritzker Realty Group), PSP Partners invests across stages and asset classes with an emphasis on four primary segments of the economy  business & technology services, housing, industrials and food and agriculture  that are well-aligned with its expertise and experience. For more information, visit www.psppartners.com.

About Sands Capital Ventures

Sands Capital Ventures invests in entrepreneurs building businesses in three dynamic, high-growth markets: Life Sciences, Technology, and Global Consumer. As the venture capital affiliate of Sands Capital Management, Sands Capital Ventures brings significant global diligence capabilities based on our deep domain experience. Sands Capital Ventures likes to back businesses that are creating scalable innovations that have the potential to become market leaders.

SOURCE WireWheel

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Target Corp. has been denied its $138 million insurance claim against ACE (now Chubb) Insurance companies stemming from a 2013 data breach. A federal judge in Minnesota ruled the retailer had failed to prove that its reimbursement to banks for their costs of issuing new credit cards to victims of the data breach was a covered loss of use under its two commercial general liability (CGL) policies.

The ruling came in a breach-of-contract action by Target against ACE, with Target seeking a declaratory judgment that Targets liability for the banks payment card claims is covered under the policies. Target also sought judgment against ACE for the settlement payments it made relating to the credit card claims.

The retailers data breach occurred in December 2013. In May 2016, Target reached a settlement in the class action lawsuit brought on behalf of a class of banks for approximately $58 million, which the district court approved. In addition to settling the class action litigation, Target reached confidential settlements with the major credit card issuers, including Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and Discover, as well as numerous individual banks.

In total, Target settled all of claims for approximately $138 million, including $20 million in attorneys fees.

On January 14, 2014, Target notified ACE of Targets potential liability for costs associated with the data breach. ACE denied coverage under the two CGL policies it had issued.

Target brought its breach-of-contract action against ACE in November 2019. The parties cross-moved for summary judgment before U.S. District Judge Wilhelmina M. Wright. This week in a 12-page decision, Judge Wright denied Targets motion for partial summary judgment and granted ACEs motion for summary judgment.

Target first argued that ACEs agreeing to defend Target in the data breach confirmed that the coverage was available for its loss. However, Judge Wright rejected that argument, citing precedents that an insurers duty to defend an insured is distinct from and broader than [an insurers] duty to indemnify the insured.

Target also relied on a Minnesota Supreme Courts conclusion in a case involving Concrete Units that said an insurer must pay all damages which are causally related to an item of property damage  that meets the policy definitions. That case involved a grain elevator that had an initial value that diminished after the incorporation of defective concrete.

But the court told Target that the Concrete Units case did not apply because Target did not present any facts regarding the value of the plastic payment cards and thus the question of a diminution of the value of the cards was not at issue.

ACEs argument rested on the distinction between property damage and the diminution in property value. The payment cards that were compromised by the data breach lost their value, not their use, and thus Targets claims were rightfully denied because only loss-of-use damages are compensable under the policies, ACE argued and the judge agreed.

The parties disputed whether damages arising out of the payment card claims by the banks are damages based on loss of use of the payment cards. ACE contended that there is no nexus between the loss-of-use damages alleged and the value of the loss of the use of payment cards. Target felt that because the payment cards allegedly lost their use and Target resolved the payment card claims by paying banks a settlement, the settlement of that liability necessarily constituted damages because of a loss of use.

Judge Wright noted that other courts have concluded that there must be a nexus between the value of the customers or companys ability to use the product or service that has been lost and the damages associated with that loss of use.

That was more bad news for Target.

Here, the record is devoid of any allegation or evidence as to what the value of the use of the payment cards is, either to Targets customers or to the payment card companies, the judge wrote, concluding that since the value of the use is not established or even approximated, damages cannot be based on the loss of use because there is no nexus between the damages and the loss of use.

In short, Target did not establish a connection between the damages incurred for settling claims related to replacing the payment cards and the value of the use of those cards, either to the payment-card holders or issuers.

The Target breach was one of the biggest data breaches to hit a U.S. retailer at the time. Target reported that hackers stole data from up to 40 million credit and debit cards of shoppers who had visited its stores during the 2013 holiday season.

In 2017, Target agreed to pay $18.5 million to settle claims by 47 states and the District of Columbia and resolve a multi-state investigation into the massive data breach. The retailer also reached a $10 million settlement of a federal consumer class action.

The case is Target Corp. v. ACE American Insurance Co.

Topics Legislation Claims Cyber Chubb
Or look to BAFTA, considered the British equivalent of the Oscars, and the groups longlists for each category released last week. Spike Lees Vietnam-vet drama Da 5 Bloods landed on nine of those longlists  including best film, screenplay, and editing  but Lee was pointedly left out of the group of 20 filmmakers nominated for best director. (If BAFTA voters were trying to send a message to Lee, did they realize the rest of the world was BCCd?)

You could even look to last year, when Parasite made Oscar history as the first film not in the English language to win best picture, but couldnt earn a single nomination in the acting categories. Awkwafina and Zhao Shuzhen, hailing from a critics favorite, The Farewell, were similarly snubbed by the academy, and those exclusions led Vultures E. Alex Jung to write about an old prejudice at work here that sees Asian people as technical workers.

Thats why Jung felt that filmmakers like Bong Joon Ho and Ang Lee could win Oscars while the actors from their films were wholly overlooked, and its why I wonder about the ultimate fate of the forthcoming Minari, Lee Isaac Chungs moving family drama starring Steven Yeun, Yeri Han and Yuh-Jung Youn. Even though a Korean movie has now won best picture at the Oscars, no Korean or Korean-American actor has ever so much as been nominated. Can the actors of Minari break through those long-held biases?

Things look more promising at the Independent Spirit Awards, where Minari scored three acting nominations and was recognized in the screenplay, director and best-feature categories, too. At this ceremony, which will be held days before the Oscars in April, the feature and director categories are exclusively made up of nominated movies directed by women and people of color.

But is that a road map for the academy to follow as it enacts new diversity guidelines, or is it a reminder of the limits that have already plagued this industry for far too long? To be eligible for the Independent Spirits, a movie must be made for less than $22.5 million. During awards season, directors from underrepresented groups are rarely working with much more.

Zhao, King and Fennell may still make this years Oscar lineup, but what will happen next year, when even more expensive movies like Steven Spielbergs West Side Story re-enter the fray? Those films had the luxury of waiting out the pandemic for a more advantageous theatrical release, and the best-director category could easily tilt back toward the sort of auteur-driven spectacle that men dominate and nominate.
In the quarter century since the watershed discovery of BRCA1 and BRCA2, dozens of other genes have been implicated in hereditary breast cancer.

A slew of commercial tests are now available that look for mutations in those breast cancer predisposition genes to help guide health-care decisions.

The thing is, some of the genes barely nudge cancer risk. Even BRCA1/2, dreaded as time bombs, can have harmless DNA variations, or variants that havent been studied enough to be classified.

Two ambitious analyses of breast cancer risk genes  a U.S. study that included the University of Pennsylvania, and a British-led international study  help to clarify which ones warrant risk-management strategies, such as increased screening or preventive surgeries, and which ones are probably inconsequential.

 READ MORE: With BRCA genetic testing on rise, insurers balk

Both analyses, published last month in the New England Journal of Medicine, used previous population-based studies to figure out which faulty genes confer a susceptibility, and how common the flaws are in women in general. The U.S. study looked for changes in 28 genes in 32,000 women with breast cancer diagnoses and an equally large control group without cancer. The international study evaluated 34 genes in 60,500 breast cancer cases and an equal number of women without cancer.

Eight genes were significantly linked to breast cancer risk in both studies: BRCA1, BRCA2, PALB2, BARD1, RAD51C, RAD51D, ATM, and CHEK2.

 READ MORE: Beyonces dad, Mathew Knowles, has hereditary breast cancer. What we know about BRCA genes

But the results for a much bigger alphabet soup of genes were ambiguous, or insignificant. Sixteen genes in the U.S. study and 22 in the international study were not tied to susceptibility to the disease.

The U.S. study detected harmful genetic variants in 5% of breast cancer cases and 1.6% of women in the control group. Studies of high-risk women have estimated that 7% to 10% of all breast cancers are due to inherited mutations.

The work shows us a clearer picture of risk and genetic drivers for women in the general population who dont fall under the high-risk category, said Susan M. Domchek, executive director of Penns Basser Center for BRCA and an author of the U.S. study, led by the Mayo Clinic.

Ellen Matloff, a certified genetic counselor and founder of My Gene Counsel, which provides programs to increase access to counseling, said the new research illustrates the complexity of interpreting genetic test results, especially as test panels add genes for which evidence is scant.

A lot of practitioners think the more genes in the panel, the better,  Matloff said. This paper shows more genes can add to confusion. People can be advised to have unnecessary surgeries and screening. Weve had patients with late diagnoses because they were told they were not at risk when they were.

Indeed, in a recent case study published by Precision Oncology News in collaboration with My Gene Counsel, a 42-year-old woman received incorrect advice about two breast cancer risk genes  both of them part of the new population-based studies.

The womans case began with a suspicious mammogram, followed by a breast biopsy that found no sign of cancer. Despite the good news, her breast surgeon ordered genetic testing because three members of her extended family died of pancreatic cancer.

Her PALB2 gene had a variant of unknown significance  meaning more study is needed to classify it as harmless or disease-related. Her surgeon told her not to worry about it.

PALB2 mutations were linked to a moderately increased risk of breast cancer in the new studies.

She also had an alteration in RAD50, a gene with such a limited breast cancer link that expert guidelines do not recommend considering extra screening or preventive surgeries.

The new population-based studies found RAD50 was not linked at all to increased breast cancer risk.

The surgeon, however, advised his patient to remove both healthy breasts because of the RAD50 variant.

That drastic elective surgery was scuttled because of the pandemic, giving her time to consult a genetic counselor. The patient ultimately opted for increased screening  because of the PALB2 variant her surgeon had brushed aside.

Matloff acknowledges her bias, but having written journal articles compiling such cases, she believes patients must have access, at least by phone or video, to professionals who can advise them and their families.

There are calls by some prominent scientists that we should be testing all women for breast cancer genes. But data shows breast surgeons and others really struggle to interpret very straightforward results. Now, there are test results that are very nuanced.

Doctors are very busy and the field is changing rapidly, she continued. Insurance companies should and must cover genetic counseling.
The Wilkes-Barre Department of Health is providing COVID-19 vaccinations to the public and, unlike flu vaccinations, theyre not just for city residents.

Since late December, shortly after the vaccine became available, the city has administered approximately 1,400 doses of the vaccine manufactured by Moderna, and has a couple hundred people on a waiting list for vaccination appointments, health department director Henry Radulski said Monday.

Radulski said the department is offering the vaccinations to nonresidents as well as residents of the city because the federal government is footing the bill for both the vaccines and the syringes used to administer them. The city administers influenza vaccinations only to city residents because the city has to pay for those vaccines.

The way it works is the health department places an order for the vaccine on a Tuesday, and federal officials decide on a Thursday how many doses to provide the city and who would qualify to receive a shot. Health department officials then learn on a Saturday how many doses they will receive on Monday or Tuesday of the following week.

According to the federal government, theyre working and pushing to make sure we receive three weeks notice, and that will happen in the near future, Radulski said.

Fortunately, Radulski said, the department so far has received the full amount of COVID-19 vaccine doses that it has requested from the federal government.

Radulski said the city received 1,800 doses of the vaccine since late December. The city will host a COVID-19 vaccination clinic on Thursday, and some of the 400 remaining doses will be administered as second doses to people who received their first dose in in early January.

Radulski said the department is capable of administering 75 to 90 vaccine doses per hour, but the number of doses that the department can administer in any given week fluctuates depending on the availability of nurses.

Our nurses that are full-time employees have many other duties, such as (administering vaccinations or testing for) influenza, HIV, sexually transmitted diseases and tuberculosis, performing wellness checks and doing contact tracing, Radulski said. It would be impossible for them to do COVID vaccinations every day of the week.

Most recently, the department held a clinic Saturday at Wilkes University Center on South Main Street for preregistered patients.

James Spagnola, 56, of Wilkes-Barre, said the injection of the vaccine on Saturday didnt hurt a bit, and there were no adverse side effects other than having a sore arm.

They tell you your arm is going to be sore the next day. You can ice it and move it around to exercise it, he said.

Spagnola, who works for Luzerne County as director of Veterans Affairs, said the city informed the county that the health department was offering the shots, which he said was fortunate because his office deals with an aging population of veterans on a regular basis.

Receiving the vaccinations, he said, will enable county workers to resume home visits to aging veterans when necessary  a practice that had been curbed by the coronavirus pandemic.

Radulski noted last week during a conference call with U.S. Sen. Bob Casey and a panel of healthcare providers that the city health department has been involved in many aspects of the pandemic, from education and testing to contact tracing and now vaccinating.

Radulski also noted that the department has been offering drive-thru flu clinics for the past 19 years as part of the departments Public Health Preparedness Plan.

Everyone thought that the reason we were doing that was to administer influenza vaccines to our community. However, as important as that is, the main reason we were doing it was as a drill and exercise in the event of a pandemic, Radulski said. We are ready to do mass immunizations at any time. Because of that training, we could do any size immunization dispensing.

When the city does hold a COVID-19 vaccination clinic, the department administers 400 to 500 doses in one day, he said.

Radulski said hes spoken with many of the residents who received vaccinations, and they all are very appreciative. Some people compared it to winning the lottery to save their lives. He said no one at the clinics has experienced any major side effects from the vaccinations.

Radulski said he wanted to stress the importance of having as many people as possible receive vaccinations.

Our positive case numbers are dropping, and they are expected to fall at a greater rate as more people are vaccinated. But its up to the community to continue to wash their hands, wear a mask, watch their distance and get vaccinated, he said.
One of the computer labs in the Enterprise Center, which has been made available for Ivy Tech students to use through a partnership between the community college and Steuben County Economic Development Corporation.
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There is a very long tradition of silencing women in public. Professor Mary Beard makes that point wonderfully when she traces the origins of telling women to shut up, as she bluntly puts it, right back to the 'Odyssey', Homers epic poem of antiquity.

The shushing of a woman  or, at the very least, an early example of mansplaining  is right there at the start of Western literature as the heros loyal wife is firmly put back in her place.

You might remember the 'Odyssey' for the swashbuckling adventures of its hero, Odysseus, who spends years making the long, treacherous journey home after the Trojan War. Less well remembered is his long-suffering wife, Penelope, who faithfully bats off hordes of suitors as she awaits his return. At one point, she comes down from her chambers to ask the bards not to sing of the difficulties Greek heroes have in reaching home, as it touches a nerve. Sing a happier song, she entreats them.

But her son, the bould Telemachus, is having none of it. He steps in quickly and tells her to go back to her quarters and her womens work at the loom because (and heres the mansplaining bit) speech will be the business of men, all men, and of me most of all; for mine is the power in this household.

How far we have come since then, you might think, as you smile smugly at the misguided chauvinism of our Greek literary forebears.

The smile, rather than the chauvinism, seems misguided, though, because only last week  and in the real not the storybook world  the president of the Tokyo Olympic organising committee came out and said that women had an annoying tendency of talking too much at meetings

Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games Organising Committee (TOGOC) President Yoshiro Mori. Picture: AP

Yoshiro Mori complained that meetings with lots of women on the board of directors took an annoyingly long time because, well, women think its their business to speak. One of them raises a hand, then another thinks they need to speak up as well, he protested. And on and on the talking goes. Maddening.



The backlash was swift and Mr Mori had the grace to try to eat his own words but the issue of silencing womens voices remains. And not just when they talk.

Sour note...

Of the top 20 most-played songs by Irish artists on Irish radio between June and December 2020, a staggering 85% were male artists, according to the updated report on gender disparity compiled by the delightfully forthright Linda Coogan Byrne. The music publicist and activist got so tired of being told what women werent supposed to do that she founded Why Not Her?, a campaign to amplify the voices of women on radio  and beyond.

The response has been phenomenal. This week, the report clocked up 2 million views.

While Linda Coogan Byrne says she is heartened by that, she says it is still frustrating to see the lack of change from many in Irish radio.

Rights and equality

What this report has shown is that people can now understand womens frustration at the Governments lack of ability to implement legislation for womens rights and equality, she says. The positives of the campaign are that we are witnessing this huge insurgence of people coming together and looking at the data, and proof that women were not imagining how much they are silenced by radio. We call for legislative changes. And we call for them now.

She is not alone in that. Social Democrats TD Holly Cairns marked the anniversary of the 2020 general election earlier this week by observing the fact that there are 18 TDs for Cork, but only one of them  herself  is a woman.

She noted: There are six times more men named Michael representing Cork in the Dail than there are women.

For the record, the Cork Michaels are Taoiseach Micheal Martin, Mick Barry TD, Michael Collins TD, Michael Creed TD, Michael McGrath TD.

Are ye right there Michael, are ye right?

Do ye think that well have more women at the decision-making table before its light?

It mightnt make a radio playlist but, as Deputy Cairns has pointed out, the continuing lack of representation fails women, time and time again, from the CervicalCheck scandal to the Mother and Baby Homes report to the gender pay gap

It is, perhaps, just a symptom of a much wider malaise that the recorded testimony of those who gave evidence to the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes was deleted before transcripts were made. That testimony  much of it from women  had already been downgraded by the Commissions authors who decided that it did not constitute evidence.

That highlights the need to think about how we classify words; those lofty ones spoken in the public sphere, often by men, and those that come from the private sphere which are often spoken by women.

How easy it is to elevate some statements and give them the status of debate or public discourse while denigrating others by labelling them as gossip or mere chat. The former is seen as fact while the latter is considered hearsay.

Add gender into the equation and the situation becomes more complicated  and more disputed  but any studies that touch on the subject repeatedly reveal that female voices are muted.

Muted voices

The arrival of Covid-19 has further silenced women. A recent report found that female voices are being drowned out in the reporting of the pandemic, particularly in the UK and the US.

Only 19% of experts quoted in highly ranked coronavirus stories were women, compared with 77% of men, according to a report commissioned by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that looked at coverage in the UK, US, Kenya, South Africa, Nigeria and India.

Closer to home, Covid Womens Voices, an all-island group of women across a range of sectors from medicine and law to psychology, has warned that the pandemic is disproportionally affecting women who are taking on the lions share of caring work, both formally and informally

The third lockdown has, says the group, thrown into stark relief the inequalities (including structural) and social and economic barriers still faced by women.

Tomorrow is International Day of Women and Girls in Science. It is a good time to look at those barriers and also to see how we might break them down. The Women on Walls project, which has been putting a series of portraits of women on walls since 2016, is a great way to highlight womens often-overlooked achievements.

At Dublin City University, a series of portraits will be unveiled later this year to celebrate the work of outstanding women in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

One of them, Kathleen Lonsdale (1903-1971), a pioneering X-ray crystallographer born in Kildare, did all she could to encourage women and girls to study science. She once made a note to herself: Never refuse an opportunity to speak in schools.

She knew only too well that women must not only be seen, but heard.
MPs attacked the decision by US Congress members Tom Malinowski and Don Beyer to form an Egyptian Human Rights Caucus to mark the 10th anniversary of the Egyptian revolution on 25 January.

Parliament Speaker Mohamed Abul-Enein said forming the bloc was an attempt to intervene in Egypts domestic affairs, and that US representatives should stop weaponising human rights to do so.

Abul-Enein noted that the bloc had been formed at a time when the Egyptian state is working hard to improve public freedoms and civil rights.

We should send a message to Congress that Egypt respects human rights and that the state is doing its best to improve the economic and social conditions of its citizens. Human rights is not just a matter of freedom of expression but concerns meeting peoples needs in terms of food security and housing, and improving the quality of life, said Abul-Enein.

Ashraf Rashad, leader of the majority Mostaqbal Watan (Future of the Homeland) Party, denounced the way some foreign parliaments, particularly the US Congress and the European Parliament, use human rights as a pretext to intervene in Egypts domestic affairs.

It is unacceptable to use loaded terms like political detention and forced disappearance as an excuse to intervene in domestic matters, said Rashad.

He added that Congress should better take care of Americas own affairs rather than discussing the affairs of other countries.

According to Rashad, the term political detainees is inaccurate because the Egyptian judicial system has deep roots and is empowered to follow the correct legal procedures to achieve justice and defendants have the right to defend themselves at every stage of an investigation.

Head of parliaments Human Rights Committee Tarek Radwan singled out US Congressman Tom Malinowski, accusing him of using the caucus to support Muslim Brotherhood activists and Islamist movements.

Malinowski has recently announced the formation of the so-called Egyptian Human Rights Caucus and wants to use this forum to allow members of the Muslim Brotherhood to hold hearing sessions and conferences inside Congress. This represents a violation of the UN Charter which states that no country has the right to directly or indirectly interfere into the internal and external affairs of any other country, said Radwan.

Malinowski was lending himself to an initiative that will allow the Muslim Brotherhood to deceive American policymakers and public opinion by introducing its members and officials as political activists defending human and civilian rights. It is a dangerous game, said Radwan, because when you open the door of Congress to groups that espouse Islamist Jihadist, you will only hurt American national security.

US politicians need to draw lessons from the wars in Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, and Libya where the US supported Islamist jihadists and opened dialogue with political Islamist movements. The result caused great harm to the US and Western countries in the terms of the proliferation of terrorist movements, said Radwan.

It is playing with fire to forge contacts with such movements because this is the way you help them infiltrate American society and threaten American national security. And the same Islamist movements endanger the stability and security of Egypt and other Arab countries which is why the Muslim Brotherhood was designated a terrorist organisation.

In Radwans words: The US and the West must recognise that the Muslim Brotherhood was the progenitor of Islamist terrorist organisations such as Hasm, the Army of Islam, Islamic State, Al-Qaeda and Ansar Beit Al-Maqdis, all of them designated terrorist organisations by the United States and most Western countries.

Egypt-US relations were a central issue in the statement delivered by Egypts Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukri to MPs on 26 January.

Egypt will never allow outside interference in its affairs and fully respects human rights, said Shoukri. He added that Egypt-US relations stand on solid foundations, are not determined by partisan concerns and Cairo remains keen on reinforcing relations with Washington across the economic, commercial, and military fields.

He underlined that the two countries have a mutual interest in fighting terrorism and that trade between Egypt and the US increased by 76 per cent between 2016 and 2019.

America ranks third in terms of foreign investments in Egypt. US investments in Egypt have reached $22 billion, placing Egypt as the top African recipient of US investment, said Shoukri.

US Congress member Don Beyer said Egypt remains a key ally, but its human rights record  including the years-long detention of my constituent Aya Hijazi  remains a major concern, and we must demand better of our closest allies.

Malinowski said the Egyptian Human Rights Caucus will reflect and help shape the growing consensus in Congress that we need to rebalance our relationship with this important country.

Malinowski and Beyer previously served in the US State Department. Malinowski, a Democrat representing New Jersey, was former assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labour under the Barack Obama administration.

*A version of this article appears in print in the 11 February , 2021 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly

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"Attracting and retaining the best talent means offering a strong compensation and benefits package, a positive, performance-driven work environment where wins are celebrated and opportunities for growth, learning and development," said Barb Miller, senior vice president of Human Relations for C Spire, which employs 1,800-plus workers in Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee.

Miller said the ranking recognizes that C Spire is committed to helping employees excel, including the opportunity to work on innovative projects and next-generation technologies in small, diverse teams, which provide team members with a chance to expand their knowledge, skills, abilities and experiences, leading to better products and services.

"Our culture supports innovation, internal growth and the ability to work with diverse teams on new ideas using cutting-edge technologies that serve our customers and improve the quality of life for everyone in our service areas. In addition, we give back to the communities we serve through our Tech Movement initiative and we encourage team member involvement," she added.

"We're pleased that C Spire has been named to this prestigious list, but it's really all about our great team members," said CEO Hu Meena. "Our employees are proud innovators, pioneers and game-changers who push boundaries and bring next-level technology to market. We have the team with the vision, drive and backbone to win every day and that's exactly what we do."

Forbes and Statista selected the lists for America's best large and mid-size employers in 2021 through an independent survey across 25 industry sectors. A total of 1,000 companies were honored this year, including 500 large employers and 500 mid-size employers. The evaluation was based on direct and indirect recommendations from employees that were asked to rate their willingness to recommend their own employers to friends and family. Employee evaluations also included other employers in their respective industries that stood out either positively or negatively.

To learn about job and career opportunities with C Spire, go to www.cspire.com/careers. To learn more about the Forbes-Statista best mid-size employers awards, go to the website.

About C Spire

C Spire is a privately-owned telecommunications and technology company driven to deliver the best experiences in wireless, fiber internet, and business IT solutions such as internet, VoIP, cloud and managed services. Read more news releases and announcements at cspire.com/news. For more information, visit cspire.com or find us on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.

SOURCE C Spire

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A PROGRAMME of events should be put together to mark important one hundred year anniversaries of milestones in history in 2021 including the drive for independence, the second Dail and the Anglo-Irish Treaty.

Cllr Liam Quinn said that a sub-committee should be established to oversee the programme similar to the group which co-ordinated events to mark the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising.

Speaking at the January meeting of Edenderry Municipal District, the Fine Gael councillor said the 1916 sub-committee had been composed of representatives of the different political parties and everything was agreed in advance and above board.

There were no banana skins, he added.

Cllr Quinn recalled the 1916 committee had its own budget and consulted with local historical groups and schools about its programme of commemorative events.

That [the 1916 commemorations] was not particularly sensitive but in 2021 we are going into a lot of significant dates, he stressed.

Cllr Quinn added the period had a lot of significance for the north Offaly area due to important figures in the struggle for independence such as Daniel Hoey and Eamonn Bray connections with the area.

He asked that the council's management team prepare a report for the February meeting of the body.

In 2016, Offaly County Council oversaw an impressive number of commemorations at various locations in the county.

Relatives of Offaly people who took part in the Easter Rising and the Tullamore Incident, seen as a prelude to the Rising, were among the thousands who attended the Offaly 100 1916 flagship commemorative events at the Courthosue and on William St in Tullamore in April 2016.

The events, organised by a special sub committee of the council as part of the official State commemorative activities, included the laying of a wreath at the Monument outside the County Courthouse in Tullamore, a candlelit procession through Tullamore, the unveiling of a flagstone to mark the Tullamore Incident and a commemorative concert in the Church of the Assumption.

The then Cathaoirleach of Offaly County Council, Cllr Eamon Dooley, speaking at Courthouse, explained: These events mark the centrepiece of our celebrations in Offaly of the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising. Offaly 100 is also our local response to Irelands journey towards peace, reconciliation and equality over the past one hundred years.

The Chief Executive of Offaly County Council, Anna Marie Delaney, also speaking at the Courthouse, extended the gratitude of the organisers to all those who had assisted in any way with the commemorative events.

Two student members of Offaly Comhairle na nOg, Cathal Claffey and Tracey Murphy read the Proclamation of the Republic, in Irish and English, before the commemorative wreath was laid at the Monument by the Cathaoirleach of the Co. Council and the Cathaoirleach of the Offaly Ireland 2016 Committee, Cllr Sinead Dooley.

Among the dignitaries present at the ceremonies were local Dail Deputies Marcella Corcoran-Kennedy, Carol Nolan and Barry Cowen and former Taoiseach Brian Cowen.

Meanwhile, the story of the Tullamore Incident, was charted by the Michael Byrne, Secretary of the Offaly Historical and Archaeological Society, at William Street following the candlelit procession from the Courthouse.
What price love? Billionaire rag trader Solomon Lew has found out the hard way after losing an appeal in his three-year battle to buy the $7 million Thai villa where he proposed to his wife Roza.

Solomon Lew. Credit:John Shakespeare

Lew claimed he had been cut out of a deal to buy a luxury Phuket pad, but a Singaporean judge this week found that wasnt the case. In 2017 Credit Suisse banker Kai Nargolwala sold the property in Phukets glitzy Andara Resort to Hong Kong businessman Christian Larpin. This was despite Lew verbally agreeing to purchase the villa several weeks earlier.

But who could blame the vendor? Larpin had offered $US2.7 million ($3.5 million) more.

However, the matter of Andaras Villa 29 and its sentimental value made it a deeply personal for Lew.
Princess Eugenie has given birth to a baby boy, Buckingham Palace has announced.

The Queens granddaughter Eugenie and Jack Brooksbank welcomed their son, who weighed 8lbs 1oz, on Tuesday February 9 at 8.55am.

In a touching Instagram post the proud parents uploaded a black-and-white image of their hands cradling the tiny fingers and wrist of their new baby.

The image is the first glimpse of the newest member of the royal family, and it received more than 60,000 likes a few minutes after going online.

The royal baby  Eugenie and Mr Brooksbanks first child  is the Queen and the Duke of Edinburghs ninth great-grandchild.

The baby arrived at The Portland Hospital, where the Duchess of Sussex had her son Archie.

Her Royal Highness Princess Eugenie was safely delivered of a son today, 9th February 2021, at 0855hrs at The Portland Hospital. Jack Brooksbank was present.

A

The baby weighs 8lbs 1oz.



Read the announcement in full: https://t.co/hPiT2aKJe3 pic.twitter.com/QfUtRIG39N  The Royal Family (@RoyalFamily) February 9, 2021

Congratulations to Her Royal Highness Princess Eugenie and Jack Brooksbank on the birth of their son.



Read the announcement in full: https://t.co/we1tVc3HNP pic.twitter.com/uW59kqVBkj  The Prince of Wales and The Duchess of Cornwall (@ClarenceHouse) February 9, 2021

Buckingham Palace said Mr Brooksbank was at his wifes side for the birth.

The palace said in a statement: The Queen, The Duke of Edinburgh, The Duke of York, Sarah, Duchess of York, and Mr and Mrs George Brooksbank have been informed and are delighted with the news.

It added: Her Royal Highness and her child are both doing well.

Eugenies thrilled parents, the Duke of York and ex-wife Sarah, Duchess of York, have become grandparents for the first time.

The baby is 11th in line to the throne, and the latest addition to the royal family means the Queen and Philips youngest son the Earl of Wessex, who was third in line when he was born in 1964, has moved down to 12th place in the line of succession.

The arrival brings joy for the royal family as the coronavirus pandemic continues its grip on the country and beyond.

The Windsors were apart through most of last year and into 2021, the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Cambridge caught coronavirus, and the Queen, who has now been vaccinated, delivered two rare televised addresses, telling the nation: We will meet again.

Mr Brooksbanks father George also contracted Covid-19 in 2020 and was put on a ventilator for five weeks.

Eugenie, 30, and her husband were warned to prepare for the worst but Mr Brooksbank recovered and Eugenie posted a video thanking NHS staff for saving her father-in-laws life.

After announcing her pregnancy in September, Eugenie shared a photo on Instagram of a pair of babys teddy slippers and wrote: Jack and I are so excited for early 2021

The baby is a regular Master Brooksbank even though his mother is a princess.

His father has no title and they have been born down a female line of the royal family, with rules issued by King George V in 1917 limiting royal titles.

They will not be an HRH nor hold a title, unless the Queen decides to intervene and give Mr Brooksbank an earldom or issue a Letters Patent amending the restrictions, which is thought unlikely.

Eugenie and Mr Brooksbank, who is European brand director of Casamigos Tequila, co-founded by the actor George Clooney, wed in a glittering ceremony in the Gothic surroundings of St Georges Chapel, Windsor Castle, in front of royal and celebrity guests in October 2018.

The princess wore a 1950s-inspired gown by Peter Pilotto and Christopher De Vos, with a low back designed to show her scar from the scoliosis surgery she underwent as a child.

Eugenies baby is not the only royal baby due in 2021.

Zara Tindall, the princesss cousin, is expecting her third child this year.

Princess Eugenie Victoria Helena of York was born on March 23 1990 at the exclusive Portland Hospital in London.

She is Princess Beatrices younger sister and a director at the contemporary art gallery Hauser & Wirth in London.

Her romance with Stowe-educated Mr Brooksbank began after they fell in love at first sight on a ski trip near Verbier in Switzerland.

They dated for around seven years before he proposed.

The princesss mother Sarah was cast out from the Windsors amid her toe sucking scandal in the 1990s, but has remained close to her ex-husband.

Andrew stepped down from royal duties in 2019 following a disastrous Newsnight interview about his friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
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New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday said the central government and the Parliament have great respect for the farmers who are voicing their views on the three farm bills and that is why top most ministers have been talking to them.

Replying in Lok Sabha to the discussion on the motion of thanks to the President's address to the joint sitting of Parliament, Modi again allayed apprehensions on the farm laws, saying neither any agriculture 'mandi' (market) has shut down after the three laws were enacted nor has the MSP stopped, rather the MSP has only increased which no one can deny.

PM Modi

"This House, our government and we all respect farmers who are voicing their views on the farm bills. This is the reason why topmost ministers of the government are constantly talking to them. There is great respect for farmers.

"After the laws relating to agriculture were passed by Parliament, no 'mandi' has shut. Likewise, MSP has remained. Procurement on MSP has remained. These facts can't be ignored," he said.

The prime minister said those who are disrupting the House are doing so as per a well-planned strategy as they are unable to digest that people can see the truth.

Narendra Modi

"Through their games, the trust of the people can never be won," he said, amidst protests by the opposition members.

The Congress walked out of Lok Sabha as PM Modi explained the government's stand on the three farm laws.

Modi said the Congress has taken different stands in Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha. "A divided and confused party like this can do no good to the country," he added.
The Federal High Court in Abuja, on Wednesday, ordered the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to unfreeze the accounts of 20 #EndSARS campaigners targeted by the apex bank after last years anti-police brutality demonstrations.

PREMIUM TIMES reported on Sunday how the accounts of the protesters remained frozen despite the expiration of the 90-day order on February 2.

The judge, Ahmed Mohammed, issued the order unfreezing the accounts after the legal teams of both the CBN and the 20 defendants decided to end the case on Wednesday.

The judge commended the two lawyers for their commitment to ensure justice after they announced their decision to withdraw all pending applications and the entire suit.

In the light of this, the ex parte order issued on November 4, 2022 freezing the accounts of the defendants pending the investigation by the Central Bank of Nigeria is here by set aside.

An order is also made unfreezing the accounts of the defendants, Mr Mohammed ruled on Wednesday.

Hearing

Earlier, CBNs lawyer, Michael Aondoakaa, a former Attorney-General of the Federation, told the judge he filed an ex parte application for the extension of the expired order on Tuesday, but later got instruction from the CBN Governor, Godwin Emefiele, to withdraw the case.

Mr Aondoakaa, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, said he was withdrawing the suit in the spirit of reconciliation behind the setting up of the various Judicial Panels of Inquiry set up to probe cases of police brutality in the aftermath of the #EndSARS protests.

He said, This matter involves young people. I talked to my colleagues and I advised, let us discard all the processes. I will withdraw my processes and they will withdraw theirs.

By implication, the order goes, the accounts will be unfrozen, and nobody will be indicted.

The government has set up reconciliation panels. We should give room for a rethink on this matter.

We have the instruction form my client, the Governor of CBN, that in the spirit of reconciliation, we should not apply for the extension of the order.

So we are withdrawing our ex parte motion. We should allow reconciliation and peace to reign.

Freezing order expired last week

Responding, the defendants lawyer, Femi Falana, also a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, confirmed that he had discussed with Mr Aondoakaa on the way forward in this matter.

He, however, insisted that the order ex parte made by this court expired last week.

He said he had filed a motion to have the order quashed but has been overtaken by event, since the order has expired.

After hearing the two lawyers, the judge set aside the order and struck out the suit.

Mr Aondokaa promised to ensure that that the accounts are unfrozen as soon as the courts written order is issued.

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The #EndSARS protesters and promoters targeted in the case by the CBN included Bolatito Oduala, Chima Ibebunjoh, Mary Kpengwa, Gatefield Nigeria Limited, Saadat Bibi, Bassey Israel, Wisdom Obi, Nicholas Osazele, Ebere Idibie, Akintomide Yusuf, Uhuo Promise, Mosopefoluwa Odeseye and Adegoke Emmanuel.

The rest are, Umoh Ekanem, Babatunde Segun, Mulu Teghenan, Mary Oshifowora, Winifred Jacob, Victor Solomon, and Idunu Williams.

Background

The 20 account holders affected by the freezing order had participated in or contributed to the #EndSARS protests which were triggered by grievances arising from years of harassment and rights violations by operatives of the defunct Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS).

The protests led to the disbandment of the police tactical squad in October last year.

In the twilight of the protests, the CBN governor, Godwin Emefiele, on October 15, 2020, directed various banks to place a Post-No-Debit order on the accounts linked to the 20 #EndSARS campaigners.

About three weeks after, the CBN, through its lawyer, Mr Aondoakaa, on November 4, 2020, obtained an ex parte order of the Federal High Court in Abuja freezing their bank accounts for 90 days.

The judge gave the order based on CBNs allegation that the 20 defendants were suspected of terrorism financing.

PREMIUM TIMES reported how the court order was widely condemned as an attack on democracy.

The protesters challenged the order but the judge, who kept adjourning the case, did not conclude hearing on the matter until Wednesday.
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If you were anything like me as a little girl, you probably spent a lot of time watching fairy tale movies or reading stories about how a prince meets a girl and whisks her away into a beautiful love story and they live happily ever after.

You may have also played with your barbie and ken dolls and envisioned similar fairytale endings. When we get older, we hope and dream to play a similar starring role as the princesses we one watched and read about.

In each of our unique love stories that God designs for us, we in fact, do have a starring role to play. It may not be covered in jewels and a glass slipper, but that role is one of a wife and it is a title we can wear with great honor.

Genesis 2:18 speaks to this saying that the Lord God said, it isnt good for man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him. A helper might not sound like a role one aspires to be, but it actually holds a place of great honor.

The word for helper that is used for woman is ezer, and is derived from the Hebrew word azar used for God and the Holy Spirit. Both mean helper--the one who comes alongside to aid or assist. In the New Testament, Jesus told the disciples that when he ascended to heaven, His Father would send them another Helper, the Holy Spirit (John 14:16).

You see, the same title used for God, is the same title used for woman. To be a helper is a position of great honor, and we shouldnt take our roles lightly.

Now, what about our husbands? For most of them, they didnt play with Ken and Barbie, nor think about sweeping their future wife off their feet onto a horse into the sunset. Most of them played with trucks, or warrior type toys and certainly didnt sit around watching fairy tales movies or reading book alike.

However, as these boys turn into young adults, their vision of their future becomes clearer and, in most cases, involves finding a wife to share their future with.

Perhaps you desire to be a wife one day, or you are already a wife and as life happens, you may feel your husband doesnt see you as the woman of his dreams like he once did when he was courting and dating you in the beginning. In any case, there are things men desire to be able to call you their dream woman--the woman of their dreams.

Here are 3 qualities to becoming his dream woman in every stage whether youre waiting and hoping, dating, or currently married:

1. Be a Prayer Warrior

Have you ever tried to change your husband or fix things and it doesnt turn out as you planned? Have you tried to work on your marriage or work on your husband only to realize you have spent so much of your power, not seeing any results in your husband or your marriage?

Perhaps its because you are doing everything in your power and in your power might not be enough. As wives, if we want to become the woman of our mans dreams, we need to not put all our efforts into fixing things in our own power. We must depend on God's power working in and through us to be the wife our husbands needs. And we accomplish this through prayer.

The greatest work we can ever do in our marriage will be the work we do on our knees in prayer. Prayer should always be our first resort and not our last. It should be our key thing we do if we want to become the woman of his dreams. Acts 16:31 reminds us to believe on the Lord, and you will be saved, you and your household.

We have a vital role to play as our husbands prayer warrior covering our entire households in prayer. Of all the roles and responsibilities God has given as us wives, being a prayer warrior is perhaps the greatest of them all. Someone who intercedes on behalf of someone else.

We have a real enemy by the name of Satan who wants to destroy our family and marriage. I certainly dont say that to scare you for the enemy is already a defeated foe as this was accomplished the day Jesus died on Calvary (John 3:16).

But if we ignore his existence, we are ignoring his effectiveness he has been having by wreaking havoc in our marriages. To be the woman of our husbands dreams, we can play a vital role in standing in victory with prayer over our marriages.

One of the devils many names is "diablos," which, translated in Greek, is the one who divides. He will go to great lengths to divide our marriages and families as his goal is to steal, kill, and destroy (John 10:10) our most precious relationships.

It is a battle not to be feared but to be fought in the only place where is can be won--in prayer. Lets become the woman of his dreams by praying without ceasing (I Thessalonians 5:17), for the effective fervent prayers of a righteous person [a woman of his dreams] avails much (James 5:16).

2. Respect and Esteem Him

The one thing a husband cant do without is respect, and to become the woman of his dreams, we must learn how to respect him. My husband has told me that a man would prefer hearing we respect them vs we love them. Of course, they value our love, but most of us women would prefer hearing the words, I love you.

This is taught to us in Ephesians 5:33 as it is simply put: each man must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband. Paul in this passage was summing up what is paramount for both men and women. We as women, want to be loved and cherished, just as much as our husbands want to be honored and respected.

So, what does it look like to respect our husband so that we can become the woman of his dreams? Or perhaps, some of us are asking, how do we respect someone who might not have earned our respect? Why should we respect someone who doesnt show us love in return?

What if we just simply dont know how to show respect to our husband?

Going back to the first quality in becoming the woman of his dreams: it all starts and ends with prayer. Respecting your husband is not pointing out the reasons to our husband on why hes not someone to be respected showing our lack of trust in him.

But rather, its making a pivotal yet profound change to praying about it first. Its wrestling out anything regarding your husband with God first before anything else. Scripture says to seek His kingdom first, and then everything else will be added until you (Matthew 6:33).

As you pray for your husband, he will begin to see you respect him and see you as the woman of his dreams honoring him. The amazing thing is youll begin to see the seeds planted grow over time.

Every seed you plant to respect him, notice him, regard him, honor him, prefer him, praise him, and esteem him will grow into something beautiful, and eventually, youll see the fruit from it.

So, lets begin to pray about everything regarding our husbands, and trust the Lord hears us as He promises us in 1 John 5:14. Lets trust Gods leading through our husbands and respect him by trusting him as the spiritual head of our home in the role that he plays.

One of the most giving gifts as wives we can give to our husbands to be the woman of his dreams is to esteem him, showing him respect with gentle and quiet spirit (1 Peter 3:4) taking everything to our husbands maker, our God, in prayer.

3. Support and Encourage Him

The world will try to grind our husbands down. We can become the woman of his dreams by admiring his efforts by building him up while supporting him rather than partnering with the world by engaging in tearing him down. One of your husbands greatest longings is to be adored, admired, and appreciated by the woman of his dreams.

We can do this by supporting him in all his endeavors, all while encouraging him along the way reminding him just how much we believe in him.

The primary way to support and encourage our husbands is through our words. Remember--the world is full of discouragers.

To be the woman of our mans dreams, we need to let them know how we support them and believe in them with our words. Our words can cause someone to start, stop, and can direct the entire course of ones life as King Solomon wrote the tongue has the power of life or death (Proverbs 18:21)

He also wrote that Pleasant words are a honeycomb, sweet to the soul and healing to the bones, (Proverbs 16:24), but reckless words pierce like a sword (Proverbs 12:18).

To encourage it involves affirming your husband. According to the dictionary, to affirm means to make firm, to declare positively, to assert, to confirm, to ratify, to validate.

Are you affirming your husband or doing the opposite with your words? Do your words bring life or death?

We can have incredible influence on our men. Satan knew this when he tempted Eve. Adams desire for Eve overrode his desire to obey God. Our husbands lead our home as they are called to be leaders and we are told to submit to their leadership as it says in 1 Peter 3:1.

But we can have great influence on them with our words. Lets not tear down our husbands, ultimately tearing down our homes through our words. Proverbs 14:1 says the wise woman builds her house, but with her own hands the foolish one tears hers down.

Do your words build up or tear down?

To become the woman of our mans dreams, lets work on building our husbands up by supporting them in their big decisions and everyday ones too, while we encourage them with our words along the way.

Happily, Ever After

While we may not live in a fairy tale movie or be the princess of a happily ever after book, we have a starring role in Gods greater plan as a wife.

My prayer is that as your husband reflects back on a life married to you, that he can call you the woman of his dreams, as he will say many women do noble things, but you, my dear, surpass them all. (Proverbs 31:29)

Photo Credit: GettyImages/Ivanko Brnjakovic

Alisha Headley is a writer + speaker who has a desire to meet the everyday woman in her everyday life with biblical truth. Stepping into her true calling, she left the corporate world behind as a former-financial VP to love on her family as a stay-at-home wifey + dog mama, while also being able to pursue her passion as a writer. Healing from a chapter of life consumed with lies she once believed about herself, she is inspired to point women to Christ to experience the freedom + power to overcome those lies with the truth written in Gods word. In her free time, Alisha enjoys road trips around the country, working out so she can eat her favorite foods, and creatively styling her outfits with a craft for fashion. Alisha is a proud wifey and dog mama living in Scottsdale, Arizona.

You can follow her blog by visiting her website or connect with her on facebook + instagram.
A warehouse in Brisbanes south has become the citys first hub of smart kitchens that cater purely for online delivery services such as Deliveroo and Uber Eats.*

The facility in Coorparoo houses 29 kitchens, purpose-built for existing and new restaurants to cater for online food deliveries.

Just of the food on offer from Seoul Bistro, which has leased a smart kitchen within the Chef Collective facility in Coorparoo.

Established Brisbane restaurants have set up operations in the hub, to allow their existing premises to focus on in-person customers.

Chef Collective spokesman Mark Heath said about half of the kitchens were leased, days after the facility launched.
The Law Offices of David A. Black, a criminal defense firm located in Phoenix, Arizona, is pleased to announce that it will be awarding a $1,000 educational scholarship to assist those diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder. The scholarship will be in the form of tuition assistance for the winner, who will be studying at college or at a vocational school. This is the latest in a series of educational scholarships that have been awarded by the firm over the past 5 years.

Autism Spectrum Disorder, also referred to as ASD or simply autism, can result in serious challenges in the areas of communication and social skills. Many people are not aware that those challenges continue after early childhood. ASD also includes a range of conditions such as Asperger syndrome and pervasive development disorder, all of which are now included within the definition of ASD. Needless to say, ASD often presents significant challenges in the area of education.

The attorneys and staff at the law firm are hopeful that the scholarship offer will encourage those who have been diagnosed with autism to continue their studies and further their education at the college (or university or junior college), or at the vocational or trade school, of their choice.

The application is open to U.S. citizens who have been diagnosed with ASD. The winning applicant must utilize the tuition funds within 1 year from the date the scholarship award is announced.

For anyone who may be interested in applying, or in learning more about the firms scholarship program, a visit to the firms website will be instructive. It includes the application, additional information including eligibility, deadlines, and more. Applications must be submitted no later than March 11, 2022. The winner will be announced on or before March 25, 2022.

We urge those who have additional questions to contact us, via email, at:

Law Offices of David A. Black

40 North Central Avenue #1850

Phoenix, AZ 85004

(480) 280-8028

email: michael@dbphoenixcriminallawyer.com
(Natural News) If men are women, then truth, science, and sanity are history.

(Article by David Fiorazo republished from DavidFiorazo.com)

A new study reveals 74% of generation Z embrace moral relativism. And Twitter censors another Christian organization for referring to a biological male as a male. Wait. There just might be a connection here between moral relativism and transgenderism.

How are these two stories related? Children are taught to think that truth and facts change, and adults in the tech world think it is normal to be born one gender and change to the other. Youll be cancelled if you affirm the opposite.

Young adults now believe truth can change and so can the meaning of what a man is and what a woman is, and they think children can now choose their gender. Social media giants such as Twitter are suspending the accounts of those who simply state biological facts  about gender. Talk about being anti-biology!

This is called Redefining Truth. Theres even a good book on the topic. Remove God as Creator of all things, deny scientific realities of male and female, redefine natural marriage and family, and remove moral absolutes and guess what? Anything goes!

The godless left controls every major institution in America. God has warned about His coming wrath against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of people who suppress the truth. They are doing this to innocent children and many will be scarred for life.

It should be alarming to us that 74% of young adults down to 12 years old at least somewhat agree with the notion that what is morally right and wrong changes over time, based on society. Not based on any fixed laws or truth, but on society.

By this reasoning, if Gods laws now change along with right and wrong, then throw out the Ten Commandments. Wait, never mind  they already did that in the early 1960s.

Thank you, government-run schools for contributing to the decay and moral decline of our society. Because of the deception of this gender surrender, it makes sense that when these kids grow up and work at these Democrat-run tech companies, theyre going to go after those who disagree with their warped worldview.

Twitter suspended the account of a Christian-based family organizations magazine, The Daily Citizen, a publication of Focus on the Family. Theres now a hash tag going around that simply asks #AreWeNext?

What was the offending tweet? It simply described President Bidens pick for secretary of health in his administration, Rachel Levine.

Dr. Levine is a transgender woman, that is, a man who believes he is a woman.

Is that a true statement or not? Aside from what the Bible teaches about God creating them male and female and telling them to procreate, this is biologically accurate. But Democrats always insist they are following the science.

President of Focus on the Family, Jim Daly responded:

As Ive noted before, Big Tech titans are the new emperors of the twenty-first century, wielding an inordinate amount of power by silencing individuals and organizations that dont comport or cave to their political or social point of view,

By the way, Catholic World Report also got cancelled for a similar statement that Twitter classified as hateful conduct.

For saying a biological man identifies as a transgender woman, big tech will now punish you. Tell the truth and the liberal big tech conglomerate will silence you. Hows that for tolerance?

This toxic environment has been spreading like a deadly virus for years, so none of this should surprise us. Abraham Lincoln once said:

The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.

And today, the philosophy and worldview in the school room in one generation is now running government, Hollywood, media, corporations, and big tech companies as well!

The Bible warns about avoiding godless and worldly ideas. Colossians 2:8 states:

See to it that there is no one who takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception in accordance with human tradition, in accordance with the elementary principles of the world, rather than in accordance with Christ.

Christians and conservatives; freedom-loving Americans, stay rooted in the firm foundation of Gods Word. Jesus is the truth.

When big tech Democrats can shut down the speech of whomever they want for ridiculous reasons, and when an overwhelming majority of young people under 30 actually think morality changes based on whats popular in society or how people feel, we are in serious trouble.

Psalm 11:3 states:

If the foundations are destroyed,

What can the righteous do?

When a societys underpinnings are removed, confusion reigns and people will suffer. I just hope they turn to the truth before its too late. There is a coming kingdom where righteousness will reign. This present system is temporary, God is everlasting! Psalm 119:160 states:

All your words are true; all your righteous laws are eternal.

Read more at: DavidFiorazo.com
An ex-pharmacist who allegedly believes that the COVID-19 vaccine will render people infertile and mutate their DNAs has pleaded guilty to charges that he tried to spoil dozens of vials of the Moderna inoculation.

Federal prosecutors charged Steven Brandenburg, 46, of Grafton, Wisconsin in late January with two counts of attempting to tamper with consumer products.

He pleaded guilty to both counts during a video conference with US District Judge Brett Ludwig in Milwaukee on Tuesday.

The charges carry a maximum combined sentence of 20 years in prison and $500,000 in fines.

Steven Brandenburg, 46, struck a plea bargain with federal prosecutors in Wisconsin by agreeing to plead guilty to two counts of attempting to tamper with consumer products. He was arrested on December 31 for deliberately removing a box of Moderna COVID-19 vaccines from a refrigerator knowing that it would ruin the drug

According to court filings, Brandenburg used his position as a third-shift pharmacist at the facility to remove the vials from the refrigerator undetected. He believed the Moderna vaccine (seen in the above December 24 file photo taken in Boston) was laced with microchips, would render people infertile and would mutate people's DNA

Prosecutors agreed to recommend that Ludwig give him at least three years and five months and at most four years and three months for his guilty pleas.

The judge scheduled a sentencing hearing for June 8.

Federal authorities allege that the pharmacist deliberately removed a box containing the vials from a refrigerator knowing it could ruin the vaccine  which was then given to at least 57 patients.

Prosecutors had asked Ludwig to jail Brandenburg until sentencing, arguing in a filing that he holds extremist views, including that the September 11 terrorist attacks were faked, the Earth is flat and vaccines were 'of the Devil.'

He also brought guns in a suitcase to his job at Advocate Aurora Health, they wrote.

Dr. Jeff Bahr, president of Aurora Health Care Medical Group, said there is 'no evidence' Brandenburg tampered with the vaccine in any other way other than removing it from the fridge.

Brandenburg also secretly substituted saline for flu vaccine that he was mandated to receive and persuaded several co-workers to secretly swap saline for their flu vaccine as well, the filing said.

His attorney, Jason Baltz, argued that Brandenburg was going through a contentious divorce when he tried to sabotage the vaccine.

He's no longer in a position to tamper with any medication, Baltz said, noting that Advocate Aurora Health fired him in December and state regulators revoked his pharmacist license on Monday.

Brandenburg (left) is seen above entering Ozaukee County Courthouse in Port Washington, Wisconsin on January 19. As part of his plea agreement, prosecutors will recommend that Brandenburg serve a maximum of four years and three months in prison

He also has turned all his guns over to sheriff's deputies, the attorney said.

Ludwig said that holding 'crazy' views isn't a basis for detaining someone, but ordered Brandenburg to submit to GPS monitoring until sentencing and undergo a mental health evaluation.

Police arrested Brandenburg on December 31 as part of an investigation into how 57 vials of the Moderna vaccine were left for hours outside a refrigerator at Advocate Aurora Health in Grafton, a Milwaukee suburb, over Christmas.

The vials contained enough vaccine to inoculate more than 500 people.

According to court filings, Brandenburg used his position as a third-shift pharmacist at the facility to remove the vials from the refrigerator undetected.

He believed the Moderna vaccine was laced with microchips, would render people infertile and would mutate people's DNA.

There is no scientific evidence to support any of those contentions.

Nearly 60 workers at the facility received shots from the unrefrigerated vials before they were discarded.

Prosecutors said efforts to determine whether those doses were inert or harmful continue.

Aurora Health Care fired Brandenburg the day before he was arrested, WISN-TV reported.

Brandenburg is also dealing with a state misdemeanor charge of attempted criminal damage to property.

He's set to make his next court appearance in Ozaukee County in March.

Investigators conducted a search of Brandenburg's iPhone, laptop and a USB stick.

Investigators interviewed a technician named Sarah Sticker who had allegedly reported Brandenburg

The hospital's own staff interviewed a co-worker of Brandenburg named Sarah Sticker  who reportedly discovered the box of vaccines had been tampered with and turned him in.

'Sticker immediately suspected Brandenburg of removing the vaccine from the refrigerator because of his vocal convictions against the vaccine,' the warrant reads.

'Brandenburg has explained to Sticker that he does not believe the coronavirus is real, and he thinks the vaccine is going to harm people.'

Sticker told investigators that Brandenburg was 'very engaged in conspiracy theories' and thinks that the vaccine is 'micro-chipped' to turn off some people's birth control while making others infertile.

'Sticker said that Brandenburg has been voicing his theories for months at work to anyone that would listen,' the warrant reads.

'Some of the conspiracy theories Brandenburg told Sticker about included: the earth is flat; the sky is not real, rather it is a shield put up by the Government to prevent individuals from seeing God; and Judgment Day is coming.'

Brandenburg admitted to investigators that he had tampered with the vaccine vials and explained that he believed the Moderna vaccine 'could hurt people and was not safe to administer,' according to the warrant.

'My actions were inexcusable and I deeply apologize for the harm I have caused,' Brandenburg said in an email to hospital investigators documented in the warrant.

Brandenburg then went into a litany of explanations for his behavior in removing the vaccines from their refrigerator.

Brandenburg allegedly said the sky is a 'shield put up by the government' to prevent people from seeing God

'It's not an excuse but I have been under a tremendous amount of pressure in my life within the past two weeks and preceding 6 months,' Brandenburg wrote in the email, noting a 'very contentions divorce' and separation from his children.

'In the last two weeks I have been functioning on little to no sleep alternating with too much sleep from taking prescribed clonazepam when the lack of sleep was too much to bear.'

Clonazepam, also known by its brand name Klonopin, is used to treat seizures, panic disorder, and anxiety.

The pharmacist was also interviewed by the Grafton Police Department, who recorded the interview with a body camera, and admitted 'he is a conspiracy theorist,' according to the warrant.

'Brandenburg noted that he has had an interest in conspiracy theories for the past 7 years and was vocal at work about his beliefs,' the warrant reads.

Sticker also told investigators that Brandenburg carried a .45-caliber handgun to work 'in case the military came to take him away.'

Gretchen Brandenburg, his wife, said in court filings made on December 30 that he had a storage units filled with 'bulk food and guns.'

'I was so concerned about my safety and the safety of the children, that I left town for a period of time,' Gretchen wrote in the filings, obtained by WISN.

Gretchen also told the judge that Brandenburg thought 'the government is planning cyber attacks and plans to shut down the power grid,' according to the outlet.

David Schoen, defense lawyer, speaks on the first day of former President Donald Trump's second impeachment trial at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Feb. 9, 2021. (congress.gov via Getty Images)

Trump Attorney David Schoen Says Impeachment Trial Will Tear This Country in Half

Former President Donald Trump attorney David Schoen warned senators on Tuesday that allowing the impeachment trial to go ahead could tear the country apart.

Schoen, who is defending the former president in the trial, made the remarks as part of his opening statement urging the Senate to dismiss the article of impeachment against Trump.

On Tuesday, House managers and Trumps lawyers debated for four hours in an attempt to convince senators not to continue with the proceedings. The first day of arguments focused on the constitutionality of the trial since Trump is no longer in office.

Democrats argued that the Constitution gives the Senate full authority to preside over the impeachment even if Trump isnt president, while Trumps defense team framed the Democrats push to proceed with the trial as an abuse of impeachment power for political gain.

With this trial, you will open up new and bigger wounds across the nation, for a great many Americans see this process for exactly what it is: a chance by a group of partisan politicians seeking to eliminate Donald Trump from the American political scene and seeking to disenfranchise 74 million-plus American voters and those who dare to share their political beliefs and vision of America, Schoen said in his opening remarks.

They tell us that we have to have this impeachment trial, such as it is, to bring about unity. But they dont want unity and they know the so-called trial will tear the country in half, leaving tens of millions of Americans feeling left out of the nations agenda, he added.

Schoen also attempted to pick apart the Democrats case, arguing their claim that the proceedings are to seek accountability for the Jan. 6 Capitol breach is false.

Anyone truly interested in real accountability for what happened at the Capitol on  January 6, would insist on waiting for a full investigation to be completed. Indeed one is underway in earnest already, he said.

He added that evidence that is emerging daily could exonerate Trump as the new information shows the violence was a result of pre-planning by people who had an agenda bearing no relationship to the claims made here.

At the end of the day this is not just about Donald Trump or any individual, this is about our Constitution and abusing the impeachment power for political gain, he said.

Following the presentation by both sides, the Senate returned a 56-44 vote to authorize the proceedings. Although the trial will move forward, it indicates the Democrats are likely to fall short of the necessary two-thirds, or 67 votes, needed to convict Trump.

Several senators told reporters following the first day that they thought the performance of Trumps attorneys was weaker than the House managers team, and that Trumps other attorney Bruce Castor spent too much time focusing on extraneous arguments before addressing the core of the defense.

Schoen addressed the criticism with Fox News Sean Hannity, saying that his defense partners seem to be very capable people and that Caster hadnt planned on attending the arguments on Tuesday.

So, Im sure they will be very well prepared in the future and do a great job in the case, Schoen said. Theres a lot to say, and I know they feel very strongly about fighting against what they are seeing.
Specialty shops in the EU are starting to switch to Irish suppliers to stock empty shelves after Brexit.

Stonemanor, a specialty shop in Belgium, is now sourcing Cadburys creme eggs and sausages from Ireland to avoid supply hurdles.

The family-run store, 20km north-east of Brussels, has been selling British cheese, milk, chocolate and meats to expats for 39 years.

But with supplies effectively blocked due to new customs rules, general manager Ryan Pearce says he is having to look to Irish suppliers to help fill the now-empty shelves.

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Weve always had Irish products on our shelves, Mr Pearce told the Irish Independent. Ireland, right now, is a good route for us to go because its fairly reliable.

The self-titled "British Store previously stocked Irish products including Barrys tea, Tayto crisps and Odlums flour.

But it is now turning to Irish wholesalers for products it would usually get from the UK.

Stonemanor took delivery of 1000 Cadburys creme eggs this week and is awaiting a shipment of Dairy Milk chocolate bars from an Irish-based supplier.

And Mr Pearce is sourcing sausages and bacon from Crowes Farm in Tipperary, which is shipping the goods by ferry, directly from Rosslare to Dunkirk, to avoid the UK landbridge.

With Brexit, its the easiest route to get sausages and bacon that require health certificates, he said. We dont have that issue from Ireland to the EU.

Expand Close Saving their bacon: The shop now sources sausages from Crowe's Farm in Co Tipperary / Facebook

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Whatsapp Saving their bacon: The shop now sources sausages from Crowe's Farm in Co Tipperary

TJ Crowe, director of Crowes Farm said he is also in talks to supply specialty stores in France and Luxembourg.

Were delighted with it, he said. I think there is an appetite there for us, or for anyone. We hope it will be an ongoing thing.

Gourmet International Food & Gifts, a stones throw from the European Commissions Brussels headquarters  and one of Stonemanors buyers  says its shelves are also empty of British goods.

They have had to start sourcing HP sauce from Sweden, where its much more expensive, according to Hakan Sundkvist, who works at the store part-time.

We didnt get any delivery for six weeks now, and its running out on the shelves here. We dont [have] a plan B for the moment.

While its known as the English shop by local expats, Gourmet International also sells products from Norway, Sweden, Ireland and the US, so its not as exposed as Stonemanor.

But Irish products are not the same as British ones, said Mr Sundkvist, who says British suppliers should have figured out the new customs formalities by now.

This is ridiculous, he said of the delays.

Expand Close Expats: The Stonemanor 'English shop' in Belgium. Photo: Ryan Pearce / Facebook

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Whatsapp Expats: The Stonemanor 'English shop' in Belgium. Photo: Ryan Pearce

Home from Home, a specialty store in Luxembourg, says its customers are very happy" with the switch to Irish goods.

Owner John Heffernan said he is getting sausages, black pudding and bacon from Crowes Farm.

Our customer base is very, very happy with the products from Crowes, and theyre finding its better quality meat."

He said he would be looking at other suppliers in Ireland to help fill the shelves in the store.

Our shelves are half empty as well, and we cant get nothing over [sic]. So we will be switching over.
Agriculture CS Peter Munya refuted claims by Deputy President William Ruto that a section of leaders was diminishing President Uhuru Kenyattas profile to that of a Mt Kenya leader.

The two leaders appeared to clash during the burial of Thika MP Patrick Wainainas mother in Gatundu on Tuesday.

In his speech, Deputy President William Ruto said it was unfortunate that some politicians were branding the President as a tribal leader.

The president is a leader of the whole country. I beg you as citizens and leaders of Mt Kenya, do not take the president away from us.

If you say President Kenyatta is the leader of this (Central) region, then who is our leader? he posed.

Noting that he has never considered himself as the leader of Rift Valley but a servant of all Kenyans, Ruto asked leaders to shun tribal politics.

When we plan for the countrys development let us plan for every single Kenyan, he said.

Adding: We cannot allow the country to go back to the politics of tribalism; we want to work together and move the country forward.

But Munya, who delivered a condolence speech on behalf of the President, disagreed with Ruto.

We have never claimed the President serves Mt Kenya Region alone. The President is the leader of the whole country. Just the way he carries development projects across the country, he also develops Mt Kenya region Munya said.

The Agriculture CS also reprimanded some of the DPs supporters who walked out of the event in protest of a CS reading the Presidents speech.

This is a very solemn ceremony. If you respect others, you will also be respected. If you humble yourself, you will be exalted.

With a lot of respect to everybody here including the DP, this is a very solemn occasion where we are giving the last respects to one of our friends. I was sent by the President who has a right to choose who he assigns whatever functions he wishes, said Munya.
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OTTAWA, Feb. 10, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- In a statement released today, the Canadian Institute of Actuaries (CIA) adds its voice to the debate on pharmacare in Canada.



The CIA believes that all Canadians should have access to affordable prescription drugs. However, rather than implement an entirely new single-payer system, Canadas actuaries urge the government to build a framework that harnesses successes from both private insurance and provincial/territorial programs to focus on meeting the immediate needs of Canadians without coverage.

Implementing drug coverage for all Canadians is about more than affordable medicines, says Michel St-Germain, FCIA, President of the CIA. This is about filling a gap in our health system that can contribute to improvements in healthy life expectancy, improved worker productivity, longer labour force participation, and more economic growth.

The CIAs proposed framework includes a cooperative overseeing body with representatives from the federal, provincial, and territorial governments, the insurance industry, and other experts. It would establish a national formulary, negotiate drug prices on behalf of all public and private plans across Canada, and explore optimal evidence-based prescribing and public health alternatives to pharmaceuticals.

Provinces and territories would have the flexibility to design their own public drug plan and create a structure for the coordination of their plan with the existing private drug insurance marketplace. Both provinces and private plans would cover all drugs included in the national formulary and any drugs beyond it if they wish.

Some provinces already have effective systems in place, and Canada has a robust private insurance industry, says Robert Brown, FCIA, Professor Emeritus at University of Waterloo and co-lead of the drafting team. We can build on these successes to accelerate us to the next step, instead of starting from scratch with a whole new system.

Private plans and provinces/territories would act as primary insurers and cover up to a certain limit of an individuals costs. The federal government would pay for costs beyond that defined limit, including for specialty or high-cost drugs, such as those for orphan diseases.

This framework would help public and private plans better manage the volatility of costs, while ensuring the federal government has an important level of participation. For individual Canadians, their costs would simply be covered without worrying about different cost thresholds or unaffordable prescriptions.

The CIA urges convening a task force of medical professionals, pharmaceutical experts, insurance leaders, private plan sponsors, government representatives, and actuaries to identify more accurate, consistent data on the costs and potential savings, and to perform a financial analysis over a long-term horizon.

There is a lot more work to be done in analyzing the available data and to understand the future costs and savings of such a program, says John Dark, FCIA, Actuary at The Co-operators and co-lead of the drafting team. Lets get started with coverage right away, so no Canadian has to wait another day for the medicines they need, but lets also get the right people around the table to figure out whats next for this system.

Visit cia-ica.ca/pharmacare for the CIAs full statement, Pharmacare: Is There a Pill for That?, an executive summary, podcast interview, and article from members of the drafting team.

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Dramatic footage from the Capitol on January 6th showed Secret Service agents rushing Vice President Mike Pence out of his hiding place near the Senate chamber while Speaker Nancy Pelosi had to be taken from the complex entirely as the MAGA rioters threatened to kill them.

In the footage, taken from a security camera from inside the Capitol, a group of agents, one of whom carried the football with the nuclear codes, led the Pence family from where they had been taken after being removed from the Senate chamber.

Pence, his wife Karen and daughter Charlotte followed the agents down the stairs and were moved to another location in the Capitol.

'You can see Vice President Pence and his family quickly moved downstairs. Then, as Pence was being evacuated, rioters started to spread throughout the Capitol, Democratic Rep. Stacey Plaskett said during the impeachment managers presentation.

Plaskett played several never-before-seen security camera footage from the January 6th riot as part of Democrats' case for the impeachment of Donald Trump. She then showed the pro-Trump supporters yelling 'Kill Mike Pence.'

At a later moment in the trial, Rep. Joaquin Castro, noted how 'some of these insurgents were heard saying that they hope to find Vice President Mike Pence and execute him by hanging him as a traitors.'

A makeshift gallows had been erected outside the Capitol Building. Castro asked senators to look at that image for a moment.

'It harkens back to our nation's worst history of lynching,' the Texas Democrat said.

New footage also included the moment the MAGA mob busted into the Capitol Building, with Plaskett pointing out the first man who entered the Capitol was wearing 'full tactical body armor and carrying a baseball bat.'

'Others are carrying riot shields. Among this group are members of the Proud Boys,' she noted.

New footage shows Capitol Police officer Eugene Goodman running and getting Sen. Mitt Romney out of harm's way before distracting the MAGA mob away from the Senate chamber.

The footage, not yet seen publicly, shows Goodman running toward the Senate and its famous Ohio Clock. He then gestures to Romney, who does an immediate 180-degree turn, having been walking toward the House where another larger mob had already gathered.

'I did not know that was Officer Goodman but I look forward to thanking him when I next see him,' Romney said after the clip played. 'I was very fortunate indeed that Officer Goodman was there they get me in the right direction.'

Overall, Romney said of the playback: 'It tears at your heart and brings tears to your eyes. That was overwhelmingly distressing and emotional.'

The footage showed rioters searching for Pelosi in and around her office, with Plaskett revealing that Pelosi had been pulled entirely from the building for her own safety.

'The vice president, the speaker of the House, the first and second in line to the presidency, were performing their constitutional duties, presiding over the election certification and they were put in danger because President Trump put his own desires, his own need for power over his duty to the Constitution and our democratic process,' Plaskett said.

Plaskett also highlighted that Richard Barnett, the rioter who was photographed seated at Pelosi's desk, had been carrying a 950,000 volt stun gun, a weapon the FBI had since identified.

Dramatic new footage showed Vice President Mike Pence, his wife and his daughter being removed to safety as MAGA mob crowds spread throughout the building

Impeachment manager, Rep. Joaquin Castro, spoke of the gallows that had been erected outside the Capitol Building, nothing that 'Some of these insurgents were heard saying that they hope to find Vice President Mike Pence and execute him by hanging him as a traitors'

House Democrats showed new footage of the MAGA mob breaking into the Capitol during Wednesday's Senate impeachment trial

Democratic House impeachment managers showed the break-in from two angles

New footage shows a close call now Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (right) had, almost running into the MAGA mob

Rep. Eric Swalwell played some footage from the officers' perspective including a clip from a bodycam as the MAGA mob tries to break in

Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell, one of the House impeachment managers, showed the senators just how close they came to being attacked by the pro-Trump mob that day.

The senators, who are sitting as jurors in Trump's impeachment trial, saw, for the first time, security camera footage that showed their escape from the Senate chamber, as U.S. Capitol Police officers created a line of defense to hold the mob back long enough for the lawmakers to be ushered to safety.

'You were just 58 steps away from where the mob,' Swalwell told the senators.

The footage showed a hallway with senators running past the camera. In the background, police officers can be seen, holding the crowd away.

The senators sat in silence as the video presentation played, their eyes glued to the TV screens.

'You know how close you came to the mob. Some of you, I understand, could hear them. But most of the public does not know how close these rioters came to you. As you were moving through that hallway, I paced it off. You were just 58 steps away from where the mob was amassing and where police were rushing to stop them. They were yelling. In this security video, you can see how the police created a line and blocked the hallway with their bodies to prevent rioters from reaching you and your staff,' he said.

He then played it for them again.

'Because this is security footage that you've not seen before, I want to play it again. At the top of the screen, the other end of that hallway, where the mob has amassed, and the officers are rushing to protect you,' Swalwell told the senators.

He then showed never-before-seen footage of Senate Democratic Leader having a near miss with the rioters.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer's security detail escorted the senator up a ramp and down one of the hallways. The fixed security camera shows Schumer and his detail walking toward the camera and out of view. A few seconds later, the senator and his team are seen running back from where they came.

'They came within just yards of the rioters, and had to turn around,' Swalwell said. 'You see Leader Schumer walking up a ramp. Going up the ramp with his detail, he will soon go out of view. Seconds later, they return, and run back down the hallway. Officers immediately shut the door and use their bodies to keep them safe.'

Schumer called the clips 'gut wrenching' during Wednesday's dinner break. '

'I don't think many of us feel like eating dinner,' the New York Democrat noted.

'As for me, my situation, I just want to give tremendous credit to the Capitol Police officers who were in my detail, like the rest of the Capitol Police officers they are utterly amazing and great and we love them,' the Senate majority leader added.

He then showed the senators the footage of rioters on the Senate floor.

'We're here,' one yells. 'Where the f**k are they?,' another yells of the lawmakers.

'They invaded and desecrated the Senate floor,' Swalwell said. 'These vandals shouted, and rifled through the desks in this room. They took pictures of documents and of themselves. Celebrating that they had taken over the floor and stopped the counting of electoral college votes.'

Swalwell noted that while it wasn't part of his video presentation, he credited Senate staff with grabbing and protecting the Electoral College votes the mob was after.

Democrats play footage of officers being bludgeoned

He also played audio recordings between police officers and video from their perspective.

'The crowd is using munitions against us,' an officer in an audio clip said. 'They have bear spray in the crowd. Bear spray in the crowd.'

Swalwell talked about the 'hand-to-hand combat' the officers were forced to engage in, speaking of their 'extraordinary bravery.'

At the top of his presentation he said, 'I want to warn you that the following audio and video is graphic and unsettling.'

In a second audio clip that Swalwell played senators could hear the voice of a D.C. Metropolitan Police Department officer shouting, 'We have been flanked and we lost the line,' yelling out the code that an officer needed assistance.

Videos then showed officers being sprayed in the face.

'In this new security video, you can see the mob attacking officers with a crutch, a hockey stick, a bullhorn and a Trump flag,' Swalwell said, before rolling footage from the same moments from two perspectives, including from an officer's bodycam.

The California Democrat noted that this footage was taken two hours after the initial Capitol break-in.

'The attack on police that afternoon was constant,' Swalwell said.

D.C. Police Mike Fanone, Swalwell continued, was one of three police officers that the mob grabbed and dragged down the Capitol Building's stairs. Fanone was tased, which triggered a heart attack, Swalwell revealed.

'It was a medieval battle scene, it was some of the most brutal combat I've ever encountered,' Fanone said in a video clip, recalling the experience.

Swalwell paid homage to the three officers who died, Brian Sicknick, who perished from his injuries and officers Howard Liebengood and Jeffery Smith, who took their lives. He noted that another 140 police officers had been injured.

The impeachment manager blasted the rioters for crushing trapping and crushing Officer Daniel Hodges between two doors.

'I'm sorry I have to show you the next video,' Swalwell said at the conclusion of his presentation.

He then rolled the footage, that had previously gone viral, of Officer Hodges being crushed in the Capitol's door.

Impeachment managers also played a clip of the moment Ashli Babbitt was shot.

During recess after the video presentation a Capitol Hill pool reporter noted that the senators gathered in groups on the floor and 'it was clear that they were reliving the experience and realizing how close the riots had been.'

Top Trump ally, Sen. Lindsey Graham, suggested officers should have used more force.

'Well, I just can't believe that we could lose the Capitol like that. I got mad. I mean these police officers had every right to use deadly force, they should have used it,' Graham told the Capitol Hill pool. 'The people in charge of securing the Capitol left the country.'

Graham called Democrats legal theory 'absurd.' 'That somehow that Trumps a secret member of the Proud boys.'

Democrats argue Trump knew the Capitol protest would turn violent

Before showing the new footage, Democratic House impeachment managers argued that Trump knew his supporters' plans to violently attack the Capitol, yet still encouraged them to do so.

'Some of you have said there's no way the president could have known how violent the mob would be. That is false - because the violence it was foreseeable,' argued Plaskett.

She shared pieces of social media leading up to the January 6 attack.

One meme, which showed an illuminated image of the Capitol Building, said the date - January 6 - and below it, 'The capitol is our goal, everything else is a distraction. Every corrupt member of Congress locked in one room and surrounded by real Americans is an opportunity that will never present itself again.'

Chatter on pro-Trump message boards, shared by Plaskett, showed supporters plotting to overwhelm the Capitol Police. 'There are only around 2K of them and a lot are useless fat asses or girls,' one supporter pointed out.

'These are not just hidden posts in dark websites that Trump would not have seen. Quite the opposite. We know that President Trump's team monitored these websites,' Plaskett argued. 'We know this because his advisers confirm it.'

Lead House impeachment manager Jamie Raskin said Trump was 'a man who praised and encouraged and cultivated violence' as he disputed Joe Biden's victory.

Democrats presented evidence of that Wednesday by pointing to Trump telling the right-wing group The Proud Boys, a group involved in the insurrection, to 'stand back and stand by' during the September presidential debate. Then Plaskett shared a video of a Proud Boys member inside the Capitol on January 6 wearing an earpiece - evidence of the coordination and planning that was made.

'That's the level of planning in advance that occurred,' the Democratic rep said.

Plaskett also recalled how Trump had embraced supporters' efforts to run a Biden-Harris bus off the road in Texas.

Sharing a tweet the ex-president shared of the altercation, Plaskett noted how Trump 'put music to that video ... and then added to the top, "I LOVE TEXAS."'

Trump is charged on one count of impeachment - inciting the insurrection at the Capitol that left five dead.

In his opening remarks, Raskin blasted Trump for inciting the insurrection and enjoying the spectacle of his supporters disrupting the certification in the Capitol.

'He watched it on TV like a reality show, he reveled in it,' he charged. 'There has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the U.S. of his office and his oath to the Constitution.'

Raskin, in his nearly 20 minute speech, painted Trump as betraying his duties as president in order to preserve his political power.

'He incited this attack and he saw it coming,' Raskin argued. 'To us it may have felt like chaos and madness but there was method and the madness that day. This was an organized attack on the counting of the electoral college votes in joint session of the United States Congress.'

House Democrats on Wednesday began to make their case why Donald Trump should be impeached for inciting the January 6th riot on Capitol Hill

Impeachment managers showed the social media postings related to the January 6th riot

Lead House impeachment manager Jamie Raskin called Donald Trump 'a man who praised and encouraged and cultivated violence'

Rep. Stacey Plaskett of the Virgin Islands argued that the president knew his supporters' plans to violently attack the Capitol, but encouraged them to do so anyway

Democratic Rep. Joe Neguse of Colorado charged Trump with failing to stop the insurrection

TRUMP: GEORGIA CRIMINAL PROBE ON ELECTION CALL Donald Trump is facing a criminal investigation in Georgia into his call to its secretary of state asking him to 'find' votes to overturn the election, it emerged Wednesday. Newly-elected Fulton County prosecutor Fani Willis, a Democrat, sent a letter to state leaders, state officials telling them to save records related to the call, state officials with knowledge of the letter told The New York Times. Specifically, the criminal investigation is looking into the then-president's questionable January 2 call with Georgia's Secretary of State where Trump told Brad Raffensperger to 'find' enough votes to reverse his loss to Joe Biden in the Peach State. The letter does not specify what crimes are being investigated but experts have suggested that Trump could have committed conspiracy to commit election fraud, which can carry felony charges and a sentence of up to a year in prison on conviction. A Trump aide dismissed the move as a stunt by Democrats on day two of the impeachment trial. Advertisement

House Democrats face an uphill battle in getting Trump convicted. Senate Democrats need 17 Republicans to cross over and vote for conviction and there is no indication those numbers are there.

But Democrats laid out their case that Trump, as it became apparent he could not legally win the election, sought to incite his base in order to stay in power.

'President Donald J. Trump ran out of nonviolent options to maintain power. After his efforts in the courts and threatening officials failed, he turned to privately and publicly attacking members of his own party in the House and in the Senate,' Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu of California said.

'The president wasn't just coming for one or two people or Democrats like me. He was coming for you, for Democratic and Republican senators. He was coming for all of us,' he said.

The prosecutors reminded Republicans how Trump treated them - calling them 'pathetic' and threatening to primary them - while offering example after example of how the former president tried to overthrow the election results.

House impeachment managers have 16 hours to make their case against the former president. Then the defense will offer theirs.

Raskin said the prosecution will show Trump violated his oath of office and abdicated his duty as commander in chief.

'The evidence will show you that ex-President Trump was no innocent bystander. The evidence will show that he clearly incited the January 6th insurrection. It will show that Donald Trump surrendered his role as commander in chief and became the inciter in chief,' he said.

The managers handed off to one another to methodically tracing Trump's months long effort to undermine the election. And they repeatedly brought senators back to that day in the Capitol, when the Trump supporters stormed the building.

'That mob was summoned, assembled and incited by the former president of the United States, Donald Trump. He did that because he wanted to stop the print transfer of power so he could obtain power even though he had lost the election. And when the violence erupted, when they were here in our building with weapons, he did nothing to stop it,' Democratic Rep. Joe Neguse said.

Trump is only the president in American history to be impeached. It's also the first time senators have set in judgement of a president accused of putting their lives in danger while trying to overthrow a legitimate election.

Neguse focused his argument on demonstrating that Trump was ramping up his supporters long before his January 6th speech, intending to counter Trump's defense that his speech was protected under the first amendment. Trump's attorneys also argue that federal evidence shows the insurrection had been in the works for some time - meaning Trump's speech that morning could not have incited it.

'I'd respectfully ask that you remember those three phrases as you consider the evidence today. 'Election was stolen. Stop the steal. And fight like hell' because they did not just appear on January 6,' Neguse said.

He showed clips of Trump speeches and rallies where the president complained - falsely and repeatedly - that the election was stolen.

'He didn't just tell them to fly like hell, he told them how, where, and when, he made sure they had advance notice, 18 days advance notice, he sent his save the date for January 6th,' Neguse said.

He also showed video clips of the rioters from January 6th, saying they were at the Capitol because of Trump: 'Fight for Trump! Fight for Trump! Fight for Trump!,' one said. 'We were invited by the president of the United States,' said another.

Neguse also argued Trump didn't do enough to stop the rioters that day.

'He alone, our commander in chief, had the power to stop it. And he didn't. You will hear evidence tonight, tomorrow, throughout the trial about his refusal as commander in chief to respond to numerous desperate pleas on the phone, across social media, begging him to stop the attack,' he said.

Democratic Rep. Joaquin Castro also showed multiple examples of Trump falsely claiming the election was stolen from him.

And he appealed to the senators to remember their own election contests when listening to what Trump said.

'All of us in this room have run for election. It's no fun to lose. I'm a Texas Democrat. We've lost a few elections over the years. But can you imagine telling your supporters that the only way you could possibly lose is if an American election was rigged and stolen from you? Ask yourself if you have ever seen anyone make the same claim about their own election. That's exactly what President Trump did,' he said.

He went on to say when the media, including Fox News, said when the remaining votes were counted Biden would be the victor 'President Trump began urging his supporters to stop the count.'

'I would imagine that if we went around this room, there are folks sitting here that started down on election night and ended up coming back up and winning their races. Perhaps that's why some of you are seated in this room today. But imagine if you were behind and the results start coming in, and as you started pulling ahead, your opponent said, that's not fair, stop the count while I'm still ahead. That's what Donald Trump did. But that's not how America works. Here every vote counts. You don't just stop counting when one person is ahead. We count every vote,' he added.

Trump's goal, Castro argued, was to incite his base, 'to make sure that his supporters were angry, like the election was being ripped away from them.'

'This is clearly a man who refuses to accept the possibility or the reality in our democracy of losing an election,' Castro said.

As part of their case, House impeachment managers will show never-before-seen Capitol security footage of the January 6th riot as they start their case for impeaching Donald Trump.

The footage will demonstrate the extent of the violence that occurred and the threat the rioters posed to everyone in the Capitol, senior aides on the House impeachment team told CNN.

They did not say what the new footage was, or whether it came from Capitol Police or Washington DC's Metropolitan Police.

The video will show 'extreme violence' and make clear what additional safety risks were posed by the insurrection, a House aide told The Washington Post, including 'just how close Trump's mob came to senators, members of Congress and staff.'

'It will show the extent of what Donald Trump unleashed on our Capitol,' said the aide.

The House managers are not expected to use the full 16 hours they are allotted for their presentation. After they finish, the defense will make its case and also is not expected to use its full 16 hours.

Trump's second impeachment trial could end as soon as this weekend. He is expected to be acquitted.

The Democratic impeachment managers previewed their case against the former president with a 14-minute video on Tuesday that contained dramatic footage of Trump supporters storming the Capitol and taunting police officers with obscenities as they bashed in doors and windows.

Democrats showed video of the rioters on January 6th, stating why they were there

The new footage will show the extent of the violence that occurred and the threat the rioters posed to everyone in the Capitol

Trump's defense tried to counter the lingering image of the video, which visibly affected many senators in the chamber. Those lawmakers were also in the Capitol on January 6th.

But Trump wasn't happy with his defense team after their first day making arguments, according to reports.

Trump, viewing the proceedings from his new home at Mar-a-Lago, was aghast that one of his lawyers, Bruce Castor, acknowledged the potency of the opening argument put forward by House Democratic impeachment managers, ABC News reported.

Castor even acknowledged that his team changed course after viewing the Democrats' dramatic video.

'I'll be quite frank with you, we changed what we were going to do on account that we thought that the House managers' presentation was well done,' Castor admitted. 'And I wanted you to know that we have responses to those things.'

One Trump advisor even told CNN getting good legal representation was a concern if he is ever charged in criminal court, which is now possible since he is out of office.

'Trump is f***** if anyone ever charges him. No one wants to work with him,' said the advisor.

Raskin compares Trump to a fire chief 'who set the theater on fire'

Democratic impeachment manager Jamie Raskin sought to explode the First Amendment defenses put forward by Donald Trump's lawyers in their impeachment legal brief.

Trump's team had argued that the president's call for his supporters to 'fight' where not an incitement to riot but protected political speech.

Raskin, a constitutional law professor, picked apart the claim and brought up the well-worn example of a limit on free speech  that you can't yell 'fire in a crowded theater,' a concept explored by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.

'But even that time-honored principle doesn't begin to capture how off base the argument is,' Raskin said. 'This case is much worse than someone who falsely shouts fire in a crowded theater. It's more like a case where the town fire chief who's paid to put out fires sends a mob yet to yell fire in a crowded theater but to actually set the theater on fire,' he said.

He continued: And who then when the fire alarms go off and the calls start flooding into the fire department asking for help, does nothing but sit back, encourage the mob to continue its rampage and watch the fire spread on TV with glee and delight.'

Raskin was alluding to Trump's inaction during the riot, and his tweets praising rioters even when he finally asked them to go home.

'So then we say this fire chief should never be allowed to hold this public job again and you're fired and you're permanently disqualified and he objects. And he says, we're violating his free speech rights just because he's pro-mob or pro-fire or whatever it might be,' he added.

Then he quoted conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. 'As Justice Scalia once said, memorably, you can't ride with the cops and root for the robbers.'

Raskin acknowledged the potential attractiveness of the free speech argument  but said it didn't apply.

'They present president trump as merely like a guy at a rally expressing a political opinion that we disagree with, and now we're trying to put him in jail for it. That has nothing to do with the reality of these charges where his constitutional offense,' he said.

He said his legal team would demonstrate 'with overwhelming evidence portraying Trump as a guy on the street being punished for his ideas is a false description of his actions, his intent, and the role that he played on January 6th when he willfully incited an insurrectionary mob to riot at the Capitol.'

Impeachment manager Rep. Joe Neguse pointed to the specifics of some of Trump's comments in and around the riot.

'He didn't' stop it. He didn't' condemn the violence. He incited further,' Neguse said.

'He didn't' just tell them to fight like hell. He told them how, where and when.'

'What time was that rally scheduled for?' Neguse told senators. 'The exact same time that this chamber was certifying the election results in joint session,' he said. He noted that Trump concluded his Jan. 6 speech 'literally moments' after Pelosi gaveled the House into session.

Only Trump could have stopped the rioters

Democratic Rep. Joe Neguse of Colorado used his time at the trial Wednesday to parse President Trumps statements for signals he sent to his supporters  as well as underline the things he did not do when MAGA rioters took the Capitol.

When the violence erupted, when they were here in our building with weapons, he did nothing to stop it. If we are to protect our republic and prevent something like this from ever happening again, he must be convicted, said Neguse, a lawyer and second-term lawmaker.

Neguse, 37, spoke of his own background as the child of immigrants, but also let Trump do the talking through his tweets and recorded statements.

He observed that neither he nor even a figure like former Vice President Mike Pence could have stopped the mob.

Rep. Joe Neguse, 37, spoke of his own background as the child of immigrants as he made the case against Trump

In his unique role as commander in chief of our country and as the one person that the mob was listening to and following orders from, he had the power to stop it. And he didn't, Neguse said.

He said Trumps Jan. 6 remarks were a deliberate effort and culmination of months of advance work through other remarks.

Now, some have said that President Trump's remarks, his speech on January 6th was just a speech. Well, let me ask you this. When in our history has a speech led thousands of people to storm our nations capital with weapons? To scale the walls, break windows, kill a Capitol Police officer? This was not just a speech, he said.

He said Trumps words were carefully chosen and had a very specific meaning to that crowd. The reason? Trump had used the same words over and over again.

Neguse went back repeatedly to Trumps words, including setting the table even before the elections, saying it's only way we can lose, in my opinion, is massive fraud.

He told his base that the election was stolen, as he had forecasted. and then he told them, your election has been stolen, but you cannot concede, you must stop the steal, Neguse continued.

The he sketched out the rest of Trumps pressure campaign: including efforts to threaten state election officials, have the Justice Department investigate his claims, and persuade Republicans in Congress to block certification of the vote.

None of it worked. so, what does he do? With his back against the wall when all else has failed, he turns back to his supporters who he'd already spent months telling them that the election was stolen, he continued.

He told them that they had to be ready not just to stop the steal but to fight like hell.'

Trump's pressure campaign on state officials

Democratic Rep. Madeleine Dean, who represents a suburban Philadelphia district, walked the senators through Trump's court challenges - and when those failed - his pressure campaign aimed at state officials in Michigan, Georgia and her home state of Pennsylvania.

'Donald Trump told his supporters they are stealing the election, they took away your vote,' Dean said. 'That was not true. According to judge after judge the truth was exactly the opposite.'

'Trump wasn't suing to ensure election integrity. He was pursuing lawsuits that would, in effect, strip away American votes so he could win,' she told her Senate audience.

She noted the calls Trump made to election officials in Michigan, inviting some top state lawmakers to Washington for a meeting.

'Let's be clear Donald Trump was calling officials, hosting them at the White House, urging them to defy the voters in their state,' she said.

Dean noted how he made similar entreaties to state officials in Pennsylvania, even calling into a legislative policy meeting - attended by his lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis - as a way to curry favor.

Democratic Rep. Madeleine Dean walked the senators through Trump's pressure campaign aimed at state officials in Michigan, Georgia and her home state of Pennsylvania

However, 'his conduct was the most egregious,' Dean argued, in how he treated Georgia's Secretary of State Georgia secretary of state.

She called attention to a handful of Trump's tweets where the president attacked the Republican official, who then received death threats.

'Donald Trump was savagely attacking a secretary of state because the official did his job,' Dean said. 'Remember senators, those threats were to Mr. Raffensperger's family.'

Dean also pointed out that instead of stopping the attacks once they resulted in death threats, Trump doubled down.

She played a clip where Trump referred to Raffensperger as an 'enemy of the people,' usually a term the ex-president reserved for the press.

And she replayed the audio obtained by The Washington Post where Trump asks Georgia election officials to 'find' the precise number of votes that would give him an edge over Biden by one.

Republicans struggle to pay attention

Josh Hawley puts his feet up while Rand Paul doodles  Republicans struggle to pay attention

Many Republican senators struggled to pay attention during the Democrats prosecution of Trump. Most of these lawmakers have indicated they think the trial is unconstitutional, arguing a former president cannot be impeached.

Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri sat in the visitors gallery instead of at his desk on the chamber floor as his fellow senators did. He had his feet up on the chair in front of him while he read papers in unmarked manila folders.

He told reporters on Capitol Hill he sat there because the view was better than the one from his desk.

The gallery is, I feel had a little bit better view, kind of where I sit over in the Senate chamber is kind of in the corner. So, here you can sit head on, I can also space out a little bit more. And it's just not quite as crowded, he said.

As to his reading material, he said: I've got the trial briefs with me and I've also got my notes that I'm taking during the proceedings.

Most Republicans were looking down or otherwise occupied while the impeachment managers made their case. Some were taking notes on the presentation, but some were reading and others were just staring down or worrying their hands.

But a few heads popped up when Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu said the words bulls*** and p**** on the Senate floor during his part of the presentation.

Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky was doodling on Wednesday afternoon. He had a legal pad with a watermark of the Capitol at the bottom and he appeared to be tracing that watermark in pencil  for at least three pages.

Senator Rick Scott of Florida read a magazine article.

A notable exception was Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell, who paid attention as the House Democrats spoke. McConnell didnt visibly react, however, as the impeachment managers read tweets from Donald Trump threatening him.

And Senator Bill Cassidy  the only Republican to change his vote and say the impeachment trial is constitutional - spent about 30 minutes pacing at the back of the chamber during the prosecutions talk.

Meanwhile, Democratic Senator Cory Booker brought a bag of candy with him and passed out treats to his fellow senators.

Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts told him: Trick or treat! Trick or treat! She grabbed a yellow bag M&Ms and a small packet of Welch's fruit snacks.

During one the breaks, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York walked around with a large white Lululemon bag filled with books. She handed out at least five copies of Tim Keller's The Songs of Jesus to senators on both sides of the aisle including Tim Kaine, Joni Ernst, Steve Daines and Cassidy.

Of the 100 senators, only Republicans Rand Paul and Cynthia Lummis were not wearing face masks.

Day one of arguments ends in a brief burst of chaos

The first day of arguments at President Donald Trump's second impeachment trial ended in chaos when Sen. Mike Lee tried to object to evidence that referenced him.

'Statements were attributed to me moments ago by the House impeachment managers, statements related to the content of conversations between - a phone call involving President Trump and Senator Tuberville, were not made by me, they're not accurate and they're contrary to fact,' Lee said on the heels of primary impeachment manager, Rep. Jamie Raskin, saying they were done for the day.

Lee took issue with part of Rep. David Cicilline's presentation, which was supposed to show the senators where Trump's mind was at during the deadly January 6 siege.

Sen. Mike Lee delayed the close of the first day of arguments at President Donald Trump's impeachment trial by trying to strike evidence from the record. Lee was mentioned because Trump had accidentally tried to call his phone to reach Sen. Tommy Tuberville

'Senator Lee stood by as Senator Tuberville and President Trump spoke on the phone and on that call Donald Trump reportedly asked Senator Tuberville to make additional objections to the certification process,' Rep. David Cicilline said, which was what Sen. Mike Lee objected to

Democratic impeachment managers pointed out, again and again, that Trump never explicitly told his supporters to stand down, as they invaded the Capitol, hunted lawmakers and participated in hand-to-hand combat with police.

Trump was impeached by the House last month for inciting the insurrection and the Senate will decide whether he should be convicted on that charge.

On Wednesday night, Cicilline told an anecdote that was based on a story in Deseret News that cited Lee as its source.

During the insurrection Trump accidentally called Lee's cell phone trying to get ahold of Alabama Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville instead.

'Senator Lee describes it, he had just ended a prayer with his colleagues here in the Senate chamber and the phone rang, it was Donald Trump,' Cicilline said.

'And how Senator Lee describes it is the phone call goes something like this,' the Rhode Island Democrat continued. '"Hey Tommy,"' Trump asks. And Senator Lee says this isn't Tommy. And he hands the phone to Sen. Tuberville.'

'Senator Lee stood by as Senator Tuberville and President Trump spoke on the phone and on that call Donald Trump reportedly asked Senator Tuberville to make additional objections to the certification process,' Cicilline explained.

In the Deseret News story, Lee doesn't divulge the contents of the call, though he does say that in speaking to Tuberville after the Alabama senator's conversation with Trump that he got the impression the president didn't know that the protesters were laying siege to the Capitol.

Lee also told the publication that Tuberville and Trump spoke for about five to 10 minutes. He said he stood nearby to ensure he didn't lose his phone in the commotion.

Other news organizations reported that Trump pressured Tuberville to keep objecting to states' Electoral College vote counts.

'That's why he called,' Cicilline had said in disgust.

The Dispatch reported on a voicemail left for Tuberville by Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani that day, but he dialed the number of a different unnamed senator.

In the message, Giuliani is heard asking Tuberville to 'slow it down.'

'The only strategy we can follow is to object to numerous states and raise issues so that we get ourselves into tomorrow - ideally until the end of tomorrow,' Giuliani said.

After his initial request to get Cicilline's statements struck from the record, Lee explained, 'my point was not about whether it was appropriate for them to make characterizations, my point was to strike them because they were false.'

'Statements were attributed to me repeatedly to which I have personal knowledge because I am the source, they are not true,' Lee said.

With the use of 'reportedly' Cicilline didn't directly attribute the contents of the call to Lee.

'I never made those statements I asked that they be stricken,' the Utah Republican said. 'This has nothing to do with whether they are based on depositions, which they're not, it's simply based on the fact that I'm the witness, I'm the only witness, those statements are not true and I ask that you strike them.'

After a few procedural hiccups with Sen. Patrick Leahy at the gavel, Raskin, the chief impeachment manager, said the Democrats would voluntarily withdraw that piece of evidence - with the understanding they could bring it back up if needed.

'This is much ado about nothing, because it's not critical in anyway to our case,' Raskin said.

Afterward, Tuberville was asked by reporters what had been incorrect about Cicilline's retelling of the call, which Lee had said lasted five to 10 minutes.

'I don't know, you know President Trump, you don't get many words in but he didn't get a chance to say a whole lot because I said, "Mr. President, they just took the vice president out, I've got to go,"' Tuberville said. 'That's what it was.'

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The following resolution protesting Facebook censorship of accounts associated with the World Socialist Web Site and Socialist Equality Party has been received by the London Bus Rank-and-File Committee. The motion was adopted by a meeting of the committee on Sunday night. The rank-and-file committees own Administrator account was disabled on January 20, with Facebook claiming it failed to meet community standards.

One of the last postings by the c ommittees Administrator was an advertisement for the WSWS online meeting Where is America Going? called to discuss the January 6 fascist coup attempt. Other content included a WSWS article on the pandemic,  London Mayor declares major incident as UK capital devastated by COVID-19  and an emergency statement by the London Bus Rank-and-File Committee calling for a walkout at Cricklewood bus garage against the threat to life from COVID-19. The committee is calling on other garages and workplaces in the UK and internationally to pass similar resolutions protesting social media censorship of socialist and left-wing organisations.

RESOLUTION

The London Bus Rank-and-File Committee protests Facebooks censorship of left-wing and socialist organisations and individuals.

Facebooks targeting of the WSWS is aimed at curtailing the democratic rights of the entire working class. It goes hand in hand with attempts to muzzle the London Bus Rank-and-File Committee. On January 20, the main Administrator account for the London Bus Rank-and-File Committee was disabled without warning, with Facebook claiming our administrator account failed to meet community standards.

At the same time, Facebook accounts associated with the World Socialist Web Site, Socialist Equality Party and International Youth and Students for Social Equality in the United States were shut down. Among those targeted was IYSSE National Secretary Genevieve Leigh and World Socialist Web Site WSWS US Managing Editor Niles Niemuth.

London buses at Euston Station

We oppose this attack on the WSWS, whose articles are read by thousands of bus drivers. It was the WSWS which alone spoke the truth about the pandemic, exposing the collusion between the bus companies, Transport for London and Unite the union and giving a conscious voice for workers in London and throughout the world.

No matter what language workers speak, or their nationality, race or gender, the WSWS speaks with one voice, fighting to unite the working class in the fight for socialism. Socialism is not illegal. Our committee demands, Hands off the WSWS!

We demand that Facebook explain why our main Admin account was purged. The Account was only established on January 6. How is it against community standards to expose the truth about COVID-19 infections at London bus garages? Why is Facebook censoring information exposing major safety breaches by the bus companies that are killing workers?

Due to worldwide protests, the accounts linked to the WSWS, SEP and IYSSE were restored, but serious questions remain. Who made the decision to remove these accounts? What was the involvement of US government agencies in Facebooks decision? Did Facebook come under pressure from the US government to take actions against the SEP? And was the British government or its intelligence agencies consulted over the censorship of the London Bus Rank-and-File Committee?

We urge all bus workers to oppose this attack on free speech and to join with us in sending letters of protest to Facebook. An injury to one is an injury to all!

London Bus Rank-and-File Committee

January 31, 2021

Dan, a bus driver from West London and a member of the rank-and-file committee, explained why he voted for the motion, Facebook is an American company, but its censorship of the SEP and WSWS and other left-wing websites is a clear breach of the First Amendment. It is an attempt to starve the oxygen of publicity from those who are showing up the failures of capitalism worldwide and putting forward their verdictsocialism.

It is complete hypocrisy. They are deliberately targeting the left. I don't buy the claim by Facebook that it was an administrative error. It seems okay to have right-wing or moderate views, but not those which are on the left. I agree with the warning that the storming of the Capitol on January 6 was an attempted coup. It was a deliberate attempt to overturn democracy and Trump whipped up sections of the military and police to conduct a violent insurrection. That does not happen in a normal or healthy society. I have been left very disturbed by what took place, and I don't think that threat has ended. Government has become solely about looking after the wealthy elite not the citizens.

Dan asked, What does Facebook mean that the London Bus Drivers Rank-and File-Committee violated community standardshow does it define this? The rank-and-file committee represents the common man and woman, the working class, so they have a collective voice. In collaboration with the WSWS it has highlighted the exploitation by the corporations and fought for measures so workers can stay safe from the pandemic. Bus drivers and all workers are being placed at risk of their lives while those who are rich are sheltered in luxury and can continue to make their profits. They want to keep us down, in our place. I don't think so.

Since its founding last September, the rank-and-file committee has been opening bus workers eyes about the cover-up by Unite [the union] with management over the rates of infections and deaths of our colleagues. When you speak up about this you are met with bully boy tactics and face sanction, censorship and unfair dismissal based on trumped up charges. Unite and the unions serve as the police force for the private operators. They too are involved in censorship of social media, of bus drivers who criticise the union. This includes the so-called Unite Left, such as Joanne Harris, Mo Manir and John Murphy and the list could go on. They all feel threatened.

Leya, a driver from Abellio, said she was not surprised that WSWS was being censored, To be honest, I see a lot of articles from the WSWS on Facebook and whenever they are posted, everyone reacts.

It has a lot of support and thats why its being censored. This is a new platform for bus drivers to raise their concerns. If WSWS was a union, it would have a lot of members. The Socialist Party doesnt get censored by Unite, they are only going after WSWS. From what I see, WSWS is the voice of the people. It should grow bigger because its helping people.

I subscribe to WSWS. The articles talk about a lot of things in the world going on that are important. People can learn from WSWS. I hope everyone reads WSWS and if we all stand together, we will be strong.

Amir, a Metroline driver in north London, described the actions of Facebook against WSWS as high censorship and anti-democratic. He said the closure of accounts owned by leading WSWS, SEP and IYSSE members had, strongly indicated the governments influence on Facebooks decisions.

He concluded, Very obviously they are trying to silence any socialist political movement, which could expose more the broken economic system and other social issues. WSWS gives another perspective from all other media.
Colorado Springs, CO (80903)

Today

Scattered thunderstorms during the morning becoming more widespread this afternoon. High 58F. Winds NNE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 90%..

Tonight

A steady rain this evening. Showers continuing overnight. Low around 45F. Winds N at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 80%.
EAST CLEVELAND, Ohio -- An East Cleveland police officer shot and killed a man during a struggle with him while they investigated a domestic dispute between the man and his ex-girlfriend, police said.

The man has not yet been identified in the shooting that happened about 10 a.m. Wednesday on Bryn Mawr near Hayden Avenue, East Cleveland police Chief Scott Gardner said.

East Cleveland police and Ohio BCI remained at the scene as of 1:30 p.m. Several cars belonging to investigators remained parked in front of the nearby Louis Stokes/Windermere Rapid Station. Police say the woman, who called police about her ex-boyfriend, lives on Bryn Mawr Road. Police are not sure where the man lived.

Police have not identified the officer who shot the man and have not released their current employment status with the police department.

A woman called police from a car and said her ex-boyfriend was causing issues and had a gun, Gardner said.

Police found the woman sitting in the car and the man attempting to get inside. The woman yelled to the officers that the man had a gun, Gardner said.

The officer who fired the shots struggled with the man who was wearing a security vest. The officer saw a gun poking out of his vest and tried to get a hold of the gun, Gardner said.

The officer pushed the man away from him. The man reached for the gun and the officer fired his gun at the man, Gardner said.

He was taken to University Hospitals where he died from his injuries, Garnder said.

The mans ex-girlfriend is currently being interviewed by police. She told police she saw her ex-boyfriend pull out the gun and witnessed him pull the gun on the officer.

The Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation will investigate the shooting.

This is the second fatal shooting involving an East Cleveland police officer in 2021. East Cleveland police Sgt. Larry McDonald shot and killed 18-year-old Vincent Belmonte. City council members, Belmontes family and activists have called for McDonalds firing.

Read more crime stories on cleveland.com:

Prosecutor drops felony assault charge against one of two protesters charged for bullhorn use outside TownHall restaurant

TSA at Cleveland Hopkins Airport finds loaded handgun in passengers bag

Cleveland serial killer Anthony Sowells brutal murders were flashpoint for city that long mishandled sex crimes

Its finally over now: Families of Anthony Sowells victims say Cleveland serial killers death provides a path to move forward

Mans body found under burning mattress in Cleveland, police say
When the first two segments of NASAs Gateway station make their way to the Moon sometime in 2024, theyll be carried into space by a Falcon Heavy rocket. The $331.8 million agreement, which the agency announced on Tuesday, is the second launch contract NASA has awarded to SpaceX in as many weeks.

Once its safely in lunar orbit, the Gateway will serve as a way station for astronauts and equipment heading to the Moon as part of NASAs Artemis program. The pair of modules SpaceX will ferry into space are the power and propulsion element (PPE) and the habitation and logistics outpost (HALO), which two separate companies are building for NASA for $375 million and $187 million respectively. The former will provide Gateway with power and allow the station to move to different lunar orbits, while the latter will give astronauts a place to stay on their way to the Moon. The mission will blast off from Kennedy Space Center in May of 2024 at the earliest.

In the lead up to Artemis, NASA has been awarding contracts to private companies to speed up the projects timeline. In January, however, it came out that the agency had quietly pushed back the award timeframe for two lander contracts from late February to the end of April, which has cast doubt over whether NASA will be able to meet its ambitious 2024 goal for Artemis.
GRANTS PASS, Ore.  Police in Grants Pass say that a man is in custody after he allegedly damaged and destroyed a number of vehicles in a neighborhood on Monday night.

Dispatch started receiving a number of 911 calls coming from the 1200-block of NE Grable Drive around 9:15 p.m. The callers reported that a man with a gas can was setting cars on fire.

Police and firefighters from the Grants Pass Department of Public Safety responded to the area, and the suspect ran away on foot "shattering windows of other vehicles as he ran." More callers from the NE 12th Street and NE Meier Drive area reported that their car tires had been slashed.

As more officers arrived in the area, they saw people chasing the male suspect near the corner of NE D Street and NE Beacon Drive. Officers were able to take the man into custody.

The suspect was identified as 36-year-old Grant Brannaman, with a last-known listed address in Portland.

Firefighters helped to clean up after the car fires, GPDPS said, as the flames had already been extinguished before they arrived. One car "sustained heavy damage" from the fires.

Brannaman was taken to the Josephine County Jail on charges for Arson in the Second Degree, two counts of Criminal Mischief in the First Degree, three counts of Criminal Mischief in the Second Degree, Felon in Possession of a Restricted Weapon, and Disorderly Conduct.

"It is possible there are other victims of this incident. If you are a victim, or have further information please call the Grants Pass Department of Public Safety at (541)-450-6260 and reference Case # 2021-6043," the agency said in a statement. "We would also like to the thank the alert citizens who assisted in apprehending the suspect."
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ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.  Leaders of the Albuquerque Publishing and Journal Publishing companies announced a series of changes during an Economic Forum of Albuquerque online meeting Wednesday, including an upcoming premium subscription and a partnership with a local technology company, designed to keep the states largest newspaper successful and relevant in a dynamic media environment.

While Albuquerque Publishing Co., which publishes the Journal and three other newspapers in Central New Mexico, faces the same systemic challenges affecting much of the print journalism world  including declining advertising revenues and struggles attracting younger readers  president and publisher Bill Lang said the company has streamlined its operations to deliver local news more efficiently.

If you look at community newspapers around the country, theyre actually doing pretty well, Lang said.

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The company opted to merge its printing operations with the Santa Fe New Mexicans last year, a move Lang said consolidated resources and saved the company money.

And as it became more and more expensive to deliver papers to far-flung parts of New Mexico, the company worked to convert rural customers to digital subscribers, in some cases including an iPad as part of their subscription. Lang said 70% of print customers in Roswell converted to digital subscribers in 2020.

The reality is  its much more cost-effective for us, he said.

Debbie Johnson, executive marketing director at Albuquerque Publishing, said 2020 proved to be a strong year for the Journals online operations. Before the COVID-19 pandemic reached New Mexico, Johnson said the Journal averaged about 3 million page views per month. Today, that figure has tripled to 9 million.

Our audience is actually larger than it ever has been before, Johnson said.

To build on that momentum, Johnson announced a partnership with RS21, an Albuquerque-based data analytics firm, that she said will help the publishing company use its data more effectively.

Additionally, Johnson said the company is planning to debut an overhauled website in the coming weeks.

Karen Moses, editor and senior vice president of Journal Publishing Company, said the company is also preparing to roll out a new premium subscription program, called the On First Club, that will provide readers with additional perks and give them a platform to support the Journals local journalism.

She said the Journal newsroom not only covers major breaking news, but also provides important explanatory and solutions-based stories to its readers.

We care about New Mexico, we care about our home, and we care about  what we can do to make a difference, Moses said.
Huck's Won't Build Gas Station Near Lotus

By West Kentucky Star Staff

PADUCAH - The owner of Huck's Market has withdrawn its application to build a location in Paducah near a sexual assault crisis center.Martin & Bayley, Inc. released a statement Wednesday saying the company will no longer pursue efforts to develop the vacant property, formerly the Guy Gray Supply building, at the intersection of North Friendship Road and Alben Barkley Drive. The planned project has been met with staunch opposition from community members, as well as employees at Lotus, a child advocacy and sexual assault resource center that operates just a few feet from the property."There has been an overwhelming campaign against our application to develop a Huck's Market on this site," The company said. "Martin & Bayley has agreed to all noted concerns, such as the removal of separate diesel islands, lighting restrictions, and adding property boundary barriers. This proposed location was never intended as a truck-stop for a large semi-truck fueling facility. Our executive team has spent numerous hours on this site evaluating how this location could be developed not only to service the needs of the area, but how to do so safely. Our vision has been to build a beautiful store, create 40 or more good-paying jobs and offer this neighborhood the facility it deserves."Lotus Executive Director Lori Brown told West Kentucky Star last week that having busy a gas station so close to where victims of assault are trying to recover and be at peace would have had a negative impact on the healing process.Brown and several other members of the community voiced their opposition to the project at a recent meeting of the Paducah Planning Commission.Calls to Martin & Bayley and Lotus for comment have not been returned.
The North Adams location would be the eighth store to offer beer and wine in Massachusetts.

North Adams OKs Package Store License for Ocean State Job Lot

NORTH ADAMS, Mass.  Ocean State Job Lot has been approved for selling beer and wine.

The Planning Board on Monday and the Licensing Board on Tuesday both approved the request, pending a final OK by the state's Alcoholic Beverages Control Commission.

Attorney Lisa Adelman, representing OSJL Spirits LLC, said a 279 square foot space would be carved out for the retail area in the Curran Highway store and another 260 square feet would be secured and locked cage for when it is not on display.

There will not be any coolers but rather wine bottles and six-packs would be sold off shelf.

"It is wine and beer and the product that we typically engage in sales, not solely, but the primary product that is sold are closeouts or a product that is specifically made for OSJL Spirits almost like your Trader Joe's brand," Adelman said. "We have specific products that's made for OSJL Spirts.

"The product remains on pallets and shelving. And so again it's a little unique and it helps to stand out what we do as compared to some of your other liquor stores."

In response to questions, Adelman said there would be no sales of kegs and thought the largest volume sale would possibly be a magnum of wine. There had been situations where the discount chain had allowed for "choose your own" six pack but there would be nothing larger.

The area would be cordoned off during the hour on Sunday between 9 and 10 when alcohol cannot be sold and during any holidays, though the store is usually closed on those days anyways, Adelman said.

The location of the alcohol will be near the registers and will be under surveillance. Adelman said a register could be dedicated to wine and beer sales but that the clerks and salespeople tend to be older than 21 and would have Training for Intervention Procedures, known as TIPS.

"We have policies and procedures in place. We TIPS train all of the associates that handle or engage in the sale of alcohol. Typically associates are trained within 45 days of employment and that's usually from training to get your certificate to allow them to then engage in the sale of beer and wine," she said. "We do not allow anyone under the age of 18 to handle the wine, to touch or stock anything, and certainly not to engage in the sale of beer and wine."

Ocean State hold seven other package store licenses in Massachusetts with the first three permitted in 2014 in Medford, East Falmouth and Randolph.

Board member Peter Breen said he was concerned about the ownership of the chain, noting that state law requires a majority of state residents in any partnership and that Ocean State is a headquartered in Rhode Island. Adelman said the manager of the entity, an affiliate of Ocean State Job Lots, is Massachusetts resident Donna McLeod, director of recruitment and training. The manager of the North Adams store is a local person.

"Based on that setup, we've never encountered an issue, either through the ABCC or any of our other licenses," she said.

But Breen wondered what would happen if the state decided that wasn't enough, noting McLeod wasn't an owner.

"I don't want to stop the application but it's something we ought to address with the ABCC and see how they did it on the other seven [licenses]," he said. "All I'm saying is if it's been addressed, great. If it hasn't been addressed, then I guess why hasn't it been addressed. Is it a concern for us to ignore it?"

Member Rosemari Dickinson did not see why they would hold up a license based on a organizational structure that the state agency had already approved seven times before. She asked if Breen wanted to hold and call the ABCC for clarification.

"We're approving it with the information that we have. And if it is wrong, the state won't approve this," she said. "I don't like to use the word ignore it because we're doing our job. What I'm saying is, do you think that the ABCC ignored it seven times? If there were a problem with it, it would have been identified, long before this application, since they have seven establishments in the state of Massachusetts."

Adelman said the company is headquartered in Rhode Island bu the limited liability company was organized and is operating in Massachusetts.

Member Michael Obahason agreed with Dickinson that if had been approved before there should not be a problem.

"I think I am not seeing any problem, or any issues there," he said. "But I think I understand, from where we're doing our due diligence and from me I don't see any concerns moving forward."

The board voted to approve the license for 9 to 9 on weekdays and 10 to 9 on Sundays, with the expectation that the state would do its own due diligence on the application.

"I'm voting for this because I think everything makes sense, it's just that jumped out at me when you started talking about different companies," said Breen.

Dickinson said the city has a quota for five package store licenses of which this will be the third. Based on information from the city clerk, the city had a population of 12,085 as of July, 10 2021; Dicksinson said this will be the annual estimate provided to the ABCC.

The board also approved a change of ownership for Blackinton Partners LLC (the Planning Board did as well on Monday). Partner Fredric "Eric" Kerns said Francis Waterman is no longer a member but all others remain the same.

They are Benjamin Svenson, Eric Svenson and Dana Nielson of Broder Blackinton LLC, Kerns, John Stirratt and Nathaniel Stedman.

The partnership operates the real estate arm Beyond Place LLC (property including Tourists), Blackinton Operating LLC (operating Tourists), and properties owned by Blackinton Backwoods LLC and Blackinton Mill LLC.
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MOSCOW, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Sheremetyevo has been the Russian Federation's main airport serving flights from epidemiologically unfavorable countries during the COVID-19 pandemic and adopted critical services to protect passengers and employees. The airport summed up its activities for the period on the eve of Civil Aviation Day in the Russian Federation.

Despite global anti-epidemic restrictions and a significant decrease in passenger traffic during 2020, the airport quickly adapted to work in the new realities and confirmed its status as one of the most important passenger and cargo hubs in Russia and Europe.

"Although 2020 brought many challenges, particularly for the aviation industry, Sheremetyevo nimbly responded to the adversity. We successfully implemented many changes to protect passengers and employees and to ensure the health of all who passed through the airport, and are pleased to be at the forefront of the vaccination efforts domestically and abroad," stated Sheremetyevo's Chairman of the Board of Directors Alexander Ponomarenko.

From March through September 2020, Sheremetyevo received 236 flights returning 50,000 citizens to Russia, including a special inbound flight of Royal Flight airlines from seven African countries carrying 197 Russians as well as citizens of Ukraine and Kazakhstan. The flight had been arranged by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation and Sheremetyevo Airport, with the participation of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs.

With the outbreak of the pandemic, Sheremetyevo Airport joined with government agencies and services to develop and implement an integrated set of preventive measures designed to protect the health of passengers, guests and employees. It also took steps to optimize costs and save production resources for the prompt resumption of full-scale operational activities once restrictions on international traffic were removed and domestic and international flights began to return to their pre-pandemic levels.

Sheremetyevo currently offers the following pandemic-related services at the airport for passengers:

The world's first rapid testing for COVID-19, launched on the eve of the resumption of regular international flights in cooperation with RDIF

A vaccination station administering vaccines to the public at the airport, begun in January 2021

Sheremetyevo Airport continues to implement anti-epidemic measures on a full scale. The effectiveness of these measures has been confirmed by the Ministry of Transport of the Russian Federation, Federal Air Transport Agency, Rospotrebnadzor and the Government for Moscow Region.

In 2020, Sheremetyevo Airport strengthened its position as the largest cargo air hub in Russia, with a 70% share in the Moscow Air Transportation Cluster market. This was despite a significant reduction in flights by passenger airlines. The airport's cargo operator, Moscow Cargo LLC, was able to offset the decrease in scheduled passenger flights by working closely with cargo airlines and attracting new air carriers operating cargo charter flights.

In 2020, a significant part of Sheremetyevo's cargo turnover consisted of medical goods. At the end of the year, Moscow Cargo LLC handled about 20,000 tons of medical cargo carried on international airlines, which is almost 70% more than in 2019. Since November 2020, the Moscow Cargo terminal has been handling the shipments of Sputnik V, the first Russian vaccine against coronavirus, both in Russia and abroad, including to Hungary, Serbia, Egypt and Argentina. Modern infrastructure, the presence of an extensive fleet of special apron equipment and Moscow Cargo's extensive experience in handling pharmaceuticals were critical factors in Moscow Cargo's careful handling of the vaccine.

Sheremetyevo Airport handled various categories of cargo in 2020 in addition to the Sputnik V vaccine, including other non-standard cargo requiring special conditions for transportation and storage. This cargo included other medical cargo such as pharmaceuticals, medical equipment and batches of personal protective equipment.

On September 3, Moscow Cargo handled and shipped equipment for complex tests of the Nauka multifunctional laboratory module (MLM) to the Baikonur cosmodrome by a special flight. The unique equipment was carried on an AN-124-100 Ruslan cargo plane of Volga-Dnepr Airline.

Also in September, Moscow Cargo delivered special equipment for servicing aircraft to the organizers of the Formula 1 VTB Russian Grand Prix 2020 to Sochi on an AirBridgeCargo Airline flight. With the help of specialized 10- and 20-foot carts, the airport optimized the process of loading and unloading the racecars, escort vehicles and additional equipment with a total weight of more than 800 tons.

In November, Moscow Cargo handled shipment of Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn's painting The Expulsion of Merchants from the Temple, which arrived in Moscow by flight from London after being shown at the Young Rembrandt exhibition.

On December 23, Moscow Cargo handled the first large batch of Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine, weighing more than nine tons, intended for the vaccination of doctors in Argentina. The cargo was delivered on a special charter flight of Aerolineas Argentinas. The air carrier had not previously operated flights to Sheremetyevo and chose the Moscow Cargo terminal based on the recommendations of professional market participants who regularly ship pharmaceutical cargo through Sheremetyevo.

Sheremetyevo Airport is among the TOP-5 airport hubs in Europe, the largest Russian airport in terms of passenger and cargo traffic. In 2020, the airport served 19 million 784 thousand passengers.

Sheremetyevo is the best airport in terms of quality of services in Europe, the absolute world leader in punctuality of flights, the recipient of the highest 5-star Skytrax rating.

You can find additional information at http://www.svo.aero.

SOURCE Sheremetyevo International Airport
Public health officials said 58,189 COVID-19 vaccinations were administered statewide Monday, nearly double the one-day total from the same day a week ago.

Compared to the 32,559 doses administered Feb. 1, the one-day total reflects a steadily improving statewide vaccination picture as Gov. J.B. Pritzkers administration faces continued criticisms for the states rollout of the vaccine.

The state reported a single-day record of 74,965 vaccinations on Friday, while nearly 65,000 doses were administered during the weekend. More than 2.1 million doses have been distributed to Illinois with more than 1.4 million administered thus far. That means the state has administered about 66% of the vaccine doses it has received, with 2.4% of the states population having received both required doses.

The states seven-day rolling average for daily vaccinations stands at 55,455 a day, up nearly 10,000 additional daily doses when compared to a week ago.

As of Tuesday, Illinois ranked 34th out of all 50 states in percentage of the population to receive at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, according to data from The New York Times. The state previously had ranked as low as 47th but has moved up in recent days as 9.1% of the state has received at least one dose.

While the states vaccination numbers have improved, some state lawmakers are calling for added transparency in the vaccination effort. Critics have attributed lagging numbers to a confusing process for making vaccination appointments statewide.

As a result, the chair of the Senate Health Committee, Sen. Julie Morrison, D-Lake Forest, announced she would hold a hearing regarding the states vaccination efforts at noon today, citing a need for greater efficiency in the rollout of the vaccine.

The states seven-day rolling COVID-19 positivity rate has continued to hold steady over the past several days.

The statewide positivity rate stood at 3.3% Tuesday, the sixth consecutive day it has been within a tenth of a percentage point of that number.

.

Total cases in west-central Illinois counties as of Monday, according to individual county health departments, were:

Brown County

648 total, 638 recovered, seven deaths

One new case

Cass County

1,849 total, 1,808 recovered, 32 deaths

Greene County

1,329 total, 1,245 recovered, 44 deaths

Five new cases.

Jersey County

2,397 total, 2,287 recovered, 44 deaths

Macoupin County

4,379 total, 3,273 recovered, 105 deaths

14 new cases and two additional deaths.

Morgan County

3,530 total, 3,330 released from restrictions, 96 deaths

Six new cases

Pike County

1,640 total, 1,626 recovered, 47 deaths

Five new cases.

Sangamon County

15,623 total, 207 deaths

18 new cases.

Schuyler County

643 total, 640 recovered, 16 deaths

Two new cases

Scott County

444 total, 424 recovered, one death

16 new cases

Statewide, 2,082 new cases of coronavirus disease and 20 deaths were reported Tuesday, according to the Illinois Department of Public Health.

There have been 1,150,170 cases and 19,686 deaths in Illinois.

The Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs has launched the Texas Rent Relief Program.

The program will help qualifying Texas households with rent and utility assistance. More than $1 billion has been allocated to Texas for this through the federal COVID-19 stimulus bill, according to a news release from Governor Greg Abbotts Office.

TDHCA will start accepting applications for the program on Feb. 15. Those interested can start submitting applications to TexasRentRelief.com. Additional information can also be found by calling 1(833)989-7368. The call center will be open Monday through Saturday from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.

The program is available for use by both tenants and landlords with past due rent and utilities. The program helps renters with costs starting as far back as March 13, 2020, according to the website. It offers assistance for up to three months-worth of rent and/or utility payments that are past due or current. After the initial assistance, you can apply for three more months if funds are available.

The pandemic has dealt a heavy blow to many Texas families, said Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick in the news release. The Texas Rent Relief program is for those Texans who need help to pay rent and utility bills and I encourage those who need it to apply.

Households may qualify if they meet the following guidelines:

Households must have income at or below 80% of the Area Median Income defined by TDHCA

One or more of the tenant household members must have qualified for unemployment benefits or attest in writing that they have experienced a reduction in household income, incurred significant costs or have experienced a financial hardship as a result of the pandemic.

Households must also demonstrate they have a risk of homelessness or housing instability by providing proof with either an eviction notice or past-due utility or rent notice. They must also show theyre in unsafe or unhealthy housing conditions.

The rented unit must be a primary residence and within the state.

Any unpaid rent or utility bills cannot go further back than March 13, 2020.

The program also includes an additional set of guidelines to help prioritize funding for households that need it most. Its not a separate program.

Applications that meet the noted guidelines must be submitted by Feb. 28. TDHCA will review and commit funds to those applications first.

The additional prioritization guidelines include:

Households that are at or below 50 percent of the Area Median Income

Households in which one or more members are unemployed as of the date the application is completed and in which a member (could be the same one) is unemployed for 90 days prior.

The website also notes that a portion of funding has been set aside for households whose landlords have already sued for eviction.

The website also provides guidance for landlords regarding documentation, payment information and more.
Pennsylvania reported 3,378 new COVID-19 infections on Wednesday, a continued decline from the late-December and early-January peak that saw more than 10,000 new infections daily.

The state also reported 125 new deaths, raising the toll to 22,245 since the pandemic began in early 2020.

Hospitalizations continue a downward trend, with 2,890 hospitalized, including 574 in intensive care.

The state said that by the end of the week it will have received a total of 2.4 million doses of vaccine since the first shipments arrived about a week before Christmas.

About 1.1 million people have received a dose, including 317,338 who have received the second of two doses needed to be fully vaccinated.

Those figures dont include people vaccinated in Philadelphia, which has its own vaccination program.
An NHS surgeon sacked after a patient was accidentally set on fire during an operation has won almost 65,000 in a race and unfair dismissal claim.

Breast specialist Obi Iwuchukwu, 57, was suspended after a woman suffered major burns whilst he operated on her in August 2013.

Mr Iwuchukwu had used an alcoholic antiseptic on the patient that ignited like a 'flash of lightning' when he then attempted to use a heated surgical tool to sterilise wounds.

All staff involved in the incident at the South Tyneside and Sunderland NHS Trust hospital received counselling, an employment tribunal heard.

Breast specialist Obi Iwuchukwu, 57, was suspended after a woman suffered a major burn whilst he had been operating on her in August 2013

An investigation was launched and Mr Iwuchukwu was eventually sacked after further concerns were raised about his performance.

More than five years later - and after a lengthy legal battle - the surgeon has won compensation, successfully arguing that he had been unfairly dismissed and racially discriminated against by the hospital trust.

However, the damages he will receive are nowhere near the 5million he was originally seeking.

The latest tribunal in Newcastle heard that Mr Iwuchukwu, originally from Nigeria, started work in Sunderland as a general surgeon with an interest in breast surgery in 2007.

During his time there he had a number of run-ins with colleagues, the panel was told.

The serious fire took place during an operation at a South Tyneside and Sunderland NHS Trust hospital in August 2013

This included an incident in which he clashed with a German colleague who had told him 'we are not operating out of a hut in Congo' to which Mr Iwuchukwu replied that Britain is 'not like Nazi Germany'.

The tribunal also heard how colleagues had begun to have concerns about Mr Iwuchukwu's performance, in particular the number of complications his patients suffered after surgery.

Then on a 'fateful day' in August 2013 a serious incident took place during an operation he was conducting.

The tribunal panel was told: 'During the operation he was handed an alcohol, rather than aqueous, based antiseptic solution which he applied to the patient.

'He then used a diathermy pen which targets electrically induced heat to stop the wound from bleeding. It ignited the alcohol preparation and the patient suffered a major burn.

'It was described in the subsequent investigation as though a flash of lightning had entered the theatre. All staff were given counselling.'

The hospital suspended Mr Iwuchukwu and launched a series of investigations before concluding in November that year that 'system error' rather than individual human error was mostly to blame, the tribunal heard.

Despite this the hospital continued with the surgeon's suspension without reviewing whether he could return to work in some fashion.

In addition, two grievances that Mr Iwuchukwu launched in 2014 against his bosses, complaining that he was being unfairly treated were mostly ignored.

The tribunal heard that the trust did not hold a formal 'capability' hearing into the surgeon until March of 2015.

At that meeting a report from the Royal College of Surgeons raised concerns about Mr Iwuchukwu's abilities and the hospital decided to sack him.

In the recent tribunal employment Judge Andrew Buchanan suggested that the sacking was a 'knee-jerk' reaction and more could have been done to create a plan to bring Mr Iwuchukwu back to work.

Judge Buchanan said: 'No analysis was carried out of the extent of [Mr Iwuchukwu's] practice which was giving rise to concern and no consideration was given to anything other than a blanket exclusion,'

'Everything points to the exclusion...being a knee-jerk reaction to the serious incident on 13 August 2013 on the assumption that the claimant was responsible for it but it became clear by early November 2013, at the latest, that [it] was not the fault of [Mr Iwuchukwu].

Judge Buchanan added that 'there was no review of the blanket exclusion' and that if the hospital had acted differently there was a chance Mr Iwuchkwu could have been allowed to continue some clinical work.

As it was, following his dismissal the surgeon moved to Cornwall to take up supervised operations and has continued to work in NHS hospitals, where he is currently earning more than 100,000 a year.

The failure by the trust to properly investigate Mr Iwuchkwu's grievances in May and October 2014 constituted racial discrimination and harassment, the panel concluded.

Following numerous employment tribunal hearings and a case at the Court of Appeal, the trust has now been ordered to pay the surgeon a total of 63,504 for the unfair dismissal and race discrimination claims.

A South Tyneside and Sunderland NHS Trust spokesperson said: 'Providing safe and high quality care to all of our patients is our absolute priority and we are pleased that this was accepted by the tribunal as a 'key consideration' in this case.

'Mr Iwuchukwu worked as the sole Consultant in Breast Surgery in 2013, when concerns around his performance first came to light. These concerns were fully investigated and subsequently confirmed by independent experts appointed by the Royal College of Surgeons. The General Medical Council (GMC) imposed restrictions on Mr Iwuchukwu's practice in 2014 which effectively prevented him from carrying out his role. These restrictions continued and were in force when City Hospitals Sunderland NHS Foundation Trust terminated his employment in August 2015, following a capability process.

'The Trust successfully defended many of Mr Iwuchukwu's claims at a hearing in 2016 and is disappointed with the outcome of the tribunal. However, we respect the findings and are pleased that the tribunal concluded that the content of Mr Iwuchukwu's grievances was in fact addressed as a result of other investigations.'
LAFAYETTE, LA  February 10, 2021  The Law Offices of Blaine Barrilleaux, a Lafayette area personal injury law firm, today announced it has started accepting applications for its 2021 Spring Scholarship. Louisiana students enrolled or enrolling in college are encouraged to apply. The application deadline is May 28, 2021, after which one student will receive $1,000 in support of their education.

One of the core values at our law firm is giving back, stated attorney Blaine J. Barrilleaux. We hope that by offering educational assistance to local students, we are helping support future community leaders. Education is an essential tool for creating opportunity, and positive change comes from that. We think its so important that weve increased our scholarship from $500 to $1,000 this year.

The Law Offices of Blaine Barrilleaux believes every individual should have the opportunity to receive an education so that he or she can develop the skills necessary to reach his or her goals in life. By offering this scholarship opportunity, the firm is supporting the next generation of corporate, nonprofit and government leaders. Finances often limit students who desire to pursue higher education, and this scholarship is intended to remove some of that barrier.

To be considered for the scholarship, applicants should submit a short essay about the importance of education and how it can be used to support the local community. Eligibility requirements include a 2.5 GPA or better, and enrollment or pursuing enrollment at a two-year or four-year accredited college. Law office clients and firm employees are not eligible.

Its always exciting to see how students will use the scholarship money, added Barrilleaux. Last years winner Miah Walton used it to continue her education at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux. Grace Payton, our 2019 recipient, used it to cover tuition at my alma mater, the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. I cant wait to see the good that the 2021 scholarship brings.

Those interested in applying are encouraged to submit their transcript, a brief bio, and essay to the following email: blainebarrilleauxscholarship@gmail.com. All scholarship submissions must be submitted by May 28th, 2021 for consideration. The selection committee will announce one winner on June 30th, 2021.

For more information about the Law Offices of Blaine Barrilleaux and its 2021 Spring Scholarship, please visit its scholarship resource page.

Australias former top public servant, Martin Parkinson, says the Morrison government has poorly managed its communication of policies that have upset China, warning it has further inflamed tensions with the nations biggest trading partner.

The former head of Treasury and the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet said Australia should not simplify the debate about the geo-strategic situation in the region, saying it was not a choice between the United States and China.

Former top public servant Martin Parkinson says Australia needs to better communicate its policies which have upset China. Credit:Louie Douvis

Speaking at the Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia annual conference on Wednesday, Mr Parkinson said to simplify the debate on China as a choice was actually really dangerous.

It implies we end up with two blocs and if we end up with two blocs we are heading toward a Cold War-type environment, he said.
A Kiambu court has released former Nairobi Governor Mike Sonko on a Sh300,000 bond with a surety of the same amount in his assault and robbery with violence case.

The case is in relation to an incident that happened on May 25, 2019 at Buruburu Phase 4 in Nairobi.

Chief Magistrate Stella Atambo noted that she arrived at these terms because most of the issues raised by the prosecution can be resolved out of court. The case will be mentioned on February 23.

Sonko earlier denied nine counts of assault, contrary to section 251 of the penal code.

From the Kiambu court, the former governor proceeded to the Kahawa Law Courts for the hearing of an application for his detention for 30 days, to allow investigations into his alleged links to terror activities.

On Monday, Anti-Terrorism Police Unit (ATPU) boss John Gachomo confirmed the arrest of nine of Sonko's aides.

"We have them. They will be arraigned tomorrow," Mr Gachomo said.

Seven of the aides were arrested within the city over the weekend by ATPU officers who found knives and an assortment of items including camouflage military fatigue.

The other two were arrested last week outside Kamiti.

The ATPU is investigating alleged planning and funding of terror activities by a militia allied to the former governor.


A strange optical illusion showing parallel bars with different shades of purple is dividing the internet.

Twitter users are hotly debating how many different shades the image shows, with some seeing 11 and 14 and one user even saying they can see 17 shades.

The image was posted by Twitter user @0UTR0EG0 earlier this month, who said: 'How many colors do you see???? i see 3.'

How many shades we see could be due to the Mach Bands illusion  at points where two colours join, some of us can see variations in shading even if they're not there.

But there might not be a definitive answer  different people will see different amounts of shades based on cones in their eyes, or even how much light is in their surrounding environment.

The image was posted by Twitter user @0UTR0EG0, who said: 'How many colors do you see???? i see 3.' The pink chunk to the right is very ambiguous, although some Twitter users said it alone contains six colours

Lighting conditions of your home, how much light is coming from your device and generally how good your eyesight is may all have an effect.

Twitter user @jtae0613 pointed out: 'To all the people here being confused.. it mostly has something to do with your output device (smartphone, laptop etc.), [because] the color rendering differs a lot more between devices than you think!

'Also if you are viewing it in dark or light mode, your surrounding light in real life etc.'

MailOnline can only see six  wait, make that seven  but can just about see faint lines dividing up the big chunk of dark pinkish-purple on the right.

Dr Paul Azzopardi, a researcher of visual perception at the University of Oxford, thinks that variations in calibration of devices  such as colour balance, contrast, brightness and ambient light  may be the explanation.

'If the question is why is it harder to tell apart adjacent bars as they get brighter, then Webers Law comes in to play  the just-noticeable-difference is proportional to the background intensity, which means we have to crank up the brightness of a bright bar more than we would for a dim bar before would notice the change,' he said.

'However, these bars seem to vary in several dimensions (hue, saturation and brightness), so they are not ideal for demonstrating this effect.'

One user said they could see 17 shades, and marked them out - but the consensus was somewhere between 11 and 15

According to one UK-based expert in perception and cognition, how many shades we see may even depend on our sex.

'Even though all humans see more or less the same range of the electromagnetic spectrum that is visible light for us, there are still individual differences,' Dr Michael J. Proulx, a neuroscientist at the University of Bath, told MailOnline.

'Average vision is trichromatic  we have three types of cone cells in the eye that combine to allow us to see the colours we see.

'In colour-blindness there is dichromacy, where only two types of cone cells are available, and so the ability to see colour is reduced, and this more common in males.

'There is even tetrachromacy where there are more than three cone cell types so even more colours can be seen, and this is more common in females.

'Besides those large differences, every person's eyes have different optics that screen the incoming light in different ways, and different densities in pigment in the eye that impacts light absorption.'

The ratios of the different types of cone cells  the photoreceptor cells in the retinas of our eyes  can vary too.

'All of these differences mean that different people can see more or fewer colours than others  and this image nicely captures that for a portion of the colour spectrum!, Dr Proulx said.

One Twitter user pointed out that seeing more than 11 shades is due to an optical illusion where the transition between the colours looks like a separate colour itself.

This effect is known as the Mach Bands illusion  an optical phenomenon named after the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach (1838-1916).

The illusion  originally described for bands of grey  exaggerates the contrast at the edges of slightly differing shades as soon as they contact one another, by triggering edge-detection in the human visual system.

Mach Bands illusion is an optical phenomenon named after the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach, who first demonstrated it. The effect exaggerates the contrast between edges of the slightly differing shades of grey, as soon as they contact one another, by triggering edge-detection in the human visual system

But once the bands become separated, the Mach Bands illusion is no longer seen.

For sake of argument, let's say there are around 10 different shades in the image of purple vertical bands that's currently trending on Twitter.

At the points where bars of two different shades come into contact, the human eye can see another shade.

So, for example, the very edge of a light shaded purple bar looks even lighter when it's next to a darker shaded bar.

The edge of the darker shaded bar, meanwhile, looks even darker when up against the lighter shaded bar.

This is due to an automatic process in our brains called lateral inhibition that helps us define the edges of objects.

Lateral inhibition is the capacity of an excited neurons in the eye  or nerve cells  to reduce the activity of its neighbours, which creates a contrast in stimulation that allows increased sensory perception.

Some people experience the effects of the Mach Bands illusion more than others  which is essentially why images like this one create such fierce debate on social media.

Some optical illusions can trick you into seeing moving shapes, but it seems this one can make you notice colours or shades that aren't actually there.


Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

In recent years, three meta-analyses of clinical studies have come to the conclusion that vitamin D supplementation was associated with a reduction in the mortality rate from cancer of around 13 percent. Scientists at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) have now transferred these results to the situation in Germany and calculated: If all Germans over the age of 50 were to take vitamin D supplements, up to 30,000 cancer deaths per year could possibly be avoided and more than 300,000 years of life could be gainedin addition, health care costs could be saved.

For several years now, scientists have been investigating the influence of an adequate supply of vitamin D on the prognosis of numerous diseases. The focus is particularly on inflammatory diseases, diabetes, respiratory diseases and cancer.

Three meta-analyses of large clinical studies have been published in recent years on the question of how vitamin D supply affects cancer mortality rates. The studies came to the same conclusion: cancer mortality is reduced by around 13 percent with vitamin D supplementationacross all cancers. Only methodologically high-quality randomized trials from all parts of the world were included in the meta-analyses. Exactly what biological mechanisms might underlie this is not yet clear.

"In many countries around the world, the age-adjusted rate of cancer mortality has fortunately declined over the past decade," says Hermann Brenner, an epidemiologist at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ). "However, given the often considerable costs of many new cancer drugs, this success has often come at a high price. Vitamin D, on the other hand, is comparatively inexpensive in the usual daily doses."

Vitamin D deficiency is common in the elderly population and especially among cancer patients. Brenner and colleagues now calculated what costs would be incurred by vitamin D supplementation of the entire population of Germany from the age of 50. They contrasted this sum with the potential savings for cancer therapies, which are often associated with costs in the range of several 10,000 euros, particularly in the case of advanced cancers during the last months of patients' lives.

The scientists based this calculation on a daily administration of 1,000 international units of vitamin D at a cost of 25 euros per person per year. In 2016, approximately 36 million people over the age of 50 lived in Germany, resulting in annual supplementation costs of 900 million euros.

The researchers took the cost of cancer treatment from the scientific literature, assuming mean additional treatment costs of 40,000 for the last year of life. A 13 percent reduction in cancer mortality in Germany corresponded to approximately 30,000 fewer cancer-related deaths per year, the treatment costs of which amounted to 1.154 billion in the model calculation. Compared with the costs of vitamin supplementation, this model calculates an annual saving of 254 million.

The researchers determined the number of years of life lost at the time of cancer death using data from the German Federal Statistical Office. Brenner considers the costs and effort of a routine determination of the individual vitamin D level to be dispensable, since an overdose is not to be feared with a supplementation of 1000 international units. Such a prior testing had not been made in the clinical trials either.

"In view of the potentially significant positive effects on cancer mortalityadditionally combined with a possible cost savingwe should look for new ways to reduce the widespread vitamin D deficiency in the elderly population in Germany. In some countries, foods have even been enriched with vitamin D for many yearsfor example, in Finland, where cancer mortality rates are about 20 percent lower than in Germany. Not to mention that there is mounting evidence of other positive health effects of adequate vitamin D supply, such as in lung disease mortality rates," says Brenner, adding, "Finally, we consider vitamin D supplementation so safe that we even recommend it for newborn babies to develop healthy bones."

To improve one's vitamin D levels at absolutely no cost, DKFZ's Cancer Information Service recommends spending time outdoors in the sunshine, two to three times a week for about twelve minutes. Face, hands and parts of arms and legs should be uncovered and without sunscreen for this period of time.

Explore further Is there a connection between vitamin D deficiency and COVID-19?

More information: Tobias Niedermaier et al, Vitamin D supplementation to the older adult population in Germany has the costsaving potential of preventing almost 30,000 cancer deaths per year, Molecular Oncology (2021). Tobias Niedermaier et al, Vitamin D supplementation to the older adult population in Germany has the costsaving potential of preventing almost 30,000 cancer deaths per year,(2021). DOI: 10.1002/1878-0261.12924
Search Party has been renewed for a fifth season with series creators Charles Rogers and Sarah-Violet Bliss also scoring a development deal.

The dark comedy thriller was renewed by HBO Max with creators Rogers and Bliss signing a two-year overall deal, according to an article Tuesday by Deadline.

Search Party stars Alia Shawkat, 31, John Reynolds, 29, John Early, 33, Meredith Hagner, 33, and 28-year-old Brandon Micheal Hall.

Search continues: Search Party, starring Alia Shawkat (shown in September 2019 in Italy), has been renewed for a fifth season with series creators Charles Rogers and Sarah-Violet Bliss also scoring a development deal

'We are thrilled that HBO Max has not only given the world a fifth season of Search Party, but also shown this much faith in our partnership with them as we develop new projects for the platform,' Bliss and Rogers told Deadline in a statement.

Search Party aired its first two seasons on TBS before relocating to HBO Max for seasons three and four.

'Charles and Sarah-Violet are the masters of genre-blending and we can't wait to see what they come up with next,' said Sarah Aubrey, head of original content at HBO Max.

'It's been a joy working with them  they are whip-smart, wildly funny and have such a distinctive worldview  we couldn't be happier that they are continuing to call HBO Max their home,' Aubrey added.

Development deal: The dark comedy thriller was renewed by HBO Max with creators Charles Rogers and Sarah-Violet Bliss, shown in November 2017 in Hollywood, signing a two-year overall deal, according to an article Tuesday by Deadline

Search Party has been switching genres each season while satirizing the millennial generation and Bliss credited the cast and crew for helping push the boundaries.

'It's such a testament to Alia and all the actors, and everyone who works on the show, being so willing to go to places that are really risky. And with each season, we have been able to kind of earn the next season,' Bliss told Deadline.

'I don't think in season one we thought we would take it exactly where we've taken it and where we are planning to take it. It's progressed, we have been able to take more and more leaps to a point where people now trust us more and we trust ourselves more to be able to take risks that people really tend to respond to. It is a joy to get to try to create and work with people who are capable of pulling it all off,' she added.

Switching genres: Search Party has been switching genres each season while satirizing the millennial generation with a cast featuring John Reynolds and Meredith Hagner, shown in November 2017 in Hollywood

The fourth season of Search Party began airing on January 14 on HBO Max and the final four episodes were released on January 28.

The latest season has received overwhelmingly positive critical reviews and held a 100 percent rating Tuesday on Rotten Tomatoes.

Search Party is primarily set in New York City and follows a group of friends who become involved in the search for a missing young woman.

Posted Wednesday, February 10, 2021 5:06 am

Last September, the City of Battle Ground launched a review of its Shoreline Master Program (SMP) as required by the Washington State Shoreline Management Act. Areas within the city with a shorelines designation are located in the southeast quadrant of the city and border Salmon Creek.

The purpose and focus of the SMP review is to ensure consistency with changes to state law, with the citys comprehensive plan and overall usability of the program.

Members of the public have two opportunities to provide comments on the plan and proposed amendments. Comments for the record of a February 24 Planning Commission meeting and public hearing must be received by the city no later than 5 p.m. February 23. A joint city of Battle Ground/Washington State Department of Ecology public comment period is open from February 10 through March 12.

Comments for either option should be submitted to Battle Ground Assistant Planner James Cramer by email at james.cramer@cityofbg.org or by mail to City of Battle Ground, 109 SW 1st Street, Suite 127, Battle Ground, WA 98604. Submitted comments received by the city are also reviewed by the Department of Ecology.

The February 24 Planning Commission Meeting and Public Hearing will be held remotely via Zoom meeting. Instructions on how to join can be found at cityofbg.org/agendacenter.
The Russian Ambassador in Bucharest, Valery Kuzmin, says Moscow has "every reason" to doubt an "impartial investigation" by the European Union into Alexei Navalny case.

"It is very strange to hear that the European Union as a whole or countries of the European Union, one after another, including Romania, have demanded, in fact insisted, that Russia violate Russian law. How many times have we not heard and will we not hear statements about justice, about the rule of law, about the fact that democratic principles are inviolable in this area? What are we talking about in the Navalny case? My younger son would say that this case is a performance of transparency and extraordinary humanism," the Russian diplomat told a press conference on Wednesday.

According to him, Alexei Navalny was "the only citizen in Russia who enjoyed the privilege of not being in prison even for a day, despite two successive convictions.""In principle, it is arrogance that Mr. Navalny has become a kind of candidate to becoming a sacred victim in Russia, to launch something similar to the revolution in Maidan, Kiev, seven years ago. We remember very well the time when Ukrainian law enforcement followed the line of extreme tolerance and humanness, interacting with protesters or being unarmed in front of protesters," Kuzmin said.He claimed that the European Union had "politicized" Alexei Navalny's case."We have every reason to doubt any impartial investigation by the European Union, which itself has intensely politicized Navalny's case, in fact created it as a political issue. It was simply a criminal case. Now, in Europe's view, it is a big political problem. If you think that Mr. Navalny is the leader of the opposition, he is a politician, take advantage of the progressive experience and practice of his colleagues in Spain. They talk about the arrest and imprisonment of one of the leaders of the Catalan movement - 'We have no political prisoners, we have politicians in prison'. If you consider Mr. Navalny a politician, then note that he is not a political prisoner, but an imprisoned politician," said Valery Kuzmin.The Kremlin's main critic, Alexei Navalny, was arrested on January 17 and sentenced to almost three years in prison. According to Navalny, the Kremlin is trying to silence him by this arrest, after failing to kill him in August by poisoning him with a Novichok-class toxic agent, accusations rejected by the Russian authorities.

AGERPRES
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The U.S.-government funded outlet Voice of America has confirmed rumors that a new military base is being built in northeastern Syria. A convoy of 40 troop carriers and other vehicles arrived and began setting up shop in the city of Hasakah near the Turkish and Iraqi borders over the weekend. The U.S. flag is now raised over a building, said journalist Jindar Berekat, a native of the city, it is not clear how many American soldiers will be stationed at this location, but their armored military vehicles are here and it looks like they are still constructing parts of it.

Many here believe that the building of a U.S. base inside Hasakah could be a response to the growing Russian presence in the city, a local reporter told Voice of America, this new center [is being built] with the aim of observing Russian forces in Hasakah. Russian military units have been present in Syria since 2015, intervening on behalf of the government of Bashar al-Assad.

The two foreign superpowers have come close to armed confrontation in Syria many times, including in 2017, when President Trump ordered the bombing of a Russian airbase near the Lebanese border. Already, the American presence has prevented the Russian military from carrying out patrols in northeastern Syria.

While the United States has presented its role in Syria as a counter terrorism operation, Assads government has accused it of plundering its resources, condemn[ing] in the strongest terms the agreement signed between al-Qasd militia (SDF) and an American oil company to steal Syrias oil under the sponsorship and support of the American administration. Around 500 American troops have been guarding the countrys oilfields for months, and last summer, Senator Lindsay Graham confirmed that the U.S. had indeed signed a deal with the SDF to modernize the countrys oil industry. Damascus considers the agreement null and void.

The new base at Hasakah is the latest in a string of actions that suggest the United States wishes to bolster or expand its presence in the war-torn country. Last month, American forces reinforced another base along the M4 highway, which runs from the city of Aleppo through the north of the country and towards the Iraqi border in the east. At the same time, its ally Israel was conducting a series of major airstrikes across the east of the country, reportedly targeting Iranian or pro-Iranian forces.

Increasing hostilities against Iran appears to be a chief concern of the U.S. in the Middle East. 12 months ago, the government announced the construction of three further military bases along the Iran-Iraq border. This was despite a recent unanimous vote (with some abstentions) in the Iraqi parliament demanding the United States military leave the country. This was followed by huge demonstrations in Baghdad demanding the withdrawal of U.S. troops Some estimates put the number of those attending as high as 2.5 million people. President Biden has also ruled out lifting deadly sanctions on the country until it complies with the 2015 nuclear deal  an agreement that the U.S. left unilaterally.

The Biden administration has distanced itself from Trump somewhat on the question of Yemen. The new president received a great deal of praise for his announcement that he was suspending military support to Saudi Arabia. However, as Yemen-born academic Shireen Al-Adeimi noted, he included a number of qualifiers to his statement, including that the U.S. would only stop supporting offensive operations and block relevant arms sales. We are going to continue to help Saudi Arabia defend its sovereignty and its territorial integrity and its people, Biden said in a speech at the State Department. Almost immediately, the State Department began condemning Yemens Houthi rebels for supposedly attacking civilian targets inside Saudi Arabia.

Perhaps the Saudis defense of their own territory will start to look like Israels self-defense against Lebanon and Palestine. On Israel, Biden has countersigned Donald Trumps decision to move the American embassy to Jerusalem, effectively endorsing the Israeli occupation of Palestines largest city. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, reports suggest he might go back on the decision to remove U.S. troops from the country.

With the arrival of every new president, hope springs eternal that they will conduct a less aggressive strategy in the Middle East. However, many of Bidens first moves, including the building of a new base in Syria, suggest his term will be more of the same rather than a break with the old.

Feature photo | A US soldier stands guard at an undisclosed location in Syria, Oct. 27, 2020. Jensen Guillory | DVIDS

Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams.
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The grand jury that declined to charge a state prison assistant warden in a rape case earlier this month was not provided the sexual assault forensic examination and report done by a nurse, an omission sharply questioned by the victim and sex crime experts.

Jurors rejected a second-degree rape charge against Louisiana State Penitentiary assistant warden Barrett Boeker on March 6, issuing a "no true bill" in the case.

Sexual assault experts said the failure of the West Feliciana Parish District Attorney and Sheriff's offices to collect and examine the physical evidence gathered during the rape exam falls outside standard practices.

"If there's a rape exam done, I can't imagine not looking at the sexual assault exam," said retired East Baton Rouge assistant district attorney Sue Bernie, who prosecuted sex crimes for 30 years. "You'd always want to see that."

West Feliciana Parish District Attorney Sam D'Aquilla said they did not need to use the rape kit because both the victim and the perpetrator said sexual intercourse had occurred the night of the alleged incident. D'Aquilla said the pertinent question in this case was consent, which couldn't be tested by the evidence included in the kit.

"It wouldn't help out the case," D'Aquilla said. "(Boeker) has already admitted that, 'Yeah we had sex.'"

However, the sexual assault exam, commonly known as a "rape kit," includes more than bodily fluids that can be sampled for DNA, East Baton Rouge Coroner Beau Clark said. A completed report includes the victim's statement, descriptions of any signs of violence such as bruises or scratches, as well as an evaluation by the specially-trained nurse, Clark said.

"The kit is so important, it really is the best thing a prosecutor can have to prove a sexual assault," said Racheal Hebert, the president and CEO of Sexual Trauma Awareness & Response (STAR). "The fact that it was not (reviewed) is not only shocking, it's also unbelievable, and it points in my mind to mishandling in this case."

Priscilla Lefebure, the 23-year-old victim, said that there were photos taken of Boeker's handprints on her elbows and leg in the rape kit, signs that he forced himself on her.

Lefebure said she was raped twice by Boeker, first on Nov. 30 when she had been staying with the man and his family following the flood. Boeker's wife and their children are Lefebure's cousins. The second rape happened on Dec. 3 after a party, also at Boeker's home on the grounds of the Angola prison, she said. Lefebure said she returned because she thought she would be safe with Boeker's wife present at the house.

+2 Assistant warden arrested after alleged rape at home in Angola village An assistant warden at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola was arrested Tuesday on a 

Lefebure went to Woman's Hospital on Dec. 8 for the sexual assault evaluation, which is within the recommended five days following an assault to complete a rape kit, Hebert said. Boeker was booked with one count of second-degree rape by the West Feliciana Sheriff's Office on Dec. 20.

The Advocate typically does not name people who report that they are victims of sexual assault. But Lefebure said she wanted to have her name used in this article.

Clark said the rape kit and accompanying evidence collected when Lefebure went to Woman's Hospital for the evaluation in early December sat in his office until after the grand jury met, a fact first reported by WBRZ-TV. Because Lefebure went to a hospital within East Baton Rouge parish for her examination, the rape kit was handled by his office. Clark said they cooperate with law enforcement agencies from any jurisdiction.

"When the cops get the kit can change (from case to case), but they always come get the kit and they're the ones that submit it to the crime lab," Clark said. The West Feliciana sheriff's office picked up the rape kit Monday, he said, a week after the grand jury decision and almost three months after it was conducted.

As dictated under Louisiana law, a victim does not have to report to a law enforcement agency after having a rape kit done, so the kits are stored indefinitely by the coroner's office until an officer comes to retrieve them, Clark said.

However, D'Aquilla said even if there were photos of bruising or other evidence in the rape kit, he didn't think it would make a difference in his prosecution.

"It's not a question of whether or not she had bruises," D'Aquilla said. "(Boeker) got up there and told his side of the story, 'We had sex and it was consensual, we got kind of rough.' ... It was just credibility."

D'Aquilla added that he doubted evidence in the kit would support Lefebure's contention that she was attacked. "Even if you have a ton of bruises, that doesn't say it's not consensual," he said.

Bernie said there are some cases of sexual assault where the DNA-portion of the rape kit wouldn't need to be tested, such as when consent is the main issue. But the former sex crimes prosecutor said it should be protocol for a DA's office to review the rest of the rape exam report. She said the details included can corroborate the account given by a victim or defendant.

"That would be one of the first things I would want to see, the rape exam report," Bernie said. However, she added that, "there may be situations even in a consent-defense case, depending on what details the accused gave," that prosecutors might still want to review evidence in the kit.

Bernie said she's worked on cases where both the victim and the accused state that intercourse occurred, but the details of the account are different, so she has tested the rape kit for saliva or other pertinent evidence.

Two days after D'Aquilla first explained to The Advocate why he chose to not use the evidence before taking the case to the grand jury, he said that his office had actually called the East Baton Rouge Parish coroner to ask for the kit multiple times. D'Aquilla could not confirm how or when someone from his office contacted the coroner's office.

Clark disputed that claim, saying he checked if his office had received inquiries from the West Feliciana Parish District Attorney's Office. He said they did not. But either way, Clark said, it is not his office's role to take a completed rape kit to be tested or to deliver it.

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The West Feliciana Sheriff's Office declined to answer questions about why they did not retrieve the rape kit and evaluation during their investigation of the incident, saying it could affect future proceedings. They also denied a public records request to view the investigative file of the case on the same grounds.

D'Aquilla said they decided to present the case to a grand jury to determine if charges would be filed.

"Every time we have a grand jury, we present everything we have in our file," D'Aquilla said. He said they did not have any photos and had little witness cooperation, so the case really rode on the statements from Lefebure and Boeker. He said it came down to which story was more believable.

Both Lefebure and Boeker testified, D'Aquilla said, and their decision to refuse charges showed the 12 independent grand jurors found her not credible.

"If somebody's squirming around, not paying attention, you are smart enough to know (they are) trying to be deceptive," D'Aquilla said. "That's why she was there."

But that thinking can be flawed when it comes to victims of trauma, said Hebert, the STAR leader.

"Trauma has a very chaotic effect on the brain... they can forget or confuse details," Hebert said. "It's scary that people in our community, especially people responsible for holding people accountable, still don't understand the dynamics of sexual trauma and how that affects the victim and their memory."

A nurse trained in sexual assault procedures asks questions in a way that sparks the memory during a sexual assault exam, Hebert said, which is another reason accessing the rape exam report is crucial.

The two Sheriff's office deputies who investigated the case were not called to testify at the grand jury. D'Aquilla said his office did not call them because they had nothing to add beyond the victim's statement. The nurse who conducted the sexual assault evaluation or any expert from the coroner's office was not called either, something Clark said has been done in other cases.

Lefebure never met in person with D'Aquilla or anyone from his office to tell the entirety of what happened to her the nights she alleged she was raped, both Lefebure and D'Aquilla said. D'Aquilla said he spoke with her briefly on the phone a few times and in person at Boeker's arraignment, and he had watched her video statements from the Sheriff's Office.

Bernie said she would always try to meet with the victim before going to a grand jury. When possible, she tried to prepare victims who were going to testify as best she could, sometimes even taking them to the courtroom to see what it will be like. Lefebure said she did not feel ready to testify.

"He didn't do his job," Lefebure said. "At this point I would never tell a sexual assault victim to come forward."

D'Aquilla said he didn't feel comfortable speaking to Lefebure. He told her, "'Don't tell me, you just go in there and testify,'" D'Aquilla said.

D'Aquilla told The Advocate that he found many red flags in Lefebure's story and credibility, including her arrest on domestic violence and home invasion counts after an incident with her boyfriend that occurred two weeks before the first alleged rape. The district attorney said Boeker and his wife, Lefebure's cousin, picked Lefebure up from jail after that arrest, something that was part of the file presented in this case.

However, East Baton Rouge Parish District Attorney Hillar Moore III said his office dropped that case at the end of January at the victim's request.

D'Aquilla also said he found it troubling that there were no witnesses of the assaults, that no one heard her scream or woke up during the attacks and that she returned to the house where she said she was first raped.

But Hebert countered that past criminal histories of victims should never be relevant because even if someone has committed a crime, it does not mean they cannot be a victim of a crime, she said.

She said it is also common that victims of an assault do not scream, whether out of fear for their lives or another reason, and that when someone is assaulted by a relative or friend, there are a lot of factors at play including power dynamics that may have led her to return to the perpetrator.

"It sounds like the DA is trying to diminish her credibility," Hebert said.

D'Aquilla said their office simply used the evidence they had. If more evidence becomes available, he said they will reopen the case.

Boeker's attorney Cy D'Aquila, a distant relative of D'Aquilla, said that his client maintained from the beginning that they had sex twice, and that it was consensual. He said he didn't think the rape kit was necessary, while pointing out that his client passed a privately administered polygraph examination about if there was consent.

Lefebure said she wouldn't want West Feliciana opening the case again because she felt the whole system was there to support Boeker and discredit her.

"They knew they were never going to convict this man," Lefebure said, a nursing student. "I never stood a chance with the DA, up against this man in this parish... I felt like I was on trial, like I was the criminal."
Highlights Nokia 5.4 has a big display but it does not support 1080p resolution.

The Nokia 5.4 is powered by an octa-core Snapdragon 662 SoC.

Nokia 5.4 comes with 10W fast charging on the 4000mAh battery.

Nokia 5.4 has been launched in India as the new budget smartphone. It comes as the successor to the Nokia 5.3 that arrived in the Indian market back in August last year. The new phone brings a lot of new features, such as a Qualcomm processor, pure Android experience, capable cameras, and promised Android upgrades. HMD is trying to lure customers with these things because the specifications-wise, the Nokia 5.4 does not go quite against the Realme and Redmi smartphones.

If you think you are convinced enough to consider the Nokia 5.4 as your next phone, despite knowing you can get a better value for money in smartphones from Realme, Redmi brands, here is a rundown of specifications of the Nokia 5.4, its price, and features that you should definitely know about. To remind you, we also have a quick review for the Nokia 5.4 in case you want to get a clearer idea while the review should be out in the coming days.

Nokia 5.4 specifications

Display: The Nokia 5.4 comes with a 6.39-inch 720p LCD with a punch-hole and no 90Hz refresh rate.

Processor: Powering the Nokia 5.4 is an octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 662 processor.

RAM: There is up to 6GB RAM available on the Nokia 5.4.

Storage: Nokia 5.4 comes with 64GB storage with support for microSD card.

Rear Cameras: The Nokia 5.4 comes with a 48MP main sensor on the back with support from a 5MP ultrawide camera, a 2MP macro camera, and a 2MP depth-sensing camera.

Front Camera: Inside the punch-hole cutout is the 16MP selfie camera.

Battery: The Nokia 5.4 is backed by a 4000mAh battery with 10W fast charging.

Operating System: The Nokia 5.4 runs Android 10 and will get Android 11 soon.

Nokia 5.4 features

The Nokia 5.4 comes with a Google Assistant button on the left side that triggers the voice assistant when pressed. The smartphone has a cinematic video recording for pros along with a colour grading feature on the back cameras. The smartphone is equipped with AI technology for almost everything that will help you create the content. The Nokia 5.4 comes with two years of Android version upgrades and three years of Android security updates. The display is quite big but it does not support 1080p resolution, which means you cannot watch Netflix, YouTube videos in high quality. The battery is facilitated by Android's Adaptive Battery feature that allocates power according to the priority of requirement.

Nokia 5.4 price in India

The Nokia 5.4 comes at a price of Rs 13,999 for the base variant with 4GB RAM and Rs 15,499 for the 6GB RAM model. It comes in Polar Night and Dusk colour options. The sale starts on February 17 from Flipkart and Nokia online store.
Anana the polar bear, who recently left the Cincinnati Zoo on a breeding recommendation, was killed Monday at the Detroit Zoo.

The 20-year-old polar bear died in a breeding attempt with 16-year-old male Nuka, officials with the Detroit Zoo said.

The pair had lived together without incident since 2020.

"This was completely unexpected and the Detroit Zoo staff is devastated by the loss of Anana in this sudden and tragic event, said Detroit Zoological Society Chief Life Sciences Officer Scott Carter.

The Detroit Zoo has not experienced the killing of one animal by another animal in decades; the last occurrence was also with polar bears in 1988.

After being apart for several months, Nuka and Anana were re-introduced last week as part of the Association of Zoos & Aquariums Polar Bear Species Survival Plan.

Anana spent three breeding seasons with Cincinnati's tenured male polar, 31-year-old Little One, without producing a cub.

The AZA paired her with Nuka, who has sired cubs in the past.

The two polar bears lived at Detroit's Arctic Ring of Life, which includes a grassy tundra, a freshwater pool, a "pack ice" area and a 190,000-gallon saltwater pool. It's one of North America's largest polar bear habitats.

The Detroit Zoos other adult female polar bear, Suka, is in a private maternity den with one of her cubs.
CHICAGO, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Paessler, the monitoring experts, today announced that CRN, a brand of The Channel Company, has named Sebastian Kruger, regional manager, Americas, to its 2021 list of Channel Chiefs. The prestigious CRN Channel Chiefs list, released annually, recognizes leading IT channel vendor executives who continually demonstrate outstanding leadership, influence, innovation, and growth.

Kruger, who has led Paessler's North and South American teams for the past two years, made significant expansions and enhancements to Paessler's channel strategy. Under his leadership, Paessler developed an MSP subscription licensing model for PRTG, its monitoring software, giving MSPs more flexibility and transparency to serve their customers through consultative technology monitoring while growing their bottom line. He also launched a new enterprise subscription model as market demand for an enterprise-level monitoring solution continued to build.

Kruger grew Paessler's channel team by establishing a new territory approach with dedicated channel account managers, inside sales reps and pre-sales technical support to better serve the needs of the company's channel partners. At the onset of the pandemic, Kruger and his team quickly pivoted to hosting virtual channel events, focusing on the quality of engagement between Paessler and attendees, which resulted in a high-level of engagement, stronger relationships, and increased sales. He also launched the new IoT program created by Paessler, including new sensors in PRTG to accommodate for the explosion of growth around Smart Building, Smart Factory and Smart City. This included building new alliances with the OPC Foundation for industry standardization, which has made it easier for channel partners to enter this market or expand their service offerings.

"We are proud of Sebastian for the success he has achieved building a strong channel-focused team and new programs geared to help Paessler's channel partners expand their services portfolios and sustainably grow their businesses," said Jurgen Thiel, head of global sales & business development, Paessler. "His vision and leadership have helped Paessler and its customers be in the forefront of emerging technologies and markets in order to better capitalize on the opportunities within them."

The 2021 Channel Chiefs are prominent leaders who have influenced the IT channel with cutting-edge strategies, programs and partnerships. All honorees are selected by CRN's editorial staff based on their dedication, industry prestige, and exceptional accomplishments as channel advocates.

"CRN's 2021 Channel Chiefs list includes the industry's biggest channel evangelists, a group of individuals who work tirelessly on behalf of their partners and drive growth through the development of strong partner programs and innovative business strategies that help bring business-critical solutions to market," said Blaine Raddon, CEO of The Channel Company. "The Channel Company is proud to recognize these channel influencers and looks forward to following their continued success."

CRN's 2021 Channel Chiefs list will be featured in the February 2021 issue of CRN Magazine and online at www.CRN.com/ChannelChiefs.

About Paessler AG

In 1997 Paessler revolutionized IT monitoring with the introduction of PRTG Network Monitor. Today over 300,000 IT administrators, in more than 170 countries, rely on PRTG to monitor their business-critical systems, devices and network infrastructures. PRTG monitors the entire IT infrastructure 24/7 and helps IT professionals to seamlessly solve problems before they impact users.

Our mission is to empower technical teams to manage their infrastructure, ensuring maximum productivity. We build lasting partnerships and integrative, holistic solutions to achieve this. Thinking beyond IT networks, Paessler is actively developing solutions to support digital transformation strategies and the Internet of Things.

Learn more about Paessler and PRTG at www.paessler.com

About The Channel Company

The Channel Company enables breakthrough IT channel performance with our dominant media, engaging events, expert consulting and education, and innovative marketing services and platforms. As the channel catalyst, we connect and empower technology suppliers, solution providers and end users. Backed by more than 30 years of unequalled channel experience, we draw from our deep knowledge to envision innovative new solutions for ever-evolving challenges in the technology marketplace. www.thechannelcompany.com

Follow The Channel Company: Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

 2021. CRN is a registered trademark of The Channel Company, LLC. All rights reserved.

Media Contacts Hughes Agency Amanda Long T: +1 864.271.0718 [email protected] www.hughes-agency.com The Channel Company Contact: Jennifer Hogan The Channel Company [email protected] Paessler AG Gimena Robles Marketing & PR Manager T: +49 911 93775-0 F: +49 911 93775-409 [email protected] www.paessler.com

SOURCE Paessler AG - The Monitoring Experts

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Indian technology major (TCS) and pharmaceutical and biotech major are among the big investment wins being celebrated in the as International Trade Secretary Liz Truss concluded her five-day visit to India this week.

The Department for International Trade (DIT) confirmed that the Cabinet minister, who held talks with Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal during her visit to Delhi between February 5 and 9, had agreed the terms of an Enhanced Trade Partnership (ETP) and set the stage for a potential free trade agreement (FTA) in the future.

Besides, the minister also clinched a major investment by TCS that will bring 1,500 high-skilled jobs to sites all over the and further investment by at its Wrexham site in Wales, which will lead to more than 40 new jobs and the extension of a COVID-19 vaccination contract to ensure the has uninterrupted fill and finish capacity for vaccines in 2022.

India is the world's biggest democracy and a nation that shares our belief in free enterprise. Deeper trading ties will create opportunities for UK businesses that were simply not there as part of the European Union, and set the stage for a much closer partnership with one of the economic powerhouses of the present and future, said Truss.

We will be collaborating much more closely in the industries of tomorrow like science, tech and green growth, so we can build back better and deliver an export-led, investment-led, jobs-led recovery from coronavirus, she said.

According to official statistics, the UK-India trade relationship was worth 23 billion pounds in 2019 and supports key industries such as technology and life sciences and around half a million jobs in each other's economies.

During her India visit, Truss met UK respiratory digital health company Smart Respiratory Products, which is helping doctors in India manage their patients remotely via a smartphone app and telemedicine platform. The firm recently secured a GBP 5-million partnership with Indian company, Care Ability Healthcare, to supply their Smart Asthma respiratory solutions.

Life Sciences has been a priority sector for both nations, with UK pharmaceuticals exports to India growing by 21.4 per cent to 96.75 million pounds in 2019, the DIT notes.

In the field of life sciences and artificial intelligence (AI), AI healthcare start-up Behold, AI announced during the visit that it has partnered with India's Apollo Group to provide a diagnostic tool, which can quickly analyse chest x-rays to aid in screening COVID-19 positive patients.

And UK firm Micropore, which specialises in equipment and support services to enable pharma to improve the performance and economies of their formulated products, is setting up in Hyderabad to supply its membrane emulsification technology to the region and neighbouring markets.

The DIT said that the proposed ETP, the parameters of which were agreed by the ministers over the weekend, is an important part of the UK government's plan to deepen links with major economies of the present and future beyond Europe, creating more trade and investment in strategic industries like science, tech and services. And India, as the fastest growing major economy in the world, is an important part of this post-Brexit outlook.

Throughout the global pandemic, India and the UK have supported each other by keeping vital supply chains open, tackling protectionism and collaborating on vaccine research whether that be the production of over a billion doses of our life-saving Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine at India's Serum institute or unlocking the export of nearly 3 million packets of paracetamol, the DIT said.

The UK and India are pegged as significant investors and markets for each other's economies as in 2019-20, the UK was the largest European market for India's goods exports.

(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.)
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Novel Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 Transmission electron micrograph of SARS-CoV-2 virus particles, isolated from a patient. Image captured and color-enhanced at the NIAID Integrated Research Facility (IRF) in Fort Detrick, Maryland. Credit: National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, NIH

Past exposure to seasonal coronaviruses (CoVs), which cause the common cold, does not result in the production of antibodies that protect against the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, according to a study led by Scott Hensley, Ph.D., an associate professor of Microbiology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

Prior studies have suggested that recent exposure to seasonal CoVs protects against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. However, research from Hensley's team, published in Cell, suggests that if there is such protection, it does not come from antibodies.

"We found that many people possessed antibodies that could bind to SARS-CoV-2 before the pandemic, but these antibodies could not prevent infections," Hensley said. "Although antibodies from prior coronavirus infections cannot prevent SARS-CoV-2 infections, it is possible that pre-existing memory B cells and T cells could potentially provide some level of protection or at least reduce the disease severity of COVID-19. Studies need to be completed to test that hypothesis."

The researchers examined blood samples banked before the pandemic from hundreds of people. They found that more than 20 percent of these pre-pandemic samples carried "cross reactive" anti-CoV antibodies that could bind not only to ordinary cold-causing CoVs but also to key sites on SARS-CoV-2. However, these cross-reactive antibodies could not neutralize the infectivity of SARS-CoV-2, and were not associated with better outcomes in people who later went on to get COVID-19.

The scientists also found from blood testing in different groups that both children and adults on average tend to have similar levels of cross-reactive anti-CoV antibodiesimplying that these antibodies are not the factor that confers protection against severe COVID-19 among most children.

The COVID-19 pandemic, after more than a year of global spread, has resulted in more than 100 million reported infections, of which more than two million have been fatal. Although some risk factors, such as age, are clear enough, scientists still don't fully understand why some people become deathly sick with COVID-19 while others escape with mild illness or even no symptoms.

Antibodies have been considered one possible explanation. Ordinary seasonal coronaviruses, of the type that cause colds, have long circulated in the human population. An obvious hypothesis is that some of the antibodies elicited by these common infections cross-react with the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, providing some measure of protection, at least against severe COVID-19 illness.

In one set of analyses that Hensley and colleagues conducted, they examined blood samples collected from 263 children at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, and from 168 adults at the Penn Medicine Biobank. The samples had been taken in 2017, more than two years before the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic started.

The researchers found that most of the 431 samples contained antibodies to ordinary, seasonal CoVs. Some samples, about 20 percent, contained anti-CoV antibodies that were "cross reactive" with SARS-CoV-2, binding tightly to sites on its outer spike protein and/or its nucleocapsid proteinthe two coronavirus proteins that are most accessible to the immune system of infected hosts.

Hensley and colleagues separately analyzed blood samples banked before the pandemic from 251 people who later went on to test positive for SARS-CoV-2, and a control group of 251 peoplematched for age and other relevant characteristicswho did not test positive for the novel coronavirus. Again, they found that greater than 20 percent of the pre-pandemic samples contained anti-CoV antibodies that could cross-react with the SARS-CoV-2 spike and/or nucleocapsid proteins. Yet similar proportions of the infected and uninfected groups had these cross-reactive antibodies, implying that they provided no protection against SARS-CoV-2 infection. Moreover, in the group that later went on to be infected with SARS-CoV-2, levels of cross-reactive anti-CoV antibodies in their pre-pandemic blood samples did not correlate with measures of COVID-19 severity such as the need for hospitalization or ICU care.

In a third set of tests, the researchers analyzed blood samples from 27 hospitalized COVID-19 patients, and found that levels of these cross-reactive anti-CoV antibodies were strongly boosted during the course of COVID-19 illness.

The researchers recommend that larger studies be done to definitively resolve the question of whether pre-existing anti-CoV antibodies can protect against SARS-CoV-2 viruses. They also suggest that further studies examine other types of immune response, such as the T cell response, to see if these provide a measure of cross-reactive protection following seasonal CoV infection.

In the meantime, though, they say their results suggest that the shared sites where some antibodies bind both to seasonal coronaviruses and to SARS-CoV-2 are generally not vulnerable sites where SARS-CoV-2 can be neutralized.

Explore further Follow the latest news on the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak

More information: Elizabeth M. Anderson et al. Seasonal human coronavirus antibodies are boosted upon SARS-CoV-2 infection but not associated with protection, Cell (2021). Journal information: Cell Elizabeth M. Anderson et al. Seasonal human coronavirus antibodies are boosted upon SARS-CoV-2 infection but not associated with protection,(2021). DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2021.02.010
WESTFIELD - Guy McLain, a librarian and historian, is the new director of the Westfield Athenaeum.

McLain served as the director of the Lyman and Merrie Wood Museum of Springfield History at the Springfield Museums where he worked for more than a decade until 2017. At the museums, he oversaw the merging of the former Connecticut Valley Historical Museum, which he previously directed, with the Wood museum.

I am so pleased to have an opportunity to work at the Westfield Athenaeum. I consider it to be a jewel of Western Massachusetts, said McLain. It has a reputation for offering excellent library and historical services and I look forward to being part of the continuation of this effort while seeking to expand and improve all services for residents.

McLain also previously served as the librarian for the Springfield City Librarys Rare Book and Special Collections, overseeing the preservation and maintenance of more than 15,000 rare books dating from circa 1475 to the 20th century.

Susan Drummey, president of the Westfield Athenaeum Board of Directors, said McLain will help move the library grow and prosper.

His aspirations closely align with ours as he is dedicated to a mission of helping institutions prosper, grow and serve the public more efficiently, she said. This appointment ensures robust leadership, continuity on the strategic plan, physical building improvements, community services, programs and staff development.

McLain brings 20 years of progressive leadership experience to the Athenaeum. He also wrote a novel published in 2020 and titled, Drawing Without an Eraser which recounts experiences working with artists throughout his career.

Added Drummey, The athenaeum has a rich, historic and vital role in our community as a treasured resource for cultural enrichment. We are confident that Mr. McLain will lead our institution into its third century of outstanding service.

To learn more about the athenaeum, go online to westath.org.

Related content:

Former Springfield museum directors novel centers on plight of female artists

Westfield Library to Go program a success, hours added

Springfield, Worcester Museums look to expand

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Almost 1300 cases of illegally dumped rubbish and household goods in Brisbane show the mess left since the Brisbane City Council cancelled kerbside collections almost a year ago, the Labor opposition says.

The council cancelled kerbside collections in April 2020 for two years to reduce risk to its staff during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Brisbane City Council is cracking down on illegal dumping. Credit:Fairfax Media

Waste management groups say the decision could lead to an increase in illegal dumping.

Council has put CCTV cameras in known illegal dumping sites and in the past six months issued 100 infringement notices for illegal dumping, totalling $235,518 in fines.
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As Valentines Day rapidly approaches, U.S. Customs and Border Protections highly skilled agriculture specialists continue to dutifully examine hundreds of millions of arriving cut flower stems to ensure that plant diseases and plant pests are detected and stopped from being introduced into the United States where they could cause harm.

At international ports of entry, land borders and mail facilities, CBP agriculture specialists are the front line in the fight against the introduction of harmful insects and diseases into the United States.
Bo Bo Nge with his wife, Me Kyi, and son. Nge, the deputy governor of the Central Bank of Myanmar, has strong ties in Great Barrington. A photo has confirmed that he still is alive, after a Facebook post this month said he had died while jailed by the military regime.
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.
ROME, FEB 10 - Four police officers were found guilty on Wednesday of assaulting Stefano Origone, a reporter for daily newspaper La Repubblica, during clashes between police and anti-fascists in Genoa on May 23, 2019. The clashes took place following a rally by far-right group Casapound. The four officers were sentenced to 40 days in jail in a fast-track trial after being found guilty of causing bodily harm via excessive use of weapons. The judge said the cops did not recognise Origone as a journalist, having mistook him as a protestor. Such short jail terms in Italy are usually suspended. (ANSA).
UPDATE: CVS opens bookings in N.J. for COVID vaccines but appointments go quickly

Residents in New Jersey who want to book a COVID vaccine appointment at a CVS location will be be able to sign up starting Thursday and vaccinations will begin Friday, the company said.

CVS hasnt released which specific pharmacies will offer the vaccine, but it previously said they would be offered at 27 locations including stores in Brigantine, Edison, Elizabeth, Flemington, Green Brook, Hoboken, North Bergen, North Plainfield, Princeton, Seaside Heights, Stanhope, Union, Voorhees and West Orange.

Because active stores will change regularly based on vaccine supply, CVS Health will not provide a full list of participating locations, spokeswoman Tara Burke told NJ Advance Media.

To sign up for an appointment, you can go to cvs.com/immunizations/covid-19-vaccine or you can use the CVS Pharmacy app, the company said.

It also has a customer service line at (800) 746-7287 for those without internet access.

No walk-in vaccines will be provided, it said.

When you go to the website, you will see a map that highlights the different states where vaccines are available. New Jersey had not been added as of Wednesday morning.

When you sign up for a COVID vaccine using CVS' website, you will first see a map that shows in which states the doses are available.

When appointments are available in the state, you should be able to click the words New Jersey and you will see a pop-up box that will tell you who in the state is eligible for the vaccine and whether appointments are open or all booked.

If you click Schedule your appointment now, it will take you to a screening form that asks whether youve tested positive for COVID in the past 14 days, whether you have been close to someone else who has tested positive and whether you have COVID symptoms.

If you answer no to the three questions, the next screen will ask if youre looking for a first dose or second dose. After you select which you need, the next screen takes you to an eligibility checklist so you can attest that you are eligible. After you submit it, you will be given the opportunity to schedule your dose if appointments are available.

You should also be able to schedule a second dose appointment at the same time, the companys website said.

The second dose is scheduled within the appropriate timeframe, allowing enough time for a potential reschedule of the appointment, if needed, it said. CVS Health has implemented a detailed tracking system to make sure we know who received which vaccine and to help ensure they get the second dose of the same vaccine.

You wont be able to choose whether you get the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine, the company said, because it will depend on what supply goes to individual stores.

After you get the first dose, you will receive a vaccine card, the company said.

Individuals eligible for COVID-19 vaccinations are asked to use the appropriate digital channels or contact customer service to check for appointment availability, as opposed to contacting individual CVS Pharmacy locations, Burke said.

CVS vaccine supply comes directly through the federal pharmacy program and does not cut into the states supply, state officials said last week.

Tell us your COVID-19 vaccination stories, send us a news tip or questions about the vaccination process on our tip form.

Please subscribe now and support the local journalism YOU rely on and trust.

Karin Price Mueller may be reached at KPriceMueller@NJAdvanceMedia.com.

SEOUL: South Korea on Wednesday said it would grant its first approval for a coronavirus vaccine to AstraZeneca, and will allow use in people 65 years or older, despite advisory panels warning of a lack of data on its efficacy for the elderly

Regulators will grant AstraZenecas vaccine emergency authorisation under the condition the company must submit its full clinical trial results, Vice Health Minister Kim Gang-lip told a news conference.

However, we have added a precautionary line for cautious decision for use of the shots the elderly aged 65 and older," Kim said.

Several European countries have warned that the shot should only be given to those ages 18 to 64, and such concerns had threatened to upend South Koreas plan to prioritise elderly residents and medical workers in the first round of vaccinations.

On Monday, authorities sought to reassure elderly residents after a panel of advisers urged caution over the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine for people older than 65 because of a lack of data.

AstraZeneca and the chief of clinical trials for Britains Oxford University, which co-developed the vaccine, have said it triggers a good immune response in older people.

The approved doses for South Korea are produced by SK bioscience, the drugmaking arm of SK Chemicals, Kim said.

The Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA) had said vaccinations will begin on Feb. 26 with about 1.5 million doses of AstraZeneca vaccines, enough for 750,000 people. It will inoculate about 10 million high-risk people by July and aim to reach herd immunity by November.

The ministry has asked to receive by April final clinical trial results from AstraZenecas survey in the United States on about 30,000 people. The study includes around 7,500 elderly people, Kim said.

He added that the KDCA is reviewing the efficacy of the AstraZeneca-Oxford shot on new UK or South African variants, after uncertainty over protection. Oxford had said its vaccine has similar efficacy against the British coronavirus variant as it does to the previously circulating variants.

The KDCA reported 444 new COVID-19 cases by Tuesday, bringing the total number of infections to 81,930, with 1,486 deaths. The daily cases rebounded above 400 ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday, boosted by cluster infections mostly in near the capital Seoul.

Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor
Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-10 16:11:30|Editor: huaxia

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by Xinhua writers Zhu Sheng, Shen Zhonghao

BERLIN, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- German carmaker BMW voiced its confidence over the long-term development of the Chinese market, following a record high of sales in the country in 2020.

"We are confident that China will continue to open up and promote high-quality development," said Oliver Zipse, chairman of the board of management of BMW AG, in a written interview with Xinhua on Tuesday, prior to the Spring Festival, or the Chinese lunar new year, which falls on Feb.12 this year.

He said the year 2021, also the first year of China's 14th Five-Year Plan, will start a new journey of modernization in all dimensions.

China's economy and premium car market have achieved a rapid recovery thanks to the effective measures the country has taken, he said.

BMW Group's sales in China reached a new record in 2020 despite the COVID-19 pandemic, increasing by 7.4 percent year-on-year, with 777,379 BMW and MINI brand vehicles delivered to its customers in China.

An earlier announcement from the carmaker said that of the total 2.3 million BMW and Mini vehicles sold last year, almost one in three was sold in China.

China has established extensive economic and trade cooperation with Europe and Germany. The Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI) between China and the European Union (EU) has been reached in principle, which is expected to further promote cooperation between the two sides in the future.

"The dimension of cooperation between China and the EU is not limited to topics like investment and trade, but especially regarding our common climate goals," said Zipse, who is also the new head of the European Automobile Manufacturers' Association (ACEA).

"With a high-level environment and climate dialogue established and the EU-China CAI talks completed, we expect both sides to further enhance their carbon reduction policy coordination," he said, noting BMW fully supports China's goal to achieve carbon emissions' peak before 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060.

"We promote sustainable goals throughout the entire value chain. We will continue to contribute to China's green and low-carbon development from the enterprise level in the future," Zipse said.

BMW established a joint venture with China's Great Wall Motor and broke ground on a new energy vehicles (NEVs) factory in east China's Jiangsu Province in November 2019. The new plant, due for completion in 2022, will produce BMW's electric MINIs and Great Wall Motors models, with an annual capacity of 160,000 cars.

The second phase of the auto giant's high-voltage battery center began production in Shenyang, capital city of northeast China's Liaoning Province in September 2020.

Zipse said that BMW sees China beyond a market, but an origin of innovation. BMW is committed to the transformation from "made in China" to "created in China."

BMW will continue to focus on customer centricity and accelerate its development in China, including promotion of technological and digital innovation and the fulfillment of its commitment to a sustainable development, according to the chief of the Bavarian company.

"As a multinational enterprise in China, we seek sustainable development and continue to live up to our social responsibilities," he said.

Since 2009, BMW has built two vehicle plants, a powertrain plant and an R&D center in Shenyang, and invested more than 64 billion yuan (about 9.94 billion U.S. dollars) in China. German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited one of the plants in Shenyang in 2016.

The number of motor vehicles in China reached 372 million last year, 281 million of which were cars, according to its traffic administration. Enditem
1. Roads. The citys roads are a mess. Significant resources are needed to fix them.

2. Public safety. The crime rate is too high. Police pay and resources come first.

3. More city programs. The city must invest more in city programs and services.

4. Comprehensive plan. The city needs to focus on rebuilding and rebranding.

5. Cut city spending. City officials must get serious about trimming the budget.

Vote

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COLUMBIA  State senators approved a bill making K-12 school employees eligible for a COVID-19 vaccine, without requiring they actually get a shot anytime soon, in hopes no older South Carolinians will be tossed from an existing appointment.

The Senate voted unanimously Feb. 9 on the measure that also requires all school districts statewide to offer a full week of in-person learning following their scheduled spring break.

But amid limited vaccine supplies, it's certain most employees won't be able to get shots before the mandate starts.

The vote came a day after 309,000 seniors ages 65 to 69 became eligible for a shot. In all, 1.3 million South Carolinians are on the eligibility list, which already included seniors 70 and older, health care workers and long-term care residents.

The legislation would add roughly 150,000 more to the list, following an amendment that also bumped up day care workers.

As of Monday, nearly 471,000 South Carolinians had received at least their initial shot, and more than 410,000 doses were reserved through appointments, which largely depend on future shipments. Some of those are scheduled more than a month away, according to the state Department of Health and Environmental Control.

Exactly when schools would have to offer a full week in the classroom would vary by district, as each sets its own calendar. But it would likely guarantee at least six weeks of face-to-face instruction.

It's not the two months its sponsor, Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey, was aiming for, but he still considers it a win.

"It puts (school employees) into a higher-priority category and sets a certain date to get students back in school," the Edgefield Republican said.

As initially proposed, his bill would have required that every K-12 employee willing to get vaccinated receive both shots within 30 days, and then return fully to the classroom by March 22. Less than 75,000 of the K-12 staff statewide, or 58 percent, are ready to roll up their sleeve, according to a survey by the state Department of Education.

But some legislators called that unworkable, especially considering the shots should be given three to four weeks apart.

The bigger issue was that making it happen would have upended seniors' existing appointments for two weeks.

Some senators argued seniors would gladly give up their spots if it meant getting students fully back in the classroom quicker.

But Sen. Tom Davis countered that's not realistic. The Beaufort Republican knows from experience the outrage that follows seniors' appointments being suddenly canceled.

After seniors 70 and older became eligible last month, the Beaufort hospital had to cancel 6,000 appointments made on the incorrect expectation that their future shipments would be much larger.

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"The level of frustration and anger and feeling of having been misled was unlike anything Id ever seen in my 12 years in the Senate," Davis said, adding the state's difficult, multistep sign-up system exacerbated those frustrations.

"Once youve been told youre eligible and taken it upon yourself to run that gauntlet and managed to get that appointment, I dont want to do something that cancels that," he said.

His proposal, which ultimately failed, would have designated the week of March 15-22 solely to vaccinating K-12 school employees.

That was the first week that could be devoted to the effort without bumping slots for seniors, according to DHEC.

Davis' proposal would have delayed the statewide mandate for in-person learning until May, following a second round of shots in April and the two weeks after that health experts say it takes to be fully immunized.

What passed gets them in classrooms sooner but with few likely being vaccinated, something state and federal officials contend isn't necessary for safely operating schools.

It's similar to a measure introduced in the House hours earlier with bi-partisan support, suggesting both chambers could reach consensus to bump teachers onto the eligibility list in exchange for requiring five days of five-to-face learning.

But the details could potentially delay the bill becoming law before the state moves on to the next eligibility phase anyway, which includes teachers.

The vote in the Senate moved the debate to the House, where a resolution introduced by Rep. Russell Ott, D-St. Matthews, would require all districts offer full weeks of in-person instruction within 28 days of it becoming law.

Ott, who represents a rural school district where students have yet to return, called it a simpler approach that doesn't toss seniors from their slots. More than 20 colleagues have already signed on, including GOP House Education Chairwoman Rita Allison of Spartanburg County, where all seven school districts are among those already offering full face-to-face instruction.

Just over half of South Carolina's 1,263 public K-12 schools provide the option of a full-week in the classroom; 47 percent offer a mix of two to four days weekly in school, depending on the district and grades. The rest that remain remote-only are all poor, rural schools where, lawmakers contend, students particularly need the benefits of being in class.

Holding up the bill potentially becoming law is a promised veto from Gov. Henry McMaster.

Senators hoped the bill's changes would prevent a spat with the Republican governor, who has adamantly opposed putting teachers ahead of seniors who are much more susceptible of getting seriously ill and dying of the disease.

But the governor made clear after the vote it will still get his veto pen.

"Seniors are getting vaccinated in greater numbers each day," he said in a tweet. "Breaking faith by slowing down, disrupting, cancelling, or delaying any seniors vaccination shot is a bad idea with deadly consequences. I cannot  and will not  allow their lives to be jeopardized."

Of the nearly 7,700 South Carolinians who have died with COVID-19, more than 80 percent of them were 65 and older, according to DHEC.
NHS visitor bans mean teenagers with cancer are going alone to appointments where doctors tell them their illness is terminal, campaigners warn.

The Teenage Cancer Trust and CLIC Sargent have written a letter to health ministers across the UK asking them to pledge that young cancer patients will not have to face the devastating news or go through gruelling treatment on their own.

Seven young people aged between 13 and 24 are diagnosed with cancer every day in the UK, amounting to around 2,500 every year.

The charities, which are launching their 'Hand2Hold' campaign, said they want to 'dispel the disparity' in support in different areas of the NHS.

While NHS England insists visitors and chaperones are allowed to attend appointments with young cancer patients, hospital inpatient visits are generally not being permitted.

Decisions are ultimately made by individual hospitals  some require visitors to be pre-approved, while others reportedly haven't allowed them at all during the crisis.

In the letter to health minister Jo Churchill, the charities praised the 'diligent work of the NHS and its staff to ensure that vital care continues'.

Some worried parents have had to sit in hospital car parks waiting for their children to come out of appointments, said children's cancer charity CLIC Sargent.

And a survey by the charity found that 90 per cent of sick young people had been to treatment alone, while one 22-year-old from Wales said she would have to stay in Manchester for a stem cell transplant but wouldn't be able to take family with her.

Kathryn was shocked when a scan found a 12cm x 14cm mass in her chest, and doctors diagnosed her with Hodgkin lymphoma when she was just 20 years old. Now 22, she will have to travel alone from Wales to Manchester for treatment

Sophie, 24, said her family would not be able to stay with her during a lengthy stay at hospital in Manchester  she lives in Wales  after her leukaemia last year returned for the second time

The charities' letter said: ' [We] are extremely grateful that in many cases, staff and trusts have gone above and beyond to help mitigate this difficult situation for young people with cancer and ensure there is some sort of accompaniment  even if virtual.

'We want these examples of good practice to be encouraged throughout the UK.

'We are asking you as minister for health in each nation, to commit to young people with cancer that they should not have to hear the news they have cancer, or face their treatment alone.'

In a recent Facebook poll of 100 young people CLIC Sargent supports, nine out of 10 said they had gone through treatment on their own in hospital during the pandemic.

NHS policy dictates that visiting 'is allowed in a very careful and Covid-secure way'.

Visiting inpatients may be allowed but limited to one person who must wear PPE and maintain social distancing.

And people can be accompanied to outpatient appointments by anyone 'important to them', but generally only one person, and social distancing must be followed. The rules are open to interpretation by individual clinics and hospitals.

Hodgkin lymphoma patient Kathryn Rodwell, 22, said she would have to travel from her home in North Wales to Manchester for a stem cell transplant.

She said it will be 'extremely difficult' for her to be away from home for week, and she would miss out on being able to take family with her.

The deadly toll of scrapped cancer surgery The devastating toll of the pandemic on cancer patients was laid bare this week. Tens of thousands have missed out on potentially lifesaving treatment, official figures revealed. Surgery to remove tumours plummeted by one third during the first wave of coronavirus. From April to August some 21,700 fewer patients had cancer surgery than in the same period of 2019, according to Public Health England (PHE). The number of patients diagnosed with cancer from April to September last year was 35,592, a fall of one quarter compared with 2019 levels. And in the eight months from April to November, 35,488 fewer patients started cancer treatments including chemotherapy and radiotherapy, down 17 per cent on 2019. The devastating figures emerged as the head of the NHS said further delays to cancer surgery in recent weeks were a major cause of concern. An estimated 800 cancer operations were cancelled in the first two weeks of January, as hospitals once again postponed thousands of non-Covid treatments. Sir Simon Stevens told MPs last week that health bosses were most concerned about the disruption to cancer surgery. Advertisement

Miss Rodwell, from Gwernaffield, said: 'I know from friends going through similar things that having family there is really important and I won't have that at all.'

Helen Gravestock, associate policy director CLIC Sargent said: 'Young people have been telling us that one of the worst things about having cancer during the pandemic is having to go into hospital alone  sometimes to hear bad news.

'Our social workers have been on the phone to worried parents as they sit in hospital car parks waiting for their son or daughter to come out.

'You don't stop worrying about your child just because they're adults.'

Sophie, 24, was first diagnosed with leukemia in 2015 and in February 2020, just before the first lockdown, relapsed for the second time.

She was told she needed CAR-T cell therapy and would have to be treated at the Christie in Manchester, 70 miles away from home.

CAR-T is a highly specialised cancer treatment only available at some hospitals and requires medics to take white blood cells out of the body, supercharge them to recognise and destroy cancer cells, and then put them back in.

Sophie, who didn't give her surname, said: 'We had to travel to Manchester, so my mum drove me, we got to the door and I had my suitcase because I knew I was going to be admitted [for] around five weeks for me to have the CAR-T.

'My mum was crying, I was crying and she had to leave me at the door and drive off.

'I was struggling alone with this suitcase. my Mum was terrified leaving me because she was probably thinking "I can't be there to comfort her" and as well, "if things go wrong, would she be walking back out of the hospital?"'

Fellow cancer patient Daniela Alves recalled having to go through chemotherapy without visitors.

The 21-year-old, from north London said: 'Going through my first week alone was quite scary.

'You don't know what symptoms you're going to feel first, you don't know how you're going to react to the pain. It was very daunting.'

Dr Louise Soanes, chief nurse at Teenage Cancer Trust, said in some areas 'having that important hand to hold is allowed whereas in others, it is not'.

She said: 'We want to dispel the disparity so all young people, where safe and possible, have that crucial loved one with them and a hand to hold, particularly during some of the most difficult times of their life.'

The charities are asking members of the public to support their campaign.

An NHS spokesperson said: 'The NHS is absolutely clear that young cancer patients should be able to have friends and family supporting them at appointments, which is why the national guidance is explicit that this should be offered, in a Covid-safe way.

'It is important that families know cancer treatment is continuing across the country, so that young people can come forward for the care they need, with the right support.'

A study published in the Lancet in October estimating that three million people in the UK have missed cancer screenings during the Covid pandemic.

The National Institute of Health and Care Excellence changed its guidance to tell doctors to warn cancer patients that visiting hospitals during the first wave may be more dangerous than delaying treatment due to the risk of infection.

It took months for the NHS to get back on its feet and, during that time, the number of people waiting for routine operations surged to a record 4.46million.
A few months after I profiled the Burmese journalist Swe Win, in August 2019, he was shot in the leg. He had been driving through Rakhine State, on vacation with his wife and young daughter, when a bullet tore through his car. A source later told him that an army chief had personally directed the attempted hit.

Myanmar Now, the bilingual news outlet that Swe Win leads in Yangon, had recently published exposes of the vast business interests of Min Aung Hlaing, the commander in chief of the countrys armed forces. I got word from some soldiers to be very careful, Swe Win recalled. I had infuriated the top.

It wasnt Swe Wins first encounter with the military: during the time of the junta, he had been thrown in prison for joining the democracy movement; then, after generals began to share power with Aung San Suu Kyis civilian government, in 2010, he defended himself against physical attacks and frivolous litigation intended to derail the reporting of Myanmar Now. But the shooting made him fear for his familys safety. So they decided to flee the country, with plans to return ahead of the national elections, on November 8, 2020.

The pandemic made coming home impossible. As did signs that the military would not respect the outcome of the vote. Sure enough, when Aung San Suu Kyis party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), swept the election, the military alleged that more than eight million ballots had been fraudulently cast. Then, on February 1 Myanmar time, just before the newly elected parliament was set to certify the results, the military detained State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi, President Win Myint, and dozens of human rights activists and pro-democracy monks; Min Hlaing was installed as the countrys sole leader. He declared a one-year state of emergency, then blocked internet and telephone lines.

Thousands of Burmese responded in protest, holding images of Aung San Suu Kyi, singing the freedom song of the 1988 democracy movement, Kabar Ma Kyay Bu (We Shall Not Surrender Until the End of the World, set to Kansass Dust in the Wind), and raising the three-finger Hunger Games salute recently popularized in Thailand. On February 8, the junta imposed a curfew and a ban on public gatherings. By February 9, there were reports of police shooting water cannons, rubber bullets, and live rounds at crowds in Yangon, Mandalay, and the capital city of Nay Pyi Taw.

Swe Win has followed these events in exile, from outside Myanmar. I spoke with him by phone, on February 2 and 6, about the logic of the coup, how to report on regime change, and the future of his nations democracy.

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Thank you for making time, Swe Win. Have you been able to contact any of your coworkers?

I did, but its very, very difficult. I managed to have a few minutes of a phone call with a colleague. Apart from that, I could not contact them at all.

You and I talked a lot in 2019. The defamation case against you was finally dismissed. But I recently learned that, at the end of that year, you were shot, seemingly by the military, while you were on vacation. What happened?

Around 2019, August and September, our newsroom stepped up reporting about the family businesses of the top generals, particularly Min Hlaing. So we wrote a couple of stories looking into the businesses of his son and his daughter. That generated an enormous amount of attention, for the very first time, about the extent of his wealth. So much so that there was a lot of agitation, particularly within the military families. And then I got word of an attempt by the military leadership to file lawsuits against me for those stories.

I did my best to make the story legally watertight. Everything was fact-basedall primary information, etc.so there was no opportunity for the military leadership to file a lawsuit against me. So I think that was the stage for the attack on me. I released a statement [about the shooting] in September of 2020 because of my analysis that a military coup was on its way. I thought it was time to tell the people.

My understanding is that, by August of 2020, there were worries about a coup, because the military had held a conference at which it raised suspicions about the election. Were many people concerned?

In August 2020, the commander in chief of the armed forces, senior general Min Aung Hlaing, called a meeting of the leaders of forty-three political parties, including the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party. The rest were proxies for the USDP, so we should never forget that this was all orchestrated by the military. They knew ahead of time that the NLD, led by Aung San Suu Kyi, would be the dominant force, so they created a motley of smaller political parties.

All these smaller parties are just skeletons: just one party leader and ten people, mostly. The fact that the meeting was convened itself was a signal of a coup to me. Its never happened before. And then the more worrying thing was that some of those leaders of the proxy parties reportedly pleaded with the commander in chief to intervene if the election results turned out fraudulent.

So they were already planting that idea?

Yeah, and then the military general respondedthat made the whole scenario more suspiciousThere is nothing I dare not do. There was threatening talk.

How did the NLD react to that conference in August?

They did not respond very much, actually. Nothing significant. They said, Its their right to have a meeting and public discussions. Nobody thought, based on the conference, that there were undertones about a coup. I told my newsroom, Theres a 70 percent chance of a coup. I told the same to a leader of one of the key advocacy groups that is now calling for the boycott of military businesses. I thought about how I would restructure my newsroom if the coup took place. But, at the same time, I felt like I was deranged.

I thought about how I would restructure my newsroom if the coup took place. But, at the same time, I felt like I was deranged.

When the election came, did you think that the military was going to take control at that point?

I got so worried in the two days before the election, because the military aired a propaganda film on November 7, before Election Day. That was a brazen act. This movie has never been broadcast since 2005, since the transition [to democracy]. That led to my conclusion that the coup was imminent.

There have been coups before in Burmese history. Did you think that this one would be the kind of coup where the military takes control of just a few positions, or did you think itd be the kind of coup were seeing now?

I was wrong about my prediction of how the coup would unfold. My prediction of the coup was that the military would not arrest many people and would not detain Aung San Suu Kyi. All of the members of parliament have to live in the municipality of Nay Pyi Taw, so you dont need to round them up in the middle of night; theyre already there. They could not get out of the compound because of the covid-19 regulation. So the military just needs to issue a statement and say, Aung San Suu Kyi cannot get out of there, and then prepare a greater police force for street proteststhats all. But I was wrong. I was wrong. They raided the monasteries. They targeted individuals who they thought would initiate broader public actions. They arrested a number of individuals, and then, when they made those arrests, they did it in a very stupid wayto give a message. All these soldiers dressed in full gear, in battle zones, and they used overwhelming force.

What does this mean for your staff in Yangon? You have about thirty people who work in your newsroom. Are they okay?

Two days before the coup, we wrote a story that, within seventy-two hours, there would be a huge political storm. It was written on the morning of January 28. I had already evacuated the newsroom. Still, nobody thought the coup is completely likely because [the power-sharing government has been] a military-orchestrated political framework. They retained so much power economically; they dont need to obey anyone. They committed massacres of the Rohingya in the Rakhine State and detained all these journalists, and then they released all the soldiers and officers accused of committing executions. The military is so powerful, so why [stage a coup]? Some of my friends even cited [political theorist] Larry Diamond: in a transitional democracy, if there is a coup, that coup is never initiated by the leaders of the army; that coup is initiated by midlevel officers. I said, We cannot resort to theories when we have dictators who dont think in a logical way like we do. They can do anything.

So when you told your newsroom to close down, since youre not in the country anymore, where did your reporters go? Did you give them instructions?

Even though I foresaw the coup, I did not foresee the brutal way it would be launched. So before the coup, they all stayed in their houses, and then, within five hours of the coup, I ordered all my colleagues to leave their houses and stay somewhere with their families or their friends. Half of the team did not want to accept my idea because they were outraged, as equally as members of the public. Why should we leave? Weve got to do what weve got to do. If I worked in Yangon, I would not shut down the newsroom. I would not ask them to flee. I would keep operating the newsroom, no matter what the consequences. But since Im out of the danger zone, I have the moral obligation to take precautionary measures.

It has now been almost a week since the coup began, and a lot of Burmese people have been out to protests, the medical university has threatened to strike, the teachers are involved; public sector workers, miners are involved. What do you think about the protests and the uprising from the people of Myanmar?

There is so much anger about what has transpired during the past week. We have developed so much anger and animosity toward the military. But the level of anger, the nature of the anger this time around is different because people have tasted democracy and liberty. No matter how it is flawed, no matter how it is limited in its nature and philosophy, people have tasted it. It was so delicious to all these people who languished in military rule.

Even people who are twenty-five or in their thirties have experienced two entirely different political systems: military dictatorship and democracy. Also, its very clear that the NLD party won the election. The NLD has remained the most popular political party not because of the charisma of Aung San Suu Kyi, not because of their performance in government, but because there is no rival.

If I were in my country, I wouldnt want to cast a ballot for the NLD. The NLD has let us down time and time again. Ive felt theyve never done enough to improve human rights and democratic values, using all the resources at their disposal the past ten years. Particularly the Rohingya issue. Its not just the Rohingya. We as members of humanity have to fight for their rights.

Do you think the protests will make a difference against the coup?

I dont think so at all. The military knew how to deal with these protests, how to deal with public opposition. They have already started big-time information warfare, psychological warfare against the public. They have cut off all the internet. Yesterday, the vigilante groups hired by the military, they went around a neighborhood in trucks saying Aung San Suu Kyi was already released. People flooded the streets to celebrate the rumor of the release; they lit firecrackers. So Im not hopeful about these ongoing protests, even though I congratulate [the people], even though I feel emotional about the bravery of the youth.

What about the fact that were still in the middle of covid? How is the military using that? I saw that their excuse for arresting the president was that he had campaigned in violation of covid guidelines. Is the military taking advantage of covid to stage the coup right now?

Im not sure about that. I believe that, with or without covid, they would have done it anyway. This was premeditated.

What about the influence of China and Russia? Early in January, there were military and high-level foreign-ministry visits from China and Russia to Myanmar. And China and Russia have blocked the condemnation of Myanmars killing of Rohingya people in Rakhine. Do you feel that these countries have been encouraging authoritarianism in Myanmar?

My gut feeling is that China is the most responsible entity for the coup in Myanmar. We had coups in 1962 and 1988, but Chinas influence on Myanmar was not very strong. Actually, the Myanmar military was fighting against the communists, who were supported by Beijing. But after 1988, the military generals in Myanmar have had no choice but to turn to China for all the support they needeconomic support, political supportand then the ethnic armed groups around the border have grown.

Theres a lot of influence from China on the military in many ways. What the military has done is, they started colluding with Chinaa lot of businesses and also at a personal and government level. The Burmese generals became shareholders in Chinese companies. China struck successful business deals with the military before the political transition. We have the controversial biggest copper mine in Myanmar: that deal was done before the transition. They signed a contract to build a huge hydropower dam in the northern part of the country, which has been delayed until now. The Chinese government proposed construction of an oil-and-gas pipeline. And the Chinese proposed the construction of railways and bus lines allowing for this oil-and-gas pipeline.

During the Obama administration, the US was much more involved in Myanmar. During the Trump administration, the State Department was not really active. Do you think that the Trump administrations neglect of Southeast Asia led Myanmar and the military to get much closer to China?

I dont think so. Democratic forces have felt very discouraged by Trumps pathetic diplomacy towards Asia in general, but with or without Trump, the military would have done it anyway.

Im curious about the relationship between protesters in Myanmar and protesters in Thailand. Theres a lot of overlap, as seen most visibly in photographs of people raising the three-finger salute. It seems like theres been a lot of exchange.

One sure thing is, the Thai military learned something from Myanmars political transition, a militarily guided transition. They were inspired by the military generals in Nay Pyi Taw. They launched a coupthey concocted a constitution of their own, which gave them a lot of leverage. And I think the Burmese generals got inspired again by their Thai counterparts. Theres a complementary process going on. There was a small protest in front of the Burmese embassy in Bangkok a few days after the coup, and then Prayut [Chan-o-cha], the prime minister, came out saying that the media should not inflame the anger or something like that; he was basically protecting his counterpart in Nay Pyi Taw.

Do you have thoughts on January 6 in the US? Here, we called that an attempted coup. People were frightened.

I already had a clear analysis of what was going to happen in Nay Pyi Taw, in Myanmar, so I felt very emotional about what was happening at the US Capitol on January 6. I felt that we are going to see the resilience and the strength of the USs democratic institutions in resisting this lunatic president who wants to be a dictator. If this was not the US, if you did not have all these institutions made over the centuries, the man who wants to be dictatorhe would not incite a mob; he would send soldiers. And then I saw the soldiers in my own home country.

It sounds like youre very pessimistic about the next few months. What do you think is going to happen in terms of journalism? What is the responsibility of journalists in Myanmar, and outside Myanmar, to keep track of whats happening? To inform the public of what the military is doing, especially with the cutoff of internet and phones?

We will have to follow not just the political events, but our entire focus also must be on the brutal injustices waiting to happen. Also, the international community, we have to scramble to find out what leverage we can use to supportemotionally, psychologically, or physicallypeople who are oppressed, and also to punish those individuals who are torturing their own citizens.

At the same time the military uses a lot of psychological warfare tactics to divide the public, we cant be like, Oh, lets do neutral reporting or All sides are to blame. Sometimes we forget about the need to do critical reporting in the proper context.

We will have to follow not just the political events, but our entire focus also must be on the brutal injustices waiting to happen

What are you going to do at Myanmar Now? Your newsroom is in hiding. A lot of people are on the run. How do you operate a newsroom in these conditions?

Half of the team is now back at work. They are going out from their hideouts to cover the protests. It would be a shame if we missed the entire public opposition. It would be psychologically devastating to all of uswed feel very irresponsibleso I put half the team back at work. But still, were in disarray. Theyre still grappling with the trauma of the coup.

Im talking with our donors about whether theres a possibility of setting up the newsroom in a neighboring country. Many journalistic colleagues wont want to work for a newsroom in Myanmar. They will have to accommodate the junta; they will have to adjust their coverage to the reality of military rule. There will be a lot of injustices, tons of stories to cover.

Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today

E. Tammy Kim is a freelance reporter and essayist whose writing has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, and many other publications. She coedited 2016s Punk Ethnography.
Ocado posted sales of more than 2billion for the first time despite losing customers in the pandemic.

Revenues in its retail division, which is half-owned by Marks & Spencer, rose 35 per cent to 2.2billion last year, despite the number of customers falling from 795,000 in 2019 to 680,000 in 2020.

But that lower figure featured customers who shopped more often and spent more each time. The new range of M&S products has been well-received, bosses said.

Robo shoppers: Ocado has continued to invest heavily in technology, which has resulted in an overall loss before tax of 44m, down from a 214.5m loss in 2019

But as the company continued to invest heavily in technology, it posted an overall loss before tax of 44million, down from a 214.5million loss in 2019.

The pandemic has turbo-charged demand for online groceries, which make up a record 16 per cent of the UK market.

Ocado chief executive Tim Steiner said: 'Millions of people have tried online grocery for the first time.

'Generally they see the benefit and won't be going back.' He predicted online grocery would continue to grow even after the vaccine rollout.

Average orders per week rose from 325,000 in 2019 to 334,000 in 2020. And the average order rose from 106 to 137.

This compares to an average supermarket basket size of around 25 in-store and 85 online.

Critics say it is still not able to say when it will return sustainable profits, 20 years after it was founded.

Clive Black, of Shore Capital, said: 'Ocado has torn up the financial script in being a perennially capital-hungry experiment that delivers no financial returns.'

Ocado's ability to license its robotic technology is what underpins its 20billion valuation, and reflects bosses' belief they can take a chunk of the developed world's 2.8trillion grocery market.

It has signed deals with Kroger in the US and Aeon in Japan, and plans to boost UK capacity by 40 per cent.
The company said the acquisition will increase its land holdings in Mongolias prospective lithium salars to over 100,000 hectares

ION Energy noted that previous work done at Urgakh Naran was highly successful in identifying multiple targets for follow-up exploration

ION Energy Limited ( ) ( ) (FRA:5YB) announced Wednesday that it has acquired the Urgakh Naran lithium brine project located in Mongolias Dorngovi Province, which covers an area of more than 19,000 hectares of what the company calls highly prospective lithium terrain.

The company noted that the Urgakh Naran project, located 150 kilometres (km) west-northwest of its flagship Baavhai Uul lithium brine property, will increase its land holdings in Mongolias prospective lithium salars to over 100,000 hectares.

The acquisition of this project represents the further execution of our companys objectives to secure terrains highly prospective for the discovery of lithium salars. Ion Energy is a leader in Mongolias lithium exploration and development. It also solidifies Ion Energys long-term commitment to support our worlds green revolution by playing a key role in the supply chain, ION Energy CEO Ali Haji said in a statement.

He added: Work has already commenced to develop the exploration program on this highly prospective project and the company will also be releasing results from its recently completed Geophysics program on the Baavhai Uul Lithium Brine Project.

ION Energy said it was able to acquire Urgakh Naran, which is Mongolian for Rising Sun, by paying approximately US$310,000 in consulting, administrative and transfer tax costs following a successful tender bid submitted to Mongolias Mineral Resource Authority.

The company noted that previous work conducted at Urgakh Naran included a substantial Hydro-chemical sampling program of identified shallow lithium in brines.

It pointed out that the program, although in its early stage, was highly successful in identifying multiple targets for follow-up exploration.

ION Energy is a lithium exploration company that was granted Mongolias first lithium brine mining license.

The companys Baavhai Uul lithium brine project is spread over nearly 81,000 hectares, and is strategically located in southeast Mongolia, 24 kilometers away from the Chinese border.

Baavhai Uul is located in the arid Gobi Desert with high evaporation rates and low precipitation rates that are considered optimal for lithium brine extraction.

Contact Sean at sean@proactiveinvestors.com
The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company

Democratic House managers initiated the Senate trial of Donald Trump yesterday with a thirteen-minute video that reveals, to an extent not seen before, the large scale and intensity of the January 6, 2021 assault on the US Capitol, where both houses of Congress were in session.

The video will come as a shock to millions of viewers. Up until now, video footage of the event has been broadcast in bits and pieces, and often with the most violent scenes left out. The numbers of people involved in the assault, the extreme violence used by the mob as it stormed the Capitol, and the determination with which it hunted for congressmen, senators and even the vice president have never been presented to the public in so clear and concentrated a form.

Moreover, the video presentation exposed the direct link between Trumps incitement of the fascist mob and the violent assault that followed.

Senate Impeachment Trial: January 6 Video Montage

Well over 5,000 people were involved in the mob, which included a large number of military, police and members of far-right militia groups. The insurrectionists were out for blood and were prepared to murder those whom they considered hostile to Trump.

The video lays out a very clear narrative of what transpired. It begins with Trumps speech prior to the storming of the Capitol. We will stop the steal! Trump declares, repeating the lie that he won in a landslide and that the election was rigged. You cant vote on fraud, he says. And when you catch somebody in a fraud, you are allowed to go by very different rules.

We fight, and we fight like hell, Trump threatens. And if you dont fight like hell, youre not going to have a country anymore. He says that the plan is to march on the Capitol building and give our Republicansthe weak ones, because the strong ones dont need any of our helpwe are going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.

Trumps remarks are interspersed with scenes of thousands of far-right militia members and Trump supporters violently charging the Capitol building, overriding the flimsy and poorly manned security around the perimeter. Individuals in the crowd can be heard yelling, Take the building!, Stop the Steal! Traitors! Fight for Trump! and USA! USA! One individual is seen constructing a noose.

After breaching the barriers, the mob, including many individuals clad in military-style gear, break through windows, flood into the building and storm toward the separate House and Senate chambers.

Some are directing the operation, guiding people into and through the building. One declares to a member of the Capitol police, Youre outnumbered. Theres a fucking million of us out there, and we are listening to Trump, your boss. As they engage in a coordinated push to override internal barriers, pinning one police officer violently against a door, one of the attackers shouts out, We need fresh patriots to the front!

The video notes that as the insurrectionists were approaching the Senate chamber, with senators still inside, Trump sent out a tweet criticizing then-Vice President Mike Pence, who was presiding over the congressional certification of the Electoral College vote. Members of Congress are hastily evacuated amidst an armed stand-off with rioters. Outside of the Capitol building, one protester is recorded saying that what they need is 30,000 guns, to which another replies, Next trip.

Two hours after the breaching of the Capitol buildingby which time it had become clear that the insurrectionists had failed to capture hostages and secure control of the CapitolTrump released a video denouncing the fraudulent election, while urging the very special insurrectionists to go home.

Certain points arise out of the documentary evidence of the events of January 6.

First, the video demolishes every effort to diminish the seriousness of the events of January 6. Though the video presentation was limited to a visual documentation of the assault, what is seen is an organized attempt at a coup detat. There is no doubt that the coup was directed by the president himself, who personally gave the signal for the attack in his speech to the right-wing mob.

While the documentaryin keeping with the limited aims of the Democratsavoids drawing any broader political conclusions, the obvious aim of the assault was to seize control of the Capitol, preempt the confirmation of Bidens majority in the Electoral College, effectively nullify the results of the 2020 election, and create conditions for keeping Trump in power as a presidential dictator.

The date of January 6, when Congress was meeting to confirm the results of the election, was chosen by Trump and his co-conspirators as the ideal point to take action. The assault was carefully prepared over several months, utilizing the fraudulent charges of a rigged election, promoted by many of the senators who are currently hearing the impeachment charges.

The video presents a chilling picture of what occurred in the hours leading up to and during the assault. But the Democrats presentation avoided any consideration of the underlying political strategy that motivated the attack.

The question that arises from the events documented by the video is: What would have happened if the insurrectionists had succeeded in seizing control of Congress, killing lawmakers and/or taking them hostage, and shutting down the legislative branch of the government?

Apart from an exhaustive investigation of the conspiracy, this question cannot be definitively answered. But it is more than likely that Trump had prepared forand was banking onthis outcome. If the objective had been realized, Trump would have certainly exploited the political crisis created by his own assault on the legislative branch of the government.

It is highly probable that Trump, who had retreated to the White House after inciting the assault, would have declared a state of emergency and invoked the extraordinary powers invested in the commander in chief. Top advisors like Michael Flynn had previously urged Trump to declare martial law to stop the transfer of power. That would have meant, in a vacuum created by the shutdown of Congress, a de facto presidential dictatorship.

The Republican Party would have united behind Trump, as it is currently doing in opposing even the constitutionality of the impeachment. Encouraged by the success in Washington, similar operations would have been organized by far-right militias in states like Michigan, Virginia and Pennsylvania. The Democrats, terrified of doing anything that would encourage popular opposition from below, would have tried to reach some agreement in the name of unity and bipartisanship.

In the impeachment proceedings, almost the entirety of the Republican Party (44 out of 50 Senators) sided Tuesday with the patently absurd arguments of Trumps lawyers, which have absolutely no basis in law, that the trial is unconstitutional because Trump is no longer in office.

The events of January 6 must be taken as an urgent warning. The phrase, It cant happen herethat is, that the US is supposedly immune from fascism and dictatorshiphas been proven false. Not only can a fascistic insurrection happen, but it has happened and came very close to succeeding. And this is not the last attempt.

To the extent that the Democrats are focused on convincing their fascist colleagues in the Republican Party to join with them in a bipartisan vote for impeachment, they are avoiding what should be the main purpose of the proceedings: the comprehensive exposure of all critical aspects of the conspiracy, above all, who were its organizers, who participated in one or another level in its planning, and what its objectives were. The proceedings should be aimed at uncovering the facts that clear the path, whatever the outcome of the Senate vote, for the arrest and criminal prosecution of Trump and all of his co-conspirators.
Close aide of UK based Khalistan terrorist Paramjit Pamma held in UP was plotting series of sinister acts

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

New Delhi, Feb 10: Earlier this week a joint team the Punjab and Uttar Pradesh police arrested an accomplice of a suspected pro-Khalistan terrorist from Lucknow. He has been identified as Jagdev Singh.

The police said that the accused is linked to the pro-Khalistan terrorists, Paramjit Singh Pammah and Maltani Singh. Paramjit is currently in UK, while Malkani is in Germany.

The security agencies say that both these persons are accused of carrying out anti-national activities in Punjab. They are trying to promote. Terror and harm peace by fanning religious intolerance, the police also said.

Churning the communal cauldron: Handlers in Italy, Canada, UK fan the Khalistan movement

The police said that the two were prepping Jagdev Singh to carry out anti-national activity. Further he had been provided with money and also with his accomplice, Jagroop Singh, he had purchased arms and ammunition from Madhya Pradesh.

Pammah is a member of the Khalistan Tiger Force. He was involved in petty crimes until 1992. In 1994, he left India for Pakistan and became a main fund raiser for the Babbar Khalsa International. He later joined Jagtar Singh Tara of the KTF, who was one of the assassins of former Punjab Chief Minister, Beant Singh. Pamma also masterminded the Patiala and Ambala explosions.

Pamma had been detained by the British police based on a plea by the Indian government in 2010. However the police freed him, while stating that they found nothing concrete on him.

During a protest in support of the farmers coordinated by the Labour Party MP, Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi outside the Indian mission in London, Khalistan flags were raised. Pamma was among a group of supporters sporting the Babbar Khalsa t-shits.

Sources tell OneIndia that they are probing Jagdev Singh for his links with terrorists settled abroad. We have evidence to suggest that he was planning on disrupting peace and undertaking anti-national activities. We will also probe and find out if he was trying to infiltrate any of the protest sites, the source cited above said.

Recently the NIA sent notices to several persons including a journalist and farmer leaders in connection with a probe related to the Sikhs For Justice, a pro-Khalistan outfit that has been banned in India.

The NIA had registered a case last year and in the FIR, the agency said that the SJF an unlawful association and other Khalistani terrorist outfits including, but not limited to the Babbar Khalsa International, Khalistan Tiger Force and Khalistan Zindabad Force along with their frontal organisations have entered into a conspiracy to create an atmosphere of fear and lawlessness and to cause disaffection in people and to incite them towards rising in rebellion against the government.

Khalistan, the real intent: Why demand for repeal of farm laws is just an excuse

Twitter blocks portion of accounts, cites free speech | OneIndia News

The NIA also said that huge funds are being collected abroad for the on-going ground campaign and propaganda against the missions in countries like US, UK, Canada and Germany. These campaigns are being spearheaded by designated terrorists, Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, Paramjit Singh Pamma, Hardeep Singh Nijjar and others.

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Story first published: Wednesday, February 10, 2021, 9:12 [IST]
LOS ANGELESIn 2018, less than 24 hours after Californias then-governor Jerry Brown signed the states net neutrality bill into law, the United States Department of Justice sued to stop the law from ever taking effect. As of Monday, that lawsuit is no more.

The initial lawsuit was filed by the DoJ under the Trump administration. But with a new, Democratic administration now in place, net neutrality activists called on the Justice Department, under President Joe Bidens attorney general nominee Merrick Garland, to withdraw the lawsuit. That has now happened.

While Garland himself has not yet been confirmed by the Senate, on Monday the DoJ voluntarily dismissed the suit, which claimed that Californias law was not permitted to take effect because it was superseded by the federal repeal of net neutrality rules by the Federal Communications Commission.

The California law has not yet taken effect, due to various legal proceedings, including the DoJ lawsuit. And even after the dismissal of the federal lawsuit on Monday, the state still faces litigation from private industry which is also trying to stop the law. A lobbying group representing the broadband industry filed a suit in 2018, just days after the Trump administration lawsuit was filed, claiming that the California law was unconstitutional.

The California law "was purposefully intended to countermand and undermine federal law by imposing on [broadband] the very same regulations that the Federal Communications Commission expressly repealed, the broadband industry lobbying group lawsuit stated.

That lawsuit is set for a hearing in a federal courtroom on February 23.

Ajit Pai, the Trump-appointed FCC Chair who led the net neutrality repeal, resigned his post on January 20. Biden named FCC board member Jessica Rosenworcel to serve as acting chair, replacing Pai. On Monday, she praised the DoJs voluntary dismissal of the federal lawsuit.

I am pleased that the Department of Justice has withdrawn this lawsuit. When the FCC, over my objection, rolled back its net neutrality policies, states like California sought to fill the void with their own laws, Rosenworcel said. By taking this step, Washington is listening to the American people, who overwhelmingly support an open internet, and is charting a course to once again make net neutrality the law of the land.

Photo By USA-Reiseblogger / Pixabay
21 runners killed during mountain race in northwestern province of Gansu; Indian variant of Covid-19 found in Guangzhou; Beijing willing to arrange for vaccines to be sent to Taiwan

May 28, 2021 08:15 PM
Last year, Philadelphia lawyer Michael van der Veen filed a lawsuit against then-President Donald Trump accusing him of making "repeated claims" that mail voting is ripe with fraud "despite having no evidence in support of these claims."

This week, van der Veen is adopting a different posture as part of the team of attorneys defending Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election result in his Senate impeachment trial.

How a longtime personal-injury lawyer found himself at the center of that trial, which opened Tuesday, may say more about his client than his own legal career. Trump struggled to find lawyers to take on his case, parting ways with several who were unwilling to claim that the 2020 election was stolen, as the president is said to have wanted them to do.

Van der Veen's route to Trump's legal team began when the firm he founded - van der Veen, O'Neill, Hartshorn and Levin - hired Bruce Castor Jr. in December. Castor, a former prosecutor from suburban Philadelphia, in turn was recommended to Trump aides and hired last month.

Now, van der Veen's name and signature appear in Trump's impeachment filings alongside Castor's, as well as those of David Schoen, an Atlanta-based lawyer Trump brought on last week. In a 78-page defense brief filed Monday, the lawyers argued that Trump was entitled to express his belief that "voting irregularities" he attributed to illegal changes to election laws had tainted the election.

Van der Veen did not respond to repeated requests for comment made through his law firm.

It has been just a few months since his name was on a very different legal document - a lawsuit against Trump, the U.S. Postal Service and Postmaster General Louis DeJoy filed in federal court in August on behalf of Melvin Johnakin, an independent candidate who last year unsuccessfully sought to challenge Rep. Dwight Evans, D-Pa. Johnakin claimed in the suit that operational changes at the federal agency would make it harder for voters to cast ballots during the coronavirus pandemic, part of a wave of litigation against the Postal Service last year.

On his website, van der Veen touted the action thusly: "To exercise the fundamental right to vote, many voters have and will utilize all available means to vote by mail rather than in person at a polling place. Advanced planning and proactive measures will be necessary to ensure that voters have sufficient access to vote by mail to preserve and protect the essential right to vote and prevent large-scale disenfranchisement."

The suit described DeJoy as a "Republican Party and Trump campaign megadonor" and accused the Postal Service of "reducing staff hours, prohibiting overtime, removing hundreds of high-volume mail-processing machines from facilities across the country and removing mail boxes in urban areas with high concentrations of minority, low income and Democratic voters."

Those operational changes "led to delays in the delivery of mail," the suit said - and came at a time when Trump was making "repeated claims" without evidence that voting by mail is "ripe with fraud."

The suit was settled in late November, part of a broader effort in 19 states and the District of Columbia to block the Postal Service from making changes that could delay the mail.

Trump and his legal team at the time were attacking accommodations that state officials had made to help voters cast ballots amid the health crisis, falsely asserting that those changes led to widespread fraud.

On Nov. 25, the day the suit was dismissed, Trump spoke by telephone to a panel of Pennsylvania state senators who had assembled to examine allegations of fraud. He said he had "won by a lot" - and lamented that "all we need is to have some judge listen to it properly without having a political opinion or having another kind of a problem."

There is no prohibition against a lawyer representing a former adversary in a new matter when the previous client has no interest, said Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University, who noted that the practice is common.

In Philadelphia, van der Veen is best-known for his law firm's ubiquitous ads on local news radio station KYW-AM, which are reminiscent of East Coast electronics chain Crazy Eddie's high-octane TV pitches from the 1980s.

"Whether you're walking down Chestnut or Market, Frankurt or Aramingo, be careful and watch your step," the announcer nearly shouts in one of van der Veen's radio spots. "But if the walkway isn't clear, and you fall and get hurt due to snow and ice, call 215-546-1000 for van der Veen, O'Neill Hartshorn and Levin - trial lawyers excelling in the area of the law most critical to your family."

"The 'V,' " the announcer concludes, 'is for 'Victory.' "

The law firm's website offers personal-injury representation as well as "relentless, savvy defense" work for those accused of corporate embezzlement, Internet-based offenses or violent crime. And it claims massive results, including a $31.5 million judgment for a man paralyzed in a motorcycle accident and a $10 million settlement for a 9-year-old boy struck by a tractor-trailer.

Van der Veen is active in local and state trial lawyers' associations; last year, he donated $5,000 to the state group's political action committee, according to Pennsylvania campaign finance reports.

During the first two years of Trump's presidency, van der Veen donated to prominent Pennsylvania Democrats, including Sen. Robert Casey Jr., one of the former president's most vocal critics in the chamber. A spokesman for Casey's office declined to comment on van der Veen's representation of Trump.

Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, D-Pa., who has received several political donations from van der Veen in recent years, said in an interview that she wondered whether Trump realizes he hired someone who recently went up against him in court.

"Given the former president's enemies list, he would likely not be happy to learn he'd been sued by his current lawyer, since he generally demands total loyalty," said Scanlon, who is also a lawyer. "It does seem a little out of character for the former president to embrace someone who so recently sued him."

A spokesman for Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Van der Veen drew local media attention in 2018 for the elaborate renovation of his small firm's offices in Philadelphia's Center City neighborhood. The 25-employee firm occupies a 19th-century row house featuring a Delftware fireplace and ornate mantel carvings of Zeus and Apollo. The customized furniture he bought from Maine-based Thos. Moser was built from cherrywood harvested from family farms in Pennsylvania's Allegheny Plateau - "so there's no clear-cutting involved," according to a write-up in Philadelphia Business Journal.

For some in Pennsylvania, van der Veen's representation of Trump is a natural fit, given his career path as a personal-injury lawyer who broadcasts ads on local talk radio and touts glowing magazine cover stories on his law firm's website.

"It probably speaks more to the gadfly culture of Philadelphia trial attorneys than anything else," said one Democratic strategist from Pennsylvania who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly. "It's a showman's culture."
Researchers developed a model to geographically visualize supply chains for any given sector using publicly available data, and applied the model for illustrative purposes to the grain farming industry. Credit: USDA via Flickr

The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically exposed the economic vulnerability of U.S. businesses, primarily because they are so interconnected: when one region experiences a labor shortage or supply interruption, adverse effects reverberate throughout the global economy. Researchers at Penn State and the Korea Rural Economic Institute have developed a model to help visualize the interconnectedness of businesses and industries over geographic space, which potentially can show supply-chain vulnerabilities to future shocks, such as pandemics or climate-change impacts.

"In any given industry, businesses rely on other industries to supply their inputs or to purchase their products for further processing, and the potential for bottlenecks or disruptions along these supply chains is real; we saw this play out on grocery store shelves across the nation last year," said Stephan Goetz, professor of agricultural and regional economics and director of the Northeast Regional Center for Rural Development (NERCRD). "Our study begins to demonstrate how we can geographically visualize these supply chains for any given sector using publicly available data, so that we may better prepare for future shocks."

To construct their mathematical model, Goetz and his colleagues compiled county-level data from several publicly available sources, including data on employment by industry, farm sales, population, transportation, and transactions between and within industries. They used the U.S. national industry input-output table to measure all transactions between and among domestic industries.

In their study, published this month in the journal Sustainability, they applied their model for illustrative purposes to three industries representing different sectors of the economygrain farming, motor vehicle manufacturing, and data processingresulting in geographic visualizations of each of these industries' supply chains.

For example, in their analysis of grain farming, they included not only the farms that produce corn, wheat and soybeans but also the businesses that provide those farms with inputs, such as fertilizer and equipment, as well as the processors who purchase grains to produce products ranging from livestock feed, high-fructose corn syrup and organic chemicals, to breads and pastries.

"Our visualizations confirm that grain farming is concentrated in the nation's 'breadbasket," which includes the Great Plains states of Illinois, Iowa, Kansas and the Dakotas," Goetz said. "However, because our model considers upstream sellers of grain inputs and downstream grain buyers, it reveals that Arkansas, California and Washington also play important roles in the overall grain supply chain."

These states would not appear as critical to the grain industry, if only grain production were considered, as is the case with rudimentary industry location maps, according to Goetz. By offering a higher-altitude view of the transactions between industries, the research offers potentially new insights into supply-chain vulnerabilities.

"In the case of a pandemic, public agencies and emergency responders could cross-reference these visualizations with data on infection hot-spots, for example, to better understand where protection of workers would be most critically needed in order to soften supply-chain disruptions," he said. "Similarly, knowing where food processors are located relative to a tornado belt or wildfire zone could help them target resources aimed at mitigating disruptions."

The team's visualizations also show that most of the grain production activity, including activities related to inputs and processing, tends to be located primarily in rural areas, whereas most of the grain "consumption" activities, including milling, baking and retailing, are located in urban areas.

"This interdependence between rural and urban areas isn't as pronounced in the two other industries we studied, but these illustrations raise an important policy point," said Goetz. "To be a strong and sound partner of urban America, rural communities require public and private investments to build physical and human capacity, and investments in rural community development contribute to the well-being of urban areas, as well."

Looking ahead, the researchers plan to build on this work by developing a platform that will allow local decision-makers to study their communities in much more detail, and that will allow users to focus on a particular commodity.

Explore further Innovation is widespread in rural areas, not just cities

More information: Yicheol Han et al. Visualizing Spatial Economic Supply Chains to Enhance Sustainability and Resilience, Sustainability (2021). Yicheol Han et al. Visualizing Spatial Economic Supply Chains to Enhance Sustainability and Resilience,(2021). DOI: 10.3390/su13031512
A 41-year-old Easton woman who was taken into custody during a Jan. 29 drug raid in the 1200 block of Washington Street but later released is now wanted in three felony cases of possession with intent to deliver crystal methamphetamine, court papers say.

Shannon Lynn Miller was removed in handcuffs after a narcotics search warrant was served just after 6 a.m. that day at an apartment at 1235 Washington St. and, with her cooperation, city police investigators found suspected meth in a dresser drawer in her bedroom and also located the drug in a bathroom, court papers say. A digital scale with residue, plastic bags and cash were also recovered, police said.

At least two previous controlled buys of meth were made from Miller in January, court papers say.

Miller told police how long she had been selling meth, how much she obtains and how much she profits, court papers say.

Miller is white, stands 5 feet 1 inch tall and weighs 175 pounds, court papers say. She has brown eyes and black hair, although a photo of her on Jan. 29 showed red highlights.

In addition to the three felony dealing charges, Miller faces two counts of using a cellphone to commit a crime and one count each of possession of a controlled substance and possession of drug paraphernalia, records from District Judge Richard Yetter IIIs court in Wilson Borough show.

She was not in custody as of Wednesday morning.

Thank you for relying on us to provide the journalism you can trust. Please consider supporting lehighvalleylive.com with a subscription.

Tony Rhodin can be reached at arhodin@lehighvalleylive.com.
Dr Susan Lawlor has told The Kerryman that those who loved her brother - Dr Martin Lawlor, one of the top psychiatric consultants in Britain and Ireland - must forever live with the tragic irony that a man who devoted himself to helping the most vulnerable was himself left to die on the side of a road.

Denis McSweeney (75) of Pouladuff Road, Ballyphehane, Cork, was jailed last week for four years after driving away on December 15, 2018, from the scene on the Airport Road in Cork, where his car struck the late Tralee native, a father of three.

Speaking two days after judge Sean O Donnabhain sentenced Mr McSweeney, a taxi driver at the time of the incident, to five years in prison with the final year suspended, Susan said she found it incredibly difficult to process the details that emerged at Cork Circuit Criminal Court. She has since chosen to speak out to instil in people the importance of staying at the scene of a road traffic collision.

"I lost my breath for a moment in court, and I woke up today and it hit me," she said. "You keep trucking along and think you're doing okay, and then you realise that this is our reality and the healing process begins now.

"It was so shocking, in particular that he knew he hit Martin and chose to drive away. He never stopped the car, he went and picked up another fare and dropped them to their location. And for whatever reason, he doubled back to the scene and was spotted by gardai. Then he said he'd hit an animal after they asked him about the damage to his car.

"He took any piece of hope from usIt's unforgivable. He made several choices that night. He made them consciously, and as a result my brother was left at the side of the road alone. I have no words to describe the lack of respect he showed for human life."

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Judge O Donnabhain rejected Mr McSweeney's explanation that he had 'panicked' in leaving the scene and described his actions as callous.

He acknowledged Mr McSweeney's guilty plea to failing to stop his vehicle after the incident; failing to keep his vehicle at the scene; failing to report the incident to gardai and failing to give appropriate information to gardai.

He also noted his remorse, lack of previous convictions, and voluntary surrender of his driving licence, but he felt the seriousness of the offence and the pain it caused to Martin Lawlor's loved ones merited a custodial sentence.

"It's this deep grief that rips your heart from your chest," Susan said. "It's the lack of respect that he [Mr McSweeney] had for my brother and his family. This was a man who devoted his life to saving the most vulnerable people. He treated people who really needed help, in a voluntary capacity and also through his work. That's what makes this so hard to comprehend.

"There's no closure. Me, my parents, my brothers, his wife, his children - who were 12, 14 and 18 - have to live with the reality that my lovely brother was left on the side of a road."

Susan described how her brother had since missed several milestones in his children's lives and that every Christmas since his death has been a blur. She also spoke of the goals she and Martin had in their capacity as work colleagues and of the moment she learned that he had died.

"We founded the State of Mind Ireland charity together. We collaborated for over a decade. He was a phenomenal human being. I don't want him to be remembered as a statistic, a road-accident figure, a countless number on a page. He was a human being, born to help people, he saved lives on a daily basis. He went above and beyond what was ever asked of him. He had such a respect for life, he was at the peak of his own career and life.

"I can't even comprehend what my brother, Dr John Lawlor, went through to hear what had happened, and then he had to break the news. Helen [Martin's wife] even noted that there were no words that could describe the impact it has had on her and her children.

"It was as if my world imploded. I couldn't catch my breath. My mother was on the phone, screaming in grief that her baby was dead, Martin, but it didn't register. I rang John and asked what had happened, and he said, 'I'm so sorry, Martin is dead'. He told me that our brother was killed and left on the side of the road.

"To think that you'd leave any living entity at the side of the road. You wouldn't do it to an animal, never mind my lovely brother."

Susan said that Martin's loved ones would not have been able to avoid the pain of losing him but would have approached the matter differently had Mr McSweeney "stood up and been accountable" rather than leaving the family to put the pieces together themselves.

She said it is imperative that people realise how actions such as his compound the grief families who lose loved ones go through following road traffic collisions.

She added that she feels Martin continues to drive her forward to achieve the goals that both had set out prior to his tragic death in late 2018.

"It feels like I've been embodied by his dreams and passion for mental health, combined with my own," she said. "It's like a fire has been lit in me. It drives me forward. There are so many people in our community that are living with an array of mental-health problems."

She recently launched a new range of psychotherapy, psychiatry, and psychological mental-health services in Cork and Kerry and divides her week up between clinics in both counties, providing adult and child counselling, psychotherapy, psychological, and psychiatric services. She has also collaborated with Mary Lucey at Careers Ahead to offer educational and careers advice alongside mental-health and workplace well-being counselling to second- and third-level students, their parents, and job-seekers. She said that all of this fits in with the goals she and Martin had set themselves many years ago.

"I am contactable for anyone who needs my help at (085) 736 0994 and through e-mail at susanmarylawlor@yahoo.com," she added.
In times of economic, and political uncertainty environmental events can trigger chaos in markets, financial institutions and establishments that we all trust in for stability. If we depend on these systems for our livelihood we inevitably tie ourselves to the continuity of these systems.

While we do not need to be completely independent from their influence it is possible to reduce the threat that uncertainty brings by being prepared. There are several ways too reduce you dependence upon any institution. Here are several ways to better prepare yourself.

1. Open up a savings account abroad

Having an offshore bank account in a bank that is strong with adequate capital reserve in a jurisdiction which is financially and politically sound is one of the most strategic thing you can do to protect your wealth

Placing your assets offshore in a offshore bank account that has a reliable track record, cooperates with a fiscally prudent government that encourages conservative lending policies is effective in safeguarding against financial and economic uncertainty where you live.

2. Safeguarding your wealth in an overseas country

Forming a company or trust abroad is a reliable way to secure your assets by creating a separation of powers between you and your companys assets that can also reduce your tax burden, provide security, and protection against potential lawsuits and creditors. Going a step further, having a company or asset protection trust formed overseas in two jurisdictions gives you maximum protection by utilizing two different and separate structures that are based in different countries helps insure assets that are held remain distinct and separate from you as an individual.

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3. Diversification of assets

Diversification is ensured by having assets spread across multiple accounts and countries around the globe. Diversity is about reducing your risk which is done by spreading physical or liquid assets in different classes, accounts, and countries. This is achieved by having several ways to access your assets should a market crash, an institution fail, or a bank collapses.

Having an account overseas to access cash allows you a fall back and is an integral part of anyones plan b. Diversification is about self-sufficiency and not being dependent on any single type of institution for your survival. http://www.survivalartist.com

4. Maintain a back-up of physical cash

An easy financial preparation tactic is to carry enough cash for you to survive for a few months should events turn south. Having cold hard cash is a simple backup that doesnt call for much planning. If your bank fails you still have access to cash quickly.

5. Store physical gold

Having physical tangible assets that can be liquidated quickly such as gold acts as another failsafe and another step in ones asset diversification plan. Currencies can crash, while gold usually remains steady, is extremely liquid, as well as conveniently exchangeable in case of an emergency. It is a trustworthy back-up plan in addition to an investment that will provide a solid fall back should you need it.

6. Plan on getting a passport

Acquiring a second passport where you are welcomed as a first rate citizen is a crucial part of any kind of emergency plan. A passport from a second country gives you greater mobility, visa free travel and security by having a reliable second place to live in. Obtaining a passport usually requires a financial investment in cash or real-estate if you do not have the time to invest in getting citizenship through other means. A second passport gives you long-term planning capacity and gives you a trustworthy alternative should be caught in an emergency.

Takeaway

Having financial strategy has to do with cutting your dependence from any kind of single establishment, bank, or nation for your financial well-being. Having a solid plan b in place gives you control in times of uncertainty and should all else fail, you will not be left unprepared.

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Offshore Protection offers company formations, offshore accounts, financial licenses, crypto licenses, offshore trusts and foundations as well as second passports. Offshore Protection has over 20 years of experience conducting business in over 35 jurisdictions offering tailor-made offshore solutions.

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PONTOISE, France  In the town of Pontoise, which gently slopes upward from the Oise River about 15 miles northwest of Paris, Mayor Stephanie Von Euw is laser-focused on her new vaccination center  a blocky, sand-colored recreational facility where up to 450 shots are administered daily to those over 75 or otherwise at high risk.

Ms. Von Euw was energetic on a recent visit, chatting with doctors and vaccine recipients. But here in Pontoise, as in many other parts of France, there is no hiding that a winter of pandemic doldrums has set in.

To keep my chin up, I try to follow this rule: I take one day at a time, Ms. Von Euw said across a table covered with chocolate boxes left by recent vaccine recipients. If I look to the future, I lose myself.
The history of illegal drug usage and pushing rings out in Latin America and around the world. Most countries have their version of drug syndicates that are hunted down by the authorities.

In addition, the media has its representation of drug lords that depicts power, control, and bloodshed.

Thus, people can't help but think that illegal drugs are banned because of its representation and the effects it shows based on the recent updates.

But did you know that there are drug kingpins in Latin America (just diminish the authorities' cinematic actions and the drug syndicates) that can cause harm and are monitored by the Latin American government? To give you an idea, here are the most notorious drug lords of Latin America.

Pablo Escobar

This man might be the definition of a drug kingpin in Latin America. According to Biography, Escobar's brutal tactic ensured a stable supply of cocaine into America while running the Medellin Cartel out of Columbia during the 70s and 80s.

They add that some sources could estimate that 80 percent of the cocaine imported in the country was from Escobar's enterprise, with 15 tons per day as its peak.

He fostered corruption in the Columbian government, and those who do not concur meet their demise. They also emphasize that Escobar is responsible for about 4,000 mortality.

Read also: Top 5 Richest Latin American Drug Lords

Griselda Blanco

If you think that the illegal drug industry is an all-male industry, you are wrong because a woman could play a man's forte. In a report by Crime Museum,

Griselda Blanco was one of the pioneers of the cocaine trade industry who was a pickpocket, prostitute, and gang member in her youth.

They add that she began pushing cocaine from Colombia and the United States when she married Alberto Bravo. Crime Museum emphasized that Blanco was arrested by the FDA and tried to leave behind her past. However, she was gunned down when she was 690.

Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman

Biography shares that this man is the kingpin of the Sinaloa Cartel, which is the source of the most significant percentage of drugs imported in the United States every year.

The law has been chasing Guzman from 1993 to 2001, and he was arrested; however, he made himself comfortable through bribing and intimidating people, then he escaped.

In 2015, Biography adds that he was arrested again; however, he also fled. The United States Department of Justice reports that Guzman was arrested in 2019 and sentenced to life in prison plus 30 years.

Frank Lucas

Biography shares that by utilizing military connections from overseas, Lucas established a distribution network directly from South East Asia.

They add that the purity of heroin with his violent tactics against his competitors and the corrupt New York City Police Force in the early 70s assured him millions of dollars per month. They emphasized that Lucas died in May 2019.

Osiel Caardenas Guillen

Britannica shares that this man was running for leadership in the Gulf Cartel, an organized crime group that controlled a noteworthy portion of Mexico's drug trade.

The biography also notes that the U.S. Border Security Handbook labels the Gulf to be violent and expanded under Cardena's leadership. They further that he was arrested in 20013 and is still residing in Texas prison.

The history of drug lords somehow reflects how the media portray them in certain dramas and spectacle. Knowing that authorities are eyeing them puts us the assurance that we are safe and their protection will outlast.

Related article: How Mexican Drug Cartels Earn Billions in Drug Trade

WATCH: Mexico's Cartels Are Deadlier Than Ever Despite the Pandemic from VICE News
HARBERT, MI  Ellen Sobczak doesnt like boulder revetments.

But she and her husband, Michael, a Chicago anesthesiologist, shelved that distaste when they saw how close an eroding bluff had come to their Lake Michigan home last spring in Harbert, a small lakeside community in Berrien County near Sawyer once home to poet Carl Sandburg.

It was just so shocking, said Sobczak. It turned us both from anti-revetment and thinking that this would run its course to feeling like we really had to do something to prevent our home from sliding down the dune.

Worried about the natural forces advancing toward them, the Sobczaks and three neighbors sought permission from state regulators to armor the beach below their homes. They asked to build boulder revetments, a type of seawall thats become increasingly common, and increasingly controversial, as Great Lakes water levels have surged in recent years.

The state hasnt made a final decision yet, but regulators who are reviewing the proposals say they dont plan to approve them due to opposition from local elected leaders, whove taken a step many peers in other Michigan lakeside areas have been reluctant to by formally objecting to the hard armoring.

The Chikaming Township board voted on Nov. 12 to unanimously oppose the Harbert permits under review by the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy (EGLE), which has come under increasing pressure to both expedite solutions for homeowners along the lakeshore and stop allowing boulder fields to overtake the beach.

Its a lot of rock, said David Bunte, Chikaming Township supervisor, who has watched in dismay as neighboring communities to the south from New Buffalo to Michigan City have allowed vast swaths of beach to disappear under one revetment after another.

For those of us that have spent most of our lives enjoying this coastline, its hard to see that, he said.

State shall not issue permits

Chikaming Townships approval matters greatly because the applications were submitted under the states critical dune law, which requires a special exception that functions like township variance approval, said Ben Zimont, an environmental quality analyst in EGLEs water resources division who is reviewing the Harbert armoring proposal.

That essentially gives the board veto power. The state shall not issue a permit over opposition from the local unit of government, Zimont said last month. Its very clear.

At this point in time, unless were missing something with how the township has worded their opposition  and we dont think were misinterpreting the law  we dont think were going to be able to issue permits, Zimont said.

Objection from neighbors worried about the cascading impact on the shoreline is a common theme in disputes over boulder revetments. When located in the water, the structures can worsen downdrift erosion  often triggering a domino effect that results in hardening of long stretches.

15 Lake Michigan erosion in West Michigan in spring 2020

In Harberts case, the neighbor is Chikaming Township and the concern is for the public beach. Immediately south of the proposed revetments is Cherry Beach, a township beach with new access stairs rebuilt last year thats expanding through a state Natural Resources Trust Fund grant. To the north is another township beach at the end of Harbor Road.

In its opposition letter, the Chikaming board said the cumulative size of the revetments, at 411 linear feet, would have a significant detrimental effect on Cherry Beach.

However, the Harbert revetments would not be built in the water. They, like many others, would be placed on land above the ordinary high water mark. Those proposing them say thats meant to reduce their overall environmental impact.

Richard Ham owns one of the properties with a proposed revetment and argues that the groups plans were designed to minimize the impact on the environment and neighboring shoreline by placing stone on land at the bluff toe, not in the water where it can disrupt littoral sand flow.

This conversation has played out as if all revetments are the same, Ham said. Weve tried to do it right, with the understanding that what I consider to be done right looks wrong to some.

Competing policy goals

Experts say revetments built above the high water mark are still problematic for several reasons. According to Great Lakes researchers, the inevitable inward march of Lake Michigans coastline over time means that even revetments built on the beach will someday fail and topple forward as the relentless wave action scours sand from underneath. Once in the water, the rocks disrupt the natural sand flow along the coast that helps build beaches back after high waters recede.

In the meantime, the rocks stop eroding bluff sand from replenishing the nearshore zone, where it helps to build sandbars to protect the beach from energetic waves.

In its letter to EGLE, Chikaming Township also argued that the revetments would violate the public trust, a common law principle that certain natural resources like the Great Lakes and parts of the beach are preserved for public use.

The board specifically cited the revetments as hindering peoples ability to walk between both township beaches, which are separated by about 940 feet of private land in between. The letter cited the Michigan Supreme Courts 2005 decision in Glass v. Goeckel, which upheld the publics right to walk over privately-owned shoreline at the waters edge.

Bunte said Chikaming would like to see the state more uniformly apply public trust principles to armoring reviews and not let each municipality deal with proposals alone.

Are we going to support accessibility for all, or is our priority to allow property owners to erect seawall revetments or armaments on a constantly changing coastline? Bunte asked. Those revetments could be there forever.

Richard Norton, a University of Michigan planning professor who works with Great Lakes states and coastal communities on shoreline management, including Chikaming Township, said regulators are caught in a difficult position of trying to balance shifting attitudes toward armoring.

Michigan has approved thousands of shoreline protection permits at an increasing clip over the past couple years as the Great Lakes surged to record levels and storms began eating away large chunks of shoreline. But opposition has been rising to meet the proliferation of hard armoring proposals, and many who push back cite Nortons research.

I think EGLE is in a really tough spot, Norton said. Theyre having to respond to shoreline property owners desperate to save their homes and they are getting pressured to be responsive to that. At the same time, they are the agency charged with protecting the public trust. They are really caught in the middle of those competing policy goals.

The states policy waters are indeed muddy. Michigan gave up its authority last year to regulate revetments above the high water mark under a different statute after its jurisdiction was challenged. Thats sewn confusion among armoring applicants and has the Democratic administration looking to Republican lawmakers for a fix this year.

Republican legislation from Sen. Roger Victory, R-Hudsonville, that would simplify permitting and move the states authority back to the waters edge was reintroduced on Jan. 28 and sent to the environmental quality committee.

We hadnt really been engaging in a careful discussion about the long-term implications of what we were going to do before we got into this panic situation, Norton said. My hope is we would take a step back and talk that through in a systematic way.

Norton has worked with Chikaming Township to help craft zoning codes that favor natural resiliency principles and bake those into master planning documents.

He said Chikamings willingness to draw a line in the sand, as it were, makes it unique among coastal communities responding to similar concerns about the wider impacts of hardening. To the north, Lake Charter Township sidestepped a similar debate last year by remaining impartial when neighbors began to battle over proposed revetments.

In Chikaming, Bunte said the township is exploring a police power ordinance to codify its authority on hard armoring in addition to amending its planning approach. There are already other armoring proposals in the township. The state is holding an online public hearing on a seawall/revetment proposal in nearby Lakeside on March 2.

Herasanna Richards, a legislative associate at the Michigan Municipal League (MML) who has been tracking high water issues, said understanding among local officials has grown as theyve watched high water levels besiege infrastructure.

Richards said she wouldnt be surprised to see more communities begin asserting greater control along the coast through zoning codes and other municipal authorities as local leaders assess the damage while the lakes inch downward and look for ways to mitigate high water problems in the future.

This is a much more robust conversation than it was a year, or a year and a half ago, she said.

Beach neighbors lobby EGLE

In Harbert, EGLE held a public hearing last month on the applications that was largely a pro forma exercise required under the dune law because neighbors requested it. A substantial number of objections have been raised to the revetments beyond the townships. Zimont has received dozens of emails as well as a 560-signature petition in opposition.

The objections are largely from neighbors and backlot owners worried about long-term impact the revetments could have on the shoreline as a whole. They argue the revetments arent necessary, other solutions exist and that homeowners proposing them ought to have better understood the risks before purchasing property along a dynamic shoreline.

We as impacted homeowners do not wish to absorb the risks and financial impact to our investments that a few select property owners seek to impose on us, their neighbors, and on the wider community, wrote Sarah Schrup and Douglas Greeff, who live on Suns End near those proposing revetments.

In their emails, opponents offer lengthy examples of research on the negative impact of revetments on the ecosystem. But they also veer into tangential arguments in their efforts to persuade EGLE, such as directing particular ire at one property used as a vacation rental and questioning the ethics of listing a structure at such apparent risk.

An email to EGLE from the revetment groups consultant, Prism Science & Technology of St. Joseph, triggered anger from neighbors by seeking expedited review, claiming that lakeshore property owners are spending more time at their seasonal homes due to the impact from COVID-19 and neighborhoods at risk to violence in other locations.

Ian Ram, a backlot owner in Suns End, wasnt buying it.

These are all non-primary homes belonging to people who reside in wealthy neighborhoods in Illinois and Indiana, he wrote, None of these homeowners is in imminent danger.

The ferocity of opposition was unexpected.

Im kind of surprised at how vehement people have been about it, said Sobczak, who bought the home 20 years ago. Our own neighbors havent really spoken to us about it. Its easy for them to be anti-revetment because their houses are away from the beach and their own access is at Cherry Beach.

Sobczak said she and her husband have turned to softer options like large sandbags in the meantime, but they would like to have a permit in case erosion accelerates again. She recalls storms last year where they could feel the waves hitting the dune like a battering ram.

Im hoping the sandbags will be enough. It buys some time to let the beach come back and let the dune get reforested, Sobczak said. If the house slides down the dune, then we really have an environmental problem on our beach.

Ham, who is CEO of a corporate expense management consulting firm in Bloomington, Ind., owns the vacation rental, which he said hasnt been rented since last winter.

Chikaming Townships posture on revetments came as a surprise to Ham and his neighbors, and he said it feels like its a significant change from historical precedent.

Telling lakefront owners that their properties and homes must simply be allowed to fail is bad public policy and a recipe for decades of fighting and litigation, Ham said. The risk, as we understood it, was that we might have to spend a couple hundred grand protecting our homes  not that we would have to watch them fall into the lake.

Related stories:

Bridgman neighbors battle over proposed revetments

Submerged high water mark upends beach permitting

Lawmakers consider flooding and erosion task force

Seawalls could have lasting impact after water recedes

As Great Lakes surge, coastal areas face a reckoning

Lake Michigan level peaking short of 1986 record

Lake Huron levels besiege, reconfigure Tawas Point

Chronic flooding plagues Michigan inland lakes

Opinion: Lets not destroy the beach to save every house
The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
Chubb announced the creation of a new energy team in Chubb Global Markets (CGM) that will underwrite and serve as a center of excellence for all large corporate energy customers in EMEA, Asia Pacific and Latin America. CGM comprises Chubbs London market wholesale and specialty business, including the companys Lloyds platform.

Middle market energy customers risks will continue to be underwritten and serviced locally.

The team, which is based in London, is led by Andrew Brown, the newly appointed head of Energy CGM. Brown brings more than 15 years of experience to the role, most recently as chief underwriting officer, Global Energy Chubb Overseas General (COG). He joined Chubb 14 years ago and has held positions across upstream and downstream energy within CGM and has been based in both London and MENA.

Brown will be joined by the following product leads:

Melanie Markwick-Day , appointed head of Upstream Energy. Markwick-Day is responsible for managing and developing the upstream portfolio, moving from her most recent role as upstream energy senior underwriter COG.

, appointed head of Upstream Energy. Markwick-Day is responsible for managing and developing the upstream portfolio, moving from her most recent role as upstream energy senior underwriter COG. Adam Groves , appointed head of Downstream Energy. Groves will oversee the management and development of the downstream energy portfolio. He was previously regional head of energy for Chubb in MENA (the Middle East and North Africa).

, appointed head of Downstream Energy. Groves will oversee the management and development of the downstream energy portfolio. He was previously regional head of energy for Chubb in MENA (the Middle East and North Africa). Riaz Thanduparakkal , appointed head of Multinational and Network. Formerly, energy product head for CGM, Thanduparakkal is now responsible for managing the multinational portfolio and network.

, appointed head of Multinational and Network. Formerly, energy product head for CGM, Thanduparakkal is now responsible for managing the multinational portfolio and network. Matthew Bilbey, appointed chief underwriting officer.Bilbey joins the team from his most recent role as regional head of energy for Chubb in Asia Pacific.

These structural changes will enhance the value proposition across our Global Energy operation and help us to deliver more focused solutions for our clients and distribution partners, commented Matthew Hardy, global head of Energy, executive vice president Chubb Overseas General.

Crafting two distinct operating models, with dedicated underwriting, engineering and claims teams, will enable us to create an effective offering for brokers and clients so we can respond to their needs even more quickly and capitalise on our global insights across both segments, he added. Our regional offices will provide local expertise along with focused underwriting for our clients. These changes also further demonstrate the breadth of technical understanding we have within Chubb Global Energy.

Source: Chubb

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Washington: Donald Trump's historic second impeachment trial opened on Tuesday with a graphic video showing the former president whipping up a rally crowd to march to the Capitol and "fight like hell" against his reelection defeat, followed by images of the deadly attack on Congress that came soon after.

In an early test of the former president's defence, Donald Trump's team lost a crucial bid to halt the trial on constitutional grounds. Senators confirmed 56-44, their jurisdiction over the trial, the first of a president no longer in office.

While six Republican senators joined the Democrats in the proceeding, the tally showed how far prosecutors have to go to win a conviction, which requires a two-thirds threshold of 67 senators.

Tuesday's vote was on whether a former president could be tried after leaving office. House Democrats prosecuting the case told senators they were presenting "cold, hard facts" against Trump, who is charged with inciting the mob siege of the Capitol to overturn the election he lost to Democrat Joe Biden.

Senators sitting as jurors, many who themselves fled for safety that day, watched the jarring video of Trump supporters battling past police to storm the halls, Trump flags waving. "That's a high crime and misdemeanour," declared Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., in opening remarks. "If that's not an impeachable offence, then there's no such thing."

Trump is the first president to face impeachment charges after leaving office and the first to be twice impeached. The Capitol siege stunned the world as hundreds of rioters ransacked the building to try to stop the certification of Biden's victory, a domestic attack on the nation's seat of government unlike any in its history. Five people died.

Acquittal is likely, but the trial will test the nation's attitude toward Trump's brand of presidential power, the Democrats' resolve in pursuing him, and the loyalty of Trump's Republican allies defending him.

Trump's lawyers are insisting that he is not guilty of the sole charge of "incitement of insurrection", his fiery words just a figure of speech as he encouraged a rally crowd to "fight like hell" for his presidency. But prosecutors say he "as no good defence" and they promise new evidence.

Security remained extremely tight at the Capitol on Tuesday, a changed place after the attack, fenced off with razor wire with armed National Guard troops on patrol.

The nine House managers walked across the shuttered building to prosecute the case before the Senate.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Biden would not be watching the trial of his predecessor. "Joe Biden is the president, he's not a pundit, he's not going to opine on back and forth arguments," she said. With senators gathered as the court of impeachment, sworn to deliver "impartial justice", the trial started with debate and a vote over whether it's constitutionally permissible to prosecute Trump after he is no longer in the White House.

Trump's defence team has focused on that question, which could resonate with Republicans eager to acquit Trump without being seen as condoning his behaviour.

Lead lawyer Bruce Castor said that no member of the former president's defence team would do anything but condemn the violence of the "repugnant" attack, and "in the strongest possible way denounce the rioters". Yet Trump's attorney appealed to the senators as "patriots first", and encouraged them to be "cool-headed" as they assess the arguments.

At one pivotal point, Raskin told the personal story of bringing his family to the Capitol the day of the riot, to witness the certification of the Electoral College vote, only to have his daughter and son-in-law hiding in an office, fearing for their lives.

"Senators, this cannot be our future," Raskin said through tears. "This cannot be the future of America." Trump attorney David Schoen turned the trial toward starkly partisan tones, the defence showing its own video of Democrats calling for the former president's impeachment.

Schoen said Democrats are fuelled by a "base hatred" of the former president and "seeking to eliminate Donald Trump from the American political scene." It appears unlikely that the House prosecutors will call witnesses, in part because the senators were witnesses themselves. At his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, Trump has declined a request to testify.

Presidential impeachment trials have been conducted only three times before, leading to acquittals for Andrew Johnson, Bill Clinton and then Trump last year. Timothy Naftali, a clinical associate professor at New York University and an expert on impeachment, said in an interview, "This trial is one way of having that difficult national conversation about the difference between dissent and insurrection."

The first test Tuesday was on the constitutionality of the trial, signalling attitudes in the Senate. Six Republicans joined with Democrats pursue the trial, just one more than on a similar vote last week. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana added to the ranks of Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitt Romney of Utah, Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania.

The Democratic-led House impeached the President swiftly, one week after the attack. Five people died, including a woman shot by police inside the building and a police officer who died the next day of his injuries.

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China in Focus (Feb. 9): WHO Echoes Chinas Virus Comments

A World Health Organization expert agrees with Chinas narrative that the virus can be transmitted via frozen food, despite no reports of virus transmission via food packaging in China.

Chinas ambassador to the United States echoed a claim pushed by Beijing: that the CCP virus may have originated from the United States.

A local Chinese official orders police to show no mercy while beating petitioners, including pregnant women.

Chinas regulators met with Tesla over customer complaints. They instruct the carmaker to comply with Chinese law.

And the United States challenges Beijings claims in the South China Sea as tensions rise between Japan and China over contested islands in the East China Sea.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel for more first-hand news from China.

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A day after his widely panned opening in Donald Trumps Senate impeachment trial, defense lawyer Bruce L. Castor Jr. denied reports that the former president was unhappy with his performance and said he purposefully delivered a meandering, 50-minute presentation as a distraction.

The media is paying far more attention to what I had to say, and consequently spent less time on arguments advanced by [lead Democratic House impeachment manager Jamie] Raskin and his team, the former Montgomery County district attorney told Fox News in an interview Wednesday. That was by design.

Castor offered that rationalization of his rocky start  which drew criticism from GOP pundits and senators and reportedly had Trump near screaming at his TV  just moments before returning to the Senate chamber for a second day of proceedings.

He paused to talk to reporters on his way in, saying that if Trump was unhappy with his presentation, no one had communicated that to him.

For the rest of the day, he sat in uncharacteristic silence as the nine Democratic House impeachment managers  including Castors own congresswoman, Rep. Madeleine Dean (D., Pa.)  began laying out their case for conviction.

 READ MORE: Bruce Castor had a big spotlight to open Trumps impeachment defense. It didnt go well.

Dean, one of the lawmakers prosecuting Trump for the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol attack, choked up as she recounted her own experience fleeing from rioters outside the House gallery that day. Several senators stopped taking notes as they watched in silence.

There was a terrifying banging on the chamber doors, she said. I will never forget that sound. Shouts and panicked calls to my husband and my sons. Instructions to flee.  The chamber of the United States House of Representatives turned to chaos.

Though Castor and Dean grew up just miles from each other in Montgomery County and have both spent their careers to law and politics in the region, they didnt cross paths until the Senate trial this week.

 READ MORE: Montcos Bruce Castor and Madeleine Dean bring very different approaches to Trumps impeachment trial

Wearing a gold brooch her father gave her mother to mark President John F. Kennedys election, Dean addressed senators as both a representative from one of the key states whose votes Trump attacked with false fraud claims, and as someone who was trapped in the House chamber as rioters reached the doors.

Her presentation was aimed at convincing them the incitement charge centers not just on Trumps rally speech hours before the attack, but also on the months-long campaign he waged to cast doubt on the integrity of the election and his efforts to pressure officials in swing states to overturn the votes.

In Pennsylvania, Dean recounted, Trump and his allies filed lawsuit after lawsuit, spread baseless claims at legislative hearings, and lobbied friendly state lawmakers to stop the certification of the vote.

She balked while recounting Trump calling in to a November Republican hearing in Gettysburg and repeating, through a cell phone his lawyer held up to a microphone, his baseless lies that the vote had been stolen.

Senators, we must not become numb to this, she said. Trump did this across state after state, so often, so loudly, so publicly.

She later walked senators through Trumps words during his Jan. 6 rally in Washington that preceded the storming of the Capitol. While Trumps lawyers had highlighted a snippet of that speech where the former president called for peaceful protests, it was the only time he used that word in his nearly 11,000-word remarks. He used fight or fighting 20 times, Dean noted.

This attack never would have happened but for Donald Trump, she said. They came draped in Trumps flag and used our flag to batter and bludgeon.  For the first time in more than 200 years, the seat of our government was ransacked on our watch.

Raskin hugged her as she concluded her speech. Sen. Bob Casey (D., Pa.) gave her an elbow bump. Castor responded with the verbal equivalent of a shrug.

I didnt learn anything that I didnt already know, he told reporters during a break.

Trumps defense team, including Atlanta lawyer David Schoen and Philadelphia attorneys Michael T. van der Veen and William J. Brennan, arent expected to address the Senate again until later this week.

And despite speculation among some GOP pundits  including Trump adviser and Fox News host Sean Hannity  that Castors ongoing role in the case was in doubt, he told the network Wednesday the defense team has no intention of changing their strategy.

In fact, Castor maintained, Trumps former chief of staff Mark Meadows came to the Capitol Tuesday to personally tell him that, despite negative news coverage, everything [was] going fine.

Castor remained confident that no matter how poorly his performance was reviewed, Trump would eventually be acquitted. Hes probably right about that: Democrats need 17 Republicans to vote to convict, and only a handful have suggested theyre open to doing so.

If winning the case has a consequence that I have to take a few torpedoes in order to focus attention on us and away from what the House impeachment managers are doing, he said, then that is part of the danger in being a trial lawyer, when prevailing is of greater importance than personal grandiosement.

His cocounsel, Schoen, was more circumspect. When asked by reporters outside the Senate chamber about Castors future with the team and whether Schoen might end up taking a greater role in the defense going forward, he said only:

Mr. Trump always gives great advice.

Staff writer Jonathan Tamari contributed to this article.
HELSINKI (dpa-AFX) - Finland's industrial production dropped in December, data from Statistics Finland showed on Wednesday. Industrial production fell 0.9 percent month-on-month in December, after a 0.8 percent growth in November. Manufacturing output fell 0.2 percent monthly in December, while production in mining and quarrying industry grew 4.4 percent. Among industries, production in electrical and electronics industry declined 5.1 percent. Production in metal industry and electricity, gas, steam and air conditioning supply production decreased by 3.0 percent and 1.4 percent, respectively. On a yearly basis, industrial output decreased 2.5 percent in December, following a 1.1 percent fall in the previous month. During January to December, output declined by 3.1 percent from the year ago, data showed. Another report from Statistics Finland showed that new orders in manufacturing declined 15.1 percent year-on-year in December, after a 9.7 percent growth in November. In 2020, new orders in manufacturing fell 11.4 percent. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

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.
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Tata Steel share price added over 3 percent in the early trade on February 10 a day after the company announced its December quarter numbers.

On February 9, the company reported a consolidated profit of Rs 3,989 crore for the quarter ended December 2020 driven by improved realisation-backed strong operating income. The loss in corresponding period was Rs 1,166 crore.

Consolidated revenue from operations grew by 11.5 percent year-on-year to Rs 39,594 crore in Q3FY21.

Tata Steel Europe reported a 1.8 percent year-on-year growth in revenue at Rs 14,069.92 crore, but at EBITDA level, it posted loss of Rs 724.27 crore in Q3FY21 against Rs 956.30 crore in Q3FY20.

Also Read - Tata Steel Q3 result | Company beats estimates, posts profit of Rs 3,989 crore with 1,380 bps operating margin expansion

Motilal Oswal

Broking house kept neutral rating on the stock.

The company's consolidated debt reduced by Rs 103 billion QoQ to Rs 884 billion.

Tata Steel Europe (TSE) reported EBITDA loss of Rs 7.2b v/s loss of Rs 4.6b in 2QFY21, and was below our expectation of EBITDA of Rs 5.7b. The miss on EBITDA was due to the reversal of wage support from the govt. (which was recognized in 2QFY21) and higher provisions for carbon emissions in 3QFY21.

At 09:21 hrs Tata Steel was quoting at Rs 713.10, up Rs 13.90, or 1.99 percent on the BSE.

The share touched its 52-week high Rs 731.35 and 52-week low Rs 250.90 on 07 January, 2021 and 30 March, 2020, respectively.

Currently, it is trading 2.5 percent below its 52-week high and 184.22 percent above its 52-week low.
European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has apologised publicly for mistakes" made in triggering Article 16 of the Northern Ireland protocol last month.

The bottom line is that mistakes were made in the process leading up to the decision, Ms von der Leyen told MEPs in Brussels this morning. And I deeply regret that.

"But in the end, we got it right, and I can reassure you that my Commission will do its utmost to protect the peace of Northern Ireland, just as it has done throughout the entire Brexit process.

Read More

Last month the Commission introduced export controls on vaccines, requiring manufacturers on EU soil to apply for authorisation before sending the finished products outside the bloc.

Ms von der Leyen said the Commission does "not intend to restrict companies that are honouring their contracts with the EU.

Ms von der Leyen defended the Commissions record on vaccines in the face of increasing criticism, especially from the junior coalition partner in her home country of Germany.

She said the EU had "made a choice to take more time to safety assess vaccines, and decided against shortcuts.

Read More




Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 10)  The Department of Trade and Industry, through the Small Business Corporation, has approved a total of 2.35 billion loans under its program that targets to help small businesses restart amid the pandemic.

In a statement on Wednesday, the DTI said this translates to a total of 21,695 loan applications under the Bayanihan COVID-19 Assistance to Restart Enterprises program.

"Over 20,000 MSMEs [micro, small, and medium enterprises] have already benefitted from this loan portfolio, which has helped businesses survive from permanent closure, recover from the effects of the pandemic, save or even create more jobs, and provide income to millions of Filipinos and their families," Trade Secretary Ramon Lopez said.

The pandemic has impacted many economies. In the Philippines, some businesses had no choice but to shut down due to losses incurred with the government's implementation of restrictions on movements of people.

Lopez emphasized that MSMEs are the "key pillar" to the economy, with a contribution of 35.7% to gross domestic product and an employment of 62.5% of the labor force. However, around 38% of 3,000 MSMEs the DTI surveyed were forced to close down from April to June when strict restrictions were in place, he added.

To address this, the government formulated the Bayanihan CARES program, a special loan facility of the SB Corp. for MSMEs adversely affected by the global health crisis. Under the Bayanihan to Recover as One Act, this was allocated with 10 billion, wherein businesses can borrow up to 5 million, without interest and collateral. A grace period of up to six months is also provided for regular businesses, and up to 12 months for selected industries.

The program is also available to returning overseas Filipino workers who wish to start their own businesses.

Lopez said the process was streamlined and shifted online to be able to reach more businesses. Evaluation can be completed within 7 working days depending on the documents submitted, he noted.
Conroy Gold has a substantial land position in Ireland

( ) has released results from a ground geophysical survey over the Cargalisgorran part of the Clay Lake gold target.

The reinterpretation of the geology using the new geophysical data has had a transformative impact on understanding the subsurface geology and gold mineralisation at the Cargalisgorran target.

The interpretation highlights details of the gold mineralisation trend and newly discovered parallel structures, upgrading the discovery potential for additional gold mineralisation.

The Cargalisgorran part of the Clay Lake gold target has already generated significant results from drilling, including 6.6 metres at 6.2 grams per tonne gold.

The value of such geophysical data in relation to drilling has been demonstrated on the Derryhennet part of the Clay Lake gold target, where the data indicated a geological feature which, on subsequent drilling, yielded a drill intersection of approximately 100 metres grading 0.6 grams per tonne gold, one of the longest publicly recorded gold drill intersections in Britain or Ireland.

We consider there is substantial potential to increase our compliant gold resource, accelerate Clontibret mine development and also to test the geological comparability of our Clontibret deposit to the Fosterville deposit in Victoria, Australia, where the occurrence of visible gold is becoming increasingly significant at depth, said Professor Richard Conroy.

Wine is perishable: a volatile organic product that never stands still. Historically, this fact led to much experimentation with methods of stabilizing wine to extend its shelf life. One of the most effective strategies was to fortify wine, or boost its alcoholic strength, by adding distilled spirits. Modern winemaking technology has largely eliminated the need to stabilize wine this way, but fortified wines happen to be quite delicious and a few traditional styles are still made, including port and sherry.

However, there is another type of tasty fortified wine that is often overlooked, a category known as aperitif wines. These are not simply spiked with spirits but also flavored with herbs, spices fruits, and other botanicals. Almost every major wine region of Europe produces wines like these, the most famous of which are vermouths bittered with wormwood. Only a handful of non-vermouth aperitif wines are exported to the U.S., but the most well-known is Lillet Blanc from Bordeaux, France. First formulated by the Lillet brothers in 1872, their innovation was to spike their semillon-based white wines with sweet liqueur rather than raw spirit to make a delicious wine-based cocktail. The secret recipe is citrus-driven with lots of orange peel but also faintly bittered with quinine, the ingredient used in tonic water. You may need to stray into the spirits aisle to find this mouthwatering golden elixir, but youll be getting a taste of history, whether you serve it on ice or use it in a cocktail.

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YEREVAN, 10 FEBUARY, ARMENPRESS. The Central Bank of Armenia informs Armenpress that today, 10 February, USD exchange rate up by 0.53 drams to 523.13 drams. EUR exchange rate up by 1.33 drams to 634.09 drams. Russian Ruble exchange rate up by 0.03 drams to 7.09 drams. GBP exchange rate up by 3.77 drams to 723.91 drams.

The Central Bank has set the following prices for precious metals.

Gold price up by 104.44 drams to 30940.27 drams. Silver price up by 8.11 drams to 464.79 drams. Platinum price up by 406.62 drams to 19913.72 drams.

The sight of two senior members of the Establishment battling like ferrets in a sack is unusual. When it involves the Governor of the Bank of England and a former Appeal Court justice, it becomes destructive.

Raising questions over the reliability of Andrew Bailey at a moment when the Bank is propping up the pandemic economy with 875billion of bond buying is not a good look.

In passionate testimony before the Treasury Select Committee, Bailey said he had not wanted to evade responsibility for the collapse of the mini-bond firm London Capital & Finance (LCF).

Raising questions over the reliability of Andrew Bailey at a moment when the Bank is propping up the pandemic economy with 875bn of bond buying is not a good look

He may have persuaded MPs, but not Dame Elizabeth Gloster, who probed the Financial Conduct Authoritys (FCA) failure to prevent the scandal.

Her icy and speedily-written response challenged Baileys assertion that he had only tried to have his name and that of his colleagues removed from the report because it implied legal culpability as well as responsibility.

The doughty lawyer said she disagreed with this version of events and corrected Bailey by saying it was the Governor, not her, who had described the Financial Conduct Authority as a broken machine.

More critical now than the substance of the LCF report, which is damaging enough, is what it does for the Governors credibility.

Last night he sought to draw a line under the affair by saying he would not comment further. The spat requires a meeting of the Banks independent board of directors, known as the Court, headed by US financier Bradley Fried, and including such luminaries as Baroness Dido Harding.

Rather than leave Bailey to twist in the wind, the Court needs to establish a course of action which underpins the integrity of the role of Governor.

Bailey and the Court also need to recognise that mistakes made when he was chief executive of the FCA  including the implosion in the Neil Woodford investment empire  have the capacity to do yet further harm.

Steiners world

It should hardly come as a surprise that grocery tech pioneer Tim Steiner doesnt like the idea of higher taxes. A wealth tax or hike in capital taxes would risk denting his personal wealth at a moment when the value of Ocado has raced ahead to 20billion.

Valuing Ocado is tricky because it is still a loss maker. But earnings are not the correct metric for tech. Amazon and Tesla spent years losing money while ploughing billions into investment. It was only later that they became profit and value gushers.

Ocados technology has become more valuable than ever in the pandemic. Data shows online British grocery sales at a record market share of 16 per cent in January, double the level in 2020.

At Ocado, retail revenues were up 35.3 per cent last year to 2.2billion even though customer numbers slipped. It will be stronger when three UK hubs are completed and the partnership with M&S foods is at full blast.

Steiner has customer fulfilment centres up and running for Groupe Casino in Paris and Sobeys in Canada, with contracts in the US and Japan still to come through.

The idea of a UK firm bringing robotics to Japan is like coals to Newcastle but provides evidence that Ocado does offer systems that others dont have.

At this stage, ramping up investment is the right thing for Ocado. If and when the pandemic subsides, the speed of revenue growth may stutter too. But Ocado already is proving that it has created an insatiable demand from shoppers.

Security breach

Remember G4S, the worlds largest security firm, which guards defence facilities and runs some of the nations prisons?

It has just revealed contract wins worth 5.5billion and describes the final quarter as strong. This weeks bid deadlines will come and go and there could be a Takeover Panel-convened auction.

But barring a late intervention it will be sold to US outfit Allied Universal or Canadian rival Garda World, both of which are controlled by private equity.

We know how badly that can end for the UK, from the gutting of Debenhams to the rapid break-up and disposal of aerospace pioneer Cobham.

All of this offers an opportunity for new Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng to make a mark by ordering a public interest inquiry into the G4S sale by the Competition & Markets Authority.
President Biden threw his support behind Gov. Gavin Newsom on Tuesday as the California Democrat faces a mounting drive to remove him from office.

In addition to sharing a commitment to a range of issues with @GavinNewsom from addressing the climate crisis to getting the pandemic under control, @POTUS clearly opposes any effort to recall @GavinNewsom, Jen Psaki, Bidens press secretary, wrote on Twitter.

The statement came hours after a reporter asked about the recall campaign at a White House news briefing. Psaki replied that she had not spoken with the president about the effort to recall Newsom, whom she erroneously referred to as former Gov. Newsom.

They have a range of issues they have common agreement on, she said, and we remain closely engaged with him and his office.

Newsoms opponents have repeatedly tried to oust the governor since he took office in 2019, though they now appear closer than ever to clearing a major hurdle after anger over Newsoms handling of the coronavirus pandemic turbocharged their sixth attempt.

If recall proponents submit nearly 1.5 million valid signatures from registered California voters by March 17, Newsom will go before the voters again in a special election this year. They had turned in about 410,000 valid signatures as of Jan. 6, though the campaign recently said it has collected 1.4 million signatures. The next update from the secretary of states office on signature verification is due next week.

A representative for Newsom did not immediately respond to questions about whether the governor had asked Biden to speak out about the recall effort.

During a series of public appearances over the past week at mass coronavirus vaccination sites across California, Newsom has dodged questions about the campaign, including at Levis Stadium in Santa Clara on Tuesday, where he said he was not focusing on that at all.

But Democratic elected officials have closed ranks around the governor in the wake of a pair of public polls last week that showed his approval ratings dropping.

Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf told reporters at the Oakland Coliseum last week, I cant tell you how lucky we are in California to have Gavin Newsom as our governor, while San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria praised him Monday at Petco Park for working day and night for a year straight to keep us safe.

State Sen. Steve Glazer, an Orinda Democrat who has frequently criticized Newsoms economic reopening strategy during the pandemic, released a video on social media Tuesday calling the recall a distraction.

Alexei Koseff is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: alexei.koseff@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @akoseff
At school, children always made Valentine cards for all the other students in their class. Parties were happy and fun with heart crafts and heart-shaped goodies, and the classrooms were draped in red, white and pink.

But this Valentines Day, why not try something a little different with these ideas?

 The Complete Photo Guide to Card Making by Judy Wantanabe has instructions for incorporating origami, decoupage, stamping and more into a thoughtful card.

 Another idea would be to write a loved one a letter using calligraphy. The library has two titles to help with that plan, Calligraphy 101: a Workshop in a Book by Jeaneen Gauthier and Calligraphy in 24 Hours by Vieko Kespersaks which would provide the necessary lessons.

 Looking for something a bit more detailed? Try Handmade Gifts by Hannah Moore has many ideas for small, thoughtful offerings such as natural soaps, a rollaway game board or something for a pet.

 Wired Jewelry: Knitting, Crocheting and Twisting in Wire by Kath Orsman is just one of the jewelry making titles the library carries for both beginners and advanced crafters.

 Children may love to receive a handmade gift from Wool Pets: Making 20 Figures with Wool Roving and a Barbed Needle by Laurie Sharp which has detailed instructions for creating adorable fuzzy animals.

 Foodies might enjoy creating cocktails and appetizers using Aperitivo: the Cocktail Culture of Italy: Recipes for Drinks and Small Dishes by Marisa Huff will take one to Italy to sample liqueurs, crostini and fried sage leaves  Winter Cocktails: Mulled Ciders, Hot Toddies, Punches, Pitchers and Cocktail Party Snacks by Maria del Mar Sacasa has recipes for hot buttered rum, or Irish Coffee and more or The Art of Vintage Cocktails by Stephanie Rosenbaum with classic cocktails and their history.

 Take inspiration from the romantic meal and plan a getaway to the islands using Fodors Travel Caribbean Cruise Ports of Call'' or explore an exotic location with The Rough Guide to Romania or Fodors Travel Essential Iceland.

 Moon Napa & Sonoma and Moon Charleston & Savannah are both romantic locations with titles available detailing the destinations.

If one prefers a quiet day of reading, the library suggests some of the many romances on offer.

 The Amish Sweet Shop by Emma Miller, Laura Bradford, and Mary Ellis has three stories set in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Meet a meddling mother, a shy young woman and a single mother-to-be who each celebrate Valentines Day in a unique way.

 Love Gently Falling by Melody Carlson brings a young woman home to help her mother after a stroke and she finds herself falling in love.

 Tessa Baileys Fix Her Up is a warm, funny story. After turning down her place in the family renovation business to plan childrens parties, Georgie decides to renovate herself and enlists a local celebrity to help.

 Another funny story is Sophie Kinsellas Love Your Life. Agreeing to false identities, two people meet at a writers retreat in Italy and spend their time exploring the Italian coast, swimming and enjoying a love affair. But when its time to go home, the reality may be too much for the young lovers.

 The Bromance Book Club by Lyssa Adams finds a disillusioned husband taking advice from a secret men's book club to save his marriage.

 Well Met by Jen DeLuca takes a Renaissance Faire, a school teacher and a new-in-town volunteer on an unexpected journey to love.

The library is wishing all a happy Valentines Day, and is also asking readers to share their Valentines Day ideas on the Manistee County Facebook and Instagram.
Hyde follows family tradition, takes home PIAA gold in shot put

"It's awesome," Hyde said. "It really feels like a tradition, now. It will be cool to see our names next to each other in the record books."
In this screenshot from the RNCs livestream of the 2020 Republican National Convention, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem addresses the virtual convention on Aug. 26, 2020. (Courtesy of the Committee on Arrangements for the 2020 Republican National Committee via Getty Images)

South Dakota Court Ruling Sends Pot Referendum Up in Smoke

A state judge in South Dakota struck down a state constitutional amendment approved by voters in November that would lead to the legalization and taxation of the recreational use of marijuana because its supporters supposedly failed to follow proper procedure.

The lawsuit on which the judge ruled didnt deal with Initiated Measure 26, another referendum approved by the voters at the same time. That initiative, which would create by statute a medical marijuana program in the state for individuals with a debilitating medical condition, was approved by voters 69.92 percent to 30.08 percent, according to Ballotpedia.

Measure 26 applies to patients suffering from cachexia or wasting syndrome; severe, debilitating pain; severe nausea; seizures; or severe and persistent muscle spasms caused by a chronic or debilitating disease or medical condition or its treatment, according to a Reason summary.

Circuit Judge Christina Klingers Feb. 8 ruling stated that Constitutional Amendment A ran afoul of a rule requiring that an amendment deal with only a single subject. Klinger ruled the measure, which dealt both with legalization and taxation of marijuana, had to be considered by a convention of state delegates before being placed on the ballot, and couldnt be enacted by the petition process.

Lawyers for the individuals who brought the lawsuit challenging the constitutional amendment, South Dakota Highway Patrol Superintendent Rick Miller and Pennington County Sheriff Kevin Thom, had argued in court that because Amendment A added an entirely new section to the state constitution instead of merely changing an existing section, it was a revision, not an amendment.

Klinger agreed, writing that the failure to submit Amendment A through the proper constitutional process voids the amendment and it has no effect.

Miller and Thom were backed in the litigation by Gov. Kristi Noem, a Republican, who opposed the initiative during the election campaign.

Constitutional Amendment A was approved by the states voters 54.18 percent to 45.82 percent on Nov. 3, 2020, according to Ballotpedia. A yes vote supported the constitutional amendment to legalize the recreational use of marijuana and required the state legislature to pass laws providing for the use of medical marijuana and the sale of hemp by April 1, 2022.

Amendment A would make the recreational use of marijuana by individuals 21 years of age and older lawful. Under it, individuals would be allowed to possess or distribute up to one ounce of marijuana. The measure also provided that individuals in a jurisdiction with no licensed retail stores would be allowed to grow as many as three marijuana plants in a private residence in a locked space, though not more than six marijuana plants could be kept in one residence at a time.

A state tax of 15 percent would be applied to marijuana sales. The taxes collected would be used to cover costs associated with implementing the amendment, and the remaining revenue would be evenly split between the states public schools and the states general fund.

The amendment also stipulated that local governments would be free to ban marijuana cultivators, testing facilities, wholesalers, or retail stores from operating within their physical jurisdictions.

Had the November vote stood, South Dakota would have become the 14th state to allow recreational use of marijuana.

Noem lauded the judges ruling in a statement, saying the decision protects and safeguards our constitution.

The Epoch Times reached out to South Dakotans for Better Marijuana Laws, the group that put the amendment on the ballot, but did not receive a reply by press time.

A spokesman for the group, Brendan Johnson, was quoted by local media, saying, We disagree with the ruling and we are preparing our appeal to the South Dakota Supreme Court.



PARMA, Ohio -- Motorists familiar with the bumpy experience associated with driving on York Road will be happy to hear that the issue is being addressed this year.

The currently concrete Parma and Parma Heights thoroughfare will receive full-depth repairs as needed, followed by asphalt paving from Pleasant Valley Road to Pearl Road.

Just like the rest of our main roads, we keep trying to work with our partners and get these bigger projects done, Parma Mayor Tim DeGeeter said. Were glad its moving forward, and it helps with our residents and non-residents coming to and from Tri-C or home.

Added Parma Heights Mayor Michael P. Byrne: Im looking forward to the repaying of York Road this spring. This project is another piece in the overall puzzle of addressing our major traffic corridors.

Parma Assistant City Engineer Hasmukh Patel said the estimated $4.4 million project is set to start May 3 and end Nov. 5.

Sharing in the costs are the Ohio Public Works Commission, Cuyahoga County, Parma and Parma Heights.

A third of York Road -- from Pleasant Valley Road to just north of Boundary Lane -- is in Parma, which is estimated to be paying $250,000. Parma Heights portion is $530,000.

Because ODOT doesnt cover curbs, curb ramps and full-depth repairs, Parma Assistant Engineer James J. Mihelich estimated that his citys full contribution will be in the $2 million range.

There are a lot of longitudinal joint repairs in some sections of the concrete on York Road that are failing, Mihelich said. This job was originally going to go in 2020. I think budgetary-wise they couldnt get it out ... until 2021.

Other road work

Looking ahead in Parma, the repaving of Pearl Road from Snow Road to Brookpark Road is set to begin this fall. Mihelich said the goal is to get half of the project to Ridge Road finished this year, with a 2022 completion date.

Then, in the spring of 2022, the final leg of Ridge Road north from Pearl Road to Flowerdale Avenue -- a joint project including Parma, Brooklyn and Cleveland -- will be started.

Parma Heights is also finishing up major road work in 2021.

In addition to the York Road project, the second and last phase of the repaving of Pearl Road will be completed, Byrne said.

These projects -- along with the recent resurfacing of Snow Road, Stumph Road and West 130th Street -- will leave only West Ridgewood Drive as a major corridor in need of repairs.

Read more news from the Parma Sun Post.

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From mom-and-pop shops to the big retail chains, pharmacies in New Jersey would be prohibited from selling tobacco and vaping products if a bill that state panel approved Tuesday becomes law.

With pharmacies offering clinic services like blood pressure screenings, vaccinations and on-site medical consultations, they are health care facilities, and should not be selling products that are harmful, said Sen. Joseph Vitale, D-Middlesex, who sponsored the legislation.

The Senate Health, Human Services and Senior Citizens Committee that Vitale chairs approved the bill by a 5-3 vote.

Before the vote, the bill was amended to say department stores, supermarkets and box stores with pharmacies would be exempt, a move sought by these retailers.

No one testified for or against the bill during the brief, virtual hearing. But in a statement Tuesday night, John Holub from the New Jersey Council of Chain Drug Stores said his members will oppose the bill.

We oppose any effort that prohibits a retailer from selling a legal product, Holub said. What makes this bill even worse, it picks and chooses which retailers can and cannot sell a legal product.

CVS Caremark CEO Larry Merlo announced the pharmacy chain would stop selling tobacco products in 2014, saying it was simply the right thing to do for the good of our customers and our company. The sale of tobacco products is inconsistent with our purpose  helping people on their path to better health.

Vitale said he had hoped other pharmacy chains like Walgreen and Rite Aid would follow suit, but they have not.

We are asking these pharmacies to do the right thing, he said.

If caught violating the law, a pharmacy would receive a $250 fine for the first offense, $500 for the second offense and $1,000 for subsequent offenses, according to the bill.

The legislation now moves to the full, 40-member Senate for a vote.

New Jersey is known for its tough laws on smoking. It banned the sale of tobacco products to people under 21 years old in 2017, and banned smoking on beaches in 2019.

Last year, Gov. Phil Murphy signed into law a ban on the sale and distribution of flavored e-cigarettes, making New Jersey the first state to do so.

Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to NJ.com.



Susan K. Livio may be reached at slivio@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @SusanKLivio.

US warships in South China Sea send a strong signal to Beijing

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

New Delhi, Feb 10: In a clear sign that the Joe Biden administration would continue the Trump administration's tough policy on China, two American aircraft carriers including the USS Nimitz conducted military exercises in the South China Sea.

The coordinated operations combining ships and planes of the two strike groups, Theodore Roosevelt and Nimitz were carried out. This is a clear sign of the US Navy's ability to operating in such challenging environments, the US Pacific Fleet said in a statement. An angry Beijing said that the exercises are an effort by the US to flex its muscles.

Most sophisticated repression of minorities conducted by China abroad: Report

The developments came in the backdrop of multiple provocations over the last few weeks that included flying of military aircraft into the Taiwan Strait last month. Beijing had last week reacted aggressively to the presence of USS John S. McCcain and said that it was able to drive away the US guided missile destroyer from near the Parcel Island in the South China Sea region.

It may be recalled that Biden had during conversation with Prime Minister Narendra Modi pointed out reference to the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, the strategic dialogue between India, USA, Japan and Australia. This mostly focuses on Beijing.

Angered by the US actions, a Chinese foreign ministry official said that this is not conducive to peace and stability in the region. China will continue to take necessary measures to firmly defend national sovereignty and security and work together with regional countries to safeguard peace and stability in the South China Sea.

Twitter blocks portion of accounts, cites free speech | OneIndia News

One must also note that a new Chinese law was enforced on Monday, which allows its coast guard to fire at foreign ships in its waters and also remove buildings constructed by foreign countries on what it calls on Chinese territories.

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Story first published: Wednesday, February 10, 2021, 8:52 [IST]
Celebrity chef John Whaite has revealed his secret battle with an eating disorder for the first time.

The Great British Bake Off winner, 32, from Lancashire, appeared Channel 4's Steph's Packed Lunch today and said his struggles with his body image started when he was just a teenager.

John explained: 'If I was making a batch of muffins and something went wrong in my life that day, or around that time, I would sit there and I would eat all 12 of the muffins and then I'd run to the bathroom and I'd make myself sick.'

The TV presenter, who has never spoken of his bulimia before, said he had 'only accepted' his problem as an eating disorder in the past two years, and called the experience 'very raw'.

The chef said he still struggles to talk about the problem because he feels 'guilty' about those in the UK who have little to eat, saying: 'One of the things I feel very shameful about is that...we talk about kids who have very little to eat at the minute in the UK, so to think that I throw up my food every now and again, I feel very guilty for that. But it isn't something I can control'

Celebrity chef John Whaite, 32, revealed his experiences with bulimia in an emotional film during today's episode of Steph's Packed Lunch (above) on Channel 4

He explained: 'I've been very vocal in the past about my mental health issues but one thing I haven't really spoken about is my eating disorder.

'My body image as I grew up was very difficult I was so conscious of being fat. But one thing I was aware of as being problematic for 12, 14 years was overeating and then purging.

'The painful forcing down of food and then that instant need to get that out of me.'

More than one million people in the UK are estimated to have an eating disorder, with one in four of these individuals being men.

In the short film, John bravely admitted that his relationship with food has 'at times been very complicated' and said he struggled with his 'body image' as he grew up

John said the eating disorder had been very 'difficult to overcome' and explained he found it challenging to speak about due to the stigma surrounding eating disorders.

He explained: 'I've only really accepted it as an eating disorder in the past 18 months, two years and it's been very, very raw.

'It's been very, very difficult to overcome and I think that is down to the stigma of an eating disorder.

'Especially as a chef, I didn't really want to talk about it because I felt like it kind of undermined my entire career.

WHAT IS BULIMIA? Bulimia is an eating disorder and mental health condition. People who have bulimia go through periods where they eat a lot of food in a very short amount of time (binge eating) and then make themselves sick, use laxatives (medicine to help them poo) or do excessive exercise, or a combination of these, to try to stop themselves gaining weight. Anyone can get bulimia, but it is more common in young people aged 13 to 17. Getting help and support as soon as possible gives you the best chance of recovering from bulimia. Source: NHS Advertisement

'How can a chef who writes recipes books and cooks on TV, how can he realistically have bulimia?'

Speaking to host Steph, John said he feels like a weight has been lifted after opening up about his struggles, because he had felt 'ashamed' of his eating disorder.

Steph, who knows John well because he is the resident chef on the chat show, admitted that she did not previously realise that he was struggling with an eating disorder.

Speaking about the film, John said: 'I feel a weight has been lifted in a way I did feel very ashamed of it because not only am I a chef and it sort of undermines that side of my career'

John revealed to Steph that he did not think it was a 'huge problem' but has been receiving help and support from a psychotherapist since being diagnosed.

He continued: 'It feels good to talk about it. I've been an advocate for mental health since being on Bake Off and when I've talked to my psychotherapist about this, I didn't really realise I had an eating disorder until about two years ago when she said, "This is bulimia".

'Until that point, I just thought it was a slight way of coping with overeating, I didn't think it was a huge problem.'

John said that he hopes his own battle with an eating disorder will help other people to speak out about their own experiences and not stay 'silent'.

Speaking about 'toxic masculinity', John admitted that he believes the real 'poison' is in staying silent and not seeking out any help.

He explained: 'A lot of people struggle, whether you're a man, woman, non-binary but I think men, in particular, are conditioned from a very early age not to talk about how they feel, not to cry, not to ask for help.

The Great British Bake Off winner (pictured on the show in 2012) said he found his bulimia hard to speak about due to a stigma as he felt it might 'undermine' his career as a chef

'We hear a lot about this phrase "toxic masculinity" but I think the real poison in manhood is silence If men don't speak it starts to erode them from the inside out.

'I just want to say to men, it doesn't matter if you're straight, it doesn't matter if you're gay, asexual, whatever you are, you have to speak, you have to talk, you have to find the help that you need, the help is there

'When you share a problem and get a problem out of you, the toxic is diluted, the poison is diluted. I just want men to understand that, even if you're the burliest bloke and you're a builder, whatever you are, you need to talk to somebody.'

During the film, John also spoke to ambassador for eating disorder charity Beat Ben Robinson, who has suffered from anorexia since the age of 15.

He told John about his own spiral into decline, but admitted that he did not realise he had a problem.

Ben said: 'I didn't think I had a problem because only size zero models can have an eating disorder, only women get eating disorders, and that's why I kept batting it off.'

John said that he hopes his own battle with an eating disorder will help other people to speak out about their own experiences and not stay 'silent'

Ben was treated at an inpatient unit before being sectioned under the mental health act, with his recovery taking around seven years.

He continued: 'I'd just kind of given up, I didn't see any route out of the illness If I didn't go into hospital, I wouldn't be where I am now.

'The staff saved my life, but at the same time, my family and friends when I came out of hospital ensured my life was safe. I'll never be able to repay them for what they've done.'

Giving advice to other people who might be struggling with an eating disorder, Ben said: 'There's this stigma that men can't cry or feel weak.

John said he felt 'very guilty' about his eating disorder when speaking about children in the UK going hungry on the programme

'If you're feeling even just one percent different to how the normal positive you feels, speak to someone.

'It's better to talk about it than let it grow into something major. And if you're somebody on the outside who thinks something's not quite right there, don't be scared to go up to them and say "I've noticed this, are you okay?"'

If you have been affected by this story, please visit eating disorder charity Beat's website, phone their helpline 0808 801 0677 or visit Channel 4.

Steph's Packed Lunch airs weekdays at 12.30pm on Channel 4.
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A New York neighborhood has put their Christmas decorations back up to stand in solidarity with a woman who was scolded in a letter for leaving her lights on display in memory of her father who had put them up just before he died from COVID-19.

Sara Pascucci, of Bethpage, reported receiving a letter on February 3 that read: 'Take your Christmas lights down! Its Valentines Day!!!!'

Pascucci was particularly stung by the letter since her family was still mourning the loss of her father, 61-year-old Anthony Pascucci, who loved Christmas and had decorated the home for her. She said that between funeral arrangements mortgage and utility payments and 'just the grieving process of it all', she hadn't had the time or inclination to take down the decorations.

She said the letter, which did not have a return address, was postmarked January 30.

Her father died on January 15 after he was diagnosed with COVID-19. Just six days earlier, Anthonys sister, Connie Pascucci, 70, also succumbed to the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.

Now, her neighbors have started putting their Christmas decorations back up to stand with Sara Pascucci during her time of mourning.

A New York neighborhood has put their Christmas decorations back up to stand in solidarity with Sara Pascucci who was scolded in a letter for leaving her lights on display (pictured) because her father had died from COVID-19

One of her neighbors put lights back on their bushes outside their home. They also brought out their Santa Claus decoration (left)

Another neighbor gathered up their Christmas lights and placed them along their bushes

Sara Pascucci (left), 31, says that she was hurt to receive the letter since the decorations were put up by her late father, Anthony (right), 61, just weeks before he died of COVID-19 on January 15

Take your Christmas lights down! Its Valentines Day!!!! reads the typed letter sent to Pascucci and her family

Images obtained by The Washington Post, show the homes of Pascucci's neighbors lit up with Christmas decorations so the 31-year-old wouldn't feel alone.

Her neighbors have also been sending her heartfelt letters, cards and flowers.

'A man and his wife came with roses and a letter,' Pascucci told the Post. 'He said: "Keep your Christmas lights up. I know what it feels like to lose someone and not want to put their things away. Its very hard".'

Pascucci and her neighbors are also planning to host 'Lights On' in memory of those who lost their battle with COVID-19.

Pascucci shared a flyer on Facebook encouraging Bethpage residents and people in the surrounding areas to decorate their homes for Valentine's Day in honor of the pandemic's victims.

A GoFundMe page was even created to help the Pascucci family cover costs from her dad's funeral and mounting mortgage payments.

Her neighbors have also been sending her heartfelt letters, cards, flowers and cookies (left)

Pascucci and her neighbors are also planning to host 'Lights On' in memory of those who lost their battle with COVID-19

After receiving the letter, Pascucci took to social media and shared the incident in the Long Island Moms Facebook group.

'For anyone in the Bethpage area  if you know of a person who would do something so insensitive like this please pass along my message,' Pascucci wrote.

'Our entire family was sick with covid starting December 24th. Within this timeframe, we lost 2 family members. One being my father.

'He loved decorating our house every year for the holidays ever since we were children and he took so much pride in doing so. He did it for us, especially for my 2 year old son who he loved so dearly.'

Pascucci explained that over the past several weeks, her family has been trying to take care of funeral arrangements, mortgage and utility payments and 'just the grieving process of it all'.

'So yes, we havent gotten around to taking down his Christmas decorations. And maybe we just arent ready to yet. I wont apologize for this,' she added.

After receiving the letter, Pascucci took to social media and shared the incident in the Long Island Moms Facebook group (post pictured)

Pascucci then received an outpouring of love and support, which prompted her to take to her Facebook page and address 'the Grinch of Bethpage'

She paid tribute to her late father, posting a photo of him and her from years ago (left). She also shared a photo of her dad with her son (right)

A GoFundMe page was also started to help the family cover funeral costs. Pascucci (center) is pictured with her father (right)

Pascucci then received an outpouring of love and support, which prompted her to take to her Facebook page and address 'the Grinch of Bethpage'.

'Love outweighs the hate, she wrote. 'I just want to thank everyone for all of their love and support today! And I want to thank the grinch too! For bringing all of this love to me in a time of need!'

She urged people to 'remember to be kind, especially during a pandemic.

'You dont really know what anybodys going through.'

'My father ended up going to the hospital because he couldn't breathe,' Sara said.

'They ended up having to put the ventilator, and he passed on January 15th.'

Pascucci, her brother and another aunt have all since recovered from the coronavirus.
Farrukhabad : , Feb 10 (IANS) A 38-year-old woman has been arrested for allegedly beating and smothering her 5-year-old nephew to death because he soiled his bed.

The incident took place on Sunday. On Monday, police got the first complaint that Yash Pratap has gone missing, from his uncle Shailendra Singh. He told police that the child went missing from a fair, where he had gone with his aunt Neeraj.

An FIR for kidnapping was lodged into the matter.

The police began scanning the footage of the fair but did not see the child with Neeraj.

Yash's father, Brijendra Singh, who lives in Etah district, said that his sister-in-law Neeraj told him on February 7 that his son has been missing from the fair.

Next morning, she changed her statement and told him that she took Yash out of the house and closed the doors after she found that he had soiled the bed. Later, when she opened the doors after 45 minutes, the boy was missing.

Police got suspicious after seeing CCTV footage and the changing statements coming from the woman.

During aggressive interrogation, she finally admitted committing crime and took the police where she had buried the body with the help of her 65-year-old father, Ram Bahadur.

Her father has also been arrested on Tuesday.

Superintendent of Police (SP) Farrukhabad, Ashok Kumar Meena, said that during interrogation, Neeraj told the police that after beating and smothering her nephew to death, she called her father and informed him about the incident.

Ram Bahadur, who lives 60 km away from Neeraj's house, advised her to bring the body to his place in Kampala and he would make some arrangements.

The father told the police that his daughter took the body in a black bag to his house located under Kampel police jurisdiction in an auto.

The woman, with the help of her father, buried the boy's body in a deep pit in a forest.

Meena said that Sections 302 (murder) 201 (Causing disappearance of evidence of offence) and 120 B (criminal conspiracy) of IPC have been added in the FIR.

The body was exhumed and the post mortem report revealed that the boy was smothered to death, said Meena, adding that several injury marks were also found on his body.

The boy had been staying with his aunt in Farrukhabad's New Fauji Colony for the past 7 months, as his father wanted him to study with other children. The boy's mother had passed away three years ago and also the grandmother.
Beitbridge Bureau

Communities in Lesanth area in Beitbridge East's ward 13 are resuscitating a fish farming project in the area, which they previously used to raise money for the development of essential infrastructure.

A few years ago, the villagers, who lived 80km north of the border town, used proceeds from the venture to construct a classroom block at Lesanth Primary School.

However, progress slowed down when the local dam dried up following successive droughts.

According to the Lesanth Campfire chairperson, Mr Brighton Siziba, the project started taking shape again when the legislator for the area donated thousands of fingerlings in May 2020.

He said they have started harvesting the fish and proceeds will go towards the construction of another classroom block at the local school.

"We are very grateful that we have had good rains and we have started harvesting the fish from Lesanth dam," said Mr Siziba.

"As a community, we have agreed that all the proceeds from this project will be used to build another classroom block, just like what we did a few years back."

He said they were already working on a programme to manage the harvesting of the fish by the committee and those wishing to do fishing for recreation.

Mr Siziba said they had put security around the dam to guard against poaching.

He said when the dam (Lesanth) is full to capacity it can store water for three years and that they expected to have done a lot of infrastructure development projects within that period.

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"This is commitment everyone of us has made here. We want to use natural resources around us to fill in gaps in terms of infrastructure development," said Mr Siziba.

"When we finish with the primary school, our next focus will be on building clinic to service Ward 13. Currently, some are relying on Makombe or Beitbridge town to get medical attention."

He said they had also tightened security on the extraction of sand, gravel and other soils for construction purposes, and on the harvesting of mopani worms (amacimbi/madora) and firewood.

Ward 13 councillor, Sibongile Chauke said although villagers have done well in managing natural resources in the area, they need more assistance in market links and capacity building.

"Teamwork and commitment have helped the community to achieve set target and it is our hope that should we get more capacity building programmes and more market linkages for our natural resources, we can improve on issues of self-sustenance," said Clr Chauke.

She said they had a number of outstanding infrastructure development projects in the area including the construction of a clinic, roads rehabilitation, and irrigation development.

Beitbridge East legislator, Cde Albert Nguluvhe said he was also mobilising resources to revive irrigation-based farming in Lesanth area.

He said the area had great potential for citrus and horticulture produce.


Tunis/Tunisia  Members of the House of People's Representatives (HPR), Tuesday, voted to extend the mission to deploy a military aviation unit in Mali and to send a helicopter unit to the Central African Republic (CAR) under United Nations' umbrella.

The first decision on the extension of the mission for the deployment of a military aviation unit to Mali was approved by 113 votes, while 1 MP voted against and 5 abstained.

This mission is part of the support provided to the multidimensional integrated United Nations Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA).

The second, on sending of a helicopter unit to the Central African Republic, received 110 votes in favour, 2 against and 4 abstentions.

This mission is being deployed in support of the multidimensional integrated United Nations Stabilization Mission in the Central African Republic (MINUSCA).

This unit is in charge of air intervention missions, armed air accompaniment, search and rescue.

It also ensures the security and escorting of movements, aerial reconnaissance and medical evacuation within the framework of missions assigned to MINUSCA.

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Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-10 21:16:26|Editor: huaxia

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BAMAKO, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- At least 20 peacekeepers were injured on Wednesday morning in an attack targeting their camp in central Mali, said Olivier Salgado, spokesperson of the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA).

"Around 7 a.m. this morning, a temporary MINUSMA base in Kerena, located near Douentza, was the target of direct and indirect shooting. During the attack, and according to a provisional assessment, some twenty peacekeepers were wounded", said Salgado.

According to another anonymous source within MINUSMA, the injured peacekeeprs belonged to the Togolese contingent.

The head of MINUSMA Mahamat Saleh Annadif strongly condemned the cowardly attack on the peacekeepers, adding that all measures were taken to ensure the wounded receive appropriate treatment.

In January this year, five peacekeepers lost their lives during the UN peacekeeping mission in Mali where terrorist threats persist since the coup in 2012. In 2020, six peacekeepers were killed on mission.

The MINUSMA was deployed in 2013 to support political processes in Mali. During a failed coup in 2012, extremist militias took control of Mali's north. A UN-backed peace deal in 2015 between the government and various armed groups failed to stabilize the situation in the country's central and northern regions, with attacks multiplying in the past years. Enditem

The information below has been supplied by dairy marketers and other industry organizations. It has not been edited, verified or endorsed by Hoards Dairyman.

Standing up for customers and farmers, the Dairy Business Association today pressed the state Senate to approve legislation aimed at stopping the use of misleading labels on imitation dairy and meat products.

The Senate was holding a hearing on bills that seek to ban the labeling of food as milk or as a dairy product or ingredient if the food is not made from the milk of a cow or another hooved mammal. Another part to the proposal would essentially do the same for meat products.



A number of other states would have to follow suit for the dairy measures to become law in Wisconsin, under federal interstate commerce rules. Some states have already done so.Parents who are deciding what to feed their families deserve transparency, DBA President Amy Penterman, a mom who farms in northwestern Wisconsin, said. The variety of beverages and other foods being misrepresented as real dairy seems to grow by the day. Customers should have options, but misleading those customers about whats in their food is wrong.





Chad Zuleger, associate director of government affairs for DBA, told the Senate Committee on Agriculture and Tourism that the bills also would protect dairy farmers and processors from being treated unfairly.

The federal governments failure to enforce existing standards of identity for milk and other dairy products has made it necessary for states like Wisconsin to act, Zuleger said.





This failure also raises concerns about how well the government will be able to handle emerging labeling concerns about plant-based products that imitate meat as well as lab-grown cultured tissue, he said.

Hopefully, by states taking action regarding meat labeling now, we can prevent the abject failure to protect farmers, processors and customers that has already occurred in the dairy space, Zuleger said.

Penterman praised Sen. Howard Marklein, R-Spring Green, and Reps. Travis Tranel, R-Cuba City, and Clint Moses, R-Menomonie, for their leadership on the legislation, and the co-sponsors for their support. The state Assembly approved the bills last year but the Senate was unable to complete its final session day in March due to the onset of COVID-19.

We urge the full Senate to stand up for customers and the dairy community and make this happen, Penterman said. A vote for these bills is a vote for Wisconsin families and farmers.



Research has shown that imitation dairy products do confuse customers. For example, a national survey commissioned by Wisconsin dairy groups found that customers are confused about whether imitation cheese products are indeed dairy foods and whether they carry the same nutritional value. Some of the findings, which were released in 2019:

Customer confusion

One-quarter of customers mistakenly think plant-based products labeled as cheese contain milk.



One-third of customers believe that the products contain protein, and 21 percent think that it is of a higher quality than dairy even though the imitations have little to no protein. Real dairy cheese has 7 grams of protein.



One-quarter of customers purchase imitation cheeses because they believe them to be low in calories and fat and without additives. In reality, these plant-based foods contain an equal or comparable amount of fat and calories and substantially more additives than dairy cheeses.





Customer survey:

Study background and executive summary

A graphic of key findings





Senate documents:




Funeral homes often submit obituaries as a service to the families they are assisting. However, we will be happy to accept obituaries from family members pending proper verification of the death.

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OTTAWA - A Bank of Canada official delivered a detailed defence of why the central bank should issue a "digital loonie" instead of ceding control to private cryptocurrencies that could become economic gatekeepers.

Bank of Canada deputy governor Timothy Lane delivers a keynote at the Ottawa Board of Trade in Ottawa, on Thursday, Dec. 5, 2019. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang

OTTAWA - A Bank of Canada official delivered a detailed defence of why the central bank should issue a "digital loonie" instead of ceding control to private cryptocurrencies that could become economic gatekeepers.

The Bank of Canada has been developing its own digital currency, one of a number of central banks doing the same kind of development should the need arise to issue one.

Deputy governor Timothy Lane said in a speech Wednesday that the bank doesn't see a need for a central bank digital currency even as the pandemic has accelerated the shift to more a digital economy.

But, Lane said, that could change if there is a tipping point where cash is no longer widely used in Canada.

He said any digital currency should come from the central bank to ensure the public interest, not private sector profits, is a top priority.

Only a central bank can guarantee privacy rights would be upheld, competition encouraged, and universal access for those in remote communities, Lane said.

Many technology companies harvest users' data as part of their business model to better target products and services, creating a cycle that pulls in more business and generates more data.

"If that business model were used as a foundation for the dominant method of payment in the economy, the issuer would gain control over an enormous range of data  bringing with it overwhelming market power," Lane said in the text of his speech.

"In effect, a technology company could become the gatekeeper of the entire economy, with concerning implications for privacy, competition and inclusion."

The Bank of Canada doesn't have the legislative authority from Parliament to offer a digital currency, only to design, issue and distribute the bills stuffed inside wallets and handed over a counter.

Since the first wave of COVID-19 almost one year ago, the central bank has watched what Lane described as a growing hesitancy about using cash in this country. Consumer surveys conducted by the central bank suggest merchants prefer contactless payments, with other stores refusing cash due to fears of virus transmission.

Even in this increasingly digital economy, cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin "do not have a plausible claim to become the money of the future," Lane said in his speech to Montreal's Institute for Data Valorization. He cited costly verification methods and their wildly unstable value, noting "one high-profile tweet is enough to trigger a sudden jump in price."

Lane said a large amount of regulatory work remains before stablecoins, whose value are backed by safe assets, can be used in Canada or elsewhere.

In the meantime, the central bank is looking to summer 2022 to roll out changes to the country's electronic payments system that will handle real-time payments beyond existing e-transfers.

Lane said the "real-time rail system" could allow businesses to pay part-time workers immediately after a shift, or let homebuyers make a deposit digitally, instead of physically bringing a bank draft to their lawyer's office.

He also said the system could allow governments to distribute emergency aid, tens of billions of which have flowed during the pandemic, directly into citizens' bank accounts in a matter of seconds.

Similarly, Lane said, the central bank is working on making it easier for people to transfer money overseas  an issue for many newcomers who send money to family in their country of origin or snowbirds who head to warm weather for the winter.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 10, 2021.
WASHINGTON, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Increased appetites for outdoor and shared experiences are leading consumers to: hit the highways and seek out of home activities, notice their surroundings with fresh eyes, take comfort in public safety messaging, and embrace new contactless technology. At the same time, digital device burn out is rising, with 75 percent of respondents stating that excessive time on devices is causing them to tune out digital device adsa +7 points increase since September. These findings  from "Consumer Insights & Intent: Q1 2021," a research report from the Out of Home Advertising Association of America (OAAA), the national trade association for the entire out of home (OOH) and DOOH media ecosystem, and conducted by The Harris Poll  point to strong potential for OOH to take on new potency with consumers in the coming months.

Those in major urban centers are especially prone to be engaged with and influenced by out of home marketing. Over half (55%) of consumers who live in big cities (1M+ population) reported that they are noticing more OOH messaging and signage today, in comparison to 41 percent in the general population saying the same. In addition, over a third (34%) of big city dwellers say that they are being influenced by OOH in their purchasing decision.

Moreover, consumers are noticing OOH most while driving right now  83 percent on highways and 82 percent driving locally around their city or town. Heightening the opportunity for exposure, nearly three-quarters (72%) of workers expect to commute to their jobs at least part of the time in the next few months. Once the pandemic subsides, over half (56%) of those in big urban markets expect to primarily commute by car, while 40 percent expect that they will be taking mass transit, such as subways, light rail, or buses. Those in less dense urban areas (<1M population) will be more likely to continue to drive a car to get to the workplace post-COVID (73%).

The pandemic has also raised interest in using new technologies that allow for "touch free" experiences. A number of respondents (43%) report that contactless tap-to-pay apps have been a go-to since the crisis began. Nearly a third (31%) say the same about QR codes. Millennials and those in big cities are especially apt to use these two technologies. Over 40 percent of respondents said that they would be interested in learning about special sales or deals available through both. When it comes to augmented reality (AR), Gen Z and Millennials, as well as people in heavily populated urban areas, are most likely to partake, with 28 percent overall open to receiving messages about sales and deals through AR.

Other notable findings include:

Consumers (particularly Gen Z and Millennials) report noticing OOH "much more," showing a 5% increase in interest since last September. The messages are not lost on the general adult population either; about one-quarter of the general public report learning of a new brands or businesses through OOH.

Not surprisingly, the combination of pandemic and current events has increased interest in public health and security messages. 71% of consumers say they have been comforted and informed by OOH that focuses on public safety measures.

Meantime, 82% Gen Z respondents indicated a longing for outdoor dining options, and 78% of Millennials are seeking safe outdoor activities.

"We have a powerful opportunity in the coming months to capture the heart and imagination of people who are looking at their surroundings and out of home marketing with more awareness and appreciation," said Anna Bager, President and CEO, OAAA. "The bottom line is that OOH advertising will have a growing role to play in consumers' lives, when it comes to learning about products, services, public safety, and more."

"People are eager to make up for lost time," said John Gerzema, CEO, The Harris Poll. "They're looking to get back out into the world with a vengeance. Brands should meet consumers where they are, which will be anywhere but at home on Zoom."

"Consumer Insights & Intent: Q1 2021" was sponsored by The Foundation for Outdoor Advertising Research and Education (FOARE), a 501 (c) (3) not for profit, charitable organization. To review the findings, go to: http://oaaa.org/harrispollFeb2021.

Methodology

The Harris Poll conducted the online survey from January 15  20, 2021, with a representative sample of 1000 U.S. Adults 18+. Data is weighted to reflect the U.S. general public across age, gender, race/ethnicity, region, income, household size, and employment.

About the OAAA

The Out of Home Advertising Association of America (OAAA) is the national trade association for the entire out of home (OOH) advertising industry. OAAA represents more than 800 members, including leading media companies, advertisers, agencies, ad-tech providers, and suppliers which comprise over 90 percent of the industry. OOH media includes billboards, street furniture, transit, place-based media, and digital formats (DOOH) across every sector of the channel. OAAA is the unifying voice for the industry, the authoritative thought leader, and the passionate advocate for advancing OOH advertising in the United States. The legislative unit of OAAA advocates for the responsible growth of OOH with federal, state, and local government. OAAA-member media companies generously donate over $500 million in public service advertising annually. Founded in 1891, OAAA is headquartered in Washington, DC with offices in New York City. For more information, please visit oaaa.org.

About The Harris Poll

The Harris Poll is one of the longest-running surveys in the U.S. tracking public opinion, motivations, and social sentiment since 1963 that is now part of Harris Insights & Analytics, a global consulting and market research firm that delivers social intelligence for transformational times. We work with clients in three primary areas; building twenty-first-century corporate reputation, crafting brand strategy and performance tracking, and earning organic media through public relations research. Our mission is to provide insights and advisory to help leaders make the best decisions possible.

For more information, please visit www.theharrispoll.com.

SOURCE Out of Home Advertising Association

Related Links

https://oaaa.org/default.aspx


Japanese Prime Minister Suga Yoshihide says the government will start coronavirus vaccinations in the middle of next week.

Suga spoke at a meeting on Wednesday with officials from the government and ruling parties.

Suga said the inoculations will begin once the vaccine's efficacy and safety are confirmed. He said cooperation from local governments, doctors and nurses is absolutely necessary. He pledged to make every effort to prepare for the vaccine rollout.

Suga also commented on his recent decision to extend the state of emergency in Tokyo, Osaka and other eight prefectures, which was originally supposed to end on Sunday.

He said he feels very sorry for putting additional burdens on people, but he stressed the need to contain the virus at any cost.

Suga said the government will continue to take thorough coronavirus measures, focusing on restaurants and bars. He pledged to curb new infections and reduce the number of inpatients, including those who are seriously ill.

He said the government will continue to analyze the daily situation carefully and seek experts' advice. He added that he will make necessary decisions accordingly.

Suga also talked about the revised legislation for special measures to respond to the coronavirus, which is due to take effect on Saturday.

Suga said he wants to take effective measures under the revised law, while considering the rights of individuals and businesses.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Kato Katsunobu also revealed that the government plans to make some changes to its anti-coronavirus guidelines on Friday.
Taking Prime Minister Narendra Modi on over the new farm legislation, leader Vadra on Wednesday said his heart beats only for his billionaire friends and promised that her party will scrap the laws if it comes to power.

At a 'kisan panchayat' organised by the party at Chilkana in Saharanpur district, she accused Modi of "insulting" farmers who are protesting against the laws, caring little for their viewpoint.

You have seen the 56-inch chest, in which there is a small heart that beats only for his billionaire friends. He doesn't understand how farmers feel, the general secretary said.

She called the three agri-marketing laws demonic.

If voted to power, the will scrap these laws. Farmers will get the MSP (minimum support price). Laws will be made to help you, not oppress you," she said.

The rally was the first in a series of farmers' meetings planned by the Congress in western Uttar Pradesh, a year before the assembly elections in the state where the opposition party is struggling to revive itself.

Gandhi was presented with a pair of ploughs at the meeting.

Beginning her address, the leader said she had visited the Saharanpur temple dedicated to goddess Shakumbhari. She also went to the Raipur Khanqah Dargah.

"These three laws were drafted in such a way that government 'mandis' will eventually close down, the farmers will not get the MSP and there will be hoarding," she said.

"In other words, the farmers' voice will become weak and the voice of billionaires will grow stronger," she said, in an apparent reference to private businesses.

She said the farmer's heart beats for the country. Farmers' sons sacrifice their lives protecting the country, or even providing security to the prime minister. But our prime minister doesn't realise their pain, she added.

She accused Modi of insulting farmers. The prime minister said the farmers are 'aandolanjivi', she claimed, referring to his remark about people who lived for the sake of taking part in protests.

The farmers are protesting for their own life, land, country and for their sons. A person who ridicules them, terms them terrorists and traitors is not a patriot and can never be," she said.

Recalling the ruling BJP's poll promises, the Congress leader said the money government sugar mill owe to farmers in the state has not been paid.

However, two aircraft worth Rs 16,000 crore have been bought for Narendra Modi ji so that he can travel across the world," she claimed.

She also criticised the spending on the planned new Parliament complex when the sugarcane farmers are not being paid their dues.

Earlier, she tweeted in Hindi, "To listen to the farmers' 'dil ki baat', understand them, share my feelings with them and support their struggle, I will be in Saharanpur today. The BJP government will have to withdraw the black farm laws."



When asked to comment on the Congress event, UP minister Anand Swarup Shukla said a "drama is being enacted in the name of farmers.

He claimed that "gangs" opposing the government have gone international, and referred to tweets on the farmers' protest by foreign celebrities.

He asked Congress leaders to "oppose Prime Minister Narendra Modi, but not the country".

Law Minister Brijesh Pathak said the BJP government was committed to helping farmers and termed Priyanka Gandhi's tour an "eyewash". "Some leaders just want to be in the limelight," he added.

UP Congress chief Ajay Kumar Lallu and senior party leader P L Punia attended the 'panchayat'.

Opposition parties including the Congress are supporting farmers camping on the borders of Delhi for weeks, demanding the repeal of the agri-marketing laws enacted last September.

Most of the protesters are from Punjab and Haryana, but there is sizeable number from western Uttar Pradesh with Bharatiya Kisan Union leader Rakesh Tikait assuming a lead role in the agitation.

Recently, Rashtriya Lok Dal leader Jayant Chaudhary also addressed farmers' 'mahapanchayats' in western UP.

Farmer unions say the laws will weaken the MSP system. But the government says they offer more options to farmers to sell their crops, and will help raise their incomes.

(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.)
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New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday assured Canadian PM Justin Trudeau on COVID-19 vaccine supplies. The Centre has sent India made COVID-19 vaccines to around 20 countries and has got a lot of requests from developed as well as developing countries for vaccines.

Taking to micro-blogging site Twitter, PM Modi said that he received a call from his 'friend', the Canadian PM. Besides speaking on COVID-19 vaccines, the two leaders also agreed "to continue collaborating on other important issues like climate change and the global economic recovery".

"Was happy to receive a call from my friend Justin Trudeau. Assured him that India would do its best to facilitate supplies of COVID vaccines sought by Canada. We also agreed to continue collaborating on other important issues like Climate Change and the global economic recovery," PM Modi tweeted.

Was happy to receive a call from my friend @JustinTrudeau. Assured him that India would do its best to facilitate supplies of COVID vaccines sought by Canada. We also agreed to continue collaborating on other important issues like Climate Change and the global economic recovery.  Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) February 10, 2021

A readout from PM Modi's office said during the talks Prime Minister Trudeau informed his PM Modi about "Canada's requirements of COVID-19 vaccines from India" to which the latter "assured...that India would do its best to support Canada's vaccination efforts, just as it had done for many other countries already".

The readout said Canadian leader lauded New Delhi saying, "if the world managed to conquer COVID-19, it would be significant because of India's tremendous pharmaceutical capacity" and "Prime Minister Modi's leadership in sharing this capacity with the world".

The vaccines will be supplied commercially from India to Canada. India has already supplied vaccines on a commercial basis to countries like Brazil, Morrocco, South Africa. During the talks, both sides discussed issues such as the economic impact of the pandemic, climate change.

The talks assume significance since ties were impacted in December 2020 after Canadian PM has commented on the farmers' protests in India. An angry New Delhi had summoned Nadir Patel, the Canadian envoy to Delhi and handed over a strong demarche. In fact, the matter was taken up with Canadian authorities both in Ottawa and New Delhi and conveyed that such comments pertaining to the internal affairs of India are "unwarranted and unacceptable".
More than 50 youth received the first Blue Shoe Box subscription box from Serve Credit Union in January.

In the early days of Serve Credit Union, much of the business was run out of a shoe box.

So when the $87 million asset credit union in Des Moines, Iowa, launched its newest youth financial literacy effortthe Blue Shoe Box subscription boxearlier this year, it was a natural fit to tie in a shoe box as the credit union celebrates its 90th birthday.

We were trying to figure out a way to engage with our youth, says Hayley Vanderpool, member outreach coordinator. This box became the answer to that and it ties in the history of the shoe box. It came together as the perfect program to kick off this year.

The credit union sent out its first Blue Shoe Box Subscription Box in January to 54 children. The box included credit union swag, including a t-shirt and branded notebook, a savings box, and financial information.
ICC ruling on war crimes probe 'step towards peace', UN 'Ending impunity and pursuing justice' to bring closer to peace

(ANSAmed) - ROME, FEBRUARY 10 - The International Criminal Court's (ICC) decision that it has jurisdiction over serious crimes committed in occupied Palestinian territory, including potential war crimes, is a "significant step forward in the quest for justice and accountability", the UN's Special Rapporteur for human rights in Palestinian territory occupied since 1967 said in a statement released Tuesday.



The UN special rapporteur, Michael Lynk, noted that "ending impunity and pursuing justice can only bring us closer to peace in the Middle East".



The ICC's ruling was called "scandalous" by the Israeli government's defense council, which "fully" rejected the idea that the international court has jurisdiction.



Lynk instead said that it offered "profound hope to those who believe that consequences, not condonation, must be the answer to the commission of grave crimes".



""This is a significant step forward in the quest for justice and accountability involving the unaccountable 53-year-old occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza," he said.



On Feb. 5, the preliminary section of the ICC ruled that the territorial jurisdiction of the court on the situation in Palestine, a state signatory to the ICC's Rome Statute, extends to the territories occupied by Israel since 1967: Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem.



The expert noted that the "allegations of grave crimes that could be investigated by the Prosecutor of the ICC include Israel's actions during the 2014 war against Gaza, the killing and wounding of thousands of largely unarmed demonstrators during the Great March of Return in 2018-9, and Israel's settlement activities in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. As well, the Prosecutor can also look into allegations of grave crimes involving Palestinian armed groups", according to the statement.



The UN rapporteur added that the ICC prosecutor will also be able to look into serious crimes involving Palestinian armed groups. (ANSAmed).




Myanmar's political upheaval is prompting global companies from Japan to Thailand to dial back operations in the country, spurring concern about a widening business fallout.

From beer maker Kirin Holdings Co. to an early backer of gaming firm Razer Inc., companies and investors are weighing the impact of a military coup that's thrust the once- thriving nation into a state of emergency. The turmoil is prompting multinationals like Thailand's biggest industrial developer to delay investment plans, a harbinger of things to come should the chaos deepen.

Western nations are applying pressure on the newly installed military government of the Southeast Asian country, once regarded as greenfield territory for everything from oil and gas to leisure resorts. With the U.S. reiterating plans to renew sanctions, it could cause a rippling effect among businesses, threatening $5.5 billion in foreign investment in a country that just a few years ago was on the path to democracy.

"It will definitely get bigger as these corporations get on board the leave-first-and-ask-questions-later bandwagon," Justin Tang, head of Asian research at United First Partners in Singapore.

Myanmar has been attracting more outside investment in recent years after posting double-digit economic growth in the early part of the last decade. Bordering the massive markets of India and China, Myanmar has abundant natural resources, including oil and gas, gold, silver and precious stones. The population of about 57 million people is greater than South Korea's, and not far off Italy's.

Among recent foreign deals, CVC Capital Partners reached an agreement in December to buy Myanmar's biggest telecommunications tower company for close to $700 million. The deal for Irrawaddy Green Towers was the second-biggest in the country, trailing only the acquisition of Myanmar Distillery group by a unit of Thai Beverage. Singapore's sovereign wealth firm GIC and Norway's Norfund bought a 30% stake in Yoma Bank for 131 billion kyat ($92.1 million) last April.

Nations with the most at stake from the instability include Singapore, Myanmar's largest foreign investor, accounting for almost 34% of approved investment by dollar value, according to a World Bank report in December. Yoma Strategic Holdings, a Singapore-listed conglomerate that gets almost all its revenue from Myanmar, has plunged by a third this year.

Singapore is monitoring the situation closely, said a spokesperson for Enterprise Singapore, a government agency that helps companies grow overseas.

The turmoil is creating a rippling effect across industries. Kirin ended its joint-venture partnership with the nation's largest brewer Myanma Economic Holdings Public Co., which has ties to the military. The company isn't planning to entirely exit the country, where its operations accounted for just 1.7% of revenue in 2019.

Lim Kaling, the founding investor of Singapore-based gaming firm Razer, is disposing of his one-third stake in a joint venture that owns RMH Singapore Pte Ltd. RMH owns 49% of Virginia Tobacco Co. in Myanmar, while Myanma Economic Holdings Ltd. -- owned by the military -- holds the balance. "I hope for a time when I can be an investor in the country and its people once more," Kaling said in a statement on Monday.

Amata Corp., one of Thailand's biggest industrial land developers, delayed some investment plans after it won approval from the government to proceed on several projects.

"The investment outlook of Myanmar doesn't look good," Viboon Kromadit, the company's chief marketing officer, said last week. "Possible sanctions by the international community will definitely affect foreign companies' confidence."

Singapore-listed energy company Interra Resources Ltd. may face labor disruptions at the Chauk and Yenangyaung plants due to the protests, the company said in a filing to the Singapore Exchange.

Rights groups have called on a boycott of companies believed to be owned by the country's military. There are 134 companies owned by two of Myanmar's military-run holding firms -- Myanma Economic Holdings and Myanmar Economic Corp. -- according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

The unrest will lower the country's economic growth this fiscal year to 3%, from a previous estimate of 4.5%, according to estimates from Malaysia's Malayan Banking Bhd.

"A military coup has dealt a severe blow to Myanmar's economic recovery and political stability," economists Linda Liu and Chua Hak Bin said in a note. Investment "will likely fall given heightened uncertainty and freeze on fresh investments from Western countries."

Companies adopting a wait-and-see approach include:

- Thailand's energy company, PTT Exploration & Production, is closely monitoring the political situation but doesn't expect the internal strife to affect its operations or plans, senior vice president for finance Orachon Ouiyamapun said at an investor presentation on Tuesday.

- Australian & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd. said it has a small presence in the Southeast Asian country and is monitoring the situation closely, a spokesperson said.

- Singapore's Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp.'s branch continues to operate in the country, said Patrick Chew, head of operational risk management.

Chinese investors, on the other hand, could benefit from the upheaval. They tend to have a higher risk tolerance compared with those from other regions, according to an analysis by Fitch Solutions Country Risk & Industry Research. That means there's a "chance they may take the opportunity to expand their reach in the country as other investors stay cautious."
Issues with the effectiveness of long supply chains amid pandemic have put Ukraine on the map for European investors.

Ukraine hopes more investment will be lured to its battered economy, including from European companies as post-pandemic supply chains face reformatting.

Production of mattresses and furniture are already planned, Bloomberg reports.

"Asia was the world's leading production venue," Sergiy Tsivkach, head of a state-run UkraineInvest agency, said in an interview. "But because of the coronavirus, it became clear that long supply chains can impact contracts' effectiveness. It puts Ukraine on the map for European investors."

While Ukraine benefits from its location between Asia and the European Union, "endemic corruption and weak governance often deter foreign direct investment, which turned negative on a net basis last year amid the pandemic," the report reads.

As Ukraine economy rebounded 4.8% this year due to domestic consumption, experts and foreign creditors note that the country requires investments to ensure sustainable growth.

Read alsoTurkey invests almost US$3 bln in Ukraine  Finance Minister MarchenkoUkraineInvest helped secure more than $600 million of investments in 2020, Tsivkach says, adding that the agency aims for $7.7 billion of deals starting in 2021, including $2.4 billion in concession projects.

The article points to a number of early dividends:

Belgium's Monks International will build in western Ukraine a facility for the confection of mattress covers, aimed for exports;

Denmark's furniture producer Hjort Knudsen this spring will launch construction of a new plant, where production start is planned for late summer for the European market as well as Canada, the U.S, Israel and Japan; and

Kronospan is building a new EUR 200 million ($241 million) facility, and Black Iron sees $1.1 billion of investments into a mining and processing plant.

"Everything's in our hands  there's interest," Tsivkach said. "We should ensure comfortable conditions" for investors.

As the government seeks to improve the investment climate, investors still complain about things like documentation approvals, law enforcement, and the tax and customs agencies, as per Tsivkach.

Reporting by UNIAN
Trials involving primates at the University of Louisiana at Lafayettes New Iberia Research Center were instrumental in development of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, according to a UL news release issued Wednesday.

We are so privileged to have been on the front lines of the fight against the pandemic, said Jane Fontenot, NIRCs director of contract research. Its very rewarding.

The United Kingdom was the first nation to issue an emergency authorization for the use of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in December. The United States, the European Union and other countries soon followed suit. Studies have shown that the vaccine is about 95% effective at preventing COVID-19 after two doses.

UL dashboard suggests campus COVID-19 cases declining: Campus remains vigilant COVID-19 cases at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette have steadily declined since the spring semester started, according to a dashboard 

Beginning last spring, rhesus macaques at NIRC were immunized as part of clinical trials of the vaccine, according to the release. Staff administered vaccines, collected samples and observed the animals for any signs of problems, Fontenot said. That included evidence of pain, elevated temperatures, loss of appetite  any symptoms that may have raised concern about tolerability.

The vaccinated animals were then transferred to the Southwest National Primate Center in San Antonio, which includes a biosafety level 3 facility that can securely handle live, airborne infectious agents such as COVID-19. NIRC is a biosafety level 2 facility, though UL is seeking funds to bring it up to level 3 status.

+7 Opponent of Drag Queen Story Time event appointed to Lafayette library board The Parish Council on Tuesday appointed to the Lafayette Parish Library Board a resident who protested the library's Drag Queen Story Time eve

In Texas, the rhesus macaques underwent the challenge phase of the trial in which they were exposed to COVID-19. Results showed the vaccine offered protection from the virus.

NIRC has a long history of contract testing on primates for private drug companies at its sprawling 100-acre campus. With more than 8,500 animals, it's the largest primate research center in the United States and has increasingly found itself in the crosshairs of animal welfare groups.

The group Stop Animal Exploitation NOW!, founded in 1996, has filed multiple complaints and lawsuits against the facility, several of which have resulted in fines. In 2017, UL agreed to pay $100,000 to settle six complaints about its primate lab without admitting any wrongdoing.

Dr. Francois Villinger, the centers director, said NIRCs research collaborations include the biopharmaceutical industry, federal agencies and nonprofit organizations. Its research and development expenditures last fiscal year topped $54 million, with 75% of that coming from industry partners.

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We specialize in applied and basic research aimed at promoting human quality of life, Villinger said. The work we do here is all about bringing treatments and vaccines to the public.

The center has previously been involved in attempts to develop vaccines for HIV and SIV in nonhuman primates. The center has also conducted research on preventing and curing infectious diseases such as flu, RSV, Zika, and Ebola.

Expertise, based on past and ongoing work, enabled NIRC to pivot quickly to address COVID-19, Villinger said.

In addition to its work on the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, NIRC is involved in eight vaccine and therapeutic drug studies related to COVID-19, university officials said.

+4 Energy flagging? Petroleum engineering enrollment down, not out, during downturn Persistently low oil and gas market prices may have led some students to forgo petroleum engineering careers along the Gulf Coast  at least f

Proving the vaccines effectiveness in nonhuman primates started right here, Villinger said. That work began right here.

The FDA authorized the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for emergency use in mid-December, about a year after COVID-19 emerged globally. The first U.S. cases of the virus were reported in January 2020.

The rapidity of the vaccines development depended on preexisting relationships the biopharmaceutical giant had with research facilities such as NIRC, said Ramesh Kolluru, UL's vice president for research, innovation and economic development.

We were instrumental in Pfizer being able to work as quickly as they did, Kolluru said.

The relationships weve nurtured over the decades enabled us to be a part of this historic answer to a global challenge.

Dr. Joseph Savoie, UL's president, said the university's researchers were prepared to meet this moment. ... This is what modern research universities do. Research for a reason is a driving force for our University and there is no better motivation to do the work that we do than to help overcome a challenge like COVID-19 that has impacted all of humanity.

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.
Im encouraged by the Biden administrations initial steps, said Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, an industry group. But the federal government really needs to step up its game and provide certainty to American companies that answered the national call to action, not just for this crisis, but for those in the future.

Tim Manning, the White Houses Covid-19 supply coordinator, said the administration would announce a number of new D.P.A. contracts for personal protective equipment in the coming weeks, but that the larger supply-chain issues would take longer to address.

One of our priorities in our pandemic response is doing this in a way so we can ensure the industrial base expansion that has happened can be sustained, so we dont end up in the same situation the next time, Mr. Manning said in an interview.

Companies like United States Mask, a start-up in Fort Worth, Texas, which began producing N95s in November, may not be able to hold out much longer. John Bielamowicz, a commercial real estate broker who started the company with a friend, David Baillargeon, in the early weeks of the pandemic, said he has been frustrated by the lack of interest from the hospital chains, long-term care facilities and local governments that buy in bulk.

Although the companys masks have been certified by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, a division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Mr. Bielamowicz says many buyers are reluctant to give unfamiliar products a try. Big hospitals prefer to stick with masks they already use because of the time-consuming need to fit-test new models on employees. But many cost-conscious bulk buyers prefer to purchase cheaper Chinese ones.

One of the more painful rebuffs came from Tarrant County, where Mr. Bielamowiczs factory is located. Last month the county disqualified his companys bid because officials wanted to buy specific Chinese-made models. County officials did not respond to requests for comment.
George P. Shultz, who served for six eventful years as secretary of state during the Reagan administration, died Saturday, Feb. 7 at age 100.

Widely admired for his calm demeanor and intellect, Shultz is given credit across the foreign policy spectrum for his key role in bringing about the end of the Cold War while the reformist Mikhail S. Gorbachev was president of the Soviet Union. Less well known, but almost as significant, was Shultzs timely role in persuading the USSR to at last open the floodgates to allow over 1 million Soviet Jews to emigrate to Israel and another 250,000 to move to the United States and other Western democracies.

What is all the more remarkable about Shultzs major push to free Soviet Jews  and thereby strengthen Israel by adding to its Jewish population  is that before he joined the Reagan Cabinet, he spent two years as president of the Bechtel Group, a major engineering firm that completed most of the oil and gas infrastructure for Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, long before the Gulf nations dropped their hostility to Israel.

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Many within the pro-Israel community at the time (including me, to my embarrassment!) believed Shultz would be bad news for Israel, given his close ties to the oil rich Gulf states. Im happy to take back my jumping to conclusions even before Shultz became secretary of state.

During his tenure, Shultz learned that when Israel made a deal, its leaders could be trusted to keep their end of the bargain, while the dictators of Syria would not.

After the Second Lebanon War, Shultz got Israel and Lebanon to agree to make peace with the tacit support of Syrian President Hafez al-Assad. Before the deal could be finalized, Assad forcefully intervened to sabotage the agreement. Shultz often said that trust is the cornerstone of diplomacy and that Israel could be trusted while Syria absolutely could not be counted upon.

Shultz strongly supported the Soviet Jewry movement, even to the point of attending a seder in Moscow in 1987 with prominent refuseniks like Natan Sharansky and Ida Nudel. According to an obituary in the Wall Street Journal, Shultz gave Soviet Foreign Secretary Eduard Shevardnadze a list of refuseniks, Jews whose visa applications had been refused, in order to help them move to Israel.

Although some Jews (including me) initially were wary of Shultzs appointment, he proved to be one of the most consequential supporters of Israel and Soviet Jewry in modern Jewish and Israeli History.

Rest in peace, George Shultz  statesman, righteous gentile and mensch.
Chinese President Xi Jinping chairs the China-Central and Eastern European Countries (CEEC) Summit and delivers a keynote speech via video link in Beijing, capital of China, Feb. 9, 2021. (Xinhua/Li Tao)

- "I believe that other member states will work with China to further safeguard multilateralism, promote free trade, deepen mutually beneficial cooperation between China and Europe ... as well as build an open world economy," said Piotr Gadzinowski, editor-in-chief of the Polish newspaper Trybuna.

- Cooperation with China is needed for "all European Union countries," said Milan Bandic, mayor of Croatia's capital Zagreb.

BEIJING, Feb. 9 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping's keynote speech at the Summit of China and Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs) has charted the course for both sides to achieve common development and mutual benefit at a higher level and injected impetus into the joint efforts to build a community with a shared future for mankind, experts have said.

The summit, held via video link, called on relevant countries to keep up the momentum and work together for a new chapter in China-CEEC cooperation.

The China-CEEC cooperation has become an important part of China-Europe cooperation, said Piotr Gadzinowski, editor-in-chief of the Polish newspaper Trybuna.

"I believe that other member states will work with China to further safeguard multilateralism, promote free trade, deepen mutually beneficial cooperation between China and Europe ... as well as build an open world economy," he said.

Gadzinowski added that China has joined hands with the CEECs in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, providing each other with much-needed medical supplies, actively cooperating to resume production, and working together to promote economic recovery, which shows the adherence to the concept of a community with a shared future for mankind.

Chinese President Xi Jinping chairs the China-Central and Eastern European Countries (CEEC) Summit and delivers a keynote speech via video link in Beijing, capital of China, Feb. 9, 2021. (Xinhua/Liu Weibing)

Milan Bandic, mayor of Croatia's capital Zagreb, believed that cooperation with China is needed for "all European Union countries," noting it is positive that trade between China and the CEECs is growing.

"More intensive cooperation between Europe and China in the field of science and research should continue, primarily to ensure larger quantities of COVID-19 vaccines," he said, adding that the Chinese experience in the field of ecology and sustainable development "will be valuable to everyone in Europe."

Jelena Begovic, director of the Institute of Molecular Genetics and Genetic Engineering of University of Belgrade, Serbia, said China's initiative to "gather these countries and make a wall, a battlefield to beat this pandemic" is a great idea, adding that "I think it's the only way if we want to win this war."

If the international community can strengthen ties between countries and try to find more countries to involve, Begovic said, "it would be great and we have to come to some mutual solutions on the global level or just start at a regional level."

Andrey Shvedov, editor-in-chief of Latvia's Russian-language newspaper Segodnya, said Xi's remarks that all countries involved, regardless of size, are equal partners in a cooperation mechanism, is especially important to Latvia.

Cape Town motorists and pedestrians have been advised of minimal parking restrictions and temporary road closures in and around Parliament ahead of the hybrid Joint Sitting of the State of the Nation Address (SONA).

President Cyril Ramaphosa will address SONA on Thursday at 7pm.

Due to the event, several roads around Parliament will be closed off this week, with full closure around Parliament on Thursday.

Roads that will be affected from 10 - 11 February can be found on this link: https://tinyurl.com/yyn77gxe.

"Parliament apologises for any inconvenience caused by the road closures to members of the public," Parliament said in a statement on Tuesday.

The Joint Sitting of the National Assembly and the National Council of Provinces will be held in a hybrid format as part of efforts to adhere to the National State of Disaster lockdown regulations - Alert Level 3.

No more than 50 participants will be allowed inside the National Assembly Chamber. All other Members of Parliament and guests will connect through a virtual platform.
EBRD 1 million contribution for the preparation of new dry port in 10th of Ramadan City

Project to improve logistics and to increase trade competitiveness in Egypt

Funded by the EBRD Infrastructure Project Preparation Facility

As a country with a growing population and economy, Egypt needs urgent investment in its infrastructure capacity to alleviate the pressure on existing ports, shipment points and trade centres. New facilities are required to reduce congestion, allow for a better distribution of goods and let trade flow freely.

A key element in this chain are dry ports, inland intermodal terminals directly connected by road or rail to a seaport, operating as centres for the shipment of sea cargo to inland destinations. Egypts latest transport master plan calls for the development of nine dry port and logistics centres throughout the country under public-private partnership (PPP) structures.

In a first step, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) is supporting the construction of a dry port and logistics centre in 10th of Ramadan City, Egypt, with a 1 million contribution to project preparation and procurement. The city was founded in the 1970s in close vicinity to the capital Cairo and is one of the most industrialised municipalities in the country.

The new dry port is expected to improve the efficiency of Egypts transport infrastructure by reducing congestion at seaports and creating the conditions for accelerated customs processes and procedures. Facilitating trade will contribute to an increase in the competitiveness of local producers, which will help accelerate sustainable economic growth and create employment opportunities.

The project is part of Egypts transport master plan, which recommends the development of an intermodal corridor extending from Alexandria on the Mediterranean coast to El Sokhna on the Red Sea coast.

Infrastructure development is one of the strategic priorities of the EBRD and one of the pillars of the Banks business activities.

Heike Harmgart, EBRD Managing Director for the southern and eastern Mediterranean region, said: We are very proud to support the preparation of sustainable infrastructure in Egypt to be implemented and financed by the private sector. The dry port in 10th of Ramadan City is the second in Egypt to receive funds from the Banks Infrastructure Project Preparation Facility which demonstrates our commitment to this approach.

Egypt is a founding member of the EBRD. Since the start of the Banks operations there in 2012, the EBRD has invested over 7 billion in 127 projects in the country.
[February 10, 2021] Charger Investment Partners Welcomes Avis Duncan as Operating Partner and Operating Executive Network Member

Charger Investment Partners, a private equity firm that invests in mid-sized companies, is pleased to announce today that Avis Duncan has joined the firm as an Operating Partner and a member of its Operating Executive Network. As an Operating Partner, Mr. Duncan will have a hands-on role in supporting Charger's on-the-ground resources to direct the value creation strategies of Charger's portfolio companies. As member of the Operating Executive Network, Mr. Duncan will assist in guiding the firm's overall portfolio value creation strategy, including diligence and sourcing of new opportunities. In his role, Mr. Duncan will spearhead operational optimization and productivity improvements with Charger's portfolio companies. His extensive experience in lean manufacturing, work transfer, implementations of SIOP, new product introduction, and supplier development programs will help our management teams drive superior performance across our entire portfolio. He will also provide hands on mentoring and support in the integration of portfolio company acquisitions. "We have known and respected Avis for nearly a decade and are thrilled that he is joining Charger as an Operating Partner," commented Aaron Perlmutter, one of Charger'sFounding Partners. "Avis brings a wealth of expertise in maximizing operational performance, but equally as important, in developing high performing teams and cultures. This experience will be invaluable to our portfolio companies and our investment partners."



Prior to joining Charger, Mr. Duncan served in numerous key operating executive roles for privately held manufacturing companies where he led their supply chain and operational excellence efforts. Mr. Duncan also played a pivotal role in the due diligence of key acquisitions and directed work transfer efforts. Mr. Duncan has significant experience across a broad array of industries (including aerospace, mass transit, A/V security, plastics, telecommunications, and contract manufacturing) and managing operations in key functional areas such as operations, supply chain management, engineering, project management, and lean manufacturing. Mr. Duncan possesses strong leadership skills and has an excellent track record of recruiting and building teams to support accelerated growth. About Charger Investment Partners

Based in Hermosa Beach, California, Charger Investment Partners is a private equity firm that invests in dynamic small and mid-sized companies primarily in the industrial, services, and consumer industries that can benefit from Charger's partnership and value enhancement expertise. The firm's principals have decades of experience successfully building market-leading companies utilizing an operationally focused, flexible capital approach that encompasses a variety of transaction types including ownership transitions, corporate carve-outs, and recapitalizations. For more information, please refer to the Charger website at www.chargerinv.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210210005248/en/

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New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modis response to the motion of thanks on the Presidents address in the Lok Sabha Wednesday was overtaken midway by angry Opposition protests as he referred to the farm laws. The Congress, after a huge altercation, walked out shortly after he said the slogan-shouting was a planned strategy to drown out reason and hide the truth.

The protests started as Mr Modi, after speaking on Covid-19, switched to the farm laws, saying: This government and Parliament respects farmers and will always continue to respect them. The motion of thanks on the Presidents address was later passed by the Lok Sabha.

The Opposition, which has shredded him over the past two days for comments like andolanjeevi and parjeevi (parasites) made during his last address, broke out in protests. As Speaker Om Birla repeatedly asked the members to calm down, Mr Modi said: The farm laws will not bring down any farmers. No mandi has been shut nor have minimum support prices been stopped. The PM added: Minimum support prices have been increased after the farm laws were enacted. Moreover, farmers can now sell their goods wherever they want.

Mr Modi again used the andolanjeevi jibe to target protesting farmers, which he had used in his speech in the Rajya Sabha earlier.

There were strong words for the Congress, which the BJP has repeatedly accused of instigating the farmers. No matter how much you may try to sabotage it, you will fail to do so, because the truth is out there, that the farmers have not lost anything since the laws came into effect, Mr Modi said, but without naming the Congress.

Mr Modi said the Congress was a divided and confused party, saying it was adopting different positions on various issues in the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha as it had no clear-cut stand. He said: The Congress today is a confused and divided party. It has reduced itself to this. Such a confused party cannot help the country or anyone else. You want to shout inside Parliament, just as you do outside, then please go ahead, but hiding behind lies will never get you anywhere.
Study Results: The graph shows how articles written in languages other than English appear above position 900 in the Google Scholar ranking. Credit: Universitat Pompeu Fabra - Barcelona

The visibility of scientific articles and conference papers is conditional upon being easily found in academic search engines, especially Google Scholar. To enhance this visibility, search engine optimization (SEO) has been applied in recent years to academic search engines in order to optimize documents and, thereby, ensure they are better ranked in search pages (i.e., academic search engine optimization or ASEO).

Recent research, published in Future Internet, has found out whether the language of the document is a factor involved in the sorting algorithm of search results on Google Scholar. The study authors are Cristofol Rovira, Lluis Codina and Carlos Lopezosa, members of the Department of Communication at UPF.

"To implement this optimization we need to further our understanding of Google Scholar's relevance ranking algorithm, so that, based on this knowledge, we can highlight or improve those characteristics that academic documents already present and which are taken into account by the algorithm," says Rovira, first author of the study. To prevent fraudulent practices, Google Scholar does not explain this algorithm and, therefore, this kind of research becomes necessary.

For the study, the authors applied an inverse engineering research methodology based on statistical analysis using Spearman's correlation coefficient. Three different types of search were conducted yielding a sample of 45 searches each with 1,000 results (45,000 documents): by author, by year, and by keyword.

Quality articles with hundreds of citations are treated in a discriminatory manner

The results show that when a search is performed on Google Scholar with results in various languages, the vast majority (90%) of documents in languages other than English are systematically relegated to positions that render them totally invisible. These documents are almost always placed in positions above rank position 900, even though they are quality articles with hundreds of citations. Thus, it can be stated that Google Scholar discriminates against documents not written in English in searches with multilingual results.

A lack of awareness of this factor could be detrimental to researchers from all over the non-English-speaking world, making them believe that there is no literature in their national language when they conduct searches with multilingual results.

"This is particularly the case in the most frequent searches, that is, those conducted by year. Nevertheless, it can also occur in searches using certain keywords that are the same in languages around the world, including trademarks, chemical compounds, industrial products, acronyms, drugs, and diseases, with COVID-19 being the most recent example," the study authors reveal.

And they add "moreover, if we consider the results of this study from the perspective of ASEO, it is more than evident that until this bias is addressed, the chances of being ranked in a multilingual Google Scholar search increase remarkably if the researchers opt for publication in English."

Graph of the results of the study

The scatter plot above summarizes the research results. There are 45,000 dots, one per document. The gray dots represent documents written in English, other languages in red, and blue shows the median positions.

The graph shows how articles written in languages other than English appear above 900th position in the Google Scholar ranking. This is so even for quality documents that have hundreds of citations and are well placed in the ranking for number of citations.

The most striking cases are the red dots located in the bottom-right corner. They correspond to documents written in languages other than English that are ranked by number of citations below 100 and have a Google Scholar ranking over 900. This means that all of them receive over a thousand citations and appear in Google Scholar in the same positions as documents in English cited just a few dozen times.

More information: Cristofol Rovira et al, Language Bias in the Google Scholar Ranking Algorithm, Future Internet (2021). Cristofol Rovira et al, Language Bias in the Google Scholar Ranking Algorithm,(2021). DOI: 10.3390/fi13020031

Provided by Universitat Pompeu Fabra - Barcelona

Iraq said the OPEC+ oil cartel is unlikely to change its production policy at next months meeting and repeated promises to deliver overdue output cuts, even as the Arab nations economy reels.

The group of crude exporters meets on March 4 and members will probably agree to keep output steady in April, Iraqs Oil Minister Ihsan Abdul Jabbar said. The biggest change will come from Saudi Arabia, which will likely end unilateral daily cuts of 1 million barrels after March, he said.

I think in March the agreement will be that output will remain on the same level, the minister told reporters in Baghdad Wednesday.

The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and partners such as Russia -- an alliance known as OPEC+ -- began unprecedented production curbs in May after the coronavirus pandemic battered economies and caused oil demand to collapse.

STANDING FIRM: OPEC+ discipline and US stimulus could drive oil this week

Iraq has drawn fire from fellow members for breaching its quota on several occasions and failing to compensate, despite repeated pledges to do so.

OPECs second-largest producer after Saudi Arabia has a limit of 3.86 million barrels per day for the first three months of the year under the current agreement.

Jabbar said Iraq will pump 3.6 million barrels a day this month if the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government complies with Baghdads wishes.

Iraq had said it would also cap its daily production for January at 3.6 million barrels, but ended up pumping more than 3.8 million a day.

The minister expects to export 2.9 million barrels a day in February, excluding Kurdish flows. Thats more or less in line with the figure for January.

Jabbar thinks crude prices will trade in the range of $58 to $63 a barrel this year. Brent crude has soared almost 20% since the end of 2020 to around $61.50 a barrel amid rising demand in China and vaccine roll-outs.

(Photo : Screenshot from YouTube/Angela Nicole Chu) Does Myspace still exist? You might say yes after seeing its closest copy, Spacehey which was coded by an 18-year-old.

Myspace is still active as of today, but not anymore a go-to platform for social media users. It was once the king of social media networks especially from 2005 to 2008, where it serves over 100 million users on a monthly basis. Now, an 18-year-old teen recreated it with its carbon-copy app,Spacehey.

Does Myspace Still Exist?

Myspace can be accessed by the users at this time. Its website is still active even though the ownership of the once-giant social media platform is now handed to Time Inc in 2016. It is reportedly reconstructed through several tweaks in designs and layouts since its gradual decline.

Myspace supports Android and iOS through its mobile app previously, but it was already removed by the company. However, users can still enter it through Myspace.com so accessing the app through mobile devices will not be a problem. Myspace could have thrived in the competition, but Facebook still prevailed in the social media app battle.

How did Spacehey start?

Would you believe that Myspace's carbon copy, Spacehey, was created by an 18-year-old teen? It was developed by An, a student from Germany who loves coding. Since its launch in November 2020, 55,00 users have already used the app worldwide.

An wanted to make software that will cater to the needs of the people when it comes to privacy, so he came up with a social media website that resembles Myspace.

"Thanks to older friends and the internet, I heard a lot about [Myspace]. I came to the conclusion that you can't find something like this nowadays," An said in a report by Gizmodo's Joanna Nelius.

Read Also: 10 Valentines Day Zoom Date Ideas to Make Your Valentines' Day 'Remotely' Special

The German coder revealed that he arrived with the idea of Spacehey to pass time during the quarantine period. An was just testing to construct a website for his free time, but he did not know that he would finish it with quality design and interface for the users. Moreover, he pointed out that Myspace underwent several redesigns in the past but it was not satisfying compared to the original design so he remade it.

Spacehey Features

While the two social media websites look the same, there is still a glaring difference between the two. Spacehey now features link posting of your profiles on other social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. In addition, the users are now allowed to embed videos and audios from YouTube and audio-streaming provider, Spotify.

In using Spacehey, you can also utilize user-created layouts so you will not code anymore from the start. When it comes to similarities of the website to Myspace, the Comment section, Friend space, and Blog Space are still there. You can also see the "online now" label so using Spacehey will bring a rush of nostalgia to a Myspace user.

It seems that Spacehey is just a startup, but An is already serious about serving the users through a help desk. He answers the people's queries when they have complained, and he also imposes a ban on those who spark hate speech and other violations across the platform. The young coder sees to it that his website will be people-friendly to all, so misinformation has no place in the environment.

When asked about what drove him to accomplish his creation, An recalled that HTML really helped him in building the first foundation of the Spacehey. It also became his sanctuary since he got used to his parents' habit of looking through his text messages and eavesdropping during phone calls. The website that he developed is a big help for his privacy.

Indeed, the launch was a success for An, but he knew that it still has a lot to improve soon. He hopes that someday, this will take over the social media world to spread the news about a safer app for all users.

According to New York Post, a user named Chaos told them that Spacehey is much more enjoyable because it is less toxic compared to other social media platforms.

Related Article: Hive Social Media App: Twitter's Trendiest App is Run by One Woman? [More Fun Facts]



This article is owned by Tech Times.

Written by Joen Coronel

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
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In the United States military, the Purple Heart is a revered, if unwanted, military accolade bestowed upon those individuals who have been wounded in action with the enemy. The Military Order of the Purple Heart describes it as awarded to members of the armed forces of the U.S. who are wounded by an instrument of war in the hands of the enemy and posthumously to the next of kin in the name of those killed in action or die of wounds received in action. It is specifically a combat decoration.

The Purple Heart traces its lineage all the way back to the Revolutionary War when it was called the Badge of Military Merit. After World War I, renewed interest in reviving the Badge of Military Merit led to the establishment of the modern Purple Heart. When the new Purple Heart was authorized in 1932, it superseded the short-lived Army Wound Ribbon and the wear of Wound Chevrons  devices on the sleeve that denoted the number of times someone had been wounded in combat.

Two million Purple Hearts have been awarded since it was created. The men below earned more of them per individual than any others.

1. Staff Sgt. Albert L. Ireland  Marine Corps

Four Marines man a machine gun in Korea, where they are serving with the 1st Marine Division. (Photo: U.S. Marine Corps)

Staff Sergeant Albert Ireland has the distinction of being awarded the most Purple Hearts of any individual across all branches of service. During his 12 years of service  spanning two wars from 1941 to 1953  Ireland was wounded a total of nine times. Albert fought his way across the Pacific with the Marines during World War II, during which time he was wounded five times. During the Korean War, he was wounded four more times, and the last one was severe enough that he was medically discharged.

2. Lt. Col. Richard J. Buck  Army

Dressed in parkas (Overcoat, parka type, with pile liner), Missouri infantrymen pose for a New Year greeting, 19th Infantry Regiment, Kumsong front, Korea, 14 December 1951. (Photo: U.S. Army)

Richard Buck graduated from West Point in 1951 before being shipped to the Korean peninsula. During his service in the Korean War, Buck was wounded a total of four times. After the Korean War, Buck stayed in the Army and eventually joined Special Forces before being deployed to Vietnam. There, Buck was again wounded four times, bringing his Purple Heart total to eight for his career. He retired as a Lieutenant Colonel in 1970.

3. Maj. Gen. Robert T. Frederick  Army

Maj. Gen. Robert T. Frederick (U.S. Army)

Major General Frederick began World War II as a Lieutenant Colonel tasked with raising the 1st Special Service Force. With this force he would fight in the Aleutian Islands, North Africa, and Italy before being promoted to Brigadier General and taking charge of the 1st Allied Airborne Task Force. During his time with 1st Special Service Force, he was wounded numerous times. At Anzio he was wounded twice in the same day. Frederick was once again promoted and took command of the 45th Infantry Division until the end of the war. Major General Frederick ended WWII with eight Purple Hearts, two Distinguished Service Crosses, and a Silver Star. He retired in 1952.

4. Col. David H. Hackworth  Army

Col. David H. Hackworth (U.S. Army)

Colonel Hackworth was awarded eight purple hearts over the course of the Korean and Vietnam wars. During the Korean War, Hackworth served with several elite units  8th Ranger Company, 25th Recon Company, and the 27th Wolfhound Raiders  before earning a battlefield commission and volunteering to serve another tour, which he completed with the 40th Infantry Division. During his time in Korea he was awarded three Purple Hearts. During the Vietnam War, Hackworth served multiple tours in Vietnam in multiple capacities but was well known for creating the Tiger Force with the 101st Airborne and revitalizing the demoralized 4/39th into the Hardcore Recondo Battalion. There he received another five Purple Hearts. Col. Hackworth also holds the record for the most Silver Stars with ten awards.

5. Capt. Joe Hooper  Army

Capt. Joe Hooper (photo: U.S. Army)

Joe Hooper enlisted in the U.S. Army as an Airborne Infantryman in 1960. He was stationed at a number of locations before being assigned to D Co., 2nd Battalion, 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment just prior to that units deployment to Vietnam. On February 21, 1968, Hoopers actions outside of Hue earned him the Medal of Honor as well as one of his Purple Hearts. Hooper would serve a second tour in Vietnam from 1970-71, during which time he received a direct commission to 2nd Lieutenant. During his tours, Lt. Cooper received eight Purple Hearts, the Medal of Honor, and two Silver Stars as well as numerous other awards.

6. Col. Robert L. Howard  Army

Col. Robert L. Howard receives the Medal of Honor from President Richard Nixon. (U.S. Army)

Robert Howard enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1956 and by 1967 found himself assigned to Military Assistance Command, Vietnam  Studies and Observations Group (MACV-SOG) in Vietnam. Howard served a total of 54 months in Vietnam. During one thirteen month tour, he was recommended for the Medal of Honor on three separate occasions, but due to the covert nature of the operations, two were reduced  to the Silver Star and Distinguished Service Cross. He was awarded the Medal of Honor and a Purple Heart for actions in December 1968. In the remainder of his time in Vietnam, Howard was given a commission to 2nd Lieutenant and wounded a further seven times giving him a total of eight Purple Hearts for his career. He retired as a Colonel in 1992.

7. Col. William L. Russell  Army

William Russell first enlisted in the 153rd Infantry Regiment of the Arkansas National Guard during World War II, seeing action in the Aleutian Islands before being given a direct commission. After Advanced Infantry Officer Training, he was assigned to I Co., 330th Infantry Regiment, 83rd Infantry Division. During his time with the 83rd Infantry Division, he earned a Silver Star, was nominated for the Medal of Honor, and was wounded seven times, earning him the nickname The King of the Purple Hearts. After WWII, Russell returned to Arkansas before being called up to participate in the Korean War where he led the 937th Field Artillery Battalion into combat. Russell retired from the military in 1965 with the rank of Colonel, having been awarded eightPurple Hearts.

8. Sgt. Maj. William Waugh  Army

Sgt. Maj. William Waugh (U.S. Army)

William Waugh enlisted in the Army in 1948 and was briefly assigned to the 187th Parachute Regimental Combat Team in Korea before earning his Green Beret in 1954. Waugh deployed to Vietnam with Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha team in 1961. During numerous tours in Vietnam, Waugh was involved in many different operations including multiple combat High Altitude Low Opening insertions. During the Battle of Bong Son, Waugh was grievously wounded and was later awarded the Silver Star and his sixth Purple Heart. By the time Sgt. Maj. Waugh retired in 1972, he had been wounded two more times for a total of eight Purple Hearts. After his illustrious Special Forces career, Waugh continued on working for the CIA during which time, at the age of 71, he participated in Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan.

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Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - February 10, 2021) - ION Energy Limited (TSXV: ION) (OTCQB: IONGF) (FSE: 5YB) ("ION" or the "Company"), is pleased to announce the acquisition of the Urgakh Naran Lithium Brine Project (the "Urgakh Naran Project") located in Mongolia's Dorngovi Province. The name "Urgakh Naran" is Mongolian for "Rising Sun" and the Project covers an area of approximately over 19,000 hectares of highly prospective lithium terrain located 150km WNW of the Company's flagship property, the Baavhai Uul Lithium Brine Project. The acquisition of the Urgakh Naran Project brings the total land area held by ION that is prospective for lithium salars to over 100,000 hectares (247,000 acres).

Figure 1: Urgakh Naran Project License Map

To view an enhanced version of Figure 1, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/6906/74141_263c0725147baa8e_002full.jpg

Figure 2: Urgakh Naran Project and Baavhai Uul location map

To view an enhanced version of Figure 2, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/6906/74141_263c0725147baa8e_003full.jpg

The Company acquired the Urgakh Naran Project as a result of its successful tender bid submitted to the Mineral Resource Authority of Mongolia. The total cost of acquiring the Urgakh Naran Project was approximately USD$310,000 for consulting, administrative and transfer tax costs.

"The acquisition of this project represents the further execution of our Company's objectives to secure terrains highly prospective for the discovery of lithium salars. Ion Energy is a leader in Mongolia's lithium exploration and development. It also solidifies Ion Energy's long-term commitment to support our world's green revolution by playing a key role in the supply chain. The Urgakh Naran Project is situated in the arid and infrastructure rich region of the South Gobi Desert," commented ION's CEO, Ali Haji. Work has already commenced to develop the exploration program on this highly prospective project. The Company will also be releasing results from its recently completed Geophysics program on the Baavhai Uul Lithium Brine Project.

Lithium mineralization at Urgakh Naran Project

Previous work conducted at the Urgakh Naran Lithium Brine Project has included a substantial Hydro-chemical sampling program of identified shallow lithium in brines. Although early stage, this program was highly successful in identifying multiple targets for follow up exploration. Ion Energy is already well into planning follow up exploration of the best of these exciting new targets.

All technical information in this press release has been reviewed and approved by Khurelbaatar Lamzav, P.Geo., an independent consultant to the Company and a "Qualified Person" under National Instrument 43-101.

For more information, please visit the Company website.

About ION Energy Ltd.

ION Energy Ltd. (TSXV: ION) (OTCQB: IONGF) (FSE: 5YB) is committed to exploring and developing Mongolia's lithium salars. ION's flagship, 81,000+ hectare Baavhai Uul lithium brine project, represents the largest and first lithium brine exploration licence award in Mongolia. ION Energy also holds the 19,000+ hectare Urgakh Naran highly prospective Lithium Brine licence in Dorngovi Province in Mongolia. Energy is well-poised to be a key player in the clean energy revolution, positioned well to service the world's increased demand for lithium. Information about the Company is available on its website, www.ionenergy.ca, or under its profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com.

For further information:

MEDIA CONTACT: Siloni Waraich, siloni@ionenergy.ca, 416-432-4920

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Information

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.

Information set forth in this news release contains forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements include estimates and statements that describe the Company's future plans, objectives or goals, including words to the effect that the Company or 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 the Company, the Company 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, the Company's objectives, goals or future plans, statements, potential mineralization, exploration and development results, the estimation of mineral resources, exploration and mine development plans, timing of the commencement of operations and estimates of market conditions. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from Ion Energy's expectations include, among others, uncertainties relating to availability and costs of financing needed in the future, changes in equity markets, risks related to international operations, the actual results of current exploration activities, delays in the development of projects, conclusions of economic evaluations and changes in project parameters as plans continue to be refined as well as future prices of lithium, and ability to predict or counteract potential impact of COVID-19 coronavirus on factors relevant to the Company's business. There can be no assurance that forward-looking statements will prove to be accurate and actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/74141
Jerusalem: Israels former UN ambassador sent an ill-tempered tweet to Joe Biden on Wednesday imploring him to call Benjamin Netanyahu, as the US President appeared to give the cold shoulder to his closest security partner in the Middle East.

The Israeli Prime Minister is yet to receive a personal phone call from Biden, who has already spoken to leaders in Britain, France and Germany.

Danny Danon, Israels former permanent representative to the United Nations, sent a tweet to the US president with a phone number for Netanyahus office as he pleaded for the White House to make the call.

Might it now be time to call the leader of Israel, the closest ally of the US? Danny Danon asked in the tweet.


An Opposition MP in the Rajya Sabha on Monday asked why prices of petrol and diesel were lower in neighbouring countries such as Nepal and Sri Lanka.

Petrol is cheaper in Mother Sitas land Nepal and Ravanas land Lanka. When will the government reduce petrol, diesel prices in the land of Ram? Samajwadi Party MP Vishambhar Prasad Nishad asked Union Minister for Petroleum Dharmendra Pradhan in the Rajya Sabha.

Also Read | Fuel prices hiked; petrol, diesel prices touch new highs

Comparing fuel prices of neighbouring countries with prices in India has been a common theme on social media.

Petrol and diesel prices on Wednesday scaled new highs in the country as rates were hiked for the second day in a row. Petrol price was hiked by 30 paise per litre and diesel by 25 paise a litre, according to a price notification of state-owned fuel retailers.

Also read | Explainer | Why are petrol, diesel prices rising?

The increase took petrol price to an all-time high of Rs 87.60 a litre in Delhi and to Rs 94.12 in Mumbai.

Oil Minister Dharmendra Pradhan in Rajya Sabha said the government is not considering a reduction in excise duty to cool rates from their record highs.

(With inputs from PTI)

In an assurance this week to Bexar County commissioners, the director of the county-owned Freeman Coliseum outlined a number of improvements the facility has made to prevent the spread of COVID-19 at its events, including the San Antonio Stock Show & Rodeo, which has been scaled down during the pandemic.

Weve taken a lot of precautionary methods for anybody that has an event in the coliseum. So theyre going, and so our job now is to try to make it as safe as possible, County Judge Nelson Wolff said at Tuesdays briefing.

Those improvements include installation of touchless restroom fixtures, antiviral lighting and ventilation and contact-free payment options, coliseum Executive Director Derrick Howard said in a letter to Wolff and county commissioners.

Wolff asked the San Antonio Livestock Exposition nearly two weeks ago to consider postponing its public rodeo performances. At the last Commissioners Court meeting, Commissioner Tommy Calvert said he was worried about the rodeo becoming a spreader event.

Rodeo events in Austin, Houston and Fort Worth have already been canceled this year because of the coronavirus. But SALE officials are moving forward with a significantly smaller version of the stock show and rodeo, a scholarship fund-raiser and traditionally one of the biggest economic generators among special events in San Antonio.

On ExpressNews.com: Wolff asks the rodeo to postpone its public performances

Wolff said during Tuesday nights city-county COVID-19 briefing that he had talked to rodeo officials that day and secured assurances that sheriffs deputies and officials of the countys Office of Emergency Management would be there to help enforce emergency orders still in place on social distancing and face coverings.

In addition, there are the upgrades to the coliseum to help limit the spread of COVID-19. Last year, commissioners approved a plan to set aside more than $5 million from a $79.6 million allocation of federal coronavirus relief fund dollars to add public health features at county buildings and facilities.

The stock show and rodeo, which opens Thursday and runs through Feb. 28, is expected to have a total attendance of about 120,000  far below its normal turnout of more than 1 million people.

The carnival and other attractions on the grounds have been eliminated, and the rodeo competitions and concerts have moved from the AT&T Center to the adjacent coliseum, where no more than 3,800 spectators will be seated at each performance. Another 3,000 people daily are expected to attend junior livestock events on the county-owned coliseum grounds.

On ExpressNews.com: Bexar commissioners want rapid COVID-19 testing at rodeo

In his letter, Howard said the coliseum has upgraded its wireless internet services to provide for touchless transactions for parking fees, ticketing and in-seat concessions. It has installed two grab-and-go concession stands in areas of the coliseum where foot traffic is low; added 40 additional hand-sanitizing stations, for a total of 70; and instituted a policy of temperature-screening guests.

The facility also has installed air purification lighting in the coliseum and expo hall air-conditioning units to kill the coronavirus, as well as bacteria and mold, and installed protective transparent barriers at concession stands and offices. It also has purchased masks, gloves, safety signage and sanitation supplies, including cleaning products and portable germicidal lights, in accordance with guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

We continue to work on educating ourselves on new and improved ways to be CDC-compliant and beyond for the protection of our community, Howard said in the letter.

shuddleston@express-news.net
Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-11 04:19:28|Editor: huaxia

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CAIRO, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- Arab League Secretary-General Ahmed Aboul-Gheit welcomed the reconciliation reached among rival Palestinian factions following their two-day dialogue in Egypt's capital Cairo, the pan-Arab body said in a statement on Wednesday.

Aboul-Gheit made the remarks after his meeting with Jibril Rajoub, secretary general of the Central Committee of Fatah at the Arab League's headquarters in Cairo.

"The dialogue achieved the required consensus to pave the way for holding the upcoming (Palestinian) legislative and presidential elections in a positive atmosphere," said the Arab League chief.

On Monday and Tuesday, Cairo hosted a reconciliation dialogue for a dozen of Palestinian factions, including the two main rivals Fatah and Hamas which have a 14-year-long rift.

The internal Palestinian division between ruling Fatah and Hamas that controls the Gaza Strip began in 2007 when Hamas forcibly took over Gaza. Since then, the Palestinian territories have been split into a Hamas-controlled Gaza and a Fatah-dominated West Bank.

The last legislative elections in the Palestinian territories were held in late 2006 when Hamas won a majority.

In a presidential decree issued last month, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas announced that the legislative elections will be held on May 22, the presidential elections on July 31, and the Palestinian National Council elections on Aug. 31.

"Elections represent an important step for renewing the Palestinian legitimacy," Aboul-Gheit noted, calling on the international community to make every effort to ensure the elections will be held in all the occupied Palestinian territories.

He also reaffirmed Arab League's support for the Palestinian cause and the future establishment of an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital on the 1967 borders. Enditem
A body has been found in a suitcase alongside a river in North Carolina near where a pregnant woman was reported missing last week.

The female corpse was spotted by a passerby on Monday morning near the Neuse River Trail in Raleigh, the Wake County Sheriff's Office said.

Police have not disclosed the identity of the victim but said it's possible she is 28-year-old Brittany Samone Smith, who disappeared about 10 miles away in Wendell on February 2.

Smith's family was at the scene where the suitcase was found, ABC11 reported.

A woman's body was found in a found in a suitcase alongside a river in Raleigh, North Carolina, on Monday morning, near where Brittany Samone Smith (left and right) was reported missing last week. Police have not confirmed the identity of the victim but said it's possible she is Smith, who was described as 'noticeably pregnant'

The female corpse was spotted by a passerby on Monday morning near the Neuse River Trail in Raleigh. Deputies with the Wake County Sheriff's Office are pictured at the scene

The case is being treated as a homicide, according to Wake County Sheriff Gerald Baker, who told reporters that it's 'safe to say this was no accident'.

An autopsy is underway to confirm the woman's identity and cause of death.

'We're getting ready to confirm [the woman's identity],' Baker told reporters at the scene on Monday.

'I can't sit here and tell you that's what's in there right now. We have not gotten to that point. We have information to believe it.'

'It's not every day, it's not every morning, that you find what could be a person's body in a suitcase, in a river,' he added.

Police had put out an alert asking for the public's help in locating Smith (pictured) on Saturday, four days after she was last seen in Wendell

An aerial view shows detectives on the scene where the woman's body was found on Monday. ABC11 reported that Smith's family was also at the scene

Police had put out an alert asking for the public's help in locating Smith on Saturday, four days after she was last seen in Wendell.

WRAL reported that neighbors said Smith had been living in a tent with her boyfriend in the 200 block of Fox Run Drive. WXII 12 News also published photos of the tent.

Smith was described as being 4'11" tall, about 115 pounds and 'noticeably pregnant'.

Baker hinted that investigators suspect Smith may be the victim in the suitcase on Monday.

'If this is, in fact, this young lady that we've been looking for all weekend, someone is responsible for that,' he said.

The sheriff also said there is a 'person of interest' detectives want to speak with.

'We're going to work very hard. We're going to find out who was responsible. I can tell you that. Because these things just don't happen. Someone is responsible.'

A home on the block where Smith was last seen is shown with caution tape around it in footage from WXII 12 News
Data released by Facebook last fall showed that during one week in October, seven of the 10 most-engaged pages were primarily political, including those of President Donald J. Trump, Fox News, Breitbart and Occupy Democrats.

Three years ago, Facebook said it would pull back on the amount of content posted to the site by news publishers and brands, an overhaul that it said put more focus on interaction among friends and family. At the time, Mr. Zuckerberg said he wanted to make sure Facebooks products were not just fun, but good for people. He also said the company would take those actions even if it meant hurting the bottom line.

Still, Facebook users have had no problem finding political content. Nongovernmental organizations and political action committees paid to show millions of Americans highly targeted political advertising in the months before Novembers presidential election. Users created vast numbers of private groups to discuss campaign issues, organize protests and support candidates. Until recently, Facebooks own systems frequently suggested new, different political groups that users could join.

Facebook has backtracked on some of this in recent months. After the polls closed on Election Day, the company shut down the ability to buy new political advertising. And after the deadly Capitol riot on Jan. 6, Mr. Zuckerberg said the company would turn off the ability to recommend political groups to turn down the temperature on global conversations.

Under the new test, a machine-learning model will predict the likelihood that a post  whether its posted by a major news organization, a political pundit, or your friend or relative  is political. Posts deemed political will appear less often in users feeds.

Its unclear how Facebooks algorithm will define political content, or how significantly the changes will affect peoples feeds. Lauren Svensson, a Facebook spokeswoman, said the company would keep refining this model during the test period to better identify political content, and we may or may not end up using this method longer term.

It is also unclear what will happen if Facebooks tests determine that reducing the political content also reduces peoples use of the site. In the past, the company has shelved or modified algorithm changes that aimed to lower the amount of misleading and divisive content people saw, after determining that the changes caused them to open Facebook less frequently.
Highlights Instagram does not want users to post recycled TikTok videos to Reels.

The photo-sharing app said that it will not promote videos with TikTok watermark from Reels.

After TikTok was banned in India, a lot of users uploaded their TikTok videos on Instagram.

Instagram does not want users to post recycled TikTok videos to Reels. The photo-sharing app said that it will not promote videos with TikTok watermark from Reels. After TikTok was banned in India, a lot of users uploaded their TikTok videos on Instagram. Although it has the same video format, the videos with TikTok written over it were seen in large numbers on Instagram.

Instagram has said that it is making changes to its algorithm. The social media company wants users to upload original videos in a vertical format rather than reusing the old videos of TikTok. Instagram had said that it will not remove those videos but will stop promoting them on the feed. Although the post will be visible, it may not appear on the feed of the app.

"We're building on what we've learned from Explore to recommend fun and entertaining videos in places like the Reels tab, and personalize the experience. We are getting better at using ranking signals that help us predict whether people will find a reel entertaining and whether we should recommend it," spokesperson Devi Narasimhan told The Verge.

Considering both Reels and TikTok have identical formats, users find it convenient to use the same videos on both platforms. However, once a video is uploaded on TikTok, it gets published with a watermark. The same video when published on Reels may not be promoted but it will also not be removed. The company wants users to make unique and fresh videos for Reels using the songs that are available in Instagram's music library not the ones from TikTok or any other platform.

Soon after TikTok was banned in India in June, Instagram added a Reels tab to its app. There is no standalone app for Reels but it performs the same job as TikTok. Reels lets users discover short, fun videos from creators all over the world

On a related note, Instagram is planning to make the Stories look like Reels. If reports are to be trusted, Instagram will soon launch a Vertical Stories feed. The new layout would make it easier for people to swipe stories vertically instead of swiping left and right.

The feature was first spotted by tipster Alexandra Paluzzi. In the screenshot shared by Paluzzi, you can see a short intro given by Instagram about its Vertical Stories feed. The pop-up reads, "Swipe up and down to browse stories".

A company spokesperson told TechCrunch that it is working on the feature but it is not available for public usage as of now. "This is an early prototype and is not currently testing on Instagram."

Although Instagram has confirmed working on the feature, it has not revealed when the feature will be rolled out. However, when this happens, the app would resemble TikTok a lot. Instagram might also priorities videos over photos if the vertical stories feed are rolled out. In that case, the content that goes up in Reels and Stories separately will be unified once the feature is made available to the public.


A man who said he wanted to throw a grenade at a police station has been convicted of terror and explosives offences.

Mohammed Chowdhury, 24, was arrested after meeting with an undercover police officer who was posing as an arms dealer at a Costa Coffee branch in London.

Chowdhury paid 300 for what he believed to be a real grenade, but was immediately arrested in a sting by armed police.

He was convicted of attempting to possess an explosive with intent to endanger life or property on Wednesday, following a trial at the Old Bailey.

Chowdhury had previously pleaded guilty to four counts of possessing documents likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism, but was not charged with planning a terror attack himself.

Following his arrest on 5 February, 2020, he made several phone calls to relatives from prison where he told them what he wanted to do with the grenade.

In one call to his mother and sister, he said he wanted to chuck it in the station area, adding: I wanted to do something serious like on the TV.

Speaking to his mother in March 2020, he said: I dont care about the judge or the police and that. I wanted to hurt one of them, innit. I was getting annoyed. Thats why I went, thats why I went to get the thingy."

Chowdhury suggested he could have concealed the grenade in a place where it would have blown up in their face, but then added: If I would have got that I would have chucked it at the station, innit, I dont care.

He said he wanted to do something bad and told his mother: I dont care if I see any legs or anything or someones legs coming off. Something like that.

Prosecutor Alistair Richardson told jurors: When Mr Chowdhury did try to come into possession of the hand grenade, he was clearly intending to use it to put life in danger or to cause serious damage.

Chowdhury had previous dealings with the police in November 2019, when he was prosecuted after brandishing an axe outside Stepney Green Underground Station in east London.

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 21st May 2021 A family buffeted by the wind whilst crossing the the Millennium Bridge in London, with wind and rain forecast to ravage the UK on the first Friday that people have been allowed to meet in large groups outside in England PA UK news in pictures 20 May 2021 Devon And Cornwall Police Demonstrate Their Skills For Policing The G7 Summit Getty Images UK news in pictures 18 May 2021 An employee stands before a costume for the Queen of Hearts by Bob Crowley on display at the Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London PA UK news in pictures 17 May 2021 Passengers prepare to board an easyJet flight to Faro, Portugal, at Gatwick Airport after the ban on international leisure travel for people in England was lifted following the further easing of lockdown restrictions in England PA UK news in pictures 16 May 2021 Emergency workers at the scene of a suspected gas explosion, in which a young child was killed and two people were seriously injured, on Mallowdale Ave Heysham which caused 2 houses to collapse and badly damaged another PA UK news in pictures 15 May 2021 Pro-Palestinian activists and supporters let off smoke flares, wave flags and carry placards during a demonstration in support of the Palestinian cause as violence escalates in the ongoing conflict with Israel, in central London AFP via Getty UK news in pictures 14 May 2021 Member of staffs tighten screws and paint a Marlin skeleton, before it goes on display at the Natural History Museum in London, as the museum prepares to reopen to the public on 17 May, following the further easing of lockdown restrictions in England PA UK news in pictures 13 May 2021 A worshipper at the Baitul Futuh Mosque in Mordon, south London, ahead of Eid al-Fitr. 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PA UK news in pictures 12 May 2021 A couple have wedding photos taken in Westminster, London Getty UK news in pictures 11 May 2021 The sun rises on Coquet Island, off Amble on the Northumberland coast, where as many as 35000 seabirds cram onto this tiny island to breed PA UK news in pictures 10 May 2021 Newly elected for a second term Mayor of London Sadiq Khan during his signing in ceremony at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre on Londons Southbank PA UK news in pictures 9 May 2021 People mill around St. Michael's tower on top of Glastonbury Tor as it is seen through blooming yellow rapeseed on a day of mixed weather in Glastonbury, Somerset PA UK news in pictures 8 May 2021 Wales First Minister Mark Drakeford elbow bumps newly elected MS Labour candidates Elizabeth Buffy Williams, Rhondda, left, and Sarah Murphy, Bridgend & Porthcawl Labour, right, as they meet in Porthcawl, Wales PA UK news in pictures 6 May 2021 A group of five Sisters from Carmelite Monastery in Dysart cast their vote in the Scottish Parliamentary election at Dysart Community Hall, West Port, Dysart PA UK news in pictures 5 May 2021 Leader of the Labour Party Sir Keir Starmer (centre) with West Midlands Metro Mayor candidate Liam Byrne (far right) and Labour Deputy Leader, Angela Rayner (far left) during a visit to Birmingham, whilst on the election campaign trail PA UK news in pictures 4 May 2021 Artists Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey stand within 100 oak saplings which form part of a living art installation entitled Beuys' Acorns by the UK-based artist duo, outside the Tate Modern in London PA UK news in pictures 3 May 2021 Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Willie Rennie feeds the Gentoo penguins during a visit to Edinburgh Zoo on the campaign trail for the forthcoming Scottish Parliamentary Election on May 6 PA UK news in pictures 2 May 2021 Chelsea players celebrate their fourth goal during the Womens Champions League semi-final second leg against Bayern Munich, at Kingsmeadow Stadium in south west London. The Blues won the game 4-1, (and the tie 5-3 on aggregate) sending them through to their first Champions League final AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 1 May 2020 Demonstrators during a march through London during a 'Kill the Bill' protest Angela Christofilou UK news in pictures 30 April 2021 Shoppers queue outside Primark in Belfast as shops reopen and hospitality is able to open outdoors in Northern Ireland where lockdown restrictions have begun to gradually ease PA UK news in pictures 29 April 2021 Specialist operators at the Royal Air Force Museum Cosford, near Telford, Shropshire, clean the Hawker Hunter aircraft displayed within the museum's National Cold War Exhibition, during annual high-level aircraft cleaning and maintenance PA UK news in pictures 28 April 2021 Millions of tulips in flower near Kings Lynn in Norfolk, as Belmont Nurseries, the UK's largest commercial grower of outdoor tulips, offers socially-distanced visits to its tulip fields at Hillington to raise funds for local charity The Norfolk Hospice Tapping House PA UK news in pictures 27 April 2021 Paula Laughton checks one of the newly installed Lego models in the new Lego Mythica land at Legoland Windsor Resort PA UK news in pictures 26 April 2021 A red panda rests on a tree at Manor Wildlife park, which reopened its doors as lockdown restrictions continue to ease, in Tenby, Wales Reuters UK news in pictures 25 April 2021 Sheep climb the hillside as flames from a moor fire are seen on Marsden moor, near Huddersfield AFP via Getty UK news in pictures 24 April 2021 Supporters protest against Manchester United's owners, outside English Premier League club Manchester United's Old Trafford stadium in Manchester AFP via Getty UK news in pictures 23 April 2021 People enjoy the warm weather at City Hall near Tower Bridge in central London PA UK news in pictures 22 April 2021 Uyghurs during a demonstration in Parliament Square, London, which is being held ahead of a House of Commons debate, bought by backbench MP Nus Ghani, on whether Uyghurs in China's Xinjiang province are suffering crimes against humanity and genocide PA UK news in pictures 21 April 2021 People walk at the Taihaku Cherry Orchard in Alnwick REUTERS UK news in pictures 20 April 2021 People stand in front of anti Super League banners outside Anfield as twelve of Europe's top football clubs, including Liverpool, launch a breakaway league Reuters UK news in pictures 19 April 2021 Women enjoy sunny weather in Greenwich, amid the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak, in London, Britain, Reuters UK news in pictures 18 April 2021 Stephen Maguire (right) of Scotland interacts with Jamie Jones of Wales during day 2 of the Betfred World Snooker Championships 2021 at The Crucible, Sheffield PA UK news in pictures 17 April 2021 Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburghs coffin, covered with His Royal Highnesss Personal Standard arrives by Landrover Defender at St Georges Chapel carried by a bearer party found by the Royal Marines during the funeral of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh at Windsor Castle Getty Images UK news in pictures 16 April 2021 Scotland's First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, checks the teeth of "Dentosaurus" during a visit to the Thornliebank Dental Care centre in Glasgow, as she campaigns ahead of the 2021 Scottish Parliamentary Election AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 15 April 2021 Myanmar's former ambassador to the UK, Kyaw Zwar Minn, outside his residence in north west London. 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The court heard that he had been pushed by a man and returned with the weapon, waving it around.

Chowdhury was given a suspended prison sentence, which he breached by trying to buy the grenade.

Having been caught on CCTV for the axe incident, Chowdhury appeared to direct his rage against the police. The Old Bailey heard the likely target for his grenade attack was Bethnal Green police station.

In a search of his flat, police recovered a shopping list including handcuffs, nitrite gloves, and strong acid.

Chowdhury appeared to have attempted to buy a balaclava, lock picks, a stun gun and a handgun online, jurors heard.

In a note saved on his mobile phone, he had written about wanting his family dead, feeling homicidal and attacking students in a college.

I feel I want to commit mass murder and kill myself before the police get a chance to arrest me, Chowdhury wrote.

An examination of the device indicated that he had downloaded information on making explosives, including terrorist documents.

Chowdhury had also searched the internet for terms including IED, pipebomb and the phrase lets make a bomb.

Commander Richard Smith, head of the Metropolitan Police Counter Terrorism Command said: Chowdhury downloaded a number of extremely concerning documents and manuals, containing details of how to create and deploy explosives and lethal weapons. Whats more, he then made very serious attempts at trying to get hold of a hand grenade.

These are extremely serious offences and the public are undoubtedly safer following this investigation and outcome.

This case is a reminder to everyone that the threat from terrorism remains and I want to remind the public that their continued vigilance and support is needed.

Chowdhury will be sentenced on 23 March.

Additional reporting by PA


Johannesburg, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 10th Feb, 2021 ) :South Africa is considering trading its doses of AstraZeneca's Covid-19 vaccine, which may be less effective against a local virus variant, and beginning its inoculation campaign with Johnson & Johnson shots instead, the health minister said Wednesday.

The country worst-hit by the pandemic in Africa has suspended its vaccine rollout -- meant to begin with Oxford/AstraZeneca this week -- after a study found the jab failed to prevent mild and moderate illness caused by a variant discovered in South Africa dubbed 501Y.V2.

The vaccination delay has set back an ambitious plan to inoculate around 40 million people -- 67 percent of the population -- by the end of 2021.

"Given the outcomes of the efficacy studies (government) will continue with the planned phase one vaccination using the Johnson & Johnson vaccines instead of the AstraZeneca vaccine," Health Minister Zweli Mkhize told a press briefing.

"The Johnson & Johnson vaccine has been proven effective against the 501Y.V2 variant." He did not say when immunisation would begin.

Meantime officials are deciding on the fate of more than a million Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccines already secured from the Serum Institute of India (SII) and set to expire at the end of April, though that date could potentially be adjusted.

Mkhize pointed at several options, including selling or swapping the doses with countries tackling the original coronavirus strain.

"Depending on their advice, the vaccine will be swapped before the expiry date," he said, adding that "there are already countries who are asking to sell it to them".

Scientific advisors have also suggested administering the vaccine to several thousand people within South Africa to assess whether it can still prevent severe infection from 501Y.V2.

"Our scientists will continue with further deliberations on the AstraZeneca vaccine use in South Africa," Mkhize explained, assuring that nothing would go to waste.

South Africa was slow to catch on to the global vaccine scramble and only received its first jabs, one million AstraZeneca shots, on February 1.

An additional 500,000 doses have been purchased from the SII and are meant to be delivered this month.

South Africa has ordered nine million doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccines, of which a small shipment is expected to arrive next week.

But Mkhize said the first consignment would likely be used as "research stock".

Vaccines have also been secured from US drugmaker Pfizer, the WHO-backed Covax facility and the African Union -- bringing the announced total to just over 40 million.

Pfizer/BioNTech doses should be available in time for the first rollout phase, Mkhize added.

South African pharmaceutical giant Aspen, a contracted Johnson & Johnson vaccine manufacturer, is meanwhile striving to produce its first doses next month.

"They are very determined to fast-track this production in South Africa," Mkhize said, adding that the stock would then be available in April.

Aspen told AFP it had "no further information" on its agreement with Johnson & Johnson and that speculations were "premature".

South Africa is emerging from a second wave of coronavirus infections largely fuelled by 501Y.V2, said to be more transmissible than the original form.

The country has recorded close to 1.5 million cases and over 46,800 deaths.

Its now dominant variant has spread significantly across southern Africa, prompting a handful of countries to reconsider the use of Oxford/AstraZeneca shots.

Eswatini's health minister on Tuesday said it would no longer be using the vaccine, while Malawi's government is pondering a similar decision.
Jabalpur : , Feb 10 (IANS) President Ram Nath Kovind is scheduled to visit Jabalpur district of Madhya Pradesh on March 6.

A meeting of administrative officials was held over Kovind's scheduled stay to review preparations. In this meeting, the route plan, traffic plan, meeting arrangements at the venue, parking of vehicles and security arrangements were discussed.

Divisional Commissioner B. Chandrashekar instructed the officials to complete all arrangements on time ahead of the VVIP arrival. During the meeting, he also discussed the arrangement of staying of all VVIPs, including the guests.

In this meeting, Inspector General of Police (Jabalpur zone) Bhagwat Singh Chouhan, Collector Karmveer Sharma, Superintendent of Police Siddharth Bahuguna, Municipal Corporation Commissioner Anup Kumar Singh, Additional Collector Sandeep G.R., Riju Bafna, CEO of Zila Panchayat, Administrative Officers of High Court and officials of all departments concerned were present.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Week after week and resident after resident, Clackamas County commissioners have listened to demands for new member Mark Shull to resign over his documented history of xenophobic and anti-Muslim remarks.

Board Chair Tootie Smith has heard enough.

On Tuesday, Smith announced she will move the public comment portion to the end of the boards weekly business meetings and she floated the idea of limiting public comments to 30 minutes overall with each speaker getting two minutes instead of three.

Anybody can make a comment in two minutes, she said.

The idea triggered pushback from the other commissioners.

Lately, the public comment portion of the meetings has run from 45 minutes to an hour  mostly monopolized with calls for Shull to step down.

The high-profile controversy engulfing Shull has dominated Smiths nascent second term.

Smith, a Republican from Molalla, is a polarizing political figure in her own right.

Last fall, after winning a seat on the nonpartisan board, she announced on social media that she planned to host a large Thanksgiving dinner at her home despite the raging COVID-19 pandemic.

Early last month, Smith posted a YouTube video of a man sitting in front of a framed Boston University diploma saying masks should be a matter of choice for people who are not at high-risk for the virus and that masks in general interfere with herd immunity.

This makes sense, Smith wrote. A one size fits all does not apply to viruses.

The idea of allowing widespread infection as a way of developing immunity was at one point promoted by one of former President Donald Trumps advisers. But Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, condemned the approach as too dangerous to be considered.

Smith previously sat on the board during the Clackamas County Tea Party-funded wave of elections in 2012.

At the time, she and former Chair John Ludlow created a power bloc that set them at odds with TriMet, Metro and often their fellow commissioners. She lost her reelection bid after one term.

Last year, she ran again, this time defeating Jim Bernard, a Democrat, for a seat on the board.

An analysis of election results by The Oregonian/OregonLive found that while Bernard won Milwaukie, Lake Oswego, West Linn and Wilsonville, Smith fared better with voters in unincorporated areas and everywhere else in the county.

SHULL NEEDS TIME

Smith was confronted with the blowup over Shull immediately and acknowledged in a meeting last month that the matter has been hugely difficult to navigate.

She appeared to seek control over the boards response almost from the outset after taking office in January.

On Jan. 12, she asked her fellow commissioners to remain silent for 24 hours while she drafted a response to what she said was not a political matter but a human one, according to an email to her fellow commissioners at the time.

Smith said in the message that she was trying to lead through peace and calm.

Commission (sic) Shull needs the time, she wrote.

Though she sent the message on her government account, she asked the commissioners not to forward the email or reveal any of its contents to ANYONE!

The Oregonian/OregonLive obtained the email through a public records request.

Smith in a follow-up email accused Commissioner Sonya Fischer of breaching my direct appeal to remain silent by commenting on the matter with a local TV news outlet.

Smith went on to call for Shull to resign. She voted last month along with the rest of the board to censure Shull.

Shull has said he wont step aside. A recall campaign organized by his critics cant happen until he is in office for six months.

Shulls offensive remarks came to light last month after a Clackamas County resident and a leader in the countys Democratic Party saw them online.

Screenshots of the posts show Shull has made comments about Islam, Muslim people, as well as transgender people and the Black Lives Matter movement, which he called a pawn for the rise of neo Marxism.

After meeting with members of the local Muslim community last month, Shull issued a statement that seemed to deepen the crisis by saying, inaccurately, that the Muslim community believes in shariah law over the U.S. Constitution and supports open borders instead of immigration regulation. Shariah law is a wide-ranging set of rules and customs that govern aspects of Islamic life.

Elected officials from across the region have joined the chorus asking for his resignation.

CALLS  ARE SEVERELY POLITICAL

Smith has also taken heat during the public comment portions of the board meetings.

Last week, one Milwaukie resident accused Smith of uneven treatment of those making public comments based on their political leanings.

If you fail to represent all citizens of this county alike, we will recall you, the woman said via Zoom. Clackamas County deserves better.

Smith in response announced the comment section during meetings would be under review by our staff and our board.

We do not take political actions on this board and we do not govern or pass laws with politics in mind, she said in response. I believe that many of the calls that came in today are severely political in nature.

On Tuesday, Smith said she wants the board to consider imposing limits on comments and said if residents desire additional words on the record, they can always submit that by email, telephonically or reach out to any commissioner.

Smith pointed out that before the pandemic, people attended board meetings in person, filled out a form and jotted down the topic they planned to address. Now anyone can chime in via Zoom and they are not required to give a name or topic, she said.

We have no idea what type of bomb we are going to get, she said.

She said she wants the board to remain nonpartisan and above the political pressures that are ravaging through our community right now.

I would like this board of county commissioners to be above that and in a way be a safe place and a sanctuary for anybody to come and comment on the business we are doing, she said.

She said at last weeks meeting about 16 people signed up to speak and the comment segment devolved into a debate between the callers.'

Tuesdays meeting was not a business meeting and did not include public comments so there was no reaction from residents to Smiths proposal.

LIMITS DONT REFLECT GOAL OF TRANSPARENCY

Elsewhere in the region, members of the public encounter time limits when it comes to addressing commissioners.

Washington County has two public comment portions of its boards business meetings. People get two minutes to address the board and each topic has a 10-minute limit.

The board offers a second opportunity for comment later in its meetings and at that time people can speak for up to five minutes. Public comments during the second opportunity are limited to 30 minutes total.

Multnomah Countys Board of Commissioners also allows public comment and limits comments to three minutes per person.

Two Clackamas County commissioners  Fischer and Paul Savas  pushed back on Smiths proposal to limit speakers time.

My concern is that any effort to limit public comment because certain members of the commission may not like the comments that are being made does not help us with our goal of transparency and public trust in government, said Fischer, a Democrat.

Yes, this is uncomfortable, she said. Its uncomfortable for all of us and its awkward and its difficult, but we should not limit public comment on things that might be difficult for us.

Savas, a Republican, also said Smiths plan is a blow for transparency and access.

Ive got to be true to the core here today and remain an advocate for that three-minute limit, he said.

The issue was left unresolved at Tuesdays meeting.

Commissioner Martha Schrader did not offer her opinion during the meeting.

Shull, for his part, also did not give an opinion during the meeting nor did he respond to an email from The Oregonian/OregonLive seeking comment.

The Oregonians Mark Friesen contributed to this report.

-- Noelle Crombie; ncrombie@oregonian.com; 503-276-7184; @noellecrombie
Land rights, lack of materials, and labor shortages stand in the way of 700 new houses.

This Jan. 2021 file photo shows houses under construction for survivors of Laos worst ever flood in Sanamxay district, Attapeu province, Laos.

Survivors of a Laos worst-ever dam collapse more than two years ago are still waiting in temporary shelters because of serious setbacks in the construction of their new homes, local government officials told RFA.

On July 23, 2018, billions of cubic feet of water from a tributary of the Mekong River poured over a collapsed saddle dam at the Xe Pian-Xe Namnoy (PNPC) hydropower project in southern Laos Champassak province, sweeping away homes and causing severe flooding in villages downstream in Attapeu province and beyond into Cambodia.

Cash-strapped Laos handling of the flood  which killed 71 people and wiped out all or part of 19 villagesresulted in some 14,000 displaced people living in temporary relocation centers.

Most have since returned home, but more than 4,000 remain in the centers, which have turned to construction sites, as developers transform them into permanent villages.

In May 2020, the Vanseng Construction and Development Co. won a contract to build 700 houses, on a bid of U.S. $24.5 million. Under the deal signed with Attapeus Public Works and Transport Department, Vanseng has until Dec. 2021 to finish the houses, but appears nowhere near on track to meet that deadline.

Construction is slow because there arent enough workers and the ones they have are inexperienced laborers, an Attapeu provincial official told RFAs Lao Service Jan. 27.

Many of them do substandard work, so the company has to hire more qualified workers. Thats why the construction is delayed, said the official, who requested anonymity to speak freely.

The official also said that shortly after winning the deal, the developer took three months off between July and October in observance of Buddhist Lent.

A higher-ranking provincial official with connections to the project told RFA on Feb. 2 that fewer than 500 of the homes would be completed by years end.

According to the contract, all 700 of the homes are scheduled for completion by the end of 2021, but because some land has not yet been cleared, and has not yet been zoned to Samong village construction will be delayed, possibly into next year, said the second official, who requested anonymity for professional reasons.

The company has formulated a new plan under which it will complete 496 houses by the end of the year, 440 of which will be complete before May. About 35 percent of these 440 homes are already complete. But for the remaining 204 homes, we have to wait for the land, the second official said.

Material delays, labor shortages and picky homeowners were also to blame for delays, according to the second official.

The homeowners are too demanding. There have been a lot of the negotiations between the victims and the construction company regarding the size and design of their new homes. This is why there are as of now only 50 homes near completion, the second official said.

Another reason is that building 700 homes requires a lot of workers, but Lao workers sometimes leave to go back home and wont show up for work until weeks later. Materials are also in short supply because of the COVID-19 pandemic, said the second official.

Land issues were the main cause of delay in some of the villages, according to an official of Attapeus Public Works and Transport Department.

The land we need for about 103 of the homes in Pindong village in Camp 4 is owned privately by cassava farmers. We have to wait until they harvest their crops before we can acquire their land, said the public works official, who declined to be named.

Survivors complain

Survivors in the camps say they are tired of excuses from either the government or the developer.

Construction on 700 homes is so far away from complete. Only 50 homes are anywhere near finished. The rest are all skeletal, a survivor in Camp 4 told RFA.

Another survivor in the same camp told RFA, As of now, they have only built the stilts. A group of workers come and work for a couple of days and then they leave. They say they arent getting paid, and since they are day laborers, they need to get paid every day.

A 67-year-old survivor in Camp 3 told RFA he and others have built their own hovels to get by.

Some of us, myself included, live in small huts in the forest near the camps and the lake because our temporary metal shelters are too hot, small and crowded. We have been waiting too long for our homes, he said.

A Camp 4 survivor complained about the delays, telling RFA, I signed a document in July last year to accept a permanent home in Pindong village. Even now, I dont even know where my home will be located. Its nowhere near being built yet.

Meanwhile, a survivor who had been his villages chief prior to the disaster told RFA that of the promised 77 homes, only stilts have been raised.

Theres no roof and no walls. I dont see many workers onsite, the chief said.

Land rights

A subcontractor for the project told RFA that the delays are due to zoning and private land ownership issues.

Not all the land there belongs to the government. Parts of it are privately owned so its not so easy to just come to an agreement. This is why the construction of the 103 homes in Camp 4s Pindong village has not yet begun, and possibly wont begin until next year, the subcontractor said.

A representative of Vanseng Construction told RFA that most of the homes would be completed on schedule.

We promised the deputy Prime Minister, who visited the construction sites in November last year that we would complete 440 homes by April this year, around the Lao New Year, and we will complete 56 more by the end of the year, said Vanseng Sisongkham.

As for the remaining 204 homes, we have to wait for the land which is owned by some private individuals, he said.

Deputy Prime Minister Sonexay Siphandone urged all related parties to come together and complete the construction on schedule during his November visit.

On July 23, 2019, the first anniversary of the dam collapse, Attapeu Governor Leth Xayaphone told a local news conference that the dam collapse had killed 71 people and caused $15 million in damage to parts of 19 villages, affecting 3,540 families or 14,440 people.

Laos has built dozens of hydropower dams on the Mekong and its tributaries, with ultimate plans to build scores more under a plan to become the Battery of Southeast Asia to export the electricity they generate to other countries in the region.

Though the Lao government sees power generation as a way to boost the countrys economy, the projects are controversial because of their environmental impact, displacement of villagers without adequate compensation, and questionable financial and power demand arrangements.

Reported by RFAs Lao Service. Translated by Max Avary. Written in English by Eugene Whong.
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MASON CITY, Iowa - This past Sunday, many COVID-19 restrictions on Iowa businesses were lifted thanks to an order from Governor Kim Reynolds. While the Governor is still encouraging Iowans to follow safe practices while out in public, the move has caused some backlash from state representatives.

State Senator Amanda Ragan and State Representative Sharon Steckman were both surprised by Reynolds' move. Though the positive case average, as well as hospitalizations and deaths, have dropped statewide, which the Governor's office has cited as the reason behind the move, the say the discovery of new strains in the state is troubling.

"There are many people that are concerned about this because their workplaces have changed because of this proclamation. The spread is very concerning," Ragan said.

"We've had a total of over 5,000 deaths now. We also have one of the variants now in Iowa, and that was discovered the same week. Johnson County and Bremer County have discovered the variants. Those two issues, and then all of a sudden, everything's pulled away. The masks...don't need those, and opening everything up. I think the timing was incredible," Steckman said.

On Monday, House and Senate Democrats asked the Iowa Department of Public Health if the Governor consulted the agency before issuing the proclamation. Director Dr. Kelly Garcia said the department was not consulted on the decision.

"This is a very concerning direction to go when we see so many other opportunities to make it worse by doing this," Ragan added.

KIMT also reached out to both State Representative Shannon Latham and State Senator Waylon Brown to get their thoughts on the move. So far, we have not yet heard from them.
The US government will begin shipping COVID-19 vaccines directly to community health centers next week in an effort to speed vaccinations and ensure doses are reaching vulnerable people, health officials said on Tuesday.

The government will send doses to 250 centers nationwide selected based on their proximity to vulnerable groups, such as homeless people and those with limited proficiency in English, they said.

Typically, vaccine doses would go to state governments for distribution to health centers.

Eventually the effort will expand to more than 1,300 community health centers, a considerable extension of a program to send one million doses of vaccine to 6,500 retail pharmacies, beginning this week, and growing eventually to as many as 40,000 locations.

The federal government will initially distribute one million vaccine doses to the health centers and increase from there, officials added on Tuesday.

So far, the US has administered 44.4 million doses of vaccine, and 10.2 percent of the population has gotten one or more shots.

Vaccine doses will be sent directly to community health centers starting next week, the Biden administration announced on Tuesday. The expansion should help vaccinate homeless people and non-English speakers. Some community health centers are already designated vaccination sites by states, including Kedren Community Health Center in Los Angeles, which allowed people to line up for extra doses so they would not spoil last month (file)

Some towns in the UK and Canada began vaccinating homeless populations last month, and community health centers are already vaccination sites in some states including California.

The program is part of a broader push by the Biden administration to increase access to COVID-19 shots with the goal of administering 100 million doses in Biden's first 100 days in office.

Biden has also made it a priority to ensure that vaccines are distributed equitably with respect to race, ethnicity and economic status.

The US government is already ahead of pace to meet its goal of 100 million shots in 100 days, which only required it to modestly outpace the previous administration's distribution levels.

Biden said in January he may aim for 150 million shots in that time, but his press secretary later said 100 million was still the official target.

The White House this week began coordinating shipments of vaccines directly to 6,500 pharmacies with the goal of reaching about 40,000.

'We are providing tools to communities around the country to do this work and look forward to partnering with them to ensure equity,' said Marcella Nunez-Smith, chair of the Biden administration's COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force, on a press call.

The US has boosted vaccine distribution from 8.6 million doses to 11 million doses weekly since Biden came into office three weeks ago, said Jeff Zients, the White House's COVID-19 response coordinator.

The White House has said it plans to continue boosting the number of doses it distributes and will use the federal government's emergency powers under the Defense Production Act, to increase production of vaccines.

Johnson & Johnson is expected to receive authorization for its experimental COVID vaccine as soon as this month which would further increase vaccine supplies.

That would nearly immediately make another 100 million doss available for distribution across the US.
Cloud simplifies services delivery for human trafficking victims

A cloud-based case management system is speeding the federal governments ability to process claims and services for victims of human trafficking.

The Shepherd Case Management System, which REI Systems modernized for the Office on Trafficking in Persons within the Health and Human Services Departments Administration for Children and Families (ACF), now saves about 10 staff hours for each victim the system processes. In fiscal year 2019, that amounted to more than 800 hours of saved case processing time, OTIP Director Katherine Chon wrote in an email to GCN.

OTIP case specialists can now manage cases and all subsequent processes through one system, Chon said. In the future, benefit-issuing agencies will also be able to access real-time verification status of HHS letters online, rather than calling our office.

Also fiscal 2019, OTIP issued 1,203 Certification and Eligibility Letters, up 37% from the prior year, but by the end of fiscal 2020, OTIP reduced its pending case load by 75% from the previous fiscal year, according to an ACF press statement.

These improvements are because Shepherd replaced older, largely manual and siloed processes with a web portal for case submission and tracking, case management and workflow for OTIP staff. Deployed in December 2019, Shepherd features audit tracking, secure cloud-based data sharing and reporting as well as role-based user access, allowing a range of agencies to access the same data.

Now, the public and human-trafficking victims and their representatives can submit requests for services through a web portal. OTIP case specialists can use Shepherd to expedite cases for people in emergencies, request consultations, refer someone to case management services through federally funded grantees and submit cases for review and approval by office leaders, Chon said.

Previously, individuals who submitted requests to our office  had to do so through password-protected documents in an email, Chon said. OTIP case specialists had then tracked all cases manually in a database and managed consultations, case management referrals and other related correspondence through email.

Besides allowing case requesters to electronically submit and track requests and case specialists to manage them in one system, Shepherd provides advanced cybersecurity to better protect victims privacy. Plus, its data sharing and analytics capabilities improve efficiency in program implementation and oversight, Chon added.

We are providing survivors of trafficking and victim advocates a better experience seeking federal assistance, she said.

When case specialists log in to the system, they see a dashboard with cases in order of date submitted. They can also view the history of actions taken on the case and select which action they want to take next. Options include adding comments or files; looking through cases by trend, means of labor and work location; certifying or revoking a case; and prepping a decision letter.

When a case requester submits the request, automatically its available to the case specialist to review, said Gauri Kayande, a senior program manager at REI Systems who managed the project. Its going to show up in their queue. They can go ahead and start triaging the information, decide if thats a relevant case or not.

Because ACF is moving into the Amazon Web Services cloud, REI Systems used several AWS products to support the system, including Elastic Compute Cloud machines to host the system, RDS for SQL Server to manage data, Simple Storage Service for file storage, CloudSearch for index-based searching and QuickSight for business intelligence.

Additionally, the team integrated HHS Access Management System so that users can log in using their HHS-issued personal identity verification cards.

The system is based on a microservices architecture that was divided into three main domains: request, review and case. The first is the public-facing web portal, while the other two are for agency staff. Additional supporting microservices include an authentication service that helps with logins and CloudSearch.

The goal is that we divide our applications into smaller domains, which aligns with the business process, said Yogesh Kumar, a technical architect at the company.

Overall, the yearlong effort had four goals, Kayande said: modernize and simplify case management, secure the data, improve efficiency and make data accessible.

The different agencies that are involved with helping the victims are able to work together and share the information based on the correct privileges, roles, etc., but then we can also use this data to share with other agencies and say, Hey, it looks like theres a whole bunch of people coming from this particular farm in Mexico. We can consider doing something about it because a lot of labor trafficking victims are coming from there, Kayande said.

Whats more, the system can be easily adapted to other needs at HHS and beyond. For instance, Kayande said another potential use case is at ACFs Office of Refugee Resettlement, which helps unaccompanied alien children with no legal guardian in the United States.

They would obviously have to do a little customization because not everything that ACF requires for their victims of trafficking is going to be required, she said, but at the heart of it, its a case management system, and any place or any application where a case management system is required, it is very easy to scale.

The Shepherd systems name refers to ACFs work to shepherd human-trafficking victims to a better life.
Priyanka Chopra gave her fans a peek into her life and the long route to stardom in her new book Unfinished. Chopra released her memoir on Tuesday. Pouring her heart out, Priyanka Chopra talks about the one regrettable misstep in her career, how she learned humility from her first co-star Vijay, how she thought she had presented herself respectfully in the controversial photo with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and how the disgusting behaviour of a director turned her away from a project. Chopra's Unfinished also includes many family photos and many from several milestones in her life.

The White Tiger actor said that endorsing a skin-whitening cream was the biggest misstep of her career. Without beating about the bush, Priyanka Chopra straight up apologises for the advertisement.

She spoke about the controversial photo with PM Modi that got her a lot of backlash, Chopra said that she still believes that she had presented herself respectfully. The actor was promoting Baywatch in Berlin when she met PM Modi. A photo of her sitting with PM Modi in a white dress went viral and she received a lot of backlash for her choice of clothing. Chopra recalls the incident and says that PM Modi and she were staying in the same hotel and she requested his office for a meeting with the Prime Minister.

Thank you to everyone whos giving my first book a chance. I hope you all enjoy my #Unfinished story  pic.twitter.com/dQfTF8XQRJ  PRIYANKA (@priyankachopra) February 9, 2021

The Quantico star recalled how she learnt humility from her first co-star Vijay, who she met during the filming of Thamizhan soon after she had won the Miss World title. She said that Vijay's humility and generosity with fans made a lasting impression on her. Chopra said that while filming Quantico in New York, long queues of people would wait to meet her. "As I stood and took pictures with them through my lunch break, I thought about my very first co-actor ever and the example he'd set," she said.

Reminiscing about her early days in the film industry, Chopra said that there was a sensuous dance number she was required to do when the director asked her to take off her clothes one piece at a time in front of the camera. She asked if she needed to wear more clothes in order to do so. "The director suggested I speak to my stylist, so I called him and briefly explained the situation, then passed the phone to the director. Standing right in front of me, the director said: 'Jo bhi ho, chaddiyan dikhni chahiyen. Nahi toh log picture kyon dekhne aayenge?'" She said that she quit the project the next day.

The book also has some unseen photos including her 'griha pravesh' with husband Nick Jonas in their Los Angeles home. "Moving into our new house during quarantine was unusual but we made the best of it, including a Griha Pravesh (house warming) ceremony," reads the description.

|| Some pics of Nick and Priyanka from her new book! pic.twitter.com/QzukPkW1MC  Daily Nick Jonas (@DailyNickJonas) February 8, 2021

Another photo shows Priyanka and Nick cuddling their dogs Diana, Gino and Panda, while another shows them after their engagement in Crete in July 2018.

In a recent interview to Asian Style magazine, Priyanka Chopra said that everyone who has been mentioned in the book has been sent a copy. She said that after writing her experiences, she would call up the person who was part of it and corroborate the story. "I needed a lot of filling in the blanks from them. Memory is a funny thing; you leave a lot behind," she said.

Also read: Priyanka Chopra takes a walk down memory lane; shares pics from when she was 'mean, lean, all of 17'

Also read: 'What a surreal moment,' says Priyanka Chopra as she launches vegan haircare line, Anomaly
A Tibetan man practices traditional dance ahead of his performance during a function organized to mark "Losar" or the Tibetan New Year in Kathmandu, Nepal February 26, 2020.

Chinese authorities in Tibet have imposed restrictions on religious practices and shuttered temples in the city of Lhasa ahead the Tibetan New Year, citing coronavirus concerns, sources in Tibet told RFA.

The Lunar New Year, called Losar in Tibetan, falls on February 12 this year. In most years, the first three days of the New Year are packed with festivals and religious ceremonies, and most Tibetan Buddhists in Lhasa visit temples during the holiday.

There are many religious activities that we perform prior to and during the Tibetan New Year, but these have all been denied by the Chinese government, Ngawang Woebar, a former political prisoner who now lives in exile told RFAs Tibetan Service, citing sources in Tibet.

Theyve closed Potala Palace, Tsuglakhang Temple, Deprung Monastery and Sera Monastery These restrictions and random searches have spread to other areas in the eastern parts of Tibet too, he said.

Ngawang Woebar said that although the Chinese authorities said the restrictions were due to COVID-19, he believes there is a political agenda to prevent Tibetans from meeting each other.

Recently it has been more difficult for those of us in exile to communicate with our families inside Tibet. We are receiving much less response from them as well, he said.

A Tibetan who took a recent trip to China told RFA that certain members of Tibetan society have more restrictions than others.

Losar is supposed to be a joyous occasion, but we are always anxious. Government officials, students and retired officials are not allowed to take part in any religious events. If they are summoned to their office, they must report within 24 hours, said the traveler, who requested anonymity for security reasons.

Temples in Lhasa are closing down ahead of the holiday, according to sources inside Tibet.

Usually, we go to Tsuglakhang Temple on the first day of Losar to celebrate and perform our religious activities for the New Year, but this year there are notices that the temples will remain closed, so we have no choice, a Tibetan resident who declined to be named for safety reasons told RFA.

A Han Chinese resident who runs a restaurant in Lhasa told RFA, All the monasteries and temples in Lhasa will remain closed during Losar.

Lhasas Potala Palace will remain open during Losar, but visiting hours are limited from 9:30 a.m. to noon, with guests required to acquire a visitors pass the day before the visit, the palaces management committee said. Visitors must wear masks and submit to temperature checks.

Meanwhile a notice circulated by the management of Tsuglakhang Temple said the temple would be closed on the first two days preceding Losar for cleaning, and the first six days of the New Year to observe the holiday. It will reopen to the public on Feb. 19.

A formerly independent nation, Tibet was invaded and incorporated into China by force nearly 70 years ago, and the Dalai Lama and thousands of his followers fled into exile in India and other countries around the world following a failed 1959 national uprising against Chinese rule.

Chinese authorities maintain a tight grip on the region, restricting Tibetans political activities and peaceful expression of cultural and religious identity, and subjecting Tibetans to persecution, torture, imprisonment, and extrajudicial killings.

Reported by RFAs Tibetan Service. Translated by Tenzin Dickyi. Written in English by Eugene Whong.
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DANBURY  The governors budget proposal includes funding to allow Danbury and Norwalk students to attend schools in nearby districts.

With many of our urban schools crowded and their suburban schools with extra capacity, my budget proposes an expansion of the open choice program, beginning in Norwalk and Danbury, so these kids and those in surrounding communities can go to school in a more diverse environment with greater opportunity, Gov. Ned Lamont said in a speech announcing his budget proposal Wednesday afternoon.
SIUs Touch of Nature offering high ropes/elements course training

by Christi Mathis

CARBONDALE, Ill.  Southern Illinois University Carbondales Touch of Nature Environmental Center is hosting a specialized high ropes/elements training course this spring, giving people the chance to earn their Association of Challenge Course Technology certifications.

The class is set for April 19-22. Participants will gain experience on the zip line, flying squirrel, giant swing, climbing tower and multilevel high ropes course. New facilitators who want to become certified for high-elements as well as experienced facilitators seeking to improve their Level 1 skills will find the class valuable. After completing the course, participants will receive the one-year ACCT Level 1 Certification.

Sign up online now

The course is offered in partnership with Experiential Systems Inc. and Camp Ondessonk. High elements sessions will be offered at Touch of Nature, located about eight miles south of Carbondale off Giant City Road as well as at Camp Ondessonk, located in rural Ozark.

The cost of the training session, including lunches, is $650. Overnight lodging, along with breakfast and dinner options, are available for an additional cost. Register online at https://campscui.active.com/orgs/TouchofNatureEnvironmentalCenter#/selectSessions/2929042. For more information about the training, contact Andrea Vogt at Experiential Systems at 877-206-8967 or andrea@experientialsystems.com.

Overnight lodging and additional meals are available for an extra $149 fee. Sign up online at ton.siu.edu or contact Erik Oberg at 618-453-3945 or eriko@siu.edu for details.

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Saturday, January 30 was a very special day for Ballinaglera man and Redemptorist priest Fr Anthony Mulveys as he celebrated his 99th birthday.

He is the oldest Irish Redemptorist, and still going strong.

He even hit the front cover of the January/February issue of Reality magazine.

A proud Leitrim man, he was born on January 30th of 1922, the year of the founding of the State.

He went to the Redemptorist School in Limerick  then known as the Redemptorist College, now known as St Clements. He entered the Redemptorist noviciate in 1942: he studied in what was then the newly opened Cluain Mhuire House of Studies in Galway.

During his studies, he had the opportunity to spend one year in Belgium, and fell in love with Europe. This was just after the War.

He was ordained to the priesthood in August 1951.

Having taught in the Redemptorist College in Limerick for seventeen years, he spent one year at Mount Oliver in Dundalk, relearning his theology after the Vatican Council  the best year of my life.

In 1973, when Ireland had joined the Common Market, Fr Tony went to Luxembourg as Chaplain to the English-speaking (and Irish-speaking) people working in the newly-expanded Community.

He spent thirteen years ministering there, again a time he loved.

Following one year in St Gerards Parish in Belfast, in 1987 Fr Tony was called to Rome to work as translator in the General Curia of the Redemptorist Congregation.

He loved his twenty five years in Rome, and walked nearly every street of the Eternal City.

When the heat of Rome became too much for him, he returned to Ireland, and spent some years in Dundalk.

Since 2016, he has been a member of the Esker Community. Sill as bright as a button, still able to quote Shakespeare at length, and still able to remember where each of his students sat in class, back in the 50s and 60s in Limerick, his only concession to age is his walking frame.

Credit: Reality Magazine  Redemptorist Communications

Magazine can be purchased www.redcoms.org
The Micromax In note 1 will receive Android 11 in April, company is working on a 5G phone

In November Micromax returned to India with the announcement of the In note 1 and In 1b. Co-founder Rahul Sharma answered several questions in the second episode of Lets Talk INdia (which you can watch below).

He revealed that an Android 11 update for the In note 1 is in the works and is expected to be released in April. It will go through an early access testing period first, volunteers will be able to sign up at Micromax community forum soon.

As for the Micromax In 1b, an update to Android 11 Go edition is planned but no time frame was provided. First, a smaller update will be released with improvements to the camera (including slow-mo video option), the speakers and a January security patch.

The companys first 5G smartphone is being developed in the Bengaluru R&D center. Another team is working on wireless headphones that will have a unique design. More details on these projects will be revealed at a later date.

The company co-founder affirmed that Micromax has no interest in creating a custom skin for Android (unlike virtually all other Android makers). Also, Micromax will never put ads in its phones, says the co-founder.

By the way, a smaller update for the note 1 came out last month. It added EIS and RAW mode to the camera, improved the portrait mode for the selfie cam and upped the security patch to January.

Via
A program supported by the United Nations says it is ready to deploy coronavirus vaccines to the neediest people, especially in poor countries. The COVAX program announced its plans last week to provide 100 million doses of vaccine by the end of March. It expects to give out 200 million more doses by July.

Leaders of COVAX said most of the doses for the first distribution will come from British-Swedish drug maker AstraZeneca. The companys partner, the Serum Institute of India, will also provide doses of the same vaccine.

Frederik Kristensen co-leads the program Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovation. He told a video news conference that the plans come at an important time as new forms of the coronavirus have appeared.

We are on a path to really start balancing out the problem of wealthy countries being vaccinated before poorer countries, he said.

Dr. Seth Berkley leads the international non-profit organization GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance. It is administering the COVAX program along with the World Health Organization and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations. Berkley said COVAX plans the first distribution of 336 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine to go to several countries until June.

GAVI expects that nearly 100 million of those doses will start being distributed to targeted countries by the end of March, officials said.

Another 1.2 million doses of the vaccine from companies Pfizer and BioNTech are expected to be shared by 18 countries in the first three months of the year. The companies already have been selling and distributing their vaccine to wealthy countries.

Of course, we would like more BioNTech vaccines in the first and second parts of the year, said Berkley. That is what we were offered given the demand and supply that was there.

Berkley noted that AstraZeneca vaccines first distribution was 57 million doses fewer than had been planned. He said delays were caused by countries needing emergency use approval from the World Health Organization. He noted it was not a result of supply problems, like those in Europe.

The AstraZeneca vaccine distribution depends on the World Health Organization giving emergency use permission, which is expected this month. The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is already approved. Supplying it to poorer nations is difficult because the vaccine must be stored at extremely cold temperatures.

GAVI pointed to a number of issues that could still hurt plans for the distribution. The group said the plan requires regulatory approvals, supplies, coordination and the readiness of countries to receive the vaccines.

About 190 countries and territories that are taking part in the COVAX plan have been waiting for details. That includes upper- and middle-income countries that have paid money and 93 lower-income countries which are expected to benefit.



India is expected to get most of the 240 million AstraZeneca doses that the Serum Institute is producing. Pakistan is to receive over 17 million, while Malawi is to get nearly 1.5 million doses and Haiti about 876,000.

A South Korean factory is producing another 96 million doses of the AstraZeneca product. Brazil is expected to receive over 10 million doses, Egypt more than 5.1 million, Iran over 4.2 million and Canada more than 1.9 million.

Henrietta Fore is executive director of UNICEF, the United Nations childrens agency. She announced a long-term supply deal with the Serum Institute for the AstraZeneca vaccine and one from U.S. drug maker Novavax. It will provide to up to 1.1 billion doses of vaccine for 100 countries. The cost to lower- and middle-income countries is to be about $3 a dose.

Im Caty Weaver. I'm John Russell.

The Associated Press reported this story. Alice Bryant adapted it for VOA Learning English. Mario Ritter, Jr. was the editor.

______________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

dose n. the amount of a medicine or vaccine needed to prevent or cure sickness

distribution n. a specific effort to give or deliver something, a good or product, to a large number of people

phase n. a step in a process; one part in a series of related actions

regulatory adj. making or concerned with making official rules about what is acceptable in a particular business or activity such as medicine

income n. money that is earned from work, investments, business, or similar activities

benefit n. a good, helpful or useful result
Dont insult shitty public defenders by comparing them to this clown.

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We wont hear from the defense today, will we? I dont think I can take a day of those two guys rambling.

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Ooh really? I don't think I can either.

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I had to turn it off when they started speaking! I felt like I was losing brain cells

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Thank you for this post and thank you to everyone for putting up with my MANY comments yesterday. I have many feelings, haha.

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John Stewart is wrong for that tweet

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IKR you'd think he'd know better

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I don't know why I bothered to watch yesterday, repubs already made up their mind even when qanon shaman gets on the stand and says "trump's words inspired me to do it"

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Was painful to watch, but your beautiful icon popping up made me happy while listening to Trump's goons so thank you for that.

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more important: impeachment or getting the 2k checks out?

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the checks

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Both because neither affects the other and even tho imo the Senate won't convict T45 I think it will affect the overall climate for 2022 mid terms and more Dems in both House and Senate will help drive more relief and policies benefitting Dem agenda

.

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i was thinking they had to pause movement on the checks while the trial was going, i have no idea where i got that idea lol

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Checks

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checks

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They're working on both at the same time tho.

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It's not an either/or. They're working on both.



Checks are important.



But I think it's also important to put Trump on trial because it can shift public opinion on the Republican party.

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Like Biden said, Congress SHOULD be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. Especially when they have time allotted for each specific activity.

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it's my money and i need it now: the checks



Edited at 2021-02-10 04:53 pm (UTC)

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ladychips? nah ladyCHECKS

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checks! gotta pay for my emergency wisdom teeth removal :,(

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Both. With the power, influence, and MONEY these clowns all have I expect them to be able to multitask and do the work of both as they expect all working class citizens to do.

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Jon Stewart needs to delete that tweet...

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Im tired and they just have to die

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I wonder how many of the Republicans will vote to convict. I don't expect that all 6 who voted in favor of proceeding will



Edited at 2021-02-10 04:23 pm (UTC)

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My guess is just the usual three suspects.

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I know the senate wont convict, but I hope this lights a fire under the Dems for the midterms to push harder to vote out the sedition caucaus. Q has taken over the GOP, and morons like Mitch are just rolling over and taking it. The dems need to take advantage of this split.

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It doesnt make any sense. Didnt they sworn in to act like an impartial juror for this trial? Those Rep mfs already made up their minds and will side with trump. What even is the point.

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The point is that this is a trial for the public. The Dems make a really compelling case and then the Republicans acquit anyway? That can shift how the public views Republicans. There are a chunk of people out there who think that Trump was an aberration. Showing that it's the entire party, not just Trump can help people move away from the GOP.

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Youre right. Lets hope the Dems will play it right and have the spine to actually attack the Reps with this in 2022 and forward.

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That's why (in my perfect world) every single one who voted to appeal the election results, ESPECIALLY after the insurrection should immediately be removed.



I want the GOP to dissolve and become two parties so their votes get split and maybe more Dems (esp. progressives) could win House/Senate seats.

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"Many of those who heeded [Trump's] call will be spending substantial portions if not the remainder of their lives in prison as a consequence. Meanwhile Donald Trump resumes his life of luxury and privilege" pic.twitter.com/QM4RPJfP3B  Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) February 10, 2021

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Do they think this so called defense will actually work? It may be helpful in any criminal charges against 45, but wont keep the terrorists outta real prison time.

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Leopardsatemyface is becoming a real political movement huh

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Republicans: We don't give in to terrorists!



Also Republicans: "A lot of people" will be "upset" if we vote to impeach 

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shameless swine all of them ughhhh

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That's an insult to pigs. They're unprincipled, spineless sewer scum.

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I hope they show some of the video of Tr*mp and his family watching and enjoying TV during the day of the insurrection and Don Jr. saying that they were "their people" and all of that. Also Ivanka calling them patriots.

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DUBLIN, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Electric Drives Market - Global Outlook and Forecast 2021-2026" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

In-depth Analysis and Data-driven Insights on the Impact of COVID-19 Included in this Global Electric Drives Market Report



The electric drives market by revenue is expected to grow at a CAGR of over 4.6% during the period 2021-2026.



The global market is expected to grow during the forecast period with the growth in industrial production, enhancement in technological advancement, increase in urbanization, and expansion of industries. Owing to the high energy cost associated with industrial motors, several players in end-user industries are focusing on incorporating energy-efficient techniques. Electric drives are one such variety of technology that delivers a highly-efficient production process at a low cost. As the electricity consumption is the major cost component across end-user industries, the demand for electric drives is expected to increase at a considerable rate during the forecast period. Furthermore, the increasing awareness and stringent government regulations on energy savings are fueling the demand for electric drives across the globe.



The following factors are likely to contribute to the growth of the electric drives market during the forecast period:

High Future Potential for Integrated Motor Drives (IMD)

The advent of IIoT in Electric Drives Market

Significant Demand for AC Drives

Growing Demand for Renewable Energy

The study considers the present scenario of the electric drives market and its market dynamics for the period 2020-2026. It covers a detailed overview of several market growth enablers, restraints, and trends. The report offers both the demand and supply aspects of the market. It profiles and examines leading companies and other prominent ones operating in the market.



Global Electric Drives Market Segmentation



The global electric drives market research report includes a detailed segmentation by product type, sales channel, voltage, end-user, geography. Alternate current (AC) electric drives held over 80% of the electric drives market share in 2020. The market is highly fragmented due to the presence of several global and regional players. Several incentive programs in the US and European countries for the early replacement of low-efficient electric motors is expected to boost the demand for AC drives. However, these regions could not witness high growth owing to the shift of manufacturing plants of several motor vehicles and electronic appliances to Asian countries. APAC is expected to witness significant growth over the next few years owing to the increasing purchasing power, continuous production of AC motor-driven applications, and developing economies in India, China, and others. Moreover, the recent trend of the industrial internet of things (IIoT), Big Data, and other technological advancements is promoting huge competition in the global market.



The demand for low-voltage electric drives is driving by increased applications in several end-user industries and the ability to be cost efficient. However, strict government regulations regarding the application are favorably affecting the market growth. Retrofitting activities with regards to low-voltage electric drives are extremely high across industrial as well as commercial enterprises. This, in turn, is expected to boost the demand for low-voltage electric drives during the forecast period. Owing to the increasing implementation of low-energy systems, coupled with easy installation and availability of compact sizes, are the key features driving the electric drives demand.



The expansion and investments in oil & gas, chemical, mining, and other industries in the Middle East, North America, and APAC are expected to increase electric drives demand in the coming years. Thus, the demand for drives in several industrial applications is anticipated to grow. Further, the current uncertainty over the macro-outlook for the global economy has been reduced by the recent COVID-19 outbreak and has affected the market, thus developing a challenge for the motor market growth in the short term. The end-user industry demand for electric drives has been adversely affected in 2020 on account of the COVID-19 outbreak. Technological advances in drives and industrial revolution are strongly supporting the growth of the industry, however, due to the ongoing pandemic, the demand for metals has become highly uncertain. Owing to the significant usage of drives in several applications in the food processing industry across the globe, the demand for electric drives is expected to grow at a significant rate during the forecast period.



Direct sales hold a prominent share in the market as they offer scope for strategic partnerships between vendors and OEMs, thereby helping to reduce operational costs for OEMs. APAC and Europe are expected to dominate the share of direct electric drives sales owing to the high popularity of direct selling in the region. However, India and China are expected to witness the highest growth in direct sales owing to rapidly growing industrialization during the forecast period. Indirect sales hold a low share in the market majorly due to increased operational cost and rising awareness of traceability among buyers. Indirect networks relieve the manufacturer from start-up expenses, they are better to handle than direct delivery networks.



Product Type

AC

DC

Sales Channel

Direct Sales

Indirect Sales

Voltage

Low

Medium

End-User

F&B

Metal & Mining

Chemicals

Oil & Gas

Power Generation

Packaging

Cement

Textile

Water & Wastewater

Paper & Pulp

Rubber & Plastic

Forestry & Woodwork

Others

Insights by Geography

APAC accounts for the highest share of the global electric drive market due to rapidly increasing urbanization and industrialization in the region. Continuous industrial automation in manufacturing, construction, power generation, and mining end-users are significantly increasing, which is increasing the application of electric drives. Urbanization and industrialization in emerging countries such as India, China, and other countries in Southeast Asia are driving the demand for vehicles, which, in turn, is boosting the demand for electric drives from the automotive industry. However, the breakout of the COVID-19 pandemic affected the growth prospects of the industry.



The growth in China witnessed a decline from around 6% in 2019 to 1-1.5% by the end of 2020. The production in chemical manufacturing units in China declined by over 15-20% in 2020, which is expected to negatively impact the demand for electric drives from the chemical & petrochemical industry. Similarly, the oil & gas industry has been one of the most adversely affected globally and oil & gas production in the APAC region has been badly hit. However, post-COVID-19 the global economy, as well as the production in end-user industries, is expected to recover, which is likely to drive the demand for electric drives.



By Geography

North America

US

Canada

Europe

UK

Germany

France

Italy

Spain

APAC

China

Japan

South Korea

India

Australia

Latin America

Brazil

Mexico

Chile

Rest of Latin America

Middle East & Africa

& Saudi Arabia

Turkey

Rest of Middle East

Vendor Insights

Siemens, ABB, Schneider Electric, Emerson Electric, Mitsubishi Electric, and Danfoss are the major vendors in the global electric drive market. These vendors offer high-quality reliable devices with technological advancement. However, the cost of drives remains high face intense competition from small vendors that provide low-quality products at an inexpensive price. The competition is likely to intensify due to the rise in merger and acquisition activities. Major vendors are expected to acquire small- and medium-scale vendors to enhance their market presence and expand their product portfolios.



Key Questions Answered



What is the growth rate of the electric drives market during the forecast period? What are the major technological advancements in the global electric drives market? Which is the largest revenue-generating region in the market? Who are the key players in the market? What are the challenges faced by the vendors? Which are the most revenue-generating end-user segments in the global electric drives market?

Companies Mentioned



ABB

Danfoss

Emerson Electric

Fuji Electric

Mitsubishi Electric

Parker-Hannifin Corporation

Siemens

Rockwell Automation

Schneider Electric

WEG

Nidec Corporation

Yasakawa Electric

Hiconics Drive Technology

Inovance Technology

KEB Automation

Sew-Eurodrive

Teco Westinghouse

Toshiba International Corporation

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/lniy6m

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


Farms in the Daraa Governorate have been searched for items including medium weapons, reports Etihad Press.

At five in the morning on Tuesday, the Fourth Division began searching farms in the southern region of Tafas city in the western countryside of the Daraa Governorate.

This comes following the implementation of the agreement that the Central Committee, the Security Committee in the city of Daraa, and Fourth Division officers reached on Monday.

The farms are being inspected by members of the Fourth Division, in the presence of the owners, local members of the settlement groups who operate in western Daraa, and Central Committee representatives.

Mondays agreement came after a series of meetings that resulted in the cessation of the military operation that the Fourth Division had been carrying out. The agreement also prevented the displacement of six people that the Fourth Division had demanded to deport towards northern Syria.

The agreement also stipulated handing over medium weapons, which drew attention in the area recently, and searches of some farms on the southern side of the city and some government headquarters, in addition to reactivating the Civil Status Department in the Tafas police station building.

It is reported that military members from the Fourth Division arrived in the west of Daraa at the beginning of the year and threatened to take military action to storm the city of Tafas, west of Daraa. The threats led to sporadic clashes that killed and wounded people.

This article was translated and edited by The Syrian Observer. The Syrian Observer has not verified the content of this story. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author.
Recent developments in the rule of law and anti-corruption show that a comprehensive judiciary reform is long overdue.

The European Commission says a widespread corruption continues to hamper Ukraine's reform process.

"It rightly highlights that Ukraine has delivered many important reforms over the past years. These have all been hard-fought and Ukraine's leadership should be praised. However, I share your assessment that, 'despite notable progress, widespread corruption continues to hamper Ukraine's reform process'. Its key institutions must have strong and independent leadership and the chance to do their work free of political, economic or other interference," Executive Vice-President Valdis Dombrovskis said in a statement at the European Parliament plenary debate on the EU Association Agreement with Ukraine.

According to the official, as the report says, smuggling only benefits criminals and oligarchs.

Read alsoEU notes Ukraine's efforts toward Donbas settlement, urges Russia to reciprocate"It must be stopped  and for this, it is vital that the National Anti-Corruption Bureau be fully independent. Over the years, the Bureau has demonstrated its effectiveness and produced tangible results. The fight against corruption is a key condition for the EU's macro-financial support," Dombrovskis said.

Recent developments in the rule of law and anti-corruption show that a comprehensive judiciary reform is long overdue, he stressed.

"The Venice Commission and G7's roadmap, complementing the EU Delegation's constant advice to authorities and politicians, gives clear guidance on what has to be done. We recognize the complexity of the task. From the start, Russian interference was designed to destabilize, divide and weaken Ukraine. So the best response is to stay united, and keep working toward the prosperity and stability that come from sound economic policies," he said.

Dombrovskis will meet with Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal in Brussels today, February 10, while a meeting of the Ukraine-EU Association Council will take place on February 11.

Background

On January 25, 2021, the Ambassadors of the G7 countries (the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, France, Italy, Germany, and Japan) in Ukraine provided advice to the Ukrainian authorities on how to reform the Constitutional Court of Ukraine (CCU) and conduct judicial reform in general.

According to the G7 Ambassadors, they provided a set of priority actions that should restore public confidence in the Ukrainian judiciary and anti-corruption infrastructure and trust in them, as well as significantly contribute to the advancement of Ukraine on the path to achieving a prosperous, secure democracy.

Reporting by UNIAN
21 runners killed during mountain race in northwestern province of Gansu; Indian variant of Covid-19 found in Guangzhou; Beijing willing to arrange for vaccines to be sent to Taiwan

May 28, 2021 08:15 PM

Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US

Iran ready to help improve the defense capability of Syria

European Parliament head proposes to strengthen sanctions on Russia

UK PM gets married in London

Armenia reports COVID-19 new 81 cases: for people die

EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia

2 people die in Armenia road accident

Nigeria: Students taken hostage a month ago are released

61 quakes recorded in Congo per day

Syrian MFA: EU lost credibility due to blind obedience to US policy

Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack

Mher Grigoryan: Clarification of border points is possible only after withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops from Armenia

Suspicious deal: Whether there was profit from buying DNA IDs?

Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war

4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack

Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities

Kocharyan: I have to ask people how it happened that overwhelming majority elected this leader

Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country

Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia

US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs

Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners

Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions

Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US

Iran intensifies its diplomacy amid Armenia-Azerbaijan border tensions

Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes

Lukashenko accuses West of destabilizing situation in Belarus

Armenia Central Electoral Commission chief on snap elections: No legal basis for postponing, suspending any function

Armenias Pashinyan is met by Yerevan district residents chanting against him

We are ready to be fully engaged in negotiation process to resolve Karabakh issue, says Armenia acting PM

Armenia ex-President Kocharyan gives interview to Russia TV channel

Armenia acting premier: We are ready to start withdrawing troops at any moment

Canada MFA expresses concern over 6 Armenian soldiers capture by Azerbaijan troops

There are omissions in registration documents of political forces that applied to Armenia Central Electoral Commission

Armenia Central Electoral Commission chief: There is activeness in Yerevan for the past day or two

Three new cases of coronavirus reported in Artsakh

Group of US Congress members threaten Azerbaijans Aliyev regime with sanctions

Chicago mayor is sued for allegedly refusing interview with white reporter

Iran exports oil to US for first time after long interval

"Armenia" bloc top 50 MP candidates are announced

42 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia

Sri Lanka public beach is covered in charred plastic pellets due to fire in container ship

US preparing list of targeted sanctions on Belarus authorities

China believes it will own America by 2035, Biden says

15 al-Shabab militants killed in Somalia

Newspaper: Armenia political forces that applied for running in election impatiently await CEC decision

Newspaper: Changes are expected in Artsakh

California prisoner who considers himself Satanist beheads cellmate, dismembers his body

Newspaper: Armenia acting PM's "mutually beneficial" proposal to collapse state system?

Armenia National Security Service Reserve Officers' Union members meet with His Holiness Karekin II

EU is ready to help Armenia and Azerbaijan with border delimitation and demarcation

ARF-D member on Nikol Pashinyan: 103 years ago Armenia's founding fathers would have executed him for treason

Iran President hails brotherly ties with Azerbaijan

Robert Kocharyan on years of his leadership in Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia

Situation on Armenian-Azerbaijani border is still tense, more on COVID-19 in Armenia, May 28 digest

"Armenia" alliance of political parties paying tribute to founder of First Republic Aram Manukyan

Yerevan.today: Armenia acting PM not greeted at ruling party's headquarters, citizens call him 'capitulator'

Russia MOD reports on maintenance of ceasefire regime in Nagorno-Karabakh

Armenia acting MOD meets with Russian counterpart in Moscow

Armenia 2nd President: I see possibility of restoring borders of Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast

We can provide our army with some key, modernized weapons, says Armenia ex-President Kocharyan

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan: Captives issue is not one that any opposition force can resolve

OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs release statement on detention of 6 Armenian servicemen by Azerbaijan

Armenian acting Deputy PM: Discussion on issues possible only after withdrawal of Azeri troops from Armenia's territory

Armenia acting PM on Syunik roads, Russian military posts: This is only place where there are working nuances

Armenia acting PM: Process of return of POWs will intensify after upcoming elections

Putin congratulates Aliyev on Republic Day

Josep Borrell: A group of EU Ministers will visit Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan

Armenia acting PM: We're not going to escalate situation for 30% of Sev Lake

Armenia 3rd President visits Vanadzor, pays tribute to heroes of Battle of Gharakilisa (PHOTOS)

Armenia ex-President Kocharyan lays flowers at Battle of Karakilisa memorial (PHOTOS)

Armenia acting PM: Solution to captives issue is matter of time

Shoygu to Harutyunyan: Russia, Armenia strengthen military cooperation

Armenia acting premier: We are 100% honest toward our country

Artsakh President pays tribute at Stepanakert memorial, Shushi Tank-Monument

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan on Meghri corridor plan: Not beneficial to us now to discuss it as "corridor"

Acting PM: "Cement," "fittings" were stolen while constructing Armenia state "building"

Two new cases of coronavirus reported in Artsakh

Catholicos of All Armenians visits Sardarapat Memorial, again separate from state officials

MOD dismisses Azerbaijan statement on Armenia army firing toward Nakhchivan

Jerusalem Post: Israel prepares for a new war with Hamas

France, UN World Food Programme partner to support displaced people in Armenia

Armenia ex-President Kocharyan: Today we are not full-fledged negotiating party

Norwegian prime minister opposes series of NATO reforms

Armenia deputy FM briefs UN, Red Cross leaders on consequences of Azerbaijan aggression against Artsakh

NATO Secretary-General: Afghans must take full responsibility for peace and stability in their country

104 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia

Armenia acting premier: Our sovereignty, independence cannot be subject of discussion

Karabakh state-finance minister announces resignation

Artsakh MFA: Sardarapat victory has inspired all Armenians for over a century

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan: In contrast to kneeling, disgraceful authorities of the day, we have determination

Armenia President: Today we stand on threshold of Sardarapat of morality, dignity

Catholicos of All Armenians: Our people shall find strength to overcome this ordeal as well

Armenia First Republic Day event is held under very modest conditions

Newspaper: Armenia authorities claiming to be popular close off First Republic Day event to public

Armenia ex-President Sargsyan: Now or never!

Armenia President, then acting premier arrive at Sardarapat Memorial

Newspaper: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan's new "cleverness?"

France ambassador: I wish Armenia to be able to live its independence in peace, prosperity

Bashar al-Assad wins Syria presidential election

Reporters not allowed entering Sardarapat Memorial of Armenia
The EU is exploring options to help Ukraine receive early access to vaccines, the EC vice-president says.

The European Union "is concerned about the impact of Russian disinformation about the vaccination process in Ukraine," says Valdis DOMBROVSKIS, Executive Vice-President of the European Commission in charge of an Economy that works for People, and Commissioner for Trade.

The Bloc is "ready to assist in the fight against this disinformation and vaccine skepticism," Dombrovskis said, addressing a plenary session in the European Parliament on the Ukraine-EU Association Agreement on Tuesday, February 9.

"We're exploring options to help Ukraine to receive early access to vaccines," the EC vice-president added.

Read alsoZelensky on snubbing Russian vaccine: Ukrainians "no rabbits"As part of the COVAX facility, Dombovskis recalled, Ukraine will receive 170,000 doses of Pfizer vaccine as early as February and 2.2. to 3.7 million doses of Astra Zeneca vaccines during the first half of the year.

The EU is looking forward for vaccination to start in Ukraine this month, the official concluded.

COVID-19 vaccination in Ukraine

On December 30, Ukraine signed a contract with China's Sinovac for the supply of 1.9 million doses of a coronavirus vaccine.

On January 30, 2021, Ukrainian Deputy Health Minister, Chief Medical Officer Viktor Liashko said Ukraine would receive 117,000 doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine within the COVAX (the COVID-19 Vaccine Global Access Facility) in February.

Read alsoHealth Minister: 100% of Ukrainians could have access to COVID-19 vaccine by end of 202

From the middle of February to the end of June 2021, Ukraine will obtain 2.2 million to 3.7 million doses of an AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine.

First to get vaccinated will be healthcare workers, the elderly, and seriously ill patients.

In December 2020, the Health Ministry's coronavirus task force approved a COVID-19 immunization plan under which at least 50% of Ukrainians (20 million people) are to be vaccinated during 2021-2022.

On January 29, the National Commission for technology-related and environmental safety and emergencies approved a schedule for vaccination against the coronavirus in Ukraine in 2021.

On February 4, Ukrainian Health Minister Maksym Stepanov said the vaccination against COVID-19 in the country would start on February 15.

Reporting by UNIAN
Paris, Feb 11 : France on Wednesday confirmed 25,387 Covid-19 cases in the past 24 hours, the highest daily total in a week. The country is facing a high risk of a rebound in the epidemic as more contagious variants of the virus continue to circulate, health authorities said.

France's cumulative number of confirmed infections has grown to 3,385,622, while the number of coronavirus-related deaths reached 80,443 after another 296 patients died in one day, according to the Xinhua news agency.

Currently, 27,461 people are hospitalised, including 3,319 in intensive care. The two tallies decreased by 216 and 23, respectively, within a day.

In Ile-de-France (Paris Region), the country's most populated zone and its main economic hub, 39 percent of the positive tests are attributable to the Covid-19 variant first detected in Britain, warned Gilles Pialoux, head of the Infectious Diseases Department at Tenon Hospital in Paris.

"We have an incredible surge of the variant in Ile-de-France... We have clusters mixing caregivers and patients," Pialoux told media early on Wednesday.

"The situation is alarming for several reasons. First, we cannot predict the path of these variants and we are very late in France with sequencing. And there are clusters in hospitals, which means bed closures and staff eviction," he said.

The virus variant, first detected in Britain, could be responsible for the majority of new cases from the beginning of March, Arnaud Fontanet, an epidemiologist, told a newspaper in a recent interview.

Fontanet, member of the government's advisory body on Covid-19, added that "difficult months" were still ahead for France.

"The coming weeks will be decisive. The variant will dictate the way forward, it circulates in all age groups and would be 30 per cent more lethal," he said.

Unlike some of its neighbours, France has decided against a new lockdown, betting on a night-time curfew and an intensified vaccination campaign to bring the epidemic under control.

The night-time ban on people's movement, in force since mid-December, was extended by two hours nationwide on January 16 to reduce social mixing. The country has also tightened border controls, ordered the closure of large shopping malls and intensified police patrols to enforce the curfew.

The Health Ministry said on Wednesday that 2,056,572 people had already received the first vaccine dose, representing 3.1 per cent of France's population of 67 million.

A total of 76,415 inhabitants have received the second jab in the past 24 hours, bringing the total number of people who have received both vaccine doses to 443,148.

As the world is struggling to contain the pandemic, vaccination is underway in France and some other countries with the already-authorized coronavirus vaccines.

Meanwhile, 242 candidate vaccines are still being developed worldwide -- 63 of them in clinical trials -- in countries including Germany, China, Russia, Britain and the US, according to information released by the World Health Organization on February 9.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Oh, you like podcasts? Sign up for Vultures new recommendation newsletter 1.5x Speed here. Photo: NBC Universal

After more than 50 years in the broadcasting business, there are still some surprises to be had for Keith Morrison, the dulcet-toned correspondent of NBCs long-running newsmagazine, Dateline. For instance, the success of his first podcast, 2019s The Thing About Pam, which hit No. 1 on Apple Podcasts and will soon be adapted by Blumhouse Television into a limited series starring Renee Zellweger.

I hadnt given much thought to the podcast world because we were busy enough as it was, says Morrison, who began his career in radio. I was somewhat skeptical at the beginning that this would be such a good fit for us, but once you realize that youre not constrained by all the structure of a television show, you can get more into the details and down the rabbit holes. It was fun.

So fun, in fact, that Morrison has decided to do it again: His new podcast Mommy Doomsday follows the bizarre story of Lori Vallow, an Idaho woman whose two children went missing in 2019 and were later discovered dead on her husbands property in 2020. The series, produced by Dateline and NBC News in partnership with Neon Hum, debuts February 16 with two episodes. (Check out the trailer here.)

Vulture recently spoke with Morrison about Mommy Doomsday, his initial reluctance about covering true crime, and the one case that he just cant seem to shake.

When you sit down to review the vast number of cases Dateline has covered over the years to select one for the podcast treatment, what criteria are you looking for?

Keith Morrison: I think the principles of a good story are all the same  It needs a strong character who people are amazed by and want to hear more about. And also things that happen that you wouldnt think could possibly happen. If you can allow people to imagine what might be coming next, and that what is coming next is really quite remarkable, then youve got a good story to tell. Im just talking about it in terms of storytelling, the morality of these things is quite another matter altogether.

Is it just coincidental that the two podcasts youve done so far have centered around crimes perpetrated by women?

[Laughs] It is, totally. Although, I dont know whether it is safe to say such a thing, but some of the most interesting criminal minds you run across are the women. Im from Canada, and people used to say  and maybe still do  that We dont get as many murders in Canada, but theyre so interesting.

Keith Morrison. Photo: Patrick Randak/NBC

For those who are unfamiliar with the particulars of the Lori Vallow story, what can they expect out of this podcast?

This is a story about a woman who had been having trouble getting stability in her life, who had kind of bounced from one thing to another, one husband to another, one difficulty to another. Shed always been a religious woman. She seized upon a religious crusade that would give her some real purpose in her life, but it went off the rails, and it left bodies in its wake. Were still investigating just how many bodies that may be.

To your point, investigations are still pending, so her story really isnt finished. How then do you craft a compelling conclusion for listeners?

I fully anticipate that therell be another trial before too long  and would already have been by now, had it not been for COVID. [Vallows trial for misdemeanor charges is slated for August 30.] So you can leave things in advance  as long as listeners or viewers kind of understand whats what and whos who and what happened. You dont have to see them carted off to prison. It sounds so cold. Its a weird thing. Can I back up for just a second?

Of course.

Getting into this line of work, this storytelling about true crime, was not an easy thing for me. I had covered all kinds of stuff for a long time in Canada and the U.S.  daily news for NBC Nightly News and the Today show and long-form documentaries on NBC, but also on the CBC for years covering politics mostly, but other stuff, lots of stuff, and I enjoyed it immensely.

The evidence shows that an average college student can detect lying with a somewhat better average than the average detective.

And when true crime sort of took over the genre of long form in America, I was one of the early resistors. I didnt want to do it. I just thought, What? Its almost like youre intruding into a process, which its our right to intrude and look into it and see what happened. But I wasnt sure it was a good thing for us to do, necessarily. But as I have done it, it not only opens a window on human character, that is probably a uniquely suited way to get there. I dont know of any other way to get to the heart of what makes a human being, a human being. To dive deeply into a criminal matter that a person has been involved in. And the victims of these murders or whatever they happened to be, the families of those people, we dont talk to them unless they want to talk to us. If they want their privacy, we give them their privacy. But we find more often than not, theyre happy to do so. That its cathartic for them. That its a way to honor and celebrate the life that was lost. And so I feel better about it, but I will say, I never expected to be quite so fascinated about the many and varied facets of human behavior. How were all strange little ducks inside somewhere.

I feel like shows such as Dateline give viewers a level of transparency about the justice system that we maybe wouldnt get otherwise.

Yes, I agree. Ive learned lots of things about the justice system I wasnt aware of.

You just celebrated your 25th year with Dateline. Im curious if, in all this time, youve developed a BS meter for when people are lying to you?

Maybe to some degree. I was fascinated by the study that came out years ago on this very question. I interviewed this guy, and hed done a lot of research, and the evidence shows that an average college student can detect lying with a somewhat better average than the average detective whos been working in homicide cases. The research speculated that the reason for that is simply that the homicide detective thinks he can identify a lie, therefore hes apt to make mistakes when listening to the answers. Really, human beings are incredibly good at lying and not very good at determining when theyre being lied to. I think thats a large part of the reason people are so fascinated by true crime, because they are in a world where you dont know whos telling you the truth and you want to find out.

So would you say youre in between a college student and a detective?

[Laughs] Im probably the worst of those.

Speaking of your long tenure at Dateline, is there one case youve covered that stands out as the most memorable  one you just cant shake?

Thereve been so many, there really have. The one I think about, its a story that really, nobody knows and hasnt been particularly celebrated outside of classrooms where they teach about it in some universities. It was a case the Innocence Project took up and never got the result they were hoping for.

The case involved a man named Billy Wayne Cope, who lived in a small town in South Carolina. His daughter was murdered and sexually assaulted one night, and Billy Wayne had been in the house. He called 911, and they decided he mustve done it. And though he denied it endlessly  666 times, his attorney would later say  he eventually caved. He was not a terribly bright man, but he was a very sweet fellow. He was charged with the murder. He finally confessed. But a month later, they identified the DNA that was found in his daughter [from] another crime that occurred a block or two away from where he lived. And the person who was caught for that crime, it was clear as day that he also committed this crime. I mean, he left DNA in both of those people. But instead of absolving Billy Wayne Cope and charging the other guy, they charged him with conspiracy and tried them both, and accused Billy Wayne of helping him and watching, and being an even worse villain for that, even though theyd never met each other before. And so it was a total bogus case and he was convicted, sent away for life. All the efforts of all the Innocence Projects that got involved, because they wanted to free this innocent man, came to nothing and he eventually died in prison. So its a very, very sad story, but one that I cant shake. I think about it a lot.

Ive always been a fan of Dr. Seuss. One of my favorite books of his is Horton Hears a Who!, and the reason is because it exemplifies whats good about the justice system. A persons a person, no matter how small and is entitled to equal justice under the law. And that, I think, drives a lot of people who are in that line of work, that they would like to see justice achieved for everybody. And its a terribly imperfect system, but I think thats the goal people have, and the thing that gives emotional heft to a lot of stories, like the one about Billy Wayne Cope.
The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
[February 10, 2021] Physicians' Education Resource Announces Six Highly Impactful Q1 Meetings with 100+ Expert Faculty and 2,000+ Attendees Across Multiple Specialties

For Physicians' Education Resource, LLC, (PER), the leading go-to resource for continuing medical education (CME), contributing to the support of patients with cancer and improving the quality of care is not just a professional commitment, it's also a personal one. Which is why PER transformed six of its core, oncology signature events this quarter into all-inclusive, highly impactful virtual, interactive conferences this winter. For decades, world-renowned surgical, medical, and radiation oncologists have attended these historic conferences to network with expert faculty and explore state-of-the-art cancer care strategies and treatments in each oncology therapeutic area. To fulfill a growing need for critical patient care, it is at the heart of PER's DNA to produce targeted, impactful programming that elevates the education experience for both healthcare providers and the patient's cancer care journey. The upcoming virtual, interactive conferences will unveil new groundbreaking data and discuss the latest innovations in patient care with the top minds in the oncology space across hematologic malignancies, breast cancers, skin cancers, lung cancers, genitourinary cancers, gastrointestinal cancers, and many more. "What sets PER apart from all others is its passionate commitment to improving care. Now more than ever, it is important that health care professionals around the world are up to date with the latest advance patient care strategies at this unprecedented time when optimizing care and outcomes for patients is so crucial," said Phil Talamo, CHCP, president of PER. "Throughout these six cutting-edge virtual conferences, our learners will learn how to integrate new and emerging data and strategies into real-world case scenarios they face in their practices daily." Key PER virtual, interactive core oncology conferences include: 18th Annual Winter Lung Cancer Conference held from Feb. 5-7. HCP's discussed breakthroughs in immunotherapy, targeted agents, and multidisciplinary approaches to lung cancer therapy with a world-class panel of thoracic oncologists.



held from Feb. 5-7. HCP's discussed breakthroughs in immunotherapy, targeted agents, and multidisciplinary approaches to lung cancer therapy with a world-class panel of thoracic oncologists. 17th Annual International Symposium on Melanoma and Other Cutaneous Malignancies, held on Feb. 6. In this single-day educational conference, physicians who treat skin cancer took part in fast-paced discussions and Medical Crossfire exchanges. Participants walked away with thorough updates on current and emerging treatments in melanoma, basal cell carcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma, and other skin cancers.



held on Feb. 6. In this single-day educational conference, physicians who treat skin cancer took part in fast-paced discussions and Medical Crossfire exchanges. Participants walked away with thorough updates on current and emerging treatments in melanoma, basal cell carcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma, and other skin cancers. 25th Annual International Congress on Hematologic Malignancies: ocus on Leukemias, Lymphomas, and Myeloma will be held from Feb. 25-28. This highly engaging three-day meeting will provide physicians who treat and manage hematologic malignancies with the practical tools to translate emerging data into the best therapies for their patients, to personalize care according to patient and tumor characteristics, and apply novel treatment strategies to improve patient outcomes. Register here.







will be held from Feb. 25-28. This highly engaging three-day meeting will provide physicians who treat and manage hematologic malignancies with the practical tools to translate emerging data into the best therapies for their patients, to personalize care according to patient and tumor characteristics, and apply novel treatment strategies to improve patient outcomes. Register 38th Annual Miami Breast Cancer Conference will be held from March 4-7. One of the most impactful and longest-running breast cancer conferences has been reimagined for 2021 as a robust, virtual educational experience. HCPs will take part in world-class tumor board panels, multidisciplinary meet-the-expert sessions, poster talks, lively debates, and much more - including new tracks on pathology, radiation oncology, and nursing, designed to educate the entire care team. A new international session has been developed to meet the needs of learners from around the world. Register here.



will be held from March 4-7. One of the most impactful and longest-running breast cancer conferences has been reimagined for 2021 as a robust, virtual educational experience. HCPs will take part in world-class tumor board panels, multidisciplinary meet-the-expert sessions, poster talks, lively debates, and much more - including new tracks on pathology, radiation oncology, and nursing, designed to educate the entire care team. A new international session has been developed to meet the needs of learners from around the world. Register here. New York GU 14th Annual Interdisciplinary Prostate Cancer Congress and Other Genitourinary Malignancies will be held from March 12-13. Clinicians will continue learn how to provide state-of-the-art care to optimize outcomes for patients with GU malignancies. The 2021 meeting will focus on a variety of therapeutic approaches that include chemotherapy, targeted therapies, novel hormonal agents, immunotherapies, and much more. Register here.



will be held from March 12-13. Clinicians will continue learn how to provide state-of-the-art care to optimize outcomes for patients with GU malignancies. The 2021 meeting will focus on a variety of therapeutic approaches that include chemotherapy, targeted therapies, novel hormonal agents, immunotherapies, and much more. Register here. 6th Annual School of Gastrointestinal Oncology (SOGO) will be held on March 20. This one-day multidisciplinary conference will provide HCPs with the tools and strategies they need to personalize care for each patient with gastrointestinal (GI) cancers. Register here. About Physicians' Education Resource (PER) Since 1995, PER has been dedicated to advancing cancer care through professional education and now advances patient care and treatment strategies on a wide variety of chronic illnesses and diseases. In 2016, PER initiated continuing medical education (CME) programming in the cardiovascular and endocrinology areas. Although it is expanding into topics outside of oncology, PER stands as the leading provider of live, online and print CME activities related to oncology and hematology. The high-quality, evidence-based activities feature leading distinguished experts who focus on the application of practice-changing advances. PER is accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education and the California Board of Registered Nursing. PER is a brand of MJH Life Sciences, the largest privately held, independent, full-service medical media company in North America dedicated to delivering trusted health care news across multiple channels.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210210005640/en/

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The W.H.O. is concluding its investigation into whether COVID-19 originated from a Wuhan lab instead of the city's wet markets, but critics including former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are not convinced about the investigation's legitimacy.

A four-week investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 virus that has taken the lives of over 2.3 million people worldwide is now on its tail-end. According to BBC, the W.H.O.-led investigation concluded that it was "extremely unlikely" that the coronavirus leaked from a Wuhan City laboratory and that more work was needed to truly identify the real source of COVID-19.

W.H.O. is now standing by the report that COVID-19 crossed over to humans from an animal source. W.H.O. team leader Peter Embarek said that based on their initial findings, "The introduction through an intermediary host species is the most likely pathway and one that will require more studies and more specific targeted research."

NBC News reported that according to Embarek, the theory that COVID-19 originated from an accident at the Wuhan laboratory "did not warrant future study," causing the W.H.O. to absolve the lab from any blame for the pandemic, which continues to take a toll worldwide.

Embarek also denied that there was transmission within Wuhan or other parts of China even before the first cases were reported in 2019, despite numerous reports that the coronavirus was already spreading across the globe months before December 2019, Breitbart reported.

Embarek's assertions echo the words of China's Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian, who claimed in 2019 that COVID-19 started elsewhere. This is in line with the communist nation's attempts to suppress the truth when it comes to the pandemic's origins in Wuhan.

The investigation into the Wuhan laboratory and its likelihood that it was the original source of COVID-19 is yet inconclusive as to where the coronavirus truly originated from. While investigators are looking into the transmission from animals to humans, specifically with the coronavirus originating from bats, the W.H.O. has not been able to identify which animals are indeed the original host. According to researchers, while bats and pangolins may be the source of COVID-19, the samples found in them, while similar to COVID-19, were not identical to the coronavirus present in humans today.

As the W.H.O. absolves the Wuhan laboratory as the source of COVID-19, many remain unconvinced about the legitimacy of the organization's investigation results.

One of the most vocal critics is former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who on Tuesday told FOX News that "not a thing" has changed about his suspicion that the coronavirus that continues to ravage the United States indeed came from the Wuhan laboratory.

Pompeo said that there was "significant evidence" that the Wuhan laboratory is the true source of COVID-19 and criticized the W.H.O. for being "corrupt" and "politicized." He accused the W.H.O. of "bending a knee" to Chinese Communist Party General Secretary and China President Xi Jinping.

"I hope they got to see all the data, all the science, into the lab, talk to the doctors, interview them in private, in places where they could actually tell the truth about what took place," Pompeo said. "Not under the supervision of a Communist Party person sitting in the back of the room making sure that they toed the Communist Party line. I look forward to seeing their results. I continue to know that there was significant evidence that this may well have come from that laboratory."

This fuels further criticism against the Chinese government, which according to Breitbart destroyed early evidence of the coronavirus in an effort to "prevent the risk to laboratory biological safety and prevent secondary disasters caused by unidentified pathogens," as told by China's National Health Commission Liu Dengfeng (via Newsweek).

Pompeo is taking a firmer, more combative stance, insisting that Jinping's "feelings" should not be taken into consideration in determining the truth behind the source of COVID-19 and the pandemic that ensued. He said, "We have to confront the challenge that the Chinese Communist Party is presenting to America and to the world."
Deputy Foreign Minister of Belarus S.Aleinik pays a visit to the Vatican

On February 8-9, 2021 the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Belarus, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Republic of Belarus to the Holy See, Sergei Aleinik, paid a visit to the Vatican.

On February 8, S.Aleinik took part in the annual New Year's audience of Pope Francis for the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See. On the sidelines of the event, the Ambassador of Belarus held a short conversation with the Pontiff.

During the visit, S.Aleinik held meetings with the Secretary of State of the Holy See, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Chair of the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity, Cardinal Kurt Koch, as well as with the Secretary for Relations with States (Minister of Foreign Affairs) of the State Secretariat of the Holy See, Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher.

During the meeting, the sides discussed current issues on the bilateral agenda, cooperation within the framework of international organizations, as well as current situation in the region.

The parties reaffirmed the common interest in promoting the Belarus-Vatican cooperation in order to achieve further positive dynamics in bilateral interaction and encourage interfaith dialogue.



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OTTAWA - Senators have voted to give the federal government 18 months to expand access to medical assistance in dying to people suffering solely from mental illnesses.

The Senate of Canada building and Senate Chamber are pictured in Ottawa on Monday, Feb. 18, 2019. Senators voted Tuesday to give the federal government 18 months to expand access to medical assistance in dying to people suffering solely from mental illnesses. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick

OTTAWA - Senators have voted to give the federal government 18 months to expand access to medical assistance in dying to people suffering solely from mental illnesses.

They voted 57-21 Tuesday to amend Bill C-7, which proposes an explicit, blanket prohibition on assisted dying in cases involving only mental illness but would expand access to other intolerably suffering people who are not near the natural end of their lives.

The amendment puts an 18-month time limit on the mental illness exclusion, intended to give the federal government, along with provinces, territories and medical associations, time to come up with appropriate guidelines and safeguards.

Until the exclusion is lifted, senators also agreed to another amendment to clarify that it will not apply to people suffering from neurocognitive disorders such as Alzheimer's disease, dementia, Parkinson's disease and Huntington's disease.

Justice Minister David Lametti has said it was not the government's intention to exclude such disorders. The amendment to make that crystal clear was approved by senators on a voice vote.

The sunset clause on the mental illness exclusion was proposed by Sen. Stan Kutcher, a psychiatrist who now sits in the Independent Senators Group.

He argued that the exclusion is unconstitutional, violating the right to equal treatment under the law, regardless of physical and mental disability, as guaranteed in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Moreover, Kutcher argued that it stigmatizes people with mental illnesses, suggesting that they don't have the mental capacity to decide when their suffering has become intolerable and that their suffering is somehow less than that caused by physical illnesses.

"Intolerable suffering is a subjective, personal experience. It cannot be negated or delegitimized by anyone else's valuation of that suffering," Kutcher told the Senate.

"Persons who have intolerable suffering from a mental disorder do not have a second-class type of suffering. Their suffering must be taken just as seriously as we take the suffering of those who request MAID (medical assistance in dying) for any other medical condition."

The Canadian Psychiatric Association has denounced the exclusion as discriminatory, stigmatizing and unconstitutional.

Six senators, including the government's representative in the Senate, Sen. Marc Gold, and the bill's sponsor, Sen. Chantal Petitclerc of the Independent Senators Group, abstained on Kutcher's amendment.

Lametti has argued that the exclusion is necessary because there is no consensus among psychiatrists on whether people suffering solely from mental illnesses should ever be allowed access to assisted dying.

That's because the trajectory of mental illnesses is often unpredictable, making it difficult to determine if a patient's condition might improve, he has said. Moreover, Lametti has pointed out that a wish to die is often a symptom of a mental illness.

But Kutcher argued that the same complexities can apply in assessing patients with physical conditions. He noted that the bill would allow assisted dying for people suffering from a combination of mental and physical disorders.

An overwhelming majority of senators supported the amendment, with many saying they'd prefer to see the mental illness exclusion repealed altogether but accepted Kutcher's sunset clause as a reasonable compromise.

However, Conservative Sen. Denise Batters argued strenuously against the amendment.

"The term sunset clause is just a euphemism for the sunsetting of vulnerable people's lives," she told the Senate.

"It sounds so innocuous, a sunset clause," Batters added.

"But, honourable senators, don't be fooled. This means that at least some Canadians will have their lives ended before they can access the treatments or options that could very well relieve their suffering and give them years to live."

Senators rejected Monday a third proposed amendment aimed at forcing the creation of a parliamentary committee within three months to review access to assisted dying for people with neurodegenerative diseases.

Conservative Sen. Pierre-Hugues Boisvenu, who proposed the amendment, wanted the committee, which was to report back within one year, to look particularly at the issue of advanced directives for such people.

That amendment was defeated by a vote of 47-28, with six abstentions.

Senators are to resume debate Wednesday, with more amendments to be proposed.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 9, 2021.
New coronavirus variants are forcing Australia and New Zealand to rethink already-stringent quarantine rules for overseas visitors, even as their systems are replicated around the world

Sydney, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 10th Feb, 2021 ) :New coronavirus variants are forcing Australia and New Zealand to rethink already-stringent quarantine rules for overseas visitors, even as their systems are replicated around the world.

Officials in Australia's Victoria state on Wednesday became the latest to warn that the spread of the UK, Brazilian and South African mutations mean its 14-day mandatory quarantine must be toughened.

"These hyper infectious strains are proving very difficult to contain," Victoria state premier Dan Andrews said, signalling coming reforms and announcing the snap closure of a Melbourne quarantine hotel at the centre of a new leak into the community.

"We all have to acknowledge that quarantine and the public health response today must be, by necessity, different than it was a month ago, six months ago," he said.

Health authorities in both Australia and New Zealand this week launched full reviews of quarantine facilities and procedures.

Proposals range from developing outback quarantine centres to testing arrivals more often and for longer.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, around 320,000 travellers have been scooped up at Australian and New Zealand ports and airports, shuttled to quarantine hotels and confined to their rooms for 14 days.

The systems have contained thousands of cases, helping both countries remain largely free of Covid-19.

Places around the world -- including Britain, Canada and Thailand -- are trying to replicate the relative success of such systems, leading Australia's health minister to boast the country's quarantine is the "gold standard" internationally.

But in both Australia and New Zealand there is growing concern about the durability of the protocol.
Washington: Hair dye was not running down Bruce Castors face as he made the opening argument for Donald Trumps defence in his Senate impeachment trial.

But his embarrassing performance managed to rival Rudy Giulianis infamous November press conference in which a suspicious dark liquid began dripping down his cheek as the Trump lawyer made laughable claims of voter fraud.

As bad as Giuilianis performance was, he was speaking to a bunch of reporters. Castor was addressing the 100 US senators who will decide whether Trump should be convicted of inciting a deadly insurrection and disqualified from holding public office again.

Bruce Castor, lawyer for former US president Donald Trump, speaks during the second impeachment trial of Trump in the Senate at the US Capitol in Washington. Credit:Senate TV/AP

Castors opening address to the Senate on Wednesday (AEDT) was rambling, incoherent and cringe-worthy. The speech was so disjointed that its difficult to extract any meaningful quotes from it. Nebraska is quite a judicial-thinking place, was one of Castors more memorable lines.
press release

In November 2020, armed violence between federal and regional forces erupted in Tigray, northern Ethiopia - triggering immense suffering for people living there. Clashes continue to take place and there are now major humanitarian needs across the region.

Families in Ethiopia and Sudan need us now. Tens of thousands of people are in urgent need of our help.

The ICRC, the Ethiopian Red Cross Society and other members of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement are working tirelessly - and with your support, we can do more. To support the scaling up of our activities in northern Ethiopia and eastern Sudan, the ICRC is appealing for funding which will be used in Ethiopia and Sudan. For example:

CHF 10,000 could help more than 430 people meet their essential needs e.g. access food, cooking items, soap, blankets etc. at an average cost of CHF 23 per person.

CHF 50,000 could help 10,000 people access safe water an average cost of CHF 5 each.

CHF 170,000 could provide a health centre or hospital with medical supplies and equipment, as well as training so that staff can provide specialized care for victims/survivors of sexual violence.
Chandigarh, Feb 10 : British Labour Party MP Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi on Wednesday expressed concern over the arrest of labour rights activist Nodeep Kaur over the farmers' agitation, saying the abuse of peaceful protest activists, especially women, is an affront to democracy and civilised society.

"Alarmed to learn of sexual assault and torture allegations in police custody of Punjabi trade unionist Nodeep Kaur, who after four weeks hasn't even been granted bail," Dhesi tweeted.

He added, "Abuse of peaceful farmers protest activists, especially women, is an affront to democracy and civilised society." Earlier, Punjab-origin politician Dhesi had sent a letter, signed by over 100 MPs and Lords, to UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson on the ongoing farmers' protests, asking him to raise this matter with his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi when they next liaise.

On Monday, the Punjab State Commission for Scheduled Castes asked the Additional Chief Secretary (Home) to ensure relief for Nodeep Kaur.

The Commission also sought a report by February 23. It said it has taken suo motu notice of the issue since the woman is a resident of the state.

Nodeep Kaur, 23, was arrested on January 12 during the farmers' protest at Kundli in Haryana.

Nodeep's case came to the fore as US Vice President Kamala Harris' niece Meena Harris claimed in a tweet that she was "tortured and sexually assaulted" in police custody.

However, the police said she was facing serious criminal cases.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
SALEM, Ore.  A state lawmaker representing part of southern Oregon has introduced a bill designed to limit Governor Kate Brown's power to shut down businesses during the coronavirus pandemic.

Representative David Brock Smith's district covers parts of Curry, Coos, Douglas, and Josephine counties. House Bill 3177, the "Covid Business Equity Act," would explicitly limit the Governor's power to impose restrictions on restaurants, bars, gyms, and other fitness establishments  unless those restrictions apply to all businesses broadly.

Rep. Brock Smith highlighted the job losses in the hospitality sector as the major impetus for the bill.

"These business owners, their hardworking employees and their families have faced extreme hardships with devastating delays in business relief, unemployment insurance payments, with little to no income and no relief in sight," Brock Smith said in a statement. "Many of these restaurants and hospitality industry businesses will close their doors forever, taking these jobs with them. Further, the majority of these impacted Oregonians are the most vulnerable working families across our state."

In Oregon counties at the higher end of the state's risk level guidance, restaurants and gyms face significant restrictions on indoor activities. For restaurants and bars, this means no indoor service in "Extreme Risk" counties.

HB 3177 carves out space for the Governor to continue requiring masking, physical distancing, physical barriers, and other restrictions that are "generally applicable to all types of businesses." However, it would prevent Governor Brown from establishing restrictions on these sectors that don't apply across all sectors.

Though restaurants and gyms have certainly seen the toughest restrictions of any businesses in the state, the guidance produced by Governor Brown's office and the Oregon Health Authority includes tailored rules for a number of sectors, both private and public. As a result, it's unclear how Brock Smith's bill  if passed  would interact with a complex system of restrictions that doesn't neatly break down into eating establishments, fitness centers, and everything else.

Us legislators have been telling our constituents that while not in session, we have no authority to intervene on the Governors Executive Orders related to the Covid-19 emergency, subsequent mandates and their closures. We have now begun the 21 Legislative Session and it is past time for the legislative branch to assert our responsibility; and I would argue the obligation, in guiding policy and lead in this work for the residents that put us here to do so, said Brock Smith.

The lawmaker urged people to email their legislators in support of the bill. HB 3177 is currently on the House Speaker's desk, awaiting referral.
Now, Abbott proves shes a genuine triple threat, with a performance devoid of song and dance but full of spark and life. As Diana, the niece of Thomsons celebrity chef Easton West, shes the heart and soul of this six-part comedy-drama from Julie De Fina and Matthew Bate.

This is the TV debut of the 25-year-old whose professional stage bow came as the lead of Muriels Wedding The Musical in 2019. It cant have been easy to fill the shoes of Toni Collette in the film and Maggie McKenna in the original stage production, but she made it look so.

While Erik Thomson is the star of Aftertaste , he is not the brightest thing in it. Natalie Abbott is.

The pretentiously named Easton (real name Jimmy) is a celebrity chef consigned to the outer circles of social-media hell after a well-publicised blow-up at his eponymous restaurant in Shanghai. Funny how tossing a pig carcass at a food critic will do that (and top marks to the premieres masterful first four minutes, in which Eastons dubious character, fading reputation and wilful self-immolation were all established before the opening titles).

In Packed to the Rafters (soon to be rebooted for Amazon as Back to the Rafters) and 800 Words, Thomson has made a very successful career playing nice-guy dads. Here, though, he gets his angry on in a big way.

As he never tires of reminding us, the foul-mouthed, short-fused Easton (a character clearly inspired by Gordon Ramsay) is a Michelin-starred chef. But for years he has traded off past glory rather than create it anew, and post-flame-out even his infamy is no longer bankable. Returning to the Adelaide Hills he left 30 years ago he tells his long-suffering sister Denise (Susan Prior) he could have gone anywhere  London, Paris, New York. But its a lie. No one wants him.

Except Diana. Shes a budding pastry chef who has taken the exercise book full of recipes bequeathed by her grandmother and spun them into something uniquely her own. Where Eastons food is French-inspired, rule-bound and a product of strict hierarchy, hers is vernacular, chaotic, intensely personal. Clearly, theyre meant to be in business together, and soon enough they are.
Priyanka Chopra Remembers Hiding A Boy In Her Closet & Lying To Her Aunt In Her Book Unfinished

Fans had eagerly been waiting for global icon and our beloved Desi Girl Priyanka Chopra Jonas to release her much awaited memoir Unfinished. Well, its finally out and many of her most cherished memories have beautifully been penned in for fans to read. One of the most talked about incidents that has taken the internet by storm is when PeeCee hid a boy in her closet. She was living in America and was in the 10th standard when she fell for a boy named Bob.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Priyanka Chopra Jonas (@priyankachopra)

One day she was sitting on the couch watching television with him, while they innocently held hands, when from the window she saw her aunt making her way back home. Priyanka remembered, I panicked. It was 2 in the afternoon and not her usual time to return. There was no way Bob could go outside the house and he and I ran to my room and I shoved him into my closet. She asked him to stay there till she can send her aunt to the grocery store.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Priyanka Chopra Jonas (@priyankachopra)

However, PeeCees Kiran Maasi entered the house and started looking inside every single room while the actress sat on her bed with a biology book pretending to study. Priyanka wrote, She came to my doorway and said 'Open it' and I asked her 'open what.' 'Open your closet,' said my aunt. I was shaken as I have never seen my aunt this angry. I opened the closet door, it was a big mess: a boy came out. Masi called my mother and said, 'I can't believe that she lied to my face. There was a boy in her closet!'.

Well, we are sure many youngsters can relate to this incident!
[February 10, 2021] LexaGene's MiQLab Successfully Detects Mutant UK and South African COVID-19 Sequences

BEVERLY, Mass., Feb. 10, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- LexaGene Holdings, Inc., (TSX-V: LXG; OTCQB: LXXGF) (the Company), a molecular diagnostics company that develops fully automated rapid pathogen detection systems, is pleased to announce that it has successfully configured a MiQLab system to detect mutant sequences unique to the United Kingdom (UK, B.1.1.7)1 and South African (SA, B.1.351)2 variants of SARS-CoV-2, the pathogen that causes COVID-19. The UK variant, known to be more contagious and possibly deadlier, was first detected in the United States at the end of December and has now been identified in 33 states.3 Likewise, both the SA and Brazilian variants were first detected in the United States at the end of January, and several cases have now been reported in the United States, suggesting more widespread infections. The UK, SA, and Brazilian variants have now acquired mutations that may likely reduce the efficacy of approved vaccines and therapeutics.4,5 LexaGenes MiQLab is designed for point-of-care use and for simultaneous screening of numerous respiratory pathogens, including COVID-19 strain identification. The system is open-access, which allows for new tests to be easily loaded onto the system. This is a unique feature that is not found in any other system designed for point-of-care use. Dr. Jack Regan, LexaGenes CEO and Founder states, Just three weeks ago, we designed assays to detect the UK and SA variants to demonstrate proof-of-principle that these assays could be quickly ported onto the MiQLab. After just two full work days of having these reagents in-house, we verified our MiQLab could detect mutations associated with these variants. With proper FDA approvals, these tests could quickly be sent to MiQLabs operating at the point-of-care for faster detection, which would likely improve containment efforts for the spread of these new variants. Dr. Regan continues, The optimism over the increasing availability of COVID-19 vaccines needs to be tempered with the worrisome potential that some of these new variants are not only more contagious, but also may render these vaccines less effective. Generally, getting a new vaccine authorized for use by FDA takes six or more months, so e really need to rely on better diagnostics to stop the spread of these new variants before they become more widespread and nearly impossible to contain. MiQLabs open-access design allows the system to be quickly configured to detect new variants at the point-of-care. As such, our technology fills a critical testing gap we have in our defenses against these ever-changing pathogens.



LexaGene is pursuing FDA EUA for COVID-19 testing using assays that are predicted to detect >99.9% of the strains circulating today based on published sequences, including the UK, SA, and Brazilian variants. At this time, LexaGene has no plans to incorporate the variant specific tests into the initial FDA studies for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for COVID-19 testing. As is standard practice, until the FDA grants LexaGenes instrument EUA for COVID-19 testing, all work using LexaGene instruments is classified as Research Use Only and cannot be used for human clinical diagnostics. To date, there is no FDA approved device that is designed for point-of-care usage and is open-access.

The Company is not making any express or implied claims that its product has the ability to eliminate, cure or contain the COVID-19 (or SARS-2 Coronavirus) at this time. To be added to the LexaGene email list, please subscribe on the Company website. On Behalf of the Board of Directors

Dr. Jack Regan

Chief Executive Officer & Director About LexaGene Holdings Inc.

LexaGene is a molecular diagnostics company that develops molecular diagnostic systems for pathogen detection and genetic testing for other molecular markers for on-site rapid testing in veterinary diagnostics, food safety and for use in open-access markets such as clinical research, agricultural testing and biodefense. End-users simply need to collect a sample, load it onto the instrument with a sample preparation cartridge, enter sample ID and press go. The MiQLab system delivers excellent sensitivity, specificity, and breadth of detection and can return results in approximately one hour. The unique open-access feature is designed for custom testing so that end-users can load their own real-time PCR assays onto the instrument to target any genetic target of interest. For further information, please contact: Media Contact

Nicole Ridgedale

Director of Corporate Marketing, LexaGene

800.215.1824 ext 206

nridgedale@lexagene.com Investor Relations

Jay Adelaar

Vice President of Capital Markets, LexaGene

800.215.1824 ext 207

jadelaar@lexagene.com The TSX Venture Exchange Inc. has in no way passed upon the merits of the proposed transaction and has neither approved nor disapproved the contents of this press release. Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. This news release contains forward-looking information, which involves known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual events to differ materially from current expectation. Important factors -- including the availability of funds, the results of financing efforts, the success of technology development efforts, the cost to procure critical parts, performance of the instrument, market acceptance of the technology, regulatory acceptance, and licensing issues -- that could cause actual results to differ materially from the Company's expectations as disclosed in the Company's documents filed from time to time on SEDAR (see www.sedar.com). Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this press release. The company disclaims any intention or obligation, except to the extent required by law, to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. 1 https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/documents/SARS-CoV-2-variant-multiple-spike-protein-mutations-United-Kingdom.pdf

2 https://www.eatthis.com/news-cdc-mutant-covid-south-africa/

3 https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/transmission/variant-cases.html

4 https://www.newscientist.com/article/2266429-uk-coronavirus-variant-gets-nastier-as-south-african-variant-spreads/

5 https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/transmission/variant.html



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Valentine's Day poses a particular challenge this year. The pressure to lavish thought, care and money on our other halves is as strong as ever  but the shops are closed. Yet there is comfort in knowing it's not always the most traditional gestures that leave the biggest impression. Here, writers share the surprising, tender acts that have made them feel especially cherished  and one or two that didn't go quite according to plan. . .

I ALMOST KILLED MY WIFE

By Simon Mills

Simon Mills (pictured) reveals how he almost killed his wife when she choked on a ring

I'm not that good at Valentine's Day. At various times in my myriad relationships, I have purchased lingerie in wildly inappropriate sizes, forgotten to take the supermarket tag off a bouquet of orchids, omitted to send greetings cards on the correct day and then managed to send a birthday card instead of the specified Valentine's card.

And worst of all, I actually believed a girlfriend when she said she 'didn't want me to make a fuss' on Valentine's Day, as she 'really wasn't into all that kind of stuff'. So I didn't. Big, big mistake.

But, about 15 years ago, I made an exception. My tenth (I think) wedding anniversary was coming up and I had just come into possession of a diamond ring (my grandmother's). I booked lunch at a posh London restaurant and slipped the maitre d' the ring. On my request for pre-prandial champagne, he popped the blinger into her flute of fizz and served it to our table.

Well, that glass of bubbly sat unsipped for what seemed like an age while she perused the menu. Eventually, I held up the dregs of my Moet, said 'Cheers' and clinked her glass. As she took a first drink, I watched in horror as the ring, all but invisible in the golden liquid, slid neatly into her open mouth.

My Valentine spat, spluttered and half-choked. I got up to help her. Staff surrounded the table. Someone smacked her on the back. She gagged again. Champagne all over the napkins. Ring rolling around on the carpet. It was as about as lovey-dovey as a bout of stomach flu.

'Why did you do that?' she asked, when Evian and fresh linens had been supplied. 'I was trying to be romantic,' I said, cleaning sticky wine residue off the ring.

She's my ex-wife now.

SURPRISE AT THE AIRPORT

By Liz Jones

October 2014. Not the best year. In January I was sacked. In August my mum died. And then Lizzie, my rescued racehorse, came in from the field with colic.

This is stomach ache, possibly a blockage, and since horses can't vomit, it can be fatal. She was taken to an equine clinic and operated on. I'd visit each day and she would hear my car and whicker.

After a week she was allowed home, heavily bandaged. Eventually I was able to hand-graze her. The surgeon said there was no likelihood of colic returning, so I took a work assignment in Canada.

But on the second night I received a text from Nic, who looks after my horses. 'She has colic again,' she wrote. 'I'm trying to get a box to take her back to the clinic. It's awful.'

Liz Jones (pictured with her rescue horse Lizzie) has told how she was surprised at the airport by her boyfriend

I looked into flights but there were none that evening. I woke to a stream of texts. The last asked me to call. Nic told me the surgeon had to let Lizzie go.

I texted my then-boyfriend. He asked if there was anything he could do. I replied: 'No. Lizzie was the reason I left London for the country. It was all for nothing.'

Unbeknown to me, he asked Nic for my flight details. I'd never have told him, as I hate being seen after a long-haul flight. But as I wheeled my case through nothing-to-declare at dawn, I spotted him. He looked like a ghost.

He took my case and I crumpled: it was like the closing credits in Love Actually. My throat had swollen due to sobbing on the plane, so we walked in silence to the lifts and he saw me to my car.

He had risen at an ungodly hour, parked, waited, just to see me for ten minutes, as I couldn't face company on the drive back to Yorkshire. As I pulled away, he became small in my rear-view mirror. But he filled a corner of the huge space Lizzie left in my heart.

THE CLICHE I YEARNED FOR

By Esther Walker

For many years I declared Valentine's Day 'rubbish', 'ridiculous', 'not even a real thing', 'just a gimmick invented by shops'.

Then, an epiphany: I realised I only said that because no boyfriend ever liked me enough to get me so much as a single, scentless, cellophane-wrapped rose.

Dismissing the day made me feel like a modern feminist rather than an unloved girlfriend. Really, I wanted to be like the other girls in the office who were buried alive under flowers on February 14. I was just too scared to admit it.

Esther Walker says she had always wanted to be lavished with flowers on Valentine's Day by her husband Giles Coren (pictured together)

A few more loveless years passed until I met my now-husband Giles Coren (pictured with me), just before Valentine's Day in 2007.

He seemed quite romantic  he always saw me safely home and booked nice restaurants  so I confessed my uncool yearning for flowers. 'I see,' he said.

A week later, the biggest bunch of roses I have ever seen arrived at my desk. Lush and scented, they bloomed among glossy foliage. I kept them next to my computer for three weeks until I started to get complaints. And then a few more weeks after that.

Other women probably consider only diamonds and trips to Paris to be sweeping gestures. They might think, 'So what? Just a bunch of flowers.' But to me, then, it was the epitome of romance.

After eleven years of marriage, Giles remains romantic (I've had the diamonds and the trips to Paris), but it will always be those flowers I remember most fondly.

GIRLFRIENDS ARE FOREVER

By Mariella Frostrup

I don't approve of Valentine's Day but I appreciate romance  and the most beautiful gesture I ever experienced came from an anonymous admirer.

I was about 25 and living with my boyfriend. On Valentine's morning, the post delivered an exquisite handwritten version of the lyrics to Cole Porter's These Foolish Things. There were little watercoloured illustrations of musical notes and pretty flowers down the side of the page.

It must have taken someone hours to complete. So to never claim the credit seems, to me, the ultimate romantic act.

In my opinion, true romance ought to be entirely spontaneous, not forced. I would far rather get a bunch of flowers on June 2 or November 16 than on February 14. High expectations make it the most impossible date ever.

Mariella Frostrup (pictured) says she doesn't approve of Valentine's Day but the most beautiful gesture she has ever experienced came from an anonymous admirer

So Valentine's Day is usually marked in my diary for dinner out with a single or similarly cynical girlfriend.

In fact, the other grand gesture that has touched me most in my life was from my friend Sarah, when I was 22 and flying to America for work on Valentine's Day.

She made me a little beribboned box which she told me to open on the plane. I was set for an exhausting flight. But when I opened it, there was half a bottle of champagne, a glass, a bag of chocolate almonds and a miniature copy of Much Ado About Nothing.

It was such a thoughtful thing to do that it made me cry. I had a wonderful flight, drinking my drink, eating almonds and trying to read the minuscule Shakespeare print, thinking all the while that love will come and go, but girlfriends are there for life.

Desire: 100 Of Literature's Sexiest Stories, edited by Mariella Frostrup and the Erotic Review, is out now (15, Head of Zeus).

SAUCINESS AT THE IVY

By Rowan Pelling

My tweedy, old-school husband Angus isn't given to lavish romantic gestures. But in the first year of our marriage, on February 14, 1996, he astonished me by announcing he'd booked a table at The Ivy that evening.

This was in the days when there was only one Ivy, in London's West End, packed with celebrities, and the waiting list was ten miles long. The plan was so far out of his comfort zone, and so entirely my idea of a treat, that I knew he must really love me.

Mind you, the gesture also had much to do with the fact that he had just been made editor of GQ magazine and had an office full of staff to help squeeze him into exclusive joints.

Rowan Pelling (pictured) was surprised by her old-school husband Angus with a trip to The Ivy

I put on my glitziest frock and met him outside the restaurant. I couldn't believe it when I saw he was wearing a Paul Smith suit (this is a man famous for teaming ancient corduroys with moth-eaten Shetland jumpers).

We were ushered in, offered champagne and swept to one of the best tables, right next to an equally loved-up Nigella Lawson with her husband John Diamond. The only problem was the Domestic Goddess's proximity made it hard to listen to my husband's sweet nothings, as I was desperately trying to eavesdrop.

This was in the days when there was only one Ivy, in London's West End, packed with celebrities

Although I heard loud and clear when he said I should have whatever I fancied on the menu. As a parsimonious Scot, such sentiments didn't come easy to him. It was slightly sadistic of me to order a steak, medium rare, as he's a vegetarian. But the most unlikely part of the whole evening was that, as we started the dessert, I felt a hand on my thigh under the long white tablecloth.

My husband was being inappropriate in a public place.

This brazenness was unprecedented. Generally, he won't hold my hand in public for fear that it's a near-criminal PDA. Yet here he was, being intimate at two metres' removed from Nigella.

I must confess, shameless hussy that I was, I relished every second. But it was a one-off occasion. We never went to The Ivy again and there were no more frolics under the cover of table linen.

Nowadays, I get a hand-drawn owl card every year (the Owl and the Pussycat). But I'll always have my Ivy escapade warm in memory.

SUPERCAR WEEKEND AWAY

By Nick Curtis

It was the vulgar mid-1990s and I was in the first flush of love with my now-wife Ann when she mentioned, completely offhand, that her favourite car was an E-Type Jaguar.

Nick Curtis (pictured) rented an E-Type Jaguar for Valentine's weekend

So I rented one for a Valentine's weekend, an impeccable silver convertible with wire wheels and a terrifying V8 engine.

I handed over a month's wages to a rental place, then drove to Ann's flat. The car was as long and low as a racing yacht but handled like a rollerskate strapped to a jet engine. Ann virtually turned cartwheels when she saw it, and when I told her we were booked into the Grand Hotel in Brighton.

The first hours of the jaunt were anything but romantic as we grunted through gridlock. At traffic lights, we drew jealous glances and obscene gestures. Thwarted Mondeo drivers tried to beat me off the mark as the lights turned amber. But once we were past Croydon it was like flying, Ann's blonde hair streaming back in the unseasonal sunshine as she sang along to Janis Joplin on the stereo.

When we slid up to the Grand, porters fought to park the car. The hotel had a sea view and a Jacuzzi that we managed to flood. Then on Sunday we visited my parents in Hove and Ann's parents in Surrey and I took them for a spin: I remember my mother-in-law's joyous laugh as we sped round the M25 and my cautious father-in-law urging me to put my foot down.

So my grand romantic gesture mostly involved being stuck in traffic in a supercar while strangers abused us, then taking old people for a jaunt. And I've still never been able to top it.

Nick rented a impeccable silver convertible with wire wheels and a terrifying V8 engine

LOVE IS... TRACKING DOWN THE PERFECT SUEDE SANDALS

By Marian Keyes

Four thousand years ago (actually it was February 1997, to be accurate), I was newly published and about to go to Australia on my first book tour.

I was wild with excitement and also a nervous wreck (what if the Australians hated me and no one bought my book?). The one thing that would magically make everything OK would be the right pair of sandals.

As it was February, sandals were thin on the ground. But in Hobbs, near closing time, I found the perfect pair  black suede, not too high, not too low. Saved!

Except they didn't have them in my size (three). So my only option was to spend the next day going round London, visiting branches of Hobbs and hoping to get lucky. Alas, no time for that. I was working that day, then going straight to the airport.

Although now, of course, there was no point in going to Australia. Without those sandals, everything was ruined.

At home, I told my husband Tony my woes and he sympathised energetically, then suddenly became animated.

The author Marian Keyes (pictured) has told how her husband Tony tracked down some shoes she had wanted

'Describe them to me,' he said. Then, 'No, draw a picture of them!' So I did. The next day he set off, a man on a mission, his Tube pass in his pocket, the illustration of the sandals folded under his arm.

Visiting several branches of Hobbs, he 'did asking'  an activity he finds so difficult that he tries to avoid it to this day. Like an old-fashioned private investigator, he approached assistants, unfolded the page and asked: 'Have you seen these sandals?'

The first store denied all knowledge of them, the second admitted stocking them but not in size three, and at the third store he got lucky. Yes! He and the woman compared the sandals against the drawing and agreed they looked very similar.

We had no smartphones back then, so he couldn't send me a photo but he bought them anyway  and they were the right ones. Disaster averted.

We went to Australia and the sandals acquitted themselves triumphantly. This is still the loveliest thing anyone has ever done for me.

Grown Ups is out in paperback now (8.99, Penguin). The second series of Between Ourselves airs on BBC Radio 4 on February 18.
Un A, a North Korean presenter of "Echo DPRK," a YouTube channel believed to be managed by the North Korean regime, introduces goods at a department store in Pyongyang. / Korea Times file





By Kang Seung-woo







North Korea is fighting international sanctions imposed on the country due to its nuclear and missile tests.







This fight against punitive actions has reached YouTube, where its channels have been deleted over claims they violate the platform's terms of service, with the country continuously attempting to revive its propaganda channels.







"Red Star TV," a YouTube channel hosted by a North Korean living in Russia, has been in operation again after suffering its seventh shutdown in January by the Google subsidiary.







However, while reopening the channel, North Korea is emphasizing that "Red Star TV" is an informational project of the DPRK International Solidarity Group, which disseminates "true information" about the latest events in the world and on the Korean Peninsula. The DPRK refers to the official name of North Korea, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.







Whenever its YouTube channels were deleted, North Korea has protested, claiming that the videos were aimed at correcting the international community's misconceptions about the country.







As soon as YouTube deleted "Echo of Truth," formerly "Echo DPRK," last December, Un A, its female North Korean presenter, said the channel neither provided false information nor criticized individuals.







The channel, which had nearly 50,000 subscribers, was reborn in the same month as "Echo of Truth Returns."







"All I know is it was blocked in violation of Google policy, although I don't remember myself blaming anyone or spreading false information in my videos," Un A said in a post of "Echo of Truth Returns."







The replacement channel has also been suspended by YouTube since January.







Currently, a North Korean YouTube channel that still stands out is "New DPRK," which features seven-year-old Ri Su-jin describing the daily lives of children in Pyongyang. The number of its subscribers is 18,000.







The North Korean regime has taken advantage of this new method of propaganda, as its leader Kim Jong-un pursues practical methods of promoting his country.



Suzan Bateson, Executive Director, Alameda County Community Food Bank In contemplating what is best for ACCFB and our community, it seemed right to work with the board on a transition to an energetic, accomplished leader who will help us grow...

Alameda County Community Food Bank announced today that Suzan Bateson, executive director, will leave her post in 2021.

The past several months have made a few things clear: the economic impact of the pandemic is going to last for years, the ACCFB staff and board are amazing, and our financial position is incredibly strong, said Bateson. In contemplating what is best for ACCFB and our community, it seemed right to work with the board on a transition to an energetic, accomplished leader who will help us grow, forge new partnerships, and deepen our critical racial-equity work  and could serve the community for the duration of this enormous recovery effort.

Despite the deep challenges of the pandemic, ACCFB is continuing to meet the needs of the community.



In the first half of this fiscal year (July-December), ACCFB distributed more than 26 million pounds of food, a 66 percent increase from a year earlier.

ACCFB is investing deeply in its network of agency members, helping build capacity in response to vastly increased needs stemming from COVID-19.

The organizations financial position remains incredibly strong; generous support from the community reflects confidence in ACCFBs staff and their work.

"Suzan has led ACCFB with such a tremendous heart, it will be hard to replace her," said Candi Thornton, founder and director of Arsola's Distribution Center and Community Services, who also serves as a member of ACCFB's board of directors and the ACCFB Network Chairperson. "I am deeply grateful for her support and advice over the years, which has helped build up my organization and the rest of the network to have the greatest impact possible. At the same time, I'm excited at the potential for a new executive director to partner with and continue building upon the incredible foundation that Suzan has helped build."

Suzan joined Alameda County Community Food Bank as executive director in 2001. During her two-decade tenure, the Food Bank has grown its annual budget from $3.75M to more than $20M; established a permanent headquarters site in Oakland; tripled its roster of employees; and more than quadrupled its annual food distribution  with a target of more than 52 million pounds this fiscal year ending June 30, 2021.

In 2005, Suzan was the first Food Bank leader in the nation to stop the distribution of carbonated beverages, promising the ACCFB board of directors that she would replace the million-pound loss in distribution with farm-fresh produce. Since then, the Food Bank has increased its distribution of produce, from 1 million to 20 million pounds annually, accounting for more than half of the total food distributed prior to the COVID-19 response. Under the current strategic plan, Alameda County Community Food Bankthrough its multitude of innovative serviceswill provide the equivalent of 120 million meals worth of food by 2023. Those services include one of the nations first food bank-based CalFresh (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) outreach and application assistance programs, and nationally-recognized anti-hunger advocacy efforts. The organizations success and bold approach earned it Feeding Americas national food bank of the year in 2016, and numerous other recognitions during Suzans tenure.

In 2020 Suzan received Feeding Americas prestigious John van Hengel Fellowship, awarded to one food bank leader annually in recognition of their local impact, national influence, commitment, and entrepreneurial spirit in hunger relief. Suzan is a 2017 inductee into the Alameda County Womens Hall of Fame, which honors local outstanding women for their contributions to the community. She is currently chair of Feeding Americas Western Region and serves on the Feeding America national advisory committee. Suzan has formerly served as both board chair and board member of the California Association of Food Banks and was an inaugural member of Feeding Americas Policy Engagement and Advocacy Committee (PEAC).

Its clear that filling the executive director position after Suzan will be no small feat, says Beth Strachan, ACCFB board chair. Still, there is so much work to be done, and while change is always hard, we have every confidence in this organization to continue blazing trails to meet the needs of the community, despite the deep challenges of the COVID pandemic. Among Suzans greatest accomplishments as a leader is hiring and nurturing a passionate and committed leadership team, which offers decades of experience to every core function, from fundraising to operations.

The ACCFB board has engaged Korn Ferry, one of the countrys best-rated firms for executive search, which has a deep commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion by design, not by default. Bateson will stay through the transition to ensure continuity and a solid handoff to the new leader.

# # #

About Alameda County Community Food Bank

Alameda County Community Food Bank  Feeding Americas 2016-2017 Food Bank of the Year  has been at the forefront of hunger relief efforts in the Bay Area since 1985. While in COVID-19 emergency response, the Food Bank serves 1 in 4 Alameda County residents by distributing food through a network of 350 food pantries, soup kitchens, and other community organizations, as well as direct distribution and COVID-relief programs including school programs, home delivery and contactless drive-through distributions. This year, the Food Bank will distribute the equivalent of 43 million meals. For 14 consecutive years, Alameda County Community Food Bank has received Charity Navigators top rating  Four Stars  ranking the organization among the top 1 percent of charities nationwide. Learn more at http://www.accfb.org
City of Sydney Liberal councillor Christine Forster has announced she will not stand for preselection for the upcoming local government elections.

Cr Forster, the sister of former prime minister Tony Abbott, took to social media to reveal she would be retiring from council to focus on her full-time job as a media adviser for petroleum company Woodside Energy.

City of Sydney Liberal councillor Christine Forster wont stand for preselection in the upcoming local government elections. Credit:Peter Braig

Ive been privileged to meet people from all walks of life who share my passion for our city and my commitment to striving to make it the best place in the world to live, work and visit, Cr Forster said on Wednesday morning.

Its been wonderful to be able to support, encourage and facilitate their ideas and projects alongside my own vision for Sydney.
Zauatkhan Tursyn held a protest outside the Chinese Consulate in Kazakhstan's largest city, Almaty, on February 10 after a Kazakh court found her son Baibolat Kunbolatuly guilty of violating the law on mass gatherings. Kunbolaty was sent to jail for 10 days after he protested outside the consulate the previous day demanding the Chinese authorities release his brother, Baimurat, from a so-called reeducation camp in Xinjiang.
Cawthorn nominates seniors for service academy appointments

Nominees for service academy appointments pose with U.S. Rep. Madison Cawthorn.

U.S. Rep. Madison Cawthorn nominated six high school seniors from the 11th Congressional District for appointment to service academies and met with the candidates recently at his district office in the Grove Street Courthouse.

Posing with Cawthorn, nominees, their high school and the service academy theyre applying for, from left, are Luke Artz, Enka High School, U.S. Military Academy (West Point), U.S. Naval Academy; Connor Mailander, Carolina Day School, Naval Academy; Graham Green, Brevard High School, Air Force Academy; Luther Leblanc, Veritas Christian Academy, West Point, Naval Academy; John Ross, Hendersonville High School, West Point, Naval Academy. Unable to attend that day was Derek Meaney, McDowell County High School, West Point, Naval Academy, Air Force Academy. The applicants still must be admitted by the service academy they hope to attend. A nomination from their congressman is a part of the application process, said Hal Weatherman, Cawthorns district director.
Consumers are rallying to British food products to help local suppliers suffering from post-Brexit export chaos and a drop in demand from pubs and restaurants due to coronavirus lockdowns.

Top chefs are among those supporting UK seafood producers who are facing huge problems exporting to Europe, with Rick Stein's son Jack buying 220lb of lobster a week from a struggling Welsh supplier.

Sales of lamb have rocketed by 14% year-on-year, according to figures from data firm Kantar, with demand especially high for locally-sourced meat sold by high street butchers.

The National Farmers' Union told MailOnline it had seen a 'surge' in demand for British food since the start of the pandemic, and said public support was vital amid continuing border chaos.

It comes as a survey found that half of British consumers said they would buy more home-grown food after Brexit. Supporting farmers and protecting the environment were among the most popular reasons for doing so.

London-based chef Stevie Parle has been selling Scottish langoustines for home delivery through his Joy Portobello shop

A social media campaign saw hundreds of customers support the Cornish Cheese Co by putting in orders - although there is still plenty of cheese left to sell

The Cornish Cheese Co, which sells blue cheese made in the county, was left with a mountain of extra stock after the closure of pubs and restaurants.

A social media campaign saw hundreds of customers help them out by putting in orders - although there is still plenty of cheese left to sell.

What is the new paperwork delaying food exports from Britain to the EU? EU customs declarations and extra checks are now required on food moving from Britain to the EU. This demands time-consuming paperwork which is then delayed further by customs checks. The new red tape includes: Export health certificate - Required for every food item to prove it is safe to eat. Customs export declarations - Describes the goods being exported. Sanitary and phytosanitary checks - For certain live plant and animal products including root vegetables, leafy vegetables and most fruits. Seafood suppliers face even more red tape, including a catch certificate, endangered species permit, common health entry document, storage document and processing statement. Shellfish producers have also been clobbered by a Brussels ban on selling live mussels, oysters, clams and cockles to EU member states. The live animals can only be transported to the Continent only if they have been treated in expensive purification plants. Advertisement

The UK seafood industry has been badly hit by Brexit-related delays, with companies complaining that border delays had left their produce rotting in lorries.

Firms must now fill in seven baffling new forms to send just one species of fish to the EU, including an export health certificate, catch certificate, customs export declaration, endangered species permit, common health entry document, storage document and processing statement.

Shellfish producers have also been clobbered by a Brussels ban on selling live mussels, oysters, clams and cockles to EU member states.

The live animals can only be transported to the Continent only if they have been treated in expensive purification plants.

Jack Stein, chef director across the Rick Stein Restaurant Group, is buying lobster from Welsh supplier Syren Shellfish to help it survive Brexit-related export problems.

The lobster is cooked and sold in Stein's at Home menu boxes, which are sent out to local homes in Padstow.

'I messaged [Syren] on Facebook and said we'll take whatever you've got because we need it, if you've got a shipment stuck at a port call us anytime,' he told The Caterer.

London-based chef Stevie Parle has been selling Scottish langoustines for home delivery through his Joy Portobello shop.

He posted on Twitter: 'Wow. Thanks everyone for ordering these. We sold thousands. Lango [langoustines] guy has never had such a big order.'

Meanwhile, online delivery site Local and Independent is helping shellfish producers to sell direct to British consumers, and has waived commission on all sales for the first three months.

Its director Craig Allen said: 'One of the reasons we set up was to help out fishermen and farmers in these changing times.

'We also think the EU are playing games with our fishing industry and this will make life harder for British fishermen and encourage more European fishermen to take advantage of this change, again having an immediate knock on effect on our industry.'

Aldi is also supporting UK seafood by selling British oysters 3.99/360g for a pack of six, starting from tomorrow.

Jack Stein, chef director across the Rick Stein Restaurant Group, is buying lobster from Welsh supplier Syren Shellfish to help it survive Brexit-related export problems

Cornish fishermen rebrand catches to tempt UK customers after EU rules hit exports Cornish fisherman are to cast aside the names of two of their most common catches and rebrand them in a bid to lure in more customers. Local industry chiefs fear the names 'spider crab' and 'megrim' might be putting customers off. In a bid to drum up more UK business in the wake of Brexit, they are looking at the successful rebrand of the popular monkfish, previously known as anglerfish, for inspiration. Under the plans Cornish fisherman will hook the name megrim and replace it with 'Cornish sole'. Spider crab will be rebranded as 'Cornish king crab'. Advertisement

A poll late last year found that half of British adults intend to buy more UK products after Brexit.

The survey of 2,000 people found that two thirds want to support the economy, while many thought it was simply a logical choice.

And everyone asked said it was important for major brands to support British producers following the UK's exit from the EU.

Dean Towey, from Princes, owner of food production company Crosse & Blackwell which commissioned the survey, said: 'It's clear from the research that consumers are more committed than ever to buying local produce and supporting British farmers.'

The public's appetite for lamb increased over Christmas as Kantar data showed retail sales of 68 million in the 4-week period to 27 December 2020. This was an increase of 14% on both 2018 and 2019.

Glesni Phillips, from Hybu Cig Cymru  Meat Promotion Wales (HCC) - told Farming UK: 'It's encouraging to see new groups of consumers responding to campaigns to inspire them to try new family recipes at home.

'Of course, sales of lamb in restaurants and hotels have been much lower, but demand from the retail sector has been strong.

'We've seen growing sales across all types of British retailers, but especially in independent butchers, which is a very interesting trend.'

NFU President Minette Batters said: 'Since the start of the pandemic we have seen a welcome surge in people looking specifically for British produce and wanting to buy direct from farmers, farm shops and butchers, and looking for the Union Jack and Red Tractor logo when shopping.

'With businesses facing new challenges trading and exporting, the continued support of the public is invaluable.

'British farmers work tirelessly to ensure the highest health and welfare for their livestock and are world leaders in producing climate-friendly food.'
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Party General Secretary and State President Nguyen Phu Trong on February 10 offered incense to late President Ho Chi Minh at House No.67 in Hanoi

on the occasion of the 91st founding anniversary of the Communist Party of Vietnam and the traditional Lunar New Year (Tet).

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Party General Secretary and State President Nguyen Phu Trong offers incense to late President Ho Chi Minh at House No. 67 in Hanoi (Photo: VNA)

Talking with officials and staff of the President Ho Chi Minh relic site, Trong hailed their efforts to fulfill the entrusted missions to study, preserve and promote values of the exhibits and documents about the late President.

He took the occasion to wish them a warm Tet holiday with good health and happiness, hoping they will continue following President Ho Chi Minhs thought, morality and lifestyle, as well as popularising his life and career to local people and international friends.

Laying stress on the success of the 13th National Party Congress, Trong believed that the whole Party, people and army will promote solidarity to build Vietnam into a prosperous and democratic nation with an equitable and civilised society to be on par with powers across the five continents as expected by President Ho Chi Minh.

President Ho Chi Minh led the country to success in its struggle for national independence. On September 2, 1945, he read the Declaration of Independence, proclaiming to the world the foundation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, now the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

He was a talented leader and a national hero who devoted his whole life to the cause of national independence and freedom and happiness for the people while tirelessly striving for peace and progress in the world.

Located in the President Ho Chi Minh relic site, House No. 67 was named after the year 1967 when it was built, in which the late leader worked and passed away. It was the venue of Politburo meetings during the fiercest years of war./VNA


Spains central government has given the green light to the regions to immediately begin giving the AstraZeneca vaccine to groups of "essential" workers.

This will include members of the police forces, military, firefighters and teachers - as long as they are not older than 55 years of age.

Last Friday the Ministry of Health vetoed the immunisation of people over this age with the AstraZeneca vaccine. The decision has led to a major modification of the national vaccination strategy due to the impossibility of using the AstraZeneca doses for the next target group - people aged from 80 upwards.

The government department also confirmed its decision that the 196,800 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine that arrived at the weekend and the 1,613,775 vaccines from this laboratory that are due to arrive in Spain this February will be given to "active health and social care professionals and workers" who are not on the frontline of the fight against Covid.

It clarified that included in this group are "people at risk of exposure due to their work activity" including physiotherapists, occupational therapists, pharmacy personnel, home help services, staff at centres for children, day centre personnel and workers in the prison service.

In parallel to these groups, the ministry headed by Carolina Darias has also authorised the autonomous regions to inoculate the British vaccine to a new group, which includes workers "with an essential function for society".

This group will include members of the police forces (National Police, Guardia Civil, regional police and local police); emergency personnel ("firefighters and others"); and the Armed Forces. Likewise, teaching staff - including nursery, primary, secondary and special needs - will be considered as "essential".

Journalists

The new vaccination strategy includes many of the suggestions from the regions although some had asked for the inclusion of other more controversial groups such as waiters, taxi drivers, service station employees and journalists.

Health Minister Darias insisted that "the population groups that are established (by the government) and the order that is established, must be followed by the autonomous regions because they are binding on all of them."

The vast majority of regions have already completed or are about to complete the double inoculation of the first "target group" - care home residents and their caregivers and frontline health personnel in the fight against the virus.
New Delhi: The Delhi Police has arrested five more people in connection with the violence that took place on Republic Day at Burari, officials said.

Surjeet alias Deepu (26), Satveer Singh alias Sachin (32), Sandeep Singh (30), Devender Singh (35) and Ravi Kumar (24) were arrested, they said.

Arrest

According to police, three of them were from Nehru Vihar and two from Rohini.

Actor-activist Deep Sidhu, who was "a prominent player" behind the violence at the Red Fort, was arrested by police on Monday night.
Robert Irwin has landed himself in hot water with his heavily pregnant sister Bindi.

The 17-year-old and his mother Terri appeared on Channel Seven's Sunrise on Wednesday to discuss season three of their reality show Crikey! It's the Irwins.

When Terri, 56, talked about how overjoyed they were about Bindi and her husband Chandler Powell's impending arrival, Robert made a passing comment that had everyone in stitches.

'I am in so much trouble': Robert Irwin made a hilarious gaffe on live TV for his remark about his heavily pregnant sister Bindi on Wednesday. During an interview on Sunrise he said Bindi was 'massive now'

'She's massive now,' he declared, as his mother jokingly punched him in the arm.

In an attempt to save himself from the embarrassing remark, Robert added: 'Like, in a good way. It's special.'

'Spoken like a true little brother,' co-host Samantha Armytage quipped.

'Spoken like a true little brother': In an attempt to save himself from the embarrassing remark about pregnant Bindi, Robert added: 'Like, in a good way. It's special'

David 'Kochie' Koch then jokingly asked if Bindi was going to a hospital and not their wildlife clinic.

Robert said: 'She's not going to our wildlife hospital, no. We do have incredible facilities here though. She could if she wanted to!'

Terri also got in on the joke and added: 'There is a little spot between the injured kangaroos and koalas.'

Hilarious: David 'Kochie' Koch then jokingly asked him if his sister was going to a hospital and not their wildlife clinic. Robert said: 'She's not going to our wildlife hospital, no. We do have incredible facilities here though. She could if she wanted to!'

Samantha then told the young Wildlife Warrior that he was in 'so much trouble' with Bindi for his on-air gaffe.

Robert, who was still flushed with embarrassment, agreed, saying: 'I'm in so much trouble!'

Elsewhere in the interview, Terri mentioned that Bindi is due to give birth next month.

It's a girl! Bindi and her husband Chandler Powell announced their baby news in August 2020 and revealed their are expecting a daughter the following month

Just married: The young couple were married on March 25, in a makeshift ceremony at Australia Zoo, just before Covid pandemic lockdown

Bindi and Chandler announced their baby news in August 2020 and revealed their are expecting a daughter the following month.

The young couple were married on March 25 in a makeshift ceremony at Australia Zoo, just before the Covid-19 lockdown took effect.

They first met in November 2013 when Chandler, who hails from Florida, was touring Australia for a wakeboarding competition.
Paris Hilton is known for a lot of thingspartying, scandals, jail time Unfortunately, her name doesnt always conjure up positive connotations. However, Hilton is actually a phenomenal businesswoman with a creative mind. Over the years, shes created a brand that includes numerous product lines and boutiques around the globe.

In addition to her product lines, shes also built quite a music career. She has a passion for EDM and loves being a DJ. Shes become one of the most sought-after female DJs in the world, and she loves every minute of it. Her first experience as a DJ certainly wasnt flawless, though

What has Paris Hilton been doing after she got out of jail?

Paris Hilton | Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagic

After her famous stint in jail in 2007, Paris Hilton swore she was a changed woman, and she was going to lead a more productive life. Shed become well-known for being splashed across the tabloids, always involved in some sort of scandalous behavior.

Her arrest for a DUI and the subsequent charges for driving with a suspended license provided even more fodder for the tabloids. People were shocked when she was given actual prison time for her offense, as celebrities usually get off with a slap on the wrist in those situations.

Her sentence ended up being harsher than a regular citizen would have received, because the court was trying to prove that they dont let celebrities get away with everything.

She served a few days, then was released and placed under house arrest instead, due to a medical condition. However, the judge reversed that order and a few days later, Hilton found herself right back in her tiny cell. She spent 23 days in jail, which was five times more than the average person served for similar charges.

Once Hilton was released, she vowed to change her ways. She focused on several endeavors, including launching numerous product lines and creating a music career. By 2014, she was named the Best Breakthrough DJ, and quickly became the highest-paid female DJ in the world. She now has over 50 boutiques worldwide, selling products from handbags to accessories to fragrances.

What happened the first time she went solo as a DJ?

According to Even the Rich, Hiltons first solo DJ performance took place at the Pop Music Festival in Sao Paulo, Brazil in 2012. As always, she showed up on stage in style, sporting diamond-encrusted headphones and a black, glittering bodysuit. Her performance wasnt as flawless as her outfit, howevernot even close.

First, a strange hand appears from under the table, adjusting the levels on her mixer. Then, after introducing her new single with Afrojack, she accidentally starts playing a Rihanna song at the same time. Maybe the crowd thought it was just a new mash-up, but it sounded pretty horrible.

Although her first gig didnt go super smoothly, the crowd didnt seem to mind too much. They were still dancing and having a good time. When Hiltons face flashed up on the jumbo screen behind her, she looked as cool as a cucumber, smiling and winking into the audience.

Despite not-so-great reviews, Hilton was offered another DJ gig, this time at a club in Cannes. She was still learning, but she drew big crowds and even bigger paychecks. By the time she played in Ibiza, she was earning $2.7 million for four nights. Some other DJs werent too happy with Hiltons sudden successthey felt she had no talent and was drawing crowds because of her name.

Deadmau5 (pronounced dead mouse)a Canadian musician, producer, and DJwas quick to call out Hilton. He said she was a phony, but Hilton came right back at him, tweeting Sorry that Im #killingit while doing what I love and live for

Paris Hilton lets the world in with her documentary

RELATED: Why Paris Hilton Is Demanding This Utah School Be Shut Down

Hilton grew up in the lap of luxury, leading a very privileged life. She was given basically anything she wanted, and grew into a very rebellious teen. Her parents sent her to multiple reform schools in an attempt to keep her on the straight and narrow. It never worked, as Hilton made a habit of running away from them.

She continued to drink and party, with the reform schools having very little effect. That was the story up until she found herself at Provo Canyon in Utah. It was her time at this school that was the driving force behind her 2020 documentary, This is Paris.

The documentary shows a very different side of Hilton than we have ever seen. She is vulnerable, and seems far more honest and real than the cool, aloof image shes created. She talks about the traumatic experiences that she and other students at Provo are still struggling to move past. This is Paris finally gives fans a glimpse of the real Paris Hilton.
An Israeli company unveiled the first 3D-printed rib-eye steak on Tuesday, using a culture of live animal tissue, in what could be a leap forward for lab-grown meat once it receives regulatory approval.

During the coronavirus pandemic, alternative protein products have soared in popularity, prompting nearly every multinational food corporation to hasten to bring its own versions to market. Frequently plant-based products have been patties or processed nuggets - "everyday" foods easier for companies to produce - that aim to ease the climate effects of the worst offender: Americans eat nearly 50 billion burgers a year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Aleph Farms' new 3D bioprinting technology- which uses living animal cells as opposed to plant-based alternatives - allows for premium whole-muscle cuts to come to market, broadening the scope of alt-meat in what is expected to be a rich area of expansion for food companies. A survey of more than 1,000 U.S. adults, conducted by MRS research company for agriculture company Proagrica, showed that 39% of American consumers have considered going vegetarian or vegan since the pandemic began. Health concerns, climate change and animal welfare are drivers.

Several other companies are sprinting to capture what is expected to be a robust appetite for what is often called "cultivated meat." San Diego-based BlueNalu has announced its intent to bring cell-based seafood products to market in the second half of this year; Israel-based Future Meat Technologies and Dutch companies Meatable and Mosa Meat aim to have cultivated meat products in the market by 2022, each with proprietary methods of growing meat tissues from punch biopsies from live or slaughtered animals.

But the lack of a regulatory framework could stymie the companies' race to market. In December, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu became the world's first head of state to eat cultivated meat, and that same month Singapore became the first country in the world to grant regulatory approval for the sale of cultivated meat. It remains unclear when other countries will follow suit. In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration has not set a date for when it will rule on the matter.

The new meat-making process, developed with research partners at the Israel Institute of Technology, prints living cells that are incubated on a plant-based matrix to grow, differentiate and interact to achieve the texture and qualities of a real steak. It has a system similar to an animal's vascular system, which allows cells to mature and nutrients to move across thicker tissue, resulting in a steak with a similar shape and structure to traditional cow tissue before and during cooking.

"It's not just proteins, it's a complex, emotional product," says Aleph chief executive Didier Toubia. He says the product mirrors the sensory quality, texture, flavor and fatty marbling of a traditionally produced rib-eye.

Toubia's claim will be quickly tested. Unlike plant-based burger patties or meat strips used in a more complex dish, Aleph's rib-eye will often be served unadorned and at the center of a plate - with no bun, sauce or other ingredients to disguise it. Toubia said the company will even be able to adapt the steak to a specific country or palate, for instance, making it more or less tender, according to a consumer's taste.

"With cows, the breed has a role, but the quality comes from the feed. With our cultivated meat it is similar," Toubia said. "We control the cultivation process, and we can design meat specifically for a market, adjusting the amount of collagen and connective tissues and fat, to tailor meat to specific requirements. The idea is not to replace traditional agriculture but to build a second category of meat."

Toubia acknowledges it will still take some time to bring products to market and to scale up so its products are price-competitive with the traditional ones. With a focus on higher-end, higher-quality products, he says, being first is not a primary goal.

"From our standpoint, time to market is important, but time to acceptance is more important," he said. "The companies that drive impact aren't necessarily the ones first to launch - it's Tesla versus the Nissan Leaf. And in any new technology that is initially expensive, like solar panels, cost goes down due to economies of scale."

Toubia says Aleph Farms has invested $14 million in the development of its thin-cut steak unveiled in 2018 (which did not use 3D bioprinting) and now this thicker, fattier rib-eye. He estimates it will be five years to achieve cost parity for cultivation of meat products at scale.

Seventy companies are now moving quickly to bring to market beef and other meat, poultry and seafood products derived from muscle tissue grown in a lab with cells harvested from a living animal. Last year was a landmark one for the industry, according to Caroline Bushnell, director of corporate engagement for the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit that promotes alternatives to traditional meat, dairy and eggs. Memphis Meats had a record-breaking $186 million second round of funding, followed by Mosa Meat's $75 million round later in the year.

In March 2019, the FDA and the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service agreed to establish a joint regulatory framework for human foods made from cultured cells of livestock and poultry, with the FDA overseeing cell banks and FSIS overseeing the processing, labeling and packaging of these products. In October 2020, the FDA issued a request for information on the labeling of cell-cultured seafoods, but no date has been set for the announcement of regulatory details.

Toubia is optimistic about being granted approval.

"Agencies have been very proactive in reaching out to industry and open to learning the space early on to assess the safety of such products," he said. "We've been interacting with the USDA and FDA for the past two and a half years, and we believe the U.S. may be one of the first countries to clear cellular meat."

Although the March 2019 agreement is the most current formal document specifically describing FDA and USDA interactions on cultured animal cell foods, the FDA said in a statement that it encourages firms working on the culture of animal cells for food use to contact the agency early in the development phase to begin discussions.

"The agencies have identified three specific topics (premarket assessment, labeling and transfer of jurisdiction) to be advanced by designated working groups and are collaborating in other ways," the FDA said in a statement. The agency's spokeswoman did not offer dates by which these will be advanced.

Toubia says the company's first products will reach the marketplace in the second half of 2022. He says because cultivated meat can be traced back to a specific cell, there will be greater transparency than with traditional animal agriculture, with no need for antibiotics. And because meat will be grown in a sterile environment in a closed system, it will be shipped with certified zero pathogens, which can potentially help preserve meat for a longer time.

Traditional animal agriculture has pushed back against plant-based meat, claiming common nomenclature was confusing to consumers, which has resulted in a flurry of state legislative activity and litigation around labeling. It is not clear whether the USDA will approve cell-based products to be labeled as "meat."
Restaurants will no longer be allowed to sell pre-packaged meals through arrangements with supermarkets and other outlets, as Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley definitively closed this loophole yesterday.

Rowley said this would not be allowed to continue, as it defeats the purpose of the public health regulations. Restaurants and street food vendors were among those businesses ordered to close to limit the movement of people and curb the spread of Covid-19.

Realty firm has tied up with co-working operator to set up six centres, comprising around 4,000 desks, in Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Chennai with an investment of about Rs 40 crore.

Bengaluru-based and will jointly invest to set up these centres and also share revenues.

These six centres, spread over 2 lakh square feet area, will come up at Prestige Group's commercial properties in the three cities.

"The total investment in setting up these six centre is around Rs 40 crore. Both the partners are investing," founder and CEO Amit Ramani told PTI.

He said all these centres will be operational between April and July this year.

Ramani said the company will target not just startups and SMEs but also mid- and large-sized corporations looking to decentralise their workplaces amidst the new normal.

"Our partnership with aligns us to provide world-class amenities and meet the ever-evolving demand of new-age workforce and organisations.

"Over the past few months, we are witnessing large corporates and MNCs turning towards a hybrid model and witnessing the merit in partnering with for the same," Ramani said.

Awfis intends to deepen this partnership further and expand across other micro-markets and buildings, he said.

"This partnership will help us to accelerate our plans to strengthen our office portfolio and increasing our offering to our large clients, while leveraging the strength of Awfis' proven credibility in the co-working space across India," said Juggy Marwaha, CEO, Prestige Office Ventures.

He remained bullish about the growth prospects of the Indian office market.

Of the six centres, four are located in Bengaluru's prime commercial locations, namely Koramangala, Outer Ring Road and two in Whitefield. The other two centres are at Guindy in Chennai and Begumpet in Hyderabad.

With a diverse portfolio across asset classes such as office, residential, retail and hospitality, Prestige Group is well established in Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kochi, Mysore, Mangalore, Goa, Ahmedabad and has now forayed into Mumbai, NCR and Pune.

Prestige Group has completed 112 commercial projects spread across 36 million square feet and is developing 24 projects spread across 42 million square feet in some of the major cities of the country.

In November, Prestige Estates Projects announced sale of large portfolio of office, retail and hotel properties to global investment firm Blackstone for an enterprise value of Rs 9,160 crore.

Awfis currently has 75 centres and 40,000 seats across 11 cities. It is a fully tech-enabled workspace solutions platform.

(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.)
Montreal, Feb 9 (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 10th Feb, 2021 ) :Air Canada announced Tuesday the suspension of 17 US and international routes until the end of April and layoffs of 1,500 workers, citing a drop in demand for travel after a tightening of public health restrictions to slow the spread of new Covid-19 variants.

The cancellations to be phased in over the coming days will affect flights between Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Boston, New York, Seattle and Washington as well as Bogota, Sao Paulo, Dublin, Dubai, Tel-Aviv, London, Hong Kong and Narita.

Canada's flagship airline said in a statement it will "also temporarily reduce its unionized workforce by 1,500 employees and an as yet undetermined number of managers." The decision is another blow to employees of Air Canada, which has slashed more than half its workforce -- or about 20,000 jobs -- since the start of the pandemic, including 1,900 in January.

Three other Canadian airlines last month also suspended flights, at Ottawa's behest, to sunbelt destinations in the Caribbean and Mexico to curb winter vacationing abroad.

This followed a recent tightening of public health restrictions on travel, including requiring travelers to Canada to quarantine in hotels at their own expense for up to three days under strict supervision while they await the results of mandatory PCR testing for the coronavirus.

As of Tuesday, Canada reported 810,000 cases of Covid-19 illnesses and almost 21,000 deaths.

Local airlines have asked the government for a bailout, but Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has insisted travelers must be reimbursed for cancelled trips and all flights within Canada -- the second largest nation in the world by geography -- be maintained.
File / Hearst Connecticut Media

GREENWICH  A local man has been charged with obtaining large quantities of the prescription pill Xanax through the mail and selling the medication, according to his arrest report.

Working with the U.S. Postal Police, Greenwich detectives searched a package that was delivered to the Cos Cob residence of Stephen Bridge, 32, of Decatur Lane, and seized about 1,000 Xanax pills, police announced Tuesday.

Under the biggest spotlight of his career, Bruce L. Castor Jr. stood in the well of the U.S. Senate and delivered the opening salvo of his defense in the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump.

By most accounts, it did not go well.

In a meandering, 50-minute speech Tuesday, the former Montgomery County commissioner and district attorney heaped praise upon the senators who will serve as jurors, calling them extraordinary people and patriots. He digressed into folksy anecdotes from little Bruces childhood in suburban Philadelphia. And he mystified his audience with an extended explanation on the difference between murder and manslaughter.

What he spent precious little time on was the central question of the day: Is it constitutional for a former president to face an impeachment trial?

And by its end, Castors rambling presentation had the internet howling, some GOP senators scratching their heads, and, according to CNN, Trump nearly screaming at the television.

Ive seen a lot of lawyers and a lot of arguments and that was  not one of the finest Ive seen, Sen. John Cornyn (R., Texas) said.

Even the right-wing cable channel Newsmax cut away from Castor to a confused-looking Alan Dershowitz, who defended Trump in his last impeachment trial.

 READ MORE: Searing images of the Capitol attack and arguments over the Constitution open Trumps impeachment trial

I have no idea what hes doing, Dershowitz said. There is no argument. I have no idea why hes saying what hes saying.

At least one person gave Castor a five-star review: Castor himself.

I thought we had a good day, he told reporters outside the Senate chamber.

That enduring confidence and Castors penchant for long-winded circumlocution should be familiar to anyone whos followed his decades-long career in Pennsylvania politics and law.

When he testified in Bill Cosbys sexual-assault case five years ago  about a non-prosecution agreement he maintains he signed with the former comedian  he began with a 20-minute recitation of his career and the awards he had won.

 READ MORE: More Philly lawyers are on Trumps impeachment defense team and one sued the president last year

There would be so many, he told the judge, it might be easier to submit a resume.

In interviews, Castor frequently recounts tales of his courtroom victories during his heyday as Montgomery Countys hard-charging DA.

And as he read notes hastily scratched on a yellow legal pad Tuesday, he appeared at times to be pining for those more familiar stomping grounds.

My name is Bruce Castor, and I am the lead prosecutor  err  lead counsel for the 45th president of the United States, he said, before apologizing. I was an assistant DA for such a long time that I keep saying prosecutor, but I do understand the difference.

He eventually moved on to a somewhat more focused defense: Allowing the impeachment trial  which he argued is unconstitutional and seeks to hold Trump accountable for speech protected by the First Amendment  to proceed would open the floodgates to more partisan use of impeachment in the future.

The political pendulum will shift one day, he said. And partisan impeachments will become commonplace.

 READ MORE: Bruce Castors impeachment trial speech spawns memes and confusion

But by then, Castor had already lost much of the room. Some GOP senators didnt mince words when speaking to reporters afterward.

I couldnt figure out where he was going, said Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R., Alaska). He spent 45 minutes going somewhere, but I dont think he helped with us better understanding where he was coming from on the constitutionality of this.

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R., La.) described the presentation as so bad that it prompted him to change his vote. He broke with most of his party and threw his support behind allowing the trial to continue, after previously voting that its unconstitutional because Trump is no longer in office.

Did you listen to it? he said of the defense presentation. It was disorganized, random ... [and] they did not talk about the issue at hand. If Im an impartial juror, and Im trying to make a decision based upon the facts as presented on this issue, then the House managers did a much better job.

That may have been part of the problem. Castor hadnt originally planned to lead off Trumps defense Tuesday, deferring that position to his cocounsel on the case, Alabama lawyer David Schoen.

But after a taut, emotional appeal from the lead Democratic House impeachment manager  featuring a startling 13-minute video recap of the Jan. 6 Capitol attack  the defense team reshuffled its plans.

 READ MORE: 5 things to know about Bruce Castor, the Montgomery County lawyer now repping Donald Trump

Ill be quite frank with you, Castor said on the Senate floor. We changed what we were going to do on account that we thought the House managers presentation was well-done.

No matter what senators think of Castor, its unlikely to change the outcome of the trial. Democrats need 17 Republicans to vote to convict, and only a handful have suggested theyre open to doing so.

Still, sources within Trumps defense team said the choice to put the folksier Castor up before the pugnacious Schoen was an attempt, as one put it, to lower the temperature in the room.

But, as a strategy, did it work? Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas), one of Trumps most ardent supporters, paused for several seconds before finally answering that question.

I dont think the lawyers did the most effective job, he told reporters. But Ill leave it to others to fill out the scorecard on that front.

Staff writer Jonathan Tamari contributed to this article.
Photos courtesy of Bravo

Bravo's "Top Chef" returns April 1, and two Houston chefs will be in the kitchen whipping it up.

Dawn Burrell and Sasha Grumman will be among 15 "cheftestants" competing for the coveted title of Top Chef, $250,000, a feature in "FOOD & WINE" magazine and an appearance at the annual "FOOD & WINE" Classic in Aspen.
Jenna Coleman has spoken about how the cast feared they were cursed while they filmed true crime thriller, The Serpent.

The actress, 34, plays the girlfriend of conman and murderer Charles Sobhraj, (Tahar Rahim), who preyed on and murdered Western tourists throughout Southeast Asia during the 1970s.

Appearing on Jessie Ware's Table Manners podcase, Jenna revealed why a string of setbacks made the cast think they were under a 'curse'.

The Victoria star also explained that the BBC drama was never actually filmed in India, and instead was shot mainly in Bangkok, Thailand, for the Thai storyline and Tring, Hertfordshire, for the parts set in India.

Superstitious: Jenna Coleman has spoken about how the cast feared they were cursed while they filmed the true crime thriller The Serpent

Jenna portrays the timid Marie-Andree as well as her alter ego, Monique, who helps boyfriend Charles trap his victims on their travels.

Discussing filming, she said: 'This job was the job we all call it 'The Serpent curse', so many things went wrong in the filming of it, so there was this whole other element that went into it.

'The shoot was supposed to take four months, it then took 13, so we all got to know each other really, really well.

'It's so weird for me now when I see people freaked out or scared of Tahar because he could not be more opposite to that character.'

Criminals: Jenna portrays the timid Marie-Andree as well as her alter ego, Monique, who helps boyfriend Charles trap his victims on their travels

The former Doctor Who star previously revealed how cast members 'went to the temples to get the curse lifted' after filming was halted due to the monsoon season and then the coronavirus pandemic.

Jenna continued: 'Our director, what does he call it? 'The Making of Michelangelo The Sistine Chapel', because they were trying to make it for years and years and years.

'It began, but it was the monsoon season, so it was Kanit house, we shot everything there first.

'We'd be doing all these party scenes, and within 2 minutes, you'd get downpour Monsoon rain, everyone ran inside. Have to quickly shoot something else.

Cursed? The former Doctor Who star previously revealed how cast members 'went to the temples to get the curse lifted' after filming was halted due to the monsoon season

'Where's the monkey? Let's shoot the monkey. And also, the Bangkok market scenes and things like that, were just rocking up.

'Were in all the real life of Bangkok there and shooting. I mean it was so much.'

Jenna continued how Tahar went to film another project but arrived back 'bald and really skinny'.

Setbacks: Jenna said: 'This job was the job we all call it 'The Serpent curse', so many things went wrong in the filming of it, so there was this whole other element that went into it'

The actress said: 'I just remember, he looked at me like "okay this is it", and suddenly we watched the news and it was like "coronavirus, borders in Paris might be beginning to shut".

'So we had four days left to shoot in Bangkok, and then we got our call sheets and then it was actually "youre flying home".

'We had four days left there, had to shoot in Budapest, got flown home, sat tight for 5/ 6 months, then in August we went to finish it. But we finished it in all places in Tring in Hertfordshire.'

The Serpent airs on Sunday, February 14 at 9pm on BBC One, with all episodes available now on BBC iPlayer.
SPRINGFIELD  The Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts announced its latest round of coronavirus relief funds on Wednesday, awarding $1.3 million to help prevent evictions and hunger and to address mental health needs.

Grants awarded from the COVID-19 Response Fund for the Pioneer Valley to date total $10.2 million to182 agencies in the Hampden, Hampshire and Franklin counties, the foundation said in a news release.

More people are struggling to stay in their homes as a result of the devastating consequences of COVID-19 on our economy, said Katie Allan Zobel, president and CEO of the foundation. Food insecurity continues to plague the region and there is a marked increase in individuals and families needing behavioral health care services. This latest round is aimed at these critical areas of need.

The foundation began its pandemic response in March of 2020, providing emergency grants to support nonprofit organizations serving those in greatest need, the foundation said. The effort also included $2 million in stabilization grants in October to 70 nonprofits struggling financially during the pandemic, the foundation said.

The foundation expects to award grants in February to organizations that directly support the immigrant population.

It has also relaunched Valley Gives, described as a one-stop-giving online platform to connect donors with local nonprofits.

The foundations mission is to enrich the quality of life for people in the region. It relies on donations from various sources including individuals, foundations and businesses.

The church Tabernaculo de Gozo on Sumner Avenue in Springfield was among the latest grant recipients. Pastor Henry Garcia said the grant allowed the church to help approximately 90 people struggling financially.

TDG helped individuals with big utility bills that were behind such as electricity bills, gas bills and rents in arrears, Garcia said. We also assisted with COVID-19 protection needs such as hand sanitizer, sanitizer wipes and face tissue.

Organizations that received the new round of COVID-19 Response grants are:

Friends Food Pantry (Springfield); Amherst Survival Center; Behavioral Health Network (Springfield); Bethany Assembly of God Food Pantry (Agawam); Boys & Girls Club of Greater Holyoke; Caring Health Center (Springfield); Catholic Charities Agency of the Diocese of Springfield; Center for Human Development (Springfield); Clinical & Support Options (Northampton); Community Action Pioneer Valley (Greenfield); Community Health Center of Franklin County (Greenfield); Community Legal Aid; Community Survival Center (Springfield); Easthampton Community Center; Franklin Area Survival Center (Turners Falls); Franklin County Community Meals Program (Greenfield); Franklin County Regional Housing & Redevelopment Authority (Turners Falls); Gandara Mental Health Center (West Springfield); Good Neighbors Food Pantry (Charlemont); Greater Springfield Senior Services; Greater Westfield Emergency Food Pantry; Health Law Advocates; Helping Hands Cupboard Food Pantry (Belchertown); Highland-Valley Elder Services (Northampton); Hilltown Churches Food Pantry (Ashfield); Hilltown Community Health Centers (Worthington); Holyoke Health Center; Iglesia Tabernacolo de Gozo (Springfield); Jubilee Cupboard Food Pantry (Ware); LifePath (Greenfield); Lorraines Soup Kitchen and Pantry (Chicopee); MANNA Soup Kitchen (Northampton); Massachusetts Military Support Foundation (Agawam); Mental Health Association (Springfield); NAMI Western Massachusetts (Agawam); Neighbors Helping Neighbors (South Hadley); Oasis Food Pantry (Springfield); Open Pantry Community Services (Springfield); Palmer Food Share; Rachels Table (Springfield); Reaping the Harvest (Springfield); River Valley Counseling (Holyoke); Root Studio (Turners Falls); Safe Passage (Northampton); Seeds of Solidarity Education Center (Orange); ServiceNet (Northampton); Spring of Hope Church of God in Christ Food Pantry (Springfield); Springfield No One Leaves; Springfield Partners for Community Action; Stone Soup Cafe (Greenfield); The Salvation Army - Springfield Corps; The Salvation Army - Greenfield Corps; The Salvation Army - Holyoke Corps; Valley Opportunity Council (Chicopee); Victory Temple Church of God in Christ (West Springfield); Wales Community Pantry; Way Finders (Springfield); Wendell Good Neighbors; Western Massachusetts Training Consortium (Holyoke); WestMass Elder Care (Holyoke); Womanshelter Companeras (Holyoke); YWCA of Western Massachusetts (Springfield)

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Police have reported that a Chinese employee died after he fell some 31 metres off a scaffolding where he was welding at his workplace at the Hwange Power Station Expansion 7 and 8.

Kong Demin (42) , who entered the country on 31 October last year, was employed by SinoHydro, a Chinese state-owned engineering and construction company contracted to build the power station in Hwange.

According to an informant, John Bimha, in a police memo seen by NewZimbabwe.com, Demin was welding at a height of 31 metres up Boiler Number 8 where the company is carrying out construction work.

He allegedly fell on a platform and fractured a leg and hip.

"On 31 January at around 6.30 am Kong Demin commenced duty at Boiler Number 8. At around 8 am he was welding at a height of 31 metres above ground on scaffolding. He fell and landed on a 15-metre high platform and was rushed to Hwange Colliery Hospital with a broken leg and fractured hip," said the police in a memo.

He died on the same day around 11.30 am.

A report was made to the police and the body was taken to United Bulawayo Hospitals for a postmortem. NewZimbabwe.com failed to determine want the postmortem result showed.
(Picture Credits: IANS)

Residents of Raini village in Chamoli district, who faced the worst brunt of the glacier outburst on February 7, suspect a radioactive device containing the generator with plutonium capsules to be the reason behind the fatal disaster.

The villagers, while speaking to reporters, recalled the 1965 joint expedition of US spy agency CIA and India's Intelligence Bureau to install nuclear-powered surveillance equipment on the summit of Nanda Devi. The expedition was called off midway due to bad weather.

Members of the expedition who rushed back to save their lives left the radioactive device at the base camp of Nanda Devi. When they returned a year later to retrieve the device, it was not to be found.

The villagers fear that the heat radiating from the equipment - which has a lifespan of 100 years - is responsible for the increased melting of snow in the region.

"If the device is buried under the snow somewhere in the area and is radiating heat, then, of course, there would be more melting of snow and further avalanches," TOI quoted Sangram Singh Rawat, a resident of Raini village as saying.

Capt Manmohan Singh Kohli, who in an interview to Times of India "the device is not active. There are four parts to the device  the generator with the plutonium capsules, two transmitter sets, and one big aerial to collect the radio waves  and they are all buried separately. If not connected together, there is very little possibility of anyone finding it."

State Tourism Minister Satpal Maharaj had, in 2018, appealed to the central government to conduct a high-level search operation to find the device.

Deveshwar Devi, another villager, told the publication that a strong pungent smell accompanied the gushing snow and debris following the glacier break. "This has triggered concerns in our village that the long-lost radioactive device  about which our elders used to tell us," she said.

The glacier break led to massive flooding in Dhauli Ganga and Alaknanda Rivers, damaging houses and the nearby Rishiganga power project. Officials have so far confirmed 31 deaths, whereas, 197 others are reported to be missing.

In 1965, during a secret expedition to Nanda Devi, an atomic device got lost and continues to be missing and potentially hazardous to the people of India.
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Machakos  Mystery surrounds the death of a couple in Athi River, who were found brutally murdered inside their rental house on Tuesday.

Police said they were informed by neighbours that the couple which had just moved in had gone missing for a week.

"We last saw our neighbours last week. We had not interacted with them for long but I can say they were new to this area," a resident said late Tuesday when police were called in to collect the bodies.

Mlolongo Assistant Commissioner Dennis Oganga said the body of the man was found dangling from the roof of his house while his wife's body was lying on the bed with chains on the neck.

"The house was locked from outside but the window was partially closed. We found the two decomposing bodies. Investigations have commenced," said Oganga.

The bodies were taken to Shalom hospital mortuary.

Police did not immediately provide their identities because their next of kin had not been informed.

Cases of homicide have been on the increase in various parts of the country lately, with police saying they have at least three cases weekly in what some attribute to COVID-19 related economic challenges and stress.
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VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / February 10, 2021 / MGX Minerals Inc. ("MGX" or the "Company") (CSE:XMG)(FKT:1MG)(OTC PINK:MGXMF) is pleased to announce project geochemical analysis results of rock chip samples taken from the Grizzly, Silver Queen (Photo 1), Arnie Flats, East Ridge, Jennie and Road Zones.

Zone Name Sample no Au g/t Au oz/t Ag g/t Ag oz/t Cu ppm Pb ppm Zn ppm Grizzly 20GRIZ1 10.55 0.308 16 0.47 1665 345 456 Grizzly 20GRIZ2 3.52 0.103 10.55 0.31 274 355 416 Grizzly 20GRIZ5 14.25 0.416 6.21 0.18 208 23.4 86 Arnie Flats 20AF1 4.17 0.122 430 12.54 460 1085 403 Arnie Flats 20AF2 3.47 0.101 421 12.28 462 889 278 Silver Queen 20SQ1 1.48 0.043 19 0.55 57.5 40.2 62 Silver Queen 20SQ2 2.87 0.084 9.06 0.26 37.7 45.5 73 Silver Queen 20SQ7 1.08 0.032 2590 75.54 807 110500 180000 East Ridge 20EAST1 1.33 0.039 13.95 0.41 2170 15.5 13300 East Ridge 20EAST2 2.32 0.068 47.8 1.39 961 2350 4520 Jennie 20JEN1 1.13 0.033 42.4 1.24 295 6990 13300 Jennie 20JEN4 1.46 0.043 3.02 0.09 99 177.5 3690 Road 20ROAD1 2.28 0.067 7.55 0.22 109 396 2700

(analytical data reported by ALS Canada Ltd, method ME-MS41, and Au-GRA22)

Grizzly- Located 0.6 kilometers east and southeast of Tillicum Mountain, shear-related calc-silicate-quartz skarn zones host sulphide mineralization consists primarily of massive pyrrhotite, pyrite-marcasite, sphalerite, chalcopyrite, galena, and traces of free gold hosted in conformable bands to pods within pelitic schist (shale protolith), tuffaceous basalt and feldspar porphyry (hybrid diorite) intrusion. The Grizzly mineralization closely resemble the Heino-Money & East Ridge Zones. In 1989, diamond drilling Grizzly Zone yielded values up to 10.4 grams per tonne gold over 1.2 metres in hole G89-214; 19.9 grams per tonne gold over 0.9 metre in hole G89-213 and 2.6 grams per tonne gold with 15.3 grams per tonne silver over 14.4 metres in hole G89-220, including 3.3 metres yielding 5.1 grams per tonne gold and 15.8 grams per tonne silver. Rock chip sampling from a roadcut near the 1989 drilling obtained gold values of 14.52 g/t Au (0.424 ounces/ton Au) across a sample interval of 0.35 meters (1.15 feet). This area in the southern portion of the Grizzly Zone, and several drill holes are planned to intersect extensions of the southern (higher elevation) gold-bearing portions of the Grizzly Zone.

Silver Queen- Locally tuffs and limy/sandy sediments strike east to northeast, dipping steeply south, have been intruded by numerous dikes. The gold and silver mineralization is related to hornfelsing associated with various dykes and sills and the mid-Jurassic Goatcanyon granitic stock. Mineralization is stratiform and hosted in limy and garnetiferous greenstone. Mineralization has been traced over a strike length of 950 metres. Drilling on the zone has identified several 20- metre thick mineralized skarn zones hosted in a 30- metre wide sequence of impure calcareous quartzites, siltstones and thin marble beds marginal to feldspar porphyry sills. Sulphide mineralization consisted of pyrite, pyrrhotite, tetrahedrite, sphalerite, galena, pyrargyrite and arsenopyrite. Alteration minerals include quartz, tremolite, actinolite and anhedral garnet. Grab sample 20SQ-7, located near the north portion of the NE trending Silver Queen trend, consisted of massive sphalerite-galena, and returned assay values of 2,590 grams/tonne Ag (75.54 ounces/ton Ag), 11.05% Pb, 18.0% Zn.

Arnie Flats- Locally, tuffaceous and meta-basaltic andesites near a hybrid diorite sill host two sub-parallel calc-silicate skarn zones. The zones trend east to northeast with moderate dip to southwest, and have been traced for 120 metres along strike. Sulphide mineralization consists of disseminated and stringer pyrite with pyrrhotite and trace argentite or tetrahedrite. Alteration minerals include epidote, quartz and chlorite. Rock chip samples 20AF-1 & 2 returned assay values of 4.17 & 3.47 g/t Au (0.122 & 0.101 ounces/ton Au), and 430 & 421 g/t Ag (12.54 & 12.3 ounces/ton Ag).

The Grizzly, Silver Queen and Arnie Flats Zones qualify as extension and exploration targets for further drill testing where drilling is planned for Grizzly in 2021. The Jennie and Road Zones also have good exploration potential, and they align as north extensions of the high-grade gold Heino-Money Zone.

Recent Exploration

As announced July 24th, 2020, six 0.5kg to 1kg, samples were taken at the 2030 Portal of the Heino-Money Pit Zone at the Heino Gold Deposit during the SRK Consulting (Canada) Site Visit July 8th, 2020. Samples were shipped under direct chain of custody to ALS Canada Ltd. in Kamloops, British Columbia, crushed and pulverized, with further shipment to ALS Canada Ltd, North Vancouver, BC under custody of ALS Canada Ltd. The samples have undergone gold analysis by fire assay and gravimetric finish up to 6 ounces per tonne Au are reported. Previous silver, lead, and zinc assays from press release issued July 20 are included. Bulk Samples are of selected mineralized material and are not representative of the deposit as no mineral resource estimate at any level of confidence has been completed:

Sample # Weight kg Au ppm Au oz/ton Ag ppm Ag oz/ton Pb % Zn % 301 .78 138.5 4.04 1090 31.8 9.05 3.92 302 .61 87.4 2.56 522 15.2 4.75 4.94 303 .94 207.0 6.04 94 2.7 1.015 3.38 304 .93 114.0 3.33 1080 31.5 9.13 4.49 305 .94 85.5 2.49 1080 31.5 7.5 5.35 306 .51 7.52 0.22 295 8.6 3.45 12.55



Historical Work

Summary of recorded surface and underground drilling from the NI 43-101 compliant technical report (the "SRK Report") are reported below:

Table 10-1: Summary of recorded drilling

Year(s) Mineral Zone Surface Drilling Underground Drilling No. of Holes Meterage No. of Holes Meterage 1981-1987 Heino-Money 100 7,060 9 177 1988 92 3,079 1993 8 284 1981-1984 East Ridge 26 1,586 1988 75 13,149 14 610 1989 10 1,446 1984 Silver Queen 12 ? 1984 Grizzly 4 615 1984 Arnie Flats 5 292 Totals 232 24,148 123 4,150



Small scale production occurred in 1981, 1984, and 1993 from the Heino-Money Zone. Table 6-4 from the SRK Report summarizes tonnages and metal content recovered per year of extraction.

Table 6-4: Summary of bulk sampling conducted on the Heino-Money Zone

Year Mined Tonnes Milled Tonnes Au Grams Recovered Au Ounces Recovered Ag Grams Recovered Ag Ounces Recovered 1981 58 58 4,570 145 3,259 105 1984 227 168 48,351 1,554 51,570 1,658 1985/1986 2,972 2,972 98,910 3,180 1993 6,800 5,503 102,455 3,294 164,071 5,275 Total 10.057 8,701 254,286 8,173 218,900 7,038



Qualified Person

Andris Kikauka (P. Geo.), Vice President of Exploration for MGX Minerals, has prepared, reviewed and approved the scientific and technical information in this press release. Mr. Kikauka is a non-independent Qualified Person within the meaning of NI 43-101.

About MGX Minerals Inc.

MGX Minerals Inc. invests in commodity and technology companies and projects focusing on battery and energy mass storage technology, extraction of minerals from fluids, and exploration for industrial minerals and precious metals.

Contact Information

Neil Foran

Chief Financial Officer

neil@mgxminerals.com

Web: www.mgxminerals.com

Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the Canadian Securities Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking information or forward-looking statements (collectively, "forward-looking information") within the meaning of applicable securities laws. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, included herein are forward-looking information. Forward-looking information in this press release include, but are not limited to, statements with respect to plans for assessment and other activities conducted and proposed to be conducted at the Heino-Money Deposit and Tillicum Claims, the preparation and filing of the Technical Report, and the preparation for structural engineering review for the purpose of underground bulk sampling. Forward-looking information is generally, but not always, identified by the words "expects", "plans", "anticipates", "in the event", "if", "believes", "asserts", "position", "intends", "envisages", "assumes", "recommends", "estimates", "approximate", "projects", "potential", "indicate" and similar expressions, or that events or conditions "will", "would", "may", "could" or "should" occur.

The Company's forward-looking information are based on the applicable assumptions and factors the Company considers reasonable as of the date hereof, based on the information available to the Company at such time, including without limitation, the receipt of any necessary permits, licenses and regulatory approvals, and the Company's ability to comply with environmental, health and safety laws. The Company cautions investors that any forward-looking information provided by the Company is not a guarantee of future results or performance, and that actual results may differ materially from those in forward-looking information as a result of various risk factors. These factors include, among others, geological and environmental factors, operating or technical difficulties in connection with the activities contemplated in this press release, general economic conditions, or conditions in the financial markets. The reader is referred to the Company's public filings for a more complete discussion of such risk factors, and their potential effects, which may be accessed through the Company's profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. Except as required by securities law, the Company does not intend, and does not assume any obligation, to update or revise any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, events or otherwise.

SOURCE: MGX Minerals Inc.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/628400/MGX-Minerals-Announces-Exploration-Results-up-to-75-Ounces-per-Tonne-Silver-at-Silver-Queen-Deposit-and-04-Ounces-Per-Tonne-Gold-at-Grizzly-Deposit-Tillicum-Claims-British-Columbia
Lisa Rinna defended her daughter Amelia Gray Hamlin's recent lingerie snaps after a troll branded the images 'disgusting'.

Model Amelia, 19, was met with praise from The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star, 57, as she posed up a storm in white lace underwear by Boux Avenue in images shared to Instagram on Tuesday.

After complimenting her youngest child, the former Melrose Place actress was forced to hit back at an angered social media user as she wrote: 'what is wrong with you? This is my child.' (sic)

Supportive parent: Lisa Rinna defended her daughter Amelia Gray Hamlin's recent lingerie snaps after a troll branded the images 'disgusting'

The media personality supported the influencer by commenting with three white hearts under her post, to which the troll responded: '@lisarinna wtf is wrong with u? U like what u see???? Discusting.' (sic)

Despite the criticism, the celebrity offspring's pictures has since garnered over 23,000 likes.

The brunette beauty left little to the imagination as she took part in an impromptu photoshoot at home.

Lisa raises Amelia and eldest daughter Delilah Belle, 22, with her actor husband Harry Hamlin, 69.

Close: Model Amelia, 19, was met with praise from The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star, 57, as she posed up a storm in Instagram snaps shared on Tuesday (pictured together in 2017)

'What is wrong with you?' After complimenting her youngest child, the former Melrose Place actress was forced to hit back at an angered social media user

In the romance department, the reality star has been dating KUWTK star Scott Disick, 37, since November 2020.

On their relationship, a source told E! News: 'Scott and Amelia are talking and hanging out, but neither are looking for anything serious.

'He is enjoying her company. She doesn't spend time with the kids at all and Scott only sees her on his days off from his kids.'

Businessman Scott and his former partner Kourtney Kardashian, 41, dated from 2005 until 2010, with the pair splitting due to the New Yorker's issues with alcohol misuse.

Wow-factor! The brunette beauty left little to the imagination as she slipped into white lace underwear by Boux Avenue for an impromptu photoshoot at home

The couple reconciled in mid-2010 after the birth of their first child, before splitting for good in five years later following claims of cheating on his part.

Poosh founder Kourtney - who co-parents Mason, 11, Penelope, eight, and Reign, six, with Scott - is believed to be dating rock star Travis Barker.

An insider previously told The Sun: 'Kourtney and Travis are very close and they have unreal chemistry.

'They talk almost every day and everyone around them is desperate for them to get together. It was a very interesting gift for Traviss 15 year old daughter.'
The design is far along but the critical issue is the railroad tracks are between the two intersections. We have filed a petition with the Illinois Commerce Commission to compel the railroad to allow the village to connect the signals so when the railroad crossing signal is activated, the traffic signals will change so that cars backed up by the tracks will be able to flush out so no one will backup onto the tracks, Hughes said.
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

Qualcomm rolled out its next generation of 5G processors Tuesday that the company says can deliver peak download speeds of 10 gigabits per seconds to smartphones, laptops, household Internet and private business networks.

The company's new Snapdragon X65 baseband chip is currently being tested by device makers. It's expected to be used in smartphones and possibly other electronic gadgets launched later this year.

The processor is Qualcomm's fourth generation 5G cellular modem, the semiconductor responsible for linking mobile devices to cellular towers and the overall network. The X65's peak speed is about 10 times faster than the top speeds available on the most advanced 4G LTE networks.

"The Snapdragon X65 is the cornerstone of our opportunity to bring the benefit of 5G to almost every industry," said Qualcomm President Cristiano Amon, who will become chief executive of the San Diego company next month.

While 10-gigabits per second is the headline number, smartphone, laptop, hotspot and other mobile device users are unlikely to get speeds that fast in the real world.

10 gigabits is the peak data rate under ideal conditions. Traffic on the network, distance from a cell tower and a host of other factors determine actual speeds.

Still, the X65 is faster speeds than Qualcomm's best chip on the market today. The speed improvement is "good for the industry and good for the carriers," said Jim McGregor, principal at technology industry consulting firm Tirias Research. "The more they can transmit at a quicker rate, the lower their cost per bit of transmission."

The new Snapdragon X65 baseband tops the peak data rates of its predecessorthe X60which delivered maximum data rates of 7.5 gigabits per second.

The new processor has an upgradable architecture to enable new software features to be added later. And Qualcomm also revamped its Radio Frequency Front End system and 5G antenna products to deliver better coverage and lower power usage.

McGregor said the X65 likely will show up in smartphones first, in part because the demand for high data rates, for now, comes mostly from consumer applications such as mobile gaming, video calls, movie streaming and so on.

"Qualcomm aims for the phone first and goes for everything else after that," he said. "So they will go for the phone but obviously this is good for a lot of other applications, especially looking at private networks and industrial applications."

While 3G and 4G cellular networks brought the wireless Internet mostly to smartphones, 5G has been designed from the outset to bring wireless connectivity to other industries. They include connected factories, artificial/virtual reality gear, and private networks for businesses, venues and stadiums.

In addition, 5G-based home Internet, known as fixed wireless access, also is expected to emerge as a competitor to wired cable and DSL. It has been slow to roll out to date, in part because it requires installing infrastructure in new locations beyond existing cell towers.

On Tuesday, Qualcomm sought to jumpstart 5G home Internet with its second-generation fixed wireless access platforma combination of its X65 modem, RF System, extended range antennas, and a reference design to enable plug and play equipment installation without the need for technicians.

The company said the platform helps provide a way to deliver fiber-like Internet speeds over 5G to households and help ease the "connectivity divide."

"The Qualcomm 5G Fixed Wireless Access Platform Generation 2 is a comprehensive, cost-effective and scalable solution for operators and (equipment makers) to deploy 5G's multi-gigabit speeds and low latency connectivity to homes, small businesses, schools, hospital and town halls," said Gautam Sheoran, a senior manager of product management for Qualcomm.

Explore further Qualcomm's latest 5G chips to deliver 7 gigabits per second speeds to mobile devices

2021 The San Diego Union-Tribune.

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Mysterious monolith in Turkey 'space program publicity' Attracted media attention after appearing in archaeological site

(ANSAmed) - ROME, FEBRUARY 10 - A mystery about a monolith that appeared over the weekend in Turkey's Gobekli Tepe archaeological site has been found to be part of an attempt to draw attention to the country's space program.



The site is in southeastern Turkey near the border with Syria and is a UNESCO World Heritage site that some scholars say hosts the oldest stone temple in the world.



On Tuesday, the three-meter-high metal pillar that had sparked curiosity among the local population and drawn attention even from international media was gone.



The pillar turned out to be an initiative to promote the Turkish space program announced by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.



During the presentation in Ankara, the monolith appeared on a screen beside the head of state, who cited the plan to land on the moon by 2023, the centenary of the founding of the Turkish Republic, as a 'priority'.



The pillar had carried an inscription cited by Erdogan and in the ancient local language of Gokturk that called for all to: "look at the sky if you want to see the moon". (ANSAmed).




Lynsey Bennett is the name on everyones lips since last Wednesday when she stood on the steps of the High Court and delivered a brave and emotional speech following the settlement of her case against the HSE over the misreading of her cervical smear tests.

The 32-year-old mother of two has battled cervical cancer twice already and come out the other side but was told in the autumn that the disease had returned and, this time, she wouldn't be cured by the treatment.

Since last week, the whole of Ireland has rallied around Lynsey, with an inspiring and dignified appearance on the Late Late Show last Friday night moving the entire country to tears as she explained how she told her two daughters, Zoe and Hailee that mammy might have to be an angel this time.

But the local ladys positivity shines through still and her bubbly personality, despite everything she has endured was what stood out most when she took time out of her busy schedule to speak to the Longford Leader this week.

Trust me to be going to Mexico in a pandemic lockdown when you cant buy clothes, she laughed, explaining that the clothes she had ordered online for her trip had not arrived in time.

I need to find clothes that probably dont exist in my house. Its 25 to 28 degrees over there. Itll be nice and Ill have no clothes - Ill be there in the winter woollies!

Lysney flew to Mexico on Tuesday and is feeling hopeful about the four weeks of treatment she will receive there.

Read more: Longford's Lynsey Bennet jets off to Mexico for four weeks of treatment

Im not nervous, she said, I just feel so hopeful about it, but its been so busy between the Late Late Show, Miriam OCallaghan, Ireland AM, Shannonside, that I havent had five minutes to pack, let alone think about how I feel. I want to get over and I want to get started.

Theyre going to be using a lot of different machines on me for complementary treatments, and then theyre also going to be doing infusions, she explained.

Some of them will be vitamins and some of them will be immunotherapy, but it will be a non-toxic immunotherapy. Its not the pembro one that I hope to do at some stage after I get back, as my next backup plan.

Because shes got the whole of Ireland following her journey now, she promises shell be vlogging about her treatment regularly via Facebook and Instagram (@cancerwithgratitude), while shes undergoing this unique treatment.

Ive spoken to three or four people who have actually gone to Mexico because I wasnt going to be spending nearly 45,000 - and thats not even including flights - to not have at least spoken to some people who have gone there and said its legit, she remarked.

Some of them have actually gone into remission when their cancer has spread so bad, which is amazing.

Incredibly, while Lynseys main focus is to fight the disease and get better so that she can spend as much time as possible with her two girls, her thoughts are also filled with the hopes of helping others through her own experiences.

I am hoping - because the machines should be good for lots of different illnesses - Im hoping that I might actually get back and buy some of these machines and get something set up in Longford - a little centre that theyre all together in one so people will be able to benefit from these machines as well, she said.

I just need to get over, see what theyre like, see if theyre any good and then I would love to bring it back to Longford so someone else will have a fighting chance if it is a thing that they dont want to be doing the treatments that theyre doing or they might want to build up their body and their immune system in non-toxic ways.

Its a big dream and a thoughtful one and, for someone who has already battled cancer twice - and won - anything is possible. It would be an entirely selfless way to give back to the people of Longford, who rowed in behind her as soon as she was diagnosed in the autumn, raising over 84,000 via GoFundMe and a Christmas Tractor Run, which saw over 270 tractors take to the streets of Longford, flashing Christmas lights all the while.

In fact a quick look at the Curing LynseyBee GoFundMe campaign shows that people are still donating in the hope that the young mother will find a breakthrough treatment.

Read also: Late Late Show viewers captivated by dignity of inspirational Longford mum Lynsey Bennett

I am so grateful. I will never forget the support during such a hard time for the entire country - not only Longford. You often hear people saying negative things about Longford but it just shows what fantastic people do exist in Longford, said a grateful Lynsey.

Because of them, I feel like it is possible to get my miraculous cure and its only thanks to all of them that Im able to step foot on this plane to Mexico and try and get myself better.

People have flocked to Lynseys aid across the country. Optimal Chauffeur company picked her up from her home and transported her to the airport on Tuesday. Even in Dublin Airport, she was given the VIP treatment, with access to the lounge and transport from the door of the airport to the steps of the plane, she noted with a laugh.

Amazingly, were actually flying business class and a big thank you to Mary in Kanes Travel who helped organise the flights and stuff like that, so it wasnt like I was having to look up stuff, she said.

But it was only 200 more expensive to fly business class than to fly economy on the day that we chose, yet it was 1,500 more expensive on other days, so we got so lucky. So, so lucky. And youre away from other people, because theyre more single seats, I think... not that I have any experience in business class, she joked.

Ahead of her appearance on Ireland AM on Monday morning, Lynsey and her daughters, Zoe and Hailee, were put up in a hotel, where they spent some time together before being separated for four weeks. Following such a busy week of interviews and High Court settlements and preparation for treatment, Lysney treasured that time she got to spend with her girls and is extremely grateful to Ireland AM for giving her that opportunity.

We got to spend a couple of hours together. I gave them their Valentines presents and stuff because I wont be here for Valentines, Ill be in Mexico. The girls are amazing through all of this. Im so proud of them, she added, and it is clear she is doing her best to bring that gratitude and positivity to as many people as possible.

I did a podcast called What is Your Why. I did it on the 16th of January. Its up on YouTube. So I did it before the High Court or any of the interviews or anything like that and I said in it one of my goals is to try and help people. It would be interesting for people to see my views and how I was before anything that happened since last Wednesday, and it was really great to do that podcast.

Lynsey has captured the hearts of so many across the nation but what stands out is the number of people she has helped over the years, and how many people have told her theyve gone for their smear tests or gotten themselves checked out because of her encouragement.

On Friday night, when she spoke with Ryan Tubridy on the Late Late Show, she said that her advice to women is to get their smear test and if it comes back all clear, great - but trust your gut if you feel like something is wrong, as Lynsey herself did before each of ther three cervical cancer diagnoses.

Its funny because I never thought that Id have half of Ireland messaging me and women ringing me, worrying and saying thank you so much, youve helped me.

I had a couple of thousand followers anyway on my Instagram, so every so often I used to get messages. But now I can see there are just so many women contacting me saying wow, Im actually now going to believe in myself. But its crazy. My Instagram is now 35 and a half thousand followers and Im just like, okay, its amazing and I hope I will be able to help more people. Its amazing.

I have never met one family yet that has not been devastated by cancer or touched by cancer. Its really a worldwide thing. Certainly in Ireland there are no families that havent had that horrendous word mentioned. So I hope I can help others, she added.

It has been a whirlwind week for Lynsey since her High Court case was settled and, while she has been swept up and kept busy with all the media interviews and her plans to travel to Mexico, not to mention making time for her daughters, theres still the ever-present issue of liability and the fact that no proper apology has been issued by the state who let Lynsey and so many other women down so badly.

During her Late Late Show appearance, Lynsey commented that the words deep regret were being put out there so often but the words Im sorry were not so forthcoming. But, while womens health campaigner, Vicky Phelan expressed anger at the lack of a proper apology from the HSE and the lab that let both Vicky and Lynsey down, the Longford lady refuses to focus on the negatives and chooses only to stay strong for herself and for her girls.

I just say to myself, look, were all human at the end of the day. And I dont know why people make the decisions that they make and I just worry about myself and the girls and I work on our little corner, she explained.

Because I cant force someone to properly say Im sorry. I have too many other things to worry about to focus on any of that and I just try and be the best I can be for the girls and for myself and I just dont let all the other stuff take over.

I cant be dwelling on it because its not going to make me better. If anything, it will just end up upsetting me and I have too many more important things to worry about. Whats been done is done and I cant make it undone. I can only just try to make things better for myself and my girls and thats what Im trying to do.

Read also: Longford mum Lynsey Bennett was 'failed by the State'

Through it all, Lynseys positivity has been an inspiration. Where others might fall into the depths of despair, she puts her best foot forward, accepts the hand shes been dealt, and keeps going.

The only thing that I dont be happy with is those needles, she laughed.

The doctors and the nurses are like you do be such a lady and so dignified and the second the word needle or injection comes into the equation, you literally just turn into a different person.

Ive always said my only problem is those needles. I think about what Im able to deal with and then when I get into a state or I get upset, I let it happen. But just not all the time. When I really feel like I cant cope, I let it take over, whereas when I think Im going to be okay, I think right, it might not be great, just put your best foot forward.

Messages have flooded Lynseys social media and phone in their thousands, she said, and her plan is to get back to each and every one when she can.

I just want to say thank you to everyone, really. I just want people to know that I will get back to messages. Im replying to three or four hundred messages at a time and then it just comes back with five or six hundred messages and thats not even the people Ive replied to - its more people and Im just like, wow, she laughed.

Im hoping that in Mexico, because everything will have calmed down, Im hoping that I will get a chance to reply to people then. But I appreciate every single message.

Zoe and Hailee, she added, will be going between Hailee's dad, Michael, Zoe's dad and Lynsey's aunt Irene, while shes away for her treatment - something for which she is extremely grateful, while a number of friends and family will be house-sitting for her.

Most of all, she is filled with appreciation for everyone in Longford who donated and offered support through everything.

I am so grateful for everyone. I am always rooting for Longford. I love Longford. Its home, she concluded.

Read also: Women's health campaigner Vicky Phelan angered by absence of apology to Longford mum Lynsey Bennett

In a previous life, I worked for an organization that did a great job of mining the existing database. While we were always on the lookout for net new business, we had built up a healthy stream of recurring revenue and could exist just fine servicing our clients and selling them new products occasionally. As we developed and sold new products and services to the existing client base and upgraded their aging systems every five years, we generated the necessary revenue and the business was thriving.

I look at what credit unions are doing today and think they could do a better job of mining the existing member base or field of membership. How often do credit unions reach out to existing members to let them know that family members can join the credit union? It would seem like an easy ask since the primary member obviously enjoys their relationship with the credit union.

I remember when my two children got accounts at our credit union. They didnt have any money other than birthday money or a small allowance, and their membership at the time would not have made a significant difference to the credit union. However, ten years later they both have share draft accounts, debit cards, loans, and a credit card. Through my membership the credit union reached my children. The long game is important.

There are credit unions where most of their growth comes from indirect lending. People show up at the dealership wanting to drive away in a shiny new car, and wa-lah, the credit union has a new member. These people didnt seek out a membership at the credit union, and many of these loans are lost or stolen weeks later. We all know that if a member doesnt fully participate in the programs you offer, that they rarely become one of your best members and often times you simply start collecting on the minimum balance once the account has become inactive. That isnt a long-term strategy.

What processes does your credit union have in place to turn these indirect members into quality memberships at your credit union? You need to drive home the message that they are now owners of the credit union and not just customers at a bank. You need to encourage them to open draft accounts, use mobile and home banking, and learn the credit union philosophy and jargon.

Investing in a good on-boarding program can pay huge dividends. If you dont have one, get one. It is that simple. Start by emailing, texting, and sending letters to new members via an automated onboarding system so that these new members understand why credit unions are better. Let them know that now they are part of a family, and their family members can also join. Monitor your success. Are you retaining more of your indirect or new accounts month over month? If not, dont wait to ask for help, the success of your credit union depends upon it.

Cross-selling is yet another way to get more wallet share from your existing members. Most core systems have cross-selling products, but many do not have sales tracking processes in place. Tracking sales and rewarding employees appropriately is one way to increase your results in your cross-selling strategy.

Cross-selling doesnt have to be limited to e-Statements and bill pay. Cross-selling is more effective coming from your employees. They dont have to know all the ins and outs of all the products and services but being aware the credit union has a solution available is key. Your tellers interact with your members daily. Most of them know their names and are familiar with their families. If they come in with an issue or a problem about their car, house, or college debt, your tellers could suggest financial consulting or a loan product that would be useful to the member. Just being able to discuss these items in a friendly manner, opens the door for opportunity.

Your strategies for onboarding members and cross-selling members need to become priorities if you want your existing membership to become more engaged in your credit union. There are plenty of tools out there to help you, you just have to find the right ones!
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Reeling from a failed engagement on the long boat home to England from India in 1938, Mary Oliver had a brainwave. She had cancelled her wedding just weeks before the ceremony after realising she had simply nothing in common with the man she was about to marry.

Clearly, finding the perfect match couldn't always be left to chance. What she, and others just like her, needed was help.

That flash of inspiration was to lead to Britain's first dating agency, the Marriage Bureau. While matchmaking sites may be common today, with around a third of new couples meeting digitally, in the 1930s the idea of paying a stranger to find you a soulmate was alien.

Yet the Marriage Bureau, set up in London in April 1939 by Mary (a pseudonym for Audrey Parsons, to spare her family's blushes) and her aristocratic friend Heather Jenner, was an instant success  despite another war looming.

World War I and the Spanish Flu had left Britain with an excess of two million unmarried women, yet until the Bureau was set up, personal adverts in newspapers were the only way to engineer meeting someone.

Now there was a place where the lonely could be matched with another of their social class and interests, by two entrepreneurial 24-year-olds for the princely sum of 5 5s (335 in today's money).

Mary Oliver (pictured) experienced a failed engagement and decided women need help in finding a perfect match

Those lucky enough to secure a wedding would pay an additional 21 (1,200 now).

The Bureau gave discounts to impoverished female clients. No male clients got a discount  Mary and Heather believed the men must be solvent enough to support a wife.

And so a social revolution began, one in which women no longer needed to depend on family to introduce them to a partner.

In the 15 years after its inception, the Marriage Bureau introduced 10,000 people to their spouses, And inspired dozens of imitators.

Mary left for America in the 1940s, but Heather stayed running the agency, which only closed for good in 1992. Now the story of the heady early days of their groundbreaking agency are set to be made into a TV series, based on Mary's recently rediscovered and published memoir, written in 1942.

Here, in our exclusive extracts, she describes the lonely hearts whose lives she changed  and whose revolutionary search paved the way for today's Tinder generation:

For the past three weeks I had sat in the hall, listening for footsteps outside. Whenever they came, I darted towards the door and, as the maid appeared, I had to look as if I had just happened to be going out at that particular moment.

Each time, I had somehow manoeuvred my visitor away again, and decoyed him out of earshot.

There was the same vigil on the telephone. For three weeks, I never dared to bathe properly, but made a cautionary splashing, ready for the headlong rush to reach the telephone before everyone else.

How could I ever tell my family that I had put an advertisement in the matrimonial weekly?

I did it because I was planning to start a marriage bureau and I wanted to find out how the matrimonial papers worked.

The Marriage Bureau, set up in London in April 1939 by Mary was a huge success. Pictured: A cocktail party held by Heather Jenner, wife of Stephen Potter, who helped run the Marriage Bureau

I paid 5 and advertised for a husband who was not fat. But I never gave a thought to the consequences.

These took the shape of a continuous flow of would-be husbands who made surprise attacks on my home.

Bus drivers, commercial travellers, City clerks, sanitary inspectors and railwaymen either rang up or arrived unheralded on the doorstep in alarmingly quick succession.

How much better it would be if there were an organisation that could arrange the actual matchmaking and see that only suitable people met each other. This was my idea for the Marriage Bureau. Whenever possible, I would see clients in person. I hoped to pair people off who shared the same tastes, religion, social status and income; and whose marriage, therefore, would start with a firm basis of equality and common interest. I had 10 with which to start the Bureau.

'Who do you know socially?'

'Nobody,' I replied.

'Oh, but I saw your picture in the Bystander.'

He was tall, dark and very good-looking. His suit was well cut and the figure in the suit moved with assurance. I thought our first client was going to be everything a girl could wish for.

In the 1930s the idea of paying a stranger to find you a soulmate was alien but the scheme was a huge success. Pictured: A man at the door of the marriage Bureau in Bond Street, London, in 1950

I had expected the first interview to be very difficult, was prepared for frankness or shyness, but I had never conceived the one that took place.

Who did I know of importance? I really didn't see why I should parade my few titled friends to impress this young Englishman on leave from his job in Calcutta.

I managed to pull myself together enough to add that we did have some girls of very good family.

Actually, we had no wives to offer him at all, so I tried to describe them as vaguely as I could, while Heather kicked the telephone bell underneath her desk (we discovered we could make it ring that way) and answered fictitious calls from dazzling young women.

I felt very dispirited about our prospects of ever finding him a wife.

Among our first day's would-be brides, we had a girl who had an interesting family tree and worked in a beauty salon.

To show 'Calcutta' how prompt we were, we introduced them.

He came in the next day, and while he announced condescendingly that she was certainly well-born, he took exception to her working in the beauty parlour. 'One's friends in Calcutta wouldn't have liked it.'

She rang up and said he was frightful. Nobody, in fact, took a good view of him. We feared we would have to ship him back alone, when in walked the solution.

She was rather bulgy, wore putty-coloured clothes and had a putty complexion; rather like a cold pudding, with eyes like currants that someone had pressed too far into its surface.

But she was a peeress's daughter and wanted to be taken to the colonies.

When she opened her bag, press cuttings fluttered to the floor. There she was, with all her bulges, in Tatler.

There was quite a chance she would qualify for 'one's friends in Calcutta'. And she did. They got engaged in about three days.

A month in, we were getting an average of 300 letters a day but we were beset with problems. For a long time, we had on our books a large number of aristocratic girls and mostly working-class men.

Heather Jenner, founder of the Marriage Bureau dating agency in Bond Street, London, registers a new client, a 21-year-old actress named Pam in December 1952

Then we had widows for whom we had to find middle-aged husbands  preferably widowers.

Besides the actual match-making, there was another side of our work which was just as gratifying.

I'm thinking in particular of one lady who was 34. She had a hat like one in a cartoon in Punch magazine, and underneath it a face that had no sort of visible attraction beyond reasonably clear skin.

Her whole appearance was so mouse-like and ordinary.

She lived in a village in Somerset and did 'social work', visiting chronic invalids, arranging the flowers in the sanctuary and having passions for the vicar.

I was wondering whether I could not somehow make her into the person she wanted to be.

I decided to try. I whipped her off to choose some underclothes. Next, I took her to get a tailor-made suit and an attractive dress and I took her to the hairdresser's.

But I had not taken into consideration a whole mass of inhibitions that were still to be contended with, or the violent swing-over that would follow their collapse.

After her first meeting with a retired civil servant who tried to kiss her, my little sanctuary mouse underwent a terrifying change.

She ran through an MP, a bookseller, a farmer, a naval officer and a textile manufacturer in five months.

Heather Jenner and Mary Oliver are pictured together. They set men and women up on dates together

It was always the men who fell back from her advances.

One day, a letter from her arrived at the office to be forwarded to the young man she was writing to. She had forgotten to close it down and a snapshot tumbled out.

There was my sanctuary mouse, standing in very short scanty knickers and barest little bodice. I pushed it back in and in doing so I caught sight of a second snapshot  the same, only her back view. She did indeed marry the young man; they were very happy.

We shall never forget the day a young City typist arranged to meet a bank clerk at Waterloo station. They went to a cafeteria for tea where they had to queue and pile things on a tray.

He left her in the queue, saying he would secure a table and come back to carry the tray for her.

She had laden it with delicacies for two, looked round, but couldn't see him anywhere.

She waited and waited, growing more dismal all the time, with the waitress eyeing her as she was expecting the young man to pay for their tea. But he never came.

Of course, we thought the young man had run away (though we were surprised because she was attractive) and tried to get in touch to tell him this was no way to treat our clients. Three weeks later, we got a letter from him saying that, just as he was going to find the table, he saw a friend in the Army whom he thought he might never meet again. He dashed out across the road and was knocked down by a car. We sent her to the hospital to see him, and a few months later they got engaged.

On April 17, 1941, with the dust still unsettled from the ruins of the worst raid on London the night before, the Marriage Bureau had its 2nd birthday.

A few yards away, there was a gaping tear in a familiar side street, where the work and hopes of several more people had been reduced to a mountain of rubble.

Further down Bond Street were other gaps. There were many more windows without glass and buildings with their contents churned into demoniacal chaos.

It was the kind of day when a sleepless night and the fate of others were enough to make one feel a futility about troubling with something that might fall in the next hour of destruction. But our office walls were lined with telegrams from happy couples, and the people who picked their way across the broken glass were mostly men and women who had found in each other something precious that shut out all the ugliness and fear of war.

Even if our offices are razed in the next 'Blitz', our work would not just be a memory with a monument of rubble.

There would be living testimonies to it all over the world in those 932 married couples and 250-odd people who were just engaged.

At no time in the history of any generation could they have needed love and companionship more  and we had helped them find it.

Extracted by Nicole Lampert from Marriage Bureau: The True Story That Revolutionised Dating, by Mary Oliver, Mary Benedetta and Richard Kurti (16.99 hardback, 7.99 paperback, B7 Media).
Parliament has opened an institute for inducting and training Members of Parliament how to legislate and debate on the floor of the House, with the next legislators coming in May being the first beneficiaries.

The Rebecca Alitwala Kadaga Institute of Parliamentary Studies in Kampala was launched on Monday by Speaker Rebecca Kadaga whom it is named after.

In her launch speech, Ms Kadaga said that previously, MPs were trained for only one month, but Parliament realised that the period was not enough to train them how to legislate and manage other parliamentary work.

"This institute is to assist mainly the parliamentarians and staff. It will help members to be more efficient by doing continuous training and induction. In the past, we have been doing induction for one month, that is before and after swearing and we stop there for five months," she said.

"We have found that the one month is not enough because they get challenges along the way. The new MPs, who are elected through by-elections, are also not totally inducted, so we need a facility that would continue looking out for them and helping them," she added.

According to Ms Kadaga, some MPs are elected when they do not know anything about legislation. She said if they make use of the institute, their debate on the floor of Parliament will improve since they will be able to access researched data, information and many things from the facility.

The chairperson of the institute, Ms Cecilia Ogwal, said it consists of four MPs who represent legislators, the Clerk to Parliament to represent management, members of the academia who will train the MPs, and a commissioner who represents local government councils.

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Councillors to benefit

According to Ms Ogwal, the Kadaga institute will not only train MPs on legislation but also councillors of Local Government councils.

"We shall also train permanent secretaries of various government agencies because some of them do not understand requisition for funds. They usually appear on the floor of parliament and look green about the Public Finance and Management Act. So we are going to design training for them so that we are on the same page," Ms Ogwal said.

She said the team has started developing training models. The institute will be funded by Parliament.

A performance scorecard for the third session of the 10th Parliament shows that of the 459 MPs, only 17 per cent scored above the 75 per cent mark, which is considered excellent while 29 per cent of MPs scored between 50 and
London: The European Commission says it will not block the first wave of coronavirus vaccine shipments to Australia, paving the way for the nationwide rollout to begin as planned.

In a widely criticised ploy to shore up its own supplies, the European Union last month gave itself sweeping powers over whether vaccines manufactured on the continent by Pfizer and AstraZeneca can leave the territory.

The export controls were hurriedly drawn up after the drug manufacturers warned the number of doses available to Europe over the coming months would be slashed because of production problems.

Pfizer and AstraZeneca now have to ask the EU for approval before vaccines can be flown abroad. Officials would be lawfully permitted to curb exports if they conclude the shipments would deprive the EUs 27 member countries of its pre-agreed doses.

New Delhi:

Delhi Police on Sunday arrested a man who threatened to blow away Red Fort with a bomb.

Mehroop, who is the front desk officer at a hotel in Paharganj locality of Delhi, spoke over the phone with a person in Rohini and threatened that he would blow away Red Fort with a bomb. After this, the person from Rohini called the police and told them about the bomb threat.

Right now Mehroop is being questioned by officers of Intelligence Bureau and Special Cell in Paharganj police station.

ALSO READ: Bomb scare at Red Fort: Army says suspicious object a part of its unused armory

"Our 2021 AHLA Apprentice class is by far the largest in company history. These 73 hotel associates, representing a broad spectrum of our hotels across all eight verticals, or product categories, have tremendous leadership potential, and Aimbridge is committed to investing in their success," said Ann Christenson, Chief Human Resources Officer of Aimbridge Hospitality. "This program is also a testament to our Aimbridge General Managers, who commit time and energy to foster and mentor hospitality's future leaders. It's a worthy effort and a core part of our company culture and values to support an in-depth training program that will help our associates accelerate their hospitality careers with Aimbridge."

The American Hotel & Lodging Association (AHLA) Foundation partnered with the National Restaurant Association Education Foundation (NRAEF) to create the first hospitality apprenticeship program, funded by The Department of Labor, to expand apprenticeship in the hospitality industry. The Lodging Manager apprenticeship program, which Aimbridge Hospitality participates in, provides an avenue for management companies to increase "bench strength" across the industry for supervisory and managerial positions and qualified candidates.

Rosanna Maietta, President of the AHLA Foundation added, "The hotel industry is in the business of people, serving our guests and providing lifelong careers for our employees. Apprentices in the AHLA Foundation program with Aimbridge Hospitality have the unique ability to fast-track their careers into management. The Lodging Manager apprenticeship program allows apprentices to earn competitive wages, gain new skills, have hands-on mentoring with company leaders, earn an industry-recognized certification and obtain college credit to further their education if they so choose  all at no cost to them. We are proud to have some of the brightest future leaders at Aimbridge Hospitality as part of the program and look forward to supporting their career journey every step of the way."

Apprentices, made up of some of the highest performing employees showing an aptitude for management, benefit from on-the-job training and related educational instruction and the ability to learn new skills while receiving paychecks from day one. In turn, the apprenticeship program benefits participating companies by creating highly skilled employees, raising productivity levels, opening the door to potential federal and local funding, and decreasing turnover rates, with roughly 94 percent of apprentices continuing employment with the company where they apprentice. While the program is self-paced, it usually takes apprentices about one year to complete while also working full-time at their respective hotels.

About Aimbridge Hospitality

Aimbridge Hospitality is a leading, multinational hospitality company offering best in class hotel management services across a broad spectrum of franchised branded full and select service properties, luxury hotels, destination resorts, convention centers, and lifestyle hotels. Aimbridge's premium portfolio, inclusive of pipeline, represents over 1,550 properties in 49 states and 22 countries, with 70 lodging brands under management. As the world's largest third-party operator, Aimbridge is dedicated to its mission to be the best hospitality operator by leveraging its scale to add value for owners and opportunities for associates. Aligned with a concentrated focus, agility, and expertise for each vertical, or hotel product category, Aimbridge drives market success for hotels and optimizes investment returns for owners. Aimbridge Hospitality is based in Plano, Texas, with additional corporate offices in Atlanta, Calgary, Fargo, Puerto Rico, Toronto, and Washington D.C. Evolution Hospitality, Aimbridge's Lifestyle Division, is based in San Clemente, Calif. Aimbridge's International Division, Interstate Hotels & Resorts, has supporting offices across Europe in Amsterdam, Birmingham, Glasgow, and Moscow.

For more information on Aimbridge Hospitality, please visit www.aimbridgehospitality.com and connect with Aimbridge on LinkedIn.

SOURCE Aimbridge Hospitality

Related Links

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Alaska has vaccinated more of its population than any other state in the US, despite the challenges posed by the nation's largest state with its frigid cold, frequent storms, and an expanse of land and few roads.

Roughly 18 percent of the population is American Indian or Alaska native  a larger share of indigenous people than any other state in the US has.

Native Americans have been hit especially hard by the pandemic itself, but the state's large native population has turned out to be a major advantage in the rollout of vaccines.

Alaska has been receiving additional doses on top of its state allocation through Indian Health Services (as well as significant allotments through the military and DoD), which have come in monthly shipments, rather than weekly ones like most states get, since the start of rollout.

The state also has a pre-existing vaccine distribution program that is almost unique in the US. State authorities still act a as a middleman in Alaska, while doses of flu and MMR vaccines are sent directly from distributors to pharmacies.

The Alaskan system might add an unnecessary step in the flow of vaccines under normal circumstances, but the structure of its program was exactly what other states had to hastily recreate when COVID-19 vaccines were authorized, officials there told Bloomberg.

It's one of the reasons the state has become the Americans dark horse of the pandemic, with at least one dose already given to 15 percent of its far-flung population, while the US as a whole has gotten one or more shots into the arms of just 10 percent of its population.

Dr Bengaard, Meredith Dean pharm, Heather Kenison RN and James Austin RN, boarded a dogsled to transport vaccine doses across the Alaskan tundra. The state has raced ahead of all others in the US and given at least one dose to 15% of its population

American Indian and Alaska Native people are 1.8 times more likely to get COVID-19, four times more likely to be hospitalized for treatment, and 2.6 times more likely to die of the disease.

Like other high-risk groups, including black and Hispanic people, Native Americans face a higher proportion of social factors that drive overall health.

High rates of poverty, poor access to healthcare and living in remote locations that may be pharmacy and hospital deserts all contribute to these disparities.

In some parts of the US, the COVID-19 death rates of Native Americans are staggering. One in 127 of one Mississippi tribe's members have died of the virus.

Oklahoma's largest tribe, the Cherokee Nation, lost so many of its elderly members who still speak the Cherokee language, that it included its 2,000 fluent speakers in its first priority access group for vaccines in a desperate effort to save its ancestral language from dying out.

But Native vaccination programs are going exceptionally well, compared to how the rest of the country's rollout has fared. That's especially true in Alaska.

The state has used 61.5 percent of the doses of COVID-19 vaccines distributed to it.

Meanwhile, Indian Health Service (IHS) has administered 59.1 percent of its doses nationwide.

In Alaska, 55,300 of the total doses allocated are through HIS, accounting for nearly 32 percent of the state's total supply.

So the share of Alaska's vaccine supply allocated through HIS is about twice the size of the 18 percent of the state's population that are Native Americans or Alaska Natives.

And tribal and state health officials have a lot more latitude to control the flow of vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna to their communities, according to Bloomberg.

Alaska has some communities that are almost entirely indigenous, and which live in remote, hard-to reach areas of the massive state.

IHS was willing to allocate single mega-shipments to some of these communities, rather than spend thousands of dollars on several trips to deliver them piecemeal in accordance with the priority groups designated for the rest of the state.

The rest of the state also gets larger shipments at longer, more regular intervals, than other parts of the US.

Alaska negotiated to be treated as a territory, rather than than a state, in terms of the logistical structure of vaccine allocation and shipping.

In effect, this turned one of the toughest challenges of the vaccine weakness into a strength.

Alaska is larger than California, Montana and Texas combined, with fewer than a million people scattered across its sprawling 663,300 square miles.

But the state has just 14,336 miles of public roads. By comparison, the much smaller state of Massachusetts has 77,557 miles of road.

When the weather turned too bad to fly, three health workers boarded a boat to transport vaccine doses across choppy water to communities in need in Alaska

Despite the bumpy ride, the vaccine doses arrived safely at their destination on the morning of December 17

And 500 miles of British Columbia lie between Alaska and the nearest point of the continental US, in Washington state.

That poses significant logistical issues for transporting vaccines that are rather delicate, and urgently needed.

So rather than giving it weekly allocations like other states, the federal government started sending Alaska monthly shipments of doses.

'It makes a tremendous difference in getting to our communities much more easily,' Dr Anne Zink told Bloomberg.

'Having that vaccine upfront allows us to work through logistical challenges of getting to more remote areas.'

And for their part, local officials have traveled by plane, car, boat and even dogsled to get the doses where they need to go.
Elon Musk. Source: A video screenshot, Youtube, Bloomberg.

Twitter, Elon Musk and crypto  hardly a minute seems to go by without a combination of the three dominating the headlines. And it looks like the Tesla supremo has been busy behind his keyboard again for a new spate of crypto-themed tweets at the time when American regulators could come after Musk for his Twitter activity.

He is now taking aim at the crypto wallet service Freewallet and sharing Chuck Norris-themed memes  while regulators reportedly consider moving against him following Teslas recent bitcoin (BTC)-related activities.

After Freewallets Twitter account quote-tweeted a dogecoin (DOGE)-themed post, Musk replied by writing your app sucks and adding the barb,

Any crypto wallet that wont give you your private keys should be avoided at all costs.

The wallets PR team spun into overdrive, writing the following statement:

Hi Elon, the app is online. Integrations to buy, exchange and merchant tools are working, support is available 24/7. It's nice you tried us out of all crypto services. Anything we can help you with, let us know.

However, as the adage goes, play with fire and youll get burned. Musk duly responded with a call for the wallet operator to please unlock my account, sparking a torrent of wallet-themed replies, many of which were targeted at the wallet provider.

Outspoken developer and self-proclaimed blockchain skeptic Udi Wertheimer waded into the increasingly messy affair, tweeting: I cant.

The worlds richest man paused his sideswiping at Freewallet to share a (yes, you guessed it) crypto-themed meme about the most notorious crypto exchange of all.

This is true power haha https://t.co/Fc9uhQSd7O  Elon Musk (@elonmusk)

Meanwhile, The Daily Telegraph (via The Age) claims that American regulators could come after Musk for his Twitter activity  which has hogged the headlines in both the crypto and mainstream media all year.

The newspaper quoted experts who concluded that Musk was likely to be quizzed by the American Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) over whether Tesla already owned bitcoin when his intervention on social media sent prices surging.

The media outlet quoted Doug Davison, a former branch chief at the SEC, as stating,

It would not be surprising  given the focus on the chief executives tweets, bitcoin pricing and recent dramatic market moves  for the SEC to ask questions about the facts and circumstances here.

The European Central Banks Vitor Constancio claimed that it was not disclosed when Tesla had made this investment  a suggestion perhaps that some feel Musk may have sought to drive prices up for his companys own benefit.

Meanwhile, a bogus Tesla insider who unveiled the companys plans to accept bitcoin on Reddit days before the Musk-led firm made its big BTC reveal has come forward, claiming drugs drove him to troll the crypto community.

Per the New York Post, the poster was not a Tesla employee after all, but a 24-year-old political science student from Germany named Hendrik (surname withheld) who took the hallucinogenic narcotic LSD before taking to the net.

Hendrik stated,

If you want to know the truth: I am a young German guy and I was on acid while I did this post in the last month. I had this afflatus that Elon is going to buy bitcoin, so I created this trollpost. And now all the newspapers around the globe are writing about it, it is kinda funny and scary to be honest.

Hendrik added, however, that his post was inspired by real news  namely an exchange (on Twitter, where else?) between Musk and the head of the bitcoin-buying American software company MicroStrategy, Michael Saylor.

After bitcoin-related musings from Musk, Saylor offered to share his BTC purchasing playbook with the Tesla boss.

And this apparently inspired the mind of the drug-fueled Hendrik to dream up a scenario that led him to create the post. He concluded,

Me and my girlfriend, we took acid, and I saw the conversation between Saylor and Musk on Twitter, and I was like, yeah, why shouldnt he buy into bitcoin? Hes crazy and he has a lot of money, so why not?

__

Learn more:

- Heres What the Mainstream Media Makes of Teslas Bitcoin Move

- Bitcoiners Bristle as Musk-fuelled Dogecoin Rocket Re-enters Top 10

- GameStop and Dogecoin Show How Memes Can Move Markets

Kisumu  Kisumu County Assembly is the latest to pass the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) Bill, joining Siaya County Assembly which adopted it on February 3.

The report on the Bill was tabled before the Assembly by MCA Seth Okumu, the Chairperson Administrative of Law and Justice Committee after the legislature resumed on Tuesday after a long recess.

The Committee had conducted a public participation on the draft Bill on Friday, February 5.

Okumu told the House members of the public who turned up emphasized on the need to strengthen devolution.

The members of public, he said, were happy with the proposals to increase the revenue allocation to the counties from 15 per cent to 35 per cent.

Okumu said they were unanimous that the Bill be passed without any amendment.

While debating on the motion, South West Nyakach MCA Gard Olima said the Bill will herald a tremendous development agenda.

Olima said every Kenyan is yearning for development and BBI gives more resources to every corner of this country to uplift them in terms of development.

He said the executive will no longer dangle development to the MCAs since ward-based development will be catered for under the Ward Development Fund.

When the vote was put by Speaker Elisha Oraro, the MCAs unanimously voted to have the Bill passed.

Oraro promised to transmit the decision of the Assembly to the National Assembly and the Senate.
The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company

Help India!

Washington DC: On Tuesday, US-based advocacy group Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC) issued an open letter, strongly condemning the continuous attacks on organisation and its coalition partners by the Islamophobic Middle East Forum (MEF) and its Hindutva allies.

The latest letter comes on the heels of a defamatory article written by Benjamin Baird of MEF and published by The Sunday Guardian  a rightwing Indian publication founded by Bharatiya Janata Party leader MJ Akbar. The article peddles fallacies as fact and lies as truth in an attempt to discredit IAMCs work on safeguarding Indias pluralist and tolerant ethos.

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The MEF article makes many baseless allegations against IAMC, Indian Vice President Hamid Ansari, prominent activist Harsh Mander, Ladeeda Farzana, and Aysha Renna.

The pathetic attacks published in a barely known online publication are laughable for their sheer absurdity. However, they also demonstrate the desperation of Hindu nationalist front organizations in the US to besmirch IAMC, even at the expense of collaborating with racist and xenophobic organizations like MEF that have zero credibility, said Mr. Rasheed Ahmed, Executive Director of IAMC.

MEF, which is run by the infamous anti-Muslim provocateur Daniel Pipes has been called out US non-profit Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as having spent the better part of three decades vilifying Muslims.

MEF is not only notorious for its Islamophobic views but has also inspired terror attacks in the past. The MEF and Pipes were cited sixteen times in far-right mass murderer Norwegian Anders Breiviks manifesto, detailing his motivations for his July 2011 attack that resulted in the killing of 77 people.

According to the letter, MEF is targeting IAMC on behalf of its Hindutva allies, including the Hindu American Foundation (HAF), an advocacy group that lobbies to deflect scrutiny of the rapidly deteriorating situation in India with respect to human rights and religious freedom.

IAMC is working with the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the UN Special Rapporteur to bring international attention to the plight of Muslims and Dalits in India, the letter mentions as the reason for Hindu nationalist front organizations in the US attacking IAMC.

These Hindutva front organizations have now extended their dragnet to target anyone working with IAMC, including credible Hindu organizations such as Hindus For Human Rights, says a statement issued by IAMC that references the letter.

In December last year, MEFs Sam Westrop, another known Islamophobe, wrote an article in Newsweek accusing IAMC of being an anti-Hindu Islamist group with alleged ties to SIMI, a banned terrorist organization in India. Notably, after IAMC tweeted its second letter to Newsweek expressing displeasure with the Westrop canard, the editor-at-large of Newsweek, Naveed Jamali, wrote on Twitter that people like Sam Westrop or the Middle Eastern Forum shouldnt be given a platform, while citing the history of their Islamophobia and misinformation.

He, however, later deleted the tweets, possibly due to pressure from within the news organisation.

IAMC President Mr. Ahsan Khan termed the continuous attacks by Hindu nationalist front organizations as a larger part of the smear campaign to spread vile and dangerous propaganda against Muslim organizations in America.

Them going to this extent to attack IAMC actually energizes us even more, as it implies that our advocacy is hurting their efforts at contextualizing the persecution of minorities in India and at mainstreaming Islamophobia in the US, Mr. Khan said.

We urge everyone interested in the details of the absurd attack on IAMC to read the open letter to Sunday Guardian Live. They provide a window into the minds of bigoted individuals who are behind the attacks and for whom facts do not matter, he added.

Read the full letter here.
(@ChaudhryMAli88)

ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News / WAM - 10th Feb, 2021) Pakistan has congratulated the leadership and people of the UAE on Hope Probe's successful entry into the Mars orbit.

Zahid Hafeez Chaudhri, the Spokesperson of Pakistan Ministry of Foreign Affairs ( MoFA), in a congratulatory message on Twitter described the historical feat as "outstanding success" for the Emirates' Mars Mission #HopeProbe.

"It is a testament to the vision of the UAE leadership, and a pride for its people, as well as Muslim Ummah," he concluded.

The UAE made history on Tuesday when its first-ever interplanetary Hope Probe mission successfully entered orbit around Mars, after seven-month, 480-million-kilometre journey and begun circling the Red Planet.
Chris Graythen/Getty Images

Whether you've had the life-changing experience of attending Mardi Gras in New Orleans or have always dreamed of visiting, this is the perfect year to bring the famed party to the privacy of your own living room.

Since COVID-19 restrictions have canceled the city's elaborate street parades featuring outsized floats and the fancy dress balls of January and February, as well as the culminating Fat Tuesday celebration on Feb. 16, Mardi Gras 2021 is one for the imagination. Whether you live on the city's famed St. Charles Avenue or thousands of miles away, use this high-spirited guide for the best ways to bring the timeless party Gras into your home this year. And laissez les bon temps rouler!

Dig into New Orleans dishes

Mardi Gras season is the perfect excuse to indulge in traditional New Orleans cuisine. And the good news is that these specialty foods can be ordered from local purveyors and shipped to your home, allowing you to support an economy suffering from the cancellation of so many events. Get your Mardi Gras menu started with the following treats you can order today:

1. Shrimp and grits: This Creole classic is something you can certainly cook up on your own at home, but it would be more fun to order up from Commander's Palace, a dining institution that's been the site of celebrations since it opened in 1893. The restaurant's Wild Shrimp & Cognac with Creole Cream Cheese Grits ($89) serves two and is available via Goldbelly, a service that connects restaurants with patrons throughout the U.S. Order it here: Wild Shrimp & Cognac with Creole Cream Cheese Grits.

2. Po'boys and muffulettas: These two iconic sandwiches are the twin pillars of New Orleans casual eating. Said to have been invented during New Orleans 1929 streetcar strike, the po'boy is a hearty sandwich on a soft stretch of French bread that can feature any meat or seafood. Dig in to the roast beef and gravy with Swiss cheese from Parkway Bakery and Tavern for one of the earliest  and most delicious  versions ($99 for 4). Order it here: Roast Beef Po Boys for 4.

To experience the original muffuletta sandwich, head to where it was invented: Central Grocery & Deli, open in the French Quarter since 1906. The Sicilian owner's creation for farmers who wanted a hearty lunch of meats and cheeses, the historic sandwich layers ham, salami, mortadella, Swiss and provolone with a marinated olive salad on a round sesame loaf ($109 for a two-pack that serves 6-8). Order it here: Original Muffuletta Sandwich.

3. King cake: A ritual-linked food with roots that predate Mardi Gras, this breaded dough ring with brightly sugared vanilla icing is now practically the symbol of Mardi Gras season, and loads of New Orleans bakeries offer delicious variations. The confection has a small plastic baby tucked inside, and whoever gets the slice that contains it is said to receive good luck and is crowned the king or queen of the day. Here are three of the best king cake versions:
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President Joe Biden's interaction with a nurse came only days after the "Saturday Night Live" host Colin Jost joked regarding his 'handsome records' at the beginning of the segment.

Biden had an awkward moment with a nurse during a conference

On Monday, the President had an awkward, flirty moment with health care workers in Arizona during a video conference event. Biden stopped to compliment a nurse for her youthful appearance, saying the nurse looks 'like a freshman.'

According to Fox News, Biden got up to some of his "creepy" old antics when he replied to the thorough explanation of giving COVID-19 vaccine shots by the nursing supervisor by telling her about her age.

Complementing a nurse as she looks like a freshman was another "creepy" mishaps of President Joe Biden, as per The Sun. The President dismissed a nursing supervisor's discussion of giving COVID-19 vaccine shots in the state during a conference event and instead asked the nurse about her age.

Read also: Trump Appointee Sues Joe Biden, Urges Him to Resign Before Term Ends

At the end of her informative talk about the vaccine roll-out in the hardest-hit state in the US, Biden asked Brittney Hayes, "Are you a freshman at the university?"

Hayes has just outlined the vaccine roll-out process at the State Farm Stadium vaccination site in Glendale for individuals receiving vaccines. A blushing Hayes replied immediately, "No, no," adding that she was from Arizona State University and making it clear that she was the vaccination site's "head charge nurse."

"You look like a freshman," Biden chuckling responded, while Hayes said, "Why thank you," through her mask. When Vice President Kamala Harris continued to raise questions after the awkward interaction, Biden still focused on the nurse's age.

Read also: Biden Says Minimum Wage Increase Won't Likely Be Included in COVID-19 Relief Package

Previously, Biden was called "Creepy Joe"

According to the NY Post, President Joe Biden is notorious for intruding into women's personal space, often when whispering suggestions in their ear or impromptu massaging a hand.

During the 2020 race, former President Donald Trump's followers called him "Creepy Joe" and cheerfully shared compilations of him doing so.

At the beginning of his campaign in 2019, Biden was also forced to bring out a video in which he admitted making viewers "uncomfortable" with his tactile gestures and vowed to be "much more mindful" in the future.

The President's virtual tour has more than one awkward moment. Major Gen. Michael McGuire of the Arizona National Guard told Biden in a separate presentation that other states are welcome to rip off his state's COVID-19 proposal.

"That's what we say, plagiarism is the highest form of flattery, so if everyone wants to copy what Arizona is doing, we think we have it figured out here," McGuire said. In 1988, McGuire ended his presidential run because of a plagiarism fiasco.

Read also: Biden Does Not Want Trump To Receive Intelligence Briefings, Claims He Might 'Slip and Say Something'

@ 2021 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.



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Doctors have demanded a ban on clinics providing 'no baby, no fee' IVF deals direct to patients over fears that it could encourage rushed treatments which may put mothers and infants at risk.

The campaign comes after the UK's biggest fertility clinic launched a deal offering patients refunds after three failed cycles of IVF treatment.

Care Fertility runs 21 clinics across the UK also offer a multi-cycle deal which gives patients the option to pay in advance for two rounds of IVF.

A campaign group made up of fertility doctors, finance brokers and former patients have joined to voice their concerns that the deals could encourage rushed treatments which lead to health complications.

Usually similar finance deals would be offered by third parties and campaigners believe that if clinics start to offer them directly to patients there would be a conflict of interest.

The campaign comes after the UK's biggest fertility clinic launched a deal offering patients refunds after three failed cycles of IVF treatment. Stock picture

A spokesman for the Safe campaign told The Times: 'Clinics in the US stimulate their patients with larger doses of medication in search of higher egg yields ... However, this approach comes at a cost.

'Patients in the US endure higher rates of often serious complications such as ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome (OHSS), increased risks of adverse pregnancy outcomes and higher rates of children born with low birth weight.'

Care Fertility denies these claims and says it had protocols in place which wouldn't allow for a conflict of interest.

It added that its rates of ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome are below average.

The fertility group claims they are offering the deals in order to help the patient and give them a better experience of IVF treatment.

It said that it recommends different treatments based on advice from doctors and will not take into account how a patient is paying for the service.

However, the Safe campaign is calling for the industry's regulator - the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority - to ban the deals.

Care Fertility runs 21 clinics across the UK also offer a multi-cycle deal which gives patients the option to pay in advance for two rounds of IVF. Stock picture

Lead embryologist of Manchester Fertility, Debbie Falconer, said she is asking for the regulator to carry out a review of the deals.

A Care Fertility spokesman said: 'We would also like to highlight that until very recently we have worked with Access Fertility to provide IVF funding programmes to our patients.

'However, following extensive patient feedback through various research projects we have conducted over a number of years, we have learned that patients found it disruptive to have to contact a third party like Access Fertility to access an IVF funding package.

'Furthermore, patients were concerned that an unknown medic from this third party would be deciding whether or not they would be eligible for a funding programme without having spoken to the patient.

'We therefore designed CAREpay to address these concerns and make accessing much-needed IVF funding programmes a more seamless patient experience, with patients having no need to contact anyone other than CARE.

'Patients also have the reassurance of knowing that their own fertility doctor, with full knowledge of their medical history and circumstances, will assess whether they are suitable for an IVF funding programme, keeping the details of their very personal fertility plans and treatment private.

'We were also uneasy that under the current Access Fertility model, clinics have little incentive to get patients pregnant.

'The Access Fertility model effectively rewards failure as clinics are paid for each cycle performed irrespective of outcome. By offering IVF funding programmes in-house, CARE is totally aligned with our human desire to help patients become pregnant safely.'

An HFEA spokesperson said: 'The comparison with the US is misleading and may cause unnecessary anxiety for patients. Unlike the US, fertility treatment in the UK is tightly regulated by us.

'Our primary role is to ensure licensed clinics provide safe treatment for patients.

'We monitor all aspects of treatment including multiple births and OHSS and over recent years, the fertility sector in the UK has become safer; multiple births are at an all-time low, OHSS is decreasing, and clinics are more compliant with our regulations. Any evidence of unsafe practices would be picked up by our inspection process.

'We have no evidence that payment plans affect the safety of treatment in the UK and we'll continue to ensure that all clinics provide safe treatment regardless of how it is funded.'
President Joe Biden is launching a new Defense Department task force on China that will take an overall look at the growing military and strategic rival of the U.S.  putting in place a scheme that could lead to a new national military posture.

He announced the move at the Pentagon  a signal to Beijing that the look will overarching and will include military and not just economic components of the U.S. posture.

The reexamination comes after four years of clashes with Beijing over economic policy and a trade war that featured tariffs and counter-tariffs.

The task force will look at intelligence, technology as well as the U.S. the military footprint in the region.

It will include representatives of the joint staff and combatant commands as well as the intelligence community, a reflection of the areas upon which it will focus.

It will consist of 15 people, and will be tasked with presenting its findings in four months.

Move on China: Joe Biden announced a Pentagon review of the military's approach to China at the Pentagon

Rival: Joe Biden said of Xi Jinping's CHina: 'We need to meet the growing challenges posed by China to keep the peace and defend our interest in the Indo-Pacific and globally.'

Speaking at the Pentagon for the first time as president along with new Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Biden called for the U.S. to lead a new era of competition 'from the deep sea to outer space'  two areas where China is on the move.

'And we need to meet the growing challenges posed by China to keep the peace and defend our interest in the Indo-Pacific and globally,' Biden said.

'Today I was briefed on a new DOD-wide China Task Force and Secretary Austin is standing up to look at our strategy and operational concepts, technology and force posture and so much more.

'The task force will work quickly, drawing on civilian and military experts across the department to provide within the next few months recommendations to Secretary Austin on key priorities and decision points, so that we can chart a strong path forward on China related matters.

'It will require a whole government effort, bipartisan cooperation in Congress, and strong alliances and partnerships. That's how we'll meet the China challenge and ensure the American people win the competition in the future.'

The moves comes days after Biden issued his most extensive public comments on China of his presidency in an interview with CBS where he cast China as a competitor.

'There's going to be extreme competition. And I'm not going to do it the way that he knows,' Biden said of Chinese President Xi Jinping. 'And that's because he's  sending signals as well. I'm not going to do it the way Trump did. We're going to focus on international rules of the road,' he said.

He also spoke of his experience meeting with the Chinese leader numerous times.

'He's very bright,' Biden said of Xi. 'He's very tough. He doesn't have  and I don't mean it as a criticism, just the reality, he doesn't have a democratic, small-D, bone in his body. But ... the question is, I've said to him all along, that we need not have a conflict.'

Officials have described the task force as coordinating various U.S. government levers. They include economic, diplomatic, political and military areas, the Wall Street Journal reported.

China for decades has been considered a growing rival to the U.S., and its own leaders have designed elaborate strategies to carve out influence in the developing world; expand Chinese territorial claims; exert more control of special territories like Hong Kong; and continue its gains as a global military and economic power.

The Barack Obama administration also had to manage tensions with China, hosting Xi at the White House, while also using military and diplomatic efforts to push back Chinese assertions of territorial dominance in the region.

The task force will be chaired by Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense Dr. Ely Ratner.

It will also examine the areas of strategy, force structure, the posture of U.S. forces, U.S. alliances, and defense relations with China.

Currently two U.S. carrier groups conducted joint exercises in the South China Sea on Tuesday, days after a U.S. warship sailed near Chinese-controlled islands in the disputed waters, as China denounced the United States for damaging peace and stability.

Strike group: The Theodore Roosevelt, seen in Da Nang, Vietnam, last year, carried out a rare joint exercise with her own strike group and that of the Nimitz close to Chinese waters

Show of strength: The USS Sterett is part of the Nimitz Strike Group deployed to joint exercises with the Theodore Roosevelt Strike Group in the South China Sea

The Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group and the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group 'conducted a multitude of exercises aimed at increasing interoperability between assets as well as command and control capabilities,' the U.S. Navy said, marking the first dual carrier operations in the busy waterway since July 2020.

In Beijing, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said the frequent moves by U.S. warships and aircraft into the South China Sea in a 'show of force' was not conducive to regional peace and stability.

'China will continue to take necessary measures to firmly safeguard national sovereignty and security and work with countries in the region to firmly safeguard peace and stability in the South China Sea,' he said.

The exercise comes days after China condemned the sailing of the destroyer, the USS John S. McCain, near the Chinese-controlled Paracel Islands in what the United States calls a freedom of navigation operation - the first such mission by the U.S. navy since President Joe Biden took office.

Last month, the U.S. military said Chinese military flights over the South China Sea fit a pattern of destabilizing and aggressive behavior but posed no threat to a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier strike group in the region.

The United States has contested China's extensive territorial claims in the region, accusing it of militarizing the South China Sea and trying to intimidate neighbors such as Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam, who have claims that overlap with China's in the resource-rich area.

'We are committed to ensuring the lawful use of the sea that all nations enjoy under international law,' Rear Admiral Jim Kirk, commander of the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group, said in a statement.

China has been infuriated by repeated U.S. sailings near the islands it occupies and controls in the South China Sea. China says it has irrefutable sovereignty and has accused the United States of deliberately stoking tension.

China has also been angered by U.S. warships sailing through the Taiwan Strait, including one last week, also the first such operation under the Biden administration.

Speaking in Taipei, Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen said U.S. ships and aircraft carrying out freedom of navigation operations was reassuring.

'This demonstrates the clear U.S. attitude towards challenges to the security status quo in the Indo-Pacific region,' she said.


In the weeks since the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, hundreds of people have been tasked with cleaning the building, collecting piles of litter, painting over violent graffiti and sweeping up broken glass. So much broken glass.

But far more than windows was shattered during the attempted insurrection - for those in the Capitol, who had once felt safe within that sanctum; for the families who saw loved ones injured and killed; and for a country that had never before doubted the orderly transition of power. Scenes of the violence and destruction replayed on Capitol Hill as former president Donald Trump's impeachment trial opened Tuesday. No matter how the trial ends, the United States must live with that damage.

Living with the damage does not need to be a metaphor. The Architect of the Capitol can preserve some physical evidence of the attack to create a permanent reminder for a country too eager to forget how precarious democracy can be. Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, has proposed leaving such evidence for future generations.

Communities around the world have made a similar choice in response to wars and political violence. From London to Berlin, battered buildings stand in memory of the horrors of World War II. In Ottawa, there are bullet holes in the Canadian Parliament's Hall of Honor, a memorial to a 2014 assault on the city by an Islamic State sympathizer. In Madrid, the Palacio de las Cortes, where the Spanish Congress of Deputies meets, is still tattooed with the gunfire of an attempted coup in 1981.

And in Prague, the mottled facade of the National Museum is an ever-present reminder of the Soviet invasion of 1968. The occupying force strafed the sandstone building with machine-gun fire. When the Soviets later instructed local laborers to repair it, the Czechs, according to national lore, deliberately chose the wrong materials. Instead of restoring the museum to its pristine former state, the patches permanently marked the building, turning the site of a painful attack into a symbol of national pride.

In the hours after the Capitol riot last month, as members of Congress reentered the ransacked building to continue their constitutionally mandated duty, then-Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., began to try to make sense of the events. "We can now add January 6th, 2021, to that very short list of dates in American history that will live, forever, in infamy," he said, likening the insurrection to the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

In 1962, the United States erected a moving memorial to that national trauma and the more than 2,400 Americans who died under Japanese fire. But another remembrance has stood for much longer: At Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, the buildings some 20,000 active duty Navy and Air Force troops walk by each day are forever pockmarked by the machine-gun fire and shrapnel that fell that Dec. 7.

Today, veterans, their children, their grandchildren and their great-grandchildren make pilgrimages to the site to see firsthand how the world fractured that day. A retired master sergeant of the Air Force Reserve was given special permission to create castings of the damage as handmade keepsakes. And since 1985, what some have called the base's "birthmarks" were protected by a National Register of Historic Places designation, guaranteeing they would be retained during a recent renovation of the headquarters.

Romney has called for this same type of preservation at the U.S. Capitol. "Architecturally and historically, I think it would be a good thing to preserve some evidence of the destruction of the building," he said in a recent statement. His concern was for visitors centuries in the future: "One hundred and fifty years from now, as people tour the building, they'll say, 'Ah, this was where that insurrection occurred.' "

History will certainly remember the events of Jan. 6. Curators from the Smithsonian Institution began to collect artifacts even before the death toll and the damage were fully understood. The items will be studied, put into context and, eventually, secured behind glass. Some day, the damaged placard emblazoned with Nancy Pelosi's name that once hung above the House speaker's office door may be part of a museum exhibit on election violence.

But what happens before the event takes its place in the history books? How will the country remember the event in the coming weeks, months and election cycles?

Preserving prominent damage of the attempted insurrection - a shattered window, a splintered door - inside one of the country's most prominent buildings would be an immediate and profound act of remembrance. In a normal year, some 5 million visitors come to marvel at the buildings' beauty and their promise of enduring democracy; the Capitol complex employs thousands more who maintain it. Most importantly, our 535 representatives and senators and their staffs wander its marble halls daily. The very people who came under attack on Jan. 6 should not need a regular reminder that their words have the power to stoke hate and incite violence, but some do.

The seat of government must, of course, be repaired sufficiently to ensure the safety of those who work there, but a complete restoration will smooth over the physical evidence of the deep divides that threaten the nation, and leave the new razor-wire-topped fence around the complex as the only reminder of these events. The insurrection attempt was fueled by misinformation, but transforming the scars that now mar the Capitol into a monument will preserve one incontrovertible and uncomfortable truth, for this generation and for future ones: An attack on democracy happened here, in this place and in our time.

- - -

April White is a former editor at Smithsonian magazine. She is writing a book about the history of divorce in the United States.
Reckless Driver Call Leads to Drug, DUI Arrest

By West Kentucky Star Staff

and operating a motor vehicle under the influence 3

Offense. Johnson was first transported to the Caldwell County Medical Center and later lodged in the Caldwell County Jail.

CALDWELL COUNTY - A man faces drug and DUI charges in Caldwell County.The Caldwell County Sheriff's Office said deputies were dispatched to Blue Springs Market in reference to a reckless driver. Upon arriving at the scene and locating the driver, deputies arrested 28-year-old Devin Johnson of Hopkinsville.Johnson was charged with possession of synthetic drugs
School principals in the capital welcomed the announcement of the nursery admissions schedule which has cleared the air for parents who were waiting for two months for clarity on the issue.

The Directorate of Education (DoE) on Wednesday announced that the admission process for entry level classes will begin from February 18 and will conclude on March 31.

Usually, nursery admissions in around 1,700 schools in the capital begin in the last week of November. The DoE releases guidelines and schools are asked to furnish the required information, following which the application process is rolled out in December.

The officials had in December said a proposal to scrap nursery admissions was being considered as schools were closed for nine months due to COVID-19 and will remain closed till a vaccine was available. A whole year of online learning for small children seems unviable, they had said. But school principals had opposed this idea.

However, Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia last month had ruled out scrapping nursery admissions.

The Directorate of Education of Delhi in their recent announcement about beginning the nursery admissions next week has made the future of lakhs of students secured. The school management and teachers are rejoicing at the move and preparing themselves to welcome the new batch of young ones, said Priyanka Barara, Principal, MRG School, Rohini, Delhi.

In the past few days, while the government was considering the possibility of scrapping the nursery admissions off, a unanimous opinion from parents and teachers prevailed that a whole year of child will completely go waste. We are glad the authorities took notice of our concerns and made a positive move, she added.

According to Sumedha Goel, Director, The Shri Ram Wonder Years, Rohini, the construct of the nursery class is a conduit between home to school. It acts as the first classroom which can be a great boost to children's confidence and overall development.

It is clear from the recent announcements by government that it fully understands the major impact nursery classes can have on a child's growth. We as school authorities appreciate the move and are hoping to interact with our little ones soon. Our efforts would be directed towards accommodating children as per the new scenario, she added.

Alka Kapur, Principal, Modern School, Shalimar Bagh, said, The Directorate of Education has already thought things through and given appropriate directions so there isn't much to improvise while conducting the admissions. The only thing that has been left solely to the jurisdiction of schools is the responsibility of devising a fair, reasonable, and unbiased admission procedure. We will be conducting the admissions via a lottery system as it is the most suitable procedure of admission for nursery class.

Parents have also welcomed the move saying it was not a wise idea to scrap the admission for whole year.

We have been on hook waiting for announcement for nursery admission schedule. There was lot of uncertainty about whether it will happen or not and when will it happen as almost two months had passed than the usual deadline, said Pragati Mishra, a parent.

Ram Jha, another parent said, It is right that it is not easy to teach such small kids online and it is harmful to an extent too but not letting them be involved in any formal learning for the whole year was not a wise idea. We are happy that the government has issued instructions".

(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.)
Vietnam tries to attract eagles, or big investors, into agriculture, but it also needs sparrows or cooperatives and small enterprises.

Deputy Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Le Minh Hoan

According to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD), the farm produce processing industry in Vietnam has been developing rapidly thanks to the application of high technology, thus helping increase the added value of farm produce.

Sixty-seven large-scale farm produce processing plants have become operational in the last five years with total investment capital of $2.58 billion, creating new capability that promotes agriculture restructuring.

The production and business organization in agriculture has become more suited to the market economy and large-scale production. Many new-generation cooperatives and farms have been set up and are running well.

Agriculture firms have been developing rapidly with increasingly large scale. To date, Vietnam has 7,500 facilities that process farm produce in industrial scale for export.

Deputy Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Le Minh Hoan said Vietnamese enterprises have stepped up investment in agriculture and there have been more and more large economic groups in agriculture sector.

They (large economic groups) understand that agriculture is not the sector which can bring profits immediately, and there are many risks. However, they want to invest in agriculture not just to make money, but also to try to give a push to agricultural production, thus helping change the image of Vietnams agriculture, he said.

According to Hoang, this is the biggest value of the investment of the private sector in agriculture. The enterprises help create competitiveness for Vietnams farm produce and conquer the global farm produce market.

He stressed that it is necessary to respect the contribution of large enterprises which invest in agriculture, acting as eagles that lead the sector. However, Vietnam also needs small sparrows  local small enterprises and cooperatives  which can create high value if they work together.

Innovation and startup programs in agriculture will be prioritized in the time to come. The enterprises and young people returning to rural areas from large cities bringing knowledge and modern technology will have opportunities to start businesses in many segments of agriculture, from product classification and preservation to distribution to e-commerce.

According to Hoan, once there are many small agricultural enterprises, the big investors making investment will cooperate with the enterprises to create ecosystems.

Investors should work together rather than going alone, he said.

Professionalizing farmers

The farm produce processing industry in Vietnam has been developing rapidly thanks to the application of high technology, thus helping increase the added value of farm produce.

Regarding the restructuring of the agriculture sector, Hoan said it is necessary to have the cooperative and collective economy, with cooperatives as the core, into a position appropriate to the process of restructuring Vietnams agriculture.

This should be seen as the solution to change small-scale agricultural production, he said, adding that what Son La, Dong Thap, Gia Lai and Kon Tum have done shows the importance of cooperatives and collective economy.

The cooperative movement is expected to develop in a stronger and more sustainable way, acting as the leverage to connect small-scale production households, activate farmers cooperation chains, and create links among farmers, between cooperatives and enterprises.

Our story is cooperation and connection. In order to do this, it is necessary to define the market because the market will determine the production, scale and technical standards."

However, Hoan said in order to have professional agriculture, there must be professional farmers. The agriculture ministry will join forces with the Farmers Association and agencies to apply a foreign model, i.e., farmers will have to have licenses for agricultural production, and agriculture will be an occupation.

It is commonly thought that those who do well at school will be sent to universities in large cities, while those who are weak at learning will become farmers. With this viewpoint, agriculture wont be able to develop.

It is necessary to professionalize farmers, Hoan said.

Tam An - Thu Hang - Tran Thuong

Vietnam heads towards modern, integrated agriculture Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Nguyen Xuan Cuong talks about measures to promote modern agricultural development.
It's being reported this morning that Apple has won a ruling tossing out a consumer lawsuit alleging that its voice-activated software records conversations without user consent. However, Siris reprieve may be short-lived because U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White in Oakland, California, gave consumers permission to revise and refile the suit.

The plaintiffs had alleged violations of various state and federal statutes, including a U.S. wiretapping law that outlaws intentional interceptions of communications. White didnt rule on the merits of the case. He said the plaintiffs had failed to advance enough facts to support their claims. For more on this read the full Bloomberg report.
Representative Image (AP Photo/Mukhtar Khan)

August 5, 2019 changed Jammu & Kashmir as we knew it. With one stroke the central government did something that no other government dreamt of.

The circumstances under which J&K was formed were special, and it called for a special status. However, over the years this special status was not politically syncing with the rest of India, and external forces took advantage of the fragile situation. Added to this, local opportunists were only interested in furthering their own agenda.

Talks failed, force didnt yield desired results, and politics didnt bear fruit. Nothing had worked  so a different approach was required. The power of the law is limitless, and if implemented well and in its true spirit, it can bear results. Kashmir is testimony to that.

One of the biggest concerns for the civilian population in Kashmir has been the safety of their children. The year 2018 saw a record number of civilians losing their lives due to violence in the Valley. In 2021, it no longer seems a major concern. Other common occurrences in the past were the calls for strikes and stone-pelting. Today, incidents of stone-pelting have drastically reduced and there are few takers for calls of boycott or hartal.

Revoking of J&Ks special status was met with a lot of criticism from the foreign media and sections of society. Many analysts and commentators predicted that it was the beginning of the end in Kashmir. A fear was created, especially among locals, that the removal of special status would see an influx of people from other states choosing to settle in the Union Territory. Locals were made to believe that they would lose their land, livelihood and identity.

Today, 18 months on, there is an exodus, but it is that of thousands of visiting tourists. The restoration of peace in J&K has meant that economic prospects are looking up, and not even COVID-19 can dampen the hopes of a better tomorrow.

The scrapping of special status and the subsequent presidential assent of the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act, 2019 also meant that state laws were done away with and central laws were introduced. This meant the powerful satraps lost control of the local banks, and the Centres rule also ensured the noose was tightened around foreign funding. With funds running out, alliances such as the Hurriyat and leaders like Syed Ali Shah Geelani have been pushed to the wall.

The Centres intervention and calculated moves such as the temporary suspension of Internet services and restriction in movements of a select few meant that it was not business as usual  and this was a further blow to the separatists. As of midnight on February 5, 4G Internet services have been restored in the whole of J&K.

With many of the traditional issues being resolved one-after-the-other, the issue of restoring statehood remains. That, Im afraid, only time will tell. Much has been achieved, and much more needs to be done before the question of statehood is revisited.

Indias policies and steps taken since August 5, 2019 in J&K have left Pakistan without a response. Its decades-old tactics of instigating the locals, and causing unrest has been blunted by the Centre. Perhaps this is why Islamabads all-weather friend, China has resorted to antics in Eastern Ladakh.

This does not mean that we are out of the woods, not yet. With a pesky neighbour like Pakistan, which has a stated policy to bleed India with a thousand cuts, we cannot let our guard down. We need to be as alert as ever.

The past 18 months have been transformational for J&K, unlike anything seen in the past few decades. It will be an uphill task for Indias enemies to recover lost ground, during which the government is expected to usher in more development on the ground and empower the local people  this is expected to wean the youth away from militancy. The promise that peace holds and the hope that development will bring is enough to realign J&K on the path to regain its lost glory, and once again become paradise on Earth.
A beauty queen has allegedly been strangled to death by her husband in Lebanon, becoming the latest victim in a spate of domestic abuse killings in the country.

The murder of model Zeina Kanjo in Beirut and two other women has provoked outrage, as authorities revealed a doubling of domestic abuse reports in a country that recently won praise for new laws to protect women.

Kanjo was allegedly killed at her home by husband Ibrahim Ghazal, who was charged with her murder after fleeing to Turkey, state-run National News Agency reported.

She was killed on Sunday evening having previously filed a complaint of domestic abuse against her husband. They had only been married for a few months.

The murder of model Zeina Kanjo (pictured) and two other women has provoked outrage in Lebanon, as authorities revealed a doubling of domestic abuse reports in a country that recently won praise for new laws to protect women

A warrant is out for Ghazal's arrest, who fled the couple's home in the Ain el-Mraisseh district of Beirut where initial investigations found him to have killed his wife.

Findings from a preliminary investigation by the Internal Security Forces, led by Beirut's chief prosecutor showed that her death was a result of strangulation, that she had previously filed a domestic violence case, and was trying to get a divorce.

Lebanese TV channel Al Jadeed broadcast an audio recording in which Ghazal can be heard discussing the death of Kanjo with her sister Ruba.

'Ask me anything. By the way, I didn't want to, I didn't want her to die, when she was screaming, I just put my hand on her mouth. Just like she would scream and fight with me in front of you, Ruba,' he is heard saying, according to Middle East Eye.

'I told her to be quiet and stop crying since it was morning. Would I kill her?'

When Ruba continued to press her brother-in-law on her sister's death, he refused to give a straight answer, saying that he informed the police of her death.

A local news channel invited Kanjo's husband, Ibrahim Ghazal, on to share his version of events, triggering anger on social media over what many see as a culture of victim blaming.

'Lebanese media often help enshrine the idea that men can get away with these crimes,' said Hayat Mirshad, co-director at Fe-Male, a local feminist group.

'(Ghazal) said on the show that if he didn't want to get arrested, he wouldn't be.'

Following reports of her death, social media users posted #ZeinaKanjo (in Arabic) to spread awareness about domestic violence issues women face in the country.

Kanjo (right) was allegedly killed at her home by husband Ibrahim Ghazal (left), who was charged with her murder after fleeing to Turkey, state-run National News Agency reported

Lebanon outlawed sexual harassment and reformed its domestic violence law in December but it does not criminalise marital rape and personal laws administered by religious courts discriminate against women in matters like divorce and child custody.

The United Nations has described a global increase in domestic abuse during coronavirus lockdowns as a 'shadow pandemic', with a spiralling economic crisis worsening violence in homes in Lebanon, according to women's rights groups.

In new figures shared with the Thomson Reuters Foundation on Wednesday, the Internal Security Forces (ISF) said domestic violence reports doubled last year, with 1,468 cases received in the last 12 months, up from 747 during the previous year.

The number of women killed during domestic violence also increased but the exact figure has not yet been finalised, said the ISF official, who declined to be named because they were not authorised to speak to the media.

The official figures reflect a similar trend noted by women's rights organisation ABAAD, which saw calls to its helpline triple to 4,127 in 2020, up from 1,375 in 2019.

Kanjo (pictured) was killed on Sunday evening having previously filed a complaint of domestic abuse against her husband. They had only been married for a few months

The second murder to make the headlines this month was of a woman in her 50s who was killed by a man who was trying to sexually assault her, the ISF said in a statement, adding that it had arrested a teenage male relative who had confessed.

Widad Hassoun, a middle-aged woman, was also found dead in northern Lebanon after being strangled, according to Fe-Male's feminist website Sharika wa Laken website.

'These crimes should not be seen as isolated incidents,' said Mirshad of Fe-Male.

'They are part of a series of crimes enacted every day against women and girls because of the patriarchal system and a mentality that justifies these crimes.'

Women's rights activists welcomed Lebanon's amendment in December of its 2014 domestic violence law to include violence 'resulting from' marriage, but local lawyers say it is unclear if this applies to divorced women, leaving a legal loophole.

'We've seen many cases where men divorce women after they abuse them' to escape prosecution in civil courts, said Manal Majed, a lawyer with the Lebanese Women Democratic Gathering, a women's rights group.

'Women still have few protections from aggressors in positions of power over them.'
DMK member Dayanidhi Maran on Wednesday said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi should take a COVID vaccine shot in public as such a move will give confidence to people since many are not trusting the vaccine. Participating in the discussion on Union Budget 2021-22 in Lok Sabha, he also said that apart from the prime minister, President, home minister and defence minister should take the vaccine shots in public.

"There is a discomfort, people are not truly trusting the vaccine... because of the efficacy," he said and mentioned that US President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris had taken the vaccine shots in public. He also mentioned that UK's Prince Philip and the prime minister's good friend and Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu have also taken the vaccine shots.

"I think our prime minister likes the American model... President of India, prime minister, home minister and defence minister should go (take vaccine shots) in public," he noted. This will give confidence to people, he said.

Alpine, Texas: A West Texas judge has a word of caution for those attending court hearings via Zoom: always check for filters before logging on.

Judge Roy Fergusons warning comes after an attorney accidentally joined a video court hearing while using a Zoom filter that made him appear like a fluffy white kitten.

Im here live. Im not a cat, the attorney said.

I can see that, replied Ferguson, whose district covers five counties in West Texas, including the town of Marfa.
The new service chiefs were appointed by President Muhammadu Buhari in January.

The Senate has received a formal request from President Muhammadu Buhari for the confirmation of the newly appointed service chiefs.

The request, contained in a letter dated January, 27, was read by the Senate President, Ahmad Lawan, during plenary on Tuesday.

The new service chiefs are the Chief of Defence Staff, Lucky Irabor, a major general and the Chief of Army Staff, Ibrahim Attahiru, also a major general.

Others are the Chief of Naval Staff, Awwal Gambo, a rear admiral, and the Chief of Air staff, Isiaka Amao, an air vice marshal.

They will replace the former set of service chiefs - Chief of Defence Staff, Gabriel Olonisakin; Chief of Army Staff, Tukur Buratai; Chief of Naval Staff, Ibok Ibas; and Chief of Air Staff, Sadique Abubakar.

The letter comes about a week after the presidency announced the resignation of the former service chiefs as well as the appointment of the new set.

The appointments, Mr Buhari said, were in compliance with Section 18(1) of the Armed Forces Act. Cap A20 Laws the Federation of Nigeria 2004.

Also, in a separate letter, the president sought confirmation of the appointment of the former service chiefs as non-career ambassadors - an announcement that was made one week after their resignation.

Condemnation

The nominations sparked outrage among Nigerians with many condemning the president's decision and rating low the performance of the former service chiefs amidst growing insecurity in the country.

The opposition party, PDP, also accused the Buhari administration of attempting to shield the ex-service chiefs from investigation and subsequent prosecution for alleged crimes against humanity.

But in reaction to public criticism, the presidency described the ambassadorial nomination as a reward for "hard work and exceptional sacrifice".

In a letter dated February 4, and read during plenary by Mr Lawan, Mr Buhari said the appointments were duly carried out in accordance to section 171(1),(2)(c) & sub-section (4) of 1999 constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria as amended.

Other appointments

Meanwhile, the president also sought the Senate's confirmation of Victor Muruako as Chairman for the Fiscal Responsibility Commission.

In another letter, Mr Buhari said the confirmation request was made in accordance with provision of Section 5(3) of the Fiscal Responsibility Act, 2007.

He also asked the Senate to confirm Aghughu Adolphus as Auditor-General of the Federation - pursuant to section 86(1) of Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (as amended); Larry Chukwu as Commissioner representing South-East, at the Nigerian Law Reform Commission and Wakil Bukar as Commissioner representing Bauchi, Borno and Yobe States, at the Federal Civil Service Commission.

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They were all conveyed in separate letters read out by the senate president.

In his welcome address, Mr Lawan said he hoped that important legislations like the Petroleum Industry Bill will be considered by the end of April and the Electoral Act, before the end of the second quarter.

He called for calm on the recent emergence of inter-ethnic and inter-tribal conflicts in some parts of the country. This is even as he urged leaders to unite and fight defeat criminality in the country.

Adjournment

The lawmakers suspended all legislative activities for the day in honour a member of the House of Representative, Ossy Prestige, who died recently.

The late lawmaker was initially in a hospital in the United Kingdom but was later transferred to another hospital in Germany, where he died, the Speaker of the House, Femi Gbajabiamila, said on Tuesday.

The late lawmaker represented Aba North/Aba South Federal Constituency in the House of Representatives. He was first elected in 2015 and re-elected in 2019.

Full legislative activities are expected to resume at the National Assembly on Wednesday.



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To judge from the reaction on social media, and from the way I felt, the video brought the Capitol siege alive as vividly as the day it occurred, maybe more so. The images were startling not only because they reminded us that yes, that really happened. In this country. Just last month. The video shocked also because it reminded us how easily we can be lured into forgetting how awful and dangerous that day was.
Sweden as the chair of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) must respect Russia's sovereignty, and Moscow expects the country to fulfill its obligations in a more professional manner, Russia's Permanent Representative to the OSCE Alexander Lukashevich said in an interview with Sputnik, commenting on recent statements by the OSCE chairperson-in-office

VIENNA (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 10th February, 2021) Sweden as the chair of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) must respect Russia's sovereignty, and Moscow expects the country to fulfill its obligations in a more professional manner, Russia's Permanent Representative to the OSCE Alexander Lukashevich said in an interview with Sputnik, commenting on recent statements by the OSCE chairperson-in-office.

OSCE chairperson-in-office and Swedish foreign minister, Ann Linde, said on January 19, when she was paying a visit to Kiev, that forces of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine were engaged in "non-direct monitoring" of the situation in Crimea  which rejoined Russia after a referendum back in 2014. Lukashevich expressed the belief that Linde's statements were "clearly outside the framework of OSCE consensual approaches." According to the Russian diplomat, even though Russia is accustomed to inappropriate statements on Crimea by Ukrainian and Western officials, one could not expect an OSCE chairperson-in-office to say something like that.

"Anyway, the chairpersonship must respect the Russian Federation's sovereignty. Otherwise, we will not get anywhere. Meanwhile, stirring up trouble is as easy as ABC. We expect our Swedish colleagues to fulfill their obligations as the OSCE chair in a more professional manner, without abusing powers," Lukashevich said.

An OSCE chair should help conflicting parties find solutions that are in line with the Minsk accords, and provide both political and organizational support, the Russian diplomat stressed. An OSCE chair should act as an "honest broker", but the beginning of Sweden's chairpersonship does not equal these hopes so far, Lukashevich noted.

The Crimean Peninsula rejoined Russia after nearly 97 percent of voters supported the move in a referendum, held in March 2014. The majority of Western countries, as well as Ukraine, have not recognized the referendum results and imposed sanctions on Russia.
WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Moody's Corporation (MCO) has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Cortera, a provider of North American credit data and workflow solutions. The company said the acquisition enhances Moody's integrated risk assessment capabilities and significantly extends coverage in the small and medium enterprise segment. Cortera will be integrated into MA's Research, Data & Analytics line of business. Moody's noted that the acquisition of Cortera will augment its Orbis database of private company information and enhance its know-your-customer, commercial lending, and supply chain solutions. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

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.
Moscow's Basmanny court has placed two municipal lawmakers under house arrest on charges of breaking coronavirus restrictions by publicly calling on Moscow residents to take part in unsanctioned rallies to protest the arrest of opposition politician Aleksei Navalny.

The court made the ruling on Konstantin Yankauskas and Dmitry Baranovsky on February 9 after earlier using the same charge against a third municipal lawmaker, Lyusya Shtein.

The lawmakers did not immediately comment on the situation, but Mikhail Timonov, an opposition deputy in the Moscow City Duma, called the move "an attack against [civil] rights and freedoms."

The lawmakers are three of 10 supporters and associates of Navalny who were detained in January on the eve of unsanctioned mass rallies against the Kremlin critic's arrest.

The others include Navalny's brother Oleg Navalny; Lyubov Sobol, a lawyer of Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation; the head of the Alliance of Doctors NGO, Anastasia Vasilyeva; a leading member of the Pussy Riot protest group, Maria Alyokhina; a coordinator of Navalny's team in Moscow, Oleg Stepanov; Navalny's spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh; and an activist, Nikolai Lyaskin.

The majority were placed under house arrest and charged with the violation of sanitary and epidemiological safety precautions during a pandemic. If found guilty of the charges, each person faces up to 2 years in prison.

On February 8, the Memorial Human Rights Center in Moscow recognized the group as political prisoners.

A day earlier, more than 100 Russian actors, directors, writers, musicians, poets, and scholars issued an open letter, protesting Navalny's persecution and the mass arrests of his supporters in recent weeks.

The 44-year-old Navalny was arrested on January 17 after returning to Russia from Germany where he was treated for a nerve-agent poisoning that he says was ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin, which the Kremlin has denied.

More than 10,000 people were rounded up by police during nationwide rallies protesting Navalny's arrest in more than 100 Russian towns and cities on January 23 and January 31.

On February 2, Navalny was found guilty of violating the terms of his suspended sentence relating to an embezzlement case that he has called politically motivated. The court converted the sentence to 3 1/2 years in prison. Given credit for time already spent in detention, the court said the Kremlin critic would have to serve 2 years and 8 months behind bars.

The court's ruling caused new mass protests across the country that were also violently dispersed by police.

More than 1,400 people were detained by police in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other Russian cities on that day.

With reporting by TASS and Interfax

The self-identified Virginia Ku Klux Klan leader accused of driving a truck through Black Lives Matter protesters over the summerwas sentenced to 3 years and 8 months in prison on Tuesday.

Harry Rogers, a 37-year-old from Hanover, pleaded guilty on Thursday to three counts of assault and one count each of destruction of property and hit and run.

There were no fatalities or life-threatening injuries reported as a result of the incident, which occurred June 7, 2020, in Richmond, Va.

Rogers was originally sentenced to six years in prison but appealed the conviction. Henrico County Commonwealth Attorney Shannon Taylor opted not to move forward with three felony charges against Rogers, citing "inadequate" hate crime legislation.

"While I believe his hateful and bigoted motivations should have him behind bars even longer, the Virginia Code is not helpful," Taylor said in a statement. "My commitment is to keep Henircoans safe and this bigoted heinous Klansman is off the streets."

Rogers has been behind bars since June 7. Henrico County Ciruit Court ruled that he would get credit for the time he has already served.

George Townsend, Roger's attorney, did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Townsend had argued protesters who were struck put themselves in the vehicle's way, according to reports from the Associated Press.
View the Feb. 4 COVID-19 town hall, the latest in an ongoing series of virtual Emory community conversations providing updates and information about vaccines.

With more COVID-19 vaccines now in development  and new virus variants on the rise  interest in vaccinations remains high, with many of us left wondering where and how soon we can get one.

We understand the concern. As everyone waits for the nations supply of COVID vaccines to catch up with public demand, there are sure to be some anxious moments.

Thats why Emory is hosting a series of bi-monthly vaccine town halls (see video above)  a virtual forum that brings together experts to answer your questions, discuss the latest in vaccine development and distribution, and share insights to keep you informed and engaged.

As you may know, Emory Healthcare has taken a lead role in the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines here in Georgia, in accordance with state guidelines. For last weeks town hall, we invited Emory physicians Nicole M. Franks and Nadine Rouphael, along with Alan Anderson, assistant vice president of university partnerships, to discuss vaccine distribution.

Rouphael emphasized that these vaccines are safe, presenting promising efficacy and rare adverse allergic reactions. The most common side effect  which indicates your immune system is working  is some arm pain, but thats different for each patient, Franks noted.

Vaccine distribution

Emory vaccines are now being distributed by appointment  based on eligibility and availability  through a centralized clinic at Northlake Mall and decentralized mobile clinics rotated among Emory hospital campuses.

To date, much of our success with Emorys vaccine distribution has risen from coordinated teamwork  from our frontline health care workers and the leadership of Emorys vaccine planning group to the scores of volunteers whove given their time to help at our vaccine clinics, as well as those whove volunteered in vaccine trials.

I want to acknowledge everyone whos made this happen  its been a phenomenal community effort. To learn more about volunteering at Emorys vaccine clinics, visit here.

While were pleased so many are eager to receive the vaccine, we ask for your patience. Our distribution must follow the rollout plan set by the state, which remains in phase 1A+. Once the state moves to phase 1B  and supplies are available  Emory community members eligible to receive the vaccine will receive an email notification via our HOME system. But if you have access now through other sources, please dont wait  take the opportunity.

Emory is also working to help increase vaccination rates across Atlanta. With evidence that COVID-19 disproportionately impacts Latinx and African American communities, the Woodruff Health Sciences Center has launched a steering committee to help provide quality health information through targeted community outreach.

This includes hundreds of webinars and panel discussions with civic and community organizations, elected officials and the business community. A mobile health messaging campaign has sent over 1 million text messages to nearly 125,000 people, recorded videos shared via social media, launched a health equity dashboard, and sponsored community events to help share health information and build trust.

Virus variants and face masks: To double up, or not?

Recently, weve been hearing about the emergence of new variants of the virus that causes COVID-19, with at least three now detected here in the U.S. Some are highly transmittable and spreading rapidly; evidence suggests they may also result in more severe symptoms.

While that may sound scary, we know this is what viruses do  they mutate. We see the same thing happen with influenza strains almost every year. But of course, these viral strains can carry serious health consequences, so a COVID vaccine is still highly recommended.

News of these variants has also sparked questions: Does one face mask offer adequate protection? Should we be doubling up?

To help answer these questions, its important to remember that overall effectiveness depends primarily on the mask quality and its fit. If you are wearing a good-quality standard surgical mask or a well-fitting, breathable cloth mask  with two or more layers of tightly woven fabric covering both your nose and mouth  Emory experts say you are taking the right preventive measures.

The bottom line is this: Everybody should be wearing a mask.

Masks remain one of our best weapons in the fight against COVID transmission, offering protection to yourself and others. Even if youve already received a vaccine, you need to still wear a mask, and continue practicing physical distancing and frequent handwashing.

Our motivation? Its simple.

The more responsibility everyone takes today in helping drive down COVID transmission, the faster all of our lives can return to normal.
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To decide on future trajectory of farmer protests, SKM to meet today

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

New Delhi, Feb 10: The Samayukt Kisan Morcha, the umbrella organisation of the farmers' unions protesting against the farm laws will meet today and decide the road ahead.

The unions have rejected the Centre's proposal of putting the laws in the back burner for one and half years. Following this there has been no fresh date for further consultations. Prime Minister Narendra Modi had said in the Rajya Sabha that the agriculture minister, Narendra Singh Tomar was in constant touch with the farmers.

Govt pursuing target of doubling farmers' income by 2022: Narendra Singh Tomar

The meeting of the morcha comes at a time when the farmer protests have been sullied due to the large scale violence that broke out on Republic Day. The meeting today will decide on the trajectory of the protest and also look and find ways for an image correction.

Twitter blocks portion of accounts, cites free speech | OneIndia News

Meanwhile farmer leader, Rakesh Tikait said that the Centre has time till October to repeal the laws. The recent Chakka Jam, which garnered support from across the country was a peaceful affair.

For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications

Story first published: Wednesday, February 10, 2021, 10:31 [IST]
San Francisco police arrested one man and are still searching for another in connection with the harrowing abduction of two children in Pacific Heights this weekend by suspected car thieves, police confirmed Wednesday.

Erlin Romero, 25, was arrested without incident at 11:20 a.m. Tuesday near Crisp Road and Palou Avenue in the Bayview district, said San Francisco Police Sgt. Michael Andraychak.

Romero was booked into San Francisco County Jail on Tuesday on suspicion of multiple charges including two counts of kidnapping, first-degree robbery and car theft.

Police declined to release details about how they tracked down Romero, but confirmed that he was wearing an ankle monitor at the time of his arrest. Romero was already facing two open cases for robbery and car theft out of San Francisco, and was required to wear the electronic GPS device as a term of his release.

The suspect still at large has not been identified.

After a preliminary review of the case, prosecutors said they plan to file a range of felony charges including robbery, kidnapping, assault, vehicle theft and child abandonment.

The kidnapping touched off a regionwide manhunt Saturday after the childrens father, Jeffrey Fang, a DoorDash delivery driver, left the engine of his minivan running and his 1-year-old son and 4-year-old daughter inside while delivering food near Jackson and Laguna streets.

Authorities issued an Amber Alert for San Francisco, San Mateo, Alameda, Marin and Santa Clara counties shortly before 11 p.m. and police mobilized all available units, including motorcycle, traffic enforcement and dirt bikes, to search for the children.

The case also went viral on social media after KQED reporter Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez  a friend of Fang  tweeted out an urgent call to action.

Police said they found the children safe inside the vehicle in the Bayview at around 1:15 a.m. Sunday. The children were examined by medical professionals and returned to their father.

Prosecutors charged Romero with robbery in January 2020 after he and other suspects allegedly stole another mans bag. Then in August he was arrested and charged again after police reportedly found him in a stolen car.

San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin said prosecutors in the 2020 robbery case asked that Romero be detained while awaiting trial, but a judge denied that request and set bail at $25,000. A judge allowed him to be released a few weeks later with an ankle monitor, Boudin said.

Romero spent a total of 135 days in jail following his January 2020 arrest, Boudin said, with stints following technical violations on his release and the August arrest.

Romero has no prior convictions. His robbery case was referred to young adult court  a collaborative San Francisco program that works with people between 18 and 24 years old  but was put on the wait list due to the programs caseload, Boudin said.

Though our request to detain Mr. Romero was denied, the fact that he was on court-ordered electronic monitoring was critical to the investigation in this most recent arrest, Boudin said.

Boudin commended police on the arrest and said he was thankful that the children were found safe.

San Francisco Supervisor Catherine Stefani, who represents the Pacific Heights neighborhood, where the kidnapping occurred, said the abduction was the latest example of a city thats out of control with crime being allegedly committed by people who were previously arrested and not held in jail.

On top of this horrifying kidnapping, weve seen two women killed on New Years Eve, a young father killed in an eight-vehicle crash, fatal midday attacks on our seniors and too many car break-ins and home invasions to count, she said in a statement. We cannot keep releasing dangerous individuals back onto the streets after arrests only to see them commit more crimes. Enough is enough.

Boudin, a progressive prosecutor who has vowed to help curb mass incarceration, has recently come under fire from critics who say his policies have put the public at risk. But Boudin said the kidnapping case highlights the need for better support and resources for young people involved in the criminal justice system, and stressed that filing charges is not synonymous with pretrial detention.

Specialized youth programs can address the root causes of criminal behavior, he said. Prosecution alone cannot always prevent future crimes.

Megan Cassidy is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: megan.cassidy@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @meganrcassidy
A divided Senate voted on Tuesday to proceed with Donald J. Trumps second impeachment trial, narrowly rejecting constitutional objections after House prosecutors opened their case with a harrowing 13-minute video capturing the deadly Capitol riot he stands accused of inciting. Though the presentation stunned senators who lived through the rampage into silence, only six Republicans joined Democrats in clearing the way for the case to be heard. The 56-to-44 vote was the second indication in two weeks that Trump was all but certain to be acquitted. The result of this trial ...
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Justice Sridevi suspended the orders issued against Raja Singh and ordered that he will be on bail until the appeal is disposed of.  By arrangement

Hyderabad: BJP MLA Raja Singh had a sigh of relief on Wednesday after the Telangana high Court suspended the one-year imprisonment awarded to him by the special court dealing with criminal cases against MLAs and MPs.

Justice Gandikota Sridevi passed the order based on an appeal filed by Raja Singh challenging his conviction.

The trial court had, on 29 January 2021, declared him guilty in a case linked to provisions relating to assault or use of criminal force to deter a public servant from discharge of his duty, and criminal intimidation.

The case against the MLA was that he used foul language and criminal force against the police and prevented cops from discharge of duties during a protest staged by the BJP against the holding of a Beef Festival at Osmania University on December 10, 2015.

Challenging the lower court order, Raja Singh filed the appeal. In response, Justice Sridevi suspended the orders issued against Raja Singh and ordered that he will be on bail until the appeal is disposed of.
The United States policies toward Latin America will be constrained by the multiple national crises Mr. Biden has inherited, which will likely consume the governments time, political capital and spending capacity. In U.S. foreign policy, Europe and Asia will take precedence over Latin America.

To his credit, Mr. Biden wasted no time making it clear that his Latin America policies would mark a substantial departure from his predecessors. The suspension of the wall on the border with Mexico, changes in asylum rules, the reunification of families that had been cruelly separated and other proposed immigration reforms will be cheered across the region.

Early signs of new approaches toward Venezuela and Cuba are also encouraging. On Venezuela, pragmatic diplomacy, with the United States rejoining European efforts to promote serious negotiations, is expected. On Cuba, moves toward greater U.S. engagement, reminiscent of the Obama administration thaw in 2015, appear likely. Threats and harsh sanctions against both countries  for the sake of projecting toughness  have been counterproductive and harmful to ordinary citizens.

The Biden administrations efforts to generate the momentum needed to defend democracy in Latin America will have trouble finding amenable partners. Some Latin American governments were content that Mr. Trump gave them a free pass on democracy and human rights concerns. In the past four years, cooperation has meant accommodation to U.S. demands, especially on migration. In the name of noninterference and national sovereignty, these governments are likely to push back if the Biden administration takes firm public stands on, say, military corruption in Mexico, deforestation in Brazil or killings of social leaders in Colombia.

The past four years, culminating in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, have weakened the United States moral authority as a keeper of democracy. Mr. Biden has his work cut out for him to demonstrate that Mr. Trump was an aberration and that the United States is a credible and reliable ally on human rights and democracy. Mr. Biden will need to pursue a consistent approach toward governments across the region, whether of the left or of the right, even if they are ready to accommodate the United States on other issues. Fair treatment of immigrants and serious attention to inequalities and racism in the United States would enhance the Biden administrations standing on these issues.


A Connecticut superintendent is facing a firestorm of criticism after teachers say they were put behind administrators, school board members and spouses for the COVID-19 vaccine.

In the Region 14 school district, 97 percent of teachers voted they have no confidence in Superintendent Joseph Olzacki and COVID officer Mark Hartunian, while the school board has launched an independent investigation into their claims.

Chris York, president of the Nonnewaug Teachers Association, said the school community is angry that administrators, central office staff, and school board members and their spouses were allegedly among those to receive the limited number of doses available at a Southbury clinic last month. Some teachers and other school staff were vaccinated, too.

They cant believe it, York said. Theyre so shocked. Looking back now, I think the superintendent wanted to get himself and the people he spends the most time with vaccinated.

H John Voorhees III / Hearst Connecticut Media

But Olzacki said he was not involved in deciding who got the vaccine and that federal privacy laws prevent him from knowing who did.

I encourage an independent look at this, said Olzacki, whose district includes Woodbury and Bethlehem.

He declined to say whether he received the vaccine and says he plans to remain superintendent, despite calls for his dismissal.

Olzacki said the districts COVID officer surveyed everyone who has a district email account to determine who wanted the vaccine and sent those names to the health department so they could sign up. The form from the health department included elected officials, which is how school board members were eligible, he said.

The COVID officer tried to ensure every groupsuch as teachers, custodians, paraprofessionals and volunteersin the school community would receive the vaccine in an equitable way, Olzacki said.

He tried to put it together as fairly as possible, he said.

After an executive session during a Wednesday meeting, the school board voted to launch the investigation and form an ad hoc committee to explore COVID protocols and concerns.

We want to ensure that the community has complete confidence in our efforts and if any mistakes were made, the district will own up to them, George Bauer, board chairman, said before the the executive session.

Rare clinic for educators

Educators are not yet eligible for the vaccine, but the Pomperaug Health District in Southbury vaccinated more than 300 employees from Region 14, Region 15 and the Oxford school district on Wednesday, Jan. 20.

These appointments had already been scheduled before the state clarified that only residents 75 and older should be vaccinated, officials have said. The state health department allowed Pomperaug to vaccinate the educators scheduled for that day, but future clinics for school staff were canceled.

The Pomperaug health director and state health department did not return requests for comment.

Three weeks of clinics had been planned, when all educators would have been vaccinated, Olzacki said.

I understand that they are upset, but the upset-ness has to be with the state of Connecticut, he said.

School board members did not cut the line and registered for the vaccine in the same way that educators did in an effort to return to in-person meetings, Bauer said.

Indeed, board members were assured that if they received the vaccine from the clinic, they would not be taking away from other persons with Region 14, he said.

Members of all bargaining units received the vaccine, Bauer said.

In addition to the essential teachers, the school district needs many different types of personnel to operate successfully, he said. Imagine trying to educate kids without administrators, without paraprofessionals, custodians to keep the buildings clean during COVID-19 times, plus drivers to bring the students safely, substitutes to help when teachers are ill and so forth.

Those who got vaccinated were the fortunate ones to schedule appointments on the first day, Olzacki said.

I didnt know who was on it [the list], Olzacki said. I never saw a list.

So incompetent it looks malicious

But York doubts Olzackis account.

York, who said he has an underlying health condition, was one of the teachers to be vaccinated that day.

After filling out the survey, York said he received a text message from the superintendent on the Saturday before the clinic saying that he would get an email about scheduling an appointment. York described the message as generic and clearly sent to those who could make a Wednesday appointment.

His claim that he doesnt have anything to do with these lists is such nonsense, York said.

The only date available to register was Wednesday, he said.

York said he saw two school board members at the clinic and that others have reported another school member, spouse and even a parent.

York said he has not heard of these issues happening in Region 15 or Oxford.

York has requested through the Freedom of Information Act the list of people vaccinated at the clinic. He estimates roughly 20 teachers and other Region 14 staff members were among those to be vaccinated, while about another 20 were administrators, central office staff, and school board members and their spouses.

York said the union is working with the Connecticut Education Associations legal team to determine whether an ethics complaint should be filed. He is unsure if officials made honest mistakes or acted with ill intent.

Its so incompetent that it makes me think it was malicious, York said.

School faculty have banded together since the clinic, all wearing red one Friday and staging a walk-in last Thursday, York said. Frustration remains that some people who do not regularly interact with students got vaccinated when most teachers did not, he said.

The governor announced Monday that residents 65 and over will be able to register for the vaccine beginning Thursday, but its unknown when teachers will be eligible.

Some of them [teachers] are in their 60s, York said. They have underlying health issues. They lost their chance. Its really sad.
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The Sony World Photography Awards 2021 is shaping up very nicely indeed.

The judges have revealed the winners in the competition's National Awards. And they're quite something.

Overall, the contest receives entries from over 200 territories. However, these winners are drawn from the 51 countries in its National Awards programme, which celebrates local photography talent. Any photographer from a participating country that entered an image in the open contest in any category was automatically entered.

The judges had to sift through 165,000 images before choosing a single winning image from each country. Quite a task.

The jaw-dropping winning images include an electrifying lightning shot taken in Switzerland, an enchanting photo of a red fox in Italy, an awe-inspiring snap of an active volcano in Mexico and a mesmerising picture of a winding mountain road in Japan.

The Sony World Photography Awards Photographer of the Year 2021 title as well as the winners of the open, youth and student contests, will be announced online on April 15. Scroll down to see MailOnline Travel's pick of the incredible National Awards winners...

This image of a lightning-filled storm cloud was snapped by Raphael Barbar from a mountain called Saleve near Geneva. He scoops the national award title for Switzerland

Slovenia's national award winner is Aljaz Znidarsic, who impressed the judges with this breathtaking shot of the Julian Alps. Aljaz says: 'My friend and I were on our first climb of the winter. We'd hoped to ascend three mountains on the same ridge, but because of the conditions, we had to turn back before the final peak. This image expresses the struggle we faced in deciding whether to turn round or continue'

LEFT: Photographer Matti Virtanen is behind this amazing image, which snares him the national award for Finland. He explains: 'I may not have managed to capture any meteors during the Perseids [a meteor shower] of 2020, but I did get this night shot, which is full of wonder.' RIGHT: A superb image of the Vestrahorn, a 2,917ft mountain in Iceland, by Viktor Einar Vilhelmsson, winner of the national award for Iceland. He says: 'Vestrahorn is a beautiful mountain that appears almost to rise out of the sea. The scenery that blends in with it makes an impressive sight'

An amazing aerial image by Tomislav Veic, the winner of the national award for Croatia, taken in Gorski Kotar - a mountainous region in the country where forest covers 63 per cent of the land. He explains: 'After the first snowfall towards the end of 2020, I took my camera to the largest old-growth forest in Croatia. This road runs through it'

This jaw-dropping photo, called First Breath, shows Mexico's active Popocatepetl volcano. It was snapped at sunrise by Brian Mena Laureano, the winner of the national award for Mexico

LEFT: The winner of the national award for Italy is photographer Davide Giannetti with this enchanting image of a red fox looking for food following heavy rain in the National Park of Abruzzo. RIGHT: This mesmerising image of sheep grazing on Mount Zeus, a 3,290ft mountain on the Greek island of Naxos, was snapped by Thoedoros Apeiranthitis - the winner of the national award for Greece. He explains: 'One day in early April, I decided to make my way to the top. By the time I was halfway up, the fog had become so dense it completely obscured the base of the mountain, making me feel as if I was flying. I noticed a small herd of sheep grazing peacefully in this strange environment. I took a shot before moving on and becoming lost in the fog'

This beautiful image, called On His Own Path, shows a lone cross-country skier ascending a slope in the National Park of High Tatras. It earned Peter Svoboda the gold medal for Slovakia. He says: 'I wanted to capture a minimal winter image that had symbolism and suggested a parallel with human life'

This striking image of a 'snaking dune' in Death Valley meeting the surrounding mountains was snapped by Patrick Mueller - the winner of the national award for the USA

An elderly woman prepares threads of red paprika in the village of Donja Lokosnica, Serbia, in this charming shot by Vladimir Zivojinovic. He is the winner of the national award for Serbia. He explains: 'In this village in a valley in South Morava, some 250 of the 280 households are involved in the growing of pepper - although depopulation means this number is in decline. Around 500 tons of ground pepper is produced in a 250-hectare area'

LEFT: Min Min Zaw scoops the national award for Myanmar with this beautiful scene showing a father and son catching fish early one winter morning. The photographer says: 'In Myanmar, children work with their parents to bring in an income for the whole family.' RIGHT: This bustling street scene in Colombo, Sri Lanka, was captured by Isira Sooriyaarachchi - winner of the national award for Sri Lanka. He says: 'On a weekday in August, while I was wandering along Main Street, Colombo, this man caught my attention among the crowds of people and busy traffic. I crossed to the middle of the road and pulled out my phone to capture the life of a worker doing his best to survive during the Covid-19 pandemic'


Katsina  President Muhammadu Buhari has ordered the military service chiefs to be decisive in dealing with terrorists and ending the insurgency in the North-east without further delay.

Buhari has also justified the extension of the Kano-Katsina-Jibiya rail line to Maradi in Niger Republic, saying the project, when completed, will boost trade between Nigeria and Niger Republic, foster trans-Sahara trade and contribute to the expected gains in the African Continental Free Trade Area Agreement (AfCFTA).

The Chief of Air Staff, Air Vice Marshal Oladayo Amao, who spoke on the presidential directive during a visit to Maiduguri, said the president routed the order through the Chief of Defence Staff, Maj.Gen. Lucky Irabor, for them to come up with new strategies to rout the insurgents.

He stated that he has had meetings with the other service chiefs leading to the continuing tour of military formations in the North-east, including Sector 3 Operation Lafiya Dole (OPLD) and the Multi-National Joint Task Force (MNJTF).

Amao, during his visit to the Air Task Force of Operation Lafiya Dole in Maiduguri, said: "Mr. President had given the Chief of Defence Staff, along with the service chiefs, the onerous task of bringing the war against insurgency to a decisive end in order to restore normalcy to all troubled parts of the country."

He stated that they had already begun to "take action in this regard, holding several meetings to evolve strategies for better synergy in the joint operations."

According to him, in line with the president's mandate as well as the defence minister's strategic guidance, he has crafted his vision for the service, which is "to enhance and sustain critical airpower capabilities required for joint force deployment in pursuit of national security imperatives."

He added that the vision is hinged on five key drivers which include "focus on doctrinal development and application of airpower in joint military operations, pursuit of purposeful training and human capacity development as well as sustenance of platforms and equipment serviceability through innovative maintenance methods and logistics support systems.

He listed other key drivers as "fostering a disciplined workforce essential for combat readiness and bolstering morale by improving personnel welfare."

Amao, therefore, charged all personnel to do their own bit towards the attainment of the noble objective.

He said the focus on joint doctrinal development is premised on the need to evolve new ways of doing things in order to achieve better and longer-lasting results. He stated that in terms of pursuing purposeful training and human capacity development, the service will sustain and build on the capacity building initiatives of his predecessor while ensuring that training will be robust and balanced.

Amao also said in sustaining platforms' serviceability, the service will continue to leverage on the acquisition of new platforms while ensuring effective maintenance of existing ones.

He said in addition to the 23 new aircraft the federal government acquired for the air force, 15 additional new manned aircraft - 12 A-29 Super Tucano attack aircraft and three JF-17 Thunder multi-role fighter jets - as well as eight new Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles (UCAVs) were also being expected.

He noted that the additional new aircraft will add value to operations in the North-east and other operational theatres.

Amao also addressed personnel during his maiden operational visit to the ATF Headquarters in Maiduguri and the 171 Nigerian Air Force Detachment (171 NAF Det) in Monguno to assess the conduct of the counterinsurgency operation as well as inspect facilities and ongoing projects.

Amao, in company with the Chief of Army Staff, Maj. Gen. Ibrahim Attahiru, commended the ATF for the recent successes recorded in the renewed offensive by the land and air components of OPLD.

He stated that the NAF headquarters will continue to provide all necessary support to ensure "the sustenance of critical airpower capabilities required for joint force employment in pursuit of national security imperatives."

On welfare issues, Amao said in line with the president's mandate to ensure adequate welfare of all personnel, his administration will give priority to the provision of equipment, uniforms and kits, while ensuring the prompt payment of allowances and provision of residential accommodation for both serving and retired officers.

He commended the ATF commander as well as his officers, airmen and airwomen for their hard work and dedication to duty, as evident in the intensive rate of effort with missions being conducted day and night to attack terrorists' targets as well as provide support to ground troops, whenever required.

He called for the strengthening of the synergy with the army and other security agencies to ensure total victory.

Buhari Lists Gains of Nigeria-Niger Republic Rail Link

Meanwhile, Buhari yesterday justified the extension of the Kano-Katsina-Jibiya rail line to Maradi in Niger Republic, saying the project, when completed, will boost trade between Nigeria and Niger Republic, foster trans-Sahara trade and contribute to the expected gains in AfCFTA.

Buhari, during the virtual ground breaking for the Kano-Katsina-Jibiya-Maradi rail line, also directed the Ministry of Transportation as well as the Ministry of Finance, Budget and National Planning to conclude financial plans for the execution of the west-east coastal rail line from Lagos to Calabar.

The $1.959 billion Kano-Katsina-Jibiya-Maradi rail project, covering 284 kilometres, was approved by the Federal Executive Council (FEC), presided over by the president last September.

The president, in a statement by his media adviser, Mr. Femi Adesina, noted that Jibiya and Maradi constitute a significant trading core between Nigeria and Niger Republic - a tradition dating back many centuries.

"This vital infrastructure line will establish an end-to-end logistic supply chain in railway transport services between northern and southern regions of the country, reaching Nigerian southern ports of Lagos and Warri.

"The entire route encompasses territory inhabited by close to 80 million people across 10 states of the country. This project has a branch line to Dutse, the capital of Jigawa State, to open up this corridor which is endowed with vast resources," he stated.

He said the Kano-Maradi rail line has been identified as a viable line that will enhance the movement of passengers and freight to the hinterland, especially raw materials from both agricultural and mineral resources for industries.

"The rail line traverses the major commercial and administrative centre of Kano and passing through other economic hubs of the country, including Kazaure, Daura, Katsina and up to the border town of Jibiya and the Niger Republic city of Maradi, " the president stated.

Buhari said the Kano-Maradi project, when completed, will serve import and export of goods for Niger Republic and other countries in the sub-region through Nigerian ports.

"The country would earn revenue through expansion of trade and commerce, while the people of Niger Republic will benefit from ease of transportation logistics at affordable cost in their import and export business," he added.

The president also gave directives for the conclusion of financial arrangements with appropriate co-financiers that will partner with the federal government for the construction of the west-east coastal rail line from Lagos to Calabar.

According to him, the coastal rail line will connect Onitsha, Benin, Warri, Yenagoa, Port Harcourt, Aba and Uyo.

"Furthermore, the contract for the important central railway traversing Itakpe-Baro-Abuja with connection to Lokoja and a new seaport in Warri has been signed and is expected to achieve an appreciable level of completion during the tenure of this administration," the president said.

Buhari commended the construction company handling the project, Messrs Mota-Engil Nigeria Limited, for supporting knowledge and technology transfer by investing in the establishment of a learning Institution for Transportation and Railway Science.

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"We have in the rail sector embarked on the completion of the 1,424 Kilometre Lagos-Kano rail line to join the one being flagged-off today for the country's western axis.

"On the eastern corridor of the country, the Port Harcourt-Enugu-Makurdi-Maiduguri rail line with branches to Owerri, Imo State and Damaturu, Yobe State, have been awarded for reconstruction to include a deep sea port in Bonny Island and a railway industrial park in Port Harcourt with the objectives of achieving a vibrant and functional railway," he said.

Governor of Katsina State, Hon. Aminu Bello Masari, appreciated Buhari for bringing the life-long dream of the state to reality with the inclusion of the Kano-Maradi rail line.

Masari urged the Minister of Transportation, Hon. Rotimi Amaechi, to work towards the completion and inauguration of the project by 2023.

Amaechi said the feasibility study for the Kano-Maradi railway started in 2012 and was concluded in 2015.

He thanked the president for his support and regular intervention.

Amaechi said the entire network of the project has 15 railway stations of different categories with major stations of approximately 3,000 peak passenger-capacity in Kano and Katsina and stations of standard category in Kazaure, Daura, Jibiya and Dutse.

He added that there will be minor stations in Dambatta, Shargelle and Mashi as well as halt stations in Kunya, Kano Airport, Muduru, Dadara and in Niger Republic at Annol Mata and Maradi.

He stated that the rail line is also provided with accessories and special installations, including power and water supply schemes, signalling system and communication in GSM-railway, freight yards, rolling stock depots and maintenance workshops.

Also, the Minister of Transportation, Niger Republic, Mr. Sadou Seydou, said the project will help Niger Republic in the development of transport infrastructure and facilitate movement of goods and services across the border.

From the Las Vegas Visitor Authority: December 2020 Las Vegas Visitor Statistics



With resumption of broader COVID-related restrictions across the country and the absence of traditional seasonal special events such as NFR, Las Vegas visitation came in at approximately 1.2M in December, down - 17.6% MoM and -64.0% YoY.



With the combined impacts of the pandemic in the course of the year, Las Vegas hosted just over 19M visitors in 2020, down -55% from 2019.



Total occupancy dropped to 30.9% from 39.3% in Nov and 85.1% during last year's robust December. Weekend occupancy for the month came in at 45.4% and midweek occupancy was 25%.Mbr .



Average daily rates among open properties reached $100 (up 6.5% from Nov but down -20% YoY) while RevPAR came in at approx. $31, down -71% vs. Dec 2019.

Click on graph for larger image.





On an annual basis, visitor traffic was down 55% compared to 2019, and convention attendance was down 74%.

Here is the data from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority The blue and red bars are monthly visitor traffic (left scale) for 2019 and 2020. The dashed blue and orange lines are convention attendance (right scale).Convention traffic in December was down 100% compared to December 2019.And visitor traffic was down 64% YoY.The casinos started to reopen on June 4th (it appears about 96% of rooms have now opened).

Soldiers of Operation Whirl Stroke (OPWS) have arrested 10 suspects over the communal crisis, which broke out between Ibilla and Ukpa Communities of Oju Local Government Areas of Benue State.

The troops were also said to have recovered weapons from members of the two warring communities who are fighting over a delineation exercise embarked upon by the National Population Commission (NPC) in the area.

A team of NPC officials had barely arrived in the border communities to do their duty when the locals known to be nursing an age-long land dispute out of suspicion took up arms against each other and started shooting sporadically, injuring themselves and burning many houses.

Local sources said following the violence, soldiers of OPWS and 72 Battalion in Makurdi were drafted to the vicinity to restore calm during which the 10 people were arrested.

The locals, however, admitted that sanity has returned to Ibilla and Ukpa following the presence of security operatives who throughout the weekend condoned and searched the area to apprehend the culprits, noting that the suspects may have been taken to Makurdi for further interrogation.

Contacted, the OPWS Force Commander, Major General, Adeyemi Yekini, declined comments as he urged our correspondent to seek clarification from the media office of the Defence Headquarters in Abuja.

Meanwhile, Police Public Relations Officer (PPRO), DSP Catherine Anene, said she was not yet aware of the arrests made by the soldiers but confirmed that the police arrested four persons in the area while investigation is still in progress.
Two cases of a coronavirus variant first found in South Africa that reduces the effectiveness of some vaccines have been identified in the Bay Area, in Alameda and Santa Clara counties, Gov. Gavin Newsom said Wednesday.

They are the first two cases of this variant, called B.1.351, to be found in California. They were identified by scientists at the Stanford Clinical Virology Laboratory on Tuesday night and reported to the state Wednesday morning.

Both people who tested positive for the new variant were diagnosed with COVID-19 in January. The Santa Clara County individual had recently traveled and was in quarantine with one other person, who also became sick but was never tested. That individual is presumed to also have been infected with the new variant, public health officials said.

The Santa Clara County individuals were extraordinarily careful about quarantine and do not pose a risk of further spread of the variant, said Dr. Sara Cody, the Santa Clara County health officer.

The Alameda County case is under investigation and the persons travel history and potential interactions with others is not yet known, said Dr. Nicholas Moss, the county health officer.

We dont want any of these variants if they are here to spread any further. Thats really, really, really important, Cody said at a news conference Wednesday. She said finding this variant in the region should signal people to double down on behaviors that slow down the spread of disease, such as wearing masks and maintaining social distance.

Though the winter surge is waning in the state and Bay Area, daily case counts are still worryingly high and the death toll is grim, Cody said. News of the variants arrival came the same day that California surpassed New York as the state with the most coronavirus deaths.

California reported 45,351 total coronavirus deaths as of Wednesday evening, just over New Yorks 45,312 deaths, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. California remains far behind New York in deaths per capita, with about 115 deaths per 100,000 residents compared to 231 per 100,000 in New York, according to data analyzed by The Chronicle.

Public health officials have worried that new variants could pose a threat to the United States ability to quickly end the pandemic, either by evading vaccines or spreading too fast to contain. New variants could lead to more illness and death if they cause more severe symptoms or are more infectious and trigger fresh surges in cases.

The variant from the United Kingdom is thought to be about 50% more infectious than the original virus, and experts have warned it could become dominant in parts of the United States, including Southern California, by early March. More than 150 cases of that variant have been found in California, including Alameda and San Mateo counties.

Another pair of closely related variants identified in California have been spreading quickly in the Bay Area and Southern California. Scientists believe they respond to vaccines but are running tests now to determine if the variants reduce effectiveness. Theyre also studying whether the variants are more infectious.

The variant from South Africa is considered particularly concerning because studies have found that it is able to partially evade the bodys immune response, whether from a vaccine or previous infection by the coronavirus. So far the vaccines appear to prevent severe disease and death from the variant.

The British variant, its still susceptible to vaccines and its going to spread anyway. But lets get this one back in the box, said Dr. George Rutherford, an infectious disease expert at UCSF.

As of Tuesday, nine cases of the variant from South Africa had been identified in three states, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That number did not include the new California cases.

These variants are here, Moss said Wednesday. We should prepare and plan accordingly. Because relatively few coronavirus cases are genomically sequenced, he said, we only have a very limited picture of their spread locally.

Dr. Benjamin Pinsky, who heads the Stanford lab that found the variants, said they were identified through a process that screened positive coronavirus samples for specific mutations. Samples with those mutations then went through genomic sequencing to confirm the variant.

The two cases announced Wednesday were from samples sent to the lab about a week to 10 days ago, Pinsky said. His lab also identified the first cases of the variant from the United Kingdom found in the Bay Area.

The two vaccines available in the United States, made by Pfizer and Moderna, provide some protection against B.1.351, the South African variant, but perhaps less than the initial virus from China for which they were designed.

The Moderna vaccine induced an immune response six times lower against the variant from South African compared to earlier variants, the company said in late January after conducting a small study. But even this lower level of immune response, or neutralizing antibodies, is likely to protect against COVID-19, the company said.

Still, Moderna is testing a booster vaccine to see if it can provide more immunity.

Similarly, the Pfizer vaccine also induced a slightly lower level of neutralizing antibodies against the variant, but it should still be enough to protect against COVID-19, according to studies by Pfizer and the University of Texas Medical Branch. The difference is unlikely to lead to a significant reduction in the effectiveness of the vaccine, Pfizer said.

Pfizer and Moderna are both made using messenger RNA, a type of technology that allows vaccine manufacturers to tweak vaccines quickly to account for variants. So the companies could essentially plug in a slightly adjusted genetic sequence into the vaccine. This could still be concerning, though, because even though the vaccine itself could be tweaked fast, it would take time to produce and distribute.

Also concerning is whether other vaccines in the pipeline, particularly one made by AstraZeneca and Oxford University, will work against emerging variants. South Africa recently stopped using the AstraZeneca vaccine because of reduced effectiveness. That vaccine is not yet approved for use in the United States. South Africa switched to the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which has yet to be authorized in any country but in clinical studies was shown to be 57% effective at preventing moderate to severe disease caused by B.1.351.

Scientists in South Africa also have said that people who were previously infected with other coronavirus variants appear to be susceptible to reinfection with the new one.

Moss of Alameda County expressed optimism about vaccines. However, he said, we have to stick with the things we know work for the time being. That means face coverings, distancing and limiting gatherings.

The most important thing with variants is to just limit the amount of COVID that is out there, he added.

San Francisco Chronicle staff writers Aidin Vaziri, Catherine Ho

and Meghan Bobrowsky contributed to this report.

Erin Allday is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: eallday@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @erinallday


India said on Wednesday that the global community must not lose sight of the ease with which the Haqqani Network and its supporters, "especially the Pakistani authorities", have worked along with terror groups in South Asia as it asserted that the UN chief's report on the Islamic State should also cover activities of Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad that perpetrate attacks from "safe haven" in Pakistan.

The UN Security Council held a briefing on 'Threats to international peace and security caused by terrorist acts' and considered the 12th report of Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on the threat posed by ISIL (Da'esh) to international peace and security.

The report has said that Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant-Khorasan (ISIL-K) is currently assessed to have between 1,000 and 2,200 fighters in Afghanistan spread across several provinces and is expected to continue to target Kabul and provincial capitals in future attacks.

Shihab al-Muhajir, announced as the group's new leader in June 2020, reportedly heads ISIL operations in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Maldives, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and States in Central Asia. He is said to have had an earlier affiliation with and to maintain familial ties to the Haqqani Network, the report has said.

India's Permanent Representative to the UN Ambassador T S Tirumurti said that the UNSG's report provides an account of activities of ISIL-K, including the appointment of its new leader al-Mujahir, who has close links with the proscribed Haqqani Network and earlier operated in the Af-Pak region as an al-Qaeda commander.

"It is essential that we don't lose sight of the ease with which the proscribed Haqqani Network and its supporters, especially the Pakistani authorities, have worked along with prominent terrorist organisations like al-Qaeda, ISIL-K, Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, etc. in South Asia," Tirumurti said in his strongly-worded speech that hit out at Pakistan.

"Al-Qaeda, Haqqani Network, JeM and continue to flourish and operate with impunity in the Af-Pak region, he said.

India is of the view that the UNSG's periodic report on ISIL "should also cover activities of the proscribed terrorist entities under ISIL and al-Qaeda Sanctions regime like Lashkar-e-Taiba and other Pakistan based terror groups like Jaish-e-Mohammad and frontal organisations that raise funds for their activities.

Tirumurti asserted that exclusion of these Pakistan-based terror outfits from the report, which is prepared by the Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team and the Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate, does not give a complete view of the situation in the South Asian region.

"The world is fully aware that these groups also perpetrate terrorist activities from safe havens in Pakistan, including through violent attacks in Afghanistan that have disrupted the peace process," Tirumurti said.

He added that the world is witnessing the relocation of terror groups to Afghanistan especially in Kunar and Nangarhar provinces, across the Durand line. "To not name them in this report is doing a disservice as it gives only a partial and a biased view of the situation in the region.

Tirumurti said the Secretary General's periodic report on ISIL, prepared in close collaboration with the Office of Counter-Terrorism and other United Nations entities and international organisations, is an "important tool" for member states to reflect on the threat posed by ISIL and strategize a collective approach towards global terrorism.

As Tirumurti conveyed India's sincere condolences to all countries, including its immediate neighbour Afghanistan, which continues to suffer from cross border and international terrorism, he said the current report on ISIL reiterates the necessity of a forceful and decisive global fight against terrorism.

"The report makes it amply clear that despite its territorial defeat, ISIL (Da'esh) activities are on the rise, and its presence and activities are affecting significant parts of Africa, beyond its core area of operations in Syria and Iraq," he said.

The COVID-19 pandemic has further negatively resulted in terrorism getting a fillip across the world, he said, as easy access to new and emerging technologies, including drones, virtual currencies, encrypted communications, and artificial intelligence (AI) has enabled ISIL and other terrorist groups to adapt to the pandemic-affected world and exploit current conditions to their advantage.

"These new methods have resulted in greater freedom and tactical autonomy to ISIL affiliate," he said. "The modus operandi of ISIL has also changed, as is evident from the lone wolf attacks occurring in Europe. This changed and reinvigorated ISIL poses a new set of challenges to our collective efforts in our fight against ISIL and terrorism."



Tirumurti told the briefing that for the UN system to effectively address the threats posed by terrorists, the Council should seriously re-consider implementing the eight-point action plan outlined by External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar at the Ministerial Meeting last month.

The action plan had called on the international community to summon the political will and not justify terrorism and not glorify terrorists, there should be no double standards as terrorists are terrorists and no good or bad distinction should be made.

"It is imperative therefore to collectively build on these principles in ensuring that we are able to defeat the scourge of terrorism for good," Tirumurti said.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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Orange County DA Calls for End to Mass Incarceration, Police Chokeholds

Orange Countys top prosecutor says he wants to end mass incarceration, ban carotid holds, and ensure more accountability as he looks to address race-based prejudice in the criminal justice system.

We as a society have engaged in systemic mass incarceration. As a prosecutor, I will stop it, District Attorney Todd Spitzer said Feb. 10 in a press release. We as a society have prosecuted people of color differently. As a prosecutor, I will stop it.

We cannot fix a systematic problem without a systematic approach. That approach must be thoughtful, thorough, and include different perspectives, different experiences, and different ideas. Justice is not evidenced by the longest sentence; justice is what is best for the individual, the victim, and society as a whole.

Spitzer released a series of guiding principles for the Orange County District Attorneys (OCDA) office regarding the role of a prosecutor in society.

His initiatives include ending mass incarceration and banning the use of carotid holds by law enforcement within the OCDAs bureau of investigation. The chokehold reduces or prevents air or blood from passing through the neck.

Rather than packing inmates into jails, Spitzer said lawmakers should instead utilize diversion and alternative programs when appropriate and when success is high. He wants cases evaluated based on criminal history, ability to rehabilitate, and victim concerns.

Spitzer also said he supports policies that prevent law enforcement agencies from investigating their own officer-involved shootings. He also backs an initiative requiring all officer-involved shooting medical exams to be conducted by an independent coroner.

When he released the policy positions and initiatives, Spitzer called on all of Californias elected district attorneys to discuss how prosecutors can address racism in the criminal justice systems.

Seeking justice means we must constantly ask ourselves whether the system in which we hold so much power is working in a fair way for all people, from all backgrounds, experiences and beliefs, and who may or may not be citizens of this country, Spitzer said.

Where the system fails to be fair, we fail to be fair unless we improve the system. And where we have failed, we must acknowledge those failures as important steps in improving our own work, and the system of justice in which we do that work.
SAGE offers educational and social personal interaction to members of the senior community, which is critical, especially during the pandemic." Mike Bracchi, Partner Attorney at Florida Probate Law Firm

Local attorneys Tommy R. Walser and Mike Bracchi support the non-profit SAGE (Advocacy & Services for LGBT Elders) and their mission to enrich the lives of LGBT seniors in South Florida by providing advocacy, elder housing initiatives, long term care training and promoting intergenerational connection in the LGBT community.

We are delighted to support organizations that contribute so much to our local community and that is why we have contributed financially, via our law firm, Walser stated.

Bracchi, a Wilton Manors City Commissioner, said SAGE offers educational and social personal interaction to members of the senior community, which is critical, especially during the pandemic. We need to ensure organizations like SAGE have the funds to continue to provide these services.

Walser and Bracchi are both members of the LGBT community and support a number of local organizations. Both live in Wilton Manors, which has a large senior LGBT population. During these unprecedented times, those that can give to amazing organizations like SAGE should, stated Bracchi.

About Florida Probate Law Firm, PLLC

Florida Probate Law Firm, PLLC provides formal probate administration, ancillary probate administration, probate litigation, and professional executor services in all 67 counties across the state of Florida. Their goal is to provide clients with individualized, affordable, and timely service to help meet their clients unique needs.

Contact Info:

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Phone: (561) 210-5500

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CAN I GET A REFUND FOR HOLIDAYS? Can I get a refund if my travel company cancels the trip? Yes, if you've booked a package holiday, by law the travel company must refund your holiday if they cancel it. Some firms have been pushing customers to accept vouchers, but you are entitled to a full cash refund. Those who have privately booked holidays will likely be able to rearrange their flights for free. But accommodation costs will be harder to recover and most travel insurance policies do not cover government coronavirus travel restrictions. Can I get a refund if I cancel my flight? Many companies have a policy whereby if they cancel the trip, customers are entitled to a full cash refund. Whereas if the customer cancels, often they will only be entitled to a voucher to put towards a future flight, or the option of rescheduling. The best option is checking with your provider. I no longer want to travel. Should I cancel my flight now? Probably not. If you cancel now, you are not entitled to a refund under the law. But you are if the company cancels your flights. Most carriers will also let you rearrange your flights free of charge. Guy Anker of Money Saving Expert told MailOnline: 'The general message is wait to see if they cancel on you, unless you get close to their cut off to get something back.' He added: 'It's a bit like a game of chicken to some extent. It's not a game of wait to the last second, it's a game of wait to the last second until you can get something back.' Advertisement

Millions of Britons have had their holiday plans ruined by Grant Shapps' announcement today that 'people shouldn't be booking holidays right now'.

It has left both customers scrambling to re-arrange their plans or claim refunds - while furious travel companies demand that strict new quarantine rules have a 'sunset clause' when they will come to an end.

Ryanair is still urging people to book summer holidays, with its chief executive Michael O'Leary firing a stinging broadside at the Transport Secretary.

'Nobody in the travel industry would take any advice from Grant Shapps who has mismanaged almost every aspect of travel during the pandemic,' he said.

Tui announced yesterday that 2.8million people have booked holidays for this year, more than half of them Britons, while Jet2 yesterday cancelled all of its holidays until April 14.

Many of the trips have already been rescheduled from last year, or booked on the back of ministers' previous predictions that life would be back to normal by 'Christmas' or 'Easter'.

Package holiday customers now face a wait to see if companies will cancel their holidays, entitling them to a refund, or offer to reschedule their breaks for later in the year or next year.

Anyone who has booked their own flights should be able to reschedule for free under most airlines coronavirus rules, but face losing accommodation costs such as Airbnbs.

And if rules were to be lifted before Autumn - Matt Hancock has indicated quarantine rules will stay until it is 'safe' to lift them - prices are expected to rocket as demand soars for a limited supply of flights and destinations.

Ryanair has already said it still expects the travel restrictions to be lifted despite the tough rhetoric from the government.

A spokesman said: 'The UK's successful vaccine rollout program eliminates the need for these draconian travel restrictions from May onwards.

'If all over 50s are vaccinated by May as predicted by Boris Johnson, then the risk of the Covid virus to the health service is severely diminished and this must give rise to the removal of travel restrictions on UK citizens, particularly on short-haul flights both within the UK and to/from Europe.'

Travel consultant Paul Charles added: 'I can't believe we're going to have a summer that's worse than last year. With 30-40million people vaccinated... I don't think the British people will stand for that, having been in lockdown so long.'

Meanwhile staycation costs have already rocketed this year, with one ultra-luxurious two week break in Scotland being marketed for 600,000 and Cornwall reporting a flood of bookings.

Other Brits are block booking holiday cottages for weeks at a time for a so-called 'workation' - allowing them to work remotely from their holiday destination.

Those who have organised a staycation include Health Secretary Matt Hancock, who announced he will holiday in Cornwall this year, despite Shapps warning against booking domestic holidays.

One disappointed customer is Lauren Porteous, 23, from Newcastle, has been forced to re-book her trip to Florida three times during the pandemic - and is now braced for it to be delayed for a fourth time.

She initially booked her trip to the US in April last year in the hope of going in November, before it was pushed back to May and now August.

She told MailOnline: 'We're going to be waiting until closer to the time to see how things are... If we have to change our flights and dates again though, we will.'

The test analyst, who also has a trip booked for Los Angeles in August, said she has a mixed experience with travel companies - some have been accommodating while others have been a 'nightmare'.

Asked if she was worried about her trip being cancelled, the she said: 'I'm more worried about being stuck here for longer... I hate being in the same place for too long and I'm missing LA so much.

'At the moment we can keep changing flights as many times as we need, so I'm not too worried about it yet.'

However many would-be holidaymakers are demanding refunds and want to know what what options they have to claw back their money.

Experts advised people against immediately cancelling their flights as it could prevent their entitlement to a full cash refund.

Guy Anker, deputy editor of MoneySavingExpert, told MailOnline: 'This is a bad story for people who want a holiday - but financially there's a lot that can be done.'

Lauren Porteous, 23, from Newcastle, has been forced to re-book her trip to Florida three times during the pandemic - and is now braced for it to be delayed for a fourth time

Tui announced yesterday that 2.8million people have booked holidays for this year, while Jet2 said there is 'huge pent-up demand' for trips abroad

Shapps says 'vaccines passports' likely to happen in the future Grant Shapps today said he believes 'vaccine passports' will happen so holidays can resume when the pandemic eases. The Transport Secretary confirmed the government is working on a system and was having talks with other countries. However, he stressed it is not the same thing as documentation to allow people to access services in this country, which is not being considered. Mr Shapps said in a round of interviews: 'I imagine that in the future there will be an international system where countries will want to know that you have been potentially vaccinated or potentially had tests taken before flying. 'I was speaking to my Singaporean counterpart, I was speaking to my US counterpart this week, and we'll have discussions about those things to have an internationally recognised system.' Advertisement

He said: 'A lot of it will depend on the holiday company and their rules. So the first thing to do is check with your holiday company.

'The second point is that a lot of these companies will have built-in flexibility.

'The general message is wait to see if they cancel on you, unless you get close to their cut off to get something back.

He explained that many, but not all, companies have a policy whereby if they cancel the trip, customers are entitled to a full cash refund.

Whereas if the customer cancels, often they will only be entitled to a voucher to put towards a future flight, or the option of rescheduling.

Mr Anker said: 'It's a bit like a game of chicken to some extent. It's not a game of wait to the last second, it's a game of wait to the last second until you can get something back.'

Nicky Kelvin, director of content at The Points Guy UK, agreed: For now, the best advice is to sit tight.

'If you don't already know, check now with the airline or company you have booked with to see if your booking is flexible or refundable.

'If it is, you can wait to see what happens, and then be ready to cancel or re-book once you can be certain the trip won't happen.'

Are companies already cancelling holidays?

Tui is allowing customers due to depart before October 31 to change their holiday for free - and providing a refund if they cancel.

Jet 2 today said it will be providing updates for people with booked holidays 'loser to the time' - but highlighted the 1billion in refunds it has doled out during the pandemic.

Virgin says it offers a refund or the option of a travel voucher valid until September 30 if coronavirus forces the holiday to be cancelled.

Love Holidays is offering refunds or rescheduling for holidays before May 1 if they are affected by government coronavirus travel restrictions.

in the UK, Butlins allows customers to cancel or rearrange their break free of charge up to three days in advance, while Center Parcs also offers free rescheduling or refunds.

Airbnb offers refunds if the guest is infected with coronavirus, but not under any other circumstances.

The prospect of having to hand yet more money back to customers has come as a blow for the travel industry, whose revenues have nosedived during the pandemic.

Paul Charles, travel consultant and chief executive of the PC Agency, said the holiday moratorium could be the death knell for airlines.

He told BBC News today: 'I think there will be many casualties, not just small firms like travel firms and our operators, but the airlines are really going to be at risk if there is no travel for the next six months.'

With Mr Shapps also advising against booking staycations, some domestic travel firms are also preparing to issue refunds.

Butlins said you can get your money back if they have to cancel, government restrictions do not allow, or simply if you no longer feel comfortable making the trip.

Center Parcs is allowing guests to reschedule with a discount to the value of 100 or cancel with a full refund.

Mr Hancock indicated the quarantine measures might be in place until the autumn if vaccine booster jabs are needed in response to coronavirus variants

Could summer holidays abroad still be possible?

Ryanair insisted that people should continue to make holiday bookings and excoriated ministers' 'draconian' restrictions.

A spokesperson told MailOnline: 'The UK's successful vaccine rollout program eliminates the need for these draconian travel restrictions from May onwards.

'If all over-50s are vaccinated by May as predicted by Boris Johnson, then the risk of the Covid virus to the health service is severely diminished and this must give rise to the removal of travel restrictions on UK citizens, particularly on short-haul flights both within the UK and to/from Europe.

With this in mind, people should feel free to make summer holiday bookings safe in the knowledge that if the Covid restrictions change, they can change these bookings without any change fees.'



Mr Charles was also optimistic that the vaccine rollout would pave a way for overseas trips.

He said: 'I do see a way through and am more optimistic than some. I can't believe we're going to have a summer that's worse than last year. With 30-40million people vaccinated... I don't think the British people will stand for that, having been in lockdown so long and told vaccinations are the way back to normality.'

Mr Kelvin predicted that, if restrictions were lifted and flights to some holiday destinations were allowed, the surge in demand could push prices up.

He said: 'As we saw in summer 2020, it is also likely that certain 'safe' hotspots where it becomes possible to travel will crop up, and prices may rise to get to these places.

'This could continue to be an issue until there is a critical mass of available destinations. We have already seen prices for UK staycations rocket for 2021, and if international restrictions stay in place whilst domestic travel becomes possible, this trend will continue.'

The ABTA industry body said people could have 'confidence' booking holidays and pointed out many companies are offering 'additional flexibility to take into account the uncertainty created by the pandemic'.

'If we wait for the full rollout of the vaccination programme in the UK before people start to travel overseas, we'll lose another summer season to the pandemic  something the travel industry can't afford,' a spokeswoman said.

'We need a reopening strategy that keeps up with the developing medical situation and with medical understanding, and considers the role of optional vaccine certificates and testing together to open up travel. The Government also needs to provide tailored financial support to help travel businesses through the difficulties they are facing.'

His comments came after Mr Shapps suggested that foreign holidays will continue to be banned until everyone has received a jab.

He said: 'The Prime Minister will say more about the route to unlocking this country, starting when he speaks about it on February 22.

'But we don't know yet whether that will include information on things like holidays, simply because we don't know where we'll be up to in terms of the decline in cases, deaths, vaccination.

'And not just the vaccination programme here, but the vaccination programme internationally, because people will be going outside of our borders. So it's too soon.'

Mr Shapps indicated that travel restrictions may not be eased until everyone in the UK - and potentially in overseas destinations - has had their coronavirus vaccinations.

Asked in an interview on BBC Breakfast what needs to change for travel restrictions to be lifted, he replied: 'First of all, everybody having their vaccinations.'

Travel industry turns on Grant Shapps as he snuffs out hopes of foreign AND British holidays this year - saying no-one be booking anything - despite Matt Hancock already having made plans to visit Cornwall

By James Tapsfield, political editor, and Luke May for MailOnline

Grant Shapps faced the wrath of the travel industry today as he snuffed out hopes of a summer holiday season, warning people not to book anything at home or abroad.

The Transport Secretary made clear there is no guarantee that breaks will be possible at all this year, saying he did not want to 'raise people's hopes'.

He stressed that it is currently illegal to go abroad for any non-essential reason - although he did say the government is looking at a 'vaccines passport' system that might allow leisure travel to resume when the crisis eases.

The grim comments came despite Boris Johnson previously voicing 'optimism' about the summer, and Matt Hancock revealing he has already booked a trip to Cornwall.

Mr Johnson increased the gloom at PMQs this afternoon by warning the country will have to 'get used' to the idea of vaccine booster shots in the Autumn, and dodging Tory calls to guarantee that all schools in England will return on March 8.

There is also growing anger at the extreme border crackdown unveiled by the Health Secretary yesterday in an effort to stop mutant coronavirus strains.

Former Supreme Court justice Lord Sumption branded the mooted maximum 10-year prison term for travellers who try to hide their movements 'inhumane' - pointing out it is longer than for some sex offences.

And ex-Attorney General Dominic Grieve said courts would never impose the 'draconian' 10-year sentence.

However, questions were raised this morning over whether the law is going to be changed at all - with some Cabinet ministers unhappy and suggesting Mr Hancock was just pointing to the current provisions in the Forgery Act.

Paul Charles of the PC Agency travel consultancy said: 'The government promised that vaccines would enable a return to some normality - such as a holiday.

'Now they're saying they may not be possible. Can government stop 40 million UK vaccinated people travelling this summer?'

At PMQs, Mr Johnson dodged committing to an extension of furlough beyond April and support for the stricken travel industry.

Mr Shapps defended the 10-year jail threat today, insisting it was'appropriate'.

'It's up to 10 years, it's a tariff, it's not necessarily how long somebody would go to prison for,' he told BBC Breakfast.

'But I do think it is serious if people put others in danger by deliberately misleading and saying that you weren't in Brazil or South Africa, or one of the red list countries, which as you say does include Portugal.

'I think the British public would expect pretty strong action because we're not talking now just about, 'oh there's a lot of coronavirus in that country and you might bring some more of it back when we already have plenty of it here'.

'What we're talking about now are the mutations, the variants, and that is a different matter, because we don't want to be in a situation where we later on discover that there's a problem with vaccines.'

In other rollercoaster developments in the coronavirus crisis today:

Boris Johnson said we will have to 'get used' to the idea of re-vaccinating in the autumn as the UK faces new Covid-19 variants;

There are claims Pfizer and Oxford University's Covid vaccines both cut the risk of falling ill with the disease by 65 per cent after just one dose;

Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall have been given their first coronavirus jab, Clarence House has revealed;

Plans to help school students catch-up from a year of Covid disruption were thrown into doubt last night after teaching unions issued a fresh pay demand;

Mr Shapps has revealed his 89-year-old father is fighting for his life in a Covid ward after catching the virus in hospital.

Grant Shapps made clear there is no guarantee that breaks will be possible at all this year, saying he did not want to 'raise people's hopes'

Mr Johnson increased the gloom at PMQs this afternoon by warning the country will have to 'get used' to the idea of vaccine booster shots in the Autumn, and dodging Tory calls to guarantee that all schools in England will return on March 8

Asked during a round of interviews this morning what the prospects were for the restrictions easing in time for the summer, Mr Shapps said: 'It is a fact that right now it is illegal to leave your home to go on holiday

'At the moment that is off the cards...

'I don't want to unnecessarily raise people's hopes. The truth is we just don't know how the virus will respond both to the vaccines and how people will respond...'

Mr Shapps told Sky News: 'I can't give you a definitive will there or won't there be the opportunity to take holidays this next year, either at home or abroad.'

He added: 'I don't know what the situation will be by the middle of the summer. Nobody can tell from the point where we sit right now.'

Mr Shapps also told the BBC: 'You shouldn't be booking holidays right now, either internationally or domestically..

'Until we know the route out of lockdown, which we can't know until we have more data, more information on vaccines as well, please don't go ahead and book holidays for something which, at this stage, is illegal to actually go and do - whether it's here or abroad.

'And, further down the line, I simply don't know the answer to the question of where we'll be up to this summer.

'It's too early to be able to give you that information. You would want to wait until that's clear before booking anything. So the best advice to people is do nothing at this stage.'

The remarks from Mr Shapps about not booking holidays in the UK will not be welcomed by the domestic tourism industry, with hopes of a bumper year as people cannot go abroad.

Mr Hancock has previously revealed that he has booked a break in Cornwall - something that Mr Shapps now says is not advisable.

The Health Secretary told the Commons in December: 'I do have high confidence that the summer of 2021 will be a bright one without the sort of restrictions that made the summer of 2020 more restricted. I've booked my holiday, Mr Speaker, I'm going to Cornwall.'

Lord Sumption's article in The Telegraph suggested ministers who only considered the positives of the term, without considering the cons, are 'unfit to hold office'.

He then suggested Mr Hancock should lose his position as Health Secretary, which he has held since July 2018.

Lord Sumption said: 'A spell in another department which has to cope with the collateral damage, would do him, and us, a power of good. Try Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, or perhaps Culture, Media and Sport.'

In a comment piece published yesterday, Lord Sumption wrote: 'Does Mr Hancock really think that non-disclosure of a visit to Portugal is worse than the large number of violent firearms offences or sexual offences involving minors, for which the maximum is seven years?'

The measures come amid continuing concerns over home-grown coronavirus strains as scientists advising the Government added one detected in Bristol to its 'variant of concern' list.

How do other offences compare to the 10 years for 'red list' liars? SEVEN YEAR MAXIMUM SENTENCES Child sex offences Carrying a loaded firearm Racially aggravated assault Incest TEN YEAR MAXIMUM SENTENCES Rioting Making threats to kill Indecent assault Firearm possession Burglary with intent to commit rape Indecency with children under 14 Advertisement

Former attorney general Dominic Grieve also told the paper: 'The maximum sentence of 10 years for what is effectively a regulatory breach sounds, in the circumstances, unless it can be justified, extraordinarily high.'

Speaking on Radio 4's Today programme he added: 'The reality is that nobody would get such a sentence anyway, the courts are simply not going to impose it.

'You certainly shouldn't do it, it's not however proportionate to suggest that someone should be sent to prison for 10 years.

'You only have to look at the sort of offences that attract a maximum of 10 years, it's a mistake of the government to suggest something which is not going to happen.

'My view is that good government is about proportionality and sounding off with suggestions of draconian and disproportionate sentences for an offence is a mistake.

'The fact is I have no doubt that if this is properly tailored a person who does this might receive a custodial sentence and if somebody who is normally a law abiding individual, that will doubtless do them a lot of damage and act as an adequate deterrent.'

Mr Grieve added: 'It needs to be explained plainly and simply to people rather than exaggerated in this fashion.'

Mr Hancock had earlier told MPs: 'I make no apologies for the strength of these measures, because we're dealing with one of the strongest threats to our public health that we've faced as a nation.'

He also confirmed a new 'enhanced testing' regime for all international travellers, with two tests required during the quarantine process from Monday.

Those who fail to take a test face a 1,000 fine, followed by a 2,000 penalty and an extension to their quarantine period, to 14 days, if they miss the second test.

Mr Hancock indicated the quarantine measures might be in place until the autumn if vaccine booster jabs are needed in response to coronavirus variants.

Six in ten Britons say they 'could cope well' with ten days in hotel quarantine From Monday, UK residents returning from 33 countries will have to isolate for 10 days in hotels. Now, a YouGov poll has revealed that most Britons think they'd cope well with the quarantine. Forty four percent think they would cope fairly well in this situation, while a further 16% think they would cope very well A third (34%) say they would either not cope very well (19%) or not well at all (15%) Women (37%) are slightly more likely than men (31%) to say they wouldn't cope well in hotel quarantine Advertisement

He told the Commons that 16 hotels have been contracted to provide 4,600 rooms for the quarantine programme, which begins on Monday.

The Scottish Government said this approach is 'not sufficient' so it is requiring all international travellers arriving into Scotland to stay in a quarantine hotel.

No international flights are currently operating to Wales or Northern Ireland, but Stormont's chief medical officer Dr Michael McBride said it is 'crucially important' for the nations to work together to stall the arrival of new and concerning strains from abroad.

Shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth claimed the public wants the Government to 'go further' on border measures.

'Our first line of defence is surely to do everything we can to stop (new variants) arising in the first place,' the Labour MP said.

'That means securing our borders to isolate new variants as they come in. He's announced a detailed package today but he hasn't announced comprehensive quarantine controls at the borders.'

Travel trade organisation Abta said requiring passengers to pay for multiple tests once leisure travel is restarted would have 'serious cost implications' and 'hurt demand'.

A spokeswoman urged ministers to 'develop a roadmap to reopen travel'.

Single adults will be charged 1,750 for a 10-day stay in a quarantine hotel, which covers the hotel, transfer and testing.

Meanwhile, the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag) added the variant detected in Bristol to its 'variant of concern' list.

A strain identified in Liverpool was also classed as a 'variant under investigation'.

Public Health England's Dr Susan Hopkins said the relatively slow rise in cases of the South African and Bristol variant is 'reassuring'.

But she warned that controlling them will become much more challenging as lockdown is relaxed.

Health officials said they had so far found 76 cases of the Bristol and Liverpool variants in the UK.

Both those variants contain the E484K mutation, a genetic change also found in both the South African and Brazilian variants, which experts suggest may be better at evading the human immune response.

The Department of Health and Social Care also said extra coronavirus testing will be carried out in the borough of Lambeth, south London, after a case of the South African variant was discovered.

In a more positive development, The Sun reported official data from tests on the Pfizer vaccine showed a single dose could reduce the risk of infection by around 65% in both older people and young adults after as little as two weeks.

Police in riot gear march to take a position to block demonstrators at an intersection during a protest in Mandalay, Burma, on Feb. 9, 2021. (AP Photo)

Burma Junta Cracks Down on Crowds Defying Protest Ban

YANGON, BurmaPolice cracked down on demonstrators opposing Burma (also known as Myanmar)s military coup, firing warning shots and shooting water cannons to disperse crowds that took to the streets again Tuesday in defiance of new protest bans.

Reports of many injured demonstrators drew strong concern from the U.N.s office in Burma.

According to reports from Nay Pyi Taw, Mandalay and other cities, numerous demonstrators have been injured, some of them seriously, by security forces in connection with the current protests across the country, the U.N. said.

The use of disproportionate force against demonstrators is unacceptable, said Ola Almgren, the U.N. resident coordinator in Burma.

Water cannons were used in Mandalay, Burmas second-biggest city, where witnesses said at least two warning shots were fired in early attempts to break up the crowd. Gunfire could be heard on videos from the city, some of which showed riot police flailing wildly with their batons at people trying to flee. Reports on social media said police arrested more than two dozen people there.

Police use water cannon to disperse demonstrators during a protest in Mandalay, Burma, on Feb. 9, 2021. (AP Photo)

Police use water cannons to disperse demonstrators during a protest in Mandalay, Burma, on Feb. 9, 2021. (AP Photo)

Police also used water cannons in the capital, Natpyitaw, for a second day and fired shots into the air. Police were reported to have also shot rubber bullets at the crowd in Naypyitaw, wounding several people. Photos on social media showed an alleged shooteran officer with a short-barreled gunand several injured people. Protesters posted photos online of bullet casings they said they found at the scene.

Unconfirmed social media reports circulated of shootings with live rounds and deaths among the protesters, with the potential of sparking violent retaliation against the authoritiesan outcome proponents of the countrys civil disobedience movement have warned against. The AP was unable to immediately confirm the reports.

The weekly magazine 7Day News reported on Twitter that a 19-year-old woman was shot by police in Naypyidaw and was undergoing emergency surgery at the citys main hospital. It cited Min Thu, the local chairman of the National League for Democracy party of ousted national leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

Security forces on Tuesday night raided the NLDs national office in Yangon, following raids of regional party offices last week that the party called illegal. NLD spokesman Kyi Toe wrote on his Facebook page that army personnel took documents and computer hardware.

The protesters are demanding that power be restored to the deposed civilian government and are seeking freedom for Suu Kyi and other governing party members detained since the military took over and blocked the new session of Parliament from convening on Feb. 1.

The growing defiance is striking in a country where past demonstrations have been met with deadly force and are a reminder of previous movements in the Southeast Asian countrys long and bloody struggle for democracy. The military used deadly force to quash a massive 1988 uprising against military dictatorship and a 2007 revolt led by Buddhist monks.

The protests were banned by decrees issued Monday night for some areas of Yangon and Mandalay that made illegal rallies and gatherings of more than five people, along with motorized processions, while also imposing a 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. curfew. It was not clear if restrictions were imposed for other areas. Violators could be punished by up to six months in prison or a fine.

Protesters flash the three-fingered salute, a symbol of resistance, during a protest in Mandalay, Burma, on Feb. 9, 2021. (AP Photo)

Demonstrators display placards calling for the release of detained Myanmar State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi in Yangon, Burma, on Feb. 9, 2021. (AP Photo)

Demonstrations were also held in other cities Tuesday, including Bagowhere city elders negotiated with police to avoid a violent confrontationand Dawei, and in northern Shan state.

In Magwe in central Burma, where water cannons were also used, unconfirmed reports on social media said several police officers had crossed over to join the protesters ranks. Police in Naypyitaw and Pathein, west of Yangon, were also said to have switched sides. The AP was unable to immediately confirm the reports.

Crowds also gathered in Yangon, the countrys biggest city where thousands of people have been demonstrating since Saturday, despite a heightened security presence. No violence was reported.

Police, not soldiers, appeared to have been deployed to stop the demonstrations, a small indicator of restraint by the military government. The army has a record of brutality in crushing past revolts as well as in fighting ethnic minorities in border areas seeking self-determination. It also has been accused of carrying out genocide in its 2017 counterinsurgency campaign that drove more than 700,000 members of the Muslim Rohingya minority across the border to seek safety in Bangladesh.

State media for the first time on Monday referred to the protests, saying they were endangering the countrys stability.

Democracy can be destroyed if there is no discipline, declared a statement from the Ministry of Information read on state television station MRTV. We will have to take legal actions to prevent acts that are violating state stability, public safety and the rule of law.

However, the military commander who led the coup and is now Burmas leader made no mention of the unrest in a 20-minute televised speech Monday night, his first to the public since the takeover.

Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing instead repeated claims about voting fraud that have been the justification for the militarys takeover, allegations that were refuted by the state election commission. He added that his junta would hold new elections as promised in a year and hand over power to the winners, and explained the juntas intended policies for COVID-19 control and the economy.

The generals remarks, which included encouragement for foreign investors, did nothing to assuage concern in the international community.

U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price said the U.S. condemned violence against the protesters and reiterated the U.S.s earlier calls for the military to restore power to the elected government. The international community is attempting every avenue to ensure that democracy and civilian leadership is restored in Burma, Price said in Washington.

The U.N.s Human Rights Council, based in Geneva, will meet Friday to consider the human rights implications of the crisis. Britain and the European Union spearheaded the request for the special session, which will amount to a high-profile public debate among diplomats over Burma and could lead to a resolution airing concerns or recommendations of international action.

New Zealand suspended all military and high-level political contact with Burma, Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta announced Tuesday in Wellington, adding that any New Zealand aid should not go to or benefit Burmars military government.

We do not recognize the legitimacy of the military-led government and we call on the military to immediately release all detained political leaders and restore civilian rule, Mahuta said. New Zealand was also placing a travel ban on the military leaders.




OECD logo
The National Party is ignorant, misleading and divisive on climate change  and, to its peril, woefully out of touch with its constituency, the wonderful people, as leader Michael McCormack calls them. He means the farmers, many of whom would be hurt by the Nationals attempt to exclude agriculture from any commitment  still only a preference for Prime Minister Scott Morrison  to achieve net zero emissions by 2050.

Carbon farming ... the people on the land see the opportunity. Credit:Bloomberg

In recent days, McCormack, reflecting earlier remarks by his leadership rival Barnaby Joyce, said: We are not worried, or Im certainly not worried, about what might happen in 30 years time. As if we can wait until 2049 to address the climate crisis. Joyce has gone further, claiming: If the Nationals supported net zero emissions we would cease to be a party that could credibly represent farmers.

McCormacks specific reason for exempting agriculture? We are not going to hurt those wonderful people that put food on our table. This suggestion is actually divisive within the Nats, but his exiled former cabinet ministers, Joyce, Matt Canavan and Bridget McKenzie (the disgruntled triumvirate of exes) oppose any emissions deadline that doesnt exempt agriculture, mining and manufacturing.

The Nats obviously dont know their wonderful people. This is not new. I recall how they knew them so well that they expected most of their seats to vote no in the same-sex marriage postal survey, only to be jolted when 15 of 16 seats voted yes.
US president, Joe Biden has threatened to sanction countries that are yet to make laws to accommodate Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer and Intersex (LGBTQI) people.



The Democrat issued a presidential memorandum aimed at expanding the protection of the rights of LGBTQI people worldwide.



Bidens memo reads, When foreign governments move to restrict the rights of LGBTQI+ persons or fail to enforce legal protections in place, thereby contributing to a climate of intolerance, agencies engaged abroad shall consider appropriate responses, including using the full range of diplomatic and assistance tools and, as appropriate, financial sanctions, visa restrictions, and other actions.



All human beings should be treated with respect and dignity and should be able to live without fear no matter who they are or whom they love.



The United States belongs at the forefront of this struggle  speaking out and standing strong for our most dearly held values.



The memo directs US agencies working in foreign countries to work harder to combat the criminalisation by foreign governments of LGBTQ status or conduct and directs the State Department to include anti-LGBTQ violence, discrimination, and laws in its annual human rights report.



It also calls for increased efforts to ensure that LGBTQ asylum seekers have equal access to protection, expanded training for US federal personnel, and potential increased use of priority referrals to expedite resettlement of vulnerable people.



It also instructs agencies to consider appropriate responses, including the full range of diplomatic tools, and potentially financial sanctions and visa restrictions, when foreign governments restrict the rights of LGBTQ people.



Biden first announced the push during a recent speech at the State Department, vowing to rebuild US credibility worldwide.



To further repair our moral leadership, Im also issuing a presidential memo to agencies to reinvigorate our leadership on the LGBTQI issues and do it internationally, he said.



Nigeria is categorized as a homophobic country due to its anti-gay laws which have been heavily criticised by global rights groups.



The anti-gay laws in Nigeria, a leading ant-LGBTQI country in Africa, prescribes between 10 and 14 years in prison for anyone caught flouting the law either by cohabitation between same-sex sexual partners, public show of same-sex relationship, registration, operation or participation in gay clubs, societies and organisation, amongst others.



In January 2014, ex- Nigerian President, Goodluck Jonathan signed the Same-Sex-Marriage (Prohibition) Act despite pressure from former US President, Barrack Obama.



The anti-gay laws in Nigeria, a leading ant-LGBTQI country in Africa, prescribes between 10 and 14 years in prison for anyone caught flouting the law either by cohabitation between same-sex sexual partners, public show of same-sex relationship, registration, operation or participation in gay clubs, societies and organisation, amongst others.









Source: WhiteHouse.gov









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Shes been a war correspondent, a soldier and an educator. Today, at 80, shes also a victim crusading tirelessly for Agent Orange justice.

Nga came online with her silver hair in rollers.

"My hair is way too long now. I have not made time for a haircut yet," she said, explaining the hair rollers in a video call with VnExpress International from her apartment in Paris, where she lives by herself.

At almost 80, Nga gives herself no time to rest. She is busy with indictments, statements, speeches and interviews, especially since last January when her name became a byword for a doughty fighter.

On January 25, Ngas profile shot up among millions interested in the Vietnam War in general and Agent Orange in particular. That day, she officially filed a suit against 14 companies that supplied the U.S. Army with the notorious, toxic defoliant during the Vietnam War. Studies have shown that they knew it was toxic but decided to make it for profit anyway. The case was filed in the southern Paris suburb of Evry.

The defendants in Ngas case are on top of a Whos Who list in international agriculture, like Monsanto and Dow Chemicals. She has accused them of being responsible for physical ailments and mental suffering sustained by her, her children and countless others, as well as for severe damage done to the environment.

"This is not my trial alone, this is not my fight alone. By now, the name Tran To Nga should only be a symbol. This is a fight for the people, for truth," she said.

Nga suffers from certain typical Agent Orange effects, including type 2 diabetes and an extremely rare insulin allergy. She has contracted tuberculosis twice and a cancer once. She lost one of her daughters to a malformation in the heart. She has also suffered Alpha Thalassemie, which results in impaired production of hemoglobin, the molecule that carries oxygen in the blood, and her daughter and grandchild have the syndrome.

Tran To Nga during a rally to call for justice for Agent Orange victims in Paris, 2019. Photo by Collectif Vietnam Dioxine.

Nga, a naturalized French citizen now, has been fully backed by Vietnam in her fight for justice.

In an open statement early February, the HCMC Peace Committee and HCMC Development Foundation, two organizations within the HCMC Union of Friendship Organizations, said that "in line with our deep and steadfast commitment to humanity and justice, we declare our full moral support for Tran To Ngas legitimate right to have her case as a victim of dioxin/Agent Orange impacts heard before a court of justice."

They said manufacturers cannot "shirk their moral responsibility for the terrible pain and suffering endured by combatants and civilians, and simply shrug off this damning reality."

While international cooperation, including between the Vietnamese and U.S. authorities, has made some progress on mitigating dioxin/Agent Oranges impact on Vietnams soil, specifically through decontamination of former airbase hotspots, "proper recognition and remediation of the many facets of its long-lasting impact on humans, especially civilians in Vietnam, still lags far behind," they said.

Foreign Affairs Ministry spokeswoman Le Thi Thu Hang said at a recent press meet: "We support Agent Orange/dioxin victims claiming legal liability from the U.S. chemical firms that manufactured and traded Agent Orange/dioxin during the war in Vietnam."

Multinational firms taken to court by Tran To Nga should take responsibility for the impacts of the toxic defoliant used in Vietnam, she added.

A reporter and a fighter

Tran To Nga was born in 1942 in southern Vietnam. After graduating from college in Hanoi, she returned to the south and worked as a journalist for the Liberation News Agency, which later merged with the Vietnam News Agency. She covered the Vietnam War and also fought as a soldier. She was jailed for almost a year in 1974 and released when the war ended in 1975.

After the war, she became an educator as principal of the Le Thi Hong Gam and Marie Curie high schools, and later, the HCMC University of Technology and Education.

In 1993, she moved to France.

After she retired Nga engaged in charity work both in France and Vietnam, making herself a connection between benefactors and those in need, especially children. In 2004, her work was recognized with the Ordre national de la Legion d'honneur, or The Legion of Honor, the highest French order of merit.

"I have been doing a lot of charity work, but it was only in 2008 that I truly put my heart and soul into helping Agent Orange victims," Nga said.

That year, Nga had struck a deal with a donor to build houses for people in difficulties in Vietnam. On some friends advice, she decided to direct this assistance to Agent Orange victims. She asked local authorities in Vietnam for beneficiary suggestions and was advised to visit the northern province of Thai Binh.

That trip turned out to be a life changer.

Don't cry

"One day I visited a family and met a person whose whole body is distorted with crooked arms and legs, and humps both in the front and back of the body. I burst into tears immediately.

"What happened next was that the person reached out with a crooked arm and wiped my tears, telling me, Dont cry!

"I realized at that moment that whatever miseries I have experienced in my life, it could never compare with the suffering of such people.

"For days after that visit, I could not sleep well. If I dont do anything, then who. I asked myself."

As a direct participant in the war, Nga had direct experience of being exposed to Agent Orange, and could no longer do nothing.

She decided to devote the rest of her life to supporting Agent Orange victims and procuring justice for them.

Lending her voice

In 2009, when Nga returned to France, she learned by chance that the International Peoples Tribunal of Conscience in Support of the Vietnamese Victims of Agent Orange would meet in May in Paris to hear evidence on the impacts of the use of Agent Orange by the U.S. military in Vietnam from 1961 until 1971.

Nga wrote to the organizer of the tribunal, offering herself as a witness, "on behalf of those that can no longer be there to speak up because they had died in the war, and those that cannot make it to the court." Her offer was accepted.

The day she showed up as a witness, nobody knew who she was because she was on her own while all others testifying were introduced by the Vietnam Association for Victims of Agent Orange/Dioxin (VAVA).

The only reference she got was from Nguyen Thi Binh, who had led Vietnams delegation to negotiate at the Paris Peace Conference and later served as the nations vice president. Binh introduced Nga to other people as "the daughter of a friend of mine." Ngas mother was Nguyen Thi Tu, who was chairwoman of the South Vietnam Women's Liberation Association.

Compared to other witnesses, Nga had a distinct advantage: her French skills. Before attending the tribunal, she had already submitted a statement that she wrote in Vietnamese and translated into French by herself.

Nga also speaks French fluently and this made her testimony more convincing as she detailed the serious impacts of Agent Orange that she had witnessed as a soldier, a victim and as an activist.

Her statement was powerful: "I would like to invite all of you, all the Americans, all the lawyers, to come to Vietnam with me and see for yourself the consequences of the Agent Orange; and Im sure you will never have the courage again to defend those that caused such consequences."

She has repeated that statement at the ongoing trial in Evry.

By now, it is known internationally that between 1961 and 1971, the U.S. army sprayed some 80 million liters of Agent Orange, a compound of dioxins and dioxin-like substances, over 78,000 square kilometers (30,000 square miles) in southern Vietnam.

Dioxin stays in the soil and at the bottom of water bodies for generations, entering the food chain through meat, fish and other animals, and has been found at alarmingly high levels in human breast milk.

Between 2.1 to 4.8 million Vietnamese were directly exposed to Agent Orange and other chemicals before the war ended in April 1975. These chemicals have been linked to cancers, birth defects and many other chronic diseases.

Nga's appearance at the tribunal took her fight for Agent Orange victims to a new level. More and more people started to know what she was doing and she captured the media's interest.

"From that day, I officially walked into the public light."

The perfect candidate

After the 2009 appearance, Nga was approached by Andre Bouny, a French writer and president of the International Committee of Support (CIS) to support victims of Agent Orange; and William Bourdon, a French lawyer who practices criminal law, specializing in white-collar crime, communications law and human rights.

Even before they saw her at the tribunal, the two men had visited Vietnam and met with Agent Orange victims. They were looking for ways to help and fight for them.

In 2008, in a meeting with the then Prime Minister of Vietnam, Nguyen Tan Dung, they said if there was an Agent Orange victim with French citizenship, they could help that person file a suit in France against U.S. firms that had either made or sold dioxin, on behalf of all other Vietnamese victims.

Nga was the perfect candidate: She is the only plaintiff who can sue firms that had made and traded dioxin on behalf of Agent Orange victims in Vietnam. She is a victim herself and a Vietnamese-French citizen who lives in the only country that allows its citizens to turn to the courts for justice against foreign attacks.

It took Nga a while to accept the offer made by Bouny and Bourdon.

"I was almost 70 then and quite satisfied with what Id done so far, spending years doing charity work and supporting unlucky people. So I was not keen on any involvement in such legal drama."

However, some people, including several in Vietnam, convinced her, telling her how important it would be for her to take the case, as she lived in the only country that allows such an international lawsuit.

They also said if she turned down the offer, there would be no one else to pick up the cudgels, ever. Before her, the VAVA had filed a lawsuit in the U.S. in 2004 against 37 U.S. chemical manufacturers  including Dow Chemical and Monsanto. However, the case was rejected three times by U.S. courts, which ruled that there was no legal basis for the plaintiff's claims.

After Nga eventually decided to sue the U.S. chemical firms, lawyers explained to her that she could always accept the option of reconciliation outside the court, "which would allow me to get lots of money from those companies."

The other option would be to take "a very long and very challenging path, but would pave the way to justice for so many Agent Orange victims out there."

If the French court rules in her favor, it will be the first time ever that Vietnamese victims of the Agent Orange win compensation for the horrific aftereffects caused. So far, only military veterans from the U.S., Australia and South Korea have been compensated.

Nga chose the latter path, one that she has walked on for more than a decade and that is yet to reach its end.

A happy poisoning

For five years (2009 to 2013), Nga had a lot to do to prepare the paperwork for her lawsuit. During this period, she had to convince and get the endorsement of VAVA members.

In 2011, though Nga had been in the fight for almost two years, official medical confirmation was needed that she had a higher-than-permitted level of dioxin in her body.

Nga explained that such a test was costly, one that is beyond many people in Vietnam. For the case, Nga had her blood samples taken for testing and sent to a laboratory in Germany via the VAVA. The test results arrived after two months, cementing the foundation for her case: the amount of dioxin in her blood is a bit higher than the European standard but much higher than the Vietnamese standard.

"It means that after more than 50 years, it is still there in my body. But, holding the result, I cried a happy tear, knowing for sure that I was totally capable of taking those firms to court."

But that very year, French President Nicolas Sarkozy removed the law allowing international courts in the country.

Ngas hands were tied. She planned to switch to Belgium but that European country had also removed the relevant law, following an incident related to the arrest of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.

Nga ended up waiting until 2013, when France had a new president and the law was reinstated. In March that year, the Crown Court of Evry City approved her petition for the case. Until then, every preparation for the lawsuit had remained undisclosed to the public.

However, she encountered another problem: money.

Nga said her personal income had always placed her among the poorest population segment in France, and that has not changed until today.

"Even my lawyers told me: We know you cannot afford to pay us. We will not charge you anything."

But for the lawsuit to be taken to the international court, she had to have an international lawyer translate an indictment of 30 pages from French to English aside from other related fees. In all, she needed about $36,000 euros.

Her lawyers held a meeting, gathering around 20 people that Nga "had never met before." Among them were overseas Vietnamese, French people, and some that had joined the war as soldiers fighting for the South Vietnamese side backed by the U.S., which means they were once Ngas rivals.

Nga and the lawyers tried to explain the cause of her trial and why it was essential. In just one week, she received $16,000 from the people who attended the meeting.

"I was very happy, but my surprise was greater. It was for me such clear example for national reconciliation. The reconciliation happened only because everyone believed in justice and wanted to fight for it," she said.

The rest of the sum was raised by the VAVA via different sources.

In April 2014, the court opened the first procedural session. A total of 26 chemical companies were sued in the beginning, but 12 of them have been sold or shut down over the past years.

After going through 19 procedural sessions during which Nga had to struggle with various types of legal issues aside from her own health problems, on June 29, 2020, the court finally issued a notice in her case and directed that procedural sessions be closed on September 28, so that the trial with litigation sessions could begin on October 12 the same year.

The trial, however, was further postponed to January 25, 2021 due to the pandemic.

Tran To Nga and Andre Bouny at the court on January 25 in Evry, France. Photo by Collectif Vietnam Dioxine.

At the trial, 20 lawyers of the 14 U.S. chemical companies, including Bayer-Monsanto, Dow Chemical, Harcros Chemicals, Uniroyal Chemical and Thompson-Hayward Chemical among others, had four hours to present their arguments debate, while Ngas three lawyers had one hour and 30 minutes.

Ngas lawyers  William Bourdon, Amelie Lefebvre and Bertrand Repolt  have been representing Nga pro bono from 2014 onwards.

Speaking on behalf of the three lawyers, Repolt wrote in an email: "We chose to take this case because Agent Orange is a drama in 20th century history linked to a war that made no sense. No one wants to see such a human and environmental disaster recurring in the future.

"One of the ways to prevent this from happening again is to make everyone understand that there is no impunity, including no impunity for the American companies that supplied Agent Orange to the U.S. Army and who must now account for what they did and assume their responsibilities."

Commenting on their support, Nga said: "To reach where I am right now, I dont know how to thank my lawyers and the public around who have been supporting me nonstop, especially the wonderful young people here in France."

From a virtual unknown, Nga now has thousands of people who have supported her directly and via different social media platforms.

The France-based NGO, Collectif Vietnam Dioxine, which has backed Nga from the beginning, wrote on their Facebook page: "Almost 60 years after Agent Orange's first spread, we remember and are still here to support the victims of yesterday and today of the first and greatest ecocide in history. Our fight will serve future generations!"

On January 31, a rally held by this organization gathered nearly 300 people in Trocadero Square, expressing support for Nga and other victims of Agent Orange in their fight for justice.

The NGO was established in 2004 to raise awareness and claim justice for the Agent Orange victims.

"The organization had not even considered the option that Ms. Nga would one day appear and take the issue to trial, and after six years of non-stop activism, the issue has caused a social upheaval in France," Charlotte Tsang, in charge of media and communications for the NGO, wrote in an email.

"Ms. Nga is our last hope. Being French and Vietnamese directly touched by Agent Orange during the Vietnam War, she fulfills the French requirements to condemn the firms responsible for Agent Oranges conception," she added.

Not us... they knew

The 14 multinationals have argued that they cannot be held responsible for the use the American military made of their product.

Bayer said Agent Orange was made "under the sole management of the U.S. government for exclusively military purposes." Its lawyers argued that the court was not the proper jurisdiction for holding the trial, AFP reported.

Monsanto lawyer Jean-Daniel Bretzner told the court that the companies "acted on the orders of a government and on its behalf," and since the U.S. government cannot be expected to answer to a foreign court for its war actions, the companies should also be immune from prosecution, he said.

Ngas lawyer Repolt said he and the other two lawyers in the team had had to provide proof of the liability of American companies.

"Indeed, we had to demonstrate that when the chemical companies supplied Agent Orange, they were aware of the dangerousness of the product. This required producing, before the French judge, exchanges of internal correspondences from the 1960s, demonstrating this perfect knowledge of dangerousness. Given the age of the facts, this was not easy, but I think we produced sufficiently convincing documents in court to win our case."

For Nga, the case has "obtained some initial successes in making many more people know about Agent Orange/dioxin and what it has done to the Vietnamese people because apparently, before the trial, not many people were aware of this issue."

Tran To Nga waves as she stands with her supporters at the Trocadero Square in Paris, January 31, 2021. Photo by Collectif Vietnam Dioxine.

Tsang of Collectif Vietnam Dioxine made the same observation: "When Ms. Nga launched the legal proceedings in 2014, the scandal of Agent Orange was pretty unknown in France.

"The trial happened but the challenge remained the same: how can we raise Agent Orange as a global environmental and social issue in France? How can we raise Ms. Ngas trial as a symbol of resistance against imperialist wars and ecocide?"

The courts ruling is scheduled on May 10.

From a legal point of view, attorney Repolt said: "If we do not succeed in establishing legal responsibility, before French or another foreign court, the only reasonable and effective way that we will have left is the diplomatic channel, that is to say a commitment by the U.S. for the benefit of Vietnam to repair the damage caused by the war, especially of Agent Orange."

The U.S. government is working on different projects to clean up dioxin contamination in Vietnam. It was announced last month that the clean up of an area at the Bien Hoa Airport, a former airbase of the U.S. army during the war, has been completed. The U.S. has also approved a grant of $65 million to support people with disabilities affected by Agent Orange in eight provinces.

Ive already won

Asked if she had ever thought of giving up, given the long and tough path shes been on, Nga said that the Agent Orange victims in Vietnam, including those whose parents used to fight the war as her comrades, "have placed so much hope in me and I cannot let them down.

"Their hope and their trust does not allow me to ever stop fighting.

"I am old and really sick now, and I could die anytime, but I do not regret anything I have done. For the long fight ahead, I only wish to have three things: courage, patience and hope. The truth has been distorted, and I have to keep speaking up."

And, she added firmly: "We will not lose, the power of truth and justice will win."

"We could see so clearly at the court that when the group of almost 20 lawyers that represent the 14 firms showed up, they were extremely lonely; while my three lawyers and I have been receiving such warm welcome from the public," she said, adding that there were people waiting for her outside the court just to tell her that they will always stand beside her.

"Such genuine support can only happen because people know what is right and believe in justice, and in that, I have already won."
The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai has launched a new center for research into lights impact on health. The Mount Sinai Center for Light and Health Research in the Department of Population Health Science and Policy will expand on Mount Sinais research into lights influence on mental and physical health, including burgeoning areas such as ultraviolet technology disinfection.

The clinical research conducted through the Center will investigate how to use light to improve peoples lives by stabilizing their circadian rhythms, the natural internal clock that regulates the bodys sleep-wake cycle. Researchers will study how light, either from daylight or electric indoor light, affects circadian rhythms in various populations, from the very young to the very old, including patients with COVID-19, cancer, Alzheimers disease, depression, and other illnesses. The goal is to help abate symptoms and improve their sleep, mental health, and cognition.

Mariana Figueiro, PhD, has been recruited from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) to create and serve as Director of the Center. She headed the Lighting Research Center (LRC) at RPI in Troy, New York, and is an internationally known leader in light research and education. She began her career in architecture and started studying lighting in 1996, developing insights into how light impacts circadian rhythms and sleep and how it may affect diseases.

She has four multimillion-dollar grants, including a prestigious training grant, from the National Institutes of Health. She also has garnered loyal support from a wide range of industry sponsors.

Dr. Figueiro has brought 17 members of her team to join the new Mount Sinai Center, including Mark Rea, PhD, who served as LRC Director for almost 30 years, and is now a Professor of Population Health Science and Policy at Icahn Mount Sinai. He will serve as Associate Director and assist with setting up the center at Mount Sinai.

We are really excited about bringing light as an adjunct therapy to many other therapies being used at Mount Sinai, said Dr. Figueiro, who has also been appointed Professor of Population Health Science and Policy at Icahn Mount Sinai. Many people take light for granted. Our work can improve all phases of patients lives from premature infants in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit to the aging suffering from cognitive decline.

Their expertise is in light and human health, energy efficiency, plant health and lighting, and safety in transportation such as outdoor lighting and lighting for emergency vehicles, passenger planes, and submarines. They hope to expand their research into other clinical areas as well as into using ultraviolet technology in sterilization, a technique that was elevated during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Center will seamlessly combine basic science, clinical research, and bioengineering and design to bolster our knowledge of lights impact on human health and safety, said Annetine Gelijns, PhD, JD, Professor and Chair of Population Health Science and Policy at Icahn Mount Sinai. Dr. Figueiros commitment to research, education, and administration is unique. She and her team will build on their scientific expertise and partner with the lighting industry to engineer technology for clinical and industrial applications and will forge public-private partnerships to support novel avenues of research.

Mount Sinais existing team of light researchers, who are investigating how bright light therapy could help with cancer-related fatigue, sleep, and cognition in multiple myeloma and breast cancer patients, will also be members of the Center.

About the Mount Sinai Health System

The Mount Sinai Health System is New York City's largest academic medical system, encompassing eight hospitals, a leading medical school, and a vast network of ambulatory practices throughout the greater New York region. Mount Sinai is a national and international source of unrivaled education, translational research and discovery, and collaborative clinical leadership ensuring that we deliver the highest quality carefrom prevention to treatment of the most serious and complex human diseases. The Health System includes more than 7,200 physicians and features a robust and continually expanding network of multispecialty services, including more than 400 ambulatory practice locations throughout the five boroughs of New York City, Westchester, and Long Island. The Mount Sinai Hospital is ranked No. 14 on U.S. News & World Report's "Honor Roll" of the Top 20 Best Hospitals in the country and the Icahn School of Medicine as one of the Top 20 Best Medical Schools in country. Mount Sinai Health System hospitals are consistently ranked regionally by specialty and our physicians in the top 1% of all physicians nationally by U.S. News & World Report.

For more information, visit https://www.mountsinai.org or find Mount Sinai on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
EU expects start of COVID-19 vaccination in Ukraine in Feb, but concerned about Russian disinformation on this issue  Dombrovskis

The European Commission is involved in the process of reselling coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccines to Ukraine from Poland without any benefit and expects vaccination to start this month, Executive Vice President of the European Commission Valdis Dombrovskis has said.

At the same time, at the end of the meeting with Prime Minister of Ukraine Denys Shmyhal on Wednesday in Brussels, he said that there are concerns about the impact of Russian disinformation about the vaccination process.

Dombrovskis said that the European Commission "is exploring options to help Ukraine receive early access to vaccines." "As part of the COVAX program, Ukraine will receive 117,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine in February, and 2.2 million to 3.7 million doses of the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccines during the first half of the year. In addition, the European Commission is helping Poland to resell 1.2 million doses of vaccine. AstraZeneca Ukraine, since the supply agreements signed earlier [with companies] allow reselling [vaccines] without any benefit," he said.

"The Commission helps with contractual arrangements, exports and supplies from Poland to Ukraine through the European civilian defense mechanism," Dombrovskis said.

In this regard, he expressed the hope "to see vaccination will start this month." "However, we are concerned about the impact of Russian disinformation about the vaccination process in Ukraine and are ready to assist in the fight against disinformation and vaccine scepticism," the Executive Vice President of the European Commission said.

According to him, the meeting with the Ukrainian Prime Minister was "very fruitful," during which the parties discussed a number of issues that "are of interest to both Ukraine and the EU."

"Ukraine remains high on the European agenda. We continue to provide political, financial and technical assistance as support for its reform agenda to build a more resilient economy. The EU also stands by Ukraine in fighting the pandemic. We have re-oriented several ongoing and future assistance programmes, with more than EUR 190 million going to Ukraine to help meet its COVID-19-related needs," Dombrovskis said.
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A health worker prepares a dose of Chinese-made Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccine in Belgrade Fair, Serbia, Feb. 4. AFP-Yonhap



By Lee Hyo-jin



The Chinese Embassy in Korea said its government is seeking to provide its own developed coronavirus vaccines for Chinese nationals here.



In a recent interview with The Korea Times, Chinese Ambassador to Seoul Xing Haiming stated, "We are consulting with the South Korean government over whether to provide vaccines developed in China for the 1 million Chinese citizens living here."



But the ambassador did not specify which firm's vaccines the country is planning to administer and how the distribution process would take place.






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.
Can animals catch Covid-19?

The chance of your dog catching Covid-19 strain is very slim, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

Professor James Wood, head of veterinary medicine at the University of Cambridge, said: 'Despite millions of people having had Covid-19, the numbers of pets found to be ill or infected is still tiny.

'Put simply, our pet dogs and cats can catch Covid-19 from us, when they are living with us, but only do on very rare occasions.'

Scientists say pets don't appear to get very sick with Covid-19, and various pet organisations and charities say there is no need to be worried.

The first dog in the world to catch coronavirus died after it was declared disease-free and returned home to its owner in Hong Kong.

The owner of the 17-year-old Pomeranian, whose also had Covid-19, did not allow the dog to be autopsied, so the exact cause of death remains unknown.

How do animals get infected?

Animals are likely to catch the virus the same way a human would  when respiratory droplets enter the pets' nose or mouth.

Professor Wood said: 'Cats may become infected by the high doses of virus transmitted by their infected owners in some settings.

'The relative size of a cat versus a human means that there is far less exhaled breath from one cat in a house, compared to the exhaled breath volumes from a human patient.

'Further, the grooming behaviour of cats means that they are more likely to catch infection from an owner than vice versa.'

When pets have been reported to have the virus, they have signs that indicate a respiratory illness.

Downing Street said the cat in England with the virus had symptoms of a respiratory infection with a nasal discharge and some shortness of breath.

Scientists have shown that cats, ferrets and hamsters are susceptible to SARS-CoV-2. But ducks, chickens and pigs don't appear to be.

Professor William Weir, of the University of Glasgow's School of Veterinary Medicine, said 'the significance of SARS-CoV-2 as a feline or canine pathogen is unknown'.

He added that there have been no reports of cats passing the virus to dogs or vice versa.

Can humans catch Covid-19 from animals?

There is no evidence that a human could catch the coronavirus from an animal in the same way as it would from another human.

Covid-19 is mainly spread through droplets produced when an infected person coughs, sneezes, or speaks.

Jonathan Ball, professor of molecular virology at Nottingham University, said pets produce 'very low levels of the virus' compared to humans.

Professor James Wood, head of department of veterinary medicine, University of Cambridge, added that pets would exhale far less breath  which may have virus droplets inside  than humans.

In any case where a pet has tested positive for the virus, the owner reportedly had it first.

The WHO says: 'While there has been one instance of a dog being infected in Hong Kong, to date, there is no evidence that a dog, cat or any pet can transmit Covid-19.'

Professor Weir said: 'At present, there is no evidence that cats, dogs or other domestic animals play any role in the epidemiology of human infections with SARS-CoV-2.'

An official report by the UK's top vet said household pets may carry the virus on their fur, which risks spreading the disease from person to person.

It said: 'Close contact such as cuddling, grooming, feeding and allowing animals to share food could all allow the transfer of virus.'

The document, prepared by the UK's Chief Veterinary Officer, was considered on April 30 at a meeting of the Government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE).

The report warned that the virus could survive on pet fur, meaning 'there is a plausible pathway that the animal may act as a fomite [infectious object] for at least a few hours and transfer virus to others in the household.'

It added that pet owners who have symptoms to prevent their dog or cat from coming into contact with 'susceptible humans'.

How many pets have had the infection?

A very small number of pets have been reported to have the coronavirus in other countries in Europe, North America and Asia.

The first dog in the world to catch coronavirus in Hong Kong, a 17-year-old Pomeranian, died on March 16.

It was declared disease-free and returned home to its owner, a 60-year-old woman who was hospitalised with Covid-19 the month prior, after being quarantined at a government facility.

The dog was never autopsied, and so the exact cause of death was not determined.

What precautions should I take when dealing with animals?

If you are sick with Covid-19, it is recommended you restrict contact with your dog and see if other people can look after them.

The Centre for Disease Control and Prevention says: 'It is still recommended that people sick with Covid-19 limit contact with animals until more information is known about the virus. This can help ensure both you and your animals stay healthy.'

How to you stay safe around your pet:
The wife of jailed Russian opposition politician and anti-corruption crusader Aleksei Navalny has left Russia and flown to Germany under unclear circumstances.



Yulia Navalnaya flew from Domodedovo airport in Moscow on February 10 and arrived in Frankfurt in the evening.



German broadcaster Deutsche Welle reported she was not seen leaving the airport transit area, but that passengers on the Lufthansa flight confirmed she was on board.



Earlier, Russian agency Interfax quoted a source as saying Navalnaya had left for Germany without providing details.



Navalnaya's lawyer, Svetlana Davydova, could not confirm the report when asked about it by the TASS news agency, saying she didn't "have such information."



She had recently been detained for taking part in unsanctioned rallies in support of her jailed husband.



Her departure led to speculation she had fled Russia out of concern for her freedom and safety in the wake of a crackdown on Navalnys associates and protesters calling for his release from prison.



German magazine Der Spiegel, citing sources, reported that Navalnaya arrived in the country to attend private matters, without providing further details.



Navalny was arrested on January 17 upon his return to Russia from Germany, where he was being treated for a nerve-agent poisoning that he says was ordered by President Vladimir Putin, which the Kremlin has denied.



A court on February 2 later sentenced Navalny to 3 1/2 years in prison for violating the terms of probation while recuperating in Germany in a case that has caused domestic and international outrage..

He had been serving a suspended sentence relating to an embezzlement case that he has called politically motivated. Given credit for time already spent in detention, the court said the Kremlin critic would have to serve 2 years and 8 months behind bars.



Navalnaya had been in Berlin with her husband while he was recovering from the nerve-agent poisoning.

With reporting by Current Time, Der Spiegel, Deutsche Welle, and TASS
Tractor Supply Company announced today that it will provide employees with $50 and time off to get the COVID-19 vaccine.

The one-time payment is available to all hourly employees who choose to get the vaccine. The company is not mandating that employees get it.

Tractor Supply said it also has partnered with a third-party provider to facilitate onsite vaccination clinics at its eight distribution centers and Store Support Center upon approval and availability.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, Tractor Supplys top priority has been the health and safety of our Team Members, customers and communities, said Melissa Kersey, Tractor Supplys executive vice president, chief human resources officer.

We have closely followed the advice of the CDC and other medical professionals to take proactive steps to protect our team and customers. As vaccines become more widely available, we hope to make it as easy as possible for those who want to be vaccinated.

Tractor Supply said, Any Team Member who needs to take time off to get vaccinated will be given the opportunity to make up the time taken off, unless state law requires otherwise.

These incentives will be available to any employee who wishes to receive a vaccine, regardless of location, even if at an onsite vaccination clinic.

Compensation will be available once the full manufacturer-recommended doses of the COVID-19 vaccine are received and appropriate proof of vaccination has been provided to the Companys third-party vendor who is already performing COVID case management, safe return to work assessments and now vaccine verification.

The rural lifestyle retailer has remained open during the pandemic as an essential business.

READ MORE

Dollar General will pay employees to get the COVID-19 vaccine.
Individual choices in medicine carry a certain amount of uncertainty.

An innovative partnership at The University of Texas at Austin takes aim at medicine down to the individual level by applying state-of-the-art computation to medical care.

"Medicine in its essence is decision-making under uncertainty, decisions about tests and treatments," said Radek Bukowski, MD, PhD, professor and associate chair of Investigation and Discovery in the Department of Women's Health at Dell Medical School at UT Austin.

"The human body and the healthcare system are complex systems made of a vast number of intensely interacting elements," he said. "In such complex systems, there are many different pathways along which an outcome can occur. Our bodies are robust, but this also makes us very individualized, and the practice of medicine challenging. Everyone is made of different combinations of risk factors and protective characteristics. This is why precision medicine is paramount going forward."

To that effect, in the January 2021 edition of the American Journal of Obstetrics Gynecology, experts at Dell Med, Oden Institute for Computational and Engineering Sciences (Oden Institute), and Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), along with stakeholders across healthcare, industry, and government, stated that the emergence of computational medicine will revolutionize the future of medicine and health care. Craig Cordola of Ascension and Christopher Zarins of HeartFlow co-authored this editorial review with Bukowski and others.

According to Bukowski, this interdisciplinary group provides a unique combination of resources that are poised to make Texas a leader in providing computational solutions to today's and tomorrow's health care issues.

"At UT Austin we're fortunate to have found ourselves at a very opportune point in time for computational medical research," Bukowski said. "The Oden Institute has world-class expertise in mathematical modeling, applied math, and computational medicine; TACC is home to the world's largest supercomputer for open science, and also committed to improving medical care, including outcomes for women and babies."

Powered by such collaborations, the emerging discipline of computational medicine focuses on developing quantitative approaches to understanding the mechanisms, diagnosis, and treatment of human disease through applications, more commonly found in mathematics, engineering, and computational science. These computational approaches are well-suited to modeling complex systems such as the human body.

An On-Point area of Study for Obstetrics

While computation is pivotal to all domains in medicine, it is especially promising in obstetrics because it concerns at least two patients -- mother and baby, who frequently have conflicting interests, making medical decision-making particularly difficult and the stakes exceptionally high.

According to state Rep. Donna Howard, D-Austin, a co-author of the editorial review, Texas legislators should be concerned about the unacceptably high rate of maternal morbidity and mortality in the state.

"When I became aware of the efforts to bring computational medical approaches to addressing maternal morbidity and mortality, I was immediately intrigued," Howard said. "And when I learned of the interdisciplinary expertise that has found itself conveniently positioned to create this new frontier of medicine, I was sold."

Individualized medicine is happening now because of advancements in computing power and mathematical modeling that can solve the problems which were unsolvable until now.

Case in point: in 2018 the National Science Foundation awarded UT Austin a $1.2 million grant to support research using computational medicine and smartphones to monitor the activity and behavior of 1,000 pregnant women in the Austin area.

In particular, the growing array of data sources including health records, administrative databases, randomized controlled trials, and internet-connected sensors provides a wealth of information at multiple timescales for which to develop sophisticated data-driven models and inform theoretical formulations.

"When combined with analysis platforms via high performance computing, we now have the capability to provide patients and medical providers analysis of outcomes and risk assessment on a per-individual basis to improve the shared decision making process," Bukowski concluded.

###

The study, "Computational medicine, present and the future: obstetrics and gynecology perspective," was published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, January 2021. The editorial review authors are Radek Bukowski MD, PhD; Karl Schulz PhD; Kelly Gaither PhD; Keri K. Stephens PhD; Dave Semeraro PhD; Justin Drake PhD; Gordon Smith MD, PhD; Craig Cordola FACHE; Thaleia Zariphopoulou PhD; Thomas J.R. Hughes PhD; Christopher Zarins MD; Dimitri Kusnezov PhD; Rep. Donna Howard MA; and Tinsley Oden PhD.
Aspen, CO (81611)

Today

Scattered thunderstorms this morning, then mainly cloudy during the afternoon with thunderstorms likely. High 64F. Winds SE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 70%..

Tonight

A shower or two possible this evening with partly cloudy skies overnight. Low 41F. Winds SSE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 30%.
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Work to resume on Peel Marina dredging

A dredging operation to remove 44,000 tonnes of silt from Peel Marina will resume later this month.



Following on from last years dredging works, the dredging process will again involve using a long reach excavator on a floating barge, with the material transported 450 metres in purpose-designed trailers to a temporary drainage pool constructed in a field upstream from the Marina, beyond the power station site.



Moving the material involves two tractors and trailers undertaking a total of 30 return journeys a day during the dredging works, running 7am to 7pm every day. 16,000 tonnes of silt was removed from the marina during 2020.



To ensure the safety of the public, a road closure order has been put in place to cover the path the trailers will take from the boat yard on East Quay to the former steam railway line heritage trail. Drivers and pedestrians can pass through the area, however, traffic management will be in place to indicate when it is safe to proceed.



Road Closed signs will be displayed during each period of short closure between 7am and 7pm until the end of May. The heritage trail from Mill Road to the drainage pool is subject to a full-time road closure for the duration of the dredging programme, but access will be maintained at all times for businesses and residents.



Tim Baker MHK, Minister for Infrastructure, said: Im pleased that this work is now able to resume, after the challenges of our recent COVID-19 circuit break. I want to thank the team for their hard work and look forward to the completion of this project. This series of planned works marks the end of our main dredging project, requiring only annual or bi-annual maintenance in the years to come.
SOUTHFIELD, Mich., Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Lear Corporation (NYSE: LEA), a global automotive technology leader in Seating and E-Systems, today announced that its Board of Directors has declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.25 per share on the Company's common stock. The dividend is payable on March 23, 2021, to shareholders of record at the close of business on March 4, 2021.

Lear also announced the date for its 2021 Annual Stockholders Meeting, which will be held on May 20, 2021, at 9:00 a.m. EDT, via a virtual web conference. The record date for determining eligibility to vote at the 2021 Annual Meeting is March 26, 2021.

About Lear Corporation

Lear, a global automotive technology leader in Seating and E-Systems, enables superior in-vehicle experiences for consumers around the world. Our diverse team of talented employees in 38 countries is driven by a commitment to innovation, operational excellence, and sustainability. Lear is Making every drive better by providing the technology for safer, smarter, and more comfortable journeys. Lear, headquartered in Southfield, Michigan, serves every major automaker in the world and ranks 166 on the Fortune 500. Further information about Lear is available at lear.com, or follow us on Twitter @LearCorporation.

SOURCE Lear Corporation

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By Long Island Published: February 10 2021

Representatives Kathleen Rice (NY-04) and Steve Stivers (OH-16) introduced two bipartisan bills, the Students and Families Empowerment Act (H.R. 891), and the Decreasing Employees Burdensome Taxes from Student Loans Act (DEBT Act) (H.R. 902), which ...

Far too many of our nations college graduates are being crippled under the weight of their student loan debt, said Rep. Kathleen Rice. This crisis has gone on unchecked for far too long, burdening recent graduates and their families in New York and across the country. The two bills I am introducing with Representative Stivers will make it easier for student loan borrowers and their families to quickly pay off student loans. These are bipartisan, common-sense changes we can make to provide immediate financial relief to our college graduates.

For some students in Ohios 15th, pursuing their dreams means pursing higher education, but too often the cost is prohibitive, or it results in tens of thousands of dollars of debt, said Rep. Steve Stivers. I know how stressful the cost of higher education can be. One of the reasons I joined the Ohio Army National Guard was to help pay for my undergraduate degree at Ohio State. With help from these bills, students who are eager to create the next big thing, to innovate and advance our nation, wont have to shy away from education due to the rising costs of attendance or the potential to be hamstrung by debt throughout their professional careers.

The Students and Families Empowerment Act would amend the Internal Revenue Code to effectively remove the $2,500 cap on deductions for student loan interest. Borrowers would be able to deduct all of their interest for student loan amounts up to $750,000  the same loan threshold as mortgage interest deductions. The bill would also eliminate the income limits on student loan interest deductions, allowing individuals earning more than $85,000 annually ($170,000 for couples filing jointly) to take these deductions on their taxes, and end the phase-out for individuals earning more than $70,000 ($140,000 for couples). Additionally, the bill would amend the Higher Education Act of 1965 to extend the grace period from six months to twelve months before recent graduates must begin to pay back their loans; this grace period also applies to parent borrowers, who are generally not afforded a grace period. Further, the bill would prohibit interest from accruing during this twelve-month grace period for most undergraduate, parent, and graduate student borrowers.

The DEBT Act would allow borrowers to keep more of their paycheck and pay off their debt sooner while making it easier for employers to provide student loan repayment assistance to their employees. The bill would expand the tax exclusion for employer-provided educational assistance programs to include an employers payment of any qualified education loan incurred by an employee, increase the maximum amount that may be excluded from the gross income of an employee under employer-provided educational assistance programs, and increase the maximum tax deduction and the income limitation for interest on education loans.

Click here for text of the Students and Families Empowerment Act. Click here for text of the DEBT Act.
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Madrid, Feb 10 : Spain and Portugal have announced the extention of the restrictions along the countries' internal land border until March 1 in a bid to control the spread of new coronavirus variants.

According to Tuesday's edition of Spain's Official State Gazette (BOE), border crossings are only allowed at authorised posts, and exceptions have been made for those crossing the border for work or study purposes, as well as for accredited residents returning home from another country in the Schengen travel area and for diplomatic personnel, reports Xinhua news agency.

Spain has so far reported 3,005,487 Covid-19 cases and 63,061 deaths, while Portugal's overall infection tally and fatality toll stood at 770,502 and 14,557, respectively.

At its Tuesday meeting, the Spanish government also decided to maintain the ban on flights from the UK, Brazil and South Africa, the three countries where the new variants have been discovered, until March 2.

The measures have been extended despite clear signs that the third wave of the pandemic continues to ease in Spain.

Also on Tuesday, Spain began to administer 196,800 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, which arrived in the country over the weekend and were distributed to the 17 autonomous communities a day earlier.

For now, these vaccines will only be administered to people aged between 18 and 55, starting with sanitary and care workers who are not on the frontline of the battle against the coronavirus.
MBABANE - A businessman has narrated in court how he caught his nephew red handed stealing his wines.

Maxwell Dlamini told the court that he launched his own investigations after his house was broken into on numerous occasions at Mnyokane.

At the time, he told the court that he had lost six watches worth above E200 000 and wines from the house.

I engaged my family members, but nobody seemed to know the person behind the theft. I received information that my nephew shared whisky and wines with his friends on New Years Eve. I was told that the whisky and the wines met the description of the items which were stolen from my house, he said.

He stated that his house was private in that it was only accessed by him and his wife.

Information

Dlamini stated that acting on the information, he pretended as if he was leaving for work on the fateful day.

He submitted that he parked his motor vehicle somewhere and went back to camp at a peak, where he could observe all activities taking place next to his house.

The businessman stated that while at the peak, he saw his nephew tampering with the sliding door with a plank.

I took a video footage the moment I saw him tampering with the door. He moved in and out of the house and I noticed that he snacked on my peanuts and juice. He then left the house with two whisky bottles. I saw him entering his house, Dlamini told the court.

He mentioned that he then joined his nephew in the house, where he entered with the exhibits.

He stated that a scuffle ensued as his nephew tried to escape.

The businessman told the court that his nephew was injured during the scuffle. He mentioned that while questioning Celumusa Mhlanga, he (Mhlanga) admitted to the theft of the items, including the watches which went missing in July.

He told me that he gave the watches to Melusi Zulu, who is also my nephew living at Nginamadvolo. I drove him to Nginamadvolo where we located Zulu. Zulu handed over three of the six stolen watches. The watches seemed to have been used as they were no longer in a good condition, he said.

Dlamini told the court that he then handed his nephew to the police at Mbabane Police Station, where he was formally charged with housebreaking with intent to steal and theft.

According to the charge sheet, there was a Gold Vecheron wrist watch valued at E120 000, Black diesel wrist watch valued at E70 000, Black tag heuer watch valued at E55 000, Bellavino wine valued at E500 and Nottage hill wine valued at E500.

During cross-examination, Mhlanga admitted to have stolen the items from his uncles house. However, he put it to Dlamini that in as much as he gave the court a factual account of what transpired on the day, he omitted something. Why arent you telling the court that you assaulted me in the head with a stick after you locked the door of my house? Why are you leaving out that I bled profusely after you had assaulted me with the stick on the head? I have a medical report to prove that. You further assaulted me with fists all over the face on the day, Mhlanga told the court.

He added that the police officer advised him to open an assault case against his uncle, something he found unnecessary due to the fact that he wronged the businessman.

In response, Dlamini only admitted that Mhlanga was injured during the scuffle after he attempted to escape.

He also admitted that he threatened to injure Mhlanga if he tried to run away while on their way to board the car.

Mhlangas arrest was confirmed by Detective Constable Nothando Magongo, who investigated the matter. Mitigating on the sentence, Mhlanga pleaded for the courts leniency, stating that he had a younger sister to look after.

He further told the court that a custodial sentence might result in him losing his job. He undertook not to commit a similar offence in future.

Acting Mbabane Senior Magistrate Sifiso Vilakati called upon the businessman to share his sentiments before he could sentence Mhlanga.

Dlamini told the court that he banked his hopes on the Correctional facility that his nephew would come back a rehabilitated and a law-abiding citizen.

The businessman said he had done all in his powers to rehabilitate his nephew but he persisted with his habits.

I hope you have better experts to rehabilitate my nephew, he said.

However, Vilakati mentioned that it was not for the Correctional Services to transform individuals.

The judicial officer stated that it was important that individuals took it upon themselves to transform.

Mhlanga was sentenced to five years imprisonment with an option to pay a fine of E5 000.






Within hours of Georgia voters November decision to make Joe Biden the first Democratic president to win the state since 1992, a national narrative emerged that the suburbs  imagined as mostly white areas around Atlanta  would be key in the pending twin Senate runoffs.

Emory political scientist Bernard Fraga had been drafting a different story. It focused not only on his work as a voting behavior expert but also on his lived experience as one of the transplants behind the demographic shift in the state and the suburbs in question.

Elections in Georgia are inseparable from race and ethnicity in both who votes and who doesnt, says Fraga, the author of The Turnout Gap, an analysis of those disparities in voter turnout.

Fraga explained that missing part of the story with daily analysis and graphics on Twitter. When 4.4 million Georgians voted in the January runoff  more than the 2016 Presidential election  the research showed it was the more than 1 million Black voters who pushed both Democrats to victory and with it, control of the U.S. Senate.

The cool thing was to see the changes in real time of what was happening, says Cara Waite, the sophomore political science major who worked with Fraga on his project. Ive learned a lot about how the changes in demographics influence the makeup of our government and shapes policy, and I am not the only one.

Growing scholarship

Fraga arrived at Emory as part of a cluster hire of Latinx scholars in 2019. He was drawn in part to help expand the Colleges distinction in the study of race through his background in interdisciplinary research. At Emory, he has joined a deep bench of well-known scholars studying the topic, including political science colleagues Andra Gillespie and Michael Leo Owens and historian Carol Anderson, professor and chair of African American studies.

Another part that drew him to Emory was the chance to conduct his work in the middle of a state undergoing a demographic transformation complicated by a historical racial divide. Together, those elements are making Emory a hub for the study of elections, race and politics.

Going forward, I hope we can use this national moment to build a community of scholars on every level who can examine politics from a variety of angles, Fraga says.

Waite, who had done both constituent work and campaign data collection for state representatives in her native Pennsylvania, is the first student Fraga plans to include in that community.

She reached out to Fraga as part of the SIRE program, looking to deepen her understanding of voter turnout.

They teamed up last summer, with Fraga providing the framework of how they could conduct statistical analysis of large-scale election data in Georgia.

Waites job was to collect the often-unpublished information from Georgias 159 counties. The work to uncover who had voted early, by absentee ballot or on Election Day was slow going. But Waite enjoyed it enough to be considering a minor in Quantitative Sciences.

The most exciting part was connecting the idea that this data means people, she says. The future of politics, which is the future of our country, is data analysis so you can understand those people.

Reams of data real the story of turnout

At the end of fall semester, it became clear that Fraga and Waite were extracting the information needed for their story just in time for the runoff election to capture national attention.

Over winter break, Waite downloaded daily tallies of Georgians voting early or returning their absentee ballots, data made public by the Georgia Secretary of State.

Fraga focused on techniques, writing the code that created graphics showing how those voter totals broke out by race and age compared to the general election. The visualizations began to show that while Asian-American, Black and Latino voters were casting early ballots at record rates, white voters were tapering off for the January runoff.

That was the first hint that the Republican candidates, who historically had the advantage in runoffs, were in trouble. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue went on to narrowly lose to Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, respectively.

Fraga, routinely offering his expertise to national media throughout the campaigns, relied on the updated data when explaining the results.

When I look at what happened here this year, I see highly engaged efforts to mobilize every single person who can vote, Fraga says. I think and hope we will see more of that engagement not just by campaigns but with non-partisan and educational organizations. Its good for both parties if everyones voice is heard.

Such engagement will be important in ongoing data collection, as will refining the 2020-2021 voter information. Fraga also plans to use the current data in classes starting next fall, for students to conduct their own analyses.

As with Waite, he will help students with framework and technique. In turn, he expects that students will offer perspectives he may not have thought of or have time to do.

With so much good information, and so many different things to look at, we are in the perfect place to study race, politics and elections more broadly, Fraga says. The more the merrier when you have this tremendous opportunity to understand and interpret American politics and our future.
Vincent D. Rougeau, the current dean of Boston College Law School, has been named to succeed Rev. Philip L. Boroughs as the president of the College of the Holy Cross, the school announced Wednesday.

Rougeau is the first Black and first lay president in the history of the Worcester college. He was selected after a national search and was approved unanimously by the Board of Trustees on Feb. 9 and will assume the role as Holy Crosss 33rd president on July 1.

There are plans to introduce him to the Holy Cross community by a live stream at 7 p.m. on Feb. 11, Holy Cross said in a statement.

We are thrilled to welcome Vincent to the Holy Cross community, and look forward to his leadership in building on the Colleges success of the past decade, said Chairman of the Board of Trustees Richard Patterson. Vincent brings the strategic vision, deep experience as a faculty member and administrator, and commitment to liberal arts education that will allow him to lead Holy Cross in meeting the many challenges facing higher education today. Both his scholarship and his leadership demonstrate his profound dedication to Catholic social teaching and to educating students toward seeking justice and making a meaningful difference in our world.

Rougeau has been dean of Boston College Law School since 2011 and during his tenure led a reorganization in leadership structure to support a more holistic approach to student services, expanded the schools national and international recruitment of a diverse student body and enhanced the schools commitment to experiential learning and global engagement, according to Holy Cross.

I am thrilled to be joining the Holy Cross community as its new president, said Rougeau. I have long admired the College for its academic excellence, its talented students and accomplished alumni, its dedicated faculty and staff and its unique place as our nations only Jesuit, Catholic liberal arts college. Our current moment in history cries out for the mission-driven education that Holy Cross provides, and I am very excited about what this community can accomplish in the years ahead.

Recently, Rougeau was named the inaugural director of the new Boston College Forum on Racial Justice in America, a meeting place for listening, dialogue and greater understanding about race and racism in the country.

Before Boston College, Rougeau was a tenured professor of law at Notre Dame Law School and served as their Associate Dean for Academic Affairs from 1999-2002.

Holy Cross called Rougeau a national expert in Catholic social thought. In 2008, his book Christians in the American Empire: Faith and Citizenship in the New World Order was released by Oxford University Press.

Currently, his research and writing consider the relationships among religious identity, citizenship and membership in highly mobile and increasingly multicultural democratic societies, said Holy Cross. Additionally, Rougeau serves as Senior Fellow at the Centre for Theology and Community in London, where he researches broad-based community organizing, immigration and citizenship in the U.K. as part of the Just Communities Project.

The national search process was led by a nine-member Presidential Search Committee.

During our time together at Boston College, I discovered that Vincent Rougeau has a deep understanding of, and appreciation for, the Jesuit, Catholic vision of higher education, said Rev. Joseph M. OKeefe, 76, Provincial of the USA East Province of the Society of Jesus. Moreover, he has the leadership skills to make that vision a reality. I am delighted to welcome Vince and his wife Robin to our Holy Cross family.

Rougeau has a bachelor of arts in international relations from Brown University and a Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School, where he served as articles editor of the Harvard Human Rights Journal. He and his wife, Dr. Robin Kornegay-Rougeau, a pediatrician, have three sons.

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(Newser)  All those Salesforce employees in New York City who are giving up the commute for good may have more reasons than one to be glad about it. A study published Wednesday in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives looked at the quality of the air during AM and PM rush hours in 71 subway stations in NYC, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it wasn't great. But here's how not-great: The established safe daily level of the minute airborne pollution particles called PM2.5 is 35 micrograms per cubic meter. The figure was worst in NYC, at 251 micrograms per cubic meter. And the worst of those stations was truly the worst. The Christopher Street Station that acts as a connector between New York and New Jersey registered 1,499 micrograms per cubic meter, reports the Guardian.

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A press release says that figure is what you'd expect amid sooty contamination from forest fires or building demolition. Study co-author Terry Gordon, a professor at New York University's Grossman School of Medicine, elaborates: "It was the worst pollution ever measured in a subway station, higher than some of the worst days in Beijing or Delhi." He says the readings were so shocking they repeated them several times to verify them. As for how the other cities fared, the readings clocked in at 145 micrograms per cubic meter in Washington, DC; 140 in Boston; and a comparatively slim 39 in Philadelphia. The average reading for above-ground air in those cities was 16 micrograms per cubic meter. The researchers next want to look at where the pollution is coming from and what it means for the health of commuters and transit employees. (Read more discoveries stories.)
WAALRE, Netherlands, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- IME Medical Electrospinning, a global leader in electrospun medical devices, today announced that it has entered into a collaboration with Dutch medical device company STENTiT, to join forces in the further development and production of regenerative endovascular support grafts (see video). These resorbable fibrous implants hold the promise to rebuild a new blood vessel inside the existing artery, by exploiting the natural healing response of the body.

IME's technological solutions enable the manufacturing of innovative devices like STENTiT's endovascular support grafts, which are aimed to mimic the natural human extracellular matrix for implants in the human body in nanometer and micrometer format. Human cells rebuild these matrices leading to new body tissue. This is in contrast to implants of traditional structures, which are seen as foreign and therefore can lead to scar tissue formation or rejection phenomena.

STENTiT is an emerging player in the field of regenerative medical devices, offering a breakthrough solution for cardiovascular interventions developing first-of-its-kind regenerative endovascular blood vessel implants. Using a catheter-based approach, it provides the ability to restore the artery without the need for an invasive surgical intervention. The aim is to ultimately restore the affected artery from the inside-out to provide a life-lasting solution.

Bart Sanders, CEO of STENTiT, says:

"We are thrilled to join forces with IME Medical Electrospinning to further optimize our fibrillated endovascular implants. IME is a highly innovative and leading company in the field of Medical Electrospinning, for which I'm confident that together we will spur the development of a superior and reproducible product, while getting STENTiT ready to scale."

Judith Heikoop, CEO of IME Medical Electrospinning, adds:

"We are extremely proud to have been able to expand our collaborations with such a promising company like STENTiT. IME Medical Electrospinning develops medical devices in close collaboration with an ever-growing portfolio of customers and partners worldwide within the industry, the scientific environment, hospitals and medical institutes. This collaboration is testimony to our strategic goal to become a trusted partner worldwide in co-developing electrospun medical devices that will cause a revolution in the industry and will enable tissue rebuilding."

IME has set the worldwide standard in the co-development and production of scalable and reproducible nanometer and micrometer scaffolds that enable scientists to develop medical implants helping the human body to repair itself, such as heart valves, blood vessels, nerves, tendons, skin and bone. IME operates a brand new high-end GMP Laboratory and set of cleanrooms. With this the company is able to not only develop and manufacture its top-end proprietary electrospinning machines, but to also produce the actual scaffolds for the intended medical implants for their customers. The cleanroom facilities enable the production of Class I, II and III medical devices.

About Medical Electrospinning

Applying specific polymers, IME's advanced equipment creates fiber-based medical device solutions that mimic the natural human extracellular matrix in nanometer and micrometer format for implants and membranes in the human body. Human cells recognize these artificial matrices (scaffolds) as the body's own, facilitating the repair of the damaged tissue for heart valves, blood vessels, nerves, tendons, skin and bone etc. This is in contrast to implants and membranes of traditional structures, which are seen as foreign and therefore can lead to scar tissue or rejection phenomena. The MediSpina XL platform has been developed specifically for MedTech industrial manufacturing of medical devices and is now also suitable for pharmaceutical drug delivery applications and ensures firm control over the crucial parameters of the electrospinning process, leading to reproducible and consistent end-products.

About STENTiT

STENTiT is a medical device spin-off company from Dutch Eindhoven University of Technology, focusing on the development of regenerative endovascular implants. These devices trigger a natural healing response by the circulating blood cells, in which the implant is being rebuilt with new vascular tissue while safely dissolving over time.

Since the establishment of the company in 2017, STENTiT has received broad international recognition and awards for its high-potential approach, covering world leading stages. As the company is currently going through the next translational phases, STENTiT is on its way to fulfill its ambition to become the new standard in endovascular treatment, providing a life-lasting solution for millions of patients around the world.

For more info, please visit www.stentit.com

About IME Medical Electrospinning

For over ten years, IME Medical Electrospinning has been a leading player in the field of developing and implementing electrospinning processes and equipment for the manufacturing of medical devices for (regenerative) medicine and drug delivery. Electrospinning is a flexible process for producing extremely thin fibers and structures that have excellent properties to help regenerate human tissue. IME Medical Electrospinning has developed a unique set of innovations in electrospinning technology for the reproducible and scalable production of electrospun material under tightly controlled conditions required for the MedTech and Pharma market. Customers and scientific partners include the MedTech and Pharma industry, scientists and health institutions.

More information available at www.ime-electrospinning.com

For further inquiries:

IME Medical Electrospinning, Waalre, The Netherlands

Judith Heikoop M.Sc. Ph.D.

T: +31 40 28 27 956

E: [email protected]

STENTiT, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

Bart Sanders M.Sc. Ph.D.

T: +31 40 24 72 445

E: [email protected]

For media:

LifeSpring Life Sciences Communication, Amsterdam

Leon Melens

T: +31 6 538 16 427

E: [email protected]

Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1248580/IME_Medical_Electrospinning_Logo.jpg

SOURCE IME Medical Electrospinning

Campaigners have ramped up their demands for a public inquiry into Britain's care home Covid crisis because deaths are still spiralling.

Coronavirus fatalities in care homes have hit the highest levels since May, official figures revealed yesterday. More than 2,500 residents had the virus mentioned on their death certificates in England and Wales over the seven days to January 29.

In the week ending May 1, 2020, 3,082 residents died with Covid-19, and a total of 3,679 were killed the week earlier at the outbreak's peak.

This week's tally took the total to 35,720 since the pandemic began  with care homes accounting for about a third of all deaths from the virus in the UK, according to the Office for National Statistics.

Care home deaths rose again in the second wave despite the Government's promise to throw a 'protective ring' around the vulnerable residents and the introduction of regular swab testing for the elderly and their carers.

Care Campaign for the Vulnerable blasted the figures as a 'heart-breaking scandal' as they repeated their calls for Boris Johnson to launch a public inquiry into the toll.

In a letter sent to the Prime Minister, they warned the crisis would have a 'life-long negative impact' on younger family members, too, who say they feel guilty about being unable to visit their loved ones.

Care home deaths from the virus are expected to slow in the coming weeks after the Government said every resident who was eligible had been given their first dose of the vaccine, which should protect them from severe illness and death. But immunity does not kick in for several weeks.

Care Campaign for the Vulnerable today blasted the number of deaths in care homes - about a third of the UK total - as heartbreaking and called on Boris Johnson to launch an inquiry

Office for National Statistics data show that, although most Covid-19 deaths have been in hospitals (green bars), a large proportion have been in care homes (dark blue), where there are significantly fewer people  this shows they have higher rates of death per person

Some 2,505 care home residents died from the virus in the most recent week in all settings - which was almost a third of the total number of deaths from the disease in that week

Jayne Connery, who founded CCV to fight for justice for the sector, said their letter called on Mr Johnson to take action to protect the sector.

'The current heart-breaking scandal of rationed care home visits can be directly traced back to that shortsighted and stupid decision to export the virus into care homes,' she told the Daily Express.

CARE HOME STAFF LEFT WITHOUT PPE IN FIRST WAVE OF COVID Care home staff were left without PPE during the first wave of Covid-19 as the government prioritised the NHS, MPs have said. The Commons Public Accounts Committee heard the social care sector received just 10 per cent of the required PPE items between March and July last week - compared to 80 per cent in hospitals. Overall both sectors experienced PPE shortages, with some forced to reuse single-use items as stocks ran 'perilously low'. The committee said care homes were only taken seriously after the high mortality rates became apparent. Overall, the committee said frontline staff in both health and social care experienced shortages of PPE, with some forced to reuse single-use items as stocks ran 'perilously low'. Surveys by staff organisations found at least 30 per cent of care workers, doctors and nurses reported having insufficient PPE - even in high-risk settings. 'Many workers at the front line in health and social care were put in the appalling situation of having to care for people with Covid-19 or suspected Covid-19 without sufficient PPE to protect themselves from infection,' it said. Advertisement

'Our letter tells Boris Johnson that, from the start of the pandemic, we advised that one nominated family member could be treated as a key worker and allowed to assist in a loved one's care.'

She added: 'We're calling for a public inquiry into the handling of the crisis in care homes.

'This error of judgement on the Government's part is still continuing and our aim is to ensure it never happens again.'

Their letter was immediately backed by other campaigners and charities working in the sector, who piled further pressure on the PM to investigate the spiking deaths in the sector.

Charity care home think-tank the NPC has also previously called for an inquiry into the handling of the crisis in care homes.

In its letter, also sent to the Prime Minister, general secretary Jan Shortt wrote: 'The citizens of the UK are entitled to understand the missed opportunities, delays, poor decision-making, confusing messages and lessons not learned, that have contributed to the staggering figures of losses.

'The "ring of steel" you said would be put around care homes to protect our oldest and most vulnerable was nothing of the kind.

'The decision to discharge patients from hospitals into care homes without a negative test proved disastrous for both care home residents and those who care for them.'

Human rights group Amnesty International told MailOnline it suspects the resurgence of the virus in care homes this winter is linked to the Government's controversial policy to continue to send Covid patients discharged from hospitals back into care homes.

Under the scheme, designed to free up hospital beds and protect the NHS, care homes which pass inspection and are deemed Covid-secure are asked to house infected patients.

The Office for National Statistics said there were 1,705 deaths in English care homes reported to the Care Quality Commission in the seven days to January 2, up from 661 a fortnight ago

Other experts have said that when transmission is allowed to spiral in the community - there were thought to be about 100,000 new infections in the UK every day last month - it will always trickle into care homes through asymptomatic staff and claim lives.

More than 20,000 care home residents died from Covid-19 during the first wave of the pandemic and experts say the decision to discharge thousands of untested hospital patients into care homes in spring was partly to blame. MPs accused the Government of throwing care homes 'to the wolves'.

Statistics published at the end of January revealed that deaths in care homes had nearly tripled in a fortnight.

The ONS found 1,705 care home residents died from the virus in the week ending January 22, up from 661 a fortnight earlier.

It showed care home residents made up almost a third of all Covid-19 fatalities.

Mike Padgham, chair of the Independent Care Group, said: 'We now have vaccines, and the Government is to be congratulated on the speed at which it is protecting the vulnerable.

'But Covid-19 is not beaten yet and we must remain cautious and, on our guard, observing all the guidance and keeping everyone in care settings  care and nursing homes and those receiving care in their own homes  as safe as we can, alongside those who are caring for them.'
Mumbai, Feb 10 : Telugu superstar Mahesh Babu and his wife Namrata Shirodkar celebrated their 16th wedding anniversary on Wednesday.

The star couple took to social media to share photographs and express love for each other. Namrata also shared the secret ingredient in the recipe of her happy marriage.

Mahesh Babu posted a photograph on Instagram where he is seen kissing Namrata on the head inside an aircraft. "Happy 16th NSG.. To forever and beyond with you. @namratashirodkar," he wrote.

Namrata shared a photo planting a peck on her husband's cheeck. "Easy peasy 16!! In our little recipe of marriage there's a solid mix of love trust and faith! Counting our blessings together... forever. Happy Anniversary MB. More and more love to you @urstrulymahesh," she posted.

Mahesh Babu and Namrata Shirodkar tied the knot on February 10, 2005. The couple have a daughter, Sitara, and a son, Gautham.
A sex offender from Jefferson County was sentenced to federal prison Tuesday for distribution of child pornography

Chadwick Rice, a 48-year-old Pinson man, was sentenced to 188 months  more than 15 years, according to an announcement by Northern District of Alabama U.S. Attorney Prim Escalona, FBI Special Agent in Charge Johnnie Sharp Jr. and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Homeland Security Investigations Special Agent in Charge Katrina W. Berger.

Rices prison sentence  in which there is no early parole  will be followed by a lifetime of supervised release. He pleaded guilty to the charge in March 2020.

Rice was previously convicted of three counts of possession of child pornography in Jefferson County, in 2016. This conviction required him to register as a sex offender.

According to the plea agreement, during a law enforcement operation in December 2017, an agent downloaded images of suspected child pornography from a specific IP address. In February 2018, the agent received cyber tips from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children that images of child pornography had been uploaded from the same IP address.

Further investigation revealed that the IP address was registered to Rice. In March 2018, a search warrant was executed at Rices home in Pinson, where child pornography was located on Rices Samsung Galaxy cell phone. During a forensic review of Rices cell phone, 771 images of children being sexually exploited were identified. Rice admitted he had various apps on his cell phone that he used to trade videos of child pornography with other individuals.

There is zero tolerance for those who continue to break the law to engage in the sexual exploitation of children, Escalona said. Law enforcement will continue to vigilantly monitor the internet using every method available to us in order to uncover evidence of child exploitation and abuse so that we can protect children from such offenders.

The FBI investigated the case, along with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Homeland Security Investigations, the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency and the Vestavia Hills Police Department. Assistant United States Attorney R. Leann White prosecuted the case.

The case was brought as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative to combat the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse, launched in May 2006 by the Department of Justice.

The community can rest a little easier,' Berger said, knowing that this serial offender is no longer free to spread the filth that victimizes our most vulnerable population.
The Indian diaspora which celebrates its 176th Indian Arrival Day in Trinidad and Tobago is not an abstract entity, but one that flowers the socio-economic and cultural growth and development of our peoples.

It remains a proud moment for all of uspoliticians, sociologists, economists, civic, religious and cultural leadersin world history.
VANCOUVER, BC, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ - Taseko Mines Limited (TSX: TKO) (NYSE American: TGB) (LSE: TKO) ("Taseko" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that it has completed its offering of US$400 million aggregate principal amount of 7.0% Senior Secured Notes due 2026 ("Notes"). A portion of the proceeds will be used to redeem the outstanding US$250 million 8.75% Senior Secured Notes due 2022 ("Existing Notes"). The remaining proceeds, net of transaction costs and accrued interest, of US$131 million are available for capital expenditures, working capital and general corporate purposes.

Stuart McDonald, President of Taseko, commented, "This bond refinancing and upsize has significantly strengthened Taseko's financial position and lowered our cost of capital. We now have a cash balance of approximately US$200 million and no significant debt maturities until 2026. With the majority of the required funding for our Florence Copper project now in hand, we are moving forward with final design engineering of the commercial production facility as well as procurement of certain critical components."

"Capital requirements for the commercial production facility are estimated at US$230 million," added Mr. McDonald. "We continue to advance discussions with potential joint venture partners, but with our strong cash balance and improved Gibraltar cash flows from copper prices that are currently over US$3.70 per pound, we have numerous options available to obtain the remaining funding."

Russell Hallbauer, CEO of Taseko concluded, "A commitment to capital discipline is a guiding principle for this organization. We have demonstrated this in the past by completing over $800 million of capital programs at Gibraltar, on time and on budget. Florence is no different. We are designing and engineering the commercial facility to achieve the most accretive results for shareholders. Florence is one of the least capital intensive copper production facilities in the world and when fully ramped up will produce 40,000 tonnes of high quality cathode copper annually for the US domestic market. It is a green project, with carbon emissions and water and energy consumption all dramatically lower than a conventional mine, and with C1 operating costs of US$0.90 per pound of copper, it will also be in the lowest quartile of the global cost curve."

Russell Hallbauer

Chief Executive Officer and Director

No regulatory authority has approved or disapproved of the information contained in this news release.

The Notes have not and will not be registered under the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "Securities Act"), or the securities laws of any other jurisdiction. The Notes have not and will not be qualified by a prospectus in Canada. Unless registered or qualified by a prospectus, the Notes may be offered and sold, only in transactions that are exempt from registration requirements and from prospectus qualification under Canadian securities laws. In the United States, the Notes were offered and sold, only to persons reasonably believed to be "qualified institutional buyers" (as defined in Rule 144A under the Securities Act) and outside the United States, to non-U.S. persons in compliance with Regulation S under the Securities Act.

This press release is neither an offer to sell nor the solicitation of an offer to buy the Notes, the Existing Notes or any other securities and shall not constitute an offer to sell or solicitation of an offer to buy, or a sale of, the Notes, the Existing Notes or any other securities in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale is unlawful. This press release does not constitute a notice of redemption with respect to the Existing Notes.

CAUTION REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING INFORMATION

This document contains forward-looking statements and forward-looking information (collectively referred to as "forward-looking statements") within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation and the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, Section 27A of the Securities Act and 21E of the U.S. Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, which may not be based on historical fact, including without limitation statements regarding Taseko's expectations in respect of future financial position, business strategy, future production, reserve potential, exploration drilling, exploitation activities, events or developments that Taseko expects to take place in the future, projected costs and plans and objectives. Often, but not always, forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "outlook", "anticipate", "project", "target", "believe", "estimate", "expect", "intend", "should" and similar expressions.

Forward-looking statements are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the Company's actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. These included but are not limited to:

uncertainties about the effect of COVID-19 and the response of local, provincial, federal and international governments to the threat of COVID-19 on our operations (including our suppliers, customers, supply chain, employees and contractors) and economic conditions generally and in particular with respect to the demand for copper and other metals we produce;

uncertainties and costs related to the Company's exploration and development activities, such as those associated with continuity of mineralization or determining whether mineral resources or reserves exist on a property;

uncertainties related to the accuracy of our estimates of mineral reserves, mineral resources, production rates and timing of production, future production and future cash and total costs of production and milling;

uncertainties related to feasibility studies that provide estimates of expected or anticipated costs, expenditures and economic returns from a mining project;

uncertainties related to the ability to obtain necessary licenses permits for development projects and project delays due to third party opposition;

uncertainties related to unexpected judicial or regulatory proceedings;

changes in, and the effects of, the laws, regulations and government policies affecting our exploration and development activities and mining operations, particularly laws, regulations and policies;

changes in general economic conditions, the financial markets and in the demand and market price for copper, gold and other minerals and commodities, such as diesel fuel, steel, concrete, electricity and other forms of energy, mining equipment, and fluctuations in exchange rates, particularly with respect to the value of the U.S. dollar and Canadian dollar, and the continued availability of capital and financing;

the effects of forward selling instruments to protect against fluctuations in copper prices and exchange rate movements and the risks of counterparty defaults, and mark to market risk;

the risk of inadequate insurance or inability to obtain insurance to cover mining risks;

the risk of loss of key employees; the risk of changes in accounting policies and methods we use to report our financial condition, including uncertainties associated with critical accounting assumptions and estimates;

environmental issues and liabilities associated with mining including processing and stock piling ore; and

labour strikes, work stoppages, or other interruptions to, or difficulties in, the employment of labour in markets in which we operate mines, or environmental hazards, industrial accidents or other events or occurrences, including third party interference that interrupt the production of minerals in our mines.

For further information on Taseko, investors should review the Company's annual Form 40-F filing with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission www.sec.gov and home jurisdiction filings that are available at www.sedar.com, including the "Risk Factors" included in our Annual Information Form.

SOURCE Taseko Mines Limited

Related Links

www.tasekomines.com


The wine industry of northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region has flourished in recent years, thanks to growing wine exports, Chinanews.com reported on Feb.6.

Last year, wine exports of Ningxia grew by 46.4 percent year-on-year to 2.65 million yuan (about $410,485), bucking the global downward trend of wine exports caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, according to data released by customs department of the regional capital Yinchuan.

Customs officers check Ningxia wine to be exported. (Photo courtesy of Yinchuan customs)

The major destinations of Ningxia wine exports were the US, EU, Australia and Japan.

Not long ago, wine of Xige Estate, a chateau in Ningxia, was exported to Canada, the most difficult yet attractive market for all estates in the world to enter, proving the fine quality of Ningxia wine, said Christelle Chene, International Affairs Director at Ningxia Xige Estate.

The wine industry plays a vital part of the foreign trade of agricultural products of Ningxia, which has a grape-growing area of 492,000 mu (32,800 hectares), one quarter of the country's total.

To facilitate wine exports, the Ningxia government has adopted multiple measures. The customs department of Yinchuan simplified customs procedures and improved efficiency so that the wine could be exported in a timely manner.

Ningxia enters harvest season of wine grapes in September. (File photo)

Under the help of Ningxia's foreign affairs office, Ningxia wine is now on the shopping list of Chinese embassies and consulates overseas. According to statistics, more than 7,000 bottles of wine have been sold to China's diplomatic and consular missions in 36 countries so far.

In December 2020, gift packages consisting of fine-quality wine of Ho-Lan Soul were sold out within a few days at the 12th "Love Knows No Borders - Let Dreams Take Flight" International Charity Sale held by China's Foreign Ministry in Beijing.

Our efforts to boost sales of Ningxia wine, through charity sale, live streaming and e-commerce, aim to let the world better understand the wine. We are looking forward to building more platforms to let more local specialties go global, an official with Ningxia's foreign affairs office said.

A wine cellar in Ningxia (Photo/Li Peishan)

In recent years, Ningxia has seen a booming wine-tourism industry. According to Ma Yongming, assistant to the director of the management bureau of a grape industrial park in Ningxia, in 2020, estates in the region received over 800,000 visitors, sold a total of over 22 million bottles of wine, and garnered online sales of more than 350 million yuan, up by 25 percent year-on-year.

Ma said that Ningxia wine centers are seen in cities in and out of the region, such as Beijing, Xi'an and Hangzhou, adding that such centers will also be opened in foreign countries to display the wine culture of Ningxia.

USD$900,000 In-Kind Investment by Procare Health into Phase I Clinical Study for BVX-0918A in the EU

Co-Development of Vaccines for Cervical Cancer and HPV

Right of First Refusal for US Marketing of Papilocare

VANCOUVER, BC and BARCELONA, Spain, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- BioVaxys Technology Corp. (CSE: BIOV) (FRA: 5LB) (OTC: LMNGF) ("BioVaxys"), the world leader in haptenized protein vaccines for antiviral and cancer applications, and Procare Health Iberia, S.L., of Barcelona, Spain ("Procare Health"), a leading privately-held European pharmaceutical company, announced today that they have entered into a broad collaboration for the co-development, joint commercialization, and marketing of BioVaxys vaccines for ovarian cancer, cervical cancer, and human papilloma virus ("HPV"), and the right of first refusal for marketing by BioVaxys in the United States of Procare Health's vaginal gel product, Papilocare, the world's first and only product to prevent and treat HPV-dependent cervical lesions. Left untreated, HPV infection generally leads to cervical cancer (World Health Organization, HPV and Cervical Cancer,11 November 2020). Formed in 2012 as a spin-out from Procter & Gamble Pharmaceuticals, Procare Health is a market leader in the women's health field in the European Union ("EU"), with marketed products including Papilocare, Libicare, Palomacare, Idracare, Pronolis HD and Ovosicare.

Under the terms of the agreement, the companies will jointly conduct a Phase I Clinical Study of BVX-0918A in Spain, BioVaxys' autologous haptenized protein vaccine for late-stage ovarian cancer. BioVaxys will be responsible for the core technology and vaccine production, with Procare Health overseeing and making an in-kind investment in the clinical program and regulatory planning, CRO management, patient/clinical center recruitment, marketing, and opinion leader management. Both companies have agreed to equally share costs associated with engaging a European clinical research organization ("CRO") to conduct the study. In return, Procare Health will have exclusive rights to market and distribute BVX-0918A in the European Union ("EU"), and the United Kingdom. Clinical data from the Spanish Phase I study will be used by BioVaxys to support its planned IND for BVX-0918A in the US next year, as well as for all other global markets. The two companies will be working out any remaining details by end of 2Q21.

BioVaxys President and Chief Operating Officer Ken Kovan said "This co-development gives BioVaxys access to Procare Health's clinical development and regulatory expertise in the EU, and to its marketing & sales presence in Europe." Kovan added that "Procare Health has an established portfolio of marketed brands that is focused heavily on the women's health and gynecological oncology markets. As we anticipate that these will be the primary users of our ovarian cancer vaccine, the relationship with Procare Health will give access to key gynecological oncology opinion leaders for patient access, clinical trial recruitment, and a relationship that post-approval will drive vaccine sales. Having a strong EU opinion leader network will also be invaluable for our planned US launch of the vaccine."

The collaboration with BioVaxys will help Procare Health fuel its product offerings in the gynecological oncology field. Yann Gaslain, CEO of Procare Health stated, "We are thrilled to start working the collaboration with BioVaxys as it brings a new hope in the field of gynecological cancer. We have been working for 8 years in the area of cervical cancer and HPV, investigating to understand how the immune response of the host could be stimulated to help defend versus HPV infection and persistency, and we believe that the new haptenized cell platform technology can bring a valid answer to this unmet therapeutical need, mainly when high grade lesions of the cervix or even cervical carcinoma have been characterized. The promising vaccine technology platform of BioVaxys will likely help bringing response in ovarian and cervical cancer."

In Phase I and Phase II clinical studies previously conducted by BioVaxys, co-founder and Chief Medical Officer, Dr. David Berd, using an earlier generation of the BioVaxys cancer vaccine on nearly 500 patients with melanoma or ovarian cancer, the haptenized cell platform showed significant clinical promise. BioVaxys has developed its vaccine technology platforms based on the established immunological concept that modifying proteins with simple chemicals called haptens makes them more visible to the immune system. The process of haptenization "teaches" a patient's immune system to recognize and make target proteins more 'visible' as foreign, thereby stimulating an immune response.

Javier Cortes, MD, Specialist in Gynecology and Cytology for the international Academy of Cytology (Chicago, USA), member of the Spanish association against Cancer (AECC) and of the European Cervical Cancer Association (ECCA) stated, "I believe that the planned clinical trial in Phase I is of a very high interest based on my experience in oncology for more than 30 years. The immunotherapy is a line of treatment with very active investigation and promising early results in some cancers (lungs, melanoma and ovarian). That is why, every single line of investigation well based and with consistent criteria of quality in the design of the investigation should be very well received and encouraged."

Leveraging the recent proven ability of its haptenized viral antigen vaccine platform in stimulating both a 96.4% positive immune response and powerful 'memory' T-cell activation against SARS-CoV-2, BioVaxys will use the platform's flexibility to swap in viral antigens for Human Papilloma Virus ("HPV"), with the intent to develop a treatment for adults who are already infected with HPV. There are vaccines to protect against getting HPV, but none to treat someone who already has HPV. BioVaxys and Procare Health will split costs for feasibility, proof-of-concept, and preclinical development for a HPV viral vaccine, as well as a cervical cancer vaccine based on the BioVaxys cancer vaccine platform. In return, Procare Health will have an exclusive right in the EU and UK for a HPV and/or cervical cancer vaccine, with BioVaxys retaining rights to North America and Rest of World. Development milestones, go/no-go decisions, and other details will be finalized in 2Q2021.

In a major step toward transitioning to a revenue-generating company, BioVaxys has agreed to have a right of first refusal to market and distribute Papilocare in the US.

In Procare Health's PALOMA Phase IIb clinical trial, Papilocare showed consistent and significant efficacy in normalizing cervical cytology at 3 months and at 6 months in the total study population with 50% to 70% of High-Risk HPV clearance at 6 months in six different international studies and more than 600 patients. HPV infection causes 528,000 cases of cervical cancer and 266,000 cervical cancer deaths each year.1 Papilocare has a CE mark valid for the entire EU, and is currently marketed as a Class IIa medical device in Spain, France, Portugal, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania. Once the FDA regulatory pathway has been determined for the US, BioVaxys will have a detailed plan in place by 3Q21 to build an appropriate capability to market and support the brand in the US, with BioVaxys providing the funding for such efforts. Preliminary forecasts from Procare anticipate potential US sales of US$30.0 million.

James Passin, CEO of BioVaxys, stated, "We are honored to partner with Procare Health, a market leader in gynecological oncology and women's health in the EU; this transformative collaboration leverages all of the innovative work of Dr. David Berd in the field in oncology and novel vaccine development, as well as our recent success with the preclinical development of a viable haptenized viral protein vaccine for Covid-19. We look forward to using our proprietary haptenized vaccine technology to address urgent and large market deficiencies in the area of women's health and to potentially generate a new and material revenue stream for our company."

1.WHO. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/sexually-transmitted-infections-(stis)

About BioVaxys Technology Corp.

Based in Vancouver, BioVaxys Technology Corp . is a British Columbia-registered, early stage biotechnology company that is developing viral and oncology vaccine platforms, as well as immuno-diagnostics. The Company is advancing a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine based on its haptenized viral protein technology, and is planning a clinical trial of its haptenized autologous cell vaccine used in combination with anti-PD1 and anti-PDL-1 checkpoint inhibitors that will initially be developed for ovarian cancer. Also in development is a diagnostic for evaluating the presence or absence of a T cell immune response to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. BioVaxys has two issued US patents and two patent applications related to its cancer vaccine, and pending patent applications for its SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) vaccine and diagnostic technologies. BioVaxys common shares are listed on the CSE under the stock symbol "BIOV" and trades on the Frankfurt Bourse (FRA: 5LB) and US OTC: LMNGF.

About Procare Health

Procare Health is a multi-national EU biotechnology company based in Barcelona (Spain) founded in 2012 as a result of the spin-off of executives and employees of Procter & Gamble Pharmaceuticals that is focused primarily to bring innovative solutions in women's health, with a special interest into unmet therapeutical needs. Procare Health invests every year circa 25% of its investments budget into R&D, fundamental research on Cervix ("cervix on a chip" research project) and clinical trials in order bring clinical evidence of its main products in the market. Procare Health develops, investigates and commercializes its own products into more than 50 countries in the world with main focus in EU and in women's genital tract diseases (HPV, cervical lesions, vaginal infections, vaginal dryness, and fertility). Procare Health vision is to become a women's health leader in Europe.

Hyderabad: Seeking votes for TRS in the soon to be held Nagarjuna Sagar bypoll, Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrashekhar Rao on Wednesday lashed out at the Congress, saying that the grand old party had ignored development during its tenure in the state.

He, however, spared the BJP, which otherwise was always under his attack. Speaking in a public meeting at Haliya about 135 km from here, Rao said he would not seek votes in the next Assembly elections (in 2023) if the promised irrigation projects were not completed in the next one and half years. Nagarjuna Sagar will be going for the bypoll as sitting TRS legislator Nomula Narsimhaiah died in December last. "Rs 2500 crore worth lift irrigation schemes will be taken up in the district.

If we dont complete these projects, we will not seek votes in the next elections. We will work hard to complete all the projects in one and half years, Rao said. Blaming Congress for the backwardness of Nalgonda district, Rao said if his Government takes up projects, the opposition party levels allegations that there are kickbacks. Rao sought to know whether the Nagarjuna Sagar Project, which was constructed during the Congress regime, was taken up for kickbacks. He said Rs 1,000 crore would allotted in the coming Budget for the welfare of Dalits under the "CM Dalit Empowerment Fund" and he would personally monitor it.

Rao lost his cool when some people at the meeting allegedly tried to distract it by showing some papers and ordered the police to take them out. "There are several dogs like you. Police take them out. Take papers whatever they want to give. They are just a handful (in the meeting).

If we are determined, there will not be any trace of you. You will become dust," an annoyed KCR said. He quoted a Telugu proverb which says that 'new beggars' (someone who has taken up the profession now) have no time sense and likened the BJP to them. KCR said if any party has an opinion they also could convene meetings and convey what they wanted to the people. But it was not good to disturb meetings of other parties "So don't resort to senseless activities. If you have anything to say you also hold a public meeting. People will decide.

Coming to meetings of other parties and disturbing them is not good culture. None will appreciate it and in the coming days people will teach you a lesson. I am warning their leader to be careful. There is a limit to our patience. If you cross the limits, we know what to do," he said.
A 29-year-old Eugene man is accused of stealing a rifle, pistol, ballistic vest and ammunition from an FBI agents government car while it was parked outside the agents Lane County home.

Surveillance footage caught the early morning car break-in on Jan. 11 and the suspects multiple trips to and from the agents car to a personal car, according to court records.

Investigators identified Michael Stuart Fancher, a convicted felon, as a suspect.

Several weeks later, investigators working undercover contacted Fancher and arranged to buy the stolen rifle from him in exchange for cash and two pistols, according to agent Noah K. Slackman of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives.

The undercover agents met with Fancher at a hotel room in Eugene, where he shared that he had stolen the rifle and that it belonged to law enforcement, according to a recording of the meeting, Slackman wrote in the affidavit.

The undercover officer gave Fancher $3,000 and two pistols in exchange for the rifle, the affidavit said.

Fancher left the hotel, spotted officers and attempted to run before he tripped and fell and was arrested, according to the affidavit.

Fancher was found with a backpack containing the cash and two pistols, as well as another loaded pistol with 10 rounds of ammunition, according to Slackman.

Police also searched a Subaru belonging to Fancher and seized about a half-pound of methamphetamine and recovered the FBI agents stolen ballistic vest and body armor, the affidavit said. Fanchers girlfriend was in the car but theres no indication she was arrested on state or federal charges.

Fancher made his first appearance Tuesday in U.S. District Court on allegations of theft of government property and being a felon in possession of a firearm.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Mustafa T. Kasubhai ordered Fancher to remain in custody as he awaits trial.

Fancher has prior convictions for theft, unlawful use of a motor vehicle, attempting to elude police, possession of methamphetamine and criminal trespass in 2018 and for burglary and reckless burning in 2017.

-- Maxine Bernstein

Email at mbernstein@oregonian.com; 503-221-8212

Follow on Twitter @maxoregonian
CHICAGO, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Today members of IBEW Local 134 called on Governor J.B. Pritzker to reverse his policy of excluding building trades workers from the current phase of vaccination, which jeopardizes the health and safety of nearly 200,000 essential workers while they continue to serve in vital front-line positions across Chicagoland and Illinois. Throughout the COVID-19 crisis, Gov. Pritzker has categorized construction workers as essential in order for them to continue to perform their critical functions.

"When you have groups that were deemed essential by the Governor from day one in March 2020 now being told to go to the back of the line to be vaccinated, that's just not right. I don't get that," said IBEW Local 134 Business Manager Don Finn. "We know there is a shortage of vaccines and the rollout is taking time. All we are asking for is the ability to register now, just like all of the other essential workers that are included in his 1B phase of the vaccine rollout. That's the right thing to do, the safe thing for us and all the people we interact with while we're out on the job. It's what our members deserve after 11 months of serving the people of Chicago and Illinois at the request of the Governor himself."

Finn railed against the inequity of being deemed essential previously, yet not being prioritized for vaccination access. He noted that the 12,500 IBEW Local 134 members have been bravely, quietly and skillfully conducting their work on sites in some of the most critical structures, such as hospitals, airports, railways, water reclamation facilities and others, since the pandemic began. State, city and county leaders have repeatedly acknowledged the vital contributions of Local 134 members to protecting the health and safety of Chicagoans throughout the pandemic.

Finn added that Local 134 electricians are on the job right now helping to ensure delivery of power in critical places such as operating rooms in Chicago hospitals and on the runways at O'Hare Airport where cargo deliveries of vaccine doses are arriving daily. "We are the definition of essential," Finn said.

"We have been 100 percent all in, answering the call to serve day in and day out, while we put our own health on the line," said Finn. "We have watched while members of Local 134 contracted COVID-19, brought it home to their families and even lost their life over it. And now the Governor says we don't deserve access to the vaccine even in wave 2? It's outrageous, unsafe, dangerous and disrespectful."

Finn added that hundreds of Local 134 members have had COVID-19, and some have died from the virus.

"The most important place during this whole pandemic has been the hospitals. Do you think our electricians said, 'Oh my gosh, there's COVID in that hospital. I'm not going in there?' No, they've gone to work so those hospitals could remain open," Finn said.

Finn is frustrated because he says he has had multiple meetings and conversations with the Governor's office, and was under the impression that his members would be granted the same essential status they have always had, to continue to conduct their vital work in the safest way possible.

"Governor Pritzker betrayed our trust by not granting vaccine access to building trades workers in phase 1B. We are front-line essential workers who are at high risk of exposure, just as we have been every day of the past 11 months. Our service and dedication have never wavered," Finn said.

The Governor's office did not provide a basis for their decision to exclude building trades workers from phase 1B of the vaccination rollout.

Contact:

Eileen Rochford

312-953-3305

[email protected]

SOURCE IBEW Local 134
Controlling COVID-19 is my only focus: Yediyurappa on speculation about attempts to unseat him

JD(S) not to contest upcoming by-polls in Karnataka

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

Bengaluru, Feb 10: JD(S) patriarch H D Deve Gowda on Wednesday said his party will not contest by-elections for Belgaum Lok Sabha segment, and Basavakalyan, Sindgi and Maski Assembly seats.

The by-poll schedule is yet to be announced by the Election Commission.

"JD(S) will not field its candidates for bypolls to Belgaum Lok Sabha and Basavakalyan, Sindgi and Maski Assembly seats. We don't have money to fight these elections," Gowda was quoted as saying to reporters by his office in a release.

Most number of sedition cases filed in Karnataka: Rajya Sabha told

The former Prime Minister said he will completely involve himself towards organizing or building the party for 2023 assembly polls.

"... I will put all my efforts to save and build the regional party, with the support of leaders and workers," he said.

While by-polls to Belgaum Lok Sabha and Basavakalyan Assembly seats are necessitated following the death of Union Minister Suresh Angadi and MLA B Narayan Rao respectively due to COVID-19 in September last year, Maski seat fell vacant following the disqualification of MLA Prathapagouda Patil.

Patil had won the Maski assembly seat in 2018 from Congress and is now with the BJP.

Sindagi MLA and senior JD(S) leader M C Managuli's death last month, due to age related ailments, has necessitated the by-polls there.

With an aim to win these seats, the ruling BJP and opposition Congress have already begun the process of shortlisting the candidates, party sources said.

Noting that BJP will face a setback in elections to four states this year, Gowda said according to him the saffron party will not get much seats in Tamil Nadu, and lauded the "courage" of West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.

"Despite getting less votes, Mamata may retain power... the whole BJP team is camping in West Bengal.

Legislators and Ministers quitting the party may cause a setback to TMC to an extent, butMamata Banerjee will become CM (of West Bengal) for the third time," he added.

The terms of the legislative assemblies of the four states-Tamil Nadu, Kerala, West Bengal, Assam, and the Union Territory of Puducherry end on different dates in May and June and the elections are likely to take place in April.

For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications

Story first published: Wednesday, February 10, 2021, 17:46 [IST]

The high court quoted an SC court order that had held that the sexual orientation of a person is an individual choice and any act of treating it as an offence interfered with the persons right to privacy

Allahabad: The Allahabad High Court has directed reinstatement of a home guard dismissed from service after a video of him with his same-sex partner surfaced, saying display of public affection amongst LGBTQ members cannot be bogged down by majority perception if it does not amount to indecency or has potential to disturb public order.

Justice Sunita Agarwal directed the Commandant General of Home Guards, headquarters, Lucknow to take the petitioner back in service with immediate effect, and said he shall be entitled to all admissible dues and the honorarium shall be paid regularly as and when the same falls due.

The assertion in paragraph no.8 of the counter affidavit shows the perception of the officer who had passed the order of cancellation. The sexual orientation of the petitioner has been stated to be indulgence in untoward activity, which is completely in violation of observations of the apex court in Navtej Singh Johar VS Union of India reported in (2018) 10 SCC 1," the court said in the order passed on 2 February.

The apex court in the said case has held that the sexual orientation of the person is his individual choice and any act of treating it as an offence would be interference in the right of the privacy of the person concerned.

The court quashed the order of the cancellation of the appointment of the petitioner dated 11 June, 2019 from the post of Home Guard passed by the District Commandant of Home Guards, Bulandshahar

The home guard was dismissed from service after a video of the petitioner with his same-sex partner went viral.
The government respects "farmers' sentiments" but reforms in agriculture are necessary for the countrys progress, said Prime Minister on Wednesday, defending laws enacted in September that have sparked protests by cultivators.

"Status quo cannot change thingsthe youth of the country cannot wait," he said in the Lok Sabha while replying to the motion of thanks on the Presidents address to

Demanding the repeal of three new farm laws that they say will hurt them to the benefit of large corporations and allow the government to discontinue buying food grains at a minimum support price (MSP), tens of thousands of farmers have been camped on the outskirts of Delhi since late 2020.

ALSO READ: LIVE: Govt respects sentiments of farmers but reforms needed, says Modi

"This House, our government and we all respect farmers sentiments who are voicing their views on the farm bills. This is the reason why government ministers are constantly talking to them, he said. "Farm reforms were needed for long. We (government have made an honest effort to do this."

Opposition lawmakers shouted slogans against Modi for using the terms "Andolanjeevi (professional protesters)" and "parjeevi (parasites)" earlier this week; and later Congress and Trinamool Congress members walked out of the house, reported NDTV.com. "The farm laws will not bring down any farmers. No mandi has been shut or Minimum Support Prices have been stopped," said Modi, referring to government-mandated support prices for key crops.

"No matter how much you try to sabotage it, you will fail to do so, because the truth is out there, that the farmers have not lost anything since the laws came into effect," Modi said without naming the Congress.

"The Congress today is a confused and divided party. Such a confused party cannot help the country or anyone, he said.

Modi in Rajya Speech on Monday coined two terms"aandolan jeevi" and "Foreign Destructive Ideology (FDI)"--to attack the Opposition and foreign individuals who have tweeted in support of the farmers protests. On Wednesday, he attacked a group that "talks the right things" but allegedly protests action.

There is a group of who talk the right things but start protesting when it comes to doing the right things, said Modi, claiming such people opposed gender justice and nuclear power projects.
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on February 10 bought bonds worth Rs 20,000 crore through an open market operation (OMO). The OMO is a mechanism through which the RBI either buys or sells bonds to manage the rupee liquidity in the market.

The central bank bought Rs 14,654 crore worth 10-year bonds at a cut-off yield of 6 percent and bought Rs 2,040 crore worth four-year paper and Rs 3,306 crore of 14-year paper, according to the details published by the central bank. The RBI, which announced the OMO on February 8, received total bids of Rs 89,234 crore.

Announcing the OMO, the RBI had said that it stands committed to ensure the availability of ample liquidity in the system in order to foster congenial financial conditions. On a review of current liquidity and financial conditions, therefore, the Reserve Bank has decided to conduct purchase of Government securities under Open Market Operations (OMO) for an aggregate amount of Rs 20,000 crore on February 10, 2021, the RBI had said in a press release.

The central bank is expected to buy more at auctions to support the governments huge borrowing programme.

Announcing a status-quo on rates on February 5, the RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das assured investors that its stance on liquidity remained accommodative and that the government's Rs 12.06 lakh crore borrowing programme for the fiscal year starting April would be managed in a smooth and orderly manner.

The government will borrow Rs 12.05 lakh crore from the market in 2021-22, lower than the Rs 12.80 lakh crore estimated for the current financial year. According to the Revised Estimate, the gross borrowing for the current financial year was raised to Rs 12.8 lakh crore as against the Budget Estimate of Rs 7.8 lakh crore, registering an increase of 64 percent.

Gross borrowing includes repayments of past loans. Repayment for past loans in the next financial year has been pegged at Rs 2.80 lakh crore. The government raises money from the market to fund its fiscal deficit through dated securities and treasury bills. As a result, net borrowing would come down to Rs 9.24 lakh crore for the next fiscal, while for the current fiscal it is estimated at Rs 10.52 lakh crore during 2020-21.
(Natural News) A new pilot program from Amazon will furnish some of the companys delivery fleet with artificial intelligence (AI) surveillance cameras that will track everything happening in and around them, even if it is unrelated to Amazons delivery business and in no way involves Amazon customers.

Described as the largest expansion of corporate surveillance in human history, Amazons AI-based surveillance scheme is a boon to the spying industry, which has advanced by leaps and bounds in recent years.

According to reports, the four-lens cameras, known as Driveri, are manufactured by a San Diego-based tech startup known as Netradyne. The devices will record their surroundings 100 percent of the time that Amazon vans are in operation.

Driveris AI software is capable of detecting 16 different safety issues, from drivers eye movements to vehicle speed and braking patterns. Drivers who violate these safety features will be told through an automatic audio alert to change the way they drive.

Safety is our top priority at Amazon and its our hope that this new system will give drivers and DSPs [delivery service partners] peace of mind while out delivering smiles to our customers, stated Karolina Haraldsdottir, a senior manager for last-mile safety at Amazon, in an instructional video that was sent to DSPs.

If you are enjoying this story so far, you can find more like it at Surveillance.news.

Will Amazon run the new world orders global spying and surveillance apparatus?

Not all Amazon drivers are on board with the plan, and neither are their labor union and privacy advocating partners.

[Amazon] will be watching everyone including your kids, warns the digital rights group Fight for the Future (FftF), which launched a petition warning the public that if this is allowed to persist, Amazon will have roaming eyes in every neighborhood, shopping center, and intersection in our communities.

Along with the millions of Ring doorbell cams, floodlight cams, and mailbox cams, Amazon will have the perfect panopticon in place to sweep up unprecedented amounts of data en masse.

With its more than 2,000 law enforcement partnerships already in place, Amazon will soon be sharing footage from the new surveillance program with police, just like it already does with data from Ring cameras, giving them access to license plates, biometric data, and enabling them to use facial recognition to track anyones movements across neighborhoods and cities.

Beyond fueling the expansion of the police surveillance state, this means even if you dont use Amazon youre going to be in their system, being monitored, and targeted, the FftF petition further reads.

Back in 2018, former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos introduced an AI-based facial recognition tool known as Rekognition that had been adopted by at least one police agency, in Oregon, to aid in fighting crime.

This latest video surveillance technology builds upon that concept, making every human being a potential target for illegal spying and surveillance.

FftF deputy director Evan Greer, in a statement, warned that Driveri threatens to violate everyones basic rights by constantly collecting and analyzing footage of our neighborhoods, our homes and our children.

Such data can and will, he warns, be shared with law enforcement in the same way that Rekognition is, or was since Amazon issued a one-year moratorium on Rekognition last summer due to concerns about its alleged inherent algorithmic bias.

Following the reported deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, Amazons spying technologies immediately became politicized as if they are somehow only used to target minorities. Truth be told, Amazon is a threat to all humans, regardless of their skin color.

Because of all this, Greer is demanding that Amazon immediately stop the roll out of this unsafe program, and is pushing Congress to launch a full investigation into Amazons surveillance empire.

Sources for this article include:

ChildrensHealthDefense.org

NaturalNews.com
BRAVE Longford woman Lynsey Bennett has safely arrived in Mexico, where she hopes a clinic there will help save her life.

Lynsey is now in Cancun and will soon start pioneering treatment in a specialised hospital.

The 32-year-old and her pal Martin Guilfoyle flew into Mexico city from connecting flights from Dublin and had an overland 30-hour drive before settling into their hotel in the seaside city of Cancun.

She said that the hope for cancer clinic hotel is 'not too far' of a walking distance from her hotel.

Lynsey also stressed that she was told by her driver that Cancun is very safe.

Because they rely on their tourism so much to survive, that its actually very very safe in Cancun, she confirms. We have been treated like absolute royalty.

Lynsey last week settled her High Court action over the alleged misinterpretation of her cervical smear slides.

The single mum has planned her own funeral, and has set up a trust fund for her two daughters Zoe (12) and Hailee (7).

Reverend Simon Scott has helped Lynsey plan her funeral, in which she wants Dermot Kennedys version of the Van Morrison song Days Like This played at it.

He sat there writing pages and pages of everything that I wanted said and done and he had no problem, she tells Sundayworld.com. I had said if anything happened me and if we were still in Covid times, making sure I would be OK, He said he absolutely, he would link in and do everything that he had to do. He supported my friends and I sent them messages and phoned them and checked in with them, and honestly he is just a remarkable man.

The dignified young woman manages to join her services every weekend despite all that is going on in her life.

So we have online services, we all go onto zoom calls, she notes. Sometimes you might call out the prayers or the answers to the prayers and then he had asked me just to use some videos, that would be you tubes of some of the prayers.

She believes in the power or prayer.

I believe that everybody when they are in a time of need, or someone that they love is in a time of need, she reflects.

The amount of people who have said that they are praying for me and Im so grateful and I so appreciate that, its just an amazing thing that somebody is willing to take, no matter what their religion is or faith is, and the amount of people who will say Im not religious but Im praying for you, and I just think its gives people some hope and its so comforting people knowing that.

Asked how she can believe in a God that oversees tragedies that befall the likes of her, she pauses and then says: I dont really go into thoughts like that. I have never ever once turned around and said why me?. Ive often said sure why not me?.

I think that sometimes things happen and you are maybe that you are given it because you need to help other people. I think people learn from peoples pain and peoples misfortune, so thats how I view it. I dont go into the why me and the negative thoughts, I try to stay away from that as much as I can.

Lynsey has met other women affected by the cervical smear test scandal, including Vicky Phelan.

I have actually met Vicky in person and we do send messages every so often and I have met loads of the other women, she confirms. I have had huge support and phone calls and messages. I had gone to a few of the meetings, but I had spoken up because I had such a horrendous experience at my RCOG (Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists) meeting, so people had reached out to me and they have been so amazing.

She is accompanied during her stay in Mexico by Spin FM radio presenter Martin Guilfoyle.

I have known Martin for the last couple of years, he ended up covering to support me for one of my appointments, he recalls. He had said when I told him I was sick again that if there was anything he could do just ask.

One of the days in November I was going to a new hospital to a new consultant and didnt really want to go to the appointment alone, and he was upset listening to me explaining all that happened. I just mentioned it to him I was going to Mexico and that I could actually bring a companion, he said that he would never let me go to an appointment on my own again and said Im going to ask work can I go.

Lynsey appeared on RTEs First Dates show last year, and was paired with a local lad called Liam.

We went for a walk in Longford park run, we also had a cuppa in the Longford Arms and we also had another meeting as well, she smiles. But it wasnt romantic. It was such a lovely date and Liam had even messaged me after the court case when it was on the news and just saying all the best. I was so grateful that I got to have such a lovely experience on First Dates and we can truly remain friends because he isnt too far down the road.

Online dating is something thats last on her list.

For me a relationship is just not possible with what my prognosis is and the fact you cant meet anyone, she stresses.

But all my friends know that two years ago there was someone that came into my life that has always stayed around. That means an awful lot to me and even though we are not being romantic, he is a great support to have. His name is Ted and it would be hard to find someone who is as good a man as he is.

Lynsey also chuckles when told she could pass for a Scandanavian model, shes so good looking.

Everybody says that, she chortles. One time I went to Andrea Roches open day. We got some social pictures, but it never went any further. Im always asked how long am I living in Ireland, and I always say since 1988.
CLEVELAND, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The privately held MB Dynamics, Inc. today announced that it was recently honored, among a select group of companies in the State of Ohio, as the recipient of a 2021 International Market Access Grant for Exporters (IMAGE) award.



The IMAGE awards program provides specialized grant funding to eligible businesses in the State of Ohio. It is funded in part by the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) State Trade Expansion Program, working in close collaboration with the Ohio Development Services Agency. Eligible award candidates must first undergo a stringent application and selection process, including an evaluation of the specific export sales and marketing activities that are proposed to be conducted over the course of the grant term. To be eligible, a company must be operating as a licensed for-profit business in the State of Ohio; must engage in the manufacture, assembly and/or distribution of a product, which itself must contain a majority of U.S. related components; and must have a viable strategic plan for the expanded export of its product technologies within global markets.



MB Dynamics, with manufacturing operations that are both 100% U.S.- and Ohio-based, are more than 40-year field-proven industry experts in the design, manufacture and supply of vibration test systems and equipment, including buzz, squeak and rattle (BSR) test systems; steering test systems; suspension component test systems; modal exciters and amplifiers; single- and multi-DUT automated accelerometer calibration systems; dynamic controllers; transducer calibration systems; and test engineering services. The products and services of MB Dynamics support worldwide customer requirements within automotive, aerospace, industrial, laboratory R&D, civil engineering, industrial and consumer equipment, modal and structural testing, test and measurement, academia, and other critical sectors.



MB Dynamics will be utilizing its 2021 IMAGE award to carry out several key global market expansion plans, working in direct collaboration with its longtime global strategic technical marketing, PR and business development partner, the 100% woman-owned and Buffalo, New York, USA-based Embassy Global, LLC.



Founded in 2008, Embassy Global, LLC are more than 20-year recognized worldwide industry growth experts in the precise products, markets, applications, and end customers served by MB Dynamics. The firm uniquely supports the growth of a world-class roster of select small-to-medium sized high-tech manufacturing clients, such as MB Dynamics, via the application of Embassy Global's own in-depth industry experience, one-of-a-kind recognized methods, and strategies. This firm also uniquely connects its clients with an expanded number of new and pre-qualified prospective end customers, as well as tangible new business.



Notes MB Dynamics president, Richard E. McCormick, "As experts in modal testing, and as a longtime manufacturer in the State of Ohio, we are grateful to the Ohio Development Services Agency and the SBA for this boost to our export expansion plans. This much-appreciated IMAGE grant funding will afford MB Dynamics the capability to pursue an expedited growth strategy in areas of Europe, Asia Pacific and beyond. It does so, most vitally, while further supporting our existing collaborations with established niche industry growth partners."



Photo(s):

https://www.prlog.org/12857450



Press release distributed by PRLog

SOURCE MB Dynamics, Inc.
[February 10, 2021] Evolution of Networking, Photonics and Artificial Intelligence and Deployment of Edge Cloud for Rural Among Topics for OFC 2021 Plenary

WASHINGTON, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Visionaries representing industry and government will describe the latest development in key optical technologies as plenary speakers for the 2021 Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exhibition. The event, to be held 06  10 June 2021 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, USA, is the premier conference and exhibition for optical communications and networking professionals. This year's conference will be a blended in-person and virtual format. Nancy Shemwell, COO, Trilogy Networks, USA; Young-Kai Chen, program manager, Microsystems Technology Office, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), USA; and Yiqun Cai, vice president, Alibaba Group, China will present compelling technical content on groundbreaking initiatives. The talks will cover edge cloud support and applications in rural territories, advances in photonics and artificial intelligence, and the evolution of networking driven by cloud computing. The plenary program is scheduled for Tuesday, 08 June 2021, 08:00 PDT, UTC-04:00. "The OFC 2021 plenary will demonstrate the impressive work of leaders in our field who are driving innovations that will inspire our community and benefit society-at-large," said Jun-ichi Kani, OFC General Chair. "Nancy Shemwell, Young-Kai Chen and Yiqun Cai are behind the revolutionary applications of technologies that are rapidly changing communications and computing. We are privileged to have them as headliners for an engaging plenary program, which is always a highly anicipated segment of our international conference and exhibition."



In her presentation titled "Industrial Revolution 4.0  Gone Country," Nancy Shemwell, COO, Trilogy Networks, USA, will describe the Rural Cloud Initiative, the deployment of distributed edge cloud support and applications across rural America to help close the "digital divide." The initiative will bring the technology platforms required to run advanced solutions software and hardware to create an ecosystem. Young-Kai Chen, program manager, Microsystems Technology Office at DARPA, USA, will discuss the "Symbiotic Perspective of Photonics and Artificial Intelligence" in his talk. Tremendous advances in photonics and artificial intelligence over the past decades have enabled the next generation of communications and computing.

A veteran in the networking industry, Yiqun Cai, vice president, Alibaba Group, China, will explore how cloud computing became the foundation of the company's infrastructure. In his talk titled "Hammers and Nails: How Technologies and Applications Drive the Evolution of Networking in Alibaba," Cai will share the company's experience building networks to enable the transition to this technology. Registration Information Conference registration opens in early 2021. Credentialed media and analysts who wish to cover OFC 2021 can find registration and other essential information in the OFC media room. About OFC The 2021 Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exhibition (OFC) is the premier conference and exhibition for optical communications and networking professionals. For more than 40 years, OFC has drawn attendees from all corners of the globe to meet and greet, teach and learn, make connections and move business forward. OFC includes dynamic business programming, an exhibition of global companies, and high impact peer-reviewed research that, combined, showcase the trends and pulse of the entire optical networking and communications industry. OFC is co-sponsored by The Optical Society (OSA), the IEEE Communications Society (IEEE/ComSoc), and the IEEE Photonics Society and managed by OSA. OFC 2021, a blended in-person and virtual event, will take place 06  10 June 2021 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California, USA. Follow @OFCConference, learn more at OFC Community LinkedIn, and watch highlights on OFC YouTube. About The Optical Society Founded in 1916, The Optical Society (OSA) is the leading professional organization for scientists, engineers, students and business leaders who fuel discoveries, shape real-life applications and accelerate achievements in the science of light. Through world-renowned publications, meetings and membership initiatives, OSA provides quality research, inspired interactions and dedicated resources for its extensive global network of optics and photonics experts. For more information, visit osa.org. View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/evolution-of-networking-photonics-and-artificial-intelligence-and-deployment-of-edge-cloud-for-rural-among-topics-for-ofc-2021-plenary-301226035.html SOURCE The Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exhibition (OFC)

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Officials of the Lagos State Environmental Tasks Force accompanied by policemen and persons suspected to be thugs have burnt down a community whose residents witnessed the October 20 shooting of peaceful #ENDSARS protesters by soldiers at the Lekki Tollgate.

PREMIUM TIMES sourced some of its witnesses from the community for its groundbreaking investigation into the shooting, which revealed that soldiers and policemen shot directly at the protesters, killing some and injuring several others.

After originally claiming that soldiers deployed to the tollgate to disperse protesters were given only blank rounds and that they merely shot in the air, the army later admitted that the troops carried both live rounds and blank bullets.

Ahmed Taiwo, a major general, who represented the army at a judicial panel investigating the #ENDSARS shooting, argued that the soldiers carried live rounds because hoodlums had infiltrated the protest.

Residents of the community also accused the divisional police officer of the nearby Maroko Police Division, Raji Ganiyu, of shooting and killing some of the protesters. Mr Ganiyu denied the allegation.

A 24-hours notice

Residents of the community who spoke to PREMIUM TIMES said policemen and some officials of the environmental task force, arrived at the community on Tuesday and told them to vacate their residences within 24 hours.

The residents, who asked not to be named for fear of being arrested by the authorities, said they were still trying to gather their belongings on Wednesday morning when a contingent of taskforce officials, mobile policemen and persons that looked like thugs arrived and immediately started pulling down structures in the community.

Residents of the demolished community witnessed the October 2020 shooting of #ENDSARS protesters Residents of the demolished community witnessed the October 2020 shooting of #ENDSARS protesters

They said while a bulldozer was pulling down the mainly makeshift houses, the thugs were setting fire to the fallen structures. Policemen chased residents who were still trying to salvage their belongings far into the banks of the lagoon, injuring some of them, witnesses said.

People were scared and thought they were going to be arrested and ran towards the lagoon where they sustain deep cuts in their legs from broken bottles that were discarded there, one resident said.

Residents of the demolished community witnessed the October 2020 shooting of #ENDSARS protesters Residents of the demolished community witnessed the October 2020 shooting of #ENDSARS protesters

Police mock residents over #ENDSARS

Another resident said he and other residents were stopped and searched by the policemen who claimed they were looking for weapons hidden in the shanties.

He also said the policemen mocked residents of the shanty for participating in the protest and for speaking to the media after the indiscriminate shooting of peaceful protesters at the tollgate.

They were laughing at us as we struggled to gather our properties. The policemen said: Sheybi na una be #ENDSARS protesters abi?

No comments

When reached for comment, the spokesperson of the Lagos State Environmental Taskforce, Taofeek Adebayo, asked for 30 minutes to find out why the community was demolished and burnt.

When he was reached later, he directed this reporter to the police for comment.

Muyiwa Adejobi, the spokesperson of the Lagos State Police Command, said he was not aware of the demolition but promised to find out. He is yet to revert on this.

Florence carries out test run of Hitachi's new battery-powered tram.

Hitachi Rail says it has successfully completed trials of its new battery-powered tram in Florence, for the first time in Italy.

The battery-operated model allows for significant savings on infrastructure costs as well as reducing the visual impact of overhead wires, poles and pylons on city streets.

During the tests in Florence, battery packs were fitted to an existing Hitachi-built Sirio tram which travelled under battery power along tracks between Alamanni and Fortezza.

The innovative new technology allows power to be returned to the batteries every time the tram brakes, reducing the overall energy consumption.

Florence mayor Dario Nardella said: Battery-powered trams can revolutionise this type of service within cities. Public transport, especially in historic centres, will have to be less impactful and increasingly sustainable.

The global company, the rolling stock manufacturing division of Japan's Hitachi Group, says that it will now work towards marketing battery-operated trams internationally.
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Yi-Chin Lee, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer

WASHINGTON  House impeachment managers used an incident in which former President Donald Trumps supporters surrounded and harassed a Biden campaign bus on Interstate 35 in Texas as evidence that Trump knew the potential violence his followers were capable of and didnt hesitate to cheer them on.

U.S. Rep. Stacey Plaskett, a delegate of the Virgin Islands, showed senators footage of the caravan of Trump supporters surrounding the bus as it traveled between San Antonio and Austin in October. She then showed a tweet Trump sent that said I LOVE TEXAS! with edited footage of the same incident that included upbeat music. And she showed another tweet the former president sent after the FBI began investigating the incident in which he said, these patriots did nothing wrong.
It is disappointing and stunning that Gov. Tom Wolf would propose a massive tax increase which despite a proposed increase in the exemption for lower income families, would hit countless middle class families through a boost of almost 50% in the states levy on income, taking it from 3.07 to 4.49%.

The governor would be the first to acknowledge that this is a time of hardship for many whose good jobs no longer exist, or who are working reduced hours for lower wages. How can he justify taking more from them in a time of such economic challenge?

The governors goal to massively increase funding for public schools is noble, but the means of achieving it is severely flawed. Can he possibly believe that anything close to his proposal will garner the support of the Republican controlled General Assembly? Has he not learned the lessons of prior years in which his spending and taxing plans have been derailed?

Supporters of the governors grand plan will tout the fact that Pennsylvanias state income would remain one of the lowest in the country even at 4.49%. That argument overlooks a number of facts. The state income tax is imposed on virtually all income, including wages, capital gains and dividends. Nine states impose no income tax on wages, and five impose no sales tax.

Pennsylvania is one of a small number of states which imposes a death tax that takes as much as 15% of an inheritance, the only exemption being when the heir is a surviving spouse. Ever escalating Pennsylvania property taxes continue to take a huge bite out of the assets of homeowners.

The governor may have scored points with those who advocate for huge boosts in public education funding, but his plans are doomed.

Oren Spiegler, Peters Township Pa.

Colorado Springs, CO (80903)

Today

Scattered thunderstorms during the morning becoming more widespread this afternoon. High 58F. Winds NNE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 90%..

Tonight

A steady rain this evening. Showers continuing overnight. Low around 45F. Winds N at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 80%.

Houston and Harris County are teaming up to launch a $159 million relief program for area tenants struggling to make rent, the largest local investment in housing aid to date, made possible by the stimulus package Congress approved late last year.

Some details of the program were not yet finalized, although the county on Tuesday approved contracts with nonprofits BakerRipley and Catholic Charities. The city plans to do the same Wednesday.

The governments and the nonprofits hope to launch a portal to begin accepting applications from landlords next week, according to Catholic Charities, but it was not clear when that portal will be available.

The federal Emergency Rental Assistance Program approved last year sent $73.8 million to Harris County and $70.1 million to Houston for rent relief efforts, according to the county. The city is devoting an additional $7.9 million in other funds and the county $6.9 million for a total of $158.7 million.

The state launched its own $1 billion fund with federal relief dollars Tuesday. Applications for that pot of money open Monday, and more information is available at texasrentrelief.com.

When applications for the state fund open Monday, residents can submit documents through the website or by calling 1-833-9TX-RENT.

City Housing Department officials declined comment on the local effort Tuesday, deferring questions to Catholic Charities. Mayor Sylvester Turner said Monday the city is working as quickly as possible to launch the program. He said the funds, which came from the Treasury Department, carry some additional logistical requirements, but he did not specify them.

Ill announce on Wednesday steps were going to take to minimize the impact on people while both the city and county work through these bureaucratic hurdles, Turner said.

Houston City Councilmember Tiffany Thomas, who chairs the councils housing committee and has helped craft the program, said the city plans to use about $19 million to give money to some 12,000 households that applied for relief last year but did not receive funds.

The federal funds will allow Houston and Harris County to more than double their investment in rent relief from last year. The city and county both directed $30 million toward separate relief efforts with funds from the CARES Act, part of an earlier stimulus package.

This time, however, they plan to collaborate on one program, offering common eligibility requirements, a single tenant application portal and landlord agreements.

Zoe Middleton, Southeast Texas Co-Director for the housing nonprofit Texas Housers, said that collaboration is encouraging.

I think it reduces confusion for tenants and for landlords in need. Its been really hard historically to get the city and county to match up programs, and it causes a lot of confusion for people, Middleton said. Its the biggest pot that weve had to play with. Thats why I think its important to get it right.

There were 156 eviction hearings in Houston and Harris County on Tuesday, by Middletons count, and more than 22,000 hearings since March 13. Not all of those hearings result in evictions, but Middleton said they have harmful effects on residents finances even if they are not ultimately kicked out.

She cited a report from New America, a Washington, D.C.-based nonpartisan think tank, that found evictions account for 79 percent of all housing loss in Harris County, even though renters account for roughly half of residents here.

Houston and Harris County also are hiring navigators, or case managers, from several community nonprofits, including the YMCA, Houston Area Urban League, Memorial Assistance Ministries and others, to help guide residents through the process and connect them to other services if needed, according to Thomas.

The intention behind them is to really foster those families through that whole process, Thomas said. The case managers are going to be really key to getting down in the nuts and bolts of walking them through that process.

To qualify, applicants must make less than 80 percent of the area median income, roughly $63,000 for a family of four in Houston. They must have suffered a financial impact from the COVID-19 pandemic and be able to demonstrate housing instability, according to Treasury Department guidelines.

The program will not dole out funds on a first-come, first-served basis. Applicants will be weighted by need, with priority to those making less than 50 percent of the area median income  $39,400 for a Houston family of four  and who have been unemployed for 90 days.

The application portal will open to landlords first, who must agree not to pursue evictions or late fees against residents, said Joy Partain, a spokesperson for Catholic Charities and BakerRipley. About a week later, tenants will be able to apply. The organization hopes to open the tenant portal by the end of February.

Recipients would be able to use the money toward up to three months of past due, current or future rent, utility and home energy expenses.

There also will be a direct assistance program for renters whose landlords do not apply to the program, Thomas said. It is unclear if the agencies plan to set aside a certain amount of money for those people.

BakerRipley, which administered past rent relief efforts for the city, will handle technology and landlord enrollment, according to county documents. Catholic Charities, which has worked with the county, will operate a contact center and communications.

dylan.mcguinness@chron.com
Congress Legislature Party (CLP) leader in the State Assembly Mallu Bhatti Vikramarka on Tuesday lashed out at the state government for its sheer "negligence and incapacity" to come to the rescue of farmers and for its utter failure in all the fronts.

Interacting with the farmers in Bhimsari in Adilabad district, as part of the CLP's Raitulatho mukhamukhi ( direct interaction with farmer's ) programme in Adilabad, Vikramarka said Chief Minister and TRS supremo K Chandrashekar Rao had taken U-turn on the issue of the newly passed farm laws after the Delhi trip.

The CLP leader said people in are not slaves like Chief Minister KCR and they, especially, farmers would fight tooth and nail till the farm laws, which were enacted to help the big Corporates, are withdrawn unconditionally.

"If these farm laws, which are brought in to help the big corporates, implemented, the farmer will not live with any dignity. The farmers' agitation will continue till the draconian laws are withdrawn,' he said.

The CPL leader alleged that KCR prostrated before Prime Minister Narendra Modi and is working as "a slave of the Prime minister.

"KCR who compared the chief ministership provided by the Constitution written by Dr Ambedkar as his left foot's slipper, so he should leave the slipper by resigning. How should KCR be taught a lesson for comparing CM post with the slipper? KCR cannot lift the Procurement Centres as the state is not his fiefdom to do things according to his whims and fancies," he added.

He said the solution to the problem faced by the country is being searched from Adilabad. "The preparedness of farmers in Adilabad to continue their stir reminding one of the Armed struggles that shook the country. The Congress came to the doorstep of farmers to make the farmer King and to protect him from all the onslaughts," Vikramarka added.

(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.)

Kids want to fish? You don't know how yourself? Here's a little help
Liberal Leader Andrew Furey takes questions from the media following a televised debate at the Confederation Building in St. John's N.L. on February 3, 2021. Newfoundland and Labrador will hold a provincial election on February 13, 2021. (Paul Daly/The Canadian Press)

Even With Community Spread of COVID 19, Voting in N.L.s Election Is Safe: Experts

ST. JOHNS, N.L.A Montreal cardiologist with a background in epidemiology says even with community spread of COVID-19 in St. Johns, Newfoundland and Labrador can have a safe election on Saturday.

McGill University professor Dr. Christopher Labos says its not the election itself thats a concern but the possibility of people gathering in large numbers.

Labos said Tuesday if venues are ventilated and if voters are masked and keep their distance from one another, then everything should be fine.

Newfoundlanders and Labradorians will be heading to the polls days after health officials confirmed community spread of COVID-19 in the capitals metro region.

And although officials announced stricter health measures in St. Johns, shutting gyms, cinemas and bars, the chief electoral officer said Tuesday that voting day was still a go.

Chief medical officer of health Dr. Janice Fitzgerald said Tuesday that going to a polling station where safety protocols are followed is no riskier than visiting a grocery store.
The state Department of States failure to advertise a pending state constitutional amendment, which would have enabled many sexual abuse victims to sue their assailants and enablers, was inexcusable.

State Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar acknowledged as much with her resignation.

Because of statutes of limitations for civil litigation, many adults who suffered abuse as children cannot now sue their tormentors. The amendment, which easily passed both legislative houses, would have provided a two-year window for victims to file lawsuits.

The primary defendants in such litigation would be Catholic priests, their dioceses and bishops, most of whom were identified in the landmark 2018 statewide grand jury investigation on that abuse.

The process for a state constitutional amendment takes two years, including a statewide referendum. The states blunder means that the soonest an amendment could make it to the ballot would be in the 2023 spring primary election.

Timing is critical now because of impending bankruptcy proceedings for some dioceses and the Boy Scouts of America, another likely defendant.

Republican state senators justly condemned the Democratic administrations blunder. But they could have opened the litigation window by legislation as early as 2018. The state House has passed such a law.

Now lawmakers are talking about using a rarely invoked procedure to get the amendment to the ballot this spring. But that procedure is to be used in the event a major emergency threatens or is about to threaten the Commonwealth and if the safety or welfare of the Commonwealth requires prompt amendment.

Though the matter is serious it does not threaten the commonwealth. Invoking the emergency procedure would ensure litigation from likely defendants.

A group of Democratic senators has introduced a bill to open the litigation window by law. The Legislature should pass it.
The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
Aster DM Healthcare declined 2.16% to Rs 151.75 after the company's consolidated net profit dropped 29% to Rs 107.45 crore on a 2.7% decline in net sales at Rs 2,258.87 crore in Q3 December 2020 over Q3 December 2019.

Consolidated profit before tax (PBT) skid 27.8% to Rs 115.23 crore in Q3 December 2020 over Q3 December 2019. Current tax expense for the quarter soared 27.3% to Rs 5.92 crore as against Rs 4.65 crore in Q3 December 2019. The Q3 result was declared after trading hours yesterday, 9 February 2021.

Operational revenue stood at Rs 2,258.87 crore for Q3 FY21 compared with Rs 2,267.71 crore for Q2 FY21 and Rs 2,321.66 crore of Q3 FY20. EBITDA (excluding other income) jumped 21% Q-o-Q (quarter-on-quarter) to Rs 328 crore in Q3 FY21 from Rs 271 crore in Q2 FY21, but declined 14.80% Y-o-Y (year-on-year) from Rs 385 crore in Q3 FY20.

Commenting on Q3 FY21 performance, Dr Azad Moopen, the founder chairman and managing director of Aster DM Healthcare, has said that: "As we bid farewell to an unprecedented calendar year in the history of mankind, we are seeing light at the end of the tunnel with the rolling out of COVID-19 vaccine in many countries. India, apart from the aggressive vaccination drive has also become the supplier of vaccine to many parts of the world, which will help to contain the global pandemic. In the GCC states, there has been a downward trend in the Covid cases but in U.A.E, the cases have increased recently as the second wave has set in."

"The good news is that U.A.E ranks 2nd in terms of vaccination rollout with over 1/3rd of the total population already receiving the vaccine, including the Astra Zeneca vaccine from India. In India, the daily COVID cases are at an all-time low and the vaccine rollout is also progressing well. In Kerala, where majority of our Indian business lies, the COVID cases are still high due to a late start and spiking of the pandemic," Dr Moopen added.

Aster DM Healthcare operates in various segments of the healthcare industry, which include hospitals, clinics and retail pharmacies, and provides healthcare services to patients across economic segments in various gulf corporation council (GCC) states through its various brands, such as Aster, Medcare and Access.

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Health official: 'I am hopeful for the brighter days ahead'
Ottawa: China poses a serious strategic threat to Canada, both through attempts to steal secrets and a campaign to intimidate the Chinese community, the head of Canadas spy agency said in a rare public appearance.

The remarks by Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) Director David Vigneault mark the second time in a few months that Ottawa - mired in a broad diplomatic and trade dispute with Beijing - has identified China as a problem actor.

Vigneault told an online forum on Wednesday (AEDT) that hostile activity by state actors seeking among other things to purloin business secrets and sensitive data represents a significant danger to Canadas prosperity and sovereignty and singled out China.

David Vigneault, head of the Canada Canadian Security Intelligence Service. Credit:File

The government of China ... is pursuing a strategy for geopolitical advantage on all fronts  economic, technological, political, and military  and using all elements of state power to carry out activities that are a direct threat to our national security and sovereignty, he said.
In order for a drug to be effective at the right places in the body, it helps if scientists can predict as accurately as possible how the molecules of that drug will interact with human cells. In a joint research project, scientists from Collaborative Research Centre 1423 at Leipzig University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai have succeeded in elucidating such a structure, namely that of the neuropeptide Y receptor Y2 with one of its ligands. This is the first time that a molecular blueprint for this receptor is available, which will enable the development of tailor-made new drugs, for example to treat epilepsy or cardiovascular diseases. The researchers' findings have now been published in Nature Communications.

The Y2 receptor plays an important role, especially in the peripheral nervous system and in the brain, as it is considered one of the "satiety receptors". It also plays a role in epilepsy as well as in cardiovascular diseases. If these diseases are to be treated with drugs that block the Y2 receptor, it is important to ensure that the drug can target this receptor precisely and exclusively, because some closely related receptors would have exactly the opposite effect. When developing novel drugs, it is therefore essential to obtain highly targeted compounds and to have precise knowledge of their molecular properties.

Researchers led by Professor Annette Beck-Sickinger and Dr Anette Kaiser at Leipzig University have succeeded in showing on the molecular level how substances can block the Y2 receptor. Working with their colleagues in Shanghai, they were able to explain the crystal structure with a bound ligand, validate it by means of numerous biochemical investigations, and transfer it to other systems. The new study also reveals that Y2 receptor blockers bind differently than comparable molecules at the closely related Y1 subtype. This will facilitate further knowledge-based development of selective compounds at both receptors.

The investigation of this receptor family with its endogenous ligands as well as other clinically relevant compounds is one focus of Collaborative Research Centre 1423. The CRC 1423 is a research project being funded for four years by the German Research Foundation (DFG), in which four funding institutions are involved: Leipzig University, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Charite - Universitatsmedizin Berlin and the Max Delbruck Center for Molecular Medicine. Researchers from these institutions with backgrounds in biochemistry, biomedicine and computational science are collaborating on an interdisciplinary basis to gain a comprehensive understanding of the effects of structural dynamics on the function of G protein-coupled receptors. The Collaborative Research Centre comprises a total of 19 sub-projects.

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Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 10)  The National Historical Commission of the Philippines on Wednesday released a statement on rapper EZ Mil's song "Panalo," which has been criticized for its controversial lyrics on the death of Philippine hero Lapu-Lapu.

While it said it welcomes new songs that inform Filipinos of their history, the agency stressed the importance of accuracy.

"Let us not compromise our history and be conscious of our accountability on what we are conveying to our people," it said. "Lapu-lapu was definitely not killed in the Battle of Mactan. The battle was a victory of our ancestors led by him."

The NHCP was referring to the line in the rapper's song, which said, "Pinugutan si Lapu sa Mactan [Lapu-Lapu was beheaded in Mactan]."

Lapu-Lapu City Mayor Junard Chan earlier said he wants to declare the rapper persona non grata over the lyrics, which he called "a big insult" to locals. "He mocked the person we consider a hero," he said. The Victory at Mactan is approaching its 500th anniversary this April 27.

Following the backlash, Mil apologized for the inaccuracy and said it was done for rhyming purposes. The viral video of his song performance, which was uploaded on YouTube, has already garnered over 31 million views.
An unsuspecting traditional healer was recently arrested in a foiled bid to sell python skin valued at US$2 000 to Zimbabwe Parks Authority (ZimParks) rangers, who posed as potential buyers.

Matirikisi Dzomba (51) of Gweshe 2 village in Siakobvu was last week arraigned before Chinhoyi magistrate, Tendai Banda facing charges of contravening part of the Parks and Wildlife Act, related to the "possession of a python skin without a permit."

Dzomba pleaded guilty and was remanded in custody to 26 March 2021 when the regional court, which has jurisdiction over such matters, is expected to hand down sentence.

The python skin, measuring 2,48 metres, is valued at US$2 000, according to police evaluators.

The state led by Tinoziva Chipupuri told the court that on 2 February 2021 at Gweshe 2 village under Chief Nebiri in Siakobvu, and at around 5:30 pm, ZimParks ranger Herbert Makiyi got a tip off the accused had a python skin at his homestead.

Makiyi teamed up with Tazvishaya Dhinhiwe whom he works with at the Mutasadonha National Park and approached Dzomba before misrepresenting they wanted to buy to python skin.

An unsuspecting Dzomba went into his house and emerged with a small sack containing the contraband, leading to his immediate arrest.

Illegal possession of endangered animal species or their trophies attracts a mandatory custodial nine-year jail term.
(Sharecast News) - London stocks were in the black by midday on Wednesday as investors sifted through results from the likes of Smurfit Kappa and Dunelm, but gains were unspectacular as investors awaited fresh catalysts.

The FTSE 100 was ahead 0.3% at 6,553.67, while sterling was 0.2% firmer against the dollar at 1.3841.



IG market analyst Joshua Mahony said markets appear to be set for another day of contemplation, with the gains of last week giving way to a period of consolidation.



"Despite notable market drivers in the form of the US stimulus plans and ongoing coronavirus vaccination programme, the gains seen last week appear to have captured much of that initial improvement in sentiment. Instead we appear to be in a holding pattern as markets await a breakthrough in stimulus talks.



"Unfortunately the focus in Washington has shifted away from stimulus, with politicians instead sidetracked by the Trump impeachment trial that has kicked off this week. From a US perspective, that hope for a belated stimulus boost does provide expectations of further outperformance, with US markets pushing into record highs of late. That comes despite Biden's agreement to restrict stimulus payments for higher earning individuals. An appearance from Jerome Powell this evening should strike a fine balance between highlighting the improving economic picture and refraining from any tones that would indicate impending monetary tightening."



In equity markets, miners were the standout gainers, with Glencore, Anglo American, Rio and BHP all higher.



Smurfit Kappa advanced after the packaging company reported posted forecast-beating final earnings, boosted by strong demand in Europe and America. Rival DS Smith also gained.



Dunelm rallied as the homewares retailer resumed dividend payments and posted a rise in first-half profits driven by higher online sales as tougher Covid-19 lockdown restrictions closed its stores.



On the downside, online supermarket Ocado was under the cosh as Barclays reiterated its 'underweight' rating on the stock. The bank said it was disappointed and surprised that "2020 did not see any new deals inked".



Watches of Switzerland fell private equity firm after Apollo Global Management placed 22m shares in the company.



Redrow fell even as the housebuilder reinstated dividends and posted an 11% rise in first-half profit, as customers rushed to buy homes before the end of government incentives next month. Berkeley, Barratt Developments, Crest Nicholson and Vistry were also trading lower.



Elsewhere, JD Sports was knocked lower by a rating downgrade at Exane.



Market Movers



FTSE 100 (UKX) 6,553.67 0.34%

FTSE 250 (MCX) 21,067.89 -0.21%

techMARK (TASX) 4,139.40 -0.25%



FTSE 100 - Risers



Glencore (GLEN) 272.00p 3.26%

Smurfit Kappa Group (SKG) 3,646.00p 2.99%

Anglo American (AAL) 2,664.50p 2.88%

Rio Tinto (RIO) 5,921.00p 2.62%

Standard Chartered (STAN) 466.30p 2.26%

Phoenix Group Holdings (PHNX) 714.00p 2.23%

Aviva (AV.) 347.50p 1.70%

BHP Group (BHP) 2,116.50p 1.68%

Smith (DS) (SMDS) 368.90p 1.65%

Prudential (PRU) 1,291.50p 1.61%



FTSE 100 - Fallers



Ocado Group (OCDO) 2,614.00p -3.19%

Barratt Developments (BDEV) 680.80p -2.41%

International Consolidated Airlines Group SA (CDI) (IAG) 150.30p -2.34%

Compass Group (CPG) 1,440.00p -1.97%

Flutter Entertainment (FLTR) 13,960.00p -1.69%

BP (BP.) 256.10p -1.39%

Berkeley Group Holdings (The) (BKG) 4,333.00p -1.34%

JD Sports Fashion (JD.) 799.80p -1.16%

Taylor Wimpey (TW.) 164.05p -1.12%

Diageo (DGE) 2,979.50p -1.05%



FTSE 250 - Risers



Dunelm Group (DNLM) 1,326.00p 5.15%

Petropavlovsk (POG) 28.45p 3.45%

Centrica (CNA) 54.54p 2.79%

Greencore Group (GNC) 130.40p 2.60%

Fidelity China Special Situations (FCSS) 482.00p 2.44%

Clarkson (CKN) 2,725.00p 2.25%

Just Group (JUST) 86.30p 2.01%

Petrofac Ltd. (PFC) 122.75p 1.91%

Biffa (BIFF) 240.50p 1.91%

IG Group Holdings (IGG) 764.50p 1.87%



FTSE 250 - Fallers



Crest Nicholson Holdings (CRST) 317.00p -4.58%

Micro Focus International (MCRO) 506.20p -3.40%

Countryside Properties (CSP) 457.80p -3.21%

FirstGroup (FGP) 78.40p -3.09%

Bellway (BWY) 3,029.00p -2.92%

Vistry Group (VTY) 899.00p -2.76%

Lancashire Holdings Limited (LRE) 726.00p -2.55%

C&C Group (CCR) 244.50p -2.40%

AO World (AO.) 306.00p -2.24%

Helios Towers (HTWS) 166.60p -2.23%
Prospect New Orleans, the contemporary art triennial, will receive $2.5 million in grants from the Mellon Foundation and the Open Society Foundation to support work about monuments in its Prospect.5 expo.

"It's transformative for Prospect," says executive director Nick Stillman.

The grants will allow the organization to present public art more regularly.

"For Prospect to be successful, it has to be visible and active all the time," Stillman says.

Prospect.5 originally was slated to open in October 2020 but was postponed due to the pandemic. It will open Oct. 23 and run through January 2022.

The Mellon Foundation's Monuments Project is providing $2 million. The Open Society Foundation is providing $500,000.

Mellon announced in October 2020 that the foundation would commit $250 million to its Monuments Project over five years. Grants support construction of new monuments, memorials and storytelling spaces; contextualizing existing monuments through installations, research and education; and relocation of existing monuments and memorials.

The grants support commissioned work by seven artists in Prospect.5. New York artist Glenn Ligon is creating neon light installations incorporating the dates of removal of monuments to the Confederacy in New Orleans, says Stillman. Anastasia Pelias is creating a monument to Greek heritage in a park on Esplanade Avenue near Bayou St. John. Other work being supported by the grant is by Adriana Corral, EJ Hill, Simone Leigh, Dave McKenzie and Nari Ward.

Prospect.5 is curated by Naima J. Keith and Diana Nawi and titled "Yesterday We Said Tomorrow." Its theme is about reconciling history. The pandemic delayed the opening but there are no changes from the original roster of 51 artists from around the world. Art will be displayed at venues across the city and in public art installations. A full list of venues and locations has not been announced.

Prospect.5, New Orleans' international art triennial, will open Oct. 23, 2021 Prospect.5, the next edition of New Orleans' international art triennial, has been postponed. The expo was scheduled to open in October. It wi

The Mellon grant is the single largest grant the arts organization has received in its 13 year history, Stillman says.

The original Prospect New Orleans expo was the brainchild of Dan Cameron, who curated the first iteration as a response to Hurricane Katrina. Prospect.1 opened in fall 2008 and featured more than 80 artists and many site-specific installations and was well reviewed. It spent roughly $4.3 million, but subsequent Prospect expos have been smaller in scale, with fewer artists and locations.

Originally, Prospect was meant to be a biennial, but has adjusted to a triennial schedule. With the new grants, Prospect also will present art in public spaces in 2022 after Prospect.5 closes, says Stillman.

Prospect New Orleans was one of five recipients of Monuments Project grants. The others are the Emmett Till Interpretive Center in Mississippi, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the MASS Design Gropu in Boston for its Public Memory and Memorial Lab and the Social and Public Art Resource Center in Los Angeles for an ongoing mural project.
(Alliance News) - The World Health Organization on Wednesday offered its backing to the coronavirus vaccine made by embattled drug company AstraZeneca PLC, as one of its experts exchanged barbs with the US government over a controversial mission to probe the pandemic's origins in China.

The WHO said AstraZeneca's jabs could be used on people aged over 65 and also in places where new variants of Covid-19 are circulating, following recent questions over the efficacy of the British-Swedish firm's vaccine.

And there was further good news for AstraZeneca as the company announced it would work with German firm IDT Biologika to produce more vaccines for Europe, where shortages of doses have sparked a bitter dispute with the EU.A

Covid-19 has killed more than 2.3 million people since emerging in China in late 2019, exerting a firm grip over people's lives across the world with lockdowns, curfews and business closures.

Germany looked set to prolong its restrictions as the EU passed 500,000 deaths on Wednesday, with many EU countries struggling to get momentum behind their vaccine rollouts.A

The EU's top official admitted in a public forum for the first time that the bloc had botched some aspects of its vaccine strategy.A

"We were late to authorise. We were too optimistic when it came to massive production," European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen told the European Parliament.A

Even Russia, widely hailed for its homegrown Sputnik V jab, had only managed to fully vaccinate just over two million, two months into its programme.A

Questions over the handling of the initial outbreak have meanwhile sparked an intense diplomatic row between Washington and Beijing.A

A joint Chinese-WHO mission to the ground zero city of Wuhan wrapped up on Tuesday without any concrete answers, and US officials said they would not accept the findings before verification with their own intelligence.A

The jibe prompted WHO team member Peter Daszak to tweet: "Please don't rely too much on US intel: increasingly disengaged under Trump & frankly wrong on many aspects."A

Hundreds of millions of people are still living under severe restrictions including curfews and full lockdowns, and many businesses are beginning to take a more strident tone with their governments.A

"We are suffocating," read a banner at a rally in Greece's capital Athens, where hundreds of restaurant owners dropped their keys in a box to give to the government as a symbol of their despondency.A

Greece, which has been under severe restrictions since late last year, will face an even tighter regime from Thursday as Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis warned of a third wave.A

Frustrations were also boiling over in Israel, where security forces and ultra-orthodox Jews clashed in the latest in a series of protests against coronavirus restrictions.

"Stop the harassment of religion on health grounds," read one banner, highlighting that curbs are being lifted more slowly in ultra-orthodox districts because of higher infection rates.A

Israel has so far given more than 40% of its population at least one vaccine shot, leaving other parts of the world to play catch-up.A

Peru on Tuesday began administering shots developed by China's Sinopharm, while Argentina approved the Indian-made version of the AstraZeneca vaccine.A

South Korea on Wednesday also authorised the AstraZeneca shot for people aged 18 and above, including over-65s.A

Japan will start vaccinations next week a most likely the Pfizer/BioNTech jab a but it is scrambling to secure suitable syringes so doses are not wasted.

AstraZeneca has faced a tough few weeks, with European leaders casting doubt on the efficacy of its jabs for over-65s and a small South African study suggesting it performed badly against their local strain.A

Before Wednesday's announcements from the WHO, South African officials said they were considering selling or swapping the jabs they had already bought, opting to stock up on another vaccine made by rival Johnson & Johnson.

"There are already countries who are asking to sell it to them," said Health Minister Zweli Mkhize.

As vaccine rollouts rumble on, governments still face the thorny issue of persuading restless populations to abide by social-distancing rules a a particular problem this weekend when couples will look for a way to mark Valentine's Day on Sunday.

Thailand's capital Bangkok has banned people from getting married on the day, usually a popular time for weddings.

In Brussels, entrepreneurs are trying to enable some kind of celebration, with hotels converting rooms into private dining salons for two.A

"We're over the moon about being here tonight, just like in a restaurant," said Marine Deroo, a 34-year-old who tried out the concept ahead of Valentine's Day.A

source: AFP

Copyright 2021 Alliance News Limited. All Rights Reserved.
Emissions from ozone-destroying chemicals used in fridges, insulation and industry have fallen rapidly after a spike in 2018, according to a new study.

An international team of scientists, including the University of Bristol, examined data on atmospheric levels of the chemical and found a 'dramatic drop in emissions'.

Two studies published in Nature show levels of CFC-11 emissions, one of the many chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) chemicals once widely used in refrigerators and insulating foams, are in decline around the world, giving hope for ozone recovery efforts.

This comes less than two years after the exposure of the chemical's resurgence in the wake of suspected rogue production, scientists say.

Dr Luke Western, from the University of Bristol, said if the emissions had stayed at the higher levels there could be a delay, possibly of many years, in ozone recovery.

An image of Gosan measurement station - part of the AGAGE monitoring network - on Jeju Island in South Korea. Measurements from this station were used in the study to quantify emissions from China

Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs): Ozone-depleting chemicals Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are nontoxic, nonflammable chemicals containing atoms of carbon, chlorine, and fluorine. They are used in the manufacture of aerosol sprays, blowing agents for foams and packing materials, as solvents, and as refrigerants. CFCs are classified as halocarbons, a class of compounds that contain atoms of carbon and halogen atoms. Individual CFC molecules are labelled with a unique numbering system. For example, the CFC number of 11 indicates the number of atoms of carbon, hydrogen, fluorine, and chlorine. Whereas CFCs are safe to use in most applications and are inert in the lower atmosphere, they do undergo significant reaction in the upper atmosphere or stratosphere where they cause damage. Advertisement

The production of CFC-11 was banned globally in 2010 as part of the Montreal Protocol, a treaty that mandated the phasing out of ozone-depleting substances.

Emissions of the chemical should have fallen from that point, but in 2018 scientists noticed a jump from about 2014 - prompting concern production had resumed.

This was concerning, as CFC-11 is a potent greenhouse gas, with higher emission levels contributing to climate change at levels similar to CO2 from a megacity.

An international atmospheric monitoring team, led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), spotted the original spike in emissions.

Dr Steve Montzka, from NOAA, said: 'We noticed the concentration of CFC-11 had declined more slowly since 2013 than predicted.'

Adding that this clearly indicating an upturn in emissions, and 'the results suggested that some of the increase was from eastern Asia.'

The findings were confirmed by the Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment (AGAGE), an independent global measurement network.

Professor Ron Prinn, from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said: 'The global data clearly suggested new emissions. The question was where exactly?

'The answer lay in the measurements at AGAGE and affiliate monitoring stations that detect polluted air from nearby regions.

'Using data from Korean and Japanese stations, it appeared around half of the increase in global emissions originated from parts of eastern China.'

Emissions of CFC-11 increased substantially in north-east China between 2008-2012 and 2014-2017, and fell back to these earlier levels in 2019. Emissions are concentrated in the Chinese provinces of Shandong and Hebe

Unexpected emissions of banned gases from China found in 2018 could have resulted in a delay in the recovery of the hole in the ozone layer above the Antarctic  seen here in 2006, at its largest  by almost 20 years if the emissions hadn't gone into decline again

Environmental campaigners later exposed usage of CFC-11 in the manufacture of insulating foams in China, with Chinese authorities confirming some banned substances were identified during factory inspections - in small quantities.

According to their reports, arrests, material seizures and the demolition of production facilities then followed.

Scientific teams continued to closely monitor atmospheric levels and the latest evidence, reported in the two papers, indicates a dramatic decline in emissions.

Professor Matt Rigby, from the University of Bristol, was involved in efforts to quantify how emissions had changed at regional scales.

To do this they compared the pollution enhancements observed in the Korean and Japanese measurement data to computer models simulating how CFC-11 is transported through the atmosphere.

'With the global data, we used another type of model that quantified the emissions change required to match the observed global CFC-11 concentration trends,' he said.

The ozone layer is important to life as it acts like a shield, filtering out the Sun's harmful ultraviolet rays before they reach the Earth's surface  but it can be broken down by the release of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which are used as refrigerants and foaming agents

'At both scales, the findings were striking; emissions had dropped by thousands of tonnes per year between 2017 and 2019.

'In fact, we estimate this recent decline is comparable or even greater than the original increase, which is a remarkable turnaround.'

But Prof Rigby warned it is likely that only part of the total CFC-11 that was made has been released to the atmosphere so far.

'The rest may still be sitting in foams in buildings and appliances and will seep out into the air over the coming decades,' he said.

Scientists are now calling for enhanced international efforts to trace any future emitting regions.

Since the estimated eastern Chinese CFC-11 emissions could not fully account for the inferred global emissions, there are calls to enhance international efforts to track and trace any future emitting regions.

Professor Ray Weiss, from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, a Principal Investigator in AGAGE, said steps are now being taken globally to 'identify, locate and quantify any future unexpected emissions of controlled substances.'

To do this nations are expanding the coverage of atmospheric measurements in key regions of the globe.

The findings have been published in the journal Nature.
Spearman Police Department Makes Arrests After Chase On January 20, 2021, Sgt. Gary Garrett of the Spearman Police Department received information that the Hanford County Sheriffs office was looking for an individual with a possible runaway from Wise County, Texas, and noticed a vehicle parked in the rear parking lot of Pizza Hut matching that description.



Sgt. Garrett started to investigate the suspicious vehicle, but on approach, the vehicle sped away and a pursuit was initiated. Upon further information, the vehicle was reported stolen out of Wise County, Texas.



The pursuit headed southbound on Highway 207 at a high rate of speed. Sgt. Garrett, along with Hansford County Sheriffs Office, pursued the vehicle into Hutchinson County where a Texas DPS Trooper and Deputies from Hutchinson County entered into the pursuit.



The pursuit turned northbound on Highway 136 heading back to Morse and Gruver at high rates of speed. At one point in the pursuit, the vehicle started to lose the right rear tire, causing the vehicle to slow to speeds of 50mph.



The driver turned into Palo Duro feedyard, still on the rim, and made his way through the feed alleys, and finally came to a stop, after crashing into a tailwater pit. The driver and two passengers evaded on foot into a field in the northeast area of the Feedyard. Law Enforcement apprehended a male subject and two females on the scene.



The male driver was later identified as Robert Dylan Hefner. Subject Hefner was arrested and booked into the Hansford County Jail for Unauthorized Use of a Motor Vehicle and Evading Arrest and/or Detention with a Motor Vehicle. At the time of this writing, his bond has been set at $40,000.



Upon further investigation, a 14-year-old runaway from Wise County was detained along with an adult female, Tiffany Dillingham, from Amarillo. No charges at this time have been filed for either of the two females. Both of the females were released to their parents for a safe return home.

I would like to thank Hansford County and Hutchinson County Sheriffs Offices and their deputies, along with the Texas Department of Public Safety for their assistance in this incident.



Together we will make a difference!!!



Chief Lance A. Swan

Spearman Police Department



From HCSHO:



Wednesday night at around 11:00 p.m. Spearman police attempted to make a traffic stop on a reported stolen vehicle.



A pursuit began with the white Ford south on HWY 207 into Hutchinson County.



The white Ford then turned north on to HWY 136 back toward Morse. The white Ford blew a tire near HWY 136 and FM 520 and drove into Palo Duro Feeders facility where it bogged down and came to a halt.



The driver Robert Dylan Hefner was arrested for evading detention in a motor vehicle and outstanding Wise County warrant for Unauthorized Use of a Motor Vehicle.



A 14 female runaway was a passenger and was detained along with another adult female passenger Tifany Dillingham.



Gruver EMS was notified and transported the two females to Hansford County Hospital where they were treated for minor injuries.



Dillingham was released from the Hospital with no charges. Our deputy stayed with the juvenile at the Hospital until her parents arrived from Wise County to take custody of her.



Another great job by rural law enforcement working together!



Robert Mahaffee

Hansford County Sheriff




Tallinn, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 10th Feb, 2021 ) :Could a QR code open up the world? That is the question in Estonia as it takes a lead in global efforts to develop digital vaccine passports.

The small, tech-savvy Baltic EU member state is working on a pilot project with the World Health Organization on how globally recognised electronic vaccine certificates might work.

Marten Kaevats, an adviser to the Estonian government on technology, said the Primary issue for the project so far is to ensure that anyone checking the certificate can "trust the source".

"Both the architecture and the solution should work both in Eritrea and Singapore," Kaevats said.

While Estonia already has its own system of electronic health records with vaccine information, most countries in the world do not and there is no mutual recognition across borders.

There are now many digital vaccine passport initiatives cropping up globally that are raising urgent questions about privacy and human rights.

The WHO is also moving cautiously and for the moment does not recommend vaccination passports for travel as it does not see them as sufficient guarantee of protection from transmission.

Nevertheless, digital vaccine certificates are an attractive prospect, particularly for pandemic-hit businesses such as airlines.

Emirates and Etihad, two of the middle East's biggest airlines, announced last month that they would be trying out an application that allows pre-travel verification of vaccinations.

The agreement between the WHO and Estonia is to explore the possibility of a "smart yellow card" -- a digital version of an existing paper system to prove yellow fever vaccination.

Kaevats, who also advises the WHO on digital health issues, said it would be "impossible" to create a global digital ID in the coming months and that a mix of paper and electronic certificates was more likely.

He said the main focus at the moment was on elaborating global standards to develop "a single common solution for checking the existence of healthcare providers".

Estonia, a eurozone member of 1.3 million people, is known as a tech trailblazer and innovation testing ground, with Estonians helping pioneer the likes of Skype, e-voting and delivery robots.

Guardtime, an Estonian company, is now developing a system for cross-border recognition of electronic health records using blockchain.

The company is also working with Iceland, Hungary and Lithuania, as well as with AstraZeneca, the pharmaceutical giant producing one of the coronavirus vaccines.

Ain Aaviksoo, Guardtime's chief medical officer, said he expected the first countries to begin using digital vaccine certificates domestically "in the coming weeks".

Aaviksoo dismissed privacy concerns for the VaccineGuard system, pointing to the company's use of blockchain to ensure data protection.

Personal and health data remain in the original location and the system provides "cryptographic proof of the certificate and its issuance process and the authenticity of the vaccine," he said.

In response to similar concerns, the WHO-Estonia project is guided by the principles that people should be allowed to delete the data and tech companies should not be allowed to profit from the data that they handle.

But many are still worried about their implementation.

Ana Beduschi, an associate professor of law at the University of Exeter in Britain, said the introduction of vaccine passports "poses essential questions for the protection of data privacy and human rights".

"These passports build on sensitive personal health information to create a new distinction between individuals based on their health status," she said.

This differentiation "can then be used to determine the degree of freedoms and rights they may enjoy".

Before they are rolled out more widely, Beduschi said policymakers should ensure vaccines are universally available and explore alternatives for people who cannot be vaccinated such as pregnant women.

"It is not sufficient to develop technical solutions for the verification of people's health status," she said, adding that "the risks of deploying such technologies must be anticipated and mitigated as much as possible".
An Israeli company has, for the first time, unveiled a 3D bioprinted steak on Tuesday, February 9, and is now awaiting approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for mass production and release to the public.

First-Ever 3D Bioprinted Steak

In a report by The Washington Post, the rib-eye steak was created by Aleph Farms with the help of their new 3D bioprinting technology that uses live animal cells compared to the usual plant-based options, which would then release more premium whole cuts to the market and make them readily available to consumers.

If the Aleph Farms receive the go signal from the FDA, it would be a huge step for the entire lab-grown meat industry.

The new meat-making process was created in partnership with researchers from the Technion Israel Institute of Technology that would print living cells which would then be incubated on a plant-based matrix to grow.

It has a similar system to an animal's vascular system that would allow the cells to mature, with nutrients moving across thicker tissue.

That could help achieve the same structure of a traditional cow tissue before it gets cooked.

Read Also: GalSafe Pigs: FDA Gives First Approval on Genetically-Modified Pigs for Food, Drug Production, Transplants

Customizing Based on Consumer Preference

"It's not just proteins. It's a complex, emotional product," said Didier Toubia, the Aleph chief executive, to The Washington Post, further saying that the 3D bioprinted meat mirrors the same quality, texture, fatty marbling, and the flavor of a traditional rib-eye steak.

Furthermore, Toubia said that they could customize the steak based on their consumer's preference, for example, making it more or less tender.

"With cows, the breed has a role, but the quality comes from the feed. With our cultivated meat it is similar," the Aleph Farms boss said, according to the news outlet. "We control the cultivation process, and we can design meat specifically for a market, adjusting the amount of collagen and connective tissues and fat, to tailor meat to specific requirements. The idea is not to replace traditional agriculture but to build a second category of meat."

Toubia said that they are not aiming to be the first company to mass-produce such a product, especially as he knows that it will take some time to bring the product to the market.

The company has initially unveiled a thin-cut steak in 2018 but it did not involve 3D bioprinting.

Based on the report, Aleph Farms has invested $14 million on the development of the first steak they unleashed three years back and the bioprinted one on Tuesday.

Awaiting FDA Approval

The Israeli company is confident that they will be granted approval soon and they are aiming to reach the marketplace in the second half of 2022.

The FDA has already agreed to establish a joint regulatory framework for human foods made from culture cells from poultry and livestock in March 2019, with the agency overseeing the cell banks, while the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) overseeing the processing, labeling, and packaging of the products, according to the FSIS website.

In October 2020, the FDA requested information regarding the labeling of cell-cultured seafood, but until now, there are no announcements of the regulatory details.

Related Article: Human Consumption of Ouroboros Steaks Face Ethical Questions; Experts Insist It's Not Cannibalism

This article is owned by Tech Times

Written by: Nhx Tingson

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.

If you just let them go right back to the streets again, hanging with the same people, they are only going to go back to what they were doing. And we miss a valuable three weeks or so that can really do wonders in turning their lives around, he said.

SALT LAKE CITY, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Cimarron Healthcare Capital ("Cimarron"), a private equity firm focused on making investments into healthcare companies in the lower-middle market, today announced that it has completed the acquisition of CareAccess MSO ("CareAccess" or "the Company") together in partnership with the Company's management team. CareAccess is a Management Services Organization ("MSO") that partners with primary care physician groups in support of establishing and managing value-based risk contracts with Medicare Advantage ("MA") plans. CareAccess also offers a comprehensive specialty network to its physician group partners in support of delivering quality care across all specialties of medicine. Financial terms of the private transaction were not disclosed.

CareAccess was founded by current CEO Tammy Le, a 20+ year executive in the southern California managed care industry, having spent time at several IPAs, Medicare managed care plans, and independent hospitals. The Company is headquartered in Los Angeles County, California, and manages dozens of physician groups / IPAs with Medicare, Medi-Cal, and Commercial lives.

"From my first meeting with Cimarron, it was clear that their understanding of managed care and their partnership orientation would help me accomplish the lofty goals I have for CareAccess MSO," said Tammy Le, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of CareAccess MSO. "I have already felt the positive impact of their highly relevant relationships and healthcare expertise, and I couldn't be more pleased with what this investment means for our company and our clients."

"We are thrilled to partner with Tammy and the broader CareAccess team to further advance this exciting growth story and are grateful she's entrusted Cimarron with this partnership," said James Nadauld, Managing Partner of Cimarron.

The investment will be used to support the tremendous growth of the Company in response to the significant demand from physician groups and health plans looking to promote quality patient care through effective partnerships and alignment.

"Tammy and her team have built a terrific business at the forefront of managed care," said Nick Smith, a Principal at Cimarron. "CareAccess' commitment to service delivery, combined with its broad network of industry relationships, provides tremendous support and opportunity to its physician partners to thrive in a value-based care environment."

The rising cost of healthcare is a top concern for the US healthcare system. Over the last several years, there has been a shift from the traditional fee-for-service (FFS) model to value-based or pay-for-performance payment models, driven largely by Medicare Advantage plans proactively moving covered lives into risk-based models. Value-based care aligns incentives of patients, providers, and payors to increase and maintain the health of patients in the most cost-efficient manner. The result is increased patient health and satisfaction, lower overall healthcare spending, and higher profitability, work-life balance, and satisfaction for physicians.

It can be challenging for smaller, independent physician practices to manage their businesses while also delivering quality patient care. CareAccess provides all the support physicians need to establish and manage risk-based arrangements, break away from the demanding fee-for-service environment, and participate in the value that is created by delivering exceptional patient care.

About Cimarron

Cimarron Healthcare Capital is a Salt Lake City-based private equity firm focused on healthcare investments in the lower middle-market. Cimarron's experienced investment team and industry domain expertise aligns its investment strategy with its portfolio companies' growth and expansion needs, creating an ecosystem designed to maximize value. For more information, please visit: www.cimarronhc.com.

PRESS CONTACT:

Clay Andrus

[email protected]

SOURCE Cimarron Healthcare Capital

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Rochester, N.Y. -- A 25-year-old Rochester man has pleaded guilty to federal charges after being accused of hacking social media pages and then trading womens nude photos, according to the U.S. Attorneys Office for the Western District of New York.

Nicholas Faber pleaded guilty to computer fraud, computer intrusion causing damage and aggravated identity theft, federal prosecutors said. Faber hacked the social media accounts and stole nude images of dozens of women, according to federal prosecutors.

He graduated from SUNY Plattsburgh in 2017 and admitted that he worked with another man, Michael Fish, from 2017 to 2019 to access university email accounts of dozens of women, prosecutors said. Faber used information from those email accounts to access their social media accounts, according to prosecutors.

He then stole and traded the photographs and videos from the victims social media accounts, prosecutors said.

The university identified the compromised accounts, reviewed computer and server access logs, reset passwords and notified students of the hack, according to prosecutors.

Faber faces from two to 12 years in prison, a $250,000 fine and up to three years of post-imprisonment supervised release. He has also agreed to pay $35,430 in restitution to SUNY Plattsburgh.

Fish already pleaded guilty to computer hacking, aggravated identity theft and child pornography charges and will be sentenced later this year.

Got a tip, comment or story idea? Contact Chris Libonati via the Signal app for encrypted messaging at 585-290-0718, by phone at the same number, by email or on Twitter.
Mumbai: Four people were injured after a major fire broke out in a godown where LPG cylinders were kept in suburban Andheri on Wednesday morning, officials said.

The blaze erupted around 9.40 am due to a cylinder blast in the godown located on Yari Road in Versova area of the western suburb, they said.

Four people were injured and they taken to the nearby Cooper Hospital, a civic official said.

At least eight fire engines and seven water jetties were rushed to the spot, he said, adding that firefighting is still on.
NEW DELHI: With just weeks remaining for the start of COVID-19 vaccination for people above 50 years of age, the Union government has still not decided whether this priority group will receive the doses free of cost on the lines of healthcare and frontline workers who are currently being immunised under a nationwide programme.

Dr VK Paul, member (health) NITI Aayog and Chairperson, National Task Force For Covid-19, said on Wednesday that no decision regarding free vaccination to people above 50 years of age - who fall in the third priority group of vaccination -- has been made by the Centre so far. He added that meetings with state heads would follow soon to explore the possibility of free vaccination of the subset.

"We have already provided vaccines free to all the healthcare and frontline workers. For people above 50 years of age, meetings between the states and union would be conducted to discuss the sharing of expenditure. However, no decision is made so far," Paul said.

The union government has prioritised 30 crore Indian population to receive Covid vaccines. The government has divided this vast range into three groups which include 1 crore of healthcare workers, 2 crore frontline workers and remaining 27 crores of the general population who are above 50 years of age and more susceptible to be exposed to the Covid-19.

The government is providing free vaccines to health care and frontline workers which constitute nearly 3 crore of the total population of the country. Meanwhile, Paul also explained why the government prioritised people above 50 years of age to receive Covid-19 vaccines. He shared that of the total fatalities caused by Covid, 78% were those aged above 50 years.

"Once you reach the age of 50, you are vulnerable to develop 70% of the underlying medical conditions (diabetes, hypertension etc) and become more vulnerable to any kind of viral infection," Paul said.

"Since Covid-19 is also a viral disease and data suggests it brings more damage to people above 50 (years) and with co-morbidities, we took a public health approach and decided to prioritise this population fraction along with our Covid-19 warriors,`" he explained.

Asked whether the remaining population would also be prioritised, Paul said that an evaluation post immunisation of all the priority groups would be done to decide further. "Things like stockpiling of vaccines would be evaluated to account if people need further vaccinations and how," Paul added.

Amid all this, active COVID-19 cases in the country have dropped to 1.41 lakh comprising just 1.30 per cent of the total infections, while 33 states and UTs have reported less than 5000 active cases in a span of 24 hours, the Union Health Ministry said on Wednesday.

#CoronaVirusUpdates: Total #COVID19 Cases in India (as on February 10, 2021) 97.27% Cured/Discharged/Migrated (1,05,61,608)

1.30% Active cases (1,41,511)

1.43% Deaths (1,55,252) Total COVID-19 confirmed cases = Cured/Discharged/Migrated+Active cases+Deaths pic.twitter.com/N22xOZuCBo  #IndiaFightsCorona (@COVIDNewsByMIB) February 10, 2021

Daman and Diu and Dadra and Nagar Haveli currently have zero active cases. A total of 11,067 new daily cases have been recorded in a span of 24 hours whereas 13,087 patients have recovered during the same period. It has led to a net decline of 2,114 cases from the total active caseload, the Health Ministry highlighted.

Kerala and Maharashtra account for 71 per cent of the total active cases of the country, the Ministry said.

Nineteen states and UTs have not reported any death in a span of 24 hours. These are Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, Rajasthan, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, J&K (UT), Jharkhand, Puducherry, Manipur, Nagaland, Lakshadweep, Meghalaya, Sikkim, A&N Islands, Ladakh (UT), Mizoram, Arunachal Pradesh, Tripura and Daman and Diu and Dadar and Nagar Haveli.

India's cumulative recoveries have surged to 1,05,61,608, it added.

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House Energy and Commerce Chairman Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) listens during a press conference as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) speaks, in Washington on Nov. 6, 2020. (Al Drago/Getty Images)

House Democrats Unveil $1.9 Trillion COVID-19 Relief Package

House Democrats on Feb. 10 unveiled a portion of what is expected to coalesce into an approximately $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package as they work to push the bill through Congress without Republican support.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee released the parts of the bill that its lawmakers are working on, including additional funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

As new variants of the virus emerge, it is vital that Congress act quickly to provide relief to the American people and the resources and support needed to bring an end to the COVID-19 pandemic, Chairman Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) said in a statement.

This week, the Energy and Commerce Committee will take big and bold action to speed up the distribution of vaccines, expand national testing efforts, ramp up health services in underserved communities, and fund other critical needs during this terrible pandemic. There is simply no time to waste, and I look forward to marking up this urgently needed legislation later this week.

The portions total approximately $102 billion in new spending.

Proposed funding includes $7.5 billion for the CDC to prepare, promote, administer, monitor, and track vaccines against COVID-19, the disease caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus.

Lawmakers also want to give $46 billion to the Department of Health and Human Services to detect, diagnose, trace, and monitor COVID-19 infections, and other work related to mitigating the spread of the illness.

Another $7.6 billion would go to the department to establish a public health workforce including tracing contacts of those infected by COVID-19. A $6 billion portion would fund tribal health programs.

The committee plans to mark up the legislative recommendations on Feb. 11.

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) attends a House hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, on April 2, 2019. (Zach Gibson/Getty Images)

Pallone is forging ahead over opposition from Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), the ranking member of the committee. She wrote to him on Feb. 8 to ask him to pause the partisan sprint towards a reconciliation package for one week and begin earnest, bipartisan negotiations on further COVID relief with Energy and Commerce Republicans.

Democrats, with Bidens backing, are trying to push a package through Congress without Republican support by using a process known as budget reconciliation. The primary reason is to avoid the 60-vote threshold in the Senate; with reconciliation, Democrats can pass a package with no Republican votes if no Democrat senators defect.

Both chambers last week approved reconciliation, paving the way for passage of the package.

Now House committees are working on portions of the package related to their focuses. The House Oversight Committee said it supports sending $350 billion to state and local governments, including at least $500 million to every state. It will hold a markup hearing on Feb. 12.

The House Transportation and Infrastructure met Feb. 10 to discuss proposed portions of the package falling under its purview that total nearly $100 billion. Among the proposals: sending $8 billion to airports, apportioning $1.5 billion for Amtrak, and providing $50 billion to the Federal Emergency Management Agencys Disaster Relief Fund.

Senate committees are also working on drafting bill language, even as they spend hours each day holding an impeachment trial against former President Donald Trump.

By Asahel D. Church

The prospect that statewide elections might be replaced by regional districts has prompted a flurry of commentary in recent weeks. To the extent critics have been willing to move beyond the understandable charge of retaliation, good-faith considerations of the merits of the proposed amendment tend to focus on one significant objection: the destruction of judicial independence.

While gerrymandering is the boogie-man in the room, the real objection to HB38 is a manifestation of a long sought after and more lofty goal- the end of judicial elections altogether.

When most commentators today discuss judicial independence, what they have in mind is the federal model where insulation via lifetime tenure permits judges to make decisions based on the law, rather than popular opinion. While federal judges cannot be voted out of office, they are subject to intense scrutiny.

Internal mechanisms of precedent, appeals, and judicial codes of conduct are intended to further provide the necessary accountability. The rub is that its a paradigm that has never been fully embraced by Pennsylvania. Instead, faced with a need for a more independent judiciary, Pennsylvanians have consistently chosen elections.

Although each historical episode is unique in its own context, a common urban-rural divide runs through every Constitutional Convention since 1776. The revolutionary writers of Pennsylvanias first constitution rejected the idea of lifetime appointments for judges because it smacked of monarchy. Under the influence of the federal Constitutional Convention and the consolidation of state power by the aristocratic and Quaker old guard, the 1790 Constitution reverted to an appointive judiciary.

The negative impact is clear in the historical record. After years of loud complaints over the complete domination by the governor of a decidedly not independent judiciary, Pennsylvania reverted to popular elections, first in the Constitutional Convention of 1838 and then by a statewide ballot in 1850.

At the next Constitutional Convention in 1874, delegates concerned once again with the integrity of the judicial system fractured over a number of proposed changes, ultimately leaving elections stand. When merit selection cleared the 1968 Convention and was included on the 1969 primary ballot as a stand-alone question, Pennsylvanians rejected it narrowly.

HB38 doubles down on an elective judiciary and support for the idea not surprisingly breaks down along a familiar divide. At the 1873 Convention, rural delegates proposed judicial districts in order to ensure geographic diversity. More than 100 years later the same idea was again debated in 1990, largely for the same reason.

The creation of judicial districts is a powerful mechanism of accountability that potentially gives too much power to the electorate and under HB38 alone, to the legislature. Elections, particularly judicial elections, are increasingly less benign. There is reason to be concerned.

But even if the federal model of judicial independence can be applied to the state judiciary, increasing doubt about its own mythology makes it clear that independence and accountability are really two sides of the same coin. You cant have one without the other. Lawyers and law professors alike know that the judicial philosophy makes a difference and the American public is on to it, too.

Its no surprise that accountability seeking measures such as increasing the size of the Supreme Court and the end of life terms are being increasingly touted.

Theres plenty of reason to think creating judicial districts as a replacement for statewide judicial elections is a bad idea on its own, but its an idea no more likely to go away than merit selection. Any compromise either between separate amendments or as part of the merit selection amendment itself will have to contend with the interdependent values of independence and accountability.

At a time where we should all be concerned about the politicization of the judiciary, there just might be more than one cure.

Asahel D. Church is a Juris Doctorate candidate at Penn State Dickinson Law School.
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SANTA FE  The state Senate gave decisive approval Wednesday to a new COVID-19 pandemic relief package aimed at providing a lifeline to hard-hit New Mexico workers, restaurants and small businesses.

The trio of bills now moves on to the House, which is expected to act quickly so that Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham could give her final approval in the coming days.

One of the three bills approved Wednesday would authorize $600 rebates for New Mexico workers who make less than $15 per hour, as well as a four-month tax holiday for restaurants, breweries, food trucks and other dining establishments.

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Sen. Jacob Candelaria, D-Albuquerque, one of the co-sponsors of Senate Bill 1, said the legislation would bolster New Mexicos economy, while also helping New Mexico families that have struggled to make ends meet over the past 11 months.

This pandemic has not affected all communities in New Mexico equally, Candelaria said during floor debate on the relief legislation, which passed on a unanimous 42-0 vote.

The other two approved pieces of the recovery package, Senate Bills 2 and 3, would direct a state agency to temporarily waive the fees for liquor licenses and overhaul a small-business loan program, respectively.

Statewide, the pandemic and restrictions enacted in response to it in an attempt to slow the virus spread have inflicted a body blow on parts of New Mexicos economy.

Statewide, taxable gross receipts from the states hospitality and food industries were down by more than $445 million  or 21.8%  over the previous years levels through the first five months of the current budget year, according to state Taxation and Revenue Department data.

And bars had to pay liquor license fees last year, despite being closed for most of the year due to public health orders issued by Lujan Grishams administration.

Senate Minority Leader Greg Baca, R-Belen, voted in favor of all three bills, but cautioned the package would not be a cure-all for businesses impacted by virus-related closures.

We cannot pat ourselves on the back for curing an ailment that we ourselves helped nurture and create, Baca said.

Money to pay for the relief package  an estimated $185 million for the rebates and restaurant tax breaks alone  would come from the states cash-flush reserves. There is currently an estimated $2.5 billion in the those reserves  or about 35% of state spending.

More work to be done

The package being debated at the Roundhouse, which also includes other measures, would be the third round of targeted financial relief approved by state lawmakers since the COVID-19 pandemic hit New Mexico in March 2020.

Legislators passed two relief packages last year  in separate June and November special sessions  that earmarked state and federal funds for expanded unemployment benefits, cash assistance and small-business grants, among other programs.

However, the November package was approved over objections that it did not include hazard-pay bonuses to essential workers making less than $31,200 per year who have been at the front lines of the pandemic working at grocery stores, hospitals and other businesses.

Senate Majority Leader Peter Wirth, D-Santa Fe, said such workers would benefit from the new relief package, which would target the $600 rebates to New Mexicans who qualified for the states Working Families Tax Credit in 2020.

There is to some extent light at the end of the tunnel, Wirth said Tuesday, referring to the states improved coronavirus outlook. But, lets be clear, theres more work to be done.

Other senators were more blunt.

Our communities are hurting, said Sen. Cliff Pirtle, R-Roswell. Really (these bills) are a Band-Aid on a pretty large wound.

Governor asks for $475M

New Mexico business and restaurant groups have testified in favor of the pandemic relief package, though some restaurant owners have said that relaxing restrictions would have a bigger impact than enacting a tax holiday from March through June.

In addition, some senators raised questions during Wednesdays debate about why other businesses that have been shuttered under the states health orders  such as movie theaters and amusement parks  would not receive the same financial relief as bars.

Meanwhile, the bill overhauling the small-business loan program passed after four senators recused themselves from the final vote  Sens. George Munoz, D-Gallup; Pat Woods, R-Broadview; Joshua Sanchez, R-Bosque; and Joseph Cervantes, D-Las Cruces.

New Mexico has the nations only unsalaried Legislature, and several lawmakers benefitted from direct grants to small businesses and nonprofit organizations that were part of a previous relief package.

This years recovery bills will take effect immediately on being signed if they pass both legislative chambers with at least a two-thirds majority vote.

In all, Lujan Grisham has called for up to $475 million to be spent on one-time pandemic relief measures during the 60-day session that started last month, although she has left it up to lawmakers to determine which specific programs should be funded.

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA / ACCESSWIRE / February 10, 2021 / Clean Group, a cleaning company in Australia, is pleased to announce that they are offering 100 percent guaranteed cleaning services for commercial establishments in Sydney and neighbouring areas. This is in addition to the fact that they use environmentally friendly and state of the art cleaning equipment. Their cleaning is assured to be eco-friendly through the elimination of allergens and contaminants while ensuring that the carbon footprint of the property is minimised. Furthermore, they ensure that there would be no cross-contamination between different parts of the building by utilising colour-coded microfibre cloth and other cleaning equipment.

Suji Siv, CEO and owner of the Clean Group, says, "When you hire our professional cleaners, you don't have to worry about cleaners who show up late or not at all. There will be no smudged windows, dusty sills, unemptied rubbish bins, inadequately cleaned toilets, doors left unlocked, and more. This is because we offer a 100 percent guaranteed cleaning job for your commercial establishment. We have more than 20 years of experience, which means we have the knowledge and experience to ensure that your office or establishment will truly be cleaned and sanitised according to your expectations."

Clean Group has been providing quality cleaning services for local companies in a number of suburbs throughout Australia for over 20 years. Their professional cleaners have the skills and experience in cleaning different types of commercial establishments, such as care centres, hospitals, offices, malls, strata buildings, gyms, and schools. They have more than 50 full-time cleaners who can provide a comprehensive range of commercial cleaning services, including steam cleaning, carpet cleaning, end of lease cleaning, carpet cleaning, stain removal, and more.

There are various reasons why the Clean Group stands out among the different cleaning companies in Sydney and surrounding areas. These include the: virus protection they provide using virus shield and electrostatic disinfection; extremely high quality cleaning service that is backed by a 100 percent guarantee; fully insured coverage and bonded cleaning; provision of a work environment that becomes twice as clean compared to other cleaning services, while it is performed in half the time because of their use of state-of-the-art cleaning equipment; prevention of cross-contamination; provision of a one-stop service; provision of a dedicated account manager assigned to each customer; affordable prices; and use of eco-friendly and safe cleaning products that get rid of carbon footprint, allergens, and contaminants.

They use state of the art cleaning equipment like the HEPA multi-filtration vacuum cleaner, which can be used to ensure that indoor air quality is at an acceptable level. They also use the i-mop floor scrubber, which can provide a much faster and more thorough cleaning in contrast to the wet mop. The i-mop's twin counter-rotating brushes have been proven in tests to provide 90 percent cleaner floors and other similar surfaces. It also has colour-coded accessories to avoid cross-contamination. Its power and speed come from its suction technology that can get rid of the cleaning solution and any liquid that is found on the floor, in order to provide a dry and clean floor.

To ensure that they offer green cleaning services, they always make sure to focus on the: reduction of water usage during the clean-up operations; minimisation of the use of strong and harmful chemicals through the help of microfibre technology; prolonging the life of the cleaning equipment through effective and regular maintenance; and avoidance of cleaning products that contain phosphates and other dangerous chemicals.

The microfibres that they use are synthetic cloths constructed from nylon and polyester. Microfibre clothes have a net-like surface capable of trapping a lot of moisture and dirt, thus making them much more effective in getting rid of dust and dirt in surfaces. They are also much more absorbent, which means the need for water or cleaning solutions is greatly reduced.

Businesses that require the services of professional and high-quality commercial cleaners may want to visit the Clean Group website, or contact them on the phone or through email.

For more information about Clean Group, contact the company here:

Clean Group

Suji Siv

1300 141 946

sales@cleangroup.email

14 Carrington St, Sydney NSW 2000

SOURCE: Clean Group

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/629100/Clean-Group-Provides-100-Percent-Guaranteed-Commercial-Cleaning-Services
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A demand for a massive amount of data from nine technology companies -- including Facebook and Twitter -- has been made by the Federal Trade Commission in what could be a prelude to regulation on the handling data by the industry.

The demand made Monday by the FTC seeks to obtain information on how many users the companies have, how active the users are, what the companies know about them, how they got that information, and what steps the companies take to continue to engage users.

The agency also wants to know how social media and video streaming companies process the data they collect and what kinds of inferences they are able to make about user attributes, interest and interactions.

In addition, the commission is gathering information on the companies' business models and how they target children and families.

Firms targeted in the FTC's demand were Facebook, WhatsApp, Snap, Twitter, YouTube, ByteDance, Twitch, Reddit and Discord.

Data gathered from the demand will be used for a study that will "lift the hood on the social media and video streaming firms to carefully study their engines," the commission said in a statement.

"Despite their central role in our daily lives, the decisions that prominent online platforms make regarding consumers and consumer data remain shrouded in secrecy," it noted. "Critical questions about business models, algorithms, and data collection and use have gone unanswered."

"Policymakers and the public are in the dark about what social media and video streaming services do to capture and sell users' data and attention," it continued. "It is alarming that we still know so little about companies that know so much about us."

'Fishing Expedition'

Not all the members of the commission supported the data dump demand.

Commissioner Noah Joshua Phillips, in a dissenting opinion, called the move "an undisciplined foray into a wide variety of topics, some only tangentially related to the stated focus of this investigation."

"The actions undertaken today trade a real opportunity to use scarce government resources to advance public understanding of consumer data privacy practices -- critical to informing ongoing policy discussions in the United States and internationally -- for the appearance of action on a litany of gripes with technology companies," he maintained.

"The breadth of the inquiry, the tangential relationship of its parts, and the dissimilarity of the recipients combine to render these orders unlikely to produce the kind of information the public needs," he continued, "and certain to divert scarce Commission resources better directed elsewhere."

Julian Sanchez, a senior fellow with the Cato Institute, a public policy think tank in Washington, D.C. also questioned the wisdom of the FTC's move.

"The breadth of the information requests -- covering everything from data practices to advertising to business strategy -- from nine somewhat arbitrarily chosen companies with quite different business models gives this the feel of something of a fishing expedition," he told TechNewsWorld.

"Given that the FTC is primarily an enforcement agency, I don't know if this sort of open-ended data dive is the best use of their limited manpower," he continued.

"To my mind," he added, "it would make more sense for Congress to take the lead in reviewing industry privacy practices for the purpose of informing federal privacy policy, and let FTC focus on investigating specific violations."

Data Dump Needed

While the FTC's information demand is hefty and complex, it's necessary, countered Michelle Richardson, director of the Privacy & Data Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology, an online civil liberties and human rights advocacy organization in Washington, D.C.

"You need a lot of information if you're going to go ahead and either enforce against bad behavior or draft guidance for companies," she told TechNewsWorld.

"This seems like a first step that will eventually lead to closer scrutiny of the companies in the interest of consumers," she said.

"This can lead to a public-facing report that will inform consumers so they can make better choices," she continued.

"It will allow the FTC to be smarter in its own choices about bringing cases," she added, "and help it set a baseline of explicit questions to ask all companies."

Performing these kinds of studies based on data gathered from the industries it regulates is part of the FTC's job, maintained Rob Shavell, CEO and co-founder of Abine, a Boston-based maker of software for managing passwords, masking email and blocking ads and trackers.

"It's important to have this information so Congress can make decisions based on actual data, not company statements about their data, which can be misleading," he told TechNewsWorld.

Hidden Antitrust Agenda

However, French Caldwell, CFO of The Analyst Syndicate, an IT research and analysis group, asserted that the commission appears to be interested in more than privacy in its demand for data.

"They've gone beyond what is necessary for their stated purposes," he told TechNewsWorld. "The only reason I can see for that is that they're looking at antitrust, not just privacy."

Although consumers are supposed to be the beneficiaries of the FTC's data grab, they might not be the prime beneficiaries.

"The biggest beneficiaries of the information gathered by the FTC are going to be regulators," said Fred H. Cate, vice president for research at Indiana University.

"They'll be able to understand more about what's going on," he told TechNewsWorld. "That will determine if they pursue other measures or if they're satisfied with what they learn and stop there. In which case, consumers may not benefit much at all."

"I also think it's overblown that we, the public, would know what to do with information like this," he added. "If every social media company is doing the same aggressive things with data, am I really going to abandon one when I don't really have a choice of anywhere else to go to?"

Reality, Not Fear Mongering

Liz Miller, vice president and a principal analyst at Constellation Research, a technology research and advisory firm in Cupertino, Calif. maintained that the lack of focus of the study will reduce any potential benefits for consumers.

"Unlike previous FTC research initiatives -- say, for example, advertising practices of cigarette companies and the impact these branding initiatives have had on influencing children to smoke -- this current investigation doesn't seem to have a specific outcome in mind other than to say social media and technology are bad," she told TechNewsWorld.

"As someone who's career has largely centered on research, I am all for true investigations into the impact of technology -- in this case, social media on community," she said, "but the scope of this study is arbitrary."

Since most of the laws on the books governing technology are antiquated, Miller expects to see more investigations into the sector.

"My hope is," she said, "that we see more informed legislation based on the realities of today and tomorrow's consumption, development and business of digital rather than fear mongering over what those evil elites in big tech are doing to everyone."

John P. Mello Jr. has been an ECT News Network reporter since 2003. His areas of focus include cybersecurity, IT issues, privacy, e-commerce, social media, artificial intelligence, big data and consumer electronics. He has written and edited for numerous publications, including the Boston Business Journal, the Boston Phoenix, Megapixel.Net and Government Security News. Email John.


Grant Shapps has revealed his 89-year-old father is fighting for his life in a Covid ward after catching the virus in hospital.

The Transport Secretary said he hasn't been able to visit his father Tony Shapps for two months due to lockdown rules - but praised the 'incredible' NHS staff who he speaks to 'every day'.

Mr Shapps said his father has always been 'quite techy' so spoke to the family over the phone - but hasn't been able to do so in the past few days.

It is not clear why Tony - who ran an audio video equipment business with his wife Beryl until he retired aged 76 - was initially admitted to hospital.

Tony's hospital stay has reiterated the importance of adhering to the rules, Mr Shapps said - including 'not bringing in new variants of this virus which we may not be quite so ready to combat'.

His warning comes just days before travellers arriving into England from 'red list' countries will be forced to pay 1,750 to quarantine in a hotel for 10 days.

Grant Shapps (left) has revealed his 89-year-old father Tony is fighting for his life in a Covid ward after catching the virus in hospital

Mr Shapps told Good Morning Britain: 'My own father is on a Covid ward and has been for some time. We've not been able to visit my dad for two months now.'

He said it has been 'very difficult' and stressed that coronavirus 'gets everybody', including politicians.

Mr Shapps said his father (pictured) has always been 'quite techy' so spoke to the family over the phone - but hasn't been able to do so in the past few days

He added: '[Covid] wasn't the reason he went into hospital originally but he did pick it up. We're all very worried.'

Mr Shapps said he was able to speak to his father over the phone during his hospital stint, but added: 'Unfortunately in the last day or two we've not been getting contact from him in the same way.

'We're obviously speaking to the nurses when we can, but they're very, very pressed and this is the point, the hospitals are still under immense pressure.'

He said that 'one good piece of news' is his father was moved from a larger Covid ward to a smaller one one day prior, as the hospital reported a reduction in patients.

He added: 'But even now, even with that reduction, it's still higher than it was in the first peak so we are not out of this yet, we just need to adhere to lockdown and to the rules to stop more people ending up in those hospitals.'

Asked about carrying out the role of Cabinet minister while his father is unwell, he said: 'It is very difficult. I know that quite often people think that people in authority or power or in public service live a different, gilded life.

'The truth is, you live the same life as everyone else, and coronavirus, that gets everybody, got my dad.

'It wasn't the reason he went into hospital originally but unfortunately he did pick it up and we're all very worried.'

Mr Shapps said that he had been speaking to nurses about his father's condition when possible, but said staff were 'very, very pressed' and that hospitals remained under 'immense pressure'.

Mr Shapps told Good Morning Britain (pictured): 'My own father is on a Covid ward and has been for some time. We've not been able to visit my dad for two months now'

'I do just pay tribute to their extraordinary patience,' he added.

'Not only with the patients themselves, who sometimes can be quite distressed as my dad has been, but also just the relentless pressure of this and the hours that they have been working.'

Earlier today, Mr Shapps today warned people not to book any holidays at home or abroad yet as ministers face a major backlash over threatening to jail travellers for 10 years if they lie about having been to 'red list' countries.

The Transport Secretary made clear there is no guarantee that breaks will be possible at all this year, saying he did not want to 'raise people's hopes'.

Matt Hancock yesterday unveiled the toughest crackdown on border measures to prevent strains of coronavirus entering the UK from 33 'red list,' countries, including a 10-year term for those who lie about passing through the countries

The grim comments came amid anger at the extreme border crackdown unveiled by Matt Hancock yesterday in an effort to stop mutant coronavirus strains.

Former Supreme Court justice Lord Sumption branded the mooted maximum 10-year prison term for travellers who try to hide their movements 'inhumane' - pointing out it is longer than for some sex offences.

And ex-Attorney General Dominic Grieve said courts would never impose the 10-year sentence, which he branded 'draconian'.

However, Mr Shapps insisted the move was 'appropriate'.

'It's up to 10 years, it's a tariff, it's not necessarily how long somebody would go to prison for,' he told BBC Breakfast.

'But I do think it is serious if people put others in danger by deliberately misleading and saying that you weren't in Brazil or South Africa, or one of the red list countries, which as you say does include Portugal.

'But I think the British public would expect pretty strong action because we're not talking now just about, 'oh there's a lot of coronavirus in that country and you might bring some more of it back when we already have plenty of it here'.

'What we're talking about now are the mutations, the variants, and that is a different matter, because we don't want to be in a situation where we later on discover that there's a problem with vaccines.'

Lord Sumption has blasted the Government's measures, saying ministers were 'unfit for office,' and suggesting moving Mr Hancock to another department would do 'him, and us, a power of good'

Asked during a round of interviews this morning what the prospects were for the restrictions easing in time for the summer, Mr Shapps said: 'It is a fact that right now it is illegal to leave your home to go on holiday

'At the moment that is off the cards...

'I don't want to unnecessarily raise people's hopes. The truth is we just don't know how the virus will respond both to the vaccines and how people will respond...'

Mr Shapps told Sky News: 'I can't give you a definitive will there or won't there be the opportunity to take holidays this next year, either at home or abroad.'

He added: 'I don't know what the situation will be by the middle of the summer. Nobody can tell from the point where we sit right now.'

Mr Shapps also told the BBC: 'You shouldn't be booking holidays right now, either internationally or domestically'

Lord Sumption's article in The Telegraph suggested ministers who only considered the positives of the term, without considering the cons, are 'unfit to hold office'.

He then suggested Mr Hancock should lose his position as Health Secretary, which he has held since July 2018.

Lord Sumption said: 'A spell in another department which has to cope with the collateral damage, would do him, and us, a power of good. Try Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, or perhaps Culture, Media and Sport.'

In a comment piece published yesterday, Lord Sumption wrote: 'Does Mr Hancock really think that non-disclosure of a visit to Portugal is worse than the large number of violent firearms offences or sexual offences involving minors, for which the maximum is seven years?'

The measures come amid continuing concerns over home-grown coronavirus strains as scientists advising the Government added one detected in Bristol to its 'variant of concern' list.

Former attorney general Dominic Grieve also told the paper: 'The maximum sentence of 10 years for what is effectively a regulatory breach sounds, in the circumstances, unless it can be justified, extraordinarily high.'

Speaking on Radio 4's Today programme he added: 'The reality is that nobody would get such a sentence anyway, the courts are simply not going to impose it.

'You certainly shouldn't do it, it's not however proportionate to suggest that someone should be sent to prison for 10 years.

'You only have to look at the sort of offences that attract a maximum of 10 years, it's a mistake of the government to suggest something which is not going to happen.

'My view is that good government is about proportionality and sounding off with suggestions of draconian and disproportionate sentences for an offence is a mistake.

'The fact is I have no doubt that if this is properly tailored a person who does this might receive a custodial sentence and if somebody who is normally a law abiding individual, that will doubtless do them a lot of damage and act as an adequate deterrent.'

Mr Grieve added: 'It needs to be explained plainly and simply to people rather than exaggerated in this fashion.'

Mr Hancock had earlier told MPs: 'I make no apologies for the strength of these measures, because we're dealing with one of the strongest threats to our public health that we've faced as a nation.'

He also confirmed a new 'enhanced testing' regime for all international travellers, with two tests required during the quarantine process from Monday.

Those who fail to take a test face a 1,000 fine, followed by a 2,000 penalty and an extension to their quarantine period, to 14 days, if they miss the second test.

Mr Hancock indicated the quarantine measures might be in place until the autumn if vaccine booster jabs are needed in response to coronavirus variants.

He told the Commons that 16 hotels have been contracted to provide 4,600 rooms for the quarantine programme, which begins on Monday.

The Scottish Government said this approach is 'not sufficient' so it is requiring all international travellers arriving into Scotland to stay in a quarantine hotel.

No international flights are currently operating to Wales or Northern Ireland, but Stormont's chief medical officer Dr Michael McBride said it is 'crucially important' for the nations to work together to stall the arrival of new and concerning strains from abroad.

Shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth claimed the public wants the Government to 'go further' on border measures.

Mr Hancock indicated the quarantine measures might be in place until the autumn if vaccine booster jabs are needed in response to coronavirus variants

Six in ten Britons say they 'could cope well' with ten days in hotel quarantine From Monday, UK residents returning from 33 countries will have to isolate for 10 days in hotels. Now, a YouGov poll has revealed that most Britons think they'd cope well with the quarantine. Forty four percent think they would cope fairly well in this situation, while a further 16% think they would cope very well A third (34%) say they would either not cope very well (19%) or not well at all (15%) Women (37%) are slightly more likely than men (31%) to say they wouldn't cope well in hotel quarantine Advertisement

'Our first line of defence is surely to do everything we can to stop (new variants) arising in the first place,' the Labour MP said.

'That means securing our borders to isolate new variants as they come in. He's announced a detailed package today but he hasn't announced comprehensive quarantine controls at the borders.'

Travel trade organisation Abta said requiring passengers to pay for multiple tests once leisure travel is restarted would have 'serious cost implications' and 'hurt demand'.

A spokeswoman urged ministers to 'develop a roadmap to reopen travel'.

Single adults will be charged 1,750 for a 10-day stay in a quarantine hotel, which covers the hotel, transfer and testing.

Meanwhile, the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag) added the variant detected in Bristol to its 'variant of concern' list.

A strain identified in Liverpool was also classed as a 'variant under investigation'.

Public Health England's Dr Susan Hopkins said the relatively slow rise in cases of the South African and Bristol variant is 'reassuring'.

But she warned that controlling them will become much more challenging as lockdown is relaxed.

Health officials said they had so far found 76 cases of the Bristol and Liverpool variants in the UK.

Both those variants contain the E484K mutation, a genetic change also found in both the South African and Brazilian variants, which experts suggest may be better at evading the human immune response.

The Department of Health and Social Care also said extra coronavirus testing will be carried out in the borough of Lambeth, south London, after a case of the South African variant was discovered.

In a more positive development, The Sun reported official data from tests on the Pfizer vaccine showed a single dose could reduce the risk of infection by around 65% in both older people and young adults after as little as two weeks.
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WAUKESHA, Wis., Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Generac Power Systems today announced plans to open a new manufacturing, assembly, and distribution operation in Trenton, South Carolina. The facility will support increased demand for home standby generators and associated energy technologies, and serve as a distribution center to customers in the southeast part of the United States, creating approximately 450 new jobs over the next two years.

"With significant demand for Generac products across the country, we're excited to expand our operational capacity to accommodate the increased interest in residential power systems," said Aaron Jagdfeld, President and CEO of Generac Power Systems, Inc. "The Trenton facility is strategically located closer to our customers in the southern part of the country and has access to a local labor force capable of helping us meet growing demand while strengthening our market-leading position."

The expansion of the company's manufacturing and distribution capacity begins with the acquisition and upgrade of a 421,000-square-foot manufacturing, distribution and office facility located at 30 Industrial Park Boulevard in Trenton, conveniently located between Charleston, South Carolina; Columbia, South Carolina; Charlotte, North Carolina; and Atlanta. The facility is expected to be operational by the third quarter and has the capability to expand further when needed.

"We're proud to welcome Generac to the South Carolina business community and look forward to seeing all that we know they will achieve in Edgefield County," said South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster. "With a workforce at its disposal that is second to none and one of the most competitive business environments in the world, we know that Generac will have the tools necessary for success."

With this increase in production and distribution capabilities, Generac is inviting individuals seeking career opportunities at the Trenton plant to learn more about Generac on its careers webpage .

MEDIA CONTACT: Dave Racine: [email protected] | 414-534-6948

About Generac

Generac Power Systems, Inc. (NYSE: GNRC) is a leading global energy solutions company, supplying backup power and prime power systems, engine-powered and battery-powered tools and equipment, and solar energy storage systems. In 1959 our founder designed and manufactured the first affordable backup generator. 62 years later, the same dedication to innovation, quality and performance has expanded the company's industry-leading product portfolio into homes and small businesses, job sites, and industrial and mobile applications across the globe. Generac offers battery storage systems for homes, energy management systems for businesses and utilities, backup and prime power systems up to 2 megawatts, and paralleled power solutions up to 100 megawatts.

About S.C. Department of Commerce

As South Carolina's leading economic development agency, the Department of Commerce works to recruit new businesses and help existing business grow. S.C. Commerce has recruited world-class companies to South Carolina such as BMW, Boeing, Continental, Giti Tire, LPL Financial Holdings, Mercedes-Benz Vans, Samsung, Toray and Volvo Cars and also supports startups, small and existing business, innovation, and rural development initiatives. S.C. Commerce partners with the S.C. Technical College System via readySC to support workforce training and recruiting, and with the S.C. Department of Employment and Workforce, which provides worker training and employment opportunities within the state. With a strong international footprint, the Palmetto State has consistently been among the top in the nation for attracting jobs through foreign direct investment on a per capita basis. Additionally, the state has won the Gold or Silver Shovel Award from Area Development magazine every year since 2011. For more information, visit www.SCcommerce.com .

SOURCE Generac Power Systems, Inc.

Related Links

www.generac.com


I continue to be amazed by the beauty of Turkey! Although a busy industrial country (its number-one industry is car manufacturing), the land is fertile, so there's a lot of agricultural activity going on.

Our guide told us that while Turkey had used Kurds as its chief labour force in the past, it has now shifted to Syrians. In January, there were 3.6 million Syrian refugees in Turkey, but only around 20,000 have work visas. This means tens of thousands are working wherever they can, especially in construction, textiles and agriculture. (As a disturbing sidebar, I've been trying to understand the history of the Kurds.

The persecution they've been exposed to is horrendous and starkly wrong. It's shameful that the global community has allowed this to continue for so long!)

Turkey pays Syrians just 60 lira (15 NZD) per day for 10 hours as labourers, with Syrian children vulnerable to exploitation as cheap labour (and also for sex trafficking). Syrians work more hours than anyone else, but for less pay. This reflects the greed of bosses who want to make as much as they can without paying a fair wage or benefits.

Language is a considerable barrier to employment, with highly-skilled professionals from Syria working in unskilled roles because they cannot communicate to work in their paid field.

Our guide explained a three-bedroom home to rent in a good suburb in a city like Pergamum is around 2000 lira (521 NZD) per month - and three times that in Istanbul, where the population is 15 million and so housing is harder to come by.

Photo - Keith and Christina Tyson on tour in Turkey at Symrna

The Revelation

Today we purely focused on Jesus's messages to John for seven Christian churches, as recorded in the book of Revelation. So, first thing, we were off to Izmir (Smyrna in ancient times), which was re-founded by Alexander the Great.

Modern Izmir is build on top of Alexander's Smyrna, so we found ourselves in a busy city centre to visit the Agora (gathering place). Again, the symmetry and artistry of the construction was breathtaking. Magnificent!

Along with Pergamum and Ephesus, Smyrna was one of the principal cities in Asia Minor. In Revelation, this church was encouraged to be faithful in the face of coming persecution.

The early church father Polycarp was Bishop of Smyrna and a disciple of the apostle John. The cult of emperor worship was especially strong at various times in South Asia for some reason, and at 86 years of age (in 156 AD), Polycarp was burned at the stake for refusing to renounce his faith in Jesus. Some of his last words were, 'For 86 years I have been his servant, and he has done me no wrong. How can I blaspheme my King who saved me?'

Devotions from Bruce Tong reminded us that despite the temptations around them, the greatest pressure the early Christians in Smyrna faced was from the local Jewish fellowship. The challenge John gave them from Jesus was to faithfulness, for which the reward was the crown of life eternal. This was one of just two churches out of the seven that received no criticism from Jesus.

Photo - Tour in Turkey Sardis ruins  Early church sites (3)

Sardis

Then we headed to Sardis, the ancient capital of Lydia, once a Persian city. In John's time, Sardis was one of the wealthiest Roman cities despite having been rebuilt multiple times after devastating earthquakes. We visited a well restored area containing a toilet(!), shops, a bath-gymnasium complex, and the ruins of the largest ancient Jewish diaspora synagogue in the world. Then we were back on the bus to visit the nearby Artemis temple.

Our time of devotions from Frederick, in a tiny brick and rubble Byzantine chapel just at the corner of the temple, was so moving. The chapel structure was probably built in the late 4th century as a place of Christian worship until the early 7th century. The construction of a Christian church within a temple reflects the changes that swept across the later Roman empire during the 4th century, with State recognition of Christianity by the emperor Constantine.

Frederick had snuck in more pages for his devotional time than David had authorised (something that Malcolm, Keith and I failed in!), but this was definitely God's word for many of us. The Holy Spirit seemed to seal this divine appointment, with the wind shutting the chapel door on our group just as Frederick started speaking and blowing the door open again immediately after his closing prayer.

He reminisced on his time at boarding school in Tonga, when letters from loved ones were so valued. And yet, for the Christians in Sardis, who had a strong reputation for being alive, John's letter was upsetting because it said God could see they were really dead in their spiritual lives. Frederick noted that sometimes in The Salvation Army, we only expect our leaders to say positive things, when we may need to hear that we are losing the power of God in our corps/churches.

This can happen when we start to do things on our own and are satisfied with that, rather than continuing to be set apart for God. When we become more focused on pleasing each other, than pleasing God.

'We can make it as a duty, not what the Holy Spirit wants,' Frederick said. Even when the church is growing in numbers and doing great and wonderful things, God may still say to us, 'I know what you are doing, but you are dead!'

Jesus showed the example of being authentic, personally and spiritually, and not merely 'playing a role', Frederick said. The key to this authenticity in us today is found in the words of the chorus he read in closing: 'Move Holy Spirit, move on my life... to make me like Christ.' Amen!

Philadelphia (now Alasehir)

We ended our day in Alasehir (which used to known as Philadelphia). Like Sardis, this church received only commendation from Jesus. Here the church was steadfast in faith - it had kept God's word and endured patiently. Just a quick stop here as there wasn't much to see.

We took the prudent option of not having devotions in this small location, which didn't afford much privacy, with David instead reading the relevant passage from Revelation in the bus.

Our guide advised that praying in public - whether Muslim or Christian prayer - can carry a prison sentence as a way of maintaining Turkey's secular ideology instituted as part of Ataturk's Reforms. The Turkish Constitution of 1982 neither recognises an official religion nor promotes any.

Unlike other definitions of secularism, where this means separation between church and state, in Turkey the term 'laiklik' denotes state control and legal regulation of religion. However, under the current president, Erdogan, there appears to be a shift away from secularism, with the view being promoted that a true Turk must be a Sunni Muslim.

Pamukkale

Tonight we're staying 90 km from Philadelphia in Pamukkale, which is visited by about two million tourists each year. Its white terraces were created by the waters of thermal springs reacting with the air (similar to the pink and white terraces of New Zealand destroyed in the 1886 eruption of Mount Tarawera).

We're eating well, enjoying the delicious offerings even when we don't know exactly what we're eating. A practical Turkish travel tip around food that I found today: 'Never criticise the food. Muslims consider every meal to be a blessing, and it is not only offensive to your host, but to Allah, if you make disparaging comments about your meal.

Don't eat too much. Gluttony is culturally frowned upon in Muslim countries. While you won't put yourself at risk, you will bring attention to yourself if you stuff your face every meal' (from World Nomads). Perhaps our 'amen' to that last bit may not be so fervent as it was for Frederick's message at Sardis!

Photo - Tour in Turkey Sardis ruins  Early church sites (4)
A study of over a million people in England has revealed additional symptoms linked with having coronavirus, which could include chills, loss of appetite, headache and muscle ache.

While these wider symptoms were noted in addition to the known or so-called classic symptoms of loss of sense of smell and taste, fever and new persistent cough, around 60 per cent of infected people did not report any symptoms in the week leading up to their test, the Imperial College London led Real-time Assessment of Community Transmission (REACT) study revealed on Wednesday.

"These new findings suggest many people with COVID-19 won't be getting tested and therefore won't be self-isolating because their symptoms don't match those used in current public health guidance to help identify infected people," said Professor Paul Elliott, director of the REACT programme at Imperial.

"We understand that there is a need for clear testing criteria, and that including lots of symptoms which are commonly found in other illnesses like seasonal flu could risk people self-isolating unnecessarily. I hope that our findings on the most informative symptoms mean that the testing programme can take advantage of the most up-to-date evidence, helping to identify more infected people, he said.

Swab tests and questionnaires collected between June 2020 and January 2021 as part of the study showed that among these other symptoms, chills, loss of appetite, headache and muscle aches were together most strongly linked with being infected, alongside the four so-called classic symptoms.

Having any of these other symptoms or the classic ones, either alone or in combination, was associated with infection with the and the more symptoms people showed the more likely they were to test positive.

The study also found that there was variation in symptoms with age. While chills were linked with testing positive across all ages, headaches were reported in young people aged 5-17, appetite loss in 18-54 and 55+, and muscle aches in people aged 18-54. Infected 5-17-year-olds were also less likely to report fever, persistent cough and appetite loss compared with adults.

The research also explored whether the emergence of the UK's new variant, first identified in Kent, was linked with a different profile of symptoms. While symptoms were broadly similar, in January this year compared to November-December 2020, loss or change to sense of smell was less predictive of having COVID-19, while the proportion of people testing positive with a new persistent cough appeared to be increased.

"As the epidemic progresses and new variants emerge, it's essential that we keep monitoring how the virus affects people so that testing programmes meet changing needs," said Dr Joshua Elliott, from Imperial College London's School of Public Health.

"We hope that our data will help inform testing guidance and the development of systems which could help better identify people who should take a COVID-19 test based on their symptoms, he said.

People in England are currently encouraged to take a COVID-19 test if they have at least one of the four classic symptoms: loss of sense of taste, loss of sense of smell, fever, new persistent cough. This is called "Pillar 2 testing".

Based on the new REACT study findings, the researchers estimate that current Pillar 2 testing would pick up around half of all symptomatic infections if everyone eligible were tested. But if the additional symptoms were included, this could be improved to three-quarters of symptomatic infections.

The findings, released as a pre-print report ahead of being peer reviewed, are part of the REACT-1 ongoing stream of analysis, led by Imperial College London and carried out in partnership with Ipsos MORI. The Real-time Assessment of Community Transmission programme is funded by the government's Department of Health and Social Care.

(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.)
Herald Reporter

While the free Covid-19 vaccinations will be voluntary, the Ministry of Health and Child Care is urging all Zimbabweans to accept vaccination to maximise protection.

The present network of hospitals and clinics and their trained staff that already vaccinate against other diseases will be used to administer the Covid-19 vaccinations with extra staff assigned when needed.

Outlining Zimbabwe's immunisation plan, Deputy Minister of Health and Child Care Dr John Mangwiro said yesterday that following analysis of global and local scientific research, the ministry was urging everyone to take the doses.

"This vaccine is going to be free of charge. It is going to be on a voluntary basis, but our advice is that people must get this injection if possible, but no one will be forced."

"Our scientists point to the fact that this vaccine is potentially very helpful. It's helpful in trying to avert the disaster we are seeing with the Covid-19 disease. We definitely encourage people to get it," said Dr Mangwiro.

Zimbabwe had structures already in place for vaccination of other diseases like polio and a swathe of childhood illnesses and these would be used for Covid-19.

Testing and monitoring would ensure vaccination safety.

"The preparations that are already on the ground are that we already have a structure where we were giving the vaccines for diseases like polio. Those are still in place and we will use those structures. We will also collect data from people to see if they already have antibodies to this Covid-19 and to see what will come after this injection of the Covid-19 vaccine.

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"We need swabs to see if they have the disease in their nostrils at that time. People should be ready to give us information about themselves. It will be kept confidential, but this will help us when we give the second dose of the vaccine to say how did you react when we gave you the first dose," said Dr Mangwiro.

Dr Mangwiro said it was very important for people to report any unusual feeling like headaches so that they could get assistance if they reacted to the vaccine.

"We will have centres where the vaccine will be given. Very soon, you will be told where to get your vaccine.

Dr Mangwiro said the dates for vaccination would be announced soon, saying there would normally be two jabs, separated by around a month, to ensure maximum resistance to Covid-19.
Titan Company Ltd on Wednesday reported 11 per cent year-on-year decline in net profit at Rs 419 crore for October-December quarter, hit by a one-time provision.

The company's total income rose 18 per cent to Rs 7,324 crore during December quarter, while earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) rose 19 per cent to Rs 896 crore.

"The company made a provision for Rs 137 crore relating to impairment in the investments in Favre Leuba AG (FLAG), a wholly owned subsidiary, consequent to the decision of the company to significantly scale down the operations outside India," Titan said in a release.

Also read: Former L&T Infotech CFO Ashok Kumar Sonthalia appointed as Titan's CFO

The revenue from jewellery segment rose 16 per cent to Rs 6,249 crore during the quarter, while that from watches segment declined 12 per cent to Rs 550 crore. Revenue from eyewear segment fell 7 per cent to Rs 124 crore.

"There was a significant recovery in the diamond studded segment of the jewellery business. While coins sales continue to remain high, wedding jewellery segment also witnessed a very good growth in the quarter," Titan said.

However, the recovery in other segments, comprising Indian dress wear and accessories, was still slow and these divisions recorded an income of Rs 36 crore as compared to Rs 50 crore in the previous year, a decline of 28 per cent.

On a consolidated basis, the company's net profit rose 12 per cent to Rs 530 crore.

Commenting on the results, the company's Managing Director C K Venkataraman said, "The recovery witnessed has been significantly better than what we had hoped just a few months back...We believe the focus on productivity and cash generation will help improve the company's margins in the future."

Also read: Titan to scale down operations of Swiss watch brand Favre Leuba
Washington: Hair dye was not running down Bruce Castors face as he made the opening argument for Donald Trumps defence in his Senate impeachment trial.

But his embarrassing performance managed to rival Rudy Giulianis infamous November press conference in which a suspicious dark liquid began dripping down his cheek as the Trump lawyer made laughable claims of voter fraud.

As bad as Giuilianis performance was, he was speaking to a bunch of reporters. Castor was addressing the 100 US senators who will decide whether Trump should be convicted of inciting a deadly insurrection and disqualified from holding public office again.

Bruce Castor, lawyer for former US president Donald Trump, speaks during the second impeachment trial of Trump in the Senate at the US Capitol in Washington. Credit:Senate TV/AP

Castors opening address to the Senate on Wednesday (AEDT) was rambling, incoherent and cringe-worthy. The speech was so disjointed that its difficult to extract any meaningful quotes from it. Nebraska is quite a judicial-thinking place, was one of Castors more memorable lines.
Residents temporarily evacuated from Homestead after fire, no injuries

A Saturday afternoon fire in an apartment at a senior living complex was quickly extinguished and nobody was injured.
EXTON, Pa., Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Despite the potential for setbacks brought forth by the COVID-19 pandemic, Amgen recently reported strong year-over-year growth for their newly acquired psoriasis (PSO) and psoriatic arthritis (PsA) agent, Otezla.1 In late 2019, the brand was sold to Amgen in order to clear the path for Bristol-Myers Squibb's acquisition of Celgene, considering future regulatory conflicts with BMS' pipeline psoriasis drug, deucravacitinib, an oral TYK2 inhibitor anticipated to be in direct competition with Otezla.

Amgen's purchase of Otezla strengthens the company's long-standing immunology portfolio, including TNF inhibitor, Enbrel, which has been approved in RA for over two decades and also holds a dual PSO/PsA indication. However, according to ongoing feedback collected from US dermatologists and rheumatologists included in Spherix's RealTime Dynamix services, rheumatologists are much more likely than dermatologists to view Amgen as a strong corporate partner. This is particularly due to a lackluster performance of Enbrel in psoriasis compared to recently introduced competitors, including IL-17 inhibitors (Novartis' Cosentyx, Eli Lilly's Taltz, and Ortho Dermatologics' Siliq) and IL-23 inhibitors (Janssen's Tremfya, Sun Dermatology's Ilumya, and AbbVie's Skyrizi).

The addition of Otezla to Amgen's portfolio presents an opportunity for the manufacturer to bolster their presence in the dermatology sector and shine a new light on the PDE-4 inhibitor under their management. Though Amgen still has their work cut out for them, as the majority of dermatologists surveyed at the end of last year did not agree that they will increase their use of Otezla now that Amgen is the manufacturer.

However, Otezla became more top of mind for dermatologists when adjusting to the shifting dynamics caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. In the most recent wave of Spherix's Special Topix: Multi-Specialty Impact of COVID-19, fielded last month, one-third of surveyed dermatologists indicated they were more likely to prescribe Otezla now than they were prior to the pandemic.

Additionally, more respondents reported they are most comfortable prescribing Otezla to new patients and continuing established patients on the oral drug via telemedicine than they are any other inquired advanced mechanism. As for drivers behind systemic brand choice, nearly one-half of dermatologists indicate required monitoring, administration (IV, SC, oral), and safety profile are more important drivers than prior to the pandemic  all aspects that work in favor of an Otezla prescription.

In their Q4 earnings call, Amgen also announced the upcoming label expansion for the mild to moderate psoriasis indication is coming this quarter.2 Spherix reports that dermatologists are already comfortable prescribing the brand to less severe PSO patients, as Otezla share for mild PSO has been approximately 5% since 2016. Nonetheless, feedback from the Q4 2020 wave of the RealTime Dynamix report reveals 31% of dermatologists report a formal mild indication would have a high impact on prescribing  possibly bringing additional lift to the brand and giving it solid placement in the pre-biologic realm.

Spherix's RealWorld Dynamix service examines the naive and switched psoriasis patient populations via retrospective, large-scale chart audits. In the 2020 new starts audit, Spherix confirms Otezla's strong positioning in the pre-biologic PSO segment. The brand continues to dominate as a first-line advanced systemic option, mainly a result of the agent's oral administration and safety. However, Otezla use diminishes as a patient advances in lines of therapy, making it imperative to secure and grow the pre-biologic space.

Holding on to the Otezla patients may be harder, particularly as practice patterns return to normal and patient flow resumes to pre-COVID levels. Indeed, according to Spherix's switching audit (conducted in late 2020), 71% of all psoriasis patients switching from Otezla did so due to lack of efficacy a figure significantly higher than all currently available biologics. Additionally, while Otezla is typically applauded for its safety profile, tolerability (namely GI issues) poses a threat for the brand. Demand for Otezla is typically driven by patient preference for the oral formulation and safety considerations.

BMS recently announced positive topline results from a Phase 3 trial evaluating deucravacitinib in plaque psoriasis, including meeting key secondary endpoints of achieving superiority to Otezla in the proportion of patients reaching PASI 75 and sPGA 0/1 at Week 16.3 Yet, Amgen remains positive at the prospect of oral competition, stating in their Q4 earnings call, "We think we've got a good opportunity for growth We also said when we gave that guidance that it assumed a successful competitive program from the TYK2 asset."2

Interestingly, the RealWorld Dynamix switching audit also revealed that patients who were switched to (or currently treated with) Otezla were most likely to be considered candidates for deucravacitinib and Eli Lilly's mirikizumab, had the pipeline agents been commercially available.

Will Otezla's double digit growth continue past the pandemic? Will Amgen be able to differentiate the brand enough from incoming oral competition? How much will an official FDA indication for mild plaque psoriasis boost the brand? How much will Otezla cannibalize Enbrel as both compete for the first-line advanced systemic patients? Spherix will continue to dive deep into the impacts of these shifting market events.

About Our Services

RealTime Dynamix is an independent service providing strategic guidance through quarterly or semiannual reports, which include market trending and a fresh infusion of event-driven and variable content with each wave. The reports provide an unbiased view of the competitive landscape within rapidly evolving specialty markets, fueled by robust HCP primary research and our in-house team of experts.

RealWorld Dynamix is an independent, data-driven service unveiling real patient management patterns through rigorous analysis of large-scale patient chart audits. Insights reveal the "why" behind treatment decisions, include year over year trending to quantify key aspects of market evolution, and integrate specialists' attitudinal & demographic data to highlight differences between stated and actual treatment patterns.

Special Topix: Multi-Specialty Impact of COVID-19 (US) is an ongoing series of monthly monitoring that evaluates the impact of COVID-19 on physicians and their practices  including, but not limited to, the utilization of telemedicine, at-risk patient groups, key concerns, support from industry, and future changes in prescribing patterns. Specialty reports are available for dermatology, gastroenterology, nephrology, neurology, and rheumatology.

Learn more about our services here.

About Spherix Global Insights

Spherix Global Insights is a hyper-focused market intelligence firm that leverages our own independent data and expertise to provide strategic guidance, so biopharma stakeholders make decisions with confidence. We specialize in select immunology, nephrology, and neurology markets.

All company, brand or product names in this document are trademarks of their respective holders.

Sources:

1. Q4 2020 Amgen Earnings Conference Call Presentation. Amgen. February 2, 2021. https://investors.amgen.com/static-files/f4ddd625-93ef-4f9c-bc28-db0e42026709

2. Amgen Inc. (AMGN) CEO Bob Bradway on Q4 2020 Results - Earnings Call Transcript. Seeking Alpha. February 2, 2021. https://seekingalpha.com/article/4402916-amgen-inc-amgn-ceo-bob-bradway-on-q4-2020-results-earnings-call-transcript

3. Bristol Myers Squibb Announces Positive Topline Results from Second Pivotal Phase 3 Psoriasis Study Showing Superiority of Deucravacitinib Compared to Placebo and Otezla (apremilast). BMS. February 2, 2021. https://news.bms.com/news/corporate-financial/2021/Bristol-Myers-Squibb-Announces-Positive-Topline-Results-from-Second-Pivotal-Phase-3-Psoriasis-Study-Showing-Superiority-of-Deucravacitinib-Compared-to-Placebo-and-Otezla-apremilast/default.aspx

For more information contact:

Kristen Henn, Business Development Manager

Email: [email protected]

www.spherixglobalinsights.com

SOURCE Spherix Global Insights

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In another bizarre episode of this happens only in India, a man was taken into custody at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport in Mumbai. The man landed in India from Dubai and left gold valued at around Rs 85 lakh in the aircrafts restroom on Friday.

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According to the officials, the one who is arrested is an Indian citizen and arrived from Dubai. The man left Rs 85 lakh worth of gold bars inside the aircrafts restroom as he feared that he would get caught.

 BCCL

According to official inquiries that took place, it was found out that someone who works at the airport was supposed to remove the gold from the aircraft. But that didnt happen so the passenger left the gold in the restroom.



Also, earlier, in another incident, customs officials recovered 1.01 kg gold from a passenger who came from Dubai by Fly Dubai flight FZ 8517 at the Chennai airport on Sunday.

 BCCL

According to the officials, the accused was named Sithik and belonged to Ramanathapuram. He was intercepted at the exit of the airport. According to reports, "On personal search, two bundles of gold paste were found concealed in his rectum. On extraction, 416 grams of gold valued at Rs.19.9 lakhs was recovered and seized.

 BCCL

As per an official release, on rummaging of an Indigo flight, three rectangular heavy pieces covered in the black adhesive tape were recovered from a hollow pipe under a seat inside the aircraft.



After the officials cut open the pieces, six gold bars each weighing 100 grams were recovered. The recovered bars also had a foreign marking and they were seized as unclaimed gold under Customs Act.
A ship on its way to the Port of Lome attacked by the Pirates

12% increase in acts of maritime piracy, this is what West Africa recorded in the course of 2020.

According to reports, the chemical tanker Sea Phantom, flying the flag of the Marshall Islands, was attacked and boarded on February 6 by pirates, west of Bata (Equatorial Guinea). This, even while the ship was on its way to the Autonomous Port of Lome.
An electric vehicle can have 5,000 battery cells and an EV could need 10 kg of lithium.

Lithium is one of two commoditiescobalt being the otherthat has gained the most since the beginning of 2021 on strong demand from the electric vehicles (EV) sector.

According to the Trading Economics website, lithium has gained 41 percent since January 1. Based on the Chinese spot prices for lithium carbonate, which is used in making lithium batteries, the metal is quoted at 65,500 Chinese yuan (Rs 7.40 lakh) a tonne.

US multinational and financial services group Morgan Stanley has projected a 50 percent growth in EVs in 2021. Sales of EVs are particularly higher in Europe as the continent looks to decarbonise by 2030 by phasing out vehicles running on fossil fuels.

The development has shifted the focus on lithium, whose prices are currently at a six-year high.

What is lithium and its source?

According to Austrade, lithium has been in the forefront of many technological changes since the 1990s with the commercialisation of lithium-ion batteries. It is the reason for the revolution in mobile phones, smart gadgets and tablets.

Lithium is the lightest known metal and is the least dense solid element. It has got good electro-chemical potential in view of a low melting point which makes it suitable for many metallurgical applications.

Lithium is extracted from minerals found in igneous rocks composed of large rocks (spodumene) or in water with high concentration of lithium carbonate.

Both processes contribute equally to lithium production today.

Lithium carbonate is the main source for lithium. Lithium carbonate is a stable salt that is refined to produce the metal. However, it has to be handled carefully in view of its highly reactive nature.

According to Barrons, some 5.3 tonnes of lithium carbonate can help produce one tonne of lithium.

According to NS Energy business, global lithium mineral reserves are about 80 million tonnes with Bolivia holding 21 million tonnes of it, followed by Argentina with 17 million tonnes and Chile nine million tonnes.

The US (6.8 million tonnes), Australia (6.5 million tonnes) and China (4.5 million tonnes) are the other three countries where major lithium reserves can be found.

According to the Atomic Minerals Directorate for Exploration and Research, a unit of the Department of Atomic Energy, India has 1,600 tonnes of lithium resources in rocks in Marlagalla-Allapatna region in Mandya district, Karnataka.

How much of lithium do EV batteries contain?

Batteries in EVs have a few grams of lithium that can at best be termed equivalent to half a teaspoon of sugar. An EV can have 5,000 battery cells and an EV could need 10 kg of lithium. One tonne of lithium can help meet the demand of 90 electric cars.

These batteries are lithium-ion that have many individual cells. About 60,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate equivalent are required to produce one million electric cars.

Tesla owner Elon Musk recently tweeted that 30 million electric cars need to be produced by 2027, and that would require 1.8 million tonnes of lithium carbonate equivalent. This would mean production of lithium carbon equivalent will have to increase 473 percent to 1.8 million tonnes from 2019 levels of 3.8 lakh tonnes.

Tesla itself plans to increase its battery manufacturing capacity at least 50 times more to three terawatt hours from its current capacity by 2030. This would require investments to the tune of $7 billion (Rs 51,025 crore), but it is comparatively lower if investments in batteries and car manufacturing are considered.

Lithium-ion batteries are preferred as they are rechargeable and they made up 54 percent of the demand for the metal in 2019. They are scalable and have higher energy density besides a longer life-cycle with lower maintenance.

Are there any alternatives to lithium carbonate?

Lithium hydroxide is an alternative to lithium carbonate and demand for it is increasing. EV industry analysts expect lithium hydroxide demand to exceed that of lithium carbonate in view of developments in battery technology.

Lithium hydroxide is seen as a better performer than carbonate in batteries, increasing their performance and lifespan. This is because a higher temperature is required to synthesise cathode material with lithium carbonate. This damages the crystal structure of the cathode and changes the oxidation state of the nickel metal in the battery.

While producers extracting lithium from spodumene, a method that is on the rise, can use either carbonate or hydroxide process, those extracting it from brine use carbonate process.

In Spain, a project has found that producing lithium hydroxide from spodumene costs lower than producing lithium carbonate from brines.

Whats the reason for Chinese dominance in lithium?

There are a few reasons for this. One, spodumene in the form of concentrate is exported to China for processing. From here, it is sent to Japan and South Korea to produce battery packs.

China processes 89 percent of the total lithium hydroxide available in the world.

Chinese automobile makers are investing in increasing electric vehicles capacity. The Chinese government is also extending subsidies to automobile makers and Beijing is set to pass a new law to support production of new EVs.

EV industry experts say that Chinese subsidies have either been equal to or higher than production costs, though they could end in a couple of years.

In 2021, the media reported that subsidies for new energy vehicles in China would be reduced 20 percent. Last year, Beijing extended a subsidy of $2,500-3,500 (Rs 1.82 lakhs-2.55 lakhs) for an electric car that had a driving range of 300 km. Besides, China is also the largest supplier of batteries and EVs other than being the top producer of both.

In addition, Chinese firm Tianqi Lithium Co is the largest producer of lithium compounds and it also has a 23.77 per cent stake in Chiles SQM, another major producer.

Though South Korea and Japan have developed and fine-tuned battery manufacturing technology, China has increased its battery manufacturing capacity, thanks to its dominance in lithium refining.

According to Austrade, Beijing has improved its scale of economies also.

How is India placed?

India is handicapped by a meagre lithium resource that has been found recently. This has resulted in the country importing lithium. Its imports trebled between 2017 and 2020.

But it will soon have its first lithium refinery that will be set up by Manikaran Power Limited, a power trading and renewable energy company, at an outlay of about Rs 1,000 crore in Gujarat.

The refinery will import ore from Australia and refine it for use by lithium-ion battery makers. A few battery makers are planning to set up units in Gujarat and they will likely gain from this.

This will help Indian EV producers to source batteries locally rather than import from China, Japan, Korea or Taiwan as is being done now.

EV and battery manufacturers, however, have to watch out how lithium prices behave in the short and long term. Any rise in the metals price will lead to consequent rise in vehicle price.

Though production is unable to match demand, industry experts expect price to drop particularly with growing use of lithium hydroxide.
The sign at the main entrance to the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus is seen Thursday, Oct. 22, 2020, in Fairbanks. Caitlin Miller/News-Miner
New Delhi: Indian sailors stuck aboard cargo ship MV Anastasia in China will reach India on February 14, the Union Shipping Minister Mansukh Mandaviya announced on Wednesday.

Mandaviya thanked the efforts of the Indian embassy in China in the safe return of the Indian seafarers.

Taking to microblogging site Twitter, Mandaviya said, "Great start of the day! Our stranded seafarers of MV Anastasia are coming back to India! The crew will sign off from Japan today and will reach India on 14th Feb. And soon will be reunited with their families! Appreciate the efforts of Indian Embassy in China and Team MSC."

Great start of the day ! Our stranded seafarers of MV Anastasia are coming back to India! The crew will sign off from Japan today and will reach India on 14th Feb. And soon will be reunited with their families! Appreciate the efforts of Indian Embassy in China and Team MSC  Mansukh Mandaviya (@mansukhmandviya) February 10, 2021

A total of 39 Indian crew members were stranded on two cargo ships in Chinese waters.

The MV Anastasia, with 16 Indians as crew, had been on anchorage near Caofeidian port since September 20.

The Chinese authorities did not allow the ship to either dock or go for a crew change for months due to restrictions which had been imposed due to coronavirus pandemic.

While, twenty three sailors on board MV Jag Anand returned to India last month.

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TORONTO, ON / ACCESSWIRE / February 10, 2021 / Victory Nickel Inc. ("Victory Nickel" or the "Company") (CSE:NI) (www.victorynickel.ca) today announced that it has sold its Minago nickel property in northern Manitoba to Silver Elephant Mining Corp. ("Silver Elephant") on the terms announced in the news release of January 22, 2021.

In a separate transaction, Silver Elephant acquired 100% of the Company's debt held by the Company's secured lender (the "Secured Debt"). The Secured Debt has been restructured such that the Company's secured debt has decreased to approximately US$5.4 million.

The sale of Minago to Silver Elephant provides for consideration to the Company as follows:

A US$6,675,000 credit against the Company's Secured Debt.

Restructuring of the secured debt facility (" SDF ") now owned by Silver Elephant to bear zero percent interest. The SDF has a term ending on February 8, 2026, at which time it will automatically be extended in 5-year increments. Silver Elephant will credit the remaining balance under the SDF to Victory Nickel's benefit upon completion of an independent economic study proving positive net present value in respect of the Minago project during the term of the SDF.

") now owned by Silver Elephant to bear zero percent interest. The SDF has a term ending on February 8, 2026, at which time it will automatically be extended in 5-year increments. Silver Elephant will credit the remaining balance under the SDF to Victory Nickel's benefit upon completion of an independent economic study proving positive net present value in respect of the Minago project during the term of the SDF. Reimbursement of up to $200,000 for financial advisory services rendered by Red Cloud Securities Inc.

The subscription by Silver Elephant to a private placement of 40,000,000 common shares of Victory Nickel (" VN Share ") issued at a price per VN Share of $0.025 for cash consideration of $1,000,000, resulting in Silver Elephant owning approximately 29% of Victory Nickel post-investment on a non-diluted basis. This private placement has closed, and each VN Share is subject to a four-month plus 1-day statutory hold period.

") issued at a price per VN Share of $0.025 for cash consideration of $1,000,000, resulting in Silver Elephant owning approximately 29% of Victory Nickel post-investment on a non-diluted basis. This private placement has closed, and each VN Share is subject to a four-month plus 1-day statutory hold period. The issuance of US$5,000,000 worth of Silver Elephant common shares (" Consideration Shares ") to Victory Nickel over a one-year period. An initial tranche of 5,363,630 Consideration Shares worth US$2,000,000 was issued on February 9, 2021, a further US$2,000,000 worth of Consideration Shares will be issued on or before August 31, 2021, and a further US$1,000,000 worth of Consideration Shares on or before December 31, 2021, at such timings as may be determined at the sole option of Silver Elephant. All Consideration Shares are subject to a four-month plus one-day statutory hold period.

") to Victory Nickel over a one-year period. An initial tranche of 5,363,630 Consideration Shares worth US$2,000,000 was issued on February 9, 2021, a further US$2,000,000 worth of Consideration Shares will be issued on or before August 31, 2021, and a further US$1,000,000 worth of Consideration Shares on or before December 31, 2021, at such timings as may be determined at the sole option of Silver Elephant. All Consideration Shares are subject to a four-month plus one-day statutory hold period. The issuance to Victory Nickel of $2,000,000 in Silver Elephant common shares upon the price of nickel exceeding US$10 per pound for 30 consecutive business days at any time before December 31, 2023.

A right of first refusal, exercisable until December 31, 2023, with respect to the exploration of the sandstone (non-nickel bearing sulphides) resources at Minago.

"As stated previously, the Board of Directors' focus in any transaction was on preserving value for all stakeholders of Victory Nickel while at the same time creating a platform that allows the Company to move forward and grow the business. The Company believes it has achieved these goals with the signing of this agreement," said Sean Stokes, Interim CEO of the Company. "The Company has restructured the balance sheet to eliminate a substantial portion of the Secured Debt, and will work to further improve the financial position in the near term. Victory Nickel continues to generate revenue from sand sales at the 7 Persons plant in Alberta, is advancing a strategy to access a sand resource near the Alberta facility in order to expand sand sales from the 7 Persons plant and retains optionality on the Minago sandstone resource. The Company intends to return to active nickel exploration at its Mel and Lac Rocher projects and will identify and review other project opportunities as they become available."

Red Cloud Securities Inc. is acting as financial advisor to the Company.

About Victory Nickel

Victory Nickel Inc. is a Canadian company with two sulphide nickel deposits, Mel in Manitoba and Lac Rocher in Quebec, containing significant NI 43-101-compliant nickel resources. Additionally, through a wholly-owned subsidiary, Victory Silica Ltd., Victory Nickel has established itself as a producer and marketer of industrial sands in the western Canadian marketplace.

Contact:

Victory Nickel Inc.

Sean Stokes

Email: admin@victorynickel.ca www.victorynickel.ca

Forward-Looking Information: This news release contains certain forward-looking information. All information, other than information regarding historic fact that addresses activities, events or developments that the Company believes, expects or anticipates will or may occur in the future is forward-looking information. The forward-looking information contained in this news release, including information related to the completion and outcome of any debt restructuring activities reflects the current expectations, assumptions and/or beliefs of the Company based on information currently available to the Company. The forward-looking information contained in this news release is subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results or events to differ materially from current expectations. Any forward-looking information speaks only as of the date on which it is made and, except as may be required by applicable law, the Company disclaims any obligation to update or modify such forward-looking information, either because of new information, future events or for any other reason. Although the Company believes that the assumptions inherent in the forward-looking information are reasonable, forward-looking information is not a guarantee of future performance and accordingly undue reliance should not be put on such information due to the inherent uncertainty therein.

SOURCE: Victory Nickel Inc.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/628884/Victory-Nickel-Sells-Minago-Property-Closes-Private-Placement-Positions-Company-to-Move-Forward-in-Nickel-and-Industrial-Minerals-Markets
The World Health Organization has officially recommended the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine for people over the age of 65 and said it should be used 'without an upper age limit'.

WHO experts have reviewed all the evidence from studies of the jab and said there is 'no reason' it shouldn't be used against the South African variant because it should still prevent severe illness and death even if it's less effective.

There are concerns the vaccine won't work against that mutated strain of the virus after a study in South Africa found it offered only 'minimal protection' against mild disease in young people  but WHO scientists said it was 'inconclusive'.

And they backed up the UK's strategy of spacing the first and second dose by three months, saying between eight and 12 weeks was ideal for maximum protection.

The over-65s ruling is a hit back against European countries that criticised the jab and refused to use it among their older populations, claiming there was not enough proof it worked.

Countries including Germany, France, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Spain, Poland, Hungary and Italy decided not to roll out the vaccine to older people.

News reports from Germany in January sensationally claimed the vaccine was only eight per cent effective among over-65s, but it later emerged that ministers had put an inaccurate percentage on clinical data that was so vague it was meaningless.

However today, Dr Alejandro Cravioto, a director at the WHO, said in a briefing that the jab could be given 'without an upper age limit'. And Dr Katherine O'Brien added: 'Even with a hypothetical drop in efficacy, its still the right thing to do to vaccinate.'

Dr Cravioto added there was 'no reason' that places with the South African variant of the virus should not use the vaccine to keep down hospital admissions and deaths with the virus. No10's top scientific advisers insist it should still prevent vaccinated people from being hospitalised or dying  which is their main purpose.

Boris Johnson welcomed the WHOs support for the UKs strategy of delivering the Oxford vaccine in over-65s, saying it was 'good to see' in tonight's Downing Street press conference.

It comes after it was revealed today that Pfizer and Oxford University's Covid jabs both cut the risk of falling ill with the disease by 65 per cent after just one dose.

In the clearest proof yet that the NHS inoculation drive is working, Government data shows the Pfizer jab kicks in within two weeks and is just as effective at blocking symptoms in the elderly as it is in the young. The Oxford jab is similarly robust.

The Prime Minister today said Britain has made 'great strides' in its vaccination programme, as he urged all unvaccinated over-70s to come forward so the UK can hit its target to reach 15million people by Monday.

The Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine has been the most controversial of all the jabs so far, with claims that it might give less protection among people over 65. But the World Health Organization today put some of the concerns to bed, recommending the jab for people 'without an upper age limit' (Pictured: A pharmacist in Hertfordshire loads a syringe with the vaccine)

Dr Alejandro Cravioto, a director at the WHO, said in a briefing that there was 'no reason' that places with the South African variant of the virus should not use the vaccine to keep down hospital admissions and deaths with the virus, in the wake of a study suggesting it may be less effective against it

The WHO said that two-doses of the Oxford/AstraZeneca was, overall, 63 per cent effective at preventing Covid symptoms.

The efficacy is expected to be higher at preventing severe illness and close to 100 per cent for death, but it is not known how well it will stop the virus spreading.

Those parts of the WHO's report were expected  the big move was the confirmation that it should be used for people over the age of 65.

Britain is using the jab as one of its key components of the rollout in elderly people, which has so far immunised more than 13million people.

It is being given to people of all ages but some European countries were sceptical about this, despite the thumbs-up from the European Medicines Agency.

France's President Macron ruffled feathers by calling it 'quasi-ineffective' for elderly people.

But the WHO's Dr Joachim Hombach said today that 'the immune response in people over 65 is almost the same as in younger people, and this makes us confident that this vaccine is protective.'

WHY DID PARTS OF EUROPE REJECT THE JAB FOR OVER-65s? The reason European countries are turning down the AstraZeneca vaccine for people over the age of 65 seems to be that there isn't enough proof that it will work. A German analysis of the clinical trial of the vaccine, published on Twitter by a Berlin correspondent for The Times, showed that officials there estimated the efficacy of the vaccine to be just 6.3 per cent in over-65s. This figure was close to an eight per cent claim touted in German newspapers Handelsblatt and Bild in January, which sparked outrage among scientists and fierce rebuttals from Oxford University and AstraZeneca, who said it was 'completely incorrect'. The issue with the study is that the vaccine was only trialled on 660 people over the age of 65 in results that have been published so far. In the breakdown shown in the German report, it shows that one out of 341 people who got the jab later tested positive for coronavirus. Meanwhile one in 319 people who got a fake jab, called a placebo, tested positive. The whole point of a clinical trial is to compare the number of positive cases in the vaccine group to the number of positives in the non-vaccine group, to work out how well the jab works. With the exact same number of cases in both groups and an almost identical number of participants, this is impossible to do. To illustrate how unreliable the 6.3 per cent estimate is, the researchers included their confidence interval, which is a range of numbers they are almost certain the true number falls within. The confidence interval suggests that scientists thought the true effectiveness of the vaccine in over-65s was somewhere between -1,405% and 94.5%. This means the estimate is wildly unreliable and a true figure cannot be calculated. The data is the same that was used by the UK Government to approve the jab, and regulators in Britain admitted there was not enough data to give a percentage estimate of its efficacy  while the Germans attempted to do it anyway. But they were satisfied by the fact that the vaccine was well-tolerated and safe in the older people who did receive it, and the fact that their immune response appeared in lab tests to be the same as those in younger people, who featured more heavily in the trial. In short, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) said they would not expect the vaccine to work any differently in older people than in other age groups. They said: 'Efficacy and safety data are currently limited in individuals 65 years of age. No dosage adjustment is required.' The study has enrolled more older people since it first reported results and continues to gather data on how the vaccine functions in that group. The jab appears to be between 62 and 90 per cent effective in the adult population in general, according to Oxford University researchers.

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Dr Katherine O'Brien, the WHO's director for vaccines, said that even if the vaccine was less effective than billed, it should still be used.

She told a news conference: 'Even with a hypothetical drop in efficacy, its still the right thing to do to vaccinate adults with a low efficacy vaccine because of the high risk of severe disease in that age group.

'Even if the efficacy was substantially lower than what was measured, its still the right thing to do.'

In its report the WHO said: 'Because a relatively small number of participants aged 65 years or over were recruited into the clinical trials, there were few cases of Covid in either the vaccine or the control group in this age category, and thus the confidence interval on the efficacy estimate is very wide.

'More precise efficacy estimates for this age group are expected soon, from both ongoing trials and vaccine effectiveness studies in countries that are using this vaccine.

'Immune responses induced by the vaccine in older persons are well documented and similar to those in other age groups.

'This suggests it is likely that the vaccine will be found to be efficacious in older persons. The trial data indicate that the vaccine is safe for this age group.

'The risk of severe disease and death due to Covid-19 increases steeply with age. Older adults are identified as a priority group in the WHO SAGE Prioritization Roadmap.

'This prioritization is supported by vaccine impact modelling work, even for vaccine efficacy that is substantially below that observed among younger adults administered AZD1222 [Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine].

'Taking the totality of available evidence into account, WHO recommends the vaccine for use in persons aged 65 years and older.'

The WHO's report comes after a senior scientist in the UK said last week that more evidence coming from the Oxford trials that the jab will be effective for older people.

Sir Munir Pirmohamed, boss of the Commission on Human Medicines, said on Friday that regulators had received extra information from Oxford University and AstraZeneca scientists to prove their jab was safe and effective for over-65s.

The data, which is not yet publicly available, is coming now from same clinical trials in the UK and around the world that got it approved in the first place.

The WHO also urged countries to continue to use the vaccine even if they have the South African variant of the virus circulating.

The South African variant has developed a mutation that allows it to slip past the immune systems of some people who have developed protection based on an older version of the virus, either by catching it or by getting vaccinated.

The research, first reported by the Financial Times at the weekend and not yet published by the scientists who did it, looked at whether the vaccine could prevent mild and moderate Covid-19 in young, healthy people.

It found that the vaccine didn't really work in this way, with efficacy dropping to around 10-20 per cent.

But the WHO scientists shot down the paper.

Dr Katherine O'Brien called it 'small' and 'inconclusive', saying all it produced was 'no evidence to point in one direction or another on severe disease', which is what the jab was designed to prevent.

Speaking about the South African variant and the Oxford jab, Dr Cravioto said in the briefing: 'The preliminary analysis has shown that there is a marked reduction in the vaccine effectiveness against mild or moderate disease, and a reduction in the neutralising antibody levels.

'The study was designed to assess the efficacy against disease of any severity but the small sample size did not allow the assessment of vaccine efficacy against severe infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

'There is indirect evidence that there is protection against severe disease using the AstraZeneca vaccine.

'Considering all these factors, we have made the recommendation that even if there is a reduction in the possibility of this vaccine having a full impact in its protection capacity, especially against severe disease, there is no reason not to recommend its use even in countries that have the circulation of the variant.

'I will repeat that  even if you have the circulation of the variant in a country, there is no reason that we see, for now, [not to] use the AstraZeneca vaccine as indicated to be able to reduce the levels of severe disease in that population.'

Britain's vaccine drive IS working: Official figures 'reveal Pfizer and Oxford vaccines are cutting the risk of falling ill with coronavirus by 65%' - as well as slashing hospitalisations - in ray of hope for ending lockdown

Pfizer and Oxford University's Covid vaccines both cut the risk of falling ill with the disease by 65 per cent after just one dose, in a ray of hope for Britain's lockdown-easing plans.

In the most concrete proof yet that the NHS inoculation drive is working, unpublished Government data shows the Pfizer/BioNTech jab kicks in within two weeks and is just as effective at blocking symptoms in the elderly as it is in the young. The Oxford/AstraZeneca jab is similarly robust.

The first Pfizer dose reportedly cuts the risk of getting symptoms by 64 per cent in over-80s and by 65 per cent in younger adults, the first data from the UK immunisation programme has found. Protection soars to between 79 and 84 per cent after the second dose for all ages. Similar results have been seen in Israel.

Number 10 sources told The Sun hospitalisation rates among the 12.6million Britons who've been vaccinated have also reportedly starting falling to a 'fraction of previous levels'.

Public Health England chiefs monitoring the UK's mammoth vaccination rollout have not yet released any actual data detailing the real-world efficacy of either jab. Initial results are expected within days.

Although the leaked findings are lower than the 95 per cent efficacy shown in Pfizer's original trial, top scientists today described them as 'amazing'. Efficacy is always higher in controlled studies because researchers use more young and healthy people to make the trials run smoothly and quickly. Older people  who are at the front of the queue for vaccines because they are most vulnerable  have weaker immune systems.

Reacting to the early results, Professor Paul Hunter, an infectious disease specialist at the University of East Anglia, said he was 'quite confident' ministers will be able to gradually ease lockdown within weeks, if they are proven to be true.

There are still questions about how effective jabs will be at stopping people from falling ill with the South African Covid variant, however, after studies indicated they are less effective against the mutant strain. But scientists are confident they will be potent enough to reduce Covid to 'the sniffles' and prevent vaccinated people from being hospitalised or dying  which is their main purpose.

The news will come as a boost for lockdown-sceptic Tories, who yesterday savaged Matt Hancock for his 'forever lockdown' after the Health Secretary warned border restrictions might be needed until booster jabs arrive in the autumn. Backbenchers skewered the Downing Street dove as he unveiled the brutal measures aimed at stopping mutant variants  some of which are already spreading in Britain  from entering the country.

As Mr Hancock ratcheted restrictions, his department announced 12,364 new Covid cases and 1,052 deaths. Both daily counts were 25 per cent lower than last Tuesday's figures.

A patients receiving a Pfizer BioNTech Covid-19 vaccination at Haxby and Wiggington Surgery on December 22, 2020 in York, England

In other coronavirus developments today:

Transport Secretary Grant Shapps has warned Brits against booking any holiday this summer, foreign or domestic, amid crackdown on mutant strains entering the UK;

Families face bills running into hundreds of pounds for compulsory new Covid tests if they holiday abroad, with the two-swab package to be offered at a cost of 210 per person;

A scientist on the WHO's controversial fact-finding mission to China today lashed out at the US and said its intelligence linking coronavirus to a biochemical lab in Wuhan was 'wrong on many aspects';

A commonly used asthma drug cuts the need to send Covid patients to hospital by 90 per cent and shortens recovery times, Oxford University said today.

The leaked findings show the vaccines take three weeks to build up immunity in the elderly, while it starts after two weeks for younger people.

Paul Hunter, professor of medicine at the University of East Anglia, called the findings 'quite amazing.' He told The Sun: 'If these numbers are borne out, then they are very reassuring. If they are achieving 65 per cent protection after three weeks with both jabs, then I think that's really good.

Compulsory Covid-19 tests for travellers could add 1,000 to the cost of a holiday abroad Families face bills running into hundreds of pounds for compulsory new Covid tests if they holiday abroad. The rules announced by Health Secretary Matt Hancock yesterday will force all travellers to take an extra two tests after entering the UK. The two-test package will be offered at a cost of 210 per person. Holidaymakers and business travellers will have to book tests through an online portal before returning home. People are already required to get a test at their own expense three days before arriving in the UK. The new regime means that a family of four is likely to face a total bill well in excess of 1,000, making foreign holidays unaffordable for many. Those wanting to leave quarantine after five days under the test to release scheme would have to pay for another test. Mr Hancock did not say how long the rules would stay in place but a Government source said travel testing was here to stay. While hotel quarantine applies to arrivals from 33 red-listed countries, the new regime will cover all arrivals. The first test will be taken two days after arrival and sent for analysis to help identify new virus strains. The second test will be taken after eight days. Failure to take them could incur fines totalling 3,000 per person. Advertisement

'And that's a vindication of our current strategy as it protects more people than giving two doses three weeks apart. I am still, despite the South African strain, quite confident that we will see a gradual opening of the society, probably starting with schools opening early March.'

A government source also told the newspaper that Downing Street would be proven right for approving the Oxford jab for the elderly, while other European countries decided not to give it to over-65s.

Germany, France, Spain and Sweden have all decided not to administer the Oxford vaccine to the older age bracket over a lack of data from the drug company.

The results echo findings coming out of Israel, where daily case rates for over-60s have plunged by 46 per cent since mid-January after rolling out the Pfizer and Oxford jabs.

Hospital admissions have dropped by 35 per cent compared to mid-January, while admissions for younger adults have stayed flat and are even slightly higher now.

A similar disparity is seen in hospital admissions, with a 30 per cent decline for over-60s in the two weeks to February 1.

It comes after another 356,291 coronavirus jabs were administered on Monday, with 12.6million Brits having now received their first dose.

With five days still to go, No10 is within touching distance of delivering on its target of injecting the 15million most vulnerable by February 15.

The Government has said more than half of all UK adults should receive a coronavirus vaccine by May.

Downing Street confirmed that the vaccine programme planned to reach all those aged 50 and over, as well as adults aged 16-65 in an at-risk group, by May  having previously said it aimed to do so 'by the spring'.

Mr Hancock warned that 'lots of things have got to go right' to hit the goal, including supply, but he said he was 'sure' it was achievable. More than 10.9 million first doses have already been given.

According to the Government's vaccines delivery plan, some 32 million people across the UK are estimated to fall into the first nine groups. There are 52.7 million people aged 18 and over in the UK.

The target was disclosed as the Cabinet Office announced that local elections in England and Wales would go ahead as planned on May 6  though voters will have to wear face coverings and will be asked to take their own pen or pencil to mark their ballot.

It will be seen as indicative of lockdown restrictions easing in the spring, with reports that outdoor team and individual sports, as well as outdoor gatherings, could be possible within weeks of a planned return of schools from March 8.

But hopes of Britain's vaccine rollout bringing an end to brutal lockdown curbs any time soon were shot down yesterday by Mr Hancock, who unveiled a suite of new border curbs in the Commons, aimed at tackling new mutant strains.

There are now six variants of coronavirus being investigated by Public Health England, five of which have already been found in the UK

'Does Matt Hancock really think it's worse than a sexual offence?' Lord Sumption blasts 'inhumane' 10-year jail terms for travellers who lie about whether they have been to mutant Covid hotspots Former Supreme Court justice Lord Sumption has blasted a 10-year prison term for travellers who lie about travelling to mutant Covid-19 hotspots as 'inhumane'. Health Secretary Matt Hancock yesterday unveiled the toughest crackdown on border measures to prevent strains of coronavirus entering the UK from 33 'red list,' countries. From Monday, all arrivals from those countries will have to pay 1,750 to quarantine for 10 days in Government-designated hotels. The Health Secretary said those caught lying about their movements could be fined 10,000 or be jailed for 10 years. Former Attorney General Dominic Grieve today said courts would never impose the 10-year sentence, which he branded 'draconian'. In a comment piece published yesterday, Lord Sumption wrote: 'Does Mr Hancock really think that non-disclosure of a visit to Portugal is worse than the large number of violent firearms offences or sexual offences involving minors, for which the maximum is seven years?' But Transport Secretary Grant Shapps insisted the move was 'appropriate'. 'It's up to 10 years, it's a tariff, it's not necessarily how long somebody would go to prison for,' he told BBC Breakfast. 'But I do think it is serious if people put others in danger by deliberately misleading and saying that you weren't in Brazil or South Africa, or one of the red list countries, which as you say does include Portugal. 'But I think the British public would expect pretty strong action because we're not talking now just about, 'oh there's a lot of coronavirus in that country and you might bring some more of it back when we already have plenty of it here'. 'What we're talking about now are the mutations, the variants, and that is a different matter, because we don't want to be in a situation where we later on discover that there's a problem with vaccines.' Advertisement

As of Monday travellers from high-risk 'Red List' countries will be forced to spend 10 days in 'quarantine hotels', and all arrivals must test negative three times through gold-standard PCR coronavirus tests before being allowed to freely move around the UK.

Anyone who lies about whether they have been to places on the banned list recently will face up to 10 years in prison.

Travel and hospitality bosses warned the UK faces a second summer write off as uncertainty over when restrictions will end squashes demand for holidays and social venues.

They called for reassurances that curbs will be eased from April to avoid pushing their industries 'over a cliff-edge'.

In a Commons statement, Mr Hancock was confronted by a series of senior Conservatives over when the restrictions might ease  and whether the goalposts were being shifted on relaxing the wider lockdown.

Former chief whip Mark Harper, chair of the lockdown-sceptic CRG bloc of around 70 MPs, urged the government to reconsider its approach with Covid likely to be a permanent issue.

'If the virus continues to mutate, surely the risk is going to be there forever,' he said.



Tory MP Craig Mackinlay told MailOnline that he was sceptical about the border crackdown and it might do 'more damage than it tries to solve'. He added: 'This whole trying to stop things from coming in, I think we are way beyond that frankly. The virus does its own thing no matter where it is.'

It came as one of Oxford's vaccine chiefs, Professor Andrew Pollard, said today the South African variant was not a 'reason for alarm' and jabs should work to prevent hospitalisations and deaths and reduce the disease to 'the sniffles'.

It comes after South Africa suspended the Oxford roll-out after finding the jab was ineffective against the mutant strain in the country.

It comes after another strain, first identified in Bristol, was yesterday labelled a 'variant of concern' by scientists.

Public Health England said it has now found 21 cases of this version of the virus, with 14 in Bristol and the South West, four in Manchester and three 'scattered' across the UK.

It is a version of the Kent variant  the dominant strain of the virus in England  which has mutated further to develop a change first found on the South African strain which may make vaccines less effective.

Because of this mutation named E484K, which also raises the risk of people getting reinfected after they already had Covid-19, experts are desperate to stamp it out.

It becomes the third variant of concern found in Britain, alongside the now-dominant Kent variant and the South African one.

A fourth  one of two strains from Brazil  is also listed by Public Health England but it has not yet been found in the UK.

Experts said they were worried about the Bristol variant's combination of mutations because it would be 'at least as transmissible' as the fast-spreading Kent variant but also potentially able to dodge immunity from vaccines.

Although it is not likely to take over and become dominant now, there is a risk it could come through when the Kent strain has been suppressed by vaccinations.

Sir Elton John and Sir Michael Caine have appeared in an NHS advert urging the public to get vaccinated against coronavirus

The video, shot at London's Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, aims to 'show others that getting the life-saving jab is easy and safe', according to a statement

The Department of Health announced today it had finished its surge testing  which is used to weed out these variants  in Woking, but started it in Lambeth, London.

The NHS vaccinated 352,480 people on Monday, taking the total number of Britons given their first dose to more than 12.6 million.

Matt Hancock has now invited over-70s who have not yet had the jab to book an appointment after first ensuring that the most vulnerable were looked after.

People in that age group can now schedule an appointment using the NHS booking service or those unable to get online can phone 119.

Mr Hancock said take-up of the vaccines has so far been 'significantly better than we hoped for', claiming it has hit a staggering 95 per cent in people in their late 70s, 91 per cent of over-80s and almost three quarters of people in their early 70s.

He said the Government had been expecting approximately 75 per cent, at a Downing Street briefing on Monday.

Frontline health and social care workers, who are also at the top of the priority list, are also being urged to come forward and arrange an appointment if they've not had a dose.

And GP practices have been told to contact any extremely vulnerable patients who have still yet to receive their first injection.

Downing Street said it expects to have vaccinated all over-50s by the end of April, raising hopes that Britain could drop the vast majority of curbs in May.

Boris Johnson is under pressure to step up the reopening of the country as soon as the top nine groups - around 32 million people - are covered.

Britain is jabbing at record pace, dishing out more vaccines per person than any country in the world other than Israel.

Boris Johnson is due to unveil his 'road map' for easing the lockdown in the week of February 22, by which time the four most vulnerable groups should have received vaccine doses.

Schools are set to be the first things back from March 8, but the concerns about mutant strains have sparked warnings from scientists that any relaxation must be slower.
Tunis/Tunisia  Tunisian and Moroccan startups will present, on February 10, innovative projects dealing with the environment and new technologies, to facilitate the management of municipalities, improve the daily life of citizens and foster their well-being.

These young entrepreneurs will present their projects during a webinar on the theme: "Innovation territory startups in service of local authorities," organised by the Tunisian Forum of Maghreb Leaders (FTLM) in partnership with Morocco's Maghrebian Leading Women Network (RFLM).

This VTC meeting, to be held live on the FTLM's YouTube channel and Facebook page, will also offer the opportunity for local MPs and municipal officials to learn about startup projects and the innovative solutions they propose to municipalities to solve recurring problems, according to a joint press release by the two organisers.

"In an uncertain context rendered by the pandemic, this virtual Maghreb meeting is a means to strengthen ties between the Maghreb countries, create a space for reflection and sharing which is oriented towards the Maghreb where a comprehensive regional vision is much needed today," reads the press release.

Representatives of Tunisian and Moroccan startups and of municipalities, academics and FTLM members as well as experts and trainers will participate in the webinar.
- Covid-safe protocols developed to support safe reopening of domestic sector after Easter

- 89% of sector revenues come from educational visits; 600m of sector revenue has been lost resulting in 6,000 jobs gone and a further 10,000 jobs at risk

- 1.3 million activity days, impacting 500,000 children, booked during summer term at risk

- 50m financial support package requested to safeguard 700m sector

- Government-backed Insurance scheme requested to enable future school bookings

LONDON, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- UK Outdoors, the industry body for outdoor learning and activities, announces that, in conjunction with the School Travel Sector Stakeholder Group ("STSSG"), it has submitted to Rt Hon Gavin Williamson, Secretary of State, and the Department for Education, a roadmap for the phased restart of domestic educational visits after Easter, over a year after visits were suspended by government guidance in March 2020.

The proposals, which have been developed by a consortium of 12 industry groups, seek to ensure that the sector is able to safely restart school visits and includes a number of elements:

A request for amended guidance to allow domestic day and overnight educational visits to resume in the summer term, in line with background transmission rates in Tiers 1, 2 & 3

Development of a COVID-safe operations protocol in consultation with Public Health England to allow centres to operate safely and within existing school bubbles

Development of a Government-backed Insurance Policy to reinstate COVID-19 pre-trip cancellation cover in both commercial insurance policies and the Department for Education's Risk Protection Arrangement

Request for access to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport's Culture Recovery Fund, the extension of the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme to 30 September 2021 and improved access to existing BEIS grant funding through Local Authorities

Andy Robinson, Chief Executive of Institute for Outdoor Learning and Member of UK Outdoors, said:

"The pandemic and the Department for Education's guidance have been catastrophic for the sector, with thousands of jobs gone and a worrying acceleration in the number of centres closing forever. Our 700m industry is on a knife edge. But with the right support and guidance, the sector can still be saved. Our Roadmap to Restart provides a clear and prudent proposal for a phased restart of the outdoor education sector in time for the critical Summer Term, giving providers a sustainable path to survival. If no action is taken and no additional support is provided, the sector stands to lose all its 16,000 jobs, snuffing out a vital British industry."

Educational visits play a huge role in the cognitive, social, emotional and physical development of students. The benefits to health and wellbeing and to socio-emotional learning outcomes (including self-confidence, teamwork and resilience) are particularly well-evidenced.

Educational visits also bring students closer to nature and its benefits, such as health, wellbeing and pro-environmental outcomes. Over the last ten months, so many children and young people have been locked down in cities and towns with restricted opportunities to connect with each other or with nature. The inequalities between groups of children accessing these benefits are widening.

The School travel sector will play an important role in students' learning and recovery from the impact of COVID-19 restrictions.

Jim Whittaker, Chair of Association of Heads of Outdoors Centres and UK Outdoors Member, said:

"Outdoor education is a vital resource for all schools with over two million children a year taking part. At a time when COVID has so disproportionately affected the nation's children, outdoor education has a unique role to play in helping to restore and rebuild their confidence and mental health. This is particularly true for disadvantaged children and the thousands of inner-city schools, students and parents for whom outdoor education is a unique and life changing experience. Without meaningful action by the Government now, this invaluable resource risks being lost forever."

Media Enquiries

UK Outdoors (c/o Montfort Communications)

Andy Robinson

Jim Whittaker

Nick Bastin

bastin@montfort.london

+44 (0) 7931 500 066

Woolf Thomson Jones

woolf@montfort.london

+44 (0) 7376 392 693

Notes to Editors

About UK Outdoors

UK Outdoors is the industry body for outdoor learning, representing over 5,000 individuals and organisations in the outdoor and environmental education and adventure world. We deliver one voice and the best support for individuals and organisations throughout the sector.

Outdoor learning changes lives and provides opportunities for all students, regardless of background. The sector holds a pivotal role in supporting schools to develop students' social and mental health wellbeing through adventure and engagement with the natural environment.

The outdoor learning sector delivers formative educational experiences to at least 2m students across the UK every year. The sector provides over 16,000 jobs and 700m to the UK economy.

UK Outdoors includes the following organisations:

AHOEC - Association of Heads of Outdoor Education Centres

BAPA - British Activity Providers Association

IOL - Institute for Outdoor Learning

Outdoor Council

About the School Travel Sector Stakeholder Group

The School Travel Sector Stakeholder Group ("STSSG") was convened by the Department for Education in November 2020 to formally represent the school travel sector's interests and address potential challenges ahead of the sector's restart. The STSSG is made up of representatives drawn from the educational visits and travel sector and come from industry bodies, trade associations and providers.

The participants of the School Travel Sector Stakeholder Working Group are:
For Chevrolet, the first major redesign of its trucks came in the form of the Advance-Design (New Design as far as GMC was concerned), launched in 1947 as a line of light and medium trucks. Unlike the series that were to follow it, the Task Force and later the C/K , Advance-Design trucks are much harder to find these days. Particularly specialized onesWeve already seen several high-profile builds based on these trucks, like the Chevy 3600 rat rod tow truck of last year, but there are others out there just waiting to be uncovered. And the best way to do that is to be on the lookout for them on the open market.This is how we stumbled across this 3800 Chevy, a former fire-engine employed by the city of Goldendale, Washington. Its a 1-ton machine converted to fight fires by the Howard-Cooper Corporation and released from active duty sometime in 2015.Even if it is no longer enlisted, it still retains the hardware that made it effective at its job back in the day. It no longer has hoses, but it features the hose reels, things like a Motorola public-address speaker, and lights all around, potentially making it the ultimate party machine.The truck still runs, and its 18-inch wheels spin under the power of a 261ci (4.3-liter) engine rocking a single downdraft carburetor and linked to a four-speed manual transmission. The odometer on the thing shows no more than 4,000 miles (6,400 km).The Chevy 3800 fire truck is selling on Bring a Trailer , and with one day left in the bidding process at the time of writing, the highest offer sits at $12,000.
Notice those two red letters on the grille of this 1971 model, where one might expect to see the "Chevelle" branding? Those are the initials of Quintin Brothers Auto and Performance, the Vermont-based shop which considers taking such a muscle car down the restomod route.And the specialist has turned to the pixels of Abimelec Arellano, a digital artist who sometimes goes as far as building small universes revolving around American icons such as the Chevelle (as well as some beasts from other parts of the world), to visualize the proposal.1971 was the final model year that saw a significant visual overhaul for the second-generation Chevelle, which reigned between 1968 and 1972.And you can still see the '71 styling changes , such as the Power Beam single-unit headlights, the revised grille and bumper, as well as the rounded taillights, since this virtual build features subtle custom pieces. Then again, with LED light rings at both ends of the vehicle, old-school enthusiasts might not agree with the statement above.The handling has been massaged, even though all we can see, at least for now, is the ride height drop and a set of RS5 wheels supplied by Forgeline. The Toyo rubber was the natural choice, especially given how popular these tires are among those who do the quarter-mile thing.The black-on-black contrast, which sees a pair of generous satin stripes sitting on top of the uber-shiny attire, is a sight for sore eyes while also having "badass" written all over it.And while we can see some serious stopping hardware behind those wheels, it looks like the engine bay's contents might still be the topic of debate - check out the description of the Insta post below.
DID YOU KNOW 

Even though James Earl Jones was born on Jan. 17, 1931, in Arkabutla, Mississippi, he lived much of his childhood and young adult life in Michigan. With his grandparents, whom he called Mama and Papa, his family left Mississippi and settled on a site unseen in Dublin, Michigan, which is in Manistee County. His grandfather taught him how to work the farm. The family was poor and depended on subsidies from the government. He attended and graduated from Kaleva-Norman-Dickson High School in Brethren, Michigan.

He took acting lessons to control his stuttering, which was a problem he had since a child.

During his school years, he was teased about his stuttering. He had a teacher in high school, professor Crouch, who introduced him to Shakespeare and other poets. James even began to write poetry on his own. He began to realize that he could control his voice and his stuttering when he read poetry.

He remembered one of his whippings was when he told his Mama and Papa he wanted to become an actor. They did not want him following the career path of his father, Robert Earl Jones, who was a prizefighter and an on-again-off-again actor.

James served in the United States Army as a lieutenant during the Korean War after he graduated from the University of Michigan in 1955.

In his autobiography, Voices and Silences, James Earl Jones, states, Being myself is very complex, even as a racial entity. I am not only African, but I am Cherokee and Choctaw through my maternal grandmother. I am Irish through my maternal grandfather. Contrary to the view of racialists, black and white, a mixed blood Black person is not only Black.

In 2006, James Earl Jones returned to Manistee to read poetry at the Ramsdell Theatre and it was also a fundraising event for the Dickson School Cultural Center. He started his career more than six decades ago as a stage carpenter and then as an actor at the Ramsdell Theatre. He would sometimes sleep in the tower of the Ramsdell. Many of the area residents who befriended him brought him sandwiches, soda pop and other treats.

Some of the movies portraying his acting abilities and his dynamic voice were:

 Great White Hope, 1976

 Roots (TV series), 1977

 Conan the Barbarian, 1982

 Return of the Jedi, 1983

 Coming to America, 1988

 Field of Dreams, 1989

 Fences (play), 1987

 Lion King (Mufasa),1994

Compiled by Shirley Madden, member of the Manistee Area Racial Justice & Diversity Initiative.
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Sick of all the snow weve gotten during the past 10 days?

Well, buckle up. Forecasters say we are stuck in an active winter weather pattern thats expected to keep churning out a parade of storms that could bring more snow or a sloppy mix of snow, sleet and rain to the New Jersey region.

It definitely looks like the next couple of weeks are going to be fairly active, said Lee Robertson, a meteorologist at the National Weather Services forecast office in New Jersey.

There are several storms that keep getting forecast to come across this area.

Robertson says this active storm pattern will likely continue for at least a week or a week and a half.

Whats triggering this stormy weather is a series of atmospheric elements that are conducive for snow to fall in our region of the country, according to Robertson and other weather forecasters.

One big factor is the cold air that has been pushing down into the northern United States because of the displaced polar vortex.

The polar vortex is a mass of frigid air that normally circulates tightly around the North Pole, but occasionally the circulation weakens because of rising temperatures in the Arctic region.

The polar vortex is a band of frigid air that circulates tightly around the North Pole. It occasionally weakens, allowing Arctic air to drift down into other regions of the world, including the United States.AccuWeather

When this happens, pockets of cold air will break away from the Arctic region, drift down into Canada and then into the northern United States. That has been happening during the past two weeks, although New Jersey has yet to see a long-lasting cold snap.

Most of the frigid air from the polar vortex disruption has been lingering over the central and upper Plains during recent days. But some of that cold air has been pushing its way south and east because of a strong upper-level low pressure system sitting over southern-central Canada, Robertson said.

Because the upper-level low has air circulating in a counter-clockwise flow, that allows the cold air to dip down, then east towards the New Jersey region.

Forecasters say a strong area of low pressure stationed over central Canada is pushing a lot of frigid air into the northern United States. The cold air helps boost our chances of snow here in New Jersey.AccuWeather

Also playing a role in our active winter weather pattern is the location of the polar jet stream  those wavy bands of strong upper-level winds.

The jet stream is pushed farther south, so any storms coming off the Pacific Ocean get caught up in the jet stream and continue to get tracked across the southern states and the southeast coast and bring these precipitation storms to our area, Robertson noted.

So, with more storms weaving in our direction and cold air getting pushed in, that is boosting our chances of getting snow.

Upcoming storm threats

After getting hit with a fast-moving coastal storm on Sunday and a light coating of snow in northern counties Tuesday, New Jersey faces two more snow chances this week and the possibility of additional snow or mixed precipitation this weekend.

On top of that, forecasters say computer guidance models are hinting at another potential winter storm next Tuesday.

Heres what to expect during the next several days:

Wednesday night

A winter storm that is expected to dump heavy snow on Virginia, Maryland and Delaware is expected to brush northern New Jersey with 1 to 3 inches of snow late Wednesday night and Thursday morning, bring 2 to 4 inches of snow to central New Jersey and as much as 4 to 6 inches of snow across a wide swath of South Jersey.

This is the National Weather Service's updated snowfall map for Wednesday night, Feb. 10, through early Thursday, Feb. 11.National Weather Service

This is the updated snow forecast for northeastern New Jersey, New York City and Long Island.National Weather Service

Thursday night

A fairly weak storm system could bring the southernmost areas of New Jersey another 1 to 2 inches of snow Thursday night into Friday morning.

This map shows the National Weather Service's snow forecast from Thursday night, Feb. 11, through early Friday, Feb. 12.National Weather Service

Saturday

Forecasters say a storm might form off the coast of North Carolina or Virginia and could move up the Atlantic this weekend. As a result, New Jersey could get hit with snow, rain or mixed precipitation Saturday afternoon or Saturday night.

Robertson said its too early to pin down the exact type of precipitation and how much we could get, but more details will emerge when forecasters get a better handle on that storm system.

Tuesday

Forecasters say theres a potential for another winter storm on Tuesday, but its far too early to predict its track and impacts.

Current weather radar

Thank you for relying on us to provide the journalism you can trust. Please consider supporting NJ.com with a subscription.

Len Melisurgo may be reached at LMelisurgo@njadvancemedia.com.


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The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
Scientists at the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology suggest that rock mass weakened over time due to freezing and thawing of snow, led to the creation of a 'weak zone'

The flash floods in Uttarakhand two days ago was due to the collapse of a hanging glacier, initial observations by scientists at the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology suggests.

A hanging glacier is a body of ice that breaks off abruptly at the edge of a precipice or steep slope.

"The event happened in a hanging glacier, adjacent to Raunthi glacier, which originates from Raunthi/Mrigudhani peak (6,063 metres above sea level)," Kalachand Sain, director of the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology, said.

The observations also suggest that rock mass weakened over a period of time due to freezing and thawing of snow must have led to the creation of a "weak zone", triggering its collapse, which resulted in the formation of a temporary dam that eventually breached, causing the deadly floods.

Two teams of five glaciologists are studying the reasons behind Sunday's disaster. They also undertook a helicopter survey on Tuesday.

The glaciers around the area feed the Rishiganga river, which meets the Dhualiganga river.

The death toll in the Uttarakhand disaster rose to 32 with six more bodies being recovered, officials said Tuesday, as multiple agencies raced against time to reach about 30 workers trapped inside a tunnel at a power project site and 174 people remained missing.

About 600 rescue workers are involved in the operation, two days after the sudden flood in the Alaknanda river system in Chamoli district that was possibly triggered by an avalanche or glacier burst.
His partner David I. Schoen was sharper, asserting that Democrats were driven by an insatiable lust to destroy Mr. Trump. Mr. Schoen warned that they would instead damage the country by setting a new standard to pursue former officials, despite the fact that the House voted with bipartisan support to impeach Mr. Trump before he left office.

Under their unsupportable constitutional theory, and tortured reading of the text, every civil officer who has served is at risk of impeachment if any given group elected to the House decides that what was thought to be important service to the country when they served now deserves to be canceled, Mr. Schoen said.

The defenses case drew perplexed reactions from Republicans, evidently including Mr. Trump, who  barred from Twitter and out of sight in Florida  lacks the public megaphone he frequently used to weigh in on his first trial. The performance prompted at least one Republican, Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, to side with Democrats on the vote to allow the trial to proceed.

Anyone who listened to President Trumps legal team saw they were unfocused, they attempted to avoid the issue and they talked about everything but the issue at hand, said Mr. Cassidy, who had voted last month in favor of a constitutional objection to the trial and was the only Republican to switch his position on the matter on Tuesday. He quickly drew rebukes from the Louisiana Republican Party.

The debate reflected the historic nature of the undertaking. Though in the 19th century the Senate agreed to try a war secretary after he left office, it has never before sat in judgment of a former president. Mr. Trump is also the first president ever to be impeached and stand trial twice, and certainly the only one to require a court of impeachment to don masks and meet in the middle of a deadly pandemic.

With senators in both parties eager to conclude an undertaking whose outcome was clear, they agreed to rules that would allow for an extraordinarily rapid impeachment trial, with a verdict expected as soon as this weekend. It could conclude in as little as half the time of Mr. Trumps first trial, when senators acquitted him of charges related to a pressure campaign on Ukraine.

The speed reflected Democrats fears that pausing to judge Mr. Trump would spoil the momentum behind President Bidens agenda. Republicans, too, had good reason to want the trial over with, closing a chapter that has been divisive and damaging to their party.
Photo: (Photo : Chewy / Unsplash)

Frontline worker and single mother of two Annmarie Sliney opened up about the challenges she encountered in her roles amid the pandemic. The Dublin mom said that it had been a learning curve for her with the school closures, working at odd hours and longer shifts, and her family battling COVID-19.





Front Line Healthcare Worker and Single Mom of Twins Struggle During Pandemic

Sliney is a mom to 9-year-old twin girls, Meabh and Aine. Ever since the pandemic, she needed to balance the constantly changing and demanding needs of her work and her children. Sliney, the assistant director of midwifery and nursing at the Rotanda Hospital, had been in service for over 27 years. Now, there are safety concerns on top of the already unpredictable business that is pregnancy and childbirth. The frontline worker needed to work 14-hour shifts, early-morning and night duty at any given time of the week. Then the pandemic lockdown started, and schools closed.

ALSO READ: Biggest Pandemic Parenting Questions Answered by Experts





Finding Someone to Take Care of Kids Amid the Pandemic

As Sliney was needed more at the hospital, she needed someone she can depend on while the children stay at home due to the school closures. She said that to feel balanced, she needed to be sure her girls' needs were met first. But within the week the pandemic started, the family lost their live-in au pair who needed to go come to care for her mother. That was the first member of their social support that the family lost.

Next, Sliney planned to live with her retired parents. However, before they even made the move, Sliney's mother began to show the symptoms of COVID-19, Irish Times reported. Alternatively, the mom and her daughters could move in with her sister, brother-in-law, and children. However, there were concerns about her sister's work, who also happened to be a frontline health professional. So the risk of exposure to COVID-19 was even greater.

ALSO READ: New online game eerily simulates the chaos of pandemic parenting





Mom Found Single Parents Social Bubble in the Form of a Friendly Neighbor

A day before the family was to move to the sister's home, Sliney was met by a neighbor-friend who offered to look after her daughters. It stunned her as the neighbor also began to work from home and also had her own children to care for. However, her fears and worries were eased, knowing that now she has a selfless and empathetic support network that she could count on. While she needed to calm her daughters, who felt worried that their mom needed to go to work while other kids' parents stayed at home, she felt relieved that she had strong support, which meant she did not miss a single day at work.

ALSO READ: Parenting During the Pandemic: Finding the Authenticity, Humor and Irony





Who Can Start a Social Bubble?

The single mom could have been overwhelmed had she not accepted the help of others. She knew early on that she needed a strong support system. She had her parents, sister, and a live-in au pair she could count on. But when situations changed, she learned to adapt. Yet she stood by the importance of a social bubble for single parents and did not try to handle things on her own.

When forming a social bubble, keep in mind that there are limitations as to who can be in a social bubble, especially now with the pandemic. There is no social distancing within the social bubble, which is taken to be two households merged into one. So, overnights are okay. Those who live solo, have children under age 5, or has a child with a disability, ages 16 or 17 and living without an adult, or like Sliney, who is a single adult who lives with children under age 18, can form a social bubble. It is wise to have the social bubble living locally or in close proximity with each other.
The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Wednesday that the only way to resolve decades of dispute over Cyprus was to establish two states on the island, and a federation favoured by Athens would not be on the agenda of upcoming talks.

On Monday the leaders of Greece and Cyprus said they would only accept a peace deal for the Mediterranean island based on U.N. resolutions, rejecting the two-state formula supported by Turkey and Turkish Cypriots. Talks under United Nations auspices are planned for next month.

Erdogan also told lawmakers from his AK Party he could not meet Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis despite a resumption of talks between the two NATO members over their maritime disputes. Erdogan said Mitsotakis had "challenged" him, and called on the Greek premier to "know his limit".

Short link:


Ten-year jail sentences for travellers who try to conceal journeys to high-risk countries have been branded extraordinarily high in a backlash against the British Governments plan to tackle coronavirus variants.

Britain's Health Secretary Matt Hancock announced a requirement for UK residents returning to England from 33 red list countries to pay 1,750 to quarantine for 10 days in Government-designated hotels.

He said those caught lying about their movements could be fined 10,000 or be jailed for 10 years.

It comes amid continuing concerns over home-grown coronavirus strains as scientists advising the UK government added one detected in Bristol to its variant of concern list.

Former Supreme Court justice Lord Sumption hit out at the punishment and said it should not compare to those for violent or sexual crimes.

Does Mr Hancock really think that non-disclosure of a visit to Portugal is worse than the large number of violent firearms offences or sexual offences involving minors, for which the maximum is seven years? the peer wrote in the Daily Telegraph.

Former attorney general Dominic Grieve also told the paper: The maximum sentence of 10 years for what is effectively a regulatory breach sounds, in the circumstances, unless it can be justified, extraordinarily high.

(PA Graphics)

Mr Hancock had earlier told MPs: I make no apologies for the strength of these measures, because were dealing with one of the strongest threats to our public health that weve faced as a nation.

He also confirmed a new enhanced testing regime for all international travellers, with two tests required during the quarantine process from Monday.

Those who fail to take a test face a 1,000 fine, followed by a 2,000 penalty and an extension to their quarantine period, to 14 days, if they miss the second test.

Mr Hancock indicated the quarantine measures might be in place until the autumn if vaccine booster jabs are needed in response to coronavirus variants.

He told the Commons that 16 hotels have been contracted to provide 4,600 rooms for the quarantine programme, which begins on Monday.

(PA Graphics)

The Scottish Government said this approach is not sufficient so it is requiring all international travellers arriving into Scotland to stay in a quarantine hotel.

No international flights are currently operating to Wales or Northern Ireland, but Stormonts chief medical officer Dr Michael McBride said it is crucially important for the nations to work together to stall the arrival of new and concerning strains from abroad.

Shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth claimed the public wants the Government to go further on border measures.

Our first line of defence is surely to do everything we can to stop (new variants) arising in the first place, the Labour MP said.

That means securing our borders to isolate new variants as they come in. Hes announced a detailed package today but he hasnt announced comprehensive quarantine controls at the borders.

Travel trade organisation Abta said requiring passengers to pay for multiple tests once leisure travel is restarted would have serious cost implications and hurt demand.

A spokeswoman urged ministers to develop a roadmap to reopen travel.

Single adults will be charged 1,750 for a 10-day stay in a quarantine hotel, which covers the hotel, transfer and testing.

Meanwhile, the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag) added the variant detected in Bristol to its variant of concern list.

A strain identified in Liverpool was also classed as a variant under investigation.

Public Health Englands Dr Susan Hopkins said the relatively slow rise in cases of the South African and Bristol variant is reassuring.

But she warned that controlling them will become much more challenging as lockdown is relaxed.

(PA Graphics)

Health officials said they had so far found 76 cases of the Bristol and Liverpool variants in the UK.

Both those variants contain the E484K mutation, a genetic change also found in both the South African and Brazilian variants, which experts suggest may be better at evading the human immune response.

The Department of Health and Social Care also said extra coronavirus testing will be carried out in the borough of Lambeth, south London, after a case of the South African variant was discovered.

In a more positive development, The Sun reported official data from tests on the Pfizer vaccine showed a single dose could reduce the risk of infection by around 65% in both older people and young adults after as little as two weeks.

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A former vet who is wanted on multiple charges of sexual activity with animals and of having extreme pornographic material has appeared before the High Court after his arrest in Donegal on foot of an extradition warrant.

Oliver Lown,35, with an address at Main Road, Kesgrave, Suffolk is wanted by authorities in the UK to face 12 offences, which also include making indecent images of children.

Mr Lown was arrested by detectives from the Gardas extradition unit on Monday in Kilmacrennan and taken to Letterkenny garda station following the endorsement of a European Arrest Warrant (EAW) issued by the police in Suffolk.

The former vet appeared before Mr Justice Paul Burns in the High Court on Tuesday wearing a face mask, an orange jacket and trousers.

Detective Sergeant Jim Kirwan of the Garda Extradition Unit told Aoife Carroll BL, for the State, that he was on duty on Monday in Kilmacrenan called to an address at Gortnaskea near Letterkenny at 6.37pm, where he arrested Mr Lown on foot of the warrant and cautioned him.

Det Sgt Kirwan said he introduced himself to Mr Lown and showed him his ID card. He said that Mr Lown agreed that his name was Oliver Lown and that one of the aliases he used was Ollie Fraser Henderson, while his place of birth was in Ipswich in the UK.

The detective said he showed Mr Lown a photograph which he agreed was him.

Outlining the offences facing Mr Lown, Det Sgt Kirwan said the warrant relates to 12 offences relating to images found on a PC laptop on April 4, 2019 in Kesgrave in Suffolk.

Mr Justice Burns fixed February 26 as the date for the full hearing of the extradition case.

He remanded Mr Lown in custody until that date, when an application for bail is expected to be made.
Some kids are extremely cool and know exactly what they are talking about. One such kid made us proud when he made a complaint against a man for getting penalized a sum of Rs 62,000 for cutting a tree at Saidabad in Hyderabad.



The class 8th boy called the Telangana Forest Departments toll-free number (1800 425 5364) to report the axing of a neem tree which is around 40 years old.

A Class-VIII boys complaint led to a man getting penalised Rs 62,075 for chopping down a neem tree at Saidabad in #Hyderabad



The boy lodged complaint on #Telangana Forest Departments toll free number (1800 425 5364) https://t.co/5QK5XmpCHs  Nilesh TNIE (@Nilesh_TNIE) February 9, 2021

The boy acted quickly and as he was environmentally aware he dialed the toll-free number and informed that a tree was being cut which resulted in the man paying a hefty fine of Rs 62,000.



According to New Indian Express, the officials responded immediately and fined G Santhosh Reddy for cutting the tree where he was constructing a house. Hyderabad Forest Range Officer Ch Venkataiah Goud said, At 4 am, the boy called our toll-free number and informed that a chopped tree was being loaded into a vehicle to be moved away.

The staff that answered the call informed me and I also spoke with the boy. He refused to reveal his name and other details but said he was a member of the Green Brigade, he added.

Heres what people on the internet have to say about the incident-

Telangana forest department fined a man for Rs 62k for felling down a Neem tree

class 8th boy filed a complaint against that man to forest officials, little warrior on his duty pic.twitter.com/HzrQKg9nWZ  Aiden Butler (@aidenbutler007) February 9, 2021

#Telangana forest department imposed a fine of Rs 62,075 after Saidabad residents chopped a 42-year-old neem tree. Forest dept took action against them after they received a complain by a Class 8 boy. He introduced himself as a green brigadier & asked for action against them! pic.twitter.com/qdxWEt4VyU  Anusha Puppala (@anusha_puppala) February 8, 2021

Well done kid. You gave a Tight slap.  Malakpet Diaries (@MalakpetD) February 8, 2021

The Telangana government had directed the schools to create Green Brigades with students and teachers to protect the fauna and flora planted as part of the scheme.

After receiving the complaint, Goud and the other Forest Department Staff rushed to the spot where they found the tree cutting equipment. They also found that the man who cut the tree dialed to follow the due procedure and also did not take any permission to do the same.

What do you think of the woke kid? Let us know in the comments section below!
[February 10, 2021] New Jersey American Water Donates $41,000 to United Way Through Virtual Workplace Campaign

New Jersey American Water announced today that its employees raised over $26,000 for eight United Way chapters through its annual fundraising campaign. The company also provided an additional donation of $15,000, totaling over $41,000 to help individuals and families in need. "We've all seen the devastating effects that COVID-19 is having in our local communities, and now more than ever, United Way needs our support," said Cheryl Norton, president of New Jersey American Water. "Our employees have a long history of generously supporting United Way, and this year they really stepped up to make a positive impact." Each holiday season, American Water launches its national United Way fundraising campaign, encouraging employees to contribute to the efforts of United Way. In addition to financial donations, American Water employees participated in creative, virtual fundraising events including a 5K Turkey Trot, an online auction, BINGO games, trivia games and other fun events, all contributing to United Way. Over the last five years, New Jersey American Water and its employees have raised nearly $200,000 for United Way through this annual campaign. This tradition has continued for over 15 years. "Without our corporate partners, we would not be able to provide the support, resources, or programs to help Union County's most vulnerable families," said James Horne, President and CEO of United Way of Greater Union County. "Especially in these difficult times, we are extremely grateful to have the support of New Jersey American Water and look forward to working together to make a difference in the community and help local families beat the odds." This year, New Jersey American Water employees donated to the following United Way chapters: United Way of Glucester County

United Way of Greater Lehigh Valley

United Way of Greater Mercer County

United Way of Greater Philadelphia and Southern New Jersey

United Way of Greater Union County

United Way of Hunterdon County

United Way of Monmouth and Ocean Counties

United Way of Northern New Jersey



About United Way United Way is the world's largest privately funded nonprofit, working in 95% of U.S. communities and 40 countries and territories. It's the mission of choice for 2.5 million volunteers, 7.7 million donors and 45,000 corporate partners in some 1,200 communities. Learn more at UnitedWay.org.

About New Jersey American Water New Jersey American Water, a subsidiary of American Water (NYSE: AWK), is the largest investor-owned water utility in the state, providing high-quality and reliable water and/or wastewater services to approximately 2.8 million people. For more information, visit www.newjerseyamwater.com and follow New Jersey American Water on Twitter and Facebook. About American Water With a history dating back to 1886, American Water is the largest and most geographically diverse U.S. publicly traded water and wastewater utility company. The company employs more than 7,000 dedicated professionals who provide regulated and market-based drinking water, wastewater and other related services to 15 million people in 46 states. American Water provides safe, clean, affordable and reliable water services to our customers to make sure we keep their lives flowing. For more information, visit amwater.com and follow American Water on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210210005623/en/

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Syracuse, N.Y.  Some students in Central New York school districts havent been offered the chance to attend school in-person since the coronavirus pandemic began in March.

That is starting to change, as the number of coronavirus cases locally begins to slide. Many parents say they are elated after months of distance learning for their children.

The Oswego City School District, with nearly 3,700 students, has kept its classrooms closed for middle and high school since the pandemic started, with all those students learning remotely. Thats about to change, said Oswego Schools Superintendent Mathis A. Calvin III.

Middle school students are slated to begin attending school on a hybrid schedule Feb. 22, attending either Monday-Tuesday or Thursday-Friday, Calvin said. High school students are targeted to start on a hybrid plan in early March, he said.

Elementary students, which account for just over 600 students, have been attending on a hybrid schedule since September.

The decision by Oswego city schools is likely the beginning of an effort statewide to bring more kids back into the classrooms, said Bob Lowry, deputy director of the New York State School Superintendents Association.

In some CNY school districts, that means kids who havent had the chance to come to school are now getting the chance. Other schools are looking at bringing more younger kids into classrooms, or increasing the number of days students attend school in classrooms.

In the West Genesee school district, officials have decided to bring in fifth and sixth-graders every other Wednesday, starting in March. That will give them a third day of in-person classes, according to a letter sent to parents.

Onondaga County Executive Ryan McMahon said Tuesday he encouraged school districts to get as many kids back into classrooms as possible. He also said he will be looking into the states six-foot social distancing guideline to see if its feasible and safe to make any adjustments.

Most Central New York districts approach to education in the pandemic has been a hybrid model - some days in class, some days remote. A few districts had enough room in classrooms that they were able to bring more students into the classrooms. A few kept all students completely remote.

Oswegos Calvin told Syracuse.com | The Post Standard that Covid-19 cases are declining, and the district needs to take care of the needs of students who are looking for a return to normalcy. The students mental health also has to be considered, he said.

Also, many of the districts teacher have been vaccinated, or have upcoming appointments, he said.

We will work to get everyone back safely,' Calvin said.

In the Liverpool Central School District, officials are reaching out to families this week to gauge interest in having students return to school four days a week. They also are being asked if their children would need transportation to and from school.

The district, with more than 6,800 students, will see if there is room on the buses and classrooms to make the change, according to Liverpool Superintendent Mark Potter.

The Central Square School District, with 3,500 students, started looking into getting students in grades 6 to 12 who havent had the opportunity to be in classrooms back into school buildings sometime in March. The district was going to have students attend on a hybrid schedule.

But the district pulled back after a survey of parents showed the majority at both the high school and middle school didnt want to make the switch from the all-remote model at this time. After some parents said not enough people filled out the survey, the district agreed to send a new survey to all affected parents and re-evaluate after that data comes in.

In Onondaga County, all districts have offered in-person instruction at least one day a week for most students. Thats not the case in some other CNY counties. In Oneida County, for example, the Utica City School District - the regions second largest district with nearly 10,000 students - has offered only distance learning since March.

At a recent school board meeting, Utica Superintendent Bruce Karan said as cases continue a downward trend, the district is looking at reopening sometime soon.

Elizabeth Doran covers education, suburban government and development, breaking news and more. Got a tip, comment or story idea? Contact her anytime 315-470-3012 or email edoran@syracuse.com.

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Complete coronavirus coverage on syracuse.com
SME-focused challenger bank goes live on the cloud-based platform to help ensure its client interactions are relationship-led and digitally enabled

LONDON, Feb. 10, 2021, Inc.with new SME banking entrant, Recognise, following the granting of its banking license in November 2020.



SMEs in the UK supply 60% of jobsin the private sector and therefore have a significant impact on the economy, including playing an important role in the UK's financial bounce-back from the COVID pandemic. Recognise understands that the SME market does not have a "one size fits all" approach. With nCino, Recognise has a nimble, scalable platform to manage clients' specific needs and enable the bank's employees to provide more effective customer service regardless of where they are working, all of which has been particularly vital during the pandemic when SME support is of paramount importance.

Built by bankers for bankers, nCino has helped Recognise quickly become operational by providing simple and streamlined SME banking processes. nCino's intuitive workflow mirrors the loan journey, allowing applications - from enquiry or referral through to the loan drawdown - to be rapidly processed on a single, end-to-end platform. The cloud-based technology also helps financial institutions meet various compliance obligations while providing valuable, timesaving automation in lieu of tedious, manual tasks. With nCino, Recognise is resolving numerous pain points that are faced by SMEs and are common in day-to-day banking operations. Recognise also has the ability to further enhance and leverage the platform as the bank grows.

Jason Oakley, CEO at Recognise, said, "We exist to realise the extraordinary potential of UK SMEs, the undisputed backbone of our economy. We recognise their needs, challenges and frustrations, and by addressing them head on we're driving prosperity, one ambitious business at a time. We do this by having a model that is led by strong relationship management, enabled by cutting edge technology. Our goal is for 80% of our employees' time to be spent in front of clients rather than on transactional work. By working with nCino and implementing its platform, we have already seen, even at this early stage, how technology plays a valuable part in enabling a strong and effective client experience, which is why we will shortly launch our broker and customer portals to further enhance the experience for our key relationships."

"The ease of configuration of nCino is already being evidenced as we learn from our early lending activity, and there is no need to wait months to implement enhancements, enabling us to become a SME signature bank in the UK," added Monica Velasquez-Torres, Chief Technology Officer at Recognise. "New employees have quickly achieved the required competence through our training and testing methodologies by making use of our 'test & play' environment, which is a testament to the ease of navigation and intuitive nature of the nCino Bank Operating System. We're really excited to be on this journey with nCino and for the future of SME lending in the UK as our services and technology bring a markedly different approach to this underserved market."

"We're thrilled to see the impact Recognise is already having on the SME sector now that they are actively lending and building client relationships," said Charlie McIver, Vice President of Customer Success - EMEA, at nCino. "I'm extremely proud of how the nCino platform is helping Recognise provide a truly innovative service to its SME clients as well as the strong partnership our two companies have formed through the implementation process. Recognise has a thoughtful and ambitious team, dedicated to their mission, and we believe this is just the start of an amazing collaboration."

About Recognise Bank Limited

Recognise Bank Limited ('Recognise') was formed to provide financial services to the UK Small and Medium Enterprises sector and the retail and business savings markets. It will target an underserved but growing SME segment, offering a relationship-led, digitally enabled proposition.

The bank's efficient technology-driven operating base, partners with leading fintech platforms to create a market leading SME service using the best-in-class technology. Recognise has a strong independent Board and an executive team with over 280 years' experience in the banking industry. In five years' time it aims to reach 54,000 depositors and 5,100 borrowers. Recognise is a subsidiary of the City of London Group.

Click herefor further information on Recognise. Follow us on LinkedIn by clicking here

About nCino

nCino.

MEDIA CONTACTS Claire Sandstrom, nCino Natalia Moose, nCino +1 646.520.0710 +1 910.248.4602 csandstrom@mww.com natalia.moose@ncino.com

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The Inspector-General of Schools and Executive Director of the National Schools Inspectorate Authority (NaSIA), Dr. Hilda Ampadu, has emphasized that the Authority continues to ensure that both private and public pre-tertiary schools comply with the COVID-19 protocols laid down by government in order to keep learners safe in school.



We are on top of issues regarding compliance of COVID-19 protocols in all schools. In our inspection of schools since reopening, we have ensured that schools abide by the protocols and take the right measures to ensure the safety of all learners and staff without fail, she stated.



Dr. Ampadu was speaking as a panelist on the topic, COVID-19: Curbing Spread in Schools in Ghana, on The Probe Show on Joy News on Sunday, 7th February, 2021. Other guests on the show were: Prof. John Gyapong, Chairman Vice Chancellors Ghana, Vice Chancellor, UHAS, Philipa Larsen, President, Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT) and Alhaji Yacoub A. B Abubakari, President, Conference of Heads of Assisted Schools, CHASS.



According to the Inspector-General of Schools, our inspection of schools so far show that most schools are complying with the COVID-19 protocols with the wearing of masks, provision of running water, soap and hand sanitizers for learners and staff to wash and sanitize their hands regularly. The only challenge we have encountered is the overcrowding in some schools and we have since advised such schools to run a shift system or divide the classrooms to accommodate fewer learners.



Citing an example of a school that recently recorded positive cases of COVID-19, Dr. Ampadu disclosed that after an inspection of the school, the Authority directed the School Leadership to immediately run a shift system to reduce overcrowding.



She assured the general public that NaSIA will continue to ensure that there is compliance to COVID-19 protocols in schools and reported cases are managed well to prevent further spread.



Prof. John Gyapong, Chairman, Vice Chancellors Ghana and Vice Chancellor of UHAS, said, if schools are able to abide by all the protocols of COVID-19, then the levels of risk will be minimized and learners will be safe. He added that, some universities are also introducing online learning for some courses to ensure minimal contact.



Madam Philipa Larsen, President of GNAT, indicated that there are measures in all senior high schools to protect learners against then virus. She disclosed that in addition to infirmaries, schools have been mapped to various health facilities in the regions and districts to ensure that emergencies are swiftly taken care off.



On his part, Alhaji A. B Abubakari, President of CHASS, stated, all senior high schools go through the laid down protocols and we refer suspected cases to the infirmaries and if need be it is referred to the health directorate, adding that, school authorities are managing the situation to ensure that there is no fear and panic amongst learners and parents.



Source: Peacefmonline.com









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A federal appeals court refused Wednesday to revive a lawsuit by 21 young people demanding government action against climate change, reaffirming a ruling that judges have no power to order such action.

The suit was filed in 2015 by plaintiffs ranging in age from 8 to 19. Saying some had seen their homes and schools flooded because of warming temperatures and others had been harmed by smoke from wildfires, they argued that the government was violating their constitutional rights to life and liberty by approving continued oil, gas and coal development.

A federal judge in Oregon refused to dismiss the suit but was overruled in January 2020 by the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. Although climate change is potentially catastrophic, the remedy the youths seek  requiring the government to move toward a carbon-free energy system by mid-century  is beyond the powers of the judiciary, the court said in a 2-1 ruling that it described as reluctant.

Lawyers for the youths asked the full appeals court for a new hearing before a larger panel. On Wednesday, the court said the request had failed to gain a majority among the 25 judges taking part in the vote. It did not disclose the vote total but said four judges  M. Margaret McKeown, Daniel Collins, Daniel Bress and Lawrence VanDyke  did not participate, for reasons the court did not specify.

The youths will seek review from the Supreme Court and will also invite President Bidens administration to the negotiating table, their lawyers said. Former President Donald Trump described as a hoax the scientific consensus that humans are responsible for climate change.

But Biden has promised to work toward carbon-free power production by 2035, stopped issuing oil and gas drilling permits on federal land, rejoined the Paris climate accord and named former Secretary of State John Kerry as his envoy on climate change.

The ruling deprives people in the nine states covered by the Ninth Circuit of the ability to seek a resolution of a real controversy with their government, and hear a controversy about harm to the health and safety of children, said attorney Julia Olson of the nonprofit Our Childrens Trust. That travesty cannot stand.

I hope that President Joe Biden will understand the crisis were in, stop fighting our claims and our rights, and will decide to come to the settlement table in our case, one of the youths, Sahara V., said in a statement released by the lawyers.

In last years ruling, Judge Andrew Hurwitz said the changes the lawsuit seeks would require a fundamental transformation of this countrys energy system, if not that of the industrialized world. The youths must instead make their case to the president and Congress, he said.

In dissent, U.S. District Judge Josephine Staton of Santa Ana, temporarily assigned to the appeals court, said the courts may not be able to undo climate change but can require the government to take meaningful action. The Constitution does not condone the nations willful destruction, she said.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @BobEgelko
Kabul, Feb 10 : At least two people were killed and five others injured on Wednesday in two separate explosions in Kabul, the latest in a string of violent incidents in the Afghan capital, police said.

An Improvised Explosive Device (IED) attached to a vehicle exploded at 8.55 a.m. in Kart-e-Parwan, Police District 4, along a four-line road connecting the Kabul airport to the Intercontinental Hotel, Xinhua news agency quoted Kabul police spokesman Ferdaus Faramarz as saying to reporters.

This blast killed two people inside the vehicle and one other person was injured, he said.

Earlier in the day, another IED explosion took place in Kart-e-Ariana in Police District 2, wounding four people, Faramarz added.

No group has claimed responsibility for the attacks.

On Tuesday, four employees of the Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development were killed in the capital city after unidentified gunman opened fire on the vehicle they were travelling in.

The incident took place in Bagh-e-Daud area in the city's Police District 5.

This was the second violent incident in Kabul on Tuesday.

An IED exploded in Police District 16, injuring one person.

The US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) said in a report released on January 30 that the Taliban and IS Islamic State terror group have increased targeted assassinations in the country, with increasing killings of government officials, civil society leaders and journalists.
[February 10, 2021] Cadillac Fairview Celebrates the Year of the Ox with New Digital Experiences

TORONTO, Feb. 10, 2021 /CNW/ - As Canadians prepare to celebrate Lunar New Year, Cadillac Fairview (CF) is marking the year of the Ox by introducing new digital experiences and exclusive offers aimed at engaging and educating Canadians about the holiday, while safely bringing communities together virtually. Select CF properties will be hosting an Instagram contest from February 12 - 19, asking shoppers to share their favourite Lunar New Year traditions and memories for a chance to win a CF SHOP! card valued at $888, paying homage to the lucky number eight, which culturally symbolizes wealth and prosperity. With limited in-person gathering restrictions currently in place in many cities, the online contest is an opportunity to bring community members together online to share memories and well wishes while keeping cultural traditions alive. "Cadillac Fairview has proudly celebrated Lunar New Year for many years through vibrant displays, performances and experiences, and while this year will be understandably different, it's important for us to continue to celebrate this important holiday for our communities," said Craig Flannagan, VP of Marketing, Cadillac Fairview. Throughout the month of February, guests at CF Pacific Centre, CF Richmond Centre, CF Markville, CF Fairview Mall and CF Toronto Eaton Centre will be treated to ne digital creative highlighting the Year of the Ox and Lunar New Year.



As part of an exclusive partnership with UnionPay, CF shoppers will receive a special bonus CF SHOP! card offer with purchases using UnionPay. Available until February 26th at CF Pacific Centre, CF Richmond Centre, CF Chinook Centre and CF Market Mall, shoppers will receive a limited edition card featuring the Year of the Ox. For the safety of guests and employees, shoppers are required to make an appointment through CF Guest List for this CF SHOP! card offer. CF SHOP! Card x UnionPay Exclusive Bonus Gift Offer

Buy $500 in CF SHOP! cards, get a $20 bonus CF SHOP! card

in CF SHOP! cards, get a bonus CF SHOP! card Buy $3,000 in CF SHOP! cards, get a $135 bonus CF SHOP! card

in CF SHOP! cards, get a bonus CF SHOP! card Buy $5,000 in CF SHOP! cards, get a $250 bonus CF SHOP! card For more information on participating CF shopping centres and to check out exclusive Lunar New Year retail promotions please visit www.cfshops.com . About Cadillac Fairview

Cadillac Fairview is one of the largest owners, operators and developers of best-in-class office, retail and mixed-use properties in North America. The Cadillac Fairview portfolio is owned by the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, a diversified global investor which administers the pensions of more than 323,000 active and retired school teachers. The real estate portfolio also includes investments in retail, mixed-use and industrial real estate in Brazil, Colombia and Mexico. Valued at around $32 billion, the Canadian portfolio includes over 37 million square feet of leasable space at 70 properties in Canada, including landmark developments, such as Toronto-Dominion Centre, CF Toronto Eaton Centre, CF Pacific Centre, CF Chinook Centre, Tour Deloitte and CF Carrefour Laval. SOURCE Cadillac Fairview Corporation Limited

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Several post-secondary school presidents came out in support of the provinces new Skills, Talent and Knowledge Strategy, including the heads of both Brandon University and Assiniboine Community College.

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Several post-secondary school presidents came out in support of the provinces new Skills, Talent and Knowledge Strategy, including the heads of both Brandon University and Assiniboine Community College.

Advanced Education, Skills and Immigration Minister Wayne Ewasko publicly unveiled this new strategy on Monday morning, revealing that a different approach to rebuilding the economy was needed following the disruptive influence of the COVID-19 pandemic.

As such, over the past year, the province consulted with various post-secondary schools, businesses and sector council partners to develop this guideline that will hopefully put Manitoba on the right path to economic recovery.

"The goal of this strategy is to ensure we have people with the right skills, at the right time, to quickly rebound from the pandemic, ensure resilience and support economic growth, now and again into the future," Ewasko said on Monday.

The document itself has four key objectives, including:

 anticipating skills needed for the future;

 aligning education and training to labour market needs and helping students succeed;

 fostering entrepreneurial and innovative skills; and

 growing, attracting and retaining talent.

To help spell out the significance of each pillar, Ewasko played a video featuring the heads of different post-secondary institutions, who explained how their schools will benefit from an increased focus on these specific objectives.

LEFT: Assiniboine Community College president Mark Frison talks about the merits of the provinces new Skills, Talent and Knowledge Strategy during a Monday morning news conference. RIGHT: Brandon University president David Docherty talks about the Manitoba governments new Skills, Talent and Knowledge Strategy during Mondays online news conference. This strategy will serve as a guideline to help get the provinces economy back on track following the destructive impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. (Screenshot)

For example, Assiniboine president Mark Frison revealed how step two is important for his institution, which is so "hardwired" into the community and the broader agricultural industry in Manitoba.

"Aligning your programs with the labour market is second nature," Frison said. "Whether thats adapting programs based on 35 plus program reviews weve done over the last five years, or adding new programs like weve done through our Centre for Animal Proteins as a result of trying to address (the reality) that one in five jobs in the agricultural sector will go unfilled by 2025."

Meanwhile, BU president David Doherty said his school has always been a big proponent of "innovation and entrepreneurship," since they normally attract students from all over the Westman area.

"BU is proud to welcome 80 per cent of our students from Manitoba, with nearly 90 per cent of those from right here in our region," said Doherty.

"Better yet, three-quarters of our graduates choose to stay here (in Brandon), putting down roots and putting their innovative and entrepreneurial skills to work, building Manitobas economic, social and cultural institutions."

Moving forward, Ewasko said this new strategy will serve as a three-year "living document," which will be continually edited and updated as the province receives feedback from various stakeholders like BU and ACC.

Plus, throughout this time, the province will be looking to complete some short- and medium-term objectives using this strategy that will further their overarching goal of economic recovery.

One of these medium-term objectives involves increasing the number of joint programs between provincial colleges and universities, like engineering pathways.

"Were showing that were listening and were willing to collaborate with our many stakeholders throughout the province, and that goes with post-secondary institutions, business, students, various different communities, First Nations," said Ewasko. "And I look forward to seeing these strategies come to fruition over the next three years."

Anyone who would like to read the provinces new Skills, Talent and Knowledge Strategy in its entirety can do so by visiting gov.mb.ca/mbskills.

 kdarbyson@brandonsun.com

 Twitter: @KyleDarbyson
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Clarice Massmann,age 86 of Osakis passed away on Monday, May 24, 2021 at the Lakeside Lodge care facility in Osakis, MN. Funeral services will be held on Saturday, May 29, 2021 at 11:00 am at the Immaculate Conception Church in Osakis with burial at the Calvary Cemetery. Visitation hour
DELHI UNION OF JOURNALISTS (Regd.)

Flat no.29, New Central Market, Connaught Circus, New Delhi-110 001

9.02. 2021

Press Release

Ominous Portents ...

DUJ Condemns Raids on Newsclick

The Delhi Union of Journalists (DUJ) condemns the raids by the Enforcement

Directorate on the office of online portal Newsclick and the homes of its owner editor Prabir Purkayastha, editor Pranjal and human resources head Amit Chakravarty earlier today.

Newsclick has been providing a platform to leading investigative journalists like

Paranjoy Guha Thakurta and bold video journalist Abhisar Sharma, P.Sainath - among others. lt has also been reporting extensively on the farmers agitation for the past two months. II has established itself as a different voice with news and analysis of national and international affairs.

We view these raids as a serious attack on the online media and the freedom of the press. Coming In the wake of the filing of sedition charges against several senior journalists last week and government moves to curb free speech on Twitter and YouTube, the raids are ominous. The aim is clearly to intimidate and browbeat independent and critical voices that disagree with the government on contemporary issues.

Sd/-

S.K.Pande

President

Sd/-

Sujata Madhok

General Secretary
New Delhi: A Delhi court Wednesday sent a man, arrested from Punjab, to 7-day police custody in connection with the Red Fort violence on Republic Day during farmers' tractor parade against the Centre's three new agri laws. Iqbal Singh, carrying a reward of Rs 50,000 on his arrest, was nabbed from Hoshiarpur by the Delhi Police's Special Cell and brought to the national capital today. He was produced before Metropolitan Magistrate Poorva Mehra who sent him for custodial interrogation after the police said his interrogation was required to confront him with several videos and identify other accused persons.

The police sought his custody for 10 days saying Singh was allegedly one of the main conspirators of the violence and there was a need to establish where his funding was coming from. The investigating officer said Singh's alleged link to actor-activist Deep Sidhu, who was arrested on Tuesday in the case, needed to be ascertained.

Police alleged the events leading to the violence were allegedly well planned and not a random occurrence. There are hundreds of videos. We need to confront him with all these. We need to find out who are the people who came with him and who are they affiliated with. He was one of the main instigators. This was a conspiracy, the police alleged.

The investigating officer alleged that Singh did a live video for over an hour on a news channel in which he can be seen instigating the crowd to violence. We need to go to Punjab and look into his news channel. We need to establish where his funding is coming from. He (Singh)told us during interrogation that he ran that news channel on which there was a live video for 1.15 hr, IO alleged.

Singh, however, claimed he did not go to Red Fort to cause violence and whatever he did or said was in the heat of the moment. I did not come to cause violence. I reached Red Fort just like that and had not planned to go there. When I reached emotions flared up. Whatever I did is on my live video. I did not instigate anyone, he claimed.

The police had announced a cash reward of Rs 50,000 for information leading to Singh's arrest. Thousands of farmers protesting the Centre's new agriculture laws had clashed with the police during their tractor parade on January 26. Over 500 police personnel were injured and one protestor died.

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Congress leader and MP Rahul Gandhi, the man known as Pappu among the BJP and its followers, hit back at Prime Minister Narendra Modi for calling farm bill protestors Andolanjeevi, or someone who is a professional activist, saying at least the protestors were not cronyjeevi, or professional cronies, as the entire BJP has turned out to be.





"Crony-jeevi is someone who is selling the country," Gandhi, who is a supporter of the farmers agitation, said in a tweet.

The Congress MP has slammed the BJP government at the Center in the past for abandoning the poor and middle class while surrendering to the whims and demands of capitalists like the Adanis and the Ambanis.

Farmers in Punjab have been agitating for the past couple of months in protest against the three farm bills tabled by the Modi government saying if allowed to pass, the big companies will be able to control the farm market leaving the poor farmers in even worse shape than before.

As reported, the PM, in a speech in the Rajya Sabha, slammed the agitating farmers calling them agents of Pakistan and Khalistan while coining a new term for them andolanjeevi.

"There is a new crop of andolanjeevi. They live for protests. They look for ways to start a new movement. The country needs to be aware of these andolanjeevis," he said.

Senior Congress leader and former Finance Minister P Chidambaram also took exception to Modis andolanjeevi barb saying the father of the nation Mahatma Gandhi was also an andolanjeevi who got us freedom from the British.

Though the government has offered to hold talks with the farmers and has even agreed to delay the new farm laws for a year and half, farmers have refused to call off their stir unless the law was repealed in its totality.
More share trading has shifted from London to Dublin and its sister exchanges in the wake of Brexit, but UK companies are still reluctant to take the plunge of dual listings, according to the owner of the Irish Stock Exchange.

Euronext Amsterdam overtook London in January as Europe's biggest trading venue as 6.5bn in business fled the UK. Euronext's stock markets in Paris and Dublin also benefited after EU financial institutions were barred from trading in London post-Brexit.

CEO Stephane Boujnah said a strong performance in 2020 was due not only to Covid-related market volatility, but also to the migration of trading activity out of the UK in advance of its departure from the EU.

"There has been an increase in volumes in equity markets related to dual-listed companies," said Euronext CEO Stephane Boujnah. "It is difficult to allocate a cause...but decisions are now being driven by the reality of Brexit." However, very few companies have so far opted to follow the money and add a second listing in Dublin or other Euronext venues. Last year retail real estate firm Hammerson listed in Dublin, while UK property company Segro sought a listing in Paris. Consumer products giant Unilever also restored its secondary listing in Amsterdam. Read More Euronext Head of Listing Anthony Attia said this was due to "several technical factors". He said he expected more companies to seek dual-listings in Dublin and elsewhere once these were resolved. "The CSD [central securities depository] from Crest to Euroclear won't be complete until the end of March. That's one of the roadblocks," he said. "And there were a lot of technicalities of Brexit that were under discussion until very recently." Increased flows to Dublin were visible throughout last year among top Irish blue-chip stocks as institutional investors began to shift business away from London ahead of Brexit. Euronext's market share in trading Ryanair, CRH and Smurfit Kappa  three highly liquid companies listed in both London and Dublin  topped 50pc each by September, outperforming the London Stock Exchange (LSE) by a wide margin. However, Dublin has been completely overlooked in a major year of initial public offerings (IPOs) globally, with none of the 49 primary equity issues on Euronext venues taking place on the Irish exchange.
WASHINGTON  East Bay Rep. Eric Swalwell returned to his courtroom roots Wednesday as he helped prosecute the impeachment case against Donald Trump, arguing that the former president whipped up supporters with baseless charges of voting fraud to steal the election for himself.

Swalwell, one of nine House managers arguing for conviction in the Senate, said Trump consciously laid the groundwork in the weeks after the November election for the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by militant supporters seeking to block Congress from certifying Joe Biden as president-elect.

That attack didnt come after just a handful of tweets and offhand remarks, Swalwell and other House prosecutors told senators.

Just like to build a fire it doesnt just start with the flames, Donald Trump for months and months assembled the tinder, the kindling, threw on logs for fuel to have his supporters believe that the only way that their victory would be lost was if it was stolen, said Swalwell, D-Dublin. So that way, President Trump was ready if he lost the election to light the match.

And lose he did, Swalwell noted, by 7 million votes.

Instead of accepting the results or pursuing legitimate claims, he told his base more lies, Swalwell said. He doused the flames with kerosene.

The former Alameda County deputy district attorney helped make Democrats opening presentation in their case that Trump incited the insurrection; Swalwell returned later to narrate a harrowing series of social media videos, surveillance camera footage and police communications from when rioters broke into the Capitol.

Prosecutors laid out what lead impeachment manager Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin labeled as the provocation by Trump in three parts: initiating the big lie that the election would be fraudulent, urging supporters to stop the election counting, and then telling them to fight like hell to install him in a second term.

Reps. Joe Neguse of Colorado and Joaquin Castro of Texas highlighted tweets and statements from Trump in the months leading up to the election telling his supporters that the only way he could lose would be through fraud.

Handout / Getty Images

Swalwell picked up the narrative in December, as states were certifying their Electoral College votes. He said Trump repeatedly used words evoking violence and told supporters they had to show up in Washington on Jan. 6 to prevent Congress from ratifying the results.

He built this mob over many months with repeated messaging until they believed that they had been robbed of their vote and they would do anything to stop the certification, Swalwell said. He made them believe that their victory was stolen and incited them so he could use them to steal the election for himself. ... And when they were primed and angry and ready to fight, he escalated and channeled their rage with a call to arms.

Swalwell noted his own background prosecuting violent crimes in Alameda County  he was a deputy district attorney from 2006 to 2012  and the frequent need for prosecutors to prove in court that defendants acted with premeditation.

The evidence here on this count is overwhelming, Swalwell said. President Trumps conduct leading up to Jan. 6 was deliberate, planned and premeditated. This was not one speech, not one tweet. It was dozens in rapid succession with the specific details. He was acting as part of the host committee.

It was the highest-profile impeachment moment for Swalwell, but not an entirely unfamiliar one. Swalwell was also a key player in Trumps first impeachment, on abuse of power and obstruction of justice, as a member of the Intelligence and Judiciary committees that held hearings on removing Trump from office. Swalwell was also on the House floor the day the Capitol was breached, and was evacuated from the House chamber as rioters attempted to break in.

Swalwell described the moment when lawmakers learned the mob was inside the building. He said they were told to look for the gas masks under their seats while a chaplain prayed.

Uncertain what would happen next, I sent a text message to my wife: I love you and the babies, please hug them for me, Swalwell said.

He told senators that the mob came within about 58 steps of them as they were evacuated from their chamber. Swalwell played a security video showing how Capitol police blocked the hallway with their bodies to prevent rioters from reaching you and your staff.

The public does not know how close these rioters came to you, he said.

Another Californian among the nine House managers, Rep. Ted Lieu of Torrance (Los Angeles County), followed Swalwell to make the case that as Trump ran out of nonviolent options to stay in office, he targeted Republican officials including Vice President Mike Pence and Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

He was coming for you, Lieu told senators. He was coming for all of us, just as the mob did at his direction.

Its unlikely that Democrats arguments will sway enough Republicans to convict Trump. Only six Republicans joined the 50 Democrats on Tuesday in voting that the Senate had the right to hear the case  far fewer than the 67 votes needed to convict Trump in the 100-member chamber.

Before wrapping up his case, Swalwell seemed to acknowledge the task ahead of him. He made a point of not implicating Republican senators who had backed Trumps pre-Jan. 6 arguments in the insurrection. And he noted that Trump tweeted the night before in a threatening way at three top Republicans in the Senate, including McConnell, about the thousands of his supporters in the city.

What our commander in chief did was wildly different from what anyone here in this room did to raise election concerns, Swalwell said.

Swalwell is a polarizing figure for some Republicans, however, and at least one saw him as a flawed messenger. A spokesperson for Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, one of the six Republicans who voted in favor of hearing the impeachment case, noted that in 2018, Swalwell reacted to a report of ugly voice mails directed at her for voting to confirm Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh by tweeting, Boo hoo hoo. Youre a senator who police will protect.

Collins spokesperson Annie Clark said Wednesday, After he derisively mocked death threats aimed at Sen. Collins, it was ironic to hear Rep. Swalwell today talk about the importance of taking such threats seriously.

Chronicle staff writer Dustin Gardiner contributed to this report.

Tal Kopan is The San Francisco Chronicles Washington correspondent. Email: tal.kopan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @talkopan
The Department of Petroleum Resources, DPR, Tuesday, disclosed that it plans to upgrade operations in the downstream petroleum industry, leveraging on its ongoing automation process.

In a statement in Abuja, Director/Chief Executive Officer of the DPR, Engineer Sarki Auwalu, stated that the upgrade would be to global standards and would be driven by its deployment of improved technology.

Auwalu, who was speaking at a virtual meeting with members of the Major Oil Marketers Association of Nigeria, MOMAN, in Abuja, noted that the DPR was currently deploying appropriate technology to enhance value for operators and investors alike in the downstream sector .

Specifically, Auwalu explained that the DPR had concluded plans to launch the Downstream Remote Monitoring Systems, DRMS, an inventory and regulatory tool designed to track product levels across retail outlets and depots using the short code: '*7117#' on February 11 2021 in Abuja.

He added that the introduction of the DRMS would create value for the sector by providing access to data for efficient management of their operations.

He added that the DPR had developed a framework around quality, quantity, integrity and safety, QQIS, for petroleum products in response to the current situation of price freedom in the Downstream sector.

The DPR chief executive assured that the petroleum industry regulator, as partner in progress, would continue to engage with MOMAN to ensure seamless communication and feedback on its regulatory activities.

He lauded the support of MOMAN for the gas expansion program of government and advised the association to ensure their members compliance with the gas add-on directives for their stations as they are the energy bridge of the nation.

Also speaking, Chairman of MOMAN, Mr. Tunji Oyebanji, assured the DPR of the readiness of the association to always partner with the petroleum industry regulator for the development and growth of the Downstream sector.

He applauded the technology deployment by DPR in its operations which, according to him, had enhanced its approval processes and data collection drive.
Forget feasts fit for kings. This is America, and were celebrating Presidents Day with meals worthy of our democratically elected leaders.

This week were looking at some of the favorite foods of presidents past. And thats surprisingly well documented in some cases. From George Washington forward, historians have taken notes on what many of our presidents enjoyed for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Some, most notably Thomas Jefferson, even scribbled out recipes for those dishes by hand.

The tastes of those presidents varied quite a bit. Some had quite humble appetites while others went all-out on lavish ingredients and dishes.

Andrew Jackson was known to have a fondness for leather britches, a modest dish of dried green beans simmered in water with bacon. Squirrel stew was a favorite of multiple presidents, including William Henry Harrison and James A. Garfield, who both had access to far more flashy proteins than tree rodents.

On ExpressNews.com: Nine native Texas ingredients you should be cooking with

Theodore Roosevelt was quite defensive about his simple tastes. In 1906 a Washington Post story claimed his appetites were quite extravagant, resulting in a published correction reading, Instead of a breakfast consisting of oranges, cantaloupes, cereals, eggs, bacon, lamb chops, hotcakes, and waffles, President Roosevelt insists that the regular White House breakfast consists of hard boiled eggs, rolls, and coffee.

On the more refined side of the plate, Chester A. Arthur, an enthusiastic angler and noted food fan, was particularly smitten with Rhode Island eel. Considered a delicacy at the time, the eel was fished to the point of near extinction. Presidents John Adams, James Buchanan, Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft all regularly served turtle soup at the White House, another dish thats nearly vanished from American tables, although it was quite common earlier in the countrys history.

The swagger and grace of John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy extended to the dinner table. The two helped popularize French food in the U.S.  a stark contrast to Richard Nixon, who allegedly demanded his cottage cheese topped with ketchup.

While were not going to ask anyone to re-create turtle soup or, heaven forbid, Nixons preferred snack, this week we do have four recipes from past presidents any home cook could feel patriotic about preparing this Presidents Day.

On ExpressNews.com: Cold-weather Mexican soups and stews with a modern twist

George Washington: Our nations first president reportedly preferred to start his day with a breakfast of cornmeal hoecakes. In his time baking powder hadnt yet been invented, so those would have been leavened with yeast for a unique texture not commonly found today. Our recipe for 18th-century style hoecakes like those that Washington would have eaten comes from the Mount Vernon Inn Restaurant on Washingtons plantation in Virginia.

Recipe: Mount Vernon Hoecakes

John Adams: Our second president  and the first to live in the White House  preferred foods reflecting the pantry of his native Massachusetts. Apples played a significant role in that: Adams reportedly drank a tankard of hard apple cider nearly every day. When those apples werent in a mug, theyd wind up in desserts including our recipe for a classic spiced apple pandowdy from his wife Abigail.

Recipe: Abigail Adams Apple Pandowdy

Thomas Jefferson: Jefferson has often been billed as the nations first foodie president for his renowned appetite shaped in part by his service as an ambassador to France from 1785 to 1789. Ten recipes penned by Jefferson himself are housed at the Library of Congress, as is a hand-written document detailing the construction of a pasta-making machine, a reflection of his deep appreciation for macaroni and cheese. His recipe for white bean soup was adapted into a modern recipe by food historian and writer Tori Avey.

Recipe: Monticello White Bean Soup

Abraham Lincoln: The famously frugal Lincoln was known for simple tastes, being a fan of biscuits, bacon, corned beef and other staples of the day. But he had a fancy side as well, including an appreciation for the classic French dish chicken fricassee. Its an old-fashioned dish of well-browned chicken braised in a creamy sauce. Our recipe reflects a unique way Lincoln enjoyed his fricassee: with a dash of ground nutmeg and mace.

Recipe: Abraham Lincolns Chicken Fricassee

pstephen@express-news.net | Twitter: @pjbites | Instagram: @pjstephen
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GOVERNMENT has affirmed its commitment to create an enabling environment for coffee farmers to improve their produce and benefit from value addition.

Deputy Minister for Agriculture Hussein Bashe said in order for the coffee farmers to get the best prices, the government in collaboration with the private and financial sectors, are mobilising farmers to purchase Central Pulpery Unit - CPU processing machines.

He said the CPU machine will help in value addition of the cash crop as farmers can process coffee to the desired quality.

"This process will help farmers to produce coffee with the required standards in international markets," he said.

Mr Bashe gave the clarification in Parliament when responding to Ngara legislator Mr Ndaisaba Ruhoro who wanted to know the government's plans to create a conducive environment for local coffee producers to enable them enjoy best prices as their colleagues in neighbouring countries.

Mr Ruhoro also questioned the involvement of the private sector in buying coffee direct from the farmers instead of cooperative unions which makes it less competitive due to low prices.

Mr Bashe said the government is revamping the cooperative unions for them to offer competitive prices and improve exports of coffee.

Furthermore, he said, the government has initiated discussions with major coffee buyers in the world like Strabag, to introduce the country coffee into their market.

"The ultimate goal is to see the company (Strabag) embrace Tanzania coffee brands," he said.

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On top of that, Mr Bashe said the ministry is working on a logo that will introduce Tanzania products to end users.

Mr Bashe said coffee selling business is conducted through cooperative unions and societies whereas in 2020/21 season, as of January, Kagera Region had in stock a total of 78,309,239 kilogrammes of cherry coffee, while private buyers had 13,129,491-kilogrammes.

The Deputy Minister said Kagera Region has seven dealers namely Kaderes Co. Ltd, Karagwe Estates, Kyeju's Co. Ltd, Shayakye Co. Ltd, Kongeru Co. Ltd, Khasum Co. Ltd and Togabe Co. Ltd.

He insisted that the government will keep on working with private sector in boosting coffee production and sales.

"Private coffee buying companies are being invited to register as they increase competition in the market and at the end of the day it is the farmers who benefits with the best packages," said Mr Bashe.

For increased coffee production, he said, the government is having a special strategy in production of seedlings as almost 55,722,185 have been distributed to farmers.

"We want to produce at least 20-million seedlings annually so that we reach our benchmark of producing 300,000 tonnes of coffee come 2025," said the Deputy Minister.
The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
editorial

Good rains are always good news for farmers as shown by this week's reports that the Grain Marketing Board is gearing up for what could be the largest maize crop ever harvested in Zimbabwe, 3,1 million tonnes.

The good rains are only part of the story. Government launched a sustained and serious effort this year to ensure that all farmers, smallholders right up to commercial A2 farmers, had adequate inputs on time.

There was also the switch to conservation farming, which does not just ensure a reasonable crop in a drought, but also means that when good rains fall, the extra water is of benefit, with erosion and other rain damage limited. So we were set up for a good crop in an ordinary year and an adequate crop in a bad year, but that meant we were ready to grow a record crop in a very good year.

All of this goes to show that Zimbabwe's problem had never been lazy or indifferent farmers, but a lack of organisation right across the board to ensure genuine and hard-working farmers, the overwhelming majority, could produce a harvest.

The excellent rains were an exceptionally welcome bonus, turning what would have been national self-sufficiency with a bit over into something that looks like an eight months reserve to carry over into the next season, or even to earn a bit of extra money on some exports if there is a suitable market nearby, although our immediate neighbours have also had good rains.

Far more importantly, this harvest is spread. The reports of minor flood damage in Matabeleland South and Masvingo provinces suggest that even our traditionally drier districts were winning with the weather this year.

Some city dwellers detached from the countryside might have read too much into the reports of this minor flooding. The odd farmer who took a chance and planted next to a river, or who had skimped maintenance on farm huts, might have had a bit of damage.

But the overwhelming majority would infinitely prefer above normal rains to normal rains, and definitely prefer too much water to too little. In fact there has been probably more flooding of homes in urban areas, on those wetlands where criminal land barons illegally allocated land, than in rural Zimbabwe where almost everyone can remember at least one heavy-rainfall season and take precautions.

That spread of good crops, along with the actual totals, has a huge impact socially, as well as economically, on Zimbabwe. Yes, at the national level we will grow our own food this year and the filling of dams and recharging of aquifers will mean, when combined with an expansion of last year's wheat inputs programme, that we should expect the 2021 wheat harvest to give self-sufficiency.

Since Pfumvudza, the Presidential inputs scheme, also included oil seeds, the imports of this vital raw material will also be right down. For many farmers this was a new crop, but a decent rainy season means that they can recover from any mistakes and so know more exactly what to do if the next season is not so good.

But the real revolution has been at the household level. Not only will almost all rural families have grown enough food to last the next year, but most will have something left over to sell. And that means not just being self-reliant, it means the family will have cash in the bank, or at least the mobile wallet.

Even selling just 10 bags of maize and a few bags of oil seeds will do a lot for the average smallholder's life. It is not only moving away from handouts, but moving into the commercial farming world.

There has always been the top level of smallholders who think and act commercially. Now most of their neighbours will be doing the same.

When we talk about Zimbabwe moving towards self-sufficiency and becoming a middle income economy by 2030, we have to move far beyond the national, or even provincial and district gross domestic product.

We have to look at families and households. If Zimbabwe's gross domestic product divided by its population produces a per capita figure that puts us into the middle income bracket in 2030, it will be an achievement, but not one that means a lot if this leaves a few hundred thousand rich people taking the lion's share and leaving millions in poverty.

If we have most families somewhere in the middle income range, whether because they are good farmers, have a decent job, run a profitable business as a skilled person, even if it is a one-person business, then there will still be inequalities, sometimes large ones, but little dire poverty.

Development and economic growth means more than just increasing the national wealth, although that is a necessary condition.

It also means we move forward together, perhaps at different paces, but all on the same road to individual prosperity as well as meeting the national total.

Almost certainly the middle income status requires this approach, since it is only achievable if there are a lot of people putting in their personal input. This is easy to see when we look at the expected harvests this year, and a substantial majority of rural families having some money. Having an extra million consumers, even if their wallets are on the thin side, should be very good news for those manufacturers who can produce exactly what those consumers want and need, produce it at the right quality and produce it at the right price.

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Few families are going to rush from a GMB collection point and squander their profit. But those who have prepared for the emerging market can benefit, as can their employees, and it is even at this point that Government starts getting taxes, even if it is only VAT and the odd duty payment.

At the same time sustained rural growth starts building more businesses, service industries and even processing centres in the rural areas. In a developed country where farms are still small, like vast swathes of Europe, you will find three quarters of rural communities are not farmers, or at least farming is not their major activity.

But the entire local economy is built on what the farmers produce, with the rest adding value, maintaining equipment and the like.

That is why those countries are upper middle income or upper income nations. The other major gain from this year's excellent rains is that farmers now understand the new Pfumvudza farming systems, the upgrade in livestock management, and the need for conservation works where there has been some slackness.

So even if the next season is less wonderful, and Zimbabwe rarely has two good rainy seasons in a row, and has only seen three in a row once since independence, we will have good carry-over stocks of food and more than a million farming families who now know how to produce even in bad years, and they have water in dams and wells and the soil.
A teenage boy who allegedly broke into the home of a young woman just a day after she was killed in a car chase blames her for leaving the door unlocked.

Jennifer Board, 22, died when a Holden Statesman ran into the back of an allegedly stolen Hyundai, which then crossed onto the wrong side of the road and smashed into her bike at an intersection in Townsville on Friday night.

Two teenage boys allegedly broke into her home in Currajong about 1am on Sunday, stealing several items before fleeing when a man there caught them.

One of the boys, 15, called Magistrate Viviana Keegan 'a dumb c**t' after she denied him bail in court on Wednesday.

Jennifer Board (pictured), 22, died when a Holden Statesman ran into the back of an allegedly stolen Hyundai, which then crossed onto the wrong side of the road and smashed into her bike

Pictured: One of the teenagers being questioned and arrested by police over the alleged robbery. One of the boys, 15, reportedly called Magistrate Viviana Keegan 'a dumb c***' after she denied him bail in court on Wednesday

'I just want to go home,' the boy said in court, according to The Townsville Bulletin. 'I've been in the watch house for over 24 hours. I want to go home.

'It is not even my fault, sir. If they want to leave their f**king door unlocked.'

The boys are not suggested to have targeted the home or knew Ms Board lived there before allegedly breaking in.

Police have not said whether it was a targeted attack or coincidence.

Ms Keegan noted the boy allegedly told police he would have attacked occupants of the house if they woke up. A man did catch them, but instead they fled.

'When talking to police you said that if a victim woke up and approached you, you would 'f**k them up',' she said.

The boy claimed this was an empty threat and 'people just say stuff'.

Christopher Hughes, the 25-year-old Holden driver, has been charged with Ms Board's (pictured) murder

The teen was supported by his mother and uncle in court and faces eight dishonestly and drug charges including burglary, stealing and possessing marijuana.

His lawyer applied for bail while a police prosecutor opposed bail, which ultimately led to Magistrate Keegan denying bail for the boy to reappear on on February 24.

The 15-year-old was previously charged with burglary and three counts of stealing, while a second teenage boy has been arrested and is assisting police with their investigation, the court heard.

Christopher Hughes, the 25-year-old Holden driver, is charged with murder and the 18-year-old Hyundai driver with driving and property offences.

He is accused of following Hyundai sedan driver Gregory Clubb during a suspected vigilante pursuit.

A 15-year-old has been charged with burglary and three counts of stealing. Pictured: One of the alleged burglars being arrested

Clubb faced Townsville Magistrates Court on Tuesday and had his bail revoked.

Hughes, who has been charged with murder, also had his matter heard in court and was remanded in custody.

Police will rely on a definition of murder that does not require intent, instead assessing whether someone committed a criminal act that was reckless or negligent where death was a likely consequence.

Locals banded together on Saturday to hold a memorial motorbike ride while loved ones of the young woman come to terms with the heartbreaking news.

Hughes, who has been charged with Ms Board's (pictured) murder, also had his matter heard in court and was remanded in custody

Pictured: Ms Board's abandoned motorbike after the smash in Townsville on Friday night

Jennifer Board (pictured) was killed when a car chase came to a dramatic end at an intersection

Ms Board's final post to Instagram in December showed her celebrating the moment she received her restricted motorcycle license, having got her learner's permit three months earlier.

Her sister and best friend, Siana Board, said Jennifer was the 'most genuine soul', who loved the colour orange.

'Jennifer has never hurt a single person in this life,' Ms Board told the Courier Mail.

'I couldn't think of a worse person for this to happen to.'

Ms Board also revealed that her sister recently applied for the police service.

The aspiring policewoman (pictured) died on the scene. A 25-year-old man has been charged with murder

Jennifer Board, 22, (pictured) was killed after she was hit by a vehicle that had just ploughed into another car at an intersection in Thuringowa Central, in Townsville on Friday night

Having just moved to Darwin, she is now desperately trying to get back to Queensland to farewell Jennifer.

'There are no flights today it destroyed me to move away from her, and now this happens,' Ms Board said.

More than 100 motorcyclists rode down the street where Ms Board was killed on Saturday morning, with many donning orange in honour of the 22-year-old.

Hundreds of other locals laid orange flowers and carried orange balloons to pay their respects at the crash site.

The 22-year-old's last post to Instagram showed her celebrating the moment she received her restricted motorcycle license, having got her learner's permit three months earlier

Her sister and best friend, Siana Board, (left) said Jennifer (right) was the 'most genuine soul' and had dreamed of becoming a police officer

Police alleged after the crash the stolen Hyundai fled the scene before the car was found abandoned in Garbutt an hour later.

The alleged driver of the Holden, a 25-year-old Bushland Beach man and his two passengers, a 41-year-old man and a 22-year-old woman were taken to hospital with minor injuries.

Police are appealing for anyone who may have any information regarding this incident to come forward as investigations continue.

Ms Board (pictured) had been riding down the road just before 10pm on Friday when she was struck

Hundreds of mourners gathered at the crash site on Saturday to farewell the young motorcyclist

The collision allegedly happened a vigilante member of the public decided to 'aggressively' follow the allegedly stolen car, crossing the median strip of the road into the motorcycle's path.

Superintendent Glen Ponting said: 'I very strongly caution against any form of vigilante action.

'Often times while people may have good intentions, it can result in unintended consequences.'
The Houthi rebels in Yemen have claimed responsibility for a drone attack that the Saudi-led coalition said caused a small fire at an airport in southwestern Saudi Arabia.

A spokesperson for the Iran-aligned group said the Houthis flew four armed drones to the Abha airport, which the Houthis targeted because they believe it to be military rather than civilian infrastructure.

This targeting comes in response to the continued aerial bombardment and the brutal siege on our country, said spokesperson Yehia Sareai.

The Houthis are battling a Saudi-led military coalition, which intervened in Yemen's civil war on behalf of the internationally recognized government in 2015. Since seizing the capital, Sanaa, the Houthis consolidated their control over much of the country and have now renewed their offensive on the oil-rich Marib province.

In a statement carried by the Saudi Press Agency, coalition spokesman Turki al-Malki described Wednesdays attack, which set fire to a civilian plane, as one that deliberately targeted Yemeni civilians.

Joint Coalition Forces have intercepted and destroyed this afternoon two bomb-laden UAVs launched systematically and deliberately by the terrorist Houthi militia to target civilians and civilian objects in [the] southern region, al-Malki said.

The minister of information in Yemens Saudi-backed government, Moammar Al-Eryani, described the airport attack as cowardly.

The attack, he said, according to Arab News, amounts to a full-fledged war crime, and is an extension of the terrorist attacks carried out by the Houthi militia with Iranian weapons and experts that have targeted residential neighborhoods, airports, ports and energy infrastructure.

The Saudi military said on Sunday it had intercepted and destroyed four armed drones fired by the Houthis. The weekends cross-border attack prompted the US State Department to issue a statement calling on the Houthis to refrain from destabilizing actions and work with UN special envoy Martin Griffiths on a political resolution to the conflict.

Days before, the US administration announced it was removing the Iran-aligned group's formal terrorist designation in a move hailed by aid agencies, who said the previous administration's Houthi blacklisting could complicate their life-saving work.

As part of his broader commitment to ending the nearly seven-year war, President Joe Biden announced last week he was cutting off US support for the Saudi-led coalitions offensive operations in Yemen that war monitors say are responsible for thousands of civilian casualties. During his foreign policy speech, Biden also pledged to continue defending Saudi Arabias sovereignty, citing missile attacks, drone strikes and other threats from Iran and its regional proxies.

The Houthis were also widely blamed for a December rocket attack on an airport in the southern city of Aden that killed and injured dozens. The attack came as Yemen's new cabinet had arrived at the airport from Riyadh, where they were sworn in under a power-sharing deal between the Saudi-backed government and the secessionist Southern Transitional Council.

The rebels denied involvement in the attack, but an analysis released this week from investigative outlet Bellingcat showed that the missiles were fired from Houthi-controlled territory.
(@FahadShabbir)

ABU DHABI, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News / WAM - 10th Feb, 2021) Sheikh Nahyan bin Mubarak Al Nahyan, Minister of Tolerance and Coexistence, today received Moez Benmim, Ambassador of Tunisia to the UAE, in his palace.

Sheikh Nahyan welcomed Benmim and congratulated him on assuming his duties in his new position while wishing him success and a good stay in the UAE.

During the meeting, both sides discussed the cooperation between the UAE and Tunisia and ways of strengthening and developing them, to serve their interests. They also exchanged opinions on several issues of mutual concern.

The two sides then discussed the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, as well as the precautionary and preventive measures adopted by the two countries and their joint action aimed at limiting the spread of the virus.

Sheikh Nahyan stressed that the UAE, under the leadership of President His Highness Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, is looking forward to strengthening its cooperation and friendships with all countries, to consolidate the principles of human fraternity and the values of peace and tolerance around the world.

He added that the UAE is a distinguished example of addressing the pandemic, through the cooperation of all relevant authorities and their rapid response, readiness and efficiency in terms of addressing the pandemics repercussions.

He then highlighted the UAE's global efforts and its solidarity with other countries during the pandemic, through supporting the collective international efforts to accelerate the distribution of vaccines around the world, noting that the country launched the "Hope Consortium" to facilitate the delivery of vaccines globally.

Benmim highlighted his countrys keenness to reinforce its cooperation with the UAE, to serve their mutual interests while thanking the UAE for supporting Tunisia through the coronavirus crisis.

He also commended the UAEs international role in promoting the values of peace, tolerance and coexistence.
Departing from the usual practice, the discussion on on Wednesday is likely to start first in in the ongoing Parliament session. This is only for the sixth time ever that the Upper House will take up the discussion before the

Normally, discussion on General Budget is taken up first in But in 1955, 1959, 1963, 1965 and 2002, discussion on Budget commenced first in

The discussion on General Budget is listed after consideration of Major Ports Bill in Rajya Sabha, Wednesday. In Lok Sabha, it is listed after the ongoing discussion on Motion of Thanks on the President's address today.

The first part of the budget session will conclude on February 13. The Parliament will again meet on March 8 and the budget session will conclude on April 8.

Presenting the first-ever digital Union Budget, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman earlier this month had said that India's fight against COVID-19 continues into 2021.

(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.)


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.
Commercial Bank of Dubai (CBD) has announced its go-live on the UAE KYC Blockchain Platform, an initiative which facilitates secure digital customer onboarding, instant bank account functionality, automated data updates, and sharing of verified KYC (Know-Your-Customer) data between licensing authorities and financial institutions.



The market-leading initiative, championed by Dubai Economy as part of enhancing business competitiveness and enhancing the digital transformation of the economy in the UAE, is powered by norbloc, a global leader in enterprise blockchain technologies, through its FIDES Blockchain Platform.



The UAE KYC Blockchain Platform was launched by Dubai Economy and a consortium of six banks in February 2020 and is set to become a nationwide ecosystem for exchange of verified KYC data. The initiative is supported by regulators such as Central Bank of UAE and Smart Dubai who will play a significant role in the network expansion and governance.



Dubai Economy and CBD have in the past fostered a strong and long-term partnership to support ease of doing business for investors and businesses in UAE. We are delighted that CBD is amongst the first financial institutions in UAE to go live on the UAE KYC Blockchain Platform, which now allows licensed investors and businesses to digitally open instant bank account and for banks to receive real-time data updates on their clients, said Omar Bushahab, CEO of Business Registration and Licensing (BRL) Sector in Dubai Economy.



The Dubai Economy licences hosted on the Platform account for approximately 40% of all licences in the UAE. The project is in full alignment with the vision of the UAE Government to promote digitisation as well as business sustainability, and provides a seamless experience to investors and businesses seeking to establish themselves in the UAE. We invite other licensing entities, free zones and financial institutions to join and leverage this market-leading initiative that is fully tested and proven to be invaluable and sustainable, added Bu Shahab.



The UAE KYC Blockchain platform now has CBD along with Emirates NBD, which was the first banking group to go live on the platform, and the ecosystem continues to expand with ADCB, HSBC and RAKBANK scheduled for Q1 2021, as well as the joining of additional banks and free zones. The next milestone will be the official release of the Consortium Agreement that will govern the ecosystem and outline how data will be shared between its members.



Dr Bernd van Linder, CEO of Commercial Bank of Dubai, said, We are delighted to be amongst the first banks in the UAE to go live with the UAE KYC Blockchain Consortium, initiated by Dubai Economy. CBD has always been committed to accelerate the growth of the UAE economy and enhance the overall business climate by adopting innovative digital tools and technology and delivering a seamless banking experience, in line with our Default Digital strategy.



The UAE KYC Blockchain Consortium will significantly improve the customer onboarding journey and facilitate a faster and more secure digital KYC process using advanced blockchain-powered distributed technologies leading to enhanced ease of doing business in the UAE.



Astyanax Kanakakis, CEO of norbloc, said: Banks such as CBD have understood that being able to offer frictionless, convenient and digital customer journeys is something that is increasingly expected by their customers. In addition to that, reducing the effort spent on onboarding and KYC means more time and resources can be spent on serving the customers.



As the UAE KYC Blockchain ecosystem continues to grow, these benefits will become more pronounced and increasingly expected by customers. The FIDES platform removes data silos that currently exist within and across institutions and in doing so brings in cost savings and delivers a vastly improved customer service, resulting in more efficient markets.  TradeArabia News Service
How angry must you be to pay for a newspaper post and place your complaint in it? A 90-year-old American addressed AT&T, a telecommunications company, through The Wall Street Journal printed in its Manhattan and Dallas editions. The man paid $ 10,000 (approximately 201,344 Mexican pesos) for the advertisement, according to ars Technica .

In the letter, Aaron Epstein claims that the Internet speed offered by the company in the area where he lives is 3 Mbps while in other places it is 100 Mbps. He also states that the company's competitors offer speeds of more than 200 Mbps.

South Africa: Advocate Ntsebeza appointed new judge of African Court

The Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO) has congratulated Advocate Dumisa Ntsebezas on his appointment as a member of the African Court on Human and Peoples Rights.

The 34th African Union (AU) Heads of State and Government Ordinary Summit, which sat over the weekend, selected Ntsebeza from South Africa and Sacko Modibo from Mali as new judges.

The newly elected Justices are replacing Sylvain Ore from the Republic of Cote dIvoire (2010-2021), the current President of the Court, and Angelo Vasco Matusse (2014-2021) from the Republic of Mozambique.

According to the Court, the newly elected Judges will be sworn-in during the 61st Ordinary Session scheduled for June 2021.

DIRCO Minister, Dr Naledi Pandor, says the appointment is an outcome of the support and confidence African countries have in South Africa.

South Africa wishes Advocate Ntsebeza well in his new assignment. We are glad that his extensive experience and knowledge in the field of human rights will be of immense contribution to our continent, Pandor said.

The African Court on Human and Peoples Rights is the judicial arm of the AU and one of the three regional human rights courts, together with the European Court of Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human rights.

It was established to protect human rights in Africa, principally through the delivery of judgments.

Ntsebeza is a well-renowned judge, who has served as a Commissioner on the United Nations International Commission of Inquiry Darfur.

In South Africa, he was a Commissioner and Head of the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions Investigative Unit.

He has also, on several occasions, served as a Judge of the High Court and the Labour Court of South Africa.  SAnews.gov.za

This story has been published on: 2021-02-10. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Holyoke Soldiers Home trustees were reassured that the long-term care facility had everything under control, a board member told state legislators Tuesday.

We were told everything is fine  everything is in place and theres nothing to worry about, trustee Carmen Ostrander said in testimony before a joint Special Legislative Oversight Committee probing the outbreak at the home. Then all of a sudden, these people were gone. And the numbers kept going up and up.

Between March and June, 76 veterans died after testing positive for the virus and dozens more residents and staff were sickened. The Holyoke Soldiers Home became a horrific emblem of the pandemics impact on elder care facilities.

Ostrander said trustees initially knew little about the virus, except that it would affect long-term care homes most profoundly.

She was one of five of seven appointed board members to testify during the sixth public hearing devoted to probing the impact of the pandemic on the state-run home for Massachusetts veterans.

Prior hearings highlighted insights from family members who lost loved ones at the home, staff, and former administrators who spoke to historic fiscal neglect by the state, among others. Tuesdays was focused on the composition of the board, its relationship to the state and its authority by law. Trustees have wrestled with state officials over who has hiring and firing authority over certain positions and other matters.

Speaking to those issues Tuesday was the new trustees chairman, who described the current statute governing the Holyoke home as outdated and said changes to the board are needed.

Maj. Gen. Gary W. Keefe, adjutant general of the Massachusetts National Guard, told the committee the law is not clear on the boards authority to manage the facilitys operations.

Prior to when this happened, I think you had a board that was, quite frankly, very hands-off and probably didnt expect to be held accountable or empowered to exercise some of the things that have been done, said Keefe, who became the boards chairman in January. The problem is the statute needs to be updated to reflect how we operate presently.

Keefes recommendations included changing the terms for trustees to four years, with the possibility for extensions. He said the current seven-year terms lead board members to develop groupthink.

A battle over the homes management and oversight played out in a lawsuit when Baker and Health and Human Services Secretary Marylou Sudders fired former Superintendent Bennett Walsh. Walsh sued, and a Hampden Superior Court judge ruled the board of trustees has sovereign power to hire and fire superintendents, along with other top positions. Walsh then resigned.

He and former medical director Dr. David Clinton now face criminal neglect charges over their response to the outbreak. They have denied wrongdoing.

The power struggle reemerged as the state pushes through a capital plan for a new, $300 million home paid in part with federal funding. Trustees including former chairman Kevin Jourdain and Isaac Mass have pushed back on state officials for not allowing them enough feedback on those plans.

Here we go again, Jourdain said at a Jan. 27 special trustees meeting on the new project. They act like we dont matter. The way that (project) was presented at the last meeting was ridiculous, in my opinion.

Along with the trustees, Sudders testified for the second time before the oversight committee.

The secretary touted her hands-on approach by calling in the National Guard and an emergency interim administrator as the outbreak mounted, plus securing capital and administrative funds to deal with the crisis.

Do you believe you should have been equally as hands on in the weeks leading up to the outbreak, given what we saw in Washington state? committee Co-chairman Sen. Walter Timilty asked Sudders.

I think I made my expectations clear, she responded.

The committee includes six local legislators, including Co-chairwoman state Rep. Linda Dean Campbell. It is charged with submitting a report with findings and reforms by April.

Material from the State House News Service, with reporting by Chris Lisinski, is included in this report.

Related content:
Kevin Barton and John Wentworth

Barton is the district attorney for Washington County. Wentworth is the district attorney for Clackamas County.

As the elected district attorneys for Washington and Clackamas counties representing over 1 million Oregonians, we share many values. We are committed to ensuring public safety in our communities and promoting just and equitable criminal justice policies. Our perspective is shaped by direct experience working with thousands of crime victims.

We believe the American justice system is fundamentally fair, but recognize that it is imperfect and requires responsible reform to ensure it meets the needs of all members of our community. Like our nation that constantly strives to be a more perfect union, our justice system must continually evolve. Addressing racial disparities, prioritizing police accountability and ensuring access to justice are imperatives that require immediate attention.

As we work to improve our justice system, we must seek reforms guided by experience and data rather than wholesale change driven by politics. However, legislators and special interest groups disagree and seek to repeal Measure 11, Oregons violent crime mandatory minimum sentencing law.

Oregon voters overwhelmingly passed Measure 11 in 1994 and reaffirmed it in 2000 with 73% approval. Measure 11 provides reasonable and uniform minimum prison sentences for Oregons most violent crimes. It is a law proposed by the people  not prosecutors or politicians  in response to a justice system in need of reform because it failed to protect crime victims and the public.

Measure 11 makes us safer. In the years prior to the passage of Measure 11, violent crime rates in Oregon were at all-time highs. However, in the 27 years since, violent crime rates in Oregon dropped by over 50%, more than almost anywhere in the United States, according to FBI data. Oregon is now the safest it has been since the early 1970s.

Measure 11 addresses conduct, not color. While racial disparities are present in our justice system and require attention, we maintain that Measure 11 is not the cause. Not only did those disparities exist before Measure 11, but Oregon Criminal Justice Commission data shows that prison population disparities for Black and Hispanic inmates have decreased since Measure 11s implementation. Moreover, independent studies have made the same observation: Measure 11 itself is not racially biased or disparate. It ensures the sentence for a violent crime is just, regardless of the race or wealth of the offender or victim.

Yet, Measure 11 is under attack. Politicians and special interest groups aim to replace mandatory minimums with lower presumptive sentences, which are the sentences judges give in all but the most extreme circumstances. Oregons Legislature is currently considering several bills to reduce sentences for violent crimes, making them unreasonably low. For example, SB 191, SB 401, HB 2002 and HB 2172 each propose cutting the sentence for raping someone at knifepoint from 8.3 years to 6.7 years or lower; for shooting and paralyzing someone from 7.5 years to 6 years or lower; and the sentence for filming an adult raping a child from 5.8 years to 4.7 years or lower. Even the sentence for attempted murder would drop from 7.5 to 6 years or lower. Nothing about these proposed reductions will bring more justice to victims, make Oregonians safer or sentencing more equitable. Rather, they return Oregon to the ineffective system that compelled voters to pass Measure 11 in the first place.

We encourage responsible reform of our justice system that is informed by lessons of the past, respects the will of Oregon voters and prioritizes public safety. And we agree with Oregons voters that Measure 11 is a reasonable and necessary tool to keep Oregonians safe.

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After a nearly seven-month journey to Mars, NASA's Perseverance rover is slated to land at the Red Planet's Jezero Crater Feb. 18, 2021, a rugged expanse chosen for its scientific research and sample collection possibilities.

But the very features that make the site fascinating to scientists also make it a relatively dangerous place to land - a challenge that has motivated rigorous testing here on Earth for the lander vision system (LVS) that the rover will count on to safely touch down.



"Jezero is 28 miles wide, but within that expanse there are a lot of potential hazards the rover could encounter: hills, rock fields, dunes, the walls of the crater itself, to name just a few," said Andrew Johnson, principal robotics systems engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. "So, if you land on one of those hazards, it could be catastrophic to the whole mission."



Enter Terrain-Relative Navigation (TRN), the mission-critical technology at the heart of the LVS that captures photos of the Mars terrain in real time and compares them with onboard maps of the landing area, autonomously directing the rover to divert around known hazards and obstacles as needed.



"For Mars 2020, LVS will use the position information to figure out where the rover is relative to safe spots between those hazards. And in one of those safe spots is where the rover will touch down," explained Johnson.



If Johnson sounds confident that LVS will work to land Perseverance safely, that's because it allows the rover to determine its position relative to the ground with an accuracy of about 200 feet or less. That low margin of error and high degree of assurance are by design, and the result of extensive testing both in the lab and in the field.



"We have what we call the trifecta of testing," explained JPL's Swati Mohan, guidance, navigation, and control operations lead for Mars 2020.



Mohan said that the first two testing areas - hardware and simulation - were done in a lab.



"That's where we test every condition and variable we can. Vacuum, vibration, temperature, electrical compatibility - we put the hardware through its paces," said Mohan. "Then with simulation, we model various scenarios that the software algorithms may encounter on Mars - a too-sunny day, very dark day, windy day - and we make sure the system behaves as expected regardless of those conditions."



But the third piece of the trifecta - the field tests - require actual flights to put the lab results through further rigor and provide a high level of technical readiness for NASA missions. For LVS's early flight tests, Johnson and team mounted the LVS to a helicopter and used it to estimate the vehicle's position automatically as it was flying.



"That got us to a certain level of technical readiness because the system could monitor a wide range of terrain, but it didn't have the same kind of descent that Perseverance will have," said Johnson. "There was also a need to demonstrate LVS on a rocket."



That need was met by NASA's Flight Opportunities program, which facilitated two 2014 flights in the Mojave Desert on Masten Space Systems' Xombie - a vertical takeoff and vertical landing (VTVL) system that functions similarly to a lander. The flight tests demonstrated LVS's ability to direct Xombie to autonomously change course and avoid hazards on descent by adopting a newly calculated path to a safe landing site. Earlier flights on Masten's VTVL system also helped validate algorithms and software used to calculate fuel-optimal trajectories for planetary landings.



"Testing on the rocket laid pretty much all remaining doubts to rest and answered a critical question for the LVS operation affirmatively," said JPL's Nikolas Trawny, a payload and pointing control systems engineer who worked closely with Masten on the 2014 field tests. "It was then that we knew LVS would work during the high-speed vertical descent typical of Mars landings."



Johnson added that the suborbital testing in fact increased the technology readiness level to get the final green light of acceptance into the Mars 2020 mission.



"The testing that Flight Opportunities is set up to provide was really unprecedented within NASA at the time," said Johnson. "But it's proven so valuable that it's now becoming expected to do these types of flight tests. For LVS, those rocket flights were the capstone of our technology development effort."



With the technology accepted for Mars 2020, the mission team began to build the final version of LVS that would fly on Perseverance. In 2019, a copy of that system flew on one more helicopter demonstration in Death Valley, California, facilitated by NASA's Technology Demonstration Missions program. The helicopter flight provided a final check on over six-years of multiple field tests.



But Mohan pointed out that even with these successful demonstrations, there will be more work to do to ensure a safe landing. She'll be at Mission Control for the landing, monitoring the health of the system every step of the way.



"Real life can always throw you curve balls. So, we'll be monitoring everything during the cruise phase, checking power to the camera, making sure the data is flowing as expected," Mohan said. "And once we get that signal from the rover that says, 'I've landed and I'm on stable ground,' then we can celebrate."



About Flight Opportunities



The Flight Opportunities program is funded by NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD) and managed at NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California. NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley manages the solicitation and evaluation of technologies to be tested and demonstrated on commercial flight vehicles.



About Technology Demonstration Missions



Also under the umbrella of STMD, the program is based at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The program bridges the gap between scientific and engineering challenges and the technological innovations needed to overcome them, enabling robust new space missions.



More About the Mission



A key objective for Perseverance's mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet's geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith (broken rock and dust).



Subsequent missions, currently under consideration by NASA in cooperation with the European Space Agency, would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these cached samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.



The Mars 2020 mission is part of a larger program that includes missions to the Moon as a way to prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet. Charged with returning astronauts to the Moon by 2024, NASA will establish a sustained human presence on and around the Moon by 2028 through NASA's Artemis lunar exploration plans.



JPL, which is managed for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena, California, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover.

Please follow SpaceRef on Twitter and Like us on Facebook.
Stock Market News

USA Stocks - Huawei is suing to be removed from the FCC's 'national threat' list as the Chinese company seeks to re-establish ties with the US 10-02-2021 03:17



Stock News headlines are gathered from financial news sources around the web. Views and opinions on each item are from their respective authors and website. They are not opinions of LiveCharts.co.uk

MONCKS CORNER, S.C., Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Sea Fox , a leading manufacturer of hand-crafted saltwater boats, recently announced an exclusive partnership with Northpoint Commercial Finance (Northpoint), a diversified finance company that provides flexible inventory lending and floorplan financing solutions. Northpoint will be the exclusive financier of the Sea Fox dealer network across the United States and Canada.

With the partnership, Sea Fox is looking to provide its dealer network with the best financing options for their marine inventory. The partnership will include flexible, manageable, and customized terms with a dedicated customer support team. It will also ensure dealers have access to competitive rates and terms and a cutting edge inventory management system.

"We're very excited to partner with Northpoint in order to provide our dealers and customers with the financing solutions they are looking for," said Freddy Renken. "This partnership is an incredible opportunity to ensure success with our dealers and focus on aligning strategies to increase market share and profitability."

"The exclusive partnership with Sea Fox is a perfect fit for us, and we couldn't be more excited to continue our long-standing relationship with Sea Fox and their dealers. We're honored that they have entrusted us to be their exclusive floorplan provider," says Russell Baqir, SVP of Business Development at Northpoint. "Sea Fox's exceptional quality continues to attract a new segment of consumers and consistently increases a dealer's potential customer base. With the dramatic consumer demand the industry has experienced, we think it's a perfect time to create an exclusive partnership with Sea Fox to ensure the best programs are in place to support their aggressive sales pace."

For detailed information on Sea Fox, please visit https://www.seafoxboats.com. For more information on Northpoint Commercial Finance, please visit http://northpointcf.com/

About Sea Fox Boat Company

In 1995, Sea Fox Boat Company began with a clear governing philosophy at heart: to develop and build quality hand-crafted fiberglass boats that offer the best amenities, features, styling, performance and function. With a Boat Manufacturing lineage going back four generations to 1957, Sea Fox has grown to become one of the top tier manufacturers of saltwater boats offering a full line of diverse boat designs including center consoles, side consoles and dual consoles. More information about Sea Fox Boat Company is available at www.seafoxboats.com.

About Northpoint Commercial Finance

Northpoint, is owned by LBC Capital, a subsidiary of Laurentian Bank of Canada and has offices in Alpharetta, GA, and Burlington, ON. Laurentian Bank, which has been in business for over 175 years, acquired Northpoint Financial in 2017. Northpoint was created by floorplan industry veterans highly experienced in forming and managing specialty finance programs. Our dedicated program team is empowered to make quick credit decisions and our unique flexibility provides a significant advantage in today's often inflexible environment. More information about Northpoint and their offerings is available at www.northpointcf.com.

Contact: Jill Howell, [email protected]

SOURCE Northpoint Commercial Finance

Related Links

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After a lengthy session of public comment and debate among commissioners, the Athens-Clarke County Mayor and Commission approved a plan for an expansion of the Firefly Trail in the area just outside Winterville at its voting meeting Tuesday night.

NEW DELHI  Twitter held firm when the Indian government demanded last week that the social media platform take down hundreds of accounts that criticized the government for its conduct during protests by angry farmers.

On Wednesday, under threat of prison for its local employees, Twitter relented.

The company, based in San Francisco, said it had permanently blocked over 500 accounts and moved an unspecified number of others from view within India after the government accused them of making inflammatory remarks about Narendra Modi, the countrys prime minister. Twitter said it had acted after the government issued a notice of noncompliance, a move that experts said could put the companys local employees in danger of spending up to seven years in custody.

In a blog post published on Wednesday, Twitter said it was not taking any action on the accounts that belonged to media organizations, journalists, activists or politicians, saying it did not believe the orders to block them are consistent with Indian law. It also said it was exploring its options under local laws and had requested a meeting with a senior government official.

We remain committed to safeguarding the health of the conversation occurring on Twitter, it said, and strongly believe that the tweets should flow.

LAist only exists with reader support. If you're in a position to give, your donation powers our reporters and keeps us independent.

Our reporting is free for everyone, but its not free to make.

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Silkscreen artist Corita Kent was known in the art world as the Pop Art Nun. A member of the order of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Los Feliz between 1936 and 1968, her work was a rebellious take on religious art. In 1966, she was named an L.A. Times Woman of the Year.

So when Nellie Scott, director of the Corita Art Center, found out that the small studio in East Hollywood where Kent did some of her most significant work was going to be razed for a parking lot, she was devastated.

"It really was just a gut punch," she said. "A plaque just wouldn't do it justice."

And so, in September 2020, Scott launched an effort to designate the building as a historical landmark. Scott argued that even though the building lacked architectural significance, it was worthy of the designation based on the person who occupied it and the work she produced there.

City of L.A. staff disagreed. Arguing that the building wouldn't be recognizable to the artist who taught and created there for almost a decade, they recommended that Scott's application be rejected.

The exterior of the building that housed Corita Kent's studio in the 1960s. (Courtesy Corita Art Center)

COMMUNITY SUPPORT DESPITE CITY RECOMMENDATION

When the L.A. Cultural Heritage Commission met and heard the application on Dec. 17, though, things went differently.

The argument in favor of designating Kent's former studio as a historic landmark was made by Scott, of the Corita Art Center, and Kathryn Wollan, an independent historic preservationist who grew up in the neighborhood. The argument against designation was made by the developer, Blake Megdal of Franklin Western Partners, LLC. The Immaculate Heart order rented the building from shortly after its 1959 construction through 1968, and it has had numerous tenants since.

But the real case seemed to be made by the community. Family, friends, former students and total strangers who have connected to Corita Kent's art and legacy, flooded the Zoom meeting's public comment period, almost entirely in support of designating the building a historic monument. It didn't stop for an hour.

At the close of comment, Richard Barron, the commission's president, said he was "[a] little overwhelmed."

"I think we had more ... public comment on this item than any item that I've been involved on the commission," he said. "And I've been on the commission for close to 15 years."

All of that comment had an effect on Barron's opinion, who said, "though when it first came before us I was not supportive of it becoming a monument, I've changed my mind."

SISTER CORITA

Corita Kent in her nun's habit. (Courtesy of Corita Art Center)

Frances Elizabeth Kent was born in Iowa in 1918, moving to Los Angeles with her family in 1923. At age 18, she joined the order of the Immaculate Heart of Mary and took the religious name Sister Mary Corita.

In 1947, she joined the art department at Immaculate Heart College as an instructor, challenging her students to think beyond traditional conventions by reinterpreting L.A.'s landscape.

Sister Corita frequently took her classes on what she called "slow-looking" trips around Hollywood, finding beauty in car lots and street signs. Her outlook was driven in part by religious faith -- an ability to breathe the gospel into even the most mundane cityscape -- and also a personal artistic vision. She saw art as the product of absorbing one's surroundings and creating in great volume, without inhibition. Her approach was rigorous -- Kent is known for a list of classroom rules, popularized by John Cage, one of which being "the only rule is work" -- but she was also freespirited.

The building where it all happened is, put nicely, utilitarian. But Sister Corita filled it with colorful and joyful work. In her own art, she reimagined billboards and advertising in a bright, vivid conversation between God and the social and political turmoil of the 1960s, printing in response to the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement.

Sister Mary Corita soon became known as the "pop art nun." She was named a 1966 L.A. Times Woman of the Year, and in 1967 was on the cover of Newsweek. While her earliest work created figurative depictions of religious figures, in the early 1960s she transitioned into an iconoclastic new way of representing her faith.

manflowers, serigraph, 1969. Corita Kent. (Courtesy of Corita Art Center)

Kent's comments on consumerism and social upheaval were not judgmental, but infused everyday joy. Her colorful screenprints, mass-produced by a troupe of students and fellow nuns, were distributed in un-numbered editions to spread her message of love and hard work.

The Los Angeles Archdiocese pushed back on the radical nature of Kent's art, but the newly progressive Vatican embraced her, even inviting Kent to design its pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair in New York.

The global art world embraced Sister Mary Corita, too. Since the 1960s, her work has continually appeared in exhibitions in L.A. and around the world. Dozens of institutions around the world added her prints to their collections, including LACMA, the Hammer Museum, the Whitney Museum, MOMA, and the Library of Congress.

One of Kent's most famous pieces recreated the iconic circles from Wonderbread bags. The inspiration for that work was found in a grocery store across the parking lot from her East Hollywood studio.

In nun's habit, with students in tow, she went into the Market Basket and hunted for inspiration on the newsstand or the logo of Del Monte Tomato Sauce, "and then they would march across the parking lot into this space and begin screen printing," Scott said.

In the 1970's, Sister Mary Corita became Corita Kent when she left the order, and also left L.A. She was exhausted by the simultaneous strains of teaching and creating, and the relief of a sabbatical in Massachusetts led her to seek dispensation from her vows. (Around the same time, the order had been in a battle with the L.A. Archdiocese over independence -- the subject of a new documentary, "Rebel Hearts," that just premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.) The East Hollywood building that once housed Kent's studio is the only remaining space in the city tied to her work.

INTEGRITY A POTENTIAL GATEKEEPER

City staff contended that Kent's work in L.A. is worth recognizing, but didn't find that preserving this building was the way to do it. Most of the city's historical buildings are architectural gems, such as centuries-old adobes or the Art Deco City Hall building.

But Adrian Scott Fine, the L.A. Conservancy's director of advocacy, argues that if a run-down building such as Kent's former studio can be saved, it could change the way L.A. thinks about its own art history, and how it's preserved. The L.A. Conservancy ties an integrity-based evaluation, at least in part, to some startling statistics -- that only 3% of Historic-Cultural Monuments are associated with women's history, and only 8% are associated overall with women's, BIPOC and LGBTQ+ history.

"When there's this focus on kind of the materiality, or the physical aspects of a building, that can be a barrier, or, in some ways, a gatekeeper," Fine said. The L.A. Conservancy believes that the qualifier of integrity holds back underrepresented groups at the gates to designation, because they are less likely to have worked in spaces that have maintained architectural integrity.

In the end, the L.A. Cultural Heritage Commission agreed. They voted unanimously to designate the building a historic monument. The recommendation now goes to the L.A. City Council's Planning and Land Use Management Committee.

If committee members' response to public support is anything like that of the commissioners, things are looking good.

This little building, according to Scott, can help us reimagine the history in our own backyards.

"I think that that's some of the magic of Corita, that it is such a utilitarian building," Scott said. Kent encouraged her viewers to "look at ordinary things, and make them extraordinary."

This story first ran on our newsroom's local news and culture show, Take Two, which airs on 89.3 KPCC. You can listen to the segment below:
A panel recommended Plcs Covid-19 vaccine for all adults over 18, paving the way to speed up inoculations in developing countries.

The recommendation may encourage more countries to use the vaccine broadly, after some European Union countries advised against giving it to the elderly, citing insufficient trial data involving older people.



The shots effect in older people is expected to be the same as for younger recipients, said Alejandro Cravioto, chairman of the WHO panel, in a briefing.



The move is good news for developing countries, many of which are waiting to administer their first shots as wealthier countries have already inoculated millions of residents. AstraZeneca, which developed the vaccine with the University of Oxford, has pledged significant supplies to Covax, a facility that aims to distribute vaccines equitably around the world.



ALSO READ: Coronavirus LIVE: Kerala reports 5,980 new Covid-19 cases in past 24 hours

The WHOs recommendation on the Astra shot follows the organizations decision to clear a vaccine from Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE in December. The UK drugmakers shot is easier to deploy than other vaccines like Pfizers that need to be stored at ultra-cold temperatures, and costs less.





ALSO READ: Wockhardt's Covid vaccine supply deal with UK Govt extended for 6 months

As mutated virus strains spread across the globe, concern has grown that theyll impact vaccine efficacy. South Africa, where one of the variants was first identified late last year, said it would pause a rollout of AstraZenecas vaccine after a trial showed it had limited efficacy against mild infections with the strain. Chief Executive Officer Pascal Soriot said the shot should still protect against severe disease, and WHO officials underlined the benefits of continuing to use the vaccine even in variant-hit areas.



Covax Plans



We made the recommendation that even if there is a reduction in possibility of this vaccine having a full impact in its protection capacity, theres no reason not to recommend its use, even in countries that have the circulation of variants, Cravioto said.



Covax said last month that its on track to deliver at least 2 billion doses -- about two-thirds of which will go to lower-income economies -- and to vaccinate at least a fifth of each participating countrys population by years end.



The WHOs emergency use authorization is needed for Covax to send the vaccines to participating countries, in order to ensure a products safety and efficacy for countries that might not have the resources to make the assessments themselves. Individual countries can still make their own decisions on the use of shots.



shares traded 0.9% lower in London.


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The Minister of Health-designate, Kwaku Agyeman-Manu has disclosed that some $100 million allocated for the fight against COVID-19 has been exhausted.



He made this disclosure when he appeared before Parliaments Appointments Committee on Wednesday, February 10, 2021.



Mr. Agyeman-Manu, however, disclosed that some $120 million loan facility from the World Bank is about maturing for use by the Health Ministry to boost the COVID-19 fight in Ghana.



The Ministry of Health initially got $100 million allocation to spend on COVID-19. That amount has been exhausted, and we have got another money that is just about to mature for the Ministry to utilize which is about $120 million from the World Bank, and it is a loan, he said.



But touching on new measures that will be put in place to ensure that government is able to control the current surge, the former Health Minister who has been re-nominated by President Akufo-Addo said, the strategies used over the last months have worked for the country, hence will be maintained.



We have battled Covid for nearly 11 months. The strategies we have used have worked for us in Ghana. If you look at our deaths or even our infection rate at the point where we slowed down transmission to this level, we must be thankful and grateful to God and our President for leading the battle.



We are not going to change soo much. The only new things we are going to do are the new things that have come up on the globe like the vaccination.



But apart from that, we are beefing up our risk communication again and we have started to ensure that Ghanaians adhere strictly to the Covid protocols. That is the only solution, the Dormaa Central MP, stressed.

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

New Delhi: Another wanted in the Red Fort violence case Ikbal Singh was arrested by the Northern Range of Special Cell from Punjab's Hoshiayarpur on Tuesday night.

He was declared as one of the wanted in the Lal Quila case of January 26 and an award of Rs 50,000 had been announced for him.

Singh, 45, hails from Ludhiana and was part of key accused Punjabi actor-cum-activist Deep Sidhu's group that breached the security at Red Fort during Republic Day tractor rally and created ruckus. Their videos went viral on social media where he was purportedly heard threatening cops on duty and inciting protesters to go on a rampage.

Meanwhile, on Sunday the Special Task Force made arrest accused Sukhdev Singh, who was also carrying a reward of Rs 50,000 was held from Chandigarh after giving the forces a 100 km chase. While Sidhu was arrested by a team of Delhi Police's Special Cell from Karnal in Haryana on Monday.

According to reports, Delhi police was trying to trace the accused for the past ten days.

As per authorities, as many as 38 FIRs have been filed and over 126 people have been arrested in relation to the Republic Days Red Fort violence. Thousands of farmers broke barriers, clashed with the police and entered the Red Fort on the Republic Day during the tractor march. Some hoisted a religious flag on an empty mast at the Red Fort creating a huge furore.

Additionally, the police have collected over 70 pictures of the potential suspects and are digging for more information on them.

The police had announced a cash reward of Rs 1 lakh for information of Deep Sidhu, Jugraj Singh, Gurjot Singh and Gurjant Singh.

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MINERSVILLE  Eight people were displaced Tuesday afternoon when a fire damaged a historic home on the boroughs main street.

Fire crews responded to the building at 28 Sunbury St. just after 3 p.m., Police Chief Michael Combs said, adding the occupants were coming out when the first firefighters arrived on the scene.

Everyone got out safely, he said on the scene.

Crews worked to knock down the blaze as smoke poured from windows of the stone house at the corner of Sunbury and North Front streets, with damage visible around the buildings windows. In addition to the eight people inside at the time of the fire, Combs said three cats were also rescued from the building.

Allison Wildermuth, 22, and her 4-year old daughter, Chloe Wildermuth, were among the occupants that escaped the building. Wildermuth said she was getting ready for work that afternoon, while her daughter was in an upstairs bathroom. Her daughters babysitter, Todd Bernhard, had just arrived to watch her when Wildermuth said she opened her bedroom door and saw smoke, which was coming from the upstairs bathroom.

As soon as I realized that was where the smoke was, I went and got her out, she said holding her daughter across from the home, a white blanket wrapped around her shoulders.

However, Allison Wildermuth said she found the stairs leading to the bathroom to be full of smoke, which terrified her.

It was sheer panic because the second I got to the stairs, the smoke was so dark, I could barely see an inch in front of my face, she recounted. It burned my eyes and lungs.

Bernhard, who resides a block away on Lewis Street, arrived at the apartment that afternoon when he heard what he described as a cat or kid yelling. He opened the front door to the building, smelled smoke and yelled at the occupants to get out.

The top floor was heavily smoky, he said on the sidewalk across from the house.

Combs said the smoke was intense with firefighters having to break windows to fight the fire. The buildings layout also made it confusing for firefighters.

Its a maze in there, he said.

Allison Wildermuth said she was checked out by Schuylkill EMS paramedics and she and Chloe Wildermuth are staying with her mother and sister in New Castle Township. Glancing at the building, she was still taking in what happened.

This is one of those things you never think will happen and then it does, Allison Wildermuth said.

One other person was also checked out by paramedics but Combs said there were no injuries to either the occupants or firefighters. The American Red Cross Tri-County Chapter is assisting all eight occupants. In addition to the Wildermuths, the other residents are Mary Tuske, 27; Sean Serrari, 24; Amanda Henry, 28, and her children, Mia Tindall, 4, and Kloe Stoudt, 11, according to disaster services supervisor Patty Daley.

Minersville firefighters were assisted by companies from Frackville, Pottsville, Schuylkill Haven, Llewellyn, along with Schuylkill EMS, Tremont Area Ambulance Inc., and Minersville and Branch-Reilly police officers.

The building was built in 1860, according to property records, and housed the offices of the late Dr. Arthur DiNicola. Teresa DeTurk, the buildings owner, watched firefighters bring the fire under control outside the Minersville Pharmacy on Sunbury and North Front streets. She has owned the building for three years and lived there until moving to Mohrsville, Berks County, several months ago.

Its a shame to see it all destroyed, she said, adding the building has a lot of original flooring and crown molding.

Combs also noted the historical nature of the building, saying it is one of the most beautiful in the borough.

The street was closed at Second and Sunbury streets; Front and Lewis streets and Sunbury and Delaware streets while crews battled the fire. Fire police officers directed traffic onto surrounding streets. Combs said borough police and firefighters are investigating the cause.
Muthiya  Omuthiya mayor John Ndeutepo says the local authority will not be held to ransom by disgruntled individuals, as the town continues to operate without a substantive CEO for about two years.

In an interview with New Era, Ndeutepo said council is busy consulting with the line ministry and relevant authority on how to timely recruit a new CEO.

The town council has been unable to recruit a new CEO due to a dispute, which is before the labour commissioner and in the High Court, lodged by the former CEO Samuel Mbango, who

claimed unfair dismissal.

Mbango argued his

employment contract was breached, claiming he was served on short notice in June 2019 of council's intentions not to renew his contract.

Mbango's contract came to an end in August 2019. The former CEO has argued council was supposed to inform him before June 2019 about his employment status as stipulated in his contract.

Mbango also argued he was not given sufficient reasons why his contract could not be renewed, as he believes he was performing optimally.

"We are busy consulting on what process and how we can recruit a new CEO. As a new council, we realised that there is actually no dispute at all; therefore, this case holds no merits - and in fact, as council, we were not even supposed to be defending this matter. The former was given an opportunity to reapply, since his employment contract runs for five years," said Ndeutepo.

"We will not be kept to ransom by one individual at the expense of the residents we have to serve. Therefore, we are forging ahead with the idea of advertising this post as soon as consultations are done."

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When asked about the legal battle, he insisted: "There is no dispute and never was, so we will go ahead and the court can decide on which way; for now, we are only seized with getting a substantive head". Furthermore, Ndeutepo said, the institution is already understaffed; hence, there is no need to wait longer, as the state of affairs is compromising the service delivery and performance of the local authority.

"There is personnel vacuum, whereby almost everyone is just acting; we really need to fill these vacancies soon," he added.

Meanwhile, labour expert Herbert Jauch said the move to employ a new CEO while the matter is still before courts is very risky and that might come back to haunt the council if the court rules against them.

"Courts normally look at technicalities, looking at the clause of the employment contracts - whether such were followed and honoured. Therefore, there is possibility council might pay heavily if the court rules in favour of the former CEO. It may order reinstatement or to pay former CEO, which will be a very expensive exercise," stressed Jauch.
Huge Ma, a software engineer, in New York on Jan. 31, 2021. Ma built his own vaccine appointment site in less than two weeks. Image by Amir Hamja  2021 The New York Times

Huge Ma, a 31-year-old software engineer for Airbnb, was stunned when he tried to make a coronavirus vaccine appointment for his mother in early January and saw that there were dozens of websites to check, each with its own sign-up protocol. The city and state appointment systems were completely distinct.

There has to be a better way, he said he remembered thinking.

So, he developed one. In less than two weeks, he launched TurboVax, a free website that compiles availability from the three main city and state New York vaccine systems and sends the information in real time to Twitter. It cost Ma less than $50 to build, yet it offers an easier way to spot appointments than the city and states official systems do.

Its sort of become a challenge to myself, to prove what one person with time and a little motivation can do, he said last week. This wasnt a priority for governments, which was unfortunate. But everyone has a role to play in the pandemic, and Im just doing the very little that I can to make it a little bit easier.

Supply shortages and problems with access to vaccination appointments have been some of the barriers to the equitable distribution of the vaccine in New York City and across the United States, officials have acknowledged.

COVID-19 Vaccine Frequently Asked Questions View more How does a vaccine work? A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine. How many types of vaccines are there? There are broadly four types of vaccine  one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine. What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind? Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time. View more Show

Statistics released recently by the city showed that the vaccine is disproportionately flowing to white New Yorkers, not the Black and brown communities that suffered the most in the pandemics first wave.

Only 12% of the roughly 210,000 city residents who are older than 65 and were vaccinated were Black, for example, even though Black people make up 24% of the citys population.

The only way they are able to access those appointments is to use a very, very complicated tech platform that in and of itself marginalizes the elderly community that I serve, Ebone Carrington, the chief executive officer of Harlem Hospital, said at the end of last month. As a result, she said, white people from outside Harlem for weeks had filled most of her available slots.

So some volunteers in New York, as well as in states including Texas, California and Massachusetts, have tried to use their technological skills to simplify that process.

Jeremy Novich, 35, a clinical psychologist on the Upper West Side on Manhattan, started reaching out to seniors after realizing that his own older relatives could not have made appointments on their own.

The system is set up to be a technology race between 25-year-olds and 85-year-olds, he said. Thats not a race, thats elder neglect.

Along with two friends, on Jan. 12 he launched the Vaccine Appointment Assistance Team, a person-to-person effort that began by helping older people from local synagogues and expanded to help those who sign up via a phone hotline or web form. Because of high demand, the service  which now has 20 volunteer caseworkers  has stopped taking new cases for now, and the founders are thinking about partnering with a nonprofit to increase capacity.

The most ambitious online volunteer assistance effort in the city is NYC Vaccine List, a website that compiles appointments from more than 50 vaccination sites  city, state and private. About 20 volunteers write code, reach out to community organizations and call inoculation centers directly to post the centers availabilities.

Dan Benamy, a software developer for Datadog and one of NYC Vaccine Lists founders, said that when he was searching last month for dates for his grandparents, he was struck at how labor-intensive the appointment system was.

Im an engineer and an optimizer, so I was looking at this and saying it feels like we could maybe look at pulling this data together and aggregating it, so that it is faster and easier to find vaccines, he said.

Benamy reached out to a couple of friends and got to work. The site went live five days later, on Jan. 16.

Inspired by VaccinateCA, a volunteer-run vaccine finder site in California, NYC Vaccine List not only lists available city and state appointments, but also allows users to click through more directly to some available appointment times, saving precious minutes in which a slot could go to someone else.

In its effectiveness, the site is also offering a real-time glimpse at how brutally competitive the appointment process can be. At 2:30 p.m. on Jan. 28, for example, hundreds of openings popped up, including 45 at the citys Brooklyn Army Marine Terminal, and many more at a city-run site in the Bronx. Within 15 minutes, they were gone.

These sites do not solve all access problems, because they still require computer literacy and benefit only those who know about them. As of Feb. 8, NYC Vaccine List was getting about 16,000 visitors a day, which remains a fraction of the millions of qualified New Yorkers who need appointments, its founders said.

But by making the process more efficient, the sites are easing the way for hundreds who were struggling to find a slot. Their Twitter feed has been flooded with messages of gratitude, and NYC Vaccine List been labeled the hottest website in the city by Mark Levine, a city councilman. They recently added a Google translate feature to the site.

As the number of volunteers increases and we get these basic pieces up and running, we would love to make it accessible to as many people as possible, said Benamy, 36, who lives in Brooklyn.

Mayor Bill de Blasio has promised to improve the appointment system, which he called too cumbersome in a recent news conference, and the city upgraded one of its main scheduling sites to be more user-friendly last week.

Both the city and state also offer the option to schedule by phone. The states hotline recently added a special option for people 75 years and older, as well as a callback service. But operators at those hotlines make appointments at the same city or state run centers where most appointments are snapped up by those using the first-come, first serve web-based system.

Software developers peeking under the hood of some of the public scheduling sites were surprised to see just how messy it was back there. Paul Schreiber, 42, a freelance software engineer in Brooklyn, said he was chagrined to find misspellings and other errors in the code of the vaccine hub run for the first month by the city Health Department. The new website that rolled out Feb. 1, he said, seemed substantially better.

Even grading on a very generous curve  well, this is a government website, its not Amazon.com  it was really bad, he said.

Schreiber has done some preliminary work on building his own appointment site and was looking at how he could incorporate the updates to the city-run site.

Some of the technological help has come from pure chance.

Adriana Scamparini, 45, a corporate lawyer who lives in the Gramercy area of Manhattan, spent 18 hours trying to make her father an appointment. After she did, she realized that a password she had used for an appointment site saved on her phone, allowing her to bypass a public page that incorrectly stated no appointments were available.

She began reaching out to friends, family and her door attendant to see if they knew older people who needed help. She set up email addresses for those who didnt have them. She printed out appointment forms and delivered them to peoples homes. She made about 30 appointments and personally accompanied seven people to a vaccination site in Lower Manhattan, mostly in the middle of the night when appointments were easier to get. For her efforts, she got tears of gratitude, cards and flowers.

I dont have a computer and I dont have Wi-Fi, said Mariley Carlota, a widow originally from Brazil who lives alone on the Upper East Side. She got her first shot at 4:30 a.m. on Jan. 19 thanks to Scamparini. She was like an angel for me.

Carlota had been scared to go to the doctor and go shopping. Now, she is scheduling her colonoscopy, her endoscopy and physical therapy for February. She cries at the thought that she will soon be able to go back to her church and her friends there.

Its like I won a lottery, she said.

By Sharon Otterman

c.2021 The New York Times Company
Credit: Imperial College London/ Caroline Brogan

The findings add to current knowledge of how insects fly and keep stable in the air. They could also help to inspire new designs in small aerial vehicles like drones, which can be useful for search-and-rescue attempts and building inspection.

Our colourful sunny-day companions can glide, fly backwards, and travel up to 54 km/h when hunting prey or escaping predatorsbut like any flying creature, they can be thrown off balance and even find themselves upside down.

Many land-based animals like cats, and aerial animals like hoverflies, rotate themselves around a head-to-tail axis when falling, known as 'rolling', but not much is known about how most insects right themselves from extreme orientations.

In a new study published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Imperial College London researchers have found that unlike many animals documented to date, dragonflies most frequently perform upside down backflips, known as 'pitching', to right themselves from upside down positions in the air.

They also found that dragonflies perform the same righting maneuver whilst unconscious, suggesting the response has a large component of passive stabilitya flight mechanism like that which lets planes glide when their engines are switched off. The research reveals how the shape and joint stiffness of the dragonflies' wings provide passive stability and could inform designs for small drones.

Credit: Imperial College London/ Caroline Brogan

Senior author Dr. Huai-Ti Lin, of Imperial's Department of Bioengineering, said: "Engineers could take inspiration from flying animals to improve aerial systems. Drones tend to rely heavily on fast feedback to keep them upright and on course, but our findings could help engineers incorporate passive stability mechanisms into their wing structure."

To conduct the study, the researchers dressed 20 common darter dragonflies with tiny magnets and motion tracking dots like those used to create CGI imagery.

They then magnetically attached each dragonfly to a magnetic platform either rightside-up or upside-down with some variations in tilt, before releasing the insects into a freefall. The motion tracking dots provided moving 3-D models of the dragonfly movements, which were captured by high-speed cameras for 3-D reconstruction.

They found that conscious dragonflies, when dropped from the upside-down position, somersaulted backwards to regain the rightside-up position. Dragonflies that were unconscious also completed the somersault, but more slowly.

Credit: Imperial College London/ Caroline Brogan

Dead dragonflies did not perform the maneuver at all, but when their wings were posed into specific live or unconscious positions by researchers, they were able to complete the righting maneuveralbeit with a little more spin around the vertical axis than in live dragonflies. The researchers say this suggests that the maneuver relies on both muscle tone and wing posture, which is inbuilt in the dragonfly as a passive response rather than an active control.

Lead author Dr. Sam Fabian, also of the Department of Bioengineering, said: "Planes are often designed so that if their engines fail, they will glide along stably rather than drop out of the sky. We saw a similar response in dragonflies, despite the lack of active flapping, meaning that some insects, despite their small size, can leverage passive stability without active control.

"Passive stability lowers the effort requirements of flight, and this trait likely influenced how dragonfly shapes evolved. Dragonflies that use passive stability in flight are likely to have an advantage, as they use less energy and are better able to recover from inconvenient events."

The researchers continue to research dragonfly flight biomechanics and will next investigate how these passive effects impact a dragonfly's active vision and guidance strategies in prey interception and obstacle avoidance.

Explore further The secret of dragonflies' flight

More information: DragonDrop: A novel passive mechanism for aerial righting in the dragonfly, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, rspb.royalsocietypublishing.or  .1098/rspb.2020.2676 Journal information: Proceedings of the Royal Society B DragonDrop: A novel passive mechanism for aerial righting in the dragonfly,
New motion sensor features market-leading battery performance and simplifies consumer experience in the smart home

SOFIA, Bulgaria and AUSTIN, Texas, Feb. 10, 2021, makers of the IoT brand Shelly, and Silicon Labs, a leading provider of silicon, software and solutions for a smarter, more connected world, today introduce Shelly Motion, a next-generation motion sensor with unrivaled battery life enabled by Silicon Labs' Wi-Fi IoT solution. Shelly Motion is the first product to combine Shelly's innovative home automation sensors with the only industry-leading Wi-Fi solution designed to meet the ultra-low power requirements of IoT sensors. Optimized with Silicon Labs' Wi-Fi technology, Shelly Motion is the most responsive, energy efficient, and easy-to-use smart home Wi-Fi motion sensor on the market today.



As consumers spend more time at home, they are increasingly looking for innovative smart home products that ensure a safer, efficient and more comfortable lifestyle. Shelly Motion, the latest in Shelly's revolutionary Wi-Fi product line, empowers customers to connect directly to any Wi-Fi router without the use of a dedicated hub. The sensor also offers full compatibility with Alexa, Home Assistant, SmartThings, and other third-party home automation platforms for the ultimate ease of use.

Shelly Motion features a 6500 mAh rechargeable battery that can operate and remain connected to a home Wi-Fi network for more than one year on a single charge, unlike competing sensors that require a replacement battery or recharge after weeks of continuous operation. The sensor remains connected to the Wi-Fi network 24/7, delivering extremely quick real-time response (less than 200 ms on average) and instant detection of even the slightest movement. This combination of features delivers superior home automation experiences whereby Shelly Motion can trigger immediate action by another device, such as turning on the lights when a person enters a room.

"Shelly Motion integrates locally with Home Assistant without requiring a hub or any other hardware. The sensor's permanent connection reduces system latency and thereby enhances consumer experience in the smart home," said Paulus Schoutsen, founder, Home Assistant. "With Shelly Motion you're going to have an easy to install and configure motion sensor with a battery that will last."



In addition to the ultra-long battery life, key features of Shelly Motion include:

Real-Time Response : With quick motion detection capability, in less than 200ms - or as fast as the blink of an eye - the sensor can trigger action to any connected device, such as turning on the air-conditioner or opening room window shutters.

: With quick motion detection capability, in less than 200ms - or as fast as the blink of an eye - the sensor can trigger action to any connected device, such as turning on the air-conditioner or opening room window shutters. Unmatched Sensitivity : The unique 256 levels of sensitivity will allow you to adjust extremely precisely the distance and the movement to which the sensor reacts.

: The unique 256 levels of sensitivity will allow you to adjust extremely precisely the distance and the movement to which the sensor reacts. Tamper Detection : With 128 levels of vibration sensitivity, Shelly Motion will immediately inform homeowners if someone touches the device or tries to dislocate or move it from its initial position.

: With 128 levels of vibration sensitivity, Shelly Motion will immediately inform homeowners if someone touches the device or tries to dislocate or move it from its initial position. No Hub Required : Shelly Motion can be controlled directly without using a hub and is compatible with any standard Wi-Fi router.

: Shelly Motion can be controlled directly without using a hub and is compatible with any standard Wi-Fi router. Customized Schedule: Homeowners can customize sensors' actions, like controlling other devices, based on days, hour, light intensity, sunset and sunrise or any defined personal preferences.



"We are thrilled to partner with Silicon Labs and introduce Shelly Motion to the market," said Dimitar Dimitrov, CEO of Allterco. "Our first Wi-Fi motion sensor combines the powerful, yet easy to use features customers have come to expect from Shelly products combined with the cutting edge IoT technology from Silicon Labs. We are committed to working with the best in the industry to deliver accessible, proven smart home products and look forward to announcing more innovations with Silicon Labs in the months to come."

"The new Shelly Motion Wi-Fi sensor meets the increasing need for low maintenance, long battery life operation from IoT products," said Jake Alamat, VP and GM of IoT home and consumer products at Silicon Labs. "Silicon Labs' market leading ultra-low power Wi-Fi IoT solutions play a key role in delivering superior performance and ease of use, simplifying the smart home experience."

Shelly Motion will be available for sale at for $39.90/33.25. To purchase visit http://shopusa.shelly.cloudor to shop the full line of Shelly products visit http://shelly.cloud.

About Allterco and Shelly

Allterco

Connect with Allterco:

Contact Allterco PR & Marketing team at marketing@allterco.com.

About Silicon Labs

Silicon Labs

Connect with Silicon Labs

Contact Silicon Labs PR team at pr@silabs.com.

Cautionary Language

This press release may contain forward-looking statements based on Silicon Labs' current expectations. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties. A number of important factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. For a discussion of factors that could impact Silicon Labs' financial results and cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements, please refer to Silicon Labs' filings with the SEC. Silicon Labs disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Note to editors: Silicon Labs, Silicon Laboratories, the "S" symbol, the Silicon Laboratories logo and the Silicon Labs logo are trademarks of Silicon Laboratories Inc. All other product names noted herein may be trademarks of their respective holders.

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/9919e5fb-db19-4219-858d-8ac4039b76e9
New Delhi:

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday expressed happiness as the beneficiaries of the Ujjwala LPG scheme crossed 2.5 crore mark.

In May last year, the government had embarked on a drive to provide free cooking gas connections to 5 crore women from poor households in three years with a view to reduce the use of polluting fuels such as wood and dried cow dung.

President Pranab Mukherjee today handed over cooking gas connection to a woman in Jangipur in West Bengal to mark the milestone.

Ujjwala Yojana continues to expand its reach! Extremely delighted that today the number of beneficiaries crossed 2.5 crore, tweeted Modi, who had piloted the ambitious programme.

I thank Rashtrapati Ji for the special gesture of handing over LPG connections to beneficiaries in Jangipur, West Bengal, he added.

The prime minister also congratulated Minister for Petroleum and Natural Gas Dharmendra Pradhan and and his entire team for working round-the-clock for the success of Ujjwala Yojana.

Also read: PM Ujjwala Yojana completes 1 year, sets record with 2.20 crore new LPG connections

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AUSTIN, Texas and LONDON, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Hyper Wear Inc., Hyperwear, the innovation driven fitness leader in unconventional tools for unconventional training, announced today its exclusive distribution agreement for the United Kingdom with London based fitness equipment and solutions experts Stronger Wellness Ltd ("Stronger"). By joining forces, the companies will deliver the latest innovative workout solutions for fitness consumers and businesses throughout the UK. Hyperwear's proprietary product line includes the award-winning Hyper Vest weighted vests, patent-pending Hyper Rope space saving battle rope, the original SandBell neoprene sandbag free weights and SoftBell System of soft, adjustable dumbbells, kettlebells, cardio barbells and soft weight plates.

Hyperwear Hyper Vest ELITE Weight Vest and the SandBell free weight Hyperwear Hyper Rope flexible metal core short unanchored battle rope

'WE BELIEVE that your body is the greatest gift you will ever own! We are in the business of giving people time back, a smarter way of living life and this cannot happen without the best partners, so we are thrilled with this new partnership. It is our commitment to introduce best in class, whether that is for a home workout or for your gym'' said Elena Lapetra co-founder of Stronger.

"With the explosive growth of demand for home gyms and home fitness, Hyperwear wanted to join with an excellent provider of fitness solutions in the UK. Hyperwear's safe and space saving functional fitness equipment is a perfect addition for Stronger's customers" said Hyperwear CEO and Founder Dirk Buikema.

About Stronger

S7RONGER (pronounced Stronger) It is a small british company striving to give people a smarter way of living life by creating the right spaces to maximise their own potential. With the deep belief that your body is the greatest gift you will ever own, therefore working hard to make smarter workouts and improved recovery more accessible for everybody. Products and services include the creation of workout and wellbeing spaces for home and for commercial facilities, from the design all the way to delivery and execution, and longevity of the projects. Visit strongerwellness.com, email [email protected] or call 0044-(0)2 3920 6519

About Hyperwear:

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Kate Delaware

Hyperwear

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Geraldine Prieto

Stronger Wellness

[email protected]

SOURCE Hyper Wear Inc
Yemen's Iran-backed Huthi rebels said they undertook a drone attack on a Saudi airport that left an aircraft in flames Wednesday, saying the facility was used to launch attacks on Yemen.

"The UAV air force targeted the airfields of warplanes at Abha International Airport - which is used for military purposes to target the Yemeni people - with four drones," Yahya Sarie, spokesman for the Huthis' armed wing, said in a tweet.

"The strike was accurate, thanks to God."

A civilian plane was engulfed in flames Wednesday after Yemen's Huthi rebels attacked an airport in southern Saudi Arabia, officials said, days after the US moved to delist the insurgents as terrorists.

RELATED NEWS Indian Woman Among 26 Injured in Missile Attack by Yemeni Rebels at Saudi's Abha Airport

"A cowardly criminal terrorist attack launched against Abha International Airport in Saudi Arabia by the Huthi militia," state-run Al-Ekhbariya television quoted the Riyadh-led military coalition battling the rebels as saying.

"A fire that engulfed a passenger plane due to the Huthi attack on Abha Airport is under control," it added.
Tucker Carlson addresses the pandemic (Fox News)

Fox News host Tucker Carlson has accused US authorities of lying about the safety of new coronavirus vaccines during a segment on his show attacking Big Tech and the media for censoring scepticism towards inoculation.

Rather than cover the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump on Tuesday night, the presenter addressed the pandemic, arguing that orthodoxies surrounding masks and social distancing had evolved without explanation and that any dissent was immediately being silenced.

What about this vaccine?, he asked. Why are Americans being discouraged from asking simple, straightforward questions about it? How effective are these drugs? Are they safe? What's the miscarriage risk for pregnant women, for example? Is there a study on that? May we see it? And by the way, how much are the drug companies making off this stuff?

Well theres nothing QAnon about questions like that, he continued. They are not conspiracy theories, they're the most basic questions. In a democracy, every citizen has a right to know the answer, but instead we got fluff and propaganda.

The media rollout for the vaccine came off like a Diet Pepsi commercial at the Super Bowl. Tonnes of celebrity endorsements, not a lot of science.

Mr Carlson did not overtly question vaccines themselves, agreeing that most Americans supported them having seen the beneficial effects of treatments against polio, tetanus and chickenpox, but did attack the way the authorities handled the coronavirus vaccine, saying it did not inspire confidence.

If the vaccine was so great, why were all these people lying about it? Honest question. And they were lying. Clearly, they were lying. You know that for certain because from the moment that Covid vaccine arrived, the most powerful people in America work to make certain that no one could criticise it.

He then launched into criticism of vaccine proponent Melinda Gates, wife of billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates - who was shown in a clip from a CNN interview in December in which she said social media had a moral responsibility to tackle anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories - and pointed to the removal of a Facebook group named COVID-19 Vaccine Injury Stories.

Story continues

The host then contradicted his own anti-censorship argument somewhat by alluding to a recent New York Times article reporting that Covid vaccines could trigger blood disorders in certain cases, a story that remains available online, on Facebook and on Twitter.

While Tucker Carlsons argument had more to do with with attacking Silicon Valley gatekeepers than explicitly doubting vaccines - he has said he intends to accept the jab himself and his employer, Rupert Murdoch, has already had his - his defence of the right to question medical expertise follows a pattern among American conservative media of humouring the anti-vaxxer movement since the pandemic began.

Most recently, his Fox colleague Laura Ingraham used her Quake Media podcast to interview Robert F Kennedy Jr, son of the slain presidential candidate and US attorney general, who took the opportunity to attack the countrys top infectious diseases expert, Dr Anthony Fauci, by calling him a very sinister guy who has turned this country over to Big Pharma and the J Edgar Hoover of public health.

Tony Fauci arranged for all of these vaccines to get immunity from liability, so no matter how negligent that company is, no matter how toxic the ingredients, no matter reckless they are, no matter how grievous your injury or death, you cannot sue them, he said.

On the subject of mass vaccination strategies in pursuit of herd immunity, Mr Kennedy asked: You have to give 300,000 vaccines to prevent one death - how many deaths are you going to cause in that cohort?

Another Fox host, Sean Hannity, said on his show on 26 January that he is beginning to have doubts about whether he will personally get the vaccine because half of his friends wouldnt take it in a million years and he doesnt know who to listen to.

Renowned conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has also aired anti-vaxxer ideas, provoking an outcry in October when he made a guest appearance on Joe Rogans popular podcast and falsely claimed that an oral vaccine had caused polio in 100 per cent of recipients.

Evangelical pastors including Rodney Howard-Browne and Guillermo Maldonado have also expressed similar scepticism online, the former claiming last April that vaccines kill more people than viruses and the latter saying in December that vaccines are preparing the structure for the Antichrist.

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On the pandemic more generally, Fox challenger One America News ran a segment in May 2020 claiming coronavirus was a globalist conspiracy masterminded by the elite to ensure then-US president Donald Trump was not re-elected, citing controversial medical researcher Judy Mikovits, who contributed to the widely discredited Plandemic viral video, which made similarly hysterical allegations.

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Influential right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh, recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Mr Trump, also declared at the outset of the international disaster last February that Covid-19 was no more dangerous than the common cold.

While Mr Carlsons free speech arguments against Big Tech might be reasonable, his accusation that medical authorities are lying to the American public risks further undermining trust when the pandemic has already claimed 468,000 American lives and counting.

A recent demonstration forcing the temporary closure of a vaccination centre at Dodgers Stadium in Los Angeles meanwhile exposes the danger of doubting the experts at a time when a YouGov poll found just 51 per cent of Americans are willing to be vaccinated.

New US president Joe Biden and his deputy Kamala Harris as well as celebrities like Arnold Schwarzenegger have made a point of receiving their jabs in public to counter public concerns about safety, while organisations such as International SOS have published fact-checking guidelines to counter online mythmaking over vaccines.

Read More

Tucker Carlson defends QAnon believers

Trump-supporting pastor tells followers Covid vaccine is preparing structure for the antichrist
Monrovia  Liberia's historic Providence Baptist Church today, February 10 begins its bicentennial celebration with a new vision set on transforming lives and renewing communities "intentionally and radically."

At a press conference on Tuesday, the Senior Pastor of the Church, the Rev. Dr. Samuel B. Reeves, Jr. also called on Liberians at home and abroad to unite and a build a prosperous nation guided by God.

"Our greatest faith is that Liberia shall rise to its ideals because it is our strong belief that as the Church rises, Liberia will grow and flow," Dr, Reeves said in a prepared statement.

He continued: Since 1821, Providence has stood the test of time to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ, and our current vision is to transform lives and renewed communities intentionally and radically, still lifting Jesus up in all that we do."

Dr. Reeves is also the president of the Liberia Baptist Missionary and Educational Convention (LBMEC).

The Bicentennial celebration is being held under the theme, "Bridge to Providence!"

The Providence Baptist Church, known as the cornerstone of the nation played a pivotal role in the formation of Liberia. It was in the Church that the historic Declaration of Independence was signed.

Throughout Liberia's history, and in living out this vision, Dr. Reeves noted that the church has become and pray to remain the conscience of the nation, adding "we have met the spiritual and physical needs of the vulnerable across Liberia. We have promoted love, joy, holiness, and neighborliness and we have held that Christian faith keeps a nation on the straight and narrow road."

He furthered that "It is a rich heritage that is reflected in our oral and written history. That's why from Providence Hill, we have always prayed for the success of the Liberia, the health of democracy, and the wellbeing of our leaders and people. History tells us that it was on this Hill that Liberia emerged strong, rich and free."

Outlining events marking the commemoration of the Church's 200th anniversary, the Senior Pastor of the Church said the celebration will be carried out in four quarters with the first running from February 14, 2021 to March 28, 2021 in both Ministry and Leadership in order to remind Liberians that it was through Providence Baptist Church that the nation Liberia was birthed.

Beginning Sunday, February 14, 2021, Dr. Reeves revealed that a divine worship service will be held to give God the Glory for 200 years of Leadership and Ministry; and this will be followed by a youth lead spoken word event on February 19, held under the theme "Bridge of Love. The next day, February 20 begins with a "grand parade to be followed by a fun day jamboree, featuring good food, games for everyone, and excellent exhibitors in partnership with made in Liberia."

Close Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox Top Headlines Religion Liberia By submitting above, you agree to our privacy policy. Success! Almost finished... We need to confirm your email address. To complete the process, please follow the instructions in the email we just sent you. Error! Error! There was a problem processing your submission. Please try again later.

In concluding the first quarter celebration, the Senior Pastor of the Providence Baptist Church further disclosed that a historical symposium will be held on March 20. The quarter, he added will be climaxed with a National Thanksgiving Service involving the three branches of Government on March 28, 2021 at the Church's edifice on Providence Hill on Broad and Ashmun Streets in Central Monrovia where President George Weah is expected to deliver a special remark.

According to him, President Weah has been very instrumental in support of this celebration as evidence of his pledge to attend the event when he graced the launch of the bicentennial celebration in 2020.

At that event, the President said, "The history of Liberia cannot be told without also recounting the numerous contributions of the country's first Church- the Providence Baptist Church," adding that the "Church was an embodiment of the history of our great country."

Meanwhile, he was flanked by the Chairperson of the Anniversary Committee Mother Eva Mae Mappy Morgan and Co-chair, Madam Laura Prutchard. They, in separate remarks stressed the importance of the celebration and called on Liberians at home and abroad to join the events.

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This image created by graffiti collective RBS highlights the need to wear face masks as the novel coronavirus continues to spread.

document

Overview and Background

This interim guidance has been developed on the basis of the advice issued by the Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization (SAGE) at its extraordinary meeting on 8 February 2021.

Declarations of interests were collected from all external contributors and assessed for any conflicts of interest. Summaries of the reported interests can be found on the SAGE meeting websiteand SAGE Working Group website.

These interim recommendations apply to AZD1222 (ChAdOx1-S [recombinant]) vaccine against COVID-19 developed by Oxford University (United Kingdom) and AstraZeneca as well as to ChAdOx1-S [recombinant] vaccines against COVID-19 produced by other manufacturers that rely on the AstraZeneca core clinical data, following demonstrated equivalence in their regulatory review and once emergency use listing (EUL) has been obtained from WHO.

The guidance is based on the evidence summarized in the Background document on AZD1222 vaccine against COVID-19 developedby Oxford University and AstraZeneca and the Background paper on COVID-19 disease and vaccines. Both these documents areavailable on the SAGE COVID-19 webpage: https://www.who.int/groups/strategic-advisory-group-of-experts-on-immunization/covid-19-materials

Methods

SAGE applies the principles of evidence- based medicine and has set in place a thorough methodological process for issuing and updating recommendations (2). A detailed description of the methodological processes as they apply to COVID-19 vaccines can be found in the SAGE evidence framework for COVID-19 vaccines (3). This framework contains guidance on considering data emerging from clinical trials in relation to the issuance of vaccine-specific evidence-based recommendations.

General goal and strategy for the use of the AZD1222 vaccine against COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused significant morbidity and mortality throughout the world, as well as major social, educational and economic disruptions. There is an urgent global need to develop effective and safe vaccines and to make them available at scale and equitably across all countries.

The AZD1222 vaccine against COVID-19 has an efficacy of 63.09% (95% CI 51.81; 71.73) against symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection, as shown by the primary analysis of data irrespective of interdose interval (data cut 7 December 2020) from trial participants in the United Kingdom, Brazil and South Africa who received 2 standard doses. Vaccine efficacy tended to be higher when the interval between doses was longer. This, together with the finding of higher antibody levels with increasing interdose interval, supports the conclusion that longer dose intervals within the 412 weeks range are associated with greater vaccine efficacy. No vaccinated persons were hospitalized as from 22 days after dose 1, compared with 14 unvaccinated persons who were hospitalized for COVID-19 in the same time frame. At the time of analysis, the median follow-up time after the second dose was 80 days. More detailed data on the efficacy and safety of this vaccine can be found in the Background document on AZD1222vaccine against COVID-19 developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca (https://www.who.int/groups/strategic-advisory-group-of-experts-on-immunization/covid-19-materials). The data reviewed by WHO support the conclusion that the known and

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potential benefits of AZD1222 outweigh the known and potential risks. As sufficient vaccine supply will not be immediately available to immunize all who could benefit from it, countries are recommended to use the WHO Prioritization Roadmap (4) and the WHO Values Framework (5) as guidance for their prioritization of target groups. As long as vaccine supplies are very limited (stage I in the WHO Prioritization Roadmap), in settings with community transmission, the Roadmap recommends that priority be given initially to health workers and older people with and without comorbidities. Protecting health workers has a threefold purpose:

to protect the individual health workers; (ii) to protect critical essential services during the COVID-19 pandemic; and (iii) to prevent onward transmission to vulnerable people. Protecting older people will have the greatest public health impact in terms of reducing the number of deaths. As more vaccine becomes available, additional priority groups should be vaccinated as outlined in the WHO Prioritization Roadmap (4), taking into account national epidemiological data, vaccine-specific characteristics as outlined in product information approved by regulatory authorities, and other relevant considerations.

Intended use

Persons aged 18 years and above.

Administration

The recommended schedule is two doses (0.5 ml) given intramuscularly into the deltoid muscle. According to the manufacturers product label, the vaccine can be administered with an interval of 4-12 weeks (6). In light of the observation that two-dose efficacy and immunogenicity increase with a longer interdose interval, WHO recommends an interval of 8 to 12 weeks between the doses. If the second dose is inadvertently administered less than 4 weeks after the first, the dose does not need to be repeated. If administration of the second dose is inadvertently delayed beyond 12 weeks, it should be given at the earliest possible opportunity. It is recommended that all vaccinated individuals receive two doses.

Booster doses

There is currently no evidence indicating a need for further doses once an individual has received two doses. The need for, and timing of, additional doses will be evaluated as further data accumulate.

Interchangeability with COVID-19 vaccines

No data are available on the interchangeability of doses of this vaccine with other COVID -19 vaccines. It is currently recommended that the same product should be used for both doses. Recommendations may be updated as further information becomes available on interchangeability.

Co-administration with other vaccines

There should be a minimum interval of 14 days between administration of this vaccine and any other vaccine against other conditions.

This recommendation may be amended as data on co-administration with other vaccines become available.

Contraindications

A history of anaphylaxis to any component of the vaccine is a contraindication to vaccination. People who have an anaphylactic reaction following the first dose of this vaccine should not receive a second dose of the same vaccine.

Precautions

No severe allergic reactions or anaphylaxis caused by AZD1222 have been recorded in the context of clinical trials. However, as for all vaccines, AZD1222 should be given under health care supervision, with the appropriate medical treatment available in case of allergic reactions. As for any other vaccine, an observation period of 15 min after vaccination should be ensured.

Anyone with an acute febrile illness (body temperature over 38.5 C) should postpone vaccination until they are afebrile. However, the presence of a minor infection, such as a cold, or low-grade fever should not delay vaccination.

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Vaccination of specific populations

Populations for which supportive data are available from immunogenicity and clinical trials

Persons aged 65 years and over

Because a relatively small number of participants aged 65 years or over were recruited into the clinical trials, there were few cases of COVID-19 in either the vaccine or the control group in this age category, and thus the confidence interval on the efficacy estimate is very wide. More precise efficacy estimates for this age group are expected soon, from both ongoing trials and vaccine effectiveness studies in countries that are using this vaccine. Immune responses induced by the vaccine in older persons are well documented and similar to those in other age groups. This suggests it is likely that the vaccine will be found to be efficacious in older persons. The trial data indicate that the vaccine is safe for this age group. The risk of severe disease and death due to COVID-19 increases steeply with age. Older adults are identified as a priority group in the WHO SAGE Prioritization Roadmap. This prioritization is supported by vaccine impact modelling work, even for vaccine efficacy that is substantially below that observed among younger adults administered AZD1222. Taking the totality of available evidence into account, WHO recommends the vaccine for use in persons aged 65 years and older.

Persons with comorbidities

Certain comorbidities have been identified as increasing the risk of severe COVID-19 disease and death. The clinical trials demonstrated that the vaccine has similar safety and efficacy profiles in persons with various underlying medical conditions, including those that place them at increased risk for severe COVID-19. The comorbidities studied in the clinical trials included obesity, cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease and diabetes. Vaccination is recommended for persons with comorbidities that have been identified as increasing the risk of severe COVID-19.

Populations for which limited or no data exist from the clinical trials

Children and adolescents below the age of 18 years

There are currently no efficacy or safety data for children or adolescents below the age of 18 years. Until such data are available, vaccination of individuals below 18 years of age is not recommended.

Pregnant women

Pregnant women are at higher risk of severe COVID- 19 compared with women of childbearing age who are not pregnant, and COVID -19 has been associated with an increased risk of preterm birth. The available data on AZD1222 vaccination of pregnant women are insufficient to assess vaccine efficacy or vaccine-associated risks in pregnancy. However, it should be noted that AZD1222 is a nonreplicating vaccine.

Animal developmental and reproductive toxicity (DART) studies are ongoing. Preliminary findings show no indication of harm to the development of the foetus. Further studies are planned in pregnant women in the coming months, including a pregnancy sub-study and a pregnancy registry. As data from these studies become available, recommendations on vaccination will be updated accordingly. In the interim, pregnant women should receive AZD 1222 only if the benefit of vaccination to the pregnant woman outweighs the potential vaccine risks, such as if they are health workers at high risk of exposure or have comorbidities that place them in a high -risk group for severe COVID-19. Information and, if possible, counselling on the lack of safety data for pregnant women should be provided.

WHO does not recommend pregnancy testing prior to vaccination. WHO does not recommend delaying pregnancy because of vaccination.

Lactating women

Breastfeeding offers substantial health benefits to lactating women and their breastfed children. Vaccine efficacy is expected to be similar in lactating women as in other adults. It is unknown whether AZD1222 is excreted in human milk. As the AZD1222 vaccine is a non -replicating vaccine, it is unlikely to pose a risk to the breastfeeding child. On the basis of these considerations, a lactating woman who is part of a group recommended for vaccination, e.g., health workers, should be offered vaccination on an equivalent basis. WHO does not recommend discontinuing breastfeeding after vaccination.

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Persons living with HIV

Persons living with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) may be at higher risk of severe COVID -19. Persons living with HIV were not included in the primary analyses of the trials and safety data in subgroups of HIV-positive subjects are awaited. Data on administration of the vaccine are currently insufficient to allow assessment of vaccine efficacy or safety for persons living with HIV. It is possible that the immune response to the vaccine may be reduced, which may lower its clinical effectiveness. In the interim, given that the vaccine is nonreplicating, persons living with HIV who are part of a group recommended for vaccination may be vaccinated. Information and, where possible, counselling should be provided to inform individual benefitrisk assessment. It is not necessary to test for HIV infection prior to vaccine administration.

Immunocompromised persons

Immunocompromised persons are at higher risk of severe COVID-19. Available data are currently insufficient to assess vaccine efficacy or vaccine-associated risks in severely immunocompromised persons, including those receiving immunosuppressant therapy. It is possible that the immune response to the vaccine may be reduced, which may lower its clinical effectiveness. In the interim, given that the vaccine is nonreplicating, immunocompromised persons who are part of a group recommended for vaccination may be vaccinated. Information and, where possible, counselling about vaccine safety and efficacy profiles in immunocompromised persons should be provided to inform individual benefitrisk assessment.

Persons with autoimmune conditions

No data are currently available on the safety and efficacy of AZD1222 in persons with autoimmune conditions. Persons with autoimmune conditions who are part of a group recommended for vaccination may be vaccinated.

Persons who have previously had SARS-CoV-2 infection

Vaccination may be offered regardless of a persons history of symptomatic or asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection. Viral or serological testing for prior infection is not recommended for the purpose of decision-making about vaccination. Available data from the pooled analyses indicate that AZD1222 is safe in people with evidence of prior SARS-CoV-2 infection. In participants who were seropositive at baseline, antibody levels were boosted after dose 1, with no further boosting after dose 2. The added protection of vaccinating previously infected individuals is yet to be established. Currently available data indicate that symptomatic reinfection within 6 months after an initial infection is rare. Thus, persons with PCR-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection in the preceding 6 months may delay vaccination until near the end of this period. When more data on duration of immunity after natural infection become available, the length of this time period may be revised.

Persons with current acute COVID-19

Persons with acute PCR- confirmed COVID-19, including those with onset of PCR-confirmed infection between doses, should not be vaccinated until after they have recovered from acute illness and the criteria for discontinuation of isolation have been met. Persons with PCR-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection may delay vaccination for 6 months. When more data on duration of immunity after natural infection become available, the length of this delay may be revised.

Persons who previously received passive antibody therapy for COVID-19

Currently there are no data on the safety or efficacy of vaccination in persons who received monoclonal antibodies or convalescent plasma as part of COVID-19 treatment. Hence, as a precautionary measure, vaccination should be deferred for at least 90 days to avoid interference of the antibody treatment with vaccine-induced immune responses.

Special settings

Persons in settings such as refugee and detention camps, prisons, slums, and other settings with high population densities, where physical distancing is not implementable, should be prioritized for vaccination as outlined in the WHO Prioritization Roadmap (4), taking into account national epidemiological data, vaccine supply and other relevant considerations.

As noted in the WHO Prioritization Roadmap, national programmes should give special consideration to groups that are disproportionately affected by COVID-19 or that face health inequities as a result of social or structural inequities. Such groups

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should be identified, barriers to vaccination should be addressed, and programmes should be developed to allow equitable access to vaccines.

In the current period of very limited vaccine supply, preferential vaccination of international travellers would counter the principle of equity. Because of this and the lack of evidence on whether vaccination reduces the risk of transmission, WHO currently does not recommend COVID-19 vaccination of travellers (unless they are also part of a high-risk group or in epidemiological settings identified in the WHO Prioritization Roadmap (4)). As vaccine supply increases, these recommendations will be revisited.

Other considerations

SARS-CoV-2 variants

SARS- CoV-2 viruses undergo evolution. Some new virus variants may be associated with higher transmissibility, disease severity, risk of reinfection, or a change in antigenic composition resulting in lower vaccine effectiveness.

Preliminary analyses have shown a slightly reduced vaccine effectiveness of AZD1222 against B1.1.1.7 in the V002 trial in the United Kingdom which is associated with only a limited reduction in neutralizing antibody. Preliminary analyses from the Phase 1/2a trial (COV005) in South Africa indicate marked reduction in vaccine effectiveness against mild and moderate disease due to B 1.351 based on a small sample size and substantial loss of neutralizing antibody activity. This study was designed to assess efficacy against disease of any severity, but the small sample size did not allow a specific assessment of vaccine efficacy against severe COVID-19. Indirect evidence is compatible with protection against severe COVID-19; however, this remains to be demonstrated in ongoing clinical trials and post-implementation evaluations.

In view of this, WHO currently recommends the use of AZD1222 vaccine according to the Prioritization Roadmap (4) even if variants are present in a country. Countries should conduct a benefit-risk assessment according to the local epidemiological situation including the extent of circulating virus variants.

These preliminary findings highlight the urgent need for a coordinated approach for surveillance and evaluation of variants and their potential impact on vaccine effectiveness. WHO will continue to monitor the situation; as new data become available, recommendations will be updated accordingly.

SARS-CoV-2 tests

Prior receipt of the vaccine will not affect the results of SARS-CoV-2 nucleic acid amplification or antigen tests for diagnosis of acute/current SARS-CoV-2 infection. However, it is important to note that currently available antibody tests for SARS-CoV- 2 assess levels of IgM and/or IgG to the spike or the nucleocapsid protein. The vaccine contains the spike protein; thus, a positive test for spike protein IgM or IgG could indicate either prior infection or prior vaccination. To evaluate for evidence of prior infection in an individual who has received the AZD1222 vaccine, a test that specifically evaluates IgM or IgG to the nucleocapsid protein should be used. A positive nucleocapsid protein-based assay indicates prior infection, while a negative nucleocapsid protein-based assay is expected after vaccination (unless a natural infection has occurred). Antibody testing is not currently recommended to assess immunity to COVID-19 following AZD1222 vaccination.

Role of vaccines among other preventive measures

As there is not yet sufficient evidence of an effect of the vaccine on transmission, nonpharmaceutical interventions must continue, including use of face masks, physical distancing, handwashing and other measures as appropriate in particular settings, depending on the COVID-19 epidemiology and potential risks of emerging variants. Government advice on nonpharmaceutical interventions should continue to be followed by vaccinated individuals, as well as those who have not yet been vaccinated. This advice will be updated as information on the impact of vaccination on virus transmission and indirect protection in the community is assessed.

Community engagement, effective communication, and legitimacy

Community engagement and effective communication (including risk communication) are essential to the success of COVID -19 vaccination programmes. Prioritization decisions should be made through transparent processes that are based on shared values, the best available scientific evidence, and appropriate representation and input by affected parties. Furthermore, communication about the mechanism of action of vector-based vaccines, and efficacy and safety data derived from clinical trials and post- marketing studies, as well as background mortality, maternal and neonatal outcomes and rates of adverse events of special interest (AESI) in groups prioritized for vaccination, needs to be strengthened. Strategies should include: (i) culturally acceptable and linguistically

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accessible communications regarding COVID-19 vaccination made freely available; (ii) active community engagement and involvement of community opinion leaders and trusted voices to improve awareness and understanding of such communications; and (iii) inclusion of diverse and affected stakeholder opinions in decision-making. Such efforts are especially important in subpopulations who may be unfamiliar with or distrustful of health care systems and immunization.

Vaccination logistics

The vaccine is presented as a 10-dose vial with stopper (elastomeric with aluminium overseal), delivered in packs containing 10 multidose vials. Unopened multidose vials should be stored in a refrigerator (2 C to 8 C) and should not be frozen. Once a vial has been opened (first needle puncture), it should be handled according to the WHO open vial policy and be discarded at the end of the immunization session or within six hours of opening, whichever comes first. Within this period, the product may be kept and used at temperatures up to 30 C (6, 7).

In order to improve the traceability of biological medicinal products, the name and the batch number of the administered product should be clearly recorded in patient records.

When scheduling vaccination for occupational groups, e.g., health workers, consideration should be given to the reactogenicity profile of AZD1222 vaccine observed in clinical trials, which may occasionally lead to time off work in the 2448 hours following vaccination.

In considering the programme implications of implementing these recommendations, particular attention should be given to equity, including the feasibility, acceptability, and effectiveness of the programme in resource-constrained settings.

Recommendations on addressing current knowledge gaps through further research

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WHO recommends the following post-authorization monitoring activities and research.

Safety surveillance and monitoring:

serious adverse events, anaphylaxis and other serious allergic reactions, Bell`s palsy, transverse myelitis, cases of multisystem inflammatory syndrome following vaccination, cases of COVID-19 following vaccination that result in hospitalization or death;

background rates of AESIs, maternal and neonatal outcomes, and mortality in groups prioritized for vaccination.

Vaccine effectiveness:

vaccine effectiveness in older persons;

vaccine effectiveness in relation to time interval between the first and second dose;

vaccine effectiveness in relation to new virus variants;

vaccine effectiveness over time and whether protection can be prolonged by booster doses;

booster studies with heterologous vaccines;

studies to investigate whether this vaccine reduces SARS-CoV-2 transmission and viral shedding;

assessment and reporting of breakthrough infections and virus sequence information;

head-to-head studies with other vaccines on extent and duration of immunity using standardized neutralization, T-cell and mucosal immunity assays.

Subpopulations:

prospective studies on the safety of AZD1222 vaccine in pregnant and lactating women;

randomized controlled trials on efficacy and safety of vaccination in persons below the age of 18 years;

safety data on vaccination in immunocompromised persons, including persons living with HIV and persons with autoimmune disease.

Vaccination logistics

immunogenicity and safety studies of co-administration with other vaccines, including influenza and pneumococcal vaccines, to adults and older persons;

safety, immunogenicity, and impact of a delayed second dose, as currently implemented by certain countries;

interchangeability and mix and match studies within and across COVID-19 vaccine platforms;

stability of vaccine under alternative cold-chain distribution and storage conditions.

Virus variants

global surveillance of virus evolution and the impact of virus variants on vaccine effectiveness to support update of vaccines;

Modelling to determine the trade-offs for the use of vaccines with reduced effectiveness against emergent variants;

Booster studies with updated vaccine formulations.

References

Extraordinary meeting of the Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization (SAGE) - 8 February 2021. Geneva: World Health Organization; 2021 (https://www.who.int/news-room/events/detail/2021/02/08/default-calendar/extraordinary-meeting-of-the-strategic-advisory-group-of-experts-on-immunization-(sage)---8-february-2021,accessed 8 February 2021).

SAGE guidance for the development of evidence-based vaccination-related recommendations. Geneva: World Health Organization; 2017 (https://www.who.int/immunization/sage/Guidelines_development_recommendations.pdf, accessed 8 February 2021).

Evidence to recommendations for COVID-19 vaccines: evidence framework. Geneva: World Health Organization; 2020 (https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/WHO-2019-nCoV-SAGE-Framework-Evidence-2020-1/, accessed 10 February 2021).

WHO SAGE roadmap for prioritizing uses of COVID-19 vaccines in the context of limited supply. Geneva: World Health Organization; 2020 (https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/who-WHO-roadmap-for-prioritizing-uses-of-covid-19-vaccines-in-the-context-of-limited-supply, accessed 8 February 2021).

WHO SAGE values framework for the allocation and prioritization of COVID-19 vaccination. Geneva: World Health Organization; 2020 (https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/who-WHO-values-framework-for-the-allocation-and-prioritization-of-covid-19-vaccination, accessed 8 February 2021).

COVID-19 vaccine AstraZeneca. European Medicines Agency (https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/documents/product-information/covid-19-vaccine-astrazeneca-product-information-approved-chmp-29-january-2021-pending-endorsement_en.pdf, accessed 8 February 2021).

WHO Policy Statement: Multi-dose Vial Policy (MDVP)

(https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/135972/WHO_IVB_14.07_eng.pdf, accessed 8 February 2021).

Funding source

SAGE members and SAGE working group members do not receive any remuneration from the Organization for any work related to the SAGE. The SAGE secretariat is funded through core contributions to WHO.

Acknowledgements

This document was developed in consultation with:

External: Current members of the Strategic Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE) on Immunization and the SAGE Working Groupon COVID-19 Vaccines.

WHO: Annelies Wilder-Smith, Joachim Hombach, Melanie Marti, Susan Wang, Katherine OBrien.

WHO continues to monitor the situation closely for any changes that may affect this interim guidance. Should any factors change, WHO will issue a further update. Otherwise, this interim guidance document will expire 2 years after the date of publication.
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Donald Trump's defense attorney Bruce Castor claimed Wednesday that the ex-president hasn't complained about his performance, saying 'far from it,' despite Republican senators lining up to mock it.

'Only one person's opinion matters and that is what I am going by,' Castor told reporters before the second day of impeachment proceedings kicked off on Wednesday afternoon.

Reports emerged shortly after the vote Tuesday indicating Trump was 'beyond angry' and 'furious' with Castor's defense argument on the Senate floor Tuesday.

Castor told Fox News: 'You need to check those sources because that has not been communicated to me by the president or anybody associated with the president. Including Mark Meadows, who specifically came to the Capitol yesterday to tell me don't read news coverage.'

The president's approval, Castor said, would influence his decision not to shake up any legal strategy going forward.

The former district attorney for Montgomery County, Pennsylvania told Fox that Meadows, Trump's former chief of staff, told him 'everything is going fine,' and he should 'continue doing what you're doing.'

Castor said he did not initially plan to speak at all during the pre-trial motion on the constitutionality of the proceedings Tuesday as they moved to vote on whether the Senate would move forward with trying the former president.

'Yesterday was a pretrial motion,' the former president's attorney explained. 'It was supposed to be, according to the Senate resolution, a legal discussion on the issue of jurisdiction. We took the Senate resolution literally and were prepared to argue jurisdiction.'

Republicans lashed out with criticism of Castor decrying his hour-long 'rambling' speech devoid of any coherent argument against the constitutionality of the trial.

'I thought the President's lawyer  the first lawyer just rambled on and on and on and didn't really address the constitutional argument,' Texas Senator John Cornyn told reporters outside the chamber following the vote Tuesday evening.

'Finally, the second lawyer got around to it and, I thought, did an effective job,' he continued, referencing David Schoen. 'But I've seen a lot of lawyers and a lot of arguments and that was not one of the finest I've seen.'

Donald Trump's defense attorney Bruce Castor (pictured left with fellow lawyer David Schoen on right), said Wednesday that the former president is far from furious with his speech Tuesday, which was highly criticized by Republicans and Twitter

Castor told Fox News on Wednesday that Trump's former chief of staff Mark Meadows (pictured), an ally of the ex-president, said that 'everything is going fine' in the impeachment trial and he should 'continue doing what you're doing'

One Twitter user likened Castor to a character on children's network Nickelodeon doing something stupid and in turn getting 'slimed'

In one edited image, he showed images of cartoon character Spongebob on the scene of the Senate floor as defense attorney David Schoen presented his case against moving the proceedings forward on Tuesday

In another image, he edited green 'slime' covering Castor's head

On Wednesday, joke ads started popping up on Subways in New York poking criticism at Castor and fellow impeachment defense attorney David Schoen. It advertises their services for impeachment if 'literally no one else will represent you'

On the Q Train, their fake ad appeared next to another ad for the Museum of Sex

Castor was until now best known for his decision  while serving as Montgomery County, Pennsylvania's district attorney  not to prosecute Bill Cosby on rape charges. That decision was overturned by his successor and Cosby, 83, is now serving three to 10 years for sexual assault.

Trump tapped the private practice attorney last month after parting with his previous legal team.

The Twittersphere also exploded with memes and harsh words for Castor, comparing him to fictional bad lawyers.

'My Cousin Vinny' started trending on Twitter as Castor was ridiculed for his performance and compared unflatteringly to the Texas lawyer who forgot to switch off the kitten filter when appearing remotely in court this week.

Some Twitter users said Trump would be better off with the 'Three Stooges' representing him or his ex-attorney Rudy Giuliani, who has also faced wide criticism for his defense of the former president.

Castor admitted both during his remarks on the Senate floor Tuesday and when speaking to Fox Wednesday, that the House Democratic managers did a good job in arguing it is constitutional to hold an impeachment trial for a former president.

'The House Managers deviated substantially from the mandate and made a very strong, and direct emotional appeal,' he told Fox.

'I have had 35 years of reading the expressions of people's faces as jurors, and I could see that it had hit home,' he continued, specifically referring to lead manager Jamie Raskin's opening remarks.

Senator Ted Cruz of Texas said the whole trial is a 'waste of time' before struggling to say what he thought about Castor, starting with a laugh when he was asked.

'I don't think the lawyers did the most effective job,' Cruz told reporters on Capitol Hill after a long pause.

Castor made his first mistake in his opening sentences saying 'I am the lead prosecutor, lead counsel for the 45th president of the United States' - then saying 'I do know the difference.'

Donald Trump's defense attorney Bruce Castor is facing a slew of backlash from Republican senator  and Twitter  for his 'rambling' speech they claim was devoid of any coherent legal argument against the constitutionality of moving forward with the impeachment trial

While Jon Stewart mocked Castor as a 'sh***y public defender', a respondent to that thread said all he could think of is 'My Cousin Vinny'

Others on Twitter compared him to a bad lawyer in The Simpsons

A meme circulated of Castor in his pinstripe suit on the floor of the Senate Tuesday with the head of a cat

Another meme on Instagram poked fun at Trump's anger at his attorneys, claiming his next team would be comprised of the 'Three Stooges'

He also praised lead impeachment manager Jamie Raskin for his 'impressive' argument for the constitutionality of holding an impeachment trial for a no longer sitting president, admitted that he and David Schoen had changed their plans because it.

When I was growing up in suburban Philadelphia, my parents were big fans of Senator Everett Dirksen from Illinois. And Senator Dirksen recorded a series of lectures that my parents had on a record and  we still know what records are right? On the thing you put the needle down on and it played.'

'I'll be quite frank with you, we changed what we were going to do on account that we thought that the House manager's presentation was well done,' he said.

As the 47-minute speech went on, it raised more and more eyebrows among senators. Some Republicans were seen passing notes to each other.

'Senators of the United States  they're not ordinary people. They're extraordinary people in the technical sense  extraordinary people,' Castor said to the room of all 100 U.S. senators before launching into a rambling and seemingly unrelated story about listening to records of past senators speaking.

'When I was growing up in suburban Philadelphia, my parents were big fans of Senator Everett Dirksen from Illinois. And Senator Dirksen recorded a series of lectures that my parents had on a record and  we still know what records are right? On the thing you put the needle down on and it played,' he said.

'Here's little Bruce  8, 9, 10-years-old  listening to this back in the late 60s,' he described, before claiming Dirksen's voice was commanding.

At another point, in an argument of the unprecedented nature of two impeachments against Trump, Castor appeared to try to take a stab at making a joke that did not land and added to the chaos of the defense argument.

'Until the impeachment of Bill Clinton, no one alive had ever lived through a presidential impeachment  not unless some of you are 150-years-old,' Castor said to the otherwise silent room. The oldest senators are 87, the president pro tempore who is presiding over the trial, Patrick Leahy, is 80 and the average age if 61.8, dragged down by 33-year-old Jon Ossoff and 41-year-old Josh Hawley.

Nebraska, and you're going to hear, is quite a judicial thinking place, and just maybe Senator Sasse is onto something, and you'll hear about what it is that the Nebraska courts have to say about the issue that you all are deciding this week. There seem to be some pretty smart jurists in Nebraska and I can't believe a United States senator doesn't know that.

'Not a single person alive had lived through presidential impeachment. Now most of us have lived through three of them.'

At one point he spoke about Nebraska, home state of Ben Sasse, one of the most outspoken Republican critics of Trump, in a meandering quote which Sasse said later he did not understand, calling the courts of Nebraska 'pretty smart jurists.'

In yet another questionable move, at another point during Castor's remarks, he even suggested Trump could be arrested.

'If my colleagues on this side of the chamber,' Castor pointing to Democrats, 'actually think that President Trump committed a criminal offense after he's out of office, you go and arrest him.'

'So there is no opportunity where the President of the United States can run rampant in January  the end of his term  and just go away scot-free,' he continued. 'The Department of Justice does know what to do with such people. And so far, I haven't seen any activity in that direction.'

Castor, in making that argument, is claiming that instead of facing impeachment, Trump should actually be criminally pursued by the Justice Department.

He reiterated that there are also no findings or charges related to Trump somehow conspiring with those who stormed the Capitol on January 6.

Perhaps worst of all for Trump's own pride, he directly conceded that Trump had lost saying: 'President Trump no longer is in office. The object of the Constitution has been achieved. He was removed by the voters.'

Then he said the electorate were 'smart' for doing it.

Reports emerged at the same time Trump's second lawyer, David Schoen, was wrapping up his defense argument that the former president was furious at his legal team.

On Newsmax, the anchors switched from showing Castor's speech to interviewing Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor who had spoken for Trump at his first impeachment.

'There is no argument. I have no idea what he's doing. I have no idea why he's saying what he's saying,'Dershowitz said.

Even one of Trump's biggest congressional allies, Senator Lindsey Graham, said Castor's argument was just 'OK' and claimed he wasn't exactly sure where the defense lawyers were going with their remarks on the floor.

'I think the President's defense was OK,' Graham told reporters as he walked from the chamber back to his office after voting against moving forward with the trial. 'I mean it took a long time to get to where I think the meat of the question is.'

'I really didn't know  I thought I knew where it was going, and I really didn't know very well,' Graham said of Castor's argument, adding that only one mind was changed in the whole four hours of procedure.

While five of those votes were already expected, one wildcard joined the pack  Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who said his mind was changed after hearing both arguments from the House impeachment managers and Trump's defense team on Tuesday.

One Twitter user said Castor is a worse lawyer than Trump's former attorney Rudy Giuliani

Former FBI agent and now CNN analyst Asha Rangappa suggested Trump's lawyers are doing back on purpose because they want to 'get off the case'

Cassidy was straightforward on what swayed him to change his mind: Trump's legal defense.

'Did you listen to it?,' he said to reporters gathered after the vote. 'If you listen to it, it speaks for itself. It was disorganized, random, they talked about many things but they didn't talk about the issue at hand.'

'And so if I'm an impartial juror, and I'm trying to make a decision based upon the facts as presented on this issue, then the House managers did a much better job,' Cassidy said.

He also released a statement reiterating his thought process on the vote.

'If anyone disagrees with my vote and would like an explanation, I ask them to listen to the arguments presented by the House Managers and former President Trump's lawyers,' the Louisiana senator said. 'The House managers had much stronger constitutional arguments. The president's team did not.'

He made clear in the statement, however: 'This vote is not a prejudgment on the final vote to convict.'

Texas Senator John Cornyn said after the vote Tuesday: 'I thought the President's lawyer  the first lawyer just rambled on and on and on and didn't really address the constitutional argument... I've seen a lot of lawyers and a lot of arguments and that was not one of the finest I've seen'

Six Republicans crossed the party line Tuesday night to vote with the 50 Democrats that moving forward with an impeachment trial against an ex-president is constitutional.

When walking out of the chamber on Tuesday night, Murkowski, one of the Republican defectors, made clear to reporters she felt Trump's lawyers missed their opportunity to present a sound case against the constitutionality of continuing the impeachment proceedings against now-private citizen Trump.

'Today was supposed to be an opportunity to be briefed on the constitutionality of whether or not you can move forward with an impeachment of a former president,' the Alaska moderate Republican said. 'I thought that the House presented a pretty good legal analysis.'

She also claimed Castor was a disaster for the former president, but said Schoen was able to redeem some of the legal argument.

'In fairness, I was really stunned at the first attorney who presented for former President Trump,' she said of Castor. 'I couldn't figure out where he was going, spent 45 minutes going somewhere, but I don't think he helped with us better understanding where he was coming from on the constitutionality of this.'

House impeachment managers, led by Representative Raskin, kicked off Tuesday's proceedings by presenting an argument rooted in legal theory and precedent that an impeachment trial against a former president is in line with the Constitution.

Castor and Schoen were not Trump's first choice, but were picked up after several other law firms refused to take the case and he fired his first team after they refused to take Trump's desired approach arguing a fraudulent election.

From 2000-2008, Castor, a Republican, was district attorney in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania  an area where Trump claims there were wide instances of voter fraud by Democrats.

Famously, during that time he decided not to prosecute Bill Cosby on rape charges, which his successor went ahead with  leading to the comedian being convicted and imprisoned.

The attorney later had to settle a case with Cosby victim Andrea Costand who claimed Castor defamed her by suggesting she was not credible.

In August 2016, Castor briefly became acting attorney general of Pennsylvania for less than a month. He is now in private practice.

The 59-year-old

Despite facing harsh criticism for his approach on Tuesday, Castor defended himself, claiming he doesn't plan to switch up any legal strategy going forward in the trial.

'I thought we had a good day,' Castor told the press on Capitol Hill when asked about criticism  including from Republicans  that he didn't make a good case against constitutionality for the trial.

'Do you anticipate any sort of adjustments after today?' a reporter asked of the former president's attorney.

'No, I set up the outline a week ago and it will not change,' he shot back.

The Senate voted 56-44 on Tuesday that the trial is constitutional and to move forward on Wednesday with the proceedings.

The Republican senators who voted along with Democrats include Cassidy, Murkowski, Susan Collins of Maine, Mitt Romney of Utah, Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania.

Most surprising of the six is Cassidy, who previously agreed with 44 other Republicans that holding the trial would go against the Constitution's intent since he is no longer the sitting president.
Listowel GP Dr Donal Daly who anticipates greater clarity later this week on the next phase of the Covid vaccine roll-out. Photo by Domnick Walsh

GPs in Kerry still have no idea how many doses of vaccine they will get in the coming week as they prepare to vaccinate their elderly patients.

They also have no firm date for when the vaccines will arrive in surgeries across the county.

According to the vaccination programme, GPs will begin vaccinating their patients from February 15 (Monday).

However, despite it being just days until the start date, GPs are still in the dark over what quantity of vaccines they will receive at their surgery and the date on which they will arrive.

Patients have been contacting their GPs in recent days seeking the date as excitement mounts among the elderly in the community who are now to be vaccinated.

Irish public-health officials decided this week to use the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines for the over-70s instead of the planned AstraZeneca jab due to a lack of data for its effectiveness in older people.

This decision has made it more difficult for GPs as both those vaccines are more difficult to administer.

Dr Gary Stack from Killarney is hoping that more information will be forthcoming as he prepares to contact his elderly patients in the coming days to give them an appointment.

"We don't know on what basis they will give us the vaccine... We don't know who many vaccines we will get. It could be based on the medical card list or on previous deliveries of the flu vaccine. There is no clarity on that yet but hopefully by later in the week there will be," he said.

Dr Stack said, given that the date for the roll-out is fast approaching and patients are contacting the surgery daily asking about the vaccine, such clarity is needed.

He said that until GPs have more information, they cannot book appointments for their elderly patients.

"We are looking at sending texts to patients to book online. We will contact those aged over 85 but as we work down the age groups we will have an online booking system," he said.

Once the over 85s are vaccinated, the over 80s will be next, and so on down the line.

Dr Stack has hundreds of patients in the elderly age bracket, including more than 50 patients aged over 85 who have yet to be vaccinated.

Other patients in that age bracket have been vaccinated during the nursing-home vaccine roll-out.

Meanwhile, Dr Donal Daly, a Listowel-based GP, is also facing a similar situation, with hundreds of patients waiting to be vaccinated but no information on when the vaccine will arrive or how many doses will be received: "It is unclear at the moment but the situation and the information is changing all the time."

He is hopeful that further information will be forthcoming later this week.

A meeting was scheduled with the Irish Medical Organisation (IMO) on Tuesday and the Irish College of General Practitioners (ICGP) on Wednesday, when the vaccine roll-out was to be discussed.

Dr Daly said it is a 'bit of a worry' that information is not yet forthcoming but he said, despite this, there is still good news on the horizon as many of the elderly in Kerry will be vaccinated in the coming weeks.

"The bottom line is that it is a fantastic achievement that there is a vaccine a year after COVID arrived and more vaccines will be coming on stream," he said.

"I presume we will be told more by the end of the week. It will happen."

He raised concerns, however, about the roll-out of vaccines in patients in those age cohorts who cannot come to the GP practice to be vaccinated. He said such numbers may be small but, nonetheless, it is a cohort of people who must receive the vaccine and other arrangements must be made.

Both GPs have urged patients to attend their appointment when the time and date is given to ensure a smooth roll-out.
US Must End Corporate Americas Subservience to Beijing: Expert

For years, the Chinese regime has been able to rely on a powerful bloc to represent its interests in Washington: corporate America.

Thats according to Clyde Prestowitz, author of the book The World Turned Upside Down: America, China, and The Struggle for Global Leadership. And he wants it to end.

Prestowitz, who was a trade official in the Reagan administration and now president of the Economic Strategy Institute, a Washington-based think tank, told The Epoch Times there now exists a crazy imbalance in the U.S.-China relationship, thanks to the outsized role that big business plays in American politics.

U.S. corporations are more representative of China politically, and in terms of trade negotiations, than they are of the United States, he said in an interview.

This is a huge issue that I fight constantly.

Take, for example, Apple, which assembles most of its products in China and counts the country as its second-largest consumer market. Its CEO Tim Cook holds enormous sway over Americas political elite, according to the author.

He makes huge contributions to politicians to help them win their seats in Congress. He has armies of lawyers and lobbyists, Prestowitz said. Hes a very powerful guy in Washington.

In Beijing, however, the CEO is on his knees, Prestowitz said. Hes at the mercy of the Party, just like everybody else, he added, referring to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

When these big company heads engage with officials and Congress, they say they represent the interests of U.S. businesses. But Prestowitz described this as total nonsense.

They dont represent American business. They represent China, he said. Tim Cook is not afraid of Joe Biden, but believe me, hes afraid of Xi Jinping.

Fueling the Rise

How corporate America became a cheerleader for China is detailed in Prestowitzs book. The story is enmeshed in almost four decades of U.S. engagement with the regime, since President Richard Nixon paved the way for the opening of relations in the 1970s.

Successive administrations encouraged U.S. trade and investment in China, in hopes that globalization would make the communist country more democratic.

In the wake of the Tiananmen Square Massacre in June 1989, when the Chinese regime violently suppressed pro-democracy student protesters, the regime faced isolation from the United States and the international community. Then, one month after the incident, President George H. W. Bush extended a lifeline. Bush sent his national security adviser on a secret visit to Beijing, to deliver a message to CCP leaders that he would do his best to restore the relationship, and ward off efforts by Congress to cut trade. His rationale for continued trade was: as people have commercial incentives, whether its China or in other totalitarian systems, the move to democracy is inexorable.

The CCP also found a partner in President Bill Clinton, an enthusiastic promoter of constructive engagement who brokered Chinas ascension into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001. In selling the deal to the American public, Clinton said in 2000 that the move meant the regime would import one of democracys most cherished values, economic freedom, which would have a profound impact on human rights and liberty in China.

Evidently, none of those things happened.

The CCP has since expanded its human rights abuses targeting religious and ethnic minorities, and stifled critics across the mainland and Hong Kong, while tightening its control over Chinese citizens by deploying the worlds most pervasive system of tech-surveillance.

Fueled by a cascade of foreign investment, while using a bevy of unfair trade practices, the regime boosted domestic industries, gutting American manufacturing in the process. It now seeks to lead the world in high-tech manufacturing and has packaged its own model of techno-autocracy for export around the globe.

Yet, how did Americas political elite end up being seduced by the siren song, as Prestowitz describes it, that promised liberalization through trade?

The answer, I think, is that they desperately wanted to believe for two reasons, he writes in his book. One was that the corporations that largely run Washington saw huge business opportunities in China and were determined to cash in. The second was that the leading pundits and academics of the time told them it was all true.

The author goes on to illustrate how corporate bosses, Wall Street bankers, and former officials-turned-Washington-lobbyists rushed to cash in on the China market. There was Robert Galvin, former CEO of Motorola, who used the opportunity presented by the Tiananmen Square Massacrewhen an isolated Beijing was in desperate need of foreign backersto negotiate a favorable deal to move the companys factories to the country. Maurice Greenberg, former CEO of insurance giant AIG, and Fred Smith, CEO of FedEx, both eager for a slice of the China-sized pie, were also powerful friends of the regime at home.

Smith became a master at playing Washington, putting ex-senators and congresspersons on his board, donating to all the influence makers just as [Greenberg] did, and making big contributions to political campaigns, Prestowitz writes.

Over on Wall Street in the early 1990s, Henry Paulson, then an executive at investment bank Goldman Sachs, spearheaded a plan to help consolidate Chinas struggling state-owned companies (SOE) into large firms and take them public. Chinese SOEs raised hundreds of billions of dollars on domestic and international exchanges, netting Wall Street billions in profits. Paulson went on to become treasury secretary under the George W. Bush presidency and now heads the Paulson Institute, a think tank dedicated to fostering a US-China relationship that serves to maintain global order, its website says.

Paulson did extensive writing and speaking as a self-styled China expert, Prestowitz writes. [Y]et there is no evidence that he or anyone else on Wall Street understood that far from privatizing that country, they were strengthening the Partys authoritarian rule and its ability to project its power beyond Chinas borders.

Apple, FedEx, and Paulson did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Holding Corporations Accountable

The author recommends that the Foreign Agents Registration Act be strengthened so that corporations and other organizations that do business with China have to reveal their links.

They should all be required to make full disclosure of their political donations and their ties to China when they testify, speak, or write for public consumption, Prestowitz writes.

Returning to Apples CEO, he highlights that the public must know that when Cook talks about China, he is a hostage to Beijing because of Apples extensive production operations there.

Instances of Apple and other Western companies bending to the Chinese regime are legion. During the height of the Hong Kong pro-democracy protests in 2019, Apple removed from its App Store an app that allowed protesters to track police activity. The move came one day after Chinese state media berated the company for aiding Hong Kong protesters by approving the toxic app. But the company said the app was pulled because it was a risk to public safety.

Around that time, video game company Activision Blizzard also suspended a prominent player who voiced support for the protesters in Hong Kong.

Beyond greater transparency, Prestowitz wants certain large multinationals to register a charter with the federal government, on top of the charter registered with a state (typically, Delaware). This federal charter would set tougher standards on firms, such as how they can behave politically, and how they operate in other countries, he said.

For instance, the United States could punish companies that aid foreign governments in repressing its citizens, or cave in to demands by foreign powers that jeopardize Americans freedom of speech or religion, the book says.

You can use the charter to really discipline the company and to really put obligations on the CEOs and the top executives, Prestowitz said.
Russian authorities aim to discredit and disintegrate the EU, the Polish politician said.

Andrzej Sados, the permanent representative of Poland to the European Union, has urged to stop the Nord Stream 2 construction.

"Member states cannot allow themselves to be dependent on a state with an openly hostile policy towards the EU," he told EURACTIV.

"Russian authorities aim to discredit and disintegrate our Union as well as the unity of our Western alliances. Today, the only adequate reaction to the confrontational attitude of Russia can be the discontinuation of the Nord Stream 2 (NS2) investment. This would be a clear and unequivocal consequence of outrageous statements made by the representative of Russian authorities about the EU in general and about the individual member states," Sados said.

According to the politician, "completing the pipeline and allowing Russia to benefit in this way from a deal with an 'unreliable partner' would mean allowing the law to be broken, allowing persecutions, corruption and division of Western states."

Nord Stream 2: Background

The Nord Stream 2 project envisages the construction and operation of two gas pipeline branches with a total throughput capacity of 55 billion cubic meters of natural gas per year from the coast of Russia through the Baltic Sea to Germany. It should connect Russia's Ust-Lug and Germany's Greifswald. This new pipeline bypassing Ukraine is to be built next to the existing Nord Stream 1 pipeline.

The construction of the pipeline was expected to be completed before the end of 2019.

The pipeline will be 1,220 km long. The project is being implemented by Russia's Gazprom in alliance with European companies  ENGIE, OMV, Royal Dutch Shell, Uniper, and Wintershall. Ukraine stands against the construction of Nord Stream 2 as it will most likely lose its status of a gas transit country, while its potential revenue losses are estimated at US$3 billion annually. The project is also highly criticized by the U.S., Poland, and the Baltic States.

Read also"Impossible" to complete Nord Stream 2  expertAccording to media reports, U.S. President-elect Joe Biden intends to do his best to prevent the construction of Nord Stream 2.

On November 4, 2020, the media reported that U.S. Congress wanted to expand sanctions against Nord Stream 2 and TurkStream.

On December 4, 2020, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said he doubted that the U.S. position on Nord Stream 2 would change after Joe Biden's inauguration.

On December 6, 2020, United States Charge d'Affaires to Germany Robin Quinville called on the EU and Germany to declare a moratorium on the construction of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline.

On December 9, 2020, the U.S. House of Representatives approved the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) with expanded restrictions against the Russian Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline.

On December 11, 2020, the construction of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline resumed.

Read alsoGermany may freeze Nord Stream 2 after September elections  mediaGermany's federal maritime regulator BSH says the construction work on the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline could be stopped for an indefinite period in German waters but opponents still need to give detailed reasons to justify the halt.

On February 7, 2021, the Nord Stream 2 operator announced the start of pipe-laying in Danish waters.

Reporting by UNIAN
Etesevimab and bamlanivimab administered together is authorized for treatment of recently diagnosed, mild to moderate COVID-19 in patients who are high risk for progression to severe COVID-19

More than 250,000 doses manufactured throughout Q1 2021; up to 1 million doses by mid-2021

FDA authorizes shortened infusion time for this neutralizing antibody therapy authorized for emergency use



SHANGHAI, China, Feb. 10, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Junshi Biosciences (HKEX: 1877; SSE: 688180), a leading innovation-driven biopharmaceutical company dedicated to the discovery, development and commercialization of novel therapies, announced today that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for investigational etesevimab (JS016 or LY-CoV016) 1400 mg and bamlanivimab (LY-CoV555) 700 mg together, according to the company's global partner Eli Lilly and Company (NYSE: LLY). This therapy is authorized for the treatment of mild to moderate COVID-19 in patients aged 12 and older who are at high risk for progressing to severe COVID-19 and/or hospitalization. Etesevimab and bamlanivimab should be administered together via a single intravenous infusion as soon as possible after a positive COVID-19 test and within 10 days of symptom onset.

In addition, the FDA has authorized infusion times for bamlanivimab alone and bamlanivimab and etesevimab together to be as short as 16 or 21 minutes, respectively - a significant reduction from the previously authorized time of 60 minutes. This change has been made in response to feedback received from front-line nurses and doctors administering these infusions and is aimed at reducing the burden on the healthcare system.

The EUA is based on Phase 3 data from the BLAZE-1 trial, announced on January 26, 2021, which demonstrated that etesevimab and bamlanivimab together reduced the risk of COVID-19 hospitalizations and death by 70 percent. These data replicate earlier results, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association (IF=45.54), in a much larger group of patients. The most common adverse event more often reported for patients receiving etesevimab and bamlanivimab together versus placebo was nausea on the day of infusion.

While Phase 2 and Phase 3 trials evaluated a range of doses of bamlanivimab alone and etesevimab and bamlanivimab together, data demonstrated consistent and similar clinical effects among all doses studied. Additionally, initial results from an ongoing Phase 2 study provided viral load and pharmacodynamic/pharmacokinetic data which demonstrated etesevimab 1400 mg and bamlanivimab 700 mg together produced similar effects to those observed in the Phase 3 trial with etesevimab 2800 and bamlanivimab 2800 together. Together, these data provide confidence in the authorized dose, which expands available supply to help more patients without sacrificing potential efficacy.

The FDA grants EUA to provide availability of a medicine that may help diagnose, treat or prevent a life-threatening disease when no adequate and approved alternatives are available. This administration of etesevimab and bamlanivimab together is authorized only for the duration of the declaration, unless the authorization is terminated or revoked sooner. The authorization is temporary and does not replace the formal review and approval process. The administration of etesevimab and bamlanivimab together remains investigational and has not been approved under a Biologics License Application (BLA). Evaluation of its safety and efficacy is ongoing in clinical trials. Data from these studies will be used to support a future BLA submission for the treatment.

Bamlanivimab alone is authorized in numerous countries, while bamlanivimab and etesevimab together is currently authorized in the U.S. and Italy. Lilly will continue working with global regulators to make these therapies available around the world. In an effort to help as many patients as possible, Lilly will continue to accelerate manufacturing of etesevimab for use around the world. Lilly, in collaboration with Amgen, plans to manufacture up to 1 million doses of etesevimab for administration with bamlanivimab by mid-2021. There are 100,000 doses ready immediately and an additional 150,000 doses will be available throughout the first quarter. Lilly anticipates procurement and allocation of etesevimab and bamlanivimab together will mirror the process followed for bamlanivimab alone - making the therapy available directly to governments for allocation based on unmet needs. Global allocation will aim to ensure access for patients with high unmet need, no matter where they live.

Dr. Ning LI, CEO of Junshi Biosciences said: "Since the outbreak of the pandemic, Junshi Biosciences and the IMCAS have been dedicated to the co-development of neutralizing antibodies. Now, with Lilly, our global partner's participation, the innovative therapy is authorized for use in the U.S. and Italy, while unremitting endeavors to meet the extensive anti-COVID-19 needs are made by the local and overseas medical industry. The data of etesevimab and bamlanivimab together provides strong evidence for the safety and efficacy of JS016, thus giving us confidence to proceed with the clinical trial of JS016, which is ongoing in several countries and regions, including Mainland China, Hong Kong, the Philippines, etc."

About etesevimab(JS016)

Etesevimab (JS016 or LY-CoV016) is a recombinant fully human monoclonal neutralizing antibody, which specifically binds to the SARS-CoV-2 surface spike protein receptor binding domain with high affinity and can block the binding of the virus to the ACE2 host cell surface receptor. Point mutations were introduced into the native human IgG1 antibody to mitigate effector function. Lilly licensed etesevimab from Junshi Biosciences after it was jointly developed by Junshi Biosciences and the Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Science (IMCAS). Junshi Biosciences leads development in Greater China, while Lilly leads development in the rest of the world.

Lilly has successfully completed a Phase 1 study (NCT04441931) of etesevimab in healthy U.S. volunteers to evaluate the safety, tolerability, pharmacokinetics and immunogenicity. A Phase 2/3 study in people recently diagnosed with COVID-19 in the ambulatory setting (BLAZE-1, NCT04427501) is ongoing. Junshi Biosciences has completed a similar Phase 1 study in healthy volunteers in China and has initiated Phase 1b/2 trials in COVID-19 patients globally.

About bamlanivimab(LY-CoV555)

Bamlanivimab (LY-CoV555) is a recombinant, neutralizing human IgG1 monoclonal antibody (mAb) directed against the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2. It is designed to block viral attachment and entry into human cells, thus neutralizing the virus, potentially treating COVID-19. Bamlanivimab emerged from the collaboration between Lilly and AbCellera to create antibody therapies for the prevention and treatment of COVID-19. Lilly scientists rapidly developed the antibody in less than three months after it was discovered by AbCellera and the scientists at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Vaccine Research Center. It was identified from a blood sample taken from one of the first U.S. patients who recovered from COVID-19.

Lilly has successfully completed a Phase 1 study of bamlanivimab in hospitalized patients with COVID-19 (NCT04411628). A Phase 2/3 study in people recently diagnosed with COVID-19 in the ambulatory setting (BLAZE-1, NCT04427501) is ongoing. A Phase 3 study of bamlanivimab for the prevention of COVID-19 in residents and staff at long-term care facilities (BLAZE-2, NCT04497987) is also ongoing. In addition, bamlanivimab is being tested in the National Institutes of Health-led ACTIV-2 study in ambulatory COVID-19 patients.

About BLAZE-1

BLAZE-1) is a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled Phase 2/3 study designed to assess the efficacy and safety of bamlanivimab alone or together with etesevimab for the treatment of symptomatic COVID-19 in the outpatient setting. To be eligible, patients were required to have mild or moderate symptoms of COVID-19 as well as a positive SARS-CoV-2 test based on a sample collected no more than three days prior to drug infusion.

In the Phase 2 portion of BLAZE-1, cohorts of mild to moderate, recently diagnosed COVID-19 patients, were randomized to one of three doses of bamlanivimaband The Journal of the American Medical Association.

In the Phase 3 portion of BLAZE-1, the combination therapy arms enrolled mild to moderate, recently diagnosed COVID-19 patients who are at high risk for progressing to severe COVID-19 and/or hospitalization, studying etesevimab 2800 mg plus bamlanivimab 2800 mg versus placebo. The primary outcome measure for the Phase 3 portion of the BLAZE-1 trial was the percentage of participants who experience COVID-related hospitalizations or death from any cause by day 29. The key secondary endpoints were change from baseline to day 7 in SARS-CoV-2 viral load, persistently high SARS-CoV-2 viral load on day 7, time to sustained symptom resolution, and COVID-related hospitalization, ER visit or death from any cause from baseline by day 29. Additional endpoints include change from baseline in viral load at other time points, symptom improvement, symptom resolution, as well as safety.

The study is ongoing with additional treatment arms. Across all treatment arms, the trial will enroll up to 3,300 participants.

About BLAZE-4

BLAZE-4) is a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial designed to assess the efficacy and safety of bamlanivimab alone, and bamlanivimab and etesevimab together, at various doses, versus placebo for the treatment of symptomatic COVID-19 in the outpatient setting. Across all treatment arms, the trial will enroll an estimated 1,000 participants in the United States and Puerto Rico.

The primary outcome measure is percentage of participants who have a viral load greater than 5.27 at day 7. Additional endpoints include change from baseline to Day 7 in SARS-CoV-2 viral load, percentage of participants who experience COVID-related hospitalization, ER visit or death from baseline through Day 29, as well as safety.

About Junshi Biosciences

Founded in December 2012, Junshi Biosciences (HK: 1877; SH: 688180) is an innovation-driven biopharmaceutical company dedicated to the discovery, development and commercialization of innovative therapeutics. The company has established a diversified R & D pipeline comprising 27 innovative drug candidates and 2 biosimilars, with five therapeutic focus areas covering cancer, autoimmune, metabolic, neurological, and infectious diseases. Junshi Biosciences was the first Chinese pharmaceutical company that obtained marketing approval for anti-PD-1 monoclonal antibody in China. Its first-in-human anti-BTLA antibody for solid tumors was the first in the world to be approved for clinical trials by the FDA and NMPA and its anti-PCSK9 monoclonal antibody was the first in China to be approved for clinical trials by the NMPA. In early 2020, Junshi Biosciences joined forces with the Institute of Microbiology Chinese Academy of Science and Eli Lilly to co-develop JS016, China's first neutralizing fully human monoclonal antibody against SARS-CoV-2, which has entered clinical trials and is now a part of our continuous innovation for disease control and prevention of the global pandemic. Junshi Biosciences has over 2,000 employees in the United States (San Francisco and Maryland) and China (Shanghai, Suzhou, Beijing and Guangzhou). For more information, please visit: http://junshipharma.com.

About Eli Lilly and Company

Lilly is a global healthcare leader that unites caring with discovery to create medicines that make life better for people around the world. We were founded more than a century ago by a man committed to creating high-quality medicines that meet real needs, and today we remain true to that mission in all our work. Across the globe, Lilly employees work to discover and bring life-changing medicines to those who need them, improve the understanding and management of disease, and give back to communities through philanthropy and volunteerism. To learn more about Lilly, please visit us at? www.lilly.com ?and? www.lilly.com/news .?P-LLY

Contact Information



IR Team:

Junshi Biosciences

info@junshipharma.com

+ 86 021-2250 0300

Solebury Trout

Bob Ai

bai@soleburytrout.com

+ 1 646-389-6658

PR Team:

Junshi Biosciences

Zhi Li

zhi_li@junshipharma.com

+ 86 021-6105 8800



Adarsh Gourav has made a splash in the film circuit with a scintillating performance in The White Tiger. He plays a low-caste teenage boy, hailing from a village, who frees himself from the clutches of obeisance. The Netflix release will be seen in 27 million households by the time it completes one month of release and the actor could not be happier about his role as gritty Balram Halwai.

"I feel very humbled and fortunate to be a part of this project. One never imagines for a film to be receiving such appreciation. When you are part of something, you just try to make the journey as amazing as possible and when that gets reciprocated in the form of love from the audience, you just feel gratitude. I am so thankful to the universe for making it happen," Gourav says reacting to the appreciation his performance in The White Tiger has been getting.

So how does a city boy transform himself to convincingly pull of the role of a villager? Adarsh says, "The first thing I did after I got cast was to go to a village in Jharkhand called Chalkari Basti with a friend. I stayed there for close to a couple of weeks. I wanted my experience to be very unbiased and pure, so I never revealed to the people there that I was an actor. Later, I went to Delhi and worked at a small food joint in the city. My job was to clean plates, keep the place tidy and run small errands. I also realised that this is hard labour to be doing on a daily basis and a tough life to live. All this really gave me perspective into how Balram would be."

Read: Smriti Chauhan on Designing 'The White Tiger' Costumes and Working with Priyanka Chopra

Adarsh also talks about working with his The White Tiger co-stars Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Rajkummar Rao and Mahesh Manjrekar. "I had the privilege to know them in person. To see the work ethics they bring to the set and to witness how passionate they are about films. Despite being around for such long years, there is no complacency in them. They all are dedicated to their craft and are there to make a movie great. Whether its their ability to improvise or to do research for their characters, they give everything."

The White Tiger is directed by Ramin Bahrani and deals with class divide in Indian society.
Court Correspondent

A 41-year-old Harare man yesterday appeared in court after being found in possession of a piece of rail channel iron worth US$14 400, belonging to the National Railways of Zimbabwe.

He kept the channel iron at his factory shop.

Maxwell Dzawanda of Zone 5 Hopely Farm appeared before Harare Provincial Magistrate Mrs Vongai Muchuchuti Guwuwriro on charges of contravening the National Railways Act.

He was remanded in custody to today for bail application.

The court heard that on February 6 police detectives received information to the effect that Dzawanda was in possession of National Railways of Zimbabwe property at his place of residence.

It is alleged that the detectives teamed up with an NRZ loss control official and proceeded to Dzawanda's place of residence and found him opening his carpentry shop. The court heard that the detectives informed Dzawanda of the purpose of their visit.

It is the State's case that Dzawanda showed the detectives the piece of rail, which was positively identified by its officials from the loss control department.

It is alleged that the rail was placed on three boulders under the carpentry shop verandah and was inscribed Dzawanda's cellphone number.
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A young woman who sued a skydiving company after her spine was fractured in a tandem jump has failed to extract a cent from the company.

Hayley Marks launched legal action in the Supreme Court of Victoria against skydive company Skydive Australia after she was injured during a jump in 2018 just outside of Melbourne.

Her case was dismissed last week after Justice Melinda Richards ruled Ms Marks knew what she was getting into when she agreed to jump out of a perfectly good aircraft.

Hayley Marks launched legal action in the Supreme Court of Victoria against Lilydale skydive company Skydive Australia

Hayley Marks sustained horrific back injuries after a skydive went wrong

Hayley Marks claimed her life had been changed forever due to the injury she suffered in a skydiving accident

'I find that Ms Marks was injured as a result of the materialisation of an "inherent risk" associated with skydiving, that could not be avoided by the exercise of reasonable care,' she said.

Ms Marks - a medical researcher - had purchased the skydive over the picturesque Yarra Valley - north east of Melbourne - as a surprise 30th birthday present for her boyfriend Dane Cummins.

The pair were were clipped on to the front of their respective tandem instructors after signing a waiver and undergoing routine training.

The pair had never jumped before diving out of the aircraft 13,000 feet above the Lilydale airfield.

The birthday boy completed his jump without a hitch.

But Ms Marks was not so lucky.

Moments after Mr Cummins landed, a freak wind gust saw Ms Marks and her instructor slam into the ground.

Ms Marks fractured her spine at L2, which required an L1-L3 fusion and her L2 removed.

The court heard Ms Marks now lived in constant pain and had been unable to return to her job full-time.

Hayley Marks had gifted her boyfriend Dane Cummins (right) with the skydive for his 30th birthday

Hayley Marks had been an active jetsetter before the accident

Skydive Australia was found to have done it all could to avoid the accident

She has also become anxious and depressed.

Skydive Australia Waiver What skydivers sign before jumping out of a perfectly good aircraft: Your participation in the recreational activities supplied by the Providers and the APF is inherently dangerous and may involve risk. There are risks specifically associated with participation in the recreational activities and accidents can and often do happen which may result in personal injury, death or property damage. Prior to undertaking any such recreational activity, you should ensure you are aware of all of the risks involved, including those risks associated with any health condition you may have. By accepting this form, you acknowledge, agree, and understand that participation in the recreational services provided by the Providers and APF may involve risk. You agree and undertake any such risk voluntarily and at your own risk. You acknowledge that the assumption of risk and warning above constitutes a risk warning in accordance with relevant legislation. Advertisement

Ms Marks launched a civil suit against the skydive company claiming damages for her injuries, breach of contract and for breaches of guarantees in Australian Consumer Law.

She had argued that her injuries were caused by a lack of care and skill on the part of her instructor who she made the jump with.

Skydive Australia, which boasts 12 premium drop zones Australia wide, took Ms Marks on, claiming she knew the risks before agreeing to make the jump.

The company denied any fault, and contended that the heavy landing was due to an unfortunate, random event in the form of a short-lived, localised downdraft.

The Supreme Court trial saw expert witnesses ranging from meteorologists to skydiving experts take the witness box.

The incident was also captured on video.

By the time the matter went to trial in November last year, Ms Marks' instructor had carried out 3000 jumps and was working in Queenstown in New Zealand.

He recalled that the wind conditions on the day were pretty consistent, and that the jump with Ms Marks was just a regular jump until the last 10 seconds.

He opened the canopy at about 4,500 feet, upwind of the landing area.

He then described executing a series of left hand turns as they approached the landing area, until they were just past the spot where he was trying to land.

At about 200 feet, the instructor said he knew they were in trouble.

Hayley Marks sued Skydive Australia after a horrific accident. She had been an excellent student and had done everything right. The Supreme Court found accidents happen

Hayley Marks suffers life-long back pain after a horrific skydiving accident

Hayley Marks had bought the skydive for her boyfriend as a surprise gift

He told Ms Marks to lift her legs up and started to flare his parachute at about 30 feet from the ground.

He pushed the toggles right down, as far as he could, but unusually this did not slow their acceleration towards the ground.

They came straight down and hit the ground hard.

Ms Marks recalled just falling before the parachute opened.

'We slammed into the ground rather than landed on the ground,' she told the court.

Her legal team had argued the instructor had failed to make proper corrections and align the parachute into the direction of wind.

But Justice Richards concluded the experienced jumper had done all he could to safely land the jump.

'He performed the landing with due care and skill, aligning the parachute into the wind on his final approach, and braking early to slow the parachutes unusually fast descent,' Justice Richards ruled.

COVID's impact on cancer diagnoses will be devastating, but for pancreatic cancer patients there is a drug that could help

HALIFAX, NS, Feb. 10, 2021 /CNW/ - The anticipated impact of delayed cancer diagnoses as a result of the COVID 19 pandemic will be devastating. But for pancreatic cancer patients, 50% of whom die within 4 months of diagnosis, the clock is ticking even more loudly. However, if Canadian governments will come back to the negotiating table, there is a medication that offers some hope.

Onivyde (Irinotecan Liposome) was approved by Health Canada for the treatment of metastatic pancreatic cancer. The drug has been shown to extend patients' overall survival by 45% while maintaining their quality of life. But negotiations with the pan-Canadian Pharmaceutical Alliance (pCPA) ended without resolution in June 2019, meaning Onivyde is sitting on a shelf while patients lose precious time with their loved ones.

Dr. Winson Y. Cheung medical oncologist and professor with the Departments of Medicine and Oncology at the University of Calgary explained that "After many years of clinical trials, liposomal irinotecan or Onivyde has emerged as the only drug that demonstrates a survival advantage in the second line treatment of patients with advanced pancreatic cancer following gemcitabine-based chemotherapy." Cheung, also the Director of Health Services Research at Cancer Control Alberta expresses concern that "Onivyde is available in other countries, but not in Canada. This means a number of Canadian patients who would potentially benefit from Onivyde are not able to access it right now. Advanced pancreatic cancer continues to be an aggressive disease with uniformly poor outcomes, so we must do our utmost to ensure that patients are given the option to pursue all effective therapies."

Onivyde is the only second line therapy available for the treatment of pancreatic cancer. With the anticipated increase in late stage diagnoses as a result of COVID 19, gaining access to this therapy is even more critical.

"I am a Stage 4 Pancreatic Cancer patient with a 3% chance of surviving three more years." Said Alexandra Robis. "I am pleading with the government to provide me and other patients like me with this critical treatment option. I lost my mother to pancreatic cancer and I will not easily surrender to this insidious disease. Few advancements have been made in the last 40 years and I'm running out of options. Help me live - I want to live !"

We are calling on all Canadian governments to come back to the pCPA negotiating table now and make Onivyde available to those who need it. Patients deserve to have access to the best treatment options so they can survive as long as possible and enjoy more time with their loved ones.

Craig's Cause Pancreatic Cancer Society

Craig's Cause Pancreatic Cancer Society is a national charity dedicated to both increasing survival and improving the quality of life for every Canadian diagnosed with pancreatic cancer through awareness raising, education, support and research.

SOURCE Craig''s Cause Pancreatic Cancer Society

UNOOSA and ESA space debris infographics and podcasts



10 February 2021

What is this series about?

Space debris is an issue of global concern that threatens our continued use of near-Earth space for the benefit of humankind. To raise awareness about this growing problem, ESA and the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) have created a series of nine infographics and podcasts that tell the story of space debris, explain the risks and illustrate the solutions available to ensure future space exploration remains sustainable. Scroll down to see the infographics and listen to the podcasts.

A limited natural resource

Space may seem vast, but the orbits around Earth in which satellites reside are a limited natural resource. Accidental collisions, explosions and even the intentional destruction of satellites have created millions of debris fragments, which, orbiting at high speed, can damage or destroy any functioning spacecraft that crosses their path.

As satellite technology becomes ever more relied upon, it gets increasingly important to protect these unique orbital regions that are essential for humanity to, for example, gather data for weather forecasting and to better understand extreme weather and our changing climate, as well as for internet access, communication and location services.

A concern to all nations

Unfortunately, the amount of space debris in orbit is increasing at an exponential rate. As a growing number of countries and actors begin space activities - a hugely positive development in general - and as satellite operations become more complex and the number of objects being launched, including in large constellations, rapidly increases, so too do the challenges posed to our space environment.

In 2019, ESA's Space Safety programme was adopted as a key pillar in the Agency's activities. The programme, an expansion of the former Space Situational Awareness programme, includes ESA's Space Debris and Clean Space Offices, which are working to better understand the debris environment, prevent the creation of more debris, reduce the amount in orbit and lessen the impact of space activities on Earth.

In 2018, the United Nations General Assembly expressed its worry about the fragility of the space environment and the impact of space debris, which is an issue of concern to all nations. In 2019, the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS), of which UNOOSA is Secretariat, adopted the Guidelines for the Long-Term Sustainability of Outer Space Activities (LTS Guidelines), which provide guidance to help ensure the safe and sustainable use of space. The LTS Guidelines were subsequently welcomed with appreciation by the United Nations General Assembly, and a new working group will continue multilateral discussions on the topic.

Raising awareness

This new series of infographics jointly produced by UNOOSA and ESA include attractive, easy to understand illustrations, facts and figures so that everyone, with or without any previous knowledge of spaceflight, can understand space debris and the challenge it poses. They cover topics such as how debris is created, how to avoid collisions, the risk to humans in space from debris and on Earth from re-entries, as well as technologies for safe debris mitigation and removal.

Each of the nine infographics is accompanied by a podcast with audio commentary from UNOOSA and ESA experts, who help navigate and understand the material.

Infographics and podcasts will be released here, once a week, over a period of nine weeks, starting on 10 February 2021, as well as via @UNOOSA and @ESA social media accounts.

"A new era of space has begun, in which large constellations of thousands of satellites are being launched to the skies," said ESA Director Jan Worner. "What this 'New Space' makes possible - global internet access, telecommunications - it also threatens, as a rapid increase in space traffic may dramatically increase the chance of collisions. Innovative technologies, responsible behaviour and importantly international cooperation are fundamental to ensuring our future in space is sustainable."

UNOOSA Director Simonetta Di Pippo said: " Space debris poses a clear risk for the long-term sustainability of outer space activities. Space economy calls for a safe, secure and sustainable space environment. UNOOSA welcomes working with ESA to disseminate clear, accessible public information on space debris that will increase awareness of the challenges they pose and contribute to strengthening international cooperation on mitigation measures."

Infographic 1: satellites versus debris

Space debris is a topic of global concern. While space has brought huge benefits to individuals and societies across the globe, the rapid increase of launched objects and increased traffic in our space highways means we are creating ever-more debris and threatening the very technologies we have come to rely on. Acknowledging the significance of this problem, UNOOSA and ESA have come together to raise awareness with a series of nine infographics that tell the space debris story so far and illustrate some of the solutions available for us to achieve a sustainable use of space.

Satellites in orbit share near-Earth space with millions of fast-moving and dangerous debris objects. From tiny fragments millimetres in size to entire satellites no longer working, no longer controlled, roaming the space highways, each debris piece travels many kilometres per second. Any impact with one of these objects threatens to at least impair the functioning of a working spacecraft, or at worst destroy it altogether, creating ever more debris. In this infographic from ESA and the UN, find out about the scale of the debris problem: how much of it is up there, what scales are we talking about, and what are our satellites are up against? Find out more in Episode one of the corresponding ESA & UN podcast below, "Satellites vs. debris".

Listen to the podcast here: https://soundcloud.com/esa/satellites-vs-debris

Infographic 2: falling to Earth takes a long time





Our planet's atmosphere reduces the energy of satellites in orbit (on Earth, this would be like reducing their speed, but in space, it's complex!). This gradually then brings them back down to Earth. This process can be relatively fast for satellites flying at lower altitudes, taking less than 25 years, but for satellites launched into orbits tens of thousands of km away, it can be thousands of years before they return, if the atmosphere is even able to impact them at all. Had the dinosaurs launched a satellite into the furthest geostationary orbit, it would still be up there today. This means that as we launch satellites to space we must consider how they will be removed at the end of their lives, or else the skies will be filled with old, defunct spacecraft at risk of collision, explosion, and the near-certain creation of vast amounts of space debris. In this infographic from ESA and the UN, find out how long it would take satellites at different altitudes to naturally fall back to Earth, and what must be done responsibly dispose of them at the end of their lives. Find out more in Episode two of the corresponding ESA & UN podcast below, "Falling to Earth takes a long time".

Listen to the podcast here: https://soundcloud.com/esa/falling-to-earth-takes-a-long-time

Infographic 3: the cost of avoiding collisions

Space might seem an empty, vast expanse, but satellites in Earth's orbit face the constant risk of collision - with other satellites, dead or alive, or with fragments of debris. It is now routine for operators of spacecraft in busy highways to divert their mission out of harms way. In fact at ESA, each mission flown performs on average two 'collision avoidance manoeuvres' per year. These manoeuvres are costly. Hours are spent on the ground monitoring the skies, calculating the risk and planning manoeuvres, not to mention the extra fuel spent and missed science and data collected while instruments are turned off. Find out more in the podcast below.

Listen to the podcast here: https://soundcloud.com/esa/avoiding-collision

Infographic 4: we are launching more than ever

Since the beginning of the space age, with the launch of Sputnik in 1957, we have launched thousands of rockets carrying more than ten thousand satellites into space. The last few years have seen a dramatic increase in these numbers, and over the last few decades there has been a change in the type of mission flown, with private companies (yellow) launching smaller satellites than those launched by non-commercial agencies (blue). This graph, created in a joint project between ESA and the UN, also shows the number of unregistered objects (red) has increased in recent years. It should be noted that these are objects not yet registered with the UN, and are expected to rise. Find out more about why this matters in the joint ESA-UN podcast that narrates this space debris infographic series.

Listen to the podcast here: https://soundcloud.com/esa/launching-more

Infographic 5: the role of reentries

What goes up, nearly always comes back down. When it comes to the objects we send to space, atmospheric reentries are actually a fundamental tool in minimising the creation of space debris, and ensuring a sustainable future in space. Objects in low-Earth orbit, affected by the 'drag' forces caused by Earth's atmosphere, gradually lower in altitude and then make a rapid and firey descent towards Earth. Small objects disintegrate as they reenter due to the immense friction and heat created, but parts of larger bodies can reach the ground, so should be controlled to land over uninhabited regions. Find out more about why this matters in the joint ESA-UNOOSA podcast that narrates this space debris infographic series below.

Listen to the podcast: https://soundcloud.com/esa/the-role-of-reentries

Infographic 6: the history of space debris
The Recall Newsom drumbeat is getting louder by the day. Leaders claim they are within 250,000 signatures of the 1.5 million valid signatures required by March 17 for a ballot measure asking whether California voters want to dismiss Californias governor.

Thus far, local county registrars have confirmed about 600,000 signatures at an 85% validation rate, which leaves substantial uncertainty on whether there will be the required number of valid signatures by the deadline. Still, this effort  the sixth during Gov. Gavin Newsoms two-year tenure  represents the most serious removal attempt to date. They may get there, but if they do, recall proponents will find a considerably different political environment than during the 2003 successful recall campaign to replace then-California Gov. Gray Davis. Nevertheless, the anti-Newsom movement is palpable and deserves recognition.

A comparison between the conditions facing Davis and Newsom might well shed some light on the current governors prospects.

Three issues converged in 2003 to facilitate voter rejection of Davis less than a year after his 2002 re-election. A massive $38 billion state budget deficit, a depressed economy, and an unforeseeable power crisis causing both blackouts and soaring electricity rates created a toxic environment that would have challenged any governor. Other than Davis concealing the totality of the budget deficit from the public, the three events were largely outside of Davis power.

Nevertheless, Davis had a substantial role in his undoing. His arrogant attitude toward the Legislature, considered an equal branch of state government, was a mainstay in their relationship. Declaring the job of the Legislature is to implement my (Davis) vision left Davis with few allies  allies he would need when the recall issue was placed before the voters. In addition, organized labor and like-minded allies found Davis more willing to discuss campaign contributions than policy questions, or at least in that order. These two otherwise intangible factors, along with an appealing alternative in the name of actor-turned-citizen politician Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger, left Davis to fight his battle largely alone. And he lost.

Fast forward a couple of decades to Gavin Newsom, where we find similarities and differences with the Davis era, after which I wrote Recall: Californias Political Earthquake. Like his predecessor, Newsom is haunted by a crisis not of his doing. Not only has COVID-19 claimed the lives of more than 40,000 Californians, it has also put Newsoms career in jeopardy by virtue of way he has responded to it. More times than not, Newsom has seemed a step behind rapidly moving events, unavoidable perhaps, but not a desirable place for a leader. His inconsistent management of the crisis and ever-changing public messages about COVID-19 have left the states residents bewildered in some cases and angered in others.

But more than his questionable COVID-19 management, Newsom has committed serious blunders. Dining with others at one of the states most expensive restaurants when residents were told to stay home was an unforced error. Accepting $3 million in federal funds during the pandemic to help his enterprises at a time when small businesses were shuttered for a lack of assistance was another sign of poor judgment. And allowing some local governments to ignore his edicts when the state needed strong stewardship revealed a leader with questionable conviction. To his detractors, its not so much that Newsom is arrogant or ruthless as much as he is out of touch and perhaps not up to the job.

There are a couple of significant differences. To begin with, the Davis recall had a major sponsor in the name of wealthy Republican Congressman Darrell Issa, who early on contributed $2 million to the Davis recall campaign; that money enabled a strong organization. And whereas many of Newsoms detractors represent fringe sectors such as anti-vaxxers, white supremacists and opponents of almost any government, Davis suffered from mainstream opponents  including some in his own political party.

Still, the Newsom recall effort is well under way, to which we must ask about Newsom: Does a lack of common sense rise to the level of incompetence? Does sloppy management serve as justification for dismissal from office? Those are the kinds of questions voters will need to consider when deliberating Newsoms question, should the recall election come to pass. Equally important, the voters will have to decide whether Newsoms actions are sufficiently worrisome to warrant his replacement by someone with less familiarity with Californias issues at a pivotal moment for the state.

His plunging status in the polls has made Newsom vulnerable to being recalled from office. Maybe he should be, maybe he shouldnt. However, one fact is clear: His poor judgment doesnt come close to the callous disregard and ruthless behavior exhibited by a predecessor who was recalled.

Larry N. Gerston is political science professor emeritus at San Jose State University. He wrote Recall: Californias Political Earthquake (with Terry Christensen), M.E. Sharpe, publisher 2004.
Kim Kardashian has donated bouquets of 'thank you' flowers to front line medical staff amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

The reality star, 40, reportedly gifted the flowers arranged by celebrity florist Jeff Leatham to hospital workers after using them on a photoshoot.

Kim had apparently used them for an upcoming project and decided to offer the token to a local hospital rather than throwing them away, according to TMZ.

'Thank you': Kim Kardashian has donated bouquets of 'thank you' flowers to front line medical staff amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic

The publication reported that the flowers were delivered to the USC Verdugo Hills Hospital along with a thank you note to medical staff.

The hospital's Instagram account later shared pictures of the doctors and nurses posing with the generously donated bouquets, holding a thank you note to Kim.

The bouquets appeared to have been displayed in the hospital alongside a note which read: 'Flowers generously donated by Kim Kardashian West and Jeff Leatham.'

Gesture: The reality star, 40, reportedly gifted the flowers arranged by celebrity florist Jeff Leatham to hospital workers after using them on a photoshoot (stock image, not the photoshoot mentioned)

Generous: The bouquets appeared to have been displayed in the hospital alongside a note which read: 'Flowers generously donated by Kim Kardashian West and Jeff Leatham'

Alongside the images, the hospital account wrote: 'Lovely bouquets of flowers donated to frontline healthcare workers by Kim Kardashian West. #keckmedicineofusc #kimkardashian #jeffleatham @kimkardashian #rosesmakemehappy @keith_hobbs7.'

The stunning pale pink roses were given out by the hospital's CEO Keith Hobbs to healthcare staff as an early Valentine's Day gift.

One the the images shared to social media showed the mask-covered staff lined up around two boxes of flowers, each holding a letter which spelt out 'thank you'.

Gifted: The stunning pale pink roses were given out by the hospital's CEO Keith Hobbs to healthcare staff as an early Valentine's Day gift

Thoughtful: One the the images shared to social media showed the mask-covered staff lined up around two boxes of flowers, each holding a letter which spelt out 'thank you'

Kim is currently holidaying in Turks and Caicos with her children amid a swirl of reports that she is on the verge of divorcing Kanye West whom she married in 2014.

Kanye is Kim's third husband and the father of all four of her children - North, seven, Saint, five, Chicago, three, and Psalm, one.

Her latest vacation comes just three months after she landed on a spot of controversy for her extravagant 40th birthday trip.

Having a ball: Kim is currently holidaying in Turks and Caicos with her children amid a swirl of reports that she is on the verge of divorcing Kanye West whom she married in 2014

Kim got 40 of her loved ones together and flew them out to Marlon Brando's former private island in Tahiti for a luxurious six-day holiday.

The trip was slammed on social media for being insensitive amid the coronavirus pandemic and the economic fallout of the lockdowns.

Recently a Page Six insider alleged that the upcoming last season of Keeping Up With The Kardashians will show the 'Kimye' marriage on the rocks.

Living it up: Kanye is Kim's third husband and the father of all four of her children - North, seven, Saint, five, Chicago, three, and Psalm, one

The source claimed that 'the Kardashians intend to go out with a bang. Theyve filmed Kim discussing her marriage problems. But everybody involved is on a nondisclosure agreement, because the finale wont screen until later in 2021.'

A new trailer for the final season dropped recently and although Kanye was never mentioned Kim was seen getting tearful about the end of the show.

Keeping Up With The Kardashians is coming to a close this year after a grand total of 20 seasons, making global superstars of the whole family including Kendall.

Once the show ends the Kardashian-Jenner women will hop over to a currently untitled project that will stream on Hulu in America and Star abroad.
The new subsidiary will look to acquire or develop innovative products and services within the healthcare sector

Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - February 10, 2021) - Leveljump Healthcare Corp. (TSXV: JUMP) ("Leveljump" or the "Company"), a Canadian leader in B2B telehealth solutions, is pleased to announce it has formed a new subsidiary, Leveljump Technologies Inc. ("LJT").

Leveljump Technologies Inc. has a mandate to primarily focus on new products and services that may have the potential to disrupt various segments of the healthcare industry. LJT will be considering direct investments in companies developing new healthcare solutions, and/or the acquisition of technology assets. In addition, the subsidiary will also develop new in-house technology offerings that can create a significant impact on the healthcare marketplace.

Areas of initial interest for LJT will include medical imaging and diagnostic imaging, eye care products and services, as well as telehealth innovations for various aspects of patient care.

"We are very excited to explore more opportunities in the healthcare sector with the establishment of this new subsidiary, which will complement the teleradiology services that we already provide," said Mitchell Geisler, CEO of Leveljump Healthcare Corp. "LJT will offer new innovations in healthcare procedures and products that can provide better patient care and reduce the cost pressure on the overstressed Canadian healthcare system."

About Leveljump Healthcare

Leveljump Healthcare Corp., (TSXV: JUMP) is building a national medical diagnostic imaging company and brand, primarily by providing teleradiology (remote radiology) services to its client hospitals and imaging centers. Additionally, JUMP plans to expand through the acquisition of independent healthcare facilities focused on diagnostic imaging as well as acquiring new disruptive imaging technologies.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF

LEVELJUMP HEALTHCARE CORP.

Mitchell Geisler, Chief Executive Officer

info@leveljumphealthcare.com

(877) 722-6965

CAUTIONARY STATEMENT REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING INFORMATION

This news release contains "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities laws relating to the Company's business plans and the outlook of the Company's industry. Although the Company believes, in light of the experience of its officers and directors, current conditions and expected future developments and other factors that have been considered appropriate, that the expectations reflected in this forward-looking information are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on them because the Company can give no assurance that they will prove to be correct. Actual results and developments may differ materially from those contemplated by these statements. The statements in this press release are made as of the date of this release and the Company assumes no responsibility to update them or revise them to reflect new events or circumstances other than as required by applicable securities laws. The Company undertakes no obligation to comment on analyses, expectations or statements made by third-parties in respect of the Company, Canadian Teleradiology Services, Inc., their securities, or their respective financial or operating results (as applicable).

Neither the 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.

NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO UNITED STATES NEWSWIRE SERVICES OR FOR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/74088
Despite campaign promises to invest in our nations infrastructure, create good-paying union jobs, and build our economy back better, President Bidens track record from his first week in office is coming up short.

On Day One, Biden canceled the Keystone XL pipeline. Then he signed an executive order halting oil and gas leasing on public lands. Now, Keep it in the Ground activists are calling on him to shut down the Dakota Access Pipeline, which has been safely operating for more than three and a half years  delivering up to 570,000 barrels of North Dakota crude oil per day to U.S. markets.

Unfortunately, it seems the president is paying homage to the vocal far-left rather than the millions of blue-collar union workers and working class families who put him in the White House.

Many Americans agree that climate change should be among the top priorities for the Biden administration. According to an October Pew Research Center survey, 44% of voters ranked climate change as a very important issue. While this percentage has grown in recent decades, it still lags significantly behind the leading issue: the economy, which 79% of voters recognized as very important in the 2020 election. This was followed by health care (68%) and the coronavirus outbreak (62%).

Bidens decision to block the $9 billion Keystone XL pipeline  which was estimated to support 11,000 American jobs in 2021, generate $1.6 billion in gross wages, serve as a lifeline to labor unions in the wake of the pandemic, and ultimately usher in $140 million in annual property tax revenues for state and local governments  certainly does not seem to align with his promises of creating jobs and investing in infrastructure.

Or consider the presidents decision to ban oil and gas leasing on federal lands and waters.

Reports from the American Petroleum Institute forecast detrimental effects on the economy, with potential losses of nearly 1 million jobs by 2022, more than $9 billion in government revenue at risk, and U.S. households spending a cumulative $19 billion more on energy by 2030.

High energy-producing states with large areas of federal land, such as New Mexico and Wyoming, stand to lose not only thousands of industry jobs and access to affordable energy, but also billions in state revenue that could hurt public services, schools, infrastructure and health care. In Wyoming, where more than half of the states oil and more than 90 percent of its natural gas is retrieved from federal land, the oil and gas industry paid $1.67 billion to state and local governments. In New Mexico, that number is even larger, with the industry contributing $3.1 billion, about 40 percent of the states revenue of which $1.4 billion is earmarked for education funding.

Nationally, more than 12 percent of U.S. natural gas production and nearly a quarter of U.S. oil production is sourced from public lands and waters, and without it, our nation will need additional foreign oil and gas. And since the president said no to Keystone XL, it wont be coming from Canada. In fact, it will strain the global market, raising costs on consumers and adding to the coffers of petro-authoritarian nations that would seek to do democracy harm.

Preventing the construction of Keystone XL or banning drilling on public lands wont reduce the importance of fossil fuels in the American economy. Beyond the economic ramifications, these misguided, anti-energy policies revive American dependence on foreign energy, and cut off access to reliable, affordable, American-produced energy to our allies and trade partners around the globe  jeopardizing our strategic advantage as a global hegemon and instead allowing foreign states to grow their influence.

Good environmental policy and policies that promote American economic growth are not mutually exclusive. For example, TC Energy, Keystone XLs developer, committed to use only renewable energy to operate the pipeline system, and eliminate all greenhouse-gas emissions from operations by 2030. This is a positive example of addressing environmental concerns while recognizing the still-critical role of crude oil and ensuring reliable access to the United States.

More broadly, an all of the above strategy that welcomes investment in renewable energy sources but recognizes the importance of the cornerstones of American energy  oil and natural gas  is key to fueling the our nations economy, bolstering our energy security and national security, and achieving our shared future economic and environmental goals.

As the United States continues its COVID-19 recovery, it is more important now than ever to set aside politics and come together to focus on sound policies that put our nation on the path to success.

Craig Stevens is a former senior adviser in the Energy Department and is the spokesman for Grow Americas Infrastructure Now. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.
In arriving at Mars, China far surpassed its last attempt at an interplanetary mission, which failed nearly 10 years ago, although through no fault of the countrys own. That Mars-bound spacecraft, Yinghuo-1, burned up in Earths atmosphere when the Russian rocket it was traveling on failed in flight.

But while the arrival at Mars was a new milestone for Chinas space program, a bigger challenge for the Tianwen-1 mission is a few months away.

When will China land on Mars?

The orbiter carries a lander and a rover which will make the difficult transit to the surface. China says it will attempt to land on Mars as early as May, but it has not specified a date.

Its destination is Utopia Planitia, a large basin in the northern hemisphere that most likely was once impacted by a meteor, and which was visited by NASAs Viking 2 lander in 1976. One goal of the Tianwen-1 mission is to better understand the distribution of ice in this region, which future human colonists on Mars could use to sustain themselves.

Landing on the red planet is perilous. Spacecraft descend at a high speed and the thin atmosphere does little to help slow the trip to the ground. Air friction still generates extreme heat that must be absorbed or dissipated. A number of Soviet, NASA and European missions have crashed. Only NASA has landed intact more than once.

The Chinese spacecraft will spend months orbiting Mars to check systems and pick a landing spot that will not be too treacherous.

Should it land in one piece, the rover will need a name. After nominations from people in China, a panel of experts selected 10 semifinalists. Among them, according to state media, are Hongyi, from a Chinese word for ambition and persistence; Qilin, a hoofed creature of Chinese legend; and Nezha, a young deity who is considered a patron of rebellious youth.
Low-income mothers feminize their children in the womb by adjusting their hormones, whereas high-income mothers masculinize their children, a major study based on finger length, led by a Swansea University expert, has found.

The phenomenon is an unconscious evolutionary response aimed at boosting their offspring's chances of successful reproduction.

It helps, in part, explain associations between low income, low levels of testosterone before birth, and major causes of mortality such as cardiovascular disease.

The study was based on the relationship between the length of a person's index and ring fingers, known as the 2D:4D ratio. A longer ring finger is a marker of higher levels of testosterone, whereas a longer index finger is a marker of higher levels of estrogen. Generally, men have longer ring fingers, whereas women have longer index fingers.

The 2D:4D ratio is a widely-debated measure that has been the subject of over 1000 studies, but what is significant about the new report is that the team examined the ratio in relation to parental income.

Led by Professor John Manning of Swansea University, with colleagues in Austria and Jamaica, the team tested a hypothesis about evolutionary influences on the mother and her children. This suggests that for higher-income mothers, sons have higher reproductive success compared to daughters. For lower-income mothers, in contrast, daughters will be more reproductively successful. Known as the Trivers-Willard hypothesis, its senior author, Professor Robert Trivers, was also involved in this new study.

The team used data from over 250,000 people from around 200 countries, who were taking part in an online BBC survey. Participants were asked to measure their index and ring fingers and given instructions on how to do this accurately. They were also asked to indicate their parents' income level.

The results showed:

Children of parents of above-average income had a low 2D:4D ratio, with longer ring fingers, which indicates high testosterone and low estrogen before birth, hallmarks of a more masculinized fetus

Conversely, the children of parents of below-average income had a high 2D:4D ratio with longer index fingers, which indicates lower testosterone and higher estrogen before birth, markers of a more feminized fetus

These effects were present for both men and women

Professor John Manning of Swansea University's A-STEM research team in sport science, lead researcher on the study, said:

"Our results show that mothers with high income may secrete high levels of testosterone relative to estrogen early in pregnancy, thereby masculinizing their male and female children. In contrast, women with low income may secrete low levels of testosterone, which will feminize their male and female children.

This is an evolutionary response, which mothers will not be aware of, let alone able to control. It is geared towards giving their offspring the best chance of reproductive success.

For high-income mothers, the advantages of high testosterone for their sons are likely to outweigh its disadvantages for their daughters. For low-income mothers, the fitness gain from feminized daughters is likely to outweigh the fitness loss for feminized sons.

This pattern is consistent with the Trivers-Willard hypothesis."

Professor Manning explained how the findings could shed light on susceptibility to disease.

These patterns suggest important effects on public health which are linked to poverty.

Low testosterone and high estrogen in male fetuses may predispose those men, as adults, to diseases linked to poverty such as heart attacks, strokes, and high blood pressure. It is well known that poverty is closely associated with poorer health. What our research indicates is that this link can be replicated across generations". Professor John Manning, Swansea University
We are rarely given a glimpse inside the struggle sessions at the New York Times. Last week New York Times science reporter Donald McNeil exited the newspaper as a result of an incident that occurred outside the Times two years ago. The Times made up a rule after the fact to justify McNeils exit. Aaron Sibarium recounts the background in the Washington Free Beacon story New York Times Meltdown Plays Out in Private Facebook Group. Sibarium relates it as follows:

McNeils ouster came nearly two years after the incident that precipitated it. While chaperoning high school students on a pricey trip to Peru, the science reporter responded to a question from a student about whether one of her classmates should have been suspended for using the n-word. In the process, he uttered the offending syllables himself. An internal Times investigation found his judgment wanting but stopped short of firing him. Only after the Daily Beast published an account of the incident, thrusting it into the public realm for the first time, was McNeil pushed out. We do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent, Dean Baquet, the papers executive editor, told staff in an email. McNeils resignation on Fridayand Baquets post hoc explanation that intent doesnt matterrenewed the bitter debate among staff, with reporters warring with each other in public and private. A Times spokeswoman muddied the waters further on Sunday, telling the Free Beacon that racial epithets had no place in the newspaper. The paper printed the same epithet as recently as last week in a magazine profile of the Princeton classics professor Dan-el Padilla Peralta.

Sibariums story reports on the argument that has taken place in posts to a Facebook group for current and former Times staffers, where a tense debate is unfolding over McNeils exit. One camp argues that [McNeils] dismissal was justified and another asserts it set a troubling precedent, which the New York Times union should have done more to prevent. The application of a fabricated rule applied ex post facto reeks of Orwellian tyranny.

The invocation of labor solidarity sounds so retrograde in the face of the woke brigade: Times crossword columnist Deb Amlen accused [former Times labor reporter Steven] Greenhouse of an excessive focus on the perpetrator, arguing that he and others should shift their attention to the people McNeil had harmed.' What is a four-letter word beginning with j and ending with k for the Times crossword columnist?

In the course of his reporting Sibarium discovered that Times star Nikole Hannah-Jones had used the word that supposedly warranted McNeils termination, regardless of context. Sibarium sought comment from her via Twitter and was doxxed as a result, in violation of current (not ex post facto) Times policy. Sibarium tells this part of the story in Nikole Hannah-Jones Scrubs Social Media After Doxxing Free Beacon Reporter.

This entire story is saturated in the racial/racist orthodoxy to which the Times is now bound upon a wheel of fire, to borrow the phrase from King Lear. Beyond this obvious point, we can infer that Nikole Hannah-Jones is in effect running the Times as a law unto herself.

More to come.
ROCKFORD, MI - In a collaboration between the Rockford Chamber of Commerce and the City of Rockford, the idea for RORA - the Rockford Outdoor Refreshment Area was born.

We spent a few hour in the downtown district last week as part of our search for Michigans Best Outdoor Dining.

See all the photos in the gallery above by MLive photographer Hope Davison.

Even though RORA did not come out on top of our voting poll, we couldnt help but check it out.

Its not too often you find a community that allows alcoholic beverages in approved cups to be carried anywhere in the RORA district, which pretty much includes all of downtown.

Main St. is closed off to traffic where you will find three fire pits, picnic tables, fire tables and outdoor dining spaces called Dog Sheds at the iconic Corner Bar, known for their chili dogs.

The RORA district opened on Dec. 17 and plans to remain open until the end of March.

So far its been very successful, our downtown businesses have seen an increase in business compared to before we had the RORA and visitors seem to really enjoy it, said Kris Murphy, deputy clerk/communications coordinator for the City of Rockford.

Weve had a lot of positive feedback. We do ask that people observe social distancing and when they are unable to distance, wear a mask.

Learn more about the RORA district on the citys website at rockford.mi.us.

The RORA is open from noon-10 p.m., seven days a week. The fire pits are lit at 2 p.m. on weekdays and 11 a.m. on weekends.

Rockford Brewing Company, located along the White Pine Trail in Rockford, is pictured on Thursday, Feb. 4, 2021. (Hope Davison | MLive.com)Hope Davison

The restaurants participating:

1. The Corner Bar

2. Rockford Brewing Company

3. Rogue River Tavern

4. Uccellos Ristorante

5. Grill One Eleven

6. Marinades

7. Cinco de Mayo

8. Kayla Rae Cellars

9. Rockford Lanes.

We featured RORA in our recent story about outdoor dining on the White Pine Trail.

RELATED: 10 great Outdoor Dining spots along the White Pine Trail

The search for Michigans Best Outdoor Dining is sponsored in part by Warm Fitness.

Operation Shantyville picks a different local restaurant every week to support. They encourage people to bring whatever type of shelter they like to set up outside and order food and drinks. Damien Perez TALN MediaDamien Perez TALN Media Courtesy photo, used with permission

More Michigans Best Outdoor Dining Stories

Operation Shantyville is adventurous twist on outdoor dining, supporting Bay area restaurants

Play River Rocks, get farm-to-table cuisine at this SW Michigan outdoor dining spot

Traditional Irish food, tacos and great service at this Michigans Best Outdoor Dining spot

See all of the nominations for Michigans Best Outdoor Dining

How you can enjoy the cozy hygge lifestyle outdoors at this Grand Rapids spot

Kalamazoo brewery tucks heaters under tables to create outdoor Campground Patio

Igloos, shanties, huts and more: Where to dine outdoors in Michigan this winter

Follow our Michigans Best adventures on social media:

@mlivemibest on Twitter

@mlivemibest on Instagram

Facebook at MLiveMIBest.

Join in by using the hashtags #mibest and #outdoordining.

In addition:

Amy Sherman is on Twitter @amyonthetrail, as well as Facebook and Instagram @amyonthetrail.

John Gonzalez is on Twitter @michigangonzo, as well as Facebook and Instagram @MichiganGonzo.
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.
The government is set to unveil a multibillion pound package of funding for work to strip homes of unsafe cladding, it has been reported following concerns some leaseholders may be loaned the money needed to fix the issue.

The housing secretary, Robert Jenrick, will address the Commons on Wednesday amid increasing pressure from his own partys MPs over his departments response to remove potentially hazardous coverings from buildings in the wake of the Grenfell Tower fire.

Measures being considered include a 5bn fund on top of an already established 1.6bn grant scheme that leaseholders can apply for, according to reports.

However, it has been suggested direct funding may only be offered to towers more than 18 metres in height, while smaller buildings may have to rely on loans from the government instead.

The push to remove unsafe cladding was prompted by the deadly Grenfell fire three and a half years ago, a disaster fuelled by plastic-filled aluminium panels wrapped around the building. An inquiry into the blaze which killed 72 people in Kensington, west London, is currently ongoing.

However, the pace of the government's response has left homeowners across the country unable to sell their properties, while some have been saddled with bills of up to 160,000 to fix the issue.

The Association of Residential Managing Agent estimates some 650,000 people in the UK are living in flats with dangerous cladding.

Labour has called for a national taskforce to get a grip and said leaseholders should be protected from the cost of replacing dangerous cladding on homes.

Last week Tory politicians also aired their dissatisfaction with the government over its provisions for leaseholders, with Stevenage MP Stephen McPartland saying the government had been incompetent in its response ahead of a vote demanding action.

All 365 Conservative MPs abstained on the largely symbolic motion tabled by the Labour Party on the order of the whips, however several spoke out in the debate to argue homeowners should not have to shoulder the financial burden.

Among their concerns were reports companies that own buildings would be given government loans to remedy the issue and the cost would then be handed down to residents through service charges.

Recommended Pressure mounts on government to fix millions of potentially unsafe homes as Grenfell inquiry restarts

I will not accept loans to leaseholders, Mr McPartland added. If the government announces that, I will not accept it, I will vote against it. We cannot have leaseholders paying mortgages of 150,000 which is 90 per cent and then maybe having to pay a loan on top of 75,000.

It comes as the chief lawyer in the Grenfell Inquiry said three witnesses from a company that produced the towers cladding were refusing to give evidence.

Gwenaelle Derrendinger and Claude Wehrle, both French residents, along with Peter Froehlich, based in Germany, have all claimed they will risk prosecution in France if they speak to the inquiry.

The three were employed by Arconic, the manufacturer that sold the rain screen panels that were used on the tower block when it caught fire in 2017, killing 72 people.

Speaking at the start of Tuesdays session, Richard Millett QC said: Each of these witnesses has been given a final chance to decide whether or not to come to give evidence to the inquiry.

They still refuse to come to assist you, I regret to say.

Mr Millett said their refusal cites the so-called French Blocking Statute (FBS), which bans people from disclosing documents or information of an economic, commercial, industrial, financial or technical nature with a view to establishing evidence in foreign judicial or administrative proceedings.

However, reading from a note received by the inquiry in December, Mr Millett said the French authorities do not share the position that the stature would stand in the way of the three attending the inquiry.

Mr Millett went on: Since this inquiry is not a court, and cannot determine a persons civil or criminal liability, it appears to the inquiry to be very doubtful that the FBS has any application to any evidence given to the inquiry.

He added: The inquirys position is that the refusal of these witnesses to come and give evidence is unreasonable.

Additional reporting by agencies
The Alabama House of Representatives has passed a bill that would allow some nonviolent offenders in Alabama prisons to be considered for new, shorter sentences.

Rep. Jim Hill, R-Moody, the sponsor of the bill, said about 1,000 inmates could be eligible for new sentences if the bill passes. Hill is a retired circuit judge and was a member of the criminal justice study group that recommended the bill, along with others. Gov. Kay Ivey appointed the group to find ways to improve Alabamas overcrowded prison system.

The House passed the bill by a vote of 63-33. It moves to the Senate.

Alabama sentencing guidelines that took effect in October 2013 resulted in shorter sentences for many nonviolent offenders. Hills bill would let prisoners sentenced for nonviolent offenses before the guidelines to apply to have their sentences reduced.

The request would go to the trial court where the offender was sentenced. Hill said the judge who sentenced the offender, or the judges replacement if the judge is no longer working, would consider the underlying crime as well as the prisoners conduct during incarceration. The district attorney for the trial court would have a chance to object to the petition for a shorter sentence.

Hill said there are some inmates in Alabama prisons who received harsher sentences because their convictions came before the sentencing guidelines.
The United Nations main human rights body is set to consider a resolution on Friday, drafted by Britain and the European Union, that would condemn the military coup in Myanmar and demand urgent access to the country, a text seen by Reuters shows.

But China and Russia - members of the Human Rights Council with ties to Myanmar's military - raised concerns in a public meeting this week over "virtual voting" at the Geneva forum, required because of the pandemic.

Also Read | Inside the third front of the farm agitation

The UN Security Council last week called for the release of elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi and others detained by the military but stopped short of condemning the coup.

Protesters took to the streets of Myanmar for a fifth day on Wednesday, vowing to keep up demonstrations against last week's coup even after a woman was shot and critically wounded during clashes the previous day.

"It's all a matter of time until there is a big scale confrontation," a U.N. official, who declined to be identified, told Reuters.

Britain announced on Monday that it was calling for the special session of the rights council and would present a draft resolution with the EU.

Their draft - circulating among diplomats amid heavy lobbying - has formal support from 19 members, including Japan and South Korea, at the 47-member forum, it said.

The text condemns the ousting of the civilian government and calls for its restoration and the unconditional release of those "arbitrarily detained". It urges the military to refrain from using violence against peaceful protesters, while demanding it ensures freedom of expression and an open Internet.

Thomas Andrews, the U.N. investigator on human rights in Myanmar, should be granted urgent and "unrestricted" access, it says.

This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text.

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The transport secretary has raised the prospect of international travel being outlawed until all UK adults have been vaccinated.

Speaking on BBC Breakfast, Grant Shapps said travelling abroad would depend on everybody having their vaccinations in the UK  and potentially abroad.

He was speaking after the government revealed plans for many arrivals to the UK to go into hotel quarantine, with penalties of up to 10 years in prison for people who fail to disclose a visit to Portugal or other red-list countries within the past 10 days.

The presenter, Louise Minchin, asked Mr Shapps: Theres so much concern from many people, including of course the travel industry, about how you lift this  so what is the pathway, what needs to be the difference for this to change?

First of all, everybody having their vaccinations, the transport secretary said. The government expects the programme to be completed in the autumn.

Ms Minchin, asked: Until thats done, these restrictions wont be lifted?

Yes, Mr Shapps responded, before going on to talk about the prime ministers planned announcement on 22 February about easing some of the lockdown measures.

Well need to wait for other countries to catch up as well, in order to do that wider international unlock, he added.

The transport secretary also told BBC Breakfast that jail terms of up to 10 years for people who lied on their passenger locator form was appropriate.

I think the British public would expect pretty strong action, he said.

In a move that will anger the travel industry, Mr Shapps warned prospective holidaymakers against making any plans.

He told the BBCs Today programme: On the shrinking chance that theres anybody listening to this interview at this stage and thinking of booking a holiday under the current circumstances, bear in mind you cannot legally do that at the moment.

Until you know the result of a lockdown which we cant know until we have more data, more information, more information on vaccines as well, please dont go ahead and book holidays for something which at this stage it is illegal to actually go and do  whether its here or abroad.

Further down the line I simply dont know the answer to the question of where well be up to this summer. Its too early to be able to give you that information. Youd want to wait until thats clear before booking anything.

The best advice is: do nothing at this stage.

Earlier on Sky News, Mr Shapps claimed: Weve had [quarantine] in place since last spring.

In fact, the government ended quarantine in March 2020, and reintroduced it in June.

The transport secretary also said the number of hotel rooms had increased since the health secretary, Matt Hancock, said 4,600 had been contracted.

More than 5,000 hotel rooms were immediately available, said Mr Shapps.

South Africa: North West to rebuild following heavy rains

The North West provincial government is working with all spheres of government to repair damaged roads in flood stricken areas of Dr Ruth Segomotsi Mompati.

This follows heavy rainfall and floods.

Premier, Professor Tebogo Job Mokgoro, said information gathered following inspection and assessment of the damaged roads and other infrastructure in the Greater Taung Local Municipality, will be presented to National Government to consider declaring the area a State of Disaster.

Mokgoro visited the flood stricken areas of Matlapaneng, Mokgareng and Shaleng on Tuesday, in order to get first-hand information of the situation on the ground.

He said that despite the already dry provincial government purse, affected citizens and areas have to be assisted.

National, provincial and internal roads, including those which were under construction, have been affected. We will be meeting once more as [the] three spheres of government to secure the budget and restore damaged roads. Theres no doubt that funds are limited because most funds were directed towards tackling [the] COVID-19 pandemic. However, we will ensure that we rescue our people, Mokgoro said.

He added that the roads which were under construction will also be restored as soon as possible, through the Department of Public Works and Roads.

Through the available financial prescripts we will negotiate with constructors on site and readjust their scope of work to accommodate the restoration of the affected portions of the roads.

Meanwhile, a number of houses have been affected and those built with mud collapsed.

Social Development MEC Boitumelo Moiloa, who accompanied Mokgoro, visited several households in Madipelesa and Mmamutle.

Over 150 households need urgent assistance. We are still on the ground with our social workers doing assessment. Food parcels will be given to affected families. We are also providing blankets and mattresses to some through the assistance of different institutions, Moiloa said.

The Premier and his entourage also visited the bereaved family of Molebole in Mokgareng whose nine- year old child died after drowning in the flooded Mokgareng River.  SAnews.gov.za

This story has been published on: 2021-02-10. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
We want to see restorative justice practiced in the community, Ewing said after the meeting. We dont want to presume a student is going to do something wrong and require discipline. If a student is late, we mete out progressive discipline. We want to actually repair what harm is done.
1. Roads. The citys roads are a mess. Significant resources are needed to fix them.

2. Public safety. The crime rate is too high. Police pay and resources come first.

3. More city programs. The city must invest more in city programs and services.

4. Comprehensive plan. The city needs to focus on rebuilding and rebranding.

5. Cut city spending. City officials must get serious about trimming the budget.

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Thai Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha, who himself first seized power in a coup, said on Wednesday he had received a letter from Myanmar's new junta leader asking for help to support democracy.

Prayuth, who overthrew an elected prime minister in 2014 and stayed in office after a 2019 election his rivals said was badly flawed, told reporters in Bangkok that he had always supported democracy in the neighbouring country.

Min Aung Hlaing's army overthrew elected civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi on February 1 and detained her, alleging fraud in an election last year that her party won in a landslide. The electoral commission had dismissed the army's claims.

"We are supportive of the democratic process in Myanmar but what is most important today is to maintain good relations because it impacts the people, the economy, border trade, particularly now," Prayuth said.

"Thailand supports the democratic process. The rest is up to him to see how to proceed," he said.

Also read: Myanmar military tightens grip as protests enter Day 5

Since the coup, Myanmar has been convulsed by the biggest protests in more than a decade as Suu Kyi's supporters challenge the coup that halted a tentative decade-long transition to democracy.

Thailand witnessed its biggest protests in decades last year as Prayuth's opponents demanded that he step down, accusing him of engineering the last election to continue the domination of Thai politics by the army and monarchy. He denies any interference.

The Thai and Myanmar armies have had close working relationships in recent decades despite a distant history of enmity between the countries.
To ensure the public will find it beyond the world of jewelry stores and websites and quite literally stumble upon itAaron and her team have customized their acclaimed jewelry vending machine which is to be stationed it in the heart of New York City at Rockefeller Center starting Feb 15.

"I am a small business owner and the struggle over the last year was real and complex in the jewelry industry," says Marla Aaron, "That said, our pain doesn't even compare with how the restaurant industry has been challenged during the pandemic." "It has been heartbreaking as a New Yorker but the same thing is playing out with restaurants around the world. I wanted to do something immediate and am thrilled to support World Central Kitchen. Their work with Restaurants for the People keeps restaurants open feeding people who are hungryI can't think of a better thing to do."

During the COVID-19 pandemic, WCK has activated thousands of restaurants to feed marginalized and vulnerable communities as well as the medical professionals on the front lines. WCK's 'Restaurants for the People' program addresses both the humanitarian and economic relief fronts of the pandemic by providing fresh meals to communities in immediate need while also keeping small restaurants and food businesses open.

Every element of the Take a Seat project came together swiftly with immense support from Aaron's own jewelry community and beyond. Her silver supplier pledged to donate the silver for the first few hundred chairs. Marla Aaron retail partners throughout the country offered to sell the chairs in their stores because no community has been spared. They will make no money off the sales either.

The vending machine will take to the streets of New York City for the first time, residing for a limited-time outdoors at 1 Rockefeller Plaza, located at Rockefeller Center's South Plaza between 48th & 49th Streets and 5th & 6th Avenues, outside the Today Show Studio  a new thrill for the company who debuted it as an installation at the Brooklyn Museum in 2017 but always dreamt of bringing the "stumble upon" excitement of its fine jewelry vending machine to the streets of Manhattan. Yes the machine will dispense the actual products, gift-wrapped. No, it cannot be carried away or broken into.

Beyond the vending machine, The Marla Aaron "Take A Seat" chair is also available for purchase at www.marlaaaron.com and select retailers nationwide. at the Marla Aaron's by-appointment showroom (37 W. 47th Street). All retail proceeds to benefit World Central Kitchen.

ABOUT MARLA AARON

Marla Aaron Jewelry is a rebellious little company that makes jewelry and other objects in New York City. They are beautiful and people seem to love them. What began with one lock is now an entire collection designed to be worn in infinite ways and used as "jewel tools" with individuals' own collectionsto redefine the "precious" in jewelry with individuality. The collection is sold in select independent stores in the US and around the world and online.

FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT KRUPP GROUP:

Denise Martinez  [email protected]



Delia Carnero  [email protected]

SOURCE Marla Aaron

Related Links

http://www.marlaaaron.com


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Between 8 and 9 February the 14 Palestinian factions and organisations that signed the Palestinian Reconciliation Agreement nearly a decade ago convened in Cairo for the 14th round of the Palestinian National Dialogue. Held under the sponsorship of President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi, the goal was to draw up a working plan for Palestinian presidential and legislative elections.

The outcome of the meeting was an agreement on 15 main items, namely: commitment to the timetable set by the decree of legislative and presidential elections, with an emphasis on holding them in Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza without exception, and a pledge to respect and accept their results.

It also called for the formation of a court for election lawsuits in agreement with the judges in the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem. The Palestinian police in the West Bank and Gaza, in their uniforms, will secure the election headquarters and their presence will be in accordance with the law.

The meetings statement also called for the promotion of civil liberties and political freedoms, and the immediate release of all those detained on the grounds of factionalism or for expression of opinion.

It also called for ensuring the provision of complete freedom for political advertising, publishing, printing, holding political and electoral meetings and financing them in accordance with the provisions of the elections law.

The agreement also called for ensuring the impartiality of the security services in the West Bank and Gaza and that they do not interfere in the elections or the electoral propaganda of any party, in addition to a pledge to provide equal opportunities in the official media without discrimination for all electoral lists.

The agreement also stressed that all mechanisms must be used to ensure that elections are held in Jerusalem, including candidacy and elections.

Furthermore, a meeting of the Palestinian factions will be held in Cairo next March, in the presence of the presidency of the national council and the Central Elections Committee, to agree on the foundations and mechanisms through which the formation of the new national council will be completed with the aim of activating and developing the Palestine Liberation Organisation and strengthening the national resistance programme based on it being a national liberation movement.

There was a general sense of optimism that a new dynamic was in reach for Palestinian reunification. According to a source familiar with the Palestinian reconciliation process, Cairo has done everything possible to facilitate and encourage the dialogue and is committed to helping convert the outputs of this meeting into the committees and other executive mechanisms needed to translate the decisions taken into concrete action.

Other sources in Cairo, citing Palestinian reports, confirmed the generally positive atmosphere, especially during the face-to-face meeting between the Fatah and Hamas delegates held at the end of the first day. In addition to agreeing on the outlines of the closing statement of this round of the Cairo dialogue, participants discussed differences that need to be resolved in order to hold elections. Of central importance here are a number of judicial rulings by the Palestinian Supreme Constitutional Court, and the High Court of Justice which has jurisdiction over disputes related to elections.

Sources nonetheless caution against over-optimism, saying progress will be gradual. Many challenges lie ahead. The Palestinian factions have yet to take the necessary actions to transform the terms of the reconciliation agreement they signed in 2011 into realities on the ground, a delay that has worked to entrench and institutionalise the Palestinian schism, pitting the West Bank, governed by the Palestinian Authority (PA), against Gaza, ruled by Hamas. This has complicated fence-mending efforts, difficulties compounded by alliances and conflicts between regional actors and axes. Cairo is perhaps the exception to the rule in that among regional actors it has maintained good working relations with all concerned parties, including close relations with the PA and a practical and strategic relationship with Hamas.

As the sponsor of the dialogue Egypt must possess all the ingredients necessary to generate an atmosphere in which these talks can prove fruitful, said Major General Mohamed Ibrahim, assistant director of the Egyptian Centre for Strategic Studies and one of the architects of the 2011 reconciliation agreement.

He believes Egypt possesses five main qualities in this regard. First, it has close relations with the PA under President Mahmoud Abbas, aka Abu Mazen, as well as with Palestinian factions and organisations in Palestine and abroad. It keeps an equal distance from them, and is committed solely to the welfare of the Palestinian people.

Second, Egypt has never changed its position that the Palestinian question can only be resolved based on a two-state solution, an independent and sovereign Palestine within the pre-June 1967 borders with its capital in East Jerusalem, coexisting side-by-side with Israel in peace and security.

Third, Egypt has a unique experience of the Palestinian question in its various phases of development. Ibrahim stresses that there is no better testimony to this than the fact that the main document proposing a solution to the Palestinian rift was prepared and launched in Cairo on 4 May, after three years of difficult yet persistent mediation.

Fourth, the Egyptian working group that oversees the Palestinian reconciliation process consists of professional and committed team members endowed with the expertise needed to deal with issues that are directly connected to Egyptian national security.

And fifth is the simple fact that Egypt is the crucible of all serious efforts to advance the Palestinian cause. According to Ibrahim: We could say that Egypt is the cardinal compass point for stimulating action and keeping the focus on this question, particularly given that Egypt has excellent relations and coordinates closely with all countries concerned with the issue, especially Jordan and the main international powers.

President Abbas is clearly tired of the status quo and looking forward to a process of change for the sake of change even if it does not immediately yield comprehensive arrangements, and even if Fatah does not yet appear prepared to fully engage in the reconciliation process. One factor that has influenced Abbas openness to change is the arrival of a new administration in Washington.

As for Hamas, according to sources contacted by Al-Ahram Weekly, its position will be contingent on its assessments of the situation in the lead-up to the elections and its prospects of winning a parliamentary majority. In the 2006 elections, Hamas won 74 of the 132 seats in the Palestinian parliament, compared to Fatahs 45.

Analysts predict that, in the forthcoming poll, Hamas could lose between 20 to 25 per cent of its seats but still lead Fatah. Fatah is unlikely to make any large electoral gains, with remaining seats expected to be divided among 12 factions: the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine; the Vanguard for the Popular Liberation War; Palestinian Peoples Party; the Palestinian Democratic Union; the Palestinian Popular Struggle Front; the Palestinian Liberation Front; the Arab Liberation Front; the Palestinian Arab Front; the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command; the Palestinian National Initiative and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

A source who preferred to remain anonymous told the Weekly that Hamas has the ability to conduct accurate opinion polls and that, regardless of what it agrees to in Cairo, the polls will ultimately determine its position.

So can we expect a change in the political and security situation in Gaza if the elections result in a coalition government or another type of power-sharing arrangement?

According to this source, Hamas will never hand over control over its security-related posts or dismantle its security apparatuses. On the other hand, he stressed that the agreement we are concerned with here primarily has to do with the elections, not with the reconciliation process per se, although this does not rule out some limited progress towards rapprochement.

The road to elections will not be free of other impediments. Will the approximately 340,000 Palestinians in East Jerusalem be able to vote? Palestinian Prime Minister Mohamed Shtayeh said last month that he would formally ask Israel to abide by its agreements on this subject and by relevant international conventions. Concern remains, however, that Israel will deprive Palestinians in East Jerusalem of their right to vote now that the US has recognised Jerusalem as the Israeli capital. According to Mohamed Kanaan, a former Arab member of the Knesset, this was one of the subjects that Abbas discussed in his meeting with the heads of Egyptian and Jordanian intelligence in Ramallah last month. Kanaan added that the PA has been following through on this matter with the EU, the new US administration, Russia, Egypt, and Jordan in order to build pressure on Israel to ensure East Jerusalems inhabitants are not deprived of their right to vote in the forthcoming Palestinian elections.

*A version of this article appears in print in the 11 February , 2021 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly

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There are swing districts and then there are seesaw districts. New Yorks 22nd Congressional District is the latter. After a drawn-out legal challenge, Republican Claudia Tenney was certified as the winner on Monday, unseating moderate Democrat Anthony Brindisi  who just two years earlier defeated Tenney after her first term in Congress.

The outcome may induce whiplash for residents of the Central New York district  and for observers who waited more than three months for the last undecided House seat in the country to be called.But in a year full of upheaval and changes to how New Yorkers voted, it may not be that surprising the district switched hands again, especially since Tenney only won by 109 votes. It has really kind of been a Ping-Pong match between Brindisi and Tenney, said Luke Perry, a political science professor at Utica College. One bounce of the ball has determined who has been the victor.

The success seen by Tenney  a fervent supporter of former President Donald Trump with her own history of controversial rhetoric  might on the surface seem to suggest that the district is shifting further right, after electing a Democrat in 2018 amid waning support for Trump in the middle of his presidency. After all, fidelity to Trump in this past election cycle boosted several New York Republican candidates, including Reps. Nicole Malliotakis, Chris Jacobs and Elise Stefanik in beating their Democratic challengers. But rather than Tenneys success in 2020 being indicative of a larger trend or shifting political winds in the district, its likely that her barely eked out win is attributable to a number of smaller factors, such as higher turnout in a presidential election year and changes to the campaigning process caused by the pandemic.

While Brindisi campaigned successfully in the 2018 midterm election  drawing not only on Tenneys unpopularity, but Trumps as well  in 2020 he lacked several of the factors that gave him an advantage the last time around. After two years in office, Brindisi now had to face questions on his voting record rather than promising to serve as a moderate. If youre a Democrat who is trying to walk the line in a kind of socially conservative district, I think having to vote on impeachment, having to take positions on budgets  those are now (votes) that your opponent can push against, said Shana Kushner Gadarian, a political science professor at Syracuse University. Its not just rhetoric to say that you vote with Nancy Pelosi. Youre a Democrat in Congress, you have voted with the House speaker.

Brindisi also had to contend with the constraints of campaigning during the pandemic  a challenge for Democrats who typically build strong grassroots and door-to-door campaigns. Grassroots liberal organizations were heavily mobilized and very instrumental in his success in 2018. Due to health concerns, their activity went mostly virtual, and it does not appear to have the same impact as it did in the midterm, Perry said, noting that Tenneys campaign was more willing to continue in-person campaigning throughout the pandemic. Brindisi conceded to Tenney on Monday, and a Brindisi spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on what accounted for Tenneys victory. Representatives for Tenney did not respond to a request for comment.

The 22nd Congressional District  despite being home to disaffected Republicans who were willing to cross party lines in 2018 to vote for Brindisi  is still a conservative district where registered Republicans outnumber Democrats by roughly 30,000 people. For a Democrat to win in the district, the stars have to fall into some kind of rough alignment. As the district is currently composed, for Democrats to be successful, they have to have an optimal candidate coupled with an optimal organizational effort to register and turn out voters, Perry said. Thats not just the formal campaign, thats also the grassroots liberal organizations that we saw intensify and grow in number and volume following President Trumps election.

The Rev. Jill Farnham-Us, a steering committee member of Indivisible Mohawk Valley  a progressive activism group that campaigned for Brindisi  said that door-to-door canvassing is important in a campaign, and phone-banking wasnt always a perfect replacement. A lot of people didnt answer the phone who would have answered the door, if wed knocked on their door, Farnham-Us said. Still, phone-banking had its own advantages, she said, allowing volunteers to reach a greater number of people in a shorter amount of time than theyd be able to if they were walking from door to door.

And while midterm elections tend to be a referendum on the incumbent president  turning out more voters of the opposite party and opening the possibility that members of the incumbent party will cross partisan lines  a presidential election year tends to inspire more party loyalty. I think Trump-supporting Republicans, in particular, and then Republicans more broadly  just like Democrats  were a little more queued up in terms of partisanship and more inclined to vote the ticket than (to) cross over to the same degree as they did in 18 in this congressional district, Perry said.

With 109 votes separating Tenney and Brindisi, its important not to ignore the role that county boards of elections played in the messy and delayed counting of ballots, Kushner Gadarian said. The pandemic made for a chaotic election in all parts of the state, with the proliferation of absentee voting and boards of elections underprepared for administering a large-scale mail-in voting operation. In the 22nd District especially, problems abounded, including in Oneida County where more than 2,400 online voter registration applications were not processed despite being returned on time. I think that whats really different this time  as it is across the country  is the increased demand on the electoral systems that are not quite up to task, particularly in the registration of new voters and the counting of votes, Kushner Gadarian said.

While Brindisi was expected to appeal a state Supreme Court ruling late last week to certify Tenney as the winner, he conceded on Monday, mentioning his regret over some of these election administration issues. My one disappointment is that the court did not see fit to grant us a recount, he said in a statement. Sadly, we may never know how many legal voters were turned away at the polls or ballots not counted due to the ineptitude of the boards of election, especially in Oneida County.

Republican Assembly Member John Salka, who represents Central New York, said that while he is sure that Brindisi is disappointed, it might be nice to have some closure after the monthslong saga. The amount of stress that both these candidates have been under for the last 94, 95 days was unbelievable, Salka said. I think everybody is pretty much glad its over.
UPDATE: Gov. Phil Murphy cancels in-person COVID briefing after member of his family tests positive for coronavirus

Gov. Phil Murphy will be back at the Trenton War Memorial on Wednesday for a press conference to provide updates on the coronavirus pandemic.

The press conference starts at 1 p.m. and will be streamed live on the governors YouTube.com channel.

Murphy will be joined by sate health commissioner Judy Persichilli, advisor Dr. Eddy Bresnitz and State Police Superintendent Colonel Pat Callahan.

Wednesday marks 11 months since the first coronavirus-related death in New Jersey.

Since then another 19,915 people in New Jersey have died of coronavirus-related causes. An additional 2,187 deaths were probably due to the coronavirus.

"It's a false choice to compare smokers vs. someone else. Anyone who is under 65 who is the most vulnerable including if you are an essential worker or educator you are eligible right now. I hope we'll get to educators sooner than later," says @GovMurphy pic.twitter.com/U0uYGCAa6S  Squawk Box (@SquawkCNBC) February 10, 2021

Murphy disclosed 92 more COVID-19 deaths and 3,164 additional cases on Tuesday.

At least 1,114,392 have been vaccinated as of about 4 p.m. Tuesday, with 254,072 of those having received their second of two doses, according to the states coronavirus dashboard.

Hospitalizations continue to decline across New Jersey, too. As of 10 p.m. Tuesday, there were 2,786 patients in New Jerseys 71 hospitals with the virus or a suspected case, down nearly 1.5% from 2,827 in the previous 24-hour period. There are about 22% fewer coronavirus patients in hospitals in New Jersey than there were 30 days ago.

Officials said 533 patients getting intensive care as of Tuesday night with 341 on ventilators.

Earlier Wednesday, the governor appeared on CNBCs Squawk Box and on New York City television station WPIX-11. Murphy again said educators would be the next to be eligible to be vaccinated but didnt say when that would happen.

At 10 a.m. Murphy will lead an entourage which will tour the vaccination site at Mary McLeod Bethune Life Center in Jersey City. The tour will also be streamed on Murphys YouTube.com channel.

Among those in attendance were Persichilli, who has twice had to self-isolate since the fall due to a staff member in her office testing positive.

Jeff Goldman may be reached at jeff_goldman@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JGoldmanNJ.

Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to NJ.com.
ANN ARBOR, MI - As Washtenaw County school employees wait their turn among 80,000 eligible residents to get the COVID-19 vaccine, limited access to supply have left it with the lowest percentage of vaccinated educators in the state, according to a survey from the Michigan Education Association.

While the online survey of MEA members found that 63.1% of responding Michigan school employees are either vaccinated or are in the process of being vaccinated against the virus, that figure is just 25.6% in Washtenaw County, with 1,291 members responding.

It is very concerning that teachers in Washtenaw County have had such limited access to the vaccine, Ann Arbor Educator Association President Fred Klein said. ... I know that some teachers have had to go elsewhere - like Jackson and Grand Rapids - to get vaccinated.

For weeks, supply of the vaccine has been an issue for the Washtenaw County Health Department, which is in the process of shifting from vaccinating its 1A prioritization group to the 1B group that includes teachers and school staff.

Approximately 600 Washtenaw County educators have received their first doses of the vaccine in phase 1A, with the group primarily consisting of special education staff that are in self-contained classrooms, Washtenaw Intermediate School District Interim Superintendent Naomi Norman said.

Majority of Michigan teachers surveyed are in process of getting COVID-19 vaccine

Some school staff 65 and older began receiving vaccinations last week as the health department transitions into phase 1B, accounting for another 600 individuals.

Norman said about 60% of the entire 1B group is over 65 years old, with the remainder being essential workers, including school staff. The health department is required to allocate 75% of its vaccinations to people 65 years old and up, with the other 25% going to essential workers, including educators.

Washtenaw County does have more hospital staff per resident than most counties in Michigan, so not surprisingly, weve had to focus on getting those hospital staff vaccinated, Norman said. That group has taken a little bit longer here than in other counties.

Norman said she expects doses that were going to the hospitals to be reallocated to expand focus on the 1B group, which should lead to more people getting vaccinated faster across the community, including school staff.

School staff ages 50 and up are next in line awaiting vaccination, representing 2,800 people countywide, said Norman, who hopes to see that group begin receiving invitations to schedule appointments either this week or next week.

That group could take a few weeks to vaccinate those employees, Norman said, which could lead to school staff who are ages 50 and younger receiving their first doses of the vaccine by early or mid-March, depending on future allocations the county receives.

Norman noted all school districts, charter academies and private schools in the county are being treated equally in the process, with no prioritization being placed on being in-person or remote learning.

Instead, the health department has only created priority based on age because the risk of serious health issues or death is higher the older you are, and focusing on age is the way our health department is addressing equity, Norman said.

Dexter Community Schools Superintendent Chris Timmis said the district continues to hear anecdotally that other counties are vaccinating the 1B group much quicker than in Washtenaw County, leading some educators who live outside the county to get vaccinated where they live.

Timmis said approximately half of the districts staff have either had their first or both doses of the vaccine, with just 2% receiving both doses.

In our county, the high number of medical personnel and the limited vaccine doses being supplied to the health department compared to surrounding areas has only exacerbated the tensions, Timmis said. I do know that the WCHD is ready whenever they get enough vaccine doses to provide a quick turnaround for our staff. They just need the doses.

Saline Area Schools Superintendent Steve Laatsch said approximately 33% of staff who currently work directly with students have received their first dose of the vaccine.

A growing number of those vaccinations have been received outside of the health department, Laatsch noted, with approximately 90 of its 150 employees getting the vaccine through other means - whether it be outside the county or state or through pharmacies.

Were asking staff to self-report when theyre finding other appointments in other counties, Laatsch said. Theyre being creative trying to get appointments because in other counties, theyre just focused on if youre an educator. If you fit in that group, theyre allowing the vaccination process to go through.

Norman noted neighboring counties like Jackson County manage their vaccination lists differently. In Jackson County, school staff were prioritized immediately when the county started the 1B phase. The MEA survey showed 71.5% of Jackson County educators had received or scheduled their first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.

Each county is making local decisions based on their health department and local context; however, its also important to note that every county is facing a vaccine shortage, Norman said.

Washtenaw County Health Department Spokesperson Susan Ringler-Cerniglia said it is difficult to quantify how many healthcare workers in the county are eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine in the 1A prioritization group because systems that track vaccination arent set up to track occupation.

The countys 1A group is now accounting for a much smaller portion of the 2,000 to 3,000 available doses the health department receives each week, she said, but supply of the vaccine remains an issue.

I think we all can recognize with large regional health systems like Michigan Medicine and St. Joes that theres a lot of employed healthcare folks, whether they live here or work here, Ringler-Cerniglia said. We are not getting any indication of an increase (in vaccine supply). Its been about the same and the info we received this week is that we can expect that to remain roughly the same (number of doses) for the next few weeks.

In the meantime, local school districts continue to weigh decisions on how much face-to-face learning they can offer. Ann Arbor Public Schools has targeted an early March return date to the hybrid learning format, although a specific date has not yet been set.

The transition to in-school learning timelines are subject to adjustment, depending on significant progress in the school personnel vaccination process, ongoing monitoring of district and community COVID-19 infection numbers and monitoring of any factors that would inhibit a safe and healthy reopening of schools, Superintendent Jeanice Swift said.

Approximately 75% of AAEA membership said they arent confident in the districts ability to mitigate the risk of COVID spread in a hybrid environment, Klein noted. In a recent survey, more than 83% of AAEA membership felt the district should remain in remote learning until they have been able to get vaccinated.

The importance of educators and school teams receiving the vaccine cannot be overstated in ensuring the effective operations of the district in service to our students and families, Swift said. As is true in all workplaces, in our community and across the country, vaccines prove a game-changer in making progress to move forward.

READ MORE:

Saline talks teacher vaccinations, progress toward more in-person classes

Limited supply means some schools cant vaccinate their teachers against COVID like others can

Majority of Michigan teachers surveyed are in process of getting COVID-19 vaccine
China's spacecraft has entered orbit around Mars following a 500-million-km journey from Earth that started seven months ago.

Tianwen-1  which consists of an orbiter, lander and rover  completed its journey just before 1PM GMT on Wednesday as it entered orbit around the Red Planet.

However, it will remain paired in orbit until May, when the rover separates to descend to the planet's dusty red surface - the rover isn't being deployed straight away.

The five-ton spacecraft performed a burn of its engines to slow it down enough to be captured by the Red Planet's gravitational pull.

If the rover is deployed successfully in May, it will make China the first country to orbit, land and deploy a rover on its first mission to Mars.

The Chinese mission is named Tianwen-1 ('Questions to Heaven') as a nod to a classical poem that has verses about the cosmos.

Tianwen-1 entered Mars orbit less than 24 hours after the United Arab Emirates', Hope probe, which entered Mars orbit at around 16:15 GMT on Tuesday.

Tianwen-1: China's Mars debut. The five-tonne Tianwen-1 includes a Mars orbiter, a lander and a solar-powered rover that will for three months study the planet's soil and atmosphere, take photos, chart maps and look for signs of past life

Image from China National Space Administration shows the Tianwen-1 probe en route to Mars. If all goes well, it will be the second country to land successfully on the Red Planet

Meanwhile, a rover sent by NASA, Perseverance, will arrive next week later, on February 18, in its mission to collect rocks for return to Earth.

Hope, Tianwen-1 and Perseverance all launched within 12 days of each other in the second half of July last year.

The UAE, China and the US took advantage of a period last July when Mars and Earth were favourably aligned to launch their exploratory missions to the Red Planet.

China successfully launched Tianwen-1 on July 23 aboard a Long March 5 Y-4 carrier rocket from Wenchang Space Launch Centre on the southern island province of Hainan, China.

Tianwen-1 is a double orbiter and rover and should all go well, the latter will make its way to the surface in May, a feat that would make China only the second country to successfully do so.

In May, Tianwen-1's rover will try to land in Utopia Planitia, a plain in the northern hemisphere which is lower than other parts of Mars due to being inside a crater.

Once Tianwen-1's rover lands, it will survey the composition, types of substance, geological structure and meteorological environment of the Martian surface, and look for signs of alien life.

Its solar-powered rover weighs 529lb (240kg) and should operate for about three months, while the orbiter is expected to last two years.

The orbiter will loop around Mars for an entire Martian year and act as a communication link for the rover.

The orbiter has its own set of instruments for studying Mars, including a high-resolution camera that should produce some amazing images.

Last week, Tianwen-1 sent back its first stunning image of Mars in its approach of our dusty planetary neighbour.

China's space probe has sent back its first image of Mars and is scheduled to touch down on the Red Planet later this year

The black-and-white photo released late Friday by the China National Space Administration (CNSA) showed geological features including the Schiaparelli crater and the Valles Marineris, a vast stretch of canyons on the Martian surface.

The photo was taken about 2.2 million kilometres (1.4 million miles) from Mars, according to CNSA.

The robotic craft ignited one of its engines to 'make an orbital correction' Friday and slowed down in preparation for being 'captured by Martian gravity' today.

All systems on the Tianwen-1 probe are in 'good condition', CNSA said on Friday.

NASA currently has three spacecraft in orbit, and it has one rover and one lander on the surface. The United Arab Emirates' orbiter successfully entered Mars orbit on Tuesday, February 9. NASA launched the next-generation Perseverance rover to Mars on July 30, 2020 - and it's set to land on the planet's surface on February 18

After watching the US and the Soviet Union lead the way during the Cold War, China has poured billions of dollars into its military-led space programme.

It has made huge strides in the past decade, sending a human into space in 2003.

The Asian powerhouse has laid the groundwork to assemble a space station by 2022 and gain a permanent foothold in Earth orbit.

'As a first try for China, I don't expect it to do anything significant beyond what the US has already done,' previously said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, about the Chinese craft.

Tianwen-1 is 'broadly comparable to Viking in its scope and ambition', said McDowell, referring to NASA's Mars landing missions in 1975 to 1976.

This is not China's first attempt at Mars  in 2011, a Chinese orbiter accompanying a Russian mission was lost when the spacecraft failed to get out of Earth's orbit after launching from Kazakhstan, eventually burning up in the atmosphere.
RIP Rajiv Kapoor: Neetu Kapoor Announces There Wont Be A Chautha For The Late Actor

2020 was one of the toughest years that we all had to live through. Not only because of the pandemic but also because of the big losses seen by the Indian film industry. Irrfan Khan and Rishi Kapoor left us in the month of April, while Sushant Singh Rajput and Wajid Khan bid a final adieu to the world two months later. Yesterday, veteran actress Neetu Kapoor took to her social media handle to announce yet another heartbreaking news. Veteran actor Rajiv Kapoor, younger brother of Randhir Kapoor and Rishi ji, breathed his last on 9th February.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Kareena Kapoor Khan (@kareenakapoorkhan)

Today, Neetu ji took to her official social media handle to announce that a Chautha will not be held for the late actor due to the ongoing pandemic. She wrote: Due to the current pandemic circumstances, there will be no Chautha held for the Late Mr. Rajiv Kapoor for safety reasons. May his soul rest in peace. The entire Raj Kapoor family is a part of your grief too.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by neetu Kapoor. Fightingfyt (@neetu54)

The Ram Teri Ganga Maili star suffered a heart attack at his house and was rushed to the Inlaks Hospital in Chembur by his brother. However, he was declared dead on arrival. Bollywood mourned the loss of another member of the industry and many celebs arrived at his residence to pay their final respects. We wish the family peace and strength in this troubled time.
Watch: Bengal Tiger roaming freely in Texas suburb; Houston police say man arrested, animal is on the loose

Itanagar: Zoo attendant mauled to death by tigress, gates were open, says official

SC notice to Maharashtra govt on plea claiming Avni was not man-eater

India

oi-Deepika S

New Delhi, Feb 10: The Supreme Court on Wednesday issued a contempt notice to Maharashtra government in connection with the killing of Avni, an adult tigress, in Maharashtra in 2018.

Issuing notice to nine persons, mostly state government officials,A bench headed by the Chief Justice of India SA Bobde said "...they flouted orders that they shall not reward anyone who kills (the tigress)."

"We want to see clear findings that human nails, hair, teeth or whatever, does not disappear for a period of six months and that no such thing was found in (T1's) intestine. Show us...she was not a man-eater," Bobde said. "We will issue notice also. Because the reward part is clearly violated."

The tigress, T1, as she was known officially, was killed on November 2, 2018, by the team of hunters which was dispatched to eliminate her. T1 was shot by Hyderabad-based sharp shooter Nawab Shafath Ali Khan's son Asgarh around 11 pm.

She was killed in a single shot, from point blank, without even making an attempt to tranquilize her and capture the tiger alive, which the activists were demanding.

However, the incident triggered outrage among wildlife activists, who alleged that no efforts were made to tranquillise Avni and called it "murder in cold blood".

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Story first published: Wednesday, February 10, 2021, 16:19 [IST]

One reveler at last year's Mardi Gras celebration may have been the catalyst for 50,000 cases of the coronavirus, a new study claims.

It's well-known that the 2020 Carnival celebration in Louisiana at the end of February made the state one of the earliest U.S. pandemic hot spots.

But researchers now believe a single person likely brought the virus to the city in the weeks before Fat Tuesday and spawned tens of thousands of infections due to people crowded together and sharing food and drinks without masks.

They suspect that the 'Patient Zero' of Mardi Gras infected 800 people within the two weeks separating February 13 the conclusion of the festivities on Ash Wednesday, February 26.

And those 800 then went on to spread the infection to another 50,000 people in Louisiana and neighboring states.

The team - which consisted of several institutions including the Scripps Research Institute, Tulane University and Louisiana State University Health Shreveport - says the outbreak went mostly largely undetected due to a lack of testing and mitigation efforts in place at the time.

A new study determined that a single person, likely traveling from Texas, brought COVID-19 into New Orleans for Carnival 2020. Pictured: The risk of where the virus spread in the U.S. in the first week after Mardi Gras

By Mardi Gras and Ash Wednesday, almost 800 people were likely infected, and led to 50,000 cases in Louisianas first wave. Pictured: Percentage of people who traveled from others states to New Orleans before Mardi Gras 2020

There was little genetic variety in the samples found in New Orleans, which created conditions similar to a cruise ship in which an outbreak hails from a single source. Pictured: Bourbon Street in New Orleans on Mardi Gras day in February 2020

Studies later showed that COVID-19 exposure rates were close to 10% in Louisiana's first wave from March 9 to May 15. Pictured: The Society of Saint Anne parade during Mardi Gras in New Orleans, February 2020

'Back then, there were no precautions. No one.was thinking about this,' study co-author Mark Zeller, a researcher at Scripps, told DailyMail.com.

'No one was wearing masks, no one was socially distancing, just partying as the previous year.

'But the problem was the virus was already there. The virus was most likely introduced before Mardi Gras and it just got kicked-started, and dramatically increased transmission like a snowball.'

For the study, which has yet to be peer-reviewed and was published on pre-print server medRxiv.org, the team sequenced genomes of the virus from New Orleans and other locations in Louisiana during the first wave, from March 9 to May 15.

These were then then compared with genomes from the U.S. and globally to pinpoint the emergence of COVID-19 in The Bayou State.

There was little genetic variety in the sample found in New Orleans, which created conditions similar to a cruise ship in which an outbreak hails from a single source.

Infections were spread to other states, such as Texas, Mississippi and Alabama, but stay-at-home orders prevented the virus from spreading much further (above)

'I think there's a lot of people in a relatively small space, that's a fair comparison,' Zeller said.

'Obviously the scale of Mardi Gras is way, way bigger but it was a super-spreading event, that basically happens like a cruise ship.

'You have one infected person coming in and the virus, starts bouncing around on the ship. Think of Louisiana as like one big ship, where the virus got in and just got dramatically amplified by Mardi Gras

They also looked at mobility data to gather who was traveling into and out of New Orleans during Carnival.

Between February 14, 2020, the start of the celebration and February 25, Mardi Gras Day, more than one Americans visited the city.

The first case of COVID-19 in Louisiana was reported March 9. Unlike early outbreaks in New York and Washington, the researchers determined Patient Zero was not from Europe or Asia but from someone traveling domestically.

An analysis determined that the ill person likely came from Texas, which was more than twice as likely as the next most probable state to be the source.

This is because, during February 2020, Texas passengers accounted for 13 percent of travel to New Orleans, and 35 percent of travel to Shreveport, a city in northwest Louisiana.

Approximately 800 people were infected by the following day, Ash Wednesday, which went on to spread the virus to other and lead to about 50,000 confirmed cases, mostly in Louisiana during the first wave over the next few months.

'The rapid nature of the early COVID-19 epidemic in New Orleans likely resulted in thousands of additional cases, which is supported by seroprevalence studies showing exposure rates of close to ten percent by May 15, 2020 in New Orleans,' the authors wrote.

'Compared to neighboring states that did not experience the same explosive first waves as Louisiana, the CDC...estimated that the seroprevalence in Louisiana was 35 percent to 134 percent higher than in other states in the Southern U.S.'

And while the strain in New Orleans did lead to infections in other parts of Louisiana and other Southern states, including Texas, Mississippi and Alabama, stay-at-home orders appeared to help the virus spreading to other states.

This year, New Orleans is closing down bars from February 12 to February 17 and no establishment will be allowed to sell to-go alcoholic drinks. Pictured: A group of revelers on a balcony toss beads to the crowd below on Bourbon Street on Mardi Gras day in February 2020

'It was sort of a perfect storm. Very few people in US were conscious of the epidemic about to become so everyone was still behaving normally,' Zeller said.

'If Mardi Gras has come three weeks before, the virus would not have been there or the amplification would have been much much lower.

'It also works the other away around so if Mardi Gras was one month later, everyone would have ben aware of the virus and it would have been canceled, It was just unfortunate timing of the event.'

This year, Mardi Gras and Carnival will look much different.

Bars will be closed from February 12 to February 17 and no establishment, such as restaurants, will be allowed to sell to-go alcoholic drinks.

Pedestrians and vehicles will not be allowed on some of the city's most popular streets from 7pm to 3am and there will be no parking zones in effect as well.

Indoor gatherings will be limited to a maximum of 10 people and outdoor gatherings to a maximum of 25 guests.

'Vaccinations are ramping up but only a very small percentage of the population is vaccinated right now,' Zeller said.

'We should still behave for still a couple of months. As soon as we stop wearing face masks, stop social distancing, the virus will pop back up and spreading again.

'People should not have parties...I know everybody is fed up with the whole situation but this is not the right time to start partying.'
New Year: Section 144 to be imposed in Bengaluru from 6pm on 31st Dec till 6am on 1st Jan

Bengaluru: Section 144 to be imposed from 12 noon today till Jan 1 in view of New Year's celebrations

Section 144 imposed in Noida: What is open, what is not

Coronavirus cases in Karnataka: Section 144 to be imposed in Bengaluru limits from today

Uttar Pradesh: Section 144 imposed in Saharanpur ahead of Kisan Mahapanchayat

India

oi-Ajay Joseph Raj P

Lucknow, Feb 10: Ahead of kisan mahapanchayat, Section 144 was imposed at Saharanpur district, Uttar Pradesh on Wednesday, due to various reasons including upcoming festivities, COVID-19 pandemic and law and order.

According to reports, District Magistrate Saharanpur issued an order citing various reasons including upcoming festivities, the spread of COVID-19 pandemic and the possibility of violence by the anti-social elements in the state.

Coronavirus cases: India records 11,067 new COVID-19 cases, 94 new fatalities in last 24 hours

The move comes ahead of the Congress General Secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra's visit to attend kisan mahapanchayat.

"Today I will be in Saharanpur to listen, understand, share my feelings with the farmers and support their struggle. The BJP government will have to withdraw the black agriculture law," Priyanka Vadra posted a tweet in Hindi.

She was heading towards Saharanpur to attend kisan mahapanchayat and was also scheduled to offer prayers at Shakumbhra Devi Temple before attending the programme. The Congress leader is also expected to also conduct a dialogue with farmers in Bijnor and Muzaffarnagar districts on February 13.

Cong calls for Odisha bandh on Feb 15 over rising fuel prices

Earlier, Congress had extended its full support to the call for 'chakka jam' from farmers for three hours last week. The grand old party and the other opposition parties have raised their concern against the new farm laws.

Twitter blocks portion of accounts, cites free speech | OneIndia News

Farmers have been protesting at different borders of the national capital since November 26 last year against the three newly enacted farm laws: Farmers' Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, 2020; the Farmers Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and farm Services Act 2020 and the Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act, 2020.

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Story first published: Wednesday, February 10, 2021, 11:37 [IST]

Stone from Sita Eliya in Sri Lanka to be used for making Ayodhya Ram temple

10th trustee for Ayodhya Mosque Trust appointed

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

Lucknow, Feb 10: The Ayodhya Mosque Trust on Tuesday nominated war veteran Captain Mohammad Afzaal Ahmad Khan as its tenth trustee, officials said.

The Ayodhya mosque project was formally launched on Republic Day at Dhannipur, around 24 km from the Ram Janmabhoomi, exactly six months after the Sunni Waqf Board constituted the mosque's trust -- Indo-Islamic Cultural Foundation (IICF).

The trust was constituted following the 2019 Supreme Court verdict that backed the construction of a temple at the Ram Janmabhoomi and ruled that an alternative five-acre plot be found for a mosque in Ayodhya in lieu of the Babri Masjid.

Allahabad HC rejects plea claiming ownership of land offered for Ayodhya mosque

The blueprint of the mosque complex, which includes a hospital, was unveiled on December 19.

In a virtual meeting of the IICF in Lucknow, it unanimously nominated 80-year-old Khan as its tenth trustee, officials said.

Khan is a veteran of the 1965 and 1971 wars and a recipient of the Sena Medal. He is also a recipient of the President Award - Samaj Ratan.

The Ayodhya Mosque project of the IICF is based on serving humanity. The hospital will be the centre stage of the project, Khan said.

"We will provide free of cost treatment to the ailing poor through this hospital, and our community kitchen, another important part of our project, will feed at least 1,000 people daily, and the research centre that is also part of the project will be dedicated to great freedom fighter of Awadh Maulvi Ahmadullah Shah," he said.

The new mosque will be bigger than Babri Masjid, but won't be a lookalike of the structure which once stood in Ramjanmabhoomi premises.

Meanwhile, the Indo-Islamic Cultural Research Centre, to be built by Uttar Pradesh Sunni Central Waqf Board in Ayodhya, would be named after freedom fighter who led the first war of Independence in the Avadh region, Maulvi Ahmadullah Shah.

The decision was taken in the IICF meeting, spokesperson of the trust, Athar Hussain said.

The research centre will have a museum, library and publications to showcase Indo-Islamic culture of shared struggle and accomplishments of Hindus and Muslims of India, he said.

Two sisters claim ownership of land offered for Ayodhya mosque, move court

Twitter blocks portion of accounts, cites free speech | OneIndia News

Shah had led the first war of Independence in 1857 in the Avadh region.

The spokesperson said that as the Allahabad High Court has dismissed a petition filed by two Delhi-based sisters claiming ownership of the five-acre land at Dhannipur village in Ayodhya, the process to speed up the project will begin now.

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Story first published: Wednesday, February 10, 2021, 10:09 [IST]
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Abednico Bhebhe, who was expelled from the Movement for Democratic Change led by Thokozani Khupe before Douglas Mwonzora was elected president of the party in what MDC activists and observers say was a chaotic Extraordinary Congress, says efforts to readmit him into the opposition party are designed to belittle his integrity as he does not recognize Mwonzoras leadership.

In a scathing statement, Bhebhe said he has not attempted to rejoin the party contrary to the Mwonzora formations claims that he wants to be readmitted together with Dorcas Sibanda of Bulawayo.

The Mwonzora MDC formation held a National Council meeting recently and claimed that Bhebhe was among the people who wanted to be re-admitted to the MDC.

Bhebhe, who was expelled from the MDC-T following claims that he was working with the MDC Alliance led by Nelson Chamisa, said it was untrue that intends re-joining the party.

The supposed resolution to re-admit me in MDC-T as an ordinary party member is not only a violation of the partys constitution, unless of course if the said gathering amended that clause as well, but more concerning is the devious portrayal as as well as battering my character as if I am a desperate politician seeking someones benevolence. That is unacceptable and should not be left unchallenged.

He claims that he defeated all candidates in the primary election in Bulawayo resulting in his expulsion from the party.

That deprived me of my administrative and constitutional rights while it gave unfair advantage to Mr. Douglas Mwonzora to contest the highest party office having eliminated the participation of the main challenger whose victory was beyond doubt. My constitutional rights were put under siege by the very National Council and I immediately lost the opportunity to contest for presidency. What has changed now that I would renege on my pursuit of justice and submit to a rigged leadership.

 I want to make it categorically clear that I dont recognize the outcome of the 27th December 2020 EOC (Extraordinary Congress) and hence the so-called National Council has no legal mandate to readmit me to what I do not even recognize. As far as I am concerned the EOC elections were not conducted and hence the amendment of the constitution is illegal. My position is that the party must sit down and elect an interim leader pending a proper EOC, where every willing member is given a chance to vote or contest for the presidency.

Bhebhe claims that a large number of MDC-T members, who were in the 2014 party structures that were supposed to participate in the Extraordinary Congress as laid down by the Supreme Court, were disenfranchised by the MDC-T leadership.

MDC-T information secretary Witness Dube was unreachable for comment.
Disneyland has announced a major new development: In March, Disney California Adventure will offer an all new, limited-time ticketed experience focusing on food and wine.

The announcement, which comes shortly after outdoor dining returned to Downtown Disney, will bring 1,000 employees back to work at the resort.

In a letter to cast members, Disneyland President Ken Potrock was careful not to use the word festival, but the timing and description hint that the event will be a scaled-back version of the Food & Wine Festival.

More:

Tampa Bay vs. Kansas City: Why every Super Bowl MVP says 'I'm going to Disney World!' The answer has to do with money, of course, but also a dinner party, and the most hated CEO in Disney history. Read more.

At Disney characters union, lawsuit seeks end to takeover. The Teamsters local that represents workers who play Mickey Mouse, Goofy and other characters was taken over almost two years ago by its parent union. Read more.

'So inappropriate': This Calif. man is calling out some of Disney's politically incorrect videos. Hes editing himself into old Disney videos from the 1960s and adding commentary, akin to Mystery Science Theatre 3000. Read more.

Disney is finally updating its problematic Jungle Cruise ride at Disneyland and Walt Disney World. As silly and overly pun-filled as the Jungle Cruise may be, it has long been criticized as viewing adventure through an imperialist lens." Read more.

Dispatches from Disneyland is curated by Jasmine Garnett and Disneyland editor Julie Tremaine. Contact Garnett at Jasmine.Garnett@sfgate.com or Tremaine at Julie.Tremaine@sfgate.com.
As any market-watcher knows, investment trusts have enjoyed a good run recently.

Listed on the stock exchange and run by professional managers, they spread your money across dozens of different companies.

Thanks to their stock market listing, investors buy into investment trusts by purchasing shares - owning a stake in the investment company - and unlike investment funds they do not grow or shrink with demand.

The past year has seen investment trusts grow in popularity - with some doubling investors' money within a year.

Listed on the stock exchange and run by professional managers, investment trusts spread your money across dozens of different companies

Of course, no investment is guaranteed, and investors should be careful not to assume that last year's winners will perform as well in future.

You should also do your homework to find out just what you're buying.

A look at the best-performing trusts of last year, compiled by online platform Interactive Investor, shows many contain the same investments, in particular Chinese and U.S. tech stocks.

Even if you believe those stocks will grow further, it pays not to have your money in a small number of trusts and diversify.

Top performers of last year

Pacific Horizon Investment Trust

It's been an excellent run for the Asia-focused Pacific Horizon, which was the best-performing investment trust of 2020.

The trust invests in equities from the Asia-Pacific region (excluding Japan) with a focus on China and the Indian subcontinent. With big stakes in online retailers, such as Alibaba, JD and Singapore-based Sea, it has profited from the big tech boom.

As with all good investments, it's hard to know if new customers have missed the boat.

Five-year return on 10,000: 53,800

Annual fees: 0.92 per cent

As one of Tesla's first big backers, Baillie Gifford has been invited to invest in Elon Musk's SpaceX venture

Baillie Gifford US Growth

Last year's second-best performer was Baillie Gifford's US Growth trust, which returned 135 per cent across the calendar year. Big tech stocks, such as Tesla, Amazon and Netflix dominate.

And, as one of Tesla's first big backers, Baillie Gifford has been invited to invest in Elon Musk's SpaceX venture.

Whether those tech stocks can continue to grow remains the subject of fierce debate. Though few expect the same sky high returns that we saw last year.

Three-year* return on 10,000: 31,400 (*Trust launched in March 2018

Annual fees: 0.75 per cent

Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust

With a 106 per cent return last year, Baillie Gifford's Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust is the most popular trust fund among customers of investment platform AJ Bell.

Despite its name, the trust is international in focus, with 60 per cent of assets in the U. S. and China. Managers Tom Slater and James Anderson back their holdings as they believe they are the companies of the future.

Many of its holdings also appear in other trusts, such as Pacific Horizon and Baillie Gifford US  worth recalling when it comes to diversification of your portfolio.

Five-year return on 10,000: 61,400

Annual fees: 0.36 per cent

Polar Capital Technology Trust has holdings across many tech sectors, such as electronic payments and e-commerce, artificial intelligence, gaming and robotics

Some ideas from the best of the rest

Polar Capital Technology Trust

Polar Capital's tech trust might have been squeezed out of last year's top list, but it remains a formidable performer. Manager Ben Rogoff believes its more diversified strategy will win in the long run.

As well as Apple and Microsoft, the trust is looking to invest in specialist markets with higher-growth prospects.

'Our holdings are diversified across many tech sectors, such as electronic payments and e-commerce, artificial intelligence, gaming and robotics,' he says.

Five-year return on 10,000: 45,000

Annual fees: 0.99 per cent

Baillie Gifford European Growth

European stock markets may not have kept up with those in the U.S. and Asia, but trust manager Stephen Paice believes the continent has plenty to offer.

'Our overall strategy is to find companies that have a very good chance of doubling in value within five years,' he says.

He says Europe has two main advantages: a legacy of highly successful consumer brands and manufacturing.

He gives Kering and Richemont, owners of Gucci and Cartier respectively, as examples. He also cites Swedish air compressor maker Atlas Copco as a top pick among the trust's holdings.

Five-year return on 10,000: 26,100

Annual fees: 0.55 per cent

Finsbury Growth & Income

Low returns and Brexit uncertainty has made the UK less popular with many investors. But with the vaccine rollout under way, the FTSE is being touted as a future value market.

'We are certain there are many world-class companies and many appear undervalued,' says Nick Train, manager of Finsbury's UK- focused Growth & Income trust.

The trust isn't on top-performer lists, but has performed well against the FTSE benchmark.

'Our investments are based on the assumption we will get through the pandemic, that there will follow a 'Roaring 20s', and the UK will be a rewarding market again,' says Mr Train.

Five-year return on 10,000: 16,100

Annual fees: 0.64 per cent

Specialist picks

Most investment trusts tend to focus on larger markets, but some have a narrower remit. These are seen as riskier choices. But a small investment can bolster a balanced portfolio.

Healthcare-focused trusts, for example, are often dubbed 'recession-proof' due to strong performances in tough times.

Frostrow's Biotech Growth Trust, which invests in drug development and gene therapy, was the ninth-best performer of 2020 - with a 61 per cent return.

The fund may have had a Covid boost, but its long-term performance is strong: 10,000 invested five years ago would now be worth 26,800.

Environment-friendly trusts are popular, as investors try to capitalise on the green energy boom.

Impax's Environmental Markets Trust has had a 230 per cent return in five years: making 10,000 worth over 33,000. It invests in renewable energy firms, such as U.S.-geothermals pioneer Ormat.
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World Health Organization expert mission to China ended this week without finding the source of the coronavirus that has killed over 2.3 million worldwide

Wuhan (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 10th Feb, 2021 ) :World Health Organization expert mission to China ended this week without finding the source of the coronavirus that has killed over 2.3 million worldwide.

But the team of foreign experts did agree the virus likely jumped from bats to an unknown animal species, before being transmitted to humans.

It also concluded that it was "extremely unlikely" that the virus came from a high-security lab in the central city of Wuhan, appearing to quash a number of theories linking the city's virology institute to the outbreak.

Huge global pressure and scrutiny trailed the team during its probe in China, which mission member Peter Daszak described as working "flat out under the most politically charged environment possible." After a mission that lasted nearly a month, here are five things we still don't know about the virus' origin: The animal source Experts said tests were done on tens of thousands of samples from wild, farmed and domestic animals across China -- but none of them contained the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid-19.

However, Dutch virologist and WHO team member Marion Koopmans said that species more susceptible to the virus -- including bamboo rats, badgers and rabbits -- were sold at Wuhan's Huanan market, the site of an early virus cluster, and could be an entry point for trace-back investigations.

British zoologist Daszak also said after the briefing that new bat viruses discovered in Thailand and Cambodia, "shifts our focus to Southeast Asia".

"I think one day we'll find that (reservoir), it might take some time... but it will be out there without a doubt," he told reporters.

Raw data Concern has been expressed about the scientists' access to data in China, amid accusations that Beijing downplayed the initial severity of the outbreak in Wuhan in late 2019.

Danish epidemiologist and team member Thea Kolsen Fischer said after the briefing that the WHO team were not given raw data, but instead relied on earlier analysis by Chinese scientists.

In most cases, she said, it would be usual for outsiders to get access to "aggregated data".

WHO team members said they were granted full access to the sites and individuals they requested to visit.

Cold chain transmission Beijing has repeatedly floated the theory that the virus was brought to China through packaging on cold chain products like imported frozen seafood, linking these to recent domestic outbreaks.

WHO emergencies chief Mike Ryan had previously said that there is "no evidence that food or the food chain is participating in transmission".

But in China the WHO mission appeared to give some weight to the theory.

The head of the Chinese side of the mission, Liang Wannian, said the virus can travel long distances on the surface of cold chain products, and environmental samples from Huanan market -- which sold frozen wild animals and seafood -- showed "widespread contamination" of the virus.

But WHO team lead Peter Ben Embarek cautioned that it is still unclear whether the virus can transmit to humans from contaminated cold chain surfaces.

Origin outside China? Beijing has repeatedly called for the WHO to launch an origin tracing mission in the US, and foreign ministry officials have drawn attention to conspiracy theories about virus leaks from an American military germ research lab.

Eager to deflect international criticism over its initial handling of the outbreak, China has also amplified studies suggesting some Covid-19 cases emerged in Italy and other countries in late 2019.

But in releasing the report's conclusions, Koopmans said these studies "do not provide full evidence of earlier circulation" outside China in early December.

However, she conceded that experts "should really go and search for evidence of earlier circulation."
Bennington, VT (05201)

Today

Cloudy with periods of rain. High around 50F. Winds ENE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 100%. Rainfall near a quarter of an inch..

Tonight

Cloudy with periods of rain. Low 44F. Winds NE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 90%. Rainfall near a half an inch.
North Carolina's Elon University has cancelled an event for 'white-identifying' students to process their complicity in racial injustice following complaints the meeting excluded students of color.

The existence of the upcoming 'White Caucus' was first revealed by the Young America's Foundation (YAF) on Tuesday.

The conservative organization published an email, said to have been sent by Elons Coordinator of Graduate Programs Jennifer Strange, that specified the aim of the event was to allow white 'allies' to speak openly about systemic oppression without 're-traumatizing people of color'.

'We know that racism and systemic oppression are woven deeply into the roots of our society and our education system,' the email read. 'White caucusing is one part of a lifelong and multifaceted commitment to anti-racism for white-identifying people who are passionate about racial justice.'

The email further stated that the caucus would give white students a 'space to learn about and process their awareness of and complicity in unjust systems without harming their friends of color.'

But the caucus, slated to take place on February 16, has since been canceled after the YAF called it a 'segregated' event and students of color complained, Fox News reported.

Elon University (above) has cancelled an event for 'White-identifying' students to process their complicity in racial injustice following complaints it excluded students of color

YAF published an email, said to have been sent by Elons Coordinator of Graduate Programs Jennifer Strange, that specified the event was intended for white 'allies' to speak openly about systemic oppression without 're-traumatizing people of color'

'Racially segregating conversations meant to improve race relations and build community will only create more division,' YAFs Kara Zupkus wrote in an article on the group's website.

According to the university's news outlet, ENN, students looking to participate in the program were required to fill out a Google form in which they were asked to adhere to a confidentiality agreement.

'By signing up, participants agree to leave what is said in the caucus meetings within those meetings, and to not share anything outside of the group for any reason,' the form reportedly read.

Elon freshman Jon Seaton, who is black, told the outlet he thought the White Caucus was a 'horrible idea.'

'Theres no way you can get anything done on the issue,' Seaton said. 'If youre going to exclude the people who the issues are about out of the conversation, thats counterintuitive. Theres just no positive outcome that comes from that.'

South Asian Elon senior Jaya Bhardwaj added: 'The only way white people can actively change their opinions and learn something valuable is if they listen to the stories and very valid feelings of people of color.

'If Elon wants to make strides to becoming an actively anti-racist institution, deliberately excluding their already limited people of color from the conversation is incredibly unproductive.'

The caucus was intended to give white students a 'space to learn about and process their awareness of and complicity in unjust systems without harming their friends of color' (file photo)

Amid the mounting scrutiny, Vice President of University Communications Daniel Anderson told Fox that the event has now been cancelled.

Anderson added that the caucus was organized by a group of students in the School of Education and that it had learned of the event on Tuesday.

YAF reported the email was sent by Coordinator of Graduate Programs Jennifer Strange (above). However the school claimed the email was sent by students using a program that Strange oversees

However, according to YAF, the email they published was sent to all School of Education students by Jennifer Strange, Elons coordinator of graduate programs in the school.

'Elon University today learned of a program being organized by a group of students in the School of Education who wanted to hold candid, confidential discussions about racism without victimizing those of other races,' Anderson said in his statement.

'Elons policies prohibit discrimination on the basis of age, race, color, creed, sex, national or ethnic origin, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, or veterans status.

'Because this student-led program would have excluded non-white individuals, it would be at odds with university policies and will not be held. Elon is reviewing the planning for this event to ensure that future programs are planned in compliance with university policies, are inclusive and align with the universitys mission.'

Discussing the discrepancy of who sent the email, Anderson said that Strange manages the department's 'Constant Contact' account, which can be used to send messages to students.

'This email was sent from students to other students and Jennifer assisted in that process,' he said.

According to the University's news outlet, ENN, students looking to participate in the program were required to fill out a Google form in which they were asked to adhere to a confidentiality agreement (file photo)

In their report, YAF blasted the private college for 'creating more division'.

'Racially segregating conversations meant to improve race relations and build community will only create more division,' the foundation wrote.

'Elon is essentially putting a gag order on students who partake in white caucusing by forcing them to sign a confidentiality agreement. What exactly are they hiding, and what are these students afraid of the wider public knowing about?

'College is intended for students to face uncomfortable ideasto live and learn in a community made up of people from different places and backgrounds. Separating students by the color of their skin is the antithesis of having a diverse and welcoming campus.'

According to CollegeFactual.com, white students make up 79.5 percent of Elon's undergraduates. Comparatively, Hispanic students make up for 6.5 percent; black students account for 5.6 percent; and 2.4 percent of undergrads are Asian, data shows.

Other similar White Caucuses have recently been held in a number of other US colleges, including the University at Buffalo, UC Davis, University of Kentucky, and University of Florida, YAF reported.

WASHINGTON -- Two Ukrainian tycoons under investigation by the FBI for money laundering are suing the United States for attempting to seize their Texas commercial building worth $23 million, saying the governments actions violate the sovereignty of their home country.

Optima Ventures, a U.S. real-estate holding company controlled by billionaires Ihor Kolomoyskiy and Hennadiy Boholyubov, informed a Florida court on February 5 that it will file for arbitration against the United States in the World Banks International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID).



The U.S. Justice Department last year moved to seize three of Optima Ventures commercial buildings, including in Texas, Kentucky, and Ohio, accusing Kolomoyskiy and Boholyubov of purchasing them with money embezzled from Kyiv-based PrivatBank and later laundered by U.S. shell companies.

The billionaires deny the allegations, saying they have not been charged with any crime in Ukraine. Furthermore, they say some of the PrivatBank loans the U.S. claims were used to buy the Texas buildings have been performing in accordance with borrowing agreements.

The United States is attempting to regulate the propriety of conduct occurring in Ukraine -- the management of a Ukrainian bank in the territory of Ukraine -- and has expropriated Ukrainian investors investment in the [Texas commercial building] based on the United States own interpretation and application of Ukrainian criminal law to Ukrainian conduct, their complaint filed to ICSiD stated.

They further claimed that the United States is effectively seeking to substitute itself for the Ukrainian Prosecutors Office.



It is unclear if the tycoons will seek arbitration for the other two buildings the U.S. government is seeking to expropriate. Lawyers for Optima Ventures did not return a call for comment.

Backing Zelenskiy

Kolomoyskiy is one of the most powerful tycoons in Ukraine with assets ranging from oil and gas to metals and media. His television stations backed the candidacy of President Volodymyr Zelenskiy during the 2019 campaign and he is reported to have close ties to his administration.

Ukrainian media also say he has outsized influence over the nations courts. Ukraines justice system is notorious for corruption and Western officials have said courts are often beholden to powerful political and business leaders.

The National Bank of Ukraine accused the two tycoons in 2016 of using their PrivatBank, then one of the nations largest lenders, as a personal piggy bank to distribute themselves loans. Ukraine later nationalized the bank and pumped in $5.5 billon to stave off its collapse.

Parroting the Ukrainian central bank, the United States accuses the Ukrainian magnates of laundering the loans from PrivatBank through Delaware shell companies with the help of two American associates, Mordechai Korf and Uriel Laber, who oversee their U.S. assets from Miami and own a minority stake in Optima.

William Kirtley, a Geneva-based lawyer specializing in investment arbitration at Aceris Law, told RFE/RL that the Optima Ventures ICSID case is a fairly big deal as arbitrations against the United States are rare.

The overwhelming majority of ICSID arbitration cases involve emerging market nations, such as Ukraine, where the rule of law is weak.

Of the more than 800 cases registered by ICSID over the decades, the United States has been a party in only 5 cases, or 0.6 percent, according to the ICSID. Eastern European and Central Asian is the largest region by cases, accounting for just over a quarter of all cases, according to ICSID.

ICSID was established in the 1960s to settle disputes arising between an investor -- be it an individual or a corporation -- and a foreign government.

However, ICSID arbitration is essentially off-limits to most individuals except the very wealthy due to the high cost of arbitration, Kirtley said.

The average cost of arbitration for a claimant is $6 million, according to a 2017 study by Allen & Overy.

ICSID arbitral tribunals rule on a limited number of issues, including expropriations, and seek to determine if public international law has been violated.

A tribunal may consider rulings by a domestic court when making their decision, but it is not binding, Kirtley said. Thus, an arbitral tribunal can rule that an expropriation was illegal regardless of what a domestic court determined, he said.



Even if a tribunal determines an expropriation was legal, it may still award compensation to a foreign investor, Kirtley said.

However, tribunals generally do not award compensation to a foreign investor if a domestic court expropriates an asset due to a crime, he said.

It is very hard for a foreign investor to win a case when they have unclean hands, he said. If what [Kolomoyskiy] is doing is illegal under American laws, then the United States stands a very low chance of ever having a negative reward rendered against it.

The Department of Justice said it does not believe its actions violate the U.S.-Ukraine Bilateral Investment Treaty, according to the February 5 filing by Optima Ventures.

The United States signed the bilateral treaty with Ukraine that is the basis of Optima Ventures lawsuit in the 1990s.

ICSID arbitration is not the only step Kolomoyskiy and Boholyubov are taking to protect their wealth in the United States.

In December 2020, their U.S. metals holding, Georgian American Alloys (GAA), filed a lawsuit against its U.S. insurance company for not accepting a claim arising from PrivatBanks case against the Ukrainian billionaires and their two American associates.

PrivatBank is suing the tycoons, Korf, and Laber in a Delaware court for hundreds of millions of dollars, claiming they defrauded the bank and used the money to buy U.S. assets, including a GAA subsidiary.

GAAs insurance policy from AXIS included coverage of a wrongful act committed by the company, its subsidiaries or its directors, according to the lawsuit. Korf and Laber are among the holdings directors.

The tycoons and their American associates claim that the PrivatBank lawsuit -- which they describe as representing various errors and omissions with respect to the issuance of corporate loans -- should be covered under the policy.

AXIS did not immediately respond to an RFE/RL request for comment.



We do years of homework and testing before we launch any of these products, says Mr. Kapres.

Responding to demand from builders, distributors and homeowners, Versatex Building Products, LLC, continues to expand its portfolio of authentic color options in maintenance-free PVC for porch ceilings, soffits and accent walls.

Homeowners dont stop loving color and texture when they insist on labor-saving, weather-resistant trim, says Versatex Vice President for Sales Rick Kapres. White PVC has been the standard solution for decades, and it still complements countless architectural styles. But interest has surged in ceilings that show off the traditional warmth of woodor, in many parts of the South, a distinctive shade of blue.

Rick says that's why Versatex originally developed the Canvas Series, a T&G system that marries durable PVC with a variety of realistic, permanent, wood-tone laminates. These innovative materials deliver natural good looks while minimizing the hassles of finishing, installation and periodic care. Recently unveiled choices include:.



Turner Oak, a contemporary greige" shade that's lighter than Walnut.

Kitami, which simulates the elegant carbonized surface of shou sugi ban, an age-old Japanese preservation technique.

They join the already popular Canvas range of Black Cherry, Walnut, Tropical Macore, Amber and Weathered Grey, Mr. Kapres says. All Canvas Series products match the standard Versatex WP4 T&G profile, with tactile woodgrain laminate permanently bonded to a moisture-resistant PVC substrate. The nominal 1x 6" WP4 profile (actual thickness a full ") comes in 18' lengths, and can span up to 24" on center. Matching 4" crown mouldings come in 16' lengths. Color-coordinated touchup kits make short work of butt joints and fastener marks.

Meanwhile, he says, online resources like Houzz, and publications like Southern Living, have helped revive a romantic ceiling color called haint blue or piazza blue. It has a long history in the Carolinasespecially for historic or country-style projects. Versatex has just ushered in its own, innovative Piazza Blue, a color-through, solid-PVC beadboard that is is available in a full 5 1/2" (nominal 6") profile, in 18' lengths.

Both the Canvas Series and the Piazza Blue Stealth beadboard are available through Versatex Building Products distributors nationwide. Contractors, distributors and lumberyard operators can learn more from regional Versatex Building Products representatives, or from Mr. Kapres at 724-857-1111 and rkapres@versatex.com.

We do years of homework and testing before we launch any of these products, says Mr. Kapres. By the time they hit the market, were certain our customers will get exactly the technical performance and aesthetics they depend on us to supply.

About Versatex

Weather-resistant, long-lasting VERSATEX trim materials and systems are manufactured by Versatex Building Products, LLC, of Pittsburgh, a division of The Azek Company, where state-of-the-art facilities produce cellular PVC extrusion products such as VERSATEX trimboards, sheet, T&G, mouldings, prefabricated corners, and one-piece column wraps; the innovative VERSATEX soffit system; dimensionally compatible VERSATEX Max nominal 2-by boards; and the Canvas Series, which pairs the beauty of wood with the durability of PVC. Details are posted at http://www.versatex.com.

Tawazun announced its participation at The International Defence Exhibition and Conference (Idex 2021) and the Naval Defence And Maritime Security Exhibition (Navdex 2021) from the February 21 to 25 at the Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Centre (Adnec).

Tawazun Economic Council had previously signed an agreement with Adnec to become the Principal Partner of this edition of Idex and Navdex 2021.

Tarek Abdulraheem Al Hosani, the Chief Executive Officer of the Tawazun Economic Council said: The principal partnership and participation of Tawazun Economic Council in Idex 2021 and Navdex 2021 is in line with the vision of Tawazun. Our objectives include supporting and empowering the defense and security industry and contributing to the development of the UAE Armed Forces capabilities. Tawazun is also focused on developing the UAEs technological and industrial capabilities and in supporting the governments directives of achieving sustainable economic growth in the country.

The Tawazun Economic Council looks forward to showcasing its core operations and crucial role in empowering the national defence and security industry and enabling strategic partners and specialised international companies by focusing on three key areas.

The first area covers support of acquisitions and procurements for the Armed Forces, GHQ and Abu Dhabi Police, providing technical support and ensuring utilisation of the latest technologies. The second area addresses the role of Tawazun in R&D and innovation, as well as seeking an effective contribution for transfer of advanced technology. The third area of focus is on Tawazuns role in providing multiple investment options to its strategic partners, global defense companies and suppliers, whilst creating an enabling legal framework for the military and security industry.

This will significantly contribute to the advancement of the national economy and enhance Tawazuns ability to attract foreign direct investment.

Idex and Navdex 2021 count as an ideal platform to exhibit the most cutting-edge advancements in the global defence and security industries. Consequently, they have become viewed as the most prominent exhibitions worldwide in the defence industry, and are counted as the destination of preference by many companies working in this active sector, Al Hosani added.

Mona Ahmed Al Jaber, Director of Tawazun Corporate Communications Department commented: The Tawazun Economic Council counts Idex and Navdex as an important opportunity to promote its objectives, programmes, methodologies, and future projects.

The Tawazun Economic Council pavilion in this edition of Idex is 1600 sqm of space, which covers a 74% increase in size, in comparison to its previous space in the last edition of Idex. The reason for the increase is because of Tawazun managements strong belief in the importance of the exhibition and the opportunity that it offers to communicate with strategic partners in the defence sector.

The pavilion includes specialised projects and advanced technologies developed locally and in collaboration with several strategic partners. Tawazun, Proof House, Strategic Development Fund and others will be showcasing their individual programmes and projects.

Al Jaber added: In this edition of the exhibition, the Council will offer a virtual platform to allow those who cannot visit in person to explore the pavilion virtually. Viewers also have the ability to interact with the exhibitors to get more information about the projects or set online meetings. The virtual platform reflects the consideration Tawazun has taken to ensure the protection and safety of the public and are in line with its own safety measures and efforts to limit the spread of Covid-19. -- Tradearabia News Service
Thousands of people stormed the streets of Nepal on Wednesday to protest against the dissolution of the parliament by caretaker Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli. Former Prime Ministers Pushpa Kamal Dahal, Madhav Kumar Nepal, and other members of the Nepal Communist Party (NPC) had called upon people to come out on the streets and protest against Oli's recent move to dissolve the parliament and announce fresh elections in April and May.

Read: Nepal Saddened By Uttarakhand Glacier Burst; Offers Deep Condolences To Bereaved Families

People heeded the call of protest, while many were brought by members of the NPC in buses and trucks to make it one of the biggest rallies in Nepal since it transformed from constitutional monarchy to democracy a few years ago. Security was beefed up in the capital Kathmandu, with police personnel securing key government offices. However, there were no reports of violence on Wednesday.

What's happening in Nepal?

The political turmoil in Nepal became worse after Prime Minister Oli dissolved the parliament in December 2020, days before the winter session was scheduled to begin. According to experts, PM Oli feared opposition from his own party members as well as a no-confidence motion, which prompted him to recommend President Bidya Devi Bhandari to dissolve the democratically elected body and call for fresh polls.

Read: In Nepal, Prachanda Seeks India & China's Help Against Oli's Move To Dissolve Parliament

Oli had long anticipated opposition from his own party members since he was facing growing pressure over his authoritarian way of running the government and his repeated interference in party affairs despite handing over the reign to Pushpa Kamal Dahal. Oli and Dahal had reached an agreement in 2017, prior to the general election, where both leaders had decided to share the Prime Minister's seat for an equal period of time.

Read: India & Nepal Jointly Inaugurate 108km Road To Improve Daily Connectivity At Border

However, after winning the polls and becoming the PM with the help of the coalition, Oli refused to fulfill the terms of the agreement and instead tried to convince Dahal by offering him the chairmanship of the party. Oli had won the most number of seats in the election but was still short of the majority mark required to form the government, which he did by merging his and Dahal's party into one entity - NCP.

What's ahead for Oli?

Since the dissolution of the parliament, Oli has been removed from the party and is facing numerous petitions in Nepal's Supreme Court. It is now up to the apex court of Nepal to decide whether the move made by Oli was constitutional. The court will make a decision on the basis of certain factors, including if there was a chance of forming a new government without dissolving the parliament. If the court approves Oli's move, the caretaker Prime Minister will remain until the next elections, and if it rules reinstates the parliament, he will likely be removed by a no-confidence vote.

Read: Former Nepal PMs Protest Against Oli's Move To Dissolve Parliament
New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell, City Council members and other top municipal officials got their first doses of the coronavirus vaccine Wednesday at New Orleans East Hospital.

The public vaccinations were aimed at encouraging residents to get inoculated.

The vaccinations were administered after Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards added local officials involved in the response to the coronavirus pandemic to the list of people eligible for the shots. Other groups currently eligible are people who are 65 or older, health care providers, law enforcers, first responders and some elections staff.

Anyone who wants to schedule a vaccination may find more information on covidvaccine.la.gov or by calling 211.

Other local officials who were scheduled for shots Wednesday were Chief Administrative Officer Gilbert Montano, City Attorney Sunni LeBoeuf, Communications Director Beau Tidwell, Chief of Staff John Pourciau, Deputy Chief of Staff Liana Elliott, Chief Financial Officer Norman White and Executive Director Tyrell Morris of the Orleans Parish Communications District, City Hall said.

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The state Department of Health reported that more than 448,000 people in Louisiana had received the first dose of the vaccine as of Tuesday and more than 189,000 of those had received both doses needed for the vaccines to work at full effectiveness.

Earlier in the week, Edwards, Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin and Jefferson Parish President Cythnia Lee Sheng received their first shots.
In a bizarre or rather appawlling' incident, a Texas lawyer accidentally showed up to a video court hearing unable to remove the cat filter on his Zoom account.

The hearing took a hilarious turn when Judge Roy B Ferguson addressed the cat filter situation to lawyer Rod Ponton who was struggling to remove the filter.

"Mr. Ponton, I believe you have a filter turned on in the video settings," the judge can be heard saying in the video.

However, this did not stop Ponton from carrying on with his work as other lawyers in the hearing smiled.

"I'm prepared to go forward with it. I'm here to live, I'm not a cat," Ponton said.



IMPORTANT ZOOM TIP: If a child used your computer, before you join a virtual hearing check the Zoom Video Options to be sure filters are off. This kitten just made a formal announcement on a case in the 394th (sound on). #lawtwitter #OhNo @zoom_ushttps://t.co/I0zaj0wu6K

 Judge Roy Ferguson (@JudgeFergusonTX) February 9, 2021

"If a child used your computer, before you join a virtual hearing check the Zoom Video Options to be sure filters are off," Ferguson tweeted as he posted a video of the incident. "This kitten just made a formal announcement on a case in the 394th."

Ponton told NBC news that he was forced to use his secretary's computer, because the office was in the midst of a move.

"If I could make everyone laugh at my expense I'm happy to do that. It's an example of what can happen in our computer connected world," Ponton told the news portal.

The video which is now going viral online was first posted on February 9 by the court's YouTube channel and has over 1,616,069 views at the time of writing this.
New York sues pro-life activists for harassing Planned Parenthood staff, patients

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The state of New York has filed a lawsuit against a pair of pro-life activists that it claims have blocked access to a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic and harassed the staff and patients.

New York Attorney General Letitia Jamesfiled the complaint Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York against Bevelyn Beatty and Edmee Chavannes.

According to the complaint, Beatty and Chavannes engaged in obstructive, threatening, harassing, and violent activity against the Planned Parenthood of Greater New Yorks Manhattan Health Center in New York City.

The suit alleges that the two frequently held protests at the clinic throughout 2020 by standing near the entrances and shouting at close range to staff and patients as they access the facility.

The filing claims that Beatty and Chavannes pounded on and screamed through the clinics glass windows.

Furthermore, the legal filing states that Beatty slammed a staff members hand into a door, slapped a volunteer in the face and threatened to knock a clinic escort unconscious.

Chavannes was accused of screaming threats in a staff members face while maskless.

They were both accused of physically blocking the health center's main and side entrances and preventing staff and patients from entering.

The attorney generals office accused the two women of weaponizing the threat of the coronavirus to impede access to the facility since they did not wear face masks.

The complaint seeks to force the two activists to pay compensatory damages for each violation of state law, civil penalties authorized under the law and legal costs the state incurred to carry out the lawsuit.

The complaint also asks for the right to secure a buffer zone around the abortion clinic to guarantee safe access to the facility.

Despite the clear protections under the law, these individuals used violent and illegal tactics to harass, threaten and block women from entering Planned Parenthood,James said in a statement.

Let me be very clear: no person, no business, and no government body has the right to deny or limit a womans access to an abortion, and I will continue to do everything within my legal power to support the reproductive rights of women.

As black pro-life activists have long voiced concern with Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger's history as a proponent of eugenics, Planned Parenthood of Greater New York announced last summer the removal of Sanger's name from its Manhattan clinic because of the woman's racist legacy."

Beatty and Chavannes, who are black and founded At The Well Ministries, had a run-in with the law last summer when they were arrested for defacing Black Lives Matters murals in New York City.

Viral videos of them from last July showed them smearing black paint over a yellow BLM street mural. They called the BLM organization a domestic terrorist organization.

Vote the ungodly, demonic, anti-Christ people out of this nation, Beatty was quoted as saying at the time, adding that onlookers should stand with your police force, vote for Trump, vote Republican, vote for Christians and stand up Christians.

The Staten Island Advance reported at the time that Beatty and Chavannes were charged with criminal mischief but released later that day.

In 2019, New York passed the Reproductive Health Act, which codified the controversial U.S. Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade and expanded abortion access.

Last month, the state was sued over the law by a group of residents. An attorney for the plaintiffs claims that the law has dangerous ambiguities regarding domestic violence issues and how abortion is deemed medically necessary.

The lawyer argued that the law eliminated all criminal penalties for the killing of an unborn child, meaning theres not a separate homicide charge for the murder of a wanted, near term child.

This is not the first time Attorney General James came to the defense of an abortion clinic.

She defended a 15-foot buffer zone in front of an abortion clinic in Rochester. In January 2020, a judge ruled that the city could continue to enforce a 2005 order that established a sidewalk buffer zone outside a local Planned Parenthood facility.

According to James office, she is also litigating a case involving the Choices Womens Medical Center in Queens.
Commercial fishers in Hawaii have had enough of monk seals stealing their catches, damaging their gear and even threatening their crew.

But the hefty marine mammals are an endangered species, leading federal officials to look for non-lethal deterrents.

The National Marine Fisheries is proposing fisherman shoot the endangered seals with paintballs and sponge grenades.

However, the notion has sparked fury among animal rights advocates, with some calling the proposal 'horrid' and that it would encourage more abuse against the endangered seals.

The agency says it is now reviewing comments from the public, and the response has been overwhelmingly negative.

Scroll down for video

A Hawaiian monk seal resting on the beach on Kauai, Hawaii. There are only about 1,100 left but new nonlethal methods to deter the massive marine mammals have been met with resistance

The monk seal is one of only two mammals native to Hawaii, but there are only about 1,100 left in the wild, according to the National Wildlife Federation.

The population in the northwestern Islands is estimated to be declining at a rate of 4 percent annually.

According to the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972, animals like the monk seal 'should not be permitted to diminish below their optimum sustainable population.'

The National Marine Fisheries Service, a division of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) published a proposed rule in the Federal Register listing various methods to deter marine mammals without killing or seriously injuring them.

A proposal to use paintballs, sponge grenades and other projectiles on Hawaiian monk seals has been called 'horrid' by animal advocates. 'If I see someone shoot a monk seal with a paintball gun I'm doing the exact same to them' one opponent of the plan tweeted

That list included water guns, paintballs, foam missiles, sponge grenades and even broom and mop handles.

Softer than rubber bullets, sponge grenades are 40-millimeter rounds with foam noses.

The non-lethal weapons have become increasingly popular with police to handle protests because they 'spread the force of impact out over a larger area, reducing the chance of injury,' according to The Washington Post.

But using them against marine mammals has been met with resistance.

Of the more than 330 public comments the Service received, most were against the non-lethal projectiles, according to the Civil Beat, including one from U.S. Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Hawaii), chair of the House Committee on Natural Resources.

'In the face of climate change, fishing, pollution, and other human pressures, marine mammals deserve more protections  not the unnecessary assault and harassment proposed by NOAA,' Grijalva said.

The proposed regulation would only allow projectiles to be fired at the seals 'posterior end,'

Most of the responses opposed using the method against Hawaiian monk seals, one of the only marine mammals found only in the US.

Staffers at Ke Kai Ola, a veterinary hospital dedicated to Hawaiian monk seals, called the guidelines 'lengthy, and difficult for the average lay person to completely read and understand.'

'If this proposed ruling is for the public to understand, most Americans won't take the time nor understand the ramifications,' they added.

Reaction online was equally negative, as one Twitter user threatened: 'If I see someone shoot a monk seal with a paintball gun I'm doing the exact same to them.'

Opponents of the proposal say if sponge grenades or paintballs guns are approved as deterrents, people will assume 'that it is acceptable to shoot seals or harm seals'

The NMFS was also interested in feedback on whether the proposals were appropriate in the context of native Hawaiian culture.

Bertram Weeks, a biologist with the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources, said some Hawaiians consider the monk seal the physical representation of an ancestor or a harbinger of natural phenomena.

'Harming these animals, even in the act of defending one's catch is extremely disrespectful to the cultural importance that has been given to monk seals,' Weeks said.

The proposed rule indicated such tactile deterrents could only be aimed at 'the posterior end' of an animal, 'taking care to avoid the animal's head and blowhole.'

Still, Christine Tarski, a volunteer with Hawaii Marine Animal Response (HMAR), commented that she couldn't 'such a horrid rule' was even being considered.

'I have witnessed the horrible things people now do or attempt to do to these animals while on shore, including attempting to hit seals with rocks, sticks or even motor vehicles,' Tarski wrote.

'If the public witnesses NOAA shooting at seals, even with paintballs or rubber bullets, many people will  assume that it is acceptable to shoot seals or harm seals. We have enough seal abuse and even deaths already without making it seem that it is okay to do so!'

The state's largest marine conservancy group, HMAR said in a Facebook post in September that 'certain deterrence methods are needed and used in a variety of scenarios to support effective coexistence between humans and marine mammals.' .

But the group claimed these strategies were not appropriate when dealing with Hawaiian monk seals.

It urged experts and officials to devise other measures to deter Hawaiian monk seals away from fishers 'and to promote coexistence.'

The NMFS indicated it, too, would prefer fishermen use other methods before resorting to paintballs.

'NMFS strongly encourages fishermen, private property owners, and government officials to practice avoidance techniques prior to attempting to deter any marine mammal,' the agency wrote in the Register.

'Avoiding interactions is the safest method for preventing death or serious injury to marine mammals and the most definitive way to minimize risk to human safety.'

It also encouraged a variety of other strategies, including auditory and visual deterrents  including banging pipes, strobe lights and lasers  and modifications to fishing gear, provided they don't 'result in the death or serious injury of a marine mammal.'

The NMFS says it will publish the final regulations later this year after it completes a review of public comments.

Attacks by tiger sharks are a major contributor to the decline of monk seals in Hawaii, but the mammals can also run into boats and get caught in fishing nets.

In February, the NMFS reported two monk seal pups died after getting entangled in gill nets, which create a 'wall' of filament that indiscriminately ensnares fish and other creatures alike.

'There was no evidence of underlying disease  and no signs of injury,' the agency said. But fluid in the seals' lungs suggest they struggled to breathe before death. Taken together, these findings strongly suggest that both seals died from being held underwater in a net and unable to breathe.'

The Service called the nets 'one of the top threats monk seals face in the main Hawaiian Islands.'

State regulations forbid the use of the nets from 30 minutes after sunset to 30 minutes before sunrise.


Yarmouth prayer gathering moves on-line

The Great Yarmouth meeting of Burn 24-7 prayer is now streaming online every two weeks whilst Covid restrictions continue.

Burn 24-7 is a global worship/prayer movement with 300 locations across the world, including 32 locations within the UK. For the last year this has included Great Yarmouth.



The heart of Burn24-7 is, first and foremost, the passionate pursuit of the presence of God. Participants gather, regardless of denominational affiliation, to cry out to God for an awakening in the church, an unprecedented global harvest of souls and the transformation of entire cities. Burn 24-7 is seen as an expression and fulfilment of the restoration of David's Tabernacle as prophesied in Amos 9:11 and Acts 15:16.



A typical Burn event would be non-stop live worship by teams of worshippers, musicians, artists, and intercessors to worship, pray and create.



However, whilst Covid-19 makes it impossible to meet together, Great Yarmouth Burn 24-7 is streaming online on Facebook. The next meeting will be held on February 13 starting at 7pm and online meetings will take place every two weeks.



Everyone is invited to join in. If you are a worship leader or musician and would like to join in or would like to know more, please contact the directors of Great Yarmouth Burn24-7:



Alick Sutherland 07884 582859

Alan Hendry 07450 814929



Visit the Great Yarmouth Burn 24-7 Facebook page .



For more about the Burn 24-7 movement, visit burn24-7.com .



This article first appeared on Network Yarmouth .

Do you have a news story or forthcoming event relating to Christians or a church in East Norfolk?

If so, e-mail tony.rothe@networknorwich.co.uk with details and, if possible a suitable picture.

Tony Rothe, 10/02/2021
Beijing:

China's Nobel Peace Prize laureate and prominent dissident Liu Xiaobo was cremated on Saturday. He succumbed to cancer while in custody, even as Beijing said his wife was "free so far" but must "avoid trouble" amid international pressure to let her leave the country.



The 61-year-old human rights activist died due to multiple organ failure following a battle with liver cancer on Thursday.



Family members and friends of Liu bade farewell to him at a private ceremony in northeast China's Shenyang city, an official told a media briefing in the city.



Liu's body was cremated in accordance with the will of his family members and local customs, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.



Prior to the cremation, a simple ceremony was held with the attendance of Liu's wife Liu Xia and his friends.



"The cremation of Liu's body on Saturday accords with local customs and respects relatives' wishes," Zhang Qingyang, spokesperson for Shenyang's information office, said.



Liu's relatives, including his wife and brother Liu Xiaoguang, decided to cremate the remains and hold a simple funeral after consultation, the report said.



An official said Liu's body had been cremated, and that plans for the ashes would be finalised later.



The Chinese government, which had long banned Liu's work and even his name, continues to censor the story of his death, deleting social media posts mourning him and blocking online searches containing variations of his name and famed quotes.



China's media outlets, all controlled by the ruling Communist Party, mostly ignored the news on Liu.



The death of Liu, who was sentenced in 2009 for 11 years on the charges of sedition and incarcerated since then has brought the focus on the future of his activist wife Liu Xia, who has also been confined to house detention.



Liu Xia, who was also an artist, poet and a long-time associate of Liu in his uncompromising fight for democracy in China, was allowed to be with him after he was granted medical parole in the month of June.



After Liu's death pressure was mounted by the international community on China to allow Liu Xia to travel abroad to receive the Noble Prize awarded in absentia to her husband in 2010. It was symbolically presented to an empty chair.



Asked about Liu Xia's condition, Zhang said, "Liu Xia is a Chinese citizen, and Chinese relevant departments will protect her legal interests and rights in accordance with the law."



"Liu Xia is free so far, and we want her to avoid trouble because she was in grief after losing a relative," Zhang was quoted as saying.



According to north Chinese customs, the remains of the deceased should be cremated and a funeral held within three days after his or her passing away.



"The remains of Liu was surrounded by plain coloured petals, with wreathes laying around his body at a funeral parlor in southern Shenyang," the Xinhua report said.



"At 6:30 AM Saturday, Liu Xia was the first to bid farewell to her husband to the rhythm of Mozart's Requiem, then Liu's relatives and friends bowed three times in front of his body during the ceremony," it said.



On Friday, while replying to a barrage of questions on Liu and Liu Xia, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told a media briefing here that no "prejudgements" need to be made about Liu Xia's future.



Asked whether China would permit Liu Xia to visit Norway to receive the Noble Peace Prize, Geng said, "Let's not make any prejudgements here," without elaborating.



"As for situation of Lu Xia, I am not aware of that. I can tell you that China is a rule of law country. We will handle relevant case in accordance with law," Geng said.



Liu's death led to international criticism of China's handling of the issue. The leader of the Norwegian Nobel committee Berit Reiss-Andersen said the Chinese government bore a "heavy responsibility" for Liu's death.



On Friday, Geng also refuted criticism of the treatment meted out to Liu, saying that awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to him amounted to "blasphemy".



He said China lodged protests with several countries, including the US, for making "irresponsible statements" on the death of the prominent dissident.



He said China had lodged protests with the US, the UN Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCR) and "certain countries" for interfering in its "judicial sovereignty".



"Liu is a prisoner who was sentenced to imprisonment in accordance with Chinese law...Conferring the prize to such a person goes against the purposes of this award. It's a blasphemy of the peace prize," Geng said.

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WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. (WLFI) - Former Wabash Township Fire Chief Ed Ward is now sharing his side of the story. Ward was fired in December in a whirlwind of controversy. Township Trustee Jennifer Teising said he was conspiring other board members to stage a "coup" against her.

"It's difficult because it changed everything for my family," said Ward.

Ward said his passion in life has been serving the community. He started as a Darlington volunteer firefighter in 1998. More than two decades later, he found himself promoted to fire chief at the Wabash Township Fire Department in March 2019. He acted as interim chief until September before becoming full-time chief.

"The 30,000 people who live in the unincorporated part of West Lafayette still are due a service, they're our customers," he said. "At the end of the day everything should revolve around that."

He wanted several terms legally written out for him to stay on as fire chief, one being that should there be in decision to change leadership, he could return to his previous position as a firefighter. He said he repeatedly asked if Teising had followed through with making that stipulation official, but he said she always had some kind of excuse.

He said it had been a long year and a half trying to move the department forward. He said working with Trustee Teising could be difficult, but he felt they had developed a positive working relationship. That is until he came into the office on December 7th 2020.

"Through the wall I hear her tell the firefighter that she is going to be removing me as chief," he said.

He said he instantly started to prepare. He called his wife. He met with his deputy chiefs to talk about the direction of the department with or without him. He said he had a meeting scheduled with Teising the next day, and he had prepared a list of talking points. The meeting came and went and she didn't bring it up.

He waited in limbo for five days when he said the trustee finally talked with him about his employment status.

"She had told me three different times that I was being placed on paid vacation, three different times paid vacation this and paid vacation that," he said, adding that she wanted to know if he had been talking about her with others. "I was very upfront with her and said the only conversations I've had about you have been people asking where you're at."

Rumors had begun to circulate that Teising had moved to Florida. She had stopped coming to the regular township board meetings. Ward said Teising told him to be on standby and to call her office on January 2nd for further talks about his employment. But on December 21st, the board asked Teising to resign. That same day, she officially terminated Ward.

"She didn't give any sort of rules I'd broken. She didn't give any sort of procedures or policies that had I didn't carry out," he said.

The firefighters walked out in protest of his firing that same day.

Teising sent News 18 the following statement about her decision to fire Ward on December 22nd:

"After having conversations with township personnel, it has come to my attention that the commissioners of Tippecanoe County have been uninterested in approving a fire district if I am the trustee. They are upset with me personally and 'it goes beyond you beating Dave Byers wife in the election'. This has created a problem because both Lafayette and west Lafayette fire chiefs have gone on record at the county council meetings and in writing to the township board members in support of the township fire department fire district. Therefore a faction of the fire department, lead by chief Ed ward have been working with board president Michelle whitbrock to stage a coup and get me to resign from my position. They asked me to resign because I havent actually done anything wrong. During this global pandemic I have been working remotely. I did indeed sell my home and become a renter. All completely within the regulations and laws of our state. Ive attended all board meetings required by my position and supplied all the information necessary for the board to vote and complete their jobs. Which they did. I have been working with the state (we are the only township in Tippecanoe county to do so) to administer state funds in the rental assistance program. I have been working with the non profit task force hotline to make sure that township residents are receiving any funds they are eligible. This has saved the taxpayers tax dollars for next year when foreclosures are likely to start happening. The fire department has told me they have everything they need to do the job and in fact benefits have been expended under my leadership. This blatant power grab and people attacking me for their own political gain is appalling and does nothing but cement my commitment to the voters. The leadership in Tippecanoe county shouldnt be taking their political inspiration from Donald Trump and usurping the will of the people."

Ward said reached out via email to Teising on December 28th requesting a hearing regarding his termination. He said that under Indiana Code 36-8-3-4, he is a due a hearing if it is requested five days of termination. However, Teising responded with, in Ward's eyes, a loophole out of that.

She said that the code only applies to "towns and townships that have full-time, paid police or fire departments." Since Wabash Township has a status of a volunteer fire department, she claimed she didn't have to give him a hearing, even though he was a full-time employee.

The email was also his formal notice that entering any Wabash Township property would be considered trespassing with legal repercussions.

Ward is now suing for wrongful termination.

"It would be the easiest thing for me to grab my stuff and walk away," he said, adding that it's been difficult to justify paying for a lawsuit when he is out of a job, has bills to pay and a family to help support.

However, he said he can't turn his back on the family of firefighters he has who are still with the department and that this fight is bigger than him. It's about the future of the township community.

"My family and I have been blessed with support," he said, getting choked up. "That's a pretty strong thing to help keep you drive forward when you want to quit."

Ward said his days of fighting fires are most likely over, something that is especially hard because of how much he loved his job. He said he has begun to search for another job, with his developed skills as a leader in a workplace. Ward's brother started a GoFundMe to help cover his legal fees.
Tipping his hat to the private sector, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday, in his reply in Lok Sabha to the motion of thanks to the President's address, said that the public sector is essential but the role of the private sector is also vital.

"The public sector is essential but at the same time, the role of the private sector is also vital. Take any sector- telecom, pharma- we see the role of the private sector," he said adding, "If India is able to serve humanity, it is also due to the role of the private sector."

In a sly dig at the Opposition which has been disrupting proceedings in the House demanding a debate on the Centre's three farm laws that are being denounced by farmers across the country as being 'anti-farmers' and benefitting to only big corporates, Modi said, "To use improper words against the private sector may have got votes for a few people in the past but those times are gone. The culture of abusing the private sector is not acceptable any longer. We cannot keep insulting our youth like this."

To use improper words against the private sector may have got votes for a few people in the past but those times are gone. The culture of abusing the private sector is not acceptable any longer. We cannot keep insulting our youth like this: PM @narendramodi PMO India (@PMOIndia) February 10, 2021

Wealth creators are required in the country. How else can wealth be distributed, who will create employment, the PM asked.

The Congress had walked out of Lok Sabha as PM Modi explained the government's stand on the three farm laws earlier. Modi said the Congress has taken different stands in Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha. "A divided and confused party like this can do no good to the country," he added.

The Modi government has often deflected charges of being 'pro-corporate' especially over its policies on wealth creation and business. The Union Budget 2021, too, underlined a slew of measures targeted at attracting investments to revive economic activity crippled by the coronavirus pandemic. The opposition parties criticised it as being a pro-corporate move, while the BJP leaders and Cabinet ministers hailed it as a vision for an Aatmanirbhar Bharat.

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi had said that instead of giving cash in the hands of the people, the government was selling the countrys assets to "Modis crony capitalist friends.
There is some good news from the search and rescue operations for the nearly 30 workers who have been missing since the Uttarakhand glacier burst on Sunday.

They are trapped in the 12-ft-high and about 2.5-km-long 'head race tunnel' (HRT) and teams of the Army, Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), National Disaster Response Force (NDRF), State Disaster Response Force (SDRF) and Uttarakhand Police are trying to clear the pathway so that these people can be taken out safely.

AFP

According to a senior official, the rescuers have not been able to make any contact with those stuck inside but are hopeful for "signs of life".

Uttarakhand Director General of Police Ashok Kumar said all possible efforts will be made to save the lives of those trapped inside the tunnel.

But there is a growing fear that if they are not found soon, it could be too late.

"As time passes, the chances of finding them are reducing. But miracles do happen," Piyoosh Rautela, a senior state disaster relief official told AFP.

AFP

"There's only so much that one can do. We can't push in multiple bulldozers together. We are working round the clock -- man, machinery we are all working round the clock. But the amount of debris is so much that it's going to take a while to remove all that," he said.

Vivek Pandey, a spokesman for the border police told the Times of India that if the 34 are alive, the biggest concern is hypothermia, "which can be fatal in such conditions".

Outside the tunnel, there were medical teams on standby with oxygen cylinders and stretchers, as well as anxious relatives.

AP

"Heavy machines have removed more slush from the tunnel the whole night. A joint team of ITBP, NDRF, SDRF and sister agencies entered into the tunnel this morning.

"The tunnel is approachable till about 120 meters but more slush and water coming from inside the tunnel is making the way ahead difficult," Indo-Tibetan Border Police force spokesperson Vivek Kumar Pandey said in Delhi.

Reuters

Measures like drilling to take oxygen to those trapped inside the tunnel are being contemplated, project consultant A K Shrivastava said at the site in Tapovan.
Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US

Iran ready to help improve the defense capability of Syria

European Parliament head proposes to strengthen sanctions on Russia

UK PM gets married in London

Armenia reports COVID-19 new 81 cases: for people die

EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia

2 people die in Armenia road accident

Nigeria: Students taken hostage a month ago are released

61 quakes recorded in Congo per day

Syrian MFA: EU lost credibility due to blind obedience to US policy

Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack

Mher Grigoryan: Clarification of border points is possible only after withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops from Armenia

Suspicious deal: Whether there was profit from buying DNA IDs?

Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war

4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack

Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities

Kocharyan: I have to ask people how it happened that overwhelming majority elected this leader

Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country

Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia

US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs

Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners

Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions

Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US

Iran intensifies its diplomacy amid Armenia-Azerbaijan border tensions

Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes

Lukashenko accuses West of destabilizing situation in Belarus

Armenia Central Electoral Commission chief on snap elections: No legal basis for postponing, suspending any function

Armenias Pashinyan is met by Yerevan district residents chanting against him

We are ready to be fully engaged in negotiation process to resolve Karabakh issue, says Armenia acting PM

Armenia ex-President Kocharyan gives interview to Russia TV channel

Armenia acting premier: We are ready to start withdrawing troops at any moment

Canada MFA expresses concern over 6 Armenian soldiers capture by Azerbaijan troops

There are omissions in registration documents of political forces that applied to Armenia Central Electoral Commission

Armenia Central Electoral Commission chief: There is activeness in Yerevan for the past day or two

Three new cases of coronavirus reported in Artsakh

Group of US Congress members threaten Azerbaijans Aliyev regime with sanctions

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Armenia National Security Service Reserve Officers' Union members meet with His Holiness Karekin II

EU is ready to help Armenia and Azerbaijan with border delimitation and demarcation

ARF-D member on Nikol Pashinyan: 103 years ago Armenia's founding fathers would have executed him for treason

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Robert Kocharyan on years of his leadership in Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia

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Russia MOD reports on maintenance of ceasefire regime in Nagorno-Karabakh

Armenia acting MOD meets with Russian counterpart in Moscow

Armenia 2nd President: I see possibility of restoring borders of Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast

We can provide our army with some key, modernized weapons, says Armenia ex-President Kocharyan

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan: Captives issue is not one that any opposition force can resolve

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FREDERICK, MD / ACCESSWIRE / February 10, 2021 / Green Health Docs, based in Frederick, MD, is happy to announce that an authorized list of West Virginia cannabis dispensaries has been released on Friday, January 29, 2021. All patients who need to buy medical marijuana from dispensaries for their health issues must obtain a legal West Virginia medical marijuana card. Green Health Docs, a group of medical cannabis doctors, provides risk-free evaluations via telemedicine or in-person visits for those who want to get a WV medical marijuana card. It is risk-free because if the patient doesn't qualify for the medical marijuana card, 100 percent of the money will be refunded.

Those who would like to know more about registering for the West Virginia medical marijuana card with the help of Green Health Docs can visit the website at GreenHealthDocs.com/west-virginia-medical-marijuana-card/, or contact them by phone or email.?

The complete list of dispensaries and registered physicians can be accessed online through the website of the West Virginia Office of Medical Cannabis. Patients in West Virginia who have serious medical conditions were able to register beginning at noon on February 3, 2021. It is important to note that the West Virginia medical marijuana card will provide legal protection and allow patients to purchase and possess medical marijuana products both within the state of West Virginia as well as any state that offers reciprocity. Green Health Docs will be keeping their patients informed about states that offer reciprocity, but the easiest way for patients to find out is by contacting a dispensary in another state an asking if they accept West Virginia medical cards.

The team of physicians at Green Health Docs can offer WV medical marijuana card evaluations online via telemedicine, or in-person visits. Those who register must be a resident of the state of West Virginia and must be at least 18 years of age. If they are less than 18 years old, they must have approval from a parent or guardian caregiver.

The West Virginia marijuana card can only be issued to patients who have certain medical conditions. These conditions include: positive status for human immunodeficiency virus or acquired immune deficiency syndrome; cancer; amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS); multiple sclerosis; epilepsy; severe chronic or intractable pain of neuropathic origin or severe chronic or intractable pain; Huntington's disease; Crohn's disease; neuropathies; Parkinson's disease; post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); Neuro-Bechet's autoimmune disease; sickle cell anemia; spinal cord injury, which is damage to the nervous tissue of the spinal cord with objective neurological indication of intractable spasticity; seizures (including those characteristic of epilepsy); and terminal illness that is defined as a medical prognosis of life expectancy of approximately one year or less if the illness runs its normal course.

To be able to get an evaluation at Green Health Docs, the patient must have a West Virginia driver's license or valid State ID card, plus proof of West Virginia residency. The patient must also provide proof of their medical condition, such as prescriptions, x-ray reports, medical records, doctor's notes, pill bottles, or other acceptable documentation.

The West Virginia medical marijuana card and the certification for the WV cannabis program will be valid for one year, but this can be easily renewed every year. After the approval has been given by the provider, the State of West Virginia may take 30 days to release information regarding the status of the MMJ card. The card will arrive through the mail within seven to 10 business days after payment and approval.

For patients who are under 18 years of age and need a caregiver to qualify for the MMJ card, it is important to note that a caregiver must be at least 21 years of age. He or she must have been selected by the qualifying patient as the person authorized to purchase and possess medical marijuana from the dispensaries that have been authorized by the State of West Virginia.

Green Health Docs is a company made up of physicians, anesthesiologists and surgeons, that have made it their goal to combat the opioid epidemic in the United States by using natural medications like medical marijuana. Dr. Anand Dugar, owner of Green Health Docs, says, "We want to provide patients the ability to access medical cannabis as an alternative to conventional pain medications, anti-anxiety drugs, antidepressants, and other addictive and possibly harmful drugs."

For more information about Green Health Docs, contact the company here:



Green Health Docs

Dr. Anand Dugar

877-242-0362

drdugar@greenhealthdocs.com

930 N East St

Suites 5/6

Frederick, MD 21701

SOURCE: Green Health Docs

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/629124/Authorized-West-Virginia-Medical-Marijuana-Dispensary-List-Has-Been-Released
Even though Trump can no longer be removed from office, conviction would stand as a statement of repudiation for history and permit senators to bar him from running for federal office again

The Senate voted on Tuesday to proceed with the impeachment trial of former president Donald Trump, rejecting his defence teams claim that it would be unconstitutional to prosecute a president after leaving office. But the final tally signalled that his Republican allies could muster enough support to potentially block the two-thirds necessary for conviction.

The 56-44 vote, with six Republicans joining all 50 Democrats, paved the way for the House Democrats trying the case to formally open their arguments on Wednesday afternoon as they seek to prove that Trump incited an insurrection by encouraging supporters who stormed the Capitol last month and disrupted the counting of Electoral College votes.

But the 44 Republicans who agreed with Trumps claim that a former president cannot be subject to an impeachment trial seemed to all but guarantee that he would have the 34 votes he needs on the final verdict to avoid conviction. To succeed, the House managers would need to persuade at least 11 Republican senators to find Trump guilty in a trial that they have deemed unconstitutional.

The vote came after House managers, arguing to proceed with the trial, presented the Senate with a vivid and graphic sequence of footage of Trumps backers assaulting the Capitol last month.

The managers wasted no time moving immediately to their most powerful evidence: The explicit visual record of the deadly Capitol siege that threatened the lives of former vice-president Mike Pence and members of both Houses of Congress juxtaposed against Trumps own words encouraging members of the mob at a rally beforehand.

The scenes of mayhem and violence  punctuated by expletives rarely heard on the floor of the Senate  highlighted the drama of the trial in gut-punching fashion for the senators who lived through the events barely a month ago and now sit as quasi-juror. On the screens they saw enraged extremists storming barricades, beating police officers, setting up a gallows and yelling, Take the building, Fight for Trump and Pence is a traitor! Traitor Pence!

You ask what a high crime and misdemeanour is under our Constitution, Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the leader of the House Democrats prosecuting the case, told the senators after playing the video. Thats a high crime and misdemeanour. If thats not an impeachable offence, then theres no such thing.

Trumps lawyers responded by arguing that his words at the rally on 6 January constituted free speech akin to typical political language and hardly incited the violence. They characterised the impeachment as yet another partisan attack driven by animus that will set a precedent for political retribution as power changes with each election.

The political pendulum will shift one day, Bruce Castor, the lawyer leading off for the former president, told the Senate. This chamber and the chamber across the way will change one day, and partisan impeachments will become commonplace.

The second trial of Trump opened in the crime scene itself, the same chamber occupied on 6 January by the mob that forced senators to evacuate in the middle of counting the Electoral College votes ratifying President Joe Bidens victory.

Never before has a president been tried by the Senate twice, much less after his term has expired, but Trumps accusers argue that his actions in his final days in power were so egregious and threatening to democracy that he must be held accountable.

What you experienced that day, what we experienced that day, what our country experienced that day, is the framers worst nightmare come to life, Representative Joe Neguse, D-Colorado, another impeachment manager, told the senators. Presidents cant inflame insurrection in their final weeks and then walk away like nothing happened.

Even though Trump can no longer be removed from office, conviction would stand as a statement of repudiation for history and permit the senators to bar him from running for federal office again.

The managers maintained that there must be no January exception for presidents to escape repercussions through impeachment on their way out of office and cited a series of writings by the nations framers as well as contemporary conservative scholars.

Trumps lawyers condemned the violence but rejected the suggestion that the former president was responsible for it. They maintained that the Constitution did not permit an impeachment trial of a former president because it was meant to lead to removal, and Trump is no longer in office. If he committed a crime, they said, he could be prosecuted criminally.

This idea of a January amnesty is nonsense, Castor said. There is no opportunity where the President of the United States can run rampant in January at the end of his term and just go away scot-free. The Department of Justice does know what to do with such people.

Peter Baker c.2021 The New York Times Company
The Ghana Federation of Disability Organisations (GFD) on Tuesday held a stakeholder engagement to deliberate on provisions in the Labour Act that are unfavourable to its members and workers in general.



The engagement was to enable members and stakeholders to collectively outline the provisions for consideration in the ongoing review of the Labour Act.



Members of the GFD are from the Ghana Blind Union, Ghana National Association of the Deaf, Ghana Society of the Physically Disabled, Ghana Association of Persons with Albinism, Mental Health Society of Ghana, and Inclusion Ghana (A group of Persons with Intellectual Disability).



Mr Samuel Agbenyega, Senior Industrial Relations Officer, National Labour Commission (NLC), said employers had the right to terminate appointments when workers violated or went contrary to the provisions of a contract, hence advised people to read and understand the terms of contracts well before signing them.



However, he said many employees abused the conditions for termination of appointments in the Labour Act by acting with emotions and without proper documentations, a conduct that he said, was wrong.



Mr Agbenyega said employers were not supposed to engage casual workers for more than six months without employing them.



After six months, they are supposed to give them the same treatment they give to permanent workers, he added.



Mr Alexander Bankole Williams, Chairman of the National Advocacy Committee, GFD, said the provision in the Labour Act, Section 46, which stated that special incentives should be given to Persons with Disability (PWDs) and to business organisations that employed persons with disability should be given strong legal backing to make it more instrumental.



The Section 53, on the other hand, which calls on employers to train and retrain employees, he said, was not compelling enough to encourage the employers to implement those measures, hence called for more mechanisms to enforce it.



Members of the Federation called on government to ensure that the NLC had a unit to handle PWDs and their employment issues, and ensure that the composition of the NLC had a PWD on its leadership team.



According to Section 49 of the Labour Act: Persons with disability who enter the public service shall be appointed on the same terms as persons without disability, irrespective of whether they are allowed to work for fewer hours; and shall be classified in accordance with their previous period of qualifying service for the purposes of promotion and other public service awards.



Members, therefore, appealed that the new Labour Act considered PWDs by giving them exceptions in the conditions of service, especially when they had challenging issues on health.



With the maternity leave, at stated in Section 57 of the Act, the members requested that special considerations be given to mothers of children with disability to enable them to spend fewer hours at work or if possible, work from home to enable them give their children significant attention.

Source: GNA









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IndiGo parent InterGlobe Aviation pays Rs 2.1 crore to settle case with SEBI

InterGlobe Aviation, the parent of low-cost carrier IndiGo, has paid Rs 2.10 crore to Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) to settle a pending case. The case pertains to alleged corporate governance lapses and listing norms violations that were raised by the company's co-promoter Rakesh Gangwal. The company has settled the matter "without admitting or denying any violation on its part.

E-commerce companies under govt scanner on retailers' complaints: Piyush Goyal

The government is investigating some e-commerce companies as there have been complaints from consumers and small retailers about certain practices followed by these companies, Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal said on Tuesday. Saying that India's foreign direct investment (FDI) policy for e-commerce sector is robust, Goyal said the government is considering issuing some clarifications to ensure that fair trade practices are followed.

Future Retail Q3 loss widens to Rs 847 crore; revenue plummets 71%

Future Retail, which operates retail stores such as Big Bazaar, FBB, Foodhall, Easyday and Nilgiris, saw its net loss widening to Rs 846.92 crore during December quarter of 2020, as business operations continued to face the impact of COVID-19 pandemic. The Kishore Biyani-led company had posted consolidated net loss of Rs 692.36 crore in the September quarter of the current fiscal and a net profit of Rs 164.56 crore in the year ago period.

Trans-fatty acids to be limited to 2% in food products from January 2022

Trans-fatty acids cannot exceed more than 2 percent of oils/fats present in food products from January 2022. The regulation, Food Safety and Standards (Prohibition and Restrictions on Sales) Second Amendment Regulations, 2021, notified on February 2, places India in the league of countries that have best practice policies for elimination of trans-fat from food products.

Biden administration welcomes India's emergence as leading global power

Describing India as one of the most important partners of the US in the Indo-Pacific region, the Biden Administration on Tuesday said that it welcomes India's emergence as a leading global power and its role as a net security provider in the region. The United States, he noted, also remains India's largest and most important trading partner, with total bilateral trade increasing to USD146 billion in 2019. US companies, of course, are a large source of India's foreign direct investment, he said.

Karnataka to create 10 lakh jobs in IT, related sectors under Digital Economy Mission by 2025

The Karnataka Digital Economy Mission (KDEM) will create ten lakh jobs by 2025 in the state as it will attract more investments in the information technology sector, Karnataka Deputy Chief Minister Dr C N Ashwath Narayan said on Tuesday. He was speaking at the inauguration of the office of Karnataka Digital Economy Mission which has the objective of increasing digital economy contribution to GSDP to 30 per cent and launch of the 'Beyond Bengaluru' report which facilitates achieving this target.
The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
KYODO NEWS - Feb 11, 2021 - 02:09 | All, Japan

Japan and the United States have broadly agreed to extend by one year the current deal on Tokyo's costs for hosting American troops, Japanese government sources said Wednesday.

Under the agreement, Japan will shoulder roughly 200 billion yen ($1.91 billion) in fiscal 2021, around the same level as last year, for the so-called host nation support, they said, adding a formal accord is expected to take place soon.

Talks for cost-sharing for fiscal 2022 and onwards will resume in April later, they said.

The current five-year deal will expire next month.

Tokyo shoulders part of the cost of stationing around 55,000 U.S. military personnel in Japan, including their utility, labor and training expenses, under a bilateral security treaty.

Japan had tentatively earmarked 201.7 billion yen for the initial budget plan for fiscal 2021, about the same amount as the previous year.

Working-level talks on a fresh agreement began in November under former President Donald Trump, who had criticized the alliance as one-sided. Trump had pressured Tokyo to vastly increase its burden, but the talks were put on hold until Joe Biden's administration was inaugurated in January.

Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi, in his first telephone talks with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in late January, explained Japan's idea of a tentative extension. The plan was proposed by Tokyo during the working-level talks, which resumed on Feb. 2 and was held for the first time under Biden.

In the cost-sharing talks for fiscal 2022 and onwards, Japan and the United States are set to discuss their mutual roles in strengthening the alliance, including in new defense fields such as space and cybersecurity.

The Biden administration, with his focus on collaborating with allies to counter China's military rise, may ask Japan to contribute more financially.

Such bilateral cost-sharing negotiations are conducted roughly every five years and are usually concluded by December of the final year of the agreement, so as to time it when Japan compiles its budget plan.

But the latest round was slowed down by the transition from Trump to Biden and the novel coronavirus pandemic that restricted reciprocal travel by the negotiators.

New Delhi:

Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti on Saturday said that all countries have condemned Amarnath terror attack but it is surprising that we didnt hear anything from China.

The way they (China) should condemn the cross border terrorism, it hasn't been done by China, said Mufti.

Speaking on situation in J&K, Mufti said that situation in the state is not of law and order, external dimensions are there where the neighbouring country gets involved and it is internal too.

Earlier in the day, Mufti met Home Minister Rajnath Singh at his residence in Delhi to discuss the issue of terrorism in Kashmir valley and terror attacks on pilgrims of Amarnath Yatra.

Speaking to media Mufti said that 'outside' forces are responsible for using Kashmir to spread communal riots in India.

Mufti also raises concern over Chinas role in Kashmir valley and said that China is responsible for the turmoil in the state. J&K CM also said that steps will be taken to stop Pakistans terror funding activities.

J&K CM also said that all political parties of the country are united to provide solution to Kashmir problem.

On article 270 of the Indian Constitution, Mufti said that article 370 is associate with sentiments of people of Kashmir.

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At the meeting participated along with President Hernandez, and WHO Director-General, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the Foreign Minister, Lisandro Rosales, the Minister Coordinator of the Cabinet for Economic Reactivation, Carlos Madero, and the coordinator for the COVID emergency in Francisco Morazan province, Yolany Batres.

After the meeting, President Hernandez reported that WHO Director-General reiterated his commitment to do everything possible to make Honduras the first country in Latin America to receive the vaccine donated by the Covax program in the quantities offered.

Meanwhile, the Minister Coordinator of the Cabinet for Economic Reactivation, Carlos Madero, announced that the first delivery would be arriving in the country at the end of February. This announcement took place after his participation at a high-level meeting with Dr. Seth Berkley, CEO of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, which leads COVAX procurement and deliver.

This first vaccines will target the country's health personnel, "we will begin this process with the vaccination of front-line workers, including doctors, nurses, laboratory staff and all workers at hospitals", he said.

Hernandez's government designed a solid national strategy to immunize 81 percent of the population from COVID-19.

Para mas informacion: https://presidencia.gob.hn/index.php/gob/el-presidente/8943-queremos-hacer-de-honduras-un-ejemplo-de-como-podemos-levantarnos-de-una-desgracia-natural-y-de-una-emergencia-sanitaria-presidente-hernandez

SOURCE Government of Honduras

'. Indians often refer to jam as Kissan Jam, and that is because generations have grown up consuming Kissan's Mixed Fruit Jam for breakfast. However, when supply chain mechanisms of most companies, including that of Hindustan Unilever, which manufactures Kissan Jam, came to a halt during the Coronavirus lockdown last year, consumers had little choice but to try out locally manufactured brands. By virtue of their proximity to the market, the local brands were able to service customers better.

Panchgani-based Mala's Fruit Product's jams and ketchups came to the rescue of consumers not just in Maharashtra but also in adjoining Gujarat, through general trade as well as ecommerce platforms such as Grofers and Big Basket. Murtaza Mala, Partner, Mala's Fruit Products, says that jams and ketchup saved his business during the peak of the lockdown. "In fact, jams and ketchup helped us run our factories."

Though Mala's father, Taiyab Mala, started the business way back in 1958 by making six bottles of strawberry jam everyday, it was the Mala's juices, crushes and cordials which eventually became popular. A trip to Panchgani would never be complete without indulging in strawberry and cream topped with generous portions of strawberry crush at the Mala's restaurant. Almost 40 per cent of Mala's revenues comes from the HOREKA segment, where it supplies its beverages, crushes and cordials.

During the COVID-19 lockdown, when the restaurants shut down Mala's beverage business came to a complete halt. "Even after the restaurants opened, consumers were averse to consuming cold beverages because they feared they would catch a cold. The beverage business is coming back now, but it's still not what it was pre-COVID," explains Mala. It was during this time that the company's food business (jams and sauces) took off in general trade and ecommerce.

Around 40 per cent of the company's business through the COVID months have come from general trade. "We do a lot of R&D on fruit-based products. In fact, our jams have 100 per cent fruit pulp unlike others which use only 40 per cent pulp."

Apart from HORECA and general trade, around 20 per cent of the company's revenue in the past few months has been coming from contract manufacturing. The private label jam, ketchup, and ready-to-drink fruit beverages of most retail chains are manufactured by Mala's. "Contract manufacturing has grown by 100 per cent in the past couple of years," claims Mala.

COVID, says the third-generation entrepreneur, has taught him the importance of having a basket of products. "You need to have a basket of products, comprising of products which people eat on a regular basis. Beverages are a party phenomenon, not a regular consumption item." Mala's has 200 SKUs and manufactures 200 tonnes of jam everyday.

Also Read: Future Group shares rise up to 10% after Delhi HC lifts 'Status Quo' order on RIL deal
AUTRICIRI CIRCU W! OFFICE OF THE FULTON COUNTY DISTRICT ATTORNEY ATLANTA JUDICIAL CIRCUIT 136 PRYOR STREET SW, 3RD FLOOR ATLANTA, GEORGIA 30303 TELEPHONE 404-612-4639 Fani T Willis District Attorney ICT 831 February 10, 2021 The Honorable Geoff Duncan Lieutenant Governor and President of the Senate 240 State Capitol Atlanta, GA 30334 VIA HAND DELIVERY Dear Governor Duncan: This letter is notice that the Fulton County District Attorney has opened an investigation into attempts to influence the administration of the 2020 Georgia General Election. This investigation includes, but is not limited to, potential violations of Georgia law prohibiting the solicitation of election fraud, the making of false statements to state and local governmental bodies, conspiracy, racketeering, violation of oath of office and any involvement in violence or threats related to the election's administration. It has come to our attention via media reports that contacts were made by subjects of the investigation with other cies that could be investigating this matter, luding the Secretary of State, the Attorney General and the United States Attorney's office for the Northern District of Georgia. As such, this office is the one agency with jurisdiction that is not a witness to the conduct that is the subject of the investigation. This agency has jurisdiction over this matter because this judicial circuit is where the Georgia government entities that were contacted are headquartered, including the Office of the Governor, the Secretary of State, the Attorney General and the General Assembly. This letter is notification that all records potentially related to the administration of the 2020 General Election must be preserved, with particular care being given to set aside and preserve those that may be evidence of attempts to influence the actions of persons who were administering that election. Please remind your staff that it is a crime under Georgia law to destroy records created or received in the performance of government duty other than through operation of an approved retention schedule. Should any retention schedule in your office dictate that relevant records be destroyed before being provided to my office, please suspend that schedule regarding such records immediately. Please be mindful that such records include email messages related to official duties that were sent or received by government employees on both governmental and nongovernmental email accounts. Please remind your employees to preserve any potentially relevant messages that were sent via any email account.
Taoiseach Micheal Martin is likely to require a Covid vaccine if he travels to the White House for St Patrick's Day.

Diplomatic sources briefed on discussions around the potential Washington DC trip said there would be an expectation that Mr Martin would be vaccinated ahead of a meeting with US President Joe Biden.

It's understood officials in Washington would be surprised if Mr Martin is not vaccinated.

There has also been surprise among US officials over reports in the Republic of a potential public backlash if Mr Martin is vaccinated and the trip goes ahead.

Sinn Fein has called on the Taoiseach not to go to the US given current travel restrictions.

Stormont leaders Arlene Foster and Michelle O'Neill have already said they will not be on the trip this year.

Mr Biden, senior US politicians and several hundred White House officials have already been vaccinated.

If required to undergo vaccination, Mr Martin would need to receive his first dose soon in order to be fully vaccinated in time for the trip.

The Taoiseach's spokesman said a decision on whether to go ahead with the visit will be made in the next two weeks.

"His position has always been that he and the Cabinet will take their place in the vaccination schedule on public health advice, which is after the over-70s and the front line healthcare workers," he said.

"We would have to get to a position where a trip is happening and if vaccination is part of the public health protocol for the visit that would have to be considered. Travel to Brussels is possible with testing protocols, but the US might have different protocols."

The White House did not respond to queries about the protocols for visiting foreign dignitaries.

Some senior Government figures believe the Taoiseach is unlikely to travel given the status of the virus.

Officials in Dublin and Washington have discussed a possible virtual event, with Irish diplomats confident a "substantive" engagement will go ahead either way.

Outlining Sinn Fein's opposition to the US trip on Monday, Dublin Fingal TD Louise O'Reilly told Virgin Media: "In the midst of a global pandemic, when people are being told don't go 5km from your homes, then I think he should show some leadership."

Ms O'Reilly, whose constituency is nearly 30km from Virgin's studios, said: "All travel that can be avoided should be avoided."
The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) has announced that it provided Egypt with a 1 million contribution for the construction of a dry port and logistics centre in 10th of Ramadan City.

The sum will be used in the preparation and execution of the project, EBRD said on Wednesday.

The new dry port is aims to upgrade the efficiency of Egypts transport infrastructure by reducing congestion at seaports and creating the conditions for accelerated customs processes and procedures, according to the EBRD.

It also added that facilitating trade in this way will contribute to an increase in the competitiveness of local producers, which will help accelerate sustainable economic growth and create employment opportunities.

The project is part of Egypts transport master plan, which recommends the development of an intermodal corridor extending from Alexandria on the Mediterranean coast to El-Sokhna on the Red Sea coast.

The bank said that infrastructure development is one of the strategic priorities of the EBRD and one of the pillars of its business activities.

We are very proud to support the preparation of sustainable infrastructure in Egypt to be implemented and financed by the private sector. The dry port in 10th of Ramadan City is the second in Egypt to receive funds from the Banks Infrastructure Project Preparation Facility which demonstrates our commitment to this approach, said Heike Harmgart, the EBRDs managing director for the southern and eastern Mediterranean region.

10th of Ramadan City was founded in the 1970s in close vicinity to the capital Cairo, and is one of the most industrialised municipalities in the country.

As a country with a growing population and economy, Egypt needs urgent investment in its infrastructure capacity to alleviate the pressure on existing ports, shipment points and trade centres. New facilities are required to reduce congestion, allow for a better distribution of goods and let trade flow freely, according to the EBRD.

Egypt is a founding member of the EBRD. Since the start of the banks operations there in 2012, the EBRD has invested over 7 billion in 127 projects in the country.

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Drawing on her extensive advertising and marketing experience, Sadira will help establish the Happy Money brand and ignite the Happy Money Movement  all with the goal of improving members' relationships with money and transforming lives through a human-centered, science-driven approach. As CMO, her scope of work spans everything from growth marketing to communications  overseeing all supporting teams, including Happy Money's internal brand and design agencies.

"In bringing Sadira to Happy Money, we now have the right team in place to drive our business forward and architect sustainable growth," said Scott Saunders, Happy Money CEO and Founder. "Sadira shares our mission for helping borrowers become savers and has her finger on the pulse of what consumers are looking for from Happy Money. With her dynamic, strategic leadership and consumer-centric mindset, she will help bring our vision to life in new ways and accelerate our growth in the months and years to come."

From her agency experience leading consumer engagement for Coca-Cola, Verizon, and MillerCoors to her most recent role at PepsiCo, Sadira has been recognized for her ability to transform the way brands connect with consumers. While at PepsiCo, Sadira revitalized multiple iconic brands, broke the internet with the 'puppymonkeybaby' Super Bowl commercial, oversaw multi-billion-dollar Frito-Lay brands (Lay's, Ruffles, and Fritos), and led the highly successful launch of LIFEWTR. Among other accolades, she has been named a Brand Genius by Adweek, one of AdAge's Women to Watch, and one of Savoy's Top Influential Women in Corporate America.

"Throughout my career, I've had a hunger for growth fueled by a love of the consumer and a passion for purpose. That sense of purpose drew me to Happy Money and its mission-driven approach to fintech," said Sadira Furlow, Happy Money CMO. "By leveraging behavioral science and a deep understanding of our consumers as well as our partners, we are shifting the financial services paradigm and creating an entirely new category at the intersection of finance and human happiness that Happy Money will own."

Sadira joins Happy Money during a time of rapid growth, both within the company and in its expanding ecosystem. Happy Money recently announced strategic partnerships with several new mission-aligned financial institutions to help originate personal loans for individuals who want to eliminate high-cost credit card debt, increase savings, and start on a path toward financial wellness.

With Sadira as CMO, Happy Money is entering a new and exciting chapter of building the Happy Money brand while remaining laser-focused on its mission of Helping Borrowers Become Savers.

About Happy Money

Happy Money is a financial technology company, delivering digitally-native financial tools and services for human happiness through its purpose-driven marketplace between mission-aligned capital and consumers. Happy Money is creating an alternative to the "Sad Money" system with a connected ecosystem of consumer financial products designed to help borrowers become savers. Happy Money. A Happier Future.

Backed by leading investors including Anthemis Group, Tencent Holdings and CMFG Ventures, Happy Money has helped over 100,000 members pay off their credit card debt since inception. Founded in 2009, Happy Money has a diverse employee base of over 300 people across the United States. For more information, please visit www.happymoney.com.

SOURCE Happy Money

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Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-11 02:11:36|Editor: huaxia

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A man works at a coin workshop in Cairo, Egypt, on Feb. 10, 2021. Egypt has started issuing 15 million commemorative coins in appreciation of the role played by medical workers in fighting COVID-19 in the country, an Egyptian finance ministry official told Xinhua on Wednesday. (Xinhua/Ahmed Gomaa)

CAIRO, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- Egypt has started issuing 15 million commemorative coins in appreciation of the role played by medical workers in fighting COVID-19 in the country, an Egyptian finance ministry official told Xinhua on Wednesday.

"We have already started issuing the coins and making them available in the markets. The issuing of the 15 million coins will be completed within the next six months. But they will remain in the people's hands for years as a coin's lifespan varies between 15 and 20 years," said Sherif Hazem, an adviser to the Egyptian finance minister.

He noted that there will be 10 million one-pound coins and 5 million half-pound ones, for they are frequently used by Egyptians in everyday life, "instead of issuing gold or silver commemorative coins to be collected only by a few people."

The coins feature Egyptian doctors and nurses with the words "Medical Teams of Egypt." Hazem explained that the "Medical Teams of Egypt" include doctors, nursing staff, paramedics and also administrative staff who played "a huge role" in fighting the pandemic nationwide.

"Commemorative coins raise people's awareness of current events, projects and efforts," he said, noting that such coins get the attention of the Egyptians, especially the youth.

The gesture has been appreciated by medical personnel.

Mohamed Ali, undersecretary of the Health Affairs Directorate of Matrouh province in northern Egypt, said that it is "a wonderful idea that raises the morale of medical workers whose role has been greatly recognized after the pandemic."

In late January, Egypt started vaccinating the country's medical staff with Chinese Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccine.

Ali noted that the medics of Matrouh hospitals have already started receiving the vaccine.

Egypt has registered a total of 170,780 COVID-19 cases, including 9,751 deaths and 133,098 recoveries.

Along with managing the complex work of delivering vaccines to more than 300,000 people, give or take, in the county, health officials also are working to identify and address worries and myths that might keep people from being inoculated against the virus.

Governor AbdulRahman AbdulRazaq has vowed to suspend members of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in Kwara who have taken the party to court over its membership registration exercise and the removal of the party chairperson in the state.

At a meeting with party leaders loyal to him on Saturday, Mr AbdulRazaq said the party would take a decisive action against the dissidents in the party.

The governor said the members had hatched their plots in Abuja to frustrate the membership registration exercise of the party in the state through needless litigations.

It has come to our notice that some people were hatching a series of plots from Abuja to stop APC membership registration.

They went to court to challenge the process when it has already begun. This was designed to frustrate the exercise but we are unperturbed.

However, we need to sound a note of warning that those fanning ember of disaffection in our party risk suspension. The APC leadership will take decisive action on them on Monday so that our people can have rest of mind.

From our own end, we can assure you again that there is no cause for alarm. Our members and those interested in the party should go to their polling unit from Tuesday and register, Mr AbdulRazaq said.

PREMIUM TIMES has obtained the court documents filed by the aggrieved party members.

Insiders in the governors office also informed this newspaper that Mr AbdulRazaq believes the suit was sponsored by his opponents in the party.

He believes that those people were sponsored by some bigwigs in the party like Lai (Mohammed), Gbemi Saraki, Gobir and others. And the suspension threat is targeted at them.

He will most likely orchestrate the suspension of those applicants any time from Monday. Then, people he suspected to be their sponsors, another source stated.

However, the spokesperson of the governor, Rafiu Ajakaiye, denied that the governor plans to suspend anyone when PREMIUM TIMES reached out to him.

But he said the party has the right to enforce its rules on members.

The governor did not say he is suspending anyone. He has no powers to suspend party officials. What he said is that some party members have run foul of the laws of the party such as taking the party to court in manners contravening party rules.

He said the party, for the sake of sanity and discipline, will have the right to invoke relevant laws to ensure that its rules are complied with by its members, he said to this newspaper.

When contacted, the spokesperson of the party, Tajudeen Aro, told PREMIUM TIMES that the party is not worried about the suit, stating that the Federal High Court lacks jurisdiction to hear such matters.

On the proposed suspension, he said the party had not made the decision yet.

The decision has not been taken as Im talking to you, he said.

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The press officer to Mr Mohammed, Joe Mutah, declined comments when this newspaper sought the reaction of his principal on Tuesday.

He said he was on an assignment in Kaduna State and would not be able to respond to the enquiries sent.

Backstory

The development stemmed from the lingering crisis in the party centred on a rift between Mr AbdulRazaq and a group of party leaders led by the Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed.

It recently escalated when Bashir Bolarinwa, who is loyal to Mr Mohammed, was removed as the party chairperson and replaced with Abdullahi Samari.

Although the national body and executives of the North-central zone of the party have intervened in the matter, they are yet to reconcile the warring factions.

Observers say the lingering crisis is a threat to the membership registration and revalidation exercise which began in the state on Tuesday.

Earlier, a meeting scheduled for last Wednesday ahead of the exercise was violently disrupted after supporters of Governor AbdulRazaq clashed with those behind Mr Bolarinwa.

Suit

According to the originating summons filed on January 29, 11 chieftains of the party approached the Federal High Court in Abuja, seeking an order to stop Mr Samari from parading himself as the partys caretaker chair in Kwara.

A copy of the court process was exclusively obtained by this newspaper.

The process was filed by the partys welfare officer, Joseph Tsado; Chairman of Isin Local Government area, Bamidele Ogunbayo; Vice Chairman of Ilorin East Local Government, Abdullateef Kolawole, caretaker Vice chairman of Asa Local Government, Imam Abdulkadir, and seven others.

The respondents are the APC, National Secretary of its Convention Planning Committee, John Akpanudoedele; and Mr Samari.

The aggrieved members also want the court to restrain the APC from commencing or continuing the Membership Registration, Revalidation and Update Exercise.

AN ORDER of Interlocutory Injunction restraining the 1st defendant acting through the Chairman Caretaker/Extraordinary convention planning committee (CECPC) or any other members of the Committee from continue to deal with or accord any further recognition to the 3rd defendant as the purported caretaker Chairman of the 1s Defendant Kwara State Chapter pending the hearing and determination of the substantive suit.

AN ORDER OF INTERLOCUTORY INJUNCTION restraining the 3rd defendant from parading himself or holding himself out as the Chairman of the Caretaker Committee of the 1st defendant in Kwara State or perform any function or duties/responsibilities of the caretaker Chairman of the 1st defendant Kwara State Chapter pending the hearing and determination of the substantive suit, the chieftains prayed the court.

AN ORDER OF INTERLOCUTORY INJUNCTION restraining the defendants from commencing and/ or continue the 1st Defendants Membership Registration, Revalidation and Update Exercise scheduled to hold between the 2nd February, 2021 to March 2021 in Kwara State pending the hearing and determination of the substantive suit.

Also, in a follow-up letter addressed to the Governor of Yobe, Mai Mala Buni, who is also the Chair, APC Caretaker and Extra-Ordinary Convention Planning Committee, the plaintiffs urged the party to suspend the registration exercise.

The letter dated February 1 was served through their legal representative, R.O Balogun.

Mr Chairman, the implication of being served with the originating process and the motion on Notice for Injunction is that your party must respect and honour the revered and sacred Institution called Judiciary by putting in abeyance all activities that are connected with the issues raised in the Originating Summons and the prayers contained in the Motion on Notice for Interlocutory Injunction.

In other words, the Membership Registration, Revalidation and Update Exercise scheduled to hold between the 2nd February, 2021 to March 2021 in Kwara State ought to be suspended, pending the hearing and determination of the Motion on Notice.

Judicial authorities have crystalised the need to maintain status quo by the parties, when a matter has been filed before the Court in the interest of all the parties and adherence to the Rule of Law. We wish to restate the settled position of the law that, the Court can invoke its coercive powers under its inherent jurisdiction to ex debito justitiae undo or set aside that which was done by the recalcitrant party during the pendency of the suit and most especially when the motion on Notice for Injunction has been served, Mr Balogun wrote.

Reacting to the moves to suspend his clients over the suit, Mr Balogun said the governors threat should not be taken seriously.

The governor with respect to His Excellency should not be taken seriously if truly he says that, the text message he sent to PREMIUM TIMES read.
Facing rebuke and warnings of fresh sanctions over its imprisonment of opposition politician Aleksei Navalny and the arrest of thousands of Russians who protested his jailing, the Kremlin got a piece of good news recently.

On February 7, the consortium overseeing the construction of a 1,200-kilometer pipeline to supply Russian natural gas to Europe announced it had resumed laying pipes in the final unfinished stretch in Danish waters.

Washington has long opposed the Nord Stream 2 project, arguing it would only make Europe more dependent on Russian energy -- a stance backed by much of Eastern Europe and in particular by Ukraine, a key energy-transit country that would lose out on billions of dollars in transit fees if the Baltic Sea conduit from Russia to Germany were to go into operation.

Given its economic and strategic importance, Nord Stream 2 has been in the spotlight following the jailing of Navalny, the detention of thousands of people who protested his arrest and prison sentence, and the expulsion of three European diplomats whom Russia accused of participating in the protests.



With calls growing louder to pull the plug on the project, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on February 5 -- after the expulsions of the diplomats, who Germany, Sweden, and Poland said were merely observing the protests -- that "for the time being" her stance in support of Nord Stream 2 remained unchanged.

"In connection with the events in Russia, we have already said that we reserve the right to continue sanctions, especially against individuals," Merkel told reporters after talks with French President Emmanuel Macron. "The [German government's] position on Nord Stream 2 is not affected by this for the time being."

In late December 2020, a vessel called the Fortuna put a 2.6-kilometer section of the pipeline in place in German waters.

And on February 6, the consortium overseeing construction of the pipeline announced that the Fortuna had resumed laying pipes in Danish waters not far from the terminus on Germany's Baltic coast.

Despite the fact that the Russian-based company that owns the Fortuna is under U.S. sanctions, the consortium told Reuters, "All works are [being] performed in line with the relevant permits."

France has called on Germany to rethink the project in the wake of the Navalny jailing. "We have always said we have the greatest doubts on this project in this context," European Affairs Minister Clement Beaune told France Inter radio on February 1.

Asked specifically if France wanted Berlin to drop the project, Beaune said, "Indeed, we have already said this."

"Sanctions have already been imposed, we could [add more sanctions] but we have to be clear, they will not be enough," Beaune said, although he acknowledged any final decision would rest with Germany.

New U.S. President Joe Biden has called Nord Stream 2 a "bad deal" for Europe, and White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said on January 26 that he continued to see it that way. But with just that 120-kilometer link in Danish waters, plus a small section near German shores, is there any stopping the project now?

Nord Stream 2 is a joint initiative between Russia's state-owned Gazprom and Germany's Uniper and the Wintershall Dea unit of BASF, Anglo-Dutch Shell, Austria's OMV, and French-based Engie.

Energy And Influence

As the name suggests, there is a Nord Stream 1 pipeline. Nord Stream 2 would double the capacity of the existing Nord Stream pipeline to a total for both of 110 billion cubic meters of gas per year.

For the government of Russia, which is currently the world's biggest energy exporter and relies on oil and gas sales both to fill state coffers and build geopolitical clout, the project is an important one.

In late December, Russian President Vladimir Putin said he hoped the new U.S. administration would not impede the completion of the pipeline. He suggested it would mark a return to what he called "fair competition in international markets" -- apparently a reference to sanctions imposed upon it, which Moscow claims are merely meant to muscle Russia out of the market for U.S. gain.

The United States denies that, and a core U.S. concern about the project is that it could increase Europe's reliance on Russian gas, compromising its energy independence and potentially boosting Moscow's political clout in the region.

In the last decade, Gazprom has boasted of increasing its exports to Europe, grabbing a larger share of the gas market across the continent. It now holds the largest single chunk of imported gas in the market, at 37 percent in 2018, compared with 27 percent in 2011. Norway is second with 27 percent.

The fate of the pipeline will depend largely on the United States and Germany and on whether their positions change in the coming weeks or months.

"The fate of Nord Stream 2 is not clear yet, as it will depend on the results of...U.S.-German negotiations," said Maria Shagina, a research fellow at the University of Zurich

Biden, who was inaugurated on January 20, spoke with Merkel on January 25 and with Putin one day later. But White House readouts of the conversations made no mention of Nord Stream 2.

"We continue to believe, the president continues to believe, that Nord Stream 2 is a bad deal for Europe," Psaki said on January 26. She also said the administration would review certain sanctions measures imposed under Trump.

NDAA, CAATSA, PEESCA

"We're aware that the previous administration imposed new restrictions on activities related to the pipeline under the National Defense Authorization Act [NDAA], and we will be reviewing those measures," Psaki said..

On January 1 in a rare New Year's Day vote, the U.S. Senate voted to override then-President Donald Trump's veto of the NDAA, which included new provisions aimed to counter Nord Stream 2 under the Protecting Europe's Energy Security Clarification Act (PEESCA).

These expand the threat of U.S. sanctions against companies that provide services to ships laying pipes for the project, as well as those that carry out pipeline testing, inspection, or certification activities.

On Trump's last full day in office, January 19, his administration also imposed sanctions on Russia-based KVT-RUS, owner of the pipe-laying ship Fortuna, under the separate Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA).

With questions still swirling as the construction finish line approaches, a February 9 report from a German NGO added to the intrigue by suggesting that while Trump was still in office, Berlin had been ready to do a backdoor deal to avoid any imposition of U.S. sanctions against the project.

The NGO Environmental Action Germany (DUH) said it had a copy of letter in which German Finance Minister Olaf Sholz, addressing then-U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, offered up to 1 billion euros ($1.2 billion) for the import of U.S. liquefied natural gas.

The German Finance Ministry did not immediately comment on the report.

In e-mailed comments to RFE/RL, research fellow Shagina said the United States might be prepared to drop the PEESCA sanctions "if Germany tables a 'grand bargain' deal that would reduce Europe's energy dependence on Russian gas" and ensure Ukraine a continued role in providing gas to Europe.

However, she added, "It is unclear what sort of a 'grand bargain' is acceptable for the U.S. to alleviate its concerns about Nord Stream 2."

In addition to concerns about European reliance on Russia for energy supplies, another worry for the United States is that Ukraine could lose crucial gas-transit revenues -- a further blow to a country that has been under immense pressure from Moscow for years.

Ukraine, which lies between Russia and the EU, was one of Russia's largest consumers of natural gas until relations between the two ex-Soviet republics soured badly in 2014, when Moscow seized control of the Crimean Peninsula and began backing separatists in eastern Ukraine in a conflict that has killed more than 13,200 people.

Kyiv stopped buying Russian gas in November 2015, increasing purchases from Europe instead. Gazprom, meanwhile, has shipped less gas through Ukraine. Shagina said estimates indicate that Ukraine could lose up to $3 billion in gas-transit fees annually as a result of Nord Stream 2.

Unneeded?

Whatever the positions of the United States and Germany's EU partners, Berlin's ultimate decision may rest on domestic politics. General elections are slated for September, when Merkel is expected to step down after 15 years at the helm.

The man in pole position to succeed Merkel after the vote, new Christian Democrat leader Armin Laschet, firmly supports Nord Stream 2. But his potential governing partner, the ecologist Greens, are stiffening their opposition to it.

The Navalny case has galvanized the Greens into ramping up their demand that the pipeline be stopped, and it could hamstring the next chancellor, experts say.

Greens leader Annalena Baerbock recently made it clear she would press the government to renounce the politically charged pipeline project. "We'll push hard for that now and in the future," Baerbock told broadcaster ZDF last week when asked if the project could not go ahead with her party in the German government.

Amid the heated-up politics over Nord Stream 2, Arild Moe, an energy researcher at Norway's Fridtjof Nansen Institute, said that there was no need for it at this point, given that EU gas demand is rising slower than had been projected.

"The interest in Nord Stream 2 in Europe was not only caused by transit concerns, but also out of anticipation of growing gas demand," Moe told RFE/RL in e-mailed comments.

"Today it looks like demand will not grow that fast -- which means there is no imminent need for Nord Stream 2," he wrote. "It can remain unfinished for several years without creating much problems for importers."

The National Democratic Congress Member of Parliament for Juaboso, Mr Kwabena Minta Akandoh , has called on the government to constitute a multidisciplinary and non-partisan Technical Advisory Team on COVID-19 to bolster the fight against the spread of COVID-19 pandemic.



He also called on the government to release enough funds to regional and district health teams to enhance contact tracing and case testing and pay all monies promised health workers.



As a matter of urgency, the government must expand more management facilities and build capacity to handle the many severe cases that are likely to be confirmed.



Schools should be adequately resourced and supported to make the environment safe from Covid-19, he added.



Press conference



Mr Akandoh, who made the call at a press conference in Accra yesterday, expressed concern about the increase in COVID-19 cases in the country.



Evidence on the ground now points to increased cross infections among COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 patients and caregivers due to overcrowding at health facilities. Long delays in the delivery of test results is also putting patients and caregivers at risk of infection, he said.



He claimed that the governments unwillingness to engage contact tracers and reneging on its promise to pay some frontline healthcare professionals the 50 per cent allowances, as well as the insurance packages for those who got infected were contributory factors to the increase in cases.



Mr Akandoh also mentioned the failure by the government to ensure adequate provision of personal protective equipment to basic and senior high school prior to their reopening, inability to adequately use COVID-19 donations to support frontline health workers as other risk factors for spread of the pandemic.







Source: graphiconline.com









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Former presidential candidate Robert Kyagulanyi, alias Bobi Wine, has said without the help of army and police, President Museveni cannot defeat him in a national election.

The leader of the National Unity Platform (NUP) party dared Mr Museveni in a reelection where they are only two on the ballot.

"I challenge him for a reelection without involvement of the army and police. With Internet and a free media, I can beat him," Mr Kyagulanyi told party supporters and elected leaders from Mukono at his home in Magere, Wakiso District, yesterday.

He insisted he won the January 14 General Election but fraud and violence by the state denied him the presidency.

On January 16, the Electoral Commission announced President Museveni as winner of the polls with 58 per cent against Mr Kyagulanyi's 34 per cent.

Mr Kyagulanyi also urged the party's elected leaders to become agents of change in the country's political space.

He said his focus was not on the party leaders being in Opposition but in government.

On February 1, Mr Kyagulanyi filed a petition with the Supreme Court challenging Mr Museveni's victory.

"I believe in the rule of law, that is why I went to court. My belief in the courts does not mean that the courts are not going to be abused by Gen Museveni. I believe in democracy, that is why I participated in the elections. My belief in democracy does not mean that democracy is not going to be disrespected by Museveni," Mr Kyagulanyi told Daily Monitor yesterday.

Court is expected to deliver its judgment within 45 days from the date of filing the petition.

"I have thrown the challenge to the Judiciary. This is a clear case. Everything that I stated in the petition was public knowledge. It is up on the court of law to show that they are worth their name," Mr Kyagulanyi said.

Expectations

"We went to court because we have evidence that is clear for even for a blind man. We, therefore, asked court for two things; we asked it to cancel Mr Musevenis victory and if it comes to the worst, we get have a re-election as long the army [and security] us kept out polls/election matters and without teargas," he added.

Meanwhile, the party is expected to chose the next Leader of Opposition in Parliament to replace Forum for Democratic Change's Betty Aol Ocan.
A mysterious metal slab that appeared in southeastern Turkey last week, then quietly disappeared, turned out to be a government publicity stunt to promote Turkeys new space program.

The monolith, which stood about 10 feet tall, was discovered in a rural area of the province of Sanliurfa on Friday then vanished without explanation four days later. It was inscribed with a cryptic message in the Gokturk alphabet, an ancient Turkic language: Look at the sky, see the moon.

During a televised address on Tuesday, Turkeys president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, announced an ambitious new space program for the country, including missions to the moon. An image of the monolith was projected behind him.

Turkeys 10-year vision for space, Mr. Erdogan said, was driven by a famous slogan.

I announce to the whole world and say, Look at the sky, see the moon, he said.
Calling himself a 'proud Hindustani Muslim' who did not go to Pakistan, Azad recalled how he learnt a lot from Parliament

New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday bid a tearful farewell to Congress veteran and Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad, saying that he respects the Congress leader as a true friend and will not let him retire, and will continue taking his advice.

Modi said it would be difficult for Azads successor in the Rajya Sabha to match him as he has set very high standards as an MP and as the Leader of the Opposition. Vice-president M. Venkaiah Naidu also described Mr Azad as a voice of sanity in the nations public life, and someone who speaks softly but conveys his point of view effectively.

Calling himself a proud Hindustani Muslim who did not go to Pakistan, Mr Azad recalled how he learnt a lot from Parliament, late PMs Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi and got inspired from former PM Atal Behari Vajpayee, and prayed that militancy should end in the country. Praising the PM, Mr Azad said Mr Modi never mixed personal context and his partys responsibilities and used to be among the first ones to wish him on festivals and birthdays.

The terms of four Rajya Sabha members -- Mr Azad, PDPs Nazir Ahmed Laway, his party colleague Mir Mohammad Fayaz and BJPs Shamsher Singh Manhas -- are coming to an end, and the House bid farewell to the retiring members. While Mr Azad and Mr Laway are retiring February 15 from the Upper House, Mr Fayazs and Mr Singhs term are ending on February 10.

Recalling conversations with the two PDP MPs in his Parliament room, Mr Modi said the sessions with them were always enlightening and that he is personally thankful to the information on Kashmirs specifics that they used to engage during their conversations. Mr Modi said he had personal relations with both PDP members. Describing Mr Manhas as soft-spoken, Mr Modi said he had known him for many years and had worked along with him during his organisational days in J&K. While Mr Laway, in his farewell speech, requested that Jammu and Kashmirs statehood be restored, Mr Fayaz parised the Modi governments Ujwala scheme and said whenever they reached out to the government for help, they always received support from it.

One thing I would like to say about Mr Azad that the next LoP will have a difficult time in matching his work because he was not only concerned about his party but also about the country and the House, said the PM, and revealed how it was the Congress leader who had suggested to him to call a meeting of all party leaders during the Covid-19 pandemic, when the PM was holding a meeting of the floor leaders.

Mr Modi had tears as he recalled the 2007 terrorist attack on a tourist bus carrying Gujaratis in J&K when both him and Mr Azad were chief ministers of their respective states. The PM recalled how Mr Azad was the first one to call him, all teared up, and took care of the pilgrims from Gujarat as they were like his own family members.

Posts come and go but how to remain sane is something one should learn from him. It was a very emotional time for me I respect him as a friend. I am sure that his nature and his zeal to work for the nation will never let him rest and whichever task he takes next, he will do value addition and his contribution will benefit the nation, said the PM, while adding that his door will always remain open for Mr Azad and the other retiring members.

I would not let you retire, will continue taking your advice, the Prime Minister said in a tearful farewell to Mr Azad in the Upper House.
The Firefighters Highland Guard of Naperville perform during the St. Patrick's Day Parade in Naperville in 2017. The annual parade, held by the West Suburban Irish, was canceled again this year because of the COVID-19 pandemic. (Mike Mantucca / Naperville Sun)

Kymeta (www.kymetacorp.com)the communications company making mobile globalannounced today the expansion and availability of its KymetaTM u8 product, including the Kymeta u8 GOV terminal with an embedded iDirect 950mp modem and the u8 GO transportable terminal. Kymeta u8 GOV terminals are designed to meet the needs of government, military and specialized commercial use and support.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210209005134/en/

The u8 GOV terminal and u8 GO provide the complete connectivity solution for on-the-go communications. (Photo: Business Wire)

The u8 GOV terminal includes a FIPS, 140-2 level 3 TRANSEC module and meets the demands of tactical users in scenarios that require secure data, voice, and video connectivity in highly mobile military, government and other rapid response applications. The u8 GOV terminal covers the full Ku-band and is available today as a turnkey terminal with a satellite modem, cellular modem, and SD-WAN capabilities. It is compliant with existing security requirements as defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Kymetas solutions meet the mission-critical needs of military, first responders, and commercial customers providing always-on connectivity for mobile platforms, making communications on the move more seamless and reliable than ever, said Rob Weitendorf, Vice President, Business Development, Kymeta.

Also available today, the u8 GO transportable terminals come in multiple configurations including ODU, Commercial and GOV terminals, and enable safe transport with a hardened and rugged shipping case for protection and provide a built-in vehicle mount to support easy communications on the pause (COTP) and communications on-the-move (COTM). This transportable configuration is easily maneuverable and ideal for rapid deployments and has been tested against military transportation standards including MIL-STD-810H, Transit Drop, Transportation Shock, and Loose Cargo Vibration. The u8 GO includes an outdoor AC/DC power supply, supports communications on the pause (COTP) with a 25-degree tilt mechanism, and can also be mounted on a vehicle for easy deployment in a multitude of use cases.

The Kymeta u8 solutions, which now also include the u8 GOV terminal and u8 GO transportable case, provide a complete connectivity solution for communications-on-the-move (COTM) and networks-on-the-move (NOTM) when and where you need it most. The u8 terminal, with Kymetas revolutionary software-defined, electronic beam-steering technology, is low profile and easy-to-mount on vehicles and vessels. The u8 turnkey solutions come in multiple terminal configurations that provide customers with the hardware, software, and connectivity they need.

Kymeta recently launched its next-generation antenna, terminal, and services in Q4 of 2020, and has received an overwhelmingly positive response from the industry. The Kymeta u8 terminal paired with Kymetas hybrid satellite-cellular connectivity services, Kymeta Connect, transforms the purchase and consumption of mobile data with all-inclusive hardware, connectivity, and services monthly subscription. The Kymeta u8 is the worlds only commercially available flat-panel electronically steered antenna built specifically for mobility and designed for the needs of military, first responders, and commercial customers.

About Kymeta

Kymeta is unlocking the potential of broadband satellite connectivity, combined with cellular networks, to satisfy the overwhelming demand for comms on the move and making mobile global. Lepton Global Solutions, a Kymeta company, hosts the companys satellite connectivity solutions and offers unique, complete, and turnkey bundled solutions to the market based on best-in-class technologies and tailored customer-centric services that meet and exceed customer mission requirements. These solutions in tandem with the companys flat-panel satellite antenna, the first of its kind, and Kymeta Connect services provide revolutionary mobile connectivity on satellite and hybrid satellite-cellular networks to customers around the world. Backed by U.S. and international patents and licenses, the Kymeta terminal addresses the need for lightweight, slim, and high-throughput communication systems that do not require mechanical components to steer toward a satellite. Kymeta makes connecting easy  for any vehicle, vessel, or fixed platform.

Kymeta is a privately held company based in Redmond, Washington.

For more information, visit kymetacorp.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210209005134/en/

The KWETB said its officials are in ongoing discussions with the Department of Education about the provision of school places in many areas such as Newbridge, Naas, Kildare and Celbridge.

Joe Kelly, the Director of Organisation Support and Development told its board meeting in January there was a serious level of concern over the issue of school places. He said principals are being encouraged to examine needs in their catchment areas in coming years. Mr Kelly said that sometimes parents may apply to up to three local schools and then chose one for their child.

Board member Cllr Tom Fortune, representing Wicklow Co Council, criticised the robotic approach taken by Department of Education officials to representations made by councillors.

Board member Cllr Ide Cussen said she struggled to describe the crisis of school places in north Kildare.

Board member Cllr Angela Feeney said that the population of Co Kildare was projected to rise by over 40,000 and that a situation could develop that parents buying homes in the county may not have school places for their children.

Cllr Feeney added: We need a multi-agency approach.

Councillors are getting phone calls all the time about school places. Its a huge stress for parents.

I have continuously put it on the Kildare Co Councils agenda and will continue to do so.

We must bang on the door of the Department and continue to do so before it becomes a crisis.

Board member Cllr Kevin Duffy said that in south Kildare it was safe to say to say that not one single school is under subscribed.

He acknowledged that the KWETB isnt responsible for all areas, but he added that a cross-agency approach is needed on the issue of school places.

He said: The Department of Education needs to be held to account. Its an absolute disgrace.

Sitting on a board of management, to see the numbers of students that may not be getting places in September, it is really worrying.

He urged the Department to get rolling on installing prefabs on school grounds as schools will be under more serious pressure.

Sinn Fein TD Patricia Ryan recently raised the issue of school places in Kildare Town to the Minister for Education in the Dail.

Minister Norma Foley told the Dail that her Department is aware of increasing pressures and demand for additional primary and post primary school places in the Kildare town area.

She added that where capacity issues arise, it may not be as a result of lack of accommodation but may be driven by factors such as duplication of applications where pupils have applied for a place to a number of schools in the area.

Pupils cant get a place in their preferred school while there are places in other schools in the town/ area and that some towns/ areas have single sex schools and while places are available in the school there are not available to all pupils.

The Minister also said that pupils coming from outside the local area are also applying for places.

She added: Until these issues are discussed with the relevant school authorities the true extent of any capacity issue will only become known.

Under Project Ireland 2040, the Minister said her Department continues to make progress to increase the infra structural capacity in the schools sector, in order to meet demographic and other demands.
When you think about longevity in the music industry, you see plenty of artists come and go. Artists can hit their stride, and eventually, that momentum dies down. But those rules don't apply to rappers like Slim Thug.

Born Stayve Jerome Thomas, Slim Thug has made a large footprint in the music industry not only for his iconic verses on Houston anthems like Mike Jones' "Still Tippin'" but also for being largely adamant about remaining independent as an artist.

OTHER SWISHAHOUSE ACTS: Where would Nelly's 'Grillz' be without Paul Wall?

While we've seen a resurgence of artists going independent or never seeking out label representation, the out-the-trunk mentality can be claimed by Houston. The Houston rapper would release mixtapes and albums, and drive around the South selling his projects to mom-and-pop record stores.

Slim Thug started his career signed to the Swishahouse label in the late '90s. The rapper then briefly signed with Interscope in the early 2000s as the popularity of Houston's sound rose around the U.S.

After trying the major label route, the Houston rapper decided to take the long way home. Once the emcee realized how much money he could make by distributing his own mixtapes and albums, the idea of signing with a music label quickly faded.

Much can be said about major label record deals. Many horror stories abound regarding artists getting into treacherous deals and rarely getting paid for their work. Stories like Houston's own Megan Thee Stallion come to mind. But when you're independent you get to do things a little differently.

After leaving the labels, Slim went on to create his own imprint, Boss Hogg Outlawz, where he would release his debut solo album, "Already Platinum," which debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 in 2005, selling 130,000 in its first week.

Slim Thug has managed to see it all over the course of his career. Being in control of his career has largely impacted his ventures. Slim Thug has had chart-topping hits, started a clothing line, entered the construction business all while still releasing new music to this day.
Overseas drug king pins are fuming at bungling bikies after a significant chunk of their Australian revenue has been seized by West Australian detectives in recent months, according to Deputy Police Commissioner Col Blanch.

Serious and organised crime detectives drug squad has stopped five trucks over the past two months thanks to interstate intelligence, resulting in what they claim is the largest seizure ever in Australia of $13 million in cash, as well as more than 210 kilograms of drugs that included smaller amounts of cocaine and heroin.

The most recent seizure of more than 175 kilograms of methylamphetamine and over $8 million in cash was allegedly found aboard trucks entering WA from New South Wales.

Mr Blanch said a total of $50 million in cash been taken from organised crime in the past six months.
"Investing in my community will always be one of the smartest, most valuable business decisions I'll ever make."

After receiving hundreds of applications, 10 students were selected and awarded their scholarships with a surprise hometown visit by Thompson himself.

The scholarship winners are Jalen Robinson (Morehouse), Tate Toole (Morehouse), Robert Pinkney (Morehouse), Je'Von James Tone (Texas Southern University), Miles Smith (Bethune-Cooke University), Kaleb Perkins (Livingstone College), Daisha Green (Philander Smith College), Taylor Helton (Prairie View A&M University), Ms. Jordan James (Hampton University) and Lindsay Collins (Howard University).

Once a struggling student himself, Thompson vowed to one day give back to students facing financial challenges after his uncle generously paid for his first year of tuition. "I know what it feels like to not know whether you're going to be able to register for the next semester," says Thompson, who studied engineering while at Morehouse. "So, to now be in a position to ensure that at least 10 students will be able further their education is an incredible blessing and honor."

A native of Missouri City, Texas, Thompson began his entrepreneurial journey as a college student when his older brother Branden introduced him to cryptocurrency and investing. He began studying the industry and developed a knack for teaching others how to make profitable investments. Sensing an opportunity to build a following by inspiring others to join the cryptocurrency movement, Thompson, along with his brother Branden and four fellow Morehouse students (Nathan Samuel, Reynaldo Perez, Joshua Stewart, and Ian Jackson) formed the TradeHouse Investment Group. The goal of the company is to teach financial literacy through investment strategies and to provide a platform that offers economic and social advancement to traditionally disenfranchised communities. The partners' networking savvy and charisma grew the company into a multi-million-dollar business in just 2 years. And it all started at an HBCU.

"I am a testament to how giving back can change the trajectory of one's life," he says. "If it were not for my uncle's generosity, I wouldn't have been able to attend Morehouse and develop a network of like-minded individuals who would go on to become my business partners. Investing in my community will always be one of the smartest, most valuable business decisions I'll ever make."

To learn more about Bryce Thompson, please visit: www.brycethompsonofficial.com or Instagram: www.instagram.com/bthompsonofficial

About Bryce Thompson

Thompson hopes to encourage people through his story and journey that they too can make a significant impact and hold important roles no matter their age, skin color, or circumstance. He wants to inspire people to go off the beaten path and create their own success through entrepreneurship. If Thompson could say one thing to young people it would be, "Your goals are your goals, and no-one else's. Believe in your goals and the things that you do because what makes sense to you doesn't have to make sense to anyone else."

About Scholly

Scholly, based in Philadelphia, PA, was founded in 2014 by Christopher Gray -- then a student -- who won 1.3 million in scholarships. Scholly (As seen on Shark Tank and Forbes 30 Under 30) is an app that gives high school students, current college students, and graduate students a fast and simple way to find scholarships for college. The app turns months of looking for money for college into minutes. The Scholly App has been #1 in the iPhone and Android App store for several weeks, and, several cities and states (e.g. Philadelphia, Memphis and Montana) have purchased the app for their students. The app has also been endorsed by the Coca Cola Scholars Foundation and the Gates Millennium Scholars Foundation. The free Scholly app - which offers tips and advice for applying for scholarships -- is available through the iPhone and Android app stores. The full version with access to the scholarship matching platform is $2.99 and includes a web version as well. For more information about Scholly visit www.myScholly.com.

About IAMS Foundation

www.iamsworldwide.com

SOURCE Bryce Thompson

Related Links

https://myscholly.com


(Newser)  The government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan may not be known as a bunch of pranksters, but it conceded Tuesday that a monolith that mysteriously appeared in a field was an official publicity stunt. The 10-foot-tall monolith was discovered Friday in a field of wheat and olive trees, the New York Times reports. Although armed guards were sent to keep an eye on it, the metal monolith was nowhere to be found Tuesday morning. The mystery ended when Erdogan made a televised announcement of the nation's goals for its space program. "I now present to you Turkey's 10-year vision, strategy, and aims, and I say: 'Look at the sky, you will see the moon,'" Erdogan said, per the AP. The last part is the inscription on the monolith. Adding to the mystery, it's written in the Gokturk alphabet, an ancient Turkic language.

story continues below

Monoliths had come and gone without explanation before, but there was foreshadowing this time from the landowner, who had said, "We don't know if it was placed on my field for marketing purposes or as an advertisement." The monolith had drawn visitors. There was a logic to the site chosen: It's close to Gobekli Tepe, a UNESCO World Heritage site with megalithic structures dating to the 10th millennium BC. There's criticism of spending money on a space program when Turkey's economy is suffering, but there's also support for creating jobs for researchers and keeping scientists from leaving the country. "Our primary and most important goal for our national space program is the contact of the Republic, in its 100th year, with the moon," Erdogan said in his announcement, which included special effects. "I hope that this road map, which will carry Turkey to the top league in the global space race, will come to life successfully," he said. (Read more monolith stories.)

US likely to interact more with Vietnam on South China Sea: experts

U.S. President Joe Biden is likely to interact more often with Vietnamese officials as the South China Sea issue becomes increasingly complex, experts say.

"The situation in the South China Sea this year will be tenser because the Biden administration indicated that the U.S. will continue the strategic competition against China," Professor Renato Cruz De Castro of the international studies department at De La Salle University in the Philippines told VnExpress International.

The South China Sea is known as the East Sea in Vietnam.

The USS Theodore Roosevelt docks in Da Nang, Vietnam, March 5, 2020. Photo by Reuters.

On February 5 Biden, calling China Americas most serious competitor, said Beijing poses challenges to the U.S.'s "prosperity, security and democratic values."

Secretary of state Antony Blinken had said earlier there was a very strong foundation to build a consensus in the U.S. to stand up to Beijing.

According to Castro, Biden is looking at the South China Sea as an important arena with strategic competition with China that is similar to former president Donald Trump's stand. At a time when the U.S. is highly divided, one thing that would unite Americans is a tough stance on China, he said.

On January 23, just days after Biden was sworn in as president, a U.S. aircraft carrier group led by the USS Theodore Roosevelt entered the South China Sea to promote "freedom of the seas."

On the same day Chinese military aircraft simulated missile attacks on a U.S. aircraft carrier during an incursion into Taiwans air defense zone.

The Peoples Liberation Army sent 11 aircraft into the south-western area of Taiwans air defense zone and 15 more the next day, according to the Financial Times.

China said it conducted a new midcourse intercept anti-ballistic missile test on February 4.

In a more recent activity, two U.S. carrier groups Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike and the Nimitz Carrier Strike conducted joint exercises in the South China Sea on Tuesday, marking the first dual carrier operations in the waterway since July 2020.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said the frequent moves by U.S. warships and aircraft into the South China Sea in a "show of force" was not conducive to regional peace and stability, Reuters reported.

Castro said China thinks it could intimidate the U.S. and so he does not discount military action by Beijing. Some Chinese analysts are talking about a limited war with the U.S., and so the worst-case scenario is a clash, he said.

"It is very dangerous because some Chinese are thinking that they could inflict casualties on the U.S Navy."

Agreeing with Castro that China might have more aggressive actions, Carl Schuster, a visiting professor at Hawaii Pacific University, the U.S., said Beijing is likely to simulate more anti-ship ballistic missile launches and conduct at least one other large scale naval exercise.

The goal would be to see how the opponent reacts to certain situations and how committed the U.S. is to continuing its presence in the South China Sea.

Derek Grossman, a senior defense analyst at U.S. think tank RAND, said China's seasonal frictions over fishing and natural resource extraction ramp up starting around May are again likely.

But this time it would be interesting to see whether China is as assertive as in the last few years or decides to tread easier, he said.

With the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party and 20th Party Congress this year, Beijing could decide it does not want any problems or could decide now is the time to demonstrate its growing confidence, he explained, admitting however there is no good answer.

"My take is that tensions will be very similar to the last few years which, for Vietnam, will not be a good outcome."

Vanguard Bank and other tense situations were a feature of these years, he said.

Professor Zachary Abuza of the National War College, the U.S., expected the Chinese to increase their "provocations" in the South China Sea this summer.

Normally the Chinese focus on one claimant nation at a time, he said, pointing out that in 2019 they did a lot of seismic research on Vietnam's continental shelf and put pressure on multinational oil corporations to stop exploration, before shifting their attention to another country.

"But this year China is likely to be provocative toward all of the claimants to test the new Biden administration and gauge their responses."

More navies operating in South China Sea

According to Schuster, people are going to see more countries showing interest in operating in the South China Sea. For example, a British carrier is going to go in there, doing some work with the U.S. and exercises with Japan, the French aircraft carrier is going to do exercises with the Indian Navy in the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean, he said.

The European Union might not do anything collectively, but its member states would be sending ships into the South China Sea to Japan and Australia, while India would probably send a couple of ships to transit through the area.

Castro said the Biden administration intends to rely on allies and partners not only in Asia but also in Europe. Washington would continue to cooperate with Japan, Australia, South Korea, and probably the Philippines when the two countries renegotiate the visiting forces agreement, he said.

Besides the Quad (including the U.S., Japan, Australia, and India), the U.S is also likely to bring the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to the South China Sea as Biden seeks to mend defenses with NATO, he said.

Schuster said Trump tended to act first and then look for partners while Biden prefers to find partners first and then act.

"For that reason, I think Biden will look for ways to interact with Vietnamese officials more often than has been done in the past."

However, the fact that some members of Congress consider Vietnam a currency manipulator could complicate Biden's efforts to reach out, he said.

He speculated that Vietnam would increase its Coast Guard presence and operations in the South China Sea.

With coast guards being primarily viewed as law enforcement agencies, if Vietnam offers to interact with the American coast guard, that would strengthen the bilateral partnership, he said.

When the new prime minister of Vietnam takes office, the new leaders on both sides are likely to meet or talk, he said.

In Grossman's view, with Nguyen Phu Trong remaining Party chief for another five years, it would seem Vietnams "delicate balancing act" between China and the U.S. is set to continue. He did not foresee any major changes in Vietnams relationship with either country, but if the U.S. under Biden criticizes Vietnam on several issues, including currency manipulation, that could significantly slow the enormous momentum in relations between the two countries.

Abuza expected the Biden administration to continue the current tempo of FONOPs (freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea.

After four years of the Trump administration raising doubts about American reliability and commitment to treaty allies and partners, the Biden administration should be expected to have a firm stance on Chinese "aggression" in the region, he said.

He also hoped Biden would rejoin the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which would be an important signal to the region, but is not sure the president could muster the requisite votes in the Senate.

At the same time China will want to gauge how Hanoi responds and its interaction with the Biden administration, many of whose officials served in the Obama administration and played an important role in developing U.S.-Vietnam ties, he said.

Castro said Vietnam would continue to play a "sophisticated balancing game," managing the U.S. and China. He doubted there would be strong consensus among ASEAN members on the South China Sea issue in 2021 since Brunei, the blocs chair, is economically dependent on China.

In that scenario, he said, Vietnam has to keep the momentum of maintaining ASEAN's consensus on the South China Sea issue in 2020.

NEW YORK, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Pulse of the Primary: 2021 NYC Mayor's Race , a recurring series of quantitative voter surveys, was unveiled today to provide fresh insights on the upcoming New York City Democratic primary and key issues in the race for mayor. The project, sponsored by Fontas Advisors and Core Decision Analytics, takes an independent look at major candidates as well as key issues. Results released today from the first poll of N=842 NYC Democratic Primary likely voters offer a revealing peek at the fiercely contested race to replace term-limited incumbent Mayor Bill de Blasio.

"New York City is at a crossroads and the election of the new mayor will be a pivotal milestone in our recovery from the pandemic and the resulting economic devastation," said George Fontas, Founder and CEO of Fontas Advisors, a leading NYC-based government affairs consultancy. "Our poll found that New Yorkers seek mayoral candidates who offer clear plans to tackle the many pressing issues facing the city, and voters especially value proven experience demonstrated in government or the public sector."

"Our survey shows that voters are concerned about the many challenges facing the city, though their pick for mayor is still quite fluid at this time," said Adam Rosenblatt, President of Core Decision Analytics (CODA), a non-partisan national public opinion research and analytics firm based in Washington, DC. "Awareness appears to aid three candidates as of late January, though the vast majority of voters are unfamiliar with the wider set of prominent candidates running."

The full survey results, including complete question wording, all questions asked, as well as demographics and screening criteria, will be publicly available at PulseOfThePrimary.com.

This first Fontas/CODA Pulse of the Primary Poll suggests that the COVID pandemic will be the dominant issue on the campaign trail. Key findings included:

57% of likely voters said "the pandemic caused a significant negative impact on my household finances." (26% strongly agree + 31% somewhat agree)

of likely voters said (26% strongly agree + 31% somewhat agree) 47% indicated that "If I had the ability, I would consider moving out of NYC permanently." (19% strongly agree + 28% somewhat agree)

indicated that (19% strongly agree + 28% somewhat agree) When presented with a list of nine major topics frequently discussed on the campaign trail, nearly half of voters (49%) said the "most important" issue to them when considering the candidates relates to COVID: health aspects (30% "preventing the spread of COVID / vaccine distribution"), as well as economic aspects (19% "reopening the economy / job creation").

Fielded from January 20-25th, the first Fontas/CODA Pulse of the Primary poll presented voters with nine candidates to assess across several key metrics including familiarity ("awareness"), as well as the "horserace" ("If the Democratic Primary election for mayor of New York City were held today"). The survey also examined ranked choice voting as well as attributes voters often consider when evaluating candidates. Key findings included:

Three candidates enjoy strong awareness among voters: Four in five NYC likely voters (84%) indicated that they have heard of Andrew Yang . He is likely a familiar name to many Democrats given his prominence during the 2020 presidential primary, though it is also worth emphasizing that this survey was conducted in the wake of Yang's campaign launch and heavy media blitz. Three in five voters say they have heard of Scott Stringer and Eric Adams (66% and 60%, respectively). Familiarity was 33% or less for the other six candidates examined.

Four in five NYC likely voters (84%) indicated that they have heard of . He is likely a familiar name to many Democrats given his prominence during the 2020 presidential primary, though it is also worth emphasizing that this survey was conducted in the wake of Yang's campaign launch and heavy media blitz. Three in five voters say they have heard of and (66% and 60%, respectively). Familiarity was 33% or less for the other six candidates examined. Boosted by strong awareness, Andrew Yang appears to lead in the "horserace" question, followed by Eric Adams and Scott Stringer . By design, the Fontas/CODA Poll's "horserace" question included a short description of the candidate, aiming to simulate what voters might hear, read, or see if the candidate were described in the news. Andrew Yang (described as "entrepreneur and former Democratic presidential primary candidate") drew support from one in four likely voters (28%). " Eric Adams , Brooklyn Borough President" and " Scott Stringer , NYC Comptroller" were closely tied with the support of 17% and 13% of likely voters, respectively. One in four likely voters (23%) indicated a preference for one of the other six candidates presented. Meanwhile, essentially one in five voters (19%) said they were undecided.

By design, the Fontas/CODA Poll's "horserace" question included a short description of the candidate, aiming to simulate what voters might hear, read, or see if the candidate were described in the news. (described as "entrepreneur and former Democratic presidential primary candidate") drew support from one in four likely voters (28%). " , Brooklyn Borough President" and " , NYC Comptroller" were closely tied with the support of 17% and 13% of likely voters, respectively. One in four likely voters (23%) indicated a preference for one of the other six candidates presented. Meanwhile, essentially one in five voters (19%) said they were undecided. Voters value having a plan plus government experience: Voters said the most important attributes they consider when evaluating candidates for mayor were someone who has a "detailed plan on an issue [they] care about", a "broad plan of many issues", as well as "proven experience in government / public sector." These attributes rank very high, with over 90% of voters valuing each of these attributes. By contrast, voters placed significantly less importance on someone who has "proven experience in business / private sector" or even "has held elected office before." Whereas 72% said proven government / public sector experience was "extremely or very" important, only 44% said the same regarding proven business / private sector experience, and 39% for prior elected experience.

Voters said the most important attributes they consider when evaluating candidates for mayor were someone who has a "detailed plan on an issue [they] care about", a "broad plan of many issues", as well as "proven experience in government / public sector." These attributes rank very high, with over 90% of voters valuing each of these attributes. By contrast, voters placed significantly less importance on someone who has "proven experience in business / private sector" or even "has held elected office before." Whereas 72% said proven government / public sector experience was "extremely or very" important, only 44% said the same regarding proven business / private sector experience, and 39% for prior elected experience. NYC likely voters are overwhelmingly unaware of the new ranked choice voting process: 88% of voters indicated that they have not heard "a lot" about ranked choice voting. Fully one-third (34%) said they have heard "nothing at all."

"The lack of awareness concerning ranked choice voting is worrisome," said Rosenblatt. "This process is likely to be a major factor in the race for mayor and other offices, yet 9 in 10 voters are in the dark. We will examine this closely in the next survey since ranked choice will influence how campaigns communicate as they attempt to persuade New Yorkers to cast a ballot for more than one candidate."

"While this is where things stood in late January, it's essential to remember that there's five months of campaigning still ahead and most voters are just starting to recognize the significance of the June Democratic primary in determining our new mayor," said Fontas. "Awareness is still low for many of the candidates, endorsements have just begun, and, for the most part, retail campaigning has yet to kick off  although candidates will need to utilize different tactics this year due to the pandemic. Our next poll will present a great opportunity to assess how the race for mayor is progressing."

The Fontas/CODA Pulse of the Primary Poll is a three-part series which will publish poll results and analysis leading up to the New York City Democratic primary. The next poll is slated to field in March, followed by a final poll in May in advance of election day on June 22nd. Visit PulseOfThePrimary.com for the latest poll reports, analysis, and to subscribe to receive updates.

Methodology

Core Decision Analytics (CODA) conducted N=842 online interviews among New York City Democratic primary likely voters from January 20-25, 2021. By definition, all likely voters interviewed had to say they currently live in one of the five boroughs, are registered to vote as a Democrat, and will "definitely" or "probably" vote in the June primary election for NYC Mayor and other elected offices. The overall margin of error is +/-3.38% at the 95% confidence interval. The report of findings, including all survey questions, screening criteria, and demographics, are available at PulseOfThePrimary.com

About Fontas Advisors

Fontas Advisors is a boutique government affairs consultancy focused on the New York metropolitan area. Leveraging our strong knowledge of city and state administrations combined with our robust network honed over decades of experience, we drive results by serving the next-generation needs of corporations, nonprofits, and trade associations. Learn more at fontasadvisors.com

About Core Decision Analytics

Core Decision Analytics (CODA) provides actionable opinion insights and cutting-edge data analytics programs grounded in trustworthy quantitative, qualitative, and advanced analytics methods. CODA leverages decades of experience in over 20 countries on behalf of governments, campaigns, business organizations, associations, and corporate clients. Learn more at coredecision.com

SOURCE Core Decision Analytics; Fontas Advisors
The nonprofit Entrepreneurship for All (EforAll), whose mission is to accelerate economic and social impact in the communities it serves through inclusive entrepreneurship, announced today the appointment of InaMarie Johnson, Chief People and Diversity Officer of Zendesk; Vernon Irvin, Chief Revenue Officer of Everbridge; and Marcos Marrero, Former Director of Planning and Economic Development for the City of Holyoke, Mass. to its Board of Directors. The three new additions are joining the board to provide strategic counsel and help EforAll to better meet the needs of the diverse entrepreneurs it serves in communities across the U.S.

We are thrilled to have such talented and experienced professionals joining our team, said Gail Goodman, EforAlls Chairman of the Board. We serve such a diverse pool of entrepreneurs, and we feel it is important that our board reflects the lives and experiences of the people we work with. With this distinguished group, we are expanding our organizations knowledge in community work, advocacy, diversity, equity and inclusion, as well as in organizational scaling, business practices and entrepreneurship.

InaMarie Johnson has more than 30 years of experience in human resources, holding various leadership roles. As Chief People and Diversity Officer at Zendesk in San Francisco, Johnson is responsible for leading the companys vision for developing a superlative employee experience. She also brings her commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion to her community, serving on the boards of several organizations dedicated to providing aid for underprivileged young people and adults. Johnson has been recognized for her work as one of San Francisco Business Times Most Influential Women in Business and one of Northern Californias Most Powerful & Influential Women by the California Diversity Council.

Vernon Irvin, EVP and Chief Revenue Officer at Everbridge, has spent his career in Information Technology Services, with over 30 years of enterprise and SaaS sales leadership experience. Through his work, Irvin has come to understand the importance of digital transformation for businesses, and how technology can be utilized to drive efficiency and achieve objectives  both in the business world and beyond. He is personally committed to promoting diversity, particularly in the technology field, and in his community in Denver. He serves as Chairman of the Board of Directors for Mile High United Way and is an active board member for the Colorado Technology Association and the Community College of Denver.

Marcos Marrero is a public sector professional with expertise in economic development, urban planning, and sustainability. While serving as the Director of Planning and Economic Development for the city of Holyoke, Marrero actively guided the citys economic transformation strategies in areas spanning entrepreneurship, business development, housing, public infrastructure, placemaking and more. He brings over a decade of essential knowledge in economic development and entrepreneurship.

EforAll remains committed to partnering with under-represented communities and individuals nationwide to help them grow their entrepreneurial pursuits. The addition of Johnson, Irvin and Marrero to its Board of Directors will be a huge asset as the nonprofit continues to grow and foster a collaborative and supportive culture for the entrepreneurs and communities in which it serves.

To learn more about EforAll, please visit http://www.eforall.org.

About EforAll

Entrepreneurship for All (EforAll) is a nonprofit organization that partners with communities nationwide to help under-represented individuals successfully start and grow a business through intensive business training, mentorship and an extended professional support network. To date, EforAll alumni have launched more than 500 businesses and created more than 700 local jobs. Programs are available in both English and Spanish. EforAll is currently available in the following MA communities: Berkshire County, Cape Cod, Fall River/New Bedford, Greater Worcester, Holyoke, Lawrence, Lowell, Lynn, and Roxbury as well as Longmont CO. To learn more about EforAll, please visit eforall.org.
KALAMAZOO COUNTY, MI -- The Kalamazoo County health department is nearing the halfway point in an effort to vaccinate local K-12 educators.

By the end of this week, 2,722 educators, or about 53% of the countys teachers believed to be interested in receiving the vaccine, will have received their first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, according to Kalamazoo County Department of Health and Community Services spokesperson Lyndi Warner.

Another approximately 684 educators are scheduled to be vaccinated for next week. Those appointments will bring the county total to 3,406 educators, about 66% of the educator population interested in being vaccinated, Warner said.

The county first invited all school employees working face-to-face with students to be vaccinated, Warner said. Currently, those working in hybrid models are receiving their first doses, she said. The county expects to finish giving initial doses to this group by the end of next week, Warner said.

The numbers for scheduled appointments are dependent on vaccine supply that we anticipate receiving, Warner said. Therefore, if we are notified this week that we will receive more vaccine then we could schedule more K-12 employees for next week.

There are approximately 6,800 educators in Kalamazoo County. Of those, about 5,200, or 76%, expressed interest in being vaccinated when surveyed by the Kalamazoo Regional Educational Service Agency, said Tom Zahrt, assistant superintendent of human resources.

Kalamazoo Public Schools and Comstock Public Schools are the only remaining districts currently operating in completely virtual mode. Comstock students will return to the classroom on Feb. 22, while KPS has yet to announce a decision on what mode students will learn in for the remainder of the school year.

Kalamazoo Superintendent Rita Raichoudhuri is expected to announce her decision on the plan for the third trimester, which begins March 15, at the upcoming school board meeting Thursday, Feb. 11. The district will either decide to remain fully virtual for the remainder of the school year or implement a hybrid model.

Kalamazoo Education Association President Amanda Miller said previously that teachers are nervous about the possibility of returning to school without the protection of the vaccine.

The county health department expects to administer the first doses to those teachers working in virtual mode by the end of February or early March, all of which is dependent on vaccine supply we receive, Warner said.

We continue to allocate 25% of the vaccine supply we receive for K-12 employees and early learning centers, Warner said. We will continue to do this until this group is completed.

The federal government has distributed 61,325 doses of the vaccine to Kalamazoo County, as of Feb. 7, according to the state of Michigan. Of those, 17,600 were distributed to the health department. More than 43,000 doses were given to the local hospitals.

Miller said Wednesday that teachers will be more willing to return to work once they have received both doses of the vaccine.

The health department cant promise that we will have both shots before March 15, so moving to hybrid model is not an option, Miller said. Since Dr. Raichoudhuri has to make a decision this Thursday, theres only one decision to be made -- remain virtual to protect the entire community and all the education employees throughout the end of the year.

Across the state, a majority of educators say they are in the process of being vaccinated. An online survey of Michigan Education Members members found that 63.1%, of responding Michigan school employees are either vaccinated or are in the process of being vaccinated against the virus, according to a news release from MEA.

The remainder of the more than 22,500 educators who responded to the survey are still waiting their turn to get their first dose.

According to the survey results, the majority of those across Michigan who have received shots or are scheduled to do so, about 60.7% of survey respondents, secured their appointment on their own, rather than through their employer.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer urged all districts to get kids back in school by March 1 due to falling grades and the negative affects on students mental health.

Also on MLive:

Majority of Michigan teachers surveyed are in process of getting COVID-19 vaccine

Kalamazoo teachers fear vaccine wont come in time for spring return to classrooms

Vaccination frustration: Washtenaw County has states lowest percentage of vaccinated teachers

Whitmer budget to include K-12 increase of up to $164 per pupil, more funding for higher education
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This year's African Union summit has closed with the re-election of Moussa Faki Mahamat as chair of the bloc's commission. The virtual summit approved some measures aimed at reforming the organisation, although much work remains on overhauling the continental union.

Moussa Faki stood unopposed for a second term in the AU's top job, the first time this has happened in the history of the bloc. He secured the votes of 51 of the 55 member states.

"Moussa Faki Mahamat is politically savvy," said Babatunde Fagbayibo, an expert on the African Union at the University of South Africa. "He understands how to play the politics of continental regionalism, and essentially that's the reason why he stood unopposed."

Moussa Faki has been able to help steer reforms within the regional bloc, according to Fagbayibo. However, there have been reports of mismanagement within the commission, as well as allegations of nepotism and sexual harassment that have not been addressed.

Fighting the ravages of Covid-19

Africa's fight against Covid-19 was one of the main topics on the agenda during the summit, which took place almost entirely online because of restrictions aimed at stopping the spread of coronavirus infections.

Initiatives on Covid-19 taken by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, former AU chairperson, were validated by African heads of state, notably a platform for purchasing medical supplies.

Other major topics, such as the war in Ethiopia's Tigray region, did not feature on the agenda and were not part of discussions by African presidents.

"We're talking about Tigray as the big elephant in the room, but there are many big elephants in the room," Fagbayibo told this week's Africa Calling podcast, published this Friday. "The African Union has acted true to character in not discussing the Tigray issue."

Fagbayibo said the AU has developed a number of bad habits, which often help certain governments in their efforts to crack down on dissent or rig elections.

"This African brotherhood approach to handling things and not wanting to call each other out for transgressions" is a problem, added Fagbayibo, describing how the AU avoids confronting such issues head on.

Revitalising the African Union

Reforms to the organisation, begun in 2002, have long been mooted, with Rwanda's President Paul Kagame leading the process which is designed to overhaul the way the continental bloc is run.

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The 34th summit did indeed take decisions on reducing the number of commissioners from eight to six and giving the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) more autonomy.

But a number of issues remain outstanding, such as the Pan-African Parliament and the African Court of Justice and Human Rights.

"The AU needs to be reformed at a much quicker rate," said Fagbayibo, who has written extensively on the restructuring of the bloc. "The AU has to be reformed in a way that deepens regionalism in which more powers are given to the African Union Commission."

The AU is stuck in an inter-governmental framework, according to Fagbayibo, and without transferring more power from states to the commission, nothing will change.

Africa Calling podcast - Ep 16: Uganda LRA war crimes, Chad toxic spill, al-Qaeda in Sahel, Covid-19 in Tanzania, Vatican talks in Cameroon, Africa Podcast Festival

Nigeria's government weighed in on the importance of restructuring, as President Muhammadu Buhari outlined the importance of reforms during the summit's close on Sunday.

"Nigeria demands a truly reformed, efficient and effective AU Commission," said Buhari, according to the Reuters news agency.

Rwanda's Kagame, the AU's point man on reforms, has expressed frustration at the slow rate of change within the organisation. Yet the whole process has not taken into account diverging views, the balance between state sovereignty and consultations at a grassroots level, necessary to make the process legitimate, according to Fagbayibo.

"When it comes to the high politics, the sensitive issues, those are things that are still found wanting," he said. "It has to be addressed, to make this reform process more concrete and more progressive.
Whether its on the streets, in a church, a shopping mall, or a school, gun violence is ripping out the heart and soul of Philadelphias neighborhoods. This year, more than a dozen people, including a 13-year-old, were shot within hours of each other, ending in three deaths. A 9-year-old was also killed recently while playing with an unsecured handgun. These are only a few of the hundreds of children who have been victims of gun violence during the past year.

In Philadelphia alone, the sharp increase in gun violence prompted City Council to request that the mayor issue a state of emergency. Nearly 500 people were killed by homicides, most from guns, in the city last year, a 40% increase compared with 2019. In the first 40 days of this year, the city has seen more than 60 homicides, most gun-related murders.

Gun violence disproportionately impacts Black communities. Black men are 6% of the countrys population but account for more than 50% of homicide victims.

 READ MORE: As shootings in Philly have surged, law enforcement has failed to deliver justice

At the end of each day in America, we are experiencing mass murder in slow motion from the collective daily death tally of Philadelphia and other cities and communities nationwide.

Reducing gun violence for all people should be our goal  and our collective responsibility. The question is, what are we going to do about it?

One step we can take right now is passing the SAVE Students Act that will be considered this year by the Pennsylvania General Assembly. This measure would require that every middle and high school student in the state receives violence prevention training that includes knowing the warning signs of someone at risk of harming themselves or others and when and how to reach out for help.

Not only will programs like these help to reduce gun violence in our schools and on our streets, they will also help to reduce the growing epidemic of suicides in our state. Suicides have increased by more than 50% in the past decade alone and are increasing among Black youth faster than any other racial group. And experts fear those numbers will only increase given the social isolation and increased depression many are experiencing due to the pandemic.

We dont have to do this alone. Organizations like Cities United, which I founded, and Sandy Hook Promise, of which I am a board member, help Black communities advocate for violence prevention. These programs prove that gun violence is not inevitable, but preventable.

By becoming upstanders instead of bystanders, we can all make our communities safer.

We need to encourage the adoption of these programs  or others like them  in schools and other community-based organizations, particularly in areas hit hardest by the violence. Legislation like the SAVE Students Act can help ensure that all of our students, regardless of the color of their skin or their socioeconomic status, will get these vital and lifesaving tools.

Only by working together can we create solutions to address the mass murder plaguing this nation.

Its time for everyone to stand up and say enough is enough. I urge everyone to call or write their state representative and ask them to support the SAVE Students Act. Too many children are dying on the streets of our cities. Its time that we stand up and put an end to the violence.

Michael Nutter was the 98th mayor of Philadelphia. He is the founder of Cities United and a board member of the Sandy Hook Promise Foundation.
When Dr. Stanley Fineman started as an allergist in Atlanta, he told patients they should start taking their medications and prepare for the drippy, sneezy onslaught of pollen season around St. Patricks Day. That was about 40 years ago. Now he tells them to start around St. Valentines Day.

Across the United States and Canada, pollen season is starting 20 days earlier and pollen loads are 21% higher since 1990 and a huge chunk of that is because of global warming, a new study found in Mondays journal the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences.

While other studies have shown North Americas allergy season getting longer and worse, this is the most comprehensive data with 60 reporting stations and the first to make the required and detailed calculations that could attribute whats happening to human-caused climate change, experts said.

This is a crystal clear example that climate change is here and its in every breath we take, said lead author Bill Anderegg, a biologist and climate scientist at the University of Utah, who also has really bad allergies.

Chris Downs, a 32-year-old mechanical engineer in St. Louis, is already getting sinus problems, headaches and worst of all itchy red eyes  and his Facebook friends in the area tell him theyre feeling the same. He said the allergies, which started 22 years ago, usually hit in March, but this year and last year, they were already around in early February, along with blooms of trees and flowers outside.

As a kid I never saw anything start blooming in February, now I see a handful of years like that, Downs said.

The warmer the Earth gets, the earlier spring starts for plants and animals, especially those that release pollen. Add to that the fact that trees and plants produce more pollen when they get carbon dioxide, the study said.

This is clearly warming temperatures and more carbon dioxide putting more pollen in the air, Anderegg said. Trees are spewing the allergy-causing particles earlier than grasses, he said, but scientists arent sure why thats the case. Just look at cherry blossoms opening several days earlier in Japan and Washington, D.C., he said.

Texas is where some of the biggest changes are happening, Anderegg said. The South and southern Midwest are getting pollen season about 1.3 days earlier each year, while its coming about 1.1 days earlier in the West, he said. The northern Midwest is getting allergy season about 0.65 days earlier per year, and its coming 0.33 days earlier a year in the Southeast. In Canada, Alaska and the Northeast researchers couldn't see a statistically significant trend.

Anderegg said his team factored that in that parks and plants in cities were getting greener. They did standard detailed calculations that scientists have developed to see if changes in nature can be attributed to the increase of heat-trapping gases from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas. They compared whats happening now to computer simulations of an Earth without human-caused warming and rising carbon dioxide in the air.

Since 1990, about half of the earlier pollen season can be attributed to climate change  mostly from the warmer temperatures  but also from the plant-feeding carbon dioxide, Anderegg said. But since the 2000s, about 65% of earlier pollen seasons can be blamed on warming, he said. About 8% of the increased pollen load can be attributed to climate change, he said.

Dr. Fineman, past president of the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology and who wasnt part of the study, said this makes sense and fits with what he sees: Pollen really follows the temperature. Theres not a question.

While doctors and scientists knew earlier allergy season was happening, until now no one had done formal climate attribution studies to help understand why, said University of Washington environmental health professor Kristie Ebi, who wasnt part of the study. This can help scientists estimate how many allergies and asthma cases could be due to climate change, she said.

This is not just a matter of sniffles.

We should care about pollen season because pollen is an important risk factor for allergic diseases such as hay fever and asthma exacerbation, said University of Maryland environmental health professor Amir Sapkota, who wasnt part of the study. Asthma costs the U.S. economy an estimated $80 billion per year in terms of treatment and loss of productivity. So a longer pollen season poses real threats to individuals suffering from allergy as well as the U.S. economy.

Sapkota recently found a correlation between earlier spring onset and increase risk in asthma hospitalizations. One study found students do worse on tests because of pollen levels, Anderegg said.

Gene Longenecker, a hazards geographer who recently returned to Alabama, didnt really suffer from pollen allergies until he moved to Atlanta. Then he moved to Colorado: Every summer it was just crushing headaches and big things like that and (I) started into allergy testing and found out that, well, Im allergic to everything in Colorado  at the very least trees, grasses and pollens, weeds.

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Read stories on climate issues by The Associated Press at https://apnews.com/hub/climate

___

Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears.

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institutes Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
A court in Moscow has ordered mental assessments for former U.S. Marine, Trevor Reed, who was sentenced to 9 years in prison in Russia for assaulting police, a charge he has rejected.

The Moscow City Court began a hearing into Reed's appeal on February 10 with a ruling that the 29-year-old Texas student must undergo psychological and psychiatric evaluations before the hearing could resume at a later date.

A district court in Moscow sentenced Reed in late July after finding him guilty of assaulting two police officers. Reed denies the charge saying he does not remember anything about the incident as he was drunk at the time.

Reed and his family have insisted that the case is politically motivated, and have urged the U.S. government to intervene.

U.S. Ambassador John Sullivan condemned the conviction and sentencing at the time, calling it "theater of the absurd."

Reed is one of several American citizens to face trial in Russia in recent years on charges that their families, supporters, and in some cases the U.S. government, have said appear trumped up.

Last June, another former U.S. Marine, 50-year-old Paul Whelan, was sentenced by a court in Moscow to 16 years in prison for espionage which he, his supporters, and the U.S. government have questioned.

Some analysts believe Moscow is looking to use the American prisoners in a swap for Russians being held in the United States.

With reporting by TASS and Interfax
Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US

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UK PM gets married in London

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Suspicious deal: Whether there was profit from buying DNA IDs?

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4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack

Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities

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Russia MOD reports on maintenance of ceasefire regime in Nagorno-Karabakh

Armenia acting MOD meets with Russian counterpart in Moscow

Armenia 2nd President: I see possibility of restoring borders of Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast

We can provide our army with some key, modernized weapons, says Armenia ex-President Kocharyan

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OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs release statement on detention of 6 Armenian servicemen by Azerbaijan

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Addis Ababa  Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Demeke Mekonnen held a phone conversation on Tuesday with Minister for Foreign Affairs of Sweden, Ann Linde.

During their discussion, Demeke briefed his counterpart on the successful accomplishment of the law enforcement operation in Tigray and the rehabilitation and reconstruction works that the government of Ethiopia has been undertaking since then.

According to him, people who need humanitarian assistance have been identified and the government together with international aid agencies has been distributing food and non-food items, including pharmaceuticals from 92 distribution centers in the region.

The relief operation in the region is ever-increasing and 26 major relief organizations are accessing many parts of the region, he added.

Demeke also explained the relentless efforts of the government of Ethiopia to coordinate relief agencies to further boost the humanitarian assistance efforts and meet the demands of affected people.

Speaking about the Eritrean refugees, who were affected and displaced during the law enforcement campaign, he pointed out that the refugees have settled in different parts of Ethiopia and many of them are relocated to safer camps.

Demeke also raised his concerns on the unhelpful and unfounded claims made by some corners in the European Union who failed to understand the nature and objectives of the law enforcement operation and the humanitarian assistance efforts on the ground.

The two sides have also exchanged views about the upcoming general election in Ethiopia in which the Deputy Prime Minister affirmed the government's commitment to make the election transparent, fair, and democratic.

The two officials also pledged their country's commitment to strengthen the historical and strong relationship between Ethiopia and Sweden.

The discussion ended with the Foreign minister of Sweden appreciating the efforts being made to address her concern, according to Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
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SPOKANE (AP)  Gov. Jay Inslee's request for individual assistance for residents in eastern Washington who were displaced when wildfires devastated their communities has been denied by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The decision was announced in a letter Monday less than a week after President Joe Biden declared last year's wildfires in Washington a major disaster and approved public assistance funds for the state, The Spokesman-Review reported.





. . .
Global emissions of a potent substance notorious for depleting the Earth's ozone layer - the protective barrier which absorbs the Sun's harmful UV rays - have fallen rapidly and are now back on the decline, according to new research.

Two international studies published today in Nature, show emissions of CFC-11, one of the many chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) chemicals once widely used in refrigerators and insulating foams, are back on the decline less than two years after the exposure of their shock resurgence in the wake of suspected rogue production.

Dr Luke Western, from the University of Bristol, a co-lead author of one of the studies, said: "The findings are very welcome news and hopefully mark an end to a disturbing period of apparent regulatory breaches. If the emissions had stayed at the significantly elevated levels we found, there could have been a delay, possibly of many years, in ozone layer recovery. On top of that, since CFC-11 is also a potent greenhouse gas, the new emissions were contributing to climate change at levels similar to the carbon dioxide emissions of a megacity."

The production of CFC-11 was banned globally in 2010 as part of the Montreal Protocol, a historic international treaty which mandated the phase-out of ozone-depleting substances. Thereafter, CFC-11 emissions should have steadily fallen.

But in 2018 some of the same scientists behind the recent more reassuring discovery found a jump in emissions had begun around 2013, prompting alarm at the time that production of the banned substance had resumed in an apparent violation of the Montreal Protocol.

The first sign of something untoward was spotted by an international atmospheric monitoring team led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Dr Steve Montzka from NOAA, lead author of the original research paper explained: "We noticed the concentration of CFC-11 had declined more slowly since 2013 than predicted, clearly indicating an upturn in emissions. The results suggested that some of the increase was from eastern Asia."

These unexpected findings were confirmed by an independent global measurement network, the Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment (AGAGE).

Professor Ron Prinn from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), AGAGE principal investigator and co-author of both new papers, said: "The global data clearly suggested new emissions. The question was where exactly?

"The answer lay in the measurements at AGAGE and affiliate monitoring stations that detect polluted air from nearby regions. Using data from Korean and Japanese stations, it appeared around half of the increase in global emissions originated from parts of eastern China."

Further investigation by media and environmental campaigners exposed usage of CFC-11 in the manufacture of insulating foams in China. Chinese authorities took notice and at meetings of the Montreal Protocol in 2018 and 2019, they confirmed some banned ozone depleting substances were identified during factory inspections, but only in very small amounts relative to those inferred from the atmospheric data. According to their reports, arrests, material seizures, and the demolition of production facilities ensued.

The scientific teams have continued to closely monitor atmospheric levels, and the latest evidence, reported in the two papers on global CFC-11 emissions and eastern Chinese emissions, indicates that those efforts have likely contributed to dramatic emission declines.

Professor Matt Rigby, from the University of Bristol, co-author of both studies, explained: "To quantify how emissions have changed at regional scales, we compared the pollution enhancements observed in the Korean and Japanese measurement data to computer models simulating how CFC-11 is transported through the atmosphere. With the global data, we used another type of model that quantified the emissions change required to match the observed global CFC-11 concentration trends.

"At both scales, the findings were striking; emissions had dropped by thousands of tonnes per year between 2017 and 2019. In fact, we estimate this recent decline is comparable or even greater than the original increase, which is a remarkable turnaround."

Whilst the findings suggest the rapid action in eastern China and other regions of the world has likely prevented a substantial delay in ozone layer recovery, any unreported production will have a lingering environmental impact.

Professor Rigby added: "Even if the new production associated with the emissions from eastern China, and other regions of the world, has now stopped, it is likely only part of the total CFC-11 that was made has been released to the atmosphere so far. The rest may still be sitting in foams in buildings and appliances and will seep out into the air over the coming decades."

Since the estimated eastern Chinese CFC-11 emissions could not fully account for the inferred global emissions, there are calls to enhance international efforts to track and trace any future emitting regions.

Professor Ray Weiss, from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, a Principal Investigator in AGAGE, said: "As a direct result of these findings, the Parties of the Montreal Protocol are now taking steps to identify, locate and quantify any future unexpected emissions of controlled substances by expanding the coverage of atmospheric measurements in key regions of the globe."

###

Papers

'A decline in emissions of CFC-11 and related chemicals from eastern China' by Park et al in Nature

'A decline in global CFC-11 emissions during 2018-2019' by Montzka et al in Nature
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NEW DELHI : Here is a list of top 10 stocks that could be in focus on Tuesday:

Future Retail: The Delhi High Court on Monday quashed an order that halted Future Groups 24,713 crore deal to sell its assets to Reliance Industries Ltd, dealing a blow to Amazon.com Inc.s efforts to block the sale.

Torrent Pharmaceuticals: The company reported an 18.32% rise in its consolidated net profit to 297 crore for the quarter ended in December. The drug firm had posted a net profit of 251 crore for the corresponding period of the previous fiscal, Torrent Pharma said in a filing to BSE.

Also Read | India should worry about its public debt

AstraZeneca Pharma: The drug firm reported a 21% decline in net profit at 21.05 crore for the quarter ended in December. AstraZeneca Pharma India had posted a net profit of 26.70 crore for the corresponding period of the previous fiscal, AstraZeneca Pharma India said in a BSE filing.

NMDC: State-owned mining major NMDC on Monday said its consolidated net profit jumped 53% to 2,108 crore for the quarter ended in December. The company had posted a net profit of 1,375 crore during the same quarter a year ago, NMDC said in a BSE filing.

GE Power: The company reported 65% decline in consolidated net profit at 35.09 crore for December quarter 2020-21. The net profit in the year-ago period stood at 100.81 crore, the company said in a BSE filing.

Essar Shipping: The companys consolidated net loss widened to 181.88 crore in the third quarter ended December 2020. Essar Shipping had reported a loss of 95.29 crore in the corresponding quarter a year ago, it said in a regulatory filing.

Ultratech Cement: The board of directors of the company has approved issuance of Senior Unsecured Sustainability-linked Notes aggregating up to $400 million, corresponding to 3,000 crore, Ultratech Cement said in a regulatory filing.

Jindal Stainless Hisar: The company posted an over three-fold jump in its consolidated net profit to 270 crore for the December 2020 quarter. Jindal Stainless Hisar Ltd had posted a net profit of 82 crore in the corresponding quarter of last fiscal, JSHL said in a BSE filing.

BPCL: The companys December quarter net profit rose 23.6% over the preceding quarter to 2,778 crore, while revenue increased 33.1% to 66,731.5 crore q-o-q.

December quarter earnings: Abbot India, Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone, Berger Paints India, Burger King India, Future Retail, Muthoot Finance, Tata Steel and Torrent Power among others.

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Pig producers have welcomed roundtable talks with the government seeking to avert a crisis which has left the sector 'at its most critical state for 20 years.'

Defra Farming Minister Victoria Prentis chaired a roundtable event on Tuesday, which was also attended by Defra Secretary George Eustice and industry representatives.

It was held at the request of the National Pig Association (NPA) to discuss the series of events that has seen thousands of pigs build up on farms due to Covid-19 problems in pork plants and export disruption since January.

This, coupled with a lack of China re-certification for several abattoirs and new Brexit related issues, have created a backlog of in excess of 100,000 pigs on farm.

NPA chief executive Zoe Davies said positive discussions with the government and sector officials must now turn into action.

We were able to raise our concerns and discuss what could be done at departmental level, but also across the supply chain in terms of sourcing more British pork to prevent what could turn into a very serious situation for the sector."

NPA chairman Richard Lister, who farms pigs in Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire, said the backlog was growing and pig farming was at its most critical state for 20 years.

The net effect of this has been that many more pigs need to be cared for and provided with increasingly expensive feed and straw, resulting in rapidly declining cashflows and mounting losses for producers," he said at the meeting.

It is estimated that, on average, UK producers are losing around 20 on each pig they produce, according to the NPA.

But whilst the sector has farm contingency plans in place to cope with short term difficulties in moving livestock, these plans cannot be sustainable in the face of continuing and further backlogs.

These comments were reinforced by the striking findings of a recent pig producer survey by the NPA, illustrating the problems farmers are facing.

The vast majority of producers (86%) reported having pigs rolled by processors, held over to a later date, therefore having to keep them on farm for longer than would usually be the case.

Most farmers (88%) are already or expect to be in a loss-making situation soon, and 84% said this situation was having a negative impact on mental health.

At the meeting, the processors, represented by the British Meat Processors Association (BMPA), outlined the issues they had faced related to Brexit and Covid, but stressed that regaining access to China was the single most effective way to resolve the current issues.

NPA chief executive Zoe Davies agreed that China was important for some, but said that this would take time, which was something that the sector did not have.

Retailers present were also supportive and said that demand for British pork was currently strong, so if processors could provide the product, they would sell it, she said.

Whilst the biggest demand was for bacon, which is something that British pig farmers cannot produce enough of, one helpfully suggested that we ask AHDB to look at national carcase balance to see which cuts could benefit from further promotion.
There were no casualties in the past day.

The Command of Ukraine's Armed Forces has reported three violations of the latest ceasefire agreement committed by Russia-controlled armed groups in the Donbas warzone on Tuesday, February 9.

"In the past day, February 9, three ceasefire violations were recorded in the Joint Forces Operation (JFO) zone," the press center of the Ukrainian JFO Command said on Facebook in an update as of 07:00 Kyiv time on February 10, 2021.

In particular, the Russian occupation troops fired an automatic grenade launcher near the village of Bohdanivka, as well as automatic rifles near the village of Pisky.

Also, the enemy used under-barrel grenade launchers and rifles near the village of Shumy.

Read alsoMilitary forced to open fire at rogue driver trying to breach checkpoint into occupied DonbasThe Joint Forces fired back, the report says.

The violations were reported to OSCE representatives through the Joint Center for Control and Coordination (JCCC) on the ceasefire and stabilization in Donbas.

There were no casualties in the past day.

Since midnight, enemy forces have not attacked Ukrainian troops.

Ukrainian military say the situation is under full control.

Donbas ceasefire: Background

Participants in the Trilateral Contact Group (Ukraine, Russia, and the OSCE) on the peace settlement in Donbas on July 22 agreed on a full and comprehensive ceasefire along the contact line from 00:01 on Monday, July 27, 2020.

On the very first day of the newly-agreed truce, Russia's hybrid military forces mounted three attacks on Ukrainian positions in Donbas, eastern Ukraine. Ukraine has reported more such violations over the latest period.

Reporting by UNIAN
While I have pushed for different language to become law in each of the last two sessions, I agree with members from both sides of the aisle that voted in favor of the bill today as a step forward in assisting pregnant women in the workforce, Holcomb said in statement.
Management

Tech and tweets: Tanden talks policy and social media on Capitol Hill

Photo credit: John Smith Williams/Shutterstock.com

Government IT modernization, customer-friendly technology and cybersecurity will be "top priorities" for Biden's nominee to director of the Office of Management and Budget, Neera Tanden, if she's confirmed.

The OMB director plays a central role in the creation of the president's annual budget, as well as oversight of executive branch agencies and the steering of administration policy. Importantly, the OMB director also has oversight of the deputy director of management and the federal CIO. Tanden told lawmakers that she will prioritize tech and cyber issues if she's confirmed.

"It's an irony that in the United States, we have the greatest technology innovations," but "small businesses can't find out if they can get access to a small business loan as efficiently and effectively as possible," she told lawmakers during her hearing Tuesday before the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.

Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), who has been active on the subject of IT modernization, asked Tanden what Congress could do to help the OMB work on technology issues.

The real challenge is funding, Tanden said.

"It takes an investment of resources in one year," she said. "We don't have capital budgets or other systems."

The shoring up and use of the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) would be central to technology work, Tanden said, as would the use of the IT Oversight and Reform Fund.

House Democrats had sought a $9 billion boost to the TMF as part of the latest round of pandemic relief and recovery legislation, but that effort was scuppered after objections arose among senators.

Tanden told lawmakers that OMB's role in helping federal and state agencies with their technology could ultimately help citizens understand what government services are available to them, maybe even with apps or tech bots.

Modernizing IT "is really, I believe, a way in which we can make the federal government much more efficient, much more effective, and much more directed to the needs to customers, the American citizens," Tanden said.

The hearing also spotlighted the major SolarWinds hack and how the federal government might best respond.

Most affected agencies failed to notify Congress about the experience of a "major incident" in cybersecurity, a phrase that OMB is in charge of defining, Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) told Tanden. He asked her if she would review those standards as OMB director.

"Transparency to the Congress and the public around cyber incidents is really vital," she assured him and other lawmakers.

"I believe SolarWinds really demonstrates the challenge of ensuring cybersecurity. It's a high risk area that sometimes agencies have not sufficiently focused on," she said. "I am appreciative that the President has proposed significant resources to shore up cybersecurity it will be a high priority."

Committee chairman Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) concentrated his questions on the cybersecurity workforce in the federal government. He voiced his intention to reintroduce the Federal Rotational Cyber Workforce Act, which would set up a rotational cyber program in the government in an attempt to help attract and retain a cybersecurity workforce.

Tanden also pointed to the potential example of the U.S. Digital Service in attracting technical talent to the federal government and solving tech problems.

"The USDS has been effective in working with agencies on what I would describe as sort of killer challenges around technology," she said. "That's been an innovative mechanism in how we share information and use resources like that to affect cybersecurity, not just the delivery of services, I think is something that I'm very interested in exploring."

The hearing also centered on Tanden's past. Most recently, she has been president and CEO of the left-leaning think tank, the Center of American Progress. Since Tanden's nomination to the position, some Republican lawmakers have pointed to inflammatory language on Tanden's Twitter account, some of which has been aimed at Republican lawmakers themselves.

"Typically the OMB director is not a partisan in particular because you have to have these kinds of relationships," Portman, himself a former OMB director, said. "I'm concerned that your personal attacks about specific senators will make it more difficult to work with them."

Tanden addressed the concerns during her opening remarks.

"I know there have been some concerns about some of my past language in social media and I regret that language and take responsibility for it," she said.

She also noted that her think tank role was inherently different from the OMB nomination in that included advocacy.

"I understand, though, that the role of OMB director calls for bipartisan action, as well as nonpartisan adherence to facts and evidence," she said.

If she's confirmed, she'll work to win over the trust of Republican lawmakers and be a nonpartisan leader, Tanden told lawmakers.

"We are committed to an evidence based approach," she said. "The policymaking and decision-making process should really always be guided by facts and evidence [and] analysis of real impact on people's lives."
New Delhi:

The Centre has told the Supreme Court that it is taking the help of a US-based private body, which gives technical details on uploading of child porn to 99 countries, to curb the menace in India.

In a status report to be filed in the top court, the Centre has said that US-based National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) acts as a resource centre for information about missing and exploited children and they provide "free" details through a secure channel to the central law enforcing agency of the US and 99 other nations.

The government has told a bench headed by Justice Dipak Misra that as per information conveyed by the NCMEC, they are trying to establish the "secure link" with the law enforcing agency in the country.

"The NCMEC, USA is a private, non-profit organisation and acts as a national clearing house and resource centre for information about missing and exploited children. The NCMEC hotline provides technical details of any child porn uploading to the law enforcement agency concern in the USA and across the world in about 99 other countries", the report said.

Read more: Govt to SC: 3,500 child pornographic sites blocked last month

"This information is provided free, but through a secure channel to a central law enforcement agency. According to the information conveyed by the NCMEC, they have been trying to establish this secure link with an Indian law enforcement agency", the government has told the apex court.

The report further said the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEIT) has sent a letter to the Ministry of Home Affairs, a copy of which has also been sent to the Ministry of Women and Child Development, requesting them to follow up for establishing communication with the NCMEC.

Recently, in a communication to the home ministry, the MEIT has said that the NCMEC has informed that "a large number of reports are available with them wherein illegal imagery related to child pornography/child abuse have been uploaded from Indian territory".

"It is also understood that the NCMEC has been trying to establish a secure channel of communication with the CBI for sharing details in this regard since 2013.

"However, there is no concrete progress in the matter so far. Action on such reports can create a definitive deterrent mechanism for potential uploaders of such illegal imagery from India", the communication said.

The status report also gave details about various other initiatives taken by the government to curb child pornographyin the country.

Additional Solicitor General Pinky Anand had on July 14 told the bench that the Centre has blocked 3,522 websites carrying child pornographic content last month and has asked the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) to consider installation of jammers in schools to block access to such sites.

The government had said that installation of jammers in school buses was "not possible" and they were coming out with steps to deal with the menace in its entirety.

"We are coming out with steps which will deal with the situation in its entirety", Anand had told the bench that also comprised Justices A M Khanwilkar and M M Shantanagoudar.

Read more: SC wants Mallyas presence in contempt case; extradition likely by Dec

"The government has asked the CBSE to consider whether jammers can be installed in schools to curb access to such websites", she had said.

The apex court had asked the government to file a status report within two days on the steps taken by it to stop child pornography.

The court is dealing with a petition which has sought a direction to the Centre to take appropriate steps to curb child pornography across the country.

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-10 21:16:27|Editor: huaxia

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by Fu Yiming, Shi Zhongyu and Nemanja Cabric

On top of a series of impressive cooperation, China has been a true friend to Serbia during these trying times amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

BELGRADE, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- "A friend in need is a friend indeed!" said Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic when he described what China is to Serbia and the Serbian people.

"Whenever Serbia asked for something, we (have) always gotten that and I will always be very proud that we succeeded in getting the level of cooperation that we can brag on ourselves about," Vucic told Xinhua in an interview.

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic speaks during a welcoming ceremony of China's Sinopharm inactivated coronavirus vaccines in Belgrade, Serbia, Jan. 16, 2021. (Photo by Predrag Milosavljevic/Xinhua)

Recalling the scale and scope of bilateral cooperation in recent years, Vucic was impressed that such cooperation transformed Serbia and benefited the Serbian people tremendously. He said that his gratitude to China can not be expressed enough.

"We do together main roads, highways, railroads with Chinese companies, and we are very satisfied with the quality of the work they deliver, with their speed, efficacy ... efficiency they deliver to us," he said.

"A Chinese company saved our steel mill in Smederevo and we preserved 5,000 jobs for ordinary people. It's not only 5,000 jobs. It's all together 50,000 jobs with their collaborators, which is a huge number for such a relatively small country as Serbia," he said.

"New plants, new factories, new production lines ... " Vucic went on to list the variety of cooperation with China that has and will benefit the Serbian people. "Wherever you go you will see something that was done by the Chinese people here in this country."

"I am so proud of all our accomplishments, of all our achievements, wherever you go you can see a number of bridges built by Chinese companies, a number of tunnels... highways, roads and railroads built in this country," he added.

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic (front) views the models of high-speed trains at the construction site of the Belgrade-Budapest railway in Stara Pazova, Serbia, on May 30, 2020. (Dimitrije Goll/Serbian President's Office/Handout via Xinhua)

On top of a series of impressive cooperation, China has been a true friend to Serbia during these trying times amid the COVID-19 pandemic. China offered extensive support to Serbia when help could hardly be sought elsewhere, and it is therefore unsurprising that the president waited in the cold at the airport to welcome vaccines coming from China.

"I went to the airport, I waited for the goods... whether they were ventilators or vaccines and I did say many thanks to our Chinese friends," Vucic said.

When the pandemic first ravaged Europe, Vucic said, China sent medical experts to help Serbia and establish "state-of-the-art laboratories," and the Chinese experts not only helped Serbs fight the virus, but also boosted the confidence of the local medical teams. "That was a decisive moment of our fight against this pandemic, and I am very, very grateful!"

China was "the champion" that tackled and managed COVID-19 in the best possible way "with unparalleled leadership and discipline, (and) offered generous help to Serbia in need, making the country one of the highest vaccinated globally," Vucic said.

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic (C) and China's ambassador to Serbia Chen Bo (L) welcome the shipment of China's Sinopharm inactivated coronavirus vaccines at the Belgrade Airport, Serbia, Jan. 16, 2021. (Photo by Predrag Milosavljevic/Xinhua)

"Most of the people here in this country are vaccinated, with Sinopharm vaccine from China... the Chinese vaccines. I think there is no such a country in Europe in which you can find that level of trust (in the Chinese vaccines) that you can see here in Belgrade and Serbia," he said.

"People here are very satisfied and we are very proud that we succeeded in delivering such good things" to benefit the health of the Serbian people and the future of this country, he added.

"My very special message to the Chinese people: We appreciate you, we respect you, we are profoundly grateful to you for everything you did and for our friendship and we will do our best to keep this friendship. You can count on Serbian people," Vucic said. 
Slate has relationships with various online retailers. If you buy something through our links, Slate may earn an affiliate commission. We update links when possible, but note that deals can expire and all prices are subject to change. All prices were up to date at the time of publication.

On a late January day in 1565 London, a man named Richard Walweyn found himself imprisoned for committing what was, for all intents and purposes, a crime of fashion. Walweyn, a servant, was arrested for wearing a very monsterous and outraygeous great payre of hose and ordered to be detained until he could prove he had some other hose of a decent & lawfull facyon. The garment that caused such an uproar was a pair of trunk hose, basically baglike shorts that billow out from the waist and taper midthigh, giving the impression of the wearer having two balloons strapped to his legs. As law professor and cultural critic Richard Thompson Ford writes in his new book Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History, Trunk hose were the parachute pants of their day; Richard Walweyn, a Renaissance-era MC Hammer.

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Dress Codes traces nearly 600 years of fashion law and social norms, detailing how style and attempts to control it have shaped history. Perhaps nowhere is the boundary between the personal and the political, the individual and the state, more blurred than in the clothes that we put on our bodies. Ford argues persuasively that fashion as we know it is largely the result of the Enlightenment-era school of thought leading to the concept of the modern individual with personalities that transcend our social status, occupation and family heritage. Individualism separated the symbolism of clothing from its tradition-bound roots: If a merchants wife could afford a crown, if a slave wore the same dress as an antebellum belle, or if a servant like Walweyn donned monstrously extravagant trunk hose usually reserved for the nobilitythen the original meaning of the garment was undermined and transformed. Fashion presented a distinctive opportunity because it alone could transform the body itself into a form of political persuasion, Ford writes.

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Poor Walweyn got off relatively easy. Ford recounts how, in the same year that Walweyn was arrested, Thomas Bradshaw was marched home through the streets with his trunk hose deflated and de-poofed, the stuffing torn out. The problem with Walweyns and Bradshaws avant-garde hose wasnt its gaudiness but its potential to disrupt the political order. European governments became increasingly concerned with who wore what around the late Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, when technological advances and trade expansion brought economic prosperity across the continent. Ford writes that this boom, along with the labor shortage created by the mass death event that was the plague, allowed working people to demand higher compensation, better working conditions, and more respect, making social mobility more pronounced than ever.

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Changes in dress codes and fashion law tend to emerge during periods of intense social change. It makes sense, then, that these dress codes often police expressions of sexuality or attempt to create visual boundaries between racial, religious, class, and gender categories. The Renaissance-era sumptuary laws that Walweyn and Bradshaw faced arent the only ones that demonstrate an effort to either impose or dismantle a social hierarchy. Fifteenth-century Italian decrees that condemned jewelry as ostentatious vanity also required Jewish women to wear hoop earrings to publicly identify themselvesvisually equating the sin of vanity with Judaism. More recently, legislation like the CROWN Act, which forbids hair discrimination, reflects the opposite impulse, forbidding rather than enforcing the status quo that dictates that European standards of beauty are synonymous with professionalism.

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Perhaps one of the best-known examples of boundary policingand its futilityis Louisianas tignon laws, passed in 1786, five years after Louisiana became a Spanish colony. Under Spanish law, some enslaved people could buy back their freedom. Freed from bondage, Black women began exploring their personal style, elaborately adorning themselves in feathers and jewels and upsetting the racial order by competing too closely with white women. Tignon laws, which required Black women to cover their hair with scarfs or tignons, were an attempt to visually return freed Black women to slaveryone that spectacularly backfired. Intricately styled tignons in dazzling fabrics became statements of resistance, a tradition that persists to this day.

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Oddly, tignon laws dont get even a passing mention in Dress Codes. Though the book begins its chronology with the Elizabethan sumptuary laws that Walweyn and Bradshaw ran afoul of, Ford spends more time in the period after the Great Masculine Renunciation at the end of the 18th century, which still largely defines male fashion as we know it. As European societies overthrew their monarchies, opulence was renounced in favor of understatement, nonchalance, and relaxed elegance. And though the rejection of all things loud and vulgar might seem egalitarian and democratic on its faceit is, after all, what gave us the homogenizing suitin reality, it reinscribed hierarchy. Instead of laws dictating who could and couldnt wear ermine, luxury and good breeding were now demonstrated in small, costly details. The material of a suit jackets button today is as significant as wearing purple would have been during the Renaissance.

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Ford is an apt cultural historian, and hes at his strongest when tracing the changing winds that produced modern dress codes. A section on the rise of the Midtown Uniform (slacks, a Patagonia vest, and a collared shirt) as the outfit du jour of financiers effectively argues that it re-creates the very uniformity it was seeking to break away from by rejecting the suit. Just as fascinating is his description of the role that Jazz Age flappers played in reforming gendered dress codes that had held women in thrall to corsets and cocoons of tulle and taffeta. He pays deft attention to the ways marginalized people use fashion either to assimilate or to repudiate the dominant culture, touching on everything from the use of respectability politics in the civil rights movement to the reclamation of the hijab.

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Dress Codes feels rushed at times; squeezing six centuries worth of history into one book is a massive undertaking. Inevitably, some trends receive more attention than others, with the much-maligned sagging pants of the early aughts afforded less historical detail than Louboutins infamous red-bottom heels. Still, Dress Codes largely manages what it sets out to do. Ford notes in the conclusion that as he was researching the book, he was often met with puzzled looks and bemused expressions whenever he brought the project up with his colleagues concerned with more serious topics. But Ford builds a case familiar to anyone whos used a pair of shoes or a skirt as an act of rebellionor whos carefully selected a wardrobe to help themselves blend in. Fashion is both strategy and self-expression. It reflects the values of the society and the people who live in it, existing where the two overlap and conflict. What could be more serious?
A resident on E. Brainerd Road called police and said that he allowed a man to stay at his apartment for a few nights. In the process, he said the man had stolen his Kenneth Cole necklace, two rings and a few pairs of cuff links. Also, he said the man charged $159 to his Wells Fargo credit card. He said he had notified Wells Fargo and they froze the credit card. He provided police with pictures of the man and pictures of the stolen rings.* * *Police were called about a disorder at the Quality Inn, 7013 Shallowford Road.Police met with the mother of a man, who said that she was trying to retrieve some items for her son who had left the scene before police arrived. The mother said her son had recently had an altercation with his female friend and that the friend still had some of the son's belongings. Police made contact with the female friend in her hotel room, where she handed all of the son's items to his motherpeacefully. The mother left the scene without incident.* * *Report of a suspicious vehicle sitting in the parking lot of the Salvation Army, 2140 E 28th St. came in to police. Officers located the vehicle and the driver was identified. Police said there was an extreme language barrier, but they figured out the man was looking for his cousin's house and was lost. He said they were sending him the address and that he would wait at another location.* * *A man called police from CiCi's Pizza, 2288 Gunbarrel Road. He said he was driving around the area when he pulled over and parked at the CiCi's Pizza parking lot and went inside the business to use the restroom. He said when he came back outside, his vehicle, a gray Nissan Altima with Georgia tag, was gone. The man said that the driver's door window was busted and there was nothing covering it. He also said that he had left the vehicle's keys inside the vehicle. He said has no idea who could have taken his vehicle. Police entered the vehicle as stolen into NCIC.* * *Police responded to a mobile home park on Lee Highway where a woman said that she and her boyfriend have been having issues with the neighbor in the RV park they are staying in. She said they have been in the area for a few weeks and, since moving in, have not been getting along with the neighbor that lives directly beside them. She said when they first moved in that the neighbor made a comment about their RV being on his property and has since put up a fence to divide his lot from theirs. The woman said that morning her boyfriend attempted to enter their truck that was parked right up next to the fence that the man put up. She said her boyfriend had to push the fence over some in order to get into the vehicle and, when he did, the neighbor yelled, "Touch my fence again and it's on." The woman wanted this encounter documented in case future issues arise.* * *An anonymous caller told police that a black male was in the middle of the parking lot at Lyerly Dialysis Clinic, 2300 E. 3rd St. Police located the man lying on his back. The man said he was trying to get to his daughter's house on Wheeler Avenue. The man was given a ride by police to Wheeler Avenue.* * *While police were on a call on Sylvan Avenue they recovered four 9mm shell casings from the front porch of a residence. They and were turned in to the CPD Property Division.* * *A woman called police from Walmart, 5764 Highway 153. She said that her friends had dropped her off and left with all of her stuff in the car. She identified a man and said he and another man, unknown to her, took all of her belongings and just left her at Walmart. The man she named could not be identified in any police system.* * *Police were called by a woman who said she was walking down E. 28th Street when she saw two white males jump the fence at Adman Electric. She said that one of the men looked like a man she knew, who she identified to police, but she wasn't sure if it was him. Police canvased the area of Adman Electric and were not able to locate anyone on the property.* * *A resident on 5th Avenue reported a vehicle parked in her driveway that she did not recognize. Police were able to locate a neighbor who had a set of keys for the vehicle. The vehicle was moved by the neighbor.* * *Police responded to a call from someone on Fagan Street who said they had located a friend's stolen vehicle. Police found the vehicle was backed in behind a residence on Hooker Road. The vehicle had no new damage and the key was still with it. The owner of the vehicle came and drove her vehicle back home.* * *A woman was found sleeping up against the Police Precinct front door, downtown location. The woman was told by police if she was located there again, she would be arrested for trespassing. The woman left the area.* * *Police were called about a woman trespassing at the Westin, 801 Pine St. The woman was located by police on the side parking lot across the street. She was identified and was officially notified by police not to return to the Westin/Defoor properties, or she would be arrested for trespassing.* * *Police responded to a disorder on E. 47th Street. A woman said that she and her boyfriend were in a verbal spat in regards to money. She said she would like for him to find somewhere else to go for the day. A cab was called for the boyfriend and he was taken to his friend's house.* * *An employee of Enterprise, 2148 Chapman Road, identified a man who was the last to rent a gray Toyota Camry. She said she found a pistol in the driver door after he returned the car. Police ran the pistol in NCIC, it came back not stolen. Police made contact with the man who said that he was heading to Enterprise to receive his pistol. Police waited for the man and returned his handgun safely.* * *A couple residing on Guild Trail called police and said that sometime early that morning, an unknown male had knocked on their front door. Two minutes later, the same person ran through their back yard. The couple said they have since checked everything around the house and nothing had been touched or stolen. They requested their home be placed on the watch list for the next couple of weeks.
Franklin Templeton MF: SBI Funds Management Seeks Protection from Liability in Disbursement

The Supreme Court has clarified that SBI Fund Management, and not SBI Mutual Funds, will be responsible for distribution of Rs9,122 crore to unit-holders of the six wound-up Franklin Templeton schemes. The SBI Fund Management also sought protection from any liability arising from the fund distribution exercise.

A bench comprising justices S Abdul Nazeer and Sanjiv Khanna allowed the SBI Fund Management to become a party in the case, as it clarified that there was a clerical error in the previous order which said that the SBI Mutual Fund will be the disbursing entity.

The petitioners' counsel, during the hearing, raised concerns on the distribution mechanism, and prayed before the top court that fund distribution should be done as per the net asset value (NAV).

The top court noted that unit-holder who are dissatisfied with wound-up schemes, can raise their grievances on the next date of hearing on 17th February. SBI Funds Management is the asset management company of SBI Mutual Funds, which sought the fund house should bear all expenses in connection with the distribution of funds.

SBI Fund Management moved the top court seeking its approval to disburse the funds among the unitholders of the mutual funds' schemes and also sought protection from any liability, which could arise out of the distribution exercise.

The petitioners' counsel contended before the top court that the asset management firm should move the SEBI, rather than approaching the court.

On 2nd February, the Supreme Court had directed Franklin Templeton Mutual Fund (FTMF) to distribute Rs9,122 crore among unit-holders of the six schemes that were shut by the mutual fund house in April last year and said the distribution of funds need to be undertaken by the SBI Mutual Fund and completed within 20 days. The apex court had said the unit-holders should be repaid in proportion to their respective share in assets of the scheme and the distribution of funds would be undertaken by SBI Mutual Funds as agreed by both Franklin Templeton Trust and the Securities and Exchange Board of India.

Disclaimer: Information, facts or opinions expressed in this news article are presented as sourced from IANS and do not reflect views of Moneylife and hence Moneylife is not responsible or liable for the same. As a source and news provider, IANS is responsible for accuracy, completeness, suitability and validity of any information in this article.
INEC says the turnout of voters across the country hovers around 30 to 35 per cent of registered voters in the last two electoral cycles.

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has said voter turnout across Nigeria hovered around 30 to 35 per cent of registered voters in the last two electoral cycles.

INEC Chairman, Mahmood Yakubu, disclosed this in Abuja at the Commission's first consultative meeting with Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) for 2021 on Tuesday.

Mr Yakubu said while some elections recorded higher percentage of voter turnouts, it was lower in some other elections.

"Over the last two electoral cycles, including off-season elections, voter turnout across the country hovers around 30 to 35 per cent.

"While a few elections had higher percentages, some recent by-elections recorded as low as 8.3 per cent voter turnout in urban and constituencies of over 1.2 million registered voters located in the nation's most densely populated city.

"This unfavourably compares to the average voter turnout of 65-70 per cent in other countries, even in the West Africa region," he said.

The INEC chairman said that justifiably, CSOs had been urging the commission to find solutions to the problem.

Mr Yakubu said as accredited election observers, "some CSOs had submitted reports to the commission", adding that after studying the reports in detail, "it was clear that they were concerned about the declining voter turnout in elections in Nigeria".

Factors

"The Commission has deeply reflected on the matter. Our conclusion is that several factors are responsible for discouraging voter turnout.

"Among them are inadequate voter and civic education, ineffective voter mobilisation, the fear of violence during elections, unfulfilled promises by elected officials and low public trust in state institutions.

"While the Commission will continue to work with CSOs and all stakeholders to address these challenges, we are also convinced that access to polling units is a critical factor in voter turnout during elections.

"Countries with higher percentages of voter turnout during elections also have adequate and convenient voting locations for eligible voters which are periodically adjusted to reflect increase in voter population, unfortunately, this is not the case in Nigeria," he said.

Mr Yakubu said Nigeria has 119,973 polling units established in 1996 by the defunct National Electoral Commission of Nigeria (NECON) to serve a projected population of 50 million voters.

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"The figure remains the same in the last 25 years although the number of registered voters has increased to 84,004,084 by 2019. It is set to rise after we resume the registration of new voters ahead of the 2023 General Election," he said.

He said that INEC had reviewed previous efforts aimed at expanding voter access to polling units in 2007, 2014 and before the 2019 General Election and why they were unsuccessful.

Mr Yakubu said the commission came to the conclusion that its intention might not have been properly communicated for inputs from Nigerians and, therefore misunderstood and politicised.

Parley

He said the INEC meeting with CSOs was in furtherance of its consultations with 'stakeholders', and it hoped that by doing so, it would better communicate its intention to Nigerians.

He, however, invited for inputs across the board on how to address the problem on immediate terms and hopefully establish the framework for future adjustments as the need arose.

"I am confident that by working together, we will make history by finally solving the 25-year old problem of expanding voter access to polling units in Nigeria," Mr Yakubu said.

(NAN)
2006

Assange creates Wikileaks with a group of like-minded activists and IT experts to provide a secure way for whistleblowers to leak information. He quickly becomes its figurehead and a lightning rod for criticism.

2010

March: U.S. authorities allege Assange engaged in a conspiracy to hack a classified U.S. government computer with former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning.

July: Wikileaks starts releasing tens of thousands of top secrets documents, including a video of U.S. helicopter pilots gunning down 12 civilians in Baghdad in 2007. What followed was the release of more than 90,000 classified US military files from the Afghan war and 400,000 from Iraq that included the names of informants.

August: Two Swedish women claim that they each had consensual sex with Assange in separate instances when he was on a 10-day trip to Stockholm. They allege the sex became non-consensual when Assange refused to wear a condom.

First woman claims Assange was staying at her apartment in Stockholm when he ripped off her clothes. She told police that when she realized Assange was trying to have unprotected sex with her, she demanded he use a condom. She claims he ripped the condom before having sex.

Second Swedish woman claims she had sex with Assange at her apartment in Stockholm and she made him wear a condom. She alleges that she later woke up to find Assange having unprotected sex with her.

He was questioned by police in Stockholm and denied the allegations. Assange was granted permission by Swedish authorities to fly back to the U.K.

November: A Swedish court ruled that the investigation should be reopened and Assange should be detained for questioning on suspicion of rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion. An international arrest warrant is issued by Swedish police through Interpol.

Wikileaks releases its cache of more than 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables.

December: Assange presents himself to London police and appears at an extradition hearing where he is remanded in custody. Assange is granted conditional bail at the High Court in London after his supporters pay 240,000 in cash and sureties.

2011

February: A British judge rules Assange should be extradited to Sweden but Wikileaks found vows to fight the decision.

April: A cache of classified U.S. military documents is released by Wikileaks, including intelligence assessments on nearly all of the 779 people who are detained at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba.

November: Assange loses High Court appeal against the decision to extradite him.

2012

June: Assange enters the Ecuadorian embassy in London requesting political asylum.

August: Assange is granted political asylum by Ecuador.

2013

June: Assange tells a group of journalists he will not leave the embassy even if sex charges against him are dropped out of fear he will be extradited to the U.S.

2015

August: Swedish prosecutors drop investigation into some of the sex allegations against Assange due to time restrictions. The investigation into suspected rape remains active.

2016

July: Wikileaks begins leaking emails U.S. Democratic Party officials favoring Hillary Clinton.

November: Assange is questioned over the sex allegation at the Ecuadorian Embassy in the presence of Sweden's assistant prosecutor Ingrid Isgren and police inspector Cecilia Redell. The interview spans two days.

2017

January: Barack Obama agrees to free whistleblower Chelsea Manning from prison. Her pending release prompts speculation Assange will end his self-imposed exile after Wikileaks tweeted he would agree to U.S. extradition.

April: Lenin Moreno becomes the new president of Ecuador who was known to want to improve diplomatic relations between his country and the U.S.

May: An investigation into a sex allegation against Assange is suddenly dropped by Swedish prosecutors.

2018

January: Ecuador confirms it has granted citizenship to Assange following his request.

February: Assange is visited by Pamela Anderson and Nobel Peace Prize winner Adolfo Perez Esquivel.

March: The Ecuadorian Embassy suspends Assange's internet access because he wasn't complying with a promise he made the previous year to 'not send messages which entailed interference in relation to other states'.



August: U.S. Senate committee asks to interview Assange as part of their investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election.

September: Assange steps down as editor of WikiLeaks.

October: Assange reveals he will launch legal action against the government of Ecuador, accusing it of violating his 'fundamental rights and freedoms'.

November: U.S. Justice Department inadvertently names Assange in a court document that says he has been charged in secret.

2019

January: Assange's lawyers say they are taking action to make President Trump's administration reveal charges 'secretly filed' against him.

April 6: WikiLeaks tweets that a high level Ecuadorian source has told them Assange will be expelled from the embassy within 'hours or days'. But a senior Ecuadorian official says no decision has been made to remove him from the London building.

April 11: Assange has his diplomatic asylum revoked by Ecuador and he is arrested by the Metropolitan Police; he is remanded in custody by a judge at Westminster Magistrates Court.

April 12: He is found guilty of breaching his bail terms.

May 1: Sentenced to 11 months in jail.

May 2: Court hearing takes place over Assange's proposed extradition to the U.S. He tells a court he does not consent to the extradition and the case is adjourned until May 30.

May 13: Swedish prosecutors reopen rape case saying they still want to question Assange.

June 3: Swedish court rules against detaining him in absentia, setting back the extradition case.

June 12 Home Secretary Sajid Javid signs an extradition request from the US.

June 13 A hearing sets out the date for Assange's full extradition hearing - February next year.

November Swedish prosecutors stop investigation into an allegation of rape against Mr Assange

November 25 - Medics say without correct medical care Assange 'could die' in Belmarsh

December 13 - Hearing in London hears he is being blocked from seeing key evidence in case

December 19 - Appears at Westminster Magistrates' Court via video-link where his lawyer claims US bid to extradite him is 'political'.

2020

June: Assange failed to appear via video link for his most recent court matter in London's Westminster Magistrates' Court
The diplomats say a service commensurate with Euro-Atlantic best practices and principles will benefit Ukrainians.

The International Advisory Group has pledged support for the reform of the SBU Security Service of Ukraine.

"The International Advisory Group met with Deputy Prime Minister Olha Stefanyshyna and pledged support for Ukraine's historic efforts to reform the Security Service through each legislative phase, including adoption and implementation," the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv wrote on Twitter.

Read alsoU.S. embassy voices support for ban on pro-Russian TV channels in UkraineDiplomats added that a "modern and efficient service commensurate with Euro-Atlantic best practices and principles will benefit all Ukrainians."

SBU reform: Background

On January 28, 2021, the Verkhovna Rada passed at first reading a draft law on amendments to the law of Ukraine On the Security Service of Ukraine regarding the improvement of the agency's organizational and legal framework (No. 3196-d).

On the same day, the Verkhovna Rada passed in the second reading and as a whole a draft law on the creation of the Bureau of Economic Security, which will take up functions to prevent, detect, suppress, investigate, and solve crimes in the field of the formation and use of financial resources of the state.

Reporting by UNIAN
Scientists who advise the World Health Organisation (WHO) have recommended the use of the Oxford AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine for all adults.

This comes as many countries have decided not to vaccinate over 65s with the Covid-19 vaccine due to there not being enough evidence that it is efficient for the age group.

However, there has been no concern that it is unsafe for use in this age group.

Read More

After recommendations from HSE Chief Clinical Officer Colm Henry, the Irish government has decided to vaccinate the over 70s group with the mRNA vaccines, Pfizer and Moderna.

A fortnight ago the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine was approved by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) for all adults, including over 65s, in the European Union.

It is the third Covid-19 vaccine that has been authorised for use in the EU by EMA, following the Pfizer/BioNtech and Moderna vaccines.

In a statement, the EMA said the quality, safety, and efficiency of the vaccine has been assessed and it has been approved for use in the EU.

Emer Cooke, Executive Director of EMA, said: With this third positive opinion, we have further expanded the arsenal of vaccines available to EU and EEA member states to combat the pandemic and protect their citizens.

"As in previous cases, the CHMP has rigorously evaluated this vaccine, and the scientific basis of our work underpins our firm commitment to safeguard the health of EU citizens.

Four clinical trials in the UK, Brazil and South Africa were undertaken and, according to the EMAs human medicines committee (CHMP), showed that the AstraZeneca vaccine is safe and effective in preventing Covid-19 in people over the age of 18.

Around 24,000 people were used in the trial with half receiving the vaccine and the other half a dummy injection.

Despite the safety of the vaccine being demonstrated across the four trials, the calculation of how effective the vaccine works was only based upon one of the trials in the UK and the one in Brazil.

This was due to the other two studies having fewer than six Covid-19 cases in each, which, according to the EMA is not enough to measure the preventive effect of the vaccine.

From these trials, the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine demonstrated a 60pc efficacy rate. However, as the majority of participants in these studies were between 18 and 55 years old, the agency couldnt provide an efficacy rate for over 55s.

The EMA added: However, protection is expected, given that an immune response is seen in this age group and based on experience with other vaccines; as there is reliable information on safety in this population, EMAs scientific experts considered that the vaccine can be used in older adults.

More information is expected from ongoing studies, which include a higher proportion of elderly participants.

The Covid-19 AstraZeneca vaccine is given as two injections into the arm, the second between 4 to 12 weeks after the first.

How the AstraZeneca vaccine is expected to work is by preparing the body to defend itself against the infection.

The vaccine is made up of another virus that has been modified to contain the gene for making the Covid-19 spike protein.

Once the vaccine has been given, it delivers the Covid-19 gene into cells in the body, these cells then use the gene to produce the spike protein and then the person's immune system treats this as foreign and produces natural defenses  antibodies and T cells- to protect against this.

.Then, if this person comes in contact with Covid-19, the immune system will recognise the virus and be prepared to attack it
The Redmi Note 10 series will arrive in India in March, Xiaomi announced earlier today. The Chinese tech company started teasing the launch of the next-generation 'Note' lineup, in a series tweets earlier this week. The exact launch date or specifications of the Redmi Note 10 series remain unclear, at the moment. The series will reportedly include the regular Redmi Note 10 and Redmi Note 10 Pro. Xiaomi had previously teased that the latest series will offer the "smoothest" performance, without sharing specific details.

The new Redmi Note 10 series will succeed the Redmi Note 9 that was launched in the country in March last year. However, the series at first included the Redmi Note 9 Pro and Redmi Note 9 Pro Max and later added the regular Redmi Note 9 in April 2020. In a tweet, Xiaomi India MD Manu Kumar Jain stated that the Redmi Note 10 series would debut in early March. The latest development also clarifies old rumours that stated the new smartphone series would debut in the country end of this month.

, !#RedmiNote10 series is from another orbit & it's arriving early March this year! Brace yourselves for a #10on10 experience! RT if you want to know more. I  #Redmi #RedmiNote #Launch pic.twitter.com/rRMWkejnI4  Manu Kumar Jain (@manukumarjain) February 10, 2021

Notably, a report had suggested that the Redmi Note 10 series would be "priced aggressively" in India considering that the Redmi Note 9 series did not perform well in terms of sale. Interestingly, Xiaomi announced earlier this week that Redmi Note series smartphones shipped more than 20 crore units globally, ever since its debut in 2014. The company had also stated that the Redmi Note 8 was the second-best-selling smartphone series globally between January 1 to June 30.

Coming back to the Redmi Note 10, the vanilla model had purportedly appeared on the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) website in January 2021. Both Redmi Note 10 Pro and the vanilla Redmi Note 10 have also purportedly appeared on several certification websites over the last few weeks - tipping their key specs. The Redmi Note 10 is tipped to come with a 120Hz LCD display and the Qualcomm Snapdragon 732G chipset. The smartphone may also feature a 64MP quad-camera system and a 5,050mAh battery with fast charging support. On the other hand, the Redmi Note 10 Pro is said to come in three - 6GB+ 64GB, 6GB + 128GB, and 8GB + 128GB configurations.
Hundreds of commuters are stranded in Ngong following a strike by matatus in protest over the entry of public service vehicles belonging to Super Metro sacco into the Nairobi-Ngong route.

The protesting matatu operators say that Super Metro should not be operating along the route. It begun doing so this week.

They also complained that the sacco came with complete crew instead of employing locals.

Grounding their vehicles Wednesday morning, the Ngong PSV operators said they will not allow any matatu to operate along the route until the matter is resolved.

Passengers were forced to look for alternative means of transport to their destinations, with most resorting to using bodabodas.

The operators alleged that the Super Metro matatu sacco began plying the route on Monday, despite their demands to be informed how its vehicles were brought to Kajiado County. the sacco, plys Nairobi and Kiambu routes.

Striking Ngong Matatu operators demand to be tear gassed

Ngong matatu operators chairman Steve Biko said that Super Metro has also denied locals a chance to get employed as crew on their matatus and has also as lowered fares from Sh100 to Sh80.

"We are not opposed to having Super Metro sacco operate the Ngong route but they must follow the due process. If that is not done then they will not operate here," he said.

Attempts by officers from Ngong Police Station to restore normal operations proved futile.

Officers from Kajiado County who tried to pacify the operators were also chased away.

The striking matatu operators said they will only listen to Governor Joseph ole Lenku.

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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The Kogi State governor, Yahaya Bello, has said a former aviation minister, Femi Fani-Kayode, has defected from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to the All Progressives Congress

Mr Bello, who met with Mr Fani-Kayode on Tuesday, took credit for the defection.

Mr Fani-Kayode has not confirmed that he has joined the APC but admitted to meeting with Mr Bello and other APC leaders.

In a video shot during an APC event in Kogi and shared on Wednesday, Mr Bello said the defection is one of his achievements as the head of the youth mobilisation committee for the partys membership registration and revalidation.

Our brother and friend, Chief Femi Fani-Kayode has joined our party in good faith. He is joining our party to come and add his own positive energy and make contributions to ensuring that APC is a party to beat.

Remember, Chief Femi Fani-Kayode is a foundation member of the All Progressives Congress, the governor said.

Mr Bello could not be reached for further comment, especially the opposition to Mr Fani-Kayodes defection from some APC leaders including the head of the partys governors forum, Salihu Lukman.

However, the governors media aide, Mohammed Onogwu, said he was not aware of the video and requested that it should be sent to him; which was done. He has yet to respond at the time of this report.

PREMIUM TIMES earlier reported the meeting between Mr Fani-Kayode and the duo of APC Interim National Chair, Mala Buni and Mr Bello.

While the ex-aviation minister in his statement did not specifically say he was planning to defect, many Nigerians had envisaged such a move.

Despite the obvious benefits and wisdom in this noble initiative, it amazes me that some people should feel that it is wrong for me to sit with other leaders in the country to discuss issues which touch and concern the national cohesion, future and stability of our country.

This is a time in which we must set all our differences aside, build bridges and come together as one lest our country drifts into fratricidal butchery and civil war, Mr Fani-Kayode said on Tuesday.

We dont need Fani-Kayode  APC

When contacted, the APC deputy spokesperson, Yekini Nabena, said the party has yet to receive Mr Fani-Kayode.

He, however, expressed disgust at his move.

If Fani-Kayode wants to defect he knows what to do. He can go to his ward to see if they can register him but his kind of characters are not the kind we need in this party.

As far as I am concerned, we dont want people who cant respect their elders and speak from the side of their mouths and do not have shame. Fani-Kayode is a disgrace to humanity and we dont need him in APC.

If he and Yahaya Bello want to come, they can come together to the national secretariat, he told this newspaper.
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The Ministry of Public Health, Social Development & Labour (Ministry VSA) Collective Prevention Services (CPS), will organize a panel discussion about the COVID-19 Vaccine rollout plan on Sint Maarten on Thursday.





Various health experts will attend to provide information about the importance, safety, and procedures of the upcoming COVID-19 vaccination rollout plan.





The event will be live streamed via the Government of Sint Maarten Facebook page, for everyone to view.





Everyone is invited to post the questions that they might have live via Facebook comments or in advance via vaccination@sintmaartengov.org.





With this public event, the Ministry of VSA & CPS aims to inform people and put a stop to the spread of misinformation.





The Facebook Livestream will take place on Thursday, February 11 at 7.00 pm via Facebook.com/SXMGOV and simultaneously on Government Radio 107.9FM. It will also be replayed on Cable TV Channel 115 Friday at 10.30 AM and 6.30 PM.





The city of Wasco is speaking out against the high speed rail, saying the project will leave the city with millions of dollars worth of mitiga
Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- This time is different may be the most dangerous words in business: billions of dollars have been lost betting that history wont repeat itself. And yet now, in the oil world, it looks like this time really will be.For the first time in decades, oil companies arent rushing to increase production to chase rising oil prices as Brent crude approaches $70. Even in the Permian, the prolific shale basin at the center of the U.S. energy boom, drillers are resisting their traditional boom-and-bust cycle of spending.The oil industry is on the ropes, constrained by Wall Street investors demanding that companies spend less on drilling and instead return more money to shareholders, and climate change activists pushing against fossil fuels. Exxon Mobil Corp. is paradigmatic of the trend, after its humiliating defeat at the hands of a tiny activist elbowing itself onto the board.The dramatic events in the industry last week only add to what is emerging as an opportunity for the producers of OPEC+, giving the coalition led by Saudi Arabia and Russia more room for maneuver to bring back their own production. As non-OPEC output fails to rebound as fast as many expected -- or feared based on past experience -- the cartel is likely to continue adding more supply when it meets on June 1.CriminalizationShareholders are asking Exxon to drill less and focus on returning money to investors. They have been throwing money down the drill hole like crazy, Christopher Ailman, chief investment officer for CalSTRS. We really saw that company just heading down the hole, not surviving into the future, unless they change and adapt. And now they have to.Exxon is unlikely to be alone. Royal Dutch Shell Plc lost a landmark legal battle last week when a Dutch court told it to cut emissions significantly by 2030 -- something that would require less oil production. Many in the industry fear a wave of lawsuits elsewhere, with western oil majors more immediate targets than the state-owned oil companies that make up much of OPEC production.We see a shift from stigmatization toward criminalization of investing in higher oil production, said Bob McNally, president of consultant Rapidan Energy Group and a former White House official.While its true that non-OPEC+ output is creeping back from the crash of 2020 -- and the ultra-depressed levels of April and May last year -- its far from a full recovery. Overall, non-OPEC+ output will grow this year by 620,000 barrels a day, less than half the 1.3 million barrels a day it fell in 2020. The supply growth forecast through the rest of this year comes nowhere close to matching the expected increase in demand, according to the International Energy Agency.Beyond 2021, oil output is likely to rise in a handful of nations, including the U.S., Brazil, Canada and new oil-producer Guyana. But production will decline elsewhere, from the U.K. to Colombia, Malaysia and Argentina.As non-OPEC+ production increases less than global oil demand, the cartel will be in control of the market, executives and traders said. Its a major break with the past, when oil companies responded to higher prices by rushing to invest again, boosting non-OPEC output and leaving the ministers led by Saudi Arabias Abdulaziz bin Salman with a much more difficult balancing act.Drilling DownSo far, the lack of non-OPEC+ oil production growth isnt registering much in the market. After all, the coronavirus pandemic continues to constrain global oil demand. It may be more noticeable later this year and into 2022. By then, vaccination campaigns against Covid-19 are likely to be bearing fruit, and the world will need more oil. The expected return of Iran into the market will provide some of that, but there will likely be a need for more.When that happens, it will be largely up to OPEC to plug the gap. One signal of how the recovery will be different this time is the U.S. drilling count: It is gradually increasing, but the recovery is slower than it was after the last big oil price crash in 2008-09. Shale companies are sticking to their commitment to return more money to shareholders via dividends. While before the pandemic shale companies re-used 70-90% of their cash flow into further drilling, they are now keeping that metric at around 50%.The result is that U.S. crude production has flat-lined at around 11 million barrels a day since July 2020. Outside the U.S. and Canada, the outlook is even more somber: at the end of April, the ex-North America oil rig count stood at 523, lower than it was a year ago, and nearly 40% below the same month two years earlier, according to data from Baker Hughes Co.When Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz predicted earlier this year that drill, baby, drill is gone for ever, it sounded like a bold call. As ministers meet this week, they may dare to hope hes right.More stories like this are available on bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.2021 Bloomberg L.P.
MELVILLE, N.Y., Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Nationwide Mortgage Bankers (NMB) and its Hispanic market subsidiary Americasa, are proud to provide FHA Mortgages to DACA recipients, along with a bilingual team to help guide clients through the mortgage process in their preferred language.

To be able to offer this product to our Dreamers all across the United States makes us extremely proud of our country. Tweet this Americasa logo

"FHA loans, with their modest credit requirements and 3.5% down payment minimum, have been helping families achieve the dream of homeownership for decades," said Jodi Hall, President at NMB. "To be able to offer this product to our Dreamers all across the United States makes us extremely proud of our country and our craft."

Extending FHA Mortgage eligibility to DACA recipients enables NMB & Americasa to better serve a core segment of the American immigrant population. "We're already helping a number of families achieve homeownership thanks to this landmark change to the FHA eligibility criteria," said Richard Steinberg, Founder and Chairman of NMB & Americasa. "Our vision for creating Americasa was to build a mortgage company that lowered the barriers to homeownership for the Hispanic community. Giving Dreamers access to FHA loans gives us a powerful tool to continue driving this important vision."

Founded in 2011, Nationwide Mortgage Bankers has quickly grown to become America's fastest growing mortgage company, according to Inc 5000. In 2019, Americasa was created to provide a dedicated team of trusted advisors for the Hispanic community. NMB & Americasa have originated over one billion dollars in loans for Hispanic clients since 2019.

About Nationwide Mortgage Bankers & Americasa

NMB was born with the vision of demystifying mortgages through transparency, education, and dedicated client support. NMB's mission is to be our clients trusted advisors, guiding them through the home financing process with the highest level of service and professionalism. NMB is a "Great Place to Work" Certified Company and rated the #1 fastest growing mid-size mortgage company in America by Inc 5000 for the past two years. NMB is a full-service mortgage company licensed in 43 states. Americasa, a subsidiary of NMB, is a new breed of mortgage company uniquely designed to support the needs of the Hispanic community, which encompasses about 30% of NMB's total business.

Contact:

Yianni Garcia, CMO

Nationwide Mortgage Bankers Inc  NMLS 819382

[email protected]

786.423.3225

SOURCE Nationwide Mortgage Bankers; Americasa

Related Links

https://nmbnow.com/


Jurassic Park star Sam Neill has offered fans a nugget of information about the upcoming sixth film in the franchise, Jurassic World: Dominion.

Plot details are sparse and being kept that way until nearer the sequel's release in June 2022, but moviegoers are keen to know where Sam's character - Dr Alan Grant - fits into the plot.

He is returning to the franchise alongside Jeff Goldblum, as Dr Ian Malcolm, and Laura Dern, as Dr Ellie Sattler, with the trio starring in the first movie in 1993, not appearing as a threesome for 27 years.

Relationship status? Sam Neill has teased Jurassic World: Dominion plot details about his on-screen relationship with co-star Laura Dern... and claimed the movie could easily be six hours long

Speaking to Variety, Sam, 73, said of Alan Grant in present day: 'Same character, but different world, different times.'

He added: 'Dr Grant and Dr Sattler havent seen each other for some time, so youll see how that pans out.'

This is the first morsel of information to be disclosed about the two legacy characters' current relationship.

In Jurassic Park, the pair were a couple who also worked together, recruited by the late Richard Attenborough's character John Hammond to visit his dinosaur theme park before it opens to the public.

Trio: He is returning to the franchise alongside Jeff Goldblum, as Dr Ian Malcolm, and Laura Dern, as Dr Ellie Sattler, having not appeared as a threesome for 27 years

Speaking to Variety, Sam, 73, said of Alan Grant and co in present day: 'Same character[s], but different world, different times.'

The park, of course, never opened, when, during the visit, a power outage led to disaster when the dinosaurs escaped from their paddocks and took over the island the park was built on.

Having escaped the island, Grant and Sattler reappeared again in 2001's Jurassic Park III, with Grant sent to John Hammond's second island, also overrun with dinosaurs.

In this movie, he and Sattler were friends but not lovers, with the latter married to another man with two children.

Tease: Offering up the first morsel of information about the two legacy characters' current relationship, Sam said, 'Dr Grant and Dr Sattler havent seen each other for some time, so youll see how that pans out'

TBC: In Jurassic Park, the pair were a couple who also worked together, recruited by the late Richard Attenborough's character John Hammond to visit his dinosaur theme park before it opens to the public

Where their relationship stands in Jurassic World: Dominion is yet to be revealed, but Neill's latest teaser sheds a little light on this.

He also claims the film - which was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic and became the first movie to resume amid new industry safety measures - has so much footage in the can it could be a six-hour event.

'Its going be a big film. [Director] Colin Trevorrow has that childlike sense of wonder, playfulness and inventiveness that [Jurassic Park director] Steven Spielberg has.

'We really shot a six-hour movie. We were all very gung-ho. Hopefully, therell be thousands of massive cinemas ready for it because its a big film for big audiences.'

Cinema classic: The park, of course, never opened, when, during the visit, a power outage led to disaster when the dinosaurs escaped from their paddocks and took over the island the park was built on

Lovers to friends: Having escaped the island, Grant and Sattler reappeared again in 2001's Jurassic Park III, with the latter married to another man with two children

Sam - who is promoting another film currently, Rams - appeared on The Graham Norton Show last week, echoed this, saying: 'We shot it all at Pinewood and it's going to be huge so hopefully there will be some cinemas open soon so people can see it!'

The franchise has been shot at England's Pinewood Studios in recent years, on the outskirts of London.

Fifth film Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and now sixth film Dominion have filmed at the iconic sound stage, in part due to the franchise moving from its original tropical setting.

While each instalment until now has taken place, in part, on fictitious Costa Rican islands Nublar and Sorna - for which scenes were shot on location in Hawaii - the current movie is not thought to feature any sequences in the tropics.

Continuation: He also claims the film - which was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic and became the first movie to resume amid new industry safety measures - has so much footage in the can it could be a six-hour event

Exciting times: Sam promised Jurassic World: Dominion will be 'huge' when it is finally released during a recent appearance on The Graham Norton Show

The film is picking up where Fallen Kingdom left off - with a series of dinosaurs accidentally released in mainland North America.

In October, Sam, Laura and Jeff posed for a selfie outside the Richard Attenborough Stage at Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire.

Sam wrote in a caption for his Instagram page: 'Today, here we are, thinking about our old pal and colleague, dear old Dickie Attenborough, on the actual #RichardAttenboroughStage at #PinewoodStudios.

'Completely appropriately, we face our greatest dinosaur terror yet today, on a great soundstage named for the great man himself.'

Jurassic World: Dominion is slated to be released on 10 June 2022.


Johannesburg Stock Exchange accesses data from Infront Professional Terminal

Infront, a European leader for flexible financial market data solutions, announced today that the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE), the largest stock exchange on the African continent, has subscribed to its Infront Professional Terminal.

The JSE provides a range of reliable and transparent market data products and solutions to market professionals and data distributors . The use of the Infront Professional Terminal by the JSE will ?allow access to critical market data and the opportunity to use the ?latest in market data technology which is easy to use, flexible and has? extensive data coverage.

About the JSE

The Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) has a well-established history operating as a market place for trading financial products. It is a pioneering, globally connected exchange group that enables inclusive economic growth through trusted, world class, socially responsible products and services for the investor of the future. It offers secure and efficient primary and secondary capital markets across a diverse range of securities, spanning equities, derivatives and debt markets. It prides itself as being the market of choice for local and international investors looking to gain exposure to leading capital markets on the African continent. The JSE is currently ranked in the Top 20 largest stock exchanges in the world by market capitalisation, and is the largest stock exchange in Africa, having been in operation for 130 years.

Financial professionals across Europe and South Africa rely on Infront for flexible financial market solutions.

We offer a powerful combination of global market data, news, analytics and trading together with integrated solutions for data feeds, portfolio management and advisory, and regulatory compliance and calculations.

Our solutions serve 3,600 customers with over 90,000 professional users. With support for their complete workflow, financial professionals can manage investment decisions, reduce costs, adapt to fast-changing market requirements and work more efficiently with ever-increasing amounts of information  quickly, easily and flexibly.

More than 500 employees in 13 countries across Europe and South Africa apply their expertise to meet the challenges of our clients, ensuring they continuously receive the best solutions and services.

Infront is listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange.

New Delhi: Delhis new excise policy, which could increase duty on liquor, and reform the process for grant of license for liquor shops, is likely to be announced soon, Delhi government sources said.

The Aam Aadmi Party government had around two months back indicated a new excise policy was being prepared and had set up a committee of experts for it, while also seeking suggestions from the citizens.

The report prepared by the expert committee has suggested various reforms that could result in an increase in liquor prices. The new excise policy is likely to introduce many changes in terms of issuing licenses for both government-run and private liquor shops in Delhi, sources told IANS.

Sources also told that Delhi Government has planned to increase the number of liquor shops under its new excise policy.

"Apart from changes in the number of dry days and lowering the age of drinking to 21, other main changes are likely to be seen in new excise policy that around 700-800 new liquor shops to be set up in Delhi," a source told IANS.

On the basis of the panels suggestions, the Delhi government plans to increase its revenue by pushing prices of both Indian and foreign liquor by up to 50 percent to earn an estimated Rs 8,000 crore against the present Rs 5,000 crore.

The proposal of lowering the drinking age had been opposed by other parties in Delhi, but the government seems to be firm on its decision.

Last week, the Delhi Cabinet had approved a Group of Ministers under Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia, who also holds the Finance portfolio, to examine the new excise policy.

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Congress needs to keep a much closer eye on technology in order to uphold the rights of all individuals, according to a document that outlines numerous oversight recommendations for the federal Legislature.The list of recommendations was put together by several advocacy groups, including the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) and The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.Technology has created tremendous opportunities, the document said, and at its best can support a stronger, more-inclusive economy, society and public sphere. But these outcomes do not occur by chance. Policymakers must work to ensure that technology is designed and used in ways that respect civil rights, preserve privacy, ensure transparency and hold both nation-states and companies accountable for harm.Within the document, one of the major areas of concern is a growing trend of immigration surveillance, which includes the use of facial recognition, automated decision-making tools and social media monitoring.Generally speaking, theres a lot of issues with technology and privacy at the border and ports of entry, said Iman Boukadoum, senior manager with The Leadership Conference.Border agents will sometimes confiscate the property of someone who is legally entering the country in order to scour the persons social media for incriminating evidence. In one high-profile case , Ismail Ajjawi, a Palestinian student on his way to Harvard, was deported after an officer took away his computer and phone and searched Ajjawis social media accounts.When I asked every time to have my phone back so I could tell them about the situation, the officer refused and told me to sit back in [my] position and not move at all, Ajjawi said in a written statement, according to the Harvard Crimson. After the 5 hours ended, she called me into a room, and she started screaming at me. She said that she found people posting political points of view that oppose the U.S. on my friend[s] list.According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation , the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has been engaging in social media surveillance for several years. Boukadoum, a human rights lawyer, said its hard to know exactly how long this type of surveillance has occurred given the secrecy around international affairs, but she has heard anecdotal evidence that social media monitoring happened much more often under the Trump administration. In 2019, DHS started collecting social media usernames via forms in accordance with a 2017 executive order that called for enhanced vetting of immigrants.Thats extremely invasive, Boukadoum said in regard to the username vetting. Again, its not clear to us what protections are in place to make sure the State Department doesnt use that information in an illegitimate way. Its quite frightening, honestly.Boukadoum added that the border is the Wild West in terms of protections for peoples rights. New biometric technologies that might be considered too invasive for use within the U.S. can be tested out on the border.Broadband access is another topic addressed by the set of recommendations to Congress. Cheryl Leanza, attorney for Best Best & Krieger, said the pandemic has shined a bigger spotlight on the fact that certain neighborhoods are served better than others by Internet service providers. This unequal approach to deployment is called digital redlining, which can be based on income or other factors. The recommendations document advises Congress to investigate how some companies roll out older broadband technologies and slower speeds in low-income areas and communities of color while upgrading technologies elsewhere.Leanza added that there have been different efforts to take power away from local areas in relation to broadband-related negotiations with companies. In regard to this point, she made reference to both redlining and the 5G tower controversy Lisa Barrett, policy director for LDF, said the oversight recommendations to Congress should be just the beginning of efforts to reel in the largely unchecked technology industry. New regulations and policies will hopefully follow.Barrett added that recent events from last year, such as the surveillance of protestors in the wake of George Floyds death, underscores how marginalized communities are the first to raise a flag on issues that threaten democracy. People who dont think theyre not as impacted by such issues are fooling themselves, she argues.These issues impact everyone, these issues will come to bear for everyone, and weve seen that time and time again, Barrett said.In addition to federal oversight, local areas must play their own part when it comes to ensuring that people are on a level playing field. Leanza suggested that localities of all types should take a close look at the products they purchase to make sure that tech doesnt have an unfair impact.Just because its a high-tech use doesnt mean its a better use, Leanza said. It could be an equally problematic use.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 10)  The Health Department is eyeing having a set number of people as back up COVID-19 vaccinees in case some back out or miss their appointment.

For example, if 800 people are set to be vaccinated on that day, there will be 200 names on the quick substitution list who should be on standby and ready to go to the vaccination site.

"Gusto lang natin makasigurado na kung sakali dumating tayo sa day of vaccination and we will have refusals, at least we have this reserve 20%," Health Spokesperson Maria Rosario Vergeire said on Wednesday.

[Translation: If we will have refusals on the day of vaccination, we want to be sure that we have a reserve of 20%.]

Officials have yet to finalize the guidelines for the substitution list, but Vergeire said it will follow the national government's prioritization list.

Hospitals and local government units will be required to come up with a quick substitution list to prevent coronavirus vaccines from going to waste.

Last year, the first of the pandemic, managed to even take the shine off Winnipegs industrial real estate market, but 2020 ended with what observers say is the largest industrial real estate deal in the citys history.

Last year, the first of the pandemic, managed to even take the shine off Winnipegs industrial real estate market, but 2020 ended with what observers say is the largest industrial real estate deal in the citys history.

The paint was barely dry on the 248,000-square-foot FedEx distribution and sorting facility, completed in October in St. Boniface Industrial Park, when the facility was scooped up at years end by Torontos Crestpoint Real Estate Investments Ltd., a real estate investment fund, for $60 million.

Last year saw half the total of institutional real estate deals as the year before  $335 million  but this deal is seen by some as a testament to the attractiveness of the market.

According to Trevor Clay of Capital Commercial Real Estate Services Inc., the broker of the deal, it was the largest single industrial asset sale in at least 15 years and maybe ever.

It is also potentially a sign of things to come, both in terms of institutional investment interest in industrial properties in Winnipeg and also regarding the demand for e-commerce oriented, high volume distribution centres.

In October, Amazon announced a 113,000-square-foot distribution centre for last-mile deliveries in the city and sources say that it is not likely the only facility Amazon will acquire in the city and that another one is close to being finalized.

Clay had been involved in the FedEx project for a while, working with the developer, Scannell Properties out of Indianapolis.

"For us, it was a two-year project from beginning to end," said Clay. "But if the question is how hard is it to sell an asset of that size and value in this market, I would say it is not hard to find interested buyers. Demand is not an issue."

But for all sorts of reasons, mostly COVID-related, building owners are reluctant to put their assets on the market, not unlike residential home owners.

"There is lots of money out looking for industrial space," said Clay. "If we had three or four more of these types of properties we definitely could have three or four more buyers interested."

But having said that, Don White, a commercial property veteran in the city, said the FedEx distribution centre was a bit of an outlier in terms of the attractiveness of the asset and that it has a long-term lease with a blue-chip tenant.

"Youve got a U.S. developer with a strong development relationship with an international tenant who builds a very large design built asset in Winnipeg, which is then sold to a very successful Canadian institution buyer who is building a presence here in the city," said White, CEO and co-founding partner of Private Pension Partners and executive vice-president at Colliers,. "It tells a pretty good story."

Scannell has built other FedEx distribution centres around the world and it is not uncommon for it to sell a property so soon after completion.

With a 15-year lease with a high profile tenant like FedEx, Crestpoint, with $5.5 billion of assets under management, gets a reliable long-term income stream.

Its the second Winnipeg property acquisition for Crestpoint in just over a year and another indication of how attractive this market is for institutional investors.

In a company release, Kevin Leon, President and CEO of Crestpoint, said, "This asset (provides) the fund with geographic diversification and exposure to a high-quality core industrial asset. Given its central location within the Winnipeg market and the long term commitment from such a reputable tenant we are really excited to add this asset to our fund."

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca
Gaborone  The just-ended African Union (AU) assembly has emphasised the need for a systematic response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to Minister of International Affairs and Cooperation, Dr Lemogang Kwape, the aim of such a response was to avert the continued loss of human life and further deterioration of socio-economic and quality of life in Africa.

Briefing the media Monday about the 34th AU ordinary session held virtually this past week, he also stressed the importance to reprioritise resources to adequately respond to the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dr Kwape said the assembly reaffirmed its commitment towards finding lasting solutions to the challenges besieging the continent, including COVID-19 pandemic.

He said the assembly deliberated on the progress report on the AU's response to COVID-19, which was presented by President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa.

The report highlights achievements and challenges faced by the continent since the outbreak of coronavirus in December 2019.

Major achievements include the establishment of the COVID-19 Response Fund, the launch of the African Medical Supplies Platform to ensure that all African countries have access to necessary equipment and supplies, setting up of the COVID-19 African Vaccine Acquisition Task Team in support of the Africa Vaccine Strategy meant to ensure availability of vaccines to the continent's populations.

"These efforts are meant to complement the national interventions employed by the different member states, including Botswana," he stated.

Dr Kwape said in recognition of the efforts made by President Ramaphosa in mobilising assistance for African countries in their fight against the pandemic, the assembly appointed him AU Response to COVID-19 champion.

On other issues, the assembly deliberated on the implementation of the 2016 AU institutional reforms progress report.

The purpose of the reforms was to align the AU's mandate of with resources at its disposal, its capacity and relevance to deliver a united Africa, through a lean and effective African Union Commission.

Dr Kwape said the assembly declared the period 2021-2031 the 'Decade of African Roots and Diasporas'.

In this regard, he said, the commission has been directed to set up a high level committee that would ensure effective implementation of the project.

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He revealed that preparations were underway to convene an Afro-descendants forum in August 2021 to be hosted by Equatorial Guinea.

Minister Kwape said the assembly agreed on developing an African convention on the protection of women against all forms of violence as well as on the convening of a women-led peace forum, with the participation of heads of state and government.

The meeting appointed the new AU Bureau for 2021, with President Felix Antoine Tshisekedi Tshilombo of the Democratic Republic of Congo as the new chairperson taking over from President Ramaphosa.

It also elected and appointed the new senior leadership of the AU Commission, which saw Mr Moussa Faki Mahamat of Chad re-elected chair, deputised by Rwanda's Dr Nsanzabaganwa Monique as well as the appointment of four commissioners for a four-year term.

Two other commissioner positions; education, science, technology and innovation as well as health, humanitarian affairs and social development, are expected to be filled by the northern and western regions at the next session of the executive council slated for July.

The assembly was held under the theme: Arts, Culture and Heritage: Levers for Building the Africa We Want.BOPA

Source : BOPA
Help India!

By Shalini S, TwoCircles.net

Chennai: The debate of whether or not e-learning replicates a classroom experience has been of huge significance since Covid-19 lockdown. The narrative of disabled students in this debate has been long absent. Scores of vision-impaired students from different Arts colleges in Chennai in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, while talking to TwoCircles.net, recall a collective experience of exclusion in online education. Many of these students expect the reopening of colleges after the Tamil Nadu government announced its approval to reopen educational institutions starting February 8.

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Online education is merely a supplement and it can never substitute classroom learning, says Venkatesan, an M.Phil student from Madras Christian College.

Vision impaired students, who are at a higher risk of exclusion, explain the struggle and humiliation they face as a result of online education at the college level. The students express difficulty in finding scribes or volunteers to write their assignments, internals and semester examinations.

Talking to TwoCircles.net, a student from Loyola College in Chennai says, Once a volunteer asked me for my picture to see if I am really a vision-impaired person. When I refused to send the picture, the person blocked me on WhatsApp. It was a humiliating experience for me.

The students explain how arranging scribes was difficult during the pandemic lock down. Usually, the college arranges scribes for us and provides them with compensation. During the lock down, we were exhausted while looking for a scribe, let alone prepare for the exams. Some scribes dont agree to help without incentives. Its been very difficult and I am used to it by now, he said.

The vision-impaired students that TwoCircles.net talked to express resentment against the inaccessibility of certain online portals and websites that are used in online teaching. In Loyola, we use the LMS portal. It cant be accessed with Talkback (inbuilt accessibility software in android phones). It always reads not enabled, certain departments have switched to Google Classroom but some departments, like in Tamil, continue to use LMS where there are a greater number of vision-impaired students, one of the students said.

It doesnt occur to our professors to send accessibility friendly material, they just post scanned PDFs or links. We dont have open software to read them, says another student from Soka Ikeda College for Women.

The vision-impaired students explain that they were disappointed at the blunt verbal instructions given in conventional classrooms. The Professors will not bother to explain whats being written on the board or projected on the screen, they said. In online platforms, it is even worse as, They screen share PPTs and videos most of the time.

The vision-impaired students had the benefit of recording lectures in audio devices inside classrooms. However, recording online lectures is difficult as the accessibility software would overlap and create distorted sounds, says Jeeva, a final year undergraduate student at Loyola College.

Another student is unhappy with the denial of his rights. I can do my assignments on my own using NVDA (NonVisual Desktop Access) software on the computer but I am expected to provide written scripts with the help of a scribe. They are curbing my rights to be independent. I thought online education would give us a sense of freedom but I am proven wrong, the student said.

They think I am giving excuses not to do my assignment and cash out because of my disability, but I am only demanding my rights to do it in a way that is accessible to me, the student added.

Associate Professor Dr Sivaraman (VI), Department of English, Presidency College, pointed out that in the guidelines released by Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment dated 29 August 2018, suggest that for a vision-impaired student, Online examination should be in an accessible format i.e., websites, question papers and all other study material should be accessible as per international standards laid down in this regard.

Dr Sivaraman expressed distress about the struggles impaired students faced during the pandemic. The decision-making authority in this aspect is Controller of Examination in respective colleges, however, the teaching staff could try to make online education inclusive and accessible for all, says he.

According to the vision-impaired students, Tamil Nadu government distributed smart mobile phones for vision-impaired students in every district during the lockdown. As it came with so many criteria, not many were able to benefit from it, they maintain.

No special guidelines were announced by Directorate of Collegiate Education or the Tamil Nadu government regarding the accessibility of online education for the visually impaired. The vision-impaired student community has been neglected, they said.

While studies like Digital education in India: Will students with disabilities miss the bus? conducted by the National Centre for Promotion of Employment for Disabled People (NCPEDP) report the vulnerability of disabled students at the post-secondary level, the disabled students at college level remain underrepresented.

According to G. Udayaraj (VI), Assistant Professor, Madras Christian College, Online education seems to have exacerbated the existing inequities, sighted professors show sympathy towards the vision-impaired students, but there is no proper sensitization about their capabilities and needs.

G. Udayaraj told TwoCircles.net that, Students with vision impairment are considered either lousy or exceptional. It is just these two extremes with no in-betweens and a behavioural change must be brought among educators.

With the disabled community facing alienation in almost all policies of the Union Government, such as failing the disability sector in National Education Policy, 2020 and Budget 2021, the vision-impaired students see no revolutionary steps taken for them in near future in terms of educational accessibility.

Having too much on their plates, reopening colleges appears to be their only ray of hope.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- When ErinKelli Kilbane sees an empty space on a wall, her creative mind gets to work.

The Stapleton-based artist has made a name for herself on Staten Island as a muralist, artist and painter.

Since 2013, Kilbane has led and participated in borough beautification initiatives with organizations like Projectivity, Hub 17 and the Pride Center of Staten Island.

Theres actually a very large artist community on Staten Island, Kilbane told the Advance/SILive.com. Everyones very welcoming and likes to help each other out.

Her most notable project to date has been The SolidariTree, A Pride Project in collaboration with Nitecap Megastore and the Pride Center of Staten Island. In 2017, Kilbane spent the summer painting a multicolored mural of a tree outside Nitecap in Bloomfield in solidarity with the LGBTQ+ community.

Most recently, her work was featured on the cover of Staten Islander Kimbra Eberlys book on the Lizzie Borden murder cases.

I dont really like to label myself with a specific style, Kilbane said. I like to paint things that are inspired by real life, but have a fantasy feel to them. I really lose myself in that kind of work, and its hard for me to stop sometimes.

Throughout the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, Kilbane has been commissioned to do several indoor murals and took on the role of creative director for Hub 17s outdoor Halloween event. (In the past, she has planned parties, photo shoots and festivals for the arts community.)

We were definitely trying to put on an event as safely as possible, so we wore masks and decided to have one live performance instead of several, Kilbane said. We kept it small in the hopes we could get the ball rolling for when spring comes around.

The artist said while she enjoys working on community projects, she also dedicates a lot of her time to being an art teacher in the New York City public school system. She added that she is currently planning outdoor murals for the warmer months.

For more information, or to contact Kilbane, follow her on Instagram at @erinkelli_k.
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Select Oregon pharmacies will begin receiving COVID-19 vaccines through a new federal distribution program this week, with the states doses going to Costco, Health Mart, Safeway and Albertsons during the programs initial phase.

Already, though, there is uncertainty over just when the retail pharmacies will receive their vaccines, start scheduling appointments and begin vaccinating eligible Oregonians. The confusion mirrors the broader questions affecting the vaccine rollout.

White House officials announced last week that approximately 1 million vaccine doses would be shipped directly to 6,500 pharmacies across the country this week in the first phase of the Federal Retail Pharmacy Program, with the possibility that vaccinations could begin as soon as Thursday.

Oregon Health Authority Director Patrick Allen said that 133 pharmacies across the state would receive a combined 12,000 doses this week, with an average of 90 doses going to each participating pharmacy.

However, Trushar Patel, a pharmacist and owner of three Health Mart pharmacies in Tillamook, Gold Beach and Salem, said he was still awaiting clarification from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about whether the doses would show up Thursday or Friday.

He said the three pharmacies will wait until Monday to begin vaccinations to ensure they have the doses in hand. He said the appointments will be scheduled out over the course of next week.

Kristen Breland, a spokesman for Health Mart, said that the company had shared its online scheduler with state health officials and planned to open the scheduler to the public on its website Monday. Patel encouraged individuals without internet access to seek help from friends and family so that pharmacies can avoid a flood of calls, but encouraged those who couldnt access the internet to call their Health Mart pharmacy directly.

Only eight Health Mart locations across the state are expected to receive vaccines this week, but the company anticipates that more of its pharmacies will receive doses in the coming weeks.

During this early stage of the vaccine rollout, Oregon is limiting vaccines to health care workers, people living in nursing homes and other congregate care settings, teachers and -- beginning this week -- people ages 80 and over. Oregonians over 75 will become eligible to receive vaccines on Feb. 15.

Most people up to now have received their vaccines at clinics, senior living facilities or special vaccination sites like the Oregon Convention Center. The Biden administration hopes its retail pharmacy program will ultimately make vaccines accessible to more Americans.

The vast majority of the vaccine doses that Oregon is receiving through the program this week will go to Safeway and Albertsons pharmacies across the state. The two grocery chains share common ownership and operate in tandem.

Company spokesman Jill McGinnis said they anticipate approximately 11,500 doses to be shipped to 115 Albertsons and Safeway pharmacies in Oregon.

All but four of the companys Oregon pharmacies are expected to receive doses. The Albertsons locations in Hillsboro and Bend, the Safeway in St. Helens and the companys stand alone pharmacy in Myrtle Creek will not receive doses.

Eligible Oregonians can sign up for appointments online through Albertsons and Safeway by visiting www.albertsons.com/COVID-19 and www.safeway.com/COVID-19. Slots are limited. McGinnis said that Oregonians who dont have access to the internet can call their pharmacies directly to try to schedule appointments.

Vaccine doses will also be going to 13 Costco locations statewide, according to the companys website. Those stores are in Albany, Aloha, Bend, Central Point, Clackamas, Eugene, Hillsboro, Portland, Roseburg, Salem, Tigard, Warrenton and Wilsonville.

Costco has an online portal for vaccine appointments at https://www.costco.com/covid-vaccine.html. Appointments were not available Tuesday and it was not clear whether Costco had already filled all its vaccine appointment slots. A Costco spokesman would not answer questions about the companys participation in the vaccine program.

Only Oregonians currently eligible to receive vaccines under state guidelines will be able to sign up for appointments through the participating pharmacies.

Guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend that vaccines be provided to broader groups of people if doses are in danger of being wasted, but that is unlikely to happen given the limited supply arriving at Oregon pharmacies this week.

Elderly Oregonians faced major obstacles trying to sign up for COVID-19 vaccinations Monday when vaccines became available to those 80 years old and older. Some reported problems with online sign-up systems as metro-area appointments filled up in just two and a half hours.

Patel, the Health Mart pharmacist, said his Tillamook pharmacy is working directly with the county to ensure it can accommodate vulnerable individuals who are already on the countys waitlist for COVID-19 vaccines. However, appointments at his other pharmacies and a certain percentage of appointments at the Tillamook pharmacy will still be made available to eligible Oregonians online.

But he expects there will be high demand for the limited number of vaccines available. Patel said they are prepared to answer questions and help customers sign up for appointments, but said there could be hiccups along the way as they get the program running.

The pharmacies also havent been told how many vaccines they should expect in subsequent weeks, Patel said. That has made it difficult for them to plan ahead. He said they will tentatively schedule customers who receive their first doses next week for second doses under the assumption that their vaccine allotment will go up over time, but may have to move second appointments around if they receive fewer doses than anticipated moving forward.

While Oregon pharmacies will receive only a limited number of doses this week, Jeff Zients, the White Houses COVID-19 response coordinator, told reporters last week that the program could be scaled up over time, with doses eventually being shipped to roughly 40,000 pharmacies nationwide.

Patel said he is hopeful that pharmacies will ultimately play an important role in the nations vaccine effort.

Even though were a small piece of the puzzle, Patel said, were glad were able to do something for the community and can make a difference.

-- Jamie Goldberg | jgoldberg@oregonian.com | @jamiebgoldberg

Kids want to fish? You don't know how yourself? Here's a little help
Koh Boon Hwee to step down as Chairman of NTU Singapore after 28 years

Koh Boon Hwee, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore), will be stepping down on March 31, 2021 after an illustrious 28 years, an official release stated.

Koh Boon Hwee also pushed for administrative reforms of the University to create more efficient and advanced administration systems to support NTUs growth.Photo courtesy: NTU

The former chairman of Singtel, Singapore Airlines and DBS Bank, the prominent businessman and veteran technology investor is also the chairman of Altara Partners, Rippledot Capital, Sunningdale Tech and Agilent Technologies, among other companies.

Boon Hwee has been at the heart of NTUs phenomenal progress through the years. We will miss his visionary leadership, sharp strategic insights and wise counsel. However, I am confident that we will continue to benefit from his passionate engagement with NTU in other ways for many more years to come," Professor Subra Suresh, NTU president said.

A strong advocate of digital technologies, Koh has supported NTUs adoption of the flipped classroom model of learning. Moving away from mass lectures, lessons have been digitised so that students can access course content online and spend their time in person with professors and classmates discussing solutions that explore their application of concepts and knowledge.

He also pushed for administrative reforms of the University to create more efficient and advanced administration systems to support NTUs growth.

The work is not yet complete but having started on the greater adoption of digital technologies years before, it facilitated the Universitys move quickly into online learning, e-exams, virtual meetings and virtual events, and kept the NTU community safe during the COVID-19 pandemic, Koh said.

Koh joined the Board of the then-NTU Council in 1991 and was appointed its Chairman in 1993, two years after NTU was inaugurated as a university following the merger of Nanyang Technological Institute (NTI) and the National Institute of Education (NIE). After NTU became an autonomous university in 2006, he was appointed the founding Chairman of the NTU Board of Trustees.

Singapore's Minister for Education Lawrence Wong expressed the Ministrys deep appreciation for Kohs contributions, saying, As the longest-serving university Chairman for almost three decades, Boon Hwees contributions to NTU and the university landscape have been immense. He has steered NTU through major milestones such as its formation in the 1990s and its transition to become an autonomous university in 2006. Under his visionary leadership, NTU has grown into a world-class institution with high standards in education."

Koh hands over the Chairmanship of the University to Goh Swee Chen, chairman of the National Arts Council, Institute of HR Professionals, and Global Compact Network Singapore. She joined the NTU Board of Trustees in August 2019 and also sits on the boards of CapitaLand, Singapore Airlines, SP Group Ltd. and Woodside Energy Ltd (Australia).

Goh Swee Chen, chairman of the National Arts Council, Institute of HR Professionals, and Global Compact Network Singapore. Photo courtesy: NTU

It is an honour for me to succeed Boon Hwee as the Chairman of NTU Board of Trustees. He has done an extraordinary job in stewardship and steering the development of the NTU in the last three decades. I am committed to work with members of the university community to further strengthen NTUs global and societal impact," she said.

Under Kohs stewardship, NTU made a paradigm shift from being a predominantly teaching-led university to becoming a research-intensive university, after its corporatisation.

As a result of the strong academic foundations it has laid, the University has been on an upward trajectory in international league tables in recent years. Since 2015, NTU has been ranked between 11th and 13th in QS World University Rankings, a leap from its 74th place in 2010.

NTU has also kept its No 1 spot for seven consecutive years in QS league of the worlds best young universities below 50 years old.

In an internal message announcing his stepping down as Chairman, Koh reminded the NTU community to appreciate the heritage of the former Nanyang University, on which grounds NTUs campus is built on, and its contributions to Singapores education journey.
Youre now all law school graduates, and the PPP is a national organization. But you started organizing during your first year at Harvard. Tell me about that.

Sejal Singh: It began in Vails and my living room.

Vail Kohnert-Yount: We knew each other in D.C. before law school. We were introduced through a mutual friend who Sejal met on a picket line.

Emma Janger: Everything about us is incredibly on brand, even accidentally.

Singh: Our first year was the peak of the #MeToo movement, and it was extraordinarily clear that the legal system was designed to cover up sexual harassment and make it impossible for working people to come forward about a variety of abuses.

Kohnert-Yount: We all came to law school to do justice, right? And if youre paying attention in law school, very quickly you realize that law and justice have very little to do with each other. I remember learning in civil procedure at the very end of the semester about tools like forced arbitration. And I was like, Wait, why did we learn a semester of civil procedure when I might not ever be able to get into court on behalf of the low-wage workers who are my clients?

Janger: We saw again and again that the law is not neutral and lawmakers are not neutral. So if we were going to take on this system, it wasnt going to be about vindicating one siloed issue, it had to be about the entire system.

Molly Coleman: We also saw the ways in which law students and lawyers were encouraged to be passive participants in furthering that system. There is an obligation to do more than that.
Grisly visuals from about six hours of violent action by a pro-Trump mob starting around 1 pm on January 6 will occupy centre stage during Donald Trump's second impeachment trial that kicks off Tuesday at the US Capitol.

Trump's lawyers will argue that he is not guilty of the single charge of "incitement of insurrection", and that his fiery rhetoric ahead of the siege is not a causal factor in the storming of the Capitol that killed five people and injured many others.

Democrats plan to unload a visual mosaic that captures the horror of January 6. Almost everything they present will revolve around the events of a single day, with occasional context from other times. At least 211 people from 43 states have been charged so far in the attack, and digital media evidence has poured into the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Below is a rewind to the slow explosion in the first two hours of crisis on January 6, which will be on full public view again at the Trump trial. The Democrats say they are approaching this as a "criminal" case.

The 1 pm hour:

Trump is almost finished with his remarks at the Ellipse Park, a 52-acre park south of the White House fence and north of Constitution Avenue and the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

Pentagon gets open source reports of demonstrator movements to the US Capitol.

Washington DC Mayor asks Army Secretary for additional Guard forces, according to the Pentagon.

Capitol Police Chief asks DC National Guard for immediate assistance.

The 2 pm hour:

The first visuals of people in pro-Trump gear smashing glass and breaking property at the Capitol begin flashing on television screens worldwide, after the news breaks on social media platforms via reporters and lawmakers on location.

Capitol Police sounds an alert that all buildings in the Capitol are on lockdown.A"An external security threat located on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol Building...Stay away from exterior windows and doors. If you are outside, seek cover." The House and Senate abruptly go into recess.

The mob comes dangerously close to the Senate chamber. In videos that surfaced online via reporters, Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman is seen redirecting the mob in the opposite direction.

The DC Mayor and Capitol Police ChiefArequests National Guard support, a string of red tape-led delays follow the call.

Trump sends an attack tweet flying. "Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!"

Acting Defense Secretary, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Army Secretary meet.

Washington DC Mayor orders a citywide curfew beginning at 6 p.m.

The first gunshot is heard. A Capitol police officer shoots an Air Force veteran - a woman from San Diego.

By 3 pm, Acting Defense Secretary decides that the entire DC National Guard needs to rush to the Capitol.
The woman escaped the house as police arrived, Petrak said. Law enforcement officers spent about four hours trying to negotiate with the man, who was alone in the house.
21 runners killed during mountain race in northwestern province of Gansu; Indian variant of Covid-19 found in Guangzhou; Beijing willing to arrange for vaccines to be sent to Taiwan

May 28, 2021 08:15 PM
Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on February 10 that the private sector is as important as the public sector for development, in one of the most forceful endorsements by a senior policymaker of the role that businesses can play to distribute wealth and create jobs.

Take any sectortelecom, pharmawe see the role of the private sector. If India is able to serve humanity, it is also due to the role of the private sector, Modi said, while replying to the Motion of Thanks on the Presidents address in the Lok Sabha.

Modis statement is a marked departure from previous governments that were reluctant to associate, let alone endorse, with private enterprises due to the dominance of a socialist agenda in policymaking. The remarks, coming soon after the unveiling of the budget in which the finance minister laid bare a clear intent to chase growth and reduce involvement in the public sector, signals that the reform agenda of the government should be in full swing.

Modi said it was not right to malign wealth creators as they were important for generating employment in the country. Wealth creators are required in the country. How else can wealth be distributed, who will create employment, the PM asked.

Successive governments have been keen to distance themselves from the private sector for fear of inviting criticism that they would be seen pro-elite and anti-poor. Indeed, the Modi government itself has often had to backpedal on reforms. Even as recent as the farmer protests against new agricultural laws, the government faced backlash for its pro-business outlook.

On Wednesday, Modi signalled that it would no longer fret over such attacks. The PM said that to use improper words against the private sector may have got votes to a few people in the past but those times are gone. The culture of abusing the private sector is not acceptable any longer. We cannot keep insulting our youth like this," he said.

Modi also unleashed a broadside against Indias overweening bureaucracy, which has long been accused of stalling growth.

Babus (IAS officers) cannot do everything. An IAS cannot run a fertiliser factory, a chemical factory or fly a plane. What do we want to achieve by giving the country in the hands of babus (IAS officers).

Initiatives of the Modi government, much like its predecessors, too have faced delays due die to Indias statist bureaucracy. Red tape is often blamed for the difficulties in implementing welfare measures and doing business.

Babus are as much ours as are our youth. The more we give chance to our youth, the better it is, Modi said.

'Should differentiate between andolankaris and andolanjeevis'

PM Modi said he considered the Kisan Andolan (Farmers Protest) pious, but expressed concern over andolanjeevis, people who survive on protests, hijacking it.

When Andolanjeevis hijack protest, showcase photos of those jailed for serious offences, does it serve any purpose? Not allowing toll plazas to work, destroying telecom towers-does it serve pious protests, he said asserting that the protestors (andolankaris) should be differentiated from andolanjeevis'."

The PM launched an attack on the Opposition and said those who disrupted the House proceedings were doing so as per a well-planned strategy. On the farm laws, he said his government respected farmers, but they needed to come up with specific demands which could be changed in the law.

After the Laws relating to agriculture were passed by Parliament  no mandi has been shut. Likewise, MSP has remained. Procurement on MSP has remained. These facts cant be ignored, he said.

'Congress a confused party'

"The Congress party is divided and confused. Neither it can work for its own good nor it can think about solving the issues of the country. What can be more unfortunate than this," he asked.

Earlier, Opposition MPs created an uproar in the Lok Sabha as Prime Minister started speaking. Congress and TMC MPs staged walkout during his speech.

I am surprised for the first time a new argument has come that we did not ask, so why did you give. Be it dowry or triple talaq, no one had demanded a law for this, but due to being necessary for progressive society, the law was made, he said.

Enacted in September 2020, the three farm laws have been projected by the Centre as major reforms in the agriculture sector. But, thousands of protesting farmers, primarily from Punjab and Haryana, have been camping at several Delhi border points for over two months, demanding the repeal of the laws, and a legal guarantee on minimum support prices (MSP) for their crops.
Civil servants, the cash-strapped Kenya Airways, security agents and Kenya Railways are the biggest winners in Treasury Cabinet Secretary Ukur Yatani's proposed expansion of the current year's budget by Sh120 billion.

A supplementary budget tabled in Parliament yesterday will see the 2020/21 budget hit Sh3 trillion, a four percent growth over the previous financial year expenditure.

A supplementary budget is a request for additional funds in the course of a financial year.

"It (supplementary budget) seeks to address post Covid-19 related interventions, provisions for security related expenditure, pending bills, salary shortfall and phase IV of job evaluation, changes in development partners funded projects and scaling down of expenditures to achieve the targeted overall fiscal deficit level," CS Yatani says.

National carrier Kenya Airways is set to get a total of Sh10 billion from two different allocations. The first is Sh8 billion, to enable the airline to sustain basic operations during and after the Covid-19 pandemic.

An additional Sh40 million is for a public debt management support project for the airline. These will be allocated through the National Treasury's public financial management vote.

Car grant deal

The second cash injection into KQ is through its parent ministry, the department of transport, where it has been given another Sh2 billion cash injection to also cushion it against the impact of the global health crisis that has heavily affected air transport.

There is still no funding for the upcoming referendum in the new budget, in which the Treasury has only allocated Sh621 million to the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) for various by-elections.

Neither is there a provision for the Sh4 billion-sweetheart car grant deal to the ward representatives as enticement to pass the Referendum Bill.

The department of Transport will get an additional Sh11 billion, which will be shared between air and rail transport.

From this, the Treasury has allocated Sh2 billion for the commuter rail project, Sh2.7 billion for construction of the Naivasha Internal Container Depot-Longonot Railway link and Sh1 billion for rehabilitation of the Longonot-Malaba metre gauge railway.

Another Sh2 billion will go to the railway development levy kitty that is used to repay the Standard Gauge Railway loan, while Sh1.35 billion will be used for rehabilitation of locomotives.

The infrastructure department will receive an additional Sh9 billion that will be used for, among others, upgrading of the 265 kilometre Lamu-Ijara-Garissa Road to an all weather highway (Sh2 billion), Nairobi expressway (Sh5.4 billion) and Sh1.6 billion for roads in the informal settlements.

Huduma Namba

The urban and metropolitan development will get an additional Sh7.1 billion to deal with shortfalls in the provision of Kazi Mtaani programme (Sh1 billion). The Nairobi Metropolitan Services (NMS) and Ministry of Water will receive Sh500 million each.

The supplementary budget has also allocated an additional Sh1.9 billion to the Office of the President, the bulk of which will go to the NMS for health services delivery plan for Nairobi County.

"The provision is to address the emerging challenges as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic to the densely populated informal settlement areas as well as decongesting Kenyatta National Hospital," the supplementary budget notes.

The department of Interior will get an additional Sh2.85 billion to cater for security operations under the multi-agency team and operationalise 10 sub-counties.

The controversial Huduma Namba will get another additional funding of Sh500 million, while Sh300 million will go towards security operations.

The Ministry of Defence will get an additional Sh3.1 billion. This will be used to deal with operations related to containment of the spread of Covid-19 (Sh250 million) while the Kenya Meat Commission (KMC), which is now under the military, will receive another Sh687 million. Some Sh2 billion will be used for security operations while Sh259 million will go towards the dredging of the Kisumu 7 Mbita ports.

Donor-funded projects

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A total of Sh25.6 million will be used for the Kenya-Italy debt development programme, while Sh132 million will support a donor-funded project under the department of University Education.

The Treasury has also allocated Sh2.5 billion to cater for the Kenya Mortgage Refinance Company (KMRC), which is being positioned to help increase uptake of home ownership loans in the country.

In total, the Treasury has approved expenditures amounting to Sh83.4bilion, which comprise donor-funded projects of Sh16.8 billion and Sh2.1 billion for the railway development levy.

The Treasury says that by December 2020, the government had collected total revenues of Sh800.1 billion, against a target of Sh907.7 billion. This performance was below target by Sh107.6 billion.

Ordinary revenue was Sh726.4 billion, against a target of Sh802.2 billion, an under-performance of Sh75.8 billion.

However, the total expenditure in the period, inclusive of transfers to county governments, stood at Sh1.1 trillion against a target of Sh1.2 trillion. The shortfall of Sh98.5 billion was attributed to under-absorption in both recurrent and development expenditures by the national and county governments.
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

In the age of COVID-19, decisions that affect our day-to-day lives are influenced by analyzing numbers and data. For example, the COVID-19 positivity rate (the percentage of people who test positive for the virus out of the total number tested) influence whether or not businesses may open to the public, or, if schools should offer virtual, hybrid or in-class learning. Data are critical for strategizing, planning and implementing the policies and procedures needed to respond to the crisis and keep people safe. But what happens if different organizations are using different definitions to track the same data? Now, in a commentary published online Dec. 23, 2020, in the Journal of Hospital Medicine, J. Matthew Austin, Ph.D., M.S., and Allen Kachalia, M.D., J.D., highlight how the lack of standardized definitions for many key measures needed to manage the public health response can lead to debate, confusion and politicization of pandemic data.

During the early stages of the pandemic, Austin and Kachalia, at the Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality, began to question the methods used to report the number of positive COVID-19 cases in Maryland, as cases were being reported publically by the day the test result was knownnot by the day the test was conducted. In turn, this got them thinking about how the decisions that were being made regarding how to collect and report these data could have a serious impact on how people work and live.

"This is not about a right way or a wrong way of collecting these data," says Austin, a faculty member at the Armstrong Institute and assistant professor of anesthesiology and critical care medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "What we're advocating is a standardized way of collecting and analyzing data so that we can effectively manage this pandemic and future ones."

In their commentary, Austin and Kachalia propose, among other recommendations, that health care officials in the United States create a consensus task force to identify and define metrics and, over time, refine thembased on the prevailing science and public health priorities. They believe that once metrics are standardized, public health leaders and health care organizations will be able to use the improvements in performance and outcomes to identify which strategies are best suited for future public health planning and actions.

Explore further Follow the latest news on the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak

More information: J Matthew Austin et al. The Need for Standardized Metrics to Drive Decision-making During the COVID-19 Pandemic, Journal of Hospital Medicine (2020). Journal information: Journal of Hospital Medicine J Matthew Austin et al. The Need for Standardized Metrics to Drive Decision-making During the COVID-19 Pandemic,(2020). DOI: 10.12788/jhm.3549

A sign on the way to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service building in Ottawa in a file photo. (The Canadian Press/Sean Kilpatrick)

CSIS Mandate: Expand Scope to Allow Intel Gathering Abroad, Says Intelligence Expert

A court decision that nixed an effort by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service to expand its scope in collecting foreign intelligence raises the question of whether the services mandate should be changed to meet the needs of an evolving landscape, says a former CSIS analyst and expert on terrorism.

CSISs request to be able to gather intelligence in other countries was struck down by Federal Court Justice Patrick Gleeson on the grounds of Section 16 of the CSIS Act, which states that the spy service can only collect information regarding the capabilities, intentions, or activities of a foreign state within Canada.

CSIS can only gather information abroad if it relates to threats to national security.

Phil Gurski, who worked as a senior strategic analyst at CSIS for 12 years and is now president and CEO of Borealis Threat and Risk Consulting, says not being able to collect foreign intelligence outside the country is a limitation unique to Canada and has hindered CSISs ability to keep up with others in the intelligence arena.

Security is more espionage and terrorism, and foreign intelligence is more looking at the intentions and actions of foreign states, Gurski explained in an interview.

When CSIS was established, and in the acts sections 12 and 16 particularly, they put this clause in that said you can only gather foreign intelligence within Canadawhich isnt impossible as there are foreign elements in Canadabut its funny because other intelligence services dont really have this barrier.

Gleeson delivered his decision last July, but a public version with many passages blacked out was only released on Feb. 3.

In turning down the warrant request, Gleeson pointed to a previous Federal Court ruling that said Parliament did not intend CSISs limited foreign-intelligence mandate to open the door to covert intelligence operations abroad.

Organizations like the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the United States, by contrast, have a mandate that allows them to conduct extensive covert and offensive operations abroad for the purpose of foreign intelligence.

When the Federal Court delivered the ruling in the summer of 2018 limiting CSISs legal authority to spy outside Canada, it cited the CIAs controversial methods as a reason.

In the ruling, Justice Simon Noel wrote that the geographical limitation of the within Canada clause was to bar the Service from the conducting CIA-like controversially aggressive covert and offensive activities abroad.

The restriction helps to mitigate the political, diplomatic, and moral risk of conducting foreign intelligence collection abroad, he said.

Gurski says that whenever there is even the slightest push of the envelope regarding CSISs mandate on foreign intelligence, Section 16 has been a barrier.

We dont have foreign intelligence here really. Global Affairs obviously can do things, but its not foreign intelligence. Theyre not trained or equipped to do this sort of thing.

He notes that Canada has become complacent due to its reliance on putting all its eggs in the Five Eyes basket and the U.S. basket in terms of defence and intelligence sharing, but that it needs to put in place intelligence policies that will help it adapt to the ever-changing international landscape and become self-reliant.

However, creating a proper foreign intelligence service would take years, he says, and in order to bring it about there needs to be political will.

Foreign intelligence is trying to discern the motives and intentions of foreign states as they relate to Canadian interests, Gurski says.

Its complicated work. If we allow CSIS to finally do foreign intelligence, it also becomes another question regarding where the resources are to come from. We have a lot of need for counterintelligence, combating foreign interference and other concerns in our own backyard. Well have to enhance the mandate, but it will be tough to do.

With files from The Canadian Press
KYODO NEWS - Feb 10, 2021 - 11:41 | All, Japan, 3/11 Fukushima

The former chief of the Tokyo Fire Department clearly remembers the day nearly 10 years ago when he ordered a team to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant crippled by a massive earthquake and tsunami in the belief it "had to be done, even if it caused casualties" among its members.

The capital's former fire chief Yuji Arai, 69, and a dozen former commanding officers who were involved in the unprecedented mission in 2011, met five times between July and December last year to document their experiences in dealing with the country's worst nuclear disaster.

Most at the department did not have a strong sense of danger when the loss of power occurred at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant following the earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011, according to documents detailing the department's response to the crisis compiled by Arai and the former officers.

Even when the magnitude-9.0 quake consequently led to hydrogen explosions at the plant and reactor meltdowns were suspected, most people at the department were under the impression that the incident occurring over 200 kilometers away from Tokyo was not under its jurisdiction and was "not really related" to their responsibilities, according to the records.

The department began to think about the possibility of sending its members to Fukushima as the situation at the plant worsened and they felt the problem was "not being dealt with well," as built-up hydrogen gas exploded at three of the complex's six reactor buildings by March 15, the documents showed.

The central government requested the Tokyo Fire Department in the early hours of March 18 to assist the situation in Fukushima. The brigade had conducted training in anticipation of a dispatch to the plant, aiming to move quickly at the accident site to minimize firefighters' exposure to radiation.

A 139-member team was dispatched at 3:20 a.m. that day.

"I believed the situation had become so dire that we could no longer think about whether sending the firefighters was a good or bad idea," a former chief of the rescue operation team said in one of the meetings.

The fire brigade arrived at the plant on March 18 at around 5 p.m., but temporarily withdrew due to equipment trouble. The Fire and Disaster Management Agency immediately ordered the team to return to the scene.

The order to work through the night in such dangerous circumstances was "very unusual," according to one of the commanding officers who was at the scene. It made the team members realize how severe the situation was.

Starting in the early hours of March 19, the brigade successfully carried out its mission of releasing water onto the No. 3 reactor.

The documentary record from the time notes the brigade did not have a full understanding of the overall situation, and that there were issues regarding the sharing of information also within the department's chain of command.

"It's important to understand what happened, prepare response measures and train for them," Arai was quoted as telling the meeting. "We should not leave what we experienced as a simple memory."
An investigation is underway after a state prison inmate died during an assault.

Dexter Freeman, 38, was serving a 15-year sentence for first-degree sodomy out of Sumter County. He was incarcerated at St. Clair County Correctional Facility in Springville.

According to Alabama Department of Corrections officials, Freeman died Feb. 8 from injuries sustained during an apparent inmate-on-inmate assault. No additional details about the assault have been released.

The ADOC condemns all violence in its facilities, and the fatal actions taken against Freeman by another inmate are being thoroughly investigated,' spokeswoman Samantha Rose said in a prepared statement.

Freemans exact cause of death is pending a full autopsy, and more information will be available upon the conclusion of the investigation into his death, Rose said.

--China-CEEC cooperation is part and parcel of China-EU relations, whose good progress means new opportunities for China-CEEC cooperation.

--China and CEE countries need to tackle COVID-19 head-on and boost confidence in cooperation to tide over the tough times.

--China and CEE countries share the conviction that openness brings opportunities and inclusiveness ensures diversity.

BEIJING, Feb. 9 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping on Tuesday lauded the cooperation between China and Central and Eastern European countries (CEEC), calling on relevant countries to keep up the momentum and work together for a new chapter in China-CEEC cooperation.

"China-CEEC cooperation is part and parcel of China-EU relations, whose good progress means new opportunities for China-CEEC cooperation," said Xi while delivering a keynote speech at the China-CEEC Summit via video link.

Chinese President Xi Jinping chairs the China-Central and Eastern European Countries (CEEC) Summit and delivers a keynote speech via video link in Beijing, capital of China, Feb. 9, 2021. (Xinhua/Huang Jingwen)

"17 PLUS 1 COULD MAKE MORE THAN 18"

Xi lauded China-CEEC cooperation, saying that "17 plus 1 could make more than 18."

In 2020, overall China-EU relations made new progress despite the challenges caused by the pandemic. The two sides concluded schedule negotiations on the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment and signed a geographical indications agreement. They also launched partnerships for green and digital cooperation.

"The two sides also stood firm for multilateralism and took on global challenges together," Xi said.

"Today, trade between China and CEE countries is nearly 85 percent bigger than nine years ago," Xi noted, adding that the China-Europe Railway Express has reached most of the CEE countries, running more than 30,000 freight services so far.

A China-Europe freight train heading for Belgrade prepares to depart from Wujiashan railway container center station in Wuhan, central China's Hubei Province, May 9, 2020. (Xinhua/Xiao Yijiu)

The China-CEEC cooperation mechanism came into being in 2012 against the backdrop of the European debt crisis.

"Impressive progress has been made in several cooperation projects, including the Port of Piraeus in Greece, the Smederevo Steel Plant in Serbia, and the Peljesac Bridge in Croatia," said Xi.

China-CEEC cooperation is based on mutual respect and has no political strings attached, Xi stressed. He added that all countries involved, regardless of their size, are equal partners in a cooperation mechanism featuring extensive consultation, joint contributions, and shared benefits.

Xi lauded the progress jointly made by China and CEE countries in the Belt and Road cooperation. He said that in an innovative and pioneering spirit, China and CEE countries took steps early to explore the possibility of aligning cross-regional cooperation with Belt and Road cooperation. It makes Central and Eastern Europe the first region where all countries have signed agreements on Belt and Road cooperation.

Aerial photo taken on Feb. 15, 2019 shows the COSCO Shipping Pisces approaching Piraeus port, Greece. (Xinhua/Wu Lu)

ENHANCING COOPERATION AMID DIFFICULTIES

"We need to tackle COVID-19 head-on and boost confidence in cooperation to tide over the tough times," Xi said, adding China will work with CEE countries through solidarity, coordination, and cooperation to complete the pressing task of pandemic responses.

COVID-19 vaccines serve as a powerful weapon to defeat the ravaging coronavirus, and those developed and produced by China are gaining popularity. Serbia has received one million doses of vaccines from a Chinese company so far, and there is ongoing cooperation between Hungary and Chinese vaccine companies.

"China will actively consider such cooperation with other CEE countries if there is a need," said Xi.

Workers unload a container of China's Sinopharm inactivated coronavirus vaccines at the Belgrade Airport, Serbia, Jan. 16, 2021. (Photo by Predrag Milosavljevic/Xinhua)

Noting China and CEE countries need to develop smooth avenues of cooperation for interconnected development, Xi proposed pursuing high-quality Belt and Road cooperation. It means speeding up significant projects like the Budapest-Belgrade Railway and continuing the development of the China-Europe Railway Express to unlock the full potential of cooperation.

To achieve concrete cooperation results and increasing cooperation outcomes that benefit both sides, Xi mentioned in particular, the coming five years. He said China intends to "import more than 170 billion U.S. dollars of goods from CEE countries" and will "work to double CEE countries' agricultural exports to China and raise two-way agricultural trade by 50 percent."

Also, eying green development and forging drivers of future-oriented cooperation, Xi urged advancing international cooperation on climate change. He also urged the joint implementation of the Paris Agreement and capitalizing on various emerging business forms to widen the cooperation of the digital economy, e-commerce, and the health sector.

"The proposals put forward by Xi for advancing cooperation with CEE countries have given adequate consideration to the core interests of those countries. It has also demonstrated China's sense of global responsibility and the readiness to work for win-win results," said Liu Zuokui, a researcher with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

CHINA'S OPENING-UP TO BROADEN HORIZONS FOR COOPERATION

"China and CEE countries share the conviction that openness brings opportunities and inclusiveness ensures diversity. This is the key to the sustained vibrancy of China-CEEC cooperation," said Xi.

During the speech, Xi pledged that China would continue to open its doors wider with a focus on institutional opening-up that covers rules, regulations, management, and standards to broaden the horizons for China-CEEC cooperation.

A Serbian worker (L) discusses with a Chinese engineer at the Chinese-invested HBIS Group Serbia Iron & Steel in Smederevo, Serbia, Oct. 10, 2019.(Xinhua/Shi Zhongyu)

"We will continue our efforts to foster a business environment based on market principles, governed by law, and up to international standards," he said.

This year marks the beginning of China's 14th Five-Year Plan for economic and social development and the start of the country's new journey toward building a modern socialist country.

China has also been fostering a new development paradigm with domestic circulation as the mainstay and domestic and international circulations reinforcing each other.

"This will unlock the full potential of China's vast market and domestic demand generated by the 1.4 billion population, including the over 400 million Chinese in the middle-income group. It will thus boost global demand and create more opportunities for the rest of the world," Xi said.

The Chinese president vowed to take a more active role in bilateral, multilateral, and regional cooperation that delivers higher levels of mutual benefit for all.

"We also welcome the participation of other countries and international organizations in our cooperation to achieve win-win results," said Xi.
Seven Albanian stowaways have been arrested after they were found on a cargo ship bound for Dorset.

Paramedics received a call from the Chise Bulker at around 5.40am on Tuesday after a person on board was reportedly in need of medical attention.

It was soon discovered that seven 'unidentified individuals' had been found stowing on board the vessel, though nobody needed any help from paramedics.

The 584ft vessel, a bulk carrier built in 2014 and flagged in Panama, was brought to port today at 1pm - more than 24 hours after initially calling for assistance.

Police say there is nothing to indicate that those found on board attempted to take control of the ship at any stage - despite claims the ship's captain was heard 'crying' for assistance over the radio yesterday morning.

The ship loaded a week ago in Rouen, France, after having previously Algeria, Tunisia, the US and Mexico. The stowaways were arrested for immigration offences and are being held in Dorset Police custody.

Seven Albian stowaways were found on board the Chise Bulker cargo vessel off Portland yesterday morning

Vessels could be seen escorting the ship to port this afternoon after it anchored in Weymouth Bay

Paramedics were initially called after a person was reportedly in need of medical attention at around 5.40am on Tuesday

The Chise Bulker was due to arrive at Portland at around 4am yesterday after loading at the Port of Rouen on February 3.

According to Trade Winds News, the ship's captain was heard 'crying,' over the radio calling for immediate assistance as it sailed for Le Havre, before turning back for Portland.

A source told the publication the captain was audibly distressed and claimed the stowaways were trying to force themselves on the bridge.

They also claimed the crew were being harmed - though police later stated nobody needed medical attention.

It anchored off Weymouth Bay yesterday, before Border Force vessels were seen escorting the ship to port this afternoon.

The Chise Bulker was built in 2014, it flies under Panama's flag and can carry 33,355 tonnes.

A spokesman from Dorset Police said today: 'We received a call at around 5.40am on Tuesday from the ambulance service in relation to a person reportedly in need of medical attention on board a commercial vessel, called Chise Bulker, off the coast of Portland.

The Chise Bulker, which can carry up to 33,355 tonnes, is thought to have last loaded at the Port of Rouen, before sailing for Portland

Reports claim the ship's captain was heard 'crying' over the radio as he called for help on Tuesday morning. Border Force brought the vessel to shore this afternoon

Police took seven people into custody this afternoon, each of whom is being considered for offences by immigration officials

Police said nobody on board the vessel required medical assistance, after a paramedics received a call out on Tuesday morning

Dorset Police said it was investigating whether any criminal offences took place on board the Chise Bulker, but said there was no evidence of a potential takeover

'Following enquiries, it was established there were reportedly a small number of unidentified individuals that had been located on board the vessel and none of them required any medical assistance.

'Officers liaised with the Border Force, the vessels crew and other partner agencies and arrangements were made for the vessel to safely dock at Portland Port.

'A total of seven individuals  believed to be Albanian nationals  were arrested by police and escorted from the ship. They will be considered by the Border Force and UK Visas and Immigration for potential offences.

'The ships crew are being spoken to by officers and enquiries are ongoing to establish whether there are any reports of criminal offences. There were no reports of any injuries to the crew or the detainees involved in this incident.

'We would like to thank all those involved in the multi-agency operation to ensure this vessel could safely be brought into port and those on board taken safely to shore.'

In October last year, SBS forces stormed the Nave Andromeda oil tanker off the coast of Southampton after reports Nigerian stowaways had taken control of the vessel.

However, prosecutors later released the seven men involved in the incident after concluding there was 'no realistic prospect' of securing a conviction.

Border Force officials joined paramedics, police and the coastguard at Portland in Dorset

The tanker was able to sail into port at around 1pm this afternoon - more than 24 hours after initially calling for help
In a scene of democracy long missing in Gaza, election workers in fluorescent orange vests are touring the Palestinian enclave to help residents register for upcoming polls despite doubts clouding them.

If held, the vote would be the first since 2006, when the militant Hamas group, participating for the first time, scored a surprising landslide victory against the long dominant Fatah party of President Mahmoud Abbas.

A year later, Hamas seized Gaza by force, routing pro-Abbas forces and leaving the Palestinian Authority administering autonomous enclaves in the West Bank.

Abbas decreed legislative elections be held in May, followed by presidential polls in August.

After two days of talks to overcome hurdles threatening elections, Palestinian factions reaffirmed Tuesday to proceed with the call for the election and to agree on mechanisms for holding it.

No conclusive agreement has been reached and the factions will go for another round of talks in Egypt next month.

But on the ground, officials from the Central Elections Commission say they want to secure as many eligible voters as possible.

Since the widening of the Palestinian split in 2007, repeated attempts at reconciliation have all but failed.

This raised fears that residents will not take the call for updating their information in the electoral register seriously.

So on Wednesday, 28 teams from the Central Elections Commission set off, touring streets, stores, hospitals, schools and rural areas where internet access is difficult.

But ECE officials say the turnout in Gaza City, the largest electoral constituency, was high.

More than 90% of the 385,000 eligible voters have registered so far, said Mohammed Abu el-Khair, an ECE official.

The voter register closes on Feb. 16.

"There is a passion by the people. The last legislation elections took place in 2006 and now we are in 2021, so a large portion of the youth did not participate or vote in an election," el-Khair said.

One of the youths who will vote is Mohammed Al-Jawabra. He graduated with a degree in journalism shortly after Hamas took over Gaza, but he failed to find a job.

Unemployment in Gaza skyrocketed to around 50% and is higher among the graduates, in large part due to an Israeli-Egyptian blockade meant to isolate Hamas, which doesn't recognize Israel and with whom it fought three deadly and destructive wars.

"I want to see a change here in terms of economy, unemployment and many things like (border) crossing points," said Al-Jawabra, 34, who sells coffee and tea on a sidewalk cart.

"I'm sorry to say that there are youths who can't work at this time and graduates could not be hired," he said, as the ECE team member updated his information on a tablet.

(Disclaimer: This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed; only the image & headline may have been reworked by www.republicworld.com)
The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
More than a dozen businesses, most of them Asian-owned, have been the victims of acts of vandalism in recent weeks, according to the Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon.

In the last week of January, at least 13 businesses had rocks thrown through their windows or were otherwise targeted, according to APANO.

A year into the pandemic, at a time when we all need to do our part to keep each other safe, it is unacceptable that Asian Americans continue to be targeted and experience these harms, Duncan Hwang, associate director of the organization, said in a statement. It is up to all of us to root out these bigoted, racist sentiments that sow divides and make our communities unsafe.

Among the targeted businesses were Fujiyama on 82nd Toast La Tea, Hanoi Kitchen, Utopia, Thanhs Billiards, Buddys Lounge and My Brothers Crawfish, which posted video of a person lobbing a rock at their window on Jan. 27.

A Portland police spokesman said the Jade District vandalism reports remain under investigation and that one person had been arrested in connection with a window being broken at a building in the 7900 block of Northeast Glisan Street.

Allie Yee, a spokesperson for APANO, said the motive for the vandalism was unclear, but that a pattern emerged in the type of businesses that were hit.

Nearly all of the businesses that were impacted are (Asian-Pacific Islander)-owned and these attacks are coming at a time when were seeing several reports of anti-Asian incidents locally, Yee said in an email to The Oregonian/OregonLive.

In mid-December, a man was arrested for a bias crime after he approached an Asian American male who was waiting at a MAX stop in North Portland. Are you Chinese? the man, later identified as 38-year-old Daniel Hutchens, reportedly asked the victim. Before the victim had a chance to respond, Hutchens punched him in the face, prosecutors said, and fled the area.

On Jan. 22, an Asian American woman and her son were assaulted on a TriMet bus when a man, identified as Peter Eschright, kicked them in the shins and started shouting racial slurs and making racist statements about the coronavirus. He was also arrested on charges of bias crimes.

Pandemic-related racism in the Southeast Portland business district stretches back to the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

When the virus was first spreading in March, Multnomah County put out a statement saying some minority groups had begun experiencing an increase in racist incidents, and Asian American-owned businesses have even reported fewer customers because of the myths surrounding COVID-19, Willamette Week reported.

Former President Donald Trump repeatedly dispatched racist nicknames for the coronavirus during speeches and rallies in 2020. Those kinds of statements, coming from the highest echelons of government, only serve to inflame racism against Asian Americans, Yee said.

This also comes a year into a pandemic where anti-Asian sentiment has been stoked and weve seen a surge of hate incidents and discrimination against Asian Americans, she said.

Stop AAPI Hate, which tracks incidents of hate against Asian Americans, took more than 2,500 reports of bias or hate between March and August. In Oregon, the Department of Justice took 77 similar reports between March and January. Of those, the vast majority were reported in Multnomah County.

Yees organization has rallied to help the affected businesses in the short term, she said, helping to pay for repairs and connect business owners with local and state government resources.

But while windows can be repaired, the underlying prejudice that Yee said fueled the vandalism is a deeper problem that can only be solved at the systemic level.

We need to address the racism and hate at the root of this violence, which has impacted many BIPOC communities, especially the Black community, in the past year, she said.

-- Kale Williams; kwilliams@oregonian.com; 503-294-4048; @sfkale
Officials said, "We are thrilled to be able to welcome back our in-person students five days a week.

It is imperative that we remain vigilant to continue the decline of COVID-19 spread in our community. Please remember to follow the healthy behaviors outlined in the HCS SAFE Pledge including wearing a mask, washing your hands, and keeping distance when possible.

Chris Hemsworth is apparently 'wary' of the recent influx of Sydneysiders to Byron Bay, the coastal New South Wales town he and his family have called home for seven years.

The Thor star, 37, who moved to Byron from Los Angeles in 2014, is said to have expressed slight disapproval of city types flocking to the tourist hotspot during the Covid-19 pandemic, in this month's edition of Men's Health Australia.

While Chris wasn't quoted directly on the subject, the journalist who interviewed him, Men's Health Deputy Editor Ben Jhoty, noted the actor's apparent 'wariness' of visitors.

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Chris Hemsworth (pictured with wife Elsa Pataky) is apparently 'wary' of the recent influx of Sydneysiders to Byron Bay, the coastal New South Wales town he and his family have called home for seven years

As the conversation turned to the coronavirus pandemic and lockdowns, Mr Jhoty wrote: 'Of course, there are worse places to be locked down than Byron Bay. And like a good local, Hemsworth was wary of the influx of visitors escaping Sydney last year.

'At the same time, he can understand the appeal as well as the environmental payoffs of decentralisation.'

Hemsworth was then quoted directly as he spoke generally about Covid-19 encouraging city dwellers to escape to rural areas.

He said: 'Maybe that's what it forces us to do, just spread out a little and not live on top of each other so much. And be a bit more self-sufficient and consume more local produce. It would be a huge positive if that was the by-product of this experience.'

The actor, who moved to Byron from LA in 2014, is said to have expressed slight disapproval of city types flocking to the tourist hotspot during the Covid-19 pandemic, in this month's edition of Men's Health Australia. Pictured: crowds at Byron Bay's Main Beach in March last year

Elsewhere in the wide-ranging interview, the Avengers star spoke about the ups and downs of his career, his ambitions to produce his own movies, and his fitness regimen for Thor: Love and Thunder.

Daily Mail Australia has contacted Hemsworth's Australian representatives at Morrissey Management for comment.

Hemsworth relocated to Byron with his wife, Spanish actress Elsa Pataky, and their children, daughter India Rose, eight, and twin sons Sasha and Tristan, six, in 2014.

While Chris wasn't quoted directly on the subject, the journalist who interviewed him, Men's Health Deputy Editor Ben Jhoty, noted the actor's apparent 'wariness' of visitors. Pictured: Cape Byron Lighthouse, one of Byron Bay's most recognisable landmarks

They live in the suburb of Broken Head, a 20-minute drive from central Byron, in a mega-mansion estimated to be worth $30million.

They spent years renovating their home, which sits on 4.2 hectares of land, with the help of Sydney-based MCK Architects - but the development faced some resistance from locals, who compared it to a multi-storey car park or shopping centre.

The property features a 50-metre infinity pool, a large Indigenous mural, two bars and a gym complex including steam, sauna and massage rooms.

Elsewhere in the wide-ranging interview, Hemsworth spoke about the ups and downs of his career, his ambitions to produce movies, and his fitness regimen for Thor: Love and Thunder

Last month, a Byron Bay real estate agent who has sold homes to the Hemsworths and other celebrities insisted Hollywood stars weren't the ones driving up property prices in the trendy coastal town.

While frustrated locals blame a few high-profile residents for the influx of wannabe models and social media influencers to the area in recent years, Peter Yopp of LJ Hooker Byron Bay said it wasn't A-listers spending the most money.

Mr Yopp told Realestate.com.au the soaring house and rent prices in Byron Bay were actually the result of the 'secretly rich' splashing the cash.

Last month, a real estate agent who has sold homes to the Hemsworths and other celebrities insisted Hollywood stars weren't the ones driving up property prices in Byron Bay

'To be honest, the people with the real money look like they don't have any money. You wouldn't even know who they are,' he said.

Mr Yopp also revealed sale prices were constantly rising, with new records being set whenever a luxury property changes hands.

'The latest sale is the new bottom,' he told the website. 'As soon as something else comes along, it supersedes it [in price].'

According to Domain, the median house price in Byron Bay is now more than $1.44million, which is up 22.8 per cent from last year.

Meanwhile, rent has 'jumped by a third in six months', reports Realestate.com.au.

Chris relocated to Byron with his wife, Spanish actress Elsa Pataky (right), and their children, daughter India Rose, eight, and twin sons Sasha and Tristan, six, in 2014

Notable Byron Bay residents include Hemsworth brothers Chris, Luke and Liam; model Elyse Knowles, who bought a $2.3million beach house last year; and The Project host Carrie Bickmore, who rents out her $3million holiday home to visitors.

In addition to the famous locals, many Hollywood stars have rented in Byron Bay while visiting Australia, including Zac Efron, Natalie Portman and Mark Wahlberg, who spent his 14-day quarantine at a luxury $2,500-a-night retreat in the area.

Domain claims that nearby towns like Lennox Head, Suffolk Park, Pottsville and Brunswick Heads have seen an increase in tourism as Byron Bay becomes increasingly pricey.

But even those more humble towns are seeing property prices soar, with prices in Lennox Head going up 44.7 per cent. Pottsville has a median house price of $780,000, up from $500,000 five years ago.

Notable Byron Bay residents include Hemsworth brothers Chris, Luke and Liam; model Elyse Knowles (left), who bought a $2.3million beach house last year; and The Project host Carrie Bickmore (right), who rents out her $3million holiday home to visitors
NEW YORK: Micro-blogging platform Twitter on Wednesday defended its policies in India, days after the government issued a notice to it ordering it to remove over 1,400 accounts related to the ongoing farmers' protest against the three farm laws.

Defending its policies, Twitter issued a statement in which it said that transparency is the foundation for promoting healthy public conversation. Providing an update about its policies, the micro-blogging platform said, Following the reports of violence in recent weeks, we're sharing a granular update on our proactive efforts to enforce our rules and defend our principles in India.''

"We believe transparency is the foundation for promoting healthy public conversation on Twitter and to earn trust. It is critical that people understand our approach to content moderation and how we engage with governments around the world, and that we are transparent about the consequences and the results of this work. Our Transparency Report and Lumen continue to be the places to go to observe trends in the requests governments make of us, and to assess how we operate globally.

Transparency is the foundation for promoting healthy public conversation. Following the reports of violence in recent weeks, we're sharing a granular update on our proactive efforts to enforce our rules and defend our principles in India: https://t.co/ry557Nj94U  Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) February 10, 2021

It went on to say in the statement:  The values that underpin the Open Internet and free expression are increasingly under threat around the world. Following the reports of violence in New Delhi in recent weeks, we wanted to share a granular update on our proactive efforts to enforce our rules and defend our principles in India. Twitter exists to empower voices to be heard, and we continue to make improvements to our service so that everyone  no matter their views or perspective  feels safe participating in the public conversation.

The company further informed that its global team provided 24/7 coverage and took enforcement action judiciously and impartially on content, Trends, Tweets, and accounts that were in violation of the Twitter Rules beginning 26 January 2021.

It said that the company took action on hundreds of accounts that violated the Twitter Rules, particularly inciting violence, abuse, wishes of harm, and threats that could trigger the risk of offline harm. Prevented certain terms that violated our Rules from appearing in the Trends section. Suspended more than 500 accounts that were engaging in clear examples of platform manipulation and spam. Tackled misinformation based on the highest potential for real-world harm, and prioritized labelling of Tweets that were in violation of our synthetic and manipulated media policy.

We took steps to reduce the visibility of the hashtags containing harmful content, which included prohibiting them from trending on Twitter and appearing as recommended search terms. We took a range of enforcement actions  including permanent suspension in certain cases  against more than 500 accounts escalated across all MeitY orders for clear violations of Twitters Rules, the company said in a blog post.

The micro-blogging platform stated that it will continue to maintain a dialogue with the Government of India and respectfully engage with them.

We will continue to advocate for the right of free expression on behalf of the people we serve. We are exploring options under Indian law  both for Twitter and for the accounts that have been impacted. We remain committed to safeguarding the health of the conversation occurring on Twitter, and strongly believe that the Tweets should flow, Twitter said in the blog post.

The clarification from Twitter came days after the government issued notice to the firm ordering it to remove over 1,400 accounts related to farmers' protests. Twitter India officials also later met the Secretary, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) to discuss the issue.

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STATEN ISLAND, N.Y.  President Joe Bidens proposed pandemic stimulus plan would bring billions of dollars in relief to help schools across the United States reopen amid the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

As part of the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package to battle the pandemic and revive the economy, nearly $130 billion is proposed to help the countrys schools reopen.

Heres a look at the highlights of the proposed plan for schools.

K-12 schools to receive nearly $130 billion in emergency funds

According to the plan, the fund will provide over $128 billion in grants to state and local education agencies.

Funds can be used to reduce class sizes, improve ventilation, buy protective equipment, hire nurses and counselors, increase transportation, and close the digital divide amid the pandemic. They can also be used to create or expand community schools, and to provide summer school or other supports to help students make up lost learning time.

Funding to high-poverty schools

There will be provisions in place to ensure states adequately fund education and protect students in low-income communities hardest hit by COVID-19.

About $5 billion will be allocated in funds for governors to use to support educational programs and learning needs of students significantly impacted by the pandemic, including K-12, higher education and early childhood education programs.

Schools and states must address learning loss

As part of the funding schools receive, they are required to reserve at least 20% for efforts to address learning loss, including after-school programs, extended-day programs and summer courses.

State education agencies are also required to reserve 5% of their allocations to carry out activities to address learning loss, the proposal states.

Private schools wont be left out

Of the 20% allocation districts must reserve for learning loss, districts will be required to provide equitable services to students who attend private schools. The amount will be based on the number of low-income students living within the district who attend private schools.

Meeting students academic and social-emotional health

The plan states that school districts must ensure funds are used to not only reopen schools, but to meet students academic, mental health and social-emotional needs in relation to the coronavirus. That could be through extended learning time, tutoring and counselors.

Funding reserved for equity grants

A portion of funding will be reserved for a COVID-19 Educational Equity Challenge Grant. The grant will support state and local governments in partnering with teachers, parents and other stakeholders to advance equity- and evidence-based policies to respond to coronavirus-related educational challenges. It will give all students the support they need to succeed.

Reimbursed for COVID-19 related expenses

Schools will be able to access the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Disaster Relief Fund to get reimbursed for certain coronavirus-related expenses. They will also receive support to implement regular COVID-19 testing protocols.

Higher education institutions to receive funding

The proposal includes over $35 billion in funding for the Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund. It will ensure colleges have critical resources to implement public health protocols, execute distance learning plans and provide emergency grants to students in need. It will offer millions of students up to an additional $1,700 in financial assistance from their college.

Studying learning loss

Bidens plan will provide $100 million for the Institute of Education Sciences to study learning loss.

School Zone: A new newsletter with the updates you need as our schools try to get back to normal. Enter your email address here and hit "subscribe" to receive this weekly newsletter:



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Prime Minister Saara Kuugongelwa-Amadhila yesterday defended President Hage Geingob's decision to address parliamentarians remotely during the occasion of the official opening of parliament.

The traditional pomp and ceremony usually associated with the opening of parliament were missing yesterday, largely due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

There was, however, a first for the country when the Head of State elected to address MPs virtually, instead of making his way to the National Assembly chamber for the joint sitting, much to the chagrin of opposition members.

However, the premier defended the decision, saying there was nothing in the law that prevents the President from addressing remotely.

"There is no violation that has been committed by the President by opening parliament virtually; there is absolutely no violation because we, ourselves, as members of this house, are engaged in the deliberation of the house from debate points, and we even pass laws," said Kuugongelwa-Amadhila, who is also the leader of government business in the National Assembly.

"I am also not aware of any provision in the law that states the President should be here to address the house."

Kuugongelwa-Amadhila made the remarks while reacting to leader of the official opposition McHenry Venaani of the Popular Democratic Movement (PDM), who, after the address, labelled Geingob's decision to address the house virtually as "cowardice".

Landless People's Movement (LPM) and PDM MPs staged a walkout of the chamber yesterday, claiming they were not told that Geingob would open parliament virtually.

"For a President, who is supposed to come to an open parliament, to sit in the comfort of his office, apparently fearing corona, but he did not fear to open Cabinet, is an act of cowardice," Venaani said.

He said his party members walked out of parliament because, if they allow Geingob to continue with the virtual address, he will do a similar move with the State of the Nation Address (SONA) in April.

"If the fear was Covid-19, the speaker has viable time to lessen the people in the house for the President to come to the house," Venaani said.

Namibia Economic Freedom Fighter (NEFF) MP Kalimbo Iipumbu said Geingob's decision to address parliament virtually portrayed a sign of arrogance from his part.

"For us to have travelled to attend this important event and for the President not to pitch was a sign of arrogance. His leadership qualities are now questionable; he shows that he is unable to lead this country up until 2024," Kalimbo said, adding he expected the Head of State to apologise to the nation.

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"We are expecting the President to come and address parliament in a proper manner," he said.

Rally for Democracy and Progress (RDP) MP Mike Kavekotora claimed Geingob was running away from reality.

"He knew that even though questions are not allowed during the opening of parliament, some members, because of frustration, would have posted questions to him; this is a sign of running away from reality," he said.

Nudo MP Josef Kauandenge said he does not see anything wrong with Geingob addressing parliament virtually.

However, what was worrisome, he said, is the fact that it was not communicated prior to the opening of parliament.

"If there was nothing fishy, they would have communicated; this was a well-calculated move from their side for a reason they only knew. I hope the Speaker will not make such a move again," he said.
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David Kaser, 56, of Sand Springs, Oklahoma shot and killed his two young daughters before turning the gun on himself, according to local police

An Oklahoma man shot dead his two young daughters while on the phone with his wife and told her How do you like that? before eventually turning the gun on himself in what police are calling a murder-suicide.

Sand Springs police identified the suspect as David Kaser, 56. Investigators said Kaser fired a fatal gunshot at each of his two daughters - Clarissa Kaser, 19, and Crystal 'Grey' Kaser, 14, on Tuesday afternoon.

Clarissa had just graduated from Charles Page High School. Crystal was attending ninth grade at Clyde Boyd Middle School, according to police.

Investigators in Sand Springs said they received a call just before 1pm from the girls mother who was at work at the time.

She told police that moments earlier she was on the phone with her husband. During their conversation, he threatened to kill their two daughters as well as himself, police told Sand Springs Leader.

The woman, who works some 20 minutes away from the familys home on South Walnut Creek Drive, asked officers to do a welfare check at the home.

Police said the woman told investigators that she and her husband had been having marital problems for months and that her husband had made threats before, though nothing as serious.

Investigators said Kaser fired a fatal gunshot at each of his two daughters - Clarissa Kaser (right), 19, and Crystal 'Grey' Kaser (left), 14

The image above shows investigators at the scene of a double murder-suicide at a home on South Walnut Creek Drive in Sand Springs, Oklahoma, on Tuesday

According to investigators, the father-of-two fatally shot his young daughters before turning the gun on himself while on the phone with his wife

According to police, investigators visited the home in 2017 due to a 'domestic' incident, though no arrests were made.

The woman told authorities that David had guns in the home. When officers arrived at the house, they tapped on windows, knocked on the doors, and called the girls cell phones, but got no response.

At that point, police asked the woman to come to the home, according to Captain Todd Enzbrenner.

When she arrived, she gave officers permission to enter the house, Fox 23 TV reported.

Investigators then entered the home and found the man and the couples two young daughters dead. They also found a handgun, according to police.

The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation is assisting local law enforcement agencies with the probe.

The murder-suicide took place less than a mile away from a similar incident involving a family slightly more than a week ago.

Phillip Daniel Stephen Ross, 31, fatally stabbed his two young children and their mother before killing himself either late on January 29 or in the early morning hours of January 30, according to police.

The gruesome incident took place less than two weeks after police say a triple murder-suicide occurred about a mile away in the same town. Phillip Daniel Stephen Ross (left), 31, fatally stabbed his two young children and their mother sometime between January 29 and 30 in their home in Sand Springs, Oklahoma before killing himself. Anastacia 'Staci' Lynn Smith, 41; River Gale Ross, 4; and Piper Ann Ross (right), 2, died of sharp-force injuries

Anastacia 'Staci' Lynn Smith, 41; River Gale Ross, 4; and Piper Ann Ross, 2, died of sharp-force injuries. Investigators said they were confident that the father's wounds were self-inflicted.

Enzbrenner said that investigators had not yet determined the order in which the stabbings occurred.

Smith's body was found in the back bedroom while Ross and his two kids were in the living room when investigators arrived on the scene in the afternoon hours of January 30.

Investigators said they recovered knives with blood on them but no other weapons were found in the home.

Enzbrenner said that Ross had a history of domestic violence, though none of the complaints made against him appear to have resulted in any convictions.
Mechanical watchmaking in France and Switzerland has joined a grass mowing competition in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Finnish sauna culture and tree beekeeping on UNESCOs lists of Intangible Cultural Heritage.

The lists, which have grown to more than 580 items since their start in 2008, identify crafts, skills and cultural traditions in member states that, UNESCO says, require urgent measures to keep them alive or that help demonstrate the diversity of this heritage and raise awareness about its importance. Watchmaking in the two countries was added to the second category in December.

With luxury watch boutiques lining the streets of major cities around the globe and Switzerlands own estimate of pre-pandemic annual sales to be in the region of 50 billion Swiss francs ($55.9 billion), it could be argued that the world already is quite aware of the industry.

But Antonio Calce, chief executive of the independent Swiss watch company Greubel Forsey, one of the brands behind the application, said protecting skills was the point of the effort. The UNESCO inscription is a first real affirmation of the value of mechanical watchmaking and of the importance of the people practicing this rare craft, he wrote in an email. The inscription raises awareness of the fundamental differences between industrial mass production and traditional hand craftsmanship.
A Republican legislative leader in Michigan has issued a vague apology after falsely claiming that supporters of former President Donald Trump were not involved in the deadly attack at the U.S. Capitol.

Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey said it was an 'hoax' to suggest Trump supporters were involved.

Shirkey made the comments last Wednesday while meeting with leaders of the Hillsdale County GOP, according to a video posted on YouTube by a group called Reclaim Our American Republic. The remarks were first reported by the Detroit Metro Times.

'I said some things in a videoed conversation that are not fitting for the role I am privileged to serve,' he said in a statement.

'I own that. I have many flaws. Being passionate coupled with an occasional lapse in restraint of tongue are at least two of them. I regret the words I chose, and I apologize for my insensitive comments.'

The statement did not specify the remarks for which he was apologizing.

Michigan Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey said it was a 'hoax' to suggest Trump supporters were involved. He was caught on camera saying: 'That wasn't Trump people, that was a hoax from day one'

A Republican legislative leader in Michigan has apologized after falsely claiming that supporters of former President Donald Trump were not involved in the deadly attack at the U.S. Capitol. Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey (pictured) apologized on Tuesday for the comments, which included claiming it was a 'hoax' to suggest Trump supporters were involved [File photo]

In the contentious meeting, three Republicans spoke with Shirkey at a restaurant a day before the Hillsdale County GOP's executive board censured him for a number of reasons, including backing a ban on the open carry of guns into the Statehouse and allegedly not doing enough to fight Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's COVID-19 restrictions.

Shirkey countered that Republicans had successfully sued the governor and taken other steps such as blocking her nominees.

'Spanked her hard on the budget,' he said. 'Spanked her hard on appointments. Did everything we could constitutionally do.'

At one point, a participant who said he was at the January 6 protest in Washington, D.C., asked Shirkey about it.

He responded: 'That wasn't Trump people. That's been a hoax from day one. That was all prearranged.'

Shirkey made the comments during a contentious meeting in which he was accused of not going enough to fight Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer's (pictured) coronavirus restrictions [File photo]

Another participant, who also said he had been in D.C., suggested that police tear-gassed 'their own guards.'

Shirkey said: 'Why wasn't there more security there? It was ridiculous. It was all staged,' claiming that then-U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell 'was part of it. ...They wanted to have a mess.'

He added that some Trump backers 'probably got caught up in the emotion' of the mob.

The siege of the Capitol stunned the world as hundreds of Trump supporters ransacked the building to try to stop the certification of Joe Biden's victory. Five people died, including a police officer.

Jon Smith, the Hillsdale County GOP's secretary who helped organize two busloads of people to travel to D.C., told The Associated Press that he recorded the hour-long conversation with a phone in his pocket because he was worried Shirkey would lie. It was unclear whether Shirkey knew he was being recorded. Hillsdale County is one of three south-central Michigan counties Shirkey represents in the Senate.

The siege of the Capitol on January 6 stunned the world as hundreds of Trump supporters ransacked the building to try to stop the certification of Joe Biden's victory. Five people died, including a police officer. Pictured: Trump supports protest outside the capital before laying siege to the building

Senate Minority Leader Jim Ananich, a Flint Democrat, said 'it is past time to accept the facts. On Jan. 6, 2021, there was an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Republicans need to decide for themselves if they are going to hold their leaders accountable for spreading lies.'

'We would expect such comments from a leader of a QAnon chat group or local militia chapter - not the majority leader of the Michigan Senate,' said House Minority Leader Donna Laskinski, a Democrat from Scio Township.

Shirkey was among seven Michigan lawmakers who met with Trump at the White House after the election amid the president's extraordinary efforts to subvert the democratic process that handed the battleground state to Biden.

He said he and then-House Speaker Lee Chatfield told Trump that state law did not give the Legislature a say in awarding Michigan's 16 electoral votes. Days later, the state elections board certified Biden's victory.

Shirkey has faced criticism from Democrats for meeting with militia leaders last May, weeks after armed protesters had entered the Capitol to object to a coronavirus lockdown - some blocked by police while demanding entry onto the House floor, others shouting down from the Senate gallery.

Shirkey, who called some demonstrators 'jackasses,' has said he challenged the groups to develop a 'code of conduct' so they could protest safely.

Some of the men who carried guns at protests against Whitmer's stay-at-home order last spring, including one at which Shirkey spoke, were later charged in a plot to kidnap her.

Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 10) The top defense officials of the Philippines and the United States have reaffirmed commitment to their countries' alliance and pledged to further strengthen cooperation between their agencies.

Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana and his counterpart US Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III discussed over the phone on Wednesday developments in the two countries bilateral relations, the DND said in a statement.

Secretary Austin reaffirmed commitment to the Philippines-US alliance through the Mutual Defense Treaty (MDT), and the Agreement Regarding the Treatment of US Armed Forces Visiting the Philippines (VFA), the department said.

In a separate press release, the US Department of Defense said the secretaries also discussed regional security challenges including the South China Sea dispute, counterterrorism, and maritime security.

The camps likewise affirmed the importance of upholding international laws, including the Philippines 2016 arbitral victory against China in a tribunal ruling that recognized Manila's sovereign rights in areas of its exclusive economic zone that Beijing contests.

Both sides likewise committed to hold further dialogues amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and have agreed to meet in person in the future, DND added.
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A former Lee County corrections officer has been charged with a felony crime after authorities say he provided contraband to an inmate in exchange for money.

The Lee County Sheriffs Office on Wednesday announced the arrest of 27-year-old DMario Jones of Columbus, Ga. He was a corrections officer at the time of the alleged crimes.

Officials said that Jones was receiving payments from family members of the unnamed inmate. The inmate was provided with cell phones and related equipment, said Sheriff Jay Jones. The investigation is continuing, and other arrests are expected.

Detention Center operations involve constant monitoring of security procedures and protocols,' the sheriff said. Diligence on the part of other corrections officers played a significant role in the detection of Jones actions and identification of other involved persons.

Jones, arrested Tuesday, is charged with two counts of first-degree promoting prison contraband. His bond is set at $10,000. The sheriff said the alleged crimes happened on multiple occasions.

As public safety officers, we all take an oath to provide for the preservation of law and the protection of our community. When we discover that someone in our ranks has broken that oath, it is our duty to act swiftly and decisively in a fair manner to remove that person and hold them accountable,' Jones said. Anything less would be a disservice to the vast majority of law enforcement officers who display professionalism and integrity every day and an affront to the citizens we serve.

Anyone with information about this case or any other associated cases is asked to contact the Lee County Sheriffs Office at 334-749-5651 or Central Alabama Crime Stoppers at 334-215-STOP (7867).
FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Donald Trump gestures as he speaks during a rally to contest the certification of the 2020 U.S. presidential election results by the U.S. Congress, in Washington, U.S, January 6, 2021. REUTERS/Jim Bourg/File Photo

Donald Trump was the Founding Fathers worst nightmare come to life, Democrat prosecutors said as the former presidents second impeachment trial opened yesterday.

Mr Trump incited a violent insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6 that desecrated the seat of US democracy, and he must not be allowed to get away with it or similar events would become Americas future, they said.

The first day of the trial was taken up with legal argument over whether a former president could be tried for alleged crimes committed while in office. If convicted by the Senate, Mr Trump would be barred from running for president again.

The former president committed an unforgivable betrayal of office and was singularly responsible for a riot that could have killed all of us, the prosecutors argued yesterday.

He issued a tweet five hours after the Capitol was sacked in which he sided with the bad guys, said David Cicilline, one of the prosecutors.

People died. It was a national tragedy, a disaster for Americas standing in the world. Things could have been much worse.

Prosecutors showed a slick video giving a timeline of Mr Trumps exhortations and tweets to followers, spliced with images of mob violence and chants of Fight for Trump.

Read More

The graphic 15-minute video showed supporters of Mr Trump, throwing down barriers and hitting police officers, and yelling expletives.

It showed the moment a police officer shot protester Ashli Babbitt as she tried to climb through a broken window.

In another scene, a rioter sifted the contents of a politicians desk, saying, Theres got to be something here we can use against the scumbags.

Mr Trump has argued that he is now a private citizen so the trial is unconstitutional. No ex-president has ever been tried in the US Senate before.

But the Democrat prosecutors  known as House managers  said it would set a dangerous precedent not to try Mr Trump, allowing future presidents to do anything they wanted in their final weeks. They said there must be no January exception to impeachment in which presidents could commit offences in the days before they traditionally leave office on January 20 without accountability.

Jamie Raskin, lead House manager, said: A January exception is an invitation to the president to take his best shot to hang on to the Oval Office at all costs and lock the door to the peaceful transfer of power.

The January exception is an invitation to our founders worst nightmare.

Democrats, who hold the balance of power in the Senate, won a vote last night allowing opening arguments to begin today.

The House managers said the case against Mr Trump would be devastating and they would introduce new evidence.

Mr Raskin said: Our case is based on cold, hard facts. Its all about the facts.

Pointing at the tweet on a screen, Mr Raskin said: Thats a high crime and misdemeanour. If thats not an impeachable offence then what is?

Bruce Castor, representing Mr Trump, denounced the rioters who breached the citadel of our democracy.

He said: To have it attacked is repugnant. The loss of life is horrific. We mourn the loss of the Capitol police officer. Those responsible should be prosecuted to the fullest extent.

Read More

Telegraph Media Group Limited [2021]
Official denies John MacArthur makes more than $500K a year from Grace to You

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California megachurch Pastor John MacArthurs ministry denied he makes more than $500,000 annually from his Grace to You media ministry and defended the stewardship of his collective ministries' finances on Tuesday after a recent report suggested his private lifestyle belies the modesty he preaches at the pulpit.

The questions and quibbling innuendo that have been published on the Internet regarding John MacArthurs income and stewardship are rooted in misinformation. For example, a report has been floating around online for some time that John makes more than half a million dollars annually from GTY. Totally false, Phil Johnson, GTY executive director and an elder at MacArthurs Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, said in a statement to The Christian Post on Tuesday.

That idea is wrongly extrapolated from the fact that GTYs 2011 990 tax form (ten years ago) reported $400k in salary and benefits paid to John. That figure reflects a one-time gifta rare 1st-edition KJV Bible given to John to honor the completion of his verse-by-verse exposition of the whole NT. It was an expression of thanks for 40 years of faithful ministry. John in turn gave the Bible to the seminarys collection of rare manuscripts and early Bible editions, Johnson explained.

Johnsons statement came in response to questions from CP about a report published by independent journalist Julie Roys last Wednesday highlighting that while MacArthur is well known for preaching against the prosperity gospel, financial statements and tax forms show that MacArthur and his family run a religious media and educational empire with more than $130 million in assets that generates more than $70 million a year in tax-free revenue.

Roys also reported that MacArthur, his family, and related companies have been paid more than $12.8 million from ministry and donor funds and the megachurch pastor owns three luxury homes worth millions.

It was further revealed that MacArthurs Grace Community Church resigned from the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability after Roys raised questions about the ministrys compliance with membership standards, such as the timely release of financial statements on request, and concerns that two of MacArthurs sons have served on GTYs board along with their father.

MacArthurs son, Matthew, remains on the board of GTY and has been listed on every 990 since 2002 as the treasurer. His other son, Mark, has also been listed as a GTY board member on every 990 since 2002.

Last year, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Mark MacArthur, 52, along with a wealth management company he founded, with defrauding their advisory clients in a $16 million real estate investment scheme.

GTY has also reportedly paid MacArthurs son-in-law, Kory Welch, and companies Welch owns millions over the years, according to Roys. In 2008, Welch, whos married to MacArthurs daughter, Melinda, was earning a salary of $83,677 as director of television broadcasting at GTY. He also received a $20,000 no-interest home loan with total debt forgiveness from GTY.

The following year, Welch began working for GTY as a video production contractor through a company he formed two years earlier, called The Welch Group. GTY reportedly paid The Welch Group $741,000 for post-production services that year.

Johnson, who reportedly also served on the GTY board for many years, defended their business practice.

We do lots of video, and we bid out the contract. We chose Johns son-in-laws firm because 1) his companys work is excellent; 2) he has easier access to record John than any other videographers would; and 3) his bid was competitive. Our payments go to his company, not him personally, Johnson said.

It is not personal salary paid to him, despite what some have claimed. We save money by not maintaining our own video production department. The critics who seem so eager to sully Johns name with controversy are busybodies guilty of sinful scandal-mongering. As far as I know, no one who has any actual firsthand knowledge of John or his lifestyle has ever accused him of extravagance or poor stewardship, he continued.

Johnson did not respond to specific questions from CP about Grace Community Churchs resignation from the ECFA and the accountability organization did not provide a response in time for this report. He insisted, however, that his boss does not live an extravagant life.

John is paid a modest but reasonable salary by Grace Church. Lay elders review and approve his salary annually, using information gleaned from careful surveys. They take great pains to ensure that Johns salary is well within the upper-medium range for California pastors salaries. The same process is followed with equal care by the board of directors at Grace to You. (Board members with blood relationships or employment connections to John MacArthur recuse themselves from those decisions, to make sure there are no conflicts of interest.) Professional auditors and an impartial audit review committee review all such decisions to add two extra layers of accountability. John is not paid an exorbitant salary by either organization, he said.

Without sharing any specifics on MacArthurs income, Johnson said it was possible that most of Johns total annual income comes neither from the church nor from Grace to You but from book royalties paid by his publishers.

He has written numerous best-selling works, and his commentaries and the Study Bible will no doubt be in print long after we are all in heaven. John earns a fair authors royalty for all those worksand all of that income comes from the publisher, not from any of the three nonprofit organizations John serves, he said.

No law requires an author to make book royalties paid from his publisher public information, so the facts about Johns total annual income being reported by a small group of critical bloggers are pure speculation and (frankly) well-salted with cynical false assumptions.

He urged people to pay attention to MacArthurs lifestyle, such as living in the same home for the last 40 years and owning just one car. Johnson further noted that MacArthur doesnt always fly 1st class.

For flights longer than three hours, he explained that MacArthur, who is 81, needs to fly business class for health reasons.

Contrary to other noisy claims once made [in 2014] by a certain angry blogger [not Julie Roys], MacArthur,  since he almost died of pulmonary embolism a few years ago, its not good for him to be immobilized in a middle seat on a long flight. So when we at GTY make his reservations for flights more than 3 hours, we do put him in business class whenever we can so that he can move around and stretch more easily, Johnson said. Hes in his eighties and often has to preach multiple sessions immediately after arrival on an overseas flight. Its hardly an unreasonable expenditure.

MacArthur recently slammed some of America's biggest churches for supporting a culture of corrupt, superficial Christianity and making a lot of money doing it. He also asserted that the internet is now making it harder for phonies to survive.

He explained that one of the things he likes to do is to call the church to repentance, but it was a tough call because superficial Christianity made a lot of money and elevated a lot of charlatans.

It was successful. The biggest churches in America are part of it. It was very hard to call people to faithfulness when you could be so corrupt and so successful in Christian religion. That was the battle. Now I think theres a sifting and a shifting, he said before alluding to sex scandals surrounding prominent Christian figures like late apologist Ravi Zacharias and former Hillsong Church Pastor Carl Lentz without mentioning their names.

First of all, phonies are going to have a hard time hiding with the internet. Were seeing one after another after another. Dead ones and alive ones. This dead apologist had a deviant sex life. This cool dude rock and roll pastor was immoral with multiple women for years and years, MacArthur said.
You may have heard that a 9-year-old was recently pepper-sprayed by a police officer in Rochester, New York. But did you happen to watch the whole 10-minute video of what transpired? There is so much more going on there than just another police brutality story. Its a window into pain.

The police were called to a domestic disturbance. According to the mother, mental illness is involved. Its a sometimes under-the-radar plague in our country  certainly for the individuals and families suffering from it. And the children!

The Pennsylvania Parent and Family Alliance shared one mothers reaction to the incident on its Facebook page, relating some of her familys experiences of having to make frantic 911 calls in fear of her child hurting herself or someone else, with police having to handcuff her child for the sake of everyone, including herself. Her 13-year-old is currently in residential treatment because only a hospital setting can keep her safe.

I have received death threats that ended with my child in police custody. I have been physically attacked with fists, with feet, and with broken glass. I have called 911 while my other children ran to a neighbors home for safety. I have cleaned and bandaged my childs self-harm wounds. I have been to the ER and been to the ER and been to the ER, the woman writes.

She suggests that the media spend more time asking questions about family life and needs rather than simply writing another cop brutality story.

Again, I dont know all that was going on in the Rochester situation, but it cannot be mere fodder for the woke wars. There are children in America who never have a chance. They may be victims of cycles of misery. Some of them may be sick and not have the help they need. Some of them are in homes incapable of giving them what they need because of illness, addiction and trauma.

The other day, I saw a young woman walking into a Planned Parenthood clinic while on her phone. It seemed clear the person on the other end was trying to talk her out of an abortion. One wonders what the circumstances are to make choosing life for your child not a conceivable option. We live in a time that seems to support abortion instead of working to make motherhood possible. Life is hard for families, and our culture and politics dont value them as the precious resource they are.

In a new book called What It Means to Be Human: The Case for The Body in Public Bioethics, O. Carter Snead from the University of Notre Dame argues that our public bioethics needs to be grounded in the whole truth of who we are and how we stand in relation to one another as vulnerable, mutually dependent, finite, and embodied beings. That would be a game-changer.

Snead argues that we can only govern ourselves wisely, humanly and justly if we become the kind of people who can make each others goods our own. That means doing more than putting up a sign on the lawn or assenting to the current political mantras in vogue. It means actually loving one another and working to help each other, no matter the sacrifices involved.

Before he got to the moment in the video that obviously got the most play, the police officer asked the girl what she needed. We need to ask that question more, and get creative about resources. We dont need to defund the police, but we do need get people the help they need. Thats a question for civil society to take the lead on and for government to support.

(Lopez is a writer for

United Feature Syndicate)
ALMATY, Kazakhstan -- A court in Kazakhstans largest city, Almaty, has sentenced a man to 10 days in jail for picketing the Chinese Consulate to demand information about his brother, who is in custody in China's northwestern region of Xinjiang.

The court on February 10 found Baibolat Kunbolatuly guilty of violating the law on mass gatherings and sent him to jail for 10 days.

A day earlier, Kunbolatuly and nine other people, mainly women, picketed the Chinese Consulate in Almaty, demanding their relatives be released from so-called reeducation camps in Xinjiang. Some of the protesters said their relatives have been prevented from leaving China for Kazakhstan to join their families, while some said their loved ones have been held incommunicado in Xinjiang for years.

Kunbolatuly's mother, Zauatkhan Tursyn, was in front of the Chinese Consulate with several other women again on February 10, the third day in a row of such protests.

"China incarcerated one of my sons, Kazakhstan jailed another. I demand from Chinese authorities to release my son Baimurat, and I demand Kazakh authorities release my son Baibolat," Tursyn chanted in front of the consulate, holding pictures of her son.

Other women were holding pictures of their relatives and had posters saying "China, Stop Genocide."

An Almaty city official and police were monitoring the protest, but did not interfere.

A consulate security officer appeared to remove a piece of electronic equipment with multiple antennas from the building as reporters covered the event live. After he emerged, the journalists said their Internet connection stopped working.

A security official denied the removal of the piece of equipment had anything to do with the Internet outage.

Many similar protests have taken place in Kazakhstan in recent years, with demonstrators demanding Kazakh authorities officially intervene in the situation faced by ethnic Kazakhs in Xinjiang.

The U.S. State Department has said as many as 2 million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and members of Xinjiang's other indigenous, mostly Muslim, ethnic groups have been taken to detention centers.

China denies that the facilities are internment camps.

People who have fled the province say that thousands of ethnic Kazakhs, Uyghurs, and other Muslims in Xinjiang are undergoing "political indoctrination" at a network of facilities known officially as reeducation camps.

Kazakhs are the second-largest Turkic-speaking indigenous community in Xinjiang after Uyghurs. The region is also home to ethnic Kyrgyz, Tajiks, and Hui, also known as Dungans. Han, China's largest ethnicity, is the second-largest community in Xinjiang.
press release

Companies that ignore their impact on the environment don't just alienate customers and turn off investors. Ultimately, says a new business brief from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), they face "existential challenges".

The GEO for Business brief, Adapt to Survive: Business transformation in a time of uncertainty calls on businesses to dramatically reduce their environmental footprints. Failure to make the transformation, it warns, is a risk to their survival.

A how-to guide for businesses looking to transition to more sustainable practices and operations, the brief, which is the first of a series,builds on UNEP's flagship report, the Global Environment Outlook 6 (GEO-6), a 2019 scientific study that examined the health of the planet. According to the brief, unless the world slashes the environmental degradation caused by energy, food and waste systems, many of the earth's natural systems will collapse.

"Now is the time to put nature at the heart of all decision making and embark on transforming our world." emphasizes Joyce Msuya, UNEP Deputy Executive Director.

"The private sector has the resources and ingenuity to steer us towards a greener future. This is the smart choice. This is the only choice. Business leaders that think long-term must act collaboratively, across sectors to embed sustainability into our definitions of success" she adds.

The GEO for Business inaugural brief calls for businesses to embrace a "nature-positive" economic model - one that reduces their carbon footprint, conserves natural resources and safeguards biodiversity while creating value for nature and people.

The business case for sustainability

"This is the one planet we live on and the one planet we have to do business on," says Ben Tuxworth, an author of the brief and the director of consulting firm Anthesis Group. "The model where businesses essentially create value for shareholders without regard for social and environmental impact is coming to an end. Many firms will have to completely rethink their business models to make a transformation."

Alberto Garza Santos, a Mexican entrepreneur, who has founded companies that specialize in wind power and eco-friendly sanitation, finds that there is a compelling business case for going green. In recent years, Garza Santos - who also works with UNEP to promote environmental causes in Mexico - has seen consumers increasingly shun companies that forsake their responsibilities to the planet.

"Thanks to social media and cell phones, we are so informed right now," he says. "As the population gets younger, new generations will demand even more environmental responsibility from companies. They will decide who lives and who dies," he warns.

Businesses will also face pressure from investors, finds the GEO for Business brief. Take for instance, the investment firm BlackRock, which had more than US$6.8 trillion in assets under management last year. The company called climate change one of the most "significant" risks facing the corporate world and has begun to target its investment decisions using environmental sustainability criteria.

The UNEP brief notes that companies will also have to contend with tightening environmental regulations. Several countries, including Germany and South Korea, have set targets to reduce their carbon emissions to net zero by 2050 or earlier. Governments as diverse as China, France and Israel have announced future bans on petrol- and diesel-burning cars. Ethiopia has even unveiled an economic master plan intended to develop "a climateresilient green economy by 2025".

Building back better

The pandemic has challenged us all. However, as economies begin to rev up again, the brief urges smart business leaders to re-evaluate how they operate. Its authors recommend they examine how to "break away from a locked-in, linear, extractive and fossil-fuel-based economy" towards investments, practices and job creation that bring value for nature and people.

Close Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox Top Headlines Sustainable Development Business Africa By submitting above, you agree to our privacy policy. Success! Almost finished... We need to confirm your email address. To complete the process, please follow the instructions in the email we just sent you. Error! Error! There was a problem processing your submission. Please try again later.

"Business success is inextricably linked to healthy people and ecosystems," says Denise Delaney, an author of the GEO for Business brief and a partner at Environmental Resources Management. "Yet, COVID-19 has exposed the fragility and vulnerability of our health and ecosystems. Now more than ever, we need global resilience and we hope that this brief offers business a pathway and the light at the end of the tunnel: a nature positive economy."

If businesses are still waffling on whether to make the investments necessary to go green, Garza Santos has a message for them: "Bet on it. The consumer will be on your side. And it will pay for itself," he says. "You will have the wind at your back."

The way forward is clear, reiterates the Geo for Business brief. Forward-thinking businesses are already on the pathway to a green transformation, but more need to follow, or will find themselves left behind.
NEW MARYLAND, NB, Feb. 10, 2021 /CNW/ - The Government of Canada is investing in infrastructure to bring greater opportunities to New Brunswick's rural communities, ensure their success and to promote economic growth.

Today, the Honourable Maryam Monsef, Minister for Women and Gender Equality and Rural Economic Development, the Honourable Gary Crossman, Minister of Environment and Climate Change and Minister Responsible for the Regional Development Corporation, the Honourable Jill Green, Minister of Transportation and Infrastructure, and municipal representatives announced funding for four rural infrastructure projects across New Brunswick.

Included in these four projects is a vital bridge refurbishment in St. Martins. Additionally, part of this investment will support improvements to local wastewater and drinking water facilities in New Maryland, St. Stephen, and Plaster Rock.

The Vaughan Creek Bridge replacement will greatly improve local transportation infrastructure and provide the residents of St. Martins with safer and more reliable road. Meanwhile, improvements to wastewater and drinking water facilities in New Maryland, Plaster Rock, and St. Stephen will ensure that these communities have further access to safe drinking water and dependable wastewater services.

The Government of Canada is investing over $9 million to these four projects through the Rural and Northern Infrastructure Stream of the Investing in Canada Plan. The Province of New Brunswick is investing is investing more than $6 million. The communities of St. Stephen, New Maryland, and Plaster Rock are contributing a collective $852,807 to their respective local projects.

Quotes

"Today's investment of over $9 million in federal funding will bring safer, more reliable roads and more sustainable water infrastructure to communities across the province. This builds on more than $400 million in federal investments in infrastructure projects in small communities in New Brunswick since 2015, including 32 bridges, over 1,250 kilometres of roads, and more than 98 projects that are improving access to clean drinking water. As communities across the province manage the impacts of COVID-19, our government will continue to be there for them, including through important infrastructure investments like these."

The Honourable Maryam Monsef, Minister for Women and Gender Equality and Rural Economic Development

"Rural communities are an integral part of our country, and have been significantly impacted by COVID-19. Today's important announcement will help improve essential water and transportation infrastructure for these communities in New Brunswick. We are committed to investing in infrastructure projects like these around the country, because we know that when our small communities thrive  Canada gets stronger."

The Honourable Dominic Leblanc, President of the Queen's Privy Council for Canada and Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs and Member of Parliament for Beausejour

"Investing in improved wastewater and drinking water facilities is an important part of delivering on our government's priority to build vibrant and sustainable communities. With projects like these, we are not only preserving public health and protecting the environment, we are also equipping these communities with the infrastructure they need for population growth and economic recovery."

The Honourable Gary Crossman, Minister of Environment and Climate Change and Minister Responsible for the Regional Development Corporation

"Investing in safe and reliable transportation infrastructure has a positive impact on our economy and our quality of life. The replacement of the Vaughan Creek Bridge in St. Martins will help promote the tourism industry in this region as the new structure will maintain the look of a covered bridge as a way to pay tribute to our collective heritage."

The Honourable Jill Green, Minister of Transportation and Infrastructure

Quick facts

The four projects receiving funding today are some of the many infrastructure projects in small or rural communities receiving federal funding under the Investing in Canada Plan . Other similar funded projects include new wastewater facilities to increase the capacity to treat and manage wastewater in Boudreau-Ouest .

. Other similar funded projects include new wastewater facilities to increase the capacity to treat and manage wastewater in . Through the Investing in Canada infrastructure plan, the Government of Canada is investing more than $180 billion over 12 years in public transit projects, green infrastructure, social infrastructure, trade and transportation routes, and Canada's rural and northern communities.

infrastructure plan, the Government of is investing more than over 12 years in public transit projects, green infrastructure, social infrastructure, trade and transportation routes, and rural and northern communities. More than $10.1 billion of this funding is supporting trade and transportation projects, including $5 billion available for investment through the Canada Infrastructure Bank.

Related product

Backgrounder: Canada and New Brunswick invest in four rural infrastructure projects across the province

Joint federal, provincial, and municipal funding through the Investing in Canada infrastructure plan will support four rural infrastructure projects across New Brunswick, including wastewater, drinking water, and transportation infrastructure improvements.

The Government of Canada is investing over $9 million to these four projects through the Rural and Northern Infrastructure Stream of the Investing in Canada Plan. The Province of New Brunswick is investing more than $6 million. The communities of St. Stephen, New Maryland, and Plaster Rock are contributing a combined amount of $852,807 to their respective local projects.

Project Information:

Location Project Name Project Details Federal Funding Provincial Funding Municipal Funding Plaster Rock North Lagoon Decommissioning and Collector Sewer Decommission of the North wastewater treatment plant will reduce operational and maintenance costs, as well as improve water quality in the Tobique River. $1,044,000 $579,942 $116,058 New Maryland Sunrise Wellfield Development Development of a new water supply field, including the construction of new water supply wells, a new water treatment facility, and 4,350 meters of water mains. The project benefits the community by increasing access to safe potable water. $5,559,426 $3,088,261 $618,023 St. Stephen Combined Sewer Separation & Utility Renewal Construction of 790 meters of storm sewer along Union Street, in addition to the reconstruction of Union Street by creating a new asphalt surface. This will increase the Town's capacity to manage wastewater and storm water while increasing access to potable water. $1,068,000 $593,274 $118,726 St. Martins Vaughan Creek Bridge Replacement Replacement of the Vaughan Creek Bridge, including the removal of the current temporary bridge structure and the construction of a 0.18 kilometer two-lane bridge. The project will result in an improved and more reliable bridge St. Martins residents. $1,590,500 $1,883,500 $0

Associated links

Investing in Canada Plan Project Map:

http://www.infrastructure.gc.ca/map

Federal infrastructure investments in New Brunswick

https://www.infrastructure.gc.ca/plan/prog-proj-nb-eng.html

Investing in Canada: Canada's Long-Term Infrastructure Plan:

http://www.infrastructure.gc.ca/plan/icp-publication-pic-eng.html

Rural Opportunity, National Prosperity: An Economic Development Strategy for Rural Canada:

https://www.infrastructure.gc.ca/rural/strat-eng.html

Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn

Web: Infrastructure Canada

SOURCE Infrastructure Canada

For further information: Contacts: Marie-Pier Baril, Press Secretary, Office of the Minister for Women and Gender Equality and Rural Economic Development, 613-295-8123, [email protected]; Mary-Anne Corbyn-Hurley, Communications Director, Regional Development Corporation, 506-457-4996, [email protected]; Media Relations: Infrastructure Canada, 613-960-9251, Toll free: 1-877-250-7154, Email: [email protected]

Related Links

www.infrastructure.gc.ca


State Capitol In Sacramento View Photo

Sacramento, CA  As more people have been ordering items online during the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of package thefts has been increasing as well.

Republican Senator Brian Jones has introduced legislation at the state capitol, Senate Bill 358, which would allow prosecutors to charge perpetrators with a misdemeanor for the first offense, and a felony if there are three convictions within a three year period.

Because current law treats package theft outside the home differently than burglaries inside the home, many of these porch pirates are habitual offenders who keep dodging real punishment for their crimes, says Senator Jones. In addition to driving up the price for all consumers, porch piracy leaves the most vulnerable in our community without essential items that many need to survive.

SB 358 will soon be heard in a Senate Committee.
When Mary Wilson, Florence Ballard, and the-then Diane Ross met as children, in a housing commission in Detroit in the 1950s, there was no telling that they would not only one day become the most famous girl group of all time, but that their breathtaking costumes would play an important role in the civil rights movement.

But with their heavily embellished chandelier gowns, body-hugging dresses with matching turkey-feathers circling the hems, shimmering capes and elaborate hairstyles  created with the help of Hollywood designers including Bob Mackie and Michael Travis  they changed racial perceptions at a time when the United States was becoming engulfed by political upheaval during growing unrest over the fight for equal rights.

Mary Wilson of The Supremes (right) with, from left, group mates Cindy Birdsong (who replaced original member Florence Ballard) and Diana Ross, in a live concert in 1965. Credit:Getty Images

These were [three] brown women as they had never, ever been seen before on national television, Whoopi Goldberg wrote in the forward to Supreme Glamour, a book that documented the groups outfits by Mary Wilson who died on Monday at 76. Everything about the Supremes  all those gowns, all those pantsuits, all those caps, gloves, furs, the makeup, the eyelashes, the wigs  made me believe they were speaking to me. I too could be well-spoken, tall, majestic, an emissary of black folks who  like The Supremes  came from the projects.

Oprah Winfrey once said that, as a 10-year-old, she felt the same. You never saw anything like it in the 1960s  three women of colour who were totally empowered, creative, imaginative, she is quoted as saying in Diana Ross: A Biography. To see the Supremes and know that it was possible to be like them, that black people could do that 
The U.S. Supreme Court is considering to finally give attention to the high-profile 2020 election lawsuits filed by various individuals including former President Donald Trump's legal team during its conference this month, a report said.

The Epoch Times reported that the U.S. Supreme Court announced last Friday that it has scheduled for consideration the election lawsuits filed by Trump for Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, by Mike Kelly, by Lin Wood, Jr. for Georgia, and by Sidney Powell for Michigan during its conference on Feb. 19.

As per Epoch Times, all the cases alleged "some form of unlawful election-related conduct affecting the results of the election." This included the "expansion of mail-in balloting by elections officials, changing rules in contravention of state election laws, lack of adequate security measures around mail ballots, issues with machine vote tabulation, and denial of meaningful access to poll watchers."

These cases were filed prior to the inauguration of Joe Biden in an effort to disqualify the electoral certification given by the respective states where the alleged fraud took place. However, The Epoch Times explained, the Supreme court did not grant the much requested relief nor did they fast-track the cases prior to the inauguration.

The Supreme Court even rejected one of the lawsuit filed by Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that was supported by Trump out of its distancing from the said allegations on election fraud, The Epoch Times said.

According to the American Bar Association, Powell's Michigan case, officially entitled King v. Whitmer or case No. 20-815, is about fraud and vote dilution. It is a case filed by a "group of Michigan voters and nominees of the Republican Party to be presidential electors in Michigan against Michigan Governor Whitmer and other state officials, alleging widespread voter fraud and various violations of Michigan voting law." It cited three "constitutional violations under 42 U.S.C. section 1983 of: (1) the Elections and Electors Clauses, (2) the Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection Clause, and (3) the Fourteenth Amendment Due Process Clause."

The Wood v. Raffensperger or case number 20-14418, as per the American Bar Association, complained on the restrictions on voting by mail. Filed on Nov. 13 by individual Georgia voter Lin Wood, Jr. against various Georgian election officials led by Secretary of State Bradford Raffensperger "to enjoin certification of the November general election results, secure a recount, and establish new rules for the January senate run-off election" out of claims that "the absentee-ballot and recount procedures violated state law and his rights under the U.S. Constitution." The motion to expedite the case was denied on Jan. 11.

Also on fraud and vote dilution, Trump's Case, which is number 20-845 entitled "In re: Canvassing Observation", was filed on election day itself in Pennsylvania. The American Bar Association summarized that "President Trump's campaign committee petitioned to allow campaign representatives to more closely observe the canvassing of ballots in Philadelphia County" but the "Court of Common Pleas of Philadelphia County Election Court denied the motion."

"The committee claimed that the Philadelphia County Board of Elections had configured their ballot-canvassing tables in a manner that made it difficult to observe the process by candidates, candidates' representatives, and watchers. The Board countered that so long as observers were permitted to be present in the canvassing room, they had an opportunity to observe the canvassing process as required by the state's Election Code," the American Bar Association narrated.

They added that the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania then reversed its decision after "finding that the intent of the relevant portion of the Election Code was to provide an opportunity for 'meaningful observation' and that this opportunity had been denied to observers in Philadelphia County."

Trump v. Biden or case number 20-882, on the other hand, was filed on Dec. 3 at Wisconsin by Trump, former Vice President Mike Pence, and the organization Donald J. Trump For President, Inc. in appeal "from the recounts in Dane and Milwaukee Counties" against Biden who was already declared President-elect at that time.

"The plaintiffs claimed that absentee ballots had been submitted without the requisite written applications; certification envelopes for the ballots were incomplete or had been altered; voters who did not qualify to vote by absentee ballot as being 'indefinitely confined' due to disability or illness had done so; and ballots cast during 'Democracy in the Park' events were not properly mailed or delivered to the municipal clerk issuing the ballots," the American Bar Association said in summaring the case's content.

As for Kelly's case with number 20-810, The Epoch Times said it was a request for an injunction to prohibit the Executive-Respondents from taking official action to tabulate, compute, canvass, certify, or otherwise finalize the results of the Election."

Powell's case, number 20-815, requested for "emergency declaratory relief avowing that the presidential election results certified by Michigan officials were unconstitutional and otherwise contrary to law, together with injunctive relief de-certifying those results."

The Duchess of York has been seen for the first time since her grandson was welcomed into the world on Tuesday.

Sarah Ferguson, 61, commonly known as Fergie, made her appearance in a video which she shared on her Youtube Channel the same day that her daughter, Princess Eugenie, 30, and son-in-law Jack Brooksbank, 34, welcomed their baby boy.

The Queen's granddaughter had husband Jack at her side at The Portland Hospital in central London where their son - the Queen's ninth great grandchild - was delivered at 8.55am yesterday, weighing 8lbs 1oz.

Ever the working girl, Fergie, who posts videos daily as part of her Storytime with Fergie and Friends series on her Youtube channel, shared two clips - one yesterday and one this afternoon - although it is not clear when they were both filmed.

In the video posted on Tuesday, the now grandmother-of-one can be seen reading Sniff: Unicorn Fart Book by Buddy and Barney, while today she shared a tutorial on how to make unicorn magnets.

The Duchess of York Sarah Ferguson, 61, has shared two videos on Youtube following the birth of her grandson after it was announced Princess Eugenie, 30 and Jack Brooksbank, 34, welcomed their first child yesterday

The Queen's granddaughter had husband Jack at her side at The Portland Hospital in central London where their son - the Queen's ninth great grandchild - was delivered at 8.55am yesterday, weighing 8lbs 1oz. She broke with tradition and shortly shared a picture of her and Jack holding their son's hand to Instagram, pictured

However, there's indication that Fergie may have known the arrival of her grandson was imminent as she repeats the words 'grandpa and grandma' with great emphasis several times throughout the video - perhaps in a hint Eugenie was about to give birth.

Eugenie and Jack broke with tradition and shared a black and white photo to Eugenie's Instagram of their baby boy, who is 11th in line to the throne, showing them holding his tiny hand.

Proud new mother Eugenie followed the post with three blue hearts after welcoming her son at the luxury private hospital where Meghan Markle also gave birth to her son, Archie.

Sarah Ferguson 'liked' her daughter's Instagram post announcing the news.

Eugenie and Jack, who married in October 2018, are yet to reveal the name of their firstborn. Pictured, attending the Serpentine Summer Party 2017

Fergie made no mention of the birth of her grandson on the videos she shared yesterday and today (pictured)

The Queen, The Duke of Edinburgh, The Duke of York, Sarah, Duchess of York, and Mr and Mrs George Brooksbank were delighted with the news, Buckingham Palace announced, adding that 'Her Royal Highness and her child are both doing well'.

This is Princess Eugenie and Jack Brooksbanks first child, The Duke of York and Sarah, Duchess of Yorks first grandchild, and the ninth great-grandchild for The Queen and The Duke of Edinburgh, but will not have a royal title.

The Duchess of Cambridge's younger brother James Middleton was among the first to congratulate Eugenie and her husband, a tequila brand ambassador, writing on Instagram: 'Such wonderful news'.

Lady Violet Diana Louise Manners also 'liked' the post, while Clarence House sent their well-wishes and penned: 'Congratulations to Her Royal Highness Princess Eugenie and Jack Brooksbank on the birth of their son.'

Eugenie's pregnancy was revealed in November, with a traditional announcement from Buckingham Palace, as well as an Instagram post from the happy couple.

Sharing the news, Eugenie, 30, wrote: 'Jack and I are so excited for early 2021....,' alongside photos of baby slippers and her and Jack smiling.

Sarah Ferguson shared her excitement, writing: 'I am so excited by the news that Eugenie and Jack are expecting their first child.

'Thrilled for them both and in my 60th year cannot wait to be a grandmother. Welcoming a new baby into the York family is going to be a moment of profound joy.'

Although the baby is the first biological grandchild for Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson, they are step-grandparents to Wolfie, the son of Princess Beatrice's husband Edo Mapelli Mozzi.

Sarah Ferguson has not yet spoken publicly of the birth of her first grandchild. Pictured in a tutorial on unicorn magnets posted today

When Eugenie's pregnancy was announced, a spokesman for the duchess told the Mail that while she was clearly overjoyed at Eugenie's news, she also wanted to stress that she and Andrew very much saw Beatrice's stepson, Wolfie, as a grandchild too.

'Wolfie is already a very much-loved member of their family and the duchess is very keen to stress that she sees Wolfie as their grandchild too,' they said. The three-year-old is Mr Mapelli Mozzi's son by a previous relationship.

Eugenie and Jack's child will be 11th in the order of succession, which means the Queen's youngest son Prince Edward will slip down a place into 12th place.

Eugenie and Jack, spent lockdown at Fergie and Prince Andrew's home on the Queen's Windsor estate, but have recently spent time at Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's former home, Frogmore cottage.
(Natural News) A lawyer for former president Donald Trump has said that his defense will show videos of Democrats encouraging violence at his Senate impeachment trial.

Attorney Bruce Castor told Fox News Laura Ingraham that they would be presenting videos showing Democratic Congress members calling for violence against officials with the Trump administration and law enforcement.

These clips will counter videos the Democrats are expected to show of the rioting at the Capitol as well as the speech Trump gave at a rally prior to the January 6 attack.

House Democrats have charged Trump with inciting violence by claiming election fraud and urging his supporters to protest at the joint session of Congress certifying the results of the election. They claim that he mobilized his voters to make the attacks.

Ingraham asked: Will you then respond with Maxine Waters, a number of other Democrat officials not speaking out about the Antifa and other extremist rallies over the last summer?

Rep. Waters (D-Calif.) called on supporters at a 2018 rally to confront Trump officials publicly in protest of the administrations child separation policy.

I think you can count on that, Castor replied. He also mentioned that there is footage of cities burning, and courthouses being attacked, and federal agents being assaulted by rioters in the streets, cheered on by Democrats throughout the country, a likely reference to the continued unrest in Portland, Oregon.

The legal team has also pointed to a statement made by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at a news conference in 2018 about the Trump Administrations immigration policy. On that occasion, she said: I just dont even know why there arent uprisings all over the country. Maybe there will be.

Trumps legal team has said that House impeachment managers are cherry-picking statements from Trumps hour-long speech at a rally ahead of the riots, focusing only on those that help their case while ignoring his repeated requests in the same speech to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.

Trumps lawyers will also argue that the statement that has attracted the most attention, If you dont fight like hell, youre not going to have a country anymore, was figurative and referred to election security in a general context rather than serving as a call to violence. They also plan to argue that law enforcement already had indications that there was a potential for violence on January 6 well ahead of the day, which makes it unlikely it was Trumps speech that incited the violence.

Trumps primary defense is that hes no longer in office

However, this is not expected to make up his primary defense. Instead, his lawyers will be taking the approach that the Senate lacks jurisdiction over the matter. In the proceedings, which are set to get underway today, they will argue that the Senate should not be hearing an impeachment trial because Trump is no longer in office. The Constitution, they say, does not extend impeachment power to be used against private citizens. Because the punishment for being convicted is removal from office, it is essentially a moot point.

Castor said: By the House impeachment resolution logic, they could go back and impeach Abraham Lincoln. They could impeach Donald Trump if he was dead because hes not in office.

Republican senators have been encouraging Trump to avoid focusing on claims about the election in his defense, but his legal team has said that he did not try to subvert the results of the election and that giving his opinion about the elections is his First Amendment right.

Sources for this article include:

WashingtonTimes.com

Politico.com

APNews.com
by Vladimir Rozanskij

Attempt to overcome the pandemic and boost prospects. The most advantageous Chinese provinces for Russian business are Hong Kong, Guangdong, Shanghai and Beijing. Russian is spoken in border areas, like Heilongjiang.

Moscow (AsiaNews) - A "Russian-Chinese pact" is underway to overcome the pandemic and boost economic relations between Moscow and Beijing.

Chinese leaders confirmed the move to reporters of Nezavisimaja Gazeta, one of the most authoritative newspapers in Russia. The length article published on February 4th was re-printed in the following days by various publications.

It begins from the premise that trade between Russia and China in 2020 fell by 6.7%, to over 100 billion dollars, as the central office of the Russian Customs announced on 8 February. The Chinese Customs confirmed the decline also from the eastern part to 2.9%, again over 100 billion dollars.

But at the end of January, the Russian Ministry of Economic Development organized a presentation of the Russian regions for Chinese investors, and on February 8, the Russian-Asian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs presented a "Perspective Index of Chinese Regions for trade with Russian companies ".

It greatly advertises the ease with which Russian exporters adapt quickly to the rigid demands of the Chinese authorities, which have prohibited the export of fish and birds, due to the discovery of traces of Covid-19.

The president of the Union, Vitalij Mankevich (photo 2), observed that "Asia must become the main building site for transnational companies of the new type, in the field of exports of non-primary and non-energy materials", hence the plans to identify the most advantageous Chinese provinces for Russian business, and vice versa.

Hong Kong, Guangdong, Shanghai and Beijing stand out among the Chinese provinces, and excellent prospects are found in the south-eastern coastal regions of China.

Moreover, the central and northern provinces also have close relations with Russia, although they are much less developed. A key role is attributed to the north-eastern region of Heilongjiang, which borders the Russian Far East and serves as a distribution point for commercial traffic between the two countries, with the necessary infrastructure to regulate the passage of convoys. The use of the Russian language is also spreading more and more in the area.

The founder of the Sinoruss company, Surana Radnaeva (photo 3), insists that the regional rating be specified also for the Russian provinces: "I think that Russia has great possibilities to grow exports of non-primary materials, ensuring that companies Russian cooperate more with Chinese ones in the production of various articles on our territory; it is not convenient to export raw materials to China, to make them work and come back to us and all over the world, especially in Europe , Radnaeva told Nezavisimaja Gazeta.

This would help boost employment among the Russian population, and would bring large Chinese investments, with significant tax advantages; for this reason, Russian entrepreneurs insist on creating a more favourable climate for business with the Chinese.

In recent years, an area of the Volga in Middle Eastern European Russia about a thousand kilometers from Moscow, Samara (which also includes the city of Togliatti) has stood out among the Russian regions for the volume of business with China.

As the Idel.Realii website notes, the distance from the capital is not prohibitive for Russian customs, and the coordination of economic relations in the region is controlled directly from Moscow, according to the project called "Volga-Yangtse".

38 trade agreements are in force between the Russian and Chinese regions, 4 of which are very wide-ranging, precisely between the Samara region and the Chinese ones of Anhui, Hubei, Sichuan and the city of Chongqing. The growth of trade with Samara was particularly significant after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, combining the waters of the Volga with those of the Black Sea.

Trade between the Russian and Chinese provinces therefore seem to take on a more advantageous and concrete dimension than many other major Eurasian global plans, using different vectors and more targeted directions, in which Russian regions open their doors to Chinese partners.
Four counties and dozens of local governments in the 24th Congressional District would receive nearly $400 million in federal aid if Congress approves President Joe Biden's $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief plan.

The estimates were released by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Biden's proposal includes $350 billion for state and local governments. It also contains another round of stimulus checks for millions of Americans, enhanced unemployment benefits, grants and loans for small businesses, more federal funding for COVID-19 testing and vaccines, and help for renters.

In the 24th district, the city of Syracuse would receive $117 million and Onondaga County would get $90 million. Oswego County, the western portion of which is in the congressional district, would get $23 million. Wayne and Cayuga counties would receive $18 million and $15 million. The city of Auburn would get $21 million in federal funding.

Smaller cities, towns and villages in the 24th district would also benefit from the aid package. They will get a portion of $113 million. Thirty-three municipalities would receive at least $1 million, with the largest amounts going to eight towns in Onondaga County. The town of Clay ($10.9 million) would receive more than any other town or village in the congressional district.
Garbage collectors from Casella Waste Systems make their rounds in the Lakewood neighborhood of Pittsfield on Wednesday.
Photo: The Canadian Press Police officers stand behind barbed-wire blocking protesters during a demonstration in Mandalay, Myanmar, Tuesday, Feb. 9, 2021. Protesters continued to gather Tuesday morning in major cities breaching Myanmar's new military rulers ban of public gathering of five or more issued on Monday intended to crack down on peaceful public protests opposing their takeover. (AP Photo)

Police cracked down on demonstrators opposing Myanmars military coup, firing warning shots and shooting water cannons to disperse crowds that took to the streets again Tuesday in defiance of rules making protests illegal.

Reports of many injured demonstrators drew strong concern from the U.N.'s office in Myanmar.

According to reports from Nay Pyi Taw, Mandalay and other cities, numerous demonstrators have been injured, some of them seriously, by security forces in connection with the current protests across the country, the U.N. said.

The use of disproportionate force against demonstrators is unacceptable, said Ola Almgren, the U.N. Resident Coordinator in Myanmar.

Water cannons were used in Mandalay, Myanmars second-biggest city, where witnesses said at least two warning shots were fired in early attempts to break up the crowd. Gunfire could be heard on videos from the city, some of which showed riot police flailing wildly with their batons at people trying to flee. Reports on social media said police arrested more than two dozen people there.

Police also used water cannons in the capital, Natpyitaw, for a second day and fired shots into the air. Police were reported to have also shot rubber bullets at the crowd in Naypyitaw, wounding several people. Photos on social media showed an alleged shooter  an officer with a short-barrelled gun  and several injured people. Protesters posted photos online of bullet casings they said they found at the scene.

Unconfirmed social media reports circulated of shootings with live rounds and deaths among the protesters, with the potential of sparking violent retaliation against the authorities  an outcome proponents of the countrys civil disobedience movement have warned against. The AP was unable to immediately confirm the reports.

The weekly magazine 7Day News reported on its Twitter account that a 19-year-old woman was shot by police in Naypyidaw and was undergoing an emergency operation at the city's main hospital. It cited Min Thu, the local chairman of the National League for Democracy party of ousted national leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

The protesters are demanding that power be restored to the deposed civilian government and are seeking freedom for Suu Kyi and other governing party members detained since the military took over and blocked the new session of Parliament from convening on Feb. 1.

Security forces on Tuesday night raided the national office of Suu Kyi's party in Yangon. Regional offices of the party had been raided last week in actions the party decried as illegal.

The growing defiance is striking in a country where past demonstrations have been met with deadly force and are a reminder of previous movements in the Southeast Asian countrys long and bloody struggle for democracy. The military used deadly force to quash a massive 1988 uprising against military dictatorship and a 2007 revolt led by Buddhist monks.

The decrees issued Monday night for some areas of Yangon and Mandalay banned rallies and gatherings of more than five people, along with motorized processions, while also imposing a 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. curfew. It was not clear if restrictions were imposed for other areas.

Violation of the orders, issued under Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code, is punishable by up to six months in prison or a fine.

Demonstrations were also held in other cities Tuesday, including Bago  where city elders negotiated with police to avoid a violent confrontation  and Dawei, and in northern Shan state.

In Magwe in central Myanmar, where water cannons were also used, unconfirmed reports on social media said several police officers had crossed over to join the protesters ranks. Police in Naypyitaw and Pathein, west of Yangon, were also said to have switched sides. The AP was unable to immediately confirm the reports.

Crowds also gathered in Yangon, the countrys biggest city where thousands of people have been demonstrating since Saturday, despite a heightened security presence. No violence was reported.

Police, not soldiers, appeared to have been deployed to stop the demonstrations, a small indicator of restraint by the military government. The army has a record of brutality in crushing past revolts as well as in fighting ethnic minorities in border areas seeking self-determination. It also has been accused of carrying out genocide in its 2017 counterinsurgency campaign that drove more than 700,000 members of the Muslim Rohingya minority across the border to seek safety in Bangladesh.

State media for the first time on Monday referred to the protests, saying they were endangering the countrys stability.

Democracy can be destroyed if there is no discipline, declared a statement from the Ministry of Information read on state television station MRTV. We will have to take legal actions to prevent acts that are violating state stability, public safety and the rule of law.

However, the military commander who led the coup and is now Myanmars leader made no mention of the unrest in a 20-minute televised speech Monday night, his first to the public since the takeover.

Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing instead repeated claims about voting fraud that have been the justification for the militarys takeover, allegations that were refuted by the state election commission. He added that his junta would hold new elections as promised in a year and hand over power to the winners, and explained the juntas intended policies for COVID-19 control and the economy.

The general's remarks, which included encouragement for foreign investors, did nothing to assuage concern in the international community.

The U.N.s Human Rights Council, the 47-member-state body based in Geneva, is to hold a special session on Friday to consider the human rights implications of the crisis in Myanmar.

Britain and the European Union spearheaded the request for the session, which will amount to a high-profile public debate among diplomats over the situation in Myanmar and could lead to a resolution airing concerns about the situation or recommending international action.

New Zealand has suspended all military and high-level political contact with Myanmar, Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta announced Tuesday in Wellington, adding that any New Zealand aid should not go to Myanmars military government or benefit them.

We do not recognize the legitimacy of the military-led government and we call on the military to immediately release all detained political leaders and restore civilian rule, Mahuta said. She said New Zealand was also placing a travel ban on the military leaders and had joined other countries in calling for the special session of the U.N. Human Rights Council.
Regional

Agitating college teachers in Manipur dismiss CMs appeal

Teachers of YK College, Thoubal staging sit-in-protest demanding 7th UGC Pay and Regulation 2018 on Wednesday. (NP)

Correspondent IMPHAL, FEB 10 | Publish Date: 2/10/2021 11:20:44 AM IST

Agitating government college teachers in Manipur on Wednesday dismissed state governments blamed on COVID-19 pandemic behind the delay in fulfilling their demands.

While making an appeal to the agitating teachers to cooperate with the government and come to the negotiation table, state chief minister N Biren Singh had told the house of state Assembly in the ongoing budget session that the implementation of the 7th Pay was affected and delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The state government had already agreed to implement college teachers demands. However, the implementation process has been affected by the pandemic and as such it is taking time," Singh had said.

He then informed the house that efforts were on to implement the 7th Pay and the government needs three-four months time as it is facing the unprecedented Covid pandemic.

Dismissing the blame, Federation of Government College Teachers Association (FEGOCTA) asked if the government was serious enough to implement national policy of UGC in pre-Covid-19 time.

FEGOCTA has been requesting the government of Manipur to implement 7th UGC Pay and Regulations, 2018 since December, 2018, the apex body of the government college teachers asserted.

And, added that the state government had given three written assurances to FEGOCTA to implement UGC policy in pre-Covid-19 pandemic and were not fulfilled.

Two cabinet approvals in principle were taken in the pre-Covid-19 time on November 29, 2019 and on February 11, 2020, it recalled. Ahead of the launching of the ongoing agitations, FEGOCTA had submitted a written ultimatum to the government on January 11, 2021 to issue the orders of the cabinet approval by January 27.

Meanwhile, teachers continued staging sit-in-protests at the campuses of their respective schools today also.
There will be no mass return of students to third-level campuses in the current academic year.

Depending on public health advice, there may be opportunities for more students to attend for small group teaching or other activities, but lecture theatres wont fill until autumn, at the earliest.

Currently, most third-level teaching is done online, with students attending campus for essential laboratory and practical classes. A Government announcement on what restrictions will apply after March 5 is awaited, but some universities have already made decisions with a clear trend emerging.

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Dublin City University has advised that any relaxation in restrictions to allow a return to on-campus teaching would only give it a week or two at best, before the end of its second semester.

That would leave students scrambling for accommodation and transport arrangements for a very short period which would be far from ideal, it stated.

Trinity College Dublin said it took a decision early that most teaching would take place online in the second semester and we now must stand over that decision.

A spokesperson said: All our focus now is on making sure that face-to-face teaching is possible from September.

Maynooth University will operate to the Governments Level 5-plus plan until the mid-semester study week, ending on March 21, and may see some increase in on-campus teaching in the second half of the semester, but this will be contingent on Government decisions.

UCC said that all second-semester teaching in the form of lectures, small group classes and tutorials would continue online.

At UCD, arrangements are in place until March 8, the beginning of study period, and it has not taken any further decision.

University of Limerick is continuing with its blended learning model until at least March 5.

NUI Galway said it was continuing with online teaching throughout the current lockdown, and possibly for the reminder of semester two.

TU Dublin has not made a decision, but will be aiming to get people back into labs, studios and kitchens in small groups. Decisions on any other lectures or in-person exams are under consideration, a spokesperson said.

Munster Technological University, which was recently formed through a merger of Cork IT and IT Tralee, said lectures would continue online for the remainder of this semester and exams will also take place online. Most for Semester 2 exams have been replaced by ongoing assessments.

Reopening for lab, practicals and studio classes and access to facilities and services will depend on Government advice.
The Johnson government is hell-bent on relaxing lockdown restrictions to reopen the UK economy, beginning February 22. Schools are to reopen in England from March 8 with the Tories justifying this on the grounds of feigned concerns about childrens welfare.

Schools in Scotland and Wales will reopen even earlier, on February 22, and Johnson is under pressure to reopen sooner in England. Tory MP Mark Harper, from a 70-strong section of the party in the anti-lockdown Covid Recovery Group, told the BBC: I was pleased the Prime Minister confirmed that schools will be the first thing to reopen from 8th March but disappointed it wasnt earlier. Now we see that Scotland is going to start bringing back pupils from 22 February, straight after half-term, many colleagues will hope that Ministers will look urgently to see if that could happen in England as well.

Professor Robert Dingwall of the governments New and Emerging Respiratory Advisory Group (NERVTAG), referring to the numbers vaccinated, told the Telegraph, Many people think its a tolerable risk to get the kids back as the Scots are doing.

Year seven pupils are directed to socially distance as they arrive for their first day at Kingsdale Foundation School in London, Thursday, Sept. 3, 2020. AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)

The pandemic demands the strictest lockdown measures. At least 113,000 people have succumbed to the virus in the UK and new more transmissible variants are emerging.

Just over 12 million people of the 66 million population have received only their first vaccine dose. Until the virus is suppressed in the population, the opportunity lurks for vaccine-resistant strains to develop. According to one study, whose results are being verified, the protection offered by the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine may not be as effective against the new South African variant.

When Johnson precipitously reopened schools and businesses last September, it led to a massive resurgence of the virus which killed more people than the first wave in the spring. He used the same cynical justification for opening schools then: Its the kids from the poorer families who arent going back, and so you are entrenching social injustice.

Another unsafe reopening would be devastating. Professor Neil Fergusons team at Imperial College London warns that easing restrictions too rapidly from March to July could lead to an additional 130,800 fatalities between now and June next year. This would take UK COVID-19 deaths up to around a quarter of a million.

Addressing Parliament January 27, Johnson declared reopening schools a national priority and insisted, we are doing everything in our power to keep them open because childrens education is too vital This is why schools were the very last to close and when we move out of lockdown, they will be the first to reopen.

Childrens education and mental health certainly suffered the over the past year. The attainment gap between poorer and better-off children widened. Referrals to child mental health services reached an all-time high. Charities such as Childline and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children experienced an increase in children under 11 seeking counselling.

Child and adolescent psychotherapist Jane ORourke, founder of website for mental health professionals Mind in Mind, told the BBC Today programme for deprived children, the pandemic has exacerbated issues not just [for] teenagers. I am seeing very young children displaying signs of depression, five, six, seven-year-olds.

But the governmentbacked by the Labour opposition and education unionsis not rushing to reopen schools out of concern for childrens welfare. As in the US and Europe, schools are viewed only as holding pens for children which must be opened to get parents back to work and producing profits for the corporations. Child welfare is being weaponized in a despicable propaganda campaign to justify criminality and mass deaths described by the British Medical Journal as social murder.

Johnson had the gall to repeat his previous absurdity that schools are simultaneously safe and contribute to the spread of the pandemic: I want to stress that the problem is not that schools are unsafe to children. The problem is that schools may nonetheless act as vectors for transmission, causing the virus to spread between households.

The fact is that schools, alongside workplaces, are proven major vectors for the virus and that closing schools is one of the most effective measures that can be taken to save lives. Up to 100 children a week are currently being hospitalised with paediatric inflammatory multi-system syndrome (PIMS), a rare inflammatory disease linked with coronavirus.

Johnson was not contradicted by Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, who agreed, Of course we welcome any steps to reopen schools. He then wrote in the pro-Tory Daily Mail, I share the Governments ambition to make it a national mission to reopen our schools. I will do everything in my power as leader of the Labour Party to make that happen.

The education unions took the same line. National Education Union (NEU) joint leader Mary Bousted said in a press release on January 27, We all want schools to open, but like the Prime Minister we want them to open when it is safe to do so We agree with Boris Johnson that this is a balancing act [emphasis added].

The Tories, Labours and the unions concern for the fate of children is belied by decades of cuts to childrens services and rising child poverty. Johnson added a derisory 300 million to the 1 billion catch-up programme for pupils announced in November. This measly amount is no compensation for the privations of the last year for which the government was responsibleoverseeing a surge in unemployment, poverty and destitutionlet alone the decades of cuts to education and childrens services.

Between 2009-10 and 2019-20, spending on state education fell by 8 percent in real terms. In this time, more than 1,000 Sure Start centresthat provided a wide variety of services to support children's learning skills, health and well-beingclosed due to Tory austerity cuts imposed by Labour controlled councils. These forced the poorest families to rely on volunteer provision run by charities and the church.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation wrote in a recent report that in 2019, 4.2 million children were living in poverty and a total of 14.5 million people in the UK, over one in five.

United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, following his visit to the UK in 2018 reported that, Although the United Kingdom is the worlds fifth largest economy, one fifth of its population (14 million people) live in poverty, and 1.5 million of them experienced destitution in 2017. Policies of austerity introduced in 2010 continue largely unabated, despite the tragic social consequences. Close to 40 percent of children are predicted to be living in poverty by 2021. [emphasis added]

Such deprivation has had a catastrophic effect on the mental health and well-being of the UKs children. Over the past five years mental health professionals repeatedly emphasised the impact on childrens mental health of social disadvantage combined with government-driven tests and exam pressures.

In 2017, research carried out by the National Health Service (NHS) reported one in 20 five to 19-year-olds met the criteria for having two or more mental disorders. One in eight (12.8 percent) five to 19-year-olds had at least one mental health disorder. That rose in the first year of the pandemic to one in six, which translates into four to five children in each class.

Less than one in three children and young people with a diagnosable mental health condition get access to NHS care and treatment and the average median waiting time for children in 2017/18 was five weeks to receive an initial assessment and nine weeks to receive treatment. In 2019/20, 538,564 children were referred for help, an increase of 35 percent on 2018/19, and nearly 60 percent on 2017/18. The numbers getting treatment are also increasing but at a much slower rate. In 2019/20, 391,940 children received treatment.

Research by the Young Minds (YM) mental health charity on A&E attendances by young people with psychiatric conditions in 2018 showed a doubling in five years to 27,487.

The fight to put an end to child poverty, provide high-quality childrens services and education, and to end the mass loss of life from the pandemic puts the working class in direct conflict with the profit interests of capitalism. These goals are incompatible with the monopolisation of huge swathes of social wealth by a tiny super-rich oligarchy, many of whom have profited handsomely throughout the pandemic and benefited from government bailouts and money printing. That wealth must be seized and distributed to meet social need.

Chicago educators in the US fighting to prevent the reopening of schools and save lives understand that to fight for their own interests the working class must rely on its own strength. Educators rank-and-file safety committees have been set up in the UK, US, Europe and Australia to provide this struggle with a political programme and international organisation, independent of the trade unions. We urge all educators, parents and students to sign up to read the Committees newsletter and join its work today.
A man in his fifties who called to a garda station and told officers that he had threatened to murder his ex wife and had also assaulted her by placing a belt around her neck and lifting her from a chair has been jailed for five years.

Cork Circuit Criminal Court heard that Michael Quirke of Manor Hills, Lisnigar, Rathcormac, Co Cork had placed a GPS tracking device on the car of his ex wife Mary in order to monitor her movements.

Judge Sean ODonnabhain was also told that having been charged with the offences the 53-year-old contacted Mary Quirke by phone whilst on bail and warned her that he would still be the same man when he got out of prison.

On the 9th of December 2020 he phoned Miss Quirke and said the guards will not be around you when you need them most.

"When I get out of jail, be it two years, I will be the same. You wont have that Garda protection you have now. You have the 24 hour around the clock armed response and they wont be there when you need them the most.

Detective Garda David Barry said that Quirke called to Fermoy Garda Station in Co Cork on the 31st of January 2019.

He told gardai he had assaulted Mary Quirke on two occasions.

On the first occasion on a date in 2018 he placed a belt around her neck and lifted her from the chair with it. In the second instance in 2019 he held her against a wall and told her hed get a rope and hang her.

He pleaded guilty to assault causing harm to Mary Quirke, two counts of threatening to kill her and one count of harassment.

Read More

Det Garda David Barry said Mary and Michael Quirke divorced in 2013 but lived in the same home for several years.

He said when Quirke presented to gardai in January of 2019 he told them that he had attempted to murder Mary Quirke.

He said (that it happened on two occasions) . In the bedroom at their home (in 2018) he put a trouser belt around her neck and lifted her off the chair for three seconds. He said it was his intention to kill Mary Quirke on this date.

"Their (adult children) heard a loud scream. The were prevented (by Quirke) from entering the room.

Det Garda Barry said that Quirke told them that at a date towards the end of January 2019 he held his ex wife against the wall.

He said I did threaten her that I had a rope in the shed and I would hang her. If my hands came out (out of his pockets) I would have killed her.

The court heard that Mr Quirke - who owned a fuel company and was also involved in property development - had a dependence on alcohol and serious psychiatric issues.

In a victim impact statement Mary Quirke said that she was hopeful that her husband would receive all necessary medical assistance.

"I wish Michael all the best with his future and I hope he seeks professional help going forward as things cannot continue like this, as someday in the future matters will go too far and someone in the family will get hurt or worse."

She said that she and her children were "mentally scarred" as a result of the incident.

"I do not believe that Michael Quirke understands the consequences of his previous actions. I am very concerned that if he is released from custody, similar and probably more serious incidents will occur.

"For this reason I am afraid for my own safety of my three children. And my three children share my fears and are very concerned as to the possibility of losing a parent or both parents or worse still a sibling over a matter which has got out of control."

She said that she believed her husband needed to be excluded from the townland of Lisnagar as he was previously under the terms of his bail conditions.

Barrister Siobhan Lankford, SC, said her client was deeply remorseful and ashamed of his actions.

She said that Quirke, who suffers from bi-polar disorder, has voluntarily admitted himself to psychiatric hospitals on a number of occasions.

She added that the Quirkes had been married for 35 years up until their separation in 2010 and that her clients ex wife had helped him to obtain support for his psychiatric issues.

Judge Sean ODonnabhain sentenced Quirke to six years in jail, suspending the final year of the sentence. He ordered that Quirke have no contact direct or indirect with the injured party or her family at any stage in the future.

Mr Quirke was sentenced by video link from Cork Prison. He was visibly emotional throughout the sentencing hearing.



Pacific Biosciences of California Inc said on Wednesday SoftBank Group Corp will invest $900 million in the gene sequencing firm, sending its shares up 21% before the bell. The latest healthcare investment from SoftBank, in the form of convertible debt, will help accelerate the commercialization of Pacific Biosciences' gene sequencing technology. Last month, Bloomberg News reported that SoftBank had picked up a 6% stake in the company. Pacific Biosciences' stock has risen more than nine-fold in the last 12 months and has a market value of $7.4 billion. Menlo Park, ...

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TBWA Group Singapore has promoted Mandy Wong to Managing Partner from her current role as the key business lead. With over two decades of experience, Wong has handled communication strategies and creative output for some of the region's largest brands including Standard Chartered Bank and Airbnb.

Wong joined TBWA Kuala Lumpur in 2001 as an entry-level account executive and within five years was moved to Singapore to handle Standard Chartered Bank  one of the companys largest global accounts. Moving up the ranks, Wong was later selected to lead the revamp of Singapores destination brand for Singapore Tourism Board across the globe.
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Employees in the Aiken County Public School District missing work due to COVID-19 will have extended access to 10 extra days of sick leave after a unanimous vote by the Aiken County Board of Education.

The Families First Coronavirus Response Act provided the two weeks of paid leave for COVID-related absences until it expired on Dec. 31. According to the school district, the federal benefit maintained pay for employees who were otherwise out of leave options.

Any employees in the school district who did not use all 10 days before Dec. 31 will now be able to take them if needed. The extension will last through the end of the fiscal year on June 30.

Employees will also be able to request shared leave. After a motion from Patrice Rhinehart-Jackson, board members voted to make employees eligible for shared leave if they have exhausted all their other paid leave options but must miss work due to the pandemic.

Shared leave comes from sick leave donated by other employees. According to the district's shared leave policy, "an employee who earns sick leave and has accumulated in excess of one year's annual sick leave earnings is eligible to contribute."

Employees must work a minimum of 30 hours per week and be eligible for sick leave benefits to qualify for shared leave, according to the policy.

The school board also unanimously approved a change to the policy that prohibits students from using electronic items like smartphones and cameras during school hours. Now, smartwatches have been added to the list of devices students can't use outside of authorized educational purposes.

Board members approved personnel appointments, out-of-district transfer requests and upcoming demolition of North Augusta High School's old gym.

During his scheduled update, Superintendent King Laurence said the school district had 90 new COVID-19 cases among face-to-face students and 24 cases among employees from Jan. 24 to Jan. 30.

The district also reported 1,176 quarantines, just over 40% of which were due to school exposures, Laurence said.

Jason Crane, District 2 board member, was absent from the meeting.

To view a livestream of the school board meeting, visit acpsd.net.

The Aiken County Board of Education will next meet on Feb. 23 at 1000 Brookhaven Drive.

As Caribbean countries Barbados and Dominica today received consignments of Made in India Covishield vaccine, Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar points it as 'Consolidating our Caribbean connect'.

Posting a picture consignment reaching Dominica, he took to Twitter to say: A gesture of goodwill, an example of support. Made in India vaccines arrive in Dominica.

Also Read | Inside the third front of the farm agitation

A gesture of goodwill, an example of support. Made in India vaccines arrive in Dominica. #VaccineMaitri pic.twitter.com/HeYYkjpDoR  Dr. S. Jaishankar (@DrSJaishankar) February 10, 2021

In another tweet, he writes Consolidating our Caribbean connect. He also posted a picture of Covishield reaching Barbados with the tweet.

Consolidating our Caribbean connect. Barbados receives Made in India vaccines. #VaccineMaitri pic.twitter.com/Fn0EZK1Zuv  Dr. S. Jaishankar (@DrSJaishankar) February 10, 2021

Last month, Mottley wrote to Prime Minister Modi, requesting for vaccines for the island nation. Following this, Barbados media reported that the country will be receiving 1,00,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccine from India.

Mottley said that the country's health ministry has confirmed that the Covishield vaccine has been approved for use in Barbados and will be administered in accordance with the manufacturers' guidelines.

Later Motley has expressed her gratitude to the Indian government and the people for "most generous" donation of COVID-19 vaccine doses.

In a letter addressed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday, Mottley said: "I trust that you are well and safe. On behalf of my Government and people, I wish to express gratitude to you, your Government and the people of the Republic of India for its most generous donation of the Covishield vaccines (under the auspices of Oxford Astrazeneca)."

The first supply of 50,000 vaccines, comprising 100,000 doses, from India will be targeted towards frontline workers, police and security forces, essential services, hotel workers, supermarket employees as well as the elderly.





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Erectile dysfunction can be an important cardiovascular disease risk factor like smoking or family history. Because the penile arteries are smaller than the cardiac arteries, plaque formation will preferentially show up first as ED. Previous research has shown that among patients who seek help for ED, nearly 20% had undiagnosed high blood pressure, 15% had diabetes, and 5% already had significant coronary artery disease.

"Healthy lifestyle changes like quitting smoking, losing excess weight, and increasing physical activity may help some men regain sexual function or at least prevent further worsening," said Harris M. Nagler, MD, President of the Urology Care Foundation. "Erectile dysfunction is a common and very treatable urologic condition. Men shouldn't be afraid to visit their urologist to get help."

For more information on erectile dysfunction treatments and to find a urologist near, you visit www.urologyhealth.org

About the Urology Care Foundation: The Urology Care Foundation is the world's leading nonprofit urological health foundation, and the official foundation of the American Urological Association. Partnering with physicians, researchers, healthcare professionals, patients, caregivers, families and the public, the Foundation supports and improves urologic clinical care by funding research, developing patient education and pursuing philanthropic support. To learn more about the Urology Care Foundation and its programs visit: www.urologyhealth.org.

About the American Urological Association: Founded in 1902 and headquartered near Baltimore, Maryland, the American Urological Association is a leading advocate for the specialty of urology and has nearly 24,000 members throughout the world. The AUA is a premier urologic association, providing invaluable support to the urologic community as it pursues its mission of fostering the highest standards of urologic care through education, research and the formulation of health policy.

Media Contact:

Teri Arnold, Corporate Communications and Media Relations Manager

Cell: 757-272-7002, [email protected]

SOURCE Urology Care Foundation

Related Links

http://www.urologyhealth.org


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The police in Rivers State on Wednesday have confirmed the abduction of a reporter with the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) in Port Harcourt.

The police spokesperson in the state, Nnamdi Omoni, said the reporter, Chidiebere Onyia, was abducted by gunmen at about 6.30 p.m. on Tuesday around Woji area in Port Harcourt.

Mrs Onyia, a mother of three, was said to be with some of her colleagues in her car when the kidnappers intercepted her vehicle, fired gunshots into the air, forced her out and then drove her away in their vehicle.

She was returning home from her office at Choba area before the incident.

I was in the vehicle before the incident. Onyia drove me to my destination and continued to drop others, said her colleague who had alighted from the car before the incident.

I was shocked to hear that gunmen double-crossed her and took her away whilst abandoning the vehicle and other occupants.

She is a mother of three young children, we are begging her abductors to release her unconditionally, she added.

Meanwhile, the journalists union in Rivers State has condemned the journalists abduction as inhuman and heinous.

It is worrisome and regrettable that journalists are now victims of abduction and held for whatever reason.

A fundamental prerequisite for a free media is that journalists should be allowed to move freely in their efforts to serve the public, the Nigeria Union of Journalists chapter in the state said in a statement signed by its chairman and secretary, Stanley Job and Ike Wigodo respectively.

What we are witnessing in the country today gives us serious concern, as less than two weeks ago, a reporter with The Punch, Okechukwu Nnodim, was abducted in Abuja, only to be released a few days ago.

Also recently, the Business Manager of Silverbird, Segun Owolabi, escaped assassination attempt in Port Harcourt after close of work.

And now, another journalist, Onyia, was kidnapped in Port Harcourt on Tuesday. This is unacceptable, the union stated.

The union charged the Rivers State Government and security agencies to arrest the kidnappers and ensure the safety of journalists in the state.

The police spokesperson in the state, Mr Omoni, a superintendent of police, said the Commissioner of Police in the state, Joseph Mukan, has ordered the commands tactical units to ensure the victims safe release.

(NAN)
Australia will push back against Britains bid to use the worlds most exclusive leaders summit to establish climate tariffs, arguing the sanctions would be a new form of protectionism designed to shield local industries from free trade.

The issue could come to a head at the G7 summit in Britain in June, which Prime Minister Scott Morrison has been invited to attend, after British Prime Minister Boris Johnson indicated it would be a key priority at the meeting of the worlds leading economies.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has invited Scott Morrison to this years G7. Credit:PA

Mr Johnson has directed British government departments to come up with options for carbon border levies ahead of several major international summits, which he believes could act as a global emissions trading scheme as the world strives to hit net-zero emissions by 2050.

The British Prime Minister, riding a new wave of environmental momentum following the election of US President Joe Biden, has told aides the United Nations climate change conference in Glasgow in November is his number one initiative and passion project for the year.
Baltimore, Feb. 10, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Business Network for Offshore Wind has launched a virtual training course designed to help U.S.-based businesses expand into the growing offshore wind industry  an industry that has received focused attention in the first month of the Biden Administration. The Networks Foundation 2 Blade training program ensures businesses have the tools and information they need to capitalize on the expanding market. A recent executive order included doubling offshore wind energy in the U.S. in the next ten years and builds off goals set by several pioneering states as a way to address climate change and create well-paying U.S.-based jobs.

The offshore wind energy industry is one of the fastest growing renewable energies in the U.S. and globally. As an industry in its infancy in the U.S., it will require companies currently in industries from oil and gas, boating and transportation, and aerospace to civil engineering, composites, and steel manufacturing to diversify into offshore wind. This diversification will create a local supply chain that can meet the growing demand and project pipeline along the East, West, and Gulf Coasts.

This year will be marked as the year offshore wind energy established itself as the next great American industry, said Liz Burdock, president and CEO of the Business Network, a non-profit focused on developing offshore wind renewable energy in the U.S. The Network created the Foundation 2 Blade training program to help companies leverage the economic, job-creating benefits the offshore wind industry has to offer  its only going to get bigger and a local supply chain is essential to that growth.



Foundation 2 Blade (F2B) is an extensive training program created to help companies identify where they fit into the growing offshore wind supply chain and create more opportunities to capitalize on prospective leads. F2Bs training course features six modules that demystify the supply chain, spur innovation, and present a market entry path for a company. F2B industry training programs will be held virtually in four, half-day training classes. Programs are currently available in March, May, and June and will be capped at 30 students per course. Students will receive 20 hours of instruction, a F2B training manual, PDF classroom handouts, and access to supplemental educational videos.

In late 2020, the Business Network successfully partnered with the State of Rhode Island  home to the U.S.s first offshore wind project  to provide F2B training to local businesses as it prepares for a new offshore wind project 14 times larger than Block Island. New projects in Rhode Island, New York, and New Jersey, along with other anticipated projects and a renewed focus by the federal government on renewable energy, are already attracting millions in local investment.

With encouraging federal and state governments, the industry is in a race to develop the infrastructure needed to grow, from expanding local supply chains, ordering new ships, and port infrastructure buildout to ensure construction on wind projects can begin next year. That means local companies need to position themselves today to take advantage of this rare opportunity, said Burdock.

For more information or to arrange an interview with a Network spokesperson, contact Melinda Skea at melinda@offshorewindus.org or 410-779-1362.

Additional Information:

###

About the Business Network for Offshore Wind

The Business Network for Offshore Wind is the largest nonprofit organization dedicated to establishing a robust offshore wind supply chain in the U.S. It advances the industry forward through education, facilitating partnerships, and events, including the International Offshore Wind Partnership Forum, the largest offshore wind conference in America. Learn more at offshorewindus.org.

Attachment
YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 10, ARMENPRESS. Defense Minister of Armenia Vagharshak Harutyunyan received on February 10 Commander of the Russian peacekeeping troops who are deployed in Nagorno Karabakh, Lieutenant-General Rustam Muradov, the ministry told Armenpress.

Vagharshak Harutyunyan thanked Lieutenant-General Rustam Muradov for his active role in the exchange process of prisoners of war, as well as for assisting the search operations for missing in action, highlighting the efficiency of the operation of the Russian peacekeeping forces.

During the meeting the Armenian defense minister also touched upon a number of issues of the mutual partnership and presented his views to Mr. Muradov in this context. He emphasized the necessity to continue the current steps aimed at fulfilling the agreements reached.

Editing and Translating by Aneta Harutyunyan
The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
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The polar vortex has wrapped its icy arms this week around nearly every inch of the Prairie provinces and northern Ontario, drawing warnings from Environment Canada.

The polar vortex has wrapped its icy arms this week around nearly every inch of the Prairie provinces and northern Ontario, drawing warnings from Environment Canada.

As much as the extreme warmth of January was related to climate change, so too is the recent extreme cold  and it all starts and ends with how a warming planet is changing an enormous climate feature that has the power to dictate weather across the Northern Hemisphere.

The polar vortex is nothing new. It is a low-pressure area that exists over the northern pole of the planet, with a mass of cold air circulating counterclockwise.

"I've been going to the North for close to 40 years now. And when I first started working in the Arctic, the polar vortex was a thing that was well-understood," said David Barber, a Canada Research Chair in Arctic System Science and director of the University of Manitobas Centre for Earth Observation Science.

NATIONAL OCEANIC AND ATMOSPHERIC ADMINISTRATION Polar Vortex graphic

"But in those days, it was very constrained as a pressure pattern around the pole. So it was really quite uniform in shape. And it would move around a little bit, but it was very much an Arctic phenomenon."

The difference in the general temperature of warm air in the south and cold air in the North forced the polar vortex to stay in place, and keep spinning in a generally predictable circle, reinforced by the polar jet stream.

But now, as Arctic sea ice disappears and the energy from the warming ocean is released, changes are being seen in the behaviour of this previously boring climate feature.

"When the temperature difference across the jet stream is large, it tends to be strong and keeps the polar vortex stable. But when the difference is small, the jet stream tends to be weaker and more susceptible to twisting and curving," according to an online explainer by the University of California, Davis.

In the 1980s and '90s, Barber explained, in the winter, like clockwork, cold air would build up in the Arctic and the polar vortex would uniformly descend southward over Canada, which would bring the weeks of cold weather the country was known for.

JOHN WOODS / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS "Going into the early 2000s, we started to notice that the polar vortex was changing shape, quite significantly," David Barber said.

"Going into the early 2000s, we started to notice that the polar vortex was changing shape, quite significantly. So there was the beginning of large lobes that would be drawn down over top of lower latitudes of the planet," Barber said.

Think of them as arms that reach down from the Arctic and bring freezing cold temperatures with them. These "lobes," as Barber refers to them, have become more common and stretch further south. Big swaths of the United States are preparing to deal with this deep freeze, as well.

Because a temperature differential on the two sides of the jet stream is needed to keep the polar vortex in check, it is important to note the Arctic is warming at two to three times the average global rate.

A paper published by the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society in 2018 found in the last four decades, the deterioration of the polar vortex has become much more common, especially in January and February.

Barber said the polar vortex lobes have two sides of them: one that sends cold air south, another that sends warm air into the Arctic. In January, Winnipeg was on the other side of one of these lobes, as warm air rushed over the city headed north.

JOHN WOODS / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS In the 1980s and '90s, in the winter, like clockwork, cold air would build up in the Arctic and the polar vortex would uniformly descend southward over Canada, which would bring the weeks of cold weather the country was known for.

In addition to changes in the shape of the vortex, researchers are watching as it occasionally splits into multiple vortices, as it did in January.

Researchers have also noted the circulation of the air isnt spinning as fast as it used to, Barber said. This helps to account for why the weather that comes with these lobes seems to stall out and stick around.

"This is what makes it so confusing for people, because people think of global warming as this monotonic increase in temperature, which it is not," Barber said.

What he is watching for now, is the answer to the question of what comes next.

"I think the best guess is weve already passed the point where the polar vortex is going to behave the way it used to 40 years ago," Barber said.

"And these lobes are going to continue until such point as we reduce the amount of ice in the North too much in the winter, in which case, this thing will probably break down altogether."

sarah.lawrynuik@freepress.mb.ca
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Women whose household drinking water contained nitrate had babies that weighed, on average, 10 grams less than babies born to mothers where household water had no detectible nitrate, according to a new study from researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago and Aarhus University.

The study, which is published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, followed pregnant women living in Denmark. The researchers found that even low nitrate levels -- about half of the allowable level set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA -- caused an adverse effect.

While the effects of elevated nitrate levels on infant health are known, little research has been done on the impact of lower levels of nitrate in drinking water may have on neonates. This is a critical data gap if we want to assess the adequacy of our current water standards for nitrate." Vanessa Coffman, UIC Visiting Research Specialist, School of Public Health and Lead Author

Drinking water becomes contaminated by nitrate when fertilizers seep into drinking water sources. High levels of nitrate in tap water can cause infant methemoglobinemia -- a potentially fatal condition known as blue baby syndrome in which a baby's skin turns blue -- as nitrate prevents hemoglobin in the blood from carrying oxygen. For this reason, the EPA set standards for nitrate in drinking water at 10 parts per million, to reduce the risk of blue baby syndrome. In Denmark, the allowable level of nitrate in drinking water is similar.

In the largest study of the association between nitrate in drinking water and birth weight, Coffman and colleagues estimated maternal nitrate exposure for 852,348 live births in Denmark from 1991 to 2011. They linked home addresses with nitrate data from a national water quality monitoring database with data from Danish registries on infant birth weight, length and head circumference -- these registries offer an unparalleled resource for epidemiologists, as they are some of the most complete in the world, with national health care data and robust individual demographics and environmental data spanning decades.

The researchers found that levels of nitrate in maternal drinking water were associated with birth weight, but the weight differences were small but important. Babies born to mothers whose drinking water was estimated to contain about half of the allowable level of nitrates were on average 10 grams lighter than babies born to households where drinking water nitrate levels were undetectable. The researchers also observed a decrease in body length with increasing nitrate concentrations in drinking water. No effect was observed on head circumference.

"This difference in weight and body length is small but could have an impact on health if the baby is underweight to begin with for other reasons. Birthweight is a critical marker for health, as it can have a life-long impact on health and development," Coffman said.


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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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BULLHEAD CITY, Ariz.  Police in Bullhead City police arrested a 74-year-old woman accused of hitting her sleeping boyfriend in the head with a hammer because he left the television on during the night.

They said Marilyn Kepler told officers she was upset with her boyfriend because she couldnt sleep with the TV on.

Kepler was booked into the Mohave County Jail on suspicion of aggravated assault and domestic violence, according to police.

It was unclear Tuesday if she had a lawyer yet for her case.

Police said the 74-year-old victim was treated at a Kingman hospital for head injuries.

His name wasnt immediately released.

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................................................................

The man told police he was able to convince Kepler to drive him to the hospital after the assault.

But instead of taking him to get medical attention, Kepler drove past the hospital and allegedly pulled a gun on him while she was driving.

The man was able to wrestle the gun away and get out of the car before Kepler drove off.

People driving by saw the victim and took him to the nearest hospital.
She welcomed her first child with her stockbroker boyfriend Sammy Kimmence late last month.

And Dani Dyer was left mortified when her father Danny suggested she conceived her son Santiago after a Valentine's Day 'roll around' last year.

During this week's edition of their podcast Sorted, the Love Island star, 24, admitted she didn't want to disclose details to the former EastEnders star, 43, as she recalled when she enjoyed a wild night out after watching Pretty Woman: The Musical.

'I don't want to tell you about it!' Dani Dyer was left mortified when her father Danny suggested she conceived her son Santiago after a Valentine's Day 'roll around' last year

'I was a bit p***ed but it was beautiful - it was the best show I've ever watched', the new mother shared.

Actor Danny proceeded to pry about his daughter's sex life as he asked: 'After that Valentine's night out, was that when you had the roll around to impregnate you?'

'I don't really want to tell you the roll around. It's a little bit... it weren't Feb', an embarrassed Dani replied.

The reality TV star's response didn't stop her nosey parent as he went on: 'It was Valentine's Day and you're forced to... well you are aren't you?

New parents: The Love Island star, 24, welcomed her first child with her stockbroker boyfriend Sammy Kimmence late last month

'Was that the day?' During this week's edition of their podcast Sorted, the influencer recalled when she enjoyed a wild night out after watching Pretty Woman: The Musical

'You gotta get intimate at some point and you think oh, f***ing hell I can't be bothered.'

Influencer Dani added: 'I'm sure you want it on Valentine's Day', to which the soap star joked: 'Wait till you get to my age, that will be sapped from your f***ing body.'

Elsewhere on the episode, the TV star admitted he has 'absolutely nothing in common' with his wife Joanne Mas.

TV's hardman - who has been married to his high school sweetheart since 2016 and also share daughter Sunnie, 13, and son Arty, seven, together - claimed the couple are like 'chalk and cheese', but he finds her 'fascinating'.

'After that Valentine's night out, was that when you had the roll around to impregnate you?' Actor Danny proceeded to pry about his daughter's sex life (pictured in 2018)

The Mick Carter actor shared: 'Me and your mother have absolutely nothing in common. And it does work, because there are no grey areas. It's about adapting though isn't it. Me and your mother are chalk and cheese.

'But it keeps it interesting, keeps it alive, and I find her fascinating, the fact that she is into the s*** she's into and I'm into the s*** I'm into, and it works.'

Dani interrupted her dad to insist she believes their relationship wouldn't have worked if they were too similar.

She said: 'I think if mummy was the same as you it never would have worked. Mummy liking the indoors reigned you in a bit. Being different reins you in and makes you realise what's right.'

However, former financial adviser Jo, 44, shouldn't be expecting too much in terms of gifts on Valentine's Day, as the Survival of the Fittest star declared he doesn't 'give a f***' about February 14th.

He said: 'I do that [get gifts the day before] for Christmas and birthdays and all that, but this, I really don't give a f*** about this.'

'But didn't you ask Mummy to be your girlfriend on Valentine's Day?', a curious Dani asked, to which the thespian hit back: 'No, because we didn't do that back in the 90s.

'It wasn't ''linking'' or ''a motive''. But I've never got Valentine's Day. It's too close to Christmas.'

Sorted with the Dyers is a Spotify original podcast with new episodes out every Wednesday.

New Jersey has crafted one of the most progressive and innovative medical marijuana programs in the nation over the last two years, and it has been one of our proudest boasts.

But if a dying cancer patient, a vet haunted by PTSD, or someone in the grips of ALS or chronic migraines cannot afford a treatment that could cost $10,000 to $15,000 annually  or if there is a shortage of the particular strain that will deliver effective relief  this program is of little use to them.

It is not acceptable to make sick and dying people endure such agony, especially if there are options available.

The easiest way to lighten the out-of-pocket burden and increase access for people who suffer is to allow them to grow their own medicine at home  something that is allowed in 18 states, but gets you a 3- to 5-year prison term for a single plant in New Jersey.

So we welcome two sensible ideas from Sen. Troy Singleton (D-Burlington), who has introduced measures that will address an emergency that has grown worse during this pandemic.

The first bill allows people to grow cannabis for medical purposes at home after registering as a home cultivator.

Those who say this could eventually hurt the retail market are entitled to their misconceptions: The home grower would be allowed to possess only four mature plants and four immature plants  not exactly enough for a cottage industry  and the states severe penalties for those unauthorized to grow will still apply, only with an additional $1,000 fine attached.

But it is unclear how many would choose to grow at home  it takes money and skill to build a thriving grow room  so for those who will continue to purchase, Singleton introduced another bill that subsidizes 20% of the cost of medical marijuana for qualified patients enrolled in Medicaid or NJ FamilyCare.

Theres an extraordinary amount of frustration for those who need this medicine, Singleton said. These are people who also have to worry about the cost of prescription drugs, and we need to apply some downward pressure on pricing where we can, particularly during the pandemic.

So this is one way to do it, by allowing a modest home grow component to alleviate the supply issue, but also to ensure that the medicine is more affordable to patients.

Imagine being in ceaseless pain while youre also at the mercy of Trenton, where progress on marijuana policy is as dynamic as watching a plant grow.

Gov. Murphy and lawmakers are still haggling over how to implement adult recreational use while keeping it away from minors, three months after the state overwhelmingly voted for legalization.

Eventually, our leaders will need to take a look at other home-grow proposals such as the one from Sen. Gerald Cardinale (D-Bergen), and debate whether allowing it for recreational users will damage the retail market. It will be a contentious debate.

But bringing comfort to the sick and dying is something we can do quickly without any discernible impact on, or protest from, the legal industry, experts claim.

Since the COVID nightmare began, we have re-learned that the medical marijuana industry is essential and that the distribution centers cant always deliver what our sickest neighbors need, even if they are equipped to pay $400 per ounce.

There have been long lines and shortages of needed strains: We saw it throughout the spring, said Bill Caruso, founder of the New Jersey United for Marijuana Reform. The sickest of the sick were stuck outside in line, for medicine they did not get.

These people dont deserve more bureaucracy, they deserve better options. Its time to deliver for them.

While Murphy dithers, Weedman gets busted | Mulshine https://t.co/VWUUhBzOEm  Paul Mulshine (@Mulshine) February 9, 2021

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New Delhi:

Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Mehbooba Mufti met Home Minister Rajnath Singh at his residence in Delhi to discuss the issue of terrorism in Kashmir valley and terror attacks on pilgrims of Amarnath Yatra.

Speaking to media Mufti said that 'outside' forces are responsible for using Kashmir to spread communal riots in India.

Mufti also raises concern over Chinas role in Kashmir valley and said that China is responsible for the turmoil in the state. J&K CM also said that steps will be taken to stop Pakistans terror funding activities.

J&K CM also said that all political parties of the country are united to provide solution to Kashmir problem.

During the meeting that lasted about half-an-hour, the chief minister apprised the home minister about the steps taken to maintain peace in the Kashmir Valley.

On article 270 of the Indian Constitution, Mufi said that article 370 is associate with sentiments of people of Kashmir.

Mehbooba Mufti said that she will also meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi and discuss the present situation in the Kashmir valley.

ALSO READ: Tral encounter: J&K Police foils major attack, 2-3 terrorists killed

Steps taken to ensure the security of Amarnath pilgrims were also discussed, officials said.

Seven pilgrims were killed by militants in Anantnag district while returning from the Amarnath cave shrine on Monday.

Security agencies engaged in anti-militancy operations in Jammu and Kashmir have been told to implement security plans with full vigour, officials said.

So far, more than 1.86 lakh pilgrims have visited the high altitude Himalayan shrine.

As many as 21,000 paramilitary personnel in addition to state police forces and two battalions of Army have been deployed for security of the pilgrimage routes.

The number of paramilitary personnel deployed this year is 9,500 more than last year.

Four districts of the state -- Pulwama, Kulgam, Shopian and Anantnag -- have been on the boil since the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani in an encounter with security forces on July 8, 2016.

The unrest has resumed since the April 9 by-poll to the Srinagar Lok Sabha seat.

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Yantar  The New Name for Gibraltars Bronze Age Man

Minister for the Environment, Sustainability, Climate Change, Heritage and Culture, Professor John Cortes unveiled a reconstruction of the head of a Bronze Age man from Gibraltar on Tuesday 24th November, 2020.

The reconstruction was of a man whose cranium was excavated from Brays Cave on the Upper Rock by a team from the Gibraltar National Museum in the course of excavations carried out between 1999 and 2006. He was one of nine individuals (including adults, a five year old, a 9/10 year old, a 15/20 year old, and a neonate) buried on site. The burials were dated to between 1,496 and 1,900 BCE, that is approximately 3.5 to 4 thousand years ago. This individual was subsequently sampled for ancient DNA as part of a collaboration with the Harvard Medical School, a project which also revealed part of Calpeias (a Neolithic woman from Europa Point) DNA.

The results were published in 2019 in the journal Science https://science.sciencemag.org/content/363/6432/1230 .

The skin, eye and hair colour were derived from the genetic information obtained from a sample of Iberian individuals from that period (which included Brays Cave Man) used in the published study.

Following the presentation of the reconstruction, the Gibraltar National Museum put out a call to the public for suggested names that could be given to this individual. A total of 188 name proposals were received, reflecting the public interest in the project. A team of curators and scientists from the museum whittled the list down to five names which were then put to public vote on social media. A total of 451 votes were received. The winning name was Yantar with 179 votes (39.69%).

Yantar means amber in Russian. The individual is known to have had his origins in what is today the Russian steppe. This is also one of the main sources of amber. When Yantar was excavated, archaeologists were intrigued when they found an amber bead as part of the burial. The reason for the surprise is that there are no sources of amber in the western Mediterranean. The closest sources are in the eastern Mediterranean where the bead was assumed to have originated but the genetic information of the origin of Yantar opened up the possibility that the source of the amber was instead the Russian steppe. Scientists at the Gibraltar National Museum hope that further work may confirm the source of the amber.

The Gibraltar National Museum is grateful to the public for the fantastic response and support. Yantar is expected to go on permanent exhibition in the spring.
The President-elect of the Paynesville Photographers Association (PAPA) Mr. Sampson B. Yeabah says preparations are ongoing for subsequent induction of officials elected at recently held elections. Making the disclosure to reporters in Paynesville City outside Monrovia, he said the elected officials will be inducted into office as soon as ongoing planning and implementation committee work is completed.

"The committee is doing her job and we are waiting on it to execute our induction into office to commence work based on the popular mandate of the membership of our unique organization that has the authority to ensure equal opportunity, capacity building, health care and welfare, for every member of PAPA", Mr. Yeabah said.

The PAPA President-elect is proprietor of the Modern Photo Studio situated in Paynesville Redlight.

Mr. Yeabah along with several others was recently elected by majority votes which witnessed the election of president, vice president, secretary general, treasure and chaplain.

The election of the new leadership brings to an end the leadership vacuum which long impeded the effective and efficient operations of the association with many photo analysts hoping for a better and brighter future for photographers in Paynesville City under Yeabah's leadership. In the immediate past, activities PAPA was implemented in close collaboration with the National Photographers Union of Liberia, the mother organization of photographers in Liberia.

Moreover, one thing that remains a serious challenge to the new administration is securing an office space in which officials of the association are to be situated to run their day-to-day activities.
Glyntraian community looking forward to working with developer on a scheme the village can be proud of for former school

This article is old - Published: Wednesday, Feb 10th, 2021

Plans to develop affordable housing on the site of a former village school are set to progress to the next stage after receiving unanimous support from senior councillors.

Ysgol Pontfadog, located in the Ceiriog Valley, shut its doors for the final time in July 2019 after serving the area for 110 years.

Despite opposition from some local residents, Wrexham Council made a decision in summer 2018 to close the school due to dwindling pupil numbers.

Following its closure, villagers decided to focus on how the land on which the primary school sits should be used in the future.





A report commissioned by rural development agency Cadwyn Clwyd and Glyntraian Community Council concluded that creating housing at the site would be the best option.

As part of the proposals the executive board was asked to approve selling it off to a registered social landlord to allow affordable housing to be built.

Speaking at yesterday mornings executive board councillor Mark Pritchard, leader of Wrexham Council, said the local authority had worked alongside Glyntraian Community Council to find a use for the former school site.

Cllr Pritchard added: Its been a long journey, but weve got there. Id like to thank councillor Trevor Bates, the local elected member for all the hard work and effort hes put into this.

Also the community council because they played a big role in this, they spent their own money to go out for consultation within the community and get the reflections and the thoughts and the wants from the community.

What came back loud and clear, was that the community wanted homes for local people. And they went out another consultation and that was and thats what came back.

I have visited the Community Council on two occasions, on one occasion the lead member for education Cllr Phil Wynn came with me and we listened to the community council. To be fair, we were challenged robustly by the Community Council and that was pleasing.

Im pleased that now hopefully this will be supported this morning and within that community, we can put affordable homes for people to live.

It was also agreed that some items from the school  such as the bell would be retained for the community. A stone marking the 1908 date of the school along with blocks that contain the words boys and girls and infants were requested to be saved, and placed as part of some form of structure with a memorial plaque to remind future generations of what stood before.

The plans for the site was welcomed by Glyn Ceiriog councillor Trevor Bates, who said it would offer housing opportunities for young people who want to stay in the area.

He said: The consultation report recommended that Wrexham Council engaged with housing associations in the area to establish need and ideas for the use of the site.

Im pleased to say the Wrexham Council have indeed undertaken a lot of work preparing for this report today.

I would like to thank council officers and members of the corporate land and building strategy group for their work in bringing this report.

Id like to emphasise that support was across political parties, so thank you to members of the that group for helping us in the Ceiriog Valley.

There was a fear in the community that the site would be sold on the open market and that any developments would result in more outsiders moving into the valley whilst young couples and families move out to the valley to find suitable affordable homes elsewhere.

I think thats something that will be prevented on this site if you approve this report today.

I also hope the local businesses like this Swan Inn in Pontfadog and, the Pontfadog Post Office and stores which have been a tremendous help for us throughout COVID and have done a fantastic job of looking after the locals, that they and the local garage will benefit from a few more residents in the village will will help keep their business sustainable going forward.

Members of the councils executive board unanimously backed the plans along with allowing a senior officer to press ahead to negotiate and conclude the terms of the sale.

Glyntraian Community Council (GCC) welcomed the decision taken to accept the recommendation of the Local Authoritys Corporate Land and Buildings Strategy Group to dispose of the former Ysgol Pontfadog site to a Registered Social Landlord for development as affordable housing, and the sale to the Registered Social Landlord will result in delivery of the site for affordable housing, generate a capital receipt, providing a mix of properties with 100% nomination rights in perpetuity.

GCC voted in March last year to accept an independent Feasibility Study & Recommendation Report, jointly commissioned with Welsh Rural Development Agency, Cadwyn Clwyd, which recommended the former school site be developed for a small number of low-cost starter homes. The GCC vote was carried by 7-1 and followed a rigorous six-month community consultation exercise, including an options survey sent to all 323 homes in the community where housing was regarded as being of the highest benefit to the community.

Glyntraian Community Council Chairman, Cllr Graham Barrow said: We now look forward to working closely with whichever Registered Social Landlord acquires the site. Our expectation is the developers will consult widely with local residents. In so doing, we anticipate that they will put forward a scheme the village can be proud of and crucially, one that preserves key heritage elements of the historic old school building.

A team of Melbourne-based researchers believe they have taken a significant step towards unlocking the regenerative power of the stem cells in our muscles, after six years of experiments on fish isolated a signal that turns on the cells.

In mice, a dose of the signalling chemical prompts stem cells to begin knitting together otherwise-unrepairable wounds.

Peter Currie in the fish lab at Monash Universitys Clayton campus. Credit:Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute / Supplied

The teams discovery is published on Thursday in Nature, and talks are already under way with pharma companies to test it as a treatment for muscular dystrophy  and ageing.

It fully restored the architecture of the muscle, it was remarkable, said Peter Currie, director of Monash Universitys Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute.
To many, Mateo Saina is the gatekeeper of reality TV romance. The enigmatic maitre D' has shepherded scores of singletons towards the path of true love on our screens.

Some might argue that fronting a show like First Dates Ireland, which is now in its sixth series, makes the Croatian somewhat of a matchmaking expert.

So in the build-up to what is billed as the most romantic day of the year, the doting dad is surely planning to make a statement this Valentine's Day? Wrong.

"I wouldn't say Vjerana thinks I am too romantic," he says of his long-term partner with a laugh.

"For Valentine's Day I will try to make a nice dinner, probably something she won't like," he chuckles. "What I won't be doing is ordering clothes because I will get the size wrong again and be in even more trouble."

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The couple, already proud parents to their daughter Isabella Luna (2), are now set to welcome their second child in May, so at least for now, grand gestures of love are off the table.

Cool, candid and always collected, what Mateo will at least attest to is that it is possible to keep love locked down during the pandemic.

He adds: "You spend the whole day together, it's new for all of us and we are not designed to be locked in the house all the time. We don't have a clear road in front of us so that makes it very difficult.

"But it is possible to keep the romance alive in lockdown, without even going into details, I put my ego aside and always look for solutions.

"I would also recommend a lot of sex, that will lead to a healthy relationship," he quips with a laugh.

"I have learned a lot from my mum and father, you choose your lady and regardless of how hard it is, you stick to it.

"If it is broken, fix it. It might be an old-fashioned way of thinking but that's how I think."

Mateo may have popped the question over three years ago, but there's no immediate plans to organise a wedding.

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"We got engaged, we had a child and that (the wedding) wasn't a priority and then corona happened and now we have another baby on the way. The last thing we think about is us."

Asked if he is ready to welcome his latest addition, he says: "I guess it is a corona baby. Nobody has a plan and nobody is ready for children - not for the first, second or third.

"Right now it's like we have two kids in the house because we have a new puppy. She will grow up with my daughter, they love each other, they are always up to something which is why I'm so busy.

"Isabella is two-and-a-half, she is quite like me. She has her own set of rules, nobody listens to me in the house anymore. I need to go back to work."

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Relishing the free time he now has with his daughter, Mateo says: "You have to make the most of the free time that you have now. Before I wouldn't have been able to spend as much time with her because of work, but now I have all the time in the world to spend with her."

Reflecting on the impact the pandemic has had on his beloved restaurant industry, the TV star says he is hopeful businesses can recover.

"It is not an easy time for anyone. After this pandemic, within a year we are going to see how many restaurants are still open and see who has survived."

Amid the devastation of the virus, Mateo hopes the fly-on-the-wall dating show will give viewers a much-needed boost. And as always, he promises the smash hit RTE show will make us laugh, cry and cringe in equal measure.

"It has become an Irish institution and it is a genuine product.

"It's a place where people make real connections.

"We barely made it with filming because they closed the country on the second lockdown and that was the last day of filming.

"With all the stress I think we did a phenomenal job. Everyone felt comfortable, there was masks and the tables were bigger.

"We made it our little bubble and it worked perfectly and we did our jobs and made the daters feel special.

"There a lot of great characters on this series, there is a lot to look forward to."

As always, he takes no credit for the success of the show.

"Maybe I come across as having a great job and being on TV, but I do a job.

"I deal with the public. I am not a real estate agent or a banker. I am a normal person that provides normal pay for his family and this is the way I pay my bills.

"I am not crying that I am not a billionaire.

"I am human being just like everyone else and I am grateful. I am happy with everything I have."

Check out First Dates Ireland, on RTE Two, this Thursday, February 11 at 9.30pm
According to The Wall Street Journal, Huawei has filed a lawsuit to challenge a decision the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) made last year when it designated the company as a national security threat. The legal challenge comes as the Chinese manufacturer attempts to claw back at least some of the restrictions President Trump imposed on the company during his time in office.

In the suit filed on Monday, the company alleges the FCC exceeded its authority when it made the decision, claiming it was "arbitrary, capricious, and an abuse of discretion, and not supported by substantial evidence." In addition to labeling Huawei as a national security threat, the order prevents US operators from accessing the agency's Universal Service Fund to buy networking equipment from Huawei. At the time, former FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said an "overwhelming weight of evidence" informed the order.

"Last year the FCC issued a final designation identifying Huawei as a national security threat based on a substantial body of evidence developed by the FCC and numerous US national security agencies. We will continue to defend that decision," a spokesperson for the agency told The Wall Street Journal.

During President Trump's four years in office, his administration made repeated claims the Chinese government could use Huawei's networking equipment to spy on the US and its allies but ultimately offered little proof that was actually the case. The closest we have to compelling evidence of Huawei supporting Bejing's spying efforts came last year when The Washington Post published a report that said the company had tested  but never deployed  a facial recognition system that would have allowed Chinese authorities to identify minority Uyghur individuals.

Mere hours after Huawei filed the lawsuit, its founder, Ren Zhengfei, told journalists he would welcome the chance to talk to President Biden on the phone. "We still hope to be able to buy a lot of US components, parts and machinery so that US companies can also develop with the Chinese economy," he said.

The Biden administration hasn't said much about its plans related to Huawei. "We can't have the Chinese or really anyone having a backdoor into our network and compromising in any way our national or economic security," Gina Raimondo, the president's nominee for commerce secretary, told lawmakers at her January confirmation hearing. But when she was asked about Huawei specifically, she didn't say whether the Commerce Department would keep the company blacklisted.

What is clear is that all of the US sanctions on Huawei have affected the company. When Huawei sold its budget Honor brand in November, it said it did so to ensure the companys survival in the face of US sanctions. It blamed those same sanctions for the fact the Mate 40 features its final high-end Kirin processor.
The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
tech2 News Staff

Samsung is currently hosting a Samsung Days sale in India that will end on 15 February. The sale is now live across Samsung.com, e-commerce portals and leading retail outlets. During this sale, the company is giving a 10 percent cashback on ICICI Bank and Kodak Bank debit and credit cards. The sale brings offers and discounts on the company's smartphones and tablets. Here are the best deals on handsets and tabs that you can consider buying during this ongoing sale.

(Also Read: Samsung Galaxy Buds Pro review: Not the best TWS earbuds but a great performer at its price)

Best deals on smartphones

Samsung is providing a 10 percent cashback offer on credit cards on smartphones. These handsets include Galaxy Note 10 Lite (Review), Galaxy S10 Lite (Review), Galaxy A71, Galaxy A51 (Review), Galaxy A31, Galaxy A21s, Galaxy M51 (Review), Galaxy M31s (Review), Galaxy M31 (Review), Galaxy M21, Galaxy F41 and Galaxy M11. According to the company, "for debit cards, the offers will be valid on EMI transactions using debit cards of ICICI Bank (on Samsung.com and all offline channels) and Kotak Bank (all channels)."

Best deals on tablets

On tablets, Samsung is offering a discount of up to Rs 10,000 on HDFC Bank debit and credit cards. On Galaxy Tab S7+, buyers can get a discount of Rs 10,000 on HDFC Bank credit and debit cards. In addition to this, they can get Rs 10,000 off on keyboard cover or Rs 7,000 off on Galaxy Buds+. Samsung is offering Rs 7,000 off on HDFC Bank cards on Galaxy Tab S7 and Rs 10,000 off on keyboard cover or Rs 7,000 off on Galaxy Buds+.

On the purchase of Galaxy Tab S6 Lite (Review), buyers can get a discount of Rs 3,000 and Rs 7,000 off on Galaxy Buds+. Lastly, Samsung is offering a discount of Rs 2,000 on Galaxy Tab A7 and Rs 3,500 off on book cover or Rs 7,000 off on Galaxy Buds+.
Mark Winema / Getty Images

The Contra Costa County district attorney on Tuesday filed murder charges against a Richmond couple accused of abusing and killing their 5-week old son, authorities said.

Ray Ray Darn, 35, and Marilyn Northington, 28, were charged with murder, assault and child abuse, according to a federal complaint filed by the office of District Attorney Diana Becton. They are being held in the Martinez Detention Facility in lieu of $1.1 million bail.
The government's stand on cryptocurrency has confused stakeholders in the industry, as some of the arguments forwarded by them, defeats the very purpose of the currency.

In response to a question in the Rajya Sabha, Finance Minister, Nirmala Sitharaman, said that while an Inter-Ministerial Committee will study the issues and launch a new crypto bill, all private cryptocurrencies, except any virtual currencies issued by the government, will be prohibited in India.

Last week, the governments stand was said to be changing to regulate instead of imposing a ban on cryptocurrencies, but the possibility of an embargo has spooked many in the ecosystem.

Sitharaman reiterated the governments position spelled out in its 2019 Union Budget speech, which had said, ...that the government does not consider cryptocurrencies legal tender or coins and will take all measures to eliminate use of these crypto-assets in financing illegitimate activities or as part of the payment system."

However, many experts believe that a bill banning cryptocurrencies is unlikely. To be sure, the current proposal has not been cleared at the Union cabinet level and will not be tabled in the Parliament till it is cleared, following which it will also be referred to a parliamentary standing committee.

I think leaders will ask, when no other country has banned cryptocurrencies so far, what justifies India banning it? What makes us different, said Nischal Shetty, co-founder of crypto exchange WazirX.

He added, hopefully: The draft bill released in 2019 was very crude in its definition of cryptocurrency, its classification, and other contents. Since it came out, the global regulatory landscape has changed tremendously. It seems that the current version of the bill is still in its early stages right now, but the government of India might be on the path to positive crypto regulations.

However, only government-owned cryptocurrencies defeat the purpose of the asset, say experts. When bitcoin was launched, its objective was to have a decentralised currency that is not owned by any government or company, and hence cannot be tampered with.

It defeats the purpose. A government owned cryptocurrency is an oxymoron, and it loses its attractiveness for investors, said a senior executive at a fintech firm, requesting anonymity.

The industry also needs clarity on what existing bitcoin holders can do, and what could happen to their wealth. In the earliest draft of the bill, Clause 26 referred to holders of cryptocurrency being given 90 days to dispose of their holdings.

Said Ajeet Khurana, former CEO of Zebpay, a bitcoin trading firm: ``Cryptocurrency is one of the fastest growing sectors in fintech globally, and conducive regulations have been put in place in many countries of the world. At such a time for India to consider a draconian piece of legislation, will deprive our investors, entrepreneurs, engineers, and citizens at large, of participating in one of the greatest wealth creation opportunities of our time.

I hope that those in power are looking at what is happening in the world. I would strongly recommend coming up with a framework that addresses the government s concerns. That is the key. We have to address the concerns, not throw out the baby with the bathwater, he concluded.

Globally, governments have grown wary of this unregulated asset class, and like a lot of technologies, heavy regulation comes later and then evolves over time. For years, governments in the US, UK, France and other countries have been looking to crackdown on cryptocurrency fraud, with many convinced that it is a bubble and not a legitimate asset class. However, all developed countries have tried regulating it and removing bad actors instead of banning the technology or its applications.

Cryptocurrency cant be banned until and unless it is totally controlled by a single organization, which in case of bitcoin, Ethereum and other major crypto, is not possible. In my opinion, the government should look at regulating this industry comprehensively so that users can be secured from scams and other illegal schemes, said Shivam Thakral, founder and CEO of BuyUCoin, a cryptocurrency exchange.

For him, Digital Assets like Bitcoin are not controlled or issued by any single entity hence there is no single owner of Bitcoin. In essence, therefore, it's not possible to ban a 'piece of code'. I think a ban is unlikely, but if it does happen, I hope they will at least give some time for existing investors to exit their position in cryptocurrency to safeguard their interest. Thats what a lot of stakeholders in the industry are fervently hoping for, in the eventuality of a ban being imposed.
Andrew Lelling, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts, announced on Wednesday that he is stepping down from his role on Feb. 28, according to a statement from his office.

Lelling tendered his resignation to President Joe Biden earlier this week.

Over the last 15 years, I have had the privilege of working not only with the best federal prosecutors in the country, but with the federal, state and local law enforcement officers who put themselves at risk to keep Massachusetts safe, Lelling said in a statement.

Lellings departure marks the end of a 20-year career with the Department of Justice, which began in 2001 when he worked as a senior official in the Civil Rights Division. He then moved on to become a federal prosecutor in the U.S. Attorneys offices for the Eastern District of Virginia and the District of Massachusetts.

Former President Donald Trump in 2017 nominated Lelling for the role of U.S. Attorney; he was subsequently confirmed by the Senate by an unanimous vote.

Lellings office oversaw a number of high-profile investigations during his tenure, including, among others, the Massachusetts State Police overtime scandal, the college admissions scandal  launched under the code name Operation Varsity Blues  and the prosecution of Louis D. Coleman III, who is accused of killing 23-year-old Jassy Correia.

Eleven current and former members of the Massachusetts State Police and 10 current and former members of the Boston Police Department are facing charges as a result of Lellings prosecution, according to his office. In the college admissions scandal, which garnered national attention, 42 of the 56 people charged have been convicted to date.

First Assistant U.S. Attorney Nathaniel R. Mendell will replace the outgoing Lelling as acting U.S. attorney.

I know that my colleagues, in the U.S. Attorneys Office and in the law enforcement agencies we work with, share my belief that this is a calling, Lelling said. I look forward to new challenges in the years ahead, but I will miss the sense of mission that comes with working for the U.S. Department of Justice.

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Sinn Fein has criticised Government plans to introduce a supplementary payment to workers who retire at the age of 65, before they qualify for the state pension.

The plan introduces a new payment for people who retire at 65, before they qualify for the state pension at 66, but at a reduced rate of 203 euro instead of 248.

Mary Lou McDonald said the plan would cost individuals more than 2,000 euro in that year, and condemned Fianna Fail for an apparent U-turn on a pledge made at the last general election.

The Sinn Fein leader referenced a statement by Fianna Fails then social protection spokesman Willie ODea three days before the election last February.

It's gold-plated pensions for government politicians, while workers wanting to retire at 65 will be out of pocket a45 a week. The hypocrisy of this government is staggering. a @MaryLouMcDonald #DAil #RightToRetire #STOP67 pic.twitter.com/qVsA6ixew8  Sinn FAin (@sinnfeinireland) February 10, 2021

Reading from his statement, she said: Under our proposals people aged 65 will receive a state pension, which will be held at the same rate of the state pension of 248 euros per week.

This payment will not be means-tested, entitlement will be based on an individuals employment record.

In contrast, Fine Gael will only pay those who are 65 a payment of 203 euros a week, which will result in an annual loss of 2,340 euros for this age group.

She told the Taoiseach during Leaders Questions on Wednesday: You knew at that time the strength of public feeling as regards the access to a state pension for workers when they reach the age of 65.

But you seem to have forgotten that in the meantime, because your Governments announcement on state pensions on Monday is exactly what Fine Gael proposed in the course of that election, 12 months ago.

She said only enormous public pressure prevented the Government from raising the state pension age to 67, as had been proposed under Fine Gael.

Everything you've thrown at us here clearly can be thrown at yourself in respect of what you've supported within Northern Ireland Micheal Martin

She added: You have adopted the Fine Gael policy hook, line and sinker and this is a real blow for 65-year-olds who will rely on a decent pension to get by.

The lack of fairness, the lack of respect, is absolutely breathtaking, particularly in these times when people are under such enormous pressure.

The Taoiseach accused Ms McDonald of extraordinary two-dimensional thinking, raising Sinn Feins record on pensions in Northern Ireland.

He said: They say one thing in this house and they do the exact opposite in Northern Ireland on the executive.

You call for a pension age of 65 here. And yet, last October, the exact opposite happened after your party voted for the pension age to be increased from 65 to 66.

So everything youve thrown at us here clearly can be thrown at yourself in respect of what youve supported within Northern Ireland.

Mr Martin said Sinn Fein proposals on fuel allowance and pensions would amount to 4.5 billion euro in spending.

Thats just in seven days and thats just in one Government department he added.

He said the proposals on the state pension had been negotiated with Fine Gael and the Green party as part of the Programme for Government during the talks that formed the current coalition.

The Pensions Commission has launched its public consultation on State Pensions



This is an opportunity for people to have their say on the future of State Pensions in Ireland



Further information and guidelines for preparing submissions is available here https://t.co/GUQUK2u9of pic.twitter.com/Yls6BCiDyi  Department of Social Protection (@welfare_ie) February 9, 2021

The Taoiseach said it was important to be honest with people that the sustainability of pensions will provide huge challenges to the state in the future.

He said: The Department of Social Protection this year will spend about 25 billion euros  over 40% of that, 9 billion, will be spent on pension payments alone.

That is why a commission in respect of pensions has been established.

Its looking at the issue of mandatory retirement ages and employment contracts where that age is below the state pension age. Its due to report back to Government later this year.

I think its important to be honest with people  the sustainability of pensions over the next number of decades will be challenging for the state.

On Monday, Social Protection Minister Heather Humphreys announced a new Benefit Payment for 65-year-olds.

It will apply to people aged between 65 and 66 who cease employment, whether voluntarily or otherwise.

It means they will no longer have to sign on, or be genuinely seeking work, to receive the benefit, as was previously the case.

However, they will receive the equivalent of the Jobseekers Payment of 203 euro a week, 45 euro less than the state pension rate.
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(Natural News) A leading Hungarian politician in the ruling conservative and nationalist Fidesz Party wants to confront big techs censorship by proposing a law that will rein in the power of social media giants like Facebook and Twitter.

Hungarian Minister of Justice Judit Varga said Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who also serves as the leader of Fidesz, does not tolerate the attacks made by big tech companies against free speech.

To this end, Varga announced that the country will follow neighboring Poland in punishing social media companies that would try to censor conservative voices on the internet.

This announcement was made as the world struggles against the growing power of big tech companies. In the United States, President Donald Trump and many other like-minded conservatives were permanently deplatformed from popular websites. When Facebook banned Trump, Varga accused the social media giant of excluding public dignitaries from online spaces.

In the European Union, politicians are struggling to adopt a coordinated approach on how much big tech should be allowed to police content on social media. (Related: Conservatives and Trump supporters who get censored are being accused of spreading disinformation for speaking up about the abuse.)

This struggle within the EU is being hampered by a clear ideological division between western and eastern EU members. In the west, countries like France and Germany are trying to fight against religious extremist rhetoric as well as supposed violence from the far-right. In the east, countries like Hungary and Poland want to focus on what Varga called deliberate and ideological censorship on social media.

In a recent Facebook post, Varga said she intended to submit a bill that would regulate the domestic operations of large tech companies in the spring.

Today anyone can be disconnected from the online space without the possibility of any formal, transparent, fair procedure and legal remedy, Varga said. She also alleged in an earlier post that Facebook had shadow banned her as the visibility of her posts on social media was significantly reduced without any proper explanation or official reason.

In addition, Varga claimed that mainstream social media networks like Facebook and Twitter regularly limit the visibility of people who hold Christian, conservative and other right-wing beliefs and opinions. She accused these big tech companies of being directed to do this by power groups.

Orban and Fidesz hold a supermajority in Hungarys main parliament, the National Assembly, thanks to its coalition with the social conservative KDNP Party. This means that if Varga submits her bill before the next parliamentary election, it will most likely pass provided that nobody within the ruling coalition objects to it.

The ruling party of Poland is also proposing a concrete measure to fight against the right-wing bias of big tech companies. Under the countrys proposed law, users who have had posts removed or accounts blocked from social media will be able to appeal their case to a body known as the Free Speech Council.

If the council finds that the accused social media company refuses to reinstate posts or blocked accounts, they could be fined up to 50 million zloty ($13.5 million).

Europeans do not trust big tech social media companies

Back in June 2020, Hungarian research foundation Szazadveg conducted an EU-wide survey regarding how much people trust social media. The foundation republished the results of its research following recent events concerning big techs suppression of conservative speech.

According to the survey, 57 percent of people in every EU nation and the United Kingdom do not trust social media at all. This represents a very slight increase compared to 54 percent who said they did not trust social media in 2019.

When Szazadveg asked the participants how much they trusted social media, 57 percent said they did not trust social media at all, 7 percent said they trusted social media very much, 32 percent said they somewhat trusted social media and 4 percent did not know.

When asked how much they trusted their national media, 34 percent of the participants said they did not trust national media at all, 11 percent said they trusted it very much, 52 percent said they somewhat trusted the news and 3 percent said they did not know.

Szazadveg also asked the participants: What do you think, is it acceptable or not that social media sites delete user content from their site based on their own political views? The survey found that 59 percent of the EU and the UK found it not acceptable. Twenty-five percent said it was acceptable and 16 percent either refused to answer or did not know what to answer.

When broken down, Szazadvegs survey showed that 69 percent of people in Hungary found it unacceptable while only 15 percent said it was okay. Germany had the highest percentage of people who said it was okay for social media to censor people based on their politics at 37 percent.

Learn more about how countries are attempting to fight back against the power of big tech by reading the latest articles at TechGiants.news.

Sources include:

BigLeaguePolitics.com

FT.com

DW.com

BudapestTimes.hu




By Nam Hyun-woo







Mercedes-Benz has resumed sales of its diesel vehicles in Korea after briefly suspending customer delivery of nine diesel models.







Mercedes-Benz Korea said Wednesday it has resumed customer delivery of the diesel vehicles which had been suspended since last Friday.







Although the company refused to reveal which models, industry officials said the German carmaker had told dealers to suspend the delivery of nine diesel vehicles, including the A220d, C220d, E220d, GLC 220d, GLC 220d Coupe and GLE 300d.







A Mercedes-Benz Korea official said the carmaker suspended delivery due to "issues related to pre-delivery checkups," but refused to elaborate.







"However, this is unrelated to last year's punitive measures from the environment ministry," the official said.







Last May, Mercedes-Benz Korea was fined 77.6 billion won ($63 million) after the ministry determined that the German carmaker illegally used software in the diesel vehicles to manipulate nitrogen oxide emission data during testing. It was the largest fine given to a single car company in Korea.







The environment ministry's punishment of Mercedes-Benz Korea stems from the carmaker's 2018 emissions scandal in Germany. A year later, prosecutors in Stuttgart imposed a fine of 870 million euros ($957 million) for violating diesel emissions regulations.







Mercedes-Benz Korea claimed the environment ministry's decision was unfair and filed a suit with the Seoul Administrative Court in October. The case is still in deliberation as the court delayed a number of trials due to the COVID-19 pandemic.







Following the ministry's punishment, prosecutors are also investigating Mercedes-Benz Korea's alleged emissions-rigging. But the investigation is known to be in a stalemate as the former CEO of Mercedes-Benz Korea, Dimitris Psillakis, left the country before being questioned by prosecutors.







Mercedes-Benz Korea had said Psillakis had left on a business trip, but he did not come back to Korea. The company replaced its chief with interim CEO Kim Jee-seop and later appointed Thomas Klein as CEO.







During a Jan. 26 press conference, Klein said the company will cooperate sincerely with investigators.


Posted Wednesday, February 10, 2021 6:57 am

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee praised an Idaho U.S. congressman for his proposal to spend $33 billion to breach the four lower Snake River dams.

The money would cover dismantling the earthen portions of the dams to let water flow freely, building new energy and transportation systems and addressing the economic impact of the loss of the dams.

"Washington welcomes Rep. (Mike) Simpson's willingness to think boldly about how to recover Columbia and Snake River salmon in a way that works for the entire region and invests  at a potentially transformative level  in clean energy, transportation and agriculture," Inslee said in a statement Tuesday.

Simpson, an Idaho Republican, is concerned about the low return of endangered salmon that must swim as far as 900 miles, including past eight hydroelectric dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers, to reach the ocean and to spawn in Idaho.

The Columbia Basin Collaborative, led by the governors of Washington, Idaho, Oregon and Montana, must play a prominent role in the formation and implementation of a comprehensive plan for the future of the Columbia and Snake rivers, Inslee said.

The collaborative group can complement and inform Congressional efforts to help the four states recover salmon while protecting and enhancing clean, reliable and affordable energy, plus work on transportation systems and help farmers and shippers, he said.

"Conversations among different interests and across party lines are essential to identifying creative solutions that work for salmon, energy and the economy," he said. "This is important  to Washington's tribes, people, economy and culture."

Inslee will be working with the state's congressional delegation to make sure the needs of Washington state are fully met, he said.

Rep. Dan Newhouse, R-Wash., opposes removing the dams. And he was joined last week in a resolution of support for existing and new hydropower by Republican Reps. Cathy McMorris Rodgers and Jaime Herrera Beutler in Washington state and Russ Fulcher in Idaho.

Tri-Cities area leaders were generally dubious about the proposal despite large amounts of money proposed to be used for economic development and compensation in the Tri-Cities area.

Tri-Cities concerns

Money includes $600 million to further develop the Tri-Cities into a transportation hub, $750 million for irrigation mitigation and $75 million for Tri-Cities area economic development. A new Snake River Center for Advanced Energy Storage would be established by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, likely at a branch campus in the Lewiston-Clarkston area.

The $33 billion also include $10 billion to replace the power generated by the four dams.

But Tri-Cities leaders are concerned about whether long-term battery storage of wind and solar or small modular reactor technology would be ready to provide a clean energy replacement for the dam's hydropower within a decade.

More trucks and trains would pollute the air and add traffic in the Tri-Cities and down the Columbia River Gorge if barging can no longer be done up and down the Snake River to as far inland as the Lewiston-Clarkston area.

They also questioned whether tearing out the four dams  which have modern fish passage systems  would substantially increase endangered salmon numbers.

"Given the Pacific Coast-wide declines in salmon survival in both dammed and undammed rivers, it is hard to make the case that breaching dams with advanced fish passage technology will reverse this disturbing trend," said Kurt Miller executive director of Northwest RiverPartners.

Tribes, environmental concerns

But tribes and fishing and environmental groups are more certain of the benefits of Simpson's proposal.

"We have reached a tipping point where we must choose between our Treaty-protected salmon and the federal dams, and we choose salmon," said Delano Saluskin, Yakama Nation Tribal Council chairman. "We applaud Congressman Simpson for taking this important step towards protecting our salmon runs for future generations."

A coalition of 11 groups working on conservation and other environmental causes in the West called for members of Congress and Northwest governors to offer their ideas on Simpson's proposal to include in a national infrastructure bill.

Simpson has provided a blueprint for the largest river and salmon restoration effort in history, which would also create jobs and strengthen the energy and agriculture sectors, said Chris Hager, executive director of the Association of Northwest Steelheaders.

"Salmon are the lifeblood of Northwest cultures, economies and ecosystems," said Brett VandenHeuvel, executive director of Columbia Riverkeeper. "We welcome Congressman Mike Simpson's serious and comprehensive proposal to recover Northwest salmon, honor tribal rights and interests, and modernize our region's energy and infrastructure systems."

Sam Mace, Inland Northwest director of Save our Wild Salmon, called Simpson's proposal a once-in-a-generation opportunity.

Idaho Conservation League American Rivers, the National Wildlife Federation, Idaho Rivers United, the Sierra Club, the Endangered Species Coalition, the Idaho Conservation League, Defenders of Wildlife and the Natural Resources Defense Council also praised Simpson's proposal.

___

(c)2021 Tri-City Herald (Kennewick, Wash.)

Visit Tri-City Herald (Kennewick, Wash.) at www.tri-cityherald.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Processors are set to also express milk price on the basis of 4.2pc butterfat and 3.4pc protein

Dairy Industry Ireland (DII) is under fire from the countrys farm organisations for announcing changes to milk price metrics without farmer consultation.

The dairy processor representative body revealed this week that an extra line will be added to monthly milk price statements to allow for a better comparison of Irish milk prices with standard EU milk prices.

As such  and in parallel with the current 3.6pc / 3.3pc model  each milk processor will now also express their milk price on the basis of 4.2pc butterfat and 3.4pc protein (the EU standard).

Although the current pricing model will be retained, ICMSA and IFA have criticised the move.

ICMSA Dairy Committee chair Gerald Quain is urging co-op boards to assert authority, stating that no decision on milk price reporting to farmers should be taken by an external body where co-ops are represented by management and not farmer board members.

It is hugely disappointing that DII did not see fit to consult with other industry partners and stakeholders before announcing such a change to the media and we bluntly question the idea of an industry body making decisions for all milk processors in relation to price reporting for individual milk suppliers.

"How a co-op reports its price to the co-op suppliers is a matter for the board of that co-op.

"Milk price announcements and changes should  and will  continue to be based on the 3.3pc, 3.6pc metric and that will apply regardless of other metrics being introduced, he said.

He warned that simply rebasing milk price is not milk price transparency, nor does it allow for better comparisons between co-ops.

If milk processors are serious about price transparency then they should publish data on market returns on their product mix and stop hiding behind the commercially sensitive excuse.

If co-ops are going to publish data on a European solids standard alongside the Irish standard metric of 3.3pc and 3.6pc solids, then they should  on a monthly basis  publish where their milk price is relative to the LTO EU average and where in the EU league, their milk price stands.

"This would be real transparency and they could explain why the Irish price is consistently near the bottom of the league, Mr Quain concluded.

Optics

Meanwhile, Stephen Arthur acting IFA Dairy Committee chairman also condemned DIIs move to change base milk price quotations.

Last week, IFA wrote to all milk processors outlining its opposition to the proposed change and requested that the letters be read out at all milk processor board of management meetings next month.

The representative structure of milk processors is being undermined by management. Farmers have been side-lined. There is no consultation with elected representatives.

This is a change sought solely by management, not by suppliers, and must be reversed. Its all for optics.

"Processors want to look like they are paying more for milk when nothing has changed  we are still getting the same price for our milk as we did 25 years ago, he said.

To enhance transparency, IFA is advocating that milk price should be stated on a /kg milk solids basis.

The real threat from this change is that it will erode the gains farmers have made within the farm gate. Over time, we will end up supplying milk with higher milk solids, but for a lower price, he concluded.
Thanks to significant investment and a focus on digital transformation, New Statesman sees highest paid circulation for 40 years, with subscriptions revenue also up 77% over three years. With the title set to launch a new website in the coming months.

LONDON, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- New Statesman has announced digital subscription growth of 75% in just one year, with subscription revenues also up 77% in three years following significant investment in its journalism and the launch of new brands and associated digital services.

Registered users on the New Statesman website rose by 83% to more than 200,000 from January 2020 to February 2021, and 86% of New Statesman's circulation is now paid for. The New Statesman website has reached the highest level of audience growth since the introduction of a paywall in early 2018 and it now attracts around 2 million unique users a month. By the end of January this year, the New Statesman's paid circulation had reached 34,451. Print subscriptions rose 12% and the number of readers signed up to our New Statesman newsletters is now over 150,000.

Martin Ashplant, Chief Product Officer, New Statesman Media Group explains: "With the launch of the New Statesman's new website now imminent and following a period of significant, recent digital expansion, our focus is firmly on engagement and communities. This rapid growth in digital readership and paid-for subscriptions shows that the strategy is working and it enabled us to remove network advertising from the website last year."

Robert Jay, Chief Marketing Officer, New Statesman Media Group, who has been at the helm of several new product launches in recent months, says: "Growth has come as part of our focus to build New Statesman's brand and digital offering. The overall subscription numbers are very encouraging and heading in the right direction. To have paid digital subscriptions up 75% in such a short time is testament to the team and we are all set for the next phase of our digital expansion".

With several digital products launched, including a new and improved website underway, the media group's mission remains the same: to analyse and explain the defining issues driving change in the world today.

New Statesman Editor-in-Chief, Jason Cowley adds: "At this time of multifaceted crisis, our response has been to accelerate investment and invest in journalism. In recent months, Philip Collins, John Gray, Chris Deerin, Rachel Cunliffe and Louise Perryhave joined the team as exclusive NS writers and we are planning to hire even more outstanding writers. The New Statesman has successfully rebuilt from a low base over recent years and we are now in a position to accelerate our expansion - which includes international expansion under the leadership of Jeremy Cliffe and the launch of a new website. I am delighted by our organic growth and that, across all of our platforms, we are reaching more engaged readers than ever before. I would like congratulate the whole team on all their efforts."

New Statesman has successfully managed to reduce controlled free and bulk copies by 49%, with actively purchased copies now accounting for 86% of its circulation, up from 70% in 2019. Its multi-platform publishing model has ensured the newly revamped offering is conquering the digital space.

The New Statesman Media Group also launched a stable of 'Monitor' digital brands in recent months, headed by four top editors, Courtney Fingar, Philippa Nuttall Jones, Sommer Mathis and Pete Swabey. Its titles now include eight vertical brands, besides New Statesman, which include Investment Monitor, Energy Monitor, City Monitor, Tech Monitor, Spear's, Elite Traveller, The World of Fine Wine and Press Gazette. Alongside this, New Statesman Media Group is set to announce the launch of LeadMonitor.ai, a unique marketing solution which offers through-the-funnel content marketing and lead generation via its range of premium B2B and B2C brands, through first-party insights to an audience of over 89m users.

For more information, contact:

Sharon Ezzeldin, Head of Corporate Communications and PR

New Statesman Media Group

Tel: + 44 (0) 7442668441

About New Statesman

The New Statesman, our founding title,?is the leading progressive political and cultural magazine in the United Kingdom. Established as a weekly review of politics and literature in 1913, the New Statesman is celebrated?for its progressive and liberal politics, its intelligence, its range of opinions and the quality of its writing and analysis. We launched 107 years ago as a journal for "rational and scientific method". Since then, we have brought a liberal sensibility, sceptical politics and an open mind to everything that we do. In this new digital era, we continue to be committed to truth-telling and journalistic excellence. Now our goal is to?expand our coverage internationally as we analyse and explain the?defining?political, economic, cultural, technological and social issues of our time. The effects of technological disruption, changes in investment flows, the clean energy transition and the shifting roles of cities and nations are key issues shaping the world today. Our mission is to understand and then explain these key issues. We do that through our network of new Monitor sites which include City Monitor, Investment Monitor, Energy Monitor, Tech Monitor and Lead Monitor and through the New Statesman, showing how the issues are converging and why they matter so much to our readers and partners.

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It's been well over a year since the Coronavirus broke out and was first reported in China's Wuhan Province.

Since then, many countries, including the United States, have accused China of not coming clean on the origins of the virus, which has claimed 2.34 million lives.

Now, a team of 14 scientists, belonging to the World Health Organisation (WHO), investigating several accusations, including that the virus might have leaked from a lab in Wuhan, have concluded their probe.

According to a report in Daily Mail, the WHO investigators have backed the ruling Communist Party's claims that "cold-chain products" such as Australian beef, may have caused the initial outbreak.

Peter Embarek, the leader of the WHO team, also said that studies should be carried out to find if the virus was imported into the country, adding it was "extremely unlikely" that the virus leaked from a lab. They even went on to declare that no further study should be undertaken into the theory.

In October, China had claimed that SARS-CoV2 broke out in the various parts of the world in 2019 but it was the only one to have reported and acted first. The country also rubbished the widely-held view that the deadly contagion originated in Wuhan before turning out to be a pandemic.

The findings of the WHO report come as a shot in the arm for the Chinese who have repeatedly denied that letting up on their part cost so many human lives across the world.

But the report will arm the critics of WHO, who always feared the trip would become a part of "Chinese whitewashing."

Reacting sharply to the WHO report, Australia's Health Minister Greg Hunt said it was not surprising that there are no surprises there.

The overwhelming likelihood is that you have an animal-based source and that the virus is likely to arise somewhere in the vicinity of the first human cases, Hunt said.

Australian Senator Matt Canavan, too, was critical of the investigation and said: "Through this whole process, Chinas acted like it had something to hide and it has frustrated the inquiry, dragged it out.

We needed this inquiry to start pretty much straight away if there was any hope of finding conclusions and it hasnt, Canavan was quoted as saying by news.com.au.

In the past, the Chinese have repeatedly pinned the blame for the pandemic on other countries, including Bangladesh, the US, Greece, India, Italy, Czech Republic, Russia, and Serbia.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian had even said: "The tracing of the virus origin will most likely involve multiple countries and localities."
Edo State Governor, Godwin Obaseki, on Tuesday, backtracked on his earlier position on land for herders in the state.

PREMIUM TIMES reported how Mr Obaseki, in 2019, during the now suspended controversial RUGA programme of the federal government, was among the governors who rejected the idea of the state government providing land for herders to build a settlement and grazing area for their cattle.

We assure Edo people that Governor Obaseki will not cede their rights and land to anybody, as our programmes as a sovereign state do not run on the back of any external entity, a Government House statement quoted the Edo governor as saying then, in July 2019.

In all the agricultural programmes being executed by the Obaseki administration, the safety, security and prosperity of our people are the top priority and non-negotiable, the statement added.

Mr Obaseki, however, reversed himself on Tuesday, saying Edo State would create a grazing area for herders to curb clashes with farmers.

The governor said this while on a fact-finding tour to Udo, Ovia South West Local Government Area of the state to assess the impact of the herders-farmers conflict in the state.

We will create an area where the cattle will go regularly to eat, as they must not go to peoples farms. This will stop cattle from moving around the community, including in farmlands, a statement by Crusoe Osagie, the governors spokesperson, quoted Mr Obaseki as saying so at a town hall meeting during the tour.

Mr Obaseki also visited a traditional leader, the Iyase of Udo, Patrick Igbinidu, in his palace.

The governor, who was accompanied on the tour by the head of security agencies in the state, warned against policising the herder-farmer conflict in Nigeria.

As a government, we do not believe that we should politicise security. It is important that we get the facts right and understand what exactly is going on. We had reports about the crisis or impending crisis around this axis.

We have also had all sorts of anxieties. Well, I will call them speculations on social media about herdsmen being pushed off from neighboring states into this area and the escalating crisis or impending crisis.

Our position is that we have to manage this crisis carefully. Like I said, we should not politicise the issues of herdsmen in our society.

Mr Obaseki attributed the herdsmen crisis to environmental changes and called for a collective approach to solving it, rather than take it out of context because of cheap political gains to create crisis in the country.

The governor, however, said it was unacceptable for herders to carry weapons in Edo.

We do not accept the situation whereby anybody will be herding cattle with AK-47 rifles and other dangerous weapons. We also understand that there are bandits and criminals who pretend to be herders but undertake criminal activities such as kidnapping in the name and guise of being herdsmen.

I have always argued that we should separate these people and deal with each one accordingly. Today, we are here to undertake assessments ourselves and to assure the people of Ovia South West of adequate security being provided by the government to protect the people.

The Iyase of Udo, Mr Igbinidu, told Mr Obaseki the security challenges in his community have been on for a very long time.

Farmers always complain about the activities of the herdsmen. When I received such reports, I had to call both parties to resolve the issues immediately. We have been on it for a very long time, the traditional leader said.

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The leader of the Fulani Community in the area, Muhammad Buhari, thanked the governor for the fact-finding tour to the area.

Mr Buhari said the Fulani community in the area are peace-loving people who have lived in the community for years. He said his people will always support peace.

In a visit to another community, Odighi community in Uhiere Ward of Ovia-North East Local Government Area of the state, Governor Obaseki said bandits, who disguise as herders to perpetrate violence, kidnapping and robbery, will be treated as criminals.

We must separate the issues of security and politics and never accept the issue of criminality. We have always lived with herders and those we know act responsibly. The ones we see today are different and act otherwise. These ones that cause violence, kidnapping, robbery are criminals and must be treated as such, he said.
I said some things in a videoed conversation that are not fitting for the role I am privileged to serve, he said in a statement. I own that. I have many flaws. Being passionate coupled with an occasional lapse in restraint of tongue are at least two of them. I regret the words I chose, and I apologize for my insensitive comments.
Washington, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 10th Feb, 2021 ) :Democratic lawmakers prosecuting Donald Trump are set to detail their case against him Wednesday at his impeachment trial, in a longshot bid to convince skeptical Republican senators they should convict the former president.

Trump's second impeachment trial opened Tuesday with Democrats showing harrowing video footage of his supporters' January 6 assault on the US Capitol, where they smashed down doors, broke into the Senate chamber and led riots that left five people dead.

Trump faces a single charge of inciting the insurrection after he told enraged Republican supporters near the White House to "fight like hell." Securing a conviction is highly unlikely, as the Democrats would need 17 Republican senators to vote with them to make a two-thirds majority.

So far, only six Republicans have agreed that the trial is even constitutional in the first place.

Following Tuesday's opening statements from Democratic "impeachment managers" and Trump's lawyers, both sides will flesh out their cases starting Wednesday, with the Democrats going first.

Under impeachment rules, each side is allowed up to 16 hours over two days to present their case, starting at noon (1700 GMT).

Senators will also be given a total of four hours for questioning.

On Tuesday, senators voted 56-44 in favor of the constitutionality of the historic trial, rejecting a bid by Trump's lawyers to throw it out on grounds that a former president cannot be tried by lawmakers.

Earlier, both sides presented their opening cases, with Democrats arguing that Trump broke his oath in a naked bid to retain power after losing the November election to Joe Biden.

Refusing to accept his defeat, Trump spread lies about vote rigging and repeatedly pressured officials, including then vice president Mike Pence, to try and stop the transfer of power.

"If Congress were to just stand completely aside in the face of such an extraordinary crime against the Republic, it would invite future presidents to use their power without any fear of accountability," Democratic impeachment manager Joe Neguse said.

Video from the mayhem played back inside the ornate Senate packed Tuesday's biggest punch.

Senators -- who witnessed the events firsthand when they had to be rushed to safety -- watched raw footage of Trump's speech and the crowd's ensuing assault on the Capitol.

The video montage showed the mob chanting pro-Trump slogans as it smashed through doors, swarmed police, and managed for the first time in history to disrupt the Congressional vote certifying the election.

"If that's not an impeachable offense, then there is no such thing," lead impeachment manager Jamie Raskin said.

Trump lawyer David Schoen, however, said the Senate had no jurisdiction to try Trump once he had left office and warned that the impeachment threatened to "tear this country apart." It will leave the United States "far more divided and our standing around the world will be badly broken," he argued.

Republican Senator Bill Cassidy, who voted to allow the trial to proceed, tweeted that the Democrats had "much stronger constitutional arguments" than Trump's lawyers.

Independent Senator Bernie Sanders, who votes with Democrats, told AFP he thought the first day of the trial was "interesting," but he would not be drawn on whether he believed the compelling video montage would sway Republicans.

Trump is the first president ever to face two impeachment trials -- he was already acquitted in 2020 of abuse of power -- as well as the first in history to be tried after leaving the White House.

His team is basing its case largely on the procedural argument that a former president cannot be tried, calling the Senate trial "absurd." They also argue that whatever Trump said during his January 6 rally is protected by the constitutional right to free speech and did not amount to ordering the assault on Congress.

A second acquittal is all but certain for Trump, who is holed up in his luxury Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

Amped up on four years of Trump's populist claims to be fighting for ordinary people against the elites, huge numbers of Republican voters continue to support the ex-president, pushing their party further to the right.
The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company

Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-11 03:37:06|Editor: huaxia

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CAIRO, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- The total number of COVID-19 cases in Turkey reached 2,556,837 on Wednesday after 8,642 new cases were reported, while Bahrain approved Russia's Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use.

The death toll from the COVID-19 in Turkey rose by 95 to 27,093, while the total recoveries climbed to 2,445,285 after 7,903 more cases recovered in the last 24 hours, according to local authorities.

The country started mass vaccination of health workers against COVID-19 on Jan. 14 after the authorities approved the emergency use of the Chinese CoronaVac vaccine. More than 2,810,000 people have been vaccinated so far.

Turkey expects to start the human trials of three COVID-19 vaccines developed locally in the upcoming period, Turkish Industry and Technology Minister Mustafa Varank announced on Wednesday.

Speaking at a televised interview with the state-run Anadolu agency, Varank said the jabs are inactive, virus-like particle (VLP), and adenovirus-based.

"We have completed all the necessary studies, pre-clinic examinations, and toxicity studies for these three vaccines," he noted, adding that the intermediate results were submitted to the Health Ministry for approval. "Following a series of evaluations, they will decide whether to grant permission for human trials or not," he noted.

Bahrain's health regulator on Wednesday approved Russia's COVID-19 vaccine Sputnik V for emergency use.

The National Health Regulatory Authority(NHRA) stated that the decision to authorise the Sputnik V vaccine was based on data provided by the manufacturing company and results of an expanded study.

The Sputnik V vaccine becomes the fourth COVID-19 vaccine offered to all people in Bahrain above the age of 18 free of cost, following the approval of vaccines from Sinopharm, Pfizer/BioNTech, and Oxford-AstraZeneca.

Iran's Health Ministry reported 7,585 daily COVID-19 cases on Wednesday, raising the total nationwide infections to 1,488,981.

The pandemic has so far claimed 58,686 lives in Iran, up by 61 in the past 24 hours, while a total of 1,272,287 people have recovered from the disease, said Sima Sadat Lari, the spokeswoman for Iranian Ministry of Health and Medical Education.

Iranian Health Ministry started the COVID-19 vaccination in Iran on Tuesday using Russia-made vaccine Sputnik V.

The Iraqi Health Ministry reported on Wednesday 2,282 new COVID-19 cases, the highest daily record in 2021, bringing the tally to 634,539.

The ministry also reported six new deaths, raising the death toll from the infectious virus to 13,140, while the total recoveries in Iraq climbed by 802 to 602,820.

In a statement, the ministry revealed that it had proposed a package of measures to the Higher Committee for Health and National Safety to control the spread of the virus, "including applying stricter measures if the epidemiological situation continues to deteriorate."

Israel's Ministry of Health reported 5,725 new COVID-19 cases on Wednesday, raising the tally of confirmed cases in the country to 708,827.

The death toll from the COVID-19 in Israel reached 5,244 after 42 new fatalities were added, while the number of patients in serious condition decreased from 1,069 to 1,031, out of 1,605 hospitalized patients.

The total recoveries rose to 635,506, with 9,436 newly recovered cases, while the active cases decreased to 68,077.

The number of people vaccinated against the COVID-19 in Israel has surpassed 3.64 million, or 39.1 percent of the total population, since the vaccination campaign began on Dec. 20, 2020.

Kuwait reported on Wednesday 987 new COVID-19 cases and five more deaths, bringing the total number of confirmed cases in the country to 173,983 and the death toll to 980, the Kuwaiti Health Ministry announced.

The ministry also announced the recovery of 553 more patients, taking the total recoveries in Kuwait to 163,264. Meanwhile, it said that 9,739 coronavirus patients are receiving treatment.

The Qatari Health Ministry on Wednesday announced 451 new COVID-19 infections, raising the total number of confirmed cases in the Gulf state to 155,453.

Meanwhile, 260 more recovered from the virus, bringing the overall recoveries to 147,451, while no new deaths were reported, keeping the tally at 253 for the second day running.

The Omani Health Ministry on Wednesday announced 190 new COVID-19 infections, raising the total number of confirmed cases in the country to 136,377.

Meanwhile, 166 people recovered during the past 24 hours, taking the overall recoveries to 128,255, while one person reportedly died, pushing the tally up to 1,537.

Morocco's total number of COVID-19 cases rose to 476,689 on Wednesday after 564 new cases were registered during the past 24 hours.

According to a statement by the Ministry of Health, the death toll mounted to 8,436 as 12 COVID-19 patients died in the last 24 hours. The total number of recoveries from COVID-19 in Morocco increased to 456,751 after 719 new ones were added.

Meanwhile, 746,116 people have been vaccinated so far against COVID-19 in Morocco.

Lebanon registered on Wednesday 3,157 new COVID-19 cases, raising the total number in the country to 328,023. Meanwhile, the death toll from the virus went up by 66 to 3,803. Enditem
On Wednesday, a ceremony was held in Odesa to hand over 20 armored humvees and 84 inflatable boats of various types from the United States to the Naval Forces of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine said.

"U.S. Naval Attache Peter Mallory and Marine Corps Attache Dan Schierling participated in a ceremony in Odesa commemorating delivery of 20 humvees and 84 boats to the Ukrainian Navy in December, a demonstration of U.S. commitment to helping Ukraine defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity," the U.S. Embassy wrote on Twitter on Wednesday.
This time last year, Paul Oakley Stovall was playing the role of George Washington in the musical phenomenon Hamilton and enjoying every minute of it. Then Covid struck and everything changed, the iconic show created by Lin-Manuel Miranda just one of the thousands of productions that went dark around the world due to lockdown.

I had taken over [the role] in early September 2018. It had been a year and a half. I was coasting along, I was happy to do it for another couple of years. It was great craic, as you say, says Stovall.

That last sentence gives a clue to what happened next for Stovall, who is now hunkered down in Cork, a place he had never even heard of until a couple of months ago. The performer is lending his support and creative talents to Douglass Week, a festival organised by researchers at UCC, commemorating the life and legacy of Frederick Douglass, the African American abolitionist and social reformer who escaped slavery and paid a historic visit to Ireland just over 175 years ago.

There were a lot of things I could have imagined happening when Hamilton got shut down, this [coming to Cork] was not one of them, says Stovall.

Stovall arrived in Dublin over two months ago, when the lockdown had eased, to research and write a planned television series about the life of Douglass.

I had been introduced to some great historians who were helping me with research but I wanted to see Ireland, and as restrictions were lessened, I could get here and walk in his footsteps in Dublin. Almost as soon as I landed in Ireland, I was introduced to Caroline Schroeter (UCC) who is running Douglass Week. She was thinking perhaps I could read a speech, walking down a street where Douglass had been in Cork. I didnt know where Cork was. She told me this is where he had spent much of his time during his visit.

Stovall arrived in Cork last week, having been given special permission to travel, and, along with Hamilton castmate Nikhil Saboo, is working on several events for Douglass Week, including a collaboration with the young people who attend Cork Migrant Centre and their mentors, DJ Stevie G and rapper Raphael Olympio. Stovall is very much aware of the echoes of the migrant experience that resound in Hamilton, which follows the story of the first US secretary of the treasury who was born in Puerto Rico.

Alexander Hamilton stepped out on faith, went to a new place and tried to make the best of it. He was wildly successful of course, that cant be everyones story, but he is a great inspiration of what can be done.

Stovall says starring as George Washington in the first US touring production of Hamilton was an adrenaline-fuelled experience.

Its like a moving train, you just have to grab on with both hands, and dive in. You cant spend much time thinking Im in Hamilton, isnt that wonderful?. There really is no time to do that. Physically, mentally, spiritually, you are on a juggernaut and it moves quickly. He says the smash-hit show has connected with audiences around the world because it is a masterful blend of the old and new.

The life of Frederick Douglass is being marked by a week of events in Cork.

Its incredible. While Lin-Manuel had previously had a big hit with In The Heights, nobody could have imagined that Hamilton would go to this level.

"The combination of hip-hop and rap  I equate it to the groundlings in Shakespeares time, he was giving a new language to the people who might not be able to afford to go to the theatre but were ready to hear new words and new ways of speaking. And then, at the same time, he cannily constructed a very traditional western story  the hero, anti-hero, the villain, the father figure, the love story, the three companions that travel with him it is like Star Wars or the Wizard of Oz. Those who are possibly intimidated by the hip-hop or the fast pace, are immediately comforted by that traditional framework.

Stovall has also benefited from Mirandas expertise himself.

Ive written a new musical myself, and he has read it, listened to it, given me notes and pushed me along. That has been very nice of him because he is a busy guy, he has got one or two things going on, laughs Stovall.

The musical he has written is loosely based on an incident that happened when Stovall worked for Barack and Michelle Obama. He was employed by the former US presidents campaign and administration for seven years, in events management. Having also worked with the Bidens, he looked on with a mixture of sadness and happiness at events in Washington DC last month. He was in Dublin when rioters stormed the Capitol.

What I felt was that this was a long time coming. I was sad. I wasnt angry, I was very sad. Im still sad about it. However, these emotions were leavened somewhat by the inauguration of Joe Biden, especially the acclaimed recital of the poem The Hill We Climb by Amanda Gorman, in which there were two allusions to Hamilton, both of which were inspired by the words of George Washington in the show.

I caught the first mention, that everyone would sit under their own vine, and then she said history has its eyes on us. Both of the lines she used were my lines, or rather Lins lines, that I humbly tried to say correctly each night. I thought, well, heres a 22-year-old super- intelligent writer, poet, black girl  of course Hamilton is part of our lives now, it doesnt surprise me at all that she used it. I thought it was wonderful.

Stovall says he is delighted to be honouring the work of Frederick Douglass but that he is also determined to spread the word about how Irish women especially supported him in his fight to abolish slavery.

Douglass blazed a trail of fearlessness and his desire for autonomy led him throughout his life. And it is not lost on me that it was the women of Ireland, who also wanted autonomy, who supported him.

"They were running the anti-slavery and abolitionist groups  Isabel Jennings from Cork, Hannah Webb from Dublin, Mary McCracken from Belfast; Rebecca and Susanna Fisher from Limerick. Their voices were so lost and I am going to push these names out. These were the woman who organised a global sugar boycott. It makes me tear up, what they were willing to sacrifice for something they just saw was wrong.

Stovall plans to return to the US at the end of February, to rehearse a virtual show in his hometown of Chicago. He is also optimistic that his TV series will be picked up, having received the imprimatur of Ken Morris, great-great-grandson of Frederick Douglass.

He says he will be back to Ireland at the first opportunity. You come to Ireland, and it just grabs you by the waist and says lets dance, it really does.

Douglass Week runs until Sunday, Feb 14. All events are online and free. www.douglassincork.com
Michael Kevane, an economics professor in San Jose, California, didnt give a second thought to parking his 2005 Toyota Prius in his driveway one rainy evening last month. But the next morning, when his son Elliot went to start up the car, it sounded like a jackhammer, Kevane said. The whole block could hear the noise.

The reason for the ruckus: A thief in the night had made off with the cars catalytic converter, a critical emissions-control device that contains precious metals more valuable than gold.

Two days later, Kevanes sister, Jean, who lives in Los Angeles, had the catalytic converter stolen from her 2003 Honda Accord LX.

I thought, This cant be a coincidence, Kevane said.

It wasnt.

Stricter car emissions rules around the world  particularly in China, which has scrambled in recent years to get its dire air pollution problem under control  have sent demand for the precious metals in catalytic converters surging. That has pushed up the asking price for some of the precious metals used in the device  like palladium and rhodium  to record highs.

From about $500 an ounce five years ago, the price of palladium quintupled to hit a record of $2,875 an ounce last year, and is now hovering between $2,000 and $2,500 an ounce, above the price of gold. Rhodium prices have skyrocketed more than 3,000% from about $640 an ounce five years ago to a record $21,900 an ounce this year, roughly 12 times the price of gold.

The soaring prices may be accelerating the shift to electric cars, analysts said, noting that catalytic converters now make up a much larger proportion of a gasoline-powered vehicles cost than they did even just a year ago.

The metals prices, in turn, are fueling a black market in stolen catalytic converters, which can be sawed off from the belly of a car in minutes and fetch several hundred dollars at a scrapyard, which then sells it to recyclers who extract the metals. These global trends in emissions regulations, metals markets and larceny appear to have converged that rainy night in Kevanes driveway.

Nationwide, police are reporting a surge in cases.

James Tensuan/NYT

In St. Louis, catalytic converter thefts jumped more than eightfold, from 50 in 2019 to 420 last year, with the trend gaining speed near the end of the year into early 2021. In Lexington, South Carolina, sheriffs deputies responded to 144 catalytic converter thefts between July and December, nearly triple the number of cases over the year-earlier period.

Converter thefts in Wichita, Kansas, also almost tripled in 2020 compared with the previous year, to 547 cases from 191, and the pace picked up in January, with 102 reported cases just that month. (Other police departments, including those in San Jose and New York, said such detailed data was not available.)

People are just trying to make ends meet. Then, all of a sudden, they have a thousand-dollar repair bill they didnt expect, said Sgt. Trevor McDonald of the Wichita Police. Weve also seen this increase at a time weve seen a lot of job loss in the U.S."

The bottom line: We have a finite number of detectives, and it appears right now we have an infinite number of cases, McDonald said.

Catalytic converters, the shiny bulbous contraptions found between a cars engine and the muffler, might seem like an unlikely target of a national crime wave. Required in all gasoline cars and trucks sold in the United States since 1975, the converters have a honeycomb-like interior  coated with precious metals like palladium, rhodium and platinum  that scrubs the worst toxic pollutants from the cars exhaust.

The presence of those metals has always made catalytic converters a target, and incidents of theft  which can set owners back $2,000 in repairs  go back years. But a global trend toward stricter tailpipe emissions rules, as well as more rigorous enforcement after the Volkswagen emissions scandal, in which the automaker illicitly modified its vehicles pollution controls to seem cleaner than they really were, has led to a surge in demand for higher-performance catalytic converters and the valuable metals that make them work.

Rhodium, in particular, is effective in reducing levels of nitrogen oxide from a gasoline cars tailpipe emissions. And weve had a very steep step-up in nitrogen oxide rules around the world, said Wilma Swarts, director of platinum group metals at the London-based precious metals research consulting firm Metals Focus.

About 80% of demand for palladium and rhodium now comes from the automotive sector. At the same time, the effects of the pandemic on mining in South Africa, a major producer of rhodium, has kept supply limited.

This is why youve seen this very dramatic rise in demand and prices, Swarts said.

For automakers, the metals boom has jacked up the cost of producing gasoline vehicles. Max Layton, a London-based commodity analyst at Citi, estimates that soaring metal prices added $18 billion to the global auto industrys production costs in 2019, gobbling up 15% of their total cash flow, and that those costs surged further in 2020.

At current prices, he said, the industry as a whole was set to spend more than $40 billion this year just on metals for catalytic converters. The escalating costs, Layton said, were putting pressure on automakers to shift to battery electric vehicles as quickly as possible.

Some owners of gasoline vehicles are going to extremes to protect their vehicles.

After being hit with three converter thefts in quick succession last year, Jerry Turriff, proprietor of Jerrys Certified Service and Towing in Milwaukee, has resorted to deflating the tires of some of his customers most at-risk vehicles to deter thieves from crawling underneath.

James Tensuan/NYT

Its unbelievable, Turriff said. Now if I have a vehicle I thinks going to be targeted, I take the air out the tires, so they cant slither underneath.

He has spotted the thieves on his security-camera footage  usually alone, entering his property in the dead of night, with a big duffel bag carrying all his junk, he said. (Stealing the converters can be treacherous for the thieves, too. Last year, a Kansas City man died after the Prius he was stealing the converter from crushed him to death.)

The last vehicle targeted, in November, was a Toyota Tundra pickup truck. Turriff replaced the stolen part, but the owner had the part stolen again several weeks later, he said.

Some states have started to require scrapyards and other recyclers to check photo IDs before buying used catalytic converters. California even requires businesses to take a photograph or video clip of the seller, and retain those records for two years. But different rules between states makes tracking and enforcement almost impossible, law enforcement officials say.

Online, ads abound of scrapyards willing to pay quick cash for catalytic converters. One site advertised payouts of up to $500 for certain foreign models. Older foreign models tend to contain more of the precious metals than newer ones.

Prius converters also fetch a higher price because their gasoline engines arent in as much use, and so it can take longer for the car to burn out the precious metals.

Some Toyota owners, in fact, are demanding that the automaker add anti-theft protections like metal shields to converters to make stealing them more difficult.

Ed Hellwig, a spokesperson for Toyota, called catalytic converter theft an industrywide challenge and said the Prius was no more at risk than any other vehicle. He urged owners to follow the basics to protect their vehicles, including parking in well-lit areas.

Many buyers accept old catalytic converters by mail, with free shipping. And YouTube tutorials are available for would-be sellers.

J.C. Fontanive, a sculptor in Brooklyn, bought a used 2008 Prius in the summer, spurred by concerns over taking public transportation during the pandemic. Then last month, he went to drive it to a friends and it sounds like NASCAR, he said.

Fontanive didnt have full auto insurance coverage, so he had to pay $3,200 out of pocket for a replacement and repairs  half the price he had paid for the car itself.

Determined to deter future thieves, Fontanive, who often uses metal in his artworks, drew on his metalworking skills. He bought an aftermarket metal guard for his catalytic converter, then made his own modifications, with security screws and hardened steel bell pins that would be hard to saw through.

I really went overboard, he said. If they look under my Prius now, theyre just going to be like: No way.

For car owners who arent trained in metalworking or dont want to dole out money for a metal guard, police advise parking in secure garages or well-lit areas. Etching a vehicle identification number or license plate ID on the converter could also help track it down if it does get stolen.

The Kevanes are still dealing with the aftermath. The younger Kevane, who works at a Whole Foods and at an immigration law firm, recently had to drive his Prius  its exhaust blaring  to a nearby repair shop.

God, its embarrassing, he said. People probably will think I tricked out my Prius.

He brought the car to Tony Nguyen at Bayshore Automotive. It was the second catalytic converter theft that day Nguyen had gotten a call about  a first in his 25 years in business. A used car lot across the street had eight converters stolen last week, he said.

Reached by phone, an exasperated Nguyen asked a reporter optimistically, Are you going to try to solve it? He sounded disappointed when the reporter said that only a news article would ensue.

Its getting worse every day, Nguyen said. Someone has to do something.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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Drug trial that could improve respiratory recovery from COVID-19 now underway Credit: Shutterstock

A clinical trial has commenced this week to test whether a drug called Almitrine can help people who are seriously ill with COVID-19 to recover from the disease.

Patients suffering from COVID-19 pneumonia often develop very low levels of oxygen, called hypoxia, in the arterial blood supplying the body. Researchers from the University of Oxford hypothesize that the underlying problem is that the virus disrupts a normal process in the lungs called hypoxic pulmonary vasoconstriction, which diverts blood away from the diseased, non-functional parts of the lung and towards the parts of the lung that are still working properly. If the lungs are prevented from diverting blood to better-oxygenated lung segments, then this can cause the profound hypoxia from which patients with COVID-19 may die. The supportive therapy in hospitals aims to prevent this by using supplementary oxygen and ventilators to support breathing.

Almitrine bismesylate, a drug first developed in France, has been successful in treating acute respiratory distress syndrome by constricting the blood vessels in regions of the lung where the oxygen is low. Researchers say Almitrine could have the same effect in COVID-19 patients, with the potential to help restore the natural protective process in the lungs and increase oxygen levels in the arterial blood. The trial team hopes that administering this drug to COVID-19 patients will consequently reduce the amount of other respiratory support the patient needs.

According to the lead researcher Professor Peter Robbins, "The primary idea behind medical treatment is that it is supportiveits aim is to keep people alive while they make their recovery from the disease. In a way, you can view the potential support from Almitrine as extending people's individual runway to make a recovery from the disease. The idea behind our trial is to enhance the supportive treatmentextend people's runway."

The clinical trial commenced this week at the Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust in Reading. Almitrine will be administered orally over a seven-day period to determine whether it is effective in reducing the need for other forms of ventilatory support.

Professor Robbins said, "I am pleased about our decision to use oral, rather than intravenous, almitrine for the trial. This lower tech approach could also be used in low- and middle-income countries which maybe have no, or insufficient, infrastructure to provide oxygen. As an oral drug, it really does have the potential to extend the runway to recovery for many people."

Clinicians aim to recruit in the region of 116 patients in total across three centers, starting with the first center, the Royal Berkshire Hospital, this week. The second and third centers will be the Oxford University Hospitals' John Radcliffe Hospital and University Hospital of Wales, Cardiff. The trial is expected to run for approximately 4 months.

Nicky Lloyd, Acting CEO of the Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust, said, "This trial offers a great opportunity to supplement our increasing understanding of COVID-19 and meet the need for new, cost-effective treatments. The Royal Berkshire Hospital is a research-active hospital, which is well-placed to improve care and outcomes for our patients by taking part in collaborative research studies."

Dr. Nick Talbot, Chief Investigator for the overall trial across the three sites, added, "If Almitrine proves beneficial for our patients, we think it would represent a really important new approach in the management of COVID-19."

Explore further Follow the latest news on the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak
On Monday, the Canadian embassy in China issued a statement on its official website, expressing "sincere regret" about staff members ordering T-shirts with WU-HAN emblazoned across what looks like a bat (the embassy called it "logo of a popular hip hop group"). The statement expressed "regret" for "the offence they may have caused".

Indeed, any Chinese citizen will take grave offence to any design linking Wuhan with a bat, more so after how certain biased Western media outlets and politicians badmouthed China not long after Wuhan residents battled the novel coronavirus outbreak.

However, the choice of the word "regret" does not hide what the embassy sincerely feels about such a grave offence. The least one would have expected from them would have been an "apology".

Some organizations prefer to avoid apologizing and simply say "sorry". However, the Canadian embassy chose the word "regret", which is 90 percent about "hoping it never happens again", 10 percent about "sensing what you feel" and zero percent about "knowing I have done wrong".

The Canadian embassy also said the T-shirts were being privately produced for their staff members. They did not say if those persons will be held responsible or if they will do anything to make amends. In fact, they didn't even say they will ensure there is no repeat of the incident in the future. That was left for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to say. At its press conference on Tuesday, the ministry said it had noticed the offenses made by Canadian embassy staff members and stressed that such incidents should never happen again.

There is ample reason to believe the Canadian embassy staff members will be sensitive in the future to not hurt Chinese sensibilities in this manner.
FBI Stringer in Oath Keepers Involved in Capitol Assault, FBI Affidavits Confirm Attack Was Preplanned

Feb. 9 , 2021 (EIRNS)Evidence that the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol was not a spontaneous insurrection, but was carefully preplanned, including involvement of FBI stringers embedded in extremist groups, continues to emerge. It was previously revealed that Enrique Tarrio, national chairman of the right-wing Proud Boys, also involved in the storming of the Capitol, had been a longtime FBI informant.

Now, in a Feb. 8 posting to his Just the News blog, investigative reporter John Solomon zeroes in on the case of one Thomas Edward Caldwell, a member of the Oath Keepers, which the Justice Department describes as a paramilitary group. According to Feb. 9 coverage in the Washington Post, Caldwells attorney Thomas Plofchan stated on Feb. 8 that Caldwell, a retired Navy lieutenant commander, was an intelligence officer in the Navy Reserve for 19 years, and worked as a section chief for the FBI from 2009 to 2010, has had a top-secret security clearance since 1979, and had done security work for the U.S. government. On Jan. 19, Caldwell was arrested and indicted along with two other Oath Keepers members, Jessica Marie Watkins and Donovan Ray Crowl, charged with conspiracy, destruction of government property, and unlawful entry on restricted building or grounds.

According to FBI affidavits, the three conspired with each other to forcibly storm the U.S. Capitol, and communicated with one another in advance of the incursionbeginning in November of 2020and planned their attack. Facebook and other social media posts from all three on Jan. 6 boasted that they had breached the Capitol. In one transmission that day, Watkins is quoted saying we have about 30-40 of us. We are sticking together and sticking to the plan, according to a Justice Department press release Jan. 27. In a Facebook posting, Caldwell also said he was coordinating with Oath Keepers from other states.

More broadly, as Solomon reports, there are a dozen FBI affidavits supporting charges against more than 200 defendants, showing rioters engaged in advance planning on social media sites. This included training, casing sites, identifying commanders on scene, and requests for donations of cash as well as combat and communications gear. More than half a dozen of the suspects are now charged with conspiracy to commit violence for actions predating the Jan. 6 riots. Court documents identify early actions dating back to November, with planning and rhetoric accelerating after Christmas of 2020, Solomon documents.
BATON ROUGE, La. - Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana joined Democrats in voting against ending Donald Trump's impeachment trial Tuesday, a surprise reversal that Cassidy said was a response to the former president's lawyers doing a terrible job of arguing their case.

Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., walks on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Feb. 9, 2021. The second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump began Tuesday. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

BATON ROUGE, La. - Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana joined Democrats in voting against ending Donald Trump's impeachment trial Tuesday, a surprise reversal that Cassidy said was a response to the former president's lawyers doing a terrible job of arguing their case.

Cassidy was among six Republican senators who sided with Democrats on the question of whether a former president can be tried after leaving office. The Louisiana senator's position was a switch from January, when he voted to end the proceedings on the grounds that they were unconstitutional.

The vote drew swift criticism from Republicans in the senator's deeply conservative state. But Cassidy said Trump's attorneys didn't make their case. While the Democrats' impeachment managers were focused, they were organized, relying on precedent and legal scholars, Trump's team was disorganized, random, had nothing," he said.

"They talked about many things, but they didn't talk about the issue at hand," Cassidy said after the vote.

Still, the senator said his decision to move ahead with the trial shouldn't be taken as a sign he will later vote to convict the former president. In recent calls with reporters, including one Tuesday morning, Cassidy has refused to say whether he believes Trump committed an impeachable offence.

I have not yet decided on how I will vote, he said.

Trump is the first president to face impeachment charges after leaving office. The House accused him of inciting an insurrection for his role in the Jan 6. siege on the U.S. Capitol. Hundreds of rioters ransacked the building to try to stop the certification of Democrat Joe Bidens victory, a domestic attack on the nations seat of government unlike any in its history. Five people died.

The Republican Party of Louisiana quickly issued a statement Tuesday criticizing Cassidy for his vote and praising Louisiana's junior GOP senator, John Kennedy, for voting against moving ahead with the impeachment trial. The Louisiana GOP said it was profoundly disappointed by Cassidy's vote.

We feel that an impeachment trial of a private citizen is not only an unconstitutional act, but also an attack on the very foundation of American democracy, which will have far reaching and unforeseen consequences for our republic, the party's statement said.

Cassidy won reelection this fall to a six-year term, giving him some time to make amends with his party. But he's already received criticism for accepting the Electoral College vote for Biden and for acknowledging the Democratic president's victory weeks ahead of many of his colleagues.

A local Republican women's club sent Cassidy a letter in December telling him they felt betrayed after he declared Biden had won the presidential election.

Kennedy, who is up for reelection next year, has issued statements panning the impeachment trial as unconstitutional and calling it "a thinly veiled effort by the uber-elites in our country, who look down on most Americans, to denigrate further those people who chose to vote for President Trump and not vote for President Biden.
Former first lady Michelle Obama announced Tuesday that she is launching a new childrens show revolving around puppets and food.

The new Netflix series is titled Waffles + Mochi. The 10-episode series is set to debut March 16 and in addition to appearing in the series, Obama also is an executive producer.

The show features two puppets are named  you guessed it  Waffles and Mochi. Obama goes on to explain a little about the show on Instagram, saying Its all about good food: discovering it, cooking it, and of course, eating it. These two will take us on adventures all around the world to explore new ingredients and try out new recipes.

According to a press release about the show, viewers will be taken on adventures to meet renowned chefs, home cooks, kids and celebrities.

Whether theyre picking potatoes in the Andes of Peru, sampling spices in Italy, or making Miso in Japan, these curious explorers uncover the wonder of food and discover every meal is a chance to make new friends.

The show is produced by Higher Ground Productions, a company owned by Obama and her husband, former President Barack Obama. In 2018, the Obamas signed a multi-year agreement with Netflix.

Obama says the show is an extension of the work she did to promote childrens health when she was first lady. Adding, To be quite honest, I wish a program like this had been around when my girls were young.

She also hopes it will bring a bit of light and laughter to homes around the world.

FIRST LOOK: Waffles + Mochi.



The first original preschool series from Higher Ground, and starring @MichelleObama herself, is coming to Netflix on March 16! pic.twitter.com/vKVaZ3vk2l  Strong Black Lead (@strongblacklead) February 9, 2021

Read more:
FY 20 results

 FY 20 NPAT (underlying) of A$295 million (FY 19: A$439 million) reflecting the impacts of COVID-19 on our clients, our business and the broader economy and financial markets. FY 20 statutory NPAT of A$177 million, reversing A$2.5 billion loss in FY 19.

 Assets under management (AUM) in Australian wealth management (down 8 per cent) and AMP Capital (down 7 per cent), reflecting volatile investment markets and net cash outflows, which included the Australian Governments early release of super program (A$1.8 billion).

 As guided, the AMP Board has resolved not to declare a final dividend for FY 20, following A$344 million paid to shareholders in the form of a 10c per share special dividend at 1H 20. The board is committed to restarting the groups capital management initiatives including the payment of dividends, share buyback and other capital initiatives in 2021. This is subject to the completion of the portfolio review, market conditions and business performance.

Portfolio review

 The review has confirmed AMPs transformation strategy for the AMP Australia (Australian wealth management and AMP Bank) and New Zealand wealth management businesses is likely to be the optimal outcome for shareholders. The AMP Board has therefore concluded the review of these assets.

 AMP continues to review options for maximising the ability to grow and invest in AMP Capital including exploring partnership options.

AMP Chief Executive Francesco De Ferrari said

Within our business, it was also an extraordinary year, with significant internal change and the initiation of a portfolio review in 2H 20. The review has made good progress, assessing options for the groups assets and businesses, and we are confident of bringing it to a conclusion in the near future.

Most notably, we completed the sale of AMP Life, unlocking capital and simplifying our portfolio. In AMP Australia, we simplified our super business, substantially progressed the reshape of advice and delivered a major platform upgrade in AMP Bank enabling future growth. We also pivoted AMP Capital, increasing focus on private markets, where the strength of our real assets franchise continues to deliver.

We have maintained focus on costs, with an acceleration of efficiency initiatives in 2H 20, following increased investment in client support in the first half.

Please see the links below for details:

AMP reports FY20 results and portfolio review update

2020 Full Year Investor report

2020 Full Year Investor presentation

Appendix 4E

Source: AMP Limited

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Reddit Inc.s role in the recent stock-trading frenzy has brought millions of new users to the social-media platform, its chief executive says, as well as scrutiny to the power of large communities online.

One of Reddits defining quirks is that it largely relies on users, instead of algorithms or armies of tech employees, to police speech. Those community moderators didnt intervene when users in a forum called WallStreetBets egged on people to buy shares of heavily shorted stocks such as GameStop Corp. U.S. regulators are now probing whether the ensuing market upheaval resulted in securities-law violations.

In an interview, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said the WallStreetBets episode has demonstrated the durability of the companys model, as it matures and grows. The 37-year-old Reddit co-founder recently changed his Reddit profile image to WallStreetBets cartoonish mascot of a Wall Street trader with so-called diamond hands, in a show of support for the group.

This whole event is showing the power of large communities of everyday people," said Mr. Huffman. Not just massive institutional and professional investors get to participate in the stock market."

Reddit wants to capitalize on the attention of the moment and on the growth the platform has experienced through the Covid-19 pandemic as people spend more time online and on social media. The company paid for a five-second commercial that aired Sunday during Super Bowl LV that showed text including Powerful things happen when people rally around something they really care about. And theres a place for that. Its called Reddit."

Reddit on Monday said it raised $250 million in its latest funding round led by Vy Capital, bringing the companys valuation to $6 billion.

It was previously valued at $3 billion after a 2019 funding round.

The action on Reddit has helped the company land new advertisersits main source revenueand bring back lapsed ones, including those who recently paused spending in the market melee, Mr. Huffman said. The most recent user numbers from Reddit, which isnt profitable, put the daily average at 52 million as of October.

Were still proving ourselves to advertisers," he said. The company paid for a five-second commercial that aired Sunday for the Super Bowl.

San Francisco-based Reddit is known for its message boards on a multitude of topics, as well as its ask me anything" digital town halls with celebrities, politicians and subject-matter experts. The company was founded in 2005 and sold to Conde Nast a year later. The magazine publishers parent, Advance Publications Inc., spun Reddit off in 2011 and remains a shareholder, along with venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Chinese internet conglomerate Tencent Holdings Ltd. and others.

Social-media companies have long grappled with how best to moderate and curate their content, and now face the prospect of lawmakers changing how they do business. One possibility is an overhaul of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which since 1996 has shielded social-media companies from civil liability potentially resulting from content that users post on the platforms. A congressional hearing on the recent market gyrations has been scheduled for Feb. 18; Mr. Huffman said Friday he hadnt yet been asked to participate.

Reddit lets users rate all content on the platform and relies on tens of thousands of unpaid users to police speech. By contrast, larger social-media platforms rely mainly on algorithms and paid help to do that kind of work.

Facebook, the worlds largest social network, said it had roughly 1.85 billion daily users in the December quarter, while Twitter most recently said it averaged 187 million daily users in the three months ended in September. Both also lean on technology designed to help quickly identify rule-breakersas does Reddit, though to a much lesser extent.

Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. have been showing increased interest in having their users help moderate content that appears on their platforms. Facebook, which has struggled in containing calls for violence within communities on the platform, is pushing volunteer administrators of groups to devote more effort to reviewing posts from members. Twitter is piloting a program called Birdwatch that encourages users to identify information in tweets that they believe is misleading and write notes that provide informative context.

Community moderation can work, but only when theres good collaboration and communication between the moderators and the platforms," said Joseph Seering, a Stanford University scholar who researches volunteer moderation.

Reddits relationship with its volunteer moderators hasnt always been harmonious. Hundreds of communities shut down in 2015 to protest the sudden firing of a popular Reddit employee. The companys CEO at the time, Ellen Pao, apologized for how Reddit handled the matter and resigned shortly after; Mr. Huffman took over the position.

Reddit in June banned The_Donald," a community devoted to former President Donald Trump, saying moderators frequently ignored content that violated the platforms rules. It was a political community dedicated to a president, so theres a heavy weight to that," Mr. Huffman said. We gave them many opportunities to be good citizens of Reddit, and they were never able to do so."

The membership of WallStreetBets alone more than quadrupled to 8.7 million subscribers this year. Mr. Huffman said the group, which lists 25 moderators on its forum, chose to temporarily make the forum private last month because they were overwhelmed and ran into technical challenges.

While Reddits unpaid moderators are expected to ensure their communities members adhere to the companys rules, they have the freedom to create additional rules, which for some include no swearing or joking. The most common rule that Reddit communities have adopted, Mr. Huffman stressed, is to be civil.

When its written by your peers in the context of a community, its really powerful," he said. Think of it as the difference between your parents saying, Be nice, and your friends saying, Be nice. The latter carries a lot of weight."

For the past four years, Dylan Kuehl has been a moderator of a Reddit community called buildapc," for people seeking help with building their own computers. It has more than 3.6 million subscribers. Reddit provides us with no active input," he said. They dont have anybody around that says, Hey, you should ban this person or take a post down. Its completely up to us."

Mr. Kuehl, a 31-year-old software engineer in Ontario, described the relationship between Reddit and its moderators as symbiotic, almost a co-dependence." He said, They rely on us to keep their platform cleanso they can keep the lights on, so we can continue to have our free platform to have our community in."

Mr. Huffman said Reddit launched an initiative in 2019 for its volunteer moderators to get help quickly from more experienced volunteer moderators in times of crisis. He said Reddit has more work to do in this area but considers the companys approach as essential to its success and future, which could include additional fundraising and a public listing of its shares.

Reddit was valued at $3 billion after its last funding round in February 2019, according to PitchBook, and has raised more than $550 million since its inception.

I do often think about what Reddit looks like as a public company," Mr. Huffman said. We still have some growing to do, but we are looking forward to that."

This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text.

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WEST HILLS, Calif.Pipedream Products is now stocking the PDX Plus collection of ultra-realistic male masturbators, all of which feature a new range of skin tones, which will be shipping from its Midwest Distribution warehouse. With this collection, Pipedream's renewed company commitment to inclusivity means retailers will be able to merchandise their male masturbator section with a more diverse color selection.

With six new models, including the "Perfect Pussy Strokers, Perfect Ass Masturbator, "Perfect DDs Masturbator, and Perfect 10 Torso to choose from, the collection is geared towards guys who enjoy pussies in every shape, size, and color.

Each "Perfect Pussy reflects the female anatomy's diversity and highlights the beauty and individuality of each model's labia. Hand-sculpted with attention to detail and lifelike skin texture, the close-ended Perfect Pussies are compact strokers for lip-lovers and coochie connoisseurs! No two pussies look the same on the outside, and no two pussies feel the same on the inside, thanks to their unique textured tunnels.

For customers looking for even more realism, PDX Plus has two new dual-entry, table-top, flat-bottomed masturbators available with their Perfect Ass Masturbator and Perfect DDs Masturbator.

With big bubble-butt cheeks and thumb grips on her back, the Perfect Ass gives users two love tunnels along with a jiggly, round rump to smack, slap, and fap.

For boob lovers, the Perfect DDs Masturbator features a pair of big, squishy DD breasts as well as a warm pussy and tight, textured asshole.

For full-size realism and the most lifelike experience, the 10.5 pound Perfect 10 Torso is the trifecta: Tits, ass, and pussy all together in a full-figure fuck friend. This 3D torso is a scaled-down version of Pipedreams best-selling RD177 Fuck Me Silly Mega Fuck Slut, and it jiggles, wiggles, and bounces in an imitation of a real partner. With bouncy DD breasts, a spine that swells into her bubble-butt, and thumb grips on her backside, the Perfect 10 Torso is meant to embody pussy perfection.

Made from Pipedreams proprietary blend of soft TPE, the new and improved formula looks as good as it feels and is available in three new colors: Light, tan, and brown. The complete 18-piece planogram features new no-nudity packaging, free of any objectionable language. The sturdy corrugated boxes look good on the wall and online, with spot-UV accents and subtly implied imagery.

Product images, planogram inspiration, dimensions, videos, and marketing materials are all available online at PipedreamProducts.com.

A flipbook style catalog may be found here.
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In August 2020, Drew shared her love of the Garnier Whole Blends Legendary Olive Shampoo and Conditioner with her Instagram community during a #BeautyJunkieWeek series. In a detailed review she told fans "I got this because my daughter's name is Olive. And it turns out that I am in love." Drew's love for Garnier doesn't stop there, the Hollywood star also uses Garnier Micellar Water and is impressed by the brand's Greener Beauty commitments. This true passion for Garnier and beauty in general combined with Drew's powerful influence and outstanding achievements in the film industry made her the perfect addition to the Garnier family to help the brand launch the new Whole Blends Sulfate Free Remedy Hair Care collection.

Adrien Koskas, Global Brand President for Garnier: "We are delighted to welcome Drew to the Garnier brand. Together we have thrown out the rulebook when it comes to haircare advertising, creating a truly fresh approach which we hope connects with our consumers. Drew's involvement has been phenomenal, both because she genuinely loves the products and also because of her creative input in the campaign."

Working closely with the Garnier team, Drew helped lead creative for her first-ever TV advertising spot with the brand and will serve as the face of the new Whole Blends Sulfate Free Remedy Collection. From concept development to scripting, Drew lent her creative and entrepreneurial talent, along with her fun-loving and free spirit, to bring to life the Garnier Whole Blends Sulfate Free Remedy Honey Treasures range, and the brand's Greener Beauty commitments towards sustainability, to help Garnier Whole Blends make a positive impact on people and the planet.

Drew Barrymore: "I truly fell in love with Garnier and I am thrilled to become part of the brand. I genuinely use their products, they make my hair feel amazing, and I had the most fun creating the campaign. Beauty can be boring, but we've turned it on its head! Garnier is a brand striving to be more sustainable while creating accessible beauty products that work. Garnier Whole Blends provides clean and accessible hair care products that help people feel like their best selves while being free of nasties, and I dig that."

Regarding her new role and the upcoming campaign, Drew shares:

Drew Barrymore "I've been a fan of Garnier Whole Blends since trying the Olive products last summer, so when they approached me with the idea to help them launch the new clean beauty Sulfate Free Remedy Collection, I was all in. The products are amazing and good for your hair, but what's even better is that the brand is doing so many good things to give back and help make the planet greener, they have a total end-to-end approach to sustainability, Greener Beauty, and work with NGOs such as the Bee Conservancy, protecting 10 million bees, and that's really important to me."

The creative will begin running on February 15th, 2021, and includes TV, digital and social media content.

With the insight that when women search for natural haircare products, sulfate free is the #1 most important characteristic they seek, the brand introduces the Garnier Whole Blends Sulfate Free Remedy collection that is available in three blends:

Whole Blends Sulfate Free Remedy Honey Treasures  Whole Blends Honey Treasures is America's #1 Repairing shampoo & conditioner and now comes in a Sulfate Free option for your dry, damaged hair. The potent, yet gentle formula expertly blends the natural treasures of sustainably sourced Acacia Honey and beeswax, in a powerful, sulfate free recipe. A regimen of Sulfate Free Remedy Honey Treasures Shampoo, Conditioner, and Leave-In Miracle Nectar 10-in-1 Treatment nourishes and protects against breakage, and reinforces damaged fibers. The 10-in-1 treatment moisturizes, detangles, repairs and prevents split ends, tames frizz, strengthens hair's fiber, restores softness, nourishes, protects against heat, reduces breakage, and improves manageability. With use hair looks healthier and feels ultra-nourished, for up to 72 hours of damage protection, guaranteed**

Whole Blends Sulfate Free Remedy Coconut Oil & Cocoa Butter  A potent yet gentle clean remedy for very frizzy hair expertly blends coconut oil and sustainably sourced Cocoa Butter in a powerful, enriching, sulfate free recipe. A regimen of Sulfate Free Remedy Coconut Oil & Cocoa Butter Shampoo, Conditioner and Leave-In Frizz Tamer Treatment smooths and tames frizz and flyaways. With use hair looks healthier, smoother for up to 72 hours frizz control, guaranteed**

Whole Blends Sulfate Free Remedy Royal Hibiscus & Shea Butter  A potent, yet gentle clean remedy for curls and coils expertly blends Hibiscus Flower and sustainably sourced Shea Butter in a powerful, deeply nourishing sulfate free recipe. A regimen of Whole Blends Sulfate Free Remedy Royal Hibiscus & Shea Butter Shampoo and 5-in-1 Conditioner moisturizes and defines curls, help combat dryness and shapelessness. The 5-in-1 Conditioner can be used as a pre-wash, co-wash, conditioner, combing cream, leave in. With use hair looks healthier for up to 72 hour curl definition, guaranteed**

Garnier Whole Blends is committed to Greener Beauty and launched its end-to-end sustainability journey in 2020 to make a positive impact on people and the planet through the following initiatives:

Whole Blends Sulfate Free Remedy is blended with sustainably sourced ingredients and blended without sulfates, parabens, mineral oil, petrolatum, dyes and gluten*.

The formula is blended with fairly traded and sustainably sourced honey, cocoa seed butter, argan oil and shea butter.

Whole Blends Commits to respect bees:

Whole Blends is using sustainably sourced Honey and Beeswax that are obtained using traditional beekeeping methods, which respect bees & help maintain biodiversity.



Whole Blends supports The Bee Conservancy, a non-profit organization that protects 10 million bees.

The plastic bottle, not including the pump, is made of 100% recycled material.

The products are produced in a facility committed to sustainability, reducing its waste and water consumption per unit by approximately 58% and 47% respectively, since 2005.

Proud supporter of Ocean Conservancy, an organization who mobilizes beach clean ups of plastic pollution on their International Coastal Clean Up Day.

Garnier Whole Blends Sulfate Free Remedy products are now available (SRP $8.49) at food, mass, and drugstores nationwide, and for the first time the brand is offering a money back guarantee program. For more information on Garnier, the new Whole Blends Sulfate Free Remedy Collection, and Garnier's partnership with Drew Barrymore, please visit www.garnierusa.com.

About Garnier USA

Garnier, a L'Oreal USA brand, was developed in 1904 in France by hair care expert Alfred Amour Garnier and is now present in more than 65 countries worldwide. Following the launch of Garnier in the United States in 1999 with Nutrisse hair color, the brand has continued to develop beauty products with a keen awareness of its responsibility to you and the planet. The entire collection of Garnier brands available in the U.S. includes Nutrisse, Fructis hair care and Fructis Style, Olia hair color, Color Sensation hair color, SkinActive and Whole Blends hair care.

For more information visit www.garnierusa.com or follow us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and Snapchat @GarnierUSA.

Disclaimers:

*Made in a facility that processes gluten

**Money back guarantee, up to $8.49 (sales tax and shipping not refunded), for Garnier Whole Blends Sulfate Free Remedy shampoo, conditioner, and Miracle treatments. Purchase must be made between 1/1/21-12/31/21 and redeemed by 1/29/22. Restrictions apply. For details, call 1-855-332-9983.

Please contact Garnier: [email protected].

SOURCE Garnier

Related Links

https://www.garnierusa.com


Priyanka Chopra wrote in Unfinished that Thalapathy Vijay's friendliness with his fans was crucial when she was interacting with her's on the sets of Quantico

Priyanka Chopra-Jonas' memoir Unfinished details instances from her debut film Thamizhan and how the actor learnt humility from her co-star Thalapathy Vijay. The actor who debuted with the Tamil film Thamizhan, soon after winning the Miss World title in 2000, saw her being paired opposite southern superstar Thalapathy Vijay.

According to a report in India Today, in her book, she wrote that Vijay's humility and generosity with fans made a lasting impression on her. The actor wrote that years later while she was shooting in New York shooting for Quantico, fans thronged to get a photo with her. It is when she realised what Vijay had taught her on the sets of her first film.

The actor penned that as she stood and took pictures with them through her lunch break, she thought about her very first co-actor and the example he had set.

Priyanka, in Unfinished, also revealed that during her early days, she was supposed to shoot a sensuous dance number when the director instructed her to take off her clothes in front of the camera one at a time.

When the actor asked if she should be wearing multiple layers so that she would not be "down to skin way too fast," the director suggested she speak to her stylist to explain the situation.

The actor passed the phone to the director after a brief conversation with the stylist and the director instructed the stylist to do whatever but make sure her undergarments can be seen or else people won't come to watch the film. Priyanka revealed she quit the very next day.

The government, besides two expressions of interest (EoI) for Air India, has received a surprise bid from Pawan Ruia, chairman of Ruia Group.

The businessman has submitted an EoI to buy a 100% stake in the embattled national carrier. Tata Group and an employees' consortium of Air India are other entities that have expressed interest in Air India.

Ruia, a chartered accountant-turned-businessman, was better known in Kolkata business circles as a "turnaround tycoon" after he bought controlling stakes in financially stressed companies such as Dunlop India, Falcon Tyres, and Jessop & Company.

Also Read: LIC IPO likely after Oct; BPCL, Air India disinvestment by Sept: govt official

However, he tapped off that pedestal following the above-mentioned firms entering the Board for Industrial and Financial Reconstruction. The companies are currently facing liquidation.

Despite political concerns coming in the way of the reversal of these three sick firms, Air India would be a different case, a source told the Business Standard, adding that the Centre would resolutely back any company that wins the bid in order to ensure a turnaround for Air India.

The EoI was reportedly submitted under a consortium led by Kanti Commercials Private Ltd, a company associated with the Ruia Group. The other firms associated with the consortium are Fragment Nivesh and Enormous Nivesh, both related parties of Ruia-owned companies.

Also Read: Congress questions Centre on hiding names of Air India bidders; govt cites rules change

Meanwhile, Ruia has not yet commented on queries about his interest in Air India. It is widely believed that unless he brings in a financial partner or a big company to support his bid for the national carrier, he is unlikely to win.

As per the eligibility criteria set by transaction advisor EY, which is currently assessing the EoIs from potential parties, a bidder should have a net worth of Rs 3,500 crore.

The government is hoping to fetch approximately Rs 15,000 crore from the sale of Air India, its subsidiary Air India Express and AISATS - a 50:50 joint venture partnership between Air India and Singapore Airport Terminal Services (SATS) Limited.
What is killing fish in lake Victoria?

February 10,2021 | Source: All Africa

Panic has gripped fishing communities around Lake Victoria over continued unexplained deaths of fish which is being swept ashore by waves. The death of thousands of the Nile perch (Mbuta) in the lake is threatening the livelihood of the fishing community in Nyanza and Western regions. According to fishermen at Marenga Beach in Busalangi, the death of fish threatens the export industry. The deaths have also raised concerns about the safety of fish from the regional lake. The cause of death is yet to be established although it is speculated that the fish could be dying due to climactic changes.



"There are few isolated cases in Busia but the situation is worse on the Ugandan side and parts of Nyanza," said Mr Robert Anema, the Marenga Beach manager. Mr Antony Bahati, a fisherman, confirmed that they are encountering several dead fish in the lake. In Uganda, dead fish were last month found on the beaches or floating in water at Gerenge and Kigungu landing sites in Entebbe, Wakiso District, Uganda.



Fish appeared 'drunk'



A similar phenomenon was reported last month at Philomena landing site in Mwanza, Tanzania, with local fishers saying fish that appeared "drunk" were swimming close to the water surface but were not dead. In Homa Bay County, the phenomenon has been witnessed on beaches in Suba and Mbita sub counties. The county government of Homa Bay said it is working with Kenya Marine and Fisheries Research Institute (Kemfri) to establish what is killing the fish. Agriculture and Fisheries Executive Aguko Juma said samples of dead fish are being collected for tests.



Oxygen deficiency



Dr Christopher Aura, deputy director in charge of Fresh Water Systems Research at Kemfri said the deaths of the fish could be linked to oxygen deficiency in the water. This, he said is caused by a process in which cold water with low oxygen level replaces warm water where the fish live. "This normally happens when there is a sudden change of weather affecting the lake. The longer the water mixes the more the fish die," said Dr Aura. Meanwhile, officials from the fisheries department in Homa Bay are also investigating a new practice that is taking the fishing industry by storm -- the sale of fish bladder, popularly known as mondo.



Fish bladder trade



Trade in fish bladder is considered more profitable than sale of fish itself. Mr Juma said his office has received complaints from boat owners that fishermen are discarding fish in the lake after removing bladders, which are sold in foreign markets. "It is an illegal activity to discard dead fish in the lake. It is a practice that is becoming common among our fishermen," he said. Meanwhile, fishermen have been warned against picking dead fish for sale. Mr Juma said the fish may harm humans f consumed.

Theme(s): Post Harvest Technology and Trade, Coastal Ecosystems and Threats, Fisheries Development and Aquaculture, Freshwater ecosystems and threats, Landing Centres, Others, Communities and Organisations, Fishing Craft, Gear and Fishing Methods, Fisheries Resources.
An Indian drug manufacturer has agreed to plead guilty to concealing and destroying records prior to a 2013 US Food and Drug Administration's inspection of its plant and pay $50 million in fines and forfeiture, the Department of Justice has announced In a criminal information filed in federal court in the District of Nevada and unsealed on Tuesday, Fresenius Kabi Oncology Limited (FKOL) was charged with violating the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act by failing to provide certain records to Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) investigators.

As part of a criminal resolution, FKOL agreed to plead guilty to the misdemeanour offense, pay a criminal fine of $30 million, and forfeit an additional $20 million. FKOL also agreed to implement a compliance and ethics programme designed to prevent, detect, and correct violations of US law relating to FKOLs manufacture of cancer drugs intended for terminally ill patients, a media release said.

By hiding and deleting manufacturing records, FKOL sought to obstruct the FDA's regulatory authority and prevent the FDA from doing its job of ensuring the purity and potency of drugs intended for US consumers," said Acting Assistant Attorney General Brian Boynton of the Justice Departments Civil Division.

FKOLs conduct put vulnerable patients at risk. The Department of Justice will continue to work with FDA to prosecute drug manufacturers who obstruct these inspections," the statement said.

Pharmaceutical companies that obstruct FDA inspections jeopardise patient safety," said US Attorney Nicholas A. Trutanich for the District of Nevada.

According to court documents, FKOL owned and operated a manufacturing plant in Kalyani, West Bengal, that manufactured active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) used in various cancer drug products distributed to the United States.

The government alleges that prior to a January 2013 FDA inspection of the Kalyani facility, FKOL plant management directed employees to remove certain records from the premises and delete other records from computers that would have revealed FKOL was manufacturing drug ingredients in contravention of FDA requirements.

Kalyani plant employees removed computers, hardcopy documents, and other materials from the premises and deleted spreadsheets that contained evidence of the plants violative practices, the Department of Justice alleged.

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THE government is eyeing at registering a total of seven million beneficiaries from 1.4 households in the second stage of the implementation of the third phase of the Tanzania Social Action Fund (Tasaf).

In the implementation, the government would also ensure beneficiaries from all councils are lined up in the digital database, to address the shortcomings that the Tasaf has been facing over the years.

Speaking in the Parliament on Tuesday, the Deputy Minister of State, President's Office, Public Services and Good Governance, Deo Ndejembi said the government is well determined to end double payment and misallocation of the money.

"The government is working to ensure all payments are made through mobile money transactions for which beneficiaries will be receiving the cash directly through their mobile phones," he told the house.

Responding to a supplementary question by Special Seats MP Neema Lugangira (CCM), who sought to get government commitment on registering all needy households to the Tasaf scheme, the deputy minister said so far Tasaf has added 39 councils in the database and the plan is to have all local government councils for proper implementation and execution of the scheme.

On her basic question, Ms Lugangira said there have been complaints from residents in Kagera Region that the scheme has been recruiting disqualified households, leaving behind qualified ones.

Responding, the deputy minister said so far, Tasaf has benefited a total of 1.1 million people who have their living standard uplifted under the scheme.

"In Kagera region, the scheme has registered a total of 68,915 beneficiaries who have been receiving subsidy in the past five years of its implementation," said the deputy minister.
Xiaomi on Wednesday announced that it would launch Redmi Note 10 series in India next month.

  ,      !#RedmiNote10 series is from another orbit & it's arriving early March this year! 



Brace yourselves for a #10on10 experience! RT if you want to know more. 



I  #Redmi #RedmiNote  #Launch pic.twitter.com/rRMWkejnI4  Manu Kumar Jain (@manukumarjain) February 10, 2021

Redmi Note 10 is said to come in two variants, 4GB of RAM and 64GB built-in storage, and 6GB of RAM and 64GB built-in storage. The Pro version will be available in at least three variants, 6GB/64GB, 6GB/128GB, and 8GB/128GB. The Redmi Note 10 series is said to run on Qualcomms Snapdragon 750G processor, which also comes with 5G support. One of the models will be featuring MediaTeks Dimensity chipset.

A separate report suggests that the Pro model will have Qualcomms Snapdragon 732G processor. It is also said to come with a 5,050mAh battery. It will pack a quad-camera setup with a 64-megapixel primary sensor. It will run on MIUI 12 out-of-the-box. The smartphone is unlikely to come with NFC support. Other leaked specifications of Redmi Note 10 Pro are a 6.67-inch display with full HD+ resolution, Corning Gorilla Glass 5 protection, and a 32-megapixel front-facing camera.

We are likely to find out more about Xiaomis upcoming Redmi Note 10 series in coming days. Until then, stay tuned.

SHOWS

February 22, 2021 10.00 am

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.


Fire broke out at Hwange Thermal Power Station (Unit One) on Wednesday, plunging parts of Zimbabwe into load-shedding. The fire broke out between 5pm and 6pm, lasting roughly 40 minutes.

Energy and Power Development Minister Zhemu Soda said: I received the message from Dr Gata (Zesa Holdings chairman). It happened on the boiler plant on Unit One. There is likelihood of load shedding which I think must have started at 6pm, ending at 8pm. Minister Soda said the Zimbabwe Power Company will determine the extent of damage. It takes about five to six hours to cool the plant down if it is running. The plant was running so it will need about six hours to cool before they start the assessment. ZTN News
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Rosario Dawson has talked about her relationship with her adopted daughter.

The Mandalorian actress opened up her home to 17-year-old Lola when the girl was 11-years-old and told Health magazine she feels that taking on the youngster was 'meant to be.'

'With my daughter, I didn't go to an adoption center or anything like that,' said the star. 'My family knew her biological mom, and when we found out she was in foster care, we looked for her. It wasn't even a question; it was clearly meant to be  she's my kid.'

Motherly bond: Actress Rosario Dawson opened up her home to 17-year-old daughter Lola when the girl was 11; seen in 2019

The 41-year-old star said the pair have a 'beautiful' bond and she loves the fact they have grown even closer as Lola has gotten older.

In the March cover story, Rosario also told Health magazine: 'I'm grateful for her development, our maturation and our connection...

'To have a young person move in with you and to have to really consciously work through triggers and that kind of stuff is a really different thing than being pregnant and having your baby grow up in front of you  to be able to see how we're getting closer and closer. We are a family, and it's beautiful.'

The Sin City star revealed she and Lola attend regular therapy sessions together. She said: 'My daughter has had therapy most of her life through foster care and stuff. I've done weekly therapy with her starting at the age of 11.

'I have had it in my life, but it hasn't been specific to me and my personal needs.'

Cover girl: The 41-year-old star said in Health's March issues that she has a 'beautiful' bond with her daughter and loves the fact they've grown even closer as Lola has gotten older

Dynamic duo: The Sin City star also revealed she and Lola attend regular therapy sessions together; seen in 2017

The notoriously private actress had vowed to adopt an older child when she was very young after learning her dad was not her biological father.

She recalled: 'Around the age of five, I found out my dad wasn't my biological father. That was super shocking to me. I'm Daddy's little girl. I don't know my biological father. Apparently, he died in 2011, but I didn't have a relationship with him.'

Rosario continued: 'At five, it was a lot to take in, and I recall thinking, "What if my parents hadn't met, and I was older, and no one wanted to marry my mom because she had an older kid?"

'I remember vividly back then saying that when I was older I was going to adopt an older child... It's wild to think I manifested this when I was younger.'

The importance of family: The notoriously private actress had vowed to adopt an older child when she was very young after learning her dad wasn't her biological father; seen 2018

Rosario packed up her LA home in 2020 and drove a bus with her father across the country to establish a life closer to her extended family and boyfriend, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, who she has dated since 2018.

The star said she is 'grateful' for her extensive career and hopes the move will help her find more balance as she juggles motherhood and a very public relationship.

'I'm grateful that I've traveled so much and worked so hard,' she said. 'But my priorities have shifted, and I've realized I need to slow down a bit and be nearer to the people I love most.'
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Polaris Bank on Tuesday unveiled Lucky Okunzuwa, a customer with the Banks Akpakpava branch, Benin, Edo State, as the first millionaire at the maiden draw of its ongoing nationwide Save & Win promo.

Other 60 lucky customers who also emerged from across the six geo-political zones, won N100,000 each during the draw which held at the Banks headquarters in Lagos. The promo which ends in April 2021 is designed to enrich Nigerians with a N26 million pay-out

The winners emerged through a transparent draw witnessed by officials of the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, representatives of other regulatory agencies; as well as customers and relations of the winners. The draw was conducted using a hybrid media technology which enabled in-premises event whilst over 600 customers logged in through the banks virtual network and social media handles.

The promo is designed to make millionaires of everyday Nigerians by encouraging current and prospective customers of the Bank to save minimum of N10,000 monthly, for any three consecutive months within the promo period, starting from November 2020 to April 2021, to qualify and be part of the winners of the promo.

The first millionaire of the promo, Mr. Okunzuwa, said, I am very delighted at winning one million naira in the Polaris Banks Save & Win Promo. It was like a dream, when I was told but this is a reality. The money will go a long way in supporting my small business to grow. I also make a commitment to continue to save more. I sincerely thank Polaris Bank for this novel initiative.

Speaking at the unveiling of the winners, Polaris Banks Executive Director, Lagos Business, Segun Opeke, while offering his congratulations, said the event was significant because it was a testament of Polaris Banks unwavering commitment to impact and enrich the lives of Nigerians, while noting that the reward is aimed at encouraging more people to save and invest their money.

Earlier in his opening remarks, Mr. Opeke said, In tough times such as we are now, there is a compelling need to save, not only to win a prize, but also to plan for the rainy day. He noted that the Polaris Bank Save and Win Promo is a sure way to save more and also become either a millionaire or win N100,000. The promo will produce 8 millionaires, while 180 others will go home with N100,000 each across 3 draws in February, March and April with winners drawn from the 6-geo-political zones of the country, he added.

From the regulatory bodies, Susie Onwuka, of the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC); Ezeani Daniel Abumchukwu and Akoji Elizabeth, both of Advertising Practitioners Council of Nigeria (APCON) and Peace Ibadin of National Lottery Regulatory Commission (NLRC), all attested to the free, fair and transparent draw that threw up the winners, commending the Bank for making good its promise to the winners.

In her contribution at the draw, the Banks Group Head, Product and Market Development, Adebimpe Ihekuna, emphasized that the promo is ongoing till April 30 and encouraged existing and prospective customers of the Bank to take advantage of the savings promotion to increase their savings; as well as get more money to invest especially for the low-income earners.

Following the first draw on Tuesday, February 9, 2021, in which the first set of winners emerged, the Bank will likewise announce and reward the second set of winners in March. The month of April will be for the Grand-finale leading to the emergence of 60 more winners of N100,000 each and six millionaires of N1million each, across the six geo-political zones, bringing the entire draw to a total of 188 winners.

Polaris Bank is a future-determining Bank committed to delivering industry-defining products, and services, across all sectors of the Nigerian economy
CHELSEA, MI - A plan seven years in the making doesnt let a pandemic stop it. The Grateful Crow in Chelsea opened its doors in October 2020, and promptly had to close them due to the shutdown in November. With the help of a good friend who happens to own Great Lakes Yurt Company, the restaurant quickly erected a yurt village, and kept on serving - outdoors.

Owner Jason Povilich, and his wife and co-owner, Suzi, are no strangers to the restaurant scene in this small, historic town located about half way between Ann Arbor and Jackson. The couple also own four Jets Pizzas in the area, including one right across the street from The Grateful Crow that features over 40 different craft beers on tap. This spot is combined with The Rumpus Room, a music and event space. The couple also own ClockTower Comix & Collectables.

The concept for The Grateful Crow was hatched seven years ago, after a trip inspired the Poviliches to think about bringing sushi to Chelsea. After visiting a restaurant that offered both sushi and burgers, they knew that this would be a winning combo. It might seem like a weird pairing at first, but it makes sense the more you think about it, according to The Grateful Crows social media manager, Max Harrison Johnson.

Not everyone likes sushi, and not everyone likes burgers, he said. Here there is really something for everyone.

The restaurant took over space three years ago that formerly held the Chelsea Alehouse, which had moved up the street. The Poviliches undertook a complete remodel of the building, which took longer than they thought it would. Originally, they had hoped to open in March of 2020. Instead, they spent the time during the first shutdown finishing up work, and figuring out everything internally.

The Grateful Crows name is a mash-up of two of Jason Povilichs favorite bands, The Grateful Dead and the Black Crows. The restaurants interior is a dramatic, slightly edgy space, with deep, dark walls punctuated with steam punk light fixtures that throw a warming glow over the room. One wall holds glass shelves with sparkling liquor bottles, while a concrete-topped bar awaits a visit. You can watch your sushi being made fresh at one end of the dining room, as the chefs slice, dice and roll right before your eyes. Custom murals grace the walls, and at one end of the bar there is a floor-to-ceiling double crow sculpture looming over everything.

There are six yurts on the patio at The Grateful Crow in Chelsea, two large ones, and four smaller ones.MLive.com

The Grateful Crow had been planning on adding some type of outdoor dining, but not until fall of 2021. When the statewide shutdown happened, Povilich moved quickly, and put in a call to his friend Steve Caro, who owns Great Lakes Yurt Company.

I started building yurts in like 2016, said Caro. He has a background as a builder, and had a friend who wanted to build one as a project. They constructed the first one, and things kind of took off from there. We knew the yurt market was all West Coast, east of the Mississippi there were very few companies. We saw an opportunity to start a company. We started a little website, GreatLakesYurtCo.com, and started selling yurts right away. The company became official in 2017, and has been growing exponentially every year.

When the shutdown happened in March, Grass Lake Yurts orders also pretty much shut down. The lull in sales didnt last long. By mid April 2020, the floodgates just opened Caro said, and sales almost tripled from the year before. The typical yurt purchasing season runs March to November; this year Caro has sold multiple yurts through the off season.

Caro and Povilich worked together to figure out how to fit as many yurts as possible, while still keeping it functional, on the patio at The Grateful Crow. The yurts at The Grateful Crow are different than what we normally make, Caro said.

All the yurts made by Great Lakes Yurt are custom-made according to precise specifications. They typically are constructed with very durable materials made to withstand every form of Michigan weather. They usually are insulated, have a vinyl-coated exterior and feature real windows, hardwood floors and full-size, hung doors.

The ones at The Grateful Crow were built more like tents. Very, very nice tents, with interior frames, covered in canvas. They sit on platforms, and have cloth openings that you can just pull open. The Crow has six total: four that are smaller, and two that are bigger. All host up to six people inside, and have fire tables to provide warmth, and a variety of seating options in a very cozy, charming setting.

People really like them, Povilich said.

Although they considered igloos, the yurts just felt like the right fit for the restaurant. This is our vibe, were earthy, he said. The yurts have been instrumental in helping The Grateful Crow keep their staff of 30 employed during the indoor dining shutdown. Theyve helped a lot Povilich said.

The Grateful Crow is known for two things, sushi and burgers, a combo that has proved very popular at this Chelsea spot. Shown is the Rainbow Roll.MLive.com

Even though indoor dining is open now, the super reduced capacity and continuing pandemic means that outdoor dining is still a popular option. A reservation is a pretty much a must at The Grateful Crow, and the yurts can be reserved for up to two hours, for $25 an hour.

Once in your yurt, order up. The restaurant offers some incredible hand crafted artisan cocktails, as they make all of their infusions, tinctures, and syrups fresh in house. They have quite a collection of liquors to choose from, and also offer craft beer and wines. Sushi is ultra fresh, with well-made rice, and a large variety of rolls to select from. The Las Vegas roll is their number-one seller, and a gateway that is the perfect introduction to sushi, Povilich said. The Rainbow roll is a beauty, layered with tuna, salmon, and avocado, and stuffed with a creamy crab salad. On the burger side, try the Sting Me, a massive, two hander that comes topped with crispy bacon, blue cheese, sauteed mushrooms, roasted jalapenos, and drizzled with the special house sauce. Dont miss the truffle fries on the side.

The addition of the yurts have been a welcome addition to dining at The Grateful Crow, and theyll be sticking around even after restaurants return to their new normal.

Even without Covid, a yurt adds dining room space, and if you are running a successful restaurant, you can always use that, said Caro.

One of the yurts that Great Lakes Yurts typically makes. These are sturdy structures, with full doors on them.Great Lakes Yurt Company Courtesy Photo, used with permission.

Another example of the yurts that Great Lakes Yurt Company makes. The yurts come in a variety of sizes, can be insulated, and feature full size doors, and windows if you'd like.Great Lakes Yurt Company Courtesy Photo, used with permission.

The yurts are structured tents made by Great Lakes Yurt Company, a Michigan company.MLive.com

The staff at The Grateful Crow in Chelsea.MLive.com

The search for Michigans Best Outdoor Dining is sponsored in part by Warm Fitness.

The Grateful Crow

420 N Main St., Chelsea, MI 48118

(734) 562-2903 Please call this number for reservations, inside or out.

More info: https://www.thegratefulcrow.com/ or https://www.facebook.com/thegratefulcrow

Great Lakes Yurt Company

12402 Curtis Road, Grass Lake, MI 49240

(269) 808-3664

More info: https://www.greatlakesyurtco.com/ or https://www.facebook.com/greatlakesyurtco/

The Sting Me Burger from The Grateful Crow in Chelsea.MLive.com

More Michigans Best Outdoor Dining:

10 great outdoor dining spots along the White Pine Trail

Operation Shantyville is adventurous twist on outdoor dining supporting Bay area restaurants

Play river rocks, get farm to table dining at this SW Michigan spot

See all of the nominations for Michigans Best Outdoor Dining

Traditional Irish food, tacos and great service at this Michigans Best Outdoor Dining spot

6 things Michigan restaurant staff want you to know before you eat out

This Northern Michigan town has transformed into an outdoor dining village

Enjoy the cozy hygge lifestyle at this Grand Rapids restaurant
What it does

Araguaia

The Araguaia ferronickel project is in Para State, Brazil.

The plan ultimately is to have the project producing 28,000 tonnes per year.

Vermelho

Vermelho is a nickel-cobalt project in the eastern part of the Carajas mining district.

Production could reach upwards of 30,000 tonnes per year, with total cash flows over that time estimated around US$7bn.

Nickel

Projections that nickel prices will go higher underpin the significant value in its projects at Araguaia and Vermelho in Brazil, Horizonte believes.

Concerns remain about supplies of the metal when electric vehicle production fully hit its stride, says Horizonte.





How it is doing

In August, ( )( ) mandated five banks to raise US$325mln required for the debt portion of the Araguaia financing package.

In December 2020, Horizonte said it had completed of the value engineering phase of project design, with improvements made to plant design and flow sheet to optimise operational performance.;

Under the new parametres, the capex and opex remain in line with the feasibility study estimates.

Key environmental and social programmes are now underway in preparation for construction phase.

The company also said in December that the project finance process continues to progress, with a number of key milestones delivered. A cornerstone investor for the equity portion of the Araguaia financing has been lined up.

What the boss says: Jeremy Martin, chief executive

"Horizonte has made significant progress with the key workstreams required to commence construction at Araguaia, despite the challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic over the last 10 months," said chief executive Jeremy Martin.

"The project funding package for Araguaia involves multiple components that are being negotiated simultaneously. We continue to engage with a number of prospective investors, have recently negotiated a non-binding, term sheet with a major cornerstone equity investor, have reached an advanced stage with offtake agreements, received initial approval for a financing facility of up to R$200 million (around.$32mln) from Banco da Amazonia and are advancing workstreams with a syndicate of five international banks for the principal project finance package, as previously announced."

He added:

"In parallel, we have spent the past eight months undertaking a phase of value engineering to upgrade the Feasibility Study completed in 2018 and optimise certain aspects of the Project to a level where it is implementation ready. This work has included development of a detailed Project Execution and Operational Readiness Plan."

"

Video

What the broker says

House broker Peel Hunt started coverage of the miner in September with a 'buy' recommendation and a target price of 14p. Analysts forecast potential for underlying earnings (EBITDA) to reach nearly 90mln by 2025.

We see HZM as a medium risk, but strong growth prospect for greater exposure to nickel and (eventually) cobalt, they commented.

We expect further announcements on Araguaia Stage 1 funding in the coming six months, and also expect further nickel price momentum in the coming two years. Araguaias strong cash flow profile from Stage 1 should enable HZM to self-fund Stage 2 by Years 3-4 of production.

Inflexion points
He starred in what is perhaps the most famous erotic book of all time.

And Jamie Dornan was recently forced to speculate on who would make a better erotic book club partner, his Fifty Shades of Grey costar Dakota Johnson, or her character from the film, Anastasia Steele.

The Northern Irish actor, 28, participated in a round of 'would you rather' questioning from video host Josh Horowitz, for his Comedy Central series Stir Crazy.

Tough choice: Jamie Dornan was recently forced to speculate on who would make a better erotic book club partner, his Fifty Shades of Grey costar Dakota Johnson, or her character from the film, Anastasia Steele

During the chat, Horowitz asked Jamie about his ideal erotic book club roster, explaining that he had asked Dakota the same question when she visited him on the show.

For Dakota, the choice was between Dornan and his 50 Shades alter-ego, Christian Grey.

'If she didn't say me, I'm calling her immediately,' Jamie joked, before Josh revealed Dakota picked Jamie the actor, and not the character he played.

During the chat: Horowitz asked Jamie about his ideal erotic book club roster, explaining that he asked Dakota the same question when she visited him on the show; the stars seen in 2018

Josh also said Dakota picked him because he's a little funnier than his fictional cinematic counterpart.

Then it was his turn to answer the question in earnest.

'Anastasia Steele!' he said, before collapsing into laughter.

'If she didn't say me, I'm calling her immediately,' Jamie joked, before host Josh Horowitz revealed Dakota picked Jamie the actor, and not the character he played

'No, I'm joking, c'mon, I'm joking' he continued.

But then he picked Johnson, of course, 'for the same reason.

'She's a legitimately funny person,' the Fall star specified.

'She's a legitimately funny person,' Dornan said of his costar Johnson, with whom he costarred in three 50 Shades films

Horowitz then mentioned that Dakota was incredible at playing Would You Rather, which didn't shock Jamie at all.

'She's a big Would You Rather [person],' he revealed, describing how she'd launch into WYR questions during a lull on set.

As for Dornan, his next 'sexy' role is in Barb & Star Go To Vista Del Mar with Kristen Wiig, out this weekend on demand.
The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
Father-in-law-son-in-law combo to new opposition leader; first session of 15th Kerala Assembly on May 24

Kerala to issue Covid vaccination certificates with passport number for people who plan to go abroad

Cheating case: Kerala HC grants interim protection from arrest to Sunny Leone

India

oi-Deepika S

Thiruvananthapuram, Feb 10: Kerala High Court on Wednesday restrained Crime Branch from arresting actor Sunny Leone in connection with an alleged financial fraud of Rs 29 lakhs. The order has come after considering the anticipatory bail plea of the actor.

The petitioners-- Leone alias Karenjt Kaur Vohra along with her husband Daniel Weber, and another person-- submitted they were innocent, ready to cooperate with the investigation and no manner of criminality can be attributed against them.

It was also submitted that"if arrested and remanded, it will cause irreparableloss and injury" to them.

Leone, who was questioned by Kochi crime branch officials on February 3 at Thiruvananthapuram, said it was only then she realised that an FIR had been registered against them undervarious sections of IPC including 406 (criminal breach of trust) and 420 (cheating) .

They submitted they have fully cooperated with the officers and apprised them of the facts and circumstances, handed over documents substantiatingthe transactions that transpired between them and the complainant.

It was also submitted that the complainant, Shiyas, had demanded Rs two crore as compensation from them, tried to "exploit and cheat the petitioners by compelling them to participatein shows prepared by him without paying the agreed consideration".

While the event management organisers maintained that the former ''Big Boss'' contestant had not turned up for their function, Leone said she had come twice and the event was not held. Though the function had to be postponed several times, it was finally scheduled to be held at Adlux International Convention Centre at Angamally near Kochi.

Twitter blocks portion of accounts, cites free speech | OneIndia News

The''Ragini MMS 2'' star reportedly stated that the programme had been rescheduled several times by the organisers and it was not due to her inconvenience and a balance amount of Rs 12 lakh was still due to her.

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Story first published: Wednesday, February 10, 2021, 11:28 [IST]
Phoenix, Arizona--(Newsfile Corp. - February 10, 2021) - The Stock Day Podcast welcomed Hammer Fiber Optics Holdings Corp. (OTCQB: HMMR) ("the Company"), a telecommunications company investing in the future of wireless technology. President and CEO of the Company, Erik Levitt, joined Stock Day host, Everett Jolly.

"Can you give us an update on your business plan and where you plan on going from here?", asked Jolly to start the interview. Levitt shared that the Company's business plan is made up of four primary divisions: a high-speed fixed wireless service, mobility, Over-The-Top (OTT) services, and SmartyCity. "Our plan continues to move forward on many fronts," said Levitt. "Our OTT continues to grow, and we have several commitments from new and existing platform members that will begin in the coming quarter."

"Our new product in OTT is HammerCall," shared Levitt, noting that the website for this service is now live. "Test customers have been using HammerCall, which is our video and collaboration service, for some time now," he continued, adding that the Company's target market will primarily focus on small businesses with the need for one to twenty users. "Our cost per customer is quite low," explained Levitt, before elaborating on the Company's profit margins for both standard and wholesale customers.

"On our international segment, our new service in Dominica is progressing quite well, and our launch is underway," shared Levitt. "We'll soon have our new business segment, dominicavoice.com, available in the early-February timeframe."

"The most significant news is on the fixed wireless front," said Levitt. "We're going to be reentering the fixed wireless market and we're adding customers to our new Huntsville, Alabama network," he continued. "Investors should anticipate that revenues from the fixed wireless business should overtake our OTT segment."

"Can you provide us an update on the Huntsville, Alabama network?," asked Jolly. "All of our agreements are in place, our first site is ready-to-go, the equipment orders are in place, and we're temporarily holding pre-orders until we have that site complete, but in the meantime we've been very actively working on the new website to accept orders and on building our pipeline," explained Levitt, adding that the Company currently has over 300 backorders in their pipeline. "We're expecting to be contacting over 1,000 potential customers that have expressed interest within the first three months."

Levitt then elaborated on the competitive advantages of the Company's OTT service. "We'll be offering a basic package to residential customers and a more advanced package for small businesses and higher volume residential customers, as well as a third package to buildings that are multi-dwell units where we can service the entire building with one wireless shot," said Levitt. "We're ready-to-go and once our fiber arrives at the Lowe Mill, we plan to hit the ground running."

The conversation then turned to the importance of having access to wireless resources, including the possibility of being able to utilize 12 GHz, which has been traditionally used by satellite providers, in the near future. "They're considering opening that up for use of high-volume services such as 5G. There's also progress on CBRS, Citizens Broadband Radio Service, which is also beneficial to Hammer and other wireless service providers in the long-run," said Levitt. "We hope that the FCC is going to continue to expand the frequencies available in CBRS because the more spectrum allocation we have, the more bandwidth we can deliver to users."

"Under the current pandemic conditions, we continue to see bandwidth usage skyrocketing, and that's going to continue into the foreseeable future," said Levitt. "We don't anticipate that a lot of businesses are going to return to the office. The trends have always been that we've been moving more towards the virtual office, and really the pandemic has increased that trend probably by a decade."

Jolly then commented on the Company's significant growth over a short period of time. "We certainly appreciate that our investors have been patient," shared Levitt. "These things do take time to develop, but we're starting to see now that we're on the cusp of potentially explosive growth," said Levitt. "We're now growing into three of the four segments that are part of our Everything Wireless strategy. So, I think that the market is responding to that and we're very excited to see growth in our stock."

To close the interview, Levitt thanked his shareholders, board members, and team members for their continued dedication and support. "We've put a lot of work into the pieces of the Everything Wireless strategy and we're really looking forward to what is going to come in the coming quarters."

To hear Erik Levitt's entire interview, follow the link to the podcast here: https://audioboom.com/posts/7796472-hammer-fiber-optics-discusses-2021-growth-potential-with-the-stock-day-podcast.

Investors Hangout is a proud sponsor of "Stock Day," and Stock Day Media encourages listeners to visit the Company's message board at https://investorshangout.com/.

About Hammer

Hammer Fiber Optics Holdings Corp. (OTCQB: HMMR) is a telecommunications company investing in the future of wireless technology. Hammer's "Everything Wireless" go to market strategy includes the development of high-speed fixed wireless service for residential and small businesses using its wireless fiber platform, Hammer Wireless AIR, Over-the-Top services such as voice, SMS and video collaboration services, the construction of smart city networks and hosting services including cloud and colocation. For more information contact our Investor Relations Team at info@hammerfiber.com.

About The "Stock Day" Podcast

Founded in 2013, Stock Day is the fastest growing media outlet for Nano-Cap and Micro-Cap companies. It educates investors while simultaneously working with penny stock and OTC companies, providing transparency and clarification of under-valued, under-sold Micro-Cap stocks of the market. Stock Day provides companies with customized solutions to their news distribution in both national and international media outlets. The Stock Day Podcast is the number one radio show of its kind in America. Stock Day recently launched its Video Interview Studio located in Phoenix, Arizona.

SOURCE:

Stock Day Media

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To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/74126
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Lenders reinforcing cyber defences. Photo: freepik.com

Vietnam Export-Import Commercial Joint Stock Bank (Eximbank) has just warned of a few new tricks from criminals to steal money from customers accounts.

In a specific case, fraudsters send messages to customers stating that Eximbank updated its banking software, and your Eximbank account has been deactivated.

Links are then attached to these messages that lead to fake websites, which are created and controlled by the fraudsters.

These fake websites feature a similar interface to Eximbanks own website, so customers can be easily tricked into logging in. Without notice, customers would provide their personal information like accounts and passwords. Thats when cybercriminals break into their real accounts, an Eximbank representative cautioned.

With the fraudulent website logins, scammers reach for one-time passwords (OTPs)  a security feature to verify a users identity for online transactions. They would use them to access the victims real accounts and transfer money out to another account or use the funds within the account for online purchases.

The latest cybercrime-related case is one of Sacombanks customers, who had her account activated on an alleged Sacombank website which turned out to be fake. According to local media, the female customer lost VND38 million ($1,652) within a few minutes.

A few months ago, Tran Viet Luan from Ho Chi Minh City lost VND406 million ($17,650) when logging into his Vietcombanks account, while the money was transferred to a beneficiary at MSB and SeABank. Luans incident was allegedly linked to an OTP attack, with the same old trick.

Last year, a large sum of money was illegally usurped by hackers through a network attack on banks that targeted OTPs for user transactions. The major way of cyber criminals is to trick users into installing malware, particularly spyware, on their mobile phones in order to steal OTP messages and proceed with illegal transactions.

Nguyen Van Giang, deputy director of the Department of Cyber Security and High-tech Crime Prevention and Control under the Ministry of Public Security, noted there were around 4,000 cases related to cybersecurity attacks, leading to a total loss of about VND100 billion ($4.35 million) last year.

Experts predicted that, in 2021, financial institutions such as banks, payment intermediaries, and e-wallets in Vietnam will continue to be prime targets of cybercriminals.

Ngo Tuan Anh, vice president in charge of cybersecurity from security solutions developer Bkav Vietnam said, Nowadays, there are many cases where hackers exploit the weaknesses of fintech and banks. Fraud attacks regarding bank accounts are predicted to increase unpredictably in 2021, especially as digitally-led financial services lure more attention from customers in the face of Industry 4.0.

Nguyen Son Hai, director of Viettel Cyber Security, revealed that 90 per cent of cyberattack alerts are linked to finance and banking, emphasising the immense threats of a relatively weak security infrastructure in Vietnamese fintech and banks.

Furthermore, market watchdogs cautioned that instead of targeting consumers directly, hackers now could attack software manufacturers. Once victims download or update such software, the malware is activated and hackers can easily break into the protected systems.

A report conducted by consultancy PwC showed that 96 per cent of executives have shifted their cybersecurity strategy due to the COVID-19 pandemic, while 55 per cent of respondents lack confidence that their cyber spending is allocated towards the most significant risks.

Getting the most value for every US dollar spent on cybersecurity becomes more critical as organisations digitalise. More than half of organisations (55 per cent), state that their cyber budget will be increasing in 2021.

Pho Duc Giang, director of PwC Vietnam Cybersecurity, commented, We have seen increased investments in cybersecurity in terms of technical solutions, managed services, and human resources in Vietnam. However, few companies are operating cyber risk assessments in practical ways, and local leaders need more sufficient business information to raise confidence in budget estimation and decision-making.

Do Quy Vu, deputy director of the National Institute of Information and Communication Strategy under the Ministry of Information and Communications, told VIR that the country boasts prime advantages in developing digitally-led financial services with e-commerce growth estimated at 30 per cent annually.

Le Anh Dung, deputy director of the Payment Department under the State Bank of Vietnam also said that 95 per cent of credit institutions are embarking on their digital transformation journey.

But this process is facing many challenges. For example, the incomplete legal framework has become a bottleneck in the process, specifically with regards to electronic transactions, the authentication of e-signatures, and digital contracts in banking transactions, Dung said.
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Under the hood, the Nokia 5.4 packs the octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 662 SoC paired (the Nokia 5.3 packs SD 665 SoC) with up to 6GB RAM and 128GB storage that is expandable up to 512GB with a microSD card. It also supports dual-SIM cards (Nano) and runs Android 10 out-of-the-box. The company says that the phone is guaranteed with three years of monthly security updates and two years of software upgrades.
The government has told Twitter to delete 257 handles. The government termed the list of 257 handles non-negotiable even it agreed to meet Twitter officials to discuss issues flagged. Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) on Wednesday agreed to a virtual meeting with Twitter officials to discuss issues that were flagged by the government earlier.

During the meeting, the Centre read out the Riot Act to Twitter. The Secretary Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology reportedly told Twitter officials not to maintain double standards.

In addition, the government also pulled up Twitter for dragging its feet in the aftermath of the Red Fort incident while it had acted swiftly to block objectionable handles, including that of former US president Donald Trump following violence at the US Capitol.

"Twitter cannot be the adjudicator on the Constitution of India and can take legal recourse on the government's request to block handles. However, Twitter cannot make judgements on the government's request to block objectionable handles," the Government of India told the social media giant.

The Secretary Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology also asked Twitter officials how the micro-blogging website is "transparent" if it allows millions of bots to operate.

As per details accessed by India Today TV, Ajay Sawhney, Secretary Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeitY) met Twitter officials on Wednesday.

As per sources, the government will promote swadeshi platform Koo against Twitter. The government is annoyed with Twitter's response on its response on January 26 violence.

It is also being said that the government is not happy with Twitter's response despite repeated notice to streamline the system.

The indication is that maximum ministers from the Indian government may soon be going to shift to Koo platform.

Twitter India on Tuesday had responded to the government of India and requested a formal dialogue with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. "An acknowledgment to the receipt of the non-compliance notice has also been formally communicated," the company had said in a statement.

This week, the government sent a notice to Twitter India where it asked another 1178 accounts to be removed from the platform. This was the second notice, after a few days, when Twitter failed to remove or block around 250 accounts and tweets that the government registered as a non-compliance of its orders.

Twitter India in a blog post earlier on Wednesday posted its response to blocking orders from the government.

"Beginning on 26 January 2021, our global team provided 24/7 coverage and took enforcement action judiciously and impartially on content, Trends, Tweets, and accounts that were in violation of the Twitter Rules  our global policy framework that governs every Tweet on the service," the company said in its blog post.

The company also added that it took a range of enforcement actions including permanent suspension in certain cases against more than 500 accounts escalated across all MeitY orders for clear violations of Twitter's rules.

Twitter also listed some of the actions it took as per the government orders, "Specifically, we: Took action on hundreds of accounts that violated the Twitter Rules, particularly inciting violence, abuse, wishes of harm, and threats that could trigger the risk of offline harm, prevented certain terms that violated our Rules from appearing in the Trends section, suspended more than 500 accounts that were engaging in clear examples of platform manipulation and spam, tackled misinformation based on the highest potential for real-world harm, and prioritized labelling of Tweets that were in violation of our synthetic and manipulated media policy."
The Karnataka Digital Economy Mission (KDEM) will create ten lakh jobs by 2025 in the state as it will attract more investments in the information technology sector, Karnataka Deputy Chief Minister Dr C N Ashwath Narayan said on Tuesday. "The KDEM will create ten lakh jobs by 2025 and will help Karnataka to reach the goal of $150 Billion in IT exports and also to become a $300 Billion Economy by 2025," Narayan, who holds the electronic and the IT-BT portfolio, said.

He was speaking at the inauguration of the office of Karnataka Digital Economy Mission which has the objective of increasing digital economy contribution to GSDP to 30 per cent and launch of the 'Beyond Bengaluru' report which facilitates achieving this target. He added that the government would focus on improving connectivity even to remote parts of the state, providing round the clock electricity, and reduce rural-urban divide by establishing needed infrastructure in order to strengthen the digital economy.

He sought a bigger role for KDEM in improving the economy of the state. "The government wanted KDEM to be more industry friendly and keeping this in mind it has allowed for 51 per cent stake to Industry associations while retaining a minority holding of 49 per cent for itself.The government wants to act rather as a facilitator than an authority," Narayan pointed out.

According to the Additional Chief Secretary in the department of electronics, IT/BT, E V Ramana Reddy, the IT sector contributes 25 per cent of GSDP of which 98 per cent accounts for Bengaluru alone. In order to increase the share of other regions of the state as well, the 'Beyond Bengaluru' project has been initiated, he said.

According to officials, the KDEM has been set up on a public-private partnership model, where Industry associations like NASSCOM, The Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (ASSOCHAM), India Electronics & Semiconductor Association (IESA), and Vision Group on Startups- contribute 51 per cent stake.

Also read: Govt aims to provide jobs to 80% J&K youth within 5 years: LG
John Moylan, a highly revered member of the San Francisco community who dedicated his life to public service and was an advocate for the installation of a suicide barrier on the Golden Gate Bridge, died Feb. 4 at age 92.

Moylan immigrated from Ireland to the United States in 1951 and within days landed a job plastering walls and ceilings, according to the Irish newspaper the Tipperary Star.

Moylan was a leader among his colleagues and in 1970 became president of a local plasterers union, and later its business manager, expanding membership, growing pension funds, launching an apprentice program and leading mergers. He was a 70-year member of the Golden Gate Lodge of Plasterers and Shop Hands Local 66, according to his obituary.

Moylan was appointed to the Board of Directors for the Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District in 1997 and served for 20 years; he was president of the board in 2007 and 2008.

"It was an honor to be with John on the bridge board," said board member David Rabbitt. "He had the respect of everyone because of who he was and how he treated people, which was of the utmost respect. When John spoke, everyone listened intently because his words were chosen carefully and usually right on point."

Courtesy Moylan family

Moylan's daughter Patricia Moylan Davis said Mayor London Breed reappointed him to the board Jan. 21, only two weeks before his death, and called Moylan Davis after his passing.

When Sen. Dianne Feinstein was mayor of San Francisco and first appointed Moylan to the Golden Gate Bridge board, he was interviewed by the press and famously said he wanted to accomplish two things: build a suicide deterrent barrier as well as a moveable median barrier to reduce head-on car accidents.

"At that time, the suicide barrier was not a popular idea and he was an outlier for supporting the project," Paolo Cosulich-Schwartz, a spokesperson for the Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District, said in an email. "Decades later, his role in advocating for both projects has saved lives and will continue to save many more at the Golden Gate Bridge. While we will miss John dearly, his legacy will live on at the Golden Gate Bridge for generations to come."

Moylan's grandson, Sean Moylan, jumped off the bridge to his death at age 27 in 2014 as Golden Gate Bridge officials neared a decision on funding the barrier that had been debated for decades and with Moylan as a steadfast advocate for its construction.

"My fathers dedication to the suicide barrier was very strong before Sean's death," Moylan Davis said. "Its a sensitive family topic. I think some people misconstrue the reason he was so dedicated to building the barrier. He took Sean's passing in the family very hard."

The median barrier was installed in 2015 and the suicide barrier, which was approved by the board in 2008 under Moylan's leadership as president, is still under construction with a completion estimated in 2023.

Moylan's contributions to the community were also made as a member of San Francisco Human Rights Commission and the San Francisco Recreation and Park Commission, according to his obituary.

Born in the a small Irish town of Nenagh in Tipperary, Moylan was also an active member of S.F.'s Irish community and a founding member and builder of the United Irish Cultural Center.

"He never forgot his roots and the place where he grew up," said Moylan's nephew Tommy Moylan. "He made numerous trips home here to see his family every chance he got."

Moylan was a mentor to several political leaders and Moylan Davis said he was among the first to encourage Gov. Gavin Newsom to run for mayor of San Francisco.

"One of the things Im hearing over and over and over again is he was fair, honest, had great leadership qualities and vision and he did it with humor. He was also a mentor. He was a mentor to Mayor Breed, Frank Jordan, Joanne Hayes [longtime S.F. fire chief], Greg Suhr with the SFPD. He was a great friend and loyal to people like Dianne Feinstein. Nancy Pelosi just sent flowers to the house. He was just a kind, helpful, get-it-done, dont-complain, make-it-happen and 'then have fun with it' kind of person."

Moylan is survived by his wife Phyllis. They were married for more than 60 years and had seven children (Maura, Kevin, Michael, Brendan, Patricia, Teresa and Eileen), 18 grandchildren and 19 grandchildren.

"He was an extraordinarily dedicated family man," said Moylan Davis. "He was one of 12 children and he was the oldest son and he made it his life work to make our family connected and not only among his seven children but also all the cousins and aunts and uncles. We all have close relationships with our cousins here in the United States and also our Irish cousins. We stay in the family homes. Were a very large and tight family and its because of John."

If you are in distress, call the National Suicide Prevention hotline 24 hours a day at 800-273-8255, or visit suicidepreventionlifeline.org for more resources.
[February 10, 2021] BREAKING NEWS: ROSEN, GLOBALLY RESPECTED INVESTOR COUNSEL, Encourages Exxon Mobil Corporation Investors with Large Losses to Secure Counsel Before Important Deadline - XOM

WHY: Rosen Law Firm, a global investor rights law firm, reminds purchasers of the securities of Exxon Mobil Corporation (NYSE: XOM) between November 6, 2019 and January 14, 2021, inclusive (the "Class Period"), of the important March 29, 2021 lead plaintiff deadline. SO WHAT: If you purchased Exxon securities during the Class Period you may be entitled to compensation without payment of any out of pocket fees or costs through a contingency fee arrangement. WHAT TO DO NEXT: To join the Exxon class action, go to http://www.rosenlegal.com/cases-register-2021.html or call Phillip Kim, Esq. toll-free at 866-767-3653 or email pkim@rosenlegal.com or cases@rosenlegal.com for information on the class action. A class action lawsuit has already been filed. If you wish to serve as lead plaintiff, you must move the Court no later than March 29, 2021. A lead plaintiff is a representative party acting on behalf of other class members in directing the litigation. WHY ROSEN LAW: We encourage investors to select qualified counsel with a track record of success in leadership roles. Often, firms issuing notices do not have comparable experience or resources. The Rosen Law Firm represents investors throughout the globe, concentrating its practice in securities class actions and shareholder derivative litigation. Rosen Law Firm has achieved the largest ever securities class action settlement against a Chinese Company. 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 and has recovered hundreds of millions of dollars for investors. In 2019 alone the firm secured over $438 million for investors. In 2020 founding partner Laurence Rosen was named by law360 as a Titan of Plaintiffs' Bar. Many of the firm's attorneys have been recognized by Lawdragon and Super Lawyers.



DETAILS OF THE CASE: According to the lawsuit, defendants throughout the Class Period made false and/or misleading statements and/or failed to disclose that: (1) Exxon forced its employees to use unrealistic assumptions regarding the timelines for well drilling in the Permian Basin; (2) the foregoing assumptions served to artificially inflate the value of the Company's well operations in the Permian Basin; (3) the foregoing conduct, when revealed, subjected Exxon to a heightened risk of regulatory investigation and oversight; and (4) as a result, the Company's 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. To join the Exxon class action, go to http://www.rosenlegal.com/cases-register-2021.html or call Phillip Kim, Esq. toll-free at 866-767-3653 or email pkim@rosenlegal.com or cases@rosenlegal.com for information on the class action.

No Class Has Been Certified. Until a class is certified, you are not represented by counsel unless you retain one. You may select 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. Follow us for updates on LinkedIn (News - Alert) : https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-rosen-law-firm, on Twitter (News - Alert) : https://twitter.com/rosen_firm or on Facebook (News - Alert) : https://www.facebook.com/rosenlawfirm/. Attorney Advertising. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210210005968/en/

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There is cause for fresh alarm over voting rights in Texas.

Gov. Greg Abbott revealed his priorities for the 2021 Texas Legislative session, designating election integrity as an emergency item that lawmakers can vote on within the first 60 days of session, potentially bypassing the due deliberation and public input this issue deserves. House Speaker Dade Phelan named Rep. Briscoe Cain as the chair of the House Elections Committee, despite his notoriety for traveling to Pennsylvania to help overthrow the results of the 2020 election.

These actions signal an escalating attack on voting rights in a state that is infamous for being among the hardest in the nation to cast a ballot. It feeds and amplifies dangerously false rhetoric designed to undermine trust in our democratic system and prioritize partisan interests over the will of the people  exactly what fueled the failed white supremacist insurrection at the U.S. Capitol just weeks ago.

Opponents of democracy rely on unconscionable double-speak to assert there must be trust and confidence in the outcome of our elections, without ever acknowledging the complicity of the states leadership  Sen. Ted Cruz, Attorney General Ken Paxton and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick  in undermining the trust and confidence the people hold in our democratic processes.

Abbott, Cain and their co-conspirators are willfully perpetuating distrust in democracy to hold on to power in Texas. Partisan actors have been chasing the specter of voter fraud for years, scaring Texans and funneling misinformation about the integrity of our elections to sow seeds of doubt and mistrust. Its not new or surprising  their true mission is to continue Texass 150-year-old pattern of voter suppression.

State leadership, over the years, has wasted millions of tax-payer dollars while passing discriminatory laws that restrict access to the ballot box. Their steadfast refusal to move Texas into the 21st century in terms of both modernizing our election infrastructure and abolishing Jim Crow-era voting restrictions to make our democracy equitable is beyond shameful. Texas voter registration process, the most onerous in the country, demonstrates this point: Texas is among only nine states to not offer online voter registration, its 30-day deadline to register is tied for earliest in the country.

We dont know exactly what they have planned for their latest assault on voting rights but Gov. Abbott pointed to the 2019 Senate Bill 9 as a starting point; that iniquitous bill would have further institutionalized voter suppression and intimidation by criminalizing honest mistakes on voter registration forms and allowing partisan poll watchers to look over the shoulders of voters inside the poll booths in certain circumstances.

So far this session, Sen. Paul Bettencourt has a bill to prevent counties from proactively sending vote by mail applications to registered voters. Were also alarmed by a bill by Rep. Mayes Middleton that would strip local control over voter registration from county election officials and consolidate sole power over the voter registration rolls under the secretary of state, which has a record of improper purges.

We are in a critical crossroads for our democracy. As we detailed in our latest report, Defending Democracy, the challenges that Texas voters face are unrivaled. While encouraging, the increased turnout we saw in 2020 does not mean that our elections are administered fairly and equitably. Texas still has restrictive registration and ID laws and works tirelessly to further limit access for historically disenfranchised groups. We saw that in the last election when Texas was one of the only states that refused to expand access to vote by mail despite the ongoing pandemic that is disproportionately affecting communities of color. And we saw it when Gov. Abbott ordered Texas counties to shut down multiple ballot drop-off locations that would have made voting easier and safer. Even with increased engagement and enthusiasm around voting, Texass democracy is overwhelmed with structural barriers to democratic participation.

If Gov. Abbott and the other politicians in charge actually cared about the integrity of our elections, they would let Texas vote. They would clearly denounce the partisan myths about our democratic process that theyve been spreading for years. They would stop passing laws that put up barriers that affect some groups more than others. They would reflect on the gravity of the attack on the will of the people at the U.S. Capitol. They would reflect on their actions and, in a moment of true leadership, begin to tear down the barriers they sustain. They would work to reform our democracy, ensuring it lives up to its promise of equity, justice and accountability.

But thats not what theyre doing. Its up to us  the people of the great state of Texas  to do what current leadership refuses. Texans value our democracy and the right to vote. We must do everything in our power to block their voter suppression agenda this legislative session. Our democracy is at stake. We must all stand up to demand and defend, better democracy for all.

Gomez is the associate director of Common Cause Texas.

Of all the PlayStation consoles released by Sony, the next-generation PlayStation 5 seems to have the most unique-looking aesthetic, but fans were still rather disappointed by the lack of customization for it, especially when people have been asking for a black version of the console.

And now, it may seem like gaming fans' dreams are coming true, except that there's a catch.

Customized PS5 Faceplates

Before anything else, Sony won't be creating an official black PS5 version and we might not see any official black console from the company since they have already been having a hard time fulfilling the demands of gaming enthusiasts who are yet to secure their own consoles.

To get the highly-requested black console, custom skin maker Dbrand has announced that they are planning to sell PlayStation 5 faceplates that are aptly named Darkplates that could transform the shiny white console into a black matte unit.

According to Tom's Guide, the Dbrand faceplate features an interior micro-texture just like with the Sony console's default design.

Nevertheless, it seems like the company will be changing its micro-texture feature with its very own "apocalyptic dbrand versions," claiming that Sony won't be able to sue them for including the design--but that doesn't mean the tech giant will simply ignore them for offering unauthorized PS5 accessories.

Read Also: PS5 DualSense Joystick Drift Issues: Here are Possible Fixes You Can Try

Sony Against Skin Makers

Dbrand is referencing the situation with a custom skin maker called PlateStation, which previously announced their plans to sell PS5 faceplates but they were unable to continue the business and had to change names as Sony has allegedly sued them.

Moreover, a company called SUP5R has also decided to offer customized faceplates for the next-gen console but also canceled all the pre-orders after alleged threats from Sony.

Dbrand's fate against Sony is unknown, but they are actually yet to release the Darkplates.

The Catch: It's Pricey

Based on the reports, the company has only emailed a survey for those who have signed up for notifications, asking them how much they are willing to pay for the PlayStation 5 skin, and it seemed like the lowest price that was mentioned was $69.

The company has also apparently asked its subscribers whether they are willing to pay an additional $15 for the shipping fee since the PS5 is "[expletive] enormous."

There also appears to be a custom skin that console owners could put on the unit's center spine, which Dbrand has suggested a $0.69 price tag for it since it appears to be a simple customized decal.

With that, it seems like the customization won't come cheap.

Furthermore, there's also no detail as to when the Darkplates will be released, although based on their website, the faceplate will be coming this 2021, so we won't probably have to wait that long for it.

Plus the company has also admitted that if they were to be released.

As of now, PlayStation 5 consoles are still hard to come by, with shortage most likely continuing until mid-2021 as AMD said they are unable to supply the customized chip for the console at a faster rate.

Related Article: Aurora 7 Has Seven Screens and a 1-Hour Battery Life--For Now

This article is owned by Tech Times

Written by: Nhx Tingson

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Just before the last nuclear arms-control treaty with Russia, New START, expired, Mr. Biden extended for another five years. But it does nothing to diminish the threat from more modern technologies, from tactical or medium-range nuclear missiles, or from other nuclear nations.

All other nuclear arms control treaties, including the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, have lapsed, and Mr. Trump pulled out of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which put tight limits on Tehrans ability to enrich uranium.

The combination of these challenges raises the nuclear security of our allies anew, as they ask whether they can continue to rely on the United States as theyve always done, said Ivo Daalder, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO and president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

Some allies wonder about the viability and credibility of the U.S. nuclear and security guarantee, he said.

Doubts about Americas security guarantees are not new, but they are bigger than ever. Charles de Gaulle, who as French president created his countrys independent nuclear deterrent in the 1960s, questioned American willingness to trade New York for Paris, and in 2018 Mr. Trump wondered if the United States should go to war to defend Montenegro, a NATO member state.

Given the new reach and capability of North Korea, with missiles that could hit the United States, Mr. Daalder said, Asian allies are asking: Will you sacrifice us for you? Will you save Seattle at the price of Seoul?

With the possibility of third stimulus checks looming, the question is, are you qualified to receive it or not? Now that the income limits have been set and announced for the latest stimulus checks, it is good news for most middle earners as they are still eligible to receive the relief payments.

Democrats proposed stimulus checks to fewer Americans

The news that there will be no change in the salary threshold requirements from that of the Trump administration to the existing one for stimulus checks might sound like a no-news story, but it's not.

A few weeks ago, the Democrats proposed offering checks to fewer people, which had several opponents angrily claiming that they had already reneged on their pledge to give out $2,000 stimulus checks.

And while the $2,000 independent checks have still not become a reality, the $1,400 stimulus checks are happening, and the good news is that the requirements for receiving them have not changed.

Republican "moderates" and a couple of centrist Democrats had wanted to lower the salary threshold from $75,000 to $50,000, from which the gain would begin to phase out. The net result of this move will give less than 29 million people the money for no good cause, breaking a pledge to voters.

The Biden administration suggested that this kind of reform was "open to negotiate," which is a bad policy, as Bernie Sanders pointed out on Twitter, it is bad politics.

Unbelievable. There are some Dems who want to lower the income eligibility for direct payments from $75,000 to $50,000 for individuals, and $150,000 to $100,000 for couples. In other words, working class people who got checks from Trump would not get them from Biden. Brilliant!  Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) February 7, 2021

According to Fatherly on MSN, Sanders and the party's left-wing unsurprisingly threw a fit, and their attempts held the thresholds used for the first two rounds of stimulus payments intact in the new plan.

But while most people are likely to get the same amount of cash they did under Trump, the Democrats have lowered the overall money that can be made to gain any cash at all.

Sanders says anyone earning $75,000 should get full payment

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, the new chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, will form the final $1.9 trillion coronavirus stimulus bill, as per NJ.com.

On Sunday, Sanders said the $1,400 direct payments should go to Americans who earn $75,000 or less.

Sanders opposed plans to allocate the total payments to anyone making $50,000, which was part of a strategy to avoid getting a share of the revenue from wealthier taxpayers. Checks could flow to households earning $300,000 or more under the initial plan.

The senator said the requirements for people should be $75,000 and $150,000 for married couples, much as President Donald Trump signed into law during the first two rounds of stimulus checks. Those making less than $100,000 and couples making less than $200,000 have earned lower revenue-based benefits.

"It's also a bit absurd, from a political perspective, that under Trump, these people would get the benefit, but under [President Joe] Biden, who is fighting hard for this country's working class, they wouldn't get that full benefit," Sanders said.

A budget resolution to start a legislative procedure known as reconciliation was approved last week by Congress, which would avoid a Senate boycott and encourage Democrats without any Republican support to approve the stimulus bill.

Although Biden has spoken of working on the bill with Republicans, Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-Louisiana, said that was not the case, citing the President's disapproval of the alternative $618 billion budget package proposed by him and nine other Republicans in the Senate. Biden said it was too small.

Senate Republicans have confirmed that, with overwhelming bipartisan support, the previous stimulus proposals were approved. But it came after GOP senators sought and failed to pass their bills without any Democratic objectives.

Since the House passed the $2 trillion-dollar stimulus measures, Republicans still could not compromise with congressional Democrats.

Stimulus checks should go to Americans who put them to savings

The proposed third round of stimulus checks should be allocated to Americans even though the funds will not be automatically invested back into the economy by any of those who receive the payments, experts say.

Republicans and some liberal Democrats have proposed lowering the payment amount or decreasing the income level to $50,000 or less for people to earn benefits.

According to Newsweek on MSN, arguments regarding the greater volume and higher tax threshold have also claimed that more individuals who earn the benefit will either invest the money or use it instead of using it to pay loans, apparently defeating the immediate purpose of stimulating the economy.

However, multiple economists refute the idea that not instantly investing the money would work against the stimulus plan, arguing that the economy would eventually feel the effects.

Read also: IRS Could Start Sending Out the Third Stimulus Checks as Early as First Week of March

@ 2021 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Kathmandu, January 28

The Ministry of Health and Population has informed that the countrys Covid-19 tally has reached 270,588 as of Thursday afternoon.

The ministry says 213 new cases were confirmed in the country in the past 24 hours.

In this period, 3,791 swab samples were tested. So far, 2 million and 60,860 people have been tested in the country.

As of today, 3,203 cases are active.

Of the total cases so far, 265,365 people have achieved recovery whereas 2,020 died, according to the ministry. In the past 24 hours, 296 people have been discharged whereas zero (0) deaths have been reported.

The recovery rate as of today is 98 per cent.

Over 100 people are quarantined across the country.
The second Trump impeachment trial continues today: Heres everything you need to know, including how to watch, what to expect and more.

When is the Trump impeachment trial? What time does the impeachment trial start?

Former President Donald Trumps second impeachment trial began Tuesday and continues Wednesday, Feb. 10, 2021, at 12 p.m. ET, in the U.S. Senate at the Capitol in Washington, D.C. The trial is expected to last into the weekend and possibly longer.

What channel is the Trump impeachment trial on? Heres how to watch:

Live coverage of the impeachment trial will broadcast on PBS, C-SPAN, CNN, Fox News and MSNBC. ABC, CBS, and NBC will also be providing special coverage in their evening and morning newscasts.

The trial will also be streaming live through the apps and websites for ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, NBC and PBS. Free livestreams are also available on YouTube, Facebook, and through Newsy (via FuboTV, Philo, Sling TV and YouTube TV). Heres C-SPANs live online stream:

What is Trump charged with? Will he be convicted?

Trump has been charged with article of impeachment for incitement of insurrection. Hes accused of encouraging a pro-Trump mob to storm the U.S. Capitol, which led to five deaths and dozens of injured police officers. Several insurrectionists have been accused of threatening to kill lawmakers, chanting Hang Mike Pence! and searching for people like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, as they objected to the results of the 2020 presidential election, which President Joe Biden won, and interrupted Congress Electoral College count.

Two-thirds of the Senate must vote to convict Trump, which appears unlikely as 45 Senate Republicans voted to dismiss the trial. The Senate is currently split 50-50, and Democrats have a slight majority with Vice President Kamala Harris, but Dems would need 17 additional votes to convict the former Republican president.

What to watch for:

According to the Associated Press, lawyers for Trump are arguing that the trial is unconstitutional and that the former president was exercising his free speech rights when he told Make America Great Again supporters to fight like hell.

Tuesdays proceedings began with a debate to dismiss the trial before it even begins; Republicans argued that an impeachment to remove the president from office is irrelevant because Trump is no longer president, though he was impeached by the House before he left office. The Senate voted, 56-44, that the trial is constitutional and agreed to proceed with the trial Tuesday.

Trump impeachment trial: History lessons, tweets, more Day 1 highlights

The House managers present their arguments first, with each side allowed up to 16 hours to make their case, with up to eight hours per day.

Defense arguments are likely to begin Friday, according to the AP, with arguments that fight like hell did not literally mean to fight with violence.

Witnesses are currently not expected to appear at the trial, presided over by Senate Pro Tem Patrick Leahy (D-VT), and Trump has declined a request to testify.

Will any Republicans vote to convict Trump?

Democrats are expected to appeal to Republicans in an effort to sway at least 17 of them to convict Trump, focusing on the threats to their own lives in the Capitol riots. A separate vote could potentially bar Trump from holding future office and would only need a majority.

Susan Collins of Maine, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, Mitt Romney of Utah, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania have all criticized Trump and voted in favor of having the impeachment trial. Those same five Republican senators voted Tuesday that the trial was constitutional, plus a sixth: Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana.

GOP senators retiring in 2022, like Toomey, Rob Portman of Ohio, Richard Burr of North Carolina and Richard Shelby of Alabama, may also be free of political consequences from voting to impeach Trump.

Trump is the first U.S. president to be impeached twice. He was first impeached in December 2019 on two articles of impeachment, for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. Trump was acquitted in January 2020 by the then GOP-controlled Senate; Romney was the only Republican who voted to convict him for abuse of power.
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A police inspector, simply identified as Umoh, on Wednesday shot himself dead after returning from an official assignment in Owerri, Imo State.

The inspector, until his death, was serving at area command headquarters in Owerri, according to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN).

A witness said the officer went into a private room and shot himself in the stomach.

Mobile officers came back and one of them went into one of the rooms and locked himself in. The next minute, we heard a gunshot.

When we approached the quarters, it was discovered the door was locked.

We forced it open and the mobile policeman was found dead in a pool of his own blood, the witness said.

The incident caused panic in the area.

The police spokesperson in Imo State, Orlando Ikeokwu, confirmed the incident.

Mr Ikeokwu, a superintendent of police, said the state Commissioner of Police, Nasiru Muhammed, has ordered an investigation into the incident.

(NAN)
Popular actress Njeri Gachomba, commonly known by her stage name Njambi, says she has elected to ignore reports that her hubby is stepping on her.

Speaking to a local online platform Njambi says she realized those who told her about her husband's reported unfaithful methods were keen to see the couple break up.

"Some people see you happy and make it their job to see you unhappy, that is what happened to us. After getting the information I overreacted before finding out the truth. Now we are good," she said.

Last December Njambi who gained his fame for her role in Real Househelps of Kawangware series, claimed via social media she'd received lots of 'evidence' from well-wishers incriminating her baby daddy.

She further disclosed she was 'shocked behind words' after finding out from fans that her hubby was spotted with other women including one who later confessed to having a great time.

The incident happened just months after the mother of two went on social media to shower praise at her man, thanking her for raising a child he did not sire.
KIRKLAND, Wash. and MILWAUKEE, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Children's Community Health Plan (CCHP) has partnered with Freespira, Inc., the maker of the first FDA-cleared digital therapeutic to significantly reduce or eliminate symptoms of panic attacks, panic disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in only 28 days. Freespira is now available to all of CCHP's members, including Medicaid patients, making it the first health plan to offer this new digital treatment in Wisconsin.

"Our team is passionately dedicated to our members and meeting their ever-changing healthcare needs, especially during such a challenging and stressful time," said Mark Rakowski, chief operating officer, CCHP. "Freespira is an exciting and innovative option to add to our mental health toolkit for members who suffer from panic attacks, panic disorder and PTSD. We chose Freespira because it has been not only proven effective at alleviating symptoms, but also has been proven to reduce overall healthcare costs. We see that win-win as the best way to improve the medical and social well-being of our members and the community."

CCHP, an affiliate of Children's Wisconsin, is an HMO dedicated to providing access to the highest quality health care and services to members living in Wisconsin. The health plan serves more than 160,000 adults and children with the combined resources of Children's Hospital, Children's Community Services, Children's specialty, primary care clinics and community partners.

While the use of this treatment isn't limited to adolescents, it's especially important for them as nearly 3 million children have been diagnosed with a serious emotional or behavioral health condition during the pandemic according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Roughly 6 percent of children ages 6 through 17 live with serious emotional or behavioral challenges, including severe anxiety, and trauma-related mental health conditions like PTSD, according to the CDC data.

"The CCHP team realizes that adults, adolescents and their families need new options to tackle moderate to severe anxiety-related behavioral health challenges," said Dean Sawyer, Chief Executive Officer, Freespira. "Even more importantly, they're deeply committed to bringing the newest, most effective treatments on the market to their members. We're proud to offer Freespira, our medication-free, at-home digital therapeutic that reduces symptoms, utilization and cost in as fast as 28 days".

Freespira is unique in that it addresses the underlying physiological cause of panic disorder and PTSD symptoms. The FDA-cleared digital therapeutic has been proven, via multiple studies, to address the hypersensitivity to carbon dioxide and related breathing irregularities which are the key physiological causes of panic disorder and PTSD symptoms. Freespira provides patients with real-time physiological feedback-based training to normalize their respiration rate and exhaled carbon dioxide levels to reduce or eliminate panic disorder and PTSD symptoms.

About Freespira, Inc.

Freespira, Inc. is the maker of Freespira, the only FDA-cleared digital therapeutic proven to significantly reduce or eliminate symptoms of panic attacks, panic disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in just 28 days by training users to normalize respiratory irregularities. Health plans, self-insured employers and the Veteran's Administration provide the company's drug-free solutions to improve quality of life, reduce medical spend and support the appropriate use of valuable healthcare resources. Find out how at www.freespira.com .

About Children's Community Health Plan (CCHP)

Children's Community Health Plan (CCHP), an affiliate of Children's Wisconsin, is an HMO dedicated to providing access to the highest quality health care and services to our members living in Wisconsin. We are proud to serve over 160,000 members between our two products, Medicaid and Marketplace. Children's Community Health Plan is a member of the Association for Community Affiliated Plans (ACAP), which is a national trade association representing more than 75 nonprofit safety net health plans which collectively provide health coverage to more than 20 million people. ACAP's mission is to strengthen not-for-profit Safety Net Health Plans in their work to improve the health and well-being of lower-income people and/or people with significant health needs.

For more information: www.childrenscommunityhealthplan.org/Freespira

To talk with Children's Community Health Plan please contact Mark Rakowski 414-266-6328

Media Contacts:

CCHP

Ashley Cobert

(414) 266-3056

[email protected]

Freespira

Todd Stein

(510) 417-0612

[email protected]oddsteincommunications.com

SOURCE Freespira

Related Links

http://www.freespira.com


Andolanjeevi row: After Chidambaram, now Rahul Gandhi takes a jibe

India

oi-Briti Roy Barman

New Delhi, Feb 10: After P Chidambaram, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has joined the exchange of "andolanjeevi" jibes, used by Prime Minister Narendra Modi two days ago in parliament over the protest by farmers against the three new farm laws.

The word andolanjeevi could be seen as referring to people who often participate in mass mobilisation.

Rahul tweeted in Hindi, "Crony-jeevi, he who is selling the country."

Earlier, Chidambaram tweeted he was a proud andolan jeevi (someone who thrives on protests) and accepted the term as a badge of honour saying , "I am a proud andolan jeevi. The quintessential andolan jeevi was Mahatma Gandhi."

Proud to be 'andolan jeevi: Chidambaram

Not only Chidambaram, advocate Meena Kandasamy and Congress' social media coordinator Gaurav Pandhi also expressed pride in being andolan jeevis and changed their profile names to andolanjeevi dr. meena kandasamy and Gaurav Pandhi-Andolanjeevi. Former diplomat KC Singh took a jibe at the Prime Minister via a tweet.

Samajwadi Party chief and former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav also attacked PM Modi on his 'andolan jeevi' remark and went onto call the leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party as 'chanda jeevis', which means those who survive on chanda or donations.

However, the term coined by the Prime Minister was welcomed by some people like BJP MP from Bengaluru Central P C Mohan, entrepreneur Nikhil Nanda and Former Governor of Tripura and Meghalaya Tathagata Roy.

P C Mohan tweeted, "Word of the year Feb 08, 2021 Andolanjeevi Adjective [ Aandolanjeevi ]

One who cannot live without protests and its members continually keep finding ways to stoke protests.

Eg: He's been an Andolanjeevi for many years!"

PM Modi said while replying to The Motion of Thanks on President's address in the Rajya Sabha, "We are well aware of some terms like 'shram jeevi' and 'buddhi jeevi'. But I am seeing that for some time a new entity has come up in this country- andolan jeevi. This community can be spotted wherever there is a protest, be it agitation by lawyers, students, or labourers, sometimes at the forefront and sometimes from behind. They cannot live without protests. We have to identify such people and protect the nation from them. They are parasites."
The interstellar visitor Oumuamua has baffled scientists since it passed through our Solar System in 2017, sparking a number of speculations as it left  a Harvard professor claims it is an alien traveler and others say it is a massive cosmic dust bunny or just a comet.

Now, a team from Arizona State University (ASU) has added to the ever-growing list of theories, suggesting the object is a fragment of Nitrogen ice from a distant Pluto-like planet.

The new study builds on previous work that concluded Oumuamua is a hydrogen iceberg, but states this proposal misses the fact the ice body sublimate quickly and evaporated before reaching our Solar System.

Nitrogen ice, however, is found throughout objects beyond the Solar System and reflects about two-thirds of the Suns light  Oumuamua is said to be 10 times more reflective than comets.

Researchers at ASU also note that Pluto and Triton, Neptunes largest moon, are abundant with Nitrogen gas and there may once have been thousands of worlds similar to Pluto.

In the early stages of our Solar System, such bodies are said to have been scattered and endured numerous impacts from smaller bodies, which sent massive chunks of Nitrogen ice flying through space - and one of them may have been Oumuamua.

Scroll down for video

A team from Arizona State University (ASU) proposes Oumuamua is a fragment of Nitrogen ice from a distant Pluto-like planet. Nitrogen ice is found throughout objects beyond the Solar System and reflects about two-thirds of the Suns light  Oumuamua is said to be 10 times more reflective than comets

The theory of Oumuamu being a massive chunk of Nitrogen ice was proposed by Alan Jackson and Steve Desch, both researchers at ASU, during the 2021 Lunar Planetary Science conference.

In recent work, we consider the likelihood that Oumuamua could be a fragment of N2 ice, reads the proposal.

In considering the origin and expected occurrence rate of N2 ice fragments we return to our comparison with the surfaces of Pluto and Triton.

Today N2 ice covers the surfaces of Pluto and Triton to depths of a few km, but the N2 ice layer may have been much thicker in the past. The cosmic abundance of nitrogen allows for the mass of N2 ice to be as high as 16% that of H2O ice.

Researchers explain that Pluto (pictured) is covered with a Nitrogen ice layer that is about 110,880 feet thick. Also located in the Kuiper Belt is a smaller dwarf planet called Gonggong, which sits just beyond Pluto, and is covered in a layer that is about 58,080 feet thick

The researches continue to explain that Pluto is covered with a Nitrogen ice layer that is about 110,880 feet thick.

Also located in the Kuiper Belt is a smaller dwarf planet called Gonggong, which sits just beyond Pluto, and is covered in a layer that is about 58,080 feet thick.

The Kuiper Belt, which begins at the orbit of Neptune, contains 20 to 35 planets with similar masses to Earth and it is believed that around six of them were much larger in the early stages of the Solar System.

During the migration of Neptune and the depletion of the primordial Kuiper belt, these bodies are said to have been scattered and endured numerous impacts by smaller bodies.

In regards to Pluto-sized planets, impacts during scatterings could have sent 0.5 percent of its mass flying into space, which is a Nitrogen ice layer some 130,000 feet thick.

The Kuiper Belt contains 20 to 35 planets with similar masses to Earth. During the migration of Neptune and the depletion of the primordial Kuiper belt, these bodies are said to have been scattered and endured numerous impacts by smaller bodies

For a Gonggong-sized body around three percent of the mass would be eroded, which is equivalent to a layer 36,089-foot deep.

The team notes that the average Nitrogen ice fragment would have a lifespan of 500 million years as it soars through space, with larger formations lasting longer.

In total if other stellar systems have a similar ejecta profile to the Solar system we expect about 4% of bodies in the ISM to be N2 ice fragments, making Oumuamua a mildly unusual body, but not exceptional, reads the proposal.

Oumuamua was discovered in October 2017 by a telescope in Hawaii millions of miles away.

During the impacts, incredibly thick layers of Nitrogen ice were flung into space and experts believe one of them may be Oumuamua

The object did not seem to be an ordinary rock, because after slingshotting around the sun, it sped up and deviated from the expected trajectory, propelled by a mysterious force.

This could be easily explained if it was a comet expelling gas and debris - but there was no visible evidence of this 'outgassing.'

The traveler also tumbled in a strange way - as inferred by how it got brighter and dimmer in scientists' telescopes, and it was unusually luminous, possibly suggesting it was made from a bright metal.

In order to explain what happened, astronomers came up with novel theories, such as that it was made of hydrogen ice and would therefore not have visible trails, or that it disintegrated into a dust cloud  but now it is proposed to be a Nitrogen iceberg.
People who previously thought that online was a poor substitute for face-to-face have changed their minds and there has been a rethink about the role of technology in supporting education. And each university cant afford to develop the tools themselves, she said. Going forward I think we have to be very judicious in the way that we understand the role technologies can play to support what we are doing. Every university cant afford to be developing technologies to duplicate what every other university does, so we have to find ways of increasing our productivity like every other business. Ms Field said the technology used was very sophisticated so that when students were chatting to lecturers or tutors, artificial intelligence technology could be used to identify students needing extra support. Its not cheap and nasty courses online. It is a much more sophisticated, educationally sound offering than that, she said. A spokeswoman for Swinburne University of Technology said it delivered a number of innovative online courses through its joint venture with Online Education Services.

Swinburne has adopted a comprehensive blended learning approach for the first semester of 2021, including a combination of digital and online learning with high-value on-campus learning experiences, she said. Online Education Services said it had supported its university partners throughout the pandemic to develop and deliver a range of undergraduate and postgraduate online education courses to students. A new report by Anna Hogan from the University of Queensland and Ben Williamson from the University of Edinburgh released on Wednesday identified the emergence of an educational gig economy  in which educators will compete for short-term contracts to teach partly automated degree programs online. The Hogan and Williamson report Pandemic Privatisation in Higher Education: Edtech and University Reform commissioned by global teacher union federation Education International shows that what started as a short-term response to the COVID-19 crisis would transform higher education in the long term. The researchers said the imposition of course materials and assessment products and surveillance software could risk the professional autonomy of teachers. The coronavirus pandemic forced a speedy transition to online learning. Credit:AP

The report said global technology companies, including Amazon, Google, Alibaba and Microsoft, have provided courses and extended their cloud and data infrastructure services to an increasing number of university partners. The researchers estimated that the global online market, valued at $36 billion in 2019, would be worth $74 billion by 2025. University of Sydney Professor of Labour Law Shae McCrystal said the long-term systemic underfunding of universities was driving a crisis in employment. It is not surprising that we would see universities looking to casualisation and outsourcing of ways of coping in increasingly difficult financial times and this will fundamentally challenge secure permanent employment in the future, she said. Education policy researcher Peter Hurley from Victoria Universitys Mitchell Institute said technology had improved the quality of remote learning, making it more interactive, and it helped institutions offer courses to a larger number of students more cheaply and was easier to audit. Once the initial investment is made in the learning product, it is cheaper to manage because the ratio of staff to students required to run an online course can be less than, for example, what is needed to run a series of smaller tutorials, he said.
The Federal Government has said that the nation has detected a total of 13 of the deadlier B117 variant strain of the COVID-19.

The Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF) Boss Mustapha said this on Monday in Abuja at the joint national briefing of the Presidential Task Force (PTF) on COVID-19.

According to him, six out of these numbers were detected in the last one week and they all came out of samples collected between November and January.

He, however, assured that the PTF (through the NCDC) was working with the Africa CDC on genomic surveillance.

He also said that the National snap shot for COVID-19 as at 7 February, 2021 stood at 139,748 cases; active cases, 24,556 (17%); discharged, 113,525 (81.2%); deaths, 1,667 (1.2%) and the total tests being 1,398,630.

While saying that these are just the current cumulative numbers, he said that the test positivity ratio was an indication of the severity of the spread.

"Testing is still being aggressively pursued as a viable strategy and the PTF shall continue to appeal to not just the citizens to get tested but call on sub-national entities to ensure that capacity of the laboratories that have been established within their jurisdictions be fully maximized.

"This will help reduce the burden on the National Reference Laboratory and the attendant lengthy turnaround time for test results," Mustapha said.

Overcoming oxygen challenges

He also said that the shortage of oxygen for case management is gradually being overcome as the private sector (CACOVID) is supporting the provision of oxygen nationwide and allocations have been made to states.

"New protection regulations covers all"

The SGF also warned that the Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Health Protection Regulations 2021 signed by Mr. President is now fully operational.

"The PFT wishes to reiterate that the provisions contained in the Regulations are lucid and are applicable to all entities (public or private sectors).

"I therefore wish to remind all MDAs of the strong need to deploy technology for meetings, retreat, etc and to avoid large gatherings that may violate the Regulations. If such plans are on-going, they should be modified forthwith.

"The PTF considers the violation of protocols very seriously and urges international passengers arriving Nigeria to ensure compliance with the international travel protocols and observe the Non-Pharmaceutical Intervention measures while in-Country," Mustapha said.

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Vaccine disqualification

The PTF boss who said that the process for accessing vaccines and the plans for getting it to the last mile is progressing, urged all Nigerians and particularly, the media to recognize that humanity is at war with an unseen enemy.

He said, "Nations are also struggling to take poll positions to access the same commodity which is in obvious short supply. We must therefore play our critical complimentary roles of educating the public on the benefits of the vaccines in overcoming the pandemic.

"The PTF similarly wishes to firmly restate that Nigeria was never disqualified from accessing the COVID-19 vaccine. The PTF has debunked the story and so did the WHO.

"Misinformation of Nigerians in any form or shape will be counterproductive and dangerous to our health, security and economy."

Mustapha added that the PTF, last week, through the Ministry of Aviation briefed on the new burden of test imposed by the Emirates Airlines and KLM on outbound passengers.

He said that the "NCAA, after due consideration, promptly suspended the lifting of outbound passengers on Emirates and KLM for 72 hours until this was resolved.

Mustapha said that the subject was still under deliberations within the nation's laws and international aviation rules.
This is the heart-stopping moment a candle flame escalates into a fiery blaze when a bored student attempts to extinguish it with water.

Footage, which was recorded in London, shows the candle burning on the desk after the young man lit it and then dropped matches into the container during an online Zoom lesson.

As flames flare out of the wax-filled container he tries to douse them in water, which only makes the situation worse.

The unnamed student then starts to panic before carrying the pot into the bathroom where he claims the candle 'exploded'.

In the clip, recorded on February 5, the candle can be seen sitting on the student's desk as he giggles and says: 'This is just too funny.'

His teacher can be heard talking in the background as a Zoom class continues on his laptop.

The student then takes a glass of water and pours it into the candle's container which suddenly causes flames to shoot up uncontrollably.

The young man behind the camera takes an abrupt step back and mumbles expletives under his breath.

The footage, which was recorded in London, shows a candle burning on the desk after the unnamed young man lit it during an online Zoom lesson before attempting to douse it with water

The student pours water it into the candle's container which suddenly causes flames to shoot up uncontrollably (pictured) as he takes an abrupt step back and mumbles expletives under his breath

The video then cuts to the student carrying the pot into his bathroom using a towel to protect his hand from the heat.

He repeatedly says 'oh my God' as the candle spits and crackles before he hurriedly launches the candle into the sink in his adjoining bathroom.

Filming the aftermath, the young man pans to show the wax that has spilled over the edge of the sink and on to the floor.

The tap has been left running with the towel and candle holder drenched in water.

He says: 'Oh my God, I actually turned it off but it's such a mess. I'm laughing so hard.

The video then cuts to the student carrying the pot into his bathroom using a towel to protect his hand from the heat as the candle spits and crackles

Filming the aftermath, the young man pans to show the wax that has spilled over the edge of the sink and on to the floor as the tap is left running over the the towel and candle holder

'I would have gone to jail. My God. But look at my bathroom because you know it is full of wax and I didn't know that wax was very flammable.'

He looks down and laughs at the dozens of matches lying in the sink which he had put into the candleholder to create a 'mini fireplace'.

Speaking after the mishap, the student said: 'During online school, I was in a boring zoom class and I was playing with a candle I had on my desk.

'I thought it would be fun to create a mini fireplace with the candle just for the fun of it.

'So I put around 30 matches inside the candle and, afterward, the fire got bigger and I decided to put it out with water but it got worse.

'I was really scared, the fire got bigger and bigger so I decided to bring it to my bathroom and shower to put it out, where the candle exploded there, and all the wax was everywhere.

'This is why you should be paying attention during class and not playing with fire or candles.'
"It will be our pleasure to assist ORLEN from design to startup of their unit and for years to follow, said Kevin Bockwinkel, global business manager, STRATCO Alkylation Technology.

DuPont Clean Technologies (DuPont) has been awarded the contract to supply ORLEN Lietuva (ORLEN) with licensing, engineering, and technical services for a STRATCO alkylation unit and a MECS spent acid regeneration (SAR) unit at the Mazeikiai refinery in Mazeikiai, Lithuania. The Mazeikiai refinery processes an average of 8 million tons of crude per year with capacity of up to 10 million tons of crude per year. In order to increase refinery complexity and flexibility of the Mazeikiai refinery, ORLEN commissioned DuPont for a STRATCO alkylation unit with 240 kmta (6,000 bpsd) alkylate capacity. The alkylation unit will utilize LPG in the conversion to alkylate, and therefore upgrade refinery profitability. The 75 mtpd MECS SAR unit, also under license from DuPont, will provide the refinery with a consistent supply of sulfuric acid, which is utilized as the catalyst for the alkylation unit, while ensuring compliance with the regions stringent emission regulations.

The STRATCO alkylation unit will enable ORLEN to generate low-sulfur, high-octane, low-Rvp alkylate with zero olefins that meets the criteria of the EURO VI standard. Startup for both units is targeted for 2025.

The addition of an alkylation unit will continue to increase the flexibility of operations and refining efficiency at the Mazeikiai Refinery. We are extremely excited to enter into this project with ORLEN, supporting them through their modernization efforts by enabling them to produce high quality alkylate for their gasoline pool. It will be our pleasure to assist ORLEN from design to startup of their unit and for years to follow, said Kevin Bockwinkel, global business manager, STRATCO Alkylation Technology.

The STRATCO alkylation technology is a sulfuric acid-catalyzed process that converts low-value, straight-chain olefins (propylene, butylene and amylene) into high-value, branched components called alkylate. Alkylate is known for its superior blending properties and is a key component for clean gasoline. The STRATCO alkylation technology helps refiners safely produce cleaner-burning gasoline with high octane, low Reid vapor pressure, low sulfur, zero aromatics and zero olefins. Licensed and marketed by DuPont as part of its Clean Technologies portfolio, the STRATCO alkylation technology is the world-leading alkylation technology with more than 100 licensed units worldwide and more than 915,000 bpsd (35,800 kmta) of installed capacity. DuPont is committed to alkylation research and has extensive experience in assisting refiners with alkylation research, design, start-ups, test runs, troubleshooting, optimization, revamps, expansions, analytical testing, operator training, turnarounds and HAZOP studies.

The MECS Spent Acid Regeneration (SAR) technology is an extremely reliable, dry gas technology which produces the highest acid concentration (99.2 wt% sulfuric acid and oleum) of all SAR processes for refinery alkylation, acrylonitrile and methyl methacrylate unit performance. High acid concentrations are particularly important for refinery alkylation units as it increases alkylate quality and reduces acid consumption. MECS SAR plants offer high mechanical reliability and high on-stream time in comparison to wet gas processes, while also providing emissions abatement to ensure compliance with local and country environmental requirements. Integrated into the MECS SAR technology are proven specialty products such as catalysts, Brink mist eliminators, DynaWave scrubbers, ZeCor corrosion resistant alloy products, and acid coolers all of which are specifically designed for the most demanding operating environments. Licensed and marketed by DuPont as part of its Clean Technologies portfolio, the MECS technology is the world-leading sulfuric acid production technology with more than 400 licensed acid plants worldwide since the 1960s. DuPont Clean Technologies is committed to long-term customer satisfaction and support for the life of customer assets.

About DuPont Clean Technologies

The Clean Technologies business within DuPont is a global leader in process technology licensing & engineering, with an unwavering commitment to customer support. We provide extensive global expertise across our portfolio of offerings in key applications - MECS sulfuric acid production, STRATCO alkylation, BELCO wet scrubbing and IsoTherming hydroprocessing. Offering critical process equipment, products, technology and services, we enable an array of industrial markets, including phosphate fertilizer, non-ferrous metals, oil refining, petrochemicals and chemicals, to minimize their environmental impact and optimize productivity. We are dedicated to helping our customers produce high-quality products used in everyday life in the safest, most environmentally-sound way possible, with a vision to make the world a better place by creating clean alternatives to traditional industrial processes. We make everyday life better, safer, cleaner. http://www.cleantechnologies.dupont.com

About DuPont

DuPont (NYSE: DD) is a global innovation leader with technology-based materials and solutions that help transform industries and everyday life. Our employees apply diverse science and expertise to help customers advance their best ideas and deliver essential innovations in key markets including electronics, transportation, construction, water, healthcare and worker safety. More information about the company, its businesses and solutions can be found at http://www.dupont.com. Investors can access information included on the Investor Relations section of the website at investors.dupont.com.

# # #

02/10/21

DuPont, the DuPont Oval Logo, and all trademarks and service marks denoted with ,  or  are owned by affiliates of DuPont de Nemours, Inc. unless otherwise noted.
The state is launching a new relief program to aid Texans who have struggled to pay their rent and utility bills during the coronavirus pandemic.

The program, run by the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs, will offer more than $1 billion to eligible residents through funding allocated to Texas in the latest federal stimulus package. The state will begin accepting applications for aid on Feb. 15.

The COVID-19 pandemic has placed a significant financial strain on many Texans, and the Texas Rent Relief Program will provide an incredible lifeline to households in need of assistance on their rent and utility payments, Gov. Greg Abbott said in a release.

The applications for statewide rent relief will be available on Monday at 8 a.m. for landlords and tenants impacted by the coronavirus. The state has about $1.3 billion to disperse. Heres what you need to know:

Where do I find the application?

Go to TexasRentRelief.com. You can also call 1-833-9TX-RENT (1-833-989-7368) for help filling it out or questions.

The Spanish version is here: https://texasrentrelief.com/es

Im a tenant. How do I know if I qualify?

Households have to meets all of the below criteria to qualify:

A household must be at or below 80 percent of Area Median Income

One or more people in the household has either qualified for unemployment benefits OR has lost income, experienced financial hardship or had to pay significant costs due to the pandemic

Tenants must show that they are at risk of being homeless (provide an eviction notice and/or a past due utility bill) OR are living in unsafe homes

On HoustonChronicle.com: The CDC extended the federal eviction order. Heres what you need to know.

How do I find my Area Median Income?

Great question. Check the list here. Its broken down by county and household size.

Are the applications first-come, first-serve?

No. However, the state will prioritize based on need: If you get your application in by Feb. 28, the state will review it and prioritize applicants who are at or below 50 percent Area Median Income or have one or more people unemployed at the time of application and for 90 days prior to the application date.

What can the assistance cover?

The rent relief program is aimed to help renters with back rent and utility costs that began to pile up beginning March 30, 2020. Tenants who think they will struggle to pay rent and/or utilities going forward can apply for up to 3 months of expected costs. The money can cover up to 15 months of help for rent and utilities.

On HoustonChronicle.com: An absolute blessing: Council approves relief fund to give struggling Houstonians $1,200 checks

Can I apply even if Ive gotten assistance from another program?

Yesbut the state program wont pay for the time period that another program covered. Say you got rental assistance through Harris County that helped cover your May rent, but you still owe rent from June, July and August. You cant apply to the state program for your May rent, but youre eligible for June, July and August.

Im a landlord. How do I apply?

Landlords can apply online and list all their properties with tenants who need assistance.

Im a tenant, but my landlord doesnt want to participate in the program. Am I still eligible?

Yes. Even if your landlord doesnt want to be part of the program, you can still apply for assistance. However, the program will still try to pay your landlord first. Payments will go to you once your landlord confirms they are not interested or if the state hasnt heard back from your landlord within 21 days.

On HoustonChronicle.com: I dont know how to survive: Hundreds line up for pro bono eviction aid in Houston

How do payments work?

The state will pay the landlord and/or utility provider unless they refuse payment for some reasonin which case, after 21 days, the payment will go directly to the tenant.

Any other questions?

Check out the FAQs on TexasRentRelief.com or call 1-833-989-7368. Or, shoot me an email at sarah.smith@chron.com. If I dont have the answer, Ill ask people who will.
Coronavirus is just as 'traumatic' as World War One and could reduce live expectancy by 25 years, a senior NHS therapist has warned.

The impact of lockdown and the grief of losing 113,850 people to the virus will cause a trauma 'time-bomb' which could see people die young, senior NHS psychological therapist Mark Rayner said.

He is calling on the Government to double its NHS mental health funding to tackle the crisis - which could cut the country's life expectancy by 25 years.

Mr Rayner said post-pandemic mental health is the most serious medical challenge to the nation in 100 years - since the midst of the first World War.

He said trauma-related illness common in WWI such as shell shock - now known as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - are being seen nowadays in people impacted by Covid.

Military historian Andy Robertshaw - known for the BBC's Who Do You Think You Are? - agreed that WWI and the Covid pandemic are comparable, telling MailOnline that while the Great War had a significantly higher death toll, the UK's 113,850 deaths is a 'huge proportion of the population'.

Coronavirus is just as 'traumatic' as World War One (soldiers fighting in the trenches, pictured) and could reduce live expectancy by 25 years, an NHS therapist has warned

The impact of lockdown (a student studying from home, pictured) and the grief of losing 113,850 people to the virus will cause a trauma 'time-bomb' which could see people die young, senior NHS psychological therapist Mark Rayner said

What were the Pals Battalions? When war broke out in 1914 it quickly became clear that Britain's well-trained but small army was not going to be large enough to handle the scale of the conflict. Friends and colleagues were encouraged to band together into so-called 'Pals Battalions' to fight and die together in the quagmire of northern France. Many saw their first day of action during the bloodiest battle in Britain's history - the Somme offensive. In terms of sheer numbers of war dead the UKs most populous cities predictably suffered the most losses. In London 41,833 men never returned home. Glasgow, Manchester and Liverpool also saw their war dead numbers reach the tens of thousands. But it was the northern and Scottish towns that saw their populations hardest hit. In Durham 6,300 men lost their lives. This was equivalent to almost two in ten men in the city and nearly eight per cent of the total population. Another Country Durham town, Bishop Auckland, was also it hard losing more than six per cent of just 13,600 people, all of them men between 18 and 50-years-old. The Pals Battalions scheme came to an end in 1916. Advertisement

Mr Rayner - who works for EASE Wellbeing providing psychotherapy services for NHS clinics - said: 'Unless we act now to alleviate the stress, anxiety, trauma and depression young people have experienced in the last 12 months, severe long term consequences are inevitable.

'Everyone is still trying to comprehend the 100,000 deaths figure - but the full ramifications go well beyond that and won't end with universal vaccination.

'Today's children are tomorrow's adults and if the traumatic consequences of this pandemic are not dealt with, an entire generation will be affected for the next 40 or 50 years.

'Sufferers can see their life expectancy reduced by as much as 25 years.

'There is a systemic failure in addressing the mental effects of Covid-19, particularly on young people.'

Up to 15 million people died in World War I - which saw men aged 18 to 41 conscripted to take part in brutal trench warfare.

Some eight million died in combat, while a further three million died of disease.

Tragically, huge cohorts of from the same towns and villages were wiped out in Pal's Battalions - which offered conscripts the chance to serve alongside brothers, friends and neighbours.

While the mental health of young people studying from home has been a key focus point during the pandemic, England's schools reopening in March means classmates will be reunited imminently.

Mr Rayner said up to four million ten to 24-year-olds could require treatment for mental health problems in the next twelve months.

Mr Rayner added: 'The average UK life expectancy dipped between 1910 to 1920 because of the Great War and the Spanish Flu pandemic but has otherwise been rising steadily since the mid-nineteenth century - and until now reached 81.

'World War One saw the first notions of trauma-related illness known as shell-shock but now called PTSD and specifically conditions like Gulf War Syndrome.

Mr Rayner (left) said trauma-related illness common in WWI such as shell shock - now known as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - are being seen nowadays in people impacted by Covid. Military historian Andy Robertshaw (right) - known for the BBC's Who Do You Think You Are? - agreed that WWI and the Covid pandemic are comparable

Military historian Andy Robertshaw - known for the BBC's Who Do You Think You Are? - said while WWI (German prisoners in the trenches, pictured) had a significantly higher death toll, the UK's 113,850 deaths is a 'huge proportion of the population'

'In recent years PTSD become a diagnosis that embraces the psychological response to various forms of trauma, abuse, neglect as well as heightened anxiety or fear.

'These same symptoms are now being experienced by individuals and families impacted by Covid.

'Whether the stress caused by increasing financial uncertainties or bereavement from losing loved ones, the wider effect of Covid is being felt far beyond the virus itself.

'There is a very real possibility life expectancy could decline for the first time in 100 years as a result'.

Mr Rayner said: 'The average UK life expectancy dipped between 1910 to 1920 because of the Great War (the frontlines, pictured) and the Spanish Flu pandemic but has otherwise been rising steadily since the mid-nineteenth century - and until now reached 81'

Military historian Mr Robertshaw told MailOnline that relatives of World War One soldiers received letters saying their loved ones had disappeared, meaning they never got closure of a traditional funeral.

He said: 'This is comparable [today] because we see people go away in an ambulance and we can't be by their bedside.

'It is the not knowing that may cause problems, the not being there. And of course the closure of a proper funeral with [more than 30] people.'

Another factor of the First World War is the 'massive survivor guilt' felt by soldiers who safely returned - which could still be felt today.

But even so, in WWI people knew 'why their relatives had died and were willing to accept that'.

He said the main problem with Britons' mental health was in the years after the war as people were 'expected to get on with their lives' and 'get over it' - which may be a concern once 'everybody gets the vaccine' and the country emerges from lockdown.

Military historian Mr Robertshaw told MailOnline that relatives of World War One soldiers (some pictured) received letters saying their loved ones had disappeared, meaning they never got closure of a traditional funeral

Tahir Hussain - a consultant vascular surgeon at Northwick Park Hospital - said: 'The mental health fall out from Covid will be felt for years - not just by front-line workers but also by the younger generation who have missed out on so many life events.'

The Children's Commissioner has already warned that mental health services in England are struggling to cope with the impact of the pandemic on children.

Anne Longfield, the commissioner for England, said that despite an expansion in recent years the provision of treatment for child mental health problems was already falling well short of demand.
P

alestinian rival factions appeared one step closer to holding the first elections in 15 years, as they agreed on Tuesday to key voting mechanisms and a timeline set for this summer.

Long-term foes Fatah, based in the West Bank and Hamas, an Islamist militant group which runs Gaza, reached a deal during talks in Cairo this week. In a joint statement they said they agreed to an election court with judges from the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, to rule in any vote-related legal disputes. They also agreed to abide by an elections timetable which will see legislative elections set for 22 May and a presidential vote on 31 July.

The statement added they would respect and accept the results in the elections during which nearly three million eligible voters in Gaza and the West Bank could cast their ballots.

A shell discovered in a French cave almost 80 years ago has been revealed to be the earliest known conch shell horn.

The shell, found in the Marsoulas Cave in the foothills of the French Pyrenees in 1931, has been played for the first time in 18,000 years after new analysis identified it as a wind instrument.

Originally belonging to a large sea snail of the species Charonia lampas, the shell was at first thought to have been used as a ceremonial drinking cup.

Now known as the Marsoulas conch shell, the priceless object is 12.2 inches (31 cm) in height, up to 7 inches (18 cm) in diameter and up to 0.3 inches (0.8 cm) thick.

It's housed at the the Musee du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris, but it's only been reanalysed by French researchers due to a recent inventory.

To confirm that this conch was used to produce sounds, scientists enlisted the help of a horn player, who managed to produce three sounds close to the notes C, C-sharp and D.

Scroll down for audio

The Marsoulas conch shell (pictured) is 12.2 inches (31 cm) in height, 7 inches (18 cm) in diameter (at the widest point) and up to 0.3 inches (0.8 cm) thick

The new updated analysis of the shell and its history has been led by experts from the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaures, as well as the Musee du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris.

'Around the world, conch shells have served as musical instruments, calling or signalling devices, and sacred or magic objects depending on the cultures,' say the study authors.

'To our knowledge, the Marsoulas shell is unique in the prehistoric context, however, not only in France but at the scale of Palaeolithic Europe and perhaps the world.'

To date, only flutes have been discovered in earlier European Upper Palaeolithic contexts, while the conches found outside Europe are much more recent.

The research has led to the first carbon-14 dating of the cave, carried out on a piece of charcoal and a fragment of bear bone from the same archaeological level as the shell, which has provided the date of around 18,000 years.

This new dating makes the Marsoulas conch the oldest wind instrument of its type.

A CNRS spokesperson told MailOnline: 'In addition to the abundant and complex art on its walls, it contains archaeological levels attributed to the early Pyrenean Magdalenian, recently dated to 18,261  18,011 years BP [before present].'

The shell had also been decorated with a red pigment (from hematite, a common mineral) in a style that matches wall art inside the Marsoulas Cave.

This indicates the shell's status as a symbolic object, according to the team, and establishes a link between the cave art and the music played on the conch.

The Marsoulas Cave, between Haute-Garonne and Ariege, was the first decorated cave to be found in the Pyrenees

'We are supposing that the shell was decorated with the same pattern as was used in the cave art of Marsoulas, which establishes a strong link between the music played and the images on the walls,' study author Gilles Tosello told the Guardian.

'That, to our knowledge, is the first time that we can see such a relationship between music and cave art in European prehistory.'

Using photogrammetry techniques to highlight exterior modifications not readily seen with the naked eye, researchers painstakingly plotted the traces of human intervention.

The outermost edges of the shells labrum or 'lip', the flared ridge that extends outward from the shells main opening, had been removed.

Researchers noted signs that the shell's apex (its pointed tip) had been carefully and deliberately removed to create a second opening.

The apex is broken, forming a 0.3-inch (3.5 cm) diameter opening, but as this is the hardest part of the shell, the break is 'clearly not accidental'.

Reconstruction of the instrument being played. In the background, a red dotted buffalo decorates the walls of the Marsoulas Cave; similar motifs decorate the instrument

The shell bears the traces of important modifications of human origin - elimination of the labrum (outer lip) by series of strokes and opening of the apex (the tip) by destruction of the first six spires

The shell bears the traces of important modifications of human origin. In top view, the chipped edge of the mouth

They also noted traces of a brown organic substance, likely a resin or wax but not conclusively identified, around the apex opening that may have been used as an adhesive to affix a mouthpiece.

Other more recent conches at the Musee du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, which is known for its indigenous collections, were carefully modified for a mouthpiece to be installed.

This includes a conch from New Zealand that notably features a mouthpiece made of a decorated and highly ornate bone tube.

3D impressions of the Marsoulas conch will let researchers explore further whether it had a mouthpiece and verify if it can be used to produce other notes.

Another conch shell, from New Zealand, and its mouthpiece made of a decorated bone tube

Researchers also used computerised tomography (CT) scans to look at the Marsoulas conch's interior.

They found that two additional holes had been chipped away in the spiral layers directly beneath the shells apex, likely to accommodate the mouthpieces long tube extension.

At the opposite end, the shell opening shows traces of retouching (cutting) and the tomography scan has revealed that one of the first coils is perforated.

Ancient people adorned the exterior of the shell with ochre-red pigment designs that match the style of wall art found inside Marsoulas cave. Pictured, oblique view of the large painted panel

Picture shows researchers studying a palaeolithic drawing inside the Marsoulas Cave in the foothills of the French Pyrenees

The Marsoulas Cave, between Haute-Garonne and Ariege in southwestern France, was the first decorated cave to be found in the Pyrenees.

Discovered in 1897, the cave bears witness to the beginning of the Magdalenian culture in this region, at the end of the Last Glacial Maximum.

A 1932 research paper titled 'Recent Excavation in the Marsoulas Cave' reads: 'The paintings of the Marsoulas Cave are singular in the fact that they are near the entrance instead of in the far recesses of the Cave as is more usual.

'Their excellent state of preservation suggests that the entrance of the cave must have been blocked by an obstruction for a very long period after the close of the palolithic age.'

The new analysis of the shell is detailed further in the journal Science Advances.
San Francisco police arrested two men for allegedly robbing a local television news crews camera last week near the eastbound I-80 Bay Bridge Ramp.

The news crew was reporting a story on Feb. 6 when two males exited a vehicle and approached the crew, demanding them to surrender their news camera before driving off, police said on Tuesday.

During the robbery, the suspects concealed their hands beneath their clothing simulating that they each had a firearm, police said.

Authorities said the television crew flagged down several police officers who were driving near the scene for help. Two officers drove off to find the vehicle while one other officer stayed to investigate the scene, police said in a news release.

San Francisco Police Sgt. Michael Andraychak, a spokesman for the department, said the news crew involved asked not to be named in the departments announcement Tuesday.

Police said they found the suspects vehicle on Flounder Court on Treasure Island after an officer recognized one of the suspects. The stolen camera was clearly visible through the vehicles windshield, police said.

Police said the stolen camera was returned to the news crews.

Authorities found a second video camera in the backseat of the vehicle that was reported stolen on the same day, Feb. 6, at approximately 5:45 p.m. on the 1300 block of Haight Street.

Ronnell Edward Johnson, 18, of Treasure Island, was booked for robbery, possession of stolen property and conspiracy.

Romell Boyland, 21, of San Francisco, was booked for possession of stolen property, conspiracy and a probation violation. Police said Boyland is on probation for a prior aggravated assault case.

Jessica Flores is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jessica.flores@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jesssmflores
The Supreme Court will on Thursday determine whether or not the Chairperson of the Electoral Commission (EC), Mrs Jean Adukwei Mensa, must mount the witness box to be cross -examined in the 2020 election petition.



The court will make that determination following over three hours of legal arguments by various counsels to make their respective cases on the issue today.



ECs case



Counsel for the EC, Mrs Justine Amenuvor, argued that the rules of court specifically Order 38 (4) (4) of the High Court (Civil Procedure) Rules, CI47 allowed the EC, which is the first respondent in the petition, not to adduced evidence.



He argued that the decision not to testify is at the behest of parties, and that court has no business on whether or not a party will call witnesses to adduce evidence.



According to him, if the petitioner, Former President John Dramani Mahama, has a good case, he should excited that the respondents have decided not to give evidence.



Counsel of Nana Akufo-Addo (2nd respondent), Mr Akoto Ampaw, associated himself with the submissions of counsel for the EC.



He argued that the petitioner should be happy at the decision by the respondents not to call witnesses.



Tsatsu Tsikata



Counsel for Former President Mahama, Mr Tsatsu Tsikata, argued that it was in the interest of justice for the EC Chairperson to be cross-examined.



According to him, Mrs Mensa was the person responsible for the declaration of presidential results and that she had a responsible to account to the people of Ghana.



Also, it was his submission that Mrs Mensa must be in the witness box because she had filed a witness statement and also made certain assertions in her affidavits which presupposes that she was offering herself to be cross -examined.



He further argued that counsel for the EC opposed the petitioners application for interrogatories with the explanation that those interrogatories could be asked during cross-examination.



In view of that he argued the EC chairperson had willing agreed to be cross -examined.

Source: graphiconline.com









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Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-10 12:15:26|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping on Wednesday exchanged congratulatory messages with his Nigerian counterpart, Muhammadu Buhari, on the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the two countries' diplomatic relations.

In his message, Xi noted that over the past half century, the two countries have seen their traditional friendship growing stronger and practical cooperation bearing rich fruit, and have coordinated closely on international and regional affairs.

In recent years, the China-Nigeria strategic partnership has shown a sound momentum of development, and has effectively improved people's well-being in both countries, Xi said.

Since the onset of the COVID-19 epidemic, China has joined hands with African nations, including Nigeria, to fight it, which has demonstrated the brotherly friendship between China and Africa featuring solidarity in the face of adversity, he added.

Xi stressed that he attaches great importance to the development of China-Nigeria relations, and stands ready to work with Buhari to take the 50th anniversary as an opportunity to make positive contributions to the building of a closer China-Africa community with a shared future.

He suggested that the two sides carry forward their traditional friendship and deepen cooperation in various fields within the frameworks of the Belt and Road Initiative as well as the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation. Enditem
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CAIRO  Sayid Ismael Baraka, a Sudanese-American visiting from Atlanta, was playing with his three children, and his wife was making tea, when the gunmen stormed into his family village in Sudans Darfur region.

The gunmen went through the village of Jabal, shooting people. The 36-year-old Baraka was shot to death as he rushed to help a wounded neighbor, his wife said. The attack on Jan. 16 left more than two dozen dead in and around the village.

They were among 470 people killed in a days-long explosion of violence between Arab and non-Arab tribes last month in Darfur. The bloodletting stoked fears that Darfur, scene of a vicious war in the 2000s, could slide back into conflict and raised questions over the governments efforts to implement a peace deal and protect civilians.

Barakas wife, Safiya Mohammed, blamed the attack on militias and janjaweed  a name that harkens back to dark times for Darfur.

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The Arab militias known as janjaweed became notorious in 2003 and 2004 for their terror campaigns, killing and raping civilians, when the Khartoum government unleashed them to put down an insurgency by Darfurs non-Arab residents. Some 300,000 people were killed and 2.7 million were displaced, before the violence gradually declined.

Sudan is on a fragile path to democracy after a popular uprising led the military to overthrow longtime autocratic President Omar al-Bashir in April 2019. A transitional military-civilian government is now in power, trying to end decades-long rebellions in various parts of the country.

The latest burst of violence came just two weeks after the joint U.N.-African Union peacekeeping force that had been in Darfur for a decade ended its mandate, at the request of the transitional government. It was replaced with a much smaller, political mission.

Anyone could have predicted that as soon as the U.N. troops departed, some of these militias would begin attacking, said John Prendergast, co-founder of The Sentry, an organization that tracks corruption and human rights violations in Africa.

The bloodshed followed a familiar scenario: a dispute between two people or a minor crime turning into all-out ethnic clashes. It first grew out of a fistfight on Jan. 15 between two men in a camp for displaced people in Genena, the capital of West Darfur province . An Arab man was stabbed to death. The suspect, from the African Massalit tribe, was arrested, but the dead mans family, from the Arab Rizeigat tribe, subsequently attacked people in the Krinding camp and other areas across Genena.

Three days later, clashes renewed in South Darfur province between Rizeigat and the non-Arab Falata tribe over the killing of a shepherd in al-Twaiyel village.

The fighting in the two provinces killed around 470 people, including Baraka and three aid workers, according to the United Nations and local officials. More than 120,000 people, mostly women and children, fled their homes, including at least 4,300 who crossed into neighboring Chad, the U.N. said. The transitional government deployed additional troops to West Darfur and South Darfur to try to contain the situation.

Mohammed Osman, a Sudan researcher at Human Rights Watch, said witnesses said the government forces response was too little, too late. The government repeated promises of protecting civilians and holding perpetrators accountable, he said.

A government spokesman didnt answer repeated calls and messages seeking comment.

War first erupted in Darfur in 2003 when non-Arab Africans rebelled, accusing the Arab-dominated government in Khartoum of discrimination. Al-Bashirs government is accused of retaliating by arming local nomadic Arab tribes and unleashing the janjaweed on civilians  a charge it denies.

The International Criminal Court charged al-Bashir with war crimes and genocide over Darfur, but it remains unclear whether the transitional government will hand him over to face justice in The Hague, Netherlands.

In December, the joint U.N.-African Union envoy for Darfur, Jeremiah Mamabolo, cautioned that mistrust still runs deep in Darfur.

The people of Darfur have been betrayed, Mamabolo told The Associated Press. A lot of crimes and injustice have been committed against them, so they feel insecure.

Last year, the transitional government struck a peace deal in October with the Sudan Revolutionary Front, a coalition of several armed rebel groups  including from the Darfur region.

The government and rebel groups have said they will deploy a 12,000-strong Civilian Protection Force to the region. But some worry it could include former militia members who may have taken part in atrocities.

Barakas brother, Usumain Baraka, who settled in Israel, is skeptical the interim rulers can bring about peace. The current government of Sudan is run by former generals who designed and carried out the genocide in 2003, he said.

Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, the deputy head of Sudans ruling sovereign council, leads the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, which grew out of the Darfur militias. Rights groups say his forces burned villages and raped and killed civilians during a series of counterinsurgency campaigns over the last decade.

A report by U.N. experts covering March to December said tribal clashes and attacks on civilians increased sharply in both frequency and scale, particularly in South Darfur and West Darfur. Acts of sexual and gender-based violence continue to be committed daily and go unaddressed, the report found.

For Barakas family, his death has shattered their plans for the future.

Baraka fled Darfur when the war began, going first to Chad, then Libya and Ghana. From there, he was resettled as a refugee in the U.S., where he gained citizenship in 2015. In Atlanta, he ran a trucking business, his brother said, through which he supported his extended family in Sudan. He was also studying to become a medical assistant.

He was the backbone of our family, said his brother.

Baraka had married his wife on a trip home to Jabal, where she had their children. He had arrived in December to register his newly born third child at the American Embassy and start the process of bringing all of them to the United States  now that the Trump administration ban on travel from Sudan has ended.

Now those plans are gone, said his wife.

Nothing remains but memories, she said.

___

This story was first published on February 9, 2021. It was updated on February 10, 2021 to make clear that only Barakas wife said Baraka was killed as he was trying to help a neighbor.
Labor is assuring businesses its plan to let some contract workers transfer leave between jobs will not blow out costs, after Attorney-General Christian Porter claimed the oppositions new workplace proposal would add $20 billion a year in fresh leave costs.

Drawing on a promise from Labor to let insecure workers accumulate paid leave across multiple jobs, Mr Porter argued the opposition had promised to give sick, annual and long service leave to casual workers and contractors at massive expense.

An energised Christian Porter went on the attack on Wednesday. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

But Labor rejected that claim, with the partys industrial relations spokesman Tony Burke accusing Mr Porter of telling a big fat lie about what the party was proposing to distract media attention that has been focused on the governments own industrial relations bill.

Modelling Mr Porter commissioned from the Attorney-Generals Department puts the cost of giving paid leave to casuals and self-employed contractors at $20.3 billion a year or almost $8000 per casual employee if individual workers had to fund it.
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OSLO, Norway, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Targovax ASA (OSE: TRVX), a clinical stage immuno-oncology company developing immune activators to target hard-to-treat solid tumors, today announces that it has entered into a research collaboration agreement with Papyrus Therapeutics to assess the potential of combining their respective proprietary technology platforms to develop a first-in-class oncolytic virus concept with RTK inhibitor functionality.

Papyrus Therapeutics, Inc. (West Chester, PA, USA) is an emerging biopharma company developing novel tumor suppressor therapies. Papyrus's lead therapeutic is a modified, recombinant version of Opioid Binding Protein/Cell Adhesion Molecule-like (OPCML), which is an extra-cellular, upstream regulator of RTK activity. OPCML is a broadly acting tumor suppressor that is epigenetically silenced in many cancers, leading to tumor invasion and metastasis through deregulation of apoptosis, epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT) and cellular migration. Classic RTK inhibition using small molecules has proven highly effective in many cancers, but treatment resistance remains a significant challenge. Delivery of OPCML can overcome this challenge by reconstituting normal RTK signaling in the tumor.

Under the agreement, Targovax and Papyrus will run a joint pre-clinical research project to evaluate the technical feasibility and anti-cancer activity of combining the ONCOS oncolytic virus platform and recombinant OPCML technology. Targovax retains an exclusive option to develop and commercialize novel ONCOS-OPCML drug candidates emerging from the pre-clinical research collaboration.

Dr. Paul Blake, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Papyrus Therapeutics said: "We are excited by the potential of including our modified, recombinant OPCML with the clinically validated ONCOS platform, thereby extending the scope of our tumor suppression strategy to adenoviral gene therapy. Targovax has demonstrated the broad immunomodulatory power of their oncolytic immunotherapy in a variety of solid tumors, and we believe this serves as an ideal environment to reconstitute the extra-cellular tumor suppressor capabilities of OPCML".

Dr. Victor Levitsky, Chief Scientific Officer of Targovax added: "The tumor deploys two core strategies to avoid detection by the immune system and to enable it to grow and spread; local immunosuppression and inhibition of biochemical processes that prevent cellular migration and invasion into surrounding healthy tissue. By combining ONCOS and OPCML we can deal with both of these issues in parallel, and thereby establish a first-in-class immunotherapy concept that couples the power of oncolytic adenoviruses with the clinically validated principle of RTK inhibition."

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Email: [email protected]



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This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

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SOURCE Targovax

REDDING, Calif.  A Redding man was arrested Tuesday after police say he got onto a bus with a loaded AR-15 rifle.

Around 10:34 a.m., RPD responded to a report of a man at the RABA bus stop at Twin View Blvd and Caterpillar Rd. Officers contacted 21-year-old Anthony Jair Demedeiros shortly after he boarded a Raba Bus.

Officers searched Demederios and located a loaded AR-15 semi-automatic assault rifle. The loaded rifle was recently reported stolen during a residential burglary in Trinity County, police said.

Demedeiros is on Post Release Community Supervision for a prior conviction of being a felon in possession of a firearm, according to RPD. Demederios was last arrested by Redding Police on January 4, 2021, for being a felon in possession of a firearm.

Police say they do not know Demederios intentions with the rifle, as he refused to give officers an explanation.
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SAN FRANCISCO - A surge in brutal attacks against Asian American seniors in the Bay Area, including one that resulted in the death of an 84-year-old Thai man, has left residents fearful and angry and activists - including Hollywood celebrities - demanding justice.

San Francisco's mayor and police chief have promised to address concerns, and on Tuesday, Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O'Malley announced the creation of a special response unit to investigate crimes against Asian Americans, especially the elderly. "We will help victims heal from their trauma and help the businesses be strong again, here in Chinatown. We will all be vigilant in protecting the Asian community," O'Malley said at a news conference in Oakland.

There have been several attacks on elderly members of the Asian American community recently, but the brutal Jan. 28 assault of Vicha Ratanapakdee, which was captured on video, sparked particular outrage. In the video, which was widely shared around the world, Ratanapakdee is seen being violently shoved to the ground during his morning walk in San Francisco. He died days later.

San Francisco police arrested 19-year-old Antoine Watson on charges of murder and elder abuse in Ratanapakdee's death. Watson has pleaded not guilty, and a judge Monday ordered him held without bond while awaiting trial, the San Francisco Examiner reported.

Asian Americans have increasingly been targeted since the start of the pandemic. Former president Donald Trump inaccurately called the coronavirus the "China virus" and blamed the country for the pandemic. The first known coronavirus outbreak was in Wuhan, China, but scientists are still trying to discover the virus's origin.

In one of his first acts, President Joe Biden signed an executive order aimed at combating xenophobia against the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities due to the coronavirus pandemic. Asked about the recent increase in attacks against Asian Americans, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said: "I'm not aware if the president had seen any of the videos, but he is concerned about the discrimination, the actions against the Asian American community."

Civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen condemned the increase in anti-Asian crime and asked for more media coverage. The issue had received little attention outside of California until video of Ratanapakdee's attack went viral. It was widely shared by celebrities including Gemma Chan, Paris Hilton, Daniel Dae Kim and Daniel Wu.

His death sparked international outrage, prompting messages on social media, including hashtags #JusticeForVicha and #AsiansAreHumans.

Kim and Wu also turned to social media to raise awareness of the issue, posting a video of an attack on a 91-year-old man who was shoved to the pavement in Oakland's Chinatown. Kim and Wu offered a $25,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those involved in that attack.

Oakland police recently arrested a suspect in connection with the case.

Jonathan Chang, a Los Angeles-based designer and illustrator, paid tribute to Ratanapakdee with a portrait that he designed and published on Instagram. Many people have used the image as their profile picture on social media to mourn Ratanapakdee's death and draw attention to what they say is an ignored spike in hate crimes in the Asian American community.

"Art can express things in a way that you can't, and I wanted to commemorate him," Chang said. "He could have been any one of our grandparents. These crimes have been happening for a long time now. [Social media] has been helping us get the exposure for these cases."

With the Lunar New Year approaching, many in the Asian American community are worried for their safety.

"My grandma is turning 90 this year, and I'm spending time with her this week in Chinatown while she makes the traditional Chinese New Year dishes," New York resident Tiffany Hui said. "She goes out for walks to get groceries or fresh air and never in a million years could I imagine those activities to be life ending."

Oakland City Council President Nikki Fortunato Bas said the city is working to ensure residents are safe during the Lunar New Year, including organizing safety walks.

"Lunar New Year is an incredible time of celebration. We're out shopping, connecting with family and out in our own neighborhoods. The community is organizing safety walks or neighborhood strolls," Bas said. "The Oakland Chinatown Coalition has been responding to the recent incidents and organized the community to participate in these neighborhood strolls."

Ben Suarato, communications director for the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, said members are working to educate their colleagues and the public.

"Since the beginning of last year, we've been calling attention to what was fueling the rising hate crimes. We set up guidance to every member of Congress to not use things like 'Chinese flu' or 'Chinese virus.' We felt a lot of pressure from the president [Trump]," Suarato said. "President Biden is paying attention to that now."

Caucus Executive Director Krystal Ka'ai said the group is shifting its focus to legislation. The proposed No Hate Act aims to improve the tracking and reporting of data for hate crimes. Ka'ai added, "We are also working with the administration because thankfully we have an ally now."

REDDING, Calif.  A woman accused of killing her ex-husband has been charged with murder and currently has a bail set at $1 million, according to the Shasta County District Attorney.

54-year-old Annastacia Stacia Colosio of Redding was arrested Friday, Feb. 5 after being released from a hospital due to a wound to her right leg, according to the County Sheriffs Office Major Crimes Unit.

Deputies said they were investigating a disturbance that had been reported in the 5400 block of Deschutes Road on Thursday, not long after midnight. They said they discovered a dead man at the property who was identified as 57-year-old Ronald John Colosio of Anderson, California.

The man appeared to have died from a stab wound, said deputies, who also discovered his former wife, injured, inside the home.

Detectives said they discovered that the former couple has been divorced for more than 10 years, but had maintained a relationship that would turn physically violent at times.

On Feb. 10, the Shasta County District Attorneys Office announced Annastacia Colosio was arraigned for a murder charge, in connection with the death of her ex-husband, Ronald John Colosio, Jr.

Annastacia Colosio remains in custody. The preliminary hearing is set for February 18, 2021, according to the District Attorneys Office.


 Flash

Chinese President Xi Jinping on Tuesday lauded the cooperation between China and Central and Eastern European countries (CEEC), calling on relevant countries to keep up the momentum and work together for a new chapter in China-CEEC cooperation.

"China-CEEC cooperation is part and parcel of China-EU relations, whose good progress means new opportunities for China-CEEC cooperation," said Xi while delivering a keynote speech at the China-CEEC Summit via video link.

"17 plus 1 could make more than 18"

Xi lauded China-CEEC cooperation, saying that "17 plus 1 could make more than 18."

In 2020, overall China-EU relations made new progress despite the challenges caused by the pandemic. The two sides concluded schedule negotiations on the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment and signed a geographical indications agreement. They also launched partnerships for green and digital cooperation.

"The two sides also stood firm for multilateralism and took on global challenges together," Xi said.

"Today, trade between China and CEE countries is nearly 85 percent bigger than nine years ago," Xi noted, adding that the China-Europe Railway Express has reached most of the CEE countries, running more than 30,000 freight services so far.

The China-CEEC cooperation mechanism came into being in 2012 against the backdrop of the European debt crisis.

"Impressive progress has been made in several cooperation projects, including the Port of Piraeus in Greece, the Smederevo Steel Plant in Serbia, and the Peljesac Bridge in Croatia," said Xi.

China-CEEC cooperation is based on mutual respect and has no political strings attached, Xi stressed. He added that all countries involved, regardless of their size, are equal partners in a cooperation mechanism featuring extensive consultation, joint contributions, and shared benefits.

Xi lauded the progress jointly made by China and CEE countries in the Belt and Road cooperation. He said that in an innovative and pioneering spirit, China and CEE countries took steps early to explore the possibility of aligning cross-regional cooperation with Belt and Road cooperation. It makes Central and Eastern Europe the first region where all countries have signed agreements on Belt and Road cooperation.

Enhancing cooperation amid difficulties

"We need to tackle COVID-19 head-on and boost confidence in cooperation to tide over the tough times," Xi said, adding China will work with CEE countries through solidarity, coordination, and cooperation to complete the pressing task of pandemic responses.

COVID-19 vaccines serve as a powerful weapon to defeat the ravaging coronavirus, and those developed and produced by China are gaining popularity. Serbia has received one million doses of vaccines from a Chinese company so far, and there is ongoing cooperation between Hungary and Chinese vaccine companies.

"China will actively consider such cooperation with other CEE countries if there is a need," said Xi.

Noting China and CEE countries need to develop smooth avenues of cooperation for interconnected development, Xi proposed pursuing high-quality Belt and Road cooperation. It means speeding up significant projects like the Budapest-Belgrade Railway and continuing the development of the China-Europe Railway Express to unlock the full potential of cooperation.

To achieve concrete cooperation results and increasing cooperation outcomes that benefit both sides, Xi mentioned in particular, the coming five years. He said China intends to "import more than 170 billion U.S. dollars of goods from CEE countries" and will "work to double CEE countries' agricultural exports to China and raise two-way agricultural trade by 50 percent."

Also, eying green development and forging drivers of future-oriented cooperation, Xi urged advancing international cooperation on climate change. He also urged the joint implementation of the Paris Agreement and capitalizing on various emerging business forms to widen the cooperation of the digital economy, e-commerce, and the health sector.

"The proposals put forward by Xi for advancing cooperation with CEE countries have given adequate consideration to the core interests of those countries. It has also demonstrated China's sense of global responsibility and the readiness to work for win-win results," said Liu Zuokui, a researcher with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

China's opening-up to broaden horizons for cooperation

"China and CEE countries share the conviction that openness brings opportunities and inclusiveness ensures diversity. This is the key to the sustained vibrancy of China-CEEC cooperation," said Xi.

During the speech, Xi pledged that China would continue to open its doors wider with a focus on institutional opening-up that covers rules, regulations, management, and standards to broaden the horizons for China-CEEC cooperation.

"We will continue our efforts to foster a business environment based on market principles, governed by law, and up to international standards," he said.

This year marks the beginning of China's 14th Five-Year Plan for economic and social development and the start of the country's new journey toward building a modern socialist country.

China has also been fostering a new development paradigm with domestic circulation as the mainstay and domestic and international circulations reinforcing each other.

"This will unlock the full potential of China's vast market and domestic demand generated by the 1.4 billion population, including the over 400 million Chinese in the middle-income group. It will thus boost global demand and create more opportunities for the rest of the world," Xi said.

The Chinese president vowed to take a more active role in bilateral, multilateral, and regional cooperation that delivers higher levels of mutual benefit for all.

"We also welcome the participation of other countries and international organizations in our cooperation to achieve win-win results," said Xi.
Press Release

February 10, 2021 Bong Go supports deferment of implementation of child car seat law to unburden ordinary Filipinos amid ongoing pandemic Senator Christopher "Bong" Go on Tuesday, February 9, manifested his support for the deferment of the implementation of Republic Act No. 11229 or the Child Safety in Motor Vehicles Act, citing the "hardships imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic." During a public hearing conducted by the Senate Committee on Public Services, Go said that while ensuring the safety of Filipinos has always been a priority of President Rodrigo Duterte, there is a need to refrain from imposing additional economic burden on ordinary Filipino families during the pandemic. "I would like to stress that it is only proper to defer the implementation of RA No. 11229 until we have weathered the pandemic," Go said in his speech. He pointed out that the Department of Transportation, Philippine Information Agency, the Department of Education, and Department of Health have yet to conduct the mandated Information, Education, and Communication (IEC) Campaign, which was untimely shelved because of the ongoing public health crisis. "Ordinary Filipino families deserve to be properly educated and informed before we can impose an added burden on them," Go said. "I believe that this is part and parcel of due process. Our countrymen deserve to make the necessary preparations and to understand the technicalities of the law. It will be ironic to force the implementation of the law even if there is a lot of confusion on how it is to be applied," he added. The Senator also noted that the suspension will not endanger children since they are already prohibited from going out of their house, pursuant to present health protocols. "Paigtingin na lang muna natin ang ating education campaign dahil darating naman po ang panahon na dapat itong i-implement po  itong batas na ito," Go said. He, however, asked for the cooperation of Filipinos by building awareness and paying attention to the IEC campaign on the child car seat law once it is undertaken. "Hangga't hindi pa normal ang panahon, gamitin na lang po natin ang panahong ipaalam sa publiko kung ano pong tulong sa safety ng mga bata ang nasa batas na ito," he suggested. Go, then, commended President Duterte and his fellow lawmakers for supporting the deferment of the implementation of the law. "Nakausap ko rin po ang ating mahal na Pangulo ukol dito noong kasagsagan po na nalilito ang ating mga kababayan. Sumang-ayon naman po siya," Go said. "Ang sabi niya, huwag ngayon dahil nahihirapan-- naghihirap na ang mga kababayan natin. Wala ngang pambili ng pagkain 'yung iba diyan, tapos ngayon i-oobliga pa natin na bumili nitong car seat. Not at this time dahil hirap po ang ating mga kababayan," he emphasized. Go also urged the implementing agencies to faithfully perform their mandate and avoid adding to the burden of their constituents in these trying times. Concluding his manifestation, Go said that once the pandemic is over, the law may be implemented to ensure the safety of Filipinos, particularly of children. "Kapakanan at kaligtasan ng lahat, lalong-lalo na po ng mga kabataan, ang aming tanging layunin. Oras na malampasan na natin ang pandemya at magiging normal na ang ating pamumuhay, pwede na po nating ipatupad ang batas na ito," Go said. "Ito ay para rin naman sa kaligtasan at ikabubuti ng bawat Pilipino," he ended.
Governor Bill Lee released his proposed state operating budget on Tuesday, which includes a two million dollar increase in tobacco prevention program funding.Emily Ogden, director of government relations in Tennessee for the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network, said, As an organization dedicated to reducing suffering and death from cancer, ACS CAN is pleased to see the governor prioritizing public health in his proposed budget. Today, the governor proposed increasing funding for the Tennessee Tobacco Use Prevention and Control Program.Increasing funding for tobacco prevention and cessation is a vital first step to protect Tennessee youth from a lifetime of tobacco addiction and help more tobacco users quit.The program implements evidence-based strategies to reduce tobacco use, the number one cause of preventable death nationwide. This is especially important since over 32 percent of cancer deaths in Tennesee are attributed to smoking.This program is also an essential tool in reducing health disparities. The tobacco industrys marketing strategies have led to significant tobacco use disparities, including higher use of tobacco products among people with lower incomes, Black Tennesseeans and LGBTQ individuals. By increasing funding to the states tobacco control program, Tennessee can better address the deadly consequences of tobacco use disparities.ACS CAN applauds Gov. Lee for a budget proposal that prioritizes cancer prevention and looks forward to working with the governor and the legislature to ensure that the final budget includes adequate funding for this lifesaving program.
A map showing the location of Libya (orange) and Italy and the islands of Sicily and Sardinia (green).

The Ocean Viking rescue ship with its cargo of 422 migrants has docked in the Sicilian port of Augusta as health checks are being carried out. Eight of the migrants on board have tested positive to Covid-19 and will be the last to disembark after having been placed in isolation to avoid the spread of the disease on board.

The rescued migrants include some 140 minors and a few pregnant women. They all took to the sea from the Libyan coastline on inflatable boats with hopes of crossing the central Mediterranean in search for a better life. Many had reached Libya from other African states, including Ivory Coast, Mali and Sudan.

Starting 4 February, the Ocean Viking carried out four separate rescue missions from overcrowded rubber dinghies in the Mediterranean in the space of 48 hours.

Of the 424 people rescued, a pregnant woman and her partner were airlifted to Malta on Saturday. The others waited to learn where they would be taken to disembark.

After various distress calls as the ship faced deteriorating weather conditions, with forecast rains and heavy winds and seas, the 69-meter Ocean Viking, operated by French charity SOS Mediterranee, was finally granted safe port in Sicily and reached Augusta on Sunday evening.

Good news:422 #migrants saved at sea by the #OceanViking will be allowed to land in Sicily. Among them children, potential victims of trafficking & other vulnerable people needing proper assistance. Sadly,many of those sent back to Libya in these days are facing arbitrary detention https://t.co/uXv1ZB3dRU - Flavio Di Giacomo (@fladig) February 8, 2021

Quarantine

Medical staff were the first to board the ship to test all those on board for Covid-19 as a first step of the disembarkation process. Pregnant women and minors were expected to be the first to be allowed off the ship. The crew of were also undergoing a mandatory 14-day quarantine.

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The Ocean Viking resumed its rescue operations in the Mediterranean last month after a six-month halt caused by an administrative seizure by the Italian authorities.

SOS Mediterranee and other NGOs have long called on European states to introduce an effective coordination for rescue operations.

Italy has borne the brunt of the thousands of arrivals of desperate people from Libya. The country is currently in political turmoil as the government of Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte resigned and former governor of the European Central Bank Mario Draghi was asked to form a new government.

The immigration policy of the new government, which is expected to receive support from a wide political spectrum, remains unclear.
Restaurants will no longer be allowed to sell pre-packaged meals through arrangements with supermarkets and other outlets, as Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley definitively closed this loophole yesterday.

Rowley said this would not be allowed to continue, as it defeats the purpose of the public health regulations. Restaurants and street food vendors were among those businesses ordered to close to limit the movement of people and curb the spread of Covid-19.
21 runners killed during mountain race in northwestern province of Gansu; Indian variant of Covid-19 found in Guangzhou; Beijing willing to arrange for vaccines to be sent to Taiwan

May 28, 2021 08:15 PM
Inch-sized high-quality perovskite single crystals formed by suppressing the phase segregation for applications in light-powered integrated circuits. Credit: DICP

Multiple-cation and mixed-halide (FAMACs) perovskites, which are formed by incorporating Cs/MA/Br ions into the FAPbI 3 perovskites, are considered as the best compositions for applications in high-efficiency photovoltaic and photoelectronic devices owing to their enhanced stability, suppressed ion migration, and reduced hysteresis. However, the actual composition, especially the content of Cs in FAMACs perovskites, for the state-of-the-art devices reported by different research groups has been inconsistent.

Furthermore, phase segregation into the yellow non-perovskite phase is often observed during the crystallization process. This undesirable yellow phase acts as trapping states or scattering centers, which has a negative impact on the charge carrier mobility and carrier recombination dynamics, thereby deteriorating the device performance.

Recently, a research group led by Prof. Liu Shengzhong from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), in collaboration with Prof. Liu Yucheng from Shaanxi Normal University, and Prof. Mercouri G. Kanatzidis from Northwestern University (Evanston), proposed an efficient strategy for obtaining high-quality perovskite single crystals with a size up to 5 inches. The large and pure phase single crystals were used to design high-performance self-powered integrated-circuit photodetectors.

This work was published in Science Advances.

The researchers selected a reducing agent, formic acid, for suppressing phase segregation during the crystallization process to obtain very large triple-cation mixed-halide perovskite single crystals. This strategy yielded state-of-the-art perovskite single crystals with long carrier lifetime, high charge mobility, long carrier diffusion distance, superior uniformity, and long-term stability, thereby facilitating the design of high-performance self-powered integrated-circuit type photodetectors.

Moreover, since the photodetector comprising the crystal exhibited large responsivity, high photoconductive gain, excellent detectivity, and fast response speed, an integrated imaging system with uniform photo-response was fabricated based on a 12 by 12 pixelated matrix of single crystal photodetectors.

For example, a 2 by 2 pixel matrix showed good discrimination between pixels upon selective illumination.

"We believe that such a novel design will open new avenues for the applications of perovskite self-powered integrated circuits in devices relevant to imaging applications," said Prof. LIU.

Explore further New technique prepares 2-D perovskite single crystals for highest photodetectivity

More information: Inch-sized high-quality perovskite single crystals by suppressing phase segregation for light-powered integrated circuits. Science Advances (2021). Journal information: Science Advances Inch-sized high-quality perovskite single crystals by suppressing phase segregation for light-powered integrated circuits.(2021). advances.sciencemag.org/lookup  .1126/sciadv.abc8844
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Ten years of prison sentence will be imposed on any traveler who visits England from a "red list" country.

The United Kingdom's Health Secretary Matt Hancock was referred to in the new COVID-19 guideline that was implemented on Monday.

10-Year Jail Sentence

According to Hancock, "We are coming down hard on people who provide false information on the passenger locator form. Anyone who lies on the passenger locator form and tries to conceal that they have been in a country on the 'red list' in the ten days before arrival here, will face a prison sentence of up to ten years," reported Fox News.

A maximum of 10 years worth of imprisonment will be imposed for lying about recent travel history, which has been defended by the government.

According to Transport Secretary Grant Shapps, the British public would expect quite a strong action, and the maximum sentence reflects the severity of the crime, reported BBC.

The Transport Secretary has defended plans for a jail term of up to 10 years for returning travelers who attempt to evade rigid novel coronavirus quarantine rules.

Ministers have faced allegations that the penalties for United Kingdom nationals returning from susceptible destinations who lie about their actions are "disproportionate," reported Belfast Telegraph.

According to Hancock, from Monday, residents of the United Kingdom and Ireland arriving in England from the places on the government's "red list" will have to buy a "quarantine package" that costs 1,750 pounds ($2,400) per individual and covers virus testing, accommodation, and other items.

He said individuals not acting in accordance with the rules, including those arriving from a red list country without a hotel booked, also could be imposed a series of fines.

Also Read: WHO: COVID-19 Unlikely to Have Originated from Wuhan Lab

Hancock stated he makes no apologies for the strength of such guidelines because they are dealing with one of the most serious threats to our public health they are facing as a nation. He added individuals who flout these rules are making them vulnerable to the virus, reported Bahrain News Agency.

Britons are advised not to book holidays at home or abroad as it defended the new hotel quarantine policy from criticism from senior Conservatives.

The rigid new measures were declared on Tuesday for travelers coming into England in an effort to thwart the prevalence of new variants of the coronavirus.

There are 33 countries, such as Portugal, South Africa, and all of South America, from where travel to England is prohibited largely due to concerns over new variants of the virus.

In the previous week, Hancock made headlines when he stated in an interview that the 2011 movie "Contagion" contributed to influence his approach on how to disseminate the COVID-19 vaccine effectively in the United Kingdom.

The tough action was denounced by former Supreme Court judge Lord Sumption who remarked lower tariffs exist for sex offenses.

Strong action, according to Shapps, was required to prevent new COVID-19 mutations from entering the country. This potentially undermines the inoculation program.

New border measures also necessitate international arrivals to pay for extra tests during their isolation period and strengthen enforcement for those who lie regarding where they have arrived from.

Related Article: AstraZeneca Delays Second Shot, Says it Will Be More Effective Three Months from Now

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At a time when the new cases of Covid-19 have been manifesting a downward trend nationally, its unabated transmission in two Indian states Kerala and Maharashtra has become a cause of worry.

The data of last one week by the Union Health Ministry showed that both the states account for 71 percent of the fresh caseload of the week with Kerala making up almost half of the total. Also Read - COVID-19 Vaccine Voluntary, No Provision of Insurance For Side Effects: Govt

Of the total 80,536 new cases reported in the duration, Kerala and Maharashtra accounted for 56,932 whereas the southern state logged 39,260 cases (49 percent) alone. Also Read - 70-Year-Old Man Collapses, Dies Just 25 Mins After Taking Covid-19 Vaccine; Exact Reason Unclear

Speaking on the matter, Dr. Randeep Guleria, Director, All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi, evoked the possibility of an undetected mutant strain of Sars-CoV-2 circulating in the two states.

We will have to investigate whether any mutant strain of coronavirus is under circulation in the state which is causing a spurt in the daily infection, he told IANS.

In respect of Kerala, Guleria, who is also a member of the National Covid-19 task-force, acknowledged that the state did a fairly good job in controlling the transmission when pandemics hit the country. However, he added that the situation deteriorated since the restrictions were lifted in the state.

Also read: Hundreds of Self-cloning Mutant Crayfish Invade Cemetery in Belgium. 2020 Isn't Over Yet

Kerala did initially good in controlling the measures through putting restrictions. However, since they have opened up, the more number of cases are being reported there, Guleria said.

He also observed that the demography of the state could be possibly not letting the viral infection wane from the community since a significant amount of the population living in Kerala are elderly and are more susceptible to contract the Covid-19 disease.

A large number of people there (Kerala) are elderly and suffer with comorbid conditions. This fact could also be impacting the emergence of Covid-19 in the state, said Guleria.

As per the latest national family health survey (NFHS) report, the level of asthma (4,806 per 1,00,000 population) in Kerala is twice as high as the level reported for India as a whole (2,468 per 1,00,000 population).

Dr, Lalit Kant, former head, epidemiology and communicable diseases, Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) told IANS that demography plays a huge role in disease spread. Age structure of the population and presence of chronic illnesses among them are few of the deciding factors of a disease spread, he said.

Dr. Kant said the prevalence of chronic illnesses and the share of the elderly population is quite high in Kerala and Maharashtra. He quoted NFHS-5 findings which indicated that every third person in Kerala and every fourth person in Maharashtra is obese. In Kerala, up to 38 percent of the population was found obese while it was reported 25 percent in Maharashtra, Kant said.

Similarly, Diabetes is also quite high in both states. Kerala accounts for 27 percent while 12 percent in Maharashtra found exhibiting the disease, he added.

Former ICMR chief also shared that 30 percent of Keralas population are patients of hypertension while its prevalence in Maharashtras population is around 25 percent.

As per NFHS-5, the projected percentage of the population above 60 years in 2021 of Kerala is 16 percent while it is 11 percent in Maharashtra.

A few days ago, the Centre deputed two multi-disciplinary teams to Kerala and Maharashtra to take stock of the ground situation and recommend necessary public health interventions to the states for containment of the Covid-19 pandemic there.
Vanessa Hudgens is getting a heavy dose of winter while on the set of the third installment in The Princess Switch film franchise in Scotland.

And despite chilly temperatures and a heavy blanket of new snow, the High School Musical alum turned up the heat when she stepped outside for a photo in a revealing swimsuit.

It turns out Hudgens' sizzling display in the black cut-out, one-piece in the middle of winter was inspired by high-fashion model Jasmine Sanders, otherwise known as the Golden Barbie.

Sizzling: Vanessa Hudgens, 32, turned up the heat when she posed in a plunging swimsuit while braving the snow and chilly temperatures in Scotland

'I saw @goldenbarbie wearing a bathing suit in the snow so I wore a bathing suit in the snow,' the actress, 32, confessed in the caption.

To be fair, Hudgens did get a little help in braving the brutal cold and snow by wearing a long black coat that came down her shins and a pair of neon snow boots.

Adding a touch of style, she wore a matching neon headband to help push back her dark brown tresses off her face.

Hudgens' inspiration came from Sanders own daring Instagram post last week where she hit the slopes of Aspen, Colorado wearing a black bikini with a short puffer jacket and traditional ski boots.

Inspiration: Hudgens confessed she was inspired to wear the black cut-out, one-piece in the middle of winter by model Jasmine Sanders' wintry post from the slopes of Colorado last week

Working it: Sanders confessed to be walking 'like a penguin' during her shoot

Warming up: The High School Musical alum confessed: 'I was ready for the snow,' in one snap where she traded her swimsuit for a white furry onesie

Prepping: The actress can also be seen getting prepared to go outside in a grey puffer jacket

Hudgens also also gave her 40.4 million fans and followers a look at her day in the snow in a town near South Queensferry, which is just west of Edinburgh, Scotland, by posting several other photos and videos.

She confessed: 'I was ready for the snow,' in one snap where she traded her swimsuit for a white furry onesie.

The actress can also be seen getting prepared to go outside in a grey puffer jacket with the headline: 'Snow day.'

Hudgens also captured to sheer volume of snow that had fell, and was still falling, in a clip that was shot while she was driving, seemingly to the set.

Winter wonderland: She declared: 'Look at all this fresh snow,' in another video that focused on her neon boots as she made her way through the wintry conditions

Hudgens also captured to sheer volume of snow that had fell, and was still falling, in a clip that was shot while she was driving, seemingly to the set. To help paint the picture, she dropped in the timeless tune, Winter Wonderland, to the clip.

She declared: 'Look at all this fresh snow,' in another video that focused on her neon boots as she made her way through the wintry conditions.

The California native also gave a glimpse at the health and safety protocols in place amid the COVID-19 pandemic by wearing a plastic shield over her face while trudging through the snow.

According to a report by The Sun, Hudgens has been staying at an upscale hotel in Edinburgh with her mother and sister since before Christmas.

Hard at work: Hudgens has been shooting the third installment in The Princess Switch film franchise near Edinburgh, Scotland since before Christmas
Researchers will develop configurable robots in order to preserve workers health in workplaces. Cobots will be validated in a construction scenario. Coordinated by IIT, CONCERT will last 3 years and has received 3 million euro by the European Union

Genova (Italy), 10th February 2021 - CONCERT, acronym for CONfigurable CollaborativE Robot Technologies, is an innovative project that has the goal of developing a novel concept of configurable robot platforms, which can be explored in application domains with unstructured, variable and evolving workspace settings and tasks. The new cobots target to deliver important assistance in several activities thanks to their strength and versatility. The main feature will be that these robots will be composed of modules, which may be integrated to match the requirements of different tasks.

The project will last 3 years, and it is coordinated by IIT-Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italian Institute of Tecnology). The project consortium includes 5 important European partners from Italy, Poland, Austria and Germany. CONCERT has received a 3 million euro funding from the European Union within the Horizon 2020 program.

The project's vision proposes the development of a new paradigm of high power/strength, adaptable, collaborative robots, which leverages on configurable robot hardware with adaptive physical capabilities towards safer, more versatile and sustainable robots.

The introduction of CONCERT technologies could have a clear positive impact for safety in various working tasks assisting to avoid fatigue and injuries. In fact, these configurable cobots will help in solving different tasks that require substantial and repetitive physical effort from the workers and can potentially represent a danger for their health, like in building sites where there are risky activities that require the application of high level of forces, both in construction and demolition.

Nikos Tsagarakis, coordinator of the project, is the Principal Investigator of the "Humanoid & Human Centered Mechatronics" (HHCM) lab at the IIT-Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italian Institute of Technology) in Genoa, the home laboratory where the anthropomorphic robot WALK-MAN and the CENTAURO hybrid wheeled-legged quadrupedal manipulation platform were developed within the related EU research projects in the past. The CONCERT project was born as a follow up research action and will leverage on the expertise gained and technologies developed in the HHCM research line to realize the envisioned novel robotics technologies for the construction sector.

Tsagarakis' group will work alongside with Arash Ajoudani's group, also involved in this project. Ajoudani is the head of the Human-Robot Interfaces and Physical Interaction laboratory at the IIT in Genoa; Ajoudani's group is a reference point for the development of human robot interaction technologies for collaborative robots. Dr. Ajoudani is the head of another European project, Sophia, and holds an ERC grant.

Thanks to the new project CONCERT, researchers will develop different types of powerful collaborative robots, able to operate alongside human workers, demonstrating strength greater than that of a human and autonomy and collaboration intelligence while interacting with the human operators through advanced interaction interfaces and tools. The CONCERT robots will be able to acquire information from the environment and execute high-level operator commands, for example, in the case of teleoperation activities, while also adapting to the environment independently. This will be important, for example, in the case of teleoperation of hazardous construction tasks where workers will be able to command the CONCERT robot from safe distance to perform these operations, such as the application of chemical substances.

Researchers aim to realize single robotic modules responding to specific tasks, so that they can be arranged and integrated differently according to the task they have to perform. For example, an extension module may help workers in realizing tasks that are dangerous from being lifted from the ground, such as using ladders or scaffolds. Dedicated robot configurations with appropriate end-effectors may help in transportation of heavy loads and in assembling operations of structures.

The robots will be equipped with online safety verification methods, permitting the safe interaction with human operators. They will be controlled by advanced human-robot collaboration tools, with the aim of providing intelligent, adaptive and easy to use collaboration interfaces to human operators and workers. Moreover, CONCERT robots will operate on batteries and demonstrate power autonomy and mobility capabilities while being resistant against dust and water to permit their use within a realistic construction environment.

In fact, the development of the CONCERT technologies is steered by use-case scenarios from the construction industry, a sector with significantly high socio-economic impact, offering at the same time an extremely challenging, yet highly motivating and relevant domain for demonstrating and validating the quick deployment and interoperability of the CONCERT technologies.

The CONCERT technologies will be tested in realistic construction scenarios thanks to the involvement in the project of a Polish SME, Budimex and the CIOP-PIB, the Polish Central Institute for Labour Protection. During the assessment, researchers will involve construction workers to determine how to best use the CONCERT technologies by taking into account the needs and criticalities on construction sites as well as by evaluating the skills required to be transferred to workers.

In addition to the application in the construction sector which is the central focus of the project, the robots developed in CONCERT may also be adapted and find relevant use in other domains in the future, such as in evolving and dynamic production lines in manufacturing, warehouses and logistics, agriculture, inspection, maintenance and in emergency operations within unstructured environments.

The consortium involves 6 partners coming from different European countries: Italian Institute of Technology (Italy) as project coordinator, the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (Germany), Fraunhofer Italia Research Scarl (Italy), Profactor GMBH (Austria), Centralny Instytut Ochrony Pracy - Panstowowy Instytut Badawczy (Poland), Budimex Spolka Akcyjna (Poland).

###

Acting Head of the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office Maksym Hryschuk has confirmed information about the launch of an investigation into criminal case on the procurement of a vaccine against coronavirus (COVID-19) disease.

"NABU has indeed launched an investigation into the procurement of the vaccine," Hryschuk said at a briefing in Kyiv on Wednesday.

However, he did not specify the details of the investigation and names, noting only that the case was opened in February 2021.

San Francisco, Feb 10 : Facebook on Wednesday announced to temporarily reduce political content in News Feed for a small percentage of people in Canada, Brazil and Indonesia this week, and the US in the coming weeks.

Facebook said that it took this step because people don't want political content to take over their News Feed.

"During these initial tests, we'll explore a variety of ways to rank political content in people's feeds using different signals, and then decide on the approaches we'll use going forward," said Aastha Gupta, Product Management Director.

She said that Covid-19 information from authoritative health organisations like the CDC and WHO, as well as national and regional health agencies and services from affected countries, will be exempt from these tests.

"Content from official government agencies and services will also be exempt".

In October last year, the social network said it would temporarily stop recommending civic and political groups to users in the US.

Last month, Facebook said that change would become permanent.

According to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the aim is to "turn down the temperature and discourage divisive conversations and communities." Gupta said that Facebook will survey people about their experience during these tests.

"It's important to note that we're not removing political content from Facebook altogether. Our goal is to preserve the ability for people to find and interact with political content on Facebook, while respecting each person's appetite for it at the top of their News Feed".

Facebook currently offers controls to help users manage what they see in News Feed, such as tools like Favourites which lets them select people and pages they want to prioritiz=se in your News Feed; Snooze to temporarily hide posts from a person, page or group; and the ability to turn off political ads.
[February 10, 2021] Infinidat Announces Channel Partner Award Winners

WALTHAM, Mass., Feb. 10, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Infinidat , a leading provider of enterprise-class storage solutions, today announced the winners of its Channel Connection Partner Awards in the Americas, recognizing the accomplishments of top-rated partners who excelled in the enterprise market and service provider market with Infinidat technology in 2020. Winners include Dynamix, Mainline, Daymark and ADAPTURE.

During a challenging year with the pandemic, our partners were relentless in driving business and solving the data storage challenges that enterprise organizations and cloud service providers face, said Mitch Diodato, Channel Sales Director, North America at Infinidat. We congratulate all the winners of our partner awards. They exemplify the commitment, ingenuity, professionalism and expertise that produce outstanding results with the power of Infinidat storage solutions. The Infinidat Partner Program is a premier program for IT service providers in the enterprise storage industry and cloud service provider sector, reflecting the companys strong commitment to the success of its channel partners. The following is the list of award winners with the description of each award: Partner of the Year and The High Velocity Award -- Dynamix Group, Inc.



 The Partner of the Year Award recognizes the efforts of Dynamix to go above and beyond to help end-user customers succeed with enterprise storage solutions. The High Velocity Award was given to Dynamix for achieving the highest percentage increase in partner-led account executives. We are proud to be recognized by Infinidat as Partner of the Year and winner of the High Velocity Award, said Bill Boyle, Co-president & Chief Sales Officer at Dynamix Group Inc. These achievements demonstrate our commitment to help enterprise customers maximize their investments in data storage, no matter what it takes. Partnering with Infinidat has enabled us to offer our customers a combination of services, storage and related technologies to meet our customers most pressing needs. The High Flyer  Mainline Information Systems



 The High Flyer Award recognizes Mainline as the partner that closed the greatest number of deals and achieved the highest revenue in 2020. Our customers trust us to be an advocate for them and bring them best-in-class technology solutions that help them solve their most pressing needs, said Bob Elliott, Mainline VP of Storage Sales. The more we show large enterprises what Infinidat storage echnology can actually do for them, the more Infinidat is getting a seat at the table and changing how enterprise IT leaders think of the consolidation and economics of storage.



The Ultimate Contributor -- Daymark Solutions



 The Ultimate Contributor Award recognizes Daymark as the partner that invested the most time with Infinidat go-to-market initiatives in 2020. We are grateful to be awarded the Ultimate Contributor Award and to have the opportunity to partner with Infinidat on data storage deployments, said Tim Donovan, President at Daymark Solutions. Infinidat offers the only hybrid array on the market that can deliver petabyte scale with the high performance our clients expect today. Our customers love the operational simplicity, scalability and reliable performance that the Infinidat solution provides. Infinidats elastic pricing model is very attractive to customers, allowing businesses to purchase capacity when needed and scale instantly.

The Cloud Buster Award  ADAPTURE



 The Cloud Buster Award recognizes ADAPTURE as the partner that has helped managed service providers (MSPs) leverage Infinidat platforms in the cloud. The relationship with Infinidat is what matters most to us because the Infinidat team on the front lines are responsive and bring strong credibility in the data storage space to support growth, said Robert Pastor, President, at ADAPTURE. Winning this partner award from Infinidat is a testament to our ongoing collaboration. Its gratifying to know how creative we can be to put deals together with Infinidat for cloud service providers in ways they didnt even know was possible until recently. Partners have access to sell Infinidats highly competitive storage solutions. The companys software-focused architecture delivers sub-millisecond latency, 100% availability, and scalability with a significantly lower total cost of ownership than competing storage technologies. Infinidats solutions drive customer value, leveraging the uniqueness of the storage architecture, the ability of customers to scale instantly with high capacity at a petabyte level, the elastic pricing and flexible consumption model, as well as the automation, built-in intelligence and easy integration. About Infinidat

Infinidat helps enterprises and service providers empower their data-driven competitive advantage at scale. Infinidats software-focused architecture delivers sub-millisecond latency, 100% availability, and scalability with a significantly lower total cost of ownership than competing storage technologies. The company was founded by storage industry pioneer, Moshe Yanai, in 2011 and has shipped over 7.1EB worldwide to date. The corporate headquarters are based in Herzliya, Israel, and U.S. headquarters in Waltham, Massachusetts. For more information, visit www.infinidat.com. Connect with Infinidat

About Infinidat

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Be our partner Media Contact Infinidat

Sapna Capoor

Director of Global Communications

scapoor@infinidat.com I Mobile: +44 (0) 7789684159



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Despite all the chaos that took place last year, members of United Way Brandon & District still have a reason to celebrate 211 Day tomorrow.

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Despite all the chaos that took place last year, members of United Way Brandon & District still have a reason to celebrate 211 Day tomorrow.

Local United Way chief executive officer Cynamon Mychasiw told the Sun that this public awareness campaign is designed to highlight the organizations 211 service, which connects Canadians with a variety of health and social resources through mb.211.ca.

Cynamon Mychasiw

"When you Google something, you may find resources, but its not necessarily local," she said on Tuesday. "211 promotes that locality, so it doesnt matter where you are in the province or in the country  you can type in your region and what youre looking for and itll show you exactly whats available where you are."

Following a recent boost in federal funding, Manitobans finally got access to a 211 phone line that had already been available in other parts of the country.

Now, Westman residents who are looking to find the right community resource can simply dial 2-1-1 to consult with members of Volunteer Manitoba, who will direct callers toward the nearest service centre listed in their database.

To Mychasiw, this represents a big step in making the 211 service more accessible to members of the public.

"Not everyone has access to a computer," she said. "So to be able to dial 2-1-1 from anywhere and find access to the different services you need is a great thing and something were really happy about."

Even though this phone line has been available to Manitobans since October 2020, Mychasiw said Brandon United Way is still going to use this upcoming 211 Day to highlight its functionality.

Outside of the standard social media marketing blitz planned for Thursday, Brandon United Way members got a head start on this awareness campaign last week by bathing the citys iconic Dome Building in red lights.

Mychasiw hopes that these promotional tactics encourage more Westman residents to seek out financial or social assistance through 211, since managing these elements is more important than ever in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"COVID has changed a lot of things for a lot of people, with the isolation and the collective trauma that were going through as a society," she said. "Its really made us see how important things like looking after mental health, seniors in isolation, hunger and financial security are."

Moving forward, Mychasiw also wants 211 Day to help set the tone for the United Ways various activities throughout 2021.

Not only does the local organization plan on expanding their youth programming, but Mychasiw hopes to bring back initiatives like the Day of Caring and Summer of Service.

However, the CEO admitted that United Way Brandon & District will be facing its own fair share of challenges this coming year, since they still need to fulfil a $500,000 fundraising goal to adequately bankroll their 29 Westman agencies.

"In undesignated funds, were just short of what we need to be able to fund our organizations, but our board is meeting tomorrow night to come up with some solutions for that," Mychasiw said on Tuesday. "So by the end of this month, well be able to know for sure what were going to be able to do in this year as far as our commitments go."

Still, Mychasiw remains optimistic about the United Ways ability to support Westman residents in 2021, given that the community as a whole really stepped up as volunteers during last years Christmas hamper drive.

"We have a community that is so amazing at supporting its own," she said.

"Even those who were facing a little bit of financial insecurity because of layoffs and furloughs  they maybe couldnt donate funds, but they were donating their time, which is just as valuable."

The United Ways 211 phone line is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and is available in more than 150 languages.

 kdarbyson@brandonsun.com

 Twitter: @KyleDarbyson
WASHINGTON, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Forced organ harvesting is the practice of killing people for their organs. For the victims, who include political prisoners, Falun Gong practitioners and Uyghurs, it is not just the harvesting of their organs, it is also a harvesting of their life. For the rest of us, it robs us of our humanity and forever poisons our capacity of being human.

On 2/24/2021, 117 international organizations will call attention to this horrendous practice with an online conference on forced organ harvesting. The event will be co-hosted by The International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China and the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation . Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, who led the prosecution of Slobodan Milosevic, former President of Serbia, at the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, will deliver the keynote speech on the findings of the China Tribunal.

Members of the media and the public are cordially invited to register at this link https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/7310088076264056077 . The date and time for the conference at 4 major time zones are:

WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 24, 2021, 04:00 PM - 05:45 PM ET

WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 24, 2021, 01:00 PM - 02:45 PM PT

WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 24, 2021, 10:00 PM - 11:45 PM CET

THURSDAY FEBRUARY 25, 2021, 08:00 AM - 09:45 AM AEDT

Prof. Wendy Rogers, M.D., Ph.D., one of Nature's 10 People Who Mattered in 2019 and Medscape's 2019 Physicians of the Year, will discuss the ethical responsibility regarding forced organ harvesting. Ethan Gutmann, a China Studies Research Fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and a well-published author, will give recent evidence of forced organ harvesting from Uyghurs. Dr. Sean Lin, Ph.D., communication director for Falun Dafa Association in Washington, D.C., will review the Falun Gong's experience of transplant abuse. Dr David Matas, an international human rights lawyer, author, researcher, and Senior Honorary Counsel for B'nai Brith Canada, will talk about the need for responses to these severe abuses. Kristina Olney, Director of Government Relations for Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, will present legislations in the US Congress to end the practice of forced organ harvesting.

Several parliamentarians from all over the world are also scheduled to give remarks. These include members of the US Senate and the US House of Representatives, the Canadian House of Lords and House of Commons, the European Parliament, and the New Zealand Parliament. The conference organizers also recognize the participation of the UN representatives for Mongolia and South Korea. With the attendance of several organizations representing the communities of victims, the organizers are cautioning that the conference's content may cause re-traumatization for some attendees.

The organizers hope this conference will shed more light on these crimes of unmatched wickedness. Transparency in itself is empowerment. What is needed now is the recognition that it is not just a Falun Gong or Uyghur issue, but humanity's problem. To stop such a terrible catastrophe, it requires nothing short of the whole of humanity to act.

Contact:

David Tran

9725870859

[email protected]

SOURCE Vietnam Democracy Center
Rabat  Employees of hammams (traditional, Turkish-like baths), which closed due to the spread of Covid-19, will soon be compensated for job loss, Minister of State in charge of human rights and relations with parliament Mustapha Ramid said on Monday in Rabat.

These employees will be identified in order to compensate them, given the damage suffered by this category because of the closure of their workplace, said Ramid at the House of Representatives in response to a question on " the closure of traditional hammams".

The closed hammams are located in 15 prefectures and provinces out of a total of 82, he noted, specifying that their reopening remains dependent on the improvement of the epidemiological situation and the decision of the ad hoc local committees.

Their closure, especially in areas with a high number of coronavirus contaminations, is due to the fact that they are areas conducive to the spread of the virus, the government official recalled.

He also highlighted the effects of Covid-19, in particular on fragile categories, highlighting the efforts made, under the leadership of HM King Mohammed VI, to mitigate the repercussions of the pandemic, in particular at the level of protection of companies and support for affected categories.
The European Unions top diplomat has said Russias government was increasingly authoritarian and showed no tolerance of democratic rule of law, warning that a new round of sanctions was a possibility.

They are merciless, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell told the European Parliament after visiting Moscow last week to plead for the release of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny.

The current power structure in Russia, combining vested economic interests, military and political control, leave no opening for democratic rule of law.

Meanwhile a top ally of Mr Navalny, Leonid Volkov, has urged residents of big cities to gather in residential courtyards on Sunday evening with their mobile phone torches on.

Mr Volkov said the protest will start at 8pm local time and last for 15 minutes.

He wrote in a Facebook post that the new rally format  similar to the tactics opposition supporters employed during protests in neighbouring Belarus  could prevent Russian police from interfering and allow anyone to participate.

The protest will coincide with Valentines Day.

You will raise your phone flashlights  and someone, maybe, will bring candles  and form a heart shape with them... You will take a picture of it from above, from one of the apartments, and post it on Instagram. Lets have social media feeds filled with thousands of shining hearts from dozens of Russian cities, Mr Volkov wrote. No OMON (riot police), no fear.

Mr Navalny (44), an anti-corruption investigator and Russian President Vladimir Putins most prominent critic, was arrested on January 17 upon returning from Germany, where he spent five months recovering from a nerve-agent poisoning that he blames on the Kremlin. Russian authorities have rejected the accusation.

His arrest and jailing sparked nationwide protests, with tens of thousands of people rallying across Russia for two weekends in a row in the largest outpouring of discontent in years.

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Russian authorities responded with a harsh crackdown.

More than 11,000 people have been detained and hundreds have been handed jail terms. Several of Mr Navalnys close allies face criminal charges and are under house arrest.

Last week, a Moscow court ruled that while Mr Navalny was recovering in Germany, he violated the probation terms of his suspended sentence from a 2014 money laundering conviction and ordered him to serve two years and eight months in prison.

Even before that ruling, Mr Navalny rejected the 2014 conviction as political persecution and the European Court of Human Rights called it arbitrary and manifestly unreasonable.

In the wake of the heavy police crackdown, Mr Volkov said that protests should pause until spring, as trying to maintain rallies every weekend would only lead to many more arrests.

However, yesterday he cited the need to adopt something that is stronger than fear of repressions and to hold a demonstration that police would not be able to derail.

Mr Volkov wrote: We have already become the majority, but Putin divides us by (riot police) cordons so that we cant see each other and see how many of us there are. We need to find a way to overcome that.

Asked whether the oppositions call to gather in courtyards can be considered unlawful, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said it was hard to say, but assured reporters that if someone in Russia violates the law, they will be held accountable by law enforcement.

As this award is voted by our users, it reinforces this customer-centric approach. This is a truly great achievement. - Pekka Koskinen, CEO & Co-Founder

Leadfeeder, the leading website identification software product, announced it has been named a 2021 winner of G2 Crowds annual Best Software Awards. The Best Software Product Awards for 2021 provide a definitive ranking of the best software products worldwide, as rated by users. Leadfeeder is also included in G2 Crowds Best EMEA Sellers and Highest Satisfaction.

Leadfeeder has been given the distinct honor of having its website visitor tracking technology included in the 2021 top 100 rankings.

Leadfeeder is highly rated on G2 for ease of use, ease of setup, quality of support, among other things, with reviewers highlighting features such as its integration with HubSpot and Pipedrive and marketing automation. The real-time buyer intent data gives sales teams, and marketers access to companies already visiting your website.

A recent reviewer called Leadfeeder an A Great Tool for Building Your Account-Based Marketing Strategy and said, Helpful and quick customer service, continuous product improvement and solid integrations. I also love the fact that Leadfeeder shows me all the historical web/page visits up till six months back.

Another reviewer said, Leadfeeder has been a great tool for us to gain visibility into who is visiting our website. This allows us to make better connections with warm leads. It also connects to Mailchimp, which has provided us the ability to see who has gone to our website after receiving a marketing email from our company.

G2 Crowd compiled the list using data collected from over 1 million authentic customer reviews written between Jan. 1 and Dec. 31, 2020. Reviews spanned across nearly 60,000 software products, with each user-submitted review vetted by a person, not a machine, to ensure legitimacy.

"This isn't a subjective list based on a few peoples' opinions," explains G2 CEO Godard Abel. "With the highest traffic and engagement, largest selection of product and services, and highest quality data, G2 analyzes more than 4 million data points to determine which products and companies make the list."

Tech companies on the list are selected with data provided by their software users. With more than 45,000 software companies on G2 Crowd, Leadfeeders recognition of the prestigious Best Software Products 2021 list is an exceptional achievement. It can only be earned through the endorsement of its users.

"This is an incredibly proud moment for Leadfeeder and me. It's a true testament to our core philosophy here that we focus on providing a valuable product to sales and marketing teams, shared Pekka Koskinen, CEO & Co-Founder. Furthermore, we are very proud of our culture of support. We push each other every day to deliver that extra bit of value to our customer base. As this award is voted by our users, it reinforces this customer-centric approach. This is a truly great achievement."

More information about Leadfeeder is available at https://www.leadfeeder.com/blog/.

See Leadfeeders reviews on G2 here. The G2 Best of lists is available at G2.com/best.

*About Leadfeeder*

Leadfeeder is a website visitor analytics software that shows you the companies visiting your website, how they got there, and what pages they clicked. Think of us like your lead generation, account-based marketing, and sales intelligence tool all rolled into one, like a burrito. Simply install the Leadfeeder Tracker script in less than 5 minutes! The Leadfeeder Tracker will reveal up to 30% more companies close to real-time (fresh leads every hour). You can try Leadfeeder Premium free for 14 days (no credit card required). Visit Leadfeeder at http://www.Leadfeeder.com, LinkedIn, Twitter, Youtube, or read the Leadfeeder blog for more information.
Good morning, North State. Here's what you need to know to start your day on Feb. 10.

Redding woman killed in officer-involved shooting identified

The woman fatally shot in Sundays officer-involved shooting in Redding was identified Tuesday afternoon. Three Redding police officers shot and killed 27-year-old Brooke Blair of Redding. Investigators say those officers opened fire when Blair pulled a handgun on officers. However, it turned out that the gun was fake. Redding police along with the Shasta County District Attorney's Office are investigating.

Tehama County will switch to state's COVID-19 vaccination system

The Tehama County Health Department will soon transfer appointment scheduling to the new state system. It is called My Turn, the new system assesses your eligibility, then schedules your vaccination appointment. However, during the system transition, no new appointments will be scheduled from Feb. 12 to Feb. 17.

North Complex Fire recovery: PG&E to host mobile help center in Berry Creek

PG&E is hosting a new mobile help center in Berry Creek. The mobile center will be available on Thursday, Feb. 11, and Thursday, Feb. 25, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Bald Rock Road. PG&E also offers a mobile center outside the Paradise Building Resilience Center the first and third Tuesdays of each month from 9 a.m. to noon.

Biden opposes effort to recall California Gov. Newsom, White House tweets

The president is weighing in on California politics. President Joe Bidens press secretary tweeted Tuesday, that the president does not support efforts to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom, saying the president and governor share a commitment to a range of issues.

CA surpasses 45,000 coronavirus-related deaths

After seeing a decline in cases and hospitalizations, California health leaders fear new setbacks. Tuesday, California surpassed 45,000 deaths and the state COVID-19 tracker shows a slight decrease in cases. An increase of 320 deaths Tuesday is slightly higher than the rate on Monday.

House managers to make a visceral case against Trump on Wednesday

Opening arguments are set to start this morning in the presidential impeachment trial. House impeachment managers plan to begin their case at 12 p.m. Eastern Time. In favor of convicting former president Trump for incitement of insurrection. The managers have up to 16 hours this week to open their case. Click here to watch.
Two cases of a coronavirus variant first found in South Africa that reduces the effectiveness of some vaccines have been identified in the Bay Area, in Alameda and Santa Clara counties, Gov. Gavin Newsom said Wednesday.

They are the first two cases of this variant, called B.1.351, to be found in California. They were identified by scientists at the Stanford Clinical Virology Laboratory on Tuesday night and reported to the state Wednesday morning.

Both people who tested positive for the new variant were diagnosed with COVID-19 in January. The Santa Clara County individual had recently traveled and was in quarantine with one other person, who also became sick but was never tested. That individual is presumed to also have been infected with the new variant, public health officials said.

The Santa Clara County individuals were extraordinarily careful about quarantine and do not pose a risk of further spread of the variant, said Dr. Sara Cody, the Santa Clara County health officer.

The Alameda County case is under investigation and the persons travel history and potential interactions with others is not yet known, said Dr. Nicholas Moss, the county health officer.

We dont want any of these variants if they are here to spread any further. Thats really, really, really important, Cody said at a news conference Wednesday. She said finding this variant in the region should signal people to double down on behaviors that slow down the spread of disease, such as wearing masks and maintaining social distance.

Though the winter surge is waning in the state and Bay Area, daily case counts are still worryingly high and the death toll is grim, Cody said. News of the variants arrival came the same day that California surpassed New York as the state with the most coronavirus deaths.

California reported 45,351 total coronavirus deaths as of Wednesday evening, just over New Yorks 45,312 deaths, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. California remains far behind New York in deaths per capita, with about 115 deaths per 100,000 residents compared to 231 per 100,000 in New York, according to data analyzed by The Chronicle.

Public health officials have worried that new variants could pose a threat to the United States ability to quickly end the pandemic, either by evading vaccines or spreading too fast to contain. New variants could lead to more illness and death if they cause more severe symptoms or are more infectious and trigger fresh surges in cases.

The variant from the United Kingdom is thought to be about 50% more infectious than the original virus, and experts have warned it could become dominant in parts of the United States, including Southern California, by early March. More than 150 cases of that variant have been found in California, including Alameda and San Mateo counties.

Another pair of closely related variants identified in California have been spreading quickly in the Bay Area and Southern California. Scientists believe they respond to vaccines but are running tests now to determine if the variants reduce effectiveness. Theyre also studying whether the variants are more infectious.

The variant from South Africa is considered particularly concerning because studies have found that it is able to partially evade the bodys immune response, whether from a vaccine or previous infection by the coronavirus. So far the vaccines appear to prevent severe disease and death from the variant.

The British variant, its still susceptible to vaccines and its going to spread anyway. But lets get this one back in the box, said Dr. George Rutherford, an infectious disease expert at UCSF.

As of Tuesday, nine cases of the variant from South Africa had been identified in three states, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That number did not include the new California cases.

These variants are here, Moss said Wednesday. We should prepare and plan accordingly. Because relatively few coronavirus cases are genomically sequenced, he said, we only have a very limited picture of their spread locally.

Dr. Benjamin Pinsky, who heads the Stanford lab that found the variants, said they were identified through a process that screened positive coronavirus samples for specific mutations. Samples with those mutations then went through genomic sequencing to confirm the variant.

The two cases announced Wednesday were from samples sent to the lab about a week to 10 days ago, Pinsky said. His lab also identified the first cases of the variant from the United Kingdom found in the Bay Area.

The two vaccines available in the United States, made by Pfizer and Moderna, provide some protection against B.1.351, the South African variant, but perhaps less than the initial virus from China for which they were designed.

The Moderna vaccine induced an immune response six times lower against the variant from South African compared to earlier variants, the company said in late January after conducting a small study. But even this lower level of immune response, or neutralizing antibodies, is likely to protect against COVID-19, the company said.

Still, Moderna is testing a booster vaccine to see if it can provide more immunity.

Similarly, the Pfizer vaccine also induced a slightly lower level of neutralizing antibodies against the variant, but it should still be enough to protect against COVID-19, according to studies by Pfizer and the University of Texas Medical Branch. The difference is unlikely to lead to a significant reduction in the effectiveness of the vaccine, Pfizer said.

Pfizer and Moderna are both made using messenger RNA, a type of technology that allows vaccine manufacturers to tweak vaccines quickly to account for variants. So the companies could essentially plug in a slightly adjusted genetic sequence into the vaccine. This could still be concerning, though, because even though the vaccine itself could be tweaked fast, it would take time to produce and distribute.

Also concerning is whether other vaccines in the pipeline, particularly one made by AstraZeneca and Oxford University, will work against emerging variants. South Africa recently stopped using the AstraZeneca vaccine because of reduced effectiveness. That vaccine is not yet approved for use in the United States. South Africa switched to the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which has yet to be authorized in any country but in clinical studies was shown to be 57% effective at preventing moderate to severe disease caused by B.1.351.

Scientists in South Africa also have said that people who were previously infected with other coronavirus variants appear to be susceptible to reinfection with the new one.

Moss of Alameda County expressed optimism about vaccines. However, he said, we have to stick with the things we know work for the time being. That means face coverings, distancing and limiting gatherings.

The most important thing with variants is to just limit the amount of COVID that is out there, he added.

San Francisco Chronicle staff writers Aidin Vaziri, Catherine Ho

and Meghan Bobrowsky contributed to this report.

Erin Allday is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: eallday@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @erinallday
The changing of the guard at the White House has raised hopes for diplomatic settlements to decade-long conflicts in Libya, Yemen and Syria. It has also promised reduced tensions in Iraq and Sudan, and support for their governments reconstruction programmes.

Of course, whenever a new president enters the Oval Office, the people of the region hope for a fresh and balanced approach to the Palestinian question. The Trump administrations determination to pressure a number of Arab countries into normalising relations with Israel while ignoring the need to pursue a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has only complicated the task of resolving a conflict that has lasted more than 70 years.

For the moment, however, President Joe Biden and his administration are preoccupied with urgent domestic needs shaped, above all, by the Covid-19 pandemic, the economic downturn, mounting unemployment and the volatile sociopolitical polarisation epitomised by the storming of the Capitol building. On the foreign policy front, most of the focus is on the question of the Iranian nuclear programme, reengaging with Europe and strengthening the Western alliance, as well as sending signals heralding shifts in policies towards China and Russia.

Washington certainly has a lot on its plate, probably more than at any time since the end of the Cold War, and it is struggling to order priorities. For our region, this raises the question of whether it is possible to rely on the US to achieve sustainable resolutions to Middle East conflicts. Despite all the excitement over the new faces in the White House, there are no clear indications of how efficacious US interventions would be under Biden, though it would be safe to say that where Trump was inclined to military and economic threats and arm twisting, Biden will lean towards diplomatic leverage underpinned by US military and economic power.

Judging from his first few weeks in office, Bidens approach to the Middle East, in general, rests on solid alliances with Washingtons historic partners: the Gulf countries, Israel and, of course, Egypt, Jordan and  according to observers, the latest addition to this group  Sudan. As his Secretary of State Antony Blinken put it, this is the time to restore and revitalise alliances. According to experts, changing circumstances and conditions, especially the repercussions of the Covid-19 pandemic, will be among the main factors to determine how Washington goes about this.

For example, it was the brutal humanitarian plight in Yemen that led Biden to revoke the terrorist designation that the Trump administration had applied to the Houthi rebel group in his final days in office. State Department officials made it clear that this did not alter Washingtons position on the Houthis behaviour and that the step was only necessary in order to facilitate humanitarian relief operations. At the same time, Washington has reiterated its long-standing commitment to protecting the Gulf countries and Saudi Arabia, in particular.

The Biden teams position on Iran, on the other hand, is still up in the air. Although Biden has stated that he hopes to return to the nuclear agreement from which Trump unilaterally withdrew, Blinken has said that this process could take a long time. He then cautioned that, if Iran lifted more of the agreements restraints it could come closer to having enough material to produce a nuclear weapon. The US is caught in the dilemma of having to determine how to tackle Tehran: by being tough or by inducements to encourage it back to the negotiating table.

Nevertheless, it does say something that, in his first major policy address last week, President Biden mentioned the Middle East only once (in connection with Yemen). As mentioned above, his administration is prioritising those foreign policy issues that impact his countrys interests most directly, such the competition with China over world leadership, clipping Russias wings and utilising the Western alliance for such purposes.

This does not signify that Washington, under Biden, will avoid taking action on matters related to the region. But it does mean that Washington might lack the enthusiasm needed to play a more definitive role in resolving complex issues such as the civil wars in Libya and Yemen.

Hopefully, the Biden administration will see these conflicts in a strategic framework that transcends the Cold War-like head-butting with adversaries in the global power game. In recent years the Middle East has endured far too much warfare, suffering and attrition. Its people want world powers to play more constructive roles and to remedy the wrongs that drove the region to uncontainable wildfires of strife.

*A version of this article appears in print in the 11 February , 2021 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly

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Protesters engaged in minor scuffles with riot police in Bangkok Wednesday night as pro-democracy rallies continued in the Thai capital.

Prosecutors in Thailand charged four prominent activists with sedition and defaming the monarchy for their protest activities on Tuesday.

The case is the first of numerous ones lodged against participants in the student-led protest movement that is being prosecuted by the attorney generals office.

It also is the first in which the defendants are expected to spend significant time in jail, as suspects in other cases have usually been released after arrest.

The four -- Parit Penguin Chiwarak, Arnon Nampa, Somyos Prueksakasemsuk and Patiwat Saraiyaem, also known as Mor Lam Bank -- were denied bail.

The protest movement campaigned last year for Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha and his government to step down, the constitution to be amended to make it more democratic and the monarchy to be reformed to make it more accountable.

(Disclaimer: This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed; only the image & headline may have been reworked by www.republicworld.com)

Bennington, VT (05201)

Today

Cloudy with periods of rain. High around 50F. Winds ENE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 100%. Rainfall near a quarter of an inch..

Tonight

Cloudy with periods of rain. Low 44F. Winds NE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 90%. Rainfall near a half an inch.
Massachusetts officials plan to launch super vaccination sites in Natick and Dartmouth, bringing the state to seven sites for administering COVID-19 vaccines.

The Natick Mall will launch its site on Monday, according to the COVID-19 Command Center. The site will start with a ceiling of 500 doses a day. Over several weeks, itll be expected to provide up to 3,000 doses daily, depending on how many doses the state receives from the federal government.

LabCorp will be the clinical provider at that site.

Another super vaccination site will open Feb. 24, a Wednesday, at the old Circuit City site in Dartmouth. The state plans to start with 500 doses at that site and eventually ramp up to 2,000 doses a day.

The provider will be Curative. The California-based company has come under scrutiny for its handling of long lines at the super vaccination site at the Eastfield Mall. Hundreds of people ages 75 and older spent hours waiting in line outside the mall, even as snow fell, for fear of losing their place in line.

The National Guard was activated to help administer the COVID-19 vaccine and manage the crowds at the Eastfield Mall site, according to Springfield Mayor Domenic Sarnos office. Baker administration officials did not answer questions about what options people waiting for a vaccine have if theyre stuck waiting outside.

The COVID-19 Command Center did not immediately respond to questions about its response to Curatives staffing at the Springfield site or its plans for staffing at the new site.

The governors office said it will make 100,000 appointments available online for the super vaccination sites, as well as at local pharmacies and city-run vaccination sites.

CVS Health had a little more than 8,000 appointments posted this week. Walgreens had 7,620 appointments posted this week. Wegmans, Big Y and Price Chopper had a combined 3,100 appointments. Meanwhile Stop and Shop and other retail business services had roughly 2,000 appointments this week.

State officials also plan to announce new options for caregivers accompanying people ages 75 years or older getting the COVID-19 vaccine. As of Wednesday, caregivers who accompany those eligible for a vaccine can also schedule an appointment to get the first dose of the vaccine.

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Its no secret the Celtics have a chance to be active in the trade market heading into the March 25 trade deadline.

They didnt send two second-round picks to Charlotte to turn Gordon Haywards departure from a straight free agent signing into a trade if they didnt plan to at least attempt to utilize the largest trade exception in history ($28.5 million).

According to The Ringers Kevin OConnor the wheels have already begun turning. He wrote:

Late Saturday evening, I received a flurry of texts from multiple executives around the league who said the Celtics were up to something. What theyre up to is unclear, but league sources have long said Boston is searching for upgrades to bolster its wing and big man position.

Tristan Thompson became trade eligible this weekend, and with a $9.3 million salary, he could be a perfect fit for a deal. So could Daniel Theis, with his expiring $5 million contract. The Celtics have young players like Romeo Langford and Aaron Nesmith, in addition to all of their future first-round draft picks, which could position them to make a bid for a big fish such as Bradley Beal if he were to become available, or a role player like P.J. Tucker or Thaddeus Young.

Beal would be the ultimate prize anywhere and he and Tatum have a relationship dating back to the shared St. Louis roots. But so far, at least publicly the Wizards scoring machine has expressed a desire to stay in Washington as the center of their rebuild. Hes too expensive to fit into the trade exception. Boston would have to trade pieces of its nucleus. If the Celtics arent offering Jaylen Brown, then the Wizards can get a better deal elsewhere. Its hard to picture that sort of overhaul midseason.

But there are other options.

Harrison Barnes strong play for the Kings last week in their win over Boston fueled rumors about the Celtics exploring a trade for the versatile forward. But Sacramento is playing well enough that they might choose to keep the former Olympian as they try to push for a playoff spot.

The New Orleans Pelicans have reportedly pressed the Celtics, among other Northeast teams about interest in J.J. Redick, but hes been sitting as often as hes playing and might not have much left in the tank.

Aaron Gordon, is injured, but would help if he came back healthy. George Hill is a likely cadidate to get moved and could certainly help. Otto Porter and Victor Oladipo are free agents after season making them expensive rentals, but theyd obviously help.

Tucker and even Young might be nice additional pieces for the Celtics and would certainly add some depth the Celtics are lacking, but the pursuit of either one hardly seems like the sort of thing that would launch a flurry of texts from executives.

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Jaylen Brown questionable on Celtics injury report for Tuesdays game vs. Jazz

Jayson Tatum, Boston Celtics arent getting to the free throw line and its costing them

Brad Stevens more encouraged than discouraged despite loss: 5 things we learned from Celtics tough shooting night

Nigerias Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) says it has closed an unnamed test centre in the capital, Abuja, that was issuing fake COVID-19 certificates to travellers.



Chikwe Ihekweazu, the director-general of the NCDC, said they had found evidence that the lab was collecting samples and money from unsuspecting travellers, but failing to test them.



Instead, they issued certificates claiming they had tested negative for the virus, enabling them to travel.



Mr Ihekweazu added during the organisations weekly briefing on Monday that a full list of accredited labs was available on the NCDCs website and encouraged members of the public to only get tested at those centres.



He said that they were working on a platform where every lab in Nigeria could publish their test results which could then be easily verified by airlines or other countries wishing to check whether a result was genuine.



He did not specify when this platform would be ready.



The authorities in Nigeria recently suspended flights from the Emirates airline because the carrier wanted passengers from Nigeria to take a rapid Covid-19 test four hours before flying, in addition to the standard polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test.









Source: graphiconline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Teachers and school staff currently on Harris County Public Health's waiting list for COVID-19 vaccines now will be prioritized if there are any "leftover" doses at the end of each day.

Dr. Maria Rivera, who is co-leading the Harris County Health Departments school advisory group during the pandemic, told ABC 13 that educators will be called if others do not show up for their scheduled appointments. The teachers still will need to qualify for vaccines under phases 1A and 1B of Texas' vaccine allocation plan, which include those over the age of 65 and those with preexisting conditions that could make them more likely to suffer more severe cases of COVID-19.

"This is a way to make sure it doesn't go to waste and are always going to people that are eligible," Rivera told the ABC affiliate.

Educators who want to be considered for this priority access must sign up for the Harris County vaccine wait list. Those who fill out the form are asked whether they are employed by a school district, and if so, which one. Currently the county works with the 21 school districts within its borders, as well as charter networks and private schools, to provide resources.

Although some states, including Utah and Arkansas, categorized teachers as frontline workers enabling them to receive some of the first doses of the COVID-19 vaccine along with law enforcement officers and emergency medical services employees, Texas has not yet said when they will be given broad access to the vaccines. Teachers groups, superintendents and some lawmakers have called on the state's Expert Vaccine Allocation Panel to put teachers near the front of the line, but the panel has not yet released the next phase of vaccine recipients beyond phases 1A and 1B.

In the absence of a more robust state plan to vaccinate teachers, Zeph Capo, president of the Texas American Federation of Teachers, said Harris County is taking a step in the right direction.

"We definitely appreciate what the county is doing to get shots into the arms of educators," Capo said. "The more we're able to vaccinate the education workforce, the easier it will be to reopen schools and handle all the things that are currently happening."

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

The Nagol is Back! VTOs guide to this years Nagol, plus where to stay and play in south, central and north Pentecost.
San Francisco police arrested one man and are still searching for another in connection with the harrowing abduction of two children in Pacific Heights this weekend by suspected car thieves, police confirmed Wednesday.

Erlin Romero, 25, was arrested without incident at 11:20 a.m. Tuesday near Crisp Road and Palou Avenue in the Bayview district, said San Francisco Police Sgt. Michael Andraychak.

Romero was booked into San Francisco County Jail on Tuesday on suspicion of multiple charges including two counts of kidnapping, first-degree robbery and car theft.

Police declined to release details about how they tracked down Romero, but confirmed that he was wearing an ankle monitor at the time of his arrest. Romero was already facing two open cases for robbery and car theft out of San Francisco, and was required to wear the electronic GPS device as a term of his release.

The suspect still at large has not been identified.

After a preliminary review of the case, prosecutors said they plan to file a range of felony charges including robbery, kidnapping, assault, vehicle theft and child abandonment.

The kidnapping touched off a regionwide manhunt Saturday after the childrens father, Jeffrey Fang, a DoorDash delivery driver, left the engine of his minivan running and his 1-year-old son and 4-year-old daughter inside while delivering food near Jackson and Laguna streets.

Authorities issued an Amber Alert for San Francisco, San Mateo, Alameda, Marin and Santa Clara counties shortly before 11 p.m. and police mobilized all available units, including motorcycle, traffic enforcement and dirt bikes, to search for the children.

The case also went viral on social media after KQED reporter Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez  a friend of Fang  tweeted out an urgent call to action.

Police said they found the children safe inside the vehicle in the Bayview at around 1:15 a.m. Sunday. The children were examined by medical professionals and returned to their father.

Prosecutors charged Romero with robbery in January 2020 after he and other suspects allegedly stole another mans bag. Then in August he was arrested and charged again after police reportedly found him in a stolen car.

San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin said prosecutors in the 2020 robbery case asked that Romero be detained while awaiting trial, but a judge denied that request and set bail at $25,000. A judge allowed him to be released a few weeks later with an ankle monitor, Boudin said.

Romero spent a total of 135 days in jail following his January 2020 arrest, Boudin said, with stints following technical violations on his release and the August arrest.

Romero has no prior convictions. His robbery case was referred to young adult court  a collaborative San Francisco program that works with people between 18 and 24 years old  but was put on the wait list due to the programs caseload, Boudin said.

Though our request to detain Mr. Romero was denied, the fact that he was on court-ordered electronic monitoring was critical to the investigation in this most recent arrest, Boudin said.

Boudin commended police on the arrest and said he was thankful that the children were found safe.

San Francisco Supervisor Catherine Stefani, who represents the Pacific Heights neighborhood, where the kidnapping occurred, said the abduction was the latest example of a city thats out of control with crime being allegedly committed by people who were previously arrested and not held in jail.

On top of this horrifying kidnapping, weve seen two women killed on New Years Eve, a young father killed in an eight-vehicle crash, fatal midday attacks on our seniors and too many car break-ins and home invasions to count, she said in a statement. We cannot keep releasing dangerous individuals back onto the streets after arrests only to see them commit more crimes. Enough is enough.

Boudin, a progressive prosecutor who has vowed to help curb mass incarceration, has recently come under fire from critics who say his policies have put the public at risk. But Boudin said the kidnapping case highlights the need for better support and resources for young people involved in the criminal justice system, and stressed that filing charges is not synonymous with pretrial detention.

Specialized youth programs can address the root causes of criminal behavior, he said. Prosecution alone cannot always prevent future crimes.

Megan Cassidy is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: megan.cassidy@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @meganrcassidy
"The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires." - William Arthur Ward.

Once Bihar, known then as Magadh, was famous as a great centre of learning. It boasted one of the largest universities in the world in Nalanda District, housing more than 10,000 students and over 2,000 teachers and attracted students from such far away places as China and Mongolia. At present, with 47.53 percent, Bihar has the lowest literacy rate in the country.

Today Bihar has over 2.7 million children who do not go to school. In Bihar, 60 percent of children drop out of school at the primary level and around 75 percent at the middle level. The proportion is higher for girls. In 2002, Bihar had more than 190,000 vacancies for school teachers. The state has, on an average, 1 teacher per 84 pupils. The national average is 1 teacher per 40 pupils. In 2002-2003, UNICEF worked with the government to recruit and train 42,000 teachers. In 2005, UNICEF urged the government to begin teachers recruitment and training again. The government of Bihar is going to recruit 2.35 lakh teachers in the vacant seats in the schools of Bihar. It will bring teacher-pupil ratio to the national figure of 1:40. This would be the largest exercise, ever undertaken, in terms of numbers, and also a major breakthrough in regard to decentralization and devolution of powers to the Panchayati Raj institutions for management of school education as envisaged under 73rd and 74th amendment of the Constitution.

This is high time when one should focus on policies leading to quality teachers and teaching. Largest source of variation in student learning is attributable to differences in what students bring to school  their abilities and attitudes, and family and community background. Of those variables which are potentially open to policy influence, factors to do with teachers and teaching are the most important influences on student learning. It is difficult to predict who is going to be a good teacher just by considering the more measurable characteristics of teachers (e.g. qualifications, teaching experience, and indicators of academic ability and subject-matter knowledge). There are many important aspects of teacher quality that are not captured by the more measurable characteristics, such as:

 Ability to convey ideas in clear and convincing ways;

 To create effective learning environments for different types of students;

 To foster productive teacher-student relationships;

 To be enthusiastic and creative;

 To work effectively with colleagues and parents.

Policies for developing more effective teachers and teaching have intensified in recent years due to the profound economic and social changes underway and the imperatives for schools to provide the foundations for lifelong learning.

Some of the teacher and teaching related policies are suggested as follows. These policies have general relevance for teachers urban areas but take on special significance in rural and remote areas.

A. Teacher Recruitment

Improve selection into teacher education

 Information and counselling

 Assessment

 Early school experience

 Incentives for high potentials

 Put basic teacher salaries in periphery at parity with urban areas.

 Provide salary differentials and/or hardship pay for teaching in difficult areas.

 Develop programs to increase teachers social status and recognition

B. Developing Teachers Knowledge and Skills

1. Developing teacher profiles

Clear and concise standards of what teachers are expected to know and be able to do.

 reflect broad range of competencies.

 provide framework to guide and integrate initial

 teacher education, certification, induction and on-going professional development.

 should be evidence-based and reflect student learning objectives.

 should be built on active involvement by teaching profession.

2. Teacher education:

Provide more flexible forms of initial teacher education

 Modular, part-time, distance education

 Alternate routes for mid-career changers

Strengthen partnerships between teacher education institutions and schools

 Overt and deliberate partnerships

 Earlier and broader field experience

Subsidize teacher enrollment in courses for earning/upgrading credentials. Associate teacher education with credentials, pay raises, promotion, and job security. Empower and train school principals as instructional leaders/ supervisors. Use distance/ extension education programs so that teachers can upgrade credentials without too much disruption to family life.

3. Strengthening induction programmes

 Formalise induction programmes

 Qualify mentor teachers

 Provide sufficient resources for induction and reduced teaching obligation for mentors and beginning teachers

 Link successful completion of induction to certification

4. Integrating professional development throughout the teaching career

Provide incentives for lifelong learning of all teachers

 Entitle teachers to release time and/or financial support for professional development

 Create incentives: e.g., link professional development to teacher appraisal and career advancement

 Link individual teacher development with school improvement needs

5. Broaden the range of different professional development opportunities, e.g.

 Peer review and action research

 Mutual school visits

 Teacher and school networks

6. Provide more coherent framework for professional development, develop teachers learning communities

 Training, practice and feedback

 Follow-up rather than one shot events

 Teacher portfolios

C. Teacher Deployment

 Offer extra credit toward promotion for teaching in peripheral areas.

 Create organizational mechanisms to ensure that teachers recruited and trained for work in the periphery are indeed placed there.

 Provide special preparation for teaching in the periphery prior to teachers taking up assignments (including training in multigrade teaching and working under difficult conditions).

 Develop means of overcoming the image of social isolation.

 Develop strategies to support deployment of husband/wife teams.

 Offer subsidized housing as part of teaching contract.

 Cover moving costs to remote locations.

D. Teacher Retention

 Payment of overtime for extra work/preparation. Bonus for regular attendance. Bonus for student achievement.

 Improved management of automatic promotion systems (eliminate paperwork bottlenecks).

 Community contributions toward teacher welfare/earnings.

 Organize school clusters and/or working groups for peer support and group problem solving.

 Empower teachers as co-developers of school curriculum and in service education programs.

 Solicit community for teacher aids and guest instructors.

 Promote special recognition of teachers by community.

 Use decentralized systems of resource (e.g., textbooks) provision and distribution.

 Provide access to teacher education/ teacher upgrading courses (through distance or extension education).

 Make in-service teacher education relevant to teacher needs in the periphery.

 Involve teachers/teacher groups in the planning and implementation of their own in-service education.

 Maintain housing subsidies.

 Cover costs of occasional home visits for those not originating in school vicinity.

 Provide assistance for health care and education of family members.

 Scholarships for children and free books.

E. Providing Schools with More Responsibility for Teacher Personnel Development

Schools need to have more responsibility and accountability for working conditions, and development.

Pre-requisites:

 Developing school leaders skills in personnel management;

 Providing disadvantaged schools with greater resources;

 Monitoring the outcomes of a more decentralised approach;

 Creating independent appeals procedures to ensure fairness and protect teachers rights.

F. Evaluating and Rewarding Effective Teaching

There needs to be a stronger emphasis on teacher evaluation for improvement purposes. Opportunity for teachers work to be recognised and celebrated and help both teachers and schools to identify developmental needs.

Pre-requisites:

 Teacher appraisal to occur within a framework provided by profession-wide agreed statements of standards of professional performance;

 Evaluators need to be trained and evaluated themselves;

 Evaluation frameworks and tools need to be provided.

G. Providing More Opportunities for Career Diversification

Teaching would benefit from a career ladder based on skills, responsibilities and performance. There needs to be more opportunities for career diversity and mobility (between schools, between roles, and between teaching and other careers).

H. Teaching Needs to Become a Knowledge-rich Profession

Teaching needs to become a knowledge-rich profession in which individuals continually develop, and have the incentives and opportunities to do so, research is integrated into practice, and schools become professional learning communities that encourage and draw on teachers development.

I. Improving Leadership and School Climate

A range of initiatives should be taken to strengthen leadership in schools:

 Improve training, selection and evaluation processes for school principals;

 Establish leadership teams in schools;

 School leaders to be trained and supported in conducting evaluations and linking them to school planning.

J. Improving Working Conditions

 School facilities

 Classroom facilities

 Number of students

 Age range of students

 Collegiality

There needs to be an explicit recognition of the wide variety of tasks that teaching actually entails. Well trained support and administrative staff can help to reduce the burden on teachers and free them to concentrate on the tasks of teaching and learning Better facilities at school for staff preparation and planning would help in building collegiality and in programme provision.

K. Redefining Management Roles

To raise the quality of teachers, teaching and learning at the school level, new school level management roles are evolving, and low-cost alternatives to current practice are need to be explored. The traditional role of head teachers focuses on routine administrative tasks. New functions may include instructional leadership; community liaison and mobilization; stimulating and monitoring innovations (e.g., multigrade classrooms, teacher assistants); generating, understanding, and utilizing information on interventions in progress; and responding to the emergence of new priorities.

L. Monitoring and Sustaining Quality Improvement

To help monitor and sustain continual improvements, there is need at all levels but particularly at the local level for both practical technology and, within contexts of decentralization, for participatory decision processes. Head teachers, in order to provide leadership and mobilize community support, should be able to assess the quality of their schools and utilize such information in local strategic planning.

Working toward the Future

To ensure a highly qualified supply of special education teachers in the future, policymakers should consider the following strategies:

1. Create programs to encourage experienced teachers to stay on beyond retirement, perhaps as part-time teachers or mentors;

2. Promote the use of less traditional methods of recruitment, such as the use of web sites or professional recruiters;

3. Examine State and local policies that affect paperwork burden to see if some requirements can be reduced, making the jobs of special education teachers more manageable;

4. Work with school districts and teachers preparation programs to provide more training in areas in which teachers feel their skills are weakest, that is, using technology in education, interpreting results of standardized tests, accommodating diverse students, learning needs, and using literature to address problems; and

5. Help school districts tailor continuing professional development to the needs of special education teachers and ensure that those programs use best practices, including time for teachers to implement what they have learned.

Bihars future depends on how well we educate our children. To provide every child with a class education we need to start sooner, set standards higher and provide opportunities to all. We need excellent teacher and teaching methodology. We need to restructure the school day and the school year. Money alone wont solve the problems facing our schools, but a policy of reforms without resources mocks the scope of our challenge.

Good Teachers are Costly, but Bad Teachers Cost More!

--------------

The author is a research scholar at IIT Madras and can be contacted at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Original publish date: Sept. 13, 2006
smart development

Asia is home to some of the world's biggest waterways, from the Ganges and the Indus in India to the Yangtze and Mekong originating in China, that snake for thousands of kilometres.

A glacial burst that triggered a deadly flash flood in the Indian Himalayas at the weekend was a disaster waiting to happen, and one likely to be repeated in a region transformed by climate change and unchecked infrastructure development, experts warn.

Asia is home to some of the world's biggest waterways, from the Ganges and the Indus in India to the Yangtze and Mekong originating in China, that snake for thousands of kilometres.

They support the livelihoods of vast numbers of farmers and fishermen, and supply drinking water to billions of people, but have come under unprecedented pressure in recent years.

Higher temperatures are causing glaciers that feed the rivers to shrink, threatening water supplies and also increasing the chances of landslides and floods, while critics blame dam building and pollution for damaging fragile ecosystems.

"Rivers are really at risk from development projects, dumping of solid waste and liquid waste, sand mining and stone mining," Himanshu Thakkar, from the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People, told AFP.

"Climate change is a longer-term process that has already set in. The impacts are already happening.

"So in every respect, rivers are under greater threat."

The disaster in India was apparently triggered by a glacial burst, that unleashed a wall of water which barrelled down a valley in Uttarakhand state, destroying bridges and roads and hitting two hydroelectric power plants.

Dozens have been killed and more than 170 others are missing after the accident on the Dhauliganga river, which feeds into the Ganges.

Shrinking glaciers

It is not yet clear what damaged the glacier and triggered the accident, but there are suspicions that construction of hydro-power projects -- in an area that is highly seismically active -- may have contributed.

"This area is prone to vulnerability, it is not appropriate for this kind of bumper-to-bumper hydro-power development," Himanshu said.

"Proper planning, impact assessment, proper geological assessment -- this has not happened here."

Patricia Adams, executive director from Canada-based environmental NGO Probe International, said dam building in such an area was simply too dangerous, as it makes hillsides unstable and causes landslides.

Some have also pointed to rising temperatures as a contributing factor.

A major study in 2019 suggested Himalayan glaciers had melted twice as fast since the turn of the century as in the 25 preceding years.

"The impacts of climate change in the Himalayas are real," said Benjamin P. Horton, director of the Earth Observatory of Singapore.

As well as greater danger of accidents, glacier loss in the Himalayas deprives local communities of water to drink and for agriculture, he said.

There have been other flooding disasters in the region in recent years. In 2013, some 6,000 people died when flash floods and landslides swept away entire villages in Uttarakhand as rivers swollen by monsoon rains overflowed.

Record deluges

In neighbouring China, flooding has also worsened on major rivers.

Last year the Yangtze, Asia's longest waterway, suffered record deluges that killed hundreds of people and submerged thousands of homes, with environmentalists saying it indicated climate change impacts were growing.

China has also built a vast dam network, although authorities insist this infrastructure helps mitigate flooding rather than adding to the problem.

Like in India, this has proved controversial, with some blaming the structures for contributing to earthquakes and landslips.

Beijing's dam building has faced criticism outside the country particularly on the Mekong River, which begins on the Tibetan Plateau in China and winds through Southeast Asia.

Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam all battled severe drought in 2019, as the tide of the river fell to record lows.

While some pointed to climate change, there were also calls for China to be more transparent about its dam operations -- Beijing has constructed 11 dams on its section of the river.

In downstream countries, dozens of hydro-power dams have been built or are planned -- many funded by Chinese-backed companies -- sparking concerns about environmental damage.

Some see sinister motives in Beijing's Mekong dam building.

The Chinese Communist Party "now control some of the mightiest rivers in the world on which millions and millions of people in downstream neighbouring countries depend for their food, their agriculture, and shipping, and their security", said Adams from Probe International.
Specialist Risk Group (SRG), a London-based specialist insurance broker, has announced the acquisition of a UK trade credit specialist, The Channel Partnership.

Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.

The Channel Partnership, founded in 1992, provides clients with expert advice and solutions to manage their trade credit risks. This specialist area of insurance is of particular value in the current economic climate, enabling businesses to continue to trade confidently on credit terms whether with their UK-based or export customers.

Based in Bristol, The Channel Partnerships senior team and staff will join SRGs rapidly expanding retail business, Specialist Risk Insurance Solutions (SRIS). Tom Rolfe, director at The Channel Partnership, will report to Lee Anderson, managing director of SRIS.

Following the December announcement of SRGs new majority shareholder, HGGC, SRG also made two additional acquisitions in January. On Jan. 5, SRG purchased Newbury, England-based broker KBIS British Equestrian Insurance, and on Jan. 14, SRG bought GB Underwriting, a managing general agent that provides property and liability solutions for brokers whose clients operate within the building, construction and associated specialist trades.

Commenting on SRGs latest acquisition, Anderson, said: The Channel Partnership makes an excellent addition to the specialist credentials of SRIS and is further evidence of the support we give to our core client base, particularly in the non-service sectors such as manufacturing and construction.

The group will be a fantastic and natural home for our specialist business to grow and develop, said Tom Rolfe, director at The Channel Partnership. During the sale process, I was particularly attracted to the cultural alignment of the two organizations and I am looking forward to our next steps together as we continue to support clients with their trade credit risks.

About Specialist Risk Group

Specialist Risk Group (SRG) is an integrated group of insurance intermediaries arranging specialist insurance for corporates and individuals operating in the UK and internationally. The group serves over 42,000 end policyholders across multiple lines of business and specialises in creating solutions to challenging risk transfer questions. SRG is owned by its management team and HGGC (subject to regulatory approval), a middle-market private equity firm based in Palo Alto, Calif.

Source: Specialist Risk Group (SRG)

Topics Mergers Agencies
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y.  First, he groped a man in the Eltingville Transit Center, said police.

Then, weeks later, Vondell Cox followed a mother and her children from the Staten Island Railway station in New Dorp and shoved the woman and her 7-year-old daughter to the ground, authorities said.

The mom had given him a glare on the train shortly beforehand, Cox told cops, according to a criminal complaint.

As it turns out, the only thing Cox, 20, will be looking at for the immediate future is a jail cell.

The defendant has been sentenced to a year behind bars stemming from those two incidents.

Cox was initially arrested on July 3.

That morning, around 2:30 a.m., the defendant followed a 36-year-old man on the street toward the rear of the Eltingville Transit Center at 90 Wainwright Ave., according to police and a criminal complaint.

Cox approached the victim from behind and rubbed his body against him, the Advance/SILive.com previously reported.

The defendant also put his hands down the front and back of the victims pants, touching the mans genitals, police and the complaint said.

Cops nabbed Cox within minutes on the 500 block of Drumgoole Road West, said police.

Cox was charged with misdemeanor forcible touching and sexual abuse, police said.

At the time of his arrest, Cox was also accused of criminal trespass stemming from an unrelated incident on June 15 in Rossville.

The defendant walked into a home through a rear sliding door in the kitchen, said police.

When confronted by a woman, Cox said, Move, move, and ran out, police and a separate criminal complaint said.

Police said no items were reported stolen.

Thats me. I was looking for food, the complaint quoted Cox as saying after being shown surveillance images of the alleged home intrusion.

Cox was charged with misdemeanor criminal trespass.

At the time of those arrests, police said Cox lived in Great Kills.

The shoving incident in New Dorp occurred on Aug. 10.

The New York Police Department released this image of a man wanted in connection with the assault of a 7-year-old girl in New Dorp on Aug. 10, 2020. Authorities said Vondel Cox shoved the victim to the ground. (NYPD)

The defendant started following the 41-year-old mom, who was walking with her two children, ages 7 and 10, said another criminal complaint.

At one point Cox pushed the [mom] to the ground and continued to again push [her] child to the ground, the complaint said.

The woman tried to walk away from the defendant, but he kept following them, the complaint said.

She was finally able to escape him when she got into her car, said the complaint.

A witness said the girl was bleeding and in tears, at which point the mother yelled something at their alleged attacker, the Advance/SILive.com previously reported.

(The girl) was crying, and said, This man was chasing us, and he pushed me for no reason. I dont know why he did it, the witness said.

The child refused medical attention at the scene, police said.

The defendant fled in an unknown direction, according to police.

Cox was arrested on Aug. 13.

He was spotted in Tottenville less than 12 hours after cops released a surveillance-video image of the man sought in connection with the incident. The photo came from a deli in the vicinity of the attack.

When questioned by police, Cox gave this account, according to the complaint: The lady gave me a glare on the train. I was coming from Stapleton. I got off on New Dorp. I ran up to them and pushed them to the ground. People agitate me. I got agitated.

Cox was charged with stalking, harassment, endangering the welfare of a child, and assault with the intention of causing physical injury.

Police said he was homeless then.

On Tuesday, the defendant pleaded guilty in state Supreme Court, St. George, to attempted stalking, a felony, and a misdemeanor count of forcible touching to resolve all charges against him.

He was sentenced to a year in jail.

Defense lawyer Mark J. Fonte declined comment on the cases.
A Long Island DJ who allegedly filmed himself smoking marijuana inside the US Capitol during the January 6 riots has been arrested.

Greg Rubenacker, of Farmingdale, New York, was taken into custody by the FBI on Tuesday morning on misdemeanor charges for disorderly and disruptive conduct on Capitol grounds.

Hours later he was photographed by DailyMail.com leaving US District Court in Central Islip after appearing at an arraignment via video conference.

Rubenacker joins more than 180 other people who have been arrested in connection with the insurrection last month, when thousands of Donald Trump supporters descended on the Capitol in a bid to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden's victory.

The 25-year-old allegedly documented his role in the chaos on Snapchat, posting videos of himself vaping and smoking a joint inside the Capitol Rotunda, according to a criminal complaint.

Greg Rubenacker was arrested on Tuesday for storming the Capitol during the January 6 MAGA riots. The 25-year-old DJ from Long Island allegedly posted videos of himself vaping and smoking marijuana on Snapchat, as seen in the photos above from the criminal complaint

Rubenacker was photographed by DailyMail.com leaving US District Court in Central Islip on Tuesday afternoon after appearing at an arraignment via video conference

'Holy s**t! This is history! We took the Capitol!' Rubenacker said in one video after he and others breached the Capitol building, the complaint states.

In another video he puffed on a joint and declared: 'Hell yeah. Smoke out the Capitol, baby.'

One of Rubenacker's Snapchat videos showed Trump supporters outside the Capitol with the caption: 'America is pissed'

A third clip showed other people smoking in the Rotunda, with one of them asking: 'How many joints we have?'

The videos were posted on a Snapchat account under Rubenacker's name, according to photos included in the criminal complaint.

He also posted images outside the Capitol building, including one near the Washington Monument with the caption: 'America is pissed.'

The complaint states that Rubenacker was apprehended after a friend and former classmate contacted FBI investigators and identified him as participating in the riots.

'In an interview with the FBI, the witness explained that it watched the Snapchat story and knew the individual depicted throughout the videos to be Greg Rubenacker of New York,' prosecutors wrote.

'The witness stated [they] had known Rubenacker for multiple years and had attended school with Rubenacker.'

Rubenacker is facing the following misdemeanor charges:

Knowingly entering or remaining in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority to do so; knowingly, and with intent to impede or disrupt the orderly conduct of Government business or official functions

Willfully and knowingly utter loud, threatening, or abusive language, or engage in disorderly or disruptive conduct, at any place in the Grounds or in any of the Capitol Buildings with the intent to impede, disrupt, or disturb the orderly conduct of a session of Congress or either House of Congress

Parade, demonstrate, or picket in any of the Capitol Buildings

Rubenacker briefly stopped to talk to reporters after his arraignment on Tuesday

He insisted he did 'no violence' at the Capitol and said he was protected by the Constitution

During his arraignment on Tuesday Rubenacker was admonished multiple times by his own criminal defense lawyer, Michealangelo Matera, because he wouldn't stop talking, according to CNBC.

'It's really frustrating,' the defendant said at one point. 'Tired of the corruption in the government.'

Matera replied: 'Now's not the time to talk about the case.'

Rubenacker then muttered something about 'trying to protect the country'.

Later in the hearing Rubenacker asked Magistrate Judge Steven Locke if he could take off his mask. Locke said no, citing the other people in the room with him.

The judge set Rubenacker's bond at $50,000 and listed off a series of conditions for his release.

'Is there any way I can get a list of this written down?' Rubenacker asked. 'My memory's not too good. You're saying a lot.'

Locke assured him that he would get the conditions in writing.

Rubenacker briefly stopped to talk to reporters outside the court house after the hearing.

He insisted that he did 'no violence' at the Capitol and suggested that he was protected by the First Amendment.
A Department of Veterans Affairs gynecologist in Biloxi, Mississippi, made graphic and lewd comments to patients while conducting pelvic examinations, joked about sex with them and otherwise traumatized veterans under his care, yet he remained on staff for years after an administrator became aware of complaints, a VA investigation has found.

In a 33-page report released Wednesday by the VA's Office of Inspector General, the department's top watchdog said a staff gynecologist at the Gulf Coast Veterans Health Care System was disrespectful, rude and offensive to at least five veteran patients, all of whom said their experiences with the physician left them feeling violated.

"Specifically, comments made by the subject gynecologist included making graphic, lewd comments about sexual positions and penetration, telling a patient that when prescribing Valium to women they do not care if they receive 1 or 27 Pap smears, making offensive jokes while performing a pelvic examination, attributing a health condition to an untreated history of a sexually transmitted disease without evidence or conducting an examination, and telling a patient not to trust other VA providers," the report found.

One patient questioned whether her health concerns were her fault. Another, who said she had been sexually assaulted while serving, told investigators that the exam triggered memories of her past trauma. A third patient said she has not been the same since an appointment with the physician.

I wish there was more support  there is always a thing where no one believes women  when we say something is wrong  we dont have the power, one patient is quoted as saying in the investigation. The patient added, I dont even work at the VA and Im still scared  it feels like its wrong to say something when a guy does something  Does it have to be so egregious, the discomfort should be validated?

Read Next: Army War College President Suspended Pending Investigation

John Daigh, the VA's assistant inspector general for health care, said these events had a long-term impact on patients.

"The OIG determined that these provider-patient interactions resulted in patients reporting negative outcomes such as anxiety, depression, hopelessness, and feelings of re-traumatization or powerlessness," Daigh wrote.

Making matters worse, a nurse chaperone stood silently by during the misconduct, and facility leaders were aware of the problems as early as 2015 but failed to address or investigate them, according to the report.

Investigators said that when they interviewed the nurse chaperone, she attributed the gynecologist's manner to being "just his personality" and said patients should find a different doctor if they didn't like it.

She added that she and the physician were from up North and their direct communication style "rubbed the wrong way with some of the Southern women down here," according to the report.

It adds that the hospital's chief of surgery was aware of the complaints as early as 2015, but a review was not launched until September 2019, shortly after a facility director learned of a complaint and asked the chief of staff to look into it immediately.

The gynecologist retired from the VA in November 2019. Hospital administrators did not report him to the state licensing board or the National Practitioner Data Bank, an oversight the chief of surgery said was "a mistake on my part as a manager."

The shocking report comes as the VA is stepping up efforts to improve health care for female veterans, creating stand-alone centers for their care or carving out sections of existing facilities with separate entrances to make women feel more comfortable getting care at the VA.

While many veterans say they get great care at VA hospitals, many also say they feel uncomfortable in VA settings where they have experienced sexual harassment or assault, in some cases.

They also say their status as veterans is often questioned by patients and staff, placing them in the uncomfortable position of having to prove their military service.

Issues of mistreatment and the VA's handling of sexual assault at its medical campuses were spotlighted last December when the VA OIG found that then-VA Secretary Robert Wilkie disparaged a female veteran who alleged she had been sexually assaulted at the Washington, D.C., VA.

In December, Congress passed legislation that contained portions of the Deborah Sampson Act, a bill that created a new Office of Women's Health within the department. It also requires improved training to accommodate female veterans' medical needs and expands coverage for counseling and treatment of sexual harassment and assault.

Daigh said the VA must review its policies related to requirements and training of providers who conduct sensitive exams, as well as those tasked with serving as chaperones.

He also recommended that the regional office responsible for the Biloxi hospital review its process for tracking patient complaints.

VA officials said they agreed with the recommendations and would implement changes this year.

-- Patricia Kime can be reached at Patricia.Kime@Monster.com. Follow her in Twitter @patriciakime.

Related: COVID-19 Death Rate at VA Nursing Homes Is 13 Times Lower Than National Average
Experts believe that China already has a significant presence in the East Sea, going ahead of the US, and will use this advantage to force small countries to follow them.

The US cruiser USS Shiloh launches a missile during an exercise in the waters of the Philippines. Photo: Reuters

The East Sea in 2020 can be generalized by the following features:

The increase of Chinas presence after the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA)s rulings in 2016

The gathering of countries inside and outside the region through the exchange of notes against Chinas 9-dash line, asking China to strictly abide by the PCAs ruling and affirming United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea 1982 (UNCLOS) as the universal and unified legislation for all activities in the oceans, and the foundation to determine the ability to create seas, sovereignty rights, jurisdiction and legitimate interests over waters as well as to resolve disputes in the East Sea (internationally known as the South China Sea).

ASEAN has made new efforts to build a unified stance under the leadership of the ASEAN chair - Vietnam. The influence of the US presidential election will occur in efforts to shape the Pacific - Indian Ocean strategy of the US and its allies.

Competition between the US and China is increasingly fierce through diplomatic notes, gunboats, and wolf warrior diplomacy in the East Sea.

Both the US and China want to entice ASEAN countries. Washington wants to emphasize a strong US, committed to continuing its presence in the region, ensuring the maintenance of international law, and not letting any party monopolize the East Sea.

Beijing considers the East Sea as "core interest" and is not afraid of American power, and will continue to strengthen military operations and its presence in the East Sea as its backyard.

The Covid-19 pandemic did not make it difficult for China, but caused a great impact on the concentration of countries in the region on the East Sea issue. However, the East Sea, with its important role, is not out of the attention of international public opinion. The trend of internationalization and the legal content in the East Sea disputes has seen dramatic developments.

China's move

Domestic and foreign scholars and experts all agree that in 2020, China became more and more aggressive, shown on all fronts. Strategically, China was determined to complete the construction of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) into a "world-class" force by 2037, with a range of operation over two siege chains of islands established by the US and its allies after World War 2 in 2021.

China's marine science and technology has made a breakthrough. It is expected that in January 2021, the deepest and largest self-propelled exploration rig in the world, built by China, will be launched at Lingshui 17-2 oil field, 150km south of Hainan. Here, China will also arrange an oil and gas storage rig of 53,000 tons.

China has also planned to build a fleet of 10 aircraft carriers with the majority of operations in the East Sea. China will continue projects to build rescue centers, sea cities, and floating nuclear power plants in Truong Sa Archipelago (Spratly Islands), to launch submarines and large underwater research equipment.

The Dongfang Hong 3 ship. Photo: Twitter

The year 2020 marked the completion of Chinas plan to replace its ocean research fleet. In 1958, the country had only 50 marine survey ships of all kinds. Now, 42 years later, it has a fleet of 60 marine research ships with 9 ocean research ships like the White Dragon 2, which completed its first voyage to Antarctica.

Notably, these ships were present in the East Sea in 2020, including the Dongfang Hong 3 - the largest marine research vessel in the world, with Petrel-X diving equipment that set a world record at a depth of 10,619m, collecting information on salinity, temperature and elements of deep sea water.

China also announced the start of a project to build 50 aquaculture farm ships with a total area of 100,000m3, capable of catching and raising 200,000 tons of high-value seafood.

These activities are the largest in terms of scope, scale and time so far, and if they are successful, China will officially manage and "master" all maritime activities in the East Sea.

Experts believe that China has had a significant presence in the East Sea, going ahead of the US and will use this advantage to force small countries to follow them.

2021 trends

In 2021, China will continue to combine the presence of coast guard and militia maritime vessels.

They are intended to:

Affirm the 9-dash claim and Four Sha in order to reject the PCAs 2016 ruling; put pressure on relevant countries to abandon the legal path to settle the East Sea disputes;

Put pressure on foreign investors to leave projects with countries around the East Sea to implement the policy that no foreign country can participate in oil and gas exploration and exploitation in the East Sea; promote "setting aside dispute and pursue joint development"; respond to freedom of navigation activities of the US and other countries;

Promote negotiation of the Code of conducts in the East Sea (COC) in favor of China; create a position for the "One Belt, One Road" initiative before the US changes its administration and the Indo-Pacific strategy; set up bargain cards in strategic competition among powers; deploy marine science research strategy for the next decade, and finally modernize the army and its attached forces.

US and Japanese naval warships in joint exercises in the East Sea. Photo: AP

International experts have also talked about the possibility of establishing an air defense identification area (ADIZ) in the East Sea. But this possibility also has an opposite effect on China when the majority of international commercial air routes pass through the East Sea.

In 2021, based on the US attitude and response, China will have enough military activities to intimidate surrounding countries, while proving to the world its presence and security of the East Sea is under control, and that instability is caused by external factors.

The year 2021 has no convergence of factors to make the situation better. At the 12th East Sea conference held in November 2020, international experts made recommendations.

Chinese warships exercise in the East Sea. Photo: Chinamil

Scholars said that ASEAN does not have enough military power against China, so it can only rely on legal and diplomatic struggle, enlist international support for establishing and adhere to an order based on rules. Regional order should be based on interests and values, rules and norms that are common with the institutions that govern the behavior of nations and international relations.

Dialogue mechanisms can help countries resolve uncertainties and promote cooperation through the expression of intentions and interests. Transparency, dialogue, respect and mutual understanding are all elements of trust-based relationships.

Australian expert Carl Thayer proposed developing a Code of Conduct against incidents at sea, expanding regulations on the prevention of unintended sea collisions between military forces for both civilian, commercial and fishing boats.

Scholars are all inclined to develop multilateralism, calling for cooperation in building order based on rules, calling on China to negotiate. Countries need to fight for an effective surveillance and compulsory dispute resolution mechanism to stabilize the East Sea situation.

Nguyen Hong Thao

News Around the Republic of Mexico



Jalisco Avocado Exports Increased 17 Percent in 2020



The director of the Jalisco Avocado Producers and Exporters Association said that 112,000 tonnes of the fruit were sent abroad from Jalisco last year, a 17% increase over the 110,000 tonnes exported in 2018. Jalisco, Mexico - Hass avocado exports from the Mexican state of Jalisco grew 17 percent in 2020 in spite of the global economic crisis generated by the Covid-19 pandemic.



Ignacio GAmez, director of Jalisco grower-exporter association Apeajal, told El Economista that the green fruit was shipped to 21 countries, mainly in Europe and Asia.



Apeajal anticipates double-digit export growth in 2021 as new markets continue to open up.



"We've been working hard to gain access to new markets with great potential such as the United States and China; if these open up the growth figures could be exponential," Sr. GAmez said.



"Even if we stay the same, the growth rate of exports will continue at the same rate; that is 10, 15 or even 20 percent per year."



GAmez noted that the collapse in wholesale avocado sales caused by the closure of hotels, restaurants and cafes during Covid-19 lockdowns had been offset by increased household consumption as more people recognized the health properties of avocados.



According to Apeajal, in 2020 Jalisco producers exported 112,000 tonnes of avocado, of which 35 percent went to Europe (mainly Spain, the Netherlands, France, the UK, Germany and Belgium), 30 percent to Canada, 25 percent to Japan and the remaining 10 percent to Central and South America, the Middle East and Hong Kong.



GAmez said that he was hopeful that Jalisco avocados would secure access to the US market, even though the Trump administration had previously blocked such attempts, and that state officials would



"The new secretaries and middle managers [of the Biden administration] are just taking office, but we are in coordination with Sader (Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development), Senasica (National Service of Health, Safety and Agrifood Quality) and obviously the issue of access of Jalisco avocado to US is on the table," he said.



El Economista article translated and edited by Luis Antonio for BanderasNews.com. - Hass avocado exports from the Mexican state of Jalisco grew 17 percent in 2020 in spite of the global economic crisis generated by the Covid-19 pandemic.Ignacio GAmez, director of Jalisco grower-exporter association Apeajal, toldthat the green fruit was shipped to 21 countries, mainly in Europe and Asia.Apeajal anticipates double-digit export growth in 2021 as new markets continue to open up."We've been working hard to gain access to new markets with great potential such as the United States and China; if these open up the growth figures could be exponential," Sr. GAmez said."Even if we stay the same, the growth rate of exports will continue at the same rate; that is 10, 15 or even 20 percent per year."GAmez noted that the collapse in wholesale avocado sales caused by the closure of hotels, restaurants and cafes during Covid-19 lockdowns had been offset by increased household consumption as more people recognized the health properties of avocados.According to Apeajal, in 2020 Jalisco producers exported 112,000 tonnes of avocado, of which 35 percent went to Europe (mainly Spain, the Netherlands, France, the UK, Germany and Belgium), 30 percent to Canada, 25 percent to Japan and the remaining 10 percent to Central and South America, the Middle East and Hong Kong.GAmez said that he was hopeful that Jalisco avocados would secure access to the US market, even though the Trump administration had previously blocked such attempts, and that state officials would continue negotiations with their US counterparts."The new secretaries and middle managers [of the Biden administration] are just taking office, but we are in coordination with Sader (Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development), Senasica (National Service of Health, Safety and Agrifood Quality) and obviously the issue of access of Jalisco avocado to US is on the table," he said.



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MILFORD, Conn., Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- National mortgage lender, Envoy Mortgage, today announced the expansion of its Northeast lending team with a new branch in Milford, Connecticut, led by mortgage lending veteran, Debbie Siena. This new branch adds to Envoy's network of locations in the region, with several other branches located across Connecticut and outside of New York and Philadelphia.

Siena brings more than 30 years of loan origination experience to Milford and other neighboring communities. She has the distinction of being the number one producer in Connecticut previously.

"We're thrilled to welcome back Debbie Siena to the Envoy family. Her work ethic and passion for helping individuals and families with their purchase or refinance is unparalleled," Andrew Pettola, Senior Vice President, Northeast Division, said. "She has a strong commitment to providing a personal, high-touch mortgage experience to customers throughout the entire process. Customers love her, and we do too."

"Coming back to Envoy was a no-brainer. It's a great company with great leaders who make me feel supported and empowered to do what I love to do. I'm thrilled to be back and looking forward to continuing to serve clients and growing our team in the future," Siena said.

Siena has lived in Woodbridge, CT, with her husband Vinny for the past 25 years. She's a graduate of Laurelton Hall High School and attended Quinnipiac University prior to beginning her career in the mortgage industry.

About Envoy Mortgage

Founded in 1997, Envoy Mortgage is an independently owned national mortgage lender headquartered in Houston, TX, dedicated to serving retail originators exclusively to allow them to serve their customers and grow their businesses. As a Fannie, Freddie and Ginnie-approved seller/servicer licensed in 47 states, Envoy branches deliver outstanding customer service while offering a full menu of loan products with the tools, expertise and technology needed to support all functions of the mortgage process.

Visit https://www.envoymortgage.com for more information. Envoy Mortgage, Ltd. NMLS #6666.

SOURCE Envoy Mortgage

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New Delhi, Feb 10 : In a show of solidarity, scores of students from Delhi University and other private colleges, on Wednesday joined the farmers protesting against the Centre's three farm laws, at the Ghazipur border.

Sahil, a DU student, told IANS: "We are with the farmers as this privatisation culture is not only hurting the farmers, but also becoming a matter of policy for this government." He further added that the privatisation has been the root cause of all the economic hardships faced by the people.

Another DU student, Shreya Singh, said that privatisation has been implemented in every sector of our economy which is not at all good for the country, adding that even the farming sector has not been spared from this reckless privatisation.

Another student, Adrika Deogharia, said, "Due to privatisation and commercialisation, everything has now been going into the hands of corporate giants."
Two BJP MPs have moved a breach of privilege notice against Trinamool Congress (TMC) MP Mahua Moitra over her remarks against a former chief justice of India in Lok Sabha on Monday. The notice has been moved by PP Chowdhary and Nishikant Dubey.

Moitra's remarks were later expunged by the Lok Sabha.

As per Article 121 of the Constitution, no Supreme Court or High Court judge who has discharged their duty or passed a judgement can be discussed in the Parliament. The Rules and Procedures 352(5) of the Parliament also dictate that the conduct of people in constitutional positions cannot be questioned. Despite the direction of the chair, Moitra continued to repeat her statements in violation of Rule 356, sources pointed out.

In her speech during the discussion on the Motion of Thanks to the President's address, Moitra had lashed out at the government, judiciary and media.

In his breach of privilege notice, former Law Minister and Pali MP Chowdhary said, "It is to be stated that the mandate of the Article 121 was the discussion in Parliament on the conduct of judges of Supreme Court and high court while discharging their duties. The above said speech is now available on YouTube Twitter handle and other social media platforms of Mahua Moitra. Therefore the statement made on the floor of the house relating to the conduct of the then Chief Justice of India while discharging his duties and uploading the same on social media platforms constitutes breach of privilege of this house by the concerned member of parliament."

Dubey in his notice said: "Despite the fact that the remarks were expunged from the record it continued to be put on social media and was published by a daily. Thus I demand action should be taken against the said member and her membership be terminated."

"The matter should be referred to the committee of privileges under rule 227 of the rules of procedure and conduct of business in Lok Sabha for examination investigation and report," he added.

Both notices have been received by the Lok Sabha secretariat and are currently under examination by the Speaker -- the authority to examine and decide any notice lies with the Speaker.

Mahua Moitra has continued to defend her stand and the expunged remarks are still on her social media accounts and Twitter timeline.

Sources also claimed an individual MP or a group may take this matter up in court.
NORTH ROYALTON, Ohio -- The City Council president apologized last week for losing his temper with the owners of a North Royalton business, who found themselves -- along with Santa Claus -- caught in the middle of a political feud.

Paul Marnecheck said he inappropriately raised his voice Nov. 28 at the owners of Royalton Gifts, also known as Royalton Gift Shoppe, on Ohio 82 near Ridge Road.

He said he apologized to them just moments afterward -- before leaving the store that day -- and he repeated the apology toward the end of last weeks City Council meeting.

(They) were kind enough to accept my apology and I believe we had a genuinely nice visit, Marnecheck told cleveland.com in a Monday (Feb. 8) email.

At the council meeting Feb. 2, Marnecheck asked his council colleagues if any of them wanted to formally investigate his behavior for possible disciplinary action. No one on council moved to that effect, so the matter was dropped.

Marnecheck said he had visited Royalton Gifts at the end of November to ask the owners -- Samantha Fozio and her mother, Michelle Fozio -- if they would like to participate in a city-sponsored Santa tour scheduled for Dec. 19.

Thats when he learned that two political rivals -- former councilman Dan Langshaw and past council candidate Dawn Carbone-McDonald -- were organizing their own Santa-centered event for Dec. 12. He believed the Fozios had agreed to participate.

I was concerned about confusion (the Dec. 12 event) would cause with the city-sponsored event, Marnecheck said. I also wish they (the Fozios) would have reached out to me and I could have told them we were planning an event.

Carbone-McDonald, who has filed petitions with the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections to run for the Ward 5 council seat in November, said council should have investigated Marnecheck for his behavior -- the same way council investigated Langshaw last year for yelling at and threatening a City Hall secretary.

Langshaw resigned from the Ward 3 seat after council charged him with gross conduct and/or malfeasance in office. He is planning a comeback, however, and has submitted petitions with the elections board to run again for the Ward 3 council seat in November.

For city officials to brush aside (Marnechecks behavior) and not investigate proves that the city has a double standard, one that protects Marnecheck, because current council members are more concerned about their own political careers than actually caring about city residents, Carbone-McDonald said in an email to cleveland.com.

A man playing Santa Claus, who was in Royalton Gifts Nov. 28 when Marnecheck walked in, did file a complaint against Marnecheck at City Hall, but administration officials and council members chose not to act.

It was a politically motivated, contrived effort to embarrass the president of council, Law Director Tom Kelly said of the complaint. He (Marnecheck) lost his temper, spoke out of turn, apologized the moment it happened, the apology was accepted, and these people want to turn it into something it isnt.

The owners of Royalton Gifts are ready to move on and get back to business.

All is fine, Samantha Fazio told cleveland.com last week. We like all council members and non-council members, and we want to keep it that way. We have no issues with anyone. There was an apology and we accepted it.

Santa controversy

Initially, it was Carbone-McDonald who filed a Dec. 1 complaint against Marnecheck. She said she saw him walk into Royalton Gifts on Nov. 28 while the store was filled with customers, including children.

Carbone-McDonald said that according to a witness -- Frank Raleigh, the man playing Santa Claus that day in Royalton Gifts -- Marnecheck asked the stores owners why they were involved in the Dec. 12 event that Carbone-McDonald and Langshaw were organizing.

I came up with an idea to drive around town (with Santa) and bring an up-close-and-personal, yet socially distant, experience with the children of North Royalton, Carbone-McDonald said. I asked Dan Langshaw to jump on board with this event and both of our families participated, driving Santa around the city for 6 hours.

Carbone-McDonald said she had also asked Santa to appear in Royalton Gifts on three Saturdays, including Nov. 28, as a way to draw customers to a local business. Families had their pictures taken with Santa in the store.

In her complaint, Carbone-McDonald said Marnecheck spoke to the Fozios in an intimidating manner.

She said Marnecheck knew that she, Carbone-McDonald, was planning to run for council in November 2021 and that he was trying to interfere with her Dec. 12 campaign event.

She said Marnechecks behavior might be considered political corruption and, if other city officials were involved, even racketeering.

There is no place in our city for such disgusting actions, especially against our citys small business owners, Carbone-McDonald said in the complaint. Any city official found guilty of such actions must be immediately removed.

Marnecheck said he left Royalton Gifts that day on good terms with the owners, adding that he even bought a few items and had his photo taken with Santa. He called Samantha Fazio later that day and apologized a second time, asking her to share his apology with her mother.

Kelly, the law director, advised Dana Schroeder, councils director of legislative services, that Carbone-McDonalds complaint was lacking sufficient substance to qualify as a complaint because Carbone-McDonald wasnt a witness to Marnechecks actions. Her complaint was hearsay, Kelly said.

Subsequently, Carbone-McDonald told Raleigh, who has played Santa for more than 40 years at various civic events in the area, that the city had rejected her complaint. Raleigh, a direct witness to the Marnecheck incident, said he was willing to file his own complaint.

I dont care about politics, Raleigh told cleveland.com. What made me mad was this councilman came into the store during business hours and challenged them (the business owners).

Raleigh said Marnecheck mistakenly believed that Royalton Gifts had helped to organize the Dec. 12 Langshaw/Carbone-McDonald Santa drive-around. He said the store had only advertised the event on it its website.

He accused them of doing their own thing, of jumping the gun without involving the city, Raleigh said. He was upset because Dawn and Dan were involved.

Raleigh said Royalton Gifts posted no campaign signs in the store on Nov. 28.

I would not have appeared in the store if there had been, Raleigh said. It was a Santa Claus event and thats the only reason I did it.

No investigation

In his Jan. 18 complaint to City Hall, Raleigh said he was sitting in the front window of Royalton Gifts on Nov. 28 when Marnecheck walked in to confront the store owners. When the Fozios explained that they had nothing to do with the event scheduled for Dec. 12, Marnecheck continued to berate and question them in an intimidating manner.

Raleigh said the loudmouth then left the store after having his picture taken with Santa. Afterward, the Fozios apologized to Raleigh for the ruckus.

In my opinion, this was highly unprofessional, unethical, a form of bullying, and these actions should never occur by an elected city official, Raleigh said in his complaint. I request that the city ... not tolerate or make an exception for this behavior and will hold a city hearing to investigate this matter fully and take appropriate action.

Raleigh said no one from the city ever responded to him regarding his complaint.

Kelly advised Schroeder that since Raleigh was a witness, council should be asked if it wanted to pursue the matter. On Feb. 2, council didnt express interest in doing so.

Carbone-McDonald said Marnecheck should have included on councils Feb. 2 agenda that he would ask council members that night if they wanted to investigate him, so that the public would know in advance.

Regarding Marnechecks behavior, Langshaw added, Its unfortunate that anyone would act in such a way given they are the second most powerful person in the entire city.

Read more from the Sun Star Courier.

The Minority is demanding that the practice where military personnel are assigned to civilians as their body guards should stop. According to the caucus, that practice demoralizes the men and women of the Ghana Armed Forces.



Addressing the press in Parliament yesterday, Minority Leader, Haruna Iddrisu, said the constitutional mandate of the Armed Forces is to protect the territorial integrity of the country and not to be carrying bags of public officials.



We are demanding that President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, the Commander-In-Chief of the Ghana Armed Forces, take immediate and necessary steps to demilatarise Ghana.



The Ghana Police Service must be allowed to play its proper and constitutional role of maintaining law and order and, where necessary, collaborate with the Ghana Armed Forces. We find it very despicable that men and women in uniform, particularly in the Ghana Armed Forces, will now be reduced to holding bags of public officials. That is not the Ghana Armed Forces we know.



We want him to restore the dignity, the honour and the respect of the Ghana Armed Forces so that they only intervene in matters of maintaining law and order, the Minority Leader said. His concerns come on the back of pictures circulating on social media showing one of the lawyers of the Presidents legalteam in the ongoing election petiton, Frank Davies, being guarded by a soldier. The pictures also show the Chairperson of the Electoral Commission being guarded by four gun-wielding military personnel.



The Tamale South MP said though they were committed to the safety of every Ghanaian, the military must not be undermined and abused.

Source: The Ghanaian Times









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 Cuban nationals were rescued from an uninhabited island between Florida and Cuba (US Coast Guard via AP)

Two men and a woman who said they had been stranded on a deserted island for 33 days were rescued after they waved flags to get the attention of a passing US Coast Guard helicopter crew, the agency said.

The crew were reportedly on a routine mission off the Florida Keys.

Helicopter pilot Mike Allert told American digital television station WPLG: We were alerted to them by the flags that they actually had in addition to a large cross that they put out there for themselves.

#UPDATE @USCG rescued the 3 Cuban nationals stranded on Anguilla Cay. A helicopter crew transferred the 2 men & 1 woman to Lower Keys Medical Center with no reported injuries. More details to follow.#D7 #USCG #Ready #Relevant #Responsive pic.twitter.com/4kX5WJJhs8  USCGSoutheast (@USCGSoutheast) February 9, 2021

Mr Allert said he decided to fly back around Anguilla Cay to investigate and a crew returned to the island later on Monday to drop water, food and a radio.

The trio was stranded on an uninhabited Bahamian island between Key West and Cuba, the agency posted on Twitter.

A helicopter crew returned on Tuesday to pick them up.

Coast Guard officials tweeted that the trio were from Cuba.

I cannot recall a time that we saved people who were stranded for over a month on an island. That is a new one for me US Coast Guard Petty Officer Brandon Murray

They told officials their boat had capsized in rough waters and they were able to swim to the island.

The trio told the crew they had survived on coconuts, conchs and rats, news outlets reported.

It was not immediately clear whether they were migrants attempting to get to the United States, or if they were just lost at sea, US Coast Guard Petty Officer Brandon Murray told the South Florida Sun Sentinel.

They were taken to a medical centre, where none appeared to have serious injuries.

I cannot recall a time that we saved people who were stranded for over a month on an island, he told the newspaper.

That is a new one for me.
(Natural News) The recent baseless CNN attack on us is a fake news media hit job of epic proportions which lacks all journalistic ethics and impartiality. CNNs attack demonstrates that it is not just questioning of the alleged safety of vaccines but free speech itself.

(Article by Ty and Charlene Bollinger republished from TheTruthAboutCancer.com)

What is indisputable (but not mentioned in CNNs biased report) is that the COVID vaccines are being used under an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) by the FDA. An EUA makes the vaccine available for public health emergencies, but also means that the FDA has not yet compiled all the evidence and clinical data that it would examine before fully approving a drug for public distribution and use. When combined with the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) Declaration of February 4, 2020 and the invocation of the PREP Act, the vaccine manufacturers are immune from legal liability (i.e., they cannot be sued for money damages in court) for losses relating to the administration or use of covered countermeasures (like vaccines) against COVID-19.

Despite over 500 reported deaths from the COVID vaccine (according to the CDCs VAERS database), the CNN report insinuates that vaccines are undeniably safe while totally ignoring the indisputable $4.4 Billion paid out to Americans damaged by previous vaccinations  an amount paid by the DHHS itself! Congressman Adam Schiff once sponsored a House Resolution declaring that there have never been any deaths attributable to vaccinations. This is like claiming that the holocaust never happened a repugnant and idiotic notion.

Along with thousands of cases of vaccine damage acknowledged by the US government, scientific research clearly indicates that there are legitimate concerns about the safety of vaccines on the CDC schedule, since most vaccines include adjuvants that can cause neurological damage, according to peer-reviewed scientific literature and Material Safety Data Sheets.

CNNs attempts to depict us as profiteers running an empire is yet another dishonest and deceitful attack. We are extraordinarily proud of the work we have done in our documentary films  The Truth About Cancer and The Truth About Vaccines. And while we have generated income from our documentary films, we find nothing wrong with making a living. What CNNs hatchet job failed to mention was the fact that over the past six years, we have donated over $250K to charities that help people with cancer and vaccine damage, and we also have personally funded events to bring awareness to health freedom and the legitimacy of questioning the safety of vaccines.

And while brazenly disparaging us for selling products, in true fake news form, the CNN report failed to mention the record profits made by the vaccine manufacturing pharmaceutical giants in 2020, with the top 10 companies accumulating profits in excess of $400 billion.

Not surprisingly, they also failed to mention that the four companies that make all 72 of our vaccines (Merck, Pfizer, Sanofi, and Glaxo) are four of the most corrupt companies in the world. They are serial felons, and have paid $35 billion the last 10 years for falsifying science, for defrauding regulators, for lying to doctors, and for selling drugs that they knew were poisonous and knew were going to kill people, but still acquired FDA approval and took to market. Even the FDA admits, on its own website, that over 106K Americans die each year from adverse drug reactions to pharmaceuticals which are FDA approved and properly prescribed and used.

That we would sponsor an event on January 6th, a day when many conservatives, Republicans, Libertarians, Christians and other free thinkers were in Washington, DC, is only logical. These are the Americans who, un-brainwashed by the mainstream media and outlets like CNN, will honestly examine the scientific research regarding vaccines.

The CNN piece ridiculed and mocked us for our religion  this is not only elitist but also beneath contempt. The senseless acts of violence inside the Capitol on January 6th were committed by misguided individuals, and we had nothing to do with promoting or inciting violence. Those who were engaged in the illegal and politically senseless acts should be punished, however a broad-based smear of anyone who asked legitimate questions about the integrity of the vote in the 2020 elections and asserting that they are somehow responsible or connected to these unlawful acts is despicable and appalling. Its the new McCarthyism.

The report also insinuated that Charlene was somehow responsible for inciting violence at the Capitol, which is patently absurd. She had no way of knowing that anyone was being violent or destroying anything at the Capitol, nor did she utter a single word that could be construed as inciting violence. We were there peacefully protesting the abuse of power from very corrupt politicians and fighting for freedom of both our health, for our children, and for their future. We have never and will never advocate violence.

As a Presidential candidate, Donald Trump, who was then friendly with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK), seemed quite open-min ded to discuss the topic of vaccine safety. For some inexplicable reason, the Presidents curiosity ended once he was elected and he never appointed the Commission, which he had previously asked RFK to chair during the campaign. We were hopeful that in a 2nd term, President Trump would have more liberty and be less susceptible to the powerful Big Pharma lobby in Washington DC, as well as Pharmas in house advocate  Vice President Mike Pence  whose entire political career was essentially funded by Indiana based Big Pharma.

That CNNs attack on us was a hatchet job is demonstrated by the fact that CNN never contacted us directly before their vicious and malicious hit piece was scheduled to be aired. Instead, they sent an email to our customer service department a mere 24 hours before the piece went live, yet they had our mailing address the entire time. They even sent us a physical letter (image above) asking for comment, but we didnt receive it until 2 days after the report had aired. Obviously, CNN had no real desire to give us a fair shake, they just wanted to be able to conclude their ludicrous report and state Despite multiple attempts, the Bollingers refused comment.

Lastly, the coup de grace! If there were still any doubt that CNN lacks all ethics and common courtesy, CNNs so-called reporter Drew Griffin had the unbelievable audacity to pull up Google maps and show actual photos of our personal residence, while he shared details about our home and where we live. Clearly, Drew is not a journalist and has less regard for the truth than a pathological liar.

Bottom line: CNN is fake news. They should be ashamed.

Read more at: TheTruthAboutCancer.com
A Missouri mother has been arrested and charged in connection with her 12-year-old daughter's suicide after she 'failed to get her medical care and secure her firearms when the girl made self-harming statements'.

Annie M. Small, 39, of Gorin, was taken into custody on Friday on a warrant for neglect of a child resulting in death, according to the Clark County Sheriff's Office.

Small's daughter, Anyiah, 12, died by suicide on New Year's Day in Wyaconda. Earlier that day, Anyiah dog was critically injured during a fight with another canine.

Missouri mom, Annie Small (left), 39, has been charged in connection with the suicide of her daughter, Anyiah (right), 12, for 'failing to get her medical care when she made self-harming statements'

According to The Sacramento Bee, Small told authorities that she left her job at a bar to check on the pet and determined the animal was 'severely injured' and needed to be put down.

Anyiah pleaded with her mother not to do anything, but Small shot the dog in order to put it out of its misery.

She then returned to work and while there text her son to ask if Anyiah was okay.

According to the probable cause statement, her son responded that Anyiah was not doing well and nearly two hours later, Anyiah shot herself.

Small told investigators that while her children could access firearms, she didn't think Anyiah had access to the one she used.

During their investigation, authorities said they found 'I hate life' and 'I am not loved' handwritten on the ceiling.

The girl's diary reportedly included the words: 'plz help me plz plz help.'

According to the Sacramento Bee, Small told authorities that her daughter said she was considering harming herself just a day before the suicide.

Small said she left her job at a bar to check on the pet and determined the animal was 'severely injured' and needed to be put down. Anyiah pleaded with her mother not to do anything, but Small shot the dog in order to put it out of its misery. Hours later, Anyiah shot herself

Small (center) is accused of neglecting her daughter(sitting, right) by killing the dog, failing to provide the girl with proper medical care and failure to secure guns when the child was making 'self-harming statements'

Small claimed that she offered to take her to get help, but Anyiah refused.

Anyiah's obituary says that she 'was her own person, and loved expressing it'.

'She was very outgoing, and would wear any shade of makeup that was put in front of her, even the bold blue eye shadow and bright red lipstick.

'One of the most important parts of Anyiahs life was her little sister. She was always looking out for her, and cared for her deeply,' the obituary reads.

Prosecutors did say that it was unusual to charge a parent in connection with a child's suicide; however, they believe Anyiahs death would have been prevented, were it not for her mothers actions.

Clark County Prosecuting Attorney April Wilson told the news outlet: 'If you have serious mental or emotional injury, it can you lead you to do very serious self-harming or harming of others.'

Small is accused of neglecting her daughter by killing the dog, failing to provide the girl with proper medical care and failure to secure guns when the child was making 'self-harming statements'.

She is being held on a $100,000 cash only bond in Clark County.

If you or someone you know is contemplating suicide, call the Suicide Prevention Lifeline at (800) 273-8255 or (800) SUICIDE.

Good morning.

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TOP STORIES

Central Texas winery owner Christopher Grider says he was in D.C. on Jan. 6 to show support for President Donald Trump at a rally outside the White House.



He never planned to be at the Capitol, much less take part in an insurrection, his attorney says.



As the Senate begins its impeachment trial against former President Donald Trump this week, several of the two dozen Texans arrested after the riot claim they were inspired by the presidents words and actions.



Our Austin Bureau has the story.

Martin Phipps, also the owner of a popular River Walk bar, is accused of psychologically and verbally abusing his then-wife, according to an arrest affidavit.



Phipps, 51, was arrested Monday on suspicion of telephone harassment for repeatedly contacting 24-year-old Brenda Vega, to whom he was briefly married.



Vega told San Antonio police in December she had to get away from Phipps after he confronted her in an aggressive and agitated state.



Read the arrest affidavit details here.

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A member of the radical group Iron Youth was charged after allegedly purchasing a machine gun from an undercover police officer.





The state is launching a new relief program to aid Texans who have struggled to pay their rent and utility bills during the pandemic, using federal stimulus funds to support the more than $1 billion initiative.





Nirenberg and Brockhouse disagree on raiding the citys reserve fund. Gilbert Garcia gives his take in the latest Puro Politics.





Lobbyists for Bexar County said theyre hopeful President Joe Bidens rescue package will provide funding for ecosystem restoration and hike-and-bike trails that were not included in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers work program for 2021.





Though signs at Regal Fiesta Stadium 16 still state it will be back soon, the discount theater in Northwest San Antonio has permanently shut its doors and the site may eventually be turned into apartments.





By accepting Gregg Popovichs tough love and take-no-prisoners approach, the Spurs Dejounte Murray is coming into his own as an NBA point guard.





The Aggies Ryan McCollum and three other departing senior starters on a bullish offensive line played a big role in leaving a memorable mark on the program.

THE FUN STUFF

A West Texas lawyer entered an unusual piece of evidence in court Tuesday.



"Im here live. Im not a cat," said Presidio County Attorney Rod Ponton. The declaration was necessary because Ponton was appearing on the virtual hearing through a cat filter. Watch the hilarious video.



Rodeo: The rodeo is pretty much a private event this year, but you still can enjoy rodeo-inspired food, fashion and other fun around the city. Here's how.



Jazz: Doc Watkins is live again and selling out. Get into the groove.



Flicks: Watch body-swap horror movie "Freaky" with Vince Vaughan at home on Blu-ray, and streaming services.

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Kim Wagenaar has been preparing to bring covid-19 vaccines to western North Carolina for months.

She's signed up the community health center she operates in Asheville to receive and distribute the doses. She's ordered a subzero freezer to store the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and transport it to rural counties. She's also allocated her staff between covid testing sites and vaccine clinics.

But those logistics make up only half the equation, said Wagenaar, CEO of Western North Carolina Community Health Services.

Because the vaccines have a limited shelf life, "you want to make sure you're ordering what you think you'll be able to give," she said. "That's where messaging comes in."

While many of the health center's patients are eager to get their shots, Wagenaar said, she's worried about other populations in the region  from communities of color to migrant farmworkers and people who live on the street  who may be reluctant to be vaccinated, even though they are more likely to contract the virus.

"It's so important in this time to go beyond our normal education to reach more communities," she said.

The concerns arising in western North Carolina, a region tucked between Asheville to the east and the Appalachian Mountains to the west, provide a window into the challenges facing health workers across the country. Not only do they have to transport the vaccine to vulnerable populations, but they also must address those individuals' concerns and encourage them to take the shots.

Polls show Black and Hispanic Americans, as well as residents of rural areas, have expressed greater reluctance about the vaccine. And disparities in vaccination rates are already emerging.

Now, a host of grassroots organizations in western North Carolina are taking to the streets, to WhatsApp chats and to Zoom lunches to close that gap.

'You can be a community hero'

When Adrienne Sigmon talks to people living on the street in Asheville about covid vaccines, she doesn't suggest the medical system is trying to help them.

As someone who was unsheltered for two years, she knows mistrust of health workers runs deep. Many people who are homeless receive poor care or no care at all.

Instead, Sigmon frames the vaccine as an opportunity to help society. "By getting vaccinated, you can be a community hero," she tells them.

"Giving people that ownership and sense that they can help in this small way is empowering," she said.

That's how Sigmon felt four years ago when she joined the street medic team at BeLoved Asheville, a nonprofit that tackles issues like homelessness and hunger. The team trains people who are currently or formerly unsheltered in basic medical skills, from first aid to wound care and overdose prevention.

"Instead of other people coming in to say, 'I'm going to fix you and serve you,' we learn to take care of ourselves and the community," said Sigmon, who is now a lead street medic.

On Mondays and Thursdays, Sigmon and her team travel through downtown Asheville and the rural corners of Buncombe County to hand out lifesaving supplies like insulated tents, sleeping bags, thermal socks, face masks and hand sanitizer to those living outdoors. Now they also pass out flyers about the vaccines and ask people if they'll pledge to get their shots.

Some refuse, Sigmon said. They may suffer from mental illness, not believe covid is real or not care if they get sick.

But more often, people have questions: Will I get sick if I get a vaccine? Is it safe, since it came out so quickly?

Sigmon assures them that the vaccines don't contain the coronavirus and that, although the development process was quick, it built on a decade of research.

Of the hundreds of people Sigmon and her team have spoken with, about 75% have agreed to be vaccinated.

'Think about your older roommates'

Migrant farmworkers begin arriving in western North Carolina in February, when they work in greenhouses, and stay through the fall or early winter, harvesting crops and Christmas trees.

This past year, conversations about covid vaccines began in July, said Jessica Rodriguez, outreach coordinator for Vecinos Farmworker Health Program, which provides medical services to about 500 migrant workers in the region.

At the time, covid outbreaks across two farms sickened nearly 100 men. "When will this be over?" the workers asked her.

Since then, Rodriguez and her team have been updating the farmworkers about the vaccines.

Men in their 50s and 60s have generally been eager, Rodriguez said. But the younger workers, some just 18 years old, have been hesitant. They've received conflicting messages about the seriousness of the virus from family back home, and sometimes from their home countries' governments.

"Think about your older roommates," Rodriguez tells them in Spanish. The workers live in tight quarters, often old converted hotels tucked behind a main road or cabins perched on the side of a mountain, with anywhere from five to 50 men together.

"You could get covid and feel nothing at all," Rodriguez said, "but if you pass it to someone who is older or has diabetes, he could end up in the hospital."

Rodriguez also posts fact sheets in Spanish on her WhatsApp story, where anyone with her phone number can view them. That's been particularly popular, she said. Since the workers' schedules rarely allow them to check for health advisories from the White House or watch the state health secretary's afternoon telecasts, updates from Rodriguez and her team have been crucial. Even workers she met a few years ago who now live in other countries have messaged her to say thanks for the information on WhatsApp.

Her team also provides in-person education at the camps, where they often bring food and medical supplies.

"As soon as we'd arrive, the whole crew would come out," she said. "Some of our covid education sessions went up to an hour because the guys had so many questions."

'You all are my ambassadors'

Kathey Avery, a community health nurse, has been hosting monthly lunch-and-learn meetings for a group of 14 women for nearly a decade.

The youngest attendee is in her 50s, and the oldest is 94. Most are Black women who go to church, volunteer in the community and are in regular contact with their extended families, said Avery, who also co-chairs the Institute for Prevention and Healthcare Advocacy, a grassroots organization that addresses health disparities in Buncombe County.

"Whenever I need to get information out, I tell them, 'You all are my ambassadors,'" said Avery, who is Black too. "That always makes them smile."

In the past, Avery talked to them about topics like chronic disease and nutrition. During the pandemic, she's moved the lunch-and-learns to Zoom and talks about covid symptoms, testing and, now, vaccines.

Black people's history of mistreatment in the U.S. makes the vaccines a tough sell, Avery said. Many worry about a repeat of the infamous Tuskegee trial, in which Black patients with syphilis were purposely left untreated. Others point to the brutal response to Black Lives Matter protests and efforts to suppress Black votes.

That's why education about the vaccines has to come from a place they trust, Avery said.

She tries to keep it simple, using a one-page document she created with answers to questions like "What is the definition of 'vaccine'?" and "What is the definition of 'virus'?"

It's a matter of homing in on a couple of points and relating it to "something you know they already know," Avery said.

Then you build on that knowledge in a second conversation, and a third and fourth.

"If you're not talking to people and building trust over time," Avery said, "they won't listen."

In the United States, former Dodge County Deputy Sheriff Craig Harbaugh has pled guilty to wire fraud "Ponzi scheme" while seeking loans and investments in his firearms company named Tactical Solutions Gear LLC. He recited law enforcement agencies in states from Alaska to Tennessee as clients. To back up his claims, he had the contracts and purchase orders. It is described as potentially "one of the largest individual embezzlements in Nebraska history".

'Effectively a Ponzi scheme'

Harbaugh's ploy pocketed nearly $11 million from a bank and four investors. This week, he admitted that the 12 agencies he named were not doing business with him. He confessed that it was an "effectively a Ponzi scheme. After todays conviction, @FBIOmaha Special Agent in Charge Eugene Kowel said, Craig Harbaugh exploited his position as a sheriffs deputy to take advantage of victims who invested their life savings with him. Todays plea demonstrates that no one is above the law. The FBI and our law enforcement partners will continue to ensure those who commit fraud are brought to justice, even if they wear a badge.

Former Dodge County Deputy Sheriff Pleads Guilty to $10 Million Fraud Scheme: U.S. Attorney Joe Kelly announced that former Dodge County Deputy Sheriff Craig Harbaugh entered a plea of guilty today to wire fraud. 1/5 pic.twitter.com/wcRMOzy20A  U.S. Attorney Nebraska (@USAO_NE) February 8, 2021

Read: US To Deploy B-1 Bombers To Norway For The First Time: 'Bolster Collective Defense'

Wire fraud carries a possible sentence of up to 20 years in prison, up to a $250,000 fine, & up to 3 years of supervised release that could follow any term of imprisonment. Harbaughs sentencing is scheduled for May 10, 2021. According to the plea agreement, after his scheme was discovered, he told an employee of Great Western Bank, I was irresponsible, immoral, criminal, and selfish. He added, I wish I could go back and take it all back but all I can do is try and ask for your forgiveness and move forward.

Read: US: Arkansas Lawmaker Censured For Swearing At Colleague

However, the prosecutors have agreed to dismiss 12 other charges and to not pursue Harbaugh for fraud, tax, and money laundering crimes that were uncovered during the discovery process. It is still not clear where the money went. According to the reports by The Washington Post, Nebraska Department of Justice Criminal Chief Michael Norris said that it will be premature to disclose that information.

Read: US: Impeachment Trial Goes Blue, Forcing Network Language Calls

Also Read: 'We Stand With People': US Raises Concern Over Ban On Public Gatherings In Myanmar

(Image Credits: Unsplash)
Africa is the worlds second-largest continent by both population and size. It covers approximately 30.37 million square kilometers and is home to about 1.3 billion people, or 16% of the global population. Its population is four times that of the United States and slightly less than Chinas population.

Africa has an average population density of 45 people per square kilometer. However, the population and population density range across the 54 countries, with Nigeria as Africas most populous country and Seychelles as the least populous country. Mauritius is the most densely populated country, while Namibia is the most sparsely populated nation.

Approximately 1.1 billion people or 85% of the African population live within the Sub-Saharan Region (a region south of Northern Africa). Africa is one of the fastest-growing regions, with its population surpassing Europe in the 1990s and Americas in the 2000. The continents population is expected to overtake that of India and China by 2022. With a population growth rate of about 2%, Africas population is projected to reach over 4 billion by 2100.

Top 10 African Countries By Population

Top 10 African countries by population.

About 799.5 million people in Africa or 61.5% of the continents population live in ten countries. Africas top ten most populous countries are distributed across the four regions; Eastern, Northern, Central, and Southern Africa, with five of the ten countries located within the Eastern Africa region.

Nigeria is Africas most populous country, with about 201 million people. The West African country accounts for about 15.5% of the African population. It is also the worlds 6th most populous country, accounting for about 3% of the global population. Nigerias population is about two-thirds that of the US.

Ethiopia, located on the horn of Africa, is the continents second-most populous country, with 112.1 million people. Its population is slightly more than half of Nigerias population despite it being significantly larger than Nigeria by total area. Ethiopia accounts for 8.6% of Africas and 1.4% of the global population.

Egypt is North Africas largest country and Africas third-largest by population, with 100.4 million people or 7.7% of the continents population. It is the worlds 14th most-populous country, accounting for 1.3% of the global population.

Although the Democratic Republic of the Congo is Africas second-largest country by size, it is the continents 4th most-populous country with 86.8 million people (6.7%). The DRCs population is one of the fastest-growing populations in the world, increasing from 47 million in 2000 to the current 86.7 million.

South Africa and Tanzania have almost equal populations, with the southern African country having a slight edge over Tanzania. South Africa is home to 58.5 million people or 4.5% of Africans, while Tanzania hosts 58 million people or 4.46% of the continents population. However, Tanzanias population is expected to surpass South Africas before 2030.

Kenya and Uganda, the two East African neighbors, are the 7th and 8th most populous countries respectively. Kenya is home to 52.3 million people, or 4% of the continents population. Uganda, which is 2.5 times smaller than Kenya, has a population of 44.3 million people, or 3.4% of Africas population. It is the 8th densely populated country in Africa, with 213 people per square kilometer.

Algeria is North Africas second-most populous country after Egypt. With a population of 43.1 million people, it is Africas 9th most populous country. Algeria is Africas largest country and one of the most sparsely populated countries in the Arab World. Sudan, Africas second-largest country after Algeria, is the 10th most populous country in the continent, with 42.8 million people. It accounts for about 3.3% of Africas population.

Bottom 5 African Countries By Population

Bottom 5 African countries by population.

Africas five least populous countries have a combined population of approximately 2.7 million. The five countries collectively account for 0.2% of total Africas population. All the five countries, except Djibouti, are island nations and some of Africas smallest countries by size.

Seychelles, an island nation in the Indian Ocean, is Africas smallest country by both size and population. It covers an area of about 451 square kilometers and has a population of 97,625 people, representing less than 0.1% of the continents population. Sao Tome and Principe is Africas second-smallest country by population and size. The two islands cover approximately 964 square kilometers and are home to some 215,000 people.

Cape Verde is the third smallest country by population, hosting about 550,000 people. It is Africas 5th smallest country by area, covering 4,033 square kilometers. Comoros, another island country in the Indian Ocean, is Africas 4th smallest country, with about 851,000 people. Djibouti is the least populated country in mainland Africa and the continents 5th least populated country, with about 974,000 people. Although Djibouti is a small country, it is over ten times larger than Comoros, which has about 120,000 fewer people. Djiboutis lower population is partly due to its arid nature and poverty problem.

5 Most Densely And 5 Most Sparsely Populated African Countries

Most Central and Northern African countries are sparsely populated, with the majority recording at most 25 people per square kilometers. Eastern, Central, and Western Africa are the densely populated countries in the region. Mauritius, a tiny island country east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, is Africas most crowded country and the worlds 10th densely populated country, with 623 people per square kilometers. It covers an area of approximately 2,040 square kilometers but is home to 1.3 million people.

Rwanda, a country in Eastern Africa, covers an area of about 26,798 square kilometers and is home to 12.8 million people. With a population density of 499 people per square kilometers, it is Africas second-most densely populated country and the worlds 14th most-crowded country. Although Comoros is Africas 4th smallest country by population, with about 851,000 people, it is the continents 3rd and worlds 16th most-densely populated country, with 447 people per square kilometers.

Burundi and The Gambia are the 4th and 5th most densely populated countries in Africa, with 435 and 225 people per square kilometer. Burundi covers an area of approximately 27,830 square kilometers and has a population of 11.5 million people, while The Gambias 2.3 million people are spread across 10,380 square kilometers.

Namibia is Africas most sparsely populated country, with 3 people per square kilometer. Although it is the continents 15th largest country, covering 825,418 square kilometers, it is Sub-Saharas driest country. Thus, the low population density is because of the countrys arid nature.

Libya, Botswana, and Mauritania have population densities of 4 people per square kilometers, making them Africas second-most sparsely populated country. Libya is Africas 4th largest country by area, covering 1.76 million square kilometers. However, it has a population of only 6.8 million people, with over 80% of the people living in urban areas. Most parts of the country are dry and lack infrastructure, making them uninhabitable. About 70% of Botswana is within the Kalahari Desert, while 90% of Mauritania is in the Sahara Desert, making them sparsely populated countries.

Although the Central African Republic has an area of 622,984 square kilometers, it has a population of 3.8 million people, making it one of Africas most sparsely populated countries. The high poverty levels and ongoing wars are responsible for CARs low population and population density.

5 Most Populous African Countries By 2100

5 of the most populated African countries in 2100

Africa has one of the worlds fastest-growing populations. In 1950, the continent had only 177 million people. However, within seven decades, grew over 7.5 times to the current 1.3 billion people. The population surpassed the one billion mark in 2009. An increase in life expectancy and a decrease in infant mortality rates are the main factors that contributed to the exponential growth.

Demographers expect Africas population to continue growing. Most countries will maintain a growth rate of over 2% at least until the end of the 21st century. Africa is projected to have 4-5 billion people by 2100. Western and Eastern Africa countries will account for about 70% of the continents population.

Although Asia has some of the most populous countries globally, with 5 of the ten populous countries located in the region, the population outlook will change by 2100. Five African countries are expected to be among the worlds ten most populous countries. Nigeria is expected to remain Africas largest country but move up the worlds ranking to third after China and India, with 791 million people. The DRC will be Africas second-most and worlds 6th most populous country, with 246 million people. Ethiopia (223 million), and Egypt (199 million), and Tanzania (186 million) will also feature on the list of the top ten largest countries.

54 African Countries By Population

African countries by population map where darker shades represent higher population.

Rank Country Name Population 1 Nigeria 200,963,600 2 Ethiopia 112,078,730 3 Egypt 100,388,070 4 Democratic Republic of the Congo 86,790,570 5 South Africa 58,558,270 6 Tanzania 58,005,460 7 Kenya 52,573,970 8 Uganda 44,269,590 9 Algeria 43,053,050 10 Sudan 42,813,240 11 Morocco 36,471,769 12 Angola 31,825,290 13 Ghana 30,417,860 14 Mozambique 30,366,040 15 Madagascar 26,969,310 16 Cameroon 25,876,380 17 Cote d'Ivoire 25,716,540 18 Niger 23,310,720 19 Burkina Faso 20,321,380 20 Mali 19,658,030 21 Malawi 18,628,747 22 Zambia 17,861,030 23 Senegal 16,296,360 24 Chad 15,946,880 25 Somalia 15,442,910 26 Zimbabwe 14,645,470 27 Guinea 12,771,250 28 Rwanda 12,626,950 29 Benin 11,801,150 30 Tunisia 11,694,720 31 Burundi 11,530,580 32 South Sudan 11,062,110 33 Togo 8,082,370 34 Sierra Leone 7,813,220 35 Libya 6,777,450 36 Congo 5,380,510 37 Liberia 4,937,370 38 Central African Republic 4,745,190 39 Mauritania 4,525,700 40 Eritrea 3,213,970 41 Namibia 2,494,530 42 The Gambia 2,347,710 43 Botswana 2,303,700 44 Gabon 2,172,580 45 Lesotho 2,125,270 46 Guinea-Bissau 1,920,920 47 Equatorial Guinea 1,355,990 48 Mauritius 1,265,710 49 Eswatini 1,148,130 50 Djibouti 973,560 51 Comoros 850,890 52 Cabo Verde 549,930 53 Sao Tome and Principe 215,060 54 Seychelles 97,630 55 Total 1,306,033,387

Table: African countries by population. Source: World Bank
OTTAWA - A judge has rejected a request from firearms owners to suspend a sweeping ban on many gun models while their full arguments against the prohibitions are considered by the court.

OTTAWA - A judge has rejected a request from firearms owners to suspend a sweeping ban on many gun models while their full arguments against the prohibitions are considered by the court.

In her ruling, Federal Court Associate Chief Justice Jocelyne Gagne says the applicants failed to put forward clear and non-speculative evidence that they would suffer irreparable harm if the ban remains in effect pending a final ruling on the case.

The federal government outlawed a wide range of firearms by cabinet order in May, saying the guns were designed for the battlefield, not hunting or sport shooting.

The ban covers some 1,500 models and variants of what the government considers assault-style weapons, meaning they can no longer be legally used, sold or imported.

The measure has met with stiff criticism from some firearms owners and the federal Conservatives, who question the value of the ban.

Gagne dismissed several arguments from the owners seeking an injunction, including the notion of irreparable harm from not being able to use specific firearms for hunting or shooting.

She said Canadians wishing to engage in these activities can choose from a large range of non-restricted firearms that may reasonably be used for these purposes.

Gagne also rejected arguments about the loss of gun culture, saying it was not clear how the regulations affected such a culture.

Fuller arguments on the constitutionality of the regulations are expected to take place over the next several months.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 9, 2021.

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Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company

Marion Koopmans, right, and Peter Ben Embarek, center, of the World Health Organization team say farewell to their Chinese counterpart Liang Wannian, left, after a WHO-China Joint Study Press Conference held at the end of the WHO mission in Wuhan, China, Tuesday, Feb. 9, 2021. AP




Some financial experts on Wednesday in Ibadan, Oyo State, lauded the ban placed on Cryptocurrencies in Nigeria by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).

They told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) that the move was necessary considering nefarious activities that could be carried out under the guise of secrecy that shrouds cryptocurrencies.

Mr Tunji Adepeju, a Financial Consultant said the ban on cryptocurrencies by CBN should not come as a surprise because the bank first placed the ban in January, 2017 and did it again through a circular on Feb. 5.

"The latest circular just capped it up because the CBN had found out that some people were still trading in it and some banks were involved.

"The CBN acts of 2007 stated that the bank is the one in charge of monetary matters in Nigeria.

"Cryptocurrencies are not a monetary asset so the mandate of CBN does not cover its operation.

"Even in accounting, cryptocurrencies are regarded as an intangible asset, something you cannot see or touch. So to value it, there are some ways in the accounting profession in which the international accounting standard says it should be valued.

"In as much as it is an intangible asset, there is no basis for CBN to recognize it. The ban is just to restate the facts that it is forbidden in Nigeria," he said.

Adepeju explained that CBN did not recognize it as a monetary asset, the securities exchange commission recognized it and it allowed companies to have it in their possession and record it in their books.

He said on the effect of cryptocurrencies on the economy, some people claimed that 200 to 300 millions come into it through cryptocurrencies.

Adepeju further said, "but the unfortunate thing is that we don't know the owners, where the cryptocurrencies are coming from and how they are traded in because everything concerning cryptocurrencies is done in secrecy and it is anonymous.

"You don't know who is the owner of what. So transactions in cryptocurrencies are not documented as it is being done in commercial banks.

"So it is difficult to say it has positive effects on the Nigerian economy.

"But its likely negative effects according to CBN that it encourages money laundering and such money may be used to finance terrorism, banditry and drugs.

"So it is good that CBN has come again openly to ban it."

The financial expert said the effect may have on some banks who are trading in it could be devastating on depositors and shareholders if cryptocurrencies crashed due to fraudulent actions of those involved.

"The effect could be similar to the problem banks had some four years ago when the oil and gas sector had problems and a lot of banks in Nigeria had issues because they invested a lot in oil and gas.

"So if cryptocurrencies are allowed because banks will always look for where profit will come in fast and heavy, if they took money from you and invest it into cryptocurrencies and there is a bubble which burst then all the depositors and shareholders of the bank will suffer for it.

"As a nation we cannot accommodate that kind of negative impact, we have had enough problems and we should not add that to it," Adepeju said.

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Also, Mr Sola Famakinwa, a Financial Expert said the CBN had done well to reel out the evil that accompanied cryptocurrencies trading in Nigeria.

He said on Feb. 5, 2021, the CBN placed a ban on financial institutions facilitating cryptocurrencies transactions in Nigeria.

"Cryptocurrencies are issued by unregulated and unlicensed companies. This makes it an illegal business, they are not licensed by CBN.

"Also, Cryptocurrencies are speculative, anonymous and untraceable and so there is a high risk in transacting in cryptocurrency which could lead to loss of investment.

"Moreover, it can be used for money laundering, terrorism financing, illicit fund flow, tax evasion and purchase of arms and weapons illegally," Famakinwa said.

[NAN]

Vanguard News Nigeria
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Indias latest budget, tabled in Parliament on 1 February, came with a fresh set of tariff hikes. Coming after months of the Atmanirbhar Bharat push, the hikes inevitably lent steam to Indias increasingly protectionist image. A sectoral analysis shows that the electronics goods sector, which depends heavily on China, continued to be among the biggest targets of Indias tariffs this year.

Effective 2 February, the government raised duties on about 1,250 of the 10,400-odd items on Indias customs list. These items made up $75.8 billion worth of imports in 2019-20, a Mint analysis shows. The extent is lower than the 2020 budget, when nearly 1,600 items saw raised duties, but it was not enough to change the look-inwards perception India is fast developing in global trade.





Almost 68% of the import value of these items came from the electronics, mechanical and electrical items list in 2019-20. Most of such hikes were on mobile phone parts, ranging from wires, printed circuit boards, connectors and cameras to moulding plastics for chargers or adapters. The duty rate in these sectors increased from zero to 2.5% in most cases, and to 10% or 15% in the rest.

Saon Ray, a senior fellow at the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations, saw this as a way to generate revenue as electronics occupies a large portion of imports, while encouraging domestic production in the sector. But the hikes did not go down well with the Indian Cellular and Electronics Association, the apex industry body in mobiles and electronics. The association called it a big setback" in a letter to the ministry of electronics and information technology.

Plastics and rubbers were the second largest set of items to see tariffs. Renewables such as solar lamps and inverters also featured on the list.





As it was last year, China is again the trade partner most likely to be affected. Around 39% of Indias imports of electrical machinery and electronic equipment in 2019-20 came from China, which otherwise has just a 14% share in total imports, commerce ministry data shows.

This has added significance this time, as frequent border tiffs have had trade implications on more than one occasion in the past year. Manoj Pant, director at Indian Institute of Foreign Trade, welcomed the move, citing high trade deficits with China, along with the countrys tendency to employ various kinds of implicit protectionist steps against Indian exports".





Across industries, capital goods account for over half the items facing raised tariff barriers, our analysis shows. A substantial proportion of tariff hikes (43%) are also against industrial supplies, often used as inputs in domestic industry.





Some duty revisions appear to be a continuation of recent government steps in its Atmanirbhar Bharat narrative. The tariffs-hit electronics sector, for instance, was already going to be the second biggest beneficiary of the production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme announced last year. The scheme, which Sitharaman mentioned in her Budget speech, intends to promote exports in 13 key sectors, with an outlay of 1.97 trillion over five years.

Other major beneficiaries such as automobiles, renewables, and LED saw tariffs on a number of input items, such as ignition wiring sets, raw materials for lithium-ion batteries, and fixtures for LED.





In her speech, Sitharaman said Indias customs policy should have the twin objective" of promoting domestic manufacturing and helping India get onto global value chain and export better". But experts say the manner of achieving this self-relianceor atmanirbhartawill matter far more than the goal itself. It is less about being protectionist, as every country is being so in times like these when the global boom is far and unemployment a big worry," said Pant. Its more about how to go about it."

For example, the duty hikes should be time-bound and depend on an industrys export performance, he said. It would help to turn inward in labour-intensive sectors, such as textiles and leather, to start with, which have been seeing a decline in exports for several years now, he added.

Biswajit Dhar, professor at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning in Jawaharlal Nehru University, said neither production incentives nor building tariff walls could ensure efficiency. Efficiency is what it comes down to in the global market," Dhar said. Advanced economies that embraced protectionism also ensured their industries became efficient and globally competitive."

Indias stance may not be unexpected, coming soon after a pandemic disrupted global supply chains and caught the indigenous sector unawares. But only time will tell how far the tariff revisions and the incentive scheme succeed in achieving the twin objectives Sitharaman talked about.

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AMP chief executive Francesco De Ferrari has vowed to push on with his efforts to turn around the wealth giants fortunes after US investment firm Ares pulled its takeover bid for the company, sending the stock tanking.

AMP revealed early on Thursday Ares had ditched its offer to buy 100 per cent of its shares as flagged in November, triggering an investor stampede that pushed AMPs share price down 10 per cent to below $1.40.

AMP CEO Francesco De Ferrari will now refocus on his turnaround strategy after the takeover deal fell apart. Credit:Louie Douvis

Investor sentiment wasnt improved by its full-year results announced the same morning, which showed assets under management had again declined and the company would pay no final dividend to shareholders.

Mr De Ferrari said he was sleep deprived after negotiating with Ares partners in New York and Los Angeles late into Wednesday night over their decision to terminate the takeover, but wouldnt disclose why the deal fell apart.
Michelle Kingston has been working as a nurse in an emergency department for 30 years, but the tiredness she feels at the end of a shift nowadays is like nothing she experienced before.

Its a different kind of tired as its a lot more psychological. When youre watching young, fit patients in their 40s trying to catch a breath, its hard to understand. When you have a patient who is dying and only one family member can come in, it is heartbreaking and its something that will never leave you.

Frontline workers have spoken out about the impact of the pandemic on their health and personal relationships after the Oireachtas Health Committee heard how staff are suffering from burnout.

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Ms Kingston (50) works at Cork University Hospital (CUH), one of the hospitals which has been worst hit during the third coronavirus wave.

Long hours are something she is accustomed to, but whats draining about the pandemic is how you feel absolutely helpless.

Before, we had a family room and you could lay out the body and the family could grieve for a while  but thats gone now, she told the Irish Independent.

That is one of the hardest things  no, actually it is the hardest. You feel youre to blame, you feel its your fault that you cant let people in to be with loved ones and you do take it home with you. How I take things home with me is that I stay quiet, and the knock-on effect is that my husband and son know to stay away from me. I would come home at night time, get a shower, come downstairs and fall asleep on the couch and be no good to anybody.

She praised management at the hospital for their handling of a difficult situation. At one point, 135 patients were being treated at CUH for Covid. Dozens of staff also contracted the virus.

We kept going with overtime. We would do extra shifts to help out but I never worked more than two days in a row. We have had a good few nurses in our department who contracted it. We have nurses who were out as they were in contact and thats where the absenteeism would come in, as one person could have been in contact with 10 others. Were lucky in that we have a department of young, very skilled nurses, but it does take its toll.

The thing with lockdown is theres nothing else to do. When you come home, you cant visit friends and its as if youre living separately from your family. I havent seen my father-in-law in nearly a year.

Widespread vacancies, excessive workloads and a high Covid-19 infection rate among healthcare staff have also been flagged by unions.

Theres a pause on the end of the phone as Dr Mick Molloy tries to recall when he last had substantial time off from work. I cant actually remember, to be honest with you.

The consultant in emergency medicine at Wexford General Hospital works between 80 and 100 hours a week. He doesnt complain or seek sympathy, but like most healthcare workers he is exhausted.

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People are tired in their jobs at the moment and they cant take leave as hospitals are under pressure. The number of vacancies among consultants are increasing, junior doctors are being recruited from overseas as our own graduates are leaving the country and some staff are wanting to move to areas where they dont have the same risk of catching Covid, Dr Molloy said.

Working such long hours means theres very little time for anything else.

I know personally I havent been doing as much exercise as the workload has increased so dramatically. I need to do more than just walking and now that gyms are closed, its hard. Wexfords emergency department has always been busy, treating up to 40,000 patients each year, according to Dr Molloy.

Hes used to a heavy workload but the pandemic, particularly the third wave, has been on another level.

Its difficult working at the moment as were seeing a lot of patients present to the emergency department with post-Covid issues such as cardiac and respiratory problems. Every day we have people coming who were Covid positive two, three or four weeks ago and they are having ongoing chest pains. While the health system as a whole had a lot of people on waiting lists, we now have a whole new group of people for a new waiting list for complications from a disease were still trying to figure out.

The Irish Hospital Consultants Association (IHCA) told the committee that there is a severe shortage of public hospital consultants which has resulted in excessive workloads being carried by understaffed medical and surgical teams to the detriment of patients.

Dr Imran Sulaiman, a respiratory consultant at Beaumont Hospital in Dublin, returned to Ireland last March after four years in New York.

He previously worked on a Covid ward at NYU Langone Health in the US before responding to the Government call-out for healthcare workers to come home.

Ive been exhausted since I moved back, even before. We were working seven days a week at NYU, crazy hours. On top of that, the isolation from the lockdown doesnt allow you to do anything outside of work, so it has been extremely exhausting.

Its been a difficult year. My wife and I were apart while I was living in America, then I came back and Ive been in work most of the time.

Dr Sulaiman contracted Covid-19 last April, shortly after starting work at Beaumont.

I was fortunate that I wasnt admitted to hospital. My main symptoms were extreme lethargy, difficulty concentrating, sleeping quite a lot for those two weeks. It took the full two weeks out of me. I thought after a week I would be seeing an improvement, but for a full two weeks I was symptomatic.

There is an issue with exhaustion and mental health now. We brought in some psychology services in the hospital to talk to our department about stress relief, different ways of relaxing, trying to find outlets for exhaustion. I cycle in and out to work every day to try get some exercise, started a book club with friends and try spend as much time with my wife as I can.

Read More




Bank unions on Tuesday called for a two-day strike starting March 15, against the proposed privatisation of banks.

During a meeting in Hyderabad on Tuesday, the United Forum of Bank Unions also decided to hold a day long 'Dharna' (protest) in all state capitals on February 19 followed by relay 'dharnas' from February 20 to March 10 in all states, districts and towns.

A statement by the All-India Bank Employees' Association said that the meeting discussed the various announcements made in the budget regarding reform measures including privatisation of IDBI Bank and two public sector banks and setting up of bad bank.

"The meeting observed that all these measures are retrograde and hence need to be protested and opposed," it said.

After deliberations, the meeting decided that intensive struggle programmes and agitational actions have to be launched to fight back these policies of the government, the AIBEA statement said.

It added that further strikes will be decided looking at developments.

"The Government's announcement to privatise our public sector banks is totally unfortunate and unwarranted. The need of the hour is to strengthen public sector banks," the statement said.

Further, the meeting took note of the continuing agitation by the farmers against the farm laws enacted by the government expressed its solidarity with their struggle, it said.

"The meeting adopted a resolution urging upon the government to reconsider their standpoint and find amicable solutions to the demands of the farmers."
At the public housing complex in Brooklyn where he lived for nearly a decade among a colony of fellow strays, Tuxedo the cat was known to at least some people as the mayor  a fat, black-and-white fixture that hung around residents while they worked on their cars.

But his beloved status could not save him when he was fatally attacked by two dogs last month. And after a witness told the police that the killing was an act of intentional cruelty by two people who knocked Tuxedo from a tree before the attack, his death became a source of global outrage. More than 20,000 people signed an online petition demanding an arrest.

On Monday, an arrest came. A Brooklyn man, Fulton Gordon, was charged with torturing an animal, a misdemeanor, the police said. Mr. Gordon was issued a desk appearance ticket and is expected in court in about a month, the authorities said.

By Tuesday, though, the case appeared to be less than straightforward.

In an interview, Mr. Gordon fiercely denied any cruelty while acknowledging that he and his girlfriend had encountered Tuxedo while walking with their dogs in the complex and that his girlfriend had lost control of her dog. What followed, he said, was unintentional.
By Andy Mannix, Star Tribune (TNS)

MINNEAPOLIS  Gregory Paul Ulrich dreamed of getting revenge on the doctors and medical staff who had tortured him, records show.

In October 2018, Ulrich was calling his former doctor three times a day, threatening a mass shooting, to blow things up and other revenge scenarios, according to a Buffalo, Minnesota, police department report.

I believe Mr. Ulrich is a high threat to society and himself, the doctor told police at the time.

More than two years later, Ulrich, 67, has been arrested after five people were shot at the Allina Health clinic in Buffalo. Whether he obtained his gun legally was unclear Tuesday.

One person died after the shooting, and three others are hospitalized in critical condition.

After the 2018 incident, Ulrich was taken to an emergency room for a mental health evaluation. His complaints appeared to stem from a series of back surgeries and medications he was taking afterward, police said.

He threatened four Allina facilities, with Buffalo first on the list, and said he wanted to do something big and sensational so that it makes an impact, the report states.

Buffalo Police Chief Pat Budke said law enforcement had multiple encounters with Ulrich before Tuesdays shooting.

Allina medical staff believed Ulrich could act on the threats and filed paperwork barring him from the property, which police delivered to his home. Ulrich was charged with violating the restraining order at the Buffalo clinic in November 2018. That case was dismissed last year after he was found mentally incompetent, records show.

Neighbor Bob Taylor described Ulrich as a heavy drinker and marijuana smoker who spent most of his time fishing at a nearby lake, and perturbed his neighbors by throwing fish innards in the water after he cleaned his catch. Taylor said hed lived at Pulaski Mobile Home Park for about eight years, and Ulrich had been there before him. The park was like a family, he said, and he didnt fit in.

I still cant believe it, said Taylor.

At a news conference Tuesday, Wright County Sheriff Sean Deringer said Ulrich was no stranger to law enforcement, saying his office and Buffalo police have been responding to 911 calls related to Ulrich dating back to 2003. Court records indicate a history of substance abuse and mental health issues, though hes never been convicted of a violent or gun-related crime.

Ulrich was convicted of two DWIs, an open-bottle offense and several crimes related to possessing illegal drugs, according to court records.

As Ulrichs case for violating Allinas restraining order wound through the courts, an official wrote in 2019 that Ulrich had previously applied for a permit to purchase a firearm, but the request was denied. A court official argued that it was highly recommended that (Ulrich) not be allowed to have use or possession of any dangerous weapons or firearms as a condition of his probation.

Raymond Zandstra, who had rented a room in Ulrichs trailer and left on bad terms, said in an interview that he saw Ulrich with a gun, a Smith & Wesson, that was new and still in the box when he first saw it last summer. He didnt know where Ulrich got it.

In 2019, the Zion Lutheran Church called 911 after receiving a disturbing letter from Ulrich. Members of the church did not return calls Tuesday, but according to notes from a newsletter on its website: The Buffalo Police Department was called and informed Pastor Ted that Mr. Ulrich is well known to them and recommended that a no trespassing order be issued so that if he ever did appear at Zion the police could take action. The order was issued the following day and church staff were given a picture of Ulrich and informed to call 911 if he appeared on the property.

Walter Rohde, another neighbor, said he was shocked to hear that Ulrich was the man believed to have shot several people at the Allina clinic. I just knew him as a kindly old man, said Rohde, who lives just a few doors down from Ulrichs trailer. He liked to drink, I can tell you that much.
The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
Wang Lijun, a 43-year-old chilly vendor, who has been doing business at Xinfadi Market for over 15 years, haggles with her business partner on a mobile phone. (Peoples Daily Online/Kou Jie)

Only one day and 20 hours, that was all the time left. Wang Lijun glanced three times towards the calendar hanging on the shabby wall of her small apartment. Within 44 hours, she will be spending the Spring Festival at the Xinfadi wholesale market in Beijing, 686 kilometers away from her hometown, Shenyang, in northeast Chinas Heilongjiang Province, where her beloved son still resides.

Getting up at 4 am and loading trucks up with fresh chili is Wangs daily routine. Standing in the freezing wind, Wang thinks about her son, who is going to take the national college entrance exam this year, and who is about to spend his first Spring Festival without his parents.

Doing business at Xinfadi market for over 15 years, not even once has she missed the chance to celebrate Spring Festival with her family, even if the holiday is the most lucrative time of the year for a chili vendor like herself. The ostensible reason for her not coming home is to make good use of this years holiday to compensate for losses suffered during the COVID-19 pandemic, but it is the worry of not seeing her family that makes her wish she could have reunited with her family once again.

Dubbed the vegetable basket and fruit bowl of Beijing, Xinfadi market, which provides more than 90 percent of Beijings fruits and vegetables, was temporarily closed on June 13, 2020 due to a COVID-19 outbreak, but was reopened about two months later.

I was there when COVID-19 hit Xinfadi market. Some of my colleagues got infected. Thanks to the government and medical workers, they are all fine now, but I cannot risk putting my family in the same situation, said Wang.

I really miss my son, but as a responsible citizen, it is our duty to stay put during the holiday as the government has recommended, which will reduce the chance of spreading the virus as much as possible, Wang added.

An unusual Spring Festival

Photo taken on Feb. 1, 2021 shows the Shennong Gate of the Xinfadi market in Beijing. (Peoples Daily Online/Xian Jiangnan)

As Asias largest wholesale agricultural market, there are thousands of vegetable vendors like Wang working at Xinfadi market. Wangs unimpressive chili stall lies low in a corner, with a signboard bearing the name Wangs Chili.

The Wangs Chili signboard was painted in a striking crimson color and had been hung up before the COVID-19 outbreak, when its owner was making a good fortune, earning 30,000 RMB per month. Now, with her income dwindling due to the ongoing pandemic, the phrase of Wangs Chili looked somewhat less illustrious, as though the signboard could have been shortened to a more modest and unassuming Chili.

According to Wang, the COVID-19 pandemic cost her a great fortune in 2020, but with the subsidies she received from the government, as well as favorable policies such as exemptions on rent provided by Xinfadi markets operator, her business is now back on track.

During this years Spring Festival, Xinfadi market is expected to provide around 20,000 tons of vegetables and 16,000 tons of fruit every day, while 1,500 to 1,800 venders like Wang will continue working to ensure Beijings food supply.

I feel happy that people will be able to taste my fresh chili during the Spring Festival, it feels like Im contributing to a happy and festive atmosphere, which is a little more comforting and a reward for my work, said Wang.

According to Wang, all the vendors who decide to stay at the market during the Spring Festival will be offered dumplings, a traditional dish commonly seen on Spring Festival tables.

Though we cannot go home, it still feels like home. The pandemic has united all of us together; weve helped each other through many difficulties, and I think we are like one family, said Wang.

A promising 2021

Vendors carry green beans, a vegetable that is commonly seen on Chinese families food table during winter season. (Peoples Daily Online/Kou Jie)

Many months into the pandemic, Wang changed her companys name into Xinfa Dili Renhe (), which means prosperity, favorable location and harmony between people. She told Peoples Daily Online that Xinfadi is the right place to set up her business, as its favorable policies and rigid anti-pandemic measures have eliminated the negative impacts on her business, while the vendors joint efforts to tackle the pandemic have ensured a promising future for both the market and her own business.

There are many difficulties in life, and the pandemic can count among them. It is important that we never give up hope, and it is crucial that when problems arise we stick together, said Wang.

According to Wang, after the pandemic, she worked much harder to get her business back on track, hoping that her endeavors could provide a good example for her son, who is going to become a college student next year.

I want my son to know that his mom, already 43-years-old, is still fighting for a better life. There is no reason for him to not work hard, no reason not to be brave in tackling lifes problems like the pandemic, said Wang.

The pandemic has shown me how efficient and capable the government is and how united and selfless the Chinese people are. If we can take the lead in tackling the pandemic, what else wont we be able to achieve? I have confidence in Chinas future, in my future, she added.
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Piers Morgan dressed in just Union Flag pants was beamed onto Parliament last night as a tongue-in-cheek campaign to make him the next Prime Minister gathered pace.

The Good Morning Britain host, 55, was seen looking cheekily back at the camera in the patriotic briefs.

Piers' image created an eyecatching display on the side of the House of Commons.

It comes after he won millions of admirers holding Government ministers to account during the coronavirus pandemic.

Piers' image created an eye-catching display on Parliament as part of Daily Star stunt

Gail Porter projected onto Parliament to launch FHM magazine's 100 Sexiest Women in 1999

The attention-grabbing photo was dreamed up by the Daily Star who started the campaign PMforPM after asking if Piers would be a better Prime Minister than Boris Johnson.

It has been something the veteran journalist and presenter has warmed to himself.

He admitted last week: It was a bit weird to wake up and see a headline that said `PM for PM - but if its time for me to serve my people, then its time.

If Donald Trump can become President of the United States...As somebody who won his Apprentice show in America, Im ready to step up.

Beaming Piers, who is a MailOnline columnist, onto Parliament was a homage to a stunt carried out by FHM in the nineties.

Model Gail Porter was shone onto the famous building by the magazine to promote their 100 sexiest women list.

Official advertising image to launch Burger King's new Flame fragrance featuring Piers Morgan

A projection on the Houses of Parliament saying 'please turn out the lights' in December 2019

She later said she had no idea it was going happen, adding to Birmingham Live last year: 'The first thing I heard about it was on the news the next morning - there was my bottom on the Houses of Parliament.

'They had projected the image as a publicity stunt for FHM's 100 sexiest women but I knew nothing about what they were planning.

'Then the negative comments started and I go really depressed, so depressed I didn't want to leave the house.'

Piers is no stranger to appearing in less clothes for a good cause.

In 2009 he signed up to be the face  and body  of a new advertising campaign to launch a meat-scented cologne by Burger King.

He appeared in a bling Burger King gold chain in front of a roaring fire with a rug covering his modesty.

Other messages and slogans have also been shone onto Parliament in recent years.

In 2019 green protesters urged MPs inside to turn out the lights.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-10 21:41:10|Editor: huaxia

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MANAMA, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- Bahrain's health regulator on Wednesday approved Russia's COVID-19 vaccine Sputnik V for emergency use.

The National Health Regulatory Authority(NHRA) stated that the decision to authorise the Sputnik V vaccine was based on data provided by the manufacturing company and results of an expanded study.

"The NHRA reviewed and evaluated the safety of the vaccine, demonstrated by clinical trials and studies, as well as verified the quality of the vaccine by reviewing scientific data," it said.

It added the stages of manufacturing and the manufacturer's commitment to applying the principles of good pharmaceutical manufacturing (GMP) were verified according to international standards.

"After presenting the technical and scientific data, the authority took the decision to approve the emergency use authorisation of the vaccine and allow its use in the kingdom," added the NHRA.

The Sputnik V vaccine becomes the fourth COVID-19 vaccine offered to all people in Bahrain above the age of 18 free of cost, following the approval of vaccines from Sinopharm, Pfizer/Biontech, and Oxford-AstraZeneca. Enditem
Russia Charges NATO Countries Work with Top Navalny Aides To Plan Subversions Against Putin

Feb. 9 , 2021 (EIRNS)In a Facebook posting today, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova charged that an online meeting yesterday organized by Polands EU mission in Brussels, including two top aides to Russian dissident Alexey Navalny, as well as representatives of the EU, the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Ukraine, was in fact a gathering of NATO countries to deliver instructions to the Navalny crew on how to carry out subversive activities against the government of President Vladimir Putin. Zakharova elaborated further in statements to Vesti FB Radio that the fact that EU or U.S. sanctions or other reprisals against Russia were discussed in yesterdays meeting with Navalnys supporters is, in moral and ethical terms, a betrayal of Russiaan effort to enforce Russias containment.

Everything is pretty simple, Zakharova said. The Feb. 8 meeting organized by Polands permanent mission to the EU held an online meeting involving Navalny lieutenants Leonid Volkov and Vladimir Ashurkov, together with representatives of the named countries. In fact, it was a meeting of the NATO countries. They gave instructions to the opposition memberswho are actually their agents of influenceon how they should be more cunning in their future subversive activities. So, she concluded, there you go, this is what our so-called Western partners are doing, thereby continuing their absolutely illegal, wrongful and aggressive offensive against us, TASS quoted her as saying.

Zakharova knows whereof she speaks. As reported in todays EIR Daily Alert, it was Vladimir Ashurkov who met in 2012 with a suspected agent of Britains MI6 intelligence agency at the British embassy to request large sums of money precisely to finance such subversive activities. That meeting has publicized by RT on Feb. 1. The Foreign Ministry spokeswoman today said that the Navalny agents meeting yesterday likely explains why they have backtracked on their original Feb. 4 announcement that they would put off any further unauthorized rallies until spring. Now, according to Leonid Volkov, a nighttime protest action is planned for Feb. 14. The West has invested too much money and resources into this to put everything off for the spring, Zakharova explained. They realize that the West-fueled information campaign will die out by the spring. They can no longer take advantage of the chemical weapons issue without providing evidence, so they are ready to go to the limit with some new actions.



February is Black History Month, and the push to inject Black Lives Matter curriculum into Americas K-12 schools is in high gear. In the fight for racial justice, the slogan black lives matter is a reasonable mantra that focusses on equality; creating a fair and inclusive society is indeed a very worthy goal.

But Black Lives Matter the activist organization with a registered political action committee is a different matter entirely. And its Black Lives Matter the political organization that is pushing an agenda-driven curriculum into Americas K-12 schools, an agenda that at times is not only racially polarizing, but one that calls for defunding police; disrupting the nuclear family; and replacing individualism and capitalism with an irresponsible brand of socialist globalism.

A closer look at the document Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action Starter Kit shows just how politically driven their curriculum is. In this era of mass incarceration, there is a school-to-prison-pipeline system that is more invested in locking up youth than unlocking their minds, the introduction states. That system uses harsh discipline policies that push Black students out of schools at disproportionate rates; denies students the right to learn about their own cultures and whitewashes the curriculum to exclude many of the struggles and contributions of Black people and other people of color; and is pushing out Black teachers from the schools in cities around the country.

Its this very irresponsible rhetoric that causes many educators to regard BLM more as a propaganda outfit than a genuine organization seeking to educate young people (here is a resource to push back against this rhetoric). To state that our school system is more invested in locking up youth than unlocking their minds is not only terribly irresponsible and untrue, but extremely demoralizing to the millions of hard-working educators around the country who have dedicated their lives to teaching children.

Likewise, the notion that black teachers are being pushed out from schools is ridiculous; in my 25 years as a teacher, Ive witnessed a steady, collaborative effort to recruit teachers of color into Americas classrooms, not push them out. And yet BLM feels the need to use this propagandistic, inflammatory language, when simply calling for cooperation is all that is needed.

The so-called demands BLM is pushing for is also concerning. One demand is to end Black Teacher Pushouts. According to BLM, Racist policies in schools and biased skills exams eliminate Black and Brown teaching candidates. The National Center for Education Statistics show that Black teachers make up about 8 percent of Americas teaching force, while being 13 percent of the population. And although this is slightly disproportionate, the disparity has more to do with career interest than it does with so-called biased skills exams. Again, over the past 20 years, Americas educational system -- at both the university and K-12 level -- have done all they could to recruit, train, and retain teachers of color.

Yet BLMs School Week of Action Starter Kit states:

The elimination of Black teachers is an aggressive push towards homogenizing education in America, creating the School to Prison Pipeline, and honoring the pervasive system of racism from which our country gains its roots... Our Black Teachers need our support and deserve to no longer be abandoned.

This is shameful rhetoric, to put it lightly.

BLM also demands the defunding of school police, and an increase in school counselors. We have seen videos of horrifying interactions with police officers and Black students in school and each week we hear of Black people having the police called on them for simply existing while Black, they state. And while most agree investing in school counselors is a good idea, forwarding the notion that Black students are disciplined or confronted by police simply for being black is another example of irresponsible hyperbole, aimed at agitation. In K-12 schools, Black students are disciplined or met by police because they commit behavioral infractions, some very serious, just like students of all races.

At the center of the BLM School Starter Kit are the groups 13 Guiding Principles, one of which is globalism, and another Black Villages, the former concerned with replacing nationalism with a blend of worldwide socialism, and the latter with the deconstruction the Western nuclear family. This is quite puzzling, being that 50 years of educational and sociological research shows that children who come from a two-parent nuclear family do better on every academic and behavior measure than those kids who come from a non-nuclear family.

And yet the National Education Association, Americas biggest teachers union, has endorsed BLMs curriculum.

A deeper dive into the curriculum itself is eye-opening. BLMs elementary school lesson plan includes a resource titled Activism, Organizing and Resistance, which instructs third-grade art teachers to help their students become community activists, literally. In a lesson titled Art and Community Activism, along with an activity called Who Are the Activists in My Community? children are taught to make activist signs and murals, all supporting the pre-established BLM globalist, anti-police, anti-nuclear family agenda.

The lessons for third-graders go on to teach resistance stories, explore the usefulness of teacher strikes, and require children to deconstruct their racial and gender identities through identity maps and puzzles.

The middle school BLM curriculum has pre-adolescents answer the essential question: How has historical oppression lead [sic] to racial injustice in todays criminal justice system? From here these children are asked to imagine a world with no police by completing a free-writing exercise, and offers teachers a resource document called Teaching about Controversial or Difficult Issues which promotes the college-level book The New Jim Crow. Students and teachers can read this chapter to explore how many police departments seek and destroy in some neighborhoods while they protect and serve in others, the resources states.

The BLM high school curriculum offers a way to embed the activist groups agenda in all subjects -- including math -- and in English class, offers an article titled White People Hate Protests, complete with pictures of police manhandling blacks from the 1960s. This article is supplemented by a resource on LBJs Riot Commission, an activity the insinuates that property destruction is okay if its done for the right reasons. The lesson is complete with discussion questions, one of which asks: "Name 2-3 causes of the riots you feel were most important. Explain your selections."

This is only a small slice of BLMs curriculum that is being pushed into a public school near you. This is only a small slice of their effort to defund police, disrupt nuclear families, and replace individualism with socialism. Its straightforward political indoctrination, no objection allowed. Its meant to teach students what to think, not how to think, ignores most literacy and skills-based instruction, and aims to turn children into future activists who will carry their political agenda into the next generation.

Christopher Paslay is a Philadelphia public schoolteacher, counselor, and coach. His new book, Exploring White Fragility: Debating the Effects of Whiteness Studies on Americas Schools is now available for purchase.

Image: Pixabay
Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-10 13:13:27|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping on Wednesday exchanged congratulatory messages with his Nigerian counterpart, Muhammadu Buhari, on the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the two countries' diplomatic relations.

In his message, Xi noted that over the past half century, the two countries have seen their traditional friendship growing stronger and practical cooperation bearing rich fruit, and have coordinated closely on international and regional affairs.

In recent years, the China-Nigeria strategic partnership has shown a sound momentum of development, and has effectively improved people's well-being in both countries, Xi said.

Since the onset of the COVID-19 epidemic, China has joined hands with African nations, including Nigeria, to fight it, which has demonstrated the brotherly friendship between China and Africa featuring solidarity in the face of adversity, he added.

Xi stressed that he attaches great importance to the development of China-Nigeria relations, and stands ready to work with Buhari to take the 50th anniversary as an opportunity to make positive contributions to the building of a closer China-Africa community with a shared future.

He suggested that the two sides carry forward their traditional friendship and deepen cooperation in various fields within the frameworks of the Belt and Road Initiative as well as the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC).

For his part, Buhari said that since the establishment of the diplomatic ties 50 years ago, Nigeria and China have been trusting each other and working closely, and have achieved fruitful results in cooperation, bringing enormous benefits for the two countries and their people.

Nigeria appreciates China's support in such fields as railway, highway, electric power and national defense, Buhari said, adding that China has been fighting together with Nigeria and other African countries against COVID-19 since the outbreak of the pandemic, which enriches the connotation of the bilateral ties.

Facing major global challenges, the two countries have been upholding multilateralism and the principle of non-interference in other countries' internal affairs, and also staying committed to defending common interests of developing countries, the Nigerian president said.

Nigeria is willing to work with China to ensure a successful meeting of the FOCAC this year, he added. Enditem
Senior Reporter

The National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) has withdrawn all prosecutors seconded from the security services in compliance with a Supreme Court order made two years ago.

The order directed that the prosecutors vacate civilian courts by February 20 this year.

This follows an application by the Zimbabwe Law Officers Association (ZLOA), which sought to stop NPA from engaging police and military personnel as public prosecutors.

Since independence, prosecutors seconded from the police and military have played a pivotal role in the justice delivery system, as the then Attorney-General's Office, and now NPA were understaffed.

In an interview yesterday, Prosecutor-General Mr Kumbirai Hodzi said the NPA was now in full compliance with the Supreme Court order.

He said the compliance put to rest some shadowy organisations who sought to cast aspersion of the organisation thinking that they would fail to comply.

Mr Hodzi said the NPA put in place a compliance strategy through recruiting personnel with the support of the Public Service Commission (PSC) and Treasury.

"The PG's Office is in full compliance with the court ruling. It has been so for months now," said Mr Hodzi.

"There has been a concerted effort by a section of the media to create the impression that the PG's Office is in default of a Supreme Court ruling on seconded Staff from sister agencies."

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Mr Hodzi said the Supreme Court gave his office two years to comply starting from February 2019.

"The staff mainly from the Police Service and a few from other disciplined or uniformed Services had been providing the PG's Office a critical service in areas were the office had experienced a shortage of staff especially the Prosecutorial Department.

"The PG wishes to express his deep gratitude and appreciation to all the seconded staff for their service to the NPA," said Mr Hodzi.

"The PG's Office wishes to inform the public that as far as two years ago -- when the initial ruling was made -- a well-planned and deliberate process of returning seconded staff was put in motion.

"It commenced with the appointment of a secretariat comprising a secretary of the NPA and two deputy secretaries. This was two years ago.

"The Public Service Commission, with exemplary speed and efficiency approved far-reaching changes in the Composition of the PG' Office. Treasury approved to the changes resulting a massive recruitment exercise for staff of the PG's Office."

He said at least 300 prosecutors were recruited.
An irate judge yesterday postponed the trial of a former school hostel supervisor accused of sexually abusing 10 boys over a three-year period, due to the unexplained absence of the lawyer representing the accused in the matter.

Postponing the partly heard case in which Merven Nguyapeua (51) is standing trial on 32 charges, acting judge Alfred Siboleka said the trial will proceed with or without defence lawyer Hipura Ujaha on 15 March.

Ujaha was absent from the Windhoek High Court on Monday, when the trial was scheduled to resume, and also yesterday. The judge was told that Ujaha confirmed to a public prosecutor over the past weekend that he was aware the trial was due to continue from Monday, and that efforts to contact him by telephone since Monday had been unsuccessful.

Three state witnesses testified on Monday, after Siboleka directed that the trial should proceed despite Ujaha's absence.

Nguyapeua denied guilt on 32 counts of rape and 27 alternative charges of committing or attempting to commit a sexual act with a child under the age of 16 when his trial began in June 2018.

The state is alleging that Nguyapeua raped 10 boys during his stay at the hostel of a primary school at Otjiwarongo, where he was employed as a cleaner and was known as a "hostel father" by children who lived in the hostel.

The incidents are alleged to have taken place from the second school term of 2013 until February 2016.

Nine of the 10 boys allegedly raped by Nguyapeua were under the age of 16 when the sexual acts were committed with them, according to the state's indictment. Two of them were 13 years old at the time of the alleged incidents, six of them were 14, and one was 15 years old.

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Nguyapeua is denying that he committed sexual acts with any of the boys, the court has heard during the trial so far.

Most of the complainants have already testified.

The judge has also heard testimony about pornographic video clips which were found in the memory of Nguyapeua's cellphone following his arrest at the start of March 2016.

Some of the complainants have told the court that Nguyapeua showed pornographic material to them on his phone before he committed sexual acts with them.

Nguyapeua has remained in custody since his arrest.

State advocate Seredine Jacobs is conducting the prosecution in the trial.
St Andrews university has announced that teaching will remain online for the rest of the academic year.

The Scottish university where Prince William and Kate Middleton met has become the latest to rule out a mass return to campus before September.

With the exception of a small number of students such as those studying medicine, teaching will continue remotely.

It follows a similar move by Edinburgh University.

St Andrews has become the latest university to rule out a mass return to campus before September

In a message to students, vice-chancellor Sally Mapstone said St Andrews was taking 'the difficult decision' to provide certainty as early as possible.

She said: 'It is prudent to anticipate that significant restrictions on travel and other aspects of public life will remain in place in Scotland through the spring.

'Even if some of those are eased as Covid infections fall, we do not believe it will be to a degree sufficient to allow us to bring large numbers of students back to St Andrews and provide comprehensive in-person education.'

She insisted that the university would be able to continue offering 'our hallmark high-quality learning, contact, and support online'.

A spokesman said last night that students who are unable to use their accommodation were being reimbursed.

In England, the London School of Economics is also keeping remote learning for the rest of the year while University College London has said 'core teaching will continue to take place online'.

This is despite the Government's plan for universities to start welcoming students back on to campus from March 8.

With the exception of a small number of students, teaching will continue remotely. (Stock image)

Universities minister Michelle Donelan told student news site The Tab: 'Our number one priority will be getting students back as quickly as possible. It is the same roadmap as the one that is being laid out for schools.

On the week commencing February 15, the Government will review the situation. Then the decision will be announced on February 22.'

The effort is unlikely to abate student unhappiness over the impact of Covid, which has led to a record number of complaints and calls for reductions in tuition fees and rents.

Many universities have offered rent refunds or reductions after students refused to pay for accommodation they have not been able to use.

However, they have resisted calls to refund tuition fees which are usually around 9,000 a year. The Government has refused to intervene.

Miss Donelan told the Commons: 'We set the maximum tuition fee level, and it is up to universities to then decide what to charge.

'Every single one has continued to charge the maximum and, in return, we have said we expect the quantity, quality and accessibility of provision to be there.'
The Pennsylvania flag will fly at half-staff at government properties in Clearfield and Jefferson counties in remembrance of a Pennsylvania State Police trooper who died on-duty this week, Gov. Tom Wolf said.

Trooper Monty Mitchell, 45, died Monday after suffering a medical emergency while in the parking lot for Troop C in DuBois. Station personnel called 911 and performed life-saving measures, but he was pronounced dead at the hospital about an hour later.

The sudden passing of Trooper Mitchell is felt by not only his loved ones, but also his fellow members of the Pennsylvania State Police and the community he served, Wolf said in a news release. Frances and I offer our heartfelt condolences to Trooper Mitchells family and join all Pennsylvanians in mourning his loss.

Mitchell enlisted in the Pennsylvania State Police in November 2007. Before serving in DuBois, he had also been assigned to Troop G in Huntingdon and Troop C Ridgway.

Our department today feels the heartache of the sudden loss of a colleague and friend, said Pennsylvania State Police Commissioner Colonel Robert Evanchick said Tuesday. We ask Pennsylvanians to keep Trooper Mitchell and his loved ones in their thoughts during this difficult time.

READ MORE: Central Pa. lawyer pleads not guilty to charges he threatened to shoot wife, politicians

Lancaster County man attacked police officer at U.S. Capitol, stole body camera, posted threatening messages: federal prosecutors
[February 10, 2021] ORYZON to Present New Clinical Data and Corporate Updates at Conferences in February and March

2021 BIO CEO & Investor Digital Conference



15th International Conference on Alzheimers and Parkinsons Diseases AD/PD 2021

H.C. Wainwright Global Life Sciences Conference

BioCapital Europe 2021

14th Annual European Life Sciences CEO Forum 2021

33rd Annual ROTH Conference MADRID, Spain and CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Feb. 10, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Oryzon Genomics, S.A. (ISIN Code: ES0167733015, ORY), a public clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company leveraging epigenetics to develop therapies in diseases with strong unmet medical need, announces that it will present new clinical data and attend several industry conferences in February and March, all in virtual format due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Dr. Carlos Buesa, Oryzons CEO, will present a corporate update at the BIO CEO & Investor Digital Conference, to be held on February 16-18. The company will present new data from its Alzheimer's trials at the AD/PD 2021 medical conference from March 9 to 14. Dr. Michael Ropacki, CMO of CNS at Oryzon, will present new clinical data from vafidemstats Phase IIa clinical trial in Alzheimer's, ETHERAL, in an e-poster entitled "TOPLINE ETHERAL PHASE II TRIAL DATA". Dr. Buesa will present new clinical data from vafidemstats Phase IIa clinical trial in aggressive and agitated Alzheimer's patients, in an e-poster entitled "REIMAGINE-AD VAFIDEMSTAT SHOWS EFFICACY IN ALZHEIMER-RELATED AGITATION & AGGRESSION AFTER 12 MONTHS". Dr. Buesa will present the recent progress of vafidemstat and iadademstat at the H.C. Wainwright Global Life Sciences Conference, which will take place on March 9-10. Dr. Buesa will also present a corporate update at the BioCapital Europe 2021 conference on March 11 at 16:10 CET. Dr. Buesa and Dr. Torsten Hoffmann, Oryzons Chief Scientific Officer, will participate in the 14th Annual European Life Sciences CEO Forum 2021 on March 10-11. Dr. Buesa will give a corporate presentation and will also participate in the Immuno-Oncology Partnering Panel at 12:20 CET on March 11. Dr. Buesa will also present a corporate update at the 33rd Annual Roth Conference which will be held on March 15-17, where he will also participate in a cancer panel hosting several companies active in the field. About Oryzon

Founded in 2000 in Barcelona, Spain, Oryzon (ISIN Code: ES0167733015) is a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company considered as the European champion in Epigenetics. Oryzon has one of the strongest portfolios in the field. Oryzons LSD1 program has rendered two compounds, vafidemstat and iadademstat, in Phase II clinical trials. In addition, Oryzon has ongoing programs for developing inhibitors against other epigenetic targets. Oryzon has a strong technological platform for biomarker identification and performs biomarker and target validation for a variety of malignant and neurological diseases. Oryzon has offices in Spain and the United States. Oryzon is one of the most liquid biotech stocks in Europe with +90 M shares negotiated in 2020 (ORY:SM / ORY.MC / ORYZF US OTC mkt). The company had a +25% stock performance in 2020 and its cash runway is expected to extend till 1Q2023. For more information, visit www.oryzon.com About Iadademstat

Iadademstat (ORY-1001) is a small oral molecule, which acts as a highly selective inhibitr of the epigenetic enzyme LSD1 and has a powerful differentiating effect in hematologic cancers (See Maes et al., Cancer Cell 2018 Mar 12; 33 (3): 495-511.e12.doi: 10.1016 / j.ccell.2018.02.002.). A first Phase I/IIa clinical trial with iadademstat in refractory and relapsed acute leukemia patients demonstrated the safety and good tolerability of the drug and preliminary signs of antileukemic activity, including a CRi. Beyond hematological cancers, the inhibition of LSD1 has been proposed as a valid therapeutic approach in some solid tumors such as small cell lung cancer (SCLC), medulloblastoma and others. Oryzon has conducted a Phase II clinical trial of iadademstat in combination with platinum/etoposide in second line SCLC patients (CLEPSIDRA study) and is conducting a Phase IIa clinical trial of iadademstat in combination with azacitidine in elderly AML patients (ALICE study). In both studies, preliminary clinical results have been reported.



About Vafidemstat

Vafidemstat (ORY-2001) is an oral, CNS optimized LSD1 inhibitor. The molecule acts on several levels: it reduces cognitive impairment, including memory loss and neuroinflammation, and at the same time has neuroprotective effects. In animal studies vafidemstat not only restores memory but reduces the exacerbated aggressiveness of SAMP8 mice, a model for accelerated aging and Alzheimers disease (AD), to normal levels and also reduces social avoidance and enhances sociability in murine models. In addition, vafidemstat exhibits fast, strong and durable efficacy in several preclinical models of multiple sclerosis (MS). Oryzon has performed two Phase IIa clinical trials in aggressiveness in patients with different psychiatric disorders (REIMAGINE) and in aggressive/agitated patients with moderate or severe AD (REIMAGINE-AD), with positive preliminary clinical results reported in both. Additional finalized Phase IIa clinical trials with vafidemstat include the ETHERAL trial in patients with Mild to Moderate AD, where a significant reduction of the inflammatory biomarker YKL40 has been observed after 6 months of treatment, and the pilot, small scale SATEEN trial in Relapse-Remitting and Secondary Progressive MS. A Phase IIb trial in borderline personality disorder (PORTICO) has been recently authorized and the company is preparing a Phase IIb trial in schizophrenia patients (EVOLUTION). Vafidemstat is also being explored in a Phase II in severe Covid-19 patients (ESCAPE) assessing the capability of the drug to prevent ARDS, one of the most severe complications of the viral infection. FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

This communication contains, or may contain, forward-looking information and statements about Oryzon, including financial projections and estimates and their underlying assumptions, statements regarding plans, objectives and expectations with respect to future operations, capital expenditures, synergies, products and services, and statements regarding future performance. Forward-looking statements are statements that are not historical facts and are generally identified by the words expects, anticipates, believes, intends, estimates and similar expressions. Although Oryzon believes that the expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements are reasonable, investors and holders of Oryzon shares are cautioned that forward-looking information and statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties, many of which are difficult to predict and generally beyond the control of Oryzon that could cause actual results and developments to differ materially from those expressed in, or implied or projected by, the forward-looking information and statements. These risks and uncertainties include those discussed or identified in the documents sent by Oryzon to the Spanish Comision Nacional del Mercado de Valores (CNMV), which are accessible to the public. Forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and have not been reviewed by the auditors of Oryzon. You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date they were made. All subsequent oral or written forward-looking statements attributable to Oryzon or any of its members, directors, officers, employees or any persons acting on its behalf are expressly qualified in their entirety by the cautionary statement above. All forward-looking statements included herein are based on information available to Oryzon on the date hereof. Except as required by applicable law, Oryzon does not undertake any obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. This press release is not an offer of securities for sale in the United States or any other jurisdiction. Oryzons securities may not be offered or sold in the United States absent registration or an exemption from registration. Any public offering of Oryzons securities to be made in the United States will be made by means of a prospectus that may be obtained from Oryzon or the selling security holder, as applicable, that will contain detailed information about Oryzon and management, as well as financial statements.

IR & Media, US & Europe: Spain: Oryzon: LifeSci Advisors LLC ATREVIA Emili Torrell Mary-Ann Chang Patricia Cobo/Carlos C. Ungria BD Director +44 7483 284 853 +34 91 564 07 25 +34 93 515 13 13 mchang@lifesciadvisors.com pcobo@atrevia.com

etorrell@oryzon.com cungria@atrevia.com



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We had discussed prior to his passing, probably about this same time last year, that we needed to renovate the restaurant, said Judice. So once he passed in May, we closed for about eight days to regroup and then we opened up through the summer. We have two slow times in the year, after Labor Day and right now, after the New Year.
Safety measures have been put in place at Killarney Bridge, on the Thomastown Road.



The signs and road markings have been welcomed by local councillor, Deirdre Cullen.

Im delighted to say that LED activated chevron signs have now been installed and are operational on Killarney Bridge, she said.

Extra signage, road markings and an anti skid road surface have also been added as part of the safety works carried out.



Concerns

I first raised the serious issue of safety concerns here last year following yet another crash on the bridge, added Cllr Cullen.

These works were essential to prevent possible future road traffic accidents here for all who use this busy road between Thomastown and Bennettsbridge.

Cllr Cullen thanked Area Engineer Declan Murphy, Kilkenny County Council and Irish Rail for all of their hard work.
Jessica Barta has been reappointed as Texas Injured Employee Public Counsel, a role in which she has served since October 2014.

Her current term would expire on Feb. 1 2023.

The Public Counsel helps injured employees in the workers compensation system, oversees the ombudsman program, and advocates on behalf of injured employees.

Under Bartas leadership OIECs assistance in dispute resolution proceedings has increased to more than 50%, according to information posted on the Public Counsels website. Barta also implemented a First Responder Liaison Program, which has assisted hundreds of first responders with their workers comp claims and disputes.

Barta previously served at the Texas Department of Insurance (TDI) as the workers compensation legislative liaison and then assistant director of Government Relations. Prior to her service in state government, Barta was general counsel for Great American Financial Resources Inc. She holds bachelors and law degrees from Indiana University.

Topics Texas Workers' Compensation
Allison Langdon is currently recovering in hospital from a knee injury after a horror accident on the Today show.

And on Wednesday, the Today show co-host shared a health update with her loyal viewers via Today's official newsletter.

'I have a nice amount of metal in my knee now and have to wait a further five weeks before I can put any weight on my right leg,' she wrote.

Tough times: Allison Langdon is currently recovering in hospital from a knee injury

'Patience has never been a strength of mine so let's see how we go.'

The broadcast journalist also thanked her fans for supporting her during her downtime.

'I've been overwhelmed by all the lovely messages and just want to say thank you for all the love,' Allison wrote.

'I can't believe what looked like a pretty innocent fall has resulted in such drastic injuries,' she added.

'I have a nice amount of metal in my knee now': On Wednesday, the Today show co-host shared a health update with her loyal viewers via Today's official newsletter

The blonde beauty underwent knee surgery on Monday after injuring herself while hydrofoiling for a segment on the Today show.

She hurt right knee after landing badly on a swimming platform on the Gold Coast.

Her colleagues Karl Stefanovic and Leila McKinnon updated viewers on her current condition on Tuesday.

Struggles: Allison hurt right knee after landing badly on a swimming platform on the Gold Coast

Leila, who is filling in as co-anchor this week, said: 'A big shout-out to Ally this morning. Hopefully she's back on the mend after her operation.'

Karl added: 'I spoke to her last night. She seemed pretty good.

'Again, she was pretty under the influence of whatever they have after an operation. But she was going okay.'
[February 09, 2021] Lightnet Expands Payout Services Across Southeast Asia Through Collaboration With MoneyGram

SINGAPORE, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Lightnet Pte. Ltd. (Lightnet), a Singapore-headquartered fintech company, today launched a collaboration with MoneyGram International Inc. (MoneyGram), a global leader in cross-border P2P payments and money transfers. The successful integration and implementation of Lightnet's technology with MoneyGram's money transfer services provides customers with a wide selection of payout services across South East Asia. This collaboration centers around Bridgenet, Lightnet's first-layer solution, which connects Money Transfer Operators (MTOs) to MoneyGram's money transfer services. Bridgenet creates true interoperability between existing banking rails and non-bank agent networks, while bridging the gap between different entities thereby enabling companies to deliver excellent services to their users. Suvicha Sudchai, Chief Product Officer of Lightnet, said, "Through Bridgenet, Lightnet helps provide an even wider selection of payout services across Southeast Asia to MoneyGram's customers via MoneyGram's participating Money Transfer Operators." "The success of this collaoration reflects Lightnet's commitment towards improving the efficiency, convenience, affordability and accessibility of cross-border remittances. Lightnet is working tirelessly to make these kinds of services available to everyone," added Tridbodi Arunanondchai, Group CEO and Vice Chairman of Lightnet.



Chatchaval Jiaravanon, Chairman of Lightnet, said, "This successful integration is a reflection of Lightnet's mission to promote financial mobility and inclusivity for the unbanked and underbanked populations of Asia. As we continue to empower institutions such as MoneyGram, we strive toward our vision of connecting all cash-in and cash-out points under one network, thereby enabling our partners to enjoy better margins and reduced costs." As a global leader in cross-border P2P payments and money transfers, MoneyGram's consumer-centric capabilities enable family and friends to quickly and affordably send money in more than 200 countries and territories, with 89 now digitally enabled.

"We are proud to work with Lightnet to increase financial inclusion and provide our customers with the best options for money transfer in ASEAN. We love to collaborate with companies whose visions align with ours, and we look forward to a continued successful collaboration with Lightnet," said Grant Lines, Chief Revenue Officer at MoneyGram. About Lightnet Pte. Ltd. Lightnet Pte. Ltd. (Lightnet) is a Singapore-headquartered fintech company with the mission of promoting financial mobility and inclusivity. Lightnet empowers unbanked populations and SME trade finance with an inclusive international remittance ecosystem. Lightnet's international remittance ecosystem positions itself as the premiere clearing and settlement network for the Asia Pacific region by connecting existing financial systems with its network of cash agents and wallets. www.lightnet.io About MoneyGram International, Inc. MoneyGram is a global leader in cross-border P2P payments and money transfers. Its consumer-centric capabilities enable family and friends to quickly and affordably send money in more than 200 countries and territories, with 89 now digitally enabled. MoneyGram leverages its modern, mobile, and API-driven platform and collaborates with the world's leading brands to serve millions of people each year through both its walk-in business and its direct-to-consumer digital business. With a strong culture of innovation and a relentless focus on utilizing technology to deliver the world's best customer experience, MoneyGram is leading the evolution of digital P2P payments. For more information, please visit MoneyGram.com and follow @MoneyGram. SOURCE Lightnet Pte. Ltd.

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(AMF Autorite des Marches Financiers)

Regulatory News:

Genkyotex (Paris:GKTX) (Brussels:GKTX):

Genkyotex shares ISIN code FR00011790542 Euronext Paris Brussels Date Number of shares

making up the

share capital Number of voting rights January 31, 2021 11,736,174 Theoretical number of voting rights(1): 11,736,174 Number of voting rights exercisable at a shareholders'

meeting(2): 11,726,931

(1) In accordance with Article 223-111 of the AMF's General Regulation, this number of shares is calculated based on all shares carrying the right to vote, including those stripped of voting rights.

(2) Less shares stripped of voting rights.

About Genkyotex

Genkyotex is the leading biopharmaceutical company in NOX therapies, listed on the Euronext Paris and Euronext Brussels markets. Its unique platform enables the identification of orally available small-molecules which selectively inhibit specific NOX enzymes that amplify multiple disease processes such as fibrosis, inflammation, pain processing, cancer development, and neurodegeneration. Genkyotex is developing a pipeline of first-in-class product candidates targeting one or multiple NOX enzymes. The lead product candidate, setanaxib (GKT831), a NOX1 and NOX4 inhibitor has shown evidence of anti-fibrotic activity in a Phase II clinical trial in primary biliary cholangitis (PBC, a fibrotic orphan disease). Based on its positive Phase II results, a phase 3 trial with setanaxib in PBC is being planned. Setanaxib is also being evaluated in an investigator-initiated Phase II clinical trial in Type 1 Diabetes and Kidney Disease (DKD). A grant from the United States National Institutes of Health (NIH) of $8.9 million was awarded to Professor Victor Thannickal at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) to fund a multi-year research program evaluating the role of NOX enzymes in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), a chronic lung disease that results in fibrosis of the lungs. The core component of this program is a Phase 2 trial with setanaxib in patients with IPF scheduled to recruit patients in first semester of 2020. This product candidate may also be active in other fibrotic indications.

Genkyotex also has a versatile platform well-suited to the development of various immunotherapies (Vaxiclase). A partnership covering the use of Vaxiclase as an antigen per se (GTL003) has been established with Serum Institute of India Private Ltd (Serum Institute), the world's largest producer of vaccine doses, for the development by Serum Institute of cellular multivalent combination vaccines against a variety of infectious diseases

For further information, please go to www.genkyotex.com or investors@genkyotex.com

Disclaimer

This press release may contain forward-looking statements by the company with respect to its objectives. Such statements are based upon the current beliefs, estimates and expectations of Genkyotex's management and are subject to risks and uncertainties such as the company's ability to implement its chosen strategy, customer market trends, changes in technologies and in the company's competitive environment, changes in regulations, clinical or industrial risks and all risks linked to the company's growth. These factors as well as other risks and uncertainties may prevent the company from achieving the objectives outlined in the press release and actual results may differ from those set forth in the forward-looking statements, due to various factors. Without being exhaustive, such factors include uncertainties involved in the development of Genkyotex's products, which may not succeed, or in the delivery of Genkyotex's products marketing authorizations by the relevant regulatory authorities and, in general, any factor that could affects Genkyotex's capacity to commercialize the products it develops. No guarantee is given on forward-looking statements which are subject to a number of risks, notably those described in the universal registration document filed with the AMF on April 30, 2020 under number 20-0434, and those linked to changes in economic conditions, the financial markets, or the markets on which Genkyotex is present. Genkyotex products are currently used for clinical trials only and are not otherwise available for distribution or sale

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210210005805/en/

Contacts:

Genkyotex
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The farmers meet in Sahranpur is the first in a series of such events planned by the Congress in western Uttar Pradesh, a year before the Assembly elections in the state

Lucknow: Attacking the Centre over the new farm laws, Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra on Wednesday told a rally in western Uttar Pradesh that if voted to power, her party would scrap them.

At a 'kisan panchayat' organised by the party in Saharanpur, the Congress general secretary accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other BJP leaders of "insulting" farmers who are protesting against the laws. "The three laws are demonic. If voted to power, the Congress will scrap these laws," she said.

She said the party's fight will continue till the laws are scrapped.

The rally is the first in a series of such farmers' meetings planned by the Congress in western Uttar Pradesh, a year before the Assembly elections in the state where the Opposition party is struggling to revive itself.

The Congress leader was presented with a pair of ploughs at the meeting.

"These three laws were drafted in such a way that government `mandis' will eventually close down, the farmers will not get the MSP (minimum support price) and there will be hoarding," she said.

"In other words, the farmers' voice will become weak and the voice of billionaires will grow stronger," she said.

Earlier, she tweeted in Hindi, "To listen to the farmers' 'dil ki baat', understand them, share my feelings with them and support their struggle, I will be in Saharanpur today. The BJP government will have to withdraw the black farm laws."

When asked to comment on the Congress event, UP minister Anand Swarup Shukla said a "drama is being enacted in the name of farmers.

He claimed that gangs opposing the government have gone international, and referred to tweets on the farmers' protest by foreign celebrities. He asked Congress leaders to "oppose Prime Minister Narendra Modi, but not the country".

Law Minister Brijesh Pathak said the BJP government was committed to helping farmers and termed Priyanka Gandhi's tour an "eyewash". "Some leaders just want to be in the limelight," he added.

The Congress general secretary visited the Shakumbhari temple in Saharanpur and offered prayers for farmers, the UP Congress said in a tweet. She also visited Raipur Khanqah Dargah, the party said.

UP Congress chief Ajay Kumar Lallu and senior party leader PL Punia attended the panchayat'.

Opposition parties including the Congress are supporting farmers camping on the borders of Delhi for weeks, demanding the repeal of the agri-marketing laws enacted last September.

Most of the protesters are from Punjab and Haryana, but there is a sizeable number from western Uttar Pradesh with Bharatiya Kisan Union leader Rakesh Tikait assuming a lead role in the agitation.

Recently, Rashtriya Lok Dal leader Jayant Chaudhary also addressed farmers' mahapanchayats in western UP.

Farmer unions say the laws will weaken the MSP system. But the government says they offer more options to farmers to sell their crops, and will help raise their incomes.


YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 10, ARMENPRESS. High Tech Industry Minister Hakob Arshakyan reassured lawmakers that in 2021 serious achievements will be recorded in terms of the industrial capacities of munitions.

The goals of the military-industry is the increase of industrial potential, and increase of industrial capacity, he told ruling My Step bloc lawmaker Sos Avetisyan during parliamentary Questions Time when asked about the export opportunities of munitions produced in Armenia.

Taking into account that Armenias market is limited, it necessarily should also be aimed at exporting. The investments which have been made have this very direction. Investments have been made in Armenia so that the production gets sold domestically and gets exported, Arshakyan said, adding that these are private investments which also have government participation.

He noted that the opportunities of foreign markets must be used for the development of the sector.

In terms of industrial capacity, we have and will continue having rather serious achievements in 2021. We also have preliminary agreements with foreign markets, he said.

Editing and Translating by Stepan Kocharyan
Twitter on Wednesday said it had not taken action against accounts that consist of news media entities, journalists, activists, and politicians.

Because we do not believe that the actions we have been directed to take are consistent with Indian law, and, in keeping with our principles of defending protected speech and freedom of expression, we have not taken any action on accounts that consist of news media entities, journalists, activists, and politicians. To do so, we believe, would violate their fundamental right to free expression under Indian law, the company said in a blog post.

Twitter added that it had informed Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India (MeitY) about its enforcement actions on February 10. The company pointed out that it would maintain dialogue with the Indian government.

The company, however, added that it had taken a range of enforcement actions including permanent suspension in certain cases against more than 500 accounts escalated across all MeitY orders for violating Twitters rules. It has also withheld a portion of accounts that identified in blocking orders under its Country Withheld Content policy within India only.

Separate to our enforcement under the Twitter Rules, over the course of the last 10 days, Twitter has been served with several separate blocking orders by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), Government of India, under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act. Out of these, two were emergency blocking orders that we temporarily complied with but subsequently restored access to the content in a manner that we believe was consistent with Indian law. After we communicated this to MeitY, we were served with a non-compliance notice, the company said in a blog post.

Listing out steps it took following the blocking orders by the Indian government, Twitter said it had taken steps to reduce the visibility of the hashtags containing harmful content. The steps included barring them from trending section on Twitter or appearing as recommended search.

We will continue to advocate for the right of free expression on behalf of the people we serve. We are exploring options under Indian law  both for Twitter and for the accounts that have been impacted. We remain committed to safeguarding the health of the conversation occurring on Twitter, and strongly believe that the Tweets should flow, Twitter added.

The blog post comes after the company refused to comply with the Indian governments directive to block more than 250 accounts and posts. The government had sought emergency blocking of certain Twitter hashtags that it deemed provocative. Interestingly, Twitter initially complied with the directive but soon restored some of the accounts.

The government warned that the non-compliance, however, could lead to fines or jail. Twitter reportedly sought a meeting with the IT Ministry.

Safety of our employees is a top priority for us at Twitter. We continue to be engaged with the Government of India from a position of respect and have reached out to the Honourable Minister, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology for a formal dialogue. An acknowledgement to the receipt of the non-compliance notice has also been formally communicated, a company spokesperson said.

Separately, Twitter was asked to take down 1,178 Pak-Khalistani handles for posting provocative content on the farmers' protest.

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Five organizations representing their metal industries The Copper Mark, the International Lead Association (ILA), the International Zinc Association (IZA), the Nickel Institute and the Responsible Minerals Initiative (RMI)have released the Joint Due Diligence Standard for Copper, Lead, Nickel and Zinc.

The Standard takes into account the risk profile of copper, lead, nickel and zinc (the principal covered metals) supply chains and is designed to enable effective due diligence for producers and/or traders of these metals. It intends to build on existing standards and looks to provide flexibility for multi-metal producers to include materials intended for the production of metal products other than of principal covered metals at their site(s) as needed.

The development of the Standard was made possible by the financial and in-kind support provided by the International Copper Association (ICA).

The Joint Due Diligence Standard will enable companies to comply with the London Metal Exchange (LME) Responsible Sourcing requirements. Conformance of companies with this Joint Due Diligence Standard will be assessed using The Copper Marks Assurance Process or the RMIs Responsible Minerals Assurance Process.

The following types of companies are eligible to implement the Joint Due Diligence Standard and undergo an assessment:

Copper producers participating in the Copper Mark. Implementation of the Joint Due Diligence Standard is currently voluntary and will be become mandatory for participating copper producers of the Copper Mark to demonstrate conformance with Criteria 31 of the Risk Readiness Assessment. All companies extracting, producing and/or trading copper, lead, nickel or zinc materials from mine sites to, and including, producers of refined metal products, which are generally referred to as the refiner. Producers of nickel chemical compounds and all nickel raw intermediate materials (including ferro-nickel, nickel pig iron, and nickel oxide sinter) entering production of stainless steel, alloys, batteries, plating, and where no refining takes place.

For companies listed under points 2 and 3, an assessment against the Joint Due Diligence Standard does not result in participation in the Copper Mark and companies are not eligible to make any claims in that regard.

The Joint Standard was developed by a working group including the partner organizations, other interested commodity associations, multi-metal company representatives, as well as OECD and LME. The Joint Due Diligence Standard will undergo an independent third-party OECD Alignment Assessment. Through the working group, the partner organizations implement a clearly defined roadmap to ensure copper, lead, nickel and zinc brands will be able to rely on the shared framework to respond to the LME before June 2022. The process includes four main phases:
Kids want to fish? You don't know how yourself? Here's a little help
The opposition has called on the state government to explain why one of the states top doctors in charge of Perths hotel quarantine system has taken three weeks leave.

The Department of Health has confirmed Deputy Chief Health Officer and state health incident coordinator Dr Robyn Lawrence is currently on leave and is due back on March 1, the Labour Day public holiday.

WA State Health Incident Controller Robyn Lawrence at a press conference in December. Credit:Peter de Kruijff

As state health incident coordinator Dr Lawrence has been integral in successfully keeping COVID-19 at bay in WA after being given the mammoth task of setting up and managing WAs hotel quarantine system when the pandemic hit last year.

This makes the timing of her leave period peculiar given the system is the subject of an inquiry following the transmission of COVID-19 to a security guard on January 24.

The leader of one of the criminal groups behind the abduction of more than 300 of the Kankara boys in North-western Nigeria has surrendered to authorities in exchange for an amnesty agreement.

Zamfara state government said Awwalun Daudawa and six other members of the armed group had handed over their weapons, swearing on the Holy Quran not to return to their former practices.

Daudawa had kidnapped the 344 schoolboys in the Katsina State on behalf of the Boko Haram jihadist group.

Daudawa, 43, was originally a cattle thief who turned to arms trafficking, particularly between Libya and northern Nigeria, where he traded with criminal and jihadist groups.

Over time, he forged an alliance with Boko Haram and became their arms trafficker, a security source told AFP.

Authorities have sought to negotiate peace agreements with these bandits, offering them amnesty in exchange for their weapons.

Addressing reporters, Daudawa said dozens of other armed bandits had told him they were ready to cease fighting, provided they are not subsequently harassed.
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Two men and a woman have been rescued from a deserted island in the Bahamas after they were stranded for 33 days and survived on conchs and rats.

A helicopter crew with the US Coast Guard (USCG) conducted the Hollywood-worthy rescue on Tuesday.

The agency said officers spotted people waving flags on Monday during a routine air patrol of the waters around Anguilla Cay, an uninhabited Bahama Banks' island between Cuba and the Florida Keys.

The castaways, who have not been named publicly, were all Cuban nationals and are now in ICE custody, USCG said.

The trio told rescuers that they ended up on the island about five weeks ago after their boat capsized in rough waters and they swam to shore.

Coast Guard aircraft commander Mike Allert told WPLG-TV the trio survived on rats and conchs - a tropical marine mollusk.

Two men and a woman were rescued from a deserted island in the Bahamas on Tuesday after they were stranded for 33 days and survived on conchs and rats. The trio are seen on the shore before a helicopter crew picked them up in a photo released by the US Coast Guard

One of the castaways, who officials said were Cuban nationals, is seen next to a pile of supplies air-dropped by the Coast Guard before the rescue

The Coast Guard said officers spotted people waving flags on Monday during a routine air patrol of the waters around Anguilla Cay, an uninhabited Bahama Banks' island between Cuba and the Florida Keys

He added they appeared in 'dire straits due to a lack of fresh water on the island'.

USCG Petty Officer 2nd Class Brandon Murray said it wasn't immediately clear why the people were in the boat in the first place, the Sun Sentinel reported.

Murray speculated that they may have been migrants trying to make it to the US or fishermen who got lost at sea.

He expressed disbelief that the group managed to survive for so long on the island alone.

'I cannot recall a time that we saved people who were stranded for over a month on an island,' Murray said. 'That is a new one for me.'

The Coast Guard posted a video on Twitter of a helicopter crew dropping a package with food, water and a radio down to the castaways on Monday. The crew then returned on Tuesday to airlift the trio and transport them to the Lower Keys Medical Center

The helicopter crew that first noticed the group dropped water, food and a radio down to them on Monday, as seen in a video released by the USCG, but bad weather called the main rescue off for a day.

A crew then returned on Tuesday to airlift them and bring them to the Lower Keys Medical Center.

None of the castaways appeared seriously hurt, USCG said.

They were initially taken to Lower Keys Medical Center but were later taken into ICE custody and transferred to Pompano Beach.
MI6 is recruiting foreign-born spies for the first time in a bid to increase diversity among its secret agents.

The Secret Intelligence Service hopes to recruit from the 'biggest talent pool' and curate a team with a 'diversification of thought, a diverse workforce, not people who all think in similar ways', an insider told The Times.

Potential spies will no longer need to be born in the UK in order to apply to MI6, but they are still required to hold British citizenship.

A Whitehall source said: 'The rules around the employment of dual nationals have changed recently so you can now have been born a foreign national and then have come to the UK.

MI6 is recruiting foreign-born spies for the first time in a bid to increase diversity among its secret agents. Pictured: The Secret Intelligence Service building in Vauxhall, London

'This is about giving us access to the biggest talent pool. If you narrow the criteria to a British national you will end up with lots of people who are British and educated at red-brick universities.

'We want a diversification of thought, a diverse workforce, not people who all think in similar ways.'

Despite the changes, dual citizens may be asked to give up their additional citizenship in order to take up some roles.

They also must have one parent who is or was a British citizen or with 'substantial ties' to the UK in order to be eligible to apply.

Under old rules abolished in May 2018, recruits were required to have two British-born parents.

MI6 has also recently moved to ease its eligibility rules, including scrapping the upper age limit of 55. In 2020, they also cut the minimum employment age from 21 to 18 as the service sought to attract younger recruits with technology skills.

A recruitment ad campaign in 2018 sought to encourage more women and ethnic minority candidates to apply for roles, as well as older people.

WHO CAN JOIN INTELLIGENCE SERVICES ABROAD? France Hopefuls looking to work for the DGSE must be French citizens, Germany To join the Federal Intelligence Service, which is Germany's foreign intelligence service, recruits are required to have German citizenship. Dual citizens are also permitted to apply. United States Potential CIA recruits must also hold US citizenship or dual citizenship. Advertisement

It comes after MI6 last month put out a call to recruit a new army of 'part-time' spooks looking for adventure.

The UK's foreign intelligence service, which is portrayed in the James Bond films, was looking to boost recruitment by signing up Brits 'looking to spice up their otherwise dull life'.

The series of ads, reported in The Daily Star, sought to appeal to people with disabilities and 'consultants' with valuable contacts in Russia or China.

The initiative is thought to be the brainchild of the new head of MI6 Richard Moore, known as C for Controller. In the Bond films, the head of the service is known as 'M'.

One of the ads, placed in a magazine, says MI6 is seeking people with 'diverse skill sets and life experiences for part-time and consulting roles.'

It adds that the spying hopefuls will be considered 'highly desirable individuals' if they have expertise in 'their chosen field'.

In particular, the ad names 'foreign nationals' and applicants from overseas and Mr Moore spoke of encouraging diversity.

The spy chief, whose wife is blind, is keen for people with disabilities to bring their expertise to the service.

Contacts, ideally in Russia and China, are also reportedly highly valued and sought after.

One source said: 'MI6 is basically saying to anyone fed up with their country's regime that they can work for British intelligence part-time.'

The source also boasted about the glamorous and exciting elements of the job.

'They would travel on business or holiday. That will be very attractive for a corporate executive looking to spice up an otherwise dull life.'
A court in Hong Kong on denied bail to an outspoken online radio show host following his arrest under a colonial-era sedition law over comments made during his shows.



Wan Yiu-sing, known by his nickname Giggs, was arrested on suspicion of "seditious intent," over comments he made during online radio shows he hosted from August to .



The West Kowloon Magistracy on denied Wan's bail application, saying that there isn't enough evidence to suggest that he won't "re-offend" if released from custody.



Wan's wife and daughter wept openly in court when the decision was read out, with his daughter shouting out "Dad!"



The judge said there was a risk to "national security" if Wan were to be released, although the case doesn't fall under a draconian national security law imposed on Hong Kong by the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) since , 2020.



The prosecution had earlier drawn comparisons with the denial of bail on to pro-democracy media mogul Jimmy Lai, who has been charged with "collusion with a foreign power" under the national security law.



Wan, 52, has been charged with "acting with seditious intent" in online programmes that he hosted between August and October last year.



City-wide crackdown on public criticism

Seditious intent under the Crimes Ordinance is defined as "intent to arouse hatred or contempt of the Hong Kong [government] or to incite rebellion, and cause dissatisfaction with it."



Wan's arrest came amid a city-wide crackdown on public criticism of the Hong Kong authorities and the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the wake of a draconian national security law imposed on Hong Kong from , 2020.



Wan had been out on bail following an earlier arrest in on suspicion of offering financial support to alleged pro-independence activities.



Wan was also a former guest host on the weekly RFA show "China Forum," which ended its run on Nov. 18.



The Paris-based press freedom group Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said the decision meant a "de facto three-month jail sentence" for Wan.



"[RSF] demands his release and calls on #HongKong government to stop the #judicialpersecution of #pressfreedom defenders," the group said via its Twitter account.



The denial of bail to Wan came amid reports that the Hong Kong government will move to abolish jury trials in cases brought under the national security law, in a potential break with 176 years of juridical practice under Hong Kong's common law system.



Jury debate

Chief executive Carrie Lam declined to confirm or deny a Feb. 8 report from Agence France-Presse, saying only that "everything will be handled according to law."



A Hong Kong barrister who declined to be named said that the language of the National Security Law for Hong Kong is entirely consistent with the legal language used in mainland China, a civil system with no jury trials, where courts are answerable to the CCP, and where defendants are rarely acquitted.



But he said abandoning juries meant cases could be decided according to the preconceptions of judges alone.



"Sometimes judges hear too many cases of a certain kind, and they have certain prejudices or ideas about them," the barrister said. "I would hope to see as much participation in the justice system as possible by ordinary citizens [as jury members]."



AFP reported on that Hong Kong justice secretary Teresa Cheng had informed defense lawyers representing Tong Ying-kit, a 23-year old man arrested the day after the law came in to effect for allegedly driving his motorbike into a crowd of police officers while flying a protest flag, that no jury would be present at Tong's trial.



Instead the trial will be heard by three judges who have been appointed to try national security cases, Cheng reportedly told the lawyers.



Tong faces charges of "terrorism" and "inciting secession" under the new law, which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison.



A Department of Justice spokesperson declined to comment when asked by AFP for comment because case proceedings are ongoing.



Trial by jury is described by the Hong Kong justice department as one of the judiciary's "most important features."



Reported by Lau Siu Fung and Man Hoi Yan for RFA's Cantonese Service. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

Research on how well various types of masks and face coverings protect against coronavirus has varied but experts and politicians have generally leaned towards the idea that the chance of some protection is better than none.

In the UK, face coverings were first made mandatory in for public transport in June and later for shops and other indoor spaces in July.

Here's what studies have shown so far about whether masks work:

FACE MASKS LOWER VIRUS R RATE (JANUARY 2021)

Researchers at Boston University in the US found wearing face masks is an effective way to stop the spread of the coronavirus.

The study, published in the journal Lancet Digital Health, found a 10 per cent rise in self-reported mask wearing is associated with a three-fold increase in the odds of keeping the R number  the number of others each person with coronavirus infects  below 1.

Co-author of the study Ben Rader, of Boston Children's Hospital and Boston University, said: 'An important finding of this research is that mask wearing is not a replacement for physical distancing.'

INFECTIOUS DROPLETS WILL STILL SLIP THROUGH (DECEMBER 2020)

Scientists at New Mexico State University in the US found wearing a cloth mask may not shield the user totally from coronavirus because infected droplets can slip through, but it would significantly reduce how many.

'Wearing a mask will offer substantial, but not complete, protection to a susceptible person,' said Dr Krishna Kota, an associate professor at the university who led the research.

The study found while all masks blocked at least 95 per cent of droplets from coughs and sneezes - there was still a risk of the disease being passed on.

A MASK 'WILL ALWAYS BE BETTER THAN NOTHING' (DECEMBER 2020)

Research by the University of Massachusetts Lowell and California Baptist University in the US found wearing a used three-layer surgical mask can reduce the number of small droplets that are released into the air by two thirds.

Co-author Dr Jinxiang Xi said: 'It is natural to think that wearing a mask, no matter new or old, should always be better than nothing.

'Our results show that this belief is only true for particles larger than five micrometers, but not for fine particles smaller than 2.5 micrometers.'

MASK-WEARERS EQUALLY LIKELY TO CATCH VIRUS (NOVEMBER 2020)

A study by Copenhagen University Hospital in Denmark suggested face masks may only offer the wearer limited protection against Covid infection.

Researchers found there was no statistically significant difference in the number of people who contacted the virus in a group wearing masks in public compared to a group that did not do so.

The study was carried out in April and May when Danish authorities did not recommend wearing face coverings.

MASK LEADS TO THOUSANDS FEWER COUGH DROPLETS (AUGUST 2020)

Research by Edinburgh University in Scotland suggested cloth face masks are effective at reducing the amount of droplets spread by coughing or sneezing.

The findings suggest a person standing two metres from someone coughing without a mask is exposed to 10,000 times more droplets than from someone standing half a metre away wearing a basic single layer mask.

Professor Paul Digard, of the University of Edinburgh's Roslin Institute, said: 'The simple message from our research is that face masks work.

'Wearing a face covering will reduce the probability that someone unknowingly infected with the virus will pass it on.'

N95 MEDICAL MASKS COULD PREVENT 99% OF SPREAD (AUGUST 2020)

A study by Duke University in North Carolina, US, found N95 masks are the most effective masks at reducing the spread of Covid-19.

The research published in the journal Science Advances, studied 14 types of face coverings.

Co-author Dr Eric Westman said: 'If everyone wore a mask, we could stop up to 99 percent of these droplets before they reach someone else.

'In the absence of a vaccine or antiviral medicine, it's the one proven way to protect others as well as yourself.'

SURGICAL COVERINGS JUST AS GOOD AS N95 MASKS (MARCH 2020)

A University of Oxford study published on March 30 last year concluded that surgical face masks are just as effective at preventing respiratory infections as N95 respirators for doctors, nurses and other health care workers.

N95 respirators are made of thick, tightly woven and moulded material that fits tightly over the face and can stop 95 percent of all airborne particles, while surgical masks are thinner, fit more loosely, and more porous.

The Oxford analysis of past studies - which has not yet been peer reviewed - found that surgical masks were worth wearing but any face mask is only as good as other health and hygiene practices.
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STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. Is it possible that former President Donald Trump could be re-elected after being impeached twice?

Frankly, Yes. It is quite possible.

Being impeached  even when it happens a historic second time  is not the same as being convicted, removed from office and barred from ever running for office again.

Impeachment is the equivalent of an indictment, not a guilty verdict. The decision to convict Trump of insurrection for triggering the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol will be made by a trial verdict of the Senate. And, if there is a conviction, the decision about holding future office will be made by the Senate in a separate, later vote.

It would really take a conviction to keep him from running for federal office again, said Brian Browne, assistant vice president of government relations and an adjunct professor of political science at St. Johns University. In the absence of a conviction, he can still technically run for federal office again.

On Tuesday, the Senate voted largely along party lines, 56 to 44, to proceed with the second impeachment trial of Trump, declaring that such a trial is indeed constitutional, despite the fact that Trump is now a private citizen. Opening arguments began on Wednesday.

The House of Representatives impeached trump on Jan. 13 on the single charge, incitement of insurrection, for allegedly instigating the deadly Jan. 6 riot.

Then-President Trump was impeached for the first time in December 2019 on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress in relation to his dealings with Ukraine. The Senate voted to acquit Trump of those charges on Feb. 5, 2020.

Both this time around, and in the 2019 impeachment of Trump, the House, in its articles of impeachment, specified that Trump warrants impeachment and trial, removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States.'

But, in the end, the Senate can vote against that recommendation, even if Trump is convicted, said Browne. Its written in the Constitution,' he said.

For conviction, and removal from office, which Trump doesnt have to worry about because hes no longer president, a two-thirds majority vote, or supermajority' in the Senate is required.

The Senate is currently equally divided between Republicans and Democrats. That would mean that 17 Republican senators would have to break ranks to convict him on the incitement to insurrection impeachment article. In the event of a 50-50 split at trial, Vice President Kamala Harris would act as a tie-breaking vote.

On Tuesday, only six Republicans joined with their Democratic colleagues in a vote that the current impeachment trial is constitutional and could proceed, despite the fact that Trump is no longer in office.

If Trump is convicted, the Senate then would vote on whether to disqualify him from ever holding national office again, requiring only a simple majority of 51 votes to pass.

That would pretty much be a no-brainer, considering the way the Senate is aligned, and Kamala Harris could cast the tie-breaking vote,' Browne said. But, before you get to that, youd have to have a conviction, and that seems unlikely. It seems very unlikely to happen.

In the nations history, only two presidents have been impeached  Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton  but neither was removed from office. Both were later acquitted by the Senate.

Nixon resigned from office before the House could vote on his impeachment resolutions, but it is believed he would have been removed from office, because of his role in the Watergate scandal, had he not resigned.

And though Nixons articles of impeachment didnt prohibit him from ever holding office again, that wasnt the case with Clinton, whose resolution did just that.

Browne pointed to Johnson, who was impeached in the House but acquitted in the Senate, and later was elected to serve in the Senate after finishing his term as president of the United States. And Alcee Hastings, a current member of the House from Florida, was removed as a federal judge in 1989, but was later elected to serve in Congress, Browne said.

So, it can happen, Browne said:

If hes acquitted, which is likely, theres nothing to stop him from running for federal office again.'
By John J. Metzler





Myanmar's military coup d'etat overthrowing the democratically elected government has provided the stage for a new morality play in Southeast Asia. We already know the players.



On the one side we see the seemingly virtuous young democracy led by a Nobel Peace Prize laureate being pushed aside by the powerful and corrupt Myanmar military. Then there's the international community, the United Kingdom, the United States and the European Union who quickly condemn the coup makers and demand a return to democracy. Additionally, the neighboring Southeast Asian nations, notably Thailand (with its own military junta), basically shrug.



But the crescendo quickly builds when the U.N. Security Council with the U.K. at the helm, tries to mobilize a powerful condemnation of the military power grab, only to find that key veto holding members, especially China and Russia, provide diplomatic cover for Myanmar's military. Surprised?



U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres condemns the military coup calling it "totally unacceptable."



Christine Schraner Burgener, the U.N. special envoy for Myanmar, addresses ambassadors, "I strongly condemn the recent steps taken by the military and urge all of you to collectively send a clear signal in support of democracy in Myanmar."



So all the players have assumed their traditional places; the West most especially Britain, the former colonial power, and the U.S. in defending democracy and threatening sanctions. The People's Republic of China, the regime's longtime patron, protecting its client state, and the long suffering Myanmar people, on the losing end once again.



Sadly military rule, direct or indirect, has been part of the Myanmar political fabric since 1962. The current coup only reinforces the obvious; that democratic institutions have failed to take root deep enough in Myanmar's rich soil, while the military, through the cohesiveness of power and corruption, has proven a powerful political counterweight.



Since 2015 when fair elections saw the victory of the National League for Democracy, Myanmar has experienced an uneasy coexistence between Aung San Suu Kyi's democratically elected government and the powerful Myanmar military, the Tatmandaw, always lurking in the shadows.



The power sharing marriage of convenience underscored the Junta's mantra of promoting a "Discipline-flourishing democracy."



But Myanmar's road to a quasi-successful democracy faced the hurdles of the 1988 freedom movement when mass pro-democracy demonstrations were bloodily suppressed by the military, the hopeful 2007 Saffron Revolution led by Buddhist monks, and finally the political power sharing agreements between the generals and Aung San Suu Kyi's new government in 2015.



Elections in November 2020, in which the National League for Democracy (NLD) won a landslide, jolted the generals. On the day the new parliament was set to meet in the Disney-like faux capital Naypyidaw, the tanks rolled in.



Aung San Suu Kyi, has been smooth as silk with the foreign press; I recall her U.N. visit a few years back when she evoked the Angel of Democracy. Back home she's known as "Mother Suu" to the Myanmar ethnic majority. But millions of Myanmar people have become disenchanted by her NLD's political incompetence and vindictiveness as well as her government's politely looking the other way to ethnic persecution.



Myanmar, a resource rich Southeast Asian state of 54 million people borders China, Thailand, India and Bangladesh. It's strategically located on the Bay of Bengal.



Yet part of Myanmar's original sin, and this includes the once sainted Aung San Suu Kyi, has been to run a hyper-nationalist Buddhist state at the expense of the country's other ethnic and religious groups; Christians and Muslims. Though Myanmar's democratization has been rightly lauded for a decade, the ongoing tragedy of nearly one million Rohingya Muslims forced from the country into neighboring Bangladesh remains cynically overlooked. So too has been the tragedy of Christian persecution of the Shan and Karen peoples in the north.



While Beijing has historically overplayed its hand in neighboring Myanmar, causing a backlash even from an often collaborationist socialist regime, the fact stands that China's political and economic power remains the central force to be reckoned with. It's all about the Belt and Road, expanding the deep water port of Kyaukphyu, being the primary arms merchant for the military, and holding the majority of foreign investments. Add rackets, gambling, and human trafficking in this pivotal country, and China's calculation becomes clear.



Just weeks before the recent coup, China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi met with key Myanmar officials, offering support for the military's "deserved role in the course of national transformation and development." Will any sanctions by the Biden administration now push Myanmar's generals totally back into Beijing's arms?





John J. Metzler (jjmcolumn@earthlink.net) is a United Nations correspondent covering diplomatic and defense issues.
Morrison will do well to be bold and lead from the front. Martin Luther King jnr said a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a moulder of consensus. Steve Ngeow, Chatswood Politicians should never have approved casino Both sides of NSW politics gave the nod to James Packers vision of using prime harbourside land for a casino (Packers jewel now rudderless, vulnerable, February 10), supposedly to attract Asian high-rollers and boost tourism and employment. Warnings that it could be used for unsavoury activities and would not enhance tourism were ignored. Rejecting the questionable proposal would have preserved the beauty of the harbour foreshore and saved James Packer from embarking on a project that may well end in financial disaster. Nan Howard, Camden Packers Folly at Barangaroo is not only a monument to Crowns failings, but to all those NSW politicians who bought into a dream based on avarice and arrogance. Philip Cooney, Wentworth Falls Just demolish the whole edifice, with stakeholders footing the bill, and build a park that all Sydney residents can enjoy. Win, win. Liz Liddelow, Avalon Beach

Call me stupid but I cant understand how Sydney now has a second casino that not only uses prime Sydney foreshore land but also corrupts the skyline from all sides of the city. Remove it and give this land back for public amenity. Bernadette Mitchell, Mona Vale Commissioner Patricia Bergin has restored some faith in the belief that institutions exist to safeguard against insidious corruption. The fear is the community has become immune to the human misery and corruption associated with gambling and its awful by-products. Vanessa Tennent, Oatley Dominic Perrottet probably should have saved his comments about ugly buildings until after we heard that the high-rollers eyesore erected on prime public land may soon become our newest, ugliest white elephant. Colin Stokes, Camperdown The governments reputation has been damaged through its mismanagement of the Stronger Communities and Bushfire Local Economic Recovery funds. If it were to ditch the proposal for a second casino it would prove that it does, after all, have some moral fibre. Peter Mahoney, Oatley There was an arrogant air about the Crown development from day one. First, the proposal to erect the tower on a pier in the harbour, rightly squashed, then the increase in the CBD height limit, somehow allowed. Then the fact that hoi-polloi pokie players would not be catered for, as only really rich gamblers were wanted. Now its all come back to bite them on the bum. Joan Brown, Orange

Is this the beginning of the shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves curse? George Fishman, Vaucluse Do-nothing PM hides behind virus Ross Gittins is right (The Canberra policy vacuum, February 10), COVID-19 has elevated our leaders popularity because they are perceived to be doing something beneficial to the country. But it has also distracted from urgent issues like climate change, health, education and the fair use of public money. Pathetically, the PM has used it as an excuse not to do anything that might unsettle the Nationals, while Labor has been cowed into making itself a small target. The result is stagnation. Will a leader who is game enough to reverse the backward slide ever emerge? Ron Sinclair, Bathurst The trouble with policies is that theyre much harder to sell than for your opponents to misrepresent, says Ross Gittins. I have a simple, long overdue fix: a wealth tax with a threshold of $4 million, affecting only 3 per cent of households. If Labor ran this in the election lead-up it could offer free childcare and many other policies that would benefit women and the dispossessed young at the expense of the wealthy top 3 per cent  those who have benefited greatly during coronavirus times. Im no Scotty from marketing but I reckon even I could sell that. Steve Johnson, Elizabeth Beach Ross Gittins is right in saying Scott Morrison will do nothing that might hurt his chances of winning the next election. For this reason the rollout of the vaccine and lowering unemployment are his main policy goals. Anything that will make the world a better place is too risky. Using the Nationals as a reason to avoid taking action on climate is clever and serves the purpose of slowing things down. Chris Moe, Bensville

National security farce Everyone involved in exposing Crowns greed, deceit and arrogance, including the Herald, are to be commended (Taking on a corporate giant: a whistleblower exposed the rot, February 10).

Witness K and Bernard Collaery are subjected to secretive prosecutions, already costing millions and well into their third year. Behind this farce lies the greed, deceit and arrogance of the government spying on East Timor in 2004 for financial gain. Exposing corporate rot has the backing of the law. Exposing government rot means fighting government interpretation of the law, in this case including recourse to that convenient cover-all  national security. The pursuit of these two courageous Australians is unfair and threatens the concept of open justice. Susan Connelly, Lakemba Heritage vandals You need not think that the underlying mantra Progress is good. Heritage is bad is the bastion of only those in Sydney (Letters, February 10). Local government in rural and remote towns of NSW is full of little Dominic Perrottets, all expressing heritage conservation through Local Environmental and Community Plans. But scratch the surface and see that wolves in sheeps clothing are alive and well. Featureless architectural design is all the go. And where is the independent umpire in all of this  the historical adviser? Nowhere to be seen, something to do with limited resources. How convenient. Raymond Quigley, Gulgong Out of balance

Spendthrifts are on the left and frugalists have the right to opt out of paying their share, according to your correspondent (Letters, February 10). Those retirees that now live tax-free with big superannuation balances in the pension phase arrived at these privileged positions thanks to long-gone contribution levels much greater than currently available. Assets sold down and salary sacrificed could be dumped and lumped merrily into super. Its time the ageing costs of all, health and longevity, were equally shared using that dirty concept, the unmentionable bane of conservatives  tax. John Kingsmill, Fairlight Kings Cross hypocrisy I defy the average visitor to Kings Cross to know the location of the near-invisible safe injecting room (Backlash against injecting room as lockout laws axed, February 10). Members of my family have known the Cross for more than 60 years. We remember it when the sale of drugs and drug affected people were often visible. This changed dramatically when the injecting room was established. Its not the injecting room that brings drugs and alcohol affected people to the Cross. Jill Napier, Phegans Bay The purveyors of alcohol in Kings Cross self-righteously disparage the main drug and alcohol initiative in the area and the only one to have largely addressed the former plague of overdoses in their streets. Not to mention that it has brought furtive, alienated IV drug users in contact with counselling and other exit strategies. Bear in mind it was alcohol that created much of the anti-social behaviour and suffering in the Cross which led to the lockout laws. If business councils ever want to know what gives their members a bad reputation, they cant go past this astonishing example of sanctimoniousness in Kings Cross. Alex Mattea, Sydney I do hope the NSW government will also be announcing an increase in funding for the St Vincents Emergency Department to deal with the increased cases that will inevitably follow. Roger Gallagher, Merrylands

I have always been supportive of Victor Dominello, but wonder what city he is living in when he says he wants Kings Cross to be a place for families. Not only is there an injecting clinic but lockout laws are to be lifted, which doesnt bode well for somewhere to take children. Jenny Greenwood, Hunters Hill First-day blues Your correspondent (Letters, February 10) says Kiwis start school the day they turn five. Wouldnt the day after be kinder? Good luck if your birthday falls on a weekend. Stephanie Edwards, Roseville One for sorrow Lachrymose but lacks remorse (Humble pie: tearful McGuire steps down, February 10). Martin Jaffe, Lilli Pilli

Astro gridlock Is it incumbent upon the Martians to install give-way signs to avert collisions between the upcoming influx of probes from Earth? Ken Osborne, Bowraville We know best I emailed my federal member to say: What is happening to the family on Christmas Island is just not right. The response: What is fair and equitable is right. The application of this Trumpian view to the wretched situation of the Biloela family is downright depressing. Peter Bulkeley, Buderim (Qld) No, fangs



Forty-four Republicans voted against former President Donald Trump's trial, the clearest indication yet that the Senate will finally acquit him for the second time of the impeachment proceedings.

44 Republicans voted against Trump's impeachment trial

On Tuesday, three Republican Senators suggested that the vote is a predictor of how many Senators will vote to acquit the former President after the trial.

"Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) said, "I tend to assume that it will be very doubtful that there will be anywhere near enough for conviction."

Cramer added that it takes some mental gymnastics to consider this to be an unconstitutional action on the one hand, and to consider conviction to be part of it on the other hand," The Hil reported.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said if any Republicans changed their minds during the trial, he would be "very surprised." According to The Hill, Hawley said, "If you think you don't have authority, you can't go on and say, Well, we don't have authority, but I guess I'm going to go ahead and convict anyway."

He added that he would be surprised if many people change their minds on the underlying question of whether to oppose a penalty or not.

The vote on Tuesday mirrors the one cast last month when 45 Republicans voted to declare that the trial is unconstitutional. On January 13, House Democrats were joined by 10 Republicans and voted to impeach Trump on a single charge of inciting an insurrection, alleging that on January 6, the former President led a mob that breached the Capitol.

Read also: Impeachment Trial: Trump Lawyers Argue 'Majority in the House' Is Afraid of Facing Him as Opponent in 2024

According to The Epoch Times, Trump refuted the allegations. In a speech delivered on the Capitol violation day, the President told supporters to make their voices heard "peacefully and patriotically."

"I will vote the way I voted the other day in the courtroom," Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) said, as per The Hill. "I don't think it's lawful, I don't think we need to be doing it," he added.

On Tuesday, the impeachment administrators and Trump's lawyers spent about four hours telling the senators that the trial is constitutional. The impeachment managers' core argument was that if the Senate did not prosecute a sitting president, then presidents would have a so-called "January exception" during their last days in office to commit impeachable offences, believing that they could not be charged. The proposal was deemed "nonsense" by the defense lawyers.

"If, in truth, my friends on this side of the chamber believe President Trump committed a criminal crime... you go and arrest him after he's out of office. So, by the close of his tenure in January, there is no possibility for the President of the United States to run rampant and then go away scot-free. The Department of Justice knows what to do for those people," said Bruce Castor, Trump's counsel.

Read also: Report: Biden has Awkward, Flirty Moment After Complimenting a Nurse for Her Youthful Appearance

McConnell says finding Trump guilty is 'vote of conscience'

Once again, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell signaled to fellow Senate Republicans that former President Donald Trump's impeachment trial is a 'vote of conscience.' McConnell allegedly indicated that senators who challenged the trial's constitutionality could also vote to prosecute the former President, three outlets told Bloomberg News.

McConnell also indicated that, after having voted on Tuesday to make it unconstitutional for the Senate to hear the case, he has not yet decided how he will vote on finding Trump guilty, the outlet said.

On Tuesday, only six Republicans voted against the party line, in favor of the Senate trial's constitutionality, as per Daily Mail on MSN.

Read also: Sanders: It Is Bad Politics That Those Who Got Their Stimulus Check From Trump Will Not Get Them From Biden

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TORONTO, ON / ACCESSWIRE / February 10, 2021 / Tsodilo Resources Limited ("Tsodilo" or the "Company") (TSXV:TSD) is pleased to announce the closing of the second and final tranche of the previously announced private placement financing (the "Financing") for gross proceeds to the Company of $150,000 on February 10, 2021, through the issuance of 300,000 units of securities of the Company (the "Units") at a subscription price of C$0.50 per Unit.

As previously announced, each Unit is comprised of one common share in the capital of the Company ("Common Share") and one common share purchase warrant ("Warrant"). Each Warrant entitles the holder thereof to purchase one Common Share for a period of 24 months from the date of issuance at an exercise price of USD$0.55.

Pursuant to the Financing, including the closing of the first tranche announced on January 25, 2021, the Company issued an aggregate of 2,986,038 Units for aggregate gross proceeds of $1,493,019.

The Common Shares and Warrants issued as a result of the Financing are subject to a statutory four month and one day hold period, which expires on May 26, 2021 for securities issued pursuant to the first tranche of the Financing and June 11, 2021 for securities issued pursuant to the second tranche of the Financing.

Proceeds from the Financing are to be used by Tsodilo for general corporate purposes and for working capital.

As previously disclosed on January 25, 2021, a director of the Company subscribed for 23,992 Units. As a result, the Financing is a related party transaction (as defined under Multilateral Instrument 61-101 - Protection of Minority Security Holders in Special Transactions ("MI 61-101"). The Company is relying on exemptions from the formal valuation and minority shareholder approval requirements available under MI 61-101. The Company is exempt from the formal valuation requirement in section 5.4 of MI 61-101 in reliance on section 5.5(a) of MI 61-101 as the fair market value of the Second Financing, insofar as it involves the director, is not more than the 25% of the Company's market capitalization. Additionally, the Company is exempt from minority shareholder approval requirement in section 5.6 of MI 61-101 in reliance on section 5.7(b) of MI 61-101 as the fair market value of the Second Financing, insofar as it involves the director, is not more than 25% of the Company's market capitalization.

About Tsodilo Resources Limited:

Tsodilo Resources Limited is an international diamond and metals exploration company engaged in the search for economic diamond, metal deposits and industrial stone at its Bosoto (Pty) Limited ("Bosoto"), Gcwihaba Resources (Pty) Limited ("Gcwihaba") and Newdico (Pty) Ltd. ("Newdico) projects in Botswana and its Idada 361 (Pty) Limited ("Idada") project in Barberton, South Africa. The Company has a 100% stake in Bosoto (Pty) Ltd. which holds the BK16 kimberlite project in the Orapa Kimberlite Field (OKF) in Botswana and the PL216/2017 diamond prospection license also in the OKF. The Company has a 100% stake in its Gcwihaba project area consisting of seven metal (base, precious, platinum group, and rare earth) prospecting licenses all located in the North-West district of Botswana. The Company has a 100% interest in its Newdico industrial stone project located in Botswana's Central District. Additionally, Tsodilo has a 70% stake in Idada Trading 361 (Pty) Limited which holds the gold and silver exploration license in the Barberton area of South Africa. Tsodilo manages the exploration of the Gcwihaba, Bosoto, Newdico and Idada projects.

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange ("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.

This press release may contain forward-looking statements. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, that address activities, events or developments that the Company believes, expects or anticipates will or may occur in the future (including, without limitation, statements pertaining to the completion of anticipated financings) are forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements reflect the current expectations or beliefs of the Company based on information currently available to the Company. Forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that may cause the actual results of the Company to differ materially from those discussed in the forward- looking statements, and even if such actual results are realized or substantially realized, there can be no assurance that they will have the expected consequences to, or effects on the Company. Factors that could cause actual results or events to differ materially from current expectations include, among other things, changes in equity markets, changes in general economic conditions, market volatility, political developments in Botswana and surrounding countries, changes to regulations affecting the Company's activities, uncertainties relating to the availability and costs of financing needed in the future, exploration and development risks, the uncertainties involved in interpreting exploration results and the other risks involved in the mineral exploration business. Any forward-looking statement speaks only as of the date on which it is made and, except as may be required by applicable securities laws, the Company disclaims any intent or obligation to update any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or results or otherwise. Although the Company believes that the assumptions inherent in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, forward-looking statements are not a guarantee of future performance and accordingly undue reliance should not be put on such statements due to the inherent uncertainty therein.

Forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that may cause the actual results of the Company to differ materially from those discussed in the forward-looking statements and, even if such actual results are realized or substantially realized, there can be no assurance that they will have the expected consequences to, or effects on, the Company. Factors that could cause actual results or events to differ materially from current expectations include, among other things, uncertainties relating to availability and cost of funds, timing and content of work programs, results of exploration activities, interpretation of drilling results and other geological data, risks relating to variations in the diamond grade and kimberlite lithologies; variations in rates of recovery and breakage; estimates of grade and quality of diamonds, variations in diamond valuations and future diamond prices; the state of world diamond markets, reliability of mineral property titles, changes to regulations affecting the Company's activities, delays in obtaining or failure to obtain required project approvals, operational and infrastructure risk and other risks involved in the diamond exploration and development business. Any forward-looking statement speaks only as of the date on which it is made and, except as may be required by applicable securities laws, the Company disclaims any intent or obligation to update any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or results or otherwise. Although the Company believes that the assumptions inherent in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, forward-looking statements are not a guarantee of future performance and accordingly undue reliance should not be put on such statements due to their inherent uncertainty. This news release may contain assumptions, estimates, and other forward-looking statements regarding future events. Such forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties and are subject to factors, many of which are beyond the Company's control, which may cause actual results or performance to differ materially from those currently anticipated in such statements.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT:

James M. Bruchs

Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

JBruchs@TsodiloResources.com

Dr. Alistair Jeffcoate

Project Manager and Chief Geologist Officer

Alistair.jeffcoate@TsodiloResources.com

Head Office

Telephone +1 416 572 2033

Facsimile + 1 416 987 4369

http://www.TsodiloResources.com

SOURCE: Tsodilo Resources Limited

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/629195/Tsodilo-Resources-Limited-Closes-Second-and-Final-Tranche-of-Private-Placement-Financing-for-Units
S&U plc is a UK-based specialist motor finance & bridging lender. It is a holding company for two trading subsidiaries, Advantage Finance and Aspen Bridging,

Focussing on the non-prime used car market, Advantage Finance operates in the used car sector offering loans of up to 15,000 on a hire purchase basis.

Aspen Bridging was launched in 2017 to cater to the burgeoning short-term refurbishment and residential markets. Aspen Bridging lends up to 5 million per deal with an average loan of 500,000.
Representative image

A total of 65,28,210 beneficiaries have so far been vaccinated for COVID-19 through 1,34,616 sessions held till the evening of February 9, the 25th day of the immunisation drive, according to a provisional report of the Union Health Ministry.

On February 9, 2,69,202 beneficiaries were vaccinated till 6.30 pm through 7,860 vaccination sessions, the ministry said. Of these, 1,02,941 were healthcare workers, while the other 1,66,261 beneficiaries were frontline workers. Twenty-five cases of adverse effect following immunisation (AEFI) have been reported till 6:30 pm on the 25th day of the vaccination drive.

According to the health ministry, India is the fastest country to reach 60 lakh vaccinations, achieving it in just 24 days.

Follow our LIVE blog for the latest updates of the novel coronavirus pandemic

Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the vaccination drive with healthcare workers at the frontline of India's COVID-19 battle getting their first jabs on January 16.

COVID-19 Vaccine Frequently Asked Questions View more How does a vaccine work? A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine. How many types of vaccines are there? There are broadly four types of vaccine  one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine. What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind? Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time. View more Show

Indias drug regulator has approved two vaccines - Covaxin developed by Bharat Biotech and Covishield from the Oxford/AstraZeneca stable being manufactured by the Serum Institute of India (SII) - for emergency use in the country.

According to the government, the shots will be offered first to an estimated one crore healthcare workers and around two crore frontline workers, and then to persons above 50 years of age, followed by persons younger than 50 years of age with associated comorbidities.

Here are all developments related to the COVID-19 vaccine in India:

> Altogether 1,08,512 health workers in Assam have received the COVID-19 vaccine so far after 8,998 were inoculated on February 9, according to a bulletin issued by the National Health Mission. Covishield vaccine was administered to 8,301 beneficiaries at 211 session sites while 697 beneficiaries were given Covaxin at 29 sites. No case of AEFI was reported during the day.

> More than 12,700 beneficiaries received COVID-19 vaccine shots in Delhi on the day in the fourth week of the inoculation drive, the highest single-day turnout by numbers to date, officials said. The turnout was over 70 percent, a marked improvement from the figures a day before -- 9,740 (54 percent turnout).

> The government has placed orders for one crore additional doses of Covishield from Serum Institute of India and 45 lakh more doses of Covaxin from Bharat Biotech, officials of the two vaccine makers said on the day.

> More than 23,700 healthcare professionals and frontline workers were vaccinated against COVID-19 in Maharashtra on the day, said a state health official. With this, the number of people inoculated so far in the state rose to 5,36,197, he said.

> Considering the situation in Maharashtra, Mumbai-based Haffkine Institute needs to conduct research on a COVID-19 vaccine soon, Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray said on the day.

> There is no provision of insurance for recipients of COVID-19 vaccine against any kind of side effects or medical complications that may arise due to the inoculation, Rajya Sabha was informed on the day. The COVID-19 vaccination is entirely voluntary for the beneficiary, Minister of State for Health Ashwini Choubey said in response to a question on whether those administered/to be administered with the COVID-19 vaccines are insured against any kind of side effects or medical complications that may arise due to inoculation.

States Total Beneficiaries Andhra Pradesh 3,24,415 Arunachal Pradesh 13,480 Assam 1,08,887 Bihar 4,02,081 Chandigarh 6,458 Chhattisgarh 1,96,908 Delhi 1,26,353 Goa 8,929 Gujarat 5,61,499 Haryana 1,84,730 Himachal Pradesh 61,271 Jharkhand 1,39,693 Karnataka 4,39,543 Kerala 3,21,189 Madhya Pradesh 3,80,112 Maharashtra 5,33,480 Odisha 3,25,493 Punjab 86,657 Rajasthan 4,90,356 Tamil Nadu 1,84,720 Telangana 2,29,027 Uttar Pradesh 6,73,542 Uttarakhand 85,359 West Bengal 3,98,319

Here is the state-wise vaccination in the country:

(With inputs from PTI)

Follow our full coverage on COVID-19 here
The government and Parliament have great respect for farmers who are voicing their views on the three farm bills, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Wednesday and asserted that he holds their agitation "sacred" while making a fresh appeal to agitating farmers to resume talks with the Centre.

READ | PM Modi invites protesting farmers for talks on agri laws: Top points from his Lok Sabha address

In his reply in Lok Sabha to a discussion on the Motion of Thanks to the President's Address, PM Modi said, "I consider the Kisan Andolan to be 'pavitra' (sacred). But when 'andolanjivis' hijack sacred protests, showcase photos of those jailed for serious offences like terrorism, does it serve any purpose? Not allowing toll plazas to work, destroying telecom towers in Punjab, does it serve a 'pavitra andolan' (sacred agitation)."

READ | MSP hasn't stopped after three farm laws enacted, you can't deny truth: PM Modi

PM Modi said, "The sacred agitation of these farmers is ruined by 'andolanjivis' and not 'andolankaris'. So, it is necessary for the nation to differentiate between 'andolanjivi' and 'andolankari'," he said. The PM also said, "There is a big group of people who believe in 'talking the right thing' but object to 'doing the right thing'." He also made a fresh appeal to agitating farmers to come to the table for talks before concluding his speech.

READ | Ab zyada ho raha hai: PM Narendra Modi takes jibe at Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury

He staunchly defended the three contentious farms laws and made it clear that the new system under these laws was not compulsory and only provided more options. PM Modi also attacked the opposition parties for "misleading" farmers, saying those who are disrupting the House are doing so as per a "well-planned strategy" as they are unable to digest that people can see the truth.

During his over 90-minute speech, most of which was devoted to the farmers' issues, Modi said his government is open to amending the laws if there are any shortcomings, noting that the farmer unions were offered to have a clause by clause discussion on all three Acts to address their apprehensions.

With agitating farmer unions criticising his use of 'andolanjivi' during his speech in Rajya Sabha on Monday, the Prime Minister sought to make a distinction between 'andolankari' (agitators) and 'andolanjivi', a barb for people who jump from one protest to another.

Noting that his government and the House respect the farmers protesting the newly enacted laws, he said this is the reason why top Union ministers have been talking to them.

Hitting out at the protesting Congress members, he said those who are disrupting the House are doing so as per a "well-planned strategy" as they are unable to digest that people are seeing through the truth. "Through their games, the trust of the people can never be won," he said, amidst protests by the opposition members.

Congress members in their speech could not highlight any substantive flaw against these laws, he said and accused the opposition of misleading farmers. Taking on the critics of the farm laws, he said they have been fuelling fear among farmers that it will lead to the weakening of the mandi system and MSP mechanism. "After the laws were passed by Parliament, no mandi was shut. In fact, more allocation has been made in the budget to modernise the farm mandis and boost the infrastructure. Likewise, MSP has remained. Procurement on MSP has remained. These facts can't be ignored," he said.

PM Modi also hit out at opposition members who had asked why these Acts when they were not demanded by farmers, saying he was shocked at the argument and asserted that his government believes in continuously empowering people. No one had demanded laws against dowry or triple 'talaq', he said, adding that they were enacted as a requirement for a progressive society. His government believes in progressive policies and not regressive ones, he said.
Breakbulk Middle East (BBME), the GCCs leading breakbulk and project cargo event, held under the patronage of the UAE Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure, successfully wrapped up its Digital Special on February 10.

The event was participated by high-level officials and professionals from the breakbulk and project cargo industry.

Day two of the event featured two critical sessions Women in Breakbulk Leadership Forum and Education Day. The event has endorsed both these causes since quite some time as they are crucial for the growth of the industry.

Leveraging the success of 2020s Women in Breakbulk networking session, the Womens Forum brought together women thought leaders from different sectors in the industry, who shared their success stories. Through the Education Day session, the Digital Special enlightened students about the opportunities awaiting them.

As part of the Advisory Board Leadership Forums, two elite roundtables led by regional executives were also held. The roundtables focused on relationship building with regional project owners, the energy transition in the industry and how the industry is adapting to a changing cargo base.

Creating a diverse workforce

Over the years, Breakbulk Middle East has demonstrated great support to achieve gender equality within the industry. The Womens Forum highlighted the need to bridge the gender gap through two sessions  The Many Paths to Female Leadership: A Career Blueprint and How Women Are Contributing to a Post-COVID Business Recovery. Both sessions stressed on the career trajectories of women leaders, their strategies to cope with the pandemic and enhance the growth of their companies.

Princess Sarah Al Saud, Director of Maritime Business Development at the International Forum for Maritime Transport, Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport in Alexandria, explained: The world today has become progressive. Peoples minds are opening up to the fact that women have the power to transform. According to Grant Thortons Women in Business 2020 report, 87 per cent of global mid-market companies have at least one woman in a senior management role in 2020. This figure is proof of the changing world. Even though women make up a minuscule percentage of the industrys workforce, those who are in it are making a difference. Their unique innate abilities make them an asset for companies and the industry at large. To help more women be a part of the industry, spreading awareness is integral and BBME is doing a great job at inspiring young women.

Leslie Meredith, Marketing Director, Breakbulk Events & Media, said: It was truly an honour and pleasure to moderate the two Womens Forum sessions that had outstanding women who have made a mark for themselves in the industry. Our Women in Breakbulk session received much acclaim and we are happy to see the fantastic response that the Digital Special has received. Through this endeavour, we are confident that we will bring about a change in the industry by encouraging more women to be a part of the workforce.

Shaping young minds

The Education Day session had two key sessions  Why Consider a Career in Project Cargo, Logistics and Maritime and Keys to Success: Insights from Across the Supply Chain that informed and inspired students to be a part of the industry.

Dr Ismail Abdelghafar Ismail Farag, President of the Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport, said: The breakbulk and project cargo industry in the Middle East has been a key sector that contributes to the growth of economies in the region. To ensure that we continue this momentum, we must train the younger generation to be competent professionals. At the Academy, we are putting in all our efforts to ensure that our students gain the required skills to have successful careers. BBMEs Education Day has helped our students greatly to understand the functioning of the industry and gain career advice from experts.

Ben Blamire, Event Director, Breakbulk Middle East, said: We are thrilled with the response we have received over the two days of the Digital Special. This has inspired us to strive hard to ensure that our next in-person event scheduled for 2022 is even bigger. We are glad that our platform has helped key decision-makers and students gain valuable industry insights. We hope the Digital Special has piqued the interest of industry professionals, providing them with a knowledge-rich experience that will help their companies to evolve and promote the growth of the local and regional industry.

Breakbulk recently launched the Breakbulk365 program that includes engaging webinars and the BreakbulkONE Show to ensure the project cargo industry stays connected and updated on insights and regional information at all times.

The live in-person event is scheduled to be held on February 1 and 2, 2022. -TradeArabia News Service
Photo: Internet

At the reception for the Lao delegation, Vietnamese Ambassador to Singapore Tao Thi Thanh Huong highlighted the special relationship between Vietnam and Laos, as well as the close ties between the two embassies.



During the meeting, the ambassador congratulated Laos on successfully containing the COVID-19 pandemic and organising the 11th National Congress of the Lao Peoples Revolutionary Party (LPRP), saying Laos is one of the countries with the lowest COVID-19 death toll.



For his part, Ambassador Khonepheng Thammavong expressed his belief that the Vietnam-Laos relationship will grow stronger in the time ahead.



LPRP leaders are delighted at the re-election of Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong as the leader of the Communist Party of Vietnam, the Lao Ambassador said./.


Food and Drug Safety Minister Kim Gang-lip speaks during a press conference at the ministry in Cheongju, North Chungcheong Province, Wednesday, on the conditional approval of AstraZeneca's coronavirus vaccine for all age groups including people aged 65 or older. Yonhap



By Bahk Eun-ji



The Ministry of Food and Drug Safety said Wednesday it has approved the use of the COVID-19 vaccine made by AstraZeneca for all adults despite lingering concerns over its efficacy and safety especially for the elderly.



The decision is contrary to that made by a dozen other countries which have either not approved use of the vaccine from the British-Swedish pharmaceutical firm and Oxford University or have recommended against giving shots to people aged over 65.



Following the decision, anti-coronavirus inoculations are set to begin Feb. 26, with the AstraZeneca vaccine being the first to be administered before vaccines from other companies arrive.



The ministry said that it decided to approve the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine for adults aged over 18 on condition that the pharmaceutical company submits further data on clinical trials.



The decision was made at a third review by the ministry's panels of experts. Earlier in the first assessment, participants said it would be okay to administer the vaccine to adults of all ages, while the second review group concluded that further study of its efficacy and safety for senior citizens would be needed.



"The final review panel for the vaccine concluded that it is effective in the elderly, but use for senior citizens aged 65 or older should be carefully determined according to each person's health," Drug Safety Minister Kim Gang-lip said in a press briefing Wednesday.



With the approval, vaccinations will proceed according to the plan devised by the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA).



The KDCA said it will begin by vaccinating 776,900 people including medical staff and elderly people at geriatric hospitals in the rest of first quarter. Many of the elderly here are thus likely to get the AstraZeneca vaccine.



The agency said it would finalize the list of vaccination recipients in the first quarter by Feb. 19. Exactly when to begin inoculations will be decided on later by its own panel of experts.



While the government here has given a positive response to the AstraZeneca vaccine, several countries have advised caution when vaccinating those over 65, mainly due to insufficient data on its safety for the elderly.



Regulators of a number of European countries including France, Germany, Sweden and Austria have questioned whether the vaccine from the company should be given to them at all  the four decided to prioritize AstraZeneca use for those younger than 65.



Meanwhile, a survey of 1,068 adults conducted from Feb. 5 to 8 by Seoul National University's Graduate School of Public Health showed 56.8 percent of Koreans want to get the coronavirus vaccine sooner than the order that will be set by the government.



In a similar survey conducted by the school a month earlier, 67.7 percent of respondents answered that they would get the vaccine after checking on whether those getting the shots first were fine.



In the meantime, the KDCA said all Korean nationals arriving from abroad must submit a negative result from a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) coronavirus test before embarking for the country, starting from Feb. 24. Last month, the government mandated all foreign arrivals to submit negative PCR test results.



The toughened regulation came as the number of virus variant cases from the United Kingdom, Brazil and South Africa has been growing here.



Regardless of nationality, all arrivals should undergo a total of three diagnostic tests, one before departure, one immediately after entry and one before being released from the mandatory 14-day self-quarantine.



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New Delhi, Feb 10 : 'Original footage might be grainy and jerky but has a ring of truth because it is the 'thing itself and not an image of it, Gopalkrishna Gandhi writes in the Preface of "Restless as Mercury - My Life As A Young Man" that knits together the autobiographical observations scattered over several pages of the "Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi" and seamlessly complements "The Story of My Experiments With Truth" to bring into focus the Father of the Nations descriptions of his life in its familial aspect.

"This autobiographical compilation does what it does for the sole reason that a story as first told is not a story, it is reality. 'Original' footage, howsoever grainy, jerky, starting and ending without notice, has the ring of truth. It is the 'thing' itself, not an image of it. A mint-fresh 'feature' film, for all its vivid fascination, is still a manufactured product.

"Gandhi's life story in his own words and those of his contemporaries who quote him is heard best when heard directly. It is the organic truth. This book is not 'Experiments with Truth' taken further afield, nor is it a foil to the many remarkable biographies of him. It threads 'Experiments' into other autobiographical texts including, somewhat unprecedentedly, what he wrote within the fold of his family he so loved but did not privilege," Gopalkrishna Gandhi writes in this scholarly 377-page book that has been published by Rupa.

To this end, "Restless as Mercury" is a candid and unflinching account of the struggles, experiences, and philosophies that informed and influenced the young Gandhi. It also details how he kept, not without stumbling, his love of family in step with his sense of public duties.

Image Source: IANS News

"Beginning at the beginning, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi's autobiography moves rapidly from his recollections of his early years as a child, youth, husband, student, then enters real time. That is, the events he describes are happening around him as he writes about them. He includes events that are personal and 'out there' in the public sphere, as well as the seemingly small and the obviously momentous. Like two tracks of the many railway lines he travelled on, the events and his descriptions of them move together. And then, like a train that is stopped by the pull of a chain, the narrative stops, abruptly, at year 1920. Gandhi is just fifty-one at that point and his most climactic years -- nearly three full decades' long -- was ahead of him.

"He brings 'these chapters to a close' at that point because, he says, his 'experiments' are now indistinguishable from the life stories of Congress leaders and propriety requires that he not bring those into the account. 'In fact,' he says in his farewell chapter, 'my pen instinctively refuses to proceed further'," Gopalkrishna Gandhi writes in the book.

"But the 'self' cannot really disappear. Gandhi continues to speak and write about his life, incidentally, as it were. Plunged in political work, organizing his mass campaigns of satyagraha, undertaking fasts for public and personal reasons, getting imprisoned, freed, imprisoned again, traversing the Indian countryside to spread awareness of his political goal -- Swaraj, freedom, for India -- and also his 'constructive' work such as hand-spinning, the eradication of untouchability, Hindu-Muslim amity, Gandhi yet finds the time- and the need-to look back to incidents from his life, about his family, himself," says the Preface of the book, that is in six parts and covers the period 1869 to 1914.

Glimmers about his Gandhi's life, his association with people and with his large and growing family, biological and ideological, slip through his public actions, speeches, letters, and other writings. "As do personal observations about his inner struggles, his relationships with people -- both famous and not famous. With the same frankness as marks his autobiography, he shares in speeches, recorded conversations, articles, and in letters to the family and close friends, of the years 'covered' in his autobiography and beyond." "Those scattered narrations of his fill in and fill out the before-life, the real-time life, and of his autobiography's story. Alongside 'Experiments', these cameos of his childhood, adolescence, student life, his mature years, show us the son, brother, husband, father, grandfather, mentor, friend in the man who was being hailed as a Mahatma. Starting from his early days, these go right up to what probably is the very last sentence --'I hate being late'-- spoken by him (in Gujarati) seconds before his assassin-to-be, Beretta in hand, stands facing him," Gopalkrishna Gandhi writes.

This compilation, says the writer, "may be said to carry one distinguishing mark: it brings into focus Gandhi's descriptions of his life in its familial aspect. His life in the epic domain of actions for public causes has been and will continue to be written about. His life as lived within the fold of domesticities has had fewer tellings. And that cannot ring truer than in his own and his intimates' words".

Apart from selected borrowings from 'Experiments', mainly from the Gujarati original, and Gandhi's own words occurring elsewhere, the narrations of five of his contemporaries - Prabhudas Chhaganlal Gandhi (1901-1992), Gandhi's grand-nephew, who ran from Sabarmati Ashram a journal Madhpudo (Honeycomb) during Gandhi's lifetime; Joseph J. Doke (1861-1913) his first biographer; Millie Polak (1881-1962), author of "Mr Gandhi, The Man", described as a remarkable work of first-hand observation; and the writings of his secretaries, Mahadev Desai (1892-1942) and Pyarelal (1899-1982) - have been incorporated in the book. Notes at the end direct the reader to the specific works and pages where these words appear.

"Restless As Mercury" is truly a treasure-trove of knowledge for the present and future generations and is a valuable contribution to the never-ending studies on the life and times of Mahatma Gandhi.

(Vishnu Makhijani can be reached at vishnu.makhijani@ians.in)

-- Syndicated from IANS
Chinese Couple Sentenced to Prison After Voicing Support for Dissidents

Chinese entrepreneur Geng Xiaonan and her husband Qin Zhen, who have publicly voiced support for dissidents in China, were sentenced to prison on Feb. 9 after being convicted of illegal business operations.

The court, in the Haidian district of Beijing, sentenced Geng to three years in prison and Qin to two and a half years, with three years of probation.

In her personal statement, Geng pleaded guilty and expressed her wish to be held accountable for all the charges filed by the prosecution.

Geng, a publisher and artist, has been a consistent supporter of Chinese dissidents on social media, once saying they were heroes contributing to a more democratic China. According to Cai, Geng has provided financial assistance to many people who faced charges from Chinese authorities, including Xu, and Bao Tong, former policy secretary under Chinas late premier Zhao Ziyang.

She also called for the release of citizen journalist Chen Qiushi, who provided firsthand reports of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan last year.

Friends of the couple werent permitted to attend the hearing, according to tweets by Beijing-based independent journalist Gao Yu. Meanwhile, police blocked a close friend of the couple and former professor at Tsinghua University, Xu Zhangrun, from leaving his home or going to the court.

Gao said in a tweet that she thinks Geng admitted guilt to avoid implicating her loved ones, subordinates at work, and business partners in two printing house companies. Gao said Geng likely wanted to ensure they wouldnt get in trouble amid the Lunar New Year, which falls on Feb. 12 and is traditionally the holiday for Chinese families to reunite.

Cai Xia, a former professor at Beijings Central Party School, the top school for training Communist Party cadres, and a renowned Chinese dissident, questioned the courts ruling in a Feb. 9 tweet.

[Chinese] authorities prevented her friends from attending the hearing  within hours, the recorded video [of the hearing] disappeared [online]. To put it plainly, [Chinese authorities] imposed political persecution on her and are afraid of global attention on her at the same time, Cai said.

On Sept. 9, 2020, Geng and her husband were taken into custody by police in Haidian district. Her friends suspect she was detained because of her support for Chinese dissidents.

On Oct. 21, Chinese intellectuals wrote an open letter to top Chinese leaders, calling for the immediate release of Geng and her husband. Signatories included Xu; Tsinghua University professor Guo Yuhua; two professors from Peking University, He Weifang and Zhang Qianfan; Hao Jian, a research fellow at Harvard Universitys Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies; and Li Xianting, a Chinese art critic.

They noted in their letter that the charge of operating an illegal business operation was a vague accusation that is now used by Chinese authorities for political persecution of human rights defenders in corporate China.

On Nov. 12, another open letter addressed to Chinese leader Xi Jinping was sent by the Committee of Concerned Scientists in an attempt to press for the couples release.

The Committee of Concerned Scientists is a Washington-based independent body of scientists, physicians, engineers, and scholars devoted to the protection and advancement of human rights and academic freedom.
Government will be moving to clamp down on food establishments which have been trying to beat the COVID restrictions, by bringing out their staff to prepare meals, which are then put on sale at other locations.
President of the European Council Charles Michel announced a visit to Kyiv after a meeting with Prime Minister of Ukraine Denys Shmyhal.

Charles Michel wrote about this on Twitter.

"I conveyed steadfast support for Ukraines recovery, reforms and fight against corruption to Denys Shmyhal. The EU is united and firm in its position on Ukraines sovereignty and territorial integrity. Looking forward to visiting Ukraine soon," he wrote.

A Ukrainian government delegation headed by Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal began a working visit to Brussels on February 9. Shmyhal met with European Council President Charles Michel and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. The program of the visit includes a series of working meetings with representatives of the European Commission and the European Parliament. On February 11, Shmyhal will lead the talks in the format of the EU-Ukraine Association Council.

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King Mswati III of Eswatini disembarks from a plane at Sochi International Airport as he arrives to take part in the 2019 Russia-Africa Summit in Sochi, Russia, 23 October 2019.

Swaziland's coronavirus recovery strategy has been derailed after Minister of Health Lizzie Nkosi announced the tiny kingdom would no longer use the AstraZeneca vaccine.

Only last week she announced the vaccine would play the major tole in the first phase of the recovery plan for kingdom (also known as eSwatini).

Swaziland, which borders South Africa, was due to receive AstraZeneca doses from the COVAX Facility, the global vaccine distribution scheme co-led by the World Health Organisation (WHO).

South Africa has stopped the rollout of AstraZeneca shots, after researchers published preliminary data showing the vaccine was less effective against the new variant of coronavirus (COVID-19) that is spreading in southern Africa.

The eSwatini Observer newspaper reported close to 90 percent of coronavirus cases in South Africa have the variant.

Nkosi told state television on Tuesday (9 February 2021) the Swazi Government would consider getting doses from Pfizer or any other supplier endorsed by the WHO.

Swaziland had expected to receive 108,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine by the end of February. Frontline healthcare workers would have been the first to get the vaccine.

As of Tuesday 16,288 people had tested positive for coronavirus and 610 had died, according to Ministry of Health figures.
Here we are more than a month into the coronavirus vaccination campaign and it appears that there are still many elderly residents of rural Cayuga County not vaccinated and worse yet, no practical access to an appointment. Im talking about people over 85 struggling to get an appointment against their much younger and more computer-savvy neighbors in an entirely swamped system.

My call to the Cayuga County Health Department was entirely unhelpful, something to the effect they werent doing that anymore. These are elderly people, in some cases quite frail, they cannot be expected to fight their way through the system without help and they shouldnt have to.

I cant imagine that there isnt a way for the county or the state to generate a list starting with the oldest first with their names, addresses, & telephone numbers after all they must be recorded by the IRS, Medicare, or the Board of Elections. At the very least, they should be able to call the Health Department and get put on a list.

We need to do better. Yes, I know that New York State has taken over the vaccination of the high priority groups but the nearest location is Syracuse and there arent any appointments available anyways. In any event, its hardly reasonable to expect these older people to travel all the way to Syracuse in the middle of the winter anyhow.
Crown Casino being found unfit to hold a gambling licence in NSW is one of the most extraordinary shifts in gambling reform in Australia. This momentous finding by former Supreme Court judge Patricia Bergin, SC, draws a line in the sand regarding the frequently unethical, often borderline and sometimes illegal operations of the gambling industry in this country.

For far too long gambling industry players have been given a free pass to operate as they please in Australia, with minimal oversight from the governments that license them.

Crowns Barangaroo development in Sydney and major shareholder James Packer (inset). Credit:Nick Moir, Getty

Crown has undoubtedly worked in the shadows for a long time, effectively aided and abetted by the Victorian governments unwillingness to properly resource the Victorian Commission for Gambling and Liquor Regulation.

I was appalled when there was next to no action from the Victorian government when video evidence emerged of actual shopping bags of money being laundered at Crown. The review announced in December was too little, too late.
CAIRO, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News / WAM - 10th Feb, 2021) Ahmed Aboul Gheit, Secretary-General of the Arab League, congratulated the UAE for the successful entry of the Hope Probe into the orbit of Mars, stressing that this success is the outcome of an investment in knowledge and an academic and scientific renaissance, which was reinforced and supported by the government over many decades.

In his statement issued today, Aboul Gheit said that this unique space mission, which was achieved by an Emirati team, has placed Arabs on the map of global excellence in the field of knowledge.

He added that the achievement has demonstrated the ability of Arabs to keep pace with modern scientific knowledge.
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The Political Parties Disputes Tribunal has suspended the decision by the ruling Jubilee Party to expel its six nominated senators.

Following their expulsion on Monday, the senators moved to the tribunal Tuesday, seeking to overturn the Partys decision.

Senator Issac Mwaura filed his complaint separately while Senators Millicent Omanga, Naomi Waqo, Mary Yiane, Prengei Victor and Falhada Dekow filed their complaint jointly.

The tribunals chairperson, Desma Nungo, said they suspend the expulsion of the senators to allow the affected members to get a fair hearing.

The Tribunal also barred the Registrar of Political Parties from removing the names of the senators from the membership of Jubilee Party pending hearing and determination of the case.

Pending hearing and determination of this application inter-parties this tribunal hereby stays any further implementation of Jubilee Party decision dated February 8 to expel the applicants from the party the order reads.

The cases will be mentioned on February 16 and February 17.



Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - February 10, 2021) - MRVL Pet Pharmaceuticals Corp. (the "Company" or "MRVL") announced today that it has closed on a total of $4,245,653 with the closing of a 2nd tranche (final) of the private placement of 6,548,268 units at a price of $0.325 per unit for gross proceeds of $2,128,187. Each unit consisted of one common share and a half warrant. Each whole warrant will entitle the subscriber to purchase an additional common share at an exercise price of $0.50 per share on or before February 10, 2022.

Total finders' fees on the first and second (final) tranche were $43,973 in cash and $223,275 to be satisfied by the issuance of 687,000 shares at a deemed price of $0.325 per share. In addition, a total of 135,300 Finders Warrants were issued with an exercise price of $0.50 per share with an expiry date of January 8, 2022.

Along with the closing of the $4.246 Million financing, Dr. Joel Beth Navratik will be appointed CEO of MRVL. Dr. Navratik earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Zoology and a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine, both from the University of Florida. She completed her internship in small animal medicine and surgery at the world-renowned Animal Medical Center and Bobst Hospital in New York City, NY in 1994. After training she joined a veterinary practice in Aventura, Florida then became a partner and grew it from a 2.5 doctor practice to a thriving 6 doctor 24/7 referral ER facility. She sold the practice to VCA in 2012 and stayed on as medical Director until 2020. She served as corporate Medical Director for an 8 veterinary hospital corporation in South Florida from 2000-2012. In 2013, Dr. Navratik also consulted in the development of OcuBright, a veterinary tear stain supplement that eliminates tear stains in dogs. She developed a clinical trial with a veterinary ophthalmologist to determine the safety and efficacy of OcuBright. In 2017 she co-developed a Veterinary CE company that would provide state mandated RACE approved continuing education for veterinarians and technicians.

The Company announces that it has effected the previously announced name to MRVL Pet Pharmaceuticals Corp. (formerly EGF Health Holdings Corp.) as it will be focusing on the pharmaceutical sector for veterinary industry. The new CUSIP is 55349X101 and the new ISIN is CA55349X1015. The name change will automatically be reflected in any accounts after February 15th, 2021 and any share certificates will need to be exchanged with the company's transfer agent.

The Company also announces in conjunction with completing the transaction with MRVL it will hold an AGM to vote on the spinout of its medical device technology for shareholders of record on the effective date of December 24, 2020, prior to the MRVL transaction.

About MRVL Pet Pharmaceuticals Corp.

MRVL Pet Pharmaceuticals Corp. (formerly EGF Health Holdings Corp.) is a Vancouver, B.C. based early-stage life sciences and technology company seeking to acquire or develop business ventures in health and technologies.

MRVL PET PHARMACEUTICALS CORP.

Dr. Joel Beth Navratik,

CEO

Mr. Derrick Gaon,

Corporate Communications

Email: MRVLPetPharma@gmail.com

Notice Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

This news release contains "forward-looking statements," statements in this news release which are not purely historical are forward-looking statements and include any statements regarding beliefs, plans, expectations, or intentions regarding the future, including but not limited to, statements regarding the private placement, name change and transaction with MRVL.

Actual results could differ from those projected in any forward-looking statements due to numerous factors. Such factors include, among others, the inherent uncertainties associated with the life science and technology industries and difficulties associated with obtaining financing on acceptable terms. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date of this news release, and we assume no obligation to update the forward-looking statements, or to update the reasons why actual results could differ from those projected in the forward-looking statements. Although we believe that the beliefs, plans, expectations, and intentions contained in this news release are reasonable, there can be no assurance that such beliefs, plans, expectations, or intentions will prove to be accurate.

Not for dissemination in the United States.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/74165
Following President Museveni's pronouncement allowing learners in semi-candidate classes to report back to school on March 1, many private and government-funded schools across the country have hiked their tuition fees to cope with the rising operational costs occasioned by the coronavirus pandemic.

Semi-candidate classes include Primary Six, Senior Three, and Senior Five.

However, a few schools have maintained their previous fees structures.

Mr Wycliff Makky Twinomujuni, the head teacher of Kashenyi Secondary School, a government-aided school in Ruhinda Sub-county, Rukungiri District, said they increased fees from Shs400,000 to Shs450,000 to cater for extra expenses arising out of the need to observe Covid-19 standard operating procedures (SOPs) for learners and their teachers.

"....We have to buy extra beds, cater for remedial lessons, sanitisers and facemasks," he said.

President Museveni during the televised address last week observed that schools should observe the SOPs as they wait for the vaccines, which are scheduled to arrive in the country before the end of this month.

"We are putting much effort into getting the Covid-19 vaccine. We are preparing to start the vaccinations at the end of February or early March. We shall start with the health workers, security personnel, teachers, and then the elders," he said.

Mr Arthur Agaba, the head teacher of Makobore High School in Rukungiri District, said they have increased from Shs600,000 to Shs700, 000 to create more space for accommodation.

In Bushenyi, Mr Perez Basiime, the headteacher of Parental Care Primary School, a private school, said they maintained their fees.

"For us here, we have a five-year plan and our parents know that, and after that period, we will sit and review whether we increase the fees," he said.

Mr Celestine Twinomugisha, the head master St Kagwa Primary School in Bushenyi District, said they could not increase fees because some parents are yet to clear first term arrears.

"There are parents who had debts from the first term before the country was locked down and they have not paid. Parents don't have the money," he said.

In Lira, St Gracious Secondary School has also increased fees from Shs779, 000 to Shs879,000 for Senior Three and Senior Five. Mr Charles Ogwang, a parent at the school, said they were not consulted on the increment.

The Lango College school head teacher, Mr Sammy Bob Okino, said they could not increase fees because some parents can not afford even the current fees of Shs450,000.

In Masaka, Hajji Meddie Mutebi, the head teacher of KY Day and Boarding Primary School, said the school will not increase school fees since parents have also not been working as a result of the Covid-19 restrictions .

He said Primary Six pupils will pay Shs685,000, which they paid last year while Primary Seven candidates are paying Shs830,000.

At Ibin Salaam Islamic Primary School-Nyendo, Mr Sulaiman Isabirye, the head teacher, said they have slightly increased school fees to meet the extra expenses.

Previously, pupils in all classes were paying Shs400,000 but candidates and semi-candidates will now pay Shs430,000 as their school fees.

At Rich Dad Junior School, Najjanankumbi in Kampala, the learners in day section who have been paying Shs900,000 per term will now pay Shs1.2m.

"The fees have been increased to try to cope with the effects of the lockdown, which left the school with accumulated debts," Mr Hood Kiggundu, the school head teacher, said.

Mr George Bamuleseyo, the head teacher at Kennedy Secondary School in Kawuku on Entebbe Road, said they will not increase fees.

In Mityana District, many schools declined to reveal their fees structures for the reporting semi candidate classes. However Ms Sylvia Namabidde, Director St Elizabeth Girls SS in Mityana Town, said her school will not raise fees. "Through our association, we are appealing to the government to give us the promised stimulus package to cushion us against the financial problems occasioned by Covid-19 and avoid pushing the burden to the parents," she said.

In some government-aided schools in villages, few pupils were wearing facemasks and some who had them were not wearing them properly.

In Namutumba District, Ms Prossy Muyinda, the director of Victoria Primary School, said they maintained the fees structure for both day and boarding section.

Kibaale High School in Namutumba District said they have not changed their fees structure "because most of their parents are poor".

Surprisingly, some schools such as Musana Vocational High School in Iganga District said they have instead lowered fees for students preparing to report in March.

Mr Samuel Tusubira, a parent, said: "I was surprised when they told us to pay Shs650,000 instead of Shs800, 000 we have been paying."

In Buikwe District, the head teacher St Noa Mawaggali Senior Secondary School in Njeru Municipality, Mr Leonard Ssali, said following a meeting with the departmental head, they resolved not to increase fees. The same situation prevailed at MM College Wairaka in Jinja, Tororo Girls School, Mbale Progressive School and Mbale Secondary School.

Mr Valentine Obbo, a head teacher of Tropical College, a private school in Tororo, said they would meet with parents to agree on the fees structure.

The head teacher of St Kizito primary school in Tororo Municipality, Ms Clare Adikin Opoya, asked the government to increase grants for schools.

In Kabarole District, the Director of St Lucia High school, Ms Lucia Alinda, said the school will maintain the fees.

Tooro Parents Education Centre in Fort Portal will maintain the old fees.

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In Gulu, Mr James Ocira, the head teacher of Good Hope Nursery and Primary school, said they are not yet decide on whether to increase fees or not.

Gulu Central High School said parents were already complaining about the current fees structure and the school will not increase the fees.

In Kisoro District, the headmaster of St Paul's Mutolere SSm Mr Hygiene Behaisye, said although they have not increased fees, his school is facing financial challenges.

What the ministry says on hiking fees...

Meanwhile there is panic among education stakeholders that private schools will ask for prohibitive tuition fees.

The panic was escalated by Education Minister Janet Museveni's statement that the ministry has no control over tuition fees rates, leaving parents at the mercy of individual institutions.

"We can't say we will manage that at a ministry level. I can't talk about how the tuition will be. The schools will be able to inform the parents how tuition will be, how they can account which semester or term when they get to school. Technical team will be on standby where to intervene," Ms Museveni said last Friday.

Compiled by Fred Wambede, Bill Oketch, Milton Bandiho, Ronald Kabanza, Patrick Ebong, Philip Wafula, Ronald Seebe, Sandra Babirye, Denis Edema, Abubaker Kirunda, Robert Muhereza, Leonard Mbishinzimana,Alex Ashaba, Suzan Nanjala ,Malik Fahad Jjingo, Jessica Nabukenya ,Felix Warom, Rashul Adidi and Scovin Iceta.
China's new yuan-denominated loans totaled 3.58 trillion yuan (about 554.75 billion U.S. dollars) in January, up 225.2 billion yuan year on year, central bank data showed Tuesday.



The M2, a broad measure of money supply that covers cash in circulation and all deposits, increased 9.4 percent year on year to 221.3 trillion yuan at the end of January, according to the People's Bank of China (PBOC).

The M2 growth was 0.7 percentage points lower than that at the end of December but was 1 percentage point higher than the same period of the year before.

The narrow measure of the money supply (M1), which covers cash in circulation plus demand deposits, rose by 14.7 percent year on year to 62.56 trillion yuan at the end of January.

The M1 growth was 6.1 percentage points higher than that at the end of December but was 14.7 percentage points higher than the same period of the previous year.

M0, the amount of cash in circulation, fell by 3.9 percent year on year to 8.96 trillion yuan by the end of last month.

The central bank injected 531 billion yuan of net cash into the market in January, PBOC data showed.
The offices of the Osu Klottey Wulormo, Wor-Lumor Boni Nuumo Noi Osekan Kpenuku and the Osu Paramount Stool Father, Nii Narku Teinor III have called on the Inspector General of Police, Mr. James Oppong Boanu to assist in forestalling chaos in Osu in the face of the demise of the Osu Mantse, Nii Okwei Kinka Dowuona VI.



The Osu Mantse died on Saturday, 6th February 2021 at the Cocoa Clinic in Accra.



In a joint statement, the Nadu/Klortey Wulomo and the Stool father said it is trite knowledge that there is an undestooled Osu Mantse in the person of Nii Nortey Owuo III which premised a decade of litigation which had raged on until the demise of one of the litigants so there is the need to keep calm to avoid plunging the town into yet another era of litigation.



Born Michael Dowuona-Owoo on November 7, 1963, at Adabraka in Accra, the late Nii Okwei was enstooled as the Osu Mantse in 2007. Nii Dowuona VI was elected President of the Greater Accra Regional House of Chiefs in 2016 and was later re-elected in 2020 after serving a successful four-year term.



There has been an uneasy calm in the community after the death of the chief as social media news puts it that an embattled Mankralo, Nii Ako Nortei will be the acting Osu Mantse until a substantive one is installed.



In a rebuttal, the office of the Osu Klottey Wulormo and the Osu Paramount Stool Father, Nii Narku Teinor III has rubbished the news.



In a joint press release, the two traditional leaders called on all stakeholders of Osu Tradition to remain calm and to seek peace for Osu to save the town from another protracted litigation that bedeviled Osu from the time the late Nii Okwei Kinka Dowuona V ascended the Osu stool.



It is true that a 'Chief of Osu' a Mantse as known by a portion of the public has passed on. We all send our condolences to his family and all relations with all sincerity. It is trite knowledge that there is an undestooled Osu Mantse in the person of Nii Nortey Owuo III which premised a decade of litigation which had raged on until the demise of one of the litigants, the statement said.



In a petition to the Inspector General of Police, the Klorty/Nadu Wulomo and the Stool Father of Osu called for assistance to forestall chaos in Osu in the face of the demise of the "Osu Mantse" Nii Okwei Kinka Dowuona VI.



They cited reasons for the petition as;



1. There has been a long standing dispute in the court between Nii Nortey Owuo III and Nii Okwei Kinka Dowuona VI.



2. The Mankralo of Osu is bedeviled with a destoolement charges from his quarter (Osu Ashante Blohum) and that his attempt to front any traditional acting position would not be countenanced by the elders of Osu Ashante Blohum quarter.



3. Non accredited persons in the Osu are seeking to usurp authority that does not lie in their purview, which may be a serious cause of mayhem.



4. Osu has a constitution of 10th October 1910, which explicitly raise the curtain on the traditionaldirectors ladder". This constitution has been violated by obscurantist within Osu, which was the cause long protracted litigation and disturbance of the peace in Osu.



5. These same obscurantists who went underground in the days of the disputes are preparing to take advantage of the demise of Nii Okwei Kinka Dowuona VI.



The petition concluded that:



Following from the above, the Osu Nadu/Klottey Wulormo and the Osu Paramount Stool Father, the forebearers and custodians of Osu lore and customs crave your indulgence to assist us to forestall any planned lawlessness in Osu.





















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Washington: The January 6 assault on the Capitol was the predictable result of a relentless, months-long campaign by Donald Trump to cling to power and stir up anger among his supporters, Democrats have argued in Trumps Senate impeachment trial.

The Democratic impeachment managers launched their case to disqualify Trump from future office on Thursday (AEDT) by presenting an array of video evidence - including previously unseen surveillance footage - aimed at proving that the former president was singularly responsible for the Capitol attack.

House impeachment manager Jamie Raskin said that Trump assembled, inflamed and incited the January 6 riot at the Capitol. Credit:AP

The evidence will show you that ex-president Trump was no bystander, Democratic congressman Jamie Raskin, the Democrats lead impeachment manager, said.

The evidence will show that he clearly incited the January 6 insurrection.

Vienna, N.Y. -- A 42-year-old Vienna man who was shot in the chest in a house just outside Sylvan Beach has now been charged with having a weapon, according to New York State Police.

Todd A. Estes was charged with second-degree criminal possession of a weapon, third-degree criminal possession of a weapon, criminal possession of a weapon, second-degree menacing and unlawful possession of a large capacity, police said.

Estes was arrested Wednesday.

The shooting happened in Estes house on Feb. 2. That day, Nicholas C. Damanski, 35, was arrested and charged with second-degree criminal possession of a weapon and second-degree assault, police said. Hes accused of shooting Estes in the chest, according to police.

The two men were involved in an argument with two other women inside the house when Damanskis gun went off, according to New York State Police spokesman Jack Keller. It was unclear at the time how Damanskis gun went off, police said.

Estes was charged after police investigated the shooting and found that Estes illegally had a loaded 9mm handgun with a 30-round magazine clip, according to police. During the argument, Estes threatened one of the women and Damanski, police said.

He has been taken to the Oneida County Public Safety Building for centralized arraignment.

Got a tip, comment or story idea? Contact Chris Libonati via the Signal app for encrypted messaging at 585-290-0718, by phone at the same number, by email or on Twitter.
On February 7, the Hong Kong Police Force arrested Wan Yiu-sing, an online radio host for channel D100, on suspicion of sedition. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) condemns the arrest and calls on the authorities to immediately drop any imminent charges against Wan.

The Hong Kong authorities made the arrest on February 7 and the case against the radio host, known as Giggs, was listed for mention at West Kowloon Magistracy on February 8. However, Wan had been admitted to the hospital on health concerns, and his case was adjourned to February 11.

In response to IFJs inquiry regarding Wans case, the Hong Kong Police said: The 52-year-old man was charged with four counts of seditious intent.

The case against Wan was reportedly built on comments he made during his shows between August and October 2020. The authorities accused the host of attempting to incite hatred or contempt towards the Hong Kong government as well as the Peoples Republic of China while instigating unlawful behaviours or disobedience by Hong Kong residents.

This is not the first time the radio host has been targeted by the Hong Kong authorities. Wan was first arrested on November 21, along with his wife and his female assistant, at a residence in North Point for allegedly providing financial support to separatist activities and money laundering.

The charges were based on Wans fundraising program, which aimed at funding young protesters who wanted to leave Hong Kong and study in Taiwan. Through the radio program, A thousand of fathers and mothers: Taiwan education aid programme, Wan encouraged his audience to make donations to the subscription platform Patreon beginning in February 2020.

The authorities later released the trio on bail without charge.

The IFJ said: The Hong Kong authorities have increasingly levelled charges against pro-democracy figures on national security grounds and carried out assaults against the freedom of the press and speech. The IFJ condemns the arrest and calls on the authorities to immediately drop any imminent charges against Wan.
According to a major European retailer, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 series will become even harder to purchase between now and April. Prices of NVIDIA's latest graphics cards will continue to increase too, even those bought from retailers.

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NVIDIA may be gearing to release another Ampere-based graphics card this month, but a new report claims that the RTX 30 series' availability will worsen between now and the end of March. The RTX 30 series' stock levels have been poor since the launch of the first desktop cards, so it is difficult to imagine how they could get much worse.

According to Alternate, a European retailer that operates in Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands, various manufacturers blame a shortage of raw materials and NVIDIA chips for fewer RTX 30 cards hitting the market. Additionally, manufacturing has also been hit by the closure of factories in China because of its New Year celebrations.

Previously, NVIDIA stated that stock of its latest graphics cards would remain 'lean' until the end of April, with things probably picking up in May. However, the company did not disclose that stock levels would worsen in the interim.

Alternate adds that there is practically no chance of ordering an RTX 3080 this quarter, nor an RTX 3060 Ti. Conversely, the retailer expects to receive small quantities of the RTX 3070 and RTX 3090. Even then, Alternate states that market forces, such as increased transportation costs, will continue to drive the prices of new orders upwards.
NEW YORK, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- LION Eye Group ("LION") announces it has decided to build out its first "franchise-like" practice locations in Nassau and Suffolk Counties. Merrick, New York, and Holbrook, New York were disclosed but specifics of each location are forthcoming.

James Vena, Chief Operating Partner, and interim CEO is optimistic about the evolution of LION in just one year's time. "This expansion of our business model truly allows us to value partner vendors and head down the path of technology where we see the market going. Our integrated eyecare agreement with an ophthalmology network allows us to concentrate on fulfilling our vision of medical optometry while building state-of-the-art technology and retail for the betterment of the patients at our locations. It's better than we envisioned."

About LION Eye Group

Launched on January 1, 2020, LION Eye Group is a network of successful optometry practices based in New York. Originally founded as the Long Island Optical Network, the group has expanded to Manhattan and surrounding Burroughs. The mission of LION is to maintain an accessible, exceptional, and consistent level of eye care to its patients through a structure of meaningful organizations that strive to bring superior quality, value, and safe practices to doctor, patient, and the healthcare system through collaboration, cost reduction and accountability while serving as first level guardians of eyecare. Our commitment is vision, our vision is prosperity. Visit lioneyegroup.com for more information.

Media contact:

Angela Fischels

[email protected]

(844) AUTUS 00 x704

SOURCE LION Eye Group
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Keystone Investment Trust plc

LEI: 5493002H3JXLXLIGC563

Result of General Meeting and Change of Name

The resolution put to shareholders at a General Meeting of Keystone Investment Trust plc (the "Company") held on 10 February 2021 was passed on a poll.

The resolution approved a change of the Company's investment objective and policy, thereby enabling the implementation of the Board's proposals for the:

Appointment of Baillie Gifford & Co Limited ("Baillie Gifford") as new investment manager;

Adoption of Baillie Gifford's Positive Change investment strategy, a global equity strategy which seeks to provide attractive investment returns while contributing towards a more sustainable and inclusive world; and

Change of the Company's name to Keystone Positive Change Investment Trust plc.

The results of the poll are as follows:

Votes For: 2,849,319 (95.8%)

Votes Against: 125,518 (4.2%)

Votes Withheld: 377

Total Voting Rights were 6,181,563.

At the time of the General Meeting, the Company's issued share capital, excluding 5,778,363 shares held in treasury, consists of 61,815,632 ordinary shares of 10p. On a poll these carry one vote per 1 of nominal capital, accordingly Total Voting Rights were 6,181,563.

The full text of the resolution passed was as follows:

Ordinary Resolution:

THAT

the proposed investment objective and investment policy set out in Part 2 of the circular to shareholders of the Company dated 20 January 2021, a copy of which has been produced to the meeting and signed by the chairman for the purpose of identification, be and are hereby adopted as the investment objective and investment policy of the Company to the exclusion of all previous investment objectives and investment policies of the Company with effect from the appointment of Baillie Gifford & Co. Limited as the Company's investment manager, company secretary and administrator.

Upon Baillie Gifford's appointment becoming effective, which is expected to be on 11 February 2021, applications will be made to change the Company's name and TIDM to "Keystone Positive Change Investment Trust plc" and "KPC", respectively, and also to change the registered office address, in each case so as to take effect as soon as reasonably practicable. It is likely, however, that the registration of the change of the Company's legal name may take a number of weeks to process due to current delays in processing times at Companies House.

Enquiries:

Numis Securities, Corporate Broker

Nathan Brown / Matt Goss

n.brown@numis.com / m.goss@numis.com

Tel. +44 (0)20 7260 1000

Shilla Pindoria

Invesco Asset Management Limited

Corporate Company Secretary

10 February 2021

There are fears that the cost of veterinary medicine will soar

Time is running out" to reach a policy solution on how the Department of Agriculture will implement looming EU regulatory changes on the supply of veterinary medicines, the Irish Co-operative Organisation Society (ICOS) has warned.

In an address to the Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, ICOS urged the Department to decide on a policy thats best for Ireland and to not delegate responsibility to other stakeholders whom, the society claimed, could create a legal framework that will only enrich one profession.

Warnings were also sounded regarding the potentially damaging impact of the regulations on the competitiveness and sustainability of the entire food production chain.

Under the new regulations, from January 2022, vets will need to write a prescription for farmers to get antiparasitics (eg doses for treating worms / liver fluke) for livestock. Currently hundreds of trained Responsible Persons provide a similar farm drug supply service to farmers at more than 900 licensed merchant and co-op stores and 300 pharmacies nationwide.

CEO TJ Flanagan outlined that ICOS has long been involved in the development of the regulatory regime for animal remedies in Ireland  from the 1999 report of the Irish Medicines Board recommending that access to intramammary antibiotics should be on the basis of informed choice, to the 2007 EU animal remedies regulations that formally recognised the status of a co-op mastitis control programme.

These regulations provided the exemption for antiparasitics, to allow them to stay prescription-free on the basis that there was, at the time, no evidence of the development of resistance in cattle.

We are now faced with a new challenge, with the Health Products Regulatory Authority (HPRA) recommending that antiparasitics can no longer avail of the aforementioned exemption, due to the proven evidence of resistance to anthelmintics in cattle, first demonstrated on Teagasc farms.

This will result in these medicines becoming prescription-only. And members of the committee should be in no doubt that shifting this group of medicines from the current merchant and co-op route of supply to prescription-only will result in a significant shift in sales from co-ops and merchants to vets.

Such a move, he said, would result in economic loss and an undermining of the economic basis for the provision of a stores network, and a substantial increase in cost for the end user.

Mr Flanagan continued: Co-ops dont want to sell more medicines; they want to sell less medicines, but they want to be able to sell those medicines to their members.

"The footfall in small rural branches generated by animal health products is an important part of the mix, and if it were to be lost, there is no doubt that branches will close.

The simplest solution to this change would be to investigate the potential to extend the right to prescribe to the Responsible Persons who currently work in co-ops and merchants (as provided for in the Directive).

"We need to substantially enhance the data gathering and controls associated with this, so that we can reduce usage, halt the development of resistance, and protect these valuable medicines, he said.

ICOS representatives  which also included John OGorman Dairy Committee chair and Ray Doyle Environment and Livestock Services executive  contended that the Department and the EU Commission have, so far, firmly rejected this proposition.

"Pending a definitive view from the Attorney Generals office, we need to prepare contingencies.

The co-ops have shown great leadership to drive down the usage of dry cow tubes, in particular. Using the mastitis control programme we have seen substantial reductions in sales of dry cow tubes, the move towards selective dry cow therapy, as well as many co-ops banning the usage of critically important antibiotics.

We accept that substantial changes will need to occur with respect to the mechanics of prescribing, but the concept of a specialist or consultant vet, working out of a co-op lab, with access to milk recording data, bulk milk data, sensitivity data, and detailed reports on dairy hygiene and other audits, continues to be robust and scientifically sound.

It was highlighted too that the Veterinary Council of Ireland (VCI) has, to date, rejected the co-op specialist vet concept.

Were calling on the Department to recognise the strategic importance of the co-ops, large and small, in animal health, and to ensure that the Veterinary Council does not exceed its remit in this regard.

Three options

Mr Doyle explained that the Irish dairy, beef and sheep industry depends heavily on having a suite of anti-parasitic products that are effective.

The committee needs to be made aware that the Department has delegated the design of a new Prescription Only Medicine (POM) prescribing regime to the VCI.

In our discussions with the Department they insisted that ICOS meets directly with the VCI to air our concerns on creating a practical, transparent, fair and internationally defendable prescribing regime for POM products for food producing animals.

At a recent meeting between the VCI and ICOS they publicly expressed their view that the current legal method of using data to assist veterinary prescriptions cannot be allowed in the absence of a costly clinical visit which cannot on its own diagnose clinical and sub-clinical disease of certain mastitis and anthelminthic conditions.

"But data assisted diagnosis can in isolation detect these infections even before they affect animal productivity let alone welfare he said.

Mr Doyle outlined that increasingly data is being used in all aspects of human and veterinary diagnosis - including on farm where the use of robotic milking has empowered farmers in consultation with the vets to intervene early in treating animals.

Our overall national usage of antibiotics has increased which must have been as a direct result of antibiotics being prescribed and supplied via the vet-only channel, which relies almost entirely on costly clinical visits as per the Veterinary Council guidance.

"This clearly hasnt worked in driving down antibiotic usage, but the VCI is adamant it should be the only route prescriptions are generated on.

Dairygold  one of Irelands largest co-ops  has reduced its sales of antibiotic dry cow tubes by 35pc over the last 10 years and increased its sales of simple teat sealers in the same timeframe by 64pc.

Its not in the interests of co-ops to increase sales of antibiotics, anthelminthics and anti-parasitics, but it is in the co-ops and farmers interests that they can deliver them in a timely and cost-effective manner to all farmers, when required.

The use of multiple data sources through laboratory, on-farm dairy advisors and co-op vets has delivered for Ireland and must be allowed to continue, he said.

Finally, Mr Doyle highlighted three possible options available to Ireland to resolve this issue between now and January 2022 when the EU regulation must be transposed into Irish law.

The status quo remains regarding point of sale of anthelminthics, intra-mammary and anti-parasitic drugs via co-op branches, independent merchants and pharmacies, whereby responsible persons are allowed to generate prescriptions for all anti-parasitic products.

Prescriptions are generated via co-op and private merchant vets to farmers when they are part of an overall herd health plan  and generated on accurate data decisions for select drug types and ruminant species, remotely without a clinical visit.

Or a break on the dispensing and prescribing links occurs to align with current best human practice and indeed several other competing EU countries such as Denmark, Sweden and Italy.

"These have done so with their farmed animal prescriptions for maximum transparency and least market disruption, he concluded.

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New Delhi: In India, two Corona vaccines have been approved and its vaccination has been started from January 16. The Modi government has also given around 10.5 million vaccines to several countries in the world in January, of which 6.3 million have been sent to friendly countries on a friendship basis. According to sources, the Government of India has now approved the supply of 24 million doses of Covid-19 vaccine to 25 countries on a commercial basis in February.

The government had said last month that the Ministry of External Affairs would monitor the export of vaccines on a commercial basis to international countries and international organizations. India has supplied 16.7 million doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine prepared by the Serum Institute of India (SII) to 20 countries. Approximately 6.3 million doses of it were supplied in 13 countries such as Bangladesh, Myanmar, Bhutan, Nepal, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Bahrain and Oman, Barbados and Dominica.

About 10 million more doses were supplied on a commercial basis in seven countries including Brazil, Morocco and South Africa. According to the Foreign Ministry's plans for February, the Serum Institute of India will be required to supply 24 million doses on a commercial basis to 25 countries including Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Morocco, Myanmar, Nepal, Nicaragua, Mauritius, Philippines, Serbia, UAE and Qatar.

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In Switzerland, Tunisia and Libya

Va Tech Wabag has secured multiple orders worth about 100 Million Euros in Switzerland, Tunisia and Libya.

WABAG Swiss received its biggest ever order towards design and build of Lake Water Treatment Plant from ENERGIE SERVICE BIEL/BIENNE, towards replacing the existing facility which is more than 50 years old, thereby ensuring water security to the city of Biel and Nidau.

The plant will be built with state-of-the-art technology that purifies water using a multibarrier treatment, including reverse osmosis. The plant will be executed over a period of 5 years and WABAG will deliver the electro-mechanical equipment for all treatment steps as well as the automation, starting with the raw water intake up to the distribution pumps to the network of the municipalities.

WABAG in consortium with local civil partner secured an order to design and build 30 MLD Water Treatment Plant at Kasseb Dam in Tunisia from Societe Nationale D'exploitation Et De Distribution Des Eaux ('SONEDE').

The project scope includes Design, Engineering, Construction, Supply, Installation and Commissioning of WTP using advanced Lamella clarifier technology. The project funded by KfW, will be executed over a period of 20 months. The project also includes Operation & Maintenance of the plant for a period of 6 months.

WABAG Austria has signed a repeat contract with General Desalination Company of Libya ('GDCOL') to design and build 3 Thermal seawater desalination Multi-Effect Distillation (MED) plants in Bomba, Libya.

The scope of the contract includes design, supply, construction, installation, commissioning, training of the Customer's operating personnel and spare parts for 24 months plant operation.

The project comprises three Thermal Desalination lines and three steam boiler plants that will produce 30 MLD of drinking water from seawater and is an extension of the existing MED plant complex. This plant will provide drinking water capacity for more than 300,000 people in the region. The order is the largest thermal desalination plant order in the history of WABAG. This contract will be activated for execution upon receiving of L/C from the customer.

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West Australian Police have seized $9million in cash and 175kg of ice in two operations that have left crime bosses furious.

Four people have been charged in relation to the huge seizures, blamed on 'bungling bikies' by serious and organised crime division detectives.

Deputy Commissioner Col Blanch has called the bust 'a pretty hard hit for organised crime' and said that overseas kingpins, the suppliers, are very upset, the West Australian reported.

Western Australian police have seized nearly $50million dollars of organised crime proceeds in the last six months, nearly 80 per cent of cash seizures in the country.

Police busted the first set of bikies when a truck travelling from New South Wales was stopped in Meckering on January 29, with police allegedly seizing 14kg of meth and $3.6million from the vehicle.

The driver of the first truck, a 37-year-old man from New South Wales has been charged with possession of a prohibited drug with intent to sell or supply and laundering property/money from proceeds of a major offence.

The man appeared in the Perth Magistrates Court on January 30 and was refused bail, and will next appear in the same court on February 15.

The following week, Drug and Firearm Squad detectives charged three people in relation to the seizure of almost $4.5million in cash and more than 160kg of methylamphetamine.

Western Australian Police confiscated a total of $9 million from four vehicles during the busts

Detectives attending a truck bay in Fairbridge stopped and searched a truck which was bearing New South Wales license plates and allegedly found four suitcases containing $4,498,990 cash on February 3.

Shortly after, two associated vans were seen being loaded with boxes from the truck, and were intercepted by police.

It will be alleged that four boxes containing packages of methylamphetamine were located in one of the vans, with another eleven found in the second.

In total 163kg of methylamphetamine was seized by police.

Mr Blanch said some comes from Myanmar and Mexico but most comes 'down the channels' from South East Asia.

A 40-year-old man from New South Wales, the alleged driver of the truck, has been charged with several offences, including laundering property/money from proceeds of major offence and two counts of sold or supplied, or offered to sell or supply, a trafficable quantity of methylamphetamine.

Western Australian Police have seized more than $40 million from organised crime groups in the last six months, which is 80 per cent of the cash seizures across the country

A 51-year-old man from South Yunderup, the alleged driver of the van in which the eleven boxes were found has been charged with several offences including possession of a trafficable quantity of methylamphetamine with intent to sell or supply it to another.

A 30-year-old man from Floreat, the alleged driver of the van in which four boxes were found has been charged with possession of a trafficable quantity of methylamphetamine with intent to sell or supply it to another and reckless driving to evade police.

All three men appeared in the Perth Magistrates Court on February 4 and were refused bail, and are next due to appear in the Mandurah Magistrates court on February 29.

Western Australian police have confiscated $40million from organised crime groups in the last six months, which is 80 per cent of cash seizures across the country.

Mr Blanch said detectives will continue to prioritise targeting the movements of illicit drugs and cash across the state border.

'Every person involved in the distribution of drugs, from the top of the drug syndicate to the bottom, play a role in spreading the misery of meth on our streets and they can all expect to be a focus of our operations', he said.
A delegate casts her vote in the electoral process to choose members of parliament into Somalia's House of the People in Mogadishu, Somalia, on 6 December 2016.

United Nations Security Council (UNSC) called on Somalia's political leaders to resume dialogue to find solutions for the political disagreement over the electoral stalemate.

In a statement, the UN Security Council asked Somalis to resume their dialogue urgently and work together and agree on arrangements to hold elections soon.

"The members of the Security Council called for Somalias leaders to resume their dialogue urgently and work together, in the interests of the people of Somalia, to reach consensus on the arrangements for the conduct of inclusive elections to hold them as soon as possible," UNSC said in a statement.

Somalia confirms 58 new COVID-19 cases, 2 deaths

Farmaajo Is Legally In Office Until Next Polls, Govt Spokesman Moallimu Says

US, UN urge Somali leaders to resume dialogue over poll impasse

The meeting by the UN security council came after regional state and the federal government failed to resolve the electoral impasse after meeting in Dhusamareb last week for three days.

Due to the electoral stalemate, the opposition candidates said they do not recognize President Farmaajo as a legitimate president and called for a transitional government.

The statement by the opposition came after President Mohamed Abdullahi Farmaajo's four years term lapsed on the 8 February.
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Joe Manchin is arguably the most conservative Democrat in the 5050 Senate, and as a result of his position, he gets to help decide the priorities of his partys agendabecause, simply put, the Democrats need his vote. But considering how relatively tight-lipped he has been about his overall legislative priorities, its worth asking: Just how is Manchin going to use this power? And should Democrats actually be grateful that the staunch nonprogressive from West Virginia has such an outsize role in their caucus? To figure out how Joe Manchin may influence the Democratsand, thus, the other Joe in powerI spoke with Jim Newell, Slates senior politics writer, on Wednesdays episode of What Next. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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Mary Harris: Some people have said Joe Manchin is the most powerful man in Washington. Are you buying that?

Jim Newell: No, but he is in an extremely powerful position. Hes kind of being squeezed because he is not determining the agenda, but he is determining what may or may not cut through as part of that agenda. And I think he understands that every little word he says now has veto effect on what can get through Congress. So hes being a little more careful.

When he entered the chamber, he came in making a statement about being different from other party politicians.

Right. And he also recognizes that hes the last Democrat standing in West Virginia, in terms of being a really successful career politician in the state.

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It seems like he really enjoys the constituent services part of his job, like getting things done for individuals who call him. But I dont see major legislation coming from him. Is that fair?

I think so. Part of it is, one, the Senate has stopped legislating. And two, hes been in the fight in the minority for the past six years. I think what a lot of people dont appreciate is that Manchins a really, really good politician, like hes a really good retail politician. You see him interact at a town hall and with normal people, he very much has that kind of Bill Clintonstyle I feel your pain, that sort of ability to connect with people.

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Can you talk about a time youve seen it?

I just see him interacting with constituents on Capitol Hill. If they will come up to protest him or ask him to do one thing, he will stand there and talk to themhe wont run away or anything like that. He will really try to have a conversation. And he communicates effectively. Watching that, you can see how hes survivd so much even while the West Virginia Democratic Party on the federal level has been carved out.

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You say Manchin is loyal to the Democrats in his own, independent way.

He will join bipartisan votes sometimes, but Republicans dont think hell actually be the decider to either kill a Democratic bill or salvage a Republican bill. Hes been asked time and time again whether hes going to split and join the Republican conference in the Senate. Hes always said no, that hes a proud West Virginia Democrat. I think he views himself as more of an ancestral Democrat than a contemporary Republican. It seems like every two years theres always the conversation about whether Joe Manchin will split, and he has never done it.

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I dont think I understand why people on the left think hes actually a Republican. If youre on the left, he seems very conservative from your perspective. But if you want him to just admit that hes a Republican, he can go ahead and join the Republican side and give them the Senate majority. I dont think thats what the left actually wants.

I wonder if, now that Manchins in this new position, youll see Democrats making nice with him or trying to find a new relationship with him.

I think everyone knows that theyre all in this together and that you cant just yell and scream at Manchin. Thats not going to work out for you. I was talking to one Senate staffer when there was some pressure for Manchin to be stripped of his committee assignments if he didnt go along with Dems on trying to block Kavanaugh. The staffer told me that Chuck Schumer did not have that power over Manchin. No one can really tell him what to do.

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When the Senate was passing the budget resolution last week, Joe Manchin worked out a nonbinding vote that no stimulus checks should go to upper income taxpayers. It passed 991. I think that was Senate Democrats kind of holding Manchins hand a little bit, telling him that his concern was being listened to. Its kind of a delicate thing theyre working with.

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Part of Manchins power is that hes openly talked about not running for his seat at certain points, like just retiring. That would put Democrats in a bind of having to figure out how theyre going to make the math work in their favor.

Thats what makes him kind of tricky. I understand how frustrating it can be for Democrats that this one guy can dictate so much of what goes in the final bill, especially when its stuff youve been working on for years, policy youve developed for the next time you take power. But on the other hand, you have to thank your lucky stars that Joe Manchin exists. Hes a unicorn. I mean, a West Virginia Democrat in 2021 who can get reelected a couple of timesits kind of a miracle.

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Donald Trump has broken two grim records with this, his second impeachment. First, on 13 January 2021 when the House of Representatives impeached him he became the first president in history to ever be impeached a second time. He is now also the only president to ever be tried for impeachment when he is no longer serving in office.

The trial began Tuesday at 1pm ET in the Senate, but who is involved, what do they argue and when will we know the outcome?

The trial is due to run through the weekend, but it is yet unclear how long it will run on for, as this depends heavily upon whether witnesses are called or not. Some Democrats are keen to call witnesses in order to thoroughly investigate the events of the Capitol riot on 6 January, whereas others are keen to move quickly beyond that, in order to begin with the business of confirming Bidens cabinet nominees and debating spending legislation. Calling witnesses could delay the process by weeks or even months, say USA Today.

Whats Trump being impeached for?

In the US Constitution, impeachment is appropriate when a President or other federal official has committed one of the violations described as treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors. It allows a President to be removed from office; and after the trial the Senate could subsequently vote to disqualify Trump from ever holding federal office again.

The article of impeachment drawn up by Democrats the very night of 6 January, when an insurrection on the Capitol complex endangered hundreds and killed five is brief. It charges Trump with threatening the integrity of the democratic system, interfering with the peaceful transition of power, and imperilling a coequal branch of Government.

How long will the impeachment trial last?

Trumps defence team claims that the constitution makes clear that an ex-president cannot be tried for impeachment, while Lead House Impeachment Manager Rep. Jamie Raskin has argued thats not how impeachment works "The constitution makes clear there is no January exception to the impeachment power, that a president can't commit grave offenses in their final days and escape any congressional response."

Tuesday, 9 February, 1pm ET: Tuesdays opening statements centred on the question of whether the trial is constitutional or not. Following four hours of statements split equally between prosecution and defence, a vote of 56-44 deemed that the trial was indeed constitutional and will succeed.

Wednesday, 10 February, 12pm ET through to Friday: The House of Representatives will argue its case; prosecutors and defence will be given up to 16 hours each to present their arguments, with neither side permitted to present for more than eight hours per day.

Friday, 12 February, 5pm ET: Senate breaks for Saturday (TBC whether break will be Saturday or Sunday at time of writing)

Sunday, 14 February, 2pm ET: Senate trial reconvenes Sunday afternoon, continuing presentation of arguments.

Following up to 16 hours each of arguments from prosecutors and defence, senators will have four hours to give questions. If Democrat Impeachment Managers decide to bring witnesses, four hours of debate split between Republicans and Democrats will take place, then the Senate will vote on whether witnesses are permitted.

Once witnesses and evidence have been presented to the Senate, there will be four hours of closing arguments split between both sides.

Finally, there will be a vote on conviction or acquittal. A two-thirds majority is required to convict, which would mean all Democrats plus 17 Republican senators voting in favour of conviction.

Who is Donald Trumps defence?

Trumps defence attorneys are Bruce Castor, David Schoen and Michael van der Veen.

Bruce Castor Jr. is a former Republican district attorney in Montgomery County, near Philadelphia. He also previously served as county commissioner.

David Schoen is a lawyer from Alabama who has tried cases in the South on police brutality and civil rights. Hes long been a legal commentator on television and for a time provided legal counsel for Roger Stone, a Trump confidante, according to NPR.

Michael van der Veen, lesser known than Castor and Schoen, is a Philadelphia-based lawyer specialising in personal injury and criminal defence.

Who is the prosecution?

Serving on the prosecution will be nine House members, some familiar faces from Trumps first impeachment. Chosen by Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, they are Jamie Raskin of Maryland, Diana DeGette of Colorado, David Cicilline of Rhode Island, Joaquin Castro of Texas, Eric Swalwell of California, Ted Lieu of California, Stacey Plaskett of the Virgin Islands, Joe Neguse of Colorado and Madeleine Dean of Pennsylvania.

Tuesday during opening statements, Impeachment Manager Rep. Raskin began the trial with brief remarks before showing a video of the attack on the Capitol on 6 January. "You will not be hearing extended lectures from me because our case is based on cold hard facts. It's all about the facts."

Who will be on the jury?

The jury will consist of all 100 current US senators of the 117th Congress. There are 12 senators still serving in the upper chamber of Congress just a little more than two decades after first serving as jurors in a presidential impeachment trial  for Clinton in 1999 - who will once again serve on the jury this week.

These Senate members include Republican Senators Susan Collins of Maine, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Richard Shelby of Alabama. The Democrats include Senators Dick Durbin of Illinois, Dianne Feinstein of California, Patrick Leahy of Vermont, Patty Murray of Washington, Jack Reed of Rhode Island, Chuck Schumer of New York and Ron Wyden of Oregon, according to Newsweek.
There will be no setting up of new universities, colleges or campuses in the country for the next five years if the government adopts the recommendations of a parliamentary committee that has also proposed a raft of reforms aimed at stabilising the funding and provision of higher education.

The measure is intended to curb spending on expansion and focus the available resources on existing programmes and staff to reduce the financial pressure most universities are under. In the proposals, "non-viable" campuses will be merged and some programmes scrapped.

University students will also welcome news that the National Treasury, the Ministry of Education and the National Assembly Education and Research Committee have agreed to enhance allocations to the Higher Education Loans Board (Helb) to support more students in universities instead of increasing fees.

"Any fees review should take into consideration the performance of the economy at that time given the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on the economy," the chairperson of the committee, Ms Florence Mutua, said in a statement.

Students are opposed to a proposal by the Vice Chancellors Committee to increase tuition fees in public universities threefold, from Sh16,000 to Sh48,000. The fees have remained the same since 1989.

The VCs are also pushing for a differentiated unit cost formula, where fees and government subsidies would be dependent on the cost of offering the courses.

They argue that most universities offering science, technology and mathematics courses have been steeped in debts as they spend more to offer the courses.

Universities will also sigh with relief if the Ministry of Education and the National Treasury agree to give them waivers on statutory payments to the Kenya Revenue Authority such as income tax, commonly known as Pay As You Earn, as recommended by the committee. The two are expected to prepare a Cabinet memo to authorise the waivers.

Lay off staff

There is also the proposal that universities be provided with conditional grants to support them clear outstanding debts such as pension, sacco and National Hospital Insurance Fund deductions, said Mrs Mutua.

However, even as the committee canvasses for extra funding from the Exchequer, it has recommended restructuring of university functions and staff, expected to lead to job losses in the public institutions.

Already, the United States International University - Africa is in plans to lay off staff due to reduced income. Egerton University has also announced plans to send home 400 members of staff. The plan has stalled, however, as it does not have the money to pay them.

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Many institutions of higher education are in financial woes, heavily in debt and have not remitted statutory payments, attracting the attention of the KRA and the office of the Auditor General.

Universities had been surviving on money earned from Module II (parallel) programmes that were popular with qualified students who missed out on government placement.

However, since 2016 when the Ministry of Education clamped down on cheating in the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education exams, there have been fewer qualifiers for university education. Currently, all those who qualify are eligible for government sponsorship.

In the statement, Mrs Mutua said stakeholders involved in the deliberations had unanimously agreed that the Ministry of Education should introduce a "five-year moratorium on establishment of new universities, colleges or campuses as well as explore the possibility of merging non-viable campuses, rationalisation of programmes and institutions to create centres of excellence."

dmuchunguh@ke.nationmedia.com
Russia, China and Iran will hold mid this month joint naval drills in the Indian Ocean, reports say citing Russian envoy to Iran.

Levan Dzhagaryan, the reports notes, also indicated that the drills are set to include practicing search and rescue operations and measures that uphold the safety of marine navigation.

The three allies, opposed to the U.S, held a similar joint exercise in December 2019 in the Gulf of Oman and the Indian Ocean, Middle East Monitor (MEMO) notes.

The planned drills will raise eyebrows in the U.S as the Biden administration announced it is sending its USS Nimitz, the only Navy aircraft carrier operating in the Middle East, back to its homeport.
editorial

The recent wave of abductions across the country is giving Nigerians real cause for concern. Also, kidnapping which has, more or less, been raised to the level of an industry is, without doubt, the most pervasive and intractable violent crime in the country as at now. Even more worrisome is the level of coordination involved in the act despite the presence of security agencies.

In recent weeks, it is estimated that over 70 persons may have been kidnapped nationwide, with states like Kaduna, Katsina, Cross River, Edo, Borno, Niger , Ogun, Ondo, Nasarawa, Taraba, Ebonyi, Bayelsa, Delta, Anambra, Kogi and the FCT, as epicentres of this nefarious act. It is alleged that Nigeria has one of the world's highest rate of kidnap-for-ransom cases. Other countries high up on the list are Yemen, Syria, the Philippines, Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia.

The seemingly entrenched lawlessness and moral degeneracy demonstrated by these kidnappers are no longer shocking. What is lamentable is that the crime persists because of the unquenchable desire for easy money made worse by the willingness of relatives of the kidnap victims to succumb to pressure to pay the ransom. What is even more sickening is the palpable kid glove treatment meted out to the criminals when apprehended. All these seem to reinforce the argument of conspiracy theorists that it is all a syndicate with tentacles spread across the broad spectrum of the nation's economic and security apparatus.

This obviously calls for an urgent review of Nigeria's current anti-kidnapping approach to make it more effective. Kidnapping has led to the loss of tens of thousands of lives and huge sums of money in Nigeria. Many of the victims of the crime have been killed in the process either while in custody or during the course of their release. Many more have been injured. This is in addition to huge amounts of money lost to ransom takers.

Only recently, the decomposing body of a United States-based Etsako Prince, Eloniyo Dennis Abuda, was found by the police in a forest in Edo State, four days after he was abducted by criminals posing as herdsmen.

A Police team found Abuda's corpse - with deep injuries - days after his family paid N10 million ransom. Other hostages, who were freed after the ransom was paid, led security officials to the scene. Also, gunmen had stormed Rachael Orphanage in Abaji Area Council of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) and abducted several orphans and three other persons. It was reported that the kidnappers demanded N10 million as ransom

Similarly, a Punch reporter, Mr Nnodim Okechukwu who was kidnapped last Wednesday in Kubwa regained freedom after his family members allegedly paid a ransom. Similar incidents are being recorded in virtually all parts of the country, and we are not counting the mayhem being perpetrated by insurgents in parts of the country.

Prior to this disturbing wave, only foreigners were prime targets by pirates in the Gulf of Guinea, by militants in the oil patch, and by common criminals elsewhere. But now, almost anybody who appears to have the most minimal of resources, or access to resources, can be a victim. The outcome of this disturbing scenario is a demoralised psyche which has gripped the country, with many Nigerians living in fear of being kidnapped.

In the opinion of this newspaper, the existing legal framework is probably not effective enough to rein in this reign of terror. We, therefore, suggest that stricter measures, such as life imprisonment or the death penalty, may not be completely out of place in dealing with the kidnappers. After all, the crime of kidnapping is a maximum threat that requires an equally maximum deterrence.

The Police are constitutionally responsible for fighting domestic crime, including kidnapping, and the current crime wave undermines public confidence in the law enforcement agency's capacity to act in the public interest.

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We feel it is high time the callous drift was decisively halted. But flinging them off the way may prove impossible until these criminals face the punishment they rightly deserve- like public execution. This is because, without an effective security apparatus that can quash the kidnapping epidemic, economic development becomes intractably difficult.

We are also disturbed that, with the culture of random payment, poor and compromised handling of the investigation and prosecution of kidnap cases, especially by security agencies as well as complicity by powerful vested interest and powers from above, the course of justice is not only perverted but also rendered inactive if not impotent. In our considered view, until the application of criminal justice is strengthened in a way that will be a sufficient deterrent, the hoopla about kidnap menace in the land will remain what it presently is all sound and fury signifying nothing.
China announced earlier that it would provide 10 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines to the global vaccine sharing initiative COVAX to meet the urgent needs of developing countries, showing a strong sense of responsibility at such a critical moment.

It is another major move of China to promote equitable distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, push ahead international anti-pandemic cooperation and put into practice the vision of building a community of common health for mankind.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), recently warned that the unfair distribution of COVID-19 vaccines worldwide would cause severe impacts.

He called on countries to work together in solidarity to ensure that within the first 100 days of this year, vaccination of health workers and older people is underway in all countries.

China also attaches great importance to the difficulties facing the practical implementation of COVAX, in particular the huge vaccine supply gap in February and March.

Back in May 2020, China promised that COVID-19 vaccine development and deployment in China, when available, would be made a global public good, which would be China's contribution to ensuring vaccine accessibility and affordability in developing countries.

A batch of inactivated COVID-19 vaccines donated by the Chinese government to Pakistan had arrived in the latter's capital Islamabad on Feb. 1. It was the first batch of vaccines provided by the Chinese government to a foreign country.

Besides Pakistan, China is providing aid in the form of COVID-19 vaccines to 13 developing countries including Brunei, Nepal, the Philippines, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, Sri Lanka, Mongolia, Palestine, Belarus, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, and Equatorial Guinea, and will aid 38 more developing countries in need of COVID-19 vaccines.

Containing the COVID-19 pandemic is considered as the most pressing task for the international community, and China has kept its promise in a way that addresses the urgent need of the world.

Tom Fowdy, a British political and international relations analyst, commented that China's vaccines are the products that most of the world will accept.

Chinese vaccines could offer a lifeline to developing countries, according to an article recently published on The New York Times.

The international society has widely acknowledged the safety and efficacy of Chinese vaccines. They are considered reliable by clinical trials in multiple countries, as well as reports published on The Lancet.

Preliminary statistics indicate that over 40 countries have shown intention to import Chinese vaccines, and some countries have approved the use of China's vaccines.

Indonesian President Joko Widodo, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and President of Seychelles Wavel Ramkalawan led by example to take COVID-19 vaccines; Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic waited for the first batch of Chinese vaccines in cold wind at an airport apron; Chilean President Sebastian Pinera attended the ceremony for the arrival of Chinese vaccines.

Foreign countries believe that Chinese vaccines have shed light at the end of a tunnel. They say the safe, sure, and secure vaccines came at a time when they were going through the most difficult period and needed them the most. These comments expressed their gratitude for the Chinese assistance, as well as their confidence in the Chinese vaccines.

The pandemic tests the conscience of governments and examines how countries balance between justice and benefits.

It can never be overemphasized that wealth is not a criterion for judging whether a person can enjoy the right to life and health.

To uphold fairness and justice requires making vaccines a public product accessible and affordable to people in developing countries and providing assistance for countries and regions that are relatively vulnerable to the pandemic.

Viruses know no borders. To defeat the pandemic, mankind must rely on science and rationality, promote the spirit of humanitarianism, and fight against it with the most powerful weapons  solidarity and cooperation.
Only one of the three students ultimately tested positive, but following that scare, Milisauskas added another layer of safety checks. Previously, the school took temperatures and the bus drivers asked students questions about their health before they boarded; now Milisauskas also had the students come to the cafeteria upon arrival, where the school nurse and some of the most Covid-cautious teachers, who knew the students well, also went through those questions, more thoroughly, while also assessing the students for signs of illness. Of the handful of teachers who tested positive at the school since September, none were traced back to in-school transmission. And fewer than five students in quarantine ultimately tested positive, Milisauskas says  though even those students also had other close contacts who were positive at the time, making it just as likely that they had caught the virus outside of school.

As the school year wore on, experiences requiring on-the-spot problem-solving became more and more common, as teachers and administrators were forced to scramble to adjust to more and more positive cases that called for the quarantining of teachers. The state Department of Health fell so far behind on contact tracing that it enlisted school nurses to help with that work, with many of them making calls until late at night. Rather than waiting for contact tracers or overworked nurses to help determine who would and would not stay home, schools solved the problem by flipping classrooms to remote learning on some occasions when someone in the classroom was known to be positive; depending on how many students were found to need quarantining, the class would either resume in-person or stay remote.

Many days at many schools went on with little interruption; but at times, at schools with extensive quarantining, what students were experiencing did not exactly fit anyones idea of what in-person learning should be; what they were being offered would better be described as not-at-home learning. At Nathanael Greene Middle School, also in Providence, when there were not enough teachers, the principal, Roy Sermons, sometimes moved two pods whose teachers were out to a large gym so that a third teacher, sometimes one who was part of the districts entirely virtual program, could be called in to oversee all the students. In a single space, 30 kids would be Zooming with one teacher, 30 with another, while the on-site teacher tried to keep an eye on 60 restless middle schoolers as she was also conducting class via Zoom with her own students elsewhere. The union filed suit requesting that the school be closed for safety reasons. The judge rejected the suit.

In December, an executive order from the governor allowed for educators in retirement to fill in as substitutes for more than 90 days without losing pension benefits. Even apart from the issue of staffing, the erratic nature of moving in and out of remote learning was, in many classrooms, taking a toll on any semblance of routine. Caroline LeStrange, a schoolteacher at Alan Shawn Feinstein Elementary School at Broad Street, tested positive for Covid on Dec. 2, which meant that all her students were out of school for two weeks. A gym teacher at the school who rotated in to five different classrooms was a close contact of someone who tested positive, and the school quarantined all five classrooms pending the results of a Covid test, including LeStranges, adding another several days to the amount of school her first graders missed. Several children in her class had siblings who were exposed to other students or teachers who tested positive, which meant that those children missed yet more days in school. The students  many of them the children of immigrants, many of them qualifying for free lunch  struggled with the quick changes in scheduling when they arose. She could access her students computers, watching parents trying and failing to log their students on to the required application, eventually tiring of LeStranges repeated efforts to coach them through the process in a language they did not understand. On some days when she tried to run a Zoom class, only three students showed up. Those students who were able to get online, with the help of the day care they attended, wrote her notes: I miss you! I love you!

Superintendents and their staffs were trying to reconcile, for teachers and administrators, competing fact patterns that were emerging. On the one hand, cases across the state were starting to rise and were only expected to get worse after Thanksgiving; administrators were exhausted by the stress of scrambling for coverage and making quick decisions about whether or not to flip a classroom to remote, sometimes the night before families expected to send their students to school. On the other hand, with every passing week the district was seeing more reassuring evidence that student and teacher transmission was low  and that, although teachers were stressed, they were rising to the occasion and managing to keep the doors open.

On Nov. 18, with statewide positive test rates at about 6 percent, Raimondo announced that for a finite period  she hoped no more than two weeks  high schools could drop to 25 percent capacity starting Nov. 30. A few weeks later, Olayinka Alege, an administrator who oversees Providence middle and high schools, received a text from an anxious high-school principal at a school with roughly 1,000 students. Almost 50 cases, now in the janitorial staff, it read; the number referred to the total of students and staff members who had tested positive since the start of school. When the two men spoke, the principal explained how heavily the burden of keeping the school open weighed on him, how responsible he felt: Was having the students keep coming even the right thing to do? They talked briefly, but even then, the principal asked Alege to call back later that night, just so they could go over the facts one more time: The high school was safer than ever, now that it had dropped down to 25 percent capacity; they knew that the cases traced back to schools were low; they knew that schools provided structure that protected children from taking health risks. Alege says he understood that the teacher, like others, occasionally needed that reassurance so he could put his head on the pillow at night knowing he is doing the right thing for kids. The principals school, like every other in Providence, stayed open until Dec. 20, when the district temporarily switched to remote learning just a few days before the start of winter break.

At the end of the first semester, the outcomes for Providence students who attended school in person were far from ideal: 22 percent of all in-person learners had at least one incomplete in a class. But the number was even worse for virtual learners, 37 percent of whom had at least one incomplete. School openings also proved important for public health, statewide: Regular immunization rates plummeted last spring but largely rebounded by October, a function, quite likely, of the requirement that students be vaccinated before returning to class. The same was true of lead screenings, which are required for kindergarten attendance.
Activist Rona Wilson, an accused in the Bhima Koregaon case, has filed a petition in the Bombay High Court seeking fresh SIT probe into the matter after an independent forensic analysis showed that the letters, crucial evidence in the case, were planted by a hacker on his laptop.

The Pune Police had cited these letters, purportedly written by Wilson, as primary evidence in the case. Among these, the most explosive of them all, was the one apparently written by Wilson to a Maoist militant in which he discussed the need for guns and ammunition and urged the banned group to assassinate Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

According to The Washington Post, an attacker used malware to infiltrate a laptop belonging to Wilson before his arrest and deposited at least 10 incriminating letters on the computer. The findings were part of a report by Arsenal Consulting, a Massachusetts-based digital forensics firm that examined an electronic copy of the laptop at the request of Wilsons lawyers.

Several activists, all outspoken critics of the Modi regime, have been in jail for two years and are facing trial under the stringent anti-terrorism law.

Wilsons lawyer Sudeep Pasbola said the report proved his clients innocence and destabilizes the prosecution case against the activists.

Jaya Roy, a spokeswoman for the National Investigation Agency, told The Washington Post that the forensic analysis of Wilsons laptop conducted by law enforcement did not show any evidence of malware on the device. She added that there was substantial documentary and oral evidence against the individuals charged in the case.

Apart from Wilson, other accused in the case include activists Surendra Gadling, Rona Wilson, Shoma Sen, Mahesh Raut and Sudhir Dhavale, who were arrested in June 2018, and absconding Maoist leaders Dipak alias Milind Teltumbade, Kishan Da alias Prashant Bose and Prakash alias Rituparn Goswami. Sudha Bharadwaj, Varavara Rao, Arun Ferriera, Vernon Gonsalves and fugitive general secretary of the banned CPI (Maoist) Ganapathy were named in the supplementary chargesheet filed by the police in February 2019.

The initial accusations against the activists rested heavily on incriminating letters recovered from electronic devices seized from them.

Arsenal Consulting found that the letter  along with at least nine others  had been planted in a hidden folder on Wilsons computer by an unidentified attacker who used malware to control and spy on the laptop, according to the report.

This is one of the most serious cases involving evidence tampering that Arsenal has ever encountered, the report said, citing the vast timespan  nearly two years  between the time the laptop was first compromised and the moment the attacker delivered the last incriminating document.

The modus operandi

Arsenals report gives a detailed account of the cyberattack. In June 2016, Wilson apparently received several emails that appeared to be from a fellow activist who urged him to click on a link to download an innocuous statement from a civil liberties group. Instead, the report says, the link deployed NetWire, a commercially available form of malicious software that allowed a hacker to access Wilsons device.

Arsenal discovered records of the malware logging Wilsons keystrokes, passwords and browsing activity. It also recovered file system information showing the attacker creating the hidden folder to which at least 10 incriminating letters were delivered  and then attempting to conceal those steps. The letters were created using a newer version of Microsoft Word that did not exist on Wilsons computer, the report said.

Arsenal found no evidence that the documents or the hidden folder were ever opened.

Although the did not identify the hacker, it noted that Wilson was not the only victim. The same attacker had deployed some of the same servers and IP addresses to target other accused in the case over a period of four years, the report said, based on a review of forensic images related to those individuals.

The Bhima Koregaon case pertains to incidents of January 1, 2018, the day of the bicentenary celebrations of the Bhima Koregaon battle. The celebration was marred by violence between Hindu nationalists and members of the Dalit community leading to the death of one person and injuries to several others.

The police alleged that the accused activists who have "Maoist links" funded the Elgar Parishad meeting on December 31, 2017, where inflammatory speeches were made which led to the violence.
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WASHTENAW COUNTY, MI  A single-lane roundabout is scheduled to be constructed at the intersection of Zeeb Road and Liberty Road in Scio Township later this summer, the Washtenaw County Road Commission announced.

During the construction, a detour will be posted at the intersection of Zeeb and Liberty, which will be completely closed to traffic.

Road commission officials say the roundabout will be able to move traffic, including tractor trailers, through an intersection more efficiently and with less congestion than a traditional intersection at lower speeds.

Roundabouts are also one of the safest options available and they are typically more cost-effective than a traditional traffic signal, officials said.

The intersection of Zeeb Road and Liberty Road already has a higher traffic volume than what is recommended for the existing design, according to the road commission. The commission, which monitors intersections across the county for traffic volumes and safety, expects volumes to increase at the intersection once Zeeb Road between Pleasant Lake Road and Ellsworth Road is paved in August.

Commissioners believe a roundabout is the ideal solution to help safely handle current and future traffic volumes at this intersection.

Washtenaw County expects roundabout construction to begin in late summer 2021. Citing environmental restrictions, some trees near the intersection will need to be removed before March 31 to accommodate proper drainage and modern road design, the road commission said.

Funding for the roundabout is coming from the Michigan Transportation Fund, according to the county.

Officials estimate it will take 6-8 weeks to build the roundabout, weather pending. A detour will be posted while the road is closed to traffic.

Washtenaw County Road Commission is hosting a virtual public information meeting about this project on Monday, March 1, from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., via Zoom.

READ MORE FROM THE ANN ARBOR NEWS:

Reconstruction of Zeeb Road near Ann Arbor set to begin in May

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Chipotle to open restaurant on Ann Arbors west side

538 new houses, condos and apartments proposed on Ann Arbors north side
Gaborone  Botswana National Sport Commission (BNSC) acting chief executive officer (CEO) says given the rapid increase of COVID-19 cases, they are working on guidelines for those that want to practice sport, both organised and recreational.

Addressing a virtual press conference on Monday February 8, Tuelo Serufho said the commission was worried about the rising mortality rate.

He said BNSC was not oblivious to the fact that sport, as a microcosm of a broader society, was not spared, and that the people that had passed on were not just statistics.

"They are mothers, fathers, grandparents, aunts, uncles, sibling's sons and daughters, and very valuable lives. We have moved from not knowing people afflicted by COVID to now putting names behind some of those numbers. In some cases with people that we loved dearly."

Serufho said even before they got afflicted they could not remain indifferent as one life lost was one too many.

He said they started to develop guidelines for sport practitioners a few weeks ago.

The CEO said the guidelines not only emphasised standard COVID-19 measures, but most importantly demanded that there must be extensive testing to safeguard human life.

Over and above testing, he said there was a demand for appropriately qualified people to be appointed.

"We understand that the strict requirements we have placed on those that want to do sports, especially contact sports, will bring about a lot of costs, but there is no price to human life," he said.

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Furthermore, Serufho said as the sport leadership, they would mainly be providing financial support towards tests for national teams preparing for or competing in sanctioned activities

He said except for national teams, costs shall be for the account of the clubs and or individuals, adding that as the sport in general was preparing to come back, they would be no spectators allowed at league matches and or competition venues.

Serufho said face to face meetings within sport had been suspended. He noted that they had already provided the guidelines to the national sport association. "They must be strictly read together with the return to sport matrix; the latter document showing what aspect of each sport is permitted," said Serufho

He said the return to sport matrix was a live document that would keep changing depending on how good or poor compliance was in each sport.

"In the spirit of fighting the scourge, the commission's funding for the remaining part of the financial year will be for activities that cannot be avoided provided they have been determined not to have the potential to give rise to the spread of the virus," he said.

Source : BOPA
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Medical Robotics Market Overview

Medical robotics has helped the practitioners in performing the surgical operation with precision and less invasive techniques. This field has decreased the threats involved like infections, life risks, and pains. On observing the current market trends, the global medical robotics market is anticipated to reach a 23 % annual growth rate during the survey period. Demands for high precision surgical methods, increasing usage, and technological developments are the major factors driving this market. This technology is being used in endoscopy, gynecology, open surgery, and other complicated procedures for minimally invasive operations.

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The demands for improved medical practices and rising healthcare budgets have helped the market in gaining the desired speeds on a global scale. The authorities are emphasizing the usage of such technologies and are investing largely in developing their healthcare facilities, which has also helped the market. Companies are working towards introducing better robotics mechanisms with fewer costs to expand the market and make it accessible for underdeveloped economies as well.

Apart from gaining a considerable response from the medical field, the global medical robotics market is still struggling against factors like lack of trained professionals and large installation & maintenance costs. Higher overall costs have restrained the market in several underdeveloped regions and will take time for any further improvements.

Medical Robotics Market Key Players

Smith & Nephew (UK), Stryker (US), Aethon (US), Intuitive Surgical (US), Mazor Robotics (Israel), InTouch Technologies, Inc. (US), Renishaw plc (UK), Medtech SA (France), Ekso Bionics (US), ReWalk Robotics (US), Medrobotics Corporation (US), and McKesson Corporation (US) are some of the key players operating in the global medical robotics market.

Medical Robotics market segments

The global medical robotics market is segmented into three parts mentioned below:

Product types: Surgical robotic systems, non-invasive robotic systems, robotic rehabilitation systems, and other types of products are available.

Uses: Medical robotics are used for cardiology, laparoscopy, neurosurgeries, pharmacy, and other procedures.

End-Users: Hospitals, clinics, rehabilitation centers, and others are the major end-users of this industry.

Medical Robotics Market Regional Summary

The major regions observed for the global medical robotics market are America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and The Middle East & Africa

The American region is the current market leader and will maintain its lead due to the projected highest growth rates during the survey period. The demands for the latest technologies, improving healthcare facilities, the presence of significant market players, high healthcare expenditures, and other factors are driving the market in this region. The North American region is the major shareholder of this market. The European region is the second biggest market due to demands for non-invasive surgical methods, high investments, and other factors.

The Asia Pacific region is the next market in this tally. Huge population, rise in per capita incomes, higher budget release for healthcare, demand for latest technologies, and other factors will keep boosting the market here.

The rest of the regions are growing at lower speeds due to weak economic structures and lagging healthcare structures.

Medical Robotics Market Industry News

The global medical robotics market is one of the latest advancements in the medical field and is receiving a healthy response from around the globe. Still, high overall costs of the equipment and lack of trained professionals is limiting the markets growth rates. The American region is the current market leader and will stay at the top, with the highest growth rates during the survey period.

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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.
Researchers Find Broad Impacts from Political Polarization

Political polarization is having far-reaching impacts on American life, harming consumer welfare and creating challenges for people ranging from elected officials and policymakers to corporate executives and marketers.

Thats one of the conclusions of a new scholarly paper by researchers from the University of Wyoming and five other universities across the country. The paper appears in the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing of the American Marketing Association.

I think were all aware of how political polarization has affected our elections and system of government, but the impacts go far beyond the political arena, says Dave Sprott, dean of UWs College of Business and one of the papers authors. Ultimately, polarization harms mental and physical health, financial welfare, relationships and societal interests through its impact on psychology, marketing and public policy outcomes.

Other contributors are T.J. Weber and Chris Hydock, the lead authors at California Polytechnic State University; William Ding, of Southern Connecticut State University; Meryl Gardner, of the University of Delaware; Pradeep Jacob and Naomi Mandel, of Arizona State University; and Eric Van Steenburg, of Montana State University.

The researchers note previous research suggesting that political polarization in the United States is more pronounced now than in the past -- at least among members of the nations major political parties -- with Democrats significantly more likely to identify as liberal and Republicans as conservative. Additionally, consumers have indicated that they believe the parties overlap less now than they did in previous years, and the portion of people who hold extreme political opinions is increasing.

Research also has shown that political identities, such as Republican, Democrat, liberal or conservative, help determine peoples behavior, attitudes and perceptions. Those identities can be reinforced by people selecting social groups with shared belief systems; consumption of media that only align with those beliefs; and even creation of a group-specific shared reality, the researchers wrote.

From a public policy standpoint, political polarization makes it more difficult for elected officials to effectively govern, the paper asserts. Thats due to a number of factors, including a lack of trust in scientists in policymakers and prevalence of misinformation.

For instance, as society has become increasingly polarized, politicians objectives diverge and their animosity toward the opposition grows, thereby reducing opportunity for compromise, the researchers wrote. Partisan incivility is a major reason for failed dialogue: Uncivil exchanges result in disagreement and greater polarization regardless of the evidence presented.

This political polarization is reflected in the marketplace, as consumers connect with brands that they perceive reflect their values and beliefs.

In effect, activist consumers will increasingly expect brands to help spur social change, and will be more likely to respond to brand actions through a political lens, the researchers wrote.

For example, they noted that the expressions of support for former President Donald Trump by the CEO of Goya Beans, a Latin food company, resulted in liberal consumers boycotting the companys products and conservatives promoting them during 2020. Similar situations have arisen for companies including My Pillow, Home Depot and Chick-fil-A when their corporate leaders expressed support for conservative causes.

Even when companies aim to be apolitical, the nations polarized environment increases the chances that they will be viewed as being political, the researchers say.

As the population becomes more polarized, initiatives that were previously viewed through an apolitical lens may be viewed as favoring one political identity over another, as a polarized population is more likely to view corporate actions through a political lens, the researchers wrote.

Ultimately, according to the researchers, consumer welfare suffers because of political polarization in these areas:

-- Finances: With political positions influencing decisions, people may sacrifice wages, lose out on jobs, make suboptimal purchases and disregard opportunities to save. For example, research has found that employees accept lower wages to work for politically like-minded entities, and people may select higher-priced products or ones that offer less-functional value.

-- Relationships: Polarization has the potential to prevent neighbors or colleagues of opposing parties from developing friendships. This ultimately deprives individuals of intellectual diversity, among other things.

-- Health: Obstruction of social relationships stemming from political polarization can cause both mental and physical harm. Additionally, the politicization of COVID-19 prevention techniques has seemingly slowed their adoption and obscured dissemination of scientific facts, thereby amplifying the spread of a deadly disease.

-- Societal interests: For instance, beliefs relating to global warming, affirmative action, wealth inequality and gun control often tend to reflect individuals political affiliations rather than a deliberate processing of relevant information that results in evidence-based decision-making. In addition, the broader negative impacts of these policy areas on society as a whole have the potential to harm individual mental and physical health over the long term, according to the researchers.

The researchers suggest a number of potential measures to limit the effects of polarization, including reducing the spread of misinformation; using messaging techniques to try to bridge the different values of liberals and conservatives; and limiting the length of political campaigns.

At the same time, the researchers acknowledge that some level of conflict is good and natural for society, and that polarization has been shown to increase voting and political participation.

Future research should consider the possibility that while political polarization can be harmful, there may be silver linings and reasons for hope, the researchers concluded, suggesting inquiry into what types and levels of societal conflict result in positive versus negative outcomes.
NDRF personnel carry the body of a victim who died in the massive floods caused after a glacier broke off in Joshimath in the Dhauli Ganga river, near Raini village in Chamoli district of Uttarakhand, Tuesday, February 9, 2021. (PTI/Arun Sharma)

New Delhi/Dehradun: The death toll in Uttarakhands glacier burst tragedy went up to 32 by Tuesday evening as the security agencies and others raced against time to pull out more people from the slush and two blocked tunnels where at least 30 construction workers are believed to be still trapped. The ITBP has deployed drones and dogs to detect over 170 people missing since the disaster struck the Chamoli region Sunday.

A joint team of the ITBP, NDRF, SDRF and other agencies conducting rescue operations used drone cameras to see feasibility to enter beyond the cleared site inside Tapovan tunnel. They have not been successful so far. Machines have been deployed to clear slush, an ITBP official said.

About 600 rescue workers are involved in the operation, two days after the sudden flood in the Alakananda river system in Chamoli district that was possibly triggered by an avalanche or glacier burst. Rescued workers were found hanging to ropes and iron bars in the ceiling of a tunnel in Tapovan to escape from icy water and slush. Those rescued were given medical treatment and airlifted to Dehradun.

Union home minister Amit Shah told the Rajya Sabha on Tuesday that rescue operations were continuing on a war footing and the Central and state governments were closely monitoring the situation.

450 jawans of ITBP, five teams of NDRF, eight teams of Indian Army, a Navy team and five IAF helicopters are engaged in search and rescue operations," Mr Shah said, as Rajya Sabha members paid tribute to the victims of the Uttarakhand glacier disaster.

He added 12 people of an NTPC project were safely rescued from one tunnel, and 15 people from the Rishiganga project were also rescued at the time of the incident. 25-35 people are feared trapped in the second tunnel of the NTPC project, and efforts are underway on a war footing to rescue them, Mr Shah said in the Lok Sabha.

He further said since a bridge was washed away due to the deluge, 13 villages around the site of the incident have been cut off. Supplies and medical assistance were being sent to these villages through helicopters.

Earlier on Tuesday, Uttarakhand CM Trivendra Singh Rawat conducted an aerial survey of the areas affected by the glacier burst and took stock of the situation. The CM visited the ITBP hospital in Joshimath, about 300 km from Dehradun, and met the 12 workers who were rescued from a small tunnel in Tapovan on Sunday evening. He also visited Lata and Raini to meet residents of the disaster-hit villages.

Mr Rawat said that the priority was to get to those trapped inside the tunnel and save as many lives as possible, he said. More heavy machines could be pressed into service to expedite the process of clearing the tonnes of debris inside the tunnel, blocking the path of rescue personnel.

Some family members of the missing workers are also camping at Tapovan, waiting for some news about them. About 70 missing workers are from Uttar Pradesh, an official said in Lucknow. Of them, 34 are from Lakhimpur Kheri district alone.

A senior official added that the rescuers have so far not been able to make any contact with those stuck inside the tunnel but are hopeful about finding some signs of life.

As the temperatures dipped to freezing levels at the site, awash with slush, silt and debris, bonfires were lit at multiple locations to keep the rescuers warm. The rescuers are carrying tall wooden planks which are being used to wade in through the slush and will later also help create a platform to pull out the trapped people using ropes.

In New Delhi, meanwhile, scientists of the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology suggest that a rock mass may have weakened over a period of time due to the freezing and thawing of snow and led to the creation of a weak zone, triggering its collapse, which resulted in the formation of a temporary dam that eventually breached, causing the deadly floods in Uttarakhands Chamoli district on Sunday.

Kalachand Sain, director of the institute, said the incident occurred adjacent to the Raunthi glacier. The area also has glaciers that feed the Rishi Ganga river, which ultimately joins the Dhauli Ganga.
Two men are wanted for second-degree murder in an October 2020 killing police now say was linked to the city's "drug sub-culture."

Two men are wanted for second-degree murder in an October 2020 killing police now say was linked to the city's "drug sub-culture."

Evan Daniel Bill Brightnose-Baker, 21, has been charged with murder along with 28-year-old Jesse James Daher in the death of 29-year-old Mohamed Mohiadin Ahmed, the Winnipeg Police Service said Wednesday.

Canadawide arrest warrants have been issued for both men. Police announced the warrant for Daher on Jan. 19.

Police released more details Wednesday about what investigators believe led to Ahmed's death. They say he and the suspects were at a residence in Fort Garry when Ahmed was assaulted and left to die. The body was dumped in the Red River, and a passerby saw it while they were walking their dog near Churchill Drive and Hay Street just after 8 a.m. on Oct. 12.

Emergency personnel recovered the body, later identified as Ahmed. Police say they believe he was killed on Oct. 9 or Oct. 10 and that his body was left in the Fort Garry home for a few days. Neither he nor the suspects lived there. All of the men knew each other, WPS spokesman Const. Jay Murray said, but police haven't deemed it a gang-related homicide.

"We believe that the drug sub-culture played a role in this homicide," Murray said during a news conference Wednesday.

Tips from the public led to Daher being charged last month, and Murray said investigators hope Winnipeggers can provide information that will help them advance the investigation. Both suspects are known to police, and Murray said it's possible they could still be in Winnipeg.

"It's possible. We believe that people in Winnipeg will be able to help provide some information that will lead to their apprehension, whether it's in Winnipeg or elsewhere," he said, adding that "information from the public has helped us substantially," and "no tip is too small."

As the investigation progresses, Murray said it's possible police could be looking for additional suspects.

Police describe Brightnose-Baker as Indigenous, 5-5 with a medium build. He weighs about 126 pounds, has brown eyes and is believed to have black hair. Daher is described as white, 6-3, weighing about 155 pounds with a thin build. He has green eyes and is believed to have a shaved head or short brown hair.

Police warned that both suspects should be considered "armed and dangerous" and shouldn't be approached. They're asking anyone with information on their whereabouts to call 911. Police are asking anyone with information that may help investigators to call the WPS homicide unit at 204-986-6508 or Crime Stoppers at 204-786-8477.

In the past, both accused pleaded guilty to weapons offences. Brightnose-Baker was on a year-long supervised probation starting in May after he pleaded guilty to a weapons trafficking charge for which he spent about seven months in jail. The court also imposed a lifetime weapons ban on him. A few months later, in August, he was charged with theft under $5,000 and mischief to property under $5,000, court records show. Those charges are still before the court, and he had an upcoming court date set for next month.

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @thatkatiemay
Japanese TV personality Sayuri Fujita has donated W10 million from her YouTube channel to the "baby box" of a church where destitute young mothers can drop off their newborn children (US$1=W1,115).

Fujita recently made headlines by having a baby from a sperm donor despite being a single mother, and now she wants to help those less fortunate.

"Since becoming a mother, I found myself worrying even more about the baby box," she said. "As a mother, it breaks my heart to think about what would drive women to leave their babies there."

The money is badly needed. Her son, for example, uses more than 20 diapers a day. "You have to spend a lot of money every day on diapers and powdered formula," she says. "I know how difficult it can be when you have no money."

"I'm going to work hard so I'll be able to donate more money," Fujita adds.
It has been a staple of American breakfast tables for more than a century, but has long faced criticism that its name and likeness are rooted in racist imagery.

Now, Aunt Jemima has a new name: the Pearl Milling Company.

In an announcement on Tuesday by PepsiCo, which owns Aunt Jemimas parent company Quaker Oats, the pancake-mix and syrup line formally began rebranding itself and moved one step closer to permanently abandoning its 131-year-old name.

The new name comes from the milling company in St. Joseph, Mo., that pioneered the self-rising pancake mix that became known as Aunt Jemima, according to PepsiCo, which said the rebranded products would arrive in stores in June.

The change has been in the works since last June after the killing of George Floyd catalyzed widespread protests over racial injustice and a nationwide reckoning over symbols of the Old South and their meaning. Several large food companies came under fire for using racial stereotypes, including Quaker Oats, which said it would drop the Aunt Jemima name, redesign its packaging and pledge $5 million to support the Black community.
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Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-10 19:17:05|Editor: huaxia

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Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, addresses a Chinese Lunar New Year reception at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, Feb. 10, 2021. The CPC Central Committee and the State Council held the reception on Wednesday in Beijing. (Xinhua/Pang Xinglei)

BEIJING, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping, on behalf of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and the State Council, extended Spring Festival greetings to all Chinese Wednesday at a reception in Beijing.

Xi, also general secretary of the CPC Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, delivered a speech at the gathering at the Great Hall of the People, greeting Chinese people of all ethnic groups, compatriots in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, and overseas Chinese.

This year's Spring Festival, or the Chinese Lunar New Year, falls on Feb. 12.

Achieving the first centenary goal of finishing building a moderately prosperous society in all respects is a great feat of milestone significance, Xi noted.

Demanding the virtues of modesty and prudence, Xi called for efforts to achieve the second centenary goal and the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, and make new and greater contributions to the noble cause of securing peace and development for all mankind.

Party and state leaders Li Keqiang, Li Zhanshu, Wang Yang, Wang Huning, Zhao Leji, Han Zheng and Wang Qishan were present at the reception. Li Keqiang chaired the event.

Xi summarized the nation's major achievements in 2020 under the Party's leadership, including emerging as one of the first countries that brought the COVID-19 epidemic under control, taking the lead among major economies in achieving positive economic growth, making historic progress in building a moderately prosperous society in all respects and accomplishing the poverty eradication tasks on time.

The country also saw the success of a number of key science and technology innovation projects, solid progress in pushing forward the Belt and Road Initiative and the successful conclusion of implementing the 13th Five-Year Plan, as well as growing global support for building a community with a shared future for humanity, Xi said.

Facts have once again proved that the system of socialism with Chinese characteristics has incomparable vitality and creativity, Xi noted.

As long as the entire Party and the Chinese people of all ethnic groups rally closely around the CPC Central Committee, there is no difficulty that cannot be overcome, he said.

In 2021, efforts should be made to consolidate and expand the results secured in epidemic containment and social and economic development, Xi stressed, demanding a good start in boosting the country's development during the 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021-2025) so as to celebrate the Party's centenary with outstanding achievements.

Having completed a glorious journey of 100 years, the CPC has grown into the world's largest Marxist ruling party that has been in power for over 70 years in the world's largest socialist country, Xi said.

The centenary sees the Party, with more than 91 million members, in its prime with the widespread support of 1.4 billion Chinese people, he added.

The Party will remain invincible as long as it stands at the forefront of the times, leads the charge in overcoming difficulties and challenges, and takes root among the people, Xi said. Enditem
New research from Trinity College Dublin suggests that older adults can be more focused, less impeded by anxiety and less mentally restless than younger adults. The team at the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience (TCIN) (today, Wednesday, 10th February, 2021) show that older adults appear to mitigate the negative aspects of cognitive decline by increasing motivation and adopting more efficient strategies to suspend the wandering mind when focus is required.

The study, published in the journal Psychology and Aging (American Psychological Association) is the first to adjudicate between competing theories of age-related mind-wandering dominant in the field. It highlights the influential roles of affective and motivational factors in driving age-related differences in unintentional mind-wandering and provide reasons to be less persuaded by previous cognitive resources accounts.

The human mind has a natural and frequent tendency to wander. In everyday life, our thoughts often stray from the here-and-now. Mind-wandering is broadly defined as the mental state whereby our attention shifts away from a task or our current environment to unrelated and self-generated mental content. Recent research within healthy ageing populations has demonstrated a confusing yet consistent finding of reduced mind-wandering frequency with advancing age.

Although different theories have been suggested to explain this finding, previous studies have been afflicted by varying methodological challenges for capturing incidences of mind-wandering. As such, the neuropsychological mechanisms underlying age-related differences in mind-wandering remain unclear. Further, there is a lack of research exploring the mechanisms underlying different mind-wandering dynamics; specifically, mind-wandering that occurs with and without intention.

Considering the phenomenon of global population ageing, and in light of the reported benefits (e.g. creativity, problem-solving) and costs (e.g. poorer sustained attention and clinical outcomes) of mind-wandering, it is important to investigate the impact of ageing on mind-wandering. Sustaining our attention is an important ability that underlies much of our cognition and its decline is linked with an increased risk of falls, a factor contributing to the loss of independence and reduced quality of life in older adults. Therefore, research on different attentional states is vital for shaping our understanding of the brain and the natural ageing process and may help inform future interventions targeted at promoting healthy ageing.

The 'Dockree Lab' team at TCIN, in a collaboration with Prof Alan Smeaton from Dublin City University, investigated whether the nature and frequency of mind-wandering changed with age, and explored the specific mechanisms underlying unintentional and intentional mind-wandering. They employed a multi-faceted methodological approach whereby healthy younger and community-dwelling older adults completed a series of standardised cognitive and neuropsychological tasks and performed a computerised sustained attention task that periodically asked participants to report on their current mental state. Compared to previous studies, the task was well-suited to measure mind-wandering as the task was non-demanding and presented gradually unfolding targets that placed greater reliance on endogenous attentional control.

Key Findings

Older adults exhibited a lower tendency for mind-wandering, both unintentionally and intentionally, than younger adults. In total, older and younger adults reported mind-wandering 27% and 45%, respectively, in response to the thought probes throughout the task.

Younger and older adults demonstrated similar task performance; although, older adults performed with less variability indicating overall better focus.

Despite poorer performance on standard cognitive tests, older adults exhibited lower levels of anxiety and depression, fewer subjective attentional difficulties, and greater task-related motivation than their younger counterparts.

The analyses also highlight the adaptive qualities of older adults who were able to reduce their unintentional mind-wandering through their lower levels of anxiety and greater task motivation than the more mentally restless younger group. Contrary to executive resource accounts of mind-wandering, the cognitive variables did not further contribute to this model.

The team observed an association between intentional mind-wandering and increased false alarms on the task, which was mediated by more inconsistent responding, particularly in the young who were more restless in their approach. Considering that younger adults' higher variability did not incur a relative cost to their performance compared to older adults, they have more resources available to adaptively switch between focus and more explorative mind-wandering states.

Older adults, on the other hand, exploit greater focus toward the task, with less bias toward mind-wandering. We suggest this is an adaptive quality of successful ageing - when context demands it, older adults suspend the wandering mind to mitigate potential costs.

The team suggests that dispositional and strategic factors be considered in future studies exploring mind-wandering across the lifespan. The research, therefore, highlights the nature and correlates of different mind-wandering dimensions and provides new insight into how unintentional and intentional mind-wandering processes change with age.

Catherine Moran, PhD candidate, School of Psychology and lead author said:

"Age-related cognitive decline in later life represents a leading cause of disease burden and loss of functional independence. Despite these challenges, there is a consistent and perhaps, puzzling finding of reduced mind-wandering with advancing age. Our research, supported by the Irish Research Council, provides new insight into the influence of the natural ageing process on mind-wandering. We highlight the adaptive strategies and positive qualities adopted by older adults that led to a beneficial reduction in their mind-wandering and equivalent performance with younger adults. Dissecting the mechanisms underlying different cognitive processes may be important indications of successful ageing."

Dr Paul Dockree, Associate Professor, Psychology and co-author/lead investigator said:

"'Old and absentminded' is a phrase, which is recognised in common parlance, but it does not hold universal truth. Our research suggests that older adults can be more focused, less impeded by anxiety and less mentally restless than younger adults. Importantly, older adults appear to mitigate the negative aspects of cognitive decline by increasing motivation and adopting more efficient strategies to suspend the wandering mind when focus is required. This research is in keeping with Trinity's Research Theme of Ageing, which promotes a more in depth understanding of cognitive changes as we age, with a view to establishing a more age-friendly and inclusive society."

###
NEW DELHI : Some hydropower plants located downstream have decided to curtail operations to protect their turbine blades from the high silt content in the Rishiganga river water following the glacier burst and flash floods in Uttarakhand, said two people aware of the development, requesting anonymity.

Some projects downstream are exercising caution and not allowing the silt-laden water to enter their turbines. This is a standard precautionary measure," said a senior government functionary, one of the two people cited above.

Besides, Jaiprakash Power Ventures Ltds 400MW Vishnuprayag Hydro Electric Project, which went offline at 11am on Sunday, is yet to resume operations as it is yet to flush out the silt-laden water.

River water had gushed in through the tail race tunnel of the project bringing with it slush, the company said on Monday. The Vishnuprayag project is still offline," said the second person cited above.

According to Central Electricity Authority, Indias apex power sector planning body, Uttarakhand has hydropower generation potential of 17.99 GW for projects with 25MW capacity and above. Of this 3.75GW is operational and 1.49GW is under construction.

Experts said glacier lake outburst floods, which usually occur in April-September, is a widely known phenomenon and when hydropower projects are designed, precautions are taken to protect units from such natural hazards.

Due to the freeze and thaw cycle of the glacier, rocks start defragmenting and this results in moraine, that is carried by the river water along with the silt," the government official said. Even THDCs Tehri on Bhagirathi river stopped generation yesterday (Monday) and resumed operations later."

The 1,000MW Tehri dam and hydropower plant has a spillway system designed for a probable maximum flood of 15,540 cubic metres a second. Tehri dams full reservoir limit, or its safe level, is 830m. There was apprehension that with Bhagirathi flowing with Alaknanda already in swell, it may create flooding at Devprayag, Rishikesh and Haridwar. Tehri stopped generation completely and stopped the entire flow of Bhagirathi. If this measure wasnt taken, there may have been a bigger problem," the official said.

While the 13.2MW Rishiganga small hydro project was washed away, NTPC Ltds 520MW under-construction Tapovan Vishnugad hydropower project site has also been damaged. The barrage at NTPCs project site has been filled with sediment, the barrages top bridge has been damaged and three spillway gates have been washed away.

The Uttarakhand government has reported that there is no danger of downstream flooding and the rise in water level has been contained," home minister Amit Shah informed Parliament on Tuesday. All the staff of the Central Water Commission deployed in Alaknanda and Ganga basin up to Haridwar are on alert," he said, according to a statement issued by the ministry.

Experts said hydropower will continue to play a key role in decarbonizing Indias energy mix. Hydropower in general and pumped storage hydro in specific are emerging as the front-runners for this as they can play a vital role in fast ramping up and down, and peak and off-peak balancing support because of their inherent flexibility," said Subhrajit Datta Ray, director, power and utilities, PwC.

Of Indias installed power-generation capacity of 373.43GW, hydropower projects account for around 12.23% or 45.69GW capacity

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Cruise Saudi is welcoming two global cruise industry experts who will be joining the Cruise Saudi team in Jeddah in the coming weeks, bringing a combined 58 years of experience to the organisation.

Mark Robinson (previously of Global Ports Holding & Intercruises Shoreside & Port Services) and Miguel Reyna (previously of Royal Caribbean Group) will lead business growth and oversee asset development for Cruise Saudi as it continues to establish itself within the industry.

The dual strategic hires follow the successful launch of Saudi Arabias first-ever dedicated cruise and terminal developer in Cruise Saudi. Both Robinson and Reyna will be guiding the infrastructure development and suite of cruise and ship and passenger services that will be scaled in the preliminary business phase for the organization.

Miguel Reyna is a recognised cruise industry professional with a deep understanding for creating, planning, financing and implementing worldwide marine infrastructure and cruise terminal development investments. Reyna specialises in collaborating with governments, investors and local players in every market to establish win-win solutions that enable cruise infrastructure to promote long-term cruise industry growth while embracing sustainable cruise tourism principles.

Mark Robinson is a highly celebrated c-suite executive who brings extensive knowledge of commercial, operational, change management, passenger services and guest experiences from within the cruise and tour operating business. Recently, Robinson has led the development of ancillary services and retail operations for many of the worlds largest cruise port terminals. His experience as head of business development for EMEA and Asia Pacific Region with Global Ports Holdings will help shape the business strategy for Cruise Saudi and its ports.

Commenting on the transition, Robinson noted: I am excited and grateful for the opportunity to be part of building an entirely new market from the ground up. It is a unique chance for anyone in the cruise industry to take on a different kind of challenge, in a newly opened part of the world. It doesnt hurt that Saudi Arabias coastlines along the Red Sea and the Gulf Coast are some of the most attractive and intriguing destinations imaginable to establish new cruise ports and destination experiences.

Reyna added: Ive been highly impressed by the business excellence that Cruise Saudi plans to deliver to the cruise market. The thought that has gone into Saudi Arabia as a tourist destination under Vision 2030 and the commitment to preserving cultural and natural treasures is inspiring to say the least. Im excited to hit the ground running to deliver the cruise infrastructure that will make these rich and unique Saudi treasures available to all cruise guests and to make tangible economic impact for the local communities. - TradeArabia News Service
The Idaho Falls man who was shot and killed by a police officer in his own backyard after being mistaken for a wanted suspect has been identified by family members as a married father-of-four who had recently relocated his family from California in search of a 'better life.'

The fatal officer-involved shooting took place in Idaho Falls early Monday morning as police scoured a residential neighborhood in search of a man with a history of violence against law enforcement who had fled a traffic stop and was said to be armed.

During the manhunt, a police officer came upon a man carrying a gun standing in a yard and opened fire, killing him. The victim was later determined to be the owner of the property. Relatives identified him as 37-year-old Joseph 'Joe' Johnson.

Scroll down for video

Family members have identified the Idaho Falls man who was shot and killed by a police officer on Monday as Joseph Johnson, 37, a married father of four (pictured with his family)

The real suspect, Tanner Shoesmith, 22 (left), was being sought by police on three outstanding warrants. Johnson (right) was not suspected of any crime

According to the description of a GoFundMe campaign launched by Charles Johnson, the victim's father, his son, daughter-in-law and their four children had only recently moved from his native Sacramento, California, to Idaho Falls.

'He moved his family to Idaho for a better life,' wrote the father. 'They just bought a house. They were so happy.'

According to information posted on Facebook, Johnson and his wife, Bree, had been married for 11 years. They have three daughters and a son.

Neighbors speaking to The Daily Beast described Johnson as a doting dad.

'Hes a really good friend,' one neighbor told the outlet. 'He was very loving. His children and wife adored him, and he adored them. He was a great dad.'

Johnson's father has launched a GoFundMe campaign to provide financial aid to his widow and their four children (pictured)

Johnson, a native of Sacramento, California, is pictured left with his mother, Tammy. He and wife Bree, right, had been married for more than 11 years

DailyMail.com on Wednesday reached out to Johnson's mother for comment and was awaiting a reply. Tammy Johnson confirmed her son's death in a Facebook comment on Tuesday, which coincided with her birthday.

Police have not officially identified the victim of the shooting, only saying that he was white, while the officer who killed him was Hispanic.

'There are no words to express how heavy our hearts are today,' said Chief Bryce Johnson. 'This situation is devastatingly tragic for the family, for the officer, and those that love and care about them. We all feel the weight of what has occurred today. Our sincere sympathies are with the family and friends of those involved, and most especially the family of the deceased.'

Johnson stressed during a press conference this week that the shooting victim was not a suspect in any crime.

An Idaho Falls police officer looking for a suspect mistakenly shot and killed a man in his own backyard at Tendoy Drive and Syringa Drive early Monday morning

According to a detailed press release from the Idaho Police Department, the incident began unfolding after midnight, when a Bonneville County Sheriffs deputy attempted to pull over a car for a broken taillight.

The vehicle stopped on the corner of Lincoln Drive off of 1st Street and a male passenger, identified on Tuesday as 22-year-old Tanner Shoesmith, jumped out and ran into a residential neighborhood, where he scaled a fence in someone's backyard and disappeared from view.

The deputy followed and radioed for help, letting other officers know that the suspect was wearing a black shirt and khaki pants.

Several deputies and Idaho Falls police officers joined the manhunt. As they were searching the area, a resident on Holbrook Drive told them they had seen the suspect run through their yard and that they believed he was armed with a gun.

Idaho Falls Police Chief Bryce Johnson described the fatal officer-involved shooting as a 'devastatingly tragic' situation

During the search, a police officer spoke with another resident on the corner of Tendoy Drive and Syringa Drive, telling him that law enforcement officers were looking for a suspect, and that they would be in the area for some time.

Meanwhile, police learned that Shoesmith had multiple warrants out for his arrest, including felony battery on an officer, and two failure to appear warrants with original charges of resisting arrest, and providing false information to law enforcement.

Cops spoke to a woman who was in the car with Shoesmith, and she showed them a message she had received from him sharing his GPS location, reported East Idaho News.

Police used the information to pinpoint the location of the suspect, which showed him in the backyard of a home on the corner of Tendoy Drive and Syringa Drive.

Officers and deputies surrounded the residence and backyard to stop the suspect from fleeing.

'Due to the information that the suspect may be armed, and a prior history of violence when interacting with police officers, law enforcement personnel entered the location with their service weapons drawn,' according to the release.

Officers heard yelling and approached the backyard where they encountered a man wearing a black shirt armed with a firearm. They ordered the man, later identified as Joseph Johnson, to drop his weapon.

'We do not currently have the answers as to what exactly occurred during these moments,' said Chief Johnson. 'We do know that during this interaction, an Idaho Falls Police Officer discharged his service weapon firing one shot which struck the man.

The incident began unfolding after midnight, when a county sheriff's deputy attempted to pull over a car for a broken taillight, and its passenger jumped out and fled into this area

The suspect was described as wearing a black shirt and khaki pants, and a neighbor told police he may be armed with a gun

Police and paramedics tried to save Johnson's life but he died from his injuries.

Law enforcement later determined that the deceased man was not the suspect but was the resident of the home. He was the same person an officer had spoken to earlier about the manhunt.

Shortly after the shooting, a deputy reported seeing a man running through the area. Officers and deputies tracked this man to a nearby home, where he was found hiding in a shed in the backyard.

Sgt. Bryan Lovell said Shoesmith did not have a gun in his possession at the time of his arrest, reported Idaho State Journal.

The man was positively identified as Shoesmith and was taken into custody. He was then booked into the county jail on the three outstanding warrants as well as a new misdemeanor charge for resisting arrest.

The entire incident  from the traffic stop to the arrest - lasted 20 minutes.

The Idaho Falls officer who fired the fatal shot has been placed on administrative leave and will not return to duty during the investigation.

The officer was wearing a body camera during the incident. That footage, along with all other body camera and dashboard camera footage from officers on scene, will be handed over to the Eastern Idaho Critical Incident Task Force, which was called to conduct the investigation.

Once the task force, led in this case by Idaho State Police, concludes its investigation, which could take weeks or months, the results will be turned over to the Bonneville County prosecutor, who will review the case and make a determination regarding whether the shooting was legally justified.

At the same time, the Idaho Falls Police Department will be conducting an internal affairs investigation. As part of the process, a Use of Force Review Board, which includes two civilians, will determine whether departmental policies and procedures were followed, and make recommendations to the chief.

The chief will then make a final determination regarding whether or not the shooting was within the bound of departmental policy, and whether any disciplinary actions are appropriate.

'The Idaho Falls Police Department has core values, one of those values being integrity,' Chief Johnson stated. 'As we define integrity it means being honest and truthful at all times, even when the truths we have to tell may be difficult. Today, the truths we have to share with the community are difficult and incredibly tragic.'
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A Canadian laboratory can no longer sell a crucial product that independent researchers rely upon to test and analyze whether a particular PFAS chemical is present in soil or water, after the manufacturer of the chemicalSolvay S.A.threatened the lab with legal action, according to documents reviewed by Consumer Reports and interviews.

The lab, Canada-based Wellington Laboratories, specializes in making analytical standards of chemicals, essentially pure versions of compounds that scientists can use to accurately monitor the presence and concentration of a contaminant in the environment. While the work may be obscure to the general public, for scientists, it provides a necessary tool to conduct accurate research of chemicals that little may be known about. And Solvays action is unprecedented, according to researchers and advocates who spoke to CR.

Solvay is trying to make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for academic scientists to accurately measure this compound in the environment, says Michael Hansen, Ph.D., a senior scientist at CR.

Alissa Cordner, Ph.D., a sociology professor at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash., and co-director of the PFAS Project Lab at Northeastern University in Boston, agrees. Without chemical standards, it is extremely difficult to conduct any monitoring to measure the presence and concentration of chemicals in the environment or in human bodies, she says.

Wellingtons product offerings previously included a standard for a Solvay-owned PFAS chemical known as C6O4, a newer variety of PFAS, for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, a group of compounds that includes more than 5,000 related chemicals. Many of those compounds have raised concerns because they persist in the environment for long periods of time and have been linked to learning delays in children, cancer, and other health problems. Wellington is routinely cited in academic articles for PFAS.

Story continues

But late last month, Wellingtons president, Brock C. Chittim, published a letter online alerting its customers that it was discontinuing its C6O4 analytical standard permanently, after Solvay argued it violated the companys patent rights for the PFAS chemical.

Nicole Riddell, Wellington's quality manager, tells CR that after learning of Solvay's position in the summer of 2020, the company was issued a "temporary release" to sell the standard to the Italian Environmental Agency to facilitate investigations of C6O4 in the country. But after six months of discussions with Solvay, Riddell says, "We were not able to procure a license that would allow uncensored access to the standard by any research group interested in analyzing for this environmental contaminant."

Solvay asserted that its patent extended to the "manufacture, use, offer for sale, and sale of C6O4 for any purpose (including standards for environmental analysis) and that we should discontinue our sales to avoid legal action," Riddell adds.

After negotiations fell apart, Wellington complied, according to the letter from Chittim, and the company agreed to "cease the production and sale of this certified reference standard."

Independent scientists and consumer advocates were outraged by Solvays legal maneuver, saying it represented a virtually unheard of tactic by manufacturers that will impede research into a new and emerging PFAS chemical. Under federal law, companies that use PFAS to make productslike batteries or stain-resistant clothingcan already prohibit the public release of information about the chemicals they use by claiming it's confidential and secret.

Indeed, Riddell says that Solvay's request marked the first time that Wellington had encountered a patent claim.

"We offer an extensive line of PFAS reference standards and have never been contacted by a industrial manufacturer regarding patent infringement before," she says.

Brian Carroll, head of external communications at Solvay, confirmed that the company became aware of Wellingtons analytical standards in mid-2020 and subsequently determined that Wellingtons offer was in violation of Solvays patent.

Solvay subsequently notified Wellington of its infringement, Carroll says. C6O4 is manufactured by a Solvay affiliate outside of the U.S., he adds, for use in certain specialty polymers products.

As a science company with sustainability at our core, Solvay meets applicable legal standards with respect to health, safety, and the environment, he adds. We care deeply about the well-being of our employees and the communities in which we operate.

Highlights Secrecy Concerns

Solvays apparent efforts to hide information about PFAS it uses has been an ongoing source of controversy since last summer, when researchers from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) reported finding new, potentially dangerous PFAS chemicals, first in soil samples from multiple locations in New Jersey and then in drinking water. The researchers concluded Solvays plant in the state was the likely source of contamination. (Solvay has denied responsibility.)

For months, CR sought safety data and studies about those PFAScalled ClPFPECAthrough the Freedom of Information Act, but the EPA initially denied the request, citing Solvays confidentiality claims. But after CR appealed the EPAs denial, the agency released reams of internal studies conducted by Solvay, showing the company had known of potentially severe health risks, including liver damage, with the chemicals, for years. The documents also showed that Solvay had found the PFAS in the blood of its workers.

Last month, the Environmental Working Group, an advocacy organization, called on the EPA to levy civil and criminal fines of more than $430 million against Solvay, saying the documents indicated that Solvay had for several years failed to notify the agency about company studies showing health hazards of the PFAS, as required under federal law.

Dave Andrews, EWG senior scientist, says Solvays action against Wellington not only hinders scientific research for one of its chemicals, but is consistent with the companys failure to provide EPA critical safety data.

It is beyond reproach that Solvay is enforcing patent rights and hindering the ability of researchers to document the extent of PFAS contamination in the environment or independently study their toxicity, he says.

C6O4

Researchers have been keen to better understand C6O4, after the compound was discovered in 2019 in a river in Italy, according to a 2020 study in Environmental Science & Technology and news reports.

The continued emergence of previously unknown PFAS has underscored the fraught debate around the safety of the chemical group. Currently, U.S. regulations governing how much PFAS can be in drinking water are limited to only a few states covering a handful of the best studied compounds.

Major manufacturers, including Solvay, have since phased out those better-studied compounds and replaced them with newer substances that companies and industry groups say are safer.

But PFAS researchers say that studies of newer PFAS suggest they pose similar risks as the older compounds, and some have called for the EPA to regulate the entire group as a chemical class, instead of setting limits one-by-one. The sheer breadth alone of how many PFAS exist makes it easy for companies to swap out one for another that might end up regulated.

The little research done to date about C6O4 leaves many questions unanswered about the compounds safety.

The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) studied the chemicals safety in 2014 and found its not of a safety concern for the consumer if the substance is only to be used as a polymer production aid during the manufacture of fluoropolymers. The EFSA, however, said the C6O4 is intended for repeated use in contact with food.

A June 2020 study in the Journal of Endocrinological Investigation examined how C6O4 impacts thyroid cells in a test tube, calling it the first evaluation of potential adverse effects of C6O4. The study found no adverse effects, but the authors cautioned the findings do not allow drawing firm general conclusions as to the safety of C6O4 exposure.

Is C6O4 Being Used in the U.S.?

In response to questions from CR, Solvay spokesperson Carroll says that C6O4 is not manufactured or used by the company in the U.S., but he added a caveat: Nor to the best of our knowledge is it manufactured or used by other companies in the U.S.

Statements by a Solvay competitor last year raised the possibility that C6O4 might already be used in the U.S.

In a February 2020 letter to the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE), the manufacturer Chemours provided comments about the states proposed drinking water standards for PFAS, which included GenX, a compound used by Chemours.

If Michigan regulators determine that water should be tested for GenX, Chemours argued, the state should include these other short-chain processing aids as well, including Solvays C6O4. (Chemours didnt respond to a request for comment.)

The problem, experts say, is that its difficult, if not impossible, to know whether C6O4 is being used in the U.S.

The EPA must approve any new chemical for use in the U.S. under the Toxic Substances Control Act, says Erik Olson, senior strategic director for Health at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy organization, says the EPA must approve any new chemical for use in the U.S. under the Toxic Substances Control Act. But Olson says the actual formula and name of the chemicals are often shrouded in secrecy as supposed trade secrets.

This is an issue weve been fighting for years, he says. So it would be difficult to know if these chemicals are being used here.

Can the EPA Step In?

The possibility that Solvays C6O4 could be used in the U.S. underscores the risks of Solvay blocking Wellington Labs from selling an analytical standard of the compound.

This cease and desist letter from Solvay to Wellington is alarming, and if left standing it would create a dangerous precedent, says Tom Bruton, Ph.D., senior scientist at the Green Science Policy Institute and PFAS researcher. PFAS producers like Solvay should be providing analytical standards to researchers and regulators free of charge, but instead they're trying to block those scientists' access to the standards and slow down their work to protect public health.

Without analytical standards, scientists could utilize a testing technique called non-targeted analysis, which essentially allows researchers to reverse engineer the process. Thats what EPA and New Jersey researchers used to uncover and identify Solvays PFAS compound, ClPFPECA.

Researchers say non-targeted analysis is crucial for identifying new PFAS compounds, but its a costly and time-consuming endeavor. And Solvay has called into question that testing method before. The company previously told CR such findings about Solvay and ClPFPECA are inherently imprecise.

Solvay cant have it both ways, says CRs Hansen. On the one hand, the company wont provide researchers the standard needed to examine one of its PFAS. On the other, it says you cant trust results that dont use that standard.
(Natural News) A leftist journalist expressed regret about calling for Silicon Valley to censor content after it happened to him.

(Article by Paul Joseph Watson republished from InfoWars.com)

Progressive reporter Jordan Chariton had the change of heart after YouTube took down one of his videos.

Charitons original advocacy for censorship occurred when he called for Big Tech giants to target anyone who questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election.

EVERY media outlet that pushed this INSANE election fraud conspiracy for clicks should be taken off the air. Theyve incited a Civil War, Chariton tweeted on January 6, the date of the Capitol breach.

THREAD: With time to reflect, & seeing Silicon Valleys censorship onslaught, I regret this tweet made in heat of moment. Whether certain cable/YouTube outlets mislead audiences w/ dishonest claims lacking real evidence, they shouldnt be targetedhttps://t.co/h2eWsVLIQq  Jordan (@JordanChariton) February 3, 2021

However, after YouTube pulled video from his own channel featuring footage of the January 6 riot for violating the platforms policies against spam and deceptive practices, Chariton reversed his position.

With time to reflect, & seeing Silicon Valleys censorship onslaught, I regret this tweet made in [the] heat of moment, the progressive journalist wrote. Whether certain cable/YouTube outlets mislead audiences w/ dishonest claims lacking real evidence, they shouldnt be targeted.

Chariton noted that with the precedent having been set for blanket censorship, progressive content was also now being unfairly targeted, while pointing out that big left-wing networks with friendly YouTube ties like the Young Turks were not calling it out.

the FEW independent leftist outletsincluding the VERY FEW IN-THE-FIELD reporting networks like @StatusCoup. Shame on @TheYoungTurks and other outlets with MUCH bigger platforms for not drawing more attention to this censorship binge.  Jordan (@JordanChariton) February 3, 2021

In a subsequent interview, the journalist noted that the purge of right-wing content was merely an excuse for YouTube to get rid of all content that questioned the consensus on subjects such as healthcare or U.S. foreign policy.

Chariton pointed out that big networks like CNN that carried the exact same footage from January 6 were not targeted at all by YouTube.

Read more at: InfoWars.com and Censorship.news.
South Africa: Presidential Employment Stimulus making significant strides

President Cyril Ramaphosas ambitious drive to inject much-needed jobs into South Africas COVID-19 ravaged economy is beginning to bear fruit.

This much is evident in the second progress report on implementation of the Presidential Employment Stimulus released by the Presidency on Tuesday. The stimulus, which targets the employment of 600 000 youths, was announced by President Ramaphosa during his address to a joint sitting of Parliament in October.

As part of the Economic Reconstruction and Recovery Plan, the Presidential Employment Stimulus is designed to respond to the rise in unemployment caused by the Coronavirus pandemic.

In the past year, about R13 billion was allocated to the stimulus from President Ramaphosas R100 billion job protection and creation support package announced in April as part of the countrys response to the Coronavirus pandemic. The remaining R87 billion will be allocated over the next three years.

The Presidential Employment Stimulus supports a range of opportunities through the expansion of public employment as well as job retention in vulnerable sectors.

In addition to employment opportunities, the stimulus provides crucial support for livelihoods in the creative sector, the agricultural sector and the early childhood development sector.

Eleven national departments and all nine provinces are responsible for implementation of programmes supported through the employment stimulus.

Its aim is to support livelihoods while the labour market recovers  investing in public goods and services, enhancing skills and employability, and boosting demand in the economy at the same time, reads the report.

The report said the Department of Basic Education has completed its recruitment of education and school assistants at schools in every province. About 94% of assistants had been placed, and received training in curriculum support, ICT, maintenance and other skills during the December/January period.

Calls for proposals issued by the National Arts Council and the National Film and Video Foundation were oversubscribed, and awards are now being finalised. These funds will support new work, enable public and community art projects, and protect jobs at cultural institutions and businesses in the creative sector, reads the report.

The Presidency said the Department of Social Development was providing crucial income support to the Early Childhood Development sector, which has faced severe challenges during the pandemic. This programme will provide support to 110 000 ECD practitioners, helping them to stay open or reopen.

Applications for this support can be submitted until 19 February 2021.

Shifting focus to the Subsistence Producer Relief Fund, the Department of Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development was allocated R1 billion to provide production support vouchers to 74 626 subsistence farmers across the country. The Presidency said the department was currently on track to exceed this target.

The fund supports self-employed farmers back into production after the disruptions caused by COVID-19 as well as rebuild and strengthen local food value chains. This includes rural and peri-urban farmers as well as those engaged in urban agriculture.

Successful applicants receive a voucher for production inputs that can be redeemed from participating suppliers. Award sizes range between R1 000 and R9 000, depending on scale and commodity type.

Over 178 000 people applied for support via the USSD platform set up in the period 10 December to 22 December 2020. The criteria included a points system for age, gender, military veteran status and for key forms of vulnerability, such as child-headed households. The vouchers are to support existing farmers, not start-up farmers, reads the document.

On 23 December 2020, the approvals process began.

After applying the criteria, 131 595 applicants were pre-qualified, triggering visits for physical verification of the information provided.

The Presidency said the DALRRD had used the verification process to create jobs for youth, recruiting former National Rural Youth Service Corps (NARYSEC) and unemployed agricultural graduates to support the department in this process. They are working with local extension officers in each Province. Thus far 1 464 jobs have been created with appointments continuing.

By 5 February, 33 241 applicants had been visited to collect proof of identity, geo-locate them and to verify their production status as per the advertised criteria. DALRRD is also using this process to build an online geo-spatial data-base of subsistence producers, which has not existed previously.

Meanwhile, in parallel, processes of issuing eVouchers and appointing approved suppliers are being finalised.

Eleven national departments are responsible for implementing the various programmes supported by the Presidential Employment Stimulus. The Project Management Office (PMO) in the Presidency is responsible for overall coordination of the stimulus. - SAnews.gov.za

This story has been published on: 2021-02-10. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
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Armenia National Security Service Reserve Officers' Union members meet with His Holiness Karekin II

EU is ready to help Armenia and Azerbaijan with border delimitation and demarcation

ARF-D member on Nikol Pashinyan: 103 years ago Armenia's founding fathers would have executed him for treason

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Situation on Armenian-Azerbaijani border is still tense, more on COVID-19 in Armenia, May 28 digest

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Russia MOD reports on maintenance of ceasefire regime in Nagorno-Karabakh

Armenia acting MOD meets with Russian counterpart in Moscow

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Armenian acting Deputy PM: Discussion on issues possible only after withdrawal of Azeri troops from Armenia's territory

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[February 10, 2021] Chandigarh University announces Admissions-2021 for its distance education programs

Approved from UGC-DEB; Institute of Distance and Online Learning offers admissions to 5 Undergraduate and 5 Post-Graduate courses CHANDIGARH, India, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Adopting blended and technology driven learning for its distance education programs, the Institute of Distance and Online Learning of Chandigarh University has announced admissions to January-2021 intake for its distance education programs. Approved from UGC-DEB (Distance Education Bureau), CU-IDOL offers 5 Post-Graduate and 5 Under-Graduate programs. This was informed by Chandigarh University Registrar, Dr. S.S. Sehgal. The programs which are offered through distance education includes MBA, MCA, M.Com., MA English, MA Phycology, BA, BCA, BBA, B.Com., B.Sc. Travel & Tourism. "After being honored with A+ Grade by National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC), Chandigarh University entered in the field of distance education in 2020. CU-IDOL garnered tremendous response from the first batch itsef as more than 2000 students took admission in its distance education programs," said Dr. Sehgal. The advantage of earning a distance education from NAAC A+ University is that it makes you eligible for jobs offered in government and private sectors and in addition those who are already working, the degree can offer them assistance in getting promotion in their respective organization.



The University has developed Smart State-of-the-art technology oriented learning model where E-Learning Resources like Video Lectures by Industry & Academia professionals, Self-Learning Material drafted by experts from leadings institutes like IIMs, NITs, Personal Contact Program with personalized problem solving mechanism, online submission of assignments and projects and the students can also get in-touch with the university through the Mobile App for their query resolution, added Dr. Sehgal. "The University has more than 5000 e-books and 1000+ national & international e-journals which are accessible to the students of distance education programs through the E-Library facility. In addition Chandigarh University has 14 Centre-of-Excellence and 30+ Industry Established Laboratories through which the students can enhance their practical hands-on learning experience by visiting the university campus," added Dr. Sehgal. CU-IDOL has offered academic scholarships worth Rs. 10 Lakhs to 394 students during 2020 under various scholarship schemes such as Jai Jawan Scholarships for armed forces and police personals, Women Empowerment Scholarships for girl students and COVID-19 Warrior Scholarships.

"The students can register themselves online for admissions to the distance education programs at www.cuidol.in where the students can also get more information about the scholarships offered by the University for Januray-2021 intake," said Dr. S.S.Sehgal, Registrar. About Chandigarh University

Chandigarh University is a NAAC A+ Grade University and an autonomous educational institution approved by UGC and is located near Chandigarh in the state of Punjab. It is the youngest university in India and the only private university in Punjab to be honoured with A+ Grade by NAAC (National Assessment and Accreditation Council). CU offers more than 109 UG and PG programs in the field of engineering, management, pharmacy, law, architecture, journalism, animation, hotel management, commerce and others. It has been awarded as The University with Best Placements by WCRC.

Website: www.cuidol.in Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1436512/CU_IDOL.jpg

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New Delhi:

A united opposition is all set to raise the heat on the government over issues like lynching incidents and vigilantism, the Kashmir situation and the border stand-off with China during the monsoon session of Parliament that begins on Monday.



The session, which will continue till August 11, is also likely to witness heated debates on other key issues like the fallout of the GST, the agrarian crisis and the policy towards Pakistan.



Some parties are likely to raise the issue of notification on ban on cow slaughter and demand an explanation from the government on it.



We will try and put the government on the mat and demand answers on some key issues that are posing a threat to the countrys social harmony, a senior opposition leader said.



CPI leader D Raja said the opposition will seek answers from the government on what they are doing to check rising incidents of cow vigilantism and lynchings in the country that pose grave danger to the social harmony of the country and the idea of India.



The government, on its part, is seeking the cooperation of opposition in getting key legislative business passed and has lined up around two dozen bills in the session that will have around 20 sittings.



The increased opposition synergy comes at a time when 18 parties have come together under one platform to pin the government on some key issues. The parties came together on the presidential and vice presidential election, but are keen to take the unity further in raising issues in Parliament.



Both Houses of Parliament will take up obituary references on Monday and may not transact business due to the death of some sitting members.



Two Rajya Sabha members - former Union minister Anil Madhav Dave and Congress member Palvai Govardhan Reddy - died during the interregnum period after the budget session while sitting Gurdaspur Lok Sabha member Vinod Khanna also died during that period.

Suggested read: PM Modi to meet NDA leaders in series of meetings today, likely to announce VP candidate



A structured meeting within the Congress on the partys strategy in the coming session is slated on Monday, when the session is unlikely to transact much business due to the presidential election.



Another joint meeting of opposition leaders is slated the next day for putting in place their strategy for the session.



The government would want the monsoon session of Parliament to be fruitful and constructive. We will also ensure good coordination and communication with the opposition to help get legislative business passed during the session.



If the opposition demands a discussion on some current issues, we will discuss the same in the business advisory committee and the chairman will decide the time and date of discussion, Union Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi told PTI.



Issues like the flood situation particularly in Assam and other northeastern states, violence over Gorkhaland, fallout of demonetisation, job losses and disinvestment of PSUs are also likely to be raised.



The prime ministers first-ever visit to Israel is also likely to figure for discussion in the coming session.



A lot of legislative business is lined up by the government in this session, which includes the The Indian Institutes of Information Technology (Amendment) Bill, 2017, The Requisitioning and Acquisition of Immovable Property (Amendment) Bill, 2017, The Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains (Amendment) Bill, 2017 in the Lok Sabha.



Besides, The Indian Institutes of Information Technology (Public-Private Partnership) Bill, 2017 and The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (Amendment) Bill, 2017, The Motor Vehicles (Amendment) Bill, 2017, The Footwear Design and Development Institute Bill, 2017, are also lined up for passage in the Lok Sabha.



The government in Rajya Sabha has also lined up a number of legislations for consideration and passage. These include the Constitution amendment bill on national backward commission, the labour code bill, the extension of GST in Jammu and Kashmir bill, the banking resolution bill and The Admiralty (Jurisdiction and Settlement of Maritime Claims) Bill, 2017, among others.



The government has also listed The Whistle Blowers Protection (Amendment) Bill, 2015 for consideration and passage, which has been pending in Rajya Sabha for sometime now.

Suggested read: List of bills to be introduced in Lok Sabha, Rajya Sabha

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.

Katie Price has given fans a guided tour of son Harvey's transitional home as he prepares for a life of semi-independence at a residential college.

The former glamour model opened the doors to his modest two bedroom property in a YouTube video shared with subscribers on Tuesday evening.

Giving cameras unlimited access to the house, Katie, 42, admitted it was still a work in progress as they were yet to finish the painting and decorating.

Cone on in: Katie Price has given fans a guided tour of son Harvey's transitional home as he prepares for a life of semi-independence at a residential college

But every effort has been made to ensure it's a home from home for Harvey, 18, with a wide-screen TV installed in the living room and the main bedroom filled with his favourite toys.

The teenager suffers from a litany of conditions, among them partial blindness, ADHD, aggressive and self-harming behaviour and Prader-Willi syndrome.

And with Harvey living alone for the first time, Katie revealed they had taken a series of precautionary steps to ensure he does not harm himself, or damage the house.

Guided tour: The former glamour model opened the doors to his modest two bedroom property in a YouTube video shared with subscribers on Tuesday evening

Precaution: Katie revealed the fridge had been modestly filled to ensure Harvey, who struggles with obesity, does not snack on junk food throughout the night

Contact: Cameras have been installed in the living room and bedroom, giving Katie and her partner Carl Wood the opportunity to remain in touch with Harvey

These include the installation of cameras in the living room and bedroom, giving Katie and her partner Carl Wood the opportunity to remain in touch with Harvey without living under the same roof.

The fridge has also been modestly filled to ensure Harvey, who also struggles with obesity, does not snack on junk food throughout the night.

Elsewhere Katie admitted she has made a resourceful use of the living room doors by draping them with washing - meaning they won't be damaged should Harvey slam them during a violent outburst.

'This isn't where we live,' Katie stressed as the tour came to an end. 'This is where Harvey lives, ready for his transitional move to college.

'It's quieter for him, he gets used to his own space and there's obviously room if someone stays the night, or if I stay, and we're only over the road - and he absolutely loves it.'

Handy trick: Katie admitted she has made use of the living room doors by draping them with washing - meaning they won't be damaged should Harvey slam them during a violent outburst

Lovely: The main bedroom has been filled with some of Harvey's favourite toys

All mine: A second bedroom can be used by Katie and other guests when they come for visits

The video comes after Katie revealed that Harvey is home and well after he was rushed to hospital following a bad reaction to the COVID-19 vaccine.

The former glamour model took to her Instagram Stories with her son by her side on Sunday as she revealed he suffered a reaction after taking the first of his Oxford/AstraZeneca jabs.

And the mother-of-five revealed that once she got her eldest son home from the hospital, he was back 'on form', requesting chicken Kiev and chips at 4am.

'Harvey is all good, she told her army of followers. 'Thank you for all your kind messages and best wishes for Harvey he is home, safe and well.'
The Environmental Protection Agency this month released its final Rest of River cleanup plan ordering General Electric Co. to remove PCB-tainted sediment from the Housatonic River.

Retired Navy commander and alleged Oath Keeper leader, Thomas Caldwell, 66, worked for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as a section chief and has held a top secret security clearance since 1979, according to a motion filed by his lawyer on Monday. The motion seeks Caldwells release from house arrest. He is facing multiple charges, including conspiracy, for his role in the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol.

Of the roughly 200 people thus far facing federal charges in connection with the pro-Trump insurrection, those hit with the most serious charges are Oath Keeper and Proud Boy militia members who spearheaded the assault on the Capitol. That attack was the culmination of a conspiracy headed by President Donald Trump aimed at blocking the congressional certification of the electoral vote, won by Joe Biden, and paving the way for Trump to declare martial law and assume dictatorial powers.

U.S. Capitol Police officers, January 26, 2021 (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Prosecutors allege that Caldwell, from Berryville, Virginia, along with Army veteran Jessica Watkins, 38, and Marine veteran Donovan Crowl, 50, both from Woodstock, Ohio, are members of the fascistic Oath Keepers militia group. The Oath Keepers played a leading role in organizing the fascist mob that invaded the Capitol with the intention of capturing and/or killing members of Congress and Vice President Mike Pence, who was presiding over the joint session called to officially count the electoral vote.

Previous charging documents showed messages allegedly sent between Caldwell and his fellow insurrectionists as they were storming the building. One of the messages received by Caldwell reportedly said that all members [of Congress] are in the tunnels under the capital. Seal them in turn on gas.

Another message read: Tom all legislators are down in the Tunnels 3 floors down, and go through back house chamber doors facing N left down hallway down steps.

In seeking his clients release from house arrest, attorney Thomas Plofchan claimed that Caldwell is not a member of the far-right group and instead has been vetted and found numerous times as a person worthy of the trust and confidence of the United States government.

Testifying to the close connections between his client and the US government, Plofchan wrote that after his stint with the FBI, Caldwell founded a consulting firm that did business with the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Coast Guard and the Army Personnel Command.

As of this writing, the FBI has yet to confirm or deny Caldwells claims. Peculiarly, Plofchans motion states that his client was paid as a GS-12, which is a significantly lower pay grade than what is typically associated with an FBI section chiefa position that is analogous to a special agent in chargethe highest pay grade for a field agent.

If Caldwell was previously employed by the FBI, he was not the only participant in the siege who has had a working relationship with the domestic intelligence agency. Last month Proud Boy Chairman Enrique Tarrio was revealed to have been a prolific FBI informant.

In addition to his potential ties to the FBI, Caldwell is an active member of his local Republican Party. He was chosen as a delegate to Loudoun Countys Republican convention in Berryville last March, according to Virginia Republican state delegate Dave LaRock, who was also at the Capitol on January 6. In an interview with the Loudoun Times-Mirror after the assault, LaRock said that Tom is a wonderful man who has been very supportive of me.

Defending the coup attempt, LaRock issued a statement on January 7 in which he claimed that paid provocateurs were sent in to taint an otherwise orderly protest. He then blamed several decades of secularism and socialism seeping into our schools and our culture, which have brought severe division to America.

Such examples of the integration of fascists into the Republican Party and its political apparatus at the federal, state and local levels abound. The GOP is increasingly aligning itself with militia groups, such as the Oath Keepers, the III Percenters and the Proud Boys.

A recent article by the New York Times entitled, Its Own Domestic Army: How the GOP Allied Itself With Militants, details the intimate connections between Michigan Republican politicians and militia groups.

The lead organizer of the armed, anti-COVID-19 lockdown protest at the Michigan state Capitol in Lansing last April 30 was Republican planning commissioner Ryan Kelley. Kelley, who has announced that he will be running for governor in 2022, admitted in an interview with WMMT last week that he was at the US Capitol on January 6. He has openly courted militia groups, telling the New York Times, Becoming too closely aligned with militiasis that a bad thing?

The Times noted that of the six Michiganders arrested so far for their role in the assault on the US Capitol, one, a former Marine, had previously joined armed militiamen to disrupt the counting of ballots in Detroit in the November election. That protest was organized by Meshawn Maddock. The Times wrote, Ms. Maddock helped fill 19 buses to Washington for the Jan. 6 rally and defended the April armed intrusion into the Michigan Capitol.

The highest-ranking Republican state official to ingratiate himself with the militia movement has been State Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey. Two weeks after armed militia members forced their way into the Michigan state Capitol on April 30, Shirkey attended the American Patriot Rally in Grand Rapids to speak in support of the militias efforts.

The Times wrote: Prominent party members formed bonds with militias or gave tacit approval to armed activists using intimidation in a series of rallies and confrontations around the state. That intrusion into the Statehouse now looks like a portent of the assault halfway across the country months later at the United States Capitol.

Flanked by Michael Null, who has since been charged in a plot to kidnap and assassinate Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Shirkey thanked his fascist friends for threatening lawmakers. Sometimes politicians get it backward, he said. Thats when these groups need to stand up and test that assertion of authority by the government. We need you now more than ever.

Demonstrating that the feckless response of the Democratic Party to the coup attempt has done nothing but embolden the far right, on Tuesday, MLive reported that during a meeting with county Republican Party leaders, Shirkey claimed that the January 6 coup attempt was a hoax from day one.

That wasnt Trumps people, he said. That was all prearranged. It was arranged by somebody who was funding it. ... It was all staged.

Repeating a well-worn anti-Semitic trope, Shirkey suggested that there are people above elected officials. There are puppeteers.

After a video of the meeting was released, he issued a brief statement apologizing for his insensitive comments.
Female giraffes benefit from living in groups with several other females. Credit: Sonja Metzger

A research team led by Monica Bond, research associate at the Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies of the University of Zurich (UZH), studied giraffes in Tanzania for five years. The biologists examined the relative effects of sociability, the natural environment, and human factors on survival of the mega-herbivore. They have now shown that adult female giraffes living in larger groups have higher survival chances than more socially isolated individuals.

Gregariousness leads to better survival

Giraffe group formations are dynamic and change throughout the day, but adult females maintain many specific friendships over the long term. "Grouping with more females, called gregariousness, is correlated with better survival of female giraffes, even as group membership is frequently changing," says Bond. "This aspect of giraffe sociability is even more important than attributes of their non-social environment such as vegetation and nearness to human settlements."

The benefits of many friends

Aside from poaching, the main causes of adult female giraffe mortality are likely to be disease, stress or malnutrition, all of which are interconnected stressors. "Social relationships can improve foraging efficiency, and help manage intraspecific competition, predation, disease risk and psychosocial stress," says UZH professor Barbara Konig, senior author of the study. Female giraffes may seek out and join together with an optimal number of other females in order to share and obtain information about the highest-quality food sources. Other benefits to living in larger groups might be lowering stress levels by reducing harassment from males, cooperating in caring for young, or simply experiencing physiological benefits by being around familiar females. The study also finds that females living closer to towns had lower survival rates, possibly due to poaching.

In larger groups, female giraffes live longer. Credit: Derek Lee

Social habits similar to humans and primates

The team documented the social behaviors of the wild free-ranging giraffes using network analysis algorithms similar to those used by big-data social media platforms. According to the results, the giraffes are surprisingly similar in their social habits to humans and other primates, for whom greater social connectedness offers more opportunities. Chimpanzees and gorillas, for example, live in communities where ties between many individuals facilitate the flexibility of feeding strategies. "It seems to be beneficial for female giraffes to connect with a greater number of others and develop a sense of larger community, but without a strong sense of exclusive subgroup affiliation," adds Monica Bond.

Study of a giraffe population in Tanzania

For the past decade the research team has been conducting the largest study to date of a giraffe population. The vast scale of their study area in the Tarangire region of Tanzania spans more than a thousand square kilometers and includes multiple social communities, each with about 60 to 90 adult female members. Thus, the study was able to disentangle individual from community-level influences on survival. The study is also unique in combining social network analysis and modeling of vital rates such as survival in a sample of hundreds of individuals.

Explore further Human presence weakens social relationships of giraffes

More information: Sociability increases survival of adult female giraffes, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, rspb.royalsocietypublishing.or  .1098/rspb.2020.2770 Journal information: Proceedings of the Royal Society B Sociability increases survival of adult female giraffes,
CHEP, the supply chain solutions company, has announced a two-year contract renewal plus increased business with Nestle Middle East & North Africa (Mena) to replace traditional white exchange pallets with a CHEP managed pallet pooling solution throughout the region. The switch from white wood to CHEP pooled pallets is expected to streamline Nestles supply chain, while reducing cost and driving sustainability benefits mainly reducing de-forestation and less CO2 emissions, a statement said.

Nestle is the world's largest food and beverage company. With its regional head office located in the UAE, Nestle operates 25 factories in 19 countries across Mena. The Nestle product portfolio in the region currently exceeds 60 brands in a wide range of categories: dairy and infant nutrition, bottled water, chocolate and confectionery, coffee creamers, breakfast cereals, culinary products and pet food, among others.

Stefano Crotti, Nestle Head of Logistics Mena, said: For Nestle, the Middle East and North Africa means growth with sustainable operations, talent and innovation. Improvements in service to customers, quality and cost have been important drivers to switch from white pallet exchange to CHEP, as well as the strategic fit of CHEP being our recognised partner across our supply chain. Furthermore, the sustainability advantage that is built into the CHEPs share and reuse business model is important to contribute to a circular economy and in meeting Nestles commitment for Zero net emissions by 2050.

Marco Salort, CHEP Mena Commercial Director, said: Nestle is a key strategic global customer for CHEP. We share a vision of the future based on sustainability and responsibility towards our environment.

We at CHEP understand that our customers are an extension of our activity and consider them to be part of our company. We have collaborated very openly to successfully develop a long-term model built around service excellence, cost efficiencies, process standardisation and sustainability. The Mena agreement provides a clear framework under which we can continue to partner together to build ongoing efficiencies and value."TradeArabia News Service
Left parties condemned on Wednesday the (ED) raids on the offices of a digital news portal and described it as "another attack on independent media" and a "dangerous" trend that undermines democracy and freedom of press.

The ED conducted searches on Tuesday at multiple premises linked to news portal Newsclick, its promoters and some others in connection with a money-laundering probe, official sources said. The searches were conducted in south Delhi's Saidulajab, Gurgaon and some other areas.

"Yet another attack on independent media. The CPI(M) condemns the raids on the offices of Newsclick, a digital news portal, and the houses of its editors and owner.

"The ED action is a blatant attempt to intimidate and suppress an independent news portal. Newsclick has been providing credible and wide coverage of the farmers' protests," the Communist Party of India (Marxist) said in a statement.

It further alleged that central agencies are being used by the Narendra Modi government to "harass and silence independent media".

"The CPI(M) demands an end to the vindictive action against Newsclick and its management," the Left party said.

The CPI also issued a statement, saying this was another attack on the media and a dangerous trend is being set in the country.

"The Secretariat of the Communist Party of India condemns the attack on media and mediapersons and the growing trend of using government agencies to harass them as well as to raid the offices and houses of journalists.

"The party deplores this dangerous trend, which undermines democracy and freedom of press," it said.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
This is for U.S. Sens. Cory Booker and Bob Menendez, both D.N.J., Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.; Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.; and others who support large-scale cancelation of student debt.

I oppose this ill-considered absurdity for the following reasons:

 You cannot add new spending programs when we have to borrow to fund existing ones.

If you believe in the student loan program, you will destroy it by demonstrating that one does not have to repay the loans. The program will become limitless.

 Millions have been responsibly frugal and have paid or are paying off the loans while sacrificing along the way. How can you disparage that responsible conduct and reward those not as disciplined financially or made poor personal decisions in their pursuit of education? Those parents that worked multiple jobs and also sacrificed to put their kids through college without debt also cannot be ignored.

I have a suggestion. Pass legislation that rewards proper conduct, in this case, appropriate tax incentives for those who pay down their student debt off each year.

Lastly, with a debt forgiveness mindset, where do we draw the line? Do we forgive car loans? Cell phones purchased on credit? Mortgages? Credit card loans?

The cash register is empty. Senators, please conduct yourselves in a far more financially responsible manner.

Fred Lash, Denville

Capitalist creeps destroyed middle class

There was a time in America when capitalists understood the need to be socially responsible. Then creeps like Carl Icahn discovered he could make billions buying up stock in companies, breaking them up, and killing good jobs.

That led to Wall Street glorifying CEOs like (the late former General Electric CEO) Jack Welch, who mastered the art of short-term, bottom-line management. This, in turn led to the end of corporation-funded private pensions and great benefits.

But, nothing was good enough to satisfy Wall Street greed. So, the middle class died, helped along by the infamous duo of Donald Trump and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and their tax breaks for the ultra wealthy

Paul Mahler, Pompton Plains

Of course, MEN want more abortion access

In todays environment of holding people responsible for their actions, I was flabbergasted by the recent op-ed article, Why men should support expanding access to abortion.

Of course, the two MEN  Brandon McCoy and Oren Jacobsen  who authored the article want greater access to abortions because men can thus avoid taking any responsibility for getting a woman pregnant.

It is not coincidental that some abortions are coerced by the male who was involved in the pregnancy. The authors write how unfair it is to limit abortion access, it is and how this negatively impacts the family and the community.

What is never discussed by abortion advocates is the life of the unborn baby, who is not the same person as the mother, but a separate and unique human being having everything required in its DNA to develop to full maturity as an adult.

The Reproductive Freedom Act, as introduced in the New Jersey Legislature, does NOT prevent anyone from becoming pregnant but rather legalizes taking the life of the unborn baby with no late-term restrictions. As a civilized society, we should be supportive of womens health, but killing an innocent baby, even if unplanned, is not health care, it is  you name it.

Gerard Kaufhold, Budd Lake

Police deaths at Capitol forgotten already

I keep looking for new articles detailing what happened to the three officers who died after the Capitol Building was stormed on Jan. 6. I cant find anything newer than Jan. 28 concerning details. Will we ever learn exactly what happened to them?

Over 100 police officers were injured or killed by the mob Donald Trump incited to invade our the Capitol in their horrific attempt to prevent the transition of power after Trump lost the election.

Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, a military veteran from South River, died after the traitorous rioters beat the outnumbered officers mercilessly.

In the following days, two fellow policemen died by what authorities said was suicide. Capitol Police Officer Howard Liebengood and Washington, Metropolitan Police Officer Jeffery Smith lost their lives after the attack. Did they sustain brain injuries that led directly to their so-called suicides?

Which individuals among the bloodthirsty rioters, besides the former president, should now be charged with murder for the killing these three men? Like Sicknick, Liebengood and Smith are equally deserving of high honors. They should be remembered as having been killed in the line of duty, and should lie in state in the Capitol of our nation, which they loved and defended with their lives.

Neil Vincent Scheck, Belmar

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Taiwan-based iPhone manufacturing unit Wistron is all set to restart operations at its Narasapura plant, close to Bengaluru. It has been two months since contract employees went on a rampage, destroying office property, due to irregularities in payment of salaries to workers.

"We have been suggesting to them (Wistron) to start and resume operations at the earliest and I'm sure in the coming days they will start operations, I will leave it to their judgement to choose the day to restart," said Gaurav Gupta, Karnataka's Additional Chief Secretary of Commerce and Industries.

The Karnataka government has made it top priority to restart operations at the plant as the violence had caused much damage to the state's investment prospects, even drawing Prime Minister Narendra Modi's attention.

Government and independent investigations had revealed Wistron had violated labour norms and even breached the suppliers' code of conduct. But the company has assured corrective action by implementing new hiring and payroll systems.

In its statement, Apple said: "As Wistron begins the process of hiring team members and restarting their operations, everyone at the facility will undergo a new training program to ensure they understand their rights and how they can raise any concerns."

Wistron was put on probation and its Vice President of India operations, Vincent Lee, removed as part of the corrective action. Apple has also said it would continue to remain on-site and validate the new processes put in place through employees and independent auditors.

Wistron in its statement said: "All employees have been promptly and fully paid, and we implemented new hiring and payroll systems to ensure everyone is paid correctly and provided the correct documentation going forward."

As most of the accused in the case were contract employees of Wistron, the government has asked the company to comply with all acts, rules and regulations while hiring.

"Keeping in mind the changed situation, Wistron has done adequate background check so as to convince themselves of the bonafide of the employees and workman, I'm confident that with that kind of background check they should not be any problem in running the factory," Gupta said.
The move requires media support to explain reasoning.

President Volodymyr Zelensky would reportedly like to see Vice Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada, Ruslan Stefanchuk, replace Dmytro Razumkov on Parliament's top post, and the relevant work is underway to prepare the soil for the reshuffle, sources say.

According to Ukrayinska Pravda, the reason behind the intention to replace the speaker is allegedly the independence of the incumbent Rada Chairman Dmytro Razumkov, who the authors say has his own political ambitions and tries not to be "dependent" on the President's Office, which is reportedly an issue for the latter.

The publication notes that Stefanchuk still looks like the most acceptable candidate for the speaker's post, but he lacks media support.

"According to Zelensky's entourage, the president wouldn't mind putting Stefanchuk a step up in the parliamentary hierarchy. But there is a problem  that position is already taken," the article reads.

At the same time, the issue of replacing the speaker will not be forced just yet, because to this end it if first necessary to publicly explain why Razumkov doesn't suit his post and find votes in Stefanchuk's support.

To promote the vice-speaker and fix Zelensky's "disappointing sociological results", special "troikas" were set up, dealing with various issues. Stefanchuk is supposed to moderate their work to form for himself the image of a "statesman".

According to the publication's sources, the "troikas" are some 20 profile groups, each of which includes a chair of a Rada committee, a Cabinet member, and a deputy head of the Presidential Office. Their task is to draw up a plan and draft laws that would fit the president's campaign line.

Read alsoZelensky remains on top of presidential rating  pollA government official has told the outlet, "There's an economic troika, as well as the financial, tax ones, etc. There are about as many committees in the Rada as there are troikas. They decide what laws need to be drafted to ensure that Zelensky's campaign promises are fulfilled, what exactly should be laid down in them and when can they be submitted to committees and the session hall."

Razumkov, however, is not involved in the troikas' work, the report says.

Survey data

According to a poll conducted by the Razumkov Center (named after Dmytro Razumkov's late father, ex-NSDC deputy secretary who died in 1999), the Verkhovna Rada chairman would lose to Zelensky in the potential election runoff, while 40% of those who will go to the polls and have made up their mind on electoral preferences.

After almost catching up with Zelensky in public trust rating, Razumkov was asked whether he was planning to run for president. The parliament speaker has not commented on the issue so far.

Razumkov is called Zelensky's main rival if he decides to run for a second term.

On February 2, President Vladimir Zelensky put into effect the decision of the National Security and Defense Council of February 2, 2021, on the application of sanctions against People's Deputy Taras Kozak and TV channels of Putin's godfather Viktor Medvedchuk: "112 Ukraine", NewsOne, ZIK. Meanwhile, Parliament Speaker Dmitry Razumkov abstained from voting on the decision.

Razumkov elected for Parliament Speaker's post: Background

Razumkov, who was a leader of the pro-President Servant of the People party, became Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada on August 29, 2019.

When he was elected parliament speaker, he received the largest ever support of people's deputies with 382 legislators endorsing his nomination.

Reporting by UNIAN

The Alaska explorer plans to bolster its funds ahead of new well drilling, and, it also announced that managing director Dave Wall will leave the company in May

( ) has launched a A$12mln (6.7mln) share placing to support its ongoing evaluation of the conventional and unconventional prospectivity on the North Slope of Alaska.

The exploration company seeks to sell new shares at a price of 0.8 Australian cents per share, equivalent to 0.45p, which puts the placing at a 27% discount to Tuesdays closing price in Australia.

It comes as the company is preparing for the drilling of the Merlin-1 exploration well alongside a joint venture partner. The company is on schedule to spud the well in late-February or early-March.

The new funds will also allow the company to identify and exploit new opportunities in the region.

At the same time, the exploration company this morning announced that David Wall has tendered his resignation as managing director and will leave the company in May 2021.

The company said it will transition the role of managing director to Ashley Gilbert, currently chief financial officer and company secretary, initially taking the job on an acting basis prior to Walls departure.

The placing is being run as a bookbuild which is to be managed by brokers , in the UK, and EurozHartleys, in Australia.

It will open immediately and the closing is at the discretion of Cenkos, EurozHartleys and the company.

The placing is expected to bolster working capital resources. At the end of December, as previously announced, the company had A$14.8mln of cash, including amounts held in joint venture bank accounts.

Providing more detail, the company noted that the proceeds will strengthen its balance sheet and cover its share of any potential cost overruns for the Merlin well, follow-on flow testing (if the well is successful) along with it share of the costs of the planned Harrier-1 well.

Merlin and Harrier are both prospects within the Project Peregrine acreage, acquired by 88 Energy in 2020 through the merger with XCD Energy.

Additionally, the company said proceeds will also be used for its operations at the newly acquired Umiat oil field.

Umiat, which lies immediately south of Project Peregrine, is host to several wells. The company will carry out a full field review to determine at what oil price Umiat may be commercial as a stand-alone development, and, what optimisation of prior development plans is possible.

88 Energy expects that Umiat would contribute significant value to any field development at Project Peregrine, subject to well results.

The company also today noted that, follow an annual review, it has decided that certain parts of the Project Icewine acreage are no longer considered prospective and consequently certain leases wont be renewed.

Such ground represents around 25% of the project area, some 231,000 net acres.


George Wallace's name removed from University of Alabama building over segregationist past

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The University of Alabama removed the name of the states former Gov. George Wallace from a building on its Birmingham campus because of the controversial legacy of the historical figure who supported segregationist policies for much of his career before he was born-again.

The Board of Trustees of the University of Alabama Systemunanimously approved a resolution last week to amend the name of the George C. Wallace Building, citing the need for diversity, inclusion, and respect.

Governor Wallace built his political career in substantial part on defending an unlawful system of segregation, appealing to and exacerbating racial animosity, and resisting lawful court orders, all to the detriment of the State of Alabama and the University of Alabama System, declared the resolution, in part.

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED by the Board of Trustees that the name of the George C. Wallace Building on the Birmingham campus is hereby amended to the Physical Education Building.

While the resolution recognized that Wallace eventually renounced his support for segregation and made efforts to reconcile with the African-American community, Wallaces transformation does not erase the stain of his efforts to sow racial divisiveness and to promote conduct contrary to the law.

 nor does it erase the fact that for many of the students, faculty, and staff who comprise the University of Alabama System community, as well as individuals across the United States, Governor Wallaces name remains an enduring symbol of racial injustice and rekindles memories of one of the State of Alabamas darkest hours, continued the resolution.

Trustee Judge John England Jr.said in a statement released last Friday that he believed the name change was simply the right thing to do.

The UA System, the Board of Trustees, our working group and our campuses recognize Governor Wallaces complex legacy, including the well-known acceptance of his apology by civil rights icon John Lewis, stated England.

That said, his stated regret late in life did not erase the effects of the divisiveness that continue to haunt the conscience and reputation of our state.

Wallaces daughter Peggy Wallace Kennedy expressed support for the name change.

I, along with my husband Mark, have confidence in the Boards decision to rename the UAB Physical Education Building, she was quoted as saying in a statement shared by the university.

It is important to the university to always seek positive and meaningful change for the betterment of students, faculty and the community.

Wallace is a four-term governor of Alabama and failed Democratic presidential candidate, well known for his staunch support of racial segregation during the 1960s.

Refusing to enforce the U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, Wallace infamously declared, segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.

However, in the late 1970s, Wallace became a born-again Christian. He repudiated his former views on race and apologized to the African-American community for his past actions.

In the 1980s, upon being elected governor of Alabama for the last time, Wallace made a record number of African-American political appointments.

Wallace died in 1998. Franklin Graham, the son of the late evangelist Billy Graham, spoke at Wallaces funeral and tied the governors change of heart on racial issues to his conversion as a born-again Christian.

"I believe that if the governor were here, he would want to be remembered for this: Jesus Christ today, Jesus Christ tomorrow, Jesus Christ forever," Graham said at the time, as reported by CNN.

Over the past few years, many longstanding debates over buildings and schools named for historical figures with controversial racial pasts have been reignited.

Last November, the Alexandria City Public Schools board in Virginia voted to change T.C. Williams High School's name  the school made famous in the 2000 blockbuster movie Remember the Titans  due to the namesake being an avid segregationist.
Exports of non-basmati rice more than doubled to Rs 22,856 crore during April-December 2020-21 as against Rs 10,268 crore in the same period of the previous year, according to the commere ministry.

"The exports of non-basmati witnessed a growth of 122.61 per cent in Rupee term and 111.81 per cent Dollar terms," the ministry said in a statement.

India exports non-basmati rice to markets like Nepal, Benin, United Arab Emirates, Somalia, Guinea, US and many other countries in Asia and Europe.

The export of basmati rice increased to USD 2.947 billion as against USD 2.936 billion reported during the same period of the previous year.

Major destinations for Indian basmati rice exports include Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and European countries.

Wheat exports rose to Rs 1,870 crore as compared to Rs 336 crore during April-December 2019.

The key exports destination for wheat include Nepal, Bangladesh and United Arab Emirates.

Similarly, exports of cereals rose to Rs 49,832 crore during April-December 2020-21 from Rs 32,591 crore reported during the same period of 2019-20.

In a separate statement, the ministry said Indian engineering exports have increased by 18.69 per cent in January.

(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.)
Manchester Center, VT (05254)

Today

Rain likely. High 48F. Winds ENE at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 100%. Rainfall near a half an inch..

Tonight

Cloudy with periods of rain. Low 43F. Winds ENE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 100%. Rainfall near a half an inch.
I watched as much of Neera Tandens confirmation hearing yesterday as I could stand. It amounted to about 20 minutes, off and on.

Sen. Rob Portman probed Tandens nasty tweets about some of his Republican colleagues. Tanden expressed regret. It seemed to me not only that she was faking it, but that she wasnt really trying to conceal the fakery.

Her sing-song delivery cried out insincerity. Had Tanden not made it clear that she was just going through the motions, she would have risked discrediting herself with those whose approval she wants the most.

Tanden said she was sorry for any hurt her language has caused. But Tanden knows the problem with her language isnt hurt feelings. If anything, her targets, such as Sen. Ted Cruz, probably consider her tirades a badge of honor.

The problem with her tweets is that they reveal her to be a nasty, intemperate partisan. They are a window into a vicious soul. Nor are they the only such window. Her treatment of staff and associates, including a physical assault on a top editor at ThinkProgress after he asked Hillary Clinton about the war in Iraq, is another.

People who feel as Tanden does about political opponents and who lack the restraint to hide those feelings from the public shouldnt hold important government positions. Its as simple as that.

However, I assume Tanden will be confirmed. For most Senate Democrats, her viciousness is a feature, not a bug. For the few others, its not disqualifying.

If roles were reversed, a few Republican Senators would probably balk at a nominee like Tanden. But I dont expect that any Democrats will.

Tanden shouldnt be confirmed, but theres a bright side to this. The head of Bidens Office of Management and Budget was always going to be someone of Tandens ideology. The fact that its someone as visible and controversial as Tanden is advantageous for conservatives.

Tanden is a walking rebuttal of the claim that Joe Biden is serious about uniting the country. If he were serious, he wouldnt have given a key job to a vicious partisan. The sooner America disabuses itself of Bidens unification lie, the better.

In addition, an opposition party always needs people it can cast as symbols of whats evil about an administration. Tanden will take on that role, and she will not be alone.

A Maori politician has been kicked-out of New Zealand's parliament after refusing to wear a tie which he says is a 'colonial noose' that suppresses Indigenous culture.

Rawiri Waititi was ordered to leave the debating chamber on Tuesday by Speaker Trevor Mallard after instead wearing a taonga, a Maori greenstone pendant.

Mr Mallard had twice prevented Mr Waititi from asking questions on the floor of parliament, insisting that male MPs could only do so if they were wearing a necktie.

'This is more than about a tie or a taonga - this has everything to do with a colonial agenda that continues to force Maori to look and be like a Pakeha (a white New Zealander),' Mr Waititi posted on Facebook after his ejection.

Maori Party co-leader Rawiri Waititi (pictured) was ordered to leave the debating chamber of New Zealand's parliament on Tuesday after he attempted to ask questions without wearing a necktie

Mr Waititi has previously described a necktie as 'a colonial noose' and said he took it off as it continued 'to suppress out Maori rights'

When Mr Waititi continued with his question after being stopped a second time, Mr Mallard ordered him to leave the debating chamber.

Mr Waititi, who has called ties 'colonial nooses', was told last year that he would be ejected from the House if he did not wear one.

Mr Mallard on Tuesday said while ties were outdated in his view, an overwhelming majority of members asked that the rule be retained in consultations on the issue in the last few months.

In an opinion piece posted to his Facebook page, Mr Waititi said he had 'every right to represent my people and reflect their dress, their culture'.

'I took off the colonial tie as a sign that it continued to colonise, to choke and to suppress out Maori rights that Mallard suggests gives us all equality,' he said.

'We've just come out of Waitangi Day, and acknowledging the covenant between two nations, tangata whenua and tauiwi  and yet Aotearoa is a long way off from true partnership when foreigners enforce Maori to dress like them.

Mr Waititi is pictured greeting Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern with a hongi during the Commission Opening of Parliament on November 25, 2020 in Wellington, New Zealand

'So across this country, everyone knows it has nothing to do with a Pakeha tie. It has everything to do with the right of Maori to be Maori, whether in Parliament or in the pub.'

Mr Waititi vowed to 'never bow my head to Pakeha power' and insisted he 'will never surrender my culture'.

Asked to comment, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said that it was not something she had a strong opinion on and that she had no objection to someone wearing a tie in parliament or not.

'There are much more important issues for all of us,' Ms Ardern said.
Drug related issues are plaguing the area surrounding the train station, which is now patrolled by private security firms.

Drug trafficking and its side effects are frustrating residents and local shop owners. The mayor echoed those feelings at the traditional City Breakfast meeting with members of the press. Polfer said we feel let down by the authorities.

City Breakfast / Reportage Annick Goerens

The City Council feel that their demands to deal with the drug problem in Luxembourg City in a more sustainable way have fallen on deaf ears. Particularly drug abusers lounging and doing their business in building or shop entrances have left a profound sense of insecurity, particularly at night. The list of grievances that locals have is indeed long.

Extrait Lydie Polfer

Polfer stressed that not enough has been done by the government to support the City council. Last summer police was promised more resources to do away with squatters  some residents could reportedly not enter their homes anymore  but the problem persists. The City employed private security personnel out of desperation, Polfer says. It is high time that the government addresses the problems surrounding drug abuse and trafficking.

Polfer also said that local residents approve of private security personnel patrolling the streets. These patrols have been carried out since December.

The mayor also expressed her disappointment regarding the polemic that such patrols have elicited. According to Polfer, only a joint cooperation between law enforcement agencies, charities and health services could deal with problems related to drugs in the most sustainable way. Private security firms, bar an increased police presence, are part of the solution, so Polfers rationale goes.



She is calling for the police to be given the powers to remove squatters. She would also like to convene another citizens meeting to ask residents what they think regarding the issues at hand. Such meetings have been suspended due to the pandemic. The City council will instead carry out a poll amongst residents.

Results of said poll are expected at the end of February.

Further announcements

Bus operated by the Ville de Luxembourg will be fitted with security cameras. Patrick Goldschmidt, the councillor in charge, stressed that these were not intended as surveillance cameras but as protection cameras. Footage will only be analysed if there had been an incident. However, he did not say for how long such data will be stored.

Furthermore, construction at the Place de Paris are scheduled to be finished by 23rd June, Luxembourgs national holiday. Starting on Thursday, construction works will be expanded and intensified, which will trigger some road closures. Amongst others, the rue Zitha will be closed for traffic. For more details please consult vdl.lu.
As the coronavirus pandemic has played out, evidence has grown that masking is an easy, inexpensive and effective way to reduce transmission rates, experts say.

In fact, Dr. Abraar Karan, a physician at Harvard Medical School, recently told CNN that if everybody wore an N95 mask for four weeks in risky indoor settings, it would stop the pandemic.

Thats not possible right now: The global supply of N95 masks remains problematic enough that experts urge the general public not to buy them, saying they need to be reserved for first-responders and health-care workers who are around coronavirus patients.

That said, many experts say getting the public to wear higher-quality masks -- and wear them consistently and properly -- could help further reduce COVID-19 transmission rates, especially with the looming threat of new, more contagious variants.

Below are five things people should know about masking.

How much can masks reduce transmission rates?

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has just announced research showing that transmission of the virus can be reduced by up to 96.5% if both an infected individual and an uninfected individual wear tightly fitted surgical masks or a cloth-and-surgical-mask combination.

Since last spring, studies have strengthened the case that mask use reduces coronavirus transmission, experts say. The CDC points to several studies that conclude wearing any mask can reduce coronavirus transmission by 70% to 80%.

Multi-layer cloth masks can both block up to 50-70% of the droplets that carry the virus, a CDC briefing paper said. Upwards of 80% blockage has been achieved in human experiments that have measured blocking of all respiratory droplets, with cloth masks in some studies performing on par with surgical masks as barriers for source control.

Dr. Liam Sullivan, a Grand Rapids infectious disease specialist with Spectrum Health, said its important to realize that masks are about risk reduction vs. risk elimination.

One thing I want to emphasize: Nobody ever said a mask is 100% protective, he said. I hear people arguing against using a mask because its not perfect.

There is no perfect mask, he said. Theres always room for potential exposure. But the idea is to substantially decrease shedding the virus into the air around you, and to substantially reduce your exposure to the virus, thus substantially decreasing your risk of infection and infecting others.

What are the best masks available for the general public?

The best masks on the market are N95s, but as mentioned above, experts discourage their use by the general public. In addition to the shortage of N95 masks, the tight fit that makes them so effective also can make them hard to wear.

I would not encourage the public to wear an N95 regularly because theyre just so uncomfortable to wear for long periods of time, Sullivan said.

For the general public, the best mask thats widely available is the KN95 mask, which is the Chinese version of the N95 mask.

The KN95 masks are really, really good, Sullivan said. They are just a smidgen below the N95 as far as protection goes, and a little more comfortable.

Disposable surgical masks also work well, Sullivan said. Theyre double- and triple-layered, and those layers are interwoven so theres not much room for stuff to go in or out.

Cloth masks also can be effective if they are multi-layered, Sullivan said, and he particularly recommends cloth masks that include a pocket to insert a filter.

You can put something like a vacuum-cleaner filter in there, and thats a really good thing to do because vacuum cleaner filters are phenomenally good at filtering viruses, he said.

Should you double mask?

Double-masking isnt necessary for those wearing a KN95 mask or surgical mask, although putting a single-layer cloth mask over a surgical mask can ensure a tighter fit and improve effectiveness.

Double-masking is definitely recommended when using single-layer cloth masks, experts say.

If its single layer, you should absolutely double it up, Sullivan said. Cloth masks are more porous and theres more ability for virus to escape if youre infected, which is the most important reason for people to wear a mask.

The importance of proper fit and usage.

The mask should lie closely on your face without big gaps. It shouldnt cause your glasses to fog and should block out smells from the surrounding environment. If your mask is too loose, double masking may help close the gaps. Shortening the ear loops also can help.

Its also important to have both your nose and mouth covered. The primary way the virus enters and exits the body is through the nose, so leaving the nose uncovered is akin to wearing no mask at all.

What masks should you avoid?

Masks with exhalation vents or valves.

Scarves or ski masks.

Masks made from materials that make it hard to breath, such as plastic or leather.

Masks that are knitted or made of loosely woven material.

Do you need to mask after youve been vaccinated?

Yes, at least for now.

The issue is this: The data is clear that the vaccine greatly reduces the risks of being hospitalized or dying of COVID-19. What is much less clear is whether the current vaccines protect against asymptomatic cases.

And if, in fact, vaccinated people can still be infected with the virus, that means they could infect others and put them at risk of severe illness or death.

We have a pretty good confidence level that the vaccines prevent serious illness associated with COVID, said Dr. Frank Rosenblat, an Oakland County infectious disease specialist with McLaren Health. But we dont know if people who are vaccinated can still transmit the virus to others. Theres no real data yet. Were experiencing and collecting the data as we go.

So Im telling my patients to stay safe, he said. Continue to put a mask on and do all the things you were doing before with social distancing and all that stuff until we have some better data, which Im pretty confident well have in the coming months.

Read more on MLive:

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Second dose of COVID-19 vaccine can produce more side effects than first shot, doctors say

For those now fully immunized against COVID-19, the rules havent changed - yet
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Health official: 'I am hopeful for the brighter days ahead'
UPDATE 7:05 p.m.: OHSU has announced it has canceled up to 4,500 vaccination appointments for seniors at its Portland International Airport site on Saturday and Sunday.

Forecasters say at least several inches of snow could fall in the Portland area Thursday through Saturday, prompting Oregon Health & Science University to cancel COVID-19 vaccination appointments this weekend for up to 4,500 seniors 80 and older who were lucky enough to book in the first days since becoming eligible.

OHSU said in an emailed statement shortly after 6:30 p.m. Wednesday that it is closing its Portland International Airport drive-through vaccination site Saturday and Sunday for both patient and staff safety reasons. Earlier in the day, OHSU had said it was still working out inclement weather plans.

The National Weather Service is predicting 5 to 14 inches of snow could dump on the region in the next few days.

Operators of the Portland areas other mass vaccination site, at the Oregon Convention Center in Northeast Portland, said Wednesday they are closely watching forecasts but arent currently planning to postpone or cancel appointments. Rather, they plan to clear nearby sidewalks of snow and ice.

Late openings or early closures are a possibility for the site, where several hundred seniors are scheduled to make their way over the next few days.

A total closure would only occur in the worst case, reads a statement about the Convention Center site, with organizers encouraging everyone who can safely make it to the Oregon Convention Center to try and do so.

The cancellation of appointments at the airport is likely to come as both a disappointment for many seniors who have long been looking forward to their first shots and a relief because driving on the roads could become treacherous. It also represents a sizable obstacle in Oregons efforts to quickly vaccinate seniors, with administration of nearly one-quarter of this weeks 20,000 doses designed for older residents now delayed.

The Portland vaccination sites are being run through a cooperative effort by Kaiser Permanente, Legacy Health, Oregon Health & Science University and Providence Health & Services. Organizers said theyll send out information about any additional cancellations to news media as well as post it to their website, All4Oregon.org. A hotline number in English and Spanish also will be set up, with plans to have it operational by Thursday.

Organizers said if people with appointments cant make it because of the weather, they dont need to cancel. Their place in line will be held and they will get to reschedule without having to once again compete for a very limited number of appointments with the masses. OHSU plans to reschedule seniors for next week, but didnt specify days. More details will be forthcoming.

An estimated 168,000 seniors 80 and older became eligible for vaccinations Monday -- with the first appointments in the Portland area starting in earnest Wednesday. Some seniors who booked those first appointments spent a few hours online or on hold with 211. Many more had no success, with all of the online appointments gone within about 2 1/2 hours. Many said they plan to try again on the next day appointments are opened.

Organizers announced Wednesday that new appointments in Portland for people 80 and older will be available for booking Thursday at 9 a.m. by visiting covidvaccine.oregon.gov, clicking on the blue rectangular box Lets get started and answering questions through the chat tool. Those appointments are likely to be scheduled next week or beyond, and its not immediately clear what impact, if any, the weekend cancellations will have on the timeline.

Earlier this week, Bethany resident Rick Cummings booked a Saturday morning appointment for his 92-year-old mother. To do that, he said he got online Monday at 12:01 a.m., 3 a.m. and 6 a.m. before at 8 a.m. trying continuously for nearly an hour. The metro area booking portal started accepting appointments just before 9 a.m. and he snapped up one, he said.

By Wednesday, when the snow forecast had become clearer, hed devised a plan to pick up his mother more than two hours before her appointment at the airport for a drive that in ideal conditions would take less than 30 minutes. He would use his four-wheel drive with studded snow tires and chains and bring an extra blanket, water and snacks.

He felt a sense of relief Wednesday night upon learning that OHSU had canceled all weekend appointments. But only as long as the vaccination site actually does reschedule his appointment. He is eagerly awaiting this test of the system.

Getting the vaccine is life or death for the oldest seniors, he said. Its also a necessary step toward ending his mothers isolation.

She feels cooped up, Cummings said, and she cant see her friends and she cant go to book club or the library or play bridge.

Seniors arent the only ones vying for vaccines.

Some health care providers, people living in congregate care and educators are still trying to get vaccinated two to eight weeks after their eligibility began. Over the next week, more than 6,800 doses had been slated for phase 1a recipients and 3,900 for educators in the Portland area. Its unclear how the snowstorm will affect their vaccination appointments. Many are scheduled at the Convention Center.

A total of 20,000 doses across the state have been reserved for seniors 80 and older through next Tuesday, with 5,500 of those in the Portland area.

Next Monday, up to 133,000 more seniors ages 75 to 79 will be eligible to start booking appointments -- meaning the competition for a small amount of vaccine will only intensify. State officials arent sure yet of the number of doses they expect to release to those elderly residents.

Oregon Health Authority Director Patrick Allen estimates that at the current rate of vaccine shipments from the federal government itll be early May before theres enough for 75% of the eligible Oregonians 65 and older to get access to the two doses needed for full inoculation.

Coronavirus in Oregon: Latest news | Live map tracker |Text alerts | Newsletter

-- Aimee Green; agreen@oregonian.com; @o_aimee
A more recent publication of this set of statistics is available. Latest publication: New orders in manufacturing 2021, March

Published: 10 February 2021

New orders in manufacturing fell by 15.1 per cent year-on-year in December

According to Statistics Finland, the value of new orders in manufacturing was 15.1 per cent lower in December 2020 than twelve months earlier. The fall is largely explained by the exceptionally high value of new orders in the corresponding period of the previous year, generated by a few large orders in the metal industry. During 2020, orders fell by 11.4 per cent year-on-year.

Annual change in new orders in manufacturing (original series), % (TOL2008)

Enterprises received more new orders in December than twelve months ago in the chemical industry, where orders increased by 47.8 per cent year-on-year. In other manufacturing sub-industries orders declined. In the industry of the manufacture of paper and paper board products, orders declined by 5.1 per cent and in the metal industry by 24.5 per cent year-on-year. The fall in orders in the metal industry is largely explained by the exceptionally high value of new orders in the corresponding time period of the previous year, generated by, for example, large new orders in the shipbuilding industry.

When interpreting these statistics, it should be borne in mind that they typically show strong fluctuations by month. Even new orders of substantial value are not examined over extended time periods but for the statistical reference month only.

Change in new orders in manufacturing 12/2019 12/2020

The index of new orders in manufacturing describes development in the value of new orders received by enterprises for commodities and services that are meant to be produced by establishments located in Finland. These statistics are based on non-probability sampling, in which the basic observation unit is an enterprise or a kind-of-activity unit. The sample comprises monthly 400 to 450 enterprises or their kind-of-activity units. Index point figures and annual change percentages are published monthly for four industry categories. The time series start from January 2005 and their base year is 2015 (2015=100). The index figures may become slightly revised as new data accumulate and enterprises report changes to their data. Due to supplementations, the latest 12 months are revised in the releases. A detailed description of the statistics and the calculation method are included in the quality description on the home page of the statistics.

Source: New orders in manufacturing 2020, December. Statistics Finland

Inquiries: Jussi Haavisto 029 551 3341, Maarit Makela 029 551 3324, volyymi.indeksi@stat.fi

Head of Department in charge: Katri Kaaja

Publication in pdf-format (254.5 kB)

Updated 10.2.2021

Referencing instructions: Statistics: New orders in manufacturing [e-publication].

ISSN=1798-6737. December 2020. Helsinki: Statistics Finland [referred: 30.5.2021].

Access method: http://www.stat.fi/til/teul/2020/12/teul_2020_12_2021-02-10_tie_001_en.html
Actress Sonakshi Sinha on Wednesday extended support to the ongoing farmers' protest. Sonakshi posted a poem on Instagram, which she has recited and dedicated to the hands that feed us.

The Hindi poem is titled "Kyun" (Why)

"Nazarein milake khud se poochho- kyun? A tribute to the hands that feed us... a beautiful poem written by @varadbhatnagar. Shot and conceptualized by @gursanjam.s.puri and narrated by me. #farmersprotest," the actress wrote on Instagram.

The Hindi poem "Kyun" tries to explore the reasons behind why farmers have left the fields and taken to the streets, and why the protesters are being tagged as rioters.

This comes a few days after the actress shared a note on her Instagram story that speaks about journalists being harassed, internet being banned and the protesters being vilified.
The Laredo hospital region's COVID-19 hospitalization rate dipped below 30% for the first time since December 17, another indicator that the spread of COVID-19 is likely lessening in the Laredo community.

According a Texas Department of State Health Services report from February 9, 29.06% of Laredo's total hospital capacity is now being taken by COVID patients, a welcome change for the when the rate was regularly reported above 40%.

Despite the decrease, Laredo continues to lead all other Texas hospital regions in the metric, as it has since December of last year. The second-highest rate reported is El Paso's 17.41%.

This marks the first time in the last 34 days that a rate below 30% was calculated, though with a small caveat.

DSHS data also reported a rate of 28.99% on January 6, a number city leaders attributed to a misreport by DSHS. On that day, the city's hospital capacity was reported at a much higher number than actually available, skewing the numbers.

Today's report also saw the confirmation of 315 additional positives and five COVID-19 fatalities. Cumulatively, 42,108 people have tested positive for the virus and 693 deaths have been reported.

900 people are actively infected with the virus, a rise of 166 cases since yesterday's report. This marks the second day of a rise after a period of decline.

The deaths reported today have all occurred this week.

On February 7, a man in his early 70s died due to the virus. On Tuesday, a pair of deaths -- of a man in his 60s and a woman in her 70s -- was recorded. A woman in her 80s and a man in his 50s died on Wednesday, February 10.

Despite the welcome decrease in infection metrics, Laredo health authority Dr. Victor Trevino said the medical community continues to focus on the COVID-19 census in local hospitals, specifically, the percentage of COVID-19 patients out of the total hospitalizations in the Laredo area.

"This metric is important as some Laredo hospitals have started to convert COVID-19 units into non-COVID units," Trevino said. "These resources are needed to take care of other illnesses in our community.

Currently, as of February 9, this rate was reported at 37.25% after averaging about 50% since the start of 2021.

As Trevino said, the decreasing number of patients has led some Laredo hospitals to begin opening up space previously reserved for COVID-19 into general space for non-COVID patients.

Laredo fire chief and emergency management coordinator Guillermo Heard said that the same is true of some of the emergency tents that had been built outside of local hospitals. With the opening of an alternate care site on Monday at the UT Health-Science Center and the lessening of hospitalizations, such measures would no longer be necessary.

While the news is welcome after the strong surge in infections recognized in the Laredo area, local leaders continue to urge caution that the battle against the virus is far from over.

"We have been here before," Trevino said. "And based on some of the activity over the weekend we still have additional cases."

Last weekend is seen as a possible super-spreader event due to gatherings held over Super Bowl weekend. And the true effects of the weekend will not be known for 7-14 days after the event.

In an effort t0 discourage get-togethers, city leaders extended the city's curfew on social gatherings last weekend from 6 p.m. to 5 a.m. The extended curfew will be repeated this upcoming weekend in advance of Valentine's Day.

"As we prepare, our hope is we only see a small surge of cases," Trevino said. "Hospitals still have very limited ICU capacity for the entire city. This is a consequence of being medically under-served for many decades."
The Conference of the Parties (COP26) United Nations climate change conference, which was set to take place in Glasgow, Scotland in November 2020 has been postponed due to Covid-19. The bureau of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) with the UK and its Italian partners, agreed the new dates for the COP26 UN climate conference, which will now take place between 1 and 12 November 2021 in Glasgow.

The eleven members of the bureau are nominated by each of the five United Nations regional groups and small island developing states, and provide advice and guidance regarding the ongoing work under the convention, the Kyoto Protocol, and the Paris agreement, the organisation of their sessions and the relevant support by the UN climate change secretariat.

UN climate change executive secretary Patricia Espinosa said: "Our efforts to address climate change and Covid-19 are not mutually exclusive. If done right, the recovery from Covid-19 crisis can steer us to a more inclusive and sustainable climate path. We honour those whom we have lost by working with renewed commitment and continuing to demonstrate leadership and determination in addressing climate change, and building a safe, clean, just and resilient world."

With 197 Parties, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has near-universal membership and is the parent treaty of the 2015 Paris climate change agreement.

The main aim of the Paris agreement is to keep a global average temperature rise this century well below 2 degrees Celsius and to drive efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

The UNFCCC is also the parent treaty of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. The ultimate objective of all agreements under the UNFCCC is to stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that will prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system, in a time frame which allows ecosystems to adapt naturally and enables sustainable development.

At COP25, African countries have called on developed countries to take robust action and implementation to close the ambition gap of both cutting emissions and climate finance which they promised to do by 2020, under the Kyoto Protocol.

The gap in mobilising and dispersing US$100 billion a year by 2020 is a crucial concern on African countries. African nations have called on developed nations to deliver their obligation of climate finance to facilitate the implementation of more ambitious action in vulnerable countries.

The year 2020 should be the year developed countries to lead by example for the effective implementation of the Paris agreement. Conference of the Parties (COP26) should be about implementation, not just about ambitious pledges.

The UN summit in Glasgow will be the last mile before the initiation of the implementation of the Paris agreement in November 2021. The missing pieces for its effective implementation need to be completed at COP 26.

These include the rules to operationalise the global goal on adaptation and agreeing on common rules for a new carbon market, also known as article 6, that can contribute to real emissions reductions and help finance adaptation in African countries. Africa, a continent covering 54 countries, contributes only 4% of the total global emissions.

But according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change (IPCC), Africa will also suffer some of the most adverse climate impacts. African countries have already come to the table with ambitious climate plans, also called Nationally Determined Contribution (NDCs), under the Paris agreement.

At the Libreville meeting, the African group will aim to reach a common position and strategy for inter-sessional UN talks in Bonn in June, and decide its priorities for COP 26 in November 2021.

The meeting also aims to adopt a common strategy over how to engage with others with like-minded regions and countries, to ensure that African priorities are considered during this year's talk.

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COP 26 President and Secretary of State for the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, Alok Sharma, said: "While we rightly focus on fighting the immediate crisis of the coronavirus, we must not lose sight of the huge challenges of climate change. With the new dates for COP 26 now agreed we are working with our international partners on an ambitious roadmap for global climate action between now and November 2021. The steps we take to rebuild our economies will have a profound impact on our societies' future sustainability, resilience and wellbeing and COP 26 can be a moment where the world unites behind a clean resilient recovery."

This conference is the first time that Parties are expected to commit to enhanced ambition since COP 21. Parties are required to carry out every five years, as outlined in the Paris agreement, a process colloquially known as the 'ratchet mechanism'.

Finally, we'll hope COP 26 summit will bring parties together to accelerate action towards the goals of the Paris agreement and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in November 2021.
The U.S. did another dual aircraft carrier drill in the South China Sea, which made China mad. Beijing said that the new administration should not flex its muscles.

Another surprise move by the current administration, like its predecessor, is making the communists in Beijing riled up again. In the South China Sea, where the PLA likes to push its weight, it has been sent to the sidelines with a raw displace of U.S. supremacy.

Beijing's bark, louder than its bite

As soon as the new administration began, the Chinese decided to throw its weight around. They said to keep out of their way, especially in the South China Sea. The bold pronouncement got an answer; two carrier strike groups did tandem drills. True to form, China issued threats but just that, reported Newsweek.

This next salvo by Joe Biden and his advisers show that they will stick to what the former administration did. To keep the pressure in the South China Sea and push back against China's malign ways. For some, this naval move keeps faith with U.S. allies, like Australia and the rest of the Quad.

Tandem carrier strike groups in the South China Sea

With their massive air wings and escort ships, America's two supercarriers are the most potent weapons systems that surpass China's Shandong and Liaoning. Both the USS Nimitz, USS Theodore Roosevelt joined up in the SCS for dual-carrier drills.

So far, the United States is the only nation that can mount a dual aircraft carrier drill, something the CCP views as their most significant stumbling block to dominate the Indo-Pacific. An American Carrier Strike Group is one of the most formidable military forces in existence.

Also read: Aircraft Carriers Will Be in the Philippine Sea for Training While China Monitors Exercises Anxiously

Rare occasions where America chooses to flex its muscle, like for Chinese is one-upping them. It is not met well by Beijing.

China likes to use its carriers and support ships to intimidate but does not take it well when done to them. One example is the USS McCain entering the SCS.

Another comeback of tandem operations by supercarriers

Last year, in July 2020, two aircraft carriers met up in the South China Sea, but earlier in June of the same year, two carrier groups did tandem drills as well. The place of the dual exercise was the Philippine sea.

Commanders of the strike group voiced why the drill is very relevant to the U.S. navy.

According to Navy Rear Admiral Doug Verissimo, USS Theodore Roosevelt's Carrier Strike Group Nine commander stated these words. The training is to keep peace and show allies, the U.S. commitment to support a "Free and Open Indo-Pacific" is essential.

The USS Nimitz, Navy Rear Admiral Jim Kirk added the drills add to stability and security in the Indo-Pacific. With an emphasis that all unlawful claims are abandoned, and everyone abides by international law.

For the CCP, who sees the activities of the U.S. as a challenge, especially from Biden, the Americans' meddling causes the tension. Still, some reports debunk that claim China is not belligerent.

China talks big but has never been severe about confrontation.

Wang Wenbin of the Chinese Foreign Ministry accused U.S. action as counter peace, even saying the PLA can respond to threats.

Each passage of every ship, even another dual aircraft carrier drill, is based on international law. China's actions with Taiwan and other smaller nations are documented.

Related article: US Navy Sends Two Carrier Strike Groups as Show of Force Against PLA Naval Exercises

@ 2021 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.

Trump lawyer David Schoen caused confusion on social media during Tuesday's impeachment trial as he appeared to cover his head with his hand every time he took a sip of water.

As Schoen made his opening argument that Trump's second impeachment trial is unconstitutional, bemused viewers questioned the unusual drinking habit.

Yet Schoen was likely displaying a ritual observed by Orthodox Jews in which they must say a blessing before eating and drinking that includes God's name.

According to Jewish law, known as halacha, your head should always be covered when you say God's name.

'Each time we eat or drink something we say a blessing to thank God and we cover our head, typically with a yarmulke, to show respect and to acknowledge that there's someone above us,' Rabbi Menachem Genack, CEO of the kosher division of the Orthodox Union explained to the New York Post.

'Since he wasn't wearing a yarmulke, he wanted to at least cover his head with his hand.'

Trump lawyer David Schoen caused confusion during Tuesday's impeachment trial as he appeared to cover his head with his hand every time he took a sip of water. He observed the ritual as it is part of Jewish law to cover your head when you say a blessing using God's name

Viewers were quick to question why Schoen was placing his hand on his head

Others were angered that the Jewish ritual was being mocked

'Don't be jerks', one Twitter user wrote as they fired back at the jokes

Schoen was later asked why he didn't wear a yarmulke (otherwise known as a kippah) or another head covering during the trial.

The Post reports that Schoen wore a kippah into the Capitol building but chose not to do so on the Senate floor.

According to The Jerusalem Post, Schoen said he 'wasn't sure if it was appropriate'.

'I didn't want to offend anyone It's just an awkward thing and people stare at it.'

The Jerusalem Post reports that in some work situations, Orthodox men elect not to wear a head covering for fear of discrimination.

The publication highlights a court room setting, in particular, where there could be fears of antisemitism from jury members, judges, or members of the public.

Head coverings are generally banned in the Senate, but it has an exception for religious requirements.

The 181-year ban was overturned in 2019 after a push from Rep. Ilhan Omar and other interfaith groups.

Schoen's religion had already come up as part of the impeachment trial after he asked  and then withdrew his request  for it to be paused in observance of the Jewish Sabbath.

Yet even observant Jews remained confused on Tuesday at the consistent placing of his hand on his head before taking a drink.

Religious law only requires a blessing before one's first bite and after eating and drinking, according to the Jerusalem Post.

Most Orthodox interpretations of the law also don't allow for your hand to be used as a head covering.

Schoen was seen throughout his opening statement hold his hand on his head as he drank

Some observed on Twitter that your hand is not generally accepted as a head covering

'I don't think he was saying a blessing. It's a pavlovian reaction for those of us who are used to doing it whenever we tilt our heads back,' explained one Twitter user.

'Otherwise, he wouldn't do it every-time he takes a sip. He'd only need to do it the first time.'

'Like most things in Judaism, there's a debate about whether or not one's own hand counts as a "covering" for this purpose, whether or not women are also obligated, if water actually requires a blessing,' added Laura Adkins, a journalist with Jewish News.

Their explanations came after jokes at Schoen's expense hit Twitter, including one from Mary Trump.

'He can raise his voice and hold the top of his head all he wants, he has no idea what he's talking about,' the ex-president's niece wrote.

Others were angered that many on Twitter were joking about the ritual.

Some were angered that many on Twitter were joking about the ritual

Mary Trump was among those to mock the Orthodox Jewish ritual

'It is Jewish ritual, not an odd behavior to be mocked,' said a tweet from Bend the Arc: Jewish Action.

'David Schoen is an Orthodox Jew. He covers his head when drinking water because that's what many observant Jews do,' wrote Avi Mayer.

'It is generally followed by the recitation of a blessing and is an expression of religiosity. Don't be jerks.'

'Schoen is a religious Jew. There are a couple non-mockery-worthy reasons why he might've done this,' added CNN reporter Daniel Dale.

'It's like Twitter just learned about Orthodox Jews today,' wrote another user Sara Pearl.

The Senate voted largely along party lines on Tuesday to move ahead with Trump's impeachment trial, but conviction appears unlikely barring a major shift among Republicans.

During his opening statement, Schoen argued that the trial is unconstitutional, and that Democrats are simply 'seeking to eliminate Donald Trump from the American political scene' because of their 'base hatred' for the ex-president.

David Schoen, lawyer for former President Donald Trump, is pictured on Tuesday wearing a Kippah as he entered the Capitol. He did not wear the head covering on the Senate floor

David Schoen, an attorney for Donald Trump, speaks during the second impeachment trial of former President on Tuesday as he argued that the trial is unconstitutional

'This trial will tear this country apart, perhaps like we've only seen once before in our history,' he said, appearing to reference the Civil War.

'It is wrong, as wrong can be for all of us as a nation.'

He denounced the 'insatiable lust for impeachment' among Democrats before airing a video, which stitched together clips of various Democratic lawmakers calling for Trump's impeachment going back to 2017.

Schoen also blasted the 14-minute video shown by Democrats in the opening of the trial which showed the violent pro-Trump mob storming the U.S. Capitol on January 6, cut alongside parts of Trump's speech from earlier that day.

'We now learn that the House managers in their wisdom have hired a movie company and a large law firm to create, manufacture and splice for you a package designed by experts to chill and horrify you and our fellow Americans,' he said.

'They don't need to show you movies to show you that the riot happened here. We will stipulate that it happened, and you know all about it. This is a process fueled irresponsibly by base hatred by these House managers.'

The Senate voted 56-44 to proceed to the first-ever trial of a former president, rejecting his defense lawyers' argument that Trump was beyond the reach of the Senate after having left the White House on January 20.

Democrats hope to disqualify Trump from ever again holding public office, but Tuesday's outcome suggested they face long odds. Only six Republican senators joined Democrats to vote in favor of allowing the trial to take place, far short of the 17 needed to secure a conviction.

Convicting Trump would require a two-thirds majority in the 50-50 Senate.

The vote capped a dramatic day in the Senate chamber. Democratic lawmakers serving as prosecutors opened the trial with a graphic video interspersing images of the January 6 Capitol violence with clips of Trump's incendiary speech to a crowd of supporters earlier in the day urging them to 'fight like hell' to overturn his November 3 election defeat.

Senators, serving as jurors, watched as screens showed Trump's followers throwing down barriers and hitting police officers at the Capitol.

The video included the moment police guarding the House of Representatives chamber fatally shot protester Ashli Babbitt, one of five people including a police officer who died in the rampage.

The mob attacked police, sent lawmakers scrambling for safety and interrupted the formal congressional certification of President Joe Biden's victory after Trump had spent two months challenging the election results based on false claims of widespread voting fraud.
Neera Tanden, President Joe Biden's nominee to head the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, said on Wednesday she would support raising the U.S. minimum wage, without giving a target for a higher rate.

"Absolutely," she said at her U.S. Senate confirmation hearing, when Senator Bernie Sanders, the panel's Democratic chairman asked if she would help move to end "starvation wages" in the country "by raising the minimum wage over a period of several years."

Short link:


New Delhi, Feb 10 : Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar arrived in Delhi on Wednesday and is likely to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday.

It will be the first meeting between Modi and Kumar after the latter was sworn in as the Chief Minister of Bihar in November last year.

Janata Dal (United) Secretary General and spokesperson K.C. Tyagi said, "Nitishji has arrived in Delhi and tomorrow he will meet several people. Nitishji is likely to meet the Prime Minister, among others." It has been learnt that Kumar is likely to discuss issues related to the development of Bihar with senior leaders.

On Tuesday, 17 new members were inducted into the Bihar cabinet, including nine ministers from the BJP and eight from the JD(U), taking the strength of ministers in the cabinet to 30.
On New Years Eve, the hospital giant Alecto Healthcare Services, announced that they will be closing the 200-plus-bed Olympia Medical Center Hospital in Los Angeles County on March 31, 2021 and laying off all staff. The announcement came as the majority of the state of California was reporting zero percent ICU capacity and hospitals throughout Southern California were strained to the brink as ambulances snaked around emergency rooms and health care staff were given directives to ration care.

The planned closure of the hospital in the middle of a deadly pandemicas the death toll approaches half a million victimsis a testament to the utter irrationality of the capitalist system and dire need to remove the profit motive from health care entirely.

Olympia Medical Center (Google user Christopher Stephan)

The closure of Olympia will have a devastating impact on Los Angeles County, which has been one of the major epicenters of the pandemic in the US. According to the states tracking system as of February 9, at least 44,997 people have died in California where cases exceed 3,428,698. In Los Angeles County alone there are 1,110,384 positive COVID-19 cases, of which 17,764 have resulted in death. The countys ICU capacity has run dangerously low, as average daily admissions remain at approximately 400 according to County Health Director Dr. Christina Ghaly. The states tracking system predicts that a total of 51,950 deaths will occur in California by February 27. The closure of Olympia Medical Center will only put further strain on hospital systems and drive up the number of deaths.

The announcement of the hospital closure has been met with outrage by nurses, health care workers, and the larger community as a whole, which will lose access to crucial medical services provided by Olympia. UCLA Health Services plan to convert the medical center into a neuropsychiatric center, which will leave the region without direct access to vital services such as an emergency room, medical surgical beds, intensive care unit, surgical services, hyperbaric wound care center and their internationally-recognized digestive disease institute.

Patients and ambulances will have to travel farther to other area hospitals in a region with some of the heaviest traffic in the state. The next closest medical centers are Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, 1.9 miles; Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, 6.2 miles; Southern California Hospital at Culver City, 3.6 miles. For patients suffering a heart attack or stroke travel times to reach emergency rooms are a matter of life and death. This is true under normal or non-COVID-19 circumstances, but the impending closure is unfolding under a pandemic in which hospitals are already overwhelmed and will now need to absorb patients that would have been admitted to Olympia Medical Center.

Adding insult to injury, the entire staff at Olympia faces layoffs at the end of next month, on top of being expected to maintain the daily care of COVID-19 patients under conditions where many health care workers are suffering from PTSD, and what one nurse described to the WSWS as the endless conveyor belt of death. The uncertainty of employment at the end of March has now been hoisted upon their shoulders. The knowledge of the impending closure has already forced nurses and health care workers to seek employment at other hospitals, leaving Olympia further short-staffed and placing patient lives at risk. It is unclear where and how these patients will be relocated throughout the region and the effect this will have on their care.

The hospital profiteer Lex Reddy, M.D., former president and CEO of Ontario, California-based Prime Healthcare Services (PHS), a for-profit hospital chain that was investigated by the Department of Justice for Medicare fraud, founded Alecto. Reddy stepped down from PHS in 2012 after initial accusations of Medicare fraud and an investigation by the Department of Justice surfaced. In 2018 the PHS agreed to pay $65 million for engaging in what the DOJ called a deliberate corporate-driven scheme to fraudulently bill Medicare. This amounted to a slap on the wrist for the multibillion-dollar chain that owns 45 acute-care hospitals around the country. Reddy deemed he would then start another for-profit hospital chain, Alecto Healthcare Services. He has since been named nine times by Modern Healthcare as one of the 50 Most Influential Physician Executives, and among the 25 Top Minority Executives in Healthcare.

Last Thursday a rally was held outside of the Medical Center to demand the new owner, UCLA Health Services, keep medical services open. Olympia nurse Shenita Anderson told the gathered crowd that many of the hospitals patients are low-income and unhoused, with some 40 percent of admittances being African Americans and 60 percent of patients over the age of 60.

Olympia serves a racially diverse working class community, and the forthcoming closure has everything to do with the profit considerations of Alecto and its shareholders. However, attempts have been made to portray the closure as a purely racial issue. Cathy Kennedy, vice president of the California Nurses Association told ABC7 News that If this hospital were to close it would exacerbate the racial disparities we are seeing play out in this county during the COVID-19 pandemic. Mark-Anthony Clayton-Johnson from Frontline Wellness Network also told ABC7 that the closure of this facility would be devastating to Black, Latinx and indigenous communities who are dying at alarming rates.

By focusing on race, the Democratic Party seeks to conceal the fact that the majority of the 470,000 US COVID-19 victims, whatever their ethnicity, come from poorer working class communities. According to statista.com, as of January 2021 the racial breakdown of the nearly half a million deaths stands at 60.7 percent White, 18 percent Hispanic/Latino, 15.6 percent African American/Black, and 3.6 percent Asian. Instead of outrage over the fact that the virus has been allowed to continue to rip through the entirety of the population, the proponents of this narrative focus on race, to conceal the vast class gulf in society.

According to a December 2020 report in Becker  s Hospital Review, at least 21 hospitals closed last year. Among them, multiple hospitals were closed in the states of Tennessee, West Virginia, Georgia, Kansas, Pennsylvania and Texas. The opening of the economy and the devastating closures of hospitals from urban Los Angeles to rural West Virginia are not the result of racist decisions but of profit considerations and, fundamentally, a product of the crisis of the capitalist system, which is indifferent to the preservation of human life.

In California, the Democratic Party led by Governor Gavin Newsom, is spearheading a broad reopening of the economy despite the rising death toll and resultant strain on the health care systems. This has included a push for reopening of schools and relaxed restrictions on businesses.

Health care workers have responded to these policies with grave concern and have begun linking up with educators throughout the state to oppose the policy of school reopenings that threaten to ignite major outbreaks and push hospital systems far past the horrors of December and January. Health care workers and educators are natural allies who must unite together along with other sections of the working class, begin to build independent rank-and-file committees and join a national network of committees dedicated to policies that put human life and safety above profit considerations.

The calls for Olympia Medical Center to remain open must be accompanied by the demand that billions of dollars be injected into the crumbling hospital systems, new hospitals must be built, the most advanced PPE and protection provided for health care staff, with resources directed to the training and hiring of large numbers of health care workers to help provide the highest levels of patient care. Staffing and the organization of patient care must be under the control and direction of health care workers themselves. The trillions handed to the corporations through the ill-named CARES act must be seized and used to pay for these measures.

Educators in Chicago and beyond are fighting for their lives to keep schools closed. All sections of workers throughout the US and globally must come to their aid with an understanding that their struggles are one. If Chicagos Democratic Mayor Lori Lightfoot, assisted by the Chicago Teachers Union, succeeds in forcing schools to open, the same awaits millions of children and their families throughout the country, which will further drive up the death toll and devastate hospital systems.

The ruling class is doubling down on its bipartisan policy of reopening and herd immunity, no matter the death toll. On the other side is the working class, which must begin organizing and uniting for a policy and program that puts human life above all considerations, including the profits of the financial elite. Nurses and educators in California and beyond must come to the support of Chicago teachers, build rank and file committees, and take up the demands that schools remain closed everywhere and full financial assistance be provided to workers, parents and small business owners to ensure they can stay home and protect themselves and their families. To learn about how to build a rank-and-file safety committee in your area or to join one already in existence, please visit wsws.org/edsafety.
New Delhi: An Indian alternative of messaging service Whatsapp named 'Sandes' is currently being tested by government officials in India. The app is ready and is being tested by ministry officials, news agencies reported. Sandes is a Hindi word which means 'message'.

Although there is no information regarding the rollout of the app in India but if you go to the gims.gov.in page, you will notice it says 'Sandes'.

Also Read | Inside the third front of the farm agitation

The 'Sandes' app provides all the features that any instant messaging application would provide. Users can use features like voice and data. The National Informatics Centre, a branch under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology handles the backend of the Sandes Application. As per reports, 'Sandes' is available for both iOS and Android platforms.

When the users try to sign in on this app through LDAP, sign-in with Sandes OTP, and Sandes web they are told that, "This authentication method is applicable for authorized government officials."

View Full Image Sandes app

Last month, the Indian government had asked the instant messaging platform to withdraw recent controversial changes it made to its terms of service and privacy policy, expressing 'grave concern' over implications for Indian citizens.

In a letter to WhatsApps global chief executive officer Will Cathcart, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY) had sought details about the exact categories of data it collects from Indian users, the permission and consent required by different versions of the application. The Ministry has also objected to the differential privacy policies for European Union and India.

WhatsApp has delayed the introduction of the new privacy policy to 15 May from 8 February. It reiterated that neither it nor Facebook can see personal conversations and that they are safe and protected by end-to-end encryption.

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In 2018, a faulty electric transmission line ignited the Camp Fire in Northern California, ultimately consuming 239 square miles and several communities, including the town of Paradise, which was 95 percent destroyed. At least 85 people died.

Structures have been rebuilt, but some things are worse. In a paper published February 2, 2021 in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, scientists at University of California San Diego, with colleagues elsewhere, describe chronic mental health problems among some residents who experienced the Camp Fire in varying degrees.

Direct exposure to large-scale fires significantly increased the risk for mental health disorders, particularly post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression, the scientists wrote.

"We looked for symptoms of these particular disorders because emotionally traumatic events in one's lifetime are known to trigger them," said senior author Jyoti Mishra, PhD, professor in the Department of Psychiatry at UC San Diego School of Medicine and co-director of the Neural Engineering and Translation Labs at UC San Diego. Pre-existing childhood trauma or sleep disturbances were found to exacerbate mental health problems, but factors like personal resilience and mindfulness appeared to reduce them.

"We show climate change as a chronic mental health stressor. It is not like the pandemic, in that it is here for a period of time and can be mitigated with vaccines and other measures. Climate change is our future, and we need immediate action to slow down the changes being wreaked upon the planet, and on our own wellbeing."

Mishra, with collaborators at California State University and University of South Carolina, conducted a variety of mental health assessments on residents who had been exposed to the Camp Fire six months after the wildfire and those much farther away. Roughly two-thirds of those tested were residents who lived in or around Chico, a Northern California city located approximately 10 to 15 miles of the center of the Camp Fire. The remaining third were San Diego residents living approximately 600 miles from the wildfire and presumably unimpacted.

The researchers found that the Northern California residents experienced measurable increases in PTSD, depression and anxiety disorders, which were worsened by proximity and exposure to the Camp Fire or by previous adverse experiences involving childhood trauma, such as abuse and neglect.

Chronic mental health problems fanned by the wild fire were ameliorated, however, by physical exercise, mindfulness and emotional support, all of which may contribute to personal resilience and the ability to bounce back after stressful life events.

The worrisome thing is that stressful life events like the Camp Fire are becoming more frequent, due to climate change, said study co-author Veerabhadaran Ramanathan, PhD, Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric and Climate Sciences at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.

Since the 1970s, fire extent in California has increased by 400 percent. While a faulty transmission line may have lit the Camp Fire in 2018, it is part of an overall disastrous multi-decadal trend fueled by human-caused climate warming. Through evaporative drying of the air, the soil and the trees, warming acts as a force multiplier. By 2030, the warming is likely to amplify by 50 percent. This surprising, if not shocking, study identifies mental illness as a grave risk for the coming decades." Veerabhadaran Ramanathan, PhD, Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric and Climate Sciences, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego

Not just in California, but the world, write the authors.

"Unchecked climate change projected for the latter half of this century may severely impact the mental wellbeing of the global population. We must find ways to foster individual resiliency," wrote the study authors.
ANKARA, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- Turkish naval forces and the U.S. navy conducted a passing exercise in the Black Sea, Turkey's Defense Ministry said on Wednesday.

"The frigates TCG TURGUTREIS and TCG ORUCREIS of the Turkish Naval Forces conducted a joint maritime exercise with the USS PORTER and USS DONALD COOK destroyers of the U.S. Navy in the Black Sea. Two Turkish Air Force F-16s and one U.S. maritime patrol aircraft also participated in the maritime exercise," the ministry tweeted.

The training conducted for the fundamental types of naval warfare has "further strengthened cooperation between the naval forces of the two countries and has contributed to their interoperability," said the statement.

The ministry recalled that its naval forces command has been maintaining the "Black Sea Harmony Operation" since March 1, 2004 to contribute to the peace and security of the Black Sea within the framework of the "regional ownership" principle. As part of the operations, frigates, corvettes, assault boats, submarines and sea patrol planes display their flags and show their presence in the Black Sea, and various observations and expeditions are conducted, it added.

Within the scope of its planned activities, the Turkish Naval Forces conduct joint training and exercises at every opportunity with the elements of NATO, friendly and allied naval forces which have arrived in the Black Sea and regularly participates in the exercises organized by riparian countries, the ministry noted.
Leaders can positively influence experiences of Indigenous employees

TORONTO, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- A study from Catalyst, Building Inclusion for Indigenous Peoples in Canadian Workplaces, found 52% of Indigenous Peoples working in Canada said they are regularly on guard to experiences of bias, a hallmark of emotional tax, with women on guard (67%) significantly more than men (38%).

The new research shows that in addition to paying an Emotional Tax  the combination of being on guard to protect against bias because of race, ethnicity, and gender and experiencing the associated effects on well-being and ability to thrive at work  only 39% of Indigenous employees feel psychologically safe at work.

Psychological safety is when employees feel they can make mistakes and take risks without being penalized, and Indigenous employees who do not experience it are less likely to report a sense of belonging or being valued for their uniqueness, speak up when something isn't right, experience task focus, and be able to exhibit creativity.



"Indigenous people in Canada, especially women, continue to face some of the workplaces' most entrenched hurdles, including bias and discrimination that impact their health, well-being, and ability to progress," says Vandana Juneja, Executive Director, Canada, Catalyst. "Companies must take intentional action to understand the unique challenges and biases faced by Indigenous employees, and specifically how these experiences impact their work experience, to help inform solutions."

The report, led by Jennifer Thorpe-Moscon, PhD, and Joy Ohm, finds that when leaders create an empowering workplace, show accountability, and demonstrate humility, Indigenous employees feel more psychologically safe. The study surveyed 86 Indigenous Peoples working in Canada, including First Nations, Inuit, and Metis peoples. Indigenous Peoples comprise 4.9% of the total Canadian population.

"These findings provide employers with a unique opportunity to address inequities experienced in the workplace by Indigenous employees," said Thorpe-Moscon, Vice President, Research, and Chair, Catalyst Award, Catalyst. "The goal is for inclusive leaders to enable a culture of empowerment, accountability, and humility that creates an environment where Indigenous employees can belong, contribute, and thrive in the workplace."

The experience of Indigenous Peoples in the workplace is part of the long history of colonialism, genocide, racism, and inequities for the Indigenous population living on the land now known as Canada. In the workplace, this experience translates to a wage gap and feelings of isolation because of a lack of Indigenous role models at senior levels.

Additionally, Indigenous Peoples are often surrounded by managers, colleagues, and senior executives unfamiliar with their history and cultures or the burdens they carry. It is no surprise then that Indigenous employees are frequently on guard to bias, which includes feeling the need to prepare for possible insults or avoid certain situations where they anticipate bias may occur. The gender disparity in being on guard to bias likely reflects the disproportionate discrimination and violence Indigenous women experience compared to other groups.

Learn more and download the study.

About Catalyst

Catalyst is a global nonprofit working with some of the world's most powerful CEOs and leading companies to help build workplaces that work for women. Founded in 1962, Catalyst drives change with pioneering research, practical tools, and proven solutions to accelerate and advance women into leadershipbecause progress for women is progress for everyone.

Media Contacts:

Naomi R. Patton

Vice President, Media & Public Relations

Catalyst

[email protected]

Francine Beck

Canada Communications Consultant

Catalyst

[email protected]

SOURCE Catalyst

Related Links

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Its been a while since Australia has had good news on the international travel front. Instead, domestic quarantine hotel storms, cringe Byron Bay photos and waterfall chasing faux pas keep blowing in.

A recent announcement from Prime Minister Scott Morrison, however, which hints at a new travel bubble for Aussies, (news.com.au) could provide your imagination with a bit of relief.

Morrison has hinted his Government is working on new travel bubbles, meaning Australians could soon have a bunch of mojito-by-the-pool style destinations to choose from.

Speaking on 2SM radio on Monday, Morrison said the COVID-19 vaccine could bring more itchy feet opportunities Down Under.

That said, the keyword here is could. Morrison said: We dont have full confidence yet that they [countries like Vanuatu, Tonga, the Solomon Islands and Fiji] are just going to a complete whats called a green lane. But were working with them to ensure we can just lift that confidence.

Well be seeking to support them with their testing over there and I hope we can make some real progress on that soon. Id love to see a Pacific bubble.

Such a travel bubble could allow more seasonal workers to travel to rural Australia where their help is needed, news.com.au reports.

Scott Morrison said Australia will be aiming to work with Pacific Island nations to improve testing and expedite the long awaited travel bubble.

 DETAILS: https://t.co/vkgHgDAwgA pic.twitter.com/OngLloH2j5  The Daily Telegraph (@dailytelegraph) February 8, 2021

Twitter users have been jumping online to express their support of the idea since as early as February the 3rd, with some suggesting it could be mutually beneficial.

If Fiji has had 300 days without community transmission, and is begging Australia for a travel bubble, what is the delay? Might help the travel industry  and Fiji most particularly after two devastating cyclones.  Dr Josie McSkimming  (@JosieMcskimming) February 4, 2021

Fiji are calling for a travel bubble with Australia. Get it done asap. Its the best thing we could do to help our Pacific neighbours.  Darren from Newy  (@DarrenKilminst1) February 3, 2021

Morrison pointed out that the risk of Australia infecting the aforementioned nations is impacted greatly by our rate of community transmission, of which there is currently very little, and which has significantly lessened in recent months.

If the virus got into one of those Pacific countries, as you know, their health systems arent the same as ours It would go through those countries and that would be devastating.

The first doses of the vaccine are set to be administered towards the end of this month, with the Government aiming to have the majority of the population vaccinated by October.

RELATED: Photo You Wont Believe Is In Australia Blows Minds Down Under

If it all falls through though; never fear. As more and more Australians have realised over this last 12 months, almost every big-ticket overseas experience has an equivalent (or rival) Down Under.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Traveling Kameleon (@rajailiya)

Take the above cave in Tonga, for instance. You might not think such a place would be replicated on NSWs humble South Coast, but youd be surprised. Just take a look at the image below.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by New South Wales (@visitnsw)

New horizons beckon.

Read Next
Quantitative Testing Identifies Areas of Potential Infection Spikes We knew it would be critical for communities and business populations to get data they could take early action on.

Pace Environmental Sciences, a Division of Pace Analytical Services, LLC, and a preferred provider of in-lab, mobile, and emergency onsite specialty-contaminant and regulatory testing and analysis services, today announced it has been honored with a 2020 EBJ Business Achievement Award. Pace is being honored with the New Practice Area Award for its COVID-19 Wastewater Surveillance Testing Service.

Pace Environmental Sciences partnered with Pace Life Sciences, a separate Division of Pace Analytical Services, to quickly build the technology to quantify levels of RNA fragments (infections) in wastewater streams. The collaborative effort across our organization allowed us to develop this service for commercial use in just 8 weeks, notes Johnny Mitchell, Vice President of Operations, Pace Analytical National Center for Testing and Innovation. We knew it would be critical for communities and business populations to get data they could take early action on. Thats why collecting data you can quantify over time is important; the ability to track increases in RNA levels before typical human testing results are received gives our customers valuable time to prepare. Pace customers using this service include wastewater treatment facilities, Universities, prisons, industry, manufacturers, and more. Most are monitoring results weekly from multiple wastewater streams to determine locations of increased infections, to detect asymptomatic cases, and to alert the community and public health officials on trends.

Environmental Business Journal (EBJ), is a business research publication that has provided strategic business intelligence to the environmental industry since 1988. 2020 was certainly an exceptional year for our society, the economy, and the environmental industry, said Grant Ferrier, president of Environmental Business International Inc. (EBI, Inc.), and editor of Environmental Business Journal. Unique enough that we added two major categories to the EBJ Awards: COVID Resilience that recognizes companies that adapted to work-at-home, travel, field services, and other restrictions, as well as rapidly changing client needs; and COVID Response that recognizes companies that developed or accelerated new business initiatives, innovations, and entire business units to support the environment, and health and safety needs of their diverse client sectors.

The EBJ Business Achievement Awards customarily recognize business performance in conventional metrics like revenue growth, M&A, exceptional projects, technology development and deployment in the field, and advances in information and digital technology, and these categories are well represented in 2020.

The 2020 EBJ awards will be presented at a virtual Zoom ceremony on February 11th and 12th, 2021. Registration is free to the entire environmental industry community.

Pace Analytical is a portfolio company of Los Angeles-based Aurora Capital Partners.

About Pace Analytical

Pace Analytical Services, LLC makes the world a safer, healthier place. For decades, we have been the trusted source for quality environmental and life sciences lab testing and analysis and the resource for scientific lab staffing, regulatory, and equipment services. Our work is done in partnership with our clients by providing the science and the data they need to make critical decisions that benefit us all. Pace delivers science better to businesses, industries, consulting firms, government agencies, and more through the largest, American-owned, and nationally certified laboratory network. Science matters at PACELABS.com


The research team led by Masakazu Ohara, graduate student of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Toyohashi University of Technology (student in the Leading Program doctoral program); Associate Professor Kowa Koida of the Electronics-Inspired Interdisciplinary Research Institute; and Associate Professor Juno Kim of the University of New South Wales (Australia) discovered that when people judge the thickness of an object, objects with glass-like transparent optical properties are perceived to be flatter than they actually are. It was previously known that objects made of metallic or glossy materials are perceived to be thicker than what they are, but now the current research has identified that transparent properties surprisingly have the opposite effect. The result of the analysis of image cues that contribute to judgments of thickness indicated that humans may perceive thickness based on image characteristics in the form of regional variations of local luminance contrast. With this computational model, the types of images in which the shape of 3D objects may be misinterpreted by humans can now be predicted, which may be useful for everyday applications, such as devices to assist with walking in people with low-vision or autonomous driving.

The texture of an object's surface is also extremely important for product development, because it appeals to the human senses (e.g., vision, and also touch). We can infer a lot from a texture's appearance. For example, awareness that the ground is slippery is related to the gloss and perception of a surface's material composition, but if this perceptual estimate is erroneous, an accident may occur when walking or driving. Moreover, when surface gloss or transparency is misinterpreted, the bumps on the ground may also be misinterpreted. Humans identify the texture and optical properties of a surface with just a glance, even though the neural processing required is would be complex. Accordingly, understanding the mechanism by which the eyes and brain provide our experience of texture continues to generate significant interest.

When the human brain observes an object, it attempts to process and understand the illumination that hits the object, the 3D shape of the object, and the optical properties of the surface. Certainly, images are created by physically and precisely combining these three elements. However, it remains a fundamentally difficult problem to study how these three elements are dealt with by the visual system. There have been numerous reports where perceptions are not necessarily correct. For example, if a surface is glossy and compared to a gloss-less matte surface, it has been reported that the bumps on the object should appear exaggerated (Mooney & Anderson, 2014; Published in Current Biology).

Gloss is an optical phenomenon related to the reflection of light from an object's surface. However, the property of transparent refraction is also an optical phenomenon of objects. Regardless of whether transparency is a fundamental property, investigations had yet to be performed on transparent properties and the perception of 3D objects. Therefore, this research group compared transparent properties to conventional matte and glossy surfaces to understand how different materials affect the perception of 3D shape.

Participants in the experiment viewed computer-generated spherical objects (Figure 1) displayed on a computer screen, and they were asked to estimate the thickness along the direction in depth. Numerous objects with different thicknesses and surface materials were prepared for comparison. As a result, objects constructed of a transparent material were perceived as flatter than the objects with identical shape but with different material composure (Figure 2). This effect occurred consistently even when: i) the shape of the object had bumps, ii) the virtual lighting environment was changed, iii) the size of the object was changed, iv) the object was moved left and right, and v) the object was observed with only one eye. The aforementioned results indicate that transparent properties affect human perception of 3D object shape in different ways to diffuse and specular reflection.

The research group also analyzed the images to determine what kind of cues in the object image contributed to the perception of thickness. The factor that resulted in the most accurate estimations of the perception of thickness was the amount of regional variation of local contrast in the image. Local contrast is the root-mean-square (RMS) contrast of the pixels within a small region of the image, and this computation is similar to that performed by neurons found in the early visual area of the retina and brain. The regional variation is calculated as the variation from the sum of the above RMS contrast values across a wide field of view.

The research team discovered that transparent material properties can cause the 3D shape of an object to be underestimated. However, it is unknown whether these misinterpretations are a simple error or an indirect effect of a separate mechanism altogether. The cause of the misinterpretations will need to be investigated in detail in later research.

Also, the computational model for predicting the perception of thickness is not only useful for understanding neural mechanisms of the human visual system, but it is also linked to predictions of conditions in which humans might misinterpret the shape or texture of objects.

Errors in interpreting the evenness of a surface or whether surfaces are frozen can lead to accidents when walking or driving a car. In situations where the gloss, transparency, or bumps of a 3D object can be misinterpreted, it can be expected that the computational model could be used in devices to assist with mobility when walking, such as smart glasses, or semi-autonomous driving functions to caution drivers in advance of an accident.

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Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-10 14:10:00|Editor: huaxia

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PHNOM PENH, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- Cambodia launched a COVID-19 vaccination campaign on Wednesday here in four hospitals after receiving a donation of Sinopharm vaccines from China on Sunday.

Hun Manet, the eldest son of Cambodian Prime Minister Samdech Techo Hun Sen, got the first dose of the jab at the Calmette Hospital in the capital Phnom Penh as the drive started at 8:00 a.m. local time.

Hun Sen said on his official Facebook page, "Finally Cambodia began officially the vaccination program for its people. This is the result of fruitful cooperation between Cambodia and China, the iron-clad friends."

Ministry of Health secretary of state and spokeswoman Or Vandine said health authorities will initially vaccinate priority groups including frontline health workers, government officials, armed forces, and journalists, among others, at four hospitals in Phnom Penh.

"This vaccine is safe and highly effective, and I'd like to encourage people to receive it because it will protect us, our family and the community from COVID-19," she told reporters after receiving the shot of the vaccine.

The spokeswoman added that each individual has to be given two doses of the vaccine around 14 to 28 days apart.

"I'd like to express my profound thanks to China for providing the humanitarian aid of COVID-19 to Cambodia. This vaccine has greatly contributed to protecting Cambodian people and preventing the spread of COVID-19 in our community," she added.

The spokeswoman said that after getting the first dose of COVID-19 vaccine, the recipients would be observed for 30 minutes in the hospital.

The Southeast Asian nation has done well in containing the spread of COVID-19. The kingdom has so far registered a total of 478 confirmed COVID-19 cases, with zero deaths and 457 recoveries, according to the Ministry of Health. Enditem
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In the latter part of his tenure, he was a controversial politico and seemed fond of using big city tax breaks to lure development to this burgeoning suburb.

Here's a nicer estimation of his career:
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Bengaluru, Feb 10 : In a bid to provide fillip to the construction activities across Karnataka, Mines and Geology Minister Murugesh R. Nirani on Wednesday said that under the new sand mining policy, 183 sand blocks have been identified where mining will be allowed across the state.

Nirani said that the new sand mining policy is aimed at ensuring easy availability of sand at lower prices.

After a meeting with the officials at Vikasa Soudha here, the Minister told the media that the department had fixed Rs 300 per tonne for extracting sand from gorge, streams and rivers.

"We have identified 183 blocks where mining will be allowed across Karnataka. While, cess will be levied on tipper, lorry and other vehicles for transporting the sand, but bullock carts and two-wheelers will be exempted from the tax," he said.

Nirani added that transportation of sand from one district to another across the state will not be permitted while the uniform prices will be maintained for the transportation within the gram panchayat limits.

The Minister underlined that the new sand policy is investor-friendly and will help in construction activities in a big way in the state.

Nirani added that the Mines and Geology department is planning to set up Karnataka Mineral Industrial Development Board on the lines of Karnataka Industrial Area Development Board (KIADB) to give further impetus to mining activities in the state.

The Minister said that a single-window agency also would be set up to expedite the disposal of applications of mining proposals.

He added that the single-window agency will ensure speedy clearance of proposals among forest, environment, revenue and home departments.

"At districts, deputy commissioners will head the committees while the minister would be heading the state level panel. The DC will clear the applications for investments up to Rs 5 crore and the panel headed by the minister will approve the projects more than Rs 5 crore. This will help obtain licenses easily and get rid of red-tapism," he said.

The Minister further added that the government is aiming to set up a mines university in the state on the lines of National Mines University in Jharkhand's Dhanbad.

Former New York Yankees first baseman Garrett Cooper might be packing his bags.

The Miami Herald reports the Marlins are shopping the 30-year-old Cooper after signing Adam Duvall to a one-year contract on Tuesday.

The Marlins are at least listening to trade inquires about Cooper, according to a source. The Marlins had hoped to play either Cooper or Jesus Aguilar at first base and the other at designated hitter. Now, that wont be an option unless MLB and the union come to a last-minute agreement to add a DH in the National League in 2021. ... After initially being disinclined to play Cooper in right field, the Marlins grew more open to the idea, in the wake of there not being a DH in the National League this season. But because of Coopers defensive limitations in the outfield, they didnt want to count on Cooper as their starting right fielder and instead struck a deal with Duvall, a right-handed hitter.

Introducing Yankees Insider: Get exclusive news, behind-the-scenes observations and the ability to text message directly with beat writers

If the Marlins want to trade Cooper, they have a couple of potential options on the table.

MLB Networks Craig Mish reports Sources indicate the Los Angeles Dodgers have inquired about Miami Marlins 1B/OF Garrett Cooper. ... Unclear if Marlins will actually trade Garrett Cooper or not but no shortage of teams checking on his availability with the Duvall signing. Padres now join the Dodgers among the interested clubs. Per sources.

Cooper made his MLB debut in 2017 with the Yankees, getting 43 at-bats in 13 games.

After the 2017 season, the Yankees traded him and left-hander Caleb Smith to the Marlins for right-hander Michael King.

Cooper hit a career-high 15 home runs in 2019.

Get Yankees text messages: Cut through the clutter of social media and text during games with beat writers and columnists. Plus, exclusive news and analysis every day. Sign up now.

Thank you for relying on us to provide the journalism you can trust. Please consider supporting NJ.com with a subscription.

Mike Rosenstein may be reached at mrosenstein@njadvancemedia.com. Tell us your coronavirus story or send a tip here.
RYAN, Iowa (AP)  Prosecutors in eastern Iowa have charged a woman with first-degree murder in the shooting death earlier this week of her boyfriend.

Television station KWWL reports that 33-year-old Danielle Weiner, of Ryan, is accused in the fatal shooting of 27-year-old Devon Hierrezuelo, of Oak Law, Illinois.

Delaware County Sheriff's officials say the shooting happened around 1 a.m. Monday at the Shady Acres Apartments in Ryan, where arriving deputies found Hierrezuelo dead inside an apartment.

Investigators say Weiner told them a man entered the apartment and argued with Hierrezuelo before shooting him in the living room.

But investigators say evidence shows Hierrezuelo was shot in the bedroom, then moved to the living area.
Olivia Munn has made an impassioned plea to 'stop Asian hate' after mounting 'racist, verbal and physical assaults have left [her] community fearful to step outside'.

The actress, 40, said 'we need help to feel safe in our country' as she shared an open letter via her social media accounts on Tuesday.

In a lengthy statement, the X-Men Apocalypse star made a plea for Americans to be aware of the issue and help curb the rising number of hate crimes amid the COVID-19 pandemic, while detailing incidents of violence against Asian Americans.

The biracial star's mother is from Vietnam and is of Chinese descent and her father is of German, Irish and English ancestry.

Concerned: Olivia Munn has made an impassioned plea to 'stop Asian hate' after mounting 'racist, verbal and physical assaults have left [her] community fearful to step outside'

'Over the past few days I've found myself at a loss for words at the rise of anti-Asian hate crimes,' she began in the post she shared on Twitter and Instagram.

'The racist, verbal and physical assaults have left my community fearful to step outside.'

The actress went on to declare the spike in hate crimes against Asian Americans since the coronavirus crisis has happened, despite the community's persistence in asking for more media coverage.

The Newsroom star and former television news journalist offered a number of instances of violence against Asian Americans in recent weeks.

Taking a stance: The actress, 40, said 'we need help to feel safe in our country' as she shared an open letter via her social media accounts on Tuesday

'Hate crimes against Asian American have become so bad that in just the past week a 91-year-old Asian American man was attacked from behind as he walked down the street in Oakland,' Olivia explained.

She also shared about 'an 84-year-old Thai American was murdered in San Francisco, a 64-year-old Vietnamese American woman was assaulted in San Jose, and a Filipino American man was slashed in the face in Manhattan.'

As she wound down her plea for help and support, she declared: 'To simply exist as a minority in this country is seen as a protest to some.'

Olivia went on to make a plea to her more than 3.5 million social media fans and followers to get involved in the cause and solution.

'We need help amplifying the outrage; We need help to feel safe in our country; We need help to be safe in our country.'

Statement: The X-Men Apocalypse star made a plea for Americans to be aware of the issue and help curb the rising number of hate crimes amid the COVID-19 pandemic

She signed the letter: 'With love, Olivia Munn, proud Asian American.'

In the past, Olivia has revealed she had been deemed unsuitable for roles for Caucasian and Asian women because she is mixed race.

'I'd go out for so many auditions, for everything. And then I'd be told, "You're too Asian," or, "You're too white," she told the Prestige Hong Kong magazine, as reported by AZ Central.

'I remember someone telling me, "Don't feel bad. One day they won't be trying to match you to fit with anyone else. You'll just be hired for you." So you can't help but get frustrated.'
By Abubaker Kirunda

A shocked resident of Kinawankembo village in Kidera sub-county in Buyende a 32-year old son cut off the head of his father for being barred from beating up the stepmother.

The area LC3 Chairman William Kiiza said angry residents arrested the son and killed him also.

Kiiza said the son was a known drug addict in the village.

He said the son first stabbed the father in the stomach with a knife and then picked a panga from the house to cut off his head as he fell down.

He said police picked the two bodies from the scene and took them to Kidera health center four as investigations go on.

He identified the son as Baker Tibamwenda and father as John Tibamwenda.


Simon Fraser University - Mixed Reality Event - StreetFest! The virtual StreetFest! was an impressive multi-platform Mixed Reality experience; all entirely web-based, meaning that no app download was required to access the event.

With their student focused in-person StreetFest! event cancelled due to the pandemic, Simon Fraser University (SFU) collaborated with Aircards to deliver a highly innovative virtual replacement.

Leveraging Mixed Reality events with Aircards, SFU was able to deliver an engaging and fully virtual version of their annual StreetFest! event, a community street festival hosted every year by SFU and neighboring UniverCity community groups.

The virtual StreetFest! was an impressive multi-platform Mixed Reality experience; all entirely web-based, meaning that no app download was required to access the event. It featured both WebVR and WebAR features, giving SFU students and community members the opportunity to connect in real time in a variety of interactive, digital spaces.

With student interaction made increasingly difficult due to necessary Coronavirus restrictions, providing virtual spaces to connect is important to sustain engagement in University life. Through partnership with Aircards, SFU chose to be at the forefront of innovation, utilizing immersive technologies to deliver fully interactive virtual spaces allowing its students to connect back to the campus from around the globe.

The Mixed Reality event gave students the ability to join virtual spaces using desktop, mobile or VR headset, with simultaneous interaction across all devices.

As part of the Hubs module, Aircards custom created two virtual spaces which were 3D digital twins of real-life, on-campus locations at SFU - including the iconic Academic Quadrangle. Students were able to join these Hubs spaces together in real-time, featuring a variety of virtual communication tools, including voice and text chat, media sharing and custom avatars.

Located within the Hubs spaces were a series of activation points which enabled students to engage with the custom-made Web-based Augmented Reality (WebAR) mini-games and experiences powered by 8th Wall. These interactive features included a fun AR maze game, SFU Gondola face filter and virtual expo booths which students could tap-to-place in their own home.

The virtual StreetFest! was a success, driving significant student and community engagement across a two-day event period. View the video event showcase video on YouTube.

With conferences and events cancelled worldwide, Aircards offers an immersive alternative for forward thinking companies who want to continue to engage their audience at home. For more information, go to http://www.aircards.co

About Aircards:

Market-leading provider of WebXR experiences for agencies and brands, including recent high-profile launches with Samsung, Unilever (Pot Noodle) and Verizon. Aircards provides an end-to-end service - from ideation to design, development and hosting.

About Simon Fraser University:

As Canadas engaged university, SFU works with communities, organizations and partners to create, share and embrace knowledge that improves life and generates real change. We deliver a world-class education with lifelong value that shapes change-makers, visionaries and problem-solvers. We connect research and innovation to entrepreneurship and industry to deliver sustainable, relevant solutions to todays problems. With campuses in British Columbias three largest citiesVancouver, Burnaby and SurreySFU has eight faculties that deliver 193 undergraduate degree programs and 127 graduate degree programs to more than 37,000 students. The university now boasts more than 165,000 alumni residing in 143 countries.
Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US

Iran ready to help improve the defense capability of Syria

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EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia

2 people die in Armenia road accident

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61 quakes recorded in Congo per day

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Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack

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Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities

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Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia

US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs

Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners

Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions

Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US

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Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes

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There are omissions in registration documents of political forces that applied to Armenia Central Electoral Commission

Armenia Central Electoral Commission chief: There is activeness in Yerevan for the past day or two

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Group of US Congress members threaten Azerbaijans Aliyev regime with sanctions

Chicago mayor is sued for allegedly refusing interview with white reporter

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"Armenia" bloc top 50 MP candidates are announced

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US preparing list of targeted sanctions on Belarus authorities

China believes it will own America by 2035, Biden says

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Newspaper: Armenia political forces that applied for running in election impatiently await CEC decision

Newspaper: Changes are expected in Artsakh

California prisoner who considers himself Satanist beheads cellmate, dismembers his body

Newspaper: Armenia acting PM's "mutually beneficial" proposal to collapse state system?

Armenia National Security Service Reserve Officers' Union members meet with His Holiness Karekin II

EU is ready to help Armenia and Azerbaijan with border delimitation and demarcation

ARF-D member on Nikol Pashinyan: 103 years ago Armenia's founding fathers would have executed him for treason

Iran President hails brotherly ties with Azerbaijan

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"Armenia" alliance of political parties paying tribute to founder of First Republic Aram Manukyan

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Russia MOD reports on maintenance of ceasefire regime in Nagorno-Karabakh

Armenia acting MOD meets with Russian counterpart in Moscow

Armenia 2nd President: I see possibility of restoring borders of Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast

We can provide our army with some key, modernized weapons, says Armenia ex-President Kocharyan

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan: Captives issue is not one that any opposition force can resolve

OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs release statement on detention of 6 Armenian servicemen by Azerbaijan

Armenian acting Deputy PM: Discussion on issues possible only after withdrawal of Azeri troops from Armenia's territory

Armenia acting PM on Syunik roads, Russian military posts: This is only place where there are working nuances

Armenia acting PM: Process of return of POWs will intensify after upcoming elections

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Josep Borrell: A group of EU Ministers will visit Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan

Armenia acting PM: We're not going to escalate situation for 30% of Sev Lake

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Armenia acting PM: Solution to captives issue is matter of time

Shoygu to Harutyunyan: Russia, Armenia strengthen military cooperation

Armenia acting premier: We are 100% honest toward our country

Artsakh President pays tribute at Stepanakert memorial, Shushi Tank-Monument

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Mayotte's main tourist office stands nearly empty, a lonely tropical outpost overlooking a people-less port.

Its only hospital, however, is over-full.

Demand for ICU space is more than triple the supply, as medics fight to contain the French Indian Ocean territory's worst coronavirus outbreak yet.

The Mayotte islands are the poorest corner of the European Union, tucked between Madagascar and the mainland coast of Mozambique in southern Africa, and the last spot in the bloc to receive any coronavirus vaccines.

Local authorities feel forgotten, and say their difficulties in fighting the virus reflect long-standing inequalities between France's majority-white mainland and its far-flung former colonies where most people are of colour.

The French army is sending in medics and a few ICU beds, but the temporary aid will only go so far on the islands where masks are a luxury, where nearly a third of the population of some 300,000 has no running water, where a new lockdown is suffocating livelihoods.

Last week, authorities shut down Mayotte's economy, ordering people to stay home to combat fast-growing cases of the virus variant dominant in South Africa.

While ocean waves lap empty beaches and police patrol the quiet streets of Mamoudzou's business district, many people in the Bandrajou neighborhood seem unaware of confinement rules.

Clusters of children play barefoot on the dusty ground, girls carry buckets on their heads to fetch water from a collective pump, an older woman at an informal street stall braids a younger woman's hair.

Almost none wears a mask.

Mayotte's weekly infection rate is now nearly four times higher than the national French average.

The territory has registered 11,447 virus cases since the pandemic began - a third of them over the past two weeks - and at least 68 deaths, double the per capita virus death rate nationwide.

That made it all the more disappointing that Mayotte was the last French overseas region to get a vaccine shipment, a month after the first doses landed in Paris, more than 8,400 kilometers (5,000 miles) away.

The French Foreign Legion delivered the super-freezer needed to store Mayotte's initial deliveries of 950 doses of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines.

More shipments have trickled in, and the territory has so far vaccinated some 2,400 of its people, or less than 1%.

In Paris, government spokesman Gabriel Attal initially argued that Mayotte's young population  just 4% are over 60  meant the region was a low priority for vaccination, noting its "demographic and geographic realities which are obviously different" from the mainland.

But now that infections are raging, the central government is increasingly worried.

Doctors are transporting several ICU patients per day to nearby Reunion island. The French military on Sunday flew in medics.

The regional health service is organizing water deliveries to encourage the poorest to stay home.

Many Indian Ocean islands and countries on Africa's mainland are facing similar  or worse - outbreaks and vaccine delays.

When the rest of the Comoros islands chain voted in the 1970s for independence from France after a century-and-a-half of colonial rule, Mayotte residents voted overwhelmingly to stay French.

Today, Mayotte has the same administrative status as any region on mainland France  one of the world's richest countries.

The territory uses the euro as currency and is represented in the European Parliament.

A 2003 law promises "liberty, equality and fraternity" to all people on France's overseas lands.

Mayotte lawmaker Mansour Kamardine wrote to the government to plead for more permanent ICU beds, to no avail.

The whole territory has just 16.

Mayotte is among nine territories  mostly French  with a special status in the EU as an "outermost region," which have access to development funds aimed at reducing the economic gap with the European continent left over from colonial times.

But with Europe now facing its own vaccine woes and protracted economic crisis, Mayotte's prospects look dim.

Business travel and tourism have plunged as the pandemic wears on.

(Disclaimer: This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed; only the image & headline may have been reworked by www.republicworld.com)
Last month, record producer and songwriter Jordi Guillem suddenly awakened early in the morning because his phone was blowing up with messages from friends and people in the music industry asking if hed seen what was happening.

Guillem didnt have a clue what was going on and immediately started checking out links that were being sent to him. He realized that one of his songs had become part of a viral sensation across the world.

A hit song that Guillem of Spring wrote and produced in 2001 called Deja Que Mueva Mueva Mueva by Sonia Y Selena is regaining popularity as a dance challenge on TikTok. The news was a surprise, Guillem said, and perfect for the songs 20th anniversary.

Its super satisfying when you see so many people from around the globe, especially in Russia and Italy and Spain are dancing to your song and having fun especially now with the pandemic, Guillem said. Just seeing how just a little piece of music can bring some sort of joy to so many peoples lives, even if its for one minute  its just a nice feeling.

PREVIEW: Get our experts picks for concerts, kids stuff, fine arts, movies and more each week in our entertainment newsletter.

Deja Que Mueva Mueva Mueva was written by Guillem in 2001 for an album called Yo Quiero Bailar by Sonia Y Selena. Guillem said the song was a hit back then in Spain, charting number one for several weeks that summer.

Guillem said people from Spain and other counties, including the media, were talking about it. He said it was sort of like an overnight hit.

Today, Guillem runs his own production company in the Klein area called Exito Music that features a recording studio. He is mostly a pop rock producer but has worked in a variety of genres like electronic dance music, hip-hop, urban Latin, classical and country.

Talk of the town

As of last week, Guillem said nearly 30,000 individuals had choreographed and recorded a video of themselves dancing to the song. He said the actual number of times the song has been played since going viral again is in the millions.

Guillem didnt even know how TikTok worked and had to download the app in order to scroll through countless of videos.

Most of the videos are in other languages so Guillem translates comments but he said the actual messages from the recordings are universal in how people use the challenge to celebrate a certain occasion or idea, like hope for the end of the pandemic.

He said several nurses and doctors have shared videos as well.

They are pretty much creating a vision of when the pandemic ends, what theyre going to do, Guillem said. Theyre going to just throw away that mask and go crazy, dancing at the club.

More from Alvaro Montano: Magnolia 11-year-old Carter Waugh solves shoe problem by starting business

The TikTok challenge started trending in late 2020 right after the first video was uploaded to social media sometime in November. Guillem said the number of total participants was at 21,000 near the end of January, increasing to around 29,000, as of Feb. 4.

Thats what really got me. Not only just in a specific region but all over the place and it seems like its expanding like super rapidly, he said. So, its like almost 1,000 new people do the video daily.

Huge phenomenon

Guillem said the project started when other producers from Spain and himself decided to create a female duet in the early 2000s and did some casting and selected the artists to make the full album.

He remembers looking at the market in Spain at the time and seeing that there was nothing like the Spanish dance songs they were creating.

After presenting a small demo to Vale Music, Guillem said the record label tested the songs by playing them aloud to wake up participants during a taping of reality show Big Brother in Spain called Gran Hermano.

The reaction that they had is they would get up and they would start jumping off their beds and dancing to the songs, Guillem said. So, immediately the whole country of Spain started to know the songs and started singing them.

In a few days, the song became popular and people were downloading the song for free before the album was even released, making the record label panic due to lost sales, Guillem said. He remembers the president of the label telling them that they had two weeks to finish the album because the label needed to put it in stores immediately.

As a result, Guillem said the group locked itself in a studio and finished the album quickly but with a lot of passion because they knew it was going to be something special. He said five other songs were composed by him and the other producers made a collection of five more.

According to Guillem, the group had shows every single day that summer and would sometimes do as many as two or three shows a day.

That summer of 2001, you would go at any club, turn on any radio, everything was Sonia Y Selena, everywhere, he said. It was a huge phenomenon; I cannot think of any other song that went that viral then and now 20 years later, for no reason, the same story repeats.

Other songs from the album produced by Guillem include Que Viva La Noche, Tequila, and Cuando El Sol Se Va. Another song on the album that saw huge success was Yo Quiero Bailar.

The publisher and label for Deja Que Mueva Mueva Mueva today is Universal Music Group, who acquired Vale Music in 2006. Guillem is credited as writer and producer of the song.

Thats the part that I love the most about the music business  to see how you make a song and that three-minute song, how it finds its way to the entire globe, its pretty amazing to me, Guillem said.

alvaro.montano@chron.com
Xiaomi may have now released the Mi 11 globally, but it also plans to release a new entry in its already-well-stocked Mi 10 series. The new model is expected to feature the Snapdragon 870, a repackaged Snapdragon 865, while images from the TENAA reveal that the device may look an awful lot like the Mi 10 Ultra.

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The TENAA has thrown up another upcoming Xiaomi smartphone, following the publication of listings for the Redmi K40, Redmi K40 Pro and the Black Shark 4 Pro. While all these devices are new models, Xiaomi will sell the device pictured above under last year's Mi 10 series.

The listing contains the model number M2012J2SC, which Xiaomi recently certified with the 3C in China, too. The TENAA listing confirms that the device will have a 4,680 mAh battery and a 6.67-inch display. Based on the photo above, it seems that Xiaomi has re-used the shell of the Mi 10 Ultra, a device that the company never released outside of China.
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Mayor Turner and Comcast have announced a new initiative benefiting Houston area small minority businesses hit hardest by the pandemic.

Comcast is providing 100 grants to Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC)-owned, small businesses in Houston through the Comcast RISE Investment Fund.

Many businesses across the nation have faced challenges navigating the pandemic. While many have shuttered, others have been able to reinvent themselves.

NASA RANKS BEST WORKPLACE: NASA ranks in top 25 of Forbes 'America's Best Large Employers'

Houston mayor Sylvester Turner and Comcast representative Michael Bybee discussed the $1 million grant initiative at a press conference on Tuesday.

Courtesy: Comcast

Eligible BIPOC-owned, small businesses can apply from March 1 to 14 for the opportunity to receive a $10,000 grant.

Comcast RISE is part of a $100 million Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiative Comcast introduced in June 2020. Five million dollars in grants will go to BIPOC-owned, small businesses in five cities nationwide including Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit and Philadelphia.

Ralph Martinez, senior vice president for Comcasts Houston region, stressed the importance of small businesses.

Small businesses have always played an integral role in Houstons growth and future, Martinez said. In the midst of the pandemic, these entrepreneurs provided many of the services and resources that have kept our communities up and running.

BIPOC-owned small businesses in Houston that have been in business for three or more years with 25 or fewer employees are eligible for consideration.
The Coalition of American Metal Manufacturers and Users (CAMMU) is calling on United States President Joe Biden to end the Section 232 steel and aluminium tariffs, a position that puts it at odds with groups representing domestic steel producers.

The group, which represents more than 30,000 manufacturers, argues that the tariffs have not been successful in expanding US steel capacity and instead have raised prices for domestic manufacturers, making their products less competitive and thereby endangering their survival.



The raw materials that make up our members most critical input are priced at levels that are inflated over that of the global marketplace, and many products - particularly specialized types of steel and aluminium - are in short supply and subject to severe delivery delays, or simply [are] not available at all, CAMMU said.



By jeopardizing the ability of businesses to access the steel and aluminium they need, the... tariffs [imposed by former President Donald Trump] have made it more difficult for American manufacturers to compete with finished product imported from overseas.



CAMMU claims that the tariffs have caused delivery times to be delayed to up to 16 weeks and prices to soar to record highs.



Fastmarkets daily steel hot-rolled coil index, fob mill US was calculated at $58.96 per hundredweight ($1,179.20 per short ton) on Tuesday February 9, down by 0.47% from the record $59.24 per cwt on Monday.



And the exclusion process offered by the US Commerce Department is unable to resolve issues caused by the tariffs, with that system facing significant delays, according to CAMMU.



Groups representing the domestic steel industry - the American Iron and Steel Institute (AISI) and the Steel Manufacturers Association (SMA) - disagree, pointing to the success of the steel tariffs.



The steel tariffs are very much still needed and necessary because there is a massive global overcapacity estimated at 700 million tonnes, AISI chief executive officer Kevin Dempsey said, referencing a figure from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.



The recent spike in prices is a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, not the tariffs, he added.



Steel demand recovered sharply following the automotive supply chain disruptions in spring 2020, with capacity utilization from mid-March to the beginning of May last year shrinking to 51% from 81%, Dempsey noted.



Additionally, plenty of steel still enters the market duty free, he said.



On top of the product exclusions through the Commerce Department, Dempsey noted that the main sources of imports enter tariff free - pointing to Mexico and Canada - or under a quota system in the case of Brazil and South Korea.



Moreover, he noted that the steel tariffs have accomplished their purpose of supporting steel investments and expanding capacity, a point the SMA also made.



The [Section] 232 tariffs have resulted in increased capacity utilization and investment. Over $13 billion in investment is planned between now and 2023. This will result in a sustainable, modern American steel industry. To abruptly eliminate the tariffs could result in market distortions and a surge of unfairly traded imports. Also, eliminating Section 232 measures will tip the scales towards high-carbon-polluting producers from overseas shipping their products to our shores, SMA president Philip Bell said.



The SMA believes that the [Section] 232 measures should be continued until a comprehensive solution to the problem of global excess steel capacity can be reached. American steelmakers are still recovering from the pandemic, and while steel production decreased globally it increased by over 18% in China last year, he added.



Similarly to steel, aluminium producers and consumers are equally divided on the issue of the tariffs.
Nadire Atas, a Canadian woman who wrote thousands of online posts defaming her perceived enemies, was arrested on Tuesday by the police in Toronto. She was charged with crimes including harassment and libel, a Toronto police spokeswoman said.

Ms. Atas, 60, has waged online war against dozens of people in recent years, falsely accusing them of being scammers, thieves, sexual deviants and pedophiles. Her targets included a family that employed her 30 years ago; her mortgage lender; lawyers she had battled in court as well as those who had represented her; and the family members and colleagues of those people.

The arrest and charges followed a New York Times article published on Jan. 30 that detailed her campaign of harassment and defamation, illustrating the destruction that one person can wreak thanks to the hands-off postures of big tech companies like Google.

Ms. Atas was charged with 10 counts each of harassment, defamatory libel and spreading false information with the intent to alarm, said Caroline de Kloet, the police spokeswoman. This was a lengthy, complex investigation involving numerous victims, she said.



Mumbai, Feb 10 : Filmmaker Dhruv Sachdev, whose debut directorial Sifar won critical acclaim following OTT release in November, is gearing up to release his second film Lockdown.

LockDown will be a trilogy, with the first chapter scheduled to open in India this summer. The film is toplined by actors Ronit Arora and Raksha Kumawat.

The film is currently doing the rounds of the festival circuit with his second film, LockDown.

He points out his combined haul of awards for his two films has crossed 50 in just over a year. "We bagged 32 awards with Sifar and have won 20 awards with LockDown till now. As a team we couldn't imagine this a couple of years back! It all feels like a dream," Sachdev said.

LockDown has won awards in at Paris International Film Festival, Twilight Tokyo Film Festival, Istanbul Film Awards and the Berlin Flash Film Festival among other galas.

Earlier Sifar, featuring Sudha Chandran and Kanikka Kapur, had won recognition at Los Angeles Film Awards, Berlin Flash Film Festival, CKF International Film Festival, Calcutta International Cult Film Festival, Age d'Or International Art-house Film Festivaland the Miami Independent Film Festival among other ceremonies.
She's been keeping fans updated with envy-inducing family snaps from the beach.

And Tamara Ecclestone looked radiant as ever as she posted an adorable selfie with her four-month-old daughter from Dubai on Wednesday.

The Formula One heiress, 36, showed off her sun-kissed skin in a leopard print bikini as she perched baby Serena, five months, on her chest.

Golden girls: Tamara Ecclestone looked radiant as ever as she posted an adorable selfie with her four-month-old daughter Serena from Dubai on Wednesday

The mother-of-two wore minimal jewellery and accessorised with a stack of silver bangles.

The socialite kept her beauty regime simple and pulled her brunette locks back into a sleek bun.

Tamara dressed her baby girl in a pink dress with a cute unicorn print detail and a white bib to keep off any spills.

Joining the duo on their relaxing trip to Dubai are Tamara's husband Jay Rutland, 39, and the couple's daughter Sophia, six.

Close up: The Formula One heiress, 36, dressed her five-month-old baby girl in a pink dress with a cute unicorn print and a white bib to keep off any spills

Nap time: The socialite also posted adorable snaps of the infant napping in a baby pink giraffe onesie on her story on Tuesday night

The family have hardly returned to the UK since June 2020 and Jay told MailOnline that they have no plans to come back yet.

With family safety a primary concern, Jay spoke of how their west London home was the site of a multi-million pound jewel heist in December 2019.

'There are a host of reasons why we are not going back to London any time soon and security is one of them,' he revealed.

'The truth is we are playing it month by month and watching how the situation develops,' he said.

Jurors at a recent trial related to the burglary heard the family's home was so huge that security staff didn't notice the thieves looting the rooms for an hour after they had forced entry in to the home.

Happy family: Joining the duo on their relaxing trip to Dubai are Tamara's husband Jay Rutland, 39, and the couple's daughter Sophia, six

Although many celebrities have recently been criticised for trips away to Dubai, Jay maintained that he and Tamara had not broken any rules.

The family were living in Gstaad, Switzerland, until Christmas and travelled to Dubai from there.

'We have not broken the lockdown rules to come Dubai, that is not what we have done,' he explained.

'There is not a strict plan about when we are going to return to the UK or to Switzerland.

'Switzerland is in lockdown as well. We are here on an extended holiday while all this stuff is going on.' he said.


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Parliament Session Live Updates: Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed the Lok Sabha on Wednesday. The PM delivered the motion of thanks to the President's speech. Meanwhile, PM Modi's motion of thanks at the Rajya Sabha is still making headlines. PM Modi asked his fellow citizens to protect the country from 'andolan jeevis' who participate in every agitation. He also said that India needs to be aware of the new type of FDI - Foreign Destructive Ideology.

Here are the updates on his address in the Lok Sabha:

5:48 pm: I welcome farmers to discuss their concerns with us, says PM Modi.

5:36 pm: "I consider the farmer protests to be sacred. But, when Andolanjeevis hijack these sacred protests, showcase photos of those jailed for serious offences, does it serve any purpose? Not allowing toll plazas to work, destroying telecom towers - does it serve the movement," says the PM.

5:34 pm: "To use improper words against the private sector may have got votes for a few people in the past but those times are gone. The culture of abusing the private sector is not acceptable any longer. We cannot keep insulting our youth like this," says PM Modi.

5:34 pm: "The public sector is essential but at the same time the role of the private sector is also vital. Take any sector- telecom, pharma- we see the role of the private sector. If India is able to serve humanity, it is also due to the role of the private sector," says the PM.

5:25 pm: Kisan Rail has connected farmers to different corners of the country, says the PM.

5:23 pm: More investments in agriculture sector will increase job opportunities, says PM Modi.

5:15 pm: Criticising the Congress party, PM Modi said that party leaders in Rajya Sabha go in one direction and the ones in Lok Sabha go in another direction. "Such a divided party, such a confused party can neither help itself nor think about the country's welfare. The Congress is present in Rajya Sabha also, there are senior leaders there too. But they debate and discuss enthusiastically," he said.

5:12 pm: "Status quo has a role in destroying the country," said PM Modi.

5:10 pm: PM Modi gave examples of Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Jyotiba Phule and said that opposition did not stop them from pushing for reforms. "I am against this mentality. When it is said, they never asked for these laws. The people never asked for Ayushmaan Bharat, Jan Dhan, Swachh Bharat but we decided to take the initiatives. The government should work only when something is demanded, that time has gone," Prime Minister Narendra Modi said.

5:07 pm: An annoyed PM told LoP Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, "Adhir Ranjan ji please. Ab zyada ho raha hai. Main aapka aadar karta hun. Aaj aap aisa kyun kar rahe ho? Aap hadd se zyada kyun kar rahe ho?"

5:06 pm: "I want to ask any farmer, have these laws taken away anything that was there before? What has happened? An alternative system has been presented. This is optional, not compulsory. Farmers can go wherever they get more profit," said PM Modi.

5:03 pm: "Those who are disrupting the House are doing so according to a well-planned strategy. They are unable to digest that people are seeing through the truth. Through their games, the trust of the people can never be won," said PM Modi.

5:02 pm: "Three farm laws were brought in by government, these agricultural reforms are important and necessary. Farm laws were passed through an ordinance and later by Parliament. No mandis were shut after the implementation of these laws, MSP did not end anywhere in the nation. It's a truth which we hide, it has no meaning. Purchase on MSP increased after the laws were formed," said PM Modi.

4:56 pm: PM Modi said the Opposition should have not debated whether the farm laws are black or white but on the intent of it. He said that protesting farmers were victims of rumours that were spread. "This house and this government respects the spirit of protesting farmers and this is why senior ministers have been talking to them respectfully since the agitation was in Punjab. Efforts were made to identify the concerns of farmers. We make the laws for the people of this country. Even now, if they make any suggestions, we do not have objections," he said.

4:55 pm: Opposition parties create an uproar as PM Modi tries to speak about farm laws.

4:50 pm: PM Modi is heckled by Opposition MPs. "I thank you for giving me a second's rest," said PM Modi.

4:45 pm: PM Modi said if anyone is feeling discouraged, they must recall the struggle of Indians to motivate them. PM Modi said that Rs 2 lakh crore was given to the people this financial year. He said that it was possible only due to Aadhaar. PM Modi said, "I am shocked that there were people who moved courts against Aadhaar."

4:40 pm: Replying to Manish Tewari's comment that India was protected from coronavirus due to God's grace, PM Modi said, "I'd like to say something. This indeed is God's grace that the entire world shook but we remained safe. It was because doctors and nurses came as God, because they couldn't return to their homes for 15 days."

4:35 pm: "Today we can hear 'Vocal for Local' in every corner of India. People look for local. This sense of self-respect is working a lot for Aatmanirbhar Bharat," says PM Modi.

4:30 pm: "We are knocking at the doors of 75 yrs of independence. It's a matter of pride for every Indian and an occasion to move forward. We may be in any corner or belong to any strata of society but we must make a new resolve that where do we want to take India at 100 years of freedom," he said.

4:28 pm: "During coronavirus pandemic, the way India handled itself and helped the world recover is a turning point," the Prime Minister said. "A new world order is emerging post-coronavirus. A new design of relationships is coming to light. We have to decide how to find a place for ourselves," he said. He added that in such a situation, India will have to emerge as a strong player.

4:25 pm: PM Modi quoted Swami Vivekananda and said, "Every nation has a message to deliver, ambition to fulfill, a destiny to reach."

4:22 pm: "I would like to thank our women MPs in particular because their participation was more," says PM Modi

4:20 pm: PM Modi congratulates MPs for participating in the discussions
COLUMBUS, OhioUnemployment benefits fraud has become a major issue in Ohio, as tens of thousands of people are discovering that crooks have used their stolen personal information to collect benefits.

Its not just happening in Ohio. Every states unemployment benefits program, to varying degrees, has been targeted by a wave of scammers, who use online forums and messaging apps to buy and sell peoples personal information, as well as tutorials on how to exploit a particular states benefits system for cash.

The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that $63 billion  possibly more  has been paid out by state unemployment offices. Californias unemployment system alone says it paid out more than $11 billion to scammers in 2020.

But who are these scammers? And how have they been able to collect upwards of $63 billion  including at least $330 million from Ohio? Here are some answers.

Why is this such a problem?

When the coronavirus crisis hit the U.S. last March, businesses were ordered closed and millions were suddenly thrown out of work. The federal government and states sprung into action, expanding eligibility to people who are self-employed and offering an extra $600 (now $300) per week in emergency benefits.

This offered an unprecedentedly lucrative opportunity for scammers, who suddenly could net tens of thousands of dollars in benefits per victim. At the same time, it became easier to successfully lodge bogus claims -- applicants could self-attest they qualified for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance benefits, and crooks could avoid employer verification altogether by saying they were self-employed.

You basically have a perfect storm, said Blake Hall, CEO of ID.me, a security company hired by a number of states to help crack down on unemployment fraud.

State unemployment benefits systems, meanwhile, were largely unprepared for such a deluge of fraudulent claims. Ohios unemployment system runs on computers from 2004 (though the state is preparing to finish a years-long upgrade next year).

In addition, until now, unemployment systems anti-fraud efforts were mainly focused on stopping claims from actual state residents who were ineligible for benefits, not overseas criminals using stolen information.

Who are the scammers?

At least 70% of the bogus unemployment claims originated overseas in countries such as Nigeria, according to Haywood Talcove, CEO of the security firm LexisNexis Risk Solutions, citing data from a dozen states (Ohio isnt one of them) that have hired his firm to help secure their unemployment systems.

A large portion of these scams are conducted by organized crime rings with names like Scattered Canary and Yahoo Boys, Hall said. They literally just live in compounds and all they do, 24/7 is try to figure out how to trick people into stealing their identity and, you know, stripping their bank account of funds, he said.

However, an increasing number of people in the U.S. have been caught committing unemployment fraud  likely because they read media reports about the overseas fraud, said Parker Crucq, a senior intelligence analyst with Recorded Future, a Massachusetts-based cybersecurity firm.

Many scammers also make money by selling step-by-step instructions to others about how to exploit each states unemployment system via online forums and messaging apps such as Telegram. These instructions can sell for anywhere from $5 to $100, depending on the state targeted, according to a Recorded Future report.

For an additional charge, the sellers offer to provide victims personal information as well. In other cases, they sell direct access to unemployment relief accounts that have already been set up with a cash balance, the report stated.

As a result, the report concluded, Unemployment fraud has become increasingly accessible to threat actors lately and presents a low barrier of entry for fledgling cybercriminals.

Scammers also trade information on which states are best to target at a given time. At one point in November 2020, someone on Telegram advised that Ohio and six other states had stopped paying out, according to the report, though within two weeks people resumed selling instructions and stolen information associated with those states.

How the scams work

Applicants for unemployment benefits in Ohio must provide a name, Social Security number, drivers license or state ID number, list of recent previous employers, and contact information.

To get that information, some scammers rely on large-scale data breaches, sometimes from several years ago, Crucq said. Others send phishing emails to companies or organizations, which allows them to collect employees data.

If more information is needed, they turn to websites such as FamilyTreeNow or TruthFinder to fill in the blanks, a Nigerian scammer named Mayowa told USA Today.

Once we have that information, its over, Mayowa told the news organization. Its easy money.

In some cases, the unemployment funds are sent via direct deposit either to the scammers or to money mules -- often unwitting middlemen who could be online romance victims or who replied to ads the scammers posted on job websites and believe they are working for a legitimate international company, Crucq said.

Other times, when the state mails out debit cards with the funds, crooks use a variety of techniques to get ahold of the cards  including posing as state officials and asking targets to return the cards to them, and (in some cases) even going to victims homes and threatening them or claiming the card was sent to them by mistake, Crucq said.

Once the overseas criminal rings have the money, Talcove said, they often use it for more illegal purposes.

Talcove, who serves on the board of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, said the unemployment funds are also correlated to a recent uptick in human trafficking.

I think theres an assumption that people steal this money, then they go to their local mall and they buy some stuff or they buy a car, Talcove said. Theyre using that money to buy drugs. Theyre using that money for terrorism.

Read more Ohio politics and government stories:

Former Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel announces Senate bid

Ohios Rob Portman backs argument that its not constitutional to impeach a former president, votes with most GOP senators

2 new lawsuits challenge Ohios pandemic law covering remote-work rules for municipal income taxes

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine asks school districts to come up with plan to address coronavirus learning loss by April 1

U.S. attorney overseeing House Bill 6 probe asked to resign as part of broader ouster of Trump appointees by Biden administration

The World Health Organization's Chinese lead released initial details of its fact-finding mission into the origins of COVID-19. Early data from unpublished studies propose that the novel coronavirus could have been circulating for weeks outside the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the virus was first detected.

Possibility of the Missed Reported Circulation

Dr. Liang Wannian, the Chinese leader of the international team, which includes the WHO, stated this entails the probability of the missed reported circulation in other regions.

The WHO has concluded it is "extremely unlikely" that the coronavirus first spread from a Chinese laboratory leak and that no further work is necessary to probe into this theory.

The organization stated its ongoing investigation into the origins of Sars-CoV-2 had unveiled new data but not significantly changed the picture of the pandemic in Wuhan.

According to Dr. Peter Ben Embarek, leader of the WHO investigation, "The findings suggest lab incident hypothesis is extremely unlikely to explain the introduction of the virus into the human population," reported Independent.

A 12-day probing by the WHO team has unveiled little news regarding the origins of COVID-19 that ignited a devastating pandemic.

In a news conference on Tuesday in the Chinese city of Wuhan, the chiefs of the Chinese and WHO delegations stated they were unable to conclude whether the virus had been transmitted directly from animal to human or via an intermediary host.

According to the international team of scientists led by the WHO on Tuesday, the search for how COVID-19 was first introduced remains a "work in progress," with further research required into how and whether the respiratory illness circulated in animals before being contracted by humans.

Also Read: House Democrats Pass Budget Resolution To Clear Path for Approval of Biden's $1.9 Trillion COVID Relief Package

Scientists have been working in Wuhan for the past four weeks as part of their investigation for clues to the COVID-19 pandemic's origins, reported CNBC.

The joint mission investigating the origins of the pandemic indicated it is "extremely unlikely" COVID-19 originated from a laboratory incident in China.

Investigators think the most likely cause of the first outbreak was the virus being transmitted from an "intermediary host species" to humans.

As they revealed their findings at a Chinese press conference, WHO investigators have dismissed the lab leak theory as "extremely unlikely."

WHO scientists were present along with their Chinese counterparts as they also confirmed they have ruled out the Wuhan wet market as the initial origin of COVID-19.

The WHO mission to China to investigate the origins of the virus has failed to identify the animal source.

Experts believe the respiratory illness, which has recorded over 2.3 million people fatalities across the globe, originated in bats and could have been spread to humans through another mammal.

According to the WHO food safety and animal diseases expert Embarek, "Our initial findings suggest that the introduction through an intermediary host species is the most likely pathway and one that will require more studies and more specific, targeted research," reported Fox News.

On January 14, the team arrived in Wuhan and, following two weeks of quarantine, visited key sites, including the Huanan seafood market, which was linked to an early cluster of infections, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Related Article: When Will COVID-19 End for Us to Return to the Old Normal?

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[February 10, 2021] University of Chicago's Polsky Center Puts 'Buy and Build' Model of Entrepreneurship on Global Stage with First-Ever Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition Week

The Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Chicago is putting the 'buy and build' model of entrepreneurship on a global stage, hosting a first-ever ETA Week February 16-19, 2021. ETA, which stands for entrepreneurship through acquisition, is when entrepreneurs acquire an existing company-instead of creating an entirely new company-and take on the leadership role of managing, growing, and scaling that company. ETA and the closely associated search fund model, an investment vehicle first established in 1984 where entrepreneurs raise capital from investors, offers an attractive career path for MBA students with strong operations and management experience. "Several years ago we began to notice growing interest amongst students at Chicago Booth in the ETA model. In response, we developed a robust portfolio of resources to equip them with the skills and networks to raise capital, evaluate and acquire a company, and successfully lead it post acquisition," said Alex Hodgkin, Polsky Center Entrepreneur-in-Residence and CEO of Intrinsic. "In doing so, we soon realized there was tremendous demand for ETA programming and are now supporting students not only at Chicago Booth, but also at other universities. We are also seeing interest from our alumni and other individuals who are later in their career and are looking to transition into entrepreneurship." The ETA program at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business was officially formed in 2014. It is co-led by Steven Kaplan, Alex Hodgkin, and Paul Cavalieri, and is supported by Chicago Booth faculty Brian O'Connor and Mark Agnew. Today, through the help of the Polsky Center, the program has expanded to include a credit-bearing MBA class at Chicago Booth, a podcast series with more than 100,000 unique downloads, a newsletter on ETA trends, and an annual ETA conference that brings together search fund entrepreneurs, investors, MBA students, faculty, and other participants in the ETA ecosystem.



Now in its seventh year, the ETA Conference hosted in partnership with Chicago Booth and Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management student groups has grown to attract a global audience. Last year's conference, which was held in-person in downtown Chicago, featured 49 speakers, 16 sponsors, and over 575 attendees from 24 universities, 24 states, and six countries. "The global appeal of the ETA model has been phenomenal so we decided to create ETA Week," said Paul Cavalieri, associate director of entrepreneurship through acquisition at the Polsky Center. "Because of COVID-19, our annual ETA Conference needed to be 100% virtual, but we added new programming, additional days, and contracted with an AI-driven technology platform to foster networking between MBA students, investors, search fund experts, and aspiring entrepreneurs. I'm excited that our new virtual format will allow anyone from anywhere in the world the opportunity to learn about the ETA model."

Starting February 16, the Polsky Center's first-ever ETA Week includes 12 panels and networking sessions across four days culminating with the day-long Booth-Kellogg ETA Conference. Highlights include featured panels and experts speaking on the Challenges and Resilience for ETA Operators, ETA Legal Considerations, and Cybersecurity Diligence and Implementation, and more. While Friday's day-long conference is free to join, participants have the option to pay a nominal fee to gain access to the full ETA Week programming though Brella, a networking platform. Through the platform, attendees will have the opportunity to make a custom profile that highlights their interests and goals within ETA. From there, the AI-driven software will suggest people to meet based on mutual objectives. Attendees can easily set up one-on-one networking meetups with one another during the week. Registration for the ETA Week closes February 18. To learn more and register, visit the ETA Week website. About the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Chicago The Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation applies world-class business expertise from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business to bring new ideas and breakthrough innovations to market. With a 60-person professional staff, the Polsky Center drives the creation of new ventures and commercial partnerships at the University of Chicago and beyond. As a global leader in entrepreneurship education, the Polsky Center provides training for aspiring entrepreneurs and those seeking a career in private equity, venture capital, and entrepreneurship through acquisition. Learn more at polsky.uchicago.edu and follow updates on Twitter (News - Alert) @polskycenter. Fill out the "Get Started with the Polsky Center" online form to access our resources and subscribe to our newsletters, including the ETA Insider. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210210005991/en/

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Tesla boss Elon Musk is a poster child of low-carbon technology. Yet the electric carmaker's backing of bitcoin this week could turbo-charge global use of a currency that's estimated to cause more pollution than a small country every year. Tesla Inc revealed on Monday it had bought $1.5 billion of bitcoin and would soon accept it as payment for cars, sending the price of the cryptocurrency though the roof. So what's the problem, you may ask? Bitcoin's virtual, so it's not like it's made from paper or plastic, or even metal. The digital currency is ...
The 38-minute video below shows how Donald J. Trumps persistent repetition of lies and calls to action over two months created an alternate reality that he won re-election. Mr. Trumps words, which were echoed and amplified by the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, are a central focus of his second impeachment trial.

We won 00:04 This is a fraud 04:28 From Trump to Biden 19:24 Our country 27:52 Fight 33:17

In hundreds of public statements from Nov. 4, 2020, to Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Trump repeatedly used phrases like we won the election and won it by a landslide, and he said that the election was rigged and stolen by the Democrats. Such assertions have been proven false by the courts and elections officials across the country. Mr. Trumps language later signaled to his supporters that they needed to fight because youll never take back our country with weakness.

Some of Mr. Trumps statements were outright lies (that he won). Some were his own sentiments (this is a disgrace to our country). Some were oblique calls to action (if you dont fight to save your country with everything you have, youre not going to have a country left).

In a 78-page brief submitted to the Senate on Monday, lawyers of Mr. Trump say that he did not direct his supporters to storm the Capitol.

Youre not usually going to find a leader telling you exactly what to do, said Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale University who has written extensively about the similarities between Mr. Trumps language and that of authoritarian rulers. Instead, theres some kind of vague directive, which followers sharpen and act on.

Autocratic movements throughout history have been distinguished by leaders repeating lies and suggestions that whip up anger among supporters, Dr. Snyder said. That is exactly what Trump did.

Mr. Trumps defense team will assert that his false statements about the election are protected by the First Amendment, and that trying a former president at all is unconstitutional.

Dozens of constitutional scholars from across the political spectrum have said the First Amendment claim is legally frivolous and should not stop the Senate from convicting Mr. Trump. Legal scholars, including prominent conservatives, have dismissed Mr. Trumps argument that it is unconstitutional to hold an impeachment trial for a former president.

How Trumps words echoed through the Capitol

The Times reviewed hundreds of hours of footage from Jan. 6 of protesters, including the rioters that stormed the Capitol, and found evidence of how they mimicked  and amplified  Mr. Trumps words.

For instance, collective chants of Stop the Steal morphed into threats of violence against leaders like Vice President Mike Pence (Hang Mike Pence!) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Were coming for you, Nancy).

Trump won 0:00 Stop the Steal 0:59 We will fight 3:10 This is our house 4:22 Hang Mike Pence 6:10

A number of the rioters have said they did what they did because they thought it was what Mr. Trump wanted them to do.

Mr. Trump summoned this mob, assembled the mob and lit the flame of this attack, Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the No. 3 House Republican, said in a stinging statement explaining why she thought Mr. Trump should be impeached.
United Nations, Feb 10 : The UN has sought full and regular access to the almost 62,000 people in the al-Hol refugee camp in northeast Syria, the world body's humanitarian agency has confirmed.

Such access is necessary so all residents, 93 per cent being women and children, continue to receive essential assistance, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in a statement on Tuesday.

A recent hike in violence underscores that the camp, the largest for refugees and internally displaced people in Syria, is "no place for any child to grow up", Xinhua news agency quoted.

There are more than 31,000 children under the age of 12 in the camp, which is currently hosting over 56,000 people well beyond its capacity.

The world organisation and its humanitarian partners continue to provide comprehensive and life-saving assistance, including through food, clean drinking water, health facilities, shelter, and a range of other services, including sanitation, nutrition, education and protection, the OCHA statement said.

"To help protect families against cold winter temperatures, close to 4,000 tents have been replaced, and essential items distributed, including heating fuel, blankets and winter clothes.

"But even with this assistance, humanitarian conditions at al-Hol undoubtedly remain challenging," the Office further said.

Stephane Dujarric, chief spokesman for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, was asked at his regular press briefing on Tuesday about the children's possible radicalization.

"What does it mean for 31,000 children to live not only in horrendous conditions, without education, without access to proper healthcare, what is their future? Where are they going to be? These are problems that need to be dealt with immediately, because if you leave a 5- or a 10- or a 12-year-old in these conditions for too long, you've ruined their future in a certain extent."
"Once again, Texas welcomed more than half a million new residents from other states," said Marvin Jolly, 2021 chairman of Texas Realtors. "Some move here for a lower cost of living than where they're from, a great quality of life, diverse job opportunities, good weatherthere are many reasons people continue coming to Texas."

According to the Census estimates, Texas welcomed 537,000 - 582,000 new residents in 2019. This is the seventh year in a row that Texas attracted more than 500,000 new residents from out of state. The Census also estimated 435,000 - 471,000 Texans moved to other states, yielding a net gain of approximately 100,000 people. The Lone Star State also welcomed approximately 192,000 - 222,000 new residents from outside the United States in 2019.

The highest number of new Texans from other U.S. states relocated from California and Florida, respectively. Other top states for people moving to Texas included Louisiana, Illinois, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Georgia and Arizona.

California ranked first in the United States for the number of residents moving out of state in 2019, with Texas coming in second. The most popular out-of-state relocation destinations for people moving out of Texas included California, Colorado, Oklahoma, Florida and Georgia. While California was the top state new Texans moved from and existing Texans moved to, about double the number of Californians moved to Texas compared to the migration of Texans to California.

From 2014 to 2018, the top counties for people moving to Texas from out of state included Harris, Dallas, Tarrant, Bexar and Travis. On the metropolitan statistical area (MSA) level, the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington MSA and Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land MSA recorded the highest number of incoming residents from out-of-state during the same time frame.

"Though we don't have 2020 relocation statistics yet, increased remote-work opportunities and company relocations continued to fuel moves from other states to Texas during the pandemic," said Jolly. "No matter what part of the state these new residents are moving to, no one is better positioned to help them realize their real estate dreams than a Texas Realtor," he said.

About the 2021 edition of the Texas Relocation Report

The 2021 edition of the Texas Relocation Report is based on data from the 2019 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates by the U.S. Census Bureau as well as the 2020 U-Haul National Migration Trend Report. The report analyzes county relocation data of nine demographic areas in Texas. Texas REALTORS distributes insights about the Texas housing market each month, including quarterly market statistics, trends among homebuyers and sellers, international trends, and more. To view the Texas Relocation Report in its entirety, visit texasrealestate.com.

About Texas REALTORS

With more than 140,000 members, Texas REALTORS is a professional membership organization that represents all aspects of real estate in Texas. We are the advocates for REALTORS and private property rights in Texas. Visit texasrealestate.com to learn more.

Contact:

Morgan Moritz

[email protected]

SOURCE Texas REALTORS

Related Links

http://texasrealestate.com


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Registration Number: 130349 Registration Number: 130349
Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - February 10, 2021) - Conquest Resources Limited (TSXV: CQR) ("Conquest" or the "Company") reports that the Board of Directors has approved the granting of 4,175,000 incentive stock options to directors, officers, consultants and other service providers under to the Company's Stock Option Plan, subject to TSX Venture Exchange approval.

All of the stock options are exercisable at a price of $0.20 per share for a term of five years and will vest quarterly over a period of two years.

Additionally, the Board of Directors has approved the granting of 50,000 incentive stock options to Stock Marketing Inc for advisory and marketing services to the Company exercisable at a price of $0.20 per share for a term of one year.

As of the date hereof, the total number of Conquest shares outstanding is 132,587,106.

ABOUT CONQUEST

Conquest Resources Limited, incorporated in 1945, is a mineral exploration company that is exploring for gold on mineral properties in Ontario.

Conquest holds a 100% interest in the Golden Rose Project, located in the Temagami Mining Camp at Emerald Lake, approximately 65 kilometres northeast of Sudbury, Ontario, which hosts the former Golden Rose Gold Mine.

In October 2020, Conquest completed the acquisition of Canadian Continental Exploration Corp., and subsequently doubled its land holdings through the staking of 588 mining cells, centered on Belfast Township, on the edge of the Temagami Magnetic Anomaly. Conquest now controls over 220 sq km of underexplored territory, including the past producing Golden Rose Mine at Emerald Lake, in the Temagami Mining Camp.

Conquest also holds a 100% interest in the Alexander Gold Property located immediately east of the Red Lake and Campbell mines in the heart of the Red Lake Gold Camp on the important "Mine Trend" regional structure. Conquest's property is almost entirely surrounded by Evolution Mining land holdings.

In addition, Conquest owns a 100% interest in the Smith Lake Gold Property of six patented claims and 181 staked mining claims to the north, west and south of the former Renabie Gold Mine in Rennie Township in northern Ontario, operated by Corona and Barrick that had reported gold production of over 1,000,000 ounces between 1947 and 1991 (Northern Miner March 4, 1991).

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT:

general@ConquestResources.com

www.ConquestResources.com

John F. Kearney

Chairman

416-362-6686

Tom Obradovich

President & Chief Executive

416-985-7140

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/74155

Small-business owners are struggling to survive the pandemic and government-imposed lockdowns. But white male business owners have an added problem. While politicians are offering loans and grants to minority-owned and women-owned businesses, they could care less about helping white men.

What's next? Tax breaks for women and minorities, and higher rates for white men? Government programs shouldn't discriminate. We're all supposed to be equal under the law.

Tell that to President Joe Biden, who won the election with promises to unify. His 27-page plan to "build back better by advancing racial equity" proposes dozens of taxpayer-funded programs for businesses owned "by Black and Brown people" and no mention of white-owned businesses. That's bound to provoke racial resentment.

Biden pledges to close the wealth and earnings gap between whites and minorities. J Bravo. Who can argue with wanting all Americans to succeed? The issue is how. Donald Trump narrowed the gap by boosting employment and growth. Not resorting to race-specific programs.

In 2019, before the pandemic struck, the earnings gap between whites and minorities shrunk, and the poverty rate for Blacks and Hispanics tumbled to its lowest ever recorded. Homeownership and net worth for Blacks and Hispanics increased. All without doling out government help based on skin color and ethnicity.

Biden's plan, on the other hand, barely mentions growth. His approach is about rigging the system -- targeting benefits to favored groups.

Several states controlled by Democrats are also putting race and gender ahead of fairness. Last May, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo launched the New York Forward Loan Fund "focusing on minority and women-owned small businesses." The program requires that 60% of the taxpayer-funded loans go to minority- and women-owned enterprises, double their share of the state's businesses. That puts white male business owners at a disadvantage. It's probably unconstitutional -- violating the 14th Amendment's guarantee that we all be treated equally.

When Oregon state politicians reserved a pot of COVID-19 relief money for Black residents and Black business owners only, a white logging company owner who was bleeding money because of lockdowns sued the state and succeeded in getting the discriminatory program halted until the case is decided.

Similarly, when Colorado awarded COVID-19 relief funds to minority businesses only, a white barber shop owner sued, insisting on his right to be treated equally under the law.

New Jersey is currently considering legislation to provide $50 million to aid minority businesses while refusing aid funding for nonminority businesses. If they pass it, they should be sued, too.

Minority-owned businesses have been hit especially hard during the pandemic, but there are ways to help without screaming "whites need not apply."

When the first round of Paycheck Protection Program loans was launched last spring, small businesses that lacked an existing relationship with a bank had trouble applying, including many minority-owned businesses. But by late summer, that problem was largely solved by outreach efforts. Federal data show that as of Dec. 1, over half of all Paycheck Protection funding went to businesses in distressed or low to moderate income neighborhoods.

Vice President Kamala Harris has proposed "navigators" to pilot business owners who are least savvy about banking through the loan application process. That's also a good idea.

Aid should go first to enterprises that support jobs, regardless of the race of the owner. COVID-19 relief is supposed to protect paychecks. A staggering 2.1 million of the 2.6 million black-owned enterprises in the nation have no employees, just an owner, according to the U.S. Black Chambers, a business group. Propping up businesses without workers simply because they're minority-owned, in preference to businesses with employees, is foolish. Cuomo's minority-focused loan program suffers from that problem.

Congress is drafting the next COVID-19 relief bill now. To foster national unity and treat all Americans equally, legislators need to provide small businesses help without regard to race or gender. Businesses that demonstrate the greatest need should get the help. Even businesses owned by that politically disfavored group, white men.

COPYRIGHT 2021 CREATORS.COM
Government has resolved that all roads in the country be declared a State of Disaster inorder the facilitate the release funds for maintenance and repair works, Information, Publicity and Broadcasting Services minister Monica Mutsvangwa has said.

Speaking at the first 2021 post-Cabinet media briefing yesterday, Mutsvangwa said Cabinet made this declaration as significant portions of national roads have been compromised by incessant rains.

Mutsvangwa said Cabinet's decision was informed by an adverse report submitted by Minister of Local Government and Public Works, July Moyo, which revealed that some areas are now inaccessible because of extensively damaged roads.

She revealed government is working on necessary legal procedures to give effect to a declaration which eases mobilisation of funds to repair damaged roads, and ensures quality standardization of works.

"Cabinet has resolved that all roads in the country be declared a state of disaster. The declaration would facilitate the release of resources for the repair and rehabilitation of all roads that require such works.

"The restorative works will cover all urban areas as well as the rural trunk roads. It will also pave way for the standardization of quality roads under the Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure Development. The necessary legal procedures to give effect to the declaration is being worked on," she said.

Mutsvangwa warned of a high risk of floods, which could compound adverse effects of limited mobility caused by damaged infrastructure, already disturbing socio-economic activities such as distribution of food, inputs and delivery of important services.

She said Cabinet also received an update on the rehabilitation of the Beitbridge- Harare - Chirundu highway.

"People in malaria-prone areas should take necessary precautions, while those in flood-prone areas should relocate to high ground. Government will continue to institute measures to protect its citizens in the advent of natural hazards," she said.

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Similarly, the acting Minister of Transport and Infrastructural Development, Winston Chitando (MP) recently advised that effects of 'heavy and incessant rains that are being witnessed across Zimbabwe have badly affected the country's road infrastructure.'

Chitando warned motorists to avoid driving at night as depth perception, color recognition, and peripheral vision can be compromised by darkness, while the public was warned against crossing flooded rivers.

"Let us all be cautious on our roads. Together we can make a difference and save precious lives. Remember, one death is too many.

"Provincial Road Engineers (PREs) are currently on the ground assessing the state of major structures for any signs of scour, erosion, or bridge movement to timeously and effectively respond to the situation based on identified needs.

"REs will also place warning signs to warn motorists of any identified potential danger along the country's road network," he said.

Zimbabwe national road network excluding urban roads, which are also in a dire state, totals 76 241 km, of which only 9 256 km (12.1%) are bitumen surfaced. Most of these roads require complete rehabilitation works as they are aged over thirty years.

Zimbabwe National Roads Administration (ZINARA) a parastatal responsible for management maintenance and development of the national road network, is only able to fund minimal routine and periodic maintenance countrywide.
Burma NLDs Self-Declared Parliament Reappoints Daw Aung San Suu Kyi as Myanmars Leader

Myanmar State Counselor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi / Thiha Lwin / The Irrawaddy

De facto Myanmar leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was appointed to a second term as the countrys State Counselor by a self-declared Parliament formed by elected lawmakers of her National League for Democracy, in an act aimed at defying military rule and asserting their electoral legitimacy.

The military staged a coup last week and arrested the democratically elected leaders of the NLD government, President U Win Myint and State Counselor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. The takeover came a few hours before the convening of what was to be the first session of the new Parliament since Novembers general election, in which the NLD saw a landslide victory.

The coup essentially abolished the Parliament. However, the elected NLD lawmakers, who were preparing to attend Parliament in Naypyitaw when the coup occurred, held an improvised swearing-in ceremony later in the week and declared the Parliament to be in session.

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was first appointed State Counselor in 2016 by the NLD-dominated Parliament. The legislature at the time enacted the State Counselor Law to give her an official title to go with her informal de facto leader status, as she is constitutionally barred from the countrys presidency due to the foreign citizenship of her sons and her late spouse.

Military representatives in Parliament objected to the law at the time but were defeated by the NLDs majority vote.

On Tuesday, the self-declared Parliament appointed Daw Aung San Suu Kyi as Myanmar State Counselor through 2025.

Under the law, the State Counselors term lasts five years.

According to State Protocol, the State Counselor is the second highest-ranking state official after the President.

The military regime has detained Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and charged her with violating the Export and Import Law, claiming they found nine illegally imported walkie-talkies at her residence.

You may also like these stories:

Woman Shot by Myanmar Police During Anti-Coup Protest Declared Brain Dead

Protesters Against Myanmar Coup Arrested in Rakhine

UN, US Offer Support for Peaceful Protest Against Myanmar Military Regime
Australian values and culture should be the guiding theme of the national school curriculum, teaching students about the Western tradition as well as about Indigenous heritage across every subject, a new paper argues.

In the paper for the Centre for Independent Studies, Fiona Mueller, a former director of curriculum at the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), said that, while the curriculums of high-performing countries such as Singapore fostered a love of the country, Australias did not.

Dr Fiona Mueller, of the Centre for Independent Studies, says Australian culture and values should be the guiding theme of the national curriculum. Credit:Sam Mooy

With the exception of a few bits and pieces, [Australias] really looks like any other curriculum in the world, Dr Mueller said.

But another education expert said the curriculum included enough about Australian culture, while the chief executive of ACARA said it embraced both Indigenous heritage and the democratic traditions that are part of the Western tradition.
Posted Wednesday, February 10, 2021 4:54 am

A bill that would extend reporting requirements on timber purchases from July 1, 2021 to Sept. 30, 2025 received unanimous support by lawmakers in the state House of Representatives on Friday, Feb. 5.

House Bill 1055 was introduced by state Rep. April Berg, D-Mill Creek, and co-sponsored by state Rep. Peter Abbarno, R-Centralia.

"This isnt new legislation but a renewal of a program that works, and a renewal of bipartisan cooperation - something we can always use more of," Abbarno said in a news release from Washington State House Republicans.

According to the release, state law requires every purchaser of more than 200,000 board feet of privately-owned timber to report the purchase to the Department of Revenue on or before the last day of the month of the purchase.

"Information gathered by these reports helps to establish stumpage (the standing tree before it is removed from the stump) value tables for trees that are commercially harvested in Washington," Abbarno said.

"This bipartisan bill is very important to the timber communities throughout the state and in the 20th District where the timber industry has a long history and tradition, economically and socially," Abbarno said in a floor speech Feb. 5. "Plainly speaking, it ensures that we have the most up to date information about timber sales and market prices."

The measure passed 96-0 in the House. It now heads to the Senate for further consideration.
The decision by the Lagos State Judicial Panel of Inquiry and Restitution for Victims of SARS Related Abuses to reopen the Lekki Tollgate has been met by stiff opposition by Nigerians who participated in the hijacked #EndSARS protest.

Majority of the nine-man panel had last Saturday granted the prayers of the Lekki Concession Company (LCC) to reopen the toll plaza, a move that has heated the polity and seen the resurgence of the #EndSARS social media campaign.

While five members of the panel saw reasons with the toll company to reopen, four others including a human rights lawyer and two youth representatives faulted the ruling.

As the judgment of the majority panel members became public, the protesters condemned the move, noting that the planned reopening of the toll made a mince meal of the over three weeks protest and the loss of lives recorded.

To register their grouse, the protesters vowed to storm the toll gate and rehash the Occupy Lekki Tollgate like they did for weeks last year before the army was called in by the Lagos State government to disperse the teeming crowd.

Tagged 'OccupyLekkiTollGate to Sorosoke (Speak Out) and demand justice for all victims of #EndSARS Protest' they disclosed that a physical but peaceful protest would be held on Saturday, February 13.

According to them, it was a slap in the face to quickly reopen the toll to generate income when justice was yet to be gotten for those that lost their lives during the last invasion by the army.

Like the previous protest, the protesters vowed not to have any leader, rather, they would go out as one voice to occupy the toll till the panel rescinds their decision.

Already, they have put plans in motion to resuscitate their once rested machinery in terms of logistics, medical, security, feeding and even legal aid.

Concerned Nigerians, a Civil Rights Movement committed to Human Rights also joined in opposing the purported re-opening.

Tweeting from their Twitter handle they wrote, "

#OccupyLekkiTollGate You can't open a toll gate where victims of state sanctioned murder are yet to get justice. No Justice, No Re-Opening."

Emmanuel Obikoya wrote: " We will not allow these government to brainwash us. We need justice for those heroes that sacrificed their lives at the Lekki massacre. Enough of these oppression and tyranny #OccupyLekkiTollGate"

Nerfetiti tweeting from @Firstladyship wrote "#OccupyLekkiTollGate Send a strong message to the Lagos State Government. Let them know we are no fools.

"We won't allow their proxies: the Lekki Concession Company, and the Judicial Panel-paid activists to rewrite history. They can't silence us. #EndSARS will continue to haunt them."

@Oloye_ wrote: "They thought we had forgotten. They thought they could get away with it. They thought we would be too scared to demand that justice is served. They thought my generation will be defeated. Forever, we soro soke."

Meanwhile, ahead of the planned protest in Lekki and other security unrests happening in Lagos, especially in Alakuko, the Lagos State Police Command yesterday evening met with Area Commanders, Divisional Police Officers and Commanders of Mobile units to restrategise.

According the command, the meeting was necessary given the recent scale of violent attacks across the state by criminal gangs and cultists.

Speaking on anonymity to THISDAY, a senior police officer said although the police have no plans to mar any peaceful protest, but they were worried a hijack by criminal elements would reoccur, thus throwing the state back to the aftermath of the violence experienced during the last protest.

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The source said: "In the past few days, Lagos has been embroiled in several clashes between criminal gangs and cultists.

"Over the weekend, we experienced rival clashes in Itire and environs and that was contained by the police.

"We also experienced violence in Alakuko. In fact, peace was just restored to the area this Monday by a combination of force by security operatives from the police and military.

"Credible intelligence at our behest does not forebode well for any large scale protest now because of the pockets of violent activities going on.

"If you recall the aftermath of the last protest when these hoodlums hijacked it, large scale destruction of properties belonging to the police, individuals and even companies were recorded.

"No society can survive such massive scale destruction twice in a role in such a short space of time. So we are calling for caution on the part of the protesters."
(Natural News) In 2009, the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccine maker Pfizer paid $2.3 billion in what was  and is still  the largest healthcare fraud settlement in history. This is to resolve criminal and civil liability arising from the illegal promotion of certain pharmaceutical products.

The U.S. Department of Justice fined Pfizer in September of 2009 after one of its subsidiaries, Pharmacia & UpJohn Company, pleaded guilty to marketing four drugs with the intent to defraud and mislead. Aside from promoting the sale of an unapproved anti-inflammatory drug, the pharmaceutical company was also penalized for making false claims to government healthcare programs and bribing healthcare providers to prescribe the said drugs.

Pfizer fined for falsely marketing drugs

Prior to pulling Bextra from the market in 2005, Pfizer had promoted its sale for several uses and dosages that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) specifically declined to approve because of safety concerns. For this, the company and its subsidiary Pharmacia & UpJohn paid a fine of $1.195 billion. On top of this, Pfizer also had to forfeit $105 million for a total criminal restitution of $1.3 billion.

In addition, Pfizer also agreed to pay $1 billion to resolve allegations that the company had illegally promoted three other drugs besides Bextra, namely, Geodon, an anti-psychotic drug; Lyrica, an anti-epileptic drug; and Zyvox, an antibiotic. The company also caused false claims to be submitted to government health care programs for uses that were not medically accepted indications and therefore not covered by those programs.

A former Pfizer district sales manager was indicted and sentenced to home confinement for destroying documents regarding the illegal promotion of the drugs. Meanwhile, a regional manager pleaded guilty to distribution of a misbranded product and was fined $75,000 while being placed on 24 months of probation.

Also resolved in the civil settlement were allegations that Pfizer paid kickbacks to healthcare providers so they would prescribe the aforementioned drugs, as well as other drugs. Altogether this was the largest civil fraud settlement against a pharmaceutical company in history.

Pfizer is now making a windfall from the coronavirus vaccine

That Pfizer was involved in the largest pharmaceutical fraud claim in history is important, as the company begins to roll out its new vaccine against COVID-19. To cover the cost of inoculating 50 million people, the U.S. government is paying the company and its German partner, BioNTech, nearly $2 billion  a few hundred million shy of what the company paid back in 2009. Related: (We have a winner: Trump administration inks $1.95-billion coronavirus vaccine deal, forcing taxpayers to enrich evil pharma giants.)

The contract is the most that the U.S. government has agreed to spend on a vaccine, though previous deals with other vaccine makers were intended to help pay for development costs. But for Pfizer to get paid, the vaccine had to succeed in large clinical trials, which it reportedly did. The jab has recently received emergency approval from the FDA and mass vaccination in America is now underway.

Since settling with the government, Pfizer representatives have claimed that the company has reformed.

The reasons to trust Pfizer are because, as I have walked the halls at Pfizer, you would see that the vast majority of our employees spend their lives dedicated to bringing truly important medications to patients and physicians in an appropriate manner, said Amy W. Schulman, Pfizer general counsel, back in 2009.

As part of the settlement, the company entered into an expansive corporate integrity agreement with the Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services. This agreement ensures that procedures and reviews are in place to prevent a repeat of the companys previous misconduct.

Visit BigPharmaNews.com for more articles exposing how pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer have flouted the law in the past for the sake of profit.

Sources include:

GreatGameIndia.com

Reuters.com

NYTimes.com
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The company is offering eligible shareholders, at the record date of February 9, 2021, the opportunity to apply under an SPP for up to $30,000 worth of shares at the same price as the placement at 13 cents per share.

Funds raised under the SPP will be used for ongoing exploration activities and for general working capital

( ) is undertaking a capital raising of around $15 million to progress the next phase of exploration and resource growth at its Cardinia Gold Project near Leonora in Western Australia.

The raising comprises a placement of around 92.3 million shares at 13 cents to raise $12 million and a proposed share purchase plan (SPP), also at 13 cents to raise an additional $3 million.

This placement includes $8.2 million contributed by cornerstone shareholders and $3.8 million from new investors, demonstrating the strong continuing support of Kins strategy by key backers.

Drilling resumes this week

Managing director Andrew Munckton said: We are extremely grateful for the incredible support shown by our major shareholders, and we also take the opportunity to welcome a number of new investors to our register.

While we made enormous progress last year in the 60,000 metres or so of drilling completed, we believe we still have a long way to go to demonstrate the full potential of the Cardinia Gold Project and increase our resource base to the next level.

The geological and technical advances made in recent months, particularly the recent gravity survey, has transformed our understanding of the field.

Armed with this knowledge and our expanding geochemical and drilling database, we are moving ahead with confidence as drilling resumes this week.

We plan to drill some 30,000 metres in the first half of this year across a range of established and new prospects, building on the 60,000 metres completed last year.

All of which means that investors can look forward to news-flow and action aplenty as we work hard to deliver results and upside from the Cardinia Gold Project for our shareholders.

Funds to strengthen balance sheet

Kin intends to launch the SPP to provide the opportunity for all shareholders to participate in this important capital raising in a meaningful way and on the same terms as the placement.

Funds raised will strengthen the companys balance sheet, putting it in a strong position to complete the next phase of systematic exploration work at the CGP and to follow up on the exciting new discoveries and targets identified as part of the highly successful exploration campaigns completed during 2019 and 2020.

Details of placement

New shares issued from the placement will rank equally with existing fully paid ordinary shares on issue and the company will apply for official quotation of the new shares.

The issue of these shares is expected to be settled on Wednesday, February 17, and begin trading on Thursday, February 18.
VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / February 10, 2021 / Legend Power Systems (TSXV:LPS)(OTCQB:LPSIF), a global leader in commercial electrical system solutions, today announced that a major National ESCO has engaged Legend's SmartGATE Insights Service to assess 10 buildings owned and operated by the City of Boston as part of a 10-year, multi-million-dollar Energy Performance Contracting agreement. The initial 10 buildings consist of schools and other key City of Boston buildings.

This assessment supports the long-term performance contracting agreement between the City of Boston and its National ESCO partner. Under the agreement, the ESCO will use SmartGATE Insights to find energy waste seeping into the buildings and identify where power conditions are hurting the uptime and lifetime of major building systems.

"We believe that the ESCO's selection of SmartGATE Insights will demonstrate the value of the SmartGATE platform as part of a full energy management program focused on saving energy, reducing operational risks, and increasing resiliency for the City of Boston. This not only helps both the City and the ESCO save energy but also shows how we can protect newly installed equipment to maximize system longevity and reliability," said Mike Cioce, VP of Sales and Marketing for Legend Power Systems. "The success of this initial analysis could potentially expand our footprint with the end customer."

This success builds on recent wins and significant momentum for Legend Power Systems in the $15 billion a year ESCO market. "I am pleased to also announce that Legend Power has promoted Mark Schneider to Strategic Accounts Director for the ESCO Market. Mark brings over 25 years of progressive ESCO experience across the country for some of the top names in the ESCO space," continued Mr. Cioce. "His deep experience will help us to continue to serve and grow our ESCO partnerships across the US".

About SmartGATE

SmartGATE is an industry-leading, turnkey solution which identifies and fixes underperformance and waste in the electrical system of a commercial building. These performance issues often impact key areas of commercial real estate metrics including occupant safety and satisfaction as well as financial performance. This waste can also lead to higher operating costs, lower net operating income and other potential financial risks to the building owner, including adverse tenant experiences. For more information about our SmartGATE Insights service, or to download a sample Business Impact Report please visit https://legendpower.com/our-approach/.

About Legend Power Systems Inc.

Legend Power Systems Inc. (www.legendpower.com) provides an intelligent energy management platform that analyzes and improves building energy challenges, significantly impacting asset management and corporate performance. Legend's proven solutions support proactive executive decision-making in a complex and volatile business and energy environment.

For further information, please contact:

Steve Vanry, CFO

+ 1 604 671 9522

svanry@legendpower.com

Sean Peasgood, Investor Relations

+ 1 647 503 1054

sean@sophiccapital.com

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Forward-Looking Statements

This Press Release may contain statements which constitute "forward-looking information", including statements regarding the plans, intentions, beliefs and current expectations of the Company, its directors, or its officers with respect to the future business activities and operating performance of the Company. The words "may", "would", "could", "will", "intend", "plan", "anticipate", "believe", "estimate", "expect" and similar expressions, as they relate to the Company, or its management, are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. Investors are cautioned that any such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future business activities or performance and involve risks and uncertainties, and that the Company's future business activities may differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements as a result of various factors. Such risks, uncertainties and factors are described in the periodic filings with the Canadian securities regulatory authorities, including the Company's quarterly and annual Management's Discussion & Analysis, which may be viewed on SEDAR 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 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 to not be as anticipated, estimated or intended. The Company does not intend, and does not assume any obligation, to update these forward-looking statements other than as may be required by applicable law.

SOURCE: Legend Power Systems Inc.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/628849/Major-ESCO-Engages-Legend-Power-to-Assess-10-City-of-Boston-Buildings
Abakaliki  The Minister of Science and Technology, Dr.Ogbonnaya Onu, said President Muhammadu Buhari has achieved 40 percent success in the construction of the ongoing second Niger bridge.

He noted that such were the exemplary of good leadership restoration by President Buhari's led administration 'which were found absent in previous governments.'

Onu made this known in an interview with Journalists on Tuesday at Obiozara ward polling unit in Ohanzara local government area of Ebonyi state.

He arrived the polling unit with his supporters at about 10:30 for the ongoing All Progressives Congress (APC) revalidation/registration membership exercise.

"Today, Buhari's government is working very hard to make sure that he kept to his promises made in 2015 general election.

"One of those promises in the South-East is the Second Niger bridge and it is a good example of such promises.

"Today, I'm happy to say that work at the bridge has reached 40 percent but that has been a project that previous administration has been on for decades", he explained.

The minister also said the missing values have been discussed by the founding fathers of the party.

"But what I really want Nigerians to know is that the founders of APC decided that a time has come for the political party that can get back certain values that were missing in our system.

'So example there was the need for Nigerians to start trusting their government because trusting is very important and you can trust you government when it is doing the things that is needed.

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"Other administration made promises but failed but Buhari came, started it despite the fact that Mr. President came at the time when the economy is too bad. So it is a promise made and kept", he said.

'No crisis can consume APC'

He however stated that no crisis within the APC structure would consume the party owing to the fact that it has already established mechanism in resolving it's conflict.

"APC as a political party has the mechanism to resolve conflict. That is the strength of APC. Although in any human organizations like family, schools there must be little misunderstanding but that key thing is that APC has the mechanism of resolving the conflict", he noted.

The minister who also justified the reasons for the ongoing national wide revalidation/registration exercise of the party added that it would help in positioning APC in future elections.

"The party is growing and you know that APC was registered in 2013 and many people don't know that we are just barely 7 years old.

"So there is need to have the reviladation/registration of the party because many people have died and many have joined.

"So APC must know how many we are, where are the locations, what they expect from membership and it would give us idea in any election." he explained.
The opposition Social Democratic Party (PSD) filed today in the Lower House plenary meeting a simple motion against Health Minister Vlad Voiculescu, according to AGERPRES.

"We hereby refer to you the simple motion titled: 'Incompetence and lack of commitment kill! Vlad Voiculescu, a danger to the Romanians' health and life', initiated by 109 Social Democrat deputies. I ask the Standing Bureau to enter this proposal on today's agenda for us to settle the debate and voting timetable. I also hope that Mr. Vlad Voiculescu resigns at the end of the debates or, if he doesn't have the decency to do so, that Prime Minister Florin Citu urgently dismisses him," said the PSD Lower House floor leader Alfred Simonis.
Iraq said on Wednesday OPEC+ would keep its output cuts policy unchanged at a March meeting, but that Saudi Arabia would likely abandon voluntary production cuts of 1 million barrels per day (bpd) after that as oil prices rally. Iraqi Oil Minister Ihsan Abdul Jabbar said he anticipated an oil price of $58 to $63 in 2021. The minister spoke at a news briefing in Baghdad. Abdul Jabbar said he hoped Saudi Aramco might get a share in a deal to develop Iraq's Akkas gas field. He said a consortium led by oilfield services provider Schlumberger was now the front-runner ...
Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-09 17:34:12|Editor: huaxia

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China-Europe freight trains loaded with foreign goods have arrived in Chinese cities. They have brought festive products for the upcoming Chinese New Year. China-Europe freight trains loaded with foreign goods have arrived in Chinese cities. They have brought festive products for the upcoming Chinese New Year, which falls on Feb. 12. In 2020, a record 12,400 China-Europe freight train trips were made, up 50 percent from 2019, according to China's railway operator. This was also the first time freight train trips between China and Europe exceeded 10,000 per year. Produced by Xinhua Global Service
As a means of fulfilling his 2017 campaign promises to the people of Sinoe County, electoral district#1Representative and Chairman of the Sinoe Legislative Caucus, Crayton O. Duncan has put to an end long distance trekking by students in Greenville City by donating three 72-seated buses for use of students.

Presenting the buses over the weekend, Rep. Duncan recalled during his days of schooling in Sinoe, when he walked many days which led him to missing important activities on campus, something, he says, could not make him punctual due to the distance he had to cover in order to reach on campus.

"I can recall during my studies the distance I had to travel to acquire education was long, and at such during the 2017 campaign I made a promise if elected to ease the transportation burden of students by providing buses that will take them to their various schools free", he said.

He added that in this 21st century, students should be pampered and given every necessary support and motivation to go to school, as done in the western world.

Residents of Greenville and its environs were filled with excitement and jubilation when they saw three 72-seated buses for the first time in history of the county; the buses bearing the colors of Sinoe's flag, and pictures of Rep. Duncan drove through the streets of the provincial capital as students jubilated, sang praises and thanked the lawmaker.

Upon touring the principle streets in Greenville with students jubilating in and around them, Duncan, also Chair on Foreign Affairs in the House of Representatives officially turned over the buses to the people of Sinoe at the historic, J. Dominic Bing City Hall in Greenville.

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He informed the students to make use of bus stops constructed at principle points in Greenville and its environs to wait for the busesto transport them to school and home free of charge.

Meanwhile, theSinoe legislative caucus chair assured the students that he will ensure the buses are managed by paying drivers, conductors, and maintenance cost. He said the buses will be regularly serviced by himself, so no student should give a cent to anyone they meet on the bus in the name of contributing to servicing the buses.

He said the gesture is not about keeping himself perpetuallyin leadership but to do things that will show his legacies for generations after him to see and hear about his existence, noting that his efforts are to ensure that his colleagues (Lawmakers) change from depending on the people for survival to impacting lives of ordinary people

Receiving the buses, students, parents and school administrators of Sinoe lauded Rep. Duncan for the selfless services he continues to render the people of Sinoe. Terming the donation as very essential to the academic sojourn of children in the county, they said if the lawmaker decided to transition from Representative to Senator, they will ensure he's elected without campaigning because his works in just three years have proven beyond unreasonable doubt that he deserves long term leadership to enable him keep impacting their lives.
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A 100-year-old home is set to sell for more than $10million - with the agents expecting it to be knocked down for a brand new designer residence.

The 961sqm home on Victoria Road in Sydney's prestigious eastern suburb of Bellevue Hill, was owned by retired lawyer Jeremy Rhodes and his wife Kay for 40 years.

The five-bedroom property will go on the market in two weeks, and has already generated substantial interest from buyers.

137 Victoria Road in Sydney's prestigious eastern suburb on Bellevue Hill is expected to sell for $10 million (pictured)

The 961sqm home is over 100-years-old with five bedrooms and three bathrooms (pictured)

Ray White's Double Bay agent Richard Faludi, told Daily Mail Australia he believes the property will be knocked down to create a new 'dream home'.

'It's a rare opportunity to have a house untouched that a buyer can make their own', he said.

'The house has great versatility to renovate and appeal to an even wider audience.'

Mr Faludi believes the knockdown comes with 'good intentions' to better capitalise on the harbour views to the north, and Bondi Beach to the east.

'The land has been approved for the construction of two semi-detached properties, so buyers have that as another option.'

The luxury property boasts both ocean and harbour views in the prestigious suburb of Bellevue Hills

The 961sqm land has been approved for the construction of two semi-detatched properties

Bellevue Hill's market is booming because of the scarcity of properties in the suburb.

'Our last sale on Victoria road in Bellevue Hill sold for $16million at auction'.

Mr Faludi is expecting the same turnout for 137 Victoria Road, as he said houses in the precinct go for well over $10 million.

The Bellevue home boasts five bedrooms, three bathrooms and a double garage.

A large backyard alongside multiple living and dining spaces boasts the property's alfresco style living.

The entrance to the 100-year-old property boasts a sense of 'old school charm' to buyers
CHANGSHA, China, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Sponsored by Overseas Chinese Affairs Office of the State Council, organized by Hunan Broadcasting System, A Worldwide Celebration: Chinese New Year 2021 will be aired at 19:30 on Lunar New Year's Day (12th Feb.) on Hunan TV. Produced by Yang Ziyang and his team of Hunan TV, and themed by "worldwide reunion, Chinese new year", this show is about to send new year greetings to all the overseas Chinese who share the same origin, no matter where or how far apart they are.

By focusing on hot issues and the voice of China, the Gala tells many China stories with positive energy. Except for the upgrade on theme, performance and stage illusion, two sub-venues are also set up in Shantou, Guangdong province and Longyan, Fujian province, both of which are hometowns of overseas Chinese. Through these two channels, the overseas Chinese can have a great enjoyment in their familiar accent and local culture, and share the happiness of Chinese new year. In the show, host He Jiong tells a moving story of the overseas Chinese named Liu Danhong, who helped hundreds of Chinese people who were trapped on a cruise back home during the epidemic. Students studying abroad, as the representatives of overseas Chinese, also expressed their new year wishes through online videos.

Moreover, the show also tells the story which embodies the Chinese power and Chinese soul. Guests are invited to the stage to tell the Chang'e-5 story and to show the great power of China space work. Long Xianlan and his family members from Shibadong village, where the targeted poverty alleviation was first initiated, share their great changes and fruits of poverty alleviation success.

For more moments, please stay tuned to A Worldwide Celebration: Chinese New Year 2021 at 19:30 on Lunar New Year's Day (12th Feb.) on Hunan TV.

Image Attachments Links:

Link: http://asianetnews.net/view-attachment?attach-id=384116

Caption: Land of Ceremonies performed by Ayanga and He Changxi to introduce Chinese traditional culture to the world

Link: http://asianetnews.net/view-attachment?attach-id=384122

Caption: Host Group of 2021 Hunan TV Chinese Spring Festival Gala
With more than 529,000 Michigan job openings projected annually through the year 2028, many schools across the state are ramping up their efforts to make sure graduating students are career ready.

Students at Caseville Public School are some of many who utilize the Huron Area Technical Center. The programs available through the tech center are automotive technology, careers in education, construction/building technology, cosmetology, electrical technology, health sciences, hospitality/food service, law enforcement/public safety, marketing, mechanical, architectural, engineering, and design technology, power technology, and visual communications.

According to Ona Warchuck, Caseville Public Schools academic advisor and transition coordinator, around 53% of the schools juniors and seniors attend a tech center program.

These programs give students a chance to really explore a career field to decide if that is truly something they want to continue to study and do for the rest of their life, Warchuck said. If students find out they have a true passion for their career field choice and excel in their program, making plans for their future is easy.

Other students might find out they dont have the passion they thought they did for the career field, she added. Students can then change their future plans and explore other options, without it costing them a penny.

Through the Huron Area Technical Center, students also have the option to earn college credit in some of the programs. Some programs also offer certification programs to students, such as a welding certification and CDL license. These opportunities are free of charge to students. Second year students with good standing can take advantage of different programs that offer on-the-job training, giving students real-world experience.

For a rural area, our local tech center offers students in our county a lot of amazing opportunities, Warchuck said. I feel the tech center staff and administration has worked really hard over the last several years to improve the quality of education and experiences available to students.

In the past, Caseville students first visited the tech center in the eighth grade. During this visit, students would see all the tech center classrooms to learn about all the programs. Students would return in the 10th grade to learn about two programs of their choosing in a more in-depth atmosphere. According to Warchuck, the program has changed, and students do not visit the tech center until ninth grade.

It has been much more challenging to host these events this year due to the pandemic, Warchuck said. A tentative 10th grade visit date has been set for March.

Like everything this year, there have been some changes made to hopefully allow this experience to continue for our students, she added.

Although the programs are trying to do as many things as normal as possible during the pandemic, there are some things that cant be done due to the precautionary safety measures in place. Just like local schools, the tech center has had to switch to remote learning several times this year, while teachers continue to try and provide as much instruction as they can remotely.

According to Warchuck, interest in the tech center programs tends to fluctuate with each class depending on students' plans. While some classes have more students who are academically driven and want to remain at their home school all day, some classes have more students who are hands-on and enjoy the non-traditional type of class setting.

Additionally, last fall there was a county-wide career fair that was held at the fairgrounds for all seventh and eighth grade students. According to Warchuck, students had the opportunity to learn about jobs requiring all levels of education.

Students from the various tech center programs took part as well to discuss their programs, show what they are learning, and what jobs could possibly be good for them, Warchuck said.

Whenever there are opportunities available for our students through the tech center, they learn about it within their program and we try to follow up with them as well, she added.
Katsina State governor, Aminu Bello-Masari has endorsed the electric car assembled in Nigeria.

Recall that the National Automotive Design and Development Council, NADDC, in collaboration with the Stallion Group, had unveiled the first locally-made electric car, Hyundai Kona.

The car has a price tag of N24 million.

The car also has 5 years battery and manufacturers' warranty, 100 per cent electric, zero-emission and Hassle-free charging at home and workplace.

Speaking after test driving the Electric Vehicle in Katsina on Tuesday, Mr Masari commended the NADDC Director-General, Jelani Aliyu, MFR, and his team for their commitment to improving the automotive sector in the country.

While promising to patronise the electric vehicle in the state, the governor urged Nigerians to always embrace new technologies and leverage on their benefits to make the country and the world a better place.

He, therefore, called on the Federal Government through the NADDC to do all they could to make these vehicles affordable to Nigerians.

Responding, the DG stressed that the world is moving towards Electric Vehicles and Nigeria could not afford to be left behind.

According to him, there is a need for the country to accept and adapt to the new norm by keying into the project.

On the production of affordable cars to Nigerians, the DG said it is already a core objective of the NADDC to enable companies to produce inexpensive vehicles in Nigeria

"We are working tirelessly to put in as much local content as we can into these assembled vehicles, once we are able to achieve that, the prices will continue to drop," he added.
House prosecutors on Tuesday wrenched senators and the nation back to the deadly attack on Congress as they opened Donald Trump's historic second impeachment trial with graphic video of the insurrection and Trump's own calls for a rally crowd to march to the iconic building and ``fight like hell'' against his reelection defeat.

The detailed and emotional presentation by Democrats was followed by meandering and occasionally confrontational arguments from the Trump defense team, which insisted that his remarks were protected by the First Amendment and asserted that he cannot be convicted as a former president. Even Trump's backers in the Senate winced, several saying his lawyers were not helpful to his case.

The senators sitting as jurors, many of whom fled for safety themselves the day of the attack, watched and listened, unable to avoid the jarring video of Trump supporters battling past police to storm the halls, Trump flags waving. While many minds are made up, the senators will face their own moment to decide whether to convict or acquit Trump of the sole charge ``incitement of insurrection.''

The heavy emotional weight of the trial punctuates Trump's enduring legacy as the first president to face impeachment trial after leaving office and the first to be twice impeached. The Jan. 6 Capitol siege stunned the world as hundreds of rioters ransacked the building to try to stop the certification of Democrat Joe Biden's victory, a domestic attack on the nation's seat of government unlike any in its history. Five people died.

``That's a high crime and misdemeanor,'' Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., declared in opening remarks. ``If that's not an impeachable offense, then there's no such thing.''

Trump's lawyers insist he is not guilty, his fiery words just figures of speech.

In a key early test, senators rejected an effort by Trump's allies to halt the trial, instead affirming the Senate's authority under the Constitution to decide the case. They voted 56-44 to confirm their jurisdiction, ruling that impeaching a president after he leaves office is constitutionally permissible. Six Republicans joined the Democrats.

Security remained extremely tight at the Capitol on Tuesday, a changed place after the attack, fenced off with razor wire and with armed National Guard troops on patrol. The nine House managers walked across the shuttered building to prosecute the case before the Senate.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Biden would not be watching the trial of his predecessor.

``Joe Biden is the president, he's not a pundit, he's not going to opine on back and forth arguments,'' she said.

With senators gathered as the court of impeachment, sworn to deliver impartial justice, the trial started with the Democratic House managers' gripping recollections, as they described police officers maimed in the chaos and rioters parading in the very chamber where the trial was being held.

Trump's team countered that the Constitution doesn't allow impeachment at this late date. Though the trial now proceeds, that's a legal issue that could resonate with Republicans eager to acquit Trump without being seen as condoning his behavior.

Lead lawyer Bruce Castor said he shifted his planned approach after hearing the prosecutors' opening and instead spoke conversationally to the senators, saying Trump's team would do nothing but denounce the ``repugnant'' attack and ``in the strongest possible way denounce the rioters.'' He appealed to the senators as ``patriots first,'' and encouraged them to be ``cool headed'' as they assess the arguments.

Trump attorney David Schoen turned the trial toward starkly partisan tones, saying the Democrats were fueled by a ``base hatred'' of the former president.

Republicans made it clear that they were unhappy with Trump's defense, many of them saying they didn't understand where it was going -- particularly Castor's opening. Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, who voted with Democrats to move forward with the trial, said that Trump's team did a ``terrible job.'' Maine Sen. Susan Collins, who also voted with Democrats, said she was ``perplexed.'' Sen. Lisa Murkowki of Alaska said it was a ``missed opportunity'' for the defense.

The early defense struggles also underscored the uphill battle that Trump's lawyers face in defending conduct that preceded an insurrection that senators themselves personally experienced. Though they will almost certainly win Trump's acquittal _ by virtue of the composition of the Senate _ they nonetheless face a challenge of defanging the emotion from a trial centered on events that remain raw and visceral, even for Republicans.

At one pivotal point, Raskin told his personal story of bringing his family to the Capitol the day of the riot, to witness the certification of the Electoral College vote, only to have his daughter and son-in-law hiding in an office, fearing for their lives.

``Senators, this cannot be our future,'' Raskin said through tears. ``This cannot be the future of America.''

The House prosecutors had argued there is no ``January exception'' for a president to avoid impeachment on his way out the door. Rep. Joe Neguse, D-Colo., referred to the corruption case of William Belknap, a war secretary in the Grant administration, who was impeached, tried and ultimately acquitted by the Senate after leaving office.

If Congress stands by, ``it would invite future presidents to use their power without any fear of accountability,`` he said.

On the vote, six Republicans joined with Democrats pursue the trial, just one more than on a similar vote last week. Cassidy joined Collins, Murkowski, Mitt Romney of Utah, Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania. But the total of 56 was still far from the two-thirds threshold of 67 votes that would be needed for conviction.

It appears unlikely that the House prosecutors will call witnesses, in part because the senators were witnesses themselves. At his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, Trump has declined a request to testify.

Presidential impeachment trials have been conducted only three times before, leading to acquittals for Andrew Johnson, Bill Clinton and then Trump last year.

Because of the COVID-19 crisis, senators were allowed to spread out, including in the ``marble room'' just off the Senate floor or even in the public galleries, but most were at their desks.

Presiding was not the chief justice of the United States, as in previous presidential impeachment trials, but the chamber's senior-most member of the majority party, Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont.

Under an agreement between Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Republican leader Mitch McConnell, the substantive opening arguments will begin at noon Wednesday. The trial is expected to continue into the weekend.

Trump's second impeachment trial is expected to diverge from the lengthy, complicated affair of a year ago. In that case, Trump was charged with having privately pressured Ukraine to dig up dirt on Biden, then a Democratic rival for the presidency.

This time, Trump's ``stop the steal'' rally rhetoric and the storming of the Capitol played out for the world to see.

The Democratic-led House impeached the president swiftly, one week after the attack. Five people died, including a woman shot by police inside the building and a police officer who died the next day of his injuries.

Timothy Naftali, a clinical associate professor at New York University and an expert on impeachment, said in an interview, ``This trial is one way of having that difficult national conversation about the difference between dissent and insurrection.''

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Chennai: Tamil Nadu Chief Minister K Palaniswami on Tuesday hit out at AMMK leader T T V Dhinakaran, who has renewed his assertion of 'retrieving' the ruling AIADMK post V K Sasikala's release, saying those who go behind him will be "left in the lurch."

The AIADMK Joint Coordinator, addressing an election rally here, cited the example of 18 disqualified AIADMK rebel MLAs who sided with Dhinakaran earlier, to drive home his point.

The MLAs loyal to Dhinakaran were disqualified when they rebelled against Palaniswami in 2017 after he merged his led faction with that of his present deputy O Panneerselvam.

In his address, Palaniswami also lashed out at DMK, dubbing it a 'coprorate' company helmed by M K Stalin as its 'chairman'.

Targeting Dhinakaran, Palaniswami said he was not even an AIADMK member for 10 years, referring to his expulsion by late chief minister and then party supremo J Jayalalithaa in 2011, along with her confidante Sasikala, whom she later reinstated, and others.

"He himself declared that he had joined the party (again) after Amma's (Jayalalithaa) death. He made so many efforts to wrest control of the party after joining. He held 18 of our MLAs under his control. Later he left them in the lurch," the chief minister charged.

Anybody believing Dhinakaran will be left in the lurch, Palaniswami said.

Efforts were on to see that there was a setback to AIADMK and enable DMK come to power, he alleged.

"The AIADMK will counter that too," he asserted.

Earlier in the day, Dhinakaran had said efforts to 'retrieve' the ruling party will be on, especially in the wake of the return of his aunt and expelled AIADMK leader Sasikala from Bengaluru, after serving a four year jail term in the Rs 66.65 crore disproportionate assets case.

Palaniswami said both AIADMK founder, late chief minister M G Ramachandran and Jayalalithaa were always keen that the "evil force DMK" should not come to power.

The ruling AIADMK will shatter all "conspiracies" and ensure another term in the coming polls, likely in April-May, he said.

Taking on arch rival DMK, he slammed it over the issue of the release of the seven life convicts in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case, recalling that the party government, under the late M Karunanidhi, had recommended implementation of the court verdict (death penalty).

The cabinet had then recommended commuting the death sentence of Nalini alone since she had a child, he said.

"If the recommendation had been implemented, the death penalty of all but Nalini would have been implemented," he added.

However, it was the late Jayalalithaa who brought an Assembly resolution, demanding the release of all seven later, he recalled and pointed out that his-led cabinet had also adopted a similar resolution, in 2018.

The DMK was now "fooling the people" by seeking the release of all seven.

Insisting that DMK was not a party, Palaniswami said it was a 'corporate company.'

"Stalin is the chairman and his family members-- Udhayanidhi (son), Kanimozhi (sister) and Dayanidhi (Maran) are (in the) Board of Directors," he said and asked why senior leader Durai Murugan, who hails from here, has not been given due importance.

He wondered why Udhayanidhi Stalin was involved in campaigning whereas Durai Murugan was not, despite being a long time MLA.

Training his guns on Stalin, Palaniswami said he had made his way to the top because of his father Karunanidhi, but said, "I came up through hard work."

The chief minister also listed out the various pro-people initiatives of his government.

Further, he announced that the birthday of popular spiritual orator Kirubananda Variyaar, who was born in this district, on August 25 every year, will be celebrated by the government.

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New Delhi: Desi girl at heart, actress Priyanka Chopra's much-talked-about memoir 'Unfinished' has hit the stands on February 9, 2021. The global icon in her book has made some startling revelations about her initial struggles while she making a mark for her.

The Independent quoted her memoir where Priyanka Chopra Jonas opened up on an incident when a director asked her to get her 'proportions fixed'.

"After a few minutes of small talk, the director/producer told me to stand up and twirl for him. I did. He stared at me long and hard, assessing me, and then suggested that I get a b**b job, fix my jaw, and add a little more cushioning to my butt," the actress wrote in her book.

Thank you to everyone whos giving my first book a chance. I hope you all enjoy my #Unfinished story pic.twitter.com/dQfTF8XQRJ  PRIYANKA (@priyankachopra) February 9, 2021

"If I wanted to be an actress, he said, Id need to have my proportions fixed, and he knew a great doctor in LA he could send me to. My then-manager voiced his agreement with the assessment", she further wrote.

The actress decided to leave the meeting and also cut ties with her then-manager after the incident, as per her memoir account.

Priyanka got married to international music sensation Nick Jonas at the majestic Umaid Bhawan Palace in Jodhpur on December 2, 2018. The wedding festivities continued for days. The couple had two ceremoniesa white wedding followed by a traditional Hindu one.
Donald Trump Jr apparently believes his father's impeachment trial is the subject of selective editing and that the actions taken by the former president's supporters on 6 January were not driven by his words.

Donald Trump's son retweeted a lawyer who argued that the video shared by impeachment prosecutors in Donald Trump's Senate trial was "deceptive."

"Listening to the impeachment trial. Amazing how deceptive the editing is from the very beginning," Will Chamberlain, a lawyer and co-publisher of Human Events, wrote. "Raskin's video includes President Trump saying 'we are going to walk down to the Capitol' while omitting his request for his supporters to 'peacefully make their voices heard.'"

Read more: Follow live updates from Trump's second impeachment trial

Mr Chamberlain was referencing impeachment manager Sen. Jamie Raskin's opening arguments in Mr Trump's impeachment trial.

The lawyer went on to say that the only criminals he saw were the Capitol rioters, and said they should be the ones facing trial.

"Watching the video, I see a ton of crimes being committed by people who are not President Trump. Maybe those people should be prosecuted and the Senate should go back to doing the people's business," he said.

Instead, Mr Chamberlain argued that Mr Trump should be tried as a private citizen in the judicial system.

The sentiment that Mr Trump should be treated as private citizen and that impeachment should not be applied to him because he is no longer in office has been popular among Senate Republicans.

Prior to the impeachment, a majority of Republican senators voted to support Sen. Rand Paul's challenge to the impeachment trial on the grounds that it was unconstitutional.

Senate Democrats, many constitutional scholars, and five Senate Republicans disagreed with the interpretation and defeated the challenge.

Mr Trump himself appears to support the idea that a former president can face impeachment; a video recently resurfaced of him at a rally calling for former President Barack Obama to be impeached over his healthcare claims.

The president's son plans to campaign against one of the Republicans who turned their backs on Mr Trump, Rep. Liz Cheney.

Police Seek Help with Murray Burglaries

By West Kentucky Star Staff

MURRAY - The Murray Police Department is asking for the public's help with an investigation into three recent burglaries.On Tuesday, officers responded to a call regarding found property on South 12th Street. While investigating the items, officers learned that a business on South 12th Street had been burglarized.A short time later, authorities learned that a second business on South 12th Street had been burglarized, as was a third nearby business.Anyone with information is asked to contact the Murray Police Department. If you would like to leave an anonymous tip, contact the Murray Calloway County Crime Stoppers at 270-753-9500.


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It affects scientific articles and conference papers, according to a recent study published in the journal Future Internet, by Cristofol Rovira, Lluis Codina and Carles Lopezosa, researchers with the Department of Communication

The visibility of scientific articles and conference papers is conditional upon being easily found in academic search engines, especially Google Scholar. To enhance this visibility, search engine optimization (SEO) has been applied in recent years to academic search engines in order to optimize documents and, thereby, ensure they are better ranked in search pages (i.e., academic search engine optimization or ASEO).

Recent research, published in Future Internet, has found out whether the language of the document is a factor involved in the sorting algorithm of search results on Google Scholar. The study authors are Cristofol Rovira, Lluis Codina and Carlos Lopezosa, members of the Department of Communication at UPF.

"To implement this optimization we need to further our understanding of Google Scholar's relevance ranking algorithm, so that, based on this knowledge, we can highlight or improve those characteristics that academic documents already present and which are taken into account by the algorithm", says Rovira, first author of the study. To prevent fraudulent practices, Google Scholar does not explain this algorithm and, therefore, this kind of research becomes necessary.

For the study, the authors applied an inverse engineering research methodology based on statistical analysis using Spearman's correlation coefficient. Three different types of search were conducted yielding a sample of 45 searches each with 1,000 results (45,000 documents): by author, by year, and by keyword.

Quality articles with hundreds of citations are treated in a discriminatory manner

The results show that when a search is performed on Google Scholar with results in various languages, the vast majority (90%) of documents in languages other than English are systematically relegated to positions that render them totally invisible. These documents are almost always placed in positions above rank position 900, even though they are quality articles with hundreds of citations. Thus, it can be stated that Google Scholar discriminates against documents not written in English in searches with multilingual results.

A lack of awareness of this factor could be detrimental to researchers from all over the non-English-speaking world, making them believe that there is no literature in their national language when they conduct searches with multilingual results.

"This is particularly the case in the most frequent searches, that is, those conducted by year. Nevertheless, it can also occur in searches using certain keywords that are the same in languages around the world, including trademarks, chemical compounds, industrial products, acronyms, drugs, and diseases, with Covid-19 being the most recent example", the study authors reveal.

And they add "moreover, if we consider the results of this study from the perspective of ASEO, it is more than evident that until this bias is addressed, the chances of being ranked in a multilingual Google Scholar search increase remarkably if the researchers opt for publication in English".

Graph of the results of the study

The scatter plot above summarizes the research results. There are 45,000 dots, one per document. The grey dots represent documents written in English, other languages in red, and blue shows the median positions.

The graph shows how articles written in languages other than English appear above 900th position in the Google Scholar ranking. This is so even for quality documents that have hundreds of citations and are well placed in the ranking for number of citations.

The most striking cases are the red dots located in the bottom-right corner. They correspond to documents written in languages other than English that are ranked by number of citations below 100 and have a Google Scholar ranking over 900. This means that all of them receive over a thousand citations and appear in Google Scholar in the same positions as documents in English cited just a few dozen times.

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While there are no plans for an official meeting of the tripartite, the government, employers, and trade unions remain in contact via videoconference.

On Tuesday, the three parties met to discuss the vaccination strategy.

Prime Minister Xavier Bettel and Minister of Health Paulette Lenert explained the current progress and their plans for the future to representatives of the Independent Luxembourg Trade Union Confederation (OGBL), the Luxembourg Confederation of Christian Trade Unions (LCGB), the General Confederation of the Civil Service (CGFP), as well as the Union of Luxembourg Enterprises (UEL).

According to a statement published by Ministry of State, the social partners stressed that they support the government's vaccination campaign and pledged to encourage their members to do the same.

All of the parties agreed that vaccination must remain voluntary. However, this also means that raising awareness and sharing factual information about the vaccine(s) is highly important.

The next meeting will revolve around Luxembourg's economic, financial, and social situation in the context of the European Semester.
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Prosecution and defence went head-to-head on the reliability of news references to Gibril Massaquois whereabouts at the start of the second week of the trial against him at the Pirkanmaa District Court in the Finnish city of Tampere.

Sierra Leonean Mr Massaquoi is charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity, including rape and murder, allegedly committed in Liberia during the countrys second civil war in 1999-2003. The former spokesman and commander in the Sierra Leonean armed rebel group, Revolutionary United Front (RUF), relocated to Finland in 2008, where he is being tried based on universal jurisdiction.

One of the charges by Finnish State Prosecutor Tom Laitinen centers on murders that Mr Massaquoi allegedly committed and oversaw in the Waterside market area in Monrovia, Liberia. On a number of occasions, the charges allege, Mr Massaquoi and the soldiers under his command killed civilians who were seen stealing supplies from shops at the market. The probable timing of the alleged events is between January and December, 2002, according to Mr Laitinen.

Mr Massaquois counsel challenged these accounts on Monday, saying that the timing does not align with news of events as they reportedly happened during the civil war. Pointing to articles from CNN and The Guardian, defence lawyer Kaarle Gummerus argued that the kind of turmoil, hunger, and looting described by prosecution happened in Monrovia during the summer of 2003. No such reports exist from the prior year, Mr Gummerus said, even though reporting on events in the region was detailed.

Completing the presentation of nearly 80 different written pieces of evidence on Monday, Mr Massaquois defence team argues that their evidence shows Mr Massaquoi was not in Liberia during the time that the alleged crimes took place.

Their list, spanning 1999 to 2003, includes links to news articles, UN reports, and communications with the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) at the Special Court for Sierra Leone, allegedly proving Mr Massaquois presence at various locations around the continent and especially in Sierra Leones Makeni, the headquarters town of RUF.

Finnish State Prosecutor Tom Laitinen continued to question the validity of the reports, saying that many of them do not provide definitive proof that Mr Massaquoi took part in interviews and hearings in person  and that he could have been anywhere while speaking to the media and INGOs.

The court will hear from Mr Massaquoi himself later this week, after which the court will move to Liberia and Sierra Leone to hear witnesses there.

This story was a collaboration with New Narratives as part of the West Africa Justice Reporting Project
Hippos once owned by Pablo Escobar in his Colombian private zoo have become one of the world's worst invasive species that could launch deadly attacks on humans, scientists have warned.

Hacienda Napoles, the feared drug lord's lush sprawling palace, was home to illegally imported kangaroos, giraffes, elephants and other exotic animals as he established the world's biggest cocaine empire in the 1980s.

But one of the zoo's prized specimens is now flourishing in the tropical theme park as a group of scientists is calling to cull the huge animals whose population is set to reach 1,500 by 2035 if nothing is done.

Hippos owned by Pablo Escobar in his Colombian private zoo have become one of the world's worst invasive species that could launch deadly attacks on humans, scientists have warned

Hippos are seen at the Hacienda Napoles theme park, once the private zoo of drug kingpin Pablo Escobar at his Napoles ranch in Colombia on September 12, 2020

Escobar arranged for three female hippos and one male to be brought to his 5,500-acre (2,225-hectare) estate, Hacienda Napoles, in the 1980s

After he was hunted down and killed by police in 1993, many of the exotic animals owned by the drug kingpin were rounded up or died.

But the hippos were abandoned in the palace-turned-theme park due to cost and logistical issues associated with transporting 3-ton animals and the violence that plagued the area at the time.

Like the man who introduced them to this country after obtaining them from a US zoo, they are a source of endless controversy.





Nearly two decades later, the species has gone feral in the tropical countryside and wetlands lying between Medellin and Colombias capital, Bogota.

They live in the area around the Rio Magdalena - the Mississippi River of Colombia - spending the day mostly in the lakes and waterways and the night roaming endless grass pastures.

Escobar, who built the world's biggest cocaine empire in the 1980s, arranged for three female hippos and one male to be brought to his 5,500-acre (2,225-hectare) estate, Hacienda Napoles

The hippos once owned by Pablo Escobar are flourishing in the tropical theme park as a group of scientists is calling to mull the huge animals whose population is set to reach 1,500 by 2035 if nothing is done. A visitor feeds a hippo at the Hacienda Napoles Park on February 12, 2020

Unlike in their native Africa, they have no natural predators in Colombia.

Government attempts to control their reproduction have had no real impact on population growth, with the number of hippos increasing in the last eight years from 35 to somewhere between 65 and 80.

A group of scientists is now warning that the hippos pose a major threat to the area's biodiversity and could lead to deadly encounters between the huge animals and humans.

They say some of the animals need to be killed as hippo numbers could reach around 1,500 by 2035 if nothing is done.

'I believe that it is one of the greatest challenges of invasive species in the world,' said Nataly Castelblanco-Martinez, an ecologist at the University of Quintana Roo in Mexico and lead author of the group's study.

The idea of killing some in the herd has already drawn some criticism and is likely to see more. There was an outcry years ago when three hippos wandered from the Escobar compound and were causing problems and one was killed by hunters sent after the animals.

The humans in this rural area have embraced the hippos as their own, in part because of the tourist dollars they bring in. For outsiders, it can be a puzzling bond, considering the animals kill more people per year in Africa than any other wildlife species. Here, elementary school students are used to walking past a sign that reads 'Danger - hippopotamus present.'

But the experts say the government's attempt to keep down numbers by sterilising some hippos just isn't enough.

Hacienda Napoles (pictured), the feared drug lord's lush sprawling palace, was home to illegally imported kangaroos, giraffes, elephants and other exotic animals as he established the world's biggest cocaine empire in the 1980s

'Everyone asks, `Why is this happening? Well, imagine a town of 50 people and you perform a vasectomy on one man and in two years on another man, obviously, that is not going to control the reproduction of the entire population,' Castelblanco-Martinez said.

The scientists began working on the hippo population forecast last year after one of the animals chased and severely injured a poor farmer. Their study was published in the journal Biological Conservation in January.

Another study last year by researchers at the University of California, San Diego, found the hippos are changing the quality of the water in which they spend much of their time and defecate. As their population continues to grow, they could end up displacing native animals like the Antillean manatees, Castelblanco-Martinez said.

The hippos thrive in the fertile region lying between Medellin and Colombia's capital, Bogota.

A hippo warning stands on the shore of a lagoon near Doral, Colombia, Wednesday. The offspring of hippos illegally imported to Colombia by drug kingpin Pablo Escobar in the 1980s are flourishing in the lush area and experts warn about the dangers of the growing numbers

'About 10 years ago, we realised that we have a giant population of hippopotamuses. We began to learn how the population was constituted, to see if there was an immediate solution,' said David Echeverri-Lopez, a researcher at the regional environmental agency that oversees the hippos.

'We really began to realise the dimensions of the problem.'

While Echeverri agreed that killing some of the hippos would be the best solution, he said the animals magnetic personality and government regulation may never allow it.

After the public criticism erupted more than a decade ago over the killing of the hippo by hunters, touched off by a photo showing soldiers posing with the hippo as a hunting trophy, the government instituted a ban on hunting hippos.

It decided to try sterilisation, but that is a complex and expensive process. First, an animal must be tricked into entering a huge metal corral to be sedated. Then a team of wildlife experts must spend about three hours cutting through the animals thick skin and then try to find its reproductive organs, which is not easy.

This picture taken on Thursday shows hippos swimming in the lake at Hacienda Napoles Park, once the private estate of drug kingpin Pablo Escobar in Puerto Triunfo, Colombia

'The community keeps an eye on us to make sure that we are actually sterilising (the hippo) and not doing anything else,' said Gina Serna-Trujillo, a veterinarian who has conducted some of the sterilisations. 'They love them.'

Serna said each procedure can cost around $8,500 (6,140) - a steep price for the regional environmental agency that oversees the animals.

She said a documentary's production sponsored the cost of one procedure in 2019 and another film will do the same this year. No procedures were conducted in 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Echeverri said the agency has conducted 10 sterilisations and relocated four juvenile hippos to Colombian zoos. Zoos in other countries have shown interest, but bureaucratic red tape has gotten in the way.

This year, the agency hopes to be able to start carrying out a type of chemical sterilization that has worked on pigs.

Castelblanco understands the appeal of hippos, even describing a baby hippo as 'the most beautiful thing in the world,' but said the discussions over their future in Colombia should not be ruled by warm feelings the animals generate.

'We have other invasive species in Colombia that have undergone normal protocols, and no one ever makes a fuss because they are fishing lionfish,' she said referring to a fish native to the Indo-Pacific that is now an invasive species in the Atlantic Ocean.

'You cant even talk about (culling hippos) because the rejection is staggering. ... I am being called a murderer.'
In the summer of 1964, not long after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the landmark Civil Rights Act, a Ku Klux Klan member named Clarence Brandenburg invited a TV news reporter to a rally near Cincinnati.

Brandenburg, a television repairman, was wearing a hood, as were a dozen other Klan members who gathered. Some had guns. They burned a cross while spewing racist and antisemitic commentary. Brandenburg also made a threat about seeking vengeance.

"We're not a revengent organization," he said, inventing a new word. "But if our president, our Congress, our Supreme Court continues to suppress the White, Caucasian race, it's possible that there might have to be some revengence taken."

What happened next has shaped First Amendment law for more than 50 years, laying down a legal doctrine at the center of former president Donald Trump's Senate impeachment trial.

Brandenburg was arrested under an Ohio law that prohibited advocating violence to force political change. After being convicted and sentenced to a year in jail, he sued, alleging his free speech rights had been violated.

The case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in the Klan member's favor in 1969 and established a test to determine whether speech such as Brandenburg's could be prohibited. Speech that is "directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action" or "likely to incite or produce such action" was not protected by the First Amendment, the court said.

Though Trump's impeachment is not a criminal trial, his lawyers in their legal briefs referenced Brandenburg v. Ohio, arguing that Trump didn't direct his supporters to attack the Capitol. House managers prosecuting the case took the opposite view on Brandenburg and Trump, saying he crossed the line set up by the Supreme Court.

Constitutional-law scholars have been debating the issue for weeks in dueling op-eds.

Richard A. Wilson, a University of Connecticut law professor and co-author of a recent journal article about incitement in the age of populism, said the revival of the Klan case is a broader reminder of how free speech was extremely limited until the civil rights movement.

"We like to tell ourselves as Americans we've had all these great First Amendment rights for the entire period of our republic, but it's simply not true," Wilson said. "We were very repressive of speech until the end of the 1960s, and it was civil rights that opened the door."

And that meant protecting speech that many would deem deplorable, including Brandenburg's.

In his speech at the Klan rally, Brandenburg - using words too ugly to print then or now - demanded that Black people be deported to Africa and Jews to Israel.

He is lucky his wish didn't come true.

Brandenburg's legal team from the American Civil Liberties Union included Allen Brown, a Jewish man, and Eleanor Holmes Norton, an African American woman.

Norton, now 83, is Washington D.C.'s longtime delegate in Congress.

"I certainly disagreed with everything he said," Norton said in an interview. "He called African Americans all kinds of pejorative names, terrible things. But for me, it was an easy case. It's just the kind of case that you should look at to test whether you are for free speech or not."

Told that Trump's lawyers had referenced Brandenburg v. Ohio in their legal briefs, Norton said, "I don't blame them."

But she thinks Trump's actions differ from Brandenburg's. The Klan leader's speech, Norton said, did not seem aimed at "imminent lawless action," as the Supreme Court's test required. She thinks Trump did cross that line.

"His lawyers need to defend him with speech because there's no other way to defend it," she said.

It's unclear what became of Brandenburg, who died in 1986. News reports indicate he was arrested years after his Supreme Court win for harassing a Jewish neighbor.

But Norton remembers how thankful Brandenburg was for the Jewish and African American lawyers who defended his right to free speech, ugly or not.

"He was so appreciative of the argument that had been made," Norton said. "I guess he forgot his racism for a moment."
THE controversial EU-Canada trade deal is to be referred to an Oireachtas committee in a bid to prevent a damaging split in the Green Party.

Taoiseach Micheal Martin, Tanaiste Leo Varadkar and Green Party leader Eamon Ryan have agreed that the EUs Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement (CETA) with Canada will be referred to the Oireachtas European Affairs Committee for further scrutiny.

The move further delays a Dail vote on a motion to ratify CETA which would have seen a number of Green TDs, including prominent backbencher Neasa Hourigan, vote against their own party.

I can confirm that discussions have been ongoing at leader level in relation to the trade deal and that yesterday it was agreed to put it to [the] Oireachtas Committee as the best way to manage it, Mr Ryans spokesman confirmed to Independent.ie on Wednesday.

We think that the EU Affairs Committee is the best one to deal with it as trade negotiations on international agreement are an EU competence.

Ms Hourigan and another Dail backbencher, Patrick Costello, along with Green Party councillors and members have voiced strong opposition to CETA, claiming it would allow multinationals to sue Ireland if strong climate and social rights protections are brought in. Ms Hourigan has said publicly she will not vote for the deal when it comes before the Dail.

Already a Dail vote on CETA in December was postponed over the internal rift within the Green Party despite its four ministers at Cabinet, including Mr Ryan and deputy leader Catherine Martin, agreeing that it should be ratified by TDs.

"The move to place CETA under the scrutiny of a committee is in no small part due to the pressure placed on the government by various environmental groups and members of the public voicing their opposition to the fast track the treaty ratification seemed to be on, Ms Hourigan said on Wednesday.

Scrutiny by an Oireachtas Committee is a necessary step in the process but not an end in itself. An Oireachtas Committee should provide a forum for the detailed examination of some of the issues we have with the CETA treaty, particularly the Investment Court System. The next step is to look at the detail of the committee instruction."

Mr Costello also welcomed the news but said he was still strongly opposed to the deal and that the question of whether it may require a referendum must be addressed comprehensively before any Dail vote.

The news that CETA will now go before the Oireachtas Committee on European Affairs is a very welcome development and will finally ensure a longer and more comprehensive debate will be facilitated, he said.

Both myself and Deputy Neasa Hourigan have spoken out against the deal for months now, as have Green Party members who are due a large amount of credit for the internal pressure they have driven.

I am glad to see that we will finally have an opportunity to see key questions answered, particularly on the constitutionality of the Investment Court System and on the Dail ratification of CETA.

The question of whether CETA requires a referendum must also be addressed comprehensively. CETA is too serious to rush through without listening to debate from other countries and without ensuring a comprehensive analysis and discussion of potential consequences.

A senior Fine Gael source said the move helps Mr Ryans internal difficulties but stressed that, although not urgent, the deal will need to be ratified.

Despite signing a letter supporting the deal in December, it is understood Green Party deputy leader Catherine Martin put pressure on ministerial colleagues to have the deal scrutinised by an Oireachtas Committee.

She recently told a party conference that the leadership should listen to dissenting voices. Ms Martins husband and Dublin South West TD Francis Noel Duffy also wrote to Oireachtas EU Affairs Committee today asking for a debate on CETA.

When contacted Minister Martins spokesperson said: she was happy there was now an effort to scrutinised this agreement at an Oireachtas Committee level.

She has voiced concerns to Green Party colleagues and she has listened to the membership, NGOs and civil society groups, he added.
Time Warp: The Greatest Cult Films of All Time 

SBS Viceland, Thursday 9.20pm

What makes a film a cult film? The answers from some of the talking heads in this series vary from a film that never stops showing, to one that wasnt successful on its first release but gained a following to something you could only find on VHS. Then there are movies that were banned, once a guaranteed entry to cult status.

This is the second instalment of Time Warp  the first focused on midnight movies  looking at arguably the best kind of cult films: horror and sci-fi (episode three is camp and comedy).

Sid Haig in cult horror film The Devils Rejects.

Its loosely hosted by legendary director and producer Joe Dante (Gremlins, The Howling), who is joined by king of camp cult films, director John Waters (Polyester, Cry Baby) and actors Illeana Douglas and Kevin Pollack, who add little, but the reminiscences from directors and actors are as fun as the twisted plotlines themselves, and the tales of low-budget workarounds a real treat.
INDIANAPOLIS (AP)  A bill that would require students at public schools to complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid advanced to the Indiana House after lawmakers approved the measure in a Senate vote Tuesday.

Under the plan, authored by Republican Sen. Jean Leising, high school seniors would be required to fill out a FAFSA form unless a parent or school administrator signs an exemption waiver.

Because the Indiana Commission for Higher Education digitally tracks which students have completed the federal aid application, Leising said schools can easily monitor submission progress online.

We really need to do this in Indiana because were not ranking well, Leising said Tuesday, adding that Indiana ranks 32nd in the country for student FAFSA completion.

Only 60% of Indianas 2020 high school graduates completed a FAFSA form, according to the National College Attainment Network. Leising said that left more than $70 million in potential federal aid unclaimed by Hoosier learners.

The Commission for Higher Education, the Indiana Chamber of Commerce and multiple Indiana colleges have supported the bill.

Similar measures have been adopted in Louisiana, Texas and Illinois. Leising noted those laws have resulted in FAFSA participation rates to increase significantly.
The Minister of Industry, Trade and Investment, Niyi Adebayo Tuesday in Kaduna said the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) agreement will assist Nigeria to address unemployment and the prevailing insecurity in the country.

Speaking at the official flag - off of the Nationwide sensitisation tour by the National Action Committee on AfCFTA in Kaduna, the Minister said the sensitization was in line with the mandate to prepare Nigeria to take advantage of the AfCFTA Agreement while also mitigating its threats to the Nigerian economy.

He said the core objective of the AfCFTA according to the action Committee is to create a single market for goods, services, and free movement of persons in order to deepen the economic integration of the African continent.

The nationwide sensitisation he stressed is expected to take the message to the grassroots levels where the bulk of Nigeria's wealth, both natural resources and human talent and economic activities are domiciled and is set to cover all 36 States and the Federal Capital Territory".

Represented by the Director, Trade Department in the Ministry, Abubakar Aliyu, the Minister said "The agreement is about promoting industrialization among ourselves, adding that "for us in Nigeria our fortune is determined by oil. Anytime the price goes down, Nigeria goes into recession and when the price stabilize, we struggle to come out.

"The agreement can only succeed when the states key into it. It is important that all the states key into it. Not every body will take their products to Africa.

" The first question we should ask ourselves is what is the source of insecurity, it has root in unemployment, so we need to tackle unemployment. As you are tackling unemployment, if you are producing and you don't have where to sell, then the product will fail. You remember when people come from all over Africa to buy from Nigeria, that is what we are trying to reverse. The more people are engaged in job creation, the less people will be available to terrorism and criminal activities.

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"The agreement is what will guide trade in the country, nobody said this agreement will solve all our problem, they are industry that were valuable before, now they are not again."

Speaking earlier, Francis Anatogu, Secretary, the National Action Committee on AfCFTA said, "Our mandate at the National Action Committee is to coordinate the activities of private and public sector at Federal and Sub-National levels to implement AfCFTA for the benefit of Nigeria and Nigerians.

"Our strategy is to work with the states based on their areas of comparative advantages and priorities as a way of building up our national export trade and creating jobs at grassroot level", according to him.

The AfCFTA is expected to deliver an integrated continental market of 1.27 billion consumers with aggregate GDP of USD3.4 trillion. Nigeria constitutes a significant portion of these figures largely spread across our states, Nigeria signed the African Continental Free Trade Agreement in Niamey, Niger on 7 July 2019 to promote intra-African trade with other African countries."

It would be recalled that on November 11, 2020 that the Federal Executive Council approved the ratification of the agreement demonstrating Nigeria is on course to participate in trading under the AfCFTA and trading under the AfCFTA commenced on January 1st 2021.

"In this regard the National Action Committee on AfCFTA is working with relevant agencies to establish structures and processes to implement the rules of origin and other arrangements to enable businesses to commence trading under AfCFTA terms."
 "Evading the Eighth Amendment: Prison Conditions and the Courts" | Main | Mid-week and mid-winter perspectives on lots of hot criminal justice reform stories 

I have noted in prior posts linked below the various reform efforts of new Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascon and the push back these efforts have reeived from other prosecutors. This week, these issues resuted in a notable state court ruling, and detailed in this Los Angeles Times article headlined "Several of D.A. George Gascons reforms blocked by L.A. County judge." Here are excerpts:

Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. George Gascon was barred from implementing a significant part of his sprawling criminal justice reform platform Monday, after a judge ruled his plan to end the use of sentencing enhancements in thousands of criminal cases violates California law.

The order stemmed from a lawsuit filed late last year by the union that represents hundreds of L.A. County prosecutors, alleging some of Gascons plans exceeded his legal authority and put line prosecutors in an ethical bind. Sentencing enhancements can add several years to a defendants time in prison if certain criteria are met, such as using a gun causing severe injury during the commission of a crime, or being a documented gang member.

The lawsuit took particular issue with Gascons policy of barring the use of sentencing enhancements for prior felony convictions, arguing that under Californias three strikes law, prosecutors do not have discretion to refuse to seek the enhancement.

In his ruling, Judge James Chalfant noted that the three strikes law requires prosecutors to plead and prove all prior serious or violent felony offenses. He found Gascons directive ordering prosecutors not to file such enhancements unlawful, and cited several appellate cases that upheld the argument that strike offenses must be charged under state law.

A district attorneys discretion is not unlimited. He or she must work within the framework of the criminal system, Chalfant wrote. The legislature also is entitled to enact laws intruding on the executive or judicial branches of government so long as they do not defeat or materially impair that branchs core function.

In a 46-page ruling, Chalfant also barred Gascon from ordering prosecutors to dismiss any sentencing enhancements in active cases, unless they can argue that there is insufficient evidence to prove the enhancement or that the dismissal would be in the interest of justice.

Since Gascon took office, many prosecutors have appeared in court and read a statement  which some derisively refer to as the script  acknowledging they were seeking to dismiss enhancements under Gascons order because they believed the underlying penalties for the crime in question were sufficient to protect public safety and serve justice.

Judges had already been blocking such motions to dismiss on those grounds, but Chalfants ruling also stopped Gascon from ordering prosecutors to read the statement, finding the remarks themselves are inaccurate and incomplete and would require prosecutors to commit an ethical violation by making an inaccurate representation to the court.

The ruling affects a significant number of cases in L.A. County, where there are 10,794 defendants currently facing charges with sentencing enhancements, according to statistics provided to The Times in response to a public records request. Gascon can still bar prosecutors from filing most sentencing enhancements in new cases, though enhancements for prior strike offenses must still be charged, according to the order....

Gascon said he will appeal Chalfants ruling, which he acknowledged as an expected hurdle in his broader mission to reimagine criminal justice in Southern California. More than 2 million people in Los Angeles County voted for a system of justice based on science and data, not fear and emotion. Nevertheless, I never had any illusions as to the difficulty and challenges associated with reforming a dated institution steeped in systemic racism, he said in a statement. My directives are a product of the will of the people, including survivors of crime, and a substantial body of research that shows this modern approach will advance community safety.

In a reply filed in January to the unions suit, lawyers for L.A. County argued that prosecutors have broad discretion over whether to file strike enhancements and contended that if a judge granted the unions petition, it would be an unprecedented overreach from the bench. The Union asks for something no California court has ever ordered, as no California court has ever deemed itself to have the power to require ... a district attorney to plead any particular criminal charge or sentencing enhancement, the reply read. To the contrary, courts have long held that such charging power is almost entirely unreviewable and is uniquely within the district attorneys discretion.

The day he took office, Gascon announced an array of sweeping changes that included putting an end to the use of enhancements, severely restricted when prosecutors can seek to hold defendants in lieu of bail, ended the use of the death penalty in L.A. County and stopped the practice of trying juveniles as adults. The seismic policy shifts have drawn Gascon praise from other progressive prosecutors and criminal justice reformers nationwide, but left him at odds with his own staff and many of the local law enforcement officials he must work with to try cases.

The union lawsuit was being watched closely by law enforcement officials around the state and highlighted a broader divide between traditionalist and reform-minded prosecutors that has seemingly grown wider in recent weeks. San Francisco Dist. Atty. Chesa Boudin and Contra Costa County Dist. Atty. Diane Becton filed briefs in support of Gascon, worrying that a ruling like the one issued Monday would have a chilling effect on the authority of elected prosecutors to enact reforms.
(@FahadShabbir)

TEHRAN (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 10th February, 2021) The Iranian Foreign Ministry on Wednesday denounced the Canadian CBC news broadcaster's recent article, which alleged that Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif was heard saying in an audio recording that the downing of the Ukrainian International Airlines flight 752 was an intentional act.

On Tuesday, the media outlet claimed that the Canadian government and security agencies were examining the audio recording, on which a man identified as Zarif said that there were a "thousand possibilities" to explain the downing of the jet in January 2020, including a deliberate attack.

"The allegations made in this article are inaccurate and untrue. Many words attributed to Zarif fundamentally do not correspond to his statements, the statements about the existence of this recording do not correspond to reality," Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Saeed Khatibzadeh said in a statement.

The diplomat called on the Canadian authorities to not spread rumors, in order to avoid deepening the grief of the families of those killed in the plane crash.

Khatibzadeh added that the technical investigation report was almost ready. Once finished, Canada will be able to openly express its views on the disaster, the diplomat noted.

According to the CBC News, the conversation that was heard on the audio recording in Farsi took place in the first months after the plane crash.

The Ukraine International Airlines' Kiev-bound fight crashed almost immediately after takeoff from Tehran on January 8, 2020. All 176 people aboard were killed, including nationals of Ukraine, Iran, Afghanistan, Canada, Germany, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

Three days later, Iran admitted that the jet had been mistakenly shot down by its armed forces, who mistook it for a hostile cruise missile. The crash took place amid an escalating confrontation between Tehran and Washington following the US killing of prominent Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani in a targeted strike.

Biden administration needs a pragmatic foreign policy, overcome its prejudices and arrest the slide of US-Russia ties on this slippery slope

In this image made from video provided by the Babuskinsky District Court, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny stands in a cage during a hearing on his charges for defamation, in the Babuskinsky District Court in Moscow, Russia, on February 5, 2021. (AP)

The fraught relationship between the United States and Russia has come under further strain after the alleged poisoning and recent sentencing of prominent Russian Opposition leader Alexei Navalny. On February 4, US President Joe Biden, in his first articulation of foreign policy after assuming office, had some harsh words for President Vladimir Putin. Mr Biden made it clear that the days of the US rolling over in the face of Russias aggressive actions -- interfering with our elections, cyberattacks, poisoning its citizens -- are over. Castigating Russia for the politically motivated jailing of Alexei Navalny, President Biden cautioned Moscow that the US will not hesitate to raise the cost on Russia, alluding to possible additional sanctions.

Ignoring diplomatic niceties, President Biden said: The politically motivated jailing of Alexei Navalny and the Russian efforts to suppress freedom of expression and peaceful assembly are a matter of deep concern. He should be released immediately and without conditions.

On February 2, after Mr Navalny was sentenced to more than two years in prison on rather flimsy charges, new US secretary of state Anthony Blinken tweeted: We reiterate our call for the Russian government to immediately and unconditionally release Mr Navalny, as well as hundreds of other Russian citizens wrongfully detained in recent weeks for exercising the rights.

Such public criticism is likely to deeply offend Mr Putin, the strong leader of a proud country. Russia would be loath to taking any action under outside pressure and the chances of the Russian State showing any leniency towards a high-profile dissident may have simply vanished.

Besides the persecution of Mr Navalny, the Biden administration takes office with a deep-rooted suspicion towards Mr Putins Russia. The Democratic Party holds Russias involvement in the leaking of presidential candidate Hillary Clintons emails responsible for her defeat in 2016 by Donald Trump. In a signed Foreign Affairs article in March 2020, Joe Biden had declared solidarity with Russian civil society, that has stood up against President Vladimir Putins kleptrocratic authoritarian system. Laying down his future policy, candidate Biden wrote that to counter Russian aggression, we must keep (Natos) military capabilities sharp, and threatened to impose real costs on Russia for its violation of international norms.

Incoming national security adviser Jake Sullivan added to the chorus by declaring that unlike the previous administration, we will be taking steps to hold Russia accountable for the range of malign actions Russia has taken.

Americas penchant for conducting critical bilateral relations in the full glare of media publicity may win the Biden establishment accolades from internal constituencies but are unlikely to lead to effective outcomes.

The United States is no longer the worlds undisputed economic and military power, with China snapping at its heels. Its grip on alliances like Nato has also weakened. In the backdrop of the Covid-linked economic downturn, much of the democratic world puts national interests first. In this dynamic and uncertain international environment, it is doubtful that other key powers will stand by the US if it tries to impose more punitive sanctions on Russia. The US, however, certainly has the capacity to impose unilateral sanctions isolating Russia from the global financial and banking network, that would adversely hit the Russian economy.

In his February 4 address at the state department, Mr Biden assured a wary world that the US will act not to meet yesterdays challenges, but todays and tomorrows and to take on directly the challenges posed by our most serious competitor China. Mr Biden declared that we will confront Chinas economic abuses; counter its aggressive, coercive actions; to push back on Chinas attack on human rights, intellectual property and global governance.

At his confirmation hearing, Mr Blinken had also clearly identified China as posing the most significant challenge of any nation-state in the world for the United States.

The Biden administration would be well advised to take a hard look at Americas declining influence in the world and prioritise adversaries and challenges. Russia now has a shrinking footprint on the global strategic map. Its no longer an expansionist power. In 2008, Russia was severely provoked by Natos offer of membership to Ukraine and Georgia. Mr Putin had clearly warned at that time that Natos expansion towards Russia would be taken in Russia as a direct threat to the security of our country. Russias annexation of Crimea and action in Donbas, South Ossetia and Abkhazia were a riposte to the aggressive intentions of Nato.

President Putin had a career in the KGB in the days of the Soviet empire. He has firm control over all the levers of power in Russia and is popular among citizens. With Mr Putin at the helm, Russia is not an ideology-driven country, like the erstwhile Soviet Union. Russia is now obsessed with internal stability and external security. Outside support to vocal Opposition leaders is seen by the Kremlin as a West-inspired attempt to destabilise the country.

Russia poses no future challenge to the United States or the West, be it economic or technological. The West lacks any levers to soften the harsh internal system in Russia. Public criticism of a proud nation will only harden positions and genuine concerns are best conveyed behind closed doors.

For Americas own future primacy, the real challenge is from China and its demonising of Russia will only push the Kremlin into the Dragons embrace, immeasurably adding to Chinas clout and aggression. The Biden administration needs a pragmatic foreign policy, overcome its prejudices and arrest the slide of US-Russia ties on this slippery slope.
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WOOD RIVER  It wasnt quite blink and youll miss it, but the first trial for the Madison County Health Departments new online appointment scheduler and special phone number for COVID-19 vaccination appointments required a quick response.

Between the online scheduler and the phone number, it took less than 14 minutes last Thursday to fill the allotted number of appointments for 1,836 slots of the first dose at two clinics.

We had a huge response and we all considered it a success, and there were a couple of different county departments that helped with it, said Amy Yeager, public information officer and director of community health for the Madison County Health Department. We know a lot of people were disappointed because they werent able to get through, but we were upfront that we had only 1,836 slots available.

Since then, we have made a few adjustments on the technical side and were going to change some of the language and a few other things.

While the health department website (www.madisonchd.org) notes that all appointments for vaccinations are currently filled, plans are already being made for the next round of vaccinations.

It was also a good way to test that system because we have gotten confirmation from the Illinois National Guard that they are going to help us with vaccinations, Yeager said. That will double if not triple our capacity to give vaccines, as long as the vaccine is available.

Starting the week of Feb. 22, the National Guard will be at the Gateway Convention Center in Collinsville and at Lewis and Clark Community College in Godfrey to help provide vaccinations.

Our goal by the end of the month is to increase the number of appointment-only vaccinations to at least six days a week, whether at the Gateway Center or Lewis and Clark or other off-site locations, Yeager said. Were vaccinating some vulnerable populations and essential businesses and the hospitals are helping as well.

Phase 1B is not only for people age 65 and older; its also a whole list of frontline essential workers as designated by the state. Plus, we are still doing vaccinations in Phase 1A for the people in that group who have not gotten it yet.

At this point, Yeager isnt sure when the online scheduler and the vaccination appointment phone number will be operational again.

Once we know exactly how many teams the National Guard is going to be able to send and all of the logistics for each site are set and once we have confirmation from the IDPH that we will have the among of vaccine that we need, then we can open up the schedule, Yeager said.

We know that people are frustrated, and we know they are anxious and fearful, but it would be irresponsible if we set up appointments unless we have a confirmed amount of vaccine and we know we have enough people to administer it.

Yeager also addressed concerns that some people in lower priority groups may be getting vaccinated ahead of people in higher-risk groups.

We have some people who have questioned why young people are getting the vaccine, but they are either Phase 1A long-term care or healthcare staff or they are in Phase 1B in one of the essential workers groups, Yeager said.

We are asking all of those questions at the clinics and we are asking for an ID and proof of employment. We are checking, but I know some people 65 and older are wondering why younger people are getting the vaccine, and that is the reason.

In January, the health department completed its online COVID-19 vaccination registration survey, which got more than 45,000 responses.

Due to some confusion, the health department will be sending out an additional confirmation notice to survey respondents.

When we did the survey, the final page said thank you, your response has been received, but it seems like a lot of people didnt understand that that was their confirmation, so are sending another confirmation notice, Yeager said. The county emailing system only allows for 200 emails to be sent at once, and that would be a tremendous task and an excessive amount of time to email 45,000 people 200 at a time.

Our IT department was able to secure a contract with an outside company and (Monday) we were able to set up that whole system, and over the next two days, anyone that completed the survey and provided a valid email address will be contacted again to confirm that they are on our list and we will contact them to set up an appointment when their turn in line comes.

Yeager added that more than 500 emails received as part of the survey were invalid. People that did not submit an email address or submitted an invalid email address will be contacted by phone.
CBC

A school board in London, Ont., has removed a high school principal from his position after video surfaced on social media of him wearing the hair of a Black student as if it were a wig. A student who spoke to CBC News said the principal also wore the hair a second time six months after the first incident as part of a Halloween costume. The Conseil scolaire catholique Providence (CSC), the board that oversees francophone Catholic schools in southwestern Ontario, announced on Saturday that Luc Chartrand has been "immediately removed ... from his current position." Chartrand was principal at Monseigneur-Bruyere, a French-language Catholic high school in north London. In an emailed statement that came in response to calls for comment from CBC News, CSC director general Joseph Picard said: "We strongly condemn this type of behaviour and maintain a zero-tolerance policy toward any racism, discrimination or the appearance thereof." Chartrand did not respond to a request for comment from CBC News. The move comes in response to two incidents that occurred in 2019, but they only came to light Friday evening when the London branch of Black Lives Matter posted a video on its Instagram account. The four-second video shows Chartrand during a school assembly that was being held as a fundraiser for a student who was battling cancer. Students were shaving their heads to support the student and to raise money for her. This still image shared Friday on Black Lives Matter London's Instagram page shows high school principal Luc Chartrand wearing hair recently shorn from a student as a wig. The school board announced Friday that Chartrand has been removed from his position.(Black Lives Matter London/Instagram) CBC News has spoken with two students who were in the gym that day and who verified the contents of the video. CBC News has agreed not to name the students for privacy reasons. One of the students whose hair was shorn that day is Black and had long dreadlocks. In the video, Chartrand is seen putting a clump of the shaved student's hair on his own head, and he then begins to flaunt for the crowd. A former student said Chartrand wore the hair at school a second time six months later, at Halloween, as part of a costume that included a basketball jersey in an apparent attempt to dress up like the student who had his hair shorn. The student plays basketball. A former student whom CBC News has agreed not to name for privacy reasons said the two incidents left many students at the school disgusted and offended. "It bothers me racially, because dreadlocks are so important to my culture," said the student, who is of Haitian descent. The student said it was inappropriate for Chartrand to keep the hair, only to wear it again at Halloween. The student who had cancer died in August of that year. 'Absolutely wrong' Alexandra Kane, a spokesperson for Black Lives Matter London, said the video raises all kinds of red flags. "There are levels of cultural appropriation here," Kane said. "You can see he puts the hair on and he starts being 'Black' with his body movements and his actions. It is absolutely wrong. Our clothes, our hair, our skin, is not a costume for you to wear and parade around." Kane said the student may have felt compelled to let Chartrand use the hair in this way, given that he was an authority figure. Alexandra Kane, a spokesperson for Black Lives Matter London, says a white principal wearing the hair of a Black student as part of a costume raises serious problems. 'There are levels of cultural appropriation here,' Kane said.(Andrew Lupton/CBC) "Even if the student gave permission for this to happen, it's not OK to put that kind of pressure on a student," she said. "It's not OK to say, 'I'm going to be you for Halloween' as a white man. It's like you're mocking him." Since posting the video, Kane said she's been contacted by current and former Monseigneur-Bruyere students. She said many are questioning why Chartrand's actions are only surfacing and being addressed by the board now, two years after the first incident in the gym. The student who confirmed the contents of the video also shared with CBC News a letter sent to the school board in June 2020 demanding changes at the school to create a better climate for Black students. The student said the letter was partly in response to Chartrand's actions the previous Halloween but also in response to other incidents at the school and the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer a month earlier. The student said she received no response from the board. Kane said she's heard similar stories from students who've spoken out since the photo of Chartrand was posted Friday. "The school board was aware of the situation when it happened," she said. "The students sent a petition to the school board and they did nothing. I hope they do more to eradicate racism in their own board. They need to find out where the problems are." 'I left for the same reasons' News of the principal's behaviour hit a nerve with Arielle Kayabaga, a London city councillor. She attended Monseigneur-Bruyere when she was in high school but transferred to another school before graduation over what she said was a climate of racism at the school. "I left for the same reasons. I just felt there was discriminations happening towards people of colour," she said. "The racism I experienced at that school made me want to switch schools, and that was 10 years ago. "The students there now are experiencing the same thing. It's not just about the principal." Arielle Kayabaga, a London city councillor, attended Monseigneur-Bruyere in high school, but said she transferred to another school before graduating due to what she called a climate of racism at the school.(Andrew Lupton/CBC)
St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson has signed onto an initiative with mayors across the country aimed at curbing anti-Semitism.

The American Jewish Committees Mayors United Against Antisemitism effort calls on mayors and municipal leaders to affirm that antisemitism is incompatible with fundamental democratic values and to commit to working within and across U.S. communities to advance the values of respectful coexistence, a news release states.

The effort comes amidst ongoing concerns about anti-Semitism in the United States. The Anti-Defamation League reported that there were 2,107 anti-Semitic incidents recorded in 2019, a 12% increase from 2018, according to its annual audit.

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Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas was also among the 132 mayors to sign the initiative.

AJC St. Louis is honored to have Mayors Krewson and Lucas, leading the way and taking a stand against antisemitism in Missouri, as representatives of the two largest cities in our state. We hope many of their colleagues will join them and strengthen this national movement, Terry Bloomberg, chair of the Task Force to Combat Antisemitism on St. Louiss AJC Board, stated in the news release.

The statement from the mayors affirms a core set of principles, including the condemnation of anti-Jewish hatred in all forms; rejection of the notion that antisemitic acts may ever be justified by ones view on the actions or existence of the State of Israel; a declaration that antisemitism and any prejudices due to religious differences are inconsistent with core American values; and the belief that the promotion of mutual understanding and respect among all citizens is essential to good governance and democratic life, the release states.

The Bloc expects the Kremlin to use "considerable influence" over its proxy forces in eastern Ukraine.

The European Union has stood by Ukraine since Russia began its military aggression and illegally annexed Crimea in 2014, Executive Vice-President Valdis Dombrovskis said at the European Parliament plenary debate on the EU Association Agreement with Ukraine February 9.

The support for Ukraine's independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity within its internationally recognized borders has been steadfast, the official said, noting that the latest ceasefire that has largely been holding since July, being "an undeniable breakthrough" despite a recent spike in violence, according to the European Commission press service.

The overall pace of progress towards a peaceful and sustainable resolution of the conflict remains too slow, Dombrovskis says, adding that, while Ukraine must be "praised" for its "constructive approach" and President Volodymyr Zelensky's efforts, "Russia must reciprocate."

Read alsoDonbas war update: Ukraine records three ceasefire violations on Feb 9The EU expects Russia to "use its considerable influence over the armed formations that it backs."

"There is no place in 21st century Europe for using force to alter the boundaries of a sovereign country," the official stressed, recalling that sectoral sanctions were rolled over in December 2020 by the European Council.

The duration of these sanctions against Russia remains linked to the complete implementation of the Minsk agreements, Dombrovskis said, adding that individual sanctions have only become wider over the years, in response to further Russian undermining of Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Addressing the issue of the occupied Crimea, the official said the sanctions regime targeting the peninsula "is also consistently enforced."

"We have also put a new sanctions regime in place that allows the Council to impose asset freezes and travel bans on persons it deems to have committed serious human rights violations," Dombrovskis said. "If Member States call for it, we are ready to make use of the EU Global Human Rights Sanctions Regime against Russia."

Reporting by UNIAN
In efforts to bolster the ecosystem for domestic audit firms, the chartered accountants' apex body will soon come out with a revised set of networking guidelines that will provide a stronger framework for pooling of resources.

The revised networking guidelines has been approved by the council, the body's President Atul Kumar Gupta said on Wednesday.

The revised guidelines, once in place, are expected to help smaller

"The need of the hour is for domestic firms to come together... The (revised) guidelines will also help Indian firms to become global players," Gupta said.

The Institute of of India (ICAI) has more than three lakh members.

Efforts are being taken over the years boost domestic as part of larger efforts for the country to have big

According to Gupta, the corporate affairs ministry is expected to soon notify Multi Disciplinary Partnerships (MDPs) wherein a chartered accountant can have partnerships with a cost accountant or a company secretary or certain other professionals, including engineers.

The first MDP is likely to come up by March this year, he added.

He also said the "ecosystem for audit quality" has improved and that the institute is always working on improving the audit quality.

(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.)
Vancouver, British Columbia, Feb. 10, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The global laparoscopy and endoscopy devices market is projected to be worth USD 28.30 Billion by 2027growing at a CAGR of 4.3%, according to a current analysis by Emergen Research. The laparoscopy and endoscopy devices market is observing high demand attributed to the increasing demand for minimally invasive surgery. Minimally invasive surgery comprises a faster recovery time, shorter stay span at the hospital, and a decreased chance of post-surgery infections. Also, surging demand for keyhole surgery is a significant factor in driving the laparoscopy devices market growth attributed to its benefits comprising shorter stay at the hospital, quicker recovery time, reduced pain & bleeding post-surgery, and less scarring.



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Technological advancements in the laparoscopy and endoscopy devices market are crucial in fueling market demand. For instance, single-port laparoscopy, recent technology in laparoscopic surgery, as compared to multiport technology, offers various benefits such as excellent cosmesis, a plausible reduction in morbidity associated with visceral and vascular injury occurring at the time of trocar placement, and reduced risk of wound infection after the operation.

Top Companies Profiled in Laparoscopy and Endoscopy Devices Market Report are:

Stryker Corporation, Fujifilm, Smith & Nephew PLC, Cook Medical, Boston Scientific, B. Braun Melsungen, Olympus, Medtronic, Karl Storz, and Hoya Corporation, among others.

Key Highlights From The Report

In July 2020, Hoya Corporation entered into a contract agreement with Hitachi, Ltd. about EUS (Endoscopic Ultrasound Systems) to strengthen technical cooperation. Hitachi would carry on to supply diagnostic ultrasound systems and sensors implemented in EUS.

Demand for disposable endoscopes is garnering substantial traction in the market owing to the risk of contamination to the patients.

Laparoscopy has witnessed significant demand in bariatric surgery due to its advantage in reducing complications associated with injuries and enhance patient recovery.

Players in the market engaging in a strategic alliance to gain a competitive edge in the market. For instance, in May 2019, Cook Medical entered into a collaborative partnership with Ambu A/S to cater to the concerns arising out of infection caused by endoscopy surgeries.

Europe held the second-largest laparoscopy and endoscopy devices market share in 2019 due to the growing incidence of chronic diseases and surging demand for laparoscopy and endoscopy devices in the developed economies in the region.

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Emergen Research has segmented the global laparoscopy and endoscopy devices market on the basis of device type, application, end-users, and region:

Device Type Outlook (Revenue, USD Billion; 2017-2027) Laparoscopy Device Endoscopy Device

Application Outlook (Revenue, USD Billion; 2017-2027) Gastrointestinal Surgery Cardiac Surgery Gynecology Surgery Orthopedic Surgery Urologic Surgery Neurological Surgery Others

End Users Outlook (Revenue, USD Billion; 2017-2027) Hospitals & Clinics Ambulatory Surgical Centers Others



Click to access the Report Study, Read key highlights of the Report and Look at Projected Trends: https://www.emergenresearch.com/industry-report/laparoscopy-and-endoscopy-devices-market

Regional Outlook (Revenue, USD Billion; 2017-2027) North America U.S. Canada Mexico Europe Germany UK France BENELUX Rest of Europe Asia Pacific China Japan South Korea Rest of APAC Latin America Brazil Rest of LATAM MEA Saudi Arabia UAE Rest of MEA



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Youth participation in politics and their roles in government have gained traction amongst Nigerian youths in the last two decades.

It is thus with this optimism -- reinforced by gains recorded in youth candidacy in the 2015 elections and the inspiring organisation of the #EndSARS protests -- that we approach a future of youth leadership. Many ideas are packed into this lecture, and we do have a roadmap to rethink various aspects of youth politics.

Youth participation in politics and their roles in government have gained traction amongst Nigerian youths in the last two decades. Discussing this subject at a well-attended lecture at the University of Texas at Austin on February 9, under the title, "Youth, Politics, and the Future of Nigeria," Ololade Bamidele, an active member of the Nigerian civil society, a successful career journalist, and currently the secretary to the Editorial Board of Premium Times (the digital news media), commented on the socio-political and economic circumstances of the Nigerian youth, which, he explained, produced the "Not Too Young To Run" (NTYTR) and #EndSARS movements, two of the more recent expressions of youth frustration with the Nigerian status-quo.

He logically kicked off his account by providing the definition of "youth" in Nigeria, as well as an introduction to the country's expanding youth demography and its socio-economic implications. This is followed by a historical contextualisation of the changing roles played by youth in Nigeria's political evolution, from the pre-colonial era till present times. Then he moved on to the factors limiting youth participation in politics, rounding off with an explanation on how the resulting agitations produced NTYTR and the #EndSARS movements, and what this means for the future of youth participation in Nigerian politics.

In his introduction, Bamidele explained that these movements, which he attributes to the rising levels of discontent in leadership performance and limited youth representation in leadership positions, also have, as a source of agitation, questions on the origin of people who can aspire to, attain, and exercise positions of leadership in Nigeria. As such, the common use of the maxim which proclaims the youths as the "leaders of tomorrow" is not because of its appeal amongst the youth whom it supposes to enthrone, neither is it an outcome of its truism founded on the principle of a natural law of succession, which provides that the older generations yield the stage for the new ones. On the contrary, its popularity is mostly due to its transformation into a motto that expresses youth frustrations against what appears to be an idea of a divine right to leadership, held by an elite clique that is impervious to changing times and standards.

Moving to the definition of "Youth," this, he explained, depends on differing sociological perspectives, cultural contexts, and national delineations as provided for by the United Nations (UN). Thus, after providing (youth) definitions drawn from the Economic Community of West African Countries (ECOWAS), the UN, South Africa, Liberia, and Kenya, he settles on that provided in Nigeria by the National Youth Policy of 2009, which defines Nigerian youths as those between the ages of 18 and 35. In the case of Nigeria's youth demography, over forty (40) per cent of the populace is said to fall within this category. This number, which is consistently expanding owing to high fertility rates, poor family planning decisions, and lowering death rates, is projected to hit 400 million by 2050.

In providing a historical context to buttress the argument for the central role of youth in societal development, Bamidele made the point that youths have played key roles in the social and political organisations of societies across various nationalities and groups.

He explains that the existing economic difficulties created by an expanding population unmatched by economic growth and social investments in education and healthcare are made more dire by low economic earnings. This issue of low economic earnings has remained because of the failure to move the discussion on the diversification of the economy from a mono-product economy beyond the talking stage. These complications, he submitted, can only be resolved by changing the nature of politics, improving governance through more inclusiveness, and better resource allocations to cater to the needs of the population.

In providing a historical context to buttress the argument for the central role of youth in societal development, Bamidele made the point that youths have played key roles in the social and political organisations of societies across various nationalities and groups. Whereas you had the age-grade associations in the "traditional" pre-colonial period, the colonial era had young Nigerians -- the likes of Herbert Macaulay, Julius Ojo-Cole, and J. B. Danqua -- organising and leading the movement against colonial rule. They created political associations like the West African Students Union (WASU), and the National Youth Movement (NYM) in 1925 and 1934, respectively. These associations, which later morphed into political parties on the eve of independence, came to include personalities such as Samuel Akinsanya, Kofo Abayomi, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Obafemi Awolowo, and Samuel Ladoke Akintola. Others were the National Council for Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC) in 1944; Action Group (AG) in 1950; Northern People's Congress (NPC) in 1949; and the Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU) in 1950. Such were the nation's political actors at the time of independence -- made up of youths in their 20s and 30s.

In the era after political independence from Britain, the military officers who hijacked power, and those who led the country during and after the Civil War, including Kaduna Chukwuma Nzeogwu, Yakubu Gowon, Olusegun Obasanjo, and Murtala Mohammed were in their late 20s and 30s. Even those who opposed the military as members of student unions under the aegis of the National Union of Nigerian Students (NUNS) set up in 1956, youth activists, members of civil society, and professional groups were youths representing the frontline of progressive social actions. They stood in defence of social freedoms and human rights against tyrannical and oppressive regimes, often suffering through several consequences.

Things, he said, began to change with the coming of the Second Republic in 1979, and the instances of repressive leadership. Thence the frontline roles of the youth began its decline, culminating in their consignment to the "Youth Wing" of political parties. Before long, the youth were reduced to agents of destabilisation in the hands of political elites who deployed them as thugs, especially during elections. With growing youth populations, less state intervention, and increasing unemployment, more youths resorted to decadent behaviour, littering the streets of the urban centres in various regions of the country as "area boys," "agbero," and "Yan Daba."

The NTYTR and the #EndSARS are, therefore, symbolic in the sense that they represent an increasing capacity of Nigerian youths to organise and channel their frustrations into social movements and protests to call for a change in the status quo.

Regarding the factors limiting youth participation in politics, Bamidele listed poverty and other legal and political hindrances such as eligibility restriction, marginalisation, and the commercialisation of politics as responsible. The age restrictions which stipulate 40 years as the requirement to vie for the presidential seat; 40 years for senatorial positions; and 30 years for memberships to the federal and state Houses of Representatives, automatically disqualifies everyone in the youth bracket. And with commercialisation comes the added challenges of sponsorship in Nigeria's money-intensive election processes. This, he said, further marginalises the youth who is already economically disempowered, and increases the necessity for godfathers and godfatherism. Due to these factors, the huge youth population, which accounts for over 50 per cent of voters' registration in the country, has not translated into increased youth participation in elections and their representation in elective offices.

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This way, the options of Nigerian youths are almost exhausted as they are denied the opportunity to wield the transformative tool of political office, while being compelled to bear the brunt of poor political decisions. Hence the feeling of frustrations built-up into the energies that produced the NTYTR movement and the #EndSARS. The NTYTR and the #EndSARS are, therefore, symbolic in the sense that they represent an increasing capacity of Nigerian youths to organise and channel their frustrations into social movements and protests to call for a change in the status quo. The success of the former (NTYTR) in bringing about a reduction in the age requirements for elective offices and that of the latter (#EndSARS) in bringing an end to the notorious police squad (SARS) represents an awakening by the youths as to the efficacy of pressure groups.

It is thus with this optimism -- reinforced by gains recorded in youth candidacy in the 2015 elections and the inspiring organisation of the #EndSARS protests -- that we approach a future of youth leadership. Many ideas are packed into this lecture, and we do have a roadmap to rethink various aspects of youth politics.

Toyin Falola is professor of History at The University of Texas at Austin.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-10 21:30:53|Editor: huaxia

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The China National Space Administration (CNSA) releases mid-flight images of Mars probe Tianwen-1 on Oct. 1, 2020. (CNSA/Handout via Xinhua)

BEIJING, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- China's Tianwen-1 probe successfully entered the orbit around Mars on Wednesday after a nearly seven-month voyage from Earth.

A 3000N engine was ignited at 7:52 p.m. (Beijing time) to decelerate Tianwen-1, according to the China National Space Administration (CNSA).

After about 15 minutes, the spacecraft, including an orbiter, a lander and a rover, had slowed enough to be captured by Mars' gravity and entered an elliptical orbit around the red planet, with its closest distance from the Martian surface at about 400 km. It will take Tianwen-1 about 10 Earth days to complete one circle.

The development marks China's completion of a key step in its current Mars exploration program, which is designed to complete orbiting, landing and roving in one mission, said the CNSA.

After entering the Mars orbit, payloads aboard the orbiter, including cameras and various particle analyzers, will next start working and carry out surveys of the planet.

Tianwen-1 was launched via a Long March-5 rocket, China's largest launch vehicle, from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site on the coast of southern China's island province of Hainan on July 23, 2020.

Tianwen-1 has been traveling in space for 202 days. It has carried out four orbital corrections and a deep-space maneuver. It has flown 475 million km and was 192 million km from Earth when it reached the Mars orbit.

A steerable radio telescope with a 70-meter-diameter antenna in Wuqing District of northern China's Tianjin City is a key facility receiving scientific data sent back by the Mars probe. The one-way communication delay is about 10.7 minutes.

Tianwen-1 will now conduct multiple orbital corrections to enter a temporary Mars parking orbit, surveying potential landing sites in preparation to land in May or June. 
Michelle Obama / Instagram

Michelle Obama's mission of encouraging kids to eat healthier is getting a global spin - and a few puppet allies. The former first lady is launching a kids' cooking show on Netflix as part of the production deal between Netflix and the production company she founded with her husband, former president Barack Obama.

In addition to executive producing "Waffles + Mochi," which debuts March 16, she'll play the proprietor of a "whimsical supermarket" that employs the titular puppets, who are best friends and aspiring chefs. (One is an adorably small orb formed like the Japanese rice cake and the other a creature whose ears are shaped like the griddled breakfast treat.) "I'm excited for families and children everywhere to join us on our adventures as we discover, cook, and eat delicious food from all over the world," she wrote in a tweet on Tuesday.
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STATEN ISLAND, N.Y.  New York City is drafting new plans to evaluate teachers during the 2020-2021 academic year that would consider campus closures and remote learning amid the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, according to a recent report.

Chalkbeat reported that city officials are drafting a revised plan to account for the pandemic. There arent any specifics regarding the proposal, which is being made in consultation with union officials, as any modification requires state approval, according to the media outlet.

Last June, Gov. Andrew Cuomo issued an executive order to pause a state law mandating school and district leaders to formally assess teachers and principals each year.

Cuomo hasnt issued a similar executive order for the 2020-2021 school year, according to Chalkbeat  which is why city officials are currently working to draft an evaluation plan.

A spokesperson told Chalkbeat that Cuomo is still considering issuing an order similar to last year. The states education department said it plans to ask the governor to put the evaluation law on hold, according to Chalkbeat.

The media outlet reported that evaluations offer an opportunity for administrators to provide feedback with the goal of improving teaching. This process could be even more important this year, as teachers adapted to unfamiliar platforms and methods of engaging students, according to the report.

Evaluations also play a role when granting teachers tenure, Chalkbeat reported, and can also be used as grounds to fire teachers.

But a revised evaluation plan could be difficult for city officials to pull off, according to Chalkbeat, as typical performance measures, such as student assessments and in-person classroom observations, have been disrupted due to the pandemic.

Students had the option of full-time remote learning or blended learning when they started school in September  and families were able to move their children to remote learning at any time. Students were also able to opt back into in-person learning during a one-time opt-in period in November.

Teachers and students faced another disruption when all public school buildings closed in mid-November when the coronavirus positivity rate reached 3%, the former threshold the city used to close all buildings that was later scrapped.

Only elementary school students, and students with disabilities in District 75 returned to school buildings in December under stricter safety measures. Middle school students are slated to return at the end of February.

And student assessment data could be tricky, Chalkbeat reported, as state and Regents exam scores are also used in teacher evaluations. However, the state seeks to cancel reading and math exams given in grades 3-8 this school year, and its unclear if the Regents exams will be held in June (the January administration was canceled).

A city Department of Education official told Chalkbeat that timelines will be adjusted accordingly to ensure theres enough time to conduct evaluations this school year.

School Zone: A new newsletter with the updates you need as our schools try to get back to normal. Enter your email address here and hit "subscribe" to receive this weekly newsletter:



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Kelly Mi Li is one of the faces of Netflixs Bling Empire, a new reality show about the extravagant lifestyles of wealthy Asians and Asian-Americans.

She is known on the show as a driven entrepreneur with a rollercoaster love life. However, with just eight episodes, there is still a lot that fans might not know about Kelly. Showbiz Cheat Sheet decided to talk to Kelly to learn more about her life and career.

Kelly Mi Li

Showbiz Cheat Sheet: Before appearing on Bling Empire, you worked in several different fields. For example, you founded a restaurant, invested in tech companies, became a talent manager, and produced shows and movies. What made you decide to appear on a reality show?

Kelly Mi Li: When we first started filming Bling Empire, I was actually going to be more behind the scenes and didnt plan on starring in it! Jeff Jenkins, my producing partner for this project, encouraged me to be on camera with the rest of the cast. I knew being in front of the camera would be very different than what Im used to, but Im always open for new challenges and experiences.

Showbiz Cheat Sheet: Bling Empire gives viewers an inside look into your love life. How does it feel to have such a personal part of your life out in the open?

Kelly Mi Li: Its definitely very different for me to share such a personal aspect of my life publicly since a big part of Asian culture teaches you to keep your problems private. Topics such as mental health and therapy are not normally discussed. Being able to be so vulnerable in Bling Empire has pushed me to grow immensely. The support Ive received from fans and audiences is overwhelming, so Im very grateful to get this opportunity to share this with them. Im hoping my experience encourages others to be more open to therapy and mental health, especially those in the Asian community.

Kelly Mi Li and Andrew Gray on Bling Empire | Netflix

Showbiz Cheat Sheet: Although the show is a step towards giving Asian-Americans more representation in the media, some people have complained that it does not represent the majority of Asian-Americans. What would you like to say to these critics?

Kelly Mi Li: On Bling Empire, we do have people from different Asian cultures, such as Singaporean, Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese and Korean. We also have Asian people who were born in the U.S. as well as people who immigrated to the U.S. like me. While there are different cultures and experiences that Bling Empire touches on, theres still so much more to share about Asian culture. When comparing one culture to another, such as Chinese culture to Japanese culture, there are many differences for example. So showcasing everything into one season is impossible. We hope that we will get future seasons to show more insight into Asian culture and help push for Asian representation in the media.

Showbiz Cheat Sheet: You describe yourself as a serial entrepreneur  are there other ventures you would like to try in the future?

Kelly Mi Li: When it comes to production, every project is different. Each project is like working on a different business every time. Aside from production and manufacturing/distribution, I would be open to working on any venture that merges my passion for storytelling, helping others, and scaling upwards. I would also like to use my platform to spread mental health awareness and help rid the stigma of mental health in the Asian community.

Showbiz Cheat Sheet: You are also a philanthropist. Can you share with us about some of the charity work you do?

Philanthropy is something Ive always been passionate about. Ive helped with fundraising for Prince Harrys Well Child, a charity that helps provide care for ill children and young adolescents in the United Kingdom. I helped raise funds for Pencils of Promiseto build schools in developing countries. With Pencils of Promise, I traveled to Guatemala where I did more hands-on groundwork with this charity as well. I was also on the board of the Chinese Children Initiatives UNICEF, a charity dedicated to providing educational and family support services for children in needs in China.

I am a strong supporter of the adopt, dont shop campaign, too! Both my dogs, Kilo and Sophia, are rescue dogs. Kilo was found on the streets at two days old, Sophia was in a puppy mill dog hoarding situation before we rescued her. Its been such an unforgettable and rewarding experience to see my two pups get a second chance in life. I am looking forward to contributing more to causes I am passionate about and give back in any way I can!
DMK member on Wednesday said that Prime Minister should take a COVID vaccine shot in public as such a move will give confidence to people since many are not trusting the vaccine.

Participating in the discussion on Union Budget 2021-22 in Lok Sabha, he also said that apart from the prime minister, President, home minister and defence minister should take the vaccine shots in public.

"There is a discomfort, people are not truly trusting the vaccine... because of the efficacy," he said and mentioned that US President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris had taken the vaccine shots in public.

He also mentioned that UK's Prince Philip and the prime minister's good friend and Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu have also taken the vaccine shots.

"I think our prime minister likes the American model... President of India, prime minister, home minister and defence minister should go (take vaccine shots) in public," he noted.

This will give confidence to people, he said.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Andrew Bailey's reputation has been dealt a serious blow after a row erupted between the Bank of England Governor and a former judge.

Bailey, who took the helm at the Bank last March, denied in front of a panel of MPs on Monday that he had tried to have his name removed from a report accusing him of failings at the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).

But the report's author, former Court of Appeal judge Dame Elizabeth Gloster, hit back yesterday  claiming that Bailey was wrong to tell the MPs on the Treasury Committee that there had been a 'fundamental misunderstanding'.

Former Court of Appeal judge Dame Elizabeth Gloster, claimed that Andrew Bailey was wrong to tell MPs that there had been a 'fundamental misunderstanding' over the LCF scandal

She added that it was misleading for Bailey to say he had been ready to own up to his mistakes.

Tory MP Kevin Hollinrake, a prominent voice on fair business banking, called the row 'extraordinary'.

He said: 'This has absolutely damaged Andrew Bailey's credibility, 100 per cent. He is part of the phenomenally important financial sector and of course he must take responsibility for his errors.'

Gloster's report, published last December, addressed the FCA's failures relating to the collapse of London Capital & Finance at a time when Bailey was chief executive of the City watchdog.

The report accused Bailey of overseeing an ineffective culture and failing to make changes quickly enough to protect savers in the LCF scandal.

It added that Bailey had tried to persuade Gloster not to name him as personally responsible, a request the former judge found 'disappointing' and refused to grant.

Bailey told the Treasury Select Committee this week there had been a 'fundamental misunderstanding' and that he fully accepted responsibility for the failings. He said he was 'angry' with any suggestion he wanted to redact his name entirely.

He said he had only wanted his name removed where there was a suggestion that he was personally culpable for the failings, as he drew a distinction between responsibility and blame.

Once the ambiguity between culpability and responsibility was removed from the draft report, Bailey said, he was happy to be named.

But Gloster said in a letter to the Treasury Committee's chair Mel Stride on Monday that Bailey had made errors when speaking to the committee.

She wrote: 'To the extent that Mr Bailey's evidence was that his representations to me were limited to requesting a distinction between personal culpability and responsibility (which was my understanding of his evidence today), I must disagree.'

She quoted from submissions which Bailey's lawyers had sent her. One said: 'No benefit arises (and the draft report's findings and conclusions are not strengthened) by the attribution of responsibility to particular individuals - whether Mr Bailey or the executive directors of supervision.

'This is a freestanding reason for the removal of the references to Mr Bailey's responsibility.'

Andrea Hall, who leads the LCF bondholders' action group, said victims were 'beyond upset, beyond annoyed' with Bailey.

She said: '6.7million of public money was spent on the investigation. We would expect a world-class chief executive to have the ability to express himself clearly, relevantly and factually, without being defensive or aggressive, while still being appropriately assertive.

'LCF bondholders are now horrified at this latest development.'

The Bank of England said: 'As the Governor made clear in Parliament, his legal representations were made in the context of a draft report which was not clear on the distinction between personal culpability or blame, and responsibility.

If that had been made clear in the draft report, the Governor would not have needed to make the representations. At no point, was his intention to imply he did not take full responsibility.

'He fully accepts responsibility for everything that occurred during his time at the FCA and welcomed the opportunity yesterday to reiterate that, and his apology to bondholders.'
Kids want to fish? You don't know how yourself? Here's a little help
The Australian scientist on the small team of World Health Organisation experts investigating the origins of COVID-19 says he believes the virus began in China, despite WHOs official findings remaining inconclusive.

Professor Dominic Dwyer, a microbiologist and infectious diseases expert with NSW Health, was the sole Australian among a 14-strong WHO team in Wuhan that worked to identify the source of the coronavirus pandemic.

I think it started in China, Professor Dwyer told Nine News. I think the evidence for it starting elsewhere in the world is actually very limited. There is some evidence but its not really very good.

Professor Dwyer waves at journalists from a hotel room balcony in Wuhan on January 29. Credit:AP

Professor Dwyer, who is in hotel quarantine in Sydney after flying back from China on Wednesday, said the most likely source of the virus was bats, before another animal such as a cat passed it on to humans.

Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-10 18:12:41|Editor: huaxia

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MOGADISHU, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- Somali President Mohamed Farmajo has called for a new round of consultative talks on Feb. 15 to help break the deadlock on the electoral process.

The talks, to be held in Garowe, the capital of the semi-autonomous region of Puntland, comes after negotiations on the electoral process between the government and leaders of federal member states collapsed on Feb. 5 in the central town of Dhusamareb.

The president will host a "federal and state-level summit on the implementation" of the Sept. 17, 2020, "Elections Agreement," the presidency said in a statement issued on Tuesday evening.

Farmajo, whose four-year term ended on Feb. 8, has blamed unnamed foreign interventions for the failure of the talks despite his side making compromises. He accused Puntland and Jubbaland states of refusing to support the pre-election deal.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Mohamed Hussein Roble welcomed the talks, saying his government is making significant efforts to facilitate the conference and to expedite the implementation of the politically negotiated electoral model reached on Sept. 17, 2020 that guided the country's electoral process.

He said his government played an effective role in bringing together different stakeholders on the implementation of the already ratified pre-election deal and in trying to unite at this critical juncture of the political process in the country.

The Garowe talks also come amid pressure from the international community, which has called for an immediate resumption of talks to find a way forward for the conduct of delayed elections.

The United Nations Security Council, the European Union and the African Union have warned that delays in the election will only increase the risk of instability.

Puntland state has also welcomed the meeting, but said the talks should be moved to Mogadishu to ensure participation of stakeholders and the international community. Enditem



Olympic athlete Adam Rippon has announced that he's engaged to be married to boyfriend Jussi-Pekka Kajaala.

The 31-year-old figure skater - who won a bronze medal at the 2018 Winter Olympics and was one of the first openly gay men to compete for Team USA - confirmed the exciting news via Instagram on Wednesday.

He also revealed that the pair popped the question to one another while in Finland in December last year, with both of them getting down on one knee, having also chosen the rings together.

Engaged! Olympian Adam Rippon reveals he and boyfriend Jussi-Pekka Kajaala proposed to each other in Finland: 'He's my cheerleader'

The pair have been in a long-distance relationship since first meeting on Tinder in 2018, with Rippon residing in Los Angeles and Kajaala in his native Finland.

'I'm excited to marry JP because he's just the best,' Rippon told People in a statement. 'He's kind, he's funny, and he's just as beautiful on the inside as he is on the out (which is a lot). He's my cheerleader and I'm his. I just love him a lot.'

The pair are said to have both got down on one knee as they do "everything together" and even bought their rings at the same time as one another.

In it together: The pair are said to have picked out their rings together and both got down on one knee for the proposal in Finland last year

Cute: The pair are said to have both got down on one knee as they do "everything together" and even bought their rings at the same time as one another

"We did it at the same time so we both got to be the one who proposed!" he added.

However, Rippon says they haven't started wedding planning yet, as they'll struggle to get both sides of the family together amid a pandemic.

In 2019, Rippon was asked about whether marriage was on the cards for the couple, responding: 'It would be nice. My whole family loves him and he's just a great guy. My family loves him, my mom loves him.'

The pair went Instagram official with their relationship in 2018, when Rippon posted a shirtless shot of the duo with the caption: 'Good boys Finnish first' along with a Finland flag emoji.

Time apart: The couple have been forced to spend much of their time apart amid the pandemic

Kajaala - who is building a following on his own YouTube channel - also shared the same engagement snap to his Instagram on Wednesday, with the caption: 'No woman no cry.'

Rippon explained to GMA how the pandemic had forced the pair to spend much of last year apart, which only made their feelings grow stronger.

"We are used to being in a long-distance relationship, but weve had more time to stay in touch with each other because we have both been working from home," Rippon told them.
Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga said Wednesday he expects Japan's COVID-19 vaccination program to begin next week.

Suga said Japan will begin to utilise its doses of the Pzifer-BioNTech vaccine "after confirming its efficacy and safety".

Speaking during a government meeting, the prime minister said the cooperation of local governments and health workers was key to the success of the rollout.

Earlier this month, he announced an extension of a coronavirus state of emergency in Tokyo and nine other areas through March 7.

Under the state of emergency, the government has issued non-binding requests for people to avoid crowds and dining out in groups, and for restaurants and bars to close by 8 p.m.

(Disclaimer: This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed; only the image & headline may have been reworked by www.republicworld.com)




Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-10 17:33:07|Editor: huaxia

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BISHKEK, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- A COVID-19 vaccination campaign will begin in Kyrgyzstan on March 1, the country's Health Minister Alymkadyr Beishenaliev said on Wednesday.

Speaking on state radio, the minister said that 504,000 doses of AstraZeneca vaccine will arrive in Kyrgyzstan in late February under COVAX, a global initiative to ensure quick and equal access to vaccines against COVID-19.

Beishenaliev said that in order for life to return to normal, it is necessary to vaccinate at least 70-80 percent of the population.

"We have developed a national vaccination program. According to the program, first of all, doctors, teachers, border guards will be vaccinated, that is, those persons who are in direct contact with large masses of people," Beishenaliev noted.

The minister also said that negotiations are underway to secure Russian and Chinese vaccines.

"To date, we have ordered 500,000 doses of the Russian vaccine. The Foreign Ministry is also working with China on the supply of vaccines," he said. Enditem
[February 10, 2021] Cribl Closes FY2020 with Significant Customer Momentum, Expands Leadership Team to Support Rapid Growth

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Cribl , the leading Observability Pipeline company, today announced a breakout FY2020 with notable customer and employee growth in an extremely challenging environment. The company more than doubled the number of customers and expanded its team by 350%, setting the stage for an outstanding FY2021. Over the last year, Cribl hit several important company milestones furthering its leadership position in the Observability market. After acquiring global early adopters including Autodesk , TransUnion , Accuhealth and BlueVoyant , Cribl officially unveiled LogStream, its Observability Pipeline, with $35M in Series B Funding from Sequoia Capital and CRV in October. With Cribl LogStream, companies are empowered to own and use their machine data in ways that weren't possible before, such as analyzing security data in-flight or experimenting with new log analytics vendors, while reducing inrastructure costs by 30% on average.



"As the first quarter came to a close last year, there were so many uncertainties and like many others, we didn't have a full understanding of what the rest of the year would bring," stated Clint Sharp, co-founder and CEO of Cribl. "I'm completely humbled for what we've been able to accomplish as a company and so proud of our team. Not only did we drive innovation in the industry and help support more customers during a challenging time, we attracted top notch talent and exceeded expectations. I look forward to our next phase of growth and continued success for Cribl and our customers in 2021." In FY2020 the company also expanded its leadership team to support customer demand, product innovation, and overall company growth. With a wide range of expertise from B2B and consumer brands to high-growth and public companies, appointments include: Matt Bauer, vice president of sales, Abby Strong, vice president of marketing, Zachary Johnson, vice president of finance, and Farrah Bui, chief of staff. The company also furthered its industry expertise with the addition of Nick Heudecker, former Gartner VP analyst, to drive market strategy and intelligence.

"Cribl presents an amazing opportunity," stated Heudecker. "Companies are completely overwhelmed with the amount of machine data in their environment. And the influx from remote workers has dramatically added to the problem. Organizations are desperate to know where they need to focus their efforts to get the most out of this data. Cribl gives companies a choice - LogStream enables them to get the right data to the right place at the right time, cutting costs and improving productivity. With Cribl, customers can make important business decisions while decreasing overall infrastructure costs." To learn more please read Strong's recent blog, Chasing a Pipe Dream . About Cribl

Cribl is a company built to solve customer challenges and enable customer choice. Its solutions deliver innovative and customizable controls to route security and machine data where it has the most value. We call this an Observability Pipeline, and it helps slash costs, improve performance, and get the right data, to the right destinations, in the right formats, at the right time. Join over 50 early adopters, including market leaders such as TransUnion and Autodesk, to take control and shape your data. Founded in 2017, Cribl is headquartered in San Francisco, CA. For more information, please visit www.cribl.io or our LinkedIn , Twitter , or Slack community. Media Contact

Angelique Faul

media@cribl.io View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cribl-closes-fy2020-with-significant-customer-momentum-expands-leadership-team-to-support-rapid-growth-301225777.html SOURCE Cribl

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By focusing on hot issues and the voice of China, the Gala tells many China stories with positive energy. Except for the upgrade on theme, performance and stage illusion, two sub-venues are also set up in Shantou, Guangdong province and Longyan, Fujian province, both of which are hometowns of overseas Chinese. Through these two channels, the overseas Chinese can have a great enjoyment in their familiar accent and local culture, and share the happiness of Chinese new year. In the show, host He Jiong tells a moving story of the overseas Chinese named Liu Danhong, who helped hundreds of Chinese people who were trapped on a cruise back home during the epidemic. Students studying abroad, as the representatives of overseas Chinese, also expressed their new year wishes through online videos.

Moreover, the show also tells the story which embodies the Chinese power and Chinese soul. Guests are invited to the stage to tell the Chang'e-5 story and to show the great power of China space work. Long Xianlan and his family members from Shibadong village, where the targeted poverty alleviation was first initiated, share their great changes and fruits of poverty alleviation success.

For more moments, please stay tuned to A Worldwide Celebration: Chinese New Year 2021 at 19:30 on Lunar New Year's Day (12th Feb.) on Hunan TV.

Image Attachments Links:

Link: http://asianetnews.net/view-attachment?attach-id=384116

Caption: Land of Ceremonies performed by Ayanga and He Changxi to introduce Chinese traditional culture to the world

Link: http://asianetnews.net/view-attachment?attach-id=384122

Caption: Host Group of 2021 Hunan TV Chinese Spring Festival Gala

SOURCE Hunan Broadcasting System
More than 100 million Americans are under a winter weather advisories as five storms threaten a blitz of snow and sleet from Washington state to Washington, DC, and as far south as Louisiana and Mississippi.

'Winter weather hazards are the big story across the U.S. as large numbers of the population will see significant concerns for snow, ice and extreme cold temperatures the next few days,' the National Weather Service (NWS)'s prediction center tweeted.

The NWS said the winter blast is going to cause 'a couple of winter weather events' over the next few days, including an 'ice storm and some snow from the southern Plains to the Mid-Atlantic'.

'Meanwhile, a Pacific system will interact with cold air mass for heavy snow and a mix in the Northwest,' the NWS wrote.

Icy blasts pummeled parts of the Midwest on Wednesday, the first of five storms to hit the US throughout the rest of this week.

More than 100 million Americans are under a winter weather advisories as another winter storm is expected to bring additional snowfall and freezing temperatures this week

Icy blasts pummeled parts of the US Midwest on Wednesday, the first of five storms to hit the US throughout the rest of this week. Parts of New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey are expected to get snow starting Wednesday night

The NWS said the winter blast is going to cause 'a couple of winter weather events' over the next few days, including an 'ice storm and some snow from the southern Plains to the Mid-Atlantic'

Snow is expected from Virginia to New York through Friday (depicted above)

Frigid temperatures as low as minus 36 degrees Fahrenheit in Cut Bank, Montana, on Wednesday were blamed on a polar vortex threatening to move south as it hovers at the Canadian border, said meteorologist Dan Petersen at the National Weather Service's Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland.

'It's like a rapid-fire series of multiple storms coming,' Petersen said.

Chicago has already recorded its sixth straight day below freezing and residents of the city have at least another week to deal with the Arctic air.

'It is winter, but the temperatures coming are well below normal - and even record-breaking in many spots - for this time of the year,' the NWS warned.

The polar vortex is a vast frigid air mass high up in the atmosphere, bringing with it frigid temperatures that can be prolonged if a storm develops.

'The cold air will be there waiting for the storm. When a storm goes by, the situation around the storm will continue to reinforce the cold air that's in place,' Petersen said.

The first of those storms on Wednesday bombarded Kentucky, southern Illinois, northwestern Tennessee and eastern and central Arkansas.

About a half inch of ice is expected in places like Arkansas, Tennessee and Kentucky.

Chicago (pictured) has already recorded its sixth straight day below freezing and residents of the city have at least another week to deal with the Arctic air

About a half inch of ice is expected in places like Arkansas, Tennessee and Kentucky (depicted)

For Valentine's Day weekend, several states will see below freezing temperatures

Forecasters warned that ice accumulation could cause power outages and dangerous travel well into the weekend.

'A lot of areas have light freezing drizzle, and it's going to get heavier later today,' Petersen said. 'That has the ability to break down power lines and, of course, it's very difficult to travel on icy roads.'

Next up is a storm expected on Thursday to drop 3 to 5 inches of snow on West Virginia into Virginia and the nation's capitol in Washington, DC.

Winter storm warnings were issued for the same time for metropolitan Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington. A storm is predicted to bring up to 8 inches of snow in parts of Oregon and Washington.

On Saturday, a brewing storm threatens to head for New York and New England, fueled by snow likely to turn to sleet and freezing rain in the mid-Atlantic states.

In New York, the NWS reported that high temperatures across much of the Tri-State Area averaged around the freezing mark on Wednesday.

'High temperatures on this date are normally around 40,' the NWS tweeted.

Parts of Virginia to New York could see more than 6 inches of snow this week, with the most coming down on Friday.

The first wave of snow for the area is set to arrive Wednesday evening and taper off Thursday morning. The second wave is expected Thursday evening into Friday morning.

The entire storm system is likely to hit places like Maryland and Delaware with heavier snow while lighter snow accumulations could be seen in New Jersey, forecasters said.

Beginning Wednesday night and into Thursday, the NWS is anticipating 2 to 3 inches of snow in South Jersey, 1 to 3 inches of snow in Central Jersey and less than an inch in North Jersey.

Forecasters have said that the wintry mix could create hazardous travel conditions - especially on any untreated roads - in parts of the Northeast, including in areas of New York and Connecticut.

The end-of-week storm system comes just after a smaller one pushed through the Northeast on Tuesday. The snow came down at its steadiest in the Boston region (pictured) in the mid- to late afternoon

Parkway was nearly a whiteout during a snowstorm in Schuylkill Haven, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday

On Sunday yet another large system of 'significant' snow and freezing rain is likely to slam the southern Plains and Mississippi Valley before heading north into the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes, he said.

'Possible freezing rain in northern Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee. There aren't too many ice storms down there so this will definitely stand out,' Petersen said.

The end-of-week storm system comes just after a smaller one pushed through the Northeast on Tuesday.

The snow came down at its steadiest in the Boston region in the mid- to late afternoon.

Logan International Airport advised travelers to check with their airline on the status of their flight due to the wintery weather and to allow for extra time to get to and from the airport.

Two weekends ago, Winter Storm Orlena battered the Northeast, dropping more than 2 feet of snow in parts of New Jersey. New York City's Central Park saw more than 17 inches of snow.

The lumbering storm gathered force on February 1, shutting down coronavirus vaccination sites, closing schools and halting transit.

This weekend's storm system is the third snowstorm to hit the region in the past 10 days.
A formal complaint has been lodged with Belfast City Council and the police chief over a threat against Gerry Adams on a banner placed at City Hall.

A solicitor acting for the former Sinn Fein President said an image on the banner can only be construed as a threat to kill and a hate crime.

It appeared at the front railings of Belfast City Hall on Saturday February 6.

Expand Close The banner that appeared on Saturday (Sinn Fein/PA) / Facebook

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Whatsapp The banner that appeared on Saturday (Sinn Fein/PA)

Sinn Fein group leader on Belfast City Council Ciaran Beattie said he previously raised the matter with police.

In a statement Mr Adams said there can be no place for hate crime or public threats.

The banner included an image of me under the title Tick-Tock.

It also contained abusive and sectarian language underneath, he said.

The author/authors claim to have killed one person and clearly signal their intent to kill me.

I believe the banner is a breach of the councils by-laws and constitutes a hate crime and a threat to kill.

Mr Adams says PSNI Chief Constable Simon Byrne has been asked to identify those behind the banner and whether inquiries have been made around securing any relevant CCTV footage.

Adams reports threat and hate crime.There can be no place for hate crime or public threats. The PSNI has a responsibility to confront those responsible for such offences when they appear and to pursue those responsible through the courts. https://t.co/IFypPl5V5Q  Gerry Adams (@GerryAdamsSF) February 10, 2021

He also asked the police chief whether a criminal investigation is under way.

I have also written to Belfast City Councils Legal & Civil Services about the display of the banner and making a formal complaint, he said.

The area in front of City Hall is monitored by CCTV and I have asked what steps have been taken to secure the footage and any other available evidence also confirm that you have or will notify the PSNI and co-operate fully insofar as securing any evidence which would assist in their investigation of a hate crime.

I have also asked if security officials at Belfast City Council will be monitoring the situation at future Saturday demonstrations at the entrance to Belfast City Hall to avoid the repetition of any further offence.

He added: There can be no place for hate crime or public threats.

The PSNI has a responsibility to confront those responsible for such offences when they appear and to pursue those responsible through the courts.

The council responded: Belfast City Council has received correspondence regarding a banner which appeared on railings outside City Hall on Saturday February 6.

We are currently investigating this matter and have made PSNI aware of the complaint.
Strategic Partnership Follows PIPE Investment in EVBox's Planned Business Combination with TPG Pace Beneficial Finance Corp.

WICHITA, Kan., Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Koch Strategic Platforms ("KSP"), a subsidiary of Koch Investments, announced today a strategic partnership with EVBox, a pioneer in the development of electric vehicle ("EV") charging station solutions. KSP is a newly formed group created to evaluate growth opportunities and investments in companies working in "new economy" areas. KSP aims to be the preferred partner beyond capital investment by leveraging the resources and capabilities of Koch Industries - not only creating new platforms for Koch but also accelerating growth for companies in which it invests.

Founded in the Netherlands with offices across Europe and North America, EVBox recently agreed to a business combination with TPG Pace Beneficial Finance Corp. (NYSE: TPGY.U, TPGY, TPGY WS), which will result in the company being publicly listed on the NYSE and provide it with growth capital for expansion. Koch Investments is participating in that transaction as an investor in TPG Pace's fully committed Private Investment in Public Equity ("PIPE"), which will provide EVBox with additional growth capital to expand its reach globally.

As part of the partnership, KSP will help EVBox continue to scale its operations across North America. KSP and EVBox will explore opportunities to leverage the power of Koch companies' leading market positions to accelerate the growth of EVBox in the United States and around the world. The two companies will look to collaborate on matters ranging from software and hardware technology integration, project management, operations excellence, and domestic sales and marketing.

Additionally, the companies will evaluate charging station installations at various Koch corporate locations around the world. Koch Industries is the largest privately held company in North America with more than $115 billion in revenue, according to Forbes, and more than 122,000 employees globally.

"Koch is very excited to invest in and partner with EVBox as it continues to grow and build on its strong momentum," said Steve Feilmeier, President of Koch Investments. "For over a decade, EVBox has been a global leader in charging strategies and solutions, having shipped more than 200,000 charge points to customers in 70 countries. With its market-leading, flexible architecture software-enabled platform designed to meet the needs of a broad range of customer segments, EVBox is an ideal candidate for rapid expansion in the U.S."

"As we position EVBox for global expansion, this partnership with KSP will provide us with tremendous insights and strategic growth opportunities to bring our market-leading charging solutions to the United States and beyond, while empowering KSP to help accelerate transformative energy solutions for consumers across the globe," said Kristof Vereenooghe, President and CEO of EVBox Group. "Our mutual focus on developing innovative products and services that improve lives and consume fewer resources, combined with TPG Pace's extensive track record of supporting high-growth ESG companies, will further position EVBox to accelerate the next step in its growth strategy as the world moves toward EV adoption globally."

"The world continues to see significant change as technology and innovation impact everything we do," says David Park, President of Koch Strategic Platforms. "Our investment in EVBox demonstrates Koch's continuous commitment to evaluating specific industries for potential investment opportunities, including the energy transformation space."

The strategic relationship with EVBox represents a broader developing relationship between Koch Investments and TPG Pace. Koch Investments also participated in the recent TPG Pace transaction with Nerdy (NYSE: PACE), leading direct-to-consumer, curated gig economy platform for live online learning benefiting both learners and experts.

About Koch Strategic Platforms

With offices in Atlanta and Wichita, KSP desires to be the preferred investment partner with growth focused, strategic companies who are innovating in "new economy" industries. Created in 2020, the KSP team pursues public and private investments with companies where long-term mutual benefit can be realized.

About EVBox Group

Founded in 2010, EVBox Group empowers forward-thinking businesses to build a sustainable future by providing flexible and scalable electric vehicle charging solutions. With its extensive portfolio of commercial and ultra-fast EVBox charging stations, as well as scalable charging management software engineered by Everon, EVBox Group ensures that electric mobility is accessible to everyone.

EVBox Group is a leader in R&D, with facilities across Europe and North America developing groundbreaking electric vehicle charging technology. With offices across the globe, including Amsterdam, Bordeaux, Munich, and Chicago, and strong foundations in dozens of markets, EVBox Group is working to shape a sustainable future of transportation.

In 2021, EVBox Group will become a public company listed on the New York Stock Exchange via a business combination with TPG Pace Beneficial Finance (NYSE: TPGY) and initial investors BlackRock, Inclusive Capital, Neuberger Berman Funds, and Wellington Management.

About TPG Pace Group and TPG Pace Beneficial Finance

TPG Pace Group is TPG's dedicated permanent capital platform. TPG Pace Group has a long-term, patient, and highly flexible investor base, allowing it to seek compelling opportunities that will thrive in the public markets. TPG Pace Group has sponsored five special purpose acquisition companies ("SPACs") and raised more than $3 billion since 2015.

TPG Pace Beneficial Finance raised $350 million in its October 2020 IPO in order to seek a business combination target that combines attractive business fundamentals with, or with the potential for strong environmental, social and governance ("ESG") principles and practices. For more information, visit https://www.tpg.com/pace-beneficial-finance.

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Feature Article

HL-LHC Accelerator Upgrade Project receives approval to move full-speed-ahead from DOE

DOE/Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

The U.S. Department of Energy has formally approved the start of execution of the High-Luminosity LHC Accelerator Upgrade Project being carried out at eight U.S. institutions.

The approval, known as Critical Decision 3, or CD-3, is the endorsement by DOE to proceed with the full production of the U.S. contribution to the high-luminosity upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider, or HL-LHC, at the European laboratory CERN.

Fermilab leads the U.S. upgrade effort, which comprises two cutting-edge technologies: accelerator magnets and cavities. Under the HL-LHC Accelerator Upgrade Project, or AUP, the U.S. collaborators will contribute 16 magnets to dramatically focus the LHC's near-light-speed particle beams to a tiny volume before colliding. The collaborators are also contributing eight superconducting cavities, radio-frequency devices designed to manipulate the powerful beams. (They will also provide four spare magnets and two spare cavities.)

With CD-3 approval, AUP collaborators can now move full-speed-ahead building and delivering the crucial components. The new instruments will enable a giant leap in the number of particle collisions at the future HL-LHC, a 10-fold increase compared to the current LHC.

The high-luminosity upgrade to the Large Hadron Collider will enable physicists to study particles such as the Higgs boson in greater detail. And the increase in the number of collisions could also uncover rare physics phenomena or signs of new physics.

"Gaining DOE's endorsement to move to full production is a huge achievement. Knowing what it means for the future of particle physics -- for the new physics that the HL-LHC will reveal and for future accelerators enabled by these technologies -- makes it even more gratifying," said Giorgio Apollinari, Fermilab scientist and HL-LHC AUP project manager. "I congratulate the entire AUP team on the milestone. They have been instrumental in ensuring the development and technical successes of the leading-edge technologies needed for the HL-LHC."

The AUP is supported by the DOE Office of Science. The AUP team consists of six U.S. laboratories and two universities: Fermilab, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (all DOE national laboratories), the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, Old Dominion University and the University of Florida.

The AUP magnets use conductors made of niobium-tin to generate a stronger magnetic field compared to predecessor technology. These world-record-setting magnets will have their debut in the HL-LHC: Its run will be the first time that U.S.-built niobium-tin magnets will be used in a particle accelerator for particle physics research.

The 16 magnets will be installed in eight cryoassemblies -- cooling and housing units that enable the magnets' superconductivity.

"It is very exciting to see this cutting-edge magnet technology, which is enabling breakthrough science at the LHC, enter the production phase after the successful tests of our first magnets and with the approval of CD-3," said scientist Kathleen Amm, the Brookhaven representative for the Accelerator Upgrade Project and director of Brookhaven's Magnet Division. "The incredible talent across our national laboratories working seamlessly has made this possible."

The AUP accelerator cavities, made of niobium, are a type known as "crab cavities," manipulating the beam in a particular way to increase the likelihood of particle collisions. While Fermilab high-performance superconducting cavities have already been put to good use in accelerators such as XFEL in Germany or LCLS-II at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, the operation of these crab cavities in the HL-LHC will be the first application of Fermilab superconducting radio-frequency technology -- building upon critical contributions from Jefferson Lab, Old Dominion University, SLAC and industrial partners -- in a particle-physics-dedicated accelerator.

At the Large Hadron Collider, beams of protons race in opposite directions around the collider's 17-mile circumference, colliding at high energies at four specific interaction points along the way. Scientists study the collisions to better understand nature's constituent components and to look for exotic states of matter, such as dark matter.

The HL-LHC AUP magnets and cavities will be positioned near two of the LHC's collision points -- the ATLAS and CMS particle detectors. These giant, stories-high instruments are also being upgraded to take full advantage of the HL-LHC's more rapid-fire collisions.

Over the course of the HL-LHC Accelerator Upgrade Project, the AUP team has seen one success after another, hitting both technological and project milestones according to the schedule established in 2015, says Apollinari. The U.S. collaboration's first focusing magnet, completed last year, met or exceeded specifications.

"Building such an ambitious machine requires not only vision but discipline in carrying it out -- tight, transparent, respectful coordination with partners, including with funding agencies and the independent reviewers," Apollinari said. "The achievement is not only that we received CD-3 approval, but how we got here. We met our goals on a timescale that was put down on paper five years ago. That's thanks to incredible teamwork of everyone involved."

Fermilab, Brookhaven National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are currently building the components and plan to begin delivering the first magnet cryoassembly by late 2021 for critical tests. Components will be installed in the HL-LHC from 2025 to early 2027. The HL-LHC is expected to start operations in 2027 and run through the 2030s.

"HL-LHC is a truly global scientific and engineering undertaking that will usher in a new era of research and discovery in particle physics. AUP plays a critical role in making this possible," said Fermilab Director Nigel Lockyer. "The technologies developed by AUP will be important not only for the operation of HL-LHC, but also for the viability of future hadron colliders and the future of the field of particles -- beyond the end of the HL-LHC's run."

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Learn more about the LHC Accelerator Upgrade project, the AUP focusing magnets and the AUP cavities.

Fermilab is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.
Kreischer Miller and Century team up to bring integrated credit card processing into Microsoft Dynamics. The combination of EBizCharge and Microsoft Dynamics will streamline payment processing for our eCommerce and ERP customers. -- J.T. Hardy, manager at Technology Solutions Group at Kreischer Miller.

Century Business Solutions is excited to announce its partnership with Kreischer Miller, a leading independent accounting, tax, and business advisory firm, to allow credit card processing directly within Microsoft Dynamics Business Central and Microsoft Dynamics GP.

Century Business Solutions development team has built a payment integration for Microsoft Dynamics that uses Centurys proprietary payment gateway, EBizCharge, to provide credit card processing for thousands of merchants across the country.

Centurys credit card integration allows merchants to process credit cards from directly within Microsoft Dynamics Business Central and Microsoft Dynamics GP.

The powerful EBizCharge payment gateway is designed to lower processing fees by submitting line-item details directly to the bank. EBizCharge is fully PCI compliant and offers advanced data encryption and tokenization technology to ensure maximum transaction security within Microsoft Dynamics. EBizCharge is compatible with over 100 leading ERP and accounting systems and major online shopping carts and provides unlimited transaction and batch history for reporting purposes.

The combination of EBizCharge and Microsoft Dynamics will streamline payment processing for our eCommerce and ERP customers, lowering software cost of ownership and enabling an improved customer experience to end customers, said J.T. Hardy, manager at Technology Solutions Group at Kreischer Miller.

With EBizCharge, users can run custom reports, sort through transactions by category, and immediately release funds when issuing refunds.

The partnership between Kreischer Miller and Century Business Solutions will help streamline workflow, eliminate double data entry, and make payment processing more efficient within Microsoft Dynamics Business Central and Microsoft Dynamics GP.

About Century Business Solutions

Century Business Solutions is reinventing the way companies accept credit card payments with their all-in-one payment solution, EBizCharge. EBizCharge is one of the top payment gateway alternatives to its more expensive and inefficient counterparts and is specifically designed to reduce payment processing costs and inefficiencies. EBizCharge integrates seamlessly with over 100+ accounting, ERP, CRM, and shopping cart systems, including QuickBooks, Sage, SAP B1, Microsoft Dynamics, Acumatica, Magento, and WooCommerce. Century is partnered and certified with Microsoft Dynamics, Acumatica, SAP, Oracle, QuickBooks, WooCommerce, Magento, and many more. For more information, visit https://www.centurybizsolutions.net.

About Kreischer Miller

Kreischer Miller is a leading independent accounting, tax, and advisory firm serving the Greater Philadelphia and Lehigh Valley areas. Weve built our firm to respond to the unique needs of private companies, helping them smoothly transition through growth phases, business cycles, and ownership changes. The companies we work with quickly adapt and respond to changing market opportunities and challenges. Thats why our focus is on being responsive, decisive, and forward-thinking. Were up to the challengealways looking at the road ahead, not in the rear-view mirror. For more information, visit http://www.kmco.com.
Shaadi Mubarak and Kalyana Lakshmi scheme in TRS government is now limited to only one beneficiary per family (Image source: Facebook)

Hyderabad: Families from the economically backward sections that hoped to get financial aid for weddings under the Shaadi Mubarak and Kalyana Lakshmi schemes are finding that the schemes are now limited to just one beneficiary from a family.

The government orders pertaining to the eligibility criteria for these two schemes are silent about the restriction on the number of beneficiaries from a family.

In the past, there were instances of more than two young women from the same family receiving the schemes benefit. Shaadi Mubarak and Kalyana Lakshmi schemes provide beneficiary families with a financial aid of 1,00,116 in the form of a grant from the state government to cover the costs of the wedding.

Even until two weeks ago, people were able to file applications online at the state government portal http://epasswebsite.cgg.gov.in for their second or third daughters. But, during the past fortnight, people have not been able to submit their applications online as officials said the portal was being upgraded.

On Tuesday, the portal was reopened for filing of applications. But some families that sought to apply for the grant for the second time, for marriage of their daughters, found that the system rejected their application.

Social activist Mohammed Khalid said he had in the past helped poor parents in filing the online applications for the second or third girl from a family. The synchronization of the Aadhaar numbers of the parents on the server of the portal may be creating this problem. It was possible these numbers could get automatically flagged as they were in the list of previous beneficiaries.

A senior official at the minority welfare department clarified that there has been no fresh communication from the government recommending any such restriction. We will inquire into it with the Centre for Good Governance, the official said.
(Philadelphia, PA) - While the COVID-19 pandemic brought most of the country to a standstill in March 2020, Philadelphia trauma surgeons noticed an alarming trend in the incidence of firearm violence. Instead of decreasing with containment measures, firearm-injured patients were presenting at even higher rates to Temple University Hospital and other trauma centers around the city.

A team led by Jessica H. Beard, MD, MPH, FACS, Assistant Professor of Surgery and Director of Trauma Research at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University (LKSOM), sought to determine the magnitude of Philadelphia's increase in firearm violence during the COVID-19 pandemic. They also aimed to understand potential causes of the increase by trying to pinpoint when the increase occurred. They hypothesized that two major events of 2020 could explain the increase in firearm violence in Philadelphia: the enactment of public health policies designed to contain COVID-19 and a national reckoning with systemic racism, including widespread protests sparked by the police killing of George Floyd.

In a new research letter published in JAMA, Dr. Beard and her team used the Philadelphia Police registry data of shooting victims from January 1, 2016 through November 26, 2020 to determine when the spike in firearm violence began. They examined changes in the number of individuals shot per week in the city following the enactment of Philadelphia's first COVID-19 containment policy (closure of non-essential businesses) on March 16, 2020, and following the killing of George Floyd on May 25, 2020.

The team found that there were 7,159 individuals shot in the city overall during the 256 weeks included in the study. Prior to Philadelphia's first COVID-19 containment policy, there was an average of 25 individuals shot per week. In the weeks after that policy was put in place on March 16, 2020, the average number of individuals shot per week climbed to 46. A time-series analysis found that the increase in firearm violence was strongly associated with the enactment of COVID-19 containment policies. The killing of George Floyd was not associated with any significant increase in the rate of gun violence in the study model.

These findings indicate a significant and sustained increase in firearm violence in Philadelphia following enactment of COVID-19 containment policies.

"In the city of Philadelphia, shootings are often geographically concentrated in lower-income communities," Dr. Beard said. "These communities have not only been disproportionately affected by the coronavirus disease itself, but the pandemic and its associated policies have also exacerbated issues that were already present, including unemployment, poverty, structural racism and place-based economic disinvestment, which are empirically tied to firearm violence in Philadelphia. Our research shows that the measures put in place to contain the pandemic for health and safety reasons had a significant and sustained association with increased firearm violence in the city. In addition to mitigating the impact of COVID-19 in Philadelphia, we must also come together to address what is now an epidemic of gun violence in the city."

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Other researchers involved in the study include Amy J. Goldberg and Zoe Maher in the Department of Surgery, Division of Trauma and Surgical Critical Care, at LKSOM; Sara F. Jacoby in the Department of Family and Community Health at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing; Beidi Dong in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society, at George Mason University; Elinore J. Kaufman in the Division of Traumatology, Surgical Critical Care and Emergency Surgery at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania; and senior author Christopher N. Morrison in the Department of Epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University.

About Temple Health

Temple University Health System (TUHS) is a $2.2 billion academic health system dedicated to providing access to quality patient care and supporting excellence in medical education and research. The Health System consists of Temple University Hospital (TUH); TUH-Episcopal Campus; TUH-Northeastern Campus; The Hospital of Fox Chase Cancer Center and Affiliates, an NCI-designated comprehensive cancer center; Jeanes Hospital, a community-based hospital offering medical, surgical and emergency services; Temple Transport Team, a ground and air-ambulance company; Temple Physicians, Inc., a network of community-based specialty and primary-care physician practices; and Temple Faculty Practice Plan, Inc., TUHS's physician practice plan comprised of more than 500 full-time and part-time academic physicians in 20 clinical departments. TUHS is affiliated with the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University.

Temple Health refers to the health, education and research activities carried out by the affiliates of Temple University Health System (TUHS) and by the Katz School of Medicine. TUHS neither provides nor controls the provision of health care. All health care is provided by its member organizations or independent health care providers affiliated with TUHS member organizations. Each TUHS member organization is owned and operated pursuant to its governing documents.

It is the policy of Temple University Hospital and Fox Chase Cancer Center that no one shall be excluded from or denied the benefits of or participation in the delivery of quality medical care on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity/expression, disability, age, ancestry, color, national origin, physical ability, level of education, or source of payment.
At long last, the city of Monrovia has been turned into a 'new city of lights'. This was made manifest last Friday by the president of Liberia, Dr. George M. Weah.

It was a scene of jubilation for several hours by residents and nonresidents around the Clara Town area; where the switch was turned on.

"For me, it is real development for us. For just three years this boy has been in office to bring street lights, is good for us. Some government stayed in the chair for 12 years and only told us, small light today and big light tomorrow. We never saw that big light until they left," Ma Annie, a resident of Clara Town told this reporter.

Another resident who danced for several minutes before the lights were turned on said; "I am dancing because my son na do it. Manneh na do it. All the big, big people who know the book in the past never do this one, but small boy like this na bring us light," Ma Edith said. She said, the work of president Weah was something that every good Liberian needed to commend.

Addressing guests and well-wishers, president Weah said, he was happy to turn on the street lights. "I am grateful to God for this project for me to chase away darkness."

"This is part of the government's major initiative to bring lights to the darkness that citizens have been experiencing for many years," he added.

He said his government would ensure that other parts of the country benefit from his developments. He however warned people who were removing parts of the poles to desist or they would face the full weight of the law.

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On the same day, the lighting of the city was done simultaneously by Monrovia City Mayor Jefferson T. Koijee from Central Monrovia area while Montserrado County Senator Saah Joseph turned on the one from ELWA to Vamoma.

According to president Weah, Liberians have been living in darkness for many years and it was about time to see that he brought light to them. In that light, he said, light will help enhance the safety and security of the citizens especially at night while expressing delight over the project.

President Weah said the project represents a giant step and a major impact in terms of improving the quality of life for the people of Liberia.

He said, even though the project was inaugurated in 2020, it is important to secure the street lights

Speaking earlier, the Acting Public Works Madam Ruth Coker-Collins disclosed that the project cost over two million. She said they have that they have set up a surveillance and maintenance task force, that would be responsible for monitoring and supervising the poles.

Mrs. Coker-Collins pointed out that the first phase of the project was divided into three lots including: From ELWA to Vamoma while lot two from Vamoma to Broad Street and Ducor and From Johnson Street to Freeport comprise lot three respectively.
Billy Calzada /Staff photographer

Two residents of Bexar County have been diagnosed with the first known cases of a COVID-19 variant in the area, according to a press release from the City of San Antonio.

Testing results showed that the infections were caused by the variant strain first reported in the United Kingdom. The two cases are still under investigation.
Moscow (Russia) Jan 28, 2021 (SPS) - The resumption of war between Morocco and the Sahrawi Republic is not a "surprise" considering the failure of the influent international parties to deal with Western Sahara issue and the procrastination of the international community in getting Morocco to come back to the negotiation table, political analyst Sidi Mohamed Benjaafar said.

In an interview with Russian radio Sputnik on Monday, Benjaafar said "the prevailing tension is not a surprise as the Frente POLISARIO had warned, two years ago, that if Morocco did not return to the negotiation table, all relevant UN agreements would fall apart."

The specter of war was threatening for several months, he said, adding that "Western Sahara people have understood that Morocco does not want to negotiate," hence the escalation.

According to him, "if the situation becomes worse, the international community will certainly take action for a ceasefire and a settlement, but Morocco is betting on the time factor."

In addition, the Sahrawi political analyst said, Morocco's position over Western Sahara "is inconsistent with the international resolutions calling for a referendum on self-determination, as Morocco has submitted its own autonomy plan that is rejected by the Sahrawi people."

Western Sahara people are betting on international and African resolutions that stress the necessity of decolonization and the recognition of the borders inherited from the colonial era." SPS

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TikToks December 4th sale deadline came and went with no real response from the outgoing Trump administration, and it appears President Biden isnt in a rush to finalize the deal. Wall Street Journal sources understand TikToks forced sale to Oracle and Walmart has been put on hold indefinitely as Biden reviews past efforts to handle security risks from Chinese technology companies. Officials havent ruled out a sale, but it would likely be under different terms and might not happen at all.

The social media giant is reportedly still talking to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US (CFIUS) about resolving concerns, and that an alternative to a sale might involve sending data to a trusted third party to prevent the Chinese government from obtaining Americans info. That might be preferable  Chinese laws would prevent TikTok parent ByteDance from exporting the algorithms the social network uses to recommend videos.

Trump ostensibly ordered the sale of TikTok both over concerns about data security as well as the potential for its algorithm to serve Chinese political goals. He also demanded that the US Treasury get a lot of money from any sale, though, and there were concerns this might be an attempt to reward Oracle for political support as well as retaliation against TikTok users who allegedly sank a Tulsa campaign rally.

The Biden administration may have to make a decision on TikTok soon. The government has to offer its formal response to TikToks legal challenge against the divestiture on February 18th. Officials havent said what their stance will be, but the decision will reflect the governments overall policies  it would signal a more nuanced stance if the US backs off.
Abuja-based activist, Deji Adeyanju, has mocked Femi Fani-Kayode, the former Aviation Minister over his alleged defection to the All Progres...





Abuja-based activist, Deji Adeyanju, has mocked Femi Fani-Kayode, the former Aviation Minister over his alleged defection to the All Progressives Congress, APC.

Recall that Governor Yahaya Bello of Kogi State had confirmed Fani-Kayodes defection to the APC.

This followed a meeting between the former Minister, Bello and APC Interim National Chairman, Malam Mai Buni in Abuja.

However, Adeyanju wondered if Fani-Kayode would now begin to jump from state to state to to hustle at his old age.

In a series of tweets, Adeyanju wrote: My guy secretly defected. He doesnt want the world to know about his decamping. He now wants to build bridges -Julius Berger.

Will FFK now start going from state to state to visit APC governors or from one ministry to the other to hustle at this old age? Anyways, I wish him well. May he find what he is looking for.
Connected Warrior

Army to expand experimental transportation smart base

The Army wants to expand its existing smart base transportation testbed at Fort Carson, Colo., to include smart traffic and weather artificial intelligence platforms.

Fort Carsons testbed already includes a 4G/5G network, an autonomous vehicle shuttle for personnel and drone airfield services for debris detection and analysis. Now the Army plans to leverage the existing testbed and expand into the Colorado Springs local community with sensor deployment, data integration and the development of AI models and decision dashboards that integrate traffic and weather-related information.

The Army Corps of Engineers announced on Feb. 1 that it will be partnering with US Ignite in a follow-on contract to R&D work the nonprofit performed on the smart transportation platform. The initial project also gave the Army the opportunity to experiment with AI, data analytics and edge computing.

The project seeks to utilize a 4G network to exploit technology capabilities that leverage AV sensors, then integrate that data with other data sources to inform decision making, Jim P. Allen, Army Engineer Research and Development Centers program manager, said in August 2020. The goal is to conduct edge computing while maintaining cybersecurity and building an efficient data architecture that fuses data into useful information and builds knowledge over time.

The new 4G/5G internet-of-things network will initially support the upload of vehicle data from the AV shuttle and video traffic from route-monitoring cameras, according to a December 2020 US Ignite statement.

The network is also designed to accommodate broad research based on air quality and weather sensors as part of a collaborative initiative among Fort Carson, the city of Colorado Springs and the University of Colorado Boulder, which are already supporting a shared data repository. Smart sensors on base that monitor traffic, parking and public safety are linked to information from the city's sensors and mapping systems. Researchers analyze these datasets with an eye to improving safety and services and eventually plan to develop machine-learning models that prioritize transportation resources based on usage rates and community needs.

The Fort Carson research network will support 4G and 5G traffic over the CBRS band. It will feature at least 250 Mbps throughput and support for over 1,000 simultaneous device connections, according to US Ignite. JMA Wireless is providing 5G and 4G access powered by its software-based, ORAN-compliant radio-access network solution, and Federated Wireless is supplying Citizens Broadband Radio Services access.

Building smart bases and smart communities requires advanced network infrastructure. This network is foundational for the early IoT use cases were testing at Fort Carson, but its also an asset for future research and development efforts targeted at improving public safety, services, and quality of life, US Ignite Director of Technology Scott Turnbull said.

This article first appeared on GCN, a Defense Systems partner site.
Burma Myanmar Anti-Coup Protesters Defy Ban, Take to Streets for Fifth Day

Anti-coup protesters in Yangon on Wednesday / The Irrawaddy

YANGONThrongs of anti-coup protesters again poured onto the streets across Myanmar on Wednesday, undeterred by the military regimes assembly ban and speculation that more crackdowns were imminent after a number of incidents on Tuesday in which riot police violently confronted demonstrators.

In the countrys capital Naypyitaw, where protesters were gunned down with live and rubber bullets a day earlier, nearly 500 government employees from four ministries took to the streets to protest against military rule. Their participation added fuel to the countrys ongoing Civil Disobedience Movement, in which civil servants are refusing to work in order to express their opposition to the coup. Unlike Tuesday, protesters didnt experience any resistance from the police on Wednesday. A 20-year-old woman who sustained a serious head injury when police opened fire during Tuesdays crackdown had very little chance of surviving, according to her sister.

Residents of Loikaw in Kayah State in Myanmars southeast on Tuesday welcomed some new participants in their anti-coup protests. Still dressed in their uniforms, more than 20 young policemen and women joined the protest, raising the popular three-finger salute symbolizing defiance of the military regime. They held a large placard with the slogan Say No to Military Dictatorship spray-painted on it. However, the military regime said they were not full-time officers but had been hired on a temporary basis.

On Wednesday morning, a group of people held a protest in front of the Chinese Embassy in Yangon. They raised placards reading Dont Ignore Injustice and Stand Up for What Is Right! Long known for its cozy relationship with the Myanmar military, Chinaalong with Russiahas refused to condemn the takeover at the United Nations Security Council. There were also protests before the Japanese Embassy and the UNDPs office in Yangon. Unlike the protest at the Chinese Embassy, these were aimed at raising international awareness of what is happening in the country.

In Hledan, which has become ground zero for Yangons anti-coup demonstrations, columns of protesters began arriving in the morning, clogging the neighborhood as they have since Saturday. The whole area reverberated with chanted slogans like Democracy, Our Cause! and Down with Military Dictatorship! Placards emblazoned with Free Daw Aung San Suu Kyi were omnipresent.

Theint Myat Chel said she had been protesting for four days, simply because she couldnt put up with the injustice of the militarys power seizure.

We people voted freely and democratically. It is very evident who the winner was. They ignored the peoples desire and did what they liked. Thats why I have been coming out hereI cant tolerate it, said the 20-year-old University of Economics student.

The ruling National League for Democracy (NLD) won a landslide victory in Novembers general election, while the military proxy Union Solidarity and Development Party did very poorly. The military has insisted that the election was stolen, and attempted to justify its coup by saying the NLD government had ignored its complaints.

On their fifth day, the protests in downtown Yangon took on a performance-like atmosphere, with some demonstrators getting creative. Dressed in bridal costumes or cloaked in white from head to toe, they became centers of public attention and amusement. But while the costumes may have been diverse, there was unity in the sentiments expressed on their placards.

One couple was clad in traditional Burmese wedding attire. As they walked down the road, the man held high a sign saying: We Both Hate You MHL [Min Aung Hlaing, the coup leader]. Thats Why We Are Perfect for Each Other. The womans sign read: Me[a]rry Someone Who Hate[s] Military Coup.

Clad entirely in white, a spooky group of figures was seen moving around the outside of the Sule Shangri-La Hoteldespite the broad daylight. Passersby who encountered the ghostly group were doubtless relieved to read their placards, which exhorted: Shame on You MHL!

At the entrance of Sule Square, a protester in an inflatable dinosaur suit held a sign reading: Reject Military Coup.

Riot police were almost entirely absent from the area on Wednesday, resulting in a strange calm. But no one who is old enough to have experienced the bloody crackdown on Myanmars popular uprising in 1988 took much comfort from that: To them, it feels like the calm before the storm.

You may also like these stories:

Central Bank of Myanmar Staff Join Anti-Coup Protests

NLDs Self-Declared Parliament Reappoints Daw Aung San Suu Kyi as Myanmars Leader

Woman Shot by Myanmar Police During Anti-Coup Protest Declared Brain Dead
[February 10, 2021] Routinify Plans Direct-To-Consumer Launch and Names Caroline Avent Sales Director DENVER, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Routinify, the technology-based, remote healthcare solutions company, announced today its plans to launch a direct-to-consumer telehealth product in the first quarter of 2021. Additionally, the company announced that Caroline Avent has been hired as sales director and will manage the sales of its new consumer product. In her new position, Avent will assume a variety of responsibilities, including developing and executing Routinify's sales strategy for the new direct-to-consumer initiative, as well as strategies and operations for their other unique and comprehensive telecare solutions. Avent will also oversee the company's sales force. Avent joins a team of sales and marketing professionals who continue to refine Routinify's go-to-market strategy as it prepares to release its first direct-to-consumer technology later this quarter. This initiative will complement the company's estimated $15 billion business-to-business model and will help further validate the extensive needs of the senior care market, while also providing an important lead-generation tool for its in-home care partners. "We could not be more pleased to have someone of Caroline's talent and ability join us here at Routinify," said Pat Kelly, CEO and founder. "In today's environment, telehealth solutions are more important than ever before, and Routinify offers a novel platform that can, not only help improve the quality of life for aging adults and their caregivers, but also offers a new avenue for marketing, sales and operations opportunities for both homecare and healthcare providers. We're dedicated to bringing this technology to all who can benefit from it, and with Caroline's skill and expertise, we're confident that we can do just that." A sales veteran with over a decade of experience, Avent joins Routinify after serving as the commercial sales manager at Novel where she managed nearly 200,000 square feet of commercial real estate for one of Denver's largest coworking companies and regularly outperformed Novel's revenue target. Prior to Novel, she pioneered the sales strategy for the mobile SaaS platform, Hausmart, greatly expanding the organization's national footprint. Avent has also won numerous awards for leadership development, including the top sales training program in the country, and her personal sales performance. Ms. Avent added, "I am extremely pleased and excited to have the opportunity to work with Routinify, a company that has already had tremendous success through its partnerships with several homecare and healthcare groups throughout the Denver area, including the University of Denver's research study on lifestyle telemedicine. I look forward to further promoting this much-needed telecare solution that cannot only improve the lives of its users, but also help to solve some of the healthcare industries most-pressing problems." Ms. Avent holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in advertising and communication from the University of Alabama, in addition to degrees in psychology and studio art from Washington and Lee University in Virginia. She regularly volunteers at Angelica's village in Denver as a high school and college tutor. About Routinify

Routinify was founded to help aging people live safe, healthy and happy lives. Routinify's WellAssist platform and products empower people living at home or in managed care facilities by employing easy-to-use wearable technology and smart displays to monitor and assess things like mobility, heart rate, hydration and social engagement, while also serving as a reminder to the aging person to take their medications. This information can be shared with families and caregivers to provide a 24/7 view of an aging person's health and wellbeing. To find out more, visit www.routinify.com.





Contact: Rebecca Cleary

Spotlight Marketing Communications

949.427.1462

rebecca@spotlightmarcom.com View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/routinify-plans-direct-to-consumer-launch-and-names-caroline-avent-sales-director-301225730.html SOURCE Routinify

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WASHINGTON  Prosecutors unveiled chilling new security video in Donald Trumps impeachment trial on Wednesday, showing the mob of rioters breaking into the Capitol, smashing windows and doors and searching menacingly for Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as overwhelmed police begged on their radios for help.

In the previously unreleased recordings, the House prosecutors displayed gripping scenes of how close the rioters were to the countrys leaders, roaming the halls chanting Hang Mike Pence, some equipped with combat gear. Outside, the mob had set up a makeshift gallows.

Videos of the siege have been circulating since the day of the riot, but the graphic compilation amounted to a more complete narrative, a moment-by-moment retelling of one of the nations most alarming days. In addition to the evident chaos and danger, it offered fresh details on the attackers, scenes of police heroism and cries of distress. And it showed just how close the country came to a potential breakdown in its seat of democracy as Congress was certifying Trumps election defeat to Democrat Joe Biden.

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They did it because Donald Trump sent them on this mission, said House prosecutor Stacey Plaskett, the Democratic delegate representing the U.S. Virgin Islands. His mob broke into the Capitol to hunt them down.

The stunning presentation opened the first full day of arguments in the trial as the prosecutors argued Trump was no innocent bystander but rather the inciter in chief of the deadly Capitol riot, a president who spent months spreading election lies and building a mob of supporters primed for his call to stop Bidens victory.

Though most of the Senate jurors have already made up their minds on acquittal or conviction, they were riveted and sat silently. Screams from the audio and video filled the Senate chamber. Senators shook their heads, folded their arms and furrowed their brows. One Republican, James Lankford of Oklahoma, bent his head, a GOP colleague putting his hand on his arm in comfort.

On Jan. 6, President Trump left everyone in this Capitol for dead, said Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, a prosecutor.

Pence, who had been presiding over a session to certify Bidens victory over Trump  thus earning Trumps criticism  is shown being rushed to safety, sheltered in an office with his family just 100 feet from the rioters. Pelosi was evacuated from the complex before the mob prowls her suite of offices, her staff hiding quietly behind closed doors.

At one dramatic moment, the video shows police shooting into the crowd through a broken window, killing a San Diego woman, Ashli Babbitt. In another, a police officer is seen being crushed by the mob.

Police overwhelmed by the rioters frantically announce we lost the line and urge officers to safety. One officer later died.

Some senators acknowledged it was the first time they had grasped how perilously close the country came to serious danger.

When you see all the pieces come together, just the total awareness of that, the enormity of this threat, not just to us as people, as lawmakers, but the threat to the institution and what Congress represents, its disturbing, said Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. Greatly disturbing.

Trump is the first president to face an impeachment trial after leaving office and the first to be twice impeached. He is charged with incitement of insurrection through fiery words his defense lawyers say are protected by the Constitutions First Amendment and just figures of speech.

The House Democrats showed piles of evidence from the former president himself  hundreds of Trump tweets and comments that culminated in his Jan. 6 rally cry to go to the Capitol and fight like hell to overturn his defeat. Trump then did nothing to stem the violence and watched with glee, they said, as the mob ransacked the iconic building.

To us, it may have felt like chaos and madness, but there was method to the madness that day, said Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., the lead prosecutor, who pointed to Trump as the instigator.

And when his mob overran and occupied the Senate and attacked the House and assaulted law enforcement, he watched it on TV like a reality show. He reveled in it.

In one scene, a Capitol Police officer redirects Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, down a hallway to avoid the mob. It was the same officer, Eugene Goodman, who has been praised as a hero for having lured rioters away from the Senate doors.

It tears at your heart and brings tears to your eyes, Romney said after watching the video. He said he didnt realize how close he had been to danger.

The days proceedings unfolded after Tuesdays emotional start that left the former president fuming when his attorneys delivered a meandering defense and failed to halt the trial on constitutional grounds. Some allies called for yet another shakeup to his legal team.

The prosecutors are arguing that Trumps words were part of the big lie  his relentless efforts to sow doubts about the election results, revving up his followers to stop the steal even though there was no evidence of substantial fraud.

Trump knew very well what would happen when he took to the microphone at the outdoor White House rally that day as Congress gathered to certify Bidens win, said Rep. Joe Neguse, D-Colo, another impeachment manager.

This was not just a speech, he said.

Security remained extremely tight Wednesday at the Capitol, fenced off and patrolled by National Guard troops.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki has said Biden would not be watching the trial.

The difficulty facing Trumps defenders became apparent at the start as they leaned on the process of the trial rather than the substance of the case against him. They said the Constitution doesnt allow impeachment at this late date, after he has left the White House.

Even though the Senate rejected that argument in Tuesdays vote to proceed, the legal issue could resonate with Republicans eager to acquit Trump without being seen as condoning his behavior.

Defense lawyer Bruce Castor encouraged senators on Tuesday to be cool headed as they assessed the arguments.

A frustrated Trump revived his demands for his lawyers to focus on his unsupported claims of voter fraud, repeatedly calling former White House aide Peter Navarro, who told the AP in an interview that he agreed. He is calling on Trump to fire his legal team.

If he doesnt make a mid-course correction here, hes going to lose this Super Bowl, Navarro said, a reference to public opinion, not the unlikely possibility of conviction.

While six Republicans joined with Democrats to vote to proceed with the trial, the 56-44 vote was far from the two-thirds threshold of 67 votes that would be needed for conviction.

Minds did not seem to be changing, even after seeing the graphic video.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who was among those leading the effort to challenge the Electoral College tally, said, The presidents rhetoric is at times overheated, but this is not a referendum on whether you agree with everything the president says or tweets.

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., another leader of the election challenge, said, Nothing new here for me at the end of the day.

As the country numbs to the Trump eras shattering of civic norms, the prosecutors sought to remind senators and the nation how extraordinary it was to have a sitting U.S. president working to discredit the election.

As far back as spring and summer, Trump was spreading false claims about the election and refusing to commit to the peaceful transfer of power once it was over, they said.

Trumps second impeachment trial is expected to diverge from the lengthy, complicated affair of a year ago. In that case, Trump was charged with having privately pressured Ukraine to dig up dirt on Biden, then a Democratic rival for the presidency. The second trial could be over in half the time.

___

Associated Press writers Kevin Freking in Washington, Nomaan Merchant in Houston and Michelle Price in Las Vegas contributed to this report.
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Scalise Floats Childrens Union as Teachers Unions Battle Return to Classrooms

House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) said schools should resume in-person instruction, criticizing teachers unions that have battled against returning to classrooms.

Maybe you need a childrens union to compete with the teachers union, because the children need to be represented, Scalise said during a recent interview with the John Solomon Reports podcast.

So many millions of children right now are being denied future opportunity because their local [teachers] union is standing in the way of those parents being able to send their kids back to school safely, he added. And it can be done. The guidance and the science is there. The will needs to be there too.

Schools have reopened in all 50 states since the nationwide shutdowns in March 2020 over COVID-19, but some remain closed to in-person classes as unions representing teachers allege the need for strong changes before a return to classrooms.

Scalise has repeatedly pushed for schools to reopen and accused President Joe Biden of siding with unions over kids.

Last week, he highlighted on Twitter White House press secretary Jen Psaki calling a question about whether the president would choose children or unions a little bit unfair. Scalise wrote, I will answer it directly: I chose kids over teachers unionschools need to be open.

Psaki has said Biden supports reopening schools but wants the reopenings to be safe.

She told reporters in Washington Tuesday that he wants over half of the schools nationwide to reopen at least one day a week by the 100th day of his presidency.

His goal that he set is to have the majority of schoolsso, more than 50 percentopen by day 100 of his presidency. And that means some teaching in classrooms. So, at least one day a week, she said. Hopefully, its more. And obviously, it is as much as is safe in each school and local district.

Biden while campaigning said he would push for schools to reopen during his first 100 days in office.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention maintained throughout the pandemic that it never recommended schools close and its new director told reporters last week that teachers did not need to be vaccinated in order to safely return to classrooms.

The agency under the Biden administration plans to release official guidance on reopenings soon after scrapping previous guidance issued under the previous administration.

Schools in one big city will reopen soon after the union and leadership reached a deal following weeks of negotiation.

Chicago officials and union leaders announced on Wednesday the agreement after clashing over proposed return dates since earlier this year.
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Alessandra Ambrosio shared three new sensational bikini images to Instagram on Tuesday evening.

The star was in a white shiny bikini from her very own GAL Floripa line as she sat on the rocks overlooking a serene cove while she posed away.

The focus on the new photos was her dynamic figure with long limbs and a flat belly; the beauty is in incredible shape especially considering she is turning 40-years-old in just two months.

A perfect pinup moment: Alessandra Ambrosio shared three new sensational bikini images to Instagram on Tuesday evening. The star was in a string bikini from her very own GAL Floripa line as she sat on the rocks overlooking a serene beach while she posed away

The siren was born on April 11, 1981 and has done a lot in her 39 years, including securing a career as an international model that has landed her on the cover of Vogue and given her a Victoria's Secret contract. She has also welcomed two children and launched her own swimwear line, GAL Floripa.

In the new images her hair was worn down in soft waves as she was makeup-free for a day in the sun; at one point she raised one of her sculpted arms toward the sky.

The mother-of-two wrote added a sunshine, flower and sun emoji for her 10.3M followers.

For weeks she has been in Cachoeira Do Bom Jesus, Santa Catarina, Brazil, with her friends and family.

On the rocks: The focus on the new photos was her incredible figure with long limbs and a flat belly; the beauty is in incredible shape especially considering she is turning 40-years-old in just two months

Last month she treated her Instagram fans to a bevy of photographs while on the shore.

The leggy Brazilian beauty took to the Instagram page for her swimwear company GAL Floripa to show off her latest design, a light pink two piece with a bra cup top.

The Victoria's Secret favorite was not alone as she was surrounded by several other models who also had incredible figures.

Boss lady! The siren was born on April 11, 1981 and has done a lot in her 39 years, including securing a career as an international model that has landed her on the cover of Vogue and given her a Victoria's Secret contract. She has also welcomed two children and launched her own swimwear line, GAL Floripa

The star offered some sage advice: 'Be silly, be fun, be different, be crazy. Be you, because life is too short to be anything but happy.'

With her pals as they all wore white swimsuits

The California resident asked her fans to 'share your smile with the world' as she noted she was in the Sereia bikini.

And then she shared the photographer was Roberto Martini.

In another image with her pretty pals, Alessandra said she was 'ready' for fun.

In an image where the catwalker was jumping off a boat with her pals she said, 'Yes, we are aware of how silly we are together... No, we don't care!'

None of them had masks on and it's not clear if the shoot was done before COVID-19 or if they all quarantined together and were tested.

In an image where AA showed off her backside, she said, 'Happiness looks good on everyone.'

The star was in Florianopolis, while spending the holidays in her nearby home state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.

The looker accessorized the low-cut structured bikini top with layers of gold necklaces and bracelets in gold and blue.

Ambrosio debuted a fun video campaign for her swimwear line GAL Floripa over the weekend, which she filmed in Brazil with some of her closest model pals.

The Daddy's Home actress had a great time at a resort and pranced around the beach in sizzling bikinis, before moving the party to a yacht.

Although she's a proud Brazilian, Ambrosio also became an American recently, achieving citizenship status this summer.

Have a good time, folks! The star has offered some sage advice: 'Be silly, be fun, be different, be crazy. Be you, because life is too short to be anything but happy'

A mommy: She shares daughter Anja Louise, 12, and son Noah Phoenix, eight, with ex Jamie Mazur, 39, to whom she was engaged from 2008 to 2018, before calling it quits

Ambrosio has lived in the US for roughly 20 years, having kicked off her successful modeling career when she was 15

She took to her Instagram Story on Labor Day with her naturalization certificate, writing: 'From the newest addition to the American team !!!'

Ambrosio has lived in the US for roughly 20 years, having kicked off her successful modeling career when she was 15.

She shares daughter Anja Louise, 12, and son Noah Phoenix, eight, with ex Jamie Mazur, 39, to whom she was engaged from 2008 to 2018, before calling it quits.

In 2017 she talked about getting ready for a VS show.

'For breakfast I usually have eggs and/or avocado toast,' noted the slim model. 'And after my work-out I usually grab a green juice followed by lunch where I usually have a salad along with some chicken or fish,' she said.

'For dinner I might go for sushi, or grill Brazilian BBQ at home. I also have some nuts or a protein bar in my bag all the times in case I get hungry while Im running around.'

And she works out plenty: 'I would say an hour to an hour and a half a day.

'It all depends on what I'm doing that day.

'If Im going on a hike or playing volleyball with my friends it might be longer but I dont usually spend more than hour and a half in the gym.'
Burma Central Bank of Myanmar Staff Join Anti-Coup Protests

Civil servants protest in Naypyitaw. / The Irrawaddy

Yangon  Over 100 Central Bank of Myanmar staff, including employees from the headquarters in Naypyitaw and branches in Yangon and Mandalay, had joined the civil disobedience movement by Tuesday.

Around 80 Yangon staff and 20 in Mandalay and a few in Naypyitaw joined the movement against the military coup, a Yangon employee told The Irrawaddy on condition of anonymity.

We dont want to work under a government that seized power in a coup. It is sheer injustice. I feel guilty working at the office with ease while the younger generation is in the streets so I joined the movement, she told The Irrawaddy.

She urged other civil servants not to work under a military dictatorship. The staff said they will not work until the democratically elected government returns to power.

A junior clerk in Yangon, who did not want to be named, said: We will go back to work when we have the government we elected, the government that people want. We will fight until our last breath against this government that has unfairly seized power, she said.

She said the staff have been told to return to work and they expect to be asked to leave their government-provided accommodation and be denied their salaries.

The military has replaced the central banks governors and deputy governors since Mondays coup. Deputy governor U Bo Bo Nge, who was appointed by the National League for Democracy administration, remains under detention though other deputy governors have been released by the military.

The civil disobedience movement is gathering strength with department directors taking part.

On Wednesday, around 500 civil servants gathered at the Myoma market in Naypyitaw, shouting: Dont go to work! Leave the office!

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Sam Dubose, Part of the They That Matter series by Larry Collins

The Ohio Arts Council awarded three Miami University faculty members with the Individual Excellence Award for FY '21. Individual Excellence Awards are peer recognition of an artist's body of work that exemplifies their specific discipline and advances the larger artistic community. These awards support artists' development and recognize their work in Ohio and beyond. Professor of painting Dana Saulnier and Associate Professor of foundations/illustration Larry Collins, who teach on the Oxford campus, were selected in the Visual 2D Arts category. Adjunct faculty member Rachel Girard Reisert, who teaches photography at the Regionals, was selected in the photography category.

Members of the Ohio Arts Council (OAC) board annually approve grant funding to be awarded to Ohio artists through the OAC's Individual Excellence Awards program. This year, the board approved $300,000 to be awarded to 75 artists. Applications in crafts, design, interdisciplinary arts, media arts, photography, visual arts 2D, and visual arts 3D were accepted. Each award is $4,000. The grants were approved at the OAC board's winter board meeting on Jan. 20. "I am excited to see our talented faculty honored for their creative achievements, but not surprised," shared College of Creative Arts Dean Liz Mullenix. "Having three of our educators selected for individual excellence speaks to the excellence of our faculty at Miami."

Professor of painting Dana Saulnier teaches art by seeking to introduce his stu dents to their creative relationship to a life lived. Saulnier received a BFA degree in Painting from the University of Cincinnati and an MFA degree in Painting from Cornell University. Saulnier is represented by First Street Gallery in New York City. He has exhibited his work throughout the United States and in Europe. Image: Untitled (1220)', oil on canvas, 39.5 x 45.

Larry Winston Collins received his BFA degree from Columbus College of Art and Design and his MFA degree from the Maryland Institute, College of Art. Collins also received a fellowship to attend the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. The "Artist to Africa Fellowship" presented by "ACE" (Arts for Community Expression) facilitated Collinstravels to Dakar, Senegal in West Africa. Collins exhibits widely in Ohio and throughout the United States.

Rachel Girard Reisert's work combines historic and digital photographic processes to address the complexities of perception and the intersection where personal experience is unique and universal. Reisert has exhibited nationally and internationally, including in Canada, Italy, and Hungary. She holds a BFA from the Columbus College of Art and Design and an MFA in photography from Arizona State University. Image: Unfixed #01, Archival inkjet from unique lumen print, 16" x 20"







At just five years old, Jason Kissel vowed to spend his life working with trees. He meant it. Kissel earned degrees in forestry and ministry, served as curator of trees at the North Carolina Zoo, and natural resources administrator for the city of Indianapolis. Now, Kissel has served as executive director of ACRES Land Trust (ACRES) since 2006. ACRES is Indianas oldest and largest locally-based land trust  founded in 1960 by twelve members with $5 each, it has since grown to permanently protect over 7,000 acres across 100 properties, with 56 trail systems free to the public, year-round. Kissel was kind enough to take the time to walk me through his work.

BEN VALENTINE: How does a land trust work, and what makes ACRES unique?

JASON KISSEL: Land trusts are nonprofits that protect land. What type of land they protect and how they protect it varies among organizations. The two primary tools land trusts utilize to protect land is conservation easements and land ownership. ACRES is unique in several ways, we are the oldest local land trust in Indiana, we protect land primarily (99%) through ownership rather than easements, and we guarantee to never sell, trade or otherwise transfer land that we protect. Conservation easements are great tools, ACRES just prefers to own the land we protect  since its the highest level of protection. We are lucky to have partner land trusts within our service area to refer landowners wanting conservation easements on their land.

VALENTINE: How do you decide on an area to focus your conservation, and where is your big focus now?

KISSEL: ACRES will consider protecting any land within our service area. We prioritize acquisitions that expand existing properties, that contain unique natural features/systems, and land within what we call conservation areas. Conservation areas are places where ACRES and other land-owning entities determined are worthy of pooling efforts. They are large areas that accommodate natural communities to thrive at a landscape level  they are forests rather than woodlots, wildlife corridors rather than fragmented habitats, extensive wetland systems instead of isolated wetlands. Our office is located within one of the conservation areas  the Cedar Creek Corridor.

VALENTINE: What are some unique natural treasures that can be found on the lands you protect?

KISSEL: In addition to a lot of forests and wetlands, ACRES owns several unique natural features and systems. There is Hanging Rock National Natural Landmark  a remnant portion of a Silurian coral reef formed when Indiana was covered by a warm shallow sea. We also have Seven Pillars of the Mississinewa, with 25-foot limestone pillars carved by ages of water movement and revered for their beauty as far back as oral tradition goes. Furthermore, there is Quog Lake  a rare quaking bog home to carnivorous plants and rattlesnakes, Grass Lake  contains what is believed to be the largest marl flat in Indiana, and also several properties with ancient bogs and waterfalls.

VALENTINE: You have just started a short term 200-year study of a property combining art and science, can you share about that?

KISSEL: ACRES promises to protect the land we own forever. As a result, we always take the long view. To highlight the tension between our notion of time versus natures notion of time, we started a short-term, 200-year study of one of our properties. Its part of a national effort called ecological reflections where changes to a place are documented through science and art over an extended period of time, in our case, at least until 2217. If history is a guide, we know a lot will change in 200 years, this project will help us document these changes.

VALENTINE: It is increasingly clear to me that agriculture and conservation must collaborate more. Indiana is 65% farmland, and I understand that your organization has farmers within it, and live within a largely farming community. What is that relationship like?

KISSEL: Our relationship with the farming community is varied. We are part of the farming community, cash renting out about 500 acres of ag land each year. Many of our members are farmers or from farming families. Many of our land donors were farmers. We try to ensure at least one of our board members are farmers. Farmers love and understand land so most have an affinity for what ACRES does. But not all. Some view ACRES restoration of agricultural land as increasing competition (and therefore price) on the remaining ag land. And some view nature preserves as a waste of land since products are not harvested/sold from them. Overall though, the farming community respects ACRES as a fellow land manager appreciates ACRES preserving the rural character of their county, and that ACRES provides a way to ensure the land they have worked on and loved for generations remains intact.

Currently, all of ACRES agriculture lands are part of or adjacent to ACRES owned nature preserves. These fields will ultimately be converted back into their natural state (typically forest or wetland). However, ACRES is eager to help families protect their agricultural land by owning land that will stay in active production.

For agriculture land that ACRES transitions back to nature, we start by studying it  letting the land reveal its past. The soils give the most information  indicating whether the land was forest, grassland, or wetland before being converted to agriculture production. We also use historic aerial photography, surrounding natural cover, and drainage maps. Once the habitat type is selected, we enroll the field in government programs that provide cost-share for the restoration or facilitate mitigation projects to complete the restoration. Then, in a mere hundred years its a mature, natural system once again.
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Prime Minister Narendra Modi is scheduled to inaugurate the World Sustainable Development Summit 2021 on Wednesday at 6:30 pm via video conferencing.

As per an official release, the theme of the Summit is 'Redefining our common future: Safe and secure environment for all'.

"Dr Mohamed Irfaan Ali, President of the Cooperative Republic of Guyana; James Marape, Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea; Mohamed Nasheed, Speaker of the People's Majlis, Republic of Maldives; Amina J Mohammed, Deputy Secretary-General, United Nations, and Prakash Javadekar, Union Minister of Environment, Forest, and Climate Change will be present on the occasion," it stated.

The 20th edition of The Energy and Resources Institute's (TERI) flagship event, the World Sustainable Development Summit, will be held online from February 10 to February 12 and will bring together a wide number of governments, business leaders, academicians, climate scientists, youth, and the civil society in the fight against climate change.

"Marking 20 years in its journey of making 'sustainable development' a globally shared goal, the Summit series brings together governments, business leaders, academicians, climate scientists, youth, and the civil society in the fight against climate change. With its focus on bringing the voices of youth and women to the forefront, the Summit intends to carry forward these vital discussions from the Global South to the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties in Glasgow.," said the official website of the World Sustainable Development Summit.

"India's Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change, Ministry of New and Renewable Energy and Ministry of Earth Sciences are key partners of the Summit. Energy and industry transition, adaptation and resilience, nature-based solutions, climate finance, circular economy, clean oceans and air pollution, are amongst the range of topics to be discussed during the Summit," the release added. (ANI)

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Project Coordinator, Geneva

Organization: International Labour Organization (ILO)

Country: Switzerland

City: Geneva, Switzerland

Office: ILO HQ Geneva

Closing date: Monday, 22 February 2021

Grade: P4

Vacancy no.: DC/FUNDAMENTALS/P/2021/01

Publication date: 05 February 2021

Application deadline (midnight Geneva time): 22 February 2021

Job ID: 5387

Department: GOVERNANCE

Organization Unit: FUNDAMENTALS

Location: Geneva

Contract type: Fixed Term

Contract duration: One year (with possibility of renewal)

Under article 4.2, paragraph (e) of the Staff Regulations, the filling of vacancies in technical cooperation projects does not fall under Annex I of the Staff Regulations and is made by direct selection by the Director-General.

In order to support the best informed process in the filling of the present vacancy by direct selection, the ILO invites interested candidates to submit their candidature online by the above date.

Technical cooperation appointments are not expected to lead to a career in the ILO and they do not carry any expectation of renewal or conversion to any other type of appointment in the Organization. A one-year fixed-term contract will be given. Extensions of technical cooperation contracts are subject to various elements including the following: availability of funds, continuing need of the functions and satisfactory conduct and performance.

The following are eligible to apply:

ILO Internal candidates in accordance with paragraphs 31 and 32 of Annex I of the Staff Regulations.

External candidates.

Introduction

The ILO seeks to recruit a Project Coordinator at the P4 level to manage a Development Cooperation project "Alliance 8.7 Accelerator Lab to Combat Modern Slavery", which is a multi-donor pooled funding project. In the first phase, the project will focus on combatting forced labour and trafficking of fishers at sea.

The position is located in the Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work Branch (FUNDAMENTALS) of the Governance and Tripartism Department (GOVERNANCE) which provides advice on labour laws, based on ILO conventions and recommendations, technical support and capacity-building to labour ministries and assists labour inspectorates to build capacity and develop strategies to achieve compliance with labour laws.

The FUNDAMENTALS Branch carries out technical cooperation, research, statistical and advocacy functions to assist ILO member States to respect, promote and realize fundamental principles and rights at work, which are: freedom of association and effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining; elimination of all forms of forced or compulsory labour; effective abolition of child labour; and elimination of discrimination in respect of employment and occupation. The Branch also coordinates the strategic development of the International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour and Forced Labour (IPEC+), one of the five ILO flagship programmes.

The Solution and Innovation Unit provides technical backstopping to country-level implementation of the portfolio of FUNDAMENTALS projects. It also has the lead responsibility for resource mobilization, donor relations and generation of innovative solutions.

The ILO FUNDAMENTALS also acts as the Secretariat of Alliance 8.7, which has been set up as an inclusive global partnership committed to achieving Target 8.7 of the Sustainable Development Goals (eradication of forced labour, modern slavery, human trafficking and child labour). It provides a platform for governments, UN agencies, employers, workers, and civil society, to accelerate action, drive innovation, exchange information, good practices and lessons learnt. With now 24 pathfinder countries, a network of more than 300 institutional partners and over 7,000 registered followers, constant communication, membership service and engagement are required for the Alliance 8.7 to play an important role in the implementation of the UN International Year on the Elimination of Child Labour in 2021 and the V Global Conference on the Elimination of Child Labour in 2022.

---

The Alliance 8.7 was established to accelerate progress towards the eradication of child labour and forced labour. Over the past years, it has been instrumental to mobilize a wide range of actors to share information and knowledge, focus on key challenges through its action groups and strengthen the political commitment of Governments to accelerate efforts. With these achievements, the Alliance is at a critical stage of its life to demonstrate that through the joint efforts of its partners, it can accelerate progress on the ground. A focus on the "accelerating" factor of Alliance 8.7 is even more critical now that the COVID-19 pandemic has increased pressure to demonstrate the added value of global cooperation and create more demand to invest funds in solutions that can prevent a regression of the progress made over the past decades.

For this, the project will establish an Alliance 8.7 Accelerator Lab to enable members of the Alliance 8.7 Action Group on Supply Chains and the Global Business Network on Forced Labour to increase the impact of interventions that have proven to be successful in high risk supply chains or sectors. To do so, the Accelerator Lab will invest on three complementary tracks:

Identification and scaling up of existing solutions through the joint efforts of Alliance 8.7 partners;

Utilize opportunities offered by new technologies to accelerate digital innovations to achieve SDG Target 8.7;

Advocate and support a smarter financing approach of SDG 8.7 to maximize the impact of partners contributions and increase investments on solutions that work.

---

This project will support the creation of the Alliance 8.7 Accelerator Lab and its implementation at the global, regional and country level. To accelerate progress, the Accelerator Lab will start by focusing on the fishing supply chain, where risks of modern slavery are particularly high and where cooperation across actors is indispensable, given the complex cross border nature of this supply chain. By the end of the project, the Accelerator Lab will have shown how to scale up solution in the fishing sector and collect evidence for the adaption of this experience in other sectors. Since Alliance 8.7 Accelerator Lab is a multi-donor pooled funding for Alliance 8.7, it can be scaled to other sectors, regions and countries with additional resources mobilized from other donors and partners.

The expected results of the Project are as follows: The planned effect on society (impact) is: The prevalence and scope of modern slavery in selected partner countries and sectors is reduced.

The planned effects for the target group of the Project (Outcome) are:

Partnerships among governments and social partners and Alliance 8.7 partners are strengthened to reduce modern slavery in high risk sectors;

Enhanced regional cooperation among key organisations to combat modern slavery in the relevant sector, including fisheries;

Governments adopt measures to prevent, identify and address modern slavery and to protect and monitor vulnerable groups and victims of modern slavery;

Business adopt measures to prevent, identify and tackle the use of human trafficking and forced labour, including the worst forms of child labour, in their own operations and supply chains;

Vulnerable individuals and groups have improved their capacity of resisting recruitment to modern slavery.

Within the policy and procedural requirements established by the ILO and the "Alliance 8.7 Accelerator Lab to Combat Modern Slavery", the Project Coordinator will be responsible for the day-to-day management of the project implementation. He/She will provide technical advisory services towards the development and execution of any future programmes to be developed in the project sector. He/she will ensure that the objectives stated in the project document are attained within the stated time frame and budget and ensure compliance with the ILO and the projects financial and operating procedures. The incumbent will promote ILO policies in the project related technical areas.

Reporting Lines

The Project Coordinator will be based in Geneva, Switzerland. He/She will be responsible for supervising and managing the implementation of the project. He/She will work under the direct supervision and report to the Head of the Unit of Solution and Innovation within the FUNDAMENTAL Branch. He/she will closely coordinate with national and regional programmes working on relevant thematic areas. He/she will also benefit from global experiences, technical guidance, support and collaboration with other relevant technical specialists at the HQ.

He/She will also oversee the work of administrative and other support staff of the project, national officers and any other international and local consultants hired during the course of the project.

Description of Duties

Project management: 1. Revise the project document in line with the scope of work approved by the donor and in line with ILO quality criteria.

2. Ensure effective implementation of the project through timely provision of inputs, timely and efficient delivery of outputs, and planning, control, monitoring and evaluation of the project activities, in conformity with ILO policies and project strategies, and in accordance with ILO programming guidelines and country/action programmes, and administrative and financial procedures in consultation with the responsible field office if applicable.

3. Responsible for the effective management of funds/budget assigned to the project.

4. Manage efficiently the human resources of the project including recruitment, performance and talent management aspects.

Advocacy, networking and partnership: 5. Strengthen relationship to cooperate and coordinate with the concerned governments, ministries and the employers and workers organizations, non-governmental organizations, the target groups, the donors and other Alliance 8.7 partners, in the planning and implementation of activities under the project.

6. Liaise with other UN agencies counterparts to promote ILOs values, increase the projects visibility and facilitate the scaling-up of the projects interventions.

7. Promote ILO policies in the related technical areas of the project, other fundamental rights at work and the relevant International Labour Standards in collaboration with other technical/labour standards specialists

Mobilization of resources: 8. Undertake resource mobilization activities with multi-lateral and bilateral donor community for the development of future activities linked to the project in coordination with the responsible Country Offices and PARDEV.

Knowledge management: 1. Write and disseminate information materials on project in close collaboration with other relevant technical specialists at the HQ.

2. Ensure the development of information systems covering ILO technical activities covered by the project, prepare periodic and ad hoc reports on the status of programme planning and implementation, and establish coordination with concerned ILO departments and programmes.

3. Identify training needs and organize training workshops and meetings for the tripartite partners, NGOs, other agencies, target groups and staff as appropriate to reinforce the professional capabilities.

4. Organize meetings and seminars, and develop knowledge sharing tools designed to forge partnerships, share good practices with the main stakeholders of the project. .

5. Undertake any other duties requested by the responsible chief.

Required qualifications

Education

Advanced university degree in economics, management, social science or law.

Experience

Seven years of progressively responsible professional experience in the relevant field, of which at least three years at the regional and/or international level in coordination and leadership role. This includes field experience in project management and implementation of projects, preferably in the fields of fishing sector, forced labour, trafficking in persons and modern slavery. Proven capacity to initiate and implement technical co-operation programmes and activities with ILO constituents, private sector and NGOs, preferably in the Asia-Pacific and Africa regions. Familiarity with ILO policies and procedures would be an asset.

Languages

Excellent command of English. Knowledge of another official language of the ILO (French or Spanish) would be an advantage.

Competencies

Proven ability to take ownership of all responsibilities, to act with integrity and transparency by maintaining social, ethical and organisational norms, and to meet all commitments within the prescribed time, cost and quality standards;

Ability to develop clear strategic goals consistent with the projects objectives, and to design and synthesise strategies for programme development;

Tags advisory services child labour collective bargaining covid donor relations fisheries forced labour freedom of association good practices human resources information systems international labour standards knowledge management knowledge sharing labour law monitoring and evaluation new technologies programme planning project implementation project management regional cooperation regional programmes resource mobilization slavery supply chain sustainable development sustainable development goals technical cooperation trafficking trafficking in persons transparency

Ability to advocate and provide policy advice;

Excellent leadership skills, ability to work effectively in a team and excellent interpersonal skills;

Ability to formulate new concepts and methodologies, and to synthesise research and reach empirically based conclusions on related subjects by understanding both the qualitative and quantitative approaches in social science research;

Ability to develop training materials, alternative courses of action, project proposals, policy, procedural matters and present them at high-level meetings;

Ability to promote knowledge sharing and learning culture in the office, and to focus and guide others to meet objectives at individual and group level;

Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to write accurate reports and to build networks to obtain cooperation with partners;

Should be open to and able to make changes to accommodate culture and gender differences in order to interact effectively with individuals;

Proven capacity to initiate and implement technical co-operation programmes and activities with ILO constituents and NGOs, including negotiation skills with governments, social partners and to mobilise the support of international donor agencies and provide quality services;

Ability to plan and support the development of individuals skills and abilities for a more effective fulfilment of current or future job/role responsibilities;

Develop self-awareness and show empathy by demonstrating the qualities, traits, or attributes that contribute to the ability to effectively relate to and identify with others.

Ability to maintain effectiveness when experiencing major changes in work tasks or environment, and to adjust effectively to work within new work structures, processes, requirements, or cultures;

Drive to seek or encourage others to seek opportunities for different and innovative approaches to organisation problems and opportunities for improvement.

Ability to work in a multicultural environment and gender-sensitive behaviour and attitudes are also required.

Conditions of employment

Any appointment/extension of appointment is subject to ILO Staff Regulations and other relevant internal rules. Any offer of employment with the ILO is conditional upon certification by the ILO Medical Adviser that the person concerned is medically fit to perform the specific inherent requirements of the position offered. In order to confirm an offer from the ILO the successful candidate will be required to undergo a medical examination.

Any extension of technical cooperation contracts are subject to various elements including the following: availability of funds, continuing need of the functions and satisfactory conduct and performance.

For more information on conditions of employment, please visit: https://jobs.ilo.org/content/International/?locale=en_GB

Recruitment process

Please note that all candidates must complete an on-line application form. To apply, please visit ILO Jobs. The system provides instructions for online application procedures.

Applicants will be contacted directly if selected for a written test and/or an interview.

Depending on the location and availability of candidates, assessors and interview panel members, the ILO may use communication technologies such as Skype, Video or teleconference, e-mail, etc for the assessment and evaluation of candidates at the different stages of the recruitment process, including technical tests or interviews.

Fraud warning

The ILO does not charge any fee at any stage of the recruitment process whether at the application, interview, processing or training stage. Messages originating from a non ILO e-mail account - @ilo.org - should be disregarded. In addition, the ILO does not require or need to know any information relating to the bank account details of applicants.

An oil spill at the Chevron Richmond Refinery that was leaking into San Francisco Bay was stopped late Tuesday afternoon, and the cleanup is underway, the energy company said in a statement.

Chevron first noticed the sheen on the water near the refinery at 3 p.m., and approximately 600 gallons of "a petroleum and water mixture" seeped into the bay before the leak was stopped.

"We understand that the source is no longer pouring out into the bay, but there is product in the bay," Contra Costa County Hazardous Materials Specialist Maria Dulazo told KCBS Radio. "They do have a containment boom and they are working to contain that to minimize the spread of the sheen and the petroleum product."

Contra Costa County Supervisor John Gioia wrote on Twitter that five gallons of oil per minute were leaking from the refinery, and that Chevron staff and local firefighters were on the scene.

"Full investigation will occur," Gioia wrote on Facebook. "I spoke to Assemblymember Buffy Wicks tonight and she plans to introduce a bill to increase fines and penalties in order to provide more effective deterrence. ... This is unacceptable!"

Point Richmond resident Don Mill said he first smelled the spill after noon Tuesday. A friend of Mill was painting the outside of his home, which sits on the beach, only 300 to 400 feet from the Long Wharf where the spill occurred, and she told him the smell was making her feel sick.

"Ive lived here a long time, 35 years, and we've had a couple incidents where theres been an oil spill," said Mill. "This smelled more toxic. It did not smell like gasoline to us. We had neighbors calling us three hours later asking, 'Are you smelling this?'"

Booms were placed to control the spread of the spill, but the East Bay Regional Park District had to close beaches as a safety measure and "petroleum washed ashore along South Richmond shoreline which will harm wildlife and marine life," Gioia told the Bay City News Service.

The refinery said it is "fully cooperating with authorities," including the U.S. Coast Guard and the Office of Spill Prevention and Response of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Chevron's initial response was "inadequate" and "oil quickly breached Chevron's containment boom," Oakland-based environmental watchdog group San Francisco Baykeeper said in a statement, releasing photos to back its contentions.

Ray Chavez/MediaNews Group/The Mercury News via Getty Images

"Chevron's oil pipeline leak today is bad news for the Bay  we're unfortunately still learning how big the oil spill was and what the impacts are. The Bay Area's five refineries have a long history of environmental violations, so they should be prepared for a situation like this," Baykeeper executive director Sejal Choksi-Chugh said, calling the initial containment response "pathetic."

"Baykeeper's field investigator was one of the first to arrive on the scene, and he saw one small yellow boom deployed near the wharf, with lots of oil already spread beyond the boom into the Bay and onto nearby shorelines and beaches," Choksi-Chugh said.

The cause of the spill was not immediately known.

The Bay City News Service contributed to this report.
News and commentary on organized crime, street crime, white collar crime, cyber crime, sex crime, crime fiction, crime prevention, espionage and terrorism.
CHICAGO --- Northwestern University's Noshir Contractor will discuss team problem-solving and human systems integration for Mars exploration at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting.

At a AAAS press briefing at 12 p.m. ET, Wednesday, Feb. 10, Contractor will discuss recent findings and opportunities for social science research on astronauts as exploration advances into deep space. The embargo will lift at the time of the press briefing.

In addition, he will present "Pairing Teams for, and (Re)pairing Teams During, Long-Duration Space Exploration" at 1 p.m. ET on Thursday, Feb. 11 with Dorothy Carter, assistant professor of industrial-organizational psychology at the University of Georgia, and Sandra Whitmire, deputy element scientist for human factors and behavioral performance, Human Research Program, NASA Johnson Space Center. The session will be moderated by Contractor's collaborator at Northwestern Leslie DeChurch.

As space agencies prepare for deep-space exploration, researchers have been increasingly investigating human factors related to long-duration missions, including the psychology of human space travel. The NASA Artemis mission aims to put astronauts back on the moon by 2024 and build a lunar outpost for use as a space exploration "gateway" and model for Mars exploration, a journey that could involve 250 million miles of travel.

Missions will need to become increasingly independent of Earth-based support due to significant time delays in communication as spacecraft move farther into space, and crewmembers will require a readiness to problem-solve as an autonomous team and decreased reliance on mission control.

Contractor along with DeChurch, a professor of communication and psychology, and NASA researcher Suzanne Bell developed a computational model that predicts interpersonal conflicts between team members (such as astronauts) with 75-80% accuracy and prescribes interventions to repair their interactions and relationships.

###

Contractor is the Jane S. & William J. White Professor of Behavioral Sciences in the McCormick School of Engineering & Applied Science, the School of Communication and the Kellogg School of Management and Director of the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) Research Group at Northwestern University.
FAIRFIELD  All of the districts special needs students should be back in school full time by March 1, officials announced this week.

Timelines for the rest of the districts students should be ready in about three weeks as the district strives to get everyone in person five days a week.

Thats the goal and thats the work happening in the buildings, Superintendent Mike Cummings said.

While hundreds of special needs students already are in school throughout the district, the new protocol will put all students with individualized education plans or 504 plans in-person five days a week, said Robert Mancusi, executive director of special education and student services.

Its a lofty goal, but I think we can do it, he said.

Board member Jennifer Jacobsen said she wants to make sure other at-risk students are also getting the opportunity to return in person soon.

Just because someone doesnt have an IEP or 504, they might need additional support that we should be offering, she said.

Officials gave board members a rundown on plans moving forward and problems they may have once school is reopened to everybody full time.

Among biggest concerns will be lunch  and how best to allow students to safely eat, officials said. Plans on how far apart each child should sit, how many children should be gathered at a single group or wave for lunch and how many supervisors will be needed will be dependent on health guidelines. The recommendation might change from six feet to three feet, Cummings said.

And the guidelines, in turn, factor into how many lunch waves are needed and how that affects the rest of the schedule, including specials, officials said.

The amount of distance between students will also play a role in where lunch is held, the type of furniture or equipment needed and how many people are needed to supervise.

Cummings said the district doesnt have enough staff it can pull from other responsibilities to cover the different waves. And while the schools can use volunteers to help supervise, he said he worried those people might not always be available.

The district has had little luck filling a lunch supervisor position who would ideally be used to supplement the staff and volunteers throughout the district, he said.

Weve had very little interest in that position since its been posted in the fall, he said, adding only three applications have been received.

The district also plans to use plastic barriers when students are eating. These are already used for snack time and mask breaks at the lower grades, but students have complained they have a hard time hearing or seeing the board with them up, Cummings said.

Cummings added that while the district has had challenges with barriers at the elementary schools, he believes they might have better success at the middle and high schools. He said the district bought them based on input from other districts already using them.

The barriers are going to have a role going forward as an additional mitigation factor, he said.

Distancing will also affect classrooms, which vary in size throughout the district.

Some of them will be able to handle that (six-foot) distance, others will struggle, Cummings said.

The warmer weather will also allow the district to put tents back up outside, providing more space for learning, mask breaks and eating, he said.

Cummings said tents are weather dependent but expects them to go back up next month.

Sports resumed this week and advisers for before- and after-school activities are working with their principals, he said.

Board member Carol Guernsey said she had concerns about the reopening plans, particularly about a lack of timelines and with mitigation, especially lunch. She said she hoped the district would improve the Wednesday schedule and hybrid learning.

Several board members and officials commended the students, staff and community for keeping COVID-19 transmission down within the district, preventing Fairfield schools from having to go fully remote.

As of Tuesday afternoon, the district had 12 total positive cases with 54 students and eight staff in quarantine, according to the schools COVID dashboard.

The safety and mitigations we have in place are working, Chairwoman Christine Vitale said.

kkoerting@newstimes.com

Good morning.

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Central Texas winery owner Christopher Grider says he was in D.C. on Jan. 6 to show support for President Donald Trump at a rally outside the White House.



He never planned to be at the Capitol, much less take part in an insurrection, his attorney says.



As the Senate begins its impeachment trial against former President Donald Trump this week, several of the two dozen Texans arrested after the riot claim they were inspired by the presidents words and actions.



Our Austin Bureau has the story.

Martin Phipps, also the owner of a popular River Walk bar, is accused of psychologically and verbally abusing his then-wife, according to an arrest affidavit.



Phipps, 51, was arrested Monday on suspicion of telephone harassment for repeatedly contacting 24-year-old Brenda Vega, to whom he was briefly married.



Vega told San Antonio police in December she had to get away from Phipps after he confronted her in an aggressive and agitated state.



Read the arrest affidavit details here.

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A member of the radical group Iron Youth was charged after allegedly purchasing a machine gun from an undercover police officer.





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Nirenberg and Brockhouse disagree on raiding the citys reserve fund. Gilbert Garcia gives his take in the latest Puro Politics.





Lobbyists for Bexar County said theyre hopeful President Joe Bidens rescue package will provide funding for ecosystem restoration and hike-and-bike trails that were not included in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers work program for 2021.





Though signs at Regal Fiesta Stadium 16 still state it will be back soon, the discount theater in Northwest San Antonio has permanently shut its doors and the site may eventually be turned into apartments.





By accepting Gregg Popovichs tough love and take-no-prisoners approach, the Spurs Dejounte Murray is coming into his own as an NBA point guard.





The Aggies Ryan McCollum and three other departing senior starters on a bullish offensive line played a big role in leaving a memorable mark on the program.

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A West Texas lawyer entered an unusual piece of evidence in court Tuesday.



"Im here live. Im not a cat," said Presidio County Attorney Rod Ponton. The declaration was necessary because Ponton was appearing on the virtual hearing through a cat filter. Watch the hilarious video.



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Buried in the 78-page brief Donald Trump's defense attorneys filed in the impeachment trial is a footnote that pushes back against reports Trump didn't act fast enough or do enough to stop the rioters on January 6th.

'The House Managers' suggestion that President Trump did not act swiftly enough to quell the violence is absolutely not true,' the attorneys note.

They point to Trump's tweets that day - which sent mixed messages of telling the rioters to be peaceful, saying that he loved them, and complaining the election was stolen.

The lawyers also argue Trump and 'the White House further took immediate steps to coordinate with authorities to provide whatever was necessary to counteract the rioters.'

'The fact is there are complex procedural elements involved in quelling a riot at the Capitol and on the mall  DC police, Capitol Police, National Guard, etc., There was a flurry of activity inside the White House working to mobilize assets. There is no legitimate proof, nor can there ever be, that President Trump was 'delighted' by the events at the Capitol. He, like the rest of the Country, was horrified at the violence,' they write.

But much of the action taken that day was done by Vice President Mike Pence, who was in touch with law enforcement and Congressional leaders, and other aides who worked to convince Trump to denounce the violence.

It was Pence who helped facilitate the decision to mobilize members of the DC National Guard to the Capitol building on January 6th, CNN reported, and it was Pence who was in contact with the Pentagon on the matter. Pence also spoke with chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley that day.

Donald Trump's defense attorneys pushed back against reports Trump didn't act fast enough or do enough to stop the rioters on January 6th - the former president speaking at a rally that morning

House impeachment managers will argue Trump did not do enough to urge his supporters to go home on the day of the January 6th riot

A few days after the riot, Senator Lindsey Graham, a Trump ally, said the president saw the rioters as 'allies' as he sought to overturn the election results

House impeachment managers, in their argument for prosecution, will allege Trump incited the insurrection with his rally and his claims the election was rigged. They will also argue Trump took to long to urge the rioters to go home.

The prosecution begins it case at noon on Wednesday.

News reports from the time and later interviews with officials in Trump's orbit paint a different story than that of the former president's lawyers when it comes to his actions as his supporters stormed the Capitol - a riot that would leave five dead, a wake of physical destruction, and a second impeachment trial.

Trump was initially pleased to see his supporters fighting for him and had to be coaxed by staff - including Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and daughter Ivanka Trump - into making a public statement asking the rioters to stand down.

Some of the senators sitting as jurors' in Trump trial, in the aftermath of January 6th, said it took him too much time to act.

'It took him a while to appreciate the gravity of the situation,' Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, one of Trump's staunchest allies on Capitol Hill, told The Washington Post two days after the riot. 'The president saw these people as allies in his journey and sympathetic to the idea that the election was stolen.'

Graham also revealed that on January 6th, as he was hidden with other senators in an undisclosed location to keep them safe from the rioters, he called Ivanka Trump to plead with her to have her father tell the rioters to stand down.

And House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy, who spoke with Trump after rioters were in the Capitol, was so worried about the Trump's lack of response he followed up with Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law who was a powerful White House adviser, asking him to intervene.

The morning of January 6th began with Trump pressuring Pence, who, in his ceremonial role as president of the Senate would be overseeing the election certification, to overturn the results in Trump's favor.

Trump has been putting the pressure on his vice president in the lead up to the certification, a move that angered many Republicans who saw Trump's action as throwing his long-loyal vice president under the bus.

'All Mike Pence has to do is send them back to the States, AND WE WIN. Do it Mike, this is a time for extreme courage!' Trump tweeted at 8:17 a.m.

He also called Pence before the vice president left the Naval Observatory to go to the Capitol, The Washington Post reported.

Pence, instead told the president he would follow the law. He released a lengthy letter to members of Congress before arriving at the Capitol, explaining the Constitution did not allow him to change the results.

Trump, angered at Pence's response, prepared to address his supporters at a rally on the Ellipse, outside the White House. He speech would begin around 1 p.m. and followed warm up acts by his sons Eric and Don Jr., who encouraged the supporters to keep fighting for their father.

Trump even mulled walking with his supporters to the Capitol, bringing it up to aides ahead of time.

The Secret Service and presidential aides nixed the idea for security reasons but Trump was so taken with the image of him leading a dramatic march down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol steps, he referenced it in his speech.

'After this, we're going to walk down and I'll be there with you,' Trump said.

'I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard,' he added. 'So let's walk down Pennsylvania Avenue!'

President Trump mulled walking to the Capitol with his supporters after his January 6th rally

Some of Trump's tweets from January 6th

His supporters started marching before he finished talking. As Pence was in the House chamber, gaveling a special session into order, crowds of Trump supporters were outside the building.

At 2:11 p.m., the rioters broke into Capitol.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi was pulled from the House chamber, where she had been presiding over an objection to the certification. Pence was pulled from the Senate chamber.

About this time, Trump called Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah - but by accident.

Trump thought he was calling new Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville, who had said he would object to the electoral votes of some states.

Trump wanted to talk to Tuberville about expanding his challenges and slowing down the certification process even further. But he dialed Lee by mistake.

The former president's focus was on the certification.

At at 2:24 p.m., Trump tweeted: 'Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.'

Inside the Capitol building, the pro-Trump mob was looking for Pence with some shouting 'hang Mike.' Some rioters came within a few hundred feed of the vice president as Pence was pulled from the Senate floor by his security staff.

Meanwhile, various members of Congress - who are some of the most well-connected people in the world - were calling White House officials, the governors of nearby Virginia and Maryland, and anyone else that they thought could help bring the building back under government control.

A Trump adviser told The Post that, while this was going on, the then-president was spellbound to the TV, enjoying the spectacle. Aides worked to convince him to send a message calling off the rioters.

Trump supporters broke into the Capitol at 2:11 p.m.

At 2:38 p.m. Trump tweeted: 'Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!'

At 3:13 p.m., Trump tweeted again: 'I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order  respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!'

During this time, as images of rioters storming the Capitol flooded TV screens, Trump didn't reach out to check on Pence, who was sheltering in the complex, nor with any other Congressional leadership, including then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell nor Speaker Pelosi.

At 4:17 p.m., Trump posted a video to Twitter where he gave his most direct comments to date, telling the crowd: 'You have to go home.'

But he also said he loved them: 'Go home. We love you. You're very special.'

And, at 6:01 p.m., as Washington D.C. came under a curfew, Trump tweeted yet again, this time complaining about the election results: 'These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!'

The Capitol was finally declared secured around 8 p.m. and Congress resumed its work of certifying Joe Biden's electoral college win.

At 3:45 a.m., they confirmed Biden would be the nation's 46th president.

In the aftermath of the January 6th several White House aides quit because of their frustration with Trump's lack of response to the riot.

'If we could throw him to the angry mob, we'd throw him to the angry mob now,' a Trump adviser told CNN.
Salman Khan during the recent hearing in court apologised for 'mistakenly' submitting a false affidavit in the Jodhpur session court in 2003. Both hearing sessions in the court were in the case of poaching two blackbucks in Jodhpur in 1998.

In the latest hearing that took place on Tuesday (February 9), Salman appealed the Jodhpur sessions court against conviction in the blackbuck poaching case through video conferencing. Actor's lawyer Hastimal Saraswat told the court that the affidavit was mistakenly submitted for which the actor should be forgiven.

Salman Khan was asked to submit his arms licence in 2003, for which he had submitted an affidavit saying that he had lost the license. Khan had reportedly also lodged an FIR at the Bandra police station in Mumbai in this connection.

However, the court later found out that Salman's arm license was not lost, but had been submitted for renewal. Public prosecutor Bhavani Singh Bhati had demanded that a case of misleading the court should be filed against the actor.

The Sultan actor's lawyer Hastimal Saraswat on Tuesday said, "The affidavit was mistakenly given on August 8, 2003, as Salman had forgotten that his license was given for renewal because he was too busy. Therefore, he mentioned that the license had gone missing in the court."

The court has revealed that the final verdict in the case will be pronounced on Thursday (February 11, 2021).

For the unversed, Salman was arrested in 1998 for hunting two blackbucks in Kankani village near Jodhpur. At the time, the actor was reportedly shooting for the film, Hum Saath Saath Hain. He had been convicted and sentenced to five-year imprisonment during a court trial in 2018, however, Salman Khan had challenged the order in the sessions court.

ALSO READ: Salman Khan Is Ready With 3 Films For Release; Says Single Screens Have 'Kabristan Kind Of Feel'

ALSO READ: Salman Khan's Radhe Teaser To Be Slick And Massy; Makers Planning To Release It In March 2021?
Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-10 10:18:50|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- No new locally-transmitted confirmed cases of COVID-19 were reported Tuesday across the Chinese mainland, the National Health Commission said Wednesday.

A total of 14 new confirmed cases arriving from outside the mainland were reported on the same day, including six in Shanghai, three in Zhejiang and one each in Tianjin, Jiangsu, Fujian, Sichuan and Shaanxi.

No new suspected cases or new deaths related to the disease were reported, the commission added.

Tuesday also saw the discharge of 102 COVID-19 patients from hospitals following their recovery.

By the end of Tuesday, a total of 4,832 imported cases had been reported on the mainland. Among them, 4,565 had been discharged from hospitals following recovery, and 267 remained hospitalized. No deaths had been reported among the imported cases.

The total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases on the mainland reached 89,734 by Tuesday, including 969 patients still receiving treatment, 17 of whom were in severe conditions.

A total of 84,129 patients had been discharged following recovery on the mainland, and 4,636 had died as a result of the virus, according to the commission.

There were two suspected COVID-19 cases on the mainland as of Tuesday, and 18,742 close contacts remained under medical observation.

Tuesday saw seven newly reported asymptomatic cases, all arriving from outside the mainland. On the same day, three asymptomatic cases were re-categorized as confirmed cases.

A total of 555 asymptomatic cases were under medical observation, of whom 292 arrived from outside the mainland.

By the end of Tuesday, 10,693 confirmed COVID-19 cases, including 188 deaths, had been reported in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR), while 48 cases had been reported in the Macao SAR, and 933 cases, including nine deaths, had been reported in Taiwan.

A total of 9,976 COVID-19 patients in the Hong Kong SAR had been discharged from hospitals following recovery, while 46 had been discharged in the Macao SAR, and 850 had been discharged in Taiwan. Enditem
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A former Minister of Aviation, Femi Fani-Kayode, has denied defecting to the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC).

The former minister was earlier reported to have dumped the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) following his meeting with the Kogi State governor, Yahaya Bello and the APC interim National Chairman, Mala Buni.

Mr Fani-Kayodes meeting with the duo on Tuesday came as a surprise to many owing to his stern criticism of President Muhammadu Buhari-led administration.

On Wednesday, Mr Bello, in a two minutes video, claimed the former minister had dumped the PDP for the APC.

The governor said the defection of Mr Fani-Kayode was one of his achievements as the chairman of youth and women mobilisation committee of the APC.

But reacting to Mr Bellos claim on his twitter handle @realFFK , Mr Fani-Kayode said he had not left the PDP for APC.

Though we have had meetings across party lines and we are in a season of political consultation I have not left the PDP, he said.

PREMIUM TIMES had earlier on reported the ex-minister as saying in a statement that his discussion with Messrs Buni and Bello at the meeting revolved around pressing national concerns, party politics and host of affairs.

It is right and proper for us to talk and to attempt to join hands across political, religious and regional lines to save Nigeria, he said.

The fact that I am in talks with leaders from a cross-section of political parties, including the ruling party, does not in any way derogate from this and does not mean that I will ever change those views.
(ANSAmed) - ROME, FEBRUARY 10 - The doubling of the capacity of the Suez Canal "creates a great deal of opportunities for the Mediterranean, including Naples, but the city's nature tends towards tourism and I do not think millions of containers can transit through here", the new head of the Central Tyrrhenian Port Network Authority Andrea Annunziata said.



"The (southern Italian) port that could act as a hub - through which millions of containers resulting from the doubling of the Suez Canal capacity could transit - is Gioia Tauro," he added.



"We in Naples," he said, "can implement the transshipment, seeking to combine this as best as possible with the tourist nature of the city. We will work on (creating) a welcoming environment for the many cruise ship passengers that will return after COVID-19, as well as on special economic zones (SEZ).



Cities like Naples and Salerno cannot take in so many more containers than they are already handling. I am thinking above all about the success that an SEZ could have, about the many businesses that might arrive at the Naples port, the containers that there will be for this economy. We must adapt to these prospects, and de-bureaucratization of procedures will accompany them. Some 4,000 SEZs have been very successful around the world and we hope this will be brought in soon." On tourism, Annuziata, former head of eastern Sicily ports, underscored that Naples "offers history, architecture, and landscapes for tourists. The Campania region has many UNESCO /World Heritage) sites. We must work to offer better logistics, security, and respect for the environment for when cruise lines resume as best they can. Cruise ship passengers will soon have a transformed Piazza del Municipio with 300 meters of things to wonder at and archaeological finds along the way as they walk." (ANSA).
Vietnam is set to be a prime destination for travel after COVID-19, with its expert handling of the pandemic, noted an article published by UK news site yourlocalguardian.co.uk.

Ha Long Bay in Vietnam's northern province of Quang Ninh

It stated four reasons that may turn the Southeast Asian nation into the most popular destinations in the post-pandemic period.

Vietnam had already taken quick and decisive measures to safeguard its own population when most other countries in the world were still investigating the emergence of this new and strange virus.

The borders were closed in early 2020, and the government was quick to impose a lockdown, shutting down schools, restaurants and clubs. People were ordered to work from home as much as possible.

The result of all this is that Vietnam is clearly one of the countries that has managed the outbreak of COVID-19 the best, it affirmed.

As a result, Vietnams economy is picking up again faster compared to other countries.

Vietnam continues to keep its borders closed, and for good reason. This is fairly unique, the article said, citing that as popular tourist destinations like Egypt have opened up despite having far greater virus numbers.

Vietnam has this option available to them, which would greatly boost their ailing economy. But the Government has sent a clear message to the world - public health comes first.

Vietnams handling of the virus has garnered them international praise and the country now has a reputation as safe and dependable with regards to health.

It went on to explain that this criteria in particular, rather than domestic tourist attractions or hospitality, will prove decisive for tourists deciding which country they will visit once the coronavirus is no longer an issue./.VNA

A small meth lab is seen inside a raided compound belonging to a suspected Sam Gor syndicate operations chief, in Mae Sot, Thailand May 13, 2019.

Thailands counter-narcotics police chief on Tuesday confirmed the arrest in Thai territory of a suspected senior leader with a triad that, according to law enforcement sources, dominates a multi-billion-dollar illicit drugs trade in the Asia-Pacific region.

The suspect, Hong Kong's Lee Chung Chak, was arrested in October but is trying to block his extradition to Australia through an appeal in the courts, Lt. Gen. Montri Yimyaem, commander of the Thai polices Narcotics Suppression Bureau, told BenarNews.

The AFP sought our cooperation to extradite him to Australia based on an extradition treaty. We arrested him according to a Thai court order, Montri said, referring to the Australian Federal Police.

His case is at the appeals court stage. He has appealed because he doesnt want to be extradited.

In November, Thailands Criminal Court approved Lees extradition to Australia, according to a report by the Reuters news agency.

BenarNews contacted Thai appeals court officials to find out the status of Lees appeal, but they declined to give details. The news service also tried contacting the Australian Embassy in Bangkok for information, but officials did not immediately return phone calls.

Lees was the second recent high-profile arrest of senior members of the drug syndicate Sam Gor, or The Company, Reuters reported. Tse Chi Lop, a China-born Canadian national who police suspect is the kingpin of Sam Gor, was arrested last month in the Netherlands, according to the news agency.

The syndicate is suspected of mass producing drugs  mainly methamphetamine and heroin  in so-called super-labs in Myanmar, according to a 2019 Reuters investigation.

Australian Federal Police suspect the duo of being jointly involved in billions of dollars of drug imports into Australia over several decades, according to The Sydney Morning Herald. Lee is also suspected of laundering millions of dollars through Australian gaming giant Crown Resorts, the Australian newspaper said.

The AFP heads Operation Kungur, a multinational task force targeting the syndicate to which both suspects allegedly belong, according to Reuters. Australias federal police had requested law enforcement authorities around the world to arrest Tse and Lee, Reuters reported.

The Sam Gor triad is believed to launder drug money through businesses such as casinos, hotels and real estate in Southeast Asias Mekong region, Agence France-Presse reported.

Sam Gor syndicate leaders on the Australian Federal Polices wanted list include Canadian citizens, and others from Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Malaysia, Myanmar, Vietnam and mainland China, according to Reuters.

Reuters cited estimates from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) that Sam Gor made up to U.S. $17 billion from methamphetamine trafficking in the Asia-Pacific region alone in 2018.

Police officials in the Asia-Pacific region believe that, on occasion, as much as 70 percent of methamphetamines entering Australia come from this syndicate, the Morning Herald reported.

Drug network of 14 Chinese descendants

According to a Thai anti-drug official, premium drugs were being produced in the Golden Triangle and distributed by a group called 14K  a drug network of 14 Chinese descendants worldwide  that is a member of Sam Gor. The Golden Triangle is the area where the borders of Thailand, Laos and Myanmar come together.

Many key members of 14K "speak good Chinese and English so that they can distribute the drugs from the Golden Triangle to Chinese-populace areas in Australia, Singapore, Taiwan, Canada and New York, the official told BenarNews on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to reporters.

Methamphetamine production has quadrupled in Southeast Asias Golden Triangle region in recent years, the head of UNODC in Bangkok said last week. Illegal manufacturers of synthetic drugs have changed ingredients used to start the process, he said.

The surge that has come out of the Golden Triangle, we have never seen something like this globally, so quickly, Jeremy Douglas, Southeast Asia and Pacific representative for the UNODC, told BenarNews last week.

So there are indications that there are very sophisticated criminal activities around chemicals going on inside the Golden Triangle right now, Douglas said.

Thai authorities have been keeping an eye out for Sam Gor activities kept over the past few year, the former Thai anti-drug official said.

Thailand becomes a conduit for drugs trafficking to Malaysia which [in turn] is a stopover before drugs are shipped abroad to Australia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Canada and the U.S., for example, the source said.

Thai anti-drugs enforces seized 516 million meth tablets in 2018, more than double that of the previous year, Reuters reported in 2019.

UNODCs Douglas said last week that he was concerned for the future, noting there were more drug seizures in January than in the same month in 2020. He said another surge in 2021 could occur unless steps were taken to stem the flow of illegal drugs.
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I am committed to helping my patients enhance their appearance and improve their confidence and quality of life. It is an honor to earn this recognition, says Dr. John M. Anastasatos

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Tributes have been paid to a County Derry priest who passed away last week.

Mourners at the funeral of Father Tony Darragh heard how he was 'ahead of his time in many ways'.

Fr Darragh passed away on January 28 at Kimmage Manor in Dublin, after a remarkable life that took him from his native Greenlough to missionary projects in various areas of Africa.

Celebrant Fr Dermott Harkin told mourners how Father Darragh's mother had walked ten miles home from Magherafelt hospital with her newborn in her arms, and how the missionary had a difficult childhood.

 He was gravely sick from pneumonia and his very earliest memory was of being kept in a cot beside the open fire and somewhat later, of hospital, where he had polio, he said.

Tony was born on December 5, 1939, the year of the outbreak of the Second World War. He used to joke he was the cause of the Second World War.

His brother Michael sent money to help Fr Darragh attend St Columb's College, where he shared a classroom with future Poet Laureate Seamus Heaney.

From an early age, Tony was dreaming of life as a missionary priest in Africa, but he may initially have had an ulterior motive.

This was mainly because he dreamed of owning a motorbike, said Fr Harkin.

He knew from the Far East magazine that the missionaries had motorbikes to cover the long distances.

He was inspired by meeting two Holy Ghost fathers at a retreat and he travelled to Dublin for the first time for an interview.

In time, he went on to teach for three years in the junior school in Rathmines, where he learned Portuguese, in anticipation of a missionary post in Brazil.

At the last minute, he was reassigned and was in the first group to go by plane to Africa, previous deployments having left Dublin by boat.

Tony's passion for community development bore remarkable fruit. In Kenya, he set about learning the local language with a group of school children who laughed with him at his pronunciation efforts.

He spent 20 years in Kenya and Uganda, investing time with community leaders and women's groups to build infrastructure and sustainable communities.

Through experimentation, he learned what and how to farm. Discovering by coincidence that pineapple would grow from putting the fruit waste heads into sand, Fr Harkin told the congregation.

By the time he left, they had a co-operative with on million pineapples on wasteland and a working canning factory.

Tony always said he absolutely loved every single minute of his time in Africa and he was close to his beloved sisters in Zambia and South Africa.

He reminisced fondly of the people who enabled his work and memories of amazing views over the Indian Ocean.

At the heart of all his work was a man who was humble, hard-working, and more concerned with community development than the organised institution of the church.

The simple things in life were his pleasure, said Fr Harkin.

He was passionate about sustainability, the environment, and was proud of the Christian community development model that he championed in Africa.

His impact, and that of those he supported and worked with was an example to other communities and went on to be adopted across many other African countries.

Although he spent years in Africa, he never forgot his home town, and they never forgot him. After being ordained in 1966, he travelled home the following day to say mass in Greenlough.

His proud parents Henry and Susan and the local community of the parish came out in force to welcome him home, recalled a post on Facebook group 'Photos of Portglenone'.

A parade started from all roads to the centre of the village where Fr Darragh arrived, St Mary's Pipe Band Greenlough lead the way with the local GAA team and Camogie teams taking part along with different groups with in the parish.

Fr Tony worked in the missions in Africa for many years in different countries, he still found time to come home and visit family in Tyanee.

Closing the homily, Fr Harkin remembered Fr Darragh as being 'just a great man'.

Rest well, Tony, keep dreaming of your motorcycle, he added.
St. Josephs University and the University of the Sciences announced Wednesday they are considering a merger to help both institutions grow and thrive in an increasingly challenging higher education market.

Under the proposal, which was revealed to staffs of both schools in an email at noon, the 200-year-old USciences, formerly Philadelphia College of Pharmacy  the nations first pharmacy college  would become part of the larger St. Josephs, a 170-year-old Jesuit institution.

St. Josephs would retain its name over the combined entity.

Mark C. Reed, president of St. Josephs, and Paul Katz, president of USciences, said they have signed a nonbinding letter of intent to evaluate the impact of a merger and develop an agreement.

 READ MORE: St. Joe's says it is open to partnerships and wants to add programs

The two institutions are the latest example of potential higher education consolidation in an industry that expects more of it as the number of available high school students drops and pressure to lower tuition builds. Add to that the pandemic, which has cost colleges millions in lost room and board revenue and more money for cleaning, testing, and other initiatives. And in the Philadelphia region, there are a lot of colleges, which means more competition.

You kind of have this perfect storm, said Guilbert C. Hentschke, dean emeritus at the University of Southern California and coauthor of Strategic Mergers in Higher Education. Thats why you can probably look toward more mergers in the future.

The presidents of the two Philadelphia schools expect to conclude their evaluation this summer, and then complete the merger in another year if the plan is approved. It would be subject to approval by both boards and government and accrediting agencies.

Though much will be discussed over the next several months, the presidents said they envision keeping both campuses, which are less than five miles apart. St. Josephs campus straddles the Philadelphia/Lower Merion border and USciences is in West Philadelphia.

Their faculty, budgets, and administrations would be combined, but both presidents said its too early to say whether that will result in job elimination.

Katz asserted: This is not about shrinking. This is about growth and future potential.

Combined, the institutions would enroll more than 9,000 undergraduate and graduate students and have an endowment in excess of a half-billion dollars, an operating budget over $300 million, and nearly 95,000 living alumni, Reed said.

Those numbers in terms of the scale  are relevant, Reed said. It gives us a lot of runway, a lot of potential.

 READ MORE: Plans for Pa. university mergers continue

Reed and Katz said while they have looked at other models, none are quite the same. The Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education is preparing to integrate six of its 14 universities into two new entities. Thomas Jefferson University and Philadelphia University merged in 2017.

Theres not a playbook for this, Katz said. Hopefully, we and St. Joes are creating the playbook. One of the things that were very confident of is there will be others who consider similar pathways.

 READ MORE: Thomas Jefferson-Philadelphia University merger draws attention

Reed said St. Josephs, which has a rich history in liberal arts, business, and education, was looking to add health-care programs. U.S. News & World Report last month said 42 of the best 100 jobs are in health care or health-care support, with physician assistant, a USciences program, No. 1, he said.

But it was actually USciences that approached St. Josephs about a merger.

A little over a year ago, our board and I started talking about really being very proactive in looking at  a bold way to move ahead that would enhance our platform, increase our growth, and give us some new opportunities we couldnt realize as a stand-alone, Katz said.

The health sciences university hired a Chicago consulting firm and began exploring potential partners, of which St. Josephs emerged as a strong contender, Katz said, citing proximity, complementary programs, and similar graduation and retention rates. While St. Joes tuition is higher, because of aid, students at both schools pay nearly the same net price, the presidents said.

When Katz called Reed last summer about exploring a merger, we were not only prepared to do so, we were thrilled to do so, Reed said.

It isnt the first time USciences has considered merging. The school opted against joining Salus University but has formed partnerships with it.

USciences was founded in 1821 when 68 apothecaries met in Carpenters Hall to develop training standards for apprentices and students. In 1921, it became Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science and got university status in 1997, taking its current name a year later.

 READ MORE: USciences to lose accreditation for its physician assistant program

The school has faced financial challenges. In June 2017, with enrollment falling, it laid off faculty and staff and cut programs in the wake of a $4.5 million shortfall in its $90 million budget. Earlier that year, the school lost accreditation for its physician assistant program, but has since regained it and admitted its first new class of 40 students this summer, Katz said. And after resetting its tuition, the school saw a 30% increase in first-year enrollment in 2019, he said.

Fitch Ratings, however, downgraded the universitys financial rating in December and changed its outlook to negative, citing operating cash flow margins and continuous reliance on supplemental draws from the endowment, which stands at $172 million. The university drew about $10 million from its quasi-endowment to offset operating deficits in fiscal 2019 and 2020, the report said.

 READ MORE: USciences lowers its sticker price

Founded in 1851, St. Josephs, too, in the last decade has weathered challenges but has taken steps under Reed, who arrived in 2015, to bolster its financial and market position. In a message to alumni and parents in November, Reed said the university finished the last fiscal year in the black, has maintained an A-minus rating from the credit rating agency S&P, and has seen its endowment, now at $352 million, grow by more than 50% in the last five years.

Both presidents said the partnership is a strategic move, not a rescue plan.

This is an example of opportunity, not born out of necessity, Reed said.

 READ MORE: St. Joe's enrollment plan troubles students

At St. Josephs, several faculty and alumni saw strong potential in the plan.

Im really excited that were going to be able to partner with such a good school, said Ann Green, chair of the faculty policy and procedures committee and an English professor.

Ronald Dufresne, past faculty senate president and an associate professor of management, said he realizes there will be some uncertainty for employees, but that he trusts our leadership will do whatever they can to protect us.

The news came as a quirky stroke of luck for Jayna Suter, a senior psychology major from Aston and student government president at USciences. When choosing a college, she was torn between the two.

Ive always been a fan of St. Joes, she said. I put on my St. Joes hoodie to celebrate.

There is some anxiety, said Eric Pelletier, a USciences assistant professor of physical therapy and faculty senate president, with employees not knowing what it could mean for their programs and jobs. But he noted that St. Joes doesnt have many of the programs at USciences.

Theres excitement that this could position us for the future, he said.

Hes not too concerned about losing the USciences name, as long as colleges within the school, including its signature Philadelphia College of Pharmacy, retain their names.

Katz said key aspects of the schools history would be preserved.

These are institutions that have strong value in their brands and in their identities, Reed said. At the end of the day, there will be one name  but I dont want that in any way to convey from St. Joes that we see this as the absorption of an institution. In fact, this is an additive process.

As for their mascots?

The Hawk will never die, Reed said.

USciences Drake the Devil may not be as lucky.

Staff writer Harold Brubaker contributed to this article.
10,000 Noi Bai Airport employees to be tested for SARS-CoV-2

Hanoi is going to test 10,000 employees at Noi Bai International Airport to avoid an outbreak like at Tan Son Nhat Airport in HCM City.



10,000 Noi Bai Airport employees to be tested for SARS-CoV-2






State-TV journalist Hala Al-Jarf was detained on January 23 in the centre-west city of Salamaniyah, accused of spreading disinformation and misinformation on digital media platforms with the aim of causing confusion and distort public opinion. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) calls for her immediate release.

Before the detention Al-Jarf, one of the most recognized journalists in Syria and presenter of TV programme With you on the air, she published a post in her Facebook account in which she said: "Let your motto for the next stage be (Stay at home) and remain completely silent.

She was arrested the following day by the governments cybercrime division and sent to penal security in the Syrian capital city Damascus.

The Ministry of the Interior issued a statement on 31 January, stating that the Directorate of Criminal Security had arrested eight people, mentioning only their initials including her initials for the crime of spreading disinformation on digital media platforms with the aim of causing confusion and distort public opinion.

According to an IFJ report released in May 2020, Syrian is among many Arab countries who passed laws restricting freedom of expression, including United Arab Emirates, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Algeria, Jordan, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Mauritania, Egypt and Palestine. All have endorsed laws that generally contain controversial provisions on freedom of expression and freedom of the press.

IFJ General Secretary, Anthony Bellanger, said: National laws cannot serve as tools to stifle freedom of expression and information. The IFJ urges the authorities for the immediate release of prominent journalist Hala Al-Jarf and calls on the Syrian government to reform its laws in line with international standards on press freedom and freedom of expression.
A MAN who violently stabbed his flatmate while he was experiencing an acute psychotic episode has been sentenced to seven and-a-half years imprisonment.

Imposing sentence, Judge Tom ODonnell said he had not lost sight of the appalling injuries sustained but added that he was required to balance things in whatever sentence he imposed.

Jean Louis Fancony, 37, of no fixed abode was convicted by a jury last November of intentionally causing serious harm to the 33-year-old victim on July 22, 2019.

Detective Garda Colum OShea told Limerick Circuit Court the incident happened at an apartment the pair shared at Riverpoint in the city centre at around 3.30pm.

He said the French national, who had lost his job a number of months earlier, had been acting strangely on the day and that he stabbed the victim several times with a large bread knife.

The victim managed to escape from the apartment but was followed as he made his way along a corridor and down to the foyer of the apartment complex.

Detective Garda OShea said the alarm was raised by a passer-bye who described how the victim had his intestines in his hand as he emerged onto the street.

Members of Limerick Fire and Rescue who were on a training exercise nearby were alerted and provided assistance as did paramedics who were in an ambulance which was flagged down.

The detective told John OSullivan BL, prosecuting, that Mr Fancony returned to the apartment before leaving via a fire escape and walking along the Dock Road.

A knife was recovered when he was located near the Irish Cement Roundabout later in the day.

Mr Fancony was taken to Unit 5B at University Hospital Limerick for assessment a number of hours after his arrest but was discharged the following day.

While a defence of self-defence was put forward during the trial, Mr OSullivan said this had been rejected by the jury and he submitted that provocation was not a feature of the case.

The victim, who was underwent life-saving surgery following the attack, described how he still finds it hard to comprehend what happened and how it is heartbreaking not being able to do a lot of things he used to do before the was stabbed.

It is a life sentence for me he said adding: I am now fearful and worried of what the future holds.

Judge ODonnell commented that the victim had sustained horrific injuries and that he was extremely lucky to be alive.

However, he said Mr Fanconys mental state at the time, his personal circumstances and his previous good record were matters he had to consider.

He imposed a nine year prison sentence, suspending the final 18 months.
Study results have been submitted to the US Food and Drug Administration for review

A treatment, known as KEDRAB (Rabies Immune Globulin [Human]), currently used in the prevention of rabies has been demonstrated to be safe and effective for patients age 17 and under.

Results published today in Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics report the first and only pediatric trial of any human rabies immunoglobulin (HRIG) currently available in the US. Findings have been submitted to the US Food and Drug Administration for review.

In the United States, someone is treated for possible exposure to rabies every 10 minutes. Globally, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that rabies causes 59,000 human deaths annually in over 150 countries, with 95% of cases occurring in Africa and Asia - however they concede it is likely a gross underestimate of the true burden of disease.

The WHO also estimates that 40% of the global rabies disease burden occurs in children under 15 years of age, and that most encounters of the disease follow a dog bite.

Once clinical symptoms appear; rabies is virtually 100% fatal.

The current treatment for previously unvaccinated people potentially exposed to rabies is called rabies post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP), which includes thorough wound washing, passive neutralization of the virus with infiltration of human rabies immune globulin (HRIG) into and around the wound site, and a series of 4 doses of rabies vaccine given over a 2-week timeframe.

And in this latest study carried out by a team of international experts from the US and Israel, KEDRAB (HRIG150) has become the first HRIG shown to be safe and effective in children when administered promptly and properly as part of the rabies PEP process.

"Despite the large proportion of pediatric cases, limited safety and efficacy data had previously existed for use in pediatric patients," says senior author Dr James Linakis, from the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University.

"Evidence from this KEDRAB US Pediatric Trial confirms that this product addresses an unmet need in children who may have been exposed to rabies, and gives healthcare providers confidence when preventing this deadly condition in countless numbers of young patients across the US," says lead author Dr Nicholas Hobart-Porter, Pediatric Emergency Physician at University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences and Arkansas Children's Hospital.

The study looked at a group of 30 trial participants, with suspected or confirmed rabies exposure, over an 84-day period (as to include a 3-month follow-up). Each participant received PEP. KEDRAB was infiltrated into and around detectable wound site(s) and/or given intramuscularly along with the first of a 4-dose series of rabies vaccine. Although the study did not include a placebo control group, placebo treatment of exposed patients is ethically unacceptable due to the near 100% fatality rate of rabies.

No participant showed an active rabies infection at any point, and there were no deaths and no serious adverse events.

While 70% of participants experienced some form of unrelated or related side effect, all of these were mild.

"The study not only confirms the safety and efficacy of KEDRAB, but also that KEDRAB could be well tolerated by all patients who participated in this trial," says Novinyo Serge Amega, M.D., head of US Medical Affairs at Kedrion Biopharma. "It was the first and only pediatric study of any HRIG available in the United States and, as such, may provide a healthy degree of reassurance for physicians and others who treat children exposed to rabies."

In the US, rabies in humans is extremely rare; with around two deaths on average per year. The low incidence of human rabies in the US can be attributed to successful pet vaccination and animal control programs, public health surveillance and testing, and availability of post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP) for rabies.

It is important to note, that KEDRAB is not licensed outside the United States. Therefore, the authors cannot make any connection to its use in other nations. Availability, accessibility and affordability of PEP in developing nations remains a major component of the global burden of rabies.

###
During a conversation between US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, both leaders reaffirmed the US-India partnership and discussed expanded cooperation across the Indo-Pacific region.

According to a statement by US State Department spokesperson Ned Price, Blinken and Jaishankar discussed regional developments, including the value of cooperation across the Indo-Pacific.

Also Read | Inside the third front of the farm agitation

Both sides also looked forward to expanded regional cooperation, including through the Quad and to address the challenges of COVID-19 and climate change.

The leaders also expressed concern over the military coup in Myanmar and discussed the importance of rule of law and democratic process in the country.

Taking to Twitter to inform about the conversation, Blinken said: "Our partnership with India across the Indo-Pacific is critical to addressing challenges we face in the region and globally. @DrSJaishankar and I had a fruitful discussion about ways to strengthen our cooperation to address regional developments, including the situation in Burma."

On the other hand, Jaishankar tweeted: "Welcomed the comprehensive discussion today with @SecBlinken. Reviewed Indo-Pacific developments and Quad cooperation. Exchanged views on the situation in Myanmar. Look forward to remaining in touch."

This comes as members of the Quad framework- the US, India, Japan and Australia - are working to arrange the first meeting of their leaders amid China's growing clout in the region, reported the Japan Times.

According to a source, the US has already proposed to other countries the idea of holding an online meeting of the Quad leaders.

The conversation between Blinken and Jaishankar comes after US President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Narendra Modi held a telephone conversation, where they discussed cooperation in the Indo-Pacific region and the developments in Myanmar. (ANI)

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Satellite images reveal that the timing of algal blooms in the Red Sea may affect the next haul of sardines and squid by commercial fisheries.

Rising temperatures in the Red Sea have changed the timing of phytoplankton blooms. These microscopic algae form the base of many marine food webs and so are critical to ocean biodiversity and the industries that they support on land, such as fisheries and tourism.

A team led by KAUST climate modeler Ibrahim Hoteit has used satellite images to study the phenology of algal blooms in the northern Red Sea and their impact on fish catches. Phenology is the study of key stages in a species' lifecycle, such as when a seed sprouts or a bird migrates. Many phenological events are seasonal and can reveal a lot about the sensitivity of an ecosystem to environmental change. "We suspected that the timing of large phytoplankton blooms could impact fish further up the food chain, including those vital to fisheries," says Hoteit.

Using ocean color images taken weekly between 1997 and 2018, the team estimated chlorophyll-a concentrationsa proxy for phytoplankton biomass. A model developed by lead author John Gittings was used to calculate the biomass of phytoplankton larger than two micrometers, such as diatoms, as these support food chains important to commercial fisheries. Gittings' model assumes that smaller phytoplankton do not grow beyond a specific chlorophyll-a concentration, so any extra chlorophyll-a in the system is due to large phytoplankton.

The data revealed that annual winter blooms lasted longer between 2002 and 2008 due to El Nino monsoon winds driving nutrient-rich waters into the Red Sea from the Indian Ocean. However, the 2002-2003 bloom lasted 11 weeks longer than average, suggesting some additional factor. Observations of sea surface height revealed two large eddies in the northern and central Red Sea at the start of this big bloom, which could have caused an upwelling of cold nutrient-rich waters.

The team then gathered fisheries catch data for several species of sardines and squid and found that prolonged algal blooms led to larger catches the following year. This was particularly evident in the bumper catch reported the year after the 2002-2003 bloom event. "We were surprised by the strength of the link," says Gittings. "It provides compelling evidence that anomalous changes in the timing of food availability may directly impact the success of species higher up the marine food chain."

Gittings plans to develop a model that can distinguish between different sized phytoplankton and use high-resolution images from next-generation satellite sensors to create a richer picture of phytoplankton communities in the Red Sea.

"Satellite-derived phytoplankton data could serve as an early warning system for fisheries by using changes in bloom timings to predict how next year's catch may be affected," suggests Gittings. Such data could help policymakers in Red Sea nations manage this essential ecosystem.

Explore further Algorithm for algal rhythms

More information: John A. Gittings et al. Links between Phenology of Large Phytoplankton and Fisheries in the Northern and Central Red Sea, Remote Sensing (2021). John A. Gittings et al. Links between Phenology of Large Phytoplankton and Fisheries in the Northern and Central Red Sea,(2021). DOI: 10.3390/rs13020231
Democrat prosecutors hoping to convince skeptical Republicans to convict Donald Trump of insurrection will begin making their arguments on Wednesday.

After Tuesday's opening arguments over the legality of the trial, which concluded with a vote to proceed, the 'meat' of the proceedings will begin at noon on Wednesday.

Nine House Democrats, who serve as prosecutors in the Senate hearing, will set out their argument that Trump alone was responsible for inciting his mob of supporters, who broke into the U.S. Capitol on January 6 and interrupted the presidential electoral count.

Trump's lawyers on Tuesday argued that the trial was unconstitutional because Trump had already left office.

Jamie Raskin, pictured, is leading the nine House Democrats who comprise the prosecution

Donald Trump is the first president in U.S. history to have been impeached twice by the House

Trump's lawyers argue his January 6 speech is protected under the First Amendment and was not a call for insurrection

All Democrats and six Republicans disagreed, arguing that there is legal precedent for the trial and that there should be no exceptions for impeachable behavior in a president's last months in office.

While Democrats won Tuesday's vote, it also signaled that they will not likely have the votes for an eventual conviction, since they would need a minimum of 17 Republicans to vote with them.

Democrats say they know they are arguing the case uphill, but they are holding out hope that they will convert more Republicans by the final vote.

The Democrats are trying to take advantage of senators' own experiences, tapping into their emotions as they describe in detail  and show on video  what happened as the mob broke through police barriers, injured law enforcement officers, ransacked the Capitol and hunted for lawmakers.

Democratic aides working on the impeachment team said Tuesday that they think they have a 'devastating' case against the former president, and that they will prosecute it like a criminal trial.

On Tuesday the Senate voted 56:44 to proceed with the impeachment trial

On Tuesday, as they argued that the trial was constitutional, they strayed from their arcane arguments about historic precedent and the Federalist Papers to show a video that took senators through a visceral, graphic timeline of January 6, starting with Trump's speech to supporters in which he told them to 'fight like hell' to overturn his defeat.

It juxtaposed Trump's words with what was happening inside and outside the building as supporters broke in, showing violence and jeers aimed at police and lawmakers. The carnage led to five deaths.

Similar video evidence is expected on Wednesday, as they begin arguments on the merits of the case  including some that has not been seen before, according to the aides, who spoke to AP.

Trump's lawyers had a bad day on Tuesday, as Trump fumed at their performance and Republican senators leaving the trial criticized their arguments as 'random,' 'disorganized' and 'perplexing.'

Bruce Castor, one of Trump's impeachment lawyers, was criticized for his performance

David Schoen, second of Trump's impeachment lawyers, performed slightly better Tuesday

Trump felt that the team, especially lead lawyer Bruce Castor, came off badly on television and looked weak compared to the Democratic prosecutors, according to multiple reports.

After the Democrats wrap up, on Thursday, the defense team will get a chance to redeem themselves.

On Friday they will begin what is likely to be two days of arguments that last into the weekend.

They plan to argue that Trump did not incite the violence, that rioters acted of their own accord and that the former president is protected by freedom of speech.

David Schoen, who spoke after Castor, criticized statements from Democrats that he said were also inciting violence, and told the chamber that the Democratic prosecutors are fueled by a 'hatred' of Trump and fear that they will lose power.

On Sunday and Monday senators will be able to ask questions, in a four-hour session.

Trump, in February 2020, holds up a newspaper showing the Senate acquittal of his first trial

Some of the Democratic managers wanted to call Capitol Police officers who clashed with rioters last month, others wanted to hear from Trump officials who were with him in the midst of the riots

Democrats argue Trump 'incited an insurrection' in his speech before the riots where he said: 'You'll never take back our country with weakness,' urging supporters to 'fight like hell'

The House impeachment managers can call witnesses, and it is not yet clear if they will do so.

If they do, it will slow down the process.

The Senate would need to approve and depose witnesses before they can actually testify.

If they do not, a final vote will be held next week.

Six Republican senators voted with Democrats on Tuesday not to dismiss the trial on constitutional grounds. Those senators so far appear the most likely to vote to convict Trump.

The six senators, most of whom have harshly criticized the president's behavior, are Susan Collins of Maine, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, Mitt Romney of Utah, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana.

Cassidy was the only one who did not side with Democrats in a similar vote two weeks ago.

He said after the vote Tuesday that he thought Democrats had a better argument and that Trump's team had done a 'terrible' job. He said he will watch the additional arguments as an impartial juror and then decide whether to convict.

Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, who voted Tuesday to dismiss the trial, is retiring in 2022 and has also said he has an open mind about conviction.
A majority of support convicting former President on an impeachment charge over his role in the Capitol riot on January 6, according to the CBS-YouGov poll released on Tuesday (local time).

The survey found 56 percent favor the former president's conviction, the same percentage who said they supported it in an ABC News-Ipsos poll released on Sunday, as reported by The Hill.

Pollsters surveyed 2,508 American adults from February 5 to 8. The survey has a 2.3-point margin of error.

"The same percentage of respondents in the CBS poll also believed the president encouraged the violence by pro-Trump rioters at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. This included 88 percent of Democrats, 21 percent of Republicans and 54 percent of independents," it reported further.

The former President's second impeachment, which is a historic first, charged him with inciting an insurrection against the United States and if convicted, he would be permanently barred to run for public office. To secure the necessary two-thirds majority to convict Trump, at least 17 Republicans in the upper chamber would need to back it, an outcome considered unlikely.

The poll results indicate the GOP (another name for the Republican Party -- Grand Old Party) base continues to back the former president and would take umbrage at GOP senators voting for conviction, with 71 per cent saying they would view a vote for impeachment or conviction as an act of disloyalty, The Hill reported further citing the poll.

Among Republican voters, as many as 47 per cent of them believe that loyalty to Trump is very important and 27 per cent of voters somewhat important while 15 per cent voters believe it is not too important and 12 per cent voters feel it is not at all important.

The Hill reported that the poll also surveyed Republicans' and Democrats' respective views of one another and found that 57 per cent of Republicans consider Democrats as "enemies" compared to 43 percent who consider them "political opposition." By contrast, 59 per cent of Democrats consider Republicans "political opposition" compared to 41 per cent who consider them "enemies."

Trump's impeachment trial began in the upper chamber on Tuesday.

A majority of US senators on Tuesday said the impeachment trial of former President is constitutional, despite calls from some Republicans to dismiss proceedings, reported CNN.

A simple majority was needed to determine the constitutional validity of the trial. The question was passed 56-44.

Six GOP senators voted with Democrats, establishing that the impeachment trial is constitutional. One of them, Bill Cassidy, a Republican from Louisiana, was the only GOP senator to change his vote on the constitutionality of Trump's impeachment.

Trump is facing his second impeachment trial at the Senate for his role in inciting the deadly insurrection at the Capitol last month. The former President is reportedly unhappy with his defense attorney Bruce Castor's opening argument on the Senate floor this afternoon, according to two people familiar with his reaction.

(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.)
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Facial recognition software developed by China-based Dahua, one of the world's largest manufacturers of video surveillance technology, purports to detect the race of individuals caught on camera and offers to alert police clients when it identifies members of the Turkic ethnic group Uighurs.

Dahua, though among Chinese companies sanctioned by the U.S. government, has a growing presence in the country with sales and support offices in Irvine and Houston. Despite restrictions on its business within the country, the company struck a deal, reportedly valued at $10 million, with Amazon for 1,500 thermal cameras and there are 80 public contracts to purchase the company's equipment in California alone.

Screenshots of Dahua platforms, provided to The Times by video surveillance research organization IPVM, raise troubling privacy concerns. A user guide for a service targeted at law enforcement clients indicates the company's technology can send a warning when it detects someone it identifies as Uighur; a consumer-facing product offers a feature to sort by race individuals who pass in front of its cameras.

It's unclear if these features have been deployed in real-world applications, which features are available in specific markets, and whether any of them are available in products sold to U.S. companies and agencies. Dahua did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The previously unreported features come to light weeks after the U.S. government officially declared that China's campaign against the largely Muslim ethnic Uighur minority is genocide. New details about the oppression of Uighurs in Xinjiang have emerged after former detainees spoke to the BBC and alleged that women in the "reeducation" camps were systematically raped. The Associated Press reported Uighur women had been systematically sterilized to curb the population. Some have been sent to forced labor camps that are reportedly tied to dozens of U.S. brands. Others have disappeared without a trace, leaving their families to quietly wonder where they have gone.

Bugra Arkin, 30, is among those who fear for the safety of his family members. Arkin, who came to Southern California to pursue his master's degree at USC, hasn't heard from or spoken to his father since 2018. His conversations with his motherstill living in Xinjiang's capital, Urumqiover messaging app WeChat are measured and veer away from any discussion of his father or where he could be. She told Arkin that she had to download an app that monitors her phone activity and must report calls she receives at night to police the next day.

Arkin, who has tried to bring awareness to the Uighur genocide in a petition to the United Nations, said he worries that any technology that has ties to the Chinese government could be used against not just him but anyone in the U.S. "People are very naive here because they have no idea how is our life in China," Arkin said.

"There is no privacy in China," he said.

Dahua was added to the U.S. entity list in 2019, along with 27 other companies including the tech giant Huawei, for its ties to "human rights violations and abuses in the implementation of China's campaign of repression," according to the Department of Commerce. The U.S. doesn't restrict American companies or agencies from buying from companies on the listit urges caution when doing sobut blocks those foreign companies from buying American products.

New details shared with The Times show Dahua developed capabilities that could further China's campaign against Uighur Muslims. Screenshots provided by IPVM show product support documents for Dahua's police surveillance platform that include several references to "real-time warning for Uighurs."

Screenshots show that the real-time warning feature requires specific equipment to "support reporting Uighur attributes."

The documents also reference "real-time warning for non-local Uighurs."

Along with tracking members of the ethnic group, the service touts its broad facial recognition capabilities. The documents say this service can categorize every face detected for "similar or same passerby photos."

A guide for a different Dahua policing tool lists categories of people the company can track, including "Uighurs with hidden terrorist inclinations," a screenshot shows.

Dahua's stated ability to use its technology to identify Uighurs was first exposed in November by engineer Serge Bazanski thanks to code the company posted from its software development kit on the public code-hosting platform Github. Among the attributes the code could filter was "EM-NATION-TYPE-UYGUR = 1."

Dahua pulled the code shortly after Bazanski tweeted about it.

At the time, Dahua said in a statement to the South China Morning Post that it "does not sell products that feature [an] ethnicity-focused recognition function."

Additional screenshots from a consumer-facing Dahua platform for examining footage captured using company cameras show a "race" filter available to some users. Other categories included in the company's face recognition filters include age, gender, whether an individual is wearing a mask and whether an individual has a beard. These categories can be used to scan existing video footage and focus future recordings on individuals who meet the chosen criteria.

An archived version of Dahua's publicly available software development kit shows a way the company categorizes people by race: EM-RACE-UNKNOWN = 0, EM-RACE-NODISTI = 1, EM-RACE-YELLOW = 2; EM-RACE-BLACK = 3 and EM-RACE-WHITE = 4.

The consumer-facing race filter alarmed Daniel Lewkovitz, chief executive of Calamity Monitoring, an Australian security company. Lewkovitz said he found the function when using the platform, called SmartPSS, on his desktop computer to look through footage to help the police in a criminal matter. His company will stop working with Dahua because of human rights concerns, he said.

"As soon as I became aware of it, I was absolutely appalled by it and I issued an instruction to my senior management that we are going to be moving away from this vendor," Lewkovitz said.

Although being on the entity list doesn't preclude Dahua from selling equipment to U.S. companies, the National Defense Authorization Act has since August prohibited the use of federal funds to enter into, extend or renew any contracts to purchase Dahua equipment. But at least one California contract to purchase Dahua equipmentthe biggest in the state, according to public procurement dataused federal funding.

According to purchase documents reviewed by The Times, Modesto City Schools paid $362,000 to buy and install 57 Dahua camera kits in buses in October. School district spokeswoman Becky Fortuna said the cameras were purchased using federal funds and were intended to enhance the district's contact-tracing efforts on school buses.

Fortuna said the district was not aware that Dahua was on the entity list or that there were bans on using federal funding to purchase Dahua equipment. The district is seeking advice on how to proceed with the existing camera systems it has installed, she said, but won't be buying any more Dahua equipment.

Considering the U.S. government has already censured numerous Chinese companies on human rights grounds, anyone doing business with companies such as Dahuaeven if those deals are legally compliantshould take into account the genocide against the Uighurs, Arkin said.

"China is buying those technology and those hardware to monitor us and destroy our lives," Arkin said.

Arkin's concerns about the Chinese government's ability to monitor him come from experience. During his last trip to China in 2017, he said, he was interrogated by police on three occasions about his education in the U.S., whether he's trying to raise awareness about Uighurs in China and whether he had spoken to any foreign officials. On one occasion, he said, police took pictures of his face from every angle, a blood sample, a voice recording and eyelash samples.

"Face recognition is very dangerous," he said. "They took my photo from every angle so even if I wear a mask they can still catch me."

Police told him it was part of normal procedures and he was too scared to say no, he said.

2021 Los Angeles Times.

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

The Nazareth Area teachers union and district officials are working together to update safety concerns.

Nazareth Area Education Association leaders in a letter to union members dated Feb. 3 raised issues about the safety plan, stating they were never privy to the districts reopening plan, discussed this past summer, until it was approved by the school board.

At issue were union concerns the district was not following its coronavirus safety plan.

As the school year progressed, the unions executive board claimed several key safety guidelines fell by the wayside, including an alleged lack of consistent deep cleaning in classrooms and common areas; altering of the six-foot desk separation recommendation by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and questionable practices regarding positive COVID-19 case reporting and contact tracing.

The union initially threatened in a letter dated Jan. 29 by attorney Paul Blunt to move to remote-only teaching in grades K-12 before taking back that action by Feb. 4. The union then stated it would be withdrawing the letter because it accepted district Superintendent Dennis Rikers offer to join in collaborative discussions with the school board and himself.

Riker Wednesday morning told lehighvalleylive.com those discussions are ongoing, adding the district is not facing a teacher walkout or sickout. Riker said a few details need to be ironed out with the union before a final report would be released to the public.

Riker did say an issue the administration and union started working on immediately involved adherence to social distancing. A few Nazareth Area High School classrooms have been identified in not following the six-foot guideline, he said.

The social distancing concerns at the high school are being addressed, Riker said.

Aris Asdourian, vice president of the Nazareth Area Education Association, confirmed Wednesday afternoon in an email the matter was resolved but did not immediately respond to a request for further information.

The school board during this weeks board meeting also fielded a series of questions and comments during the public comment portion of the agenda. Several concerns centered around when the district might do away with its hybrid-learning model and return to an in-person schedule five days a week, Riker said.

The district has a transition plan to bring students in grades K-3 back to a regular schedule, Riker said. However, he stressed there are still many components in executing that decision, including receiving data from parents on their wishes and making sure there is enough staffing to accommodate the requests.

The goal is to return to a full-time, in-person learning model as the amount of positive cases for COVID-19 dwindles, Riker said. But he noted this must be done in a safe and comfortable environment for students, teachers and staff.

Pennsylvanias now vaccinated 1 million people and the rate of new COVID-19 cases continues to drop. The state currently is averaging 3,775 new cases over the past week -- a 30% drop from the average a week ago.

Over the last three days, there have been 11,309 new cases of the coronavirus reported in the state. This breaks down to 4,717 new COVID-19 cases on Sunday, 2,504 on Monday and 4,088 new positives on Tuesday, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Healths daily report.

Tell us your coronavirus stories, whether its a news tip, a topic you want us to cover, or a personal story you want to share.

Please subscribe now and support the local journalism YOU rely on and trust.

Pamela Sroka-Holzmann may be reached at pholzmann@lehighvalleylive.com.
The Supreme Court has sided with churches over state COVID-19 restrictions in California, which blocked some of the restrictions that Gov. Gavin Newsom has imposed on houses of worship. California is considered to have some of the most draconian restrictions on churches.

Newsom's rules have treated churches worse than most other businesses in the state of California, according to a Breitbart News report.

Two churches filed lawsuits in federal court, saying that this unfavorable treatment violates the churches' rights under the Free Exercise Clause of the Constitution's First Amendment to conduct their worship services consistent with their faith.

The suit added that at a minimum this entitles them to be subject only to restrictions that other establishments must abide by.

The Supreme Court granted temporary relief in a 6-3 decision, partially reversing contrary rulings from lower courts. This will remain in place while the Ninth Circuit finishes its consideration of the appeal and will continue until the churches have an opportunity to petition for a full review.

The Center for American Liberty also served as a counsel in a last week's case.

Harmeet Dhillon, CEO of the group spearheading litigation, said that California's temples of commerce have opened while their temples of God have been forced to remain close.

"This was the first lawsuit filed for religious liberty during the COVID-19 pandemic and the Center for American Liberty fought tirelessly to liberate God-fearing Californians from second class citizen status and the constant fear of fines and arrest," Dhillon was quoted on The Federalist report.

Related story: Newsom Imposes Overnight Curfew in California to Curb COVID-19 Surge

California's restrictions

Under the state's tiered protocols, indoor church services are prohibited in regions of the state in the purple tier, where COVID-19 is identified to be widespread, according to a Sacramento Bee report. It was reported that much of the state is in the purple tier.

The court said in the unsigned opinion that the state could limit attendance to 25 percent capacity. In addition, the state also can prohibit singing and chanting during services as some health experts believe that it could more easily spread the coronavirus.

Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, referred to the Supreme Court's ruling as a big decision.

"It's giving us the contours of what's acceptable for this Supreme Court in this clash between public health and religion," Levinson was quoted on a report.

Arthur Hodges, South Bay's bishop, said that they are thrilled and excited to go back to church without legal threats of fines or arrest. Hodges said that this decision opens up churches in the entire state of California.

Houses of worships to have service amid the pandemic

Sacramento's Capital Christian Center was not reopening Sunday due to short notice. But the church's chief operations officer, Jason Batt, said that they will be having services up to the 25 percent room capacity in the following weeks.

Capital Christian Center is one of the region's largest churches.

Meanwhile, Senior Pastor Les Simmons of South Sacramento Christian Center said that they will stay closed at least for now, saying that they are still online for the time being.

"We're still in a public health crisis," Simmons was quoted in a report.

Related story: San Diego Judge Allows Strip Clubs to Open Causing Churches to Protest


Leading malt beverage, Malta Guinness is excited to announce winners of the recently ended #MGKaraoke contest. The contest is part of the brands social media campaign dubbed Enjoy a World of Goodness aimed at engaging more consumers and creating meaningful connections with its fans.



The brand collaborated with Hip-life superstar Sarkodie and Alt-music sensation Sister Derby to give away two 256 gigabyte iPhone 11 Pro Maxes phones and four Beats Solo-3 headphones for participating in the Malta Guinness Karaoke competition.



They beat scores of other participants by submitting videos of themselves singing selected songs while using any of the Malta Guinness stock-keeping units (can, glass bottle and plastic bottle) as a microphone.



The campaign which began in September 2020 leveraged on influencers to make tangible Malta Guinness brand essence, which is to fuel the can-do attitude of its consumers. These influencers including Sarkodie and Sister Derby engaged fans and consumers through inspiring quotes and activities.



Participants of other activities of the Enjoy a World of Goodness campaign have received Malta Guinness products.



It is believed that a few millions of fans on social media have been reached. Malta Guinness is excited to have grown brand engagement among consumers through these influencers.



Follow the hashtag #MGMoments for an inspiring journey and fun surprises.

IG Handles of winners include

@obi_dumbei1

@bengroovesgh

@celebrity_tha_king

@titi.spice_xx

@nyesomofficial

@go.ogo_





Source: Peacefmonline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Madam Shirley Ayorkor Botchwey, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration designate, has held a bilateral meeting with Mr Mikhail Bogdanov, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, in Accra.



Mr Bogdanov, who is also the Special Presidential Representative of Russia for the Middle East and Africa, led a delegation comprising Russian Foreign Ministry officials and private business people to Ghana to explore business opportunities in the mining and related sectors in Ghana.



Madam Ayorkor Botchwey recalled the historic and enduring relations existing between Ghana and Russia and expressed the hope that the visit of the Russian delegation would invigorate the relations for the benefit of the two countries as new opportunities were identified.



She, further, recalled with fond memories her visit to Moscow in August 2019, at the instance of her Russian counterpart, Mr Sergey Lavrov, which further strengthened relations between the two countries and the participation of President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo in the Russia-Africa Summit held at Sochi in October 2019.



Madam Ayorkor Botchwey acknowledged the immense contribution that Russia had made and continued to make towards the socio-economic development of Ghana and indicated that Russias award of scholarships to many Ghanaian students over the years to study in Russia had produced essential human resource capacity to facilitate the development of the country.



The Minister-Designate expressed concern that in recent years the Scholarship Secretariat of Ghana and the Russian Mission had had some differences in the award of scholarships and call for a speedy resolution of the difficulties.



She requested that Russia increased the number of scholarships provided yearly to about one hundred to consolidate the enduring friendship between the two countries.



Madam Ayorkor Botchwey mentioned the potential for cooperation between Russian diplomatic training institutions and the Ministrys Foreign Service Institute, which was nearing completion.



She requested the Russian side to consider offering short courses in Russian Language training to Officers of the Ministry to facilitate interactions between the two Foreign Ministries.



Madam Ayorkor Botchwey stated Ghanas interest in initiating discussions with the Russian Government on the acquisition of the Russian made Vaccine, Sputnik-V as soon as possible, to help Ghana fight the COVID-19 infections.



She welcomed the interest shown by GBP Global Resources, to invest in Ghana and indicated that the gold refinery at Tarkwa, which was built by the former Soviet Union, could be worth considering as an investment opportunity.



Madam Ayorkor Botchwey added that the interest of GBP Global Resources in engaging in the gold refinery business was in harmony with the Government of Ghanas agenda of value addition to its vast natural resources to promote economic development and provide jobs for the burgeoning youth.



She assured the Russian envoy of Ghanas commitment to expediting the processes involved to enable GBP Global Resources to invest in gold, manganese and other related industries.



She said the Russia-Africa Summit boosted relations with countries in Africa and invited the Russian Envoy to indicate Russias policy for engaging with Africa, following the successful Summit.



Madam Ayorkor Botchwey acknowledged that despite the excellent relations between Ghana and Russia, trade volumes between the two countries had been low; and disclosed that the start of trading under the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) would provide a big opportunity for Russian businesses to take advantage of the 1.2 billion African market size, with Ghana as the entry point.



She bemoaned the low levels of investment between the two countries and called for more Russian investments in Ghana, especially in the field of energy and the petrochemical industry, following the entry into the Ghanaian market of LUKOIL and ROSNEFT.



Madam Ayorkor Botchwey provided assurances of Ghanas commitment towards negotiating with Russia, the Agreement on Investment Promotion and Protection as well as the Agreement on the Avoidance of Double Taxation to guarantee Russian investors the security of their investments.



She said as a means of enhancing bilateral relations, Ghana was earnestly preparing to host the Fourth Session of the Permanent Joint Commission for Cooperation this year, and stated that Ghana had received the suggestions from Russia regarding the April meeting to discuss the outcome of the 3rd Session and the holding of the 4th Session in October 2021.



Mr Bogdanov, who commended Ghanas participation in the last Russia-Africa Summit, also congratulated President Akufo-Addo on his re-election for a second term as head of ECOWAS.



He noted that his country had already started the preparation for the next Russia-Africa Summit, which would take place in Africa.

Source: GNA









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Linde India rose 1.54% to Rs 1,057.05 after the company informed about sale of land and buildings of the closed factory at Kolkata.

The company has on 9 February 2021 after obtaining all necessary regulatory approvals, sold and disposed of land and buildings pertaining to its closed factory (Packaged Gases Plant) at Diamond Harbour Road, Kolkata for an aggregate consideration of Rs 300 crores to Mindstone Mall Developers, Mumbai.

The operations of the erstwhile Packaged Gases Plant (factory) at Diamond Harbour Road, Kolkata were earlier shifted to the site at Uluberia, Howrah.

Linde India is in the industrial gases business, providing a one-stop solution to all businesses for gas supply and related equipment and services. It manufactures cryogenic and non-cryogenic vessels and also design and commission projects.

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Israel's former Permanent Representative to the United Nations Danny Danon called out President Biden for not yet calling Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Mr Danon tweeted out a list of ten countries whose leaders Mr Biden has spoken to and added: "Might it now be time to call the leader of Israel, the closest ally of the US?"

Mr Danon also included a phone number that he said belonged to the Prime Minister.

Josh Marshall, the founder of Talking Points Memo, responded to Mr Danon, tweeting: "Glad you're seeing that Netanyahu making Israel an affiliate of the Republican party has been noticed and has consequences. The call will come. But trolling the US President about it won't help and suggests you're still not getting the message."

Middle East analyst and Senior Fellow at the think tank Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Aaron David Miller, tweeted: "A call will come. But a clear message is being sent. Netanyahu was Trumps 3rd call. To quote Dorothy, were not in Kansas anymore," Mr Miller wrote, referencing the Wizard of Oz to say that the previous state of normality has been left behind.

Times of Israel diplomatic reporter wrote in an analysis that the lack of a phone call has become "impossible to ignore," that the silence is "resonating louder than any actual conversation" they could have had, and that "some Israelis are starting to worry".

Mr Netanyahu said Monday that he expects a call from Mr Biden to come soon. He said that Mr Biden is calling leaders "as he sees fit" and that he expects to speak to Mr Biden when the president starts calling leaders in the Middle East. Conceding that the two men have different opinions on certain issues, Mr Netanyahu added: Our alliance is strong."

Former New York Israeli consul-general Dani Dayan told Times of Israel that he interpreted the weeks of silence as a "clear sign of displeasure". Noting the troubled past between Mr Netanyahu and Mr Biden's former boss and close friend President Barack Obama, Mr Dayan added: I hope its a symbolic thing to show their displeasure that will not have serious political consequences in the decision-making process."

Danielle Pletka at the conservative DC think tank American Enterprise Institute called the lack of a call bizarre, inappropriate, immature," and said: Its unclear why President Biden would wish to signal to all of Israels enemies that the United States doesnt stand with our most important ally in the Middle East.

On Wednesday, Axios reported that the Biden Administration doesn't see the conflict between Israel and Palestine as a top priority and that they don't think they can make much progress on the issue.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
MASON CITY, Iowa - A Mason City man arrested on a valid warrant is facing felony drug charges.

Roland Thompson, 66, is being held on $50,000 bond after he was arrested Tuesday on S. Monroe Ave. and 4th St. SW.

Police said a search of his vehicle located a bag containing a substance believed to be methamphetamine.

Thompson was in possession of 4.63 grams of meth and was found with a scale and multiple little bags.

He is being held on an out-of-state warrant and a charge of intent to manufacture/deliver meth.

Dutch MPs have urged the country's government to officially recognize the 1915 massacre of Armenians as genocide, euronews reported.

Lawmaker Joel Voordewind from the ChristenUnie (Christian Union) said the Dutch government's vague position on this matter was "absurd."

"The government still uses the phrase 'the issue of the Armenian Genocide' or speaks of 'the terrible events,'" Voordewind added in a statement. "In doing so it evades the truth; that it was a planned and deliberate genocide."

"This recognition is very important, the genocide is an open wound for the Armenian community," said Voordewind. "The fact that many countries, including the Netherlands, did not even want to recognize that it was a genocide makes it all the more painful."

"For that reason alone, it is important that our government speaks out clearly about what happened in the past."

"Recognizing the past is a crucial first step for reconciliation and to prevent repetition," he added.

In 2018, Dutch lawmakers in the lower house of parliament voted overwhelmingly to acknowledge this act as genocide. But the decision did not become the country's official policy and terminology. Thursday's vote, in the upper house of parliament, seeks to change this.
Police in riot gear march to take a position to block demonstrators at an intersection during a protest in Mandalay, Burma, on Feb. 9, 2021. (AP Photo)

Biden Announces Sanctions on Burmas Military Leaders Who Orchestrated Takeover

President Joe Biden announced Feb. 10 that his administration will place sanctions on the orchestrators of a military takeover in Burma, also known as Myanmar, in what has been described by the U.S. State Department last week as a coup.

Were freezing U.S. assets that benefit the Burmese government while maintaining our support for health care, civil society groups, and other areas that benefit the people of Burma directly, he said.

The military on Feb. 1 moved to oust elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi, among others, with top officials alleging election fraud.

We will identify a first round of targets this week, and were also going to impose strong exports controls, Biden said, announcing two executive orders. Last week, he condemned the military takeover of the civilian-led government and said its a direct assault on the countrys democratic institutions.

Also on Feb. 10, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters that the effort to sanction officials involved in the apparent coup would include working with our partners and allies, including in the region, to determine the right ways to put pressure on and have engagement.

There are ongoing discussions and talks with our partners and allies in Asia and Europe, and you know theres certainly a recognition that this will need to be a coordinated effort, she said.

Protesters flash the three-fingered salute, a symbol of resistance, during a protest in Mandalay, Burma, on Feb. 9, 2021. (AP Photo)

Separately, large crowds of protesters have taken to the streets in Yangon and other cities to demonstrate against the military takeover.

As part of Generation Z we are first-time voters. This is our first time to protest as well, said one protester, reported The Associated Press. They negated our votes and this is totally unfair. We do not want that. We hope they release our leaders and implement a real democracy.

The State Department formally declared the military takeover in Burma as a coup detat, which requires the United States to cut foreign aid to the government.

After careful review of the facts and circumstances, we have assessed that Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of Burmas ruling party, and Win Myint, the duly elected head of government, were deposed in a military coup on February 1, a State Department official said last week, according to the agencys website. We continue to call on the Burmese military leadership to release them and all other detained civil society and political leaders immediately and unconditionally.

The spokesperson added: We have denounced in the strongest possible terms Burmas military leaders for seeking to reject the will of the people of Burma as expressed in democratic elections on November 8th, and for taking control of the Government of Burma. We continue to stand with the people of Burma, as we have done for decades, in their efforts to achieve democracy, freedom, peace, and development.
Later this month, Oregon will mark a surreal anniversary: One year from the first confirmed COVID-19 case in our state.

Nearly 150,000 Oregonians have since been infected by the coronavirus and more than 2,000 have died. And counting.

We are telling stories from a variety of Oregonians who contracted the virus during the last year to see how theyre doing, what their experience with the virus was like, how theyve changed and much more.

Please let us know if youre interested in participating.

Please fill out this form to tell us about your experience -- or the experience of your child or other loved one -- and how we can contact you. If you fill it out for someone else, please answer the questions based on that persons information -- but put your contact information so we can talk with you.

To be clear, we will NOT publish your name or other personal information without interviewing you first and talking with you about our publication plans.

Questions? Contact Brad Schmidt at 503-294-7628 or bschmidt@oregonian.com

Again, heres a link to the form.

-- Andrew Theen and Brad Schmidt
WASHINGTON  U.S. Attorney for Connecticut John Durham is expected to leave that role, but continue working for the Department of Justice as special counsel, leading a lengthy investigation into the federal governments probe of 2016 election interference.

According to an administration official, the Biden team has asked all U.S. attorneys to resign, a standard step when a new presidential administration takes office. Durham and David Weiss, the U.S. attorney for Delaware who is leading a criminal investigation into President Joe Bidens son, Hunter Biden, are expected to continue their probes.

/ Associated Press

Former Attorney General William Barr announced in December he conferred the title of special counsel on Durham, a move that was widely viewed as intended to protect Durham and his investigation from the forthcoming change of guard.

Its customary for a president to have his own U.S. attorneys, so John could be fired and nobody would ever know what came out of the investigation, said Stan Twardy, Connecticuts former U.S. Attorney from 1985 to 1991, said in December. What this appointment does is now the new Attorney General would have to specifically shut off the investigation... he can stay in this role even if he is not an employee of the Department of Justice.

Some legal experts criticized the appointment because they believe, according to special counsel regulations, that title is only supposed to be given to someone outside the Department of Justice investigating a case that would pose a conflict of interest for the agency.

As a result of Durhams probe, former FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith was sentenced in January to one year of probation for altering an email in connection with the submission of a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant. The Clinesmith case is the only prosecution stemming from Durhams investigation so far.

Durham is an acclaimed career prosecutor with a long history of tackling organized crime at the state and federal level. Hes handled sensitive investigations for U.S. attorneys general of both parties.

Democrats have taken issue with the investigation because Barr launched it with urging from President Donald Trump, who called investigations into his 2016 campaign  including that by Special Counsel Robert Mueller  a witch hunt.

emilie.munson@hearstdc.com; Twitter: @emiliemunson
A San Francisco couple have been charged with murder for allegedly beating their infant son to death.

Ray Ray Darn, 35, and Marilyn Northington, 28, were arrested last Thursday after rushing their five-week-old son to a hospital in Richmond, where he was pronounced dead.

The newborn baby was said to be covered in bruises as a result of the suspected abuse.

Ray Ray Darn, 35 (left), and Marilyn Northington, 28 (right), have been charged with murder, assault and child abuse in connection with their five-week-old son's death

The couple and their three young children had been staying at Marriott Courtyard Hotel in Richmond, California, which has been housing homeless people during the pandemic

On Tuesday, the Contra Costa district attorney filed charges of murder, assault and child abuse against the couple in connection with their son's death.

Darn and Northington remained jailed on $2.2million bail each on Wednesday.

According to the Richmond Police Department, the incident began unfolding at around 6.30pm on Thursday, when they received a 911 call from the Marriott Courtyard Hotel reporting that a couple had rushed out with their infant baby, telling staff the child was not breathing.

Less than 30 minutes later, a second 911 call came in from Kaiser Hospital-Richmond, saying that a non-breathing five-week-old baby had been admitted into the emergency room and died a short time later.

Sgt. Aaron Pomeroy, with the Richmond Police Department, wrote in a press release the baby 'had obvious signs of abuse.'

Darn and Northington told staff at the hotel their newborn baby was not breathing. The infant was pronounced dead at the hospital on February 4

Darn has worked as a line cook at a fast-food restaurant, while Northington has been employed as a security guard

Detectives interviewed the boy's parents and other witnesses at the hotel and the hospital, ultimately resulting in Darn and Northington's arrests.

The couple had two other small children who were taken into protective custody and turned over to Child Family Services.

The Marriott Courtyard where the couple had been staying with their family has been used to house homeless people during the coronavirus pandemic.

According to Darn's Facebook page, he has been employed as a line cook at a fast-food restaurant, while his girlfriend has worked as a security guard. The couple have a son and a young daughter who was born in the fall of 2019.

During todays question-and-answer session with government officials in parliament, deputy of the opposition Bright Armenia faction of the National Assembly of Armenia Karen Simonyan asked Deputy Prime Minister Tigran Avinyan if there is any other agreement signed between the Republic of Armenia and the Republic of Azerbaijan besides the statements signed on November 10 and January 11.

The deputy particularly stressed the following in his question: There are certain uncertainties after the signing of the November 10 statement, in particular, the Republic of Armenia and the Republic of Azerbaijan have a new 520-kilometer long border, and I would like to understand the governments vision regarding the line of contact and border. During the last question-and-answer session, the Deputy Prime Minister assured us deputies that there is no other document signed with the Republic of Azerbaijan, but yesterday ex-Prime Minister Hrant Bagratyan posted on his Facebook page some Armenian-Azerbaijani memorandum stating certain coordinates, principles and borders. What memorandum is this? Is there any other document signed by Armenia and Azerbaijan besides the statements signed on November 10 and January 11?

In response, Avinyan said he would have to reveal data serving as certain state secret in order to answer the question, but added that, in general, border guard troops of Armenia and Azerbaijan are controlling the borders in Armenias Syunik Province. If there are such issues related to the security environment, I believe deputies can hold meetings and hearings and invite representatives of the Ministry of Defense and the National Security Service and learn about the details, he said.

Simonyan asked if there is an agreement between Azerbaijan and Armenia without the mediation of the Russian Federation, to which Avinyan said he isnt aware of any document on the mediation of the Russian Federation. Besides those statements that were made, there is another agreement concerning the road sector in the Davit Bek-Goris sector since the road there passes through disputed sectors. This is the only agreement I am aware of, Avinyan said.

interview

The Chairman and Founder of the BUA Group, Alhaji Abdulsamad Rabiu in this interview spoke about a wide range of issues which included opportunities in the African Continental Free Trade Area agreement as well as the need to liberalise the cement industry so as to boost production and subsequently crash the price of the commodity. Excerpts:

The BUA Group recently sealed a deal for a refinery project, can you take us through the expectations from that project and when is it expected to be commence production?

Nigeria is consuming a lot of petroleum products and we spend a lot of revenue in importing refined products. We spend a lot of money to transport crude oil and bring back the finished products. Most people ask why we are setting up a refinery when a big project that people believe would be producing a substantial amount is coming up. I believe Nigerians consume about 50 million litres per day. Then again, if you look at the region, there is a huge potential. If you also look at it, the timing and the location that we have is better than any location.

Secondly, because of the pandemic and the price of crude oil, even though it is picking up a bit, the opportunity arose for us to do it now, compared with what it would have been few years ago when crude price was in the region of $100 per barrel or more. So, because crude oil prices are down to about half of what it was few years ago, the entire project cost, which I am not going to divulge right now, is lower. We would not only satisfy the local market, but also other markets. That is because Nigeria's crude is one of the lightest and sweetest, which makes it very easy to process. So, once you are able process that, you would be able to produce a lot of products that are of the highest quality and at a cost that is lower than what it would have been if it were in other countries. So, these are the things we looked at. So, if you see a situation where you are able to go into any project at a very comparative price, you just have to jump into it. We saw the opportunity because I can't remember the last time we saw crude prices around its current price for a long period of time. In terms of location, I think we have the best. It is an area that is at the seafront, so we have a complete marine infrastructure at same time. We took all those things into consideration before going ahead with the project. Even though there is another project that is coming, which is big, we believe this is an opportunity we should take advantage of, especially with the fact that we have a good contract with some of the best technology companies in the world. Chinese technology is good, Indian technology is good, but then when you are talking about complex type of projects of this nature, to be honest, the western world has the best. That was why we decided to go for the best. KBR is the number one consultancy firm in the world when it comes to this kind of project. So, we are using the best names and that is what we try to do in all our projects. Quality is key and by doing that, we are able to save valuable time. If a project is costing you for example, $100 million, using a lower technology and then it takes you five years to get the project completed, and you have the opportunity to pay $200 million to get the project done in two or three years, then the money you saved in finishing it on time will more than take care of the higher cost. So, at the end of the day, if you use good technology and good company, you pay a lot more, but you save a lot time. Hence the reason why we said we didn't want to go to China or Indian and we decided to go to Europe. It is on course and we expect to break ground latest May this year and ones that is done, not more than three years the project would be completed. So, far we have everything on course.

What do we need to do to bring down the price of cement in Nigeria and are you in a position to effectively compete with the dominant player in the industry in terms of pricing?

The price of cement is high in Nigeria today simply because we don't have enough supply. That is a simple economics of supply and demand. In Nigeria, every day people come up to say we are self-sufficient in cement and that Nigeria can now start exporting cement; it not true. Look at the numbers: Nigeria is over 200 million people today in terms of its population. If you look at the production of cement, last year, we were under 30 million metric tonnes. In fact, last year was higher than the year before. Which means that in 2019, we were doing between 26 and 27 million metric tonnes. I am talking about production capacity, and not installed capacity, which is another thing entirely. I am talking about actual cement production. Nigeria is 200 million people and that makes it about 130 kilograms per head. If you check, you will see that most countries in Africa are doing between 170 kilograms to 200 kilograms per head. So, Nigeria is actually producing less than any other country in Africa, apart from, maybe, Niger Republic. So, that means that we do not have enough capacity. Nigeria can actually take 200 kilograms per head, but we are not able to do that, hence the reason why the price of cement is high. The moment you have any problem in any of the plants in Nigeria and there is a shut-down or any challenge, immediately, you will see the impact in terms of price going up. That is because we do not have any buffer whatsoever. So, it is like hand to mouth daily. The reason why the price of cement went up recently was simply because there was an issue at one of Lafarge's plants and they had to stop production to few months to rectify that. So, as that had happened, the supply from Lafarge reduced by about 25 per cent in Ogun State.

Also, one of the plants of Dangote Cement had technical issue and they couldn't load. But it has been resolved. But because that took about one month, the price of cement went up to about N4,000, from N2,800. This is what I have been saying over the years. I had during the former President Olusegun Obasanjo regime insisted that even though this cement policy is a good one, it must be done in such a way that a lot of players must come in and participate. There is no point in making a policy that only one, two or three people are able to benefit from that policy. That does not make sense. I am benefiting from this policy, but I know it is a bad policy. I know the struggle I went through to be able to be doing what I am doing in the cement industry. Ordinarily, I would not even be here doing cement today. So, whilst the policy is good, the way it is being administered is not good. You can't have a policy that restricts so many people from participating. At the end of the day, you are just creating a monopoly. That is exactly what is happening in the industry. No doubt, the policy has helped. It has helped us to put up so many plants in the country, but government needs to take a second look at the policy, to see how it can bring in more companies to participate. God forbid, imagine if today, I have a serious issue with Obu Plant or the Sokoto Plant and it is shut down for months, people would be buying cement at N5,000 and there is nothing anybody can do about it. That is because there won't be enough capacity to take care of the shortfall. The cement sector is a very important sector in the economy and Nigeria has no business selling cement at N4,000. Our ex-factory price is still about N2,700 per bag, but cement is selling between N3,500 and N3,800. I had to stop my people from collecting money last week, simply because we are collecting money much more than what we can produce. And it is same thing with other companies and that is simply because there isn't enough. So, the policy is a good one, but it has to be rejigged, so that more people that are interested can come in and participate. We have companies that have the capacity, the access to funding to be able to compete in this industry and in Nigeria, the entire country, is sitting on limestone. Anywhere you go, there is limestone in Nigeria. And the cost of production is probably the lowest in Africa. I have been thinking about this and even though I know it could be to my disadvantage, I was going to propose to the government, to even allow temporary imports, so that the price would come down. Let's compete with imports and at the end of the day, if we see that the imported products are probably within same level, then we can come down to a price that is lower. We are making so much money in the industry, which is good for shareholders, but Nigerians are the ones paying for this. I am part of it, but I know it is wrong. Now, to the other part of the question, we do not. I can tell you that few weeks, one of the competitors, I am not going to mention the name, decided they wanted to increase price and I said they cannot. But they went ahead with it. I didn't increase my price and I was waiting to see. Then after a few days, I say that the market has accepted the price. Why? Because we do not have enough capacity to influence the direction of price in the market. The issue is that we have one player that is controlling over 50 per cent of the market and anytime you have that kind of situation, things become very difficult. And same thing is happening in the sugar industry, with the Backward Integration Programme (BIP). You have a situation where you have only three players and there is the BIP policy which states that unless you are seen to be doing a plantation you would not be allowed to do sugar refinery. Again, it is same kind of policy where few people are benefiting and 200 million people are suffering. The business is doing well, we are making money, but how much money do you really need? We have 200 million people and they are paying more than what other countries are paying for something that ought to be cheaper. Today, I am ready to reduce my cement and sugar prices, if other companies are ready and I challenge them. If you are posting 50 per cent as profit, and Nigerians are paying for that, why can't you make 25 per cent profit, so that instead of N4,000, they would be paying N2,000 per bag of cement, and it can happen. Even the sugar, I know what I went through before I was able to set up my sugar refinery. But whenever anybody tries to go into any of these businesses, they would be frustrated, simply because we don't want competition. To me, competition is healthy because it brings about efficiency and if you don't have competition, you will just be lazy and inefficient and at the end of the day, the consumers would suffer. Yes, it will be very difficult, but I can assure that by the time we finish our Sokoto line that is coming on stream this year, it will have an impact and then, maybe, we would be able to be in a position where we can say we are not increasing price and the market would go with us. On sugar, we can decide, but I am just waiting for the appropriate time. I believe the sugar price of N18,500 per bag is too high. But we have just started out Port Harcourt refinery and with that we hope to reduce the price of sugar very soon; simply because we have a greater percentage in terms of production. With that, we would be able to determine the price of sugar and we are going to do that. Hopefully, before Ramadan, we would definitely bring down the price of sugar, because it is just too high as well.

At a time when some have slowed down investment because of the pandemic, the BUA Group continues to push, what is the driving force?

I tell you, whenever there is a crisis, that is when you see opportunities. That was why our refinery project, we were able to get a good bargain and price that if it was today, we couldn't have gotten. The steel aspect of the project for instance was consummated at very good price and terms. Of course, nobody wants to have diseases such as COVID-19 and what have you, but the issue is that when there is crisis, that is when there are opportunities. Even the three lines of cement factory expansion, we got fantastic bargains because the companies were looking for opportunities. So, we sat down and got a good deal which ordinarily we would not have gotten if there were busy. But, because they were not busy and wanted business, that was why we were able to get such a good deal and I am glad we did.

Regarding the refinery, you talked about a three- year timeline, which starts from 2021, are you certain about the target considering that investors are no longer willing to bring out funds for investment?

See, there is more money in the global market now than ever before. If you want to take $1 billion now, you can get it from the international market. Look at when we did our bond issuance, it was highly oversubscribed and nobody expected that. We were looking for N100 billion, but people dropped N140 billion. The whole world is awash with cash, so there is money and if you have a good project, investors will stake their money. But I can assure you that despite the COVID-19 challenges, we shall deliver on schedule. If there is one thing that BUA Group prides itself with, it is delivery projects on target. When we say, we will do something, we do it within the timeline that we have given. Look at our Obu Cement factory line 1 and Sokoto line one and line two. Even our projects in Port Harcourt, Rivers State. Any time we set a timeline to deliver a particular project, we also keep to it and the Refinery project will not be different.

I will like you to speak about AfCFTA and what are the opportunities you see for your business?

The AfCFTA is a very good and important development for Nigeria, but then again, it depends. It is good because there are so many opportunities for us a BUA Group and so many other companies, if we get it right. What it means is that we are going to move goods, services and people freely within the entire continent, 54 countries, duty free. So if you are able to produce in Nigeria, you can go to any country in Africa and sell your products duty free. However, the fact that Nigeria is heavily dependent on importation presents a challenge. Secondly we are very large in terms of population, consumption is very high in Nigeria. So, if we unable to produce, we may be the dumping ground. Everyone will be dumping their goods here in Nigeria because we have the market and the population. We are the biggest economy in Africa. But if we are able to produce, whatever we produce we will consume and sell here before exporting to anywhere in Africa. Why I said it is good for some us is that, for instance, when you look at our cement factory in Sokoto, that plant is only about 120 kilometers to Niger Republic and 400 kilometers to Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso. The market in Burkina Faso is four million metric tonnes and Niger Republic is about 1.5 million metric tonnes. And none of these countries produce clinker, which is cement, apart from Niger that has a very small 100,000 tonnes clinker production. Therefore, nobody around there can compete with us; that is why I said it is good for me. Burkina Faso is landlocked, which means they cannot import anything into their country and they do not have limestone, which means they cannot produce clinker; they import the clinker and then process it. And they have to import it from either Turkey, China, or maybe from North Africa, to Lome, Togo. And from Lome to Burkina Faso is same distance from Sokoto to Burkina Faso. That means they have to transport the product by sea and the nearest seaport is Abidjan, Ivory Coast or Lome and most of these areas are very far for them.

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So, nobody can compete with me because their cost of production will be much higher. So, it is a fantastic opportunity for BUA Cement in Sokoto, because it is next door. In fact, that is the reason why we are running another line because one line will be dedicated just to exports, because nobody can compete with us there. I have limestone and I can produce clinker and then move in. So it is good for companies like us. But for other industries in Nigeria for example, that are struggling, if we allow the importation when they are not competitive, it will be an issue for them. And I don't want a situation where we would be importing almost everything. So, we need to step up, produce more so that we can not only satisfy our local market, but also take advantage of this AfCFTA because it is key and it is here to stay. Nigeria has signed and 54 other African countries have signed and about 40 have ratified. Therefore, it has already taken effect and you can see there are a lot of opportunities. There are many companies that will benefit from this arrangement. But if you do not step and allow a situation whereby everyone will be importing everything into Nigeria, with our meagre foreign exchange, you will see that in no distant time, we would become a dumping ground and it will be another big challenge for us.

Really, I am looking forward to a situation when people will start putting up things that would enable them take advantage of AfCFTA because the market is huge. A market of about 1.3 billion people and Nigeria is about 200 million and the people will be looking for market, so we must raise our game. What we are doing in the sugar industry, if we are able to complete, within the next two years, we would be producing enough sugar for export. So, we really need to push so that people from other countries would not turn Nigeria into a dumping ground and you cannot stop it so that you won't be seen not to be in compliant with the agreement that you have signed. So, to me, it provides a good opportunity because you cannot continue protecting your economy. You have to be open because that is what others all over the world are doing. But we just need to take advantage of this initiative.

I love the AfCFTA, it is a good thing for the continent; you can move around visa free, but of course the issue of country of origin has to be looked into very well. We would not want a situation whereby some countries will import products from companies outside Africa, let's say tyres from China, take it to Ghana and label them made in Ghana and then bring it to Nigeria. So, we have really to make sure that issues like these are taken care of. But, if you are able to produce a substantial part of anything within Africa, you can move it around countries in the continent freely. So, we must make sure that no country is allowing dumping. Even when it comes to movement of people, in Africa today, you will see that only about 30 per cent of Africans can actually travel to other African countries without visa. Today, if I want to go to South Africa, Zimbabwe, Morocco, and some others, I will need a visa. But, if a German wants to go to South Africa, he doesn't require visa, if he want to go to Egypt and Morocco, he doesn't require visa as well. So, foreign countries have more access to Africa than Africans, which doesn't make sense. Really, we have to look at all these issues because it doesn't make sense.


This story has been updated to include comment from Kroger.

Around 500 Houston-area Kroger workers have been diagnosed with COVID-19 since Christmas, according to their union, which said in a Tuesday news conference the time had come for grocery workers to move up the vaccine priority list.

Texas and other states defied federal guidance by not placing grocery workers in the second vaccination group, United Food and Commercial Workers said.

All this makes you feel like you dont matter, said Dawn Hand, a front-end worker for Kroger in Kingwood. It feels like leaders here in Texas have abandoned essential workers.

On HoustonChronicle.com: COVID cases spike among Houston Kroger workers

The Cincinnati-based grocery chain regularly updates United Food and Commercial Workers Local 455 about the number of cases in the area, and the union said the post-holiday surge among Houston-area workers was the largest thus far. The unions call comes amid contract negotiations and a fight between UFCW Local 455 and Kroger, which discontinued hazard pay early in the pandemic and is in the process of rolling out a more expensive health care plan.

Kroger announced last week it will pay $100 bonuses to vaccinated employees, joining a growing list of retailers offering vaccine incentives. The grocery chain began inoculating the staff at its pharmacies in early January.

Grocery workers in Texas arent officially able to receive the vaccine, yet, unless their age or a health issue puts them at higher risk for COVID complications. UFCW President Marc Perrone said it doesnt make sense that people like him can get the vaccine due to age but grocery workers facing daily exposure cannt.

Were not saying these workers need to be first, but they shouldnt be last either, he said.

Many are getting the vaccines due to flukes as pharmacies scramble to use up doses before they expire, Perrone said. Those should go to grocery workers as often as possible. We need more logic when it comes to making sure the vaccine goes into the proper arms.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Kroger rolls out COVID vaccine to staff as it prepares for rush

Hand said her store in Kingwood is too understaffed to clean properly, and more and more of the workers in my store are getting sick.

Kroger Corporate Affairs Manager Clara Campbell responded, saying rates of infection among its associates were significantly lower than the communities we serve and have continued to decline over the past several weeks.

The company, she wrote in an email, is providing a one-time payment of $100 to all associates who receive the full manufacturer-recommended doses of the COVID-19 vaccine.

In addition to the new vaccine payment, the statement said, we have also announced an additional $50 million investment to thank and reward associates across our 35-state footprint, including a $100 store credit and 1,000 fuel points for hourly frontline grocery, supply chain, manufacturing, pharmacy and call center associates.

She also said Kroger had provided PPE to staff and enhanced daily cleaning practices.

Still, Hand called on Gov. Greg Abbott and elected leaders to help them get vaccinated faster. Abbotts office did not return a call requesting comment.

Protect us, she said. Because companies like Kroger are not.

amanda.drane@

chron.com

Twitter.com/

amandadrane
Scientists create flexible biocompatible cilia that can be controlled by a magnet

Researchers at the University of Campinas's Chemistry Institute (IQ-UNICAMP) in the state of Sao Paulo, Brazil, have developed a template-free technique to fabricate cilia of different sizes that mimic biological functions and have multiple applications, from directing fluids in microchannels to loading material into a cell, for example. The highly flexible cilia are based on polymer-coated iron oxide nanoparticles, and their motion can be controlled by a magnet.

In nature, cilia are microscopic hairlike structures found in large numbers on the surface of certain cells, causing currents in the surrounding fluid or, in some protozoans and other small organisms, providing propulsion.

To fabricate the elongated nanostructures without using a template, Watson Loh and postdoctoral fellow Aline Grein-Iankovski coated particles of iron oxide (-Fe 2 O 3 , known as maghemite) with a layer of a polymer containing thermoresponsive phosphonic acid groups and custom-synthesized by a specialized company. The technique leverages the binding affinity of phosphonic acid groups to metal oxide surfaces, fabricating the cilia by means of temperature control and use of a magnetic field.

"The materials don't bind at room temperature or thereabouts, and form a clump without the stimulus of a magnetic field," Loh explained. "It's the effect of the magnetic field that gives them the elongated shape of a cilium."

Grein-Iankovski started with stable particles in solution and had the idea of obtaining the cilia during an attempt to aggregate the material. "I was preparing loose elongated filaments in solution and thought about changing the direction field," she recalled. "Instead of orienting them parallel to the glass slide, I placed them in a perpendicular position and found they then tended to migrate to the surface of the glass. I realized that if I forced them to stick to the glass, I could obtain a different type of material that wouldn't be loose: its movement would be ordered and collaborative."

The thermoresponsive polymer binds to the surface of the nanoparticles and organizes them into elongated filaments when the mixture is heated and exposed to a magnetic field. The transition occurs at a biologically compatible temperature (around 37 C). The resulting magnetic cilia are "remarkably flexible", she added. By increasing the concentration of the nanoparticles, their length can be varied from 10 to 100 microns. One micron (m) is a millionth of a meter.

"The advantage of not using a template is not being subject to the limitations of this method, such as size, for example," Grein-Inakovski explained. "In this case, to produce very small cilia we would have to create templates with microscopic holes, which would be extremely laborious. Adjustments to coat density and cilium size would require new templates. A different template has to be used for each end-product thickness. Furthermore, using a template adds another stage to the production of cilia, which is the fabrication of the template itself."

Grein-Iankovski is the lead author of an article published in The Journal of Physical Chemistry C on the invention, which was part of a Thematic Project supported by FAPESP, with Loh as principal investigator.

"The Thematic Project involves four groups who are investigating how molecules and particles are organized at the colloidal level, meaning at the level of very small structures. Our approach is to try to find ways of controlling these molecules so that they aggregate in response to an external stimulus, giving rise to different shapes with a range of different uses," Loh said.

Reversibility

After the magnetic field is removed, the material remains aggregated for at least 24 hours. It then disaggregates at a speed that depends on the temperature at which it was prepared. "The higher the temperature, the more intense the effect and the longer it remains aggregated outside the magnetic field," Grein-Iankovski said.

According to Loh, the reversibility of the material is a positive point. "In our view, being able to organize and disorganize the material, to 'switch the system on and off', is an advantage," Loh said. "We can adjust the temperature, how long it remains aggregated, cilium length, and coat density. We can customize the material for many different types of use, organize it and shape it for specific purposes. I believe the potential applications are countless, from biological to physical uses, including materials science applications."

Another major advantage, Grein-Iankovski added, is the possibility of manipulating the material externally, where the tool used to do so is not inside the system. "The filaments can be used to homogenize and move particles in a fluid microsystem, in microchannels, simply by approaching a magnet from the outside. They can be made to direct fluid in this way, for example."

The cilia can also be used in sensors, in which the particles respond to stimuli from a molecule, or to feed microscopic living organisms. "Ultimately it's possible to feed a microorganism or cell with loose cilia, which cross the cell membrane under certain conditions. They can be made to enter a cell, and a magnetic field is applied to manipulate their motion inside the cell," Loh said.

For more than ten years, Loh has collaborated with Jean-Francois Berret at Paris Diderot University (Paris 7, France) in research on the same family of polymers to obtain elongated materials for use in the biomedical field. "We're pursuing other partnerships to explore other possible uses of the cilia," he said.

The scientists now plan to include a chemical additive in the nanostructures that will bind the particles chemically, obtaining cilia with a higher mechanical strength that remain functional for longer when not exposed to a magnetic field, if this is desirable.

###

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 .

This story has been published on: 2021-02-10. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
Jakarta, Jan 21 (AP) Indonesian authorities on Thursday ended the search for remaining victims and debris from a Sriwijaya Air jet that nosedived into the Java Sea, killing all 62 people on board.

Transportation Minister Budi Karya Sumadi said retrieval operations have ended after nearly two weeks, but that a limited search for the missing memory unit from the cockpit voice recorder will continue.

The memory unit apparently broke away from other parts of the voice recorder during the crash. Divers retrieved its battered casing and cover last week near the location where the flight data recorder was recovered three days after the accident.

The Boeing 737-500 jet crashed on January 9, minutes after taking off from Jakarta, the capital.

Searchers have recovered plane parts and human remains from an area between Lancang and Laki islands in the Thousand Island chain just north of Jakarta.

After much consideration, we have to close the search and rescue operation today, Sumadi told reporters. However, we are committed to continue efforts to find the cockpit voice recorder." The government will provide a ship to take relatives to the crash site for a memorial ceremony on Friday morning, Sumadi said.

So far, 43 victims have been identified from more than 300 body bags containing human remains sent to the National Police's disaster victim identification unit.

Investigators are working with Boeing and engine maker General Electric to review information from the flight data recorder, which tracks hundreds of parameters showing how the plane was being operated.

A team from the US National Transportation Safety Board and Federal Aviation Administration is joining the investigation. Investigators will publish a preliminary investigation report within a month after the crash.

The 26-year-old Boeing 737-500 was out of service for almost nine months last year because of flight cutbacks caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

The airline and Indonesian officials say it passed inspections, including for possible engine corrosion, before resuming commercial flights in December.

Indonesia's aviation industry grew quickly after the nation's economy was opened following the fall of dictator Suharto in the late 1990s.

Safety concerns led the United States and the European Union to ban Indonesian carriers for years, but the bans have since been lifted due to better compliance with international aviation standards.(AP) RUP

(Disclaimer: This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed; only the image & headline may have been reworked by www.republicworld.com)
A Cork business representative has welcomed the Government announcement of additional supports for the sector but said that it is essential they are provided to businesses as soon as possible.

The Tanaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment Leo Varadkar TD announced 160m for measures to help businesses during the pandemic which were agreed by cabinet on Tuesday.

As part of the supports, a new 60m Scheme, called the Covid-19 Business Aid Scheme (CBAS) will be developed to target businesses currently ineligible for the Covid Restrictions Support Scheme (CRSS) or other sector specific grants. Wholesalers, suppliers, caterers and events companies down 75 per cent or more in turnover are expected to benefit from this scheme.

The Government also approved an additional 90m for the Sustaining Enterprise Fund, which offers funding of up to 800,000, with 200,000 or 50 per cent in non-repayable grants to eligible manufacturing and internationally traded services companies.

In addition, 10m will be allocated to the Covid-19 Products Scheme which will help companies researching or manufacturing PPE, sanitisers, tests and other medicinal products and equipment that are utilised in the fight against Covid-19.

The Tanaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment Leo Varadkar TD announced 160m for measures to help businesses during the pandemic. PIC:MAXWELLS

Speaking on the announcement, the Tanaiste said that the supports aim to help with the economic challenges posed by the pandemic, with a particular focus on those who do not qualify for existing schemes, such as those in the arts, tourism and transport.

The Government has sought to help as many businesses as possible through wage subsidies and the many different grant and loan schemes we have put in place.

A new Scheme, the CBAS, will help some businesses that arent eligible for existing grants, largely due to the fact that the premises they operate from have not been closed to the public.

He said that it is expected that the scheme will benefit approximately 7,500 businesses and while the grant is modest, it will be of substantial assistance to smaller businesses with fixed costs such as rent.

A 'positive' development

Eoin OSullivan, president of the Cork Business Association welcomed the announcement of additional supports but said that it is essential they are provided to businesses as soon as possible.

Eoin O'Sullivan, president of CBA. Picture Denis Minihane.

Its positive to see that theres a new suite of supports for businesses but it is essential that we get them out to businesses as soon as possible and not to wait last minute when they start opening the likes of non-essential retail and many other businesses, he said.

The new supports are welcomed but its essential that we get them out to business owners in a timely fashion, he added.

Re-opening of services

Meanwhile, Mr Varadkar told a press conference yesterday that, while it is hoped society and the economy open over the coming weeks, certain sectors may not open fully for a very long time.

When asked about the reopening of personal services such as hairdressers, he said that it would be "much later" than March 5th before they would reopen.

Amy Michelle Shanahan, who owns salon Amy Michelle on High Street, Turners Cross, said she expected that they wouldnt be opening up at the start of March.

"I presumed it would be like the last lockdown, retail would open first and then personal services after.

"It was in three-week stages last time, hopefully, it will be a bit quicker this time. Im hoping it wont be as long as last years lockdown.

"Im on the fence about it, I agree the numbers are too high at the moment, but businesses need to survive and a four-month lockdown is very difficult," she said.

The Cork hairdresser said she is hopeful this is the last lockdown.

"Im trying to keep motivated, I get up every morning and go for a big walk, Im doing online courses to stay busy, Im hopeful this is the last lockdown with the vaccine being rolled out. Once the vulnerable and elderly are vaccinated, I know there will still be restrictions and PPE but Im fingers crossed this is the last lockdown."
It was easy to root for Phil Mickelson at the PGA Championship last weekend. The little boy who learned to play golf left-handed by standing opposite his right-handed dad and mirroring dads swing has long been a crowd favorite. He is not only immensely gifted; he is imaginative and willing 
The Acting Country Representative for WHO in Ghana, Dr. Neema Kimambo has reiterated the UN Family continued support and collaboration of the Government of Ghana in the phase of increasing COVID-19 infections.

In a speech read on her behalf at a brief ceremony to hand over some medical equipment and supplies, Dr. Kimambo said since March 12, 2020 when Ghana recorded its first COVID-19 cases, the United Nations' WHO together with its Health Partners have supported in capacity building efforts, the provision of logistics as well as technical assistance in coordinating the overall response in Ghana. She added that, to date, WHO has supported the training of about 600 contact tracers.

The latest donation of 4,970 Gene Expert Cartridges, 15,000 pieces of KN 95 Respirator Masks, 32 Patient Monitors and number of Sheilds, Examination Gloves, Goggles, Gowns, Medical Masks, was with support from the World Bank Pandemic Emergency Fund - PEF and presented by Dr. Sally-Ann Ohene, Disease Prevention and Control Officer to the Ministry of Health.

The items which are estimated to cost $360,000.00 are expected to be distributed to the various Treatment Centers, the National Ambulance Service and some selected laboratories in regions with high burden of COVID-19 cases. In addition, the National Ambulance Service received some funding support of GHS 72,300 from WHO to procure fuel to transport COVID-19 cases to designated facilities in the region. Together with the UN Family, WHO also presented 120 oxygen cylinders (with oxygen) to the Ghana Infectious Disease Centre (GIDC) to help manage the increase in severe and critical cases of COVID-19.

The Minister for Health, Hon. Kwaku Agyemang-Manu in a statement, recounted the confusion and uncertainty that plagued most countries at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic almost 12 months ago. He further recalled all the emergency preparedness machinery that was activated and how much support the country received from its development partners.

He acknowledged with regret, how the country seems to be "in that same situation again, getting increases on a daily basis with facilities virtually full", and therefore called on all Ghanaians to strictly adhere to all the safety protocols since the law enforcement agencies had been mandated to enforce them.

Hon. Agyemang-Manu said he was very grateful to the UN and its agencies for their unflinching support to the Government of Ghana and was hopeful that together, the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic would be won.
The Islamic community in Ireland has criticised an online misinformation campaign aimed at persuading Muslims and other minority groups not to take up the Covid-19 vaccines.

A leading Irish Muslim scholar, Shaykh Dr Umar al-Qadri, says that the Covid-19 vaccines being rolled out nationwide are Halal and fully comply with Islamic religious requirements.

Dr al-Qadri has even offered the use of a major Dublin Islamic centre for use as a vaccination hub.

"We will make our Islamic centre available to the HSE for use as a vaccination centre," he said.

Islam supports science and the protection of health.

He stressed that the "fake news" campaign being undertaken online was particularly worrying because of how vulnerable some minority groups are to the effects of the virus.

People from the Middle East, Africa and South East Asia have proven particularly prone to Covid-19 - with a disproportionate number of healthcare worker deaths in Ireland and the UK coming from such minority groups.

Dr Syed Waqar Ali Shah, who was working at the Mater Hospital, died last summer after falling ill from Covid-19 and spending three months in intensive care. Tributes to him were paid by Irish doctors and politicians.

Dr Waqar Ali Shah, who was working at the Mater Hospital, died last summer after falling ill from Covid-19 and spending three months in intensive care

"He gave his life to serve others in the face of this dreadful virus - with the advent of various vaccines for Covid-19, we can all now be life-savers," Dr al-Qadri said.

Right wing groups are believed to be linked to an online campaign across Europe to persuade Muslims, Hindus and other groups not to accept vaccines for religious reasons.

In the UK, concern over such misinformation prompted one major Islamic leader, Shaykh Nuru Mohammed, to insist the vaccines were permissible under Islam and Halal.

Dr al-Qadri said the message from the Irish Muslim Peace and Integration Council (IMPIC) was very clear about the vaccines and their importance in the battle against Covid-19.

"IMPC is calling on Irish Muslims to lend their full support to the Covid-19 vaccination programme in Ireland," he said.

"Along with the rest of society, our religious scene has been changed beyond recognition. Mosques have been forced to close and as a community we have missed prayers, pilgrimages and festivals together.

"However, the stubborn trend of vaccine scepticism threatens to undermine the progress that has been made.

History and science tells us that vaccines work.

"The major vaccines being considered for use in Ireland are also free of animal cells and are religiously permissible for Muslims to use.

"Our Irish Muslim medics have served with their colleagues of all faiths and none on the frontline of this pandemic since March."
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CIUDAD VICTORIA, Mexico  When state police in northern Mexico allegedly shot 19 people, including at least 14 Guatemalan migrants, to death in late January near the border with Texas, it was a tragedy that critics say authorities had been warned could come.

In 2019, prosecutors charged that the same Tamaulipas state police unit, then operating under a different name, pulled eight people from their homes in the border city of Nuevo Laredo, posed them in clothing and vehicles to make them look like criminals, and shot them to death.

Now, a dozen officers of the 150-member Special Operations Group, known by its Spanish initials as GOPES, have been ordered held for trial on charges they shot to death at least 14 Guatemalan migrants and two Mexicans on a rural road in the border township of Camargo. The bodies were then set afire and burned so badly that three other corpses are still awaiting identification.

Authorities had ample warning of the problems in the unit, which was created last year from the remains of the special forces group accused of the 2019 killings and other atrocities. A federal legislator even filed a non-binding resolution in Mexicos Congress in early January to protest beatings and robberies by the unit.

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As recently as November, a Tamaulipas business association charged that officers in the GOPES unit had broken into a members home and stolen cash, other belongings and appliances. The group said the victim even took remote photos through her homes security cameras showing uniformed officers with guns slung over their backs robbing her house.

The complaint was ignored, and nothing was ever done to rein the unit in.

If back then they had done something, if any attention had been paid, perhaps today we would not be mourning the deaths of 19 people, said Marco Antonio Marino, vice president of the Tamaulipas Federation of Business Chambers.

Tamaulipas has seen rival drug cartels fighting the longest, bloodiest, best-equipped turf war in Mexicos history for over a decade now. Bands of gunmen with names like The Troop from Hell regularly drive around in home-made armored trucks.

The cartels coopted so many municipal police forces in Tamaulipas that the state decided to dissolve them all and rely more on better-trained state police officers. And the federal governments withdrawal of Mexican marines, who once provided much of the heavy firepower for law enforcement in the state, encouraged the state to create elite units like GOPES.

So fearsome is the units reputation that the U.S. government, which trained a few of its individual members, has sought to distance itself from the force, which it refers to both by its former initials, CAIET, and its current name, GOPES.

The U.S. Embassy in Mexico City said three of the 12 officers charged in the migrant massacre received basic skills and/or first line supervisor training through a State Department program before they were assigned to the special unit. The training of these individuals took place in 2016 and 2017 and were fully compliant with Leahy (human rights) vetting, the embassy said.

CAIET is the Spanish acronym for the Tamaulipas Center for Analysis, Information and Studies, a bizarrely academic name for what was essentially a rapid-reaction, SWAT-style police force. Like GOPES, it often operated with armored cars and masks.

In 2019, the bodies of the eight people dragged from their homes in Nuevo Laredo were later found with gunshot wounds to the head, dressed in camouflage cartel-style gear with bulletproof vests bearing Cartel de Noreste initials, with guns by their sides. Prosecutors eventually concluded that CAIET officers planted the guns and cartel gear on the victims before executing them.

Raymundo Ramos, the human rights activist who investigated and exposed the Nuevo Laredo massacre, notes that despite those findings only two of the 40 members of the CAIET unit involved in the killings are in custody facing charges. Three other officers agreed to testify in return for getting their charges dropped, and two officers are fugitives.

Authorities didnt dissolve the CAIET unit. They just changed its name to GOPES.

This is a recurring practice among (state) governments, that they just change their names to clean up the image of their police forces, Ramos said.

Prosecutors have not publicly discussed any motive for why the GOPES officers allegedly decided to massacre the migrants, and court hearings in the case so far have not been open to the public.

The migrants were accompanied by several Mexicans who were apparently serving as armed protection for the shipment of migrants being smuggled to the U.S. border. The Gulf cartel makes much of its money by charging migrant traffickers a protection fee for passing through its territory. It also makes money kidnapping unaccompanied migrants, torturing them until they reveal the phone numbers of relatives in the United States and holding them for ransom.

Among the theories is that the GOPES officers opened fire on armed gang members aboard the migrants vehicle  three assault rifles were found in the burned-out pickup. The gunfire killed the guards, and the officers then killed the migrants seeking to hide their mistake.

State prosecutors say the fact that there were no shell casings found at the massacre site means police picked them up to cover their tracks.

Ramos said that fits in with the units tactics. Normally, they do not leave witnesses. That is part of their training, he said.

In the 2019 massacre in Nuevo Laredo, the police unit did leave four witnesses at the homes from which the victims were dragged, apparently only because the four were teenage girls or mothers with children.

The problem is not just limited to killings, said Oscar Hernandez, an anthropologists at Colegio de la Frontera Norte.

Its not news that some police units get involved in this kind of thing, not just violence, which is the most visible, but other things like aiding and abetting, and corruption, Hernandez said.

Marino, the business leader, stresses that some state police units have made it safe again to use the roads in Tamaulipas, where drivers and bus passengers were once routinely abducted and never heard from again.

The GOPES unit isnt the first of Tamaulipas problem with abusive police forces.

In 2014, a police unit known as Grupo Hercules, which acted as a sort of paramilitary bodyguard for the mayor of the border city of Matamoros, and Mexican marines abducted and murdered four people, including three American siblings.

Erica, Alex and Jose Angel Alvarado Rivera of Progreso, Texas, disappeared in October 2014 while visiting their father in Control, a small town in Mexico near Matamoros, which is across the border from Brownsville, Texas. An acquaintance, Mexican citizen Jose Guadalupe Castaneda Benitez, was also taken. Their bodies were all found shot in the head more than two weeks later.

Other facets of this years massacre remain unexplained. For example, Ramos said some of the officers detained in the case have said they killed the migrants, but didnt burn the bodies.

A briefing paper from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration suggests the rival Northeast Cartel was active in the area in late January, looking to kill a top Gulf cartel figure, when they happened on the migrants. Some people believe the Northeast cartel gunmen could have either been involved in the massacre, or at least have set the pickup and the bodies afire after they were killed, to damage the Gulf cartels operations.

One point everyone agrees on: The bodies were so badly burned that in the normal course of events they might never have been identified and could have been buried and forgotten as the likely participants in just another gunbattle between cartels.

But unknown to the GOPES unit, the pickup was part of a larger convoy of vehicles carrying migrants, including a Guatemalan migrant smuggler who knew all the victims. He advised their families back home of the massacre and the relatives went public with the news.

If it had not been for him, they might all be buried now, as just more suspected criminals, said Ramos.

___

Stevenson reported from Mexico City.
(CNN)  Two US Navy aircraft carrier strike groups began operations in the disputed waters of the South China Sea on Tuesday, the latest show of naval capabilities by the Biden administration as it pledges to stand firm against Chinese territorial claims.

The carriers USS Theodore Roosevelt and USS Nimitz and their accompanying guided-missile cruisers and destroyers are showing the US Navy's ability to operate in highly trafficked, challenging environments, the US Navy said in statement.

The two strike groups have about 120 combat aircraft between them.

China claims almost all of the 1.3 million square mile South China Sea. Since 2014 it has transformed obscure reefs and sandbars into man-made artificial islands, fortified with missiles, runways and weapons systems -- antagonizing governments with overlapping claims, including the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei and Taiwan.

Beijing reacted harshly seven months ago when the US deployed two carrier strike groups there, the first time in six years that two carriers had operated in tandem in the South China Sea.

"The US action is intended to drive a wedge between countries, promote the militarization of the South China Sea, and undermine peace and stability in the South China Sea," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said at the time.

In a speech Thursday, Biden described China as the US' "most serious competitor" and outlined plans to confront Beijing's "attack on human rights, intellectual property, and global governance."

And in an interview with CBS News on Sunday, Biden said Washington was in "extreme competition" with China.

But Biden and officials in his administration have pledged to work with US allies when it comes to countering Beijing.

"I'm not going to do it the way Trump did," Biden said of his predecessor's administration, which often made policy regarding China without consulting regional players and organizations.

"We're going to focus on international rules of the road," Biden told CBS.

The US Navy says it has been following international rules on two occasions in the past week as it challenges Chinese claims in the Pacific. Last Thursday, the US Navy sent the guided-missile destroyer USS John S McCain through the Taiwan Strait, which separates China from self-governed Taiwan. On Friday, the same warship steamed near the Chinese-claimed Paracel Islands in the South China Sea.

Friday's so-called freedom of navigation operation near the Paracels "upheld the rights, freedoms and lawful uses of the sea recognized in international law," a US Navy statement said.

US Rear Adm. Doug Verissimo, commander, Carrier Strike Group Nine, led by the Roosevelt, said Tuesday's dual carrier operation was performed "to ensure that we are tactically proficient to meet the challenge of maintaining peace and we are able to continue to show our partners and allies in the region that we are committed to promoting a free and open Indo-Pacific."

Since assuming office on January 20, the Biden administration has reaffirmed its commitment to US allies and partners in the region, specifically letting the Philippines and Japan know that their islands also claimed by China are covered by mutual defense treaties that obligates Washington to defend them.
SEOUL, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- South Korea's top nuclear envoy held phone talks with a U.S. diplomat over the Korean Peninsula issue, Seoul's foreign ministry said Wednesday.

Noh Kyu-duk, special representative for Korean Peninsula peace and security affairs, talked over the phone with Sung Kim, acting U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific affairs.

During the phone dialogue, they traded opinions concerning the denuclearization of and the peace settlement in the peninsula.

Denuclearization talks between the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) and the United States have been stalled since the second DPRK-U.S. summit ended without agreement at the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi in February 2019.
The Social Democratic Party (PSD, opposition) deputies are demanding the resignation of Health Minister Vlad Voiculescu in the simple motion they tabled in Parliament on Wednesday, on the grounds that in the time that has elapsed since his investiture they have seen "so much incoherence, lack of professionalism and commitment as has not been seen in the last 30 years", according to AGERPRES.

The simple motion is called 'Incompetence and lack of commitment kill! Vlad Voiculescu, a danger to the Romanians' health and life'.

In the text, the Social-Democrats point out that in a month and a half, the time that has elapsed since the swearing-in of the Minister of Health, they have seen "so much incoherence, lack of professionalism and commitment as has not been seen in the last 30 years".

"Casualties, hospitals in flames, chaos in vaccination, disorder in the public health system and lies in testing and reporting! And much indifference, indolence, arrogance and defiance on the part of the one who should have as his main concern the health and safety of the citizens! (...) It's already too much! This minister has become a real danger to the health of Romanians," the motion reads and calls for Vlad Voiculescu to leave office.

According to the motion, two months after the tragedy at Piatra Neamt hospital and after another tragedy, in Bucharest, at Matei Bals Epidemiological Institute, a tragedy in which 17 patients lost their lives, Voiculescu admits "serenely" that he did nothing that he claimed must be done urgently when he was in opposition.

The Social-Democrats state that this simple motion does not put health or health care system in the bench of the defendants, but "criticizes the obvious lack of performance of the minister responsible for the Romanians' health and life".

The PSD deputies argue that the Minister of Health could have done more in the 50 days he has held the government chair.

"As for the major public health crisis caused by COVID-19 in Romania, four pressing problems should have been on the table of the Minister of Health on the first day of his mandate. And they had to be resolved immediately! Not in a month! Not next year! Actual figures on Romanians infected daily with SARS CoV-2 and regaining control over the pandemic by changing the testing strategy, knowledge of the situation of the Romanian population by resuming sero-prevalence studies, interrupted in September 2020, management of congestion and risks for patients in the ICUs and wards treating COVID-19 patients, adoption of measures to reduce the significant mortality caused by COVID-19, the protection of exhausted medical personnel directly involved in the treatment of COVID-19 patients and the mobilization of public health professionals. But... none of these was a priority for Mr Voiculescu," the text reads.

The initiators further maintain that the success of the anti-COVID-19 vaccination campaign is the essential condition for Romania to return to the normality of economic and social life, however, once at the helm of the ministry, "Vlad Voiculescu has consistently undermined the national strategy already approved".

The Social-Democrats also rebuke Voiculescu for having "conflicting stances regarding the opening of schools and economic activities".
Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-10 05:18:10|Editor: huaxia

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BUENOS AIRES, Feb. 9 (Xinhua) -- A forest fire raging for more than two weeks in Cuesta del Ternero in the Argentine region of Patagonia has not been fully controlled, the country's environmental authorities said on Tuesday.

Deputy Minister of Environment and Sustainable Development Sergio Federovisky told Radio Provincia that the fire in the tourist area of El Bolson in the southern province of Rio Negro "is contained, but not controlled."

The fire started on Jan. 24 after a family had a barbecue a few meters from a forest and did not put out the fire, which quickly spread through the area.

Meanwhile, the Forest Fire Prevention and Fighting Service of Rio Negro indicated that the estimated area affected "is approximately 7,500 hectares, considering the fire's new advances."

On Saturday, the Rio Negro provincial government declared a state of emergency and disaster in the area, due to the environmental damage and the risk to inhabitants.

In recent hours, the fire threatened the homes of a Mapuche indigenous community, but it has been contained some 200 meters from the houses. Enditem

[February 10, 2021] Rest Super Selects Charles River IMS to Streamline Front and Middle Office Operations

Charles River Development, a State Street company, today announced that Retail Employees Superannuation Trust (Rest), one of Australia's largest industry superannuation funds with approximately 1.8 million members, has selected the cloud-based Charles River Investment Management Solution (Charles River IMS) to consolidate their front and middle office operations for managing asset allocation, global equities, fixed income, FX and futures. Rest will implement Charles River IMS to support their internally managed investments as well as their 'whole-of-fund' requirements, leveraging the Charles River Investment Book of Record (IBOR) for real-time cash and positions. Rest will use Charles River to support and deliver a transparent view and workflow across their business, including portfolio construction, decision support, risk, collateral management, order management and compliance. "The platform's flexibility and scalability will enable us to automate processes and achieve efficiencies at this time as we build a global best practice internal investment capability. Combining internal and external investment management in one desktop system will allow us to focus real-time on achieving strong long-term returns for our members," said Andrew Lill, Chief Investment Officer, Rest. "Charles River continues to build a strong local presence in Melbourne which is critical to supporting our growing client base in the superannuation sector," said Cameron Field, managing director - Asia Pacific, Charles River Development. "The adoption of Microsoft Azure as the cloud platform for our SaaS (News - Alert) deployment delivers compelling benefits for this market such as the ability for clients to rapidly deploy new products and services, ease of increasing data and computing capacity, as well as a suitable approach for addressing data residency concerns." State Street currently provides Rest with custodial services as well as their data management solution State Street Alpha? Data Services. About Rest Industry Super Established in 1988, Rest Industry Super is one the largest superannuation funds by membership, with around 1.8 million members and around $60 billion in funds under management (as at 31 December 2020). Rest Investments has a 30-year history of focusing on long-term investing across multi-asset portfolios to deliver strong, superior returns for its members. Its investment team is located across Sydney, Melbourne, New York and London. About Charles River, A State Street Company Investment firms, asset owners, wealth managers, hedge funds and insurers in more than 30 countries rely on Charles River's front and midde office investment management platform to manage more than US$30 Trillion (News - Alert) in assets. Together with State Street's middle and back office capabilities, Charles River's cloud-deployed software technology forms the foundation of State Street AlphaSM. The Charles River Investment Management Solution (Charles River IMS) is designed to automate and simplify the institutional investment process across asset classes, from portfolio management and risk analytics through trading and post-trade settlement, with integrated compliance and managed data throughout. Charles River's growing partner ecosystem enables clients to seamlessly access external data and analytics, applications and liquidity venues that support the unique demands of their product and asset class mix. Headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts, we serve clients globally with more than 1,000 employees in 11 regional offices. (Statistics as of Q1 2021)



About State Street Corporation State Street Corporation (NYSE: STT) is one of the world's leading providers of financial services to institutional investors including investment servicing, investment management and investment research and trading. With $38.8 trillion in assets under custody and/or administration and $3.5 trillion* in assets under management as of December 31, 2020, State Street operates globally in more than 100 geographic markets and employs approximately 39,000 worldwide. For more information, visit State Street's website at www.statestreet.com.

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As the long-standing managing director of British media company Conde Nast - among many other titles - Nicholas Coleridge has a wealth of celebrity stories up his sleeves.

The former President of Conde Nast International spent 30 years at the top of the business, assembling more than 100 titles, as well as countless A-lister encounters which he shared with Sheerluxe podcast yesterday.

Nicholas revealed the Princess of Wales' clothes shopping habits, Victoria Beckham's desire to always have her family near her during events, and how Anna Wintour seemed prior to constantly wearing sunglasses.

The director of the Victoria & Albert Museum, who spoke about his 2019 memoir The Glossy Years, claimed Princess Diana would often try clothes on at Vogue House to avoid any embarrassment at a store if she didn't like any of the designer products.

Elsewhere, he claimed Anna, editor-in-chief of American Vogue, was 'much easier to communicate with' before her days of constantly wearing dark glasses.

Nicholas Coleridge walking behind the Princess of Wales in 1991, outside Vogue House in Mayfair, London

Speaking on the podcast, Nicholas recalled how Princess Diana used to often visit Vogue's headquarters in London.

He explained: '[During] the period when I was first working at Conde Nast, [the Princess of Wales] used to come in there a lot to Vogue House and she had a very particular reason for coming in.

'And that was that she found it very embarrassing to go to shops in Sloane Street or in Bond Street and try on clothes by a designer and then buy nothing and not get something.

'Because when she came in there was such excitement and everyone working there was so thrilled so then if she didn't buy something she felt that she caused great disappointment to everyone who worked there.

'So she had an arrangement with Vogue that if she wanted to try a new designer, the magazine would call in quite a lot of clothes from that designer for her to try them on and then the fashion editors there would look at them with her and they would say "you know we think you look great in this one, this one I don't think works quite so well, this one is marvellous."

Nicholas revealed the Princess of Wales' clothes shopping habits, Victoria Beckham's desire to always have her family near her during events, and how Anna Wintour (pictured with Nicholas in 2007) seemed prior to constantly wearing sunglasses

'Her people would then ring the designer and say the Princess saw some clothes you lent to Vogue and wants to buy two of them and she found that much easier,' he said.

Why Anna Wintour never removes her trademark sunglasses American Vogue editor and fashion legend Anna Wintour is known for never taking off her trademark sunglasses. As well as wearing them in the Vogue offices, she is regularly seen sporting them on the catwalk, and even watched the entire Oscars in 2015 without taking them off. One of the only times the British-American fashion legend, who has worked for Vogue for 30 years, has been seen taking them off is when she was made a Dame at Buckingham Palace in 2017. She wore her trademark sunglasses on arrival at the Palace, but removed them before entering the ballroom, where she received the award from the Queen. During her '60 minutes with Anna Wintour' interview, the American editor admitted she used her sunglasses as 'armour', and they were a useful tool to 'hide boredom'. 'I can sit in a show and if I am bored out of my mind, nobody will notice At this point, they have become, really, armour', she said in 2012. Advertisement

The society magazine supremo said that there was a time that whenever a person entered the lift at Vogue House, you could be confronted with the Princess of Wales.

'And then later, she came to lunch and used to come to our parties and I have to say that I found her so utterly beautiful in the flesh,' said Nicholas.

'She had something about her, this incredible glow, incredible star quality. She was very flirtatious, to everybody, to all men, and I think that was one of the extraordinary things about her. Men of all ages frankly fell for her.

'She was quite tactile which is an unusual thing. She was a big one for putting her hand on your shoulder, or her hand on your hand, or her hand on your wrist and of course, nothing is more sort of generally sexy than that.'

Nicholas also shared his experience of working with Spice Girl-turned-fashion designer Victoria Beckham, admitting that the mother-of-four would often ask for an invite to events for her whole family.

He said: 'There was a time when I was running the British Fashion Council and Victoria Beckham was absolutely the zenith of her moment, I think actually her moment continues to this very day.

'...And we always longed to have Victoria Beckham to all these Fashion Council awards and everything that we did, and when she came she always insisted on bringing her entire family and this is the weirdest thing.

'So we would invite her and then you'd get a message saying that Victoria would want to come but she'd want to bring her sister Louise, her sister Louise's partner, and her mum and her dad, and her dad's brother, and they all wanted to be on the top table.

'So the whole of the top table sort of became the Beckham family table so there was a period of my life when I was always sitting next to distant members of the Beckham family, who were all there, there was no one who wasn't there.'

Nicholas also shared his experience of working with Spice Girl-turned-fashion designer Victoria Beckham (pictured), admitting that the mother-of-four would often ask for an invite to events for her whole family

However, while the family loved 'all the attention', Nicholas suggested they 'didn't know how to get any privacy at all and weren't sure if they wanted privacy'.

The director of the Victoria & Albert Museum spoke about his 2019 memoir The Glossy Years (above)

'I could sense they were in a terrible muddle and probably still are,' he added.

The magazine guru's final reveal was about his working relationship with Anna Wintour and her signature black sunglasses.

'Well, Anna Wintour, what a phenomenon she is,' he said. 'I knew her first before she started wearing dark glasses, which was a big moment in her life, but for the first six or seven years when she was editing and a was a figure, she only wore dark glasses about half the time and she used to take them off for lunch.'

'When I was editing Harpers she was the editor of British Vogue at that time and we would have lunch together not more often than once a year, but about once a year, and she didn't wear her glasses.

'It was much easier I found communicating with her in those days. You could see the whites of her eyes, you could see her burning ambition.'
The launch of a rocket carrying China's Chang'e-5 lunar probe underlines how much progress Beijing has made towards its 'space dream'

The successful entry of China's Tianwen-1 probe into Mars' orbit on Wednesday underlined just how far the country has come in achieving its space dream.

Beijing has poured billions into its military-run space programme, with hopes of having a crewed space station by 2022 and eventually sending humans to the Moon.

The country has come a long way in its race to catch up with the United States and Russia, whose astronauts and cosmonauts have decades of experience in space exploration.

But Beijing sees its space project as a mark of its rising global stature and growing technological might.

Here is a look at China's space programme through the decades, and where it is headed:

Mao's vow

Soon after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, Chairman Mao Zedong pronounced: "We too will make satellites."

It took more than a decade, but in 1970, China launched its first satellite on a Long March rocket.

Human spaceflight took decades longer, with Yang Liwei becoming the first Chinese "taikonaut" in 2003.

As the launch approached, concerns over the viability of the mission caused Beijing to cancel a live television broadcast at the last minute.

But it went smoothly, with Yang orbiting the Earth 14 times during a 21-hour flight aboard the Shenzhou 5.

China has launched five crewed missions since.

The Jade Rabbit lunar rover surveyed the moon's surface for 31 months

Space station and 'Jade Rabbit'

Following in the footsteps of the United States and Russia, China is striving to build a space station circling the planet.

The Tiangong-1 lab was launched in September 2011.

In 2013, the second Chinese woman in space, Wang Yaping, gave a video class from inside the space module to children across the world's most populous country.

The craft was also used for medical experiments and, most importantly, tests intended to prepare for the construction of a space station.

That was followed by the "Jade Rabbit" lunar rover in 2013, which first appeared a dud when it turned dormant and stopped sending signals back to Earth.

It made a dramatic recovery, however, ultimately surveying the Moon's surface for 31 monthswell beyond its expected lifespan.

In 2016, China launched its second orbital lab, the Tiangong-2. Taikonauts who have visited the station have run experiments on growing rice and other plants.

'Space dream'

Under President Xi Jinping, plans for China's "space dream", as he calls it, have been put into overdrive.

China is looking to finally catch up with the US and Russia after years of belatedly matching their milestones.

China has been carrying out experiments in a lab simulating a lunar-like environment in preparation for its long-term goal of putting humans on the moon

In addition to a space station, China is also planning to build a base on the Moon, and the country's National Space Administration has said it aims to launch a crewed lunar mission by 2029.

But lunar work was dealt a setback in 2017 when the Long March-5 Y2, a powerful heavy-lift rocket, failed to launch on a mission to send communication satellites into orbit.

That forced the postponement of the launch of Chang'e-5, which was originally scheduled to collect Moon samples in the second half of 2017.

Another robot, the Chang'e-4, landed on the far side of the Moon in January 2019a historic first.

This was followed by one which landed on the near side of the Moon late last year and raised a Chinese flag on the Moon's surface.

The unmanned Chinese spacecraft returned to earth in December with rocks and soil from the Moonthe first lunar samples collected in four decades.

And the first images of Mars were sent back by the five-tonne Tianwen-1 this month, days before it entered the Red Planet's orbit.

It includes a Mars orbiter, a lander and a rover that will study the planet's soil.

China hopes to ultimately land the rover in May in Utopia, a massive impact basin on Mars.

 2021 AFP
Burma Protesters Against Myanmar Coup Arrested in Rakhine

Anti-coup protosters in Rakhine.

Sittwe, Rakhine  Eight anti-coup protesters were arrested in Rakhine State on Tuesday after protests against the military coup in five townships in central and southern Rakhine.

Six residents in Ann Township and two National League for Democracy (NLD) executives in Taungup Township were arrested on Tuesday. Two of the protesters detained are ethnically Chin students from the organization Chin University Students in Rakhine State.

Police are prosecuting them under the Natural Disaster Management Law.

The whole country is staging protests. It is unfair to pick out a few members of large protests, said Daw Tin Tin Aung, mother of one of the detained Chin students, Mai Yadanar Aung.

Taungup residents gathered outside the central police station on Tuesday evening, demanding that two NLD executives be released. On Wednesday, around 200 people are staging a sit-in protest at the police station, calling for their release.

There were rumors the military has taken the two from the police station to the Fifth Military Operations Command in the township.

In Manaung Township, police briefly detained three NLD members on Tuesday and released them by midnight.

Protests against the military coup are sweeping Rakhine State. Amid reports that protests are pending in the state capital, Sittwe, police interrogated leaders of some Sittwe-based civil society organizations on Tuesday, and soldiers and police patrolled the town, raising public concerns.

You may also like these stories:

UN, US Offer Support for Peaceful Protest Against Myanmar Military Regime

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Hundreds of ultra-Orthodox Jews protesting coronavirus lockdown restrictions clashed with police officers in Jerusalem on Tuesday night.

Rioters from the insulated community were pictured burning rubbish bins and reportedly threw stones at officers who responded by using water cannons and other heavy-handed tactics to disperse the crowd.

In recent weeks, ultra-Orthodox Jews have defied coronavirus restrictions by holding big funerals for beloved rabbis who died of COVID-19, celebrating large weddings and continuing to send their children to schools.

The gatherings have led to clashes with police and an unprecedented wave of public anger toward the religious community, that makes up about 12 percent of Israel's 9.3 million people.

Pictured: Hundreds of ultra-Orthodox Jews gather to protest against restrictions imposed by the Israeli government to curb cases of Covid-19, in Jerusalem's religious neighbourhood of Mea Shearim on February 9

Rioters from the insulated ultra-Orthodox community were pictured burning rubbish bins and reportedly threw stones at officers who responded by using water cannons and other heavy-handed tactics to disperse the crowd

Pictured: ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) Jews gather to protest against restrictions imposed by the Israeli government to curb cases of coronavirus, in West Jerusalem's Kikar HaShabbat region on February 09

An initial protest was organised with police approval, and saw speeches from leaders from the community (pictured) with hundreds of people attending, tightly packed together with almost none wearing masks

Gilad Malach, a researcher at the Israel Democracy Institute, says ultra-Orthodox believers accounted for over a third of the country's COVID-19 cases in 2020. Among Israelis over 65, the ultra-Orthodox mortality rate was three times that of the general population, he added.

Hundreds of ultra-Orthodox men gathered in Jerusalem's Shabbat Square to protest lockdown rules that are in place to curb Israel's high rate of coronavirus restrictions, in particular restrictions keeping schools closed.

An initial protest was organised with police approval, and saw speeches from leaders from the community with hundreds of people attending, tightly packed together with almost none wearing masks.

After the initial demonstration, hundreds of the protesters marched to the nearby Bar Ilan street, which became the scene of violent clashes between the group and police officers.

According to The Times of Israel, some demonstrators blocked traffic, burned rubbish bins, damaged vehicles and threw heavy stones and other objects at police officers.

Responding to the aggression, police deployed water cannons to disperse the protest, and at least one person was reported to have been arrested on suspicion of disturbing public order.

After the initial demonstration, hundreds of the protesters marched to the nearby Bar Ilan street, which became the scene of violent clashes between the group and police officers (pictured)

Responding to the aggression, police deployed water cannons to disperse the protest, and at least one person was reported to have been arrested on suspicion of disturbing public order. Pictured: A man is taken away by police on Tuesday night

Pictured: A man is arrested by police in Jerusalem on Tuesday night amid a protest against restrictions imposed by the Israeli government to curb cases of Covid-19, in Jerusalem's religious neighbourhood of Mea Shearim on February 9

Critics of the police have recently called for water cannons to be used to disperse illegal gatherings of ultra-Orthodox Jews. Pictured: Israeli police uses water cannon as they intervene in protests by ultra-Orthodox Jews on February 9 in Jerusalem

Critics of the police have recently called for water cannons to be used to disperse illegal gatherings of ultra-Orthodox Jews, with some - including opposition leader Yair Lapid - pointing to the police's use of aggressive tactics against anti-Netanyahu protesters, but not against ultra-Orthodox - or Haredi - gatherings.

Public opinion has turned against the community for its frequent large-scale violations of lockdown rules, as well as the government's perceived reluctance to strongly enforce the rules in the ultra-Orthodox community.

In recent weeks, there have been several large-scale Haredi funerals held for top rabbis who died of Covid-19 attended by thousands of people, despite the national lockdown in place.

While outdoor gatherings have been restricted to just 10 people, some of the funerals for the group's leading rabbis drew crowds of more than 10,000 people.

While outdoor gatherings have been restricted to just 10 people, some of the funerals for the group's leading rabbis drew crowds of more than 10,000 people. Pictured: Thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews participate in funeral for prominent rabbi Meshulam Soloveitchik, in Jerusalem on January 31, 2020

The mass ceremony in January (pictured) took place despite the country's health regulations banning large public gatherings, during a nationwide lockdown to curb the spread of the coronavirus

Coronavirus czar Nachman Ash on Tuesday warned the Haredi community that such gatherings would further spread the coronavirus in Israel and lead to additional deaths.

'It pains the heart to see the photos of mass violations [of the lockdown] at funerals because those funerals will lead to more funerals,' Ash said, also noting that while the mortality rate among the group is dropping, it 'is still high and worrying.'

But despite the high death rate among the community, ultra-Orthodox lawmakers have rebuked attempts to enforce anti-virus measures on their community, labelling the efforts as discriminatory.

Meanwhile, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has remained quiet on the issue, and appears unwilling to clash with anger his ultra-Orthodox political partners whose support keeps him in power.

But Mendy Moskowits, a member of the ultra-Orthodox Belz Hassidic sect in Jerusalem, doesn't understand the uproar toward believers like him.

Moskowits, like many other ultra-Orthodox faithful, says Israeli society doesn't understand their way of life and has turned his community into a scapegoat.

'The media gives us, in my opinion, a very bad misrepresentation,' he said.

Public opinion has turned against the community for its frequent large-scale violations of lockdown rules, as well as the government's perceived reluctance to strongly enforce the rules in the ultra-Orthodox community. Pictured: Israeli police move against ultra-Orthodox Jews protesting against restrictions imposed by the Israeli government in Jerusalem, February 9

Israel is currently under its third national lockdown since the start of the pandemic, although some restrictions were rolled back at start of the week as its vaccination efforts continue to out-pace all other nations. Pictured: A rubbish bin is seen on fire in Jerusalem on February 9 amid protests by ultra-Orthodox Jews against coronavirus restrictions

Israeli police stand guard as ultra-Orthodox Jews protesting against restrictions imposed by the Israeli government to curb cases of coronavirus, in West Jerusalem's Kikar HaShabbat region on February 09

Ultra-Orthodox men are exempt from compulsory military service and often collect welfare payments while continuing to study full time in seminaries throughout adulthood. Their schools enjoy broad autonomy and focus almost entirely on religion while shunning basic subjects like math and science.

These privileges have generated disdain from the general public - resentment that has boiled over into outright hostility during the coronavirus crisis.

Israel is currently under its third national lockdown since the start of the pandemic, although some restrictions were rolled back at start of the week as its vaccination efforts continue to out-pace all other nations.

So far, a fifth of the Israeli population has been vaccinated, with 65 people per 100 receiving at least one dose.

As of Tuesday, February 9, Israel has recorded 703,719 cases of Covid-19, and 5,216 related deaths. The country passed the 700,000 recorded cases milestone on Tuesday.

But Health Ministry data show vaccination rates in ultra-Orthodox areas lag far behind the national average.

Privileges afforded to ultra-Orthodox men - such as military service exemption - have generated disdain from the general public - resentment that has boiled over into outright hostility during the coronavirus crisis. Pictured: Ultra Orthodox Jews protest against the government's coronavirus disease restrictions in Jerusalem February 9

Despite the high death rate among the community, ultra-Orthodox lawmakers have rebuked attempts to enforce anti-virus measures on their community, labelling the efforts as discriminatory. Pictured: Haredi Jews gather to protest against restrictions imposed by the Israeli government

Pictured: ultra-Orthodox Jews protest against the government's coronavirus disease restrictions in Jerusalem February 9

Ultra-Orthodox noncompliance, Malach said, stemmed in part from members not believing that they 'need to obey the rules of the state, especially regarding questions of religious behavior.'

Ultra-Orthodox follow a strict interpretation of Judaism, and prominent rabbis are the community's arbiters in all matters. Many consider secular Israelis a recent aberration from centuries of unaltered Jewish tradition.

'We have rabbis. We don't just do what we have in our minds,' Moskowits said. 'We have listened to them for a few thousand years. We will listen to them today as well.'

While the ultra-Orthodox community is far from monolithic, many rabbis have either ignored or even intentionally flouted safety rules. The 93-year-old Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky, one of the most influential spiritual leaders, has insisted schools remain open throughout the crisis.

On a recent day, scores of ultra-Orthodox girls cascaded from a grade school in the Romema neighborhood that was operating in violation of the law. Few wore masks or maintained distance from others. Classes went on at nearby boys' elementary schools and yeshivas.

'We can't have a generation go bust,' said Moskowits, who lives in Romema. 'We are still sending our boys to school because we have rabbis who say Torah study saves and protects.'

In a community that largely shuns the internet, rabbis plaster 'pashkevils,' or public notices, on walls in religious neighborhoods to spread their messages.

So far, a fifth of the Israeli population has been vaccinated, with 65 people per 100 receiving at least one dose. Pictured: A woman receives a vaccination against the coronavirus disease at a temporary Clalit healthcare maintenance organisation (HMO) centre, in Herzliya, Israel February 3

Pictured: Medical workers, some seen through a window of an observation room, wear personal protective equipment as they work inside an underground ward treating patients with the coronavirus disease at the Critical Care Coronavirus Unit at Sheba Medical Center in Ramat Gan, Israel February 8, 2021

Israel is currently under its third national lockdown since the start of the pandemic, although some restrictions were rolled back at start of the week as its vaccination efforts continue to out-pace all other nations

Some notices urged people not to get vaccinated, even using Holocaust imagery to scare people. 'The vaccine is completely unnecessary! The pandemic is already behind us!' one read, comparing the rush for vaccinations to boarding a train to the Auschwitz death camp.

Ultra-Orthodox leaders say such views are held by a radical minority. Most people respect safety rules, they say, and the virus is spreading because communities are poor and people live in small apartments with large families.

Moskowits, a 29-year-old father of two, said some families have up to 10 children and just one bathroom. From 14, boys are sent to boarding schools and spend only the sabbath at home.

For many, lockdown 'technically, physically doesn't work,' Moskowits said. He called it a 'human rights violation.'

Moskowits, who grew up in the U.K., speaks English with a British accent, but his vocabulary is heavily seasoned with Yiddish and Hebrew words.

He wears the black velvet skullcap, pressed white shirt and black slacks typical of ultra-Orthodox men - but no mask, despite the government requiring them in public. He said he contracted COVID-19 in March and claims a letter from his doctor excuses him from wearing a mask.

A real estate developer, he punctuates his workday with prayers at a neighborhood synagogue, and tries once a week to pray at Jerusalem's Western Wall, the holiest place where Jews can worship. Once a day, he performs ablutions at a mikvah, a Jewish ritual bath, and he regularly studies religious texts with a partner.

The religious community is growing rapidly even though economists have long warned that the system is unsustainable. About 60% of its population is under 19, according to the Israel Democracy Institute.

Protecting the ultra-Orthodox way of life - or Yiddishkeit - is the community's ultimate aim. If that means infections spread, that's a price some members are willing to pay.

Ultra-Orthodox people 'sacrifice most of their lives for the next generation and for preserving Yiddishkeit. We give away everything,' Moskowits said.

This view is hardly universal.

Pictured: Graphs showing the number of new coronavirus cases (left) and deaths (right) per day in Israel (7 day rolling average). As of Tuesday, February 9, Israel has recorded 703,719 cases of Covid-19, and 5,216 related deaths. The country passed the 700,000 recorded cases milestone on Tuesday

So far, a fifth of the Israeli population has been vaccinated, with over 65 people per 100 receiving at least one dose

Nathan Slifkin, an Orthodox rabbi living in Israel, complained in a recent op-ed in the Jewish Chronicle that members of the Haredi community 'genuinely see no connection between flouting the restrictions and people dying from COVID.'

Yehuda Meshi-Zahav, head of an ultra-Orthodox ambulance service called ZAKA, lost both his parents to the virus in January. He says rabbis urging followers to violate coronavirus regulations have 'blood on their hands.'

Funerals play a central role in traditional Jewish life, and the pandemic has made them all too common. Cars with megaphones drive through religious neighborhoods announcing deaths and funeral details. Pashkevils notify communities when a prominent rabbi dies.

Shmuel Gelbstein, deputy director of a Jerusalem funeral society for the ultra-Orthodox community, said this year has been 'very busy, very difficult regarding mortality, both when it comes to ordinary deaths, plus of course coronavirus, which is certainly an amount that adds to the load.'

Funerals for two leading Haredi rabbis who died of COVID-19 each drew an estimated 10,000 mourners last week.

Israel's non-Orthodox majority was outraged at what they saw as contempt for the rules and selective enforcement by authorities.

But the ultra-Orthodox claim they are being unfairly singled out, noting that demonstrations against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu - protected under free speech laws - have been permitted to continue during the pandemic.

Moskowits explained that for the young men who flocked to these funerals, prominent rabbis are 'a huge part of your life. When these younger guys go to a funeral, they feel that their father died,' he said. 'Nothing stands in the way. He will go to the funeral anyway.'
Donald Trump Jr., son of former President Donald Trump, speaks during a Republican National Committee Victory Rally at Dalton Regional Airport in Dalton, Ga., on Jan. 4, 2021. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Trump Jr.: Impeachment Push Is a Waste of Time and Reflects a Double Standard

Donald Trump Jr.. said in an interview with Fox News Sean Hannity on Tuesday that the push to impeach former President Donald Trump is both a waste of time and a partisan effort that reflects a double standard.

Trump Jr. said that the urgency of the pandemic suggests other legislative priorities should take precedence over a second push to impeach his father.

Arent we in the middle of a pandemic? Trump Jr. said. I thought that these senators would maybe have something better to do. Maybe they would actually fight for the American people, for a change. Maybe they would actually get to the business of helping us through this pandemic.

Both Republican and Democratic lawmakers have publicly stated that they want a speedy trial, as the Senate cannot move forward with its legislative priorities until the trial is complete.

The trial will kick off on Wednesday at around 1 p.m., with six Republicans on Tuesday voting to go ahead with the trial, joining all members of the Democrats caucus in saying it is constitutional.

Trump Jr., in remarks to Hannity, denounced what he called a double standard in the impeachment push, arguing that his fathers rhetoric, which Democrats argue amounted to incitement of insurrection, was much the same as fiery stump speeches delivered by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.

You sort of highlighted all the hypocrisy that we saw during 10 months of rioting, looting, arson, in-your-face type of politics, Trump Jr. said. Candidly, whatever my father said on January 6th was mild in comparison, but if you were to take his speech and compare it to literally any stump speech ever given in the history of politics, you would see absolutely no deviation.

If it wasnt for double standards, the Democrats would have no standards at all, Trump Jr. said.

While Trump said in his Jan. 6 speech that we fight like hell and if you dont fight like hell, youre not going to have a country anymore, the former president called on supporters to peacefully and patriotically make their voices heard during the joint session of Congress and later denounced the days violence.

Trumps lawyers insist in filings that the former president is not guilty on the sole charge of incitement of insurrection, calling his rhetoric in the Jan. 6 speech a mere figure of speech.

Trump used the word fight a little more than a handful of times and each time in the figurative sense that has long been accepted in public discourse when urging people to stand and use their voices to be heard on matters important to them; it was not and could not be construed to encourage acts of violence, they argued in the filing.

The lawyers also contend that the incitement of insurrection charge against Trump is grossly exaggerated.

An insurrectionunlike a riotis an organized movement acting for the express purpose to overthrow and take possession of a governments powers, they wrote, contending that Trumps speech was not an act encouraging an organized movement to overthrow the United States government.

The Democrat impeachment managers have pushed back against the argument that Trump was exercising his First Amendment rights.

The House did not impeach President Trump because he expressed an unpopular political opinion. It impeached him because he wilfully incited violent insurrection against the government, they argued in their own filings.

Last month, the House voted 232197, including 10 Republicans, to impeach Trump on the sole charge of inciting an insurrection.

Trumps acquittal in the Senate, however, is near certain as 17 Republicans would have to join all Democrats in voting to convict.
Larry W. Smith/Getty Images

A member of the radical group Iron Youth was charged Monday after he allegedly purchased a machine gun from an undercover police officer, the Department of Justice said in a news release.

Caleb Nathaniel Oliver, 19, of Smiley was charged with unlawful possession of a machine gun  a conviction that holds up to 10 years in prison. Smiley is about 64 miles east of San Antonio.
QUEBEC, QC / ACCESSWIRE / February 10, 2021 / NuRAN Wireless Inc. ("NuRAN" or the "Company") (CSE:NUR)(OTC PINK:NRRWF)(FSE:1RN) announces that further to its news release on February 8, 2021 announcing the grant of an aggregate of 1,225,000 stock options, the Company has obtained the approval of the Canadian Securities Exchange to increase the exercise price of the stock options from $0.395 to $2.35 per common share. The options were granted pursuant to the Company's incentive stock option plan to certain employees, consultants, directors and officers of the Company. Other than the amendment to the stock option price all terms of the options previously granted remain unchanged. The options are subject to applicable policies of the Canadian Securities Exchange and applicable securities laws and will be subject to a hold period of four months commencing on the date of grant of the options.

About NuRAN Wireless

NuRAN Wireless is a leading supplier of mobile and broadband wireless infrastructure solutions. Its innovative radio access network (RAN), core network, and backhaul products dramatically drop the total cost of ownership, thereby creating new opportunities for established, as well as emerging mobile network operators. Indoor coverage, isolated rural communities, offshore platforms and ships, NuRAN Wireless helps its customers reach everyone, everywhere.

Additional Information

For further information about NuRAN Wireless: www.nuranwireless.com

Francis Letourneau, Director and CEO

info@nuranwireless.com

Tel: (418) 264-1337

Frank Candido

Investor relations

Frank.candido@nuranwireless.com

Tel: (514) 969-5530

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SOURCE: NuRAN Wireless Inc.

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COLUMBIA  South Carolinas fifth largest public school district is undecided about joining a class action lawsuit against Juul and other e-cigarette manufacturers whose products they say have damaged the health of students.

Richland Two trustee Amelia McKie said a Feb. 9 proposal to sue was prompted because of the addictive nature of vaping, the potential for health problems and other consequences for our students, the negative impacts on our schools including having to address disciplinary issues and addiction issues.

A copy of the districts lawsuit could not be immediately provided to The Post and Courier. Trustees voted 3-3 whether to proceed with the suit, but member Teresa Holmes was absent, meaning the motion was halted on a tie.

Board chairman James Manning and Cheryl Parker-Caution joined McKie in voting to sue Juul, while Lindsay Agostini, Monica Elkins and LaShonda McFadden stood opposed.

It wasn't immediately clear whether trustees plan to revisit the issue.

In October, Lexington School District One became the states first to join the lawsuit against Juul, attaching its name to others from around the country along with municipalities and individuals also suing the company.

Richland Two Superintendent Baron Davis said adding the clout of a district with 27,000 students to the suit was as much a symbolic gesture as it was an attempt to hold vaping manufacturers responsible for the impacts of their products.

Sometimes as leaders, you take on issues and lend your voice so those who don't have a voice can have the strength to do so. We have a big seat at the table in Richland Two, and we have to step up, Davis said. It's not always about us and how about it impacts us specifically.

According to a February 2020 U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report, more than 2,800 people have been hospitalized across the country because of lung complications tied to e-cigarettes, with 68 deaths. A 2019 survey of youth tobacco use, found 22 percent of South Carolina teens reported using e-cigarettes in the past 30 days.

But lacking specifics on how many Richland Two students vape, the portion that have experienced health problems because of it and without a clear understanding of how much money the district could recoup if the lawsuit is successful, some trustees were reluctant to join the suit.

I truly dont want to receive funding that could actually go to school districts that could really utilize the money, Elkins said. I cant support something in the dark.

Juul launched an assembly plant in Lexington County in May 2019 to make e-cigarettes, a project that was expected to employ about 500 people. But the company closed it down in November, citing poor market conditions among strong political pushback.

The closure also affected Flex, an international electronics manufacturer that was a subcontractor to the vaping company with a West Columbia site next to the Juul plant near the Columbia Metropolitan Airport. Before the Juul deal, Flex had about 230 full-time employees producing products for other industries.

Davis said if the district does receive a payout the proceeds could be used in several ways, including setting up a scholarship for students pursuing health careers or more aggressive marketing and education campaigns around the dangers of smoking.
Caribbean Nail Technicians have a unique opportunity to win new business by showcasing their work on social media. To develop these Entrepreneurs, Etrog Enterprises, Inc. in association with Lexann's Nail Creations will assist Nail Technicians and Nail Enthusiasts to improve their skills. Georgetown, Demerara-Mahaica, Guyana February 8, 2021 -- Lexann McPhoy, a Certified NSI Educator, and proprietor of the popular Lexanns Nail Creations, in collaboration with Etrog Enterprises, Inc. will provide 
New Delhi, Feb 10 : With just weeks remaining for the start of Covid vaccination for people above 50 years of age, the union government has still not decided whether this priority group will receive the doses free of cost on the lines of healthcare and frontline workers currently being immunised under the a nationwide programme.

Dr VK Paul, member (health) NITI Aayog and Chairperson, National Task Force For Covid-19, told IANS on Wednesday that no decision regarding free vaccination to people above 50 years of age -- who fall in the third priority group of vaccination -- has been made by the Centre so far.

He added that meetings with state heads would follow soon to explore the possibility of free vaccination of the subset.

"We have already provided vaccines free to all the healthcare and frontline workers. For people above 50 years of age, meetings between the states and union would be conducted to discuss the sharing of expenditure. However, no decision is made so far," Paul said while answering to a query put by IANS during a virtual session.

The union government has prioritised 30 crore of Indian population to receive Covid vaccines. The government has divided this vast range into three groups which include 1 crore of healthcare workers, 2 crore of frontline workers and remaining 27 crores of general population who are above 50 years of age and more susceptible to be exposed to the Covid-19.

The government is providing free vaccines to health care and frontline workers who constitute 3 crore of the total population of the country.

Meanwhile, Paul also explained why the government prioritised people above 50 years of age to receive Covid vaccines. He shared that of the total fatalities caused by Covid, 78% were those who aged above 50 years.

"Once you reach the age of 50, you are vulnerable to develop 70% of the underlying medical conditions (diabetes, hypertension etc) and become more vulnerable to any kind of viral infection," Paul said.

"Since Covid-19 is also a viral disease and data suggests it brings more damage to people above 50 (years) and with co-morbidities, we took a public health approach and decided to prioritise this population fraction along with our Covid warriors,'" he explained.

Asked whether the remaining population would also be prioritised, Paul said that an evaluation post immunisation of all the priority groups would be done to decide further. "Things like stockpiling of vaccines would be evaluated to account if people need further vaccinations and how," Paul added.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
New Delhi:

Terrorists on Saturday threw grenade on police and CRPF patrolling party in Kulgam's Laroo in Jammu and Kashmir.

During the attack, one CRPF personnel got injured.

A suspect has been apprehended from the spot after terrorists lobbed grenade in Kulgam's Laroo. The apprehended suspect confessed during interrogation about grenade lobbing. He was handed over to Kulgam police.

More details are awaited on this.

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A former vet, who is wanted to face multiple charges of sexual activity with animals and of having extreme pornographic material, has appeared before the High Court this Tuesday on foot of an extradition warrant.

Oliver Lown (35), with an address at Main Road, Kesgrave, Suffolk is wanted by authorities in the United Kingdom to face 12 offences, which also include making indecent images of children.

The warrant states that 1,219 extreme pornographic images of which 1,067 are unique, were recovered from the hard drive of Mr Lown's laptop as well as 3,512 extreme pornographic videos of which 3,511 are unique.

Other images recovered include 66 category A indecent images of which 43 are unique, 36 category B indecent images of which 26 are unique and 33 category C indecent images of which 23 are unique.

The warrant also states that Mr Lown is charged with offences including sexual penetration per vagina/anus by a person with a living animal, making indecent photographs of children and possessing extreme pornographic images portraying an act of intercourse /oral sex with a dead /alive animal.

Mr Lown was arrested by detectives from the Gardas extradition unit on Monday and taken to Letterkenny Garda Station following the endorsement of a European Arrest Warrant (EAW) issued by the police in Suffolk. The former vet appeared before Mr Justice Paul Burns in the High Court today wearing a face mask, an orange jacket and trousers.

Detective Sergeant Jim Kirwan of the Garda Extradition Unit told Aoife Carroll BL, for the State, that he was on duty on Monday last in Kilmacrenan in County Donegal and called to an address at Gortnaskea near Letterkenny at 6.37pm, where he arrested Mr Lown on foot of the warrant and cautioned him.

Det Sgt Kirwan said he introduced himself to Mr Lown and showed him his ID card. He said that Mr Lown agreed that his name was Oliver Lown and that one of the aliases he used was Ollie Fraser Henderson, while his place of birth was in Ipswich in the UK.

The detective said he showed Mr Lown a photograph, which he agreed was him.

Det Sgt Kirwan said he informed Mr Lown that he had an EAW for his arrest and showed him a copy of the original warrant, which had been endorsed by the High Court for execution.

The detective said he also informed Mr Lown of his right to consent to his surrender to the issuing state, namely the UK and gave him a copy of the EAW.

Outlining the offences facing Mr Lown, Det Sgt Kirwan said the warrant relates to 12 offences relating to images found on a PC laptop on April 4, 2019 in Kesgrave in Suffolk. The detective said he read the precis [summary] of offences contained in the warrant to the respondent and asked him whether he knew what they were about, which Mr Lown indicated he did.

Mr Lown was then conveyed to Letterkenny Garda Station.

Det Sgt Kirwan said he was satisfied that the person named on the warrant was the person he arrested. He told Kieran Kelly BL, for the respondent, that the warrant stated that Mr Lown seemed to be in breach of his bail in the UK.

After Det Sgt Kirwan gave evidence of Mr Lown's arrest, Mr Justice Burns said he was satisfied the person before him was the person to whom the warrant related.

The judge informed Mr Lown of his rights and told him that he is entitled to voluntarily surrender himself to the UK authorities between now and the hearing date.

Mr Justice Burns fixed February 26 as the date for the full hearing of the extradition case.

He remanded Mr Lown in custody until that date, when an application for bail is expected to be made.

The warrant states that PC Harvey accompanied by probation officer Chris Royal attended a house on Main Street, Kesgrave, Suffolk in the UK at 10.10am on April 4, 2019. They were informed by the occupants that their son, Mr Lown, lived in the annexe above their garage with another man.

The warrant also stated that the other man is a registered sex offender and the purpose of the visit was to ascertain where he [the sex offender] was residing since he had not notified an address as per the Sex Offender Requirements.

The warrant further states that PC Harvey located Mr Lown in the annexe and a situation then unfolded whereby Mr Lown threw a laptop in a pond to evade its inspection by police and he was subsequently arrested on suspicion of possessing extreme pornography. Mr Lown was also arrested on the same date for perverting the course of justice and possession of heroin.

The laptop was submitted to the Digital Forensic Unit and forensic examination was completed on the extracted hard drive, which included 1,067 extreme pornographic images and 3,511 extreme pornographic videos.

The warrant also states that police attended Burrell Road, Ipswich on August 29, 2019, where Mr Lown was present. He was arrested on suspicion of making, taking, possessing and distributing indecent images of children. He was also arrested on suspicion of Class B drugs. He was interviewed and responded "no comment" to all questions asked.

The warrant states that police arranged to meet Mr Lown at Martlesham Police Investigation Centre on November 27, 2019. He did not attend, went missing and was circulated on the UK's Police National Computer as "wanted".
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Construction of a coal mine that threatened UK Prime Minister Boris Johnsons claim to be a world leader in the fight against climate change is under review after growing opposition.

The Woodhouse Colliery would be the first new deep coal mine in the U.K. in three decades. Its planned to be built in Whitehaven, Cumbria, northeast England.

While Johnsons officials have publicly backed the colliery, Cumbria County Council on Tuesday said it would review its approval in light of the latest advice from the governments independent climate advisers. Officials had previously said the project could go ahead as long as it shut down in 2049  one year before the UK is supposed to have net zero emissions.

The Cumbria council backed the project in October that was subsequently approved by Johnsons government. That sparked concern among the Climate Change Committee who said it would threaten the UKs target to zero-out greenhouse gas pollution by mid-century and damage its reputation as a climate leader.

But since October, the CCC published its sixth carbon budget report. That sets out the amount of carbon that can be emitted between 2033 and 2037 if the UK is to meet its 2050 goal.

The CCC had warned that the decision to open up a new coal mine gives a negative impression of the UKs climate priorities. That could also undermine Johnsons efforts to play a leadership role in the United Nations global climate change talks, which hes due to host in Glasgow in November.

The UK cannot claim to be a climate leader whilst opening a new coal mine and ministers must realize that by doing so they undermine our credibility both at home and abroad, Ed Miliband, business spokesman for the opposition Labour party, said.

For its part, the Conservative Party has said that the planning decision is for local government to determine.

Last week, Energy Minister Anne-Marie Trevelyan said it was better for the U.K. to have its own coking coal, rather than import it from overseas in order to make the steel needed for wind turbines, electric cars and nuclear power plants.

West Cumbria Mining Ltd., the company behind the project, was due to start production in the second half of this year. It plans to extract as much as 3.1 million tons of metallurgical, or coking, coal each year to use in steelmaking,

Photograph: The location of the proposed site of a new coal mine in Whitehaven, UK, on Monday, Feb. 8, 2021. Photo credit: Anthony Devlin/Bloomberg.

Copyright 2021 Bloomberg.

Topics Construction Mining

The Chinese military made several attempts to unilaterally alter the status quo along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in eastern Ladakh since April-May last year and Indian armed forces "responded" to them "appropriately", the government said in Lok Sabha on Wednesday. Minister of State for External Affairs V Muraleedharan said the government will continue discussions with the Chinese side to achieve the objective of disengagement from all friction points and restoration of peace and tranquillity in the India-China border areas at an early date.

Indian and Chinese militaries are locked in a bitter standoff in eastern Ladakh for over nine months. "Since April/May 2020 the Chinese side had made several attempts to unilaterally alter the status quo along the LAC in Western Sector. These attempts have been responded to appropriately by our armed forces," Muraleedharan said in a written reply to a question. "It has been made clear to the Chinese side that such unilateral attempts are unacceptable. These actions have seriously disturbed the peace and tranquillity along the LAC in the Western sector," he said.

The government often refers to eastern Ladakh as western sector. Muraleedharan said diplomatic and military engagements with the Chinese side have continued in order to ensure complete disengagement from all friction points and full restoration of peace and tranquillity in the border areas.

He said six meetings of the Working Mechanism for Consultation and Coordination on India-China border affairs (WMCC) and nine meetings of the senior commanders have been held so far. Muraleedharan also referred to External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar's talks with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on September 10 in Moscow. "The two foreign ministers agreed that the current situation in the border areas is not in the interest of either side. They agreed therefore that the border troops of both sides should continue their dialogue, quickly disengage, maintain proper distance and ease tensions," he said.

Muraleedharan said the two foreign ministers also agreed that both sides shall abide by all the existing agreements and protocol on China-India boundary affairs, maintain peace and tranquillity in the border areas and avoid any action that could escalate matters. To a separate question, he said India received assistance from a few countries including Japan, the US, France, Germany and Israel in the form of medical equipment and grants-in-aid following the coronavirus pandemic.
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The Kadhi's Court has expressed alarm at the surge in divorce cases in Marsabit and Isiolo counties.

Marsabit Kadhi Ibrahim Tullu said divorces are becoming more widespread in younger couples. In the past one year, some 120 divorce cases were filed in Marsabit, he said.

The official stated that divorce rates have risen from 10 per cent in 2019 to 40 per cent in 2021.

He attributed the increase to those getting into marriage at a very young age and are unable to shoulder the responsibilities that come with such unions.

Kadhi Tullu detailed that in a month, the court had between 15 to 20 divorce cases involving young couples in Marsabit.

And in Isiolo, at least 10 divorce cases are filed every month.

He said youths should be taken through rigorous marriage counselling before they opt to live together.

And while traditions demand that warring partners seek elders' intervention, families have in the past few years been opting to seek the court's guidance on their marital differences.

This has seen the divorce rate surge from 40 per cent in 2017 to over 70 per cent in 2020 according to Isiolo Principal Kadhi Abdulhalim Hussein.

The surge has been blamed on, among others, domestic violence, drug and alcohol abuse and infidelity.

Neglecting their families

Mr Hussein notes that most of the divorce cases are filed by women who blame their husbands for neglecting their families and being violent.

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The women, he says, have resorted to starting small businesses like selling miraa (khat) to fend for their families and pay school fees for their children.

"Men have neglected their roles of providing for the family, forcing women to seek meagre jobs to provide for the children," said Mr Hussein.

Cases of girls getting married at a young age have also been blamed for the surge as most of them decide to leave marriages because they have no resilience to deal with emerging challenges.

He further said men hardly spend quality time with their families as they spend the better part of the day chewing miraa with friends and arrive home late in the evening.

"Young people should pick their marriage partners wisely, who must have good morals and be ready to take parental responsibilities," he said.

"Marriage being a lifetime investment, they should also seek advice from experts, counsellors and particularly, elders, in the event of misunderstandings."
Twitter Blocks 500 Accounts Inside India; Says No Action against Journalists, Activists and Politicians

Following pressure from the Union government, Twitter on Wednesday says that it has blocked about 500 accounts in India. However, Twitter has not taken any action on accounts that consist of news media entities, journalists, activists, and politicians.

Twitter says it has taken a range of enforcement actions, including permanent suspension in certain cases, against more than 500 accounts escalated across orders from the Indian government for the clear violations of its rules. However, it does not believe that the actions it has been directed to take by the information technology (IT) ministry are consistent with the Indian law, it added.

We have withheld some of the accounts identified in the blocking orders under our Country Withheld Content policy within India only. These accounts continue to be available outside of India. https://t.co/uQuXNtzq9t  Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) February 10, 2021

"In keeping with our principles of defending protected speech and freedom of expression, we have not taken any action on accounts that consist of news media entities, journalists, activists, and and politicians... To do so, we believe, would violate their fundamental right to free expression under Indian law," the micro-blogging platform reiterated.

However, we have not taken any action on accounts that consist of news media entities, journalists, activists, and politicians. We will continue to advocate for the right of free expression on behalf of the people we serve, and are exploring options under Indian law.  Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) February 10, 2021

The company, facing penal action if does not comply with the directions given by the IT ministry in three notices to block nearly 1,435 accounts in questions in the wake of the farmers' protests, says it has withheld a portion of the accounts identified in the blocking orders under its 'Country Withheld Content' policy within India only. These accounts, however, will continue to be available outside of India.

In a blog post, Twitter says, "We informed the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) of our enforcement actions today. We will continue to advocate for the right of free expression on behalf of the people we serve and are actively exploring options under Indian law -- both for Twitter and for the accounts that have been impacted."

Over the course of the past 10 days, Twitter has been served with several separate blocking orders by MeitY under section 69A of the IT Act.

Twitter says out of these, two were emergency blocking orders that it temporarily complied with but subsequently restored access to the content in a manner that it believes was consistent with Indian law.

"After we communicated this to MeitY, we were served with a non-compliance notice," the company informed.

On Tuesday, Twitter said it has reached out to Union IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad for a formal dialogue to resolve the deadlock over the removal of bad accounts amid the ongoing farmer protests.

The MeitY had sent three notices to Twitter, the latest one asking the company to block 1,178 accounts believed to be linked to Khalistan sympathisers and those backed by Pakistan.

In the first notice, MeitY asked Twitter to block 257 accounts using the #ModiPlanningFarmerGenocide hashtag amid the farmers' protest, under Section 69A of the IT Act.

Twitter suspended some high-profile accounts earlier this month, only to unblock them in a few hours saying that the "content is free speech and newsworthy."

The IT ministry also took cognizance of a clear attempt to polarise India when international celebrities with hardly any expertise on Indian affairs extended their support to the protesters agitating against the three new farm laws.

The government also took a serious note of Twitter chief executive (CEO) Jack Dorsey 'liking' a Tweet asking for an emoji for the hashtag #FarmersProtests.
New York City educators must organize to close all schools and prevent the deepening spread of the pandemic. Only the New York City Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee is organizing this fight. Join and help build the committee by signing up today at wsws.org/edsafety wsws.org/edsafety.

New York City will continue the national juggernaut of reopening schools to in-person instruction by allowing over 62,000 middle-school students (grades 68) back into buildings, exposing them and their educators to COVID-19. By the beginning of next month, the city plans to have 250,000 of its 1.1 million students in face-to-face learning.

The Democratic mayor, Bill de Blasio, repeated the ruling-class canard in relation to school reopenings at a press conference on Monday: Our schools have been remarkably safe, in fact the safest places in New York City. Thats why we know its time to bring back our middle-grade kids now.

Teachers and students at P.S. 15 in Red Hook, Brooklyn, New York City on September 2, 2020 [Credit: AP Photo/John Minchillo]

City Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza also said on Monday that nearly half of the 471 middle schools that are reopening will accommodate many children five days a week.

The positivity rate in the city has averaged 89 percent over the last two months. People continue to fall ill and die throughout the city, but at higher rates in poorer working-class neighborhoods.

The disease remains a significant factor in the school system. According to city data there are presently 190 school buildings and an additional 434 classrooms closed because of COVID-19 infections. Currently, when two or more cases of the disease are discovered in a building, the building is closed.

The middle-school opening announcement follows de Blasios statement last week on WNYCs The Brian Lehrer Show, that school closure policies are being reevaluated, obviously, because we need to improve our ability to get that exactly right. Last month, following new guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), New York state announced that school buildings where infected staff or students were detected would be quarantined for 10 days, not 14. The city tests 20 percent of students and staff once monthly, a figure regarded by many to be highly inadequate.

The city is also planning to reopen indoor dining at reduced capacity on Friday, which will also drive up the infection rate. New Yorks Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo announced Monday a plan called NY Pops Up, in which musicians and other artists would stage public outdoor and indoor performances. Given that some of the performers are well-known names such as Renee Fleming, Hugh Jackman, Mandy Patinkin, Chris Rock and Amy Schumer, the program threatens to draw large and closely packed crowds that will spread the coronavirus.

There is increasing evidence that gatherings of children and adults in New York City public school buildings constitute a major vector for transmission of the infection. Princeton researcher and former education blogger Jennifer Jennings was widely quoted in the media saying, The number of positive New York City Department of Education staff cases doubled in the first three weeks of January, compared to total cases reported between September and December.

Jenningss research found that elementary school teachers, many of whom are teaching in-person, have been infected at a higher rate than high school teachers, most of whom teach remotely.

Jennings noted that the number of infected children in New York City has also increased. For all New York City kids 5 to 17 years old, over the same four-month period, we had approximately 21,000 cases; weve added 12,500 new cases since the beginning of January alone, she said.

Last week, 11 of 16 children, as well as the teacher, in a third-grade class in a public school in the suburb of Bethpage, Long Island, tested positive for COVID-19.

De Blasios reopening announcement coincides with the events in Chicago, where Democratic Mayor Lori Lightfoot and the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) announced an agreement that would open the Chicago schools. The union pushed through ratification of its agreement in its House of Delegates on Monday night.

As with Chicago educators, New York City educators are overwhelmingly opposed to school reopenings, and, like their Chicago counterparts, are trapped within an organization, the United Federation of Teachers, that has facilitated them.

Although the UFT negotiated an agreement in August to close schools when the citywide positivity rate exceeded 3 percent and was forced under pressure of the teachers to close the schools when the rate reached that level in November, de Blasio, with the assistance of the UFT, was able to reopen schools in December during the second wave of the pandemic.

Since that time, the 3 percent threshold has been dropped by the union and not replaced with any other standard. It should be noted that the CTU, like the UFT, has negotiated a positivity threshold that would only hypothetically shut down schools. The recent conduct of the CTU gives no indication that it will observe the threshold any more than the UFT.

The plan to reopen New York City middle schools is accompanied by a concerted attempt in the media to tell the public that school buildings are safe. Justin Krebs, a progressive Democrat who is running for New York City Council and the former National Director of Campaigns at MoveOn, a major Democratic Party PAC, penned an op-ed in the Daily News saying, [P]ublic health data shows us that we can return to schools safelyif we invest in our safety in smart, impactful ways, ensure adequate COVID tests, increase vaccination rates among teachers and families, and create better home-based options for students who cant return.

The same sentiment appears in a New York Times profile of American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, formerly the UFTs president. The article extols her tireless work on behalf of the Biden administration in fighting to see that schools open. The main thrust of the article is that she has taken on the hard task of suffocating opposition among teachers.

The assumption of the article, and the basis on which it judges the union bureaucracy and educators, is that schools are safe. A body of international research, the Times notes, now suggests that in-school transmission of COVID-19 can be effectively mitigated with precautions such as masks and social distancing, especially where local virus rates are controlled. But with the emergence of dangerous new variants and a slow vaccine rollout, teachers remain skeptical.

This skepticism, which might be better characterized as conscious and scientifically informed opposition to school reopening, remains entrenched among educators in Chicago, New York City and thousands of other school districts in the US. Opposition by New York educators to face-to-face instructing during a pandemic remains overwhelming. The announcement that de Blasio would reopen schools elicited angry reactions from parents and educators on social media.

One teacher noted on Twitter: Testing is scattered and disorganized -Situation room is overwhelmed -Class cohesion suffers because of case levels -Variants will be the norm soon.

Another said, As a teacher in a NYC school building these buildings are NOT safe at all. The protocols are risky, the amount of children in the building [is] risky and the testing they are doing does not come back until 9 days after you take them. By that time COVID has already spread.

One parent directly addressed the mayor: We want our kids back in school, but not in  conditions where the city hasnt put all the effort nor has the means to keep teachers and children safe, on top of that with all the variants out there is just bound to get ugly.

It should come as no surprise that neither the UFT nor any of its opposition caucuses, such as the Movement of Rank-and-File Educators (MORE), which models itself on the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE) leadership of the CTU, has expressed support for Chicago teachers, although the UFT was brazen enough to retweet the New York Times  article on Randi Weingarten. The silence by the UFT and MORE on the attempt to return Chicago teachers to school buildings was only highlighted when both MORE and the UFT retweeted articles about the death of former CTU president Karen Lewis.

Educators in New York City and the region need a new perspective. The middle school reopening comes at a time when the Democratic Party, the capitalist media, the unions and their hangers-on are seeking to extinguish the opposition of educators and reopen the economy for the benefit of Wall Street.

Only one alternative has been provided to educators to fight back and win: The Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee. It is only this organization that seeks to rally New York educator in support of their brothers and sisters in Chicago as a part of a program of shutting schools in New York and across the United States.
Kids want to fish? You don't know how yourself? Here's a little help
USD$900,000 In-Kind Investment by Procare Health into Phase I Clinical Study for BVX-0918A in the EU

Co-Development of Vaccines for Cervical Cancer and HPV

Right of First Refusal for US Marketing of Papilocare

VANCOUVER, BC and BARCELONA, Spain, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- BioVaxys Technology Corp. (CSE: BIOV) (FRA: 5LB) (OTC: LMNGF) ("BioVaxys"), the world leader in haptenized protein vaccines for antiviral and cancer applications, and Procare Health Iberia, S.L., of Barcelona, Spain ("Procare Health"), a leading privately-held European pharmaceutical company, announced today that they have entered into a broad collaboration for the co-development, joint commercialization, and marketing of BioVaxys vaccines for ovarian cancer, cervical cancer, and human papilloma virus ("HPV"), and the right of first refusal for marketing by BioVaxys in the United States of Procare Health's vaginal gel product, Papilocare, the world's first and only product to prevent and treat HPV-dependent cervical lesions. Left untreated, HPV infection generally leads to cervical cancer (World Health Organization, HPV and Cervical Cancer, 11 November 2020). Formed in 2012 as a spin-out from Procter & Gamble Pharmaceuticals, Procare Health is a market leader in the women's health field in the European Union ("EU"), with marketed products including Papilocare, Libicare, Palomacare, Idracare, Pronolis HD and Ovosicare.

Under the terms of the agreement, the companies will jointly conduct a Phase I Clinical Study of BVX-0918A in Spain, BioVaxys' autologous haptenized protein vaccine for late-stage ovarian cancer. BioVaxys will be responsible for the core technology and vaccine production, with Procare Health overseeing and making an in-kind investment in the clinical program and regulatory planning, CRO management, patient/clinical center recruitment, marketing, and opinion leader management. Both companies have agreed to equally share costs associated with engaging a European clinical research organization ("CRO") to conduct the study. In return, Procare Health will have exclusive rights to market and distribute BVX-0918A in the European Union ("EU"), and the United Kingdom. Clinical data from the Spanish Phase I study will be used by BioVaxys to support its planned IND for BVX-0918A in the US next year, as well as for all other global markets. The two companies will be working out any remaining details by end of 2Q21.

BioVaxys President and Chief Operating Officer Ken Kovan said "This co-development gives BioVaxys access to Procare Health's clinical development and regulatory expertise in the EU, and to its marketing & sales presence in Europe." Kovan added that "Procare Health has an established portfolio of marketed brands that is focused heavily on the women's health and gynecological oncology markets. As we anticipate that these will be the primary users of our ovarian cancer vaccine, the relationship with Procare Health will give access to key gynecological oncology opinion leaders for patient access, clinical trial recruitment, and a relationship that post-approval will drive vaccine sales. Having a strong EU opinion leader network will also be invaluable for our planned US launch of the vaccine."

The collaboration with BioVaxys will help Procare Health fuel its product offerings in the gynecological oncology field. Yann Gaslain, CEO of Procare Health stated, "We are thrilled to start working the collaboration with BioVaxys as it brings a new hope in the field of gynecological cancer. We have been working for 8 years in the area of cervical cancer and HPV, investigating to understand how the immune response of the host could be stimulated to help defend versus HPV infection and persistency, and we believe that the new haptenized cell platform technology can bring a valid answer to this unmet therapeutical need, mainly when high grade lesions of the cervix or even cervical carcinoma have been characterized. The promising vaccine technology platform of BioVaxys will likely help bringing response in ovarian and cervical cancer."

In Phase I and Phase II clinical studies previously conducted by BioVaxys, co-founder and Chief Medical Officer, Dr. David Berd, using an earlier generation of the BioVaxys cancer vaccine on nearly 500 patients with melanoma or ovarian cancer, the haptenized cell platform showed significant clinical promise. BioVaxys has developed its vaccine technology platforms based on the established immunological concept that modifying proteins with simple chemicals called haptens makes them more visible to the immune system. The process of haptenization "teaches" a patient's immune system to recognize and make target proteins more 'visible' as foreign, thereby stimulating an immune response.

Javier Cortes, MD, Specialist in Gynecology and Cytology for the international Academy of Cytology (Chicago, USA), member of the Spanish association against Cancer (AECC) and of the European Cervical Cancer Association (ECCA) stated, "I believe that the planned clinical trial in Phase I is of a very high interest based on my experience in oncology for more than 30 years. The immunotherapy is a line of treatment with very active investigation and promising early results in some cancers (lungs, melanoma and ovarian). That is why, every single line of investigation well based and with consistent criteria of quality in the design of the investigation should be very well received and encouraged."

Leveraging the recent proven ability of its haptenized viral antigen vaccine platform in stimulating both a 96.4% positive immune response and powerful 'memory' T-cell activation against SARS-CoV-2, BioVaxys will use the platform's flexibility to swap in viral antigens for Human Papilloma Virus ("HPV"), with the intent to develop a treatment for adults who are already infected with HPV. There are vaccines to protect against getting HPV, but none to treat someone who already has HPV. BioVaxys and Procare Health will split costs for feasibility, proof-of-concept, and preclinical development for a HPV viral vaccine, as well as a cervical cancer vaccine based on the BioVaxys cancer vaccine platform. In return, Procare Health will have an exclusive right in the EU and UK for a HPV and/or cervical cancer vaccine, with BioVaxys retaining rights to North America and Rest of World. Development milestones, go/no-go decisions, and other details will be finalized in 2Q2021.

In a major step toward transitioning to a revenue-generating company, BioVaxys has agreed to have a right of first refusal to market and distribute Papilocare in the US.

In Procare Health's PALOMA Phase IIb clinical trial, Papilocare showed consistent and significant efficacy in normalizing cervical cytology at 3 months and at 6 months in the total study population with 50% to 70% of High-Risk HPV clearance at 6 months in six different international studies and more than 600 patients. HPV infection causes 528,000 cases of cervical cancer and 266,000 cervical cancer deaths each year.1 Papilocare has a CE mark valid for the entire EU, and is currently marketed as a Class IIa medical device in Spain, France, Portugal, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania. Once the FDA regulatory pathway has been determined for the US, BioVaxys will have a detailed plan in place by 3Q21 to build an appropriate capability to market and support the brand in the US, with BioVaxys providing the funding for such efforts. Preliminary forecasts from Procare anticipate potential US sales of US$30.0 million.

James Passin, CEO of BioVaxys, stated, "We are honored to partner with Procare Health, a market leader in gynecological oncology and women's health in the EU; this transformative collaboration leverages all of the innovative work of Dr. David Berd in the field in oncology and novel vaccine development, as well as our recent success with the preclinical development of a viable haptenized viral protein vaccine for Covid-19. We look forward to using our proprietary haptenized vaccine technology to address urgent and large market deficiencies in the area of women's health and to potentially generate a new and material revenue stream for our company."

1.WHO. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/sexually-transmitted-infections-(stis)

About BioVaxys Technology Corp.

Based in Vancouver, BioVaxys Technology Corp . is a British Columbia-registered, early stage biotechnology company that is developing viral and oncology vaccine platforms, as well as immuno-diagnostics. The Company is advancing a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine based on its haptenized viral protein technology, and is planning a clinical trial of its haptenized autologous cell vaccine used in combination with anti-PD1 and anti-PDL-1 checkpoint inhibitors that will initially be developed for ovarian cancer. Also in development is a diagnostic for evaluating the presence or absence of a T cell immune response to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. BioVaxys has two issued US patents and two patent applications related to its cancer vaccine, and pending patent applications for its SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) vaccine and diagnostic technologies. BioVaxys common shares are listed on the CSE under the stock symbol "BIOV" and trades on the Frankfurt Bourse (FRA: 5LB) and US OTC: LMNGF.

About Procare Health

Procare Health is a multi-national EU biotechnology company based in Barcelona (Spain) founded in 2012 as a result of the spin-off of executives and employees of Procter & Gamble Pharmaceuticals that is focused primarily to bring innovative solutions in womens health, with a special interest into unmet therapeutical needs. Procare Health invests every year circa 25% of its investments budget into R&D, fundamental research on Cervix ("cervix on a chip" research project) and clinical trials in order bring clinical evidence of its main products in the market. Procare Health develops, investigates and commercializes its own products into more than 50 countries in the world with main focus in EU and in womens genital tract diseases (HPV, cervical lesions, vaginal infections, vaginal dryness, and fertility). Procare Health vision is to become a womens health leader in Europe.

SOURCE Procare Health; BioVaxys Technology Corp.
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This year our dine and drink business locations throughout the Gorge have suffered with closures. You can help support your favorites by purchasing take out and gift cards. Many of these business will offer curb-side delivery and some will deliver to your home. Lets keep the Gorge going strong!
More than 6.9 million Pennsylvanians voted in the 2020 election, a record turnout of 70.93%, according to the state Department of State.

Remarkably, some legislative Republicans have taken that endorsement of democracy to mean that Pennsylvanians are suspicious of the governments ability to conduct an election. Because their candidate, former President Donald Trump, lost Pennsylvania by more than 80,000 votes to President Joe Biden, many of those lawmakers want to restrict voting access.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, Republican state legislators nationwide have introduced at least 165 bills to limit voting access. Pennsylvania ranked second with 14 proposals.

The 2020 election demonstrated that reform is needed, but not as those who would limit voting access suggest.

County commissioners of both parties and their election directors have explained to the Legislature what they need to ensure maximummaccess and smooth processing and to eliminate post-election speculation, litigation and confusion about the outcome.

Voting by mail was made possible by a change in state law in October 2019, which passed with substantial Republican majorities, to eliminate the need for an excuse not to vote in person. That proved invaluable when the COVID-19 pandemic struck. More than 2.6 million voters did so by mail.

But because the Legislature refused to allow election offices to begin processing mailed ballots prior to Election Day, the vote count dragged on for the remainder of the week.

Now, the Legislature should allow that precanvassing of mailed ballots, not only to ensure a smooth count but to eliminate the long post-election window that Trump used to spread lies about the outcome.

Republican lawmakers did not approve voting by mail for its own sake. They traded it for Democrats agreeing to eliminate straight-ticket voting. That helped Republicans capture two statewide row offices.

They cant alter one part of the deal now without restoring straight-ticket voting. Their best course would be to make voting as easy as possible and then to prevail the old-fashioned way, by getting more votes rather than limiting the field.
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CAIRO  Egypt is fining farmers for wasting water as Ethiopia approaches the second phase of the filling of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), built on one of the main tributaries of the Nile River, which Cairo fears will affect its share of water.

On Jan. 28, the Egyptian Minister of Water Resources and Irrigation, Mohamed Abdel-Aty, instructed the ministrys agencies to begin collecting fines for wasting water from farmers who fail to adhere to modern irrigation systems.

Abdel-Aty stressed the importance of finding successful ways to switch from flood irrigation to modern irrigation systems. He urged more farmers to switch to smart irrigation systems and use tools like soil moisture meters developed by the ministry, stressing the many advantages offered by modern systems to maximize productivity, reduce operating costs and increase profitability through the efficient use of labor, energy and water.

The Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation's meters measure soil moisture levels to determine the crops water needs and send the data to farmers' mobile phones by text message.

In December, the ministry also launched a national project to rehabilitate about 7,000 kilometers (4,350 miles) of damaged canals at a cost of 18 billion Egyptian pounds ($1.14 billion) by mid-2022.

In July 2020, Ethiopia announced it had completed the first phase of filling the GERD despite the lack of an agreement with downstream countries Egypt and Sudan. Ethiopia began constructing the GERD on the Blue Nile in 2011 as a power-generating facility but Egypt fears the dam will affect its Nile water share of 55 billion cubic meters a year, most of it from the Blue Nile.

Egypt's former Minister of Irrigation and Water Resources Mohammed Nasr Allam told Al-Monitor that Egypt is fining farmers who had received state loans to adopt modern irrigation systems but failed to follow through.

He explained that the fines are part of the Egyptian states plan to rationalize water consumption because Egypt has a water deficit of about 30 billion cubic meters annually. He said that Cairo seeks to address this deficit amid the countrys increasing population growth, which could result in a drinking water deficit of 10 billion cubic meters.

Allam added that Egypt is working to rationalize agricultural water to avoid shortages of drinking water and is implementing agricultural expansion projects that require modern irrigation systems.

We reject what Ethiopia is doing in the GERD without a binding agreement for all, neglecting Egypt's share of the Nile water. A solution that satisfies all parties must be reached because water is a red line for Egypt since it threatens its security and stability, Allam said.

Mahmoud Abdel Mohsen, a researcher at Egypt's Agricultural Research Center, told Al-Monitor that Egypt has started developing irrigation systems in Kafr El Sheikh and Beheira governorates.

Abdel Mohsen added that Egypt's share of the Nile is limited and and crucial for drinking and the rest for agriculture. He considers Ethiopias actions unacceptable and the Nile water is a matter of life and death for Cairo.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-10 21:58:00|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- Premier Li Keqiang has signed a State Council decree unveiling a regulation on preventing and handling illegal fundraising amid efforts to promote healthy economic development and maintain social stability.

The new regulation will strengthen oversight in key areas. It will also prevent and defuse risks and protect the legitimate rights and interests of the people.

It will come into effect on May 1.

A State Council executive meeting on Dec. 21, 2020 adopted the draft regulation. It stipulates the administrative and criminal responsibilities for illegal fundraising, the return of funds, and the consequences participants should bear.

The country prohibits illegal fundraising in all forms and shall put prevention first, conduct early cracking down on illegal acts, and prudently implement comprehensive management, said the regulation.

An integrated working mechanism shall be established. Governments at the provincial level shall be in charge of the work against illegal fundraising in their administrative areas, guided by the State Council, according to the regulation.

Monitoring and early warnings shall be established and improved. More efforts should be made in market entity registration, internet and advertising management, as well as funds monitoring.

The administrative deposition shall be strengthened, with timely investigation and identification of suspected illegal fundraising acts, with clarified means and compulsory measures.

The regulation stipulates legal responsibilities. Acts of illegal fundraising that constitute a crime shall be investigated for criminal responsibility under the law. Enditem
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Kun Chanty arrived in Phnom Penh in early January. The 19-year-old is from Kampong Thom and recently passed her Grade 12 examination. She is looking forward to enrolling in a bachelors degree.

A taxi dropped her and five friends, who were also high school graduates, at a rented home in the city. Chanty said they were all beginning the nerve-racking process of living in a new city, but also focusing on university applications and looking for scholarship opportunities to fund their higher education.

My brothers and sisters didnt have the chance to go to college like me because our family is poor, said Kun Chanty, who is the only one in her family to graduate high school.

The group is a mix of excitement and anxiety. This is their first time in the big city. I feel so new in the city. I only used to live in the countryside, Kun Chanty said.

After multiple school closures and postponements to the national examinations, Prime Minister Hun Sen announced last December that all high school students would automatically pass the national examination.

With the announcement, more than 121,000 students across the country reached the next step in their education: applying to universities and for scholarships.

Kun Chanty and her friends are trying to figure out the major they wanted to study at university, which would then impact the scholarships on offer to them. But with the school closures, they had received little information from universities or past graduates, who would normally assist and advise students, especially from more rural provinces.

This year, I did not receive as much information. When seniors graduated in the past, lots of universities went to provide information directly in their schools, she told VOA Khmer.

No one has ever come to tell us about majors or skills we need to learn, so it is very challenging, she added.

Education Ministry Spokesperson Ros Soveacha said the ministry had printed booklets providing scholarship information and courses available at universities, which, he said, should be enough for them to make a decision.

Heng Vanda, president of the Cambodian Higher Education Association, said on average around 60 to 70 percent of students enroll in a university. He speculates that the number could increase this year.

Normally some of them, after finishing high school, would go to work abroad like in Thailand or Korea, he said. But, with COVID-19 restrictions preventing them from traveling this year, they are likely to enroll in colleges instead, he said.

He said the government had done a good job to provide adequate information to students, urging university applicants to use social media sources to research additional information from university Facebook pages.

Khan Sophorn took the decision to study architecture at the Institute of Technology Cambodia. She moved from Takeo province to live with her sister, who works at a garment factory in Phnom Penh.

The 18-year-old loves drawing and sketching, which are good prerequisites for an architecture degree, but is still nervous about making this decision.

This transition is important because this will determine our goal. If we make the wrong choice, it will be hard to reach the destination, she said.

Pa Chanroeun, a social development researcher, said it was not uncommon for students to question their choices for higher studies because the Cambodian education system does not equip them to realize their likes and dislikes.

Id say around 80 or 85 percent of high schoolers in Cambodia have no clue what major they should study or what they should do next, Pa Chanroeun said.

He said students should be given as much information and guidance to assist them in making this decision, and even though things were a little chaotic because of the COVID-19 pandemic, university aspirants should reach to alumni networks, adding that he often gets requests from recent high schoolers.

When it comes down to it, most students are basing their decisions based on the availability of scholarships and affordability of courses.

Kun Chanty said she was keeping her options open. If she receives a scholarship she would definitely major in Mathematics. If she doesnt clear the scholarship application process, she would have to pick a Chemistry major, which is more affordable for her.

Khan Sophorn is grappling with these same uncertainties. She is facing the prospect of likely deferring her education for a few years to save and pay the tuition fee.

If I could not obtain any scholarship, I will need to work and study at the same time to earn money, she said.
State House, Freetown, Monday 8 February 2021 - The Inter-Religious Council of Sierra Leone has engaged His Excellency President Dr Julius Maada Bio on their interventions in society, before presenting their new leadership during a short ceremony at the presidency.

Newly elected President of the Council, The Most Reverend Dr Edward Tamba Charles

Minister of Social Welfare, who supervises religious affairs, Baindu Dassama Kamara, said that government would always continue to enjoy cordial relationships with the Council and had mostly consulted them on related matters. She said she considered the religious leaders as part of the country's development process, which was why they were meeting the President.

The outgoing president of the Council, Sheik Abubakarr Conteh, praised President Bio for his leadership in the fight against the COVID-19 so far, adding that they would continue to pray for his success.

Minister of Social Welfare, Baindu Dassama Kamara

Newly elected President of the Council, The Most Reverend Dr Edward Tamba Charles, thanked President Bio for the audience, adding that they had a successful assembly late last year leading to their election of a new executive to serve for the next 3 years.

He said their work would include mediating and advocating against rape, early child marriage, and lending their voices to mass sensitisations during outbreaks such as Ebola and COVID-19.

In his brief statement, President Bio said the government had enjoyed and benefited from the Inter-Religious Council, adding that the country would continue to depend on religious leaders for the peace and national cohesion it had always wanted to enjoy.

He recognised the prayers, mediations, and interventions the inter-religious council had made over the years and thanked them for helping the government through sensitisation during the Ebola and COVID-19 pandemics.

The President concluded by thanking the previous leadership and encouraged the new leadership to continue the good work, while assuring them that his doors were always open whenever they needed help.
7 of the most influential and Inspiring Italian women in the XX century

If youre unfamiliar with the tale of Romes beginnings, its a powerful story with an underlying matriarchal theme.

The legend is that Rhea Silva, a Vestal Virgin birthed twin sons named Romulus and Remus, and was soon forced to abandon them due to threats against their lives. Intercepted from the Tiber river by the god Tiberius, the twins were saved as they nursed from the she-wolf Lupercal. Some 3,000 years later, and Italian society is still suckling from the teet of womens accomplishments.

Influential women have riddled Italian history, yet rarely make it past the textbook page into public discourse.

Hortensia, the first female lawyer who lived in 42 B.C. argued that women should not have to pay for a war they wanted nothing to do with.

Trotula de Ruggiero, the first female gynecologist argued against Gods will for pain during childbirth and presented the idea of opium to ease said pain.

Artemisia Gentileschi, who lived in the 17th century, was the first recognized female painter. Despite these advanced positions, these womens accomplishments were swallowed whole by patriarchal dictation. It wasnt until the 20th century that official legislation and progress for womens rights finally became visible, and Italians have women like these to thank for it.

Here is a list of some of the most influential and Inspiring Italian women in the XX century

Franca Sozzani

Franca Sozzani isIn her 28 years as editor-in-chief of Vogue Italia (1988-2016), she accomplished many milestones and shifted the tone within the fashion industry.

Sozzani didnt shy away from bringing light to some controversial topics at the time, such as domestic violence, drug abuse, plastic surgery, weight standards, and inclusivity.

In 2008, she published an iconic issue, titled the Black Issue, which featured solely black models such as Naomi Campbell and Iman. The magazine sold out in the U.S. and U.K. within 72 hours and created a lot of buzz within the fashion industry.

Aside from her strides in fashion, Sozzani dedicated her time to philanthropic work. She became a UN Goodwill Ambassador, a global ambassador for the UN Food Programme, cofounder of Child Priority (a non-profit in which assists talented but less fortunate children achieve their dreams), and president of the European Institute of Oncology Foundation. Ph. DELBO ANDREA / Shutterstock.com

Rita Levi Montalcini

Despite her fathers initial expectations of his daughter to be a housewife, Montalciniand subsequently made substantial contributions to the science world.

In 1986, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery of the nerve growth factor. She was also honored with other biochemistry or biomedical science awards such as the Louisa Gross Horowitz Prize in 1983, the Lasker Award in 1986, and the National Medal of Science in 1987. Aside from her scientific achievements, Montalcini was appointed as Senator for Life in 2001 by Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, the President of Italy.

Anna Magnani

Otherwise known as La Lupa or the she-wolf,  Anna Magnani was a prominent figure in the Italian film industry. She left a lasting impression on many and was described as fiery by Time magazine, and was known for her expressive and emotional acting.

In 1955, Magnani starred in her first English speaking role in a mainstream Hollywood movie called The Rose Tattoo . Due to her moving performance of a distraught widow, she was the first Italian to win an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance.

Grazia Deledda

Leonilde Iotti

Grazie Deladda, was honored as a sympathetic and idealistic writer. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1926 and was. Deledda invoked moving descriptions of characters with strong connections to their origins while simultaneously criticizing societal norms. Leonilde or Nilde Iotti was a(PCI). In 1946, Iotti was selected as aand, as a result, was one of 75 members confided with drafting the Italian Republican Constitution. She was elected as the first female

President of the Chamber of Deputies in 1979, serving the longest post-war term with two more legislative terms. Though not entirely radicalized, Iotti had a more nuanced take on womens rights, such as divorce and abortion. Even at her funeral, an all-women guard of honor stood in the hall of the chamber of deputies by her coffin.

Maria Montessori

Montessori began her academic journey as a fish out of waterShe then shifted her path and graduated medical school with honors from the Sapienza University of Rome.

After graduation, she continued researching at Sapienza in the psychiatric clinic, visiting asylums to observe children with mental disabilities, and focusing on assisting these children with proper education. In 1906, she was recruited to oversee childrens education and care for low-income families in Romes San Lorenzo district. The house, called Casa dei Bambini, enrolled 50-60 children between two to seven.

Observing these children proved to be the foundation for her educational methods, as she provided practical activities that allowed the children to form self-discipline and individualism. The first casa found immense success, and Montessori opened a few more.

Meanwhile, her teaching methods were becoming popularized in Italy, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, France, Spain, the Netherlands, and the United States. She traveled to give lectures and provide training courses for her methods. Her education design is currently used on an international level.

Tina Anselmi

Tina Anselmi lived a noble life,In 1944, Nazi soldiers stormed her school and forced her and her peers to witness a hanging of a group of 31 young Partisans.

It was then that she decided to join the Italian Resistance movement and later the Christian Democracy Party. Between 1968-1987, she was re-elected five times as a Member of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, three times as undersecretary to the Department of Labour and Social Services, and became the first female member of an Italian cabinet.

She was an advocate for equal opportunities, passing a bill in 1977 that allowed both fathers and mothers to have time away from their children. She was also vocal on gender equality in terms of employment and chaired the National Equal Opportunities Commission until 1994. Anselmi received the Great Knights Cross award of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic, the highest-ranking honor. In 2016, she was featured on an Italian postage stamp.

These women managed to not just scratch, but shatter the glass ceiling by dominating their respective fields of work. This isnt to say that progress is not desperately needed when it comes to equality and representation of women in Italy, however, these women set an optimistic tone that gives modern-day women a sliver of hope and a solid foundation for opportunity and change.
NEW DELHI : US Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke to his Indian counterpart S Jaishankar overnight Wednesday to reaffirm the US-India partnership and discuss the military coup in Burma or Myanmar, a US state department statement said.

The conversation between Blinken and Jaishankar is the second since Blinken took office last month. The previous telephonic conversation was on 29 January.

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Secretary Blinken expressed concern over the military coup and the importance of rule of law and the democratic process in Burma," the US statement said.

The Secretary and the Minister also discussed regional developments, including the value of U.S.-India cooperation across the Indo-Pacific. Both sides look forward to expanded regional cooperation, including through the Quad, and to address the challenges of COVID and climate change," it said.

When asked about a Quad meeting  among the leaders of India, US, Australia and Japan that was reportedly to happen shortly  Ned Price, the US state department spokesman described the Quad is a key example of the US and our closest partners including in this case India pulling together for a free and open Indo-Pacific region."

We view the Quad as having essential momentum and important potential and thats why we are going to build on it," Price said without confirming a Quad meeting at the level of leaders of the four countries.

Building on the Quad would mean deepening focus on traditional areas including maritime security, Price said.

Blinken in a Twitter post said: Our partnership with India across the Indo-Pacific is critical to addressing challenges we face in the region and globally. @DrSJaishankar and I had a fruitful discussion about ways to strengthen our cooperation to address regional developments, including the situation in Burma."

Jaishankar on his part tweeted: "Welcomed the comprehensive discussion today with @SecBlinken. Reviewed Indo-Pacific developments and Quad cooperation. Exchanged views on the situation in Myanmar. Look forward to remaining in touch."

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One hundred, and seventy (170) new COVID-19 cases were identified out of 3453 samples tested today. This brings the cumulative number of confirmed cases sixteen thousand, six hundred, and twenty-one (16621). To date, twelve thousand, six hundred, and twenty-nine (12629) patients have recovered, including two hundred, and eighty-seven (287) in the past 24 hours. The number of active cases is three thousand, seven hundred, and sixty-nine (3769) and two hundred, and twenty-three (223) deaths. The 3 new deaths are two female of 96 and 91 years, and a male of 47 years old in Kigali.

The new cases are in Kigali (47), Nyamagabe (14), Kirehe (12), Gatsibo (11), Ruhango (11), Kayonza (11) Karongi (9), Nyagatare (8), Gisagara (7), Kamonyi (7), Ngoma (6), Muhanga (5), Huye (5), Nyaruguru (4), Gakenke (3), Rusizi (3), Nyanza (3), Rubavu (2), Gicumbi (1), and Rwamagana (1); heightened vigilance is required everywhere.

The COVID-19 prevention measures announced by the Government of Rwanda must continue to be rigorously observed, especially frequent hand-washing and physical distancing. In addition, face masks must be worn in public and multi-family compounds.

Withholding information related to contact tracing or COVID-19 symptoms, jeopardises public safety and will be punished in accordance with applicable laws.

The key symptoms of coronavirus are dry cough, shortness of breath, and fever. Automated screening is available by dialing *114#. Symptoms can also be reported to a medical professional, or as follows:

Phone: 114 (toll-free)

Whatsapp message to: +250788202080;

E mail: callcenter [at] rbc.gov.rw.

Let's continue to work together to defeat this pandemic.
Russian police have detained a convicted sex killer who is suspected of strangling his lover's 13-year-old daughter.

Nikita Silnov started a relationship with his prison officer, Ekaterina Sholokhova, who believed she could tame the man who was being released from an 11-year sentence for a sexually motivated murder.

The 33-year-old ex-convict had gone on the run amid suspicions that he had raped and murdered his girlfriend's child before he was arrested in Tver region near Moscow on Wednesday.

Ekaterina Sholokhova, a Russian mother (pictured left) who believed she could tame her convicted sex killer boyfriend was left devastated after the man allegedly murdered her young daughter, Viktoria Kravtsova (pictured right)

Nikita Silnov (pictured left) had gone on the run amid suspicions that he had raped and murdered his girlfriend's child before he was arrested (right) on Wednesday

Footage shows Silnov, who was on Russia's federal wanted list, arriving at a police station following a major manhunt.

He was detained for allegedly raping the schoolgirl, Viktoria Kravtsova, before using a scarf to kill her.

The man had been released from jail in 2019 after securing early release from a 15-year sentence for killing a woman and attempted killing of a child, said reports.

He served 11 years and then moved in with Ekaterina, the 40-year-old prison service ensign who he had met during his sentence.

The guard was fired for her relationship which began behind bars while he was still a prisoner.

The incident occurred when Ekaterina was in hospital after a miscarriage and left her daughter home alone with her convicted sex killer boyfriend.

She received a call from Viktoria who told her mother that she was taking the dog for a walk. But the girl did not answer messages afterwards.

Ekaterina Sholokhova, a Russian mother (pictured left with her daughter) who believed she could tame her convicted sex killer boyfriend was left devastated after the man allegedly murdered her young daughter, Viktoria Kravtsova (pictured left and right)

Viktoria Kravtsova (pictured left), 13, was found dead in her home in Tver, Russia. A funeral for the schoolgirl was held on Tuesday. The right picture shows family mourning at the funeral

Ekaterina became suspicious when her boyfriend, Silnov, also stopped answering his phone.

She then asked the emergency services to check her flat. When officers broke into the woman's home, they found the schoolgirl's body.

The ex-convict had vanished, along with Ekaterina's laptop, credit cards and fur coat.

Russian police launched a manhunt for Silnov while a funeral for the young girl was held on Tuesday. He was arrested today.

A friend said that the grieving mother - who also has a daughter, 20 - is in denial over her daughter's death.

She 'still does not believe that Nikita killed the girl', reported Moskovsky Komsomolets.

'She has always said that Nikita loved her and her children,' said the friend.

Ekaterina Sholokhova (pictured above and with her daughter Viktoria), a prison officer, started a relationship with Nikita Silnov on his release from an 11-year sentence in her jail

Russian police are investigating whether Viktoria (pictured left) was raped before she was killed with a scarf. Her mother's boyfriend, Silnov (right), is suspected of murdering the girl

Another friend, called Olga, said she 'trusted' the man who 'did not even raise his voice' to her teenage daughter.

But reports also say that when Ekaterina lost Silnov's baby soon after birth, he reacted badly.

Neighbours heard him tell her in the yard of their block: 'If my child did not live, nor will yours.'

She was in hospital after a subsequent miscarriage in the 19th week of pregnancy when her daughter was strangled.

Locals also said that while he was 'polite and courteous', this changed when he drank.

And Viktoria's friends say that she did not speak about her new 'stepfather' and may have been afraid of him.

When her mother was in hospital, she went to live with her grandparents, but came to the family home to walk the dog before being killed.

Police have not commented on suspicions that the girl was raped.


Arrested in connection with the Republic Day violence at the Red Fort complex in New Delhi, actor-activist Deep Sidhu has been sent to seven-day police custody by the Delhi court on Tuesday.

Sidhu was produced before Metropolitan Magistrate Prigya Gupta.

The actor-turned-activist was caught in Haryana's Karnal, about 100 km from the national capital. Reports said he kept changing his location to evade arrest.

The police had announced a cash reward of 1 lakh for information leading to Sidhu's arrest.

The probe into the 26 January violence is being conducted at three levels - local police, Special Cell and Crime Branch.

On 26 January, tens of thousands of protesting farmers who reached ITO from the Ghazipur border clashed with police.

Agitating farmers were seen climbing the iconic Red Fort and placing a Sikh religious flag, besides clashing with the police in the widely condemned violence.

The 36-year-old was accused of fueling chaos and clashes when a tractor parade by farmers protesting the government's three farm laws went rogue on Republic Day, with protesters defying agreed routes and schedules and forcing their way into the Red Fort.

The name of the Punjabi actor was included in the FIR registered in connection with the violence at Red Fort in the national capital.

The Delhi Police has filed as many as 44 cases and arrested 122 people before this. Several farmer group leaders have alsbeen named in the police cases.

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Myanmar security forces block the road in front of the headquarters of the National League for Democracy, while others raid the office, in Yangon, Feb 10, 2021.

Myanmar security forces raided the headquarters of deposed civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyis ruling party on Tuesday, a party official said, as nationwide demonstrations against the military takeover turned bloody when police fired on a large crowd in the capital, wounding two protesters.

In a nighttime raid as anti-coup protests in Myanmars major cities entered their second week, military and police broke into the National League for Democracy (NLD) headquarters in Yangon and a nearby regional office, said Kyaw Wunna, a member of the NLDs research team.

Tonight around 9 p.m., a staffer who was monitoring the security cameras informed us that the police and soldiers got into our headquarters office and the regional office at the same time, he told RFA. He said office CCTV footage showed police and army troops blocking surrounding streets as they broke in.

Even if they wanted to search our offices, they could have done it during daytime when officials are present, said Kyaw Wunna. They are committing one lawless act after another.

Earlier on Tuesday, protesters demanding the reinstatement of deposed Aung San Suu Kyi and her elected government defied a curfew and assembly ban imposed Monday and turned out for the fourth day of demonstrations following a mass protest rallies across the nation of 54 million people over the weekend.

Police used water cannons, tear gas, and rubber bullets to disperse the tens of thousands of mostly peaceful protesters in the capital Naypyidaw and Mandalay, the second largest city, injuring at least five demonstrators in the capital, sources said. Protesters responded by throwing rocks and other projectiles.

In Naypyidaw, a 20-year-old female protester was shot in the head and another person was hit in the chest after police fired about 60 shots into a crowd of demonstrators during a tussle over a police officer who had joined the protests, said a protester who heard the shots.

The woman, Mya Thwe Thwe Khaing, is now being treated in the special intensive care unit, said a doctor at a 1,000-bed hospital in the capital who declined to be identified for security reasons.

The injury is life-threatening. Her brain is not functioning due to the bullet wound, he said, adding that the bullet was lodged in her head and that it would be extremely difficult to remove.

Our medical analysis of the wound indicates that the shot was fired from very far away, but penetrated through her [motorbike] helmet and skull, so we believe it was a real bullet, the doctor said. Rubber bullets cannot inflict this kind of injury. The head CT scan also indicated that the bullet lodged in the brain was metal and not rubber.

Naypyidaws military hospital earlier pressured the civilian hospital to transfer the injured protesters, but staff declined, he said.

First known bloodshed

Tuesdays shooting, the first known bloodshed since the military takeover, followed a confrontation at a rally of as many as 100,000 protesters, including students and government workers, at the Thabyegon roundabout in Naypyidaw, where a young police officer climbed onto a building and called on fellow officers and all other government employees to join the civil disobedience movement.

I want my fellow police officers to abandon their fears and stand by the side of the people, the officer said. They cannot use violence against us.

It is also important to get the support of the judicial sector and the General Administration Department, he said. Without them, our fight for democracy cannot be successful. We need to carry on these protests day after day until power is handed back to the people. The administrative machinery must come to a stop.

Three police officers in Magway and one in Tanintharyi region joined protests there, with the latter officer arrested, sources said.

After a week of silence following the Feb. 1 putsch during which Aung San Suu Kyi and scores of officials were arrested, the junta on Monday issued curfew decrees, and coup leader Senior General Senior General Min Aung Hlaing appeared on state television to repeat the election fraud claims the army has used to justify the military takeover.

The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, a watchdog group, said that as of Monday, 170 people had been detained in relation to the military coup, with only 18 released. Most are politicians, it said.

Reported by Nayrein Kyaw and RFAs Myanmar Service. Translated by Kyaw Min Htun and Khin Maung Nyane. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.
The upcoming HBO Max dramedy series Genera+ion is expected to give a realistic look at high school life in the modern world.

But it appears the realistic premise of the show has gone too far in one instance, even for its high-profile executive producer, Lena Dunham.

The Girls creator and star has come out and denounced a scene set in a biology class, where actors dissected actual dead cats.

Speaking out: Lena Dunham denounced the use of real cat corpses in a scene of the upcoming HBO Max series Genera+ion, which touts the Girls star as an executive producer

The controversy seemingly went public when a tweet by @Lilith_Rosex was shared on Friday claiming the production team had 'brought in real dead kittens for background to "dissect" on set. No warning, people had trauma responses.'

That same person shared a second tweet about how a cameraman on the show tested positive for COVID-19 but the production team didn't disclose the information before the scene with the dead cats.

Dunham didn't get word of the accusations in the tweets until the following day because she hasn't been on set. She's currently in London, England shooting her new film, Catherine, Called Birdy, which she wrote and is directing.

Taking charge: HBO Max revealed the scene in question will be removed from the episode, and Dunham maintains she was not on the set when it was shot; some of the young and largely unknown actors in the series are pictured

'I am committed in my life and work to the principled, humane and ethical treatment of animals. I don't use animal cadavers in any of my work, ever, and I was not on set or aware that they were used in a recently shot scene depicting a biology classroom assignment,' Dunham said in a statement to Variety.

She ended by adding, 'I fully support the scene being edited out of the show.'

Her statement came right after HBO Max confirmed that two of the extras left the set due to their discomfort and that the scene would be edited out of the show.

'Genera+ion depicts the unfiltered experiences of high school students and is drawn from many formative moments in the lives of the show's writers. The production recently filmed scenes depicting a biology classroom assignment involving dissection of animal specimens. These were ethically sourced in consultation with American Humane via a biological supply company that works with schools,' An HBO Max spokesperson said in a statement to Variety.

Across the pond: Dunham has been in London, England of late, quarantining for 14 days ahead of filming for her new film Catherine, Called Birdy, which she wrote and is directing

It also noted that 'everyone [in the scene] involved was informed in advance that this would be a sensitive scene involving a real dissection; the assistant directors checked in regularly with all participants on set, and two background actors who expressed discomfort were released with full pay.'

Sources did confirm that a member of the crew had tested positive for COVID-19, and has since gone into isolation, but that the production team had learned of the test results after the day had wrapped, which contradicted the second tweet.

The series has been temporarily shut down as a precaution and will resume according to safety guidelines once it has been deemed safe.

Genera+ion was created by 19-year-old Zelda Barnz and her father Daniel Barnz. It stars mostly unknown actors along with established veteran Martha Plimpton and Justice Smith.

Genera+ion is expected to premiere on HBO Max in the spring of 2021.
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President Joe Biden opposes an effort in California to recall the state's Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom.

'In addition to sharing a commitment to a range of issues with @GavinNewsom from addressing the climate crisis to getting the pandemic under control, @POTUS clearly opposes any effort to recall @GavinNewsom,' White House press secretary Jen Psaki tweeted Tuesday afternoon.

Psaki's tweet comes after she was asked about the president's stance during the earlier press briefing.

White House press secretary Jen Psaski (left) was asked Tuesday at the press briefing how President Joe Biden felt about the recall effort in California to fire Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom (right)

Press secretary Jen Psaki followed up her initial response with a tweet saying that President Joe Biden is not supportive of any effort to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has come under fire for California's coronavirus pandemic response

California Gov. Gavin Newsom could be on the ballot in a recall election if detractors are able to get 1.5 million Californians to sign on to the effort before the deadline of March 27. Newsom's COVID-19 response has been criticized

'I have not spoken with the president about the recall, I should say, or the efforts to recall ... Gov. Newsom,' Psaki said then.

'Obviously he is somebody who he has been engaged with in the past, they have a range of issues they have common agreement on, from the need to address climate change, to put people back to work, to address the COVID crisis,' she continued. 'And you know, we remain closely engaged with him and his office.'

Newsom, who for years has been a bright spot in Democratic politics, has been criticized for California's dismal COVID-19 numbers.

He is also being hammered for the small amount of COVID-19 vaccine being distributed to the state by the federal government, a roll-out that got a bumpy start under the last administration.

California, however, has not done a great job getting shots into arms, ranking 27th among the states in the percentage of vaccines administered, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

'We don't want to be average,' Newsom said Wednesday, according to CNN. 'We want to do more and better.'

The recall is being led by Orrin Heatlie, who worked in the Yolo County Sheriff's Office for 25 years, as well as Mike Netter, a former Staples and Corporate Express executive and Robin McCrea, a former budget officer the College of Agriculture at Chico State.

While California's spike in coronavirus cases has produced national headlines, some people in the state supporting the recall expressed that Newsom had gone overboard with lockdowns.

Another pointed to Newsom's birthday dinner in a semi-enclosed space at the tony French Laundry restaurant, which went against the area's COVID-19 protocols, calling the governor's 'do as I say and not as I do' attitude 'insufferable.'

Others mentioned the state's homeless problem and high taxes.

Those backing the recall effort will need to gather 1.5 million valid signatures from Californians before March 17.

Newsom previously served as San Francisco's mayor and then was lieutenant governor of the state.

He had endorsed now Vice President Kamala Harris, a ex-California senator, in the Democratic primary before she dropped out in December 2019.

He later endorsed Biden in May, after the former vice president had wrapped up the Democratic nomination.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 10)  Alarmed by Chinas enactment of a law that allows its Coast Guard to fire on foreign vessels, the Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces said he has ordered the deployment of more forces to the West Philippine Sea.

Its quite alarming, AFP Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Cirilito Sobejana told reporters on Wednesday.

As a reaction to that I directed immediately the Philippine Navy to provide more ships to Western Command para makapagdagdag tayo ng (so we can increase the) frequency of Philippine patrols ensuring that the Filipino fishermen are safe and secured while they are fishing in that part of the country, Sobejana said.

He said the increased military presence will also ensure the integrity of our territory.

Beijing claims most of the South China Sea, including areas recognized by an international tribunal as part of Manilas exclusive economic zone in the West Philippine Sea.

According to the Chinese military's news website, the legislation passed in January "empowers the Chinese Coast Guard to take action, including the use of weapons, when national sovereignty, sovereign rights or jurisdiction are being illegally infringed upon or threatened by foreign organizations or individuals at sea."

The measure also states that the Chinese Coast Guard has the power to order foreign organizations and individuals to stop the construction of buildings, structures, and deployment of floating devices in the waters and islands of China.

"For those who do not stop the illegal activities or refuse to make rectifications within a time limit, the coast guard may forcibly dismantle [buildings and structures] in accordance with law," the law states, according to state-run China Global Television Network.

The Department of Foreign Affairs has filed a diplomatic protest with China over this law.

Chinese Ambassador Huang Xilian earlier told CNN Philippines The Source that there should be no overinterpretation of the law, and that the China Coast Guard will not take any strong measure against any fishermen.

Meanwhile, the Philippine Navy is looking into a fisherman's report that he was driven away by a ship of the China Coast Guard while on his way to fish near Philippines-occupied Pag-asa Island in the West Philippine Sea.

READ: Filipino fisherman recalls being blocked by China Coast Guard ship

On Wednesday, retired Supreme Court Senior Associate Justice Antonio Carpio said the government should wait for an actual case  when China would use the law against the Philippines, and bring a case to a tribunal under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea or UNCLOS.

While China is a signatory to this international treaty, it refuses to recognize the decision of the tribunal constituted under UNCLOS invalidating its historic nine-dash line claim to almost the entire South China Sea in a case filed by the Philippines.
It was easy to root for Phil Mickelson at the PGA Championship last weekend. The little boy who learned to play golf left-handed by standing opposite his right-handed dad and mirroring dads swing has long been a crowd favorite. He is not only immensely gifted; he is imaginative and willing 
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

AstraZeneca plans to accelerate production of its COVID vaccine in the second quarter to support EU needs, the British pharmaceutical giant said Wednesday, announcing a deal with Germany's IDT Biologika.

The announcement follows controversy over deliveries of the AstraZeneca-Oxford University jab to the European Union, which had caused tensions between the bloc and the pharmaceutical company.

Ahead of the EU's vaccine approval, AstraZeneca sparked fury among European leaders by announcing that it would miss its target of supplying the EU with 400 million doses, due to a shortfall at the firm's European plants.

While the UK government has vaccinated millions of Britons with the AstraZeneca vaccine since late last year, the company began shipping its jab to the EU only on Friday after the bloc's drug regulator took its time over recommending its use.

"Following the European Medicines Agency approval, millions of AstraZeneca vaccines began shipping on 5 February as part of the initial 17 million doses that are due to be delivered over the next weeks, with more planned in March," AstraZeneca said in the statement outlining plans to step up production.

"AstraZeneca and IDT Biologika are exploring options to accelerate output of finished COVID-19 vaccine AstraZeneca in the second quarter of 2021 in order to help support Europe's immediate vaccination needs during the pandemic," the statement added.

The company's chief executive Pascal Soriot said the agreement "will greatly help Europe build an independent vaccine manufacturing capability that will allow it to meet the challenges of the current pandemic and create strategic supply capacity for the future".

He thanked the German government and European Commission for "their support".

Beyond the immediate need for more vaccines, the agreement will see both companies invest to increase capacity at a production site in Dessau, eastern Germany, to produce millions of doses monthly by the end of 2022.

The deal could allow also for the manufacturing of coronavirus vaccines produced by other pharmaceutical companies.

The plans will give IDT Biologika some of the largest vaccine manufacturing capacities in Europe, the statement said.

"We are proud that AstraZeneca has chosen us as a strategic partner for the manufacturing of their vaccines," said IDT Biologika chief executive Jurgen Betzing, adding that it was "a great day for Germany and Europe".

Vaccine setbacks

The AstraZeneca vaccine has garnered praise for its low cost relative to rivals and the ease of storage. A regular refrigerator can be used to store the vaccine.

But it has suffered a number of setbacks in recent weeks.

The jab was temporarily excluded from South Africa's immunisation campaign over questions about its effectiveness against a new strain of the disease first identified in the country.

There have also been concerns in some parts of Europe over using the AstraZeneca vaccine on the elderly.

But on Wednesday, World Health Organization vaccine experts recommended the AstraZeneca jab for use on people aged over 65 and in settings where variants of the virus are circulating.

The 15-member Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization issued a range of interim recommendations for when and how to use the two-shot vaccine, which has yet to receive emergency use authorisation from the WHO.

Last week meanwhile saw a separate Anglo-German collaboration announced, with Britain's GlaxoSmithKline and Germany's CureVac teaming up to develop a vaccine that can potentially counter multiple variants of COVID-19.

The pair hope to have a vaccine by next year, subject to regulatory approval.

Explore further Follow the latest news on the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak

 2021 AFP
How easily we slip into the unimaginable! Think back to before the pandemic  I know it's hard. If you had been told then that travellers might be sentenced to ten years in prison for lying about which country they had recently visited, you wouldn't have believed it.

All right, you might have said, such things could happen in Russia or China. It's what you would expect in North Korea. One might, at an extreme pinch, conceive of such draconian punishments in France if President Macron really lost the plot. But not in freedom-loving Britain. Never. It's impossible.

And yet it is happening here. That's how far we have come in almost 12 months. This is how presumptuous our Government has become. A person arriving in Britain who conceals having visited any one of 33 countries on the so-called 'red list' in the previous ten days faces a prison sentence of up to ten years.

So said Health Secretary Matt Hancock in the Commons on Tuesday. He reminds me of a truculent bantamweight boxer squaring up to his adversary  in this case, liberty and decency and good sense  as he threatens soaring fines for a string of misdemeanours, culminating in ten years in jug.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock updating MPs in the House of Commons, London, on the latest situation with the Coronavirus pandemic

It's preposterous. Crazy. Laughable. As former Supreme Court judge Lord Sumption has pointed out, the maximum sentence for a large number of violent firearms offences or sexual offences involving minors is seven years. People have served fewer than ten years for murder.

A friend of mine has a house in the wilds of Portugal (one of the 33 proscribed countries) 20 miles from the Spanish border. If he nips across into Spain, and flies to Britain without admitting he has been in Portugal, should he be sentenced to ten years in jail? A fine, certainly. But not incarceration.

Some say the law (which No. 10 claims is already in place) will never be used, or that judges wouldn't apply such harsh sentences. They could be right  but that is beside the point. A Government that can even contemplate severe measures of this sort has lost sight of what is just, reasonable and proportionate.

Labour is just as bad, if not worse. There wasn't a squeak of protest about the threat of ten years in prison from Sir Keir Starmer at Prime Minister's Questions yesterday, though he did later express some reservations. Labour (like Nicola Sturgeon in Scotland) advocates even more restrictions  plus further untold billions of financial support we can't afford.

A passenger wearing a face mask at Terminal 5 of London Heathrow Airport in west London on February 9, 2021. There is no suggestion anyone pictured has broken Covid travel laws

The purpose behind the Government's invoking of imprisonment is, of course, to instil fear. Rule by fear is often effective, especially when there really are things to fear, and people are dying from Covid in large numbers.

Why not try a different approach? For it is an extraordinary reflection that this bullying, negative Government has an inspiring success story to tell, which goes some way to mitigate  or at any rate enable us to forget  its previous errors. I mean the vaccine roll-out.

Britain has administered around six times as many jabs as France and five times as many as Italy, both countries with populations roughly equal to our own. This is an amazing achievement, which should give us grounds for optimism.

The thistle hotel near Terminal 5 London Heathrow Airport. The airport has been mentioned as one of the new Covid quarantine hotels when the new restrictions come into force

Oh, I know there are those nasty mutant variants, and the Government is right to be concerned about them, though not to use them to batter us into submission and increase our already high anxiety levels.

But it is because the NHS is triumphantly on track to vaccinate everyone over the age of 50 by the end of April that Boris Johnson finds himself in a position unique among European leaders.

He alone can plausibly paint a picture of this country getting back to something resembling normality by May, while adding that we will have learn to live with the virus for the foreseeable future.

And yet the mood music from No. 10, the Health Department and the Government's myriad and ubiquitous scientific advisers is unremittingly grim. The latest contributor is Transport Secretary Grant Shapps, who spread despondency from various broadcasting studios yesterday morning.

On BBC Radio 4's Today programme he said that 'people shouldn't be booking holidays right now  not domestically or internationally'. This was inconsistent, as well as pessimistic, since Mr Hancock has already informed us that he is holidaying in Cornwall this summer.

Travellers at Heathrow airport, Heathrow, London, 9th February 2021

A woman exits a Covid-19 testing centre at Terminal 5 of London Heathrow Airport in west London on February 9, 2021. There is no suggestion anyone pictured has broken Covid laws

Couldn't Mr Shapps be more upbeat? We don't expect promises, but a ray of hope after five weeks of winter lockdown would be welcome. On BBC Breakfast he unhelpfully pointed out that ten years in jail for miscreant travellers is 'a tariff [and] not necessarily how long somebody would go to prison for'. What a relief!

Result of Mr Shapps's eruption of doom and gloom: more agony in the travel business and airline industry, both of which are struggling to survive  and further plans to get rid of employees.

Evidently the people who don't fret about the dire state of the economy or understand its needs  to wit, Messrs Hancock and Shapps, plus battalions of scientific advisers headed by Professor Chris Whitty  are more in charge of Government policy on the pandemic than ever before.

Why can't we justifiably hope for better times around the corner? It's not just the reality of effective large-scale vaccination  the current seven-day average is over 400,000. Daily Covid cases have been tumbling: yesterday's figure of 13,013 was less than a fifth of the number on January 8. Deaths, though still high, are also falling.

The Government could continue dragging its feet while dreaming up new punishments and restrictions for us. Or it could accept that the situation is changing faster than seemed possible only a few weeks ago, and that it's time to come up with a plan for saving the economy and restoring the nation's sanity.

A sign directs passengers to a Covid-19 testing centre at Terminal 5 of London Heathrow Airport, February 9, 2021. There is no suggestion anyone pictured has broken Covid laws

Needless to say, it's mostly up to Boris  the booster who has seemingly become a doomster. At the No. 10 press conference yesterday, he appeared to side with Mr Shapps on the question of summer holidays. Earlier, at Prime Minister's Questions, he wouldn't commit to England's schools returning on March 8. It'll be a near-calamity if they don't.

Why this erstwhile optimist has become as cautious as Aunt Maud is not hard to fathom. He has sometimes over-promised and under-delivered. He has been either slow or reluctant to impose all three lockdowns in England. Boris does not want to add to his tally of political scars.

But with the phenomenal success of the vaccine programme, this is the moment for the PM to break free of the one-track-minded scientists who surround him, and trust his own instincts.

Before he finally unveils his exit plan on February 22, I hope he will also ignore those ministers who have grown too fond of corralling and controlling us. He surely can't believe it's a good idea to throw someone in jail for up to ten years for failing to put the name of a country on a form.

No one apart from the Prime Minister can transform the negative mindset of this Government. This is almost certainly his greatest challenge yet. Timid Boris or brave Boris: which is it to be?
Every month, it seems like yet another Chinese woman is in the news for suffering intimate partner assault  sometimes fatal  or for speaking out against her violent partner. February is no different:

Over the weekend, a former journalist named Ma Jinyu  detailed her experience with domestic violence in an article titled Another Lhamo, a reference to the popular Tibetan video blogger who was brutally burned to death by her husband while she was live-streaming on social media.



In the article (in Chinese), published on February 6 by Truman Story, a WeChat account featuring nonfiction storytelling in Chinese, Ma accuses her husband of frequently assaulting her and threatening to kill her during their seven-year marriage.



The moment my head got hit, I peed myself. The beating continued throughout the night and into the next morning. My clothes were soaked in blood and I had no idea where the blood came from. I could barely see to use my phone. But I didnt call the police. My children were asleep. I called a female employee of mine and told her I was almost beaten to death, Ma wrote, recounting the first time she was attacked by her husband.

For more than a decade, Ma worked as a reporter working for several prominent newspapers, including the Beijing News and the Southern Metropolis Daily. In 2010, she quit her journalist career to marry Xie Decheng , a honey farmer on the Tibetan Plateau, whom she met for an interview.

Mas story received an outpouring of support, as well as skepticism, on social media after her article went viral.

Many questioned why Ma, a supposedly strong-minded, well-educated woman, never reported the alleged partner abuse to police.

Some speculated that Ma was trying to obtain a strategic advantage in a custody battle with her husband over their three children.

In response to the accusations, Xie told (in Chinese) domestic media over the weekend that he had never assaulted Ma, and that he had lost contact with Ma since 2018, when she left their home and moved to another city with their children.

Supporters of Ma argued that the hostility and skepticism faced by her was emblematic of the stigma often associated with women who come forward to accuse men of abuse.

Many said that while surviving trauma as a domestic abuse survivor can be terrifying, it can pale in comparison to what follows, especially in Chinese culture, where victim-blaming and harmful he said/she said dynamics persist.

Its totally unfair to question Mas motives while ignoring the truth. It saddened me to see that when she came forward to speak out against her abuser, she was met with doubt and shame, instead of aid and respect, a Weibo user wrote (in Chinese).
The share of critics is on decline.

Some 49% of Ukrainians support the recent decision by state authorities to block broadcasts of pro-Russian 112 Ukraine, NewsOne and ZIK TV channels.

At the same, 41% oppose this move, according to the findings of a poll recently conducted by the Rating Sociological Group.

Since the imposition of sanctions, the level of support for the decision has grown from 42% to 49%, while the share of critics has decreased from 47% to 41%.

A total of 78% of the pollees are aware that President Zelensky has put into effect the NSDC decision on the application of sanctions against TV channels, while 21% of the respondents know nothing about this. It is important that among the respondents who know about the decision, the level of support for it is even higher (57%), and the number of critics is less (37%).

Read alsoBan on Medvedchuk's TV channels in Ukraine: Implications for Zelensky, pro-Russian forces, and UkraineIt is noteworthy that 72% of the respondents support the imposition of sanctions against individuals and legal entities of Ukraine if their activities harm the interests of the state (46% unequivocally support, 26% rather support). On the other hand, if there is evidence of the involvement of these persons in terrorist activities or separatism, the level of support for sanctions against them grows to 85% (67% unequivocally support, 18% rather support).

Mechanics of the poll

The poll was conducted on February 6-8 through computer-assisted telephone interviews (CATI) using a random selection of cell numbers.

The sample is representative of the adult population (aged 18 and older).

Some 2,500 respondents were polled in all regions of Ukraine except Crimea and other Russia-occupied parts of Ukraine, namely certain districts in Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

The margin of error does not exceed 2.0%.

Read alsoU.S. embassy voices support for ban on pro-Russian TV channels in UkraineSanctions against pro-Russian TV channels: What is known

On February 2, Zelensky enacted a National Security and Defense Council decision of February 2, 2021, to impose sanctions on Member of Parliament Taras Kozak and a number of TV channels Kozak owns, such as 112 Ukraine, NewsOne, and ZIK.

After that, the channels were immediately disconnected from broadcasting.

On February 4, two unnamed individuals filed lawsuits with the Supreme Court of Ukraine contesting the Presidential Decree enacting a package of sanctions imposed on a number of TV channels.

Reporting by UNIAN
HOLYOKE  The state-appointed leader of the citys public school district is on leave, officials said Wednesday.

The announcement came two days after Receiver Alberto Vazquez Matos told school committee members he recently contracted COVID-19. Officials did not say whether his leave was related to the illness.

Holyoke Public Schools Receiver Alberto Vazquez Matos is currently on leave, and Chief Finance and Operations Officer Anthony Soto will temporarily assume the role of receiver, a spokeswoman for the Department of Secondary and Elementary Education said in a statement, in response to questions from The Republican / MassLive. We do not expect there to be any disruption to Holyoke students and we will share more information when possible.

The Holyoke School Department sent a similarly worded message, addressed to the school community.

In an email, school committee Vice Chairwoman Mildred Lefebvre referred questions to state education officials. She said the committee cannot comment on personnel matters.

In a statement posted to Facebook, Devin Sheehan  a member of the school committee and candidate for mayor  said he learned about the situation from the school departments message.

While I am unaware of the specific circumstances surrounding this unanticipated leave, I am deeply concerned about the uncertainty and void that such an absence has created, he said.

While he said he has full and complete confidence in the districts leadership team, principals, teachers and staff, he added: After less than 8 months in the role, the possibility of yet another Receiver and this transition is the last thing that Holyoke Public Schools, students, and their families need to be worried about.

Vazquez Matos participated in Mondays meeting of the committee, outlining the districts recently implemented hybrid-learning plan and school schedules.

One discussion involved recent Saturday distributions of free food boxes at Holyoke High School.

Vazquez Matos apologized for not having participated in the effort, telling the committee: I want to be very transparent. I contracted COVID, so I could not be part of that. So I did call Mr. Soto to help me out.

Vazquez Matos, who previously served in the Hartford, Connecticut Public Schools, became Holyokes receiver July 1, 2020.

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[February 10, 2021] Eon Launches Next-Gen Version of Its Patient Management Platform

DENVER, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Denver-based healthtech leader Eon recently launched the most advanced version of its Essential Patient Management (EPM). Eon, known for its best-in-class lung cancer screening and incidental pulmonary nodule (IPN) solution, expanded beyond lung into additional incidental abnormality identification and management. EPM now tracks radiologic actionable findings , and identifies and manages patients with abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAA) as well as abnormalities for pancreas, thyroid, and more, all within a single dashboard. EPM is the first of its kind to use Computational Linguistics, a discipline of Artificial Intelligence (AI), that parses millions of patient radiology reports simultaneously and flags patients with single or multiple abnormalities who need additinal follow-up procedures or exams. The technology does not require clinician workflow disruption and gives providers a safety net to catch patients who may be at risk for future catastrophic disease. What's more, EPM features advanced business logic that automates administrative tasks and saves providers time by eliminating more than 90% of current manual efforts.



"We're constantly thinking beyond today and looking for ways to enhance the solutions we bring to market," said Christine Spraker, Co-CEO of Eon. "The more radiology scans that we can run through our models to identify patients at risk for future disease, the more patients, providers, and hospitals win. Eon EPM does what Electronic Health Records have failed to do - improve patient care, drive new revenue to hospitals, and enhance clinical workflows, a very hard won trifecta in healthcare." EPM is an intuitive cloud-based platform, developed by a team of physicians, clinicians, and data scientists to decrease administrative headaches, ensure patient capture, and improve outcomes. Eon EPM uses Computational Linguistics to positively identify incidentals (or findings discovered while undergoing tests for an unrelated reason) on radiology reports with up to 98.95% accuracy. Computational Linguistics is a data science discipline that interprets the linguistic structure of written English and is widely considered superior to basic Natural Language Processing (NLP).

"Because our approach is to use computational linguistics, our models achieve the highest level of accuracy on the market compared to NLP. They can interpret complex medical ontologies with extreme accuracy and precision and consistently outperform our competitors' solutions, which often are laden with false positives and false negatives." Spraker said. Eon is constantly innovating and enhancing its products to arm facilities with the latest tools to help with early diagnosis and improved patient outcomes. The company is live in over 230 facilities and offers its disease-defying technology to hospitals across the country. Eon's dedication and drive are fueled by the positive outcomes of early identification and intervention of catastrophic disease. About Eon Eon is a Denver-based healthtech company dedicated to revolutionizing the way healthcare data is gathered, curated, and shared among industry professionals. We are on a mission to ensure the right data reaches the right people at the right time to identify disease early and stop it in its tracks. We believe together we can defy disease. For more information, please contact Fahad Siraj at 416-518-4936 or 291197@email4pr.com and follow Eon on LinkedIn and Twitter . View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/eon-launches-next-gen-version-of-its-patient-management-platform-301225880.html SOURCE Eon

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Many questions hang over Apple Inc.s car project, but one thing is increasingly clear: The project wont fail for lack of credible production partners.

Nissan is the latest car maker to signal its openness to a deal. As technology transforms the auto industry, we need to take new initiatives" and work with companies that are knowledgeable, with good experience, through partnership and collaboration," said Chief Executive Officer Makoto Uchida on Tuesday. This was in response to a question about his willingness to partner with Apple at a press conference to discuss the Japanese car makers quarterly results.

Speculation about the established automotive industrys role in an Apple car project has spread since Hyundai dropped the big news that it was in talks with the iPhone maker last month. On Monday, those discussions seemed to have broken down, but Hyundais stock is still up 23% this year. Apple might not rely on just one supplier, though, and has also held discussions with Japanese manufacturers, according to a report in the Nikkei newspaper last week.

Nissan stock has rallied in recent days. There was little in its quarterly results to justify the excitement: The companys turnaround is moving forward, but it nonetheless downgraded its revenue expectations for its fiscal year through March, noting the global semiconductor shortage. Yet Nissan, among the Japanese auto makers, is the most likely candidate to be in serious discussions with Apple," according to Mio Kato, an equity analyst who publishes on the Smartkarma research platform. Having overexpanded in the U.S. in recent years, Nissan has spare capacity to fill.

It is far too early for investors to be betting on car-manufacturing contracts from Apple. Unlike smartphones, vehicles are safety-critical devices. Self-driving technologya common feature in reports on Apples car projectis still in its infancy. Returns from companies involved in the smartphone supply chain have also been very volatile. Those who buy auto stocks for the Apple halo alone are setting themselves up for disappointment.

Still, the readiness of big-brand car makers to pitch themselves to Apple is worth watching for what it says about the industrys mellowing attitude toward Silicon Valley. Not so long ago, car makers were reluctant to work with the tech sector, let alone become contract manufacturers for tech brands. Nissan may need a fresh start, but Hyundai doesnt: It was one of the fastest-growing brands in the U.S. last year.

Car makers are also warming up to Alphabet Inc.: Last week Fordsigned a partnership with Google that will involve integrating its apps more deeply into vehicles and leaning on its strength in data analysis. Through their big infotainment screens, web-connected electric vehicles will bring new business opportunities and challenges likely to have as much do with running a smartphone empire as selling cars. To varying degrees in Asia and Detroit alike, car makers are getting more comfortable with sharing the road.

This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text.

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(Natural News) A decline in population looms ahead for China despite its governments loosening of population control measures. Provincial figures obtained from a nationwide census show Chinas population growth in 2019 plunged to its lowest in 60 years. Not even the repeal of the one-child policy, which was in place since 1979, managed to address this dive in population.

Initial nationwide census findings, which have a larger scale, recorded 14.65 million births in 2019. But this figure was lower by one third compared to averages in the 1990s and 2000s. Chinas strict population control measures were still in place during those decades.

Even the government itself acknowledged the drop in births. A report by China Business News said the country had 142 million fewer births between 1990 and 2019 compared to the preceding three decades. It based the finding on population database statistics from the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics. Nearly 240 million Chinese were born during the 1960s, equating to a 43.6 percent birth rate. But the figures plunged following the one-child policy introduced by Deng Xiaoping in 1979 to address the countrys population boom. It was loosened in 1990, but this did little to curb the demographic decline. The one-child policy was scrapped in 2015, after being in place for almost 40 years.

Starting in 1998, new births every year started to slip to below 20 million. Total births in the 2000s dropped to 162 million, about 46 million fewer than those in the 1990s. China added a total of 163 million new births between 2010 and 2019, based on current and previous headcounts. This was 477,000 more than the previous decade.

But the 163 million births added from 2010 to 2019 may likely be insufficient to address a foreseen population sinkhole in the mid-2020s. A January 2021 study by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences warned that if current trends continue, the countrys population will peak at 1.44 billion in 2029 before hitting an unstoppable decline.

China is acting fast to address this demographic time bomb

Chinas population decline is affecting the country in two ways. First, fewer Chinese means less domestic consumption  affecting the central governments push for consumption-led growth. Second, more senior citizens will put unprecedented strain on social ties and skew the demographic ratio of young and old. (Related: Population control? Half a million elderly people go missing in China every year.)

Demographic data from Shanghai obtained by Asia Times appears to reflect this sentiment. The city now has 500,000 more residents aged 65 and older compared to those aged 35 and below. The city of 24 million, reportedly the most vibrant and populous, saw only 92,000 babies born in 2019. As a result, the Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Statistics warned of a retirement tsunami. The baby boomers of the 1960s set to retire or receive pensions threaten to drain the citys funds  already nearing depletion  in the next two to five years.

The central government has proposed pushing back the current retirement age for female workers in the next five years. Its plan involves increasing female workers retirement age from 55 years old to 60 years old. Shenzhen-based financial commentator Liu Xiaobo told Asia Times that China would soon allow all couples to have no more than three children by the end of 2021 or 2022. His sources added that the central government is now discussing incentives for these couples, such as free high school education and special discounts for mortgage rates.

Meanwhile, Chinese cities themselves have implemented new policies to lure in a younger demographic. Shanghai lowered its household registration threshold last year to attract fresh graduates to stay there. Guangzhou is another city seeking to attract younger populations. It scrapped a quota regime to control the population and is now welcoming young migrant workers to settle in the suburban districts.

Xiamen University economics professor Ding Changfa told Asia Times that Chinese cities such as Shanghai and Guangzhou see the immigration of young people from other places as a solution to their population problem. It mirrors the practice of other nations such as the Netherlands, Japan and Singapore that open their doors to quality, new immigrants  ensuring an ample and capable labor force.

Young people are the future as they produce more GDP [gross domestic product], [promote] consumption and overall, when they raise their own families and have babies, the professor said.

Visit CommunistChina.news to learn more about the long-term effects of Chinas one-child policy.

Sources include:

AsiaTimes.com

Investopedia.com

FT.com
Government officials unveil five high-tech robots to support in the fight against Covid-19 (file photo).

The City of Kigali has deployed 73 pulse oximeters in Gasabo District to help covid-19 patients on home-based care.

The devices, which were distributed in 73 cells that make up Gasabo District, were rolled out under a campaign dubbed "Operation Save the Neighbour from Covid-19."

The fingertip devices, which measure the levels of oxygen in blood, will help to detect patients in need of intensive care and thus reduce Codvid-19 deaths.

According to Dr. Menelas Nkeshimana, the Team Lead for Covid-19 Case Management at Rwanda Biomedical Centre, at least 96 per cent of the current Covid-19 patients are placed on home-based care.

As of February 8, the country had 3,769 active cases of Covid-19.

Nkeshimana explained that the devices will detect Covid-19 patients with low amount of oxygen, put them under intensive care in Covid-19 treatment centres, thus avoiding deaths.

"This is important because we even see those taken to hospital with 30 per cent level because it had not been detected earlier," he said.

Oxygen levels of a healthy adult without respiratory diseases should measure above 95 per cent while a person with factors such as tobacco, other diseases that might have affected lungs, the amount of oxygen stands between 90 per cent and 92 per cent, Nkeshimana explained.

If the pulse oximeter detects that a Covid-19 patient has below 88 per cent, it means the amount of oxygen is low.

He explained that levels of oxygen can diminish in Covid-19 patients without their knowledge and therefore supplying pulse oximeters to health community workers in villages is timely for early detection.

"We urge districts and stakeholders to work together to ensure the health community workers get the devices," he noted.

Pauline Umwali, the Executive Administrator of Gasabo District, said that the district has 75 medical doctors and about 300 nurses who will help in the implementation process.

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"We worked with them to get the idea to mobilize resources from our district stakeholders to buy pulse oximeters.We agreed with them to work with community health workers to fight against covid-19 deaths among patients on home base care," she said.

She said there are four community health workers at each village and two others at cell level who will support the initiative under the support of medical doctors.

She added 73 motorcycles in district cells will also facilitate them in terms of transport as they test Covid-19 patients in home-based care every day.

"Whenever a community health worker will detect a covid-19 patient in critical situation, they will alert the doctors to rush the patient to hospital for intensive care," she said.

Andre Mutsindashyaka, the President of District Joint Action Development Forum (JADF) in Gasabo District said that resources will continue to be mobilized to ensure community health workers get more pulse oximeters.

Pudence Rubingisa, the Mayor of the City of Kigali, residents to double their efforts in the fight against the pandemic.

"The numbers are decreasing and we should keep that trend," he said.

The 21-day lockdown that was recently imposed on Kigali has had a tremendous impact, reducing new Covid-19 cases in the city by 72 per cent according to the Rwanda Biomedical Centre (RBC) Director-General.
Can 14 nations put global ocean protection back on track?

by Olive Heffernan

February 10,2021 | Source: China Dialogue Ocean

For ocean conservation, 2020 was a year of high hopes dashed. It had been billed as the year when world leaders would end harmful subsidies that drive overfishing, agree a new law to protect marine life beyond national waters, and edge closer to protecting 30% of ocean space by 2030. Instead, the world grappled with the fallout of Covid-19. But amid the missed deadlines and postponed talks, a ray of hope emerged. In December, 14 nations who together oversee 30% of the oceans exclusive economic zones committed to managing their waters 100% sustainably by 2025. The plan, conceived by the High Level Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy, sets out a blueprint for restoring marine ecosystems globally, in a way that provides more food and jobs, benefits the economy and helps to mitigate climate change. On 14 January, the panel launched its action plan in the US, calling on other ocean states  including the US  to sign up, and commit to 100% sustainable management of their waters. As a way of encouraging others, the panel extended the completion date for new signatories to 2030. Its a call to action and not just to governments, but also to the private sector, financial institutions and civil society. Its a rallying cry, says marine ecologist Jane Lubchenco, who co-chaired the panels expert group, and previously served as administrator of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration under President Obama.



The speed and urgency at which the ocean is changing requires a commensurate response. The speed and urgency at which the ocean is changing requires a commensurate response. While there are formal processes [to address ocean issues], we need an additional process, says Kristian Teleki, head of the Secretariat for the High Level Panel. The 14 nations that have agreed the deal so far are Australia, Canada, Chile, Fiji, Ghana, Indonesia, Jamaica, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, Namibia, Norway, Palau and Portugal. A motley crew, of which some  such as Norway and Palau  boast successful ocean economies, while others  such as Ghana and Jamaica  are struggling with severely depleted fish stocks. Yet all have citizens who rely heavily on the sea for food and income, and are facing the pressing need to balance these demands with environmental protection. The ocean divides these countries but it also unites them. They each face different challenges but are connected by the plight of their people, whether thats their finances or their wellbeing, says Teleki.



In 2018, they formed the High Level Panel as a way of redressing humanitys ailing relationship with the ocean. What followed was a two-year process of gathering data and knowledge from 250 global ocean experts  in 48 separate countries and regions. The panel also sought council from more than 135 organisations across industry, finance and civil society. The result was a series of 19 peer-reviewed reports that cover in unprecedented detail the challenges facing todays ocean  from overfishing to plastic pollution  and the possibilities for its sustainable use  including drug discovery and renewable energy. Informed by this evidence, the 14 nations committed to major transformations in five key areas: seafood production, climate mitigation, biodiversity protection, and integrated management, aided by huge investment in the ocean economy. Applied globally, these efforts could, by 2050, give us six times more seafood, 12 million more jobs and 40 times more renewable energy, add US$15.5 trillion to the economy and deliver 20% of the emission reductions needed to limit warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.



They have gathered this incredibly rich resource of material to guide the decision-making process, says Dana Miller, a senior policy advisor with non-profit Oceana, and an author of the panels report on ocean finance. There is an enormous opportunity here, she says, for these leading countries to really transform the way our ocean is considered, valued and used, both now and into the future. But while the plan sounds ambitious, its not about some future nirvana says Torsten Thiele, an ocean governance specialist who served as one of the panels expert advisors. Thiele says that nations have already signed up to many of these obligations elsewhere. The new plan is about how these goals can be achieved, and how theyll be financed.



A crisis on many levels



The ocean faces a growing crisis: more than 90% of commercial fish stocks are fully exploited or overexploited; waters are warming and acidifying due to climate change; and ocean pollution is at an all-time high. The state of the ocean is parlous. To be completely frank, its much worse than a lot of people think, says Dan Laffoley, an ocean conservation expert with the International Union for the Conversation of Nature. Right now, ocean governance is a patchwork of rules and regulations. Plans to mine the seabed for minerals, for instance, may fail to take into account efforts to restore wild fish populations. Coastal waters are the responsibility of nation states, and are typically managed sector by sector. Their adequate protection is crucial because they contain 90% of ocean biodiversity and are where most of the economic activity takes place. Central to the panels vision is a plan to derive more food from the sea to meet growing global demand for protein and nutrients. With the right investments, the ocean could deliver 3674% higher food yields by 2050. But first, nations will have to end overfishing and replenish wild stocks, goals that already exist internationally. So what exactly have these nations signed up to? Will others do the same? And who will hold them accountable?



Ending subsidies and illegal fishing



Currently, all major fishing nations have an opportunity to end harmful fisheries subsides through a deal being negotiated by the World Trade Organization (WTO). These subsidies drive overfishing by, for instance, covering fuel costs or financing the construction of larger boats. The deal, which was due to be finalised last year, has been delayed by Covid-19. The 14 members of the High Level Panel are now leading the charge by agreeing to end this practice in their nations unilaterally. While reform by these individual countries is positive, ultimately, we want to see it at a much bigger scale, says Isabel Jarrett, a fisheries reform campaign manager at the Pew Charitable Trusts in Washington DC. We would still like those countries to come to the table at WTO and push for a multilateral agreement, she says. To make a dent in IUU fishing additional key countries would need to commit, especially those with large distant-water fishing fleets.



Another, separate, commitment from the panel is to stop illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing. Internationally, the Port State Measures Agreement targets IUU fishing by giving nations the authority to refuse port access to fishers engaged in illicit activity, such as poaching or intentionally undervaluing their catch. Not all nations have signed on. While the panels commitment to end IUU is welcome, will it make a difference? Miller is concerned that the actions proposed to achieve this are not very concrete. She would like to see nations push for greater transparency by requiring their fleets to carry publicly accessible vessel-tracking technology or mandating the use of international registration numbers, for example. If they were to commit to these types of concrete measures, I am confident that it would make a dent in IUU fishing. But to do this on a global scale, additional key countries would need to also commit, especially those that have a role as flag, port processing and market states, and those with large distant-water fishing fleets such as China, Taiwan and Spain.



Protecting and restoring ecosystems



The High Level Panel has also committed to restoring and preventing the degradation of blue carbon ecosystems  the mangrove forests, seagrass meadows and salt marshes that are the ocean equivalent of rainforests. Coastal marine ecosystems have carbon sequestration rates up to 10 times higher than land ecosystems, and yet weve lost an estimated 20-50% of them globally. To reverse this trend, and the destruction of marine ecosystems more generally, nations will need to safeguard them within marine protected areas (MPAs). Currently, just 2.6% of the global ocean is strictly protected, meaning off limits to industrial extraction. Scientists advise that at least 30% of the ocean needs to be placed within strict MPAs by 2030, if were to stem the loss of marine life. The High Level Panel supports this goal, but how theyll scale up actions to achieve it is unclear.



We had a target to protect 10% of the ocean by 2020, and we havent reached it, says Peter Jones, a marine planning and governance expert at University College London, who argues that its important to focus on how MPAs work, and whether they are effective and equitable, rather than simply focusing on numeric targets. Others, including Laffoley, argue that the 30% target doesnt go far enough, given the continued decline of ocean health, and that we should be looking to exclude industry from at least 50% of ocean space. We need to go much further, much more quickly, he says. Elsewhere, the UN is negotiating a deal that would protect marine life in the high seas  those waters beyond national jurisdiction  and handle many of the same issues, such as establishing MPAs, offshore. Much like the WTO talks on fisheries subsidies, these negotiations have been delayed by the pandemic, and are due to reconvene in August. Thiele cautions against seeing the new deal as an alternative to these ongoing international processes. This is just another part of the puzzle. These processes should be nicely complementary, he says.



Converting words into actions



Unlike many of the formal negotiations taking place on ocean issues, the commitments of the High Level Panel are voluntary and non-prescriptive. Describing it as a healthy competition, Teleki says that the aspiration is for nations to lead by example, showing others that ocean restoration can be regenerative. Signatory nations will update the panel regularly on their progress, with the first report due in September 2021. Whether the panels vision for ocean recovery can be achieved will ultimately depend on whether it can garner political and financial support. As a starting point, the panel members would like to see nations direct a chunk of their Covid-19 stimulus packages toward a blue ocean-centred economic recovery plan. Writing in Nature, Lubchenco and others note that following the 200809 global fiscal crisis, each $1 million invested in ocean recovery in the US created an average of 17 jobs  more than twice those created for each dollar invested in road construction and fossil-fuel exploration and extraction combined. Another hope, says Thiele, is that institutions such as the EU and the UN will understand that ocean restoration can help to solve the climate problem and direct their climate funds accordingly. The UN green climate fund will have to be an ocean fund; otherwise well continue to destroy the ocean, he says. Landmark events in 2021, including UN conferences on the ocean, climate and biodiversity, could help garner support for the panels action plan. Getting the US to sign the deal  a possibility with Joe Biden now in office  would also rally support. It all depends on where the money goes, and big decisions will be made in 2021, says Thiele.



Teleki sees the agreement itself as a blue silver lining of 2020. Despite everything thats gone on in the last year, heads of states and their ministers still managed to work to put together an ocean action agenda says Teleki. Converting those words into action will be the real necessity over the coming years and decades, he says.

Theme(s): Post Harvest Technology and Trade, Others, Landing Centres, Freshwater ecosystems and threats, Fishing Craft, Gear and Fishing Methods, Fisheries Resources, Fisheries Development and Aquaculture, Communities and Organisations, Coastal Ecosystems and Threats.
The Western N.Y. teen who died in a sledding accident Saturday morning sacrificed her life to save her 3-year-old cousin, her parents said.

Renee Hill, 16, died Saturday morning at Clyde L Burmaster Park in the town of Lewiston in Niagara County. She was riding down a hill at the park in a tube sled with her three-year-old, male cousin when she hit a tree at the bottom of the hill.

She had went down the hill. She had my 3-year-old nephew on with her. She saw the tree coming. Her first instinct was to put her foot down and flip the sled so my nephew wouldnt get hurt. She hit the tree. Her heart stopped on the way to the hospital, her mother, Alexis Kraft told WKBW TV in Buffalo.

Everyones calling her a hero. But that was my baby, Kraft said.

The teen and the toddler were taken by ambulance to the John R. Oishei Childrens Hospital in Buffalo, according to the Niagara County Sheriffs Office. Subsequent to arrival at the hospital, Hill was pronounced deceased due to her injuries. The young boy who was riding with her on the tube was treated at the hospital and released.

The incident is under investigation by the Town of Lewiston Police Department and the Niagara County Sheriffs Office.

The sledding hill is closed at this time.

A GoFundMe page has been set up to help the family pay for funeral expenses.

A GoFundMe page has been set up to help the family with funeral expenses.

Renees parents thank the community for their support following the loss of their oldest of four children. She was a sophomore at Niagara Wheatfield High School and member of the schools girl lacrosse team.

Dont take one minute for granted with your babies. Tell them you love them. Every minute. Every chance you get, Kraft told the Buffalo TV station.
The budget target of 7.1 percent is a bold one, so that neither salaries, nor pensions, nor investments will be affected, and the increase will remain built into the monthly income, Deputy Prime Minister Kelemen Hunor declared on Wednesday, according to AGERPRES.

"Our goal is to have a deficit of 7 - 7.1 percent. It is an ambitious, courageous target and at this moment we can fit into this target. Of course, this means that there will be less spending than last year. In terms of investments, the large investments in key areas - infrastructure, economy, attracting investors - are provided in 2021, and I am convinced that many areas will have the necessary funding from PNRR [the National Recovery and Resilience Plan], because economic growth is needed. This is what can be done in 2021, because going down from 10 percent to 7.1 percent is an effort. This is pretty much the money we can distribute, spend in 2021, so that neither salaries, nor pensions, but also neither investments are stopped or stand to suffer. If more could have been done, more would have been done," said the Hungarian Democratic Union of Romania (UDMR) leader.

"Things are going well and I am convinced that this year we can develop Romania," Kelemen Hunor said.

With regard to bonuses, Kelemen Hunor specified that they remain built into the monthly income this year, showing that he does not agree with the computer hazard pay.

"In 2021, these bonuses remain built into the salary, within the monthly income. In 2021 we will conduct an analysis of all the bonuses and an amendment of the pay law is to be made. (...) There is a hazard pay when you work on the computer. I don't think it's a binus that needs to be kept, because everyone works on the computer. In the 21st century, to say that it's a risk to work on the computer, then throw your mobile phone in the trash and stop opening the computer. So, it is not possible. (...) I mentioned only one bonus, but certainly there follows the analysis we will be conducting in 2021. In 2021, as we promised, salaries will not be smaller in the budget sector, they will be exactly at the level of 2020, December," he explained.

The Deputy Prime Minister also specified that talks have been held within the coalition - also due in Parliament - about the removal of holiday vouchers for 2021, in order to control the budget deficit.

"There will also be restructuring in the central administration, there will be measures during the year, but you will find out the details after we discuss today in the government meeting," Kelemen Hunor added.


In a major show of strength, former Rajasthan Deputy Chief Minister Sachin Pilot on Tuesday addressed farmers at a massive mahapanchayat organised in the state's Bharatpur district to protest against the three farm laws.

At the mahapanchayat at Fateh Sagar in Bharatpur's Bayana, Pilot said that the future of farmers is being threatened by the government for a few industrialists.

"The Central government will have to withdraw these agricultural laws as otherwise farmers will suffer huge losses. The innocent farmers are protesting on the streets of Delhi in the cold, but the Central government is indifferent... it is torturing them," he added.

Claiming the laws will destroy both farming and Mandis, Sachin Pilot noted that the arrangements made by the Central government to stop the farmers on Delhi's borders are not even seen at the India-Pakistan border.

In these mahapanchayat attended by farmers from different parts of the district, Pilot was joined by Deeg-Kumher MLA Vishvendra Singh, former minister, Ramesh Meena, Congress MLA in-charge on Bharatpur Ved Prakash Solanki, and many other party leaders and activists.

Addressing the Mahapanchayat, Vishvendra Singh said that they strongly oppose the anti-farmer laws passed by the Centre.

"The farmers had never demanded these laws. They had demanded the implementation of the Swaminathan Commission Report. These laws have been brought on the demand of corporate houses. Farmers will have to work like bonded labourers after mortgaging their land. By promoting purchases outside APMC, not only will the mandis be destroyed, but it will also lead to large scale profiteering, excessive value addition. Due to this, the mandis will be closed, the MSP will not be guaranteed to the farmers and the poor will have to buy food at a higher price."

Pilot reached Bharatpur via road and was welcomed by Congress workers near Dausa. He launched an e-library in the district and the Session Court of Dausa.

THIBODAUX, La. (AP)  Louisiana has hired a firm to design a $14.5 million coastal research center at Nicholls State University. The school and the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority said in a news release Monday that Duplantis Design Group has been selected. The university's president says the school has a lot at stake. Jay Clune says Nicholls was 50 miles from the Gulf of Mexico when it was founded in 1948, but is now 24 miles away. Gov. John Bel Edwards and other officials signed an agreement in April to create a center at Nicholls to study the effects of land loss in the Terrebonne and Atchafalaya Basins.
One person is dead and another four injures have been injured after a 67-year-old man unhappy with the health care he had received opened fire at a medical clinic in the US (David Joles/Star Tribune/AP)

One person is dead and another four have been injured after a 67-year-old man unhappy with the health care he had received opened fire at a medical clinic in the US.

Bomb technicians were investigating a suspicious device left at the scene in Buffalo, Minnesota, as well as others at a motel where alleged shooter Gregory Paul Ulrich was staying, authorities said.

All five victims were rushed to the hospital before a hospital spokeswoman confirmed the death later on Tuesday. Three of the victims remained in stable but critical condition and a fourth had been discharged.

Expand Close Gregory Paul Ulrich was arrested following a shooting at a health clinic in Buffalo, Minnesota (Wright County Sheriffs Office/AP) / Facebook

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Whatsapp Gregory Paul Ulrich was arrested following a shooting at a health clinic in Buffalo, Minnesota (Wright County Sheriffs Office/AP)

The attack happened at a clinic in the community of about 15,000 people roughly 40 miles north-west of Minneapolis. Authorities said Ulrich, of Buffalo, opened fire at the facility and was arrested before noon.

Though police said it was too early to tell if Ulrich had targeted a specific doctor, court records show he at one point had been ordered to have no contact with a man whose name matches that of a doctor at the clinic.

As authorities searched the clinic for more victims, they found the suspicious device and evacuated the building, Wright County Sheriff Sean Deringer said.

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Whatsapp Authorities say one has died and Ulrich has been taken into custody (David Joles/Star Tribune/AP)

It was not immediately clear whether that device exploded, but TV footage showed several shattered plate-glass windows at the clinic. Mr Deringer said suspicious devices were also found at a local Super 8 motel where Ulrich had been staying, and there were at least two shattered windows there as well.

Hennepin County Medical Center spokeswoman Christine Hill said Tuesday night that a person brought to the hospital after being shot at the Buffalo clinic had died.

Police Chief Pat Budke said Ulrich has had a long history of conflict with health care clinics in the area.

All I can say is, its a history that spans several years and theres certainly a history of him being unhappy with health care  with the health care that hed received, Mr Budke said.
TRAVERSE CITY  An anonymous donor has pledged a $20,000 donation if at least 214 women renew their memberships or join Impact100 Traverse City for the first time by Feb. 14.

Women of all ages and backgrounds are invited to join by contributing $1,000, all of which will be granted later this year. No minimum engagement is required, which allows individuals to participate at the level that best suits their schedule.
Are you on a trip on the Western Kenya tourism circuit and would wish to see one of the largest aquatic antelopes only found in East and Central Africa?

Then King'wal swamp conservancy in Nandi County is the place to visit and have a glimpse of the rare antelope sitatunga.

Scientists say their rear legs are longer than the front ones and they spend most of the time in swampy, marshy areas with thick, long grass.

Located some 40 kilometres off the Eldoret-Kisumu highway, the King'wal marshland is a natural habitat for more than 200 of the swamp-dwelling antelopes.

The marshland is a stunning ecotourism and sight-seeing habitat patronised by local and international vacationers for culture and education.

Covering more than 10,000 hectares of wetland replete with papyrus plants, the wetland is also home to exceptional species of birds and reptiles.

Sharp horns

To access the sanctuary, one can take the Eldoret-Kapsabet highway before making a turn onto a murram road off Chepterit trading centre.

The shy antelopes are known to come out of their hideouts in the evening - at around 6pm - to graze.

The male ones are brown and heavily built with semi-twisted sharp horns and sporadically fight for territorial dominance.

King'wal is one of the two swamps in Kenya hosting the rare antelopes. The other is Saiwa swamp in Trans Nzoia County.

Besides Kenya, sitatunga are found in Uganda, Tanzania, South Sudan, Rwanda, Angola and Ghana among others.

The Kenya Wildlife Services (KWS) and communities around the marshland have erected viewing towers for tourists to catch a glimpse of the antelopes.

"We have developed tourism infrastructure, mapped out resources inventory in biodiversity areas to safeguard the endangered sitatunga antelopes and attract more tourists," said Mr Joshua Lagat of Mateget Conservancy Group.

Adjacent to the King'wal swamp is Keben springs, Nandi rock, Kaptumek game reserve and Kibirong swamp, where one can watch rare birds.

"Most of these ecotourism projects are community-driven where they are empowered on environmental conservation and promotion of tourism as an alternative source of income," explained Mr Lagat.

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He disclosed that previously, sitatungas were killed by farmers who cultivate crops near the swamp, while some of the locals hunted the animals for meat.

Conservation efforts

"Sustained conservation efforts have led to an increase in the population of the rare antelopes and boosted the number of tourists visiting the beautiful nature," said Mr Lagat.

According to Nandi County Lands, Water and Environment Chief Officer Solomon Mangira, the devolved unit is losing millions of shillings in illegal poaching of the rare antelopes.

"There is a need to protect the sitatunga from poachers who believe its meat has medicinal value," said Mr Mangira.

Security teams have been deployed to the swamp to stop poachers from killing the animals.

Statistics by the KWS indicate that Uasin-Gishu County has a population of 40 semi-aquatic antelopes at the Kesses scheme; Saiwa National Park in Trans-Nzoia has 60 sitatungas, while King'wal Swamp has 200.

According to the National Environmental Complaints Committee secretary, Dr John Chumo, measures have been put in place to protect the sitatunga from illegal poaching.

"The protection of sitatunga will also complement the survival of over 300 species of birds which coexist with the antelopes at the swamp," said Dr Chumo.

He disclosed that the Kingwal swamp, with more than 300 species of birds, has been classified as an Important Bird Area (IBA) by the KWS and has the potential income generation to the local community through bird watching.
Police have charged the partner of missing woman Ju Zhang with murder.

Joon Seong Tan was charged on Thursday night and is expected to face Melbourne Magistrates Court on Friday.

Police say the investigation into the matter is ongoing. Officers spent hours searching bushland in Melbournes north-east for clues that could lead to the missing woman on Thursday, after Mr Tan was taken into custody for a second time.

Ten days after the Epping mothers disappearance, detectives scoured the Darebin Creek Trail near Ivanhoe for hours on Thursday as the search for the missing woman intensified.
Coronavirus. Credit: European Centers for Disease Control

Russia officially surpassed four million coronavirus infections Wednesday, days after the country dramatically revised upwards its fatality rate, cementing its place as one of the world's worst-hit nations.

A government tally showed infections had reached 4,012,710, which is the fourth-highest rate globally after the United States, India and Brazil.

But Russia has come under fire for its official virus statistics and the government's stated death toll of 78,134 in particular has been undermined by recent mortality data.

Figures published by statistics agency Rosstat on Monday showed more than 162,000 virus-related deaths last year, more than double the number reported by the government's task force so far.

Russia has frequently come under fire for downplaying the impact of the pandemic and only counting fatalities where coronavirus was found to be the primary cause of death after an autopsy.

The country had been battered recently by a second wave of infections but has held back on reimposing lockdowns like other European countries and instead relied on a nationwide vaccine rollout.

Russia said Wednesday that 2.2 million people in the country had been administered the jab since vaccinations began in January.

The mayor of Moscow Sergei Sobyain said last month that half of the city's population, or at least six million people, had been infected with the virus, suggesting a much higher nationwide toll.

Still, last month he also announced a significant easing of restrictions in the capital, which is the epicentre of the virus outbreak in Russia.

Bars and restaurants are operating as usual, schools have reopened and companies are no longer mandated to have staff work from home. Mask wearing in public is still mandatory.

Explore further Follow the latest news on the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak

 2021 AFP
The Best Little Floorhouse in Texas Your choice for flooring in Central Texas! Your flooring is more than just the surface you walk on  it's an integral part of your home. With over 35 years of flooring experience, The Best Little Floorhouse in Texas has the resources and knowled
Qubool Hai 2.0 Teaser: Surbhi Jyoti And Karan Singh Grover To Return As Asad-Zoya On 12th March

Fans were over the moon with joy when it was reported that the gorgeous Surbhi Jyoti and the very handsome Karan Singh Grover will be reuniting on-screen for the second season of their show Qubool Hai. The 2012 series, which focused on the Muslim community and initially aimed to dispel stereotypes regarding Islam, followed the eternal love story of two very different individuals-- Zoya Farooqui and Asad Ahmed Khan. The adorable chemistry of the lead pair along with the gripping story-line made it one of the most loves shows on television.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by karan singh grover (@iamksgofficial)

Last year in the month of December, Surbhi and Karan jetted off to Belgrade, Serbia to begin shooting the sequel which has been titled Qubool Hai 2.0. Sneak peeks were shared on social media and fans eagerly waited for the first promo. Well much to our delight, Karan and Surbhi took to their social media handles today to announce that Asad and Zoya will be returning to our screens on 12th March on digital platform ZEE5. They also shared a beautiful teaser which left us mesmerized once again.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Surbhi Jyoti (@surbhijyoti)

Remember how Asad and Zoya met for the first time? She ran away from her wedding and bumped into him. Well, the teaser of Qubool Hai 2.0 reveals that they will meet again in a similar fashion. How romantic! Are you excited to see Karan and Surbhi as Asad and Zoya again?
Two Queensland women accused of illegally travelling to Melbourne at the height of the COVID-19 outbreak, and lying to border officials on their return, have also been charged by NSW police.

Olivia Winnie Muranga, 20, and Diana Lasu, 21, have each been charged with knowingly making a false or misleading statement over their alleged travel through Sydney Domestic Airport last year.

Olivia Muranga (left) and Diana Lasu were infected with COVID-19 when they flew to Brisbane from Melbourne via Sydney last year. Credit:Nine News

They went through Sydney on July 21 last year on their way back to Queensland from Victoria, and are accused of lying to NSW border officials.

NSW Police Force said in a statement Ms Muranga was charged on November 19, appeared at Downing Centre Local Court on December 21 and will reappear at the same court on March 17, 2021.
A group of about 70 Amazon investors are telling the company to stop interfering in efforts by workers to join a union at the online retailers Bessemer fulfillment center.

Financial Times is reporting the investors, led by the Swedish groups Folksam and Ohman Fonder, control more than $20 billion in company shares.

The group includes the comptrollers for both New York State and New York City, Legal and General Investment Management, BMO Global Asset Management and the Church of England Pensions Board.

FT reported that the group, in a letter, called upon Amazon to remain neutral in the fight and end union-busting efforts. They noted that the company website states that it respects employee rights to join or not join unions without fear or reprisal, intimidation, or harassment.

Ballots go out this week to more than 5,000 workers at the center in a mail-in vote on whether to be represented by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), which has a membership of up to 18,000 members in Alabama. Workers must return the ballots by March 29.

Workers and union organizers have said publicly that the company has employed various union-busting tactics over the past few weeks, including mandatory meetings, text messages and a website. Employees say they are told at training sessions that unions are broke, bad for business, with union leaders spending union dues on lavish lifestyles.

Amazon has said it does not believe the RWDSU represents the majority of its employees views.

Our employees choose to work at Amazon because we offer some of the best jobs available everywhere we hire, and we encourage anyone to compare our total compensation package, health benefits, and workplace environment to any other company with similar jobs, spokesman Max Gleber said in a statement.
Senate votes that Trump impeachment trial is constitutional, even as most Republicans vote against proceeding. Trump's second impeachment trial opens in the Senate, first for an ex-president.

However, a wide array of Senate Republicans harshly criticized former President Donald Trump's defense team on the opening day of his second impeachment trial, arguing that Trump attorney Bruce Castor had delivered a rambling and unfocused argument in making the case that the proceedings are unconstitutional.

"I thought the President's lawyer, the first lawyer, just rambled on and on and on," John Cornyn of Texas, a member of Senate GOP leadership, said of Castor, adding that the lawyer "didn't really address the constitutional argument. Finally the second lawyer got around to it, and, I thought, did an effective job."

Castor opened Trump's defense with a meandering presentation and warned that a second impeachment trial in 13 months would "open the floodgates" to future impeachments, even making the rhetorically unfounded suggestion that former Obama administration Attorney General Eric Holder could be impeached.

Prominent Republicans argued on Tuesday that it was hard to understand exactly what Castor's argument was, while emphasizing that they thought attorney David Schoen was more skilled in his role.

GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said, "I was really stunned at the first attorney who presented for former President Trump. I couldn't figure out where he was going, spent 45 minutes going somewhere, but I don't think he helped with us better understanding where he was coming from on the constitutionality of this. And I felt that Mr. Schoen ... did a better job, but I think they sure had a missed opportunity with their first, first attorney there."

GOP Sen. Susan Collins of Maine was also critical of Castor's performance, telling CNN, "I thought the second lawyer ... made the arguments very well. I was perplexed by the first attorney, who did not seem to make any arguments at all, which was an unusual approach to take."

The criticism is a stinging rebuke to Trump and his defense team from members of his own party, and may reflect a growing willingness on the part of Republicans to criticize the former President in the wake of the Capitol attack he provoked, even as it looks all but certain that he will be acquitted at the end of the trial by Senate Republicans.

Six Republicans Vote that Impeachment is Constitutional

Six Republican Senators joined their Democratic colleagues to vote that the impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump is constitutional. The Senate confirmed the constitutionality of Trump's impeachment trial by 56-44 votes following presentation from both sides -- House impeachment managers and lawyers representing the former president -- paving the way for the historic impeachment trial of the 45th President of the United States who left office on January 20.

From Wednesday onwards, each of the two sides -- the House impeachment managers and Trump lawyers -- would have up to 16 hours to present their case before the 100-member Senate for them to vote on the impeachment of Trump days later.

Both the Republicans and the Democrats have 50 members each. To impeach Trump, the Senate needs to vote the House impeachment motion by 67 votes. On Tuesday, six Republicans supported the Democrats in their effort to impeach Trump. Now they need the support of at least another 11 Republicans to do that. Given the current situation that seems to be unlikely, political analysts said, noting that the entire process is most likely to end up in the acquittal of the former president. Trump is the first president in the American history to be impeached twice. He is also the first president ever to have faced impeachment trial after he left the office of presidency.

Republican Senators who voted along with the Democrats were Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse, Bill Cassidy and Pat Toomey. Trump's impeachment trial is slated to begin Wednesday noon. Earlier, the House impeachment managers started the debate on the constitutionality of the impeachment by showing footage of the Capitol Hill riots on January 6, which is the main basis of the charge sheet against him. The Democrats plan to use a lot of video footage from the attack on the US Capitol by supporters of Trump to make their case.

If that's not an impeachable offense, then there is no such thing. And if the President's arguments for a January exception are upheld, then even if everyone agrees that if he's culpable for these events, even if the evidence proves, as we think this definitely does, that the president incited a violent insurrection on the day Congress met to finalise the presidential election, he would have you believe there is absolutely nothing the Senate can do about it -- no trial, no facts. He wants you to decide that the Senate is powerless at that point. That can't be right, Lead House Impeachment Manager Jamie Raskin argued. Trump's attorneys David Schoen and Bruce Castor argued that impeaching a former president when he is a private citizen is unconstitutional, and that in doing so they warned the Democrats were setting a wrong precedent. Media reports said that Trump was dissatisfied with the defense by his lawyers.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said President Joe Biden is going to wait for the Senate to determine the outcome of this impeachment trial. His view is that his role should be currently focused on addressing the needs of the American people, putting people back to work, addressing the pandemic, she said in response to a question. Biden himself refrained from speaking on the impeachment.

"...I tell people that I have a job. My job is to keep people. We have already lost over 4,50,000 people (due to the coronavirus pandemic) and we could lose a whole lot more if we don't act and act decisively. A lot of people, as I have said before, children are going to bed hungry. A lot of families are food insecure. They are in trouble. That's my job. The Senate has their job and they are about to begin it and I am sure they are going to conduct themselves well. That's all I am going to say about impeachment," Biden told reporters at the White House.
Taoiseach Micheal Martin is likely to require a Covid vaccine if he travels to the White House for St Patricks Day.

Diplomatic sources briefed on discussions around the potential Washington DC trip said there would be an expectation that Mr Martin would be vaccinated ahead of an in-person meeting with US President Joe Biden.

The Irish Independent understands officials in Washington would be surprised if Mr Martin is not vaccinated ahead of any US trip.

There has also been surprise among US officials over reports in Ireland of a potential public backlash if Mr Martin is vaccinated and the trip goes ahead. Sinn Fein has called on the Taoiseach not to travel to the US given current travel restrictions.

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Mr Biden, senior US politicians and several hundred White House officials have already been vaccinated.

If required to undergo vaccination, Mr Martin would need to receive his first dose soon in order to be fully vaccinated in time for the trip.

The Taoiseachs spokesman said a decision on whether to go ahead with the visit will be made in the next two weeks.

His position has always been that he and the Cabinet will take their place in the vaccination schedule on public health advice, which is after the over-70s and the frontline healthcare workers, he said.

We would have to get to a position where a trip is happening and if vaccination is part of the public health protocol for the visit that would have to be considered. Travel to Brussels is possible with testing protocols, but the US might have different protocols.

The White House did not respond to queries about the protocols for visiting foreign dignitaries.

Some senior Government figures believe the Taoiseach is unlikely to travel given the status of the virus.

Officials in Dublin and Washington have discussed a possible virtual event, with Irish diplomats confident a substantive engagement will go ahead either way.

Outlining Sinn Feins opposition to the US trip on Monday, Dublin Fingal TD Louise OReilly told Virgin Media: In the midst of a global pandemic, when people are being told dont go 5km from your homes, then I think he should show some leadership.

Ms OReilly, whose constituency is nearly 30km from Virgins studios, said: All travel that can be avoided should be avoided.
SW Nigeria recently revealed the latest addition to its brand influencers, notably referred to as the 'Sparkle Queens,' which is Erica Nlewedim.

She joins other SW Nigeria's diverse and influential portfolio of personalities which includes the likes of Nancy Isime, Tomike Adeoye, and Anita Okoye.

According to a statement, for over 125 years, Swarovski has globally aligned itself with promoting the well-being, development and creativity of women through strategic partnerships and initiatives.

"SW Nigeria has proven to be a pioneering brand by continuously setting the standard through collaborative, fruitful and meaningful relationships with its influencers," it stated.

It revealed that Erica was recently unveiled through an inclusive Meet and Greet activation at SW Nigeria's flagship store at Ikeja City Mall.

"The Swarovski team were conscious to make the event Covid-compliant, distributing numerous face masks and bottles of hand sanitizer. This event is a further testament to the brand's commitment to supporting women by creating unique networking opportunities and unforgettable experiences driven by an electrifying ambience," the statement added.

Speaking on the new signing, Executive Director of Polo Luxury Group, Jennifer Obayuwana said: "Erica is the perfect addition to the SW Nigeria family. She is proof that you can achieve your dreams with dedication and hard work and we know that she is going to have an outstanding impact on the brand.

"Erica has demonstrated a high level of integrity, class and sophistication which aligns with the values of the SW Nigeria brand and we are excited to reveal the unique activations that we have planned with her."

Also speaking on the new signing, Nlewedim said: "I feel so excited and honoured to be on boarded as the new Sparkle Queen for SW Nigeria. This is like a dream come true for me and the brand also speaks so much to my personality. I hope to make the brand proud as their ambassador, grow their share of voice in Nigeria using my platform as well as pull customers who are able to patronize the brand".
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Travel advice from the Government descended into farce last night as ministers bickered over whether it is safe to book a summer break in the UK this year.

Transport Secretary Grant Shapps sparked a furious backlash after declaring yesterday morning: People shouldnt be booking holidays right now  not domestically or internationally.

As anger mounted, Downing Street appeared to distance itself from Mr Shapps at lunchtime, saying it was a choice for individuals.

But Boris Johnson, who earlier this month said he was optimistic about the prospect of summer holidays, appeared to change his mind yesterday.

The Prime Minister told a Downing Street press conference it was just too early for people to be certain about what we will be able to do this summer.

On a chaotic day, Health Secretary Matt Hancock then revealed to Tory MPs he has already booked a holiday in Cornwall this summer. Whitehall sources told the Mail that, despite the cautious message from the PM, Chancellor Rishi Sunak and Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden are working on packages to promote holidays in the UK.

One insider said: We are going to strain every sinew to let people have a holiday this summer.

Another senior Tory said: We are in danger of making holiday a dirty word when it should be exactly the sort of aspirational thing we are celebrating.'

Health Secretary Matt Hancock (pictured) has revealed to Tory MPs he has already booked a holiday in Cornwall this summer

Transport Secretary Grant Shapps sparked a furious backlash after declaring yesterday morning: People shouldnt be booking holidays right now  not domestically or internationally'

Ministers have already put dreams of a summer break abroad in jeopardy, with the introduction of draconian border controls backed by the threat of ten-year prison sentences for those who try to cheat the system. Mr Shapps yesterday said opening up foreign travel would depend on everybody having their vaccinations  a process not currently due to be completed until the autumn.

The PM later told MPs that people would have to get used to the idea of re-vaccinating in the autumn to counter new variants of the disease. But suggestions that domestic holidays could also be disrupted sparked anger among Tory MPs and travel bosses.

Sir Charles Walker, vice-chairman of the 1922 Committee of backbench Conservative MPs, said the suggestion that people should not book summer breaks in the UK was extraordinary and unacceptable.

He insisted the goalposts for easing lockdown had not so much been moved as ripped out and moved to another playing field.

Shapps says 'vaccines passports' likely to happen in the future Grant Shapps today said he believes 'vaccine passports' will happen so holidays can resume when the pandemic eases. The Transport Secretary confirmed the government is working on a system and was having talks with other countries. However, he stressed it is not the same thing as documentation to allow people to access services in this country, which is not being considered. Mr Shapps said in a round of interviews: 'I imagine that in the future there will be an international system where countries will want to know that you have been potentially vaccinated or potentially had tests taken before flying. 'I was speaking to my Singaporean counterpart, I was speaking to my US counterpart this week, and we'll have discussions about those things to have an internationally recognised system.' Advertisement

He said: We had summer holidays last year when we didnt have vaccines. Now we have vaccines coming out of our ears we are being told we cant book a holiday. It is very strange and very frustrating.

Sir Charles, who called on the PM to rein in Mr Shapps and Mr Hancock, warned that lockdown was becoming an extended exercise in almost studied and deliberate cruelty for a nation now that is increasingly anxious and under pressure.

In a further sign of Tory unease about the lockdown, 24 MPs yesterday staged a symbolic rebellion over Covid regulations relating to house parties.

Steve Double, Tory chairman of the all-party hospitality and tourism group, said it was almost too late to book a holiday in many parts of the UK.

He stressed it was essential that the PM set out a timetable for the reopening of the domestic tourism industry when he publishes his road map out of lockdown later this month.

Mr Double said: I dont know about telling people its too early to book a UK holiday this summer  in many places like Cornwall its too late.

People are listening to what is being said about foreign travel and booking in this country.

The PM previously indicated that the road map, due in the week beginning February 22, would offer guidance on holidays. Asked directly whether it was safe to book for this summer, he replied yesterday: I understand why people want to make plans now, but were just going to have to be a little bit more patient.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer last night urged ministers to stop the mixed messages on holidays adding: That really isnt helping.

Mr Johnson also warned that the reopening of the economy and society would be cautious.

He added: What businesses up and down the country are going to want is a cautious and measured approach that is pragmatic and one we dont have to retreat from or reverse.

Microbiologist Professor Paul Hunter yesterday said the tough border restrictions should be lifted once the over-50s are vaccinated at the end of April.

Ministers have already put dreams of a summer break abroad in jeopardy, with the introduction of draconian border controls backed by the threat of ten-year prison sentences for those who try to cheat the system. Mr Shapps yesterday said opening up foreign travel would depend on everybody having their vaccinations  a process not currently due to be completed until the autumn (stock image)

Boris Johnson (pictured), who earlier this month said he was optimistic about the prospect of summer holidays, appeared to change his mind yesterday. The Prime Minister told a Downing Street press conference it was just too early for people to be certain about what we will be able to do this summer

He told the BBCs World At One: The things we are trying to keep out are probably already here. Border restrictions may have some value in terms of delaying things until we have got more vaccine. But in the longer term I cannot see them having any substantial ongoing benefit after April.

Travel chiefs yesterday warned of a second lost summer and stepped up urgent calls for a bailout and recovery package.

Tim Alderslade, of Airlines UK, wrote to Mr Johnson, saying in order to run a full flying programme in July, airlines need to begin planning by the end of the month.

CAN I GET A REFUND FOR HOLIDAYS? Can I get a refund if my travel company cancels the trip? Yes, if you've booked a package holiday, by law the travel company must refund your holiday if they cancel it. Some firms have been pushing customers to accept vouchers, but you are entitled to a full cash refund. Those who have privately booked holidays will likely be able to rearrange their flights for free. But accommodation costs will be harder to recover and most travel insurance policies do not cover government coronavirus travel restrictions. Can I get a refund if I cancel my flight? Many companies have a policy whereby if they cancel the trip, customers are entitled to a full cash refund. Whereas if the customer cancels, often they will only be entitled to a voucher to put towards a future flight, or the option of rescheduling. The best option is checking with your provider. I no longer want to travel. Should I cancel my flight now? Probably not. If you cancel now, you are not entitled to a refund under the law. But you are if the company cancels your flights. Most carriers will also let you rearrange your flights free of charge. Guy Anker of Money Saving Expert told MailOnline: 'The general message is wait to see if they cancel on you, unless you get close to their cut off to get something back.' He added: 'It's a bit like a game of chicken to some extent. It's not a game of wait to the last second, it's a game of wait to the last second until you can get something back.' Advertisement

Ryanair boss Michael OLeary told Sky News: If everybody over 50 is vaccinated by the end of May, frankly theres going to be no justification for restricting peoples civil liberties or forcing them to sit at home when the risk of coronavirus has been hugely reduced.

Ryanair is still urging people to book summer holidays, with Mr O'Leary firing a stinging broadside at the Transport Secretary.

'Nobody in the travel industry would take any advice from Grant Shapps who has mismanaged almost every aspect of travel during the pandemic,' he said.

Tui announced yesterday that 2.8million people have booked holidays for this year, more than half of them Britons, while Jet2 yesterday cancelled all of its holidays until April 14.

Many of the trips have already been rescheduled from last year, or booked on the back of ministers' previous predictions that life would be back to normal by 'Christmas' or 'Easter'.

Package holiday customers now face a wait to see if companies will cancel their holidays, entitling them to a refund, or offer to reschedule their breaks for later in the year or next year.

Anyone who has booked their own flights should be able to reschedule for free under most airlines coronavirus rules, but face losing accommodation costs such as Airbnbs.

And if rules were to be lifted before Autumn - Matt Hancock has indicated quarantine rules will stay until it is 'safe' to lift them - prices are expected to rocket as demand soars for a limited supply of flights and destinations.

Ryanair has already said it still expects the travel restrictions to be lifted despite the tough rhetoric from the government.

A spokesman said: 'The UK's successful vaccine rollout program eliminates the need for these draconian travel restrictions from May onwards.

'If all over 50s are vaccinated by May as predicted by Boris Johnson, then the risk of the Covid virus to the health service is severely diminished and this must give rise to the removal of travel restrictions on UK citizens, particularly on short-haul flights both within the UK and to/from Europe.'

Meanwhile staycation costs have already rocketed this year, with one ultra-luxurious two week break in Scotland being marketed for 600,000 and Cornwall reporting a flood of bookings.

Other Brits are block booking holiday cottages for weeks at a time for a so-called 'workation' - allowing them to work remotely from their holiday destination.

Those who have organised a staycation include Health Secretary Matt Hancock, who announced he will holiday in Cornwall this year, despite Shapps warning against booking domestic holidays.

One disappointed customer is Lauren Porteous, 23, from Newcastle, has been forced to re-book her trip to Florida three times during the pandemic - and is now braced for it to be delayed for a fourth time.

She initially booked her trip to the US in April last year in the hope of going in November, before it was pushed back to May and now August.

She told MailOnline: 'We're going to be waiting until closer to the time to see how things are... If we have to change our flights and dates again though, we will.'

The test analyst, who also has a trip booked for Los Angeles in August, said she has a mixed experience with travel companies - some have been accommodating while others have been a 'nightmare'.

Asked if she was worried about her trip being cancelled, the she said: 'I'm more worried about being stuck here for longer... I hate being in the same place for too long and I'm missing LA so much.

Lauren Porteous, 23, from Newcastle, has been forced to re-book her trip to Florida three times during the pandemic - and is now braced for it to be delayed for a fourth time

Tui announced yesterday that 2.8million people have booked holidays for this year, while Jet2 said there is 'huge pent-up demand' for trips abroad

'At the moment we can keep changing flights as many times as we need, so I'm not too worried about it yet.'

However many would-be holidaymakers are demanding refunds and want to know what what options they have to claw back their money.

Experts advised people against immediately cancelling their flights as it could prevent their entitlement to a full cash refund.

Guy Anker, deputy editor of MoneySavingExpert, told MailOnline: 'This is a bad story for people who want a holiday - but financially there's a lot that can be done.'

He said: 'A lot of it will depend on the holiday company and their rules. So the first thing to do is check with your holiday company.

'The second point is that a lot of these companies will have built-in flexibility.

'The general message is wait to see if they cancel on you, unless you get close to their cut off to get something back.

He explained that many, but not all, companies have a policy whereby if they cancel the trip, customers are entitled to a full cash refund.

Whereas if the customer cancels, often they will only be entitled to a voucher to put towards a future flight, or the option of rescheduling.

Mr Anker said: 'It's a bit like a game of chicken to some extent. It's not a game of wait to the last second, it's a game of wait to the last second until you can get something back.'

Nicky Kelvin, director of content at The Points Guy UK, agreed: For now, the best advice is to sit tight.

'If you don't already know, check now with the airline or company you have booked with to see if your booking is flexible or refundable.

'If it is, you can wait to see what happens, and then be ready to cancel or re-book once you can be certain the trip won't happen.'
There was a glimmer of hope after two persons listed as missing in the avalanche and flash floods returned to their homes safely on Wednesday after being stranded in different areas of Chamoli

The toll in the Uttarakhand flash floods rose to 34 on Wednesday with two more bodies being recovered and more than 170 still missing, according to several media reports.

The missing people include those working at NTPC's 480-MW Tapovan-Vishnugad project and the 13.2-MW Rishiganga Hydel Project, and villagers whose homes nearby were washed away after a glacier burst at Joshimath on Sunday triggered an avalanche and a deluge in the Alaknanda river system.

Late Wednesday evening, after three days of efforts to rescue 30-35 labourers trapped in NTPCs Intake Adit tunnel in Uttarakhands Tapovan, the rescue team had to change their strategy, The Indian Express reported.

The change was brought about after NTPC authorities informed that the last known worksite of the trapped labourers is another silt filtration tunnel located 12 metres below the Intake Adit.

Garhwal commissioner Ravinath Raman told The Indian Express, Earlier, we were told about the probability of about 34 labourers present 180 metres inside the Intake Adit tunnel, and we were digging in that direction. Today, they (NTPC authorities) informed us that the last known worksite of the labourers is a silt filtration tunnel (SFT) 12 metres below the Intake Adit Tunnel and about 72 metres from its opening. With this, the strategy of going up to 180 metres has been changed. Drilling will be done in the SFT and lights with cameras will be lowered into the area.

Sources also told the newspaper that Uttarakhand government authorities, in a meeting today, directed NTPC officials to share correct information, and send expert engineers of the tunnel to the site to assist in the rescue operations.

Earlier Wednesday, Hindustan Times reported that rescuers were still clearing the slush and boulders from the tunnel in NTPC's hydel power project in Tapovan, but were unable to reach them. Rescuers are using drones to laser scan the tunnel to determine the volume of slush and find the workers and dog squads have also been deployed, the newspaper reported.

"Till Wednesday evening 34 bodies were recovered out of which 10 have been identified while 24 are yet to be identified. Now, out of the total 204 missing, 170 are yet to be found," Uttarakhands director general of police, Ashok Kumar told the newspaper.

The bodies of two police personnel found Tuesday among the dead were identified on Wednesday as assistant sub-inspector Manoj Choudhary and constable Balbir Singh. Choudhary was deployed as a security guard at the NTPC project in Tapovan while Singh was at the Rishi Ganga project, the newspaper reported.

Two missing persons turn up safe

Amid the doom and gloom there was a glimmer of hope after two persons who were listed as missing in the avalanche and flash floods returned to their homes safely on Wednesday after being stranded in different areas of Chamoli district following the calamity three days ago, officials told PTI.

Suraj Singh from Chamoli in Uttarakhand and Rashid from Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh returned to their homes on Wednesday, Additional District Information Officer, Chamoli, Ravindra Negi said.

Singh and Rashid were among those missing after the calamity, as per official records. The duo were stranded while they were returning to their villages, the officials said.

The families of workers missing from the Rishiganga hydel project site created a ruckus on Wednesday accusing the authorities of not carrying out the rescue operations properly. The kin of around 40 missing workers engaged in a heated argument with the authorities of the project for two hours, alleging lack of urgency in the rescue work.

"It is four days since the tragedy occurred but all the focus is on restoring connectivity. Rescuing the missing people does not seem to be the priority," alleged a man from Punjab, whose brother Jugal worked at the Rishiganga hydel project.

"Jugal's phone rings when his number is dialled," he said.

Rishiganga project manager Kamal Chauhan, who had to face the wrath of the families, said his help was not being taken by the administration to locate the missing.

Meanwhile, Tibetan spiritual leader Dalai Lama has written to Uttarakhand chief minister Trivendra Singh Rawat, expressing his condolences to the families of the people killed in a glacier disaster in Chamoli district of the state.

"I offer my condolences to those who have lost loved ones, and pray for them. I also pray for the safety and well-being of those who are still missing. I understand that both the central and the state governments are engaged in rescue work and are doing their utmost to provide relief to people affected by this calamity," the letter read.

"As a gesture of solidarity with the people of Uttarakhand, I have asked the Dalai Lama Trust to make a donation towards the relief and rescue efforts," it added.

With inputs from PTI

Chrysler's RWD platform is positively ancient, and while the 300 and Dodge Charger still use this thing, there used to be another member of the family. That's right, we're talking about the Dodge Magnum For most of its life, the Magnum was a regular American barge, nothing to write home about. But at one point, Daimler's European influences must have rubbed off because a wagon was approved for production. It wasn't exactly a hot seller, with about 170,000 units delivered to American customers, but it left a lasting impression on car culture, along with its Cadillac competitor, the CTS wagon.In November 2007, Chrysler announced that the "Magnum, along with the PT Cruiser convertible, the Crossfire, and the Pacifica were not earning their keep." Production ended the following spring, its place being by the Journey minivan. In more recent years, this quirky wagon is witnessing a comeback, as more and more people are getting one. We've also seen a few conversions to the Charger Hellcat sedan front end But this rendering by wb.artist20 goes in the opposite direction, imagining the Magnum not as a sportier Hellcat model but as a luxury Chrysler 300. There is a slight difference here, as Chrysler products are supposed to target a traditional luxury buyer. So there's not a lot of muscle under the hood, and they don't have SUVs so as not to compete with Jeep.As crazy as it might sound, this used to be a real car made by the Daimler-Chrysler alliance. If we remember correctly, the "300C Touring" was assembled by a factory in Austria and was available with an SRT8 engine back about 15 years ago. They even shipped right-hand-drive models over to Japan, though not many of them were sold.Of course, the one in wb.artist20's rendering looks a heck of a lot more modern, thanks to the 300S V8 front end with slightly larger intakes and sporty black wheels. So what do you think, can Chrysler ever sell a wagon again?
Two countries sent their first spacecraft to Mars this week  China and the United Arab Emirates.

A Chinese spacecraft went into orbit around Mars on Wednesday. It followed a United Arab Emirates spacecraft that successfully entered orbit on Tuesday.

Success

Both countries celebrated successfully reaching Martian orbit. Entering orbit has been successful...making it our countrys first artificial Mars satellite, the Chinese space agency announced. Chinas Tianwen-1 spacecraft spent seven months on the trip to Mars and traveled nearly 475 million kilometers. Tianwen, the name of an ancient poem, means Quest for Heavenly Truth.

The UAEs spacecraft is called Amal. Amal is the Arabic word for Hope. Messages on the Hope Mars Missions Twitter page announced the news in Arabic and English on Tuesday. 204 days and more than 480 million kms later, the #HopeProbe is now in the Capture Orbit of #Mars, one post said.



Quick progress

The trips to Mars come at a time when both countries have made quick progress in their space programs. Chinas secretive, military-linked space program brought moon rocks back to Earth in December. That is the first time a country has returned moon rocks back to Earth since the 1970s. China was also the first country to successfully land a spacecraft on the little-explored far side of the moon in 2019.

The UAE first announced its planned mission in 2014 and launched a National Space Program in 2017 to develop local experts. In 2019, Hazza al-Mansouri became the first Emirati in space when he flew to the International Space Station.

Both countries succeeded at something that has been difficult to do in the past. About 60 percent of all Mars missions have ended in failure, crashing, burning up or failing to reach orbit.

Chinas spacecraft will send a vehicle, called a rover, to land on the Martian surface. The goal is to search for signs of life in the area called Utopia Planitia, where the U.S. Viking 2 lander touched down in 1976.

The UAEs spacecraft will remain in a very high Martian orbit. From that orbit, the spacecraft will be able to observe the Martian atmosphere at all times.

Along with Tianwen-1, Amal will join six other spacecraft already operating around Mars. Three are from the United States, two are European and one is from India.



US rover to come soon

A NASA rover called Perseverance is aiming for a February 18 landing on Mars. It, too, will search for signs of ancient life, collecting rocks that will be returned to Earth in about 10 years.

All three of the latest missions were launched in July to take advantage of the closer distance between Earth and Mars at that time. Such an event happens only once every two years.

The U.S. first successfully landed on Mars with two NASA Viking missions in the 1970s. An American lander and rover are in operation there today.

Im John Russell.

John Russell adapted this story from Reuters and AP reports. Mario Ritter, Jr. was the editor. _____________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

artificial  adj. not natural or real : made, produced, or done to seem like something natural

mission  n. a flight by an aircraft or spacecraft to perform a specific task

rover  n. a vehicle used for exploring the surface of a moon, planet, etc.

advantage  n. something (such as a good position or condition) that helps to make someone or something better or more likely to succeed
Government ministers are extremely reluctant to discuss when they will be vaccinated. While many high-profile political figures worldwide have been jabbed in recent weeks  partly to build public confidence in Covid-19 vaccines  there is still no clarity on when Irish government ministers can expect their vaccinations.

They are totally petrified, says one government insider. They are very nervous about it.

The fear among ministers and their officials is that the sight of them being vaccinated when some healthcare workers and nursing home residents are still waiting would torpedo public support for the national effort to beat Covid-19.

When Independent.ie asked a number of Cabinet ministers last week when they expect to get their jabs, the responses ranged from one who said: I thought we'd be last, to another who remarked: If they could vaccinate nurses and doctors that would be a good start.

Health Minister Stephen Donnelly has stated publicly he is in cohort 13 for vaccination  everyone aged between 18 and 54  which means he could be waiting until late into the summer.

However, a senior Coalition figure said they suspect ministers will be in cohort six of the vaccine allocation programme which includes key workers. The groups of workers in this category has yet to be finalised, but is likely to also include gardai and other frontline non-healthcare workers. Vaccination of this cohort is unlikely to begin until April or possibly May.

Read More

There have been no formal discussions between officials in the Health Department and Department of the Taoiseach about vaccinating ministers and key officials.

But the issue is coming to a head now because, as the Irish Independent reported on Wednesday, if Taoiseach Micheal Martin is to visit the White House for St Patricks Day next month, it is likely he will require a vaccination.

President Joe Biden and hundreds of staff who work with him at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue are all vaccinated as are many senior US politicians no matter their age. There is some but not a lot of public debate or controversy in the US about this.

We understand that US officials in Washington are perplexed at the debate emerging in Ireland over the last week where there appears to be the potential for a public backlash if Mr Martin is vaccinated and the annual White House trip goes ahead.

There have been calls for Mr Martin to swerve a trip to the White House this year in solidarity with all of us who are being told to stay at home with Sinn Fein, notwithstanding its sometimes questionable approach to public health restrictions, leading the charge.

Sinn Fein TDs point to the Norths First and Deputy First Minister, DUP leader Arlene Foster and their own Michelle ONeill, deciding to forgo their annual trip to the US.

But there is one crucial difference in that neither would be afforded a bilateral meeting with the US President in the Oval Office, as the Taoiseach would.

This sort of engagement is important to furthering Irelands international agenda on several fronts, not least the plight of Irish people living illegally in the US. This shouldnt be dismissed just because of concerns about the optics of Mr Martin travelling to the US and having the audacity to be vaccinated before doing so.

In fact, he and the entire Cabinet should get their jabs as soon as possible to put an end to an increasingly pointless debate. Whether you support it or not, the work ministers do and the decisions they take are essential to the States pandemic response.
Rwanda exported 43,237 kilogrammes of flowers, earning $467,544 (Rwf456 million) in the week ending February 7, according to data from the National Agricultural Export Development Board (NAEB).

The figures reflect a sharp rise in exports when compared to the previous week when the country exported 19,235 kilogrammes of flowers, which fetched $126,131 (Rwf123 million).

The data imply that flower export volumes increased by more than 200 per cent while revenues rose by over 300 per cent.

NAEB attributed the rise to the increase in demand ahead of the February 14 Valentine's Day. The surge in demand fueled increased production by local floriculturists.

Valentine's [Day] preparation worldwide has led to more demand for the product," said Pie Ntwari, the NAEB Communication Specialist.

The Valentine's Week - considered to be a period of expressing love between partners, runs from February 7 to February 14.

The week comprises days like Rose Day on which roses are presented as a token of love and culminate with the Valentine's Day celebrations.

Despite cancelled weddings due to the Covid-19, the high global death rates caused by the virus has increased the demand for flowers from people paying tribute to their deceased loved ones.

Overall, last week Rwanda exported 366,292 kilogrammes of horticulture produce (including fruits, vegetables and flowers) which generated over $901,000 (Rwf880 million).

Horticulture export volumes and revenues increased by 38.6 per cent and 61 per cent respectively.

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The main markets for Rwanda's horticulture products are DR Congo, Netherlands, UK, Dubai and Belgium. Others included Germany, France, Uganda and Tanzania.

Ntwari said that fruits exporters have been facilitated in the recently lifted lockdown in the City of Kigali to be able to reach several farmers and their farms to buy their produce for export.

"During the week we experienced an increase in value-added products that were exported hence fetching high prices," he said.

He added that there was increased export of products that fetch high prices such as passion fruits, and that cross border trade facilitation also led to the development.

During the 2019/20 fiscal year, Rwanda exported 31,788 tonnes of horticulture commodities which generated $28.7 million.

The country now eyes $130 million from horticulture exports by 2024, according to forecasts from NAEB.
US State Department spokesman Ned Price, seen removing his face-mask, has distanced the agency from propagating theories that Covid-19 came from a Chinese laboratory

The United States distanced itself Tuesday from a theory propagated by former president Donald Trump that Covid-19 came from a Chinese laboratory and voiced support for WHO researchers.

A mission to China from the World Health Organization said Tuesday that it has failed to find the source behind the disease that has killed more than 2.3 million people but said the laboratory hypothesis was "extremely unlikely."

The State Department -- whose chief under Trump, Mike Pompeo, was a leading proponent of the lab theory -- said it was waiting for the full findings from the WHO.

"I think rather than rush to conclusions that may be motivated by anything other than science, we want to see where that data leads us, where that science leads us, and our conclusions will be predicated on that," State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters.

"We clearly support this investigation," he said.

Pompeo was a sworn foe of Beijing and led the charge in blaming China's communist leaders for Covid-19 at a time when Trump faced heavy criticism for his handling of the pandemic at home.

Pompeo pointed to China's early efforts to conceal cases and did not completely rule out that SARS-CoV-2 virus was released deliberately.

In findings released five days before President Joe Biden was sworn in, Pompeo's State Department said the United States was aware that before the mass outbreak that several researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology fell ill with "symptoms consistent with both Covid-19 and common seasonal illnesses."

Price said the January 15 fact sheet was "very clear that it was inconclusive -- it didn't give credence to one theory over another."

Price, however, shared criticism that China concealed information.

"I think clearly the Chinese, at least heretofore, had not offered the requisite transparency that we need and, just as importantly, the international community needs, so that we can prevent these sorts of pandemics from ever happening again," Price said.

Story continues

Asked if China had fully cooperated with the WHO team, he said: "I think the jury's still out."

Trump accused the WHO of being beholden to China and ordered a withdrawal of the United States from the UN body, an action immediately reversed by Biden.

sct/ft
There is no room for complacency yet in Laois with the Covid-19 pandemic as the number of new cases this Wednesday more than doubles what it was yesterday.

There are 21 new cases reported for the county, while it continues to rise higher in the incidence rate table of Irish counties.

The latest report by the National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET) this evening February 10 gives the incidence rate for Laois now at 292.8 per 100,000 people on the back of 248 cases in the past two weeks, a rise instead of decrease as the Level 5 lockdown continues. This means that average cases over five days is 17 a day.

Laois has a higher incidence than neighbouring Kildare, Kilkenny and Tipperary but is lower than Offaly and Carlow which has the third-highest incidence in Ireland. FULL COUNTY BY COUNTY BREAKDOWN AT END OF STORY.

Read also: FRONTLINE FIGHT EASING AT PORTLAOISE HOSPITAL

The latest cases push the total official number of cases in Laois to 2,811 since the virus arrived here in late February 2020.

The incidence at the end of November when restrictions were lifted was 55.5 per 100 k on the back of 45 cases in the previous two weeks.

The NPHET statement said the Health Protection Surveillance Centre (HPSC) has today been notified of 54 additional deaths related to COVID-19. Of those deaths, 45 occurred in February, five in January and four are still under investigation.

The median age of those who died was 86 years and the age range was 48 - 104 years. There has been a total of 3,794* COVID-19 related deaths in Ireland.

As of 8am today, 1,032 COVID-19 patients are hospitalised, of which 173 are in ICU. 40 additional hospitalisations in the past 24 hours.

As of midnight, Tuesday 9th February, the HPSC has been notified of 1,006 confirmed cases of COVID-19. There is now a total of 205,939** confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Ireland.

Of the cases notified today 516 are in Dublin, 63 in Cork, 46 in Galway, 43 in Meath, 36 in Louth and the remaining 302 cases are spread across all other counties.** FULL COUNTY BY COUNTY BREAKDOWN AT END OF STORY.

NPHET highlighted that 476 are men / 524 are women, 65% are under 45 years of age and the median age is 35 years old.

The 7 day incidence is 138.6 per 100,000 people while the 5-day moving average for new cases is down to 848.

NPHET said that as of February 7, 240,487 doses of COVID-19 vaccine have been administered in Ireland:

153,654 people have received their first dose

86,833 people have received their second dose

NPHET says the COVID-19 Dashboard provides up-to-date information on the key indicators of COVID-19 in the community.





*Validation of data at the HPSC has resulted in the denotification of 12 deaths. The figure of 3,794 deaths reflects this.

** Validation of data at the HPSC has resulted in the denotification of 7 cases. The figure of 205,939 cases reflects this

***County data should be considered provisional as the national Computerised Infectious Disease Reporting System (CIDR) is a dynamic system and case details are continually being validated and updated.


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As a pediatric emergency physician in Chicago, I am no stranger to the effects of gun violence in our patient population and society. But what do we do when gun violence is turned on our own community as physicians?

Recently a beloved pediatrician in Austin, Texas, Dr. Lindley Dodson, was held hostage and killed in a murder-suicide carried out by another pediatrician with whom she had no relationship. This senseless tragedy has not only rocked the local Austin pediatric community, but the shockwaves have rippled nationally. The events hit very close to home. I completed my fellowship in Austin and knew Dr. Dodson personally as a compassionate, wonderful doctor who cared deeply about her patients. My colleagues and I struggle to understand how something like this could happen, especially to someone so beloved in our community.

Events like this show us that we are not immune to the effects of gun violence. The COVID-19 pandemic, with increased strain on medical systems and providers along with worsening patient fear and misinformation, has exacerbated the problem worldwide.

There have been several instances of gun violence against physicians in the recent past. In 2018, a gunman killed three people at Mercy Hospital in Chicago, including an emergency physician. In 2017, a disgruntled physician committed a mass shooting at Bronx-Lebanon Hospital Center, killing a doctor and wounding many others. In 2015, a cardiac surgeon was fatally shot at Brigham and Womens Hospital in Boston by an armed man.

While the circumstances of each event may be different, it is clear that physicians are vulnerable. A common theme is that these acts of violence were carried out at each of their workplaces.

Workplace violence is not an uncommon occurrence. According to the World Health Organization, between 8 and 38 percent of health workers worldwide suffer from physical violence at some point in their career, and many more are victims of verbal aggression and threats. When these attacks involve firearms they become more deadly and more terrifying. An article in the Annals of Emergency Medicine found that there were 154 hospital-based shootings between the years 2000-2011.

How do we combat the dovetailing issues of gun violence and health care workplace violence?

In a recent Lancet article, the authors outline several strategies to combat violence against health care workers, especially in this current pandemic climate. In order to understand the scope of the problem, we must prioritize further research on this issue and use this information to design interventions. We must learn from particular incidents of violence and use momentum to form community partnerships with local and state governments to condemn and prevent these attacks. We must ensure accountability against anyone who threatens physician and health care worker safety. And finally, we need security measures to prevent future violence against health care workers.

Similarly, funding gun violence research and strengthening community and government partnerships are key to mitigating firearm injuries. Studies have shown that stronger gun policies are associated with decreased rates of firearm homicide, including laws that strengthen background checks, permits and identification requirements.

Some may say physician shootings are isolated instances that could not have been prevented. I say one physician death is too many, especially when that doctor is a respected member of our community who was in her clinic taking care of children.

Most physicians go into medicine to help people. Most physicians do not fear going to their workplaces. Tragedies like what happened to Dr. Dodson give us pause and leave most of us wondering if it could have just as easily been ourselves.

My hope is that Dr. Dodsons tragic death will not be in vain. With the post-election promise of stronger leadership on anti-gun violence, now is the time to make strides to protect our most vulnerable populations and ourselves as physicians.

Sheryl Yanger is a pediatric emergency physician.

Image credit: Shutterstock.com
[February 10, 2021] i2S2 Formed with Goal of Supporting Critical Government Operations

Integrated ICBM Support Services, LLC (i2S2) today announced it is planning to establish a presence in Utah, in preparation to support the U.S. Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center's (AFNWC) next-generation mission for national security and strategic deterrence. i2S2 was formed exclusively to pursue the ICBM Integrated Services Contract (ISC) 2.0. It combines the resources and expertise of three industry leaders- Leidos, Amentum and Apex (News - Alert) Systems - into one dedicated entity to meet ISC challenges ahead. "We know this is a vital mission. Our strategic nuclear deterrence is the foundation for our nation's security and sustaining global peace," said Darrell Graddy, i2S2 President. "The i2S2 member companies bring exceptional experience, helping large, highly-technical programs sustain critical and complex operations. We're excited about the prospect of launching this team in the Silicon Slopes area, a great place to live and raise a family, with a culture of mission and service to others. If we are privileged to be awarded the ISC 2.0 contract, we look forward to growing that team and providing superior support to AFNWC's mission." i2S2 was formed to help usher in a new era of response for the land-based leg of the country's nuclear defense triad. The ICBM Directorate and the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) Directorate oversee a complex, critical mission that could benefit from i2S2's exceptional expertise. Core i2S2 company highlights include: Leidos: Leidos contributes expertise in Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE), Digital Engineering, Modeling and Simulation (M&S), and Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning. This expertise complements a rich history of successful large, technically-complex program sustainment. Coupled with mature financial, contractual, acquisition, program and task order management processes, Leidos holds the industry standard for exemplary program oversight, product delivery and mission success.

Amentum: With exceptional experience in systems engineering, mission resilience and advanced weapon systems, Amentum specializes in operational sustainment services for large-scale, critical nuclear programs throughout the Department of Defense and Department of Energy. Its proven track record in major contract transitions, successful JV standups and management expertise will add strength to AFNWC.

Apex Systems: A global leader in Workforce Mobilization solutions, Apex Systems brings expertise, tools and processes to support rapid, proactive and responsive recruiting of talented employees. The unique and diverse talent requirements of ISC 2. demand a local and national approach to attract and hire the best people over the long life of the contract.



As the Air Force sustains readiness of the Minuteman III platform and transitions to GBSD, the team selected for ISC 2.0 will need to pivot with ease to the cadence of the mission. i2S2 is purpose-built for this mission, bringing the domain expertise and operational capability needed to adapt to changing requirements and drive efficiencies into resource allocation. The team will be fully supported and enabled in an exceptional work environment that prioritizes employee development, inclusive collaboration and outstanding compensation and benefits packages.

"We understand how critical recruiting and retention are to AFNWC," added Graddy. "i2S2 is designed to be the employer of choice for the Salt Lake City/Ogden area, a place where both experienced and new staff can integrate quickly around the mission. Our approach will enable them to continually upgrade skills while being a part of a special and significant chapter in a rewarding career." About i2S2 Integrated ICBM Support Services (i2S2) is a Systems Engineering and Integration (SE&I) company. The company is built to meet the most demanding challenges facing our customers. If awarded the ISC 2.0 contract, i2S2 will deliver a broad range of programmatic and engineering capabilities via its diverse and talented people to meet the customer's mission to sustain current and future readiness of our nation's security. To learn more, visit www.i2S2llc.com. About Leidos Leidos is a Fortune 500 information technology, engineering, and science solutions and services leader working to solve the world's toughest challenges in the defense, intelligence, homeland security, civil, and health markets. The company's 38,000 employees support vital missions for government and commercial customers. Headquartered in Reston, Va., Leidos reported annual revenues of approximately $11.09 billion for the fiscal year ended January 3, 2020. For more information, visit www.leidos.com. About Amentum Amentum is a premier global technical and engineering services partner supporting critical programs of national significance across defense, security, intelligence, energy, and environment. We draw from a century-old heritage of operational excellence, mission focus, and successful execution underpinned by a strong culture of safety and ethics. Headquartered in Germantown, Md., we employ more than 34,000 people in all 50 states and perform work in 105 foreign countries and territories. Visit us at amentum.com to explore how we deliver excellence for our customers' most vital missions. About Apex Systems Apex Systems is a world-class technology services business that incorporates industry insights and experience to deliver solutions that fulfill our clients' digital visions. We provide a continuum of service from workforce mobilization and modern enterprise solutions to digital innovation to drive better results and bring more value to our clients. Apex transforms our customers with modern enterprise solutions tailored to the industries we serve. Apex has a presence in over 70 markets across the US, Canada and Mexico. Apex is a segment of ASGN Incorporated. (NYSE: ASGN). To learn more, visit www.apexsystems.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210210005101/en/

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Parts of the Curragh Plains are being damaged by antisocial activity such the use of scrambler bikes, a recent Kildare Newbridge municipal district meeting has been told.

Cllr Fiona McLoughlin Healy also claimed that the surface of the public amenity was being visibly damaged by car tyres as the ground is very wet at the moment.

The politician said the Plains were needed during the public health pandemic as a safe sanctuary to get some head space for the local community.

Rangers



Cllr McLoughlin Healy called for more Rangers to be assigned to the Curragh Plains to monitor antisocial behaviour. She said that the weekend is the busiest time of the week on the Plains and she claimed that there was no telephone number to report antisocial behaviour.

She also told the meeting she had only seen one Ranger patrol in the past 10 months on the Curragh and she is a regular user of the amenity.

She explained: During one incident, there were scrambler bikes going around and giving the two fingers.

I see no consequences for illegal dumping, illegal camping and all the time damage is being done to the Curragh.

District manager Joe Boland told the meeting that the management of the Curragh Plains is a matter for the Department of Defence.

And he added: The intention in the future is that the Curragh Plains is a focus for amenity, tourism and heritage.

Mr Boland said he would take up Cllr McLoughlin Healys concerns with the Department of Defence.

Cllr Mark Stafford told the meeting that there is now a dedicated Minister for Defence  Simon Coveney  and he should be allowed the space to do what is necessary to protect the Curragh Plains.

Cllr Peggy ODwyer said that the Curragh Plains should be managed in the same way as Phoenix Park in Dublin, which is patroled and policed.

Problem for years

She told the meeting that scrambler bikes have been a problem for years on the Curragh and that they are also a nuisance on bogs.

Cllr McLoughlin Healy said that illegal parking is an ongoing issue as there is no organised or managed parking system.

She claimed that successive ministers of Defence have let us down in terms of properly safeguarding the Curragh Plains.
An estimated 60 percent of business closures due to the pandemic appear to be permanent. Since virtually all job growth comes from new businesses, we need a huge number of new businesses starting and succeeding to drive economic recovery. One solution that often gets overlooked is government contracting. To boost new and small businesses, governments at all levels should dedicate 5 percent of procurement contracts to them. That commitment wouldn't disrupt established businesses, yet it would provide an economic shot in the arm that communities across the nation so desperately need.

New and small businesses provide more than just jobs. They revitalize America's downtowns and neighborhoods, provide a sense of momentum and strength, and lift up the incomes and quality of life of entire communities. They are the front line of economic recovery.

Yet government spending typically goes to larger, more established companies. The playing field is tilted toward them. It's hard for newer businesses to break into the system, navigate the bureaucracy, befriend the right procurement officers, and build enough momentum to win against incumbents. Research suggests that standard government procurement practices hinder new businesses. It's time to change those practices and leverage government procurement to grow young businesses.

The value of government contracts for new businesses is not simply the infusion of revenue. They generate far greater impact. Kim Folsom, CEO of Founders First, one of the largest national platforms for growing small businesses led by diverse founders, says that a single government contract can make the difference in growing a company from startup to scalable business.

"Government contracts can be the breakthrough for sustainability and job creation for micro-small businesses," she says. "They provide validation and a credential that can be used to attract additional business contracts in both the public and private sectors."

She cites as an example an IT services company in San Diego with three co-founders--a mother, her grown son, and a family friend. Founders First funded them initially in 2017 and now, thanks to a contract with the San Diego Water Authority, the company has more than tripled in size, to 10 employees.

"One contract with a government entity like that can be both catalytic and additive," Folsom says. "That one contract opened the door to so much more. It enabled the pursuit of work with other San Diego government entities, water authorities elsewhere, other cities and counties in California and beyond, and private-sector providers too."

That's where the 5 percent commitment can become significant on a large scale, especially if applied across all levels of government--local, state, and federal. It can remove unfair barriers that prevent doors from opening to new businesses.

"Procurement officers typically focus on businesses they know, and use the excuse of 'executional risk' to bypass younger companies," Folsom says. "A 5 percent commitment would provide a mandate for procurement officers to accept new entrants and work to ensure their success rather than their exclusion."

This 5 percent of government contracts should go to "new entrant" businesses that have never won government contracts before. The focus should be on businesses that haven't yet reached $3 million in annual revenues, with a special interest in businesses less than five years old, especially in underserved communities. Along with the 5 percent commitment should be a concierge service to help new entrants navigate the procurement process, and a "fast track" process for certification. Large corporations and quasi-government entities, such as hospitals, universities, and utilities with massive procurement systems, should also adopt 5 percent practices, which would inject fresh innovation into their businesses.

The benefits to American communities would be enormous. Not only would such an effort breathe revenues directly into new businesses, it would also generate secondary effects, lifting other businesses, suppliers, and employees in their communities. A wide range of industries could be impacted--from professional and administrative services to construction and merchandise of all types, including business supplies and foods.

Committing 5 percent of government contracts to new businesses is part of a broader initiative called "5% to Start," advanced by the nonprofit I founded, Right to Start. The other components of that initiative include commitments of 5 percent of workforce development funds and 5 percent of economic development funds to young businesses.

Steering such a modest percentage of government funding to entrepreneurial businesses would be, as Folsom says, "both catalytic and additive." It would open up government procurement to new entrants, enable them to grow their businesses, and revitalize their communities. And it would be revenue-neutral for governments--not requiring additional spending, but just shifting current spending from established companies to emerging ones.

MANLY, Iowa  The investigation into a bomb threat against Central Springs School District is closed.

Authorities say someone on the live chat line of the districts YouTube channel made a bomb threat the evening of January 28, leading to the cancelation of classes on January 29.

Central Springs Superintendent Darwin Lehmann and the Manly Police Department issued a statement Wednesday that the investigation into the incident has concluded and no additional statements will be made.

Threats such as these are serious, and we will not tolerate threats of any nature, says Lehmann. I urge you to talk to your children and impress upon them the seriousness of threats in todays society. Ask them to notify you or school personnel should they hear of any planned or potential disruptive behavior.
Panasonic AI-driven cameras empower an expanding vision of new uses

Imagine a world where video cameras are not just watching and reporting for security, but have an even wider positive impact on our lives. Imagine that cameras control street and building lights, as people come and go, that traffic jams are predicted and vehicles are automatically rerouted, and more tills are opened, just before a queue starts to form. Cameras with AI capabilities Cameras in stores can show us how we might look in the latest outfit as we browse. Thats the vision from Panasonic about current and future uses for their cameras that provide artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities at the edge. Panasonic feels that these types of intelligent camera applications are also the basis for automation and introduction of Industry 4.0, in which processes are automated, monitored and controlled by AI-driven systems. 4K network security cameras The companys i-PRO AI-capable camera line can install and run up to three AI-driven video analytic applications Panasonics 4K network security cameras have built-in AI capabilities suitable for this next generation of intelligent applications in business and society. The companys i-PRO AI-capable camera line can install and run up to three AI-driven video analytic applications. The AI engine is directly embedded into the camera, thus reducing costs and Panasonics image quality ensures the accuracy of the analytics outcome. FacePRO facial recognition technology Panasonic began advancing AI technology on the server side with FacePRO, the in-house facial recognition application, which uses AI deep learning capabilities. Moving ahead, they transitioned their knowledge of AI from the server side to the edge, introducing i-PRO security cameras with built-in AI capabilities last summer, alongside their own in-house analytics. Moreover, in line with the Panasonic approach to focus more on collaboration with specialist AI software developers, a partnership with Italian software company, A.I. Tech followed in September, with a range of intelligent applications, partially based on deep learning. Additional collaborations are already in place with more than 10 other developers, across the European Union, working on more future applications. i-PRO AI-capable security cameras Open systems are an important part of Panasonics current approach. The companys i-PRO AI-capable cameras are an open platform and designed for third-party application development, therefore, applications can be built or tailored to the needs of an individual customer. Panasonic use to be a company that developed everything in-house, including all the analytics and applications. However, now we have turned around our strategy by making our i-PRO security cameras open to integrate applications and analytics from third-party companies, says Gerard Figols, Head of Security Solutions at Panasonic Business Europe. Flexible and adapting to specific customer needs This new approach allows the company to be more flexible and adaptable to customers needs. At the same time, we can be quicker and much more tailored to the market trend, said Gerard Figols. He adds, For example, in the retail space, enabling retailers to enhance the customer experience, in smart cities for traffic monitoring and smart parking, and by event organisers and transport hubs to monitor and ensure safety. Edge-based analytics offer multiple benefits over server-based systems Edge-based analytics Edge-based analytics offer multiple benefits over server-based systems. On one hand, there are monetary benefits - a cost reduction results from the decreased amount of more powerful hardware required on the server side to process the data, on top of reduction in the infrastructure costs, as not all the full video stream needs to be sent for analysis, we can work solely with the metadata. On the other hand, there are also advantages of flexibility, as well as reliability. Each camera can have its own individual analytic setup and in case of any issue on the communication or server side, the camera can keep running the analysis at the edge, thereby making sure the CCTV system is still fully operational. Most importantly, systems can keep the same high level of accuracy. Explosion of AI camera applications We can compare the explosion of AI camera applications to the way we experienced it for smartphone applications" We can compare the explosion of AI camera applications to the way we experienced it for smartphone applications, said Gerard Figols, adding However, it doesnt mean the hardware is not important anymore, as I believe its more important than ever. Working with poor picture quality or if the hardware is not reliable, and works 24/7, software cannot run or deliver the outcome it has been designed for. As hardware specialists, Figols believes that Panasonic seeks to focus on what they do best - Building long-lasting, open network cameras, which are capable of capturing the highest quality images that are required for the latest AI applications, while software developers can concentrate on bringing specialist applications to the market. Same as for smartphones, AI applications will proliferate based on market demand and succeed or fail, based on the value that they deliver. Facial recognition, privacy protection and cross line technologies Panasonic has been in the forefront in developing essential AI applications for CCTV, such as facial recognition, privacy protection and cross line. However, with the market developing so rapidly and the potential applications of AI-driven camera systems being so varied and widespread, Panasonic quickly realised that the future of their network cameras was going to be in open systems, which allow specialist developers and their customers to use their sector expertise to develop their own applications for specific vertical market applications, while using i-PRO hardware. Metadata for detection and recognition Regarding privacy, consider that the use of AI in cameras is about generating metadata for the detection and recognition of patterns, rather than identifying individual identities. However, there are legitimate privacy concerns, but I firmly believe that attitudes will change quickly when people see the incredible benefits that this technology can deliver, said Gerard Figols, adding I hope that we will be able to redefine our view of cameras and AI, not just as insurance, but as life advancing and enhancing. i-PRO AI Privacy Guard One of the AI applications that Panasonic developed was i-PRO AI Privacy Guard Seeking to understand and appreciate privacy concerns, one of the AI applications that Panasonic developed was i-PRO AI Privacy Guard that generates data without capturing individual identities, following European privacy regulations that are among the strictest in the world. Gerard Fogils said, The combination of artificial intelligence and the latest generation open camera technology will change the worlds perceptions from Big Brother to Big Benefits. New applications will emerge as the existing generation of cameras is updated to the new open and intelligent next generation devices, and the existing role of the security camera will also continue. Future scope of AI and cameras He adds, Not just relying on the security cameras for evidence when things have gone wrong, end users will increasingly be able to use AI and the cameras with much higher accuracy to prevent false alarms and in a proactive way to prevent incidents." Gerard Figols concludes, That could be monitoring and alerting when health and safety guidelines are being breached or spotting and flagging patterns of suspicious behaviour before incidents occur.
As of Monday, the Huntsville Hospital system is caring for less than half of the number of in-patients it had during the holiday spike. After hitting a peak of more than 500, the number is now at 214.

The hospital's Vice President of Operations, Tracy Doughty, said the decline is a step forward not just for North Alabama, but also the hospital itself.

Doughty said the drop in hospitalizations means more people are following CDC guidelines.

He also said this allows the hospital to start the process of resuming elective surgeries, after being put on hold for several months. Doughty said it's up to doctors to let them know which procedures need to happen first. Once those are complete, they'll move forward one facility at a time.

Doughty said they'll start with patients at Women's and Children's, then the Governors Medical Tower, and then look at options to do more at the main campus too. To start, doctors will determine the urgency in which patients need to have the surgery and work with them to get it scheduled.

Doughty said after only being able to do emergency and out-patient surgeries, this is a big step forward.

I think its a good sign to the community, you know, that were getting back to normal. Dont want it to signal the end of this fight against COVID," said Doughty. "We need to definitely maintain our social distance, be safe, wash our hands and all those things weve learned over the last year almost, but we can see theres a light at the end of the tunnel.

He suggests getting in contact with your doctor if you previously had an elective surgery that was put on hold.

Doughty said the Huntsville Hospital is still busy treating patients with respiratory illnesses, but he said they've been able to consolidate the COVID units and open up beds for other patients.

The lower number of COVID patients means the hospital now has the flexibility to move their staff where they're needed according to Doughty.

Staff is working well in their departments, were able to move people around to help with the vaccine clinic, but as surgery opens back up, well move some of those folks back to the surgery areas, and weve got folks already signed up to help," said Doughty.

Doughty said it's exciting to see the number of COVID patients go down, but everyone needs to continue to wear masks and practice social distancing so the number can stay down.
The ruling party in Tanzania has dismissed growing calls from its MPs for President John Magufuli to extend his term in office.



The 61-year-old president, who won elections in October, is currently serving his second and final five-year term in office.



Humphrey Polepole, the CCM partys publicity secretary, has told parliament that Mr Magufuli has no intentions of remaining in power beyond his current constitutional mandate.



Some ruling party MPs have been proposing the constitution be changed to allow for a third term for him.



President Magufuli is not harbouring intentions to remain in power," said Mr Polepole, who is also an MP.



This is a closed matter at party level... however, Im not in a position to prevent MPs from airing out their views in parliament, he said.



He was forced to speak after an opposition MP asked if the ruling party was endorsing the calls for a presidential term limit extension.



During his first term in office, Mr. Magufuli had dismissed such proposals, saying: I will not extend my [presidential] limit even by a minute.

Source: BBC









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The Oregon Health Authority announced 529 new cases of COVID-19 on Tuesday along with seven new deaths, raising the states coronavirus death toll to 2,031.

The new cases come as Gov. Kate Brown announced that restaurants, bars and brewpubs in the Portland metro area could reopen for indoor dining with a limited capacity starting Friday.

Falling COVID-19 cases led Brown to shift 10 Oregon counties -- including Multnomah, Clackamas and Washington -- from the extreme to the high risk category, allowing the partial reopening of some businesses including restaurants, gyms and movie theaters for the first time since November.

Gyms in the Portland area can also reopen for indoor workouts of up to 50 people starting Friday. Brown relaxed the restrictions on gyms a bit last month, allowing up to six clients inside, after indoor workouts were shut down across much of the state last November as coronavirus infections were soaring.

The state opened up general vaccinations to Oregonians ages 80 and older on Monday, in a day wreaked by online havoc and frustration as metro-area appointments filled up within hours of registration opening.

Many were able to secure appointment slots over the next week, but local health providers who run the Portland areas two vaccination clinics couldnt say on what date new appointments would open up for booking. It appears, however, that the next available appointments wont likely be until Wednesday, Feb. 17.

Where the new cases are by county: Baker (4), Benton (20), Clackamas (65), Clatsop (2), Columbia (3), Coos (9), Crook (1), Curry (3), Deschutes (5), Douglas (16), Grant (1), Harney (18), Hood River (10), Jackson (19), Jefferson (5), Josephine (20), Klamath (9), Lake (13), Lane (39), Lincoln (1), Linn (9), Malheur (1), Marion (54), Morrow (3), Multnomah (78), Polk (19), Tillamook (1), Umatilla (29), Union (5), Wallowa (9), Wasco (7), Washington (40) and Yamhill (11).

Who died: The 2,025th death is a 68-year-old Columbia County woman who tested positive Dec. 22 and died Feb. 4 at her residence.

The 2,026th death is a 92-year-old Deschutes County woman who tested positive Nov. 23 and died Dec. 9 at her residence.

The 2,027th death is a 92-year-old Josephine County man who tested positive Dec. 21 and died Jan. 17 at his residence.

The 2,028th death is an 82-year-old Lane County man who tested positive Dec. 16 and died Feb. 6 at McKenzie-Willamette Medical Center.

The 2,029th death is a 79-year-old Marion County man who tested positive Jan. 25 and died Feb. 2 at his residence.

The 2,030th death is a 77-year-old Union County woman in who tested positive Jan. 22 and died Feb. 7 at Grande Ronde Hospital.

The 2,031st death is a 44-year-old Hood River County man who tested positive Jan. 25 and died Feb. 6. Location of death is being confirmed.

Unless noted above, each person who died had underlying health conditions or state officials were working to determine if the person had underlying medical conditions.

The prevalence of infections: On Tuesday, the state reported 622 new positive tests out of 14,063 tests performed, equaling a 4.4% positivity rate.

The OHA said it received about 3,000 negative laboratory results Feb. 8 from tests performed June 1 to Feb. 2 due to a delay in reporting. Total lab results are higher for Feb. 8 than usual, but there was no change in percent positivity, the health authority said.

Whos in the hospital: The state reported 226 Oregonians with confirmed coronavirus infections were hospitalized Tuesday, five more than Monday. Of those, 53 coronavirus patients were in intensive care units, two fewer than Monday.

Vaccines administered: Oregon has administered 588,740 first and second doses out of 801,125 received, which is about 73.5% of its supply. Oregon reported 16,340 newly administered doses, which includes 7,863 on Monday and the remainder from previous days.

Since it began: Oregon has reported 147,932 confirmed or presumed infections and 2,031 deaths, among the lowest per capita numbers in the nation. To date, the state has reported over 3,328,998 lab reports from tests.

-- Jaimie Ding

jding@oregonian.com; 503-221-4395; @j_dingdingding

ROCHESTER, Minn. - Access to the COVID-19 vaccine could improve following Gov. Tim Walz's announcement of a new mass vaccination site in Rochester. It will be set up at the Mayo Civic Center, according to the Minnesota Department of Health.

Walz says he hopes to give more Minnesotans access to the vaccine where they live. It will be the third site in the state joining Duluth and Minneapolis.

FILE - In this July 27, 2020, file photo, a nurse prepares a shot as a study of a possible COVID-19 vaccine, developed by the National Institutes of Health and Moderna Inc., gets underway in Binghamton, N.Y. The U.S. is poised to give the green light as e FILE - In this July 27, 2020, file photo, a nurse prepares a shot as a study of a possible COVID-19 vaccine, developed by the National Institutes of Health and Moderna Inc., gets underway in Binghamton, N.Y. The U.S. is poised to give the green light as e

The site will administer shots to roughly 1,500 Minnesotans age 65+ along with educators and childcare professionals during the first week of operation.

Rep. Tina Liebling (DFL-Rochester) says having the infrastructure in Rochester is a step in the right direction as many are still counting on the government to allocate more vaccines for distribution.

She explained, "Having more sites doesn't necessarily mean there's more vaccine available but ultimately when there is more vaccine s this will give people more options about where to go and make it more convenient. For some people it's going to be easier to get to this location but for others it will be easier to go to their own health care provider."

Mayor Kim Norton also weighed in on the news saying hopefully this means vaccines will soon be distributed to individuals beyond the first priority groups.

Norton said, "I think it's good news for our area. I know they're going to start with the 65 and older and take that particular population as a starting place and then we'll move into the other groups."

Liebling added, "People who have different types of health conditions that make them vulnerable, even if they live in their own homes, those people need to get the vaccine . So, this is just one option and I hope it's going to create more ability to get this out to a wider range of people."

There is no word yet on where the site will be located. All three sites involved in the program are estimated to administer roughly 11,000 doses to those 65+, education and childcare professionals by February 9.
Iraq said the OPEC+ oil cartel is unlikely to change its production policy at next months meeting and repeated promises to deliver overdue output cuts, even as the Arab nations economy reels.

The group of crude exporters meets on March 4 and members will probably agree to keep output steady in April, Iraqs Oil Minister Ihsan Abdul Jabbar said. The biggest change will come from Saudi Arabia, which will likely end unilateral daily cuts of 1 million barrels after March, he said.

I think in March the agreement will be that output will remain on the same level, the minister told reporters in Baghdad Wednesday.

The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and partners such as Russia -- an alliance known as OPEC+ -- began unprecedented production curbs in May after the coronavirus pandemic battered economies and caused oil demand to collapse.

STANDING FIRM: OPEC+ discipline and US stimulus could drive oil this week

Iraq has drawn fire from fellow members for breaching its quota on several occasions and failing to compensate, despite repeated pledges to do so.

OPECs second-largest producer after Saudi Arabia has a limit of 3.86 million barrels per day for the first three months of the year under the current agreement.

Jabbar said Iraq will pump 3.6 million barrels a day this month if the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government complies with Baghdads wishes.

Iraq had said it would also cap its daily production for January at 3.6 million barrels, but ended up pumping more than 3.8 million a day.

The minister expects to export 2.9 million barrels a day in February, excluding Kurdish flows. Thats more or less in line with the figure for January.

Jabbar thinks crude prices will trade in the range of $58 to $63 a barrel this year. Brent crude has soared almost 20% since the end of 2020 to around $61.50 a barrel amid rising demand in China and vaccine roll-outs.
A GROUP of Walvis Bay residents formed an organisation to tackle the housing problem they are experiencing at the harbour town.

The group, which is in the process of registering the Erongo Housing Association with the Business and Intellectual Property Authority (Bipa), consists of 200 residents who were born and raised at the town.

Group organiser Pamela Nauses says members through WhatsApp group have already had a start-up meeting, and are discussing strategies to help them obtain houses.

She says the group will continue to communicate on WhatsApp to avoid Covid-19-restricted gatherings.

She says she started the group after struggling for 12 years to obtain a house at her home town.

"It is an open secret that land and housing are not easy to acquire for various reasons.

I applied at the National Housing Enterprise (NHE) in 2009. They later said when the system was upgraded, my application showed I applied in 2014. In the same year I applied at the municipality, but apparently my application disappeared. I was born at Walvis Bay 40 years ago and am still living in my parents' house. Many Walvis Bay residents are in the same boat," Nauses says.

She says the group is especially unhappy that people from outside Walvis Bay have obtained houses after a short period of living at the town, while residents are still on waiting lists after years of applying.

"We see what the other people are doing, which is very wrong. We must all do things within the law. Many members on the group are currently renting places in people's backyards, but have been residents of the coastal town for more than five years. If they can pay rent, they can pay for their own homes or land under affordable housing schemes.

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Some of these people are staying with their siblings in their parents' houses in disunity," she says.

Group member Mildreth Ames is tired of living in a shack, although she is from Walvis Bay.

"I need my own place because I am worried about my children's future," she says.

Cornelia Hipondoka, another member, says: "I am a single mother of four and hope to get a house through this group.

My expectation is that the councillors will give us houses at Walvis Bay as a priority as we were born and raised here." Ndahafa Andreas says: "I am still amazed at what happened a few years ago. Someone came from Windhoek to work at our office. About five months later, she got a house from the NHE. I still live in my parents' house. This is so unfair."

The group plans to engage with the town's local authority councillors and other key stakeholders, Nauses says.

She says they are waiting for a letter from their lawyers to complete the registration process.

Nauses says the group does not believe in grabbing land, and is willing to assist residents of neighbouring towns to form their own organisations.
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House Democrats prosecuting the impeachment of former U.S. President Donald Trump are set to lay out their case Wednesday as they try to convince Senators serving as jurors to convict Trump of inciting insurrection at the Capitol last month.

The House impeachment managers and Trumps defense will each have 16 hours over the course of two days to present their case, after which Senators will be given a total of four hours for questioning.

The Senate voted 56-44 Tuesday to hear the case.

The vote followed four hours of impassioned arguments from the two sides, with Democratic lawmakers arguing Trump must be held accountable for his actions and the former presidents defense contending an impeachment trial after the end of his term is unconstitutional.

Congressman Jamie Raskin, the Democrats lead impeachment manager, said Tuesday that not holding the trial would create a dangerous new exception for a president to act with impunity in their final weeks in office.

It's an invitation to the president to take his best shot at anything he may want to do on his way out the door, Raskin said.

The Democrats showed the Senate a dramatic video of the chaos that unfolded in the Capitol on January 6 when a pro-Trump mob stormed past authorities and sent lawmakers scrambling for safety.

The attack, which ended with five people dead, came shortly after members of Congress started to certify Joe Bidens victory over Trump in the November election. Trump had spent two months baselessly alleging voter fraud, and at a rally that day outside the White House he continued, telling his supporters, if you don't fight like hell you're not going to have a country anymore. He encouraged them multiple times to march to the Capitol.

Raskin recalled that his chief of staff, daughter and son-in-law were forced to barricade themselves in House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer's office. He said they hid under a desk while rioters banged on the door, "placing what they thought were their final texts and whispered phone calls to say their goodbyes. They thought they were gonna die."

Raskin said every day a president is in office hes prohibited from committing high crimes and misdemeanors  the standard for conviction on impeachment charges  and cannot avoid responsibility for the deadly mayhem at the Capitol because he now is out of office.

Trump lawyer Bruce Castor Jr. rejected the premise that not holding the trial would create a loophole for avoiding responsibility, saying, The idea of a January exception is nonsense. He said that if Trump committed any offenses, arrest him, now that he is a private citizen and no longer immune from prosecution.

Castor quoted the Constitution saying that conviction on impeachment charges shall not extend further than removal from office, an impossibility since Trumps term has already ended.

The object of the Constitution has already been achieved, Castor said. He was removed by the voters.

Trumps other lawyer, David Schoen, accused Democrats of pursuing the impeachment case against him to eliminate Donald Trump from the American political scene. He said pure, raw, misguided partisanship was at the heart of the Democrats case.

Last month, Republican Senator Rand Paul, a staunch Trump supporter, attempted to block the trial on the same constitutional grounds, but five Republicans joined all 50 members of the Democratic caucus in voting 55-45 to proceed with the trial.

In the new vote Tuesday, another Republican, Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, also voted to go ahead with the trial.

Tuesday's vote to proceed was expected.

Last month, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, a staunch Trump supporter, attempted to block the trial on the same constitutional grounds, but five Republicans joined all 50 Democrats in voting 55-45 to proceed with the trial.

In the new vote Tuesday, another Republican, Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, also voted to go ahead with the trial.

However, it will take a two-thirds majority for conviction, meaning at least 11 more Republican senators would have to reverse their votes for the prosecution to prevail in the 100-member body.

Paul says there is a zero chance of conviction. If Trump is convicted, the Senate, on a simple majority vote, could bar him from ever holding federal office again.

In 1876, the Senate conducted an impeachment trial of a Cabinet secretary who resigned moments before he was impeached. Trump was impeached by the House while still in office.

The senators deciding the impeachment case against the single-term president are in a unique position: Many of them were witnesses themselves to the chaos as they fled the Senate chamber.

Trump, the only U.S. president to be twice impeached, was acquitted a year ago when he was accused of soliciting the president of Ukraine to dig up dirt against Biden ahead of the election.

A week after the storming of the Capitol, the House voted 232-197, with 10 Republicans joining all 222 Democrats, to accuse Trump of incitement of insurrection. Then, on January 20, Biden was inaugurated and Trump went to his Florida estate where he has stayed since.

Trump has declined a request from Democrats to testify in his defense and is not expected to attend. The trial could last a week or longer.
New Delhi, Feb 10 : The HMD Global-owned handset maker Nokia on Wednesday unveiled two new smartphones -- Nokia 5.4 and Nokia 3.4 -- in India.

The Nokia 5.4 will be available on Flipkart from February 17 in two storage variants -- 4GB+64GB and 6GB+64GB -- at Rs 13,999 and Rs 15,499, respectively.

The Nokia 3.4 will be available on Amazon and Flipkart in 4GB+64GB storage variant at Rs 11,999 from February 20.

"With this year's first set of launches, we're bringing to our fans unique propositions that can help them expand possibilities in their professional and personal lives; all in a value package that is not just accessible, but also lasts; from a brand they trust," Sanmeet Singh Kochhar, Vice President, HMD Global, said in a statement.

The Nokia 5.4 features a 6.39-inch HD+ punch-hole display with a quad camera setup up that has 48MP main camera and 16MP front camera. The smartphone is powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 662 processor.

The Nokia 3.4 comes packed with a powerful processor -- Qualcomm Snapdragon 460 -- along with 6.39-inch HD+ screen.

Both the smartphones come in a Finnish-inspired, brand-new contemporary colour -- Dusk, in addition to other colours.

The company also launched Nokia Power Earbuds Lite that comes with a premium Nordic design in a pocket-sized charging case in two Nordic-inspired colours -- Snow and Charcoal colours -- inspired by nature.

The earbuds come with universal Bluetooth compatibility and provide an immersive sound experience and crystal-clear audio.

Priced at Rs 3,599, the Nokia Power Earbuds Lite will be available on Amazon from February 17.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
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American Airlines will furlough more than 1,000 employees at Philadelphia International Airport.

The company filed a WARN (Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act) notice with the Pennsylvania Department of Labor & Industry earlier this month.

The 1,032 employees are expected to be furloughed on April 1 or within 14 days. The furloughs are expected to be temporary. There are also 28 employees who are expected to be laid off permanently on April 1 or within 14 days.

The more than 1,000 people that could possibly be furloughed in Philadelphia are part of about 13,000 people that American Airlines said it could furlough on April 1 when the Payroll Support Program expires. The Payroll Support Program provides payroll support to passenger air carriers, cargo air carriers, and certain contractors for the continuation of payment of employee wages, salaries, and benefits due to COVID-19 and its financial impact on the airlines industry.

We are nearly five weeks into 2021, and unfortunately, we find ourselves in a situation similar to much of 2020, Doug Parker, CEO of American Airlines and Robert Isom, president of American Airlines said in a letter to American Airlines employees last week. As we closed out last year with the successful extension of the Payroll Support Program (PSP), we fully believed that we would be looking at a summer schedule where wed fly all of our airplanes and need the full strength of our team. Regrettably, that is no longer the case. The vaccine is not being distributed as quickly as any of us believed, and new restrictions on international travel that require customers to have a negative COVID-19 test have dampened demand.

We will fly at least 45% less in the first quarter compared to what we flew for the same period in 2019, and based on current demand outlook, we will not fly all of our aircraft this summer as planned, the letter continued. Consequently, like last fall, we will have more team members than the schedule requires after federal payroll support expires April 1.

Parker and Isom also wrote in the letter that its supports an extension of the PSP by Congress through Sep. 30.

American Airlines provided a breakdown of the 13,000 people that might be furloughed:

Pilots - 1,850

Flight attendants - 4,245

Maintenance and related - 1,420

Fleet service - 3,145

Passenger service - 1,205

Dispatch - 100

Flight crew training instructors and simulator pilot instructors - 40

You can follow Daniel Urie on twitter @DanielUrie2018 and you can like him on Facebook.
One person died, two people were seriously injured and dozens more were reportedly displaced after a massive fire broke out at a home in Lowell early Wednesday, later spreading to a pair of neighboring buildings, according to authorities.

The three-alarm blaze started at a home at 98 Westford St. and spread to two other adjacent structures, a spokesperson from the Massachusetts Department of Fire Services told MassLive.

The spokesperson confirmed one person died in the blaze, and two others were flown to Boston hospitals to be treated for serious injuries.

The fire is being jointly investigated by the Lowell Fire and Police Departments and State Police assigned to both the Office of the State Fire Marshal and the Office of the Middlesex District Attorney, the spokesperson said.

WHDH reported the roof of the home where the fire broke out around 3:30 a.m. collapsed. Firefighters were able to rescue a dog from the building, according to the news outlet.

The Salvation Army Lowell and the American Red Cross of Massachusetts are assisting the residents displaced by the blaze, the organizations said. WCVB reported 50 to 60 residents were displaced.

An unknown number of adults and an unknown number of children are reportedly displaced, the Red Cross tweeted. We will offer comfort, Financial Assistance, and long-term recovery services.

#Northeast1 Red Cross responding to a MFF- Multi Family Fire in #Lowell where an unknown number of adults and an unknown number of children are reportedly displaced. We will offer comfort, Financial Assistance, and long-term recovery services.  RedCrossMA (@RedCrossMA) February 10, 2021

Related Content: 3-alarm fire breaks out at Lowell home, spread to 2nd residence
Abdullahs petition challenging ED to come up for hearing in JK High court on Monday

Changes can be made, farm laws are not religious scriptures: Abdullah

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

New Delhi, Feb 10: National Conference member Farooq Abdullah on Tuesday said that the new farm laws are not religious scriptures that changes cannot be made as he appealed to the Centre to hold a dialogue with the agitating farmers and come out with a solution.

He was speaking during the discussion on Motion of Thanks to the President's address.

"I just want to make this request on the farmers' issue. It is not a 'Khudai kitaab' (religious scripture) that we cannot make changes. But we have made law. If they (farmers) want it to be scrapped, why can't you talk to them," he said.

PM Modi quotes Manmohan Singh to blunt Opposition offensive on farm laws

"I would request you with folded hands that let us not stand on prestige... This is our nation. We belong to this nation and if we belong to this nation let us respect everybody in this nation," Abdullah said, adding, "Come out with a solution."

He also urged the law minister to bring some law to stop such activities.

Abdullah also asserted that Lord Ram belongs to the whole world.

"Ram belongs to all of us. The way Muslims have held on to the Quran, the Quran is not just ours."

He also accused NDA MPs of questioning the stature of political visionaries such as Jawaharlal Nehru and said that he feels really bad when he sees that fingers are being pointed at India's first prime minister, Sardar Patel, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi and other leaders.

"It is not an Indian parampara. Respect those who have gone," he stressed.

On the recently-concluded District Development Council (DDC) polls, he said, these happened peacefully but now elected members were being purchased to force the members to vote for others.

Govt treating farmers the way it should be treating China on borders: Owaisi

Congratulating Indian scientists and the Serum Institute of India for developing a vaccine against coronavirus, he said that as of now very few people were being vaccinated and efforts should be made that more and more people get the jab.

Twitter blocks portion of accounts, cites free speech | OneIndia News

He also said that the virus has badly hit the tourism industry in Jammu and Kashmir and he has no words to explain the poverty of the people in the Union territory.
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When Gov. Gretchen Whitmers budget is unveiled Thursday it will include a per-pupil increase of $82-164 for K-12 schools and a 2% increase for the states universities, Whitmer told MLive in an interview Tuesday.

For K-12 students, a concern that looms large is students who experience learning loss after time away from being physically present in a classroom.

Theres no question that our kids needs are going to be great, and that the schools are going to need to have the kind of support so that they can work to meet the needs of our kids, Whitmers said.

Its one thing she aims to address with additional funding in the upcoming fiscal year, which runs from Oct. 1, 2021 to Sept. 30, 2022. Shes slated to unveil her full budget proposal on Thursday, the first step in a months-long budget process that works its way through the state legislature and eventually to the governors desk for signature each year.

In the per-pupil increase, the lowest-funded schools would get an increase of $164 per pupil and the highest-funded schools would get an increase of $82 per pupil under the governors proposal. The difference in funding levels is part of a longstanding effort to narrow the gap between what the highest- and lowest-funded districts receive, and if enacted would bring that gap down to $336 per pupil.

The governor will also propose $250 million in one-time funding to support student academic recovery as well as mental and physical wellbeing. What exactly the money gets spent on will be informed by the advisory council she recently put in place to examine the issue, she said.

Her proposal also includes:

- $14.1 million for economically disadvantaged students, English language learners, special education students and students in rural and isolated districts

- $200 million in one-time funding for districts that need to stabilize their budgets due to declining enrollment

- $120 million to fund learning outside of the normal school schedule, like day camps and after-school programs

- $32 million to increase payments in the Great Start Readiness Program

Whitmer said the K-12 budget is a meaningful increase, but also encouraged lawmakers to act on a supplemental that would send billions of federal dollars to schools sooner.

The House recently tied additional school funding to a bill that would strip the state Department of Health and Human Services of some of its power to stop pandemics and give authority on school openings and closings to local health departments.

Her proposal also includes a one-time funding boost of 2% to operational funding for colleges and universities, along with a one-time line item of $70 million to support institutions that adopt policies related to COVID-19 testing, quarantining and contact tracing.

She said the increase was a recognition of the importance of higher education institutions, particularly to Michigans economy.

I do think that we are in a moment where were really going to have to work together to address making sure that these paths are affordable and accessible and that our schools arent undermined in terms of the incredible high quality that is offered by Michigan institutions of higher learning, Whitmer said.

She did not discuss other budget areas, but her team is expected to present the full picture on Thursday.

Shes hopeful she can find common ground with the legislature as the budget process rolls forward, and sees an interest in getting kids educations back on track as something all parties have in common.

Im committed to making sure that we get this done and we get it done right, and Ill work with anyone who wants to do that, too, Whitmer said.
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A shooting at a medical facility in Minnesota on Tuesday left several injured and sent shock waves across a local community as law enforcement officials reported multiple injuries and explosions after gunfire broke out at the Allina Health Clinic in Buffalo.

Gregory Paul Ulrich, a 67-year-old Buffalo resident, was arrested as a suspect in the mass shooting after local news outlet The Star Tribune reported a bomb had exploded at the medical clinic and up to five people were wounded in the incident, citing police sources.

The Tribune said emergency dispatch audio described a bomb going off in the clinic nearly 30 minutes after reports of gunfire.

Local radio station WCCO Radio also reported on emergency dispatch audio, which revealed four homemade bombs had been detonated at the facilities.

Police Chief Pat Budke told TV station KSTP that the shooting happened inside the Allina Clinic Crossroads campus. He said the situation was contained shortly before noon and that there was no further threat to the public's safety.

North Memorial Health spokeswoman Abigail Greenheck said multiple victims were brought to its hospital in Robbinsdale. She did not say how many or what condition they were in.

Allina Health spokesman Timothy Burke declined to say if any victims were brought to its Buffalo hospital.

FBI spokesman Kevin Smith said the agency's bomb technicians were on their way to the scene, but he couldn't confirm media reports about a possible bomb or explosion at the clinic.

Members of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms' enforcement group and special agents from the state's Bureau of Criminal Apprehension were also headed to the scene, spokespeople for the agencies said.

TV helicopter news footage nearly two hours after the attack showed no activity at the clinic, but at least three shattered plate-glass windows could be seen on the clinic's exterior.

The Midwest Medical Examiners Office, which handles cases in Wright County, had no comment on whether it had sent anyone to the scene.

A state Department of Public Health spokesman said he didn't immediately know if the clinic has been administering COVID-19 vaccinations. An Allina spokesman referred all questions to the Buffalo police and the Wright County Sheriff's Office.

The Associated Press contributed to this report
Michelle Obama / Instagram

Michelle Obama's mission of encouraging kids to eat healthier is getting a global spin - and a few puppet allies. The former first lady is launching a kids' cooking show on Netflix as part of the production deal between Netflix and the production company she founded with her husband, former president Barack Obama.

In addition to executive producing "Waffles + Mochi," which debuts March 16, she'll play the proprietor of a "whimsical supermarket" that employs the titular puppets, who are best friends and aspiring chefs. (One is an adorably small orb formed like the Japanese rice cake and the other a creature whose ears are shaped like the griddled breakfast treat.) "I'm excited for families and children everywhere to join us on our adventures as we discover, cook, and eat delicious food from all over the world," she wrote in a tweet on Tuesday.
Twitter, on February 10, said that it had not taken any action on many accounts - as directed by the Centre - because it believed it would violate their fundamental right to free expression under Indian law and its own principles of defending freedom of expression.

The microblogging site also listed steps, including suspension of more than 500 accounts engaging in manipulation, action on accounts inciting violence and labelling of tweets that were in violation of its policy, as part of enforcement under the Twitter Rules since the violence in New Delhi on January 26.

Because we do not believe that the actions we have been directed to take are consistent with Indian law, and, in keeping with our principles of defending protected speech and freedom of expression, we have not taken any action on accounts that consist of news media entities, journalists, activists, and politicians," the social media site said in its response published on its blog 'Updates on our response to blocking orders from the Indian Government' on February 10.

"To do so, we believe, would violate their fundamental right to free expression under Indian law. We informed MeitY of our enforcement actions today, February 10, 2021, it said.

Twitter said that while it will continue to advocate for the right of free expression on behalf of the people it serves, it is actively exploring options under Indian law  both for Twitter and for the accounts that have been impacted.

The response comes amidst Twitters ongoing tussle with the government over blocking of some accounts related to farmers protest. It said Twitter has withheld some of the accounts identified in the blocking orders under its Country Withheld Content. These accounts, however, continue to be available outside of India.

We remain committed to safeguarding the health of the conversation occurring on Twitter, and strongly believe that the Tweets should flow," the response said.

The social media site also emphasised in the February 10 response that it continued to make improvements to its service so that everyone no matter their views or perspective  feels safe participating in the public conversation.

The response said that the company had taken proactive steps to enforce action judiciously and impartially on content, trends, tweets, and accounts that were in violation of the Twitter rules.

Twitter had said on February 8 that it was cooperating with the Centre which had earlier warned the microblogging site of penal action for not taking down accounts and tweets which posed threat to law and order in the country.

The social media giant said it was concerned about the safety of its employees and had reached out to Electronics and Information Technology Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad for a formal dialogue.

But, government sources said that Prasad has turned down Twitters request for a meeting. Instead, sources said, the ministrys secretary will lead the talks with the social media firm from the government site.

The Centre had on February 3 sent a non-compliance notice to Twitter for reinstating accounts and Tweets supporting the farmers protest despite a directive by the ministry to block them for posing a threat to public order.

The notice warned the social media platform of penal action for "non-compliance of directions issued under section 69-A of the IT Act.

Section 69 A(3) of the IT Act says, "the intermediary who fails to comply with the direction issued under sub-section (1) shall be punished with imprisonment for a term which may extend to seven years and shall also be liable to fine."

Twitter's ongoing tussle with Centre comes in the wake of violence in Delhi on January 26 during a tractor parade of farmers protesting the new farm laws which resulted in the death of one person and injuries to over a hundred people, including police personnel.

The Delhi Police is probing the violence wherein it has lodged multiple FIRs and booked, among others, several farmer leaders leading the protests at the national capital's borders for two months now. Punjabi actor-activist, Deep Sidhu, the main accused in the violence, has been arrested and sent to seven-day judicial custody.

Enacted in September 2020, the three laws have been projected by the Centre as major reforms in the agriculture sector. But, thousands of protesting farmers, primarily from Punjab and Haryana, have been camping at several Delhi border points for over two months, demanding the repeal of the laws, and a legal guarantee on minimum support prices (MSP) for their crops.
VINCENNES, Ind. (WTHI) - When Indiana became a state in 1816 it was labeled a free state, meaning that there could be no slavery. This was not always followed, and because of that Polly Strong sued for her freedom in 1820. Strong originally lost the case in the Knox County Circuit Court. She then appealed to the Indiana Supreme Court. The Supreme Court sided with Strong and ruled that "slavery can have no existence in Indiana." This didn't free all slaves in Indiana immediately and one historian said that there were even slaves in Knox county in 1830.
Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US

Iran ready to help improve the defense capability of Syria

European Parliament head proposes to strengthen sanctions on Russia

UK PM gets married in London

Armenia reports COVID-19 new 81 cases: for people die

EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia

2 people die in Armenia road accident

Nigeria: Students taken hostage a month ago are released

61 quakes recorded in Congo per day

Syrian MFA: EU lost credibility due to blind obedience to US policy

Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack

Mher Grigoryan: Clarification of border points is possible only after withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops from Armenia

Suspicious deal: Whether there was profit from buying DNA IDs?

Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war

4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack

Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities

Kocharyan: I have to ask people how it happened that overwhelming majority elected this leader

Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country

Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia

US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs

Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners

Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions

Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US

Iran intensifies its diplomacy amid Armenia-Azerbaijan border tensions

Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes

Lukashenko accuses West of destabilizing situation in Belarus

Armenia Central Electoral Commission chief on snap elections: No legal basis for postponing, suspending any function

Armenias Pashinyan is met by Yerevan district residents chanting against him

We are ready to be fully engaged in negotiation process to resolve Karabakh issue, says Armenia acting PM

Armenia ex-President Kocharyan gives interview to Russia TV channel

Armenia acting premier: We are ready to start withdrawing troops at any moment

Canada MFA expresses concern over 6 Armenian soldiers capture by Azerbaijan troops

There are omissions in registration documents of political forces that applied to Armenia Central Electoral Commission

Armenia Central Electoral Commission chief: There is activeness in Yerevan for the past day or two

Three new cases of coronavirus reported in Artsakh

Group of US Congress members threaten Azerbaijans Aliyev regime with sanctions

Chicago mayor is sued for allegedly refusing interview with white reporter

Iran exports oil to US for first time after long interval

"Armenia" bloc top 50 MP candidates are announced

42 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia

Sri Lanka public beach is covered in charred plastic pellets due to fire in container ship

US preparing list of targeted sanctions on Belarus authorities

China believes it will own America by 2035, Biden says

15 al-Shabab militants killed in Somalia

Newspaper: Armenia political forces that applied for running in election impatiently await CEC decision

Newspaper: Changes are expected in Artsakh

California prisoner who considers himself Satanist beheads cellmate, dismembers his body

Newspaper: Armenia acting PM's "mutually beneficial" proposal to collapse state system?

Armenia National Security Service Reserve Officers' Union members meet with His Holiness Karekin II

EU is ready to help Armenia and Azerbaijan with border delimitation and demarcation

ARF-D member on Nikol Pashinyan: 103 years ago Armenia's founding fathers would have executed him for treason

Iran President hails brotherly ties with Azerbaijan

Robert Kocharyan on years of his leadership in Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia

Situation on Armenian-Azerbaijani border is still tense, more on COVID-19 in Armenia, May 28 digest

"Armenia" alliance of political parties paying tribute to founder of First Republic Aram Manukyan

Yerevan.today: Armenia acting PM not greeted at ruling party's headquarters, citizens call him 'capitulator'

Russia MOD reports on maintenance of ceasefire regime in Nagorno-Karabakh

Armenia acting MOD meets with Russian counterpart in Moscow

Armenia 2nd President: I see possibility of restoring borders of Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast

We can provide our army with some key, modernized weapons, says Armenia ex-President Kocharyan

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan: Captives issue is not one that any opposition force can resolve

OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs release statement on detention of 6 Armenian servicemen by Azerbaijan

Armenian acting Deputy PM: Discussion on issues possible only after withdrawal of Azeri troops from Armenia's territory

Armenia acting PM on Syunik roads, Russian military posts: This is only place where there are working nuances

Armenia acting PM: Process of return of POWs will intensify after upcoming elections

Putin congratulates Aliyev on Republic Day

Josep Borrell: A group of EU Ministers will visit Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan

Armenia acting PM: We're not going to escalate situation for 30% of Sev Lake

Armenia 3rd President visits Vanadzor, pays tribute to heroes of Battle of Gharakilisa (PHOTOS)

Armenia ex-President Kocharyan lays flowers at Battle of Karakilisa memorial (PHOTOS)

Armenia acting PM: Solution to captives issue is matter of time

Shoygu to Harutyunyan: Russia, Armenia strengthen military cooperation

Armenia acting premier: We are 100% honest toward our country

Artsakh President pays tribute at Stepanakert memorial, Shushi Tank-Monument

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan on Meghri corridor plan: Not beneficial to us now to discuss it as "corridor"

Acting PM: "Cement," "fittings" were stolen while constructing Armenia state "building"

Two new cases of coronavirus reported in Artsakh

Catholicos of All Armenians visits Sardarapat Memorial, again separate from state officials

MOD dismisses Azerbaijan statement on Armenia army firing toward Nakhchivan

Jerusalem Post: Israel prepares for a new war with Hamas

France, UN World Food Programme partner to support displaced people in Armenia

Armenia ex-President Kocharyan: Today we are not full-fledged negotiating party

Norwegian prime minister opposes series of NATO reforms

Armenia deputy FM briefs UN, Red Cross leaders on consequences of Azerbaijan aggression against Artsakh

NATO Secretary-General: Afghans must take full responsibility for peace and stability in their country

104 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia

Armenia acting premier: Our sovereignty, independence cannot be subject of discussion

Karabakh state-finance minister announces resignation

Artsakh MFA: Sardarapat victory has inspired all Armenians for over a century

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan: In contrast to kneeling, disgraceful authorities of the day, we have determination

Armenia President: Today we stand on threshold of Sardarapat of morality, dignity

Catholicos of All Armenians: Our people shall find strength to overcome this ordeal as well

Armenia First Republic Day event is held under very modest conditions

Newspaper: Armenia authorities claiming to be popular close off First Republic Day event to public

Armenia ex-President Sargsyan: Now or never!

Armenia President, then acting premier arrive at Sardarapat Memorial

Newspaper: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan's new "cleverness?"

France ambassador: I wish Armenia to be able to live its independence in peace, prosperity

Bashar al-Assad wins Syria presidential election

Reporters not allowed entering Sardarapat Memorial of Armenia
Police are investigating the sudden death of a woman in Portadown

A 50-year-old man has been arrested by police investigating the sudden death of a woman in Portadown on Tuesday.

The death of the woman off the Tandragee Road in the Co Armagh town was reported in the early hours of Tuesday morning.

A post mortem examination is expected to take place to determine the cause of death.

Local reports said the woman was in her thirties and originally came from Scotland.

The man who was arrested as part of the investigation has been taken to Musgrave Custody Suite.

SDLP Upper Bann MLA Dolores Kelly expressed her condolences following the sudden death of the woman.

The Policing Board member urged anyone with information to come forward to police.

She said: "My thoughts and prayers are with the family of the woman who has tragically lost her life in the Tandragee Road area of Portadown. Police have arrested a man and I understand that they have established a line of inquiry.

"I want to put on record my thanks to the officers who are working with the family in these tragic circumstances."
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For someone only 29 years oldreally, yes, he is that youngLakeith Stanfield has a face best described as world-weary. Perhaps that stems from his eyes, which harbor an intensity that dares you not to look away. Or maybe its his confident sense of style. When we spoke over Zoom in early February, just after the Sundance premiere of his latest film, Judas and the Black Messiah, he wore a beautiful trench coat, a pair of tartan slacks, and a knit hat. Or maybe that sense of having been worn out by the grueling society around us emanates from Stanfields career choices. Since his feature debut in Short Term 12, which premiered in 2013, Stanfield has ping-ponged from a zombified modern-day slave in Get Out, to a doomed young civil rights activist in Selma, to an eccentric weirdo in Atlanta, to a struggling office worker who finds himself in a wild conspiracy in Sorry to Bother You.

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Directed by Shaka King, Judas and the Black Messiah stars Daniel Kaluuya as Black Panther leader Fred Hampton and Stanfield as William ONeal, the informant who sold Hampton out to the FBI, leading to Hamptons death at age 21. The real ONeal died by suicide on Jan. 15, 1990the same day that his first-ever interview about his role in Hamptons death aired.

Stanfield has given some  unique interviews in the past, just as hes talked thoughtfully on all manner of things in others, so I didnt know which Stanfield I would get. The conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Allegra Frank: Im curious about your preparation for this role, especially because youre known for really idiosyncratic performances. When its someone who did exist and has this really complicated backstory, how does that affect your ability to inhabit the role?

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Lakeith Stanfield: In every way really, because that was a unique challenge. As I assumed it would be, but I dont think I really understood to what extent, initially. The most difficult part for me probably is getting it out in my own way, in my own judgments of the character and allowing space to be able to see him as a full human being. I didnt want to run into the issue of going with my initial assumption, which is, Oh yeah, hes just a snitch, and thats it. I wanted to try and find the more nuanced parts of who he was, even though he didnt show very much of that. I wanted to kind of try and bring that out, if I could.

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Did you do much in terms of actual historical research? Maybe even watching the Eyes on the Prize II documentary thats excerpted at the end? I was surprised to see actual footage of ONeal from that documentary included, because there were reenactments of ONeals interview in the film itself. Eyes on the Prize II has the only real footage available of Bill ONeal, though, in general.

Yeah. Thats the only footage I had, except I was able to get my hands on an unedited version of all of his interview segments in Eyes on the Prize, rather than just the little cut that they put in. But I watched that documentary years ago actually, before I was even an actor, because I just love the Black Panthers, and I was always researching them independently and trying to just understand the group more. And I inevitably came across the Illinois chapter and Fred Hampton and Bill ONealin a small sense, though.

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I never could have imagined that I would be playing him six or seven years laterlonger than that. I tried to derive as much as I could from that, plus transcripts from his court cases after having that incident with Fred Hampton, and a couple of books that were second- and thirdhand accounts of knowing him personally and the kinds of things he was into and did. So that was helpful.

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Obviously Bill ONeal is a huge presence in the film, and probably the main character of Judas, but Fred Hampton is the better-known figure, especially as someone we just saw in The Trial of the Chicago 7. And it was hard for me not to make an immediate comparison between this movie and that one, even though they are very different. Im curious if you have seen Chicago 7 and have any sort of takeaways on how the Black Panther movementand the Black Panthers themselvesare shown in the media right now, with these movies coming out sort of close together.

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I havent seen it. I love Kelvin [Harrison, Jr., who played Fred Hampton in Chicago 7].  Hes a really good actor. Im glad that people are now willing to talk more about these stories that have kind of been hidden in history and oftentimes not talked about at all in education. Its important that we take care with these characters. I hope to see more of that, and people paying attention to detail and trying to be as honest as they can about their interpretations.

Ever since I started acting, I wanted to do movies like this and help tell stories about these great, big historical figures. So even when I did something like Selma, I just felt so good to be in that space. Even if Shaka would have asked me to play the hat on ONeals head, I would play that too. Just to be a part of the story and help bring Freds story to the top of the conversation.

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Get Slate Culture in Your Inbox The best of movies, TV, books, music, and more, delivered to your inbox three times a week. 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.

Youve played a lot of different characters over the course of your career thus far. Do you think theres something unifying between all of these characters, who you were in Short Term 12, versus in Sorry to Bother You, Atlanta, or here? What do you find to be the thing you bring to each of these roles every time?

[Stanfield points at himself.] This face! I mean, Ive just been quite fortunate to be a part of stories where the characters are going through a transformation, and you get to see them sort of unravel. I could be just playing Barney in a costume, which, nothing wrong with that either, but Ive had an opportunity to play roles that challenge me, and Im able to start diving into my inner self and unlock certain things.

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Is there anything that you are really eager to try doing thats completely different from what youve already done?

Now, I just want to tell a great story. I want to be a part of stories that move people and that can help continue conversation.

I feel like thats the best perspective to have when youre in this kind of creative industry, appreciating the actual text that youre adapting and thinking about the challenge of that and the collaboration first, as opposed to just I want to be in a Marvel movie cause thats the big get or whatever. Which, thats cool too. But you want to be in the Marvel movie that also has the really challenging, interesting script and spot for you.

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Yes. And I want to be the villain.

Yeah, I was watching this GQ video you did months ago where you were going undercover online, and a lot of people were like, Make him the Joker, Make him the Riddler, which Im very here for. Are you legitimately into the idea of Lakeith as the Joker?

Perhaps. But you know, for me, its just any character thats challenging and interesting and smart. And I just think the Joker is all of those things. And Heath Ledgers version of the Joker was a brilliant one that I quite liked. And thats how I always imagined the Joker to bejust a person thats been through a lot, [someone with] this intelligence to make different decisions and also mirror society to itself. I find those things interesting, and oftentimes more interesting than some of the heroes, so it doesnt really matter which villain I play.

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And I hope that with William ONeal, some people that mightve viewed him simply as a villain can see in this interpretation that they might have similarities or some other internal questions and dialogue that might be useful for them too.

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Something I was thinking about in doing my research on you was how you actually tell your own story. Theres this perception that the public has developed of you as this chill, laid-back guy who knows himself very well. But then I also look at your social media, and you have an interesting relationship, I think, to that. It does play into that idea of you as this deep thinker. But then you also have this strong comedic sense. I wonder how you decide what version of yourself and your own story to tell to the world.

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I dont know. I dont really think about it that much. I just kind of do whatever I feel like doing. And sometimes, I feel like being silly. Sometimes, I feel like not being silly. Sometimes, Im offended by things, and I share that. Sometimes, Im being offensive, and I share that. Im just a human being and  people sometimes become a little bit disconnected from that reality that Im just a human being and that Im not really that deep.

And I think on social media, you just get slivers of people. Youre not really getting exactly who they are. Youre just getting a little minor expression and people try to derive what they can from that.  You got to understand social media is a powerful thing. Which is somewhere at times where I mess up, because I forget that people actually care about what people say and do, just because I personally dont put that into much investment in celebrities. But sometimes people do, and so there is a responsibility to be understood within that. I think you just got to use it in the right way and not let it use you. And oftentimes the right way is not to be on it at all, because honestly, theres cooler things, like leaves and plants and stuff.
Editor: In the midst of a pandemic that holds us, in a sense, frozen in place, we have witnessed the two Americas that coexist in sharp contrast.

Jan. 6 brought to our Capitol hundreds of angry people, many of them armed. On Jan. 20, the Biden-Harris inauguration took place, armed with hopes of unity and possibility. Each event reflected our America.

The armed group was encouraged, if not sponsored, by then-President Trump. They are aggrieved. They believe that government has failed them, that the rule of law is an elite form of government and doesnt include them.

I would argue that they are aggrieved and outside by choice. They shouted throughout the siege, Stop the steal. But who was stealing what? They were looking to harm then-Vice President Mike Pence because he was about to endorse the newly elected members of Congress and the presidential election of Joe Biden  because he obeyed the law. They tried to track down Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Why? Because she was a distinguished leader of the Democratic Party.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Florida, recently elected to the Congress, is known to walk around with a rifle and had expressed the idea of murdering Democratic colleagues in the House. She claims that the attack on the high school in Parkland, Florida, was a hoax, as was the Sandy Hook mass shooting in Connecticut.

It appears that the event on Jan. 6 was not a one-time display but rather a show and tell of what the aggrieved who feed off lies and outrageous fairy tales can do. Violence is their modus operandi. Oddly enough, some of them are insiders.

It used to be in the two-party system that there were differences of opinion about how to govern this country; outlandish as it sounds, the aggrieved dont seem to want it to be governed at all.

SONDRA MYERS

SCRANTON

Editor: Former President Trumps weeks of post-election delusional efforts to overturn an election that he clearly lost led to insurrection on Jan. 6.

After answering his summons to rally in Washington, D.C., protesters, inflamed by his seditious demagoguery, stormed and desecrated our Capitol, imperiling Capitol police officers and legislators who were certifying President Joe Bidens election win. It led to the deaths of five people and several serious injuries.

Trumps unhinged actions to subvert our peaceful transfer of power rather than prioritize the safety of America were deplorable. His lies were enabled by the treacherous response of many Republican state and federal legislators. Even after the attack, 147 Republican U.S. House members voted to overturn the election, setting a dangerous precedent. More than 60 election fraud cases initiated by Trump were thrown out by judges from both parties. Similarly, election officials from both parties stated that 2020 was the most successful, secure election in U.S. history.

After being impeached by the House before leaving office, Trump might survive the Senate impeachment trial for his heinous attempts to destroy our democracy with no consequences, allowing his continuance as the lead power broker in the Republican Party. Republican senators must choose America over Trumpism, characterized by disdain for facts and science, divisive rhetoric, support of white supremacy, extremist militias and encouragement of dangerous conspiracy theories like rigged election voting machines or QAnon.

Call or email Republican senators and implore them to vote for impeachment, ensure Trump can never run for office again and set a clear mandate for future presidential elections. Some courageous Republican judges, election officials, state and national House and Senate members, and former Vice President Mike Pence defended our Constitution to save our country.

We all have a responsibility to assure that our fragile democracy of 245 years will survive for future generations.

KAREN BARANOSKI

WILKES-BARRE

Editor: I hope the Biden administration has a plan to revamp the Postal Service.

It is full of dead wood. Any industry that has less work and excess employees cuts staff; the Postal Service just raises rates and every time it raise rates, it loses customers. But it will not shed any staff.

Mail between Moscow and Scranton, a distance of fewer than 10 miles, may take nine days, if it gets delivered at all.

Due to delays, insurance premiums and utility bills may not get paid on time. That can result in late fees, or a doubling of the amount due on the next statement, while outgoing payments and incoming statements have crossed in the mail.

When I complained at the Moscow post office, I was told that it was my responsibility to negotiate with those entities. The bottom line is, I cannot pay bills until I receive them and I do not receive them in a timely manner.

The president and members of Congress must fix the mess that is the U.S. Postal Service.

HANS G. SCHWARZ

SPRING BROOK TWP.

Editor: To Girard Histeds Hate has home here, (Jan. 26) I would add a coda.

He correctly states that the Republican Partys Southern strategy since the 1960s has been one of division and appealing to peoples worst instincts.

However, I would add that in the last decade, this strategy has morphed into one that tries to lessen the effects of demographic inevitability. Call it Southern strategy dressed up in respectability. Tactics such as questionable gerrymandering, voter suppression and using the courts  not to mention acquiescing in the storming of the Capitol to try to overturn a legitimate election  Republicans strategy serves to continue the hate and division of the Southern strategy.

Meanwhile, states such as Georgia, Arizona and Texas will be in play for Democrats in the foreseeable future.

If Republicans start losing more elections in these states, we can expect to see more people like Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Ted Cruz of Texas lie and egg on voters who are susceptible to the hate and divisive rhetoric reminiscent of the Southern strategy.

BERT SILVESTRI

PECKVILLE
Thailand's student-led pro-democracy movement turned into a confrontation with police on Wednesday where ten activists were arrested in its early stages.Protest leaders marched a crowd to the police station where the activists were held.There were several minutes of chaos when tear gas was released from an unknown source, angering the crowd.

The rally ended after the ten activists were released. The rally of more than 1,000 people in central Bangkok was called by the Ratsadorn movement, which campaigned last year for Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha and his government to step down, the constitution to be amended to make it more democratic and the monarchy to be reformed to make it more accountable.

They called for the rally along with a labour activist group to reiterate their demand that Prayuth leave office and talk about what they call his government's failure to adequately deal with the COVID-19 crisis and economic problems.The rally comes ahead of a no-confidence debate in Parliament next week against Prayuth and members of his government. But after four top protest leaders were remanded into custody Tuesday on a charge of lese majeste - defaming the monarchy - the rally's focus switched to their plight.

The movement has been seeking abolition of the law, also widely known as Article 112, which carries a punishment of three to 15 years in prison. "Today, we are gathering here to start our first fight after the system of injustice took away our friends," said Panupong Jadnok, a protest leader.

The rally started on a note of tension when police arrested 10 activists who were putting up banners and poster in the public space.They were held for violating cleanlinessMany protesters in Bangkok banged pots and pans to protest, days after people in Myanmar made banging noises from their homes to show the public resistance to the coup. A group of protesters from neighboring Myanmar also spoke about the struggle in their homeland against its newly installed military government.

(Image Credit: AP)

(Disclaimer: This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed; only the image & headline may have been reworked by www.republicworld.com)
Shares of were locked in upper circuit for the twelfth straight trading day, up 5 per cent at Rs 257.40 on the BSE on Wednesday in an otherwise range-bound market. In the past 16 trading sessions, the stock of the consumer electronics company has rallied 90 per cent from the level of Rs 135.15 on January 18. It was trading at its highest level since June 2018. The stock soared 882 per cent from its 52-week low of Rs 26.20, hit on March 31, 2020.

Till 12:10 pm, a combined around 120,000 equity shares had changed hands and there were pending buy orders for 34,000 equity shares on the NSE and BSE. In comparison, the S&P BSE Sensex was down 0.22 per cent at 51,216 points.

is a partner for electronic manufacturing services and plastic moulding for leading consumer durable and automotive plastic companies in India. The company has one of the biggest capacities in the plastic injection molding and has capabilities across the value chain in the electronic manufacturing services (EMS).

For the October-December quarter (Q3FY21), the company had posted its highest quarterly sales, EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation) and net profit on back of strong demand environment from all its customers. A strong demand rebound along with Government policies on Atma Nirbhar Bharat are encouraging local manufacturing in India, the company said.

The company reported EBITDA of Rs 15.9 crore- a growth of 108 per cent year on year (YoY) due to improved margins driven by better revenue mix and cost control. Net revenues during the quarter increased 31 per cent YoY at Rs 184.60 crore, while net profit jumped an over 10-fold at Rs 6.5 crore from Rs 0.61 crore in a year ago quarter.

The management has revived and expanded its capex plans and is planning significant capacity additions along with new product development in the coming time in all of the companys focus areas of business. The management sees increased opportunities in the existing and new clients and based on the current business environment. With new capacities and capabilities, company is uniquely positioned in the consumer durables & automotive plastics space in India, it said.

In the coming quarters, the company aspires to have industry leading growth in revenues, gradual improvement in margins due to operational efficiencies and operating leverage and better capital efficiency resulting from improved cash flows and balance sheet optimization.
PARLAMENTUL REPUBLICII MOLDOVA

 2010

The Moldovan Parliaments website design was supported by the Democracy Support Programme in Moldova"  an initiative financed by the European Union and implemented by the Council of Europe

A hacker, who attempted to raise levels of sodium hydroxide in the city of Oldsmar, Floridas water supply, put thousands at risk of being poisoned, officials said.

A CNN report said that according to Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri, on Friday a hacker gained access into the citys water treatment system and adjusted the level of sodium hydroxide - commonly known as lye - to more than 100 times the normal level.

According to Gualtieri, an operator who noticed the intrusion and had watched the hacker access the system remotely, immediately reduced the level back, the report said.

CNN cited Gualtieri who noted that at no time was there a significant adverse effect to the citys water supply, and the public was never in danger.

Where did the breach come from?

According to CNN, it is unknown if the hacker was someone local, national or even outside of the U.S.

CNN cited Gualtieri, who said: This is somebody who is trying, as it appears on the surface, to do something bad. Its a bad act. Its a bad actor. He added, This isnt just Oh, were putting a little bit of chlorine or a little bit of fluoride, or a little bit of something, were basically talking about lye that you are taking from 100 parts per million to 11,100.

CNN cited Robert M. Lee, the CEO of Dragos Inc., an industrial cybersecurity company, who noted that early intervention prevented the attack from having more serious consequences, - but, he said, this type of attack is precisely what keeps industry experts awake at night.

It was not particularly sophisticated, but its exactly what folks worry about and as one of a very few examples of someone making an attempt to hurt people, its a big deal for that reason, Lee said.

There were some safety measures in place.

CNN noted that the city has taken steps to guard against further access into the system.

Had the hacker been successful in their attempt, Gualtieri said it would have taken 24-36 hours for the water to reach the system, and in the meantime, several redundancies are in place that would have alerted of the excessive sodium hydroxide levels, before that happened, CNN cited.

Who is handling the investigation?

Gualtieri said that the breach is being jointly investigated by the Pinellas County Sheriffs Office, FBI and Secret Service, while the FBIs field office in Tampa is working with Oldsmar and the sheriffs office, offering resources and assistance in the investigation, CNN noted.

CNN stated that it has reached out to the Secret Service for comment.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio tweeted on Monday that he wants the hacking of the water treatment system handled as a national security measure.

I will be asking the @FBI to provide all assistance necessary in investigating an attempt to poison the water supply of a #Florida city, the tweet read. This should be treated as a matter of national security.

I will be asking the @FBI to provide all assistance necessary in investigating an attempt to poison the water supply of a #Florida city.



This should be treated as a matter of national security.



https://t.co/XhGNLplNpr via @vice  Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) February 8, 2021

What are the symptoms of sodium hydroxide poisoning?

According to Gualtieri, sodium hydroxide is the main ingredient in liquid drain cleaner, CNN noted.

CNN cited the University of Florida Health Systems list of symptoms associated with sodium hydroxide poisoning, which includes: breathing difficulties, lung inflammation, throat swelling, burning of the esophagus and stomach, severe abdominal pain, vision loss, and low blood pressure.

The UF Health overview added: Long-term effects of poisoning depend on how fast the poison is diluted or neutralized in the system. Damage to the esophagus and stomach can continue to occur for several weeks after the poison was swallowed. Death can occur as long as a month later, CNN cited.

Had the hacker been successful in their attempt to poison the Oldsmar water supply, CNN said it is unknown if the increased levels of sodium hydroxide would have led to any of these symptoms.

What is the population of Oldsmar, Florida?

Oldsmar lies about 17 miles west of Tampa, in Pinellas County. The city has a population of about 15,000 people, CNN reported.

READ MORE:
In the last several years, Los Angeles had been a hotbed of activity, with more artists moving there, more galleries opening, the establishment of the Frieze L.A. art fair and more activity among museums, including plans for two new ones  the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures and the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art.

[Catch up on Californias reopening process.]

When the pandemic hit, I decided to stick with my L.A. plan, though it would clearly be more challenging in a Covid environment. Little did I know that my January arrival would put me smack dab in the middle of the viruss epicenter, with an estimated one in three of Los Angeles Countys roughly 10 million people infected since the pandemics outset.

Nevertheless, I connected with sources by phone and conducted in-person interviews with sources in masks. On one such visit to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the director, Michael Govan, emphasized the frustration experienced by his institution and others at having been closed since March.

[The director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art stepped down following a bumpy year.]

Since I had covered the reopening of museums in places like New York and Houston the fact that Los Angeless museums had never been allowed to reopen struck me. I subsequently spoke with the directors of other museums in the county, including the Hammer, the Petersen Automotive Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Autry Museum of the American West.

I also interviewed artists affected by the shutdown, and sought explanations from Californias governor, Gavin Newsom. The reporting process allowed me to connect with various players in the citys art world. I look forward to continuing to tell their stories.
Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US

Iran ready to help improve the defense capability of Syria

European Parliament head proposes to strengthen sanctions on Russia

UK PM gets married in London

Armenia reports COVID-19 new 81 cases: for people die

EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia

2 people die in Armenia road accident

Nigeria: Students taken hostage a month ago are released

61 quakes recorded in Congo per day

Syrian MFA: EU lost credibility due to blind obedience to US policy

Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack

Mher Grigoryan: Clarification of border points is possible only after withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops from Armenia

Suspicious deal: Whether there was profit from buying DNA IDs?

Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war

4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack

Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities

Kocharyan: I have to ask people how it happened that overwhelming majority elected this leader

Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country

Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia

US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs

Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners

Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions

Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US

Iran intensifies its diplomacy amid Armenia-Azerbaijan border tensions

Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes

Lukashenko accuses West of destabilizing situation in Belarus

Armenia Central Electoral Commission chief on snap elections: No legal basis for postponing, suspending any function

Armenias Pashinyan is met by Yerevan district residents chanting against him

We are ready to be fully engaged in negotiation process to resolve Karabakh issue, says Armenia acting PM

Armenia ex-President Kocharyan gives interview to Russia TV channel

Armenia acting premier: We are ready to start withdrawing troops at any moment

Canada MFA expresses concern over 6 Armenian soldiers capture by Azerbaijan troops

There are omissions in registration documents of political forces that applied to Armenia Central Electoral Commission

Armenia Central Electoral Commission chief: There is activeness in Yerevan for the past day or two

Three new cases of coronavirus reported in Artsakh

Group of US Congress members threaten Azerbaijans Aliyev regime with sanctions

Chicago mayor is sued for allegedly refusing interview with white reporter

Iran exports oil to US for first time after long interval

"Armenia" bloc top 50 MP candidates are announced

42 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia

Sri Lanka public beach is covered in charred plastic pellets due to fire in container ship

US preparing list of targeted sanctions on Belarus authorities

China believes it will own America by 2035, Biden says

15 al-Shabab militants killed in Somalia

Newspaper: Armenia political forces that applied for running in election impatiently await CEC decision

Newspaper: Changes are expected in Artsakh

California prisoner who considers himself Satanist beheads cellmate, dismembers his body

Newspaper: Armenia acting PM's "mutually beneficial" proposal to collapse state system?

Armenia National Security Service Reserve Officers' Union members meet with His Holiness Karekin II

EU is ready to help Armenia and Azerbaijan with border delimitation and demarcation

ARF-D member on Nikol Pashinyan: 103 years ago Armenia's founding fathers would have executed him for treason

Iran President hails brotherly ties with Azerbaijan

Robert Kocharyan on years of his leadership in Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia

Situation on Armenian-Azerbaijani border is still tense, more on COVID-19 in Armenia, May 28 digest

"Armenia" alliance of political parties paying tribute to founder of First Republic Aram Manukyan

Yerevan.today: Armenia acting PM not greeted at ruling party's headquarters, citizens call him 'capitulator'

Russia MOD reports on maintenance of ceasefire regime in Nagorno-Karabakh

Armenia acting MOD meets with Russian counterpart in Moscow

Armenia 2nd President: I see possibility of restoring borders of Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast

We can provide our army with some key, modernized weapons, says Armenia ex-President Kocharyan

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan: Captives issue is not one that any opposition force can resolve

OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs release statement on detention of 6 Armenian servicemen by Azerbaijan

Armenian acting Deputy PM: Discussion on issues possible only after withdrawal of Azeri troops from Armenia's territory

Armenia acting PM on Syunik roads, Russian military posts: This is only place where there are working nuances

Armenia acting PM: Process of return of POWs will intensify after upcoming elections

Putin congratulates Aliyev on Republic Day

Josep Borrell: A group of EU Ministers will visit Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan

Armenia acting PM: We're not going to escalate situation for 30% of Sev Lake

Armenia 3rd President visits Vanadzor, pays tribute to heroes of Battle of Gharakilisa (PHOTOS)

Armenia ex-President Kocharyan lays flowers at Battle of Karakilisa memorial (PHOTOS)

Armenia acting PM: Solution to captives issue is matter of time

Shoygu to Harutyunyan: Russia, Armenia strengthen military cooperation

Armenia acting premier: We are 100% honest toward our country

Artsakh President pays tribute at Stepanakert memorial, Shushi Tank-Monument

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan on Meghri corridor plan: Not beneficial to us now to discuss it as "corridor"

Acting PM: "Cement," "fittings" were stolen while constructing Armenia state "building"

Two new cases of coronavirus reported in Artsakh

Catholicos of All Armenians visits Sardarapat Memorial, again separate from state officials

MOD dismisses Azerbaijan statement on Armenia army firing toward Nakhchivan

Jerusalem Post: Israel prepares for a new war with Hamas

France, UN World Food Programme partner to support displaced people in Armenia

Armenia ex-President Kocharyan: Today we are not full-fledged negotiating party

Norwegian prime minister opposes series of NATO reforms

Armenia deputy FM briefs UN, Red Cross leaders on consequences of Azerbaijan aggression against Artsakh

NATO Secretary-General: Afghans must take full responsibility for peace and stability in their country

104 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia

Armenia acting premier: Our sovereignty, independence cannot be subject of discussion

Karabakh state-finance minister announces resignation

Artsakh MFA: Sardarapat victory has inspired all Armenians for over a century

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan: In contrast to kneeling, disgraceful authorities of the day, we have determination

Armenia President: Today we stand on threshold of Sardarapat of morality, dignity

Catholicos of All Armenians: Our people shall find strength to overcome this ordeal as well

Armenia First Republic Day event is held under very modest conditions

Newspaper: Armenia authorities claiming to be popular close off First Republic Day event to public

Armenia ex-President Sargsyan: Now or never!

Armenia President, then acting premier arrive at Sardarapat Memorial

Newspaper: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan's new "cleverness?"

France ambassador: I wish Armenia to be able to live its independence in peace, prosperity

Bashar al-Assad wins Syria presidential election

Reporters not allowed entering Sardarapat Memorial of Armenia
Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.), chairman of the Education and Labor Committee, at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on July 29, 2020. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Democrats Kill Amendment to Deny Relief Funding to Schools Partnering With Chinese Entities

Democrat lawmakers voted down an amendment to deny federal relief funding to educational institutions that partner with Chinese entities and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) affiliates.

The amendment to the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill was proposed by Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) on Feb. 8, two weeks after President Joe Biden quietly nixed a proposed regulation that would have required colleges to disclose ties to Confucius Institutes, CCP-funded college partnerships that the Trump administration considered a part of Beijings influence network.

The Chinese Communist Party will do everything possible to steal our intellectual property and research, compromise our professors, and even recruit individuals on campus for espionage, Stefanik said, introducing the measure during the Feb. 9 Education and Labor Committee hearing.

We value our institutions of higher education as forums for open thought and expression and incubators for innovation and learning. The Chinese Communist Party sees them as the opposite: forums for communist brainwashing and censoring speech, and unfortunately a marketplace for intellectual theft.

The Democrat-controlled committee tossed Stefaniks amendment in a 27-21 party-line vote during the 13-hour hearing that lasted into early morning hours of Feb. 10.

Confucius Institutes bill themselves as places to learn Mandarin, study Chinese culture, and land a scholarship. Theyre funded and largely staffed by Hanban, a nonprofit that claims to be non-governmental, but is in fact directly controlled by the CCP, according to a report by the Senate homeland security committees investigations subcommittee (pdf).

The Subcommittee obtained a contract between Chinese teachers and Hanban that requires Chinese instructors at U.S. schools to conscientiously safeguard national interests and terminates if the Chinese instructors violate Chinese law or engage in activities detrimental to national interests, the bipartisan report says, raising concerns over academic freedom and application of CCP laws at American universities.

The Trump administration in August urged universities to reconsider hosting the institutes, saying they advance the CCP influence by providing institutions with financial incentives to abstain from criticizing PRC [Peoples Republic of China] policies; putting pressure on faculty to self-censor; monitoring overseas students for loyalty to the party; and undermining freedom of expression by disrupting campus events deemed controversial to the CCP.

Around the same time, the State Department designated as a foreign mission a Washington-based center that promotes the institutes.

The first Confucius Institute in the United States was set up at the University of Maryland in 2004. More than 100 had been established at U.S. schools and over 500 globally as of 2019.

Since then, however, the numbers significantly dwindled.

The National Association of Scholars (NAS), an education advocacy group, reported that 55 of the institutes have closed or are in the processing of closing, as of Jan. 19, with 63 remaining in the United States, including two that are scheduled to close later this year.

There has been a global pushback against the institutes, including in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom. In 2013, McMaster University in Canada became the first university in North America to close its Confucius Institute.
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[February 10, 2021] OliX Pharmaceuticals Announces Results from Preclinical Study of Hair Loss Therapeutic Candidate

Company to discuss study results and present corporate overview at SMis 12th Annual RNA Therapeutics Virtual Conference on February 11

SUWON, Republic of Korea, Feb. 10, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- OliX Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (KOSDAQ: 226950), a leading developer of RNAi therapeutics, announced that it has demonstrated efficacy in a preclinical study of OLX104C, an investigational RNAi therapeutic in development for androgenic alopecia, also known as hair loss. In the study, OLX104C was administered topically to a mouse model with suppressed hair growth (Dihydrotestosterone, DHT administered mouse). The study evaluated the percentage of hair regrowth and duration of knockdown of the target protein, AR, following a single injection. Mice receiving OLX104C showed substantial hair regrowth compared to the control group, and results showed that a single dose could inhibit the expression of the target gene for more than three weeks. We are advancing a novel and potentially durable approach to treating hair loss with large market potential, said Dong Ki Lee, Ph.D., founder and chief executive officer of OliX Pharmaceuticals. Due to topical administration, our investigational therapy acts directly on the affected area and is rapidly degraded upon exposure to the blood, so its free from major systemic side effects such as sexual dysfunction caused by conventional hair loss therapeutics. Building on our experience evaluating RNAi therapeutics for skin diseases, we plan to initiate clinical trials of OLX104C by 2022. According to Inkwood Research, the global hair loss treatment market size is estimated to grow 5.51% annually from $8.4 billion in 2018 to $13.6 billion in 2027.1 Furthermore, OliX has completed patent applications in major global markets, including the United States, Europe, Korea, and Japan, to secure exclusive rights for its hair loss treatment substance.



Dr. Lee will discuss the preclinical results of OLX104C and present a corporate overview at SMis 12th Annual RNA Therapeutics Virtual Conference on February 11, 2021 at 9:40 a.m. GMT. About OliX Pharmaceuticals

OliX Pharmaceuticals is a clinical stage pharmaceutical company developing therapeutics against a variety of disorders by down-regulating expression of disease-causing genes, based on its own proprietary RNAi technology. The Companys core RNAi platform, asymmetric siRNA (asiRNA), is a unique gene silencing technology based on RNA interference (RNAi), which is considered as the most efficient gene silencing technology. Based on asiRNA technology, OliX has developed cell penetrating asiRNA (cp-asiRNA), a therapeutic RNAi platform to effectively target locally administrable diseases, such as hypertrophic scar, dry and wet age-related macular degeneration (AMD), subretinal fibrosis, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), and neuropathic pain. OliX has also developed another therapeutic RNAi platform, GalNAc-asiRNA, to target a variety of liver diseases. To learn more about the company, visit https://www.olixpharma.com/eng/

Media Contact: Jon Yu

Westwicke/ICR PR

Phone: +1.475.395.5375

jon.yu@westwicke.com 1 Inkwood Research. Global Alopecia (Hair Loss) Treatment Market Forecast 2019-2027. Available at: https://www.inkwoodresearch.com/reports/global-alopecia-hair-loss-treatment-market/. Accessed February 9, 2021. A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/4e8ba5a9-3289-459e-9e09-f6d9cebf242b.



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Appointment

10 February 2021

Airbnb has appointed Parin Mehta as regional director for the Asia-Pacific region. In this role, Mehta will lead Airbnb's Homes and Experiences and be responsible for the long-term growth of the company in APAC.

Mehta was previously director of Airbnb Experiences for APAC and was responsible for launching the Experiences business across the region, including Online Experiences in 2020.

He has been based in Singapore for 10 years, previously serving as head of strategic partnerships for South-east Asia at Google, and also previously lived in Japan.

Tata Steel reported 54.03% drop in consolidated net profit to Rs 1,565.41 crore on 7.4% rise in total income to Rs 37,531.67 crore in Q3 December 2020 over Q3 December 2019.

Berger Paints India reported 50.7% surge in consolidated net profit to Rs 274.80 crore on 24.83% rise in total income to Rs 2,134.80 crore in Q3 December 2020 over Q3 December 2019.

Glenmark Pharmaceuticals said that the meeting of the board of directors of the company is scheduled on 12 February 2021, to consider repurchase of foreign currency debt.

The Phoenix Mills Limited (PML) said its wholly owned subsidiary Mindstone Mall Developers has announced acquisition of approximately 7.48 acres of prime land in Alipore, Kolkata for a total consideration of Rs 300 crore. The land parcel is strategically located on Diamond Harbour Road, Alipore, Kolkata.

Mahanagar Gas reported 16.75% rise in net profit to Rs 217.21 crore on 11.16% fall in total income to Rs 686.79 crore in Q3 December 2020 over Q3 December 2019.

Raymond reported 88.89% slide in consolidated net profit to Rs 21.69 crore on 37.12% fall in total income to Rs 1,297.82 crore in Q3 December 2020 over Q3 December 2019.

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Whats new: Chinese vaccine producer CanSino Biologics Inc.s Covid-19 vaccine won approval in Mexico for emergency use for people 18 years of age or older, the company said Wednesday.

CanSino signed an agreement to supply 35 million doses of its vaccines to Mexico from the end of 2020 to 2021. CanSino said it would build capacity to produce 100 million to 200 million doses this year, without giving details on progress.

CanSinos single-dose shot, co-developed by the Chinese military and the Tianjin-based biotech company, uses adenovirus vector to deliver a coronavirus antigen. The vaccine has yet to be submitted for approval in China.

The background: CanSino said earlier this week that its experimental coronavirus shot has an efficacy rate of 65.7% for preventing symptomatic cases based on an analysis from late-stage trials.

CanSino launched the final stage of clinical trials for the vaccine in Pakistan, Mexico, Russia, Chile and Argentina, covering more than 40,000 people.

The protection reading achieved from a single dose of CanSinos vaccine falls between those of other candidates. The shot developed by state-owned China National Biotec Group Co. Ltd., a unit of Sinopharm, was shown to be 78% effective, while one from Sinovac Biotech Ltd. had a 50.38% rate in a trial involving high-risk medical workers. The shots from Pfizer Inc. and Moderna Inc. have shown protection rates of about 95%, and trials for AstraZeneca Plcs vaccine resulted in an average of 70% from two different dosing regimes.

Quick Takes are condensed versions of China-related stories for fast news you can use. To read the full story in Chinese, click here.

Contact reporter Han Wei (weihan@caixin.com) and editor Bob Simison (bobsimison@caixin.com).

Support quality journalism in China. Subscribe to Caixin Global starting at $0.99.

It may be time to start double-masking.

New data released Wednesday from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicates that wearing two masks is more effective in slowing the spread of the coronavirus. Researchers spaced two artificial heads six feet from each other and recorded how many coronavirus-sized particles spewed by one were inhaled by the other, according to the Associated Press.

The one wearing one mask, surgical or cloth, blocked around 40% of the particles, while the other one wearing a cloth mask on top of a surgical mask blocked about 80% of particles.

If both heads were double-masked, more than 95% of the particles were blocked, the CDCs Dr. John Brooks told the Associated Press.

The first challenge is to get as many as people as possible masking, Brooks said. And then for those that do mask, to help them get the best benefit out of that mask.

The study had limitations. Researchers used one brand of surgical mask and one kind of cloth mask, so its unclear if results would be the same regardless of brand. However, it echoes earlier research supporting double-masking.

A new study from the CDC suggests wearing two face masks instead of one may offer more protection and reduce ones exposure to cough particles by nearly 96.5%. (CDC)

The CDC also updated its guidance on wearing two masks. A cloth mask worn over a surgical mask should tighten the masks edges that can let virus particles in, if done correctly.

But combining two disposable masks is not recommended, and neither is combining a KN95 mask with any other mask, according to new guidance from the CDC.

The CDC is also taking down a do-it-yourself page on masking.

CDC guidance has evolved over time. U.S. health officials discouraged the general public from wearing masks when the pandemic began, but two months later, recommended people wear masks in public.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and presidential advisor, said late last month double-masking makes common sense.

So if you have a physical covering with one layer, you put another layer on, it just makes common sense that it likely would be more effective and thats the reason you see people either double-masking or doing a version of an N95, Fauci told TODAY last month.

However, its not recommended to triple-mask.

Dr. David Cennimo, an infectious disease specialist at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, called triple-masking so crazy, I dont even know how to address it.

Tripling up on masks would likely involve six or nine layers, potentially leading to suffocation, he said during a recent interview with NJ Advance Media.

The Associated Press has contributed to this report.

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Implementation of the UKs Brexit deal with the European Union has been more than bumpy in the six weeks after the transition out of the single market and customs union, Boris Johnsons chief negotiator has admitted.

David Frost cited the row over Covid vaccines, disruptions to trade with Northern Ireland, the stand-off over Britains refusal to grant EU representatives diplomatic status and what he described as niggling border issues over shellfish, as he admitted London and Brussels had failed to achieve the friendly cooperation between sovereign equals which the UK claimed to be seeking in divorce talks.

Giving evidence to the House of Lords EU Committee, Lord Frost  now Mr Johnsons Brexit policy representative  confirmed that the European parliament was now expected to request an extension to the two-month period for MEPs to ratify the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA), potentially taking the EUs formal adoption of the deal to Easter or beyond.

And he complained that the head of the UK mission in Brussels was being denied political-level contacts in what one member committee described as a tit-for-tat retaliation after London refused to give the EUs representatives diplomatic status.

But Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove attempted to play down the significance of the series of rows and setbacks which have followed the end of the transition period on 1 January, comparing the difficulties facing businesses as a result of Brexit to turbulence on take-off before a smooth air flight.

Mr Gove insisted he did not want to pooh-pooh the complaints of businesses in Northern Ireland faced with extra red tape because of Boris Johnsons trade deal with the EU, but said he believed problems could be dealt with by changes on the ground, rather than ripping up the Northern Ireland Protocol as the DUP have demanded.

His comments came amid reports that Brussels will offer only a three- or six-month extension to grace periods to ease supermarket supply chains and parcel deliveries to Northern Ireland, rather than the longer delay to January 2023 which he has requested.

Lord Frost told the committee: We said ad nauseam last year during the negotiations that we wanted friendly cooperation between sovereign equals as our vision of the future. And that is still what we want.

I dont think thats been quite the experience of last few weeks, if we are honest about it.

I think the EU is still adjusting somewhat  as we thought they might  to the existence of a genuinely independent actor in their neighbourhood.

Listing rows over vaccines, Northern Ireland, trade barriers and diplomatic status, he told peers: None of those things are in themselves dramatic, although some have been very, very serious.

I think it has been more than bumpy, to be honest, in the last six weeks. I think it's been problematic.

I hope well get over this. It is going to require a different spirit, probably, from the EU but Im sure we are going to see that and see some of this subside as we go forward.

Mr Gove told the committee that the conditions of serious economic or societal difficulties required for the UK to trigger Article 16 of the Northern Ireland Protocol were already in place, allowing Mr Johnson to use the mechanism to override certain provisions of the agreement.

But ahead of talks with European Commission vice-president Maros Sefcovic in London on Thursday, he insisted that both sides want to proceed in a pragmatic and constructive way.

We all know that when an aeroplane takes off, thats the point when you sometimes get that increased level of turbulence, he said. But then eventually you reach a cruising altitude and the crew tell you to take your seatbelt off and enjoy a gin and tonic and some peanuts.

Were not at the gin and tonic and peanuts stage yet, but Im confident we will be.

Confronted with the experience of a heritage railway operator in Downpatrick who was unable to find a courier willing to ship items from the British mainland without onerous paperwork, Mr Gove compared the situation to his experience of taxi drivers in London who refused to accept Scottish banknotes.

He said he wanted to bust myths about the difficulties created by the new customs documentation required for trade across the Irish Sea under the terms of Mr Johnsons deal.

The truth is that there are there are some businesses who, when it comes to trade  both with the EU and also with the dispatch of goods to Northern Ireland  are taking a little bit of time to adjust to the new normal, he said.

There is a reticence and a caution amongst some that we're doing our very best to dispel by making clear what the processes are and how it is possible to comply with them with the least possible disruption to effective activity.
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The news A congratulatory email that arrived in August told Mr. Seki he had won the competition. I was honored, he said. I feel the contest valued my future and talent, rather than the results of my watch, the finished product. (He said he had never been really happy with the watch: Im not really satisfied of the final results of the calendar, which isnt always accurate.) In the past, winners traveled to Geneva to present their timepieces at a news conference and receive 20,000 Swiss francs ($22,285) to help finance horological projects or purchase equipment. But, because of the pandemic, Mr. Seki was honored in October at the F.P. Journe boutique in Tokyo, a Tadao Ando-designed shop in the Aoyama district.

Next thing I have many ideas for watches Id like to create in the future, Mr. Seki said. Id like to become an independent watchmaker. After graduating last spring, he began working full time at Eguchi, a concept boutique in Kichijoji, west of Tokyo, that sells vintage watches and clothing. He now repairs watches during his eight-hour workday and, while he hopes to study in Switzerland, he knows his future is in Japan. Japan is quite unique, he said, in the sense that brands make everything from scratch, from beginning to end.
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Euro Forecast Overview:

What political risks? The Euro has roundly shrugged off concerns around the Italian and Dutch governments, and instead may be held back by a sluggish pace of vaccinations.

EUR/USD rates have broken their downtrend from the nascent yearly high, while EUR/JPY rates continue to consolidate in a short-term triangle below a multi-year trendline.

Per the IG Client Sentiment Index , the Euro still has a bullish bias in the short-term.

Euro Gains as Dollar Falls

The Euro continues to be hampered by poor vaccination rates, trailing both the UK and the US, but thats about as far as the negativity goes. Elections are moving forward in a few months to find a new Dutch government, while former European Central Bank President Mario Draghi has been pulled from the sidelines to run a technocratic Italian government. Attempts by the ECB to jawbone the Euro lower have failed, the dual threats of an exchange rate study and a market underpricing rate cut odds shrugged off. With the US Dollar back in the throes of a potential bearish breakdown, the Euro may be gaining standing to attempt bullish breakouts of its own.

EUR/USD RATE TECHNICAL ANALYSIS: DAILY CHART (February 2020 to February 2021) (CHART 1)

In the last update it was noted that the rising trendline from the May and November 2020 lows comes into focus near 1.1950 through next week, in the midst of a confluence of significant technical levels: 23.6% Fibonacci retracement of the 2019 low/2020 high range at 1.1945; the August and September 2020 highs at 1.1967 and 1.2011, respectively; and the 23.6% Fibonacci retracement of the 2017 low/2018 high range at 1.2033. In aggregate, this major support zone is carved out between 1.1945 and 1.2033. Failure below here would be a significant bearish technical development. EUR/USD fell towards 1.1945, but no further; instead, the pair has been able to retake the rising trendline from the May and November 2020 lows. In turn, the downtrend from the nascent intrayearly highs has been broken, suggesting that the continuation effort higher is beginning.

Having just broken the intrayearly downtrend, momentum is still evolving. EUR/USD rates are now above their daily 5-, 8-, 13-, and 21-EMA envelope, which is realigning towards bullish sequential order. Daily MACD has turned higher but remains below its signal line, while daily Slow Stochastics are rising through their median line. Once more, EUR/USD rates now may be finding the footing needed before attempting another turn higher.

IG Client Sentiment Index: EUR/USD Rate Forecast (February 10, 2021) (Chart 2)

EUR/USD: Retail trader data shows 41.44% of traders are net-long with the ratio of traders short to long at 1.41 to 1. The number of traders net-long is 4.17% higher than yesterday and 7.71% lower from last week, while the number of traders net-short is 5.82% higher than yesterday and 5.60% higher from last week.

We typically take a contrarian view to crowd sentiment, and the fact traders are net-short suggests EUR/USD prices may continue to rise.

Traders are further net-short than yesterday and last week, and the combination of current sentiment and recent changes gives us a stronger EUR/USD-bullish contrarian trading bias.

EUR/JPY RATE TECHNICAL ANALYSIS: DAILY CHART (February 2020 to February 2021) (CHART 3)

Given the consolidation seen in recent weeks, not much has changed for the EUR/JPY outlook since the prior update. EUR/JPY remains below the rising trendline from the October and November 2020 swing lows at the end of the week, but has rebounded ahead of the rising trendline from the May and November 2020 lows, as well as the 38.2% Fibonacci retracement of the 2014 high/2016 low range at 124.71.

Momentum is more bullish for EUR/JPY rates than previously, but its been a tedious process. Daily MACD continues to rise ever so slowly above its signal line, while daily Slow Stochastics have started to lose upward momentum prior to reaching overbought territory. The symmetrical triangle thats formed at the start of 2021, in context of the preceding bullish move, would suggest that EUR/JPY rates have a bias for a bullish breakout.

IG Client Sentiment Index: EUR/JPY Rate Forecast (February 10, 2021) (Chart 4)

EUR/JPY: Retail trader data shows 39.37% of traders are net-long with the ratio of traders short to long at 1.54 to 1. The number of traders net-long is 16.95% higher than yesterday and 0.36% lower from last week, while the number of traders net-short is 13.27% lower than yesterday and 16.50% lower from last week.

We typically take a contrarian view to crowd sentiment, and the fact traders are net-short suggests EUR/JPY prices may continue to rise.

Yet traders are less net-short than yesterday and compared with last week. Recent changes in sentiment warn that the current EUR/JPY price trend may soon reverse lower despite the fact traders remain net-short.

--- Written by Christopher Vecchio, CFA, Senior Currency Strategist
COLUMBIA  Delays in new shipments of COVID-19 vaccines are forcing several large South Carolina hospitals to reschedule appointments and stop accepting new ones.

The setback comes as changes in delivery plans bring fewer vaccine doses and shipments from drugmakers come later in the week, according to the South Carolina's hospital systems.

Prisma Health, the state's largest health care provider, this week found itself shifting doses back and forth between large vaccination sites in the Upstate and Midlands when deliveries did not arrive Feb. 9 as expected. The prior day's shipment also came with fewer doses than anticipated, said Dr. Saria Saccocio, co-lead of Prisma Health vaccine task force.

Automated phone calls went out to seniors as many appointments had to be canceled, though Saccocio did not have an exact number of people affected.

The result is a really complex issue when it comes to scheduling, Dr. Danielle Scheurer, Medical University of South Carolina Health System chief quality officer, said in an online posting. How, in good conscience, do you schedule patients to get a vaccine when youre not even sure if youll have it? We literally dont know what were getting week to week until we open that box.

MUSC spokeswoman Heather Woolwine likewise acknowledged on Feb. 9 that the hospital system may need to change scheduled vaccine appointments. She said MUSC Health apologizes to patients for the inconvenience and frustration that rescheduling appointments may cause.

Scheurer said MUSC is pushing as many appointments as possible to later in the week and has frozen all new appointments.

"All we can administer is what were given, and right now were just not getting a lot," she said.

This is not the first time doses have run out.

Thousands of appointments had to be canceled last month when those 70 and older newly became eligible and hospitals made appointments based on the incorrect assumption that their future supply shipments would be much larger.

The latest delays come the same week that South Carolina expanded vaccine eligibility to 309,000 seniors who are ages 65 to 69.

Now that so many people are needing second doses, first doses and boosters are arriving in separate shipments, the state Department of Health and Environmental Control explained. Before, South Carolina wasn't using all of its second doses every week, so those were repurposed for first doses as Gov. Henry McMaster urged hospitals to empty their shelves.

The day the next shipment arrives, the old shipment ought to be in somebodys arm," he said.

Now the trend has reversed and two-thirds of the shots being given at Prisma are to those in need of their follow-up dose.

DHEC said it is urging hospitals against holding regular mass clinics that could exceed a facility's weekly dose allotment until vaccines are more widely available.

Dr. Robert Oliverio, CEO of Roper St. Francis Physician Partners, said the hospital system has paused scheduling any new appointments for COVID-19 vaccines to ensure that existing appointments made through mid-March will be honored.

If vaccine supply drops off considerably, that may change, he said.

The hospital system may also resort to using first doses as second doses to ensure that everyone who has already received the first dose is able to get their second one.

Were running week to week, Oliverio said. Well probably be fine through next Tuesday or Wednesday. But it really depends on what comes on the truck.

On the other hand, hospitals like Bon Secours St. Francis in Greenville and Conway Medical Center along the Grand Strand say they have enough doses to vaccinate everyone who currently has an appointment.

Tidelands Health, which is operating two clinics in Murrells Inlet and Georgetown, has received 1,000 doses in each of the past two weeks  a far cry from its original hope of 2,000 and even further from its capacity of 5,000 per week.

The unpredictability of what will be delivered has kept scheduling staff on standby, according to Gayle Resetar, Tidelands Healths chief operating officer. Specialists line up 1,000 appointments per week, and if more supply is en route, the staff works all weekend to exhaust the remaining doses.

As of Feb. 9, Tidelands had a waiting list of 19,000, and Resetar believes it will be at least two months before they will be able to serve the expanded pool of those age 65 to 69.

So far, the provider has not had to cancel any appointments as a second round of doses for those 70 and older are en route this week.

Theres been so much news and angst that even though they knew they had an appointment, they were just all prepared that possibly we would call them and say we didnt get it. But we did, Resetar said.

Walk-ins also caused a problem this week, Prisma said, following a surge of demand from newly eligible seniors that led the hospital system to pause the practice.

"The 65- to 69-year-old group showed up in overwhelming numbers, and we have exhausted all of our walk-in vaccine supply for this week," Saccocio said.

The hospital system will still accept walk-ins for those without appointments in need of a second dose as long as it has been 26 days since they received their first shot. Prisma expects to receive its delayed shipment Feb. 10, and another containing booster doses Feb. 11, Saccocio said.

Meanwhile, more sites are being added to reach people living in rural areas.

Charleston County and Fetter Health Care Network will start vaccinating Feb. 16 on a first-come, first-served basis from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the St. Pauls/Hollywood Library in Hollywood. Anthony Poole, chief clinical and quality officer for Fetter Health Care Network, said his team will be prepared to give between 800 and 1,000 doses.

In all, 1.3 million South Carolinians are on the eligibility list, which already included seniors 70 and older, health care workers of all kinds and long-term care residents.

As of Monday, nearly 471,000 South Carolinians had received at least their initial shot, and more than 410,000 doses were reserved through appointments, according to DHEC.

The announcement also came on a day legislators resumed debate on how to vaccinate educators without bumping seniors from their appointments, with the goal of getting students back in the classroom on a full, five-day week statewide before the school year is essentially over.

DHEC officials have said the only way to get shots in the arms of the more than 71,000 K-12 employees statewide willing to roll up their sleeves now would be to divert all doses for two weeks toward the effort, canceling time slots for vaccines reserved by appointments.

Jessica Holdman and Seanna Adcox reported from Columbia and Lauren Sausser from Charleston. Shamira McCray contributed from Charleston, Nick Masuda from Myrtle Beach and Natalie Walters from Greenville.
press release

Friday, 05 February 2021 marks the 5th anniversary of the Lily Mine accident when three employees lost their lives in a tragic accident. The Department of Minerals Resources and Energy would like to convey our sadness in commemorating the loss of Ms Yvonne Mnisi, Ms Pretty Nkambule and Mr Solomon Nyirenda.

The Department completed the inquiry into the cause of the accident in terms of section 65(1) of the Mine Health and Safety Act No 29 of 1996. The report was submitted to the Director for Public Prosecutions in August 2018. An administrative fine of R1 million was issued in September 2020, to Vantage Goldfields (Pty) Ltd as per the recommendation of the inquiry report.

The Department is greatly concerned with the prolonged business rescue process. In this regard, there were several meetings that the Department held with the Business Rescue Practitioner, prospective new owners, families, and the current mine owners which is Vantage Goldfields (Pty) Ltd to monitor progress of the business rescue process.

Also, the DMRE wrote a letter to the Non - Executive Chairperson of Vantage Goldfields Limited expressing the Department's concerns regarding the prolonged business rescue process. The Chairperson subsequently responded to the effect that the company has decided to re-finance their subsidiary and their initial focus will be on the retrieval of the employees.

We will continually update the families on the business rescue process. Since Lily Mine was closed, hundreds of employees have lost their jobs. Further, many workers have lost due to the current pandemic, and it would be in the interests of the greater community for the mine to be re-opened as soon as possible.
The rapid development of express delivery services in rural areas is tremendously facilitating Chinas rural industries.

Statistics indicate that over 30 billion express packages were shipped to and from Chinas rural regions last year, and the exchange of industrial products and farm produce between urban and rural areas totaled 1.5 trillion yuan ($232 billion). The use of express delivery services was improved in the sales of potatoes, sweet potatoes and corns.

In 2020, express delivery outlets have been established in almost all Chinese townships and over 50 percent of Chinese villages. They not only vitalized the development potential of rural industries, but also released the consumption potential of farmers, said Liu Jiang, a researcher with the Development and Research Center of the State Post Bureau.

River snail rice noodle, a local specialty of south Chinas Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, has been enjoying huge popularity across China in recent years. It has grown into a business of 10 billion yuan in Liuzhou, the second largest city of the autonomous region.

Last year, Liuzhou sold 10.5 billion yuan of packed river snail rice noodle, and its daily production reached 3.25 million bags. More than 77.6 million parcels were shipped by China Post, up 142.7 percent from a year ago.

Baile village, Taiyangcun Township of Liuzhou is home to massive sweet bamboos from which pickled bamboo shoots, a major ingredient for the river snail rice noodle, are made. According to Huang Yugui, who runs a sweet bamboo plantation base in the village, the pickled bamboo shoots produced in the village are sold to all parts of the country. We ship pickled bamboo shoots almost every day, and sometimes we ship more than 1,000 kilograms a day, he told Peoples Daily.

To assist the development of the river snail rice noodle industry, major express delivery companies have established outlets in villages and take relevant orders as a priority. They even tailored exclusive shipping routes for the business.

Seventy to eighty percent of our business is related to the industry, and the industry is now a new growth point for Liuzhous express delivery, said Xu Zhifang, head of Liuzhou Municipal Postal Administration.

Before express delivery companies set up outlets in our village, we had to go to the township to sell the picked bamboo shoots, Huang introduced. Now, the express delivery outlets in the village are enabling the man to ship his products to everywhere, and his annual income also surged from 60,000 yuan to 90,000 yuan.

Since the last year, the Postal Administration of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region has been actively promoting express delivery services in rural areas. It carried out in-depth cooperation with market entities such as rural cooperatives, improved terminal logistics networks, and improved service capabilities, to further vitalize the rural economy.

Last year, the autonomous region sold 1.08 billion yuan of farm produce through postal and express delivery services. The shipping volume of passion fruits, duck eggs and other local specialties also surpassed 10 million pieces.

According to Chinas State Post Bureau, the country will keep enhancing efforts to bring express services to villages, striving to cover all villages in the east with direct express services before the end of this year. Meanwhile, 80 percent of administrative villages in central China and 60 percent in the west will also be offered such services

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Internet was fully restored in Uganda on Wednesday almost a month after a near-total blackout was imposed across the country ahead of elections the opposition says were rigged.

The restoration of internet and social media comes days after security forces announced dozens of arrests for alleged election-related violence, and surrounded the headquarters of the main opposition party, National Unity Platform (NUP) whose leader, Robert Kyagulanyi was last month confined to his home for several days.

Long-term leader Yoweri Musveni was declared the winner of a January 14 presidential election, securing 58.6 percent of the vote and a sixth term after 35 years in power.

His main rival, musician-turned-lawmaker Bobi Wine, came a distant second with 34.8 percent. He has rejected the results, and decried the election as a sham.

The outgoing Kyadondo East MP has petitioned the Supreme Court seeking to nullify Mr Museveni's victory.

Government said an unprecedented internet shutdown imposed on January 13 for alleged national security reasons had been fully lifted.

"Internet and Social media services have been fully restored. We apologize for the inconveniences caused, but it was for the security of our country. Let's be constructive, NOT destructive consumers/users of social media," Minister of State for Information, Communication Technology and National Guidance Peter Ogwang tweeted Wednesday.

The runup to polling day was marred by bloodshed and a sustained crackdown on government critics and Museveni's rivals.

At least 54 people were shot dead in November over two days of street protests over Bobi Wine's arrest, and the opposition leader was repeatedly detained and his rallies broken up with tear gas and live rounds.

The United States last month said it was "deeply troubled" by reports of violence and irregularities in presidential's poll, though Mr Museveni declared it the cleanest in Uganda's post-independence history.

Bobi Wine was the frontunner of 10 opposition candidates running against the veteran leader, who has ruled uninterrupted since taking power as a rebel leader in 1986.

Once hailed for his commitment to good governance, the former rebel leader has crushed any opposition and tweaked the constitution to allow himself to run again and again.
At least the government is not trying hard to hide that it has something against all places of worship. There is no way to understand why the BC government is still restricting these spaces and not allowing them to open with the same precautions as other spaces.

Physically most churches are wide open areas where keeping separate is way easier than retail, malls, grocery or other "acceptable" spaces.

The sheer volume of people crowding into Costco, Home Depot, shopping malls and even kids play centres, restaurants and more yet Churches are fully closed. I'm not even saying that keeping these places open is wrong but the fact that they can and church cannot is the problem.

Besides attacking religion and places of worship there is no reason for this completely different approach to worship centres

It's time to allow them the same freedom as the big corporations.

Justin Skriver


A team of experts appointed by the World Health Organization (WHO) completed its 28-day mission to the Chinese city of Wuhan this week seeking clues about the origins of COVID-19.

The following looks at their findings.

What are the main scenarios?

Peter Ben Embarek, the WHO's leading animal disease expert, said the team conducted scientific investigations into four main scenarios about how SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, spread into humans.

In the first, a single person was exposed to SARS-CoV-2 through direct contact with the host species, the horseshoe bat. The virus could have been circulating in humans for a while before making its breakthrough in heavily populated Wuhan.

The second scenario, seen as the most likely, involves transmission to humans via an as yet unknown intermediary species. Liang Wannian, an expert with China's National Health Commission, said pangolins were potential candidates but other animals - including mink and even cats - may also be reservoirs.

A third possibility is that COVID-19 originated under the first or second scenarios and was then transmitted via cold chain products. Chinese experts have attributed later COVID-19 clusters to imported frozen food and have raised the possibility it might also have caused the Wuhan outbreak.

The final scenario is that SARS-CoV-2 was leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is known to have studied captive coronaviruses. Ben Embarek ruled out the possibility and said it would not be subject to further research. Accidents happen, he said, but it was "very unlikely" in this case.

When did the outbreak begin?

The experts said that while it was unlikely there were large-scale outbreaks in Wuhan or elsewhere in China before December 2019, they do not rule out that it was circulating in other regions.

A crossover either directly from bats or from an intermediary species would suggest the transmission to Wuhan could have been facilitated by wildlife trading networks.

Marion Koopmans, another member of the expert team, said wildlife on sale in the Huanan seafood market could be traced to regions that contain bat habitats known to harbour viruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2.

One such region is the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan, but the team is also considering that the first human transmission took place across the border in Laos or Vietnam.

What role was played by Huanan seafood market?

Although the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan was linked to the first case clusters, the initial crossover from animals to humans did not occur there.

Liang said that there was still insufficient evidence to determine how the virus entered Huanan, but that it was clear it was circulating elsewhere in Wuhan at the same time.

The most likely scenario is that someone carried SARS-CoV-2 into the market, but Ben Embarek also suggested it could have been introduced via a "product", including frozen wild animals known to be susceptible to the virus.

Do the findings change the politics around covid's origins?

China has expressed concern that any investigation would be "politicised", and said it would only cooperate if it was clear it would not be expected to take blame for the pandemic.

By ruling out the lab leak and accepting that COVID-19 could have originated outside of China, the WHO team has not crossed any of Beijing's lines. China would also be heartened that the WHO team is considering the cold-chain theory. But the findings are unlikely to satisfy those who believe China is culpable and has covered up evidence.

What further research is required?

Ben Embarek said China needs now to find evidence that might prove the coronavirus was circulating much earlier than December 2019. He said blood bank samples would be a good place to start.

Bat communities near Wuhan have been ruled out as a source, and more needs to be done to scour caves in other regions to see if a closer match to SARS-CoV-2 can be found.

The animals on sale at the Huanan market also need to be scrutinised further, and the role played by cold chain products in general also needs more research, Ben Embarek said.

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IN NUMBERS: 11,067 new infections reported

About 11,067 new infections were recorded during the past 24 hours nationwide, taking the cumulative caseload to 10,858,371, according to a report in the Scroll. Ninety four deaths were reported, taking the total death toll to 155,252. The total recoveries have surged to 10.5 million. The national recovery rate has climbed to 97.27 per cent. About 6.6 million healthcare workers have been inoculated since the nationwide inoculation programme kicked off on January 16. Read more here

Kerala is an outlier

The only state in India where daily cases are still on the rise is Kerala. In the week ended February 7, nearly half the cases reported in the country were from Kerala, according to a report in Hindustan Times. The state's proportion in the nationwide daily fresh cases is rising fast. It was 15 per cent on December 1, 2020 and 25 per cent on January 1, 2021. Maharashtra, the state with the second-highest number of confirmed Covid-19 infections, has a 20 per cent share in the countrys fresh cases now, compared to 40 per cent last June. Read more here

Inoculating people recovered from Covid-19 is wasteful: Experts

Virologists and health experts believe inoculating people who have recovered from Covid-19 is a wasteful exercise as antibodies developed from natural infection are more effective and longer-lasting than those gained from vaccines, according to a report in the Outlook. Scientific evidence from some respiratory viral diseases such as chickenpox and influenza suggest that natural antibodies work better than vaccine-derived ones. Besides, few cases of Covid-19 reinfection have been reported globally. The experts believe the vaccines should be prioritised for those who need them the most. Read more here

Vaccination programme to turn focus to elderly and those with comorbidities soon

India's health officials have signalled that the nationwide vaccination campaign will turn its attention to the two priority groups among the general public after the deadline of March 6 for frontline workers, according to a report in The Telegraph. The two priority groups are those above the age of 50 and those with comorbidities. However, the officials did not specify a start date for the priority groups. The health ministry is also yet to inform the priority groups how potential beneficiaries need to register for the shots. Read more here

3,000 foreign diplomats express interest in India's vaccines

After India offered to inoculate diplomatic missions based out of the country, about 3000 foreign diplomats and their eligible family members have taken the government up on the offer, according to a report in WION. About 115 missions and 39 international organisations have expressed interest in the offer. A decision is yet to be taken on when the vaccination begins. India manufacturers about 60 per cent of the world's vaccines by volume and has supplied Covid-19 vaccines to 18 countries around the world, both as gifts and through commercial contracts. It has gifted 5.6 million doses and commercially supplied 10 million doses. Read more here
press release

Geneva  Monitoring, Tough Message on Dire Rights Situation Long Overdue

Egypt's human rights community is facing "annihilation" by President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi's government, more than 100 leading human rights organizations from around the world have warned today in a letter to foreign ministers.

The groups called on governments to lead and support the creation of a monitoring and reporting mechanism on the ever-deteriorating human rights situation in Egypt at the upcoming 46th regular session of the United Nations Human Rights Council scheduled to begin on February 22, 2021. Establishing a monitoring and reporting mechanism would serve as an important step in raising the profile of the violations and crimes committed, providing remedies for survivors and victims' families, deterring further abuses, and establishing pathways for accountability.

"Governments at the UN Human Rights Council should send the overdue message to the Egyptian government that abuses are and will be monitored and reported, and that brave Egyptians facing oppression every day are not alone in their struggle," said John Fisher, Geneva director at Human Rights Watch.

Ten years after the 2011 Egyptian nationwide uprising that ousted President Hosni Mubarak, Egyptians are living under a repressive government that is stifling all forms of dissent and peaceful expression. Recent weeks have shown that collective action is both possible and can have an impact. "Only through sustained and committed international action can we ensure the survival of the Egyptian human rights movement in the coming period," the groups said.

According to groups that joined the letter, the struggle for human rights in Egypt is at a "critical juncture." Inaction by Egypt's partners and Human Rights Council member states has emboldened the Egyptian government "in its efforts to silence dissent and crush independent civil society."

The recent shocking arrests and investigation of senior staff of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) and the freezing of their assets in abusive proceedings in front of a "terrorism circuit" of a criminal court represent an "abhorrent and unacceptable attack" against one of the most prominent human rights organizations in the country. It demonstrates the Egyptian government's determination to escalate its sustained, widespread, and systematic attacks against human rights defenders and civic space.

Since the ousting of former President Mohamed Morsy from power in July 2013, the Egyptian authorities have waged an increasingly brutal crackdown on human rights defenders and civil and political rights more broadly. Thousands of Egyptians, including hundreds of human rights defenders, journalists, academics, artists, and politicians have been arbitrarily detained, frequently on abusive criminal charges or through unfair trials.

Egyptian security forces have systematically subjected them to ill-treatment and torture. UN experts have warned that catastrophic detention conditions have endangered detainees' lives and health. Other peaceful activists have been forcibly disappeared. What happened to some of them has never been revealed.

"The people of Egypt have lived under despotic governments before, but current levels of repression in Egypt are unprecedented in its modern history," said Bahey el-Din Hassan, director of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies. "The consequences are potentially terrible for both human rights and regional stability."

In August 2020, Mr. Hassan was sentenced to 15 years in prison in absentia by a Terrorism Circuit Court in Egypt for his human rights advocacy work.

In such a severely repressive environment, many human rights organizations have been forced to close, scale down their operations, operate from outside the country, or work under constant risk of arrests and harassment.

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The government typically invokes "counterterrorism" to justify these abuses and to criminalize freedom of association and expression. UN experts have warned about Egypt's use of "terrorism circuits" of criminal courts to target human rights defenders, silence dissent, and lock up activists during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Faced with these repeated warnings, the UN Human Rights Council has a responsibility to act and ensure robust reporting and international scrutiny over the deteriorating human rights situation in Egypt, the groups said.

"The survival of the embattled human rights movement in Egypt is at stake," said Kevin Whelan, Amnesty International representative to the UN in Geneva. "Members of the international community have the responsibility to support efforts to establish a monitoring and reporting mechanism at the Human Rights Council on the situation in Egypt, signaling that Egypt's disregard for human rights will no longer be ignored or tolerated."


The EU is a strong supporter of the Egyptian economy, with ongoing assistance in the form of 1.3 billion in grants financing a wide range of development projects covering agriculture, irrigation, and urban transport.

In an exclusive interview with Al-Ahram Weekly, the head of the EU Delegation to Egypt, Christian Berger, who assumed his role in September 2020 amid the ongoing Covid-19 crisis, speaks in detail about the current EU portfolio in Egypt, touching upon political and economic issues of mutual interest.

What are the key features of EU-Egyptian relations?

The EU and Egypt have had a long and close relationship over many years. The EU has relationships and engagements with all neighbours in the Mediterranean and North Africa regions but Egypt is always at the centre of the EUs relationship with the regions countries.

Two documents spell out the overall spectrum of our relationship: the 2004 Association Agreement and the 2017 Partnership Priorities. In the current phase, I would add of course our joint fight against the Covid-19 pandemic, its socio-economic impact and ways of overcoming it, including the rollout of a vaccine.

During the first wave of Covid-19, urgent measures were taken by our member states and our neighbours that included many necessary restrictions aimed at containing the pandemic, including the shutdowns, the lockdowns and other associated measures.

At the same time, we saw how European countries and our partners, through working together and assisting each other, have managed to mitigate the impact of Covid-19 and address the socio-economic repercussions of the pandemic, making sure that trade can continue, jobs are secured, and preparations for recovery are launched.

Over the past year we have seen how working closely with our neighbours and partners, including Egypt, is critical in such a time of crisis to deal better with its repercussions, especially its socio-economic impacts.

How has the EU supported Egypt since the onset of the pandemic?

There are broader aspects and more specific and concrete ones in this regard. In May 2020, the EU together with other members of the G20 launched a campaign to collect funding in order to find a vaccine, then we started to contract companies to develop the vaccine and that was for the whole world, including Egypt for sure.

Meanwhile, in December 2020, the EU agreed to provide an 89 million support package for Egypts Ministry of Health to be used in Covid-19 related activities.

Moreover, the EU signed in January a three-year Support to Covid-19 Response project agreement worth 6 million with the Ministry of Social Solidarity, in collaboration with the UN Development Programme (UNDP), that aims to deal with the impact of the pandemic on the elderly and the vulnerable groups.

Another important aspect was that despite the lockdowns and restrictions trade would continue. For example, we introduced the concept of green lanes that allowed trade to continue within the EU but also with our neighbours. Despite a global slowdown we noticed an increase in trade between the EU and Egypt.

How is the EU supporting Egypt financially?

Grants are the more traditional support that the EU provides Egypt, alongside loans that are provided through two European financial institutions, the European Investment Bank (EIB) and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD).

The two kinds of support have been very important for Egypt, particularly amid the crisis, especially that the EIBs work focuses on supporting small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), an engine of employment and the economy in general, through making sure that SMEs have access to financial resources to finance their activities.

The latest tool has become what we call blending, a combination of over 620 million in grants that has leveraged a portfolio of approximately 7 billion in terms of investment supported by the EUs Neighbourhood Investment Plan (NIP), which includes Egypt, along with Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine and Tunisia, among the NIPs Southern Neighbourhood regions countries.

The NIP has managed to leverage around 9 billion in loans for Egypt so far.

What are the EUs plans in Egypt over the medium and long terms?

We always cooperate closely with our partners on the basis of their own goals, spelt out in the governments development plans. So, in Egypt, it is the Sustainable Development Agenda Egypts Vision 2030. In more general terms we will present ideas this week on how we see cooperation between the EU and the Southern Neighbourhoods.

And there is the broader international plan of the sustainable development goals (SDGs). Egypt and the EU are very strong supporters who want to make sure global SDGs are met.

Investment, trade and economy are key elements for our mutual engagement. These include aspects of human development, involving education, vocational training and making sure that women have access to business opportunities. Other key aspects are promoting the concept of a green economy, business enhancement, and broader issues like governance and regulations to enhance the business environment and attract more investments.

This is fully in line with our 2017 partnership priorities with Egypt and its three big clusters: a sustainable modern economy and social development; foreign policy; and enhancing stability.

How do view the investment environment in Egypt?

Egypt is very attractive for European investments. It has the second largest foreign direct investments (FDIs) from the European Union in the Mediterranean with about 39 billion euro in 2019, following Turkey. I think these investments are the biggest in Africa as well.

That shows how Egypt is attractive for foreign investments, and I think this is due to the well-developed infrastructure and a young, well-educated population. In addition, there are a lot of initiatives that the government launched over the last few years that aimed to improve the investment climate.

There are European business institutions and chamber of commerce that see Egypt is very attractive for their investments.

What kind of measures does Egypt need to take to create a more welcoming climate for foreign investors?

There are many things that are already happening. There is a lot of work on the regulatory framework. For instance, the procedures of opening a company and registering a business are easier. And issues such as tax payment are much easier. What else could be done is to work on the identification of feasible investments for possible EU investors. Direct communication and promotion could be a way of doing this. What the companies look for when deciding to start a business in a country is a safe environment, easy procedures, fair competition, and a system of dispute settlement.

How do you view the measures Egypt has applied to contain the pandemic and its impact on the economy?

Egypt has done very well in containing the pandemic compared to other countries in the region. It has managed to keep the right balance between measures that needed to be taken, but not impacting the socio-economic situation very negatively.

What is the total amount of trade exchange between Egypt and the EU?

Since the signing of the Association Agreement with Egypt in 2004 trade volume between the two sides has tripled.

In 2019, total EU goods exports to Egypt recorded 19.1 billion, while Egypts exports to the EU posted 8.3 billion. For services, EU exports to Egypt registered 3.6 billion while Egypts exports to EU countries were 6.2 billion. The overall trade volume is not bad but it can, of course, improve. We can do more going forward.

We are currently in discussions in Europe to shorten supply lines to minimise the impact of Covid-19 and overcome likely problems when taking measures to contain the pandemic. In this regard, the situation with Egypt is perfect. All these aspects speak in favour of strengthening Egypt as a production hub for EU countries.

To what extent will the UKs exit from the EU affect the EUs business relations with other regions like the Middle East?

All countries that inked association agreements with the EU, including Egypt, have signed a similar agreement with the UK as well. The principals are more or less the same. For us, it has not made much impact but of course it is important for them because they want to make sure that their trade with the UK will continue and will not be disrupted.

How do you see the future of cooperation in supporting Egyptian civil society?

The EU is following this very closely. The EU is the biggest supporter of civil society organisations around the world. The new legislation is an opportunity for the EU and Egypt, in the framework of our 2017 partnership priorities, to further support an enabling civil society environment and work together with civil society to contribute to the economic, political and social development process in compliance with the Egyptian constitution and respective national legislation.

Just to mention some of the most promising provisions, the new bylaws introduce a fund for capacity building for civil society organisations and to provide technical assistance. The engagement of volunteers is also foreseen, which may have a great impact in terms of youth motivation. We believe that civil society covers a wide range of issues; people who deal with daily issues and problems can, actually, contribute in solving these issues. Civil society is not limited to certain aspects. It covers a very broad approach.

The recently approved law [NGO law] is a critical step and makes it easier for these organisations to work. We will work with all concerned bodies to ensure that the implementation of the law is done in such a way that it helps in this regard.

The EU was invited as an observer to the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) negotiations. How do you view the obstacles in the way of the negotiation process?

We see these negotiations are very important and would like to see an agreement as soon as possible. We are ready to offer both technical and political support to help finding a mutually acceptable solution to generate jobs, wealth and prosperity for the three riparian states.

The EU has a strong interest that this issue to be resolved in the best manner for all concerned countries.

*A version of this article appears in print in the 11 February , 2021 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly

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A new American dating show is set to begin filming in Australia soon, with casting officially opening this week.

While the show hasn't been named yet, there are rumours it could be anything from MTV's Are You The One? to Netflix's Too Hot to Handle, reports TV Tonight.

According to a casting call, participants of all genders and sexual orientations are welcome to apply.

Looking for love? A new American dating show is set to begin filming in Australia soon, with casting officially opening this week

While the show will be set in Australia, participants will need to travel to America at some stage for filming.

'An American television network is currently casting for singles in Australia for an upcoming dating show that will take place in Sydney,' reads a casting notice.

'The production will be an inclusive dating experience that focuses on finding love matches for each of the suitors,' it continues.

International: According to TV Tonight, the show could be Bravo's To Rome For Love (pictured), which followed five African American women looking for love in Italy

'The show will be filmed in Sydney with a cast from both Australia and the U.S. looking to find love... we are flying in America's best singles!'

According to TV Tonight, the show could be Bravo's To Rome For Love, which followed five African American women looking for love in Italy.

However, due to the sexually fluid casting, it's more likely the series could be MTV's Are You The One?

Everybody's welcome! However, due to the sexually fluid casting, it's more likely the series could be MTV's Are You The One? (pictured)

The popular series recently introduced contestants of all genders and sexualities, and each season is filmed at a different location.

Some have even speculated it could be Netflix dating series Too Hot to Handle.

However, Deadline reported in January that the next two seasons of the show would be filmed on the Turks and Caicos Islands.
A bouquet of flowers lay upon the company logo as a man photographs a commentary placed beneath a rock outside the Google China headquarters in Beijing on January 14, 2010. (Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images)

Chairman Mao Would Have Approved: Critics Liken Big Tech to CCP

Critics of Google and Facebook have compared the tech giants recent actions to the behaviour of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), as the long-running dispute over an Australian media payment law continues.

Last month, Google Australia floated the idea of pulling its search service from the country, sparking a hostile response from Independent Senator Rex Patrick, who likened the tech giants threat to Beijings ongoing trade war with Australia.

I would just like to take you back to the prime minister announcing that Australia would like to see an inquiry into the origins of COVID-19. The Chinese response to that was to threaten our market, to threaten our trade, Patrick told Google Australia Managing Director Mel Silva during a Senate committee hearing into the Code.

Weve got a similar situation here where the Australian government is leading on a proposal in relation to the Wild West web, he said. Our government steps out first, and the very large organisation that is Google threatens to leave our market.

The News Media Bargaining Code, introduced last year, legislates a framework that will allow Australian news outlets to enter negotiations with the tech giants to be compensated for displaying their content.

Google and Facebook have remained defiant, with both companies toying with removing news content from their platforms altogether in Australia.

David Flint, former chairman of the then-Australian Broadcasting Authority and Epoch Times contributor, says the Code will address the critical issue of protecting intellectual property rights, particularly for the news industry.

Emeritus Professor of Law David Flint and former chairman of the Australian Broadcasting Authority in Sydney, Australia on Feb, 5. 2021. (The Epoch Times)

What we found with the development of the internet is the rights of the newspaper and television organisations in gathering and producing news, is being lost and this is severely damaging, the emeritus professor in law told The Epoch Times.

So, what is happening is theyre (Google and Facebook) killing the goose that laid the golden egg, he added.

Flint compared the intellectual property (IP) issues to how the CCP bolstered Chinas economic and technological growth via IP theft from western companies.

How is it that so soon after the Cultural Revolution, which wrecked the country  How is it the countryside was able to quickly develop so many products and produce it on the mainland? he said.

To the great discredit of a number of U.S. administrations, especially the ObamaBiden administration, they just tolerated the theft, either the theft of intellectual property or the foolishness of those moving their factories to the Peoples Republic of China and accepting being browbeaten to hand over their intellectual property, he added.

Former US President Donald Trump signs a memorandum on addressing Chinas laws, policies, practices, and actions related to intellectual property, innovation, and technology, at the White House in Washington on Aug. 14. (Chris Kleponis-Pool/Getty Images)

Flint also said the tech giants were concerned about setting a precedent that could usher in a global domino-effect of regulation aimed at curbing their market power.

Peter Lewis, director of the Centre for Responsible Technology at The Australia Institute, cited an old Chinese saying in response Big Techs threats, Right now Australia is confronted by Big Techs big stick. The threat to kill one in order to warn a hundred. Chairman Mao would have approved!

The left-leaning Australia Institute was founded by China expert Prof. Clive Hamilton, who wrote two ground-breaking books exposing CCP infiltration and interference in Australia and worldwide.

Let us be clear. What Google and Facebook are really terrified of is the existence of this legislation because it would provide a global model for addressing the impact of their market dominance of the advertising industry and  the impact of the collapse of fact-based news journalism on our sense of civics and civility, he told the Senate committee.

Googles New York office in lower Manhattan on Jan. 20, 2021. (Chung I Ho/The Epoch Times)

He went on to say that Australian businesses and government departments were overly reliant on Google technology, including Google Maps, Docs, and Gmail, and they needed to change the way they operate.

Just as we have determined that a partnership with Huawei is not in our national interest, maybe its not in our national interest to be so reliant on Google moving forward.
Watch dreams unfold and become a reality. The release of Malcolm Chester's first book "Elysia the World in Children's Dreams" proves that dreams can indeed come alive. Noteworthy, his lifelong dream of publishing his novel has been achieved with resounding success. His first successful book is translated into French with the help of AEGA Design Publishing Ltd, so his compelling story can be appreciated by more people. The sequel, "Elysia: The Magical World" translated into French comes next.

LONDON, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ --The first book centers on Courtney, a 12-year-old girl, who dreads the day she transforms into a woman. Unlike other girls her age who feel excited to experience this pivotal moment, she fears it as it means she will have to leave Elysia. This dream world full of light, goodness, and beauty has unyielding rules that only welcome children on its hallowed grounds.



Courtney enters this enchanting world and experiences a delightful realm each time she falls asleep. With beautiful scenery, fantastic creatures, and amazing new friends, Courtney is not keen to leave. Sadly, an evil civilization threatens the beautiful world she has grown to love. With the evil king stealing the magic crystal of Elysia, Courtney and her friends must embark on a perilous journey to get it back before they become adults.



Readers, librarians, and teachers cannot help but give this book glowing reviews. They commend the author for weaving a beautiful fantasy tale beyond the usual witches, warlocks, and whimsy. The poignant words encourage the readers to step into the story, becoming intoxicated with the captivating scenery and charming characters. Through this book, the readers can actually view the real world through a magical lens, allowing them to deal with real-life issues of wickedness and heartache head-on.



Malcolm Chester does a superb job in his fantasy book as it illuminates the readers' minds with a childlike wonder. At the same time, the touching stories and the vivid descriptions linger in everyone's memories because he weaves a tale that makes an emotional connection with real feelings and issues that every individual grapples with. Attorney Chester can truly express himself beautifully in words as he holds a bachelor's degree in Political Science, a master's degree in children's studies and a law degree.



Estrellita Asenorio Marusciac

Director

AEGA Design Publishing Ltd

+44 7862126716

info@aegadesign.co.uk

This release was issued through WebWire. For more information, visit http://www.webwire.com.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-10 13:22:09|Editor: huaxia

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by Xinhua writer Cui Yuanlei

MEXICO CITY, Feb. 9 (Xinhua) -- For Latin American countries like Brazil, Chile and Peru, Chinese vaccines have provided them with a much-needed shot in the arm at a critical moment when a second wave of outbreaks is ravaging the region.

The first shipment of vaccines from Chinese pharmaceutical firm Sinopharm arrived in Peru's capital Lima on Sunday. It was the latest snapshot of the cooperation between China and Latin America in the global fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, recently bolstered by Chinese vaccines.

Welcoming the arrival of flights carrying Chinese vaccines, Chilean President Sebastian Pinera said they marked a day "of joy, excitement and hope," while Peruvian President Francisco Sagasti described the vaccines as "the best shield to protect ourselves and to care for all Peruvians."

Brazil, the hardest-hit country in Latin America, with the world's second-highest COVID-19 death toll and third-largest caseload, began its nationwide vaccination program soon after its health regulatory body approved the emergency use of the CoronaVac vaccine developed by Chinese firm Sinovac.

Chile's mass vaccination drive is underway thanks to the doses that arrived in the country in two shipments from Sinovac.

With their safety and effectiveness, Chinese vaccines have gained the confidence of Latin American countries.

Clinical studies in Brazil suggested that the vaccine was 100 percent effective in preventing hospitalizations, as well as severe and fatal cases, 83.7 percent effective in preventing cases requiring medical treatment, and has a general efficacy rate of 50.65 percent.

"We are approving a safe and effective vaccine for the population," said Acting Director of Chile's Public Health Institute Heriberto Garcia, who added that the vaccine "prevents hospitalizations and the severity of the disease."

Pinera announced upon the arrival of Chinese vaccines that he and Health Minister Enrique Paris "are going to be vaccinated with a Sinovac vaccine."

Meanwhile, Chinese vaccines are welcomed by Latin American countries because of their accessibility and affordability.

Compared with other vaccines, Chinese vaccines do not require extremely stringent conditions for storage and transportation, which lowers the cost of vaccination and makes them easily accessible to poverty-stricken regions and developing countries.

Even indigenous communities deep in Brazil's Amazon have been able to breathe a sigh of relief as Chinese vaccines have been delivered to their villages.

The Sinovac vaccine arrived "at the toughest and most important time of our lives," said Ozimar, an indigenous nurse in Brazil's northern Amazonas state, where the health system was stretched to the limit by a sudden rise in cases and collapsed in January due to a lack of oxygen, forcing authorities to airlift patients to other states.

Armed with the Sinovac vaccine, Brazil launched its immunization plan in about 6,000 villages, reaching more than 400,000 inhabitants, including 20,000 indigenous healthcare workers.

China has also embraced openness and cooperation in vaccine development, production and distribution.

In addition to ready-to-use vaccines, China's Sinovac has cooperated with Sao Paulo's Butantan Institute in vaccine production, which, Brazilian Health Minister Eduardo Pazuello said, guarantees "the continuity of the manufacture and distribution of the vaccine" in the South American country.

Pledging to make its COVID-19 vaccines a global public good once developed and put into use, China endeavours to alleviate the shortage and the uneven distribution of vaccines worldwide.

From Latin America to the Middle East, from South Asia to Eastern Europe, more and more countries have cast a "vote of confidence" in Chinese vaccines.

As the pandemic is still rampaging around the globe, only with solidarity can human beings finally prevail over the pathogen and embrace a brighter future. Enditem
Paducah TIF District Moves Forward

By West Kentucky Star Staff

PADUCAH - Tuesday's City Commission meeting brought Paducah one step closer to establishing a Tax Increment Financing District downtown.During the meeting, Commissioners authorized a one time $50,000 payment to the Kentucky Economic Development Finance Authority (KEDFA) to cover an administrative fee as required by the KEDFA.Over the last two years, the City has been working to develop a Tax Increment Financing (TIF) District downtown. The city's goal in establishing the TIF District is to revitalize the downtown by capturing state dollars, reinvesting local dollars, and assisting developers with public infrastructure costs.In August of 2019, the City received preliminary approval from the KEDFA to establish the TIF District. Following the preliminary approval, a third-party consultant conducted an independent analysis of the area as required by the state. The city is now waiting for final approval from the KEDFA.The final step in the process was to approve the administrative fee to the KEDFA.Additionally, the Board introduced an ordinance to create an agreement with Commonwealth Economics for continued assistance throughout the creation of the TIF District.According to the City, TIF is an economic development tool that allows local governments to utilize future increases in property and other taxes that are generated from new development. Taxes collected by the State are also eligible to be directed back to the City.You can find additional information in the link below.
National Police investigators from Madrid have searched an office linked to Lars Gunnar Broberg  the husband of the mayor of Marbella, Angeles Munoz - and have arrested six people including a Local Police officer and several Swedish citizens.

A team from the economic and fiscal crime unit (UDEF) carried out the raid that has resulted in half a dozen people being detained, according to sources consulted by SUR.

During the search on the businessmans office investigators seized documents that are now being analysed.

SUR has learned that the police operation, in which specialists from the money laundering section participated, is classed as an 'economic crime'.

Sources also confirmed that the events were not related to either the Marbella town council or the activities of Angeles Munoz as mayor; beyond the fact that she is the wife of one of those being investigated.

It is reported that Broberg received a call from the police early in the morning in which he was summoned to an office linked to him. The septuagenarian businessman, accompanied by a relative, found the police delegation was waiting for him.

The officers notified him that they were going to conduct a search of the premises. When the police officers finished their search Broberg was allowed home and was not taken to the police station for questioning.

Associates of Broberg say that they do not know the reasons for the police investigation and that no action was taken against him after the search of the office.

The Swedish property developer has previously been involved in controversies related to his properties and business activities both in Marbella and in neighbouring Benahavis.

Investigations editor

Larry Parnass, investigations editor, joined The Eagle in 2016 from the Daily Hampshire Gazette, where he was editor in chief. His freelance work has appeared in the Washington Post, Boston Globe, Hartford Courant and CommonWealth Magazine.
BALTIMORE, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Audacious Inquiry (Ai), an industry leader in connected care, has contracted with the Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) to deploy the Patient Unified Lookup System for Emergencies (PULSE) Enterprise platform in Florida. The State of Florida has adopted this technology to provide immediate public health assistance around COVID-19 and to prepare for the 2021 hurricane season. PULSE Enterprise is branded in Florida as the Emergency Patient Look-Up System or E-PLUS.

PULSE Enterprise is the next generation of the PULSE edition leveraged by providers, emergency responders, and public health officials during the California wildfires from 2017-2019. The application leverages the eHealth Exchange, the largest query-based national health information exchange network in the country, to display patient clinical histories to authorized medical providers in nontraditional healthcare settings, including special needs shelters, mobile field hospitals, and other alternate care sites. PULSE Enterprise also integrates with Surescripts, the nation's leading health information network, to provide emergency response personnel consolidated medication history data during declared emergencies.

The new service equips response teams with more robust query, auditing, and reporting capabilities to support a wide range of disaster scenarios and crises. Through PULSE Enterprise, Florida's emergency response personnel can securely access patient health information in nonroutine healthcare settings so providers can access the clinical and medication histories of patients who have been displaced by disaster. The service has also supported critical public health activities during the COVID-19 response by providing access to patient health information used for epidemiological assessments and clinical case augmentation. 

In addition, through its Emergency Census feature, PULSE Enterprise offers the ability to locate missing individuals who have been displaced by disaster by sharing data in real-time with Florida's statewide Encounter Notification Service (ENS). Emergency Census will enable Florida's emergency response personnel to rapidly locate missing individuals who have been admitted or discharged from a hospital, health care facility, or emergency shelter.

"PULSE Enterprise is a valuable tool for bringing critical information to the front lines of clinical response, and we are pleased to support AHCA in their disaster readiness efforts", said Scott Afzal, President of Audacious Inquiry.

About Audacious Inquiry

Audacious Inquiry (Ai) is a national industry-shaping health IT company that provides a connected care platform facilitating the secure transmission of actionable, accurate, and event-driven data across the U.S. healthcare system. Audacious Inquiry's pioneering software solutions help providers and care managers be proactive during the most important moments, including during transitions of care. This information helps at-risk providers and payers working within value-based arrangements reduce costs and improve patient outcomes.

With years of experience developing health data exchanges at the federal and state level, Audacious Inquiry is a trusted partner to health plans, health systems, Health Information Exchange Organizations, public health agencies, and federal, state, and local government agencies across the country. Audacious Inquiry's trusted solutions, which include its flagship Encounter Notification Service (ENS) and the Patient Unified Lookup System for Emergencies (PULSE), serve more than 60 million people nationwide. For more information, visit us at ainq.com , or follow us on Twitter at @A_INQ .

For more information, contact: [email protected].

SOURCE Audacious Inquiry
When reports emerged that a new, potentially more contagious version of the coronavirus was circulating in Britain, Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York implored major airlines to require anyone entering the state from another country to first submit a negative coronavirus test. Scientists still had much to learn about the variant, but Mr. Cuomo was following a principle that has become scripture among public health experts: To defeat the coronavirus, you must act quickly. You cannot wait for certainty to arrive.

Today, we know much more about not only B.1.1.7, the so-called U.K. variant, but also several other variants that have since emerged. For instance, we know that B.1.1.7 is more contagious than its known siblings and that it is already in New York and other states. Experts warn that if not addressed carefully, B.1.1.7 could become the dominant version of the virus in the United States in a matter of months.

In light of this knowledge, Mr. Cuomos plan to reopen New York City restaurants for indoor dining this week, at 25 percent capacity  and to soon relax other strictures, like those for weddings  is baffling.

This is a precarious moment in the fight against the coronavirus in the United States. Case counts are declining. The death rate is slowing down. The country finally has a president who takes the crisis seriously. The vaccination rollout has been a bumbling mess, but the situation is improving, and it will get better still: The Federal Emergency Management Agency has been activated to help administer shots, the Food and Drug Administration could authorize a third vaccine for emergency use by the end of this month, and President Biden is partnering with clinics in underserved communities to correct for early vaccination inequities.

Mr Weimar said the fresh positive case was new and that he had been made aware of the case for only 30 minutes before the press conference and that health authorities were interviewing the woman. Mr Weimar said authorities had expanded the Sunbury Square Shopping Centre exposure site to include the entire facility. Previously only specific shops and food outlets at the centre were identified as exposure sites. We have now decided out of an abundance of caution to expand the exposure site to the wider Sunbury shopping centre, but at tier two, Mr Weimar said. So were not regarding it as a tier one shopping centre we think the risk is reasonably low. Mr Weimar congratulated Victorians for completing about 22,500 tests in the past 24 hours.

Were incredibly grateful to the Victorian community and to Melburnians, Mr Weimar said. Australias Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly said both cases were already in quarantine and there was no added risk to the community. I have spoken on several occasions in the last couple of days with my Victorian counterparts and Im very confident that they are doing what they need to do in terms of identifying exposure sites and putting that information out to the community, he said on Thursday afternoon. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video Professor Kelly said he would investigate reports of rule breaches in the Victorian hotel quarantine system but noted the program had resulted in only a few viral incursions into the community around the country.

Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton on Wednesday said the hotel outbreak was now believed to have started after a man used a nebuliser for asthma in his room. That man is fighting for life with COVID-19 in hospital. AMA Victoria president Julian Rait said on Wednesday that it beggars belief that a nebuliser was allowed to be used in hotel quarantine. The medical community knows full well these particular devices are really COVID spreaders, Professor Rait said in an interview Nines Today Show. There are a number of examples, both in Australia and overseas, where we think theyve contributed to outbreaks. New border controls The two new cases on Thursday came as Queensland introduced new border controls for anyone travelling from Victoria. From 1am on Saturday, Victorians will again need to fill out border declaration passes when they enter Queensland, but the border will remain open. Anyone who has visited an exposure site during the times listed by the health department will not be allowed to enter Queensland.

WA has also extended its current border restrictions for another seven days. Anyone entering WA from Victoria will need to be tested and enter 14 days quarantine. South Australia shut its border to Greater Melbourne on Thursday night. Exemptions are available for essential travellers, SA residents, people escaping domestic violence and those who are relocating. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video SA Chief Health Officer Nicole Spurrier said on Thursday it was an evolving situation and it was too soon to say how long the border would be closed, but it may not be long. The two cases discovered on Wednesday involved a worker and a former guest at the Holiday Inn, who tested positive after completing two weeks of quarantine.

The Holiday Inn was emptied and 48 guests were transferred to the Pullman Hotel in Melbournes CBD on Wednesday morning. Transport Infrastructure Minister Jacinta Allan said one of the two cases confirmed on Wednesday afternoon involved a person living in the Coburg, Pascoe Vale and Reservoir catchment area, where fragments of the virus had been detected in wastewater. That does put into context that unexpected wastewater detection that the Minister of Health spoke of yesterday, she said. The case was a person who had tested positive after having left hotel quarantine. Wastewater warnings remain in place for Roxburgh Park, Westmeadows, Glenroy, Reservoir and Coburg, where the fragments were found earlier this week. Residents with symptoms in those areas are being urged to get tested immediately.

Ms Allan said there was no clear timeline yet for when the Holiday Inn would reopen after terminal cleaning. Loading We cannot wait any longer: AMA slams poor PPE standards Australian Medical Association president Dr Omar Khorshid called out the formal Infection Control Expert Group advising the federal government on Wednesday, claiming it had failed in its duties to date to incorporate aerosol transmission into formal guidelines for quarantine hotels.

Last September, [Health] Minister [Greg] Hunt committed to reviewing guidelines for protecting healthcare workers from COVID-19, announcing a partnership between ICEG and the National COVID-19 Evidence Taskforce, specifically focussing on the question of airborne spread, he said. Its been almost six months and Infection Prevention and Control Panel is yet to produce the goods. We cannot wait any longer for ICEG to act. Dr Khorshid called on ministers via the National Cabinet to push hard for better airflow in quarantine hotels as well as N95 masks and eye protection for all workers in hotel quarantine. Doctor questions the nebuliser theory

At least one expert has expressed scepticism over the theory detailed by Premier Daniel Andrews on Wednesday that a nebuliser was to blame for the Holiday Inn outbreak spread. Professor Bruce Thompson, dean of health sciences at Swinburne University and a respiratory expert, said the particles emitted by a nebuliser were quite large. Therefore its heavy and so it will tend to [settle] very, very quickly within the room, he told 3AW. Even if a little bit actually got into the air-conditioning system and travelled down the corridor ... How viable is that virus? And if you only get one little particle, its not going to do a whole lot.

Saira Khan has gone to the police after receiving death threats since she revealed she was no longer a practising Muslim.

The former Loose Women star, 50, made the announcement about her decision renounce Islam last week, after years of feeling 'guilty, caged and unhappy'.

After sharing horrific messages she had received from trolls, Saira told her followers on Tuesday she had reported the matter - regarded as hate crime - to the police.

Worrying time: Saira Khan has gone to the police after receiving death threats since she revealed she was no longer a practising Muslim

She wrote: 'Due to the abuse and threats I have received. I have reported this matter to the police as it is regarded as hate crime.

'I am utterly saddened that my decision to live my life how I choose should resort to others wanting to cause me harm.

'How does my life choice impact theirs?'

Saira later posed for shots in her underwear as she revealed she was focusing on the positives amid the turbulent time in her life.

Wrong: On Tuesday, after sharing horrific messages she had received from trolls, Saira told her followers she had reported the matter to the police

She said: 'Its a new day to smile. To love. To be grateful. I cannot control other peoples actions, or emotions towards me.

But I can control my response to them. I choose to smile. Be kind. Be in control of what I can.

'There is no point in worrying about what could or might happen if you choose to live your truth.

Brave: The star later took to Instagram to share inspirational quotes from Prophet Muhammad and Mahatma Ghandi

Optimistic: Saira then posed up in her underwear and loungewear as she focused on the positives

'A day worrying, is a day wasted. I dont have days to waste. Everyday counts in a life you only live once. Happy thoughts everyone.'

During an Instagram Live on Monday, the star insisted she's 'not perturbed' by the vile abuse as she declared: 'I have to live my life.'

The journalist also uploaded a screenshot of a horrific message she received from a troll in a bid to help others in similar situations who may be 'too scared come out about it.'

Backlash: During an Instagram Live on Monday, star who publicly renounced Islam over the weekend, insisted she's 'not perturbed' by the vile abuse as she declared: 'I have to live my life.

TV star Saira addressed the backlash she's been met with after her revelation as she said: 'I have had death threats...

'Until you come from that background or ethnicity as a woman, you will never understand the barriers the obstacles - the deaths to your life, we are about 100 years behind in terms of freedom of speech freedom or individualism, liberty and choice.

'You cannot believe the messages I have received. I am not going to come out and say I practise the religions because I don't.' (sic)

The media personality further explained her reasoning behind leaving the faith as she shared: 'I don't believe in certain aspects of the teachings.

I have to live my life': The star who publicly renounced Islam over the weekend, insisted she's 'not perturbed' by the vile abuse (pictured in 2019)

'If it's happening to me it's happening to other women': The journalist also uploaded a screenshot of a horrific message (pictured) she received from a troll in a bid to help others

'I believe in gay marriage, and if I stay quiet nothing will change - it's important for me and my truth and my happiness and my choice, for me to demonstrate to my children you have to live your life according to your rules.

'As long as you are good and kind and not hurting anyone else, and you should not be scared that people are threatening to kill you, you should not be scared they are going to come smash your windows.'

The former Apprentice star added that while she's not fearful about uploading criticism online, she's 'frightened' that trolls 'want to come and kill you' for being yourself.

'Why my choice of how I choose to live my life should stir hatred is incomprehensible': TV star Saira addressed the backlash she's been met with after her revelation in a separate post

One of the offensive notes read: 'You f***ing dirty s**g, In'sha'Allah Allah gives you the punishment you deserve you fat ugly w***e.' (sic)

Saira elaborated: 'We must not be fearful to live our lives because of external threats. Otherwise, the world will never change.

'I am not afraid to share these threats with you because if it's happening to me it's happening to other women and they are too scared to come out about it. It doesn't frighten me, it doesn't perturb me and you know, because I live in Britain and believe the majority of people are good.

Support: The media personality also expressed her gratitude towards her followers for their 'kind words', and shared messages from others who have gone through similar situations

'I have so many messages on my messages saying they do not represent the true Islam. The majority of people just stay quiet and I say you have to step up.

I am frightened about that in a country with free speech, they want to come and kill you for it.' (sic)

In her interview about the religion, the panellist revealed she was led to share her life update after receiving a 'disgusting message from a troll' as she declared: 'This was the last taboo to overcome before I could live my best life.'

'I'm doing this for my well-being': In the interview, the panellist revealed she was led to share her life update after receiving a 'disgusting message from a troll' (pictured in 2020)

She said: 'Saying I'm Muslim and then having a boyfriend, wearing clothes that go against the Muslim dress code, having a drink and living a non-Muslim life only brings guilt, self-loathing, loneliness and a feeling of being caged.'

The reality star confessed she doesn't want to 'inadvertently confuse, represent or unintentionally hurt others' of the Muslim faith after being met with assumptions about fasting for Ramadan, not drinking and abstaining from sex before marriage.

Saira also clarified that while some Muslims 'are the most humble people I know' and most of her values are based on the 'spiritual aspect of the faith', she's influenced by other teachings and has only been 'hurting' herself by 'living a lie' for her loved ones.

The social media star added to The Mirror: 'It has taken me till the age of 50 to find the courage to say it. I'm doing it now for my own wellbeing. I want to be honest and feel free to live my life by my own rules. I have found a huge relief in being honest.

'This was the last taboo': The reality star confessed she doesn't want to 'inadvertently confuse, represent or unintentionally hurt others' of the Muslim faith (pictured in 2020)

Candid: The Apprentice star, who is of Pakistani heritage, explained how she 'pretended to be someone I'm not' in order to make her family happy

'I know that one of the reasons I have been so angry and unhappy in my life is because of the many contradictions I've had to live with. I've not dared to share these feelings before because the very few Muslim women who have are called sinful and some have even been targeted with death threats.'

Fundamentalist Muslims regard apostasy, or leaving Islam, as a sin deserving of death.

Daily Mail Australia in 2017 filmed Uthman Badar, the Australian spokesman for Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir, declaring ex-Muslims deserved to be killed.

Pakistan also has the death penalty for criticising the faith, as well as any recognised religion.

Happy family: The presenter shares son Zac, 12, and daughter Amara, nine, with businessman husband of over 15 years, Steve Hyde (pictured together in 2020)

In December 2019, the mother-of-two, who is of Pakistani heritage, revealed she was branded a 'racist' and 'white sell out' in the past for speaking against radicalisation.

The presenter, who has been trolled for sharing topless selfies to Instagram in the past, said that although it's 'difficult' for her to discuss her community, she feels some are ignoring British cultural norms.

The Long Eaton native said on Loose Women: 'It's very difficult for me sometimes to sit here and talk about a culture that I belong to. But I have to do it because this is my country. I was born here and I am British.

'I love living in a multi-cultural society, but I think we all have to wake up and see we are living by cultures, side my side, where they are flouting British values and we're allowing people to get away with it.

'We're allowing people to get away with it us because we're not an integrated society.

'I've been speaking about radicalisation of young people in this country since the 1980s and when I talk about it, I'm a 'racist' or I get told by the community I'm a white sell-out.

'That's what happens, so I can't physically do something myself. I am giving you an insight into parts of the community where things are not right.'

Saira, who shares son Zac, 12, and daughter Amara, nine, with businessman husband Steve Hyde, was nominated for the Services to Media award at the British Muslim Awards in 2013 and 2015.

The host left long-running lunchtime staple Loose Women in December 2020, shortly after Andrea McClean announced her resignation.

'Name and shame time!' Saira has been trolled for sharing topless selfies to Instagram in the past (pictured above in 2018)

The broadcaster, who has blocked some members of the panel on Instagram, previously said she felt there were bits towards the end of her stint on the show which she 'didn't feel were part of the sisterhood'.

She told HELLO!: 'There were elements both on screen and behind the scenes of being a Loose Woman that towards the end I didn't enjoy and I didn't feel like it was part of the sisterhood.

'It wasn't make me happy so I had to bow out, look after my mental health and give someone else my platform.

'I had a great five years and I did what I wanted to with my platform, which was share my stories and experiences being from a minority background, there's nothing more I can say that's new.'
Bord na Monas sudden decision to impose a blanket ban on peat production on its bogs is set to be scrutinised by the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, it has been confirmed.

Officials from the semi-state company will be questioned regarding the impact of this move on the countrys horticulture, mushroom growing, nursery and solid fuel industries. Affected stakeholders will also be asked to outline related concerns  such as the potential implication of BNMs peatlands rewetting project on neighbouring farmlands.

The broad and contentious issues will be discussed over two virtual meetings of the Agriculture Committee  the first sitting is due to take place next Tuesday, February 16. The second sitting will be set for a later date this month.

Ludicrous

Speaking to the Farming Independent Jackie Cahill (FF) said the committee fully recognises the need to move away from peat production, nonetheless he also insists that a frank discussion must be held on the economic and environmental efficiency of importing replacement peat from Northern Europe.

The next two meetings will be dedicated to peat and problems emanating from Bord na Monas decision to impose a blanket ban on the production of peat in this country.

A ludicrous situation is developing where we now have to import peat as a raw material for native industries like horticulture, mushroom growing and nurseries from the far side of the continent.

Fuel merchants are importing peat and briquettes from Germany...common sense has completely and utterly gone out the window, he said.

The TD pointed out that if peat harvested could continue on less than 2pc of Irish bogs, it would produce enough raw materials to meet the necessary domestic demand for the horticulture peat  a sector that employs an estimated 17,600 people.

Importing peat from Estonia is both economically and environmentally harmful. It appears to be a lose-lose situation in terms of the environmental footprint and the economic inefficiency.

While we fully accept that we have to move away from fossil fuel production and the cutting of bogs in the battle against climate change, surely we need a transitional arrangement to ensure that these environmentally friendly industries are protected.

"We might just be moving too fast here and doing more harm than good in the process, he said.

Last month, BNM decided to permanently cease peat production for electricity generation on its some 200,000ac boglands.

The move was compounded by a 2019 High Court decision which ruled that all peat harvesting on bogs over 30ha now requires planning permission and EPA licensing  a process that can take years to complete.
OPEC+ will meet again on March 4, but the group will likely agree to keep the same level of oil production through April 2021, Iraqi Oil Minister Ihsan Abdul-Jabbar said in a press conference on Wednesday.

Saudi Arabia will continue making its extra voluntary cuts of a million barrels per day, the Minister added.

I think in March the agreement will be that output will remain on the same level, the Minister said, adding that Saudi Arabia would continue making its extra voluntary cuts of a million barrels per day.

The Iraqi Oil Minister also reiterated its commitment to the production cuts, although it has yet to meet its promised quota.

According to Jabbar, Iraq will keep its oil production at 3.6 million barrels per day in February.

But that will be possible only if the semi-autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan regionalso oil-richdoes its part. It has yet to do so.

Iraq, battling an economic crisis fueled in part by low oil prices, is finding the production quota difficult to meet.

Iraq has stated that Iraq needs oil to trade at $80 per barrel in order to help it plug its budget holes.

"Iraq will export in 2021 about one billion and 100 million barrels of crude oil according to market data. The budget needs 140 trillion dinars ($96 billion). The price of $ 80 a barrel is the right price to make Iraq can pay the budget dues, Jabbar said earlier in the week.

Jabbar admitted that there is no chance of oil rising that high this year, and instead expects oil to reach $60 per barrel this quarter, and as much as $63 by the third quarter.

Iraq remains OPECs second-largest oil producer and relies on oil revenues for 90% of government spending.

By Julianne Geiger for Oilprice.com

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A male polar bear has killed a female polar bear at the Detroit Zoo when he attempted to mate.

Anana, 20, was killed on Monday as Nuka, 16, attempted to breed after being apart for several months in what the zoo described as a 'sudden and unexpected conflict.'

It marks the first time an animal at the zoo had killed another since 1988.

Anana, 20, (pictured) was killed on Monday as Nuka, 16, attempted to breed after being apart for several months in what the zoo described as a 'sudden and unexpected conflict.' Above, Anana at her enclosure in Detroit Zoo prior to the incident

The bears had previously lived together without incident last year, Carter said in a press statement. Male bear Nuka, 16, is pictured above

'This was completely unexpected and the Detroit Zoo staff is devastated by the loss of Anana in this sudden and tragic event,' said Scott Carter, the zoo's chief life sciences officer.

'When bears and other large carnivores breed it is sometimes described in nature as an aggressive encounter,' Carter told WDIV-TV.

'It usually involves physical control of the female by the male, which usually includes him holding her by the back of the neck.'

The bears had previously lived together without incident last year, Carter said in a press statement.

Following the incident, Nuka was separated from the other animals and now lives alone.

'When bears and other large carnivores breed it is sometimes described in nature as an aggressive encounter,' Carter said. Anana is pictured above

'They lived together fine up until' Monday, Carter said.

Christina Ross, a spokeswoman for the Detroit Zoological Society, told The Detroit News: 'Normal protocols were followed, including ensuring compatibility of two individual animals.

'For almost an entire year, these animals lived together 24-hours a day and we observed no aggression.'

According to the zoo, tissue samples from Anana have been sent to several labs following her death.

Nuka, who is 16 years old, has lived at the zoo since 2011 and bred with other bears without harmful behavior, according to Carter. The male bear is pictured above in his Detroit Zoo enclosure

Nuka, who is 16 years old, has lived at the zoo since 2011 and bred with other bears without harmful behavior, according to Carter.

Anana arrived at the zoo in suburban Detroit in January 2020 and was introduced to Nuka a few months later.

She was moved to Cincinnati as part of a breeding recommendation by the Association of Zoos and Aquarium's Species Survival Plan.

Anana had previously been at Cincinnati Zoo for three seasons without producing a cub.

In a statement in 2016, Buffalo Zoo President and CEO Dr. Donna Fernandes described Anana's genes as 'vital to polar bear survival' in a declining population.

'Anana is one of a small set of females in North America that has given birth in the past five years while in human care, and we are thrilled to participate in every effort related to conservation of this vulnerable species,' he said in the statement.
Thats not the case at the moment for me. I really have felt compelled that this is a fight worth having and if it leads to me being out of office in a year and a half, so be it, Im at peace. If it leads to something else, so be it, Im at peace. But right now, the battle is to save the soul of this party, he said.
Dhaka:

A 25-year-old Indian MBBS student was allegedly stabbed to death by his fellow countryman who then tried to commit suicide at their flat in Bangladesh's northeastern port city of Chittagong, police told on Saturday.



Ateef Sheikh died after being stabbed by Winson Maisnam Singh, 23, on their fourth floor flat of the six-storey building in Akbar Shah area on Friday night, the police said.



Sheikh, a final year student of the private University of Science and Technology Chittagong, was rushed to USTC hospital and later to Chittagong Medical College Hospital, where doctors pronounced him dead.



Singh was rescued by other roommates when he tried to hang himself. Police suspect Singh stabbed Sheikh and then tried to hang himself.



"Four Indian medical students hired the apartment where one of them killed a fellow student and then attempted suicide," a police officer said.



Other than the duo, two others, including a woman student of the same university, stayed in the building, police said.



The four students hailed from Manipur, they said, adding that it appeared to be an incident of involuntary murder as a sequel of altercations between Singh and Sheikh.



Police said there were several wounds from a sharp weapon on Sheikh's body.



"The fellow residents of the apartment tried to save both of them by taking them first to the USTC Hospital and then the (state-run) Chittagong Medical College Hospital (CMCH) where doctors declared Sheikh dead," said officer-in-charge of the city's Akbar Shah police station Alamgir Hossain.



Singh was being treated at the facility but his condition was critical, CMCH doctors said.

For all the Latest World News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
Addis Ababa  Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs Demeke Mekonnen conferred over the phone on Monday with the Foreign Minister of Russia, Sergey Lavrov.

During the talks Demeke briefed his Russian counterpart on the ongoing rehabilitation and reconstruction efforts in Tigray region.

Recalling the telephone conversation the two foreign ministers had last December, Demeke said progress has been achieved in addressing the humanitarian situation in the region and collaborative efforts with humanitarian actors on the ground to fully respond to the people in need of such assistance.

Lavrov said for his part that Russia understands and supports the efforts of the government of Ethiopia to address the humanitarian challenges in the Tigray region.

He added that his Government is always ready to continue to assist Ethiopia in this regard.

Stating the importance of further strengthening the collaboration between Africa and the Russia, Lavrov underlined the readiness of his government to hold the African TROIKA-Russian Summit in 2022 in the African soil.

To further enhance the long-standing relations between the two countries, Lavrov emphasized the need to boost trade and business relations.

Russian business associations are increasingly engaging with their African counterparts to take the relation in the field to the next level, he indicated.

The two foreign ministers also exchanged views on regional issues, among which Demeke reiterated the position of Ethiopian government to resolve the border dispute with Sudan in a peaceful and amicable manner.

According to minister of Foreign Affairs, both foreign ministers have agreed to further enhance cooperation between the two countries in various fields.
Apex auditor Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) has found that the daily pricing system for petrol and diesel has been far from perfect until recently. Lack of promptness in changing the prices by dealers, absence of sustained connectivity, and instances of overcharging due to flaws in automation system have been identified as key issues. The findings are part of the CAG report No.18 of 2020 - Union Government (Commercial) tabled in the Parliament on February 9. The audit covered the period from 2014-15 to 2017-18.

The audit showed that there were 3,463 instances in 91 out of 188 outlets (Indian Oil - 40, Hindustan Petroleum -35 and Bharat Petroleum -16) when dealers were not prompt in changing the prices at the prescribed time of 6 a.m. The daily prices were manually revised within the range of 587 minutes before 6 a.m. and 1,078 minutes after 6 a.m. Overcharging from customers by the dealers at such instances could not be ruled out, observed CAG. The 188 outlets (automated - 61 and non-automated - 127) were picked up from the 55,013 retail outlets under the control of the three government oil marketing companies.

Observing that automation of retail outlets with price push application along with sustained connectivity ensures a prompt and correct change of prices by eliminating manual intervention, CAG report revealed that oil marketing companies (OMC) had automated only 43 per cent of retail outlets in June 2017 (at the time of implementation of the policy) indicating lack of preparedness. "As per directives (November 2017) of ministry of petroleum and natural gas (MoPNG), automation of all retail outlets were supposed to be completed by December 2018. However, only 80 per cent outlets were automated by three OMCs by December 2018 with a capex of Rs 1,487 crore," CAG report said.

"In case of HPCL and BPCL, some of the ROs, which were compliant for daily price push, could not successfully receive the pushed price mainly due to lack of sustained connectivity. Review of data of HPCL for the period 16 June 2017 to 30 June 2018 showed that daily failure rate ranged between 9 and 88 per cent and for BPCL (from 20 June 2017 to 30 June 2018) the failure rate ranged between 59 and 93 per cent. None of the eight automated ROs of IOCL visited by Audit staff had sustained connectivity resulting in manual price change by the dealers," the report said.

The report also found lack of promptness in changing the prices by dealers. "There were 95 instances (IOCL- 41, HPCL-54 and BPCL-nil) when prices were revised on higher side than the prevailing retail sale price for the day by the dealers resulting in overcharging which is a major irregularity in terms of Marketing Discipline Guidelines (MDG)," the report says. It said that IOCL and HPCL in their responses on February 2019 and April 2019 respectively highlighted practical difficulties like greater number of dispensing units involved in change of prices, lack of connectivity, operation of retail outlets in shifts, repairing of printers, and automation of outlets etc. as the cause of such anomalies. BPCL said it has initiated corrective actions such as issuing of detailed SOPs, guidelines to field officers and dealer network etc. In its response, the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas had clarified (in February 2020) that auto price push with VSAT and Real Time transfer technology was already implemented at 68 per cent of the total automated retail outlets with a 100 per cent target for December 2020.

The report said that OMCs have accepted incorrect charging of prices pointed out by audit. "IOCL attributed (in April 2019) incorrect charging of prices to wrong prices communicated by the company to the dealers, absence of malafide intention by dealers, practical difficulties involved in changing of prices and that the dealers were cautioned for these errors," it said.

The report also flags malfunctioning of the Apps and SMS facility and states that it needs attention since it would improve confidence level of customers regarding the price charged to them.

Also read: Petrol crosses Rs 87 per litre in Delhi for first time; taxes account for 61.3% of price

Also read: Almost Rs 100 per litre! Petrol, diesel prices in this city are highest in country

Returning travellers who try to evade quarantine rules could be jailed for up to 10 years (Kirsty OConnor/PA)

Transport Secretary Grant Shapps has defended plans for prison sentences of up to 10 years for returning travellers who try to evade strict coronavirus quarantine rules.

Ministers have faced accusations that the penalties for UK nationals returning from high-risk destinations who lie about their movements are disproportionate.

But Mr Shapps said strong action was necessary to prevent new mutations of the virus entering the country, potentially undermining the vaccination programme.

On Tuesday, Health Secretary Matt Hancock announced people returning to England from 33 red list destinations would have to pay 1,750 to quarantine for 10 days in Government-designated hotels.

Those caught lying about their movements could be fined 10,000 or jailed for 10 years.

Former Supreme Court justice Lord Sumption said the penalties were more severe than those for some violent or sexual offences.

Does Mr Hancock really think that non-disclosure of a visit to Portugal is worse than the large number of violent firearms offences or sexual offences involving minors, for which the maximum is seven years? he wrote in the Daily Telegraph.

Former Conservative attorney general Dominic Grieve said 10-year jail terms were a mistake which would never actually be used by the courts.

This is a regulatory offence, and no regulatory offence I can think of attracts a 10-year sentence, he told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.

The reality is that nobody would get such a sentence anyway, the courts are simply not going to impose it.

Its a mistake of the Government to suggest something which is not going to happen.

However, Mr Shapps said the public would expect strong action if lives were being put at risk by people bringing dangerous new variants into the country.

I do think it is serious if people put others in danger by deliberately misleading and saying that you werent in Brazil or South Africa, or one of the red list countries, he told BBC Breakfast.

I think the British public would expect pretty strong action because were not talking now just about, Oh theres a lot of coronavirus in that country and you might bring some more of it back when we already have plenty of it here.

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What were talking about now are the mutations, the variants, and that is a different matter, because we dont want to be in a situation where we later on discover that theres a problem with vaccines.

In the Commons on Tuesday, Mr Hancock indicated the quarantine measures might be in place until the autumn if vaccine booster jabs are needed in response to coronavirus variants.

He told MPs that 16 hotels have been contracted to provide 4,600 rooms for the quarantine programme, which begins on Monday.

The Scottish Government said that it would go further and require all international travellers arriving into Scotland to stay in a quarantine hotel.

No international flights are currently operating to Wales or Northern Ireland, but Stormonts chief medical officer Dr Michael McBride said it is crucially important for the nations to work together to stall the arrival of new and concerning strains from abroad.

Travel trade organisation Abta said requiring passengers to pay for multiple tests once leisure travel is restarted would have serious cost implications and hurt demand.

A spokeswoman urged ministers to develop a roadmap to reopen travel.

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Meanwhile, the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag) added a new strain detected in Bristol to its variant of concern list.

A strain identified in Liverpool has also been classed as a variant under investigation.

Public Health Englands Dr Susan Hopkins said the relatively slow rise in cases of the South African and Bristol variant was reassuring.

But she warned that controlling them will become much more challenging as lockdown is relaxed.

Health officials said they had so far found 76 cases of the Bristol and Liverpool variants in the UK.

Both those variants contain the E484K mutation, a genetic change also found in both the South African and Brazilian variants, which experts suggest may be better at evading the human immune response.

The Department of Health and Social Care also said extra coronavirus testing was being carried out in the borough of Lambeth, south London, after a case of the South African variant was discovered there.
Shadow Chancellor Anneliese Dodds is today calling for an urgent end to the 'uncontrolled retreat of cash'.

In a letter seen by Money Mail, Miss Dodds urges the Government to introduce new laws to protect access to cash 'as soon as possible'.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak pledged to introduce legislation to address the problem in last year's Budget. But Miss Dodds says a surge in shops adopting card-only policies during the pandemic has made the need for action 'more urgent'.

Shadow Chancellor Anneliese Dodds has urged the Government to introduce new laws to protect access to cash 'as soon as possible'

Writing to Mr Sunak, the Shadow Chancellor also highlights the forthcoming closure of 82 HSBC branches.

Research by Which? suggests that an average of 55 bank branches have shut their doors every month in the past five years.

Miss Dodds writes: 'All of this adds up to a picture of an uncontrolled retreat from cash, with no one really having a grip of the unequal effects of this on different parts of the community... Almost a year on from the promise of legislation, surely the time is now to bring forward this solution.'

Experts have warned that Britain is not ready to go cashless.

Natalie Ceeney, chair of the Access to Cash review, says: 'Our cash infrastructure is collapsing in front of our eyes and once it has gone it won't ever come back.

'The Government needs to keep its promise and legislate now to protect cash.'

A Treasury spokesman says: 'We've committed to legislate and we're currently considering the responses to our call to evidence before setting out next steps.'

f.parker@dailymail.co.uk
Regularly using marijuana has long-term harmful effects regardless of how old the person was when they began smoking, a new study suggests

Researchers looked at people who began smoking or vaping cannabis routinely in high school or in their early 20s in comparison with non-users.

They found that, by age 35, pot users who began at any age were more likely at least three times more likely to be high-risk alcohol drinkers, at least seven times more likely to smoke cigarettes daily and 20 times more likely to use other drugs.

The team, from the University of Queensland, in Australia, said the findings should be used to send a clear message to the public about the risks of regular cannabis use .

Researchers from the University of Queensland, in Australia, compared people who began regularly using marijuana as teenager and as adults to non-users (file image)

People who began using pot as adolescents were 20.4 times more likely to be illicit drug users, 3.7 times more likely to be a high-risk alcohol drinkers, 7.2 times more likely to smoke cigarettes daily and 0.4 times less likely to be in a relationship (above)

Lead author Dr Gary Chan, from the University of Queensland's National Centre for Youth Substance Use Research, says many previous studies have examined the harms associated with regular marijuana use in teens.

But he says few have looked at the consequences linked with pot use when it begins from young adulthood.

'Two-thirds of people who use cannabis regularly started use in their early 20s,' Chan said in a news release.

'Because adult onset is a lot more common than adolescent onset, most of the harms associated with cannabis are in fact in the group who begin later on.'

For the study, published in the journal Drug and Alcohol Review, team followed 1,792 high school students from Victoria, Australia.

The students were 15 in 1992 and they were followed up age 35, during which researchers examined their patterns of cannabis use across 20 years.

Researchers compared adulthood life outcomes at age 35, including alcohol use, tobacco smoking, illicit drug use, relationship status, financial hardship, depression, anxiety, and employment status.

Of the group, 13.6 percent started regularly using marijuana after high school while 7.7 percent began as adolescents.

A total of 15.2 percent were considered consistent occasional users and 63.6 percent were consider minimal or non-users.

Results showed that, compared to non-users, regular cannabis users were more likely have harmful effects

Users who began as adolescents were 20.4 times more likely to be illicit drug users 3.7 times more likely to be a high-risk alcohol drinker and 7.2 times more likely to smoke cigarettes daily.

They were also 0.4 times less likely to be in a relationship than non-users.

Users who began as adults were 36.8 times more likely to be illicit drug users, 3.2 times more likely to be a high-risk alcohol drinker and 7.3 times more likely to smoke cigarettes daily.

Weed users who began as adults (in black) were 36.8 times more likely to use illicit drugs, 3.2 times more likely to be heavy drinkers. Pictured: Graph above shows the proportion, not the odds, of adult-onset users engaging in high risk behavior

Because the prevalence of those who regularly began using as young adults was nearly double those who began as teenagers, they accounted for the highest proportion of illicit drug use and tobacco use and nearly as high as high-risk drinking.

'Compared to non-users, regular cannabis users were more likely to engage in high-risk alcohol consumption, smoke tobacco, use other illicit drugs, and not be in a relationship at age 35,' Chan said.

'Overall, regular use of cannabis - more than weekly and especially daily use - was found to have harmful consequences, regardless of the age people began using it.'

He added that those who regularly began using as adolescents were more likely to have a higher risk of depression and less likely to have a paid job.

Chan says the findings should be used to inform the public about the risks of regular cannabis use.

'Public health agencies and policy makers need to deliver a clear and strong message to the public that regular cannabis use is harmful, regardless of when an individual initiates its use,' he said.

'This is particularly important for jurisdictions that have already legalized recreational cannabis, such as Canada and some US states.'

CHEYENNE, Wyo., Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Dr. Elsey's, a veterinarian-owned cat product brand, has finished completion on a production facility in the state capital of Wyoming.

Located at Swan Ranch in Cheyenne, Wyoming, the brand's new facility offers closer access to the source of silver sodium bentonite clay and better access to the railroad system used for product transportation.

Dr. Elsey's Cheyenne Production Plant

"At 180,000 square feet, the new production facility, including rail shed, is four times the size of Dr. Elsey's previous facility located in Englewood, Colorado," said CEO Aaron Westcott.

The increase in space offers new opportunities for the brand to further expand its product line of solution-based litter products for cats and meet the complex needs of pet owners.

"We try to speak for the cat," said company founder Dr. Bruce Elsey. "Coming at this from a feline veterinarian perspective, I think we've been able to hone in on what cats need. We've always put ourselves in the pet's paws, always identifying what is best for the animal, not for publicity."

Dr. Elsey's offers a variety of highly rated litters, including Cat Attract and Ultra. The first of its kind, Cat Attract is the only litter designed for cats that do not consistently use their litter box. Blended with a natural herbal attractant, Cat Attract is the problem cat training litter. Non-use of the litter box is the number one behavioral reason cats are abused or surrendered to shelters. Dr. Elsey's works to keep cats in happy homes by offering a free Litter Box Solutions Booklet in every box or bag. Ultra, recently named "The Best Cat Litter" by Wirecutter, offers excellent clumping and prevents moisture from reaching the bottom of the litter box tray. This low tracking litter is 99% dust-free and keeps your home clean and odor-free.

To learn more about Dr. Elsey's line of products, visit www.drelseys.com.

About Dr. Elsey's

Dr. Elsey's is a veterinarian owned cat product brand dedicated to creating products that solve the complex needs of pet owners. Founded in 1987 with the first all-natural clumping cat litter, Dr. Elsey's line of products has since grown to include a variety of premium litters that address the health and behavioral needs of cats in every stage of life. With the mission to enhance the lives of pets to the degree in which they enrich ours, Dr. Elsey's strives to put heart, soul and science into their line of specialty cat litters and food.

CONTACT NAME: Gina Zaro

ORGANIZATION: Dr. Elsey's Precious Cat

EMAIL: [email protected]

Related Images

dr-elseys-cheyenne-production-plant.jpg

Dr. Elsey's Cheyenne Production Plant

Dr. Elsey's Cheyenne Production Plant

SOURCE Dr. Elsey's Precious Cat
The public sector is essential but at the same time, the role of the private sector is also vital said Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday. Replying in Lok Sabha to the discussion on the motion of thanks to the President's address to the joint sitting of Parliament, PM Modi said that if India is able to serve humanity, it is also due to the role of the private sector.

READ | MSP hasn't stopped after three farm laws enacted, you can't deny truth: PM Modi in Lok Sabha

"Public sector is essential but at the same time, the role of the private sector is also vital. Take any sector- telecom, pharma- we see the role of the private sector. If India is able to serve humanity, it is also due to the role of the private sector," said PM Narendra Modi in Lok Sabha.

READ | Govt, Parliament have great respect for farmers, says PM Narendra Modi in Lok Sabha

The PM also said the central government and the Parliament have great respect for the farmers who are voicing their views on the three farm bills and that is why top most ministers have been talking to them. PM Modi again allayed apprehensions on the farm laws, saying neither any agriculture 'mandi' (market) has shut down after the three laws were enacted nor has the MSP stopped, rather the MSP has only increased which no one can deny.

"This House, our government and we all respect farmers who are voicing their views on the farm bills. This is the reason why topmost ministers of the government are constantly talking to them. There is great respect for farmers. "After the laws relating to agriculture were passed by Parliament, no 'mandi' has shut. Likewise, MSP has remained. Procurement on MSP has remained. These facts can't be ignored," he said.

The prime minister said those who are disrupting the House are doing so as per a well-planned strategy as they are unable to digest that people can see the truth. "Through their games, the trust of the people can never be won," he said, amidst protests by the opposition members.

The Congress walked out of Lok Sabha as PM Modi explained the government's stand on the three farm laws. PM Modi said the Congress has taken different stands in Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha. "A divided and confused party like this can do no good to the country," he added.

PM Modi said India has managed the COVID-19 pandemic successfully despite adverse predictions and the country has now become a ray of hope for the world. He said the world post-COVID-19 is turning out to be very different and in such times remaining isolated from the global trends will be counter-productive.

"That is why India is working towards building an 'Aatmanirbhar Bharat' (self-reliant India), which seeks to further global good. "Predictions were made India cannot survive as a nation, but people of our country proved them wrong and we are now a ray of hope for the world," he said.

Complimenting health care and frontline workers for their relentless work during the pandemic, the prime minister said the way India has managed the coronavirus crisis is a turning point and the world has seen its success.

The address of the President has showcased India's 'Sankalp Shakti' and his words have boosted the spirit of confidence among the people of India, infused new confidence and inspired every heart. During the discussion on the President's speech, a large number of women MPs took part. This is a great sign. I want to congratulate the women MPs who enriched the House proceedings with their thoughts," he said.
Brasilia, Feb 10 : Brazil, the world's leading coffee producer and exporter, exported 3,147,222 60 kg sacks of coffee in January this year, down 9.4 per cent compared to the same month last year (3,474,252 sacks), authorities said.

In a report issued on Tuesday, the Coffee Exporters Council (Cecafe) said the drop followed record coffee exports in 2020, reports Xinhua news agency.

According to the report, billing in the national currency (Brazilian real) increased 10.2 per cent compared to January 2020 as a result of the real's devaluation against the US dollar.

"We had good results in January, with an increase in billing in reals," Cecafe's president, Nicolas Rueda, said.

Taking into account the harvest period between July 2020 and January 2021, the first month of this year registered an increase of 17.2 per cent compared to the same period of the previous harvest, said Rueda.

According to the report, January foreign sales were lower than the 4,388,120 60 kg bags shipped in December 2020.

The main destination markets for Brazilian coffee are the US, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Japan, Colombia, Russia, Turkey, France and Canada.

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Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 10) - President Rodrigo Duterte said he wants the Philippines and the European Union to keep working together and strengthening ties, despite recently accusing the region of holding COVID-19 vaccines "hostage."

Duterte accepted the credentials of Luc Veron, Ambassador-designate of the EU to the Philippines, in a ceremony on Wednesday.

"We should continue to redefine, refine and reinforce our ties in face of new challenges and opportunities," Duterte told Veron. "The Philippines is ready to work constructively with the EU for the greater good of our peoples."

Duterte mentioned in particular improvements in trade and investment through a free trade agreement, as well as in fighting climate change, enhancing cooperation in humanitarian assistance and disaster relief.

He also thanked the EU for its "support to our justice sector and peace building and development efforts in Mindanao, particularly the Bangsamoro."

Less than two weeks ago, however, Duterte was singing a different tune, accusing the Eurepean bloc of holding up supplies of British-Swedish firm AstraZeneca's vaccines to other countries. He complained that Southeast Asian regions were not as influential in securing coronavirus doses.

Vaccine czar Carlito Galvez, Jr. backed Duterte's claim but assured that the country will not be affected by the "politics" in the United Kingdom given that the government's AstraZeneca supply will be manufactured in Thailand and at the Serum Institute of India.
A pensioner killed his wife five days into the first national lockdown after 'worrying about being unable to buy new shoes and the tiles on his roof', a court has heard.

Anthony Williams, 70, from Brynglas, Cwmbran, South Wales, who is accused of murdering his wife Ruth Williams, 67, in March last year, also said he had suffered sleepless nights prior to the attack.

Williams said he feared that he would run out of money because he was unable to physically attend his bank to move money from his savings account into his current account.

He is accused of murder, which he denies, but has admitted manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility.

On Wednesday Swansea Crown Court heard the injuries suffered by Mrs Williams included haemorrhaging in her eyes, face and mouth which were consistent with strangulation, as well as five neck fractures.

Anthony Williams (left), 70, from Brynglas, Cwmbran, South Wales, is accused of murdering his wife Ruth Williams (right), 67, in March last year

Her cause of death was given as pressure to the neck, with a pathologist saying the lack of a ligature mark on her neck did not rule out a 'soft' dressing gown cord found at their home in Brynglas being used in an assault.

The court was read several police interview transcripts with Williams in which he said he had found lockdown 'really, really hard' just five days into the UK-wide restrictions and felt 'depressed'.

'Since lockdown I'm worried about my money, being able to transfer it over in the bank. I've got nothing set up. Money in, money out, I've always had to go into the bank,' he said.

'Well, with this happening now, not being able to do that because the teller is not there, in my head I keep thinking we're going to run out of money all the time.'

Williams said the restrictions had not caused any issues between him and his wife of 46 years, who would address his concerns by telling him 'don't worry about it'.

The court heard Mrs Williams had previously been diagnosed with depression and anxiety for which she was receiving medication but was 'happy' since retiring from working at an Asda store four years earlier.

But Williams, who had not been diagnosed with depression or gone to see his GP about his frayed emotions, said he nevertheless felt he was coping 'not very well' in the 18 months since his own retirement from Cwmbran's Just Rollers factory.

Williams said he 'didn't have much of a pension' and became 'a total worrier all the time' including about things he knew were 'trivial'.

Asked what had been on his mind, Williams said: 'Whether it's only one or two pairs of shoes, and, you know, you're laying in bed worrying if the tiles are going to fall off the roof because you can't get nobody in to do it.'

He added: 'I've got lots of clothes, but I wear the same things all the time. But with shoes, I always buy them when I need them.

Mrs Williams was taken to hospital where she was pronounced dead in March last year

'So at this moment in time, now, as one of my pair of shoes is going down the back and the other ones are starting to as well, I think that's just freaking me out all the time.'

Asked if he was worried about not being able to buy another pair, Williams said: 'Yeah.'

Asked whether he had a problem with the tiles on his roof, Williams said: 'No. That's just a 'what if?''

He said he also worried about paying utility bills but said that the couple had 'enough money in the current account for a good few months', had paid off the mortgage on their home and were debt-free.

Williams said he had never had a major argument with his wife who he said would 'burst into tears' if he ever shouted at her.

He said the only time there was 'friction' between them was if he was 'lazy' for neglecting household chores which were mostly left to her.

In police interviews previously read to the jury, Williams agreed with detectives that he was responsible for the killing of his wife on the morning of March 28.

'We woke in the morning, I had been tossing and turning all night, two nights I could not sleep,' Williams told detectives.

'My wife said ''get over it'' or ''come on - get over it''. I just snapped. I started screaming and she tried calming me down.

The attack took place at the couple's home in Brynglas in Cwmbran, South Wales, on March 28 last year

'I had my hands around her throat, and I was actually choking the living daylights out of her. I had all these scratches over me and she is fighting me back.'

Williams said he chased his wife downstairs and again grabbed her by her throat as she tried to unlock her front door to escape, saying he found himself 'throttling her to death'.

The court heard Mrs Williams was found slumped in the porch with a pair of keys in her hand. She was taken to hospital where she was pronounced dead.

Williams is accused of murder, which he denies, but has admitted manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility.

The trial continues.
His video stream was paws-ed.

A county attorneys appearance by video in a Texas court briefly turned into a cat-astrophe on Tuesday when a filter of a googly-eyed feline flashed in the lawyers place.

Rod Ponton, the attorney, frantically told the judge that he was working with his assistant to remove the cat overlay during a civil forfeiture hearing in Texas 394th Judicial District Court.

He had used his secretarys computer to log into Zoom. She has a young daughter.

Im here live, Ponton said in court. Im not a cat.

Moments later, the tech snafu was fixed.

After the incident, the judge, Roy Ferguson, shared a clip on Twitter, saying: If a child used your computer, before you join a virtual hearing check the Zoom Video Options to be sure filters are off.

The video swiftly went viral. Ponton said that in his lunch hour, shortly after the hearing, calls began to come in.

I didnt know if it was good or bad, or if I was in trouble or what, Ponton, 69, told the Daily News on Wednesday morning.

He quickly realized he had gone viral.

In Texas, we have a saying: You cant put toothpaste back in the tube, he said. Since the cat video was everywhere, I decided to go ahead and laugh with everybody else.

Ponton said hes been showing up to hearings virtually for some nine months due to coronavirus. Ferguson called it an amusing moment that reflected efforts to keep the justice system humming despite the challenges posed by the pandemic.

Everyone involved handled it with dignity, and the filtered lawyer showed incredible grace, Ferguson tweeted.

Texas 394th Judicial District covers more than 400 miles of the U.S. border with Mexico. Ponton is based in Alpine, Tex.

I think the world needed a little moment of humor after the last year of stress, Ponton said.
The European Medicines Agency (EMA) plans to approve Janssen's coronavirus vaccine in March, according to the CEO of Janssen Italia and president of the Italian pharmaceutical industry, Massimo Scaccabarozzi, in an interview with Italy's Corriere della Sera daily newspaper.

We have presented the phase three trial, which should be authorised by the EMA in March. It was tested in 43,783 participants of various age groups and various latitudes, from the United States to Latin America, passing through South Africa, in the period in which the infection was greatest, he explained.

In the light of this, he claimed that Janssen's vaccine against Covid-19 could be more effective against the South African variant than others such as AstraZeneca's.

No evidence

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has said that he has high expectations for our vaccine. We tested the vaccine in South Africa at a time when the variant was already in circulation, and the average efficacy in the moderate and severe forms was 66 per cent, he said.

Asked if his vaccine prevents infection and not only serious illness and death, Scaccabarozzi stressed that "currently there is no evidence that vaccines can prevent transmission".

"Longer observation times are needed," he noted.

This single-dose Janssen vaccine uses the company's 'AdVac' vaccine platform, which was also used to develop and manufacture the European Commission-approved Janssen Ebola virus vaccine and to develop its experimental vaccines against Zika, RSV and HIV. This technological platform has been used to vaccinate more than 200,000 people to date. It is stable in storage at 2 to 8 degrees centigrade for three months and at -20 degrees for two years.
CHARLOTTE, N.C, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Piedmont Natural Gas says a colder winter and families sheltering at home during COVID are resulting in increased customer usage. Combined with a rise in the commodity cost of natural gas over the past few months, customers are experiencing higher bills. The company is urging customers to visit Piedmont's website for energy-saving tips, to sign up for an equal payment plan (EPP), or to find customer assistance programs.

"Typically, families would turn down their thermostats in winter as adults go off to work and children leave for school," said Mia Haynes, vice president of customer care. "With many families staying at home all day, it's a much different situation than last winter. Also, November 2020 was unusually warm, while December brought an abrupt return to more average, seasonal temperatures."

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), temperatures in the southeast region of the U.S. were much warmer than average in November 2020, but winter weather was closer to normal in December 2020 and into January 2021. In North Carolina alone, where most of Piedmont's customers are located, the average temperature decreased abruptly by about 13 degrees Fahrenheit from November to December.

Another factor contributing to higher bills is the commodity cost of natural gas, which fluctuates daily. While the commodity cost of natural gas remained lower for most of 2020, it increased by December 2020, just as the cold snap hit. Piedmont notes that this trend may continue as natural gas futures currently are trending higher. Piedmont passes through to customers the commodity cost of natural gas without any markup from the company.

Haynes continued, "The combination of rising prices, a cold winter and many families staying at home all day can quickly add up, making bills significantly higher than expected. We'd like to help with a few tips to keep bills manageable while keeping customers warm and comfortable."

Energy-saving tips

Seal your air ducts

Make sure the air ducts from your home's furnace and central air conditioner are properly sealed. Ducts that leak into the attic or crawl space can substantially increase your heating and cooling bills.

Seal your home

One of the quickest energy-saving tasks you can do is caulk, seal and weather-strip all seams, cracks and openings to the outside. This can save 10% to 20% on your heating and cooling bills.

Smart thermostats

Installing a "smart" or programmable thermostat will reduce your energy use while you are asleep or away.

Water heating

Set your water heater temperature to 120 degrees Fahrenheit or consider installing an on-demand or tankless water heater that only heats water when you need it.

Consider insulation

Consider whether you need to add insulation to your ceiling, floors and walls. Insulation between the indoors and outdoors reduces energy demand, saving you money while improving the comfort of your home.

Reduce energy use

The first step to reduce energy use in your home is to identify and prioritize energy-saving improvements. This can be accomplished through a certified auditor or by performing your own energy audit.

Piedmont also is offering programs and tools to help customers understand what factors are impacting their natural gas bills and emphasize specific actions they can take to reduce the impacts of high winter usage.

Energy-saving tools

Piedmont Natural Gas offers these energy-saving tools to help our customers and our communities identify ways to save money and energy.

Equal payment program

This free service helps customers manage their budget by allowing them to pay an estimated, equal monthly amount. Piedmont determines this payment by adding up a customer's annual natural gas usage and then dividing it into the same payment amount each month. Learn more here.

Assistance programs

In North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee, Piedmont Natural Gas is offering plans and flexible options to help customers who are behind on their utility payments.

Business customers: piedmontng.com/Extension

Residential customers: piedmontng.com/ExtraTime

211.org

Helps customers find local community agencies providing assistance with a wide range of needs.

Helps customers find local community agencies providing assistance with a wide range of needs.

Share the Warmth

Provides funds to local agencies to assist families with their utility bills, no matter the source of energy they use.

Provides funds to local agencies to assist families with their utility bills, no matter the source of energy they use.

Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP)

Helps low-income households, with special attention to households that spend a high percentage of their total income on home energy.

Piedmont Natural Gas

Piedmont Natural Gas, a subsidiary of Duke Energy, is an energy services company whose principal business is the distribution of natural gas to more than 1 million residential, commercial and industrial customers in North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee. The company also supplies natural gas to power plants. Piedmont is routinely recognized by J.D. Power for excellent customer satisfaction, and has been named by Cogent Reports as one of the most trusted utility brands in the U.S.

Duke Energy (NYSE: DUK), a Fortune 150 company headquartered in Charlotte, N.C., is one of the largest energy holding companies in the U.S. It employs 30,000 people and has an electric generating capacity of 51,000 megawatts through its regulated utilities, and 3,000 megawatts through its nonregulated Duke Energy Renewables unit.

Duke Energy is transforming its customers' experience, modernizing the energy grid, generating cleaner energy and expanding natural gas infrastructure to create a smarter energy future for the people and communities it serves.

Duke Energy was named to Fortune's 2020 "World's Most Admired Companies" list, and Forbes' 2019 "America's Best Employers" list. More information about the company is available at duke-energy.com. The Duke Energy News Center contains news releases, fact sheets, photos, videos and other materials. Duke Energy's illumination features stories about people, innovations, community topics and environmental issues. Follow Duke Energy on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook.

Media contact: Jennifer Sharpe

Media line: 800.559.3853

Cell: 704.616.2013

Email: [email protected]

SOURCE Piedmont Natural Gas
Uber is looking to unload up to 300,000 square feet of office space at its new Mission Bay campus, reports the San Francisco Business Times.

The ride-hailing tech giant has not officially listed the space yet, but has been softly marketing the lease at 1725 Third St. in San Francisco over the past month, according to the publication.

The move comes as a surprise, as the company had not yet moved into the space near the Chase Center. The company's new San Francisco headquarters, acquired in 2019, comprises four buildings totaling more than 1 million square feet.

There has been much of talk of a mass tech exodus out of Silicon Valley in recent months, with a number of high-profile companies pulling out of Bay Area offices.

Salesforce, which employs over 9,000 people in the Bay Area, announced this week its Work From Anywhere strategy, estimating that more than 65% of employees will adopt the new system, based on a company survey.

In January Digital Realty  a tech support company that employs around 1,500 people worldwide  announced its headquarter's relocation to Austin, the tech capital of Texas.

Yelp's San Francisco headquarters at 140 New Montgomery St. is also now up for lease. With more employees working remotely were reducing some of our footprint in San Francisco, but we will still maintain our HQ office there, the crowd-sourced reviews company said in a statement.

Dropbox is also subleasing major blocks of space in San Francisco after announcing a permanent work from home strategy.

Last year, Pinterest, the social-sharing site popular for pinning recipes, home inspiration and more, canceled its $89.5 million San Francisco office lease.

In another sector, Gap Inc., announced to employees this week it will be closing its Old Navy offices in Mission Bay and consolidating those workers into the parent companys Embarcadero office building.

Uber did not provide comment to SFGATE at the time of publication.
"Jewish Nobel" recognizes the preeminent filmmaker's commitment to Jewish values, extraordinary contribution to cinema and philanthropy, dedication to preserving the memory of the Holocaust and preventing future genocides

NEW YORK, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The Genesis Prize Foundation today announced film director, producer, and philanthropist Steven Spielberg as the 2021 Genesis Prize Laureate.

The annual $1 million Genesis Prize, dubbed the "Jewish Nobel" by TIME magazine, honors extraordinary individuals for their outstanding professional achievement, contribution to humanity, and commitment to Jewish values.

The award recognizes Spielberg's outstanding achievement as one the most influential filmmakers in the history of cinema; his social activism and prolific philanthropy; and his principled stance against anti-Semitism and all forms of intolerance. The Prize also recognizes his extraordinary work to preserve the memory of the Holocaust and prevent future genocides through film, public advocacy and philanthropy.

For the first time in the history of the Genesis Prize, the voice of global Jewry was a major factor in Laureate selection. Two hundred thousand Jews on six continents cast their votes for the 2021 Laureate; millions more engaged on social media. While the Prize Committee had the ultimate discretion about the selection of the recipient of this prestigious award, the fact Spielberg received the most votes was a major determining factor.

"The Genesis Prize celebrates Steven Spielberg's unique talent, his commitment to making the world a better place, and his unparalleled contribution to teaching the post-war generations about the horrors of the Holocaust," said Stan Polovets, Co-Founder and Chairman of GPF. "We are delighted to welcome Steven Spielberg to the distinguished family of Genesis Prize honorees, which includes such luminaries as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Natan Sharansky, and Michael Bloomberg."

This is the latest in a series of prominent awards bestowed on Spielberg, which among others include the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award of the United States; Legion d'Honneur, the highest order of the French Republic, and Germany's Federal Cross of Merit.

"Spielberg is a great Jewish visionary and storyteller," said the legendary human rights activist Natan Sharansky, who was awarded the Genesis Prize in 2020. "Key Jewish themes are often woven into his narratives: importance of identity and belonging, maintaining humanity in a ruthless world, caring for the other, and honoring the moral obligation to do the right thing. His talent makes them universal: told by Spielberg, these stories come alive in people's hearts across the globe."

Steven Spielberg becomes the 9th Genesis Prize honoree. All previous Laureates chose to direct the $1 million Prize award to philanthropic causes about which they were passionate. Sharansky, who preceded Spielberg as the Genesis Prize Laureate, directed his $1 million award to support individuals and organizations working to alleviate the Covid-19 health crisis and prevent future pandemics.

"Congratulations to Steven Spielberg on this important Jewish award," said Isaac Herzog, Chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel and Chairman of the Genesis Prize Selection Committee. "He is an example of great Jewish talent, whose extraordinary work in film and philanthropy is infused with the values of his people - a quest for justice, compassion, humanism, and a heartfelt desire to make the world a better place."

About the 2021 Genesis Prize Laureate

Steven Spielberg is widely considered to be the most successful film director in the history of cinema. His films grossed $10bn and his imagination has captivated tens of millions of people around the world. After establishing his reputation with blockbuster films such as Jaws, ET, Jurassic Park and Indiana Jones, he began to explore serious topics such as justice, slavery, women's rights, corruption, and morality of war in films such as Saving Private Ryan,Lincoln, The Color Purple, The Post, Munich and Bridge of Spies.

His films also have delivered compelling narratives of Jewish history and present day events - the Holocaust, terrorism, and the maturing of the State of Israel. Spielberg's 1993 masterpiece Schindler's List has had a profound impact on humanity's perception and awareness of the Holocaust. Fifty years after the Shoah, Spielberg's film fostered a strong emotional connection with this tragedy for a vast, global audience - touching the post-war generations in a way that no other medium could. Spielberg channeled all of his proceeds from Schindler's List to fund philanthropic causes - both Jewish and non-Jewish. In 1994, he established the USC Shoah Foundation, dedicated to preserving Holocaust survivor testimonies. Concerned with prevention of genocide, the Foundation also works to preserve the memory of other 20th century genocides - in Cambodia, Armenia and Rwanda. Over 55,000 survivor testimonies have been recorded to-date.

Spielberg and his wife Kate Capshaw founded the Righteous Persons Foundation, which has made more than $100 million in grants to various Jewish organizations. Through the Wunderkinder Foundation, Spielberg has given extensively to health, arts, youth and education.

About the Genesis Prize and Prior Laureates

The Genesis Prize is a global award that celebrates Jewish achievement and contribution to humanity. Launched in 2013, the Prize is financed through a permanent endowment of $100 million established by The Genesis Prize Foundation.

Previous Genesis Prize laureates are former New York City Mayor and philanthropist Michael Bloomberg (2014); actor, producer and peace activist Michael Douglas (2015); Itzhak Perlman, virtuoso violinist and advocate for individuals with special needs (2016); sculptor and advocate for the rights of refugees Sir Anish Kapoor (2017); Oscar-winning actress and social activist Natalie Portman (2018); owner of New England Patriots and founder of the leading foundation to combat anti-Semitism Robert Kraft (2019); and legendary Jewish leader and human rights activist Natan Sharansky (2020). In 2018, the Genesis Prize Foundation honored U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg with its inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award for her contribution to social justice and equal rights.

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1436786/Steven_Spielberg.jpg
New Delhi, Feb 10 : The Delhi Development Authority (DDA) on Wednesday unveiled its annual budget with an outlay of Rs 6,738 crore, while the receipts have been projected at Rs 6,749 crore.

DDA Chairman and Delhi Lieutenant Governor Anil Baijal approved the budget during a meeting held at the Vikas Sadan here.

In the budget, the DDA has provided for a big allocation to Narela, which is earmarked for a sub-city area in North Delhi.

In an official statement, the DDA said, "Significant allocations have been made for transport infrastructure projects, such as construction of Phase IV Metro line for the Rithala-Bawana-Narela corridor and construction of UER II (urban extension road) stretch in Delhi which is being developed by the NHAI. Special emphasis has also been given on rejuvenation of water bodies and the Yamuna River Front." It said that the Centre's scheme of housing for all under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojna (PMAY) is underway, and it is likely to be completed by December this year.

"Construction of 'housing for all' under the PMAY is in progress at Kalkaji Extension, Jailer Wala Bagh and Kathputli colony. Construction of 7,500 EWS houses is in progress which is likely to be completed by December 2021," the atatement said.

The authority also announced that all its housing projects which are underway will be completed within this financial year (2021-2022), for which the DDA has allocated Rs 1,100 crore.

Key highlights of DDA budget:
HAMILTON, Bermuda, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- AK Jensen Group Limited ("AKJ"), the leading provider of turnkey trading and infrastructure solutions for fund managers, today announced the acquisition of RiskCap Ltd. ("RiskCap") by AKJt Holdings Limited ("AKJt"), an affiliated company.

RiskCap was formed in 2013 and offers services including governance, risk management, and regulatory and AML/CFT compliance. Clients include electronic money institutions and payment institutions, MiFID firms, insurance firms and funds with a collective 5 billion in assets under management. The transaction, which is subject to regulatory approval, will allow AKJ and AKJt to expand its product suite by integrating RiskCap's expertise into existing full-service solutions for funds trading in both traditional and digital assets.

Commenting on the transaction, Neal Mitra, CEO, said: "We welcome RiskCap into the AKJ hedge fund ecosystem and look forward to working with their team on delivering excellent client service and new product opportunities. We plan to incorporate new technologies and expand our business model within GRC (governance, risk and compliance), building upon RiskCap's accomplishments to date and standing as a market leader."

Paul Magro, Co-founder and Managing Director of RiskCap, stated: "We are thrilled to be partnering with AKJ. RiskCap was started with a focus on providing institutions with state-of-the-art client support, and this relationship will now allow us to significantly expand the scope of what we can offer."

About AKJt Holdings Limited and AK Jensen Group Limited

AKJt Holdings Limited is a fintech holding company that is focused on trading, administrative, digitization and other advanced solutions for hedge fund managers. Services for funds provided by AKJt and its affiliates include fund formation, legal and regulatory infrastructure, trading systems, and back office support. Additionally, seed and accelerator capital is provided to qualifying fund managers through the AKJ Digital Assets FoF, which provides institutional investors with diversified exposure to the cryptoeconomy. The interests of all ecosystem participants  investors, fund managers and providers  are aligned through the AKJ Token.

AK Jensen Group Limited and its subsidiaries, established in 1995, is owned by shareholders who collectively have over US$18 billion in assets under management. The group serves hedge fund and institutional clients in 35 countries around the world.

For more information about AKJ visit: https://www.akj.com.

SOURCE AK Jensen Group Ltd; AKJ Crypto plc

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https://www.akjtoken.com


Japan will start coronavirus vaccinations next week, Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga said on Wednesday, but the country is scrambling to secure suitable syringes so that doses wont go to waste. Japan is trying to secure enough special syringes that can extract the full six doses from each vial of the Pfizer vaccine. More commonly used syringes can only draw five dosesmeaning the last one needs to be discarded. The syringe problem could force the country to forgo enough Pfizer vaccine doses for up to 12 million people, local media estimated. For more updates, heres Mint Lite.

Democrats push for school funding

View Full Image Democrats push for school funding

House Democrats muscled past Republicans on portions of President Joe Bidens pandemic plan, including a proposed $130 billion in additional relief to help the nations schools reopen and a gradual increase of the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, reports AP. Democrats on the Education and Labor Committee say schools wont be able to reopen safely until they get an infusion of federal funding to repair building ventilation systems, buy protective equipment and take other steps recommended by federal health officials. The plan faces opposition from Republicans who want to tie new school funding to reopening. The panel met Tuesday to craft its portion of a $1.9 trillion covid-19 relief package that tracks with Bidens plan for battling the pandemic and reviving a still staggering economy. Meanwhile, the senate has decided to continue with Donald Trumps impeachment.

Myanmars coup impacts businesses

View Full Image Myanmars coup impacts businesses

Myanmars political upheaval is prompting global companies from Japan to Thailand to dial back operations in the country, spurring concern about a widening business fallout, according to Bloomberg. From beer maker Kirin Holdings Co. to an early backer of gaming firm Razer Inc., companies and investors are weighing the impact of a military coup thats thrust the once- thriving nation into a state of emergency. The turmoil is prompting multinationals like Thailands biggest industrial developer to delay investment plans, a harbinger of things to come should the chaos deepen. Western nations are applying pressure on the newly installed military government of the Southeast Asian country, once regarded as greenfield territory for everything from oil and gas to leisure resorts. With the US reiterating plans to renew sanctions, it could cause a rippling effect among businesses.

The NRIs political attitude

View Full Image The NRIs political attitude

Indian-Americans have relatively more conservative views of policies in India while on issues affecting the US, the diaspora has a more liberal take, according to a survey of the political attitudes of the influential community in this country. Indian-Americans comprise slightly more than 1% of the total US population-and less than 1% of all registered voters. The survey, titled How Do Indian Americans View India? ", is a collaboration between the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Johns Hopkins-SAIS, and the University of Pennsylvania. Indian Americans, in other words, believe that white supremacy is a greater threat to minorities in the US than Hindu majoritarianism is to minorities in India, a country where Hindus are in the majority, the report said.

Thailands royal insult law

View Full Image Thailands royal insult law

A Thai opposition party on Wednesday submitted a proposal to amend the countrys strict royal insult law, a potentially groundbreaking move that it said could ease political tension and improve freedom of expression amid anti-government protests. The proposed amendment by 44 lawmakers from the opposition Move Forward Party comes a day after four leaders of youth-led demonstrations were jailed pending trial under the royal insult law, known as lese-majeste, which carries penalties of up to 15 years in prison. The move is significant in a country where criticizing the kingwho is revered among the military and many conservativeshas long been taboo and even talking about lese majeste can trigger a criminal charge. At least 58 activists have been charged with royal insult since November over protests where calls were made for reform of the monarchy and an end to military involvement in government.

Conflict zones new trading interest

View Full Image Conflict zones new trading interest

People in the worlds major conflict zones are turning to cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin as soaring values and the backing of super-rich investors make them more attractive. Online searches for bitcoin, ethereum and dogecoin have increased in Libya, Syria and Palestine, pushing aside the usual focus of interest in stock markets and safe-haven investments in gold and property, reports the Guardian. Publicity surrounding the new breed of digital currencies has spread across the world since the pandemic struck and meant users have also looked to them as a way to borrow when banks have become reluctant to lend money. Digital currencies, unlike the pound, dollar and euro, are not backed by a central bank that can print money to meet growing demand. There are a fixed number of bitcoins and they are traded and registered on a ledger that is not part of the banking system or visible to regulators.

Curated by Sohini Sen. Have something to share with us? Write to us at feedback@livemint or tweet to @shohinisen

























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Child Hope does not want to leave children and religious leaders on the sidelines of reconstruction

Beyond religion, the Child Hope Association wants to rebuild with children. This is what this association demonstrated last weekend, by organizing a meeting between children and religious leaders of different religious denominations including the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, the Catholic Church, the Church of the Assemblies of God, the Muslim faith in addition to certain civil society organizations (SantEgidio and ODOS). It was a question for the participants of this meeting to share around the restrictions caused by the coronavirus.

In the words of the President of Child Hope, Delali Akuvi Abalo, For more than 30 years, we have celebrated every year, on World Childrens Day, the progress made in terms of education, health, of nutrition and protection in the world. Today, the death rate for children under five has declined by around 60% globally. The number of out-of-school children of primary school age has fallen by around 40%. But the COVID-19 pandemic has turned our daily lives upside down and accentuated inequalities, primarily affecting children, hidden victims of the pandemic. This is a real crisis in the rights of the child. Today, hundreds of millions of children are deprived of their potential in the face of the current health crisis. Hard-won progress in advancing childrens rights is more under threat than ever. It is no longer just a health crisis but a real crisis of the rights of the child. COVID-19 is causing appalling consequences for young people and children at all levels. " It was in these terms that he painted a picture of the strain to which the Covid-19 has come to subject the practice of childrens rights.

Following her intervention during this meeting, which received the support of Arigatou International, the head of Child Hope, noted that the right to health is threatened. A 50% reduction in health services due to the pandemic could lead to nearly 200,000 additional stillbirths over a 12-month period in 117 low- and middle-income countries. Worse yet, thousands of children could die every day if the pandemic continues to weaken health systems and disrupt routine services. (Stillbirth occurs when a baby dies after 20 weeks of gestation, but before delivery. Spontaneous abortion, or miscarriage, is called fatal death that occurs before 20 weeks.) " He did not ignore the "right to education".

According to his situation analysis, it is a right that "is being abused. Restrictions on movement and school closures have cut children off from their teachers, friends and communities. At least 24 million children around the world are at risk of dropping out of school and children in the poorest countries have lost nearly 4 months of schooling since the start of the pandemic. This puts them at increased risk of violence, abuse and exploitation, while at the same time "the right to well-being is undermined. The number of children living in multidimensional poverty has increased. Today, one in six children lives in extreme poverty. " For Child Hope, who intends to go beyond religion and think human, these realities bring us at this critical moment in history, more than ever, we must remain united and mobilize ourselves so that the rights of the child are at the heart of all. the priorities. We must commit to reinventing a more equal, fairer and more sustainable future for every child. We must fight this fight together to put children first, because every child has the right to a childhood. For Child Hope, leading this fight together implies the participation of all religious denominations and of all actors in love with justice, and justice for children. Children need our support so that they can survive, thrive and achieve their dreams and their full potential. " He invited some and them to give children "the chance to become the adults the world will need".

In this dynamic, an emphasis is placed on interreligious dialogue. With regard to interreligious dialogue, before an assembly of religious leaders representing the diversity of religions in Sri Lanka, Pope Francis affirmed that the effectiveness of the meeting and of the interreligious dialogue requires a complete and sincere presentation of the convictions. respective of each. It is on this condition, he indicated before adding that "we will be able to see more clearly all that we have in common", thus opening the way to "mutual esteem, cooperation and, certainly, a friendship . Very enthusiastic about the mobilization received by this initiative, the person in charge of Child Hope said he dared to believe that it is the beginning or better the reinforcement of a mutual esteem, a lasting cooperation and a disinterested friendship or then for the cause of the layers vulnerable, especially children. As a reminder, Child Hope is an organization that supports vulnerable and destitute children).

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German airline Condor announced that it will operate a flight every Thursday in February from Germany to Egypts coastal city of Hurghada, with an increase in the number of flights starting March, a statement by Egypt's ambassador in Berlin Khaled Galal Abdel-Hamid said on Wednesday.

Condor resumed flights last Saturday, carrying about 220 passengers from Frankfurt to Hurghada.

The German trips are coordinated with Egypts Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities and the General Administration of Quarantine at the Ministry of Health, the ambassador added.

The tourism ministry is implementing a strategy to launch a safe tourist corridor between Germany and tourist destinations in Egypts Red Sea governorate to attract the German tourists back to the country, said Abdel-Hamid.

The latest moves will take place amid precautionary measures for travellers and workers in tourist resorts through a set of strict anti-coronavirus safety regulations, Abdel-Hamid added.

The ambassador expressed hope that the announced trips will reattract German tourism to Red Sea destinations.

German tourism to Egypt ranks first in terms of numbers, as 2019 saw 1.8 million German tourists visiting Egypt, the ambassador said.

In late December, Hurghada received its first flight from Berlin since Egypt reopened its airspace to regular flights in July.

Egypt requires travellers arriving to the country to present a negative PCR lab test result. However, travellers entering Egypt at any of four airports in the Red Sea governorate and South Sinai can take a coronavirus test upon arrival.

Short link:


Emissions from China of a banned gas that harms Earths ozone layer have sharply declined after increasing for several years, two teams of scientists said Wednesday, a sign that the Beijing government had made good on vows to crack down on illegal production of the industrial chemical.

The findings ease concerns that increased emissions of the gas, CFC-11, would slow progress in the decades-long environmental struggle to repair the ozone layer, which filters ultraviolet radiation from the sun that can cause skin cancer and damage crops.

We see a huge decline both in global emission rates and whats coming from Eastern China, said Stephen A. Montzka, a research chemist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the lead author of one of the studies. Work by Dr. Montzka and others three years ago first revealed the illegal emissions.

It looks like theres been a substantial response, potentially as a result of us raising a flag and saying, Hey, somethings not happening as it should, Dr. Montzka said.
One of the spokespersons for the Petitioner in the ongoing Presidential Election Petition, Sammy Gyamfi, has launched a vituperative attack on the First Respondent and Chairperson of the Electoral Commission, Jean Mensah, for her decision not to testify in court.



He claims the EC Chairperson is scared to be exposed following her fraudulent actions to rig the 2020 Presidential election for the Second Respondent, President Nana Addo Dankwa Akuffo-Addo.



Sammy Gyamfi who was speaking on NEAT FMs morning show Ghana Montie expressed his revulsion at the conduct of the EC Chairperson by tagging her as a confidence Trickster, a thief and a fraudster.



I have never had respect for this woman from day one. She is a thief," he averred.



Listen to interview





Source: King Edward Ambrose Washman Addo/peacefmonline.com









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If you run an image search for the word ARPANET, you will find lots of maps showing how the government research network expanded steadily across the country throughout the late 60s and early 70s. Im guessing that most people reading or hearing about the ARPANET for the first time encounter one of these maps.

Obviously, the maps are interestingits hard to believe that there were once so few networked computers that their locations could all be conveyed with what is really pretty lo-fi cartography. (Were talking 1960s overhead projector diagrams here. You know the vibe.) But the problem with the maps, drawn as they are with bold lines stretching across the continent, is that they reinforce the idea that the ARPANETs paramount achievement was connecting computers across the vast distances of the United States for the first time.

Today, the internet is a lifeline that keeps us tethered to each other even as an airborne virus has us all locked up indoors. So its easy to imagine that, if the ARPANET was the first draft of the internet, then surely the world that existed before it was entirely disconnected, since thats where wed be without the internet today, right? The ARPANET must have been a big deal because it connected people via computers when that hadnt before been possible.

That view doesnt get the history quite right. It also undersells what made the ARPANET such a breakthrough.

The Debut

The Washington Hilton stands near the top of a small rise about a mile and a half northeast of the National Mall. Its two white-painted modern facades sweep out in broad semicircles like the wings of a bird. The New York Times, reporting on the hotels completion in 1965, remarked that the building looks like a sea gull perched on a hilltop nest.

The hotel hides its most famous feature below ground. Underneath the driveway roundabout is an enormous ovoid event space known as the International Ballroom, which was for many years the largest pillar-less ballroom in DC. In 1967, the Doors played a concert there. In 1968, Jimi Hendrix also played a concert there. In 1972, a somewhat more sedate act took over the ballroom to put on the inaugural International Conference on Computing Communication, where a promising research project known as the ARPANET was demonstrated publicly for the first time.

The 1972 ICCC, which took place from October 24th to 26th, was attended by about 800 people. It brought together all of the leading researchers in the nascent field of computer networking. According to internet pioneer Bob Kahn, if somebody had dropped a bomb on the Washington Hilton, it would have destroyed almost all of the networking community in the US at that point.

Not all of the attendees were computer scientists, however. An advertisement for the conference claimed it would be user-focused and geared toward lawyers, medical men, economists, and government men as well as engineers and communicators. Some of the conferences sessions were highly technical, such as the session titled Data Network Design Problems I and its sequel session, Data Network Design Problems II. But most of the sessions were, as promised, focused on the potential social and economic impacts of computer networking. One session, eerily prescient today, sought to foster a discussion about how the legal system could act proactively to safeguard the right of privacy in the computer data bank.

The ARPANET demonstration was intended as a side attraction of sorts for the attendees. Between sessions, which were held either in the International Ballroom or elsewhere on the lower level of the hotel, attendees were free to wander into the Georgetown Ballroom (a smaller ballroom/conference room down the hall from the big one), where there were 40 terminals from a variety of manufacturers set up to access the ARPANET. These terminals were dumb terminalsthey only handled input and output and could do no computation on their own. (In fact, in 1972, its likely that all of these terminals were hardcopy terminals, i.e. teletype machines.) The terminals were all hooked up to a computer known as a Terminal Interface Message Processor or TIP, which sat on a raised platform in the middle of the room. The TIP was a kind of archaic router specially designed to connect dumb terminals to the ARPANET. Using the terminals and the TIP, the ICCC attendees could experiment with logging on and accessing some of the computers at the 29 host sites then comprising the ARPANET.

To exhibit the networks capabilities, researchers at the host sites across the country had collaborated to prepare 19 simple scenarios for users to experiment with. These scenarios were compiled into a booklet that was handed to conference attendees as they tentatively approached the maze of wiring and terminals. The scenarios were meant to prove that the new technology worked but also that it was useful, because so far the ARPANET was a highway system without cars, and its Pentagon funders hoped that a public demonstration would excite more interest in the network.

The scenarios thus showed off a diverse selection of the software that could be accessed over the ARPANET: There were programming language interpreters, one for a Lisp-based language at MIT and another for a numerical computing environment called Speakeasy hosted at UCLA; there were games, including a chess program and an implementation of Conways Game of Life; andperhaps most popular among the conference attendeesthere were several AI chat programs, including the famous ELIZA chat program developed at MIT by Joseph Weizenbaum.

The researchers who had prepared the scenarios were careful to list each command that users were expected to enter at their terminals. This was especially important because the sequence of commands used to connect to any given ARPANET host could vary depending on the host in question. To experiment with the AI chess program hosted on the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratorys PDP-10 minicomputer, for instance, conference attendees were instructed to enter the following:

[LF] , [SP] , and [CR] below stand for the line feed, space, and carriage return keys respectively. Ive explained each command after // , but this syntax was not used for the annotations in the original.

@r [LF] // Reset the TIP @e [SP] r [LF] // "Echo remote" setting, host echoes characters rather than TIP @L [SP] 134 [LF] // Connect to host number 134 :login [SP] iccXXX [CR] // Login to the MIT AI Lab's system, where "XXX" should be user's initials :chess [CR] // Start chess program

If conference attendees were successfully able to enter those commands, their reward was the opportunity to play around with some of the most cutting-edge chess software available at the time, where the layout of the board was represented like this:

BR BN BB BQ BK BB BN BR BP BP BP BP ** BP BP BP -- ** -- ** -- ** -- ** ** -- ** -- BP -- ** -- -- ** -- ** WP ** -- ** ** -- ** -- ** -- ** -- WP WP WP WP -- WP WP WP WR WN WB WQ WK WB WN WR

In contrast, to connect to UCLAs IBM System/360 and run the Speakeasy numerical computing environment, conference attendees had to enter the following:

@r [LF] // Reset the TIP @t [SP] o [SP] L [LF] // "Transmit on line feed" setting @i [SP] L [LF] // "Insert line feed" setting, i.e. send line feed with each carriage return @L [SP] 65 [LF] // Connect to host number 65 tso // Connect to IBM Time-Sharing Option system logon [SP] icX [CR] // Log in with username, where "X" should be a freely chosen digit iccc [CR] // This is the password (so secure!) speakez [CR] // Start Speakeasy

Successfully running that gauntlet gave attendees the power to multiply and transpose and do other operations on matrices as quickly as they could input them at their terminal:

:+! a=m*transpose(m);a [CR] :+! eigenvals(a) [CR]

Many of the attendees were impressed by the demonstration, but not for the reasons that we, from our present-day vantage point, might assume. The key piece of context hard to keep in mind today is that, in 1972, being able to use a computer remotely, even from a different city, was not new. Teletype devices had been used to talk to distant computers for decades already. Almost a full five years before the ICCC, Bill Gates was in a Seattle high school using a teletype to run his first BASIC programs on a General Electric computer housed elsewhere in the city. Merely logging in to a host computer and running a few commands or playing a text-based game was routine. The software on display here was pretty neat, but the two scenarios Ive told you about so far could ostensibly have been experienced without going over the ARPANET.

Of course, something new was happening under the hood. The lawyers, policy-makers, and economists at the ICCC might have been enamored with the clever chess program and the chat bots, but the networking experts would have been more interested in two other scenarios that did a better job of demonstrating what the ARPANET project had achieved.

The first of these scenarios involved a program called NETWRK running on MITs ITS operating system. The NETWRK command was the entrypoint for several subcommands that could report various aspects of the ARPANETs operating status. The SURVEY subcommand reported which hosts on the network were functioning and available (they all fit on a single list), while the SUMMARY.OF.SURVEY subcommand aggregated the results of past SURVEY runs to report an up percentage for each host as well as how long, on average, it took for each host to respond to messages. The output of the SUMMARY.OF.SURVEY subcommand was a table that looked like this:

--HOST-- -#- -%-UP- -RESP- UCLA-NMC 001 097% 00.80 SRI-ARC 002 068% 01.23 UCSB-75 003 059% 00.63 ...

The host number field, as you can see, has room for no more than three digits (ha!). Other NETWRK subcommands allowed users to look at summary of survey results over a longer historical period or to examine the log of survey results for a single host.

The second of these scenarios featured a piece of software called the SRI-ARC Online System being developed at Stanford. This was a fancy piece of software with lots of functionality (it was the software system that Douglas Engelbart demoed in the Mother of All Demos), but one of the many things it could do was make use of what was essentially a file hosting service run on the host at UC Santa Barbara. From a terminal at the Washington Hilton, conference attendees could copy a file created at Stanford onto the host at UCSB simply by running a copy command and answering a few of the computers questions:

[ESC] , [SP] , and [CR] below stand for the escape, space, and carriage return keys respectively. The words in parentheses are prompts printed by the computer. The escape key is used to autocomplete the filename on the third line. The file being copied here is called <system>sample.txt;1 , where the trailing one indicates the files version number and <system> indicates the directory. This was a convention for filenames used by the TENEX operating system.

@copy (TO/FROM UCSB) to (FILE) <system>sample [ESC] .TXT;1 [CR] (CREATE/REPLACE) create

These two scenarios might not look all that different from the first two, but they were remarkable. They were remarkable because they made it clear that, on the ARPANET, humans could talk to computers but computers could also talk to each other. The SURVEY results collected at MIT werent collected by a human regularly logging in to each machine to check if it was upthey were collected by a program that knew how to talk to the other machines on the network. Likewise, the file transfer from Stanford to UCSB didnt involve any humans sitting at terminals at either Stanford or UCSBthe user at a terminal in Washington DC was able to get the two computers to talk each other merely by invoking a piece of software. Even more, it didnt matter which of the 40 terminals in the Ballroom you were sitting at, because you could view the MIT network monitoring statistics or store files at UCSB using any of the terminals with almost the same sequence of commands.

This is what was totally new about the ARPANET. The ICCC demonstration didnt just involve a human communicating with a distant computer. It wasnt just a demonstration of remote I/O. It was a demonstration of software remotely communicating with other software, something nobody had seen before.

To really appreciate why it was this aspect of the ARPANET project that was important and not the wires-across-the-country, physical connection thing that the host maps suggest (the wires were leased phone lines anyhow and were already there!), consider that, before the ARPANET project began in 1966, the ARPA offices in the Pentagon had a terminal room. Inside it were three terminals. Each connected to a different computer; one computer was at MIT, one was at UC Berkeley, and another was in Santa Monica. It was convenient for the ARPA staff that they could use these three computers even from Washington DC. But what was inconvenient for them was that they had to buy and maintain terminals from three different manufacturers, remember three different login procedures, and familiarize themselves with three different computing environments in order to use the computers. The terminals might have been right next to each other, but they were merely extensions of the host computing systems on the other end of the wire and operated as differently as the computers did. Communicating with a distant computer was possible before the ARPANET; the problem was that the heterogeneity of computing systems limited how sophisticated the communication could be.

Come Together, Right Now

So what Im trying to drive home here is that there is an important distinction between statement A, the ARPANET connected people in different locations via computers for the first time, and statement B, the ARPANET connected computer systems to each other for the first time. That might seem like splitting hairs, but statement A elides some illuminating history in a way that statement B does not.

To begin with, the historian Joy Lisi Rankin has shown that people were socializing in cyberspace well before the ARPANET came along. In A Peoples History of Computing in the United States, she describes several different digital communities that existed across the country on time-sharing networks prior to or apart from the ARPANET. These time-sharing networks were not, technically speaking, computer networks, since they consisted of a single mainframe computer running computations in a basement somewhere for many dumb terminals, like some portly chthonic creature with tentacles sprawling across the country. But they nevertheless enabled most of the social behavior now connoted by the word network in a post-Facebook world. For example, on the Kiewit Network, which was an extension of the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System to colleges and high schools across the Northeast, high school students collaboratively maintained a gossip file that allowed them to keep track of the exciting goings-on at other schools, creating social connections from Connecticut to Maine. Meanwhile, women at Mount Holyoke College corresponded with men at Dartmouth over the network, perhaps to arrange dates or keep in touch with boyfriends. This was all happening in the 1960s. Rankin argues that by ignoring these early time-sharing networks we impoverish our understanding of how American digital culture developed over the last 50 years, leaving room for a Silicon Valley mythology that credits everything to the individual genius of a select few founding fathers.

As for the ARPANET itself, if we recognize that the key challenge was connecting the computer systems and not just the physical computers, then that might change what we choose to emphasize when we tell the story of the innovations that made the ARPANET possible. The ARPANET was the first ever packet-switched network, and lots of impressive engineering went into making that happen. I think its a mistake, though, to say that the ARPANET was a breakthrough because it was the first packet-switched network and then leave it at that. The ARPANET was meant to make it easier for computer scientists across the country to collaborate; that project was as much about figuring out how different operating systems and programs written in different languages would interface with each other than it was about figuring out how to efficiently ferry data back and forth between Massachusetts and California. So the ARPANET was the first packet-switched network, but it was also an amazing standards success storysomething I find especially interesting given how many times Ive written about failed standards on this blog.

Inventing the protocols for the ARPANET was an afterthought even at the time, so naturally the job fell to a group made up largely of graduate students. This group, later known as the Network Working Group, met for the first time at UC Santa Barbara in August of 1968. There were 12 people present at that first meeting, most of whom were representatives from the four universities that were to be the first host sites on the ARPANET when the equipment was ready. Steve Crocker, then a graduate student at UCLA, attended; he told me over a Zoom call that it was all young guys at that first meeting, and that Elmer Shapiro, who chaired the meeting, was probably the oldest one there at around 38. ARPA had not put anyone in charge of figuring out how the computers would communicate once they were connected, but it was obvious that some coordination was necessary. As the group continued to meet, Crocker kept expecting some legitimate adult with more experience and authority to fly out from the East Coast to take over, but that never happened. The Network Working Group had ARPAs tacit approvalall those meetings involved lots of long road trips, and ARPA money covered the travel expensesso they were it.

The Network Working Group faced a huge challenge. Nobody had ever sat down to connect computer systems together in a general-purpose way; that flew against all of the assumptions that prevailed in computing in the late 1960s:

The typical mainframe of the period behaved as if it were the only computer in the universe. There was no obvious or easy way to engage two diverse machines in even the minimal communication needed to move bits back and forth. You could connect machines, but once connected, what would they say to each other? In those days a computer interacted with devices that were attached to it, like a monarch communicating with his subjects. Everything connected to the main computer performed a specific task, and each peripheral device was presumed to be ready at all times for a fetch-my-slippers type command. Computers were strictly designed for this kind of interaction; they send instructions to subordinate card readers, terminals, and tape units, and they initiate all dialogues. But if another device in effect tapped the computer on the shoulder with a signal and said, Hi, Im a computer too, the receiving machine would be stumped.

As a result, the Network Working Groups progress was initially slow. The group did not settle on an official specification for any protocol until June, 1970, nearly two years after the groups first meeting.

But by the time the ARPANET was to be shown off at the 1972 ICCC, all the key protocols were in place. A scenario like the chess scenario exercised many of them. When a user ran the command @e r , short for @echo remote , that instructed the TIP to make use of a facility in the new TELNET virtual teletype protocol to inform the remote host that it should echo the users input. When a user then ran the command @L 134 , short for @login 134 , that caused the TIP to invoke the Initial Connection Protocol with host 134, which in turn would cause the remote host to allocate all the necessary resources for the connection and drop the user into a TELNET session. (The file transfer scenario I described may well have made use of the File Transfer Protocol, though that protocol was only ready shortly before the conference.) All of these protocols were known as level three protocols, and below them were the host-to-host protocol at level two (which defined the basic format for the messages the hosts should expect from each other), and the host-to-IMP protocol at level one (which defined how hosts communicated with the routing equipment they were linked to). Incredibly, the protocols all worked.

In my view, the Network Working Group was able to get everything together in time and just generally excel at its task because it adopted an open and informal approach to standardization, as exemplified by the famous Request for Comments (RFC) series of documents. These documents, originally circulated among the members of the Network Working Group by snail mail, were a way of keeping in touch between meetings and soliciting feedback to ideas. The Request for Comments framing was suggested by Steve Crocker, who authored the first RFC and supervised the RFC mailing list in the early years, in an attempt to emphasize the open-ended and collaborative nature of what the group was trying to do. That framing, and the availability of the documents themselves, made the protocol design process into a melting pot of contributions and riffs on other peoples contributions where the best ideas could emerge without anyone losing face. The RFC process was a smashing success and is still used to specify internet standards today, half a century later.

Its this legacy of the Network Working Group that I think we should highlight when we talk about ARPANETs impact. Though today one of the most magical things about the internet is that it can connect us with people on the other side of the planet, its only slightly facetious to say that that technology has been with us since the 19th century. Physical distance was conquered well before the ARPANET by the telegraph. The kind of distance conquered by the ARPANET was instead the logical distance between the operating systems, character codes, programming languages, and organizational policies employed at each host site. Implementing the first packet-switched network was of course a major feat of engineering that should also be mentioned, but the problem of agreeing on standards to connect computers that had never been designed to play nice with each other was the harder of the two big problems involved in building the ARPANETand its solution was the most miraculous part of the ARPANET story.

In 1981, ARPA issued a Completion Report reviewing the first decade of the ARPANETs history. In a section with the belabored title, Technical Aspects of the Effort Which Were Successful and Aspects of the Effort Which Did Not Materialize as Originally Envisaged, the authors wrote:

Possibly the most difficult task undertaken in the development of the ARPANET was the attemptwhich proved successfulto make a number of independent host computer systems of varying manufacture, and varying operating systems within a single manufactured type, communicate with each other despite their diverse characteristics.

There you have it from no less a source than the federal government of the United States.

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Previously on TwoBitHistory

Lara Worthington, her actor husband Sam and their three sons have been settling into life in Sydney since returning to Australia last month.

And on Tuesday, the 33-year-old cut a chic figure in an all-black ensemble as she picked up her son from school.

The blonde beauty teamed a boxy blazer with a T-shirt, skinny jeans and boots.

School run chic! Lara Worthington cut a fashionable figure in an all-black ensemble as she picked up her son from school on Tuesday. She was seen leaving the school grounds hand in hand with her son - likely her eldest Rocket - as she slipped on her shades

She completed her outfit with a pair gold of earrings and oversized designer sunglasses for a polished look.

The former model was seen leaving the school grounds hand-in-hand with her son - likely her eldest Rocket - as she slipped on her shades.

He managed to persuade his mother into giving him a piggy back, and she was spotted crouching down for him.

Piggy back! Lara's son managed to persuade her into giving him a piggy back, and she was spotted crouching down for him

She's got it! Carrying the five-year-old was clearly an easy task for the fit mother-of-three as she crossed the street with her boy

Carrying the five-year-old was clearly an easy task for the fit mother-of-three as she crossed the street with her boy.

Lara's school run comes after it was reported last year that she planned to move back to Australia with her husband-of-seven-years Sam and their young family.

The couple have been based in Los Angeles with their family for years. They returned to Sydney in January.

According to Who magazine last year, the couple decided to relocate to Australia for an 'extended stay'.

Welcome home: Last year, it was reported Lara planned to move back to Australia with her husband-of-seven-years, actor Sam Worthington, and their family

The publication reported the pair will be temporarily moving Down Under while Sam performs in the Sydney Theatre Company's production, Appropriate.

The production will take place in March, and along with Sam's Avatar commitments in New Zealand, 'a more permanent move Down Under doesn't seem totally off the cards just yet'.

Sam and Lara share sons Rocket, four, Racer, three, and welcomed their most recent addition, a baby boy, whose name is yet to be revealed, in 2019.
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STOCKHOLM, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- On 14 December 2020, EQT IX1 ("EQT IX"), through Roar BidCo AB2 ("Roar BidCo"), announced a public offer to the shareholders and holders of the Senior Unsecured Convertible Bonds (the "Convertible Bonds") ("Holders of Convertible Bonds") in Recipharm AB (publ) ("Recipharm" or the "Company") to tender all their shares3 and Convertible Bonds to Roar BidCo (the "Offer"). The Offer was subsequently increased on 28 January 2021 (the "Revised Offer").

Roar BidCo has received the necessary competition clearances from the EU Commission for the recommended Revised Offer. This means that Roar BidCo has obtained all necessary regulatory, governmental or similar clearances, approvals, decisions and other actions from authorities or similar, including from competition authorities, and that this condition for Roar BidCo's completion of its offer to the shareholders of Recipharm and Holders of Convertible Bonds hereby has been satisfied.



Do note that the Offer remains subject to additional conditions and only when and if such conditions are fulfilled or waived, and Roar BidCo declares the Offer unconditional, will the Offer be completed. Roar BidCo remains hopeful that the Revised Offer will be successful.



Information about the Offer:

Information about the Offer and the Revised Offer is made available here.



For enquiries, please contact:

EQT Press Office

Tel: +46 8 506 55 334, email: press@eqtpartners.com

For administrative questions regarding the Offer and the Revised Offer, please contact your bank or the nominee registered as holder of your shares, or, in respect of the Convertible Bonds, Lucid Issuer Services Limited:

Lucid Issuer Services Limited

Tankerton Works

12 Argyle Walk

London WC1H 8HA

Telephone: + 44 20 7704 0880

Attention: Owen Morris

Email: recipharm@lucid-is.com

The information in this press release was submitted for publication by Roar BidCo (contact details to EQT Press Office above) on 10 February 2021 at 19:00 CET.

Important notice

This press release has been published in Swedish and English. In the event of any discrepancy in content between the two language versions, the Swedish version shall prevail.

The Offer (which in this section "Important notice" refers to the Offer as well as the Revised Offer) is not being made, directly or indirectly, in or into Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Japan, New Zealand or South Africa or in any other jurisdiction where such offer would be prohibited by applicable law pursuant to legislation, restrictions and regulations in the relevant jurisdiction, by use of mail or any other communication means or instrumentality (including, without limitation, facsimile transmission, electronic mail, telex, telephone and the Internet) of interstate or foreign commerce, or of any facility of national securities exchange or other trading venue, of Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Japan, New Zealand or South Africa, or in any other jurisdiction where such offer would be prohibited by applicable law pursuant to legislation, restrictions and regulations in the relevant jurisdiction, and the Offer cannot be accepted by any such use or by such means, instrumentality or facility of, in or from, Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Japan, New Zealand or South Africa or in any other jurisdiction where such offer would be prohibited by applicable law pursuant to legislation, restrictions and regulations in the relevant jurisdiction. Accordingly, this press release or any documentation relating to the Offer are not being and should not be sent, mailed or otherwise distributed or forwarded in or into Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Japan, New Zealand or South Africa or in any other jurisdiction where such offer would be prohibited by applicable law pursuant to legislation, restrictions and regulations in the relevant jurisdiction.

This press release is not being, and must not be, sent to shareholders and Holders of Convertible Bonds with registered addresses in Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Japan, New Zealand or South Africa or in any other jurisdiction where such offer would be prohibited by applicable law pursuant to legislation, restrictions and regulations in the relevant jurisdiction. Banks, brokers, dealers and other nominees holding shares or Convertible Bonds for persons in Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Japan, New Zealand or South Africa or in any other jurisdiction where such offer would be prohibited by applicable law pursuant to legislation, restrictions and regulations in the relevant jurisdiction must not forward this press release or any other document received in connection with the Offer to such persons.

The Offer, the information and documents contained in this press release are not being made and have not been approved by an "authorised" person for the purposes of section 21 of the UK Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (the "FSMA"). The communication of the information and documents contained in this press release is exempt from the restriction on financial promotions under section 21 of the FSMA on the basis that it is a communication by or on behalf of a body corporate which relates to a transaction to acquire shares in a body corporate and the object of the transaction may reasonably be regarded as being the acquisition of day to day control of the affairs of that body corporate within article 62 (sale of a body corporate) of the FSMA 2000 (Financial Promotion) Order 2005.

Statements in this press release relating to future status or circumstances, including statements regarding future performance, growth and other trend projections and other benefits of the Offer, are forward-looking statements. These statements may generally, but not always, be identified by the use of words such as "anticipates", "intends", "expects", "believes", or similar expressions. By their nature, forward-looking statements involve risk and uncertainty because they relate to events and depend on circumstances that will occur in the future. There can be no assurance that actual results will not differ materially from those expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements due to many factors, many of which are outside the control of Roar BidCo and Recipharm.

Any such forward-looking statements speak only as of the date on which they are made and Roar BidCo has no obligation (and undertakes no such obligation) to update or revise any of them, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except for in accordance with applicable laws and regulations. The reader should, however, consult any additional disclosures that Roar BidCo or Recipharm have made or may make.

Goldman Sachs International is not responsible to anyone other than Roar BidCo for advice in connection with the Offer.

Special notice to shareholders and Holders of Convertible Bonds in the United States

Shareholders and Holders of Convertible Bonds domiciled in the United States (the "U.S. Holders") are advised that neither the shares nor the Convertible Bonds are registered under the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "Securities Act") and that the Company is not subject to the periodic reporting requirements of the U.S. Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended (the "Exchange Act") and is not required to, and does not, file any reports with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission thereunder. The Offer (which in this section "Special notice to shareholders and Holders of Convertible Bonds in the United States" refers to the Offer as well as the Revised Offer) is open to shareholders and Holders of Convertible Bonds resident in the United States and is made on the same terms and conditions as those made to all other shareholders of the Company or Holders of Convertible Bonds to whom an offer is made. Any information documents, including an offer document, are being disseminated to U.S. Holders on a basis comparable to the method that such documents are provided to the Company's other shareholders and Holders of Convertible Bonds.

The Offer described in this press release is made for shares and Convertible Bonds in Recipharm, a company incorporated under Swedish law, and is subject to Swedish disclosure and procedural requirements, which are different from those of the United States. In particular, the Company's financial statements, and all financial information that is included herein, or any other documents relating to the Offer, have been or will be prepared in accordance with IFRS and may not be comparable to financial statements of companies in the United States or other companies whose financial statements are prepared in accordance with U.S. generally accepted accounting principles.

The Offer is made in the United States pursuant to Section 14(e) and Regulation 14(E) of the Exchange Act, subject to the exemption provided by Rule 14d - 1(d) (the "Tier II Exemption") under the Exchange Act, and otherwise in accordance with the requirements of Swedish law. Accordingly, the Offer is subject to disclosure and other procedural requirements, including with respect to withdrawal rights, the Offer timetable, settlement procedures and timing of payments, that are different from those applicable under U.S. domestic tender offer procedures and law, and certain rules applicable to U.S. tender offers made in the United States do not apply. U.S. Holders are encouraged to consult with their own advisors regarding the Offer.

As permitted under the Tier II Exemption, the settlement of the Offer is based on the applicable Swedish law provisions which differ from the settlement procedures customary in the United States, particularly as regards the time when payment of the consideration is rendered. The Offer, which is subject to Swedish law, is being made to the U.S. Holders in accordance with the applicable United States securities laws, and the exemptions applicable thereunder, in particular the Tier II Exemption. To the extent the Offer is subject to U.S. securities laws, those laws only apply to U.S. Holders and thus will not give rise to claims on the part of any other person. The U.S. Holders should consider that the price for the Offer is being paid in SEK and that no adjustment will be made based on any changes in the exchange rate.

It may be difficult for U.S. Holders or other shareholders or Holders of Convertible Bonds to enforce their rights and any claims they may have arising under the U.S. federal or state securities laws in connection with the Offer, since the Company and Roar BidCo are located in countries other than the United States, and some or all of their officers and directors may be residents of countries other than the United States. U.S. Holders may not be able to sue the Company or Roar BidCo or their respective officers or directors in a non-U.S. court for violations of U.S. securities laws. Further, it may be difficult to compel the Company or Roar BidCo and/or their respective affiliates to subject themselves to the jurisdiction or judgment of a U.S. court.

To the extent permissible under applicable law and regulations, including Rule 14e-5 under the Exchange Act, Roar BidCo and its affiliates or brokers (acting as agents for Roar BidCo or its affiliates, as applicable) may from time to time after the date hereof directly or indirectly purchase or arrange to purchase shares or Convertible Bonds of the Company outside the United States, or any securities that are convertible into, exchangeable for or exercisable for such shares, other than pursuant to the Offer, during the period in which the Offer remains open for acceptance. These purchases may occur either in the open market at prevailing prices or in private transactions at negotiated prices. In addition, the financial advisor to Roar BidCo may also engage in ordinary course trading activities in securities of the Company, which may include purchases or arrangements to purchase such securities as long as such purchases or arrangements are in compliance with the applicable law, including Rule 14e-5 under the Exchange Act. Any information about such purchases will be announced in Swedish and in a non-binding English translation available to the U.S. Holders through relevant electronic media if, and to the extent, such announcement is required under applicable Swedish or U.S. law, rules or regulations.

The receipt of cash pursuant to the Offer by a U.S. Holder may be a taxable transaction for U.S. federal income tax purposes and under applicable U.S. state and local, as well as foreign and other, tax laws. Each shareholder and Holder of Convertible Bonds is urged to consult an independent professional adviser regarding the tax consequences of accepting the Offer. Neither Roar BidCo nor any of its affiliates and their respective directors, officers, employees or agents or any other person acting on their behalf in connection with the Offer shall be responsible for any tax effects or liabilities resulting from acceptance of this Offer.

NEITHER THE U.S. SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION NOR ANY U.S. STATE SECURITIES COMMISSION HAS APPROVED OR DISAPPROVED THE OFFER OR PASSED ANY COMMENTS ABOUT WHETHER THE OFFER IS FAIR OR HAS ANY MERITS, OR PASSED ANY COMMENT UPON THE ADEQUACY OR COMPLETENESS OF THIS PRESS RELEASE, OR PASSED ANY COMMENT ON WHETHER THE CONTENT IN THIS PRESS RELEASE IS CORRECT OR COMPLETE. ANY REPRESENTATION TO THE CONTRARY IS A CRIMINAL OFFENCE IN THE UNITED STATES.

1 The fund known as EQT IX, comprising of EQT IX Collect EUR SCSp, a Luxembourg special limited partnership (societe en commandite speciale) with its registered office at 26A, Boulevard Royal, L-2449 Luxembourg, Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, registered with the Luxembourg trade and companies register (Registre de Commerce et des Societes, Luxembourg) under number B 239.741, and EQT IX Collect USD SCSp, a Luxembourg special limited partnership (societe en commandite speciale) with its registered office at 26A, Boulevard Royal, L-2449 Luxembourg, Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, registered with the Luxembourg trade and companies register (Registre de Commerce et des Societes, Luxembourg) under number B 239.744, both acting by their manager (gerant) EQT Fund Management S.a r.l., a Luxembourg limited liability company (societe a responsabilite limitee), with its registered office at 26A, Boulevard Royal, L-2449 Luxembourg, Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, registered with the Luxembourg Trade and Companies Register (Registre de Commerce et des Societes, Luxembourg) under number B 167.972.

2 A newly established company indirectly wholly-owned by EQT IX.



3 Excluding (i) any treasury shares held by Recipharm (assumed 165,260 shares of class B), and (ii) 21,312,000 shares of class A and 4,629,410 shares of class B indirectly held by Lars Backsell and Thomas Eldered, who are participating with EQT IX in the Offer.

This announcement is not an offer, whether directly or indirectly, in Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Japan, New Zealand or South Africa or in any other jurisdiction where such offer would be prohibited by applicable law pursuant to legislation, restrictions and regulations in the relevant jurisdiction. Shareholders and Holders of Convertible Bonds not resident in Sweden who wish to accept the Revised Offer (as defined below) must make inquiries concerning applicable legislation and possible tax consequences. Shareholders and Holders of Convertible Bonds should refer to the offer restrictions included in the section titled "Important notice" at the end of this announcement and in the offer document published on Roar BidCo's website (www.eqtgroup.com/pe-bidpage1). Shareholders and Holders of Convertible Bonds in the United States should also refer to the section titled "Special notice to shareholders and Holders of Convertible Bonds in the United States" at the end of this announcement.

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

https://news.cision.com/eqt/r/roar-bidco-has-received-competition-clearance-from-the-eu-commission-for-the-recommended-offer-to-th,c3283683

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Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 10)  The Supreme Court has upheld its decision to deny the petition of opposition Senator Leila de Lima for protection against President Rodrigo Duterte's verbal threats and attacks.

The office of the detained senator said the high court's decision on her motion for reconsideration on the petition for writ of habeas data was received by her counsel on Feb. 4, but the resolution was dated Nov. 30, 2020.

Associate Justice Marvic Leonen, in his dissenting opinion, said the decision provides a double standard in the guise of "presidential immunity."

"[It] blatantly provides a double standard in the guise of 'presidential immunity.' In issuing humiliating, insulting, and misogynistic remarks at public forums in his official capacity as the President, it is President Duterte himself who degrades the dignity of his own Office," Leonen wrote in the decision sent to De Lima's office.

He voted to grant De Lima's petition, saying the Supreme Court should not give people the impression that presidents are untouchable because it could be a dangerous precedent.

The senator filed the petition in 2016, just months after Duterte assumed the presidency. She argued that Duterte should refrain from making public statements that "malign her as a woman and degrade her dignity as a human being." She called him out for accusing her of involvement in corruption and illegal drugs, and of immorality as the President repeatedly alleged she was having a romantic affair with her married driver.

Her petition for writ of habeas data was dismissed by the Supreme Court en banc in October 2019 on the ground that the President is immune to any suit.

De Lima has been detained since 2017 on drug charges, which she and human rights groups believe were fabricated to silence her for being a staunch critic of the Duterte administration and its bloody war on drugs.

Malacanang has repeatedly denied retaliating against De Lima, stressing that her drug charges are being tried by the country's independent courts, and that the constitutionality of her arrest and detention has been upheld by the Supreme Court.
President Joe Biden made his first visit to the Pentagon on Wednesday, joining Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Vice President Kamala Harris in an event honoring Black service members.

The president acknowledged the contribution of Black Americans to the armed services during his speech at the Pentagon and the need to better support Americans in the military, regardless of race, religion, gender or sexual orientation.

"Even when their contributions were not always recognized or honored appropriately ... those contributions have nevertheless helped push our country toward greater equality," Biden said of Black troops who have fought in every war in the country's history dating back to the American Revolution.

From left, Vice President Kamala Harris, President Joe Biden and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin walk up the steps at the Pentagon, Feb. 10, 2021.

"You are unquestionably part of the finest military force in history," Biden said to service members during his speech. "The Biden family is a military family. We learned firsthand what some of what your loved ones experienced when Beau was deployed to Iraq."

Forming a China task force

Biden also announced the establishment of a Pentagon task force on China to assess defense policies and make recommendations on how to address challenges from a principal adversary. The National Defense Strategy, drafted by former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, identified China as the militarys top competitor, along with Russia.

That hasn't changed under Austin, Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said.

The Department of Defense China Task Force will be staffed by as many as 15 civilian and uniformed Pentagon officials, according to the Pentagon. Its director will be Ely Ratner, a special assistant to Austin and the former official at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington think tank.

The task forces top priorities will include strategy, deployment of forces and intelligence. It is expected to report its findings and recommendations in four months.

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Pentagon priorities

Austin and Biden have identified several immediate challenges at the Pentagon, including the longstanding problem with sexual harassment and assault and the decisions on how many troops to deploy abroad, most critically in war zones.

Story continues

Austin, the first Black American to lead the Defense Department, faces the challenge of reasserting the military's independence as it grapples with race and domestic extremism within its ranks.

Senior officials had to dissuade former President Donald Trump in the summer from deploying active-duty troops to police American streets during unrest amid mostly peaceful demonstrations by protesters outraged over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis and other black men and women at the hands of police.

Here are some of Austin's top priorities:

Extremism in the ranks: News that several veterans were among the insurrectionists in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol prompted Austin to take a closer look at ties to militia and extremist groups among active-duty and reserve forces. A dozen National Guard troops were relieved of duty protecting the Capitol before Bidens inauguration after background checks raised such concerns. Austin has ordered the military to conduct a mandatory review of its policies against extremism within the next two months.

Sexual assault. One Austins first acts as secretary was an edict to each of the services to report on its efforts to combat sexual assault and harassment in the ranks. The crimes have bedeviled the military for decades, and despite pledges from senior leaders for reform, problems persist. Last year, the Pentagon reported a 3% increase in assaults in 2019. There were 6,236 reports in 2019, compared with 6,053 in 2018, but experts caution that the crime is underreported.

Troops deployed. The Pentagon is taking part in a review of where its forces are deployed and changes that need to be made in numbers and in location. The most critical, time-sensitive decision for Austin and Biden regards Afghanistan. Negotiations with the Taliban insurgency call for the remaining 2,500 U.S. troops there to be withdrawn by May. The fear is that the Afghan government, despite nearly 20 years of support from the U.S.-led allied coalition there, is not strong or stable enough to prevent the country from descending into civil war. When the Taliban led the country, it gave haven to al-Qaeda, the terrorist group responsible for the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

Remnants from Trump's tenure

Biden's first appearance at the Defense Department as commander in chief was also meant as a sign of reassurance for a military battered by instability during the Trump era.

"I will never dishonor you. I will never disrespect you. I will never politicize the work you do," Biden promised during his speech.

Austin inherits a military that has been whipsawed by four years of erratic leadership under Trump, who made snap decisions with little consultation of uniformed leaders on withdrawing troops from the Middle East and changing the Pentagons policy on transgender troops.

Trumps tenure also marked a period of instability at the top of the Pentagon. His first Defense secretary, Jim Mattis, resigned in protest after Trump abruptly announced U.S. troops would exit the fight in Syria against the Islamic State.

Mattis departure put the Pentagon on an unstable footing with various acting secretaries, including Patrick Shanahan, who resigned after USA TODAY reported on his turbulent family life, and the sacking of Mark Esper, Trumps only other Defense secretary to be confirmed by the Senate.

Trump also pardoned U.S. troops and mercenaries who committed war crimes against civilians in Iraq. The high-profile cases led to widespread questioning of the military's ability to discipline vigilantes in its ranks, as well as abuses of power in the armed forces.

Last week, Austin demanded the resignation of hundreds of volunteer advisers to the Pentagon after Trump had stocked the panels in recent months.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Biden honors Black troops, plans China review in first Pentagon visit
A committee, set up by the Centre for putting forward recommendations for the implementation of Clause 6 of the 1985 Assam Accord, has submitted its report to the state government and it is under examination, Parliament was informed on Wednesday.

In a written reply to a question in the Rajya Sabha, Union Minister of State for Home G Kishan Reddy said, "The High Level Committee for implementation of Clause 6 of Assam Accord, headed by Hon'ble Justice (Retd) B K Sharma, has submitted its report to the Assam government. The recommendations are under examination of the state government." The committee was set up for giving recommendations for the implementation of Clause 6 of the Assam Accord that came at the culmination of a six-year-long movement (1979-85) against illegal immigration from Bangladesh.

Clause 6 reads: "Constitutional, legislative and administrative safeguards, as may be appropriate, shall be provided to protect, preserve and promote the cultural, social, linguistic identity and heritage of the Assamese people." According to the terms and conditions of the committee, it will "assess the appropriate level of reservation of seats in Assam Legislative Assembly and local bodies for the Assamese people".

"The committee will recommend the appropriate level of reservations in employment under the government of Assam for the Assamese people," according to a home ministry notification.

The committee, headed by Justice (Retd) B K Sharma, submitted its report to the Assam government in February 2020.

(Disclaimer: This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed; only the image & headline may have been reworked by www.republicworld.com)


MUMBAI: Bank of India on Wednesday reported a net profit of Rs541 crore for the quarter ended December, an over five-fold jump from a year ago, due to a fall in provisions.

Net interest income (NII) declined 9.2% year-on-year to Rs3,740 crore in the fiscal third quarter (Q3) from 4,118 crore. Net interest margin (NIM) was at 2.81% as on 31 December as against 3.45% in the year-ago period.

Provisions and contingencies fell to Rs1,980 crore during the reporting quarter from Rs4,015 crore. Of this, provisions for non-performing assets (NPAs) tumbled 83.5% year-on-year to Rs623 crore in Q3.

Also Read | Inside the third front of the farm agitation

Other income fell 17.4% to Rs2,068 crore.

On the asset quality front, gross NPAs stood at Rs54,997 crore as on 31 December compared with Rs56,232 crore as of end of September and Rs61,731 crore in the year-ago period.

The ratio of gross NPAs to gross advances stood at 13.25% as on 31 December as against 13.79% as on 30 September, and 16.30% a year ago. Net NPAs to net advances stood at 2.46% as on 31 December as against 2.89% a quarter ago and 5.97% a year ago. Had it not been for the September Supreme Court order on asset classification, the bank's gross bad loan ratio would have touched 14.59%.

While the bank's deposits rose 18.24% YoY to 5,36,171 crore, advances increased 9.10% to 3,63,009 crore in the quarter under review.

At 0230 pm, shares of Bank of India traded at Rs60.35 apiece, up 1.94% from previous close, while the benchmark Sensex was down 0.5%n at 51072.87.

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An initiative involving Williams College is designed to create a more accurate history of the Northeast by bringing to light histories that 'were buried intentionally' and looking at the effects of race and colonialism. Above, a whaler identified as Joe Gomez aboard the ship Charles W. Morgan. Gomez was born in Cape Verde and later settled in New London, Conn.

Williams College, Partners to Seek More Accurate, Just Historical Narrative





Black and white photograph of Maryland sailmaker Curtis Downes, circa 1950. WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass.  The mythology of America's founding developed over the course of centuries.

It will take many years  and many hands  to set the record straight and create an accurate historical picture of how the United States came to be.

Last week, Williams College took a big step in helping that process when it was named, along with two academic partners, the recipient of a $4.9 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as part of the non-profit's Just Futures Initiative.

Williams, the Mystic (Conn.) Seaport Museum and Brown University's Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice will spend the next three years on a project titled "Reimagining New England Histories: Historical Injustice, Sovereignty and Freedom."

"Oftentimes, what some people believe to be the history of a space and place is not accurate and full," said Leticia Haynes, vice president for institutional diversity, equity and inclusion at Williams. "It's important because we know that communities, especially communities of people of color, have been historically oppressed in our society, in Berkshire County, and are not reflected in the history.

"From the perspective of the college, it is critically important for our students to understand and see how they themselves are reflected and the people in their community."

The Mellon Foundation last summer invited 38 colleges and universities to submit project proposals to address "long-existing fault lines" of racism, inequality and injustice that challenge ideas of democracy and civil society.

Williams history professor Christine DeLucia, who co-wrote the grant proposal, said in a news release that the project will investigate "the powerful links between past, present and future" and reckon with the ties between slavery and colonialism.

That reckoning has been a trend in scholarly and popular histories over the past decade. From Ibram X. Kendi's "Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America," which won the National Book Award in 2016, to the New York Times' "1619 Project," which inspired curricular changes at public schools across the country to 2013's "Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery and the Troubled History of America's Universities," by Craig Steven Wilder, a former chair of African-American Studies at Williams, the practice of restorative history has never been more a part of the national consciousness.

Haynes said it is important that Williams be part of the process of creating a more truthful historical record.

"Much of that work does step from institutions," Haynes said. "Not just from scholars and professors but other people  students, faculty, staff, even alums who engage in the question. No one space or place should have the ability to have a monopoly.

"The fact that we continue to  bring to light histories, some of which were buried intentionally, is very important. What better place than an institution like Williams or Brown. It does elevate it in a different way at times."

DeLucia said the new initiative builds on work already being done in the field.

"In no respect do we see this project as the first to engage in these questions," DeLucia said. "We're building on a lot of important initiatives at Williams College, at Brown and in the communities. We're hoping Williams can complement that existing work.

"Events of the past year have especially pushed forward conversations about monuments, about institutions being responsible for their own pasts. That's all very much part of this work."

At Williams, those conversations often are inspired by the students, who will be part of the research conducted under the grant, DeLucia said.

"I'm relatively new to the faculty here," she said. "I've been here for a year and a half. And it's striking to me how much students have driven the conversations here about revising history, about wanting to delve into fuller, more accurate pictures of history.

"At Williams  and I know many of my faculty colleagues are doing the same  we're going into the college archives and the museum and working with original sources. Sometimes it's looking at monuments, sometimes it's looking at the land itself. From there, we're having deeper conversations about, 'What is going on here? How does this item or source ask us to think in different ways about stories we think we all know?' "

The specific research questions to be explored under the grant are under development, but DeLucia said some of the major themes will include looking at how the histories of enslaved peoples and Native Americans in the Northeast are intertwined, the role of maritime history in the trafficking of slaves, and the connection between New England and other parts of the world, like the Caribbean, during the 17th and 18th centuries.

The impetus for the collaboration between Brown, Mystic and Williams came from Anthony Bogues, the director of the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice in Providence, R.I., DeLucia said. He reached out to the Mystic Seaport Museum, which has a longstanding academic partnership with Williams, which regularly sends undergraduates to the Connecticut institution to study the sea.

"At the very outset of this project, we knew it would be important to seek and develop a method that was interdisciplinary," DeLucia said. "It is not just looking at written documents but also looking at and taking seriously oral traditions, the stories that families have maintained. It also will be important to look at objects, the land itself as a way of knowing, the arts, performance. That dimension is exciting about this. What happens when you look at the past through multifaceted lenses.

"Mystic has tremendous collections down there. Being able to put those into the conversation with resources from, potentially, Williams College and other institutions in the area is something we're very much looking forward to."

Among the tangible outcomes planned for "Reimagining New England Histories," are an online "decolonial archive," expanded courses on historical injustice at all three member institutions and an exhibition at Mystic Seaport Museum focusing on "race, subjugation and power." DeLucia said she also would like to see a public facing display of the research in Williamstown and Berkshire County.

DeLucia stressed that the research is not meant to be a "narrow version of the past" but rather an examination of "where we are right now and where we're going in the future."

In that vein, the new initiative will inform the work of the college's Committee on Diversity and Community, a collection of faculty, staff and students charged with making recommendations "on both curricular and extracurricular matters with the intention of promoting better understanding between and among groups on campus."

Haynes, who serves on the CDC, said that body already is engaged in the kind of work to be funded by the Mellon Foundation grant and will benefit from the new research the grant supports.

"Already people have found things in the archives and lifted up information people did not know previously about how the college has and Williamstown has engaged different communities," Haynes said. "We do look forward to sharing some of that work in the coming months."

An honest understanding of history is key to the work of both the CDC and Haynes' Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

"We do that work every day, but how we do that is often affected by what we know," she said. "Often, we want to solve the problem but don't know the root of the problem. I like to say to people, there was 400 years of racial segregation in this country. It can't be undone 70 or 80 years after the Supreme Court handed down Brown vs. Board of Education.

"As people come to understand more, it often helps us understand how we address certain concerns, how we make sure we're advocating for social justice and racial justice. We never say we're going to wait [until the historical record is completely corrected]. There will always be more that comes to light. But the additional information helps shape how we address the challenges in our society."
Northwestern scholar to talk about science of teams in space at AAAS

CHICAGO --- Northwestern University's Noshir Contractor will discuss team problem-solving and human systems integration for Mars exploration at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting.

At a AAAS press briefing at 12 p.m. ET, Wednesday, Feb. 10, Contractor will discuss recent findings and opportunities for social science research on astronauts as exploration advances into deep space. The embargo will lift at the time of the press briefing.

In addition, he will present "Pairing Teams for, and (Re)pairing Teams During, Long-Duration Space Exploration" at 1 p.m. ET on Thursday, Feb. 11 with Dorothy Carter, assistant professor of industrial-organizational psychology at the University of Georgia, and Sandra Whitmire, deputy element scientist for human factors and behavioral performance, Human Research Program, NASA Johnson Space Center. The session will be moderated by Contractor's collaborator at Northwestern Leslie DeChurch.

As space agencies prepare for deep-space exploration, researchers have been increasingly investigating human factors related to long-duration missions, including the psychology of human space travel. The NASA Artemis mission aims to put astronauts back on the moon by 2024 and build a lunar outpost for use as a space exploration "gateway" and model for Mars exploration, a journey that could involve 250 million miles of travel.

Missions will need to become increasingly independent of Earth-based support due to significant time delays in communication as spacecraft move farther into space, and crewmembers will require a readiness to problem-solve as an autonomous team and decreased reliance on mission control.

Contractor along with DeChurch, a professor of communication and psychology, and NASA researcher Suzanne Bell developed a computational model that predicts interpersonal conflicts between team members (such as astronauts) with 75-80% accuracy and prescribes interventions to repair their interactions and relationships.

###

Contractor is the Jane S. & William J. White Professor of Behavioral Sciences in the McCormick School of Engineering & Applied Science, the School of Communication and the Kellogg School of Management and Director of the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) Research Group at Northwestern University.

This story has been published on: 2021-02-10. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.

Chamoli : , Feb 10 (IANS) It was like a 'cat and mouse' race between life and death for a group of around 10 labourers, who were stuck at the Tapovan barrage that got washed following the deadly flash floods triggered by a snow avalanche which wreaked havoc in Uttarakhand's Chamoli district on Sunday morning.

The labourers tried their best to flee from one spot to another in order to save their lives, but a strong flow of muddy water swept them away. These labourers are among the list of 174 persons who are still missing, while 32 bodies have been recovered so far follwoing the tragedy.

The fury of the flood at the Tapovan barrage was captured in mobile phones by the locals, who witnessed the wrath of nature from some nearby hills.

Going by the video, it seems that the labourers got information about the flood very late, when they didn't have much option left to move out of the barrage. To save their lives, the victims climbed atop the barrage to escape the flow of water, perhaps losing 10 crucial minutes in the process which could have made a difference between life and death.

By the time the group of labourers reached the top of the barrage, they had less than 10 seconds in their hands to save themselves. The video clearly shows that they ran from one corner to another to save themselves from the flow of muddy water coming towards them. The labourers then again fled to the previous location on the roof of the barrage after witnessing another current of water flowing towards them.

But it turned out to be the last race for the trapped labourers, as another strong flow of water swept them away. The video clearly shows them falling in the muddy waters from the roof of the barrage. No one knows if they are alive, as their bodies have not been recovered yet.

The 520 MW downstream NTPC hydro power project at Tapovan on river Dhauli Ganga was washed away in the flood that was triggered after a landslide, leading to a snow avalanche covering approximately 14 square km area that caused a flash flood in the Rishiganga river in Chamoli district.

The spokesperson of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) told IANS that the force is now planning to dig the place where the labourers fall after being swept away by the flood water from the roof of the barrage.

"It seems almost impossible that the labourers might be alive, but our force will always try to save lives. We will dig the place and try to find the bodies," the spokesman told IANS when asked about ITBP's next plan.

The tragedy occurred at 10 a.m. on Sunday when the avalanche hit the upper catchment of Rishiganga river, a tributary of Alaknanda river in Chamoli, leading to a sudden rise in the water levels of Rishiganga river.

Due to flash floods on account of rising of water levels in Rishiganga, a functional small hydro project of 13.2 MW was washed away. The flash floods also affected the under construction 520 MW NTPC hydro power project at Tapovan on river Dhauli Ganga.

The ITBP has set up its control room in the area and 450 ITBP personnel with all necessary equipment are engaged in the rescue and relief operations.

Five National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) teams have also reached the spot and are engaged in rescue and relief operations along with eight teams of the Indian Army, including one Engineer Task Force (ETF).

(Rajnish Singh can be contacted at rajnish.s@ians.in)
KYODO NEWS - Feb 11, 2021 - 00:27 | All, Japan

Japan and Indonesia voiced concern Wednesday over the situation in Myanmar, following a military coup and the detention of civilian leaders including Aung San Suu Kyi earlier this month.

In telephone talks, Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi and his Indonesian counterpart Retno Marsudi said they were concerned about the latest developments including the use of rubber bullets against peaceful protesters by police, and agreed to closely cooperate in dealing with the situation, the Japanese Foreign Ministry said.

Motegi was quoted by the ministry as saying Japan will strongly urge the Myanmar military to prevent violence against citizens, to release Suu Kyi and others detained and to swiftly restore a democratic political system in the country.

The Indonesian minister, meanwhile, stressed the importance of securing the safety of Myanmar citizens and the return to a democratic process, the ministry said.

Following the coup against the democratically elected government in Myanmar, Indonesia and Malaysia said they will jointly propose a special meeting of the foreign ministers of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

The 10-member grouping has a policy of noninterference in each other's internal affairs but has said in a statement the members share a goal of "adherence to the principles of democracy."

ASEAN consists of Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, the Philippines, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand, Singapore and Vietnam.
Ukrainians will be able to sign up for COVID-19 vaccination through the Diia app, Deputy Prime Minister - Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine Mykhailo Fedorov has said.

He said this during the All-Ukrainian Forum "Ukraine 30. Coronavirus: Challenges and Responses" in Kyiv on February 10, an Ukrinform correspondent reports.

He noted that the Ministry of Digital Transformation and the Ministry of Health are developing an effective digital tool to simplify the vaccination process for Ukrainians.

"We want every Ukrainian to have access to vaccination against coronavirus, so that people can easily register, be aware of the country's plans, as well as when and how they will be vaccinated. We are talking about effective management of citizens' expectations," Fedorov noted.

As reported, Ukraine will receive 8 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine within the framework of the COVAX Facility, in particular 117,000 doses of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and from 2.2 million to 3.7 million doses of AstraZeneca vaccine during the first and second quarters.

The Ministry of Health plans to start a COVID-19 vaccination campaign in February 2021. The ministry plans to vaccinate 50% of the population of Ukraine in 2021-2022.

ish
Home-grown micro-blogging app Koo has a Chinese investor Shunwei Capital on board who is on its way out, Aprameya Radhakrishna, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Koo, told CNBC TV18 in an interview on February 10.

Shunwei had invested in the earlier brand Vokal. We have pivoted our business and focused on Koo, they are on their way out. They are being bought out by other people. We are a truly Atmanirbhar Bharat app, Radhakrishna said.

Shunwei Capital is a very small stakeholder in the company right now which will get bought out. They are in the process of exiting, he added.

Interestingly, he took to Twitter to confirm that Koo is an India registered company with Indian founders.



Koo is an India registered company with Indian founders. Raised earlier capital 2.5 years ago. Latest funds for Bombinate Technologies is led by a truly Indian investor 3one4 capital. Shunwei (single digit shareholder) which had invested in our Vokal journey will be exiting fully

 Aprameya R (@aprameya) February 10, 2021

"Koo is an India registered company with Indian founders. Raised earlier capital 2.5 years ago. Latest funds for Bombinate Technologies is led by a truly Indian investor 3one4 capital. Shunwei (single digit shareholder) which had invested in our Vokal journey will be exiting fully," he tweeted.

Besides the Chinese investor, Koo also counts investors such as Infosys veteran Mohandas Pai's 3one4 Capital, Kalaari Capital and Blume Ventures, among others, on its cap table. It has raised around $4.1 million so far.

A bunch of Union ministers recently flocked to the local app after the government's intense row with Twitter.

Founded in March 2020 by Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka, Koo can be used to express views and opinions on various topics much like Twitter.

Growth was fuelled soon after it won Aatmanirbhar App Innovation Challenge held by the government in August 2020. The app claims to have around 3 million downloads.
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Farmer feeds tame crested guan (Penelope purpurascens) Credit: Katarzyna Mikolajczak

A common belief in nature conservation is that people need to "know nature" in order to care about it. However, new research has found that farmers in the Brazilian Amazon can develop strong connections with nature despite having little knowledge of local biodiversityin this case local bird species.

The study, led by researchers at UK and Brazilian institutions, and published in the journal People and Nature, examined the psychological attachment to nature amongst non-indigenous farmers who have settled in the Transamazon Highway region, an area of the Amazon that is experiencing deforestation.

The majority of farmers expressed views that indicated a strong connection with nature, despite recognising fewer than half of the species in the survey. The research, which involved interviews with 227 farmers, found that knowledge of birds and nature connection were not correlated, and they did not have any predictors in common.

Many farmers recognised bird species that have adapted to farmland and are widespread in Brazil, but most struggled to identify birds that only live in the Amazon forest.

The study is the first of its kind to be carried out in the "Global South" and is significant because previous, similar studies in the US and Europe indicated that knowledge of biodiversity enhances connection with nature.

White-headed marsh-tyrant (Arundinicola leucocephala) Credit: Alexander C Lees

The Amazon rainforest is under threat from deforestation and climate change, and its farm-forest frontiers are suffering from intense habitat and biodiversity loss. Therefore, understanding the feelings and motivations of its farmers is vital as studies have shown that farmers who care strongly about nature are more likely to engage in conservation.

Dr. Katarzyna Mikolajczak, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) and lead author of the study, said: "Farmers' decisions are critical for the survival of the Amazon and the species that live there, but their environmental motivations are rarely studied. We investigated how a form of the farmers' ecological knowledgethe ability to recognise local bird speciesrelated to their sense of attachment and caring about nature, known as nature connection.

"We found that farmers do not need intimate knowledge of local biodiversity to care about nature. However, at the same time, farmers might have difficulty protecting species without some knowledgemany of the farmers struggled to identify birds commonly found in the Amazon, so may fail to realise the value of forests as an irreplaceable habitat for many species.

Red-breasted Blackbird (Sturnella militaris) Credit: Alexander C Lees

"Our results contrast with previous similar studies that have taken place in industrialised nations in the Global North, namely the UK and the US, that found a positive correlation between knowing and caring about nature.

"This suggests that the relationship between ecological knowledge and nature connection is complex and might be context-specific, and we shouldn't assume there is a 'one-size-fits-all' approach to encouraging nature conservation. Our findings indicate that having a knowledge of nature is not necessary in order to connect with nature."

Explore further Soil communities threatened by destruction, instability of Amazon forests

More information: People and Nature, besjournals.onlinelibrary.wile  l/10.1002/pan3.10183
CHARLOTTE, N.C., Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- JELD-WEN Holding, Inc. (NYSE:JELD) today announced that Gary S. Michel, president and chief executive officer, will participate in a virtual fireside chat discussion at the 2021 Barclays Industrials Select Conference on Wednesday, February 17, 2021 at 3:30 p.m. EST.

John Linker, chief financial officer, will participate in a virtual fireside chat discussion at the 2021 J.P. Morgan Global High Yield & Leveraged Finance Conference on Wednesday, March 3, 2021 at 9:15 a.m. EST.

A link to the audio webcasts, along with replay and additional information, will be available on the investor relations portion of the company's website at https://investors.jeld-wen.com.

About JELD-WEN

JELD-WEN, founded in 1960, is one of the world's largest door and window manufacturers, operating manufacturing and distribution facilities in 19 countries located primarily in North America, Europe and Australia. Headquartered in Charlotte, N.C., JELD-WEN designs, produces and distributes an extensive range of interior and exterior doors, wood, vinyl and aluminum windows and related products for use in the new construction and repair and remodeling of residential homes and non-residential buildings. JELD-WEN is a recognized leader in manufacturing energy-efficient products and has been an ENERGY STAR Partner since 1998. Our products are marketed globally under the JELD-WEN brand, along with several market-leading regional brands such as Swedoor and DANA in Europe and Corinthian, Stegbar, and Trend in Australia. For more information visit www.jeld-wen.com.

SOURCE JELD-WEN Holding, Inc.

Related Links

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Real estate agent Karl Howard (pictured) has been charged with attempted murder over an alleged attack on two women on Monday

A top real estate agent allegedly took four Viagra pills before making unwanted sexual advances on a woman, and slicing her friend with a samurai sword when she rushed to her aid.

Karl Adon Howard, 44, was refused bail on Wednesday over the horrific alleged attack on a 27-year-old love interest and her 29-year-old friend at his home in Annandale, in Sydney's inner-west, in the early hours of Monday morning.

Howard, the co-owner of Ray White Balmain, had been intimately involved with the younger of the two women in recent weeks after meeting her on a dating app, the court heard.

On Sunday he invited her over to watch television and she was accompanied by her friend.

But by about 5am the next day, the mood between Howard and the 27-year-old had allegedly deteriorated, with the real estate agent allegedly choking his new love interest and trying to forcibly kiss her - leading her to scream loudly.

As she tried to break free of his grasp, Howard allegedly 'king hit' her four times.

The woman's friend heard the commotion and rushed downstairs, before Howard is alleged to have turned on her - punching her in the head and slicing her arm with a samurai sword.

Daily Mail Australia understands the 29-year-old suffered both a fractured skull and severed nerves in the alleged attack, with doctors unsure if she will regain full use of her arm.

Blood can be seen on the footpath directly opposite Howard's home, where his girlfriend and a friend ran for help after the alleged attack

A lawyer for one of the two alleged victims told the court that despite there being no sexual assault-related charges laid against Howard (pictured), the case had a 'sexual nature'

Newtown Local Court heard that only after Howard slipped was the older of the two women able to escape, managing to make it to a neighbouring property where they called Triple Zero.

The identities of the two women cannot be reported after an interim non-publication order was put in place by Magistrate Glenn Bartley on Wednesday.

Anthony Sissian appeared on behalf of the two women and told the court that not suppressing their names would only add to the 'trauma' they have already endured.

'The disclosure of the complainants identities outside of court is not necessary for the administration of justice, however, if disclosed it would expose the complainants to further significant undue distress in addition to the extreme physical and psychological trauma they have already had to endure,' Mr Sissian said.

'To do so would be cruel, inhumane and is entirely unnecessarily.'

He also told the court that despite there being no sexual assault-related charges laid against Howard, the case had a 'sexual nature'.

'This wasn't a consensual kiss, it was a forced kiss while one of the complainants was being strangled and before she was king hit four times,' Mr Sissian told the court.

'It was after the taking of four Viagra pills and the only reason a person would take those four pills before strangling and forcing his tongue down the victim's throat was because he had sexual intent.

'By chance the victim escaped, but I hate to think what would have happened if he didn't slip over.'

Police prosecutor Alexandra Tomasetti told Magistrate Bartley that naming the two victims would cause 'undue stress and embarrassment'.

Howard was due to appear in Newtown Local Court on Wednesday, but he remains in Royal Prince Alfred Hospital with a dislocated shoulder he suffered during his arrest

NSW Police returned to Howard's home on Tuesday to seize two cars - including a BMW with a Ray White Balmain logo - which will now be forensically examined as part of the investigation

Howard was due to appear in court earlier on Wednesday, but remains in the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital with a dislocated shoulder he suffered during his arrest.

The real estate agent's lawyer John Sutton fronted court on his behalf and did not apply for bail, with Howard remanded in custody until at least April 8.

Outside court Mr Sutton told reporters his client's situation was 'very unfortunate'.

'He's got various physical injuries of his own, he's undergone surgery and we're just awaiting outcomes to understand what the doctors say,' Mr Sutton said.

'I think he's worried about more than just losing his job. It's a very unfortunate circumstance.'

Howard was charged late on Tuesday night with wounding with intent to murder, assault occasioning actual bodily harm and trespassing.

Police have also taken out restraining orders on behalf of both women.

Daily Mail Australia understands Howard broke up with his long-term girlfriend - a fellow real estate agent - between 18 months and two years ago.

NSW Police detectives watched on as the two vehicles were towed away from Howard's garage

Police tape remains wrapped around a skip bin at a building site on Ferris Street - just some 50 metres from the scene of the alleged attack - where Howard's wallet and phone were allegedly found

He recently met his newest love interest through an online dating app.

A friend of Howard said he had owned the samurai sword for many years and it was a collector's item, that usual remained stored away in a box.

'He's had the samurai sword for a long time, but it never comes out of the cupboard,' his friend said.

'It's a collectors item, it's not like he used it for protection or in case of intruders.

'The saddest part is that his whole business and reputation is ruined. It's very sad.'

Detectives returned to his home on Tuesday to seize two cars - including a BMW with a Ray White logo on the side - which will now be forensically examined as part of the investigation.

Howard was eventually arrested on nearby Macquarie Street (pictured) and suffered an injury to his elbow during his arrest

In a statement, Ray White said they decided to stand down Howard until the end of any criminal proceedings.

'The Ray White Group is an Australian family owned and led business and it expects a high standard of personal conduct from all its members in representing the brand,' a spokesperson for the real estate giant said.

Neighbours on the normally quiet street described the incident as 'shocking'.

'I got woken up early yesterday morning and saw the flashing lights from the police car, but didn't realise just what had happened until I saw the news,'

'It's a really nice, quiet, leafy street. You don't expect something so shocking to happen here.'
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STATEN ISLAND, N.Y.  A Brooklyn man, who prosecutors said drunkenly crashed his car into a West Brighton home last year while his girlfriend was on the hood, killing her, was sentenced Tuesday to up to 12 years in prison.

Two months ago, Jahfare Ford, 26, pleaded guilty in state Supreme Court, St. George, to second-degree manslaughter in connection with the death of Tierra Eddy, 29, last March 14.

Tragically, Eddy was killed two months after she and Ford had held a funeral service for their baby girl, who died in the womb, the victims mother previously told the Advance/SILive.com.

The deadly episode occurred at around 11:50 p.m., said authorities.

Ford and Eddy had been at a gathering and began arguing in front of a home on Dubois Avenue, according to police and the victims mother.

Ford allegedly told officers that in the heat of the dispute, Eddy climbed onto the front of his vehicle, a 2020 Mitsubishi SUV.

Me and my daughters mother got into an argument.  She was on the windshield, trying to get into the car, Im trying to tell her to stop, a criminal complaint quotes Ford as saying. I couldnt see where I was going cause she was on the windshield and I crashed into this.

The vehicle slammed into the front porch of a home on Egbert Avenue, said police.

Police said Jahfare Ford had his foot on the gas while Tierra Eddy was on the front of the car, ending with Eddy's death and Ford ultimately pleading guilty to manslaughter. (Courtesy of Loud Labs)

A 14-count indictment alleged Ford drove three-tenths of a mile in an intoxicated condition  at a high rate of speed, while failing to maintain his lane with Eddy mounted on the hood of the SUV.

When emergency crews arrived, they found the Mitsubishi buried under the porch, the complaint said. Eddy was lying nearby in a semi-conscious state, said the complaint.

Eddy, a West Brighton resident, was pronounced dead at Richmond University Medical Center in West Brighton.

The deadly episode occurred less than a year after Eddy, known affectionately as Tee-tee, graduated with a business degree from Berkeley College.

Weeks before she died, the victim had celebrated her 29th birthday with friends and family in Manhattan.

Eddy served five years in the U.S. Navy before signing on as a healthcare worker at a hospital on Staten Island.

Ford was charged with second-degree murder, second-degree manslaughter, vehicular manslaughter, assault, vehicular assault, driving while intoxicated, reckless endangerment and reckless driving.

Under his plea agreement, Ford was sentenced to four to 12 years behind bars.

This is a very sad case, said defense lawyer Lisa Pelosi. Mr. Ford, who had no criminal record, was trying to leave the home of his girlfriend when she jumped on the front of his car trying to prevent him from leaving. The car crashed, and she did not survive the accident.

These families will suffer until the end of time, Pelosi said. There are no winners or losers.

Said District Attorney Michael E. McMahon: In pleading guilty, this defendant accepted full responsibility for his actions in causing the tragic death of a young woman, and in his allocution before the court he apologized and asked the victims family for forgiveness.

As a result of his plea, he will now serve significant time in prison and be held accountable for committing this horrible act of violence against the victim in this case, said McMahon.

Photos of Tierra Eddy as a baby, a high school student and with friends as displayed on a living room table inside her mother's West Brighton home shortly after deadly incident (Staten Island Advance/Kyle Lawson)

The D.A. thanked Assistant District Attorneys Frank Prospero and Mark Palladino, along with the offices Vehicular Crime Unit for thoroughly investigating this case and ensuring a just outcome on behalf of the people of Staten Island.
This is an opinion column.

Ive written about the Alabamafication of America enough, by now I should have a cogent explanation for what it is. But for some reason, whenever the question has come up, Ive filibustered through every answer like a French philosopher trying to explain the postmodern.

Alabama will not be subjected to your terms and definitions.

But really, its not that complicated. Its easy to understand. To get there, though, we have to look at the closing act of Richard Shelby  and who waits to replace him.

Shelby does not represent the Alabamafication of American politics, but rather an example of what came before  the political transfer of larger American wealth to Alabama.

An old yellow dog Democrat who jumped to the Republican Party, Shelby has represented Alabama in Washington longer than most folks have been alive. Shelbys tenure gave him tremendous influence  power he used to steer federal dollars to Alabama.

Universities have benefited from his influence, as did road builders and defense contractors. Even the old Iron Man on top of Red Mountain reaped the rewards of Shelbys appropriations. When the senator earmarked $3.5 million for the renovation of Birminghams Vulcan statue, Sen. John McCain threw a snit-fit.

Not one more federal dollar should be spent on this kind of foolishness, McCain said during the Senate debate in 2001. I ask my colleagues to extinguish this Roman god of fire - strike a victory for taxpayers.

The final vote was 87-12. Shelby got the money and Birmingham got a renovated Vulcan Park.

I will never apologize for my efforts, Shelby said then. Alabamas economic development, infrastructure and community needs are my top priority.

Id love to give you a dollar figure for how many billions Shelby has brought home to Alabama, but I dont know how anyone could account for so much. Its a river of federal funding that has kept an otherwise poor state from running dry, and a flow of cash that, with Shelbys retirement, could be coming to an end.

Even 20 years ago, Shelbys politics of pork was something from an earlier age. Despite all he brought home, Alabamas most popular senator was not Shelby, but the states junior member, Jeff Sessions.

Sessions never did nearly as much for Alabamas balance sheet as Shelby, but he consistently polled better. His popularity seemed to stem from his pet causes  fearmongering about immigration and fighting a war on drugs that had the added political benefit of hurting African-Americans a lot more than it hurt white people.

Racial politics were not new in Alabama, but even George Wallace didnt dare survive on racist appeals alone, as is evidenced by the community colleges and correctional facilities scattered throughout our state.

But Sessions tried. He rose higher and faster. And he rode that rocket right into the sun.

In contrast, Shelby distanced himself from Trumpism and said on TV he wouldnt vote for Roy Moore.

Putting their careers next to each other, Shelby and Sessions should serve as case studies in what works and what doesnt. They should, but Im not sure they do.

Because just about everybody whos handicapped Alabamas next Senate race has picked Rep. Mo Brooks as the front runner. And if theyre right, then the Shelby/Sessions lesson hasnt been learned.

When Brooks ran for Congress in 2010, Sessions endorsed him as a candidate that would be anything but quiet and boring.

We need a fighter, we dont need a potted plant, Sessions said then. We need somebody who will stand up, whos got convictions, who understands the rule of law like Mo Brooks.

Brooks has taken many of the same things that made Sessions popular  fearmongering of immigrants and racist law and order rhetoric  and refined it to its purest form. Hes turned it into a drug so potent that its users have been known to storm capitols while dressed like Vikings.

This is what Alabamafication is: The steady replacement of productive-but-boring Shelbys with exploitive and self-aggrandizing Brookses. Its our broken system.

The fundamental problem of Alabama politics (and American politics) is that its become more difficult, if not impossible, to achieve name recognition and popularity by quietly doing the hard work to improve the lives of Alabamians or Americans. Instead, we are stuck in a feedback loop that makes measurable results irrelevant and rewards extremism. Its easier now to climb the ladder to higher office by acting a fool.

So fools are what we get.

Kyle Whitmire is the state political columnist for the Alabama Media Group.

You can follow his work on his Facebook page, The War on Dumb. And on Twitter. And on Instagram.

More columns by Kyle Whitmire

Alabama lawmaker has a health care plan  for lawmakers, not you

Alabama prison plan went from $900 million to $3.7 billion. How? Thats still a secret.

What have you done now, Tommy Tuberville?

Heres the scariest thing about Mo Brooks

Want healing, Kay Ivey? Repeal the monuments law.

Alabamas Three Stooges. And Shemp.

Alabama owes Richard Shelby a big thank you. Doug Jones, too.

Mo Brooks knows hes lying. Just ask Mo Brooks.

Mo Brooks didnt shout fire. He started it.

Why is this taking so long? Failure and a big, big number
This article is part of the Free Speech Project, a collaboration between Future Tense and the Tech, Law, & Security Program at American University Washington College of Law that examines the ways technology is influencing how we think about speech.

If you entered the virtual corridor of the invite-only and iOS-only app Clubhouse over the weekend, you would see discussion rooms titled, in Chinese, young people on both sides of the strait free-style chat, the Silicon Valley investor living room, are there internment camps in Xinjiang? and is now the best time to go back to China? Inside those rooms, thousands from mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and other Chinese-speaking diaspora throughout the world had been queuing patiently for hours, even days, for a chance to speak their mind for a few short minutes, while others listened quietly and tentatively. Most rooms had been running nonstop for days. Moderators from one time zone would hand a room off to those in another, often after staying up all night.

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For the first time in more than a decade, select users in mainland China, usually walled off by the Great Firewall, were able to be on the same social media platform as the rest of the world, communicating freely with other Chinese-speaking communities and diaspora. (YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook were blocked by the Great Firewall in 2007, 2009 and 2009 respectively.) For a younger generation, this is the first time they were able to communicate directly with their counterparts across the Taiwan Strait or other borders.

However, after one weekend many users describe as unforgettable, the app has been put behind the Great Firewall since early Monday morning U.S. Eastern Time or early Monday evening Beijing time. Many remain on the app via a virtual private network connection, while warning one another not to sign out, as Chinese cellphones are unable to receive the verification code needed to sign in again.

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Clubhouse was first popularized in China by Elon Musk, who has a cult following among tech-savvy Chinese and joined the platform to much fanfare on Feb. 1. Despite the app not existing in Apples Chinese App Store, many found ways to download it, eager to try out the new audio drop in social media platform for themselves. Invite codes for the app were for sale on Chinese social media for up to 300 yuan ($47). Long queues formed in WeChat groups, where the next person to get into Clubhouse would invite those behind them. These users represent the upper echelons of Chinas socio-economic strata, with access to an iOS device, a foreign app store, social connections to an early invitee, or leisure time to queue for an invite code.

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Early users were lured by the high density of Western tech investors and entrepreneurs on the platform. However, as Chinese-speaking users reached critical mass, cross-border curiosity took over. Rooms aimed at connecting those outside of mainland China and those inside mushroomed. Those inside were eager to learn of different views and perspectives outside, and those outside were hungry for authentic voices from inside. The result? A decade of pent-up demand for communication with the other side of the Great Firewall was unleashed onto Clubhouse.

Early discussions were highly contentious, including occasional shouting matches. However, the moderators swiftly solved the problem by laying down rules: One speaker at a time, limited time only, no interrupting. (Unlike platforms like Twitter, moderation on Clubhouse contributes a lot toward civility.) Rooms that solved the civility problem also addressed the equity problem. Many rooms had rules where one male speaker must be followed by a female one, or a Uighur speaker by a Han speaker, or rules that users could only share first-person accountsno retorts, rhetorical questions, or sweeping generalizations about an entire group allowed.

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Many also attribute the civility of the conversations to the humanizing effect of voices. Once you hear someones voice break, you cant help but feel empathy, one man said on the night of Feb. 2 in the room titled the night of clubhouse being blockedcollect 100 of lighthight moments of us being on Clubhouse. He continued, human voice raises the temperature of the conversation to body temperature. He admitted to having been moved to tears on multiple occasions during his short time on Clubhouse.

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Whether or not they were political, all discussions were sincere, intimate, emotional, and full of moving personal accounts. Chinese-speaking people at home and abroad, speaking sometimes softly, other times fervidly or even tearfully, into their iPhones, shared their thoughts on and experiences of free speech (or the lack thereof), racial discrimination, Chinas treatment of minorities, sexism, mental illness, domestic violence, and more.

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A Taiwanese woman shared her experience working in Shanghai, trying to fit in while maintaining her identity and dealing with not being understood by her mainlander colleagues. A Chinese tech industry worker told of the toll Chinas 996 (9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week) overtime work culture took on him and his family. A Cantonese woman spoke about how her friendship with her friends in Hong Kong suffered during the anti-extradition law protests in recent years. A student from mainland China shared her concern on whether democracy would make China as divided as the United States. Uighur activists told of the torture they endured daily not knowing when they will see their families again. In response to one such story, a Chinese man said: If I had experienced what you had, Im not sure whether I would be as strong as you.

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For that one week, it was common to hear users, in various flavors of the Chinese language, say that Clubhouse taught them to listen (one spends much more time listening than speaking) and that it was an honor to hear from others.

Besides first-hand accounts and views, information also traveled cross-border on Clubhouse. Activists traded notes on anti-doxxing best practices; software programmers traded salary ranges between Shenzhen and Silicon Valley; domestic violence victims traded notes on self-care.

On Friday night, the anniversary of the death of Chinas coronavirus whistleblower, hundreds joined a silent room titled silent remembrance of doctor Li Wenliang. Another room focusing lessening depression had each speaker play a song while exchanging no words.

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The week of Clubhouse gave us a brief glimpse of what an internet with unfiltered Chinese voices might look like. Those voices also in turn enriched others understanding of China. With the app now blocked, barring a small group of interlocutors with VPNs, both sides are back to guessing. The blocking feels cruel and personal as it happened at the moment when the appetite for communication had just been optimally piqued, and when so many souls yearning for a sense of connection, belonging, and cultural identity were only beginning to imagine new possibilities.

We all have a right to speak and be heard, said a woman in the aforementioned highlight moments on Clubhouse room. We all have a right to genuine human connections.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.
Conroe chocolate shop owner Terry Quinn believes the world loves to procrastinate  especially lovers.

But as Valentines Day 2021 approaches, this is not the year to take a laissez-faire approach to celebrating your love, local business owners contend.

Because of capacity limits in restaurants, some difficulty in obtaining materials, the potential of running out of to-go packages meals, potential crowding at businesses traditionally frequented on Valentines Day and the holiday being on a Sunday this year, business owners are encouraging their patrons to plan ahead.

Melissa Stewart, executive director of the Greater Houston Chapter of the Texas Restaurant Association, encourages those looking for a special night out at a restaurant to plan early and make reservations.

As people have gotten creative during the pandemic, restaurants have done the same. She said shes seeing lots of fixed price dinners and to-go packages with wine included.

She said to-go packages did very well during Thanksgiving and Christmas and she expects them to sell out during Valentines Day.

If you dont want to be cooking yourself on Valentines Day, order early, she said.

Check your favorite restaurants or follow them on Facebook to see what types of packages theyll be offering for Valentines Day. When you order your food, there may even be an extra perk. For example, Pappasitos Cantina is offering chocolate-covered strawberries Saturday and Sunday. Order at https://order.pappasitos.com/.

Quinn said things typically get crazy at Conroes Chocolate Passion two to three days before Valentines  and that in normal years.

We never know quite what will happen until the week of, he said.

Chocolate Passion at 1520 N. Frazier is closing in on celebrating its 15th year. Zulay Quinn, a native of Venezuela, makes handmade chocolates out of Venezuelan Criollo Cacao. They also have a variety of coffees, desserts, smoothies, soups, sandwiches and salads.

All the chocolates are handmade on the premise. Its different than a Hershey bar and different than Godiva. Its pretty special Id day, Quinn said.

At Christmas their decorated hot chocolate cocoa bombs were a huge hit and he said theyre available for Valentines Day as well.

The spheres are filled with cocoa powder and marshmallows. Quinn explained you pour steaming milk over the sphere and it melts and the marshmallows literally pop out.

Its a neat experience, he said.

He also expects their chocolate-covered strawberries to do well for Valentines. He asks customers to give at least two days notice for the chocolate-covered strawberries.

He feels very fortunate that both he and Zulay have not have COVID-19 nor any of their staff.

He said they follow state rules on social distancing, maximum occupancy, mask wearing and sanitizing.

A sign on the doors asks customers to mask up before entering the shop.

As things get busy later in the week, he advises that customers can call in their order, pay over the phone and their order will be placed at a special table at the shop for pickup. Call 281-415-7889 or 936-539-6585. Visit https://chocolatepassion.net/ or see their Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/chocolatepassion.conroetx for a video that demonstrates their Hot Cocoa Bombs.

Local options for Valentines Day in Montgomery County

Mirage at Lake Conroe is hosting a Galentines Shop and Sip event from 8 to 11 p.m. Friday. Celebrate the day with your best gal pals at this waterfront event venue with live music from Payton Howie. Also featured is shopping with local vendors. Its at 7041 Kingston Cove, Willis, on Lake Conroe. See https://www.facebook.com/MirageatLakeConroe for more.

Bernhardt Winery announces the launch of two new levels of Elite Tastings and Tours beginning Saturday.

The new tastings, Winemakers Select Pairing and Signature Choice Tasting, have been designed to give participants a unique tasting experience of wines personally selected by their winemakers, Jerry Bernhardt and Jonathan Schrock.

Both experiences will be available by advance reservation on the weekends at scheduled times throughout the afternoon.

Each of these Elite Tastings is a 75-minute tasting and tour experience. They begin with a guided tour conducted by one of Bernhardt Winerys trained Elite Tasting Specialists.

The tours include an overview of the winery and stops at the crush pad, fermentation facility, barrel aging room, and a seated tasting in the Elite Tasting Room.

The two tastings and tours have been carefully designed with COVID-19 protocols and social distancing to ensure the safety of customers and staff.

We are very excited to be able to offer an elevated wine tasting experience in addition to our outdoor picnic and patio flight options, said Jerry Bernhardt. We continue to be dedicated to providing quality wines and a fun tasting experience in a warm environment during these times.

Advance reservations are required and available online. For more information about booking an Elite Tasting and Tour experience at Bernhardt Winery, visit https://www.bernhardtwinery.com/taste-tour/.

At Market Street in The Woodlands, guests enjoying a romantic Valentines Day dinner at one of the restaurants at can enjoy a candlelight concert and live music from Divisi Strings classical quartet from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. on Saturday. Additionally, all weekend long guests may enjoy snapping selfies at a Valentines Day-themed photo area displayed in Central Park. A fresh flower cart pop-up shop courtesy of Ben and Jo Flower Co. makes it easy to select a bouquet for their sweetheart.

For its first Valentines Day, Margaritaville on Lake Conroe invites guests to a cruise aboard the Little Palm Yacht at 5:30 p.m. Saturday. Tickets are $99 each and include two glasses of wine from Bernhardt Winery and a charcuterie board for each person sailing. Reserve at Valentines Weekend Sunset Cruise Tickets, Sat, Feb 13, 2021 at 5:30 PM | Eventbrite. Theres also dinner options at the resorts two island-inspired restaurants, spa packages at St. Somewhere Spa.

202 Main in downtown Conroe hosts a Valentines Dinner at 7 p.m. Saturday catered by Danellos with live music from Drew Daniels, Daniel Zeegler and Warmtapes. Get tickets at 202mainconroe.com.

Martins Hall on Simonton Street in downtown will host a Valentines Day Brunch on from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. with bottomless mimosas, a full buffet and live music for $30 per person by reserving a seat. RSVP at 281-703-6107. Call or email 832-443-9728 or longstembox@gmail.com to have flowers ready at your table when you arrive.

Honor Cafe at 103 N. Thompson in downtown Conroe has a few tickets left for its Valentines Day dinner on Sunday. Doors open at 6:30 and dinner is served at 7:30 p.m. The evening features live music by Dan Karp. Tickets are $65 per person. See the menu for the evening at https://www.facebook.com/HonorCafeConroe.

shernandez@hcnonline.com
At the United Way of Western Connecticut, we fight for the people in our region who work hard but struggle to make ends meet. Their hard-earned income barely covers essentials such as rent, food, utility bills, and transportation to and from work. We know from the 2020 Connecticut United Ways ALICE Report that 38 percent of Connecticut households were struggling to get by before the pandemic hit. Today, those numbers are far greater.

One way to help these struggling workers is through the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Child Tax Credit (CTC). Our region, and indeed all of Connecticut and the nation, are facing a severe economic crisis due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The EITC helps low-wage workers during this challenging time by encouraging work, boosting incomes, and reducing poverty among families with children.

To help our hardworking neighbors and fortify the economy, we are asking legislators to consider the following:

Expand the federal Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) for childless adult workers. This would supplement the limited earnings of struggling essential workers including those who prepare food, provide in-home health services and child care, and package and deliver goods. Because these single workers are largely excluded from the EITC, they are the only group in our country that is taxed into poverty. This makes it hard for them to pay their bills today and build financial stability to succeed in the future.

In Connecticut, we should restore the EITC to 30 percent of a filers federal credit. Over 10 years, the EITC in Connecticut was reduced to 23 percent of the federal credit, putting us below the standard set by other states in the Northeast (Massachusetts, 30 percent; New York, 30 percent; New Jersey, 30 percent). By increasing the rate, well put money into the pockets of those who need it the most  and funnel money back into the struggling economy.

Establish a Connecticut Child Tax Credit (CTC). Currently, Connecticut does not have a state-level CTC that mirrors the federal credit or any tax break, such as a child exemption or deduction, that eases the financial burden of raising children. Most states have some type of tax break for raising children. Twenty-three states and the District of Columbia have a Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit, and six states have a Child Tax Credit. A Connecticut CTC would provide ALICE families with $600 to $1,800 of much-needed flexible income each year. For every CTC dollar a recipient earns, $1.38 is returned to the economy. (Moodys Analytics estimate of financial multiplier)

Expand access to dental benefits by allowing dependent children to retain dental coverage under their parents insurance policies until age 26 or until they obtain coverage through an employer. In 2008, the Connecticut General Assembly passed legislation allowing children to remain on their parents health plan until age 26, but dental coverage was not included. This causes confusion and leaves young people without access to important dental health services.

Expanding tax credits is an effective way to stimulate a weak economy while helping those whose work we depend on every day. Lower-income people tend to spend rather than save what modest income they have in order to meet basic needs. Providing dental care to young adults simply makes sense, especially at a time when they are struggling to break into the workforce and obtain a job with benefits.

We urge Senators Chris Murphy and Richard Blumenthal, Congresswoman Jahana Hayes, and Congressman Jim Himes to let the rest of Congress know how important the EITC and the CTC is for the people of Connecticut. And we urge all the state representatives and state senators who serve greater Danbury, greater New Milford, and Stamford to consider these important issues as the Connecticut legislative session gets into full swing.

Isabel Almeida is president of United Way of Western Connecticut.
Senators in Donald Trumps historic second impeachment trial have agreed to consider the case, rejecting an attempt by the former presidents defense team and some Republican allies to halt the trial because he is no longer in office.

The vote was 56-44 on Tuesday on the question of whether the Senate has jurisdiction and could proceed. It came after four hours of arguments from Trumps lawyers and the Democratic impeachment managers, who are arguing that the former president incited the Jan. 6 Capitol riots.

The impeachment managers managed to pick up one additional vote from Republicans  Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy. Two weeks ago, he voted in favor of an effort to dismiss, but on Tuesday he voted with Democrats to move forward. Cassidy joined Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania and Mitt Romney of Utah in dismissing the Trump teams claims.

Cassidy told reporters earlier that the impeachment managers arguments were strong arguments and it was a very good opening.

Cassidy said, I have always said I was approaching this with an open mind.
Will you (or someone you know) consider joining us for this important health care mission? asked a text message from CVS in December. You can help us bring people back together again, said a solicitation email from CVS. A recruiter working with Walgreens texted him about a position that would pay up to $65 an hour, plus benefits.

Dr. Shaw signed on with CVS to give out vaccines on weekends, earning about $51 an hour, while keeping his full-time job. He said getting involved felt like his duty. If youre in the Army and war breaks out, are you going to say, No, Im going to sit this one out? he said.

Many of the new pharmacy jobs, like Dr. Shaws with CVS, are temporary, part-time stints.

Adam Nachand, a pharmacist outside Minneapolis, was not looking to leave his full-time job with an insurance company. But he has years of experience in retail pharmacies.

I told my wife, I just feel like my skills are sitting here in front of a computer in my office in my upstairs when theres a great need for this type of skill out there to help combat a pandemic, Dr. Nachand said.

In November, he got a call from the manager at a Walgreens store where he had previously worked: Would he want to give out shots in long-term care facilities? He could pick up shifts on his own schedule while keeping his day job.

Dr. Nachand said yes.

Pharmacists and pharmacy technicians must be trained to administer vaccines. Pharmacists go through a three- or four-year graduate program, which currently includes immunization training. Pharmacy technicians dont have specific degree requirements, but many complete monthslong certification programs or are trained on the job. To administer vaccines, pharmacy technicians and pharmacists who did not get training in school need to enroll in a specialized training program run by groups like the American Pharmacists Association.

Enrollment has surged in the associations immunization training programs, with pharmacies typically paying the fees. About 9,000 student and midcareer pharmacists enrolled in one version of the program in December and January, compared with 2,600 in the same period a year ago.
(CNN) -- The Senate voted Tuesday that the second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump is constitutional after the House impeachment managers made an emotionally compelling case showing how rioters violently breached the US Capitol and attacked police officers last month, invoking Trump's name as they tried to disrupt the certification of the November election.

The 56 to 44 vote, however, showed why there's little path for the House managers to obtain the two-thirds majority needed for conviction, as all but six Republican senators voted for a second time that the trial was unconstitutional because Trump is no longer president -- even while Republican senators praised the House managers' presentation and panned the one made by Trump's lawyers.

Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican, was the only senator to vote differently than a procedural vote last month on the constitutionality of the trial. Cassidy told CNN on Tuesday after the managers' presentation that it was a "very good opening" and they had made strong arguments.

"Anyone who listened to those arguments would recognize that the House managers were focused, relied upon and trusted upon the opinion of legal scholars," Cassidy said after the vote. "Anyone who listened to President Trump's legal team saw they were unfocused, they attempted to avoid the issue. And they talked about everything but the issue at hand."

Tuesday's vote was the opening act of Trump's second impeachment trial.

Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the lead impeachment manager, opened his presentation with a video showing disturbing footage of how protesters overran police and ransacked the Capitol, forcing lawmakers in the House and Senate to flee their chambers. The video was spliced with Trump's speech on January 6 ahead of the riots, showing the crowd's reaction to Trump as he urged them to head to the Capitol.

The video was an early sign about how the House impeachment managers intend to confront senators with the violent events of the riot and charge that Trump is culpable for inciting the insurrectionists that attacked the Capitol and placed their lives in danger. The opening session of the trial was a debate on the constitutionality of the trial itself, but Democrats quickly turned their attention to the harrowing attack on the Capitol.

The Democrats' 13-minute video concluded with Trump's deleted tweet on January 6, saying that "these are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away."

Senators on both sides turned away from the video from time to time as it played on monitors, the yelling of the mob echoing in the chamber that rioters had breached. When the video ended, there was silence in the chamber before Raskin spoke again.

"If that's not an impeachable offense, then there's no such thing," Raskin argued.

Trump's team responds

Trump's team has contended that the impeachment trial itself is unconstitutional, while arguing that Trump did not incite the rioters and that his speech about the election was protected by the First Amendment.

The initial presentation from the defense team offered a Jekyll-and-Hyde-esque response to the impeachment charge, with Trump attorney Bruce Castor praising the managers for a presentation that was "well done" and attorney David Schoen following by slamming Democrats for trying to tear apart the country.

Castor opened Trump's defense with a meandering presentation that included a lengthy praise of the Senate, including his home state Pennsylvania senators Republican Pat Toomey and Democrat Bob Casey, while also arguing that the Senate should not be holding the impeachment trial. Castor warned that a second impeachment trial in 13 months would "open the floodgates" to future impeachments, even making the unfounded rhetorically suggestion that former Obama administration Attorney General Eric Holder could be impeached.

"We can't possibly be suggesting we punish people for political speech in this country. If people go and commit lawless acts of their beliefs, and they cross the line, they should be locked up," Castor said. "If we go down the road my very worthy adversary here Mr. Raskin asks you to go down, the floodgates will open."

Senate Republicans were critical of Castor's presentation, saying they failed to grasp what point he was trying to make.

"I was really stunned at the first attorney who presented for former President Trump," said Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, one of the six Republicans who voted the trial was constitutional. "I couldn't figure out where he was going, spent 45 minutes going somewhere, but I don't think he helped with us better understanding where he was coming from on the constitutionality of this."

Even senators who voted against the managers raised criticisms. "I don't think the lawyers did the most effective job," said Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz.

"I thought the President's lawyer, the first lawyer, just rambled on and on and on and didn't really address the constitutional argument," said Sen. John Cornyn, also a Texas Republican. "Finally the second lawyer got around to it, and, I thought, did an effective job, but I've seen a lot of lawyers and a lot of arguments and that was ... not one of the finest I've seen."

Schoen was supposed to present first, not Castor, according to two people familiar with the plan. But Castor told the Senate that Trump's legal team "changed what we were going to do on account that we thought that the House managers' presentation was well done."

After Castor deferred to Schoen, the tone of the defense team changed starkly. Schoen charged that Democrats were using impeachment as a political "blood sport" to try to keep Trump from running for office again, accusing Democrats of trying to disenfranchise pro-Trump voters. Schoen played a video montage showing Democrats saying they wanted to impeach Trump back in 2017, before ticking through the arguments Trump's side has made that the House failed to give Trump any due process and that the trial of a former president was unconstitutional.

"They're willing to sacrifice our national character to advance their hatred and their fear that one day they might not be the party in power," Schoen said of Democrats.

Trump was unhappy with Castor's opening argument, according to two people familiar with his reaction.

'This cannot be our future'

The Democrats argued there was clear precedent for the impeachment trial when the acts Trump was impeached for happened while he was in office. After their video opening, Raskin and Democratic managers Reps. Joe Neguse of Colorado and David Cicilline of Rhode Island walked through the history of impeachment and how it was written in the Constitution, arguing there was sufficient precedent to hold a trial for Trump. Raskin used a series of writings to argue the Framers indeed intended impeachment to be a tool that could be used even after an official left office. Raskin said that in fact, one of the Founders' key concerns was protecting against politicians who came into office as "demagogues" and left as "tyrants."

"President Trump may not know a lot about the framers, but they certainly knew a lot about him," Raskin said. "Given the framers' intense focus on dangers to elections and the peaceful transfer of power, it is inconceivable they designed impeachment to be a dead letter in a president's final days in office."

The Democrats argued that Trump's team was trying to create a "January exception" that would create a loophole for presidents to commit impeachable offenses just before leaving office.

"Presidents can't inflame insurrection in their final weeks and then walk away like nothing happened," Neguse said. "And yet that is the rule that President Trump asks you to adopt."

Raskin closed the Democrats' opening argument with a personal plea to senators, choking up as he described how his daughter was in the Capitol when the riot unfolded, one day after his family had buried his 25-year-old son. When he was reunited with his daughter, who had been in hiding off the floor, Raskin apologized, saying he promised it wouldn't be like this the next time she visited. His daughter responded she didn't want to come back.

"Senators, this cannot be our future," Raskin said.

Trial schedule comes into focus

The historic impeachment trial has a number of firsts: It's the first time in US history a president will be tried in the Senate court of impeachment for a second time. And it's the first time that a former president will face the prospect of conviction and disbarment from office.

The Senate plans to continue the trial every day until it concludes, including the weekend, after an initial planned break for the Shabbat holiday on Friday evening was scrapped. Democratic senators came away from a conference call Tuesday morning with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer under the belief that a final vote on conviction could occur Sunday or Monday if there are no witnesses, according to multiple senators on the call. Republican senators discussed the possibility the trial could wrap up by Saturday evening if there are no witnesses, according to two senators.

House managers have not yet requested witnesses -- beyond a request for Trump himself last week that the defense team swiftly rejected -- but are preserving that option in case they need witnesses' testimony to rebut an argument made by the Trump team, which would extend the length of the trial into at least next week. The timing is also a bit uncertain because it's unclear how much time the Trump team will use, though they're not expected to use their full 16 hours.

Senior House aides on the impeachment team argued Tuesday that the Senate's vote that the trial is constitutional should settle the issue like any other trial motion. But while Democrats won the vote Tuesday, the constitutionality question looms over the entirety of the trial, because Republicans have coalesced around the argument as a reason to acquit Trump. Conviction requires a two-thirds majority, or at least 17 Republican senators, to join all members of the Democratic caucus.

Sen. Roger Wicker, a Mississippi Republican, told CNN Tuesday that "Democrats sent a better team" this time, calling them "very eloquent." But he said "no," nothing had changed his mind on the constitutionality question.

"I think the constitutional defects of this -- both in the House and the Senate are overwhelming," said Sen. John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican.

A different kind of trial

Unlike the last trial, senators will not be required to sit at their desks throughout the proceedings, due to the Covid-19 pandemic. They will be able to instead watch from the gallery above the Senate chamber or in a room off the floor that will show the trial on television. Masks will not be required on the floor, unlike on the House floor, but the expectation is the managers and Trump's lawyers will wear masks unless they are speaking.

As the trial got underway, all senators were wearing masks except Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who has long argued that he's immune after having Covid early last year. It's still unclear if those who have had coronavirus remain immune to the virus. Other senators, however, who have had coronavirus or been vaccinated for Covid-19, still wear masks.

Senators are not allowed to speak during the trial as jurors.

After Tuesday's debate and vote, the House managers will have 16 hours over two days to make their presentation beginning Wednesday, followed by up to two days for Trump's lawyers, though they may not use all of their time. Senators will then have four hours to ask questions submitted in writing to both sides, and the Senate could debate and vote on whether to subpoena witnesses.

This story and headline have been updated with additional developments Tuesday.
Resistance: People rally against the military coup and demand the release of elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi, in Yangon, Myanmar. Photo: Reuters

A woman was fighting for her life last night after security forces in Myanmar fired live rounds at protesters opposed to last weeks military coup.

The activist was taking part in a demonstration in Naypyitaw, the capital of Myanmar, when she was shot in the head with the bullet penetrating deep into her skull yesterday, medical sources said.

She is being treated at a Naypyitaw hospital. A doctor at the Thingangyun General Hospital in Yangon said she was unlikely to survive.

The surgeon told me they wont be [doing] surgery according to her condition. But the bullet is real ammo, the doctor said.

She was shot from behind, the source added, saying that even though she wore a helmet the bullet penetrated her brain and she had been placed on a ventilator.

The crackdown came as mass rallies erupted for the fourth straight day against last weeks military takeover that ousted civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi, with demonstrators defying a ban on gatherings of more than five people introduced by the junta on Monday.

Police fired on crowds in major cities with tear gas, water cannon and rubber bullets, injuring at least three in Naypyitaw.

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A doctor at an emergency clinic said three people with wounds suspected of being from rubber bullets and one with a head injury had been transferred to a main hospital after treatment at the clinic.

The reports were corroborated by witnesses who said police fired rubber bullets at protesters after earlier blasting them with water cannon.

They fired warning shots to the sky two times, then they fired [at protesters] with rubber bullets, said one resident, adding that he saw some people injured.

In Yangon, the countrys commercial centre, and Mandalay, the second-largest city, reports emerged of police firing water cannon on protesters and carrying out mass arrests.

The doctor in Naypyitaw said the hospital was prepared for disaster amid the widespread demonstrations and growing crackdown by the military.

My feeling is not scared. I am devoted to fight against military dictatorship. All my colleagues have the same devotion, they said.

Human rights activists were swift to condemn the governments heavy-handed tactics against peaceful mass demonstrations, which have gained pace across the country since thousands first took to the streets on Saturday.

We are facing a potential human rights catastrophe in Myanmar, said Ismail Wolff, regional director of the Fortify Rights group.

This excessive use of force in the military juntas attempt to suppress peaceful demonstrations is unlawful, unjustified and disproportionate. It threatens to escalate tensions across the country.

General Min Aung Hlaing, the head of the armed forces and chief of the new junta, tried to justify the coup in a televised address, pledging a fresh election that would make the country a true and disciplined democracy.

Meanwhile, police carried out a night raid at the headquarters of Ms Suu Kyis National League for Democracy.

Read More

Telegraph Media Group Limited [2021]
Citizen TV news anchor Lulu Hassan has addressed the growing speculation that the end of popular drama show Maria is nigh.

A section of the shows fans is convinced the series has reached its climax especially after the shows lead character Maria played by Yasmeen Saiedi found out that her father was killed by William Hausa (Daniel Musyoka).

On her Instagram page on Tuesday, Lulu Hassan, who doubles up as the shows producer, shared a trailer of Marias next episode and wrote: Wadau hii nayo ni motooo!!!!!

In the comments section, a majority of fans said they were not ready for the show to end. On the other hand, one fan asked when it would end citing boredom.

When is this kipindi ending coz the longer it takes the more it will be boring, wrote Lollieamor.

To which Lulu Hassan replied: Not anytime soon.

According to Lulu, the shows script was still detailed and breathtaking as she and husband Rashid Abdalla made in-depth research on how to produce the show before they even ventured into auditioning for cast and locations.

Abdalla is the head of their production company, Jiffy Pictures, and is also in charge of scripting while Lulu is the head of the technical team.

Lulu Hassan said their film treatment is different from other production companies as they invest in stories, write scripts in detail and also break the parts into short episodes.

Also Read: Maria Star Yasmeen Saiedi: Being Famous Is Not Easy. I Lost Friends After Finding Fame
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The United Arab Emirates Hope probe last night successfully entered Marss orbit after a nail-biting journey that could have ended with the spacecraft crashing into the planet or missing it altogether.

Emirati scientists cheered as news of the success was broadcast. The Hope probe  or Amal in Arabic  is a source of immense national pride for the UAE, which is the first Arab state to launch an interplanetary space mission.

To the people of the UAE, to the Arab and Muslim nations, we announce the successful arrival to Mars orbit. Praise be to God, said Omran Sharaf, the missions project manager.

As it approached Mars, the spacecraft fired its main engines for nearly half an hour in an intricate manoeuvre that slowed down the probe so it could be captured by the planets gravitational pull.

For several agonising minutes it was unclear whether the mission had succeeded, due to the time delay in relaying signals.

Then, as ground controllers received confirmation that the craft had entered orbit, they rose to their feet and broke into applause.

The team, which has an average age of just 27 due to the UAEs young population, will have found the ordeal extraordinarily tense  around 60pc of Mars missions end in failure.

The Hopes mission launch in July was only made possible by a rare, close alignment between Earth and Mars.

The spacecraft is roughly the same size as a car, cost $200m (160m) to build and was developed in Boulder, Colorado, before it was sent to the launchpad in Japan.

The UAE team collaborated with the University of Colorado, the University of California, Berkeley, and Arizona State University.

It was a dream that we never dared to dream, because we didnt think it was possible for the UAE to have a space programme, let alone to send a spacecraft to Mars, Sarah Al Amiri, the Emirati advanced science minister, said in an interview last year.
Lockheed Martin, the US-based global technology leader, will showcase its latest defence solutions at the 15th edition of the International Defense Exhibition and Conference (Idex), taking place in Abu Dhabi from February 21 to 25, 2021.

Attendees at Idex 2021 will experience the companys next-generation aircraft, rotary systems, air and missile defense technologies, as well as command and control systems, and advanced simulation and training solutions, all in compliance with strict Covid-19 protocols to ensure the safety of visitors and exhibitors.

At Lockheed Martin, we are committed to supporting our regional partners as they navigate an evolving and increasingly complex geopolitical environment, said Robert S. Harward, chief executive for Lockheed Martin in the Middle East.

At Idex this year, we look forward to showcasing our most innovative defence capabilities and engaging with our partners to advance their national defence and human capital development agendas.

As the only event of its kind in the Middle East and North Africa, Idex brings together top experts every two years, including government and military leaders, to discuss the future of defense technology across the land, sea, air, and space domains.

Prior to the exhibition, during the one-day International Defense Conference (IDC), Tim Cahill, senior vice president of Lockheed Martin International, will headline a high-level panel discussion titled Exploring innovative opportunities in supply-chain ecosystem management beyond the Covid-19 pandemic.

Taking place on February 20, the panel will look at the qualitative trends and technologies shaping strategic-sector manufacturing with a focus on the defence industry.

Lockheed Martin has been a committed partner to the Middle East region for more than 50 years. Today, the companys presence has moved beyond defense systems to provide various products and services, technical support, and educational expertise to strengthen the defence industry and expand in-country capabilities.

The company will display its world-class innovations during Idex at Stand 01-A11 inside the Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Centre (Adnec).-- Tradearabia News Service
Bigg Boss has consistently been leaving the contestants as well as the viewers spellbound with the surprise decisions, but it surely has kept the audience on toes. And this time, Bigg Boss drops a bomb with an unexpected announcement that one housemate will be eliminated tonight with the vote of recently entered connections.

This bit of information truly knocks the living daylights out of both the connections and the housemates. While Aly throws up his arms in shock, Rakhi starts to cry, knowing that any one of them might be asked to leave the very same day!

One by one, the Connections are called in the confession room for the process of elimination. Where connections like Vindu, Rahul Mahajan, Jasmin, or Jaan Kumar try their best to give a valid reason for their choices.

Later, as everyone sits together anxiously in the living area, Bigg Boss declares the name, and it instantly spreads a wave of shock in the entire house leaving the housemates to erupt with disappointment.

Abhinav entered the house with his wife, actress Rubina Dilaik, who is being touted as the strongest contender to win the show. Abhinav and Rubina made several revelations about their personal lives on the show. During a secret task, Rubina revealed that she and Abhinav were about to get divorced when they signed the reality show. She said that the biggest reason for them to come on Bigg Boss was that the couple had given each other time till November to save their relationship. On the other hand, Abhinav revealed that he was in depression and got bankrupt after his first film flopped. Meanwhile, Abhinav's on-and-off friendship with Rakhi Sawant has been loved by the viewers. He once shared a close bond with Jasmin Bhasin but she got evicted from the show.
National Cathedral criticized for hosting Max Lucado due to his views on homosexuality

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The Washington National Cathedral has come under fire for hosting Max Lucado, a prominent author and pastor who holds biblical Christian views on marriage, as a guest preacher.

Max Lucado was invited by the Episcopal Church's Cathedral Church of Saint Peter and Paul in the City and the Diocese of Washington to preach at a virtual service Sunday.

A backlash among members of the Episcopal Church, a denomination known for politically liberal views on marriage and sexuality issues, quickly followed.

Critics of Lucado cited his previous written opinions about same-sex marriage as a cause for concern in a petition asking Dean Randy Hollerith to "rescind Max Lucado's invitation to preach.

Lucado is not an Episcopalian. He serves as pastor of Oak Hills Church, a nondenominational Christian church in San Antonio, Texas.

"Lucado's teachings and preaching inflicts active harm on LGBTQ people," the petition contended. "To cite one example, in 2004 he wrote of his fears that homosexuality would lead to 'legalized incest' and likened same-sex marriage to incest and bestiality."

"Fear-mongering and dehumanizing messages from powerful speakers like Lucado have been used to justify rollbacks of LGBTQ rights and to exclude LGBTQ people from civil protections and sacred rites, the petition continued. To our knowledge, Lucado has not publicly renounced these views.

Mentioning that the remains of Matthew Shepard, a gay college student who was murdered in 1998, were entrusted to the cathedral, the petition maintained that inviting a man who preaches the kind of dangerous theology that promotes oppression of and violence toward the LGBTQ community does not honor that trust nor serve his memory."

The petition went as far as to accuse Lucado of causing "serious harm.

Ultimately, leaders at the cathedral let Lucado speak.

Hollerith responded to the petition, emphasizing the importance of enabling dialogue with people who hold views members of the congregation may disagree with.

"When we only engage with those whom we agree on every issue, we find ourselves in a dangerous (and lonely) place, Hollerith stated in a letter to petitioners. My hope is that all churches and faith communities will find ways to open their doors to perspectives different from their own."

The dean assured that the cathedrals commitment to the LGBT community is unshakable and unchanged.

"We believe the Gospel calls us to nothing short of full embrace and inclusion, the letter stated.

Hollerith shared why the cathedral invited Lucado to preach.

We have to come out of our corners, find common ground where we can, and find ways to live with and see each other as the beloved children of God that we are, he stressed. We have all grown too accustomed in our silos and echo chambers. In order to start the process of rebuilding, we need to hear from each other.

Jim Naughton, who formerly served as canon for communications for the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, told Episcopal News that he thought it was "incredibly disrespectful" for the Washington National Cathedral to "give its imprimatur to him" and "extend the prestige of its pulpit" to someone with his views.

An openly gay Episcopal priest who spoke with Episcopal News claimed that "Max Lucado's theology has a body count, adding, "It feels deeply disrespectful for an Episcopal church ... to publicize Lucado without any mention of this."

Lucado's sermon did not touch on the issue of same-sex marriage.

Instead, it focused heavily on the Holy Spirit, which he described as "the surest antidote for trepidation" and "the calming presence of God in the world today."

"The presence of the Holy Spirit changes everything," Lucado added. "If you have said yes to Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit has said yes to you. And when you receive Christ, you receive the presence of the Holy Spirit in your life."

Lucado urged viewers of the Sunday Sermon to "just say yes and welcome the presence of the Holy Spirit into your life."

Following Lucado's appearance at Washington National Cathedral Sunday, Kathleen Moore, who organized the Change.org petition, issued a statement expressing solidarity with "Those who are hurting today and those who will continue to hurt as a result of this decision."

As of Tuesday afternoon, the petition had amassed more than 1,600 signatures, which Moore described as "a record of the voices Dean Hollerith and Washington National Cathedral chose not to hear."

[February 10, 2021] Altimetrik Opens New Office in Poland to Support Growth in Europe

Altimetrik, a leading digital business enablement company, today announced the opening of a new office in Wroclaw, Poland to meet customer demand and support expansion in Europe. "Establishing this kind of presence as a technology hub in Poland was a strategic decision that will service our growing client needs," says Raj Sundaresan, Altimetrik's CEO. "Our emphasis on digital business, innovation, product and data engineering are a perfect match for the strong Polish technology sector and its proximity to both established talent pools and centers of business." Indeed, Poland's technology market has proven to grow at a stable rate of 5-10% annually. Poland is also a top nearshoring destination with some 15,000 new software engineers graduating every year. That includes some of the brightest in the world, with Poland ranking No. 3 globally, according to Top Coder. This should give Altimetrik the human capital needed to grow a significant DevSecOps practice as the market becomes less reactive and more security-focused in earlier stages of app development. There is oportunity for Altimetrik to develop tailored solutions that support end-to-end implementation and client education on threats and mitigations.



"We maintain Altimetrik's incredibly high bar for recruitment requirements," says Jarek Wawro, Altimetrik's Head of Engineering and Poland Technology Center. "We are seeing substantial interest from our U.S.-based clients in expanding operations to Eastern Europe. Our Poland team is able to help them better tackle challenges with EU compliance, security, business, IP, copyright, and all other aspects required to ensure business success. This important work should help lay the foundation to attract new clientele native to the region." Altimetrik's Wroclaw office employs 60 and looks to expand the company's focus into Data Science and Machine Learning, as Poland's talent market is mature and nimble enough to meet the increasing need for data analytics and inference. There is ample experience in mature technologies and frameworks, as well as in data-specific solutions and niche languages that can provide new opportunities for customers.

With the Poland office joining the company's existing global footprint across the U.S., India, Uruguay, Japan, Canada, Altimetrik is even better positioned to meet the growing needs of our clients' digital business priorities. "We're anticipating the same kind of growth our company has experienced across the board," says Sundaresan. "By the end of 2021, our goal is to surpass 250 employees in our Wroclaw office and start to become recognized as one of the best technology employers in Poland." About Altimetrik Altimetrik is a digital business enablement company. We deliver bite-size outcomes as organizations scale digitalization to accelerate revenue growth without disrupting ongoing business operations. With an end-to-end perspective, our practitioners and agile engineering teams create solutions that drive transformation and achieve business goals. In addition, our digital point solutions and products provide clients with the tools to fuel business growth and profitability. With offices across the globe and over 2,500 energized practitioners, Altimetrik partners with Fortune 500 and mid-size companies alike to enhance their agility, empowerment, and success. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210210005075/en/

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Light snow is expected to begin falling in New Jersey late Wednesday in the first of two rounds of storms that could total 3 to 6 inches of snow in the southern portions of the state by Friday.

Areas south of the Atlantic City Expressway are expected to get the most  with 2 to 3 inches likely on the ground by midday Thursday. Seven South Jersey counties will be under a winter storm from 7 p.m. Wednesday until noon Thursday. Central Jersey should get 1 to 2 inches and North Jersey is forecast is likely to see less than an inch in the first round.

The second part of the storm Thursday night into Friday could drop another 1 to 2 inches on Cape May County and less than an inch elsewhere in South Jersey The rest of the state should escape unscathed.

Want to see how much snow is predicted to fall in your area?

Using data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, weve created a map where you can see what to expect over the next 48 hours, based on the latest forecast from the National Weather Service.

Enter your town in the search bar to get an up-close look. Press the play button to watch how the storm is forecast to overtake the region.

NOTE: The snowfall forecast map below predicts snowfall expected over a 48-hour period. It updates automatically every six hours. Click the play button to begin the hour-by-hour forecast. Tap anywhere on the map to see the local forecast total. You can get specific forecasts for your neighborhood by entering your address in the search window at the top of the map.

To see a larger view of this map, please click here.

The map, which is exclusive to NJ.com, is designed to be accurate down to a 2-mile radius. It provides a neighborhood projection down to the tenth of an inch and updates 4 times a day, so come back to NJ.com for updates.

Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to NJ.com.
Housebuilder Redrow warned that a growing number of self-isolating workers is impacting construction, as it posted higher half-year profits on record revenues.

The group is seeing 'some impact' on work due to self-isolating sub-contractors who are unable to work on building sites during the third national Covid-19 lockdown.

Matthew Pratt, group chief executive of Redrow, said: 'Operating within a further national lockdown continues to present challenges.'

The comments came as the company reported an 11 per cent rise in pre-tax profits to 174million for the six months to December 27, as revenues topped 1billion - up 20 per cent.

Housebuilder Redrow is seeing 'some impact' on work due to self-isolating sub-contractors who are unable to work on building sites during the third national lockdown (file photo)

The comments came as the company reported an 11 per cent rise in pre-tax profits to 174million for the six months to December 27, as revenues topped 1billion (file photo)

Mr Pratt added: 'There has been some impact on build as an increasing number of sub-contractor colleagues are unable to work whilst self-isolating.'

Redrow said: 'We expect to see this situation improve as the country's overall Covid-19 infection rate decreases.'

The company said its sales centres were open on an appointment-only basis, with comprehensive coronavirus measures in place, while most office-based staff were working from home.

The group saw legal completions jump 20 per cent to 3,065 over its first half as its refocus away from London towards the regions pays off.

Last year Redrow scaled back operations in the capital, and has now exited four of six sites it had planned to develop, due to shifting homebuyer demands.

It expects to quit the remaining two before the end of its financial year in June.

Many homeowners are now looking for bigger properties as lockdowns and the pandemic force more people to stay at home.

The switch in demand, together with a stamp duty holiday that is due to end in March, has sparked a mini-boom in the housing market that has helped hold up the UK's struggling economy.

The group saw legal completions jump 20 per cent to 3,065 over its first half as its refocus away from London towards the regions pays off (file photo)

The company said that changing buyer trends are 'completely aligned to Redrow's strategy'.

'Demand in the regions for our heritage homes has been particularly high as more buyers reflect on their lockdown experiences and prioritise space in their homes and access to green areas,' it added.

The group said its order book stood at 1.3billion, up from 1.2billion a year ago.

It restarted shareholder dividends thanks to the robust results, announcing a 6p interim payout, although shares slipped 4 per cent.

But Redrow signalled activity may be easing back with the average weekly value of private sales reservations edging lower since the end of 2020 to 265,000 per outlet, down from strong comparatives of 298,000 a year ago.

The weekly private sales rate has also fallen to 0.67 per outlet from 0.78 a year earlier, although it said this was in line with 'a more normal market'.

Adolf Hitler's personal toilet seat from his mountain hideaway has sold for 13,750 at auction.

The bizarre Second World War relic sparked a bidding frenzy between collectors flush with cash at the sale in the U.S.

The eventual winning bid for the Nazi khazi was $15,000, with the buyer's premium taking the final purchase price to $18,750 (13,750).

The white wooden seat, with lid, was looted by an 'enterprising' young US soldier from the dictator's private bathroom at the Berghof, his retreat in the Bavarian Alps.

Ragnvald C Borch was one of the first Americans on the scene as he was fluent in German and French and was sent to liaise with the French 2nd Armoured Division.

He told by senior officers to 'get what you want' from the Berghof, which had been badly damaged by Allied bombing in the last days of the war.

Ragnvald Borch took Adolf Hitler's toilet seat from the Berghof, the Nazi dictator's private retreat in the Bavarian Alps

When asked why he was carrying a toilet seat by another soldier, Sgt Borch is said to have replied: 'Where do you think Hitler put his ass?'

When asked by another G.I holding a chandelier why he was taking a toilet seat as a keepsake, Sergeant Borch replied: 'Where do you think Hitler put his ass?'

He shipped it back from nearby Berchtesgaden to his family home in New Jersey, where he put it on display in his basement.

With the soldier's son now selling the trophy taken from the Fuhrer, Bill Panagopulos of Alexander Auctions hailed the 16-inch wide seat as 'one of a kind'.

He said: 'This was as close to a 'throne' as the dictator would ever get.

'One can scarcely imagine the plotting the tyrant undertook while contemplating the world from atop this perch.'

Aside from the 'Wolf's Lair,' on the Eastern Front, Hitler spent more time at Berghof than anywhere else during the Second World War

A view of the Berghof, Adolf Hitler's ruined mountain house

The seat was among a host of looted 'spoils of war' up for grabs in the auction in Chesapeake City, Maryland.

Hitler's personal porcelain shaving mug, bearing his portrait, that was taken from his Munich apartment fetched $21,250 (15,600).

The Fuhrer's personal monogrammed hairbrush was also seized from the Berghof by a member of the US Parachute Infantry Regiment.

Four exceptionally rare small strands of Hitler's hair removed from the brush went for $2,250 (1,650).

Meanwhile, a pair of floral lace knickers belonging to Hitler's wife Eva Braun, embroidered with her initials, raised $1,750 (1,300).

Sgt Borch (right) shipped the bizarre keepsake home to New Jersey, where it went on display in the basement of his home

The toilet seat sold for 13,750, higher than the record for such an item, which was 850 for a toilet seat cover belonging to Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones

Bill Panagopulos of Alexander Auctions said 'How could we possibly embarrass and denigrate Hitler more than offer his toilet seat and his wife's undies?'

Her matching pink nightie also went for $1,750 (1,300) while a pair of her stockings fetched $475 (350).

Mr Panagopulos said: 'How could we possibly embarrass and denigrate Hitler more than offer his toilet seat and his wife's undies?

'The image of Hitler on the throne is just ridiculous.'

The record for such an item at an auction is said to be the 850 paid last year for a 1975 toilet seat cover belonging to Bill Wyman, sporting a Rolling Stones tongue logo.
Get Used to Annual Revaccination Against COVID-19, Boris Johnson Says

People will have to get used to the idea of annual revaccination against the CCP virus as new variants emerge, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Wednesday.

I think were going to have to get used to the idea of vaccinating and then re-vaccinating in the autumn as we come to face these new variants, he said during Prime Ministers Questions in Parliament.

The idea had been floated by Nadhim Zahawi, the UKs vaccine deployment minister, on Sunday, when he told the BBC that a booster in the autumn and then annual vaccinations with updated jabs are very probable.

Johnson told a Downing Street press briefing on Wednesday afternoon that just over 13 million people have now been vaccinated across the UK, including one in four adults in England, over 90 percent of everyone over 75, and over 90 percent of eligible residents of care homes for the elderly.

But the emergence of new variants of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, also known the novel coronavirus, has led to fears that the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines could be compromised.

Of particular concern is the E484K spike protein mutation, which has been found to result in weaker neutralisation by antibodies in laboratory experiments.

It is present on a number of variants found around the world, including the South African variant, which has been found to be more resistant to antibodies and reduces the efficacy of vaccines.

A new study publicised last week showed that the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine offers minimal protection against mild and moderate cases of the South African variant.

Tests previously conducted by Johnson & Johnson and Novavax showed that their vaccines were also significantly less effective against the South African variant.

Earlier this week, British health authorities announced that they had identified two more COVID-19 variants in Liverpool and Bristol, both of which have the E484K mutation.

As new variants appear, it will be more useful than ever to have vaccines that can combat all variants and, yes, I certainly think we need to be getting ready for a world in which we do have booster jabs against new variants in the autumn, Johnson said at the Downing Street press briefing.

We should start to think about it as a flu jab, something the elderly or vulnerable people make sure they have every year. And Ive no doubt that the vaccines will get better and better at being able to cover for all variants.

He stressed that the vaccines in use are safe and effective, and welcomed the World Health Organisations confirmation earlier on Wednesday of its support for the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine for use in everyone over the age of 18, even in countries where new variants of the virus are present.

AstraZeneca said earlier this month that the firm and the University of Oxford aim to have an updated vaccine to address the different CCP virus variants by the autumn.

Simon Veazey contributed to this report.
Amid border dispute on the Line of Actual Control (LAC), India and China held bilateral talks on the issues of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) agenda, on Tuesday. According to the Ministry of External Affairs' press release, The Indian delegation was led by Prakash Gupta Joint Secretary (UNP & Summits) and the Chinese delegation by Yang Tao, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China.

"Prakash Gupta, Joint Secretary (UNP & Summits) led the Indian delegation along with officials from East Asia (EA) and UN Economic and Social (UNES) Divisions of MEA and from the Permanent Mission of India New York and Embassy of India in Beijing. The Chinese delegation was led by Director-General of the Department of International Organizations & Conferences and Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China, Yang Tao." the Ministry said, reported ANI.

READ | PM Modi Tears Apart Foreign Conspiracy Against Indian Chai In Election-bound Assam

The Indian delegation briefed "on India's priorities during its UNSC tenure." to the Chinese officials, while addressing the video conference with the Chinese officials.

"Both sides discussed a wide range of issues on the UNSC agenda. The Indian delegation briefed the Chinese side on India's priorities during its UNSC tenure. Both sides agreed to continue their engagement on key issues on the UNSC agenda," it stated further.

READ | Indian Diaspora In Canada's Vancouver Hold 'Tiranga Yatra' Against Republic Day Violence

Indian Flag Installed At UNSC

Earlier this month, India began a two-year stint as a non-permanent member of the Security Council. The Indian national flag on January 4 was installed at the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) stakeout as the country started its tenure at the UN body for the eighth time as a non-permanent member. While speaking at a news briefing, India's Permanent Representative to the UN, TS Tirumurti, called the flag installation ceremony a "proud moment" for the nation. He further thanked PM Narendra Modi for the trust that he has reposed in him to represent the nation.

READ | Indian Flag Installed At UNSC As India Begins Eighth Term As Non-permanent Member

India to be UNSC Prez in Aug 2021

India will be the UNSC President in August 2021 and will preside over the council again for a month in 2022. The presidency of the council is held by each of the members in turn for one month. The tradition of the flag installation ceremony was introduced by Kazakhstan in 2018.

READ | As India Returns To UNSC For 8th Tenure, MEA Shares 'glimpses From Past 7 Innings'

India-China Border Dispute

During the ninth round of the China-India Corps Commander Level Meeting held on the Chinese side of the Moldo-Chushul border meeting point on January 24. India and China agreed for an early disengagement of the frontline troops in eastern Ladakh. The meeting to address the ongoing military standoff lasted for more than 15 hours. Both the countries have been engaged in a stand-off along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) since April-May last year. While China began amassing massive military strength along the LAC, India responded with a befitting build-up.

(With ANI Inputs)

A Northampton County man is heading to prison for driving while under the influence of marijuana and causing an SUV rollover crash that severely injured one of his teen passengers.

Joshua Chemelli, 20, of Danielsville, was in Northampton County Court Wednesday for his sentencing in the May 2019 rollover crash on Monocacy Drive in East Allen Township.

He pleaded guilty last September to aggravated assault by vehicle while DUI and DUI in the case.

There was no sentencing agreement, and Chemelli faced a standard range sentence of one to two years in prison, prosecutors said.

But after hearing victim impact statements from the now 16-year-old boy who was injured and his family, President Judge Michael J. Koury Jr. sentenced Chemelli to three years to 10 years in state prison, Assistant District Attorney Alec Colquhoun said.

There were five people in the SUV that day, with Chemelli driving.

While Chemelli and three others suffered minors injures, the victim in this case, the youngest passenger, suffered a severe traumatic brain injury, a skull fracture and multiple facial fractures, police said.

The victim cannot talk, cannot walk, and needs help with bodily functions, Colquhoun said. He communicates via a tablet.

The teens condition will likely persist for the rest of this life, and he made a victim impact statement via video from the rehabilitation facility where he resides, Colquhoun said.

Im glad that justice was served today and the victims family can move forward, hopefully. Its every parents nightmare, this kind of case, the prosecutor said.

Chemelli did express that he was sorry during Wednesdays hearing and apologized to the victims family, according to the assistant district attorney.

At the time of the crash, Chemelli was 18 and his passengers were another 18-year-old man, two 16-year-old boys, and the 15-year-old boy, police said.

Colquhoun said the front seat passenger was the link between Chemelli and the other boys. The teen was getting a ride from Chemelli, and asked if the three other boys could come along, Colquhoun said.

Chemelli told police he was traveling north on Monocacy Drive at about 45 mph, when he lost control as he took a left turn just past Stone Post Road and traveled onto the shoulder.

When Chemelli tried to correct the SUV and get back onto the road, the SUV crossed both lanes of traffic, hit the southbound lane guardrail and a utility pole, and then started rolling over.

Surveillance video from a nearby home caught the SUV as it was rolling down Monocacy Drive and when it came to rest on the drivers side across both lanes of travel.

Officers on scene said they smelled burnt marijuana both inside the vehicle and coming from Chemelli, who had bloodshot eyes.

A blood draw showed Chemelli had active THC in his blood, prosecutors said.

In the SUV, police said they found a backpack containing marijuana, cigarette rolling papers, and eye drops, as well as a laptop issued in Chemellis name and school documents with his name.

After he was charged in the crash and released on $10,000 unsecured bail, Chemelli was arrested in May 2020 in an unrelated drug case.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers intercepted a package containing about 200 grams of a hallucinogen addressed to Chemelli from the Netherlands.

Authorities said they conducted a controlled delivery of the package to Chemellis residence at the time, in the 3200 block of Crest Vue Circle in Moore Township.

Chemelli reportedly admitted he was expecting a parcel from the Netherlands and that he bought the contents himself.

Chemelli pleaded guilty in that case Wednesday, and was sentenced to two years of probation, to run consecutive, or back-to-back, with the prison sentence in the crash.

Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to lehighvalleylive.com.

Sarah Cassi may be reached at scassi@lehighvalleylive.com.


The Chinese military made several attempts to unilaterally alter the status quo along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in eastern Ladakh since April-May last year and Indian armed forces "responded" to them "appropriately", the government said in Lok Sabha on Wednesday.

Minister of State for External Affairs V Muraleedharan said the government will continue discussions with the Chinese side to achieve the objective of disengagement from all friction points and restoration of peace and tranquillity in the India-China border areas at an early date.

Indian and Chinese militaries are locked in a bitter standoff in eastern Ladakh for over nine months.

"Since April/May 2020 the Chinese side had made several attempts to unilaterally alter the status quo along the LAC in Western Sector. These attempts have been responded to appropriately by our armed forces," Muraleedharan said in a written reply to a question.

"It has been made clear to the Chinese side that such unilateral attempts are unacceptable. These actions have seriously disturbed the peace and tranquillity along the LAC in the Western sector," he said.

The government often refers to eastern Ladakh as western sector.

Muraleedharan said diplomatic and military engagements with the Chinese side have continued in order to ensure complete disengagement from all friction points and full restoration of peace and tranquillity in the border areas.

He said six meetings of the Working Mechanism for Consultation and Coordination on India-China border affairs (WMCC) and nine meetings of the senior commanders have been held so far.

Muraleedharan also referred to External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar's talks with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on September 10 in Moscow.

"The two foreign ministers agreed that the current situation in the border areas is not in the interest of either side. They agreed therefore that the border troops of both sides should continue their dialogue, quickly disengage, maintain proper distance and ease tensions," he said.

Muraleedharan said the two foreign ministers also agreed that both sides shall abide by all the existing agreements and protocol on China-India boundary affairs, maintain peace and tranquillity in the border areas and avoid any action that could escalate matters.

To a separate question, he said India received assistance from a few countries including Japan, the US, France, Germany and Israel in the form of medical equipment and grants-in-aid following the coronavirus pandemic.

(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.)
For years folks have debated the value of bitcoin. Warren Buffett has declared it a gigantic hoax. Economists have struggled to see if it fits in the convention of money. Is it a store of value or a medium of exchange? One theory argues its value tracks the number of users, a social network effect. Promoters of course see it as the future, giving rise to its own word, hodl, which means to hold for the long-term.

Recently, major banks have belatedly begun to suggest there is a long-term value to bitcoin, first and foremost based on its substitution over time for gold, and ultimately as an alternative asset class, supported by its improving use as a money substitute. While institutional bitcoin ownership is estimated to currently stand at less than 1%, that too seems in the process of change.

But now the debate has been settled. Elon Musk, our new arbiter of all that is in and out, has purchased $1.5 billion in bitcoin and announced that Tesla plans to accept it as payment. Bitcoin predictably has jumped to a record high, in excess of $46,000, and now is up more than eight-fold in the past year.

Source: Investopedia

Regardless of whether bitcoin in the short-term gyrates unpredictably in value, it is timely to ask not what bitcoin is worth, but what its valuation tells us about ourselves.

The enduring beauty of bitcoin lies in its origin. It is typically defined as a peer-to-peer digital currency whose ownership is recorded in a secure account ledger, known as a blockchain. Lose the private key to access this ledger, as reportedly many early buyers have done, and the investment is lost forever, even if it amounts to millions, or now even billions of dollars.

The key missing word here is government. Whatever else it is, bitcoin at its core is a deeply thought-out protest medium. No permission is sought from the government for its creation, its valuation or its internal rules. It is peer to peer, meaning it existence and trade is purely between individuals. What better definition of freedom.

From this perspective, bitcoins meteoric rise sends the clearest of messages. People distrust government. Deeply. The more the distrust, the higher bitcoin will rise.

Now what could ever give people reason to so distrust government that they seek an asset outside its reach? Independent of ones politics, the question seems almost quaint today.

It is no accident that bitcoins recent rise exactly tracks the Covid crisis. Except for the miracle of the vaccine, the governmental response had been thoroughly detached from science. Common sense has shown people that the disease, while serious, overwhelming attacks the elderly and those with comorbidities. Public policy should have protected these people, while preserving the freedom and livelihoods of everyone else. That has not happened. Now we all must endure the slow vaccine roll out and its daily reminder of the sclerotic hand of government.

The US election is independently fueling a generalized conviction that we have lost our way. In Joe Biden, we have a weakened President that few authentically support and who is widely regarded as the scripted caretaker for an agenda directed by others. After signing a mind-numbing 35 executive orders in 10 days, it is apparent the administration will seek to enforce policies far to the left of the US electorate. The unholy alliance of big business and big tech seems, if anything, to be gathering ever more force, the recent reddit rebellion notwithstanding. Election laws are certain to remain in disarray.

For those focused on the longer view, it is beyond debate that the U.S. has reached a point of no return with respect to fiscal discipline. Official debt has skyrocketed from 35% of GDP in 2007 to 98% currently. By 2050, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, it will rise to 195% of GDP, with interest expense alone consuming the discretionary budget, a ruinous state of affairs. And that is before the Biden administration cavalierly adds $1.9 trillion by the end-run device of a budget reconciliation, voted out 51-50 with the tie-breaking vote from Vice-President Harris. Eventually the debt we are unable to repay and cannot afford will bring this country to its knees, not today, but for sure tomorrow.



Add in the biblical prospects for war, terror and pestilence, a weakened, economically hollowed out Europe, an ever more powerful, disruptive, and bellicose China, and whatever economic black swans lay in store, and there you have the true reason for bitcoins rise.



Anyone foreseeing events to unexpectedly work out for the best, no need to buy bitcoin. For the rest, dont act so shocked that some, perhaps soon to be many, people see danger ahead, and want some kind of shelter, however imperfect.



Bitcoin is indeed imperfect in one vital respect. By its charter, assuming no changes, only 21 million bitcoins can be created, of which 18 million are in existence today.

By most accounts, these 18 million bitcoins are held by relatively few, meaning there is insufficient trading supply to meet broad-based demand, and mystery attaches to these de facto owners of bitcoin and their intentions. That in part explains the equally shocking one-year surge in Ethereum from $260 to $1,700. A rising tides lifts the cybercurrency ships, at least until the market sorts out the terrain.For existing investors, that is the good news. For new would-be investors, the inherent short-term volatility of bitcoin merits high caution. As an outlet for societal fear, bitcoin has far too little liquidity.

In the long-run, demand creates supply and one way or another vehicles will be created to meet the demand for peer-to-peer currencies and blockchain applications outside government control. In response, governments will react with regulation. That battle is on.

But the overall message is discouraging. Bitcoins rising valuation is a measure of our collective distress.

You still want to bet against bitcoin in the long run?

William Levin is managing director of a New York investment banking firm.
[February 10, 2021] Gallup Police Department Implements Smartphone Body Cameras

GALLUP, N.M., Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- In October 2020, the Gallup Police Department fully transitioned from using in-vehicle "dash" cameras to body-worn cameras. Dash cameras had been used by GPD since 1999 to record law enforcement encounters. While effective, the dash cameras lacked the ability to visually record the officer and their actions once they left their patrol car and the field of vision of the camera was limited. Conversely, body-worn cameras provide a near first-person perspective of the actions taken by the officer and those they encounter, regardless of their location. "The goals of our body-worn camera program include enhancing services and providing transparency with respect to interactions between our officers and our citizens," said Police Chief Franklin Boyd. He added "We had been in process of deploying body worn cameras before recent legislation required their use, so we were well positioned to comply with the new law." GPD had been studying and planning for this project for almost two years. However, the passage of Senate Bill 8 in June of 2020 by the New Mexico State Legislature hastened the implementation. Senate Bill 8 requires that all sworn police officers in New Mexico wear body cameras while on-duty, and record all law enforcement encounters. The body-worn cameras used by GPD are actually fully-functioning Android cell phones. The Kyocera DuraForce PRO 2, is a waterproof, dustproof "rugged" Android smartphone. Each smartphone is connected to FirstNet built with AT&T. On each smartphone, a software application is installed from Visual Labs, a Silicon Valley software company. The Visual Labs software is the only FirstNet Certified body camera application. In addition to adding the functionality of a body-worn camera, the Visual Labs application allows the device to function as a digital camera, an audio recorder and a personnel locator, all while rtaining the functionality of the smartphone itself. "It is a great way to put more functionality in the hands of our officers without adding multiple pieces of hardware," added Chief Boyd.



One of the features that increases operational efficiency is the ability for automatic upload. Once a body-camera recording is completed, the footage is automatically uploaded to a secure, CJIS-compliant cloud storage solution. This eliminates the need for docking stations, routers or any additional hardware or wiring. "Implementation was a breeze," said Officer Jon Whitsitt, Systems Manager for the Gallup Police Department. "We provided each officer with a cell phone loaded with Visual Labs, gave them the necessary training, and sent them into the field." He added, "The deployment could not have been any easier." The Visual Labs smartphone body-worn camera solution includes several officer-safety features such as the ability to livestream video and audio directly from the scene of a critical incident. This enables command staff to obtain real-time situational awareness and make tactical decisions even when they are not present at the scene. This feature is available directly from the smartphone without the need to connect to any additional hardware.

"We are extremely pleased that the Gallup Police Department has selected the Visual Labs smartphone body camera solution," said Alexander Popof, COO of Visual Labs. "The department has always focused on better ways to serve its community, and we are glad to be part of that effort with our high-technology solution." ABOUT THE GALLUP POLICE DEPARTMENT

The Gallup Police Department is a community-oriented police organization comprised of 63 sworn Police Officers, eight Public Service Officers, and eight civilian employees. It provides around-the-clock services in the City of Gallup, located in northwest New Mexico.

https://www.gallupnm.gov/217/Police)

Contact: Jon Whitsitt; jwhitsitt@gallupnm.gov; 505-863-9365 ABOUT VISUAL LABS

Visual Labs, Inc. is a Menlo Park, California based software company that has developed software for Android smartphones and a web-based evidence management platform to provide a CJIS-compliant body and dash camera solutions. The Visual Labs solutions are used by law enforcement, private security and other customers all across the United States and internationally.

(https://www.visuallabsinc.com/)

Contact: Alexander Popof; alp@visuallabsinc.com; 818-919-9802 View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/gallup-police-department-implements-smartphone-body-cameras-301225608.html SOURCE Visual Labs

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The ruling BJP sees comments from global celebrities in support of the ongoing farmers protests as part of a deep conspiracy against India

There is really no way we can prevent the rest of the world from taking interest in our domestic affairs, especially if we wish to be at the high table of the international community. (Photo:AP)

Can tweets by international pop star Rihanna, teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg and other global celebrities in support of Indias protesting farmers destabilise this country of over 1.3 billion people?

Or should we look within? Is foreign meddling the real threat facing us or is Indias real challenge the deepening domestic polarisation on just about every front?

Successive governments in India have pointed at the foreign hand in times of crisis. I entered journalism in the 1980s when one regularly heard of the invisible foreign hand that was out to dismember our country. In many of her public speeches, then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi spoke of the dark spectre of foreign forces out to destabilise India.

Rajiv Gandhi, who came to power in 1984 with a huge majority after his mothers assassination, also talked of the invisible foreign hand trying to derail Indias development.

Back then, there was no Twitter or social media or troll armies, and no virtual slugfests. But on government-run Doordarshan and All India Radio and in sections of the print media, there was no escaping allusions to these dark, powerful and invisible forces out to get us.

Cut to the New India. The foreign hand is back. The ruling BJP sees comments from global celebrities in support of the ongoing farmers protests as part of a deep conspiracy against the country. Prime Minister Narendra Modi says India has been seeing increased FDI but there is a new FDI that has emerged -- Foreign Destructive Ideology. Modi says India needs to be protected against it.

Is the world really out to get us? Or should we get used to the fact that in a networked globalised world, nothing is local anymore? As protests erupted across the United States following George Floyds death at the hands of the police on the streets of Minneapolis, the Black Lives Matter movement resonated around the world. Support for BLM led to demonstrations in a number of countries. In a more recent example, the coup in Myanmar has been denounced by individuals around the world, including in India.

There is really no way we can prevent the rest of the world from taking interest in our domestic affairs, especially if we wish to be at the high table of the international community. If we so eagerly lap up foreign praise, can we afford to be so prickly about the foreign gaze when the comments are adverse? If Indians rejoice at going up the World Banks ease of doing business 2020 survey, they cant totally shrug off slipping in the Economist Intelligence Units 2020 Democracy Indexs global rankings.

The problems will not go away simply if foreigners stop talking about it. And as for us, stopping and reversing the current trend of polarisation is vital, for the simple reason that no country or society can make real progress if social cohesion starts eroding.

Leaving aside the foreign gaze for a moment and looking within, we cannot but help notice a deeply polarised and fractured nation, with deepening domestic political divisions. That is the real challenge, and that challenge cannot be surmounted by simply choking protests or forcibly shutting up views that clash with those of the government of the day. There must be a dialogue. The government must stop its storm troopers -- from ministers to those on the streets -- from statements and actions that polarise further. Else, social cohesion will become even more fragile.

The Global Risks Report 2021 brought out by the World Economic Forum lists social cohesion erosion among the highest-likelihood and highest-impact long-term risks facing our pandemic-battered world. As public health gaps, digital inequality, educational disparities and unemployment -- risks that result from a complex combination of existing inequalities and the impact of the pandemic - - affect vulnerable groups the most, they may further fray social cohesion, it says.

Too many people have little left to lose. The global recession, the report notes, is now expected to force as many as 150 million more people into extreme poverty, increasing the total to 9.4 per cent of the worlds population. This setback in the global development agenda will heighten vulnerability to future shocks and threaten the erosion or collapse of states, it warns.

Our government also admits that the economic shock caused by the ongoing pandemic is severe. It is now hoping for a V-shaped economic recovery. No such recovery will be possible without the vibrant pluralistic democracy that is key to Indias power. If democracy is our calling card, we must also listen to critical views and voices without feeling the need to link them with ulterior motives. Getting prickly about criticism will only worry the whole world even

more.

There is a debate about the potential impact of American concerns about the state of democracy and liberalism in India on the US-India relationship, pointed out Tanvi Madan, director of the India Project and senior fellow at globally renowned think tank Brookings, in a January 2021 essay titled Democracy and the US-India relationship.

Often commentators argue there will either be no effect because of Indias utility for the US or major impact because of the incoming Biden administrations emphasis on values, Madan added. The answer is likely to lie somewhere in between. A pragmatic Biden team will likely recognise that India will be key to their objectives vis-a-vis issues like the Indo-Pacific and China, climate change and global health security.

However, questions about Indias trajectory as a pluralistic democracy could directly or indirectly affect the pace and tone of the relationship  especially if they are accompanied by doubts about Indias capabilities, economic growth and policies, and willingness to play a balancing role versus China.

Indias handling of the ongoing farmers protests has taken a lot of sheen off the countrys image, coming as it does on the back of many other illiberal measures. This is unfortunate for many reasons, including the fact that India is getting a few things right even in these fraught, polarised times. Take Indias vaccine diplomacy. India has supplied low-cost coronavirus vaccines to many countries across the world. With the US and Europe preoccupied with Covid-19 and many nations looking to India for a Covid-19 antidote, Delhi can score valuable points, as G. Parthasarathy, a former diplomat, noted in a recent commentary.

The bottom line: we must get our act together. At the end, a country does not rise or fall because of the foreigners gaze but because of what its insiders do or fail to do.
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Restaurants will no longer be allowed to sell pre-packaged meals through arrangements with supermarkets and other outlets, as Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley definitively closed this loophole yesterday.

Rowley said this would not be allowed to continue, as it defeats the purpose of the public health regulations. Restaurants and street food vendors were among those businesses ordered to close to limit the movement of people and curb the spread of Covid-19.

Loujain al-Hathloul, a prominent Saudi womens rights activist, has been released after 1,001 days in custody, her family says.

Loujain is at home !!!!!!, her sister Lina al-Hathloul tweeted Wednesday along with a photo of a jubilant Hathloul. Their other sister Alia al-Hathloul tweeted that it was the best day of my life.

Riyadh's Specialized Criminal Court, which handles terrorism cases, sentenced Hathloul in late December to more than five years in prison. Saudi authorities took into account the time she already served, her family said in a statement at the time, adding that Hathloul would remain on probation for three years after her release. She was also given a five-year ban on travel outside of Saudi Arabia.

Hathloul, 31, was arrested in May 2018 as part of a sweeping crackdown on activists campaigning for womens driving rights and the end of Saudi Arabias restrictive male guardianship laws. A month after Hathloul's arrest, Saudi Arabia lifted the worlds only ban on women driving.

During her nearly three-year imprisonment, her family says Hathloul had been tortured with waterboarding, electric shocks and sexual harassment and at times held in solitary confinement.

In a statement, US-based advocacy group PEN America said it welcomed her release, but cautioned there may be restrictions on Hathlouls rights.

We have yet to be assured this is true freedom. Loujain may still have draconian limitations on her movement and, most poignantly, on her ability to speak out, the group said.

Her release comes less than a week after a Saudi court ordered the temporary release of two US-Saudi nationals held as political prisoners. The new administration has pledged to hold Saudi Arabia accountable for its human rights record, with President Joe Biden vowing as a candidate to make the conservative country a pariah for its repression.
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SANTA FE  New Mexico legislators on Tuesday plunged into their first big firearms debate this session as a House committee took up proposals to revise the states red flag law and ban the making of guns with 3D printers.

The 3D-printing proposal passed on a 3-2 vote and must clear two more House committees before it can reach the House floor.

Lawmakers took no action on the red flag bill, but they accepted public testimony and scheduled it for consideration Saturday.

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Tuesdays online hearing ignited familiar arguments, but in a new format.

Rather than gun owners rallying outside and carrying their firearms into the Roundhouse, the debate played out over three hours on the Zoom webconferencing program, with people raising their digital hands and taking turns speaking for 1 minute each.

Lawmakers are doing much of this years work online, as the Capitol is closed to the public amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Opponents of the firearms bills  who made up a majority of the audience, according to an online poll conducted during the meeting  repeatedly accused Democratic lawmakers of pushing to infringe on Second Amendment rights and enact laws that criminals will just ignore.

Its just another slap in the face to the law-abiding citizens of New Mexico, Harding County rancher Joe Culbertson said of the 3D-printing bill.

Supporters, in turn, cited New Mexicos high rate of gun deaths and urged legislators to update state laws to protect public safety.

Miranda Viscoli, co-president of New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence, told lawmakers that 3D printers could be used to circumvent prohibitions on gun possession by domestic violence offenders or children, creating weapons without a serial number.

Ghost guns are untraceable.  Many have been used in mass shootings, Viscoli said.

The proposal targeting 3D-printed guns, House Bill 166, would make it a misdemeanor to use a three-dimensional printer to manufacture a firearm without a federal license or share digital instructions on how to make a gun with a printer.

Rep. Tara Lujan, a Santa Fe Democrat and sponsor of the proposal, described it as a necessary update to state laws.

This is an unregulated area that were trying to bring into the day and age we live in now, Lujan said.

The proposal drew opposition from agricultural groups, public defenders and ordinary gun enthusiasts. They said it would interfere with hobbyists, the crafting of replacement parts for firearms and the constitutional right to bear arms  all without actually doing anything to address crime.

This bill does nothing to make New Mexico safer, Rep. Randall Pettigrew, R-Lovington, said.

House Bill 166 narrowly passed the House Consumer and Public Affairs Committee and moves next to the House Judiciary Committee. If approved there, it would go to the House Appropriations and Finance Committee.

The red flag proposal, House Bill 193, would revise a law passed last year allowing for the court-ordered seizure of guns from individuals deemed an imminent danger to themselves or others.

One of the changes would add law enforcement officers to the list of people who can request the filing of a petition under the act, if the officer personally has probable cause to believe someone is an imminent danger. Under the existing law, officers respond to information provided by a family member or similar reporting party rather than act on their own.

Only four extreme risk petitions have been filed since the 2020 law went into effect May 20.

Rep. Daymon Ely, a Corrales Democrat and co-sponsor of the bill, said this years proposal is a surgical approach to making the law work better.

A third firearms proposal, Senate Bill 224, sponsored by Sen. Antoinette Sedillo Lopez, D-Albuquerque, has been introduced but not yet heard by a committee. It would make it a crime to fail to properly secure a firearm against unauthorized use.
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Winter road-trip to Kumaon in an Innova Crysta

These facts brought us to a conclusion to visit few highlighted places of Kumaon in 2018 winter. As usual, we started booking our accommodation from Durgapuja onwards to ensure hasslefree travel with family.

Accordingly, we checked our Innova Crysta from Toyota care for any minor issues and got ready for the final day to roll. Our team members were the same as other tours. Me with my wife and my sibling Debjit with his wife and daughter. Planned the trip with a fixed itinerary as follows:

Day 1: Kolkata to Varanasi

Day 2: Varanasi to Lucknow

Day 3: Lucknow to Bhimtal

Day 4: Bhimtal-Nainital-Bhimtal

Day 5: Bhimtal to Jaltola(Misty Mountains)

Day 6: Misty Mountains

Day 7: Misty Mountains to Munsiyari

Day 8: Munsiyari

Day 9: Munsiyari to Kausani via Chaukori

Day 10: Kausani to Mukteswar

Day 11: Mukteswar to Lucknow

Day 12: Lucknow to Kolkata



Day 1: Kolkata to Varanasi.

On 20th December' 2018, we started for our first goal to Varanasi. Ordinarily, when we travel towards north, our morning meal point is Shan-e-Punjab at Parasnath. So we easily cruised through the chilled air to get a munch of spread Aloo parathas and a significant glass of "Chai".Sitting at the Dhaba's backyard looking at the Parasnath slope is a phenomenal inclination to savour winter morning breakfast. Started for our onward journey after an hour of refreshment. The four-lane highway was smooth till Aurangabad with no problem of a traffic jam or bad road surface. After Aurangabad, the condition of the road deteriorated due to diversions and highway widening work. With not many hiccups reached Varanasi at dusk. This was an overnight stopover, so we decided for convenience on the highway to start early morning on the following day. We chose to stay in Hotel Koushik suggested by some Bhpians and other road travellers. Be that as it may, perhaps of my misfortune, I was not happy with the accommodation. The first-floor front side rooms were average with dirty linens. With no other alternatives, we continued our stay. The main thing we enjoyed was their food. The eatery in the basement was active, and they served hot food promptly.



Breakfast Point at Parasnath





Team Members ready to start for Lucknow at 6.30 am



Day 2: Varanasi to Lucknow

As arranged, we woke up ahead of schedule and prepared ourselves to begin by 7 am towards Lucknow. Had our morning breakfast at a clean Dhaba before Handia. Lucknow is consistently lovable to stop while moving towards Uttarakhand(Kumaon area) because of its attractive fascination in food darlings uniquely. Biriyani and Kebabs at Dastar Khwan is a hotspot to all explorers. Also, Chikan art on garments for women can't be overlooked. So in the wake of arriving at Lucknow in time, we checked in at Fab Hotels Nest Inn. Pleasant stay and onward journey to Kathgodam additionally falls in on the way. In the wake of taking some rest, after dusk, we continued to our very much anticipated energy to appreciate Lucknow Awadhi cuisine and some market hopping also. Losing some cash to life partner for marketing, we headed for a lavish feast at Dastar Khwan. The photos will legitimise our bliss.





My Brother in front of Dastar Khwan





Myself with my brother and best friend.





This doesn't require any introduction







Day 3: Lucknow to Bhimtal

Left Lucknow ahead of schedule by 8 am after having some light breakfast towards our next destination Bhimtal in Uttarakhand. Instead of taking the route via Bareilly, we opted on an alternate way through Gola, Pilhibit, Kathgodam to Bhimtal. The road was exceptionally magnificent for fantastic farming lands on the two roadsides and some forest in certain parts. Sailed through the significant beautiful passage to reach Bhimtal by evening. This spot pulls me from my heart, for which that was my third visit. Beforehand we stayed in Nainital, however this time we wanted to put up in Bhimtal. Our accommodation was reserved in Hotel Harshikhar, excellent accommodation just in front of the Bhimtal lake. They allotted a delightful little family suite having two rooms with attached baths, a living room with a balcony facing the lake. Anybody can pass through a day or two without valuing the time sitting in the terrace or Balcony having an espresso and a camera. As though nature was continually pouring its magnificence to us liberally, we were overwhelmed. The photos will aptly succeed my emotions about the lodging and the spot appropriately.





The picturesque road through Pilibhit



Beautiful view from the terrace of Hotel Harshikhar





The Family Suite of Hotel Harshikhar



Sunrise from Bhimtal



Day 4: Bhimtal-Nainital-Bhimtal

The day was for our visit to the Lake District of Kumaon. Situated at the height of 2084 meters, Nainital is a popular hill station in Uttarakhand. As I have visited this place twice before, so I chose to keep the day visit fixed at Nainital this time. It isn't that you will discover the shine on the structure close to the lake by bright sun rays while strolling by the lakeside. Besides the view of the Naini Lake shining water with huge mountains at the backdrop left us enthralled. We invested the energy untiringly be beside the lake. Some pictures from our feeling with Nainital will resurface our happiness better.





My Niece on Kumaoni dress



Nainital Lake at evening



Day 5: Bhimtal  Misty Mountains, Jhaltola.

The day was significant as we were going to begin the first excursion for Uttarakhand. Our schedule sparkled with some beautiful spots we didn't visit prior aside from Kausani. So was very excited to appreciate the drive through picturesque boulevards via Sheraghat in the light and shades of pine and valley. Bhimtal to Almora highway was a drivers heaven. We booked the Misty Mountains close to Jhaltola.



The excellent road from Bhimtal to Almora





Spectacular View from Sheraghat

https://youtu.be/n9Z5QUEwy6s

This short video will justify my drive-through Sheraghat



On the way to Misty Mountain Retreat after parking the car at Hotel's safe garage



The Misty Mountains, A Foggy Mountain Resort is located in a unique location, near Patal Bhubaneswar and Chaukori.The resort was referred to me by an avid traveller Mr Kaushik Samanta from Burdwan, West Bengal. It is an exceptional resort inside forest and acres of forest land surrounding with nearest population/service available after 5kms from the hotel. It has a Stunning 180 view on Himalayan snow-topped peaks directly before you every minute of every day in winter. One who needs a peaceful spot to explore the Himalayas intimately will, without a doubt discover this spot a paradise. We needed to keep our Innova at their Garage, 6kms in away from the resort. They sent us a rough terrain vehicle to take us to the hotel. We were welcomed by the woman proprietor cum owner on arrival, and they offered a duplex with a linear perspective on snow-topped peaks directly from the deck or room. No language can explain the inclination we felt those two days of our stay. Each time, there was an unspeakable pleasure in looking up the enormous holy pinnacles and pouring in the pure mountain air. You can get some superb views from some spots if reached by walking within 2 to 5 km from the resort. Subsequent after getting ourselves fresh on arrival, we settled on one place by travelling 2kms to see the sun's last rays on the snowcapped gems of Himalaya. As if almighty is pouring gold from the sky on the holy peaks in an elegant manner. The photos can elucidate superior to pen and paper. It was chilling with temperature ranging from - 1C to 2C around evening time to morning. We arrived just after two days of full moon day, so fortunate to get the night sparkles on the peaks at midnight.





Sunset on Himalayas





180-degree view from deck

Cottage View



Sunset view from the deck in front of our cottage



Nanda Devi straight in front of the deck of the resort







Day 6: Misty Mountains at Jhaltola

The day was saved for relaxation stay and wandering around the hotel. Got the chance to see some lovely birds and living spaces in the woods. People attached to birding would get an added bit of freedom to show their skills on camera shutter. I attempted not many with my restricted camera source. The earth and mood were pleasant to such an extent that we didn't discover how time passed. As I said before, the evening is the best ideal break to relish on the deck as the nightfalls. One thing must be considered for the chilly climate. The temperature drops suddenly as the nightfalls where you have to depend on your winter gears and room heater/fireplace.

The resort staff arranged the food up under pure supervision of Mrs Ambika Madam(owner of the property). Was tasty and served hot. The variety of pickles were set up by Madam herself and free to taste. Must refer to the name of Mr Raju, always attentive to all visitors. A humble and energetic person who was continually accessible to come in to perform in that chilly temperature. He additionally fills in as a guide when we went for short treks close by. We got some organisation from a gathering from Kolkata and Mumbai. Delighted at night in pure juice of nature blended in with comfortable climate of the retreat and accommodation.



Snow-flakes in the morning in front of the cottage



Nanda Devi



On a short trek to view the Himalayan pinnacles 360 degrees



Cosy homely dining facility at the resort



With Raju, the all in one person of the resort Uttarakhand is a state in the mountain range of Himalayas divided by Garhwal and Kumaon's administrative regions. It is bordered by two neighbouring states of Himachal Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh and internationally demarcated by Nepal and Tibet on the north. The magnificent snow-capped mountain ranges from the Himalayas are significantly visible from the different places of the region. The other attraction of the area is for some most sacred Hindu worship places with ancient historical presence. Garhwal and Kumaon live with a diversity of landscape, culture and language. Kumaon is known for overwhelming warriors saluted by British colonial and Indian Army for their soldiers' courage and Honour. The innocent smiling faces give a warm welcome to the visitors by familiar people of this region.These facts brought us to a conclusion to visit few highlighted places of Kumaon in 2018 winter. As usual, we started booking our accommodation from Durgapuja onwards to ensure hasslefree travel with family.Accordingly, we checked our Innova Crysta from Toyota care for any minor issues and got ready for the final day to roll. Our team members were the same as other tours. Me with my wife and my sibling Debjit with his wife and daughter. Planned the trip with a fixed itinerary as follows:Day 1: Kolkata to VaranasiDay 2: Varanasi to LucknowDay 3: Lucknow to BhimtalDay 4: Bhimtal-Nainital-BhimtalDay 5: Bhimtal to Jaltola(Misty Mountains)Day 6: Misty MountainsDay 7: Misty Mountains to MunsiyariDay 8: MunsiyariDay 9: Munsiyari to Kausani via ChaukoriDay 10: Kausani to MukteswarDay 11: Mukteswar to LucknowDay 12: Lucknow to KolkataOn 20th December' 2018, we started for our first goal to Varanasi. Ordinarily, when we travel towards north, our morning meal point is Shan-e-Punjab at Parasnath. So we easily cruised through the chilled air to get a munch of spread Aloo parathas and a significant glass of "Chai".Sitting at the Dhaba's backyard looking at the Parasnath slope is a phenomenal inclination to savour winter morning breakfast. Started for our onward journey after an hour of refreshment. The four-lane highway was smooth till Aurangabad with no problem of a traffic jam or bad road surface. After Aurangabad, the condition of the road deteriorated due to diversions and highway widening work. With not many hiccups reached Varanasi at dusk. This was an overnight stopover, so we decided for convenience on the highway to start early morning on the following day. We chose to stay in Hotel Koushik suggested by some Bhpians and other road travellers. Be that as it may, perhaps of my misfortune, I was not happy with the accommodation. The first-floor front side rooms were average with dirty linens. With no other alternatives, we continued our stay. The main thing we enjoyed was their food. The eatery in the basement was active, and they served hot food promptly.As arranged, we woke up ahead of schedule and prepared ourselves to begin by 7 am towards Lucknow. Had our morning breakfast at a clean Dhaba before Handia. Lucknow is consistently lovable to stop while moving towards Uttarakhand(Kumaon area) because of its attractive fascination in food darlings uniquely. Biriyani and Kebabs at Dastar Khwan is a hotspot to all explorers. Also, Chikan art on garments for women can't be overlooked. So in the wake of arriving at Lucknow in time, we checked in at Fab Hotels Nest Inn. Pleasant stay and onward journey to Kathgodam additionally falls in on the way. In the wake of taking some rest, after dusk, we continued to our very much anticipated energy to appreciate Lucknow Awadhi cuisine and some market hopping also. Losing some cash to life partner for marketing, we headed for a lavish feast at Dastar Khwan. The photos will legitimise our bliss.My Brother in front of Dastar KhwanLeft Lucknow ahead of schedule by 8 am after having some light breakfast towards our next destination Bhimtal in Uttarakhand. Instead of taking the route via Bareilly, we opted on an alternate way through Gola, Pilhibit, Kathgodam to Bhimtal. The road was exceptionally magnificent for fantastic farming lands on the two roadsides and some forest in certain parts. Sailed through the significant beautiful passage to reach Bhimtal by evening. This spot pulls me from my heart, for which that was my third visit. Beforehand we stayed in Nainital, however this time we wanted to put up in Bhimtal. Our accommodation was reserved in Hotel Harshikhar, excellent accommodation just in front of the Bhimtal lake. They allotted a delightful little family suite having two rooms with attached baths, a living room with a balcony facing the lake. Anybody can pass through a day or two without valuing the time sitting in the terrace or Balcony having an espresso and a camera. As though nature was continually pouring its magnificence to us liberally, we were overwhelmed. The photos will aptly succeed my emotions about the lodging and the spot appropriately.The day was for our visit to the Lake District of Kumaon. Situated at the height of 2084 meters, Nainital is a popular hill station in Uttarakhand. As I have visited this place twice before, so I chose to keep the day visit fixed at Nainital this time. It isn't that you will discover the shine on the structure close to the lake by bright sun rays while strolling by the lakeside. Besides the view of the Naini Lake shining water with huge mountains at the backdrop left us enthralled. We invested the energy untiringly be beside the lake. Some pictures from our feeling with Nainital will resurface our happiness better.The day was significant as we were going to begin the first excursion for Uttarakhand. Our schedule sparkled with some beautiful spots we didn't visit prior aside from Kausani. So was very excited to appreciate the drive through picturesque boulevards via Sheraghat in the light and shades of pine and valley. Bhimtal to Almora highway was a drivers heaven. We booked the Misty Mountains close to Jhaltola., A Foggy Mountain Resort is located in a unique location, near Patal Bhubaneswar and Chaukori.The resort was referred to me by an avid traveller Mr Kaushik Samanta from Burdwan, West Bengal. It is an exceptional resort inside forest and acres of forest land surrounding with nearest population/service available after 5kms from the hotel. It has a Stunning 180 view on Himalayan snow-topped peaks directly before you every minute of every day in winter. One who needs a peaceful spot to explore the Himalayas intimately will, without a doubt discover this spot a paradise. We needed to keep our Innova at their Garage, 6kms in away from the resort. They sent us a rough terrain vehicle to take us to the hotel. We were welcomed by the woman proprietor cum owner on arrival, and they offered a duplex with a linear perspective on snow-topped peaks directly from the deck or room. No language can explain the inclination we felt those two days of our stay. Each time, there was an unspeakable pleasure in looking up the enormous holy pinnacles and pouring in the pure mountain air. You can get some superb views from some spots if reached by walking within 2 to 5 km from the resort. Subsequent after getting ourselves fresh on arrival, we settled on one place by travelling 2kms to see the sun's last rays on the snowcapped gems of Himalaya. As if almighty is pouring gold from the sky on the holy peaks in an elegant manner. The photos can elucidate superior to pen and paper. It was chilling with temperature ranging from - 1C to 2C around evening time to morning. We arrived just after two days of full moon day, so fortunate to get the night sparkles on the peaks at midnight.The day was saved for relaxation stay and wandering around the hotel. Got the chance to see some lovely birds and living spaces in the woods. People attached to birding would get an added bit of freedom to show their skills on camera shutter. I attempted not many with my restricted camera source. The earth and mood were pleasant to such an extent that we didn't discover how time passed. As I said before, the evening is the best ideal break to relish on the deck as the nightfalls. One thing must be considered for the chilly climate. The temperature drops suddenly as the nightfalls where you have to depend on your winter gears and room heater/fireplace.The resort staff arranged the food up under pure supervision of. Was tasty and served hot. The variety of pickles were set up by Madam herself and free to taste. Must refer to the name of Mr Raju, always attentive to all visitors. A humble and energetic person who was continually accessible to come in to perform in that chilly temperature. He additionally fills in as a guide when we went for short treks close by. We got some organisation from a gathering from Kolkata and Mumbai. Delighted at night in pure juice of nature blended in with comfortable climate of the retreat and accommodation. Last edited by Aditya : 9th February 2021 at 20:35 . Reason: Typo
She was thrust into the spotlight after debuting her romance with Liam Hemsworth in December 2019.

And on Thursday, Gabriella Brooks revealed how she stays grounded despite dating one of Australia's most famous brothers.

'I have a great support network who continually remind me of what's important,' the 24-year-old told The Daily Telegraph.

Public romance: Model Gabriella Brooks (pictured) revealed how she stays grounded on Thursday - one year after going public with her romance with Liam Hemsworth

'This is incredibly grounding,' she added.

Gabriella has been dating Liam since December 2019, following his highly publicised split from ex-wife Miley Cyrus in August that same year.

According to a report by Us Weekly in December 2019, Liam was 'happy to be moving on' following his turbulent split from Miley.

'I have a great support network who continually remind me of what's important,' the 24-year-old said. Pictured Liam Hemsworth

'Liam feels comfortable with Gabriella. His family approves of her and really likes her, which is very important to him,' a source told the publication at the time.

Gabriella and Liam's romance is also 'very different' than the hunk's relationship with ex-wife Miley, E! News reported.

'They like the same things and have the same lifestyle,' said a source.

'It's not a rollercoaster of highs and lows. Gabriella is very laid-back and even-keeled.'

Past: Gabriella has been dating Liam since December 2019, following his highly publicised split from ex-wife Miley Cyrus (pictured) in August that same year

The source also said that the young actress is getting along famously with the entire Hemsworth family.

The Hunger Games star, 31, went public with their romance in January, 2020.

They were isolating together in Victoria at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, but Gabriella later joined the whole Hemsworth family in Byron Bay.
The year 2021 has seen advances in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic. Since January, vaccines have been rolled out in more than 60 countries, according to Our World in Data. But in Tanzania, the president not only opposes vaccination, he denies the country has had COVID-19 cases.

On January 27, President John Magufuli said, without evidence, that vaccinations are dangerous. He added that if white people were able to come up with vaccinations, a vaccination for AIDS would have been found, a vaccination for tuberculosis could have eliminated it by now; a Malaria vaccine would have been found; a vaccination for cancer would have been found by now.

Magufuli also insisted that, because of God, [Tanzanians] have lived for over one year without the virus  even right here there is no one who is wearing a mask, and that the health ministry should be cautious, over the health of all Tanzanians and avoid the temptation to turn us into a country where vaccination trials are conducted freely.

His claims that vaccines are dangerous, and that Tanzania has been COVID-19 free, are false.

Vaccines for everything?

Vaccines are used to train the immune system to fight diseases, but they are not straightforward. AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and cancer are all caused by different problems (parasites, viruses, DNA mutations, bacteria), with different complexities.

No vaccine has been developed for AIDS. The Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) vaccine is used against tuberculosis, but its impact on the transmission of the disease has been limited. As the World Health Organization (WHO) states, the BCG vaccine does not prevent primary infection and, more importantly, does not prevent reactivation of latent pulmonary infection.

A more recent vaccine, the RTS,S, is used against malaria. It, too, partially protects against the disease. The WHO began recommending it in 2016, and the vaccine was first introduced on a large scale in 2019.

Vaccines exist to prevent diseases that can cause cancer, like human papillomavirus (HPV) and hepatitis. But a universal vaccine against cancer is biologically impossible, as Maurie Markman, the president of Medicine & Science at Cancer Treatment Centers of America, told the Cancer Treatment Centers of America in 2018. "There can't be a vaccine for cancer because cancer isn't a single entity. It's thousands of different conditions," Markman said.

The speed with which the major COVID-19 vaccines have been developed has aroused skepticism over their safety. However, they have undergone multiple tests before being authorized for distribution.

In the U.S., the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines received Emergency Use Authorization by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) but still had to meet rigorous safety standards and prove their effectiveness in multiple clinical trials.

Following Magufulis remarks, the WHOs regional director for Africa, Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, urged Tanzania to ramp up public health measures such as wearing masks to fight #COVID19.

Science shows that #VaccinesWork and I encourage the government to prepare for a COVID vaccination campaign, she tweeted.

Tanzanias government has encouraged citizens to choose home or herbal medicines and maintain personal hygiene rather than get vaccinated. In May, the president said Tanzania was planning to acquire an herbal cure from Madagascar.

Polygraph.info has fact-checked COVID-Organics, a drink derived from artemisia annua (an antimalaria ingredient) and other medicinal herbs, which Madagascars president, Andry Rajoelina, launched in April. The drink has not prevented the coronavirus from taking hold in Madagascar.

During a Tanzanian health ministry press briefing in early February, an official demonstrated how to make a ginger, onion, lemon and pepper smoothie, and claimed, with no evidence, it would help prevent contracting COVID-19, the BBC reported. A local doctor speaking anonymously told the BBC that the governments message that a vegetable mixture, which has nutritional benefits, is all they need to keep coronavirus at bay is bogus.

COVID-19 denial

Tanzania's president denies that the country has been hit significantly by the coronavirus pandemic.

The government hasnt reported any new COVID cases since late last April, when it recorded 509 cases and 21 deaths. Since last year, Magufuli has repeatedly stated that God removed the virus from the nation, the Associated Press reported.

On January 27, Magufuli claimed the country has been coronavirus-free for over a year because our God is able, and Satan will always fail and will be defeated in various illnesses.

News reports tell a different story. In April 2020, three members of Tanzanias parliament died from unknown causes over several days, which led opposition party members to call for the parliament to be suspended and its members to be tested, along with their staff and families, Al Jazeera reported.

The following month, Magufuli dismissed the head of Tanzanias national laboratory, which is in charge of COVID-19 testing. Since then, he has continued to insist the pandemic doesnt exist in the country, Foreign Policy magazine reported.

The sources weve been talking to say some of their colleagues and family members have passed on because of COVID-19, but this week they are saying that talking about COVID in Tanzania is a taboo, Emmanuel Makundi, the editor of Radio France Internationales Kiswahili service, told the Africa Calling podcast. Makundi said deaths have spiked, but neither the government nor the families are officially confirming it was due to coronavirus.

As the BBC wrote, several Tanzanian families have quietly mourned the deaths of family members they suspect died of COVID-19. Most wouldnt speak to the BBC for fear of government retribution.

In early February, Zanzibars first vice president, Maalim Seif Sharif Hamad, from the opposition party ACT Wazalendo, admitted to being hospitalized after contracting COVID-19. According to the Tanzanian newspaper The Citizen, he was the first person to declare his Covid-19 status in Tanzania since April 29, 2020. Despite his announcement, Zanzibar authorities said they were unaware of his situation, the newspaper wrote. (Zanzibar, an autonomous region of Tanzania, is an island off the countrys Indian Ocean coast.)

One indicator of the spread of coronavirus is the number of Tanzanians testing positive when they cross the border. Ugandan and Zambian officials say they are seeing large numbers of Tanzanian travelers testing positive when they try to cross the border, The Wall Street Journal recently reported. Rwanda is denying entry to Tanzanian truckers. Countries as far away as Denmark say they have detected the more-contagious coronavirus strain that first emerged in South Africa in test samples from people arriving from Tanzania.

After the reports from Denmark in January, Magufuli accused Tanzanians traveling abroad of importing a new weird corona, the BBC reported.

Last May, the president also dismissed COVID test kits, claiming they were faulty and had returned positive results on samples taken from a goat and a pawpaw fruit, Reuters reported. There is something happening. I said before we should not accept that every aid is meant to be good for this nation, Magufuli said.

The day before Magufulis January 27 remarks, leaders of the Catholic Church in Tanzania broke their silence and issued an alert about a surge in suspected COVID-19 cases. The secretary of the Tanzania Episcopal Conference told the BBC that there has been a rise in the number of funeral services in urban areas. We were used to having one or two requiem masses per week in urban parishes, but now we have daily masses. Something is definitely amiss," he said.
If you are seeking a little outdoor fun and go for a walk or ski in Terra Cotta Park, the city is suggesting you keep an eye out for the barred owl.
The UAEs series of game-changing regulatory amendments  from providing Emirati citizenship and golden visas to investors and select expats to allowing 100% ownership of businesses for foreign nationals  will significantly fuel the recovery and growth of the countrys property market, according to Lootah Real Estate Development (LRED), one of the regions most prominent real estate developers.

In its Industry Insights Report, LRED has highlighted top 7 drivers that will propel the real estate sectors recovery from the effects of the pandemic this 2021.

In addition to the sweeping changes in citizenship and immigration rules, LREDs in-depth analysis underlined the landmark signing of the Abraham Accords, the extensive national vaccination programme, the gradual resumption of tourism activities, the progress in the highly-anticipated Expo 2020 Dubai, the changes in full company ownership laws, and the higher appetite from Dubai renters to become homeowners as primary contributors to the real estate rebound.

Lootah Holdings Group CEO Arash Dara said: "There are clear indicators that the UAEs economy will see a V-shaped recovery from the impact of COVID-19, gauging from the notable pick up in trade and tourism sectors and the renewed positive sentiments brought about by historic immigration rules and peace deals spearheaded by the country."

LRED COO Russell Owen said: "Dubai continues to be one of the most sought-after destinations for tourists and investors. Investors and end-users stand to benefit from the property price correction and we are already seeing a movement from renters to homeowners due to attractive property prices, lower mortgage rates, and higher loan to value ratio."

Top 7 drivers of real estate recovery in UAE this year are:

*Emirati nationality and passport for certain expats

In a historic move by the UAE government, the leaders have recently approved amendments to the Executive Regulation of the Federal Law concerning Nationality and Passportsallowing investors, professionals, special talents and their families to acquire the Emirati nationality and passport under certain conditions.

This historic decision by the leaders to grant certain expats Emirati nationalities and passports will play a vital role in the countrys long-term economic diversification objectives, cementing the leaders commitment to have a growth partnership with the right workforce. It will be a game-changer for the UAEs real estate sector too, as it will increase the demand from both the end-users and the investors community, he said.

*Wide-ranging visa rules

Industry leaders also expect that the string of sweeping changes in UAE immigration, including the UAE Golden visa, which provides 10-year residency for more classes of investors, professionals, and students; the ability of foreign students to bring and sponsor their families, and the provision of 5-year renewable retirement visa to retired residents, would further beef up property demand.

Dara said: These landmark visa rules provide a highly positive impact on the UAEs real estate sector by creating a less transient expat population. With more people expected to stay in the country for a longer period of time, the more sustainable demand for properties will be, explained Dara.

*Normalising UAEs relations with Qatar and Israel

As the historic diplomatic and economic relations between the UAE and Israel normalise with the signing of the Abraham Accords in September 2020, real estate is one of the major sectors slated to benefit from the full spectrum of overseas investment from Israel. Zurich Capital Funds, for one, said it has received $500 million, in commitments from Israeli investors to invest in the UAEs major sectors, including real estate.

In addition, the UAE has recently announced plans to resume bilateral ties with Qatarstarting with the reopening trade and transport relations between the two nations.

The transformative economic cooperation between these nations has made many Israel and Qatari investors realise the great potentials of the UAE, and of Dubai in particular, in terms of diversifying their real estate holdings, Owen said.

*National vaccination inspires optimism

The arrival of millions of doses of vaccines against Covid-19 has given a booster shot to the level of optimism in the UAE.

The UAE offers four vaccines against the Covid-19 infection  Sinopharm, Pfizer-BioNTech, Sputnik V, and AstraZeneca  free of charge and on optional basis to UAE nationals and residents.

*A boost in tourism with Expo 2020

The pandemic has halted most events and activities across the globe, but the greatest show on earthExpo 2020 Dubaimarches forward this year, safely and securely.

Owen said: Expo 2020 Dubai, along with lots of opportunities it offers for the travel and tourism sector, is a vital contributor to the potential growth of Dubais real estate market this year. The construction of the mega projects within the Expo 2020 site ushers in multiple opportunities and prospects for residents, who are looking to invest and rent properties.

*Renters opting to become owners

As early as in August 2020, LRED has reported an increasing number of Dubai residents shifting from being renters to becoming first-time homeowners.

This was supported by the latest data released by the Property Finder group, which showed that the Dubai property market made a solid performance in the last quarter of 2020posing market sales worth AED22.07 billion through 11,065 transactions from October to December.

According to Owen, a host of factors has increased interest in owning a home during this time. It includes attractive property prices, lower mortgage rates, as well as higher loan to value ratio where expats can borrow up to 80 per cent of their property purchase price and up to 85 per cent for UAE nationals.

This growing market transaction is driven by professionals and families seeking affordable homes that are conducive both for residential and working lifestyle while building equity.

*Full company ownership

The changes to Federal law No. 2 of 2015 of the Commercial Companies Lawallowing full foreign ownership of commercial companies without the need for an Emirati shareholder or agentare deemed to reduce costs for companies and play a vital role in attracting more investments and liberalising business activities in the UAE.

Dara pointed out that this significant measure was set to not only help the economy gain its sterling position as a leading global hub for business but also accelerate economic growth and productivity in the UAE even further.

"With the nations stronger economy, investor confidence will be shored up further, and the property market will follow suit," he added.-TradeArabia News Service

Qatar Petroleums plans to develop the worlds largest liquefied natural gas project ramps up pressure on U.S. producers, which have been building a slew of LNG projects along the Gulf Coast to meet the worlds growing demand for natural gas.

The Middle Eastern state oil company this week committed nearly $28.8 billion to expand its North Field East LNG project in Qatar, which can produce 32 million tonnes per year of LNG. The expansion would create the single largest LNG project in history, and help Qatar again become the world's largest LNG producer by 2030, according to energy research firms Wood Mackenzie and Rystad.

Qatar is pursuing market share, said Giles Farrer, Wood Mackenzies research director. This final investment decision is likely to put pressure on other pre-FID LNG suppliers, who may find Qatar has secured a foothold in new markets.

LNG companies are investing heavily in new liquefaction plants and export terminals along the Gulf Coast to meet growing global demand for natural gas, considered a cleaner alternative to coal and oil. Liquefaction is the process by which natural gas is supercooled into its liquid form, which can be transported by cargo ship worldwide.

Several LNG projects are under construction along the Gulf Coast, including the Golden Pass LNG export facility, owned by Exxon Mobil and Qatar Petroleum, in Sabine Pass.

EXPANSION: As LNG booms, some fear bubble

New LNG projects along the Gulf Coast have opened a market for the large volumes of natural gas produced as a byproduct of shale oil production in the Permian Basin in West Texas and southeastern New Mexico. Oil and gas companies are producing so much natural gas, some of it is being flared, or burned off. Theres hope that this natural gas can be shipped abroad to Asia, where domestic natural gas production is low.

The Energy Information Administration expects U.S. LNG exports to more than double from 2020 to 2029. The U.S. exported 9.4 billion cubic feet of LNG per day in November, according to the EIA.

This LNG growth in the U.S., however, may be stunted by Qatar, the world's lowest-cost LNG producer. Qatar's LNG production can break even with natural gas at just over $4 per million British thermal units, according to Wood Mackenzie.

U.S. LNG projects under construction  including Port Arthur LNG, Driftwood LNG, Plaquemines LNG and Freeport T4  have a break-even price in the range of $6.50 to $7.50 per million British thermal units if shipped to Asia, according to Rystad.

Its right at the bottom of the global LNG cost curve, alongside Arctic Russian projects, Farrer said.

Qatar is on track to produce 107 million tonnes of LNG per year by 2030, nearly a quarter of the world's supply, and has set a target to expand its LNG production to 126 million tonnes per year. The U.S. is expected to produce 98 million tonnes of LNG per year by 2030, according to Rystad.

Global LNG demand is expected to reach about 580 million tonnes by 2030, Rystad said.

"(This) leaves significant room for bringing new LNG projects forward," said Sindre Knutsson, vice president at Rystad Energys gas markets team. "We forecast that 104 million tonnes per annum of new LNG supply must be sanctioned in the coming five years to meet the gap between actual supply and demand in 2030."
Wild Entrust Africa officer, Mr Tiego Mpho says the community co-existence project piloted at Habu in the Okavango District has the potential to eradicate poverty.

The project was designed to integrate wildlife conservation with livestock farming through zoning to separate the two.

It was implemented by Wild Entrust in partnership with Habu Elephant Development Trust and the government through the departments of veterinary services and environmental affairs.

In an interview, Wild Entrust monitoring and evaluation officer, Mr Mpho revealed that the project was on track and producing desired results.

The project, funded by the Food Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and European Union, is geared to enhance the livelihoods of the community through conservation of both rangeland and wildlife.

He appreciated the community's response, saying it was satisfactory as many had showed commitment towards the success of the project.

He said the project was intended to establish a network of community clusters since they had proven to be powerful means to combat rural poverty.

Mr Mpho explained that they were working with farmers to protect grazing land and on how to use eco-rangers effectively to manage livestock from predators.

"This is a brilliant programme which aims to boost sustainable wildlife management and food security as well as to create jobs. It will benefit both the wildlife and ecosystem and the resilience of local communities that rely on them," he added.

He said farmers donated 160 cattle which were under the stewardship of eco-rangers, adding that their target was to have 2 000 cattle and 40 eco-rangers.

He appreciated the efforts made by farmers and hoped more would come on board.

Mr Mpho noted that once the project became successful, they intended to replicate it to other parts of Ngamiland because they wanted the community to live harmoniously with wildlife, benefit from their livestock as well as the natural resources within their areas.

Fatal human wildlife conflict is a growing problem in the district and losses of livestock to predators severely impacts rural livelihoods.

In addition, Mr Mpho revealed that the district had declared a red zone because of Foot and Mouth Disease and through the project, they intended to assist in marketing of beef so that farmers had good returns from rearing livestock.

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He said the community would have free range grass and wildlife, adding that they would also have social enterprise for livestock slaughtering.

He said plans were underway to hold a workshop where farmers would elect a steering committee so that it could be part of oversight.

Mr Mpho also explained that the project was complementing the just ended Ngamiland Land Sustainable Management Project (SLM) which aimed to address land degradation challenges in the district.

The project improved management of livestock, created an enabling environment for responsive policies and practice and facilitated increased benefits from land use to communities.

In addition, he said the community co-existence project worked in the framework of Community Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) programme's objective of achieving biodiversity conservation and rural development.

Source : BOPA
Investigations editor

Larry Parnass, investigations editor, joined The Eagle in 2016 from the Daily Hampshire Gazette, where he was editor in chief. His freelance work has appeared in the Washington Post, Boston Globe, Hartford Courant and CommonWealth Magazine.
A South Jersey motorist was intoxicated when he crashed into a Salem County business Tuesday night, then ran from the scene, according to police.

Javien Brown, 27, of Pennsville Township, was driving a Jeep Grand Cherokee southbound on Route 49 in Pennsville Township shortly before 10 p.m. when he crossed into the northbound lane and left the roadway, according to Pennsville Police Chief Vince Green.

The vehicle struck a sign at the Salem Boat Exchange, then hit a building on the property.

A passerby reported that the driver, later identified as Brown, ran from the area. He was located a short time later hiding in the brush nearby, Green said.

Authorities determined Brown was under the influence of alcohol. He was transported to a hospital for his injuries from the crash.

Brown was issued motor vehicle summonses for driving under the influence, reckless driving, leaving the scene, failure to report and failure to maintain lane.

Officials could not provide details on the extent of damage to the business Wednesday and efforts to reach the business operators was unsuccessful.

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Matt Gray may be reached at mgray@njadvancemedia.com.
He is the presenter of BBC Two show, Interior Home Masters With Alan Carr.

But Hollywood actress Priyanka Chopra, 38, mistakenly believed Alan is an actual interior designer during an interview on The One Show on Tuesday.

Chatty Man host Alan, 44, (and anyone else for that matter, was too polite to correct her), causing viewers to e in hysterics over the awkward TV moment.

'What you do is an integral part of people's lives': Priyanka Chopra left The One Show viewers in hysterics on Tuesday when she mistakenly believed TV host Alan Carr is an interior designer

Host Alex Jones told the actress via video link: 'Priyanka, Alan here, is on a show which is all about interior design. I mean he's as surprised as anyone.'

Priyanka said: 'Hi Alan. Let me tell you, we just finished up doing our house, just now in LA. (She lives with husband Nick Jonas).'

As Alan started to try and suppress a giggle, she continued: 'It was the first time in about 15 years, that I've spent time picking colours and cushions and investing in my corners.

'So I think what you do is such an integral part of most people's lives. So thank you, really.'

Oh no! Alan's face was a picture when he realised what was happening, but he was too polite to say anything

As Priyanka speaks, Alan's face is a picture as he wonders whether or not to tell her he is a famous television presenter.

Viewers wrote: 'Priyanka Chopra thinking Alan Carr is an interior designer and Alan being too polite to correct her is top tier One Show.'

'Yeah no. Alan Carr is not an interior designer by any stretch.'

'Cackling': A host of viewers took to Twitter after watching the show to comment on the hilarious moment

'What time tonight are we clapping for all key interior designers, such as Alan here?'

'Priyanka Chopra is so beyond beautiful, Alan Carr doesnt even correct her.'

'Priyanka Chopra praising and thanking Alan Carr for all he does in the world on interior design.'

Alan's show sees 10 interior designers against each other for the chance to win a contract to decorate a luxury hotel in the Lake District.

The first episode saw Judge Michelle Ogundehin, former editor of Elle Decoration magazine, joined by guest Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen as they set the designers the task of transforming million-pound show homes in Oxford on a budget.

New role: Alan's show sees 10 interior designers against each other for the chance to win a contract to decorate a luxury hotel in the Lake District
Radek Bukowski, MD, PhD, professor and associate chair of Investigation and Discovery in the Department of Women's Health at Dell Medical School at UT Austin. Credit: University of Texas at Austin

Individual choices in medicine carry a certain amount of uncertainty.

An innovative partnership at The University of Texas at Austin takes aim at medicine down to the individual level by applying state-of-the-art computation to medical care.

"Medicine in its essence is decision-making under uncertainty, decisions about tests and treatments," said Radek Bukowski, MD, Ph.D., professor and associate chair of Investigation and Discovery in the Department of Women's Health at Dell Medical School at UT Austin.

"The human body and the healthcare system are complex systems made of a vast number of intensely interacting elements," he said. "In such complex systems, there are many different pathways along which an outcome can occur. Our bodies are robust, but this also makes us very individualized, and the practice of medicine challenging. Everyone is made of different combinations of risk factors and protective characteristics. This is why precision medicine is paramount going forward."

To that effect, in the January 2021 edition of the American Journal of Obstetrics Gynecology, experts at Dell Med, Oden Institute for Computational and Engineering Sciences (Oden Institute), and Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), along with stakeholders across healthcare, industry, and government, stated that the emergence of computational medicine will revolutionize the future of medicine and health care. Craig Cordola of Ascension and Christopher Zarins of HeartFlow co-authored this editorial review with Bukowski and others.

According to Bukowski, this interdisciplinary group provides a unique combination of resources that are poised to make Texas a leader in providing computational solutions to today's and tomorrow's health care issues.

"At UT Austin we're fortunate to have found ourselves at a very opportune point in time for computational medical research," Bukowski said. "The Oden Institute has world-class expertise in mathematical modeling, applied math, and computational medicine; TACC is home to the world's largest supercomputer for open science, and also committed to improving medical care, including outcomes for women and babies."

Powered by such collaborations, the emerging discipline of computational medicine focuses on developing quantitative approaches to understanding the mechanisms, diagnosis, and treatment of human disease through applications, more commonly found in mathematics, engineering, and computational science. These computational approaches are well-suited to modeling complex systems such as the human body.

An on-point area of study for obstetrics

While computation is pivotal to all domains in medicine, it is especially promising in obstetrics because it concerns at least two patientsmother and baby, who frequently have conflicting interests, making medical decision-making particularly difficult and the stakes exceptionally high.

According to state Rep. Donna Howard, D-Austin, a co-author of the editorial review, Texas legislators should be concerned about the unacceptably high rate of maternal morbidity and mortality in the state.

"When I became aware of the efforts to bring computational medical approaches to addressing maternal morbidity and mortality, I was immediately intrigued," Howard said. "And when I learned of the interdisciplinary expertise that has found itself conveniently positioned to create this new frontier of medicine, I was sold."

Individualized medicine is happening now because of advancements in computing power and mathematical modeling that can solve the problems which were unsolvable until now.

Case in point: in 2018 the National Science Foundation awarded UT Austin a $1.2 million grant to support research using computational medicine and smartphones to monitor the activity and behavior of 1,000 pregnant women in the Austin area.

In particular, the growing array of data sources including health records, administrative databases, randomized controlled trials, and internet-connected sensors provides a wealth of information at multiple timescales for which to develop sophisticated data-driven models and inform theoretical formulations.

"When combined with analysis platforms via high performance computing, we now have the capability to provide patients and medical providers analysis of outcomes and risk assessment on a per-individual basis to improve the shared decision making process," Bukowski concluded.

The study, "Computational medicine, present and the future: obstetrics and gynecology perspective," was published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology.
Construction of the Expo Dubai India pavilion will be completed by March 31, it was revealed during a visit of high-level team of officials to the headquarters and manufacturing plants of Conares.

Conares, the regions second-largest steel manufacturer, is owned by UAEs top Indian industrialist, Bharat Bhatia. The plant is at Jebel Ali Free Zone Authority (JAFZA), Dubai.

The Indian Pavilion delegation included Pavan Kapoor, Ambassador of India in the UAE; Dr Aman Puri, Consul General of India in Dubai; Dilip Chenoy, Secretary General, Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry (FICCI), Gunveena Chadha, Assistant Secretary General of FICCI, Praveen Mittal, Director of FICCI, and Pankaj Bodkhe of Consul at CGI Dubai.

FICCI is the industry partner of the Indian government for its participation in the World Expo, and the delegation is seeking support of Indian business leaders to make Expo Dubais India Pavilion a huge success, said a statement.

Kapoor said: We are glad to visit the headquarters of Conares, which is among the tier-1 organisations led by top Indian business leaders. We are seeking the support of Conares to make India Pavilion at the Expo Dubai a resounding success. We have planned to showcase some great activities and programmes as our countrys achievements and diversity at the Expo. The India Pavilion will also play a key role to make significant progress in several existing areas of cooperation between India and the UAE in addition to exploring new opportunities.

Historically, the UAE and India share a special bond. The Indo-UAE bilateral relationship will witness another phase of development with Indias massive presence in the Expo. Both the nations are moving in positive directions. The UAE looks at India seriously, and positive interactions will benefit both the countries and the people, he added.

Welcoming the delegation, Bhatia, said: We are happy to receive the honourable Indian Ambassador His Excellency Pavan Kapoor and the India Pavilion

delegation to our headquarters. We have plans to be part of the pavilion as the Expo is expected to be a key driver of the UAE-India trade in the new decade and beyond. We will extend our full support to make the presence and engagement of the Indian Pavilion a huge success. This is the best opportunity for India to tell its extraordinary stories of diversity and economic growth to the world. We all are proud of being part of this journey. Moreover, India will bring its popular industry events to the show, and together will make the best of India at the World Expo in Dubai.

Chenoy said: The India Pavilion at the World Expo in Dubai will showcase the best of India at a greater level. It will open up huge opportunities for the world to engage with India as a nation of multiple resources and innovations in arts and cultures, industrial manufacturing, knowledge-based capabilities, economic growth, traditional properties and the great Indian cuisine. The Pavilion also will initiate seamless possibilities of investing in India for visitors of the Expo and investors from around the world.

The pavilion will be unique in terms of its architecture, quality and content. A myriad of extraordinary stories of Indian success and innovation will be staged in the pavilion for the world. We are here because Conares is also a big story. Construction of the Pavilion will be completed by March 31. The pavilion will be inaugurated in line with the certification by the authorities in Dubai, he added.

The India pavilion will also conduct some of its prestigious and signature events such as FRAMES and HEAL in Dubai during the global event.

Conares is the leading producer of steel pipes and rebars within the region, and the only private manufacturer in the UAE. The company is also amongst the top three steel rebar mills operating 24x7 to serve the country's upcoming projects. -TradeArabia News Service

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The company has struck a deal over the net smelter return royalty for 0.98% on open pit operations and 0.49% of underground operations on one concession at the project

Nova must pay US$6.5 million in cash upfront on closing and up to US$9.5 million in its shares, upon the achievement of certain project milestones for the royalty

Nova Royalty Corp ( ) (OTCMKTS:NVARF) revealed on Wednesday that it is set to acquire an existing royalty on 's ( ) Vizcachitas project in Chile and that it had increased its convertible debt facility with Beedie Capital.

The company has struck a deal with an affiliate of Resource Capital Funds over the net smelter return royalty (NSR) for 0.98% on open pit operations and 0.49% of underground operations on one concession that forms part of the Vizcachitas project, namely around 50% of the projected open-pit mine plan.

Among the terms, Nova must pay US$6.5 million in cash upfront on closing and up to US$9.5 million in its shares, upon the achievement of certain project milestones. Closing of the deal is expected to occur by March this year.

"Vizcachitas is one of the premier copper development projects in the Americas. We believe the project has all the necessary components to be a strategic development asset for a major producer and a critical part of the future supply chain," said Alex Tsukernik, Nova Royalty's CEO in a statement.

"We are pleased to become a royalty holder alongside Resource Capital Funds, one of the mining sector's leading investors as it continues to support the project toward production. We look forward to welcoming them as a future shareholder."

Vizcachitas is currently undergoing permitting for an expanded drilling program, the results of which, will be used to complete a pre-feasibility study, earmarked to be completed by the first half of 2022.

A preliminary economic assessment (PEA) in 2019, envisaged a 45-year open-pit mine life at a throughput of 110,000 tonnes per day (tpd).

At a copper price of US$3 per pound, the after-tax net present value (NPV), with an 8% discount rate, was pegged at US$1.8 billion, with an internal rate of return (IRR) of 20.7%.

The payback period was 3.4 years from initial operations, and 5.4 years from initial construction.

Vizcachitas hosts a measured and indicated resources of 11.2 billion pounds of copper, 400 million pounds of molybdenum and 43.3 million ounces of silver. Production is expected to kick off by 2025 to 2026.

Also in Wednesday's statement, Nova announced it had entered into an amended and restated convertible loan agreement with Beedie Capital, which increase the facility to C$28.5 million.

The loan is subject to customary closing conditions, including the acceptance of the Toronto venture exchange, and is expected to close on or about February 12 this year.

Nova Royalty is focused on providing investors with exposure to the key building blocks of the clean energy revolution, namely copper and nickel.

Contact the author at giles@proactiveinvestors.com


George Gascon, then San Francisco District Attorney who took office as Los Angeles County District Attorney on Dec. 7, 2020, speaks during a news conference in San Francisco on Dec. 9, 2014. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Judge Deals Blow to LA District Attorneys New Policies

Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascon has suffered a setback in the first legal challenge to his controversial criminal justice reform policies.

On Feb. 8, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge James C. Chalfant granted a preliminary injunction that prohibits Gascon from ordering his prosecutors to carry through some of his directives.

Judge Chalfants ruling vindicates a lot of what we have been arguing for months in individual casesthat George Gascons policies were illegal and wrong, Sam Dordulian, an attorney who represents several families of crime victims in L.A., told The Epoch Times.

The families Dordulian represents argue that Gascons directives prevent justice for the crimes against their loved ones by decreasing penalties for those convicted.

Since taking office Dec. 7, Gascon has followed through on his promise to reimagine public safety by issuing directives that emphasize rehabilitation and other social programs he says have been shown to reduce recidivism. He has sought to phase out what he characterizes as an outdated tough-on-crime approach that focuses more on incarceration.

His policies have been criticized by judges, victims, a former district attorney, and deputy district attorneys.

But Gascon maintains that he is carrying out the will of the 2 million people in L.A. County who voted for him to overhaul the justice system. His directives are based on science and data, not fear and emotion, he said in a Feb. 8 Twitter post.

While the judge did prohibit some of Gascons directives, Chalfant also acknowledged that the DA represents the will of the voters and should not be unduly inhibited.

His ruling reads: The public interest strongly weighs in his favor. He has almost unfettered discretion to perform his prosecutorial duties.  He was elected on the very platform he is trying to implement and any intrusion on this prosecutorial discretion is not in the public interest unless clearly warranted.

Three Strikes Law

One policy the judge singled out as unlawful was Gascons attempt to eliminate the Three Strikes law, which gives defendants a sentence of 25 years to life if convicted of three violent or severe felonies.

The ruling noted a point made by the Association of Deputy District Attorneys (ADDA), who filed the lawsuit: Gascons argument about the will of the County voters who elected him ignores the will of the 5.9 million voters70% of the California electoratewho voted for the Three Strikes law.

In Gascons view, the Three Strikes law represents a legacy of Californias tough on crime era  [that] exacerbate[s] racial disparities in the justice system.

The ADDA said in a statement: As the court ruling makes clear, this decision was based on what the law is and not what an officeholder thinks it should be. The court ruled as we expected in holding that the District Attorney cannot order his prosecutors to ignore laws that protect the public from repeat offenders.

Unethical Script

The judge also took issue with a script Gascon issued to DDAs. Gascon instructed them to read it out during court proceedings to dismiss or withdraw any enhancements that could add time to a suspects sentence.

A portion of the script states, It is the position of this office that [these enhancement laws] are unconstitutional  [they] provide no deterrent effect or public safety benefit of incapacitationin fact, the opposite may be true, wasting critical financial state and local resources.

Chalfant said the script is legally inaccurate and incomplete and reading this statement in court without correction is unethical.

Attorney David J. Carrol, arguing on behalf of the ADDA, told Judge Chalfant that it was inappropriate to force DDAs to argue something is unconstitutional when they know it is not.

The DDAs were worried about being held in contempt of court for reading it out after some had been chastised by judges for doing so. The DDAs argued that they were forced to choose between following directions from their boss, Gascon, and doing what they believe to be ethical and lawful. They worried not only of facing contempt of court but also discipline by the State Bar.

Attorney Robert E. Dugdale, who represents Gascon and the DAs Office, said the ADDAs action is unprecedented. He argued that the law allows Gascon to establish the policies he has chosen.

I want to make clear: The DA does not believe he is above the law, said Dugdale.

Gascons Appeal

Gasconwho said in a statement that Chalfants ruling does not impact the vast majority of my directiveshas already announced his plan to appeal the courts decision.

Until the appeal is decided, my office will adjust its policies to be consistent with this ruling, he said via Twitter on Feb. 8. We can no longer affordmorally, socially or economicallyto justify tough-on-crime policies in the name of victims when a majority of the survivor community supports rehabilitation over excessive sentences.

The DA maintains that his policies are modeled on research that points toward a modern approach to advancing community safety, adding, I never had any illusions as to the difficulty and challenges associated with reforming a dated institution steeped in systemic racism.

The ADDA affirmed their support for common-sense criminal justice reform. However, the group argued that Gascons approach assumes that a new social infrastructure that includes educational programs, vocational training, counseling, and supervision will comfortably replace lawful prison sentences.

However, that infrastructure does not exist, ADDA said. It is difficult to conclude that letting convicted prisoners out earlywithout the theoretical support system in placeis likely to do anything but expedite recidivism.

A Possible Recall

Victims rights attorney Dordulian praised the courts decision, but said the fight for victims must continue.

Mr. Gascons focus remains on helping those who have victimized our communities (murderers, rapists, child molesters) and he has shown an almost complete disregard for the rights of the victims in such cases, he said via email. [He] is deaf to the cries of victims and how his policies are truly harmful and hurtful.

Dordulian suggested that it will take a recall effort to help restore justice in our courts.

That recall effort is already underwaybut the legal process cannot officially begin until Mar. 6, which marks Gascons 90th day in office.
China's first nuclear power unit using Hualong One, a domestically designed third-generation nuclear reactor, has entered commercial operation on Jan. 30.

The No. 5 unit of Fujian Fuqing Nuclear Plant, marks that China has made it into the world's top rank of the third-generation nuclear technology, becoming another country that masters the technology after the U.S., France and Russia.

In nearly 20 years of research and development, the research team of Hualong One conducted a total of 54 research projects, and the reactor holds independent intellectual property rights in multiple fields. Core technologies have been tackled in reactor core design, active and passive safety, fuel, and computational analysis software.

The independent technological innovation propelled the upgrading of high-end equipment manufacturing. Hualong One has over 5,300 suppliers across the country for its more than 60,000 equipments. All core equipments, as well as 88 percent of all equipments were built by China.

Through the demonstration project of Hualong One, China has completely grasped the core technologies and experiences of building third-generation nuclear power plants. The country is now able to manufacture major equipment for 8 to 10 third-generation nuclear power plants.

According to Zhao Hao, general manager of Fujian Fuqing Nuclear Power Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of the China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC), the commercial operation of Hualong One will likely generate nearly 10 billion kWh of electricity each year, potentially reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 8.16 million tonnes and standard coal consumption by 3.12 million tonnes in annual terms. It is also an equivalent to plantation of over 70 million trees annually. The reactor has a profound significance for China to improve its energy structure, peak carbon dioxide emissions, and achieve carbon neutrality.

From being commenced in Fuqing on May 7, 2015, to the commercial operation on Jan. 30 this year, the No. 5 unit saves 20 to 30 percent of cost compared with similar projects abroad. This makes Hualong One one of the most popular third-generation reactors in the world.

Two Hualong One projects are currently under construction in Karachi, Pakistan, and Chile and the UK also expressed their interest in introducing the reactor, Zhao noted.

Based on current market situations, each Hualong One unit is able to create an output of over 200 billion yuan ($31.01 billion) and create more than 150,000 jobs in China during its designed life. Besides, each exported unit will also generate revenue of nearly 20 billion yuan in the mechanical and material industries

Hualong One is a signboard of China's equipment manufacturing, just like high-speed trains, said Xu Ligen, chairman of board of the Fujian Fuqing Nuclear Power Co., Ltd.

The most central part of a nuclear power plant is the reactor core in which a minor fault could trigger gigantic problems. "Hualong One is the world's most advanced third-generation nuclear technology, and safety is its major highlight," Zhao told People's Daily.

"We placed three super large tanks above the reactor core, each holding a thousand tonnes of water. Once the active system fails, the water will go down automatically and cool down the reactor," Zhao said. The combination of passive and active safety system has largely lowered the risk of meltdown and release of radioactive materials, he added.

Besides, the nuclear power plant is covered by a two-layer concrete "shell" with a total thickness of over 3 meters. The shell can not only lock radioactive materials inside, but also resist the impacts from large aircraft and earthquakes of 9 magnitude.
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Faith to Believe: a powerful and utterly compelling discourse on the power, importance, and world-altering impact of faith. Faith to Believe is the creation of published author, Dr. Floyd Grant, a career Airman who served over twenty-seven years with the United States Air Force and ministered to deployed personnel in overseas locations. Dr. Grant is also the author of Unlocking the Principles of the Doctrine of Christ and holds a BA and MA in biblical studies from Minnesota Graduate School of Theology as well as a doctorate of ministry degree.

Dr. Grant writes: When God gives us a promise, transformation immediately starts shaping our future through the agent of change. Although we might encounter chaos and confusion along the way and, oftentimes, we cannot fully quantify the result that we desire to achieve, know that Gods transformation process in us having faith to believe is still effectively taking place in our life to fulfill our purpose, hopes, and dreams.

Published by Christian Faith Publishing, Dr. Floyd Grants new book is a potentially life-changing examination of the importance of having faith to believe in God.

Laden with spiritual nuggets of truth that can be purposefully applied and put into daily practice, and written in easily understandable language that conveys complex themes and insights with perfect clarity, Dr. Grants book is one sure to inform, inspire, open eyes, and impact the lives of each and all of its readers in ways both positive and profound.

View a synopsis of Faith to Believe on YouTube.

Consumers can purchase Faith to Believe at traditional brick & mortar bookstores, or online at Amazon.com, Apple iTunes store, or Barnes and Noble.

For additional information or inquiries about Faith to Believe, contact the Christian Faith Publishing media department at 866-554-0919.
A flood killed at least 24 people in an illegal textile factory in a villa basement in the Moroccan city of Tangier, authorities said on Monday, adding that 10 people had been rescued.

Rescue workers recovered 24 bodies from the property and rescued 10 survivors who were taken to hospital, the MAP agency said citing local authorities. A search of the premises was continuing.

It was not immediately clear how many people had been in the building at the time, but authorities said rescue operations were continuing and an investigation into the circumstances of the incident had been launched.

Local media outlets indicated at least some of the victims may have been electrocuted as the incoming water interfered with power facilities, but there was no immediate confirmation of those reports.

Morocco has experienced heavy rains in recent weeks, after a long period of drought.

Morocco's informal labour sector represents about a fifth of non-agricultural economic activity and labourers are often prey to unsafe working conditions.

In early January, the inclement weather caused several dilapidated buildings to collapse in Casablanca, the country's economic capital, causing at least four deaths, according to local media.

Poorly maintained drainage systems often exacerbate flooding in cities.

Fifty people died in floods in 2014 caused by heavy rains in the south of Morocco.

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analysis

COVID-19 vaccine supplies are available in various parts of the world. But it's clear that distribution is not symmetrical. High-income countries have access to disproportionate quantities of limited supplies. Vaccine nationalism, stockpiling and profit-driven strategies of global pharmaceutical manufacturers have shown up global health inequities.

More than 100 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered globally to date. Only about 200,000 (0.2%) have been in Africa.

South Africa is one of the first countries in sub-Saharan Africa to procure vaccines. The country has some of the highest reported cases of COVID-19 in the region. But, despite hosting a clinical trial of the AstraZeneca vaccine, South Africa was unable to secure a fair pricing agreement.

The country procured its first delivery of the AstraZeneca vaccine from the largest vaccine manufacturer in the world, the Serum Institute of India. A million doses of the vaccine arrived at a cost levied by AstraZeneca of $5.25 per dose. This is more than double the $2.16 per dose paid by European Union countries to AstraZeneca.

It was disappointing for research participants and other citizens alike. By not leveraging South Africa's participation in clinical trials, authorities violated the well established fundamental principles of post-trial access and benefit sharing in research.

Post-trial access and benefit sharing can apply to participants in a specific trial. But they can also extend to the community in which the research was conducted.

There's no international policy guideline that specifically addresses the scope and nature of benefits on a national scale. Some may argue that the scientists who conduct clinical trials shouldn't negotiate for benefits. But we argue that in a pandemic situation, sponsors, researchers and research ethics committees have an obligation to ensure the highest scientific standards and to negotiate post-trial benefits in advance.

Access and benefit sharing

Post-trial access and benefit sharing are firmly entrenched research ethics principles. They are part of collaborative partnership, which guides the ethical conduct of research in developing countries. Collaborative partnership requires a fair distribution of tangible and intangible rewards of research among the partners.

Resentment, mistrust, and a sense of exploitation are inevitable if research participants do not benefit.

The ethics community and international documents agree in principle that individuals and communities that participate in research ought to benefit. This is especially true when the product has commercial value and the study was conducted in resource-limited countries with many healthcare challenges.

HIV research is an example. New guidance from the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS recommends that, before a trial starts:

health and research communities... should initiate a process of discussion and negotiation about how products will be made available to the country in which the products are tested if the HIV preventive intervention is efficacious.

Sponsors of vaccine trials should at least give the placebo group whatever is proven to work. Ideally, a plan of wider access to the population at risk should be negotiated. One can argue that this obligation is greatest when it's the only intervention that exists and lives depend on it. Subsidised access for host communities could reduce inequalities between countries and ensure fairness in the research process. Access to HIV treatment in Africa is an example of where this has been successfully negotiated.

Ordinarily, post-trial access can be delayed by local product registration. It can take around five years to have a medical product or device registered. In contrast, emergency use authorisation of COVID-19 vaccines has made products available much sooner - weeks to months after trial completion. This increases the possibility of successfully negotiating post-trial access for participants, communities and, in a pandemic, even for countries.

Collective responsibility

Given the complexity of vaccine procurement, this responsibility must be collective. It falls on global health institutions, national governments, researchers, research ethics committees and even research participants.

Some researchers, while responsible for ensuring the highest level of scientific integrity, seem to have drawn a false dichotomy between their scientific obligations and their ethical responsibilities to their study participants, communities and country. They suggest negotiating for post-trial access to vaccines could be seen as a conflict of interest or an unfair inducement. But we don't agree.

In our view, negotiating for fair treatment before a study begins is ethically necessary.

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The International Conference for the Harmonisation of Good Clinical Practice guidelines regulate the conduct of clinical trials globally. These guidelines require researchers to be responsible for maintaining the highest levels of scientific research and ethical values. One of these values is justice - which means that those who bear the burden of research must benefit.

These guidelines ensure that the science is robust while also paying necessary attention to the ethics. Therefore negotiating for access cannot be viewed as a perverse incentive.

Research ethics committees have a duty during pandemics to insist on a benefit sharing plan for urgent and important research, especially for clinical trials conducted in the public interest.

No one is safe from COVID-19 until everyone is safe. The world is in this together and low- and middle-income countries should not be left behind. It is hoped that as research continues with the Johnson and Johnson vaccine in South Africa, fair pricing agreements have already been negotiated.

Keymanthri Moodley, Distinguished Professor in the Department of Medicine and Director, The Centre for Medical Ethics & Law, Stellenbosch University and Theresa Rossouw, Professor , University of Pretoria
The outgoing Australian High Commissioner to Nigeria, Claire Ireland, speaks in this interview with PREMIUM TIMES Publisher Dapo Olorunyomi, Taiwo Hassan Adebayo, Busayo Agbola and Adebimpe Abodunde on how Nigeria can attract big multinational corporations into its mining sector, and other issues.

Excerpts:

PT: What are your impressions about this country, which you now have to leave?

High Commissioner: I have only been here for 18 months, which is a lot shorter than I had intended. But I think as many of us have been affected by the COVID-19 crisis, I have been too. Very sadly, my family hasnt been with me and I have three young children; 15, 13 and 9. Theyre not here at the moment and so now, with the COVID crisis, you have to do quarantine every time you travel, so I cant see them as much as I could before. So it is with a very heavy heart that I made the decision to leave the posting early so that I could be with my family.

I work for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in Australia and over the last five years, they have had a really strong commitment to women leadership and to supporting women to take more leadership roles and to be much more engaged across the agencies. We set a target about four or five years ago to have 40 per cent of ambassadors to be female by 2020.

At the time they made that target, it was only 25 per cent of Australian ambassadors around the world that were female and so in a very short period of time theyve managed to achieve that target and Im definitely one of those people who have benefited from that. I was very well supported to take on this role to come here, and when I found, as a woman in a leadership role, that I was faced with this challenge of my family and my career, I was given a huge amount of support by Canberra to step down.

I havent been penalised at all, theyve given me some time out to stay with my family so I can reconnect with them, having been separated for almost nine months now. And so theyve really supported me to do that and given me the time off. And then I will be welcomed back into the department. Theyre very keen for me to carry on and take further roles in Africa down the line. So whilst Im very sad to be leaving here, Im also very proud of the Australian government for its commitment to women leadership and it has enabled me to make what has been a very tough decision in a positive way with a huge amount of support.

The Australian government really does prioritise Nigeria as a country. So, even though Im leaving, they have already identified someone to replace me. They have gone through the process very quickly, weve submitted all the necessary paperwork to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and, hopefully, my replacement will be here very soon so we wont have a big gap between me and the next person. And I think thats really indicative of the commitment that the Australian government has to filling the role.

PT: With regards to Nigeria, what are the Australian foreign policy goals?

High Commissioner: I arrived at a time when we were going through change. We had moved to our current embassy location and we had bought a new piece of land, which is where we are today. And there was a commitment to invest in building a new high commission premises and that really demonstrated our longevity that we saw in terms of our relationship here in Nigeria and the region more broadly.

We have invested a significant amount of money in purchasing this piece of land and we have just completed the first phase of this building. There will be another phase to do another part to this building. So were in this transition of scaling our presence up. But in so doing, we had to scale down our people on the ground at that moment, and so a lot of focus came on to getting the High Commission up and running and so there was less focus at that time on our policy work.

Once we got the embassy back up and running in December last year, one of the first things we did was to have one of our senior official talks with the government of Nigeria. It had been eight years since we had our last senior official talks.

But the team and I really prioritised that as a first priority for us to be able to answer that very question that you just asked me. What are our priorities here, where are we focused, what are we going to do?

So we had the senior official talks. We had a very senior representative come from the Australian government, with the Nigerian High Commissioner who came from Canberra, and we had the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. And I think during those talks, we really acknowledged that we have a modest but a focused engagement here in Nigeria.

While we dont have a huge amount of investment or two-way trade, we have a very long historical relationship that dates back to the 1960s. Just before Nigeria had its independence, the Australian government had a representative here who became the High Commissioner as soon as Nigeria got its independence. And so for the last 60 years, we have had a very enduring relationship built in the Commonwealth.

But perhaps at this moment in time, there wasnt a very deep trade relationship particularly or a very deep political relationship. So the senior official talk was a chance to really regroup and say where our priorities are.

Following the senior official talks, what the team and I have done is to develop an internal think-piece to guide us on where our priorities are for the next five years. We wanted to make sure the outcome of the senior official talks was really embedded in our engagement and we identified four main areas where we are going to work. The first area is our economic relationship. Like I said, we dont have a big two-way trade between our countries. Australia buys oil from Nigeria and we used to sell wheat but it is not (in) huge numbers.

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What we do have, though, is a big intellectual investment in the mining sector. Since 2003, the Australian government has been working very closely with the Nigerian government to support the development of the mining sector, and that was really starting from the basics, in terms of getting the mining legislation in place. The legislation that is in place in Nigeria now is very similar and mirrored on the mining legislation in place in West Australia, for example.

And so weve shared intellectual knowledge and capability of our own experience of 150 years in the mining sector to make sure weve enabled Nigeria the opportunity to develop its mining sector and get that legal framework in place, which is really critical and a foundation for it. So thats happened and the sector is developing.

There is still a lot for the sector to develop in terms of being able to be competitive, compared to the rest of West Africa like Ghana, Senegal, whove got much further advanced mining sectors. But what Nigeria is doing, and it has had support from the World Bank through a project called Mcdyver, is in terms of mapping and geology.

For example, to be enabled to get mining leases transparently and for the private sector to purchase, they need to know whats in the ground, they need to have the geological data and that needs to be open and transparently available. Thats what the mining industry is working on and the Mcdyver project has been helping them to do.

Australia has been very much supporting that in the background, sharing our technology, experience and skills. We have a couple of Australian mining companies here working on the ground to develop projects and have mining leases. And so theyre very much looking forward to the day when they can begin extracting minerals. For the moment, theyre not there yet, theyre still taking their analysis before getting to that point.

I think whats exciting when I talk to them is we are really excited that if Nigeria is able to get an internationally recognised company to have a successful mining operation in the ground. It would really demonstrate to the rest of the world the transparency and the good systems because Australian companies, they have to operate with good environmental due diligence, good social due diligence. If all those things are in place and you have an international company like an Australian company in place, you know then you have world-class standard.

At the moment Nigeria has a Canadian company, Thor, whos doing some gold mining and that has been the first one to really hit off. I keep my fingers crossed and hope that Australia could be the next country to have a successful relationship and partnership with Nigeria in terms of the mining sector.

And I think, what I said to the mining minister, that is what would really show to the rest of the world that Nigeria is open for business and is a credible country to do business in when it comes to the mining sector. We are not there yet but we are getting close and there is a lot of people working very hard to make that happen. Australia will stay fully engaged in that sector and fully supporting, where we can.

And then, just recently, we had a very successful engagement with Premium Times itself, in terms of the women in mining monograph that was done. And I think going back to my earlier point on women in leadership, and from my own experience with women engaging in the mining sector, we see that also as critical. So to be able to work on those areas is really the whole package when it comes to supporting the mining sector.

So mining is probably the biggest area that were engaged in. The other main area is the education sector. We have had over the years something called the Australian Awards. The Australian government had a scholarship programme for Nigerians to study in Australia. But at the moment, with the COVID crisis, our borders are closed and so weve had to put a pause on that programme. I know it is a challenge for international students right now.

But in Australia, our universities are world-class and it is a big destination for international students in the world. I really hope that, once the COVID crisis is over and people are able to travel again, that we would be in that situation where we would be able to promote the education sector in Australia. Over the last five years, we have seen the number of Nigerian students who are studying in Australia has gone up quite a lot. It is still not a lot of people, it is still only around 3,000. But a few years ago, that was only 500 students.

And I think there is that recognition that Australia is a real gateway to South-east Asia and the Pacific. So when you come to study in Australia, its not just a fantastic Australian education youre getting, its also a gateway to networks, to other students. Particularly, there are Chinese students, Pacific students studying in our universities. And so those networks are formed and enable Nigerians to broaden their own networks into an area that perhaps they havent historically had those relationships. So the mining and the education are really, from a sectoral perspective, the areas that we are actively engaged in.

Agriculture is an area that we feel is, perhaps, underexplored. But there is raw potential, given the similarities in our climates. At the moment, we are not doing a huge amount in that area. Were doing some light exchange in the dairy sector but we are not doing a huge amount. Like I said, our analysis and research show that given the similarity in climate, given that Nigeria wants to become more productive in its own country, and that we have the technology and capabilities that could be worth sharing, I think over the next five years, I think wed like to explore that more. But our priorities remain the mining sector and the education sector.

PT: Is there something you are doing regarding supporting Nigeria to develop local capacity in the education sector, especially basic education?

High Commissioner: Our relationship is an economic partnership, so we dont have a bilateral aid programme in Nigeria. We do give aid financing but through the multilaterals. I am very conscious that we give our bilateral aid assistance to the Pacific and Asian Pacific countries who are our neighbours. It is the Europeans, Americans who give a lot of bilateral aid assistance here in Africa and in Nigeria particularly.

To answer your question, the last thing we think Nigeria needs is Australia to come here with another basic education project. So we give our money to the multilaterals and we trust the multi-laterals to prioritise investment in this country. For example, we put a lot of money into UNICEF who work here, we put a lot of money into UNDP and the World Bank. We are believers in the multi-lateral system and the global rules-based system, and so we feel the better way to get aid investment to support basic education, like youre talking about, is through the experts like the World Bank and the UN system. That is how our money comes through for that. We dont have any separate bilateral programmes, to answer your question directly.

PT: When you started, you mentioned the historic relationship between Nigeria and Australia. How do you assess the current relationship, with regards to shared commitment to international public good like climate change and fighting terrorism?

High Commissioner: This is something I have really been thinking about during my time here. Because when you come here as a high commissioner, youre here to promote the relationship between two countries and you want to see a really strong bilateral relationship. And one thing I have really tried to understand is, where is the added value in that relationship and what can we bring?

And I really have landed back to that point, multilateralism. Those kind of shared values is something we really have in common. Back in 1960 when our relationship first started, it was very much off Nigeria being a member of the Commonwealth and we were members of the Commonwealth, so that partnership organisation brought us together. And that was the basis of our relationship then.

I think the distance between the two countries makes a bilateral relationship very different to what you would have with a European country. So it is where can we really add that value?

So for example, right now, Nigeria and Australia are both in the Human Rights Council. We are working in the UN on the human rights council, both of us pushing for those issues to become mainstream and institutionalised in our partner countries. And I think where our added value comes, and where our relationship with Nigeria particularly comes, is to work on those shared values. The global dynamics are changing and the power dynamics are changing and understandably for Australia, weve really focused on our backyard in terms of the Asian Pacific, and thats our priority in terms of our neighbours.

And I hear a very similar story when I hear the Nigerian Foreign Minister talk about your background in terms of the ECOWAS community. So I think were really like-minded in our approach. While we have different focus areas, the approach to focus in our immediate neighbours and surrounding. For us, it is the Pacific, Asian Pacific, the Asean community. For us, were part and parcel of that. When I hear Nigeria talk about its foreign policy, it is about its immediate neighbours Cameroon or Benin, then the Chad Basin, then the ECOWAS and the African Union.

So our approach is actually very similar and I think what is interesting is where we can help potentially bring the two together. The more that we can help share in the Asian Pacific whats happening, the more we can learn from Nigeria about whats happening in Africa. And it is at that higher level where I think theres a real potential for working together, and it is those shared values like human rights and climate change. In the Commonwealth still we have those forums where we can work together.

PT: Do you have any running programme with Nigeria on climate change?

High Commissioner: No, I dont think we do.

PT: You should, because Nigeria is considerably affected by the climate change. You are aware of the farmers and herdsmen crisis and it has a link with climate change.

High Commissioner: Absolutely. When I presented my credentials to President (Muhammadu) Buhari, one thing he spoke to me about was the climate change issue and the Lake Chad Basin. And he was really concerned about it. We did talk about the fact that, while we dont have a programme particularly between the two countries, we have a lot of shared experience.

So obviously in Australia you know our climate is very harsh. Fires. Drought is also something weve struggled with. And the Murray-Darling basin is a big trans-boundary water resource that has really suffered over the years of drought. Our water sources have dried up and weve had to work together collectively across states to be able to reinvigorate the climate and support farmers who depend on the water resource for it.

So we have a lot of experience that we can share and thats something we are very committed to. And obviously, we will be at the Cup 21 in Glasgow. It is disappointing that it wont be this year and had to be postponed till next year. But Australia stands firmly committed to that agenda. So again, working at the multi-lateral level and we would be working with Nigeria. But on a bilateral level, we dont have a programme.

PT: How optimistic are you that the support you have given Nigeria to develop this legal framework in the mining sector will translate to something that will encourage companies from your country to operate here? And how optimistic are you about Nigerias business environment to encourage investment from abroad?

High Commissioner: My background, before I got into the foreign policy side, I worked in aid for 25 years and Im very passionate about it. But Im also very passionate about the fact that you have just touched on, that you actually need a trade relationship and trade is a really important part of it.

To get to sustainable economic development, I am a firm believer that we need to move away from lots of small-scale projects and we need to focus on positive change and institutionalised change. I am often having debates with my colleagues who work on the aid programme here about when that kind of mining company finally takes off that will be potentially 100-150 year mine? A really long duration in terms of economic engagement, which will in turn employ up to 5000 people down the value chain for a sustained number of years. And how much more transformation that will be to the economy than another project which perhaps doesnt have that sustainability?

So Im a real believer that you need to get that proper sort of engagement and you need to have that trade to be able to sustain the economy. But I do believe, (my background is in environmental management), that you have to do it sustainably, so environmentally sustainable development is critical.

So whilst Im passionate about the mining sector, it has to be done right, it has to be done with the communitys engagement, it has to be done in a way which isnt going to negatively impact the environment. So if you get that all right, I really believe that is much more beneficial long-term for a countrys development than small aid projects which potentially dont have the sustainability.

To answer the second part of your question, how optimistic am I about that happening anytime soon? I think Ive realised that its going to take longer than I imagined when I first arrived. I would love to be leaving here to say that the Australian Mining Company is now at the extraction stage. But it is not and there are still these roadblocks that the companies come across. And I think what we have here is that the Australian government kind of convey what those policies are.

Why is it that the international company isnt yet at the extraction stage? One of the things that we have discovered with our private sector companies is the alignment of community development agreements with the mining leases. That presents a sort of challenge. Getting access to information on the geology has been a challenge. And so, I think thats where we can bring the conversation to the mining minister, about what those challenges are which are preventing the companies to be exploring or further extracting at the moment.

So its not happening yet. I think there are still a few hurdles to get through. But we are certainly passionate and will advocate to try and make it happen. We certainly see the potential. There are a lot of phenomenal resources here in Nigeria to make it happen but it is going to take sustained commitment by the Nigerian government to make it a reality.

PT: Does Australia have any local laws that prevent multi-nationals from using products produced by children or from using children in their factories or mines?

High Commissioner: Yes we do actually. There are a couple of things to note here. One, we have members signed up to the EITI, Extraction Industry Transparency Initiative. Australia is committed to that and that is part of the process, you know, having that transparency out there. Linked to that is also another initiative called the Voluntary Principles Initiative (VPI) and thats about making sure companies and governments sign up to exactly what youre saying, that commitment to social due diligence, environmental due diligence.

Australia was taking on the chair of the VPI this year and Nigeria is also a member of that, engaged in that. And that was something we were hoping to really take forward this year but perhaps got a bit slowed down because of the COVID crisis.

But certainly, this is where I mean we are real advocates of free trade system, a global laws-based system. And WTO, as you know, is a system we are really passionate about. We want to see a real trading system with the rules in place that we all kind of follow and commit to. So we really do it into those values and ensuring that environmental standards and social standards are committed to. So yeah, weve signed up to those agreements, we advocate for those agreements in the UN, we advocate for them in the WTO and we certainly implement them in our own country.

PT: What priorities does Australia have for Africa?

High Commissioner: Can I answer that in two ways, personally and professionally?

I first worked in Africa, in Kenya in 1995, so Ive worked in Africa for a number of years. I have lived in Kenya, I have lived in Uganda, I have lived in South Africa, I have worked across most of Sub-Saharan Africa. But it was the first time I have lived and worked in a West African country, and its been such a different experience to my East African experience. But it is one I have really loved. It is so different to any country in Africa that I have worked in before.

Whilst there were a lot of frustrations, as with any country, it is a country that really gets under your skin in a positive way. I think I feel for Nigeria because as soon as you say the word, Nigeria, people have this negative impression of Nigeria. But when you get here, and you live and work here, your mind is opened up in the most incredible way.

The potential for Nigeria is phenomenal. The education of so many Nigerians is superior, I often feel uneducated and under-qualified when I am talking to people like you. People have studied in Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge. Nigerians value education in a way which I have seen in no other country and are really so well educated, so the potential is phenomenal.

I see lots of frustrations, both from my own day to day experiences and from fellow Nigerians who are frustrated. But also, what I see is a phenomenal commitment. Both from Nigerians in Nigeria and also the diaspora, the commitment to this country is so inspirational and so motivating.

To answer the second part of your question, I think Australia, were honest about our relationship. It is not huge, but it is a relationship we are committed to. And like I said, we have invested in this new high commission residence and we see ourselves here for the long term. We are commitment in terms of our engagement on a global platform and in the UN, in the Commonwealth, and we see the relationship as one we would want to continue at that kind of global, multi-lateral level.

I hope that in 5-10 years time I come back and I see the Australian Mining Company in the ground and I meet a lot more Nigerians who have studied in Australia. If I come back in 5-10 years time, that would be what success looks like to me. I will leave here an absolute advocate for Nigeria and I will tell people a positive story about the potential of Nigeria and particularly the youth of Nigeria.

PT: Do you have any sleepless nights over the conduct of Nigerians in your country?

High Commissioner: I know that today, there was a petition of about 200,000 people in the UK to have an investigation and a parliamentary debate about what happened in Lekki (tollgate shooting). So it is fascinating to see you have that many Nigerians represented in the UK that can have that kind of positive impact on government.

To answer that question, we dont have a huge diaspora in Australia. Its only about 8,000 Nigerians who are registered in Australia. But what you do have are 8,000 really well-educated Nigerians. They are doctors, professors, legal practitioners. They are a very smart, well-educated diaspora who do engage and engage regularly with me.

So what we try to do as the High Commission here and also as the diaspora back in Australia is to help promote a more positive image of Africa back in Australia. Theres an African music festival that a Nigerian organises in Melbourne each year and we try to sort of promote that positive image.

But just like youve had Nigerian citizens in the UK raise concerns over the EndSARS, youve had in Australia. And Im aware that the Nigerian diaspora in Australia have written to the prime minister with their concerns about what is happening. I think it is incredible to see that breadth of support for what is happening in Nigeria by the diaspora in other countries.

I dont think I have quite as big a headache as my counterparts in America or in the UK. But Nigerians are really vocal and theyre really committed to their country and thats what I have seen. Even in Australia, we see that.
The WHO experts advice is used by health care officials worldwide, but doesnt amount to a green light for the United Nations and its partners to ship the vaccine to countries that have signed up to receive the shots through a global initiative. That approval could come after separate WHO group meetings on Friday and Monday to assess whether an emergency-use listing for the AstraZeneca vaccine is warranted.
GODFREY  Discussion at Tuesdays Lewis and Clark Community College board meeting focused on buildings it owns at 401 and 409 Brown Ave. in Edwardsville, that are adjacent to the the colleges C N.O. Nelson Campus.

L&C Vice President Lori Artis said 401 Brown Ave. was purchased in 2005 and 409 Brown Ave. was bought in 2008. Artis said she believed that, at the time, the purpose of purchasing the properties was to eliminate any neighbor or residential issues.
Oracle has expanded its hybrid cloud portfolio with Oracle Roving Edge Infrastructure, a new offering that brings core infrastructure services to the edge with Roving Edge Devices (REDs)  ruggedized, portable, scalable server nodes. Using Oracle Roving Edge Infrastructure, organizations can run cloud workloads wherever they need them, even in the worlds most remote locations. Whether it is in the back of a plane, a polar observatory, or an oil tanker in the mid-Atlantic, the power of Oracle Cloud is always accessible with Oracle Roving Edge Infrastructure.

The new service is part of Oracles comprehensive hybrid cloud portfolio, which provides customers with more flexibility and control over their cloud deployments than other vendors. Global customers across financial services, public sector, healthcare, logistics, and communications industries are using Oracles hybrid cloud solutions to support their cloud transformations without the trade-offs in scale, data sovereignty, and control that they have had to make in the past.

Customers want choice when it comes to running workloads in the cloud. Each customer has different requirements based on data sovereignty, scale, or wanting the full experience of a public cloud on-premises with all of Oracles cloud services. Oracle Roving Edge Infrastructure is the latest example, delivering core infrastructure services to remote locations, said Clay Magouyrk, executive vice president, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Oracles hybrid cloud portfolio essentially delivers a cloud region wherever and however a customer needs it.

Only Oracle offers a comprehensive cloud portfolio that meets customers where they are in their cloud transformation. In addition to its public cloud offerings, which include 29 Oracle Cloud regions, Oracle Government Cloud, and six global Oracle-Microsoft Azure Interconnect regions, Oracle offers the most complete support for hybrid cloud strategies. Services include Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer, Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer, Oracle VMware Cloud Solution, and now Oracle Roving Edge Infrastructure. Together, these solutions provide customers with flexibility of location and a high degree of customer control so customers can run an identical set of Oracle Cloud services in their datacenters, run core cloud services entirely disconnected from the internet, and minimize dependencies on the public cloud.

With Oracle Roving Edge Infrastructure, Oracle yet again broadens its hybrid cloud portfolio by giving customers a taste of its public cloud wherever they may need it, said Sriram Subramanian, Research Director, IDC. Oracle designed its cloud infrastructure portfolio to make it as easy as possible for customers to move workloads to the cloud. Oracle Roving Edge, along with other offerings of the Oracle Cloud portfolio, gives customers multiple deployment and control options to run their most important workloads.

Oracles Comprehensive Hybrid Cloud Portfolio

Oracle Roving Edge Infrastructure Accelerates Cloud Workloads Outside the Bounds of Data Centers

Oracle Roving Edge Infrastructure delivers core infrastructure services, platform software, enterprise grade security, and applications to the edge and disconnected locations with Roving Edge Devices, ruggedized, portable, scalable server nodes. It enables customers to operate cloud applications and workloads in the field, including machine learning inference, real-time data integration and replication, augmented analytics, and query-intensive data warehouses. In addition, it delivers cloud computing and storage services at the edge of networks for government and enterprise organizations, enabling low-latency processing closer to the point of data generation and ingestion, which provides timely insights into data.

Oracle Roving Edge Infrastructure is a fully mobile, connection-independent extension of customers Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) tenancy with a similar interface and workflow to provide a consistent, unified experience. An Oracle RED device is equipped with high-performance hardware including 40 OCPUs, an NVIDIA T4 Tensor Core GPU, 512 GB RAM, and 61 TB of storage, and can be clustered into groups of 5 to 15 nodes in a single cluster, starting at $160 per node per day.

Oracle Dedicated Region Provides All Capabilities of a Public Cloud Region Delivered On-Premises

Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer is the industrys first fully-managed cloud region that brings all of Oracles second-generation cloud services, including Oracle Autonomous Database and Cloud applications, to customer datacenters and starts at only $500K a month. Enterprises get the exact same complete set of modern cloud services, APIs, industry-leading SLAs, superior price-performance, and highest levels of security available from Oracles public cloud regions in their own datacenters. It is ideal for highly regulated or security-focused businesses needing to meet demanding latency and data residency requirements, reduce operational costs, and modernize legacy applications. Since its introduction, 12 new services have been added to the Dedicated Region portfolio, including Autonomous JSON Database, MySQL with Heatwave, and Logging Analytics.

Australian Data Centres (ADC) is the latest organization to turn to Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer to provide sovereign managed cloud services to the Australian Federal Government and other entities in the Australian Capital Territory. The Australian Government wants to dramatically expand its cloud-based capabilities, and ADC is committed to supporting that growth with the proper platform.

We are committed to building capacity to provide services to the government by Australian providers to assure both the security and reliability of the supply chain, said Rob Kelly, Managing Director, Australian Data Centres. This is a major step toward enabling more choice for government to access world-leading cloud services, powered and protected by a 100 percent Australian sovereign company, focused on connectivity, security, and simplified deployment. Critically, it addresses data sovereignty, security, and performance attributes required to accelerate Governments shift to the cloud services.

Another example of an organization using Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer is Nomura Research Institute (NRI), Ltd., the largest consulting firm and IT solutions provider in Japan.

We have finished deploying Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer in our data center, and will next migrate our SaaS applications for the financial industry from on-premises to Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer. With Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer, weve been able to achieve the same level or even better performance than our existing on-premises system while continuing to maintain the high level of availability we need, said Tomoshiro Takemoto, Senior Corporate Managing Director, NRI. We look forward to launching our services to customers, as well as our ongoing relationship with Oracle to operate and maintain this Dedicated Region and continuing to drive our digital transformation together.

Oracles Unique Approach to VMware

Customers also want flexibility of location and control for their VMware workloads. Oracles unique approach to VMware enables customers to maintain a high level of control while increasing their scalability and lowering costs.

Oracle Cloud VMware Solution (OCVS) provides a dedicated, cloud-native VMware-based environment that enables enterprises to quickly and easily move their production VMware workloads to OCI using familiar VMware tools. The solution provides customers with the identical experience in the cloud as in on-premises data centers and seamlessly integrates with Oracles second-generation cloud infrastructure, including Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer deployments. With OCVS, customers have complete access and control of their VMware environment, including root access, so they fully control the cluster, manage it, and even choose when, or whether, to upgrade elements of the stack. It provides the performance, control, and familiarity of an on-premises VMware cluster, while automating the provisioning and scaling of the infrastructure. Since its introduction, OCVS has expanded scaling to a 64-node cluster (3,328 cores, 49 TB of RAM, and 3.2 PB of NVMe SSD) and offers preview support of VMware 7 with Tanzu.

Today, Oracle also announced that its OCVS has obtained Authority to Operate (ATO) at the High impact level from the FedRAMP Joint Authorization Board. With this accreditation, US government customers can now operate VMware Software Defined Data Centers in Oracle Cloud to manage and run critical applications and workloads. This accreditation gives government customers the flexibility to build and manage VMware environments in Oracle Cloud, with the peace-of-mind of industry-leading security.
The new fried chicken sandwich offers Pollo Campero's storied fried chicken recipe in a sandwich for the first time. The sandwich was carefully crafted by the Pollo Campero team to balance the unmistakable flavor of its fried chicken with an all-new buttery brioche bun and thick, sweet pickles. For those looking for a lighter option, the brand also offers the sandwich featuring its grilled chicken, prepared with Campero's proprietary seasonings.

"A lot of quick-service restaurants are jumping on the chicken sandwich bandwagon, but at Pollo Campero, we've been experts at making fresh, delicious, flavorful chicken meals since 1971," said Campero USA Director of Marketing Federico Valiente. "Our chicken sandwich offers a new way to enjoy our famous fried or grilled chicken recipes for those who are looking for flavorful, juicy perfection on a bun."

The company tested the new sandwich extensively to develop the winning recipe. The Pollo Campero team wanted the sandwich to have a simple build with just the right combination of flavors. They were exhaustive and meticulous with ingredient selection, going through several iterations and many rounds of consumer testing before introducing it nationwide.

"The new sandwich showcases the passion, craft and real flavor Campero is known for," said Valiente.

Available at all U.S. Pollo Campero locations, the new sandwich can be paired with any one of Campero's nine unique sides and fresh drinks.

About Pollo Campero

Founded in Guatemala in 1971, Pollo Campero is a fast service chicken restaurant brand specializing in uniquely flavorful chicken and a wholesome menu offering individual and family meals. Using family recipes passed down from generation to generation, Pollo Campero offers tender, juicy, hand-breaded fried chicken and citrus flavor-infused grilled chicken that is always fresh and hand-prepared daily. Since its beginnings as a tiny, family-owned restaurant, Pollo Campero has grown to more than 350 restaurants around the world. To learn more about Pollo Campero, visit us.campero.com and follow the flavor on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Media Contact:

Callie Haddox or Kim Cooper

[email protected] or [email protected]

817-329-3257

SOURCE Pollo Campero

Related Links

http://us.campero.com


The spread of COVID-19 in Hale County is starting to show signs of slowing down.

The latest available data from the Plainview/Hale County Health Department shows a total of 72 new cases of COVID-19 were reported across the county between Feb. 2 to Feb. 8. It marks the second week of just a double-digit increase compared to triple-digit weeks reported in January and December.

Efforts are ramping up across the state to provide vaccines to those who are eligible as they become available. The Health Department applied for an allotment of vaccines back in January and received its shipment of doses this week prompting the city and county to host a large appointment-only clinic today (Wednesday).

City Manager Jeffrey Snyder told the Herald this week that the city hopes to continue hosting these clinics when possible pending available supplies.

Imelda Garcia, associate commissioner for laboratory and infectious disease services for the Texas Department of State Health Services and chair of the states Expert Vaccine Allocation Panel, told reporters on last week that the team is doing its best to spread the states allocated doses to the areas that need them.

She noted that the state is focused right now on vaccinating people who are 65 years old or older and those who are 18 or over with an underlying health condition that puts them more at risk for severe effects from COVID-19. There are no plans to move on to another distribution phase any time soon, though the state is working to announce the designation of another vaccine distribution hub.

The latest data available through DSHS shows an estimated 913,477 Texans in the 65 and older age group have been vaccinated. Thats approximately one in four Texans in that age group.

The states vaccine dashboard (accessible on the DSHS website) shows 2,386 of the 25,476 people in Hale County who are 16 and older have received one dose of either the Moderna or the Pfizer vaccinations. A total of 1,010 people have been fully vaccinated.

During a Plainview City Council work session last week, Councilwoman Susan Blackerby said the availability of the vaccine doesnt mean people should stop abiding by the CDCs safety recommendations.

I just wanted to reiterate to the public that even though we are starting to vaccinate, this could be a crucial situation, she said. Our numbers are definitely going down.

There also havent been any holidays, she added, which generally create significant increases in the local COVID-19 numbers.

The breakdown of new cases reported last week is as follows:

Plainview: 59 new cases; 4,847 total cases

Petersburg: 6 new cases; 152 total cases

Abernathy: 5 new cases; 458 total cases

Hale Center: 2 new cases; 463 total cases

No new cases were reported in Edmonson or in Cotton Center, which have both had a total of 24 reported cases since March 2020.

Many of the new cases were reported in the 21-40 age group (27 new cases) and in the 41-60 age group (23 new cases). Fourteen new cases were reported among those 61 or older and six were reported among those 20 years old or younger.

Almost every Hale County community experienced an increase in the number of reported recoveries. That breakdown is as follows:

Plainview: 58 new recoveries; 4,650 total recoveries

Abernathy: 15 new recoveries; 449 total recoveries

Hale Center: 5 new recoveries; 449 total recoveries

Petersburg: 4 new recoveries; 143 total recoveries

Cotton Center: 2 new recoveries: 24 total recoveries

There have been a total of 23 recoveries reported in Edmonson since March 2020, though none were reported within the last week.

The data also shows two new deaths were reported in Hale Center last week. The individuals include a man and a woman, both 61 years old or older.

Since March 2020, there have been a total of 133 deaths reported across the county.

As of Monday afternoon, there were 96 active cases of COVID-19 across Hale County. There were 81 cases in Plainview, seven in Abernathy, six in Petersburg and three in Hale Center.

Local leaders continue to encourage citizens to practice social distancing, wear masks in public and wash your hands frequently.




By Woo Tae-hee







It has been three weeks since the Biden administration took office. The election-period tumult did not dissipate after the results came out. On Jan. 6, the two chambers were about to formalize Joe Biden's victory, when Congress was stormed by Trump followers unwilling to admit defeat.







Woo Tae-hee, executive vice chairman of Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry (KCCI)





This was the first time in 206 years that Capitol Hill suffered an attack, after British troops marched on Washington, D.C., in August 1814 and set fire to multiple government facilities including the Capitol building.







Donald Trump belatedly promised a peaceful transfer of power, but the House delivered its article of impeachment against him for the second time, setting the stage for a Senate trial set to begin in the week of Feb. 8. Donald Trump will thus be remembered as the first president in U.S. history to be impeached after leaving office.







Even in the shaky aftermath of the election, the Biden administration has been moving steadily to implement his campaign promises since his victory was certified. Among Biden's picks for his White House team and Cabinet, 12 out of 26 are women. With Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo as commerce secretary, and former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm as energy secretary, women are heading key economy-related departments of the new government.







An especially noteworthy nomination is that of Taiwanese American Katherine Tai as U.S. trade representative. The chief trade lawyer for the House Ways and Means Committee will be leading the new government's negotiations with China. She is the first Asian American woman to be nominated in this position. Fluent in Mandarin and well-versed in trade, Tai is expected to carry out the Biden administration's hardline policies towards China.







The U.S. now has a new leader, but its trade policy will probably remain unchanged in two aspects. The first element is China-bashing. Donald Trump's tough stance on China is his only policy that obtained bipartisan support from lawmakers, as well as from businesses and workers alike. The Democratic Party removed the "One China" language on its 2016 platform, and President Biden stated he would adopt a zero-tolerance approach towards China's unfair trade practices such as illegal subsidies, currency manipulation, cyber theft and intellectual property rights violation.







The second element is its "America first" approach. On Jan. 25, President Biden signed an executive order strengthening "Buy American" provisions, prioritizing the purchase of U.S.-made goods in public infrastructure projects. During the campaign, he had also called for a $400 billion, four-year increase in government purchasing of U.S.-made products and services. While he blamed Donald Trump's high-tariff policy for China's retaliation, ultimately harming American farmers and consumers, Biden also revealed his intention to maintain Section 301 and Section 232 tariffs, heralding a continuation of protectionist trade policies.







In other areas, however, President Biden is expected to undo most of Donald Trump's legacy. Whereas the latter leveraged bilateral negotiations to maximize benefits for the U.S., Biden will strive to restore the multilateral world order, respect international norms, strengthen ties with allies, reform the WTO and rejoin the CPTPP, among others.







Environmental protection will become even more crucial in the Biden era. Hours after being sworn in, President Biden signed an executive order reentering the U.S. into the Paris climate accord. The U.S. government will also dedicate $2 trillion in the next four years to a clean-energy transition and infrastructure building. If the U.S. starts implementing the carbon border tax by 2025, new trade tensions could arise with China, the world's greatest carbon emitter.







For Biden's supporters, his victory means a happy return to the respect for diversity in America. However it might not be the same for Korea. Free trade has led to increased international transactions and is expected to benefit Korea's trade balance, but the Biden administration will likely be as demanding as Donald Trump with regards to rebuilding the multilateral world order, WTO reform and response to climate change.







Korea has shown its potential as a global leader in the face of the current pandemic. Hopefully, it will be as well-prepared for a successful collaboration with the Biden administration.











The writer is executive vice chairman of Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry (KCCI).
Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-10 06:19:55|Editor: huaxia

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SAO PAULO, Feb. 9 (Xinhua) -- Brazil, the world's leading coffee producer and exporter, exported 3,147,222 60-kilogram sacks of coffee in January this year, down 9.4 percent compared to the same month last year (3,474,252 sacks), the Coffee Exporters Council (Cecafe) said Tuesday.

The drop follows record coffee exports in 2020.

According to a report released in Sao Paulo by the trade group, billing in the national currency (Brazilian real) increased 10.2 percent compared to January 2020 as a result of the real's devaluation against the U.S. dollar.

"We had good results in January, with an increase in billing in reals," Cecafe's president, Nicolas Rueda, said.

Taking into account the harvest period between July 2020 and January 2021, the first month of this year registered an increase of 17.2 percent compared to the same period of the previous harvest, said Rueda.

According to the report, January foreign sales were lower than the 4,388,120 60-kilo bags shipped in December.

The main destination markets for Brazilian coffee were the United States, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Japan, Colombia, Russia, Turkey, France and Canada. Enditem


Plc CEO Simon Thomson has said he expects to meet Finance Minister next week in an attempt to get India to swiftly' honour a $1.4 billion tax verdict.

Last month, the Edinburg-based firm had written to the government saying it would be forced to seize Indian government assets if New Delhi fails to pay it $1.4 billion after losing a bitter dispute over retrospective taxes.

" CEO Simon Thomson is looking forward to meeting the Government of India Finance Minister in Delhi next week," the company tweeted with a video of the chief executive urging a swift honour of the tax verdict.

An international tribunal had in December unanimously ruled that India violated its obligations under the UK-India Bilateral Investment Treaty in 2014, when the income tax department slapped a Rs 10,247 crore tax assessment using legislation that gave it powers to levy taxes retrospectively.

"The arbitration is now finalised and the award has been given and we would request along with others, that the Indian government moves swiftly to adhere to the award that has been given," Thomson said in the video address.

This, he said, was important to Cairn's shareholders, "who are global financial institutions and who want to see a positive investment climate in India."



Soon after seeking Rs 10,247 crore in taxes over alleged capital gains made by the company over a 2006-07 reorganisation of India business before its listing, the tax department seized Cairn's residual 10 per cent stake in Cairn India.

In a ruling Cairn had previously described as "final and binding", the tribunal ordered New Delhi to pay USD 1.2 billion in damages, plus interest and costs, to compensate Cairn for the shares long sold off by the tax department as well as confiscated dividends and withheld tax refunds. This totals $1.4 billion.

Cairn is seeking a meeting with the Finance Minister to understand the Indian government's response to the arbitration award.

Its shareholders have been egging the management to take action to get the money back.

But one-and-a-half-month since the 582-page judgment was issued, the government has given no indication whether it intends to honour the verdict, though payment was due immediately.

Sitharaman's office hasn't yet given Thomson a time.

"I'm sure that in working together with the government, we can swiftly draw this to a conclusion, and reassure those investors as to the positive investment climate that India offers," said Thomson in the video.

He said Cairn is a wonderful example of successful investment and partnership in India.

"Over decades we built a legacy business that's generated so far over $20 billion of revenue for the Government of India (and has) also shown massive benefit for the local populations where we operated in Gujarat, in Andhra Pradesh, and in Rajasthan," he said.

Cairn gave the country its biggest onland oil discovery in Rajasthan. It also developed the Ravva oil and gas field off the Andhra coast and smaller discoveries in Gujarat.

In the letter to the Indian government last month, Cairn had said its shareholders - including big financial institutions such as BlackRock, Fidelity, Franklin Templeton, Schroders, and Aviva - "expect an early resolution, failing which they will expect Cairn to pursue the award in conformity with its rights under the treaty".

"The award can be enforced against Indian assets in numerous jurisdictions around the world for which the necessary preparations have been put in place," it added.

The letter did not specify the assets that might be seized but it is widely speculated that the targets could include bank accounts as well as mobile and immobile property, including the assets of public sector enterprises such as state-owned Air India, but not diplomatic assets.

Earlier this week, Minister of State for Finance Anurag Singh Thakur had told Lok Sabha that the Cairn arbitration award was "under consideration of the government.
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[February 09, 2021] D.A. Davidson Serves as Exclusive Financial Advisor to Karman Missile & Space Systems in its Acquisition of AAE Aerospace

D.A. Davidson & Co. announced today that it served as exclusive financial advisor to Karman Missile & Space Systems, a portfolio company of Trive Capital, in its acquisition of AAE Aerospace, a leading manufacturer of high temperature composites for the missile, interceptor, and space sectors. Karman is one of the largest independent "pure play" suppliers focused on manufacturing complex and exacting systems for the space, missile, interceptor and hypersonic markets. Karman operates three centers in greater Los Angeles, a historical and key source for space and missile design and manufacturing while also maintaining a presence in Washington, D.C. and Huntsville, Ala., the newly announced headquarters for the U.S. Space Force. "AAE has an exceptional reputation, team, and market position in composite technologies for missile and space," said David Stinnet, partner at Trive Capital. "The acquisition of AAE is a significant step forward for Karman, allowing us to deliver more complete subsystems bonding the mating portions of metallic and composite structures. This partnership also adds coveted content positions on the most strategic rocket, missile defense, and hypersonic platforms, while opening up significant cross selling opportunities for Karman." Headquartered in Huntington Beach, Calif., AAE is one of the largest rocket nozzle and space sector product suppliers in the United States. AAE provides ablative, insulative and other advanced materials used on current and next-generation launch vehicles, missiles and hypersonis. The addition of AAE with Karman's existing capabilities creates a diversified platform across every major segment within the space sector.



"The inclusion of AAE brings decades of advanced materials and ultra-high temperature composites capabilities to Karman and integrates strategically with the metallic capabilities represented by Aerospace Engineered Corp. and AMRO," said Paul Weisbrich, managing director and leader of aerospace, defense and space investment banking at D.A. Davidson. "The Company's technological advances in materials science supports all major next generation propulsion technologies, making Karman a leader in both composite and metallic structures. AAE, AEC and AMRO operating as Karman Missile & Space Systems creates the best-in-class pure play space supply chain company. Trive sees the future of the industry and is making it happen today." This transaction highlights the continued success of D.A. Davidson's Diversified Industrials practice and its focus on aerospace, defense and space, further demonstrating the firm's position as a leading advisor in this sector.

D.A. Davidson's investment banking division is a leading full-service investment bank that offers comprehensive financial advisory and capital markets expertise. The group has extensive transaction experience serving middle market clients worldwide across five industry verticals: consumer, diversified industrials, financial institutions, real estate and technology. Together with its European strategic partner, MCF Corporate Finance, D.A. Davidson originates and executes transatlantic M&A transactions under the common brand of D.A. Davidson MCF International. About D.A. Davidson Companies D.A. Davidson Companies is an employee-owned financial services firm offering a range of financial services and advice to individuals, corporations, institutions, and municipalities nationwide. Founded in 1935 and headquartered in Montana, with corporate offices in Denver, Los Angeles, Portland and Seattle, the company has approximately 1,400 employees and offices in 27 states. Subsidiaries include: D.A. Davidson & Co., the largest full-service investment firm headquartered in the Northwest, providing wealth management, investment banking, equity and fixed income capital markets services and advice; Davidson Investment Advisors, a professional asset management firm; D.A. Davidson Trust Company, a trust and wealth management company; and Davidson Fixed Income Management, a registered investment adviser providing fixed income portfolio and advisory services. For more information, visit dadavidson.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210209006267/en/

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A major Covid vaccine could arrive in Australia next week after the shipment was formally approved to leave the European Union.

After initial concerns the EU could block the export under new measures, the jab was finally approved on Wednesday night.

While the exact date of arrival hasn't been confirmed, it's believed the vaccine could be delivered Down Under as soon as next week.

Once the vaccine arrives however, it will need to undergo batch testing before it can reach the public.

On Tuesday, EU's Ambassador to Australia Dr Michael Pulch said Australian orders of the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine would be shipped 'as foreseen'.

'We have worked very closely with our Australian partners, I spoke also with Trade Minister Tehan last week and my colleagues said that they will work with the Australians to ensure that there will be a smooth authorisation process,' he said.

The Morrison government said the roll out will begin in late-February, with 80,000 Pfizer jabs to be administered in the first week alone

Australia has secured 20 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine, which is enough to vaccinate 10 million people

The EU also approved shipments to New Zealand, China, Bahrain, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Kuwait, Mexico, Oman, Panama, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates.

The Morrison government said the roll out will begin in late-February, with 80,000 Pfizer jabs to be administered in the first week alone.

Australia has secured 20 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine, which is enough to vaccinate 10 million people.

First in line to receive the jab are the elderly, vulnerable, frontline health workers, hotel quarantine staff, as well as aged and disability workers and residents.

Other Australians over the age of 16 will be then be ranked by health risk to determine when they get the vaccination, with those more vulnerable prioritised.

The government expects the AstraZeneca vaccine to get approval soon so it will be available in early March.

Health Department boss Brendan Murphy has said it's unlikely people will get to pick if they get the Pfizer or AstraZeneca vaccine, as it depends on their profile and category of risk.

The government wants the vaccine rollout to be complete by the end of October.

Meanwhile, an infectious disease expert fears it could take six years for the world to be vaccinated against Covid, so jabs must be shared with developing countries to ensure 'more sinister' strains don't emerge.

An expert trio have addressed the National Press Club on Wednesday to provide a specialist view on the coronavirus health crisis.

Infectious diseases physician Sanjaya Senanayake says about 70 countries have begun vaccination programs.

First in line to receive the jab are the elderly, vulnerable, frontline health workers, hotel quarantine staff, as well as aged and disability workers and residents

'At the current rate of vaccination it is estimated we won't reach global coverage of 75 per cent with vaccines for about six years,' Dr Senanayake said.

'Not one or two years, but six.

'If we continue this global vaccine rollout while in other parts of the world infection continues unchecked, then we will see more sinister strains emerge which might have further impacts on vaccine efficacy.'

Dr Senanayake, who is also an associate professor at the Australian National University's medical school, said people might end up receiving an annual coronavirus vaccine.

Covid could become a 'persistent presence' like the four other coronaviruses that have been around for decades and cause the common cold.

Electronics said on Wednesday it will explore multi-device intelligence, beyond 5G, blockchain and data science areas over the next five years at its research and development (R&D) facility here.

R&D Institute, Bangalore (SRI-B), Samsungs largest R&D facility outside Korea, is celebrating its 25 years in India.

Over the years, it has grown into an advanced R&D centre for globally, with excellence in wireless communications, multimedia and image processing, artificial intelligence in vision, voice and text technologies and Internet of Things (IoT), a company statement said on Wednesday.

"Over the next five years, SRI-B to exploreMulti-Device Intelligence, beyond 5G, Blockchain and Data Scienceareas even as it continues to create strong differentiation for Samsung through innovations in camera technologies, artificial intelligence and 5G", it said.

SRI-B, which was set up in 1996, will continue to work on advanced R&D areas such as 5G, AI, IoT, cloud services, as well as on India-specific innovations for Samsung Galaxy smartphones, it was stated.

SRI-B engineers have filed over 3,200 patents so far and over the last three years there has been a 4X increase in the number of patents being filed annually, the statement said.

In this period, there has been an increase in Gen Z and Millennial engineers at SRI-B filing patents and around 80 per cent of the patent creators were engineers who filed patents for the first time in their careers.

"It has been an incredible journey since 1996 as SRI-B has been Samsungs pillar of strength.

As we complete yet another milestone, we will focus onbreakthrough innovationswith our refreshed R&D strategy that will lead to shaping of new global lifestyles inspired from India,"saidManaging Director, SRI-B, Dipesh Shah.

On the digital infrastructure side, virtualisation and containerisation will be the key technology focus areas for SRI-B going forward.

It will also focus on intensifying community building programmes with services like 'Samsung Find' that enables users to help each other in tracing devices, the statement said.

"Since its set up in 1996, SRI-B has worked on many cutting edge technologies and has had many firsts 3G networks, the worlds first 4G, 5G networks, voice over LTE



and engineers at the centre have made significant contributions to Samsung Galaxy smartphones and Samsung networks", it said.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Maryland General Assembly is poised to create a state-mandated system to compensate people who are wrongly convicted and imprisoned, removing barriers to getting paid that exonerees have faced for decades.

The Senate unanimously approved the legislation on Wednesday, and the House is expected to move quickly on the measure as well.

"This bill gives exonerees a chance at finally getting justice," said Michelle Feldman, the state campaigns director for the Innocence Project. "It's not just about the money, it's about closure."

The bill is named in honor of Walter Lomax, who spent 39 years in prison on a wrongful murder conviction and has become a champion for prison reform and compensation for exonerees.

It would set the amount that exonerees would be paid for each year behind bars, and allow an administrative law judge to provide other benefits, including a state identification card, housing accommodations for up to five years, health and dental care, educational training and reimbursement for court fees.

The judge would decide whether an exoneree is eligible for compensation, instead of the state Board of Public Works, a three-member board made up of the governor, comptroller and treasurer that normally deals with state contracts. The amount of the payments would be calculated based on the state's average median income over five years.

Feldman said Maryland is one of 35 states that allows state payments to the wrongly convicted, and the only one of those 35 in which an appointed panel such as the Board of Public Works decides how much to pay, when to pay and whether to pay at all.

Under that system, exonerees have had to petition the board and wait - sometimes for years - for a decision. Advocates say some exonerated prisoners never bothered, because the process seemed so unpredictable.

Sen. Dolores Kelley, D-Baltimore, who has spearheaded the effort to create a more clearly defined system, recently told the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee that the change was long overdue.

"We should be ashamed of ourselves that it has taken as long" as it has, she said. "We can't let more years, more decades keep going by while we talk about something that we know is a grossly unjust situation."

The legislature has been slowly making changes to the process, trying to make it less onerous. In 2017, it eliminated the requirement for exonerees to win a gubernatorial pardon in order to get compensated, so long as they received a writ of innocence from a state prosecutor.

But exonerees still had trouble getting compensated.

In the spring of 2018, five wrongly convicted men, who collectively spent 120 years in prison for crimes they didn't commit, petitioned the state Board of Public Works for more than $12 million in redress. Their petition largely went unanswered. After the men's plight became public, a group of about 50 lawmakers, including House Speaker Adrienne Jones, D-Baltimore, urged the Board of Public Works to act on their petition.

Republican Gov. Larry Hogan argued that the Board of Public Works did not have the expertise to determine the amounts of payments. He blamed the legislature for not creating specific rules. But lawmakers said the panel had the ability and legal authority to make the decision.

Advocates and lawmakers continued to apply pressure, and by the end of 2019, the Board of Public Works agreed to pay the men about $9 million. Each man received $78,916 for each year they spent in prison. Lomax, who was among the five men who petitioned, received $3 million.

Last year, just before he was scheduled to testify on the legislation, he had a heart attack and stroke in the state house complex. A state trooper helped save his life.

Senate President Bill Ferguson visited Lomax in the hospital, and Lomax told him: "'You just really got to pass that bill.' "

Lomax, now 73, said in an interview Wednesday that he was humbled to have the bill named after him, and excited that his advocacy could mean a different experience for others like him.

"No one should have to deal with what I experienced," he said, noting that he was released in 2006, exonerated in 2014 but not approved for compensation until 2019.

"No amount of money will be able to compensate us for what we've been through," Lomax said. "But what it really does, it is an acknowledgment that something was done and it was done unjustly."

Del. Kathleen Dumais, D-Montgomery, the House sponsor of the bill, said she expects it to move through the House quickly, with bipartisan support. She said a similar bill passed the House last year before the legislature abruptly adjourned its session due to the coronavirus.

She is planning to submit amendments to the House bill for it to be similar to the one passed by the Senate on Wednesday.

"I do think that it just clarifies all sorts of things, so [the process] is not willy nilly," she said.
Children in Amber Alert found safe near Mitchell

The missing children were recovered and are safe, according to the Davison County Sheriff's Office.
Kathy Willens/AP

The grief that survivors have when loved ones pass away should not become a grievance. An inference that anyone was attempting to diminish the danger that those living in confined or crowded places is a distraction. The report of New York State Attorney General Letitia James that nursing home and long term facility deaths from coronavirus was understated does not amount to anybodys malfeasance. Its value is on understanding the limitations of reporting so that, much like so many other aspects of fighting this pandemic, we are better prepared. From the very start, we knew that counting the deaths and assigning a location was not going to be precise nor easy. Last February, President Donald Trump did not want to allow passengers of cruise ships to disembark because their deaths would occur on American soil. The process of counting the deceased begins with where they died. Determining where they became infected is important, but doing so is to some extent speculative. Imagine if officials from different locales were to dispute their countywide death toll, claiming that their deceased residents incurred the virus from a super-spreader event that occurred elsewhere. Previously reported numbers would constantly change and their limited usefulness diminished.



William P. McMillen

Delmar

An NHS doctor has revealed the horrendous abuse she receives online, including death and rape threats, simply for asking the public to 'take care' during the pandemic.

Dr Rachel Clarke, from Oxford, has been called names such as 'Hitler and Satan' and accused of being a 'child abuser' after using social media to warn people that hospitals are at full capacity due to the Covid crisis.

Appearing on Lorraine today, she revealed how several colleagues are battling depression and anxiety as a result of the pandemic and the abuse, and told how difficult it is to see trolls 'denying her lived experience'.

Dr Clarke, pictured in 2016, has been called names such as 'Hitler and Satan' and accused of being a 'child abuser' after using social media to warn people that hospitals are at full capacity

'It's really incredible,' said Rachel. 'You can be at work all day, caring for patients who are really sick and sadly dying of Covid.

'You go home and onto social media and say, "This disease is serious, it's deadly, please take care", and if you do that you are subject to a barrage of abuse.

'I've been called things like Hitler or Satan or Harold Shipman, or even a child abuser for saying that the hospitals are full of Covid patients, please stay at home.

'I've had rape threats and death threats and it's astonishing, you just can't believe it. You feel as though these people are denying your lived experience and it's absolutely shocking.'

NHS doctor Rachel Clarke, from Oxford, revealed on Lorraine the horrendous abuse she receives online simply for asking the public to 'take care' during the Covid pandemic

Rachel spoke of the shift of support for NHS staff that she and her colleagues have noticed throughout the pandemic.

'In the first wave, the thing that kept us all going was knowing the public were behind us, the claps and the rainbows, you felt we were in it together', said Rachel.

She said that while those online are a 'tiny minority', they are extremely vocal with their bullying and seem 'intent on sowing mistrust among the public', spreading incorrect information about the disease and the vaccine.

'It's really shocking and sometimes it makes you really want to cry at the end of a long day of work,' she said.

The doctor told host Lorraine Kelly (pictured left) one of the hardest things about the pandemic has been 'how cruelly Covid separates people from the people they love'

'Because you can't quite believe you're being abused after your long day of work as a doctor.'

The doctor said one of the hardest things about the pandemic has been 'how cruelly Covid separates people from the people they love', and how NHS staff have been given the added pressure of providing the support in the absence of loved ones.

'To be subjected to abuse on top of all of that is really distressing,' said Rachel. 'A lot of us are ourselves are finding ourselves have stress symptoms, some people are depressed, they're anxious.

'I have spoken to colleagues who are feeling suicidal because of the pressures and it's just really tough for staff at the moment.'
Research comparing disposable income north and south of the border highlights the need to address "huge economic under-performance" in Northern Ireland, it has been claimed.

The warning comes after researchers found that disposable household income was around 3,300 (3,800) higher annually in the Republic than in Northern Ireland. This equates to a 12% gap after accounting for price differences in both areas.

Read More

The report - Who is Better off? Measuring Cross-border Differences in Living Standards, Opportunities and Quality of Life on the Island of Ireland - found that standards of living were better in the Republic than in Northern Ireland across almost all indicators.

Carl McClean, an Ulster Unionist councillor for Ards and North Down, helps companies move their staff around the world by providing them with cost of living data. He said we did not need the ESRI report to highlight the economic difficulties in Northern Ireland.

Mr McClean said: "The report looked initially right to me at most salary levels, but my calculations can suggest otherwise. Comparing like-for-like salaries and looking at differences in goods and services, housing, and taxes, a married person on Northern Ireland's median wage of 28,000 can expect 1,500 more in their pocket living in Belfast compared to Dublin.

Read More

"This increases to 3,400 on a salary of 50,000 and 11,600 more on a salary of 100,000.

"The reason for this is that while the tax rates are very similar, goods and services are 7.4% higher in Dublin than Belfast, and housing is 92.9% higher."

The study, by the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) and published in Irish Studies in International Affairs, was conducted due to increased focus on north-south comparisons, amid growing speculation about the possibility of a referendum on a united Ireland.

However, Mr McClean said his calculations will not convert a single republican to unionism, any more than the initial report should convince a unionist to "cash-in" on a united Ireland.

He added: "The Republic balances its books - their taxes broadly cover their expenditure. Northern Ireland does not. We need about 10bn extra from London than we raise in taxes here - that's close to a 30% deficit, unheard of in sovereign nations, which are in full crisis by 10%. There are chronic issues around productivity and competitiveness here, but addressing these rank with healthcare at the bottom of the to-do list with the big two parties at Stormont.

"This renders Irish unity unfeasible for the moment, even if the Covid pandemic hasn't quietened demands for border polls."

Mr McClean added: "Unionism has some time in which to make a case for itself. A better argument is required than 'we are unaffordable'. It has to stop alienating everyone. It must reach across the aisle to help build a provincial economy that pays for itself, makes a success of this place, and a burden to neither London nor Dublin. That won't settle the constitutional arguments, but we can have that debate from a position of success.

"That's a far better place to be. The better people's livelihoods, the less of that hopelessness that draws many to believe their lives would be better if only a different flag flew over us."
Chinese conglomerate has reached a court in the US, demanding it to overturn the Federal Communications Commissions (FCC) decision to designate the company as a national security threat.

In 2019, the FCC voted to prevent US companies from doing business with and ZTE on national security concerns.

The FCC finalised the ban in December 2020, supported by former President Donald Trump.

"The order on review potentially impacts the financial interests of the telecommunications industry as a whole," said in its court filing, reports The Verge.

An FCC spokesperson said: "Last year, the FCC issued a final designation identifying Huawei as a national security threat based on a substantial body of evidence developed by the FCC and numerous US national security agencies. We will continue to defend that decision".

Trump's was part of a bigger trade war with China, followed by attempts to ban mobile apps TikTok and WeChat.

President Joe Biden has not renewed the war on TikTok, but his administration has indicated that it will continue to crack down on Huawei.

The company went to court as its Founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei on Tuesday urged the new US administration to adopt a more "open policy" towards Chinese companies, while he also expressed his desire to talk to President Joe Biden.

This was the first time the Huawei founder has spoken to international media since the new administration took office in the US.

He said that Huawei, which became a prime target of US restrictions under the Trump administration, hope to avoid getting embroiled in geopolitics, the South China Morning Post reported.

"Our company does not have the energy to be involved in this political whirlpool. We strive to make good products," he was quoted as saying.

"We hope that the US government can have a more open policy for the benefit of American companies and the development of the US economy."

The Huawei founder also reiterated his earlier offer to share Huawei's 5G technology with US companies.

--IANS

na/

(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.)
Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-09 21:10:54|Editor: huaxia

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A nurse receives the COVID-19 vaccine at a hospital in Tehran, Iran, on Feb. 9, 2021. Iran on Tuesday started the nationwide vaccination campaign against COVID-19, using Russia's Sputnik V jabs, official news agency IRNA reported. (Photo by Ahmad Halabisaz/Xinhua)

TEHRAN, Feb. 9 (Xinhua) -- Iran on Tuesday started the nationwide vaccination campaign against COVID-19, using Russia's Sputnik V jabs, official news agency IRNA reported.

The first person to receive the vaccine in the country was Parsa Namaki, the son of the Minister of Health and Medical Education Saeed Namaki.

According to the health ministry's plan, the first to be inoculated are the medical and service workers employed at intensive care units where COVID-19 patients are hospitalized.

In a second stage, people aged over 65 with underlying diseases across the country will be vaccinated.

The Iranian Ministry of Health announced 89 new deaths related to COVID-19, bringing the death toll to 58,625.

As reported by the ministry's official website, 7,640 new infections were confirmed between Monday and Tuesday, leading to an overall count of 1,481,396 cases in the country. Enditem
Posted Wednesday, February 10, 2021 6:55 am

Reacting to the unemployment-claims data breach that exposed the personal information of, lawmakers are looking to beef up the state's cybersecurity practices.

At the request of Gov. Jay Inslee, they've introduced legislation giving the state Office of Cybersecurity (OCS) more authority to direct state agencies on "best practices" for safely storing sensitive data.

That includes agencies run by independently elected officials like State Auditor Pat McCarthy, whose office last week disclosed the massive breach involving the Social Security numbers, bank account numbers and other personal information of an estimated 1.4 million people.

Senate Bill 5432, quickly drafted after the breach, was supported by McCarthy's office and by the state's chief information officer Jim Weaver at a virtual public hearing before a state Senate committee Tuesday.

The bill would formalize some of what the cybersecurity office already says it does, while also giving it more power  essentially trying to centralize what some say has been a scattershot, agency-by-agency approach to protecting data.

"Washington state has a ferocious addiction to decentralization," said the bill's chief sponsor, state Sen. Reuven Carlyle, D-Seattle, in an interview.

"There is a time and place for decentralization, but IT security is just not that place," added Carlyle, who chairs the state Senate Energy, Environment & Technology Committee, which held the hearing on the bill Tuesday.

Sherry Sawyer, a policy adviser to Inslee, testified at the hearing that the events of the past year have shown "cyberthreats are painfully real and cyberattacks are on the rise." She said while agencies have tried to be diligent, "we have some work to do."

The compromised data had been collected as part of the auditor's investigations into how the state Employment Security Department (ESD) lost $600 million to fraudulent unemployment claims.

In conducting its probe, the auditor gathered the detailed records on more than 1 million unemployment claims filed between Jan. 1 and Dec. 10 of 2020. The breach left all of them exposed when an "unauthorized person" gained access to the data in late December.

McCarthy has blamed Accellion, the California tech company whose aging data-transfer service was compromised by hackers. Her office had relied on the service for more than a decade.

Accellion executives say they'd long been urging customers to upgrade to the firm's newer, more secure file-transfer service. The auditor's office was in the process of doing that when the breach occurred in late December.

McCarthy did not appear at the hearing Tuesday. A representative of her office, Scott Nelson, briefly testified that the auditor supports the proposed legislation, but is "anxious" to ensure it does not interfere with her office's audit authority.

Weaver, the state's CIO, who runs the central tech-services agency known as WaTech, said the legislation would "solidify" the role of the state cybersecurity office and allow a "whole of government approach" to warding off threats by hackers.

The legislation would require state agencies to report major cybersecurity incidents to the OCS within 24 hours of discovery. The OCS would be required to investigate such breaches and serve as the state's "point of contact" for all such incidents.

The bill also would require WaTech, along with the state Attorney General's Office, to research best practices for data protection and submit a report to the Legislature by Dec. 1.

Sawyer said work is ongoing to further strengthen the legislation as it moves forward.

Carlyle said Washington, which is home to a vast array of tech companies and talent, should be in the "top tier" of cybersecurity nationally. "We are not meeting that standard today," he said at the hearing.

While state lawmakers scramble to fix gaps in the data security, the auditor's office data breach already is spawning potentially massive legal actions, with two class-action lawsuits filed last week in King County Superior Court.

The first, filed on Feb. 2, names Accellion as a defendant. The second, filed Feb. 5, names both Accellion and the state auditor's office. Both seek monetary damages and attorney's fees on behalf of anyone harmed by the data breach.
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Scientists from the World Health Organization held a press conference in China on Tuesday following their investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. They deemed there was no evidence the virus emerged by human error in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where it first came apparent to the world, and that it was not present in the city prior to December 2019.



This further discredited the conspiracy theory, pushed by former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former Deputy National Security Advisor Matthew Pottinger and their allies in the mainstream media, that the virus had somehow originated in a leak from a local laboratory.

The observations of the WHO were that the virus was of natural origin, crossed the species barrier from animal to human in an unknown location, and could, as Chinese scientists have repeatedly proposed, have been transmitted via frozen food.

The findings stand in sharp contrast to the enormous political blame game that has been hurled at China over COVID-19, and the refusal of some people to accept this new scientific evidence is proof as to how many have a vested interest in making a political point, as opposed to adapting their views to accept new information. The findings show we must follow science, and not political prejudices, in exploring COVID-19.

Since the epidemic first became apparent in Wuhan, Western media and political circles have sought to score ideological points against China to advance their geopolitical goals. They claimed that the situation in Wuhan was the product of a "political cover-up" as opposed to a new disease nobody really understood at time, believing it could not happen to them.

Then, when China overcame the virus successfully and the West suffered enormous outbreaks due to their complacency, the focus turned to deflecting political responsibility for the crisis to China, arguing that their failures were the fault of Beijing's cover-ups, and that the WHO was "complicit" in it.

The Trump administration created their "China virus" blame game, the United Kingdom government also tended towards blaming China, and various Western news outlets repeatedly over the course of 2020 pushed this grand narrative that the global pandemic was China's fault.

This made it inconceivable for many people, having focused their frustrations and emotions in blaming Beijing, to accept new scientific information contravening their deeply held prejudices. As Chinese scientists revealed more about COVID-19 and its origins, it was dismissed as mere propaganda. People simply didn't want to believe it, and the media kept making it worse by falsely claiming that Beijing was "blaming other countries" for the COVID-19 when it wasn't.

This phenomenon, whereby people reject factual information outright on the premise of emotional reactions and prejudices, is known as "cognitive dissonance." It is amplified by the fact that the West persistently portrays itself as the only neutral and valid source of "political" truth.

The Western public largely refuses to come to terms with the fact that their own governments and media were in fact lying to them over the COVID-19, rather than China doing so, and promoted multiple conspiracy theories in order to create legitimacy for a geopolitical confrontation against China itself.

In recognizing what has actually happened, the world now needs to be rational. Rather than following their political prejudices, they should follow science and, in turn, be willing to comprehend proper facts about the COVID-19 as opposed to tabloid gossip.

Sometimes science reveals things challenging our most deeply held convictions about the world and life. For example, nobody wanted to believe Galileo that the world, in fact, orbited the sun and many people continue to deny the science of climate change. The inability to come to terms with the truth of the COVID-19 is the same phenomenon.

Even though investigations show that it did not originate within Wuhan and that there was no "political cover-up" prior to its announcement, people simply want to believe otherwise because they are committed to advancing prejudice about China, as opposed to the reality.

There was in the end one side which has massively peddled deception about this disease on an industrial scale, and it wasn't China. It's time to follow the science and it's time for people to admit they were wrong.

Tom Fowdy is a British political and international relations analyst and a graduate of Durham and Oxford universities. He writes on topics pertaining to China, the DPRK, Britain and the U.S. For more information please visit:

http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/TomFowdy.htm

Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors, not necessarily those of China.org.cn.

If you would like to contribute, please contact us at opinion@china.org.cn.

The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
Instead of making do, some people have decided to do without. While about two-thirds of U.S. consumers surveyed by Chicago-based research firm Numerator gave Valentines Day gifts last year, fewer than half said they plan to this year. The share planning to go out to dinner plunged from 44.5% to 17.4%. Ordering takeout and cooking at home were both more popular options this year, picked by nearly 25.9% and 34.7% of consumers, respectively.


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Prime Minister Boris Johnsons Conservative government has announced a review into left-wing extremism. The review will be led by former Labour MP John Woodcock, now Baron Walney, in his post as UK Special Envoy for Countering Violent Extremism, and will spearhead efforts to criminalise left-wing and socialist activity in Britain.

What amounts to a dragnet against the left was announced on Monday as a front-page exclusive in the pro-Tory Telegraph under the headline, Far-Left influence on Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion to be probed.

The Daily Telegraph front page article Far-left hijacking of race and climate movements to be investigated

Ordered by Johnson, the review will investigate alleged Attempts by far-Left activists to hijack movements, the Telegraph reported. It will probe the extreme fringes of the hard-Left and far-Right in the UK, the Telegraph s Deputy Political Editor wrote, and will make recommendations to the prime minister and to Home Secretary Priti Patel in May.

The review of left-wing extremism marks a new stage in the campaign that began in July 2019 with the publication of a report commissioned by the UK governments Commission for Countering Extremism (CCE), titled, Violent extremist tactics and the ideology of the sectarian far left. That report, written by academics Daniel Allington, Siobhan McAndrew and David Hirsh, sought to brand entire swathes of left-wing and socialist opinion as tantamount to terrorism.

The current review is dishonestly framed as a response to the international growth of the far-right, with Woodcock warning, the UK must heed the growth of the far-right in the US, which culminated in the storming of the Capitol last month.

But Woodcocks disclaimer that his review will not draw an equivalence of threat between the far-Left and the far-right is worthless. This is the reviews central thrust, with the Socialist Workers Party bracketed with fascist paramilitary groupsincluding the Oath Keepers, Boogaloos, and Proud Boysthat helped plan and execute the January 6 coup attempt in Washington DC, backed by large swathes of the Republican Party, the military and police.

While the right-wing is mentioned, the real target is alleged left-wing extremism, with the Telegraph noting Woodcocks alarm that permissive attitudes to intolerable activity on the hard-Left may be more likely because people perceive admirable objectives and are then liable to submit to a conscious or often unconscious bias in overlooking the strategies to get there.

In media coverage of the governments review, there was no mistaking the focus on far-left extremism. The Daily Mails headline declared, Boris Johnson orders probe into attempts by far-left activists like the Socialist Workers Party to hijack movements including Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion.

The Mail quoted Woodcocks statement to the Telegraph warning we must be vigilant against a blind spot in Britain to the prospect of progressive extremismthat is, unacceptable disruption or even violence carried out in the name of progressive causes to which the political establishment and large majority of the population have great sympathy, like climate change and racial injustice.

The Orwellian reference to progressive extremism points to what the state is seeking to accomplish, as it moves to recast views shared by broad sections of the working class and youth in a criminal light.

Woodcocks targeting of the SWP for far-left entryism speaks volumes. He told the Telegraph, I want to look at the way anti-democracy, anti-capitalist far-Left fringe groups in Britain, like the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), tend to have much more success hijacking important causes and mainstream cultural activity than the far-right, and the harm that may do'.

The designation of the left as anti-democratic turns reality on its head. In Britain, large sections of the Tory party are enmeshed with far-right organisations. The Conservative Party has already spawned the United Kingdom Independence Party, with Johnson last year defending his partys links with neo-Nazi and far-right parties across Europe. Had Trumps January 6 fascist coup succeeded, there is no doubt that Johnson and Patel would have lined up to endorse his theft of the election. As in the 1930s, the source of authoritarianism is decaying capitalism.

The SWP, Britains largest nominally socialist organisation, is being branded extremist for its entryism and for seeking to influence causes and mainstream cultural activity. This definition of entryism would bar socialists from any involvement in public political, intellectual and cultural life. Such an agenda cannot be enforced peacefully. It would mean the proscription of left-wing, socialist and democratic organisations and the imposition of a police state.

The SWP is being attacked for far-left entryism into Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion. Both organisations are petty-bourgeois organisations politically hostile to Marxism and the working class. But the SWP is doing what all political parties seek to do: exercising its democratic rights to influence, through its press, social media, leaflets and meetings, protest movements it decides are relevant to its aims. In Woodcocks red-baiting language, the SWP is hijacking, when it is merely engaging with those who choose to listen and perhaps recruiting sympathetic members.

If such activity is to be branded left-wing extremist the implications are far-reaching. Socialists will face criminal sanctions and proscriptions for leading or even supporting strikes and mass protests against austerity, war and a range of pressing social issues which the working class confronts in the midst of a pandemic that has already claimed more than two million lives.

The Socialist Equality Partys political differences with the SWP are fundamental and unbridgeable, but we unequivocally condemn the state attack against its organisation and membership. The Johnson governments targeting of the SWP as violent and extremist is a slander, aimed at preparing state repression against the working class and the entire left.

Woodcocks identification of Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Extinction Rebellion as supposed victims of SWP hijacking is not accidental. BLM leaders have already participated in a media witch-hunt against the SWP. In June 2020, BLM leader Dr Remi Adekoya, a political science lecturer, told Rupert Murdochs Times, SWP involvement is a threat to the Black Lives Matter movement. The SWP will be hoping this turns into something bigger than race relations in Britainthey will want to take into something broader, like bringing down capitalism, on the wave of support for the BLM movement.

Adekoyas statement points to the real fears of the state and of the upper middle-class layers within BLM: that the radicalisation of broad sections of youth, students and the working class, against police brutality, racism, social inequality and environmental destruction, will develop in a socialist direction. It is precisely for this reason that the World Socialist Web Site and the Socialist Equality Parties internationally have met with sustained censorship from Google, Facebook, and other social media platforms in recent years, in direct collaboration with the intelligence agencies.

In Germany, the Verfassungsschutz (Office for the Protection of the Constitution) has listed the Socialist Equality Party (SGP), the German section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, as a left-wing extremist organisation. The SGP has been identified as extremist and in violation of the German constitutions Basic Law, despite the states acknowledgement that its activities are entirely legal.

In its 2019 report on far-left violence, the CCE warned that small far-left sectarian groups might soon win a mass following for their anti-imperialist, anti-war and anti-fascist views. Amid a widening radicalisation of working people, the revolutionary socialist theories of Lenin and Trotsky would lead in these circumstances to the weaponisation of the working class, the report warned. The Johnson government is acting on this threat.

The SWP acts as a stalking horse for attempts by the British state to blackguard and ultimately illegalise the socialist movement. In the process, organisations such as BLM and Extinction Rebellion that threaten to arouse broader social resistance will also be targeted, notwithstanding their own petty-bourgeois, pro-capitalist and anti-Marxist politics.

With its choice of Woodcock to lead the governments review of far-left extremism, the manufactured campaign against left-wing anti-Semitism has come full circle. Woodcocks role is mirrored by that of Blairite John Mann who resigned from Labour under Corbyn, was appointed Baron Mann of Holbeck Moor by the Tory government and made its Anti-Semitism Tsar in October 2019. Woodcock, a former member of the Defence Select Committee, was also a key player in the Blairites vicious witch-hunt against Corbyn, seeking to purge him and his thousands of supporters from the party. In the 2019 election, Woodcock called for a Tory vote to stop [Corbyn] getting his hands on the levers of national security and defence.

In return for services rendered, Woodcock was ennobled by Johnson in September 2020 and appointed to the House of Lords. Patel appointed Woodcock UK Special Envoy for Countering Violent Extremism in November 2019, saying he would bring 'a range of skills and experience to the role.'

On Monday and again on Tuesday, the WSWS wrote to the Home Office to demand further information about its forthcoming review of far-left extremism. Which organisations on the left are to be investigated? How will intelligence be gathered and by what agencies? we asked. No reply was forthcoming.
Values: Noeline Blackwell of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre welcomed the move by Grant Thornton. Photo: Andres Poveda

Grant Thornton has resigned as auditor to four Dublin based companies owned by Mindgeek, the operator of the world's most-visited pornographic website, Pornhub.

The move by Grant Thornton Ireland to quit as auditors to MG Billing Ltd and three other Dublin Mindgeek owned companies follows allegations that illegal content had been uploaded to the website, the 10th most trafficked in the world.

Pornhub denied the allegations and less than a week later, it suspended all content uploaded by unverified users onto its website.

In light of the serious nature of recent developments, Grant Thornton Ireland have disengaged with the aforementioned client, a spokeswoman for the auditor said.

Due to client confidentiality we are unable to comment on the specific nature or mandate of any client engagements.

Records show that Grant Thornton resigned as auditors to the four Mindgeek companies on January 13, with confirmation of the filed documents only becoming available in recent days.

MG Billing Ltd generated revenues here of $1.3bn (1.1bn) between 2012 and 2018.

The Dublin-based company collects subscriptions from premium users for the Mindgeek global porn empire and revenues for 2018 totalled $220.9m  or a weekly average of $4.2m.

Prior to the emergence of complaints over the websites content, it saw over 100 million daily visits and over 3.6bn visits per year.

Grant Thornton has also resigned as auditors to three other Mindgeek companies, Nutaku Publishing Ltd, Mirmay Ltd and Liquidum Ltd.

The bulk of Mindgeek's 1,800 employees are based in Montreal and the company is headquartered in Luxembourg. The chief executive of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, Noeline Blackwell welcomed the move by Grant Thornton.

I welcome Grant Thorntons recognition that there were questions to be asked about the Pornhub company, Ms Blackwell said.

She described the move by Grant Thornton as what you would expect of a company that adheres to certain values and has policies concerning social corporate responsibility, so it is welcome.

Mindgeek executives have been grilled recently in the Canadian parliament about why it took so long to remove the unlawful material.

Grant Thorntons decision came after others had already moved against the pornographic website.

Mastercard and Visa have suspended payments on Pornhub.
Students make their way through the Alkek breezeway, Monday, Aug. 24, 2020, on Texas States campus.
CLEAR LAKE, Iowa - The frigid weather is the worst for just about anything you can think of to do outdoors, but there is at least one exception - this is ice fishing weather!

Sunset Sharky's is challenging anglers to find the longest fish as part of their 2nd annual Ice Fishing Contest. Prize fish will be in four species: muskie or northern, walleye, all types of bass, crappie and bluegill, and others like carp, catfish and bullhead.

With the pandemic still among us, owner Jason Winters is hopeful more head to the lake to participate as a way to shake off some cabin fever.

"We had a half a dozen in the first year. We hope this year is 3-4 times more."

He has some thoughts on how the bitter cold interacts with bites.

"The cold weather sometimes helps. Sometimes they'll bite in the day, sometimes they'll bite in the night. You never know."

Fishers have a month, from now until March 9, to catch their prize. For official rules and how to sign up, click here.

A Normandy veteran has been sent more than 2,700 birthday cards as he turned 100 after an appeal to help him celebrate his centenary in lockdown went global.

Tommy Trotter, a former Northumberland Fusilier, said he felt spoilt and was over the moon after seeing all the cards laid out at The Last Post bar in Thornaby, Teesside.

Among them was a letter from the Prime Minister thanking him for his service, and congratulating him on his landmark birthday.

The Last Post, which has a military memorabilia theme and looks after veterans, is closed due to the coronavirus pandemic but Mr Trotter is in a bubble with landlady Julie Cooper, who helps to looks after him, although he lives alone with assistance from relatives.

She said: The cards have come from all over the world.

We got the message out via Facebook, then Regiments shared them, and it went far and wide.

She said Mr Trotter liked to share his wartime experiences with the younger generations.

We love him, hes part of the family and he has been through lockdown with me since day one, she said.

Mr Trotter joined the D-Day landings and helped prepare airstrips for the Allied forces.

He met his late wife in Germany during the war and brought her back to the UK.

Speaking beside a mural of Mr Trotter as a teenager on the wall of her bar, Mrs Cooper said: We should never forget because they gave their all for us.

Theres not many Tommys age left, I think we should respect that and remember what they did.

The veteran, who holds the Legion DHonneur, was delighted with the birthday cards which carpeted the floor of the bar before they were opened, and even had a celebratory dance.

Sitting beside Mrs Cooper, he said: Ive never had nowt like this before, its lovely.

Its always been lovely in here.

Supporters of the national veteran support club the Tommy Club gave him a lifesize and specially-engraved soldier figure made by ex-servicemen working at the military charity Royal British Legion Industries factory.

He was also made an honorary member of the Tommy Club, which raises funds for military veterans and helps them into employment.
To Australia for Love?

An American dating show is looking for Australians, aged 21 years or older, to appear alongside US participants.

Filming is planned for a 5 week period in Sydney in mid 2021 by Pitman Productions. Participants look set to travel to the US as part of the show.

Pitman previously produced To Rome for Love on Bravo in which 5 singles headed to Rome seeking a partner. Has Australias relative control on the pandemic led to an Aussie edition?

In a lengthy application candidates are asked:

Why are you single?

How long ago was your last relationship? Why did it end?

If you met the right person today would you be ready to settle down and get married?

What physical characteristics in a mate really turns you on?

How do you describe your sexuality?

What are your relationship deal breakers?

Do you prefer a monogamous relationship or non-monogamous relationship?

There is some speculation it could be a second season of Too Hot to Handle for Netflix, but that was produced by Fremantle production company Talkback.

You can apply here.

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NEW YORK, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- AIM Tell-A-Vision Group (AIM TV), producers of the nation's most-watched travel show, Raw Travel, announced today that they have firmed up a path forward for the next two seasons. The plans will take them through Season 10 and 2023.

Raw Travel is wrapping production on its eighth season, currently airing on broadcast syndication through September 2021. Thanks to an aggressive pre-pandemic travel/filming schedule, Raw Travel was able to deliver all-original content for the whole of the 2020-21 Season. With an uncertain calendar of travel's imminent recovery, and the long lead times required for production, for the first time in the show's eight-year existence, the producers plan to offer viewers a blend of original and library content in Season 9 ('21 - '22).

Viewers will finally have an opportunity to view past shows from the library of 160+ episodes in an effort that will be themed "Raw Travel Re-wind." Because the show initially launched in only a few dozen cities and is now in over 173 cities representing 95% of the US, many viewers may have just recently discovered Raw Travel. "Rewind" will be their first chance at seeing past episodes from various destinations. To promote "Rewind," the producers will create beyond-the-show content, such as "behind the scenes," "producer commentary," "bonus cuts," "bloopers," etc.

They will also roll out aggressive social media initiatives such as "Viewer's Choice" to allow viewers to vote for which episodes they'd like to see most. The producers also plan to incorporate contesting, as well as gear, and trip giveaways to spur excitement and engagement.

When domestic travel safely opens up along with limited international travel, the producers will blend in new episodes from the USA and, when safe, from abroad. By Season 10, the producers anticipate travel will have fully recovered. This milestone season of Raw Travel will be 100% original and will be entitled "Pilgrimage" as the producer & host Robert G. Rose makes his way to locales in Russia, India, Central Asia, and other destinations where the show has yet been filmed.

"There are plenty of unknowns, but there will be pent-up demand not only from travelers but from travel marketers, as they work to gain market share and take advantage of the re-set," says Robert G. Rose, producer and host of the series. "This bodes well not only for us but for our affiliates as the local and regional broadcast ad industry recovers. We want to be there for our affiliates and our viewers, guiding them as travel opens up again," Rose continued. "We will have a renewed sense of gratitude for the blessings of travel, whether at home or abroad. This spiritual reconnection with travel will be front and center as we move to this important milestone of ten seasons."

ABOUT RAW TRAVEL TV

Raw Travel is an adventure travel & lifestyle series showcasing socially and environmentally aware, independent travel. The series weaves together themes of eco-tourism and voluntourism (giving back) with underground music and authentic culture in a unique way. Each weekend the show is seen in over 173 U.S. cities on major broadcast affiliates and several international territories (Asia, Africa, Europe). It can also be found on several major airlines. AIM Tell-A-Vision Group produces the show and oversees its domestic and international distribution and internationally. Visit RawTravel.tv for more information.

ABOUT AIM TELL-A-VISION GROUP

AIM Tell-A-Vision (AIM TV) Group is an independent production, content, and distribution company founded by media veteran and entrepreneur Robert G. Rose. Since 2000, AIM TV has been producing and distributing positive, compelling content that reflects a mission of presenting "Media That Matters." Visit AIMTVGroup.com for more information.

SOURCE AIM Tell-A-Vision Group
The US State Department is outlining its position on a World Health Organization team report that has concluded the coronavirus most likely jumped to humans from an animal.

The State Department spokesperson, Ned Price said Tuesday, "We look forward to seeing this report."

"We want to see the underlying data. We intend to marry that underlying data with what is in our own broader holdings to include within our intelligence community. We are going to base our conclusions on nothing other than the data, nothing other than the science."

A team of international and Chinese scientists looking for the origins of COVID-19 said an alternate theory that the virus leaked from a Chinese lab was unlikely.

A closely watched visit by World Health Organization experts to Wuhan - the Chinese city where the first coronavirus cases were discovered - did not dramatically change the current understanding of the early days of the pandemic, said Peter Ben Embarek, the leader of the WHO mission.

But it did "add details to that story," he said at a news conference as the group wrapped up a four-week visit to the city.

And it allowed the joint Chinese-WHO team to further explore the lab leak theory - which former U.S. President Donald Trump and officials from his administration had put forward without evidence - and decide it was unlikely.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology is home to many different virus samples, leading to allegations that it may have been the source of the original outbreak, whether on purpose or accidentally.

China had already strongly rejected the possibility of a leak and has promoted other theories. The Chinese and foreign experts considered several ideas for how the disease first ended up in humans, leading to a pandemic that has now killed more than 2.3 million people worldwide.

Price said, "The WHO is leading this investigation."

Adding, "I wouldn't want to be conclusive yet about any sort of cooperation that the WHO may or may not have received from China."

Price also stated the Biden administration's position on the situation in Burma.

Police have cracked down on crowds of demonstrators protesting against Myanmar's military takeover.

"We strongly condemn violence against demonstrators, he said.

Adding, "We repeat our calls for the military to relinquish power, restore the democratically elected government, release those detained and lift all telecommunication restrictions and to refrain from violence."

"We are making no bones about where we stand when it comes to the military's need to relinquish power," Price said.

(Disclaimer: This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed; only the image & headline may have been reworked by www.republicworld.com)
Despite the government heaping blame on the use of a nebuliser as a source of the outbreak, Professor Rait said the fact a small aerosol cloud could linger in the air or be swept down a hotel corridor infecting staff and guests suggested worryingly inadequate ventilation controls. It also doesnt explain the recent cases at the Grand Hyatt or the Park Royal, Professor Rait said. Professor Rait added it was concerning a nebuliser was allowed to get into hotel quarantine in the first place, despite the government insisting such medical devices were banned. Last year, the Health Departments healthcare worker taskforce investigated transmission in hospital settings, and made several recommendations in relation to strict personal protective equipment standards for healthcare staff and proper ventilation of wards to minimise the risk of aerosol transmission. Experts have recommended similar standards for hotel quarantine.

Speaking to the media on Wednesday morning, Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton said the working hypothesis for the growing outbreak at the Holiday Inn was that a man, who later tested positive to the British variant of the virus and is now in intensive care, had used a nebuliser to treat his asthma. [A nebuliser] vaporises medication or liquid into a fine mist and especially when it is used as medication and someone is infectious or later tests positive, that virus mist can be suspended in the air, Professor Sutton said. The man who was using the nebuliser is a member of the family who were staying at the Holiday Inn. The aerosol-based medical device, commonly used by asthma sufferers, was banned for use outside of negative pressure rooms in Victorian hospitals last year after it was believed to have helped fuel transmission in a serious COVID-19 outbreak at a Melbourne hospital.

Vaporiser machines, including sleep apnoea machines, will be banned from standard quarantine hotels and bags thoroughly searched. In light of the hotel outbreaks, Victoria will not increase its intake of overseas arrivals to 1310 on Monday as planned. Nebulisers are used to change liquid medication into a fine mist, which can be breathed in through a mask or mouthpiece but can also quickly fill a room. It is likely when the door of the familys room at the Holiday Inn was opened particles were blown into the hotel corridor and infected staff. Burnet Institute epidemiologist Mike Toole said if Holiday Inn hotel workers had been wearing fitted N95 respirators and face shields they would have been unlikely to get infected. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video Investigations into outbreaks in the states hospitals after the second wave have found coronavirus particles probably travelled through the air through poor ventilation systems infecting hospital workers who had no close contact with sick patients.

A family of five and a woman in her 60s staying at the Park Royal Hotel returned genome testing results for the British strain on different days last week, suggesting the virus had spread between their hotel rooms. A 26-year-old man who was working at Grand Hyatt in the Australian Open quarantine program also tested positive to the virus, but no direct link has been found between him and any other case yet. President-elect of the Australian Institute of Occupational Hygienists Kate Cole has called for independent review of hotels being used for quarantine by ventilation engineers. She questioned why occupational hygienists  experts in respiratory protection  were yet to be included in panels of specialists advising governments.

Fit-tested N95 respirators should ... be mandated for all workers and are the minimum level of respiratory protection required for the virus in those facilities, Ms Cole said. Loading But what underpins all of this is that we need to recognise the importance of aerosol spread or airborne transmission because until we do that these outbreaks are going to continue to happen Fit-testing  which ensures a mask seals to the face  is mandatory for workers dealing with asbestos and silica, but not for all hotel quarantine workers. Professor Toole wants to see all hotel quarantine workers, regardless of whether they work in a hot hotel  which deals solely with people infected with the virus  or a cold hotel, given high protection, fit-tested N95 face masks, face shields and protective goggles.

COVID-19 Quarantine Victoria Commissioner Emma Cassar said the two infected workers were wearing surgical masks and goggles when they dealt with guests, but all Victorian hotel quarantine workers would now be provided with N95 masks. Premier Daniel Andrews insisted Victoria had the countrys strongest hotel quarantine system and that other jurisdictions were copying his governments model, drawing the ire of NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian. Hes pretty good at spin and thats all Ill say, Ms Berejiklian told radio station 2GB on Wednesday morning. Mr Andrews later said he was not interested in having an argument with Gladys. Ill somehow find a way to recover from that barb, he said. Im focused on keeping Victorians safe as Im sure shes focused on keeping the people of NSW safe.
If this weeks big new report from the Congressional Budget Office is correct, then raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour would involve a straightforward trade-off.

On one side of the ledger, about 1.4 million fewer Americans would be able to find a job, as hiring would become more expensive for businesses. On the other, up to 27 million people would potentially get a raise. Consequently, working-class Americans would take home an extra $333 billion in pay over 10 years, and 900,000 fewer individuals would be in poverty. Some families would end up a bit worse off, but on the whole, Americas low-wage workforcethe grocery store cashiers, nursing home aides, and waiters whove been perversely forced to the front lines of the coronavirus crisis while largely being paid a pittancewould be better off.

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Democrats asked the CBO, which serves as Capitol Hills official fiscal forecaster, to assess the impact of a minimum wage increase, because they are hoping to include one in their partys upcoming COVID relief bill. The chances of it making the final package were already looking shaky at best; aside from the procedural hurdles to including it, Democrats would need every one of their senators to back it, and West Virginias Joe Manchin has said hes opposed. The numbers churned out by the budget office may not help its chances politically, given that the projection of job losses will give ammunition to the pay bumps critics. But the overall finding that, on net, low-wage workers end up better off should strengthen the intellectual case for pushing the wage floor higher, especially given how it was produced.

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Perhaps the most striking thing about the CBOs results is that theyre based on very conservative assumptions about how much minimum-wage increases hurt employmentso even for $15-an-hour skeptics, they should provide some reassurance. Economists have argued about this specific topic for decades, and the debate is heated and convoluted enough that the two sides have difficulty even agreeing on basic points about what the vast and growing body of academic literature actually says. Politically progressive researchers will typically tell you that, taken as a whole, the best evidence suggests that hiking the pay floor has a small or negligible impact on jobs. Minimum-wage naysayers will claim that, actually, studies pretty consistently tell us it puts a damper on hiring.

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This week, the CBO sided firmly with the naysayerswhich one could tell easily enough by how quickly left-leaning economists flamed its results. We believe that the CBOs assumptions on the scale of job loss are just wrong and inappropriately inflated relative to what cutting-edge economics literature would indicate, Heidi Shierholz of the labor-aligned Economic Policy Institute wrote in a Monday blog post that was typical of the blowback. Critics accused the CBO of, among other analytical sins, putting far too much weight on a 2018 paper that showed Seattles push for a $15 minimum wage had eliminated a significant number of jobs, even though a follow-up study by the same team later suggested the impact of the hike was fairly small.

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But to really, fully understand just how far the CBO leaned toward the conservative camp on this issue, it helps to know a bit about one crucial technical concept at the center of the whole minimum-wage debate, called an employment elasticity. This is the all-important number that captures how many jobs are supposedly lost when the minimum wage rises. When the elasticity is negative, it means that as pay rises, employment falls; a positive elasticity means the oppositeas pay rises, employment jumps (studies finding those results are fairly rare, but they pop up now and then). If an elasticity is close to 0, it means that employment doesnt react to the minimum wage much at all.

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When analysts try to estimate how many jobs will disappear if the minimum wage increases, their result depends almost entirely on which elasticity they pick. In a stark and slightly suspicious failure of wonk transparency, the budget office did not actually state outright the number they chose to use anywhere in their report. But based on the results it published, other economists have concluded the budget office went with an elasticity of around -0.48, meaning that for every 10 percent increase in the minimum wage, employment would fall 4.8 percent among workers whose jobs were affected.

Thats a big, fat elasticity, and while some recent studies have suggested that the minimum wage could have an effect that large, they arent typical. Just last month, University of CaliforniaIrvine professor David Neumark, who is widely considered the dean of minimum-wage critics in academia, released a draft paper in which he compiled the results of three decades of papers in the field. He concluded that, in studies looking at workers directly affected by minimum wage hikes, the median elasticity was -0.15, less than one-third of what the CBO chose. The average was -0.31, only about two-thirds of what the CBO ultimately went with.

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The CBO offers various technical reasons for why it chose to assume the minimum wage would have such a large impact on jobs, and perhaps its not entirely absurd to be cautious: After all, in the states that havent already passed higher minimum wages, the climb to $15 would be very steep compared with most minimum-wage hikes in history, and as a result could cause more disruptions for businesses, even if it was implemented gradually over several years. Its also not an especially surprising move, given who currently runs the CBO. Though the budget office is officially nonpartisan and truly does its best to avoid the political fray, its current head is Phillip Swagel, a Republican former official in the George W. Bush administration who did a stint as a nonresident scholar at the center-right American Enterprise Institute. If you wanted to see a thorough assessment of the $15 minimum wage produced by a moderate conservative skeptic making an effort to at least be somewhat fair, the CBOs report is more or less it. And what their work shows is that, when you add everything up, the working class likely still comes out ahead. The legislative math might not be right for a big minimum wage hike right now. But it looks like the economic math works well in its favor.
Steuben, N.Y. -- A 32-year-old Remsen man was flown to Upstate University Hospital on Monday after the tanker truck he was driving overturned, according to New York State Police.

Jared T. Moon suffered internal injuries, though police have not yet released his condition.

The crash happened just before 9:20 a.m., police said. Moon was driving the 2010 Freightliner west on Starr Hill Road in Steuben when the tankers passenger-side tires went off the paved portion of the road and the tanker hit a large tree, according to police.

The tanker then rolled over, police said.

Moon was pinned in the tanker and then taken by Mercy Flight helicopter to Upstate, according to police.

Got a tip, comment or story idea? Contact Chris Libonati via the Signal app for encrypted messaging at 585-290-0718, by phone at the same number, by email or on Twitter.


The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company

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British tech tycoon Mike Lynch faces being pursued by American authorities for years even if his extradition is blocked, his lawyers warned yesterday.

The 55-year-old businessman is fighting US authorities who want to try him for fraud charges.

Yesterday, one of his lawyers, Christopher Morvillo, admitted that even if the extradition attempt fails, Lynch could be arrested in future if he travels outside the UK to an area with an extradition treaty with the US.

Wanted: Tech tycoon Mike Lynch is fighting US authorities who want to try him for fraud charges

Morvillo said: Those charges would remain pending in the event that he was apprehended.

His comments came during the second day of a hearing at Westminster magistrates court.

The entrepreneur is accused of cooking the books at his software company, Autonomy, before it was sold to Hewlett Packard for 7billion in 2011.

He denies the allegations and is urging a judge to block the extradition on the grounds that the allegations are best dealt with here.

While appearing as a witness, Morvillo also predicted that if Lynch was extradited he would probably not face trial until mid-2023.

He can secure bail for a hefty price tag of 7million.

The hearing continues.
Regulatory News:

Hoffmann Green Cement Technologies (Paris:ALHGR)(ISIN: FR0013451044, Ticker: ALHGR) ("Hoffmann Green" or the "Company"), a pioneer in clinker-free low-carbon cement, has obtained positive assessments from independent players specializing in extra-financial ratings, validating its environmental and social strategy.

Ever since its creation, Hoffmann Green's goal has been to decarbonize the construction sector by producing and marketing clinker-free low-carbon cement whose carbon footprint is five times lower that of traditional cement. In 2020, Hoffmann Green formalized a global CSR approach and has now obtained a number of positive assessments that illustrate the Company's commitment in this respect.

Julien Blanchard and David Hoffmann, co-founders of Hoffmann Green Cement Technologies, say: "CSR-related issues are at the very heart of Hoffmann Green's raison d'etre, which is to decarbonize the construction sector. We are very proud to see that our commitment to sustainable development is being rewarded by positive assessments from both domestic and international players. We will continue our efforts to maintain this impactful approach's momentum and thus work to deploy our global low-carbon strategy: reduce, avoid and offset our emissions!

Undertaking of a Scope 3 carbon assessment and high rating obtained in the ACT database

Bilan Carbone scope 3 allows Hoffmann Green, on the strength of the Net Zero Initiative database developed by the Carbone 4 consulting firm, to initiate an approach assessing its contribution to 2050 carbon neutrality. This approach was launched last year on the basis of 2019 data, incorporating a scope that includes direct emissions (scope 1), indirect emissions associated with energy consumption (scope 2) and emissions incurred by the company's activity (scope 3): capital assets, inputs, purchases of raw materials, services or other products, employees' travel, upstream and downstream transport of goods. To date, greenhouse gas emissions associated with 2019 activity total 2,400 metric tons of CO2 equivalent, with 99% of emissions coming within scope 3. The weight of direct and indirect carbon emissions (scopes 1 and 2) is lower than the reduction in emissions resulting from the use of Hoffmann Green cement instead of traditional cement. Expanding to emissions associated with scope 3 and notably the incorporation of capital assets, inputs and upstream and downstream freight represent sources of additional reductions in Hoffmann Green Cement Technologies' impact. Hoffmann Green is one of the first cement manufacturers to produce and publish its carbon assessment undertaken on all three scopes.

At the same time, in a spirit of transparency and in order to have an accurate assessment of the impact of its activity, Hoffmann Green has committed to following the ACT (Assessing low Carbon Transition) approach, an initiative developed by ADEME (the French agency for ecological transition) and the Carbon Disclosure Project to assess companies' climate strategies. Hoffmann Green has obtained a rating of 13A+, one of the highest ratings in the ACT database, reflecting the pertinence of its business model. The average rating obtained by cement companies participating in the ACT pilot program in 2020 in France was 9B+.

Integration in Ethifinance's Gaia-Index and a Sustainalytics rating highlighting CSR performances

The Company's ESG (Environment, Social Governance) performances have been assessed by two independent players specializing in extra-financial ratings. Hoffmann Green has thus received a rating of 54 from consulting agency Ethifinance, up three points on last year. This assessment puts the Company in 131st place in Gaia Rating's ESG 230 panel and in 23rd place out of 78 companies in the panel with revenue of less than 150 million euros. The Company has also received a rating of 20.8 from international ratings agency Sustainalytics, putting it in 3rd place of the 115 companies assessed that produce building materials.

A committed approach with Reforest'Action

In order to support projects aimed at restoring the environment and protecting biodiversity, Hoffmann Green is involved in a reforestation action in France in association with Reforest'Action. During the 2019-2020 season, Hoffmann Green thus planted 10,000 trees in the Occitanie region of southern France, which will enable 1,500 metric tons of CO2 to be stored in 30 years. This approach is fully in line with the Group's DNA and is a practical addition to its low-carbon strategy.

About Hoffmann Green Cement Technologies

Founded in 2014, Hoffmann Green Cement Technologies designs, produces and distributes innovative

clinker-free low-carbon cement with a substantially lower carbon footprint than traditional cement. Fully aware of the environmental emergency and the need to reconcile the construction sector, cement manufacturing and the environment, the Group believes it is at the heart of a genuine technological breakthrough based on altering cement's composition and the creation of a heating-free and clean manufacturing process, without clinker. Hoffmann Green's cements, currently manufactured on a first 4.0 industrial site with no kiln nor chimney in western France, address all construction sector markets and present, at equivalent dosage and with no alteration in the concrete manufacturing process, higher performances than traditional cement.

For further information, please go to: www.ciments-hoffmann.fr

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210210005735/en/

Contacts:

Hoffmann Green

Jerome Caron

Chief Financial Officer

finances@ciments-hoffmann.fr

+33 (0)2 51 46 06 00

NewCap

Pierre Laurent

Thomas Grojean/Quentin Masse

Investor Relations

ciments-hoffmann@newcap.eu

+33 (0)1 44 71 94 94

NewCap

Nicolas Merigeau

Media Relations

ciments-hoffmann@newcap.eu

+33 (0)1 44 71 94 98
Last fall, the actor Jason OConnell agreed to star in a new production of Talleys Folly, Lanford Wilsons wistful two-hander, for Syracuse Stage. The other hand? His wife, Kate Hamill. While they would film the piece in an empty auditorium, they would spend much of their rehearsal time at home, on Zoom. So much for leaving your role at the stage door.

Theres no escape, OConnell said, mostly joking. Theres no time apart, theres no breather. Theres no one to complain to about my co-star.

Since March, when theater began to pop up online, savvy producers have looked for Zoom box workarounds and ways of generating the intimacy that only actors sharing the same airspace can provide. A Covid-19 friendly solution: Hire cohabiting couples to perform opposite each another  on sofas, in bedrooms and on the occasional closed stage  with no grids or time lags intervening.

That explains how viewers saw two Apple family siblings  Maryann Plunketts Barbara and Jay O. Sanderss Richard  quarantining together in the latest Richard Nelson trilogy, with their West Village apartment subbing for Barbaras Rhinebeck house. Cohabiting actors also enabled a surprising scene in Sarah Ganchers Russian Troll Farm. Having spent the play on separate screens, the disinformation workers Greg Keller and Danielle Slavick suddenly leapt into the same box and then into bed.


South Koreas capital, Seoul, on Tuesday announced that it will give pet dogs and cats free coronavirus tests in case they come in contact with an infected member and begin to show symptoms. Seouls official, Park Yoo-mi, told an online briefing that the health authorities are ready to conduct the COVID-19 tests on pets for free and will isolate those animals that depict symptomatic infection, sending them under a 14-day quarantine in a government facility. Seoul metropolitan government will offer coronavirus tests for pet dogs and cats," Yoo-mi, Seoul citys official handling disease control, told a press conference.

Last week, Seoul released the guidelines for getting pets tested for coronavirus after a cat in the south-eastern city of Jinju was found covid positive, according to the sources of the Associated Press. The feline was a pet to a woman and his daughter from Jinju religious facility, where an outbreak occurred. Starting Monday, South Korea initiated efforts to test the animals, even as there is little scientific evidence that the virus could be transmitted from humans to the animals. On Jan 24, Seoul registered its first official confirmed case of the novel coronavirus in an animal, after the cat was found to have mild body temperature. Seoul metropolitan government announced that the health officials, including veterinarians, will conduct tests near the animal's homes, effective February 8.

Read: Seoul To Consider Need For Additional COVID Vaccine Procurement Amid New Strain Worries

Read: Hopes Rise In Portugal But COVID-19 Still Slams Hospitals

Snow leopards tested covid-positive

Earlier, similarly, a snow leopard in Kentucky, United States tested positive for COVID-19. The female big cat contracted the SARS-CoV-2 after coming in contact with a COVID-19 positive human. Meanwhile, two other male snow leopards were tested for the disease at Louisville zoo after they showed mild symptoms, the US Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service informed in a release. The predatory animals were reported to have symptomatic infection and had temperature, including dry cough and wheezing. All three snow leopards were tested at a regional veterinary diagnostic centre, the zoo facilities informed in a statement. A female leopard named NeeCee got the positive diagnosis first, followed by the males testing positive. "This is the first confirmed case of SARS-CoV-2 infection in a snow leopard," the authorities said.

Read: COVID-19: Scientists Say That UK Variant Is Spreading Rapidly Across US, May Dominate Soon

Read: UK Government Assures All Illegal Immigrants Will Receive COVID-19 Vaccine
When Mary Wilson, Florence Ballard, and the-then Diane Ross met as children, in a housing commission in Detroit in the 1950s, there was no telling that they would not only one day become the most famous girl group of all time, but that their breathtaking costumes would play an important role in the civil rights movement.

But with their heavily embellished chandelier gowns, body-hugging dresses with matching turkey-feathers circling the hems, shimmering capes and elaborate hairstyles  created with the help of Hollywood designers including Bob Mackie and Michael Travis  they changed racial perceptions at a time when the United States was becoming engulfed by political upheaval during growing unrest over the fight for equal rights.

Mary Wilson of The Supremes (right) with, from left, group mates Cindy Birdsong (who replaced original member Florence Ballard) and Diana Ross, in a live concert in 1965. Credit:Getty Images

These were [three] brown women as they had never, ever been seen before on national television, Whoopi Goldberg wrote in the forward to Supreme Glamour, a book that documented the groups outfits by Mary Wilson who died on Monday at 76. Everything about the Supremes  all those gowns, all those pantsuits, all those caps, gloves, furs, the makeup, the eyelashes, the wigs  made me believe they were speaking to me. I too could be well-spoken, tall, majestic, an emissary of black folks who  like The Supremes  came from the projects.

Oprah Winfrey once said that, as a 10-year-old, she felt the same. You never saw anything like it in the 1960s  three women of colour who were totally empowered, creative, imaginative, she is quoted as saying in Diana Ross: A Biography. To see the Supremes and know that it was possible to be like them, that black people could do that 

A 63-year-old Texas woman was scammed out of $100,000 in a catfishing scam where she was led to believe she was dating pop star Bruno Mars.

Alleged fraudster Chinwendu Azuonwu, 39, a Nigerian national and permanent resident of Houston, appeared in court on Tuesday accused of impersonating Mars on Instagram as part of the scam to swindle the victim out of her savings.

Azuonwu, charged with third-degree felony money laundering, was taken into custody this week, KPRC-TV reported.

In court documents, his co-conspirator was identified as Basil Amadi, 29. Information about Amadis arrest record was not available as of Wednesday morning.

The victim, a resident of North Richland Hills, Texas, told police that in 2018 she created a profile on Instagram 'in search of companionship.'

Chinwendu Azuonwu (left), 39, a Nigerian national and permanent resident of Houston, appeared in court on Tuesday after authorities said he impersonated Bruno Mars (seen right) on Instagram as part of a scheme to defraud a 63-year-old woman

According to investigators, the woman was persuaded to pay the scammers $100,000 after the person she believed to be Mars asked her to cover his tour expenses. Mars is seen above in Los Angeles in 2017

She then made contact online with someone claiming to be Mars. During these interactions on Instagram and Google Hangouts, the woman told investigators that she fell in love with the person she thought was Mars.

In addition, Mars told the woman that he planned to quit his tour so that he can be with her.

The woman told police that she believed at the time that she was communicating with the 11-time Grammy Award winner after she received text messages showing Mars performing while he was on tour.

In September 2018, Mars asked the woman to send him a $10,000 check to help cover touring expenses, according to police.

The woman agreed. She went to a local branch of the Wells Fargo bank in North Richland Hills and withdrew a cashiers check made out to Basil Chidiadi Amadi, a person described as a friend of the band, according to authorities.

The woman deposited the check into an account at JPMorgan Chase.

In court documents, authorities identified his co-conspirator as Basil Amadi, 29. Information about Amadis arrest record was not available as of Wednesday morning

Two days later, the woman was once again contacted by Mars who asked for another $90,000, though he did not explain the reason.

The woman then returned to her bank and withdrew a cashiers check that was made out to Chi Autos - at the request of Mars.

What is catfishing? Catfishing is the act of creating a fictional persona online as a means of luring someone into a relationship. This becomes a cyber crime when it is for the purpose of ripping them off either through taking out loans on their name or stealing their credit card data. Advertisement

The second check was deposited on September 14, 2018 into a separate bank account at JPMorgan Chase, according to investigators.

Investigators subpoenaed bank records and traced the two JPMorgan Chase accounts to Azuonwu and Amadi.

They then ran their names through the database of drivers license holders and found their pictures.

According to Harris County prosecutors, Azuonwu acknowledged that he was the owner of one of the bank accounts in question, though he denied ever knowing Amadi.

He also said he did not know how $90,000 was deposited into his account, according to the criminal complaint.

Amadi also told investigators that he did not know Azuonwu. He also could not explain the source of the $10,000 payment that appeared in his bank records.

Azuonwus bail was set at $30,000.

If convicted, each of them faces between two and 10 years in state prison.
The new Chair of the Senate Energy Committee, Sen. Joe Manchin, has asked President Biden to reconsider revoking the license for the Keystone XL oil pipeline in the latest episode of a saga that has been dragging on for years.

The Democratic senator from West Virginia and long-time supporter of the coal industry said in a letter to the President that pipelines continue to be the safest mode to transport our oil and natural gas resources, and they support thousands of high-paying, American union jobs, as quoted by the Associated Press.

Indeed, pipelines have been found to be a safer option for the transportation of crude oil and other hydrocarbon liquids than oil trains, which Canadian oil producers have been forced to resort to for lack of sufficient pipeline capacity.

However, following his green energy agenda, President Biden canceled the project with an executive order on the first day of his presidency, drawing ire from Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, who called the move a gut punch and an insult.

The provinces government is currently considering forcing Washington to pay it for the money poured so far into the project, which amounts to about $1.2 billion. According to an official from Premier Kenneys office, Alberta may invoke terms in the North American Free Trade Agreement to recoup at least some of its expenses.

Critics of the pipeline have argued that U.S. refiners do not need any more import capacity for Canadian crude. Yet analysts note that with or without Keystone XL, U.S. refiners demand for heavy crude is unlikely to decline spontaneously, leaving them exposed to more imports from OPEC rather than neighbor Canada. At the same time, Canadian oil will need to come in by train, which carries risks of derailment and a lot bigger spillsand possibly explosionsthan those likely to occur with pipelines.

By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
Greg Hunt has accused ABC anchor Michael Rowland of left-wing bias during a heated interview on breakfast television.

The fired-up Health Minster told Rowland 'you identify with the left' after the journalist questioned his decision to attach the Liberal Party logo to a Twitter post about the government's vaccine rollout last week.

'When you welcomed the 10 million doses of Pfizer on your media channels last week, why did you have the need to attach a Liberal Party logo on an Australian Government announcement?' Rowland said.

Last week Hunt attached the Liberal Party logo to a Twitter post (pictured) about the government's vaccine rollout

Mr Hunt said he was 'elected under that banner' and insisted he had done nothing wrong.

Rowland pressed further, saying 'it's an Australian government announcement, who paid for the vaccines?' before Mr Hunt questioned his integrity.

'I know this is an issue for you. In many ways you identify with the left, you do this a lot and I respect that,' Mr Hunt said.

'No minister, no, no, no, I find that offensive,' Rowland interjected. 'I'm asking you about what is right and wrong.'

Mr Hunt laughed and replied: 'Oh come on Michael, there is nobody who is watching who doesn't identify you with the left and you should be open about that. I'm open about my origins.'

Greg Hunt has accused ABC anchor Michael Rowland of left-wing bias during a heated interview on breakfast television

Rowland has worked at the ABC his whole career and has never been involved in politics - but Liberal MPs have often accused the ABC of left-wing bias.

'I did predict to people that Michael Rowland would spend 50 per cent of this interview on this topic... I win the bet with my office,' Mr Hunt joked.

He said the Twitter post was 'entirely within the rules' and 'entirely appropriate'.

Later on Twitter Rowland denied any bias.

'No, minister, I don't identify with the left,' he wrote. 'My job as an ABC journalist is to hold ALL sides of politics to account, as I was this morning.'

ABC 7.30 host Leigh Sales slammed Mr Hunt for deflecting the question.

'This practice by politicians of claiming ''bias'' when they don't want to answer a perfectly legitimate question is repellent and needs to be called out immediately,' she tweeted.

Labor Senator Kate Gallagher also criticised the Health Minister, saying Hunt was 'angry, defensive and unable to provide an answer.'

'This mob never thinks standards or rules apply to them,' she Tweeted.
If there is one country in the Middle East where one should not be surprised to see political violence resulting in brutal murders, it is Lebanon.

With presidents, prime ministers, religious leaders, key political leaders and journalists all having been killed since the countrys independence in 1943, Lebanon is not new to political assassinations.

But last weeks vicious assassination of a prominent Lebanese Shia intellectual could be a turning point not only for the deeply divided Arab country but also for the future of sectarianism in the Middle East.

Lokman Slim, a prolific writer, editor, publisher, filmmaker and political activist, was murdered after he disappeared for several hours with his rented car while on a trip through Shia-dominated southern Lebanon.

Slim, a fierce opponent of the Shia group Hizbullah, was found dead hours after he was kidnapped. The local media reported that bruises were found on his face, suggesting that he may have been tortured or interrogated.

The death of Slim, a prominent critic of Irans regional policies, has sent a shock wave across Lebanon, which faces multiple political, communal and economic problems, along with the Covid-19 pandemic, which have combined to push it to the brink of collapse.

Significantly, however, Slims assassination is expected to rip open the wounds of Shias in Lebanon and beyond over ties with Iran and the Islamic Republics increasing influence within Shia communities in several Arab countries.

Depending on the outcome of the investigation into Slims murder and the heated debate surrounded it, the Shia split could fundamentally alter the regions balance of power between Iran and the Sunni Arab nations in the years to come.

The Lebanese authorities said that 58-year-old Slim had been shot with six bullets, four in the head, one in the chest and one in the back. They believe the brazen murder could be a message by his killers to Hizbullahs critics in Lebanon.

Slim had long been an outspoken opponent of Hizbullah, which, with its Shia ally the Amal Movement, holds the most power in Lebanon and effectively operates as a state within a state.

Slim, from a well-known Shia family, had also denounced the political monopoly of the two Shia groups within the community, the corruption of their leaders and their close ties with Iran.

He had claimed that he had been threatened with death on several occasions in the past. Media close to Hizbullah, which used to label him and his colleagues as the Shias of the embassies, had published diplomatic cables released in 2010 and 2011 by WikiLeaks that revealed Slims contacts with US diplomats.

The documents show that US diplomats often sought out Slim for his views on developments in the Shia community and provided funding for some of his cultural initiatives. They also arranged high-level meetings for him during visits to Washington.

Hizbullah and its Shia ally the Amal Movement condemned Slims murder and called on the Lebanese security forces and judiciary to quickly discover the identity of the perpetrators.

But many Hizbullah supporters hailed the murder on social media as retribution for Slims treason. Jawad Nasrallah, the son of the partys chief, described his death in a tweet as a gain and an unexpected blessing before quickly deleting the posting.

Criticism of Hizbullah by Lebanese Shia is nothing new. Former party chief Subhi Al-Tufayli has been a vocal critic of current leader Hassan Nasrallah and has held him responsible for the destruction of Lebanon.

Other Shia community leaders, intellectuals and activists have also distanced themselves from Hizbullah and Amal and have slammed what they consider to be their mafia-style politics.

Hizbullah was widely accused of being behind the assassinations of two prominent leftist Lebanese Shia writers, Hussein Mroue and Mahdi Amil in 1987. But like many other political murders in Lebanon, the two crimes went unpunished.

Both men had been promoting an anti-sectarian discourse and a civic state in Lebanon. Amid a wave of kidnappings of foreigners in Lebanon blamed on Hizbullah, their targeted killing forced critics to keep a low profile or to remain silent.

In recent years, however, criticism of Hizbullah has mounted and has centred primarily on the partys determination to keep a firm grip on power and act as a proxy for Iran in Lebanon and across the region.

Hizbullah first emerged as a militant group to resist the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Amal was formed in 1974 as a political and a paramilitary wing of the Lebanese Shia cleric Musa Al-Sadrs Dispossessed Movement that had been formed to promote Shia political and economic integration.

Over the years and with enormous logistical and financial help from post-Islamic Revolution Shia Iran, the group succeeded in building a mass political and paramilitary movement in predominately Shia areas of Lebanon.

After a period of violent armed clashes between them, the two groups ended their rivalry and joined forces to shore up the communal interests of Shias who were the most socially and economically underprivileged part of Lebanons population.

Over the years and since the end of the Lebanese Civil War, Lebanese Shias have made substantial gains in the Lebanese government and have assumed more significant roles in the countrys decision-making process and in its security.

Although Lebanons politics have been influenced by sectarianism since its independence, the rise of the two Shia movements has deepened the countrys identity politics and reshaped its demographic balance of power.

Meanwhile, the empowerment of Iraqi Shias following the ouster of the Sunni-dominated regime of Saddam Hussein by the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 had a significant impact on the revival of other Shia communities in the Middle East.

Shias, members of the second-largest branch of Islam, comprise about 20 per cent of the worlds Muslims. While they make up a large majority of the population in Iran, they form a substantial majority in Iraq, Lebanon and Bahrain and smaller minorities in several other Arab countries.

Shiism was born as a protest movement within Islam. Living under Sunni caliphates, rulers and governments, Shias have been marginalised in Muslim societies for political and theological reasons.

In Iraq, the Shias suffered from discrimination, and their political groups were persecuted under various Sunni regimes. Under the Saddam regime, Shias who were accused of affiliation with political groups such as the Islamic Dawa Party faced execution.

In many Arab countries, Shias are treated as pariahs and suffer religious, political and economic exclusion and are sometimes stereotyped as being loyal to Iran.

For many Shias, the sects revival is enshrined in the Quran, which has it that the lowly who kept the faith will rise up and inherit the earth free from their oppressors.

The Shia revival, however, has sparked fears among many Sunni Arab governments of a Shia assertiveness that could fundamentally shift the regions sectarian and geopolitical balance of power.

After Saddams fall, many Sunni Arab leaders started warning of an Iran-led Shia crescent extending from Beirut to Tehran emerging in the Middle East amid concerns that this could turn into a full moon that could shift towards Shia power in other Arab countries.

Though many considered such concerns as fear-mongering, reactions to the Shia revival and Irans mounting influence have created a poisonous regional sectarian environment that has recreated ancient rivalries between the Shias and the Sunnis and increased geopolitical antagonisms.

In this respect at least, the geopolitical metaphor has so far proved inaccurate, and the Shia empowerment in Lebanon and Iraq has been owed to very specific historical circumstances in the two Arab countries and in the region.

For one thing, and as the Iraqi experiment has also proved, there is a deep-rooted sense of nationalism and also secularism that has been playing out among the Shia communities in the two countries against communalism.

Like in Lebanon, where Shias participated in the nationwide anti-establishment protests in 2019 and 2020, the simultaneous uprising against the Shia-led government in Iraq was driven by Iraqi nationalism and efforts to unmake the post-Saddam sectarian order.

Also like in Lebanon, the Shia ruling groups in Iraq started a crackdown against the mostly Shia protesters, including by killing hundreds of them sometimes in targeted murders, in order to quell opposition to their own dysfunction, corruption and alignment with Iran.

Without wanting to belittle the damage done by the identity politics that the Middle East is facing today, the rift which has started to be seen within the Shia communities in Lebanon and Iraq is a sign that the Shia Arabs have not yet said their final word.

It is impossible to say what might happen next, however. Could a new secular Shia voice emerge separate from the mostly sectarian order in Lebanon and Iraq that the Shias leaders want them to contend with?

The savage murder of Slim and the killing of Shia protesters in Iraq have exposed how difficult it is for non-democratic Shia groups to rise above the bloody legacy of their countries past.

Slims killing could, therefore, offer a lesson: that sectarianism in the Middle East has run its course and that it is time for a reset. But much will depend on a new regional order that can balance the demands of the Shias with those of the Sunnis and reinvent the region on a non-sectarian basis.

*A version of this article appears in print in the 11 February , 2021 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly

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Bengaluru, Feb 10 : Medical students in Karnataka should get vaccinated against Covid and lead the drive as its ambassadors, state Health Minister K. Sudhakar said on Wednesday.

"Medical students in the state should lead the anti-Covid vaccine drive as its ambassadors by getting vaccinated," said Sudhakar after opening the obstetric triage at the state-run Vani Vilas hospital here.

The minister, who unveiled the respiratory intensive care unit (ICU) at the state-run Victoria hospital here, said if medical students take the vaccine, staff in their colleges and attached hospitals would be inspired to receive the shot.

"Some students are citing exams as a reason to avoid vaccination. But there is no connection between vaccine and exams or side-effects," said Sudhakar, who is a doctor himself.

Though the vaccination drive was launched across the state on January 16 with healthcare warriors as its first beneficiaries, only about 40 per cent of them took the shot till date.

The southern state got Covishield from the Serum Institute of India and Covaxin from Bharat Biotech for vaccinating its healthcare workers.

"Indian vaccines are in great demand from 25 countries the world over. As the dose is offered free, people should take the shot voluntarily," Sudhakar said.

Noting that the coronavirus had made the people realise the importance of health, the minister said the BJP government had improved the health infrastructure across the state over the last 7-8 months.

"The Health and Medical Education Departments added 22,500 oxygenated beds in state-run hospitals during the pandemic to treat the Covid patients," he said.

Chief Minister B.S. Yediyurappa has decided to prioritise the health sector for more funds in the budget for 2021-22, he added.

A Marbella supermarket manager has been arrested by police after he claimed to have been the victim of a robbery where 16,000 euros in cash was stolen from his store's safe by an armed thief.

Police were called to the supermarket by a cashier who had been told by the manager that he had been robbed in the office, where the safe was located, even though none of the staff had witnessed anything.

The incident happened one evening last November and when police arrived on the scene the manager told them the robber had entered his office and, pointing a gun at him, demanded that he open the safe and give him the money.

Mobile phone clue

The manager was unable to give the officers much information about the description of the robber claiming he was extremely nervous and even took a few days' leave to recover from his ordeal.

He might have got away with the charade if the police hadnt found an incriminating piece of evidence that was dropped by the robber when he fled  the thief's mobile phone.

When data from the device was analysed it gave away the part the supermarket manager played in the fraud and linked the suspects.

This Monday (8 Febuary) police raided the home of the alleged robber, a 29-year-old German citizen, in Estepona and found two firearms, several fake guns, the clothing that was worn during the robbery, luxury watches and a cash-counting machine - along with the mobile phone box that matched the device that had been dropped near the supermarket.

A search was also made at the Estepona home of the manager  a 41-year-old man of Spanish nationality.

Both men were arrested and charged with various crimes including robbery with violence or intimidation, illegal possession of weapons and the simulation of a crime.
Dubai: Yemen's Houthi rebels on Wednesday targeted Abha International Airport in southwestern Saudi Arabia, causing a civilian plane on the tarmac to catch fire, the kingdom's state television reported. The state-owned Al-Ekhbariya TV said that firefighters have brought the blaze under control. The initial reports offered no word on any possible casualties from the attack. Saudi officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment Wednesday.

Col. Turki al-Maliki, the spokesman for the Saudi-led military coalition, said coalition forces intercepted and destroyed two bomb-laden drones launched by the Houthis toward the kingdom. He condemned the assault as a "systematic and deliberate attempt to target civilians in the southern region" of Saudi Arabia.

In November 2017, the Houthis targeted Riyadh's international airport in an attack. Saudi officials later blamed Iran for providing the missile to the Houthis used in that and other attacks on the kingdom amid its grinding, yearslong war against the rebels. Tehran long has denied providing arms to the Houthis, though evidence and United Nations expert reports show weapons linking back to Iran.

Wednesday's attack, however, represented the first one to reportedly damaged a civilian aircraft at the facility. Flight-tracking websites showed delayed and cancelled flights scheduled to either take off or land at the airport. At least two Airbus A320s flown by the Saudia, the kingdom's flag carrier, were on the ground at Abha on Wednesday afternoon, according to the flight-tracking website FlightRadar24.Com. Another Airbus A320 on the ground there belonged to low-cost carrier FlyADeal. Both airlines did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen said in a statement that it will "hold the militia accountable in accordance with international humanitarian law," referring to the Houthis. There was no announcement from the Houthis on the attack. Military spokesmen for the group did not immediately respond to calls seeking comment.

Saudi Arabia has been at war with the Houthis in Yemen for nearly six years, a grinding conflict that has spawned the world's worst humanitarian disaster. Yemen's war began in September 2014, when the Houthis seized the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, and much of the country's north. Saudi Arabia, along with the United Arab Emirates and other countries, entered the war alongside Yemen's internationally recognized government in March 2015.
I must admit that I have a strong passion for reading, particularly when it comes to history. And if it entails matters related to the outdoors as well, so much the better.

As a case in point, I came across a real jewel some time back, Hunting Expeditions of Oliver Hazard Perry, based on Perry's hunting diaries from 1836 through 1855. An article in an outdoor magazine brought this literary work to my attention, and I located it through my local library.

After reading the book, I knew I had to have my own copy for my personal collection. I did this through Barnes and Noble, and it was money well spent.

Today, the stockpile through regular bookstores has dried up, and the book is now available typically through online sources, often with a price tag that keeps climbing. But a friend of mine recently found Perry's book, secondhand, for a decent price on Amazon.

By the way, this is the only reprinting (1994 by St. Huberts Press) of a very rare piece of which only 100 original copies were made in 1899 (I saw one of these rare copies for sale online for $2,000).

Perry was killed in a railroad accident in Ohio in 1864. His detailed hunting diaries were stored away until fortunately being discovered by his niece in a chest in the attic more than three decades later.

The limited printing of the original book was not meant for sale, but for giving only to family and friends.

Perrys words clearly give us a view into the hunting style, equipment, and atmosphere of a time long gone, and no other published historical work does it so well.

The areas reflecting his hunts are at first for whitetail deer near his home in Cleveland, Ohio, and then later for elk, deer, and black bear in the pristine wilderness along the Cass River in Michigans Thumb.

Myself, being a lifelong Thumb resident who grew up not far from the Cass River, I take very special interest in this part of the book.

Some chapters can define a book, and my favorite in this work is Elk and Deer Hunt in Sanilac and Tuscola Counties, Michigan, 1852." Needless to say, I must spill the beans on the content of this chapter in an abbreviated form to give you an idea of this books value to history, and the critical insight it has into hunting in times long gone by.

Perry boarded a steamboat from Ohio to Detroit on Sept. 6, 1852. His hunt, including getting there and back, entailed more than two months. Another steamboat took him and his gear and supplies on to Port Huron, and a third steamboat then transported him to Lexington. Perry's traveling and hunting companion on this particular expedition was Frederick Deming.

Perry and Deming traveled by ox cart from Lexington on the first leg of their journey to Elk Creek. But as the trail narrowed and the ground roughened, everything was transferred to a travois made from a tree limb with a large crotch that held the supplies and was pulled by a pair of small but tough Indian ponies."

Perry and Deming set up a base camp on Elk Creek, and with minimal supplies in knapsacks and just the clothes on their backs, they began an arduous trip on foot to reach the Cass River. While they had a few days ration of pork and hard bread," they planned on living off the land as their primary source of sustenance.

This was the era of the caplock muzzleloader and Perry carried an 11-pound double-barrel .45 caliber rifle, while Deming carried a double-barrel shotgun.

This was also clearly a wilderness experience in which they used a compass and a somewhat limited map. If anything went wrong, they were definitely on their own. Some nights were spent close to their campfire listening to the vicious snarls and growls of unknown animals prowling nearby in the darkness.

The forest of giant, ancient trees was so immense that the pair of intrepid hunters would often have to climb a tree to get a compass bearing on a particular landmark. That is how they located a small slice through the cover and made a heading for it.

They encountered a small, unnamed stream that, by the direction of the current, they knew would lead them to the Cass River. It was while following this stream that they heard the bugling of bull elk and stalked in on a herd of them.

Perry shot a huge bull, using both barrels of his rifle to put it down. A photograph in the book shows Perry holding the antlers from this Thumb bull over his shoulder, posing with them after returning home. It is clear that this Sanilac County bull elk was a bruiser, but it is difficult to tell how many points it has in the photo.

But a drawing of the antlers with Perrys double-barrel rifle lying across them shows they were an enormous 8 x 8 set with an unusual crown on each side (this was of the now-extinct eastern elk, which were larger than the Rocky Mountain subspecies now found in Michigan).

While retrieving elk meat and not carrying his rifle, Perry encountered a large pack of wolves drawn in by the scent of the kill. What is truly unique is that all the wolves were jet-black.

Although black timberwolves are not rare, neither are they, I believe, a common feature. Seeing an entire pack of this color makes this a very remarkable encounter. Needless to say, what elk meat Perry and Deming couldnt carry away wasnt going to waste, according to the wolves.

Once at the Cass River, and by this time living solely on jerked elk meat and thorn apples (and a berry that Perry calls pigeon berry), Perry and Deming made their way downstream to an Indian encampment called Indian Fields," near present-day Caro.

There, they stayed for a while with a pioneer family named Bigelow to recuperate, eat bread and potatoes, and repair their woolen clothing that was torn up by the rigors of negotiating the nearly impassible wilderness.

By this time, it was mid-October and Indian groups from other encampments, such as See-bee-wane (Sebewaing) and Qua-na-cussee (Quanicassee), gathered at Indian Fields for their annual fall hunting pow-wow.

The celebration was such that Perry and Deming purchased an Indian canoe and paddled upstream to make camp in a quieter atmosphere and to hunt deer. (Due to the beating this craft could take, according to Perrys notes, I believe it was a dug-out canoe and not the birchbark version.)

During their stay, they encountered three elk hunters coming downstream by canoe who had been hunting along the North Fork of the Cass River (near present-day Cass City). Minus any elk, the three hunters had had more wilderness experiences than they cared for and were paddling back to Saginaw.

Although they had encountered plenty of elk (no wonder the township in the area they hunted is called Elkland), the forest was so dense that the trio of hunters had had trouble stalking in close enough for an accurate shot. They were quite stunned by the size of the antlers on Perrys elk.

Perry and Deming would eventually have to paddle to Saginaw themselves, passing by the small pioneer settlements of Vasser (Vassar), Tuscola, Dutch Town (Frankenmuth) and Bridgeport.

Once they were in Saginaw, arrangements were made to go by lake and retrieve the equipment left at their base camp on Elk Creek, and then return home.

The end of the chapter tells the distances Perry and Deming hiked on the Cass River hunting expedition, such as noting that the bull elk was killed eight miles from the Cass River. It also mentions the distance to the forks of the Cass, as well as the distance along the river to various pioneer settlements and Indian encampments.

Included are the detailed list of supplies hauled in for the two-month stay in the Thumbs wilderness, as well as the technique used by Thumb-area Indians to brain-tan a deerskin.

Ive canoed the Cass River countless times since childhood, including both forks, and I have paddled downstream all the way to Saginaw. Ive often wondered about the history, wild animals, and people associated with its meandering current.

Reading Oliver Hazard Perrys very detailed written account sheds an informative light on it all. I thoroughly appreciate the fact he made the effort to accurately document everything in his diary each day -- using the stub of a pencil and the mellow, dim light from a crackling campfire -- which now allows for a wonderful and enlightening step back in time.

Email Tom Lounsbury at tlounsburyoutdoors@gmail.com
Journalists and security personnel gather near the entrance of the Wuhan Institute of Virology after a visit by the World Health Organization team in Wuhan, China, on Feb. 3, 2021. (Ng Han Guan/AP Photo)

WHO Scientist Says Dont Rely Too Much on US Virus Intelligence Amid Probe Transparency Doubts

A member of the World Health Organization team in Wuhan to study the origin of the pandemic hit out at U.S. intelligence on Feb. 9, hours after a State Department spokesperson said that the jurys still out on whether the Chinese regime gave the team full transparency.

President Joe Biden has to look tough on China, Peter Daszack, a US scientist who is part of the WHO investigation of the virus origin in Wuhan, said on Twitter as the mission ended.

He added, Please dont rely too much on US intel: increasingly disengaged under Trump & frankly wrong on many aspects.

Earlier on Tuesday, Peter Ben Embarek, the Danish scientist leading the WHO team, said that based on their findings, it was extremely unlikely that the virus could have accidentally escaped from a lab. U.S. officials in the Trump administration have hypothesized that the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus may have leaked from a virology lab in Wuhan.

State Department spokesperson Ned Price later cast doubt on the transparency of the probe during a press briefing, when asked whether he believed the Chinese regime gave the WHO team full cooperation.

I think the jurys still out. I think clearly the Chinese, at least heretofore, have not offered the requisite transparency that we need, Price said.

Prices comments follow an audit by congressional Republicans in September last year that concluded the CCP and the World Health Organization are culpable for the spread of the virus, and the global pandemic could have likely been prevented had they acted differently.

The report by Republican members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee said that the CCP engaged in active cover-up efforts of information surrounding the spread of the CCP virus, and the WHO enabled the cover-up by praising the CCP and parroting its talking points.

The Trump administration announced plans to withdraw from the WHO in July last year, amid criticism that the international body was acting at the behest of the Chinese regime.

The former president said the WHO failed to investigate credible reports from sources in Chinas Wuhan province that conflicted with Beijings accounts about the viruss spread and parroted and publicly endorsed the idea that human-to-human transmission was not happening.

Biden reversed the decision to leave the WHO upon taking office.

U.S. President Joe Biden delivers remarks on the national economy and the need for his administrations proposed $1.9 trillion CCP virus relief legislation in the State Dining Room at the White House in Washington on Feb. 5, 2021. (Stefani Reynolds/Pool/Getty Images)

Following the teams findings, Embarek said that the team will focus efforts on studying the possible transmission from bats to humans and the risk of transmission through frozen foods.

The findings suggest that the laboratory incidents hypothesis is extremely unlikely to explain the introduction of the virus to the human population, and therefore not a hypothesis that we advise to suggest future studies, Embarek told reporters during a three-hour-long press conference on Tuesday in Wuhan, the Chinese city where the virus first emerged.

In a comment echoing Chinese officials narratives, he suggested that while the Huanan Seafood Market saw one of the earliest CCP virus clusters, the virus could have come from elsewhere, including frozen meat. But he said an intermediary animal host remains the most likely source.

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in a Fox News interview on Tuesday, also questioned whether the team was given full access to investigate.

Eva Fu contributed to this report.

An earlier version of this article misidentified the author of the tweet. Peter Daszak, a US scientist who is part of the WHO investigation, wrote the comments on Twitter. The Epoch Times regrets this error.

SII CEO Adar Poonawalla (File Image: Twitter)

Rising Sun Holdings, a company controlled in personal capacity by Serum Institute of India CEO Adar Poonawalla, announced a transaction on February 10 to acquire a controlling stake in Magma Fincorp (MFL), a non-banking financial company (NBFC).

The deal will be carried out via a preferential issue of Magma Fincorp's equity shares worth Rs 3,456 crore. The deal also includes an open offer as per SEBI norms.

According to an official statement, the deal  is subject to shareholders and other regulatory approvals and represents 64.68 percent of MFLs enhanced equity share capital post the issue. Based on current shareholding, Rising Sun Holding would hold 60 percent stake in the entity post issuance and the existing promoter group stake would get reduced to 13.3 percent post issuance. The net worth of MFL shall increase to over Rs 6,300 crore post the issuance.

Following the preferential issue, Rising Sun Holdings would be classified as the promoter of MFL. MFL and its subsidiaries shall be renamed and rebranded under the brand name Poonawalla Finance, subject to regulatory approvals.

Subsequent to the completion of the preferential allotment, the existing financial services business of Poonawalla Finance is proposed to be consolidated into MFL subject to compliance with extant regulations.

I am excited at this opportunity to infuse majority capital for controlling stake of MFL. I see an unlimited potential in India in the financial space as our economy is poised to grow in double digits and this ties in with our group philosophy of serving the needs and dreams of the nation, and financial service plays an important role in supporting and fuelling the growth of our country. This transaction is subject to statutory and regulatory approvals, said Poonawalla, Director, Rising Sun Holdings.

Sanjay Chamria, Vice Chairman and Managing Director, MFL, said: Considering the positives in the deal by way of huge capital infusion, strong brand value and ability to attract top notch talent, the Board of the Company has rightly decided to accept an offer for a substantial equity infusion into the company. This would help in propelling the company into a higher growth trajectory, benefiting from potential lower cost of funds, improved credit rating and with additional leveraging of the huge distribution network, will eventually improve the overall RoE. We are proud to be associating with one of the countrys finest and reputed business groups, and hope to together take the Company to new heights.

According to the official announcement, both parties believe that the transaction would be in the best interests of all the stakeholders and that post transaction, MFL would be uniquely placed to leverage the vast opportunities in the lending space with expected reduction in borrowing cost.

Strong corporate backing and substantial fund infusion is likely to have a positive effect on the credit rating of the company as well. This infusion would also enable MFL to invest in its housing finance subsidiary and general insurance joint venture, the announcement said.

Economic Laws Practice is acting as the tax and transaction advisor, Khaitan & Co is acting as the legal advisor, and Axis Capital is acting as the merchant banker to the open offer to Rising Sun Holdings.

Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu India LLP is acting as the exclusive financial advisor to MFL, Wadia Ghandy & Co is acting as legal advisor, and Vinod Kothari & Co is acting Corporate law advisors to the company.
Dozens of times a day in Covid-19 wards across California, a scene like this plays out: A hospital chaplain watches as a death is announced by machine.

Kristin Michealsen, a hospital chaplain in Los Angeles, stood at a mans bedside, holding his hand. His relatives gathered at their home just minutes from the hospital  they were not allowed into the hospital ward. The patients heart had just stopped. Ms. Michealsen, an ordained minister, had watched a computer monitor as she accompanied the man to the edge of his life. Eighty beats per minute. Sixty. Forty.

California has averaged 433 daily deaths over the past week. On Tuesday, it became the state with the largest total toll, surpassing New York.

In the depersonalized math of the pandemic, there are two ways to view the ravages of the virus in California. As Americas most populous state, it has by far the most cases in the country  more than 3.4 million  and now the most deaths. But when adjusted for its large population, California has a lower death rate than 31 states and Washington, D.C.
The first television broadcast in Israel was black and white, but unlike most nations, it wasnt due to the lack of technology to broadcast in color. As a matter of fact, when television first came to Israel in 1968, the world was already switching to color broadcast. But Israeli authorities were not sure. They thought color broadcast was a frivolous expense that should best be avoided. So despite having the capability to broadcast in color, Israels only national channel deliberately erased color from all their programs for more than twenty years, even from those they purchased or received from abroad.

Photo: Stephen Monterroso/Unsplash

Television came to Israel under a shroud of doubts and apprehension. The state founding fathers perceived television as a threat; they feared it would change the political, social and cultural characteristics of the young state. They felt that television broadcasts would put unnecessary economic pressure upon the state, and the mass buying of television sets would be an economic burden upon the population as well. Television, they argued, was a luxury that suited only wealthy and economically settled states.

The government also feared that television and western shows would dilute Hebrew culture and change peoples political views. Furthermore, television would reduce the amount of time people spent reading, going to the theater, and participating in social activities, thereby threatening traditional norms and family life.

Politicians delayed introducing television for as long as possible, until their need was widely felt during the 1967 conflict with Arab. The absence of a central broadcasting system meant that news about the war could not be quickly disseminated among the eager citizens. Secondly, the government realized they needed a tool to combat Arab propaganda. Many Palestinians living in the occupied territories owned television sets through which they received programs from the Arab countries, and Jordan was beginning to broadcast news in Hebrew for an Israeli audience. Israeli authorities decided that they could not afford to leave its public exposed exclusively to broadcasts from hostile neighbors. Only a state-controlled Israeli television channel could offer a counterattack in this psychological warfare. Thus, on May 2 1968, the Israeli Broadcasting Authority launched its first public broadcastthat years Independence Day march.

Related: Letters Q, W, And X Were Once Illegal in Turkey

Israels first television channel, called Channel One, broadcasted in black and white, even though color broadcast was already a world-wide technological convention. In the US, all the three major broadcast networks, NBC, ABC and CBS, were airing full color prime time schedules, and public broadcasting networks like NET used color for a majority of their programming. In 1955, twenty thousand color sets were purchased in the US, and in 1966, this figure had passed the 5 million mark. By 1972, the number of color television sets sold in the US exceeded black-and-white sales, and more than fifty percent of television households in the US had a color set.

In the UK, the first regular color broadcast began in 1967 by the BBC. Color broadcasting began in Japan in 1960, and in the Soviet Union in 1967. As broadcasting convention shifted towards color, networks realized that it was uneconomical to upgrade black and white broadcasting systems into color as it cost more than the initial investment in black and white equipment. As a result, the Commonwealth Broadcasting Conference of 1972 recommended that all new television services should be equipped with color facilities.

Although the Israeli Broadcasting Authority (IBA) did invest in color equipment, political pressure forced them to broadcast in back and white. When Israeli television started buying the rights to many American and British TV series and movies that were filmed in color, the government ordered the broadcasting authority to erase the color information from the signal so that receivers displayed back and white images.

A NTSC TV signal with different parts of the waveform labelled. Image credit: ohmbrew.net

The government suggested that the broadcasting network should remove the color synchronization component called the Colorburst, in the absence of which the receiver is unable to decide how to superimpose the colors over the images. As a result, the television set discards the color information and displays only black and white images. The instrument the IBA used to erase color was branded the eraser or mechikon.

Soon after its introduction, special television sets with anti-mekhikon device became available on the market. This device reinstalled the Colorburst phase signal allowing the receiver display color pictures. The only trouble was the viewer had to turn a knob to adjust the colors every 15 minutes or less. According to some estimates, nine out of every ten buyers bought a color television set fitted with the anti-mekhikon device.

The Israeli government sought to dissuade people from flocking into electronic stores. An activist opposing color television wrote in Israels leading newspaper Maariv that abandoning their regular sets in favor of color sets would be an economic disaster that a poor country as theirs could not afford. To this, the vice minister of finance added that a color picture tube consumed five times more electricity than a regular black and white tube, which would increase electricity consumption by many folds.

Professor Shelomo Avineri issued a cautionary warning against the pursuance of accessories of convenience:

If you bring colour television to the country, it will mean that so and so thousands of families, which might have purchased a bed for each child at home  or bought a book for the children from time to time  will be under strong pressure to spend this money  a lot of money, thousands of liras, to purchase a colour set.

The Vice Prime Minister also echoed these sentiments:

I have no doubt that many families, which have no money for necessities will sell their properties, will take loans and will become entangled in order to buy a colour set and not lag behind those that have the ability to purchase such a set.

Some warned of even more dire consequence:

Who will guarantee us that the pursuit of colour sets  as a status symbol  will not bring greater expansion of violent crime? Those who cannot afford to spend from their salary  or from their welfare income  10,000 liras, some of them might take part in looting and robbery or mere stealing.

Advocates of color television argued that the claim that color broadcasting would deepen social inequality didnt held water since it could be applied on all fields of consumption, such as luxury cars. Would the government ban luxury cars then?

One columnist was critical of the governments stand on suppressing technological progress:

It is known that Israeli television was always required to erase the colour so that the public will see only a black and white picture, like those that the government sees. This government serves some affluent people, who see themselves as the guardians of the poor. These guardians have decided that it is forbidden to oppress the little the poor have. It is forbidden to seduce the poor with goods that cost a lot of money. Since he is poor, he doesnt have the money to be entertained  he must sit at home, watch television, and think that the world is as gray as sackcloth.

Although the governments primary argument behind the erasure of color was to reduce inequality and cost, all it did was to increase expense on both ends. An average color television cost 50,000 liras, and another 4,000 for

the anti-eraser device so that viewers could enjoy color programs. This arrangement of first removing color and then adding it back was ridiculous, as one writer noted:

Israeli television buys colour films at full price. The technicians erase the colour and this probably also costs something. The Israeli consumer buys a colour set and anti-eraser  and receives the broadcasts in colour. It costs more both to the state and to the consumer  only the companies earn easy money.

The Israeli government allowed color transmissions from time to time, such as the November 1977 live color coverage of the Egyptian President Anwar El Sadats visit to Israel, and again in March 1979 during the annual Eurovision Song Contest.

By the late 1970s, public pressure on the issue of color transmissions mounted, and in 1981, the government allowed the Israel Broadcasting Authority and the Israeli Educational Television to film their own regular productions in color. It would take another two years before color broadcast became a regularity. By then, Israelis had spent more than 400 million liras on anti-eraser devices which became useless when the IBA stopped erasing color and moved to a full color schedule.

References:

# Oren Soffer, The eraser and the anti-eraser: the battle over colour television in Israel, Sage Journals

# Abraham Rabinovich, Israel lifts its ban on color TV, The Christian Science Monitor

# Wikipedia
Cyber

NIST posts enhanced requirements for protecting CUI

In the wake of the SolarWinds Orion hack, the National Institute of Standards and Technology has published recommendations for enhanced security requirements that can help organizations protect controlled unclassified information (CUI) against nation-state backed threats.

The requirements in 800-172 largely fall into one of three categories: structuring systems to be resistant against malicious actors, improving an organization's ability to detect threats and mitigate potential damage and ensuring an organization can recover from an attack.

"Implementing the cyber safeguards in SP 800-172 will help system owners protect what state-level hackers have considered to be particularly high-value targets: sensitive information about people, technologies, innovation and intellectual property, the revelation of which could compromise our economy and national security," NIST Fellow Ron Ross said.

The document cites a 2018 incident in which Chinese government hackers stole sensitive data from a Navy contractor working on an anti-ship missile design as the reason for its work. But the connection to the SolarWinds hack is clear.

"These tools are absolutely relevant to preventing the next SolarWinds, both for the public- and private-sector hacks," said Blake Moore, formerly chief of staff for the Pentagon's CIO and now a vice president at Wickr. "Similar to the Navy hack of 2018, the SolarWinds breach highlighted the vital importance of securing federal networks against these advanced nation-states."

Moore said that although the SolarWinds Orion hack received more attention due to its scale, the remedies needed in the aftermath of SolarWinds and the 2018 Navy breach are similar. NIST's new publication provides a "roadmap" for how agencies of any size should counter "increasingly advanced tradecraft from nation-state actors," he said.

Sarah Powazek, an analyst at the Institute for Security and Technology, said that while the report's goal is the protection of controlled unclassified information, the recommendations all target "daily security operations of federal partners, suggesting that NIST may be equally concerned about the upstream effects of poor security."

"Tightening access controls for non-federal agencies would improve confidentiality of sensitive information but can also prevent the initial access for [advanced persistent threats] targeting government agencies," she said.

Kathryn Waldron, a cybersecurity fellow at the R Street Institute, emphasized that most of SolarWinds victims were private companies, not government agencies. NIST's new publication proves "just how desperately both government agencies and private companies need to change the way they think about cybersecurity," she said.

"Private organizations -- both companies and academic institutions -- that work with the government need to realize how appealing a target they are to countries that are looking to harm the United States," Waldron said.

Waldron also noted NIST's new guidelines come a few months after the intelligence community lobbied Trump White House to rescind an Obama-era executive order that established the Controlled Unclassified Information program.

A December memorandum sent to National Security Advisor Robert O'Brien by then Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said the program poses "insurmountable hurdles" and has become "unsustainable," according to a letter published by the Federation of American Scientists.

"We have yet to see if the new DNI or the Biden administration feel the same way about the CUI program," Waldron said. "But the fact that federal intelligence agencies have struggled to comply with the CUI program could potentially hinder the rollout of these new guidelines."

This article was first posted to FCW, a sibling site to Defense Systems.

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A former Minister of Aviation, Femi Fani-Kayode, on Tuesday, clarified the focus of his controversial meeting with leaders of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC).

Mr Fani-Kayodes explanation came after pictures of his meeting with the interim chairman of the APC, Mala Buni, and the Kogi State governor, Yahaya Bello, surfaced on social media.

His meeting with the duo led to a speculation that he was planning to defect to the APC, the party whose performance he often criticizes.

Mr Fani-Kayode is a member of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).

Among the voices that criticised Mr Fani-Kayodes meeting with Messrs Buni and Bello is the Director-General of the Progressives Governors Forum, Salihu Lukman.

The latter, in a statement obtained by PREMIUM TIMES on Tuesday, described the meeting as disturbing and an affront on the APCs values.

That our leaders will be meeting with Mr. Fani-Kayode in such a compromising way, suggesting that he may be on his way to joining our party, clearly indicates that either those of us saddled with the responsibility of advising them have failed or we have been completely cut off.

How can a person who just a few days, if not a few hours, ago wrote to one of our leaders and derogatorily and condescendingly condemned his political prospects of emerging as the Presidential candidate of our party, be given such a high-level reception? Mr Lukman asked.

However, Mr Fani-Kayode in his explanation posted on his twitter account on Tuesday, said his meeting with the Yobe and Kogi governors was to discuss pressing national concerns, party politics and host of affairs he will not mind partaking irrespective of his allegiance to the PDP.

He said, Despite the obvious benefits and wisdom in this noble initiative, it amazes me that some people should feel that it is wrong for me to sit with other leaders in the country to discuss issues which touch and concern the national cohesion, future and stability of our country.

This is a time in which we must set all our differences aside, build bridges and come together as one lest our country drifts into fratricidal butchery and civil war.

It is right and proper for us to talk and to attempt to join hands across political, religious and regional lines to save Nigeria, he said, reiterating his commitment to saving Nigeria.

The fact that I am in talks with leaders from a cross-section of political parties, including the ruling party, does not in any way derogate from this and does not mean that I will ever change those views.
Bamako, Mali (PANA) - A first convoy of vehicles from Burkina Faso arrived last Friday in the Malian region of Koro without incident, after more than a year of interruption because of insecurity, the Malian national newspaper L'Essor reported

The Abuja-based Independent Investigative Panel probing rights abuses by police personnel, Wednesday, directed a former governor of Zamfara State, Sani Yerima, and the complainant who filed a petition against him to explore settlement talks over the dispute between them.

Musa Wapa had petitioned the panel accusing Mr Yerima of instigating some policemen to arrest, torture and detain him following a business dispute between them in June 2020.

The petitioner demanded N100 million compensation for alleged violation of his rights by the police whom he claimed treated him like a terrorist.

On December 2, 2020, the panel which was set up by the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) after last years #EndSARS protests against police brutality, summoned Mr Yerima to appear to tell his own side of the story.

Mr Yerima, who was Zamfara State governor between 1999 and 2007 and Zamfara West senator between 2007 and 2019, attended Wednesdays proceedings but did not speak.

Shortly after the proceedings started on Wednesday, Garba Tentengi, who stood in for the chairman of the panel, Suleiman Galadima, a retired Justice of the Supreme Court, observed that a critical look at the case showed that the dispute was mainly between Mr Yerima and the petitioner while the police were just a nominal party.

Following some enquires from the panels lawyer, the parties agreed to explore a settlement option.

The honourable panel hereby directs that the complainant and the sixth respondent (Mr Yerima) shall mediate over this matter with the secretary to the panel as amicus (a friend), Mr Tetengi, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, ruled and adjourned the case till March 15.

Breakdown in business relationship

Mr Wapa had in his testimony alleged that Mr Yerima instigated the Inspector General of Police-Intelligence Response Team (IGP-IRT) to torture, and detain him for six days in July 2020.

The business leading to the crisis between them was about the supply of maize by the petitioner to Mr Yerimas poultry farm, Rufai Poultry (Nig.) Ltd.

Mr Wapa said he had had a longstanding business relationship with the former senator to the point that they were mutually indebted to each other.

He said as of June 30, 2019, Mr Yerima was owing him N25 million, and he was owing the former governor N25 million.

He said the N25 million he was being owed by Mr Yerima accrued from supplying three trailers of maize to Rufai Poultry (Nig.) Ltd.

He alleged that the former governor on June 30, 2020 instigated a team of police personnel comprising Abdullahi and Zakariyya of Area Command Kano State and IGP-IRT Panteka, Kaduna State to torture and detain him for six days.

He said that his First Bank account was frozen at the instance of the police.

He pleaded with the panel to award him N100 million in compensation.

Meanwhile, under cross-examination, the lawyer to the Nigerian police, James Idachaba, told the panel Mr Wapas arrest followed a court order.

But Mr Wapa denied any knowledge of such a court order.

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NORTH CHICAGO, Ill. and BERKELEY, Calif., Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- AbbVie (NYSE: ABBV) and Caribou Biosciences, Inc., a leading clinical-stage CRISPR genome editing biotechnology company, announced today that they have entered into a collaboration and license agreement for the research and development of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-T cell therapeutics. Although allogeneic, "off-the-shelf" CAR-T cell therapies have shown early promise in some cancer patients, the need for overcoming the rejection of allogeneic CAR-T cells by the host immune system remains a key challenge to their broader development. Employing Caribou's CRISPR genome editing platform to engineer CAR-T cells to withstand host immune attack would enable the development of the next-generation of "off-the-shelf" cellular therapies to benefit a broader patient population.

Under the multi-year agreement, AbbVie will utilize Caribou's next-generation Cas12a CRISPR hybrid RNA-DNA (chRDNA) genome editing and cell therapy technologies to research and develop two new CAR-T cell therapies directed to targets specified by AbbVie. AbbVie will have exclusive rights to Caribou's next-generation Cas12a chRDNA genome editing and cell therapy technologies for the selected targets. Caribou will conduct certain pre-clinical research, development, and manufacturing activities for the collaboration programs, and AbbVie will reimburse Caribou for all such activities pursuant to the collaboration. AbbVie is responsible for all clinical development, commercialization, and manufacturing efforts. AbbVie has the option to pay a fee to expand the collaboration to include up to an additional two CAR-T cell therapies. Caribou will receive $40 million in an upfront cash payment and equity investment, along with up to $300 million in future development, regulatory, and launch milestones. Caribou may also receive additional payments for commercial milestones as well as global tiered royalties.

"We are excited to partner with AbbVie on the development of new CAR-T cell therapies. This collaboration validates Caribou's differentiated next-generation CRISPR genome editing technologies that provide best-in-class efficiency and specificity," said Rachel Haurwitz, Ph.D., President and Chief Executive Officer of Caribou. "We believe AbbVie is an ideal partner for Caribou as we expand upon the number of targets and diseases addressable by our technologies. Genome-edited CAR-T cell therapies hold tremendous potential for patients, and this partnership accelerates our ability to address significant unmet medical need."

"CAR-T therapies have shown to be a promising breakthrough in cancer treatment," said Steve Davidsen, Ph.D., Vice President, Oncology Discovery, AbbVie. "Collaborating with Caribou and their cutting-edge CRISPR platform will help AbbVie advance our efforts to deliver new hope for patients."

About AbbVie

AbbVie's mission is to discover and deliver innovative medicines that solve serious health issues today and address the medical challenges of tomorrow. We strive to have a remarkable impact on people's lives across several key therapeutic areas: immunology, oncology, neuroscience, eye care, virology, women's health and gastroenterology, in addition to products and services across its Allergan Aesthetics portfolio. For more information about AbbVie, please visit us at www.abbvie.com. Follow @abbvie on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn.

About Caribou Biosciences, Inc.

Caribou is a leading clinical-stage CRISPR genome editing biotechnology company founded by pioneers of CRISPR biology. Outside of this collaboration, Caribou is advancing an internal pipeline of allogeneic cell therapies for oncology. CB-010, Caribou's lead allogeneic CAR-T cell program, targets CD19 and is being evaluated in a Phase 1 clinical trial for patients with relapsed/refractory B cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma. CB-011, Caribou's second allogeneic CAR-T cell therapy, targets BCMA for multiple myeloma, and CB-012, Caribou's third allogeneic CAR-T cell therapy, targets CD371 for acute myeloid leukemia. CB-011 and CB-012 are in preclinical development. Additionally, Caribou is developing iPSC-derived allogeneic natural killer (NK) cell therapies for solid tumors. Through its next-generation CRISPR genome editing technologies, Caribou is implementing multiple strategies to boost CAR-T and NK cell persistence to overcome cell exhaustion and to prevent rapid immune-mediated clearance. These sophisticated edits drive the durability of clinical benefit of these off-the-shelf medicines.

For more information about Caribou, visit www.cariboubio.com and follow the Company @CaribouBio.

"Caribou Biosciences" and the Caribou logo are registered trademarks of Caribou Biosciences, Inc.

AbbVie Forward-Looking Statements

Some statements in this news release are, or may be considered, forward-looking statements for purposes of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The words "believe," "expect," "anticipate," "project" and similar expressions, among others, generally identify forward-looking statements. AbbVie cautions that these forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated in the forward-looking statements. Such risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, failure to realize the expected benefits from AbbVie's acquisition of Allergan plc ("Allergan"), failure to promptly and effectively integrate Allergan's businesses, competition from other products, challenges to intellectual property, difficulties inherent in the research and development process, adverse litigation or government action, changes to laws and regulations applicable to our industry and the impact of public health outbreaks, epidemics or pandemics, such as COVID-19. Additional information about the economic, competitive, governmental, technological and other factors that may affect AbbVie's operations is set forth in Item 1A, "Risk Factors," of AbbVie's 2019 Annual Report on Form 10-K, which has been filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, as updated by its subsequent Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q. AbbVie undertakes no obligation to release publicly any revisions to forward-looking statements as a result of subsequent events or developments, except as required by law.

SOURCE AbbVie

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A mother of two who was subjected to a serious assault in Ennis last month has lost her fight for life in hospital.

Wexford native, Sharon Bennett (29) died at University Hospital Limerick in the early hours of Wednesday morning 13 days after she was admitted to the hospital.

Ms Bennett was brought to hospital suffering serious head injuries after being allegedly assaulted by her boyfriend, Patrick Ballard (34) in Ennis's Market area on the evening of Thursday, January 28th last.

The mayor of Clare, Cllr Mary Howard (FG) said today: It is absolutely heartbreaking to hear that two children will be left without their mother."

The Ennis based councillor stated: It is so sad that they grow up and their Mammy isnt there.

Ms Bennett had her two children from a previous relationship and Cllr Howard stated: My thoughts and prayers are with her family and her friends who are absolutely heartbroken at this time and I say that on behalf of the people of Clare.

Cllr Howard commented: There was great fight in Sharon to fight for 13 days but it wasnt to be."

Supt Brendan McDonagh of Ennis Garda Station stated: It is very sad. Sharon Bennett had severe injuries to her brain and unfortunately she didnt make it.

Supt McDonagh confirmed that Ms Bennett passed away in the early hours of this morning at Limerick hospital.

Supt McDonagh stated that Gardai have allocated a level of resources into the investigation to date that would be normally given to a murder investigation.

He stated that following Ms Bennetts death we will be reviewing the charge as it stands. The accused has been charged with assault causing harm and we will consult with the DPP on the matter of further charges.

Supt McDonagh stated that Gardai will also await the results of the post mortem on Ms Bennetts remains and the post mortem is due to be carried out by Acting State Pathologist, Dr Linda Mulligan on Wednesday afternoon.

Supt McDonagh stated that Ms Bennett was originally from Co Wexford.

He stated: Sharon had been living in the Corofin area of Clare before moving into the Ennis area. Sharon had been living in the Clare area for a number of years.

Tributes were being paid online to Ms Bennett today with one describing Sharon as an absolute angel with another saying that Sharon was always so pleasant with a lovely smile.

Supt McDonagh stated that Ms Bennett is the first woman to die in a violent situation in a long time in County Clare.

Figures from Womens Aid show that Ms Bennett is the third woman to suffer a violent death to date this year.

This compares to a total of four for 2020 and five for 2019.

Patrick Ballard of Ashford Court Hotel, Ennis has been charged with assault causing harm of Ms Bennett and is currently on remand in custody at Limerick prison.

Mr Ballard is due to appear in Ennis court again via video link concerning the alleged assault next month.

When charged and cautioned by Det Garda Noelle Bergin on January 29th at Ennis Gardai Station, Mr Ballard replied Im sorry for what happened.

Det Bergin told the special court sitting in Ennis on Saturday evening January 30th that Ms Bennett had remained unconscious in hospital since the alleged assault as a result of sustaining serious head injuries.

Det Bergin told the court that Gardai has received a number of independent eye witnesses statements concerning the alleged assault as part of their investigation.

She stated that some of the independent witness statements are from people who were in the area at the time going about their business.

The detective stated that CCTV footage from a number of premises in the vicinity of the alleged assault has also been harvested.

Det Bergin stated that Gardai were also opposing bail concerning the seriousness of the charge before the court.

Det Bergin stated that Mr Ballard is a drug user and an alcoholic.

Solicitor for Mr Ballard, Tara Godfrey told the court that Mr Ballard has been living under the care of the Simon Community at the Ashford Court hotel in Ennis.

Ms Godfrey stated that Mr Ballard suffers from significant psychiatric difficulties and has spent the last number of years more often than not homeless.

Ms Godfrey told the court that Mr Ballard tried to take his own life on two occasions in the two weeks prior to the alleged assault on Ms Bennett.

Ms Godfrey stated that Mr Ballard has also recently spent time at the acute psychiatric unit in Ennis.

In court, Ms Godfrey described Mr Ballard as a most vulnerable person.

After failing to secure bail in the district court, Mr Ballard is scheduled to apply for bail in the High Court on Thursday, February 11th.
Berger said when he read the findings of the first probe, "it was pretty clear to me we needed to do a follow-on...


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Huawei founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei made his first appearance before international media in over a year and squashed any remaining rumors that his company is looking to sell its smartphone business. Zhengfei also reinstated his hopes of doing business with American companies for components and telecommunications equipment and the possibility for a turnaround in the China-US relations.



Ren Zhengfei (credit: South China Morning Post)

Ren Zhengfei also addressed his willingness to personally speak with reigning US President Joe Biden and outline the mutual benefits of bilateral trade between US companies and Huawei.

Allowing US companies to supply goods to Chinese customers is conducive to their own financial performance. If Huaweis production capacity expanded, that would mean US companies could sell more. Its a win-win situation. I believe the new administration will weigh and balance these interests as they consider their policies. We still hope to be able to buy a lot of US components, parts, and machinery so that US companies can also develop with the Chinese economy.  Ren Zhengfei

In addition Huaweis CEO commented that his company does not have the energy to be involved in this political whirlpool and believes that Huaweis 5G network development is key for all major smartphone players heading forward.

Going on a side note Zhengfei proclaimed Apples iPhone 12 as the worlds best smartphone and gave out high praise for Cupertinos success in the smartphone world. He also mentioned that Huawei built 5G infrastructure powers select networks in Europe where high-end customers are using their 5G iPhones in a bid to show the importance of cooperation with Huawei.

Source | Via


Check out news you should not miss today:

-- Vietnam on Wednesday morning reported one new locally-transmitted COVID-19 case from the northern province of Bac Giang, increasing the countrys tally to 2070, according to the Ministry of Health.

-- Nearly 10,000 staffers of Noi Bai International Airport in Hanoi were put through COVID-19 testing on Tuesday in a cautious attempt to minimize the risk of transmission on the job.

-- A social distancing mandate was lifted in Dong Trieu Town and Van Don District of the northern province of Quang Ninh on Tuesday after clusters of COVID-19 transmission in these locales were put under control.

-- Tan Son Nhat International Airport in Ho Chi Minh City introduced a luggage sanitizing system on Tuesday to mitigate the risk of spreading the COVID-19 pathogen from the airport staffers to passengers belongings.

-- By 5:30 pm on Tuesday, Ho Chi Minh City had cordoned off a total of 33 locations that showed up in the travel history of COVID-19 cases in the city, the municipal Center for Disease Control stated.

-- Mount Fansipan, the highest peak of Vietnam, was buried under half a meter of snow on Tuesday morning, while local temperatures dropped to as low as minus three degrees Celsius.

-- U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam Daniel Kritenbrink has dropped a surprise rap song featuring veteran Vietnamese rapper Wowy to send Lunar New Year wishes to the Southeast Asian country.

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Help India!

Undoubtedly, the law carries within itself a certain amount of ambiguity. Communication and interpretation of laws lie in the competent hands of Indian judiciary, but it is equally clear that ordinances pertaining to Love-Jihad remain unequivocally biased towards punishing Muslim youth.

Md Sabeeh Ahmad, TwoCircles.net

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Aligarh: In August 2020, mother of one Shalini Yadav, complained that her daughter had been pressured to convert to Islam to marry a Muslim man. Although Shalini had earlier clarified through a video that she wasnt forced, her mothers complaint led the UP government to order an SIT investigation into her case and also similar cases of conversion of Hindu women across Kanpur. At that point, no one could have expected the complaints of Muslim youth attempting to trap Hindu girls would give rise to the notorious anti love Jihad ordinance. The Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Ordinance 2020 states that a marriage will be termed null and void if the sole purpose was the conversion of the girls religion. The ordinance remains centered around the conversion of the girls religion alone and the onus of proving the freedom of choice lies with her. A notice stating the girls wishes is to be submitted to the District Magistrate in advance before any such action can take place.

The ordinance is not new to criticism, however. Last month Allahabad High Court ruled in favour of a couple where the father of the wife alleged forced conversion. UP police were quick to take action even though no evidence of coercion were in sight except for the fathers plea. She has a choice to live life on her terms and is free to move as per her choice without any restriction has expressed that she wants to live with her husband is free to move as per her own choice without any restriction or hindrance being created by (a) third party, Allahabad Court pointed out.

A domino effect was witnessed when Madhya Pradesh and Uttarakhand started to roll out their own version of anti Love-Jihad ordinances, even though the Centre does not recognize this term. It is a curious case of the federal states enacting laws to prevent a process which is not recognized by the central government. The MP ordinance even dictates that culprits receive imprisonment up to 10 years and are required to pay a minimum fine of 50,000 rupees compared to UPs jail term of up to five years and a minimum fine of 15,000 rupees. The only silver lining here is Madhya Pradeshs added requirement of obtaining permission to file a complaint under the new ordinance from the court, unlike UP where any blood relative can do so without any restriction.

The various ordinances suffer from the common ailment which plagues a majority of new laws being formulated in recent years: the problem of ambiguity. As the ordinance legally restricts its own bounds as being applicable to forced conversion and marriages carried out with the sole intent of religious conversion, it is easily exploitable and provides a wide avenue of misandrist practices. This does not take away from the seriousness of sexual harassment and religious conversions faced by women but surely posits itself as a loophole which can be exploited, and thus demands to be fixed. The ordinances take a reactive approach towards forced conversion as there is little detailing about the victims compensation but a detailed penalty for the accused is at hand. The bill attempts to justify their implementation under the garb of freedom and protection, but fails to define, assess, and solve the problems which are faced by the victims, to begin with. An ordinance which has been turned into a ploy for selectively targeting a particular community fails to come as a surprise at this point in Yogi governments timeline.

Section 8 of the ordinance in question requires those who wish to convert must give a 60-day notice period to a district magistrate, declaring they are converting of their own accord. The person performing the conversion must also give a months notice to the magistrate. This advance notice period can be utilized as a tool to endanger, threaten as well as coerce the individuals involved through their parents or groups with vested interests. The National Investigation Agency (NIA) back in 2018 found that no Love Jihad was in play when it investigated cases of possible forced conversions for marriage in Kerala. The investigating agency closed the cases citing no evidence of coercion in the conversion of individuals.

This, however, would not be the first instance of such a law. The Himachal Pradesh High Court way back in 2012 struck down a similar law namely Himachal Pradesh Freedom of Religion Act, 2006. The act, in the irony of what the name suggests, restricted religious conversions. It required that a magistrate must be notified of all religious conversions and that they be publicly recorded 30 days in advance. The law, obviously, made exceptions to those reverting to their original faith, mostly Hinduism. Justice Deepak Gupta (later, Judge of the Supreme Court) struck down the Act as being ultra vires of the Constitution.

Another aspect of the law has to be the camouflage of protecting women. The Apex Court has held previously in both Anuj Garg and Joseph Shine that measures perpetuating damaging sexual stereotypes that regard women as inferior cannot be saved in the name of being ostensibly beneficial to women under Article 15 (3) of the Constitution. Article 15 (3), which allows for special provisions to be made for women and children, cannot save laws whose entire rationale is discriminatory.

In addition to this, the fundamental right of an individual to choose ones life partner has been upheld by the Supreme Court in several landmark cases which include but are not limited to Shafin Jahan and Shakti Vahini. With the implementation of this law, an individual would not be free to exercise their right to choose, a crystal-clear case of the inability in exercising fundamental rights as guaranteed under the Constitution.

On 12 January, the Allahabad High Court held that the 30-day public notice period and objections procedure under the Special Marriage Act 1954 (SMA) cannot be mandatory. The notice period also unnecessarily harassed interfaith couples. The Allahabad HC is yet to hear petitions filed against the Love Jihad ordinance (the Supreme Court recently refused the UP governments plea to move the petitions to the SC), but this judgement against the SMA could be indirectly decisive for interfaith couples. The judgement could now allow interfaith couples to opt the SMA route since the notice period has been adjudged non-mandatory. Hence, not requiring any conversion for the sake of marriage, since conversion is the fundamental element to the Love Jihad Ordinance. Secondly, the arguments based against the Ordinance could also use this as a judicial precedent against any notice period and subsequently refer to this particular judgement to prove that the Love Jihad ordinance is indeed ultra vires of the Constitution.

Undoubtedly, the law carries within itself a certain amount of ambiguity. Communication and interpretation of laws lie in the competent hands of Indian judiciary, but it is equally clear that ordinances pertaining to Love-Jihad remain unequivocally biased towards punishing Muslim youth. The intention of protecting women is a clever euphemism for the perceived incompetence of women when it comes to handling themselves in social situations. The fact that this notion of incompetence is encouraged by the said ordinances while also providing an opportunity to target a selected community is a matter of concern for the judiciary. The Ordinance, therefore, is an intrusion into multiple fundamental rights, all at once.
Then-Chinese vice chair Xi Jinping unveils a plaque at the opening of Australia's first Chinese Medicine Confucius Institute at the RMIT University in Melbourne on June 20, 2010. (WILLIAM WEST/AFP via Getty Images)

Biden Administration Draws Criticism for Decision to Scrap Trumps Policy on Confucius Institutes

The Biden administration has quietly scrapped a proposal by the Trump administration to safeguard U.S. academic freedom from the threat of Beijing-funded Confucius Institutes (CI).

The proposed rule, named Establishing Requirement for Student and Exchange Visitor Program Certified Schools to Disclose Agreements with Confucius Institutes and Classrooms, was submitted by the Trump administration to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Dec. 31, 2020.

Under the rule, colleges and K12 schools that are certified to host foreign exchange programs would need to disclose their financial ties to CIs and the affiliated Confucius Classrooms.

Last month, an unidentified DHS official told Axios that the rule would also apply to any other cultural institutes or student groups, such as Chinese Students and Scholars Associations, that are funded directly or indirectly by China.

The proposal was withdrawn on Jan. 26, according to the U.S. Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), which is a division of the White Houses budget office.

On Feb. 9, a spokesperson for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the law enforcement agency under DHS, confirmed by email that the rule had been withdrawn. The spokesperson declined to comment on the reasoning for the cancellation.

ICE does not speculate about future pre-decisional proposed rules or policies, the spokesperson stated.

Under the Trump administration, CI language and culture programs came under scrutiny from U.S. officials over concerns that they spread Chinese propaganda, restrict academic freedom, and facilitate espionage in U.S. classrooms. In August last year, the State Department designated a Washington-based center that promotes CIs in the United States as a foreign mission.

In 2004, the University of Maryland became home to the first CI in the United States; since then, more than 100 CIs have been established at U.S. schools.

The National Association of Scholars (NAS), an education advocacy group, reported that 55 CIs have closed or are in the processing of closing, as of Jan. 19. Currently, 63 CIs remain open in the United States, including two that are scheduled to close later this year.

There has been a global pushback against CIs, most notably in countries such as Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom. In 2013, McMaster University in Canada became the first university in North America to close its CI.

The Biden administrations decision has since been heavily criticized by several Republican lawmakers, including Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.), and Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas).

By quietly backing away from the proposed rule without consulting Congress, the Biden administration is sending a concerning signal about its scrutiny of CCP [Chinese Communist Party] influence in academia, and telling academic institutions that they dont need to be transparent about their ties to Chinas regime, McCaul, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a statement.

I strongly urge the Biden Administration to stick to its promises to prioritize the CCP as our main national security challenge, including in the American education system.

Rep. John Joyce (R-Pa.) wrote on Twitter that CIs are a growing threat to both our national security and to the future of American research & innovation, pointing to a 2020 report on China created by the China Task Force, a group of Republican congress members concerned about the Beijing regimes influence.

Rather than encourage propaganda, the Biden Admin should stand with the American people against the CCP, he stated.

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) said Bidens decision was short-sighted and harmful, according to a statement from her office.

This illogical decision helps fuel the propaganda of Americas number one adversary, jeopardizes the integrity of our education system, and puts students on American campuses at risk, she stated.

There has been a push at the state level to close local CIs.

Last week, Utah state Rep. Candice Pierucci, a Republican, introduced a resolution (H.J.R.8) to protect her states institutions of higher education from CCP influence.

The resolution calls on colleges and universities in Utah to disclose their CI contracts and close the facilities. According to the NAS, the University of Utah and Southern Utah University have CIs on their campus.

In July last year, Alabama state Rep. Tommy Hanes unveiled a measure that would ban CIs from the states public colleges.

At least one U.S. official has publicly called for American students to learn the Chinese language and history from Taiwan instead of at CIs.

Learning Mandarin from Taiwanese teachers means learning Mandarin in an environment free from censorship or coercion, said William Brent Christensen, the Taipei office director of the American Institute in Taiwan, in an interview with Japanese media Nikkei Asia earlier this month. The institute is the de facto U.S. embassy in Taiwan.

Aside from withdrawing the proposed CI rule, the Biden administration has undone a number of other Trump administration policies related to Chinaincluding rejoining the Paris climate accord, reengaging with the United Nations Human Rights Council, and rejoining the World Health Organization.
China harps on 'package solution' for Indias bid to become UNSC permanent member

International

pti-Briti Roy Barman

Beijing, Feb 10: China, which has been blocking India's efforts to become a permanent member of the UN Security Council, on Wednesday reiterated its stand on New Delhi's bid, and called for evolving a "package solution" that is acceptable to all to reform the top organ of the global body.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin's comments in response to a question came a day after India and China discussed a wide range of issues relating to top UN body.

China is a permanent member of the UNSC while India began its two-year tenure as a non-permanent member on January 1.

In August, India is scheduled to serve as the president of the UNSC. Asked about the outcome of the meeting and whether there was any discussion on India's candidature for permanent membership of the UNSC, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang told a media briefing here that during Tuesdays virtual meeting, the two sides held consultations on Security Council issues. The two sides exchanged views on upholding multilateralism, peacekeeping operations and counter-terrorism, he said.

"As for India's bid for permanent membership to the UNSC, I can reiterate Chinas principled position on this. China has been a supporter of Security Council reform, advocating that the reform should enhance the Councils authority and efficacy and that priority be given to the increased representation and say of developing countries, with a view to enabling more small and medium-sized countries to participate in the decision-making of the Council," he said.

"Efforts should be made to seek a package solution that accommodates all parties interests and concerns on the basis of extensive and democratic consultations," he said.

China is part of the permanent five (P5) of the UNSC with veto power has been stonewalling India's efforts to become member of UN's powerful body for years pointing to lack of consensus even though the other four, US, UK, France and Russia have expressed backing for New Delhi's membership.

Beijing's all-weather ally Pakistan is also opposed to India becoming a permanent member of the UNSC. India and China on Tuesday held discussions on a wide range of issues relating to the United Nations Security Council, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) said in New Delhi.

The MEA said the Chinese delegation was briefed about India's priorities during its UNSC tenure in the meeting that took place in the virtual format. It said both sides agreed to continue their engagement on key issues on the UNSC agenda.
Romania's emergency foreign humanitarian aid provided free of charge to Moldova in the latter's effort to combat the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic will consist, in a first stage, of personal protective equipment worth almost 11 million lei, with the shipment to be provided by Romania's General Emergency Management Inspectorate (IGSU) February 11 -13, Prime Minister Florin Citu informed on Wednesday.

"Following the visit of the President of Romania to the Republic of Moldova and implicitly the decisions taken and the activation by the Republic of Moldova of the European Civil Protection Mechanism on February 4, 2021, the Government of Romania decided to grant free external emergency humanitarian aid to Moldova. The Romanian delegation participating in the mission will be composed of eight IGSU officials," Citu said at the end of a government meeting.

He added that for starters personal protective equipment will be offered: 1.5 million surgical masks, 100,000 FFP3 surgical masks, 100,000 coveralls, 100,000 non-sterile gloves.

AGERPRES

Falun Gong practitioners take part in a parade commemorating the 20th anniversary of the persecution of Falun Gong in China, in Washington on July 18, 2019. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

After Two Decades in Chinese Prison, Falun Gong Adherent Sentenced to Two More Years

About two decades ago, Zhang Rongjuan, an adherent of the meditation practice Falun Gong, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for taking part in the interception of a local television networks broadcast and instead showing a video exposing the Chinese regimes persecution of the spiritual group.

Now, as the sentence is about to expire, prison guards have abruptly added two more years to her sentence.

Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a meditation discipline with moral teachings centered on truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. By the late 1990s, up to 100 million people in China were practicing Falun Gong, according to official estimates at the time.

With nearly one in every 13 Chinese people practicing, then-Chinese Communist Party leader Jiang Zemin considered the groups enormous popularity a threat to the Partys rule. On July 20, 1999, Jiang initiated a nationwide campaign to round up adherents and throw them into prisons, labor camps, and psychiatric wards in an effort to force them to renounce their faith.

Jiang also deployed the states propaganda apparatus to vilify the practice and turn public opinion against adherents. In January 2001, the Chinese regime staged a self-immolation incident in Tiananmen Square, alleging that Falun Gong practitioners set themselves on fire. Media investigations later uncovered the authorities elaborate setup.

Broadcast Interruption

Minghui.org, a U.S.-based website that tracks the persecution of Falun Gong in China, reported that in August 2002, in order to expose the Tiananmen self-immolation incident, Falun Gong practitioners Zhang Rongjuan, Duan Xiaoyan, He Wanji, and Li Chongfeng tapped into the local TV network in Minhe county, Qinghai Province. They interrupted the broadcast with a video explaining the Chinese regimes staging of the event.

On Dec. 30, 2002, the intermediate court of Xining city, Qinghai Province sentenced them to prison: 20 years in prison for Zhang, 17 years in prison for He, 15 years in prison for Li, and 7 years in prison for Duan. They were imprisoned at the Qinghai Provincial Womens Prison and Qinghai Haomen Prison. During the court trial, there were signs of injuries on the practitioners bodies. Li was walking with a limp, according to Minghui.org.

Prior to the broadcast incident, in October 2000, Zhang was placed into a labor camp for one year by the Zhenyuan county police bureau. In May 2001, she was severely beaten and suffered painful foot and leg injuries as a result, Minghui.org reported. She was beaten until she lost consciousness five times. She suffered serious head injuries, but was still forced to work, resulting in her fainting several times while working.

In August 2001, when Zhang was released from the labor camp, local authorities had closed the shop she ran, leaving her without a job, and soon, without a home. Her then-nine-year-old child had to live with their relatives. Zhang was displaced and ended up in Qinghai.

At 7 p.m. on Aug. 17, 2002 in Xining city, Qinghai Province; at 8 p.m. on Aug. 18 in Lanzhou city, Gansu Province; and at 8 p.m. on Aug. 19 in Minhe county, Qinghai Province, local cable TV networks were intercepted with videos that exposed the persecution of Falun Gong in China.

The TV broadcast lasted for half an hour. Local authorities were extremely alarmed and ordered police to find the people involved. At least 15 Falun Gong practitioners in the area were abducted as a result.

On Aug. 24, 2002, Zhang was abducted together with fellow practitioner Duan and taken to a detention center in Xining.

Local police then confiscated personal valuables such as computers, printers, and more than 10,000 yuan (about $1,500) in cash from their residences.

During court proceedings, Duan and Zhang demanded that their cash be returned, but they only got back about 100 yuan.

They were then transferred to a secret location where torture was carried out.

Zhang was later detained at the Qinghai Provincial Womens Prison, where she also suffered torture. She became disabled and was unable to walk.

As Zhangs sentence was about to expire, she was given an additional two years by prison guards because she refused to renounce her faith, Minghui.org reported.

Fellow practitioner He, who also participated in the TV tapping, was persecuted to death at the Qinghai Haomen Prison in May 2003.

After Duans seven-year sentence ended, she was again sentenced to 10 years in 2017. She was taken to the Gansu Womens Prison. Prison guards encouraged inmate Ma Yaqin to beat Duan. The torment caused her to become mentally confused. In addition, the prison did not allow her family to visit her for nearly a year.

More TV Tappings

Falun Gong practitioners in several provinces and cities have used television tapping to tell the Chinese public about the regimes persecution.

On Feb. 16, 2002, TV cable networks in Anshan City, Liaoning Province were tapped by practitioners.

On March 5, 2002, eight television channels in northeastern Changchun city were intercepted. Then, on the evening of June 23, 2002, several channels of the state-run broadcaster CCTV that broadcast programs specifically for rural areas aired a program about the Falun Gong persecution.

On the evening of Aug. 12, 2003, Beijing TV Education Channel 3 was tapped.

In September 2007, the Asia Pacific Human Rights Foundation conferred the Fidelity Vindicator Award to Liu Chengjun, a Falun Gong practitioner who was persecuted to death by authorities for his involvement in the Changchun TV intercepting.

Current affairs commentator Hong Da condemned the Chinese regimes persecution of Falun Gong practitioners for attempting to bring truthful information to the Chinese populace.

During the 70 years of the CCPs totalitarian rule, China has been a society in which real information has been severely blocked, he said. The TV tappings by Falun Gong practitioners actually bring the truth about Falun Gong to the Chinese people. They should be praised, not tortured and killed. In the face of injustice, people have to be allowed the right to speak, he added.

Peng Yongfeng, a former lawyer in mainland China who is now in the United States, noted that the act of tapping into TV cables to tell the truth about the persecution is a completely legitimate exercise of the right to freedom of expression.
Parents urge Supreme Court to rule that Maines tuition aid program must include religious schools

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A group of parents in Maine seeking state tuition assistance to put their children in a religious private school have asked the United States Supreme Court to rule on their behalf.

At issue is a state provision that only allows for tuition assistance if a private school is "nonsectarian in accordance with the First Amendment of the United States Constitution."

The First Liberty Institute, the Institute for Justice, and others filed the appeal on behalf of the families to the Supreme Court on Friday in the case of Carson v. Makin.

By singling out religion  and only religion  for exclusion from its tuition assistance program, Maine violates the U.S. Constitution, said Institute for Justice Senior Attorney Michael Bindas in a statement.

By allowing nominally religious schools to participate but excluding schools that actually provide a religious curriculum, Maine is making governmental decisions about how religious is too religious. Government should not have that power.

In 2018, a group of parents in Maine sued over a ban on state tuition assistance for sending children to any private school that includes sectarian aspects to their curriculum.

The plaintiffs include the Carsons and the Gillises, who enroll their children at Bangor Christian School, and the Nelsons, who want to transfer their daughter from a nonsectarian private school to Temple Academy, where their son is already enrolled.

Eventually, the Gillises were removed from the suit as their daughter graduated from high school during the legal proceedings and was no longer potentially eligible for the tuition assistance.

In June 2019, U.S. District Court Judge Brock Hornby ruled against the parents, concluding that Maines educational funding program is constitutional.

Last October, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit unanimously upheld the Hornby decision, with Circuit Judge David Barron authoring the opinion.

In the panel opinion, Barron said that while the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled in Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia v. Comer that a religious school could not be barred from state aid, the high court did not address explicitly religious uses for state funding.

Barron also concluded that the Supreme Court decision Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, which ruled that religious schools can qualify for a state tax credit program, differentiated between discrimination in handing out school aid based on the recipient's affiliation with or control by a religious institution and discrimination in handing out that aid based on the religious use to which the recipient would put it.

 this restriction, unlike the one at issue in Espinoza, does not bar schools from receiving funding simply based on their religious identity  a status that in and of itself does not determine how a school would use the funds that it receives to provide educational instruction, stated Barron.

Instead, we understand this restriction to bar BCS and TA from receiving the funding based on the religious use that they would make of it in instructing children in the tuition assistance program.


The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
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India has said that reports of radicalisation, new methods of fundraising, training and incitement of external operations in facilities housing terror group ISIL in conflict-ridden Syria are of serious concern, underlining that political developments cannot be isolated from violations of Syrian sovereignty by outside factors. The UN Security Council held a closed door meeting on Syria on Tuesday.

Following the meeting, India's Permanent Representative to the UN Ambassador T S Tirumurti said in a tweet that he underlined that political developments can't be isolated from violations of Syrian sovereignty by external factors, leading to lack of mutual trust for political settlement. He warned that that this gives fillip to terrorism.

Citing the 12th report of the Secretary-General on the threat posed by ISIL (Daesh) to international peace and security, Tirumurti said the report points out that there are 11,000 ISIL fighters in north-east Syria. Reports of radicalisation, new methods of fundraising, training & incitement of external ops in facilities housing #ISIL are of serious concern. All Parties should adhere to obligation to fight #terrorism," Tirumurti said.

The report said that the 11,000 male ISIL fighters held in the north-east of Syria include 5,000 Syrians, 1,600 Iraqis, 1,700 foreign terrorist fighters of known nationality and around 2,500 of unknown nationality. UN Special Envoy for Syria Geir Pedersen said there has to be constructive international diplomacy if the peace process is to move forward in any way.

The UN humanitarian office, OCHA, estimates that some 80 per cent of the population currently lives in poverty, and civilians face a range of dangers  from instability, arbitrary detention and abduction, to criminality and the activities of terrorist groups. The UN envoy underlined the need for constructive international diplomacy that bridges existing divides and focuses on mutual and reciprocal steps.

Pedersen said steps, defined with realism and precision can create the trust and confidence needed to generate movement on the issues in resolution 2254, which calls for a ceasefire and political settlement in Syria. He said that he would continue engaging with the government in Damascus, the Syrian National Council (SNC) and the two Co-Chairs with the hopes of travelling to the capital city in the not-too-distant future."

(Disclaimer: This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed; only the image & headline may have been reworked by www.republicworld.com)
The Perspective

Atlanta, Georgia

February 9, 2021

Dr. Tipoteh & Baccus

If asked hows the Revolution? many would answer: it failed. Thats because there seems to have been many false starts. There were many moments when leaders claimed to be leading a revolution just to fall well short and chased away. People believe the revolution has failed because they tend to focus on events, rather than processes.



A revolution is a process that spans at least a generation. That would be thirty years. Its how long it took China to finalize the Mao movement with a Cultural Revolution. Its how long it took Vietnam and USSR to become the nations they aspired to be.



The Liberian revolution started in the 1970s when people who could have enjoyed the fruits of the system decided to question its legitimacy and embark on a non-compromising campaign to change the governance process.



As disparate as they were in their strategies, those who stood against the oligarchy were united in their number objective: change the political system.

Baccus Mattews, Amos Sawyer, Tipoteh, Zanga Liberty, and others started a movement that went beyond them and that marked the beginning of the revolution. The aim of that revolution was to uproot the political system.



From that moment, many events will occur. The Samuel Doe coup was an event of that revolution. Charles Taylors grassroots uprising was another phase just as was the election of the first woman president. A popular uprising to chase Taylor out of power was another event.

All of these events combined to give us the democratic process that we now have.



Now, the political revolution has come to its terms. The objectives of the 1970s was a total reversal of the power structure. All three branches of look government as well as the majority of high offices of government are headed by people who could not have aspired to such positions without selling their souls. No matter how things evolve, Liberians will never return to the oligarchy it went under for more than 100 years.



However, the political revolution is meaningless if it does not have solid economic foundations. China and Vietnam developed new economies they control. During its political revolution, Liberia fails to pay attention to the economy. The aspect that Tipoteh was focusing on.



The economic revolution is the next battle, and it may be as difficult as the political one, and it will be fought in boardrooms. As Liberians affirmed their hold on political power, they neglected the economy. Liberias economy is dominated in all its forms by foreign concessions, international institutions, and shady merchants.



After freeing itself from the century-old oligarchy, Liberia now has to embark on a new revolution, where it will take control of its resources.




Piers Morgan has tried the now-infamous Weetabix and baked beans combination on live television.

The cereal brand caused utter horror on Twitter on Tuesday when it suggested fans eat their Weetabix drenched in Heinz baked beans.

A host of brand accounts from GCHQ to the NHS and West Yorkshire Police weighed in on the "crime" against food.

Read more: Weetabix criticised for suggesting fans serve cereal with baked beans: Isnt the world suffering enough?

A day later, Piers Morgan gave the serving suggestion a try on Good Morning Britain - using cold beans.

The presenter claimed the combination was not such an unusual idea, telling viewers: "Think about it, its just wheat and baked beans. You have it on toast, why wouldnt you have those two things?"

His co-presenter Susanna Reid, on the other hand, was unimpressed and responded: "Ill give you a reason why at least, because Weetabix is so dry until the point they get wet and then theyre really mushy."

Morgan declared the dish "different but interesting", adding: "I think this might be the new beans on toast."

However, he didn't recommend eating the unique breakfast with chilled beans: "It wouldve been better being hot, obviously."

Yesterday, Weetabix tweeted: "Why should bread have all the fun, when there's Weetabix? Serving up @HeinzUK Beanz on bix for breakfast with a twist. #ItHasToBeHeinz #HaveYouHadYourWeetabix".

The tweet attracted an influx of joking replies from other brands including: Lidl, KFC, the NHS, Nando's, West Yorkshire Police, Specsavers, National Rail, Marmite, GCHQ, Virgin Atlatic, HMV and many more.

Specsavers even tweeted its own image of two pairs of glasses covered in beans.

Sex Education actor Asa Butterfield told Weetabix to "get out", to which they responded: "Sometimes the people we like dont like us back, and theres nothing you can do about it. No hard feelings... #HaveYouHadYourWeetabix"

Meanwhile, Tesco called the image an "illegal combination in the bagging area", while map-makers Ordnance Survey joked: "You've lost us on this one..."

West Yorkshire Police tweeted: "Even though this is criminal, please don't ring us to report it."

Despite the combination's apparent universal unpopularity, the post racked up over 100,000 likes.
By February 7, Anhui has given inoculations of 1,184,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccine in total, the Health Commission of Anhui Province said on February 8. 759,000 people has completed the first inoculation while 425,000 has received their second inoculation.

According to an official of the Health Commission of Anhui Province, no severe adverse reaction has emerged among recipients of the vaccine, nor are there any serious infection cases, which can serve as a proof of the safety of Chinese COVID-19 vaccine.

The inoculation of COVID-19 vaccine in Anhui is following the nation's "step by step" strategy and is mainly offering vaccination to priority groups. The vaccination of other groups will be carried out in an orderly manner based on unified national arrangements.
Gurugram, Feb 10 : Three residents of Punjab, including a woman, were arrested by Gurugram police on charge of involvement in fraudulent sale of immovable properties totalling Rs 523 crore in the district.

Officials said that the gang used to forge documents related to plots of land owned by NRIs in Ansal Townships and sell them to unsuspecting buyers.

Those arrested are Kavita Rani alias Riya Sehgal, 33, Rahul, 29, and Ranveer Kumar, 49. The gang kingpin is Sanjay Kathuriya, a proclaimed offender. Other accused were identified as Sandeep alias 'Mota', Ajay Sehgal alias Alok Kumar and Rakesh Kumar alias Ram.

Sanjay was settled in Dubai along with his family, police said. The Haryana Police had announced rewards of Rs 1 lakh each for the arrest of Kavita, Rahul, Ranveer, Sanjay and Rakesh in January 2021.

Nine cases of property fraud were registered against the culprits at Sushant Lok and Sector 29 police stations.

The accused had till now sold more than 10 plots through fraudulent means. An SIT led by ACP (DLF) Karan Goyal and ACP (Crime) Preet Pal Sangwan and including members of Crime Branch from DLF Phase-4 and Sector 40 was formed on the direction of district police chief to deal with the case.

"The accused were arrested from a guesthouse in Sector 39 after a tip-off on February 5 and sent in five-day police remand," Sangwan told IANS.

"During interrogation, the accused revealed that they used to open fake bank accounts based on forged documents and later transfer huge sums of money to them by selling plots fraudulently," Sangwan said.

He said that prime accused Sanjay conducted recces in Ansal Townships in Sushant Lok, Palam Vihar and Sector 29 area to find plots and houses whose owners did not visit often.

The gang members then used to prepare forged documents by using details of owners from area people and officials. Later, they got transferred the properties to either themselves or someone they knew and later sell these off to unsuspecting buyers, the police said.

"Rakesh brought people from Punjab to Gurugram to pose as owners of plots and prepared fake sale deed documents. The accused paid Rs 50,000 to Rs 1.5 lakh as commission to these people" the ACP said.

The accused named one Kunal of Punjab for preparing fake IDs and Aadhaar Cards to facilitate opening of bank accounts and one Kamal who prepared fake passport in Chandigarh.

"During investigation, the probe team found that transactions of around Rs 523 crore had been done through their bank accounts in the past six months. Information on the same will be forwarded to the Enforcement Directorate. Further probe is underway," Sangwan said.
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Global icon Priyanka Chopra has made some interesting revelations about her personal life in her memoir titled Unfinished. From addressing rumours of going under the knife to facing racism during her school days in the US, the Quantico star has bared it all in her book.

In her memoir, PeeCee has also narrated a story about falling for a boy, whom she named Bob in the book, during her school days in America. Walking down the memory lane, the actress opened up about her puppy love story.

Priyanka wrote in her book that she met Bob in her school when she was in Class 10 and was living with her aunt Kiran in Indianapolis. She was smitten by him as he won her over with his funny faces and the most romantic gestures. Priyanka recalled how he gifted her his chain and held hands with her at school. The Aitraaz actress was head over heels in love with him, so much so that she had even planned to get married to him.

As per a report in Zoom, Priyanka wrote in her book, "One day Bob and I were sitting on the couch watching television, innocently holding hands, when suddenly, outside the window on the sidewalk below, I saw my aunt making her way up the stairs. I panicked. It was 2 in the afternoon and not her usual time to return. There was no way Bob could go outside the house and he and I ran to my room and I shoved him into my closet and told him, 'Stay there until I can send her to the grocery store.'

She continued, "Kiran masi entered the house and started looking into each room carefully. I was sitting on my bed, with my biology book, pretending I was studying. She came to my doorway and said 'Open it' and I asked her 'open what.' 'Open your closet,' said my aunt. I was shaken as I have never seen my aunt this angry. I opened the closet door, it was a big mess: a boy came out. Masi called my mother and said, 'I can't believe that she lied to my face. There was a boy in her closet!"

Well, we hope that the book also contains details about how Priyanka handled the situation!

After few years, Priyanka Chopra returned back to India and participated in the Miss India beauty pageant. Post winning the Miss World crown, the 'desi girl' went on to make a successful career in films. The actress also found the man of her dreams Nick Jonas, and tied the knot with him.

ALSO READ: Priyanka Chopra Recalls How A Director Told Her To Undergo Plastic Surgery; Says She Felt 'Stunned & Small'

ALSO READ: Priyanka Chopra Shares Excerpt From Her Book Unfinished, Says Her Career Seemed To Be Over Before It Started
Tucker Carlson and Glenn Greenwald have slammed Facebook for bowing down to a liberal mob following its decision to remove posts that it says spread misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine.

The Fox News host on Tuesday hit out at authorities over the handling and publicity of the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, saying it has been all 'fluff and propaganda' and compared it to 'a Diet Pepsi commercial at the Super Bowl'.

His comments followed Facebook's decision to delete posts that it deemed to include misinformation about the vaccine - a move Tucker slammed as 'censorship'.

Carlson argued that Americans are being discouraged from asking 'simple, straightforward questions' about the safety and possible adverse side effects of the vaccine.

'These questions are not conspiracy theories, they're the most basic questions in a democracy. Every citizen has a right to know the answer, but instead we got fluff and propaganda,' Carlson said.

'The media rollout for the vaccine came off like a Diet Pepsi commercial at the Super Bowl. Tons of celebrity endorsements, not a lot of science. It was totally disingenuous and naturally it had the opposite of the intended effect.'

Tucker Carlson and Glenn Greenwald slammed Facebook on Tuesday night for bowing down to a liberal mob following its decision to remove posts that it says spread misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine

Facebook announced Monday it was now taking down posts that it says are misleading about the vaccines

What kind of claims on Facebook would they remove? Claims that COVID-19 vaccines do not exist or have not been approved Claims that something other than a COVID-19 vaccine can vaccinate you against COVID-19 Claims that COVID-19 vaccines kill or seriously harm people Claims that COVID-19 vaccines cause autism Claims that building immunity by getting COVID-19 is safer than getting the vaccine Claims that the COVID-19 vaccine changes peoples DNA Claims that COVID-19 vaccines cause infertility Claims about the side effects of COVID-19 vaccines which are incredulous or irrational, such as taking the vaccine turns you into a monkey Claims that COVID-19 vaccines do not provide any immunity to people Claims that COVID-19 vaccines contain toxic, prohibited, or harmful ingredients, microchips, animal products, or anything not on the vaccine ingredient list Claims that COVID-19 vaccines are untested Claims that COVID-19 vaccines contain the mark of the beast Advertisement

He went on to argue that the most 'powerful people in America' - like Facebook - have been working to make sure that no one could criticize it.

'Most Americans already supported vaccines. They didn't need to be browbeaten in order to be convinced. They were grateful their kids no longer get tetanus and polio and chickenpox. They weren't anti-vaccine. And yet from the very first day, the way the authorities handled the coronavirus vaccine did not inspire confidence,' Carlson said.

He argued that science couldn't survive without skepticism.

'Science can't live in an environment like this. Without relentless skepticism, science dies. That's what science is, relentless skepticism. And when it leaves, inevitably it's replaced by witchcraft and superstition. Are we there yet? You decide.'

Later in Carlson's program, journalist and outspoken critic of media colleagues, Glenn Greenwald, said Facebook was pressured into censoring vaccine posts by a media mob.

'I think it's so important to recognize that Silicon Valley companies are not the ones who want to do this,' he told Carlson.

'They would rather stay as far away from censoring and arbitrating and intervening and kicking people off their platforms - not because they are noble or nice, but it's in their best interest not to do it.

'They are being pressured to do it. By CNN and NBC and The New York Times who are saying: every time you allow information over the platform that we think is wrong, we're going to shame you, disgrace you.

'And they have partners who are the Democratic Party who control the entire government were right or along with them, saying we demand you censor more.'

Greenwald pointed out that, if you advocated wearing facemasks early in the pandemic, that would have been counter to World Health Organization advice.

The social media giant on Monday announced that it was introducing a new policy, which would see it remove posts which broke COVID-19 rules.

'Building trust and confidence in these vaccines is critical, so we're launching the largest worldwide campaign to help public health organizations share accurate information about Covid-19 vaccines and encourage people to get vaccinated as vaccines become available to them,' said Kang-Xing Jin, head of health at Facebook, in a company blog post.

The policy is an updated version of rules introduced last year, in which Facebook said it would 'downrank,' or push lower down in people's news feeds, misleading or false claims about vaccines.

Facebook now states: 'We remove misinformation when public health authorities conclude that the information is false and likely to contribute to imminent violence or physical harm.'

They give as examples of posts they would remove claims that COVID-19 vaccines kill or seriously harm people, cause autism or infertility, changes people's DNA and 'contain the mark of the beast'

Carlson's comments followed Facebook's decision to delete posts that they deemed to include misinformation about the vaccine - a move Tucker slammed as 'censorship'

Greenwald said Facebook was being pressured to make the changes to its policy

Greenwald, who resigned from The Intercept amid a row about editing his story about Joe Biden, said that journalists were now 'the leading activists who destroy free discourse and free thought in the United States'.

The 53-year-old New Yorker on Sunday had denounced a 'Stasi' of journalists who he argued censored each other.

'A new and rapidly growing journalistic 'beat' has arisen over the last several years that can best be described as an unholy mix of junior high hall-monitor tattling and Stasi-like citizen surveillance,' he wrote.

'They have insufficient talent or skill, and even less desire, to take on real power centers...so settle on this penny-ante, trivial bulls***  tattling, hall monitoring, speech policing.'

On Tuesday Greenwald reiterated his criticism.

'Everything they do, these liberal guardians of orthodoxy and piety, is about trying to make you think that they have a monopoly on objective truth by finding it in science,' he said.

'It is a human study, which means it is fallible, and it is extremely dangerous to say that any kind of human knowledge is so unchallengeable to being discussed that it is off-limits from even being questioned.'

Greenwald said that he himself will be vaccinated when his turn comes, and he has recommended his family do the same.

He argued it was only due to the freedom of thought on the internet that he was able to find dissenting opinions, weigh them up, and make his decision.

'If the internet were on a place where no dissent were allowed, I would have way less confidence in that ability because that would mean this as a profession that isn't confident enough to allow dissent,' he said.

'And if they are not confident, they earn much less trust and faith in their pronouncements.'
U.S. President Joe Biden has released a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package plan that would provide the third round of stimulus checks for Americans who need it. Under this proposal is a $1,400 stimulus checks waiting to be issued.

Lawmakers have deliberated who will be eligible for the said $1,400 stimulus checks.

Democrats have unveiled final details of the third round of the stimulus check on Monday night, which includes eligibility for considered dependents, according to a CNBC report.

The considered dependents include college students and disable adults. Under the latest provisions, they will be qualified to receive the $1,400 stimulus checks.

The latest relief package includes $1,400 payments for both children and non-child dependents, such as college students, disabled adults, and even older Americans who are claimed as dependent for tax purposes. L

It is expected to pass Congress in the coming weeks through a budget reconciliation process.

The budget reconciliation process would allow the Senate to pass the effort without any Republican support. House and Senate committees will discuss spending priorities before drafting and voting on legislation, according to a CBS News report.

The Senate approved on Feb. 4 a bipartisan plan introduced by Democratic Senator Joe Manchin and Republican Senator Susan Collins to block "upper-income citizens" from the next round of stimulus checks. However, the plan does not define "upper income."

Collins said in a statement that the measure would ensure that struggling families who need it most would receive the checks.

Related story: Biden Says Next Stimulus Checks Will Be $1,400: Here's What You Can Expect

Amendments Released

Draft text released by House Committee on Ways and Means chair Rep. Richard Neal revealed that income threshold for eligibility will not be reduced in the next round of pandemic aid, according to a Forbes report.

However, a previous check gradually declines until they reached a zero, whereas the House draft puts a firm cap on the maximum income you can earn and still receive a payment.

Qualifying Americans will receive up to $1,400 for individuals; $2,800 for qualifying couples who file a joint tax return; $1,400 for each dependent child under the age of 17; $1,400 for each qualifying adult independent.

Meanwhile, your adjusted gross income to receive a full payment must be $75,000 for single filers; $112,000 for the head of household filers; $150,000 for married couples filing jointly.

However, those who earn $100,000 for single filers; $150,000 for heads of household; and $200,000 for married couples filing jointly will not be receiving a stimulus payment.

"Since the middle of June, the recession in jobs for higher-income households is over - employment has been just like it was before the pandemic" because their jobs can be done remotely, Michael Stepner, an economist with Opportunity Insights, was quoted on a report.

House Democrats on Feb. 8 pushed back on those lower limits, proposing to keep the income thresholds at the same level as for the previous checks.

Biden earlier said that he will not allow the per-person payments to fall below $1,400 but has indicated flexibility on the income thresholds.

Related story: Biden Signs New Executive Orders on Food Stamps, Stimulus Checks, and Federal Minimum Wage
ZIMBABWES Ambassador to Mozambique and Retired Lieutenant-General (Retired) Cde Douglas Nyikayaramba, who succumbed to Covid-19 complications on Tuesday has been declared a national hero.

Ambassador Nyikayaramba, who passed on at St Annes Hospital, and was described by President Mnangagwa, in his condolence message, as a strong revolutionary cadre who continued to serve his country after independence with utmost loyalty, dedication and commitment will be buried at a date yet to be advised.

He was 60.

Defence and War Veterans Affairs Minister Oppah Muchinguri-Kashiri, who is also Zanu-PF national chairperson, was dispatched to the Nyikayaramba family home in Nyambira, Mashonaland West yesterday evening by President Mnangagwa to deliver the special message.

Minister Muchinguri-Kashiri said President Mnangagwa and the party saw it fit to honour Cde Nyikayaramba as a national hero for the contributions he made during the liberation struggle and after independence.

The party led by the President looked at the illustrious journey he travelled which it feels young people should emulate. It was therefore unanimously felt that he deserved the highest honour, that of national hero, so I have to convey the message that the President saw it befitting to declare him as national hero, said Minister Muchinguri.

She chronicled the road travelled by Amb Nyikayaramba from the time he left school to join the liberation struggle and the role he played after the liberation struggle. She said Ambassador Nyikayaramba was appointed to represent Zimbabwe in Mozambique because of his knowledge of critical national issues.

He was a decorated soldier who defended the countrys interests hence the President and the party felt he deserves the highest honour, said Minister Muchinguri.

She added that there is need for the country to be wary of both traditional threats and non-traditional threats that include neo-colonialism and climate-induced cyclones that have emerged in recent years.

We now have new threats such as Covid-19 which we need to be wary of. While we are happy that the number of the infections are going down we cannot be complacent, Minister Muchinguri said.

Family spokesperson Mr Frazer Zvina Nyikayaramba said the family had been honoured by the decision to grant their son the highest honour bestowed on the countrys luminaries.

We are happy with the honour bestowed on my younger brother. We humbly request that you convey our gratitude to President Mnangagwa, said Frazer, who is elder brother to the late national hero. He described his brother as a unifier in the family.

On the other hand, the late Lieutenant-Generals (Rtd) son Kelvin described his father as someone who was ever determined to satisfy the needs of every family member. A devout member of the Johane Masowe Apostolic church, Cde Nyikayaramba was described by his fellow church members as a down-to-earth-man.

A member of the church Mebiloshenzi Chipango said Ambassador Nyikayaramba was a humble man who never threw his weight around even as an army general. He would sit down just like everyone else. You would never know that he had that high rank in the army,  he said.

The late, Cde Nyikayaramba, whose nom de guerre, during the armed liberation struggle was Blessing Muhondo was born on 09 January 1960 in Mutoko District, Mashonaland East Province in a family of eleven.

He did his primary education at Kowo Primary School before proceeding for secondary education at Nyamuzuwe High School in Mutoko District in 1974. He later wrote O-levels at Malbourough High School. Ambassador Nyikayaramba grew up in a village environment where all the injustices of the colonial regime were manifested and that made him conscious of the political injustices prevalent during those times.

In the face of such injustices which made life unbearable, the late General became an active youth in the Nehanda Sector and was instrumental in organising clothing and cash from students at Nyamuzuwe High School for the comrades who were operating in the area. He later joined the liberation struggle in Nyamuzuwe in 1977, and trained in Mozambique at Tembwe Base Two.

On completion he was appointed Company Political Commissar. He later went for further training in Tanzania. Ambassador Nyikayaramba leaves behind a wife Elina, nine children and nine grandchildren. Herald

The country is expected to strengthen democratic institutions, fight corruption, introduce political control of its Armed Forces.

Secretary General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Jens Stoltenberg says NATO's door remains open for Ukraine to become its member.

He announced this at a joint press conference with Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal in Brussels on February 9, according to an UNIAN correspondent.

"And as I said, NATO's door remains open, and we work with countries like Ukraine," he said.

In this regard, he recalled that in a very successful way, new countries were invited to join the Alliance, and in recent years, Montenegro and North Macedonia became NATO members.

"We have in a very successful way, step by step, invited new countries to join the Alliance and just over the last couple of years. NATO has been enlarged with Montenegro, and North Macedonia and NATO made a decision, back in 2008, about the membership of Ukraine. We stand by that decision and all subsequent decisions following that Summit. I was actually present at that Summit back in 2008, and as I said, NATO has reiterated the decision," he said.

Read alsoNATO stepping up support for Ukraine in Black Sea

Yet, he said, Ukraine's attention should now be focused on the issue of reforms.

"Then I think that the focus now should be on the reforms, and I welcome the clear message from the Prime Minister on the need to continue to reform, to make sure that we have, or Ukraine has, democratic political control over its defense institutions and armed forces, that continued efforts to fight corruption and to strengthen democratic institutions of Ukraine," he said.

In this regard, he says he is convinced that the above mentioned measures are useful for Ukraine itself.

"This is good for Ukraine, regardless of NATO. But in addition, the more successful Ukraine is in implementing reforms, the closer Ukraine hopes to meet NATO standards, and the closer you can come to the NATO membership. I cannot give you a specific date. I will only tell you that we will continue to support Ukraine on their Euro Atlantic aspiration, we will support Ukraine, as you can move towards NATO membership. And the best way of doing that is to focus on reforms and to continue to modernize and strengthen the democratic institutions of Ukraine," he added.

Ukraine-NATO: Previous developments

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in an interview for Axios on the U.S.-based HBO channel that Ukraine wants to be an equal member of NATO. "We are grateful for everything, but Ukraine is not just saying in words that it wants to be an equal member of the Alliance, an equal member of NATO, because this is one of the most important security points  the same security that President [of the United States Joe] Biden is speaking about. How should we further state the desire to accede, if it is enshrined in the Constitution of Ukraine  the movement towards the European Union, European integration, as well as accession to NATO? Therefore, I have a very simple question  why is Ukraine still not in NATO? Putting away these phrases that we will all contemplate and communicate, the first simple question from me would be: 'Mr. President, why are we not in NATO yet?'" he said then.

Zelensky expressed the hope that during Biden's presidency, Ukraine and the United States would enter a new stage of security enhancing relations.

Reporting by UNIAN


Fines for non-essential overseas travel are set to increase to 2,000 euro, the Taoiseach has said.

Micheal Martin said that around two-thirds of people arriving into Ireland from abroad were returning Irish holidaymakers.

He told the Dail he had asked Health Minister Stephen Donnelly to sign off on the four-fold increase from 500 euro to 2,000.

There is a sense that 500 euro is not a sufficient disincentive to travel abroad, Mr Martin said.

That will be increased. The Government is considering increasing that to 2,000 euro to act as a significant deterrent to people travelling because all non-essential travel should be avoided.

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Mr Martin said he intends to bring legislation to Cabinet on Tuesday to sign off on the increased fines and deal with mandatory quarantining.

The move is part of a number of Government measures aimed at reducing non-essential travel and protecting citizens from the risk of new variants of Covid-19 entering the country.

People are already required under law to quarantine in their homes for 14 days on their arrival into Ireland.

If they fail to do so, they can be fined up to 2,500 euro or get a prison sentence of up to six months or both.

Passengers who have not arrived from Brazil or South Africa can exit quarantine after five days if they take a PCR test and receive a negative result.

Transport Minister Eamon Ryan said that the fines were being increased to 2,000 euro following consultation with public health officials and that if there was any evidence that it was not proving a restraint or restriction the Government would consider increasing it again.

The fixed penalty fine for breaching the Level 5 travel restrictions on overseas travel has already been increased from 100 euro to 500 euro.

Mr Ryan also said more countries would be added to the mandatory hotel quarantining list and that urgent work was under way to establish a mandatory quarantine facility for passengers arriving from high-risk locations associated with new variants.

Brazil and South Africa are currently on the Governments hotel quarantining list, although the system has yet to be set up.

The public health advice will come later on this afternoon as to which additional countries we should consider similar to the UK in having much stricter restrictions, and well follow that advice and implement it with full speed, he told the Dail.

It would be completely unfair if we at home were restricting our movements, and restricting our lives in so many different ways, and at the same time non-essential travel was seen to be facilitated.

The recent airport fines that you said would act as a big deterrent have failed with people just paying the 100 euro or 500 euro and going on their merry way to the Canaries or elsewhere Sinn Fein TD Darren O'Rourke

Mr Ryan said he was in regular contact with his counterpart in the UK and said he would be updating Grant Shapps on Wednesday on the Irish Governments quarantining plans.

The Green Party TD was replying to Sinn Feins Darren ORourke, who described the Governments travel measures to date as half-baked.

While the administration in London announced detailed plans for self-funded 10-day quarantine with strict measures and severe penalties for breaching it, you and your colleagues are still at a stage of confusion and indecision, Mr ORourke said.

He added that the Government had waited until the passenger locator form was ignored en masse before making it a mandatory requirement.

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Follow up is still entirely inadequate, he added.

Even the recent airport fines that you said would act as a big deterrent have failed, with people just paying the 100 euro or 500 euro and going on their merry way to the Canaries or elsewhere.

Mr ORourke accused the minister of constantly being on the backfoot, saying the Government needed to go back to the drawing board as the measures will not work.

He said a system of mandatory quarantine for all non-essential arrivals needed to be introduced immediately and remain in place until infection levels dropped.

Junior Minister Hildegarde Naughton told the Dail that international air passenger traffic had collapsed due to Covid-19.

The Irish aviation sector is currently experiencing its most challenging crisis, more severe than 9/11, or the global financial crash, she said.

Many analysts are predicting that it will take several years for the sector to return to 2019 traffic levels.

She said traffic levels at Dublin Airport are down around 90%, with Shannon and Cork airports down around 94% and 97% respectively.

She added that there were no scheduled services operating at Shannon until April at the earliest, and that at Knock, Kerry and Donegal have no scheduled international routes either.

Cork Airport has currently one airline serving one route, which is only three times a week.

Support line for those affected by missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, Two Spirit and LGBTQQIA+ people

For immediate emotional assistance, call 1-844-413-6649. You can also access long-term health support services such as mental health counselling, community-based emotional support and cultural services and some travel costs to see Elders and traditional healers.



VANCOUVER, BC, Feb. 9, 2021 /CNW/ - Canadians expect to live in a society where the criminal justice system recognizes and supports victims and survivors of crime. Violence against Indigenous women, girls, Two Spirit and LGBTQQIA+ people in Canada is an ongoing national tragedy. Everyone has a role to play in ending this violence. The Government of Canada continues to work in partnership with provincial and territorial governments, Indigenous people, Indigenous women's organizations, and others, to develop an effective National Action Plan to address the root causes of this violence and ensure the safety and security of Indigenous women, girls, Two Spirit and LGBTQQIA+ people in Canada.

Today, the Honourable David Lametti, Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, and Dr. Hedy Fry, Member of Parliament for Vancouver Centre, announced the Government of Canada's support to the Vancouver Aboriginal Community Policing Centre Society (VACPCS) and the Women Against Violence Against Women (WAVAW) Rape Crisis Centre in British Columbia. These organizations offer a range of culturally relevant support services and activities for families of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. The Department of Justice Canada is providing a total of $882,562 in financial support to these projects through the Victims Fund.

The VACPC will receive $410,970 in funding and the WAVAW Rape Crisis Centre will receive $471,592 in funding. The VACPCS will provide training, organize cultural activities, and provide support for families of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in the Vancouver area. The WAVAW Rape Crisis Centre will support Indigenous women, girls and Two Spirit survivors as well as the families of missing or murdered Indigenous women or girls, through culturally grounded and accessible counselling and supportive services. Through this funding, the Government of Canada continues to support culturally-responsive, trauma-informed, and community-based services for families of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.

Quotes

"Indigenous survivors of violence and their families need our support. This is especially true for women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA+ people who are overrepresented as victims of violence. The VACPCS and the WAVAW Rape Crisis Centre's important initiatives will offer a range of culturally relevant support services and activities to meet the ongoing needs of families of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls."

The Honourable David Lametti, P.C., Q.C., M.P.

Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada

"The Government of Canada is committed to supporting projects that address gaps in Indigenous communities where enhanced services are needed, especially to support the families of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. The projects delivered by the VACPCS and the WAVAW Rape Crisis Centre are much needed initiatives that are culturally relevant and will help better support Indigenous survivors of violence."

The Honourable Dr. Hedy Fry, P.C., MP.

Member of Parliament for Vancouver Centre

"The Vancouver Aboriginal Community Policing Centre supports the friends and families of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls with funding support from Justice Canada. That support was especially needed and intense around the times of the National Inquiry and the cultural healing provided to the families helped ease their pain and find comfort in community."

Norm Leech, Executive Director

Vancouver Aboriginal Community Policing Centre

"The ongoing commitment to funding community based Counselling Programs for families of Missing and Murdered Indigenous women, girls, and Two Spirit people is absolutely vital as we reckon with the ongoing legacy of colonialism for Indigenous peoples of this land. The ongoing funding that the Department of Justice has provided enables WAVAW to ensure family members of Missing and Murdered Indigenous women, girls, and Two Spirit people have ongoing, uninterrupted, culturally safe and affirming counselling when they need it; they don't need to wait. WAVAW continues to ensure that our programming meets the needs of the survivors that we serve, we are committed to staying agile and pivoting our services during COVID-19 to ensure survivors that rely on connecting with culture and support, have access to it when they need it most."

Dayla Israel, Executive Director

Women Against Violence Against Women Rape Crisis Centre

Quick Facts

According to the United Nations, one in three women and girls experience physical or sexual violence in their lifetime. In Canada , the rate of violent victimization of Indigenous people is more than double that of non-Indigenous people, and the numbers are particularly concerning when it comes to Indigenous women and girls. The causes are many and rooted in the legacy of colonial policies and the intergenerational effects of residential schools.

, the rate of violent victimization of Indigenous people is more than double that of non-Indigenous people, and the numbers are particularly concerning when it comes to Indigenous women and girls. The causes are many and rooted in the legacy of colonial policies and the intergenerational effects of residential schools. The Government of Canada is working with provinces, territories, Indigenous organizations and communities across the country to create a National Action Plan that keeps Indigenous women, girls, Two Spirit and LGBTQQIA+ people safe.

is working with provinces, territories, Indigenous organizations and communities across the country to create a National Action Plan that keeps Indigenous women, girls, Two Spirit and LGBTQQIA+ people safe. Investing in specialized victim services that support families of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls is an important part of the healing journey. Through the Victims Fund, the Department of Justice Canada provides funding for initiatives that support families of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls: Family Information Liaison Units and funding for community-based organizations that provide culturally-grounded grief and trauma supports for families.



provides funding for initiatives that support families of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls: Family Information Liaison Units and funding for community-based organizations that provide culturally-grounded grief and trauma supports for families. The Victims Fund provides grants and contributions to support projects and activities that encourage the development of new approaches, promote access to justice, improve the capacity of service providers, foster the establishment of referral networks, and/or increase awareness of services available to victims of crime and their families.



The acronym 2SLGBTQQIA+ refers to people who are Two Spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex and/or asexual.

Associated links

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SOURCE Department of Justice Canada

For further information: media may contact: Rachel Rappaport, Press Secretary, Office of the Minister of Justice, 613-992-6568, [email protected]; Media Relations, Department of Justice Canada, 613-957-4207, [email protected]

Related Links

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(Natural News) American pharmaceutical firm Moderna has confirmed that its in talks with the Biden administration for additional Wuhan coronavirus vaccine doses. The company said Jan. 27 that the federal government will procure an additional order of 100 million doses  for a grand total of 300 million doses. The extra doses will be sufficient for vaccinating nearly half of the U.S. population with the two-dose jab.

Moderna would deliver the additional doses in the summer of 2021 if the deal pushes through. President Joe Biden also aims to purchase an additional order of 100 million doses from Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted emergency use approval for the Pfizer/BioNTech BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine in December 2020. These additional doses would ensure the U.S. has sufficient vaccines for the long term.

The federal government also signed deals with Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca, whose vaccine candidates await FDA approval.

J&J has committed to deliver 100 million doses of its single-dose vaccine by June 2021. J&J CFO Joe Wolk said Jan. 26 that the company is confident it will be able to fulfill the 100 million doses it promised. Meanwhile, AstraZeneca is expected to turn in 300 million doses of its vaccine  but not until the fall of 2021. The British pharmaceutical firm developed its Wuhan coronavirus jab in partnership with the University of Oxford.

Those deals didnt necessarily mean vaccine rollout would speed up immediately, but achieving herd immunity by late summer or early fall became a possibility.

Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Bloomberg show that the U.S. has only vaccinated seven percent of its total population  about 23.5 million Americans. Only one percent of the population has completed the two-dose vaccine.

The Biden administration dealt with vaccine supply issues, but not vaccine safety concerns

The new deals came amid Bidens Jan. 26 announcement that vaccine deliveries to states with dose shortages will ramp up over the next three weeks. The severity of these shortages reached a point where some locations had to cancel thousands of appointments for first-dose recipients. The president called the push a wartime effort, acknowledging that states have been playing a guessing game of how much vaccine doses they have every week.

As such, he promised to boost deliveries to these states by about 16 percent. This is unacceptable. Lives are at stake, Biden remarked. The newly elected president pledged to have 100 million Americans vaccinated against the Wuhan coronavirus during his first 100 days in office. Biden may even exceed this goal with the additional 100 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine from Moderna.

However, it appears that the current administration has not addressed the safety issues surrounding the Massachusetts-based companys mRNA jab for the Wuhan coronavirus.

Dr. Hossein Sadrzadeh of the Boston Medical Center received the Moderna vaccine back in December 2020. He suffered from a severe allergic reaction within minutes after vaccination. Sadrzadehs tongue and throat started to tingle before going numb and his heart rate increased almost immediately. His blood pressure dropped, which called for immediate medical intervention. The physician was admitted to the emergency room and immediately given anti-allergy medication and steroids. Sadrzadeh felt normal the day after.

A month after, a nursing home employee from Indiana suffered from convulsions after receiving the Moderna jab. Oakland City resident Shawn Skelton exhorted people to avoid the mRNA vaccine. She posted videos on Facebook showing tongue spasms and uncontrollable shaking. Skeltons partner Rich Vidiella said the convulsions happened three days after she was vaccinated against COVID-19. (Related: Louisiana woman suffers uncontrollable spasms after Pfizer coronavirus vaccination.)

Even the nations top infectious disease doctor was not exempt from the adverse effects of the Moderna mRNA vaccine. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci said during a Jan. 22 White House briefing that he was knocked out for an entire day after getting his second dose of the COVID-19 jab. Fauci mentioned feeling a little achy and chilly, but insisted he was not sick.

Vaccines.news has more news about jabs to address the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic.

Sources include:

DailyMail.co.uk 1

RT.com

GreatGameIndia.com

DailyMail.co.uk 2
New Delhi: In yet another story of epic fail story of an online meet a US lawyer's display picture turned him into a cat during a live court session.

The incident which has since become viral on social media platforms happened on Tuesday during virtual proceedings of the 394th Judicial District Court in Texas, which was presided by Judge Roy Ferguson. It showed the photos of two lawyers and a kitten which prompted another session of helping the lawyer to reset his setting, the Reuters reported.

WATCH VIDEO HERE:

The Judge Ferguson wrote in a tweet: "IMPORTANT ZOOM TIP: If a child used your computer, before you join a virtual hearing check the Zoom Video Options to be sure filters are off."

County attorney Rod Ponton, the one with the cat filter had this epic conversation with the judge.

The judge said, "Mr Ponton, I believe you have filter turned on in the video settings."

"I`m here live, I`m not a cat," he said, adding, that his assistant was trying to fix the settings.

"I logged into my secretary`s computer to appear at this hearing via Zoom, and when everybody`s ready the judge calls the case and everybody`s face is supposed to pop up on Zoom. And everybody`s face popped up except mine. Mine was a cat," he told Reuters.

Finally, it was the judge who helped Ponton remove the filter and the hearing proceeded.

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Trillium Gold Receives Gold Centre Drill Permit and Plans to Test Continuity with Campbell- Red Lake Mine

Posted by Publisher Internet

Trillium?Gold Mines Inc. (TSXV: TGM) (OTCQB: TGLDF) (FRA: 0702) (?Trillium Gold? or the ?Company?  https://www.commoditytv. com/ondemand/companies/profil/trillium-gold-mines-inc/) is pleased to announce that it has received a drill permit for the Gold Centre property, located immediately adjacent to, and along strike of Evolution Mining?s Campbell-Red Lake Mine (?Red Lake Operations?). The announcement of the agreement to acquire an 80% interest in the Gold Centre property announced earlier in August 2020 has ideally positioned Trillium Gold in the heart of the highest-grade gold camp in North America which has produced more than 29.5 million ounces of gold at an average grade of more than 0.5 ounce of gold (or more than 15 grams per tonne of gold) over the past 91 years. Trillium Gold has planned a combination of new holes to target the shallower sulphidestyle mineralization, similar to that of the Far East Zone at the Red Lake Operations, as well as deeper drilling holes designed to target both high grade and sulphide mineralization. Closing of the acquisition is expected to occur this month.

Previous drilling at Gold Centre by Rupert Resources intersected Balmer volcanic rocks; favorable Balmer mafic metavolcanics hosting several gold deposits at the adjacent Red Lake Operations were identified in drill core and on surface following 2013 geological mapping and drill programs.

The discovery of the Far East Zone by Goldcorp provided further support that the southeast plunging Red Lake trend potentially extends through the Gold Centre property at depth. Underground infrastructure at the adjacent Red Lake Operations comes to within 350 metres of the Gold Centre property boundary.

Bill Paterson, Head of Exploration for Trillium Gold added, ?With favourable Balmer volcanics having been intersected at depth on the Gold Centre property, similar to the adjacent two mines that have produced more than 24 million ounces at an average grade of 15 g/t Au to date, the potential for extensions of both high grade and sulphide mineralization makes Gold Centre a high priority target.? Russell Starr, CEO of Trillium Gold commented, ?You could say that this drill program represents a once in a lifetime opportunity. We have an underexplored property located just 350 metres away from one of the biggest gold orebodies, not just in Canada but the world. The Gold Centre property exhibits the pedigree to become a world-class asset and generate substantial value to Trillium Gold?s market capitalization and shareholder base. Few companies have the catalysts in place to reward shareholders; current drilling at Newman Todd located 18 km from Evolution Mining?s milling operations, and the contiguous high grade veins that appear to be structurally connecting our Rivard property to the Newman Todd, and now the ability to drill the continuation of a worldclass mine.?

Following the geophysical IP survey in 2013, nine anomalous trends have been interpreted on the Gold Centre property, three of which are identified on the North Grid as being strong to very strong. Two are indicative of a sulphide mineralization source potentially associated with complexly folded/faulted contact between the Huston conglomerate and Balmer mafic metavolcanic rocks. An additional similarly anomalous trend has been identified on the South Grid.

The technical information presented in this news release has been reviewed and approved by William Paterson, P.Geo, Vice President of Exploration of Trillium Gold Mines and Qualified Person?as defined by NI 43-101.

For further information, please contact Donna Yoshimatsu, Vice President, Corporate Development and Investor Relations at dyoshimatsu@trilliumgold.com, (416) 722-2456, or info@trilliumgold.com, 604-688-9588.

Visit our website at www.trilliumgold.com.

On behalf of the Board of Directors,

Trillium Gold Mines Inc.

Russell Starr

President, CEO and Director

In Europe:

Swiss Resource Capital AG

Jochen Staiger

info@resource-capital.ch

www.resource-capital.ch

About Trillium Gold Mines Inc.

Trillium Gold Mines Inc. is a growth focused British Columbia based company engaged in the business of acquisition, exploration and development of mineral properties located in the Red Lake Mining District of Northern Ontario. The Company recently extended its holdings in the Confederation Lake and Birch-Uchi greenstone belts, as well as in highly prospective properties in Larder Lake, Ontario and the Matagami and Chibougamou areas of Quebec.

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

This news release contains forward-looking information, which involves known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual events to differ materially from current expectation. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forwardlooking statements, which speak only as of the date of this press release. The Company disclaims any intention or obligation, except to the extent required by law, to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.
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Private Legal Practitioner, Lawyer Gary Nimako Marfo has taken a swipe at former President John Dramani Mahama and his legal team over their Prsidential election petition before the Supreme Court.



Lawyer Gary Nimako, speaking on Peace FM's "Kokrokoo" programme, wondered why the petitioner's lawyers are bent on cross-examining the Electoral Commission Chairperson, Jean Mensa.



Legal Arguments



Counsel for the First Respondent, Electoral Commission, Justin Amenuvor on Monday argued before the Supreme Court that his client should not be made to mount the witness box because he believes the statements of the petitioner's witnesses and their cross-examinations are enough for the Justices of the court to make a ruling on the petition.



Lawyer Justine Amenuvor told the court that, "given the evidence of the petitioners witnesses under cross-examination so far, of those witnesses, speaking for the 1st respondent, it is the 1st respondents case that we do not wish to lead any further evidence and therefore we are praying that this matter proceeds under Order 36 Rule 43 and CI 87 rule 3 (e) 5, we hereby and on that basis close our case.



Lead Counsel for the Second Respondent, President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, Lawyer Akoto Ampaw also said he will not present any witness because the petitioner had not satisfied the burden of proof.



But Lead Counsel for the petitioner, Tsatsu Tsikata shared contrary view and insisted that Mrs. Jean Mensa must be in the witness box because she has a constitutional duty to give accounts of her conduct.



Burden of Proof



According to Lawyer Nimako, it does not lie on the EC Chair to aid the petitioner's case but rather ''in civil litigation, the plaintiff or the petitioner bears the burden of proof''.



He explained that the petitioner has to provide substantial evidence to back his petition or claims of election fraud.



But, to him, the petitioner has so far provided weak evidence in the court.





He cited Mr. Mahama's witness Johnson Asiedu Nketia's statements that he couldn't provide the election figures that the petitioner had gathered to support his petition in the court, when a Judge asked him to tell the court their figures.Lawyer Nimako wondered how the petitioner could file a case for second election but cannot provide contrary figures before the court.He questioned why Mr. Mahama would like to depend on the EC figures when they are the same figures he is contesting in court.He also found issues with the petitioner's case to put the EC Chair in the witness stand and audit or assess her constitutional mandate stressing if it's about auditing Mrs. Jean Mensa's performance, then the petitioner is not using the appropriate forum.He stressed the EC Chair can give account publicly, at IPAC meeting or in Parliament but the court of law is a ''serious business''.He, therefore, asked the petitioner to prove his case beyond doubts saying, "you must go to court, win your case on the strength of your own evidence".Providing some legal lessons for Mr. Mahama, lawyer Nimako said; ''The court will determine the petition based on the issues before the court. The court will not look outside the issues and determine any matter.''He added; " . . the court will aid you . . . when your facts are right, when you get your evidence right and you get the law right and the court will aid you. The court cannot aid you if [your facts] you go to court, you don't have evidence to support your case because you cannot shift the burden on the other side until you have made a case against the other side; then the burden will shift. The judicial burden can shift only when you have made a case against the other side."The Supreme Court will on Thursday, February 11 give a ruling on whether or not Mrs. Jean Mensa and witness for the 2nd Respondent, Peter Mac Manu will mount the witness box.

Source: Ameyaw Adu Gyamfi/Peacefmonline.com/Ghana









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

Featured Video
Britain's banks have been accused of 'sending a terrible message' to entrepreneurs by leaving new business account customers out in the cold.

Many High Street giants stopped offering business accounts at the start of the pandemic, claiming they wanted to focus on existing customers.

But while some have finally started accepting applications again, wildly divergent approaches continue to muddy the waters for start-ups.

Frozen out: Aceil Haddad was 'flabbergasted' when Santander, who she has banked with for more than 20 years, refused to allow her to apply for a business account

Aceil Haddad, a businesswoman who has banked with Santander for 20 years, was 'flabbergasted' when the bank refused to allow her to apply for a business account this month.

She was told by her local branch to apply online, but later found out the bank had halted all applications.

'I am conscious of the pandemic restrictions, but I was anticipating that I could sign up, given my long-term relationship with the bank,' says Aceil, from Camden, North London.

'They have all my details - I have never gone into my overdraft before. I wasn't even looking for a loan, I just wanted an account.

'When I asked what I was supposed to do, they said: 'We don't know'.'

Aceil, who is setting up a PR company, then found she could open an account with Starling Bank via its mobile app in minutes, after submitting a picture of her passport and further supporting documents.

T he mother of two, who is also head of communications for charity Pregnant Then Screwed, which offers free support and advice to those who face maternity or pregnancy discrimination, adds: 'I realise banks need to do due diligence for business customers, but Santander could see that I am quite careful with money.

'I've always had least 5,000 to 10,000 in my personal account. I just feel penalised.'

As the country toils under lockdown, a coalition of small business leaders and MPs is calling on banks to break the logjam.

Support: MP, chairman of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Fair Business Banking

Kevin Hollinrake MP, chairman of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Fair Business Banking, says Britain's entrepreneurial spirit is needed now more than ever.

'It's giving the impression that we are closed for business,' he says.

Urging lenders to get their act together, the Conservative MP adds: 'It is a terrible message to send at a time when people will be made unemployed and may be wanting to work for themselves. They are being deterred from doing that.'

Business accounts are not compulsory, but banks increasingly require customers to separate their personal and business affairs. The rules are different for limited companies, which must keep their business filings separate.

The features of such accounts make it easier to track income and expenses, make notifications to HMRC and create a paper trail for your company.

It is also simpler to apply for business loans such as the Government's Bounce Back Loan Scheme.

However, each of the big lenders is operating a different policy on opening these accounts.

Santander does not currently accept new business account applications, even when they come from existing customers with personal current accounts, such as Aceil.

A spokesman says: 'We are doing all we can to support our existing business customers. Currently we are not accepting new applications for business current accounts but we continue to keep this under review.'

Metro Bank is also not accepting new business account applications in store or online, but 'hopes to reopen for new applications as soon as possible'.

At TSB, only those with a personal current account can apply for a new business account, though the bank will also accept 'switchers' who have business accounts elsewhere and want to move.

A spokesman says it plans to return to opening accounts for the wider market in the next few weeks.

At TSB, only those with a personal current account can apply for a new business account, though the bank will also accept 'switchers' who have business accounts elsewhere

Lloyds and Bank of Scotland have been opening new business accounts since December. Any start-up business is eligible to apply, but the banking group is not accepting switchers - except larger customers with a turnover of more than 3 million.

Barclays is also open to business account applications, but new customers must make an in-branch appointment and there are none available until April. However, if a customer already has a personal current account with the bank, they may be able to open a business account online within a week.

Before Christmas, HSBC was closed to all prospective business account holders with a turnover of less than 2 million, but was open to switchers, sole traders and limited companies with one director. However, it says it is now 'fully open and accepting applications once again'.

NatWest Group, which includes RBS and Ulster Bank, also reopened for switchers and start-ups in December. Starling Bank, which has 300,000 business accounts, says it has continued to accept business customer applications in the pandemic.

Mr Hollinrake says the differing messages from High Street banks are leaving the nation's budding entrepreneurs confused.

Industry sources say some providers have been 'spooked' by fraudsters trying to take advantage of the Covid-19 business loans.

In December, the Treasury Select Committee heard that Bounce Back Loan fraud was five times higher than typical levels for some banks. However, High Street lenders deny that the freeze on business bank accounts has been influenced by these fears.

The Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) says the Government, lenders and regulators need to come together to provide a 'guaranteed route' through which businesses can open accounts.

FSB national vice chairman Martin McTague adds: 'Start-ups and sole traders will be fundamental to our economic recovery from this recession, as they were to the last.

'If we want more people striking out on their own as the economy changes, creating the firms of the future, we have to equip them with the fundamentals they need to start a business - including a business current account.'

moneymail@dailymail.co.uk
Tom Healy, President & CEO, CoreCentric Solutions Repairs using a remanufactured part can extend the life of an appliance, because the remanufactured part has been restored to its original specifications. The result often is better in quality, reliability and robustness than the original part.

As supply chains of all types continue to be disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, the ability to procure new refrigerators, freezers and other household appliances may not return any time soon. Concurrently, cooking and eating at home will continue to be the primary way Americans consume food through at least the first half of 2021, creating a high level of need for reliable kitchen appliances. A solution to this dichotomy can be found through remanufacturing that can be used to extend the life of an appliance and make it like new again, according to Tom Healy, president and CEO of CoreCentric Solutions.

Todays appliances rely heavily on technology that requires control boards and other components that are manufactured overseas, Healy explained. The supply chain for control boards and their associated components, specifically, was disrupted by closed factories early in the pandemic, and that disruption continues even now that manufacturing has restarted. Also, consumer electronics and automotive manufacturers are ahead of appliances for receipt of control boards and their associated components, so we are likely to experience appliance shortages through at least the first half of 2021.

As Healy noted, a working appliance can mean a huge difference to a familys ability to stick to a budget.

Many families today may not have the means to buy a new appliance, even if they could find one. Repairs using a remanufactured part can extend the life of an appliance because the remanufactured part has been restored to its original specifications. The result often is better in quality, reliability and robustness than the original part, he said. We have 200 highly trained essential employees who have worked throughout the pandemic to keep these vital parts and components in circulation. When CoreCentric employees remanufacture a part, they disassemble it, clean it and replace failed components. Their expertise extends to the ability to predict when other components may fail and proactively replace those.

CoreCentric works directly with manufacturers, appliance parts wholesalers, appliance service technicians and DIY consumers through corecentricdirect.com, partsimple.com and servicerparts.com.

Remanufacturing also supports sustainability by creating a supply chain for aging parts and manages obsolescence by extending the life of existing appliances. CoreCentric normally remanufactures more than 200,000 electrical and mechanical appliance parts and has more than 50,000 finished goods available for immediate, same-day shipping. In 2020 those numbers were up by significantly, according to Healy.

About CoreCentric Solutions

Headquartered in Carol Stream, just outside of Chicago, Illinois, CoreCentric Solutions (CoreCentric) is a privately held global company that is in the business of recovering, repairing, remanufacturing and selling back to the market, appliances, appliance parts and consumer goods. Since 1995, CoreCentric has been a leader in the repair, remanufacture and product returns industry. We provide inventive, custom remanufacturing solutions to the worlds largest OEMs  as well as exceptional service to appliance parts wholesalers, appliance service technicians and DIY consumers. CoreCentric opened a Global Engineering Center is 2010 in Pune, India, to provide R&D and engineering services that constitute an integral part in supporting the remanufacturing work undertaken in Carol Stream.
The Jewell Well is the first well in a potential five-year, 20-plus well development drilling program across the three operated Drilling Spacing Units (DSUs) the company controls in the SWISH AOI.

Brookside is strongly positioned to capitalise on its superior acreage position in the Anadarko Basin of Oklahoma.

( ) (OTCMKTS:RDFEF) is fully-funded to drill and complete the much-anticipated Jewell Well in the SWISH AOI of Oklahoma, USA, after an A$8.25 million capital raising, with shares up as much as 50%.

The oversubscribed placement to sophisticated and professional investors attracted very strong support from a mix of new and existing shareholders, including several new high net worth investors looking for exposure to the oil and gas sector.

Brookside will now progress drilling plans at the Jewell Well, which sits in the highly-sought after Sycamore-Woodford Trend in the companys SWISH Area of Interest (AOI) in the world-class Anadarko Basin.

Moving forward with drilling

Brookside managing director David Prentice said: We are delighted with the response we have received from our existing shareholders (and from new investors) to this placement and would like to thank CPS Capital Group for assisting us with this very successful raising.

This raising will enable us to move forward with our transformational operated drilling program, kicking-off immediately with the highly anticipated Jewell Well in our SWISH AOI in the SCOOP Play.

Investors welcomed the news with shares as much as 50 per cent higher to 1.2 cents intra-day on strong volume of almost 164 million.

Proven by neighbouring production

Drilling of the Jewell Well looks set to be transformational for Brookside and the catalyst to unlock the value of a conservatively estimated 11.606 million net barrels of oil equivalent (BOE) prospective resource that the company has booked across its three SWISH AOI DSUs (Jewell, Flames and Rangers).

Prentice said: Our acreage in this area is proven by neighbouring production with results from tier-one operators active in the area - Continental Resources Inc ( ) (FRA:C5L), ( ) (FRA:DY6) (ETR:DY6) (BMV:DVN), ( ) (FRA:USS) (BMV:MRO) (ETR:USS) and Ovintiv Inc (NYSE:OVV) (TSE:OVV) (FRA:47Q) - materially exceeding our expectations, including initial flow rates above 2,000 barrels of oil equivalent seen in offsetting wells.

We are looking forward to keeping shareholders and investors updated with the strong pipeline of news flow that will be generated from this operated drilling activity and this will be complemented by additional milestones achieved from the Orion Project Joint Venture project.

This is a very exciting time for the company and the team at Black Mesa Energy and we are looking forward to breaking ground on the Jewell Well location very shortly.

Brooksides position in the SWISH AOI (excluding the Flash 1-8-5MXH well and Courbet 1-27-22XHW well).

Sycamore and Woodford formations

Brookside will now move aggressively to begin operations on the Jewell Well, targeting one of two primary producing formations in the SWISH AOI, the Sycamore formation, which continues to deliver outstanding sustained productivity in nearby offsetting wells.

The Casillas Operating LLC operated Flash 1-8-5MXH well (around 3-miles west of the Jewell DSU) has produced ~500,000 barrels of oil equivalent in around 15-months, considerably higher than Brooksides conservative estimate for the Jewell Well.

Future wells in the Jewell DSU will also target the Woodford formation, which also continues to deliver outstanding sustained productivity in nearby offsetting wells.

The Continental Resources operated Courbet 1-27-22XHW well (around 1-mile southwest of the Jewell DSU) has produced ~340,000 barrels of oil equivalent in around 12-months.

This production rate is considerably higher than BRKs conservative estimate for the Jewell Well.
Police hunt down thieves for stealing mobile food vendors motorbike

PHUKET: Police have arrested two men for stealing two motorbikes with sidecars (saleng) from two houses in Phuket Town during the middle of the night  one of them belonging to a mobile food vendor.

crimepolice

By Eakkapop Thongtub

Wednesday 10 February 2021, 04:57PM

The two men  Suchart Chengthong, 27, originally from Bangkok, and Nathakorn Ritraksa, 27, a Phuket native from Pa Khlok  were arrested on Monday (Feb 8), explained Lt Col Sathit Noorit of the Phuket City Police.

Suchart and Nathakorn were arrested after a 48-year-old man reported to police at about midday last Sunday (Feb 7) that his black Honda Dream motorbike with sidecar and canopy was missing.

The motorbike was fitted to be used as a mobile food station.

The man told police that the night before (Feb 6) he had parked the motorbike in front of his house on Sakdidet Rd, Phuket Town. He did not realise his three-wheeler was missing until he exited the house at about 10am the next day.

Police checked CCTV in the area and found that two men had come and stolen the food vendors motorbike with sidecar at about 1:30am that night.

The two had arrived on a motorbike, and as they rode off one of them used his foot to push the motorbike with sidecar quietly along with them.

Through CCTV footage, police tracked down the two men to a shack in Moo 3, Pa Khlok, Lt Col Sathit explained.

Police found Suchart and Nathakorn with the red-black Honda Wave motorbike that they used to commit the theft and the clothes that they were wearing at that time, he added.

At the shack, police found that the sidecar, canopy and cooking fittings had all been disconnected and removed from the stolen motorbike.

Suchart confessed that he had disassembled the motorbike and its sidecar and posted the parts for sale on his Facebook page, Lt Col Sathit said.

During questioning, Suchart also confessed that he had previously stolen another motorbike with sidecar from a house on Yaowarat Rd in Phuket Town, on Jan 28.

Lt Col Sathit confirmed that Suchart and Nathakorn were taken to Phuket City Police Station and charged with theft in the nighttime by using a vehicle to flee.
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Some residents of Ogun State have raised alarm over the influx of Fulani herdsmen from Oyo State.

The residents of Imeko Afon Local Government Area of Ogun State, in a statement signed by some of their leaders, said the herdsmen are believed to be those expelled from Oyo State.

PREMIUM TIMES reported how a farmer identified as Dele Olowoniyi, was killed on his farm in the area on Sunday.

Sources said the deceased was found dead with machete cuts in his neck and other parts of his body after the invasion of the village by some herdsmen.

The incident was confirmed by Ogun State Police Command Public Relations Officer, Abimbola Oyeyemi, but said he was unsure whether it was carried out by herdsmen.

The leaders of Imeko Afon Local Government Area of Ogun, however, said in a statement that famine is looming in their axis because the local government shares a border with Igangan where some herdsmen were recently evicted.

The statement was jointly signed by leaders of Southern Youth Assembly of Nigeria, Abdulakeem Mulero; National Youth Council of Nigeria, Saheed Oyeleye; Federation of Imeko-Afon Local Government Student Union, Adebia Adegoke and The Patriots, Imeko-Afon Local Government, Abel Babatunde.

The statement was titled An SOS on incessant killings, destruction of property and laying siege by killer herdsmen in Imeko-Afon Local Government Area, Ogun State.

Speaking on Mr Olowoniyis death, the groups said Late Dele Olowoniyi, a farmer in his late 30s, was sleeping outside his house to enjoy the midnight breeze, having complained of heat to his wife.

He was rounded-up by the hoodlums who slaughtered him in a barbaric manner. They thereafter fled to Iwoye, a neighboring town in the same Imeko/Afon Local Government. This was according to an eyewitness who was peeping from a nearby bush.

On the 2nd of January, 2021, Alhaja Serifat Abiola-Adisa, a native of Imeko, was kidnapped in her filling station at Igboora, Oyo State. The kidnappers shooting in their usual manner abducted the business woman and later killed her at a few distance away from her filling station.

They said the influx of herdsmen shows that there is palpability of famine in an area known to be one of the food baskets of the state.

This newspaper on Tuesday morning reached out to police spokesperson, Mr Oyeyemi, on the issues raised by the residents but he did not respond to his calls and text messages.
Another pandemic similar to coronavirus is 'just around the corner', a leading disease expert has warned.

Professor Sanjaya Senanayake of the Australian National University said the 'greatest minds' on Earth including inventor Elon Musk should put their energies into stopping the next outbreak.

The last pandemic comparable to Covid-19 was Spanish Flu in 1918 which killed about 17million people - but Professor Senanayake said another virus just as dangerous would re-appear much sooner than in 100 years' time.

Medical workers in protective suits attend to coronavirus patients at the intensive care unit of a designated hospital in Wuhan, China in January 2020

'In the last 50 years or so, we have seen over 40 new infections appear,' he told the National Press Club in Canberra on Wednesday.

'Our global population is growing, we are impinging more and more natural habitats and interacting with wild animals and our inter-connectedness globally has never been as great as it is now.

'Therefore, the next pandemic is not 100 years away - it is just around the corner.'

Professor Senanayake said the world needed to be much better prepared for infectious diseases after Covid-19 killed two million worldwide.

'And what we have learnt from Covid is that a pandemic is not a niche area of healthcare. No, not at all,' he said.

'When the first person in the US got their dose of vaccine on 14 December, 1.6 million people had already died from Covid. In other words - we needed that vaccine earlier.

'We needed that vaccine before the pandemic. Now, that sounds like an absurd or ridiculous notion, but that is exactly what organisations like the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations are working on.'

Drone pictures show bodies being buried on New York's Hart Island in April 2020

Professor Senanayake said Covid-19 'invaded every aspect of our lives' and asked Elon Musk, the Tesla boss and one of the world's richest men, to turn his attention to infectious diseases.

'Here is an opportunity before we forget Covid to galvanise into action the greatest minds on the planet,' he said.

'Not just the medical minds but Elon Musk and others like him and get them to stop thinking about driverless cars and sending adventurous billionaires to space and maybe focus on predicting and preventing the next pandemic.'

'And I should add - I have no issue with sending adventurous billionaires to space, it's bringing them back to Earth afterwards that's the problem,' he joked.

Musk is working on space travel through his company SpaceX and so is Amazon boss Jeff Bezos via his company Blue Origin.

It comes as World Health Organisation bosses say Covid-19 is 'extremely unlikely' to have leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.

Sars-CoV-2 'may have originated from zoonotic transmission', meaning it passed from animals to humans, a team of experts from China and the WHO concluded.

Experts said the early findings indicate that the virus was introduced to humans through an 'intermediary host', which means it jumped from one species to another, and then jumped from the second species to humans.
Watertown, NY -- A Watertown transgender woman says she was strip-searched, hog-tied and had a wig ripped from her head before being anally probed during a 2017 arrest on two misdemeanors.

DeAnna LeTrays legal case has been championed by Legal Services of Central New York and the New York Civil Liberties Union. Shes now suing Watertown police, the Jefferson County Sheriffs Office and several officers involved in the incident in federal court.

LeTray, 54, says that police and jail deputies humiliated her simply because they couldnt get over the fact she was born a man and had -- for nearly a decade -- identified as a woman.

Samuel Young, of Central New York Legal Services, noted that charges from LeTrays Sept. 28, 2017 arrest were so minor that if charged today, she wouldnt have been taken into custody at all under the states recent bail reform.

LeTray had had no problems with the police in the past, and her misdemeanors -- for criminal mischief and minor drug possession -- were later reduced to non-criminal violations, her lawyers said.

The police were called for help. Instead, I was misgendered, assaulted and dehumanized. I never want anyone to go through the abuse I experienced from people that were supposed to protect me, LeTray said in a news release.

Neither Watertown police nor the Jefferson County Sheriffs Office have filed a response yet in court. Watertown declined comment; the sheriffs office did not respond to a request for comment.

The incident started as a dispute between LeTray and a landlord. But tensions quickly escalated, and LeTray says the landlord pulled out a shotgun and pointed it at her. She tried to leave, but in her haste accidentally broke a window, according to her lawsuit.

LeTray said she was still walking away when police arrived. She says she initially began to hurry away because she thought the landlord was still coming after her with a gun.

She later stopped when she realized it was the police, she said. The officers then began questioning her account, repeatedly criticizing her for being transgender, the lawsuit states. LeTray identified herself and also gave police her name given at birth.

You are a guy dressed like a woman and it shows you have mental problems and no one (is) going to believe (you) anyway, LeTray says one of the officers told her.

At the police station, officers wouldnt let her wear a wig for her mug shot, LeTray said. When she refused to take it off, she was charged with another misdemeanor, obstructing governmental administration. (A mug shot was eventually taken after she spent the night in jail.)

As she reached for a hairclip, one officer jumped on her, demanding to know what was in her hand and ripping off her wig, taking some hair off the scalp with it, LeTray said.

After that, LeTray was hog-tied with her hands and legs bound together, then taken to the jail to be strip-searched, her lawsuit continues. As per jail rules, every inmate undergoes a visual cavity search upon entry.

But LeTray says things went even farther than that.

When at the jail, she says that a jail corrections officer prolonged the strip search to repeatedly touch her private parts, while several other officers were present. LeTray asked if a woman could perform the search, but the officer refused, noting LeTrays biological parts remained intact, the lawsuit continues.

The corrections officer repeatedly inserted a finger into LeTrays rectum several times and touched her private parts, while ridiculing her about her sexuality, the lawsuit states. (There was no indication that she was hiding drugs in her body, the lawsuit adds.)

After the strip-search and anal probe -- which found nothing -- LeTray was taken to a jail cell overnight. The next morning, she was released from jail on $500 bail.

One of LeTrays lawyers, Josh Cotter, said that the real intent of the lawsuit is to force Watertown and the Jefferson County Sheriffs Office to reform their rules to respect transgender people.

She didnt have to be taken into custody, added Young, one of Cotters colleagues. She didnt have to be subjected to an intrusive search, but she was, and under circumstances with animus toward her status as a trans person.

Though the incident dates from 2017, LeTray has long sought sanctions for what happened. She first contacted the NYCLU, which sent her complaint to the states Division of Human Rights. But after a court battle, it was determined that the human rights division didnt have jurisdiction over police conduct.

In September 2020, LeTray attempted to file a federal lawsuit on her own. A federal magistrate judge said it appeared she was claiming false arrest, excessive force and illegal search, but the judge ruled that LeTray needed to better state her complaint.

Around that time, LeTray called CNY Legal Services. After evaluating her complaint, the non-profit agency decided to take her case.

On Monday, legal services filed a new complaint in federal court on LeTrays behalf, aided by the NYCLU.

Staff writer Douglass Dowty can be reached at ddowty@syracuse.com or 315-470-6070.
CALMAR, Iowa  A northeast Iowa man is facing burglary and drug charges after allegedly threatening someone and carrying a gun.

Timothy Walter Barnes, 36 of Clamar, is accused of 1st and 2nd degree burglary, possession of marijuana-1st offense, and possession of drug paraphernalia. The Winneshiek County Sheriffs Office and the Calmar Police Department says Barnes entered a home without permission in the 300 block of East Clay Street in Calmar on Tuesday and threatened the people inside.

Court documents state that Barnes told the people he would gun them down if they made anymore jokes about his son.

Law enforcement says that incident happened around noon Tuesday and they went to arrest Barns at his home that evening. Investigators say that before they arrived, Barnes threw a trash bag in a dumpster and two marijuana pipes, a grinder, rolling papers, marijuana wax, and a vape pen with marijuana shake were in the bag. Court documents say marijuana shake was also found on Barnes toilet. Two handguns were also seized during the investigation.
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BUSINESS kingpin Kudakwashe Tagwirei has long had a commanding position in Zimbabwes US$100m-a-month fuel import market, and owns major stakes in banking, telecoms and the countrys largest platinum mines.

But it is unclear how much he controls in his own right and to what extent is holding stakes on behalf of top political and military figures.

Should Tagwirei gain control of Fidelity Printers and Refiners, he would become the leading force in the countrys main foreign exchange earner, the gold industry.

Fidelitys gold purchases amounted to US$700m in the first 10 months of last year, and its refinery has an annual capacity of 50 tonnes. Fidelity has agents buying on its behalf from artisanal and small-scale miners around the country.

The RBZ is planning to unbundle Fidelity into two business entities  a gold refining unit and a printing and coin minting business.

Although it will retain the printing business, the central bank announced that it will offer a 60% stake in the gold refinery and marketing arm to large-scale gold producers, major gold buying agents and small-scale producers through their associations.

A three-year average delivery of gold to Fidelity will be used by the RBZ to determine its offer to the various players.

The central bank has not explained the period over which the three-year average would be worked out, but a mining industry source said this would be calibrated to ensure Tagwirei scoops a sizeable interest in Fidelity.

The source said Tagwirei and associates in his company Sotic International have been pushing for a model similar to South Africas Rand Refinery, which is owned by major gold mining companies.

They were the proponents of the unbundling exercise, the source said, and have been using their influence on the State and its institutions to get a grip on the plant.

Tagwirei has been on a buying spree of mining assets in the country, using Sotic or its wholly owned subsidiary Landela Mining Ventures. This included Sotics 2019 purchase of a 74,73% stake in Bindura Nickel Corporation from Asa Resources, and Landelas acquisition of one of Zimbabwes biggest gold mines, Freda Rebecca.

Freda Rebecca was licensed as a gold buyer by Fidelity in June last year. The mining firm has stitched up a lucrative gold-buying funding arrangement with the largest commercial bank in the country, CBZ Holdings, reported to be 30%-owned by a Tagwirei company.

Freda Rebecca aims to buy a tonne of gold every month for the next three years under the arrangement  equivalent to over 60% of the 19 tonnes that Zimbabwe officially purchased last year.

Landela also bought Shamva gold mine, with capacity to produce 21 000 ounces (0,6 tonnes) a year, from Mzi Khumalos Metallon last year. Khumalos operations in Zimbabwe were hobbled by a politically charged dispute with the government, allowing Landela to step in at an advantageous price.

Landela is targeting six more mines, including four that had been mothballed by the Zimbabwe Mining Development Corporation, with a capacity to produce at least

85 000 ounces (2,4 tonnes) a year, according to Sotic CEO David Brown, who is also Landelas CEO and former chief executive of South African mining company Impala Platinum.

Two of the mines, Metallon-owned Mazowe and Redwing, are as good as in the bag, according to two sources familiar with discussions. Metallon was forced to put most of its mines under care and maintenance after failing to get proper compensation from Fidelity for its gold production. Between 2016 and 2019, the company lost US$82m, and sued for a US$132m claim for lack of profit during the period.

Considering that Landela also assumed Metallons liability in the acquisition of its mines, an industry source speculated that the claim on Fidelity could also be transferred to the new mine owners, who may leverage that for a higher stake in the gold refinery.

It was Sotic again that was handed the militarys stake in a US$4 billion platinum joint venture with Russian investors. Mining executives said the deal was unimaginable, and suspect that Sotic may simply have acted as a cover for the army, whose involvement was scaring investors away.

The military, through Zimbabwe Defence Industries, under US sanctions, and the Zimbabwe Mining Development Corporation, together held 30% of the joint venture, known as Great Dyke Investments, also headed by Brown.

In December, Mnangagwa disclosed that a new, hitherto unknown entity, Kuvimba Mining House, had become the new owner of Sotic and Landelas gold and platinum assets. It is once again Brown who is in charge of Kuvimba.

The government is a 65% shareholder in the new entity, with the remaining 35% belonging to another mysterious company Quorus, registered in Mauritius, where information on ownership is kept secret.

Tagwirei is not part of that vehicle. The speculation is unfortunate, said Brown. Brown and Finance minister Mthuli Ncube have not explained how privately held assets, bought using offshore capital, suddenly belonged to the State.

There is no explanation for the latest move, mining sector executives say, other than that the government is now trying to distance Tagwirei from the investments because of the US sanctions.

 Africa Confidential

Dylan O'Connor, 33, was arrested 'after arranging to meet up with the girl for sex' in Redwood City, California

A pediatrician at Stanford Children's Hospital has been arrested after trying to arrange a date with police officers who were posing as an underage girl, and sending them explicit photos.

Dylan O'Connor, 33, was arrested after arranging to meet up with the girl for sex in Redwood City, California, police said.

He had also sent her explicit photographs, they said. It's unclear if they were of him or someone else, but the cops said they were 'pornographic'.

He was taken into custody on charges of sending harmful material to a juvenile and traveling to meet a minor for lewd purposes, which are both felonies.

Redwood City Police started investigating him after receiving a tip from the San Jose Police Department about O'Connor.

The officers posed online as the girl and told him she was underage, but he still arranged to meet them for sex, they said.

O'Connor is on unpaid leave as a doctor at the Lucile Packard Stanford Children's Hospital in Palo Alto

On Friday, O'Connor drove to an address where he'd arranged to meet the girl but was instead greeted by police officers and arrested immediately.

His bio has been removed from Stanford Children Hospital's website.

O'Connor arranged to meet the girl for sex and also sent her pornographic images. He was arrested at a home where he'd planned to meet her and was greeted by cops

In a statement, a spokesman said he'd been barred from his job.

'Upon learning of Dr. OConnors arrest, Stanford immediately placed him on unpaid administrative leave and relieved him of all duties.

'These are serious criminal charges, which we understand are still under investigation by law enforcement, so we are unable to comment further at this time,' a spokesman said.

The police officers also raided his home. They are now looking for other potential victims, they said.

It's unclear if O'Connor is married.

Public records list his address as a three-bedroom home in Redwood City worth around $2million.
A nightwatchman attacked in the Kim Kardashian Paris jewellery heist case is suing one of the robbers involved for writing a book about it.

The victim - who cannot be named for legal reasons  was attacked at gunpoint alongside the reality TV star, who ended up bound and gagged.

He is now incensed that Yunice Abbas, 67, is profiting from the crime before he has even stood trial.

Abbass new book, which has just gone in sale in Paris at more than 15 a copy, is called I Kidnapped Kim Kardashian.

The nightwatchman of the luxury serviced apartment block where the raid took place during Paris Fashion Week in October 2016 wants all profits to go to him.

Yunice Abbas, 67, was one the thieves dubbed the grandpa robbers who bound Miss Kardashian, 40

Kim Kardashian and Kourtney Kardashian pictured in Paris in 2016 before Kim was robbed at gunpoint

The 42-year-old, who cannot be named for legal reasons, is particularly angry that career criminal Abbas is currently promoting his work across the media, while portraying his gang as affable old men.

Our client considers this publicity campaign indecent, reads a statement from the nightwatchmans lawyers issued to French news agency AFP on Wednesday.

He maintains that the individuals who attacked him that evening were not peaceful grandpa robbers, but determined and armed criminals.

The security guard, who is now a self-financing student at the Sorbonne university in Paris, was neutralised by several people at gunpoint, says the statement.

They said a legal procedure has been launched to freeze the book royalties paid to Mr Abbas so he cannot touch them.

Instead, they want them to be paid to the nightwatchman in compensation for the damage suffered during his ordeal.

The gang took jewellery worth 7.9million, including the American mother-of-fours 3.2million engagement ring

There was no immediate comment from Abbas, or from LArchipel, the publishers of his book.

Abbas reveals in the book that he had never heard of Kim Kardashian or her rapper husband Kanye West when he joined the robbery gang, and just went along to help get a diamond.

The gang took jewellery worth 7.9million, including the American mother-of-fours 3.2million engagement ring, and most of it has never been recovered.

Abbas, who has spent 18 months in prison on remand, is awaiting trial in Paris with 12 others, mostly aged over 60.

He claims his role in the robbery was simply to stand in for the buildings nightwatchman, who was taken up to the room at gunpoint by the other thieves.

I was supposed to greet guests if any arrived, but no one arrived, said Abbas. Nobody interfered, the victim handed over the jewels without resistance.

One of the reasons the gang was caught was because Abbass DNA was found on a jewel he dropped as they fled.
A group named "Concerned Citizens of Amenfi East" has kicked against the reappointment of Helena Appiah as Municipal Chief Executive (MCE) for Amenfi East.



The concerned residents claim Helena Appiah is incompetent and has since her appointment failed Amenfi East residents.



In a statement copied to Peacefmonline.com, the group stated; "We bring to the notice of the appointing authority that, a decision to maintain our non-performing and clueless outgoing MCE will be the most unfortunate decision and travesty of justice to our people and next generations."



''Hon. Helena Ama Appiah has had no plan, purpose, or direction for the job except to amass wealth through the galamsey business, already a public knowledge. To many of us she came to do business. Those who knew her as a former Assembly member and Circuit supervisor expected nothing better from her administration. She was and it still not cut for the job. We were told she was appointed on grounds of affirmative action but it is sad to report to Mr. President that, the beneficiary of an affirmative action has failed to champion the course of the women in whose name she was appointed. Market women, traders, NPP polling station women organizers and many other groups have expressed their displeasure about her performance and relationship with them. Our Municipality is now on a life support and needs a competent, vibrant and an energetic visionary leader to the rescue."



"The group also accused their MCE of other wrongdoings saying ''she allocated most of the school feeding slots to herself, her family and friends. Her daughter who was not a supplier became the sole supplier of all school feeding materials. Job opportunities were given to his family and friends at the detriment of NPP die hard foot-soldiers and many more. All these instances contravenes the general administrative principles of conflict of interest. Her actions and inactions created disaffection for the NPP party and contributed to the presidents defeat in the constituency by over 4000 votes, the worst ever for an NPP presidential candidate since 2000. Her reappointment spells doom for the NPP in future elections".



They have threatened to demonstrate if the President fails to heed their call.



Read full statement below:





9th February, 2021



WE ARE AGAINST THE REAPPOINTMENT OF HON, HELENA APPIAH AS MCE FOR AMENFI EAST. HER POOR PERFORMANCE IS NOT WORTHY OF A REAPPOINTMENT, WE WILL DEMONSTRATE SOON - CONCERNED CITIZENS OF AMENFI EAST



We, the above mentioned group with membership across the Amenfi East constituency write to register our outmost disapproval of an attempt to maintain our incompetent outgoing MCE Hon Helena Ama Appiah. We bring to the notice of the appointing authority that, a decision to maintain our non-performing and clueless outgoing MCE will be the most unfortunate decision and travesty of justice to our people and next generations.



Since she claims to enjoy support from the NPP constituency chairman and assurances from some big men in Accra, we the ordinary people in the villages have no big men but our voices right or to lawful assembly and will speak resoundingly in the coming days. Our loud silence has been the hope and trust in leadership to identify and correct this mishap by giving to us a new hope in a new MCE nominee. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be so, we are left with no option than to make this statement for it to be on records that. We the people of Amenfi East do not want or need Hon. Helena Appiah as MCE again.



Hon. Helena Ama Appiah has had no plan, purpose, or direction for the job except to amass wealth through the galamsey business, already a public knowledge. To many of us she came to do business. Those who knew her as a former Assembly member and Circuit supervisor expected nothing better from her administration. She was and it still not cut for the job. We were told she was appointed on grounds of affirmative action but it is sad to report to Mr. President that, the beneficiary of an affirmative action has failed to champion the course of the women in whose name she was appointed. Market women, traders, NPP polling station women organizers and many other groups have expressed their displeasure about her performance and relationship with them. Our Municipality is now on a life support and needs a competent, vibrant and an energetic visionary leader to the rescue.



She has been very good at scheming the sporadic transfers of Municipal Coordinating Directors, as though they were the problem meanwhile she is the real problem that needs to be solved. We need new brains with fresh ideas to move our municipality towards a new direction especially when the NDC has given us a very young and dynamic MP. Not a single fully initiated or completed major project could be credited to her name. She halted and abandoned several communities self-initiated projects after promising to support their completion. Hon Helena, never visited any of the communities to campaign for the President or the Parliamentary Candidate in the 2020 elections.



She allocated most of the school feeding slots to herself, her family and friends. Her daughter who was not a supplier became the sole supplier of all school feeding materials. Job opportunities were given to his family and friends at the detriment of NPP die hard foot-soldiers and many more. All these instances contravenes the general administrative principles of conflict of interest. Her actions and inactions created disaffection for the NPP party and contributed to the presidents defeat in the constituency by over 4000 votes, the worst ever for an NPP presidential candidate since 2000. Her reappointment spells doom for the NPP in future elections.



Our sister, by her own actions and that off the NDCs candidate, gives credence to the public suspicion that she was part of those who sponsored the NDCs candidate now MP, against the NPPs candidate. She shielded the mining site of our main opponents for the entire four years whilst other NPP executives and members were at the mercies of the operations vanguard and galamstop. Their sites were constantly attacked at the whistle of the MCE, when our main opponents galamsey site was operating 24/7 under her protection. This was the mystery behind the constant praise singing by the NDCs candidate on radio. She fought against the presidents interests on many occasions for example, the creation of the Western North region and the Wassas inclusion (she engineered for the Amenfi easts exclusion), the elections of MMDCEs, The fight against galamsey, The one district one factory policy in the constituency ( by frustrating the process leading to the acquisition of land for the project) just to mention a few. In all such important key policy issues, she was on the other side. Many people questions her loyalty, whether she represents herself or the president?



In a conclusion, we state emphatically that, our outgoing MCE for Amenfi East Hon. Helena Ama Appiah performance has been very abysmal, she was a major contributory factor to the NPPs humiliating defeat in the constituency. She is incompetent, divisive, purposeless and therefore shouldn't be entrusted with another four year mandate. The NPP has a lot of good alternatives who can manage our Municipality better to the benefit of all. We humbly appeal to the appointing authority and those who are still lobbying for her reappointment to do so, but with proper assessment of her performance and approval ratings from the ordinary people where true sovereignty resides. We also respectfully call on our dear sister Hon. Helena Ama Appiah, to do us the honor and in the publics interest, recuse herself from the post honorably. We are by this press release calling on all other progressive minds in the municipality to join our movement to #GetHelenaOut.





....signed.....



1. Mr. Akwasi Oduro - Chairman



Wasa Akropong



2. Mr. Emmanuel Coffie- Secretary



Wasa Japa



3. Mr. Stephen Asante - Operations



Wasa Pewuako



4. Mr. Paul Mensa - Vice Chairman



Wasa Dawurampon



5. Miss Mary Donkor - Womens leader



Wasa Saa



6. James Fynn - Treasure



Wasa Nkonya



7. Vivian Darko - Welfare



Wasa Mampong







NB: Please call these numbers for any Radio or TV Interview 0550542818 or 0272223482



Cc: All Media Houses

Source: Ameyaw Adu Gyamfi/Peacefmonline.com/Ghana









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

Featured Video

New Delhi:

Deputy inspector general (prisons) D Roopa, who recently exposed alleged corrupt activities in jail, paid a second visit to the central prison in Bangalore, where AIADMK general secretary VK Sasikala is serving her sentence. She has reportedly submitted her second report to DGP (Prisons) HN Sathyanarayana Rao on Saturday.



In the report, she has highlighted the state of affairs pertaining to maintenance of the central prison, and alleged that crucial CCTV recordings of VIP treatment to AIADMK general secretary VK Sasikala, who is serving a sentence, appear to have gone missing, a police source said.



"There are only two CCTV cameras in the visitors' gallery. Camera number 8 and 9 fitted near the admission room have no recording facility. Sasikala was given a separate room with chair and tables so she can conveniently talk to her visitors. We had recorded all these on camera but it looks like they are deleted now," reads the report, reports an English daily.

Read | AIADMK leader Sasikala paid bribe to get VIP treatment in Karnataka jail, claims DIG (Prisons)



Mayhem in Bangalore jail



According to Newsnation sources, when DIG reached the jail, Superident Krishna Kumar was not on the premises. When she sought to listen to grievances of the prisoners, all hell broke loose. At least 800 odd inmates tried to get her attention. Soon the Superident rushed back to prison, the prisoner who came back with him picked a fight with those sharing problems with DIG. The tension escalated to the extent that she had to leave the jail premises in a hurry.



Roopa has been in the spotlight after she pointed to speculation about jail officials, including her senior, DGP Sathyanarayana Rao, having received a bribe of Rs 2 crore to provide special treatment to Sasikala. She had exposed several lapses in the prison's administration, which were, however, denied by Rao and the jail officials.



Karnataka Govt notice to DIG

The Karnataka government on Friday served a notice on a top police officer for going to the media on her controversial report on alleged special treatment injail to AIADMK (Amma) leader V K Sasikala, even as she stood her ground, asserting she had not violated any conduct rules.



As the report by DIG (Prisons) D Roopa erupted into a major controversy, a red-faced government asked her to explain her conduct, with Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, saying it was "absolutely against the rule book."



"It is inappropriate on her part to share details with the media," Siddaramaiah told reporters in Mysuru, expressing open displeasure over the public comments by Roopa, whose report has also brought her superior and other prison officials under a cloud of bribery allegations.



Siddaramaiah said she could have approached any of her superiors about her charges against senior officials and that her allegations before the mainstream and social media has brought embarrassment to the police department.



Roopa has been asked to give a reply to the notice served on her, the chief minister said.

Suggested read | Sasikala bribe gate: D Roopa cries foul, says targeting me for doing my job is unfair

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Bengaluru, Feb 10 : Lenovo on Wednesday said that the company will open 100 new "Lenovo Exclusive Stores" (LES) in India in the financial year 2021-2022.

This comes as an addition to their recent opening of the 400th Lenovo Exclusive Store in Bengaluru as part of its effort to continue offline retail expansion during the pandemic.

"With the consumer business growing at a rapid pace of 45 per cent YoY in Lenovo in FY 2021, it was imperative to continue our offline retail expansion to reach customers to cater to their Learn From Home and Work From Home needs," Rahul Agarwal, Managing Director and CEO, Lenovo India, said in a statement.

"We are delighted to share that in FY 2021, we opened 100 LES, and with our 400th LES in Bengaluru, our offline footprint has reached 10,000 and our revenue contribution for the consumer business is around 18-20 percent.

"We look forward to adding another 100 LES in our offline retail business in the coming financial year and take the premium user experience of our 400th LES to several more stores," he said.

With 400 Lenovo Exclusive Stores, the brand has now reached across 180 cities in India with 270 channel partners.

This expansion plan of 100 additional LES includes the metros or tier 1, 2 and 3 cities across India ensuring that their services and products are available across the nation while also generating more employment opportunities across the country.

These Lenovo Exclusive Stores host an extensive range of electronics and computer hardware from Lenovo, including the brand's flagship products such as the Legion series, ThinkBook series and Yoga series, among others.


press release

The past six years have been the warmest on record since 1880, with 2016, 2019 and 2020 being the top three, according to a World Meteorological Organization (WMO) press release on 15 January. The year 2020 was 1.2C above pre-industrial era (1880) temperatures.

WMO predicts a 20 per cent probability that temperatures will temporarily exceed 1.5C as early as 2024.

"The speed at which temperatures are increasing is alarming," says Pascal Peduzzi, Director, GRID-Geneva, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). "At this rate, we may reach +1.5C in the next 15 years."

According to the Paris Agreement, Member States committed to limit global warming to well below 2C, preferably to 1.5C, compared to pre-industrial levels. Every country signing up to the agreement set out a target, known as a nationally determined contribution (NDC) for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by around 2030.

In January this year, Antonio Guterres, the United Nations Secretary-General, said 2021 was a critical year for climate, calling for multilateral action. He urged Member States to submit Nationally Determined Contributions to cut global emissions by 45 per cent by 2030 compared with 2010 levels; donors and multilateral development banks to increase the share of adaptation finance from 20 to at least 50 per cent by 2024, and developed countries to fulfil their pledge to mobilize $100 billion annually for climate action in developing countries.

Guterres also said it was time to stop building new coal power plants and end subsidies to fossil fuels.

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Global warming and climate change will be key topics of discussion at the fifth session of the UNEP-hosted UN Environment Assembly this month. The world's highest environmental decision-making body brings together representatives of the 193 Member States of the UN, businesses leaders, civil society and environmentalists from around the world.

Growing momentum for action

In 2020 the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increased 2.57 parts per million (ppm) reaching 4.14 ppm in December, the highest concentration on record. Carbon-dioxide is the principal greenhouse gas, though methane and nitrous oxide, much more potent greenhouse gases, are also causing global warming.

As temperatures rise, so is the global momentum to address climate change. In the world's largest survey of public opinion on climate change, conducted recently, a majority of people called for wide-ranging climate action. Covering 50 countries with over half of the world's population, the survey included over half a million people under the age of 18, a key constituency on climate change that is typically unable to vote in regular elections.

The speed at which temperatures are increasing is alarming. At this rate, we may reach +1.5C in the next 15 years. Pascal Peduzzi, Director, GRID-Geneva, UNEP

The United Nations Environment Programme's (UNEP) World Environment Situation Room, set up in 2019, is a demonstration platform put together by a consortium of Big Data partners. It includes geo-referenced, remote-sensing and earth observation information and collates climate data in near real-time.
(ANSA) - RIYADH, FEBRUARY 10 - A civilian aircraft was set on fire by Houthi rebels in Yemen in an airport in the southern part of Saudi Arabia on Wednesday.



Iran-backed Houthi rebels said that they had carried out the attack on the airport, calling it a "military objective".



State-owned television Al-Ekhbariya cited armed groups part of a coalition fighting the rebels as calling it a "vile terrorist attack".



One plane was set on fire by the attack at the Abha international airport.



The coalition did not provide any numbers as to people killed or injured and did not say how the attack was conducted.



However, early in the day it had reported intercepting two drones of an "explosive trap" type in the south.



The rebel fighters seem to have stepped up attacks on Saudi-backed Yemeni forces after last month the US made a move towards removing the Houthis from the list of terrorist groups.



Houthis have also resumed an offensive to take over the Yemeni government stronghold of Marib, according to a government source, which has led to the death of dozens of people on both sides. (ANSA).


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New Delhi, Feb 10 : While the wealth of nations top 100 billionaires increased by Rs 12.97 lakh crore since March 2020, about 1.7 lakh people lost their jobs every hour in April 2020 alone.

Oxfam India's CEO Amitabh Behar says, "To contextualise the inequity in what is the biggest economic crisis in the history of independent India, the wealth of the nation's top 100 billionaires went up by Rs 12,97,822 crores since March 2020, while in April alone over 170,000 people lost their jobs every hour. Just this increase in wealth could sustain the NREGA wages (National Rural Employment Guarantee Act) for 10 years!" Behar says that over 40-50 million seasonal migrants working in construction sites, factory manufacturing units and services activities were left to fend for themselves during the 2020 lockdown.

"While affluent Indians stranded abroad were flown back and quarantined in hotels, it was only at the end of May 2020, that buses and Shramik special trains were arranged for the relocation of migrant workers," he said.

The India edition of Oxfam's newly released report 'The Inequality Virus,' elucidates how amid spiralling unemployment, dire food insecurity, distress migration as well as reverse migration, the super-rich elite continued to amass wealth while billions struggled to make ends meet.

The findings in "Inequality Virus' reports say that the pandemic has hit India's informal workers the most. Out of a total 122 million who lost their jobs, 75 percent, which accounts for 92 million jobs, were lost in the informal sector.

During the mass exodus on foot, over 300 informal workers died from starvation, suicides, exhaustion, road and rail accidents, police brutality and denial of timely medical care.

According to a Stranded Workers Action Network's report in April, 2020, 50 percent of the respondents had no rations left even for a single day; while 96 percent had not received rations, 70 percent had not received cooked food from the government; and 78 percent of the respondents had less than INR 300 left.

The National Human Rights Commission recorded over 2582 cases of human rights violation as early as in the month of April 2020.

As per the findings,the relief packages for the informal sector and migrant workers were also minuscule. Additional expenditure of the government in the first relief package announced was only 0.5 percent of the GDP and the total additional public spending promised by all the relief measures announced by the end of May 2020 amounted to only around 1 percent of the GDP.

The report found that the brunt of job loss was experienced by the female workforce and 17 million women lost their jobs just in April 2020.

Unemployment for women rose by 15 percent from a pre-lockdown level of 18 percent and could result in a loss to India's GDP of about 8 percent or $ 218 billion.

Women who were employed before the lockdown are also 23.5 percentage points less likely to be re-employed compared to men in the post-lockdown phase.

A study reports that despite having a hold of 77 million tonnes of food grain, more than three times the buffer stock requirement before the lockdown, only 2.2 million tonnes of this had been distributed to states. Eventually, public stocks increased to more than 100 million tonnes by the beginning of June 2020, which meant that some of the stock effectively rotted in the storage facilities.

Moreover, what was announced through the PDS system and fair price shops were not applicable for most of the migrants outside their home town due to sedentary bias that makes ration cards made in the source state of the migrants unusable in the destination state, the report said.
Household power and water bills in Western Australia would remain in line with increases in the consumer price index over the next three years under a returned McGowan government.

The opposition, meanwhile, says its plan to bring in private providers to the energy market will still result in even cheaper power bills.

A returned McGowan government would be committed to residential power and water rises in line with CPI for the next three years. Credit:WAtoday

The governments $60 million subsidy to keep charges with CPI increases was revealed as part of the Treasurys pre-election financial projections statement released on Monday.

CPI increases are projected as 1.75 per cent in 2021-22, 1.75 per cent in 2022-23, and 2 per cent in 2023-24 in the forward estimates.
A coronavirus related to the one causing the global pandemic has been discovered in the blood of five bats living in Thailand.

SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes Covid-19, shares 91.5 per cent of its genetic code with that of the newly-identified virus, called RacCS203.

The virus is thought to be unable to infect people as it can not bind to the ACE2 receptor on human cells, Covid-19's gateway into the body.

However, antibodies circulating in the blood of infected bats and pangolins were found to be effective at neutralising the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

This biological paradox indicates bat-based coronaviruses can not, as standard, infect humans, experts speculate.

The authors instead think coronaviruses only evolve the ability to infect human cells after first being passed into an intermediate host, such as a pangolin.

Here, it mutates and changes shape slightly which gives it the ACE2-binding facility, the authors theorise.

These findings align with yesterday's announcement from the World Health Organization that the pandemic likely emerged naturally and the coronavirus was not released from a laboratory.

A coronavirus related to the one causing the global pandemic has been discovered in the blood of five horseshoe bats (pictured) living in Thailand

Researchers believe bat coronaviruses may not be able infect humans directly and must go to an intermediate host, like pangolins (pictured), before evolving to infect human cells

SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes Covid-19, shares 91.5 per cent of its genetic code with that of the newly-identified virus, which has been called RacCS203. Viruses related to SARS-CoV-2 have now been found across south-east Asia

Researchers led by Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok took samples from bats in a wildlife sanctuary in Eastern Thailand.

They conducted genomic sequencing on the new virus to discover how closely-related it was to other coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2.

It revealed the new virus's closest relative is called RmYN02, a virus which is 93.6 per cent identical to SARS-CoV-2.

While genetically similar (91.5 per cent identical), SARS-CoV-2 and RacCS203  the new virus  have key differences.

For example, although the spike proteins of the two viruses are genetically similar, a key region on the spikes which binds to the human receptors is very different in shape, making it impossible for the new virus to bind to human ACE2 cells.

The discovery of the new virus adds to a growing bank of knowledge about the family of coronaviruses to which SARS-CoV-2 belongs.

Previously, similar viruses had only been found in China and Japan, but the presence of this strain in Thailand indicates there are far more than previously believed, likely spread over a 3,000 mile range across Southeast Asia.

Researchers led by Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok took samples from bats in Eastern Thailand. They conducted genomic sequencing on the new virus RacCS203 to discover how closely-related it was to other coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2. It revealed the new virus's closest relative is RmYN02, a virus which is 93.6 per cent identical to SARS-CoV-2

Pictured, two phylogenetic trees showing the genetic similarity of various coronaviruses. Left: the spike protein similarity shows the new virus is similar to SARS-CoV-2. Right: analysis of the shape of a specific part of the spike protein which binds to human cells. It shows the virus is unable to bind to ACE2 and therefore is unlikely to be able to infect humans

WHO backs Beijing's claim Covid did NOT leak from a Wuhan lab WHO scientists sent on a coronavirus fact-finding mission to China have today thrown their weight behind Beijing - dismissing theories the virus leaked from a lab while backing theories that the virus was imported on frozen meat. Peter Embarek, leader of the WHO team, said that 'further research' into the imported meat theory - which is being pushed by Beijing - is needed, along with studies looking at early cases of Covid reported outside of China. At the same time, he dismissed theories that the virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan, saying the possibility is 'extremely unlikely' and does not need to be investigated further - despite US government officials calling it 'the most credible' theory a few weeks ago. The findings, which mark the end of the WHO's mission to Wuhan, amount to an almost full backing of Beijing's explanations for the source of the pandemic and will be a PR coup for the ruling communist party. It will also give ammunition to WHO's critics, who feared the investigation would be used to give legitimacy to a Chinese white-washing exercise with possibly embarrassing or incriminating evidence hidden from investigators. It is hardly the first time that the WHO has come under fire for uncritically parroting information from Beijing - ex-President Trump made the same allegations last year. Advertisement

Professor Martin Hibberd, from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, who was not involved with the study, said: 'This paper has identified a further bat coronavirus that is thought to be related to the SARS-CoV-2 strain currently causing the human pandemic.

'This new finding from Thailand emphasises the broad distribution of the bats and viruses that may include the originator of the current outbreak.'

Viruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2 are found in four species of horseshoe bats, which are known to be 'reservoirs' of many pathogens.

The range of these species spans as far west as India, covers all of Southern China and reaches as far east as Japan. The southern tip of their range includes the Philippines and Singapore.

Scientists are keen to discover the evolution of the SARS-CoV-2 virus to learn where it came from, in order to prevent future outbreaks of similar pathogens.

Previous research revealed the Covid-19 virus's closest relative is another coronavirus harboured by bats, called RaTG13. The two viruses are 96 per cent identical.

This similarity also indicates the virus evolved naturally in an animal host, likely a bat, before infecting an intermediate species and then jumping to humans.

Yesterday, the World Health Organization (WHO) revealed it is 'extremely unlikely' SARS-CoV-2 was leaked from a lab in the Chinese city of Wuhan.

A team from WHO dispatched to China to determine the virus's origin made their first press conference yesterday after China delayed the mission.

Dr Peter Ben Embarek from WHO said: 'Our initial findings suggest that the introduction through an intermediary host species is the most likely pathway and one that will require more studies and more specific targeted research.'

The authors of the latest study write in their paper, published in Nature Communications: 'Cross-border surveillance is urgently needed to find the immediate progenitor virus of SARS-CoV-2.'
Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - February 10, 2021) - The Very Good Food Company Inc. (CSE: VERY) (OTCQB: VRYYF) (FSE: 0SI) ("VERY" or the "Company") is pleased to announce the appointment of Kevin Callaghan, a veteran sales executive in the plant-based food space, as its Director of Sales for US markets; as well as provide an update on US e-commerce activity.

Director of US Sales

Kevin Callaghan joins the VERY team as our new Director of US Sales focusing on building our wholesale and food service partnerships and points of distribution in the US market. Kevin was sought after by VERY's executive team for his extensive experience in the plant-based food industry where he held senior roles with early rapid growth companies. Notably, Kevin served as the Senior Eastern Regional Sales Manager for seven years with a major plant-based dairy alternative food company based in Canada; where he was responsible for scaling its US sales and overseeing sales, promotional, and product placement initiatives. Recently, Kevin was the Senior Director of US Sales for an emerging plant-based cheese company, where he established over 3,500 points of distribution for the brand in six months with key retailers such as Wegmans, Sprouts, Costco, Ingles and Central Market.

CEO Mitchell Scott commented: "We are thrilled that Kevin has joined the VERY team as he has a proven track record of launching and scaling high growth plant-based food brands in the US market. With Kevin's network and expertise, we will successfully build our US sales channel for both retail and food service. VERY has already received numerous requests for product samples from large US based retailers and look forward to our products being on their shelves in the near future."

Update on US E-Commerce Sales

VERY is also pleased to provide an update on US based e-commerce activities. The Company has experienced significant growth in order volume from US consumers over the past year. In 2019, 550 orders were received from US online customers as compared to 16,024 orders in 2020, resulting in a 2,813% increase in order volume. This US e-commerce sales order growth is a result of digital marketing campaigns and community building initiatives introduced in the latter part of 2020. VERY recently launched a separate US e-commerce website to provide a more seamless customer service experience to US consumers and for better search engine optimization.

About The Very Good Food Company

The Very Good Food Company Inc. is an emerging plant-based food technology company. Our mission is to use progressive food technology to create plant-based meat and other food products that are delicious while maintaining a wholesome nutritional profile. To date we have developed a core product line under The Very Good Butchers brand.

For further information, please contact:

Mitchell Scott

Chief Executive Officer and Director



Investor Relations:



Edge Communications Group

Invest@verygoodbutchers.com

1-855-472-9841

Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange nor its Market Regulator (as defined in the policies of the Canadian Securities Exchange) accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Information

This news release contains forward-looking information. Such forward-looking statements or information are provided for the purpose of providing information about management's current expectations and plans relating to the future. Readers are cautioned that reliance on such information may not be appropriate for other purposes. Any such forward-looking information may be identified by words such as "proposed", "expects", "intends", "may", "will", and similar expressions. Forward-looking information contained or referred to in this news release includes, but is not limited to Kevin Callaghan's experience and qualifications and the benefits the Company expects to derive therefrom, and the Company's plans and ability to successfully build out its US channel for retail and food service.

Forward-looking statements or information are based on a number of factors and assumptions which have been used to develop such statements and information, but which may prove to be incorrect. Certain assumptions in respect of continued strong demand for our products; that added production capacity will enable us to increase our sales volume, that we do not experience material interruptions or supply chain failures as a result of COVID-19, our ability to retain key personnel, the availability of labour, and changes and trends in our industry or the global economy are material assumptions made in preparing forward-looking statements or information and management's expectations. Although the Company believes that the expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements or information are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on forward-looking statements because the Company can give no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in such forward-looking information include, but are not limited to: negative cash flow and future financing requirements to sustain operations; dilution; limited history of operations and revenues and no history of earnings or dividends; competition; economic changes; and the impact of and risks associated with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic including the risk of disruption at the Company's facilities or in its supply and distribution channels. The forward-looking information in this news release reflects the current expectations, assumptions and/or beliefs of the Company based on information currently available to the Company.

Any forward-looking information speaks only as of the date on which it is made and, except as may be required by applicable securities laws, the Company disclaims any intent or obligation to update any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or results or otherwise. The forward-looking statements or information contained in this news release are expressly qualified by this cautionary statement.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/74119
NEW HAVEN  Residents came together Wednesday near where Kevin Jiang was killed, gathering in sorrow and faith to call for an end to gun violence and honor the lives of those taken before their time in this city,

Jiang, 26, who studied at the Yale School of the Environment and lived in West Haven, was shot to death on Lawrence Street between Nicoll and Nash streets Saturday night. He was the sixth homicide victim of the year in New Haven.

Ice the Beef, a New Haven-based, youth-led antiviolence organization, held a vigil on Lawrence Street Wednesday.

Natalia Katz, an East Rock resident and member of Ice the Beef, said she had been filled with inspiration after the group held a rally last Saturday.

Later that evening, as she walked home, she came across police tape, and saw Jiang after he had been shot.

She said she was glad to have a community to reach out to for guidance in how to process that. Others, she noted, are not so lucky, or have had the experience become commonplace.

It was really jarring  in any situation  but especially just feeling all the hope from earlier that day, said Katz. And just saying  this is not over. Nowhere is this over.

Preachers offered prayers for change and healing, calling on residents and authorities to consider the lives of everyone killed in New Haven.

God, I just ask, humbly, Lord, that each and every one of the hearts here today  that we want to make a change and we be about that change, that we dont just talk about it, that we walk about it ... that we become peacemakers that walk boldly, and truthfully, and with courage,  said pastor Deniqua Washington of Elm City Vineyard Church. Lord, I cast the spirit of fear to hell, and I ask us instead that you give us redemptive power that transforms this land.

Josh Williams, also a pastor with Elm City Vineyard Church, noted the area straddled the border of the East Rock and Newhallville neighborhoods. God, he said, could provide shepherds to guard life in both neighborhoods and throughout the city.

In you, there is enough. ... No matter what is life is taken, no matter where life is taken, that there is more than enough, said Williams. Holy Spirit, would you give us the courage to be shepherds in each neighborhood of our city, from East Rock to Newhallville. ... We need to see your justice come, not just in one part of New Haven, but in the whole of our city.

Jason Ting asked for God to provide a balm on New Haven, a balm that heals, serving places that seem so broken and cracked.

God, would you pour into those places; would you give us hope that you can do the healing  that death is not the last thing. That you can bring life, said Ting. That you can bring renewal.

Michelle Phyong Ting offered a poem, linking Jiangs killing to that of Vincent Chin, a Chinese American killed in 1982 by two white men who thought he was Japanese.

What to say after the unthinkable is done: nothing rational. No elite affiliation, no record of service to the country, no volunteer hours clocked could suffice to measure the worth of Kevins life, nor the magnitude of loss. I did not know Kevin, but I know he was once living, breathing, beautiful and beloved, known most intimately by his family, his mother, his fiancee and friends, she said.

I know Kevin was to be married, and that his love is now lost, that he died breaths before his union, said Ting. I know Kevins life is worth remembering on its own, but his life was an entire history.

.. Let New Haven be more than a city that uses the occasion of death to rationalize more guns, more violence, more war in our streets, because we know the outcome of war is only more loss, she said.

Ting and Remidy Shareef, director of outreach with Ice the Beef, invoked the names of the others killed this year in New Haven  Alfreda Youmans, Jeffery Dotson, Jorge Osorio-Caballero, Marquis Winfrey and Joseph Mattei.

Shareef noted the death of Brandon Jenkins, 18, as well, among others.

He called for a collective effort to address gun violence. People, he said, would come forward to help if they were secure in the knowledge that they were loved and cared for. The mass killing at Sandy Hook had come and gone; people were killed in Chicago, as well as New Haven, but the issue remains.

What are we going to do? What we do, as a people, is come together in a state of consistency, said Shareef, likening peoples collective will to water, wearing away the hardness of hearts. We need to be in every neighborhood until the youth start saying, hey, I know I can talk to him, I know I can talk to her, because he truly, sincerely loves me.

Manuel Camacho, youth president of Ice the Beef, noted their loss and that of others. It was too common, he said. He had come off a rally against gun violence last Saturday to learn of Jiangs death.

(Jiang) was an individual who had a future, who had dreams, who had aspirations, who had the chance to live a life full of prosperity, said Camacho. Is that not what a person deserves? Do we not deserve to live? Its heartbreaking. It is truly heartbreaking to know that another member of our community is gone.

Alder Charles Decker, D-9, said he was desperate to live in a city where the work of Ice the Beef was not necessary, noting the commonality of gun violence and offering peace and strength to Jiangs loved ones.

Politicians need to better to address the feature of life in the city, he said. He said he would stand with the group in its efforts.

For gun violence, theres no Band-Aid. Theres no quick fix, said Decker. We need to radically address our priorities in the city, in the country.

Chaz Carmon, director of Ice the Beef, said that last Saturday would have been Tyriek Keyes birthday. Keyes was killed in 2017, at the age of 14.

Carmon called on the Board of Alders to declare gun violence a public health crisis, like it did racism in late 2020.

I know right now it may seem like its never going to end. But I believe, and I have faith in God, that one day, change is going to come for all of us who are experiencing this madness in our neighborhoods, said Carmon. I didnt have to know Kevin to love Kevin. I dont have to know any of you to love you. I can love you just because youre a human being. ... This is a health crisis. We are losing people almost every day.

william.lambert@hearstmediact.com

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Egypt's President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi said he hopes the new Libyan leadership will end national divisions. El-Sisi's statement came during phone calls with Mohamed Menfi, head of the newly-formed Libyan Presidency Council, and Abdul Hamid Mohammed Dbeibah the newly-selected Libyan interim prime minister, on Wednesday.

During a call with Menfi, El-Sisi said that "Libya, together with its people and neighbours, have suffered as a result of its divisions," read a presidential statement.

No single government has had full control over the oil-rich country since 2011 following the ouster and murder of its leader Muammar Gaddafi on the back of the NATO-backed uprising. Since 2015, Libya has been torn between warring administrations, one in the east and one in the west.

In a critical step towards unifying the nation, various delegates from Libya's warring factions selected on Friday a new Libyan unified interim executive authority comprising four leaders to guide the oil-rich country through to national elections in December, with Mohamd Menfi chosen to head the three-member Presidential Council and Dbeibah as interim prime minister.

El-Sisi congratulated Menfi, saying he hopes the selection of the new Libyan leadership will put the war-torn country on the threshold of a new era marked with harmony and unity between Libyan institutions to uphold the countrys interests.

The president reaffirmed that Egypt will keep offering support and assistance for Libya on the economic, security, and military levels, the statement added.

Menfi said Libya appreciates the "brotherly, deep-rooted" ties with Egypt, hoping to bolster bilateral relations in various fields and increase coordination and cooperation on various regional issues of common interest.

He also praised Egypt's contributions to help solve the crisis in Libya, particularly the announcement of the Cairo Declaration, which he said helped reconcile different opinions in Libya, in addition to hosting the constitutional track meetings, which focused on discussing the constitutional basis for the Libyan state administration; and hosting meeting of the 5+5 Military Commission in the Egyptian resort city of Hurghada.

El-Sisi and Menfi agreed to continue coordinating to reinforce the efforts exerted by the Libyan side in leading the transitional phase, the statement added.

In another phone call with Dbeibah, El-Sisi offered his congratulations and asserted Egypt's readiness to fulfil Libya's needs to help restore its stability.

Friday's step came during the Geneva-hosted talks, which witnessed the selection of a new Libyan unified interim executive authority that will remain in power until elections are held on 24 December 2021.

Per the Geneva elections, Menfi, a Libyan diplomat backed by the countrys east, is chairing a presidential council, with two deputies, Abdullah Al-Lafee, an MP from the city of Al-Zawyah representing the west, and Musa Al-Koni, a former member of the incumbent council, representing the south.

The talks also witnessed the selection of Dbeibah, an influential businessmen supported by tribes in the west, as interim prime minister.

The elections step comes a few weeks after Libyan envoys at UN-backed talks in Hurghada agreed to hold a constitutional referendum before the elections in December.

Hurghada is hosting a third round of the Libyan dialogue on the constitutional track to set the "roadmap for the referendum and elections."

Egypt has been pushing for a political settlement in Libya for years, calling for a ceasefire, a complete disarming of militias, an end to foreign intervention in the country, as well as a fair distribution of wealth between various regions in the country.

In June, Egypt proposed a peace initiative dubbed the Cairo Declaration, which was based on the conclusion of an earlier Berlin conference. The Cairo Declaration proposed a ceasefire as well as the election of a new leadership council.

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OTTAWA, ON, Feb. 9, 2021 /CNW/ - Everyone has the right to feel safe and live free from violence. Women's organizations across the country provide vital services and support adapted to the individual realities of survivors of gender-based violence. The Government of Canada is committed to ensuring these organizations have the resources they need to continue their essential work.

Today, Gudie Hutchings, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Women and Gender Equality and Rural Economic Development, announced an investment of over $4.76 million for ten projects that will address gender-based violence across Ontario.

This investment will support organizations including:

Woman Abuse Council of Toronto (WomanACT) to adapt, test and evaluate a multi-agency risk management model (MARAC) for women experiencing violence;

to adapt, test and evaluate a multi-agency risk management model (MARAC) for women experiencing violence; Sexual Assault Centre Kingston, to develop and test best practices for using video counselling to increase access to trauma-informed support services for youth, Indigenous, rural, and ethno-cultural women survivors of sexual violence;

to develop and test best practices for using video counselling to increase access to trauma-informed support services for youth, Indigenous, rural, and ethno-cultural women survivors of sexual violence; White Ribbon for two projects:

for two projects: To inspire men and young men across Canada to change their attitudes and behaviors, to seek help when needed, and to embrace their roles as allies and change makers, via a social marketing campaign featuring compelling calls to action; and

to change their attitudes and behaviors, to seek help when needed, and to embrace their roles as allies and change makers, via a social marketing campaign featuring compelling calls to action; and

to improve engagement on gender-based violence issues through the application of Gender-Based Analysis plus (GBA+);

The Ottawa Coalition to End Violence Against Women, to work closely with front line advocates, communities, and aim to improve police, accountability and ensure transparency for sexual violence survivors and the public;

to work closely with front line advocates, communities, and aim to improve police, accountability and ensure transparency for sexual violence survivors and the public; Fire Service Women Ontario, to adapt, test and evaluate a MARAC for women experiencing violence;

to adapt, test and evaluate a MARAC for women experiencing violence; YWCA of St. Thomas and Elgin , to develop a gendered, multi-sectoral approach to address the root causes leading to homelessness for women and implement strategies and safeguards to ensure they have greater access to stable housing and economic security;

to develop a gendered, multi-sectoral approach to address the root causes leading to homelessness for women and implement strategies and safeguards to ensure they have greater access to stable housing and economic security; Riverdale Immigrant Women's Centre, to increase women's economic security within the food service and restaurant industry through the development of an action plan to implement institutional change within Ontario's food sector;

to increase women's economic security within the food service and restaurant industry through the development of an action plan to implement institutional change within food sector; South Asian Women's and Immigrants' Services Inc., to address barriers to equality and identify mechanisms to overcome these barriers, train women, youth leaders and volunteers; and,

to address barriers to equality and identify mechanisms to overcome these barriers, train women, youth leaders and volunteers; and, City for all Women Initiative, to advance a feminist municipal recovery plan and ensure a gendered response to the COVID-19 pandemic at the municipal level, and develop province-specific approaches to affordable housing.

to advance a feminist municipal recovery plan and ensure a gendered response to the COVID-19 pandemic at the municipal level, and develop province-specific approaches to affordable housing. Much more work remains to be done to end gender-based violence. Though investments like these, our country is one step closer to addressing the root causes of violence  one closer to a better and safer Canada .

Quotes

"Women's organizations across the country work tirelessly each day to create spaces and services to help women and girls feel safe. This essential work has increased in volume and urgency during the COVID-19 pandemic and our government is pleased to contribute to these organizations to ensure that the resources and services they offer continue. By supporting them, we are providing the most qualified people with the tools they need to better serve their communities."

Gudie Hutchings, M.P.

Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Women and Gender Equality and Rural Economic Development

"The Canadian Multi Agency Risk Assessment Conference Model project will help WomanACT implement multi-agency high-risk domestic violence tables in three communities across Ontario. Building off the MARAC model, a successful model that has been used across the United Kingdom since 2003, the project brings together justice and community agencies to respond to cases in which women are at risk of serious harm and domestic homicide. The project is implementing the model in Grey Bruce County, Perth County and Toronto and will help reduce repeat victimization and connect women to the services and supports they need."

Harmy Mendoza

Executive Director, Woman Abuse Council of Toronto (WomanAct)

"This project aims to invest in the critically needed skills and best practices for delivering video counselling to marginalized survivors of sexual violence. Our interviews with practitioners have identified the lack of best practices as a key barrier to adopting video counselling practices and developing more comprehensive and accessible modalities for supporting survivors. As a result, the project focuses on creating best practices to support individuals who identify as Indigenous, rural, youth, and survivors of color. Our organization and the gender-based violence sector recognize these four groups in particular, face significant additional barriers to accessing services. Additionally, COVID-19 has highlighted the critical need for these distance counselling practices specific to the needs of marginalized communities. We hope to share knowledge learned and adopted with other practitioners and community agencies, in order to improve professional growth and better serve our community as a whole."

Maryam Pandi  Executive Director, Sexual Assault Centre of Kingston, Ontario



"Our Allies for Gender Equality project enables White Ribbon, along with our diverse feminist partners, to embed intersectionality and accountability within the field of engaging men and boys. Those that engage with men as allies in the prevention of gender-based violence and all forms of oppression will benefit from promising practices in the development of programming and organizational policies that are equitable and inclusive for all.

White Ribbon's Call to Men: Promote Gender Equality and Prevent Violence public education campaign will inspire men and young men across Canada to be agents of change in the social movement to end gender-based violence and discrimination, to seek help when needed, and to embrace their roles as allies in a modern era. Men will benefit from their stance on gender equity, our collective connectedness to humanity, and our value of human rights."

Humberto Carolo - Executive Director of White Ribbon

Quick Facts

More than 1,000 women's shelters and sexual assault centres have received funding through the $100 million announced as part of the COVID-19 Economic Response Plan.

announced as part of the COVID-19 Economic Response Plan. The Promising practices to support survivors and their families call for concepts is the largest amount of funding ever announced for programming to specifically support diverse groups of gender-based violence survivors and their families.

call for concepts is the largest amount of funding ever announced for programming to specifically support diverse groups of gender-based violence survivors and their families. In June 2017 , Women and Gender Equality Canada announced the first-ever federal Strategy to Prevent and Address Gender-Based Violence. The Government of Canada has invested over $200 million to prevent gender-based violence, support survivors and their families, and create more responsive legal and justice systems.

, Women and Gender Equality Canada announced the first-ever federal Strategy to Prevent and Address Gender-Based Violence. The Government of has invested over to prevent gender-based violence, support survivors and their families, and create more responsive legal and justice systems. The Multi-Agency Risk Assessment Conference (MARAC) model has been tested and rolled out in more than 250 communities across the United Kingdom and will be adapted to ensure it meets the needs of diverse Canadian populations. Following testing and evaluation in an urban and rural or remote setting, a flexible and relevant blueprint of the model will be developed and disseminated across the country.

Associated Links

Follow Women and Gender Equality Canada:

SOURCE Women and Gender Equality Canada

For further information: Marie-Pier Baril, Press Secretary, Office of the Minister for Women and Gender Equality and Rural Economic Development, 613-295-8123; Media Relations, Women and Gender Equality Canada, 1-855-969-9922

Related Links

http://www.swc-cfc.gc.ca/




Students walk through Cambridge University in Cambridge, England, on March 14, 2018. (Tolga Akmen/AFP via Getty Images)

British University Researchers May Be Inadvertently Arming China: Think Tank

Top British universities may be unwittingly assisting Chinas military forces in their development of weapons of mass destruction by allowing them access to cutting-edge research, a social policy think tank has said.

In research published on Monday (pdf), Civitas, the Institute for the Study of Civil Society, said that the pervasive presence of Chinese military-linked conglomerates and universities in the sponsorship of high-technology research centres in many leading UK universities is being largely overlooked.

The reports authors found that top research centres based at at least 15 universities, including Cambridge University, Imperial College London, and Manchester University, are generating dual-use research unintentionally, unaware that it could be deployed in Chinas development of its military, such as intercontinental ballistic missiles, advanced weapons and military vehicles, and metals and other materials.

Radomir Tylecote, a former Treasury official, and Robert Clark warned that Britains oversight of research that may be vulnerable to Chinese military exploitation is insufficient and doesnt make strategic sense.

China is demonstrating rapid technological-military development and growing force-projection capabilities, they said in a statement.

To risk financing and enabling these developments suggests a lack of strategic coordination.

They called for an urgent review of the safeguards and security implications around research collaborations with China both inside and outside universities, particularly in light of the Chinese regimes stated aims of matching U.S. military capabilities by 2027 and surpassing them by 2049.

One recommendation is for the government to draw up a list of barred Chinese firms and institutions, prohibiting their funding of research in the UK.

Another is the setting up of a dedicated official body to track and assess university sponsorship akin to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS).

Those measures should form part of an urgent reassessment of the security implications of the so-called Golden Era policies towards China and the strategic assumptions that underpinned them, the report states.

A man walks past Manchester University, in Manchester, England, on Oct. 7, 2020.(Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

The report details UK universities relationships with 22 military-linked Chinese universities and manufacturers, but stresses that the researchers were not knowingly contributing to military development.

However, because of Chinas civil-military fusion strategy, any claim to be able to reliably cooperate only with the civil branches of Chinese military-linked companies and universities [is made] less credible, the report states.

The authors noted that several institutions included in the report, titled Inadvertently Arming China?, did not agree with their analysis, and all were given an opportunity to respond.

Imperial College London said that the limited instances where they receive sponsorship from Chinese companies are for fundamental scientific research, and that it conducts its own due diligence prior to any sponsorship arrangement.

We also work closely with the Export Controls Joint Unit and other relevant UK government agencies. All relationships with third parties are subject to prior and continued review, the university added.

The University of Cambridge denied it had ever had any formal research funding or conducted research with Chinese universities or military-linked companies.

Manchester University said it had due diligence measures in place to allow its researchers to question the potential of their research and only collaborated with outside organisations within the legal remits of the export control legislation.

According to The Times of London, the Civitas report comes as Britains customs authority, HMRC, is to tell up to 200 British academics that they are to be investigated for export violations that risk aiding the Chinese military in weapons development.

HMRC, Imperial College, and Cambridge and Manchester universities did not respond to requests for comment.
Nearly one-third of U.S. adults say they are not likely to get a coronavirus vaccine when it becomes available to them, a new poll suggests.

Conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, the report found that 67 percent of Americans plan to get vaccine or have already done so.

However, 15 percent are certain they will not get the jab and 17 percent said they probably will not.

Many expressed doubts about the vaccine's safety and effectiveness, suggesting that substantial skepticism persists more than a month and a half into the U.S. vaccination drive that has encountered few side effects.

The poll also found that resistance runs higher among younger people, people without college degrees, black Americans and Republicans.

Some experts say this is discouraging news if the U.S. hopes to achieve herd immunity and vanquish the outbreak as well as help President Joe Biden reach his goal of 150 million shots in his first 100 days in office

A new poll found that 67% of Americans plan to get the COVID-19 vaccine or have already done so but 32% probably or definitely will not (above)

The poll found that black Americans and those under 45 appear less likely than white and older Americans to say they will get the vaccine, or that they have already done so.

This could delay the U.S. achieving herd immunity and inhibit Joe Biden from reached his goal of vaccinating 1.5 million Americans per day. Currently, an average of 1.4 million are being vaccinated every day

Dr Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert, has estimated that somewhere between 70 percent and 85 percent of the U.S. population needs to get inoculated to stop the scourge that has killed nearly 470,000 Americans.

More recently, he said the spread of more contagious variants of the virus increases the need for more people to get their shots - and quickly.

So is 67 percent of Americans enough?

'No. No, no, no, no,' said Dr William Hanage, an associate professor of epidemiology and an expert on disease dynamics at Harvard University TH Chan School of Public Health.

'You're going to need to get quite large proportions of the population vaccinated before you see a real effect.'

Nearly 33 million Americans - or about 10 percent of the population - has received at least one dose, and 9.8 million have been fully vaccinated, according to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention.

The poll, which was surveyed 1,055 adults between January 28 and February 1, provides insight into the skepticism.

Of those who said they definitely will not get the vaccine, 60 percent cited worries about side effects, despite the shots' safety record over the past months.

About the same percentage said they don't trust COVID-19 vaccines and 38 percent said they don't believe they need a vaccine.

Of those who probably will not get the vaccine but have not ruled it out completely, 63 percent said they are waiting to see if it is safe, and 60 percent said they are concerned about possible side effects.

Nearly 30 percent said they were worried about allergic reactions after a few scarce reports of people suffering anaphylaxis.

Around 60% said they were worried about possible side effects and 30% said they were worried about allergic reactions (ABOVE)

A total of 43% said thy are worried about the virus, an increase of 38% that said the same thing in September 2020

'I don't trust pharmaceuticals. I really don't. And it doesn't sound like it's going to be safe,' Debra Nanez, a 67-year-old retired nurse from Tucson, Arizona, told the AP.

Nanez said she has gotten flu and pneumonia shots, but is concerned about rumors about what's in the coronavirus vaccine, and her friends have the same hesitation.

'It would take a while for me to do research on it to make sure it's safe. I just don't want to take anything that's going to harm me,' she said.

Baron Walker, a 42-year-old laid-off insulation installer from Parkersburg, West Virginia, said he is in the 'probably not' column, at least for now.

He said that if he were elderly, or lived in a densely populated area, he might consider the vaccine more strongly.

But he is in rural part of the country, he has been wearing a mask and social-distancing, and he feels there is a good chance the nation will achieve herd immunity, he said.

'I feel like I have plenty of time before I get a chance to get [the vaccine] anyway, to find out if there are bad side effects and whether it's even worth getting it,' Walker said.

The survey found that older Americans, who are more vulnerable to COVID-19, are especially likely to say they have received a shot or will probably or definitely get vaccinated.

Four in 10 of those under 45 say they will probably or definitely not get a vaccine, compared with a quarter of those older.

Black Americans appear less likely than white Americans to say they have received the shot or will definitely or probably get vaccinated, 57 percent versus 68 percent.

Among Hispanic Americans, 65 percent say they have gotten or plan to get the vaccine.

Nearly 33 million Americans - or about 10 percent of the population - has received at least one dose, and 9.8 million have been fully vaccinated, according to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention

Public health experts have long known that some black Americans are distrustful of the medical establishment because of its history of abuses, including the infamous Tuskegee experiments, in which black patients with syphilis were left untreated so that doctors could study the disease.

Americans without a college degree are more likely than college-educated ones to say they will definitely or probably not get vaccinated, 40 percent versus 17 percent.

And Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say they are not likely or will definitely not receive the vaccine, 44 percent versus 17 percent.

Health officials are trying to counter concerns about the vaccine with science.

The latest evidence indicates that the two vaccines being used in the U.S. - Pfizer's and Moderna's - are effective even against the variants, Fauci said

Also, while the development of the vaccines was unusually fast, it was the culmination of many years of research,

And the vaccines went through clinical trials involving thousands of people who were monitored for 60 days after their last dose. Studies of other vaccines have found that harmful side effects almost always materialize within 45 days.

'Safety certainly was not compromised, nor was scientific integrity compromised,' Fauci said.

'Many have reason for skepticism. But I think that when you explain the facts and the data to them, you can win them over.'
ROME, FEB 10 - President Sergio Mattarella on Wednesday recalled the horror of the Foibe on Remembrance Day for the massacre of the thousands of Italians by Tito's partisans in ethnic cleansing at the end of WWII. "The horror of the Foibe strikes our consciences," he said. "The suffering, deaths, uprooting, and exodus forced on tens of thousands of families in the areas of the eastern border, of Istria, of Fiume, of the Dalmatian coasts, are inscribed with an indelible mark," said the head of State. "The crimes against humanity unleashed in that conflict did not exhaust themselves with the liberation from Nazi-Fascism, but continued in their persecution and violence, perpetrated by another authoritarian regime, the Communist one". February 10 is the 'National Memorial Day of the Exiles and Foibe'. The 'foibe' refers to mass killings mainly in Friuli-Venezia Giulia , Istria and Dalmatia during and after World War II against the local Italian population. Foibe are narrow Carsic pits or gorges into which victims were thrown, sometimes alive. As many as 15,000 Italians were tortured or killed by Yugoslav communists who occupied the Istrian peninsula during the last two years of the war. Many of the victims were tossed into the Foibe during anti-Fascist uprisings in the area and the exact number of victims of these atrocities is unknown, in part because Tito's forces destroyed local population records to cover up their crimes. Last July Slovenian President Borut Pahor became the first leader of a former Yugoslav country to mark the Foibe massacres. Pahor joined Mattarella in laying a wreath at the Basovizza Foiba, where 2,000 Italian soldiers and civilians are believed to have died at the hands of the Communist partisans. Pahor and Mattarella also signed a deal returning the Narodni Dom or House of the People, torched by Fascists in 1920, to Trieste's Slovenian community. Mattarella and Pahor also honoured local author Boris Pahor (no relation), 107, who has written books that stood witness to the terrible WWII events. On Wednesday several centre-right Italian politicians recalled that the former Italian Communist Party (PCI) played a large part in airbrushing the Foibe from Italian history, and called for vigilance to make sure this would nerer happen again. (ANSA).
PHILADELPHIA, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- VBit Technologies, one of the only U.S.-based companies developing and hosting Bitcoin mining operations, based out of Philadelphia is expanding its mining business into Montana. Known as the "Known Technology Frontier", Montana provides access to cheap electricity plus cooler conditions making it an ideal place to turn dormant manufacturing plants into server farms to mine Bitcoin. Yesterday, CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk, announced that it had bought $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin, and would start accepting Bitcoin as a payment method for its products. Some are crediting Musk with raising the price of cryptocurrencies. As of today, Bitcoin has broken another all-time high at $48,200 per Coinable price index, so as the market is growing, Bitcoin mining is too.

VBit Technologies

VBit already has existing mining locations in Calgary and Colorado and is expanding into Montana while actively looking for new locations in Western Pennsylvania as well. Montana with its inexpensive and vast amounts of hydroelectric power and large vacant facilities that have their own power substations and is a prime location for expansion to mine Bitcoin. VBit will deploy its new mining hardware in a data center that is 100% powered by hydroelectricity.

According to bitcoinenergyconsumption.com, the total power consumption of Bitcoin mining in 2020 is estimated at 77.8 TWh per year which is the equivalent of the entire country of Chile. A single mining transaction uses 686.5 kWh which equates to 23.3 days of power for an average US household (Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index - Digiconomist). This amount of power generation is estimated to add over 36.9 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere which is the same as New Zealand in a year.

Don Vo, CEO and founder of VBit Technologies, said, "Crypto as an industry has now come of age, and is now firmly in the mainstream - it is here to stay, and so is VBit Technologies. From an environmental standpoint, it's therefore important for Bitcoin mining to move to a more eco-friendly energy source that not only reduces the cost of electricity consumption but also generates it from renewable sources making it environmentally friendly. In addition, VBit is exploring new liquid immersion cooling technology that will allow for a more reliable mining environment with less failure. If there's an hour of downtime from a failure, it means we're losing money, so we need to keep the equipment optimized for profitability and customer satisfaction."

VBit Technologies has a brand called VBit Mining that provides Bitcoin mining services to thousands of people worldwide, and is on its way to becoming one of the largest Bitcoin mining operations in the world.

Contact: [email protected]

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VBit Mining Montana

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SOURCE VBit Technologies
Parliament Session Live Updates: Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed the Lok Sabha on Wednesday. The PM delivered the motion of thanks to the President's speech. Meanwhile, PM Modi's motion of thanks at the Rajya Sabha is still making headlines. PM Modi asked his fellow citizens to protect the country from 'andolan jeevis' who participate in every agitation. He also said that India needs to be aware of the new type of FDI - Foreign Destructive Ideology.

Here are the updates on his address in the Lok Sabha:

5:48 pm: I welcome farmers to discuss their concerns with us, says PM Modi.

5:36 pm: "I consider the farmer protests to be sacred. But, when Andolanjeevis hijack these sacred protests, showcase photos of those jailed for serious offences, does it serve any purpose? Not allowing toll plazas to work, destroying telecom towers - does it serve the movement," says the PM.

5:34 pm: "To use improper words against the private sector may have got votes for a few people in the past but those times are gone. The culture of abusing the private sector is not acceptable any longer. We cannot keep insulting our youth like this," says PM Modi.

5:34 pm: "The public sector is essential but at the same time the role of the private sector is also vital. Take any sector- telecom, pharma- we see the role of the private sector. If India is able to serve humanity, it is also due to the role of the private sector," says the PM.

5:25 pm: Kisan Rail has connected farmers to different corners of the country, says the PM.

5:23 pm: More investments in agriculture sector will increase job opportunities, says PM Modi.

5:15 pm: Criticising the Congress party, PM Modi said that party leaders in Rajya Sabha go in one direction and the ones in Lok Sabha go in another direction. "Such a divided party, such a confused party can neither help itself nor think about the country's welfare. The Congress is present in Rajya Sabha also, there are senior leaders there too. But they debate and discuss enthusiastically," he said.

5:12 pm: "Status quo has a role in destroying the country," said PM Modi.

5:10 pm: PM Modi gave examples of Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Jyotiba Phule and said that opposition did not stop them from pushing for reforms. "I am against this mentality. When it is said, they never asked for these laws. The people never asked for Ayushmaan Bharat, Jan Dhan, Swachh Bharat but we decided to take the initiatives. The government should work only when something is demanded, that time has gone," Prime Minister Narendra Modi said.

5:07 pm: An annoyed PM told LoP Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, "Adhir Ranjan ji please. Ab zyada ho raha hai. Main aapka aadar karta hun. Aaj aap aisa kyun kar rahe ho? Aap hadd se zyada kyun kar rahe ho?"

5:06 pm: "I want to ask any farmer, have these laws taken away anything that was there before? What has happened? An alternative system has been presented. This is optional, not compulsory. Farmers can go wherever they get more profit," said PM Modi.

5:03 pm: "Those who are disrupting the House are doing so according to a well-planned strategy. They are unable to digest that people are seeing through the truth. Through their games, the trust of the people can never be won," said PM Modi.

5:02 pm: "Three farm laws were brought in by government, these agricultural reforms are important and necessary. Farm laws were passed through an ordinance and later by Parliament. No mandis were shut after the implementation of these laws, MSP did not end anywhere in the nation. It's a truth which we hide, it has no meaning. Purchase on MSP increased after the laws were formed," said PM Modi.

4:56 pm: PM Modi said the Opposition should have not debated whether the farm laws are black or white but on the intent of it. He said that protesting farmers were victims of rumours that were spread. "This house and this government respects the spirit of protesting farmers and this is why senior ministers have been talking to them respectfully since the agitation was in Punjab. Efforts were made to identify the concerns of farmers. We make the laws for the people of this country. Even now, if they make any suggestions, we do not have objections," he said.

4:55 pm: Opposition parties create an uproar as PM Modi tries to speak about farm laws.

4:50 pm: PM Modi is heckled by Opposition MPs. "I thank you for giving me a second's rest," said PM Modi.

4:45 pm: PM Modi said if anyone is feeling discouraged, they must recall the struggle of Indians to motivate them. PM Modi said that Rs 2 lakh crore was given to the people this financial year. He said that it was possible only due to Aadhaar. PM Modi said, "I am shocked that there were people who moved courts against Aadhaar."

4:40 pm: Replying to Manish Tewari's comment that India was protected from coronavirus due to God's grace, PM Modi said, "I'd like to say something. This indeed is God's grace that the entire world shook but we remained safe. It was because doctors and nurses came as God, because they couldn't return to their homes for 15 days."

4:35 pm: "Today we can hear 'Vocal for Local' in every corner of India. People look for local. This sense of self-respect is working a lot for Aatmanirbhar Bharat," says PM Modi.

4:30 pm: "We are knocking at the doors of 75 yrs of independence. It's a matter of pride for every Indian and an occasion to move forward. We may be in any corner or belong to any strata of society but we must make a new resolve that where do we want to take India at 100 years of freedom," he said.

4:28 pm: "During coronavirus pandemic, the way India handled itself and helped the world recover is a turning point," the Prime Minister said. "A new world order is emerging post-coronavirus. A new design of relationships is coming to light. We have to decide how to find a place for ourselves," he said. He added that in such a situation, India will have to emerge as a strong player.

4:25 pm: PM Modi quoted Swami Vivekananda and said, "Every nation has a message to deliver, ambition to fulfill, a destiny to reach."

4:22 pm: "I would like to thank our women MPs in particular because their participation was more," says PM Modi

4:20 pm: PM Modi congratulates MPs for participating in the discussions
The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
Taking charge of the department of industries in the state, Bihar's new Industry Minister Shahnawaz Hussain on Wednesday said the state has plenty of infrastructure, but it needs to take off. After assuming charge of the ministry, he said in his new role as minister, he'll attempt to generate employment in the state.

He said the first priority of the NDA government is creating opportunities for employment and entrepreneurship. Hussain said the existing infrastructure in Bihar needs to take off. "Bihar is a big state and creating opportunities for employment and entrepreneurship is the government's responsibility," he said. "Our government will fulfil this promise since there is no shortage of infrastructure," he added.

Praising Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, Hussain said Kumar is an experienced campaigner and the state will benefit from his experience.

Before this ministry officials welcomed Hussain when he reached his office. On Tuesday, the state cabinet was expanded in which Hussain was included as a minister.
CORVALLIS, Ore. - The Columbia River basin will see an increase in flooding over the next 50 years as a result of climate change, new modeling from Oregon State University indicates.

The magnitude of flooding - the term used to describe flooding severity - is expected to increase throughout the basin, which includes the Columbia, Willamette and Snake rivers and hundreds of tributaries. In some areas, the flooding season will expand, as well.

"The flood you're used to seeing out your window once every 10 years will likely be larger than it has been in the past," said the study's lead author, Laura Queen, a research assistant at OSU's Oregon Climate Change Research Institute.

The findings are based on natural river conditions and do not take into account potential flood control measures, including dams, but the increases are significant nonetheless, said study co-author Philip Mote, a professor in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences and dean of the Graduate School at OSU.

"We don't know how much of this increased flood risk can be managed through mitigation measures until we study the issue further," Mote said. "But managing a 30% to 40% increase, as is predicted for many areas, is clearly beyond our management capabilities."

The findings were published recently in the journal Hydrology and Earth System Science. Co-authors are David Rupp of the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute and Oriana Chegwidden and Bart Nijssen of the University of Washington.

The study emerged out of Queen's work on her honors thesis as an undergraduate in the University of Oregon's Robert D. Clark Honors College. Queen, a Corvallis native, continued the work at OCCRI and is now enrolled in a doctoral program at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand.

The goal of Queen's research was to better understand how flooding in the Columbia River basin might change as the planet warms. The Columbia River drains much of the Pacific Northwest, including portions of seven states and British Columbia. It has the fourth-largest streamflow volume in the United States.

The Pacific Northwest has a history of costly and disruptive flooding. The largest flood in modern history occurred in late spring 1948 when flooding from the Columbia River destroyed the city of Vanport, Oregon, displacing more than 18,500 people. Floods on the Chehalis River in 2007 and 2009 closed Interstate 5 in Washington and floods along the Willamette River in 1996 and 2019 caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage.

Queen ran simulations using hydrology models and a previously collected set of streamflow data for 396 sites throughout the Columbia River basin and other watersheds in western Washington. The data included a 50-year window from the past, 1950-1999, as well as a 50-year window of expected streamflows in the future, 2050 to 2099, that was developed using several different climate models.

Previous studies predicting future streamflows showed mixed results, but the results of this new analysis were clear and surprising, Mote said.

"This was the best and most complete set of data," he said. "It shows that the magnitude of one-, 10- and 100-year floods is likely go up nearly everywhere in the region. These are profound shifts."

The Willamette River and its tributaries are expected to see the biggest increase in flooding magnitude, with 50% to 60% increases in 100-year floods. The streamflows are expected to be smaller downstream and grow larger upstream.

On the Snake River, streamflows will grow larger as they move downstream until they reach the confluence of the Salmon River tributary and then will drop abruptly. Parts of the Snake River will see a 40% increase in 10-year floods and a 60% increase in 100-year floods. But below the confluence with the Salmon River on the Oregon-Idaho border, the increase drops to 20% for 10-year floods and 30% for 100-year floods.

The model also suggests a significant increase in the flood season on the Snake River, which is largely concentrated in late spring now but could start as early as December or January in the future, Mote said.

One of the drivers of the change is warmer winters that will see precipitation fall more as rain instead of snow. Lower spring snowpack will lead to earlier spring streamflows in many rivers. The cold upper Columbia River basin in Canada is projected to experience little change in snowpack volume, but the snow will melt faster.

The study's findings could have implications for flood management policy in the coming decades, Mote said. A logical next step in the research is to run the models again and include existing dams to see the role they may play in mitigating flooding.

"This work provides information and impetus for the people who manage flood risk," he said. "We'll need to know how much of this can be mitigated by existing flood control."

###

Jennifer Lawrence sustained minor injuries from shards of flying glass during a scene with co-star Timothee Chalamet while filming a movie for Netflix last Friday, according to a report by Yahoo! Movies.

A glass explosion didnt stay under control as planned on the Boston set of Dont Look Up, an Adam McKays comedy about an asteroid on its way to Earth.

Maybe it should be called Dont Look, because according to a report by TMZ, Lawrence sustained an injury on one of her eyes. Lawrence s eyelid was cut by a piece of glass and it took a while to stop the bleeding.

Although it was later reported that the injury wasnt that bad, production was shut down for the rest of the day.

Dont Look Up stars Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio as low-level astronomers who, upon discovering that an asteroid will strike the Earth in six months, go on a giant media tour to try to warn mankind, only to find that no one believes them or seems to care.

In true disaster-film fashion, the film boasts a huge cast. In addition to Lawrence, Chalamet and DiCaprio, the star-studded main cast includes Chris Evans, Meryl Streep, Jonah Hill, Cate Blanchett, Matthew Perry, Tyler Perry, Ariana Grande and Michael Chiklis.

Read more entertainment news:
Seasonal Flavors - REBEL Hard Coffee Bourbon Caramel Latte and Irish Cream Latte

Twelve5 Beverage Company has released its new and limited-edition REBEL Hard Coffee springtime sensations to take coffee connoisseurs to the fringes of extraordinary. From sweet and savory to refreshing, the Hard Bourbon Caramel Latte and Hard Irish Cream Latte are sure to indulge any type of tastebud at any social occasion  from St. Patricks Day celebrations to Kentucky Derby brunches.

We are excited for progressive adult beverage consumers and coffee-lovers across the country to enjoy these new seasonal flavors, said Michael Sargent, senior brand manager  REBEL Hard Coffee. Our innovation team is constantly on the lookout for new and exciting flavors to incorporate within the REBEL Hard Coffee collection, and this is just a glimpse of whats in store for the brand in 2021.

The Hard Bourbon Caramel Latte brings together a delicious trio of coffee, caramel, and bourbon. Swap the mimosas for a hard latte during your cozy morning brunch or enjoy on-the-rocks as a classy, after-dinner drink. The Hard Bourbon Caramel Latte is available until the end of April.

Seasonal REBEL Bourbon Caramel Hard Latte



100% Arabica coffee

Smooth bourbon notes with delectable undertones of caramel and vanilla flavors

Creamy, rich finish

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The Hard Irish Cream Latte is the perfect, spiked blend that is smooth and creamy. Notes of Irish whiskey are paired with cooling coffee undertones. This beverage can be enjoyed as part of any socially distanced St. Patricks Day party or added to a coffee for an extra kick. The Hard Irish Cream Latte is available as a limited-edition flavor from mid-February until the end of March.

Limited-Edition REBEL Hard Irish Cream Latte



100% Arabica coffee

Smooth and creamy blend of coffee and alcohol

Irish whiskey notes are blended perfectly with Natural Ingredients

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REBEL Hard Coffees Hard Bourbon Caramel Latte and Hard Irish Cream Latte are currently available in over 40+ states at select grocery, convenience, and liquor stores. The product can be purchased in four-packs, and singles.

To find the new and decidedly decadent hard coffee products this spring, visit the store locator at rebelhardcoffee.com/find. For recipes involving these new seasonal additions, visit rebelhardcoffee.com/recipes.

###

About Twelve5 Beverage Company

REBEL Hard Coffee is produced by Twelve5 Beverage Company, the founders of the hard coffee category. Twelve5 Beverage Company was founded in 2018 with a focus on pioneering innovative products that meet the needs of changing consumer preferences. The launch of REBEL Hard Coffee in August 2020 marked an opportunity to expand Twelve5 Beverage Companys products to a new audience. For more information, visit rebelhardcoffee.com.

For More Information, Contact:

Chelsey Barnes

PR Specialist, Element

Email: chelsey (at) goelement.com
Detectives used the infamous words 'credible' and 'true' to persuade a judge to let them raid Lady Brittan's homes, the Daily Mail reveals today.

Scotland Yard chief Cressida Dick has insisted that a senior officer 'mistakenly' used the phrase to describe sex abuse liar 'Nick'.

But the Mail has obtained a copy of the application used to justify the raids  and police used the same words to describe the twisted fantasist, who is now serving 18 years in jail.

The document states that police believed Nick, real name Carl Beech, was 'credible' and 'telling the truth'.

It led to Lady Brittan's homes in London and North Yorkshire being searched by police six weeks after the death of her husband Leon, the former home secretary.

Detectives used the infamous words 'credible' and 'true' to persuade a senior judge to let them raid the late Leon Brittan's homes, the Daily Mail reveals today. Pictured: Met Chief Dame Cressida Dick

The Mail has now obtained a copy of the search warrant application used to justify the raids on the houses of Lord Brittan's widow (pictured) - in which police used the same words to describe the fantasist's credibility

Detective Superintendent Kenny McDonald used the phrase 'credible and true' at a press conference in December 2014.

At the time Dame Cressida was an assistant commissioner in the Metropolitan Police with oversight of the shambolic VIP abuse inquiry, Operation Midland.

The phrase was criticised for destroying the presumption of innocence and supporting Beech's wild accusations of murder and child sex abuse against Lord Brittan and other high-profile figures. But Dame Cressida has insisted it was said mistakenly.

Detective Superintendent Kenny McDonald used the phrase 'credible and true' at a press conference in December 2014

Today's revelation leaves the Met chief under pressure to explain the wording of the search warrant and deepens the controversy around Scotland Yard's entire handling of Operation Midland.

It follows Lady Brittan's searing interview in yesterday's Daily Mail in which she attacked a 'culture of cover-up' at the Met. In other developments:

The Prime Minister's spokesman yesterday called the Operation Midland fiasco 'deeply disturbing';

Tory MPs, peers and victims of Beech demanded an independent inquiry;

Pop stars said former Labour deputy leader Tom Watson's role at UK Music was now 'untenable' because of his support for Beech's preposterous lies;

Senior Operation Midland officers were allowed to retire on gold-plated pensions without punishment;

Its boss Steve Rodhouse failed to win declarations of support from colleagues at the National Crime Agency;

Dame Cressida may step down when her contract expires in April next year instead of seeking an extension.

Last night the son of former Armed Forces chief and D-Day hero Field Marshal Lord Bramall  also falsely accused of sex abuse by Beech  backed Lady Brittan.

Nick Bramall said: 'There should be a public inquiry into Operation Midland. The officers were seduced by the idea of getting people in high places. They didn't investigate properly and consequently these people got tossed to the wolves.'

Lady Brittan has accused the leaders of Britain's biggest police force of lacking a 'moral spine' and expressed her frustration that no officers involved in the shambolic VIP abuse inquiry had been held to account over the multi-million pound fiasco.

A search warrant application, revealed for the first time today, reveals the decision to raid her homes had been 'considered at DAC [deputy assistant commissioner] level', a reference to the gold commander of the bungled inquiry, Mr Rodhouse.

By the time the raids took place, Dame Cressida had left the Metropolitan Police to take up a job at the Foreign Office.

In 2019, she told LBC radio that she knew straight away that Det Supt McDonald blundered by calling Beech a 'credible and true' witness at the press conference.

She said she realised the senior detective had made 'a mistake' and she 'felt for him'.

Yesterday leading politicians called for a fresh review of the disastrous Operation Midland investigation.

The Prime Minister's spokesman said the case raised 'serious issues' as to the conduct of the Met.

An earlier report by retired High Court judge Sir Richard Henriques was scathing about Scotland Yard's handling of the case but none of the officers he criticised faced any sanction.

Lady Brittan's late husband was among a number of notable figures falsely accused of child sexual abuse and murder by paedophile Carl Beech (pictured)

Former Tory leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith said: 'It is appalling that after all this time and after the desperate circus unfairly put on Lord Brittan that nothing has happened to anybody. We need a proper and full inquiry into what happened.

'The original report was damning. Why has nothing been done since then?

'The answer is to go back to the original inquiry and hold a full new one into what went wrong.'

Norman Lamont, a former chancellor and friend of Lord Brittan, said: 'Lady Brittan has been treated appallingly.

The timing is extraordinary that after the strong criticism by Sir Richard Henriques of the Metropolitan Police Service that people have not been disciplined in connection with Operation Midland.

'It was always to me astonishing that people believed these incredible rumours which have destroyed people's lives.

'There is certainly a case for another inquiry. It's extraordinary that no police officers have been disciplined.'

Scotland Yard yesterday declined to answer questions about Dame Cressida's previous defence of the 'credible and true' press conference.

Last year she was cleared of any wrongdoing over her role in the disastrous VIP paedophile ring investigation.

Beech was jailed for 18 years after being found guilty of perverting the course of justice, fraud and child sex offences.

Warrant of untruth: Application to raid Lord Brittan's homes shows devastating falsehoods from police... leaving his widow 'speechless' with shock

By Stephen Wright for the Daily Mail

Lord Brittan's widow was left 'speechless' on seeing the secret court document that persuaded a judge to grant search warrants for her two homes.

She expressed her astonishment at the information provided by police to justify the raids and at the fact no officers faced misconduct charges.

The document, which the Mail can reveal today, shows that the decision to seek a warrant had been 'considered at DAC [deputy assistant commissioner] level'.

This is a reference to Steve Rodhouse, 'gold commander' of the bungled VIP sex abuse inquiry into high-profile figures, including Lady Brittan's husband, the former home secretary.

Lord Brittan's widow was left 'speechless' on seeing the secret court document that persuaded a judge to grant search warrants for her two homes

The application makes clear that police sought the warrants because they believed she would not allow them entry when they arrived at her homes in London and North Yorkshire in March 2015.

In yesterday's Mail, Lady Brittan said the raids were a 'violation' that left her feeling like a criminal.

Authorised by Detective Inspector Alison Hepworth, the warrant states: 'Given the status of the individuals involved in these applications, it is not felt that the occupants would allow search of their premises on a voluntary basis.

'Given the nature of the material sought, any delay or pre-warning of an intention to search would allow the removal or destruction of such material with minimal effort.'

Critically the document includes the wholly incorrect claim that 'Nick', the fantasist Carl Beech, was 'credible' and 'telling the truth'.

It states: 'The victim in this matter has been interviewed at length by experienced officers from the child abuse investigation team.

His account has remained consistent and he is felt to be a credible witness who is telling the truth.'

That sentence helped persuade District Judge Howard Riddle to grant the warrants at the centre of the Operation Midland scandal.

The Daily Mail has now obtained a copy of the search warrant application used to justify the raids on Lady Brittan's homes

Lady Brittan, 80, a former long-serving magistrate, said: 'This is the most extraordinary search warrant I have ever seen. The information that might support the application is not there.

'Judge Riddle presumably believed the fact that the application had been signed off at a very senior level.

'And he would have taken, I suppose, some comfort in that. And he had no reason, I suppose at the time, to believe that he was not being told the entire story.'

The secret court document obtained by the Mail was part of a two-stage process that gave police permission to raid the homes of Lady Brittan, six weeks after her husband died.

Pictures of police vehicles during two-day search at Lord Brittan's North Yorkshire home in March 2015

The first involved a detective completing a confidential form and the second involved three murder squad officers going before court to get official permission to storm her houses.

The document also shows that when asked if there was anything that might undermine their request, the Metropolitan Police simply answered 'N/A'  not applicable.

In fact, police were aware of several factors that raised questions about the claims made by Beech.

In an article for the Mail in July 2019, former High Court judge Sir Richard Henriques, who wrote a scathing report about Operation Midland, insisted Beech had 'not been consistent', dating back to when the liar had first made claims of child sex abuse.

Sir Richard said: 'His allegations made to the Wiltshire Police in 2012 were fundamentally inconsistent with those made to the Metropolitan Police in 2014 and with Beech's blogs also published in 2014.

'The identities of subsequent named alleged rapists were inconsistent. The alleged locations were inconsistent, persons allegedly present were inconsistent, the alleged accompanying acts of violence were inconsistent.'

Judge Riddle, now retired, has said he was misled over warrants for raids on the homes of Lady Brittan, former Armed Forces chief Lord Bramall and Tory ex-MP Harvey Proctor.

Officers' rewards for failure: Operation Midland saw lives ruined, homes ransacked and reputations trashed on the bogus testimony of a fantasist... but five years after the probe was shut down not one officer involved has received an official sanction

By Glen Keogh and Stephen Wright for the Daily Mail

It is widely regarded as one of the worst police investigations in living memory.

Operation Midland saw lives ruined, homes ransacked and reputations trashed on the bogus testimony of a fantasist who was not properly challenged until it was too late.

In a post-Jimmy Savile culture of automatically 'believing' victims, police officers and politicians saw the 'Nick' case as a career-defining coup, seemingly rendering them blind to inconsistencies in Carl Beech's accounts.

He is now serving an 18-year prison sentence for his lies.

But what of those who helped the lies take root, and initially failed to conduct the most basic inquiries to determine their veracity?

The answer is that five years after Midland was shut down not one officer involved in the scandal has received an official sanction or punishment.

As head of Scotland Yard during Operation Midland, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe regularly defended the probe

LORD HOGAN-HOWE: ENOBLED

As head of Scotland Yard during Operation Midland, Hogan-Howe regularly defended the probe, refusing to apologise for home raids in 2016.

He commissioned Sir Richard Henriques' review of the scandal but announced his retirement that September, weeks before the judge's scathing findings were made public.

He was elevated to the House of Lords where the register of interests reveals 14 paid posts including advising a legal firm and the Cabinet Office.

Accrued an estimated 5million pension pot and owns an apartment in the Swiss ski resort of Valais.

STEVE RODHOUSE: PROMOTED

'Gold commander' and in overall charge of Operation Midland, then-deputy assistant commissioner Rodhouse approved decision to seek search warrants to raid homes and briefed superiors.

Accused of prolonging Operation Vincente probe into Lord Brittan to keep Midland going.

Cleared by police watchdog and now at the National Crime Agency on a pay package of nearly 300,000.

'Gold commander' and in overall charge of Operation Midland, then-deputy assistant commissioner Steve Rodhouse approved the decision to seek search warrants to raid homes and briefed superiors

DIANE TUDWAY: RETIRED

As senior investigating officer in charge of Operation Midland, the detective chief inspector reviewed and accepted the search warrants despite being aware of discrepancies in Nick's account between his Met and Wiltshire Police interviews.

Made a superintendent in 2018 while under investigation by the police watchdog and the only officer to have a face-to-face interview. Retired on a full pension in 2019 on eve of Nick trial.

As senior investigating officer in charge of Operation Midland, Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tudway reviewed and accepted the search warrants despite being aware of discrepancies in Nick's account between his Met and Wiltshire Police interviews

KENNY MCDONALD: RETIRED

In day-to-day charge of Operation Midland when it was launched, the former detective superintendent infamously told reporters in December 2014 that he, and senior officers specialising in both child abuse and murder, believed Nick's allegations to be 'credible and true'.

Replaced as head of Midland in October 2015 but was cleared by the watchdog of any wrongdoing.

Mr McDonald retired on a full pension in 2019 after 30 years of service. Made no comment yesterday.

In day-to-day charge of Operation Midland when it was launched, former Detective Superintendent Kenny McDonald infamously told reporters in December 2014 that he, and senior officers specialising in both child abuse and murder, believed Nick's allegations to be 'credible and true'

PATRICIA GALLAN: RETIRED

As a Met assistant commissioner at the time of Operation Midland, Miss Gallan received briefings from Mr Rodhouse.

However she has appeared to blame him for blunders, saying he had 'operational control'.

Formerly the highest-ranking black female in British policing, she said she did not approve raids on the homes of Lord Brittan, Lord Bramall or Harvey Proctor.

She was cleared in a judge-led inquiry and retired in 2018. She is now a non-executive director at HMRC.

As a Met assistant commissioner at the time of Operation Midland, Patricia Gallan received briefings from Mr Rodhouse

DAME CRESSIDA DICK

Had oversight of Operation Midland when it was set up, as well as Operation Vincente, a probe into a bogus rape claim against Lord Brittan.

Left the Met for a job at the Foreign Office but returned as 230,000-a-year commissioner in 2017.

Dame Cressida Dick had oversight of Operation Midland when it was set up

ALISON HEPWORTH: RETIRED

The detective inspector authorised the applications used to raid homes before they were submitted to the court.

Told investigators that despite her 'extensive' knowledge of Operation Midland, she could not recall what she knew about inconsistencies in Nick's claims at the time, and insisted the decision to apply for warrants was made 'at a higher level'.

Had already retired on a full pension before the IOPC inquiry started. Provided a written statement to watchdog.

Detective Inspector Alison Hepworth authorised the applications used to raid homes before they were submitted to the court

ERIC SWORD: RETIRED

A detective sergeant working on Operation Midland, Mr Sword made the applications for search warrants used to raid homes and attended Westminster Magistrates' Court to answer questions when they were granted.

He indicated he had no information that might undermine the application.

He admitted he had been provided with a summary of Nick's interviews with Wiltshire Police, which could have highlighted discrepancies, but said he did not read it.

A detective sergeant working on Operation Midland, Eric Sword made the applications for search warrants used to raid homes and attended Westminster Magistrates' Court to answer questions when they were granted

James Townly played a key role in allegations made against Lord Brittan, interviewing the terminally-ill peer under caution in May 2014 as part of Operation Vincente

JAMES TOWNLY: STILL SERVING

The detective sergeant played a key role in allegations made against Lord Brittan, interviewing the terminally-ill peer under caution in May 2014 as part of Operation Vincente.

Months later he became the first Scotland Yard officer to interview 'Nick', where he was taken in by the fantasist's preposterous claims.

DS Townly became Nick's liaison officer and took him on drives through central London to see whether he 'recognised' anything, insisting the star witness was the 'real deal'.

Avoided a misconduct probe. Still serving.

WATCHDOG THAT DIDN'T BARK

Michael Lockwood

A former council leader and accountant, he became the first director-general of the Independent Office for Police Conduct in 2017.

The 185,000-a-year executive ultimately presided over the 'whitewash' report exonerating all five Operation Midland police officers referred over alleged misconduct.

He defended the report in a Guardian newspaper article, maintaining 'shortcomings' were found, but no misconduct.

A former council leader and accountant, Michael Lockwood became the first director-general of the Independent Office for Police Conduct in 2017

He was accused of cronyism in 2019 when it emerged he hired his former Harrow council colleague as his taxpayer-funded 140,000-a-year deputy.

The IOPC said that Mr Lockwood 'declared that he knew the candidate, in accordance with policy'.

Mr Lockwood declined to comment on Lady Brittan's interview yesterday.

Kimberley Williams

Kimberley Williams was appointed lead investigator of the IPOC probe into Operation Midland

Appointed 'lead investigator' of the IOPC probe into Operation Midland just a few years after leaving university.

In her 20s at the time, Miss Williams admitted when taking statements that she had no legal training and was not fully aware of the process for obtaining search warrants.

She is thought still to be in IOPC employment.

Pressure grows for Tom Watson to lose his high-ranking music job as fallout from false 'VIP paedophile ring' claim rages on

By Paul Revoir, Glen Keogh and Claire Ellicott for the Daily Mail

Leading musicians last night called for Tom Watson to step aside from his role as chairman of UK Music over his involvement in the VIP paedophile inquiry.

Concerns over the former Labour deputy leader's position grew yesterday after Lord Brittan's widow spoke out about the devastating impact of his involvement in false claims made against her late husband.

Lady Brittan said Mr Watson had carried out 'the most despicable thing I think a human being could do to another' by joining the accusers.

One singer questioned how the former MP could have any 'credibility' in his role at the industry group given his 'disgraceful and overly eager support' of sick fantasist Carl Beech.

Carol Decker, of 80s chart-toppers T'Pau, said she and fellow musicians had questioned Mr Watson's suitability even without the Beech scandal.

Leading musicians last night called for Tom Watson to step aside from his role as chairman of UK Music over his involvement in the VIP paedophile inquiry

'It stinks like a rotting fish,' she added.

'And after his disgraceful and overly eager support for the totally discredited Carl Beech how can he have any credibility in the position and do any good whatsoever for the membership?

'Who would want to deal with him? His position as chair makes no sense on any level morally or actually.'

Mike Batt, who was behind The Wombles pop group and wrote the number one Bright Eyes, said it was a mistake for UK Music to 'even to entertain him as a candidate'.

He added: 'It was a risk too far to bring him into this position and I do hope that UK Music sees sense and takes this opportunity and this moment to ask Mr Watson to step down or that Mr Watson might even have the decency to resign.'

Mitch Murray, whose songs include How Do You Do It? for Gerry and the Pacemakers, said he considered Mr Watson 'unsuitable' to chair the music body.

The criticism comes amid broader concerns over the way the job was awarded to Mr Watson, the former shadow culture secretary, last year.

It has been suggested that Mr Watson's support for Beech, who was jailed for his lies as well as for child sex offences, helped create an environment in which figures such as Radio 2 host Paul Gambacinni and Cliff Richard were falsely accused.

Daniel Janner QC founded FAIR, Falsely Accused Individuals for Reform, after his late father Lord Janner was wrongly accused by Beech.

He said the pressure group's key supporters, including Sir Cliff, 'can't comprehend that Tom Watson remains in his role at UK Music'.

'He is representing people who have been severely wronged,' he said. 'His position has become untenable in that organisation.'

Lady Brittan yesterday used an interview with the Daily Mail to accuse Mr Watson of being 'despicable' and 'a coward' for making false sex abuse allegations against her husband in a newspaper column just three days after he died.

A UK Music spokesman said: 'Tom Watson is focused on getting the music industry back on its feet and fighting for greater support for the thousands of musicians, creators and many others who have been unable to work for a year due to the devastating impact of Covid-19.'




[This unedited press release is made available courtesy of Gamasutra and its partnership with notable game PR-related resource Games Press.]

DATE: Wednesday, 10th February, 2021



Feral Interactive have today announced that Ajax & Diomedes, the latest DLC for A Total War Saga: TROY, is now available for macOS. A new trailer is viewable on YouTube.



More mountain than man, Ajax is said to be descended from the giants and wields a shield that dwarfs his enemies. Alongside his brawn comes one of the finest tactical minds of the age: Diomedes of Argos, who longs to avenge his fathers death at the hands of the Thebans.



These two new heroes bring 18 new units, four additional faction mechanics, unique skill trees, building chains and two new starting positions. The Ajax & Diomedes DLC also sees the arrival of new Paragon units. Led by distinguished veterans, the Paragons fight with a battle-hardened zeal that strikes fear in the hearts of their enemies.



Additionally, Hephaestus has been added to the Divine Will system as a free update. Players who appease the God of Blacksmiths and Volcanoes may call upon his Divine Craftsman epic agent to strengthen their soldiers' equipment.



King Agamemnons call to war has been answered by two of antiquitys most feared warriors. A Total War Saga: TROY - Ajax & Diomedes DLC is available now for macOS exclusively from the Epic Games Store for 7.99 / $9.99 / 9,99.



Editors

For logos, other game graphics and a full list of features, visit the Feral Press Area for A Total War Saga: TROY. If you dont have a login for the press area, email [email protected] .



About Feral Interactive

Feral Interactive is a leading publisher of games for the macOS, Linux, iOS, Android and Nintendo Switch platforms, founded in 1996 and based in London, England. It is responsible for such hits as XCOM 2 Collection for iOS, Alien: Isolation for macOS, Linux and Nintendo Switch, GRID Autosport for iOS, Android and Nintendo Switch, ROME: Total War, Tropico, and Company of Heroes for iOS and Android, Life is Strange 2, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Total War: THREE KINGDOMS, XCOM 2, and Company of Heroes 2 for macOS and Linux. Visit the Feral Interactive website and find us on Twitter or Facebook. About Creative Assembly

Creative Assembly Ltd. is one of Europe's leading games development studios, founded in 1987 and located in West Sussex, UK and in Sofia, Bulgaria. With a heritage of award-winning AAA titles, including the multi-million selling Total War series, Creative Assembly continues to build an impressive portfolio of games and world-renowned partnerships; working with Games Workshop on Total War: WARHAMMER, Twentieth Century Fox on Alien: Isolation, plus 343 Industries and Microsoft on Halo Wars 2. Creative Assembly has, with their exceptionally talented team of over 500, amassed a wealth of awards, including multiple Best Place to Work awards and recent accolades from BAFTA, Music+Sound and Develops Industry Excellence awards. www.creative-assembly.com About Total War

With more than 25 million copies sold, Total War is one of the most established and critically acclaimed series in gaming. A drive for historical authenticity and superb gaming quality has helped establish the franchise as one of the most successful PC games of all time. Alongside the core historical-based games, the Total War series has expanded to include free-to-play mobile (Total War Battles: KINGDOM), fantasy epics (Total War: WARHAMMER), and historical snapshots (Total War Saga: THRONES OF BRITANNIA). www.totalwar.com About SEGA Europe Ltd.

SEGA Europe Ltd. is the European Distribution arm of Tokyo, Japan-based SEGA Games Co., Ltd., and a worldwide leader in interactive entertainment both inside and outside the home. The company develops and distributes interactive entertainment software products for a variety of hardware platforms including PC, wireless devices, and those manufactured by Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony Interactive Entertainment Europe. SEGA wholly owns the video game development studios Two Point Studios, Creative Assembly, Relic Entertainment, Amplitude Studios, Sports Interactive and Hardlight. SEGA Europes website is located at www.sega.co.uk
The countrys insurance regulators are vowing to prioritize the monitoring of the use of consumer and non-consumer data by companies, the use of artificial intelligence, and the availability and affordability of insurance products for racial minorities.

They say they will also remain active responding to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and its impact on consumers and insurance markets.

The state regulators organization, the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC), celebrating its 150th anniversary, announced its strategic priorities for 2021.

This year marks 150 years of NAIC members being unified in their commitment to protect consumers and ensure fair, competitive, and healthy markets, said NAIC President and Florida Insurance Commissioner David Altmaier. In 2021, we will continue this tradition and find ways to advance solutions that help foster a robust and responsive insurance sector that provides consumers with safe and reliable insurance products.

The NAIC 2021 priorities and the charges to its key committees are (in no specific order):

COVID-19  In 2021, the NAIC will continue its Priority One initiative designed to support state insurance departments in their response to the ongoing pandemic and its impact on consumers and insurance markets. NAIC has a COVID resource page that includes information on actions taken by individual states in response to the COVID 19 pandemic that impact various lines of insurance. NAIC said insurance regulators will continue to analyze data and develop the tools so that consumer protection keeps pace with changes brought on by the virus.

Big Data/Artificial Intelligence  The Big Data and Artificial Intelligence Working Group is chaired by Doug Ommen, Iowa, joined by Elizabeth Kelleher Dwyer, co-vice chair, Rhode Island and Mark Afable, co-vice chair, Wisconsin.

For 2021 this group plans to research the use of big data and artificial intelligence (AI) in the business of insurance and evaluate existing regulatory frameworks for overseeing their use. The result could produce model governance for the use of big data and AI for the insurance industry.

Plans also call for the group to review current audit and certification programs that could be used to oversee insurers use of consumer and non-insurance data and models using intelligent algorithms, including AI. If appropriate, the panel would recommend modifications to model laws and regulations regarding marketing, rating, underwriting and claims, regulation of data vendors and brokers, regulatory reporting requirements, and consumer disclosure requirements.

Third, the 2021 agenda addresses a charge to assess what data and tools state insurance regulators need to appropriately evaluate the use of big data and intelligent algorithms, including AI in underwriting, rating, claims and marketing practices.

Climate Risk & Resiliency  The Climate and Resiliency Task Force is led by Ricardo Lara, co-chair California; Raymond G. Farmer, co-chair, South Carolina; Colin M. Hayashida, co-vice chair, Hawaii; James J. Donelon, co-vice chair, Louisiana; Kathleen A. Birrane, co-vice chair, Maryland; Bruce R. Ramge, co-vice chair, Nebraska; and Andrew R. Stolfi, co-vice chair, Oregon. The task forces mission is to serve as the coordinating NAIC body for discussion and engagement on climate-related risk and resiliency issues.

For 2021, this task forces agenda includes considerations of: climate risk disclosures within the insurance sector, including an evaluation of the NAICs Climate Risk Disclosure Survey; the use of modeling by carriers and reinsurers concerning climate risk; how rating agencies incorporate climate risk into their analysis and governance; the potential solvency impact of insurers exposures, including both underwriting and investments, to climate-related risks; climate risk-related disclosure, stress-testing, and scenario modeling; how to apply technology and innovation to the mitigation of storm, wildfire, other climate risks and earthquake; insurance product innovation directed at mitigating climate risk and closing protection gaps; and pre-disaster mitigation and resiliency and the role of state insurance regulators in resiliency.

Race & Insurance  The Special Committee on Race and Insurance is co-chaired by Maine Superintendent Eric Cioppa and New York Executive Deputy Superintendent of Insurance My Chi To.

The 2021 agenda for this panel calls for research into the level of diversity and inclusion within the insurance sector; engagement with a broad group of stakeholders on issues related to race, diversity and inclusion in, and access to, the insurance sector and insurance products; and an examination of current practices or barriers in the insurance sector that potentially disadvantage people of color and historically underrepresented groups.

The goal is to make recommendations by year-end regarding steps that both state insurance regulators and the insurance industry can take to increase diversity and inclusion within the sector; that should be taken to address practices that potentially disadvantage people of color and/or historically underrepresented groups; and to ensure ongoing engagement of the NAIC on these issues.

Consumer Data Privacy  The Privacy Protections Working Group is headed by Cynthia Amann, chair, Missouri, joined by Ron Kreiter, vice chair, Oklahoma.

This groups 2021 plan calls for it to review state insurance privacy protections regarding the collection, use and disclosure of information gathered in connection with insurance transactions, and make recommended changes, as needed, to certain NAIC models, such as the NAIC Insurance Information and Privacy Protection Model Act (#670) and the Privacy of Consumer Financial and Health Information Regulation (#672).

Long-Term Care Insurance (LTCI)  The Long-Term Care Insurance Task Force is headed by Scott A. White, chair Virginia, joined by Michael Conway, vice chair, Colorado. For 2021 this panels charges include recognizing the gravity of the threat posed by the current long-term care insurance (LTCI) environment both to consumers and our state-based system of insurance regulation.

To respond to what the NAIC sees as the threat, the committee vows to develop a consistent national approach for reviewing LTCI rates that results in actuarially appropriate increases being granted by the states in a timely manner and eliminates cross-state rate subsidization. It will further recommend options to provide consumers with choices regarding modifications to LTCI contract benefits where policies are no longer affordable due to rate increases and will deliver such a proposal by the 2021 summer meeting

Source: NAIC

Topics InsurTech Privacy
Each winner has been awarded $1,000 as a token of appreciation for their hard work and dedication to the health of Arizona. In addition, one winner in each of the six categories was given the opportunity to select a local nonprofit to receive a $10,000 donation from BCBSAZ. The donations will help the selected nonprofits continue serving Arizonans in need during the pandemic.

"We are truly inspired by the impactful stories we have come across through the hundreds of nominations that were received," said Pam Kehaly, president and CEO of BCBSAZ. "We cannot thank the winners and all Front Line Heroes in Arizona enough, for their time, passion, and commitment in helping our state get through these difficult times."

The top six Front Line Heroes are as follows:

Amy Burke  Amy is a Registered Respiratory Therapist in Phoenix and was nominated under the hospital healthcare worker category for changing lives during the pandemic. Being a life support expert, she has seen firsthand the fragility of human life and she is honored to step up to be there for people in need. Amy selected the Southern Arizona Cystic Fibrosis Foundation for her donation.

 Amy is a Registered Respiratory Therapist in and was nominated under the hospital healthcare worker category for changing lives during the pandemic. Being a life support expert, she has seen firsthand the fragility of human life and she is honored to step up to be there for people in need. Amy selected the Southern Arizona Cystic Fibrosis Foundation for her donation. Jana Smith  Jana is the Executive Director at Phoenix ToolBox and was nominated under the essential service worker category for playing an important role during the pandemic by helping lend tools and equipment to local nonprofits, schools and government organizations. She is proud to help her community and is amazed to see the work that gets accomplished when the community comes together. Jana selected the Phoenix Toolbox for her donation.

 Jana is the Executive Director at Phoenix ToolBox and was nominated under the essential service worker category for playing an important role during the pandemic by helping lend tools and equipment to local nonprofits, schools and government organizations. She is proud to help her community and is amazed to see the work that gets accomplished when the community comes together. Jana selected the Phoenix Toolbox for her donation. Zaira Morales  Zaira is Clinical Administrator at St. Vincent de Paul and was nominated under the non-healthcare worker category for making an impact during the pandemic by assisting with the execution of launching a free COVID-19 testing center. She started her career as a volunteer, and since then has been carrying out her mission to help others and eliminate health inequality. Zaira selected the St. Vincent de Paul for her donation.

 Zaira is Clinical Administrator at St. Vincent de Paul and was nominated under the non-healthcare worker category for making an impact during the pandemic by assisting with the execution of launching a free COVID-19 testing center. She started her career as a volunteer, and since then has been carrying out her mission to help others and eliminate health inequality. Zaira selected the St. Vincent de Paul for her donation. Alicia Shields  Alicia is a Team Rubicon Volunteer and Registered Nurse, and was nominated under the volunteer category for her dedication in making a difference in other people's lives. Since the beginning of COVID-19, she has volunteered her time at hospitals and emergency rooms to ensure COVID-19 patients are getting the best care possible. Alicia selected Team Rubicon for her donation.

 Alicia is a Team Rubicon Volunteer and Registered Nurse, and was nominated under the volunteer category for her dedication in making a difference in other people's lives. Since the beginning of COVID-19, she has volunteered her time at hospitals and emergency rooms to ensure COVID-19 patients are getting the best care possible. Alicia selected Team Rubicon for her donation. Lauren Holzer  Lauren is a teacher at Kyrene de los Ninos Elementary School and was nominated under the educator category for her dedication to her students during the COVID-19 pandemic by putting their needs first and giving them the support they need. Lauren has always strived to find a career that she's passionate about and has been able to find that through teaching. Lauren has chosen the Kyrene Foundation for her donation.

 Lauren is a teacher at Kyrene de los Ninos Elementary School and was nominated under the educator category for her dedication to her students during the COVID-19 pandemic by putting their needs first and giving them the support they need. Lauren has always strived to find a career that she's passionate about and has been able to find that through teaching. Lauren has chosen the Kyrene Foundation for her donation. Kelley Mure  Kelley is a Senior Manager for Solider and Family Readiness for the Army National Guard, and was nominated under the first responder category for tirelessly working during the pandemic to help soldiers deploy, help their families put food on their tables and providing resources when needed. Throughout the pandemic, Kelley's biggest accomplishment has been making a difference in others' lives. Kelley selected Angels on Patrol for her donation.

For more information about the program and the recognized Front Line Heroes, please visit www.azblue.com/heroes.

About Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona (BCBSAZ) is committed to helping Arizonans get healthier faster and stay healthier longer. With a focus on connecting people with the care they need, BCBSAZ offers health insurance and related services to more than 1.7 million customers. Through advanced clinical programs and community outreach, BCBSAZ is inspiring health in Arizona. BCBSAZ, a not-for-profit company, is an independent licensee of the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association. The company, and its subsidiaries, employ more than 2,400 people in its Phoenix, Chandler, Flagstaff, and Tucson offices. To learn more, visit azblue.com.

SOURCE Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona

Related Links

http://www.azblue.com


ALBANY, N.Y., Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Geothermal power plants occupy crucial infrastructure for global renewable energy transition. Over the past decade, a number of actors including governmental, non-profit, and non-governmental organizations in several regions have promoted geothermal energy generation and utilization. Manufacturers in the geothermal power equipment market are leaning on constant technological advancements in the instrumentation to boost the overall efficiency. Geothermal power plants are operating in as many as 26 countries, and the percentage share in global electricity generation was pegged at ~ 0.3% in 2015. That proportion has been steadily increasing year-over-year, nudging equipment manufacturers to improve the engineering capabilities of the systems.

The adoption of environmentally friendly technologies in power equipment, notably in turbines, will spur investments by the energy sector on installing geothermal projects.

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Geothermal power equipment market companies and suppliers have a bright future ahead, with the market projected to expand at CAGR of 5.5 percent during the forecast period of 2019  2027. A sizable chunk of revenue will come from Asian nations.

Key Findings of Geothermal Power Equipment Market

Shift toward renewable energy speeds up geothermal power capacity

Worldwide, there is a conscious shift from oil and gas resources toward renewable energy generation, particularly from wind and solar power. Part of this momentum is fuelled by recurrent focus on decarbonising the energy markets.

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Over the past few years, the energy sector has shown high affinity toward geothermal systems, given the higher reliability of these over wind and solar energy. The trend has spawned steady dollar investment in geothermal power installations year-over-year. Coupled with this, geothermal power plants capacities have also been increasing on the back of the adoption of better technologies in exploration, drilling, and field infrastructure. Further, stakeholders in geothermal power capacity are ready to ramp up their expenses on installing advanced turbine technologies. According to a finding, in 2019 the installed capacity of geothermal energy was pegged at 13.93 gigawatts. Thus, countries notably in North America, Europe, and Asia have been committing sizable funds in installed geothermal power capacity, expanding the canvas for players in the geothermal power equipment market.

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Governments' support to help absorb high cost of capital in geothermal power projects

Geothermal power generation are intrinsically capital-intensive initiatives. Private players in the geothermal power equipment market have been looking for constant support from governments to increase the market feasibility of high installation costs they incur. In numerous countries, governments have offered tax credits and other financial support to reduce the risk of investments. Policy makers particularly in Asian countries, such as in India and China, in recent years have been promoting business models to share the high capital investment, which will bolster the installation of geothermal power equipment. The share of geothermal power in electricity generation has also witnessed a marked increase, boosting installations of equipment in the geothermal power equipment market.

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Geothermal Power Equipment Market: Key Driving Factors and Promising Avenues

Rising demand for renewable power resources for electricity generation is a key driver for investments in the geothermal power equipment market

Stringent governmental regulations pertaining to reduction of carbon footprints of the energy sector boost prospects

Rapid pace of people moving from rural to urban in several parts of Asia Pacific encourage funding in contemporary geothermal power systems

Geothermal Power Equipment Market: Key Players

The geothermal power equipment market can be characterized by high degree of fragmentation with the presence of large number of players of all sizes. The growing lucrativeness of geothermal power generation in the renewable energy has brightened the scope of equipment manufacturers and vendors. Top players are keen on constantly advancing the efficiency of the instrumentation and are offering different configurations to meet the demand.

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Geothermal Drilling Rig Market - https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/geothermal-drilling-rigs-market.html

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Transparency Market Research is a global market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. Our experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.

Our data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts, so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With a broad research and analysis capability, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques in developing distinctive data sets and research material for business reports.

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EDITOR'S NOTE: This is part one of a three part series looking into the need for broadband access in Manistee and Benzie counties, studying the data and how local providers are expanding. Part one will focus on looking at broadband as a critical infrastructure need.

FRANKFORT  Organizations in Benzie and Manistee counties are seeking information on who has broadband access as the importance of a good internet connection is hammered in by the continued COVID-19 pandemic.

However, the necessity of having a solid, fast internet connection was something chambers of commerce and government committees were starting to talk about even before schools, government organizations and businesses of all kinds had to suddenly switch to teaching, communicating and doing business online.

Rick Coates, executive director of the Benzie County Chamber of Commerce, said the Northern Michigan Chamber Alliance, is beginning to look at broadband access as a critical infrastructure need.

"Before I got involved, broadband was considered by the Alliance as infrastructure, but it wasn't one of their four main interests," said Coates, co-chair of the Alliance's broadband initiative. "After about six months, it was moved to one of their 'four pillars' of priority. Every chamber initiative comes down to economic development, and those initiatives will fail if you don't have broadband access."

Coates said the importance of widely accessible broadband is understated as an economic driver.

"It is critical when talking about retaining businesses and attracting business," he said. "If you want to appeal to the remote work force, it won't happen without broadband. Areas in northern Michigan are targeted worldwide as a place to reside. People are moving out of big cities, and they want to live in rural areas and work remotely. Until we get broadband sorted out, we'll fall behind. We won't be able to call on that workforce."

Coates said practically every business requires good broadband, including hospitals. He said some businesses want to step away from having brick and mortar locations, but are finding it difficult, and gave the example of an area propane supplier that had decided to go totally remote, but some employees didn't have broadband accesses to stay connected.

He said real estate agents have told him buyers have lost sales because of the lack of good internet access.

"We have to start talking about why broadband is not a luxury," Coates said. "It is as important as propane and electricity. Is is on the same level. It is not about gaming and getting ESPN. It has become a necessity of life. More and more requirements are placed upon you to have acceptable access to internet."

Marc Miller, economic development director for the Manistee Area Chamber of Commerce, said several of the chamber's partners are working on the issue of getting rural broadband.

"Our business community recognizes that broadband availability is an important component for economic development, education and overall growth of the community," he said.

One of the partners Miller mentioned is the Manistee Intermediate School District. Superintendent Dave Cox said along with the West Shore Educational Service District and Ludington ISD, and help from nonprofit Pennies from Heaven Foundation in Ludington, the MISD is pooling money to create a community broadband survey.

"We're contributing dollars to do a study," Cox said. "With COVID, you're seeing an issue with the haves and have nots. The intent is our money will create a survey and we will be conduits to the people in mass numbers to get as close to representation as we can using school, parents, the chambers and government organizations.

He hopes the survey will produce data for potential internet providers.

"My understanding is the need is there, but the providers don't have an interest because of the amount of money it costs them to bring in infrastructure," he said.

Paula Figura, chair of the broadband subcommittee of the Benzie County Economic Development Corporation, said Benzie County is looking for data as well.

"At this point, we've done a lot of work to gather all the data that is readily available on existing coverage from the FCC (Federal Communications Commission)," she said. "However, people in the know realize the FCC data is notorious for not being very accurate, or granular. It's not clear on actual coverage, and is too optimistic. It says Benzie has 90% broadband coverage."

One of the partners Miller mentioned is the Manistee Intermediate School District. Superintendent Dave Cox said along with the West Shore Educational Service District and Ludington ISD, and help from nonprofit Pennies from Heaven Foundation, they are pooling money to create a community broadband survey.

"We're contributing dollars to do a study," Cox said. "With COVID, you're seeing an issue with the haves and have nots. The intent is our money will create a survey and we will be conduits to the people in mass numbers to get as close to representation as we can using school, parents, the chambers and government organizations.

He hopes the survey will produce data for potential internet providers.

"My understanding is the need is there, but the providers don't have an interest because of the amount of money it costs them to bring in infrastructure," he said.

Cox expects the survey data will help internet providers apply for grants and other government programs to help cover the costs of bringing in broadband.


Angel mom Mary Ann Mendoza testifies during a Senate Judiciary hearing about sanctuary jurisdictions, on Capitol Hill in Washington on Oct. 22, 2019. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)

Angel Mom Says Biden Creating Super Highway to Border

An Arizona mother whose son was killed by an illegal alien said the Biden administrations border policies are absolutely going to create more angel families.

Angel families are relatives of those who have been killed by an illegal immigrant.

Thats the saddest thing to me of all, Mary Ann Mendoza told The Epoch Times on Feb. 8. Ive been speaking out on this for 5 1/2 years now.

Mendozas son, Brandon, was killed in a 2014 car crash caused by an illegal immigrant who was drunk, high on meth, and speeding along a Mesa, Arizona, highway in the wrong direction. Brandon, a sergeant on the Mesa police force, was 32 years old.

Biden decides hes going to open our borders, and every one of our lives are in jeopardy, she said. Its just going to be a super highway now.

President Joe Biden has issued executive orders to stop border wall construction, stop the Remain in Mexico programwhich will restart the practice of catch-and-releaseand pause deportations, among other actions.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said at a Feb. 8 press briefing that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) wont be prioritizing the deportation of illegal aliens who are charged with driving under the influence (DUI) or assault.

The priority for the enforcement of immigration laws will be on those who are posing a national security threat; of course, a public safety threat; and on recent arrivals, Psaki said. Nobody is saying that DUIs or assault are acceptable behavior, and those arrested for such activities should be tried and sentenced as appropriate by local law enforcement. But were talking about the prioritization of who is going to be deported from the country.

In fiscal 2020, ICE removed 185,884 illegal immigrants, of whom 92 percent had criminal convictions or pending criminal charges. The most common offense that year was a DUI conviction or charge, totaling more than 55,000.

Mendoza said she thinks the current push to peel back security measures is more about undoing Trumps legacy than anything else.

I really feel that its a quick push without real thought going into what the end results are going to be to this country, she said.

We already have a record amount of Americans out of work right now.

Mendoza said lax enforcement measures mean more illegal immigrants will enter and be employed for lower wages, displacing American workers.

She predicts a growing crisis along the border this year, with families and unaccompanied minors paying cartels and smuggling organizations to get them into the United States.

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) announced on Feb. 9 that its reopening its overflow tent facilities in Texas due to an influx across the border.

During the Trump era, Mendoza had a seat at the table, as the administration highlighted the victims of illegal alien crime by opening the Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement (VOICE) office within the Department of Homeland Security.

President Trump actually took the time to listen to us. He knew what changes had to be made to make our country safe, Mendoza said. Now, she says, with Biden, its almost like 5 1/2 years of my work is just being completely shredded, and I feel like Im starting all over again.

The Epoch Times reached out to both the White House and ICE to ask if the VOICE office will remain in operation under the Biden administration.

We have not made any new announcements regarding the VOICE office, an ICE spokesperson said.

Mendoza says its hypocritical that border wall construction has been halted at the same time fences are erected around Washington.

Members of Congress, because they felt afraid or scared, put a fence around the U.S. Capitol with razor-sharp barbed wire on top and have the National Guard outside protecting them, she said.

So these [members of Congress] are more important than everybody else who lives here? Mendoza said.

After youve had a family member killed, like some of the angel families havemurdered, assassinated, like Grant Ronnebeckit puts the perspective on how you feel safe in your own country. And they dont take that into consideration whatsoever.

Grant Ronnebeck was working as a clerk at a convenience store in metro Phoenix when he was fatally shot in the face in 2015. Apolinar Altamirano, an illegal alien from Mexico, was charged with the 21-year-olds death.

Im very scared for our country, I really am, Mendoza said.
Police have said that evidence suggests the fatal shooting of a Yale graduate student was a targeted killing, and not a random road-rage attack as some initially believed.

Kevin Jiang, 26, a graduate student at the Yale School of the Environment, was found shot dead next to his rear-end damaged Prius at about 8.30pm on Saturday in New Haven, Connecticut.

'We are looking into whether or not Mr. Jiang was actually targeted in this incident,' New Haven Police Chief Otoniel Reyes said at a press conference on Monday.

'We have developed information suggesting that this incident may actually not have been a random act, and that he in fact was targeted,' the chief said.

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Yale University graduate student Kevin Jiang, 26 (left), was shot dead in New Haven, Connecticut, on Saturday night. A week ago, Jiang proposed marriage to his girlfriend (right)

'We are looking into whether or not Mr. Jiang was actually targeted in this incident,' New Haven Police Chief Otoniel Reyes said at a press conference on Monday

Police were initially looking at the possibility that Jiang was shot after a car crash, as his Prius had rear-end damage

With the killer still at large, the tight-lipped chief did not offer much further information.

But he did suggest that neighbors had seen interactions earlier in the day that shed light on the murder of Jiang, who had become engaged to be married just a week earlier.

'Additional callers reported seeing much during that day - we do not want to give that information because the investigation is ongoing,' Reyes said.

Chief Reyes said that it was 'too early to establish any motive whatsoever.'

New Haven police said 911 callers reported hearing at least seven gunshots at 8.30pm near the intersection of Lawrence and Nicoll streets in the East Rock neighborhood.

Responding officers found Jiang lying in the street and he was pronounced dead. The case is being investigated as a homicide.

Jiang was a second-year student at the Yale School of the Environment

Police said 911 callers reported hearing at least seven gunshots at 8.30pm on Saturday near the intersection of Lawrence and Nicoll streets in New Haven

The New Haven Independent reported that Jiang, who lived in West Haven, was found near his Prius, which had rear-end damage, raising the possibility that the shooting came after a car accident and was a targeted, rather than a random, act of violence.

A neighbor said she was in her living room when she heard two shots, followed by a pause, and then at least five more shots.

'When we finally looked outside, there was someone lying in the middle of Lawrence Street,' she told the New Haven Register.

As of Monday morning, no arrests have been made, but police were said to have leads on the gunman's vehicle.

Salovey, the Yale president, said his staff had been in touch with Jiangs family.

'I wish to convey to them and to all others who loved Kevin my sincere condolences,' Salovey said. 'Kevin was an extraordinary young man.'

Just a week before his slaying, Jiang got engaged to his girlfriend of one year, fellow Yale graduate student Zion Perry. He posted a video on his Facebook page that captured the moment he went down on one knee and popped the question while the pair were on a hike.

Jiang and his girlfriend, fellow Yale graduate student Zion Perry (right), had been dating for a year

On January 30, Jiang shared a video on his Facebook page, showing him popping the question to Perry while on a hike to celebrate their dating anniversary. He wrote: 'She said YES!'

'She said YES!; Jiang wrote ecstatically in a status update on January 30. 'Zion sweetheart - youve really made a huge impact in my life! Ever since I met you, God has been working in my heart and changing my heart for the better, helping me become more generous and kinder to others . You are the most kind, beautiful, forgiving, patient, faithful woman Ive ever met. I love you more than words can say.'

According to his LinkedIn profile, Jiang served as a tank operator in the US Army and was in the Army National Guard.

The 26-year-old veteran earned a degree in environmental studies from the University of Washington before starting his graduate studies at Yale in 2019. He was a member of the Class of 2022.

'I know this tragedy comes during a year that has already been filled with so much sorrow,' School of the Environment Dean Indy Burke wrote in a statement on Sunday. 'Please know that we in our school stand ready to support you.'

Jiang served as a tank operator in the US Army and was in the Army National Guard

After serving his country and earning a Bachelor's degree in environmental science from University of Washington, Jiang in 2019 started his graduate studies at Yale

Jiang, like his fiancee, was a devout Christian and an active member of a New Haven church

New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker addressed Jiang's killing and other violent crimes that have been committed in the city, vowing to 'be relentless in efforts to provide justice for all of the victims, their families and loved ones,' reported Fox61.

Jiang was a devout Christian and an active member of Trinity Baptist Church, where he had been volunteering his time every week for the past two years.

'Earlier this week, I had agreed to officiate Kevin's wedding,' Co-Pastor Greg Hendrickson wrote in a Facebook post. 'Now, we will be officiating his funeral instead. As a community, we are grieving deeply right now. But Kevin lived by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

'Above all he looked forward to Jesus promise of the resurrection from the dead. Though his earthly life was cut short, he used the time that he had on earth to the fullest. His example inspires us to do the same.'

On his Facebook profile Jiang wrote: 'Life is a gift that I am so thankful for.'

Jiang would have celebrated his 27th birthday this week. His death marks the sixth homicide in New Haven so far this year.

Anyone with information about Jiang's murder is urged to contact the anonymous New Haven Police tip line at 1-866-888-TIPS.
A server from California quit her job at a trendy California restaurant after refusing to stop wearing a Black Lives Matter face mask while at work.

Kimi Stout from Sonoma in the northern part of the state had worked at The Girl & The Fig for several months before being furloughed in March.

She resumed her job once dining reopened in California in September after a summer of protests involving the Black Lives Matter movement had taken place.

Server Kimi Stout wore a Black Lives Matter face mask and a guest complained

The Girl & The Fig restaurant introduced a mask policy requiring all workers to wear plain masks and none with any 'political messaging'

Keen to show her support for 'marginalized people' she decided to wear the face mask while at work.

For several shifts no comment was made by anybody at the restaurant and on one occasion even the president of the company, John Toulze, told her outright that he supported the message behind the mask.

On another occasion, she was pulled aside by a manager and told that a diner had complained and become aggressive after seeing her wearing the 'politically charged' mask.

'He said, 'you're not in trouble by any means,' said Stout to SFGate. 'However, we just wanted to let you know that we did have somebody complain about your mask and they were very aggressive about it.'

Stout, who had previously received support from the head of the company over her mask then refused to switch her BLM face mask for a plain one while working her server shifts

She ended up resigning over the matter and posted a video on Instagram that showed her taking off her restaurant t-shirt and placing it in the trash

A few days later the restaurant decided to implement a dress code mask policy for all of its workers that required them to either wear a specially branded restaurant mask or a plain black or blue one to go with their uniforms.

'I got a text notification saying 'new mask policy in place, everybody sign,' said Stout. 'I'm not saying that they wrote the policy for me, but I felt very targeted when I read it. I decided that I was going to wear my mask anyway, because as far as I knew, the president of the company, I had his 100% support.'

Stout, believing she had already received prior permission from the head of the company did not take any notice of the requirements and continued to wear her BLM face mask.

The company's president saw what she was wearing and asked her to turn her mask inside out in order to obscure the logo.

Stout refused whereupon Toulze told her to come to his office at the end of her shift in order to tell her directly that she needed to fall into line with all the other workers in the restaurant and to wear a plain face mask.

Stout posted her collection of Black Lives Matter face masks on her Instagram account

Stout adapted this N95 mask to support 'Black Trans Lives'

'He told me, 'We have a new mask policy in place, and we need you to abide by that,' said Stout. 'And you know, I can't make exceptions, because if I make an exception for you, someone may come in tomorrow with another political mask, and I just can't have that. We can't be aligning ourselves anywhere politically.'

Toulze explained that if she showed up wearing the same mask to work the following day, she would be sent home.

'I regret to say that I told him, you know, let's just call it now,' said Stout. 'I don't want to cause a scene. I don't want to cause drama.'

Stout refused and handed in her notice.

She posted a video to Instagram of her taking off her restaurant branded T-shirt and throwing it in the bin, before sticking two fingers up at the trash can, with the words 'Black Lives Matter' superimposed over the screen.

Although the incident happened in September, Stout only recently made the video public on her Instagram page.

'On September 3rd, 2020, I was forced out of my position as a server at The Girl and the Fig restaurant in Sonoma, CA for refusing to remove my 'Black Lives Matter' mask after a new mask policy was put into place. I was told by the president of the company that if I did not change my mask I would not be allowed to work and that BLM is 'too political'. I asked him why I was being forced out when only three weeks previous he said I had his '100% support'. He simply responded, 'Yes I did, but that was before the policy.' ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Happy New Year, friends. Spend your money selectively,' Stout wrote.

Stout says she has since found a new job after briefly collecting unemployment

Company president and chef John Toulze told DailyMail.com that Stout left of her own accord and was not fired from her job.

'Nobody was fired from our restaurant. We had a uniform policy with masks becoming part of that attire. We provided our servers N95, surgical masks and the option to wear one displaying the company logo, but all servers were told that these were the only options. It's not about Black Lives Matter, it's out uniform. I would have said the same thing had a server shown up wearing flip flops instead of shoes,' Toulze said.

The restaurant which has counts Lady Gaga and some Bachelor contestants among its past customers, has also released a formal statement regarding the incident.

'We were disappointed to learn that a valued employee no longer wanted to continue employment with The Girl & The Fig after we created the face mask policy and resigned because they could not use their uniform to express support for this important cause.

Stout accused the restaurant of mixed messages after she believed she has received tacit approval to wear the mask from company president and chef John Toulze

'The Girl & The Fig is founded by diverse ownership and prides itself on employing and supporting a diverse workforce. We support the Black Lives Matter movement and sincerely agree that we all have a responsibility to take action to dismantle systemic racism and injustice in our society.'

Stout, meanwhile, collected unemployment for the short period of time that she was out of work but has since found a new job.

She said that being 'forced out' affected her.

'It's just cognitive dissonance. It really affected me that they preached, you know, inclusivity and family and together we're stronger. And yet they disagreed with me so much that during a pandemic, they forced me out.

'I want this to be about Black Lives Matter,' said Stout. 'I don't want it to be about me and 'oh, this girl lost her job.' Don't worry about me: worry about the fact that a very busy restaurant actively forced out somebody showing support for marginalized lives.'
Representing a significant milestone in the largest job in its history, Jumbo has completed the transportation element of its Transport & Installation contract for the Yunlin offshore wind farm in Taiwan.

Yunlin is a 640 MW project sited approximately 8km off the coast of Taiwan. The plant will feature 80 Siemens Gamesa 8.0-167 DD (direct drive) offshore wind turbines. Nominal power of the turbines is 8.0MW; rotor diameter is 167 meters; the swept area is 21,900 m2.





Jumbo mobilized ships from its own Heavy Lift Vessel fleet, together with subcontracted deck carriers and HLVs from third parties, to transport 40 monopiles, 120 monopile sections and 40 transition pieces (TPs) from yards in the Netherlands and Germany to Taiwan.





In terms of logistics, the Yunlin offshore wind farm is a substantial project; the transport of components required 21 intercontinental voyages, at times with 10 TPs per voyage.

Yunlin illustrates Jumbos position as a Tier I contractor for a major offshore wind farm construction project. In addition to the actual transport of components from A to B, Jumbos role was complete project management of numerous critical aspects of the project. This included the engineering, design and fabrication management of the supporting and sea-fastening elements such as cradles, grillages and load spreader beams, procurement of additional equipment and services, as well as the chartering of third-party vessels.

The transport of the offshore wind substructures is now completed. In the meantime, Jumbo is ready for the installation of 80 transition pieces.

Jumbo secured the Yunlin T&I contract with Yunneng Windpower Co. (a Taiwanese subsidiary of wpd AG) in June 2019.

Based in The Netherlands, Jumbo is a heavy-lift shipping and offshore transportation & installation contractor.
New Delhi: No fresh case of COVID-19 death has been reported from as many as seven states and Union Territories in the last three weeks, the Centre announced on Tuesday.

Seven states and UTs -- Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Arunachal Pradesh, Tripura, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Mizoram, Nagaland and Lakshadweep -- have reported no new COVID-19 deaths in last three weeks, Union Health Secretary Rajesh Bhushan was quoted as saying by PTI.

While 15 states and UTs have not registered any fatality in the past 24 hours, the Centre said.

In a press briefing, Bhushan said that India was the fastest country to reach 6 million COVID-19 vaccination doses in 24 days.

"There are 12 states and UTs that have vaccinated more than 65 per cent of the registered healthcare workers. These states are Bihar (78.1 per cent), Tripura (77.1 per cent), Madhya Pradesh (76 per cent), Uttarakhand (73.7 per cent), Odisha (72.4 per cent), Mizoram (69.9 per cent), Himachal Pradesh (68.7 per cent), Uttar Pradesh (68 per cent), Andaman and Nicobar Islands (67.9 per cent), Rajasthan (67.2 per cent), Kerala (66.9 per cent) and Lakshadweep (66.7 per cent)," he said.

However, it was also noted that over 70 per cent of the population is still susceptible to the disease, as per the findings of the last national serosurvey.

Live TV
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 10)  COVID-19 response deputy chief implementer Vince Dizon clarified Wednesday that retailers are already part of the government's vaccine priority list since they are considered essential workers.

Kasama naman sila sa essential workers, part ng priority list, Dizon said in an ambush interview.

[Translation: Retailers are essential workers, who part of the priority list.]

Last week, the Philippine Retailers Association reportedly wrote to Health Secretary Francisco Duque III, who chairs the Inter-Agency Task Force, to ask if frontline retail sector workers could also be prioritized in the government's vaccination program, arguing these people are regularly exposed to the general public.

The government recently released its priority list based on health experts' recommendations. First in line are frontline workers in the health sector, followed by senior citizens and people with comorbidities who are at greater risk if they catch COVID-19. Next are frontline personnel in essential sectors. The full list could be found here.

Initial 117,000 doses of Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine are expected to arrive in the country this month, officials said. Vaccine czar Carlito Galvez Jr. previously said these are reserved for 56,000 employees of four public hospitals that serve as COVID-19 referral centers: the Philippine General Hospital, Jose N. Rodriguez Memorial Hospital and Sanitarium or Tala Hospital, Lung Center of the Philippines, and East Avenue Medical Center.

US drugmaker Pfizer was the first to receive Emergency Use Authorization for its COVID-19 vaccine from the country's drug regulator, followed by British firm AstraZeneca. Other vaccine makers have pending EUA applications at the Food and Drug Administration.

For his part, acting Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Karl Chua chief Karl Chua said the current prioritization program is already good as is.

Maganda na iyong ating (We already have a good) prioritization program. We start with the frontliners sa health and those providing public service, then the most vulnerable  the senior citizens, the poor people, followed by the general population, so I think we have a coherent plan. This plan, I think, is the one that will help everyone move forward, National Economic and Development Authority chief Chua said Wednesday in a briefing.



Luanda  Adao de Almeida, the minister of State and Chief of Staff of the President of the Republic, reaffirmed last Tuesday that the basic conditions are now created for the resumption of classes in primary education.

Primary school classes, suspended in March 2020 due to the emergence of the first cases of Covid-19 in Angola, are due to restart this Wednesday (10).

With the end of the current academic year scheduled for July, more than six million primary school students will return to the classrooms, just over 3.1 million of whom entered the education system for the first time.

The school resumption in primary education was scheduled for 26 October 2020, having been postponed at the time, due to the increase in positive cases in the country.

The minister, who was speaking at a press conference to update the measures of the Decree on Public Calamity, said that the evolution of the epidemiological (High number of recovered patients and low new infection cases) situation allows the resumption of classes in primary education.

Adao de Almeida stressed that the Executive carried out a risk assessment, of organizational and occupational capacity, the results of which allowed the reopening of primary schools.

According to the minister, it is a safe and peaceful step, considering that the evaluation made it possible to take this step in terms of the teaching and learning process in Angola.

The government official also requested the continuous intervention of the parents and guardians in the teaching process, interacting continuously with the principals and heads of the schools.

Meanwhile, in the beginning of the 2020 academic year, 39 844 rooms were made available for pre-school and primary education.

For general secondary education, 16,069 classrooms were made available for the 1st cycle of the secondary education and 11,865 classrooms for the 2nd cycle (10th grade onwards).

The National Education System has 210,674 teachers.

Primary school classes, suspended in March 2020 due to the emergence of the first cases of Covid-19 in Angola, are due to restart this Wednesday (10).

With the end of the current academic year scheduled for July, more than six million primary school students will return to the classrooms, just over 3.1 million of whom entered the education system for the first time.

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The school resumption in primary education was scheduled for 26 October 2020, having been postponed at the time, due to the increase in positive cases in the country.

The minister, who was speaking at a press conference to update the measures of the Decree on Public Calamity, said that the evolution of the epidemiological (High number of recovered patients and low new infection cases) situation allows the resumption of classes in primary education.

Adao de Almeida stressed that the Executive carried out a risk assessment, of organizational and occupational capacity, the results of which allowed the reopening of primary schools.

According to the minister, it is a safe and peaceful step, considering that the evaluation made it possible to take this step in terms of the teaching and learning process in Angola.

The government official also requested the continuous intervention of the parents and guardians in the teaching process, interacting continuously with the principals and heads of the schools.

Meanwhile, in the beginning of the 2020 academic year, 39 844 rooms were made available for pre-school and primary education.

For general secondary education, 16,069 classrooms were made available for the 1st cycle of the secondary education and 11,865 classrooms for the 2nd cycle (10th grade onwards).

The National Education System has 210,674 teachers.
Register now for SIUs Give Kids a Smile on March 12

by Christi Mathis

CARBONDALE, Ill.  Southern Illinois University Carbondales Dental Hygiene Program will once again be hosting its popular annual Give Kids a Smile Day on March 12 for children. However, this year due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, a limited number of appointments will be available, so call early to reserve a spot.

The event is set for 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at the SIU Carbondale Community Dental Center, located west of the Banterra Center.

Free dental care for kids

The program provides a wide variety of free dental services to children from infants to the age of 14. Included are dental examinations, X-rays, cleanings, fluoride treatments, sealants, fillings and simple extractions.

Dozens of students and faculty from SIUs Dental Hygiene Program, along with volunteer dentists and hygienists from the region, provide the free care. The goal is to serve children who dont receive regular dental treatment or have regular access to dental care.

The program, which is part of SIUs School of Health Sciences, is in its 18th year. Safety protocols will be followed during the event to comply with the Restore Illinois plan and guidelines from local and state health departments.

Sign up now

Appointments are available on a first-come, first served basis at 618-453-8826. For more information, contact Jennifer M. Meyer, clinical instructor and Give Kids a Smile Day coordinator, at jenn10@siu.edu or 618-453-8826.
The Cross River governor wants an end to "illegal recruitment and sneaking of names into the payroll system."

Governor Ben Ayade of Cross River State has charged the newly sworn-in Head of Service (HoS), Geraldine Ekanem, to fish out fugitive workers in the state's civil service.

Mr Ayade gave the charge during the swearing-in ceremony of Ms Ekanem as the substantive HoS of Cross River State.

Ms Ekanem, 57, was first appointed as acting HoS on January 1.

She is the second woman to be appointed into a top position in the Cross River Government barely 24 hours after Justice Akon Ikpeme was sworn-in as the state chief judge on Monday.

While commending the new HoS for her "decency and eloquence", Mr Ayade said her major challenge would be to effectively pilot the affairs of the state civil service in an era of dwindling finances and corruption in the system.

"Last month, the total allocation for Cross River was about N900 million and it came when our wage bill is over N3 billion and many do not know what the state goes through to sustain salary payment.

"The State has a lot of debts hanging on its neck which was inherited from the past administrations in the state.

"So, as HoS, one of the greatest challenges you will have is to fish out fugitive workers because I inherited a pension bill of N340 million per month but as at today our pension stands at about N740 million and I do not understand where the additional N400 million came from.

"You can juxtapose it against the fact that I met a civil service salary structure of about N1. 2 billion, now it has risen to about N2.1 billion," Mr Ayade said.

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"It is expected that when pension is increasing, salaries should be reducing, but to have an increase in salaries and pension when there is no commensurate recruitment from the government, calls for investigation.

"So, I implore you to use your skill as a professional civil servant and a lawyer to check the level of manipulation in the state payroll system.

"I need you to put an end to the illegal recruitment and sneaking of names into the payroll system."

He encouraged her to be disciplined, adding that she was not picked out of emotion "but because of her seniority, character and ability to deliver on the job".

Ms Ekanem, in her response, said she felt honoured to be appointed as the HoS.

She said she "was carrying out a gap analysis to find out where there are gaps in manpower in the state civil service in order to remedy the situation".

"I will ensure that things are done properly in the service by carrying out regular visits to ministries, even those in the hinterland to fish out ghost and recalcitrant workers," she said.
Midland's top public health official on Tuesday reported the health department is hard at work fulfilling vaccine requests, currently prioritizing the oldest members of the community.

The Midland County Health Department has administered 5,427 vaccine doses so far, including 3,492 first doses and 1,935 second doses, said department director Fred Yanoski.

"We've had thousands of people log into our website and complete that (vaccine) registration form," Yanoski said. "We also had a few thousand people call 211 to register, so it's important for people to know that they don't need to call in to double check if they're still on the list."

The health department is working through the list of vaccine candidates from oldest to youngest, and is just now getting into the low 80s as of Monday, Yanoski said.

"It's important for people to know that we haven't taken their name off the list  we're just getting limited vaccine doses, so we're trying to work our way down from oldest to youngest," Yanoski said. "If you have not been contacted yet, please by patient, and we'll contact you as soon as their is vaccine available for you."

Like departments of its kind across the state, the Midland County Health Department is dealing with the limited amount of vaccine doses it is being given. This week, the health department only received 500 doses from the State of Michigan.

The department is hosting a clinic with Senior Services on Wednesday, during which all 500 doses will be given out, Yanoski said.

"We're not sitting on any vaccines, we're getting it out as soon as we get it," Yanoski said.

In addition to the health department, MidMichigan Health is distributing vaccines in Midland and Gladwin counties.

MidMichigan vaccine updates

Millie Jezior, public relations manager for MidMichigan Health, said MidMichigan will be vaccinating about 1,470 first dose patients and 3,299 second dose patients this week.

The three groups being vaccinated this week are 1st dose 1A category, 2nd dose 1A category and 1st dose 1B category.

Jezior said the MidMichigan Medical Center-Midland uses the majority of vaccine doses it gets, especially now that allocations have been lower.

"We encourage people to reach out to their primary care provider through their Patient Portal or signing up on the wait list via the MidMichigan Health website," Jezior said. "Those without a MidMichigan Health provider are to contact the (Midland County) Health Department to get added to their list."

As of Tuesday, the number of second doses administered is 7,704, Jezior said.

Currently, about 56.71% of MidMichigan employees have had their first vaccine dose, and 89.07% have gotten their second dose.

As of Feb. 9, MidMichigan Health has distributed 21,821 vaccines, and 10,048 doses have been administered in Midland.

Tuesday, Feb. 9, COVID-19 numbers:

 Midland County: four cases were added; pandemic total is 4,281 cases, 577 probable, 58 deaths and three probable deaths.

 Bay County: two cases were subtracted from the total count, and one death was added; pandemic total stands at 6,917 cases, 294 probable, 262 deaths and 12 probable deaths.

 Gladwin County: two cases were added; pandemic total stands at 1,223 cases, 227 probable, 39 deaths and three probable deaths.

 Isabella County: two new cases were added; pandemic total stands at 3,474 cases, 426 probable, 70 deaths and one probable death.

 Saginaw County: six cases were added; pandemic total stands at 13,750 cases, 691 probable, 468 deaths and 11 probable deaths.

The state on Tuesday added 563 new cases and 60 deaths, which includes 31 deaths identified during a vital records review. Overall, Michigan is at 569,980 cases and 14,965 deaths.

Testing

The state report shows as of Feb. 9, Midland County has performed 53,374 COVID-19 tests. Gladwin County is listed as having administered 15,083 tests.

Midland Countys seven-day rolling positivity rate on Feb. 5 was listed at 3.4%, and Gladwin County was listed at 3.4%. Our 12-county region is listed at 4.6% and Michigan is at 4.3%.

MidMichigan Health statistics

As of Feb. 8, MidMichigan Medical Center in Midland is listed as having an 65% bed occupancy, with 21 COVID-19 patients, including four in the ICU. MidMichigan Medical Center in Gladwin is listed as having an 18% bed occupancy, with one COVID-19 patient and none in the ICU.

Regarding PPE supplies, the Midland hospital reported 15-30 days for N95 masks; 15-30 days for surgical masks; 30-plus days for surgical gowns; 15-30 days for exam gloves and 30-plus days for eye protection. The Gladwin hospital reported 30-plus days for all the reported supplies.
Napa Countys sticker shock over the number of state-mandated homes it might have to plan for in coming years is growing.

The county told the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) that the home allocation formula for the nine Bay Area counties disproportionally affects rural, agricultural areas. But the latest, the proposed number for the unincorporated county went up instead of down.

It was a big surprise to us, county Supervisor Diane Dillon said.

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Napa County as a whole saw the number of homes it must plan for from 2023 to 2031 rise from 3,816 to 3,843. But the boost from the initial numbers announced last fall isnt evenly spread across the unincorporated county and its cities.

Unincorporated Napa County saw its proposed allocation rise from 792 to 1,013, a 28% increase. St. Helena saw its allocation rise from 171 to 254, a 49% increase. Other cities saw allocations fall slightly or remain the same.

The bottom line  Napa County and it cities, despite voter-approved growth measures to protect farmland and open space, must find room to build more housing units than already exist in Calistoga. Many must be for low and moderate incomes.
In a bid to oppose the new farmers' legislation, Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi on Wednesday attended a Kisan Mahapanchayat in Saharanpur where she criticised the BJP government at the Centre. The three agricultural laws enacted by the central government are monster-like and want to kill farmers, she alleged. Gandhi said the laws will be abolished if her party comes to power at the Centre.

"If voted to power, the Congress will scrap these laws. Farmers will get the MSP (minimum support price). Laws will be made to help you, not oppress you," she said.

Speaking to farmers at the Kisan Mahapanchayat, Gandhi said, When the Congress government is formed, laws will not be made to grind you but to help you. We will not do politics with your life. In 1955 Jawaharlal Nehru enacted a law against hoarding, but this law has been abolished by the BJP government. This new law will help the 'billionaires' and they will decide the price of farmers' produce.

The rally was the first in a series of farmers' meetings planned by the Congress in western Uttar Pradesh, a year before the assembly elections in the state where the opposition party is struggling to revive itself.

Gandhi was presented with a pair of ploughs at the meeting. Beginning her address, the leader said she had visited the Saharanpur temple dedicated to goddess Shakumbhari. She also went to the Raipur Khanqah Dargah.

"These three laws were drafted in such a way that government `mandis' will eventually close down, the farmers will not get the MSP and there will be hoarding," she said.

Earlier, she tweeted in Hindi, "To listen to the farmers' 'dil ki baat', understand them, share my feelings with them and support their struggle, I will be in Saharanpur today. The BJP government will have to withdraw the black farm laws."

When asked to comment on the Congress event, UP minister Anand Swarup Shukla said "drama is being enacted in the name of farmers". He claimed that "gangs" opposing the government have gone international, referring to tweets on the farmers' protest by foreign celebrities. Shukla asked Congress leaders to "oppose Prime Minister Narendra Modi, but not the country".

Law Minister Brijesh Pathak said the BJP government was committed to helping farmers and termed Gandhi's tour an "eyewash". "Some leaders just want to be in the limelight," he added.

(With inputs from PTI)
English French

MONTREAL, Feb. 10, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Residents of long-term care facilities are at increased risk for serious outcomes of COVID-19. As vaccines are now being offered to this priority population, the Government of Canada is investing over $2 million through Canada's COVID-19 Immunity Task Force (CITF) for two studies in British Columbia (BC) and Alberta which will investigate how the immune systems of elderly residents and staff in these facilities respond to COVID-19 infection and vaccination.

These long-term care studies are critically important for a number of reasons, says Mel Krajden, MD, FRCPC, CITF Leadership Group member. He is also the Medical Director of BC Centre for Disease Control Public Health Laboratory, and Professor, Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, University of British Columbia. Residents who are exposed can now help us understand more about how immunity develops, and why elderly individuals have been so vulnerable to the virus, he continues. With vaccine rollout underway, we need to collect evidence now about how the immune systems of elderly people react to vaccines so that we can make the best use of vaccination to protect them.

The objective of the first study, led by researchers from the University of British Columbia (UBC), Providence Health Care, Simon Fraser University, and the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, is to investigate how elderly peoples immune systems respond to COVID-19 vaccines. The researchers will also assess the viral, immunological and social factors that have contributed to COVID-19 outbreaks in long-term care facilities, to better understand why the disease has been fatal to so many residents.

We will be collecting blood samples from residents and staff of long-term care facilities in BC before vaccination, when possible, and then taking more blood samples periodically after vaccination, explains study Principal Investigator Marc Romney, MD, Clinical Associate Professor at UBC and Medical Leader for Medical Microbiology and Virology at St. Pauls Hospital, Providence Health Care. For those who have already been vaccinated, we will be assessing vaccine-induced immunity over time, using innovative and emerging laboratory tests. What we learn in this study will inform stakeholders on how best to protect individuals who live and work in long-term care facilities from COVID-19, prevent future outbreaks, and hopefully save lives.

The second study, led by researchers at the University of Alberta and Alberta Health Services (AHS), is examining how the immune systems of residents and staff in long-term care facilities in Alberta react to COVID-19 infection and to vaccines. The team is also monitoring sewage wastewater as to develop an early warning system to detect and monitor outbreaks in long-term care facilities.

Our team will study the immune response to COVID-19 vaccines among residents and staff in long-term care facilities using blood samples, comparing the response of people who have previously been infected with COVID-19 to those who werent, explains study Principal Investigator Xiaoli Pang, MD, PhD, Professor in the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology at the University of Alberta and Program Leader at Public Health laboratory, Alberta Precision Laboratories. The study will provide important information about the impact of vaccines in this population at higher risk for severe illness and death from COVID-19.

The Alberta study team will also monitor wastewater samples from selected long-term care facilities in Edmonton, to detect signs of SARS-CoV-2 infections in residents and staff. The virus has been found in human wastewater before people show signs of illness, and even among those who become infected but do not develop symptoms, says Dr. Pang. Detection of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater provides an early sign that the virus is circulating, typically before we see a clinical diagnosis of COVID-19. Were confident this project will provide a helpful early-warning system for long-term care facilities. The goal will be to use this early warning system for timely response, including rapid testing of residents and staff to identify those infected, to stop outbreaks, and prevent further spread of the disease.

These studies will contribute to our understanding of COVID-19 vaccine-induced immunity in seniors living in long-term care facilities, who have been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19, states Canadas Chief Public Health Officer, Dr. Theresa Tam. Vaccines are critical to limiting the spread of COVID-19, and this research will support their most effective use.

ABOUT THE COVID-19 IMMUNITY TASK FORCE

In late April 2020, the Government of Canada established the COVID-19 Immunity Task Force with a two-year mandate. Working virtually, the Task Force Leadership Group is a representative set of volunteer experts from across the country who are focused on understanding the nature of immunity arising from the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. To that end, the CITF is supporting numerous studies to determine the extent of SARS-CoV-2 infection in Canada (in the general population as well as in specific communities and priority populations), understand the nature of immunity following infection, and develop improved antibody testing methods. Most recently, the Task Force has been asked to take a major role in supporting vaccine surveillance for effectiveness and safety. The Task Force and its Secretariat accordingly work closely with a range of partners, including governments, public health agencies, institutions, health organizations, research teams, other task forces, communities, and stakeholders. Our overriding objective is to generate data and ideas that inform interventions aimed at slowing and ultimately stopping the spread of SARS-CoV-2 in Canada. For more information visit: www.covid19immunitytaskforce.ca

SOCIAL MEDIA HANDLES

COVID-19 Immunity Task Force

Twitter: @COVIDimmunityTF

Facebook: @COVIDimmunityTF

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/covid-19-immunity-task-force-groupe-de-travail-sur-limmunite-face-a-la-covid-19/

Alberta Health Services

Twitter: @AHS_media

Facebook: @albertahealthservices

LinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/alberta-health-services

UBC

Twitter: @ubc_health

Facebook: @UBCCHSPR

LinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/ubc-centre-for-health-services-and-policy-research

MEDIA CONTACTS

COVID-19 Immunity Task Force

media@covid19immunitytaskforce.ca

Rebecca Burns

Cell: +1.438.871.8763

Caroline Phaneuf

Cell: +1.514.444.4532



For interviews with Alberta team:

Ross Neitz

Communications associate, Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry, U of A

780-297-8354 - rneitz@ualberta.ca

For interviews with BC team:

Media Relations, The University of British Columbia

Kerry Blackadar, kerry.blackadar@ubc.ca

Eric Rolfsen, erik.rolfsen@ubc.ca



A video and B-roll of the wastewater sample collecting operation in Edmonton are available upon request.
Naga Munchetty has bitten back at a troll who called her 'false' on Twitter on Wednesday.

The BBC Breakfast presenter, 45, replied to a viewer who tweeted: 'Really wish they would axe her. She is so false. She hasnt got a nice or watchable bone in her body. She is so annoying I have to switch off.'

Retweeting the comment, she added the reply: 'Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Very constructive indeed (does that sound genuine enough?)'

Naga Munchetty has bitten back at a troll who called her 'false' on Twitter on Wednesday

The troll has since deleted their tweet.

Naga has no qualms about standing up to disrespectful critique on social media, and her followers commented with a slew of supportive remarks.

Last summer she called out a pair of trolls after they attacked her for what she was wearing on the morning news show.

One - named Paul - derogatorily referred to the news anchor as 'that Asian bird' and slammed her for wearing 'whatever the hell she wants' to present the programme.

It appeared to be a reaction to Naga's footwear - a pair of silver brogues - as she sat alongside co-host Charlie Stayt who was in a suit and tie.

Standing up for herself: Naga has no qualms about standing up to disrespectful critique on social media, and her followers commented with a slew of supportive remarks

Biting back! The BBC Breakfast presenter, 45, replied to a viewer who tweete - 'Really wish they would axe her. She is so false. She hasnt got a nice or watchable bone in her body. She is so annoying I have to switch off'

Don;t mess with her! Retweeting the comment, she added the reply - 'Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Very constructive indeed (does that sound genuine enough?)'

Clearly outraged at the funky shoes, Paul marched to Twitter to rant: 'I never understand why Charlie has to wear a formal business suit and that Asian bird seems to be able to wear whatever the hell she wants?'

Naga replied to this with a simple: 'Oh Paul!'

She then replied to another now-deleted tweet, which clearly also attacked the shoes.

It's unclear whether this was from a different Paul or the same one, but Naga quipped in response: 'Paul - Three suggestions: 1. Add a picture of yourself to your Twitter profile 2. Think about what you Tweet before you write 3. I'll leave you to guess this one...'

Hitting back: Last summer she called out a pair of trolls after they attacked her for what she was wearing on the morning news show

Anchors: On the morning show, she sat alongside co-host Charlie Stayt who was in a suit and tie

Suited and booted: The outrage appeared to be a reaction to Naga's footwear - a pair of silver brogues

Followers rushed to Naga's defence, hailing her 'stylish' and 'fabulous', with some branding her the best morning TV anchor across the whole of UK television.

The newswoman's ensemble was far from scruffy, as Naga slipped into a navy blouse with red hearts dotted around it and black slacks.

In 2016, Naga said she was 'not there to be abused' as she spoke out about the horrendous racial and sexist abuse she was bombarded with on Twitter.

She said she accepted that criticism is part of her role in the public eye but will always call out those who are simply abusive.

Previous tweets have claimed the award-winning journalist is only employed at the BBC for her ethnicity, but have also criticised her hair, glasses and even made distasteful sexual remarks.

The presenter regularly replies to trolls, often ending tweets with a trademark 'BLOCKED', with her fans then jumping to her defence and criticising the abuser.

He's fuming! Clearly outraged at the funky shoes, Paul marched to Twitter to rant - 'I never understand why Charlie has to wear a formal business suit and that Asian bird seems to be able to wear whatever the hell she wants?'

She previously told the Daily Mirror: 'Im on telly, Im in your home, so if you want to criticise me, fine. But Im not there to be abused. Nobody is there to be abused.

'You dont abuse someone while theyre doing their job, and you dont make racist, sexist or bigoted comments.

'If someone says, "She did a bad job of that interview, Ive come away and not understood anything", I would go back and re-examine that interview.

'Racist and sexist stuff, I just think, "Youre an idiot."'

Feisty Naga recently revealed she adored the Emily Bronte classic Wuthering Heights because its female star is cruel.

'It showed me that women do not have to be likeable, that they can be hateful and that love isn't glorious. I sound so dark by saying that - dark of heart,' she told The Mail On Sunday last year.

'Cathy is a hateful character, she is cruel. And I love her, I absolutely love her. Does that sound really awful?'

Career: Naga is the second longest-serving member of the current presenting team, having joined the show in 2009, becoming a main presenter in 2014 [pictured with Dan Walker]

In May, Naga confirmed that 'all four main presenters of BBC Breakfast' are now paid the same following an equal salary complaint to the broadcaster in 2017.

The presenter was one of more than 100 female employees at the station who made complaints against the corporation over equal pay.

She, Charlie, Louise Minchin and Dan Walker are now all paid equally, which was not the case before the complaint was made.

She said: 'There are four main presenters who present three days a week, we do the same job, we have the same level of responsibility, the same expectation; we should be paid the same.'

Naga is the second longest-serving member of the current presenting team, having joined the show in 2009, becoming a main presenter in 2014.

BBC Breakfast airs weekdays at 6AM on BBC One.
Mike has reported on the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem's wildlife, wildlands and the agencies that manage them since 2012. A native Minnesotan, he arrived in the West to study environmental journalism at the University of Colorado.
The three-year-old girl allegedly beaten to death by Worst Cooks in America winner Ariel Robinson could have been saved if social workers had properly monitored her 'evil' adoptive parents, the girl's biological family has told DailyMail.com.

Food Network star Robinson, 29, and her 34-year-old husband Jerry are both charged with homicide by child abuse after their adopted daughter Victoria Rose Smith was found unresponsive and covered in blunt force injuries at their Simpsonville, South Carolina home.

The couple attacked white privilege and boasted on social media of their commitment to tackling racism after taking in white Victoria and her two brothers, aged five and seven, to raise alongside their own two black sons.

However Victoria's heartbroken relatives have told DailyMail.com that scrutinizing the sweet youngster's January 14 death along racial lines will not do anything to prevent another tragedy.

They say the blame lies squarely with the South Carolina Department of Social Services (SCDSS) who were too quick to seize her from biological mom Casie Phares and didn't do enough to ensure she was going to a safe home.

Ariel Robinson, 29, and her husband Jerry, 34, were arrested on homicide by child abuse charges for the death of their adopted daughter Victoria, three

DailyMail.com spoke to Victoria's biological family who blame Social Services for putting her in the care of 'evil' adoptive parents. They shared photos of bruises and marks on the girl's body, including a red mark seen on her wrist

The family also shared photos showing what appears to be bruises on her body and a black eye

Ariel and Jerry Robinson in their mugshots. On January 14, they called 911 because Victoria was unresponsive. The police report is largely redacted but they made reference to an incident the day before that they said may have caused the child's injuries

'People are bringing the race issue into this but we don't have any evidence that it played a part. Evil is evil. Evil doesn't have a color,' Victoria's great aunt Michelle Urps said in an exclusive interview.

'This could have happened in a bad white home or they could have been placed in a loving black home where none of this would have happened.

Victoria's great aunt Michelle Urps said, 'We trusted them to put the kids in a safe and loving environment. We now know they weren't safe'

'The point is that the people in charge of the adoption process are supposed to see through the smoke.

'These people are the experts, we trusted them to put the kids in a safe and loving environment. We now know they weren't safe, they weren't in a good home.

'Victoria was sweet, she was sassy. She was a smart, happy little girl and now she's gone. It's devastating.'

Robinson, a school teacher, shot to fame as the winner of season 20 of America's Worst Cook, winning fans over with her cooking mishaps and her 'big, funny personality.'

She hosted a parenting podcast with her husband and performed as a stand-up comic, calling herself AriFunny, the Clean Queen of Comedy, referring to her supposedly wholesome brand of humor.

Robinson 'juggles life between being a 24/7 wife & mom to all-round entertainer,' according to her website, where fans can snap up merchandise including t-shirts and signed photos.

The accused mom regularly posted clips and images to social media, including photos of her two biological sons along with Victoria and her two older brothers, whom she adopted together in March 2020.

She has written repeatedly about her commitment to social justice, tweeting in the wake of the Capitol riot about how her four sons would experience the world differently because of their skin color.

'In my house, my black children get treated the same as my white children, and my white children get treated the same as my black children. 'It's a shame that when they go out into the real world, that won't be the case. #whiteprivilege #BlackLivesMatter,' Robinson wrote.

Three days before Victoria was allegedly beaten to death she posted a cute collage of photos of the pair together, captioning it: 'We go together like ketchup & MUSTARD! #MiniMe Being a girl mom is awesome'.

Victoria and her brothers have a large biological extended family who are now speaking out to say the system failed. 'Victoria was sweet, she was sassy. She was a smart, happy little girl and now she's gone. It's devastating,' Victoria's biological great aunt said

One image shows a red patch on Victoria's neck while others reveal suspicious marks on her arms and face. The family says photos and videos contained numerous warning signs missed by social workers

A red mark can be seen on Victoria's forehead. Urps, 44, says the clips and pictures provided ample warning that social services needed to probe further to see if Robinson had a 'darker side' to her gregarious TV persona

The youngster's relatives claim, however, that the posts and videos contained numerous warning signs missed by social workers, including photos where the white children appear to have feint bruises.

One image shows a clear red patch around Victoria's right wrist while others reveal suspicious marks on her neck and face.

Video has also emerged of Robinson doing a standup routine in which she joked about keeping her kids in cages to keep them quiet during a visit from adoption authorities.

'They upstairs hollering and screaming and, you know, you get to that mommy level where you just had it,' she says. 'So I turn and yell upstairs, shut up or I'm coming up to punch you in your throat.'

Urps, 44, says the clips and pictures provided ample warning that social services needed to probe further to see if Robinson had a 'darker side' to her gregarious TV persona.

'I knew something was wrong by looking at her social media so why couldn't they?' she told DailyMail.com.

'And if you listen to her podcast she actually talks about having violent thoughts and how angry she can get.

'You have to question, do these case workers have the right training? Is the screening process adequate? Are they looking in the right places?'

Urps says the lack of oversight is all the more upsetting given how social workers closely monitored her niece's social media accounts when they began to question her fitness as a mother three years ago.

She says the problems began when Phares went for a routine health screening when she was pregnant with Victoria and tested positive for marijuana.

When medics found traces of the drug in Victoria's system when she was born the SCDSS began to monitor her.

The couple have two biological sons (far right). In February 2020, they adopted Victoria Rose (left) and her two biological brothers. Ariel gushed on social media about how the three new kids completed their blended family. Victoria died from blunt force trauma injuries on January 14, 2021

Robinson won Season 2020 of Worst Cooks in America. The show has now been pulled by the Food Network

Urps said her niece briefly turned to the drug to combat crippling morning sickness and stopped using it immediately after doctors raised concerns.

'It was something she only did one or two times. We are talking no more than a couple of puffs,' she insisted.

The Robinsons with their two biological sons before they adopted the three white children

'The morning sickness was all day and night. She wasn't trying to get high, she was just trying to keep herself from throwing up so she could take care of the two boys.'

Urps says her niece was in a relationship and was providing a stable home but she split from her partner and was exhausted after staying up all night by herself tending to the newborn.

When she fell asleep one day the two boys ran to a neighbor's house who called the police. She was also having trouble finding accommodation after her breakup.

Instead of helping Phares find a new home they put the kids into foster care and hauled her into family court to present her with two options.

'A year into this, the case worker called and said, you haven't fulfilled the things you need to do to get them back,' said Urps, who has a five-year-old daughter.

'Option one is to sign away your rights, you get one final visit and then we leave the file open so when they turn 18 they can come and find you if they want.

'Option two is you can fight this and we will close the files and you will never see them again. She felt like she had no choice but to agree.

'And so she saw them for one final occasion in February last year. They were instructed to remain upbeat, not to cry or the visit would be terminated.

'Once the family left the facility everyone broke down.'

Phares never saw her adorable, blonde-haired daughter again. She knew nothing about the new family her three kids were living with until she learnt about Victoria's homicide from news bulletins.

Urps says they have been completely shut out by authorities and know little more than what's in the papers and written in heavily-redacted arrest reports.

The family have started a petition to reform Social Services on Change.com, calling it 'Victoria's Law'

In a newly released 911 call, Jerry Robinson can be heard saying: 'Our daughter is unresponsive. She's drunk a lot of water.'

The dad-of-five tells the operator the family are trying CPR before the call gets cut off.

He calls again, pleading: 'My three-year-old daughter is choking on water right now. We need help immediately.'

Victoria was rushed to the hospital but first responders were so suspicious they reported it to police as a possible abuse and aggravated assault case.

According to a coroner's report, the cause of Victoria's death several hours later was multiple blunt force injuries and nothing to do with water.

Robinson, who does not have a criminal record, and her husband were arrested five days later and were denied bond ahead of a bail hearing on Friday.

She's also been barred from teaching by State officials and the Food Network has scrubbed all the episodes of Worst Cooks in America she appears in from streaming platforms.

Victoria's biological family and her previous foster mom held a small funeral for her last week at a church graveyard in Traveler's Rest, north of Greenville, where she had originally lived with her mom.

Urps said the family had to fight officials just to get approval to bury the youngster's remains.

They asked that her two brothers be invited to say their final goodbyes but the boys were not brought along to the service.

On January 6, after the Capitol riot, Robinson tweeted about how some of her kids have white privilege and others don't

It's believed they have been placed back into the foster care system while Robinson's two biological sons are being cared for by other family members.

In the meantime Urps has started a petition on the Change.org website calling on state lawmakers to reform the SCDSS.

By Tuesday morning her demand for 'Victoria's Law', which calls for better screening and non-scheduled visits to check how children are being treated, had attracted more than 26,000 signatures.

'It's going to take time, you can't tear down the entire system overnight,' Urps told DailyMail.com.

'Casie had some issues, we do not deny that, but the system was supposed to help reunite her with her children, not shut the door on her.

'Victoria Rose was happy, she was in loving home. She was never abused or harmed in any way until she was placed with those people.'


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Activist Rona Wilson (Image: YouTube/ Dalit Camera)

Key evidence against Rona Wilson and 15 other rights activists and intellectuals accused in the Bhima Koregaon case was planted using a malware on his laptop, The Washington Post has reported.

A new forensics report by Arsenal Consulting, a US digital forensics firm has revealed that an attacker had used a malware to infiltrate the laptop belonging to Wilson before he was arrested. The hacker had deposited as many as 10 incriminating letters on the system.

The Pune Police used these letters as its primary evidence against the accused.

One of the letters retrieved from Wilsons laptop was addressed to a Maoist militant requesting them to assassinate Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In the letter, Wilson reportedly also discussed the supply of guns and other ammunition.

The Arsenal Consulting report said these letters were planted on Wilsons computer and the attacker also controlled and spied on his device with the help of a malware.

Notably, Arsenal has not identified the perpetrator of the cyberattack on Wilsons laptop yet.

Arsenal claimed that this is one of the most serious cases involving evidence tampering they have ever seen. Their report said the cyber attacker compromised the contents of the laptop over almost two years.

It started back in June 2016, when Rona Wilson received a couple of emails from a person who appeared to be a fellow activist acquainted to him. The other activist had reportedly urged him to click on a link to download a statement from a civil liberties group. However, upon being clicked, the link deployed NetWire, which gave the hacker the access to Wilsons device.

The hacker used the malware to create a hidden folder where the 10 incriminating letters were deposited. The letters, as per Arsenal, were drafted using an advanced version of Microsoft Word that did not even exist on Wilsons laptop.

The digital forensics firm also found zero evidence of the documents or the hidden folder ever being opened by Wilson.

The Arsenal report noted that Wilson was not the hackers only victim. Amnesty International had revealed in 2020 that nine people who tried to help the activists accused in the Bhima Koregaon case were also targeted with emails containing similar malicious links that deployed NetWire.

Interestingly, in both Amnesty and Arsenals reports, the same domain names and IP addresses have appeared.

The accused were arrested and charged with waging war against the nation and spreading the ideology of the CPI (Maoist), besides creating caste conflicts and hatred in the society after one person died, and several others sustained injuries following violent clashes in Maharashtras Pune on January 1, 2018.

The incident took place when people had gathered in the Koregaon area to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Koregaon  in which a British battalion comprising of Dalit soldiers had defeated the Peshwas. The Dalits celebrate this as their day of victory over the oppressive upper caste rulers.

The activists, including Gautam Navlakha, Sudha Bhardwaj, and Varavara Rao, police alleged, funded the Elgar Parishad meeting held on December 31, 2017, where inflammatory speeches were made, which eventually led to the violence.

The case was transferred to the National Investigation Agency (NIA) in January 2020 after the Bharatiya Janata Party government in Maharashtra lost the elections to the Shiv Sena-Congress-NCP alliance.
First enrollment in the study expected in Q1 2021

Regulatory News:

CARMAT (FR0010907956, ALCAR) (Paris:ALCAR), the designer and developer of the world's most advanced total artificial heart, aiming to fulfill an unmet medical need by providing a therapeutic alternative to people suffering from end-stage biventricular heart failure, today provides an update on its early feasibility study (EFS) in the United States.

The FDA has granted CARMAT approval to use the new version of its artificial heart in the EFS. This new version includes certain improvements in the prosthesis and the wearable system based on clinical experience gained in the PIVOTAL study. The company believes that this latest version should further improve patient safety and quality of life.

In view of this, the Company confirms that it expects the first enrolments in the EFS in Q1 2021.

As a reminder, CARMAT obtained the approval from the Centers for Medicare Medicaid Services (CMS) for the reimbursement of the device and associated services within the framework of this study in May 2020.

Stephane Piat, Chief Executive Officer of CARMAT, says: "We are pleased to provide this new version of our artificial heart, which is similar to our CE-marked product, to the US study centers. Despite the Covid-19 pandemic, we were able to train and initiate three of them before the end of 2020. These centers are now ready to enroll patients. We also intend to pursue the training and initiation of additional selected centers."

About CARMAT: the world's most advanced total artificial heart project

A credible response to end-stage heart failure: CARMAT aims to eventually provide a response to a major public health issue associated with heart disease, the world's leading cause of death: chronic and acute heart failure. By pursuing the development of its total artificial heart, composed of the implantable bioprosthesis and its portable external power supply system to which it is continuously connected, CARMAT intends to overcome the well-known shortfall in heart transplants for the tens of thousands of people suffering from irreversible end-stage heart failure, the most seriously affected of the 20 million patients with this progressive disease in Europe and the United States.

The result of combining two types of unique expertise: the medical expertise of Professor Carpentier, known throughout the world for inventing Carpentier-Edwards heart valves, which are the most used in the world, and the technological expertise of Airbus Group, world aerospace leader.

The first physiologic heart replacement therapy: given the use of highly biocompatible materials, its unique self-regulation system and its pulsatile nature, the CARMAT total artificial heart could, assuming a successful clinical development, potentially save the lives of thousands of patients each year with no risk of rejection and with an enhanced quality of life.

A project leader acknowledged at a European level: with the backing of the European Commission, CARMAT has been granted the largest subsidy ever given to an SME by Bpifrance; a total of 33 million.

Strongly committed, prestigious founders and shareholders: Matra Defense SAS (subsidiary of the Airbus Group), Professor Alain Carpentier, the Centre Chirurgical Marie Lannelongue, Truffle Capital, a leading European venture capital firm, ALIAD (Air Liquide's venture capital investor), CorNovum (an investment holding company held 50-50 by Bpifrance and the French State), the family offices of Pierre Bastid (Lohas), of Dr. Antonino Ligresti (Sante Holdings S.R.L.), of the Gaspard family (Corely Belgium SPRL and Bratya SPRL) and of M. Pierre-Edouard Sterin (BAD 21 SPRL), Groupe Therabel as well as the thousands of institutional and individual shareholders who have placed their trust in CARMAT.

For more information: www.carmatsa.com

Name: CARMAT

ISIN code: FR0010907956

Ticker: ALCAR

Disclaimer

This press release and the information contained herein do not constitute an offer to sell or subscribe to, or a solicitation of an offer to buy or subscribe to, shares in CARMAT ("the Company") in any country. This press release contains forward-looking statements that relate to the Company's objectives. Such forward-looking statements are based solely on the current expectations and assumptions of the Company's management and involve risk and uncertainties. Potential risks and uncertainties include, without limitation, whether the Company will be successful in implementing its strategies, whether there will be continued growth in the relevant market and demand for the Company's products, new products or technological developments introduced by competitors, and risks associated with managing growth. The Company's objectives as mentioned in this press release may not be achieved for any of these reasons or due to other risks and uncertainties.

No guarantee can be given as to any of the events anticipated by the forward-looking statements, which are subject to inherent risks, including those described in the Universal registration document filed with the Autorite des Marches Financiers on March 13, 2020 under number D.20-0126 as well as changes in economic conditions, the financial markets or the markets in which CARMAT operates. In particular, no guarantee can be given concerning the Company's ability to finalize the development, validation and industrialization of the prosthesis and the equipment required for its use, to manufacture the prostheses, satisfy the requirements of competent authorities, enroll patients, obtain satisfactory clinical results, perform the clinical trials and achieve commercial objectives.

Aeson is an active implantable medical device commercially available in Europe ONLY, CARMAT SA., CE0344. The Aeson TAH is intended to replace ventricles of native heart and is indicated as a bridge to transplant in patients suffering from end-stage biventricular heart failure (INTERMACS classes 1-4) who are not amenable to maximal medical therapy or LVAD and are likely to undergo heart transplant in the 180 days following device implantation. The decision to implant and the surgical procedure must be executed by Health Care professionals trained by the manufacturer. Carefully read the documentation (clinician manual, patient manual alarm booklet) for characteristics and information necessary for patient selection and good use (contraindications, precautions, side effects).

In the USA, Aeson is currently exclusively available within the framework of clinical trials.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210210005725/en/

Contacts:

CARMAT

Stephane Piat

Chief Executive Officer

Pascale d'Arbonneau

Chief Financial Officer

Tel.: +33 1 39 45 64 50

contact@carmatsas.com

Alize RP

Press Relations

Caroline Carmagnol

Tel.: +33 6 64 18 99 59

carmat@alizerp.com

NewCap

Investor Relations

Strategic Communication

Dusan Oresansky

Quentin Masse

Tel.: +33 1 44 71 94 94

carmat@newcap.eu
Netizens recently had a field day after Kangana Ranaut compared herself to Hollywood actresses Meryl Streep and Gal Gadot. The Manikarnika star in her tweet, claimed that she has raw talent like multi-Oscar winning actress Meryl Streep, and can do skilled action and glamour like Wonder Woman star Gal Gadot.

If that was enough, in another tweet, the actress promised to give up being 'arrogant' if someone is able to name a better actress than her. When a netizen accused her of blasphemy, the actress claimed Meryl Streep could never do a film like Queen, and said that Indians' reverence for her was a result of their 'slave mentality'.

Kangana's self-appreciation tweets were mocked by many people, and some even called it her 'self-obsession' and 'arrogance'.

Amid this, actor Ishaan Khatter took to his Instagram story to share a noteworthy quote by Meryl Streep that read, "My achievement, if you can call it that, is that I've basically pretended to be extraordinary people my entire life, and now I'm being mistaken for one." For those who don't know, The Devil Wears Prada actress had made this statement while addressing the Princeton University in 2006.

Earlier, Richa Chadha had shared a checklist for narcissistic personality disorder in a tweet, which made many fans speculate that it was her response to Kangana's self-praise tweets.

Coming back to Kangana, the Dhaakad actress not only compared herself to Meryl Streep and Gal Gadot, but also claimed that she is better than Hollywood actor Tom Cruise when it comes to performing action scenes.

a Ranaut Claims She Is Better Than Tom Cruise When It Comes To Action" title="ALSO READ: Kangana Ranaut Claims She Is Better Than Tom Cruise When It Comes To Action" />ALSO READ: Kangana Ranaut Claims She Is Better Than Tom Cruise When It Comes To Action

ALSO READ: Kangana Ranaut Flaunts Her Acting Range, Compares Herself To Meryl Streep & Gal Gadot
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. (February 10, 2021) - Brain volume, verbal IQ, and overall IQ are lower in children with Type 1 diabetes (T1D) than in children without diabetes, according to a new longitudinal study published in Diabetes Care, a journal of the American Diabetes Association. The nearly eight-year study, led by Nelly Mauras, MD, a clinical research scientist at Nemours Children's Health System in Jacksonville, Florida, and Allan Reiss MD, a Professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine in California, compared brain scans of young children who have T1D with those of non-diabetic children to assess the extent to which glycemic exposure may adversely affect the developing brain.

"Our findings indicate that, despite improved glycemic control now possible with emerging technologies, individuals with T1D are at risk for cognitive dysfunction," said Mauras, principal investigator of the study, and Chief of the Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes & Metabolism at the Nemours Children's Health System in Jacksonville, Florida, and Professor of Pediatrics at the Mayo College of Medicine. "Our longitudinal data support the hypothesis that the brain is a target of diabetes complications in young children. Whether these changes can be reversed with scrupulous diabetes control requires further study."

The research team - from the Diabetes Research in Children Network (DirecNet), a multicenter National Institutes of Health-funded consortium - studied 144 children with T1D and 72 children without diabetes. Participating children had a median age of 7 years and average disease duration of 2.4 years when the study began. All study participants underwent structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies, as well as age-appropriate cognitive testing. In those with T1D, metabolic control was assessed using continuous glucose monitors (CGM) and hemoglobin A1C (HbA1C) testing. Over the eight-year study period, up to four MRIs were performed measuring white- and gray-matter volumes in various brain regions for all participants. In the T1D group, the research team assessed total cumulative hyperglycemic exposure since diagnosis.

The researchers found that total brain volume, gray- and white-matter volumes, overall IQ, and verbal IQ were lower in the diabetes group at 6, 8, 10, and 12 years, compared to controls. Differences at baseline persisted or increased over time, and brain volumes and cognitive scores declined as lifetime HbA1C index and higher sensor glucose rose.

"Although differences in cognition were mild - around 4 IQ points - this magnitude is similar to other conditions that affect the brain," said Mauras. "We know that T1D can cause complications in multiple organ systems, and our study adds knowledge to earlier research which suggested that glucose level variation in T1D can negatively affect brain development, beginning in childhood."

"It is truly important to follow-up on these results in two ways. The first is to study this and other populations of indiviudals with T1D into young adulthood to see if and how brain and cognitive issues affect long-term educational and vocational outcome. The second is to see if more rigorous early control of blood sugars can stop or even reverse the brain and cognitive effects we have observed in this study," said Reiss, co-principal investigator of the study and Robbins Professor and director, Division of Interdisciplinary Brain Sciences at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

Future research should examine whether improved diabetes control could possibly reverse the observed brain changes, and such studies also might follow individuals with T1D into young adulthood to see whether and how brain and cognitive issues affect long-term education and vocational outcomes.

###

The DirecNet consortium includes Nemours Children's Health System Jacksonville, Fla.; the Stanford University School of Medicine; Washington University, St Louis; University of Iowa; and Yale University.

This study was funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Development at the National Institutes of Health.

About Nemours Children's Health System

Nemours is an internationally recognized children's health system that owns and operates the Nemours Children's Specialty care in Jacksonville, FL, where the study was conducted, Nemours/Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Wilmington, Del., and Nemours Children's Hospital in Orlando, Fla., along with outpatient facilities in six 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.

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.
MasterChef Australia judge Melissa Leong confirmed her split from husband Joe Jones in December, almost four years after they tied the knot in California.

And it seems as though Joe, who owns the Romeo Lane cocktail bar in Melbourne's CBD, is being comforted by friends as he moves on from his failed marriage.

The tattooed businessman held hands with an unidentified female pal as they took a stroll through the city on Tuesday.

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Friends: Joe Jones (right), the estranged husband of MasterChef judge Melissa Leong, went for a stroll in Melbourne with an unidentified female friend (left) on Tuesday

End of the road: The sighting comes weeks after food critic Melissa (left) confirmed the couple's split in a post shared to Instagram on December 20

Daily Mail Australia is not suggesting they are anything more than friends.

Tattooed Joe wore a white linen shirt, which he teamed with smart black trousers.

His female companion kept things casual in a jumper and leopard-print shorts, which she paired with flat ankle boots and oversized sunglasses.

Pals: Joe, who owns the Romeo Lane cocktail bar in Melbourne's CBD, held hands with the woman. Daily Mail Australia is not suggesting they are anything more than friends

Stylish: The tattooed businessman wore a white shirt, which he teamed with smart black pants

Outing: Before they briefly held hands, Joe and his friend had entered a house together as he clutched two bottles of champagne

Chic: Joe's female companion kept things casual in a jumper and leopard-print shorts, which she paired with flat ankle boots and oversized sunglasses

Wardrobe change: They were inside the property for a few minutes, during which time the woman changed out of her grey jumper and into a black one

Before they briefly held hands, Joe and his friend had entered a house together as he clutched two bottles of champagne.

They were inside the property for a few minutes, during which time the woman changed out of her grey jumper and into a black one.

That same day, Joe shared a video to Instagram of the pair strolling down the street with a male pal, which he captioned: 'Day for the favourites.'

The sighting comes weeks after food critic Melissa, 40, confirmed the couple's split in a post shared to Instagram on December 20.

Trio: That same day, Joe shared a video to Instagram of the pair strolling down the street with a male pal, which he captioned: 'Day for the favourites'

'It has brought us such happiness to walk together, but the time has come for Joe and I to part ways and walk on, apart,' she wrote.

'We ask for your kindness and consideration for our privacy, we will not be making any further comment as our private lives have, and will always remain exactly that.

'We wish you peace at the end of such a challenging year for all.'

Before the break-up, Joe was last seen on Melissa's account in late June, when she uploaded a photo of him holding their cat Ghost.

The pair married in a small ceremony at California's Joshua Tree National Park in February 2017, after dating for just five months.

Busy: While the reason for Joe and Melissa's split has not been disclosed, the bartender hinted in February last year as they celebrated their three-year anniversary that his wife's filming schedule for MasterChef had taken a toll on their relationship

'I first met him briefly at his bar in Melbourne, Romeo Lane,' Melissa previously told TV Week of their whirlwind romance.

'Then we met again properly about 18 months later at a function. We started talking there and we've just not ever ceased since really. It's pretty cool.'

While the reason for their split has not been disclosed, Joe hinted in February last year as they celebrated their three-year anniversary that Melissa's filming schedule for MasterChef had taken a toll on their relationship.

Their story: The pair married in a small ceremony at California's Joshua Tree National Park in February 2017, after dating for just five months. Melissa and Joe are pictured in happier times

'Mel is in the depths of one of the most challenging, defining career moves of her life,' he wrote on Instagram.

He then claimed things 'aren't always easy' in marriage, and that his wife's work schedule meant the pair were unlikely to 'see a lot of each other today'.

'The sentiment behind my feelings is that most things worth doing aren't always easy and have the capacity to be dramatic and really stressful at certain times,' he added.

'But I sort of believe the hard parts of your life overlapping and trying to dissolve your comfort is what living really is, and even if it gets heaps harder - I'm still happy to do it with you.'
Burma Woman Shot by Myanmar Police During Anti-Coup Protest Declared Brain Dead

The 20-year-old collapsed abruptly after being shot during Tuesdays protest. / Facebook

Ma Mya Thwet Thwet Khine, a 20-year-old student who was shot in the head by a police officer during an anti-coup protest in Naypyitaw on Tuesday, was pronounced brain dead that night.

Video footage that has gone viral on Facebook shows that she made no attempt to get past the police barricades at the scene. She collapsed abruptly after being struck in the head by a bullet while taking cover from water cannons under a bus-stop shelter.

The bullet that struck her was a live round, not a rubber bullet, a doctor from a medical team in Naypyitaw who requested anonymity told The Irrawaddy, adding that the bullet pierced the motorcycle helmet she was wearing and lodged in her head.

She is brain dead. The bullet that lodged in her head is still there; it cant be removed, the doctor said. He added that Ma Mya Thwate Thwate Khaing had no chance of recovery because she is being kept alive by artificial life support. She is currently in the intensive care unit at Naypyitaw 1,000-Bed Hospital.

The military reportedly requested that Ma Mya Thwate Thwate Khaing be transferred to their facility but doctors at the Naypyitaw hospital refused and kept the patient under their care.

The youth protester cast her first vote in the 2020 general election, the results of which were rejected by the military. It is widely believed that she was targeted among the crowd as she was wearing a red shirt. Red is the color of the National League for Democracy, the ousted ruling party led by detained State Counselor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.

One of her close friends told The Irrawaddy that before she was shot, they were planning celebrations for her 21st birthday on Thursday. She was also preparing to retake her matriculation exam once her school, which is currently closed due to COVID-19, reopened.

The shooting has been widely denounced as an atrocity, as police reportedly deliberately took aim and fired lethal weapons not designed for riot control at protesters who were unarmed and who were not attempting to cross security perimeters established by the authorities. A picture has spread widely on social media showing a deputy police chief overseeing security forces in Naypyitaws Thapyaygone aiming a gun at protesters as they were being violently dispersed.

Another demonstrator who was shot into the chest was also hospitalized. At least four others were also injured by gunshots during the crackdown.

Following Tuesdays violent police crackdown on demonstrators in Naypyitaw, Mandalay and other cities, the UN office in Myanmar and the US government expressed concern about the military regimes treatment of peaceful protesters, denouncing the use of disproportionate force against demonstrators as unacceptable.

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UN, US Offer Support for Peaceful Protest Against Myanmar Military Regime
NABEREZHNYE CHELNY, Russia -- Well-known Tatar writer and activist Fauzia Bairamova has been found guilty of a charge of calling for the violation of the Russian Federation's territorial integrity in a speech that she says was distorted because of translation errors.

A court in Tatarstan's second-largest city, Naberezhnye Chelny, on February 9 found Bairamova guilty of the charge and ordered her to pay a 30,000-ruble ($400) fine.

Bairamova pleaded not guilty, insisting that the translation of her speech from Tatar into Russian contained errors that distorted the essence of what she told a conference organized by the All-Tatar Public Center (TIU) almost a year ago.

In her speech, Bairamova quoted a poem by a prominent 20th century Tatar activist, Khadi Atlasi, that called for Tatars to have their own statehood.

Bairamova was fined 10,000 rubles previously for a speech she gave at an annual event in Tatarstan's capital on the day of Commemoration of Tatars fallen during the 1552 siege of Kazan by Russian troops. In that speech Bairamova called Tatarstan's leadership "a colonial administration" and said that Tatars "are losing their national identity."

In 2010, Bairamova was handed a 1 year suspended prison term on a charge of inciting ethnic hatred for her words, while in 2014, she received another 1 year suspended sentence for public statements condemning Russia's annexation of Ukraine's Crimea.

NGOs and activists in Russia's national republics and regions that are involved in promoting ethnic cultures, languages, and equal rights for indigenous ethnic groups have been under pressure in recent years.

Bairamova's trial was held less than a week after TIU Chairman Farit Zakiyev launched a hunger strike to protest a move by prosecutors to shut down his organization and label it as extremist.

In the neighboring Republic of Bashkortostan, a court banned a prominent group that had long promoted the Bashkir language and culture in May last year.
Shes currently involved in an ongoing bitter divorce and custody battle with her estranged husband.

And Jaime King was seen on Tuesday on a visit to her old house in West Hollywood, California, to see her two boys that she shares with her ex Kyle Newman.

King, 41, was in a lovely chevron patterned coat for the visit, along with bootleg bluejeans.

On her way to see her kids: Jaime King was seen on Tuesday on a visit to her old house in West Hollywood, to see her two boys that she shares with her ex Kyle Newman

The Sin City stars coat hung to just below her knees.

Underneath, she wore a black top with a colorful leaf pattern.

The actress wore heeled lace-up black boots, and she held a glass bottle of Coca-Cola.

Jaimes blonde hair was in a retro 70s-style bowl cut with bangs.

Retro hair: King was in a lovely chevron patterned coat for the visit, along with bootleg bluejeans and black lace-up shoes

The My Bloody Valentine actress shares sons Leo Thames, five, and James Knight, seven, with her filmmaker ex Kyle, 44.

The pair were married in 2007.

Last May, King filed for divorce and also requested a restraining order against Newman, alleging that he had abused her during the last five years of their 12-year marriage.

Later in the year, she was granted the temporary restraining order against him, and has had it extended once.

Seen on Instagram: The My Bloody Valentine actress shares sons Leo Thames, five, and James Knight, seven, with her filmmaker ex Kyle

In a counter-claim, Newman described his estranged wife as an alleged addict and alcoholic who has endangered their two sons.

In November, the Fanboys director filed for sole physical custody of their two children, wherein he claimed he has been 'the children's primary caretaker since their birth' and that the children 'have spent the large majority of 2020 in my sole custody.'

A representative for King maintain Newman's lawyers 'filed selectively redacted documents which perpetuate a false narrative about Jaime', and that her priority is the well-being of their boys.


WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Jeff Bezos is ranked No. 1 on the Chronicle of Philanthropy's annual list of top 50 American charity donors in 2020.



In a year the world was grappling with COVID-19, economic recession and racial tensions, they channeled big sums to a broader set of causes such as food banks, pandemic relief, racial justice efforts, and universities and organizations that serve the poor and the homeless.



Bezos, the founder of Amazon Inc., donated $10 billion to launch the Bezos Earth Fund and $100 million to Feeding America, the organization that supports more than 200 food banks. The billionaire resigned as Amazon CEO last week to devote more time to philanthropy and other projects.



Bezos, who topped the rankings in 2018 with more than $2 billion in philanthropy, could not find a place in the list in 2019.



Former wife of Jeff Bezos, MacKenzie Scott is the second biggest donor in the United States. The novelist and philanthropist donated $5.7 billion of her fortune to 512 organizations ranging from food banks to social justice advocates and racial-justice charity organizations. Having a net worth of $57.5 billion, 50 year old Scott is the third-wealthiest woman in the world.



Top U.S. philanthropist and founder of Bloomberg financial news company Michael Bloomberg is ranked third, donating $1.6 billion in 2020. The former New York mayor and presidential candidate has consistently been placed among the Chronicle of Philanthropy's annual list for 16 years.



Nike co-founder Phil Knight and his wife Penny Knight are ranked next with a total contribution of $1.4 billion. The couple's biggest gift was $900 million to Knight Foundation. Additionally, they donated $300 million to the University of Oregon.



Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey is ranked fifth. He donated $1.1 billion that included funding for COVID-19 relief efforts, girls' education and health, and universal basic income. More than 100 nonprofits have benefitted from his generosity.



Retired hedge-fund manager John Arnold and wife Laura ($567 million), former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and wife Wendy ($469.6 million), eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and wife Pam ($441 million), Construction magnate Frederick Kummer and wife June ($300 million), and Banker Denny Sanford ($224.2 million) make up the top 10.



The Chronicle of Philanthropy is a magazine that covers the nonprofit world of philanthropy. Based in Washington, DC, it is aimed at charity leaders, foundation executives, fund raisers, and other people involved in philanthropy.



Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

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Hong Kong, Hong Kong , Feb. 09, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- GCAM Limited, a Hong Kong-based asset investment management company, recently launched its new website as a part of its rebranding efforts. The company, which has been offering discretionary portfolio services, estate and inheritance planning, family office services, financial planning services and broad-spectrum investment management solutions, recently brought new leadership onboard, and also revamped its website to serve their clients better than ever before.

Owners of GCAM Limited told the press that the redesigned and revamped website will offer easy and quick access to all the essential information and the advanced features that can help the clients get a detailed understanding of the asset and investment management solutions that the company offers. They added that clients, both new and old, and first-time visitors to the site can have access to a clean design, enhanced functionality, and rich and optimized content which would help them find the right solution at their fingertips.

People can find detailed information on the products and services offered by our company right on the home page of the revamped website. If they wish to know more about the services, they can click on the respective service page links and visit the pages to gather more information. We are a company committed to assisting out clients in making wise asset investment decisions. We take pride in our proven effective research capabilities, unparalleled strategy, and unmatched customer service that are aimed at helping our clients attain their financial goals, said one of the top executives of the asset investment management company.

GCAM Limited is one of the top-flight investment management companies in Hong Kong. The company serves a global clientele and offers a diverse array of financial solutions, including discretionary portfolio solutions for both businesses and individuals. Just like the role of China Mobile, China Unicom, China Telecom in promoting 5G Network to increase the network capacity, GCAM Limited is a pioneer in providing advanced investment management solutions to help their clients more effectively around the word.

The CEO and managing director of the company, who was present at a recent press conference, said, Prospective investors need to have access to quality information and insights. Our new website will be regularly updated with latest product launches, business activities, expert inputs and latest insights so that investors can always make an informed decision. We hope they can make good use of the website and the services we offer to attain their financial goals.

About the Company

GCAM Limited is an asset investment management company based in Hong Kong.

To know more, visit https://www.gcam-hk.com/

Hong Kong company number: 0896714

Company SFC Registration number (AKS953).

Contact Info:

Name: Conroy Eu

Email: Send Email

Organization: GCAM Limited

Address: Office Tower, Galuxe Buiding, 8-10 on Lan Street, Central, Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Phone: +852-3002-2377

Website: https://www.gcam-hk.com/




Features, Health and Society Editor

South Africa-based Zimbabwean funeral and repatriation service provider Zororo -- Phumulani yesterday donated R100 000 towards University of Zimbabwe (UZ) student SteveJohn Matapire's hospital bills.

To ensure SteveJohn continues with his education online after surgery, Zororo-Phumulani, the biggest single donor towards his surgery, also gave him a laptop.

The donation was made at SteveJohn's brother Alex's residence in Louis Tritchard, Limpopo province, South Africa.

SteveJohn's sister-in law Rebecca received the donation on his behalf as he was in pain.

Speaking at the handover, Zororo Phumulani corporate marketing manager, Mrs Robertta Mutimbiri said: "The plight of SteveJohn touched us as an organisation that believes in equipping our youths for life. We did not look at the time he will spend in hospital, but we are looking at him after he has recovered. We will allocate a laptop from our 2021 give away promotion above hospital bills that we will take care of. He will use the laptop to catch up online so he does not continue missing out on his studies."

Rebecca said she was grateful for the timely donation, which will ensure SteveJohn undergoes the surgery. She revealed that following the donation, SteveJohn will be admitted in hospital today (Wednesday).

"This means a lot, we are short of words for the kindness and the help from Zororo Phumulani. The doctors will tell us when he will be operated on, but he will be admitted to hospital tomorrow (today)," she said.

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She added: "Zororo-Phumulani heard our plea and they reached out and came where we stay. They saw him and donated R100 000 for his treatment until all is done. They also gave him a laptop."

She also thanked Zimbabweans all over the world who also contributed towards SteveJohn's surgery.

SteveJohn, a 21-year-old UZ student has a huge tumour on his right shoulder and appealed for financial assistance for an emergency operation.

He was diagnosed with the condition four years ago and has been getting treatment at Karanda Mission Hospital in Mashonaland Central, where he was previously operated on without success.

The operation requires R150 000, based on the quotation they were given by doctors before Zororo-Phumulani's assistance, the family had only managed to raise part of the money through well-wishers.

Zororo-Phumulani, powered by Doves Zimbabwe, was founded by the current chief executive officer, Mr Edwin Anderson.

According to Zororo Phumulani, they believe that the best way to ensure a child's future is to give them education. For this reason, the company said, they always answer the call when active youths like SteveJohn call for help.
The news of Rajiv Kapoor's death made its way to the internet yesterday shortly after the actor and filmmaker breathed his last when he succumbed to a heart attack. At the time of his passing, Rajiv Kapoor's age was all of 58 years old. Rajiv Kapoor's family members, such as the likes of his nephew, Ranbir Kapoor & Aadar Jain were seen attending their late uncle's last rites, which began from the departed's Chembur residence, where he breathed his last. Pictures from Rajiv Kapoor's funeral featuring members from Rajiv Kapoor's family can be found below.

Also Read: Rajiv Kapoor's Death: Alia Bhatt Returns From Maldives To Be With Ranbir Kapoor's Family?

The image below sees Alia Bhatt joining the Kapoor family as a mark of support for them shortly after cutting short her vacation in the Maldives. The picture also shows that Rajeev Kapoor's niece, Karisma Kapoor was in close proximity with the star. The pictures can be found below.

Also Read: Ranbir Kapoor-'Kabir Singh' Director Sandeep Reddy Vanga To Gift New Year Surprise To Fans

The Pictures:

The picture below, on the other hand, sees Rajiv's two nephews, Ranbir and Aadar taking Rajiv's mortal remains to its final resting place. Accompanying the two were several members of Rajiv Kapoor's family. The pictures can be found below.

Image Source: PR Handouts

About Rajiv Kapoor's movies:

The late actor made his debut with 1983's Ek Jaan Hain Hum. But, he made his first movie as a leading man in 1985's Ram Teri Ganga Maili, a film that co-starred Mandakini & would soon go on to receive the status of a blockbuster. The following years would see him play central or pivotal parts in presentations like Lover Boy, Zabardast, Aasmaan and Hum To Chale Pardes. Post his debut production venture, which was 1990's Zimmedaar, the actor would go on to solely fulfil behind-the-camera roles up until the end of his time.

Also Read: Riddhima Kapoor Sahni Shares Heartwarming Childhood Picture With Father Rishi Kapoor

Once the news of Rajiv Kapoor's death made it to the film fraternity, the likes of Sanjay Kapoor and his better half, Maheep Kapoor took to Instagram in order to share a throwback picture featuring Sanjay and him. In addition to the same, through the post, the two actors can be seen communicating that the two will miss him. The pictures can be found below.

The Posts:

Also Read: Karisma Kapoor Posts Throwback Photo, Asks Fans To Guess Name Of The Song

Get the latest entertainment news from India & around the world. Now follow your favourite television celebs and telly updates. Republic World is your one-stop destination for trending Bollywood news. Tune in today to stay updated with all the latest news and headlines from the world of entertainment.
WASHINGTON - House impeachment managers on Wednesday led a rapt U.S. Senate on a harrowing retelling of the terror that engulfed the Capitol last month, sharing shocking new audio and video recordings of rioters declaring their intent to harm Vice President Mike Pence and other top officials - and showing how close they came to doing so.

The House Democrats, led by lead manager Jamie Raskin, D-Md., spent Day 2 of former president Donald Trump's impeachment trial displaying violent video scenes of the Jan. 6 attack and the rioters' relentlessly raw language, including chants to "hang" Pence and a sinister clip of a man looking for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi asking, "Naaaancy? Where aaaare you, Nancy?"

All of it, the impeachment managers said, was a direct result of the president's months-long effort to persuade his supporters of the "big lie" that the election had been stolen. After he had exhausted all other options to overturn President Joe Biden's victory, they said - including dozens of lawsuits and a sustained campaign to pressure state election officials - Trump turned his sights to Jan. 6, the day Congress was scheduled formalize Joe Biden's electoral college victory.

His supporters, the managers said, were heeding his calls with their violent plans to stop the vote count and even harm lawmakers.

"President Trump put a target on their backs," said Stacey Plaskett, a Democratic House delegate from the Virgin Islands, describing the threat to lawmakers and Pence. "And his mob broke into the Capitol to hunt them down."

Worse still, she and the other managers said, is that when lawmakers, Trump's aides and even his family members implored the president to call off the rioters as the attack unfolded, he refused initially to do so - because, the managers argued, he hoped the mayhem would block the electoral vote count.

"Senators, you've seen all the evidence so far," Rep Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, said toward the end of nearly eight hours of arguments. "And this is clear: On January 6th, President Trump left everyone in this Capitol for dead."

It was unclear whether the dramatic new evidence would change the minds of Republicans, most of whom have indicated their intent to acquit the former president on charges that he incited the Jan. 6 insurrection. A conviction would require the support of two-thirds of senators in the evenly divided chamber.

"They spent a great deal of time focusing on the horrific acts of violence that were played out by the criminals, but the language from the president doesn't come close to meeting the legal standard for incitement," said Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas.

Still, some GOP senators appeared shaken by the graphic video presentation, which included wrenching footage of an officer howling in pain as the mob crushed him in a doorway.

As the Senate recessed for dinner, Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., appeared to grow emotional at his desk, bending his head down. Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., who sits next to him, put his hand on Lankford's arm as if to comfort him.

"The evidence that has been presented so far is pretty damning," said Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, who has indicated she is open to conviction.

Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., called the case laid out by the House "gut-wrenching," adding: "I just hope that our Republican colleagues have an open mind."

Over and over again, the impeachment managers implored the senators to consider the message they wanted to send to Americans about the character of our country.

"That's the question before all of you in this trial: Is this America?" Raskin said. "Can our country and our democracy ever be the same if we don't hold accountable the person responsible for inciting the violent attack against our country?"

The House Democrats were expected to continue making their case Thursday, with Trump's lawyers expected to mount their defense Friday and Saturday. The Senate is not expected to vote on whether to allow witness testimony until after that, though Republicans and Democrats alike have said they want the trial to move at a swift pace. Democrats are eager to turn their attention back to President Biden's Cabinet appointees and a coronavirus relief bill, while Republicans simply want to turn the page on the former president's role in the insurrection.

In their presentations, the House managers revealed several gripping new details about the events that unfolded on Jan. 6 - including new surveillance footage showing Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, running down a hallway at a police officer's instruction seconds before rioters breached windows downstairs.

The officer, Eugene Goodman, had already been commended for leading rioters away from the Senate chamber as it was being evacuated, an act of heroism documented on a reporter's cellphone and widely circulated. The new scene with Romney took place just before then, the House managers said.

During a break in the trial, Romney told reporters he had no idea how close he'd been to harm's way - nor that Goodman was the officer who had helped him.

"I look forward to thanking him when I next see him," he said, adding: "It was obviously very troubling to see the great violence that our Capitol Police and others were subjected to. It tears at your heart and brings tears to your eyes. That was overwhelmingly distressing and emotional."

The managers also showed just how intent some of the rioters were on doing harm to elected leaders, actively searching for Pence at the same time he was being evacuated from a room off the Senate floor.

As Goodman led the mob up the stairs, the rioters were at one moment within 100 feet of the small room where the vice president was sheltering with his family, according to Plaskett. Goodman led the mob away from where Pence was hiding.

Surveillance video then shows Pence, along with his security detail and members of his family and staff, being evacuated down a Capitol stairway to a secure location away from the building. The evacuation took place at 2:26 p.m. - 14 minutes after rioters had entered the building.

On the other side of the building, the pro-Trump mob was banging on locked doors in search of Pelosi. House managers zoomed in on a widely circulated photo of a man sitting in a chair in Pelosi's office to reveal that he was wearing a stun gun on his belt.

As the House team walked senators through a timeline of the day's events, the managers used a diagram of the building to show where the rioters were in relation to elected officials - and how close they came to confrontation.

In another newly released bit of footage, Schumer can be seen being ushered along a basement hallway, disappearing - and then hastily changing direction with his security team after they encountered rioters blocking their planned route.

Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., showed senators an image of one rioter inside the Senate chamber with a large bunch of plastic handcuffs on his hip. "If the doors to this chamber had been breached just minutes earlier, imagine what they could have done with those cuffs," he said.

Salwell had the full attention of the Senate chamber with a 30-minute presentation designed to show them the events of Jan. 6 they were less familiar with: what happened on the House side and how police confronted the mob on the West Front of the Capitol.

He also played a chilling video of House members instructing one another to take off their identifying lapel pins.

Not until 2:30 p.m., 15 minutes after the Senate had stopped its proceedings and secured its doors, did the House fully implement internal security measures.

Republicans and Democrats intently watched every video Swalwell played, building to the confrontation just a few feet from the floor of the House chamber where a police officer shot and killed a rioter trying to enter the chamber.

Swalwell paused, and the Senate was silent as the sound of the gunshot resonated from the video. He then turned to footage of the rioters' attacks on police, again leaving the Senate in stunned silence.

When the impeachment managers began their presentation, which showed how the rioters flooded through the halls of the Capitol, many senators strained in their seats to get a better view of the video monitor.

In the back row on the Democratic side, Sens. Mark Warner of Virginia and Michael Bennet of Colorado took to their feet to watch. Bennett eventually sat down, but Warner paced behind his seat for several minutes before sitting back down.

On the Republican side, senators showed little emotion - but all paid close attention, most turning their heads away only occasionally to take notes.

As Plaskett played audio of police officers urgently summoning help, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell appeared very focused, leaning over to watch the screen on the GOP side. GOP Sen. Mike Lee of Utah took furious notes as he watched.

Trump is apparently aware of the emotional punch of the Democratic case. According to one adviser, he has pushed his team to produce its own videos to counters those of their opponents - including shots of Democratic lawmakers making controversial statements over the years.

The former president has talked to a number of advisers in the past 24 hours about the trial, including Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., his former chief of staff Mark Meadows, adviser Jason Miller and his lawyers, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Trump was displeased with the meandering presentation Tuesday by his lawyer Bruce Castor, but his team has persuaded him for now to stick with Castor and promised that the weekend would bring more prepared presentations.

The House managers began the day with a meticulous presentation documenting how Trump provoked the riot for weeks - beginning with his refusal to commit to a peaceful transfer of power before Election Day and his preemptive assertion that his defeat would mean the election had been rigged.

Senators heard him exhort his supporters in combat terms that "the election was stolen," to "stop the steal" and "to fight like hell." The impeachment managers described how Trump lost legal challenge after legal challenge - yet continued to claim he'd actually won the election. They documented how he pressured state officials in key battleground states to overturn the results.

And when all of those efforts failed, he set his sights on Jan. 6, the day Congress was scheduled to certify Biden's electoral college victory, because he "ran out of nonviolent options to maintain power," said Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif.

Trump even sent what the House managers described as a "save the date" message to his supporters more than two weeks ahead of Jan. 6, tweeting, "Be there, will be wild!"

Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, one of the impeachment managers, told senators that Trump's goal all along was "to make sure that his supporters were angry, like the election was being ripped away from them." And he showed how the resentment that Trump cultivated built up, playing footage of CNN interviews with Trump supporters who said they believed a Biden win would not be legitimate.

"Now, all of us in this room have run for election - and it's no fun to lose," Castro said. "I'm a Texas Democrat. We've lost a few elections over the years. But can you imagine telling your supporters that the only way you could possibly lose is if an American election was rigged and stolen from you? . . . But that's exactly what President Trump did."

"His words," Castro added, "became their actions."

The impeachment managers closed the day with a rundown of Trump's actions once the riot had begun. Castro showed video of Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., who first went on Twitter to tell Trump to "call it off" before giving a live television interview making the same plea. Castro also cited tweets by Mick Mulvaney, then-U.S. special envoy for Northern Ireland, and then-White House communications director Alyssa Farah urging Trump to call off the rioters because he is "the only one they'll listen to."

Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who has advised Trump, said on Jan. 6 that Trump not calling off the attack on the Capitol was an "abrogation of his responsibility" as commander in chief."He's right! Chris Christie is right!" Castro said. Rep. David Cicilline, D-R.I., laid out Trump's actions as the attacks were unfolding, showing how the president did nothing to stop them and instead remained focused solely on delaying the recognition of Biden's victory.

"We all know that President Trump had the power to stop these attacks. He was our commander in chief. He had the power to assess the security situation, send backup, send help. He also had incited this violent attack. They were listening to him. He could have commanded them to leave," Cicilline said. "But he didn't."

- - -

The Washington Post's Josh Dawsey, Colby Itkowitz, Seung Min Kim, Mike DeBonis, Ann E. Marimow, Amy B Wang and John Wagner contributed to this report.
Reporter

Debra Pressey is a reporter covering health care at The News-Gazette. Her email is dpressey@news-gazette.com, and you can follow her on Twitter (@DLPressey).

TORONTO, ON / ACCESSWIRE / February 10, 2021 / Fury Gold Mines Limited (TSX:FURY)(NYSE American:FURY) ("Fury" or the "Company") is pleased to provide an update on its regional exploration plans at the Eau Claire project located in the Eeyou Istchee Territory in the James Bay region of Quebec. This summer the Company plans to explore the Percival trend, which is located 14 kilometres (km) east of the Eau Claire deposit. Percival was the site of a 2018 discovery that included drill intercepts of 78.5 metres (m) of 1.46 g/t gold (Hole ER18-822) and 87m of 2.35 g/t gold (ER18-823)[1] from surface (Figure 1). The mineralized footprint at Percival is 400m by 100m and is hosted within sulphidized and silicified breccias in a sedimentary sequence in multiple parallel stacked lenses (Figure 2). This represents a second style of mineralization at the Eau Claire project that Fury's technical team believes is largely underexplored.

"Over the past six months our technical team has identified considerable opportunities to increase ounces at Eau Claire and expand upon past discoveries throughout the land position. At Percival we have significantly advanced the detection of surface mineralization under till cover using biogeochemistry. This opens up the entire property for new target development as we plan to explore the Percival, Serendipity and North Structure trends this summer," stated Michael Henrichsen, SVP, Exploration of Fury.

Geochemistry Advancement at Percival

The Percival prospect did not provide a gold response from the historical till sampling data that covered the mineralization, leading the Company to conduct various orientation geochemical surveys over the zone in an attempt to obtain a direct high contrast gold response from the mineralized bedrock overlain by shallow tills. Fury was successful in detecting the gold mineralization at Percival through biogeochemistry sampling where spruce branches are collected, ashed and then assayed. Samples were collected every 50m on two lines spaced 100m apart and gold results showed a cluster of elevated values over the area of mineralization (Figure 3). These elevated results demonstrate the effectiveness of the technique and the Company plans to utilize it in select structural corridors across the Eau Claire property package to aid in the development of new drill targets (Figure 1).

2021 Regional Exploration Plans

Fury plans to conduct an extensive biogeochemistry program across the Eau Claire property with the goal of developing new drill targets in 2021. In conjunction with the geochemical surveys, ground-based induced polarization geophysical surveys are planned along the Percival trend to fingerprint the geophysical signature of the mineralization. The Company believes that the sulphide-rich silica breccia bodies at Percival will image well based on the high resistivity and chargeability responses and that there will be a high potential for similar responses along trend from the observed mineralization.

Figure 1: Eau Claire prospect map and 2021 biogeochemical sampling plan on reduced to pole magnetics.

Figure 2: Percival Prospect >0.5 g/t gold interpolant with historic drilling highlights.







Figure 3: Comparison of historic till geochemistry and 2020 biogeochemical sampling.

David Rivard, P.Geo, Exploration Manager at Fury, is the Qualified Person who assumes responsibility for the technical disclosures in this press release.

Biogeochemical Samples

Biogeochemical samples were taken by collecting of approximately 200 grams of black spruce twigs and sent to ALS Lab in Vancouver, BC (ISO/IEC 17025:2017 and ISO 9001:2015 accredited facility) for preparation and analysis. Preparation included drying, separation needles from twigs and ashing of needles only at 475C for 24 hours (VEG-ASH01). Ashed samples are analyzed for 65 elements using nitric/hydrochloric acid digestion with ICP-MS finish (ME-VEG41a). QA/QC programs using lab duplicates, standards and blanks indicate good accuracy.

About Fury Gold Mines Limited

Fury Gold Mines Limited is a Canadian-focused exploration and development company positioned in three prolific mining regions across the country. Led by a management team and board of directors with proven success in financing and developing mining assets, Fury will aggressively grow and advance its multi-million-ounce gold platform through project development and potential new discoveries. Fury is committed to upholding the highest industry standards for corporate governance, environmental stewardship, community engagement and sustainable mining. For more information on Fury Gold Mines, visit www.furygoldmines.com.

For further information on Fury Gold Mines Limited, please contact:

Salisha Ilyas, Vice President, Investor Relations

Tel: (778) 729-0600

Email: info@furygoldmines.com

Website: www.furygoldmines.com

Forward-Looking Information and Additional Cautionary Language

This release includes certain statements that may be deemed contains "forward-looking information" or "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of applicable securities laws and relate to the future operations of the Company and other statements that are not historical facts. Generally, these forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "plans", "expects", "budget", "scheduled", "estimates", "forecasts", "intends", "anticipates", or "believes", or the negatives and/or variations of such words and phrases, or state that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will be taken", "occur", "be achieved" or "has the potential to". Forward-looking information is information that includes implied future performance and/or forecast information. Forward-looking information and statements in this release reflects management's current estimates, predictions, expectations or beliefs regarding future events. Specific forward-looking information contained in this release, includes information relating to: Fury's exploration programs at its Eau Claire property and specifically, along the Percival trend; Fury's growth plans; and the future growth and development of Fury's mineral properties.

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 information reflects the beliefs, opinions and projections on the date such statements are made and are based on a number of assumptions and estimates that, while considered reasonable at the time, are inherently subject to significant business, economic, competitive, political and social uncertainties and contingencies. Such assumptions, which may prove to be incorrect, include: general economic and industry growth rates; the Company's budget, including expected costs and the assumptions regarding market conditions; the Company's ability to raise additional capital to proceed with its exploration, development and operations plans; the Company's ability to obtain or renew the licenses and permits necessary for its current and future operations; and the Company's assumptions around the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the Company believes that the assumptions and expectations reflected in those forward-looking statements were reasonable at the time such statements were made, there can be no assurance that such assumptions and expectations will prove to be correct.

Forward-looking information involves known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause actual results, performance or achievements of the Company to be materially different (either positively or negatively) from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements, including risks relating, but not limited, to: the COVID-19 pandemic; the future price of minerals, including gold and other metals; and the success of the Company's exploration and development activities. Readers should refer to the risks discussed in the Company's Annual Information Form and MD&A for the year ended December 31, 2019 and subsequent continuous disclosure filings with the Canadian Securities Administrators available at www.sedar.com and the Company's Annual Report on Form 40-F for the year ended December 31, 2019 filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission and available at www.sec.gov. Readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking information, which speaks only as of the date made. The forward-looking information contained in this news release is expressly qualified by this cautionary statement. The forward-looking information and statements contained in this press release represent the Company's expectations as of the date of this press release or the date indicated. The Company disclaims any intention or obligation or undertaking to update or revise any forward-looking information or statements whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required under applicable securities law.

Cautionary Note to United States Investors Concerning Estimates of Mining Disclosure

The mining and technical disclosure throughout this release is made in accordance with applicable Canadian law and the guidelines set out in the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum ("CIM") CIM Definition Standards on Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves ("CIM Standards"). The Company's descriptions of its projects using applicable Canadian law and CIM Standards may not be comparable to similar information made public by U.S. companies subject to the reporting and disclosure requirements under the United States federal securities laws and the rules and regulations thereunder.

[1] Intervals are presented in core length; holes are generally planned to intersect mineralization as close to perpendicular to strike as possible with true widths are estimated to be 75% to 85% of downhole length when hole and dips of the mineralized horizons are considered. Assay presented is not capped. Intercept occurs within geological confines of major zones but have not been correlated to individual structures/horizons within these zones at this time. Vertical depths are 35m and 65m for ER18-822 and ER18-823, respectively, and they are measured from the surface to the mid-point of the reported interval. Refer to Eastmain Resources news release dated November 13, 2018 on www.sedar.com for more information. SOURCE: Fury Gold Mines

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/628854/Fury-Outlines-First-Regional-Exploration-Target-at-Eau-Claire-Summer-Plans-to-Explore-the-Percival-Trend
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Research published today shows how digital providers are coming together to support the mental health needs of millions of users unable to access traditional services during the COVID-19 pandemic.

For the first time ever, digital providers and experts from over 20 countries have gathered a staggering number of insights about mental health during the pandemic from potentially upwards of 50 million users worldwide.

The study, published in Frontiers in Digital Health and led by Dr. Becky Inkster from the University of Cambridge, included a range of digital services, such as patient-to-clinician platforms, digitally-enabled treatments, mental health and wellbeing apps, chatbots and social support networks. It also included insights from financial services providers, and other digital sources, such as the dark web and dark net markets.

The preliminary results paint a troubling and at times bleak picture of the impact that the pandemic is having on people's mental health, but also capture positive aspects, such as peer-to-peer support or virtual companionship for older adults.

"If we're to be ready for the pandemic's long-lasting impact on mental health, we need to get an accurate and broad picture of the situation we're facing," said Dr. Inkster. "We've shown that it's possible for a large number of providers to work together across borders to rapidly gather valuable insights. This could be used to set up an integrated digital system to better understand and respond to people's mental health needs on a global scale in real-time."

Prior to the pandemic, mental health was already a global crisis with the World Health Organization (WHO) reporting that almost 1 billion people globally had a mental health disorder, and that depression was already projected to become the leading cause of disease burden globally by 2030.

According to the WHO, mental health services have experienced substantial disruptions in 130 countries during the pandemic. This has been confirmed by clinician surveys and analyses of primary care records showing a sharp decline in clinical presentations of mental illness in April 2020 compared with expected rates. If treatment needs are delayed or undetected, there is a serious risk that pre-existing symptoms will worsen, and that new cases of mental illness will emerge.

There is mounting evidence that mental health problems have become more common since the pandemic began. Millions of people have lost loved ones. Survivors who received critical care are at increased risk of post-traumatic stress disorder. Health care workers on the front lines face anxiety, burnout, trauma-related stress and other struggles. At the same time, lockdowns separate people from family, friends, and schools, while leaving others trapped in abusive households, or turning to self-destructive behaviors. Many people have lost, or are at risk of losing, their jobs and face serious financial difficulties.

The authors of this study believe that digital providers can help address delays in mental healthcare, and deliver frontline services by offering support, treatment, and real-time monitoring of mental health. Such services can also detect how people react and respond to events that have an impact on their lives. For example, one peer mental health support network reported a substantial increase in the number of suicidal posts soon after schools closed in England in March 2020.

Co-author, Thomas R Insel, MD, co-founder of Humanest Care, said: "Just as the viral pandemic has accelerated vaccine development, this global crisis has brought together mental health experts from the public and private sector around the world to address what is surely a second pandemic triggered by loss, anxiety, and social isolation. This report captures the scale and scope of this emerging mental health crisis."

ORCHA (the Organization for the Review of Care and Health Apps), the world's leading health app evaluation and advisor organization, was also a co-author of this paper. Founding CEO, Liz Ashall-Payne, said: "We've watched the use of mental health apps increase by over 200% during lockdown. This valuable international project shines a light on a crisis in the making and we must continue to collaborate to ensure citizens are supported in every way possible."

Dr. Inkster added: "Part of the value of these digital platforms is that they encourage people to seek support through means in which they feel comfortable. At the same time, it's important to recognize that not everyone chooses or is able to access such services, and so it remains a continuing priority to find ways to reach everyone who is vulnerable."

Some illustrative examples of insights from the study include:

Changes in the type of information individuals are seeking or presenting

At the start of the first lockdown, many providers saw an increase in the number of users searching for information and resources about mental health issues, from information on anxiety to strategies for coping with domestic violence and advice on getting support through to access to food. Examples include:

ORCHA have observed a 7,500% increase in searches for health-apps related to the prevention of self-harm, a 176% increase for apps dedicated to the management of depression, an 86% increase in searches for mental health apps for the treatment of anxiety, and a 328% increase in searches for apps related to sleep.

Participants in the It's Ok To Talk discussion forum raised questions about anxiety, strategies to manage work, studies, sleep, dealing with domestic violence and difficult home relationships.

Babylon reported that many patients are seeking advice on information about local council support services, seeking advice for activities to keep busy and how to remain healthy, and how to get support to access food and relating to financial concerns.

Ieso Digital Health reported that up to a third of patients mention COVID-19 as a reason for presenting for mental health treatment and also reported a rise in patient worries about viruses, with up to 15% of in-session worries about COVID-19.

Providers saw significant increases in mental health-related issues among their users

For example:

Mental Health America reported that 45% of people who took an anxiety screen in March scored for severe anxiety.

Kooth reported increases in child abuse (69%), sadness (161%), health anxiety (155%), sleep difficulties (90%), concerns over body image (43%), eating difficulties (31%), loneliness (23%), and bereavement (20%) in young people (aged 10-17)

The Mental Health Foundation reported that respondents felt increasingly lonely, and that this was most pronounced for people aged 18-24 (44%) and 25-34 (35%).

Teen Line showed an increase of reports of child abuse by 166%

MeeTwo reported 27 suicidal posts between 8.30am and 8pm on 22 March 2020 (48 hours after schools were closed), as compared to 406 suicidal posts in all of 2019. There was a 95% increase in level 4 (severe risk) between 20 March and 4 April 2020, as compared to 20th December 2019 and 4th January 2020.

Mumsnet showed that 72% of surveyed users were concerned about their family's mental health during the coronavirus outbreak and the lockdown (3-6 April).

An increase in users seeking support

Digital mental health providers saw an increase in the number of people seeking help. For example:

Qare reported that teleconsultations with a psychiatrist increased by 382% in March 2020 compared to February 2020. The number of teleconsultations with a psychologist increased by 195% in March 2020 compared to February 2020.

BeyondNow reported a 53% increase in downloads of its suicide safety planning app from February to March 2020, compared to a 17% increase from January to February 2020.

Vala Health reported a doubling in volume of mental health-related consultations with GPs during the period 10 March to 8 April 2020. By week four of the UK lockdown, general health enquiries had returned to almost pre-COVID levels, but mental health consultations continued to rise.

National Alliance on Mental Illness reported a 41% increase in demand for HelpLine resources and information.

Ieso Digital Health reported an 84% increase in referrals to their 1-1 online cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) service in the weeks since the lockdown was announced in the UK, relative to the same time period in 2019.

Mentally Aware Nigeria Initiative (MANI) recorded the highest number of emergency calls in the month of April. 26% of these calls were cases of panic attack, 8% bordered around incessant low moods and the rest (66%) were suicidal.

Financial concerns leading to poor mental health

Examples include:

Tully and OpenWrks Group reported that 81% of self-employed customers have declared that they do not have any work coming in due to COVID-19. 50% of their wider sample have had income reduced and 19% have lost their income.

A Turn2us survey showed that 70% of respondents who have had employment affected are unable to afford rent or mortgages.

A Money and Mental Health Policy Institute survey reported a range of concerns by respondents with lived experience of mental health problems about how changes, as a result of COVID-19, might affect their finances: 62% worried about having to access the benefits system, 57% worried about losing their job and 56% worried about creditors chasing them for money.

The rise of digital peer support networks

On a positive note, providers who offer peer support networks saw an increase in the number of people offering support during these difficult times, for example:

Papa reported that 53% of users felt less lonely and that virtual companions have performed a range of tasks with elderly users, such as obtaining medications and online grocery shopping.

Digital Peer Support trained 750 peer support specialists between 10 March and mid-April 2020.

Wisdo reported a 283% increase in the numbers of people replying to other people's messages and an increase of 115% in the number of people signing up for roles to provide support for others.

Explore further Fewer people sought help for mental illness during the UK's first lockdown

More information: Becky Inkster et al, Early Warning Signs of a Mental Health Tsunami: A Coordinated Response to Gather Initial Data Insights From Multiple Digital Services Providers, Front. Digit. Health, 10 February 2021, Becky Inkster et al, Early Warning Signs of a Mental Health Tsunami: A Coordinated Response to Gather Initial Data Insights From Multiple Digital Services Providers,, 10 February 2021, doi.org/10.3389/fdgth.2020.578902
CDC Study: Schools Are Low Risk For COVID Spread

By West Kentucky Star Staff

WASHINGTON DC - As vaccine rollouts ramp up across the nation, more school districts have been returning to in-person classes. However, some parents, and even teachers unions, think it's still too soon.Now, a report from the Centers for Disease Control backs up school and health leaders. The January report indicates there has not been significant spread of the virus in K-12 schools since many U.S. districts returned to classrooms in the fall.The CDCs report, released in the journal of the American Medical Association, makes a case for returning primarily or fully to in-person instructional delivery.After schools across the country closed in March, COVID-19 spread quickly through the spring and summer in long-term care facilities, meat packing plants and jails.The report says those outbreaks led to fear of the same happening in public schools. But comprehensive data from the CDC shows that as long as schools practice social distancing, wear masks, and sanitize surfaces whenever possible, schools can remain safe spaces for students to stay healthy.School leaders maintain that theyve balanced the concerns as best they can. And local health officials have provided information showing that transmission within schools is low, even at times when numbers rose in the overall community.Of course, some students have contracted COVID-19, but the fact that few of the cases were transmitted within the school coincides with CDC research.The appropriate evaluation of (in-person class) risks vs. benefits was hampered by limited information about transmission risk in classroom settings, the new report reads.Closing schools could adversely affect students academic progress, mental health, and access to essential services; however, if (COVID-19) rapidly spread in classrooms, opening schools might accelerate community transmission of the virus. There were no simple decisions for parents, teachers, administrators, or public officials.The question is, does it make a difference whether or not boys and girls are physically present in schools?" a Georgia administrator asked.  We're seeing record numbers of trauma, abuse, mental health issues, students in poverty, who are falling further and further behind. We made the decision early on that when we could make it work, these kids need to be in school.The director at the CDC said she believes there is a safe way to get students back in the classroom before everyone is vaccinated, but the official guidelines are not expected to be released until later this week.On the Net:
Los Angeles, Feb 10 : Hollywood star Halle Berry asserts that no man has ever taken care of her. She made the revelation after Instagram trolls left negative comments suggesting she struggled with keeping her men.

A user replied claiming that is not "what most wives tell their husbands who pay for everything".

Berry replied: "Well i'm not one of them. no man has ever taken care of me.... EVER!" Another netizen said that she "had some trouble with men" in her life, she fired back: "Nope, they had trouble with me".

Berry said that she is focused on living her "best life" and learning from the mistakes she made in the past.

A person told Berry to ask herself what she is "doing wrong" and said that she "can't keep a man".

Berry replied: "Who said i wanted to keep them? i'm all about living your best life. if you make a wrong move, course correct and re-spin and start again!" Incidentally, producer Kenneth 'Babyface' Edmonds had earlier shared that the late king of pop Michael Jackson once wanted to date Berry.

He said: "One time Michael called me. Michael said, 'Babyface!' I said, 'Yeah?' He said, 'Do you know who Halle Berry is? Do you know Halle Berry?' I said, 'Yeah, I know Halle Berry.' He said, 'Could you do me a favour? I want you to call her, 'cause I wanna take her out on a date.' I said, 'What?' He said, 'Call her -- I wanna take her out on a date'. So I reached out through the agent, 'cause I didn't have Halle Berry's number. So I called and get the message to her manager, and he said, 'What?' (I said), 'Yeah, he wants to take her out on a date'," Edmonds recalled, to "keep a man", according to a femalefirst.co.uk report.

The producer however didn't think she was interested in Jackson.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text

The situation at the mall was ridiculous, said Carolyn Webber who came with her 95-year-old mother to get vaccinated on Monday. We arrived with an appointment for 11 a.m. We were outside for over an hour and then inside for another hour. Mom received her vaccination at 1 p.m.

Webber told MassLive that only due to the kindness of a stranger was she and her elderly mother, Mary Burney, able to return to their car to warm up while he kept their spot in line at the Eastfield Mall super vaccination site in Springfield.

I arrived with my mom, totally unprepared for the situation. We were stuck, I could not leave my mom in the car in 20-degree weather by herself and she could not stand for an hour in the line outside, Webber recalled.

Theres no reason for individuals to be standing out in the cold or not social distancing, said Maranda Gottlieb, vice president of marketing at Curative. They can sit in their cars until their appropriate vaccinations time where then they will be able to be received indoors and vaccinated.

One issue with sitting in their cars waiting for an appointment is rushing back to the main doors in the snow and ice. As an 81-year-old, who only wanted to be known as Joe, told MassLive on Monday, if they leave to warm up in their car, they will not only lose their spot but have to rush back in the snow and ice when a Curative staff member calls out their appointment time.

Private medical company, Curative have worked to keep residents out of the cold by reorganizing their site indoors. (Douglas Hook / MassLive)

The Eastfield Mall site, operated by the private health care company Curative opens at 9 a.m. and is one of several mass vaccination sites across the state. The site on Boston Road opened on Jan. 29 and is the only super vaccination site in Western Massachusetts. On Feb. 1, the mall opened its doors for those 75 years and older.

Since the mall opened under Curative, staff at the site have given 7,059 vaccine doses as of Tuesday. The site currently has a total of 45 staff working in the mall, 25 of them are nurses.

Curative also noted to MassLive that they will be looking to hire an additional 21 staff members over the next four days and will continue hiring for the next two weeks. As of Tuesday they are giving 2,000 doses per day and hope to scale up to 5,000 in the coming weeks.

Curative is operating the site inside the mall and the police officer and several individuals were communicating with patients that were lined up outside of the doors, said Gottlieb. So, numerous individuals -- Curative and others including the security officer -- communicated with patients to ask them to wait in their cars until 15 minutes prior to their appointment because it creates an issue with the queue.

On Monday morning, there didnt seem to be any markers placed to promote social distancing and there appeared to be only one greeter outside directing hundreds of people. Furthermore, the mayors office clarified that the Springfield Police Departments role at the site is not to direct people but to provide security.

Webber was one of the many that spoke to MassLive on Monday that said that they had not spoken to any of the Curative staff. Also, there seemed to be confusion by staff on-site over who should oversee the lines and ensure social distancing guidelines were followed.

David Thompson, property manager of the Eastfield Mall, told MassLive that he was informed by Curative that they would be overseeing the lines of those there for vaccinations.

Gottlieb agrees that outside in the cold is not an appropriate staging area and stated that the way the site was designed indoors did not account for the numbers that were arriving for their vaccination.

Private medical company, Curative have worked to keep residents out of the cold by reorganizing their site indoors. (Douglas Hook / MassLive)

We run multiple vaccination sites around the country, Gottlieb highlighted. Having people arrive during their allocated time is really critical to ensuring that we have the right throughput and were able to manage that number of people.

She explained that the people that arrived early were taken in and vaccinated before they were booked, not wanting to turn anyone away.

Whatever the cause, a large backlog was obvious this week. The results of that could be seen by the long queues outside on Monday.

Thats brutal. I rode up there. It was cold yesterday, but they waited because they want that vaccine, said State Rep. Bud Williams. We have to figure out a better way to get them in.

Williams, a Springfield Democrat, said access has been a concern for Springfield residents since the start of the vaccine rollout. The line of people waiting outside in the cold was the latest example.

One of the 10 National Guard medical personnel stands outside the doors at the Eastfield Mall vaccination site. (Douglas Hook / MassLive)

On hearing of the long lines outside of the mall on Monday, Springfield Mayor Domenic J. Sarno spoke with both Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito and Curative Site Director Dean Shultis to resolve the issue.

Springfield Police Commissioner Cheryl Clapprood and the mayor also sent additional police cruisers to the mall on Tuesday to ensure that seniors are not being left outside.

After hearing of the reports of older residents waiting outside in sub-freezing temperatures on Monday, the state deployed 10 National Guard medical personnel to help with vaccination administration, observation and patient flow under the direction of the states vaccination Command Center.

Im not about pointing fingers, said Sarno to MassLive on Tuesday. Im about, lets solve the problem.

The Springfield mayor sees smaller vaccination sites providing an answer to issues seen at the Eastfield Mall. He noted that his administration has sadly had to deal with many disasters and feels that having the ability to operate smaller sites would be a huge benefit to many in the city.

[Health and Human Services Commissioner Helen Caulton-Harris] and I again would love if the vaccine numbers continue to increase from the federal level, Sarno stated. Wed like to get our own amount for targeted populations and neighborhood areas of the city. But I cant do anything until we get something in hand.

David Thompson, Eastfield Mall property manager offered Curative more space in the mall for older residents to shelter while waiting for their vaccination. (Douglas Hook / MassLive)

Tuesday saw a much smoother operation, partly due to the Eastfield Mall property manager offering those waiting to be vaccinated a warm space to wait until they get called for their appointment.

Thompson told Masslive that after seeing the people waiting outside on Monday and especially the age group of over 75s, he called Curative on Tuesday morning and asked them if they would like to use the other section of the mall near to the vaccine entrance.

Due to the issues seen at the site, the Massachusetts vaccine command center will closely monitor operations at the Eastfield Mall vaccination location and will assist in staffing as needed.

Sarno added that Curative will also be subject to a review of its systems approach for contacting and updating senior citizens on their appointments.

A Curative employee walks through the enterance of the mall to tell people that they are accepting more appointments through the doors. At this time he was calling for 2 p.m. booking. They were half an hour behind schedule. (Douglas Hook / MassLive)

Outside of the Eastfield Mall at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, there were no longer long lines waiting in the cold, no elderly shivering outside. The problems seen in previous days seemed to have been addressed.

For some, however, the experience has been traumatic not just for themselves, but for their older relatives.

If we had known about this situation, we would not have gone to the Eastfield Mall, Webber said of Mondays experience.

She went on to state that once inside the people were pleasant, understanding and helpful.

We feel like the people in charge of the operation are responsible for the lack of efficiency, Webber said. And therefore, the very difficult, if not impossible circumstances.

Massachusetts State House reporter Steph Solis contributed to this report.

Related Content:

Vice President Nangolo Mbumba has called on African leaders to safeguard the continent's indigenous languages, saying language is a central and integral part of African culture and identity.

Mbumba made this call on Saturday during the virtual 34th Ordinary Session of the African Union Assembly of Head of States and Government held under the theme: "Arts, Culture and Heritage: Levers for Building the Africa We Want".

"We should safeguard our indigenous languages and give them due priority at all levels of education from early childhood development to tertiary levels, across our continent," Mbumba said.

Furthermore, he said, Namibia's work in the area of arts, culture and heritage draws inspiration from the African Union Agenda 2063, more specifically aspiration that calls for shared and strong cultural identity, values, ethics and Pan- African consciousness.

Therefore, he said Namibia expresses commitment to these values and re-affirms its unwavering commitment to the AU Cultural Agenda.

"Culture is vital in building social cohesion within a diverse population, as well as sustaining peace, which is a precondition for development," he said.

The VP said the inclusion of a specific section dealing with arts and culture in Namibia's National Development Plan (NDP) is a clear testimony that the country recognizes the fundamental role that heritage and culture play in human development both as an enabler and a driver of sustainable development, in particular for women and the youth.

"The arts, culture and heritage industries have over the past few years emerged as alternative sources of employment in Namibia and significant means to assert the people's national identity, supported specialised national institutions in these areas," Mbumba said.

Close Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox Top Headlines Namibia Governance Entertainment By submitting above, you agree to our privacy policy. Success! Almost finished... We need to confirm your email address. To complete the process, please follow the instructions in the email we just sent you. Error! Error! There was a problem processing your submission. Please try again later.

He said art, culture and heritage bring economic benefit in the form of commercialisation or commodification, including through cultural tourism, as well as music and film production and distribution.

"The national and traditional cuisine of any country is an integral part of its culture, with significant economic benefits," he said.

Mbumba said in Namibia, the recognition, respect and valuation of artists, innovators and cultural practitioners as well as the country's indigenous knowledge systems, innovations and practices, are continuously enhanced.

In order to ensure that maximum benefit is derived from the arts, Mbumba said culture and heritage innovations, intellectual property laws are enforced at the national level in line with the relevant conventions of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) as well as the Universal Declaration on Cultural Development (UDCD).

He said the country is also in the process of revising its, Copyright and Neighbouring Rights Protection Act 6 of 1994, to ensure sufficient protection for creators, particularly in the digital environment that characterises the world today.
Here's what you need to know: Wednesday, Feb. 10
Offensive conversations at the dinner table will not constitute a hate crime, law reform chiefs have decided.

The Law Commission had proposed extending hate crime laws into private houses, meaning heated dinner party conversations could have landed the hosts or guests with a police probe and a possible jail sentence.

But the commissioners have decided against broadening the reach of the law which criminalises hostility towards an individual because of their race, religion, sexuality or disability.

Offensive conversations in one's own home will not constitute a hate crime, Lord Justice Green (pictured) has decided

The legal chiefs are now looking at different ways the law could be applied that would not criminalise private comments at home, The Telegraph reported.

The 500-page review will be presented to ministers later this year and forms part of a potential overhaul of hate crime laws.

It could see gender, age, subcultures such as goths and sexual fetishists, and asexual people added to the list of protected characteristics covered by the law.

The commission's chairman Lord Justice Green acknowledged concerns that their proposed plan to include comments made in private homes could result in people being prosecuted for 'the mere giving of offence'.

In England and Wales, speech stirring up hatred is only a potential offence when said in public, or in a private place where it can be listened to from outside.

Dinner table conversation will not lead to a police probe and a potential prison sentence, law chiefs say

Lord Justice Green said in his letter to Lord Pearson and Lord Vinson that the exemption is 'poorly targeted' because it would protect guests at a third party's home but not two family members in a car.

He wrote: 'To use an extreme example, it could protect words used in an address to an organised meeting in a stately home.'

The commission chief is now looking at a different solution to remove the inconsistency in the law.

He wrote: 'The criminal team is looking at alternative ways in which the law might be reformed in order to ensure that these laws, which criminalise only the most serious forms of incitement, are compatible with both the right to freedom of expression and respect for one's home and private and family life.'

But he is not proposing any change to the level for what is considered to be hatred under the law.

The number of hate crimes reported to police has doubled since 2013, government figures show.

Lord Justice Green said in his letter to Lord Pearson (left) and Lord Vinson (right) the current law is 'poorly targeted'

In 2019 the majority of recorded hate crime offences were racially motivated, with 80,000 cases.

Reports to police of homophobic hate crime have almost trebled in the seven years since same-sex marriage became legal in England.

Harry Miller, a businessman, former policeman and founder of Fair Cop, which opposes hate crime rules, said at the time of the proposed change: 'If the private home law is adopted by Government, a comment over the dinner table about a huge range of people could lead to a prison sentence.

'Human rights laws protecting privacy and family life would be in the bin. This is a neo-Marxist idea and will generate unfriendliness between different communities where there is none.'

Sarah Phillimore, a barrister and fellow Fair Cop campaigner, said: 'I cannot believe the Government is being asked to consider surveillance of citizens in their own home. How will the evidence of such hate crimes be collected?

'Will we have an East German-style secret police like the Stasi?'

Andrew Rosindell, the Tory MP for Romford in east London, added: 'People are already afraid of freely speaking in public because of hate speech laws which they believe stop them even telling a joke.

'The police have enough to do without investigating what is said inside homes.'
The video showed Trump speaking at a rally the day of the insurrection. The trial is about the events of Jan. 6, but also about how Trump for years laid the groundwork that the only way he could lose an election would be if it was rigged against him.
Young men in Tajikistan who wish to forgo the dreaded experience of military service may now do so by paying a fee to the government. This opt-out provision came into effect on February 4 under changes to legislation regulating conscription, Eurasianet writes in the article Tajikistan: Military service exemption tax comes into effect. A representative at the Defense Ministry told Eurasianet that the size of the fee is not yet known and will later be calculated by the government.

In Tajikistan, military service is nominally compulsory for every male citizen aged between 18 and 27. Only people with physical or cognitive disabilities are exempted. Many manage to evade service by paying bribes or through connections, however. Enrolling at university is another method of reprieve, as studies typically include a military-preparedness course that qualifies as exemption. Others will leave the country for anywhere up to 10 years to avoid call-up.

This urge is understandable as conscripts are invariably subjected to brutal and relentless hazing. Every year brings around a dozen or so tales of young men dying while doing their military service. In order to meet annual call-up quotas, military recruiters scour cities and towns in a hunt for eligible levees. Often, men are literally snatched off the street in what is in effect tantamount to an abduction campaign. In the weeks of peak press-ganging activity, it is known for eligible young men to hide out at their homes for weeks on end.

From an official standpoint, the idea of an opt-out fee is a no-brainer. It could, if properly implemented, raise much needed revenues for a permanently cash-starved government. And it monetizes an already existing state of affairs.

While presenting parliament with the draft bill on the conscription opt-out fee on January 20, Defense Minister Sherali Mirzo noted that only 10 percent of eligible young people are enlisted to do military service each year.

Under the new system, anybody who has paid the required tax will need to serve only one month before receiving ID attesting to having performed levy duties. This document will come in handy for more than just avoiding being accidentally re-conscripted. Only people who have done military service will be permitted to obtain employment with the government or join the army in a professional capacity.

Not everybody will be celebrating, however. University students will no longer receive a military ticket by default, meaning they will now have to pay the exemption fee.

And a human rights activist who works on documenting violations in the army told Eurasianet, on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, that the opt-out is merely going to lead to formation of a conscript army of the impoverished. The army should be high-quality. People who truly want to serve the homeland should be the ones enlisting. But by introducing a charge for avoiding military service, we are just moving toward having a poor army. People with money can skip service, and those who do not will have to service in the army, the activist said.

Mumbai, Feb 10 : Television actress Anita Hassanandani and husband Rohit Reddy welcomed their first child, a baby boy on Tuesday evening. Rohit took to social media to share the news.

Rohit shared a photo from the actress' maternity photoshoot with pregnant Anita lying on the bed, where he can be seen kissing her cheek. The words "It's a boy" are written in the background. "Oh Boy!" Rohit captioned the photo.

Congratulatory messages poured in for the new parents from industry colleagues as well as fans and social media followers, who showered the newborn with their love.

"Boy I'm also a parent. Aunt-parent. Anita and Rohit Congooo!" Ekta Kapoor shared on Instagram story.

"Heartiest congratulations Anita and Rohit. So so so happy for you guys," shared Ankita Lokhande.

Karanvir Bohra commented: "Yahooo congratulations!"

Image Source: IANS News

Maanvi Gagroo, Hina Khan, Barkha Sengupta, Bharti Singh, Ankita Bhargava, Aniruddh Dave, Nakuul Mehta, Kishwer Merchantt, Bani J, Madhurima Tuli were among those who posted congratulatory messages for the couple.

Meanwhile, a photo shared by Rohit on his Instagram story from the hospital room has gone viral. In the photo Anita lies in the hospital bed with a smile on her face holding husband Rohit's hand who is seated next to her. Rohit captioned the photo: "Love you, baby. Most beautiful moments ever."

-- Syndicated from IANS
The Secretary-General of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) Secretariat, Wamkele Mene, has, since assuming office in March 2020, persistently hammered on the urgent need for effective implementation of the trade pact to stimulate Africa's recession-threatened economy.

Mene reiterated that theme on 3 December at the virtual launch of the Futures Report: Making the AfCFTA Work for Women and Youth.

Produced by the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and the AfCFTA Secretariat, the 100-page report details challenges and opportunities in intra-African trade, and reflects the views of some of Africa's leading development experts, policy makers and business leaders, as well as the lived experiences of traders, including women and youth.

The authors tout the report as "a timestamp, capturing ambitions and efforts to begin trading under the terms of the AfCFTA Agreement, scheduled for January 2021."

The AfCFTA is not just a trade agreement; it is also an instrument for development intended to lift 100 million Africans out of poverty by 2035, Mr. Mene said at the launch.

Appropriately, contributors canvass the involvement of women and young people in the AfCFTA--as participants and as beneficiaries.

"The AfCFTA is an opportunity to tap the talents of young Africans and women to ensure inclusive benefits," noted Mene.

Edem Adzogenu, co-Chair of AfroChampions, a platform that promotes African companies, warns in his contribution: "The AfCFTA is one of the greatest achievements of 21st century Africa, but it will fail unless it is inclusive--in design and implementation."

The case for women and youth as key stakeholders in Africa's economic development is easy to make: Africa's informal sector accounts for 85% of the continent's total economic activity; and while women account for 90% of the labour force in the informal sector, they constitute 70% of informal traders.

Also, 60% of Africa's population is under the age of 25, making Africa the world's youngest continent.

While a main goal of AfCFTA is a dramatic increase in intra-African trade, Ahunna Eziakonwa, Assistant Secretary-General and Director of UNDP's Regional Bureau for Africa, described the current intra-trade level of 18% "an indictment."

One of the consequences of such low-level intra-African trade is a loss of good-paying jobs, Ms. Eziakonwa emphasized, in her opening statement at the launch.

Women must be deeply engaged in cross-border trade, they must have access to finance, production network, and markets, she maintained. The UNDP, Ms. Eziakonwa added, was working to help women access virtual markets and participate in e-commerce.

Godwin Benson, CEO of Tuteria, an online learning platform in Nigeria, is one of the young entrepreneurs who contributed to the report.

Benson explains his limited success in expanding his business into other markets on the continent and provides a to-do list to improve trade in services across borders.

First is the need to understand the "needs and nuances of other African markets" so that products and services are better tailored to consumers in various countries, he writes.

Second is the need to engage in strategic partnerships to facilitate access to foreign markets.

Third, he proposes a seamless, cross-border payment system. "It should be easy for customers in Egypt or Rwanda to pay a business in Nigeria... Without seamless intra-African payments, businesses like Tuteria, especially those run by young entrepreneurs, may not be able to trade across the continent."

Lastly, Mr. Benson recommends, "It should be easy and affordable for a Kenyan business to register and commence operations in Nigeria, and vice versa. It would be preferable if this process could be completed online."

The Coordinator of the African Trade Policy Centre at the UN Economic Commission for Africa, David Luke, writes that the AfCFTA could drive post-pandemic recovery and facilitate "broad-based, inclusive growth, absorbing Africa's youth in productive activities, and enhancing gender equality."

Relying on World Bank analysis, Mr. Luke stresses that implementations of the AfCFTA as well as the Trade Facilitation Agreement of the World Trade Organisation "could lead to as much as a 10% increase in wages and contribute to closing the gender wage gap due to larger increases for unskilled workers and women."

He anticipates that agriculture and agro-food processing will generate good-paying jobs for women who constitute about 50% of the labour force in those sectors. Women will also benefit from jobs created in education, health, and tertiary services.

Luke further offers that while women engaging in informal cross-border trade are vulnerable to harassment and violence, the AfCFTA could mitigate such challenges when informal operations are formalized.

Game-changer for women

Potentially, increases in jobs in manufacturing, agribusiness and others could be a game-changer for millions of African women and youth, concurs Angela Lusigi, UNDP's Resident Representative in Ghana, in her contribution to the report.

To reap the full benefits of AfCFTA, Ms. Lusigi contends that women traders must have access to information and training opportunities on trade networks and that their voices must be heard in "AfCFTA negotiations, policymaking and decision-making."

Facilitating cross-border investment, protecting intellectual property rights, collaborating on customs and taxation, and implementing trade facilitation will ensure more equitable and sustainable opportunities, which is critical to the effectiveness of the ongoing liberalization of the services trade.

She adds that leveraging Africa's rich human assets in the AfCFTA requires reflecting the needs of women and youth in the legal and technical frameworks that are being established.

"Facilitating cross-border investment, protecting intellectual property rights, collaborating on customs and taxation, and implementing trade facilitation" will ensure "more equitable and sustainable opportunities, which is critical to the effectiveness of the ongoing liberalization of the services trade," Ms. Lusigi posits.

Luke adds that, "The liberalized continental market provided by the AfCFTA presents an opportunity for local production of pharmaceutical products and healthcare supplies at scale."

He laments the devastating effects of climate change on African economies, currently and in the future, stating that, for example, in a high-warming scenario, Sudan and Tanzania could lose nearly 18.6 per cent of their GDP by 2050.

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Still, he maintains that the global shift toward clean energy could "leave Africa stranded with devalued fossil fuel assets... In limiting global warming to 2C, as much as 26 per cent, 34 per cent and 90 per cent of the gas, oil and coal reserves, respectively, of Africa could be left unused."

Nevertheless, losses from untapped fossil fuel reserves could be offset by opportunities in the value chains around green minerals.

For example, Mr. Luke writes, "The Democratic Republic of the Congo has 47 per cent of the world's Cobalt (needed for making batteries) and Namibia and Zimbabwe have 100 per cent of the world's Caesium reserves and 89% of the world's Rubidium reserves (both used in mobile-cellular global positioning systems).

"Indeed, 42 of the 63 elements used by low-carbon technologies and in the Industrial Revolution (IR) 4.0 are found in Africa," underscoring that the continent sits atop a treasure of green opportunities.

"The AfCFTA could be one good way to bring back perspective, positing the prospect of recovery in home-grown solutions by giving exports a boost and, in doing so, empowering all participants in cross-border trade, especially women and youth," comments Ms. Eziakonwa, in her foreword to the report.

For more information on COVID-19, visit www.un.org/coronavirus12 Service sector. The report also highlights the strangulating effects of COVID-19 on the African economy and accentuates opportunities for sustainable recovery.
Much has been written recently about Sir Edward Carson, the great unionist leader, who declined the offer to become the first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland in February 1921.

Although a strong unionist, nevertheless he regarded himself as a patriotic Irishman. He was not an Ulsterman, but a Dubliner and throughout his life retained his strong Dublin accent.

He wanted a united Ireland, but an Ireland united under the British Crown. Although he regretted the partition of Ireland and supported the setting-up of a truncated Ulster, he saw it as a necessary compromise to keep as many unionists as possible connected with Britain.

However, in 1921, he declared: "What a fool I was! I was only a puppet and so was Ulster and so was Ireland, in the political game that was to get the Conservative Party into power."

What has changed in 2021? Many's a DUP politician, if they are frank, will be privately regretting the same thing Carson publicly regretted in 1921.

Throughout the Brexit debate, the DUP, in particular, have allowed themselves to be puppets in the Tory civil war over Europe.

The DUP MPs, under Nigel Dodds's leadership at Westminster, supported a hard Brexit and supported the hard-line Brexiteers, in the right-wing European Research Group. They opposed Theresa May's softer approach to Brexit, in three successive Westminster parliamentary votes.

Her approach entailed the whole of the United Kingdom remaining within the European Union's customs union. This approach could have avoided most, if not all, of the problematic trade issues that have arisen over the past month, since the United Kingdom finally left the European Union.

DUP MPs enthusiastically supported Boris Johnson and Michael Gove in their efforts to thwart Theresa May and to drive her out of office as Prime Minister. One can have little sympathy for the DUP, especially their MPs, whenever they now vent their spleen at Boris Johnson, because of his shameless betrayal of them over the Protocol.

Boris Johnson promised them that he would get rid of the backstop, which they hated, but instead he delivered the Protocol and the Irish Sea border.

After initially welcoming Johnson's deal with Europe, they were embarrassed into rejecting it, whenever they realised that this was worse than the backstop that was originally proposed.

You really have to ask yourself how could Nigel Dodds and company be so profoundly lacking in foresight? Were they so intoxicated by the pivotal role they had as kingmakers at Westminster, that they accepted whatever pup the Tories sold them?

Had they no sense of long-term strategic thinking about what was best for the future of unionism and their "precious" Union.

Now they blame everybody else for their self-inflicted plight. Some of them see the whole sorry state they are in as a result of a massive conspiracy involving the EU and Irish nationalism to push towards a united Ireland.

Incredibly, they are still in denial that it was Brexit and their stupid miscalculation in supporting a hard version of Brexit, that brought about the current situation.

Bizarrely, the DUP also arrogantly rejected and opposed the pro-European views of the 56% cross-community majority of people here, that voted to stay in Europe.

While they now flail about, shouting incoherently about the iniquities of the Protocol, as they did years ago about the Anglo-Irish Agreement, they forget that there is an even greater existential threat to the Union, namely the increasing prospect of Scottish independence.

This is no longer an increasing prospect, but one that could be realised within a few months, given the widely predicted victory of the SNP in the Holyrood parliamentary elections on May 6.

If that happens, Boris Johnson will be forced into calling an independence referendum, which could spell the end of the United Kingdom as it now is. This will have an enormous impact on our politics.

Surely, any far-sighted unionist must have taken into consideration the hostile reaction of the Scots to Brexit, as a threat to the Union and thereby readjusted their position. But there was none of this by the DUP, or for that matter by the meandering Ulster Unionists.

The DUP with last week's five-point plan, have abandoned Arlene Foster's flexible approach.

She was previously prepared to deal pragmatically with the Irish sea border. Under pressure from the ominous LucidTalk opinion poll putting the party at 19%, she has become a rejectionist.

The reality is, that their support is being systematically cannibalised over Brexit, from both the right and the left, by the TUV and the Alliance respectively.

Their rejectionist policy against the Irish Sea border will go nowhere. It is as futile as Remainers in Britain demanding the end to Brexit. The DUP might as well bay at the Moon.
Number of alimony payment applications drops  Ombudsman Moskalkova

 flickr.com/

14:34 10/02/2021

MOSCOW, February 10 (RAPSI)  Russias High Commissioner for Human Rights Tatiana Moskalkova during the State Duma Family Committees meeting on Wednesday reported reduction in the number of alimony obligations complaints by 40%.

Moskalkova believes that Russian citizens became more responsible as to payment of alimony due to the adjustment of legislative mechanisms. She also drew attention at the work of bailiffs prompting unscrupulous parents to perform their duties.

The Ombudsman also pointed that employers mostly made advances to women with children under the age of three years during the coronavirus quarantine.




It really is a modern day meow-stery that's becoming the talk of the Internet today.

When Judge Roy Ferguson opened up virtual proceedings of the 394th Judicial District Court in Texas on Zoom on Tuesday, he was not expecting to see two lawyers and a kitten. The cute blue-eyed cat in the bottom right corner was actually county attorney Rod Ponton, covered by a filter.

Mr Ponton, I believe you have filter turned on in the video settings, said the judge. Ponton said his assistant was trying to fix the settings.

Im here live, Im not a cat, he said.

I can see that, said the judge.

As the video went viral on social media, Ferguson wrote in a tweet: IMPORTANT ZOOM TIP: If a child used your computer, before you join a virtual hearing check the Zoom Video Options to be sure filters are off.

IMPORTANT ZOOM TIP: If a child used your computer, before you join a virtual hearing check the Zoom Video Options to be sure filters are off. This kitten just made a formal announcement on a case in the 394th (sound on). #lawtwitter #OhNo @zoom_ushttps://t.co/I0zaj0wu6K Judge Roy Ferguson (@JudgeFergusonTX) February 9, 2021

The 69-year-old Ponton told Reuters that he was not sure how the filter had appeared.

I logged into my secretarys computer to appear at this hearing via Zoom, and when everybodys ready the judge calls the case and everybodys face is supposed to pop up on Zoom.

And everybodys face popped up except mine. Mine was a cat, he said.

The judge helped remove the filter and the hearing proceeded, he explained. Judge Ferguson called it a fun moment.

Everyone involved handled it with dignity, and the filtered lawyer showed incredible grace, he said.

Soon after, the dilemma of whether the cat lawyer had posed, made its way to Twitter and posed an existential crisis - are we human, or are we cat filter?

"I'm not a cat" is exactly what a kitten lawyer would say Dan Saltzstein (@dansaltzstein) February 9, 2021

The dude in the upper right when he says Im not a cat pic.twitter.com/kYQyZuBPmw Mike Dorsey (@DorseyFilm) February 9, 2021

Judge: Youre new to this court? Me (terrified): *nods*Judge: Well can you introduce yourself for the record? Me (panicking): ALYSSA FROM THE PUBLIC DEFENDERS YOUR HONOR IM HERE LIVE IM NOT A CAT.  Alyssa Leader (@alittleleader) February 9, 2021

Im not a cat, we all insist as we gradually turn into sentient 12-second videos Linda Holmes Thinks You're Doing Great (@lindaholmes) February 9, 2021

i'm here live i'm not a cat (@dodaistewart) February 9, 2021

Im here. Im live. Im not a cat, I say to the mirror each morning. Heather Christle (@heatherchristle) February 9, 2021

Im not a cat is what a cat would say in this situation. Matthew Hedges (@MatthewHedges) February 9, 2021

Weve now reached the Im not a cat level of working from home in a pandemic. Avery Francis (@AveryFrancis) February 10, 2021

I feel like it's 2003 and this is a scene I'm reading in a @MargaretAtwood book about a not so far off dystopian future https://t.co/gEj4oNysqM  Teacup of Teeth  (@curse_collector) February 9, 2021

"If I can make the country chuckle for a moment in these difficult times theyre going through, Im happy to let them do that at my expense," the lawyer told NY Times.

The real question remains -- where can we also avail the same cute cat filter?

(With inputs from Reuters)
Globally, nearly 300,000 babies are born with neural tube defects including spina bifida (SB) each year. This openly available special issue of the Journal of Pediatric Rehabilitation Medicine (JPRM) provides 20 important evidence- and consensus-based updates to key sections of the 2018 "Guidelines for the Care of People with Spina Bifida" issued by the Spina Bifida Association (SBA). These reflect current recommendations for the care of patients with SB across the entire lifespan, from prenatal counseling to adult care.

As a result of research advancements and improved team-based patient care, approximately 80%-90% of children with SB now live to adulthood in the United States. The Guidelines were written with this idea in mind and present the best evidence for what care should be delivered, regardless of the model or types of practitioners available.

Medical evidence and clinical practice continue to change, and so it was time to update the most recent set of Guidelines to provide the best, most up-to-date recommendations, focusing not only on pediatric care, but also on safely transitioning young adults with SB from pediatric to adult healthcare services. Guidelines needed to be included and/or revised to reflect the needs of adults with SB. The goal was to provide a more holistic approach to care. It is not just a condition that affects health but affects life." Jonathan Castillo, MD, MPH, and Heidi A. Castillo, MD, Co-Guest Editors, Developmental Pediatrics, Department of Pediatrics, Meyer Center, Texas Children's Hospital/Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX

Judy Thibadeau, RN, MN, Director of Research and Services, Spina Bifida Association, Arlington, VA, added, "Pediatric and adult providers need to embrace the fact that adult providers will be needed and important to the lives of people with SB."

The updated and expanded sections of the Guidelines presented in this issue move beyond more traditional issues of neurosurgical, urologic and orthopedic care, emphasize the continuum of care, health, wellbeing and quality of life, and include more background information about key topics and why they are important in the care of individuals with SB. They cover:

Bowel function and care

Central precocious puberty

Coordination of care

Family functioning in families with a child with SB

Health promotion and preventive healthcare service guidelines

Latex allergy

Mental health

Mobility

Neuropsychological care

Neurosurgical guidelines

Nutrition, metabolic syndrome, and obesity

Orthopedic guidelines

Prenatal counseling

Quality of life

Self-management and independence

Sexual health and education

Short stature and the effect of human growth hormone

Skin-related issues

Urologic guidelines

Women's health

"These Guidelines stress other issues that are important to successfully transition to adulthood including (but not limited to) family functioning, mental health, women's and men's health, and self-management skills in the broader societal and participation context," noted co-Guest Editor and SBA Medical Director Timothy John Brei, MD, Division of Developmental Medicine, Department of Pediatrics, Seattle Children's Hospital and the University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle, WA. "These Guidelines acknowledge that one can have good medical health and still struggle in terms of independence and across the lifespan. So, they are not just about medical care across the lifespan, but 'life care.'"

In addition, neural tube defects like SB have widespread global significance. Some countries manage the care of patients with SB better than others, particularly when it relates to the care of adults with SB. Therefore, global accessibility to the Guidelines and their updates is vital, as healthcare professionals embedded in local communities will seek to use this guidance to provide high-quality care with a view towards reducing healthcare disparities. Language differences, immigration, cultural beliefs, acculturation, local resources, and social determinants of health must be taken into account when these Guidelines are implemented throughout the world.

SBA's Collaborative Care Network, through a cooperative agreement with the National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities (NCBDDD), part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), supported the production of the "Guidelines for the Care of People with Spina Bifida." These Guidelines were the culmination of three years of planning and work involving over 100 international experts using evidence-based research and consensus methodologies. The text of the Guidelines is openly available on the SBA website and the position papers in this special issue have been published open access through the support of the SBA.

"It is the hope of SBA that these and future Guidelines will promote and standardize best practice regardless of the characteristics of individuals with SB or where their care is received. It is through providing better care that we will ultimately achieve a better future for all those living with SB," remarked Brad E. Dicianno, Associate Medical Director, SBA, and Director, UPMC Adult Spina Bifida Clinic, Pittsburgh, PA.

"These open access Guidelines are paramount towards educating individuals with SB and their medical providers," commented Editor-in-Chief of JPRM Elaine L. Pico, MD, UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital Oakland, CA. "With better health and these Guidelines distributed worldwide we are looking at a robust aging population of those with SB that must be attended to by knowledgeable medical providers."

"We are so thankful to the journal for its continued focus on SB. Truly, it is a gift to our community, and we are grateful and excited to be part of what has happened thus far. We can't wait to see where this takes all of us," commented Sara Struwe, MPA, President & CEO, Spina Bifida Association, Arlington, VA. "From our community to yours, thank you!"
The Amadiba Crisis Committee fighting to prevent a mining project from going ahead in Xolobeni in the Eastern Cape (file image).

Western Cape Deputy Judge President Patricia Goliath has ruled that the defamation action brought by Australian mining interests against six South Africans constitutes a SLAPP suit.

SLAPP is an acronyn for Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation.

Judge Goliath said the lawsuit had been brought against the six because of their opposition to the operations of Mineral Commodities and Mineral Sands Resources.

The defendants have hailed the judgment as a victory for free speech.

The R14.25m defamation action being brought by Australian mining interests against six South Africans - three environmental lawyers, two community activists and a social worker - suffered a major set-back with an adverse High Court judgment on Tuesday.

Western Cape Deputy Judge President Patricia Goliath ruled that their action "matches the DNA of a SLAPP suit".

"The conclusion is incontrovertible that the lawsuit was initiated against the defendants because they have spoken out and had assumed a specific position in respect of the plaintiffs' mining operations," she wrote in her judgment.

SLAPP is an acronym for Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation, and is described as "meritless or exaggerated lawsuits intended to intimidate civil society advocates, human rights defenders, journalists, academics and individuals as well as organisations acting in the public interest".

One of the six defendants, prominent environmental lawyer Cormac Cullinan, said Judge Goliath's "strong" judgment was an important step in developing common law procedures "to stop the powerful abusing legal processes to silence those who expose the ecological and social harm they cause".

"This is an important victory for free speech in the public interest," he added.

In her 35-page judgment handed down on Tuesday afternoon, Judge Goliath dismissed with costs an application by the plaintiffs in the defamation action: Australian mining companies Mineral Commodities and Mineral Sands Resources, executive chairman Mark Caruso and black empowerment partner Zamile Qunya.

The case did not examine the merits of the alleged defamation of these plaintiffs by the six South African defendants in books, interviews and/or presentations, which may still be the subject of a full trial at a later date. Rather, the plaintiffs were objecting to the defendants bringing two special pleas which raised a novel defence against the alleged defamation.

The defendants argued that the companies, Caruso and Qunya were bringing an effective SLAPP suit against them and that this constituted an abuse of legal privilege and of the court process to achieve an improper end: to ensure the defendants' future silence about the miners' controversial activities on the Pondoland coast at Xolobeni and at the Tormin mineral sands mine on the West Coast, and/or to punish them for speaking out.

The plaintiffs' lawyers denied they were bringing a SLAPP suit, arguing that for legal proceedings like their defamation action to constitute "an abuse of process" their case would have to be without reasonable grounds and without any clear merits, which they said was not the case.

But Deputy Judge President Goliath came down firmly in favour of the defendants in her judgment, saying corporations should not be allowed to "weaponise our legal system" against ordinary citizens and activists in order to intimidate and silence them.

"The mining companies are claiming inexplicably exorbitant amounts for damages, which the defendants can ill-afford," the judge wrote in her judgment.

"They instituted these proceedings fully aware of the fact that there is no realistic prospect of recovering the damages they seek. This action will without a doubt place an economic burden on the defendants. However, it appears that the action is not aimed at obtaining monetary, or financial damages, but rather vindicating a right, or for some other purpose... The right to freedom of expression, robust public debate and the ability to participate in public debates without fear is essential in any democratic society. I am accordingly satisfied that this action matches the DNA of a SLAPP suit."

In her judgment, Deputy Judge President Goliath said the aim of a SLAPP suit was "essentially to silence those challenging powerful corporates on issues of public concern".

"... the main purpose of the suit is to punish or retaliate against citizens who have spoken out against the plaintiffs ... These lawsuits are notoriously, long drawn out, and extremely expensive legal battles, which consume vast amounts of time, energy, money and resources."

The targets of SLAPP suits were typically individuals, local community groups, activists or non-profit organisations who were advancing a social interest of some significance. "Generally, exorbitant damages claims are part of the strategy chilling public participation and sending a clear message to activists that there are unaffordable financial risks attached to public participation."

It was evident that the strategy adopted by the plaintiffs in this case was that the more vocal and critical the activist, the higher the damages amount claimed, the judge wrote. This was clearly the case of social worker John GI Clarke, one of the defendants who initially faced 19 defamation claims with a combined amount of R5.5 million. Another nine claims were later added, bringing the total claim against him to more than R10 million.

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In his response to the judgment, Clarke said: "The judgment is a triumph of collaboration between journalists, lawyers and social workers in support of people who are vulnerable and historically disadvantaged, to show that the Bill of Rights can become more meaningful and that it can triumph over mining rights.

"What we have done in this judgment is, hopefully, put an end to malicious 'lawfare'. They say that in war, truth becomes the first casualty, and in lawfare, truth becomes a hostage. What Judge Goliath has done with this judgment is to release the hostage of truth."

The Centre for Environmental Rights, where two of the defendants - lawyers Christine Reddell and Tracey Davies - were working at the time of the alleged defamation, tweeted "Huge court victory for activism and free speech today".

The other two defendants are Wild Coast community activist Mzamo Dlamini and Lutzville (West Coast) community activist Davine Cloete.

Attempts to contact the companies and Caruso for comment were unsuccessful at the time of publication.
What is frightening is that Democrats and some of their corporate media allies have been busy conflating all Trump voters with domestic terrorists. In a recent essay, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, by no means a conservative, asked: What acts should be criminalized by new domestic terrorism laws that are not already deemed criminal? They never say, almost certainly because  just as was true of the first set of new War on Terror laws  their real aim is to criminalize that which should not be criminalized: speech, association, protests, opposition to the new ruling coalition.

Its clear that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene doesnt care too much what her congressional colleagues think of her: The day after she was stripped of her committee assignments in response to her long trail of vile QAnon-related rhetoric, she was boasting in person and on Twitter about how the sanction just means she will have more free time.

Just as dangerous, however, is that she doesnt seem to care too much what her party thinks of her.

Once upon a time, losing a committee assignment would have been the end of a congressional career. A zombie member without a seat on a committee would be severely handicapped. Such seats are crucial to a members ability to, as the old saying goes, bring home the bacon. Unable to do that, any House member  especially a freshman  would be vulnerable to challenges in both the primary and general election.

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None of this applies anymore. Instead, Greene is channeling her favorite Obi-Wan Kenobi persona: If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
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Pressure is building on Crown Resorts chief executive Ken Barton and high profile board director Andrew Demetriou to follow two of James Packers most loyal lieutenants and resign from the gambling giant after an inquiry found it was unfit to hold a licence for its new Sydney casino.

Crown directors Michael Johnston and Guy Jalland, who represented major shareholder Mr Packer on Crowns board, both resigned on Wednesday morning following the damning report which detailed Crowns facilitation of money laundering and its partnerships with figures linked to organised crime.

Commissioner Bergin has found Crown unsuitable for its new Barangaroo casino on Sydneys waterfront. Credit:Nick Moir

Mr Packers private company Consolidated Press Holdings (CPH), which owns 37 per cent of Crown, said it would have no representation on the board with the termination of its consultancy with a third nominee John Poynton, who will request to become an independent director.

A CPH spokesman said the issue of Mr Packers board representatives and how they communicated with the billionaire were potentially complex matters for ILGA [the Independent Liquor & Gaming Authority] and Crown to resolve.
Racially-aggravated assault, carrying a loaded gun, incest and attempting to have sex with a child under the age of 13 are crimes that will receive a shorter jail term than for lying about going to Covid mutant hotspots.

Matt Hancock said yesterday that travellers who try to hide having been in high-risk countries could be jailed for up to 10 years.

From Monday, all arrivals from 33 'red list' countries will have to pay 1,750 to quarantine for 10 days in Government-designated hotels.

The Health Secretary unveiled the extreme borders crackdown while saying it was necessary to stop mutant strains entering the UK.

But his announcement sparked backlash from former Supreme Court justice Lord Sumption, who branded the maximum prison sentence as 'inhumane', and ex-Attorney General Dominic Grieve, who described it as 'draconian'.

The jail term is longer than the seven-year maximum penalties received for racially-aggravated assault (ABH or GBH), carrying a firearm in a public place, incest with a child under 13 and attempted sexual intercourse with a child under 13.

Carrying a firearm in a public place, conversion of a firearm and trespassing with a firearm in a building are crimes that will receive a shorter jail term than for lying about going to Covid mutant hotspots (file photo)

Attempting to have sex with a child under the age of 13 receives a maximum penalty of seven years in prison - less than the 10 years for those who lie about travelling to 'red list' countries (file photo)

Crimes that carry a shorter prison sentence than the 10 years for 'red list' liars The following crimes carry a maximum penalty of seven years: Trespassing with firearm or imitation firearm in a building;

Carrying firearm or imitation firearm in public place;

Shortening a shot gun; conversion of firearm;

Racially-aggravated assault - ABH or GBH;

Carrying loaded firearm in public place;

Trespassing with a firearm;

Shortening of shotgun or possession of shortened shotgun;

Assaults on officers saving wrecks;

Attempted sexual intercourse with girl under 13;

Incest by man with a girl under 13;

Incest by woman with a girl under 13;

Attempted incest by man with a girl over 13;

Man living on earnings of prostitution;

Living on earnings of male prostitution;

Paying for sexual services - penetration of a child aged 16 or 17;

Engaging in sexual activity in the presence of a person with a mental disorder;

Causing a person with a mental disorder to watch a sexual act;

Engaging in sexual activity in the presence of a person with a mental disorder;

Causing a person with a mental disorder to watch a sexual act;

Care workers: sexual activity in presence of a person with a mental disorder;

Care workers: causing a person with a mental disorder to watch a sexual act;

Causing or inciting prostitution for gain;

Controlling prostitution for gain;

Fraudulent evasion of the prohibition on importing indecent or obscene articles;

Attempted sexual intercourse with girl under 13. Advertisement

Other offences that carry shorter prison sentences include controlling prostitution for gain, trespassing with a firearm in a building and fraudulent evasion of the prohibition on importing indecent or obscene articles.

Meanwhile, crimes that have an equivalent maximum 10-year jail term include sexual assault, rioting, making threats to kill, administering poison (so as to endanger life) and burglary with the intent to commit rape.

However, questions were raised this morning over whether the law is going to be changed at all - with some Cabinet ministers unhappy and suggesting Mr Hancock was just pointing to the current provisions in the Forgery Act.

In a round of interviews this morning, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps insisted the move was 'appropriate'.

'It's up to 10 years, it's a tariff, it's not necessarily how long somebody would go to prison for,' he told BBC Breakfast.

'But I do think it is serious if people put others in danger by deliberately misleading and saying that you weren't in Brazil or South Africa, or one of the red list countries, which as you say does include Portugal.

'I think the British public would expect pretty strong action because we're not talking now just about, ''oh there's a lot of coronavirus in that country and you might bring some more of it back when we already have plenty of it here''.

'What we're talking about now are the mutations, the variants, and that is a different matter, because we don't want to be in a situation where we later on discover that there's a problem with vaccines.'

Some Cabinet ministers believe the existing Fraud and Counterfeiting Act 1981 already covers the travel form for coming to the UK, and includes a 10-year sentence.

Using secondary legislation to introduce a new offence with a punishment of that length could be controversial.

Commons sources suggested Parliament's Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments would be likely to issue a report before it came before MPs and peers.

Lord Sumption's article in The Telegraph suggested ministers who only considered the positives of the term, without considering the cons, are 'unfit to hold office'.

He then suggested Mr Hancock should lose his position as Health Secretary, which he has held since July 2018.

Lord Sumption said: 'A spell in another department which has to cope with the collateral damage, would do him, and us, a power of good. Try Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, or perhaps Culture, Media and Sport.'

The Health Secretary, pictured above unveiled the extreme borders crackdown yesterday while saying it was necessary to stop mutant strains entering the UK

Mr Hancock's announcement sparked backlash from former Supreme Court justice Lord Sumption (pictured above), who branded the maximum prison sentence as 'inhumane'

The measures come amid continuing concerns over home-grown coronavirus strains as scientists advising the Government added one detected in Bristol to its 'variant of concern' list.

Former attorney general Dominic Grieve also told the paper: 'The maximum sentence of 10 years for what is effectively a regulatory breach sounds, in the circumstances, unless it can be justified, extraordinarily high.'

Offences that carry the same amount of jail time as 10-year sentence for lying about going to Covid mutant hotspots The following crimes carry a maximum penalty of 10 years: Possession of firearm with intent to cause fear of violence;

Possessing or distributing prohibited weapon or ammunition (5 year minimum sentence);

Riot;

Making threats to kill;

Administering poison etc. so as to endanger life;

Cruelty to persons under 16;

Possession of firearm without certificate;

Possession or acquisition of shotgun without certificate;

Indecent assault on a woman;

Indecent assault on a man;

Engaging in sexual activity in the presence of a child;

Causing a child to watch a sexual act;

Meeting child following sexual grooming;

Administering a substance with intent;

Committing offence with intent to commit sexual offence;

Trespass with intent to commit sexual offence;

Cruelty to children;

Burglary with intent to inflict GBH on a person or do unlawful damage to a building or anything in it (non-dwelling);

Burglary with intent to commit rape (non-dwelling);

Burglary (non-domestic);

Fraud by false representation;

Indecency with children under 14;

Taking, having etc. indecent photographs of children;

Sexual assault;

Causing a person to engage in sexual activity without consent;

Engaging in sexual activity in the presence of a person with a mental disorder impeding choice;

Causing a person with a mental disorder impeding choice to watch a sexual act;

Engaging in sexual activity in the presence, procured by inducement, threat or deception, of a person with a mental disorder;

Causing a person with a mental disorder to watch a sexual act by inducement, threat or deception;

Care workers: sexual activity with a person with a mental disorder;

Care workers: inciting person with mental disorder to engage in sexual act. Advertisement

He further told BBC Radio 4's Today Programme: 'This is a regulatory offence, and no regulatory offence I can think of attracts a 10-year sentence.'

The comments come as experts say the lower the number of cases before lockdown restrictions are eased, the less likely it is for new coronavirus mutations to emerge.

Every time the virus infects someone it has the opportunity to mutate, and therefore the fewer cases of infection, the less chance it will have to change, scientists said.

The more transmissible variant, first detected in Kent, is now thought to be the dominant strain in the UK, and as researchers detected a mutation from the South African and Brazilian variant present in some UK cases.

Experts are also concerned new variants that emerge may be more resistant to vaccines.

On Monday, Mr Hancock said the fewer new cases of coronavirus there are, the lower the chance of a new variant appearing domestically.

Lawrence Young, professor of molecular oncology at Warwick Medical School, said: 'The more the virus is allowed to spread, the more people who are infected, the more likely it is that this virus will change and evolve and form new variants.

'Variants have been generated in everybody who's infected, really, at one level or another.

'The more the virus does spread, the more it replicates, the more chances it has to change.'

He added: 'One way of trying to put the can on the lid on the number of variants being generated is to try and control the spread of the virus.'

Prof Young said: 'The idea here is if you have a very strong immune response to the virus induced by vaccination, that that should dampen down infection within you, and therefore prevent these variants from piling up.'

The more people mix with each other, the more likely it is for the virus to spread.

Asked whether delaying relaxing lockdown restrictions would be an effective way to do this, he said: 'From a scientific, virological perspective, it makes sense because I guess we all knew that these variants would be popping up, but what's surprising is, is the nature of some of those variants.'

Rowland Kao, the Sir Timothy O'Shea Professor of Veterinary Epidemiology and Data Science at the University of Edinburgh, said the combination of many infections, plus many vaccinated people, is the most likely circumstance for an 'escape mutant' variant to arise.

He added: 'These are conditions which we are entering now, as the number of vaccinated individuals increases.

'This is a natural consequence of any vaccination programme and thus requires continued vigilance and surveillance (via the work of Cog-UK (the Covid-19 Genomics UK consortium)) for the emergence of such variants.

'Of course the number of infected and vaccinated around the globe is far higher than the number within the UK, so it is far more likely that such new variants of concern will arise elsewhere than here, thus motivating the requirement for new travel restrictions.'

Dr Alexander Edwards, associate professor in biomedical technology at the University of Reading, said: 'Public health control measures are harder, more expensive, and spread more thinly as the volume of cases increases.

'For testing and contact tracing, it's far more likely to succeed if you have very few new cases daily.

'Identifying important mutants is even harder than normal test and contact tracing (sequencing and mutation analysis is harder than testing alone), so it becomes even more critical to keep case numbers as low as possible.'
Netanyahu and Putin have discussed how to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, writes Zaman Al-Wasl.

Israels Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed coordination in Syria on Monday, a statement from Netanyahus office said Monday.

Netanyahu and Putin have discussed regional issues and the continued coordination between Israel and Russia facing security developments in the region, according to the Jerusalem Post.

The Israeli Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi also spoke with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov, the Jerusalem Post reported.

The conversation focused on preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons and consolidating its power in the region, Ashkenazi said in a tweet.

Ashkenazis office reiterated that the US will not lift sanctions on Iran until it stops enriching uranium beyond the limits of the 2015 nuclear deal.

This article was edited by The Syrian Observer. The Syrian Observer has not verified the content of this story. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author.
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Hate symbols have been found on two Navy ships in a matter of weeks, leading the service's top officer to call for an end to what he says is unacceptable behavior that's driving a wedge of division in the fleet.

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday sent a message to the entire Navy fleet on Tuesday telling sailors they "cannot be under any illusions that extremist behaviors do not exist in our Navy."

Read CNO Gilday's message about extremism in the U.S. Navy.

"We must better understand the scope of the problem, get after this issue, and eliminate conduct that is driven by extremist beliefs," Gilday wrote. "No doubt, this is a leadership issue. We will own this."

Read Next: Army Special Operations School Drops 'III' Logo Adopted by Extremist Group

Gilday cited two separate incidents in which symbols of hate and violence were anonymously left in living areas aboard ships.

A sailor assigned to the guided-missile cruiser Lake Champlain admitted to leaving a noose by a Black crewmate's rack after the Naval Criminal Investigative Service received an anonymous tip about the item. Then, racist graffiti was found on a second ship assigned to the same carrier strike group as the Lake Champlain, a Navy official said on Tuesday.

The graffiti was found in one of the heads, or restrooms, aboard the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson, Carrier Strike Group 1's flagship. The incident prompted Adm. John Aquilino, the head of U.S. Pacific Fleet to visit the carrier strike group to lead a stand-down, the official said.

Gilday said the chain of command took both of those incidents seriously and immediately launched investigations, which remain ongoing.

"But there is more we must do, together, because these symbols are contrary to our Navy culture, core values, and warfighting effectiveness," he added.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin last week ordered each of the military services to discuss the problem of extremism and extremist ideology in the ranks in the form of a day-long stand-down within the next 60 days. Gilday said the Navy will hold its stand-down on April 6.

"Hate and extremist ideology are wedges that divide us," he wrote. "These actions stoke resentment and tear others down. That's the opposite of how we will treat each other as shipmates. We build each other up, we encourage each other, and we celebrate our shipmates' success."

If sailors are questioning the intentions of their shipmates, the Navy could fail in combat, the CNO added.

"We must eliminate extremist behavior and its corrosive effects on our fighting force," Gilday said. "And we must remember that we swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution above all else."

A Navy task force last week released a report with dozens of recommendations to stamp out discrimination, from who appears in recruiting ads to how the service names its ships. Gilday directed the creation of the task force last year after George Floyd, a Black man, died in police custody.

Gilday said he's certain most personnel in the Navy serve with honor, character and integrity. He called on leaders at all levels to set the tone and example for the rest of the force.

"You must model correct behavior 24/7/365 in person and online," the CNO said. " ... We must demand of each other that we treat everyone with dignity and respect. That is how we will become a stronger Navy."

-- Gina Harkins can be reached at gina.harkins@military.com. Follow her on Twitter @ginaaharkins.

Related: Sailor Admits to Hanging Noose by Black Crewmate's Rack on Navy Cruiser
Hyderabad, Feb 10 : Police in Telangana's Nalgonda district on Wednesday detained leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in view of Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao's visit to the district.

Several BJP leaders across the district were taken into preventive custody late last night and shifted to the police stations.

Some leaders were placed under house arrest as a precautionary measure. The police action came following the statement by BJP's district unit president K. Sridhar Reddy that they will disrupt the Chief Minister's public meeting at Halia in Nagarjuna Sagar Assembly constituency.

Sridhar Reddy was placed under house arrest at Pulicherla village in Peddapura mandal. The BJP leaders and workers in other mandals were also detained and shifted to the police stations.

Police were taking all steps to prevent the BJP leaders and workers from attending the Chief Minister's public meeting.

The BJP leaders were planning to lodge the protest over police lathi-charge on its workers and tribals in Suryapet district on Sunday. The incident had occurred when the BJP workers and locals damaged a few sheds on a disputed land.

The visit by KCR assumes significance in view of the ensuing by-election to Nagarjuna Sagar Assembly constituency. The seat fell vacant following the death of ruling Telangana Rashtra Samithi's legislator Nomula Narsimhaiah in December, 2020.

The TRS chief, who will be reaching Nalgonda by helicopter from Hyderabad, will reach Nellikallu by road to lay foundation stone for 13 lift irrigation projects to be constructed at a cost of Rs 9,000 crore.

KCR will then leave for Halia to address a public meeting.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text


More than half of the US Senate has signed a letter urging US President Joe Biden to push Turkey on its human rights record.

Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida wrote the letter, Wyden said in a press release.

In the letter, they allege that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has marginalized domestic opposition and silenced or co-opted critical media outlets.

They also slammed Turkey for purchasing the Russian S-400 missile defense system and for its conflict with US-backed Kurdish groups in Syria. The senators also cited the treatment of basketball player Enes Kanter. The NBA star and supporter of the Gulen movement is a frequent critic of the Turkish government. Kanter's citizenship was revoked in 2017.

Fifty-four senators signed the letter.

The Turkish governments crackdown on journalism and opposition parties has been widely reported on.

Turkey has received significant criticism from the US Congress in recent months on similar issues. In December, the top Republican on the House Foreign Relations Committee, Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, said Turkeys provocative behavior was undermining the NATO alliance. McCaul cited Turkeys purchase of the Russian S-400 missile defense system. Russia is not a member of NATO and opposes the transatlantic alliance on several issues.

McCaul also said Turkeys conflict with US-backed Kurdish groups in Syria is undermining progress fighting the Islamic State (IS). The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) fights IS with US support, but Turkey opposes the group, alleging that it has ties to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in Turkey. The SDF and Turkey are currently in a state of war.

In October, a group of Democratic senators demanded the Trump administration look into allegations of Turkish human rights abuses in Libya, Iraq and Syria. Turkey is involved in several regional conflicts. In Libya, Turkey supports the UN-recognized Government of National Accord in the civil war. In Iraq, Turkey frequently targets PKK positions. Both Turkey and the United States consider the PKK a terrorist organization.

The same month, Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey, who now heads the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, successfully convinced the Library of Congress to recognize the Armenian genocide. This refers to the killings of Armenians, Greeks and Syriacs in present-day Turkey at the start of the 20th century. Turkey recognizes there were deaths but disputes that what happened constituted genocide.

Turkey has responded to some of the criticism in the past. In October, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi showed blatant ignorance when she criticized Erdogan.

Repeated criticisms from Congress could complicate US-Turkey relations under President Joe Biden. Relations are currently at a low point. Aides to Biden and Erdogan spoke on the phone this month to try to manage disagreements effectively.
's ( ) Peter Wall talks to Proactive London's Katie Pilbeam about the recent news that the company has entered into a non-binding letter of intent (LOI) with DPN LLC setting out terms to acquire 320 acres of land in West Texas, US.

The plan is to build a new 200-megawatt cryptocurrency mining facility in the next 12 months to take advantage of some of the lowest rates in the world with the majority coming from renewable sources.

Wall gives his opinion on Bitcoin after the cryptocurrency hit record highs after Tesla's Elon Musk's car company bought $1.5bn worth.
Canadian e-commerce company Shopify said on Tuesday it would expand its payment option, "Shop Pay," to all users choosing to sell on Facebook and Instagram.

The move marks the first time the feature will be available outside Shopify's platform and will help the company tap into the rise of shopping through social media platforms during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Some ~personal~ news  Today we enter into a new era of social commerce@shop Pay, the fastest and *most* secure way to check out is expanding to all Shopify merchants selling on @Facebook and @Instagram. Read all about it https://t.co/zZbKgZeaLW pic.twitter.com/pt1BDC5gSu  Shopify (@Shopify) February 9, 2021

The option would become available to Shopify merchants selling products in the United States through Instagram on Tuesday and will be rolled out on Facebook within the coming weeks, the company said in a blog post. Social media shoppers will be able to use Shop Pay alongside other payment options on the social media companys payments system Facebook Pay.
The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge sympathised with student nurses and told them that starting work placements in a pandemic must have been a baptism of fire during a video call on Tuesday.

Prince William, 38, and Kate Middleton, 39, were speaking to young men and women from Ulster University to hear more about their experience of studying during the pandemic and experiencing the frontline of Northern Irelands Covid-19 response.

As three students were stood around a dummy in a bed as they assessed the mock-patient, Prince William said: It is very difficult for you guys to go straight into a pandemic, I would imagine. Thats really baptism by fire.'

I imagine it has been totally crazy and very difficult to find your feethead on fire, the whole time.

Prince William, 38, and Kate Middleton, 39, spoke to nursing students from Ulster University via video call to hear more about their experiences of studying during the pandemic on Tuesday

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge (pictured, left) joined a video call with a group of second and third year students taking part in practical clinical sessions at the University's Magee Campus in Derry/Londonderry. Pictured, Stephanie Dunleavey, Lecturer in the School of Nursing, Ulster University - Elizabeth (Lisa) Semerdzhieva, Year 3 Nursing student - Rachel Reid, Year 3 Nursing student - Paige Murray, Year 3 Nursing student

Its scary, said one of the third years, Elizabeth Semerdzhieva. Although it was frightening at the start, you really want to go out more now. You cant wait to get out in practice, and feel like you are helping. Thats what we were born to do.

Kate, who paired a smart blazer with round-neck top, added: Nursing is one of the most trusted professions in the country. You could not have chosen a better career choice. Its needed now more than ever.

Youve got almost three generations now - those coming back from retirement, and you guys doing your training who are stepping up - it shows real commitment and real team work, and it should really be celebrated, so really well done.

The Cambridges also chatted separately to Abigail McGarvey, a first-year adult nursing student, who told them: It isnt ideal, and it is unfortunate that you have your patients when they cant see their families, and there are some that have been in hospital for months, they dont have anyone else to talk to apart from us.

But that is part of the job and that is what makes it so nice, because they dont have the emotional support from their family that they would have been getting. It is really important that we are there for them.

We are there if they have a bad day. We are there when they have good days as well. It is really nice to be there for them.

Kate Middleton (left, and right, Prince William) praised the group of student nurses soon to join the profession telling them they were 'needed now more than ever'

The Cambridges chatted separately to Abigail McGarvey, a first-year adult nursing student who has kept a video diary to illustrate a typical shift during her first placement as a student nurse

Abigail McGarvey (pictured, left) told the royals about some of the challenges she had faced, including the emotional impact of patients being unable to receive visits from their families

She added that her grandmother, mother and sister were all nurses and remarked: I couldnt really escape it.'

Abigail kept a video diary to illustrate a typical shift during her first placement as a student nurse.

In footage she is seen getting up for a night shift, travelling to work and putting on personal protective equipment (PPE) of a mask, apron, gloves and visor - later she puts on higher-grade protection for working with Covid-19 positive patients.

William asked if training in a pandemic had changed her thoughts on becoming a nurse, and the student replied: 'It has really confirmed that this is what I want to do for the rest of my life - this is the job I was meant to do.'

Abigail continued: 'My first day on the wards I showed up and within a few hours there was a massive cardiac arrest.

'And seeing everything just go up in the air, and how the team comes together, and how everyone is really working to look after these patients - it really just solidified that this is exactly what I want to do.'

Ranked in the top 50 nursing schools in the world, Ulster Universitys School of Nursing has approximately 1600 students registered.

At the start of the pandemic in March 2020, students were asked to join the front line.

Student placements were adapted to meet the needs and demands of the health service, with the majority of students being placed in COVID-19 areas in both hospital and community settings.
The day after Disney announced it was closing Greenwich-based Blue Sky Studios  a company that cashed in tens of millions of dollars in state tax credits  Gov. Ned Lamont again proposed a new tax incentive plan designed to deliver smaller aid packages to a larger pool of companies.

Floated last year to the General Assembly only to be tabled at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Lamonts proposed JobsCT Tax Rebate Program would give rebates to companies in targeted industries that added at least 25 employees, based on the amount of state income taxes those employees paid.

3 1 of 3 Erik Trautmann / Hearst Connecticut Media Show More Show Less 2 of 3 Tyler Sizemore / Hearst Connecticut Media Show More Show Less 3 of 3





Companies that added jobs in dozens of federally designated Opportunity Zones  carved out of three-dozen cities statewide, including portions of Stamford, Bridgeport, Danbury, Norwalk, and New Haven  would be eligible for double the rebates.

Incentives would be capped at $5,000 for any one employee  in contrast to programs under previous governors that offered, in some cases, $20,000 or more per employee  but would be more widely available than the negotiated mega-deals of the past.

Companies would not be eligible for jobs they recover after furloughs during the pandemic.

On Wednesday, the Connecticut Department of Labor reported more than 169,000 residents were receiving unemployment benefits at the end of January, a higher total than entering the new year. The Blue Sky closure is coming at the cost of nearly 470 jobs, the company disclosed in a DOL filing.

Industry insiders predicted many of those workers will be snapped up by other animation and digital media companies.

Lamont touted the JobsCT program on Wednesday as an earn-as-you-grow perk that would be available to any growth-mode business. He suggested it marks a departure from swing-for-the-fences incentives that employers like Blue Sky Studios and Alexion Pharmaceuticals have cashed in over the years in exchange for adding hundreds of jobs in Connecticut.

Small businesses are so much more than places of employment  they are the bedrock on which our towns, cities, and neighborhoods are built, Lamont said Wednesday in prepared remarks. We used our state resources to do everything we could to keep our small businesses afloat during the pandemic until the federal Paycheck Protection Program could kick in  not once but twice, with the hope that this time the vaccine will make the recovery more permanent.

Disney announced on Tuesday the shuttering of Blue Sky, which moved to Lamonts hometown of Greenwich in 2009 and received $25 million in incentives from the administration of former Gov. Jodi Rell toward a $65 million tab in setting up its animation studio.

Bob Luckey /Hearst Connecticut Media

Like the First Five program created by Rells successor Dannel Malloy that helped steer $320 million in assistance to 16 companies, the JobsCT rebate would focus on industries where Connecticut has existing strengths, including aerospace and other precision manufacturing; digital media; finance and insurance; and life sciences.

But Lamont anticipates many of those rebates going to more companies adding jobs in the dozens, rather than a few handfuls doing so by the hundreds, and with better representation statewide. The First Five program weighed heavily toward lower Fairfield County, with only five recipients situated east of Westport.

The Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development would have leeway to award rebates selectively based on the growth potential of a business, its long-term viability and the bang for the buck it offers in helping bolster a community.

In a presentation last year to a General Assembly committee, DECD cited the example of a company adding 25 jobs with average annual pay of $100,000 each, which at the maximum 50 percent rebate level would allow that employer to recoup nearly $350,000 of more than $950,000 in state income taxes withheld over seven years.

Its very important to me that whatever the incentive, its not a black box, said David Lehman, DECD commissioner, explaining the new approach last year to members of the Commerce Committee of the General Assembly. The incentives are earned over time as new jobs are created or as capital investment is being made in the state of Connecticut. The alternative is providing up-front grants or forgivable loans. ... We were subject to the business risk of those companies.

Paul Schott contributed to this report.

Alex.Soule@scni.com; 203-842-2545; @casoulman

Nickelodeons iCarly was one of the most popular shows for teens and tweens during its original run from 2007 to 2012. The comedy series was led by Miranda Cosgrove, who played the title character, Carly Shay.

Given iCarlys popularity, some fans might be wondering just how much Cosgrove made from it. In fact, her salary was quite impressive.

Miranda Cosgrove in 2016 | Roy Rochlin/FilmMagic

How much did Miranda Cosgrove make per episode of iCarly?

iCarly premiered on September 8, 2007. Cosgrove was on the show for every episode from its premiere to its finale on November 23, 2012. The series also had a spinoff movie called iGo to Japan, which aired on Nickelodeon on November 8, 2008.

According to a New York Post article from 2010, Cosgrove made a whopping $180,000 per episode. Given the fact that iCarly had almost 100 episodes, its possible that she made over $1 million during her teen years on the show.

Cosgrove was the second highest paid child star on TV at the time. The highest paid was August T. Jones of Two and Half Men, who made $250,000 per episode. Behind Cosgrove was Wizards of Waverly Place star Selena Gomez, who made only $25,000 per episode.

What is Miranda Cosgroves net worth?

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Before she became known as Carly, Cosgrove made a name for herself on the Nickelodeon show Drake & Josh. She played Megan Parker, the devious younger sister of the two title characters.

Additionally, Cosgrove has also briefly appeared on other Nickelodeon shows like Zoey 101, Just Jordan, Unfabulous, and The Naked Brothers Band. She worked on movies as well, such as School of Rock (2003), Yours, Mine and Ours (2005), and the Despicable Me film series.

Cosgrove wasnt just an actor either. She has released music, including two EPs and a full-length album.

Cosgrove clearly worked a lot even before becoming an adult, and she was able to amass a net worth of around $10 million, according to Celebrity Net Worth.

What did Miranda Cosgrove do after iCarly?

RELATED: Zoey 101 and iCarly Fans Are Feuding Over Which Nickelodeon Show Was the Best

After iCarly ended, Cosgrove enrolled in the University of Southern California. She told USA Today that she had always planned to go to college, and she ended up studying film before switching to psychology.

While in college, Cosgrove continued to act. For example, in 2016, she had a main role on the short-lived NBC sitcom Crowded. She also worked on two Despicable Me films during this time.

Will Miranda Cosgrove be a part of the iCarly revival?

RELATED: iCarly: Theres Little Hope for Creddie and Seddie Shippers in the Reboot

In December 2020, it was announced that iCarly is being revived for the Paramount+ streaming platform.

Cosgrove will be in the revival, as will some other original cast members such as Nathan Kress and Jerry Trainor. However, it is not clear if Jennette McCurdy and Noah Munck will be participating as well. McCurdy is reportedly working on another project, so it is unlikely she will be involved.

The revival is currently in development, but in the mean time, fans can watch iCarly on Netflix. The first two seasons of the show has been added to the streaming platform.
Joe Biden is rushing headlong on a path to follow Angela Merkel down the "green energy" rabbit hole, and the danger to the US and its citizens is foretold by what is now happening in Germany. There not only have power prices gone up dramatically, but reliability is in free fall from Merkel's "Energy Transition" to wind and solar..

With winter in full swing, cloud cover and snow cover have shut down much of the solar energy production in Germany, and a string of windless winter days have done the same for wind energy. Meanwhile, demand is peaking. Fortunately for now, many coal electric plants and nuclear plants, which are scheduled for shutdown in the next few years, are able to work at 100% capacity, and supplemented with imported nuclear power from France and coal fired power from Poland, they are barely able to keep the electric grid up. But what happens when those coal and nuclear plants in Germany are permanently shut down?

Radio Brandenburg, a public broadcaster has done a segment with electric engineers reporting that wind and solar cannot keep Germany's lights on, while coal and nuclear can get the job done. That must have been deemed "politically incorrect" as that segment has been taken down from the station's archives. Fortunately, it was preserved by a German advocacy group.

Biden is attacking reliable fossil fuels in the US and wants, like Merkel, to replace them with expensive and unreliable wind and solar. America must stand up to that nonsense
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Haiti - USA : ICE defies Jo Biden and deports 72 Haitians to Haiti including 22 children





Three days after the suspension of deportation flights to Haiti https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-32961-haiti-flash-the-united-states-suspends-deportation-flights-of-haitians.html the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) defied the decision of President Joe Biden, by proceeding Monday to the deportation of 72 Haitian asylum seekers including 21 children and a 2 month old baby to Port au Prince in full political chaos following an attempted coup.



Recall that when he came to power US President Biden signed a 100-day moratorium on deportations which were to be limited only to convicted criminals and suspected terrorists.



However, on January 26, U.S. District Judge Drew Tipton (appointed by Trump) issued a 14-day injunction against Biden's moratorium which he later extended to February 23 based on a federal contract with the state entered into by the Trump administration. As soon as the injunction was issued, the ICE immediately resumed its deportation operations to Haiti, Central America and Africa.



See also :

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-32961-haiti-flash-the-united-states-suspends-deportation-flights-of-haitians.html



S/ HaitiLibre


















21 runners killed during mountain race in northwestern province of Gansu; Indian variant of Covid-19 found in Guangzhou; Beijing willing to arrange for vaccines to be sent to Taiwan

May 28, 2021 08:15 PM
A handful of powerful Republicans  most prominently Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska  seem to feel the same. Last weekend, Ms. Cheney, the third-most-powerful House Republican, said on Fox that Mr. Trump does not have a role as a leader of our party moving forward. We need to make sure that we as Republicans are the party of truth, and that we are being honest about what really did happen in 2020 so we actually have a chance to win in 2022 and win the White House back in 2024.

Some of Ms. Cheneys colleagues mounted an effort to strip her of her leadership position after she voted to impeach Mr. Trump, but the vote failed overwhelmingly on a secret ballot  something Democrats should be pleased about, Eugene Robinson argues in The Washington Post. It is in everyones interest that the G.O.P. become an actual political party again, rather than a cult dedicated  in Sasses memorable phrase  to the weird worship of one dude, he writes. For that to happen, lawmakers such as Sasse and Cheney need to win the battle for their party.

Collapse

Over the next two years, the non-Trumpist faction of the Republican Party may find that it has nowhere to go but out. The 10 House Republicans who voted for impeachment, including Ms. Cheney, are already facing primary challenges, censures and other forms of retaliation from state-level party organizations, a sign that the Republicans divisions will only deepen before the next congressional election.

If the midterms end up proving a rout for Republicans who broke with Mr. Trump, those remaining in power may not be able to turn back. Ask Jeff Sessions how that worked out for him, Chris Vance, a former chair of the Washington State Republican Party, writes in The Seattle Times. During his losing primary campaign to regain his seat in the Senate, he tried to argue what a loyal Trumpist he really was, while Trump viciously attacked him. These rebel Republicans may not want a civil war, but that war has already started, and they need to fight back.

One way to do so, as the Times columnist Thomas Friedman has suggested, might be for the small number of moderate Republican senators  Mitt Romney, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, for example  to form their own caucus, if not their own party, which would consolidate their influence over the legislative process. Even if just a few principled conservatives came together and created a kind of third party in Congress, they could be kingmakers, he writes. With the Senate so finely balanced, moderates on each side have significant leverage.

As Matthew Crandall points out in Deseret News, running to the left of a Tea Party candidate was precisely how Ms. Murkowski won re-election in 2010 as a write-in candidate after she lost the Republican primary, which suggests a third party could be viable. A center-right party, he argues, would have broad appeal in New England governors races, Western and Sun Belt Senate races, and House races in the suburbs across the country. And while a center-right party would draw mostly from conservative voters, he predicts it would also draw from suburbanites who voted for President Biden out of distaste for Mr. Trump, effectively blocking Democrats from majority rule in Congress.
Full lament: Southern Baptist Seminary releases report on its history of slavery, racism

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The Southern Baptist Conventions flagship seminary has released a report detailing their history of racism and support for slavery as part of an endeavor to recognize their past moral failings on race issues.

We must repent of our own sins, we cannot repent for the dead. We must, however, offer full lament for a legacy we inherit, and a story that is now ours, wrote The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President R. Albert Mohler, Jr., in the 71-page Report on Slavery and Racism in the History of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Mohler appointed a committee last year to research the history of the Louisville-based evangelical school, which was founded in 1859 as part of the pro-slavery SBC, on the issues of race, slavery and civil rights.

The committee consisted of six scholars, including Gregory A. Wills, professor of church history and former dean of the School of Theology who chaired the committee.

The history of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary is intertwined with the history of American slavery and the commitment to white supremacy which supported it. Slavery left its mark on the seminary just as it did upon the American nation as a whole, states the reports Summary of Findings.

The belief in white supremacy that undergirded slavery also undergirded new forms of racial oppression. The seminarys leaders long shared that belief and therefore failed to combat effectively the injustices stemming from it.

The report notes that the seminarys founders all held slaves, supported the Confederacy during the American Civil War, and up until the 1940s actively supported segregation and racial inequality.

The report also found that before the 1940s, the seminary endorsed the Lost Cause narrative of American history, which promoted a pro-South perspective on slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, often to justify Jim Crow laws.

There are some positives in the seminarys history, according to the report, including steps toward advancing black education before the 1940s, integrating their classes three years before the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, and faculty giving support for the Civil Rights Movement during the 1950s and 1960s.

This report documents the contradictions and complexities of the experience of Southern Baptists and race in America. We have not overcome all the contradictions, but we are committed to doing so, notes the report in its conclusion.

Mohler said that while these questionable positions were believed or practiced widely at the time, this does not excuse them, nor will it excuse us.

As he called for repentance, he added, As Christians, we know no total sanctification or perfection in this life. We await something better, our future glorification by Christ.

Mohler also noted that while the seminarys founders had moral shortcomings like slave ownership and support for the Confederacy, the evangelical school will not censor them.

In light of the burdens of history, some schools hasten to remove names, announce plans, and declare moral superiority. That is not what I intend to do, nor do I believe that to be what the Southern Baptist Convention or our Board of Trustees would have us to do, he stated.

We do not evaluate our Christian forebears from a position of our own moral innocence. Christians know that there is no such innocence. But we must judge, even as we will be judged, by the unchanging Word of God and the deposit of biblical truth.

Over the past few years, the Southern Baptist Convention has made efforts to acknowledge and seek forgiveness for their history as a denomination founded on pro-slavery viewpoints.

In 2012, the SBC, once founded by pro-slavery Baptists, elected its first African-American president, the Rev. Fred J. Luter, Jr. of Franklin Avenue Baptist Church in New Orleans, Louisiana.

In 2014, the denomination passed a resolution that lamented and repudiated America's "long history of racial segregation as well as the complicity of Southern Baptists who resisted or opposed" racial integration.

In 2015, then SBC President Ronnie Floyd was part of a summit with Jerry Young, president of the historically African-American denomination National Baptist Convention, USA. The summit was organized by Mission Mississippi, a Christian organization founded in the 1990s that is centered on creating racial reconciliation.

The SBC's public policy arm, the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, has also been focused on racial reconciliation in recent years, with its president Russell Moore calling racism "anti-Christ."

In April at the MLK 50 Conference in Memphis, Tennessee, Moore gave a speech in which he declared that the "White American Bible Belt" often paid homage to racism while calling it "Jesus Christ."
(Reuters) - Myanmar teenager Mya Thwate Thwate Khaing was supposed to be celebrating her 20th birthday on Thursday.

Instead, she is fighting for her life in a hospital in the capital Naypyitaw after she was shot in the head when police cracked down on a protest against the military coup.

Myanmar's army seized power on Feb. 1 and detained elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi, ending a long transition towards democracy and bringing tens of thousands of demonstrators onto the streets.

The shooting of the teenager - the first known serious casualty of the protests - has roused anger across the nation and rallied support for the anti-coup movement, many of whose members are part of a Generation Z who say they refuse to allow another generation to experience military rule.

Mya Thwate Thwate Khaing, a 19-year-old grocery store worker, had traveled with her sisters from a nearby village to Naypyitaw, the army-built capital in the center of the country, for a protest on Tuesday. It was one of dozens in towns and cities across the country.

Police quashed the peaceful protest with water cannon and gunfire. The teenager was struck in the back of the head with a live round as she was fleeing. Doctors do not expect her to survive.

Her brother Ye Htut Aung told Reuters the family  though supportive of the protests  had urged her against going to the demonstration for fear of violence. She insisted.

"It was her spirit," he said by phone. "She wanted to and I couldnt stop her."

The last time he spoke to her, he said, was on a voice call over a poor connection. Neither could get the video to work  the new ruling junta has been stifling internet access.

Ye Htut Aung warned her to stay at the back of the protest and that the police were not to be trusted.

"What are you going to do if they shoot?" he asked.

"No, they wouldnt," she replied. "Its OK. Even if they fire, it should be fine."

The army's True News Information Unit said in a statement the security forces only used non-lethal weapons and the police were investigating. It said two police had been injured by the "rioters" and were in hospital.

Story continues

'FIGHTING'

The shooting has caused outrage across the country and recalled the long history of bloody crackdowns on protest by the security forces in Myanmar. During uprisings against the former ruling military junta in the late 1980s, thousands were killed.

Protesters draped a massive a portrait of her from a bridge in downtown Yangon, the commercial capital, on Wednesday. "Lets together oppose the dictator who kills the people" the banner read.

Video footage posted to Facebook and verified by Reuters shows the moment she was shot. In the footage, she stands at the front of a crowd of protesters facing riot police.

Wearing a red t-shirt and helmet, she is first struck by a stream fired by a water cannon. A woman beside her takes her hand and tries to lead her away. While their backs are turned, there is a crack and she crumples to the ground. Police continue to soak the crowd with water cannon as they try to tend to her.

"I didn't think that she was shot at first, I thought she had fainted because she was angry," said her sister, Mya Tha Toe Nwe, who was there.

Through tears, she said Mya Thwate Thwate Khaing was the youngest of four siblings.

"I feel so heartbroken," she told media. "We only have one mother, our dad is already dead.... My mother also can't stand her young daughter is dying like this."

A doctor from the hospital told Reuters she had lost significant brain function and was not likely to survive.

Human Rights Watch said a 20-year-old man also wounded by a bullet was in a stable condition.

Ye Htut Aung said the military had tried to have his sister transferred to an army hospital but the family had refused.

The family were all National League for Democracy (NLD) supporters who voted for the party in the Nov. 8 election that it won by a landslide. The military has said, without evidence, that the election was fraudulent, to justify their seizure of power.

Mya Thwate Thwate Khaing voted for the first time, her brother said.

Like many of those on the frontlines of Myanmars protests, she is also a teenager who until Tuesday had her whole life ahead of her.

In photos posted on Facebook, she stands in what looks like a forest or garden wearing a cartoon bear-print pink shirt, her long hair blown back from her face.

Since the news spread of her injury, her page has been flooded with supportive comments.

"Fighting, young sis," one reads.

(Reporting by Reuters staff, Writing by Poppy McPherson, Editing by Angus MacSwan)
BRUSSELS, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The European Wireless Infrastructure Association (EWIA) welcomed its newest member, Phoenix Tower International, a global tower company with EU presence in France, Spain, and Ireland, which joined the trade association after EWIA's last Annual General Meeting.

"In the context of Next Generation EU, independent wireless infrastructure operators have a positive role to play as the Commission and the legislators are addressing important questions on 5G and the connectivity agenda in Europe." says Tobias Martinez Gimeno, Chairman of EWIA. "In this context we welcome Phoenix Tower International as a new member so that our sector can speak with a stronger and even more representative voice in our ongoing engagement in Brussels."

"We are honored and delighted to be part of EWIA and look forward to working with all members to promote increased connectivity and wireless infrastructure across Europe" declared Dagan Kasavana, CEO of Phoenix Tower International.

While EWIA is extending its membership, its footprint across European countries is also increasing with 10 towerco members operating across 14 European countries: Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, The Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, the United Kingdom, Switzerland and Sweden.

About EWIA

The European Wireless Infrastructure Association is the European trade association of wholesale wireless infrastructure providers. Our members invest in and operate wireless infrastructure essential to the delivery of mobile voice, wireless broadband and other wireless networks.

EWIA advocates policies that encourage the network infrastructure investment and deployment necessary to make advanced wireless broadband available everywhere for consumers, businesses, health care, public safety and the countless other sectors that rely on always-on wireless connections.

About Phoenix Tower International

Phoenix Tower International was founded in 2013 with a mission to own and operate high quality wireless infrastructure sites in stable markets experiencing strong wireless usage growth around the world. PTI is currently focused on infrastructure expansion throughout Latin America, the Caribbean, the United States, and Europe.

SOURCE Phoenix Tower International

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A proposal to put more city dollars toward relief targeted for San Antonio bars and restaurants hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic is gaining momentum three months after the idea was first raised.

The City Councils governance committee  the agenda-setting panel chaired by Mayor Ron Nirenberg  unanimously agreed to move the policy forward Tuesday morning and to get the ball rolling on figuring out details such as how businesses would qualify and where the city will find the money to pay for it.

District 1 Councilman Roberto Trevino, who authored the proposal, urged other council members and city staffers not to take too long given the hardship faced by local restauranteurs  who have seen their dining rooms empty as fewer diners seek to eat indoors for fear of exposing themselves to the airborne virus, while also complying with state occupancy restrictions and other health guidelines.

Every day, a business is faltering, Trevino said. At the heart of this is really the workers that are suffering throughout this pandemic.

The pandemic has all but decimated the citys dining scene as restaurant owners have increasingly called on city leaders to pony up more dollars to help ailing watering holes and eateries.

In 2020, the city handed out $8.7 million to bars and restaurants with fewer than 20 employees  part of a broader $29.7 million small business grant program. Council members and city staff also allocated $4.5 million to help the food and beverage industry in November and December.

By early January, Bexar County had given out at least $5 million in grants to bars and restaurants with plans to hand out another $1.4 million.

But Trevino, backed by a cadre of restaurateurs, argued that more assistance is needed. When he laid out his proposal in October, he said the existing program is too restrictive. For one, the citys small business grant program focused on areas of town with higher poverty rates  making it more difficult for restaurants downtown, the heart of the citys dining scene, to tap the program.

On ExpressNews.com: Weve got to find a way: Councilman wants more COVID aid for bars, restaurants

Nirenberg, though, had hinted a separate program for bars and restaurants was unnecessary  pointing to other forms of relief available to bars and restaurants, including $284 billion Congress pumped into a second round of the Paycheck Protection Program, which provides businesses with forgivable loans for paying employees and utility bills.

Later, Nirenberg said he hadnt taken it off the table  and allowed the proposal to come up for debate Tuesday.

The citys hospitality workers have been a significant percentage of those who have sought assistance from the citys existing relief programs for help with rent and utility bills, though its hard to tell how many specifically work or worked in restaurants and bars, city officials said Tuesday.

Of those who asked for help from the citys emergency housing assistance fund in the first few months of the pandemic, more than half had worked in the broader hospitality industry, which includes restaurants but also hotels and tourism attractions, said Veronica Soto, who heads the citys Neighborhood and Housing Services Department.

More than a third of those enrolled in the citys workforce development program had previously worked jobs in bars and restaurants as well as retail and hospitality, said Alex Lopez, who runs the city Economic Development Department.

Given the dire circumstances faced by the hospitality industry at-large, District 7 Councilwoman Ana Sandoval pressed her colleagues to consider expanding the idea beyond bars and restaurants.

We do have a lot of hospitality workers in San Antonio that have lost their jobs and of course are very much in need, Sandoval said.

District 9 Councilman John Courage said that idea may be premature.

Im really hesitant to kind of broaden this so far without having an understanding of where we already have addressed small business needs, Courage said.

It remains to be seen how the city would pay for targeted relief for bars and restaurants, though Trevino has pointed to a few bank accounts the city could delve into.

One idea is to take $750,000 from a trio of tax increment reinvestment zones in the citys urban core  mechanisms that take increases in property tax revenue from land within the zone and put them into public improvements in the area such as drainage and streets. Those improvements are on hold right now so the money can be used elsewhere, Trevino has argued. But that money could only be used to help businesses within the boundaries of those zones.

Trevino has also pitched the idea of putting about $17 million in city-issued debt that would have paid for some of the stalled Alamo Plaza renovation  including the controversial moving of the Cenotaph  toward other capital improvements, which could free up the capital dollars to be spent on assistance for bars and restaurants.

The issue now heads to the councils Economic and Workforce Development committee before it goes before the full council for a final decision.

jfechter@express-news.net | Twitter: @JFReports
You cant book an appointment.

Thats what some callers say they are being told when they call the states vaccine hotline, even though state officials said Monday the system was set up to help to them secure a slot.

The representatives did not say the appointments were unavailable because they were all booked, frustrated people told NJ Advance Media. But instead, callers said they were told the workers didnt have the capability to make appointments at all.

The confusion comes after Health Department commissioner Judy Persichilli said at the governors Monday coronavirus briefing that the hotline had started making appointments.

She said more than 600 appointments had been booked through the hotline since Wednesday. Over the weekend, she said, the call center took more than 16,000 calls, registered 514 people with the New Jersey Vaccine Scheduling System (NJVSS) and made appointments for 286 people.

They started making first dose appointments last Wednesday, Persichilli said, noting she wasnt sure if second dose appointments were being made.

Faisel Muhammad of South Brunswick said he called the hotline on Tuesday and was turned away.

The person told me to wait for the second email after registering with NJVSS, that it will have a link for setting up an appointment, Muhammad said. No phone appointments.

Carol Rayside said when she called, a representative said they can only register people and could not make appointments.

Vincent Tamburro said his mother, who is over age 65, called the hotline and a representative told her they dont know why they arent able to schedule anything. And when he tried the hotline himself, the representative said she couldnt even get into the scheduling system.

We are becoming incredibly frustrated, the Wanaque man said.

Jane, 72, who didnt want to provide her last name, said she has called the hotline multiple times.

Initially I was informed there were operators to register and others to book appointments, she said. One time I was placed on hold for about an hour waiting for an appointment operator, only to be disconnected. (During) another call I was told that was incorrect. They only register.

When asked about the complaints, a spokeswoman did not answer questions about what the representatives were allegedly saying, but said vaccine supply is limited and demand is high.

As the Commissioner said in (Mondays) briefing, callers are getting through, people are being registered and appointments have been made for eligible individuals, spokeswoman Nancy Kearney said. As supply increases, more appointments will become available.

She said the call center has the same access to make appointments that is available to the public, but they are able to see all available appointments in the state at once.

As we continue to receive more vaccine from the federal government in the coming months, we anticipate more appointments will be available through the call center, Kearney said.

Others hotline callers reported other issues, including having trouble with the automated system.

Jack of Hunterdon County, who didnt want to give his last name, said when he called, the system told him to press one if hes already registered and would like to book an appointment.

You are told to hold on for a rep, then it says since you havent responded please hang up and call back. What a joke, he said. Thinking someone is going to speak with them when they are told to please wait for the next rep, then silence, and the recording says since YOU did not respond they hang up. You arent given a question to respond to!

Still others said they were on hold for 45 minutes or more, then they were suddenly disconnected.

The call center, which is open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. seven days a week, can be reached at (855) 568-0545.

Please subscribe now and support the local journalism YOU rely on and trust.

Karin Price Mueller may be reached at KPriceMueller@NJAdvanceMedia.com.
Someday, hopefully soon, the world will start to look normal again, and international business travel will once again be a thing of the present. In the meantime, you might as well stock up on the things you'll need to be prepared at all times when you're overseas  things like an international power adapter. During the sitewide Valentine's Day sale, you can save an extra 15 percent off the OMNIA Q3 3-in-1 Wireless Charging Station with Power Adapter when you use code VDAY2021 at checkout.

This charging station is a triple fast wireless charger that works with Qi-compatible Apple products like iPhone X, Apple Watch, and Apple AirPods Pro, as well as other Qi-compatible devices. The charger offers dual charging standards of 7.5W for Apple and 10W for Android to ensure all of your devices charge safely at the right pace. Plus, it has a 24W fast wall charger with US/EU/UK travel plugs to let you connect while traveling across Europe. The charging dock offers 100 percent safe charging with protection against overcharging, overheating, and detecting foreign objects.
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New Delhi, Feb 10 : The Supreme Court on Wednesday stayed the Delhi High Court verdict directing private unaided schools, along with Kendriya Vidyalayas, to provide gadgets and internet packages to students from economically weaker section (EWS) for online classes amid the pandemic.

A bench headed by Chief Justice S.A. Bobde and comprising Justices A.S. Bopanna and V. Ramasubramanian said: "Issue notice. In the meantime, there shall be stay of operation of the impugned order of the High Court." The Delhi government had moved the top court challenging the High Court's September 18 2020 order, delivered on the petition of NGO Justice for All.

Senior advocate Vikas Singh, representing the Delhi government, submitted that the High Court verdict has imposed an additional burden on the government.

"We are already spending a lot on the education front," he argued.

The bench, while observing the top court had earlier delivered a verdict on a similar issue in a case arising out of Himachal Pradesh, asked Singh to bring on record that verdict too.

The High Court had said the tuition fee does not include the cost of gadgets and internet package, and this should be provided free of cost to these students by the schools. Later, the private unaided schools could claim reimbursement from the state in accordance with provision of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009.

Justice for All moved the High Court seeking directions to the Centre and the Delhi government to provide free laptops, tablets or mobile phones to students from economically weaker background to access online classes.

The High Court had observed that if school decides to voluntarily provide online education, "they will have to ensure that the students belonging to economically weaker section or disadvantaged group category also have access and are able to avail the same".

"Segregation in education is a denial of equal protection of the laws under Article 14 of the Constitution and in particular the Right to Education (RTE) Act, 2009," the High Court said.
Prayagraj : , Feb 10 (IANS) Two couples, Avinash and Anjali, and Amit and Shiva, had a unique marriage in Prayagraj.

Instead of the ceremonial fire, the mantras and other traditional rituals, the marriages were solemnised with a 'pledge' which the couples took in the presence of their parents, several social workers and eminent persons of the city.

The marriage took place in a residential complex of Chatham lines locality of the city on Sunday.

The two couples chose each other beyond caste lines and without any religious rituals.

Avinash, 27, is a native of Domanpura village of Patherdewa in Deoria and has done masters in civil engineering while his partner, Anjali, has done masters in commerce from the Allahabad University.

"We are not against religion, but the age-old rituals associated with a marriage do not fit well into contemporary society. For a happy married life or for someone to get married, love is the only prerequisite and not caste, social status, dowry or any of such irrelevant practices put on display," said Avinash.

He further said, "We are from different castes and our families have endorsed this relationship. I think that if the boy and the girl love each other, only then they should marry and for that it is not bad to spend some years together, knowing each other for better compatibility." The other couple that got married in this unusual manner echoed similar sentiments.

Amit said, "We are against the customs that have come to be identified with most marriages. The girl is not a commodity that her father has to give as a 'daan' in a marriage." After taking a joint pledge of mutual love, trust, faith and equality, the couples also signed a document beneath the written format of the pledge and the same was counter-signed by some of the witnesses present at the ceremony.

Interestingly, both the brides have decided not to flaunt their marital status by wearing 'sindoor' and 'mangalsutra'.

After the marriage, a concert was presented at the venue composed by eminent music composer Vivek Vishal.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-10 06:46:17|Editor: huaxia

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HOUSTON, Feb. 9 (Xinhua) -- U.S. state of Louisiana will remain the current COVID-19 restrictions for another 21 days until the first week in March, Governor John Bel Edwards said on Tuesday.

During Tuesday afternoon's press briefing, Edwards announced the extension of the state's current Phase 2 Modified Restrictions which will expire this week, saying that the state still has "twice as many people in the hospital with COVID as we did over the summer."

"There has been some progress over the last month or so," Edwards said. "We're very, very thankful for that. The fact of the matter is the baseline numbers remain very high and concerning."

The governor put Louisiana back in Phase 2 Modified Restrictions in November 2020 when the state experienced a surge of COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations. Under the restrictions, bars are closed to indoor services and most businesses operate at 50 percent occupancy.

Official figures showed that 1,178 people died of COVID-19 in January in Louisiana, making it the second-deadliest month of the pandemic behind April 2020. COVID-19 measurements have improved in recent weeks. Enditem
(TNS)  As demonstrations for racial justice swept California last summer, protesters complained that they were frequently met with excessive force from police who relied on militarized tactics to break up largely peaceful gatherings.The controversy, which even caught the attention of Gov. Gavin Newsom, has prompted a Bay Area legislator to revive a bill that would limit the ability of state and local law enforcement agencies to buy military-style equipment  an approach that police groups say would interfere with their operations.The bill, AB481 by Assembly Member David Chiu, D- San Francisco, would not directly ban any purchases. But it would prevent agencies from buying certain types of equipment, including armored vehicles, drones and explosives, without approval from city councils, county boards of supervisors and other governing bodies.The measure would also require the law enforcement agencies to justify their need for the equipment, develop rules for using it and seek renewed permission every year, even for gear they have already bought. Chiu said decades of treating policing like a war has had harmful effects on people of color. Creating reviews for equipment purchases would give communities a greater voice in how they are policed, he said, and rebuild trust between law enforcement and the public."Our streets in California are not war zones. Our citizens are not enemy combatants," Chiu said. "The weapons and equipment they use should reflect that reality."Law enforcement agencies have several ways to obtain military-style equipment, most notably a federal program that provides excess property from the military itself at little or no cost  everything from vehicles and rifles to clothing and office supplies.Since the program was created in 1997, the military has transferred $7.5 billion worth of property to more than 8,000 law enforcement agencies. Only 5 percent of that is small arms and less than 1 percent is tactical vehicles, according to the Defense Logistics Agency.An investigation last summer by KGO-TV in San Francisco identified more than $11 million worth of equipment that Bay Area police agencies had received in the previous decade, including $361,000 worth of night vision viewers and a $185,000 bomb disposal robot for the San Francisco Police Department.That pipeline has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years. After widespread protests over police shootings, then-President Barack Obama restricted the program in 2015 from distributing certain types of gear, a ban that was later reversed by former President Donald Trump. Some members of Congress began pushing again last summer to curtail the transfers.A 2018 study by a doctoral candidate at the University of South Carolina also found a correlation between police departments that had accepted more surplus military equipment and those with a higher rate of using deadly force on suspects.Chiu's bill would require governing bodies to consider whether there is an alternative to buying military-style equipment, whether the purchase could be used disproportionately against some communities and whether it is the most cost-effective option.The measure would cover mine-resistant armored vehicles, tactical trucks, rocket launchers, flash-bang grenades, large-caliber firearms, bayonets and camouflage uniforms, but also equipment that might not be exclusively associated with the military, including helicopters, battering rams and riot helmets, shields and batons."Before we are arming our police officers with the equipment that is used in Iraq and Afghanistan, we ought to have a conversation about whether it's necessary," Chiu said. "If all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail."A similar bill squeaked through the Legislature in 2018, after being significantly scaled back because of law enforcement opposition. Then-Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed the measure, calling it "an unnecessary bureaucratic hurdle without commensurate public benefit."Cory Salzillo, a lobbyist for the California State Sheriffs' Association, said the approach puts law enforcement agencies in the state at a disadvantage because the bidding process for surplus military equipment can move quickly. He also expressed concern about an overly broad list of gear that would need approval."If you're the police chief, if you're the sheriff, you should be able to make those decisions about purchasing equipment," he said.


As Trump's impeachment trial opened, Congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland, one of the House impeachment managers prosecuting Trump, said that if Trump is not held accountable, it "would create a brand-new January exception" where future presidents would not face consequences for any wrongdoing during their final month in office.

Trump's two lawyers contended that the country's Founding Fathers, in writing the Constitution, only intended for impeachment to be used as a tool to remove a president from office, an impossibility in Trump's case since his four-year term ended Jan. 20 as Biden was inaugurated.

The 56-44 vote to start hearing evidence in the case at mid-day Wednesday came after four hours of impassioned arguments about the constitutionality of holding the trial while Trump is no longer in office. Democratic lawmakers from the House of Representatives prosecuting the case against Trump said the former U.S. leader must be held to account for his actions in his final weeks in office.

The U.S. Senate voted Tuesday to proceed with the impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump on a charge that he incited insurrection at the U.S. Capitol last month by urging hundreds of his supporters to confront lawmakers as they met to certify that Democrat Joe Biden had defeated him in last November's election.

 Video of Jan. 6 Violence

The Democrats showed the Senate a dramatic video of the chaos that unfolded in the Capitol on Jan. 6, with rampaging protesters storming past authorities and lawmakers scrambling to avoid the violence, shortly after they had started to certify that Biden had defeated Trump in last November's election.

Raskin recalled that his chief of staff, daughter and son-in-law were forced to barricade themselves in House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer's office and hide under a desk while rioters banged on the office door, "placing what they thought were their final texts and whispered phone calls to say their goodbyes. They thought they were gonna die."

Trump, who urged hundreds of supporters to confront lawmakers at the Capitol in a last-ditch effort to upend the election results, was impeached a week later and left office Jan. 20 as Biden was inaugurated as the country's 46th president.

Raskin said that every day a president is in office "he's prohibited from committing high crimes and misdemeanors" -- the standard for conviction on impeachment charges -- and cannot avoid responsibility for the deadly mayhem at the Capitol because he now is out of office.

But Trump's lawyers sharply disputed the legality of the Senate holding an impeachment trial on the allegation by the House of Representatives that Trump engaged in "incitement of insurrection" by urging his supporters to march on the Capitol and "fight like hell."

Trump lawyer Bruce Castor Jr. said, "The idea of a January exception [for presidential responsibility for his actions] is nonsense." He said that if Trump committed any offenses, "arrest him," now that he is a private citizen and no longer immune from prosecution. Castor quoted the Constitution saying that conviction on impeachment charges "shall not extend further than removal from office," an impossibility since Trump's four-year term in the White House has already ended. "The object of the Constitution has already been achieved," Castor said. "He was removed by the voters."

Trump's other lawyer, David Schoen, accused Democrats of pursuing the impeachment case against him "to eliminate Donald Trump from the American political scene." He said "pure, raw, misguided partisanship" was at the heart of the Democrats' case against the former president.

Tuesday's vote to proceed was expected. Last month, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, a staunch Trump supporter, attempted to block the trial on the same constitutional grounds, but five Republicans joined all 50 Democrats in voting 55-45 to proceed with the trial. In the new vote Tuesday, another Republican, Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, also voted to go ahead with the trial.

 Senate Vote

However, it will take a two-thirds majority for conviction, meaning at least 11 more Republican senators would have to reverse their votes for the prosecution to prevail. The 100-seat Senate is currently evenly divided 50-50 between Republicans and Democrats.

Paul says there is a "zero chance of conviction." If Trump is convicted, the Senate, on a simple majority vote, could bar him from ever holding federal office again. In 1876, the Senate conducted an impeachment trial of a Cabinet secretary during the Grant administration who resigned moments before he was impeached. Trump was impeached by the House while still in office.

The protest on Jan. 6 turned into mayhem, as about 800 Trump supporters rampaged past authorities into the Capitol, smashed doors and windows, ransacked some congressional offices and scuffled with police. Five people were killed, including a Capitol Police officer whose death is being investigated as a homicide, and a rioter shot by an officer.

The 100 senators deciding the impeachment case against the single-term president are in a unique position -- Many of them were witnesses themselves to the chaos as they fled the Senate chamber.

Trump, the only U.S. president to be twice impeached, was acquitted a year ago when he was accused of soliciting the president of Ukraine to dig up dirt against Biden ahead of last November's election.

A week after the storming of the Capitol, the House voted 232-197, with 10 Republicans joining all 222 Democrats, to accuse Trump of "incitement of insurrection." Then, on Jan. 20, Biden was inaugurated and Trump, no longer in power, flew for the last time on Air Force One to his Atlantic coastline mansion in Florida, where he has stayed since.

Trump has declined a request from Democrats to testify in his defense at his impeachment trial and is not expected to attend. The trial could last a week or longer. The nine Democratic House impeachment managers bringing the case against Trump -- several of them former prosecutors -- say that Trump, by urging his supporters to contest his election defeat at the Capitol, was "singularly responsible" for the riot that ensued.

Trump urged supporters to come to Washington on Jan. 6, saying it would be "wild." At a rally near the White House shortly before his supporters walked 16 blocks to the Capitol, Trump continued his weekslong barrage of unfounded claims that election fraud had cost him another four-year term.

Speaking for more than an hour, Trump told his supporters "to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard" by marching to the Capitol. But he also exhorted them, saying, "Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore and that's what this is all about. To use a favorite term that all of you people really came up with, we will stop the steal." "And we fight," he said. "We fight like hell and if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore."

Ahead of the trial, the House impeachment managers said in a legal brief, "President Trump's responsibility for the events of Jan. 6 is unmistakable" and that the former president's "conduct must be declared unacceptable in the clearest and most unequivocal terms," even though he is no longer in office.

Assuming the Senate votes to go ahead with the trial after debating its constitutionality, House managers will begin to present their case on Wednesday, likely showing some of the hours of videos recording the mayhem, much as they did Tuesday. The president's lawyers will then respond with his defense. According to an agreement announced Monday by congressional leaders, each side will have 16 hours over two days to present their arguments.

Later in the week, the Senate will have an opportunity to debate whether to call witnesses. The House managers could call some of the rioters to testify they were responding to Trump's call for them to confront lawmakers certifying Biden's victory.

Trump's lawyers have mounted a vigorous defense and contend that the former president bears no responsibility for what occurred last month. In a brief filed Monday, they said the case against him amounts to "political theater" brought by anti-Trump Democrats. Trump's lawyers suggested that he was simply exercising his constitutionally guaranteed right of free speech when he disputed the election results and argued that he explicitly encouraged his supporters to engage in a peaceful protest.

"Instead, this was only ever a selfish attempt by Democratic leadership in the House to prey upon the feelings of horror and confusion that fell upon all Americans across the entire political spectrum upon seeing the destruction at the Capitol on Jan. 6 by a few hundred people," the lawyers wrote. "Instead of acting to heal the nation, or at the very least focusing on prosecuting the lawbreakers who stormed the Capitol, the Speaker of the House (Nancy Pelosi) and her allies have tried to callously harness the chaos of the moment for their own political gain," they wrote.

In response, the House Democrats prosecuting Trump said, "We live in a nation governed by the rule of law, not mob violence incited by presidents who cannot accept their own electoral defeat." "The evidence of President Trump's conduct is overwhelming," the managers wrote. "He has no valid excuse or defense for his actions. And his efforts to escape accountability are entirely unavailing. As charged in the Article of Impeachment, President Trump violated his Oath of Office and betrayed the American people."


BUFFALO, N.Y., Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- M&T Bank (NYSE:MTB) has again been recognized as one of the country's top banks for businesses for delivering exceptional customer service by Greenwich Associates, the nation's top source for data and analytics about the financial services industry.

M&T earned 22 regional and national Greenwich Excellence awards and three Greenwich Best Brand awards across a wide range of categories for middle market and small business banking, according to the latest Greenwich survey results for calendar year 2020. In the small business category, M&T tied for the most with 13 Excellence Awards.

"M&T continues to deliver on its purpose to support small businesses  through both challenging and successful times  by providing solutions tailored to their individual needs," said Eric Feldstein, M&T senior vice president and head of Business Banking. "We are honored and humbled by this recognition and remain committed to helping small business succeed."

"Customers count on M&T to be there for them, and this is especially true during difficult times," said Gino Martocci, M&T executive vice president and head of Commercial Banking. "This recognition is especially gratifying, as it validates our focus on staying close to our customers and quickly meeting their needs."

Greenwich Associates interviewed more than 23,000 executives in markets across the U.S. to benchmark the quality of banking products and services in the marketplace. Of more than 600 banks evaluated, M&T Bank is among only 32 that received excellence awards in small business banking and 30 that received excellence awards in the middle market category.

Nationally, M&T Bank received Greenwich Excellence awards in:

Likelihood to Recommend  Middle Market

Likelihood to Recommend  Small Business

Overall Satisfaction with RM  Middle Market

Overall Satisfaction with RM  Small Business

Overall Satisfaction  Middle Market

Overall Satisfaction  Small Business

Cash Management Customer Service  Middle Market

Cash Management Customer Service  Small Business

Cash Management Overall Satisfaction  Middle Market

Cash Management Overall Satisfaction  Small Business

Cash Management Ease of Product Implementation  Middle Market

Cash Management Ease of Product Implementation  Small Business

Overall Satisfaction with CM Specialist  Small Business

Cash Management Product Capabilities  Small Business

RM Proactively Provides Advice  Small Business

Regionally, in the Northeast, M&T Bank received Greenwich Excellence awards in:

Overall Satisfaction  Middle Market

Overall Satisfaction  Small Business

Likelihood to Recommend  Middle Market

Likelihood to Recommend  Small Business

Cash Management Overall Satisfaction  Middle Market

Cash Management Overall Satisfaction  Small Business

RM Proactively Provides Advice  Small Business

Nationally, M&T received Greenwich Best Brand Awards in:

Trust  Middle Market

Trust  Small Business

Ease of Doing Business  Middle Market

Since 2011, M&T Bank has earned a total of 137 Greenwich Excellence awards. M&T has ranked among the Top 10 banks evaluated in the small business excellence award categories since 2009.

"The recent recognition from Greenwich is a testament of our commitment to our clients. We aim to exceed our clients' expectations and fulfill their needs while providing delightful experiences," said Aarthi Murali, M&T's chief customer experience officer. "We know our customers' needs are dynamic. We want to be there for them during their journey and the moments that matter."

M&T Bank provides a full range of banking, investment, insurance and mortgage products and services designed for businesses and their owners. The company ranks as one of the top 25 U.S.-based commercial banks, and in 2020 was named the 5th largest U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) lender in the nation and number one lender in most of its larger communities, including Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Delaware, Philadelphia, Buffalo, N.Y., and Syracuse, N.Y.

Additional information on M&T Bank can be accessed at www.newsroom.mtb.com.

About M&T Bank

M&T Bank Corporation is a financial holding company headquartered in Buffalo, New York. M&T's principal banking subsidiary, M&T Bank, operates banking offices in New York, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Connecticut, Virginia, West Virginia and the District of Columbia. Trust-related and investment services are provided by M&T's Wilmington Trust-affiliated companies and by M&T Bank.

Media Contacts:



New York (excluding NYC)

Julia Berchou

(716) 842-5385

[email protected]

New Jersey, Connecticut, New York City

David Samberg

(201) 368-4515

[email protected]

Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Washington, DC:

Scott Graham

(410) 244-4097

[email protected]

Equal Housing Lender.  2021 M&T Bank. Member FDIC.

SOURCE M&T Bank Corporation

Related Links

http://www.mandtbank.com


Hong Kong, Feb 10 : In a bid to accelerate its promotional efforts as part of the post-Covid-19 tourism-recovery plan, the Hong Kong Tourism Board (HKTB) has announced its first global fan-engagement programme called Hong Kong Super Fans.

"The HKTB has been planning ahead to prepare for the much-anticipated grand invitation to welcome visitors back to Hong Kong," YK Pang, Chairman of the HKTB, said during the virtual tour -- celebrating everything unique about ringing in Chinese New Year in Hong Kong, celebrated on February 12 -- organised especially for the very first Super Fans.

"The 'Hong Kong Super Fans' programme is both an important, integral element of the HKTB's recovery plan and a way for us to show our appreciation to the people whose continued passion for Hong Kong has maintained top-of-mind awareness of the city as a world-class travel destination," said Pang.

The launch of the programme's debut activity took the Super Fans through the charismatic neighbourhood of Old Town Central to experience cherished traditions and shop for auspicious essentials while enjoying a pre-delivered "Good Fortune Bag", filled with lucky ornaments, festive snacks and more, from the comfort of their own homes.

In its latest programme, the HKTB has invited Super Fans -- people with social influence and a heartfelt connection to Hong Kong -- to take part in exclusive online and offline activities that have been designed to showcase the best the city has to offer.

Once international travel is allowed again, these Super Fans will be invited to explore Hong Kong in all its glory, from heritage attractions to hidden local gems and exciting new happenings and share their experiences with their audience (Fans and Friends).

To show its appreciation, the HKTB has also organised a series of attractive offers and incentives that can be enjoyed by all Fans and Friends of Hong Kong. The HKTB has been recruiting Super Fans by invitation in Hong Kong and 20 key markets through the HKTB's worldwide offices in Asia, Australasia (Australia), Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the US.

Even though this year's Chinese New Year is likely going to be a little different, Hong Kong is set to welcome the festival in its own style by bridging traditional elements with innovative ideas, making the Year of the Ox a blissful and enjoyable year to remember.

Among many others, one of the popular traditions of the Chinese New Year is the Lion Dance, which remains popular even among the new generations. Interestingly, a young toy products designer, Wong Yin Foon, created his own design of robotic toy series -- the "Invincible Mascots." Wong has incorporated elements of a few Hongkongers' collective memory -- the Invincibles, Gundam and the Transformers into his design, and adopts a contrastive red-gold colour pattern to give them a celebrative outlook.

Mainly, there are two different versions of traditional lion dance art -- the southern and the northern lion. The southern lion is quite popular in Hong Kong, amongst them, one of the variants originates from the Foshan lion in Guangdong province, which is also the prototype version of Wong's "Invincible Mascot", which is characterized by a tilting nose and pointy horns.

Other than that, paying respect to the deities is another customary practice among locals. During the Chinese New Year, thousands of locals visit one or more famous temples, such as the Che Kung Temple, Wong Tai Sin Temple and Man Mo Temple, to pray for health and prosperity in the coming year.

Fai Chun, a traditional decoration in doorways and on walls, is also an essential item to create a joyful festive atmosphere and to bring good luck and prosperity.

Another tradition is to visit the city's renowned flower market in Prince Edward, Kowloon, where locals shop for seasonal flowers and plants that symbolise various good wishes. Tangerine trees are believed to bring good luck, while orchids symbolize fertility and refinement. Bountiful offerings of other festive blooms and fruits can also be found to bring home good wishes.

"If you make your home a very beautiful space, you are happier in general, and that brings in abundance and joy," says a shopper at the flower market.

So full of enriching, enchanting and fascinating tradition and festivities, this three-week "Fortunes in Hong Kong" CNY campaign is being held in an "online+offline" format from February 8-26 at www.discoverhongkong.com/CNY, featuring a creative online market, which offers CNY delicacies and specialities, alongside plentiful contents, including games, lucky feng shui tips and festive ecards to allow participants to feel the festive vibe across boundaries.
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Phuket Governor spearheads new domestic tourism campaign

PHUKET: Phuket Governor Narong Woonciew yesterday announced the launch of a new campaign that hopes to bring tourists to visit Phuket to help draw domestic tourists to the island.

tourismeconomics

By The Phuket News

Wednesday 10 February 2021, 12:00PM

The Have You Ever campaign was launched at Karon beach Beach yesterday evening (Feb 9). Photo: PR Phuket

The Have You Ever campaign was launched at Karon beach Beach yesterday evening (Feb 9). Photo: PR Phuket

The Have You Ever campaign was launched at Karon beach Beach yesterday evening (Feb 9). Photo: PR Phuket

The Have You Ever campaign was launched at Karon beach Beach yesterday evening (Feb 9). Photo: PR Phuket

The Have You Ever campaign was launched at Karon beach Beach yesterday evening (Feb 9). Photo: PR Phuket

The Have You Ever campaign was launched at Karon beach Beach yesterday evening (Feb 9). Photo: PR Phuket

The Have You Ever campaign was launched at Karon beach Beach yesterday evening (Feb 9). Photo: PR Phuket

The Have You Ever campaign was launched at Karon beach Beach yesterday evening (Feb 9). Photo: PR Phuket

The Have You Ever campaign was launched at Karon beach Beach yesterday evening (Feb 9). Photo: PR Phuket

The Have You Ever campaign was launched at Karon beach Beach yesterday evening (Feb 9). Photo: PR Phuket

The Have You Ever campaign was launched at Karon beach Beach yesterday evening (Feb 9). Photo: PR Phuket

The Have You Ever campaign was launched at Karon beach Beach yesterday evening (Feb 9). Photo: PR Phuket

The Have You Ever campaign was launched at Karon beach Beach yesterday evening (Feb 9). Photo: PR Phuket

Sitting beside the beach in Karon  one of the hardest-hit areas of the island amid the ongoing economic crisis  with the sun setting over the Andaman Sea as his backdrop, Governor Narong announced the campaign, themed Have You Ever".

The campaign brings together local Phuket tourism businesses and government agencies working together to help restart the islands economy.

Joining Governor Narong for the launch were were Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) Phuket Office Director Nanthasiri Ronnasiri, Phuket Tourist Association (PTA) President Bhummikitti Ruktaengam and Anuphap Wetwanitsanong, who is currently serving as the Acting Deputy Director of the Provincial Administrative Organisation (PPAO, or OrBorJor).

The PPAO was announced at a meeting at Phuket Provincial Hall on Monday (Feb 8) as now taking a proactive role in helping to launch a slew of domestic tourism campaigns to help restart Phukets ailing tourism industry.

Governor Narong said that Phuket today was now ready to receive tourists from all regions in the country, not noting that arrivals from Samut Sakhon must still observe a 14-day quarantine after arriving on the island, though arrivals from anywhere else in the country are not required to observe a mandatory quarantine.

Governor Narong noted, In these times of misfortune, we in Phuket have good fortune in two things that are gifts  namely location, and the spirit of the people living on the island.

We previously relied on just Sea Sun Sand, but today we have unseen beaches, unseen waterfalls and canals, and various activities that everyone can do even during this period, such as planting trees and camping, which are so popular today

The things people can do in Phuket cost very little to do. We have beautiful natural areas which are ideal for sporting activities, trail running, surfing or triathlons, and today we have surf skating, which is a current trend, he added.

We have a big natural studio of 543 square kilometres [the full area of Phuket island) to take pictures and shoot videos to post on social media such as Facebook and Instagram, or to hold pre-wedding and wedding events, as well as for large production events such as filming or advertising, Governor Narong explained.

Of the people living on the island, Governor Narong added, God gave the people who settled in Phuket are those who came with hope. They came with the real intention of having a better life.

So there is love on this island, where the phrase "Hometown, Muang Nong" made us never give up or give in to despair. Today we still think and continue to create ideas, and the campaign Have You Ever for all of you to see today. Although there are limitations, many obstacles, with my admiration everyone has gritted their teeth to keep going through to today, he said.

TAT Phuket Director Ms Nanthasiri said her office was targeting social media platforms to promote travel, including posting videos on Tik Tok, which she said was an increasing trend.

We have started making Tik Tok clips ourselves, appealing to a variety of tastes and preferences, from clips showing cooking to planting trees.

Since late last year a new trend has become popular, the Challenge, which challenges people to do things to test their capabilities. These subculture aspects and other little things have evolved to become pop culture today and play a part in the worlds travel trends. We will work this way, and with the campaign Have You Ever # [arrived in Phuket yet?] we are on the right track, she added.

Phuket Tourist Association President Mr Bhummikitti noted, We will be making videos comprising 11 content stories of hidden attractions in Phuket and posting them on several social media platforms so that other people can see and want to visit Phuket as well.

I assume that almost half of the Thai people have been to Phuket already and more than half have seen Phuket through various media, but if the place in the video can raise more questions for you, then you havent been to Phuket yet, he said

The 11 content stories to be created are Klong Hin Luk Diow, tunnels of trees, Koh Pling, Banana Beach, Kamala Hills, the hidden rock pools in Kamala, Seaside Street Food Markets, Pa Hin Dam Kalim, Laem Krating, Bamboo Forest and Koh Bon, he added.

Mr Bhummikitti concluded, The Phuket Provincial Governor insists that Phuket Province is now ready to welcome tourists from all regions to come and visit Phuket. We are ready to open up for everyone to experience something they may not have experienced before with the natural beauty revived again.
LONDON (dpa-AFX) - Grainger plc (GRI.L), a provider of private rental homes, reported Wednesday strong rental growth in the first four months of the year 2021. Total like-for-like rental growth was 2.4 percent. The company said sales performance remains positive across all regions. In its trading update, the company said PRS like-for-like rental growth was 1.8 percent and regulated tenancy like-for-like rental growth was 4.2 percent. The company will announce its half year financial results on May 13. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

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.
A Perth cafe owner has admitted previously baking cannabis brownies but denies he ever brought the cakes to his Woodlands shop or made them there.

Nathan Sharp, 42, is on trial in the Perth Magistrates Court, accused of serving two marijuana-laced chocolate brownies to a young Perth family who suffered hallucinations and had to be hospitalised.

Nathan Sharp at Perth Magistrates Court earlier this week. Credit:Nine News Perth

The Bada Bing Cafe owner took the stand on Wednesday to deny serving the cakes to the mother and her two children, aged three and five, saying he had no idea how the family were drugged or how a brownie allegedly purchased the next day by the father returned a positive result for cannabis.

Mr Sharps comments followed a police officers claim he admitted over the phone a few days after the incident in March 2019 that he had baked some cannabis brownies a few months prior and they must have got mixed up with the ones in the cafe.
The night before Christopher Williams hoped to come home from prison, Theophalis Bilal Wilson met with Williams family to offer advice.

Hes been in jail for 30 years. You cant expect him to be normal, he said. You have to be very loving, but at the same time very strong with him, because there are a lot of things he doesnt know, a lot of things he has to learn over. Show him love, but give him space. Dont be pulling in all different directions. ... Hes free now. Hes had 30 years of people telling him what to do.

Wilson was uniquely positioned to counsel them. He and Williams were both charged with a 1989 triple-murder. Both spent three decades in prison, including 25 years on death row for Williams. And both were exonerated after the Philadelphia District Attorneys Office opened up its case files and found a perfect storm of lying informants, prosecutorial misconduct, and hidden exculpatory evidence.

Wilson was released one year ago. But Williams  a 29-year-old carpenter from Germantown when he was pegged as a criminal mastermind, and charged with six murders in total  remained in prison on one more murder case. (He had been acquitted of the two other slayings at trial.)

There was some cynicism in me as a human being that one individual could be wrongfully convicted more than once, said Patricia Cummings, chief of the Philadelphia District Attorneys Conviction Integrity Unit, which has exonerated 18 men in three years. But ultimately her team found, lightning did strike twice.

On Tuesday, Philadelphia Common Pleas Court Judge Tracy Brandeis-Roman, who called the situation mind-boggling, agreed to toss out the sixth and final murder, the shooting of 19-year-old Michael Haynesworth in 1989. She extended apologies to Haynesworths family members for the gut punch of the systems failing. Haynesworths brother attended the hearing, held via Zoom, but did not return messages Tuesday.

Williams, 61, expressed deep gratitude to the lawyers who investigated his case. They did nothing spectacular: They did their job. But, he added, that led to a spectacular outcome: Never in the history of the Pennsylvania judicial system has someone been charged with six murders, acquitted of two and now exonerated of four.

 READ MORE: A brutal triple murder, an eager informant, hidden evidence, and now, exoneration

All the cases against Williams hinged on accusations by a man named James White  who, facing the death penalty for a series of six horrific murders, struck a deal to name his accomplices. White said in court filings that prosecutors had promised to help him apply for commutation after 15 years. That was the prosecutors word, he wrote in 2016.

Now, lawyers say its evident that White and another repeat witness both provided false testimony. Prosecutors did not disclose that other witness, David Lee, had previously taken a deal to testify in two unrelated homicide cases  and for years subsequent assistant district attorneys refused to disclose his extensive record as a commonwealth witness, they said.

Williams conviction was built on a house of cards that began to collapse in 2019 when the Commonwealth opened up its files to the defense, the District Attorneys Conviction Integrity Unit wrote in its filings. Once the light was allowed to shine, the Commonwealth was forced to see that the basic structure underpinning the conviction was built on the unscrupulous behavior of several bad actors.

 READ MORE: A perfect storm of injustice: Philly man freed after 28 years as DA condemns decades of misconduct

A third witness, a girl who was just 13 at the time, had also testified against Williams. That witness received a light sentence in exchange for her testimony. The CIU noted in its filings that she declined to cooperate with the investigation. The Inquirers attempts to contact her were unsuccessful.

Another codefendant, Troy Coulston, who was tried alongside Williams, remains in prison. Coulston maintains that he, too, is innocent. The proceeding did not make mention of Coulston, but the DAs Office is reviewing his case, a spokesperson said.

Williams and Wilson are committed to helping Coulston get his day in court.

Im not leaving him behind, Williams said.

The CIU ordered a review of DNA and fingerprint evidence from the crime scene, but the findings were unhelpful, Cummings said.

Victor Abreu of the Federal Community Defender Office, who has been representing Williams for three decades, extended an apology to the Haynesworth family that 31 years later, we still dont have the answer to who killed their loved one.

Meanwhile, watching the proceedings via Zoom from her home in Olney, Williams sister Maxine Matthis, 62, took a big sigh of relief that finally, finally, this thing had come to an end.

She and her children strung up a Welcome Home banner and festive balloons on her front porch for a modest celebration in keeping with COVID-19 safety protocols. The larger reunion would have to wait, she said. Williams, who was imprisoned at the State Correctional Institution Phoenix in Montgomery County, has five children. His children have grown up and had children, and some of them even have children of their own, said Matthis, who lost count around 18 grands and great-grandkids, scattered around the country.

When he finally arrived Tuesday evening, Williams was greeted by a tearful crowd of family and chosen family, including some of the men who came to see him as a father figure and beacon of positivity over decades of incarceration together. He carried a folder containing two execution warrants, both signed in 1999. If Pennsylvania was a state such as Texas, we wouldnt be standing here having this conversation right now.

He said he watched many men around him on death row give up, abandon their appeals, or take their own lives. He focused on staying connected to his family, reminding himself that truth tends to prevail. I couldnt give up on myself, because I couldnt give up on them.

Matthis embraced her brother, and then Wilson, who was, she said, just a baby when he was incarcerated. Weeping, she told him: Yall are home now. Im OK now.

A long, hard fight, right? said Wilson, who was 17 when the crime occurred.

Williams hopes to reclaim his place as a union carpenter, who often helped get jobs for young men in the neighborhood. Now, hed like to create an apprenticeship program that would help other formerly incarcerated people enter the building trades.

And, Williams said, he wants to be a voice for those he left behind.

If this was done to me, he said, the question remains: Who else was it done to?

Rafe Swan, Getty Images / Contributed Photo

A Connecticut man was charged by authorities in Pennsylvania after he allegedly assaulted a minor and brought the minor across state lines, according to officials.

Christopher Capozza, 39, of Newington, was indicted on Feb. 3 by a federal grand jury for transportation with the intent to engage in criminal sexual activity, and interstate travel with the intent to engage in a sexual act, with a minor, said federal prosecutors in Scranton, Pa.
Microsoft will soon warn Office 365 admins more directly about possible nation-state hacking activity, according to an update on its roadmap seen by ZDNet. Rather than just receiving an email as before, IT administrators will get notifications directly from the dashboard of Microsoft Defender for Office 365, the cloud-based security app for Office 365 users.

Nation-state hacking is generally sponsored by governments with the aim of furthering national interests, and represent some of the most advanced and persist threat activity that Microsoft tracks, the company wrote in the roadmap update. Microsoft has been tracking those threats for some time now, informing users by email that theyve been targeted and what to do about it. It warned 10,000 customers about such attacks in 2019.

However, overburdened admins might miss an email or not see it soon enough to take action. By placing the notifications directly in the Defender dashboard, IT employees might be able to secure systems and take action more quickly. Microsofts Threat Intelligence Center also follows these threats, builds comprehensive profiles of the activity, and works closely with all Microsoft security teams to implement detections and mitigations to protect our customers, according to the update.

Microsoft has been a key player in sniffing out (and being a victim of) hacking operations. Recently, it discovered that North Korean-backed hackers may have attacked researchers via certain Office 365 apps along with Googles Chrome. At the same time, Microsofts systems were recently penetrated during the SolarWinds attack, with attackers gaining access to source code.
Tessica Brown, now known worldwide as the Gorilla Glue Girl, wants people to know that she never intended to go viral after spraying her hair with ultra-strong adhesive.

Brown, a mother-of-five in Louisiana, says her hair has been rock-solid for a month now. She said she used Gorilla Glue Spray Adhesive when she ran out of the hair spray she usually uses, Got2b Glued hair spray, and mistakenly thought the glue could wash out.

Efforts to remove the glue with rubbing alcohol and olive, tea tree and other oils failed. She also went to the emergency room, where acetone burned her scalp and didnt soften the glue enough before hardening again.

She told ET that she only posted photos and videos of her saga online because she was desperate for help.

I never was going to take this to social media. The reason I took this to social media was because I didnt know what else to do, Brown said Tuesday. And I know somebody out there could have told me something. I didnt think for one second when I got up the next morning it was gonna be everywhere.

If you knew me, you wouldnt say half the stuff they are saying, she continued. Then somebody said, Oh, shes just put that on her head on purpose just to get to here. Who in their right mind would say, Oh well, let me just spray this in my head and become famous overnight? Never!Who would want them to do that? I needed somebody to tell me how to take this off, thats all it was.

The New York Post reports Brown was able to finally cut off her ponytail by using the product Goof Off to soften the glue. It took a friend four hours to remove it with the superglue remover and scissors.

On Wednesday morning, she announced that shes flying to Los Angeles to get professional help. TMZ reports a plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills has offered to help free of charge, using medical-grade glue remover in a procedure that could take three days.

Brown said that if the procedure is successful, the money shes raising on a GoFundMe will go towards buying wigs as hair might not be able to grow back in some parts of her scalp. She owns a daycare and runs a dance group, but said both businesses have struggled in the coronavirus pandemic.

Brown also denied previous reports that she spent 22 hours in the ER at a local hospital, and shot down claims she was considering suing Gorilla Glue. She said shes used the adhesive before, not on her hair, and assumed she could wash it right out.

I made a mistake, Brown admitted to ET.

Gorilla Glue, based in Ohio, said its product is not indicated for use in or on hair as it is considered permanent. The company said it was aware of Browns unique situation and cautioned that its spray adhesive is considered permanent and designed for use on craft, home, auto or office projects to mount things such as paper, cardboard, wood, laminate and fabric. The warning label also says Do not swallow. Do not get in eyes, on skin, or on clothing.

Brown added that she doesnt want to be known as the Gorilla Glue Girl, which has bothered her children as they hear about it at school.

Im not this whole Gorilla Glue girl, my name is Tessica Brown, Brown told ET. I told my son today, I wish I could just go back, because Im over it. Im over it.
Trauma Surgeon Jessica Beard, MD, MPH, FACS. Credit: Temple University

While the COVID-19 pandemic brought most of the country to a standstill in March 2020, Philadelphia trauma surgeons noticed an alarming trend in the incidence of firearm violence. Instead of decreasing with containment measures, firearm-injured patients were presenting at even higher rates to Temple University Hospital and other trauma centers around the city.

A team led by Jessica H. Beard, MD, MPH, FACS, Assistant Professor of Surgery and Director of Trauma Research at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University (LKSOM), sought to determine the magnitude of Philadelphia's increase in firearm violence during the COVID-19 pandemic. They also aimed to understand potential causes of the increase by trying to pinpoint when the increase occurred. They hypothesized that two major events of 2020 could explain the increase in firearm violence in Philadelphia: the enactment of public health policies designed to contain COVID-19 and a national reckoning with systemic racism, including widespread protests sparked by the police killing of George Floyd.

In a new research letter published in JAMA, Dr. Beard and her team used the Philadelphia Police registry data of shooting victims from January 1, 2016 through November 26, 2020 to determine when the spike in firearm violence began. They examined changes in the number of individuals shot per week in the city following the enactment of Philadelphia's first COVID-19 containment policy (closure of non-essential businesses) on March 16, 2020, and following the killing of George Floyd on May 25, 2020.

The team found that there were 7,159 individuals shot in the city overall during the 256 weeks included in the study. Prior to Philadelphia's first COVID-19 containment policy, there was an average of 25 individuals shot per week. In the weeks after that policy was put in place on March 16, 2020, the average number of individuals shot per week climbed to 46. A time-series analysis found that the increase in firearm violence was strongly associated with the enactment of COVID-19 containment policies. The killing of George Floyd was not associated with any significant increase in the rate of gun violence in the study model.

These findings indicate a significant and sustained increase in firearm violence in Philadelphia following enactment of COVID-19 containment policies.

"In the city of Philadelphia, shootings are often geographically concentrated in lower-income communities," Dr. Beard said. "These communities have not only been disproportionately affected by the coronavirus disease itself, but the pandemic and its associated policies have also exacerbated issues that were already present, including unemployment, poverty, structural racism and place-based economic disinvestment, which are empirically tied to firearm violence in Philadelphia. Our research shows that the measures put in place to contain the pandemic for health and safety reasons had a significant and sustained association with increased firearm violence in the city. In addition to mitigating the impact of COVID-19 in Philadelphia, we must also come together to address what is now an epidemic of gun violence in the city."

Explore further Follow the latest news on the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak

More information: Jessica H. Beard et al, Changes in Shooting Incidence in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Between March and November 2020, JAMA (2021). Journal information: Journal of the American Medical Association Jessica H. Beard et al, Changes in Shooting Incidence in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Between March and November 2020,(2021). DOI: 10.1001/jama.2021.1534
10,000 km2 of ice disappeared in a blink of an eye from an ice sheet in the Storfjorden Through offshore Svalbard, a new study shows. This dramatic break off was preceded by quite a rapid melt of 2.5 kilometres of ice a year. This parallels the current melt rates in Antarctica and Greenland and worries the scientists behind the study.

"Our measurements of the ice retreat in Storfjorden Through show that the prevailing conditions to the great break off, match what we see in Antarctica and Greenland today. It is uncanny. There are new studies published almost weekly, that show that the retreat of current ice sheets is two to four km a year and that it's speeding up." Says CAGE-professor and first author Tine Lander Rasmussen.

Climatically unstable period

The last deglaciation, 20,000- 10,000 years ago, was a period of coexisting global warming and rapidly shrinking ice sheets. But stating the actual correlation between the two is not as simple as it sounds. The period in question was climatically unstable, and big melts were interrupted by re-freezing and formation of new ice. The speed of the ice retreat, relative to climatic changes, has therefore been difficult to establish.

"We have studied the ice sheet development 20 000 - 10 000 years ago using marine sediment cores. The 12 cores have been collected in the area during the past 18 years, and meticulously analysed for different types of microfossils of single-celled organisms called foraminifera," says Rasmussen.

The biochemistry in the foraminifera fossils helps reconstruct the enormous amount of information about the state of the environment in prehistoric times. The sediments were sliced up in slices representing time periods of 30 to 70 years. Over 70 samples were dated and analyzed.

"What we saw is that the ice sheet starts retreating some 20,000 years ago but lingers on a ridge in the fjord. Then, some 15,000 years ago the atmosphere and ocean temperatures warm up, impacting the ocean circulation. A huge chunk of the ice sheet disappears at the same time. At the start of the Holocene warm period, 11,000 years ago, things really pick up speed. We can't see any more evidence of an ice sheet covering the ocean floor after that time."

Consistent correlation between global warming and ice retreat

The periods of extremely rapid ice sheet retreats are consistently correlating with periods of global warming of oceans and temperature. This is mirrored in ice sheet retreat from other eight Northern Norwegian fjord systems.

"This is strengthening our hypothesis that an increase in ocean temperature and global warming is the direct cause of the chain of the events leading up to the dramatically rapid ice sheet disintegration." Says Rasmussen.

This gives some alarming perspectives on present-day outlook. The great melt of the glacial maximum to the Holocene was 10,000 years in the making. The present climate change is much more rapid.

"The final retreat of the Storfjorden Through ice sheet happened as rapidly in the outer parts as it did further up the through. This means that as soon as warmer oceanic water got access to the ice sheet, it surged pretty rapidly inward from the edge of the ice shelf. To the interior of the sheet itself. We see this happening in Antarctica today. The Larsen A (1995), B (2003) and C (2017) break-offs are examples of this process. "

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It took the countrys largest lender State Bank of India (SBI) 10 years to scale its portfolio from Rs 89,000 crore to Rs 5 trillion. Now, it is aiming to double that to Rs 10 trillion in five years, at a time when lenders  and housing companies  are locked in an intense battle to gain market share.

Chairman Dinesh Khara said the bank is expecting its portfolio to touch Rs 7 trillion by financial year 2023-24 (FY24), buoyed by an increased desire among youth to own homes early in life, rising incomes, and government policies like the cuts in stamp duty and subsidy.

As competition is building up, we are also strengthening our capabilities. We are putting in place structures so that we are in a position to increase volumes and improve our delivery, Khara said.

At present, has a market share of 34 per cent in the segment amongst scheduled commercial banks, and has the most competitive rates (starting at 6.9 per cent).

Home loans are the biggest portfolio in SBIs asset book, accounting for 23 per cent as of December. Of the Rs 5 trillion, around Rs 4.86 trillion is home loans and the rest is builder Also, buyouts (loans taken over from other players) are around 23 per cent of the book, but pooled assets from shadow lenders form a miniscule portion.

One of SBIs biggest competitors in the segment is mortgage lender Housing Development Corporation (HDFC). Its asset under management (AUM) was Rs 5.52 trillion as of December, without discounting the loans it has sold. Its individual loan book stood at Rs 3.51 trillion and loans to corporate bodies stood at Rs 1.24 trillion, totaling Rs 4.83 trillion.

To achieve its target of doubling the home loan book, is strengthening its underwriting capability to improve delivery. Also, a new retail loan management system is being put in place that will reduce the time taken for the turnaround of loans. As of now, in the builder tie-up loan category, the banks turnaround time is five days, while it is 12 days for other categories in the home loan segment.

The bank is looking to use artificial intelligence (AI), Cloud, machine learning, and blockchain to propel not just the home loan business, but also other businesses. It is also looking to initiate a co-lending model for home loans to further its presence in the unorganised sector.





Referring to shifts in home purchases, Khara said, When it comes to home loan demand, it is a function of the economy and the demographic. The younger generation is looking to own a home at a younger age. We have observed that 42 per cent of our customers are under the age of 40.

Going forward, we will see a much greater shift in this direction. The increase in earnings of the younger generation, their aspirations, and the concept of a nuclear family are the contributing reasons for people to aspire for homes at an early age, Khara added.

Though credit uptake has grown at a tepid pace, the home loan segment has done exceedingly well. And, this gives an impetus to lenders to be aggressive in the segment as default rates are quite low and there is constant demand. Also, SBIs home loan segment has a bad loan ratio of just 0.68 per cent. Furthermore, of 3.9 million borrowers who were eligible for restructuring under the Reserve Bank of Indias (RBIs) Covid package, only 10,000 of its customers have availed the restructuring option, which amounts to Rs 2,500 crore.

The average ticket size of SBIs home loan is around Rs 31 lakh, which has grown from Rs 25 lakh earlier. Urban, semi-urban, and rural areas constitute about 51-52 per cent of the total book, while the rest is from metros. About 72 per cent of its customer base for home loans is the salaried segment, who are well equipped to honor commitments, the bank said. Interestingly, around 60 per cent of the banks home loan borrowers have a minimum credit score of 750. Shares of SBI closed 0.67 per cent lower at Rs 392.05 apiece on the BSE.

Kagiso Sekeseke (28) of Newtown ward in Maun, who is facing charges of murder, attempted murder and common assault has been denied bail by Magistrate Keneilwe Kgoadi.

The accused was charged for killing his aunt, attempted murder of his uncle and assault common of his mother's elder sister.

When the accused appeared before court for mention in Maun on Tuesday, Magistrate Kgoadi said the accused would not be granted bail on the grounds that his mental state was questionable.

Magistrate Kgoadi said the court could not grant the accused bail since he had potential to endanger other people's lives.

She said the court also considered that the accused did not have his own permanent and independent place of residence.

As such Magistrate Kgoadi dismissed the accused's bail application pending a mental evaluation report.

Prosecutor from the Directorate of Public Prosecutions, Ms Bezi Seralanyane, said investigations into the matter were ongoing.

Ms Seralanyane said the state had not managed to get a statement from the uncle who was hospitalised since the doctor advised against it looking at the patient's condition.

She also said the state was awaiting results for the accused's psychiatric evaluation and the doctor responsible was on a trip expected to be back the following week.

Particulars of the offence are that on November 26 last year, the mother to the accused, Ms Christina Ledimo who was visiting her son at his grandmother's place at Newtown ward in Maun asked the accused to assist her carry an iron sheet.

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The accused allegedly refused to assist his mother and assaulted his aunt, Ms Dikeledi Sekeseke with fists and a fork claiming that Ms Sekeseke was the one who asked him to assist his mother.

The mother allegedly ran out and the uncle, Mr Noah Sekeseke upon hearing the commotion came out of the house carrying a machete with an attempt to rebuke the accused.

The accused allegedly grabbed the machete and brutally attacked Mr Sekeseke with it.

The accused then allegedly followed his mother who was hiding with her older sister, Ms Ruth Segwadi in the kitchen.

It is alleged that the accused then forcibly opened the kitchen and allegedly attacked Ms Segwadi with the machete while the mother managed to escape and ran to her car and drove off.

The 66 year-old aunt who was hospitalised at Nyangbabwe Referral Hospital succumbed to the injuries while the uncle was still hospitalised with serious injuries.

Source : BOPA
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The Ananda Wellness Bliss programme in the Himalayas is a great way to introduce yoga and relaxation into your daily routine, via online appointments. Over the course of 12 one-on-one sessions, I, a near-beginner in yoga, was introduced to a wide range of practices, going from joint stretches to sun salutations and more complicated sequences. I first had to fill out a form about my health habits, from nutrition to digestion and my sleeping pattern. This then led to a one-on-one consultations with one of the spa's GPs, who gave me personalised recommendations following the ancient Indian Ayurveda system. I then had yoga sessions with Head of Yoga at Ananda, Sandeep Agarwalla, who introduced me to the basics of yoga. While nothing beats a trip to the Himalayas, the Zoom sessions were easy to integrate to my everyday routine and a great introduction to yoga.


Family and home.

Those are the images Indian Arrival Day evoke in the ticking mind of mas designer Valmiki Maharaj.

The Lost Tribe creative director says he will spend today ruminating on stories relayed by his beloved mother Basdaye and other family members who no longer walk this earth, knowing that with his every breath he carries on their legacy.
The year began with a wave of optimism on the back of the UK's vaccine rollout.

But as the Government imposes draconian travel restrictions and there are warnings that summer holidays may have to be written off, optimism about a rapid recovery and a revival of consumer and business confidence  in spite of the build-up of a wall of 125bn of savings  is endangered.

My daily inbox is inundated with anxious emails from business groups. The least that could be hoped for is that the Chancellor Rishi Sunak and Business Secretary Kwasi Kwartang try to sprinkle stardust over recovery prospects.

As the Government imposes draconian travel restrictions and there are warnings that summer holidays may have to be written off, optimism about a rapid recovery is endangered

Not surprisingly, the airline and airport industries are in despair, arguing survival is harder by the day, with almost zero revenue and a huge cost base.

As a result of paralysis in the skies, Rolls-Royce is planning to mothball aero-engine plants with an impact on a critical supply chain. The UK's entrepot and services-driven economy is gasping for breath.

Promised help for the Events Industry Alliance, which comprises exhibition and conference organisers, venues and suppliers, is stuck.

An estimated 1.4billion of Government grants remain locked up in local authority bureaucracy, with many smaller players facing bankruptcy.

The British Beer and Pub Association is demanding a road map to recovery with sales down 56 per cent and Food to Go services stymied.

The concern must be when the hospitality industry emerges from hibernation not only will there be far fewer outlets but many will have fallen into the hands of ruthless short-termist profiteers.

The triage system for the smallest businesses, in the shape of Bounce Back loans, is in danger of leaving a legacy of 'zombie' firms, killing entrepreneurship.

It is terrific that International Trade Secretary Liz Truss has just concluded new preferential trade arrangements with fast-growing India.

But it won't be much good if our manufacturing and service industries are holed below the waterline.

Green fingers

The speed of adoption of environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) ideas is amazing to see.

It is changing big oil before our eyes, with BP and Shell going headlong into new technologies, from offshore wind to hydrogen. Fund managers from US giant Blackrock to Britain's M&G are moving in a sustainable direction.

An ESG creed is manna for heaven for policy makers deemed to be made of the right stuff.

Not so long ago, Chuka Umunna was seen as a potential leader of the Labour Party before a political journey saw him driven out to join a new party Change, off to the Lib Dems and then out of politics.

He is now finding a new home at JP Morgan as ESG chief for Europe and the Middle East. His arrival is no accident. The bank's chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon, is embracing the ESG agenda.

But he and activist investor John Harrington have been less than successful in persuading JP Morgan's board that it is time for the most blue-blooded of US banks to change its status to a 'public benefit corporation' which reaches a broader range of stakeholders, including workers and customers.

Efforts to persuade US companies to reshape generally have had a poor reception  but at least Bank of America is promising a shareholder vote.

The danger for Umunna is that, cut off from New York in Europe, he will not have clout to change much.

He comes with very different credentials to former Bank of England Governor Mark Carney, who has joined Brookfield Asset Management to lead the 400billion fund's ESG strategy.

Carney, the first central banker to demand finance prepares for climate change, is Boris Johnson's adviser to the Cop26 summit scheduled for Glasgow in November, and recently delivered on-message Reith Lectures. Those are impressive credentials.

Old timer

An early task for a Mario Draghi-led government in Italy will be what to do about 64 per cent state-controlled Monte dei Paschi di Siena, the perennially sick bank which has run up losses of 1.5billion and wants further state backing to merge with Unicredit.

That the Tuscan lender has survived after countless rescues since the financial crisis is because no government has felt confident enough to pull the plug on the world's oldest bank. Time to put it out of its misery.
Capitol Breach Suspect Asks Judge for Permission To Travel to Peru to Get Married

A man facing multiple charges in connection with the Jan. 6 Capitol breach has asked a court for permission to travel to Peru later this month in order to get married.

Troy Williams was arrested on Feb. 1 in Lexington, Kentucky, and charged with unlawful entry on restricted grounds and violent entry or disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds, according to the FBI. He told investigators he went inside the Capitol building after the doors were breached but didnt participate in any violence or vandalism, court records show (pdf).

Williams was released shortly after his arrest, with a court order (pdf) setting out the terms of his pre-trial release, including that he surrender his passport, not seek international travel documents, and not leave the Eastern District of Kentucky except for work purposes and travel to court hearings.

Dwight E. Crawley, his attorney, requested in a Feb. 9 court filing obtained by CNN (pdf) that Williams be allowed to travel to Peru, where his fiancee lives, so that the two can get married.

Crawley wrote that Williams understands that he must abide by all the terms and conditions concerning travel set out in the court order, but hopes the court will allow him to travel to Peru on Feb. 23 and return around two weeks later.

According to an FBI affidavit, Williams admitted to entering the Capitol twice on Jan. 6, although he insisted he did not take part in any violence.

I wasnt doing anything wrong or inciteful, he told investigators. We were a part of something, theres cops here, they tried to stop us, they are not letting us in, but not fighting us, he said, the court document shows.

The FBI agent conducting the interview said in the affidavit that Williams also recalled talking to two elderly gentlemen outside of the Capitol building who said they were not going inside because it would be a felony.

When WILLIAMS heard this, he thought to himself that they were probably right, the agent wrote.

Williams is one of some 200 people who have been arrested and charged in connection with the Capitol breach, which a number of FBI affidavits suggest had been pre-planned, weakening the allegation leveled against former President Donald Trump that he is guilty of incitement to insurrection.

Trump is facing an impeachment trial in the Senate over the incident, with Democrat prosecutors alleging Trump incited an insurrection and committed the most grievous constitutional crime, while lawyers for the former president have dismissed the trial as political theater.
"As Canada's cities continue to grow, city planners and residents are turning to rail to provide critical urban mobility solutions while reducing congestion and emissions," said Patrick Yeung, Otis Managing Director for Canada. "We're proud of our work across Canada to make these daily journeys possible for the millions of Canadians living in or near these cities. These projects underscore our commitment to supporting rail and other transportation infrastructure projects in Canada and around the world."

Otis has been selected to supply hundreds of elevators and escalators for six projects in Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa.

In Toronto, Otis is providing 111 of its heavy-duty, commercial-grade NPE escalator units for the Eglinton Crosstown Line, part of the largest transit expansion in the city's history. The project adds 25 stops and connections with multiple bus and subway lines, and is expected to be complete in December 2022.

Otis is also providing five Gen2 elevators and four NPE escalators to Toronto's Line 6 Finch West Light Rail Transit, an 11-kilometer, 18-stop line that will include 16 surface stops, one below-grade stop, and an underground interchange station at Finch West LRT station. Metrolinx and Infrastructure Ontario awarded the contract to Mosaic Transit Group in May 2018. Construction has been underway since 2019, with the elevator and escalator installation expected to begin in the second quarter of 2021.

In Montreal, Otis is currently installing 79 elevator and escalator units across 26 stations for the REM light rail network. The project includes 45 Gen2 elevators, 22 NPE escalators and 12 additional elevators. Construction is expected to be complete in 2023.

In Ottawa, Otis recently completed work on Stage 1 of the Ottawa O-Train Line 1 providing 58 elevators, including 46 Gen2 units and 10 hydraulic and gearless elevators, and modernizing two existing units. Otis was also awarded Stage 2 of the project with an additional 69 units  59 Gen2 elevators and 10 NPE escalators  across 15 stations both east and west. Elevator and escalator construction on Stage 2 is expected to be complete in July 2023.

Otis will provide an additional 28 Gen2 elevator units for Ottawa's O-Train South extension. The contract was awarded in Q4 2020 and construction continues to progress.

The NPE escalator is Otis' heavy-duty escalator line, designed for the demands of public spaces such as airports, metros and other busy transport hubs. Otis escalators use rectangular steel trusses to increase their strength, and seal welds protect them against internal corrosion. Escalator steps are subjected to dynamic load testing and step breakage tests, ensuring quality and durability.

The Otis Gen2 elevator redefined the industry with its unique, patented flat-belt drive technology that replaces conventional ropes and significantly reduces vibration, providing passengers and tenants a remarkably smooth, quiet ride and improved overall comfort compared to conventional systems.

To learn more about Otis products and services, visit www.otis.com.

About Otis

Otis gives people freedom to connect and thrive in a taller, faster, smarter world. The global leader in the manufacture, installation and servicing of elevators and escalators, we move 2 billion people a day and maintain more than 2 million customer units worldwide  the industry's largest Service portfolio. You'll find us in the world's most iconic structures, as well as residential and commercial buildings, transportation hubs and everywhere people are on the move. Headquartered in Connecticut, USA, Otis is 69,000 people strong, including 40,000 field professionals, all committed to meeting the diverse needs of our customers and passengers in more than 200 countries and territories. To learn more, visit www.otis.com and follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter @OtisElevatorCo.

Media Contact:

Jodi Hynes

+1 561-623-4028

[email protected]

SOURCE Otis Worldwide Corporation
Ltd (PIL) on Wednesday reported a 76.64 per cent increase in consolidated net profit at Rs 153.70 crore for the third quarter ended December 2020.

The company had posted a net profit of Rs 87.01 crore during the October-December period a year ago, PIL said in a BSE filing.

Revenue from operations rose 16.78 per cent to Rs 927.06 crore during the quarter under review as against Rs 793.82 crore in the corresponding period of the previous fiscal.

"We are encouraged by the strong demand in all our product categories in all channels. The athleisure and kids categories have particularly shown very promising growth and acceptance.

"We continue to strengthen management with the best talent and invest in digital transformation, technology and innovation in product design and development, marketing and brand building," Managing Director Sunder Genomal said.

There is also renewed focus in becoming more efficient and optimal in all aspects of the business, while at the same time taking care to eliminate any wasteful spend or activity, he added.

PIL's total expenses were at Rs 723.94 crore in Q3 FY 2020-21, up 6.39 per cent from Rs 680.41 crore in the year-ago period.

Over the outlook, Genomal said, "Given our strong and proven business model, wide product portfolio, efficient financial management and a very loyal customer base, we continue to remain very confident of our medium to long term prospects."



Bangalore-based is the exclusive licensee of American underwear brand Jockey International for manufacture, distribution and marketing in countries such as India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, UAE, Oman and Qatar.

PIL is also the exclusive licensee of Speedo International for the manufacture, marketing and distribution of the Speedo brand in India.

Shares of Page Industries Ltd on Wednesday settled at Rs 31,939.95 on BSE, up 5.29 per cent from its previous close.

(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.)
Facebook is taking a new approach to political content: Showing less of it. The company announced today that it will experiment with reducing News Feed entries about politics for a small portion of users in Canada, Brazil and Indonesia this week, and in the US in the coming weeks. Facebook Product Management Director Aastha Gupta says the company will explore ways of ranking political content in the News Feed, but also made it clear that this test wont affect content from official government agencies, health agencies and COVID-19 information from trusted health organizations like the CDC and WHO.

In November, Facebook said political content made up around 6 percent of the content people typically see on the service. But that data came after the New York Times Kevin Roose started using data from Facebooks CrowdTangle analytics platform to show the top performing links on the social network. For the most part, they were from news organizations, with a heavy emphasis on conservative voices.

Its important to note that were not removing political content from Facebook altogether, Gupta said in the blog post. Our goal is to preserve the ability for people to find and interact with political content on Facebook, while respecting each persons appetite for it at the top of their News Feed. She also notes that the company will survey users about their experience after having their political content reduced.

Facebooks announcement follows a series of more aggressive content moderation moves. Earlier this week, the company said it would finally ban COVID-19 vaccine misinformation. It also removed fake accounts in Uganda and Palestine from networks that were attempting to influence local elections.
Indias government is refusing to yield in its longstanding tax dispute with Vodafone Group by appealing the case in the Singapore High Court.

The case relates to the 2007 acquisition of Hutchison Essar by UK-based Vodafone, for which the Indian government attempted to charge the operator INR221 billion (US$3.0 billion) in fees and back taxes.

As reported by TeleGeography, Indias Supreme Court ruled in favour of Vodafone in January 2012. In May that year, the government undercut the ruling by implementing legislation that allowed it to tax Vodafone for the acquisition retroactively.

This led to new litigation, which in May 2014 resulted in Vodafone taking the case to an international arbitration tribunal in The Hague. In September 2020, the tribunal unanimously rejected the Indian governments tax claim, securing Vodafones second major win in the case.

The Indian government is now seeking to challenge this verdict in the Singapore High Court, reports The Economic Times.
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The German carmaker is no stranger to the world of endurance racing, becoming one of the most successful manufacturers to compete in this form of motorsport. It won the famous 24 Hours of Le Mans race a record 19-times and has some fond memories about Brands Hatch as well.Half of a century ago, a 917 co-driven by Pedro Rodriguez and Leo Kinnunen managed to win the 1,000-kilometer (621-mile) race held at the legendary British track five laps before the competition crossed the checkered flag.In 1984, the top six cars that finished the same race were all Porsches, with the winning 956 being co-driven by Jan Lammers and Jonathan Palmer.Last year in December, Porsche returned to Brands Hatch to break as many British endurance records as possible.The idea was brought forward by British motoring journalist Colin Goodwin who approached former race driver and current Porsche GB employee Rob Durrant to see if the company would be willing to help.Not only was Goodwins idea met with positive feedback but the whole event was put together in just a few hours. They selected Brands Hatch as the ideal location, and Durrant made a list of records that they would be aiming for.The plan was to run a Taycan 4S and a Taycan Turbo S simultaneously, and the drivers selected for the job were Le Mans legend Richard Attwood, former Formula 1 and Brands Hatch owner Jonathan Palmer, 2020 Porsche Carrera Cup GB champion Harry King, and 2020 Cayman Islands Porsche Sprint Challenge GB champion James Dorlin. The professional drivers were joined by the artisans of this event, Rob Durrant and Colin Goodwin.The factory-spec cars donned unique liveries specifically created for this record-setting feat. The 4S received a Salzburg-themed livery to honor the Porsche 917 driven by Attwood that finished third in the 1,000-kilometer (621-mile) race in 1970, while the Turbo S was fitted with a Canon-style livery as a tribute to Jonathan Palmers 956 that won the same race in 1984.The record-setting run began at 7 AM in complete darkness and under heavy rain that continued throughout the day. Although the wet track surface proved more than a handful even for experienced racing drivers, the records quickly piled up.By the end of the event at 8 PM, the Taycan 4S had set records in the category of "electric cars over 1,000 kg (2,204 lbs)", for the time taken from a standing start to cover 50 km, 50 miles, 100 km, 500 km, 500 miles, and 1000 km, in addition to the record for distance covered from a standing start in one hour at 98.192 km.The Turbo S set records for the time taken from a standing start to cover 200 km, 100 miles, and 200 miles. It also set records for distance covered from a standing start in three hours (252.356 km), six hours (450.065 km), and 12 hours (915.762 km).This record-setting run's success was assured by Porsches mobile charging unit that takes full advantage of the Taycans 800V electrical system and provides quick charging capabilities.It took about half an hour for each cars 93.4Performance Battery Plus to be charged from 5% to 85%, a feat that proved crucial for the event's success.Each of Porsches thirteen records was ratified by Motorsport UK, the governing body for four-wheel motorsport in the country.
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Myanmars political upheaval is prompting global companies from Japan to Thailand to dial back operations in the country, spurring concern about a widening business fallout.

From beer maker Kirin Holdings Co. to an early backer of gaming firm Razer Inc., companies and investors are weighing the impact of a military thats thrust the once- thriving nation into a state of emergency. The turmoil is prompting multinationals like Thailands biggest industrial developer to delay investment plans, a harbinger of things to come should the chaos deepen.

Western nations are applying pressure on the newly installed military government of the Southeast Asian country, once regarded as greenfield territory for everything from oil and gas to leisure resorts. With the U. S. reiterating plans to renew sanctions, it could cause a rippling effect among businesses, threatening $5.5 billion in foreign investment in a country that just a few years ago was on the path to democracy.

It will definitely get bigger as these corporations get on board the leave-first-and-ask-questions-later bandwagon, Justin Tang, head of Asian research at United First Partners in Singapore.

has been attracting more outside investment in recent years after posting double-digit economic growth in the early part of the last decade. Bordering the massive markets of India and China, has abundant natural resources, including oil and gas, gold, silver and precious stones. The population of about 57 million people is greater than South Koreas, and not far off Italys.

Among recent foreign deals, CVC Capital Partners reached an agreement in December to buy Myanmars biggest telecommunications tower company for close to $700 million. The deal for Irrawaddy Green Towers Ltd. is the second-biggest for the country, trailing only the acquisition of the Distillery group by a unit of Thai Beverage PCL.

Nations with the most at stake from the instability include Singapore, Myanmars largest foreign investor, accounting for almost 34% of approved investment by dollar value, according to a World Bank report in December. Yoma Strategic Holdings Ltd., a Singapore-listed conglomerate that gets almost all its revenue from Myanmar, has plunged by a third this year.

Singapore is monitoring the situation closely, said a spokesperson for Enterprise Singapore, a government agency that helps companies grow overseas.

The turmoil is creating a rippling effect across industries.

Kirin ended its joint-venture partnership with the nations largest brewer Myanma Economic Holdings Public Co., which has ties to the military. The company isnt planning to entirely exit the country, where its operations accounted for just 1.7% of revenue in 2019.

Lim Kaling, the founding investor of Singapore-based gaming firm Razer, is disposing of his one-third stake in a joint venture that owns RMH Singapore Pte Ltd. RMH owns 49% of Virginia Tobacco Co. in Myanmar, while Myanma Economic Holdings Ltd. -- owned by the military -- holds the balance. I hope for a time when I can be an investor in the country and its people once more, Kaling said in a statement on Monday.

Amata Corp. Pcl, one of Thailands biggest industrial land developers, delayed some investment plans after it won approval from the government to proceed on several projects.

The investment outlook of Myanmar doesnt look good, Viboon Kromadit, the companys chief marketing officer, said last week. Possible sanctions by the community will definitely affect foreign companies confidence.

Company Boycotts

Singapore-listed energy company Interra Resources Ltd. may face labor disruptions at the Chauk and Yenangyaung plants due to the protests, the company said in a filing to the Singapore Exchange.

Rights groups have called on a boycott of companies believed to be owned by the countrys military. There are 134 companies owned by two of Myanmars military-run holding firms -- Myanma Economic Holdings and Myanmar Economic Corp. -- according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

The unrest will lower the countrys economic growth this fiscal year to 3%, from a previous estimate of 4.5%, according to estimates from Malaysias Malayan Banking Bhd.

A military has dealt a severe blow to Myanmars economic recovery and political stability, economists Linda Liu and Chua Hak Bin said in a note. Investment will likely fall given heightened uncertainty and freeze on fresh investments from Western countries.

Companies adopting a wait-and-see approach include:

Thailands energy company, PTT Exploration & Production, is closely monitoring the political situation but doesnt expect the internal strife to affect its operations or plans, senior vice president for finance Orachon Ouiyamapun said at an investor presentation on Tuesday.

Australian & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd. said it has a small presence in the Southeast Asian country and is monitoring the situation closely, a spokesperson said.

Singapores Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp.s branch continues to operate in the country, said Patrick Chew, head of operational risk management.

Chinese investors, on the other hand, could benefit from the upheaval. They tend to have a higher risk tolerance compared with those from other regions, according to an analysis by Fitch Solutions Country Risk & Industry Research. That means theres a chance they may take the opportunity to expand their reach in the country as other investors stay cautious.
In a typical year, more than 1,600 trials reach the Harris County court system, where a jury of ones peers decides guilt or innocence for a crime or whether a person or business is financially responsible for an injury.

But 2020 was no typical year. From COVID-19s local onset in March 2020 to mid-January, the county held a fraction of those cases  at least 36 civil jury trials and 16 criminal jury trials, according to state data and the Harris County District Clerks Office.

The pace isnt expected to pick up as the county continues operating on a COVID plan that some criminal justice officials fear does little to lower caseloads yet defense attorneys say endangers the public. Judges insist the proceedings are safe, necessary and ultimately, allowed by the state. Many defense attorneys cite safety risks and constitutional concerns on behalf of their defendants. Meanwhile, significant progress is far off until vaccinations are more widely available, court officials say.

In a criminal justice system designed on the promise a speedy trial, COVID has brought it to a near-grinding halt and most defendants seeking trial as well as families of crime victims are caught in the gears.

Steve Gonzales, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer

Until the vast majority of our population is vaccinated, I dont see really large volumes being moved, said Jim Bethke, director of the countys Justice Administration Department. We can have a valve to help move some of the cases, but I dont see real meaningful relief.

The lack of trials illustrates one way that coronavirus-prompted changes at the courthouse have further burdened an already clogged system, which suffered from major backlogs after Hurricane Harvey shut down the courthouse in 2017. While some criminal justice leaders cite early success contracting with Reliant Park for social distanced jury selection at NRG Arena, even that location comes with a hitch  any increase in trials stalled last week , when the arena will no longer be available because of the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeos student competitions.

County officials shuttered the criminal and civil courthouses after the virus local outbreak in March and only resumed trials officially after Oct. 1 following a series of emergency orders by the Supreme Court of Texas, although some trials occurred with special permission before then. Local judges have agreed on guidelines to safely operate their courts, including that the administrative district judge approves every jury trial and consults on each with the local health authority.

Defense attorneys organizations have fought the judges from the start. They argue that social distancing procedures make it difficult to read prospective jurors faces  deemed important because facial expressions can betray true feelings  and that returning to the courtroom isnt safe for them or their clients.

And because of lower vaccination rates in minority communities, many attorneys worry that those groups would show up for jury service in smaller numbers, not giving defendants a true jury of their peers.

Harris County judges who push forward with trials right now over the objections of the parties, as well as any county official who approves them, need to take a long hard look in the mirror, said Grant Scheiner, president of the Texas Criminal Defense Lawyers Association. Theres no reason why court cases cant wait just several more months during a time of emergency.

Steve Gonzales, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer

Harris County Chief Public Defender Alex Bunin agreed that safety concerns have dampened defense attorneys desire to conduct trials.

I certainly am not advising clients to go forward, but we cant rule it out either, he said. If it was in the clients interest to go forward and they wanted to, we would do that.

Judge Robert Schaffer, who oversees his own civil court as well as the administrative functions of the civil and criminal district courts, said the implementation of a jury plan at least gets cases moving. Without that, dockets would be nearly stagnant, he said.

Jury trials arent always the best benchmark for how swiftly judges move through their caseloads, but experts and judges say theyre still indicative: Without the threat of trial, defendants usually dont receive good plea offers and all parties are less compelled to move cases forward.

Very few cases actually go to trial - in 2018 and 2019, between 1 and 3 percent of state criminal cases saw a jury, according to the Texas Office of Court Administration.

I completely understand the issues that the criminal defense bar raises, but were following the orders that were getting from Austin, Schaffer said, referencing the Supreme Court of Texas orders. We have had the Harris County Public Health review our plan and they have neither suggested, implied or recommended that we not go forward with jury trials.

The public health organization doesnt actually have a complete say in trial oversight, said Harris County Public Health spokeswoman Elizabeth Perez. But the judges have listened to her offices suggestions.

As a separate branch of government, our authority is limited when it comes to jurisdiction over trials, Perez said. However, over the past year weve worked very closely with court officials to make sure they have all the health guidance they need from us to make informed decisions about how to protect residents from COVID-19. Theyve taken much of that advice to heart, including protocols theyve implemented for their jury selection process.

Trial by Zoom

Harris County is the only urban county in Texas holding jury trials at all, according to the Texas Office of Court Administration. Less than 100 counties out of the total 254 have even created and submitted plans for holding jury trials, and many of them arent being used.

Texas tries 186 cases every week in a usual year, and since March, the state hasnt tried that many yet, said David Slayton, administrative director of the Texas Office of Court administration.

The resulting backlog likely means criminal cases will get priority for juries in most Texas courts, leaving civil courts more likely to suffer.

If its a civil case or a family case or some other small claims eviction traffic, any of those that need to occur, theyre going to be behind criminal cases, Slayton said. That could be frankly years before we get to those.

Steve Gonzales, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer

That might push civil courts to embrace Zoom trials - an idea that criminal judges have largely rejected over constitutional concerns for defendants. Through mid-January, no trials in Harris County had been held exclusively over Zoom, but one judge last week allowed a defendant to appear by the video conferencing platform in a civil trial involving former Astros pitcher Roger Clemens son.

In criminal cases, the district attorneys office voiced a need to increase jury proceedings with the help of technology, however.

Jury trials are the heart of the justice system. Crime victims should have their day in court as should persons charged with crimes, Harris County District Attorneys Office spokesman Dane Schiller said. These are challenging times, first with delays caused by Hurricane Harvey and now COVID-19, and we strongly support embracing technology for courtrooms to be used as efficiently and safely as possible.

Access at NRG

The year-to-year change in trials is stark. In 2019, the Harris County district clerks office sent 1,617 panels, or groups of prospective jurors, to jury selection. Since jury trials began on a limited basis in July, the district clerks office sent 77 panels to jury selection, according to the district clerks office. Not all of those juries were actually seated because of case continuances or last-minute pleas.

Many more cases remain on the books: The backlog on felony cases sits at more than 42,000, Bethke said. Misdemeanor backlogs top out over 37,698, County Courts-at-Law Administrative Judge Sedrick Walker said.

Clearance rates - cases disposed divided by cases filed - dropped to 53.5 percent in the felony courts in 2020, according to court administrators. To even begin lowering backlogs of cases from previous years, clearance rates need to be at 100 percent.

At NRG, officials can convene four panels a day - a large number that still doesnt make a dent with the dozens of trial courts in Harris County, Walker said.

Its really comes down to, how much space over at NRG do we have access to? said Walker, who oversees the misdemeanor courts. Obviously some district courts and some misdemeanor courts havent requested as many trials as others have. I do think judges are working on getting cases set.

Schaffer said judges requested more jury panels in January than they have since the start of the pandemic. But even then, not every slot at NRG gets used.

Just by the virtue of fact that jury trials are now available, weve seen a lot of trials settled, Harris County District Clerk Marilyn Burgess said.

Risk vs. possible reward

Trials also arent occurring at full capacity because defendants dont always want their day in court during a pandemic.

Even for higher-profile murder cases where defendants have been waiting years for justice, the risk isnt worth the possible reward. Antonio Armstrong, Jr., who was 16 when police alleged he shot his mother and father to death at his Bellaire-area home, has a jury re-trial date in April that probably cant happen, defense attorney Rick DeToto said. Armstrong has been on bond for almost four years.

Because many in the public know about the case after a jury deadlocked and called a mistrial in 2019, possibly 300 potential jurors would need to be called the second time around  a real difficulty during a public health crisis, he said. DeToto also worried about the cross-section of jurors that would appear.

Like the public defenders office, DeToto is helping his other clients get to trial if thats what they want. But he added another common viewpoint among defense lawyers, that people on bond are often viewed as the lowest priority for trials as the Harris County Jail population climbs to dangerous levels.

I think the courts are doing their best to balance the right to a jury trial versus getting Covid, DeToto said. I understand what theyre trying to balance, but I think its dangerous.

Steve Gonzales, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer

Some people might be otherwise inclined to go before a jury. Aside from those who want to get out of jail, people with bond requirements could be hurting financially from taking days off work to go to court, or paying for ignition interlock devices for DWI cases, said Whitney Kubik, associate professor at the Center for Criminal Justice at Thurgood Marshall School of Laws Earl Carl Institute.

Its really a catch 22 for the defendant, Kubik said.

Jennifer Laurin, professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law, said widespread case dismissals would likely have to occur at some point to lower the jail population and grant reprieve for people who are being denied the right to a speedy trial. Thats a traditionally difficult violation to prove, and mass dismissals likely would have occurred by now, she said.

From the standpoint of conducting jury trials in a prudent manner with respect to health and safety, I dont see it happening at the volume that our massive criminal legal system needs to have it happening at, Laurin said.

That dilemma has pushed Texas court administrators to try cases where they can.

We want to make sure were protecting the public, Slayton said. But at the same time, as soon as we can and as much as we can, we need to be trying jury cases.

samantha.ketterer@chron.com


Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota, the N.R.C.C. chairman, forcefully condemned the rioters during a Wednesday video conference with reporters but also welcomed campaign assistance from Mr. Trump. He said that his committee would continue to embrace the former president and would maintain its policy of not taking sides in primaries  even to help incumbent members who voted to impeach the former president.

President Trump and his administration implemented some amazing policies for this country, right? Mr. Emmer said. The economic policies that they advanced, his energy policy, putting Americans and America first, that policy, it was all good. It brought in a ton of new voters to our party. I think Republicans need to celebrate those policies, I think we need to continue to embrace them.

The Republicans list is speculative, given that it will be months before states are able to begin drawing new congressional district lines. The Census Bureau is already late in delivering reapportionment and redistricting data to states, delaying until at least late summer a process that typically begins in February or March.

The tardiness of the census data has left both parties congressional campaign committees in limbo as they seek to recruit candidates for presumptive districts. Sun Belt states like Texas and Florida are expected to add multiple new House districts, while Northern states including Illinois, Ohio and New York are likely to lose at least one seat each.

Mr. Emmer said Republicans would win redistricting and maximize our opportunities.

What Im talking about is fair and transparent, and that the districts make sense and that they reflect not only the geography of the state and that they are a fair representation of the demography of the state, he said.



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Last week, Brian McCreary was arrested by the FBI and charged in connection with the violent uprising at the U.S. Capitol Building in January. Since then hes lost his job and had a massive increase in anxiety and stress.

But his biggest worry is going to jail and losing time with his 4-year-old daughter.

The thought of losing my daughter is regularly overwhelming, McCreary told MassLive in an email. I have never cried as much as I have the past weekend.

The 33-year-old from North Adams was charged with three counts of violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol Grounds and two counts of knowingly entering or remaining in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority, according to a statement released by the Boston FBI office.

He faces those charges in federal court.

He said he believes hes not guilty of the charges presented but that doesnt mean he isnt worried about the future.

I am afraid because I have never been in this position, McCreary told MassLive. Jail time is on the extreme end of the punishment for the charges - but it is an option.

He said hes now mostly worried about how this could impact his daughter.

Having both parents at home drastically increases the success of ones life. She is so bright - already reading in English and Japanese, he said. Shes still months away from beginning kindergarten - a world ahead of where I was at her age.

He said hes trying to manage his stress by spending time with his daughter, and looking for a new job likely in construction or a small online business. He also still plans to run for Congress in 2022.

The FBI believes it first heard from McCreary the day after the insurrection, when he sent text and video clips through one of the FBIs Internet portals, federal court documents state.

In one of the video clips a shot can be heard, the documents state. Five people were killed at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

A review of the video clips provided by McCreary ... showed various video footage both inside and outside the U.S. Capitol, to include rioting on the Capitol steps, a mob of people rushing the doors of the U.S. Capitol, a mob of people breaking down doors and windows of the U.S. Capitol, and multiple videos showing confrontations between rioters and uniformed police officers inside the U.S. Capitol, court documents state.

Coworkers at Dominos Pizza also contacted the FBI after seeing McCreary in photos, one former coworker told MassLive.

My mind was blown, Aine McDonald, his former coworker, told MassLive. Like I knew that Brian would do something like that. But it blew my mind that he actually did.

The FBI said the agency interviewed four of McCrearys coworkers and that each of these co-workers identified McCreary as the individual standing behind and to the far right of [Jacob Anthony] Chansley, wearing a blue surgical mask, black eyeglasses, a black parka, and black pants, and holding what appears to be a cell phone.

McCreary also told coworkers hed been at the U.S. Capitol building, according to the court documents.

After returning home from the U.S. Capitol McCreary told a co-worker that he raided the Capitol and sent this co-worker multiple videos depicting rioters inside the Capitol attempting to breach a door, confronting police officers, and towards the end of one video, a gunshot can be heard, documents state.

McCreary believes his coworkers were in the right for reaching out to the FBI.

Any American should do exactly as they did, McCreary said. I hold no resentments or grudges on that front, its more commendable than condemnable.

In his eyes, however, it was a step too far to post about it on social media.

McDonald tweeted the photo identifying him. The tweet has since received more than 22,000 retweets, more than 82,000 likes and more than 3,000 replies.

Its a shame that in todays world - thanks to social media vigilantes - we no longer live as innocent until proven guilty, McCreary said.

Social media and online tips have been a large part of the FBIs investigation into those who were part of the U.S. Capitol insurrection.

The FBI told MassLive it has received more than 200,000 digital media tips from the public - and they continue to ask for more. Those with tips can call 1-800-CALL-FBI or submit tips online at tips.fbi.gov.

We cannot do our job without the help of the American people, said assistant director in charge Steven M. DAntuono last month. Since our call for tips, videos, and pictures, we have received more than 100,000 pieces of digital media - which is absolutely fantastic - and are scouring every one for investigative and intelligence leads.

The court documents state that McCreary told the FBI he traveled to Washington D.C. to attend the rally because he was frustrated with the results of the 2020 Presidential election, specifically the fact that an audit was not performed to address allegations of mass voter fraud.

He then found himself documenting others, he told the Berkshire Eagle.

I found myself suddenly surrounded by individuals who were equipped to break into the Capitol building  and immediately began recording them in action. I followed these people inside the Capitol while continually recording various moments, he told the newspaper.

McCreary also told the FBI he was focused on recording people who were committing crimes or inciting violence, documents state.

McCreary told MassLive he has no regrets sending in the photos and videos he got while in the Capitol to the FBI.

I do hope the evidence I provided to the FBI helped in some capacity put away individuals who were destructive, he said.

Still, he followed people into the U.S. Capitol Building, the FBI said.

That, McCreary said, he regrets.

I could of just recorded the destruction on the outside and I wouldnt be in this position, he said.

McCreary stated he directed people inside the building not to harm police officers or commit any acts of violence, the court documents state. McCreary further stated that he understood going into the building might not have been legal but he made a personal choice at that point.

This lines up with the person McDonald knows, they said.

He didnt seem like a violent person to me, McDonald said. He just seemed like he wanted to debate other peoples struggles because they sounded theoretical to him.

The narrative provided by the FBI states that McCreary was asked to leave, which he did. But then he returned through a different door that was kicked in just moments before he re-entered.

The documents also state that after being shown one of the photos, McCreary identified himself as the individual wearing the blue surgical mask inside the U.S. Capitol.

McCreary said he typically tries his best to present myself as stoic, but all this has been too much and hes struggling to stay optimistic.

McDonald, however, noted its important that people, including McCreary, are held accountable for their actions.

[I] ... would like people to realize that there are consequences to these actions, McDonald said. Its just nice to finally see the justice system working to imprison dangerous people.

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The Department of Mathematics, University of Ibadan, recently honoured Professor Olabisi Ugbebor, the first Nigerian woman to obtain a PhD in Mathematics, as she clocked 70 years and retired from service at the premier university.

She is an achiever of many firsts with no mean feat. Professor Olabisi Ugbebor of the Department of Mathematics, University of Ibadan is the first Nigerian woman to obtain a Ph.D in Mathematics, the first female Nigerian Professor of Mathematics in the University of Ibadan as well as the first woman ever to be elected Fellow of the Nigerian Mathematics Society (NMS). She has also contributed immensely to the academic world in Nigeria and internationally .

Celebration rented the air recently, as colleagues, former students and students of her department, family and friends as well as church members, joined her to mark her 70 years birthday. It was also a day set aside for her to bow out of service from the premier university after 44 years.

The Acting Head of Department (HOD) of Mathematics, Dr. Michael Enioluwafe, whio welcomed everyone on behalf of the department, Faculty of Science and the university, said putting the programme together which was part of a two-day International Mathematics Conference themed, 'Mathematics : Frontiers, Perspectives and Applications', was to celebrate a woman who had impacted lives of many.

According to him, " the Department of Mathematics offer our most sincere and heartfelt congratulations to Professor Olabisi Ugbebor for all the fine work and the many contributions you have bestowed upon the department and university community. You have been an inspiration to the students and to all who have had the pleasure of knowing and working with you. Her powerful personal story has motivated our students, she has given the students a tremendous example by which our own students can form a personal vision."

In her remarks, the Secretary, Nigerian Women in Mathematics (NWM), Dr. Deborah Makinde, described Ugbebor as one who has blazed the trail and a woman of substance set in Mathematics, adding that this is what other women are following.

She disclosed that the NWM became a reality in 2014 through her efforts when she occupied the Pastor Enoch Adeboye Professorial Chair in Mathematics in the University of Ibadan, and served as the founding President.

"On behalf of the Nigerian Women in Mathematics, I am pleased to celebrate the legacy of Professor Olabisi Ugbebor, the President of the NWM. She has undoubtedly been a transformational leader all through her years of service. Unique among leaders in the field, your career has been marked by continuing fundamental contributions across the field of Mathematical Science. You have been a powerful champion of every mathematical program you partook in and have contributed immensely to professional organisations promoting the girl-child education. You have been famous in helping students find their own mathematical voices and for producing many students."

Her first Ph.D student and the Director/Chief Executive, National Mathematical Centre, Abuja, Professor Stephen Onah, , who joined the ceremony through zoom, eulogised her contributions to humanity, noting that she has continued to be a role model to the numerous students who passed through her. According to him, her qualities have made her a mother to all with everyone who had contact with her could not, but take something positive from her life.

According to him, "When I cast my mind to our first meeting at the Department of Mathematics, University of Ibadan, almost 30 years ago, it has been a pleasant memory all through. You accepted me for who I was, and till date, for who I am. I cherished this immensely and have never taken it for granted. Without much words, your lifestyle led me to the true knowledge of Christianity. To me, you are in an adorable class of your own. The humanity in you is incomparable, the charm is captivating and iresistible. In fact, I have not been able to find one scene when the smiles on your face was absent. This can only be God.

He described her as a definitive mathematician with a pleasant touch who has endeared herself to all with a pride of place on the sands of time.

"Your ability to accommodate, tolerate, inspire and build all kinds of persons associated with you, make you a mentor of uncommon virtues. You are amiable and a great source of inspiration. By these qualities you have created an ocean of human capital with unbounded domain of operations within which you will continue to dwell."

Sharing her testimony on Professor Ugbebor on behalf of the Department of Mathematics, Dr. Deborah Ajayi, said she had been an inspiration and encouragement to many, especially the women in Mathematics, adding that she made a real difference in the lives of both students and colleagues through her smiles, motivation, wisdom and positivity.

"I was blessed to meet Mama Ugbebor when I came in to register in Mathematics department in 1981 as a prelim student and she was assigned the task of registering prelim students. With encouraging words and smiles, she did the work. We admired her as the only female lecturer in the department. Later she taught me a few courses at the undergraduate level. She taught one of the courses with pregnancy. Later, when I was employed, we were the only two female lecturers for several years. To me, Mama Ugbebor was and is still a model of a strong, hardworking, active mother, lecturer, senior colleague and Christian mathematician."

From her church where she is a Deaconess, the Senior Pastor, Oritamefa Baptist Church, Ibadan, Reverend Remi Awopegba, described Ugbebor as a role model to her generation for countless reasons such as passion for everything and anything she believes in; absolute devotion to her faith; fear for God and fearlessly before men; integrity as a lecturer; meticulous nature and attention to details; creative and mathematical mind and discernment and spiritual insight.

Other qualities he noted, are her strength, tenacity and resilience in tough situations; warmth, kindness and hospitality to all and sundry; humility despite success and uncommon achievements; discipline, firmness yet humane in all matters; sense of duty and hard work as well as being a deep and very passionate person.

Awopegba said, "she is one woman that speaks with passion, and you will always see this displayed anytime she is ministering. She ministers the word powerfully, with all the grace and ability in her. She has passion for impacting lives. Mama Olabisi Ugbebor keeps impacting lives of both young and old, male and female, students and workers. Numerous testimonies abound concerning her exploits in this regard. She is a counselor, advisor and rehabilitator. She has been very useful and productive in the counseling and deliverance ministry of the church."

Paying tribute to his wife, her husband, Mr. Curtis Ugbebor, said her life spans many areas of human life but would rather eulogised her on what he called trilateral acronym of ACR with A standing for achievements, C for Christianity and R for relationships. According to him, her academic achievements are numerous such that her contributions in the field of Mathematics are globally acknowledged and can be sourced by reference to her many scholarly publications in various journals from different parts of the world.

He added that as a workaholic, her daily schedule is so demanding such that he always hope she does not suffer from physical exhaustion.

"She is extremely thorough when proof reading her students' work; this is because she always aims to bring her students to such a standard of excellence that they can favourably compete with their counterparts anywhere in the world."

"She does not relate to people on the basis of their educational, economic or social standing but purely on humanitarian considerations. She is friends with the poor, illiterates and the low-income earners. Such lowly placed citizens feel at home in her company. People generally find her as someone who is come-at-able and never reneged on promises. Even when under the cosh, she does not display maladdress towards anyone, nor does she disesteem people on the basis of their pecking order. She is loved by students from various ethnic nationalities in Nigeria because of her absolutely detribalised nature.

"She is known to care so much about other people's welfare, never solipsistic. If any help is within her power to render, she does it immediately, never procrastinating or being a dictator, forever living in the land of manna. In a world where people do not care a hoot for the needy and the poor, she is ever willing to offer them a helping hand. People generally are never at ease in her company because she never displays arrogance in her interaction with anyone. Notwithstanding her prodigious intellect, Professor Olabisi Ugbebor attitudinises and exemplifies unassuming humility."

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In a tribute titled, 'Leave It All on the Field - A Tribute to Selfless Service', her son, Ifeloju Ugbebor, described his mother as the embodiment of achiever who manages to get more done in a day than is required in a week and always getting things done by putting in her best every time.

He disclosed that it was quite difficult to fail in her class as she engages every student by asking many questions during a lecture period with a correct answer earning one mark towards the continuous assessment.

According to him, "Mama has the uncanny ability of knowing all her students by name, and if you are quiet in class she will call on you to answer questions. There are no stupid answers in Mama's class, in fact through this intellectual engagement everyone participates and learns better. By the end of the semester most students have a half of their continuous assessment scores ready, and because everyone participated and answered questions, it is difficult to find someone who knows absolutely nothing of the subject matter.

"Mama works late into the night modifying syllabi, correcting theses and making sure that knowledge transfer is effective and efficient. When she has a MSc or PhD student, mama does not break step, she is there with them all the way. This kind of selfless service is crucial for effective transfer of knowledge. It is literally all or nothing. When it comes to matters of knowledge transfer, academic or otherwise, it is simply all or nothing. You must give 100 per cent of yourself, this is the only way to ensure that the ball does not drop down the line."

In her response, Ugbebor gave glory to God for all her achievements, noting that without Him she is nothing.



They say powerful senators bring home the bacon.

For U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby, its more like Porchetta Pork Tenderloin with a side of glazed and candied bacon, dipped in chocolate.

Shelby turned the meat formerly known as pork into exquisite cuisine that kept Alabama fed for decades. Shelby announced this week that he does not plan to run for re-election in 2022, so there will be plenty of meaty magic Alabama may miss out on after benefiting from years of having Shelby as chairman of the powerful Senate appropriations committee that controls federal purse strings.

Lets start in Huntsville, with some fancy and authentic pork schnitzel.

In 2019, the FBI announced it would invest $1 billion to build an HQ2, a second headquarters, at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville.

Last month, Huntsville was announced as the preferred location of the U.S. Space Command and its 1,400-person headquarters responsible for the nations military operations in outer space. Its a decision that, if solidified for the long term, could possibly exceed the financial impact of the FBI decision.

In November 2020, FBI executive David Schlendorf said the FBI has nine buildings under construction at Redstone Arsenal, the first projects in a two-decade plan for FBI expansion within the gates of the Huntsville Army base. The investment should spur growth for decades, Schlendorf said, repeatedly thanking Shelby. More than 5,000 FBI employees are expected to eventually work at Redstone Arsenal.

None of it was luck of the draw. Power and influence matter.

You look at U.S. Space Command, that was him, said Madison County Commission Chair Dale Strong.

You look at Redstone, Army Materiel Command, a four-star general being brought to Redstone, he said. Historically, thats how this book is going to be written and Richard Shelbys name will be engraved in it in gold.

Shelbys named is literally engraved on buildings across the state. In 1999, the Missile and Space Intelligence Center at Redstone was named for Shelby. Even when his names not on it, his fingerprints often. Shelby, 86, served in the state senate from 1970-78, was elected to the U.S. House in 1978, then elected to the U.S. Senate in 1986. Hell turn 87 on May 6.

Huntsville Mayor Tommy Battle credited expansion at Huntsville International Airport, including the second-longest runway in the southeast, as the work of Shelby.

He made sure that we had the funding to be able to take the big planes that came in and because we can take in the big planes, we can do a distribution center here today, Battle said. We can do a Panalpina (a large cargo company at the airport) where we have the air traffic from all over the world coming into Huntsville, Alabama.

Higher education

In 2019, UAB President Ray Watts gave Shelby the presidents medal. Senator Shelby is a longtime champion of federally funded research and, with his stalwart support, the discoveries made at UAB and other leading universities continues to have a profound impact on health and quality of life, technology and economic development, Watts said.

In fiscal 2019, UABs research awards reached a record $602 million. Much of our leading-edge research is conducted in the Richard C. and Annette N. Shelby Interdisciplinary Biomedical Research Building, which increased research space by 25 percent when it opened in 2006 and remains the largest facility in our globally competitive research enterprise, contributing substantially to an annual economic impact exceeding seven billion dollars on the state of Alabama, Watts said.

Groundbreaking on the Shelby research building happened in 2002 after Shelby secured $27.5 million in federal funding to get it started.

In 2018, Shelby announced $1.45 million in funding for UAB from the National Science Foundation to prepare teachers in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math fields.

We must continue to prioritize education in Alabama and give students the necessary tools for success, Shelby said. I look forward to seeing the lasting impacts of this award as the participating students learn and grow.

Shelby has helped funnel funding to colleges and universities throughout the state. From 1996-2000, Alabama colleges got $91.8 million in direct appropriations and shared in another $105 million, ranking the state behind only California and Florida.

In 2000, the Shelby Hall research center at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa was named for Shelby. In 2011, the Shelby Building at the University of South Alabama was named for Shelby after he helped secure more than $40 million for the engineering and computer science center.

There is a Shelby Hall for Technology as one of the centerpiece buildings at UAH. You go over to the universities and he was big on university education, how he could make education work better, especially the physical buildings of education, Battle said. He made sure we had the facilities where we could produce some of the best and the brightest. He was always looking for that niche area that he could make bigger and better and improve.

Coastal influence

In coastal Alabama, Shelbys political strength in recent years was illustrated in the federal money he secured for the Alabama State Port Authoritys massive dredging and widening project of the Mobile ship channel.

Shelby pushed for the project to make the Mobile-based ship channel competitive with deepwater seaports nationwide. In 2020, $274.3 million was authorized through the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers budget to provide the federal funds needed to move the project forward.

John Driscoll, who became the port authoritys director and CEO last year, said the agency is forever appreciative of Shelbys leadership and guidance.

For decades, Senator Shelby has tirelessly advocated for sound water resources and transportation infrastructure policies for the betterment of all Alabamians, said Driscoll. In my short tenure as port director, Ive realized the ports expanding infrastructure, new cargo market opportunities and navigation investments to grow Alabamas only seaport could not have been achieved without Senator Shelbys contributions.

Shelby also played a recent role in securing a $125 million federal grant for the construction of a new bridge off Interstate 10 in Mobile. That grant looms large in keeping the I-10 Mobile River Bridge and Bayway project under consideration after a $2.1 billion project bankrolled with tolls was declared dead in 2019.

Mobile and Baldwin county officials are now preparing to discuss with the Alabama Department of Transportation alternatives to the toll project out of concern over losing the federal grant that Shelby secured.

Quin Hillyer, a Mobile-based senior commentary writer and editor for the Washington Examiner, said that for the coastal region, Shelbys retirement will be felt more on the loss on more targeted grants than the larger-scale projects. For instance, the fiscal year 2021 federal omnibus package, approved by Congress in December, included millions of dollars in appropriations in agriculture, military, transportation and health spending for a variety of Alabama-related interests.

Fortunately for Mobile, Shelby already delivered for the port, although it would help to have him there to keep funds from being redirected away from it in the future, Hillyer said. Meanwhile, although Shelby didnt do as much as some would like to finance a new bridge, we will lose his ability to finagle more help on that front if it does become available.

Said Hillyer, Mostly, though, it isnt the big-ticket items that will be hugely affected by Shelbys retirement, but help in identifying numerous small, targeted grants as opportunities arise.

Every corner

It hasnt been just the billion-dollar projects that Shelby put his heart into. Strong recalls Shelby asking him to come for a meeting with the senator in Washington. Shelby asked for ideas. Strong said Madison County needed a better tornado warning system.

That led to the implementation of a multi-million-dollar tornado warning system, Strong said.

Theres not a bigger champion for infrastructure, Strong said. He understands thats what it takes to grow a community. You look at his investment and what hes done for the University of Alabama in Huntsville, Alabama in Tuscaloosa, UAB, Auburn  he understands that education, if you dont have the right facilities, you cant recruit the next level of mechanical, electrical, rockets, propulsion rocket engineers. Its been a great relationship.

Strong said Shelbys lasting impact will touch nearly every corner of the state. If you look throughout this state, he has done everything in his power to grow this economy, to educate our workforce and that has led to great things for Alabama, Strong said.

Industry recruiters know Shelby as a longtime friend.

Richard Shelby has been a relentless champion for Alabama, and his immeasurable contributions to the state during his tenure in the U.S. Senate have profoundly shaped many facets of our economy, particularly in the aerospace and defense sectors, Alabama Secretary of Commerce Greg Canfield said. His longstanding support of the Port of Mobile has energized growth at Alabamas gateway to the global economy, positioning it for a brilliant future.

Corporate executives see him as a reliable ally.

Senator Shelby has been instrumental in building Alabama through his many years of honorable service, said Alabama Power CEO Mark Crosswhite. His national leadership elevates Alabama and provides growth opportunities for the state. Senator Shelbys legacy of advocating for Alabamas priorities and securing legislative successes is only matched by his principle, conviction and sense of duty to those he served.


A MHANGURA man was recently caught naked attempting to steal from Mhangura legislator, Cde Precious Chinhamo-Masango's family farm in upper Doma.

The man, Christopher Chikwari who was caught stark nude inside the farm storeroom. It is not clear how he gained entry into the storeroom

The man ran out of luck when the workers heard noise coming from the storeroom. The workers found Chikwari inside the locked room which has no other point of entry.

During intoregattion, Chikwari told Cde Masango's husband that he was stealing because of hunger. He is a worker at a nearby farm and claimed he was not being paid by his employer. The Masango family has been Chikwari's benefactor, giving him bag of maize monthly.

He was taken to Mhangura Police Station and is expected to appear in court soon.
NEW DELHI : Heres a list of top 10 stocks that may be in news on Wednesday:

Future Retail: The company reported a consolidated net loss of 846.92 crore for the third quarter ended 31 December 2020 as business operations continued to be impacted by the pandemic. Future Retail Ltd had posted a net profit of 164.56 crore in the October-December quarter a year ago.

Tata Steel: The company swung back into black in the October-December quarter posting a consolidated profit of 4,010.94 crore on the back of increased income. Tata Steel had clocked a loss of 1,228.53 crore in the year ago quarter.

InterGlobe Aviation: The parent company of budget carrier IndiGo has paid 2.10 crore to the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) to settle IndiGo co-founder Rakesh Gangwals complaints of related-party transactions and violation of corporate governance norms.

Telecom companies: Bharti Airtel, Reliance Jio and Vodafone Idea have submitted applications to participate in the 3.92 lakh crore spectrum auction scheduled to start from March 1, according to a PTI report.

Glenmark Pharmaceuticals: The board of directors of the company will meet on 12 February to consider buyback of its Singapore-listed foreign currency convertible bonds (FCCBs).

Coffee Day Enterprises: The company reported narrowing of consolidated net loss to 97.11 crore for the three months ended December 2020. Coffee Day Enterprises Ltd had posted a net loss of 184.94 crore in the October-December period a year ago.

Torrent Power: The company reported an over 23% decline in consolidated net profit at 321.73 crore for the December quarter, mainly due to a one-off gain in the year-ago period. The consolidated net profit of the company stood at 420.62 crore in the quarter ended December 31, 2019. The board of directors also approved interim dividend of 5.50 per equity share of 10 each fully paid up for 2020-21.

Dhanlaxmi Bank: Private sector lender Dhanlaxmi Bank registered 44.5% dip in net profit to 11.81 crore in the third quarter ended December 2020 on muted retail business even as bad loan ratio declined. The bank's net profit was 21.28 crore in the year-ago period.

Raymond: The company reported an 88.7% plunge in its consolidated net profit to 22.18 crore for the quarter ending December 2020. Raymond had posted a net profit of 196.83 crore during the October-December period of the previous fiscal.

Jammu & Kashmir Bank: The lender reported a 32.8% rise in its net profit at 65.94 crore for the quarter ended in December. Jammu & Kashmir Bank had posted a net profit of 49.64 crore in the year-ago period.

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Guwahati, Feb 10 : To woo the Koch-Rajbongshi votes in poll-bound Assam and West Bengal, Union Home Minister Amit Shah would meet 'Maharaj' Ananta Rai on Thursday, who claims to be a successor of the erstwhile Koch-Rajbongshi royal dynasty and an influential superior of the community.

Shah would arrive in Guwahati on Thursday and then fly to the Chirang district bordering Bhutan to meet Rai, one of the founders of the Greater Cooch Behar Peoples' Association (GCPA), an apex body of the Koch-Rajbongshi people.

Rai, a 62-year-old socio-religious leader, told IANS over phone that Shah would meet him and his family members on Thursday and have lunch at his home.

According to Rai, the Koch-Rajbongshi community with a total population of around 2.25 crore is categorised as Scheduled Caste in West Bengal and Other Backward Class in Assam. They mostly reside in western Assam and in seven districts of North Bengal, especially in Cooch Behar.

"My discussion with the Union Home Minister would be on socio-economic issues. We are happy that the Central minister is coming to meet us," Rai said.

Many in the political circles believe that during his visit, Shah would seek the support from Rai and his community in view of the ensuing Assembly polls in Assam and West Bengal due in April-May this year.

Six communities, including Koch-Rajbongshi, Tai Ahom, Chutia, Maran, Matak and Adivasi are demanding Schedule Tribe status.

Assam Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal and Finance and Health Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma are expected to accompany Shah.

Shah had visited Assam on January 23-24 and addressed two rallies in Kokrajhar.

New Delhi, Feb 9 (PTI) The government has placed orders for 1 crore additional doses of Covishield from Serum Institute of India and 45 lakh more doses of Covaxin from Bharat Biotech, officials of the two vaccine makers said on Tuesday.

India's COVID-19 vaccination drive was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on January 16.

Serum Institute has received another order from the government for 10 million doses of Covishield, a company official said in response to a query.

The government had earlier placed a purchase order with Serum Institute of India (SII) for 1.1 crore doses of AstraZeneca-Oxford COVID-19 vaccine, Covishield.

When asked, a Bharat Biotech spokesperson said, "The company has received a letter of comfort from the Government of India to supply another 4.5 million (or 45 lakh) doses''.

The spokesperson also added that Bharat Biotech will also be exporting its COVID-19 vaccine, Covaxin, to Brazil and the United Arab Emirates.

The company is also likely to export the vaccine to the Philippines and other South Asian countries, the spokesperson said.

The government had earlier placed an order for 55 lakh doses of Covaxin from Bharat Biotech.

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
Maori make up about 21 percent of the 120-member Parliament across five parties. With his signature cowboy hat and a traditional full-facial tattoo known as ta moko, Mr. Waititi  one of two members of the Maori Party elected to Parliament last year  is a visible Maori presence in New Zealands halls of power. During his first speech to Parliament in December, he was asked to leave the chamber after he made a point of removing his tie, saying, Take the noose from around my neck so that I may sing my song.

Under parliamentary rules, male politicians have to wear jackets and ties in the debating chamber. Mr. Waititi was warned that he could be ejected again if he continued to violate the dress code.

In an op-ed article published on Wednesday in The New Zealand Herald, Mr. Waititi further cast his choice as a marker of resistance. I took off the colonial tie as a sign that it continued to colonize, to choke and to suppress Maori rights, he wrote. He did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.

The requirement that men wear ties in the chamber dates to Britains colonial rule of New Zealand. The equivalent rule was effectively scrapped in Britain in 2017.

Mr. Mallard, a member of Prime Minister Jacinda Arderns governing Labour Party, had been asked late last year to ditch the rule. But after consulting with members, Mr. Mallard told the local news media that there was very little support for a change, even though he personally loathed the practice.

Ms. Ardern has distanced herself from the neckwear dispute.

Its not something I have a particularly strong opinion on, she told reporters on Tuesday. There are much more important issues. Im sure this can be resolved. I dont think most New Zealanders care about ties.
The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
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California is poised to surpass New York as the state with the highest COVID-19 death toll in the US, according to data from Johns Hopkins University, with more than 45,000 fatalities in each.

As of Wednesday morning, California's toll stood at 45,009, just behind New York's 45,140 fatalities. The two states have been the hardest hit in terms of sheer numbers of fatalities and California has had more COVID-19 case than any other, with 3.4 million infections since the pandemic began.

The pandemic has taken inverse trajectories in New York and California. While New York's cases and fatalities surged to more than 14,000 cases and 1,200 in a single day at their respective peaks, California was one of the first states to lockdown, and had a relatively mild spring for COVID-19.

Now, New York's deaths are staying well below 200 a day, while a surge of infections overwhelmed California's hospitals after the holidays, keeping daily fatalities above 500 for almost every day of last month.

Even as California approaches a grim milestone now, there are encouraging signs that the pandemic may be reaching a plateau in the US - at least for the moment.

The US recorded 95,360 new cases and 3,131 deaths on Tuesday, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

The seven-day rolling average number of new cases a day has fallen to its lowest level since November 7. At 105,786, the average number of daily infections is now 57 percent lower than it was a month ago, on January 9.

And the downward trend in hospitalizations continues in the US. A total of 79,179 Americans were getting inpatient care for COVID-19 - 30,000 fewer than were hospitalized two weeks ago, on January 26.

While US deaths in a 24-hour period surpassed 3,000 again on Tuesday, that trend in fatalities, too, is moving in the right direction at last. The seven-day average of daily deaths is now 2,900 - down 12 percent from the average two weeks ago.

Despite its appallingly high number of fatalities, the tide seems to be turning for California too, with 10,584 new cases recorded Tuesday, compared to some 40,000 a day being recorded a day in January.

California's death rate is also starting to decline after months of relentless growth, with weekly fatalities down by around 20 percent from their January peak. However, the state also recorded its first two cases of the more infectious, vaccine dulling 'super-covid' variant that first emerged in South Africa on Wednesday.

And cases are now down in 43 states, compared to new infection rates two weeks ago, according to data from the COVID Tracking Project. In the remaining four states, daily cases are holding steady. The only place that daily infections are rising is the territory of Guam.

California's death toll trailed New York's by less than 140 with 45,009 fatalities on Wednesday morning as it was poised to surpass New York's 451,45

Over the past week the seven-day average for new cases has declined by 10 percent or more in 43 states and remained steady in eight

The seven-day average for deaths has fallen by 10 percent or more in 24 states in the last week. The rate has remained steady in 18 states and risen by 10 percent or more in eight states

However, deaths are still on the rise in nine states: Delaware, Kansas, Indiana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Virginia, West Virginia, Vermont and Washington, DC.

Average deaths in California are down 17 percent compared to last week, while New York's fatalities are staying approximately the same, with only a four percent decline compared to last week.

California health secretary Mark Ghaly said the 45,000 milestone was a 'heart-wrenching reminder that Covid-19 is a deadly virus'.

'We mourn alongside every Californian who has suffered the tragic loss of a loved one during this pandemic,' Ghaly said.

Despite being on the precipice of surpassing New York's death toll, California is in better shape than New York when it comes to the number of deaths per capita.

California is 32nd in the nation with 113 deaths per 100,000 people, while New York ranks second with 230 - behind only New Jersey with 248, according to data from Statista.

As recently as October, California's absolute death toll was less than half that of New York, but America's most populous state emerged as a major epicenter during a year-end surge of infections and hospital cases that swept across much of the country.

Deaths began to mount to unprecedented levels in December, climbing into the hundreds daily in a surge which saw nearly 15,000 deaths recorded in January alone.

New York's new cases, hospitalizations and deaths are all on the decline, and it is now seeing fewer than 150 deaths a day

California's death toll continued to climb after the Thanksgiving holiday, although its hospitalizations and cases are finally on the decline after a January peak that saw more than 50,000 people hospitalized on a given day

But a fresh lockdown has succeeded in bringing that growth to a halt, with infections plunging by more than 70 percent since reaching their height in late December.

Tuesday's figures showed only 8,251 new infections the previous day, the first time the daily number has been below 10,000 since November 17.

The slowdown in new infections is now starting to show its effects on hospitalizations and deaths, with the daily average of fatalities down from 565 in late January to 450 on Tuesday.

Now, California and the US as a whole have a new threat to contend with, however. Last month, experts estimated that about a quarter of cases of COVID-19 in the state were due to a homegrown variant of the virus.

And the state has the second greatest number of UK 'super-covid' cases of any in the nation with at least 156 confirmed B117 infections. It trails only Florida, where there are at least 343 cases.

The variant that emerged in and became dominant in the UK last year now accounts for about one to four percent of all cases in the broader US, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director Dr Rochelle Walensky said during a Wednesday White House press briefing.

California scientists suspect that variants - including both the homegrown form and the UK's 'super-covid' - may have fueled last month's case spike and, in turn, the rise in hospitalizations and deaths.

Though it has come down, the death rate still remains 'remarkably' high, governor Gavin Newsom said during a Tuesday news conference.

'Deaths continue to be devastating,' Newsom said, speaking at the opening of a vaccination site at Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara County near San Francisco.

This graph shows the falling infection rates in California (purple), New York state (green) and New York City (blue), with the latter two being counted separately by the CDC

The falling infection rates in California have eased the pressure on hospitals (pictured, a virus patient is intubated at the Providence Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo)

The number of hospitalized patients has also dropped, with 11,904 people in hospital as of Tuesday's update compared to a peak of more than 22,000 at one stage.

The slowing infection rates have also eased the pressure on ICUs, where capacity is ticking up again for the first time in months.

Newsom, a Democrat, eased some of the state's lockdown measures in January, allowing restaurants to re-open for outdoor dining.

New York is also looking to ease restrictions after cases similarly fell from a January peak, reflecting a gradual improvement in virus figures across the country.

In New York, where nearly 30,000 died during the initial early-2020 outbreak, deaths this winter have not returned to the disastrous figures of last spring.

While the state's death rate is still at its highest level since May, average daily deaths have inched down to 168 as of Tuesday compared to 198 on January 20.

California governor Gavin Newsom, pictured, has eased some restrictions but says the death rate is still 'remarkably' high

The United States as a whole has reported 27.25 million infections and 468,559 deaths, as of late Tuesday.

Just over 79,000 U.S. patients were hospitalized with Covid-19 on Tuesday, the lowest daily number since mid-November.

Public health experts fear that gatherings for Super Bowl celebrations on Sunday, as well as the arrival of new, highly contagious variants of the virus may lead to another surge in cases before most Americans are vaccinated.

In an effort to speed up the immunization process, President Biden on Tuesday announced that his administration planned to increase the number of vaccine doses shipped to the states.

Part of the supply will be sent to community health centers in an effort to improve vaccine access for the mostly poor and minority populations, the White House said.

By Tuesday, about 33 million Americans had received at least one dose of vaccine to fight the coronavirus, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said.

'This vaccine is the weapon that will win this war,' New York governor Andrew Cuomo said at a news briefing on Tuesday.

Ten percent of New York state residents have received the vaccine, he said.
UPDATE: N.J. district where students were shamed for unmasked sledding will soon return to classroom

After a parent sent multiple messages complaining that her Middlesex County school district has not returned to in-person learning, a school official replied with an email saying the community has not taken the COVID-19 outbreak seriously and attached photos of the parent and her son recently sledding with friends while not wearing masks.

For instance, we know that parents and students are not following the same CDC guidelines that you continue to share with us that detail the importance of social distancing and mask wearing, Paul Rafalowski, assistant superintendent of Middlesex Borough schools said in the email dated Thursday obtained by NJ Advance Media.

Case in point, we were provided a number of photos that illustrate the precise reason our school community remains in Phase 1 (virtual), Rafalowski said in the email. As you can see from the attached photos, you and four other adults appear in close proximity without a mask. Further, the second photo illustrates 16 children all in close proximity without mask.

The photo attachments included by the Middlesex Borough school official included parents with their faces blocked with purple. The parent in the center was the person who complained to the district and her face was not obscured.

Rafalowski also referenced the case numbers in the borough since January as the reason for not returning to in-person classes, in addition to community behavior.

Bottom line, we will not subject our school community to the potential risk and exposure that results from the blatant failure to follow the same guidelines you are asking us to reference, Rafalowski said.

The parent, whose name was redacted from the email sent to NJ Advance Media, shared the letter with other members of the community, prompting an angry response from other parents who sent messages to the board and spoke at Tuesday nights board meeting.

My son is one of the 16 pictured. He is 7-years-old. He was outside. Snow sledding. With some friends. On private property, Roger Sanchez wrote in an email to members of the boroughs council and school board.

It was worrisome to see my sons image used that way, to say the least, Sanchez said, adding that he felt the school board singled out and retaliated against parents who have vocally disagreed with their virtual learning policies.

District Superintendent Frederick Williams on Wednesday defended Rafalowski, saying the email was in response to one from a parent who has been extremely vocal about children returning to school.

Williams said that neither he nor Rafalowski knew the names of the children in the photos and that the assistant superintendent had blurred kids faces before sending his email. Rafalowskis email said the photos were sent to us as evidence to validate our concern after they were posted on Facebook.

This (email) was about, Lets wear face coverings. Lets reduce the spread, Williams said. None of my administrators target children or retaliate.

The debate about returning students to in-person learning has turned contentious in multiple New Jersey districts with protests, fierce arguments at board meetings and even a lawsuit by one district seeking to force teachers to back into classrooms.

Middlesex Borough started with all remote classes in September and offered hybrid instruction for a few weeks in November. The plan to return to hybrid instruction in January was postponed.

Middlesex Mayor John Madden told NJ Advance Media he thought sending out the photos was not the correct response.

The pictures that were sent around were very inappropriate, Madden said. I find it very unacceptable and very unprofessional.

Madden said Tuesday nights borough council meeting was flooded with calls from frustrated parents demanding the resignations of school board members.

The mayor said the borough council remains independent from the school system and theres no action that can be taken. But Madden said he didnt believe that parents were being targeted for speaking out.

I feel very bad for the parents. Theyre very passionate about their kids getting back to school and I understand they are reaching out in frustration, Madden said.

But there isnt any action we can take. We have to abide by the laws, he said.

Williams said administrators, teachers and staff all hope to one day soon put the days of remote learning behind them.

We want our children back in school. We dont want them to be home all the time, Williams said. Its not the same environment and the current environment is becoming extremely stressful for everyone.

Thank you for relying on us to provide the journalism you can trust. Please consider supporting NJ.com with a subscription.

Anthony G. Attrino may be reached at tattrino@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @TonyAttrino. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
Finnish Amateur Radio League SRAL celebrate 100 years

The Finnish Amateur Radio League, SRAL, was founded one hundred years ago in 1921 and today caters for around three and a half thousand members.

It is the IARU affiliated society for Norway and runs the licensing examinations, the QSL bureau, co-ordinates repeaters and beacons and represents Finnish amateurs with their licensing authority Traficom plus all the other duties of a national society.

To mark the 100th anniversary of SRAL, they are running the 100 Years Award. To qualify, you must work and confirm either by QSL card or Logbook of the World, one hundred different stations from Finland during 2021. A special anniversary call sign OH100SRAL will be on the air throughout the year.

See sral.fi for all the details
FORMER Speaker of Parliament and MDC bigwig, Lovemore Moyo, has thrown his weight behind the current push to nudge President Emmerson Mnangagwa to engage the opposition and other key stakeholders in the country.

The still highly-regarded Moyo, who now leads the opposition United Movement for Devolution(UMD) party, told the Daily News yesterday that dialogue would end the current political tensions in the country.

This comes as attempts to have Mnangagwa, new opposition leader Douglas Mwonzora and Nelson Chamisa to talk to each other in the interest of the country and its long-suffering citizens have gathered steam in recent weeks.

National dialogue is not a panacea for the multitude of problems faced by Zimbabwe. But it will certainly loosen the political tensions that currently exist between the governing and the governed.

My well-considered view is that national dialogue is an important component of nation building.

In that regard, there is nothing wrong when an incumbent government, together with its citizens, decides to undertake a process of nation building and social cohesion to achieve unity of purpose, Moyo told the Daily News.

However, he observed that the calls for a national dialogue lacked clarity, substance, purpose and ownership.

Further, the calls for a national dialogue pre-suppose that there is a convergence that a national crisis indeed does exist that the incumbent government has failed to resolve.

Unfortunately, in this instance, opposition parties seem to be the ones desperately calling for a national dialogue. For whose benefit, I really dont know?

It is extremely difficult to make a constructive contribution when the advocates have not put on the table the structure and intended benefits for the people of Zimbabwe, Moyo further told the Daily News.

The former MDC chairperson during its heydays, when its much-loved and now late founding father Morgan Tsvangirai was in charge, also warned that it would be wrong to have another government of national unity (GNU) in the country.

I fully support dialogue on the promotion of good governance, political and constitutional reforms.

However, I dont see the value of consummating another GNU which, in my view, will dismally fail like the previous one that failed to change the Zanu PF governing culture and  to enact laws that promote democracy during its lifetime, he said.

This comes as Zimbabwes top clerics are set to meet this week to help kick-start the much-talked about national dialogue.

It also comes as political analysts such as professor of World Politics at the University of Londons School of Oriental and African Studies (OAS), Stephen Chan, have said dialogue remains the best way to end Zimbabwes decades-long crises.

The situation in Zimbabwe is dire, so that posturing is simply futile. I think everyone is slowly coming to the realisation that dialogue is unavoidable.

Certainly, the view in the international community is that talks that are unconditional  on all sides  open and transparent, should take place.

Inclusive means inclusive. The MDC has split. It cannot at this moment be repaired. Both factions need to have a place at the talks, the respected Chan told the Daily News earlier this week.

No power to help Zimbabwe exists on any side, except through careful and detailed expert planning that is also negotiable with the donor community and lending agencies of the outside world.

The economy is front, back and centre of all of Zimbabwes problems. Closely linked to that is, of course, the dire problem of corruption.

And I have often suggested the Kariba Houseboat model. The principal players should simply go off to Kariba, take a houseboat out into the lake and stay there for an entire weekend once every month  finding, via informal means, common ground.

No one should take credit for any successful plans. There should just be agreement on how best to go forward, Chan further told the Daily News.
Hong Kong: CE lauds 7 senior police officers

Chief Executive Carrie Lam today presented the Chief Executives Commendation for Government/Public Service to seven serving and retired senior police officers in recognition of their significant contributions to safeguarding national security.

The presentation ceremony for the awards, announced in the Gazette today, was held at Government House.

The Law of the Peoples Republic of China on Safeguarding National Security in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region was enacted by the National Peoples Congress Standing Committee on June 30 last year.

The Hong Kong SAR shoulders the important responsibility for safeguarding national security and the Hong Kong Police Force has established a department for safeguarding national security with law enforcement capacity.

In preparation for the National Security Laws implementation and setting up its National Security Department, Police had, within a critical time span, urgently completed the preparation for the necessary manpower, equipment, facilities, and the formulation of managerial and operational strategies and procedural guidelines.

In the past few months, the responsible officers presented outstanding leadership, professionalism and courage to shoulder responsibility and unwavering commitment to discharge their duties in safeguarding national security. Their work is commendable.

Amongst them, the seven police officers concerned made personal sacrifices to safeguard national security and ensure the full implementation of the one country, two systems policy, demonstrating steadfastness and fearlessness.

The Chief Executive fully recognised and commended their work.

This story has been published on: 2021-02-10. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
WEST HAVEN  A 22-year-old University of New Haven senior died over the weekend from complications due to COVID-19, the university has confirmed.

Oxford resident Joshua Goodart, a cybersecurity and networks major, died Saturday, according to the funeral home and a news release from the university.

He became ill over Winter Break and was hospitalized last month. He had not yet returned to campus for the spring semester, Ophelie Rowe-Allen, the schools dean of students and chief student affairs officer wrote in a press release.

Goodarts adviser, Liberty Page, said in a statement included in the release that he was hardworking, sincerely nice, and happy person.

He never had a complaint and was nothing but positive. I am thinking of his smile, how cheerful he was, and how excited he was about his future, Page said.

A GoFundMe page for the familys funeral expenses has raised just under $19,000 of a $30,000 goal as of Tuesday evening.

The page said Goodart was diagnosed with COVID-19 at the beginning of January, his symptoms grew worse and he was admitted to Bridgeport hospital. His condition worsened and he was admitted to the intensive care unit and placed on a ventilator.

His symptoms worsened and he was transferred to Yale New Haven Hospital and put on a life support machine. He eventually also required dialysis due to kidney failure, the page said.

On the evening of February 6, 2021 his parents received a call that no parent ever wants to receive. They were told that their beautiful son would not make it through the night and should come to the hospital immediately. Josh unfortunately did pass away that night from the horrible complications of Covid-19, the GoFundMe page said.

Joshua James Goodart was born Dec. 3, 1998, according to his page on the funeral home handling his death. He graduated from Oxford High School in 2017, according to the GoFundMe page. He had just started his final semester at the university.

Goodart had told Page he intended to stay in Connecticut after graduation and work in network administration.

The university plans to award Goodart his degree posthumously, and his parents will be invited as special guests if the event can be held in person.

Goodart was working on an internship course when he became ill.

We are just so shocked and saddened by Joshs passing. We would like to lessen this families stresses at this sad time by helping them financially, the GoFundMe page said. All donations will help them with Joshs medical, educational and funeral/memorial expenses or anything that this loving family may need.

The university is offering grief counselors, and plans to hold a candlelight vigil for Goodart Friday at 5:30 p.m. near the Beckerman Recreation Center. Masks are required.

Visitation will be held Sunday from 2 to 4 p.m. at the Carpino Funeral Home in Southbury. The funeral Mass will be held at Sacred Heart Church in Milford, Mass., on Monday.
The former army chief's statement comes a day after Congress leader Rahul Gandhi questioned why the Union minister was helping China make a case against India and demanded his sacking

Taking to Twitter on Wednesday, Union Minister VK Singh said his comments on the Line of Actual Control and China had been distorted by an English language newspaper and issued a clarification regarding the same.

I am more aware of the LAC and the borders.

Suggest do not fall prey to the Chinese propaganda.

Here is my statement on the subject.#GenerallySaying pic.twitter.com/uQOYLMp4fn  Vijay Kumar Singh (@Gen_VKSingh) February 10, 2021

"...It is with a feeling of deja vu that I saw my reported reply to a question in Madurai splashed across social media and the newspapers, wherein I am purported to have said that India has been transgressing the LAC with China, five times to every one ingress of theirs," Singh wrote, in a statement released on Twitter.

"This distortion could not be further from the truth. I have simply stated the established fact that the borders along the LAC have not been demarcated and until that is done there will always be differing perceptions."

"The fact that the Peoples' Republic of China has refused to settle the border is part of the bullying tactics adopted by the Chinese and that the Indian side is aware of the tactics and any aggression will be responded to with equal or greater level as was the case in Galwan," Singh added.

"...As a former army chief and Minister of State for External Affairs, I am fully aware of the implications of this blatant misreporting. I wish to place on record that this report is a malicious distortion and has nothing to do with what was actually said," Singh concluded.

The former army chief's statement comes a day after Congress leader Rahul Gandhi demanded his sacking and said not removing him would amount to "insult of Indian soldiers".

"Why is a BJP minister helping China make a case against India? He shouldve been sacked. Not sacking him means insulting every Indian Jawan," Rahul had said on Twitter, while tagging a news report.

On Sunday, a report in The Indian Express had quoted Singh as saying that China had transgressed many times based on its perception of the LAC.

none of you come to know how many times we have transgressed as per our perception. We dont announce it. Chinese media does not cover it Let me assure you if China has transgressed 10 times, we must have done it at least 50 times, as per our perception, the report quoted the Union minister as saying.

The news report also stated that Singh's comments were at odds with India's official position on the matter. MEA spokesperson Anurag Srivastava, in the aftermath of the Galwan Valley clash in which 20 soldiers and an unspecified number of Chinese troops were killed, had said the Indian side has never undertaken any actions across the LAC.

Singh's comments assume significance amidst the backdrop of close to 100,000 Indian and Chinese troops being deployed in eastern Ladakh and both sides showing indications of having dug in for the long haul.

China on Monday hit back with the foreign ministry calling Singh's statement an 'unwitting confession' and state-run Global Times taking a strong stance.

Foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin at a briefing claimed that Indias transgressions were the root cause of the tensions at the border, India Today reported.

This is an unwitting confession by the Indian side. For a long time, the Indian side has conducted frequent acts of trespass in the border area in an attempt to encroach on China's territory and constantly created disputes and frictions, which is the root cause of the tensions at the China-India border, Wang Wenbin had reportedly claimed.

We urge the Indian side to follow through on the consensus, agreements, and treaties it reached with China, and uphold peace and stability in the border region with concrete actions, he added, as per the report.

Singh's remarks also come just days after the government said in the Lok Sabha that the Chinese military attempted to transgress the LAC in several areas since May but these efforts were invariably met with an appropriate response from the Indian side.

"From April-May last year, there had been an enhanced deployment of troops and armaments by the Chinese side in the border areas and along the LAC in the Western Sector," Minister of State for External Affairs V Muraleedharan said.

The minister was replying to questions on the border row including whether the talks have helped in reaching any logical conclusions.

"Since mid-May, the Chinese side attempted to transgress the LAC in several areas of the Western Sector of the India-China border area. These attempts were invariably met with an appropriate response from us," Muraleedharan said.

On 28 January, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, in an address at an online conference on India-China ties, said the events in eastern Ladakh last year have profoundly disturbed the relationship and asserted that any attempt to unilaterally change the status quo along the LAC is "completely unacceptable".

The external affairs minister said any expectation that the situation at the border "can be brushed aside and life can carry on undisturbed" is simply not realistic.

The face-off between the two countries began in early May following a clash between soldiers of the two sides near Pangong lake in eastern Ladakh.

In the ninth round of military talks last month, both sides agreed to push for an early disengagement of troops and resolved to continue "effective efforts" to stabilise and control the situation in eastern Ladakh.

With inputs from PTI
A seizure of drugs on a beach in Nacala Porto district shows that the Cabo Delgado war has pushed the trade south to the coast of Nampula.

For two decades Mozambique has been an important transit route for heroin, in effect licenced by senior figures in Frelimo.

The heroin is produced in Afghanistan, taken south to the Pakistan coast, and put on dhows to be shipped to Mozambique. A dhow will carry 500 kg or more of heroin. The dhow stops 30-50 km off the coast, and the load is broken into smaller packages which are collected by local boats and dropped on the beach. The packages are collected from the beach, and taken by road to South Africa to put in containers to ship to Europe.

Until recently, the drugs were unloaded on beaches in northern Cabo Delgado. But insurgents have cut the roads south. It appears that the insurgents have not taken over the drug trade, but instead it has moved south to Nacala and Angoche.

Increasingly the Mozambique part of the trade is intentionally fragmented, with boatmen and drivers receiving messages on WhatsApp or other messaging service to collect a parcel from one place and deliver it to another. They are paid but have no idea who is running the network.

Another recent change in the trade is that Afghanistan is now also producing crystal meth (methamphetamine) using ephedrine which comes from a common local plant. Crystal meth has simply been added to the heroin shipments.

On 23 January police seized drugs being unloaded on the beach and arrested the man receiving the drugs; 61 kg of heroin and 5 kg of crystal meth were captured - typical of what would be carried by small boat from the offshore dhow. The man said the drugs were to be transported to South Africa by road. And he said he had been doing this business for some time.

The National Criminal Investigation Service (Sernic) said local people had alerted them to strangers looking for houses to rent and strangers arriving by sea and unloading goods that were supposed to go on to Maputo, (Lusa 28 Jan, AIM 29 Jan)

Meanwhile a Pemba businessman, Minoj Hassam, was arrested on 3 February for having 180 kg of ephedrine. His lawyer claims it was intended for using in baking cakes for one of his cafes.

The lawyer claims that ephedrine is sold for baking by VIP, Recheio and Shoprite supermarkets in Maputo. [ Comment: I can find no reference to the use of ephedrine in baking, but the process of cooking ephedrine to produce crystal meth is sometimes called "baking". jh ) Carta de Mocamique (5, 8 Feb) reports that Hassam has been under investigation for some time for money laundering and smuggling. He previously worked for the Aga Khan Foundation and had been the municipal finance minister ( vereador ) in Pemba.

Cocaine has never been regulated by Frelimo, so there is a "free market" and "wild west" culture, with both growing local use and an increasing transit trade. Heroin is rarely seized because it is protected, but cocaine apparently has no such official cover. Recently five cocaine sellers were arrested in Maputo when they were caught torturing a Nigerian who was claimed to have failed to pay for 18 kg intended for South Africa. ( Carta de Mocambique 19 Jan)

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Joint maritime drug patrol



Mozambique, South Africa and Tanzania are to set up a joint maritime security body based in Maputo with technical support from the United Nations Office for Drugs and Organised Crime (UNODC), Cesar Guedes, the UNODC representative in Maputo, told Lusa (8 Feb).

The project would link the three navies to increase patrolling of the Indian Ocean coast and the Mozambique Channel. Guedes said the initiative already has a dedicated budget and is receiving financial support from Japan, the United States, France, Germany and the European Union.

But Guedes admitted to Lusa that the project has been slow to bring to fruition. The three countries signed a memorandum of cooperation in the area of maritime security in 2018, but nothing happened - Guedes says because electoral calendars in each country hindered developments.

Two questions stand out. First, to what extent will there actually be more patrols and will they also try to control the insurgency in Cabo Delgado? Second, for two decades the heroin trade has been controlled by Frelimo, so will Frelimo allow Mozambican navy patrols to go after drugs?
Geojit's report on Agri Picks

Sugar prices are unlikely to rise significantly in the near term due to a possible surplus of the sweetner in the domestic market, ratings agency ICRA said in a report. India is likely to witness another year of record wheat production at 115 mln tn for 2020-21 (Jul-Jun) due to high acreage and better yields, Indian Institute of Wheat and Barley Research Director Gyanendra Pratap Singh told Informist. The farm ministry has approved the procurement of 79,300 tn of masur by National Agricultural Cooperative Marketing Federation of India in Madhya Pradesh under the price support scheme, an official with the agency said. The government has purchased 9,708 tn of tur harvested in the 2020-21 (JulJun) kharif season from farmers in Karnataka, Maharashtra and Gujarat under the price support scheme as of Thursday, a government official said. The government has sanctioned around 18.7 mln Kisan credit cards with an overall credit limit of over 1.76 trln rupees under the special saturation drive as of Jan 29, Minister of State for Finance Anurag Singh Thakur said in a written reply to Rajya Sabha. The drive began in February 2020. The Centre has approved procurement of chana, urad, and moong in Andhra Pradesh and masur in Madhya Pradesh grown during the 2020-21 (Jul-Jun) rabi season under the price support scheme. Food Corp of India has rented 11 silos with capacity of 775,000 tn across the country to add to the storage space in the central pool, Minister of State for Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution Raosaheb Danve said in the Lok Sabha.

For all commodities report, click here

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Australia's first convicted terrorist leader will remain behind bars despite finishing his sentence, with fears he might reoffend if let back onto the streets.

Abdul Nacer Benbrika, 60, and 15 other men were charged in 2005 for plotting to blow up the MCG on AFL Grand Final day.

Benbrika also planned to carry out terror attacks on several busy Melbourne landmarks and Sydney's Lucas Heights nuclear reactor, and was discussing assassinating then-Prime Minister John Howard.

The notorious Jihadi was sentenced to 15 years in jail in 2009 with a non-parole period of 12 years.

Benbrika completed his sentence on November 5 but was kept in custody after the Victorian Supreme Court found he still held extremist views and had a high risk of reoffending.

Abdul Nacer Benbrika, 60, and 17 others were charged in 2005 for plotting to blow up the MCG on AFL Grand Final day

Benbrika had appealed to the High Court, where his lawyers argued the law was punishing him for what he hypothetically could do, not what he had done

Benbrika had appealed to the High Court, where his lawyers argued the law was punishing him for what he hypothetically could do, not what he had done.

On Wednesday the High Court upheld the Supreme Court's decision to keep him in jail.

Victorian Judge Andrew Tinney said Benbrika had received visits in jail from people who then went and fought overseas.

'If the defendant had been visited by one seemingly problematic person many years ago, that would be one thing,' he said, the ABC reports.

'But he was visited by 15 problematic individuals over some years from the time of his incarceration.'

'On 15 September 2008, Mr Abdul Nacer Benbrika was convicted by the Supreme Court of Victoria of being a member of a terrorist organisation and directing the activities of a terrorist organisation,' the High Court's judgement read.

'At trial, the Crown case was that Mr Benbrika and others were members of a Melbourne-based terrorist organisation that was fostering or preparing the doing of a terrorist act in Australia or overseas.'

The Algerian-born terrorist who arrived in Australian in 1989, became the country's first convicted terrorist leader and was jailed for a maximum of 15 years in 2009.

Benbrika once said his group of followers needed to kill at least 1000 non-believers to make the Australian government withdraw troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Benbrika once said his group of followers needed to kill at least 1000 non-believers to make the Australian government withdraw troops from Iraq and Afghanistan

In police recordings from 2005, Benrika was heard telling followers: 'If we want to die for jihad, we have to have maximum damage. Maximum damage. Damage their buildings, everything. Damage their lives'.

Last year the Australian government cancelled Benbrika's citizenship. Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton said Benbrika would be sent back to Algeria once he is released.

'I cancelled the Australian citizenship of convicted terrorist Benbrika, [making him] the first individual to have lost citizenship onshore,' he said in November.

'It doesn't matter who it is, if it's a person that's posing a significant terror risk to our country, then we will do whatever is possible within Australian law to protect Australians.'
Rundu  Education authorities in Kavango East maintained there is no need to temporarily close a Divundu school, where 14 learners tested positive for Covid-19 this week.

Despite confirmation of the new infections on Monday, classes continued uninterrupted at Martin Ndumba Secondary School. A teacher told New Era the school was overcrowded, and that made it difficult for learners to maintain social distancing. The teacher, who requested anonymity, said more than ten learners were sharing a hostel room, instead of a more manageable six.

"We have eight rooms for male and eight for females - and in those rooms, there are about 12 to 14 learners, instead of six," said the teacher. According to the teacher, hostel boarders have been placed on self-isolation until further notice but day scholars who recently attended classes with the positive learners are still attending school, sparking fear they may have been exposed.

The school has a learner population of more than 800, with the majority being day scholars."When health officials from Andara district hospital visited the school, they told us that they didn't have the capacity to do mass testing but the school was advised to close down and put learners and teachers in self-isolation, but the director refused to close it down. Imagine, these 14 learners were tested here and results came out positive," the teacher said.

Approached for comment, Kavango East education director said he is aware of the situation at the school, adding the directorate did not see the need to temporarily close the school. "We do not want to cause panic amongst learners. Our advice is for those learners to be isolated there in the hostel, instead of closing the whole school," Kapapero said. "We want to monitor the situation at least this week before we make that drastic decision."

Kavango West

Meanwhile, in Kavango West, the education directorate has temporarily closed a Nankudu school, where 15 learners tested positive for Covid-19.

Face-to-face schooling at Kandjimi Murangi Secondary School came to a halt last week following the positive infections. The learners tested positive on 6 February.

The school has day scholars and hostel boarders. Education director Teopolina Hamutumua confirmed yesterday that affected learners were placed in isolation to curb the spread of the virus.

"Fifteen learners tested positive for Covid-19 at the school. Health officials were at the school to test some more learners who are showing some symptoms," the director said. "The school has been on lockdown since Monday; we can't allow day scholars to come to school - because, if they come, they will pick up the virus and spread it in the community," she noted.

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Hamutumua added hostel boarders have been isolated in two groups. "Those who have tested positive are in a separate group and those who have symptoms and waiting for their results have also been put in a separate area to have their own facilities like bathrooms and so on," Hamutumua said.

Hamutumua said the directorate, along with hostel and health officials, are going to have a meeting to devise strategies on the way forward.

"I don't know what the meeting will decide but those are the arrangements in place," she said.

YouTube has been challenged over how much it pays musicians per stream in an exchange with MPs.

The platforms director of government affairs and public policy Katherine Oyama appeared before the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee on Wednesday to field questions over its revenue model.

She said it was absolutely on par with rival services such as Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music.

Committee chairman Julian Knight put figures to her that said artists on YouTube were paid a lower figure of 0.05p for every stream.

Ms Oyama said the figure does not sound right to me but that it was difficult to calculate a per-stream rate because the platform used an ad share method.

But she added: Even on that analysis, although it is not a metric that we rely on, the research that I have seen that does analyse it has us absolutely on par with them.

Mr Knight criticised the Google-owned company as almost a state unto yourself and accused it of damping down another industry.

You are becoming effectively almost like a gangmaster, he said.

Ms Oyama, who appeared after two sessions featuring various representatives from the British music industry, responded by suggesting the problem lay with the sector itself.

She said: I think what is happening in the first panel today was a little bit of a distraction to alleviate hard questions about their own industry frankly.

And it is true, not all artists are having the same experience. We would love every artist on YouTube to receive a Brit Award and be successful. We know that is not the case.

What our job is is to empower as many artists as possible who have creativity, who have access to broadband, to get a chance.

The differential between what YouTube pays and what Spotify and Amazon Music and other services pay is so huge Geoff Taylor, BPI

I do think there has been a lack maybe of some other voices as part of this process. I would be so happy to recommend some.

Her comments followed an appearance from Geoff Taylor, chief executive of the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), which represents record labels, who claimed YouTube is paying only a tiny fraction of what it should in music-streaming revenue.

The BPI has argued there should be no extension of safe harbour to YouTube  a view echoed during the inquiry by musicians including Tom Gray of the Broken Record group.

The laws in question govern online services hosting user-generated content and spare them from liability for copyrighted content being uploaded, as long as they remove it when notified.

In her session, Ms Oyama argued that safe harbours have really powered the user-generated content movement that we are seeing.

She added: If we look at the economics of our business, in the panel before someone had mentioned a statistic that we are proud of, that we have sent 12 billion dollars to the music industry.

Asked whether YouTubes risk and reward were balanced, Mr Taylor told MPs: They have established and run a platform. That involves some element of risk.

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But we think the ratio of their risk and reward is out of kilter because they are growing this business as part of an enormous advertising empire across all of Googles services and yet they are paying such a tiny fraction.

The differential between what YouTube pays and what Spotify and Amazon Music and other services pay is so huge  and that is entirely caused by the fact that their position on the safe harbour is that they dont necessarily need a licence when their users upload.

They could operate without a licence. That has resulted in a massive underpayment by YouTube to the music industry.

Mr Taylor said that in 2020 the BPI received something like 35 million in the UK for all the tens of billions of views of music videos which he said were largely on YouTube.

He said that was about half what we earn from selling vinyl records  that cant be right and to me I dont recognise the projections YouTube has.

YouTube has claimed it is on course to become the industrys main source of revenue in five years.

So far there have been no appearances before the committee by executives from Amazon Music, Spotify or Apple Music.
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Australian values and culture should be the guiding theme of the national school curriculum, teaching students about the Western tradition as well as about Indigenous heritage across every subject, a new paper argues.

In the paper for the Centre for Independent Studies, Fiona Mueller, a former director of curriculum at the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), said that, while the curriculums of high-performing countries such as Singapore fostered a love of the country, Australias did not.

Dr Fiona Mueller, of the Centre for Independent Studies, says Australian culture and values should be the guiding theme of the national curriculum. Credit:Sam Mooy

With the exception of a few bits and pieces, [Australias] really looks like any other curriculum in the world, Dr Mueller said.

But another education expert said the curriculum included enough about Australian culture, while the chief executive of ACARA said it embraced both Indigenous heritage and the democratic traditions that are part of the Western tradition.
A photo shows the logo of the the American online social media and social networking service, Facebook and Twitter on a computer screen in Lille on Oct. 21, 2020. (Denis Charlet/AFP via Getty Images)

Texas Lawmaker on Bill Against Big Tech Censorship: The Law Is on Our Side

State Sen. Brian Hughes (R-Texas) was interviewed by NTD on Tuesday about his recent endeavors to fight big tech censorship.

Hughes is working with Texas Governor Greg Abbott and state legislators on a bill to prevent big tech companies from taking action to moderate user content based on political viewpoints.

Hughes said that he believes having vigorous free dialogue on social media is very important. He described it as the new public square since people now have limited access to physical public squares.

Right now we have an oligarchy, we have a small group of people in San Francisco who want to control everyones speech. Thats why this is so important, said Hughes.

In order to hold the tech giants accountable, the bill would allow citizens legal recourse if they are de-platformed or censored.

According to the bill, anyone in Texas who has their First Amendment rights violated by big tech companies can go to court and request a declaratory judgement. Then the person can demonstrate how they have been discriminated against and subsequently obtain an order to allow them to get back online.

If youre in Texas and youre punished for your speech, this gives you the chance to go immediately to court and show the judge whats happening and get a declaratory judgement and in order for them to put you back online. It should be a quick process and a process available to every Texan, Hughes said.

When every Texan whos being punished by Big Tech just for their views, when every Texan has the right to do this, we think this is going to get their attention from all across Texas.

Hughes is very optimistic in regards to the bill. He said that their team is very strong and sharp, and is prepared to take the fight to court.

We know were going to be sued if we pass this bill. Facebook is going to take us to court. Facebook and Google and Twitter have armies of lawyers and lobbyists who will be fighting us on this. But were on the right side, the law is on our side. Yes, we expect to see this bill passed, put in place, and protecting Texans free speech, Hughes said.

Hughes said that this problem cries out for a federal solution, but that they cant wait for it. He believes this bill will thread the needle to get past federal limitations and will serve as a model for other states to do the same.

The Florida legislature is also working on a new measure to penalize technology companies that de-platform a candidate during an election. They will face a daily fine of $100,000 until the candidates access to the platform is restored.

The bill will also empower the Florida Attorney General to bring action against big tech companies under Floridas Unfair and Deceptive Trade Practices Act if they violate the new policies laid out in the bill.

Floridians should have the privacy of their data and personal information protected, their ability to access and participate in online platforms protected, and their ability to participate in elections free from interference from big tech protected, said Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Masooma Haq contributed to this report.
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The Member of the Mayoral Committee (MMC) for Community Development, Cllr Margaret Arnolds is on a whirlwind tour of the City, cutting overgrown grass and weeds and beautifying parks and open spaces.



Cllr Arnolds has swapped her pristine office outfits for grimy overalls and boots as she folds her sleeves to accelerate the delivery of basic municipal services.



The MMC is joining a team of horticulturalists from Johannesburg City Parks and Zoo (JCPZ) employees across Johannesburg in cutting grass, pruning public trees, raking, beautifying parks and open spaces, removing green waste and picking up litter in municipal facilities.



Cllr Arnolds has already visited Glen Ridge Extension 16 in Protea Glen, Soweto, where she picked up litter, cut and raked overgrown grass and removed green waste.



Regions G and F will also receive green TLC this week, the MMC enthuses.



She says residents of Eldorado Park can look forward to grass cutting and litter picking in their areas until Friday, 12 February. On Thursday, 11 February, Region F will tackle Bezuidenhout Valley, where activities of grass cutting, litter picking, raking and tree pruning will be undertaken.



Joburg was blessed with rain in abundance during the past two weeks. A regional accelerated service delivery blitz programme is right on time to take care of long grass, overgrown trees and litter that accumulated as a result of lots of rain, she explains.



The MMC says JCPZs peak season is normally a busy time for operational teams, who need to address growing demands.



The blitz programme, which focuses on all seven regions, one region at a time, is designed to make a great visible impact in a relatively short space of time by pulling in maximum resources in a targeted area to perform a range of horticultural services, she says.



All JCPZs regional offices work closely with contractors to ensure Joburg residents can enjoy beautiful, tidy and green outdoor spaces. This service delivery programme is aligned with the mayoral campaign to accelerate service delivery in the short term.

Units have gone on sale in inner Sydney for as little as $150,000, blowing away the impression that you need to be a millionaire to own property in Australia's biggest city.

Several agents have dozens of micro units, usually very modest studios, for sale near the CBD for under $300,000 - a pricetag that seems like it comes from the distant past.

However the micro-apartments were very much outliers in the Sydney property market, as the 2020 median price of a one-bedroom unit in the city was $737,500 according to realestate.com.au.

The fine print also shows that many of the apartments are in buildings, such as 185 Broadway, which are restricted to students.

That meant the only possible buyers are full-time students or private investors who rent the units to students.

One of the Ultimo loft-bedroom studio units for sale at $175,000 by Kho & Lee Property Group

38 College Street Darlinghurst is for sale for $299,000 by Mint Residential

Kho & Lee of Pyrmont has around 20 units at 185 Broadway for between $150,000 and $250,000, which are between 17 and 40 square metres in size.

First National Pyrmont had eight in the same building - which has 600 units - starting at $170,000 for a 17 square metre unit.

In Australia a single garage is usually around 20 square metres and a double garage is about 26 square metres.

Patricia Kho, director of Kho & Lee, told Daily Mail Australia the typical private investor are 'mums and dads buying for their children attending an educational institution nearby'.

Ultra-cheap units for sale at Ultimo can only be lived in by students, such as this one, on the market for $200,000 with First National Pyrmont

Although the units are small, many have modern bathrooms and kitchenettes and smart loft bedrooms.

But in order to buy at such low prices, Kho says buyers need to make a few sacrifices.

For a start, you can forget about a view or a car space, but that's just the start.

"Most have a shared laundry and you have to share if you want to use a full kitchen. You will also be sacrificing external space - most have no balconies or external living space.'

The kitchen at 251-255 Darlinghurst Road, Darlinghurst, which is listed starting at $270,000 by Laing + Simmons, Potts Point

The downstairs of a loft-style unit for sale for $240,000 at Ultimo

Agents also have units for sale below the $300,000 mark across the inner city which do not have to be occupied by students.

While they do not share amenities, most are 'cosy' at been 30 and 45 square metres.

'Apartments under $300,000 are very difficult to find. Often they are tiny, totally unrenovated or offer no street outlook,' Nuri Shik of Laing and Simmons-Potts Point told realestate.com.au.

Michael Grigoriadis, a real estate agent from First National at Pyrmont, adds that buyers can expect to pay a much higher percentage of the sale price as a deposit than for larger units.

'Usually big four banks won't look at lending you 80 per cent of the money for a home of less than about 35 square metres,' he told Daily Mail Australia.

'The bank's valuer goes to look at it and if you dont have 50 per cent deposit it wont happen, it's just one of those things.

'Their computers say 'no'. They don't like small homes.'

'Your best way to buy it is you have security somewhere else from another property, or at lot of cash, or this is superannuation.'

A major bank spokesman Daily Mail Australia spoke to said big lenders determine home loan agreements based on 'location and quality not size'.

But Kho confirmed that buyers of small units need to already have a big proportion of the sale price. 'Typically finance is limited from lenders for these properties.'

Kho said the market of student-friendly accommodation for sale hadn't been damaged by Covid; she said the pandemic had a much bigger impact on students rentals.
Indoor household mixing has resumed in England today May as part of the latest stage of the governments roadmap out of lockdown.

Further relaxing of restrictions means that social mixing is now permitted at peoples homes, provided that gatherings consist of no more than six people or two households.

Hugging is also allowed, although people are being urged to do so with discretion and groups of up to 30 people may meet up outdoors.

This comes after the government said that the latest data showed that the previous easing of restrictions - including the opening of non-essential shops on 12 April  had not resulted in a major leap in coronavirus cases.

A surge in cases of the Indian variant has prompted fears that Mondays reopening could be deferred, with health minister Edward Argar saying on BBC Breakfast that the government was keeping everything under review.

The prime minister unveiled the staged approach to easing lockdown in February  but, while he pencilled in dates for lifting different rules, he said that infection, hospital and death numbers would determine the final decision each time.

Since 29 March, the rule of six means that six people have been able to meet outdoors, while outdoor group sports and leisure have also been allowed. This was followed on 12 April by the reopening of non-essential shops, as well as pubs and restaurants for outdoor hospitality.

There have been concerns that the so-called Indian variant could interrupt the final stage of lockdown easing, with Boris Johnson saying it could mean a risk of disruption and delay to the planned lifting of restrictions on 21 June. In the meantime, however, what happens next?

From 17 May: Gatherings of up to 30 people are permitted outdoors at this point. However, the rule of six and two-household rule will apply indoors as people are allowed to meet inside for the first time in months.

Pubs and restaurants will reopen indoors, as will cinemas, childrens play areas, hotels and B&Bs.

Some large events will be able to take place, including conferences, theatre and concert performances and sports events.

Controlled indoor events of up to 1,000 people or 50 per cent of a venues capacity, whichever is lower, will be permitted, as will outdoor events with a capacity of either 50 per cent or 4,000 people, whichever is lower.

The government will also make a special provision for large, outdoor, seated venues where crowds can be safely distributed, allowing up to 10,000 people or 25 per cent of total seated capacity, whichever is lower.

Up to 30 people will be allowed to attend weddings, receptions, funerals, and commemorative events, including wakes. A broader range of stand-alone life events will also be permitted at this step, including bar mitzvahs and christenings.

Carehome residents will be allowed up to five named visitors and more freedom to get out and about.

Organised adult sports and exercise classes may restart indoors with steam rooms and saunas also allowed to reopen.

Hotels, hostels and B&Bs will also be permitted to open their doors once again.

No earlier than 21 June: All legal limits on social contact should be lifted from 21 June at the earliest.

Once social-distancing is completely eased, nightclubs should be able to reopen and restrictions on events and live performances, including weddings, will finally being lifted.

What four conditions must be met?

The timetable for lifting restrictions will be subject to four tests at each stage of easing measures, including the success of the vaccination rollout, the effectiveness of the vaccination programme at reducing hospital admissions and deaths, infection rates and the impact of any new coronavirus variants.

The government will also conduct four reviews, including looking at coronavirus status certificates to allow people to prove if they have had a vaccine or negative test result, pilots of large events, international travel, and the withdrawal of social distancing measures and face masks.

Will the vaccine supply reduction affect the easing of lockdown?

The month-long significant reduction in the NHSs weekly coronavirus vaccine supply could slow the easing of lockdown restrictions.

Dr Simon Clarke, associate professor in Cellular Microbiology at the University of Reading, told The Independent the delays could mean many people are disenfranchised when England starts opening up again.

(Alliance News) - South Africa will carry on with the first phase of its mass vaccination plan using a vaccine from Johnson & Johnson, Health Minister confirmed early on Wednesday, as the country also grapples with the expiry date of a suspended vaccine by AstraZenela PLC and Oxford University.

At a media briefing, Mkhize also said the country had secured doses from Pfizer Inc for the phase one rollout that gets underway sometime next week.

The government's sudden change of plan comes after a local study revealed on Friday that the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine, which would have kick started the vaccination drive next week, was ineffective in mild to moderate disease of the new variant known as B.1.351 or 501.V2, which was first discovered in South Africa. This new strain is responsible for over 90% new coronavirus infections in Africa's worst hit country.

However, it is unclear whether the AstraZeneca vaccine protects against severe illness, hospitalisation and death.

South Africa last Monday received the first batch of AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccines, consisting of 1 million doses from the Serum Institute in India. Serum is licenced to produce the coronavirus vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford.

"Given the outcomes of the efficacy studies, the Department of Health will continue with the planned phase 1 vaccination using the Johnson & Johnson vaccine instead of the AstraZeneca vaccine," Mkhize said early on Wednesday.

The Johnson & Johnson vaccine, he said, has been proven effective against the 501Y.V2 variant and the necessary approval processes for use in South Africa are underway.

The rollout of vaccination will proceed in the form of an "implementation study", with the partnership of the Medical Research Council and the health department's vaccination sites across the country, the health minister said.

The government is finalising an agreement with J&J to use "research stock" as first tranche, which might be offered for free or at a cost, the minister said. Health care workers will receive the first jabs as part of the first phase.

Local scientists continue to evaluate other Covid-19 vaccine candidates and "we are simultaneously engaging manufacturers", Mkhize said.

South Africa is in advanced stages of evaluating and engaging the manufacturers of Russia's Sputnik -V candidate. Engagements with Sinopharm also continue with an offer made by China currently being considered. Negotiations with Moderna Inc are also ongoing.

The AstraZeneca vaccine batch that arrived in South Africa last Monday carries an expiry date of April 30.

"The vaccines have not expired. In addition, in keeping with the original vaccination plan, if the Department of Health were to proceed with the AstraZeneca vaccine roll-out, the doses would be used up by the expiry date," Mkhize said.

The April expiry date, he said, was not discovered by accident but through the implementation of quality assurance and control protocols.

South African scientists will continue with further deliberations on the AstraZeneca vaccine use in South Africa, and depending on their advice, the vaccine will be swapped before the expiry date, the minister said.

"By exchanging unused vaccines before the expiry date, the Department of Heath will ensure that the acquired AstraZeneca vaccines do not become wasteful and fruitless expenditure," he said.

By Artwell Dlamini; artwelldlamini@alliancenews.com

Copyright 2021 Alliance News Limited. All Rights Reserved.
The North Atlantic Alliance has been consistent in supporting Ukraine, welcomes its efforts to find a peaceful solution to the conflict in eastern Ukraine and calls on Russia to withdraw its troops from the region.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said this at a press conference following talks with Prime Minister of Ukraine Denys Shmyhal in Brussels on February 9, according to an Ukrinform correspondent.

During our meeting today, we discussed the security situation in Ukraine and the Black Sea region. NATO allies are united in condemning Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea and its aggressive actions in eastern Ukraine. We call on Russia to end its support for the militants in eastern Ukraine and withdraw its troops from the region. I encourage Ukraines efforts to find a peaceful solution to the conflict, Stoltenberg said.

A Ukrainian government delegation headed by Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal began a working visit to Brussels on February 9. Shmyhal met with European Council President Charles Michel and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.

The program of the visit includes a series of working meetings with representatives of the European Commission and the European Parliament. On February 11, Shmyhal will lead the talks in the format of the EU-Ukraine Association Council.

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Apple is secretly working with TSMC on micro OLED displays for Apple Glasses. This is an advanced form of OLED display in which the display is built directly into chip wafers.

While Samsung is the leader in OLED display technology, Apple is collaborating with TSMC here since micro OLED displays are different from smartphone OLED panels which are made on glass substrates. Instead, micro OLED are fabricated directly on wafers making them thinner and more efficient than traditional OLED panels. This also makes them suitable for use in AR devices where power consumption is of prime importance. The displays Apple is working on are less than 1 inch in size.

Panel players are good at making screens bigger and bigger, but when it comes to thin and light devices like AR glasses, you need a very small screen, said a source who has direct information on the micro OLED R&D project. Apple is partnering with TSMC to develop the technology because the chipmakers expertise is making things ultra-small and good, while Apple is also leveraging panel experts know-how on display technologies.

As per sources, the micro OLED project is currently in trial production stage and it will take several years to reach mass production. Apple has hired dozens of engineers from AU Optoelectronics to work on its micro OLED project along with display experts from Japan. Anyone signing up for the program must sign a NDA which even prevents one from meeting their friends from the tech industry.

This micro OLED is one of the two secret projects Apple is working on at its secretive labs in Longtan District in the Taiwanese city of Taoyian. Apple also has trial production line for microLED panels. The company hopes to eventually use microOLED displays in iPads, MacBooks, and other devices.

The company has kept its labs in Longtan Science Park unmarked with no logo or address to keep it away from prying eyes. This complex is close to TSMCs chip-packaging and testing plant.

Apart from Apple, Sony Semiconductor Solutions is also working on micro OLED display technology for use in AR and VR glasses.

Apple is working on multiple display projects to reduce its reliance on Samsung Display which is currently the leader in OLED technology.

[Via Nikkei
We intend to raise awareness of CTE as a creator of opportunities for careers that will provide a better way of life. Tweet this

"We strongly believe that CTE will play a critical role in our recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, which has devastated household finances and changed educational plans for many families," said Angel L. Pineiro Jr., vice president, strategic academic relationships, at CompTIA. "With the help of an elite group of educators and other leaders we intend to raise national awareness of CTE as a creator of opportunities for careers that will provide a better way of life for multiple generations to come and to do so in a way that address digital inequity head-on."

Today's announcement comes during Career and Technical Education Month, a public awareness campaign to celebrate the value of CTE and the achievements and accomplishments of CTE programs across the country. It is organized by the Association for Career and Technical Education (ACTE), the nation's largest not-for-profit association committed to the advancement of education that prepares youth and adults for successful careers.

"ACTE commends CompTIA on the formation of its National CTE Advisory Council and the commitment to advance a national dialogue to accelerate Tech Pathways," said LeAnn Wilson, ACTE executive director. "This national partnership model reflects the recommendations in ACTE's high-quality CTE Framework and the type of engagement that all industries should be involved in to help prepare learners for future employment."

More than 30 individuals representing 22 states have already joined the CompTIA CTE Advisory Council, including educators from Mississippi and Texas.

"The possibilities are limitless for students enrolled in career technical programs," said new council member Shirlaurence D. Fair, director of career and technical education for the Clarksdale Municipal School District in Clarksdale, Miss.

"The 2020 pandemic exposed the shortage of essential workers and the need for a more skilled workforce," Fair added. "For America to remain a superpower, we must offer all students, especially minorities, access to career technical education. Strategic partnerships with schools, businesses and community are the key to workforce development and building a brighter future for all."

"At no other time in history has it been more critical to have information technology, computer science and cybersecurity programming in our schools," said Johnny Vahalik, senior executive director for college, career and military readiness with the San Antonio Independent School District in Texas and council member.

"Technology is embedded into our daily lives and a required skill for every in-demand, high-wage career," Vahalik continued. "We must prepare students to ethically utilize technology in their daily lives and work, and we must provide students the skill and knowledge to protect themselves and others from the many threats that this generation faces and will continue to face."

In January U.S. employers advertised more than 232,000 job openings for core IT positions.1 These openings occurred in virtually every industry sector and included positions in software and application development, IT support, systems engineering and architecture and IT project management.

"CTE holds great promise as the solution to fill this need, and to do so in a way that minimizes the cost of acquiring skills and accelerates the process of preparing people with the employability skills that allow them to contribute from day one on the job," said Pineiro.

"The Technology Student Association values CompTIA's support of IT careers through its many educational initiatives," said Dr. Rosanne White, TSA executive director. "By assembling a group of national stakeholders to explore emerging tech, best practices, workforce development and diversity, the council's efforts will help administrators, educators and students with a dedicated interest in career and technical education."

The CompTIA National CTE Advisory Council intends to design strategies to diversify the tech workforce and shape the future of CTE tech curriculum. Areas of focus include technology trends and emerging tech, best practices for instruction, professional development for instructors, credentialing and certification programs, grants and other funding sources, articulation agreements and connecting with industry employers.

CompTIA will recruit three representatives from each of the 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico to join the council. Members will serve two-year terms.

CTE teachers, directors and state department of education representatives from across the country are invited to apply for council membership. For more information visit https://certs.comptia.org/comptia-national-advisory-council/.

About CompTIA

The Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) is a leading voice and advocate for the $5 trillion global information technology ecosystem; and the estimated 75 million industry and tech professionals who design, implement, manage, and safeguard the technology that powers the world's economy. Through education, training, certifications, advocacy, philanthropy, and market research, CompTIA is the hub for advancing the tech industry and its workforce. Visit www.comptia.org .

Media Contact

Steven Ostrowski

CompTIA

+1 630-678-8468

[email protected]

1 CompTIA Tech Jobs Report, February 5, 2021, https://www.comptia.org/content/tech-jobs-report

SOURCE CompTIA

Related Links

http://www.comptia.org


Introduction

The just announced extension of the tenure and reappointment of the Lafia, Nassarawa State-born retired 20th Inspector General of Police, Mr Mohammed Abubakar Adamu, is patently and outrightly unconstitutional, illegal, and even immoral. Adamu had already served Nigeria for a 35 whopping years when his tenure expired on 1st February, 2021, by effluxion of service years in accordance with extant laws. He had given his very best, which though hardly above average, was miles apart, and far better than the better forgotten service years of his disastrous and highly political and politicised Niger State - born predecessor, Ibrahim Kpotun Idris.

Adamu duly retired on 1st February, 2021. He was born on 17th September, 1961. He had enlisted into the Nigeria Police Force in 1986, after graduating with a B.Sc in Geography from Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), Zaria. He also holds a Masters Degree in International Criminal Justice System from the University of Portsmouth, UK. From his position as AIG, Zone 5, Benin City, he was made the IGP. Upon appointment, many Police Officers who were senior to Adamu, but who had become junior by virtue of his new rank of IGP, were forced to retire. They were seven DIGs, and many AIGs. During the appointment of Adamu's predecessor, IGP Ibrahim Idris Kpotun, 22 highly trained Senior Officers of the rank of DIGs and AIGs, who were senior to him, were compulsorily retired. I am told this wastage of experience, resources, training, energy, retraining, etc, is the tradition. Incredible, I dare say. Is Adamu the only qualified Nigerian to be the IGP in a country of over 208 million people (UNO, June, 2020), to have his term extended? Didn't the President and the Presidency know very well before now that his term was due to expire by effluxion of time on 1st February? Why was this self-imposed and needless simulated sense of urgency, that is now also listed in the fire brigade approach for which this government has become famous? This extension of Adamu's tenure, is patently unconscionable and unfair to servicing Police Officers who legitimately look forward to occupying the now vacant position of IGP.

Same Forces at Work

This was how the same people promoted and egged on Mr Ibrahim Magu, ex-Acting Chairman, EFCC (by the way, where is he now?). They told us that it was only him that could be EFCC Chairman, and that he could therefore,remain in office in an Acting Capacity forever, till thy Kingdom come! They did not mind his two-time rejection by the confirmatory authority, the Senate of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. The rejection was not arbitrary. It was based on a damning report by the same Government's Secret Police (the DSS), to the effect that Magu failed the "serious integrity test". It is now Adamu being promoted by the same hawks and power bloc in Government circles. The same forces - the sectionalistic, prebendalistic and nepotistic forces - are again at work. They have already flown the kite that, the President will appoint the next IGP based simply on merit. Oh, really? Of course, Nigerians now know that "merit" is a cruel euphemism for a Northern Muslim. Shi kena! Is this how to grow and nurture a pluralistic country of different nations, languages, tribes, religions and variegated tendencies that are at once centripetal and centrifugal? Didn't they see the rainbow coalition and "Dolly Parton's 'Coat of Many Colours" represented by Joe Biden's cabinet which he gathered together long before he was sworn in as the US President on January 20, 2021? Didn't they notice how Biden hit the ground running, rolling out 30 Executive Orders in his first three days in office?

The Law

Sections 214, 215 and 216 of the 1999 Constitution and Section 7(6) and 18(8) of the Nigeria Police Act are quite clear that any action taken by Adamu after 1st February, 2021, is null, void and of no effect whatsoever.

Section 215 (1)(a) provides:

"An Inspector-General of Police subject to 216 (20 of this Constitution shall be appointed by the President on the advice of Nigeria Police Council from among serving members of the Nigeria Police Force."

Section 215 (3) provides:

"The President or such Minister of the Government of the Federation as he may authorise in that behalf may give to the Inspector-General of Police such lawful directions with respect to the maintenance and securing of public safety and public order as he may consider necessary, and the Inspector-General of Police shall comply with those directions or cause them to be complied with."

Section 7(6) of the Nigeria Police Act 2020, provides thus:

"A Person who is appointed as the Inspector General of Police Shall hold office for four years".

Section 18(8) of the same Police Act 2020 states:

"Every Police officer shall on Recruitment or Appointment, Serve in the Nigeria Police Force for a period of 35 years or until he attain the aged of 65 years". This means whichever one is earlier. The Use of the word "SHALL" by the above Statute makes it impossible for the tenure of I.G.P be extended by any person. The word "Shall" in law means must. It enjoins a mandate; a compulsion. In BRAHIM & ORS. v AKINRINSOLA (2010) LPELR-4144(CA), the court held that "shall" conveys a peremptory and compulsory meaning. See National Bank of Nigeria v Alakija (1978) 9-10 SC. 59, Achineku v Ishagba (1988) 4 N.W.L.R. Pt. 89 p. 411- Ishola v Ajiboye (1994) 6 N.W.L.R. Pt.352 p.506." Per RHODES-VIVOUR, J.C.A (as he then was)(P. 5, paras. F-G).

The Effect

An IGP's tenure is therefore, 35 years' service or 65 years of age. Not a day more. Adamu was born in 1961. Though, he is 60 years old, he has served for 35 years. That makes him ineligible to continue in office, in whatever form or manner. You cannot build something upon nothing, and expect it to stand. It will collapse. See Macfoy v UAC (1962) AC 150. Even under the Civil Service Rules which peg the retirement at age 60 years or 35 years of service, Adamu had fully retired. Adamu's appointment as Acting IGP is therefore, dead on arrival. As dead as dodo. In the eye of the law, Nigeria currently has no IGP.

One more point. The IGP or other Police Officers are not subject to the usual Civil Service Rules. Their enlistment, service, promotion, discipline, retirement or dismissal are governed by the provisions of the Nigeria Police Act, 2020. This law is "sui generis" and special, for the NPF (like electoral matters that are wholly governed by the Electoral Act and Guidelines, rather than the usual courts' Civil Procedure Rules).

See AMBODE v AGBAJE & ORS (2015) LPELR-25667(CA); OGUNSAKIN & ANOR. v AJIDARA & ORS (2007) LPELR-4733(CA) and SA'AD & ANOR v MAIFATA & ORS (2008) LPELR-4915(CA), etc. An IGP office created under Section 215(i)(a), is quite different from presidential appointments which can be made under Section 171 of the Constitution. The President can appoint and remove such appointees. He can also reappoint them to act in such offices. These are the SGF, Head of Service, Ambassadors/High Commissioners, Permanent Secretaries, Heads of Extra-Ministerial Departments (MDAs) and other personal staff.

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The President cannot therefore, administratively alter, amend, reconstruct or elongate the provisions of the Police Act 2020, by purportedly extending the IGP's tenure. The Executive cannot make laws. It only executes laws made by the National Assembly, as captured in Section 214(2) (a) of the Constitution. The laws are then interpreted by the Judiciary. This is what we call the doctrine of separation of powers, as ably propounded in 1748 by the great French Philosopher, Baron de Montesquieu. It enhances checks and balances, so that absolution or dictatorship is averted.

By the way, when last did we hear Mr. President convene a meeting of the Nigeria Police Council to advice him on the appointment or removal of an IGP, as provided for in paragraph 27 of the third Schedule to the 1999 Constitution? That Council comprises of Mr President as Chairman, all the Governors of the 36 states of Nigeria, the Chairman of the Police Service Commission and the IGP himself. I did not hear. Or, did you?

What we have seen all along, is a situation where Mr President solely appoints and elongates the tenure of an IGP. That is a most unconstitutional, illegal, unlawful, unconscionable, capricious, whimsical and arbitrary act. We must learn to be a country of laws and not of men; a country of strong institutions and not strongmen.
The Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation will offer family-friendly Trip-Tips  self-guided adventures and suggested hikes  for approximately 20 state park facilities during the traditional February school vacation week.

Programming can be enjoyed at any time starting on Saturday, Feb. 13 . DCR Trip-Tips provide children and their families with self-guided activity ideas to lead their exploration of a local state park or watershed.

This winter, DCR is thrilled to offer school vacation Trip-Tips encouraging children and their families to enjoy the fresh air and experience self-guided opportunities in their local state park, said state DCR Commissioner Jim Montgomery. The Baker-Polito Administration continues to increase both access within our state parks system and opportunities for the public to enjoy the many recreational resources available to them.

Among the hiking sites mentioned:

Quabbin Reservoir; 100 Winsor Dam Road, Belchertown

Canalside Rail Trail, Unity Park, 2 Avenue A, Turners Falls

Mount Tom State Reservation, 125 Reservation Road, Holyoke

DAR State Forest, 78 Cape Street, Goshen

Wendell State Forest, 392 Wendell Rd, Millers Falls

Moore State Park, 1 Sawmill Road, Paxton

Blackstone River and Canal Heritage State Park, 287 Oak Street, Uxbridge

Upton State Forest, 205 Westboro Road, Upton

The Trip-Tips include activities like winter birding, wildlife observation. history tours, and scavenger hunts.

Visitors are encouraged to tweet, post, and tag photos on social media using @MassDCR and #DCRTripTips.

DCR asks visitors to park in designated areas only, and to come back another time if a parking lot is full. Many visitor centers remain closed. However, restrooms or porta-johns within many DCR parks remain open. Dogs are required to be on leash in state parks unless signage designates otherwise. Dogs are not permitted on DCR Water Supply Protection areas. To find a dog-friendly park, visit the DCR website.

When visiting state parks, DCR offers general guidance for visitors to follow:
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One of two Florida men arrested after a burglary, car chase and crash at Lookout Mountain, Tn., on Jan. 29 was charged in 2016 with stabbing a police officer at a Miami casino.

Police later released surveillance video they say showed Jose Carvajal Lopez stabbing a city of Miami Police officer working an off duty security detail at Magic City Casino.

Police said Officer Raul Perez was working off duty when he and Lopez got into an altercation.

Police said Lopez began stabbing the officer and he tried to remove him from the poker room. The officer was stabbed in the face and neck.

Lopez was afterward charged with attempted second-degree murder.

Lopez and Barbaro Rivera were nabbed in the town's first burglary in almost three years.

Mark Caldwell in his neighborhood news reported, "Saturday evening a week ago, LMPD officers noticed a suspicious vehicle in the area of 400 W. Brow Road. The dark-colored SUV, bearing a Florida registration, was parked in the roadway with just the parking lights on and a driver in the vehicle. While attempting to investigate the situation, a second individual came running from a yard and quickly entered the vehicle, and the vehicle fled at a high rate of speed towards the business district.
LOS ANGELESAnne Hodder-Shipp and Sarah Tomchesson, the creators of the Sex+ Summit, have launched the Sex+ Community, a private members-only portal where open-minded people can connect, learn and explore sex and pleasure free from the restrictions of traditional social media.

Members have access to exclusive educational courses, special events hosted by sexuality and wellness experts, monthly virtual hangouts, direct access to sex and relationship support and weekly activities designed to make prioritizing pleasure and self-care feel easier and more fun.

Created and guided by sex educators Hodder-Shipp and Tomchesson, Sex+ Community explores such topics as pleasure, identity, healing and more, so members can access expansive sex and relationship information they can trust. Whether through taking one of their courses, attending a guest workshop, or simply scrolling through Sex+ Communitys vast resources, members can find fresh ideas, new practices, and accessible rituals they can easily add into their daily lives.

The mission of Sex+ events have always been to explore sexuality, healing, and identity using an expansive lens and centering tools and topics typically left out of mainstream sex and relationship conversations, Tomchesson said. Now with Sex+ Community, we have our own digital space with which to do it  complete with courses, workshops, and weekly activities that we designed just for Sex+ Community members.

Through Sex+ Communitys private social feed, members will benefit from the power of community-based learning, which allows like-minded individuals to connect, share stories and support each other while learning about sex and pleasure. And because Sex+ Community is guided by professionals in the sexuality, healing, and wellness spaces, members have access to a variety of educational resources.

Sarah and I know that we arent the only ones who have been harmed by reductive, inaccurate, and biased sexuality education and part of our mission as professional sex educators is to offer a soothing antidote, Hodder-Shipp said. I also know we arent the only ones who are incredibly tired of the one-size-fits-all conversations around sex and relationships, so we built Sex+ Community to offer something profoundly different. With Sex+ Community, members will develop their inner knowing and deepen their relationships  including (and especially) then one they have with themselves.

Membership in the Sex+ Community is $25 per month, allowing members get instant access to:

 4 guided pleasure courses co-facilitated by Tomchesson and Hodder-Shipp, starting with Sex+You: Become the Authority of Your Pleasure on Feb. 18

 A structured community social feed and forum without censorship, data mining, or trolls

 Weekly activities, writing prompts, rituals and practices

 Engaging online discussion

 Resources and skill-shares

 Monthly virtual hangouts hosted by Tomchesson and Hodder-Shipp

 Quarterly events and activities hosted by your fave educators and healers

 50 percent off on tickets to the 2021 Sex+ Summit

If a monthly membership feels like too much commitment, folks can sign up for the courses and events individually with no monthly fee required. Sex+You: Become the Authority of Your Pleasure starts Feb. 18 and will allow attendees to:

 Explore and rediscover pleasure as a self-care tool

 Discover your unique pleasure conductors

 Successfully source and elevate desire

 Experience the healing power of storytelling

 Find pleasure practices and resources that are right for you

 Own and get grounded in your personal power and inner wisdom

To learn more about Sex+ Community or sign up for a monthly membership, click here.

For more information, visit www.s3xplus.com.
Increasing instances of high blood sugar combined with prevalence of type-2 diabetes and elevated cholesterol levels to enhance preference for unsweetened teas

ROCKVILLE, MD / ACCESSWIRE / February 10, 2021 / Fact.MR's report on the global ice tea market projects a sturdy growth forecast for 2021, as consumers reorient their beverage consumption priorities towards healthier and clean-label alternatives. According to Fact.MR, long-term growth prospects also appear promising, with a projected CAGR exceeding 7% through 2031.

Historical projections have remained robust, exhibiting a growth rate of over 5%. Besides enhancing their sensory experiences, consumers are opting for function-specific iced teas, pertaining to the rising prevalence of chronic ailments such as cancers, heart diseases and high cholesterol. Furthermore, demand for unsweetened ice tea is also expected to go mainstream in forthcoming years. Such trends are compelling ice tea manufacturers to invest in advanced research and development initiatives to introduce new combinations.

According to a study published by the Annals of Internal Medicine, consumption of at least six cups of green tea per day could help reduce the risk of type-2 diabetes by 33%. Consequently, sales of green iced tea infused with catechins are witnessing a sharp incline, as they reduce the effects of insulin resistance by inhibiting digestion an absorption of carbohydrates.

"Prominent manufacturers are incorporating sustainable packaging solutions, such as reusable or recyclable plastic bottles manufactured from materials such as polyethylene terephthalate, with the long-term objective of reducing environmental footprint through reducing accumulation of discarded plastic waste," remarks the Fact.MR analyst.

For More Insights into the Market, Request a Sample of this Report

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Key Takeaways from Fact.MR's Ice Tea Market Study

By product type, bottled ice teas to register maximum sales, expanding at over 6% CAGR

CBD-infused tea to gain major traction, attributed to its high anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties

Accelerating clean-label movement to fuel organic ice tea sales in the long-term

U.S to remain a highly attractive market, with over four out of five residents consuming iced tea

U.K is poised to exhibit significant growth, as perceived health benefits dictate consumer purchases

Germany and France to demonstrate credible expansion, with fruit-based tea being most preferred

China and Japan to emerge as key growth hotspots due to an ingrained tea drinking culture

Ice Tea Market- Prominent Drivers

Ice tea manufacturers are likely to yield immense gains in function-specific variants, attributed to growing demand for health boosting beverages

Leading brands are emphasizing on attractive packaging to attract a large customer base

Proliferating demand for organic tea to elevate the global ice tea market expansion prospects

Ice Tea Market- Key Restraints

Presence of substitutes such as unsweetened or low-sugar sodas, iced beverages and coffee may hinder iced tea consumption

Many ice tea brands contain artificial sweeteners and synthetic flavoring agents which are unhealthy for the human body

Discover more about the ice tea market with 153 figures and 144 data tables, along with the table of contents. You will also find detailed market segmentation on https://www.factmr.com/report/ice-tea-market.

Competitive Landscape

Key players profiled in Fact.MR's ice tea market coverage include Unilever, Coca-Cola, Starbucks, Nestle SA, Arizona Beverages, Harris Freeman & Co., Mother Packers, Hangzhou Wahaha Group, Teatulia, BOS Brands, 4C Food Corp, Steaz (Healthy Beverage) and Adagios Tea. These players emphasize on backward integration of their business models to capture a heightened market share, besides introducing new flavors.

In 2019, The Coca Cola Company collaborated with TerraCycle to incorporate refillable bottles and containers across Western Europe for packaging its numerous beverage offerings, including ice tea. The objective is to reduce the amount of plastic waste accumulation across landfills to prevent environmental damage.

Likewise, New Age Beverages Corporation expanded its partnership with Nestle SA which included the broadening of its licensing agreement on NESTEA to incorporate all products under the brand. This includes the NESTEA powdered tea across the United States.

More Valuable Insights on the Ice Tea Market

Fact.MR, in its new offering, presents an unbiased analysis of the global ice tea market. The study divulges essential insights on the ice tea market on the basis of product type (bottled, powdered, and tea bags), tea type (fruit-infused, liquor-infused, CBD-infused, and specialty tea), nature (organic and conventional), price range (economy, mid-range, and premium), and sales channel (HORECA, modern trade, specialty stores, departmental stores, convenience stores, online retailers, and other sales channels), across major regions of the world (North America, Latin America, Europe, East Asia, South Asia & Oceania, and the Middle East & Africa).

Get Customization on this Report for Specific Country

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Explore Fact.MR's Coverage on the Food & Beverages Domain

Maternal Nutrition Products Market: A detailed assessment of value chain analysis, business execution, and supply chain analysis across regional markets has been covered in Fact.MR's extensive coverage on the maternal nutrition products market research report. This report explicates on vital dynamics, such as the drivers, restraints, and opportunities for key market players along with key stakeholders as well as emerging players.

Pastry Fillings Market: The global pastry fillings market study published by Fact.MR sheds light on vital dynamics, which are likely to convert the future of pastry fillings market, in turn generating worthwhile opportunities for key companies as well as evolving players who are interested in the manufacturing of pastry fillings.

Yellow Pea Protein Market: The yellow pea protein market study is a detailed market intellect on key revenue progression factors, challenges, industry trends, and opportunities, which will eventually influence growth. The report primarily conveys a summary of the yellow pea protein market, considering present and upcoming yellow pea protein industry scenarios, to reveal striking sides relating to the acceptance of yellow pea protein across prominent regional markets.

About Fact.MR

Market research and consulting agency with a difference! That's why 80% of Fortune 1,000 companies trust us for making their most critical decisions. We have offices in US and Dublin, whereas our global headquarter is in Dubai. While our experienced consultants employ the latest technologies to extract hard-to-find insights, we believe our USP is the trust clients have on our expertise. Spanning a wide range - from automotive & industry 4.0 to healthcare & retail, our coverage is expansive, but we ensure even the most niche categories are analyzed. Reach out to us with your goals, and we'll be an able research partner.

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(Natural News) Five public colleges and universities throughout Virginia have been ordered by the state legislature to offer special scholarships or economic development programs to descendants of slaves who once labored on their campuses.

Longwood University in Farmville, Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, and the University of Virginia in Charlottesville have all been targeted.

Because each of these schools was in existence prior to 1865, the year the Civil War ended, the assumption is that they all benefitted from black slavery in some way, shape or form. Consequently, they all need to now give black people free money as reparations.

Should the bill be signed into law, it would take effect starting in the 2022-23 academic year. It will go to the Democrat-controlled Senate next and if it passes there it will head to the desk of Gov. Ralph Blackface Northam.

Passed by a 61-39 vote in the House, the bill mandates that each of the aforementioned schools offer full four-year scholarships or economic development programs to descendants of black of slaves. Said descendants would be allowed to choose any of the five institutions for attendance.

HB 1980 is a small but important step to acknowledge and address that the foundational success of five universities was based on enslaved labor, stated Del. David A. Reid (D-Loudon), is quoted as saying to the group called The Hills Changing America.

I am proud HB 1980 has passed the House, and I hope that it will be sent to the governors desk for approval so that we can begin to address the multigenerational impact of slavery here in Virginia.

Private fundraising, endowments will have to pay black tuitions

Why should taxpayer money be used like this, you may be asking? There is no need to worry about that because, in this case, the state would not be footing the bill for black tuition.

Should the Enslaved Ancestors College Access Scholarship and Memorial Program, as it is called, be signed into law, it would require that all funding come from either private fundraising or endowment revenue.

What this means is that wealthy alumni, many of whom have light skin, would be forced to foot the bill for the program, which can only be described as a form of forced black privilege.

An Episcopal seminary beat them to the punch, though.

Back in late 2019, Virginia Theological Seminary (VTS) agreed to pay out $1.7 million to the descendants of slaves who work on its campus. This reparations fund was a first for any academic institution in the United States, according to William A. Darity Jr., a professor and expert on reparations from Duke University.

VTS set up its own special task force to seek out slave descendants who helped build the historic campus in Alexandria, though a spokesman from the school says nobody really knows for sure just how many slaves worked on the property.

As we seek to mark Seminarys milestone of 200 years, we do so conscious that our past is a mixture of sin as well as grace, announced the Very Rev. Ian S. Markham, the schools dean and president, in a statement.

This is the Seminary recognizing that along with repentance for past sins, there is also a need for action.

VTS is considered to be the flagship seminary of the Episcopal Church. It was co-founded by Francis Scott Key and did not have any students with dark skin until 1951, the year it admitted John T. Walker, the schools first African student.

More related news about academias escalating worship of black people can be found at CampusInsanity.com.

Sources for this article include:

TheHill.com

NaturalNews.com

CNN.com
The science stands behind rewilding and we look forward to gaining further knowledge from our European friends Tweet this

"We are honored to have Wouter Helmer join our Science Advisory Board and share best practices with our organization, which is at the forefront of rewilding initiatives in the United States, as we work to save our wild horses through rewilding," said Manda Kalimian, founder of the CANA Foundation. "We look forward to working with Wouter to educate the public about these important issues, including through the Europe's New Wild series on PBS."

Europe's New Wild focuses on real world rewilding projects, like the once endangered European bison, which have been reintroduced to the Southern Carpathians and are now thriving. The series explores diverse locations from the Arctic Circle to rich river wetlands. Produced for National Geographic, WWF and France 5, it is premiering on Wednesdays, February 3-24 from 10:00-11:00 p.m. ET on PBS, pbs.org and the PBS Video app.

"Large herbivores, like horses and bison, help facilitate species resurgence and also to alleviate forest fires, issues we face in the United States that are ever more pressing due to climate change," said Dr. Ross MacPhee, CANA's scientific advisor and senior curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. "The science stands behind rewilding and we look forward to gaining further knowledge and collateral from our European friends and collaborators for making a case for more projects like this in the United States."

Using both fossils and modern genomic methods, MacPhee and his colleagues are conducting studies to prove that all modern horses, whether domestic or wild, have a common ancestry that originated in North America during the Ice Age. CANA is funding a variety of research initiatives devoted to understanding the horse's place in nature, as well as leading webinars and educational programs with former Congressman Steve Israel's Institute of Politics and Global Affairs at Cornell University. Other esteemed members of the CANA team include former United States Deputy Secretary of the Interior Michael Connor, Executive Director Erin King Sweeney, and paleogeneticist Hendrik Poinar from McMaster University in Canada.

Learn more at canafoundation.org.





SOURCE CANA Foundation

Related Links

https://canafoundation.org



Page Content

Speaker of Council, Cllr Nonceba Molwele is hosting a series of virtual public consultations to give residents free rein to determine the substance and character of the Citys Integrated Development Plan (IDP).

The Council led community-based planning (CBP) outreach sessions are scheduled to run on digital platforms from Tuesday, 9 February to Friday, 5 March 2021, affording residents of Johannesburg a platform to air views about how the City can deal with backlogs in the delivery of municipal services.



These sessions ensure that people are actively involved in their development. They help the City understand community issues better and to address service delivery backlogs, says Cllr Molwele.



The outreach sessions serve as a forerunner to the Integrated Development Plan (IDP) process, designed to produce service delivery policies for each ward in all of the Citys seven regions.



Cllr Molwele says all public comments are critical to ensure a legitimate IDP consultation process as provided for in prescripts of municipal governance.



This process will assist us to be responsive and to plan accordingly. It also builds partnerships between communities and the City, says the Speaker.



Cllr Molwele highlights that scheduled outreach sessions will be held in line with recently adjusted protocols regulating Level 3 of the Covid-19 lockdown. She adds that consultations will be held in line with Directive 6.7 of the Regulations issued by the Minister of Local Government and Traditional Affairs.



This should be read together with the adjusted Level 3 regulations, which call for stricter adherence to all Covid-19 public health and containment prescripts, especially those relating to gatherings, physical distancing, health and safety, she explains.



All engagements will be streamed live on the Citys social media pages, including Twitter and Facebook. Residents may also join the meeting by logging onto the Citys website, www.joburg.org.za; click on Notices, then select CBP meeting.



You will then select the region and cluster you want to join. Youll get to join the MS Teams sessions by clicking on the barcode icon. Theres also a link to make online comments and a short video clip on the CBP process, says Cllr Molwele,



The Speaker urges residents to submit their inputs by attending virtual meetings.



Inputs may be submitted to cbpinputs@joburg.org.za or online by clicking on this link: https://share.hsforms.com/1-W81Bz_gS6yf20an7wB-uQ469tl. Written comments can be submitted through suggestion boxes available at each regional office. Telephone Yusuf Lachporia on 011 407-6310 or Yusufl@joburg.org.za for any enquiries.
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Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US

Iran ready to help improve the defense capability of Syria

European Parliament head proposes to strengthen sanctions on Russia

UK PM gets married in London

Armenia reports COVID-19 new 81 cases: for people die

EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia

2 people die in Armenia road accident

Nigeria: Students taken hostage a month ago are released

61 quakes recorded in Congo per day

Syrian MFA: EU lost credibility due to blind obedience to US policy

Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack

Mher Grigoryan: Clarification of border points is possible only after withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops from Armenia

Suspicious deal: Whether there was profit from buying DNA IDs?

Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war

4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack

Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities

Kocharyan: I have to ask people how it happened that overwhelming majority elected this leader

Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country

Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia

US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs

Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners

Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions

Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US

Iran intensifies its diplomacy amid Armenia-Azerbaijan border tensions

Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes

Lukashenko accuses West of destabilizing situation in Belarus

Armenia Central Electoral Commission chief on snap elections: No legal basis for postponing, suspending any function

Armenias Pashinyan is met by Yerevan district residents chanting against him

We are ready to be fully engaged in negotiation process to resolve Karabakh issue, says Armenia acting PM

Armenia ex-President Kocharyan gives interview to Russia TV channel

Armenia acting premier: We are ready to start withdrawing troops at any moment

Canada MFA expresses concern over 6 Armenian soldiers capture by Azerbaijan troops

There are omissions in registration documents of political forces that applied to Armenia Central Electoral Commission

Armenia Central Electoral Commission chief: There is activeness in Yerevan for the past day or two

Three new cases of coronavirus reported in Artsakh

Group of US Congress members threaten Azerbaijans Aliyev regime with sanctions

Chicago mayor is sued for allegedly refusing interview with white reporter

Iran exports oil to US for first time after long interval

"Armenia" bloc top 50 MP candidates are announced

42 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia

Sri Lanka public beach is covered in charred plastic pellets due to fire in container ship

US preparing list of targeted sanctions on Belarus authorities

China believes it will own America by 2035, Biden says

15 al-Shabab militants killed in Somalia

Newspaper: Armenia political forces that applied for running in election impatiently await CEC decision

Newspaper: Changes are expected in Artsakh

California prisoner who considers himself Satanist beheads cellmate, dismembers his body

Newspaper: Armenia acting PM's "mutually beneficial" proposal to collapse state system?

Armenia National Security Service Reserve Officers' Union members meet with His Holiness Karekin II

EU is ready to help Armenia and Azerbaijan with border delimitation and demarcation

ARF-D member on Nikol Pashinyan: 103 years ago Armenia's founding fathers would have executed him for treason

Iran President hails brotherly ties with Azerbaijan

Robert Kocharyan on years of his leadership in Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia

Situation on Armenian-Azerbaijani border is still tense, more on COVID-19 in Armenia, May 28 digest

"Armenia" alliance of political parties paying tribute to founder of First Republic Aram Manukyan

Yerevan.today: Armenia acting PM not greeted at ruling party's headquarters, citizens call him 'capitulator'

Russia MOD reports on maintenance of ceasefire regime in Nagorno-Karabakh

Armenia acting MOD meets with Russian counterpart in Moscow

Armenia 2nd President: I see possibility of restoring borders of Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast

We can provide our army with some key, modernized weapons, says Armenia ex-President Kocharyan

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan: Captives issue is not one that any opposition force can resolve

OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs release statement on detention of 6 Armenian servicemen by Azerbaijan

Armenian acting Deputy PM: Discussion on issues possible only after withdrawal of Azeri troops from Armenia's territory

Armenia acting PM on Syunik roads, Russian military posts: This is only place where there are working nuances

Armenia acting PM: Process of return of POWs will intensify after upcoming elections

Putin congratulates Aliyev on Republic Day

Josep Borrell: A group of EU Ministers will visit Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan

Armenia acting PM: We're not going to escalate situation for 30% of Sev Lake

Armenia 3rd President visits Vanadzor, pays tribute to heroes of Battle of Gharakilisa (PHOTOS)

Armenia ex-President Kocharyan lays flowers at Battle of Karakilisa memorial (PHOTOS)

Armenia acting PM: Solution to captives issue is matter of time

Shoygu to Harutyunyan: Russia, Armenia strengthen military cooperation

Armenia acting premier: We are 100% honest toward our country

Artsakh President pays tribute at Stepanakert memorial, Shushi Tank-Monument

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan on Meghri corridor plan: Not beneficial to us now to discuss it as "corridor"

Acting PM: "Cement," "fittings" were stolen while constructing Armenia state "building"

Two new cases of coronavirus reported in Artsakh

Catholicos of All Armenians visits Sardarapat Memorial, again separate from state officials

MOD dismisses Azerbaijan statement on Armenia army firing toward Nakhchivan

Jerusalem Post: Israel prepares for a new war with Hamas

France, UN World Food Programme partner to support displaced people in Armenia

Armenia ex-President Kocharyan: Today we are not full-fledged negotiating party

Norwegian prime minister opposes series of NATO reforms

Armenia deputy FM briefs UN, Red Cross leaders on consequences of Azerbaijan aggression against Artsakh

NATO Secretary-General: Afghans must take full responsibility for peace and stability in their country

104 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia

Armenia acting premier: Our sovereignty, independence cannot be subject of discussion

Karabakh state-finance minister announces resignation

Artsakh MFA: Sardarapat victory has inspired all Armenians for over a century

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan: In contrast to kneeling, disgraceful authorities of the day, we have determination

Armenia President: Today we stand on threshold of Sardarapat of morality, dignity

Catholicos of All Armenians: Our people shall find strength to overcome this ordeal as well

Armenia First Republic Day event is held under very modest conditions

Newspaper: Armenia authorities claiming to be popular close off First Republic Day event to public

Armenia ex-President Sargsyan: Now or never!

Armenia President, then acting premier arrive at Sardarapat Memorial

Newspaper: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan's new "cleverness?"

France ambassador: I wish Armenia to be able to live its independence in peace, prosperity

Bashar al-Assad wins Syria presidential election

Reporters not allowed entering Sardarapat Memorial of Armenia

Thank you for reading!

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Micronesian boy, stranded abroad for one year, reunites with his family on Polowat
The Chinese Defence Ministry announced in Beijing on Wednesday that the frontline troops of China and India at the south and north banks of the Pangong Lake in eastern Ladakh started synchronised and organised disengagement from Wednesday. There was no comment from the Indian side on the statement made by the spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of National Defence, Senior Colonel Wu Qian, and carried by China's official media.

"The Chinese and Indian frontline troops at the southern and northern bank of the Pangong Lake start synchronised and organised disengagement from February 10," Wu said in a brief statement. "This move is in accordance with the consensus reached by both sides at the 9th round of China-India Corps Commander Level Meeting," the statement added.

The militaries of China and India have been engaged in a tense standoff in eastern Ladakh since early May 2020. The two countries have held several rounds of military and diplomatic-level talks to resolve the face-off. On January 24, the 9th round of China-India Corps Commander-level meeting was held on the Chinese side of the Moldo-Chushul border meeting point.

The two sides had a candid and in-depth exchange of views on disengagement along the Line of Actual Control in the Western Sector of China-India border areas. The two sides agreed that this round of meeting was positive, practical and constructive, which further enhanced mutual trust and understanding.

Both the sides agreed to push for an early disengagement of the frontline troops. They also agreed to follow the important consensus of their state leaders, maintain the good momentum of dialogue and negotiation, and hold the 10th round of the Corps Commander Level Meeting at an early date to jointly advance de-escalation.

The two sides agreed to continue their effective efforts in ensuring the restraint of the frontline troops, stabilize and control the situation along the LAC in the Western Sector of the China-India border, and jointly maintain peace and tranquillity.
Residents temporarily evacuated from Homestead after fire, no injuries

A Saturday afternoon fire in an apartment at a senior living complex was quickly extinguished and nobody was injured.


Former Nairobi Governor Mike Sonko will spend Tuesday night at Nairobi Hospital, away from the cold floors of Gigiri police station for the first time in nine days after a court declined to remand him at Kamiti Maximum Prison.

This was despite a spirited fight by Director of Public Prosecutions Noordin Haji's team to have Mr Sonko sent to Kamiti.

Anti-Terrorism Police Unit (ATPU) officers stormed the hospital in the morning and took Mr Sonko after learning he was taken there.

The former governor had complained of stomach pains while at the police station on Monday night.

He was taken to the hospital where he was admitted and obtained a report indicating he was ill.

On learning that the politician could not attend his bail hearing at Kiambu law courts, the ATPU team which had been guarding him made its way to the hospital.

The hospital management and security, who appeared to have been caught off-guard, could not prevent the more than a dozen heavily armed men taking the former governor.

He was immediately put in a vehicle and driven to Kiambu.

In a stormy session, charactarised by complaints from Mr Sonko's lawyers, Chief Magistrate Stella Atambo freed him on a Sh300,000 bond and surety of a similar amount.

The court said the prosecution failed to give good reasons to deny Mr Sonko bond.

It added that the matters raised by the State could be solved out of court.

The prosecution argued that the former governor is a flight risk.

The court, however, rejected the application, saying there is no evidence to support it.

"Apart from the annexures on previous cases against the accused, there is no material placed before this court to support the fact that if admitted to bond or bail, he will fail to observe the same," Ms Atambo said.

The court also faulted the prosecution team for failing to demonstrate that Mr Sonko would interfere with witnesses if freed.

"Mere allegations that the accused will interfere or intimidate witnesses is not sufficient to warrant a denial of bond or bail. The likelihood must be real and demonstrated," the magistrate said.

During the court appearance, the former city governor looked relaxed as he sat in the dock, a stark difference from last week when he cried.

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Next to Mr Sonko were two health workers attending to him during the proceedings.

Mr Sonko was in a white T-shirt with the words "Never Give Up" and blue jeans.

From Kiambu, the former county boss was driven to Kahawa West law courts.

His lawyers said he was unwell and needs to be attended to.

They produced the medical report from Nairobi Hospital signed by six doctors.

Mr John Khaminwa, the lead defence lawyer, said it was wrong for the former governor to be transported in a police vehicle instead of an ambulance "when his life is clearly at risk".

"He is being handled in a primitive manner," Dr Khaminwa told the court.

Chief Magistrate Diana Mochache declined to give the prosecution team the 30 days it had asked for to hold Mr Sonko "as investigations into the terrorism activities continue".

She, instead, ruled that the former Nairobi governor be escorted by the ATPU officers to Nairobi Hospital in an ambulance to continue with treatment.

She also directed that detailed information from the doctors treating Mr Sonko be taken to court at 10am today in his absence.

Additionally, Ms Mochache said the application being made by the prosecution seeking to detain Mr Sonko for 30 days be heard when the former governor is discharged from hospital.
She announced she's expecting her first child with her boyfriend Stuart McKay last month.

And Zoe Williams took to Instagram on Thursday afternoon to reveal she's now 22 weeks pregnant.

The This Morning doctor, 40, shared that her unborn baby is currently the size of an aubergine as she held an eggplant against her blossoming baby bump.

'So in love with this little aubergine': Zoe Williams took to Instagram on Thursday afternoon to reveal she's now 22 weeks pregnant

Nailing sporty chic, the former Gladiators star teamed a light blue crop top with patterned running rights.

With her tresses worn in its natural afro, the TV star complemented her beauty with dewy make-up.

The presenter appeared in great spirits as she posed with the fruit in her sweet post, which she captioned: 'So in love with this little aubergine. 22 weeks.'

Media personality Zoe was met with praise from her celebrity pals Rochelle Humes, Ferne McCann and Clara Amfo.

Parents-to-be: The This Morning doctor, 40, announced she's expecting her first child with her boyfriend Stuart McKay last month

'Oh look, I can see now!' The former Gladiators star was met with praise from her celebrity pals Rochelle Humes, Ferne McCann and Clara Amfo

In a new interview, Zoe hailed pregnancy 'magical' and admitted she was considering trying to conceive via a sperm donor before she met her partner.

The physician, who previously revealed she froze her eggs in 2018, explained: 'Having my scan was just the most amazing thing. It's so magical, the wonder of seeing this little life that's growing inside you.'

On reaching her goals, the GP told Hello! magazine: 'I had two big ambitions, one was to be a doctor and the other was to be a mother

'As a doctor none of this is new to me, but when you're the patient the experience is the same as for anyone else.'

Zoe went on to reflect on the early stages of her relationship with senior recruitment consultant Stuart, who she met at a bar in Portugal in September 2019.

The Amazon star recalled: 'As Stuart and I got to know each other it almost felt disingenuous and wrong not to talk about this thing that, in the months leading up to that, had been a really big part of my life.

'It's magical!' In a new interview, the TV star hailed pregnancy 'magical' and admitted she was considering trying to conceive via a sperm donor before she met her partner

'If I could go back two years and speak to myself and say that by January 2021 you will have met the love of your life, be pregnant and you'll have spent most of the year in lockdown I would have said you are having a laugh.'

Zoe added that she made her motherhood plans clear to her partner of over a year on their 'third or fourth date'.

The healthcare professional previously confessed she wishes she would have frozen her eggs sooner.

She told Daily Mail in August 2018: 'I chose at 35 to buy a flat but I could have chosen egg-freezing instead. In hindsight that would have been the best thing. So if it had been available on the NHS, I would certainly have done it younger.

Best known for: The media personality previously starred as Amazon in Sky One's revival of Gladiators in 2008 (pictured)

'Im in a fortunate position that I have the choice. Its a lot of money so it comes at a sacrifice, but so many women just dont even have that choice.

'Were not talking about women who are the lowest earners, were taking about the majority of women who may have to resort to taking out loans to do this.'

Despite opting for the fertility treatment, which can cost up to 8,000 in the UK, women can still conceive naturally.
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Then-Vice President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping toast during a State Luncheon for China hosted by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry at the Department of State in Washington on Sept. 25, 2015. (Paul J. Richards/AFP via Getty Images)

Biden Admin Has No Interest in Actually Confronting the CCP: Jack Posobiec

The Biden administration, despite calling China the most serious competitor to the United States, is in fact unwilling to confront Beijing, according to author and former Naval intelligence officer Jack Posobiec, who has substantial experience living and working under communist rule in China.

What youre seeing now is an administration in the United States that is little more than a theater, said Posobiec during an interview on NTDs Focus Talk. It is their window dressing for the global neo-liberal agenda. They have no interest in actually confronting the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Posobiec, who has seen firsthand the way the Obama-Biden administration dealt with Chinas maritime expansion in the South China Sea, told NTD host Jenny Chang that the U.S. government is trying to restore the same type of relations it had with the CCP during Clinton, Bush, and Obama presidencies, which he described as a failed policy of globalization.

The U.S. Navy under Obama, in response to Chinas militarization of artificial islands in international waters, would practice what Posobiec called rattling the sabers by sending its warships and aircraft through the region, a move similar to the dual aircraft carrier drill that took place earlier this month at Taiwan Strait.

But did the CCP actually respond to any of these? No, not at all, Posobiec said, noting that the saber-rattling tactic doesnt matter to Beijing, unless it comes with economic repercussion like Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo inflicted upon the communist regime. The financing is still there, the wealth flow is still there, the money is still there.

This unwillingness to continue the Trump-era economic warfare on China, Posobiec argued, is the very reason nearly all the big capital and finance institutions backed Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.

All the pro-CCP elements of the U.S. ruling elite backed Joe Biden to go against Trump, Posobiec said. Because Trump has been the only person willing to use economic warfare against CCP. This has been the most effective, and the only effective means that weve seen used in 30 years of globalization, that has been led by CCP.

When asked about a potential Chinese invasion and annexation of Taiwan, Posobiec said such a scenario could come about due to the power dynamics within the CCP, and expressed worries that the Biden administration might not intervene.

Xi Jinping still may be facing some of those threats from other factions of CCP that dont want him to become this sort of chairman for life, Posobiec said, suggesting that Xi, who rewrote Chinas constitution to give himself indefinite rule, might at one point give up the decadeslong influence campaign on Taiwan to pursue a military takeover as a way to consolidate his power.

I think that in that situation that Biden would not intervene, he said. I dont think that he would find a meaningful way. What he would do is this: He would claim that he was intervening, but he would then try to seek a compromise. He would say, We need to find something where both sides can come to an agreement.'

And the agreement that comes down would absolutely be to the detriment of the people of Taiwan, he continued. They would find an agreement that puts Taiwan in the same situation that Hong Kong found itself in 1997. That would be the type of agreement that they would make, and thats exactly what CCP wants at the end of the day.
ROCKVILLE, Md. and ROSWELL, Ga., Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- National Spine & Pain Centers (NSPC), the nation's leading network of interventional pain practices, today announced that it has completed a combination with Prospira PainCare. Now, with more than 300 affiliated providers practicing in 119 locations across the U.S., the combined organization will facilitate approximately 1.2 million patient visits a year for those suffering with chronic pain.

Studies estimate that the prevalence of chronic pain may be as high as 40% of the U.S. population. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), chronic pain is linked to numerous physical and mental conditions, and contributes to exceedingly high healthcare costs, including lost productivity and wages. Without access to appropriate treatment from qualified physicians trained in the latest non-surgical procedures, many chronic pain sufferers have limited options for managing painful conditions. Indeed, the American Medical Association (AMA) reports that during the COVID-19 pandemic, patients with chronic pain are among those who may be particularly affected by interruptions in medical care.

"With this union, we are doubling down on our commitment to our mission to end needless human pain and suffering by facilitating world-class care" says NSPC's Chief Executive Officer, Douglas Wisor, MD. "Our combined platform is not only better poised to help more people needlessly suffering from pain, but is also even better positioned to fulfill our societal goal of lowering the total cost of care through minimally invasive treatment options in readily accessible community settings, whenever clinically appropriate," continued Dr. Wisor.

The combination results in an industry-leading organization operating across 11 states, including: Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia. "This union creates an unparalleled network of the best and brightest minds in our field," said Kevin Miller, Chairman of the Board for NSPC. "With our affiliated board-certified physicians, who have authored more than 400 manuscripts published in peer-reviewed medical journals, our coming together also creates a research and education powerhouse that is entirely focused on documenting the positive outcomes of interventional pain management and its innovative treatment paradigms."

This joining of forces is also expected to enhance opportunities for clinicians. "Our affiliated physicians will have direct access to the latest research and training, enjoy extraordinary clinical support, and have the ability to more easily collaborate with peers from across the country," said NSPC Chief Medical Officer, Peter Staats, MD. "The end result will be a new global standard of care for patients suffering with chronic pain," concluded Dr. Staats.

About National Spine and Pain Centers:

For more than 30 years, NSPC affiliated physicians have been pioneers in the relief of chronic and acute pain through minimally invasive procedures and leading-edge clinical research. Today, with 119 locations and 1,000+ health professionals facilitating more than a million patient visits a year, NSPC continues to be one of the most trusted brands in healthcare for people seeking access to pain relief. NSPC's stated mission is to end needless human pain and suffering by facilitating world-class care. For more information, visit www.NationalSpine.com.

About Prospira PainCare:

Founded in 2012, Prospira PainCare partners with exceptional interventional pain management physicians and rehabilitation specialists who have dedicated their lives to patient care. Prospira's affiliated practices provide a comprehensive program in which clinical professionals from a variety of disciplines work together in an integrated manner to achieve treatment goals. That multidisciplinary approach is designed to effectively improve patients' quality of life and overall health. Our support staff takes pride in offering outstanding service that is personalized for each individual. For additional information, please visit www.ProspiraPainCare.com.

Medical services provided by independently operated physician practices branded as National Spine and Pain Centers and other affiliated brands.

SOURCE National Spine and Pain Centers

Related Links

https://www.treatingpain.com/


A UN peacekeeper in the village of Diallo in the Bandiagara area in Mopti in Mali (file photo).

interview

With many meteorological stations having fallen into disuse or now obsolete, the climate of the Central African Republic is one of the most poorly monitored in the world. Yet this green and fertile country is one of the most vulnerable to climate change - and the combined effects of this and armed conflict in the Sahel and Lake Chad regions are having a devastating impact on people's lives.

We spoke to Ibrahima Bah, former head of economic security programmes at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Bangui, to find out more.

What is the impact of climate change on the Central African population?

Ibrahima Bah : The Central African Republic is a stark example of how far-reaching the repercussions of climate change and armed conflict can be.

Instability and an increasing scarcity of resources in the Sahel and Lake Chad regions is driving many livestock herders to seek water and pasture for their herds in the Central African Republic. With its favourable climate, scattered population and huge swathes of pasture, this country provides ideal conditions for grazing cattle.

There is very little in place at the moment to regulate this seasonal migration across borders. As a result, it can sometimes put huge pressure on natural resources and spark conflict between farmers and livestock herders. Having suffered the effects of armed violence since 2013, the Central African population is struggling to manage this further layer of conflict.

At the same time, the country is contending with extreme weather events. For example, severe flooding in 2019 forced tens of thousands of people in the capital Bangui to flee their homes, putting them at risk of food insecurity. The floods also led to an outbreak of malaria and cholera, which is particularly serious in a country where access to health care is extremely limited. The situation is expected to worsen, as rainy seasons are becoming increasingly irregular in duration and frequency.1 Traditional agricultural calendars are no longer reliable; farmers are struggling and in need of some assistance.

How has seasonal migration across borders exacerbated existing tensions?

IB : Seasonal migration is not a new phenomenon - nor are the tensions it can create between farmers and livestock herders. However, when the region was stable, people tended to use designated migratory routes and follow certain rules. For example, if a herd destroyed a field, the village leaders and chief herders would negotiate an amicable solution based on established compensation scales. If this did not resolve the issue, the local authorities could be called upon or legal action taken.

The eruption of armed violence in 2013 caused security conditions to worsen and the state to withdraw from certain areas. These checks and balances disappeared and chaos reigned. Herders began deviating from traditional migratory routes, resulting in a concentration of animals close to villages and fields. Competition for space and resources intensified between farmers and herders.

Seasonal migration is now often accompanied by acts of violence, such as cattle theft, the destruction of fields, sexual assault and even execution.

There are more clashes between communities and, with money to be made from the situation, we're increasingly seeing armed groups weighing in on the violence.

What is the humanitarian impact of all of this?

IB : The farmers and herders are most directly affected, but with 70 per cent of the population depending on agricultural and animal production for survival, the indirect effects are vast. According to the latest data from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification initiative2, almost half of the population is in a position of food insecurity. Malnutrition has increased, especially among children, older people and people with disabilities. The COVID-19 pandemic has only made matters worse by slowing down trade and economic activity, in turn pushing up the price of basic imported foodstuffs, such as rice, oil and sugar.

The most disadvantaged people are struggling more than ever to feed themselves.

The negative repercussions don't stop there. In some areas, there is a high concentration of animals in a limited amount of space, which is harmful both to the environment and livestock health, as well as being a drain on resources. The bottom line is that ancestral ways of life are under threat. Reduced to poverty, many people are turning to other, more damaging, means of survival. Intensive deforestation is one example: through this practice, people are getting the fuel they need, making money through selling firewood, and feeding their animals with foliage - but it comes at a huge cost to the environment. Unfortunately, they have no other choice.

What can be done to help, from a humanitarian point of view?

IB : Any solution has to focus first on improving security conditions and facilitating the return of the authorities to areas that they have left, so that migratory routes and herding and farming practices can be regulated once more. When devising solutions, we also need to bear in mind that tensions tend to flare up at particular times of the year, namely between the herders' arrival from neighbouring countries in January and February and their departure in April and May.

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Providing humanitarian assistance to herders is highly contentious because seasonal migration is such a source of tension and violence. But too few resources are being allocated to supporting a peaceful migration process and to helping the most vulnerable people in the areas concerned.

Farmers can be encouraged to reconsider certain practices that are both risky for themselves and the environment. The practice of burning land before cultivation, for example, calls for vast stretches of land. But, with poor security conditions limiting access to fields, people are having to travel further and further to find large stretches of fertile land, putting their safety at risk. Farmers can be trained in new agricultural practices that would reduce both the need to travel and the environmental impact.

More needs to be done to foster social cohesion.

Livestock herders and farmers have always had a mutually beneficial relationship. Seasonal migration does not have to mean competing for water and land; it can offer a real opportunity for cultural, social and economic exchange. Herders can sell their animals and buy grain from the farmers. This is how alliances are created and bonds are forged, but only if harmony exists between the two groups.

On February 2, the Guardian published an exclusive report on a leaked internal strategy presentation for the Labour Party, which it summed up as a plan to focus on flag and patriotism to win back voters.

The strategy, including research on the partys brand by agency Republic dating from September, was presented last month by Labours head of research. It found that voters were confused about what we stand for, and what our purpose is, but also who we represent.

Clarifying such confusion provides Labour with an excuse for a further lurch to the right, by following advice to make use of the [union] flag, veterans [and] dressing smartly.

The presentation, as heard and seen by the Guardian, begins with a few home truths before making clear just how low Labour intends to stoop to portray itself as the right-wing, anti-socialist, and nationalist party it is, while shedding any remaining and unwanted left baggage it was saddled with under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn.

The focus is on winning back foundation seats, a term referring to the red wall constituencies in the north of England, once viewed as safely Labour but lost to the Conservatives in the 2019 general election, as well as other seats it fears could also turn blue.

The slides presented featured comments from extensive focus groups from Watford to Grimsby conducted in September alongside nationwide polling focus groups including, I dont know anything about the Labour party at the moment, they have been way too quiet and saying of new party leader Sir Keir Starmer, he needs to stop sitting on the fence.

Sir Keir Starmer speaks about joining the government in a national effort to fight the pandemic in front of a Union Jack flag on January 5. (screenshot: Sir Keir Starmer-Twitter)

The answer offered is to make displays of patriotism to reinforce that the party has changed. The illustrative soundbites cited include:

* Belonging needs to be reinforced through all messengers.

* communicating Labours respect and commitment for the country can represent a change in the partys body language.

* The use of the flag, veterans, dressing smartly at the war memorial etc give voters a sense of authentic values alignment.

The advice was taken up immediately. The Guardian reports, In WhatsApp messages, sent within hours of one briefing, senior officials ordered: Please prioritise the union jack header images, not the plain red ones. Earlier this week [January 27] Starmer presented a party-political broadcast beside a union flag and promising to rebuild our country. Red Wall voters have also been targeted with a Facebook advert, which demands the Tories get tougher on border control, something which Labour emphasised in an opposition day debate on Monday. Britain is locked down. But the borders are open. Any idea why? the ad said

Labour right falsifies reasons for 2019 general election loss

This presentation of the reasons for Labours declining support is meant to reinforce the message of the Blairite right-wing of the partythat its general election rout in 2019 was because Corbyn had taken the party too far to the left, a move that was only popular with students and the metropolitan elite. This was supposedly deeply alienating for Labours traditional working-class base in its former Northern heartlandsroutinely portrayed as socially conservative, pro-Monarchy, patriotic, and fervently supportive of Brexit.

Jeremy Corbyn (left) and Keir Starmer at an event during the 2019 General Election [Credit: AP Photo/Matt Dunham, File]

By promising to honour the 52 percent vote to leave the European Union (EU) in the 2016 referendum and Get Brexit done, the narrative insists, Boris Johnson demolished the Potemkin Village of Corbyns supposed popularity. It proved that the sharp rise in support for Labour in the previous 2017 general election was a fluke and confirming the Tories as the authentic cultural voice of the Northern working class.

The reference to dressing smartly at the war memorial pays homage to stings carried out by the Tory press against Corbyn for wearing a raincoat rather than an overcoat at the 2018 Cenotaph Remembrance Sunday commemoration, itself a rehash of a notorious 1981 attack on former Labour leader Michael Foot.

Based on this political caricature of the working class in the north, Labours right intends to press ahead with its pro-big business agendashorn of even the minimal social palliatives advanced by Corbyn that are anathema to the City of London and the financial oligarchy. According to the Guardian, the research reportedly also finds that voters believe Labour is the party of spend, spend, spend, which is blamed not only on Corbyn but on the leadership of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. The result, according to the heading on one slide, is: No part of the brand is insulated from lack of economic credibility.

To illustrate how Labour intends to use its newfound concern for the supposed views of the Norths workers, it is only necessary to cite Former Labour MP Jenny Chapman, chair of Starmers campaign to become party leader.

She declares of Corbyn, He cleared the pitch. He walked away from the flag, he didn't stand up for the national anthem, he didn't dress appropriately for an important remembrance event. People care about these things and it is about respectrespect for them and respect for the country.

Chapman, who lost her Darlington seat in 2019, asserts of canvassed voters, They would be very blunt about it They would call Jeremy a communist or a terrorist and it isn't fair And they would say he didn't love this country. I am not saying it was true or fair, but that was the perception and it is one we need to correct.

The claim that working class voters in the north are all anti-communist bigots who take their political line from The Sun newspaper is a lie. Support for Corbyn in 2017 was as widespread in the North as in the South, particularly among younger working-class voters, whether in the smaller towns and cities that voted substantially to leave the EU or in more major urban centres like Leeds, Newcastle, Manchester and Liverpool, which voted Remain. Starmers own inability to resuscitate the Labour Party, even as the Tories preside over more than 113,000 COVID-19 deaths, is proof that Labours 2019 election defeat had nothing to do with Corbyn being too far left.

WSWS analysis of Labour defeat

Analysing the 2019 result in an article, UK general election result confirms protracted death of the Labour Party, the WSWS noted that Johnson was able to capture a swathe of traditional Labour seats in the north of England, the West Midlands and Waleswith a swing varying from two-points in seats with a Leave vote below 45 percent, to eight-points in seats where 60 percent plus voted Leave:

But it insisted, The central fact, however, is that Labour haemorrhaged support across the UK and among all sections of workers, young and old, from the north and south, those in favour of leaving the European Union and for remaining

This rout can only be understood as a negative verdict on Corbyns declared project of pushing the Labour Party to the left so that it could provide a political alternative to austerity, militarism and war. This revealed a deep alienation of the working class from Labour that has been decades in the making...

Corbyn promised an end to austerity, Thatcherite free-market nostrums and war crimes such as Iraq in 2003. The enthusiasm generated saw Labour claw back in the 2017 election some of the 5 million votes lost under Blair and Brown between 1997 and 2010. But this recovery has collapsed, amid growing disenchantment among those who backed Corbyn and abstention and a shift to other parties by workers who see no reason whatsoever to remain loyal to Labour.

Regarding a more specific breakdown of Labours lost votes, the analysis continued, Labour lost fully eight points nationally and over 10 percent in Leave areas. This means that one in four Labour Leavers, 700,000, switched to the Tories, but hundreds of thousands more did not vote at all The most striking loss of all is the fall in Labours share of the national youth vote by 10 percent, matching the losses suffered in northern constituencies Datapraxis also stressed that Labour nationally lost 1.1 million votes to the Tories, but lost more still, 1.3 million, to the Lib Dems and Greens. Nearly half of Labours seat losses can be attributed to losing Remain voters to other parties.

Why the exclusive focus on the collapse of the Red Wall seats, which is continued today in the campaign to prove Labours patriotic bona fides?

The article explained, The emphasis placed on these extraordinary shifts and the conclusions drawn in official circles are bound up with efforts to use Labours collapse to steer British politics ever further to the right.

The Tories coined the term Workington Man, after the former mining town, to represents the older, Brexit supporting white voter from the north. The brainchild of the Onward thinktank, it is now commonly used to supposedly epitomise the working-class constituency lost by Labour because Corbyn was too left wing, and did not oppose immigration and champion law and order with sufficient enthusiasm.

The WSWS insisted, Corbyns betrayal of the working class was not that he did not throw himself behind the right-wing, anti-immigrant and nationalist agenda of the Tory right and Nigel Farage on Brexit. It was that his shift was to the pro-EU Remain agenda of the dominant sections of big business. In doing so he also betrayed the majority of young people, often the most exploited precariat, and the many sections of workers who supported Remain because they were repelled by the narrow nationalism of Brexit.

The only way Corbyn could have not betrayed the working class was to oppose both reactionary factions of the ruling class and call for working class unity in struggle against big business in Britain and throughout the continent for a socialist Europe. This was something Corbyn could never do. It would have set him against the Blairite right in his own party and his political masters in the City of London.

Corbyn's refusal to drive out Labours right-wing

It was Corbyns refusal to fight to drive Labours right-wing out of the party that temporarily gave political reaction its head. Without expelling the Blairites, all talk of Labour so much as lessening the devastating hardship imposed on the entire working class was hot air. And by 2019 ever larger sections of the working class had drawn this conclusion.

Brexit was only able to play its part in Labours northern debacle because the Tories and Farage successfully blamed the EU and immigration for the social devastation produced by decades of privatisation, corporate tax cutting, de-industralisation, de-skilling, the proliferation of low wage jobs, and the gutting of servicesall presided over by Labour-controlled authorities and their trade union accomplices under Tory and Labour governments.

The exposure of Corbyns pretentions to offer an alternative to this bitter legacy of betrayal was the same reason why Labour lost support in the south of England, especially in the major urban centres and among the younger voters that had backed him most enthusiastically. He and his backers in the Labour left and the pseudo-left groups such as the Socialist Party and Socialist Workers Party are politically responsible not only for Johnsons election but also for handing Labour back over to Starmer and his Blairite gang of political criminals. And it is the Tory party and the Blairite Labour Party who constitute the real right-wing threat, rather than sections of workers who presently hold a confused patriotic sentiment.

Elected Labour leader in September 2015 on a massive wave of popular demand for socialism, Corbyns five years in office ended with Labour led by witch-hunters and flag-waving anti-communists. The dangerous implications for the future are clear. In a telling response to the policy proposals, an unnamed Labour Party staffer told the Guardian, I was just sat there replaying in my mind the storming of the Capitol [in Washington last month] and thinking: are you really so blind to what happens when you start pandering to the language and concerns of the right?

As has become the norm, no comment was made on the leaked proposals by Corbynfor fear of identifying himself with even the vaguest oppositional sentiment and cutting across his campaign to win back the Labour whip. But none of his co-thinkers have fared better, instead echoing Corbyns efforts in December 2019 to offer a left variant of patriotism, based on supporting each other, not attacking somebody else and loving your country enough to make it a place where nobody is homeless or hungry, held back or left behind. This was the same perspective that led Corbyn into national unity discussions with both Johnson and his predecessor Theresa May during the protracted Brexit crisis and his spurned offer to the opposition parties and pro-EU Tories in October 2019, to lead a government of national unity to prevent a no-deal Brexit.

Clive Lewis, MP, said of the proposals, Its not patriotism; its Fatherland-ism, but proposed a more complex vision of national identity and patriotism to unite Our party, our people and our country. Brighton Kemptown MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle opined, There is nothing wrong with showing that you are comfortable with the symbols of your country. But if you do it by just waving the flag, our core supporters, who are young, liberal, EU-supporting, will get confused about the message you are trying to send.

Such invocations of a progressive patriotism, can be based on supposedly eternal British values of parliamentary democracy and the rule of law, or a love of various national institutions (always the National Health Service, sometimes, as in a recent Guardian opinion piece by Nesrine Malik, stretching to an embattled judiciary that is challenging the governments unlawful parliamentary suspensions and a civil service wrestling with Brexit.) They may also lay claim to an English nationalism, supposedly thereby cut free from the legacy of British imperialism. Collectively they represent a reactionary attempt to advance a vaguely left nationalism as a means of combating the growth of socialism and internationalism.

Like the promotion of Scottish and Welsh nationalism, all invocations of patriotism are used to divide the working class and tie workers and young people to one or another section of the bourgeoisie and its state apparatus. Such appeals, as is proved by Labours emphasis on veterans and military commemorations, always end up as support for war. The proliferation of such appeals to nationalism throughout the Labour Party confirms it as a political enemy of the working class and opponent of its struggle against Britains ruling elite, which continues its murderous refusal to fight the pandemic and destruction of the jobs, livelihoods and essential services on which millions depend.
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Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-10 22:47:03|Editor: huaxia

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ZAGREB, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- Croatia has confirmed the first cases of the new coronavirus variant initially identified in the UK, the Health Ministry announced on Wednesday.

The variant, known as B.1.1.7, was found in the sample of a 50-year-old man and 3-year-old child in Croatian capital Zagreb, and a 34-year-old man from the eastern part of the country. Since Jan. 20, 61 samples were sequenced to detect the new variant.

The three patients and their contacts are in isolation. Epidemiologists from the Croatian Institute of Public Health will collect additional epidemiological data from the patients and their contacts, the Health Ministry announced.

Scientists here are worried that the new variant could prompt a painful third wave of COVID-19 outbreak in Croatia because it could be more transmissible and deadly than earlier versions of the virus.

Thanks to the lockdown measures, the number of new infections in Croatia has dropped in recent days, and the restrictive measures are expected to be relaxed from Feb. 15, following the suggestions of the Scientific Council of the Croatian government.

Croatian Institute of Public Health counted another 577 COVID-19 cases in the last 24 hours, pushing the national total to over 236,000 since the pandemic started in the country on Feb. 25, 2020.

As the world is struggling to contain the pandemic, vaccination is underway in many countries with the already-authorized coronavirus vaccines. Croatia started administering AstraZeneca's COVID-19 vaccine this week, along with the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines that are already in use.

Meanwhile, 238 candidate vaccines are still being developed worldwide -- 63 of them in clinical trials -- in countries including Germany, China, Russia, Britain and the United States, according to information released by the World Health Organization on Feb. 2. Enditem
The Louisiana Department of Health reported 317 more confirmed coronavirus cases and 35 more confirmed deaths in its noon update Monday.

The data released Wednesday is incomplete, the Louisiana Department of Health said.

"On 2/10/21 LDH is reporting incomplete counts for tests and cases due to a server issue," agency officials wrote on its online dashboard.

+10 Mardi Gras 2020 spawned up to 50K coronavirus cases, likely from a single source, study says Public health officials have largely accepted that last year's Mardi Gras helped make New Orleans an early coronavirus hotspot in the U.S., ev

The number of hospitalizations decreased by 46, and the number of patients in need of ventilators stayed the same.

There are also 55,508 total "probable" coronavirus cases in Louisiana, according to the agency's dashboard.

These are another few key statewide statistics as of Wednesday:

Total confirmed cases: 359,179

Total "probable" cases: 55,508

Total confirmed deaths: 8,594

Currently hospitalized: 1,076

Currently on ventilators: 151

Vaccine series initiated: 448,122 (updated twice weekly)

Vaccine series completed: 189,239

Presumed recovered: 380,673 as of Feb. 8 (updated weekly)

Vaccine news in your inbox Once a week we'll update you on the progress of COVID-19 vaccinations. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up

Note: The Advocate and The Times-Picayune staff calculates daily case count and confirmed death increases based on the difference between today's total and yesterday's total of confirmed coronavirus cases and deaths. The Louisiana Department of Health releases a daily case count on its dashboard that includes probable cases as indicated by a positive antigen test. That case count can be different than the one listed here.

Here are some of the parishes with the highest single-day increase in confirmed coronavirus cases, based on the Wednesday report:

Jefferson: 69

St. Tammany: 37

Orleans: 32

Lafayette: 27

Avoyelles: 16

Livingston: 15

Caddo: 15

You can view more graphs and charts breaking down the data by clicking here.

Louisiana began reopening for Phase 1 on May 15-16 then moved to Phase 2 on June 5. Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards extended Louisiana's Phase 2 restrictions twice in August before moving the state to Phase 3 on Sept. 11. The governor then moved the state back to a modified Phase 2 near the end of November.

This is a developing story. More details and analysis to come.
Kenya and Uganda have signed a landmark agreement to end cross border female genital mutilation (FGM) between the two countries.

The signing ceremony took place during cerebrations to mark International Day of Zero Tolerance for FGM at Alale, West-Pokot County last Saturday.

The ceremony was led by Public Service and Gender Chief Administrative Secretary (CAS) Rachel Shebesh and her counterparts from Uganda.

Ms Shebesh noted that women and girls have borne the brunt of the harmful consequences of FGM for a long time adding its elimination was long overdue.

She observed that involving the elders is a prerequisite in the fight against the outlawed practise given the significant role they play as the gatekeepers of the culture in their respective communities.

"The elders are there to protect our women and girls from the harmful practices such as FGM. Their voice is the most respected in the society and so they can influence the community to choose a safer rite of passage for girls," she said.

The CAS added the government, development partners and the neighbouring countries will be at hand to accord the elders the required support.

She emphasised that the government is not fighting cultural practices but targets harmful practices that infringe on the rights and wellbeing of girls and women.

Source of livelihood

"The practitioners of female circumcision still carrying out the illegal practice as a source of livelihood should seek alternative means of income through the available government affirmative funds," she added.

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The Ugandan government delegation called for increased allocation for education budget for the border counties, which practice FGM to empower girls' through education.

West Pokot Governor John Lonyangapou urged parents to ensure their children are in school, saying his administration has given allocation for education which is enough for every child in the county.

Kenya has witnessed a growing trend in cross-border FGM where girls and women are taken to Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia and Somalia for the cut, as perpetrators attempt to circumvent the laws and systems that have been put in place to end the vice.

Findings from a report commissioned by Unicef in collaboration with Kenya's Anti-FGM Board, shows that 70 per cent of those interviewed in the survey from Uganda, and 60 per cent from Ethiopia travel to Kenya for FGM.

The agreement between Kenya and Uganda comes after the East African Countries (EAC) countries in April 2019, signed another declaration to eliminate cross-border FGM.

Public and Gender Cabinet Secretary Prof. Margaret Kobia led her counterparts from Eastern Africa in an inter-ministerial meeting on ending cross border FGM during a two-day conference in Mombasa. It brought together anti-FGM crusaders and experts from Somalia, Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya who discussed how to tackle cross-border FGM.
Inside a vaccination clinic: Behind the scenes at the Carlson Center, a lot is going on to get Fairbanks vaccinated
BOONE, N.C., Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Appalachian State University and Banfield Pet Hospital  the leading provider of preventive veterinary care in the U.S. and part of the Mars Veterinary Health family of practices  have announced a partnership aimed at strengthening the pipeline of licensed veterinary technicians and creating a more sustainable future for the veterinary profession. This is in direct response to a recent study from Banfield, which finds an estimated 75 million pets in the U.S. may not have access to the veterinary care they need by 2030, with an important factor being a critical shortage of veterinary professionals.

As part of the partnership, Banfield made a multi-million-dollar commitment towards the development of a new 4-year online degree program at App State for Licensed Veterinary Technicians (LVTs). This will address the market demand  particularly in rural communities  for skilled veterinary professionals.

"App State excels in developing visionary academic programs that address professional workforce shortages in rural communities and help advance industry standards," Chancellor Sheri Everts said. "This partnership with the leading pioneer in preventive health care for animals is synergistic and forward thinking. With graduation and licensure achievement rates that far exceed national averages, our university is uniquely positioned to develop and deliver a signature program that will help advance the profession, elevate the role of the licensed veterinary technician and address the market demand for skilled, rural veterinary professionals."

Much like a human healthcare nurse, LVTs can offer services like administering vaccinations or checking vital signs in partnership with a doctor.

"As part of the Mars Veterinary Health family of practices, Banfield believes strongly in elevating and recognizing the role of licensed veterinary technicians as critical members of the veterinary team," said Dr. Daniel Aja, Chief Veterinary Relations and Transformation Officer at Banfield. "We're thrilled to be partnering with App State and investing in this first-of-its-kind program that will benefit veterinary professionals, pets and the broader industry as we continue to see the demand for pet care rise."

App State's Interim Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Heather Norris said, "We have assembled an interdisciplinary team of App State faculty to develop a rigorous, signature program that will become a model for developing licensed veterinary professional talent and setting unprecedented industry standards."

The App State Online program will be housed in the university's College of Arts & Sciences and will combine Bachelor of Science credentials with preparation for veterinary technician licensure. App State faculty will create the curriculum plan, program, and courses. The program's first class is expected to begin in Fall 2022.

Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data show that in 2020, there were more than 110,000 LVT jobs in the U.S., and project an increase of nearly 20% in the next five years. Industry reports project a gap in the supply of LVTs of more than 50,000 by 2029. Spending on household pets continues to rise  data from the BLS and American Pet Products Association indicate annual sales of pet products and services in the U.S. is nearly $100 billion, and Americans are increasing spending on pet care at rates that exceed increases in household income.

"When veterinary professionals get to practice at the top of their license, hospitals get the best results: engaged clients and a unified team that delivers superior care," said Aja. "In support of our purpose  A Better World for Pets  we believe the profession needs to leverage all veterinary professionals to the best of their abilities to ensure pets can get the care they need."

About Appalachian State University

As the premier public undergraduate institution in the state of North Carolina, Appalachian State University prepares students to lead purposeful lives as global citizens who understand and engage their responsibilities in creating a sustainable future for all. The Appalachian Experience promotes a spirit of inclusion that brings people together in inspiring ways to acquire and create knowledge, to grow holistically, to act with passion and determination, and to embrace diversity and difference. Located in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Appalachian is one of 17 campuses in the University of North Carolina System. Appalachian enrolls more than 20,000 students, has a low student-to-faculty ratio, and offers more than 150 undergraduate and graduate majors.

About Banfield Pet Hospital

Banfield Pet Hospital was founded in Portland, Ore. in 1955 and today is a pioneer in preventive veterinary care with more than 1,000 general veterinary hospitals in 42 states, Washington D.C., and Puerto Rico. More than 3,600 Banfield veterinarians are committed to providing high-quality veterinary care to over three million pets annually. As part of the Mars Veterinary Health family of brands, Banfield is committed to its purposeA BETTER WORLD FOR PETSbecause pets make a better world for us.

SOURCE Banfield Pet Hospital
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The European Union believes that the reform process in Ukraine, despite the notable progress, continues to be hampered by widespread corruption.

This is stated in the speech of High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell, which was presented by Executive Vice-President of the European Commission Valdis Dombrovskis on Borrell's behalf on Tuesday in the European Parliament, during the discussion of the report on Ukraine's implementation of the Association Agreement.

"I share your [speaker Michael Gahler] assessment that, 'despite notable progress, widespread corruption continues to hamper Ukraines reform process'. Its key institutions must have strong and independent leadership and the chance to do their work free of political, economic or other interference," Dombrovskis said on behalf of Borrell.

He also noted that the report said that "smuggling only benefits criminals and oligarchs."

"It must be stopped - and for this, it is vital that the National Anti-Corruption Bureau be fully independent. Over the years, the Bureau has demonstrated its effectiveness and produced tangible results. The fight against corruption is a key condition for the EU's macro-financial support," the Vice-President of the European Commission said.

In addition, the EU expressed its conviction that "recent developments in the rule of law and anti-corruption show that a comprehensive judiciary reform is long overdue."

"The Venice Commission and G7's roadmap, complementing the EU Delegation's constant advice to authorities and politicians, gives clear guidance on what has to be done," Dombrovskis said.

At the same time, the EU "recognizes the complexity of the task." "From the start, Russian interference was designed to destabilize, divide and weaken Ukraine. So the best response is to stay united, and keep working toward the prosperity and stability that come from sound economic policies," the EU is confident.

At the same time, Dombrovskis assured that the EU is ready to support Ukraine in doing this.

"We urge all reform-oriented political factions to come together and give a clear signal of Ukraine's determination to make its reform path irreversible. This will be one of the main messages that I will convey to Prime Minister Shmyhal. The EU is helping Ukraine to create the right conditions for prosperity and peace. Ukraine has our support: political, financial and technical," he said.
Cyber

Validating the security of contact tracing apps

To ensure that contact tracing apps protect users security, privacy and civil liberties, the Department of Homeland Securitys Science and Technology Directorate has tapped a startup to develop app testing and validation services.

AppCensus, based in El Cerrito, Calif., already has a platform for at-scale analysis of mobile apps runtime behaviors and their security and privacy risks. The $198,600 Phase 1 award will allow the company to adapt its system to test Android and iOS contract tracing apps and publicly post the results, including descriptions and sensitivity of data the apps collect and the data-use policies of the apps publishers and third parties.

The phase 1 award was made under an S&Ts Silicon Valley Innovation Program (SVIP) solicitation, which called for a robust application testing ecosystem that would evaluate contact tracing applications to ensure they do not leak, share or misuse data or compromise users privacy, security or civil liberties.

Once adapted and enhanced, the AppCensus platform will provide reports based on consistent tests using openly developed criteria of publicly available digital contract tracing applications to make it easy for people to understand potential privacy and security risks, said SVIP Technical Director Anil John.

Several states have rolled out smartphone-based solutions to automate the manual contact tracing process. The apps use the devices GPS and Bluetooth functions to collect and share data about where users have been and with whom theyve come in contact.

The COVID Alert app launched by Virginia in August 2020 uses the exposure notification protocol developed by Google and Apple that does not rely on personal information or location data. So do complementary apps launched Oct. 1 by New York and New Jersey that supplement public health officials efforts to trace and contact individuals who may have been exposed to the COVID-19 virus. Other states, such as Utah, North and South Dakota, Nevada, Wisconsin, Oregon, Connecticut, Michigan, Florida, have also developed contact tracing apps.

AppCensus is the first of six start-ups to receive a Phase 1 award from SVIPs Emerging Needs: COVID-19 Response & Future Mitigation program, which seeks near-term solutions to DHS-specific challenges related to pandemic response and preparations for future mitigation. Other use cases include:

Video analytics for Transportation Security Administration checkpoints.

Solutions for automatic and rapid surface disinfecting.

Tools to help monitor, collect, integrate and deconflict quantitative open-source information.

Enhanced point-of-entry screening for DHS facilities that protect individual privacy.

This article first appeared on GCN, a Defense Systems partner site.
Albania: ECHR,vetting of judges necessary against corruption Following appeal filed by dismissed Constitutional Court judge

(ANSA) - STRASBOURG, 10 FEB - According to the European Court of Human Rights, Albania's procedure adopted in 2016 to assess whether all the country's magistrates have adequate "ethics and professional skills" is a necessary and proportionate solution to combat corruption. In the ruling on the appeal filed by a judge of the Constitutional Court fired following the assessment mentioned above, the Strasbourg judges established that the procedure "was fair and the dismissal was proportional". The former judge had accused, among other things, the bodies in charge of the assessment of not being "independent and impartial" and asserted that the lifetime ban on returning to the judiciary was disproportionate. But for the Strasbourg Court, the entire procedure respects the standards of a fair and impartial trial, and there is no evidence of pressure from the executive on the evaluation bodies. Furthermore, the Court said that the judge was able to present evidence in her defense and that this was insufficient to explain where the money used to buy an apartment came from. According to the Court, the latter point made the expulsion for life from the judiciary right "for serious violations of ethics", since the goal was to "eliminate the corrupt ones from the justice system." (ANSA).





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Sanaa, Feb 10 : Two massive explosions struck Yemen's Marib, as violence has continued in the government-controlled oil-rich northeastern city, a government official said.

"Two massive explosions caused by ballistic missiles fired by the Houthi rebels against the densely populated city of Marib, with no casualties," the official told Xinhua news agency on Tuesday.

The two Houthi-fired ballistic missiles landed on an empty area near a government facility in Marib, he added.

For the third consecutive day, the southern and western areas of Marib are witnessing non-stop battles, leaving dozens from the two-warring sides dead and injured.

"Nearly 30 soldiers were critically injured in today's fighting and are receiving treatment at the medical centre," sources at Marib's public hospital said.

In the past two days, the Iran-backed Houthi rebels intensified their military operations and carried out a large offensive against the city controlled by the Yemeni government.

Earlier in the day, UN Special Envoy for Yemen Martin Griffiths expressed concern over renewed attacks.

"Extremely concerned about the resumption of hostilities in the governorate of Marib by Ansar Allah (Houthi rebel group), especially at a time of renewed diplomatic momentum to end the war in Yemen and resume the political process," Griffiths tweeted.

"A negotiated political settlement that meets the aspirations of the Yemeni people is the only sustainable solution to end this conflict," the UN envoy noted.

Yemen has been mired in a civil war since late 2014, when the Houthi militia seized control over several northern provinces and forced the internationally-recognized government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi out of the capital Sanaa.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-10 21:29:19|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin on Wednesday said certain Canadian politicians should stop launching unprovoked smear and attacks on China and spreading sensational claims.

Wang made the remarks in response to reports that Canadian Security Intelligence Service Director David Vigneault accused China of threatening Canada's national security and sovereignty, as well as its citizens.

"We reject these remarks which are groundless," Wang said.

He said that China has always adhered to the path of peaceful development, pursued a mutually beneficial strategy of opening up and is committed to building a community with a shared future for humanity.

As always, China has never interfered in other countries' internal affairs, let alone arresting citizens of a third country at the behest of another country, the spokesperson added.

"We urge certain Canadian politicians to abandon the Cold War mentality and ideological prejudice, and do more things that are conducive to China-Canada relations to enhance mutual trust between the two countries," Wang said. Enditem
U'khand tragedy: 2 listed as missing return home safely after being stranded in Chamoli

India

pti-Briti Roy Barman

Tapovan, Feb 10: Two persons who were listed as missing in the avalanche and flash floods in Uttarakhand returned to their homes safely on Wednesday after being stranded in different areas of Chamoli district following the calamity three days ago, officials said.

Suraj Singh from Chamoli in Uttarakhand and Rashid from Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh returned to their homes on Wednesday, Additional District Information Officer, Chamoli, Ravindra Negi said.

Singh and Rashid were among those missing after the calamity, as per official records. The duo were stranded while they were returning to their villages, the officials said.

Rescue teams intensified efforts on Wednesday to reach the 25-35 men trapped in a sludge-choked tunnel since the glacier disaster three days ago in the district and more than 170 remain missing.

So far, 32 bodies have been recovered from different places in the disaster-hit areas of Chamoli district, the State Emergency Control Centre in Dehradun said.

The missing people include those working at NTPCs 480 MW Tapovan-Vishnugad project and the 13.2 MW Rishiganga Hydel Project and villagers whose homes were washed away as a wall of water came hurtling down mountainsides.
Anwar Gargash, the United Arab Emirates minister of state for foreign affairs who worked on a historic normalisation of relations with Israel last year, has been replaced and will take up a new position, the government said on Wednesday.

The move is part of a small cabinet reshuffle ordered by Dubai Ruler and UAE Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, Sheikh Mohammed said on Twitter.

Zaki Nusseibah also stepped down from his position of minister of state for public and cultural diplomacy at the foreign ministry to become a cultural advisor to President Khalifa.

Sheikh Shakhbout bin Nahyan, the former UAE ambassador to Saudi Arabia, and Khalifa al-Marar, former assistant minister of political affairs, have been appointed ministers of state at the foreign ministry. UAE government communications did not specify which roles the two men would take up.

Gargash, who has occupied the second most senior foreign affairs position since 2008, will become a diplomatic advisor to UAE President Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed.

Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid said on Twitter that Gargash had been "one of the most important pioneers of Emirati political work ... who had been able to bring about major transformations in our foreign political work and international political and regional relations".

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Colorado Springs, CO (80903)

Today

Scattered thunderstorms during the morning becoming more widespread this afternoon. High 58F. Winds NNE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 90%..

Tonight

A steady rain this evening. Showers continuing overnight. Low around 45F. Winds N at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 80%.
McLaughlin criticized Pekau and the village for suing Gov. J.B. Pritzker over COVID-19 restrictions on businesses, calling it a political stunt to gain publicity. Money spent on that litigation as well as holding concerts during the summer at Centennial Park West and the popular Taste of Orland food and music event could have instead been used to make loans to small businesses, McLaughlin said.
[February 10, 2021] Assembled Brands and Oaktree Announce the closing of a $50M Facility with Win Brands Group

LOS ANGELES, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The transaction provides $50 million in capital to the brand holding company, to support Win Brands Group ("Win") in its pursuit of M&A transactions in the DTC and CPG space. This facility will allow Win, the preeminent consumer product holding company, to scale and further add to its existing portfolio which includes well known, and much-loved companies such as Homesick , Qalo , and Gravity . "Assembled Brands supported our early acquisitions of QALO, as well as the working capital needs for Homesick, and has been instrumental in our ability to scale," said Eric Satler, President at Win Brands Group. "They are not only the leading lender to the consumer space, but also a trusted, strategic partner. This funding, along with funds managd by Oaktree Capital Management, L.P. ("Oaktree"), is the logical next step in our partnership to create the largest community of independent brands."



"Throughout our existing multi year relationship with Win, we have been impressed with their ability to source and scale marquee consumer brands", said Michael Lipkin, President and COO of Assembled Brands. "With our continued partnership we look forward to seeing Win double down on a proven model." "This funding is a validation of the unique value we bring to the growing number of beloved brands that are entering the marketplace every day," said Kyle Widrick, co-founder and CEO at Win Brands Group. "The investment from Oaktree and Assembled Brands will allow us to extend our comprehensive expertise to nurture a new generation of businesses, and bring more consumer brands to the next level as part of the Win family."

"We are excited about our investment in Win Brands and the opportunity to partner with Eric, l and Kyle," said Raghav Khanna, Managing Director and Assistant Portfolio Manager of the Strategic Credit strategy at Oaktree. "The Win team has had tremendous success in acquiring good brands and making them better, and our commitment should give them the resources to accelerate their growth profile." About Assembled Brands Assembled Brands was founded on a desire to help growing consumer brands scale through revolving lines of credit and M&A financing facilities. www.assembledbrands.com About Win Brands Win is a modern holding company that specializes in buying and building brands that matter. We start by acquiring exceptional, customer-focused companies with a proven track record, then plug in our shared services platform of world class experts to take them to the next level. So, instead of trying to scale alone, every brand that joins Win becomes part of a ready-made community, and instantly benefits from decades of expertise, as well as pooled resources, shared operational costs, and economies of scale. To learn more about Win, please visit winbg.com. About Oaktree Oaktree is a leader among global investment managers specializing in alternative investments, with $148 billion in assets under management as of December 31, 2020. The firm emphasizes an opportunistic, value-oriented and risk-controlled approach to investments in credit, private equity, real assets and listed equities. The firm has over 1,000 employees and offices in 19 cities worldwide. For additional information, please visit Oaktree's website at http://www.oaktreecapital.com/ . Contact: hello@assembledbrands.com View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/assembled-brands-and-oaktree-announce-the-closing-of-a-50m-facility-with-win-brands-group-301226233.html SOURCE Assembled Brands

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Amaravati, Feb 10 : Andhra Pradesh High Court on Wednesday allowed Panchayat Raj and Rural Development Minister Peddireddi Ramachandra Reddy to speak to the media, reversing a gag order imposed by State Election Commissioner Nimmagadda Ramesh Kumar, which was also upheld by the Court for a few days.

However, the Court directed the Minister to refrain from commenting anything disrespectful to Kumar or undermining the State Election Commission's respect.

Henceforth, Reddy can speak to the media, obeying the Court's orders.

His advocate highlighted that the freedom of speech and liberty are fundamental rights enshrined in the Constitution under Articles 19 and 21.

Kumar, earlier ordered the Director General of Police Gautam Sawang to confine Reddy to his home until the end of rural local bodies elections over allegedly threatening election officials.

This order was struck down by the court and now Reddy's media access has also been restored.

A host of Ministers and ruling Yuvajana Sramika Rythu Congress Party (YSRCP) leaders have assailed the SEC for issuing gag and confinement orders.

Reddy, earlier undermined the SEC that he was 'after all' a retired Indian Administrative Officer (IAS) and should not allegedly exceed his powers.

With each passing day in Andhra Pradesh, friction between the state government and Kumar is increasing, leading to a flurry of orders from the latter and a verbal backlash from the ministers and legislators.
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Colorado Springs, CO (80903)

Today

Scattered thunderstorms during the morning becoming more widespread this afternoon. High 58F. Winds NNE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 90%..

Tonight

A steady rain this evening. Showers continuing overnight. Low around 45F. Winds N at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 80%.
A former Arab medic convicted of replacing fentanyl in 129 vials with saline was sentenced in federal court yesterday.

U.S. District Judge R. David Proctor sentenced Michael Greenhaw, 43, of Arab, to 51 months in prison. Greenhaw pleaded guilty to one count of tampering with a consumer product in October 2019. U.S. Attorney Prim F. Escalona and Special Agent in Charge Justin C. Fielder, U.S. Food and Drug Administration Office of Criminal Investigations Miami Field Office, announced the sentence.

According to the plea agreement, Greenhaw, who worked as a supervisory paramedic, had access to the narcotics vault where the fentanyl was stored at Decaturs First Response Ambulance Service. He tampered with approximately 129 vials of fentanyl citrate from April through August 2018.

During his shift, Greenhaw removed fentanyl citrate from vials using a syringe and replaced the fentanyl with saline. The vials were then replaced into the narcotics safe. Greenhaw stole the fentanyl for personal use.

Greenhaw put vulnerable patients in grave danger by replacing fentanyl citrate with saline in vials that he knew were intended to be administered to critically ill or injured patients, Escalona said. Greenhaws criminal conduct undermines the tireless efforts of first responders who work hard to make sure that patients receive the necessary emergency medical care.

U.S. Food and Drug Administration Office of Criminal Investigations Miami Field Office investigated the case, along with the Decatur Police Department and Arab Police Department. Assistant U.S. Attorney Mary Stuart Burrell prosecuted the case.
After Centre's Warning, Twitter Begins Blocking Accounts with 'Khalistani' Links But Adds 'Free Speech' Rider

Under pressure over 'farmer genocide' remarks made by alleged Khalistani supporters on micro-blogging site, Twitter has finally started blocking accounts flagged by the Centre for "carrying inflammatory and divisive comments". A Times of India report quoted top sources as saying that Twitter has assured the government that it is looking into its concerns, and taking stock of the content on the handles mentioned in the notice sent by the IT Ministry under Section 69A of the IT Act.

'Welcome Your Emergence as Leading Global Power': US Calls India an Important Partner in Indo-Pacific

Describing India as one of the most important partners of the US in the Indo-Pacific region, the Biden Administration on Tuesday said that it welcomes Indias emergence as a leading global power and its role as a net security provider in the region. India is one of the most important partners in the Indo-Pacific region to us. We welcome Indias emergence as a leading global power and its role as a net security provider in the region, State Department Spokesperson Ned Price told reporters at his daily news conference.

Mutant UK Covid-19 Strain May Force Serum Institute to Tweak Vaccine Composition

Serum Institute of India may have to make adjustments in the composition of the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and British pharma major AstraZeneca after the World Health Organizations (WHO) Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization (SAGE) expressed concerns over the effectiveness of the vaccine against the South African mutant coronavirus strain. According to a report by Mint, on Monday and Tuesday, SAGE reviewed the evidence on the vaccines effectiveness on new SARS CoV-2 variants, before making significant recommendations.

Mumbai Cylinder Blast: 4 Injured After Explosion in Andheri, Fire Brigade on Spot

Four people were injured after a major fire broke out in a godown where LPG cylinders were kept in suburban Andheri on Wednesday morning, officials said. The blaze erupted around 9.40 am due to a cylinder blast in the godown located on Yari Road in Versova area of the western suburb, they said. Four people were injured and they taken to the nearby Cooper Hospital, a civic official said. At least eight fire engines and seven water jetties were rushed to the spot, he said, adding that firefighting is still on.

1 Dead in Police Encounter After Liquor Smugglers Kill Constable in Kasganj, UP CM Orders Invoking NSA

In what could be termed as a rerun of the Vikas Dubey incident, a liquor mafia killed one police constable and grievously injured a police inspector in Kasganj district when the cops went to serve a notice to the culprits. Following this, the police gunned down Alkar Singh, brother of Moti and the main accused of this murder in an encounter in the wee hours of Wednesday. In addition, the police are also conducting a constant search to nab the other miscreants. Alkar Singh is a history sheeter and has previously gone to jail.

A Smiling Munawar Faruqui's First Instagram Post after Walking out of Jail is What Hope Looks Like

Standup comedian Munawar Faruqui walked out of Indore jail late last week after being behind the bars for almost a month. Faruqui, along with four others, was put in jail on accusations of insulting Hindu deities and Union Home Minister Amit Shah during a show in Indore. On Saturday night, when he was finally allowed to go, he walked out of jail in silence, probably to avoid any further backlash. A day later when he spoke to media, he made very brief remarks saying that he has faith in the judiciary system of the country.

'I'm Not a Cat': Lawyer on Zoom Call Failed to Disable Filter, Twitter Trying to Solve the Meow-stery

It really is a modern day meow-stery that's becoming the talk of the Internet today. When Judge Roy Ferguson opened up virtual proceedings of the 394th Judicial District Court in Texas on Zoom on Tuesday, he was not expecting to see two lawyers and a kitten. The cute blue-eyed cat in the bottom right corner was actually county attorney Rod Ponton, covered by a filter. Mr Ponton, I believe you have filter turned on in the video settings, said the judge. Ponton said his assistant was trying to fix the settings. Im here live, Im not a cat, he said.
[February 10, 2021] Generational Equity Advises Northern Composites in its Sale to Krayden

Generational Equity, a leading mergers and acquisitions advisor for privately held businesses, is pleased to announce the sale of its client, Northern Composites LLC to Krayden, Inc. The acquisition closed February 1, 2021. Located in Hampton, New Hampshire, Northern Composites is a distributor of premium quality composite materials and a manufacturer of Northern Composites branded vacuum bagging materials and accessories. Their products include: Process materials, prepregs, woven reinforcements, component resins, release agents, structural reinforcements, surface treatments, tooling products, and tools & accessories. Krayden, located in Denver, Colorado, is a leading distributor of specialty chemicals to the aerospace, electronics, transportation, and Industrial sectors. Krayden is an engineered solutions distributor of adhesives, sealants, and specialty chemicals. Partnered with industry leaders like Dow, Henkel, and other leading suppliers, Krayden serves a wide array of global companies in the aerospace, transportation, energy, electronics, and general Industrial markets. Richard Hewett, GM of Northern Composites said, "Krayden is a great fit with their 18 Global facilities and 60+ outside technical sales representatives. They have a stronger relationship with top tier suppliers and a fantastic reputation for providing technical service and assistance. Our customers will continue to receive a high level of service and have access to a much broader product line." Wayne Wagner, President of Krayden, said, "We truly admire Northern Composites, and plan to leverage their expertise in composites, along with their manufacturing and kitting capabilities. They are a perfect complement to our own company culture and approach to business." Northern Composite customers will now have access to one of the largest stocking distributors of Dow Silicones, Henkel Adhesives and technologies in all markets, Huntsman, Humiseal (Chase), Alpha Metals, ITW Plexus /Devcon, HB Fuller, Bostik, 3M (News - Alert) , Sika and many other premium product lines. Krayden customers will now have access o the Northern Composites brand of vacuum bagging technologies and accessories, which include bagging films, release films, sealant tapes, breathers, prepregs, peel plies, and kitting.



Generational Equity Executive Managing Director, M&A-Technology Practice Leader, David Fergusson, and his team led by Senior Managing Director of Mergers and Acquisition, Terry Mackin, with the support of Vice President, Mergers & Acquisitions, Tristan Keefe, successfully closed the deal. Senior Managing Director Ashok Tandon established the initial relationship with Northern Composites. "By leveraging Northern Composite's unique model, we were able to find the perfect partners in Krayden, a company with solid management that not only understands its market but also has the vision to see what Northern can add to their capabilities in the future," said Mackin.

About Generational Equity Generational Equity, Generational Capital Markets (member FINRA/SIPC), Generational Wealth Advisors, Generational Consulting Group, and DealForce are part of the Generational Group, which is headquartered in Dallas and is one of the leading M&A advisory firms in North America. With over 250 professionals located throughout North America, the companies help business owners release the wealth of their business by providing growth consulting, merger, acquisition, and wealth management services. Their six-step approach features strategic and tactical growth consulting, exit planning education, business valuation, value enhancement strategies, M&A transactional services, and wealth management. The M&A Advisor named the company the 2017 and 2018 Investment Banking Firm of the Year and 2020 Valuation Firm of the Year. For more information, visit https://www.genequityco.com/ or the Generational Equity press room. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210210005012/en/

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Members of the county assemblies now have a reason to smile after the Salaries and Remuneration Commission (SRC) approved car grants for them, days after the ward representatives made the demand to President Uhuru Kenyatta in exchange for their support of the BBI Bill now in the regional Houses.

In a letter to Council of Governors chairman Martin Wambora, SRC Chairperson Lyn Mengich approved the Sh4.5 billion car grant for MCAs and county assembly speakers.

President Kenyatta had a few days ago acceded to the MCAs request for a Sh2 million grant for each of the 2,237 ward reps, which will punch a Sh4.5 billion hole in the government coffers.

Though the ward reps have been demanding the car grant since the advent of devolution in 2014, President Kenyatta's apparent willingness to open the public purse at a time he was popularising the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) has caught the attention of many Kenyans.

In the communication to Governor Wambora on Tuesday, Ms Mengich said the benefit is only applicable to current speakers and MCAs.

Speakers were entitled to a Sh4 million grant which, like the MCAs, will now be converted to a car grant.

"Taking into account the principle of equity and fairness, affordability and fiscal sustainability, SRC hereby reviews the car loan benefit as set earlier to a transport facilitation benefit in the form of a grant," Ms Mengich said in her letter to Mr Wambora.

MCAs and the governors lobby had argued that it was unfair for the members of the Senate and the National Assembly to have a car grant while the ward reps were being asked to take a loan.

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In an interview last week, ODM leader Raila Odinga defended the MCAs, saying they should get the car grant even as he dismissed concerns that the timing of the President's acceptance to the demand was suspect.

"I do not think any MCA will feel obligated to pass the BBI merely because the government gave them a car grant. I think the MCAs are going to vote for or against the document on the basis of their conviction," Mr Odinga told Spice FM.

Narc Kenya leader Martha Karua, who has joined a lobby group that is campaigning against the BBI, said the car grant was nothing but bribery.

"The car grant for MCAs is nothing short of a quid pro quo by the President. It is bribery in return for them to close their eyes on contentious issues and pass an unnecessary document. The infamous BBI must no longer be made the preserve of a few in state-driven meetings," Ms Karua said last week.
Washington: Hair dye was not running down Bruce Castors face as he made the opening argument for Donald Trumps defence in his Senate impeachment trial.

But his embarrassing performance managed to rival Rudy Giulianis infamous November press conference in which a suspicious dark liquid began dripping down his cheek as the Trump lawyer made laughable claims of voter fraud.

As bad as Giuilianis performance was, he was speaking to a bunch of reporters. Castor was addressing the 100 US senators who will decide whether Trump should be convicted of inciting a deadly insurrection and disqualified from holding public office again.

Bruce Castor, lawyer for former US president Donald Trump, speaks during the second impeachment trial of Trump in the Senate at the US Capitol in Washington. Credit:Senate TV/AP

Castors opening address to the Senate on Wednesday (AEDT) was rambling, incoherent and cringe-worthy. The speech was so disjointed that its difficult to extract any meaningful quotes from it. Nebraska is quite a judicial-thinking place, was one of Castors more memorable lines.

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The future of solar technology: New technology makes foldable cells a practical reality

With the recent development of foldable mobile phone screens, research on foldable electronics has never been so intensive. One particularly useful application of the foldable technology is in solar panels.

Current solar cells are restricted to rigid, flat panels, which are difficult to store in large numbers and integrate into everyday appliances, including phones, windows, vehicles, or indoor devices. But, one problem prevents this formidable technology from breaking through: to be integrated into these items, solar cells need to be foldable, to bend at will repeatedly without breaking. Traditional conducting materials used in solar cells lack flexibility, creating a huge obstacle in developing fully foldable cells.

A key requirement for an efficient foldable conductor is the ability to withstand the pressure of bending within a very small radius while maintaining its integrity and other desirable properties. In short, a thin, flexible, transparent, and resilient conductor material is needed. Professor Il Jeon of Pusan National University, Korea, elaborates, "Unlike merely flexible electronics, foldable devices are subject to much harsher deformations, with folding radii as small as 0.5 mm. This is not possible with conventional ultra-thin glass substrates and metal oxide transparent conductors, which can be made flexible but never fully foldable."

Fortunately, an international team of researchers, including Prof. Jeon, have found a solution, in a study published in Advanced Science. They identified a promising candidate to answer all of these requirements: single-walled carbon nanotube (SWNT) films, owing to their high transparency and mechanical resilience. The only problem is that SWNTs struggle to adhere to the substrate surface when force is applied (such as bending) and requires chemical doping. To address this problem, the scientists embedded the conducting layer into a polyimide (PI) substrate, filling the void spaces in the nanotubes.

To ensure maximum performance, they also "doped" the resulting material to increase its conductivity. By introducing small impurities (in this case, withdrawn electrons to molybdenum oxide) into the SWNT-PI nanocomposite layer, the energy needed for electrons to move across the structure is much smaller, and hence more charge can be generated for a given amount of current.

Their resulting prototype far exceeded the team's expectations. Only 7 micrometers thick, the composite film exhibited exceptional resistance to bending, almost 80% transparency, and a power conversion efficiency of 15.2%, the most ever achieved in solar cells using carbon nanotube conductors! In fact, as pointed out by Prof. Jeon, "The obtained results are some of the best among those reported thus far for flexible solar cells, both in terms efficiency and mechanical stability."

With this novel breakthrough in solar harvesting technology, one can only imagine what next-generation solar panels will look like.

###

Reference

Title of original paper: Foldable Perovskite Solar Cells Using Carbon Nanotube-Embedded Ultrathin Polyimide Conductor

Journal: Advanced Science

DOI: https:/ / doi. org/ 10. 1002/ advs. 202004092

About Pusan National University

Pusan National University, located in Busan, South Korea, was founded in 1946, and is now the no. 1 national university of South Korea in research and educational competency. The multi-campus university also has other smaller campuses in Yangsan, Miryang, and Ami. The university prides itself on the principles of truth, freedom, and service, and has approximately 30,000 students, 1200 professors, and 750 faculty members. The university is composed of 14 colleges (schools) and one independent division, with 103 departments in all.

Website: https:/ / www. pusan. ac. kr/ eng/ Main. do

About Jeon Lab

Website: https:/ / www. jeonlab. com

About the authors

Prof. Il Jeon is a Professor of Chemistry Education and Chemical Materials at Pusan National University, Korea. He completed his undergraduate degree at Oxford University, UK, and received a Ph.D. in Chemistry with honors from the University of Tokyo, Japan. Following this, he worked at LG Display Co. Ltd., South Korea, as a Senior Research engineer and then started a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Tokyo. After completing his fellowship, he worked as an assistant professor and lecturer at the same university. His research group at Pusan National University is working on nanocarbon materials, namely, endohedral fullerene, and carbon nanotubes, for optoelectronics and energy device applications. The team is also developing bioelectronics and integration of artificial intelligence with material science.

Dr. Jungjin Yoon is a postdoctoral researcher at the Pennsylvania State University (PSU), US. He obtained his Bachelor's and Ph.D. degrees in mechanical engineering at Kyung Hee University and Seoul National University, Korea, respectively. Before joining PSU, he worked at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology, Korea, as a postdoctoral researcher. With his research experience in mechanical engineering and material science, his research interest now is the perovskite-based flexible optoelectronic devices, the development of transparent conductors, and the device fabrication/integration process.

This story has been published on: 2021-02-10. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
More specifically, Ford drivers claim that navigation apps lose GPS tracking when running Android Auto, and this glitch seems to affect both Google Maps and Waze.Since the GPS connection isnt locked, following a car in motion is no longer possible; therefore, the experience overall is very inconsistent, and the navigation guidance barely makes any sense.The generic workarounds dont seem to make a difference, and someone says they tested Android Auto in several Ford cars, and all exhibit the same problems. This seems to suggest Android Auto is the one to blame for the whole thing, though without confirmation, this is just pure speculation right now.The apps work just fine and are accurate when using it on the phone itself, so I know it's not a hardware issue. The cars are not the issue, either, as I have tested them on my Edge, my Focus, and my Mustang. All three cars do the same exact thing. They all worked flawlessly with my phone until pretty recently, one user explains on Googles forums In addition to the models listed above, the same Android Auto glitch is also said to affect the Ford F-150 as well.Google is yet to acknowledge the bug, but someone says they reached out to the Waze team, only to be told to contact the engineers at Ford, as the glitch happens on their side.We have also inquired Ford about this problem and will post a follow-up if more details are shared. For now, however, a workaround that brings things back to normal doesnt seem to exist for the impacted Ford users.


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GRAND RAPIDS, MI  Mercy Health Saint Marys is hoping a series of pop-up COVID-19 vaccination clinics targeting communities of color will help reduce significant disparities in who has access to the drug.

During an online press conference Wednesday, hospital officials said they have administered about 22,000 doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine. Of those doses, about 3 percent have gone to Black residents and 3 percent have gone to Hispanic residents.

Officials said a variety of factors contribute to the disparity, but that theyre hopeful offering community vaccine clinics  including one this weekend at the Browning Claytor Health Center on Grand Rapids Southeast Side  will help reverse the trend.

Its a huge priority, said Dr. Andrew Jameson, medical director of Infection Prevention and Control at Mercy Health. Its a huge priority for the health department and us and were really open about being transparent about what that data is.

He said the goal is to host additional community clinics as more doses of the vaccine become available.

Equitable access to the COVID-19 vaccine has been a topic of significant conversation amid the coronavirus pandemic. Communities of color have been disproportionately affected by the virus, data show.

The state of Michigan is not currently reporting COVID-19 vaccination data by race and ethnicity, but it plans to begin doing so in the near future, said Michigan Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson Lynn Sutfin.

She said she expects Michigans vaccination rate will be similar to that of other states once its released.

Making use of federal guidelines, the first vaccination phase in Michigan targeted paid and unpaid health care workers, which, given the disparities in the health care worker field, will disadvantage areas with a higher (number of) African American residents, she said in a statement.

This is why the state is using equity lens in allocation strategy, including providing additional doses outside the allocation strategy to enable areas at disadvantage to catch up in vaccination.

Nationally, an examination of COVID-19 vaccine data conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 5.4 percent of the roughly 13 million doses of the vaccine distributed between Dec. 14 and Jan. 14 went to Blacks. The vaccination rate for Latinx individuals was 11.5 percent.

The rate was 60.4 percent for whites, CDC data show.

Vaccination data broken down by race was not immediately available Wednesday afternoon from Spectrum Health and Metro Health-University of Michigan.

Jameson said Mercys vaccination efforts initially focused on priority groups such as health care workers, teachers and law enforcement, and so our data is definitely skewed because of that.

However, he said that as Mercy now shifts toward vaccinating adults age 65 and older, its attempting to reach patients in communities of color, and we view that as a huge priority for us.

In addition to racial disparities, officials also discussed why the arrival in Kent County of a more contagious strain of COVID-19 reinforces the need to vaccinate more residents.

We really feel like the vaccines are a race against those variants because you cannot mutate if youre not replicating, Jameson said. So, were really viewing our response at Mercy Health St. Marys as a big part of that.

On Sunday, Feb. 7, the Kent County Health Department confirmed that a Kent County resident had been diagnosed with B.1.1.7, a mutant version of the coronavirus first found in England.

Read more:

Grand Rapids: If you want some spring weather optimism, here it is

Michigan reports 915 new coronavirus cases, 12 deaths on Wednesday, Feb. 10

Jackson snow plow crashes into vehicles, injuring two, police say
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DETROIT, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Stratview Research announces the launch of a new research report on High-Performance Structural Core Materials Market by Materials Type (PMI, PESU, PEI, and PPSU), by End-use Industry (Aerospace & Defense, Ground Transportation, Wind Energy, and Others), and by Region (North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Rest of the World), Size, Share, Trend, Forecast, & Industry Analysis: 2021-2026.

This strategic assessment report, from Stratview Research, provides a comprehensive analysis that reflects today's high-performance structural core material's market realities and future market possibilities for the forecast period of 2021 to 2026. The report estimates the short- as well as long-term repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic on the demand for aramid fibers at the global, regional, as well as country level. Also, the report provides the possible loss that the industry will register by comparing pre-COVID and post-COVID scenarios. The vital data/information provided in the report can play a crucial role for the market participants as well as investors in the identification of the low-hanging fruits available in the market as well as formulate growth strategies.

High-Performance Structural Core Materials Market: Highlights from the Report

High-performance structural core materials are used in several end-use industries with aerospace & defense and wind energy being the key demand generators. The impact of COVID-19 differs from industry to industry with aerospace & defense being the most adversely affected market segment. On one hand, some end-use industries, such as aerospace & defense and ground transportation, have experienced colossal declines, on the other hand, wind energy remained untouched and rather experiencing impressive growth in 2020.

The high-performance structural core materials market consecutively registered healthy growth over the trend period (2015-2019) but recorded a hefty decline in 2020 in the wake of the pandemic. The rapid spread of the COVID-19 entirely turned the market table and devastated the market hope by ringing in the death knell by disrupting the supply chain, deferment of orders by airlines and leasing companies, delays in B737 Max approval, and a hefty decline in the transportation market. As a result of that, both giants (Boeing and Airbus) had no option but to curtail the production rates of their key programs. Airbus has truncated the production rate of its key programs (A320, A330, and A350) by 1/3rd amid the pandemic.

However, the market is anticipated to rebound from 2021 onwards and likely to cross its 2019-sales value by 2024. An expected recovery in the GDP to revitalize the positive waves, huge order backlogs by Airbus and Boeing, expected increase in aircraft production, B737's approval from FAA, and growing wind turbine installations will assist fast recovery of the high-performance structural core materials market. Stratview Research believes that the market is expected to rebound in the next five years with a healthy CAGR to reach a value of US$ 108 million in 2026.

Click Here and Run Through the TOC of the Report: https://www.stratviewresearch.com/toc/1369/high-performance-core-materials-market.html

Based on the material type the market is segmented into Polymethacrylimide (PMI), Polyethersulfone (PESU), Polyetherimide (PEI), and polyphenylsulfone (PPSU). PMI foam core is expected to remain the most dominant material type in the market in years to come. It has a high prevalence in the aerospace and wind energy industries. PMI foam cores are lightweight, durable over their lifetime, and relatively less expensive to produce. Also, PMI cores have excellent damage tolerance and damage visibility, which are essential while designing any structural sandwich components.

Based on the end-use industry type, aerospace & defense is expected to maintain its dominant position in the market during the forecast period despite logging a massive decline in 2020. Aircraft radome, main and tail rotor blades, ceiling panels, floor panels, and cockpit doors are some key applications of high-performance structural core in the aerospace industry. Wind energy also holds a considerable share in the market. The excellent growth in wind energy in 2020 heavily mitigated the wreckage performed by the pandemic on the demand for core materials including the high-performance core materials.

Enquire Here for a Free Sample of the Detailed Report: https://www.stratviewresearch.com/Request-Sample/1369/high-performance-core-materials-market.html

All regions experienced significant decline in the demand for high-performance core materials in 2020. Among regions, North America is expected to remain the largest market during the forecast period. The USA acts as a growth engine of the region with the presence of several leading aerospace OEMs and tier players. The Asia-Pacific's market witnessed the least decline in the demand for high-performance structural cores in 2020 in the wake of a huge installed base of wind turbines and opening of an assembly base of commercial aircraft programs in the region.

The supply chain of this market comprises raw material suppliers, high-performance structural core material manufacturers, sandwich panel manufacturers, tier players, OEMs, and end-users. Key high-performance structural core material manufacturing companies are:

Evonik Industries AG

Diab AB

3A Composites

Baoding Meiwo Science & Technology Development Co.

Cashem Advanced Materials Hi-tech Co., Ltd

CA Composites

Jiaxing Sky Composites Co., Ltd

Report Features

This report provides market intelligence in the most comprehensive way. The report structure has been kept such that it offers maximum business value. It provides critical insights on the market dynamics and will enable strategic decision making for the existing market players as well as those willing to enter the market. The following are the key features of the report:

Market structure: Overview, industry life cycle analysis, supply chain analysis.

Market environment analysis: Growth drivers and constraints, Porter's five forces analysis, SWOT analysis.

Market trend and forecast analysis.

Market segment trend and forecast.

Competitive landscape and dynamics: Market share, product portfolio, product launches, etc.

Attractive market segments and associated growth opportunities.

Emerging trends.

Strategic growth opportunities for the existing and new players.

Key success factors.

This report studies the high-performance structural core materials market and has segmented the market in three ways, keeping in mind the interest of all the stakeholders across the value chain. Following are the three ways in which the market is segmented:

High-Performance Structural Core Materials Market Size, Share, & Forecast, by Material Type

Polymethacrylimide (PMI)

Polyethersulfone (PESU)

Polyetherimide (PEI)

polyphenyl sulfone (PPSU)

High-Performance Structural Core Materials Market Size, Share, & Forecast, by End-use Industry Type

Aerospace & Defense

Ground Transportation

Wind Energy

Others

High-Performance Structural Core Materials Market Size, Share, & Forecast, by Region

North America (Country Analysis: The USA , Canada , Mexico )

(Country Analysis: The , , ) Europe (Country Analysis: France , Germany , the UK, Russia , and Rest of Europe )

(Country Analysis: , , the UK, , and Rest of ) Asia-Pacific (Country Analysis: China , Japan , India , South Korea , and Rest of Asia-Pacific )

(Country Analysis: , , , , and Rest of ) Rest of the World (Country Analysis: Brazil , Argentina , and Others)

Stratview Research has several high value market reports in the composites and advanced materials industry. Please refer to the following link to browse through our reports:

Click Here for Other Reports from Stratview Research in the Advanced Materials Industry: https://www.stratviewresearch.com/market-reports/Advanced-Materials.html

About Stratview Research

Stratview Research is a global market intelligence firm providing wide range of services including syndicated market reports, custom research, and sourcing intelligence across industries, such as Advanced Materials, Aerospace & Defense, Automotive & Mass Transportation, Consumer Goods, Construction & Equipment, Electronics and Semiconductors, Energy & Utility, Healthcare & Life Sciences, and Oil & Gas.

We have a strong team of industry veterans and analysts with an extensive experience in executing custom research projects for mid-sized to Fortune 500 companies, in the areas of Market Assessment, Opportunity Screening, Competitive Intelligence, Due Diligence, Target Screening, Market Entry Strategy, Go to Market Strategy, and Voice of Customer studies.

Stratview Research is a trusted brand globally, providing high quality research and strategic insights that help companies worldwide in effective decision making.

Stratview Research has launched 'Composights', an online portal which offers free thought leadership reports, whitepapers, market report synopsis and much more for Composites and allied industries, worth US$ 20,000 every year.

Click here to sign up (No costs involved): https://www.stratviewresearch.com/composights/sign-in

For enquiries, please contact:

Stratview Research

E-mail: [email protected]

Direct: +1-313-307-4176

SOURCE Stratview Research
A cladding sales manger whose firm sold highly combustible cladding used at Grenfell Tower has told an inquiry that she has never heard of the fatal Lakanal House fire.

Deborah French, a former UK sales manager for US firm Arconic, told the Grenfell Tower inquiry she was unaware of the 2009 fire in south London.

Six people died after a fire ripped through the housing block. Flammable cladding was later identified as a key reason behind the rapid spread of the blaze.

Ms French, who was responsible for selling Reynobond PE panels with a flammable plastic core to construction projects in the UK between 2007 and 2014, was asked if she knew about the 2009 fire while giving evidence at the Grenfell Tower inquiry.

When asked by counsel to the inquiry, Richard Millett QC, Ms French said she had 'not heard' of the fatal fire.

She said: 'No I dont recall. I've not heard of Lakanal house.' Asked if she was aware of it now, she said: 'No.'

Ms French, who was responsible for selling Reynobond PE panels with a flammable plastic core to construction projects in the UK between 2007 and 2014, was asked about if she knew about the 2009 fire while giving evidence at the Grenfell Tower inquiry

Six people died after a fire ripped through a south London housing block (pictured). Flammable cladding was later identified as a key reason behind the rapid spread of the blaze

The Lakanal House blaze in July 2009 killed six people and injured at least 20 more when flames ripped through the 14-storey block in South London.

The fire started on the ninth floor of Lakanal House after a faulty TV caught alight.

What happened in the 2009 Lakanal House fire in south London? The Lakanal House blaze in July 2009 killed six people and injured at least 20 more when flames ripped through the 14-storey block in South London. The fire started on the ninth floor of Lakanal House after a faulty TV caught alight. It quickly spread through the building, which consisted of 98 maisonette flats, up to the 11th floor where the victims lived. Firefighters arrived at the building within minutes of it being reported, but the fire was so ferocious it was hours before they reached the bodies of the victims. The inquest focused on the cladding panels that had been fitted as part of a 3.5m illion refurbishment by Southwark Council three years earlier. The 2013 inquest heard the panels offered less fire resistance than the panels they replaced, and enabled the fire to spread more rapidly than expected. Advertisement

It quickly spread through the building, which consisted of 98 maisonette flats, up to the 11th floor where the victims lived.

Firefighters arrived at the building within minutes of it being reported, but the fire was so ferocious it was hours before they reached the bodies of the victims.

The inquest focused on the cladding panels that had been fitted as part of a 3.5m illion refurbishment by Southwark Council three years earlier.

The 2013 inquest heard the panels offered less fire resistance than the panels they replaced, and enabled the fire to spread more rapidly than expected.

The firm Ms French worked for, Arconic, supplied aluminum composite material for the cladding system at Grenfell Tower.

The inquiry's first phase concluded that it was the thousands of square feet of Arconic's Reynobond PE panel which were a 'source of fuel' for the fire which killed 72 people in June 2017.

The firm is accused of knowing, internally, about the dangers of their product but not passing the details on to clients or removing it from the market.

Though Ms French, who in her role was tasked with selling cladding panels with a polyethylene (PE) core and others with a fire retardant (FR) core, said she was not aware of the 2009 fire, the inquiry heard she was aware of at least one cladding fire.

The inquiry heard she had sent an email to Aronic's technical manager Claude Wehrle flagging a 2013 fire in the United Arab Emirates which was said to have involved cladding.

She denied knowing about a 2009 in the Romanian capital of Bucharest.

Ms French was yesterday questioned by Mr Millett about the week of training she received in Merxheim, France, upon joining Arconic in 2007.

He asked her: 'Did anybody ever give you a technical introduction to the products that you were to sell?'

The firm Ms French worked for, Arconic, supplied aluminum composite material for the cladding system at Grenfell Tower (pictured)

She replied: 'I had an overview of the products but I wouldn't say that I had in depth technical overview, no.'

The QC asked: 'Do I understand that there was a strong focus on sales in that training session?'

'Yes there was,' answered Ms French.

Prior to joining Arconic, Ms French's background was in sales  she started selling aluminium sheets to contractors for Alcan straight after leaving school in 1983.

Ms French said she had no relevant formal qualifications and no knowledge of cladding before she started working for the American firm.

She told the inquiry that she never had discussions with customers about the combustibility of the cladding nor did she ever consider that the height of a building was relevant.

'I didn't have conversations with customers about the combustibility of it. It's not something that I was asked, it's not something that I would have felt comfortable with, I haven't got the technical knowledge to be able to do that. I would have sought further advice to have been able to do it,' Ms French said.

'Conversations about fire were just not something that happened. They weren't part of the everyday discussions, it didn't come from any part of the process of the people involved in the chain.'

The inquiry hearings continue.
Vera Kelly Is Not a Mystery

By Rosalie Knecht

Tin House. 256 pp. $15.95

Reviewed by Chris Hewitt

Vera Kelly Is Not a Mystery is not a mystery. Rosalie Knechts follow-up to Who Is Vera Kelly? continues in its vein: A midcentury lesbian navigates being a midcentury lesbian while also maybe getting to the bottom of a crime. Early in the novel, the recently dumped private investigator is approached by a mysterious couple from the Dominican Republic, seeking the return of their son. Kelly tracks him to a home for juvenile delinquents, where she discovers his story involves government upheaval and skulduggery.

Knecht handles the Graham Greene-esque elements briskly, but the biggest pleasure is how she evokes a not-so-distant time with specific, slightly outdated language (Kelly stores bullets in an empty "cold cream jar") and period details (Kelly lives in pre-Stonewall Greenwich Village, so her local pub is subject to frequent police raids and her chums get fired because of whom they love).

Kelly narrates Mystery in a sharp, sardonic voice and Knecht is able to help us see why, frustratingly, Kelly keeps making the same mistakes. As a result, we understand that the real puzzle our heroine must solve is who, exactly, does she want to be?

From the (Minneapolis) Star Tribune.
(Photo : Screenshot from YouTube/Hardware Unboxed)

It's surprising how the Nvidia RTX 3070 just invaded the market in 2020, and now it has been one of the best options when it comes to choosing a GPU. The demand for graphics cards continues to rise, but shortages are now on their way which will affect users worldwide.

Nvidia revealed that stock shortages of the RTX 30 series will persist until May of 2021. The only thing you can do at the moment is to be watchful of the tracker to see the ongoing sales of the product. Most likely, you can also check if the prices will fluctuate, due to the imbalance of scalpers and natural buyers.

Where to Buy Nvidia RTX 3070 in the US

To be honest, Nvidia RTX 3070 is much more favorable than the RTX 3080 for the majority of the users since it is much cheaper and it only differs slightly when it comes to performance. In US, you can buy Nvidia RTX 3070 in the following stores:

Amazon

Undeniably, Amazon is a must-go store if you are searching for RTX 3070. Just be mindful that the website will not update you if they have the stock or if they have insufficient supply. Visit Amazon regularly so you will not miss any good deals.

GameStop

For $15 or $400, you can find affordable graphic cards in this market. You should check GameStop to seek RTX 3070 but do not expect that they will allow stock trade for RTX 3070!

Best Buy

Best Buy should be included in your choice of the market when it comes to GeForce RTX stocks like RTX 3070, RTX 3080, and RTX 3090. Other than that, you can also browse for other GPUs.

Walmart

Don't skip this list without seeing popular retailer Walmart as it offers a wide range of products and their choices.

Newegg

At this moment, RTX 3070 graphics cards are out of stock but visit the site daily if restocks will arrive.

B&H Photo

Eyeing for Asus Dual GeForce RTX 3070? Purchase it here but make sure to look for more products.

Read Also: Snapchat Features 'Friend Check Up' to Clean Your Friend List for Your Safety

Where to Buy Nvidia RTX 3070 in the UK

Amazon

Never miss Amazon deals. You never know if you will get a more affordable RTX 3070 here.

Currys

Hurry up and purchase now your beloved RTX 3070. Currys has been a nest of scalpers so you better rush searching.

Overclockers UK

In visiting Overclockers, you have to remember that they post stocks without any notice to the buyers. At the moment, RTX 3070 cards are out of stock.

Ebuyer

If you are looking for a faster way to acquire RTX 3070 GPU, go to Ebuyer as they have pre-built machines that banner the GPU.

Scan

Scan will inform you about RTX 3070 stocks so stay put on this site for your RTX 30 series hunt.

Where to Buy Nvidia RTX 3070 in Australia

Mwave

Unlike in the Us and in the UK, retailers of graphics cards are scattered. If you happen to stumble in Mwave, immediately look for the best deals on RTX 3070.

Scorptec

Like Mwave, if Scorptec happens to appear on your computer or in ads, the best thing to do is to purchase RTX 3070. RTX 3080 are out of stock as of now

PLE Computers

RTX 3070 is not yet available at the time. The stock tracker however will keep an eye for the incoming replenishment of supplies so check PLE regularly.

Related Article: Buying Nvidia RTX 3080? Here's Why You Should Not Buy Yet



This article is owned by Tech Times.

Written by Joen Coronel

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
As retailers adapt how they serve customers to meet immediate and long-term challenges, they are transforming their services to do more. Business transformation requires a network foundation, digital tools, and new streams of data to be analyzed. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are emerging as innovative ways to drive profitable business outcomes while driving IT process efficiency.

Below are 5 key areas that retailers need to pay attention to if they are to succeed in the new normal:

1. Start with great Wi-Fi. Mobility is key to ensuring customers and associates devices and applications work. Customers must be able to seamlessly connect to the store network and associates must be able to use their devices to find goods and assist customers quickly. IoT-enabled store solutions like check-out point-of-sale devices, product scanners, scan-and-go apps and digital signage depend on reliable connectivity. Capacity limits make it critical to move customers in and out of stores quickly to optimize turn times.

2. Get a competitive edge using IoT. IoT devices are critical to delivering a multitude of new experiences and driving new efficiencies. Mobile readers, sensors, and smart shelves can allow stores to maintain accurate inventory in retail time. Footfall sensors and location beacons provide real-time analytics for contextual and personalized offers while supporting a safe shopping experience.

3. Dont guess on application performance. Connectivity and mobility are the foundation, but the applications that customers, associates, and warehouse staff use must also perform flawlessly. IT teams have long prioritized business-critical applications so they perform at peak. Guest traffic is separated from associates applications, and transactions and payments are highly protected. But even with these steps to ensure optimal application performance, the users network experience is often hard for IT to discern until there are vocal complaints. A better way to ensure that shoppers, associates, and other staff receive a quality network experience is give IT a real-time view of the end-user experience along with clear action steps to resolve any issues before a service ticket is opened.

4. Spend your time on innovation, not on network management. It is rare for every store to have an IT staff member. But it is common for IT to get bogged down into network management, rather than innovating with new digital use cases. A cloud-native, single-pane-of-glass network management solution can allow IT staff to work remotely while maintaining visibility and control over all vital network services. Cloud-managed networks enable retailers to scale back the network when the need for temporary drive-through or pop-up services passor scale up quickly as needed. Whether the site is a store, warehouse, or corporate headquarters, IT should be able to ensure a secure, high-performance network across all locations, including teleworker home offices.

5. Extend indoor services to outside. With the popularity of curbside pickup and the need to provide touch-free experiences, many retailers need to extend their Wi-Fi outdoors without compromising connectivity to applications and devices that associates need. Associates need mobile POS systems and inventory scanning devices to assist customers, while maintaining secure connectivity to payment transactions.

Edited by Maurice Nagle
WASHINGTON  The White House announced on Wednesday that it had put a senior national security official in charge of the response to the broad Russian breach of government computers, only hours after the Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee criticized the disjointed and disorganized response in the opening weeks of the Biden administration.

The criticism from the newly installed chairman, Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, appeared to take the White House by surprise. But it reflects the deep concern on Capitol Hill that too little is known about the hacking, or how the government and private industry are addressing it, two months after the intrusion was first discovered.

Officials said lawmakers were mistaken to suggest no one was in charge of the federal response. Anne Neuberger, appointed to a newly created post of deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technology by President Biden, is overseeing the response to what has become known as the SolarWinds breach, said Emily J. Horne, the National Security Council spokeswoman.

Since Day 1, she has been running an interagency process on SolarWinds, Ms. Horne said.

But until the White Houses announcement on Wednesday, Ms. Neubergers role had not been publicly announced, and did not seem apparent to those on Capitol Hill who were receiving briefings.
Mumbai, Feb 10 : Sushmita Sen on Wednesday shared a cryptic post that reveals a hint of malice towards men, and a section of users were speculating if the 45-year-old actress had broken up with her boyfriend.

Sushmita took to her Instagram account and shared an anonymous quote: "The problem is women think he will change, he won't. The mistake men make is thinking she'll never leave, she will." "Moral of the story... He won't, She will, #factcheck #truethat. I love you guys!!! Mmuuuaaah," she added.

Soon, social media was flooded with guesswork over whether she is headed for splitsville with latest boyfriend, model Rohman Shawl.

"Ma'am please don't tell me you broke up. I was just waiting to see you getting married. #heartbreak," commented a fan of the actress.

"I hope all is well with your partner," wrote a user.

While many agreed with the actress' viewpoint, a lot of users felt she was generalising while blaming all men.

"Same goes the other way around, stop always playing the victim card for females," commented a user.

"Works the other way to. Why beat up men alone?" asked another user.
Bruce Springsteen was arrested on driving while intoxicated and related charges at the Jersey Shore last fall, authorities said.

On Nov. 14, 2020, Springsteen was cited for DWI, reckless driving and consuming alcohol in a closed area at Sandy Hook, in the Gateway National Recreation Area at the northeast tip of Monmouth County.

Springsteen was cooperative throughout the process, Gateway spokesperson Brenda Ling said in a statement Wednesday.

TMZ was first to report the arrest. The Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, a Freehold native and Colts Neck resident, is due for a court appearance in the next few weeks, the website said. Criminal charges at New Jersey federal parks are typically heard in Federal Court in Newark.

A spokesperson for Springsteen did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday morning.

The news comes after Springsteen, 71, made headlines this past weekend as he appeared in a two-minute Super Bowl commercial for Jeep, the first such product endorsement of his career.

Unlike many rock stars, Springsteen does not have a history of public intoxication. In fact, he avoided alcohol as a young man, not having his first drink until he was 22. As he wrote in his 2016 autobiography Born to Run, My experience with my father had been enough, referencing his father, Douglas Springsteen, and his struggles with alcoholism.

The terrifying, all-engulfing presence he became when he drank convinced me to never go there. He lost who he was.

Springsteen is very familiar with Sandy Hook, having used its beaches as backdrops for several music and film projects, most notably the album cover for 1987s Tunnel of Love. The music video for from the albums hit single Brilliant Disguise was shot in the kitchen of an abandoned house on Sandy Hooks Fort Hancock property. His 2014 short film Hunter of Invisible Game was also filmed there.

Please subscribe now and support the local journalism YOU rely on and trust.

Bobby Olivier may be reached at bolivier@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @BobbyOlivier and Facebook. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
China announced earlier that it would provide 10 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines to the global vaccine sharing initiative COVAX to meet the urgent needs of developing countries, showing a strong sense of responsibility at such a critical moment.

It is another major move of China to promote equitable distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, push ahead international anti-pandemic cooperation and put into practice the vision of building a community of common health for mankind.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), recently warned that the unfair distribution of COVID-19 vaccines worldwide would cause severe impacts.

He called on countries to work together in solidarity to ensure that within the first 100 days of this year, vaccination of health workers and older people is underway in all countries.

China also attaches great importance to the difficulties facing the practical implementation of COVAX, in particular the huge vaccine supply gap in February and March.

Back in May 2020, China promised that COVID-19 vaccine development and deployment in China, when available, would be made a global public good, which would be China's contribution to ensuring vaccine accessibility and affordability in developing countries.

A batch of inactivated COVID-19 vaccines donated by the Chinese government to Pakistan had arrived in the latter's capital Islamabad on Feb. 1. It was the first batch of vaccines provided by the Chinese government to a foreign country.

Besides Pakistan, China is providing aid in the form of COVID-19 vaccines to 13 developing countries including Brunei, Nepal, the Philippines, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, Sri Lanka, Mongolia, Palestine, Belarus, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, and Equatorial Guinea, and will aid 38 more developing countries in need of COVID-19 vaccines.

Containing the COVID-19 pandemic is considered as the most pressing task for the international community, and China has kept its promise in a way that addresses the urgent need of the world.

Tom Fowdy, a British political and international relations analyst, commented that China's vaccines are the products that most of the world will accept.

Chinese vaccines could offer a lifeline to developing countries, according to an article recently published on The New York Times.

The international society has widely acknowledged the safety and efficacy of Chinese vaccines. They are considered reliable by clinical trials in multiple countries, as well as reports published on The Lancet.

Preliminary statistics indicate that over 40 countries have shown intention to import Chinese vaccines, and some countries have approved the use of China's vaccines.

Indonesian President Joko Widodo, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and President of Seychelles Wavel Ramkalawan led by example to take COVID-19 vaccines; Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic waited for the first batch of Chinese vaccines in cold wind at an airport apron; Chilean President Sebastian Pinera attended the ceremony for the arrival of Chinese vaccines.

Foreign countries believe that Chinese vaccines have shed light at the end of a tunnel. They say the safe, sure, and secure vaccines came at a time when they were going through the most difficult period and needed them the most. These comments expressed their gratitude for the Chinese assistance, as well as their confidence in the Chinese vaccines.

The pandemic tests the conscience of governments and examines how countries balance between justice and benefits.

It can never be overemphasized that wealth is not a criterion for judging whether a person can enjoy the right to life and health.

To uphold fairness and justice requires making vaccines a public product accessible and affordable to people in developing countries and providing assistance for countries and regions that are relatively vulnerable to the pandemic.

Viruses know no borders. To defeat the pandemic, mankind must rely on science and rationality, promote the spirit of humanitarianism, and fight against it with the most powerful weapons  solidarity and cooperation.
The banning of conversion therapy sparked worries amongst Christians in the Australian state of Victoria, saying they fear for their religious freedom.

The Change or Conversion Practices Prohibition Bill will criminalize practices seeking to change or suppress a person's sexual orientation or gender identity in which according to the bill, could amount to a fine of $10,000 or up to 10 years of a prison sentence.

However, according to The Catholic Weekly, the bill covers such a broad subject in its definitions that it could criminalize any religious practice including praying for a person at their request in relation to issues concerning their sexual orientation or gender.

"In our view, the bill is a direct attack on religious beliefs, and in particular Christianity, and will target those who hold to traditional convictions on sexual orientation and gender identity issues," said John Steinhoff, the managing director of the Human Rights Law Alliance.

The Christian Post reported that Christians have been voicing out their concerns over a subclause included in the Bill which makes carrying out "a religious practice, including but not limited to, a prayer based practice, a deliverance practice or an exorcism" an offensive crime.

Church leaders in the state fear that they could be unconsciously committing a crime just for offering a prayer or counseling to someone who is struggling with their sexual orientation or gender identity.

Dozens of faith leaders expressed their opposition to the bill in an open letter to the premier of Victoria, Daniel Andrews.

"While we in no way support coercive and harmful practices that force someone to attempt to change their sexual orientation or gender identity, we are united in support of the human rights of any Victorian to have the freedom of choice to seek assistance to adhere to their religious convictions on matters of gender and sexuality. The Bill legislates ideological constructs around sexual orientation and gender identity." they wrote.

"Religious organizations, parents and families, faith-based schools, ministries, and other individuals will face scrutiny, investigation, censorship, significant jail terms and large fines for exercising their religious duty to teach or advise individuals who request support to maintain adherence to religious constructs of sexuality and gender," they added.

The bill was passed on Thursday night after 29 legislatures voted for the bill and only 9 voted against it after a 12-hour-long debate.

The managing director of the Australian Christian Lobby Martyn Iles said the bill "basically criminalizes the truth."

"It takes those truths about marriage, about gender, about sex, about family ... things that Christians hold dear, which are part of Creation itself, and it says that those ideas, the expression of them, the living out of them can become criminal acts," Iles claimed.

He also went on to say that Christians should continue to support and pray for people who come to them asking for help, even if it means that the law will be broken.

"I want to say something that's going to sound a little bit radical but it's so true, especially in this case. We must live as though this bill doesn't exist," he said.

Aaron Brady, who was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of Detective Garda Adrian Donohoe, has lodged an appeal on 46 grounds against his conviction.



Brady lodged his appeal on October 22 last and his grounds of appeal were submitted on December 3. It is expected that the 29-year-old's full appeal hearing will not take place before October and could last up to five days before the three-judge court.

Aaron Brady was found guilty of the murder of Det Gda Donohoe by an 11 to one majority jury verdict at the Central Criminal Court on August 11 last year.

Last October, the father-of-one with a last address at New Road, Crossmaglen, Co Armagh was sentenced to the mandatory term for murder of life imprisonment with a minimum time served of 40 years.

Read More

Brady was also sentenced to 14 years for the robbery of 7,000 - a sentence that will run concurrently with the life sentence - at Lordship Credit Union in Bellurgen, Co Louth on January 25, 2013.

One of the most important grounds of the 46 is likely to be a decision by the trial judge Mr Justice Michael White to refuse to allow the defence to call evidence regarding what they saw as possible witness inducement by Homeland Security in America.



The controversy arose after gardai disclosed thousands of files to Brady ahead of his trial. Among the files, Brady's lawyers discovered a recording of a conversation between Special Agent Matt Katske and Brady's best friend, who is also a suspect (Suspect A) in the Lordship robbery.



Special Agent Katske works for Homeland Security and at the time of the recording, in July 2017, he was attached to the British Embassy. Gardai were still building their case against Brady with members of the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation regularly travelling to New York hoping to speak to people who had information that might help to finger Brady as the gunman.



Katske had travelled to Belfast to intercept Suspect A at George Best Airport. Suspect A covertly recorded the conversation and later sent a digital copy of that recording to Agent Katske who in turn sent the recording to the then senior investigating officer in the Brady investigation, Pat Marry, now retired but a detective inspector at the time.



The recording was muffled and often difficult to understand but Brady's senior barrister Mr Michael O'Higgins SC said there was evidence on it that Agent Katske was offering to help Suspect A's brother in return for information about Brady.

Suspect A's brother was living in the US and had fallen foul of immigration authorities.



Among the snippets of conversation that could be heard was Katske saying: "He's being removed, he's going home, I can find plenty wrong with his paperwork."

He could also be heard saying: "If he puts Aaron Brady away you will probably never hear from me again. I can't do anything for him until he commits to doing something for us in this case."

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Mr O'Higgins argued that this was clear evidence of Homeland Security offering something in return for information on Brady. He also pointed to an internal Homeland Security email that was disclosed which stated that another potential witness should be sent home if he didn't provide a statement to gardai about Brady.



Mr O'Higgins wanted this introduced to the jury to show that one of the key State witnesses' in the trial, Daniel Cahill, may have been subjected to similar inducements and threats by Homeland Security. Cahill was living as an undocumented visa over stayer in New York at the time and gave a statement to gardai at Yonkers Police Department after being taken from his home by members of Homeland Security.



Both Cahill and Special Agent Mary Ann Wade denied that any threats were made or inducements offered. Mr O'Higgins said that the evidence of inducement relating to other potential witnesses might undermine Mr Cahill's credibility on that issue.

Read More



However, Mr Justice White ruled that the jury should not hear the covert recording or be told of the alleged inducement of other witnesses. In his judgment he said the issue of whether Cahill was offered an inducement was a "collateral" one and therefore evidence could not be called in relation to it.

It is a long standing principle in Irish law that issues that are not directly related to the central issue in a trial are characterized as collateral and cannot be allowed to derail the process by causing it to become unfeasibly long and drawn out.



The issue of inducement may have been collateral to the prosecution case but Brady's lawyers said it was central to the defence case.



Another issue likely to form a ground of appeal was the evidence of Molly Staunton. Ms Staunton was initially expected to travel from her New York home to Dublin to give evidence but that plan was scrapped when Covid 19 swept through New York.

The extent of the lockdown there was such that plans to have her give evidence via video link from a government building also had to be scrapped. In the end she gave her evidence from her apartment despite complaints by Brady's defence that the scenario took away from the proper gravitas of a criminal trial.



When Ms Staunton finally gave evidence she was twice interrupted by a man in her apartment who told her, among other things, "no more testimony "and "tell them what you are supposed to tell them".

In one dramatic incident Ms Staunton was interrupted at a critical point in her evidence and could be heard arguing with the man before her laptop suddenly shut down.

The key part of her evidence was that she heard Brady admit that he "shot a cop" while he lived in Ireland. Brady's lawyers argued that the jury would see the interruption as prejudicial against their client and even though there was nothing to suggest the man was acting on Brady's behalf, they said he could no longer get a fair trial.

The judge ruled that the issue could be dealt with by a warning from him that it may be dangerous to rely on Ms Staunton's evidence.

Towards the end of the trial Brady's senior counsel Mr O'Higgins complained about the evidence of Special Agent Wade. In particular Mr O'Higgins criticized a "letter of scope" that the agent had been issued by her employers which prevented her from talking about the immigration status of certain witnesses, including Daniel Cahill.

Mr O'Higgins said the agents used the letters of scope to prevent "anything that would put them in a bad light coming out."

He said such latitude has never been shown to a witness in the history of the State, adding: "The idea that witnesses would come to court and say, here are a load of things we agree are relevant but I'm not going to answer questions about them.

"That idea is so out there that nobody has ever had the temerity to come into a court of law as a pivotal witness and announce what areas they are going to discuss and what areas they are not going to discuss."
Of all the disgraceful slurs made against Leon Brittan, perhaps the most shameful came in an article the former Labour deputy leader Tom Watson wrote for the Sunday Mirror, just three days after Lord Brittan's death.

Under the headline 'Time is right to finally get to the truth' he wrote the most devastating character assassination imaginable on a man of good character who had not yet been buried.

Part of it read:

Yesterday, one survivor said to me that Brittan 'showed me no kindness or warmth'.

That Brittan was 'as close to evil as a human being could get in my view'. This survivor said that Brittan and the others 'took my childhood, they took the very essence of who I was and finally he's taken away my right to see justice done'.

It is not for me to judge whether the claims made against Brittan are true.

It's for the police to investigate these claims as they continue to do. But I believe the people I've spoken to are sincere.

You can't listen to a two-hour testimony of an abuse survivor and walk away when the going gets tough.

And any snorts of derision aimed at me from media commentators are nothing compared with the ruined lives of abuse victims.

Former Home Secretary Leon Brittan stands accused of multiple child rape.

Many others knew of these allegations and chose to remain silent. I will not.

The police must continue their investigations.

That 'survivor' of Lord Brittan was 'Nick'  aka Carl Beech, the most notorious liar, hoaxer, in British criminal history. Another of Mr Watson's sources for the column was 'Jane', the mentally ill Labour activist with a history of making false allegations.

Labour deputy leader Tom Watson wrote a devastating article for the Sunday Mirror, just three days after Lord Brittan's death

When I raise the details of that article with Lady Brittan, it is the only time in our many hours together that she loses her composure and the tears begin to fall.

'It was about the most despicable thing I think a human being could do to another,' she told me.

'To say that sort of thing about someone, when they have just died  I just thought it was an awful and terrible thing to do.

'If you are going to make those sort of allegations, make them when someone is alive. They are protected by the laws of libel. But to do it so soon after someone had died. Those words, in that way, [were] not only despicable but also an act of cowardice.

'How can you do that? Whatever you may feel to a fellow human being, and indeed to their family'

Lady Brittan cannot fathom the reasons for Mr Watson's seemingly very personal crusade against her husband

Ten months later, on the insistence of the Commons home affairs committee, Mr Watson belatedly sent a handwritten letter of apology to Lady Brittan. 'I was grateful for that. But when you have said something of that nature, at that time, about someone you deeply love, it's very offensive,' she says.

'To make it public in a newspaper it seems to me that there is nothing that can take away the hurt of actually having said it. That the act is done. And there is almost no apology you can make for it.'

Mr Watson's handwritten 'apology', I can reveal, was just 120 words long and was on House of Commons notepaper.

It can have taken only a few minutes, at most, to write. Compare that with the 627 words of character assassination that the press standards campaigner wrote in his Sunday Mirror column.

To this day, Lady Brittan cannot fathom the reasons for Mr Watson's seemingly very personal crusade against her husband. 'Apart from maybe catapulting himself up to the higher echelons of the Labour Party, I didn't entirely understand the motivation, unless it was personal hatred,' she says. 'I have no idea.'

For her, Mr Watson 'turned the knife' more than any of the politicians who made unsubstantiated claims against her husband. Some, although not Mr Watson, even suggested Lord Brittan was 'hiding behind illness' to avoid being held to account.

That 'survivor' of Lord Brittan was 'Nick'  aka Carl Beech (pictured), the most notorious liar, hoaxer, in British criminal history

In April 2015, the Met asked the CPS to review the file on Jane's allegations for a fourth and final time, and it was rejected that June.

Finally, Lord Brittan's name was in the clear  and it was Mr Watson's reputation that lay in tatters. Not that it prevented him landing a plum new job.

Though he has [thus far] been denied the peerage he craves, Mr Watson was appointed chairman of UK Music last year  to the horror of many in the industry.

Given Lady Brittan's testimony today, those who saw fit to appoint him to the role may wish to reflect of the wisdom of that decision.

Does a man who put a grieving widow through 'the most despicable thing a human being could do to another' really have the necessary judgment to be the ambassador for British music?

And should his old friend, the Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, consider trying to get Mr Watson a peerage in the future?

Lady Brittan says: 'The only thing I've wished to say publicly, is that the House of Lords abides by the same rules as the House of Commons. And both of them have parliamentary privilege. And I do think that there was a misuse of parliamentary privilege in the House of Commons by him [Mr Watson].

'The members of the House of Lords are legislators and somehow, you do have to try and make sure that everyone who goes into the House of Lords does at least adhere to the seven standards of public life.

'And one of those perhaps, is, you have to be honest, and you have to be transparent and you have to have probity. And you shouldn't do things that you shouldn't do.

'A lot of this stuff, a lot of what has been said, it's water under the bridge for me. But nonetheless, I do feel very strongly about misusing the privileges that Parliament gives you.'
By Jeremy Roebuck, The Philadelphia Inquirer (TNS)

Under the biggest spotlight of his career, Bruce L. Castor Jr. stood in the well of the U.S. Senate and delivered the opening salvo of his defense in the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump.

By most accounts, it did not go well.

In a meandering, 50-minute speech Tuesday, the former Montgomery County commissioner and district attorney heaped praise upon the senators who will serve as jurors, calling them extraordinary people and patriots. He digressed into folksy anecdotes from little Bruces childhood in suburban Philadelphia. And he mystified his audience with an extended explanation on the difference between murder and manslaughter.

What he spent precious little time on was the central question of the day: Is it constitutional for a former president to face an impeachment trial?

And by its end, Castors rambling presentation had the internet howling, some GOP senators scratching their heads, and, according to CNN, Trump nearly screaming at the television.

Ive seen a lot of lawyers and a lot of arguments and that was ... not one of the finest Ive seen, Sen. John Cornyn (R., Texas) said.

Even the right-wing cable channel Newsmax cut away from Castor to a confused-looking Alan Dershowitz, who defended Trump in his last impeachment trial.

I have no idea what hes doing, Dershowitz said. There is no argument. I have no idea why hes saying what hes saying.

At least one person gave Castor a five-star review: Castor himself.

I thought we had a good day, he told reporters outside the Senate chamber.

That enduring confidence and Castors penchant for long-winded circumlocution should be familiar to anyone whos followed his decades-long career in Pennsylvania politics and law.

When he testified in Bill Cosbys sexual-assault case five years ago  about a non-prosecution agreement he maintains he signed with the former comedian  he began with a 20-minute recitation of his career and the awards he had won.

There would be so many, he told the judge, it might be easier to submit a resume.

In interviews, Castor frequently recounts tales of his courtroom victories during his heyday as Montgomery Countys hard-charging DA.

And as he read notes hastily scratched on a yellow legal pad Tuesday, he appeared at times to be pining for those more familiar stomping grounds.

My name is Bruce Castor, and I am the lead prosecutor  err  lead counsel for the 45th president of the United States, he said, before apologizing. I was an assistant DA for such a long time that I keep saying prosecutor, but I do understand the difference.

He eventually moved on to a somewhat more focused defense: Allowing the impeachment trial  which he argued is unconstitutional and seeks to hold Trump accountable for speech protected by the First Amendment  to proceed would open the floodgates to more partisan use of impeachment in the future.

The political pendulum will shift one day, he said. And partisan impeachments will become commonplace.

But by then, Castor had already lost much of the room. Some GOP senators didnt mince words when speaking to reporters afterward.

I couldnt figure out where he was going, said Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R., Alaska). He spent 45 minutes going somewhere, but I dont think he helped with us better understanding where he was coming from on the constitutionality of this.

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R., La.) described the presentation as so bad that it prompted him to change his vote. He broke with most of his party and threw his support behind allowing the trial to continue, after previously voting that its unconstitutional because Trump is no longer in office.

Did you listen to it? he said of the defense presentation. It was disorganized, random ... [and] they did not talk about the issue at hand. If Im an impartial juror, and Im trying to make a decision based upon the facts as presented on this issue, then the House managers did a much better job.

That may have been part of the problem. Castor hadnt originally planned to lead off Trumps defense Tuesday, deferring that position to his cocounsel on the case, Alabama lawyer David Schoen.

But after a taut, emotional appeal from the lead Democratic House impeachment manager  featuring a startling 13-minute video recap of the Jan. 6 Capitol attack  the defense team reshuffled its plans.

Ill be quite frank with you, Castor said on the Senate floor. We changed what we were going to do on account that we thought the House managers presentation was well-done.

No matter what senators think of Castor, its unlikely to change the outcome of the trial. Democrats need 17 Republicans to vote to convict, and only a handful have suggested theyre open to doing so.

Still, sources within Trumps defense team said the choice to put the folksier Castor up before the pugnacious Schoen was an attempt, as one put it, to lower the temperature in the room.

But, as a strategy, did it work? Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas), one of Trumps most ardent supporters, paused for several seconds before finally answering that question.

I dont think the lawyers did the most effective job, he told reporters. But Ill leave it to others to fill out the scorecard on that front.

Staff writer Jonathan Tamari contributed to this article.

More: Lawyer accidentally uses Zoom kitten filter during virtual Texas court proceedings
TORONTO, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ - NEW WAVE HOLDINGS CORP. (the "Company" or "New Wave") (CSE: SPOR) (FWB: 0XM2) (OTCPK: TRMNF) an investment issuer that provides capital and support services, is pleased to announce the introduction of select products from its subsidiary, Way of Will Inc., to T.J. Maxx and Marshalls stores across the U.S.

Starting this month, select products from the collection of Way of Will, will be making its way into over 2,000 T.J. Maxx and Marshalls stores across the U.S. Specifically, shoppers will find natural body-care products from the health and wellness brand in the men's groom section.

The department store chains, operated by parent company TJX, offer patrons a premium "treasure hunt" shopping experience developed through strategic partnerships and specialized product selections in their thousands of stores nationwide.

The addition of Way of Will's products to the stores will provide TJX shoppers with a refreshing new selection of natural wellness and body-care product options. TJX's team of expert buyers has helped the company build a reputation for scouting out excellent products that are offered to consumers as hidden gems and fantastic finds.

"We are thrilled to see some of our bestselling products joining other exceptional brands on the shelves at T.J. Maxx and Marshalls stores," said Willie Tsang, founder and CEO of Way of Will. "We started as a body-care and wellness brand catered to active lifestyles, but we've grown organically and we're so much more than that now. Way of Will offers health and wellness products for everybody and every lifestyle. We're confident that T.J. Maxx and Marshalls shoppers will be delighted with the discovery of our brand and our wide selection of products that will fit any need."

ABOUT NEW WAVE HOLDINGS CORP.

New Wave Holdings Corp. (CSE: SPOR, FWB: 0XM2, OTCPK: TRMNF) is an investment issuer focused on the burgeoning nutraceutical and psychedelic sector and support for adaptive and progressive health and wellness products and therapies. New Wave subsidiaries contain various health and beauty products within its portfolio of non-psychoactive plants and fungi as it continues to expand its product distribution through vertical integration to provide end to end solutions while capturing a high margin business model.

Investors interested in connecting with New Wave Holdings can learn more about the company and contact the team at http://newwavecorp.com.

Information relating to WAY OF WILL INC., contained in this news release was provided by WAY OF WILL INC. and/or its agent and has not been independently verified by the Company. The Company does not take responsibility for the accuracy of such information.

The CSE has not in any way passed on the merits of the Acquisition, and neither has approved nor disapproved the contents of this press release. Neither the CSE nor its Market Regulator (as that term is defined in the policies of the CSE) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

FORWARD-LOOKING INFORMATION DISCLAIMER

Certain statements contained in this news release may constitute forwardlooking information, including but not limited to, applicable regulatory approval in connection with the Acquisition, the closing of the Acquisition, expansion of operations, size and quality of future tournaments and projections regarding attendance at future events. Forwardlooking information is often, but not always, identified by the use of words such as "anticipate", "plan", "estimate", "expect", "may", "will", "intend", "should", and similar expressions. Forwardlooking information involves known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results or events to differ materially from those anticipated in such forwardlooking information. The Company's actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in this forwardlooking information as a result of competitive factors and competition for investment opportunities, challenges relating to operations in international markets, transaction execution risk, changes to the Company's strategic growth plans, and other factors, many of which are beyond the control of the Company. The Company believes that the expectations reflected in the forwardlooking information are reasonable based on current expectations and potential investment pipeline, but no assurance can be given that these expectations will prove to be correct and such forwardlooking information should not be unduly relied upon. Any forwardlooking information contained in this news release represents the Company's expectations as of the date hereof and is subject to change after such date. The Company disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forwardlooking information whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by applicable securities legislation.

SOURCE New Wave Holdings Corp.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 10)  Officials of the Department of Transportation assured that they will be fair to motorists and implement a three-strike policy in cashless tollway lanes only after toll operators are adequately prepared in terms of RFID implementation.

At a hearing of the House Committee on Transportation on Tuesday, DOTr Undersecretary Garry De Guzman said they are in the final stages of drafting and adopting minimum performance standards and specifications (MPSS) and key performance indicators for operators.

De Guzman, also alternate chairman of the Toll Regulatory Board, said penalties will soon be imposed on operators who fail to meet MPSS.

"We can ensure that the toll operators first will comply with the MPSS before we invoke and we apply the three-strike policy," noted DOTr Assistant Secretary Giovanni Lopez, with agency officials emphasizing the policy is still not in effect for now.

The policy aims to curb motorists entering cashless toll lanes despite having insufficient RFID load. De Guzman noted there are instances where these motorists use the same lanes multiple times in a row.

De Guzman likewise said there will also be proper information dissemination prior to the policys implementation.

Members of Congress present in the hearing cited complaints from motorists about RFID readers performing inefficiently, along with disappearing RFID loads. Transport officials assured both NLEX Corporation and San Miguel Corporation have been addressing all concerns related to RFIDs in their respective toll roads.

In December, NLEX Corporation clashed with the local government of Valenzuela City after motorists complained about the companys faulty RFID sensors and other issues which aggravated city traffic. Valenzuela Mayor Rex Gatchalian suspended the firms local business permit.

Toll fees were waived in the expressway as a result, but the toll holiday eventually ended halfway through the month after both parties reached an agreement on fee collection policies, which include the upgrade of NLEX Corp.s RFID system and account management before the end of January.
A teaching assistant at Johns Hopkins University polls her social media followers on whether she should fail her pro-Israel students.

A student government official at the University of Southern California resigns after a harassment campaign focusing on her Zionist identity.

And at the University of Illinois, student government officials approved a motion linking Israel to police brutality in the United States, forcing Jewish students to choose between their support for the Jewish State and racial justice.

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With so many new and old manifestations of anti-Semitism on campus, it is important that Jewish students are prepared before they start college. In St. Louis, some of those teenagers have taken their first steps toward preparedness in a program organized by the American Jewish Committee (AJC).

While the majority of Jewish students on campus report largely positive collegiate experiences, the frequency of anti-Semitic incidents is cause for concern and action. A recent AJC report found that 43% of American Jews 18-29 had either personally experienced an incident of anti-Semitism on a college campus or knew someone who has.

The issue is no longer limited to isolated incidents of Jewish students finding swastikas scrawled on their dorm room doors or the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movements success in student government chambers. Anti-Israel activists have gone a step furthermaking antipathy for the Jewish State one and the same with support for progressive causes. Increasingly, a Zionist identity fails the litmus test for credibility as an ally for entirely unrelated issues.

Recognizing the need for students in St. Louis to prepare for such a complex web of campus challenges, AJC led a series of virtual workshops last summer to sensitize an initial group of 30 junior and senior Jewish high school students to the potential anti-Semitic bias they may face when they begin their collegiate experience. Topics covered included understanding anti-Israel myths and claims  such as Israel operating as an apartheid state, which have become prevalent on campuses  and the history of Israel as seen through its changing maps and borders.

The idea for the workshops was born out of a pair of virtual meetings with high school students on the St. Louis Jewish teenage experience that AJC organized shortly after the pandemic began. After interviewing the teens about their Jewish identities and views, the three-part series was developed, aimed specifically at students beginning college in fall 2020 and 2021. AJC St. Louis President Paul Kravitz, and Antisemitism Task Force Chair Terry Bloomberg, together with Karyn Lisker, a Clayton High School graduate now a freshman at Emory University, were instrumental in creating the program and recruiting the participants. Talia Wolkowitz, a St. Louisan studying at George Washington University, who became active in her campus Israel group after serving in the Israel Defense Forces was one of the workshop speakers.

While no Israel advocacy training can fully prepare students for the challenges posed by detractors on campus, the student participants gained tools and resources for navigating the latest iteration of hate toward Israel on campus.
YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 10, ARMENPRESS. Armenian foreign minister Ara Aivazian says he doesnt see any reason why Turkey should continue keeping its border with Armenia closed.

I think that under the international communitys pressure Turkey will gradually return to a normal process, now there is no reason to apply blockade against Armenia. The blockade was conditioned with the status-quo in Artsakh, which has changed through the use of force. Turkey no longer has any reason to keep the border with Armenia closed, Aivazian told lawmaker Gor Gevorgyan during parliamentary Questions Time.

He added that the governments main goal is to do everything to further strengthen the security environment around Armenia and Artsakh. This isnt an easy issue. Naturally, as a state, as a society, we must seek to make every effort for the situation to move towards de-escalation. Our diplomacy will make active efforts in order for a favorable environment to exist around us for strengthening Armenias security, he said.

Aivazian also expressed concern over the joint Turkish-Azerbaijani military exercises held near the Armenian border in Kars.

Editing and Translating by Stepan Kocharyan
Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-10 21:13:21|Editor: huaxia

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TEHRAN, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on Wednesday said that Iran will re-embrace its nuclear commitments in case the other parties do so.

"The day when we witness the implementation of the (nuclear deal) obligations by the P5+1, we are ready to implement our obligations in the nuclear deal, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)," Rouhani said on the occasion of the anniversary of the Islamic Revolution which was broadcast live on state TV.

The P5+1 refers to the five permanent members of the UN Security Council - the United States, Britain, Russia, France, China, plus Germany and the European Union, who signed the JCPOA deal with in Iran in 2015 to end Iran's controversial nuclear program.

Referring to the "failure" of maximum pressure campaign of the former U.S. president against Iran, Rouhani said that "the era of economic war is over, and there is no more war and no maximum pressure."

He called the regional and international players for talks with Iran over diverse issues, saying that "dialogue would be the political path for the world to come to agreement with Iran."

Iranians attended nationwide rallies on Wednesday to celebrate the 42nd anniversary of the victory of the Islamic Revolution.

Despite the previous years when mass participation of people in the rallies featured the occasion, the participants attended the demonstration this year using their cars, motorcycles and bicycles. Enditem
A year ago, two Northampton Community College students reported spotting what appeared to be an explicit image of a young girl on a computer in the office of an assistant in the schools arts department.

On Tuesday, the one-time NCC staff member, Alan West, pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography, according to the Northampton County District Attorneys Office.

Sentencing is tentatively scheduled May 5.

Alan West is a former NCC employee who served as a part-time assistant in the art department, the community college said in a statement Tuesday. His employment was discontinued a year ago on Feb. 10, 2020 for violating college policy immediately subsequent to a police investigation.

West, 63, of the Allentown area, was feverishly clicking to close the open windows and applications when the two female students on Feb. 3, 2020, observed what appeared to be an image on his computer of a young child with her genitals exposed, District Attorney Terry Houcks office said in a news release Tuesday.

The two students initially reported the incident to other staff members at the community college, and the colleges public safety director relayed the report to Bethlehem Township police on Feb. 5, 2020.

Police learned the college intended to suspend West immediately, and college officials agreed to turn over any computers, network folders and the contents of email and Microsoft Cloud accounts belonging to West, the release states.

In addition, the two students took police to the lab office in Communications Hall and identified the computer West was using, the DAs office states. West was actively on the computer at this time and was asked to step outside to speak with police. West inquired to police what was going on, and police advised him of the child pornography allegation.

Police then asked West if he looks at child pornography on his computer. Wests face turned bright red and while nodding his head yes, he answered, Noyesno Im not into child porn. Police asked what no, yes, no meant and West maintained he is not into child pornography.

Pressed further, West admitted to commonly visiting a pornography website but stated he never looks at pornography on external media or via email, according to the news release: He said if there was any child pornography on his computer it was because an internet ad popped up with it on.

Later that day, police received a call from NCCs public safety director who said West admitted to him that police would find child pornography on the computer.

Investigators arrested West on a warrant June 24. He remains free on $10,000 unsecured bail.

His attorney, Michael Ira Stump, told lehighvalleylive.com that West has been in both private and state-approved sex offenders counseling and has undergone a psychosexual evaluation and he is absolutely no threat to the community.

Hes taking this very seriously and he has been in counseling for a year, and hes going to accept all the possible treatment thats available to him, Stump said.

The attorney described Wests viewing of pornography as a short-term occurrence and said his client possessed only the one child pornography image that the students saw.

And he regrets that, of course, that the students were involved and that the college was involved, and he apologizes to both the students and the college, Stump said.

Editors note: This article was updated to correct, based on information from Northampton Community College, that West was a part-time assistant in the arts department, but not an assistant head of the department as described by the district attorneys office.

Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to lehighvalleylive.com.

Kurt Bresswein may be reached at kbresswein@lehighvalleylive.com.
Luanda  The deputies to the National Assembly (Angolan parliament) defended last Monday the need to regulate the financial activity of foreign exchange businesses, collective investment organizations, micro-credits and other similar institutions.

Parliamentarians addressed this issue during the discussion, in particular, of the Code of the Regime for the Activity of Financial Institutions, a legal tool that was unanimously approved.

In the debate, MPLA deputy Lourdes Caposso said that it is preferable that the National Bank of Angola (BNA), the Capital Market Commission or the National Insurance Agency should regulate, in detail, the role of non-bank financial institutions.

In her opinion, when talking about financial institutions, people think of banks. In light of this, she argued that it is necessary to clarify this code, as there are other similar bodies such as electronic payment and collective investment societies, which help access credit, advance payments of wages, among other actions.

In the same vein, UNITA deputy Maurilio Luyele highlighted the important role that non-bank financial institutions play in boosting the real economy.

In this context, he believes it makes sense to regulate these activities.

BNA clarifications

When answering the concerns of the deputies, the deputy governor of the National Bank of Angola, Manuel Tiago Dias, stated that, with the approval of the new legal tool, a stronger financial system is expected to face the emergence of eventual crises.

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According to Manuel Tiago Dias, this proposal integrates a set of structural norms that aim to strengthen the Angolan financial system.

Parliamentarians addressed this issue during the discussion, in particular, of the Code of the Regime for the Activity of Financial Institutions, a legal tool that was unanimously approved.

In the debate, MPLA deputy Lourdes Caposso said that it is preferable that the National Bank of Angola (BNA), the Capital Market Commission or the National Insurance Agency should regulate, in detail, the role of non-bank financial institutions.

In her opinion, when talking about financial institutions, people think of banks. In light of this, she argued that it is necessary to clarify this code, as there are other similar bodies such as electronic payment and collective investment societies, which help access credit, advance payments of wages, among other actions.

In the same vein, UNITA deputy Maurilio Luyele highlighted the important role that non-bank financial institutions play in boosting the real economy.

In this context, he believes it makes sense to regulate these activities.

BNA clarifications

When answering the concerns of the deputies, the deputy governor of the National Bank of Angola, Manuel Tiago Dias, stated that, with the approval of the new legal tool, a stronger financial system is expected to face the emergence of eventual crises.

According to Manuel Tiago Dias, this proposal integrates a set of structural norms that aim to strengthen the Angolan financial system.

An airline price war has erupted on flights between Sydney and Melbourne after Regional Express (Rex) released $49 fares that triggered a hasty response from Qantas and Virgin.

Rex, until now a regional airline, is seeking to muscle into the capital city market and disrupt the Qantas and Virgin duopoly by flying between Melbourne and Sydney.

Rex will start Sydney-Melbourne services in March. Credit:Robert Pearce

Rex will begin flying the route next month and, on Wednesday, announced $49 flights during March, which include checked baggage, seat selection and a snack.

As airlines scramble to lure travellers back into the skies, Virgin quickly matched the $49 sale while budget carrier Jetstar, which is owned by Qantas, is advertising some seats during March for $44.




Haiti - Politic : The OAS reiterates its support for Jovenel Moise





In a note, the General Secretariat of the Organization of American States (OAS) says it follows "closely monitoring the current situation in Haiti. We are concerned with the respect for human rights and the independence of powers. "



The Secretariat emphasizes that it bring "[...] an essential interest in the protection of democratic institutions and the political rights of its citizens," stating that it is fundamental "[...] that State institutions work together to resolve the problems afflicting Haiti."



"[3...] we call for democratic structural changes in Haiti through the discussion of a new Constitution and an effective participation in general elections this year.



The OAS General Secretariat renews its support for the electoral process as the only option consistent with the Democratic Charter to replace the current constitutional President with another President on February 7, 2022."



HL/ HaitiLibre


















BISHKEK -- Dozens of protesters have rallied outside the Bishkek city administration building amid uncertainty following the resignation of the Kyrgyz capital's acting mayor, Balbak Tulobaev.

Prime Minister Ulukbek Maripov appointed businessman Ermek Nurgaziev to the post after Tulobaev's resignation on February 9.

But on February 10, the government backtracked, announcing that Nurgaziev's appointment was annulled, with Maripov appointing former governor of the northern Chui region Baktybek Kudaibergenov instead.

Amid the government's apparent indecision, some 30 demonstrators gathered outside the administration building, holding posters reading "Ruslan Tagaev for mayor."

Tagaev is the former deputy head of the State Agency for Architecture and Construction.

Bishkek's mayorship has been disputed for months.

After anti-government protests over the official results of parliamentary elections in early October toppled the government and led to President Sooronbai Jeenbekov's resignation, then-Mayor Aziz Surakmatov stepped down, prompting acting President Sadyr Japarov to name Tulobaev acting mayor.

Japarov was eventually elected president on January 10.
The Institute of of India (ICAI) has asked finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman to restore a provision proposed to be taken away by the Budget for 2021-22 for the mandatory requirement of getting the annual account audited for specified professionals with respect to (GST).

The Institute has argued that the benefits of such an audit outweigh the ease of compliance that the new rule would bring for assessees. We have clarified that thousands of crores of rupees collected in tax (GST) happened because of the ..It was not self declaration, but because the CA conducted the audit and asked the firm to pay the tax in the Form 9, Atul Kumar Gupta, President, ICAI said.

The budget provision in the clause 101 of the Finance Bill 2021 seeks to omit sub-section (5) of section 35 of the Central Act so as to remove the mandatory requirement of getting annual accounts audited and the reconciliation statement submitted by specified professionals.

While the rule is meant to improve the ease of doing business, ICAI in a letter to the finance ministry and the prime ministers office has said that it will make early detection difficult'.

We check several compliances as part of the annual audit. Prevention is better than cure...Detect the disease early so it can be cured or it will become a life and death case, Gupta added.

Meanwhile, the institute has initiated disciplinary action against 25 found to be involved in the GST fraud while warning all its members to be cautious while performing their services.

ICAI is also developing audit quality indicators, audit maturity model, to benchmark the quality of an audit engagement, Gupta said.

New networking guidelines to face global competition

ICAI has also introduced revised networking guidelines for the chartered accountants firms to enable them to face global competition from big conglomerates such as Big4. The CA firms would be able to enter into different networks at the national level to develop into pan-India firms. We did not have an eco-system for them to join hands and form a common brand...They will be able to pool resources and compete on a global platform, Gupta added.

The network will be registered with the ICAI and will be able to have its own brand name, website. Indian firms should become global rather than global firms coming to India and taking over the work...This is an important step towards facing bigger conglomerates which dominate the business, the ICAI president said.

The previous networking guidelines approved in 2005 were revised due to changing global scenario and certain hindrances related to financial resources such as clubbing turnover among other things. We will have three models- affiliate, lead firm or network...The ecosystem for registration will be launched in the next few days... CA firms can later go on for a full fledged merger as well, Gupta said.

The institute has also developed the guidelines for multidisciplinary partnership where a CA can become partner with a company secretary, cost accountant or an engineer, actuarial and valuer. We will start registration after the law ministrys approval. Each profession will be regulated by their respective regulator, Gupta added.

The ICAI president was speaking at the launch of accounts assistant scheme to help graduates develop skills in book-keeping, accounting, GST and Income Tax.

ICAI will select 200 students as part of the pilot project through an online test and groom them by classroom training and internships with chartered accountants and small and medium to provide basic support services for accounting.

The institute has also launched its international curriculum which will be made available in 44 countries where there is no such professional institute. We will have collaboration with the external affairs ministry so their local citizens can participate in the programme. ICAI will be a thought leader and support bilateral relationship, Gupta said.
WASHINGTON  A simmering rift within the Democratic Party spilled into public view on Wednesday as Senator Bernie Sanders, the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, confronted Neera Tanden, President Bidens nominee to head the Office of Management and Budget, over millions of dollars of corporate donations that her think tank received and her history of leveling personal attacks on social media.

It was the second day of tough questioning for Ms. Tanden, the president of the liberal Center for American Progress think tank, and it underscored the lingering tension between the Democratic Partys progressive and moderate wings. She served in the Clinton and Obama administrations and was a top aide to Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign. The nomination of Ms. Tanden, a polarizing political operative, has drawn criticism for undercutting Mr. Bidens message of unity.

The face-off between Ms. Tanden and Mr. Sanders, independent of Vermont, who assumed the chairmanship of the budget panel this year, was one of the few moments of potential drama in the process of confirming Mr. Bidens cabinet. Mr. Sanders wasted little time breaking the ice.

Now, Ms. Tanden, at a time when the wealthy and large corporations have extraordinary influence over the economic and political life of this country, I must tell you that I am concerned about the corporate donations the Center for American Progress has received under your leadership, Mr. Sanders said in his opening statement. Before I vote to confirm your nomination, it is important for this committee to know that those donations will not influence your decision making at O.M.B.
It was no coincidence that just over a month after staunch U.S. ally-Israel and the United Arab Emirates declared that they would normalise relations and Israel and Bahrain did the same, Irans own neo-client state, Iraq, began to announce various relationship-enhancing deals centred on electricity and fuel oil. The geopolitical intentions of Iran and its key sponsor, China behind these Iraq deals are obvious when factoring in that Iraq itself is so desperately short of electricity and other power options that it still suffers from extreme power shortages that have repeatedly resulted in violent and deadly protests across the country. The chronic shortage of electricity and any fuel for power in Iraq is so bad that it is one of the worst offenders in the world for burning valuable crude oil to generate power and is why it is granted specific waivers from the U.S. to continue to import electricity and gas from the otherwise-sanctioned Iran. In line with Irans (and Chinas) geopolitical strategy for the Middle East, Iraq last week announced Lebanon is set to receive 500,000 tonnes of fuel oil from it this year for power generation. Iraq also announced that last week saw the renewal of a similarly-themed deal with Jordan as well.

The theme is the build-out of the Shia crescent of power, with Iran at its geographic centre and China at its political one, backed up by Russian on-the-ground force when and where required, a process that has been expedited following the dramatic downscaling of U.S. military presence across the Middle East and West Asia during the presidential tenure of Donald Trump. With Iran already either directly (through its foreign intelligence and military organisations) or indirectly (through its proxy paramilitary groups) highly active in the Shia crescent areas of Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Lebanon  softer pressure is being added by financing deals on offer from China (or Russia) for states teetering on the margins of this alliance that are struggling economically from the after-effects of two oil price wars in less than five years and the demand destruction effect of the COVID-19 pandemic or from general economic mismanagement. These include, from the Russian side, Azerbaijan (75 per cent Shia and a Former Soviet Union State) and Turkey (25 per cent Shia and furious at not being accepted fully into the European Union), although others remained longer-term targets, including Bahrain (75 per cent Shia), and Pakistan (up to 25 Shia and a home to sworn-U.S. enemies Al Qaeda and the Taliban). From the Chinese side, these include any country on or adjoining its land or maritime routes in its One Belt, One Road (OBOR) program, notably in the Middle East, Oman and Jordan. The build-out of a power network across the Middle East, focused on deals with Iraq  still regarded as being a possible ally by the U.S. and thus tolerated by it  perfectly aligns with this plan for this planned expansion of power. Related: Rosneft Stake Becomes Headache For Oil Major BP



On the face of it the Jordan deal might appear innocuous enough, with the formal announcement of the extension of a previous contract that had lapsed at the end of December for Jordan to import crude oil from Iraq. Jordans Energy Minister, Hala Zawati, stated in July of last year that the Kingdom would resume imports of at least 10,000 barrels per day (bpd) of Iraq crude oil via tankers at a discount of US$16 to the Brent price, reflecting transport costs and quality differential. These supplies came from Baiji in Iraq direct to the Jordan Petroleum Refinery Company (JPRC), constituting around seven per cent of Jordans daily demand. The original deal that had been struck in 2006 mandated a discount to Brent of US$18 pb, on the basis that Jordan bore the transport costs between Kirkuk in northern Iraq and Zarqa in the Kingdom and presaged a broader build-out of energy ties between the two countries.

However, underpinning this agreement were broader discussions about the future relationship between Jordan and Iraq and these also resulted in a contract being signed last year to connect the electric power grids of the two countries. By extension, this will provide a direct link between Jordan and Iraqs key regional sponsor, Iran, which recently signed a two-year deal with Iraq to supply it with electricity, the longest such deal signed between the two countries. The last piece of this game-changing regional networking operation was that just before the announcement of the Iraq-Jordan network deal, Jordan also announced that it had signed a memorandum of understanding with Saudi Arabia to lay out the framework of joint co-operation to connect the electric power grids of these two countries. This brought with it the prospect for China and Russia of being able to shift Saudi further away from the U.S. sphere of influence and into the Sino-Russian one.

Related Video: The Painful Death Of Coal

This shift in the previously apparently inextricable alliance between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia first became especially noticeable after the first oil price war launched by Riyadh in 2014 to destroy (or at least severely disable for a long time) the U.S. shale oil industry that Washington regarded as an unacceptable attack on a sector that was (and is) planned to be a cornerstone of its economic, geopolitical, and energy security for decades to come. This rift in the basic deal dating back to 1945 that had underpinned the close U.S.-Saudi relationship widened as the Saudis were forced to rely on Russia to add any gravitas to the OPEC oil production deals from 2017. This new mutual understanding was clearly signalled when Russias President, Vladimir Putin, invited Saudi Arabias King, Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, to Russia in October 2017  the first ever visit to Moscow made by a sitting Saudi monarch, and the largest ever foreign delegation to Moscow.

In this context, just a month or so before Iraq Prime Minister, Mustafa al-Kadhimis visit to Washington last year, Irans Energy Minister, Reza Ardakanian, stated that Iran and Iraqs power grids have become fully synchronised to provide electricity to both countries by dint of the new Amarah-Karkheh 400-KV transmission line stretching over 73 kilometres, which also paves the way for increasing energy exports to Iraq in the near future, from the current 1,361 megawatts per day now. He added that Iranian and Iraqi dispatching centres were fully connected in Baghdad, the power grids were seamlessly interlinked, and that Iran had signed a three-year co-operation agreement with Iraq to help the countrys power industry in different aspects. At the same time, it was announced by the Iranian Electrical Power Equipment Manufacturing and Provision Company that Irans electricity exports to other neighbouring countries in the previous Iranian calendar year (ended on 19 March 2020) reached over 8 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh), a mean average increase of 27.6 per cent year-on-year. So far, the countries receiving power from Irans grid are: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic, plus, of course, Iraq (which saw an increase of 34.6 per cent from the preceding year). This network does not include the parallel network connections that Iran is consolidating in terms both of direct electricity and gas exchanges, which further includes Turkmenistan and Turkey.

The deal with Lebanon is exactly in the same vein, although Irans influence in the country  which, very usefully for Irans crude oil export sales, has a very long Mediterranean coastline  is currently much greater and more disruptive, wielded through its political and military proxy, Hezbollah. According to a statement last week from Lebanons caretaker Energy Minister, Raymond Ghajar, the country is set to receive 500,000 tonnes of fuel oil from Iraq in 2021 for power generation. The Energy Ministry will also be buying spot cargos of fuel, as and when required, as its state power company does not have the capacity to meet demand, resulting in increasingly widespread and lengthy power cuts across the country. Compounding the obvious point that these deliveries will just be used by Iran as part of its ongoing use of Iraq as a front to export and sell its own crude oil and fuel oil and other related products was the additional  bizarre, if not taken in the above context  comment from Ghajar that: Iraqs heavy fuel does not match Lebanons specific needs but an Iraqi company can arrange a swap for another kind of fuel that was more suited.

By Simon Watkins for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:

Dodoma  MEMBERS of Parliament have challenged the government to create new streams of revenue including, surveying all the land in the country in a bid to influence construction of industries that would add value to the raw materials available in the country.

This would also play part in fostering the determination of creating eight million new employments as per the priorities in the government's third five year national development plan slated for 2021/22 to 2025/26 and priorities set in the propos als for the roadmap of the national development plan for the year 2021/2022.

The MPs made the call as they were debating the government's priorities and plans for the coming financial year as tabled on Monday in the Parliament by the Minister for Constitution and Legal Affairs Dr Mwigulu Nchemba on behalf of the Minister for Finance and Planning Dr Phillip Mpango.

The lawmakers commended the government for coming up with priorities that have aimed at enhancing the national economy, together with lifting up the livelihood of individuals.

They spoke volume on the need for the government to come up with a plan that would encourage innovation and creativity among Tanzanians and more so, enable them to venture in self-employment, instead of waiting for white collar jobs.

Their views were supported by the Speaker of the Parliament Mr Job Ndugai, who suggested the need for graduates to focus on production activities as opposed to keep waiting for formal employment.

The speaker noted that given the fact that the country's economy is dominated by those with low level education as they are the ones who have ventured in farming activities especially in the production of cotton, cashew nuts, as well as livestock keeping.

"This plan provides us with the platform for giving out our suggestions to help the government implement its strategies in propelling development," Mr Ndugai said.

The speaker was of the view that President John Magufuli is working hard to the greater interest of the country but there are few in the government who are still not working in his pace.

Debating on the government's plan, Mlimba MP, Godwin Kunambi (CCM) commended the president for major investment in the strategic development projects such as Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) and the Julius Nyerere Hydroelectricity Power Project (JNHPP) along the Rufiji River in the border of Morogoro and Coast Regions.

Mr Kunambi noted that the implementation of the plans would help the country realise its national development plans, and that have targeted at lifting up the country's economy.

According to him, most of the land in the country is yet to be surveyed, a move that denies government revenue and prevents massive investment.

Supported by other MPs, Mr Kunambi said the land sector hasn't been utilised well in contributing to national development.

"For example being the Executive Director for Dodoma City, in the last three years I surveyed 2,000 plots without involvement of the central government. If this was to be done across the country then we would have made a crucial step," he noted.

"The country has a total of 185 councils, we can even survey 50 of them, it is crucial to have the surveyed plots since people can use their land in securing loans for their business as the government will expand a scope of collecting tax and improve social service delivery," he said.

Mr Kunambi said the country still has work to do in the agriculture sector since it's a backbone of the economy.

"The sector has employed a number of Tanzanians, contributing 27 per cent to the country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP)," he said.

Since Tanzania has enough fertile land that is suitable for growing the number of food and cash crops, the lawmaker said it's a high time for the country to put more emphasis on commercialising the sector.

Close Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox Top Headlines Tanzania Business By submitting above, you agree to our privacy policy. Success! Almost finished... We need to confirm your email address. To complete the process, please follow the instructions in the email we just sent you. Error! Error! There was a problem processing your submission. Please try again later.

"Tanzania has to make better use of the international market where most developed countries like Japan buys food crops from Africa, let's do the needful," he suggested.

For his part, Geita Rural MP, Joseph Musukuma said it's high time for the government to keep considering welfare of the low educated class as they have constructive ideas.

He said the government plans should take into account the real situation in the country as more businesses are shrinking and that there is a need for immediate intervention.

Musoma Rural legislator Prof Sospeter Muhongo (CCM) apart from commending the priorities said the country should focus more on attracting investments in the energy and agricultural sectors.

"We can focus on cultivation of rice, maize, cassava and others that are of high demand, moreover the energy sector has a great role in pushing forward the national agenda," he said.
The vaccine price has turned out one of the world's highest.

The National Anti-corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) has launched a probe into possible abuse in the purchase of a Chinese vaccine against COVID-19 manufactured by Sinovac Biotech.

"On February 3, NABU launched a pretrial investigation of possible abuse in the purchase of a Chinese vaccine from Sinovac Biotech at US$17.85 per dose via a private intermediary firm," as reported by the NABU Public Control Council.

"The case has received wide media coverage, since State Enterprise 'Medical Procurement of Ukraine' had initially entered into negotiations on acquiring a vaccine with an estimated cost of about US$3, and came to the final stage of the process. However, later, Health Minister Maksym Stepanov manually stopped the process and instructed that the authorities start talks on the purchase of a Chinese vaccine from Sinovac Biotech," the report says.

The announced purchase price of a single vaccine dose has turned out to be one of the world's highest, while the drug's "overall efficacy" during the final stage of trials in Brazil stood at only 50.38%.

Read alsoReuters: Ukraine faces delay in delivery of Chinese vaccine in FebThat is why the Public Control Council addressed NABU with a corresponding statement and now welcomes the start of the pretrial investigation.

A preliminary legal qualification refers to the abuse of power or official position, resulting in grave implications (Part 2 of Article 364 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine).

COVID-19 vaccine for Ukraine

On December 30, Ukraine signed a contract with China's Sinovac for the supply of 1.9 million doses of a coronavirus vaccine.

The contract for supplies to the territory of Ukraine has been signed with Lekhim JSC, which, according to official confirmations from Sinovac Biotech, is the only authorized representative of the vaccine manufacturer in Ukraine. The purchase provides for 1,913,316 doses at UAH 504 (US$18) per dose.

Under the terms of the contract, the first batch of 700,000 doses will be delivered to Ukraine within 30 days after official registration in China, or by one of the competent authorities of the United States, UK, Switzerland, Japan, Australia, Canada, Israel, India, Mexico, Brazil, or under a centralized procedure by the competent authority of the European Union.

Read alsoHealth Minister: 100% of Ukrainians could have access to COVID-19 vaccine by end of 2021On January 13, 2021, Stepanov said, when concluding a contract for the supply of Chinese vaccine against COVID-19, the Health Ministry laid down the requirement for its effectiveness at the level of at least 70%.

Reporting by UNIAN
The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
DALLAS, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Bradley Arant Boult Cummings LLP is pleased to announce that Matthew J. Agnew has joined the firm's Dallas office as a senior attorney in the Healthcare Practice Group.

"We are pleased to welcome Matthew to our Dallas office and to our team of highly accomplished healthcare attorneys," said Dallas Office Managing Partner Richard A. Sayles. "He brings to the firm seven years of experience successfully representing providers and investors in the U.S., Canada and Europe, and we are proud to have his knowledge on our team."

Bradley's Dallas office has tripled in size since it opened in January 2019 and has reinforced the firm's strengths in its litigation, finance, corporate, fintech and emerging business practice areas. In addition, the firm has grown to more than 50 lawyers located across its offices in Dallas and Houston, and more than 70 lawyers licensed in the state, allowing the firm to handle a wide variety of legal matters for its clients in Texas and beyond.

Mr. Agnew advises healthcare companies on legal issues pertaining to business transactions and regulatory compliance, and defends healthcare companies against fraud, waste, and abuse allegations. His experience includes advising clients on merger and acquisition, divestiture and joint venture transactions, general regulatory compliance, payer-provider billing disputes and reimbursement and overpayment issues. He routinely handles matters before the State of Texas' regulatory boards, U.S. Health and Human Services' agencies, and the Department of Justice.

Mr. Agnew earned his J.D. from the University of Kansas School of Law and his B.A. from Wichita State University.

About Bradley

Bradley combines skilled legal counsel with exceptional client service and unwavering integrity to assist a diverse range of corporate and individual clients in achieving their business goals. With offices in Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and the District of Columbia, the firm's nearly 550 lawyers represent regional, national and international clients in various industries, including banking and financial services, construction, energy, healthcare, life sciences, manufacturing, real estate, and technology, among many others.

Social Media: @bradleylegal, #legalnews, #lawyers

SOURCE Bradley Arant Boult Cummings LLP
The Ashanti Youth Group, Asanteman Nkosuo, has commended Vice President Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia for being the first veep to host them at the presidency and listen to their concerns when others refused to.



He selected five of us to meet him at the presidency in order for us to present our concerns to him. This is the first of its kind in the history of the country that a Vice President has accorded respect and dignity to grassroots of the party to meet him at the Jubilee house. It has never happened in the history of the country, they revealed.



According to them, the Vice President at the meeting listened to their concerns and advised them on very important matters tailored at the development of the country.



He underscored the need for unity in order to channel our strengths in delivering a better mandate given to the party by Ghanaians so that the victory of the party in 2024 is guaranteed, they revealed at a press conference on Tuesday.



The Ahanti Youth reiterated their stance to support whoever the party presents as its candidate for the 2024 elections rubbishing claims that it was supporting on aspirant against the other.



We are working in the partys interest. Whoever is made flagbearer is the one we will support to win the 2024 elections whether a northerner, Fante, Ashanti or Dagarti. We state our position that we want and will support the person who has the expertise and experience to properly govern this country which is obvious, they stressed.













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.

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Beverage makers Coke and Pepsi and bottled water maker Bisleri have been fined by the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) for violating filing statutory returns to government bodies concerning the collection and disposal of plastic waste.

The pollution control board sent notices to the companies imposing heavy fines on them. While Bisleri has been fined Rs 10.75 crore, PepsiCo India Holdings and Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages have been penalised Rs 8.7 crore and Rs 50.66 crore, the Times of India reported.

Also Read: Beware, there are microplastics in our bottled mineral water, says study

The companies have been given 15 days to remit the fine and comply with the norms they violated. In the case of plastic waste, the firms manufacturing plastics have to fulfill Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR). It is an exercise whereby the companies take responsibility for the disposal of products they manufacture once the latter is rendered no longer useful by the consumers.

Bisleri has been fined for 21,500 tonnes of plastic waste at Rs 5,000 a tonne, while Pepsi has been penalised for 11,194 tonnes of plastic waste.

Coke has furnished documents to the CPCB saying it gathered 4,417.78 tonnes of plastic waste from January to September 2020 compared to an EPR target of 1,05,744 tonnes.

Meanwhile, the CPCB has also fined other beverage makers including Patanjali for Rs 1 crore, while Nourishco Beverages, a 50:50 joint venture of Tata Consumer Products Ltd (TCPL) and PepsiCo, has been asked to cough up Rs 85.9 lakh.

Also Read: CPCB issues show cause notices for closure issued to Flipkart, Patanjali over PWM rules

Both Coke and Pepsi have said that they are currently reviewing the CPCB notice.

"We are in receipt of the notice issued by the Central Pollution Control Board. As part of the global operations of the Coca-Cola Company (TCCC), we operate in full compliance with the regulatory framework and within the ambit of the laws of the land, both in letter and spirit. We are currently studying the order and will be working with the relevant authorities to resolve the issue within the stipulated timeframe," Coke's spokesperson told the publication.

While the PepsiCo India spokesperson also said that the company is examining the notice, confirming that "an appropriate response is being filed."

Bisleri said it has adhered to all the guidelines of the government and is currently working closely with the regulators to share detailed information relating to its actions on compliance to resolve the issue at the earliest.

"As a dedicated and socially responsible corporate, we have adhered to all the guidelines issued by the government. We have been creating awareness about plastic segregation and recycling of plastic. We have been educating citizens through corporates, schools and RWAs. The idea behind the initiative is to "Be The Change You Want To See" by disposing and recycling plastic responsibly," a company spokesperson told BusinessToday.In.
Premier Gladys Berejiklian says NSW will bring in an extra $300 million a month when restrictions ease on Friday, after she called out other states for failing to provide timely information to health authorities.

Ms Berejiklian said the Holiday Inn outbreak in Victoria, which had grown to eight cases on Wednesday afternoon, was a stark reminder for states to share health data as quickly as possible.

There have been a couple of examples across more than one state... where information could be more timely, she said, pointing to heightened risks posed by new variants of COVID-19.

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian says that from Friday businesses will revert to the two-square metre rule both indoors and outdoors. Credit: Peter Braig

I dont want to single out a state. .. Im not going to engage in a war of words, I dont think the public wants that. But what the public does want is the facts ... warts and all.
It has been an honor for me to be the dean of BC Law for the past ten years, said Rougeau. This is one of the nations outstanding law schools, and that is obvious based on many objective measuresthe impressive faculty, the outstanding students, the extraordinary staff, and the accomplished alumni. But what has always been distinctive about BC Law is the community. Over years and generations, BC Law has built a community of people who care deeply for one another and who are committed to the highest standards of professionalism and academic excellence. I have been so very proud to be a part of this community and to serve as its leader.



Although I am taking on a new role at a new institution, I am not going very far away and I will be leading a college that shares the same Jesuit heritgage that guides and animates us at BC Law: formative education of the whole person, a commitment to ethical and personal discernment, and passion for service to others, particularly those least fortunate.



A nationally respected expert in legal education and Catholic social thought, Rougeau is the author of the book Christians in the American Empire: Faith and Citizenship in the New World Order. His research and writing has focused on the relationship between religious identity and citizenship in highly mobile and increasingly multicultural democratic societies. He is the current president of the American Association of Law Schools, and serves as the inaugural director of the Boston College Forum on Racial Justice in America. He also serves as senior fellow at the Centre for Theology and Community in London.



"Since he arrived at Boston College a decade ago, Vince Rougeau's leadership at the Law School and across campus has been extraordinary, said Provost and Dean of Faculties David Quigley. He has hired a strong cohort of faculty colleagues and encouraged far greater engagement with the University's other schools and centers, all while advancing a powerful vision for the contemporary importance of our mission. Vince is recognized as a national leader in legal education and will surely be a great college president. I wish him every success at the College of the Holy Cross."



Vince Rougeau has been a well-liked and respected leader of BC Law as well as a much-appreciated member of the Boston College community for the past decade, said University President William P. Leahy, S.J. I wish him the very best in his new role as president of the College of the Holy Cross.



Prior to being named dean of BC Law School in July of 2011, Rougeau served as a professor of law and associate dean for academic affairs at the University of Notre Dame. He received his A.B. magna cum laude from Brown University in 1985, and his J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1988. He is a member of the bar in Maryland and the District of Columbia. Before entering academe, he practiced law at the Washington, D.C. office of Morrison & Foerster from 1988-1991.

BC Law will always remain a special place for me, said Rougeau. Because of the strength and dedication of the members of the BC Law community, we have been able to do transformative work together over the past decade. BC Law has emerged stronger than ever from a major crisis in legal education that followed the 2008 recession. We have made innovative curricular changes, consistently hired outstanding faculty, achieved successes in admissions and career placement that have drawn national attention, and we have reengaged our alumni and friends, who have responded with record-breaking financial generosity and extraordinary service to the school.



We also have done transformative work together to make BC Law a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive community. This was not without its challenges, but we approached it with the humility and honesty required to ensure that all are embraced and welcomed at BC Law. Although our work is not yet complete, I take great pride in the example of institutional engagement with issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion that we have set for the legal academy and the legal profession.



Jack Dunn | University Communications | February 2021
New Delhi: Bank unions have called for a two-day strike starting March 15, to protest against the proposed privatisation of banks.

During a meeting in Hyderabad on Tuesday, the United Forum of Bank Unions also decided to hold a day long 'Dharna' (protest) in all state capitals on February 19 followed by relay 'dharnas' from February 20 to March 10 in all states, districts and towns, reported IANS.

Banks will be closed for two-day strike on March 15 (Monday) and March 16 (Tuesday), while the previous two days March 13 is a second saturday while March 14 is a Sunday. Thus, to sum it up, banks will remain closed for four days in a row.

A statement by the All India Bank Employees' Association said that the meeting discussed the various announcements made in the budget regarding reform measures including privatisation of IDBI Bank and two public sector banks and setting up of bad bank.

"The meeting observed that all these measures are retrograde and hence need to be protested and opposed," it said. After deliberations, the meeting decided that intensive struggle programmes and agitational actions have to be launched to fight back these policies of the government, the AIBEA statement said.

It added that further strikes will be decided looking at developments. Further, the meeting took note of the continuing agitation by the farmers against the farm laws enacted by the government expressed its solidarity with their struggle, it said.

"The meeting adopted a resolution urging upon the government to reconsider their standpoint and find amicable solutions to the demands of the farmers."
Some factories in China plan to operate through the Lunar New Year holiday that starts Friday to meet a U.S. demand for consumer goods that's expected to set cargo records throughout the summer, including at the Port of Charleston.

The U.S. economy's rebound from the coronavirus pandemic is overwhelming overseas factories and container shipping lines, according to a new report by the National Retail Federation and Hackett Associates. Chinese manufacturers usually take a two-week break during the New Year holiday, but many are taking the unusual step of staying open to catch up on back orders.

"In about a 40-year career in shipping, I've never seen that," said Jim Newsome, president and CEO of the State Ports Authority.

The sharp rise in Chinese exports to the U.S.  up nearly 35 percent during the second half of 2020  has created logjams at some ports on the West Coast, where more than two dozen container ships are regularly anchored offshore waiting to unload their cargo. Those slowdowns haven't affected the Port of Charleston, where loaded import containers were up 5.3 percent in January.

"Regardless of whether its in-store or on retailers websites, the record holiday season and numbers for 2020 show consumers are buying again and have been for a while," said Jonathan Gold, the National Retail Federation's vice president for supply chain and customs policy. "This surge has been going on for months, and retailers are importing merchandise faster than ever."

U.S. retail sales during the November-December holiday season hit a record in 2020 at $789.4 billion, up 8.3 percent from 2019. Preliminary figures show retail sales for all of 2020 were up 6.8 percent year-over-year.

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Ben Hackett, founder of trade consulting group Hackett Associates, said the movement of containerized goods from Asia to the U.S. has "become dramatic."

"It is impressive that the cargo volumes handled by the ports remain as high as they are despite congestion at the docks and the spread of the coronavirus among workers throughout the supply chain," he said.

The nation's 12 largest ports, including Charleston, handled a combined 2.11 million imported 20-foot shipping containers in December, the latest month for which final numbers are available. That was up 22.3 percent from a year earlier. The full-year total of 22 million imported containers set a record, braking the mark of 21.8 million containers set in 2018.

Nationally, the January totals are expected to be the strongest since the National Retail Federation started keeping track of the numbers in 2002.

The Port of Charleston handled 216,265 imports and exports in January  a 2.5 percent increase over last year. The port last month also exported 10,340 finished vehicles, primarily BMWs built at the German automaker's Spartanburg County plant. Combined cargo at the inland ports in Greer and Dillon was up 10 percent year-over-year.
Regulatory News:

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210210005732/en/

Portefeuille au 31 janvier 2021 (Graphic: Business Wire)

This press release is not intended for publication or distribution in the United States, Canada, Japan or Australia.

MedinCell (FR0004065605 MEDCL) (Paris:MEDCL), a clinical stage pharmaceutical company developing a portfolio of long-acting injectable products in various therapeutic areas (the "Company"), announces today a capital increase of c.30 million through an offering to qualified investors, both French and international, by way of an accelerated bookbuilding process (the "Offering

Bryan, Garnier Co Limited1 and ODDO BHF SCA are acting as Joint Global Coordinators and Joint Bookrunners.

Reasons for the Offering

"We have been in the spotlight recently because of the very successful Phase 3 trial of the first product based on our BEPO technology in schizophrenia. This is a major event because we are getting close to the commercialization but also because all the long-acting injectable products in our portfolio are based on the same technology", stated Christophe Douat, CEO of MedinCell. "We continue its roll-out into many therapeutic areas. We already have two other Phase 3 launches scheduled for 2021 and several other programs should soon progress to clinical phase."

The proceeds from this issue are to provide the Company with additional resources in order to:

fund formulation and R&D activities along with pre-clinical and clinical trials for several of the Company's programmes in various therapeutic areas such as organ transplantation, pain treatment, prevention (prophylaxis) of Covid-19 and its variants, and animal health;

accelerate development of its technological platform in other applications; and

fund the Company's general corporate purposes.

Terms of the Offering

The gross proceeds of the Offering should be of c.30 million.

Under the Offering, the preferential subscription rights of the Company's existing shareholders will be cancelled, on the basis of Articles L. 22-10-52 and R. 22-10-32 of the French Commercial Code (previously article L. 225-136 of the French Commercial Code), and shares will be exclusively offered to qualified investors as defined by Article L. 411-2(1) of the French Monetary and Financial Code in accordance with the 22nd resolution approved in the Company's combined general meeting of 10 September 2020 and with decisions taken today by the Supervisory Board and the Management Board during those meetings.

The number of shares to be issued through the Offering, with a par value of 0.01 each, will in any case be limited to c.10% of the number of the Company's shares currently admitted to trading on the regulated market of Euronext Paris.

The issue price will be at least equal to the volume-weighted average share price of the last 3 stock market trading sessions before it is set, possibly with a discount of up to 10% in accordance with the current applicable regulation. The final number of new shares thus issued will be decided by the Company's Management Board, under the delegation of authority granted by the Company's Supervisory Board as of the date of this press release and subject to the limits thereof.

The accelerated bookbuilding process will begin immediately and should close as early as possible on 10 February 2021 subject to any extensions. The Company will announce the results of the Offering, the resulting dilution and the new ownership structure as soon as possible after the order book closes, through a press release.

The Offering is open to qualified investors as defined by Article L. 411-2(1) of the French Monetary and Financial Code, in France and outside France, except in the United States under Regulation S of the Securities Act.

The new shares will rank for dividends immediately and will be admitted to trading on the regulated market of Euronext Paris under the same ISIN code FR0004065605 MEDCL.

Settlement of the new shares issued as part of the Offering and their admission to trading on the regulated market of Euronext Paris are expected to take place on 15 February 2021.

Lock-up commitment

MedinCell will sign a lock-up commitment lasting for 90 days after the Offering settlement date, subject to usual exceptions.

MedinCell has today notified shareholders that are parties to the shareholders' agreement of 13 July 2018 (the "Agreement"),who hold 55% of the Company's share capital, that the co-ordinated disposal procedure provided for by the Agreement will be suspended for a maximum period of 30 days.

Placement

The Offering is not underwritten. However, the Offering is subject to a placement agreement between the Company, Bryan, Garnier Co Limited2 and ODDO BHF SCA acting as Joint Global Coordinators and Joint Bookrunners with respect to the Offering.

The placement agreement may be terminated by the Joint Global Coordinators and Joint Bookrunners at any time up to (and including) the settlement date of the Offering, scheduled to be 15 February 2021, subject to certain conditions.

Where the placement agreement is terminated in accordance with its terms, all investor orders placed as part of the Offering will be null and void.

Risk factors

The public's attention is drawn to the risk factors concerning the Company and its business, detailed in its universal registration document registered with the AMF under number R.20-015 on 28 July 2020, available free of charge on the Company's website (https://invest.medincell.com/fr/). The occurrence of some or all of these risk events may have an adverse impact on the Company's activities, financial position, results, development or outlook. The risk factors presented in that universal registration document are identical to those at the time of this press release.

In addition, investors are invited to take into account the following risks specific to the issue: (i) the market price of the Company's shares may fluctuate and may fall below the subscription price of the shares issued, (ii) the volatility and liquidity of the Company's shares may fluctuate significantly, (iii) disposals of the Company's shares may take place in the market and may have an adverse impact on the Company's share price, and (iv) the Company's shareholders may see potentially significant dilution as a result of any future capital increases that may become necessary to finance the Company.

Prospectus

Applying the provisions of article L. 411-2(1) of the French Monetary and Financial Code, the Offering will not imply a prospectus requiring the AMF's approval.

About MedinCell

MedinCell is a clinical stage pharmaceutical company that develops a portfolio of long-acting injectable products in various therapeutic areas by combining its proprietary BEPO technology with active ingredients already known and marketed. Through the controlled and extended release of the active pharmaceutical ingredient, MedinCell makes medical treatments more efficient, particularly thanks to improved compliance, i.e. compliance with medical prescriptions, and to a significant reduction in the quantity of medication required as part of a one-off or chronic treatment. The BEPO technology makes it possible to control and guarantee the regular delivery of a drug at the optimal therapeutic dose for several days, weeks or months starting from the subcutaneous or local injection of a simple deposit of a few millimeters, fully bioresorbable. Based in Montpellier, MedinCell currently employs more than 130 people representing over 25 different nationalities.

Disclaimer

This press release contains forward-looking statements that relate to the Company's objectives. While the Company considers such forward-looking statements to be reasonable, such forward-looking statements are based solely on the current expectations and assumptions of the Company's management and involve risk and uncertainties, which may result in different outcomes than those contained in the forward-looking statements.

This press release and the information contained herein are only for information purposes and do not constitute an offer to sell or subscribe to, or a solicitation of an offer to buy or subscribe to, shares in the Company in any country, including France.

The distribution of this press release may be subject to legal or regulatory restrictions in certain jurisdictions. Any person who comes into possession of this press release must inform him or herself of and comply with any such restrictions, and as the case may be, to abide by such restrictions. This press release does not, and will not, constitute an offer nor an invitation to solicit the interest of public in France.

This announcement is an advertisement and not a prospectus within the meaning of regulation (EU) 2017/1129 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 June 2017 (the "Prospectus Regulation

In France, the offering of the Company's securities as described above will be carried exclusively through an offer to the benefit of qualified investors, as defined in Article 2(1)(e) of the Prospectus Regulation and in accordance with article L. 411-2(1) of the French Monetary and Financial code (code monetaire et financier) and applicable regulatory provisions. No prospectus will require to be approved or subject to approval from the AMF (Autorite des Marches Financiers).

With respect to Member States of the European Economic Area other than France (the "Member States"), no action has been taken or will be taken to permit a public offering of the securities referred to in this press release requiring the publication of a prospectus in any Member State. Therefore, such securities may not be and shall not be offered in any Member State (other than France) other than in accordance with the exemptions of Article 1(4) of the Prospectus Regulation or, otherwise, in cases not requiring the publication by MedinCell of a prospectus under Article 3 of the Prospectus Regulation and/or the applicable regulations in such Member State.

In the United Kingdom, this press release has been prepared on the basis that any offering of the Company's securities in the United Kingdom will benefit from an exemption under Regulation (EU) 2017/1129, which is part of UK law under the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 (the "UK Prospectus Regulation"), regarding the obligation to publish a prospectus for offerings of the Company's securities. This press release is not a prospectus within the meaning of the UK Prospectus Regulation.

This press release and the information it contains are being distributed to and are only intended for persons who are (i) investment professionals falling within Article 19(5) of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Financial Promotion) Order 2005, as amended (the "Order"), (ii) high net worth entities and other such persons falling within Article 49(2)(a) to (d) of the Order ("high net worth companies", "unincorporated associations", etc.) or (iii) other persons to whom an invitation or inducement to participate in investment activity (within the meaning of Section 21 of the Financial Services and Market Act 2000) may otherwise lawfully be communicated or caused to be communicated (all such persons in (i), (ii) and (iii) together being referred to as "Relevant Persons

This press release is only being distributed to Relevant Persons and any person who is not a Relevant Person should not act or rely on this press release or any of its contents. Any invitation, offer or agreement to subscribe, purchase or otherwise acquire securities to which this press release relates will only be engaged with Relevant Persons.

This press release and the information it contains are not intended to be distributed, directly or indirectly, in the United States of America and do not, and will not constitute an offer to subscribe for or sell, nor the solicitation of an offer to subscribe for or buy, securities of MedinCell in the United States of America. Securities may not be offered or sold in the United States of America absent from registration or an exemption from registration under the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "U.S. Securities Act"), it being specified that the securities of MedinCell have not been and will not be registered within the U.S. Securities Act. MedinCell does not intend to register securities or conduct a public offering in the United States of America.

This press release may not be published, forwarded or distributed, directly or indirectly, in the United States of America, Canada, Japan or Australia. The information contained in this document does not constitute an offer of securities for sale in the United States of America, Canada, Japan or Australia.

1 Acting through Bryan Garnier Securities SAS.

2 Acting through Bryan Garnier Securities SAS.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210210005732/en/

Contacts:

MedinCell

David Heuze

Communication leader

david.heuze@medincell.com

+33 (0)6 83 25 21 86

NewCap

Mathilde Bohin Louis-Victor Delouvrier

Investor relations

medincell@newcap.eu

+33 (0)1 44 71 98 53

NewCap

Nicolas Merigeau

Media relations

medincell@newcap.eu

+33 (0)1 44 71 94 98

Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US

Iran ready to help improve the defense capability of Syria

European Parliament head proposes to strengthen sanctions on Russia

UK PM gets married in London

Armenia reports COVID-19 new 81 cases: for people die

EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia

2 people die in Armenia road accident

Nigeria: Students taken hostage a month ago are released

61 quakes recorded in Congo per day

Syrian MFA: EU lost credibility due to blind obedience to US policy

Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack

Mher Grigoryan: Clarification of border points is possible only after withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops from Armenia

Suspicious deal: Whether there was profit from buying DNA IDs?

Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war

4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack

Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities

Kocharyan: I have to ask people how it happened that overwhelming majority elected this leader

Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country

Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia

US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs

Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners

Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions

Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US

Iran intensifies its diplomacy amid Armenia-Azerbaijan border tensions

Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes

Lukashenko accuses West of destabilizing situation in Belarus

Armenia Central Electoral Commission chief on snap elections: No legal basis for postponing, suspending any function

Armenias Pashinyan is met by Yerevan district residents chanting against him

We are ready to be fully engaged in negotiation process to resolve Karabakh issue, says Armenia acting PM

Armenia ex-President Kocharyan gives interview to Russia TV channel

Armenia acting premier: We are ready to start withdrawing troops at any moment

Canada MFA expresses concern over 6 Armenian soldiers capture by Azerbaijan troops

There are omissions in registration documents of political forces that applied to Armenia Central Electoral Commission

Armenia Central Electoral Commission chief: There is activeness in Yerevan for the past day or two

Three new cases of coronavirus reported in Artsakh

Group of US Congress members threaten Azerbaijans Aliyev regime with sanctions

Chicago mayor is sued for allegedly refusing interview with white reporter

Iran exports oil to US for first time after long interval

"Armenia" bloc top 50 MP candidates are announced

42 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia

Sri Lanka public beach is covered in charred plastic pellets due to fire in container ship

US preparing list of targeted sanctions on Belarus authorities

China believes it will own America by 2035, Biden says

15 al-Shabab militants killed in Somalia

Newspaper: Armenia political forces that applied for running in election impatiently await CEC decision

Newspaper: Changes are expected in Artsakh

California prisoner who considers himself Satanist beheads cellmate, dismembers his body

Newspaper: Armenia acting PM's "mutually beneficial" proposal to collapse state system?

Armenia National Security Service Reserve Officers' Union members meet with His Holiness Karekin II

EU is ready to help Armenia and Azerbaijan with border delimitation and demarcation

ARF-D member on Nikol Pashinyan: 103 years ago Armenia's founding fathers would have executed him for treason

Iran President hails brotherly ties with Azerbaijan

Robert Kocharyan on years of his leadership in Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia

Situation on Armenian-Azerbaijani border is still tense, more on COVID-19 in Armenia, May 28 digest

"Armenia" alliance of political parties paying tribute to founder of First Republic Aram Manukyan

Yerevan.today: Armenia acting PM not greeted at ruling party's headquarters, citizens call him 'capitulator'

Russia MOD reports on maintenance of ceasefire regime in Nagorno-Karabakh

Armenia acting MOD meets with Russian counterpart in Moscow

Armenia 2nd President: I see possibility of restoring borders of Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast

We can provide our army with some key, modernized weapons, says Armenia ex-President Kocharyan

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan: Captives issue is not one that any opposition force can resolve

OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs release statement on detention of 6 Armenian servicemen by Azerbaijan

Armenian acting Deputy PM: Discussion on issues possible only after withdrawal of Azeri troops from Armenia's territory

Armenia acting PM on Syunik roads, Russian military posts: This is only place where there are working nuances

Armenia acting PM: Process of return of POWs will intensify after upcoming elections

Putin congratulates Aliyev on Republic Day

Josep Borrell: A group of EU Ministers will visit Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan

Armenia acting PM: We're not going to escalate situation for 30% of Sev Lake

Armenia 3rd President visits Vanadzor, pays tribute to heroes of Battle of Gharakilisa (PHOTOS)

Armenia ex-President Kocharyan lays flowers at Battle of Karakilisa memorial (PHOTOS)

Armenia acting PM: Solution to captives issue is matter of time

Shoygu to Harutyunyan: Russia, Armenia strengthen military cooperation

Armenia acting premier: We are 100% honest toward our country

Artsakh President pays tribute at Stepanakert memorial, Shushi Tank-Monument

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan on Meghri corridor plan: Not beneficial to us now to discuss it as "corridor"

Acting PM: "Cement," "fittings" were stolen while constructing Armenia state "building"

Two new cases of coronavirus reported in Artsakh

Catholicos of All Armenians visits Sardarapat Memorial, again separate from state officials

MOD dismisses Azerbaijan statement on Armenia army firing toward Nakhchivan

Jerusalem Post: Israel prepares for a new war with Hamas

France, UN World Food Programme partner to support displaced people in Armenia

Armenia ex-President Kocharyan: Today we are not full-fledged negotiating party

Norwegian prime minister opposes series of NATO reforms

Armenia deputy FM briefs UN, Red Cross leaders on consequences of Azerbaijan aggression against Artsakh

NATO Secretary-General: Afghans must take full responsibility for peace and stability in their country

104 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia

Armenia acting premier: Our sovereignty, independence cannot be subject of discussion

Karabakh state-finance minister announces resignation

Artsakh MFA: Sardarapat victory has inspired all Armenians for over a century

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan: In contrast to kneeling, disgraceful authorities of the day, we have determination

Armenia President: Today we stand on threshold of Sardarapat of morality, dignity

Catholicos of All Armenians: Our people shall find strength to overcome this ordeal as well

Armenia First Republic Day event is held under very modest conditions

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Armenia ex-President Sargsyan: Now or never!

Armenia President, then acting premier arrive at Sardarapat Memorial

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France ambassador: I wish Armenia to be able to live its independence in peace, prosperity

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Drew Barrymore's ex husband Will Kopelman is ready to get hitched again, announcing his engagement to Vogue director of fashion initiatives Alexandra Michler late last month.

And they looked like quite the couple while seen out for the first time since their happy wedding news.

The 42-year-old art consultant and his 33-year-old beloved bundled up in matching looks to take a romantic stroll around New York together on Tuesday.

Lovebirds: Drew Barrymore's ex Will Kopelman took a romantic stroll around New York with fiance Alexandra Michler on Tuesday

Both donned head-to-toe blue, pairing warm navy jackets with denim and holding gloved hands.

Even their shoes matched, with Will - who was wed to Barrymore from 2012 to 2016 -wearing tan work boots while Alexandra walked around in Ugg boots of the same hue.

Kopelman took to his private Instagram account to share the engagement news at the end of January, sharing a black and white snap where she flashed her ring while writing: 'Love you love you love you love 1/30/2021.'

Debut: It was the 42-year-old art consultant and 33-year-old Vogue editor's first public sighting since their happy news

Her last ex: Will was wed to Barrymore from 2012 to 2016

The announcement came just a month after the couple made things Instagram official in a snap where she called him 'love.'

Will and Drew were wed for four years and share two children together, daughters Olive, eight, and Frankie, six.

Barrymore previously divorced Canadian comedian Tom Green in 2002 after 15 months of marriage. She was also wed to British bar owner Jeremy Thomas for two torrid months in 1995.

Co-parents: The former couple share daughters Olive, eight, and Frankie, six. They're seen in 2015 above

Last October, Drew spoke candidly about the impact her split from Will had on her life, revealing that she 'really did not take divorce well.'

Speaking to Willie Geist on Sunday Today, she said 'I dont think I would have been able to talk about it as openly at first. I really did not take divorce well. I took it really hard.'

'I was, like, "Oh, the ultimate promise I wanted to make with you and for you was to have this amazing family." And I found them. And there's something not working that isn't livable. How tragic is that?,' she went on.
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Rita Janice Sall, an avid writer, poet, and artist who attended New Yorks Fashion Institute of Technology, where she majored in fashion design, and now resides in Westfield, New Jersey, has completed her new book Unlimited; a beautifully illustrated poetry collection that inspires the imagination and touches the shared emotions of human life.

Unlimited- a collection of diverse and stimulating original poems, by Rita Janice Salltakes us on a never-ending emotional roller-coaster ride for the senses: the heart, the mind, and the spirit. Her unparalleled depth of feelings touches on a myriad of subjects pertinent to this thing called life. An adventure for the hungry soul, Unlimited, is so much more than simply poetry. It is an exploration of lifes experiences that takes you on a joyous yet thought-provoking journey of the heartone that intimately touches on all things human. It speaks of life as we know and live it: of truth, love, passion, disappointment, and despair; of inspiration and motivation; of immense feelings of hope and faith, belief, and trust; of undeniable spirit as well as the endless beauty of nature; and of the world in which we currently live. Her words and visions will fill your senses and satisfy the need to think, to feel, to experience as she takes you on this amazing voyage that reaches out to the very depths of ones humanity.

Her words and imagery will grab you by the heartstrings as she gently guides you on a wonderful tour of self-discovery through her artistry as a poetone that brings us to the core of our kindness, compassion, and understanding. If you love the indisputable magic of words, of poetry, with all its undeniable visions, images, all its nuances, shapes, and shadingthen Unlimited is a must-read for you. It will touch your heart and allow you to think and feel as you have never done beforejust for the sheer joy of it.

Published by Page Publishing, Rita Janice Salls engrossing book is an excellent choice for avid poetry readers.

Readers who wish to experience this engaging work can purchase Unlimited 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, 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 understands that authors should be free to create, not mired in logistics like eBook conversion, establishing wholesale accounts, insurance, shipping, taxes, and so on. Pages accomplished writers and publishing professionals allow authors to leave behind these complex and time-consuming issues and focus on their passion: writing and creating. Learn more at http://www.pagepublishing.com.
The Election Commission will most likely hold elections in West Bengal in six to seven phases. The final call will be taken after February 15.

The apex electoral body is also mulling over holding single-phased elections in Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Puducherry. Assam may see elections in 2-3 phases.

Beginning Wednesday, the top brass of the Election Commission would visit Tamil Nadu, Puducherry and Kerala to take stock of election preparedness. The commission has already visited Assam and West Bengal.

The terms of the legislative assemblies of the four states and the Union Territory of Puducherry end on different dates in May and June and the elections are likely to take place in April. The commission, comprising Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora and Election Commissioners Sushil Chandra and Rajiv Kumar, will be in Tamil Nadu on February 10 and 11.

They would visit neighbouring Puducherry on February 12 and Kerala on February 13 and 14 to interact with poll officials and civil and police officers to take stock of election preparedness. The commission also interacts with political parties.

The commission usually visits poll-bound states before announcing the election schedule. But in the case of Bihar, the poll panel had visited Patna after announcing the election dates.

News18 earlier reported that the Election Commission will hold a series of meetings under chief election commissioner Sunil Arora between February 12 and 20 to discuss holding assembly polls in Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Puducherry, Assam and West Bengal.
It became known, inaccurately as it would turn out, as the Badaun rape case, after the district in Uttar Pradesh  Horror Pradesh, one news channel called it  one of Indias most politically significant and poorest states, where people survived on grass in lean times. Photographs of the dangling bodies were seen around the world, the girls mothers and grandmother crouching beneath them, veiling their faces, refusing to be moved. Children and men stood, forming a ring around them.

Image Sonia Faleiro, whose new book is The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing. Credit... Jonathan Ring

When Faleiro began visiting the village in 2015, it was to research a planned book about rape in India. But the case cracked open to reveal a honeycomb of histories, resentments, secrets, competing interpretations. The nature of the crime kept shifting. Was it murder or suicide? The families of the girls laid the blame on a local boy and his kin, of a more powerful caste. This was a story of caste violence, it was decided.

No; the police began suspecting the fathers. This was, in fact, a story of honor killings  of a world in which reputation was skin and the taboo against premarital sex was greater than the stigma of rape. Or was it a news story, about the proliferation of soap opera narratives and the Indian medias taste for them? Or a story of jagged modernization, of a country in which cellphones were cheap and ubiquitous but toilets scarce? (The girls had gone out in the night to use the fields.)

You get as much story as you can take, the writer Adrian Nicole LeBlanc has said. And, perhaps, you can tell as much story as skill and structure allow. Faleiro has a talent for ramifying plots and slippery characters  for a narrative that resists easy formulation. Her books include Beautiful Thing, a portrait of Mumbais dance bars, and 13 Men, a study of another shocking crime that, on second look, might certainly be a crime but of a very different sort. The Good Girls gathers all these strands: of sexual violence and caste, new types of media narratives and ancient taboos  no story exists in isolation after all. In brisk chapters, some just a few pages long, with the sort of headings one associates with Victorian novels  Cousin Manju Observes Something Strange; Nazru Sees It Too; A Finger Is Pointed  we glide swiftly, smoothly, only to realize that were not approaching a clearing but being led into a darker, more tangled story.

A central Pennsylvania lawyer accused of threatening to kill Democratic members of the U.S. Senate has pleaded not guilty to the federal criminal charges lodged against him.

Acting U.S. Attorney Bruce Brandler said Wednesday that Kenelm L. Shirk, 71, of Cornwall, Lebanon County, entered that plea during his initial appearance before U.S. Middle District Magistrate Judge Susan E. Schwab.

Kenelm L. Shirk III, 71, was arrested and charged with two counts of terroristic threats. Photo: PA State Police

It is standard practice in the federal courts for defendants to plead not guilty this early in their cases.

Investigators said Shirk, who was arrested by state police at a convenience store near Shippensburg on Jan. 21, had an AR-15 rifle, two handguns, a large quantity of ammunition, rope, gloves, and about $5,000 in several rolls of $50 bills. He also had threatened his wife, they said.
Yangon: Crowds demonstrating against the military takeover in Myanmar again defied a ban on protests on Wednesday, even after security forces ratcheted up the use of force against them and raided the headquarters of the political party of ousted leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

Fresh protests were reported in Yangon and Mandalay, the countrys two biggest cities, as well as the capital Naypyitaw and elsewhere.

The protesters demand power be restored to Suu Kyis deposed civilian government. Theyre also seeking freedom for her and other governing party members since the military detained them after blocking the new session of Parliament on February 1.

A group of shirtless demonstrator hold images of ousted Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi during a protest in Yangon, Myanmar, on Wednesday. Credit:AP

A group of police in Kayah state in the east joined the protesters and marched in uniform with a sign that said We dont want dictatorship, according to pictures published by local media.
YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 10, ARMENPRESS. The Armenian government plans to build alternative roads to Syunik Province. ARMENPRESS reports the Minister of Territorial Administration and Infrastructure Suren Papikyan said during parliament-Cabinet Q&A session.

"Yes, we will build. We will build as soon as the weather conditions allow, "Papikyan said.

After the large-scale war unleashed by Azerbaijan against Artsakh, the problem of some roads in Syunik still remains unsolved.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-10 17:38:26|Editor: huaxia

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Peruvian President Francisco Sagasti (L) shows his certificate after receiving a dose of COVID-19 vaccine from Chinese pharmaceutical firm Sinopharm in Lima, Peru, Feb. 9, 2021. (Peruvian Presidential Press/Handout via Xinhua)

LIMA, Feb. 9 (Xinhua) -- Peruvian President Francisco Sagasti on Tuesday received the first shot of the Chinese Sinopharm vaccine, officially launching its national vaccination campaign against COVID-19.

"Today I am getting vaccinated without fear but with confidence and hope, along with all of you who are going to be vaccinated," the president said at the Central Military Hospital in the capital Lima.

"We are absolutely sure that all Peruvians will stand behind Peru when it comes to getting vaccinated. Let's all get vaccinated, it's the best we can do, for ourselves, for our loved ones and for Peru," he added.

The initial stage of the vaccination drive prioritizes "those who work in intensive care, emergency and hospitalization services, including doctors, assistants, obstetricians and disease experts in all critical areas," Sagasti said.

As of Tuesday afternoon, 3,449 healthcare staffers at 40 hospitals have been vaccinated, he said, adding that "we have distributed 141,367 doses at 56 hospitals in Lima and Callao."

The vaccination campaign began on Tuesday at hospitals in the capital such as Arzobispo Loayza Hospital and San Bartolome Hospital, where healthcare workers welcomed the vaccine. Enditem
A man accused of arranging the murder of his marijuana dealer in the St. Claude neighborhood was arrested this week, according to the New Orleans Police Department.

Jamon Edwards, 28, faces one count of second-degree murder in the fatal shooting of 25-year-old Tevis Jones last month. He turned himself in at the New Orleans jail on Tuesday, police said.

Edwards went to a home in the 1600 block of France Street on Jan. 20 to buy marijuana from Jones, according to a police account filed in Criminal District Court. A short time after arriving, Edwards said he was going to call his cousin to come over and went to wait outside, police wrote, citing a statement from an unidentified eyewitness who was with Jones.

When the cousin arrived, he entered the house with Edwards and shot Jones, according to the witness. Jones died at the scene. The gunman and Edwards  who the witness knew only as Jamon  fled, police wrote.

Police said they used a public records database to determine Edwards' last name. Then, police wrote, the witness picked Edwards' picture out of a photographic line-up of possible suspects and said he was the one who invited Jones' killer over.

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 witness told police that Edwards sent him a text later saying: Im f---ed up right now Im soooo f----ng sorry  I swear (I) didnt know he was gon do that I swear  I was shocked just like you on God I know you seen me just standing there.

Police obtained a warrant to arrest Edwards the day of the killing, and they publicly identified him as a suspect the day before he surrendered. Edwards was also booked on an unrelated warrant accusing him of battering a former girlfriend in front of three children in Algiers on Aug. 7.

His bail was set at $460,500 on Wednesday. He faces mandatory life imprisonment if convicted of murdering Jones.

It wasnt immediately clear whether detectives have identified the alleged shooter.

Jones is one of at least 19 people who have been murdered in New Orleans since the start of 2021.
A US defense official has warned that Bidens withdrawal from Syria will leave oil fields unprotected, according to Al-Araby Al-Jadeed.

US forces in Syria are focused on fighting the remnants of the Islamic State group and are not guarding oil fields as previously ordered by ex-president Donald Trump, a US defense official said Monday.

Since a US firm contracted last year with the Kurds in northern Syria to help exploit northeastern Syria oil reserves, US troops are not involved, said Pentagon spokesman John Kirby.

The 900 US military personnel and contractors in the region are not authorized to provide assistance to any other private company, including its employees or agents, seeking to develop oil resources in Syria, said Kirby.

The only exception is when US troops in Syria are operating under existing authorizations to protect civilians, he said, which could explain the continuing presence of US forces around the area of the oil fields.

Its important to remember that our mission there remains to enable the enduring defeat of ISIS, he said, referring to the Islamic State.

The shift is more a change in tone by the new US President Joe Biden from Trumps policy for the decade-old Syrian civil war.

The main oil fields are in territory in the countrys northeast, a region where the US-allied Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces hold sway and depend on the oil for income.

In 2019, after the Syria-Iraq Islamic State caliphate was crushed by US and allied forces, Trump declared that US troops would mostly withdraw from the country, leaving behind a residual force to protect the oil.

US officials said at the time that they were there to prevent the oil fields from falling into the hands of extremists.

The next year a previously unknown US oil company, Delta Crescent Energy, signed a deal with the Kurds to exploit the oil deposits.

The Syrian Observer has not verified the content of this story. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author.

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Thomas Donohue, CEO of the U.S. Chamber Of Commerce, speaks onstage during an event at the Grand Hyatt New York in New York, N.Y., on Sept. 23, 2019. (Riccardo Savi/Getty Images for Concordia Summit)

US Chamber of Commerce Appoints Clark to Succeed Donohue as CEO

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce this week named Suzanne Clark to serve as its next chief executive, becoming the first woman to lead the organization.

Clark, currently the groups president, will succeed Thomas Donohue, who is stepping down from the role after 24 years. Clark, who will continue as president, will become CEO on March 11; Donohue will stay on in an advisory capacity.

Suzanne Clarks extensive experience through ever-increasing responsibilities during her more than 16 years at the Chamber, combined with her ambitious vision and ongoing work to strengthen the U.S. Chamber of Commerce make her the resounding choice to lead the organization into the future, Christopher Lofgren, chair of the chambers board, said in a statement.

Founded in 1912, the chamber has become the worlds largest business federation, representing millions of companies.

Donohue, who met with President Joe Biden at the White House on Feb. 9, will remain in an advisory capacity when Clark takes over. Donohue praised Clark for her business experience and passion for free enterprise.

Clark became president of the chamber in 2019 and has been at the helm of an effort to reform the group. That led to endorsements for dozens of Democrats running for Congress, sparking anger from conservatives.

It is hypocrisy that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce would endorse these Democrats that are part of this socialist agenda that is driving this country out and is fighting this president, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) told Fox News last year.

The chamber has been billed as nonpartisan but typically supported and worked closer with Republicans. It still endorsed over six times as many GOP candidates in the last cycle.

Clark in a blog post on Feb. 10 said she will champion strong U.S. engagement in markets around the world as she looks to businesses big and small for inspiration.

Clark said America must begin to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic but portrayed the situation hopefully, describing the environment as one ripe for growth and innovation.

The politics of the moment must not hold us back from the work of the future. Its true, our country is deeply divided, and so our politicians are divided. But if were all in the same boatand we arehow far can we go while rowing in opposite directions? This moment calls for our leaders to act with both urgency and foresight. They should not waste energy by working at cross-purposes or squander goodwill by pursuing hyper-partisan agendas, she wrote.

I dont think history will judge todays flame-throwers and rabble-rousers to be the brave ones. It will be the leaders who had the guts to work together to help the American people, the discipline to engage in responsible governing and problem solving, and the vision to put us on the path to a brighter future. Those are the leaders we will stand by and work with.
The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later. Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size Myanmar has descended into chaos since a junta seized power from the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi on February 1. Armed forces and police have fired on demonstrators, who appear undeterred by curfews and a nationwide state of emergency, but the military have also entered shops and houses to attack people. The country is on the brink of collapse and civil war. More than 500 have been killed, with children among the victims. Thousands of people have been detained, including leaders of the former civilian government. Air strikes have been launched against ethnic minorities and the UNs special envoy to Myanmar has warned of a possible multi-dimensional catastrophe in the heart of Asia. The most famous person arrested is Suu Kyi, the 75-year-old civilian leader whose party won the November 2020 elections in a landslide. Key allies of the Nobel peace laureate have also been locked up, including Sydney academic Sean Turnell who has long served as an economic adviser. He faces up to 14 years in prison under colonial-era laws. This latest coup happened after she came into conflict with armed forces commander-in-chief Min Aung Hlaing, who questioned the legitimacy of the November 2020 elections that returned Suu Kyi with a massive majority. The target of US sanctions under the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act for his alleged involvement in human rights abuses against the Rohingya minority and others, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing has for 10 years maintained significant power even as the country has moved towards democracy. Did Suu Kyi ever really have power? What has triggered this latest turn of events? And wasnt Myanmar a democracy? Anti-coup protesters run to avoid military forces during a demonstration in Yangon, Myanmar, on Wednesday. Credit:AP

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What do I need to know about Myanmar? The south-east Asian republic, once a British colony called Burma, lies to the west of Thailand and also shares borders with China, Bangladesh, India and Laos. Officially a federation of states and regions known as the Republic of the Union of Myanmar, it is the worlds 25th most populous nation with 57 million people, nearly 90 per cent of them Buddhist. Myanmar became independent from Britain in 1948 but endured military rule almost uninterrupted between 1962 and 2011. The generals flirted with democracy in 1990 when they held a general election but rejected it when Suu Kyi, then under house arrest, won. Then, a decade ago, a group of generals traded khaki for suits and set up a new, quasi-civilian government. They promised elections, and largely delivered in 2015 when Suu Kyis party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), scored a resounding victory. The next election, when the NLDs five-year term was up, was in November  and the partys win was even more emphatic. Loading The military has never handed over power unconditionally, though, and under the junta-drafted constitution of 2008 it holds key positions in the cabinet, picks one of the three vice-presidents and is guaranteed a quarter of the seats in Parliament (which are therefore never up for election). Myanmar has seven large ethnic groups of which the largest is Burman with about 68 per cent, and the government recognises nearly 200 ethnic minorities and clans. The government does not recognise the Rohingya, a Muslim minority; Myanmars military has been accused of waging an attempted genocide against the Rohingya, leading to more than a million displaced people, including about 700,000 in refugee camps in Bangladesh.

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Myanmars military, called the Tatmadaw, has also been involved in civil wars with state-level armed forces that opposed central rule or rebelled against the oppression of a one-party state. The national governments recent efforts to broker a truce among the states have yielded mixed results. Demographically, the country is young: more than a quarter of the population is aged under 14, yet it has one of the lowest rates of spending on education as a percentage of gross domestic product in the world. The CIA World Factbook ranks Myanmar at 175 out of 228 countries for real GDP per capita. Women working in a paddy field in the Irrawaddy region of Myanmar in August. Credit:Getty Images Who is Aung San Suu Kyi, and why is she controversial? Born in British Burma in 1945, Suu Kyi is the daughter of a general who played an important role in the fight to establish an independent Myanmar after World War II. General Aung San was assassinated in 1947, and he remains a hero to the Burmese majority, including to the military leaders who detained Suu Kyi. A diplomat and scholar, Suu Kyi married Oxford historian Michael Aris and had two children. She was outspoken on human rights issues and confronted the military as its hold on power grew more repressive in the late 20th century. Aris died in 1999. Suu Kyi under house arrest in her dilapidated mansion in Yangon (formerly Rangoon) in 1996. Credit:Getty Images

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The pro-democracy movement of 1988 was a turning point for Suu Kyi, who had returned to Myanmar from Britain. The 8888 Uprising grew during the year, building up to August 8, 1988, a date people considered auspicious. However, the army killed 350 people (activists claim the true toll is thousands) and detained many more. Suu Kyis speech urging non-violent resistance at Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon on September 26, to more than half a million people in the aftermath of the massacre, became an iconic moment. Adored as The Lady, Suu Kyi led the NLD to a landslide victory in 1990 while under house arrest in Yangon. The generals refused to hand over power. Suu Kyi was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace while detained; she spent about 15 years in total under house arrest before being released in December 2010 during a thaw in relations with the military. Aung San Suu Kyi defends her country against accusations of the Rohingya genocide at the top UN court in the Hague in the Netherlands on December 11, 2019. Credit:Getty Images Her election victory in 2015 was hailed as a watershed moment for Myanmar democracy  she was allowed to campaign openly and to actually take power  but there were already questions about whether she had compromised too much of her credibility by engaging with the generals. She was criticised during the campaign for failing to rebuke the military for their longstanding abuses of the Rohingya minority, who had been denied citizenship and the right to vote. The condemnation grew after she was in office, as the military launched a crackdown that United Nations agencies have likened to genocide, in October 2016. Two years later, at the World Economic Forum, she equivocated by saying we have to be fair to all sides. Amnesty International stripped her of the Prisoner of Conscience Award shortly after while other honours have been revoked. Despite agitation from activists, there is no possibility of rescinding the Peace Prize under the Nobel statutes. Police charged Suu Kyi for illegally possessing communications equipment, allegedly found during a raid on her house in the capital, Naypyidaw, and when she first faced court in secret on February 16, The New York Times reported she was also charged with contravening a natural disaster management law by interacting with a crowd during the coronavirus pandemic.

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The military are both unearthing obscure colonial-era laws and drafting new cybersecurity bills to counter online activism. International Commission of Jurists accountability director Kingsley Abbott told the BBC one law, threatening public tranquility, was so vague and so broad is can pretty much be used to arrest anyone on any pretext. The bottom line is the military is completely above the law, and these developments are really a full-frontal assault on human rights and the rule of law in Myanmar. A protester holds a placard with a defaced image of Myanmar military commander-in-chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing. Credit:AP What does the military want and why has it struck now? The military has been involved in politics since independence. Military dictator Ne Win had already served as prime minister when he staged a coup in 1962 that led to the establishment of a one-party, socialist state. Ne Win stood down during the protests of 1988 but he was replaced by the notorious State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC), which detained thousands of political prisoners. It renamed itself the State Peace and Development Council in 1997; armed forces chief Than Shwe led the council from 1992 to 2011 and served as prime minister for part of that time; now 88, he remains an influential behind-the-scenes figure. His successor is Min Aung Hlaing. These decades of military rule left Myanmar a pariah state. Australia was among the countries that imposed sanctions on the nation after generals rejected Suu Kyis win in 1990 elections. Subject to sanctions and reliant on China, the former rice bowl of south-east Asia became an economic ruin, reaching crisis point in 2008 after Cyclone Nargis devastated the Irrawaddy delta, killing 138,000 people. The military was criticised for blocking relief efforts and international aid.

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After people ages 75 and up spent hours waiting in the cold for the COVID-19 vaccine, Health and Human Services Secretary urged people not to show up early and wait in line before their appointment.

Speaking at a news conference at the Danvers vaccination site, Marylou Sudders acknowledged concerns about lines at super vaccination locations. She and Gov. Charlie Baker attributed the lines to people showing up early for fear of missing out of a vaccine.

We strive to offer a no-line experience, trying to encourage people not to come early for their appointments. It is possible, there might just be a wait, Sudders said. We are asking folks to remain in your car until 15 minutes before your appointment. You wont lose your place.

Hundreds of people waited outside the Eastfield Mall in Springfield on Monday and Tuesday, in some cases for hours. One woman who took her 95-year-old mother to the vaccination site on Monday told MassLive they arrived for their 11 a.m. appointment but waited two hours. They waited outside for an hour and were admitted inside, where they waited inside for another hour before the mother could get her shot.

The company running the Springfield site, Curative, said people had lined up well before their appointment to make sure they could get vaccinated. Curative also said people getting vaccinated should stay in their cars until 15 minutes before the appointment.

Neither Curative nor Sudders addressed what options exist for people ages 75 and up who take a bus and arrive early. Some interviewed by MassLive said they worry that they will not notice when their appointment time is called out because they are visually impaired or have loss of hearing. Others said they worry theyll have to rush through the snow and ice if their number is called out while theyre in the car.

After complaints about the long lines, the state called in the Massachusetts National Guard to send 10 members to help administer the vaccine and manage the lines. Another 10 members were sent to the Danvers site, and more are expected to go help the East Boston Neighborhood Health Center with their vaccination efforts.

Curative also runs the Danvers site where Baker and Sudders spoke from Wednesday morning. The company was named as the provider running a new super vaccination site at the Circuit City in Dartmouth. The Dartmouth site is expected to open Feb. 25.

Neither Curative representatives nor a spokeswoman for the COVID-19 Command Center responded to questions about Curatives staffing levels and preparation for the Dartmouth site.

Asked about the plans for a Dartmouth site run by Curative, Sen. Eric Lesser said hes worried about the possibility of mistakes happening at the new site but that its too early to tell.

I am worried, but were going to see, the Longmeadow Democrat said. Frankly, I think the Governor should come here and should show the people of Springfield that this is a priority for him.

The Baker administration also plans to launch a super vaccination site at the Natick Mall on Monday. That site will be run by LabCorp.

The state announced more than 100,000 vaccination appointments will be available over the next week. About 74,000 appointments will be posted online Thursday for super vaccination sites and pharmacies, while another 30,000 will become available over the course of the week at pharmacies around the state.

Douglas Hook contributed to the reporting of this story.

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Stunning new security footage reveals how a Capitol Police officer prevented Sen. Mitt Romney from walking in the direction of a MAGA rob rampaging through the Capitol Jan. 6.

Other clips played by House Democratic managers show just how close Senate Majority Leader Sen. Charles Schumer came to an encounter with the mob.

The close calls became part of the trial record as managers played dramatic footage of enraged rioters smashing through Capitol windows, roaming through the halls , and hunting for lawmakers, who some threatened to kill.

House impeachment manager Rep. Stacey Plaskett (Del.-V.I.) in her presentation to the Senate revealed how hero Capitol Police officer Eugene Goodman helped redirect Romney during a brief encounter in the Senate.

Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah was heading towards a mob when he got a warning from Capitol Police officer Eugene Goodman

Goodman had been rushing along a second floor Senate corridor in order to make his way where Trump supporters had entered the Capitol.

His exploits in seeking to slow their approach and leading them to where other officers were located has already been widely shared.

But in new security footage played by the managers, Goodman can be seen passing Romney and directing him to turn around in order to get to safety, said Plaskett.

The footage, not yet seen publicly, shows Goodman running toward the Senate and its famous Ohio Clock.

He then gestures to Romney, who does an immediate 180-degree turn, having been walking toward the House where another larger mob had already gathered.

Plaskett presented the footage after showing earlier footage of rioters changing Hang Mike Pence and talking about killing and shooting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Romney, 73, is the only Republican senator to vote to convict Trump on an impeachment count last year, and Trump regularly lambasted him on Twitter.

Security footage shows the moment when Romney turned around and rushed in a safer direction

Goodman sought to slow an intrusion by rioters making their way toward the Senate chamber

Footage also shows Sen. Charles Schumer being led away, only to turn around and rush in the other direction

Schumer, 70, along with other senators, was evacuated after the MAGA mob breached the Capitol

"It tears at your heard and brings tears to your eyes. That was overwhelmingly distressing and emotional,' Romney told reporters in the Capitol during a break in the trial after the video got played.

He is one of six Republicans to vote Tuesday that the impeachment trial itself is constitutional.

The next batch of footage shows Goodman trying to slow rioters who gathered on the first floor of the building and pushed up stairs toward the second floor, where the entrance to the Senate chamber is located.

Vice President Mike Pence, who Trump identified as key to his election overturn effort, was sheltering along with his family including daughter Charlotte not far from the Senate floor.

Schumer and his team could be seen running in the opposite direction on security footage after walking up a ramp

Other footage played by the managers shows Schumer being escorted out of his Capitol leadership office as the mob approached.

He and his security detail came within 'had a near miss with the mob,' said Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell of California during his own presentation. 'They came within just yards of rioters and had to turn around,' he said.

He also played footage of senators being evacuated from the same chamber they were seated in during the trial. You were just 58 steps away from where the mob, Swalwell told them.

Schumer can be seen walking up a ramp with his detail. After he goes out of view, Schumer and his detail can be seen running down the same ramp.

'Officers immediately shut the door and use their bodies to keep them safe,' says Swalwell.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was also in grave danger, said Plaskett, noting that a man armed with a cane that was also a stun gun sat at her desk after penetrating her office. 'They would have killed her,' said Plaskett.
Louisiana Republican Party Profoundly Disappointed After Sen. Cassidys Vote in Impeachment Trial

Louisianas Republican Party expressed profound disappointment with Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) after he and five other Republicans sided with Democrats in an early impeachment trial vote.

The Republican Party of Louisiana is profoundly disappointed by Senator Bill Cassidys vote on the constitutionality of the impeachment trial now underway against former president, now private citizen, Donald J. Trump. We feel that an impeachment trial of a private citizen is not only an unconstitutional act, but also an attack on the very foundation of American democracy, which will have far reaching and unforeseen consequences for our republic, the Louisiana GOP said in a statement.

Cassidy voted to call the impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump constitutional, allowing the trial to move forward. He changed his vote from last month.

Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), Louisianas other senator, voted Tuesday with 43 other Republicans to deem the trial unconstitutional.

We salute Senator John Kennedy for remaining steadfast in his opposition to the fake impeachment trial now underway in Washington, D.C. Senator Kennedy has clearly made the right decision once again, the Louisiana GOP said.

Republicans who have sided with Democrats in the latest impeachment effort, including 10 members of the House, have faced blowback from their states.

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), for instance, was censured by the Wyoming Republican Party over the weekend for voting to impeach Trump.

Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) walks in Washington on Feb. 8, 2021. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

In another example, Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), who has twice now voted to call the trial constitutional, has faced mounting opposition for his anti-Trump statements and votes.

Cassidy after the vote said senators heard arguments from both sides on whether holding a trial against Trump was constitutional.

A sufficient amount of evidence of constitutionality exists for the Senate to proceed with the trial, he said. This vote is not a prejudgment on the final vote to convict. If anyone disagrees with my vote and would like an explanation, I ask them to listen to the arguments presented by the House managers and former President Trumps lawyers. The House managers had much stronger constitutional arguments. The presidents team did not.

Kennedy didnt appear to offer a comment on his vote. In an emailed statement to The Epoch Times, Kennedy said after the previous vote: Today, I voted to affirm that these impeachment proceedings are unconstitutional. Based on the information I have right now, I voted today and will vote again later in the impeachment trial to dismiss the impeachment proceedings against former President Trump.

Additionally, these proceedings, in part, represent a thinly veiled effort by the uber-elites in our country, who look down on most Americans, to denigrate further those people who chose to vote for President Trump and not vote for President Biden, he added.

While Kennedy has indicated he will vote to acquit Trump, Cassidy is one of 14 Republicans who are waiting to hear the evidence presented during the trial before deciding on their vote, according to an Epoch Times tally. Nine Democrats have offered similar stances while two senators, Sens. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), havent outlined their thoughts on the matter.
"Blue Ridge Bank is excited to continue its evolution to serve the growing needs of our current and future customers," said Brian K. Plum, Chief Executive Officer of Blue Ridge Bankshares, Inc. (NYSE American: BRBS), the parent company of Blue Ridge Bank. "The ATMs remain able to serve cash-based and inquiry activity, so this is simply layering on more services and reinforces our commitment to the future of banking for all customers."

Blue Ridge Bank has partnered with BluePoint ATM Solutions, a national ATM operator out of Woodstock, Va., and LibertyX, the leading U.S. bitcoin ATM software provider from Boston, Massachusetts.

BluePoint ATM Solutions CEO Wade Zirkle commented, "We are proud to partner with Blue Ridge Bank and LibertyX to provide ATM management services that are Bitcoin-capable. We predict that more community banks and credit unions will demand innovative fintech solutions like this at their branches, and we are excited to be a leader in this space."

"We're honored to work with Blue Ridge Bank and BluePoint. For years, consumers have been asking for the ability to buy bitcoin from their banks. We are proud that BRB is the first bank in the nation to offer bitcoin services on their ATMs," said Chris Yim, LibertyX Co-Founder & CEO. "LibertyX provides consumers with the trust and ease of going to 8,500 ATMs at local convenience stores, pharmacies, and gas stations. Now they can also buy bitcoin at their local bank ATM."

About Blue Ridge Bank:

Blue Ridge Bank, N.A., is the wholly-owned banking subsidiary of Blue Ridge Bankshares, Inc. Through its subsidiaries and affiliates, Blue Ridge Bank provides a wide range of financial services including retail and commercial banking, payroll, insurance, card payments, wholesale and retail mortgage lending, and government-guaranteed lending. The bank provides commercial banking services to customers located throughout Virginia and North Carolina. Visit mybrb.com to learn more.

About BluePoint ATM Solutions:

BluePoint ATM Solutions is one of the largest privately-held ATM management companies in the U.S., with offices in Virginia and Colorado. BluePoint ATM Solutions specializes in providing efficient, outsourced ATM services to Community Banks and Credit Unions across the U.S. and providing customized ATM services to the retail and hospitality industries. Contact CEO: Wade Zirkle, 540-335-2848, bluepointatm.com

About LibertyX:

Founded in 2013, LibertyX is America's first and most extensive network of bitcoin cashiers, kiosks, and ATM software. Consumers can buy and sell bitcoin at 8,500 LibertyX ATMs and 20,000 retail chain stores across 45 states. Visit libertyx.com to learn more.

Forward-Looking Statements:

Certain information contained in this release may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements represent plans, estimates, objectives, goals, guidelines, expectations, intentions, projections and statements of Blue Ridge Bank's beliefs concerning future events, business plans, objectives, expected operating results and the assumptions upon which those statements are based. Forward-looking statements include without limitation, any statement that may predict, forecast, indicate or imply future results, performance or achievements, and are typically identified with words such as "may," "could," "should," "will," "would," "believe," "anticipate," "estimate," "expect," "aim," "intend," "plan," or words or phases of similar meaning. Blue Ridge Bank cautions that the forward-looking statements are based largely on its expectations and are subject to a number of known and unknown risks and uncertainties that are subject to change based on factors which are, in many instances, beyond the Blue Ridge Bank's control, including those risk factors included in Blue Ridge Bankshares, Inc.'s Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2019, and other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Actual results, performance or achievements could differ materially from those contemplated, expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements.

SOURCE Blue Ridge Bank, N.A.
What it does

Metal NRG PLC's ( ) main focus is on its Gold Ridge Project in Arizona, acquired in November 2018, which encompasses three previously-producing gold mines known as Gold Prince, Gold Ridge and Dives mines, which are over a 1.8km strike within prospective 5km long vein swarm.

The three mines contain high-grade gold bearing quartz-sulphide veins, with historical production at the Gold Prince mine of 22,000 oz through to 1996.

The explorer is hoping to monetise the waste dumps and pillars left behind by previous operators, so that it can then go on to develop the significant exploration potential in the area.

also has an 8.5% stake in the Kamushanovskoye uranium deposit in Kyrgyzstan, which is currently on hold pending government legislation on uranium mining in the country which it proposed to ban in March.

The company has completed due diligence the potential acquisition of an oil and gas concession in Romania. The terms of the acquisition are under review, following the sharp fall in the oil price in the wake of the coronavirus crisis.

believes the opportunity in Romania is significant

Recent developments

completed on its oil and gas transaction in December 2020, by acquiring, through special purpose vehicle BritNRG 100% of Sunswept Enterprises Limited and related assets.

Following completion of the acquisition and at current modest production levels, Sunswept is expected to be net cashflow positive at Brent prices sub $40/bbl, which is significantly below the current Brent price. A reduction of the breakeven oil price reference is expected as production levels are restored by bringing the Whisby #6 Well back on stream (by a wax removal workover) possibly within Q1/2021. Further reductions and additional cash generation is expected with the near-term development in both the Whisby and Newton on Trent assets. The relevant appraisals are nearing finalisation and BritNRG intends to present detailed plans to the OGA in the shortest possible timeframes.

The initial investment made by MetalNRG in BritNRG will be via a convertible loan note for a total amount of 450,000, payable in 3 tranches and which upon redemption will convert into 50% of the total BritNRG equity.

Meanwhie, the company will continue to seek additional projects that meet its set investment criteria. The intention is specifically to seek opportunities that will deliver early positive cash flows .

Progress is continuing in regard to the acquisition of the Imweru gold project in Tanzania.

What the boss says: Rolf Gerritsen, chief executive

"I am extremely pleased with the outcome and would like to thank Pierpaolo Rocco for his hard work in leading the transaction to a successful conclusion and I welcome the opportunity to work with the private investors who are our partners in this venture. Now that we have operational control of the assets the real work can commence and both Pierpaolo and I look forward to updating the market on BritNRG's progress over the next few months as we develop the potential upside of the assets."

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The jury has been discharged in the trial of a Sydney man accused of brokering deals for North Korea in contravention of United Nations sanctions, after he pleaded guilty to two charges.

Eastwood resident Chan Han Choi, 62, was standing trial in the NSW Supreme Court on seven charges relating to five alleged transactions.

Chan Han Choi outside the King Street Supreme Court in Sydney. Credit:Stephen Saphore

The prosecution had alleged the South Korean-born Australian citizen attempted to sell missiles and other military equipment, coal and iron from North Korea to other jurisdictions; and attempted to buy Iranian petroleum on behalf of North Korea.

The Crown told the jury that none of the alleged transactions was successful but each contravened United Nations sanctions. Mr Choi had pleaded not guilty to the charges.

Good morning.

An extreme cold warning remains in effect for nearly the entire province. Manitoba Hydro has cancelled several planned power outages in Winnipeg because of frigid temperatures. Meanwhile, much of Boissevain was without heat for a few hours because of an outage Tuesday.

 Adam Treusch, assignment editor
Anutin: Thai jab drive has not failed

THAILAND: Deputy Prime Minister and Public Health Minister Anutin Charnvirakul yesterday (Feb 9) insisted that Thailand has not failed in its procurement of COVID-19 vaccines and demanded that the media stop comparing Thailand with other countries.

CoronavirusCOVID-19drugshealth

By Bangkok Post

Wednesday 10 February 2021, 09:26AM

Deputy Prime Minister and Public Health Minister Anutin Charnvirakul. Photo: Bangkok Post.

His comments followed criticism that Thailand was slow to procure vaccines while several neighbouring countries have already started their roll-outs.

The country has not failed in this regard as it has become a base for the production of vaccines with the same formula as the leading university in England, he said, referring to the Oxford University/AstraZeneca vaccine.

Thailand is part of a supply chain which will make it easy for procurement and distribution of vaccines in the future. This is better than waiting for vaccines produced by other countries, which may have an impact on the countrys vaccination programme, Mr Anutin said.

Thailand had devised a carefully planned vaccination programme. But when a second wave occurred, it was necessary to adjust the plan, he said.

While the second outbreak was the result of violations of laws - illegal entry and gambling - some are trying to point the finger of blame at public health officials, Mr Anutin said.

I dont want anyone to compare the Thai public health system with other countries because Thailand ranked high on the list of countries that are successful in containing the COVID-19 outbreak, he said.

He also said the first batch of COVID-19 vaccines is expected to arrive in the country this month and it will be administered to those who need it most, as planned. He said his medical teams and officials are working hard to bring COVID-19 vaccines to the country and they are highly concerned about the safety of Thai people.

Last month, the Lowy Institute ranked Thailand 4th for its successful handling of COVID-19 in the COVID Performance Index of 98 countries worldwide.

Mr Anutin also hit back at critics of the governments vaccination programme, saying a lack of information will cause public confusion. He also rejected a claim by some media outlets that Thailand has not registered vaccines so they cannot be used.

I once said vaccines are a delicate issue. Therefore, those who know nothing about it or do not have enough information but speak through the media will cause confusion among the public, Mr Anutin said.

Public criticism of the vaccination programme is mounting as countries which are part of the Covax agreement are now preparing to roll out their inoculation drives.

At the start of the pandemic, Thailand decided against joining the programme to pursue its own deals with vaccine manufacturers, as by law, the government is not allowed to spend money on vaccines which have not been proven to be effective.

In August last year, the Public Health Ministry and the National Vaccine Institute began seeking deals with vaccine manufacturers.

Covax is co-led by Geneva-based vaccine alliance Gavi, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) and the World Health Organization (WHO), to accelerate the development and manufacturing of COVID-19 vaccines, and guarantee equitable access for every country in the world. It provides free or cheap vaccines to poor countries. However, Thailand is categorised as self-financing.

Mr Anutin also said yesterday local administration organisations and the private sector are not allowed to buy any COVID-19 vaccines by themselves for the time being.

Producers were testing their vaccines in human trials and agreed to sell them to governments for emergency use only, he added.

Vaccines would be used to prevent severe symptoms that may cause death, though whether they can prevent infections has yet to be confirmed, Mr Anutin said.

Asked how the government will screen imported vaccines, Mr Anutin said that producers will send information to the government and when the vaccines arrive, the Department of Medical Sciences will examine them to ensure they are in line with safety standards.

Mr Anutin said China has confirmed that it has approved exports of its COVID-19 vaccines to Thailand. China has registered the vaccines for emergency use and Thailand is also ready to do the same, he added.

Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha said yesterday Thailand will have 2 million COVID-19 vaccine doses by the end of April, beginning with 200,000 doses this month. Speaking to reporters after the cabinet meeting at Government House, Gen Prayut said 800,000 more would be delivered next month. A further 1 million doses will arrive in April, Gen Prayut said.
Development of a full innovative range of implants for lumbar discopathies,

US commercial launch aimed for the end of 2021 and obtaining of CE-marking in 2022

First collaborative project industrialized in the Integrated Manufacturing Company of Safe Group in Fleurieux-sur-l'Arbresle

Eragny-sur-Oise, France, on 10 February 2021, 17h35 CET - Safe Orthopaedics (FR0013467123 - ALSAF), holding of the Safe Group (composed of Safe Orthopaedics, a company specializing in the design, manufacturing and marketing of single-use technologies for spinal surgeries, and Safe Medical (Ex-LCI medical), integrated subcontractor for orthopaedic medical devices, today announces the signature of a technological co-development agreement with the American company SpineUp Inc.

The treatment for lumbar discopathies is constantly evolving : miniaturization of incisions, multiple surgical approaches, PEEK machined or titane printed implants and the surgeons wish to have the best options to best treat their patients. Since several quarters, Safe Orthopaedics works on the extension of its SteriSpine LC range, in order to offer a maximum of ready-to-use options.

"3 years ago I decided to begin using Safe Orthopaedics' ready-to-use products in order to enhance the efficiency of my OR team and improve the outcomes for my patients. In collaboration with the Safe Orthopaedics team, I have seen the benefits that the ready-to-use concept can bring to my practice and have been delighted with the clinical results. Surgeons need different options for the disc diseases treatment and I'm proud to collaborate in order to develop their portfolio of products, to expand their SteriSpineLC range and bring the benefits of the ready-to-use model to many more treatment pathways." explains Dc John Choi

The co-development strategy is a way to minimize conception costs, and to accelerate the commercial launch and clinical evoluation today requested by the new european regulation.

SpineUp, a manufacturer of medical devices for spinal surgery established in Florida, already customer of Safe Medical, shares the same interest as Safe Orthopaedics. Together, both companies aim a commercial launche and several other strategical territories by the end of 2021, the achievement of a clinical evaluation, necessary for the CE-marking, in 2022, and any other international homologations.

This co-development is perfectly in line with the strategy of Safe Group, which places at disposal its Integrated Manufacturing Company. Funded by the Recovery Plan and by BPIFrance on its innovation projects, Safe Medical continues extension of its French site, where additive manufacturing and sterile packaging of medical device will be conducted, in addition to machining and finishing.

"This partnership between manufacturers is an innovation accelerateur. By mutualizing our research and development efforts, our companies, SpineUp and Safe Group, will quickly have a large innovative range of implants for the treatment of lumbar discopathies, while keeping our unique indentities on instrument technologies. For this reason, Safe Orthopaedics works closely on its ready-to-use instrument technologies SteriSpine LC with a group of international surgeons in order to respond to different surgical approaches", Pierre Dumouchel, President and Chief Executive Officer of Safe Group, explains.

About Safe Group

Safe Group is a French medical technology company, composed of Safe Orthopaedics, pioneer of ready-to-use technologies for spinal diseases and Safe Medical (ex-LCI medical), subcontractor of medical devices for orthopaedics surgery. The Group employs around 150 employees.

Safe Orthopaedics develops and manufactures kits combining sterile implants and single-use instruments, available at any time for the surgeon. These technologies enable minimally invasive approach, reducing the risk of

cross contamination and infection, in the interest of the patient with a positive impact on hospitalization durations and costs. Protected by 17 patent families, the SteriSpineTM PS are CE marked and FDA approved.

Safe Orthopaedics has its headquarters close to Paris (95610 Eragny-sur-Oise - France) and subsidiaries in the UK, Germany, United States and in the Lyon area where the manufacturing company is located.

For more information: www.SafeOrthopaedics.com

Contacts

Safe Group

Francois-Henri Reynaud

Chief Financial and Administrative Officer

Tel.: +33

Press Relations

Ulysse Communication

Pierre-Louis Germain / +33

Bruno Arabian / +33

Attachment

San Antonio health officials have detected the first known cases of the more contagious U.K. strain of COVID-19 in two local residents, officials said Tuesday.

Details about the two cases  including how the residents contracted the strain, how long they have had it and their condition  are unknown. Metro Health is still investigating the cases, said the agencys chief epidemiologist Rita Espinoza.

Some 40 cases of the strain have been found in Texas since January  the first in Houston and others followed in Dallas and Austin.

Mayor Ron Nirenberg pointed out that although this mutant strain appears to be more contagious, existing supplies of COVID-19 vaccine appear to be effective against the variant, he said.

Residents should continue to wear masks, keep at least six feet of social distance from others and stay home if they are sick, Nirenberg said.

This serves as a wake-up call for the community to do your best to follow the guidance of our public health authorities, Nirenberg said at the daily city-county coronavirus briefing. Do not let your guard down.

Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff echoed that.

We do need to be careful, Wolff said. Its out there and it spreads very, very, very quickly.

The more contagious strains presence in San Antonio comes as the San Antonio Stock Show and Rodeo is set to start Thursday  even after Wolff asked them to postpone the annual two-week event. Rodeo officials have defended the move  noting that they have scaled back attendance and implemented safety measures like enforcement of face-mask wearing, social distancing and temperature checks.

Any protective measures implemented to combat the usual strain of the virus are thought to be just as effective against the new strain, Espinoza said.

Weve taken a lot of precautionary methods for anybody that has an event in (Freeman Coliseum), Wolff said. Theyre going, so our job now is to try to make it as safe as possible.

On ExpressNews.com: Get the latest update on coronavirus and a tracking map of U.S. cases

Health officials found the U.K. strain as the virus continued to loosen its winter grip on the city.

Bexar County added 1,348 new cases of the disease Tuesday, bringing the confirmed total since the pandemic began to 184,784. The seven-day average of new cases stood at 935  down from 1,510 a week ago.

The number of COVID-19 patients in local hospitals fell below 900 for the first time since December. As of Tuesday, some 884 people were hospitalized with the virus. Within the last 24 hours, hospitals admitted 117 new COVID-19 patients.

Those needing critical care sat at 341 Tuesday. Of those, 198 needed the assistance of a ventilator to breathe.

Health officials reported the first day without deaths since mid-January. At least 2,362 residents have died of the virus since the pandemic began last March  402 of which have been reported since the start of the new year.

Citing the citys falling positivity rate, or the percentage of tests that come back positive, Metro Health has downgrade its school risk level to moderate  recommending that local schools should prioritize in-person instruction for pre-K and elementary school students as well as special needs students, students considered at-risk and those who dont have access to resources like broadband internet.

School buildings and classrooms should not operate at more than 50 percent of capacity, per Metro Health guidelines.

Metro Health cant enforce its guidelines  that authority lies with the state.

jfechter@express-news.net | Twitter: @JFReports
The message from NSWs gambling regulator in the wake of the scathing Bergin report into Crown Resorts could not have been clearer: If you thought there was no money laundering happening in this state right now, youd be dreaming.

While it was the suitability of Crown to hold a casino licence in Sydney that was under investigation, Commissioner Patricia Bergins report has laid the groundwork for the Berejiklian government to embark on its most significant social reform this term. However, the pathway to substantive reform to gambling in NSW would be treacherous, given the power that pubs and clubs wield in the state and their deep connections to Macquarie Street.

Crown Tower at Barangaroo, where a planned casino is still awaiting approval. Credit:Jessica Hromas

Bergin found Crown facilitated money laundering in its Melbourne and Perth casinos. Philip Crawford, the chairman of the Independent Liquor and Gaming Authority, which ordered the sensational public inquiry into the James Packer-backed group, said on Wednesday the dirty money is not just a problem for Crown or casinos. Our concern would be if we were going to have a really good crack at the casino industry ... where do the money launderers take their money... we just dont want it washing into the suburban pubs and clubs, he said.

Crawford then threw his support behind an ambitious proposal led by senior minister Victor Dominello. The minister responsible for gaming is determined to overhaul the lucrative poker machine industry in NSW in a bid to save problem gamblers and tackle organised crime.
Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later. Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size Last October, NSW Customer Service Minister Victor Dominello proposed revolutionary reforms to liquor and gaming laws that he oversees. One of the most controversial elements of the proposal was a plan to transition pokie players from dropping the odd pineapple on the slots to having to register and pre-load money onto regulated, cashless cards that would be linked to the gamblers identity. The idea was that such a card would help curb the activities of problem gamblers  with the added factor it might also stem money laundering in gambling venues. On February 9, the liquor and gaming laws and their potential reform were shoved into the spotlight as former Supreme Court judge Patricia Bergin handed down a report that followed an 18-month inquiry into Crown Resorts, which exposed allegations of money laundering. In her comments to the Independent Liquor and Gaming Authority, she said such a card could be a powerful mechanism against organised crime. The plan for the card was developed in response to a 12 per cent increase in poker machine expenditure during the COVID-19 pandemic  the biggest annual increase in the history of Liquor and Gaming NSW. So how would such a card work? What are the criticisms of it? And why might we need one? What is the gambling card and how would it work?

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The government has proposed that all gaming machine players register and preload money onto a government-regulated card that would operate similarly to the states cashless Opal cards (which are for public transport). Players would need a card to play on a machine. The card aims to reduce both gambling harm and money laundering in NSW, which has been dubbed by the head of the Alliance for Gambling Reform, Tim Costello, as the non-casino pokies capital of the world. The card would be overseen by the Privacy Commissioner and linked to the states existing exclusion register, which is designed to prevent thousands of self-excluded gamblers from accessing poker machines. Individuals sign a deed asking to be banned from one or more gaming venues. If youre on the register, you wouldnt be able to get a card. As it stands, there are no sanctions for individuals or venues for breaching the states exclusion register. In fact, 2019s NSW Gambling Survey showed 92 per cent of excluded gamblers were able to enter a venue they should have been restricted from to play the pokies. Under the proposed reforms, separate from the card, venues would face up to a $27,000 fine if found to be in breach of the self-exclusion restrictions. The proposal would also allow relatives of gamblers to apply to have their relatives banned from venues. Between July and December 2020, total gaming machine profit was $4.4 billion, up from $4 billion in the last six months of 2019, despite halted trading in pubs and clubs due to restrictions implemented to stop the spread of the coronavirus. Mr Dominello, as Minister for Customer Service, has cited the death of Sydney man Gary van Duinen, who took his own life following a poker machine binge at Dee Why RSL, as part of the motivation behind the card proposal.

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Why are we talking about this now? Commissioner Bergins 750-page report into Crowns suitability to keep the licence for its new $2.2-billion Barangaroo casino has found that Crown Sydney was not a suitable person to hold a casino licence but there are steps the giant may take to make it suitable to hold a licence. The report showed that Crowns gaming machines had been used to launder money in its Melbourne and Perth casinos, bringing Mr Dominellos card proposal into the limelight. Although the inquirys report says a gambling card would be a matter for government, it notes casinos would be free to introduce their own mechanisms of a similar kind for their own patrons. There is a recent development in this regard in NSW with a proposal for the introduction of a gambling card that would enable the tracking of cash through a casino, the report says. How would a cashless card stop money laundering? Money laundering occurs where the origin of illegally obtained funds is concealed by a complex sequence of transfers or transactions. Gaming machines and the larger gambling industry can be used to assist this process because they are among the only arenas where significant amounts of cash can flow in and out of a premises in a largely unregulated way. The scale and frequency of the transactions make gaming machines a perfect place to hide the profits from nefarious or illegal deals.

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For example, an individual can enter an RSL club, put say $1000 into a machine, play for three minutes and cash in most of that sum. This process is referred to as cleaning money and provides a justification for having large amounts of cash on ones person. If the individual is questioned about the origins of the money? Theyve just had a good day on the pokies. About 20 per cent of the $6 billion players lose on gaming machines each year is almost certainly associated with crime, according to estimates from the Australian governments ministerial expert advisory group on gambling. This is because NSW has a very high load limit, meaning anyone can enter a pub or club in the state and put $7500 into one machine. Its not that high anywhere else in the country, except in the ACT where there is no limit. In her recent report, Commissioner Bergin refers to the gambling card as a powerful tool in addressing the major issues facing the industry. The proposal has been the subject of some public debate and is not free from controversy. However, it appears that the very significant utility of the card to assist the problem gambler would not be an issue. It is also obvious that it would be a powerful mechanism to assist in combating money laundering. How many people have a gambling problem in NSW? Just over half (53 per cent) of adults in NSW gamble, according to the 2019 NSW Gambling Survey. The Problem Gambling Severity Index from 2019 indicates 1 per cent of NSW adults are problem gamblers. If youre a single male aged between 18 and 24 who happens to be unemployed, youre most likely to make up the 1 per cent of adults who are problem gamblers, according to the index. The consequences of gambling are not limited to the player  an international study into gambling found in 2017 that for every problem gambler, six people around them are affected financially, socially or psychologically. What are the criticisms of the card? NSW has 95,000 poker machines across 4000 venues, 1500 of them at The Star casino in Sydney. All up, the NSW gaming machine industry is worth $6 billion. Its machines bring in a whopping $1 billion in state taxes each year and create up to 100,000 jobs. Clubs NSW has warned this is the worst time to force expensive solutions on clubs as they continue to grapple with the financial impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

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Because the cards are linked to an individuals identity, some people are concerned they will create a potential for data breaches and also feel Clubs NSW have not been adequately consulted in the development of the plan. Concerns have also been raised by Alliance for Gambling Reforms Tim Costello about the importance of ensuring the design of the cards does not detach players from the value of losing real money as this could have an inverse effect on curbing gambling harm. Has a card worked anywhere else? This is the first proposal in the world to create cashless gaming cards that will connect a players identity to their pre-loaded money and be accessible by a regulatory government body and relevant pub or club. Nova Scotia in Canada abandoned a gaming card program in 2014 where players would use preloaded cards instead of cash. But Nova Scotias program was not identity-linked, so players were able to skirt around the system by swapping, sharing and hoarding multiple cards. What are the next steps? Will a card be introduced? Thanks to an unlikely alliance between the Greens and One Nations Mark Latham, Mr Dominello has enough crossbench support in the upper house to suggest the card reform could pass, although Labor remains divided on it.

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Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-10 07:21:50|Editor: huaxia

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LOS ANGELES, Feb. 9 (Xinhua) -- Officials in the Western United States extended their greetings and congratulations upon the upcoming Chinese Lunar New Year during an online celebration on Tuesday.

Hawaii Governor David Ige extended the "warmest aloha" to Chinese people on behalf of the U.S. state located in the Pacific Ocean ahead of the Chinese Lunar Year of the Ox that begins Friday in a video message during the online event presented by the Chinese Consulate General in Los Angeles.

Aloha is a Hawaiian word for love, affection, peace, compassion and mercy.

"For over 230 years, the Chinese community in Hawaii has contributed to the economic developing and culture diversity of our state," said the governor, adding that he looks forward to the new year to build upon the legacy of friendship between the people of Hawaii and China.

Hawaii has extensive relationships with China in economic, trade, cultural, tourism and other fields. The Aloha State has sister state/province relationships with China's provinces of Guangdong and Hainan.

Speaking initially in Chinese in a video message, U.S. Congresswoman Judy Chu expressed her best wishes to everybody for good health and happiness in the Year of the Ox.

The congresswoman from California's 27th congressional district, which includes Pasadena and the west San Gabriel Valley of Southern California, noted that the Chinese New Year is an important time for family reunions and she will always have fun memories of gathering with her family for dinner on the Chinese New Year's Eve and wrapping dumplings with her mother.

The San Gabriel Valley is known for its vibrant Chinese American community as Chinese Americans make up over half of its Asian American population. The Chinese American community has been growing substantially in California in recent decades.

"Of course, the COVID-19 pandemic has made these gatherings impossible for so many people and that it is why I am so grateful that the Chinese Consulate has found the way to hold this year's celebration online. Even then this is time of social distancing, it means so much to be able to come together to welcome the New Year and celebrate our traditions," the congresswoman said.

In 2009, Chu became the first Chinese American woman elected to U.S. Congress in history.

Los Angeles County Supervisor Kathryn Barger said in her recorded video message for the event that it is a privilege to commemorate the start of the Year of the Ox.

"In the Chinese zodiac, the ox represents strength, reliability, fairness and hard work. As we work together toward recovery, the ox is the perfect symbol for the road ahead, bringing healing to our homes, workplaces and neighborhoods," she said.

Citing a Chinese proverb, "If you want happiness for a lifetime, help someone else," the supervisor of the most populous county in the United States thanked Chinese American communities for their generosity and kindness as the region overcame hardships.

"Your commitment will continue to shape our success in the years to come. And in 2021, we can move forward to a bright future for our friends, families and communities," she added.

Kate Gallego, mayor of Phoenix, said in the event that "as we enter the Year of the Ox, celebrations will be a little bit different."

The mayor of the capital and most populous city in the U.S. state of Arizona added that she hopes the Lunar New Year celebrations bring people "a sense of hope and renewal."

Gallego said she wishes people "happiness, prosperity and wonderful new year."

Nina L. Hachigian, deputy mayor of international affairs for the City of Los Angeles, also wished the Chinese American community in L.A. and everywhere a wonderful happy new year.

"I think it's going to be a much better one," she noted.

Chinese Consul General in Los Angeles Zhang Ping extended warm festive greetings and best wishes in the event to members of the Chinese community, Chinese students and company staff.

"Although the pandemic is still raging, we believe no winter lasts forever, every spring is sure to follow. We sincerely hope that the new year's firecrackers will dispel the gloom of the pandemic, and bring our life and work back to normal in the near future," he said.

Zhang noted that China-U.S. relations face both opportunities and challenges in the new year.

"The Chinese Consulate General will continue to promote sub-national exchanges and cooperation between our two countries and strengthen the understanding and friendship between our two peoples," he added. Enditem
The new ATL Action for Racial Equity initiative builds on the citys long history of activism for civil rights and racial equity. The Homage to King sculpture, an Atlanta landmark, welcomes visitors to the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Park. Photo courtesy of the Metro Atlanta Chamber.

Emory University is a founding member of ATL Action for Racial Equity, a new initiative launched Feb. 9 by the Metro Atlanta Chamber. The multi-year, multi-step action plan is designed to help address the ongoing effects of systemic racism impacting the Black community.

To date, more than 150 metro Atlanta-based companies and institutions, spanning a diverse range of sizes and industries, have joined the initiative that will leverage the size, scale and expertise of the regions business community to advance racial equity. View the full list.

At Emory, our mission is to serve humanity, yet we can only achieve that mission if every person  regardless of race or background  is given the opportunity to thrive and share their potential with the world. Today, we are very proud to partner with many incredible organizations across Atlanta as part of ATL Action for Racial Equity, says Emory President Gregory L. Fenves. This initiative will help us take a close look at our practices and find powerful ways to make measurable progress towards overturning systemic inequities. Our goal is to help build an Atlanta, and an Emory, that is more vibrant, equitable and inclusive.

Metro Atlanta has a rich legacy of activism, collaboration, inclusion and leadership in the face of the regions  and nations  most difficult tests. Whether supporting integration at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, advocating for a new inclusive state flag or fighting for passage of hate crimes legislation, the regions business community has made a habit of joining forces to drive change. MAC says it is time to build on that momentum with ATL Action for Racial Equity.

In metro Atlanta, our differences are our strength. We work together to make our community and the world better. We are not perfect, but we are committed to preserving and holding up this regions legacy, especially now, says Ed Bastian, CEO, Delta Air Lines, and MACs 2021 board chair. As we tackle economic recovery, public health and the disproportionate impacts on our Black community, our business community must do its part. This is a moral and economic imperative as we work to grow our regions competitiveness today and into the future.

ATL Action for Racial Equitys groundwork and deep dive on data reveal that a clear and surgical strategy targeting metro Atlantas Black population is necessary if the region is to move towards undoing the ills of systemic racism. Because a surgical approach is necessary to solve for the major challenges impacting many underrepresented and under-voiced groups, MAC may incorporate efforts targeting additional demographics into this work over time.

True impact starts with a detailed action plan, commitment, metrics and accountability. We spent the back half of 2020 working through these critical pieces and are eager to launch this important effort that addresses systemic racism, inequity and immobility head on, says Katie Kirkpatrick, president and CEO of the Metro Atlanta Chamber. Addressing these issues has been the lifework of so many leaders in our community. We honor them and are stepping up to join them. Leveraging the size, scale and know-how of Atlanta-based companies to make impactful change is an approach that will fuel our economy and set an example for the nation.

As a first step, ATL Action for Racial Equity is rolling out its corporate policies focus, which calls on businesses across the region to take concrete actions in the areas of people, talent pipeline and human resources policies. Businesses can access a corporate policies playbook online as a guide to setting clear goals and implementing specific actions. Playbooks for the initiatives inclusive economic development, education and workforce development focus areas will be launched later this year.

Joining forces with other Atlanta institutions and businesses in ATL Action for Racial Equity builds on Emorys longstanding, ongoing commitments to racial and social justice, from teaching and research to our role as one of the citys leading employers, says Carol E. Henderson, Emorys chief diversity officer and vice provost for diversity and inclusion, noting areas including procurement, supplier diversity, support for Atlanta entrepreneurs, and commitments to sustainability, among others.

The Metro Atlanta Chamber understands very well the partnership between businesses and the academy, and that pipeline is key, Henderson notes. Not only do we want to make sure our students have internships in Atlanta businesses, we want to support those businesses with our supplier diversity plan, as well as make sure that the businesses we engage with share our values in their corporate climate and culture. This initiative is an opportunity to look at our practices to ensure our efforts are being implemented in really transformative ways to impact our community.
Thomas Peinhopf, the owner of two bars, Livehouse and The Shady Lady, protests the closure of Guam's bar businesses on Dec. 1, 2020 in Tumon.

Photo by Norman M. Taruc/The Guam Daily Post
Arkansas Bill to Ban 1619 Curriculum in Schools Fails in Republican-Led Committee

A Republican bill seeking to ban the teaching of the revisionist 1619 curriculum in Arkansas was rejected on Tuesday by a state legislative committee.

House Bill 1231 would restrict state funding from going to Arkansass public schools that teach a curriculum based on the New York Times 1619 Project, which portrays the United States as an inherently racist nation founded upon slavery. The 1619 curriculum, developed by Pulitzer Center, was embraced by many public school districts across the nation, notably in Chicago, Illinois; Buffalo, New York; Newark, New Jersey; and Washington.

The proposed legislation failed to pass the Republican-led House Education Committee, after Democratic and Republican members voted against it, citing different reasons.

Democratic state Rep. Reginald Murdock, the vice-chair of the committee, argued during the meeting that the bill would eliminate the very opportunity of teachers leading discussions and debates about the 1619 Project, including its inaccuracies and fallacies.

We can discuss, debate, listen, and make out own conclusions from a thesis or theory, Murdock said, adding that he opposed the proposal not because it was anti-1619 Project, but because it would kill a process of education.

Murdock was joined by Republican state Rep. Charlene Fite, who expressed concerns that the bill would open a gate for lawmakers to dictate what should be taught at schools.

Im concerned when we as a Legislature begin to list things that our schools cannot teach and punish them for doing so, she said.

Republican state Rep. Gary Deffenbaugh, himself a former teacher, said teachers usually interpret bills like this one as a sign of distrust in their ability to prepare their own curriculum and do their own jobs right.

Arkansas Education Secretary Johnny Key, a Republican, also addressed the committee, saying that while his department neither endorses nor opposes the 1619 Project, the agency already has a process to determine whether teaching materials meet its curriculum standards. He echoed Deffenbaugh in saying that teachers, school boards, and administrators should decide how and what to teach their students.

This is something, as far as adoption of curriculum, thats best left to the local elected boards and administrators and educators, Key said.

Republican state Rep. Mark Lowery, who proposed the ban, told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that he will not bring up HB1231 up again. Lowery also co-sponsored the House Bill 1218, which prohibits public schools and colleges from offering courses, events, and activities that promotes the division or resentment between groups of people based on race, gender, political affiliation, and social class.
The process feels like something between trying to nab highly sought-after Beyonce tickets and gladiatorial combat.

Scheduling coronavirus vaccine shots online is causing panic for eligible Americans and the children and grandchildren helping them. That includes me and my parents, hunting for scraps of information on supply and pressing reload at all hours on poorly designed websites. By the time you type in all the required information, available appointments have vanished.

2021 has made being a computer whiz a matter of life and death. Shame on America for asking seniors to beta test bad vaccine logistics software.

We designed this guide to help. There are ways to get assistance if you need it, and strategies to conquer the process if you're persistent.

The short supply of vaccine is only partly to blame for our current chaos. It's a case study in how more technology is not always the answer.

There are just too many decentralized, overlapping vaccine websites. State governments created systems, many ignoring basics like inventory alerts we've come to expect from shopping websites. Local governments made their own too, sometimes just repurposing websites for selling community theater tickets. Then hospitals and clinics offer shots through their existing appointment systems and patient portals.

And starting this week, there will be even more places you need to look for appointments online. Pharmacy chains including CVS and Walgreens are beginning to distribute vaccine supply they're getting directly from the federal government. In many places, you'll have to call or go through their individual websites and apps to secure these shots.

Some seniors are adept at extreme online shopping and have turned juggling all these appointment interfaces into a job. But they're in the minority: An estimated 42 percent of Americans over the age of 65 don't even have a wired broadband Internet connection at home, according to a new report. Online vaccine appointment systems are particularly under-serving minority and low-income communities.

If you're helping a senior friend, you're awesome. But Thomas Kamber, executive director of the nonprofit Older Adults Technology Services, reminded me the job comes with serious responsibility for the likely very stressed-out person you're helping. "It's incredibly important to take 30 minutes before you get on the phone to spend some time researching what you're doing," he said.

I've learned a lot from helping my parents navigate appointments in Massachusetts. Pretty much every state and county process is different, so I've also been listening to professionals and volunteers helping seniors secure appointments in New York, New Jersey, Florida and California. If you've mastered your local system, I'd like to hear from you, too, via email or my Washington Post Help Desk.

"It pays to be persistent, aggressive, and to follow up," says Richard Adler, 78, chair of the steering committee at Senior Planet Avenidas, a tech-focused community center in Palo Alto, Calif. Seniors often blame themselves for computer problems, says Adler, but "they shouldn't feel that way in this case."

Persistence worked for my parents, who finally nabbed appointments by understanding when and how to grab new slots right as they arrived.

This guide starts with the basics. Keep moving down the list to more advanced suggestions and techniques that might help you increase the chances of getting your slot sooner rather than later.

- Begin with the right frame of mind - and paperwork

The system isn't working as it should, and it's not your fault.

You might be lucky: Some people are hearing directly from clinics and hospitals to book appointments for existing patients.

Everyone else will have to learn a patchwork of state, local, hospital and pharmacy websites, apps and phone lines. On some of them, you may have to type in a bunch of information to even know if there are new appointments available. Your expectation should be that getting through this will take multiple attempts.

Tip: Experiment. Job No. 1 is just to figure out how the system works. I repeatedly clicked through websites - even when they said they didn't have any appointments available - just to learn what sort of information we'd have to enter. My mom got up early and pressed reload once every few minutes for hours to see when new appointments came online.

Tip: Prepare for red tape. You're likely going to have to enter in lots of personal information, including your ID, address and various codes from medical insurance cards. Gather up all of this before you start. (Below I've got more advice on how to avoid passing this sensitive info along to scammers.)

- You don't necessarily need fancy computer skills

If you think faster than you mouse, there's help available. Across the United States, family, friends and "vaccine angel" volunteers are opening their hearts and their tech skills to the people who need it.

Tip: Locate help at the library. If you can't connect with help from a senior center or church, call your local public library. Ask to speak to a reference librarian, or another librarian on duty. They are usually plugged in to community resources, and many libraries even host their own awesome tech support clinics.

Tip: There's almost always a phone number. Some states are telling people to use the Web and not call if at all possible. But if you need it, there usually is some phone help available. Some states, like Massachusetts, even have hotlines just to help seniors book appointments. The line could be busy, or keep you on hold for a long time - but it's worth your patience.

Tip:You'll likely need email to register online. You'll use it to set up an account and receive confirmation of your appointment. If someone else is helping you book an appointment, you might need to share identity verification codes sent to your email (or over text message to your phone).

I've seen some places also ask you to photograph and upload a copy of your insurance card, but they often let you proceed with a booking even if you don't.

Tip: A smartphone might speed up your appointment. A provider might ask you to bring proof of your reservation to the vaccination site in the form of an email on your smartphone. But you can also print it out, or forward the email to someone else to print and mail to you.

In some communities, vaccination sites are also asking people to scan what are called QR codes with a smartphone when they arrive. Doing so pops up a screen on the smartphone where you have to enter more information. QR codes are just fancy bar codes: Turn on your camera app and point it toward the sign with the code. But if you don't have a smartphone, don't sweat it - just ask to fill out the form by hand.

- Information is your most valuable tool

The people having the most success getting appointments are the ones with the best information.

Vaccine appointments work a lot like how concert tickets get sold - released in bunches at a time and usually snapped up right away by people who knew they were coming.

So how do you know when and where vaccine slots are coming?

Tip: Sign up for alerts. State and local governments, hospitals and even pharmacies may have websites where you can enter an email or phone number to have them reach out with information. These are underwhelming in many places, just letting you know when you're eligible for a shot. But some may evolve: D.C.'s alerts currently say when they'll be posting new appointments but soon should be more personalized. Walgreens tells me it eventually hopes to be able to send people alerts about when there are appointments accessible near them.

Tip: Hunt for new-stock information. Some vaccine centers, like the Publix pharmacies doling out shots in Florida, post new appointments at 7 a.m. each day. Local newspapers and TV stations often have useful intelligence. Sometimes local officials publish updates on Twitter accounts, too.

Friends can also be a resource, if they're passing along firsthand knowledge. But be extra skeptical of anything you read on Facebook, which is ripe with misinformation - if someone shares something surprising, ask how they know it is true.

Tip: Look for crowdsourced information. In some places, community groups are trying to help by creating their own websites with maps and updated availability. Just remember they're relying on other people, not official sources, to stay updated. Ones I've spotted include:

California: https://www.vaccinateca.com/

New Jersey: https://vaccinatenj.com/

New York City: https://nycvaccinelist.com/ and https://www.turbovax.info/

Texas: https://www.covid19vaccinetx.com

Tip: Don't forget the old-fashioned phone call. Humans often have more up-to-date information than websites. That's the recommendation I heard from the makers of VaccinateCA, the community-made help site in California. They've got volunteers calling pharmacies and other vaccine sites to find out when they get new stock. Some midsize pharmacies, they've found, aren't getting booked up because they've fallen through the cracks of the online systems.

- Be on alert for fraud

You're right to worry that somebody might be trying to take advantage of the confusion around vaccines to steal your identity or trick you out of money. Unfortunately, some of the usual red flags won't necessarily help you - even some official websites appear sketchy to me.

Tip: Start with trusted sources of information. Rather than click on links sent to you via email or Facebook, go straight to the source. AARP publishes vetted links to official government vaccine sites for every state here: aarp.org/vaccineinfo. The Washington Post's interactive vaccine tracker also has links to government information, while our vaccine FAQ offers well-researched answers to questions about vaccine safety and science.

Tip: If you weren't expecting a message, be skeptical. In some cases, you may hear from a local vaccine program, clinic or pharmacy over email and even text message. But if you're not 100 percent certain it is legitimate, pause before you click. It never hurts to call your local health department, doctor or pharmacy and ask to confirm. Nobody should be selling you special access to the vaccine.

Tip: Look for the lock. When you're on a registration site asking you to enter private information, look in the top of your browser, immediately to the left of the Web address. There you should see an icon of a lock, indicating your information is being encrypted in a way that keeps hackers from peering in.

- Use tech to move faster

So long as the vaccine remains in short supply, getting an appointment is going to be competitive. Beware disappearing appointment times: Many sites won't actually hold a time slot for you as you type in all the required personal information.

So borrow some techniques from the tech-savvy people who snap up concert tickets and high-demand gifts like the PlayStation 5.

Tip: Pre-fill your information. On popular shopping sites, you save your address and credit card number to make checkout go quickly. That's what you also want when you're trying to nab an appointment before it gets taken by someone else.

Some but not all vaccine appointment sites will let you "preregister," or create an account to enter in contact and insurance information. At pharmacies including Walgreens, you can create a customer account profile, though that won't necessarily let you pre-fill all the health questions required by local officials.

Tip: Type fast. Or, avoid typing as much as possible. Save all your critical information in a word processing document on your computer. Then when the time comes, you can copy and paste it into the vaccine appointment website.

If you want to be even faster, install an automatic form-filling extension for your browser, such as Autofill for Chrome. You can tell it to memorize how you fill out fields on the appointment website, and then it will fill them automatically whenever you pull it up.

Tip: Automate redialing. In some places, booking appointments happens primarily over phone lines . . . which seem to always be busy when you call. Advanced smartphone users can download an app such as Auto Redial for iPhones. It basically calls back a busy line faster than you could press the buttons on your own.

Tip: Look out for new technologies. The website vaxstandby.com is trying to create a way to connect people seeking a vaccination with pharmacies and clinics with excess supply. Its makers tell me it's still just a concept, but it's encouraging to know inventors and civic-minded people are trying to make the vaccine rollout work better for everyone.

New Delhi:

External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj on Sunday said that 39 missing Indian nationals, who have been reportedly held hostage in the Iraqi city of Mosul since 2014, are probably in a jail in Badush where fighting is still going on.

Swaraj also stated that in the effort to locate them, she had asked Minister of State for External Affairs, VK Singh, to go to Erbil on the very day Iraq PM Haider al-Abadi declared Mosul has been liberated from ISIS.

Visited Peshmarga frontline in Mosul area to seek information on Indians held by ISIS. Peshmerga still clearing ISiS held areas. pic.twitter.com/ND1Auczcz7  Vijay Kumar Singh (@Gen_VKSingh) July 12, 2017

Earlier in the day, Sushma Swaraj, MoS MEA MJ Akbar and MoS MEA VK Singh met families of 39 Indians in Delhi who are missing in Iraq since 2014.

ALSO READ: Iraq PM Haider Al-Abadi congratulates troops for liberating Mosul from Islamic State

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MUSKEGON, MI  A new 195-foot cell tower at Muskegons Pere Marquette Park that is significantly shorter than initially expected should improve phone reception at the Lake Michigan beach.

The Muskegon City Commission agreed to spend up to $160,000 for the monopole that will be erected at the citys water filtration plant, 1900 Beach St. Officials earlier thought the tower would be 300 feet, about as tall as a 27-story building.

The new tower will replace an approximately 100-foot antenna owned by Muskegon County that, among other equipment, has 911 communications on it.

The primary reason for the new tower is to improve communication with the water plant, Muskegon Public Works Director Leo Evans told MLive. Plant operators need to communicate with city hall as well as water towers placed throughout the city, but tree growth as well as changes in technology have made it more difficult with the existing height of the antenna, Evans said.

The commission on Tuesday, Feb. 9, agreed to contract with Valmont Industries, a Nebraska company, for up to $93,000 for the tower and up to $67,000 with Great Lakes Antenna Company of Flat Rock to construct a foundation and erect the tower.

Its expected to be in place by May or June, Evans said.

The 911 equipment will be moved to the citys tower, which will be removed, Evans said. Both those actions will be additional future expenses for the city.

The city is finalizing negotiations with a cell phone carrier to locate equipment on the tower, with lease proceeds of about $1,800 per month offsetting the citys cost for the tower, the city commission was told.

When asked by MLive, Evans declined to name that carrier, but described it as one of four major phone carriers in the area.

We recognize there was a need for cell phone coverage down there, Evans said.

At busy times, when lots of people are trying to use their cell phones, portions of the beach can become a dead zone, Evans said.

For emergency purposes, (improved cell phone coverage) definitely could be beneficial, he said.

There is room on the tower for equipment from other cell carriers, which would further reduce city costs, he said.

With this, we solve a problem for the community, and solve a problem for ourselves, Evans said. And at the end of the day, it doesnt cost that much.

The commission previously approved a $44,250 contract with Maralat Communication to serve as project manager, which procured tower designs, handled bidding on the project and is negotiating tower leases, Evans said.

The city previously purchased new radio communication equipment for the filtration plant to improve point-to-point radio communications with water towers and city hall, he said. But the current antenna didnt clear the tree lines so that equipment has not been installed, he said.

City officials initially thought they would need a taller, 300-foot lattice tower, which drew the ire of neighbors who even hinted at a lawsuit to prevent it.

Its still an obstruction and I imagine some people wont like it, Evans said of the 195-foot tower. But its a lot less obtrusive to the environment.

Several residents of the area spoke against the tower during a planning commission public hearing last May. The planning commission approved a special use permit for the tower.

Citizens complained the tower would provide an unsightly distraction and some thought it should be moved farther into surrounding woods.

The location of the tower is inside chain link fencing surrounding the plant, which is covered by surveillance cameras.

Following the planning commissions vote, which was shown live on Facebook, one neighbor left a written message that read Let the legal action begin!

Also on MLive:

Better community engagement focus of Bang the Table website for city of Muskegon

Largest coat drive by far collects 1,500 items for Muskegon County clothing pantries

Great Lakes ice cover growing rapidly after arctic outbreak; See with your own eyes

Vitalii Abakumov | Getty Images/iStockphoto

Wanda Battle, tour director of the church where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. used to preach, will be the guest speaker for an Illinois College-hosted virtual lecture titled Human Rights and You.

The program will be at 7 p.m. Tuesday.
An 11-year-old Texas boy managed to rescue his parents and three-year-old sister from a fiery wreck after beating out the flames with his jacket and bare hands.

Anthony Canales was thrown from his family's SUV when the crash occurred on a highway near Poteet, 30 miles south of San Antonio, back on January 31.

The SUV rolled and crashed into a ditched after the boy's mother Sabrina fell asleep at the wheel.

Anthony miraculously only suffered minor injuries despite being thrown from the vehicle when it crashed.

Anthony Canales, 11, managed to rescue his parents and three-year-old sister from a fiery wreck near Poteet, 30 miles south of San Antonio, back on January 31. He is pictured with his father Alfonso, who was badly injured, in the days after the crash

Anthony was thrown from his family's SUV when the crash occurred. The SUV rolled and crashed into a ditched after the boy's mother Sabrina fell asleep at the wheel

His father Alfonso and three-year-old sister Serenity were trapped inside the vehicle. His sister had become pinned underneath a speaker box after the car rolled.

In an interview with local outlet FOX14 that aired Wednesday, Anthony described how he immediately ran towards the car after seeing the flames on the underside of the car.

He used his jacket and hands to get rid of the flames.

'I had to because if I didn't do it something could've gone wrong,' he said.

'The truck could've blown up and my sister and my dad were still in there.'

His little sister suffered minor injuries in the crash.

Anthony, who miraculously only suffered minor injuries, managed to get his three-year-old sister Serenity out of the car. She was pinned underneath a speaker box after the car rolled

The SUV was completely destroyed in the crash. Photos from the scene show how multiple windows and the windshield were blown out when the car rolled

Anthony's parents, however, were badly injured having suffered damage to their ribs and backs.

His father was also left with a gash on his head that required surgery.

The SUV was completely destroyed in the crash.

Photos from the scene show how multiple windows and the windshield were blown out when the car rolled.

Anthony's father said the family had only just cashed their federal stimulus check but that it would now have to go towards a replacement car and medical bills.

The family has created an online fundraiser to help cover the costs.
tech2 News Staff

NASA announced Tuesday that SpaceX has been awarded an important contract to launch the first two pieces of the upcoming Lunar Gateway in 2024. SpaceX plans to use a modified version of its Falcon Heavy rocket to carry the massive core of the space station in the moon's direction. The $331.8 million contract includes the cost of the Falcon Heavy launch and some "mission-related costs" according to a NASA press statement. The contract has cost NASA almost thrice as much as the Falcon Heavy launch planned in July 2022, when the agency plans to launch a probe to study the asteroid Psyche.

The US space agency envisions that the Gateway will serve as a waypoint for astronauts transiting to and from the moons surface during the Artemis mission. The first two pieces of the lunar space station  the Power and Propulsion Element (PPE) and the Habitation and Logistics Outpost (HALO)  will make up the first usable lunar space station modules. The PPE, built by Maxar, will be powered by large solar array wings, and use plasma rocket jets for deep space maneuvers. It is also equipped with communications and attitude control for the multi-module Gateway complex. The HALO, developed by Northrop Grumman and Thales Alenia Space, will house the early living quarters for astronauts and have docking ports for cargo and crew ships arriving at and departing from the Gateway. The combined function of the HALO and Orion life support systems will sustain up to four astronauts for up to 30 days on the Gateway, according to NASA.

NASA has selected Falcon Heavy to launch the first two elements of the lunar Gateway together on one mission! https://t.co/3pWt0GMS4v pic.twitter.com/QzPtIYHeuF  SpaceX (@SpaceX) February 9, 2021

Other elements of the space station from international partners like the European-Japanese habitation module and a Canadian robotic arm, will join the Gateway in orbit around the moon in subsequent launches, and the final outpost will be roughly one-sixth the size of the International Space Station currently in orbit, according to a Spaceflight Now report.

So far, NASA has maintained that it is targetting the launch of the first components no earlier than May 2024. However, that date is likely to see delays, for multiple reasons including technological setbacks, change of US presidency, and COVID-19 lockdowns. The entire Artemis mission timeline is experiencing a period of reality alignment, according to a TechCrunch report, and new target dates are yet to be announced for the ambitious plans made over the last four years. The timeline will be clarified by NASA as it copes with these changes, in the months to come, the report added.



India has recorded a net profit of Rs 50.43 crore in the quarter ended December, on the back of an increase in turnover growth of batteries and flashlights with higher gross margins due to price increases and volume growth.

In the same period last year, net profit stood at Rs 90.60 crore, which had however, included an exceptional gain of Rs 89.55 crore from sale of land in Chennai.

Profit before tax before exceptional items in the December quarter increased by 183 per cent to Rs 61.14 crore from Rs 21.58 in the year ago period.

Amritanshu Khaitan, managing director, Eveready, said that the profitability in the first nine months of the year has been the highest ever for the company.

Without the exceptional gain, net profit in Q3 2019-20, would have been Rs 15-16 crore, Khaitan explained.

Apart from high gross margins due to price increases and volume growth, cost conservation has been adopted all levels.

ALSO READ: SpiceJet posts Rs 67 cr net loss in Q3 vs Rs 78 cr profit a year ago

Sequentially, however, net profit was marginally down from Rs 58.02 crore in the September quarter to Rs 50.42 crore in the December quarter on account of seasonality.

Evereadys operating income in the third quarter stood at Rs 340.28, an increase of seven per cent in the same quarter last year.

The turnover for the quarter registered growth primarily led by an increase in turnover for the battery and flashlight segments; the turnover growth for batteries and flashlights during the quarter was at 9.4 per cent and 15.3 per cent, respectively.

As the economy opened up completely, a sustained demand for batteries was observed as the market continued to witness a sharp reduction in dumped battery imports from China, post-implementation of quality standards issued by Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS), the company said.

Even flashlights registered consistent demand in keeping with the enhanced agricultural activity and a sharp economic upturn during the quarter, it added.

As a result, EBIDTA margin for the battery segment was at 27 .5 per cent on a turnover of Rs 214 crore during the quarter, coupled with upward pricing revisions taken to mitigate the impact of higher commodity prices and rupee depreciation. The segment of flashlight also had a margin of 20.6 per cent during the quarter on a turnover of Rs 39.3 crore.
Image: Canva

I do. I need to finish. Not because Dr. Dan Treier is the beloved director of my program and offers good arguments. And not because a PhD would help achieve my dream of becoming a MN Vikings team chaplain.

I need to finish because I have a waitlist letter from Wheaton waiting to be framed as a reminder to never limit God to my lack of creativity.

When I first applied to PhD programs, I hoped to be a professor in a Bible college or seminary and teach overseas (whether fulltime or during the summers). As a woman in the U.S. I recognized firsthand that my work be taken more seriously if I had a doctorate. I also saw the demand for PhD-credentialed faculty in the Majority World for accreditation.

I narrowed my passions to apply to programs in biblical ethics. However, I was waitlisted at two institutions (including Wheaton). I determined to reapply. The Lord used that year of waiting to refine my writing, critical thinking, and scholarly interests. Since preaching was my side hobby, I decided to boost my CV by presenting a paper at the Evangelical Homiletics Society conference. There, God opened doors beyond my dreams. I discovered I could become an OT scholar who contributes to homiletics. Had I been accepted the first time I applied to Wheaton, I never would have known that I, as a woman, could do serious academic work in homiletics.

When I entered Wheaton, I was giddy. At the PhD level, I felt like I could finally love the Lord with all my mind. I was my only limitation. And I met my limitations quickly, while wearily cramming for German or receiving crushing feedback on papers. But the two-year application process left me without a doubt that the Lord had brought me to Wheaton. I would either graduate or die. (Trying to figure out German sentence structure made me a bit dramatic).

Not everyone has the certainty I gained from my personal experience. So, I offer some reasons why, by Gods grace, I intend to finish my PhD. I frame these as encouragements to other weary students. I then offer corresponding That said sections for those: 1) who are considering applying for PhDs and/or 2) who may advise PhD applicants.

Finish a PhD

If finishing the degree is an act of faithfulness. My other reasons below assume this. I have godly, brilliant friends who have withdrawn from PhD programs for reasons that involved being faithful to the Lord, such as supporting their family in crisis or managing physical/mental health. Too often, academia confuses workaholism for faithfulness. That said, do not enroll in a PhD program if you are doing so for your own ego, status, or sense of prestige. Build a sending community to faithfully pray you through the process. Only apply for a PhD program if your spouse is on board, not guilted into consenting. Collaboratively strategize to serve and empower your family as they make sacrifices with you. If you are single, dont assume youll have more time. Youll have to bring home the bacon and cook it and clean up after it with no one to hold you and tell you they still love you when youre at breaking point. Invest in a church community with a healthy theology of singleness.

My other reasons below assume this. I have godly, brilliant friends who have withdrawn from PhD programs for reasons that involved being faithful to the Lord, such as supporting their family in crisis or managing physical/mental health. Too often, academia confuses workaholism for faithfulness. That said, do not enroll in a PhD program if you are doing so for your own ego, status, or sense of prestige. Build a sending community to faithfully pray you through the process. Only apply for a PhD program if your spouse is on board, not guilted into consenting. Collaboratively strategize to serve and empower your family as they make sacrifices with you. If you are single, dont assume youll have more time. Youll have to bring home the bacon and cook it and clean up after it with no one to hold you and tell you they still love you when youre at breaking point. Invest in a church community with a healthy theology of singleness. If finishing the program is a way to love the LORD with all your mind. For wisdom is more precious than rubies, and nothing you desire can compare with her (Prov 8:11). Fellow PhD colleagues, have you lost sight of pursuing wisdom in pursuing the next addition to your CV? Revising our writing, clarifying our communication, and defending our arguments are formative processes. In our idolization of status and credentials, we can miss the goal of learning. A learning community has the power to sharpen our minds and support our spirits. That said, apply to PhD programs with a grave sense of spiritual obligation. Choose programs that care about forming you as a scholar intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. Prioritize mentors/programs with reputations of caring for their students. Do not apply only to those who are famous. It is better to be formed into the image of Christ than to gain the approval of the Church and lose your soul.

For wisdom is more precious than rubies, and nothing you desire can compare with her (Prov 8:11). Fellow PhD colleagues, have you lost sight of pursuing wisdom in pursuing the next addition to your CV? Revising our writing, clarifying our communication, and defending our arguments are formative processes. In our idolization of status and credentials, we can miss the goal of learning. A learning community has the power to sharpen our minds and support our spirits. That said, apply to PhD programs with a grave sense of spiritual obligation. Choose programs that care about forming you as a scholar intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. Prioritize mentors/programs with reputations of caring for their students. Do not apply only to those who are famous. It is better to be formed into the image of Christ than to gain the approval of the Church and lose your soul. If you are a woman or an ethnic minority. Anecdotally, I have seen women/minorities propose more integrative topics, constructing much-needed scholarly contributions. However, women and minorities face unique challenges before, during, and after the program. Although there are generally more hiring prospects now, you will feel pressure to prove that you werent just a minority hire. That said, the application process will be difficult. You may not know anyone in your demographic with a PhD. Single women may battle the lies that itll make you more intimidating, that when you find the right guy, that stuff [preaching, PhD, etc.] wont matter, or that youre a liability to the Church. I am in PhD studies because Darrell Bock accepted me as an intern when another opportunity fell through due to my gender. Pastors too often neglect encouraging their women to pursue seminary or doctoral studies. I was terrified to tell my supportive former pastor, Gary Brandenburg, that I might shift my focus toward homiletics. Hes kind but bluntly pragmatic. Instead of responding with skepticism, he gave me a look that said, Well, duh, you should! My current pastor, Mitch Kim, attended my first ETS presentation, and it meant the world. Pastors, know the gifts of women in your congregation. Wherever you fall on the complementarian/egalitarian spectrum, the intellectual gifts of the women in your congregation are a matter of your stewardship. You could be their help or hindrance in their quest to love the Lord with all their minds.

If your project will contribute to the Church. My topic combines my passions for theology of suffering, hermeneutics, and preaching Christ in the Old Testament. The Church needs quality research on biblical and theological topics. That said, not every worthy topic will directly change the lives of Christians in the marketplace. Faithful excellence in obscurity can honor the Lord. Determine how researching your topic is forming you to serve the Church.

My topic combines my passions for theology of suffering, hermeneutics, and preaching Christ in the Old Testament. The Church needs quality research on biblical and theological topics. That said, not every worthy topic will directly change the lives of Christians in the marketplace. Faithful excellence in obscurity can honor the Lord. Determine how researching your topic is forming you to serve the Church. If you are willing to contribute to a more constructive evangelicalism. In our uncivil war, there is an increasing evangelical anti-intellectualism that associates education with a liberal elite. In contemporary political and ecclesial opportunism, both the right and the left are driven by fear, unable to charitably evaluate constructive responses to our fears. PhD programs have not always facilitated growth in gracious dialogue. But they can. And thoughtful, integrative biblical-theological scholarship informs our cultural engagement better than pitiful proof-texting and pithy tweets. That said, it is vital to invest in the local church and have friends outside of academia. Consider ministry involvement in diverse settings before beginning PhD studies. I spent my seminary summers working for a missions organization and teaching overseas. Building deep relationships with those serving on the front lines of ministry has shaped the questions I bring to my work and reminds me of the world outside my red brick tower.

If you take away nothing else, know that we cant separate our personal journeys from our academic journeys. While a friend prayed over me today, I saw the Wheaton College sign, where I had prayed in the uncertainty after my first interview. The God who brought me to Wheaton in His perfect timing could be trusted in other areas of my life. One day, I hope to hang a framed diploma next to a framed waitlist letter as evidence that the One who began a good work sustained me and was glorified in my completion of a dissertation beyond my finite imagination.

Heather Joy Zimmerman (ThM, Dallas Theological Seminary) is a third-year PhD student in Biblical and Theological Studies: Old Testament at Wheaton College. Her dissertation is entitled Messianic Hope in Crisis: Interpreting and Proclaiming the Lament Psalms in light of their Editorial Locations. She serves as a team leader and researcher with Docent Research Group and is a board member of the Evangelical Homiletics Society.
Five Armenian prisoners of war (POWs) were flown to Yerevan by a Russian plane and immediately taken to a military hospital for examination late on Tuesday.

According to Lieutenant-General Rustam Muradov, the commander of Russian peacekeeping forces stationed in Karabakh, Armenia repatriated an Azerbaijani captive earlier in the day.

Armenian Defense Minister Vagharshak Harutiunian thanked Muradov for facilitating Armenian-Azerbaijani prisoner exchanges and assisting in the continuing search for missing Armenian soldiers when they met in Yerevan on Wednesday.

A spokesperson for Deputy Prime Minister Tigran Avinian told RFE/RLs Armenian Service that two of the Armenian servicemen freed on Tuesday were taken prisoner during the war. The official said the three others were among 62 soldiers captured in early December when the Azerbaijani army seized the last two Armenian-controlled villages in Karabakhs Hadrut district.

Azerbaijani officials branded those soldiers as saboteurs and terrorists last month, signaling Bakus intention to prosecute them on relevant charges. Yerevan condemned those plans as a gross violation of international law and the Karabakh ceasefire agreement.

The latest exchange brought to 64 the total number of Armenian POWs and civilians freed by Azerbaijan to date. More than 100 others are believed to remain in Azerbaijani captivity.

For its part, the Armenian side has released 16 Azerbaijanis.
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Francis Ajinzo runs a fish nursery at Ibeju-Lekki in Lagos.

Early 2019, two months after he sold 2,000 fingerlings, the buyer returned to complain that all the fish had died and to demand either a refund of her money or replacement of the fish.

I told her there was no way I could pay for her recklessness, Mr Ajinzo recalled. He had taught the woman how to safely raise the fish, just as he does for all his customers, he says. He realised, however, that the woman had not complied with his instructions.

Rather than take responsibility, she claimed I had not trained her well.

A week after the exchange, the police arrested Mr Ajinzo.

I was manhandled and detained for several days, he recalls to PREMIUM TIMES.

The woman came three days later to the Ajiwe police area command that she wanted another fish. One of the officers in the police station told me that if I refused her demand, they would keep me in their custody indefinitely.

Mr Ajinzo said he was forced to produce new juvenile fish for the customer by the officers who kept him in custody over a civil matter.

Like Mr Ajinzo, many Nigerians have faced police interference in their civil matters such as breach of contract, landlord/tenant disagreement, family dispute, and even disagreement among neighbours.

But Mike Ozekhome, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), said security agencies, including the EFCC and ICPC, have no roles in civil disputes.

Any matter that is civil or contractual or which concerns banking and general relationships with people without criminal elements must not be dabbled into by the police, he stresses.

It has been the position of the courts up to the Supreme Court that only matters that are criminal in nature should involve the attention of security agencies because they cannot make or remake a contract for people.

The Administration of Criminal Justice Act (ACJA) of 2015 excludes the police from civil disputes but the major provisions of the Act are rarely implemented.

According to section 8(2) of the Act, a suspect shall not be arrested merely on a civil wrong or breach of contract.

The Nigerian Police (Establishment) Act 2020 also frowns at officers interference in civil disputes, unless on the order of a competent court. Section 32(2) of the Act prohibits officers from arresting anyone based on a civil wrong or breach of contract.

But the police have continued to ignore those restrictions with impunity. They arrest and maltreat Nigerians based on civil offences and adjudicate matters that are exclusive to the courts.

Mr Ajinzo said he was afraid he could lose his business by going to court to challenge the police interference in his case.

I accepted my fate because the police would not stop disturbing me and I might no longer have the time to take care of my business.

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Violation of human rights

Findings by PREMIUM TIMES show that police officers across Nigeria routinely dabble into debts recovery.

The motive for some of the officers is to get a percentage of the recovered debts from the creditor and to further extort bribes from the debtors to release them on bail.

At the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of the police in Panti, Lagos State, a woman who spoke on condition of anonymity because of fear of reprisal, recalled how a microfinance bank used the police to hound her over a debt.

According to the woman, she had taken a loan from the bank in 2018 for her business and was to pay back in monthly instalments over six months. Due to business difficulties she faced, however, she defaulted in the fifth month.

I was arrested and taken to Panti, she says. The officers drew up a schedule of when I should refund the remaining debt and forced me to sign post-dated cheques.

When I didnt have sufficient balance in my account on the due date for the cheque, the same police officers turned round to accuse me of issuing a dud cheque. It took the intervention of a top police officer known by my husband. We later settled the matter amicably and I returned the borrowed funds.

Many Nigerians, including journalists, have also been arrested for comments they made on public issues on social media, as Nigerians increasingly turn to the platforms to tell truth to power.

A recent case involved a journalist, Tom Uhia, and the Minister of State for Power, Goddy Jedy-Agba. Mr Uhia publishes Power Steering, a monthly magazine that covers the power sector.

Mr Jedy-Agba accused Mr Uhia of defaming his character with a report he published in the June 2020 issue of his magazine, which accused the minister of wrongdoing when he was a senior manager with the Nigeria Nigerian Petroleum Corporation (NNPC).

Rather than go to court for redress, Mr Jedy-Agba wrote a petition to the police through his lawyer, Obi Nwakor. On October 13, 2020, the Police Force Criminal Investigation Department (FCID) in Area 10, Abuja, arrested the journalist over the petition and kept him behind bars for about a month.

Even if treated as a criminal case, Section 35 of Nigerias 1999 Constitution demands that the police should not detain any suspect for longer than 48 hours without a court order, the FCT Council of the Nigerian Union of Journalists said, in a statement at the time, by its chairperson, Emmanuel Ogbeche, to protest Mr Uhias treatment.

So many cases

A human rights lawyer and former chairman of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), Ikeja branch, Adesina Ogunlana, says cases of police interference in civil matters are commonplace.

He says the police do this to the extent that when people organise protests, police can say when you are protesting, you conducted yourself in such a way that intimidated others and they will call it (a) conspiracy to intimidate, assault and overawe authority.

The reality is that when they even interfere illegally, they can detain you for years due to poverty of the mind and poverty of the pocket. So, police officers focus on the tendency to harvest for their pockets rather than to enforce the law. They tend to read more criminality to matters that can easily be settled.

For example, if somebody takes a loan to finance a project, instead of the bank to take the collateral when he defaults, they will go to the police that what you have done is fraudulent. For you to know that police are not sincere, you will sign undertaking in police station and they will be deducting their own share.

The police are hardly sincere and they have exaggerated perception about what the law says. Even many of them that are lawyers are worse because they rejoice in having the power of law enforcement and the training of a lawyer.

Sometimes, the police tell people to rewrite petitions and say some other persons threatened to kill them even when the matters are simple disagreements. The laws are there but the way police interpret the law is heavily slanted for their selfish and unprogressive agenda, Mr Ogunlana says.

Court rulings on police interference in civil matters

Various courts in Nigeria have said it is illegal for the police to interfere in civil disputes.

In fact, when a person involves a police officer in a civil matter, both the complainant and the officer may be sued for breach of the fundamental human rights of the accused.

In the case of McLaren v. Jennings, the Court of Appeal held in 2003 that it was unlawful for the police to arrest and detain the Appellant with regard to the collection of a debt; this is as under the Law, the Police is not a debt collection agency.

In addition, in the case of NWADIUGWU v. IGP & ORS (2015) LPELR-26027(CA), the appellate court held that the police are neither debt collectors nor Arbitrators and Section 24 of the Police Act 2004 does not list settlement of disputes or collection of debts amongst the duties of the Police.

The court said the police, in that (by interfering in civil matters), muzzled the rights and freedom of Nigerians even where cases are clearly outside their jurisdiction, power or corridor. If this is not curbed, everybody, including the judicial officers, will suffer always from floodgates of civil matters being hijacked by the police and transmuted into crimes. If this is not tackled, everybody would have suffered in the merciless hand of the police who has (have) become a law unto itself in this country.

Why we interfere in civil disputes  Police

PREMIUM TIMES reached out to the police authorities on the issue.

The spokesperson of the police, Frank MBA, did not respond to our correspondent calls and text messages. But his counterparts at the state level say many complaints are sometimes difficult to isolate as civil.

The police spokesperson in Ekiti State, Sunday Abutu, says the police authorities had always warned officers to be professional when dealing with complicated matters.

Sometimes, civil matters have (led to) assault and even threat to life. It may start from a mere land dispute before it would later degenerate to threat and assault, he says.

The police authorities have always admonished those working within divisions and those handling such cases to be professional and ensure that they handle the criminal aspect alone.

I dont expect any police officer to dabble into civil matters. When (the) police come into civil matters, it is basically based on the petitions and what is being reported to us. If you report that you gave money to somebody and when you requested your money back, he started assaulting you, the police cannot sit down and look.

The police spokesperson in Ogun State, Abimbola Oyeyemi, said police officers interfere in civil matters because many Nigerians do not know the difference between civil and criminal issues.

It is not right for the police to interfere in civil matters. But the question is how do we determine civil matters? For example, a landlord comes to the police station to report that his tenant is not paying his rent. It is not police business to recover his tenancy fee from his tenant. But there are matters people present to the public as civil but in the real sense, they are criminal in nature.

If you give money to somebody to keep and he converted the money to his use without your consent, he stole by conversion. But when such a person is arrested, he wont say he stole the money. In some instances, people will say they have judgment over land matter, and take thugs to the land. Can court judgment be enforced by thugs?

Anybody can report either civil or criminal issues to the police and it is now the duty of the police, after listening to both parties, to determine which is civil because many people did not know that some cases are not meant to be brought to the police, Mr Oyeyemi says.

A lawyer, Ademola Owolabi, agreed the powers of the police do not extend to civil relationships.

But we live in a nation where human interactions bring a lot of friction, and the police are often one of the first ports of call and the police will tell them how to criminalise the offence of the offender in their petition.

This is not to say that police cannot be legally involved in assault allegations, even when the matter is civil. But one of the reasons why we have sad incidents, like illegal interference of police, is because the court system is not robust enough such that a simple matter between tenant and landlord could take years. So, when people know that they may not quickly get justice in the court, they go to the police and the officers take advantage of that.

Way forward

Mr Ozekhome said people who have their rights denied by the police may challenge that in court.

I think the more Nigerians begin to assert their rights, the more their rights and liberties would be respected, he said.

A lawyer and author, Dele Farotimi, said the issue indicates that the law does not rule in Nigeria.

We are living in the jungle. Police interfere because impunity governs Nigeria. That is the evil tree, by the time you cut the trees, all the madness we are always debating will disappear. Lets talk about the system.

It is not just about the police whom I call uniformed armed robbers. They are not different from the ones who are not carrying guns called civil servants. Even me, I am a victim. The reality is that we have become lost as a people, Mr Farotimi said.

Mr Owolabi advised the police to keep off matters that have no criminal elements.

The police must wash their hands off matters that have no criminal elements and for the populace, anytime they feel harassed, the law is not handicapped. The fundamental human rights abuse law is robust enough to get justice for victims.

A lot of Nigerians suffer in silence because they dont understand their rights. I have handled a matrimonial matter that the police sent to the anti-cultism unit. These are not (the) proper use of the police, he says.

Lawyers should also take time to engage the police on their proper duties. When an allegation is made, police must investigate before (making) arrests. It is always good to investigate the angle of the complainant first before an arrest is carried out. It is not right to arrest before investigating. The proper thing is investigation before an arrest, the Lagos lawyer said.

Mr Ogunlana, on his part, called for a change in the attitude of those in control of the police  from the commissioners of police, the minister of police affairs and those at the police service commission.

The Nigerian police are not the peoples police. They see themselves as serving those in government than serving the people. Even when we talk of reform, it deals with humans and particularly those at the helm of affairs. The citizens must be radically ready to perfect leadership change.

For the Director of Rule of Law and Accountability Advocacy Centre (RULAAC), Okechukwu Nwanguma, in performance of their duties, the police should adhere to various human rights protection protocols.

Common examples of civil matters

To guide our readers on their fundamental human rights and help them to understand matters that are civil, PREMIUM TIMES lists some examples of civil matters below:

1 Dispute between landlords and tenants.

2 Dispute over land sales.

3 Non-delivery of purchased goods and services

4 Complaints against a city or government

5 Property dispute

6 Loan recovery

7 Disagreement over child or other matrimonial issues.

All of the above are purely civil matters except when there are recorded events of assault, battery or a threat to life.

This report was funded by the Civic Media Lab, under its Criminal Justice Reporting Fellowship, with support from MacArthur Foundation.
WASHINGTON - Several Republican senators on Tuesday criticized the performance of lawyers representing former president Donald Trump at his impeachment trial, with at least one saying that the "disorganized, random" arguments by Trump's attorneys were what motivated him to change his mind and vote with Democrats.

After listening to opening statements, the Senate voted 56 to 44 to move forward with the impeachment trial, rejecting Trump's legal team's arguments that it was unconstitutional to do so. The vote mostly split along party lines and was almost identical to a similar one that was held last month.

Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., the only Republican senator to switch his vote to support moving forward with Trump's impeachment trial, blasted the meandering opening statements by Trump's attorneys as incoherent and ineffective.

"It was disorganized, random," Cassidy told reporters after Tuesday's proceedings. "[Trump's lawyers] talked about many things but didn't talk about the issue at hand. . . . The issue at hand, is it constitutional to impeach a president who's left office? And the House managers made a compelling, cogent case, and the president's team did not."

Cassidy was one of six Republican senators voting with the Democratic caucus to say that it was constitutional to carry out the impeachment trial of a former president even after he has left office. The other five Republicans - Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitt Romney of Utah, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, Patrick Toomey of Pennsylvania - had done so in a similar vote last month.

Unclear is how senators will vote when faced with the question of convicting Trump, who was acquitted by the Senate last year on separate impeachment charges.

Cassidy said at one point that as one of Trump's lawyers was speaking, he leaned over, confused, to ask Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, whether he was missing something.

"If I'm there as an impartial juror, respecting my oath of office to uphold the Constitution of the U.S., and one side makes the argument, and the other side does everything but make the argument, then to live with myself, I make that vote," Cassidy added. "I've always said I'm approaching this as an impartial juror."

Almost immediately afterward, the Louisiana Republican Party condemned Cassidy for his vote.

However, even Republicans who voted against proceeding with the impeachment trial were not impressed with Trump's lawyers - particularly with Bruce L. Castor Jr., who opened for Trump's legal team and spoke for 48 minutes, touching on subjects as diverse ancient Greece, Rome and Nebraska's being "quite a judicial thinking place." At one point, Castor admitted that his team had changed strategy after observing the thoroughness of the House impeachment managers' presentation.

Asked his opinion of Castor, Cruz paused for six seconds of silence, then laughed.

"I don't think the lawyers did the most effective job," Cruz said at last. "I'll leave it to others to, uh, to fill out a scorecard on that front."

Cruz added that the lead House impeachment manager, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., was "impressive."

"He's a serious lawyer," Cruz said.

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, who is among Trump's defenders on Capitol Hill, said that he has seen "a lot of lawyers and a lot of arguments" and that Castor's "was not one of the finest I've seen."

"I thought the president's lawyer - the first lawyer - just rambled on and on and on and didn't really address the constitutional argument," Cornyn told reporters at the Capitol after the day's proceedings had concluded. "Finally, the second lawyer got around to it and, I thought, did an effective job."

Murkowski, one of the Republicans who voted to proceed with the trial, said she that thought the House impeachment managers presented a "pretty good legal analysis" but that she was "really stunned at the first attorney who presented for former president Trump."

"I couldn't figure out where he was going - [he] spent 45 minutes going somewhere, but I don't think he helped us with better understanding where he was coming from on the constitutionality of this," Murkowski said.

She added that she thought that Trump's other attorney, David Schoen, "did a better job" but that Castor's presentation was "a missed opportunity."

Asked whether he agreed with Murkowski, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., declined to call Castor's presentation a "missed opportunity" but expressed confusion at the lawyer's performance.

"Well, I think I - I thought I - I really didn't know - I thought I knew where he was going," Graham told reporters. "And I really didn't know where he was going."

He added that "nobody's mind was changed one way or the other," perhaps with the exception of Cassidy's.

Asked about his performance, Castor told reporters, "I thought we had a good day." Pressed about Cassidy's switch, Castor said, "I don't make anything of it. If it leaks down to 34 then I'll start to worry."
Yams are considered an important cash crop in many tropical and subtropical areas of Africa. Credit: S. Yamanaka

Yams are a staple food in West Africa, which produces over 90% of the world's yams each year. Yams play a key role in the food security, economic income, and traditional culture for the region.

While they are commonly assumed to be the same as sweet potatoes in the U.S., yams are a completely different plant. The yam tubers are much starchier and drier compared to sweet potatoes. Yams are native to Africa and Asia, and most Americans have never had a true yam.

Even though yam is a staple crop for West Africa, there has been limited research to improve the genetic diversity or productivity.

Researcher Shinsuke Yamanaka focuses on improving crop breeding resources for yams. His research was recently published in Crop Science, a journal from the Crop Science Society of America.

The goal of Yamanaka's research was to increase the knowledge about the genetic information within yamsto help with future endeavors of breeding more varieties. Presently, there is little information for breeders to rely onso Yamanaka is creating a type of "library" of information for future yam breeders.

There are more than 600 species of yams. The research team focused on the white Guinea yam because of its economic importance.

Farmers in tropical and sub-tropical Africa rely on yams to make a living. But yams are not an easy crop to grow.

White Guinea yam tubers can be inconsistent in shape and size. Breeders will be able to use the collection of genetic resources to improve yam characteristics. Credit: S. Yamanaka

Yams can take up to 11 months to grow before harvest. Also, the male and female flowers grow on different plants, so it is hard to time pollination correctly for a successful breeding.

"The long growth cycle, inconsistency in flowering between plants, and polyploidy are major limitations of the yam breeding study," explains Yamanaka.

In addition to improving those characteristics, breeding new varieties can increase the crop yield, improve cooking properties, and decrease harvesting time. These would be beneficial for farmers.

When scientists breed crops, it can take several years to identify which plants have the best traits to be used as parents. Once the parent plants are chosen, the breeding process can continue as the plants are cross pollinated to create new, improved offspring.

Previous research has focused to collect and characterize genetic material from countries in the "yam belt" of West Africa. But maintaining this large collection is a challenge. Researchers wanted to better understand the physical and genetic variations of plants in the collection.

To do this, researchers used molecular markers. Molecular markers are segments of DNA that correspond with certain plant characteristics. This helps researchers predict what the plant will be like based on DNA instead of growing and observing the plant.

The team used plant material from over 400 yam plants, and DNA was extracted for analysis.

The edible yam tuber has a starchy, white flesh. Yams are a great source of fiber and potassium. Credit: S. Yamanaka

Researchers were able to reduce the size of the collection by eliminating plants that were genetically similar or not unique. A total of 100 yam plants were found to be unique, which will make up the new smaller collection.

Important agronomic traits were recorded about each plant in the new collection. These traits included the number of stems per plant, the growth period, number of tubers per plant, yield, and tuber weight.

In breeding terms, this is a "mini-core collection." Similar collections are available for rice, millet and palm, among other crops.

This smaller collection will be much easier to maintain and gather information from. And creating new, preferable types of yams will help African farmers.

Breeding better crops takes time. This collection of genetic resources will help scientists save time as they evaluate and select which plants to use for breeding.

"Although our research is just the beginning of better utilization of the wide genetic diversity in yam, we hope our research will pave the way to improve yam breeding for farmers," says Yamanaka.

More information: Babil Pachakkil et al, Simple sequence repeatbased minicore collection for white Guinea yam ( Dioscorea rotundata ) germplasm, Crop Science (2020). Babil Pachakkil et al, Simple sequence repeatbased minicore collection for white Guinea yam ( Dioscorea rotundata ) germplasm,(2020). DOI: 10.1002/csc2.20431

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Travellers are expected to have to pay 1,750 to quarantine in a 'depressing' three-star Heathrow hotel where rooms normally cost 50 a night when asylum seekers are staying for free in a four-star rival just down the road, MailOnline can reveal today.

From Monday people jetting into the UK from 33 'red list' countries will be taken from arrivals directly to 16 hotels with the Thistle, close to Heathrow Terminal 5, believed to be one of them.

All guests will have to pay an individual fee of 1,750 for ten nights where they will have to eat airline-style food left at their door, change their own sheets and towels and be accompanied by security if they want fresh air or a cigarette outside.

GLH Hotels run the Thistle building - MailOnline has contacted them for comment.

However an airline worker, who lives nearby, said: It wouldnt be my first choice for somewhere to stay, put it that way. I know you dont get much of a choice where you quarantine but that hotel looks very old now and not very welcoming. It isnt in the best of state, either, and its a little depressing if you ask me.

One guest staying at the hotel last October gave it a one out of five rating on TripAdvisor and wrote: I stay in hotels for between 150 and 200 nights a year. This is by far the worst hotel I have seen in about 15 years. I refused to stay because the rooms were so shockingly bad, as if theyd tried to recreate the set of Fawlty Towers but without the humour.

The hotel replied by promising training for staff 'to ensure that we improve the service and are working hard to improve the standard of the rooms'.

However, Government officials still need to find 28,000 rooms to accommodate them after admitting that no contracts have yet been awarded. Given its location, the Crowne Plaza and its 500 rooms might be considered an ideal location, but it has been block-booked by the Home Office until March.

The apparent freedom afforded to the migrants at the four-star neighbouring hotel contrasts with the draconian measures awaiting passengers who will be placed in quarantine after flying in to Britain. Government-hired security guards are expected to patrol each hotel floor to ensure compliance.

MailOnline understands that the 3-star Thistle Hotel at Heathrow could be among the UK's quarantine hotels where guests will have to pay 1,750 for ten nights - or more if with their families

Reviews of the Thistle (left, and rodent trap outside right) have compared it to 'Fawlty Towers' and it has also been called 'depressing'

Down the road asylum seekers are staying at the 4-star Crowne Plaza for free, it emerged over the weekend

Spot the difference: Photos from the Crowne Plaza (pictured) where hundreds of asylum seekers checked in appear to show the rooms and beds are larger, with more hardwood furniture including desks

The three-star Thistle appears to have smaller rooms with smaller windows, where quarantine guests will have to pay 1,750 to stay

Hundreds of asylum seekers are being housed at the large hotel near Heathrow as the Government struggles to find suitable accommodation for passengers forced to quarantine after arriving from virus hotspots

The quarantine policy would add an extra 3,000 to the cost of a break abroad for the average family because additional adults must pay 650 each and children between five and 12 will cost 325 each. Under-fives will be free.

How will the new border rules work? Matt Hancock has announced details of the tougher border measures to MPs. TEN YEARS IN PRISON Mr Hancock said that arrivals who lie on their passenger locator forms about visiting 'hot spot' countries, in order to avoid hotel quarantine, face up to a decade in prison. It affects British arrivals from 33 countries deemed high risk of new variants. Nationals of those countries will be refused entry to the UK and most direct flights have already been banned. The countries include all of South America, large parts of Africa - including South Africa - and the United Arab Emirates. HOTEL QUARANTINE Arrivals from Red List nations will have to quarantine at a Government-designated hotel for 10 days. It will cost the travellers 1,750 each, although the Government is paying the upfront cost and will bill them afterwards. Attempts to break out of the quarantine before the 10 days are up could result in a fine of up to 10,000. They are not eligible for the five-day 'test and release' scheme. None of the 16 hotels involved in Number 10's quarantine plan have been named for 'commercial reasons'. REPEATED COVID TESTS Red List arrivals will be required to test negative for coronavirus 72 hours before departure, using a kit that meets UK government standards. They will be tested again on day two and day eight of quarantine, with costs included in the wider charge of the hotel stay. NON-RED LIST ARRIVALS The same requirement for a negative test result 72 hours before departure applies. Once in the UK, they must isolate for 10 days at home or in private accommodation, with the authorities able to check that they are obeying the rules. Tests will be required on day two and day eight of isolation, and must be booked through a government portal in advance of travel. The portal will be launched on Thursday. The costs are not yet known but PCR tests typically cost around 120 a time. TEST AND RELEASE The test and release scheme - which allows non-'red list travellers' to leave isolation if they test negative after five days is staying in place. Many essential business travellers are likely to take this option. However, Mr Hancock suggested even though they will not be subject to quarantine after the five-day test, they will still be required to have tests on day two and days eight. That means they could be screened four times in total. Advertisement

Yet taxpayers are spending a fortune to put up more than 400 immigrants at the four-star Crowne Plaza hotel just two miles from the UKs biggest airport, it has emerged.

Hundreds of asylum seekers are being housed at a large hotel near Heathrow as the Government struggles to find accommodation for passengers forced to quarantine after arriving from virus hotspots.

Yet taxpayers are spending a fortune to put up more than 400 immigrants at the four-star Crowne Plaza hotel just two miles from the UKs biggest airport.

Astonishingly, officials have chosen not to move the asylum seekers into two nearby immigration removal centres, where there is space for more than 800 people and which would free up vital rooms for passengers required to self-isolate for ten days.

The Thistle Hotel in Heathrow is said to be one of 16-hotels earmarked by the government to be used as a quarantine centre for passengers flying in from Covid hotspots like Brazil and South Africa.

The grim two storey block with 266-rooms is on the edge of Terminal 5 meaning guests will have to endure the deafening roar of jets coming in to land on the runway just 200-metres away.

When MailOnline visited this morning, the hotel was closed to guests with just two cars parked in the vast car park. But even as the winter sun shone overhead, the building still looked gloomy.

The shabby metallic window frames give it a tired, dated feel, which is exacerbated by some of the exterior work on the building beginning to peel away due to age.

Rodent traps were also scattered around the car park suggesting the hotel grounds have had to be treated for a mouse or rat infestation.

To the right of the hotel, part of an exterior fence is topped with barbed wire and CCTV cameras are positioned everywhere.

Peering into one of the rooms, there does not appear to be much space at all. Two single beds were pushed together to make a double with just a small wardrobe and table.

A member of staff, keeping guard at the property, refused to deny the hotel - where rooms normally start at around 80 a night - was going to be used to quarantine passengers paying up to 1750 for ten days.

He said: I am not going to answer any of your questions. If you need to know anything then youll need to contact the management company.

Quarantine hotels would add an extra 3,000 to the cost of a break abroad for the average family, it emerged last night.

Industry figures said holidaymakers would be taking a huge gamble because their destination could be added to the red list of countries the rule applies to.

In addition to the individual fee of 1,750 to stay in a hotel, which are located around airports, additional adults must pay 650 each and children between five and 12 will cost 325 each. Under-fives will be free.

This means a family of four, consisting of two adults and two children aged between five and 12, would have to fork out an extra 3,050 to undergo a ten-night hotel quarantine after returning from holiday.

They would have to also shell out hundreds more for the pre-flight tests which are required 72 hours before return travel.

Many popular destinations are not currently on the red list, such as Spain, Italy and Greece.

But were they to be added in the coming weeks and months, any holidaymakers who have been there within ten days of travelling back to the UK will immediately become subject to hotel quarantine. The variants from Brazil and South Africa have already been detected in Italy and Spain and therefore these countries could be added.

Boris Johnson last month announced plans to force arrivals from 33 red list countries to quarantine in hotels, but the scheme has been delayed in part because of problems finding accommodation. Yet some 10,000 migrants are being housed at hotels across the UK, despite official figures showing only 290 of the 2,462 beds at seven purpose-built immigration centres are currently occupied.

All international arrivals into the UK from 30 'red list' countries will be taken by bus to 16 hotels from Monday

'Can you stop 40m vaccinated Brits going on holiday?' Travel industry turns on Grant Shapps as he kills off hopes of foreign AND UK breaks this year Grant Shapps was rebuked by No10 and faced the wrath of the travel industry today as he snuffed out hopes of a summer holiday season, warning people not to book anything at home or abroad. The Transport Secretary made clear there is no guarantee that breaks will be possible at all this year, saying he did not want to 'raise people's hopes'. Asked in an interview on BBC Breakfast what needs to change for restrictions on overseas travel to be lifted, Mr Shapps replied: 'First of all, everybody having their vaccinations.' Pressed on whether the rules will remain in place until that happens, he said 'yes'. He stressed that it is currently illegal to go abroad for any non-essential reason - although he did say the government is looking at a 'vaccines passport' system that might allow leisure travel to resume when the crisis eases. The grim comments came despite Boris Johnson previously voicing 'optimism' about the summer, and Matt Hancock revealing he has already booked a trip to Cornwall. Tory MPs accused ministers of 'ripping up the goalposts' on when lockdown can ease saying the restrictions were 'almost studied and deliberate cruelty' against the nation. Advertisement

At Harmondsworth, two miles from the 100-a-night Crowne Plaza, 527 beds are lying empty. There is space for a further 300 people at Colnbrook, half a mile further on. Alp Mehmet, from the Migration Watch UK think tank, said last night: This is a frankly barmy situation. The Government is struggling to find hotel rooms for travellers to quarantine in, but there are hundreds of migrants and asylum seekers staying in a hotel right next to the airport. You couldnt make it up.

An 8ft fence was erected around the perimeter of the Crowne Plaza last summer, yet migrants last week strolled past private security guards contracted by the Home Office  many of them not wearing masks. As further evidence of the apparent indifference to safety, a hand car-wash business is operating in the hotels car park in contravention of lockdown rules. There is even a sign advertising the service at the nearby exit of the M4.

Migrants who have often risked their lives to reach Britain are in despair at safety measures.

It is not a good system  people are too close together, claimed Ilyat Alkaldi, 42, who fled Kuwait and completed the final leg of his journey across the Channel by dinghy from Calais. He has been housed at the hotel since October and claimed migrants roam the corridors and visit each others rooms. Djomou Bamou, 32, who was smuggled into the UK in a car, said: We can walk around wherever we want. There are lots of people here.

Each room has a double bed, an en suite bathroom and flatscreen TV. Staff leave three basic meals outside rooms each day while dining areas and leisure facilities are closed. Housekeepers clean the rooms once a week.

Groups of migrants can be seen chatting on smartphones outside the hotel or strolling to a parade of shops in nearby West Drayton.

Among them was Atif Ali, 21, from Pakistan, who was smuggled into the UK in the back of a lorry after spending two years living in the infamous Jungle camp in Calais. After three months here in this hotel I feel like I am going crazy, he said. You just sleep, its boring.

Ministers have been accused of hopelessly inadequate planning, with tender documents sent out to hotel chains only on Thursday night. Rob Paterson, the boss of Best Western, said: In any normal company, if you went out and announced a programme nationally and you hadnt thought about how you were going to plan that, and you hadnt spoken to the people involved Im not sure Id have a job if I did that in my company.

Tory MP Sir John Hayes, a former Transport Minister, said: This is a ridiculous situation. Hotels are not the best place for asylum seekers. They should be in secure accommodation or else we risk them disappearing into the black economy or being exploited.

The Mail on Sunday has previously revealed how at least 20 hotels across Britain are being used to house migrants who had crossed the Channel as part of a 4 billion, ten-year contract between the Home Office and outsourcing firms.

The Home Office said it is legally obliged to provide accommodation to asylum seekers. A spokesman said: At all of our sites we put in place a range of measures to ensure they are safe and asylum seekers, like everyone else, must follow the coronavirus regulations.

Taxpayers are spending a fortune to put up more than 400 immigrants at the four-star Crowne Plaza hotel just two miles from the UKs biggest airport. Astonishingly, officials have chosen not to move the asylum seekers into two nearby immigration removal centres (pictured), where there is space for more than 800 people and which would free up vital rooms for passengers required to self-isolate for ten days

'She has no right to impose laws on English airports': Nicola Sturgeon branded 'ridiculous' over demand that England quarantines ALL international arrivals heading on to Scotland to comply with her border regime

Nicola Sturgeon was facing fury today after her Government demanded English authorities quarantine all travellers flying into England if they were planning to go to Scotland.

The First Minister was accused of trying to extend Scottish laws south of the border with the demand that would force England to lock people up in hotels for 10 days even if local rules said they did not need to.

Under plans unveiled by Health Secretary Matt Hancock last night, only arrivals from 33 Red List nations would be required to stay locked in a hotel for 10 days in England.

Scotland however, is forcing all international arrivals into its airports to undergo the stay at a cost of 1,750. Scots Transport Secretary Michael Matheson last night confirmed the SNP government in Edinburgh wants Boris Johnson to adhere to Scotland's policy for travellers heading north of the border via England.

Tory MP Peter Bone said Ms Sturgeon needed to clarify what her government was demanding.

'If someone arrives in England and then travels to Scotland they have to abide by the Scottish laws but it is wrong for the First Minister of Scotland to try and impose her laws on English airports,' he told MailOnline.

'Thats ridiculous and bears no logic. If that is what she means I think the UK Government should firmly reject that idea.

'She should clarify ... and make it clear that quarantine rules will apply once someone goes into Scotland.'

Passengers arriving at UK airports have to fill out a 'passenger locator form' in the 48 hours before arriving in Great Britain.

Details required include 'your travel details, including times and dates ... and the address where you will stay in the UK.'

This would theoretically allow authorities to identify travellers going on to Scotland.

Scots Transport Secretary Michael Matheson last night confirmed the SNP government in Edinburgh wants Boris Johnson to adhere to Scotland's policy for travellers heading north of the border

Under plans unveiled by Health Secretary Matt Hancock last night, only arrivals from 33 Red List nations would be required to stay locked in a hotel for 10 days

Such a move by the PM would effectively partially impose the Scottish policy on England, and it is not clear how it would be enforceable at ports and airports

Addressing the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood yesterday, Mr Matheson said: 'Passengers entering England from the red-list countries who then seek to travel onto Scotland will have to isolate in a hotel in England. Last week, that was 130 people.

'We continue to press the UK Government to adopt what we believe is a more comprehensive approach, and require all arrivals to go into a quarantine hotel.

'We ask the UK Government to work with us to identify international travellers not caught by this approach so that arrangements can be made for them to isolate in a quarantine hotel, in line with the policy in Scotland.'

Mr Matheson told MSPs the UK's strategy on international travel was 'no longer sufficient to provide the protection necessary'.

Given the lack of investigation globally into new strains of the virus, Mr Matheson said it was 'very hard to say with confidence where the high-risk countries are'.

'That is why the Scottish Government wants a comprehensive approach to managed isolation,' he added.

Last night Mr Hancock announced people returning to England from Red List destinations would have to pay 1,750 to quarantine for 10 days in Government-designated hotels.

Those caught lying about their movements could be fined 10,000 or jailed for 10 years.

He indicated the quarantine measures might be in place until the autumn if vaccine booster jabs are needed in response to coronavirus variants.

He told MPs that 16 hotels have been contracted to provide 4,600 rooms for the quarantine programme, which begins on Monday.

The Scottish Government said that it would go further and require all international travellers arriving into Scotland to stay in a quarantine hotel.

No international flights are currently operating to Wales or Northern Ireland.

Mr Matheson told MSPs that six hotels have been block-booked in Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow, with up to 1,300 rooms available.

Transport Secretary Grant Shapps told Times Radio this morning that insisting on the same quarantine rules as Scotland would cut off crucial supply routes for vaccines and other essential goods.

Transport Secretary Grant Shapps told Times Radio this morning that insisting on the same quarantine rules as Scotland would cut off crucial supply routes for vaccines and other essential goods.

'Scotland is in a slightly different position. A lot of their supply chain comes through England. For example the short straits, that's Dover to Calais, brings into the UK as a whole 75 percent of our medicines, 40 percent of our food, much of which will go to Scotland,' he said.

'If we were to do what Scotland have done we would actually be closing off their supply routes for critical goods. And a certain number of people need to move around to make sure critical infrastructure is kept going.

'The technical stuff that keeps the water supply and keeps electrics running. Sometimes people need to come and go... We wouldn't have the vaccines, we wouldn't have medicine for all sorts of purposes, we wouldn't have food on the shelves...

'Some people say why don't you just close the borders, or even quarantine everybody. That wouldn't work, we wouldn't be able to function as a country.There would be massive social costs and economic costs. That's not practical.'

A Welsh Government spokesman said Wales will be adopting the new border measures announced for England.

The spokesperson said: 'This will include all people returning to Wales from 15 February being required to book and pay for tests before they travel. This will be done through the UK portal, whether a person has been in a Red List country or not.

'People returning to Wales from Red List countries are doing so through other ports in the UK, primarily via England. From 15 February, all arrivals in England will be required to isolate in designated hotels.

'This includes anyone planning to travel on to Wales, and they will need to enter a designated hotel for quarantine in England. This will need to be booked before travel.'
Gaborone, Botswana (PANA) - Amnesty International has condemned the execution of two people in Botswana after they lost their respective death sentence appeals


Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-10 14:10:32|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- The world in the past 24hrs. A selection of the best daily press photos from Xinhua.

Aerial photo taken on Jan. 20, 2021 shows the Dagu lighthouse which stands 12.9 nautical miles east of the Tianjin Port of north China's Tianjin Municipality. The 38.3-meter-high Dagu lighthouse with a light range of 17 nautical miles, has been put into use since May 1, 1978. (Xinhua/Zhao Zishuo)

Staff members disinfect containers in Alataw Pass, northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, Feb. 7, 2021. The number of China-Europe freight trains traveling through Alataw Pass, a major land port in northwest China, reached 444 in January, up by 49.5 percent year on year. (Xinhua/Ma Kai)

A staff member disinfects the square in front of the railway station of Tonghua City, northeast China's Jilin Province, Feb. 9, 2021. (Xinhua/Xu Chang)

A medical worker rests on a chair in the residential community of Ronghui in Daxing District, Beijing, capital of China, Feb. 9, 2021. Beijing has cleared all areas with medium and high COVID-19 infection risks, according to a press conference held on Tuesday.



The residential community of Ronghui was downgraded to a low-risk area on Tuesday. Currently, all areas in Beijing are low-risk areas for COVID-19 infection. (Xinhua/Sun Ruibo)

A worker assembles pipelines inside a tunnel across the Yellow River in Zhongning County, Zhongwei City of northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Reigon, Feb. 9, 2021. More than 100 workers are still on duty in the tunnel to ensure the project development on time despite the upcoming Spring Festival, or the Chinese Lunar New Year. This tunnel, the second one to cross the Yellow River in Ningxia, is part of a greater project to provide heating service to residents in Zhongning. (Xinhua/Feng Kaihua)

Passengers about to board the train are seen at a railway station in Shijiazhuang, north China's Hebei Province, Feb. 9, 2021. The first train from the northern Chinese city of Shijiazhuang departed on Tuesday after a nearly month-long suspension of the city's train services due to a COVID-19 resurgence, according to local authorities. (Photo by Liang Zidong/Xinhua)

Children queue to enter school during COVID-19 pandemic in Bucharest, Romania, Feb. 8, 2021. A new semester started on Monday amid the COVID-19 pandemic in all kindergartens, primary schools and high schools across Romania, and more than two thirds of the kids and students reported to their campuses. (Photo by Cristian Cristel/Xinhua)

A Libyan girl in a traditional dress poses for a photo at the Martyr's Square in Tripoli, Libya on Feb. 4, 2021. (Photo by Nada Harib/Xinhua)

Afghan security force members take part in a military operation against Taliban militants in Shirzad district of Nangarhar province, Afghanistan, Feb. 9, 2021. (Photo by Saifurahman Safi/Xinhua)

People take a rest under a bridge as temporary shelter after flood hit the place due to high intensity of rainfall in Subang, West Java, Indonesia, Feb. 9, 2021. (Photo by Septianjar/Xinhua)
Mumbai, Feb 10 : Actor Kunal Kapoor celebrated his sixth wedding anniversary on Wednesday, and going his new social media post it would seem he sure knows how to keep his wife Naina happy.

Kunal posted a series of pictures donning a chef's hat. What grabbed attention of fans was his caption.

"#MrChef. The way to a woman's heart is through her stomach," the actor wrote.

Kunal's post invited this comment from Hrithik Roshan: "Hahaha. Nice ! Happy anniversary guys". Actress Sonali Bendre also commented on the post, "Wow Kunnu!!! happy anniversary lots of love to both of you." Kunal Kapoor, who has been part of films Aaja Nach Le (2007), Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana (2012), Rang De Basanti (2006) and more, recently announced his next venture. He will be seen in the thriller Koi Jaane Na, directed by Amin Hajee.
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A majority of members of the US Senate voted in favor of impeachment of former President Donald Trump, agreeing with the Democrats' argument that the impeachment procedure for a president who is no longer carrying out his duties and is now considered an individual is allowed by the US Constitution, VOA reported.

Trump's lawyers have argued that the Senate has no legal authority to try the former president's impeachment.

Democrats in the House of Representatives had announced the impeachment of Donald Trump a few days before his official resignation on January 20. Trump has been accused of inciting unrest.

After a four-hour debate in which the two sides presented their arguments, the issue of the constitutionality of the impeachment of the outgoing president was put to a vote in the Senate. A simple majority of votes was needed to continue the process. As a result, 56 senators recognized the constitutionality of the impeachment, whereas 44 Republican senators did not agree with this argument.

Six Republican senatorsBill Cassidy, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse, and Pat Toomeyalso supported the impeachment.

The senators will reconvene at noon on Wednesday to continue the impeachment process.

House managers and Trump's defense team have 16 hours to deliberate in two days.

Algeria, Feb 10, 2021 (SPS) - The head of the Parliamentary Bloc of the Future Front in the Algerian National People's Assembly, Mr. Hajj Belghouti, reaffirmed Tuesday that his bloc members full support to the Sahrawi people's right to self-determination.

Hajj Belghouti added, in a speech he addressed during the visit of Sahrawi students studying in Algeria, organized by his Parliamentary Group, he reaffirmed his party firm positions to the Sahrawi issue.

For her part, Chair of the Committee for Friendship and Fraternity with the Sahrawi People, Mrs. Saida Bonnab, said that the Moroccan aggression against unarmed Sahrawi civilians in the illegal Guerguerat breach last November 13, and the violation of the ceasefire agreement gave a new and strong impetus to the Sahrawi case against the Moroccan regime at regional and international level.SPS

128090/TRA
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Dr. Larry Siekawitch, a senior pastor and a professor of Bible and theology, has completed his new book Beyond a Reasonable Doubt: A Case for Common Sense Christianity: a compelling book that takes a look at Christianity, using common sense, evidence, and good reasoning.

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Published by Page Publishing, Siekawitchs powerful book seeks to convince readers of the reality of God and Jesus Christ using the concept of American jurisprudence.

Siekawitch addresses the atheists, the agnostics, and the believers and invites them into a conversation about the existence of a supreme being who is God and why he reveals himself the way he does.

Readers who wish to experience this insightful work can purchase Beyond a Reasonable Doubt: A Case for Common Sense Christianity at bookstores everywhere, or online at the Apple iTunes Store, Amazon, Google Play, or Barnes and Noble.

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WASHINGTON - President Joe Biden on Wednesday ordered new sanctions against the military regime in Myanmar, taking action after the military this month staged a coup in the Southeast Asian country and arrested de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi and other senior politicians.

President Joe Biden speaks about his administration's response to the coup in Myanmar in the South Court Auditorium on the White House complex, Wednesday, Feb. 10, 2021, in Washington. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

WASHINGTON - President Joe Biden on Wednesday ordered new sanctions against the military regime in Myanmar, taking action after the military this month staged a coup in the Southeast Asian country and arrested de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi and other senior politicians.

Biden said he was issuing an executive order that will prevent Myanmar's generals from accessing $1 billion in assets in the United States. Biden added that more measures are to come.

The military must relinquish power it seized and demonstrate respect for the will of the people of Burma, Biden said.

President Joe Biden speaks about his administration's response to the coup in Myanmar in the South Court Auditorium on the White House complex, Wednesday, Feb. 10, 2021, in Washington. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

Biden said the new sanctions will allow his administration to freeze U.S. assets that benefit Myanmars military leaders while maintaining support for health care programs, civil society groups and other areas that benefit the country's people. He said the administration planned to identify specific targets of the sanctions later this week.

The people of Burma are making their voices heard, and the world is watching, Biden said, using an alternate name for Myanmar. Well be ready to impose additional measures and well continue to work with our international partners to urge other nations to join us in these efforts.

Before Biden spoke from the White House, large crowds demonstrating against the military takeover again took to the streets in Myanmar, even after security forces ratcheted up the use of force against them and raided the headquarters of Suu Kyis political party.

It remains to be seen what, if any, impact the U.S. action will have on Myanmar's military regime. Many of the military leaders are already under sanctions because of attacks against the Muslim Rohingya minority.

Demonstrator wave National League for Democracy party flags during a protest against the military coup in Yangon, Myanmar Wednesday, Feb. 10, 2021. Protesters continued to gather Wednesday morning in Yangon breaching Myanmar's new military rulers' decrees that effectively banned peaceful public protests in the country's two biggest cities. (AP Photo)

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a supporter of Suu Kyi, said he appreciated Biden's "ongoing engagement with Congress on prompt and practical steps to restore democracy in Burma. I hope all nations that respect democracy and the rule of law will join the U.S. in imposing meaningful costs and accountability on the junta.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters shortly before Bidens announcement that theres certainly a recognition that this will need to be a co-ordinated effort with the international community to press change in Myanmar.

The U. N. Human Rights Council was set to hold a special session on Myanmar on Thursday.

The protesters in Myanmar are demanding that power be restored to Suu Kyis deposed civilian government. Theyre also seeking freedom for her and other governing party members detained by the military after it blocked the new session of Parliament on Feb. 1.

Witnesses estimated that tens of thousands of protesters, if not more, turned out Wednesday in Yangon and Mandalay, the countrys biggest cities. Rallies also took place in the capital, Naypyitaw, and elsewhere.

The military cited the governments failure to act on unsubstantiated allegations of widespread voter fraud as part of the reason for the takeover and declaration of a one-year state of emergency. The generals maintain the actions are legally justified, and have cited an article in the constitution that allows the military to take over in times of emergency.

Suu Kyis party has said its effectively a coup. The Biden administration also was quick to officially determine the takeover was a coup, setting the stage for Wednesday's announcement.

The U.S, first imposed sanctions in 1998 after the military there violently suppressed a protest. These were tightened over the following decades because of what Washington deemed human rights violations by the ruling military regime.

The restrictions were gradually eased in response to reforms and after the release of Suu Kyi from house arrest in 2010.

But in 2019, President Donald Trump introduced new sanctions against Myanmars military leaders over the killings of Rohingya Muslims.

Madhani reported from Chicago.
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Mary Schenk is a reporter covering police, courts and breaking news at The News-Gazette. Her email is mschenk@news-gazette.com, and you can follow her on Twitter (@schenk).
Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-10 20:48:09|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- The 737-800 Boeing Converted Freighter (BCF) project in China will add a new production line in Guangzhou, south China's Guangdong Province, according to Boeing China Wednesday.

The new production line will be the third in the partnership between Boeing and Guangzhou Aircraft Maintenance Engineering Co., Ltd. (GAMECO) in Guangzhou. It will further meet the demand for freighter conversion driven by the booming express delivery and e-commerce sectors in the country, said Boeing China.

Both sides will take it as an opportunity to implement an innovative and scalable production concept for conversions, which will boost deliveries and efficiency, it added.

In 2016, Boeing launched the 737-800BCF project exclusively in China, where there is a surging e-commerce industry and a massive market. Boeing and its partners have established production lines for the project in three Chinese cities: Shanghai, Jinan and Guangzhou.

To date, the 737-800BCF project has received more than 150 orders.

GAMECO is a joint venture between China Southern Airlines Co., Ltd. and Hutchison Whampoa (China) Ltd. from Hong Kong. It specializes in aircraft and airborne component maintenance, repair and overhaul.

China remains the world's second-largest civil aviation market, with continuous growth in total turnover, passenger traffic and cargo volume. Enditem

Dallas, Texas, Feb. 09, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Switchback Energy Acquisition Corporation (NYSE: SBE) (Switchback), encourages its stockholders to vote in favor of the approval of Switchbacks proposed business combination (the Business Combination) with ChargePoint, Inc. (ChargePoint) and the related proposals to be voted upon at Switchbacks special meeting (the Special Meeting). The Special Meeting will be held virtually at https://www.cstproxy.com/switchbackenergy/sm2021, on February 11, 2021, at 10:00 a.m., Eastern time, as described in Switchbacks definitive proxy statement/prospectus/consent solicitation statement, dated January 8, 2021 (the Registration Statement).

Every stockholders vote is important, regardless of the number of shares the stockholder holds. Switchback requests that each stockholder that holds its shares in street name, meaning that their shares are held by a broker, bank or other nominee, should, if it has not already done so, contact their broker, bank or nominee to ensure that their shares are voted. Switchback encourages stockholders to vote in advance of the Special Meeting.

The following section provides answers to frequently asked questions stockholders may have regarding the Special Meeting.

Can I still vote if I no longer own my share?

Yes, if you owned shares as of the close of business on December 16, 2020, the record date for the Special Meeting, you can still vote your shares even if you no longer own them.

How do I vote my shares?

If your shares are held in street name as described above, you can instruct your broker, bank or other nominee how to vote the shares in your account by following the instructions that the broker, bank or other nominee provided to you along with the Registration Statement.

If you need assistance voting your shares, please call Morrow Sodali LLC, Switchbacks proxy solicitor, toll-free at (877) 787-9239.

Your vote must be received by 11:59 p.m., Eastern time, on February 10, 2021 to be counted. After this time, the only way to cast a vote is at the Special Meeting on February 11, 2021 by following the instructions below.

Story continues

How do I attend and vote at the Special Meeting?

As described in the Registration Statement, you are entitled to participate in and vote at the Special Meeting if you were a stockholder of record as of the close of business on December 16, 2020, the record date.

If you hold your shares in street name and wish to attend the virtual meeting, you must obtain a legal proxy from your account representative at the bank, broker, or other nominee that holds your shares and e-mail a copy (a legible photograph is sufficient) of such legal proxy to proxy@continentalstock.com. Beneficial stockholders who e-mail a valid legal proxy will be issued a 12-digit meeting control number that will allow you to register to attend and participate in the Special Meeting.

You may vote during the Special Meeting by following the instructions available on the meeting website during the meeting.

Additional Information on the Business Combination and Where to Find It

In connection with the proposed Business Combination, Switchback filed the Registration Statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the SEC), which includes a proxy statement/prospectus of Switchback and a consent solicitation statement of ChargePoint. The Registration Statement has been declared effective by the SEC and the definitive proxy statement/prospectus/consent solicitation statement has been mailed out to Switchbacks stockholders. Switchbacks stockholders and other interested persons are advised to read the definitive proxy statement/prospectus/consent solicitation statement (including all amendments and supplements thereto) and other documents relating to the Business Combination filed with the SEC as these materials contain important information about Switchback, ChargePoint and the Business Combination. Stockholders may obtain copies of the definitive proxy statement/prospectus/consent solicitation statement and other documents filed with the SEC, without charge, at the SECs web site at www.sec.gov, or by directing a request to: Switchback Energy, 5949 Sherry Lane, Suite 1010, Dallas, TX, 75225, Attention: Jim Mutrie, Chief Commercial Officer, General Counsel, Secretary and Director, (214) 368-0821.

Participants in the Solicitation

Switchback and its directors and executive officers may be deemed to be participants in the solicitation of proxies from Switchbacks stockholders in connection with the Business Combination. ChargePoint and its officers and directors may also be deemed participants in such solicitation. Information about the directors and executive officers of Switchback is set forth in Switchbacks Annual Report on Form 10-K which was filed with the SEC on March 30, 2020. Other information regarding the participants in the proxy solicitation and a description of their direct and indirect interests, by security holdings or otherwise, are contained in the definitive proxy statement/prospectus/consent solicitation statement and other relevant materials filed with the SEC.

About Switchback

Switchback is a special purpose acquisition company and was formed for the purpose of effecting a merger, capital stock exchange, asset acquisition, stock purchase, reorganization or similar business combination with one or more businesses in the energy value chain. Switchback is sponsored by NGP Switchback, LLC, which is owned by a private investment fund advised by NGP Energy Capital Management, L.L.C. and the management team of Switchback. Switchback began trading on the New York Stock Exchange in July 2019 and its common stock, units and warrants trade under the ticker symbols SBE, SBE.U and SBE.WS, respectively. For more information, please visit www.switchback-energy.com.

About ChargePoint

Since 2007, ChargePoint has been committed to making it easy for businesses and drivers to go electric. The company has built one of the largest EV charging network and most complete portfolio of charging solutions available today. ChargePoints cloud subscription platform and software-defined charging hardware are designed to include options for every charging scenario from home and multifamily to workplace, parking, hospitality, retail and transport fleets of all types. Today, one ChargePoint account provides access to hundreds-of-thousands of places to charge in North America and Europe. To date, drivers have logged more than 85 million charging sessions, with drivers plugging into the ChargePoint network approximately every two seconds. ChargePoint is creating the new fueling network to move all people and goods on electricity.

Forward Looking Statements

The information included herein and in any oral statements made in connection herewith include forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. All statements other than statements of historical facts contained herein are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements may generally be identified by the use of words such as believe, may, will, estimate, continue, anticipate, intend, expect, should, would, plan, project, forecast, predict, potential, seem, seek, future, outlook, target or other similar expressions that predict or indicate future events or trends or that are not statements of historical matters. These forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements regarding estimates and forecasts of other financial and performance metrics, projections of market opportunity and market share. These statements are based on various assumptions, whether or not identified herein, and on the current expectations of ChargePoint and Switchbacks management and are not predictions of actual performance. These forward-looking statements are provided for illustrative purposes only and are not intended to serve as, and must not be relied on by any investor as a guarantee, an assurance, a prediction or a definitive statement of, fact or probability. Actual events and circumstances are difficult or impossible to predict and may differ from assumptions, and such differences may be material. Many actual events and circumstances are beyond the control of ChargePoint and Switchback. These forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, including changes in domestic and foreign business, market, financial, political and legal conditions; risks relating to the uncertainty of the projected financial information with respect to ChargePoint; the inability of the parties to successfully or timely consummate the proposed transactions, including the risk that any required regulatory approvals are not obtained, are delayed or are subject to unanticipated conditions that could adversely affect the combined company or the expected benefits of the proposed transactions or that the approval of the stockholders of Switchback or ChargePoint is not obtained; the failure to realize the anticipated benefits of the proposed transactions; risks related to the rollout of ChargePoints business and the timing of expected business milestones; ChargePoints dependence on widespread acceptance and adoption of electric vehicles and increased installation of charging stations; ChargePoints ability to maintain effective internal controls over financial reporting, including the remediation of identified material weaknesses in internal control over financial reporting relating to segregation of duties with respect to, and access controls to, its financial record keeping system, and ChargePoints accounting staffing levels; ChargePoints current dependence on sales of charging stations for most of its revenues; overall demand for electric vehicle charging and the potential for reduced demand if governmental rebates, tax credits and other financial incentives are reduced, modified or eliminated or governmental mandates to increase the use of electric vehicles or decrease the use of vehicles powered by fossil fuels, either directly or indirectly through mandated limits on carbon emissions, are reduced, modified or eliminated; potential adverse effects on ChargePoints revenue and gross margins if customers increasingly claim clean energy credits and, as a result, they are no longer available to be claimed by ChargePoint; the effects of competition on ChargePoints future business; risks related to ChargePoints dependence on its intellectual property and the risk that ChargePoints technology could have undetected defects or errors; the amount of redemption requests made by Switchbacks public stockholders; the ability of Switchback or the combined company to issue equity or equity-linked securities or obtain debt financing in connection with the proposed transactions or in the future and those factors discussed in Switchbacks final prospectus dated July 25, 2019, Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2019 and any subsequently filed Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q, and the definitive proxy statement/prospectus/consent solicitation statement, in each case, under the heading Risk Factors, and other documents of Switchback filed, or to be filed, with the SEC. If any of these risks materialize or Switchbacks or ChargePoints assumptions prove incorrect, actual results could differ materially from the results implied by these forward-looking statements. There may be additional risks that neither Switchback nor ChargePoint presently know or that Switchback and ChargePoint currently believe are immaterial that could also cause actual results to differ from those contained in the forward-looking statements. In addition, forward-looking statements reflect Switchbacks and ChargePoints expectations, plans or forecasts of future events and views as of the date hereof. Switchback and ChargePoint anticipate that subsequent events and developments will cause Switchbacks and ChargePoints assessments to change. However, while Switchback and ChargePoint may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, Switchback and ChargePoint specifically disclaim any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing Switchbacks and ChargePoints assessments as of any date subsequent to the date hereof. Accordingly, undue reliance should not be placed upon the forward-looking statements. Additional information concerning these and other factors that may impact Switchbacks expectations and projections can be found in Switchbacks periodic filings with the SEC, including Switchbacks Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2019 and any subsequently filed Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q, and the definitive proxy statement/prospectus/consent solicitation statement. Switchbacks SEC filings are available publicly on the SECs website at www.sec.gov.

No Offer or Solicitation

This communication does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any securities or constitute a solicitation of any vote or approval.

Contacts





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Proxy Solicitor

(877) 787-9239

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WInston Churchill famously said: Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it. All Americans, but especially my fellow Republicans, should remember this wisdom during the Senates trial of former president Donald Trump.

I say this as a lifelong Republican who voted to impeach Mr Trump last month. Virtually all my colleagues on the right side of the aisle took the opposite path. Most felt it was a waste of time  political theatre that distracted from bigger issues. The overwhelming majority of Senate Republicans appear to feel the same way about conviction.

But this isnt a waste of time. Its a matter of accountability. If the GOP doesnt take a stand, the chaos of the past few months, and the past four years, could quickly return.

The future of our party and our country depends on confronting what happened  so it doesnt happen again.

The immediate cause for Mr Trumps impeachment was January 6. But the former presidents rally and resulting riot on Capitol Hill didnt come out of nowhere.

They were the result of four-plus years of anger, outrage and outright lies.

Perhaps the most dangerous lie  or at least the most recent  was that the election was stolen.

Of course it wasnt, but a huge number of Republican leaders encouraged the belief that it was. Every time that lie was repeated, the riots of January 6 became more likely.

Even now, many Republicans refuse to admit what happened. They continue to feed anger and resentment among the people.

On January 6, that fury led to the murder of a Capitol police officer and the deaths of four other Americans. If that rage is still building, where does it go from here?

Read More

Impeachment offers a chance to say enough is enough. It ought to force every American, regardless of party affiliation, to remember not only what happened on that fateful day, but also the path that led there.

After all, the situation could get much, much worse  with more violence and more division that cannot be overcome. The further down this road we go, the closer we come to the end of America as we know it. The Republican party I joined as a young man would never take that road.

The GOP that inspired me to serve in uniform and then run for public office believed a brighter future was just around the bend.

We stood for equal opportunity, firm in our conviction that a poor kid from the south side of Chicago deserves the same shot as a privileged kid from Highland Park.

We knew that if we brought everyone into Americas promise, we would unleash a new era of American progress and prosperity. Outrage and the fear of a darker future were nowhere to be found in that Republican party.

When leaders such as Donald Trump changed that dynamic, many of my fellow Republicans went along without question. Many are still there because they believe the rank-and-file Republican voter is there too.

But I think thats an illusion. The anger and outrage are drowning out the much larger group of people who reject that approach.

Worse, many have gone silent because they assume the partys leaders no longer represent them.

Theyre waiting for leaders who will say what they know is true.

Since my vote to impeach Mr Trump, Ive heard from tens of thousands of my constituents.

Their reaction has been overwhelmingly supportive. Republicans of all backgrounds and outlooks have told me they appreciate my efforts to return the GOP to a foundation of principle, not personality.

Ive even heard from many Democrats. They dont agree with me on a lot of issues, but they want the Republican party to be healthy and competitive.

I firmly believe the majority of Americans  Republican, Democrat, independent, you name it  reject the madness of the past four years. But well never move forward by ignoring what happened or refusing to hold accountable those responsible.

That will embolden the few who led us here and dishearten the many who know America is better than this.

It will make it more likely that we see more anger, violence and chaos in the years ahead.

The better path is to learn the lessons of the recent past.

Convicting Donald Trump is necessary to save America from going further down a sad, dangerous road.





Adam Kinzinger, a Republican, represents Illinoiss 16th Congressional District in the US House of Representatives
Venture over to Minute Maid Park, and you'll stumble upon a Houston Victorian architectural gem that may seem a little out-of-place. The curious question that's baffled Houstonians over the years: "Why is that charming blue Houston icon sitting right next to a baseball field?"

Now, this home known as the Cohn home is officially on the move.

GET OFF THE GRID: The top cheap places to travel in spring 2021

Built in 1905, the two-story home will likely be headed to a city park east of U.S. 59, according to Mayor Sylvester Turner's director of communications Mary Benton. Moving along with the home will be a historic locomotive that also rests on the land near Minute Maid Park.

In 2019, a company affiliated with the Houston Astros' bought the land where the Cohn home sits for $17 million. This week, they plan to break ground on a mixed-use residential and retail development, according to the Houston Chronicle's Rebecca Schuetz.

Right after the Astros' deal was made in 2019, Houston First's Peter McStravack told ABC-13 that the city bought the home years ago and moved the house to its current location near Minute Maid Park. The home was intended to be used as a Houston heritage center, but unfortunately plans fell through due to lack of funding.

"It was supposed to be a part of regional heritage center that we were developing on this site," McStravick said "Unfortunately, the oil and gas industry, the markets did not hold their value, so we decided to go ahead and postpone that project."

This isn't the first time the home has made a move. The Victorian home has changed hands several times and moved from Rusk Street to its location on Avenida De Las Americas right next Minute Maid Park, according to Houston Public Media's Abner Fletcher.

The blue-and-white home once graced on Houston's first upscale neighborhood called Quality Hill. If you're puzzled by a "hill" found in the coastal plains of Houston, the name reportedly refers to a spot that residents used to look down on Buffalo Bayou and Allen's Landing, according to Preservation Houston's Jim Parsons.

"And in Houston, you know, you take your hills where you can find them," Parsons said in an interview with Houston Public Media.
The boyfriend of a missing Melbourne mum has been arrested at the airport while allegedly trying to leave the country after police released him without charge.

Ju 'Kelly' Zhang, 33, was last seen barefoot and wearing pink pajamas at her home on Winchester Avenue in Epping, in Melbourne's north, at 5.30pm on February 1.

Ms Zhang's partner Joon 'Sam' Seong Tan previously told detectives Ms Zhang left her eight-year-old son at home when she went for a walk with no shoes on - something police have called 'highly unlikely'.

Ju 'Kelly' Zhang, 33, was last seen at her home in Epping, in Melbourne's north, at 5.30pm on February 1

Mr Tan was arrested by police at 6.15pm on Wednesday while allegedly trying to fly interstate, The Herald Sun reports.

The 35-year-old is currently still in custody and will be interviewed by police on Thursday.

After Mr Tan's arrest police revealed they were searching an area of Darebin Creek Reserve as part of their investigation.

Investigators from the missing persons squad arrested and questioned Mr Tan earlier this week but no charges were laid.

Mr Tan was arrested by police at 6.15pm on Wednesday while allegedly trying to leave the country

Tan told police he was with Ms Zhang and her son on the day she disappeared, and claimed she went for a walk and didn't come back.

'We say that is a very unlikely scenario bearing in mind that her eight-year-old son was in the house with Sam at that stage,' Inspector Andrew Stamper said.

'The information we have is that she would not have left her son by himself with someone who is not a family member.'

Police have urged neighbours to check their CCTV footage from the afternoon she disappeared.

They are specifically looking for footage of a white Toyota Land Cruiser and a black 2008 Mazda CX9 station wagon, with registration WKE 850.

Both vehicles are believed to have travelled near Ms Zhang's home sometime between 4pm last Monday and 8am last Tuesday.

Investigators said Ms Zhang's disappearance is 'extremely out of character' and has concerns for her welfare.

Just hours before she disappeared, Ms Zhang made a post on social media that had a video of her cooking with her eight-year-old son.
WASHINGTON  U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro on Wednesday laid out to the U.S. Senate how former President Donald Trump spent months selling his supporters on the lie that the election would be stolen from him, priming them to act to stop it from happening.

It was a key part of the House impeachment managers effort to demonstrate that Trump incited the insurrection at the Capitol  not just by telling his supporters to fight like hell during a rally on Jan. 6, but by working to undermine their faith in the outcome throughout the 2020 campaign.

President Trump told his supporters over and over again, nearly every day, in dozens of tweets, speeches and rallies, that their most precious right in our democracy  their voice, their vote  was being stripped away and they had to fight to stop that, Castro said. And they believed him. So they fought.

MOB MENTALITY: Some Texans arrested in Capitol riot blame Trump as impeachment trial begins

Castro showed many of those tweets and clips of Trumps statements throughout 2020, in which he asserted repeatedly that the only way he could lose the election was through massive fraud. The San Antonio Democrat showed Trumps repeated calls to stop counting votes after election day and rolled footage of Trumps speech from the White House that evening in which he declared victory.

This attack did not come from one speech and it didnt happen by accident, Castro said. The evidence shows clearly that this mob was provoked over many months by Donald J. Trump. And if you look at the evidence  his purposeful conduct  youll see that the attack was foreseeable and preventable.

In a brief moment of levity in the Senate trial, which featured hours of weighty arguments about American democracy at risk, Castro joked that he understands its no fun to lose.

Im a Texas Democrat. Weve lost a few elections over the years, said Castro, who has not lost an election himself. But can you imagine telling your supporters that the only way you can possibly lose is if an American election was rigged and stolen from you?

TEXAS TAKE: Get political headlines from across the state sent directly to your inbox

Castro began his roughly 18-minutes presentation with clips of interviews from the summer in which Trump, behind in the polls, was asked if he would commit to a peaceful transfer of power.

I have to see, Trump said in a Fox News interview in July. Im not going to just say yes.

There wont be a transfer, frankly, there will be a continuation, Trump said in September.

Castro showed a May 24 tweet in which Trump railed against mail-in ballots and predicted It will be the greatest Rigged Election in history.

In another tweet Castro showed, from June 22, Trump wrote, RIGGED 2020 ELECTION  IT WILL BE THE SCANDAL OF OUR TIMES!

On July 30, Trump tweeted: 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history.

Castro followed those with clips of interviews with Trumps supporters telling reporters they would not believe the election results if Joe Biden won.

Theres no way in heck our presidents going to lose, one supporter said. Yes, it would be a rigged election that some type of cheating went on  what have you. I firmly believe that.

He truly made his base believe that the only way he could lose was if the election was rigged, Castro said. And senators, all of us know, and all of us understand how dangerous that is for our country. Because the most combustible thing you can do in a democracy is convince people an election doesnt count, that their voice and their vote dont count, and that its all been stolen  especially if what youre saying are lies.

NOT ONE OF THE FINEST IVE SEEN: replace this text with your teaser head and add hyperlink

Castro then walked through Trumps repeated claims on and after election day that the fraud he spent months warning his supporters about was happening.

We are up BIG, but they are trying to STEAL the Election, Trump tweeted on midnight on Nov. 4. We will never let them do it.

Castro an showed examples, including 100 Trump supporters who showed up to an election center in Phoenix with rifles.

Senators, this is dangerous, Castro said. This is not the president saying to his supporters someone stole your cup of coffee. This is the Commander-in-Chief telling his supporters your election is being stolen and you must stop the counting of American votes.

And it worked, Castro said. His words became their actions. His commands led to their actions.

ben.wermund@chron.com
Things are about to take a tense turn on EastEnders as Jack Branning and Denise Fox are reunited.

On Wednesday's edition of the BBC soap, the pair will sit down and discuss Denise's whereabouts, having mysteriously disappeared and now returned.

Jack [Scott Maslen] is thrilled to see Denise [Diane Parish] back at first - but things get confrontational when he quizzes her about her disappearance.

She's back: Things are about to take a tense turn on EastEnders as Jack Branning and Denise Fox are reunited

Denise made a return to Walford after it was revealed she had been held captive, frightened for her life.

The details of this will no doubt be on Jack's mind as he presses her about where she went, having been worried sick.

Whether Denise will tell him the truth is yet to be revealed.

EastEnders confirmed on Monday that actress Maddy Hill will be reprising her role as Nancy Carter.

Return: On Wednesday's edition of the BBC soap, the pair will sit down and discuss Denise's whereabouts, having mysteriously disappeared and now returned

Tension: Jack is thrilled to see her back at first - but things get confrontational when he quizzes her about her disappearance

The actress, 31, waved goodbye to Walford in 2016, with her character leaving to go travelling with boyfriend Tamwar Masood (Himesh Patel), with the pair eventually getting married and settling in New Zealand.

But now the daughter of Mick and Linda is coming home, with Nancy returning to a very different dynamic in the Carter household than when she first left.

Maddy told of her return in an Instagram post shared by EastEnders in which she discussed Nancy's life after leaving Albert Square.

She's back! EastEnders confirmed on Monday that actress Maddy Hill will be reprising her role as Nancy Carter

Back again: The actress, 31, waved goodbye to Walford in 2016, with her character leaving to go travelling with boyfriend Tamwar Masood (Himesh Patel) (pictured as Nancy in 2015)

Speaking about her return to the BBC soap, Maddy said: 'Im so excited to be coming back and reconnecting with all the hilarious, warm, talented cast and crew and meeting some lovely new faces.

'I absolutely loved playing Nancy and have often wondered what she's up to, so feel very grateful to be able to rediscover her five years on.'

Meanwhile, executive producer Jon Sen commented: 'We're delighted to have Maddy back and I can't wait for audiences to see what's in store for Nancy.

Big changes: But now the daughter of Mick and Linda is coming home, with Nancy returning to a very different dynamic in the Carter household than when she first left

'There's a lot of mystery surrounding her return and shes coming back to a family that have been through a very difficult year  things are definitely not as Nancy left them.'

Indeed, Nancy is set to face a very different dynamic in the family as her parents Mick (Danny Dyer) and Linda (Kellie Bright) have recently welcomed Mick's long-lost daughter Frankie Lewis (Rose Ayling-Ellis) into their lives.

Frankie is the product of the childhood sexual abuse he faced at the hands of his then support worker Katy Lewis (Simone Labhib), with Mick still suffering from the trauma of what she did to him.

Issues: Mick is still suffering from the trauma of his childhood abuse at the hands of Katie Lewis, with his recent distant behaviour driving wife Linda to have an affair with Max Branning

Meanwhile, as a result of Mick shutting down amid Katy's arrival in Walford, Linda was driven to have an affair with Max Branning (Jake Wood).

Though Mick and Linda later reconciled, Nancy has returned home without her husband Tamwar - so could her own marriage be in jeopardy?

Maddy's return comes after she teased in 2018 that she would 'totally' reprise her role as Nancy as she adored working with her onscreen parents Danny and Kellie.

She said: 'I have always said that I'd never say no. I loved everyone I worked with and Danny and Kellie are still there. I would definitely have an open mind about it  definitely.

Trouble in paradise? Though Mick and Linda later reconciled, Nancy has returned home without her husband Tamwar - so could her own marriage be in jeopardy?

'I am still very much in touch with the Carter family and I was hanging out with Himesh [Patel, who played Tamwar] last week as he was in Cardiff. I am very much still in touch with the cast.'

During her time in the soap, Maddy's character Nancy has faced her fair share of drama including her epilepsy diagnosis and seriously injuring baby brother Ollie during a fight with brother Lee.

But after some ups and downs, the character finally found her happiness when she went to explore the world with her love Tamwar.

So just why has she returned to Albert Square? EastEnders continues on BBC One.
TORONTO, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ - ArcTern Ventures, a leading climate tech fund with offices in Canada, the US and Norway, is pleased to announce an investment in Oakland-based Mighty Buildings as part of the company's $40 million Series B round. Other investors in the round include Khosla Ventures, Bold Capital Partners, and Zeno Ventures.

Mighty Buildings is reimagining the construction industry through 3D printing of homes. With their advanced robotics and proprietary composite materials, Mighty Buildings is able to print an entire home offsite in around twenty-four to thirty-six hours. By applying state-of-the-art automation and innovative new technologies, Mighty Buildings can produce 3D printed structures two times as quickly and with ten times less waste than conventional construction. On a structural basis, their composite materials are stronger and more resilient than concrete.

ArcTern is focused on investing in breakthrough clean technology companies addressing climate change and sustainability. Its latest investment in Mighty Buildings was driven by the company's unique technology and potential to eliminate waste from the construction process. The Mighty Buildings panelized technology printing system yields virtually zero waste and the byproduct waste is recycled into the production of new material.

"We chose ArcTern Ventures as our first specialized sustainability investor because we believe they can help us build the right sustainability playbook," said Slava Solonitsyn, CEO & Co-Founder at Mighty Buildings. "The Planet needs over a billion homes in the next 15-20 years and we need to build them without exacerbating the climate crisis."

"Mighty Buildings has the potential to disrupt the construction industry through its cutting-edge technology" said Mira Inbar, Associate Partner of ArcTern. "With that disruption will come enormous social and environmental benefits, including the ability to dramatically reduce waste, produce net zero homes more efficiently, and enable communities to rebuild faster after climate events. That's really exciting, and why we invested."

About ArcTern Ventures:

ArcTern Ventures is a venture capital firm obsessed with helping solve the climate crisis and rethinking sustainability. ArcTern, based in Toronto with offices in Oslo and San Francisco, invests globally in breakthrough technology companies solving climate change and sustainability - we call it #earthtech. The fund was founded on the premise that accelerating the transition to a carbon-neutral economy will disrupt all industries and present an unprecedented opportunity for outsized financial returns. Solving our planet's biggest problems will lead to big rewardsfor companies, their investors, and of course, Mother Earth.

About Mighty Buildings:

Mighty Buildings is a construction technology company based in Oakland, California that is innovating the construction industry by creating homes that are beautiful, affordable, and sustainable using 3D printing, robotics, and automation. The company's 3D-printing technology allows them to produce modular houses and building components much faster than traditional construction. Mighty Buildings is backed by notable top-tier venture capital firms such Khosla Ventures, Y Combinator, SV Angel, CoreVC, and more.

SOURCE ArcTern Partners Inc.

You are here: China

Beijing has cleared all areas with medium and high COVID-19 infection risks, according to a press conference held on Tuesday.

The residential community of Ronghui was downgraded to a low-risk area on Tuesday. Currently, all areas in Beijing are low-risk areas for COVID-19 infection.

Daxing District in the city has started to lift the lockdown of five communities including Ronghui, Han Xinxing, deputy chief of the district, told the press conference.

The latest monitoring data show that the current supply of daily necessities in Beijing is sufficient and stable, according to Wang Hongcun, an official with the Beijing Municipal Commerce Bureau.

"The government has also set aside reserves and devised emergency plans to ensure the supply of daily necessities," Wang said.
Cong calls for Odisha bandh on Feb 15 over rising fuel prices

India

oi-Deepika S

Bhubaneswar, Feb 10: The Congress gave a call for a seven-hour Odisha shutdown on February 15 to protest against the rising prices of petrol and diesel.

Blaming both the Centre and the Odisha government for the rising fuel prices, state Congress president Niranjan Patnaik said on Tuesday that the shutdown would begin from 7 am and continue till 1 pm.

Vehicles will stay off the roads, shops and other business establishments will also remain shut during the period, he said. Patnaik said that his party is aware that people will face various inconveniences due to the bandh but there is no alternative to protest against the government's "habit" of hiking fuel prices.

Seeking the support of the public for the bandh, Patnaik said the state government should reduce tax on petrol and diesel in order to give some relief to the people who are already sustaining hardship due to the pandemic.

He alleged that both the Centre and the state government are imposing unreasonable taxes on petrol and diesel, leading to a steep hike in fuel prices that in turn resulted in increase in the prices of other essential commodities.

"The two governments must be held accountable. Only a sharp reduction in fuel prices will give relief to the common man," he said.

Patnaik said the Congress will also raise the issues of the border dispute between Odisha and neighbouring states, the Mahanadi water dispute and political killings in the state.

Twitter blocks portion of accounts, cites free speech | OneIndia News

"Under the BJD government, 'jal, jungle aur zameen' (water, forest and land) are in danger in our state. In recent years, killings have become rampant. Our mothers and sisters are not safe on the streets. We need to raise our voice. I appeal to the people to support the bandh," he said.

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Story first published: Wednesday, February 10, 2021, 10:26 [IST]
MOUNT PLEASANT  When he was a kid, he assumed that all this basket-making was normal, that it was what everyone did.

There were basket makers everywhere, Antwon Ford said. Id hop on my bicycle to head down to the creek to play in the marsh and pass by peoples porches, and theyre making baskets.

So Ford learned how to make baskets, too. At 4 years old, hed pick up scraps of sweetgrass, palm, bulrush and pine needles discarded by his grandmother and tossed to the kitchen floor of their home in the Hamlin community, east of the Cooper River, and hed practice a coil.

Thats how most children learn, he said.

The grass box contained long, soft strands that were off-limits to the young people in the house. That was the money and you didnt want to waste it.

When my grandmother saw I was serious, she let me reach into the grass box, Ford said. It was more of a test. I would ask for her help, she would tell me, Youve got to do this.   She would teach me to hide the tail of the palm.

When Ford was a teenager, he realized this art form was hyper-local. That realization was inspiring, he said. Im part of something special. But why is it special, he wanted to know, and what is his role in this expression of cultural identity?

Today, Ford is perhaps the most innovative sweetgrass basket maker of his generation. Indeed, his creations are not generally utilitarian. As historian and curator Dale Rosengarten puts it, He is a sculptor, turning a traditional craft into conceptual art.

Ford, 35, said the ubiquity of basket making in his community was partly a manifestation of cultural pride combined with the kind of social solidarity that creates a community safety net and sense of camaraderie among neighbors.

A certain economic necessity also compelled African Americans in his neighborhood to make baskets. Not so much anymore. The demographics of the artisans now are skewed toward elders. Young people have smartphones and streaming services and other distractions. The cohesiveness of Black communities has been compromised by suburban development.

Ford estimates that perhaps half of young people today have any hands-on basket experience, and probably only when they visit their grandparents.

The supply of materials also has diminished and changed. No longer can artisans gather high-quality grasses nearby, or purchase a bundle for $20. They rely on suppliers who sell a bundle for as much as $100, Ford said.

Ninety percent of the baskets are made in Mount Pleasant, but 90 percent of the grasses are imported, he said.

None of this deters him.

In 2008, he was teaching English in Guatemala and decided to come home during the winter break. He had planned to rejoin the restaurant management business for a few months, then return to Guatemala, but he started making baskets instead  and contemplating his future.

Soon, he was challenging himself to imbue his creations with a sense of movement. He had been examining cubism and Futurism, entranced by the multidimensionality in this art, and he started to think about making sculptures that expressed something similar.

Then he discovered Gestalt psychology, with its emphasis on patterns and configurations. Form (gestalt) is the embodiment of patterns, and the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

Now Ford had a concept to inform his creative pursuits. Soon he was extending handles and bending them every which way, making sharp angles in three-dimensional space. He wanted admirers of his baskets to recognize their Gestalt dynamism, the illusion of apparent movement.

Ive been doing this for 31 years now, he said. Im still learning something new.

It takes a while. Hes been working on one piece for five months now, and on another for 13. Sometimes he has an idea, but hes not sure how to realize it, so hell pause and practice, coiling the grass, bending it, turning it around until he knows the maneuver is possible.

The thing about coiling is that its so time consuming, Ford said. It can be too overwhelming. Then Ill just make traditional baskets for a whole month, just to refresh my mind and regain momentum without too much thinking.

Then he returns to his forms and dimensions, his twists and turns and bends, his obsessions with movement and perception. The coils spin around and form loop-de-loops like a roller coaster, or elbows and knees like Marcel Duchamps Nude Descending a Staircase, or sudden splits as if river water were confronted by an obstacle set in its path.

The traditional craft gives way to conceptual art, the conceptual art reaches new heights.

Im in the middle of a journey, he said. Im still figuring things out.
Watertown, NY (13601)

Today

Partly cloudy this morning, then becoming cloudy during the afternoon. High 66F. Winds ENE at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Cloudy skies early, followed by partial clearing. Low 44F. Winds ESE at 5 to 10 mph.
ALBANY  Many law enforcement agencies are continuing to see a high rate of identification-theft cases involving individuals whose personal information was illegally used to apply for unemployment benefits during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

Some of the recent cases are coming to light when individuals are receiving bank debit cards or paperwork in the mail indicating they were approved for federal pandemic unemployment assistance that they never applied for.

Related: New York wants its unemployment payments back from thousands

In other instances described by law enforcement officials, victims are learning they have been defrauded when they receive tax forms instructing them that the unemployment benefits they received last year are reportable income  although those individuals were not aware that someone had applied for or received the benefits using their identity.

In some cases, multiple individuals from the same organizations  school districts, professional firms or government agencies  were victimized. That, according to law enforcement experts, could be tied to data breaches involving those entities.

Frank, a 71-year-old retired Columbia County man who spoke on condition of anonymity due to privacy concerns, said he received paperwork in the mail on Jan. 22 indicating he had received federal pandemic unemployment insurance benefits. It took several attempts over two days, he said, to be able to reach someone at the state labor department to report the fraud.

"When you call the number, there's an eight-minute dissertation," Frank said, explaining that it required him to enter his Social Security number and a PIN number. "Every time I did, it would say, 'Sorry, there are too many calls  try calling back later.' Finally I did get ahold of somebody.  I explained it to him and he said, 'Theres nothing I can do for you.' Thats when he gave me the (state) comptrollers number."

On Jan. 25, Frank received a KeyBank debit card that contained access to the unemployment funds that were retroactive to Dec. 7.

"The government doesn't care," Frank said. "I filed a fraud report through the unemployment office  three fraud reports  and also left a voicemail message, and I havent heard anything."

He added that he also filed reports with State Police and the Columbia County sheriff's department, as well as reporting the identity theft through the Federal Trade Commission's Identitytheft.gov website, which is where the state labor department has been directing victims.

"Again, I know Im not the only one, but if I filed four fraud reports you would think that somebody would at least answer the email," he said.

Melanie Carden, a senior assistant district attorney in Onondaga County, said their office saw a spike in unemployment identity theft cases last summer, including multiple victims who were employees of school districts.

"The way were seeing it around here is that its generally been big businesses," she said, adding that members of a law firm also reported having their personal information used to apply for unemployment benefits.

Earlier this month, the state Department of Labor announced it had identified more than 425,000 fraudulent unemployment benefit claims during the COVID-19 pandemic. The department touted in its announcement that it had prevented "fraudsters from stealing more than $5.5 billion in benefits" and had referred hundreds of thousands of cases to federal law enforcement authorities.

Still, it's unclear how many identity thefts were not prevented. Since March, the labor department reported paying more than $65 billion to more than 4 million New York residents. Those payments were processed as the department came under fire last year for enormous backlogs in applications. In response, the administration of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo lowered many of the safeguards for processing state and federal pandemic unemployment applications, according to employees who spoke to the Times Union.

Yet in cases like Frank's, it appears the fraudulent application was processed and cash benefits forwarded to him in the form of a debit card. A spokesman for the labor department declined to respond to written questions about how many fraudulent applications they estimate were processed  including how many victims have reported having had their personal information used to successfully apply for benefits without their knowledge.

Unemployment fraud is  sadly  a scourge that we have to fight every day, but it is particularly despicable that criminals would use a global pandemic as cover to attempt to defraud our system ... and every day our Office of Special Investigations is working to protect our system from fraud and abuse, state labor department Commissioner Roberta Reardon said in a recent press release. "Our team is using technology, including artificial intelligence and other sophisticated techniques, to identify fraud as quickly as possible and stop these criminals in their tracks."

In the U.S. Justice Department's New York Northern District, which stretches from Kingston to Syracuse, the department announced in November it would temporarily hire an assistant U.S. attorney to exclusively prosecute unemployment identity theft cases for one year. But the position has not been filled and there have been few prosecutions since March and federal officials said those responsible often are overseas, where U.S. prosecutorial options are limited.

One of the only federal cases prosecuted in this region involves a Saratoga County man who was indicted for allegedly applying for unemployment benefits using a false Social Security number. In that case, he used his own name in the application and is not accused of trying to steal someone's identity.

Albany County Sheriff Craig Apple said that employees in his department, as well as in the county Legislature and some local government officials, all have been victimized in unemployment identity theft schemes.

"Were advising everybody to check your credit history. Were forwarding everything on to the Department of Labor, but keep in mind they're completely inundated at this point," he said. "Most of its coming on the dark web and very hard to trace back. ... Were asking people to monitor their credit and change their passwords if you can; its about the best you can do right now."

The state labor department has acknowledged that "criminals are using real New Yorkers identities" to file fraudulent unemployment claims. The agency advised that someone who receives a "monetary determination letter" from the department but that did not apply for unemployment benefits should report the fraud to the department's website.

"It's a massive breach," said Albany County District Attorney David Soares, whose office has fielded complaints from victims. "I think you have individual (law enforcement) agencies that are all being contacted because people are just a bit desperate right now in not having anyone to turn to."

Recently, individuals who were approved for unemployment benefits but are now being told they were ineligible, and must return all or some of the money, are being warned that their failure to pay back the funds could be referred for criminal prosecution.

The Times Union reported last week that the state labor department had distributed more than $114 million in unemployment and federal relief benefits last year to New Yorkers later deemed ineligible to receive the money  most of it between July and December.

The most significant overpayments were logged in the final quarter of 2020, when the state reported more than $68.3 million in those payouts. That's up from $15.5 million during the same quarter in 2019, several months before the pandemic began paralyzing the U.S. economy.

Several attorneys interviewed by the Times Union said they have been contacted by people who have been instructed to repay the funds  including some who said they do not have the funds available.

The surge in ineligible unemployment payments last year were made at a time when labor department workers privately warned the state had lowered its safeguards and was overpaying or approving benefits for people not entitled to receive them. They included some who had not worked in at least 18 months and others who filed unemployment applications in multiple states, the Times Union reported in September.
A Pottsville man faces charges in U.S. District Court for allegedly using his computer to stalk his former intimate partner and threaten and harass her family and friends, federal authorities announced Tuesday.

Aaron VanDaley, 43, faces federal charges of cyberstalking and making interstate threats, Acting U.S. Attorney Bruce D. Brandler said. A federal grand jury indicted VanDaley on Feb. 3, according to Brandler.

Authorities allege VanDaley threatened to kidnap and injure the minor child of his former intimate partners current boyfriend.

Furthermore, VanDaley, with the intent to harass his former intimate partner, made numerous false police reports against her family and friends, according to prosecutors.

Assistant U.S. Attorney James Buchanan is prosecuting the case against VanDaley, who faces a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a term of supervised release following imprisonment. The FBI, the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Division, Fort Stewart, Georgia, and Pottsville police investigated the case.

UpCountry Magazine Editor/Features Digital Editor

Jennifer Huberdeau is the editor of UpCountry Magazine and The Eagle's features digital editor. Prior to The Eagle, she worked at The North Adams Transcript. She is a 2020 New England First Amendment Institute Fellow and a 2010 BCBS Health Care Fellow.
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A 61-year-old woman, Stella Omoigui, on Monday told the Edo State Panel of Inquiry how her 11-year-old son, Osasu, suffered genital damages from a stray bullet from a police officer who was trying to disperse protesters during the EndSARS protest in Benin City.

The petty trader told the 22-man panel the incident happened sometime in October 2020, along Sapele Road, Benin City, when her son was taking food to his father.

She said the boy, who is a pupil in primary four, was immediately rushed to the University of Benin Teaching Hospital for treatment.

She said she has been spending all her savings on her sons medical needs.

Mrs Omoigui requested for N50 million compensation to enable her son undergo corrective surgery.

According to her, the son can only pass out urine through a fixed pipe on his abdomen, adding that the situation has compelled him to always wear wrappers instead of trousers.

The boy has stopped going to school because of his condition, she said.

We are pleading with the panel to grant my son the sum of N50 million as compensation for the pains he has been suffering and also take care of his medical bills. We beg the panel to do all in its power to see that he gets his life back, the distraught mother pleaded.

The 11-year-old boy also told the panel he wishes to continue his education and become a medical doctor in the future.

I want to be a medical doctor by the time I grow up and finish my education, please, the government and every spirited individual should help me, he said.

Touched by his condition, the Chairman of the panel, Ada Ehigiamusoe, said the boys case needed prompt attention.

I have a medical doctor in my team and looking at the young boy, it is obvious he is unable to dress properly like a normal human being. We found him to be wrapped in wrappers and the medical doctor in my team examined him and found that he is badly damaged in his genital region and we have reviewed that this calls for an emergency intervention.

We will do the necessary things that will be required of us just like the state government has always done. Matters of this nature will be treated promptly. If you recall, we have similar matters of about two of them, deaf and dumb, and promptly, the state government intervened.

They did not even wait for us to make our final recommendations. So, I am sure with this, look at the condition of the boy, so pathetic, and it is not the police, it is a stray bullet.

It is one of those things, the consequences of that protest, we cannot lay our hands on anybody but we will try our best to make adequate recommendations.

So, we have the combined view that it is meritorious, deserving compensation. He needs urgent medical attention. So, that is our stance, Mrs Ehigiamusoe, a retired judge, said.
The award has gone in this 13th edition to the two scientists who turned computer architecture into a science and designed the processors that power today's devices

The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Information and Communication Technologies has gone in this thirteenth edition to John Hennessy (Stanford University) and David Patterson (University of California, Berkeley) for taking computer architecture, the discipline behind the central processor or "brain" of every computer system, and launching it as a new scientific area.

"Professors John Hennessy and David Patterson are synonymous with the inception and formalization of this field," the citation reads. "Before their work, the design of computers - and in particular the measurement of computer performance - was more of an art than a science, and practitioners lacked a set of repeatable principles to conceptualize and evaluate computer designs. Patterson and Hennessy provided, for the first time, a conceptual framework that gave the field a grounded approach towards measuring a computer's performance, energy efficiency, and complexity."

The new laureates' scientific contributions had their didactic parallel in a landmark textbook, Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, which three decades on from its first release and after six editions with regularly updated content, is still considered "the bible" for the discipline in universities around the world.

Hennessy and Patterson have not only transfigured computer architecture as designers and educators, reaching new generations of computer scientists through their teaching activity, they have also turned their ideas into technological innovation and industry applications. They are the joint creators of RISC, an architecture that underpins the design of central processors and today "sits at the heart of virtually every data center server, desktop, laptop, smartphone, and embedded computer [in televisions, cars and Internet of Things devices]," said the committee in its citation.

RISC, which stands for reduced instruction set computer, was developed in the 1980s building on a concept of their own devising; one that Hennessy summed up after hearing of the award as "simpler equals more efficient." This principle was squarely at odds with the thinking of the computer designers of the time, and it was precisely finding themselves in this minority position that encouraged the two men to collaborate.

A systematic and reproducible method

For Patterson, what their work shares is the determination to bring a systematic and reproducible method to their research. It was this that enabled them to formalize the domain of computer architecture, this that led them to RISC, and this that informed the writing of their book: "We design processors the same way we design books, through experiment and trial," he said in a video conference after being informed of the decision of the award committee appointed jointly by the BBVA Foundation and the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC).

Proof of its success is that RISC technology, and its efficiency maximizing principles, are currently found in 99% of all processors, and are behind both the lightweight laptops we know today and the long-lasting batteries of our smartphones. As for their textbook that laid the pillars of a discipline and continues to disseminate its key ideas, Hennessy remarks that "one of the great joys of my life is finding that there are students all over the world who appreciate our work."

"The work of Hennessy and Patterson has had a deep and enduring impact," the committee's citation concludes. "They conceived the scientific field of computer architecture, motivated a systematic and quantitative design approach to system performance, created a style of reduced instruction set processors that has transformed how industry builds computer systems, and have made transformative advancements in computer reliability and in large-scale system coherence."

From 'dark art' to science 'for all'

In the 1980s, before Hennessy and Patterson made their mark, "each company had its own way of designing processors, based on the intuition of a handful of experts," recalls Ron Ho, committee secretary and Director of Silicon Engineering at Facebook (United States). "It was like witchcraft, a series of methods that were hard to pass on. Hennessy and Patterson changed all that. They created a framework and defined parameters that let us compare systems for efficiency and speed. Computer architecture moved from being a dark art to being a science, a systematized body of transmissible knowledge. They democratized the knowledge needed to design computers, bringing it within everyone's reach."

The two look back at their efforts to set down in writing the discipline's foundations: "Both John and I were professors, and loved giving class," says Patterson. "We decided to write a book out of sheer frustration that there was nothing out there to help us teach our students what we knew."

Hennessy takes up this point: "Computer architecture was being taught in a very descriptive fashion, almost if you were walking through a museum like El Prado and looking at two different paintings and trying to compare them. We weren't happy with that approach. We wanted something that was based on important measures like performance and cost. We began to write our book based on those things so that the field would acquire an engineering and scientific approach rather than one based on mere description. That was just over 30 years ago and today the book is available in more than a dozen languages and has been used by hundreds of thousands of young students around the world."

Simpler is more efficient

The RISC processor, devised in the early 1980s, is also the product of a conceptual shift. At the time the prevailing approach to computer architecture was that a processer would run faster if it had fewer instructions to deal with, however complex they might be. But what Hennessy and Patterson showed with their RISC processor was that computing could be made more efficient with larger but simpler instruction sets that could be completed in less time.

"RISC is all about efficiency," explains Hennessy. "The key insight is that simpler is more efficient. So think of an essay that you are reading. Suppose the essay uses really complex words and difficult sentence structures, so it's hard to read fast. Now instead imagine an essay that's written with really simple words that you can read really fast. That is what RISC does. It uses instructions that are very simple and can be executed very fast. That gave us a breakthrough in terms of performance which today has led to major advantages in terms of efficiency and power use."

From initial rejection to near universal use

But RISC's good results were not enough to convince the design community. "The technology was too disruptive and counter-intuitive, saying if you do things more simply, the computer will run faster," Hennessy reflects. "In the beginning RISC was incredibly controversial," Patterson concurs. At conferences John and I would be on one side of the debate and everybody else on the other. But after a few years it got kind of switched around. We identified the formulas that explained why RISC would be better and then it led to start-ups. John founded his own company [MIPS Technologies] and I joined an existing start-up [Sun Microsystems] that brought some very successful products to the market place and that changed people's minds."

The emergence in the last ten years of small but more powerful devices like smartphones and tablets has made the advantages of RISC technology even more evident, with greater energy efficiency translating into longer battery life and a lower cost.

The committee finds room in its citation for the laureates' other innovations beyond their joint work on computer architecture and RISC technology. Patterson "created a field of study around computer reliability," while Hennessy "worked on the development of distributed shared memory multiprocessor systems." Together, it says, these ideas form the underpinning of how we build modern data centers, databases and Internet search engines. All these systems and tools require the continuous support of highly reliable large-scale computers, which would not have been possible without the multiprocessors created, in turn, through the visionary work of the two laureates.

A new 'golden age' for computer architects

For both men, the race to ever greater processor miniaturization is not over yet, meaning the challenges for computer architecture will only get bigger in the short run.

"Moore's Law [the number of transistors in a processor doubles approximately every two years], which has driven the technology used to build increasingly efficient computers, is coming to an end," says Patterson. "Yet people still want much faster computers. What this means is that computer architects are going to have to figure how to design computers with no better transistors and still deliver performance gains. The field could see a new 'golden age'."

Hennessy, for his part, sees the rise of artificial intelligence as one of the great challenges facing the discipline: "The demand for performance for AI is growing by leaps and bounds, so we are going to rethink the way we design computers to design them to do those highly intensive tasks, like machine learning, very efficiently. And that is going to lead to lots of new innovation and excitement, and opportunities for young people to make important contributions."

Laureate bio notes

John Hennessy (Huntington, New York, 1952) earned a PhD in Computer Science from Stony Brook University in New York in 1977. That same year he joined the faculty at Stanford University, where he rose to become president of the institution (2000-2016) and now heads Knight-Hennessy Scholars, an international graduate-level scholarship program. In his years at Stanford, he has also occupied the posts of Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, dean of the School of Engineering and provost. In 1984 he co-founded MIPS Computer Systems to commercialize the RISC technology developed in his research, and in 1998 became founding chairman of Atheros Communications, a pioneer in Wi-Fi technologies. He is currently Chairman of the Board at Google's parent company Alphabet, which he joined in 2004, as well as serving on the board of Cisco Systems. Author or contributor to eight books (two of them with David Patterson) and over a hundred published papers in international journals, he has lectured extensively and sits on numerous advisory committees of the U.S. National Research Council and the National Science Foundation.

David Patterson (Evergreen Park, Illinois, United States, 1947) earned a PhD in Computer Science at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1976. The following year he joined the University of California, Berkeley, where he is now E.H. and M.E. Pardee Professor of Computer Science, Emeritus. Since the 1970s, he has pursued a parallel career in research, occupying such prominent posts in technology firms as Principal Engineer at Digital Equipment Corp., Chief Scientist at Sun Microsystems, and, currently, Distinguished Engineer at Google AI. Co-author of eleven books, notably the two written with John Hennessy - Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach and Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface - and with over three hundred publications to his name between scientific papers, conference proceedings and technical reports, Patterson has served as Chair of the Computer Science Division at UC Berkeley, and Chair of the Computing Research Association. He is also a former member of the Information Technology Advisory Committee for the U.S. President (PITAC) (2003-2005) and a past president of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) (2004-2006).

Information and Communication technologies committee and evaluation support panel

The committee in this category was chaired by Joos Vandewalle, Honorary President of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts, with Ron Ho, Director of Silicon Engineering at Facebook (United States) acting as secretary. Remaining members were Regina Barzilay, Delta Electronics Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (United States), Georg Gottlob, Professor of Informatics at the University of Oxford (United Kingdom) and Vienna University of Technology (Austria), Oussama Khatib, Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Robotics Laboratory at Stanford University (United States), Rudolf Kruse, Emeritus Professor in the Faculty of Computer Science at the University of Magdeburg (Germany), and Mario Piattini, Professor of Computer Languages and Systems at the University of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain).

The evaluation support panel of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) was coordinated by M. Victoria Moreno, Deputy Vice President for Scientific and Technical Areas, and formed by: Carmen Garcia Garcia, Deputy Coordinator of the Global Area MATERIA and research professor at the Institute of Corpuscular Physics (IFC); Gabriela Cembrano Gennari, tenured scientist at the Institute of Robotics and Industrial Informatics (IRRI); Josep Maria Porta Pleite, tenured scientist at the Institute of Robotics and Industrial Informatics (IRII); Carlos Prieto de Castro, Coordinator of the Global Area MATERIA and research professor at the Institute of Materials Science of Madrid (ICMM); and Carles Sierra Garcia, research professor at the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA).

###

About the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards

The BBVA Foundation centers its activity on the promotion of world-class scientific research and cultural creation, and the encouragement of talent.

The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards, funded with 400,000 euros in each of their eight categories, recognize and reward contributions of singular impact in science, technology, social sciences and the humanities, privileging those that significantly expand the frontiers of the known world, open up new fields, or emerge from the interaction of various disciplinary areas. The goal of the awards, established in 2008, is to celebrate and promote the value of knowledge as a public good without frontiers, the best instrument at our command to take on the great global challenges of our time for the benefit of all humanity. Their eight categories are congruent with the knowledge map of the 21st century, ranging from basic science to key challenges for the natural environment by way of domains characterized by the overlap of disciplines - Biology and Medicine; Economics, Finance and Management - or the supremely creative realms of music and the opera.

The BBVA Foundation has been aided in the evaluation of the 39 nominees for the Frontiers Award in Information and Communication Technologies by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), the country's premier public research organization. CSIC appoints evaluation support panels made up of leading experts in the corresponding knowledge area, who are charged with undertaking an initial assessment of the candidates proposed by numerous institutions across the world, and drawing up a reasoned shortlist for the consideration of the award committees. CSIC is also responsible for designating each committee's chair and participates in the selection of its members, thus helping to ensure objectivity in the recognition of innovation and scientific excellence.
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WASHINGTON  House Democrats on Tuesday muscled past Republicans on portions of President Joe Bidens pandemic plan, including a proposed $130 billion in additional relief to help the nations schools reopen and a gradual increase of the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour.

Democrats on the Education and Labor Committee say schools wont be able to reopen safely until they get an infusion of federal funding to repair building ventilation systems, buy protective equipment and take other steps recommended by federal health officials. The plan faces opposition from Republicans who want to tie new school funding to reopening.

The panel met Tuesday to craft its portion of a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package that tracks with Bidens plan for battling the pandemic and reviving a still staggering economy. Democrats hope to rush the bill to Biden for his signature by mid-March, using a special budget-related process allowing certain legislation to be approved by a simple majority.

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Rep. Bobby Scott, chair of the Education and Labor Committee, dismissed complaints from Republicans who objected to use of the process.

We must address the urgent needs of the people now, said Scott, D-Va., The multiple crises affecting our communities will grow worse every day if we do not act. We must recognize that we cannot afford to prioritize process over the urgent needs of people across this country.

House Republicans attempted dozens of changes to the legislation at a hearing that stretched late into the evening. They proposed amendments to limit funding only to schools offering in-person instruction, or to steer aid to families if their schools continued operating online. On the wage increase, they sought to exempt small businesses or certain rural areas. It appeared all of the amendments would be defeated.

Biden has made reopening most of the nations K-8 schools within his first 100 days in office a key goal. The issue has become increasingly heated as some school districts face gridlock with teachers who have refused to support reopening until their demands are met. Bidens plan for $130 billion in school funding is in addition to more than $8 billion from previous relief packages.

In a tweak to Bidens plan, the Democratic proposal would require schools to reserve at least 20% of the funding for efforts to address learning loss, including after-school programs and summer classes. The bill also matches Bidens proposed $40 billion for colleges and universities but, unlike the White House plan, makes private colleges eligible for relief.

Democrats also tucked in a new limit on for-profit colleges that the party has pushed for years. The proposal would prevent for-profit colleges from accepting more than 90% of their overall funding from federal sources. An existing federal law includes that cap for some federal sources but excludes funding from the GI Bill and other veterans programs.

Republicans blasted the legislation in its entirety, saying schools have already received billions in aid and are safe to reopen. They cited data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing that social distancing and wearing a mask significantly reduce the spread of the virus in school settings.

Students are falling behind, and mental health issues are on the rise. We know the costs of keeping schools closed are high. So why are schools still closed? said Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., the ranking Republican on the Education and Labor Committee. Unfortunately, this bill is full of partisan policies disguised as COVID relief measures.

The lawmakers dispute reflected the complexities and frustrations of the national debate over reopening schools. Republicans proposed several variations of the same idea: to limit funding to schools that dont reopen. Rep. Gregory Murphy, R-N.C., sought to block funding from schools unless they bring at least high-needs students back to the classroom.

We need to stop the excuses, Murphy said. We need to stop all the nonsense. We need to get our kids back in school. Stop ruining their futures and stop playing games.

Scott countered that schools cant make changes needed to reopen safely unless they get the funding in Bidens plan.

Republicans also signaled a fight over standardized testing, backing a proposed change to prevent relief funding from being used on academic assessments. Republicans say states should be exempt from federally required tests this spring because of the pandemic, while some Democrats say its necessary to identify and help students who have fallen behind.

The $350 billion portion of the bill before the committee also includes Bidens plan to raise the minimum wage from $7.25, where is has been since 2009. The proposal calls for gradual increases that would reach $15 over five years. It faces an uphill climb, however, and even Biden has said it likely wont survive.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., told reporters Tuesday that Democrats were trying to overcome a potential procedural obstacle that could prevent them from including the wage increase in the COVID-19 relief bill.

Were trying to work as well as we can with the parliamentarian to get minimum wage to happen, Schumer said.

Under Senate rules, provisions cannot be included in the special procedure Democrats are using if the languages impact on the budget is only secondary to its main thrust. It is up to the chambers nonpartisan parliamentarian to determine that, though it would be possible for Democrats to vote to ignore that ruling. The fast-track process Democrats are using would let them prevent a GOP filibuster.

The minimum wage boost faces other significant challenges, including opposition from Republicans and a wariness by some Democrats arguing it would hurt small businesses, especially during a pandemic.

Also on Tuesday, Biden met with five business leaders, including the heads of JPMorgan Chase, Walmart, Gap, Lowes and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Biden said the meeting was a chance to find common ground with the business community.

Were going to talk about the state of the economy, the recovery package. Were going talk a little bit, God willing, about infrastructure down the road, and also about the minimum wage, Biden said at the start of the meeting.

The president said he has been exchanging correspondence and telephone calls with Republicans to see if we can follow up beyond where we are with members of House and Senate, even as Congress is moving forward with a budgetary process that will enable them to pass the relief package along party lines.

___

Associated Press writers Kevin Freking, Alan Fram, Josh Boak and Alexandra Jaffe contributed to this report.
Protesting farmers Wednesday announced a four-hour nationwide rail blockade on February 18 as they renewed their strategy to intensify their agitation, which also included a candle march on February 14 in the memory of those killed in the 2019 Pulwama terrorist attack.

In a statement, the Samyukta Kisan Morcha, which is spearheading the protest, also said toll collection will not be allowed in Rajasthan from February 12 as part of their week-long protest strategy.

The SKM said in the statement that in a meeting on Wednesday farmer unions decided to escalate their agitation.

"There will be a 'rail roko' programme across the country from 12 pm to 4 pm on February 18," the SKM said.

Earlier this month, the protesting farmers had observed a three-hour road blockade to press their demand of repealing the three laws.

SKM leader Darshan Pal said candle marches, Mashaal Juloos' (torch marches) and other programmes will be held across the country on February 14 in respect of the sacrifices of the 40 CRPF personnel who were killed in a terrorist attack in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama on February 14, 2019.

He said the farmers also will hold events in a show of solidarity on the birth anniversary of Sir Chhotu Ram -- who was one of the most prominent pre-partition farmer leaders -- on February 16.

The announcements by the protesting unions comes on a day Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that the government and Parliament have great respect for farmers who are voicing their views on the three farm laws.

The prime minister made it clear that those who want to continue with the old agriculture marketing system can continue doing so.

Replying in Lok Sabha to the discussion on the Motion of Thanks to the President's address to the joint sitting of Parliament, Modi staunchly defended the three contentious farms laws and attacked the opposition for "misleading" farmers, saying those who are disrupting the House are doing so as per a "well-planned strategy" as they are unable to digest that people can see the truth.

"Through their games, the trust of the people can never be won," he said, amidst protests by the opposition members.

Thousands of farmers, mostly from Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh, have been camping at the three Delhi border points --- Singhu, Tikri and Ghazipur --- for over 75 days, demanding a complete repeal of the three farm laws and a legal guarantee on minimum support price for their crops.

Earlier in the day, Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU) leader Rakesh Tikait asserted that the agitating farmers were not aiming at any change in power at the Centre but a solution to their problems as he said many of their leaders will tour different parts of the country to spread the movement.

Addressing the protesting farmers at Singhu border, Tikait said that the agitation against the farm laws will stretch till the Centre addresses their issues.

"We do not aim change in power (at the Centre). The government should do its work. We want it to repeal the farm laws and ensure a law on MSP," he said.

Tikait said that the agitation will be long drawn and continue till government starts talks with farmer leaders.

The protesting farmer unions have been alleging the laws will weaken the MSP mechanism and end the mandi system.

But the government says the new legislations offer more options to farmers to sell their crops, and will help raise their incomes.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A mother-of-one has died more than 20 years after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer and told she had just six months to live.

Michelle 'Shelly' Edwards, 51, passed away at Clarendon Hall care home in Humberston, North East Lincolnshire, after her battle with bone cancer.

She was just 30 years old when first diagnosed with the terminal illness and lived on for an incredible 21 years.

Her daughter, Jessica, said: 'Even in her last days she was not giving in.'

Michelle 'Shelly' Edwards (pictured above), 51, passed away at Clarendon Hall after her battle with bone cancer. She served as a special constable for Humberside Police

She added: 'Because it affected her spine it affected her walking and her mobility went because she had no feeling in her legs. It wasn't long until she was paralysed.

'But at Pinderfields hospital they taught her to walk again. Even in her last couple of years when she went for treatment she was in the ward inspiring the other patients in the oncology ward, showing them how to keep going.

'She would have a laugh in the hospital. The doctors thought she was incredible and were led by her and were impressed how strong she was.

'Her mum (Ann) was the one who gave her all the care because she was a specialist nurse. Gran was the one who kept her going.'

Shelly, as she was most popularly known, served as a special constable for Humberside Police from the age of 19 until her diagnosis.

She was also a volunteer steward at Grimsby Town FC.

Shelly pictured on her 50th birthday. She was just 30 years old when first diagnosed with terminal cancer and lived on for an incredible 21 years

Jessica said: 'One of her passions was seeing the police horses at the stadium. So we have arranged for a horse-drawn hearse to carry her to the crematorium on Thursday.'

Shelly was one of three children to the late Ann Edwards, a former special children's nurse, and Terry Edwards. Shelly lived most of her life in Cleethorpes and was renowned for wearing her favourite colour red.

She had red hair and always wore a red coat, shoes and red lipstick, told her daughter. Her coffin will be covered in red roses to reflect her love of the colour.

Jessica said: 'She loved going out on Cleethorpes seafront and going to the North Sea Lane chippy.

'She was a great swimmer in her youth and swam with the Santa Marina club.'

Shelly was one of three children to the late Ann Edwards, a former special children's nurse, and Terry Edwards. She lived most of her life in Cleethorpes

She added: 'She was happy, bubbly and lots of fun. She adored horses.'

She paid tribute to the care her mother received at the nursing home in Humberston in the final months of her life.

Despite her illness, Shelly trained to be a social worker but was unable to complete her qualifications.

Jessica said her mother enjoyed visits to Cleethorpes nightspots Flares and Reflex where she enjoyed listening to music from the Eighties.

Her family have chosen Bryan Adams' 'Summer of '69', Tina Turner's 'Simply the Best' and Nena's '99 Red Balloons' for the invite-only service at the funeral from 1.30pm on Thursday.

She is survived by her father and brothers, Martin and Malcolm and her daughter.
Fake: No new clash took place in Galwan Valley in early May

Indias oldest art gallery overlooked for fossil in Bhimbetka caves?

India

oi-Madhuri Adnal

Bhopal, Feb 10: Eleven feet up on the wall of an area called Auditorium Cave at Bhimbetka Rock Shelter near Bhopal, a group of geologists on a cultural visit has spotted a pattern that looks like an imprint of Dickinsonia.

Bhimbetka Rock Shelters, a UNESCO World Heritage Site for Paleolithic and Mesolithic cave art, near Bhopal is located in the capital of the central state of Madhya Pradesh.

Dickinsonia is a well-known fossil dating back 550 million years to the initial years of complex life on Earth.

The fossils are identical with Dickinsonia tenuis from the Ediacara Member of the Rawnsley Quartzite in South Australia. They also show deformation due to lateral impingement, arcuate pieces missing, and alignment. They are within the late Ediacaran, Maihar Sandstone of the Bhander Group, in red sandstones.

This new occurrence was first published in the February edition of Gondwana Research. The research article by Gregory J.Retallack, Neffra A.Matthews, Sharad Master, Ranjit G.Khangar and Merajuddin Khan, confirms assembly of Gondwana land by 550 Million years ago but not reconstructions adjusted for true polar wander.

Recent scientific consensus has shifted toward calling them prototypical animals that lived on the seafloor. But contraary to these findings, Dr. Retallack's work suggest that these organisms lived on land, not in the sea, and that they were lichens.

However, one way to examine the discovery according to Dr Emily Mitchell of Cambridge's Department of Earth Sciences is that if they get permission to scrape off and test a little material. But given where it was found, she said, it also could be a painting or petroglyph itself, a possibility rejected in Dr. Retallack's study.

It should be noted that the Bhimbetka rock shelters are an archaeological site that spans the prehistoric Paleolithic and Mesolithic periods, as well as the historic period. It exhibits the earliest traces of human life in India and evidence of Stone Age starting at the site in Acheulian times.

Twitter blocks portion of accounts, cites free speech | OneIndia News

Spanning across 10 km, there are close to 750 rock shelters and seven hills in the area. These caves have now been declared a UNESCO world heritage site, owing to their historical significance.

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Story first published: Wednesday, February 10, 2021, 12:30 [IST]
When I was growing up, my mother would constantly tell me to mind my attitude. This most often occurred while I was doing household chores at her request. What she meant was for me to not only respect her but also be gracious and grateful, even while doing chores.
An unvaccinated pensioner followed Matt Hancock's advice and called his local jab clinic to get an appointment  only to be told they had run out.

Paul Hardy, 70, from Barnard Castle in County Durham, said when he eventually got through the receptionist declared she wanted to 'wring' Mr Hancock's neck.

'She said, 'Well I could wring his neck because we've been inundated with calls and we don't have any vaccine',' Mr Hardy told MailOnline.

He has now secured himself and his wife Jances, 71, an appointment for their first dose of the vaccine on Saturday. But he is worried supplies were being unevenly distributed across the country because no centres should be facing shortages of jabs.

Mr Hancock urged all over-70s that hadn't already been invited for their first dose to ring their GP surgeries on Monday.

But the Department of Health today insisted he was just 'repeating' the request from the NHS, which is managing the rollout, and its medical director for primary care Dr Nikki Kanani.

It comes after a think-tank called on Boris Johnson to pick up the pace of the UK's vaccine roll-out amid fears it had 'hit a wall' at 350,000 jabs-a-day.

Boris Johnson is aiming to inoculate 15million of the most at risk  over-70s, care home residents, the vulnerable and NHS workers  by February 15.

Paul Hardy, 70, from County Durham, said when he eventually got through to his local vaccination clinic the receptionist said she wanted to 'wring' Mr Hancock's neck.

Mr Hardy managed to secure an appointment for himself and wife Jances, 71, for Saturday

WORLD'S COVID WOULD FIT IN HALF A COKE CAN, EXPERT Every single cell of SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing Covid-19, would fit into one can of Coke, a British mathematician has calculated. Covid-19 has so far infected at least 106million people worldwide and killed more than 2.3 million of these cases. But the virus itself is tiny, measuring just 100 nanometers, or 100 billionths of a meter, across  1,000 times thinner than a human hair. Bath University maths lecturer Dr Kit Yates crunched the numbers and came to the conclusion that if all the coronavirus cells were piled on top of one another, the pile would be equivalent to 160ml of liquid. One can of pop in the UK contains 330ml. Advertisement

Mr Hardy told MailOnline: 'Mr Hancock said that up until now they'd been asking people to wait until they were invited for a vaccine  but now they want us to take the initiative and phone up to get one.

'I called my surgery straight away and the receptionist was a bit perturbed because everyone was trying and make an appointment for a jab.

'She said, "Actually we don't have any vaccines available and you shouldn't be phoning the surgery anyway".

'I said to her, "That's what Mr Hancock has told people to do".

'She said, "Well I could wring his neck because we've been inundated with calls and we don't have any vaccine. She booked me in for an appointment on Saturday".'

Mr Hardy added: 'My concern is that no one should be running out anywhere in the country.

'We should be on track to give people their injections as soon as their group becomes eligible.

'I don't think central government is aware what's happening at the coal face.'

The Department of Health insisted to MailOnline Mr Hancock had only been 'repeating' what Dr Kanani called for at the press conference.

Mr Hancock said on Monday: 'From today, I have a message for everyone aged 70 and above. Until now, we've said please wait for the NHS to contact you. But now that message is changing.

'If you live in England and are 70 and over and have not yet got an appointment to be vaccinated, then please contact the NHS.

'The easiest way to do this is through the national booking service online at NHS.uk or if you cant get online then you can call 119 or you can speak to your local GP practice.'

The Government is aiming to vaccinate the top four priority groups - including NHS workers - by mid-February. Above is a woman receiving her vaccine in Cwmbran, Wales

It comes as critics today called on the Prime Minister not to get complacent in Britain's vaccines rollout, as the latest figures suggested the drive has plateaued.

The number of doses given to Brits on Monday rose by just one per cent compared to the same time last week, hovering at around 350,000, data from the Department of Health showed.

The Adam Smith Institute think-tank told MailOnline that while the programme had been a success so far, there was 'no excuse' for blips, because 'the virus doesn't sleep - the virus keeps spreading'.

Despite concerns, Britain is within touching distance of delivering on its goal of vaccinating 15million of the most vulnerable by mid-February, which paves the way for the UK become one of the first countries to drop lockdowns completely.

James Lawson, author of a the study Worth a Shot: Accelerating Covid-19 Vaccinations, and fellow at think-tank the Adam Smith Institute, today urged ministers not to be complacent because of early success.

'While the Government has made significant progress since January in boosting the amount of daily doses we can't be complacent,' he told MailOnline.

'We need to keep up the pace, keep accelerating and ultimately should be aiming to even double or triple the number of doses that we are doing compared with today.

'There is ultimately no excuse for slowing down. We can't use the excuse of weekends and weather because ultimately the virus doesn't stop for weekends, the virus doesn't sleep - the virus keeps spreading so we do need to accelerate.'
----

As New York moves to close four youth detention centers, the focus shouldnt be primarily on the shutdowns economic impact.

That may seem an odd thing to say, since Gov. Andrew Cuomos budget projects that the closures could save $22 million a year, plus avoid millions in capital costs. Taxpayers would welcome those cuts. But the rationale for closing or keeping the centers must be whether theyre needed for juvenile justice aims  not for economic gains.

For decades, New York used prisons and juvenile centers alike as economic development tools. They were placed in rural communities across upstate where jobs were scarce. It was a lazy form of economic development that failed to address the real problems underlying the decline of rural New York. After all, local economies should be based on something more productive than imprisonment.

And intentionally or not, the strategy provided a perverse incentive for draconian prison sentences and mass incarceration. The impact on families and communities, especially among minority groups, was devastating. It was also unnecessary for public safety.

With the repeal of the harsh sentences of the Rockefeller drug laws, and other criminal justice reforms, New York has been implementing alternatives to incarceration. The positive change has emptied some prison cells; three state prisons are scheduled to close this year.

Similarly, New Yorks youth juvenile justice system is shrinking: The state Office of Children and Family Services says the number of youths in detention centers has fallen by 73 percent since 2010. Now, according to Mr. Cuomos budget, four youth detention centers  three in the Hudson Valley, one on Long Island  are chronically underfilled, with roughly two-thirds of their beds typically empty.

The facilities in Columbia and Orange counties are secure centers, for juvenile felons sentenced by adult courts; those in Dutchess and Suffolk counties are non-secure, for young people sentenced by Family Court.

State officials insist the closures will not result in layoffs, but the union representing the workers is concerned. Its understandable that the workers are worried about reassignments and retraining, because those moves are disruptive. Yet keeping those jobs in place is not a reason to keep the centers open  because there are other factors to weigh. The state should detain no more youth and maintain no more facilities than is necessary.

As with adult prisons, its important that those being held in youth detention centers are not too far from their homes and families. And Mr. Cuomos administration should not bypass a law that requires a years notice before a facility is closed. That helps ensure the state is making measured and well-considered decisions, and it gives communities and workers time to prepare for the changes.

In the end, decisions about incarceration must be made aside from economic factors. Prison cells and facilities for criminal youth shouldnt be used to keep communities afloat.
The Uganda government says it is in "advanced stages" of closing the long-awaited Final Investment Decision (FID) with the international oil companies -- France's Total E&P and China's Cnooc -- in the coming weeks.

The decision, will unlock billions of dollars of investment in Uganda's oil and gas sector and turbo-charge the country's economy.

Robert Kasande, the Energy Ministry Permanent Secretary told The EastAfrican they are fine-tuning "a few minor details" ahead of the much-anticipated development that has been deferred several times owing to numerous disagreements.

"Our plan is to close this by end of this month or latest mid-March," Mr Kasande said.

Uganda indicated last year it was targeting FID by end of December, but analysts warned that the timeline was very optimistic given the election campaigns that were marred by unprecedented violence and chaos. However, with the election season ended, government officials say they expect to finally get the industry off the ground more than a decade after the country confirmed commercial deposits of crude oil. Closing FID means launching Uganda's oil project to the next development and construction phases, and subsequently starting of commercial oil production, tentatively, by 2025.

The renewed optimism on FID comes ahead of French oil giant Total SA, the parent company of Total E&P, release of its financials for 2020 and 2021 outlook next Tuesday.

Uganda's oil project is expected to feature prominently as the company's chief executive Patrick Pouyanne has been engaged in back-and-forth discussions with President Yoweri Museveni to get the project off the ground, 14 years since the country announced discovery of commercial oil volumes. Officials from Total declined to comment, citing the confidentiality of the decision.

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As much as $10 billion in investment is expected to flow into Uganda when the FID is closed, development of the oil fields -- Tilenga in Buliisa and Nwoya districts operated by Total E&P, and Kingfisher in Hoima and Kikuube districts operated by Cnooc -- and the 1,445km East African Crude Oil Pipeline running from Hoima in mid-western Uganda to Chongoleani terminal in Tanga at the Indian Ocean.

The capital expenditure for development of oil fields is about $6.7 billion. This is expected to cover the construction of feeder pipes across the oil fields in Buliisa, Hoima and Nwoya districts, and construction of two central processing facilities (CPF)--for stabilisation of oil before being fed into the pipeline or refinery, drilling, land acquisition, construction of well pads, camps, and construction yards.

The oil companies, particularly Total E&P is currently in the process of issuing Engineering, Procurement and Construction contracts for its Tilenga project, while evaluation of the EACOP EPC tenders is on course.

Meanwhile, Uganda needs about $480 million to finance its stake in the proposed 60,000 barrels per day oil refinery, $213 million to finance the 15 percent stake in EACOP, and $71.4 million in the proposed storage terminal for the refined oil products.
The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
New Delhi:

In a bid to tackle the abnormal rise in caesarean section operations in India, Health Ministry has directed all private hospitals to present data of Caesarean and normal deliveries prominently.

Women and Child Development (WCD) Minister Maneka Gandhi has expressed her concerns to Union Health Minister JP Nadda asking him to make it mandatory for private hospitals empanelled with the Central Government Health Scheme (CGHS) to display the data of C-section and normal deliveries.

According to the reports, Gandhi has pointed out that while the recommendation of the World Health Organisation (WHO) suggests that deliveries through C-Section should normally be in the range of 10-15 per cent of the total deliveries, the percentage is 54 and 34, respectively, in states like Telangana and Tamil Nadu.

Read more: AIIMS seats vacant, may hire retired professors on contract as faculty

She has also asseretd that repeated C-section surgeries will also affect the reproductive health of a woman.

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.

Sixteen bank accounts have been frozen and a number of items, including a car, were seized by the Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB) during a search operation in Tipperary and Kilkenny this morning.

The search operation involved searches of four residential properties and a business premises. It was conducted by Criminal Assets Bureau personnel supported by the Emergency Response Unit (ERU) and assisted by local Divisional personnel and the Garda Dog Unit.

The operation targeted an Organised Crime Group (OCG) originating in the Munster and South Leinster region with considerable links across the continent of Europe. Over the course of the investigation assistance was sought from and provided by Europol. Fund transfers in excess of 4 million were identified from other jurisdictions to Irish bank accounts linked to members of the OCG.



This vehicle was seized

This morning's operation has resulted in the freezing of 16 bank accounts linked to members of the OCG. The accounts contain cumulative funds of 540,000. Other items of note seized today are:

- 201 Volvo XC90

- Financial documents

Todays search operation is a significant development in an ongoing CAB investigation targeting an OCG involved in large-scale money laundering in the Republic of Ireland and Europe.
All the major political parties have started flexing their muscles in Uttar Pradesh ahead of the 2022 state assembly elections due next year. In this, the Congress might put forward the face of Priyanka Gandhi to outsmart the Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party.

As per sources, the Congress is preparing to position itself as the major opposition party against the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party in 2022 state assembly polls and this is the reason why many visits of Priyanka Gandhi have been proposed in Uttar Pradesh.

Priyanka Gandhi had participated in the last Ardas of farmer Navreet Singh in Rampur, who was killed in the violence during the Kisan Tractor rally in Delhi on Republic Day. On Wednesday, Priyanka Gandhi will be on a tour of Saharanpur, where she is expected to address farmers mahapanchayat.

At the place where she will address the farmers mahapanchayat, her grandmother and former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and father Rajiv Gandhi have also addressed the rallies earlier. The Congress party will be starting the Jai Jawan Jai Kisan campaign in West UP from 10th February with the help of Priyanka Gandhi.

The Congress is eyeing the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections through the farmer's movement. After Saharanpur, Priyanka Gandhi may also attend Farmers Mahapanchayat Meerut on February 13 in Meerut, on February 16 in Bijnor, and on February 19 in Mathura.

Also read: Priyanka Gandhi Meets Family of Deceased Farmer in Rampur

Rahul Gandhi may also be present with her in Meerut. According to Congress sources, Priyanka Gandhi can also visit the ongoing Magh fair for Ganga Snan in Prayagraj. For this, the leaders of Congress have also started preparations.

The Congress is working on a strategy to revive the party with the help of the farmers movement. The party's effort is to give an edge to the farmers' movement and to establish the party against BJP in the 2022 assembly polls. Priyanka Gandhi's tweet just before the Saharanpur tour is also clearly pointing towards this.

Priyanka had tweeted I will be in Saharanpur today to listen, understand, share my feelings with farmers and support their struggle. The BJP government will have to withdraw the black agriculture laws.
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Iran and Russia have reached an agreement to establish joint production of Russias Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine, Iranian Ambassador to Russia Kazem Jalali said Wednesday at an online ceremony marking the 42nd anniversary of Irans Islamic Revolution, TASS reports.

"Our talks on the [Sputnik V] joint production are completed, we will soon witness production of this vaccine in Iran," he said.

Jalali recalled that the first batch of Sputnik V was sent to Iran after Tehran and Moscow struck a deal to procure the jab. "The second shipment will be supplied in two days," he informed.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-10 22:08:17|Editor: huaxia

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ADDIS ABABA, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- The Ethiopian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA) disclosed Wednesday it had returned home 743 nationals from Middle Eastern countries in recent days.

A total of 675 Ethiopian nationals were returned home from Saudi Arabia, while another 68 Ethiopian nationals were returned home from Lebanon, according to the ministry.

On Tuesday, Dina Mufti, spokesperson for MoFA, said his ministry is boosting efforts to return Ethiopian nationals stranded in various foreign countries.

Mufti said efforts to return stranded Ethiopian nationals from various foreign countries are continuing despite logistical challenges and travel restrictions related to the COVID-19 global pandemic.

In recent months, Ethiopia has stepped up efforts to return home its citizens stranded in various foreign countries, as part of the government's newly unveiled "citizen focused diplomacy."

The Ethiopian government is also working to dismantle sophisticated human trafficking networks, as well as create economic opportunities for nationals with low incomes. Enditem
Chinese Vice Premier Liu He, also a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, speaks with International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva via video link at request on Feb. 9, 2021. They exchanged in-depth views on macroeconomics, trade, climate change financing, and support for the development of low-income countries. (Xinhua/Zhai Jianlan)

BEIJING, Feb. 9 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Vice-Premier Liu He spoke with International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva via video link at request on Tuesday.

They exchanged in-depth views on macroeconomics, trade, climate change financing, and support for the development of low-income countries.

Liu, also a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, said that China's economy has a sound recovery momentum, its financial system is sustainable, and its market entities are resilient.

He said China is ready to strengthen communication and coordination with the IMF to promote the world economy's stable recovery.

Georgieva said the IMF hopes to improve comprehensive cooperation with China. She also thanked China and the Chinese people for their strong support of the IMF.
The U.S. Capitol dome is seen through steam as the Senate impeachment trial against former President Donald Trump begins in Washington, U.S., Feb. 9, 2021. Reuters



A divided U.S. Senate voted largely along party lines on Tuesday to move ahead with Donald Trump's impeachment trial on a charge of inciting the deadly assault on the Capitol, but conviction appears unlikely barring a major shift among Republicans.



The Senate voted 56-44 to proceed to the first-ever trial of a former president, rejecting his defense lawyers' argument that Trump was beyond the reach of the Senate after having left the White House on Jan. 20.



Democrats hope to disqualify Trump from ever again holding public office, but Tuesday's outcome suggested they face long odds. Only six Republican senators joined Democrats to vote in favor of allowing the trial to take place, far short of the 17 needed to secure a conviction.



Convicting Trump would require a two-thirds majority in the 50-50 Senate.



The vote capped a dramatic day in the Senate chamber. Democratic lawmakers serving as prosecutors opened the trial with a graphic video interspersing images of the Jan. 6 Capitol violence with clips of Trump's incendiary speech to a crowd of supporters moments earlier urging them to "fight like hell" to overturn his Nov. 3 election defeat.



Senators, serving as jurors, watched as screens showed Trump's followers throwing down barriers and hitting police officers at the Capitol. The video included the moment when police guarding the House of Representatives chamber fatally shot protester Ashli Babbitt, one of five people including a police officer who died in the rampage.



The mob attacked police, sent lawmakers scrambling for safety and interrupted the formal congressional certification of President Joe Biden's victory after Trump had spent two months challenging the election results based on false claims of widespread voting fraud.



"If that's not an impeachment offense, then there is no such thing," Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin, who led a team of nine House members prosecuting the case, told the assembled senators after showing the video.



He wept as he recounted how relatives he brought to the Capitol that day to witness the election certification had to shelter in an office near the House floor, saying: "They thought they were going to die."



In contrast to the Democrats' emotional presentation, Trump's lawyers attacked the process, arguing that the proceeding was an unconstitutional, partisan effort to close off Trump's political future even after he had already departed the White House.



"What they really want to accomplish here in the name of the Constitution is to bar Donald Trump from ever running for political office again, but this is an affront to the Constitution no matter who they target today," David Schoen, one of Trump's lawyers, told senators.



He denounced the "insatiable lust for impeachment" among Democrats before airing his own video, which stitched together clips of various Democratic lawmakers calling for Trump's impeachment going back to 2017.



HOUSE MANAGERS' CASE 'COMPELLING, COGENT'






A weak and relatively untested group of political leaders are set to take the helm of Libya and attempt what far more powerful leaders have failed to do for 10 years: unite the countrys fractured polity and security forces, usher out myriad foreign military elements, and ameliorate the suffering of the North African nations four million people.

Interim prime minister-elect Abdulhamid al-Dbeibah vowed to form a technocratic government that would oversee the countrys affairs until elections at the end of 2021.

"There will be a fair representation of all segments of the Libyan people and all regions, but the focus will be on technocrat goals," he told Turkeys Anadolu news agency in an interview on Sunday. We will work to bring different perspectives closer to each other in order to hold the elections without violence, war, or resentment between cities."

Oil-rich Libya has been in a state of chaos since Nato-backed rebels toppled the government of Muammer Gaddafi nearly a decade ago, eventually tearing the country asunder into two rival governments in the east and west. It has also become the site of a proxy war pitting Turkey and Qatar against the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Russia.

But international officials have been pushing to end the war and stitch the country back together. The ongoing turmoil in Libya enters a fresh stage following the naming of both an interim government and the ascension of a new United Nations troubleshooter.

On Monday, UN envoy special envoy Jan Kubis, a former Slovakian foreign minister and UN representative to Lebanon, took the helm as the diplomatic point-person Libya. He takes over from the American diplomat Stephanie Williams, who has been serving as acting UN envoy for a year.

A UN-assembled council of Libyan dignitaries gathered near Geneva on Friday named Mr Dbeibah as well as a three-person presidential council to oversee the country ahead of elections scheduled for 24 December.

The outcome of the Geneva selection process for the interim government was a surprise, and a loss for the countrys entrenched political elite.

Businessman Dbeibah and former diplomat Mohammed al-Menfi won the posts of prime minister-elect and head of the presidency council respectively beating out a far more well-known and powerful grouping led by western Libya interior minister Fathi Bashaga and eastern Libya parliament speaker Aguilah Saleh after two rounds of voting.

Both Mr Bashaga and Mr Saleh have emerged as political giants of Libyas post-Gaddafi order, each cultivating ties to foreign backers and domestic armed groups.

Wow, Claudia Gazzini, Libya researcher at the Crisis Group, the conflict resolution and advocacy group, said after the vote results were announced. That was a surprise.

Some of Libyas other political players voiced tempered support for Mr Dbeibahs interim government. Mr Bashaga tweeted his congratulations.

"We must give the new government an opportunity and see if it can take the path we want, speaker of Libya's east-based parliament, Aguila Saleh, said Sunday night. He lost out in the first-round of voting. If it deviates, we will take a stand on it.

Others, including eastern warlord Khalifa Haftar were silent.

My concern is that although this line up has the endorsement of the UN backed forumt they face a great number of spoilers, said Mr Gazzini Its unclear whether forces close to Bashaga will accept this. Its unclear how Haftar will react.

Soldiers loyal to Libyan military commander Khalifa Haftar (REUTERS)

Many things can easily go wrong before 24 December. First off, Mr Dbeibah must present a Cabinet and get it approved by the eastern parliament, called the Council of Representatives, within three weeks.

If Mr Haftar, or any of Libyas foreign stakeholders want, they can likely manipulate members into rejecting Mr Dbeiibahs proposed slate. They all had their yes-men on the Bashaga list and they were counting on that list winning, said Ms Gazzini.

Mr Menfi, head of the interim presidential council, is a member of a prominent Libyan tribe but may also raise the ire of Mr Haftar because some consider him close to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Libya has pressing concerns, and the public is seething with anger at the political class. Corruption is rampant, and there are allegations that political leaders and their oligarchic allies have made off with billions of dollars in public funds and assets since 2011.

The countrys capital, Tripoli, continues to suffer extensive destruction from a war between Mr Haftar and the UN-recognised government that only came to an end last year.

The damage may not be as expensive in terms of the depth its widespread in so many areas, said Fadel Lamen, head of a Libyan think tank and among the contenders for interim prime minister in last weeks vote.

Theres no programme for reconstruction or supporting those who had homes and businesses destroyed, he said. There are some people who are on their own, and sold their cars or sold their jewelry or whatever they had, and used it to repair their own houses.

Mr Dbeibah has mentioned increasing coronavirus vaccinations and ending power outages as among his priorities over the next 10 months. But many worry that the countrys political elite is too disconnected from the troubles of ordinary people to make changes.

They live in bubbles, said Mr Lamen. If you want to fly you have your private jet. If you have medical issues you just have to fly to Turkey or the UK. They wouldnt care about the quality of schools. Their kids are staying in Cairo, or Istanbul. With the exception of a few they are there to access power in order to access funds.
Cambrigde University is said to have received a 'generous gift,' from a Chinese software giant with links to the country's community spy agency, in order to fund an engineering fellowship.

Financial backing from Tencent funded research into quantum computers under Cambridge's Dowling postdoctoral research fellowship.

Quantum computers are state-of-the-art tech that are able to solve problems that would be impossible for standard devices.

Cambridge University announced it had received a 'generous gift,' from Tencent in 2019, to fund a fellowship researching quantum computers

News of the 'generous gift,' comes amid outrage that Oxford will rename its prestigious professorship of physics after the Chinese company in return for a 700,000 donation.

Yesterday The Daily Mail revealed The Wykeham chair of physics, which was established in 1900 and comes with a fellowship at 14th-century New College, will be known as the Tencent-Wykeham chair in honour of the computing conglomerate, Oxford sources revealed.

CIA sources have claimed that when Tencent was founded it received money and support from the Ministry of State Security, Chinas main intelligence agency. A Pentagon report last month said it has been working closely with Chinese security agencies on AI.

Tencent owns the WeChat communications app, popular with millions of Chinese emigres to keep in touch with home.

The conglomerate denies receiving intelligence funding or having any claims to Chinese state security, previously stating its finances were transparent. It rejects accusations of wrongdoing.

According to The Times, Cambridge announced it had received a 'generous gift' from Tencent in 2019 to fund a five-year postdoctoral research fellowship in the department of engineering

Jesus College at Cambridge has ties to the company too.

It has hosted the Yidan Prize Conference: Europe on three occasions, the award offers a prize $3.9mllion from Charles Chen Yidan, one of Tencent's founding members.

CIA sources have claimed that when Tencent was founded it received money and support from the Ministry of State Security, Chinas main intelligence agency

MailOnline has approached Cambridge University for comment.

A Tencent spokesman said: 'Tencent seeks to be a good corporate citizen wherever it operates, including through philanthropic efforts.

'Our philanthropic efforts are just that, and are conducted transparently, in good faith and without conditions.

'We have deep respect for the rich history and innovative future of the UKs higher education establishments, and are pleased to support their missions of learning, teaching and research.'

We are also proud of our long-standing and strategic partnerships with a wide range of UK innovators, businesses, and creative and cultural leaders. We look forward to working together with them to innovate, grow - including in China - and fulfill their global aspirations.

An Oxford University spokesman told the Daily Mail: The University has a rigorous due diligence process and Tencent has been approved as an appropriate donor by our independent Committee to Review Donations, which includes independent, external representatives.

We have a very clear position on academic independence from donations. Our donors have no say in setting the research and teaching programmes of the posts they fund, nor do they have any access to the

The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company

It didnt take long for people to start blaming Jeffrey Fang for the abduction of his children on Saturday night.

While the DoorDash delivery driver was dropping off food in ritzy Pacific Heights, his van  with Winnifred, 4, and Sean, 1, inside  was stolen. A massive, multi-county search followed before the van, and the children, were located in a driveway in the Bayview neighborhood. The suspects remain at large. Tweets about the case by reporter Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez, a friend of the Fang family, went viral, and posts about the case attracted speculation across social media. Repeatedly, people asked: Why were the children there in the first place?

Should Winnifred and Sean have been in Fangs car while he was running deliveries? Any reasonable person would say no. But the fact is Fang and his kids are not outliers. Lacking the means to pay for child care, many delivery drivers take their children with them on excursions, according to Gig Workers Rising, a labor organizing campaign. The Fangs nightmarish experience exposed an ugly truth faced by the people who work throughout our food system: the affordability and accessibility of food almost always comes at a human cost.

This is not a new reality; its something Ive written about in the past. But often in the globalized world of food, that price is paid by people whose labors we dont see: cacao farmers in the Ivory Coast, enslaved shrimpers in Thailand, pistachio tree pruners in Bakersfield. Even during a standard food delivery, consumers see the couriers for just a few seconds, if at all.

In this case, though, we saw the faces of Winnifred and Sean, whose photos were seen across the media, their images heartwrenching in their youthfulness. Its rare for us to be confronted so starkly with the faces of those whose lives depend on these fleeting transactions. Fang, though, has long relied on DoorDash as his sole source of income, the way hes supported his family and was able to bring them here from China.

Fang told The Chronicle and other news outlets that the family does not make enough money to hire babysitters, and that typical 9-to-5 daycare hours are incompatible with peak food delivery hours. A 2020 report by the Insight Center for Community Economic Development shows that nearly one in three Bay Area households is unable to afford basic needs like child care, transportation and housing. So its a fallacy to cast what Fang did Saturday night as a choice, when the truth is he likely had none.

As a gig economy worker, the money stops the minute you stop working, and the pay is already low enough as it is, Fang said. Youre not obligated to work more than you want, but in order to make ends meet, there are only certain hours good enough for you to really be out there.

Yalonda M. James / The Chronicle 2019

DoorDash told The Chronicle that it has provided financial support to Fang in the wake of the carjacking. That aid, along with a successful GoFundMe campaign on the familys behalf, will help the Fangs survive as they recover. The company also outlined strategies for combatting crime against its drivers, including creating a future emergency assistance button.

But these acts of charity for one family wont keep others from continuing to have to bring children along on deliveries. And the issue is larger than what individual companies like DoorDash should be doing for its workers, though the $59.6 billion company and competitors like Uber have the capacity to effect critical change. They and others managed to spend enough funds in 2020 to help pass Proposition 22, which exempted app-based transportation and delivery companies from treating workers as employees.

And even if Prop 22 hadnt passed, its more than likely that childcare would still be out of reach for drivers like Fang. According to statistics from Childrens Council San Francisco, the estimated cost of full-time care for just one toddler can range from $20,784 to $29,508 a year.

Cherri Murphy, a social justice minister, Lyft driver and organizer with Gig Workers Rising, saw the dialogue around the Fang case as unfortunate and all too common. A lot of times, she said, what I see is folks who focus on the choices that workers make as opposed to the conditions that created the choice in the first place.

Food Guide Top 25 Restaurants Where to eat in the Bay Area. Find spots near you, create a dining wishlist, and more.

Instead, she insists, seeking economic stability through benefits like workers compensation and a process for dealing with labor standards violations would have far-reaching benefits for everyone.

Paul Chinn / The Chronicle 2020

Gig work ostensibly promises workers the freedom to drive or deliver groceries or meals whenever they want. But that freedom doesnt come without a cost. This isnt anything new, Murphy remarked, citing the work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who saw economic and racial justice as intertwined struggles. At a 1968 rally for striking sanitation workers in Memphis, King famously asked: What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesnt earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee?

If all workers had subsidized or free childcare, they wouldnt have to make the difficult compromise that Fang had to make  they could work knowing their families are safe. If Fang had had a place to leave his children during his work hours, the family might have lost only their car, and not suffered added trauma.

Affordability always comes at a price. It behooves those who rely on gig work to deliver their groceries, pizzas and more to openly question why, before Saturday night, Fangs reality was so typical, and so unknown. The outpouring to the familys GoFundMe more than $135,000 as of this writing is proof that, when we have the resources, we do want to use them to take care of other people. It shouldnt take a dramatic criminal incident to get us to start.

Soleil Ho is The San Francisco Chronicles restaurant critic. Email: soleil@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hooleil
Underwriting losses of the general insurance industry were up 6.27 per cent to Rs 23,720 crore in FY20, from Rs 22,320 crore in FY19, according to data released by Insurance Regulatory and Development Authoritys (Irdai) in its Annual Report for 2019-20.

While state-owned insurers' underwriting losses rose 1.12 per cent to Rs 18,741 crore, private insurers saw their underwriting losses rise more than 26 per cent to Rs 3,647 crore. Similarly, standalone health insurers reported a 14 per cent rise in underwriting losses in FY20.

This is because net incurred claims of general and health insurers totaled to Rs 1.08 trillion, up 7.26 per cent from 1.01 trillion in FY19. If the premiums collected is not on in proportion to the claims paid, insurers suffer underwriting losses. If claims paid are less than premiums collected, insurers earn underwriting profits.

Consequently, the general insurance industry, in FY20, suffered net losses to the tune of Rs 1,494 crore as against Rs 683 crore in FY19, mainly due to the poor performance of the state - owned insurers. The public sector companies reported a loss of Rs 5,701 crore against a loss of Rs 3,288 crore.

ALSO READ: ICAI wants FM to withdraw Budget proposal on doing away with GST audit

On the contrary, the private sector reported a net profit of Rs 4,037 crore against Rs 3,584 crore in FY19 and specialized insurers have reported profit after tax of Rs 501 crore against Rs 685 crore whereas the standalone health insurers reported loss of Rs 331 crore against a loss of Rs298 crore.

Experts are not sure what will be the impact of Covid on underwriting losses in the current financial year (FY21) because although health claims due to covid has moved up significantly, other claims were relatively lower due to the strict lockdown imposed by the authorities.

Life insurers, on the other hand, reported a net profit of Rs 7,728 crore in FY20 compared to Rs 8,436 crore in FY19. Out of the 24 in operation during 2019- 20, 17 companies reported profits. The total profit reported by during the year under consideration was Rs 2,713 crore and private insurers reported a net profit of Rs 5,016 crore.

Investment income of was down almost 18 per cent in FY20 to Rs 2.33 trillion, of which LICs investment income was Rs 2.37 trillion. Private insurers reported a negative investment income of Rs 3,105.97 crore due to negative movement in the fair value of unit linked assets.
The forthcoming HBO Max show Generation (Genera+ion) that bills itself as an ultra-realistic portrayal of high school has come under fire for using real dead cats for a biology class dissection scene.

The controversy first unfolded on Friday, following a tweet from user @Lilith_RoseX that read: 'Got word from a friend in the industry, HBO has a new show called Generation coming out [...] they brought in real dead kittens for background to "dissect" on set. No warning, people had trauma responses.'

According to Variety, two background actors were reportedly so disturbed by the cat cadavers that they walked off set.

In a follow up tweet, the same user also claimed that as 'the cherry on top' of the casts' 'traumatic experience', a cameraman also tested positive for COVID-19, of which the cast were informed of at the wrap of day two.

'That should have been disclosed earlier, but they clearly wanted their shots of these kittens,' the user wrote.

The forthcoming HBO Max show Generation (Genera+ion) has come under fire for using real dead cats for a biology class dissection scene

The controversy first unfolded on Friday, following a tweet from user @Lilith_RoseX

In a follow up tweet, the same user also claimed that as 'the cherry on top' of the casts' 'traumatic experience', a cameraman also tested positive for COVID-19

In a statement to Variety, HBO Max addressed both controversies, reiterating that the show strives to depict 'the unfiltered experiences of high school students and is drawn from many formative moments in the lives of the shows writers', 19-year-old Zelda Barnz and her father Daniel Barnz.

'The production recently filmed scenes depicting a biology classroom assignment involving dissection of animal specimens,' HBO confirmed. 'These were ethically sourced in consultation with American Humane via a biological supply company that works with schools.'

HBO further stated that everyone involved in the shoot was informed that real cat cadavers would be used in advance, and that 'this would be a sensitive scene involving a real dissection.'

HBO also said that the show's assistant directors checked in regularly on the welfare of all those on set, and confirmed the two extras who walked off set were released with full pay.

'However, after subsequent discussion with the creative team, the scene is being reconceived and will not appear in the series. We deeply regret that this occurred,' HBO continued.

The network's statement contradicts a claim made by @Lilith_RoseX in a second tweet, in which she alleged that those in the scene had been told they'd be dissecting frogs - 'but they showed up to real dead kittens and were expected to stay.'

HBO Max has not returned a DailyMail.com request seeking further comment on the matter.

In a statement to Variety, HBO Max addressed both controversies, reiterating that the show 'depicts the unfiltered experiences of high school students and is drawn from many formative moments in the lives of the shows writers', 19-year-old Zelda Barnz (seen left with executive producer Lena Dunham, who is in a white shirt) and her father, Daniel Barnz (right)

Coming soon: Genera+ion is expected to premiere on HBO Max in the spring of 2021; Martha Plimpton (left) is arguably the most known actor of the cast

Sources close to the production also confirmed to Variety that a cameraman had contracted COVID-19 and is currently in isolation.

The sources, however, claimed production had learned of the positive test after the day had wrapped, once again contradicting @Lilith_RoseX's claims that they actively waited until after the dissection scene was filmed to inform the cast and rest of the crew.

Production on Generation has been paused since the positive test was discovered last Thursday, and will resume shortly in according with health and safety guidelines, HBO said.

Executive producer of the show, Lena Dunham, the creator of HBO's gritty smash-hit Girls, has denounced the use of real dead cats and said she was unaware of the plans, as she said she hasn't been on set because she's currently filming in the UK.

Dunham said when she read the script she never imagined they'd use actual animal specimens.

'I am committed in my life and work to the principled, humane and ethical treatment of animals. I dont use animal cadavers in any of my work, ever, and I was not on set or aware that they were used in a recently shot scene depicting a biology classroom assignment,' she said in a statement.

'I fully support the scene being edited out of the show.'

Executive producer of the show, Lena Dunham, the creator of HBO's gritty smash-hit Girls, has denounced the use of real dead cats and said she was unaware of the move

Reaction to the incident has been mixed online, with some threatening to cancel their HBO subscriptions in light of the controversy.

'That cancel membership button looking real good right now,' tweeted Matt Whelan.

Others called on HBO to cease production immediately and remove the show entirely from 'your slate'.

However, many pushed back against the calls to cancel the show, insisting they had dissected dead cats in high school and Generation was simply adhering to its pledge of hyper-realism.

'Why would you apologize for something people actually do?,' wrote one user.

Another added: 'In high school [...] 9th grade biology class, we dissected earthworms, then frogs, then cats. They were real, too. Stop the constant pants-crapping BS. This isn't a story.'

According to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, roughly 10 million animals are used for dissection exercises each year in the US, which include mice, rats, rabbits, frogs, pigs and cats.

In a statement to DailyMail.com, Lisa Lange, Senior Vice President of Communications at PETA US, said: 'Generations decision to use dead cats instead of props or high-tech models is as archaic as it is cruel, and its a stain on Lena Dunhams record of often using stock footage and fake animals.

'Cats corpses dont belong on a Hollywood set any more than they belong in a classroom. After using an abused elephant in Westworld, dressing up a monkey for I Know This Much Is True, and now putting cats corpses on camera, HBOs contempt for animals is clear, so its up to compassionate producers to take a stand and never use real animals.'

Generation will be hosting a panel at the Television Critics Association Press Tour on Wednesday, at which its premiere date is expected to be announced.

The show is expected to air sometime in the spring of 2021.
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Business Reporter

The Zimbabwe Miners Federation (ZMF) national executive has defended its decision to reinstate its president, Ms Henrietta Rushwaya, who stands accused of gold smuggling.

Ms Rushwaya, who is currently out on $100 000 bail coupled with movement restrictions, is being charged of gold smuggling, illegal possession of gold and bribery arising from her arrest on October 26 last year at Robert Gabriel Mugabe International Airport when four bars of gold weighing 6kg were found in her possession en-route to Dubai.

She is jointly charged with businessman Mr Ali Muhammad with whom the ZMF signed a corporation agreement and two security details who are accused of helping her through the VIP route at the airport.

Following her arrest last year, the ZMF moved in and suspended her immediately until finalisation of the matter or the expiry of her term of office.

However, council met yesterday and decided that she be reinstated. Ms Rushwaya did not attend yesterday's meeting.

Speaking after a special meeting of the ZMF executive, the federation's secretary general Mr Morgan Mugawu, said the decision to reinstate Ms Rushwaya was arrived at on the basis that she remains innocent until proven guilty.

"As you know, we had suspended our president Madam Henrietta Rushwaya last year in October," said Mr Mugawu.

"Now, as a national executive we sat and considered that she is out on bail and unanimously agreed that she be reinstated.

"We arrived at this decision in accordance with our organisation's constitution and also anchored on the fact that she remains innocent until proven guilty," he said.

Probed on whether this will not put the name of the federation into disrepute, Mr Mugawu said the executive has "an obligation to see to it that whenever available all office bearers are allowed to carry out their mandates as was directed by the last congress."

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"We are not saying we condone the charges she faces, which I must restate that they so far remain allegations until they pass the test of a competent court of law, but what we are saying is that she is a product of congress and should be allowed to carry out her mandate.

"We are not necessarily going back on our previous decision which culminated in the suspension but the fact of the matter is that her incarceration had meant that she could not fulfil her mandate but now she is available," he said.

ZMF is the umbrella body that brings together small scale miners in the country and its operations are key to the attainment of the country's mining targets.

Government is on record saying the contribution of the sector is particularly important in the sense that the geology of the country detects that some rich mineral deposits are more amenable to small scale mining than conglomerate operations.
Bike taxi platform Rapido has seen a strong recovery in its operations over the last few months and is confident of business doubling by the end of March 2022 from pre-COVID levels, a top company executive said.

The company, which is operational in close to 100 cities, has added 'Rental' services across six cities to meet customer demand for multi-stop rides.

Speaking to PTI, Rapido co-founder Aravind Sanka said over the last months, the company saw a growing need for multi-stop and affordable ride among customers.

He explained that many people are now looking at completing a number of tasks when they step out. This could include shopping for grocery, bill payments and other work that they might want to complete in one trip, and so there is a huge opportunity to tap into this demand.

Also, many people who previously used public transport are looking at safer and affordable travel options.

"In the last two months, there has been a lot of positivity with offices opening and people stepping out although with a lot of caution...We have seen our business improving and we expect by end of March 2022, our business will be twice of pre-COVID levels," Sanka said.

Talking about Rapido Rental, Sanka said the service has been launched in six cities - Bengaluru, Delhi NCR, Hyderabad, Chennai, Kolkata and Jaipur. The company plans to expand to tier-II and -III cities soon.

The service will be available in multiple packages depending on duration and riders can book rides for 1-6 hours.

He said the Rental concept was conceived as a result of customer usage data analysis. The company launched an MVP (Minimal Viable Product) to validate the data and once the validation was received, Rapido Rental was launched in the initial Tier-I cities.

Last year, Rapido announced several initiatives towards maintaining safety and following guidelines to protect the customer and the Captain, including the innovative safety back shields for bike taxi rides. The company also introduced new policy support last year, where the company provides free cancellation if Captains or customers are without a mask.

(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.)
Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana did not just vote this week with Democrats to proceed with the impeachment trial of former President Donald J. Trump  he also effectively shamed his fellow Republican senators by voicing, and acting on, what many of them were surely thinking.

Mr. Cassidy blistered Mr. Trumps lawyers as disorganized and seemingly embarrassed by their arguments, explaining that their poor performance and the compelling case by the Democratic House impeachment managers had persuaded him to break from his partys attempt to dismiss the proceedings on constitutional grounds.

If Im an impartial juror, and one side is doing a great job, and the other side is doing a terrible job, on the issue at hand, as an impartial juror, Im going to vote for the side that did the good job, he told reporters on Tuesday. He did, though, emphasize on Wednesday that his view on constitutionality did not predict my vote on anything else, namely whether to convict Mr. Trump, saying only that he had an open mind.

By becoming the only Senate Republican to switch his position from the one he held last month on a similar question about the constitutionality of holding an impeachment trial for a person no longer in public office, however, Mr. Cassidy delighted Louisiana Democrats, angered Republicans in his home state and presented himself as a one-man testimony of why Mr. Trumps eventual acquittal is all but inevitable.
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- EQT Private Equity divests Flying Tiger Copenhagen to the investment firm Treville

- Since EQT Private Equity's entry in 2013, Flying Tiger Copenhagen has grown from around 200 stores in 16 European countries to more than 900 stores across 27 countries in Europe and Asia. The number of full-time employees has increased from around 1,000 to approximately 6,000

- The management team, led by CEO Martin Jermiin and CFO Christian Kofoed Jakobsen, spearheaded a successful turnaround in 2019 increasing EBITDA by more than 50 percent and was expecting an all-time high EBITDA going into 2020 before the COVID-19 pandemic struck

STOCKHOLM, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- EQT announces that the EQT VI fund ("EQT Private Equity") exits Flying Tiger Copenhagen ("Flying Tiger" or "the Company"), a Copenhagen-based variety retailer, to Treville, an experienced investor in the consumer sector, after eight years of ownership.

Since founder Lennart Lajboschitz in 1988 opened the first store at Islands Brygge, Copenhagen, Flying Tiger has become a global retailer known for its DNA and unique product assortment. The Company offers a wide range of affordable items and accessories for the home, kitchen, office and school.

After a disappointing outcome in 2018 caused by internal complexity, EQT initiated a restructuring process together with a new management team and worked closely with the Company to safeguard a solid foundation and healthy financial performance. This resulted in a rapid turnaround with an EBITDA increase of over 50 percent already in 2019, and the Company was on track towards continued growth in 2020 with an all-time high EBITDA.

As the COVID-19 pandemic struck, strict regulations and global lockdowns imposed by authorities around the world caused store closures in all core markets. Throughout this time, EQT and the lenders stood by the Company and worked closely together with the management team in securing a sustainable and long-term capital structure that looks beyond the pandemic.

Mads Ditlevsen, Partner and Investment Advisor to EQT Private Equity, said: "On behalf of EQT, I would like to extend my deep appreciation to all employees at Flying Tiger Copenhagen for their dedication during this challenging period. 2019 marked an impressive turnaround and all-time high on many metrics, while 2020 was a setback due to global lockdowns and strict regulations. Looking beyond the pandemic, we are confident that the Company is well-positioned for a strong rebound and we are happy to have found new owners for Flying Tiger Copenhagen with Treville who has experience in the consumer sector."

Martin Jermiin, CEO of Flying Tiger Copenhagen, said: "We would like to thank EQT for supporting us closely as responsible owners during a turbulent time. Today, we are well-equipped to continue on a positive trajectory with our new owners and dedicated colleagues and we are looking forward to the journey."

The transaction closed on 10 February 2021.

EQT Private Equity was advised by FIH Partners (M&A), Goldman Sachs (M&A) and Accura (legal).

Contact

Danish media enquiries: Hans Skovgaard Andersen, hsa@ulvemanborsting.com +45 27 26 42 47

EQT Press Office, press@eqtpartners.com, +46 8 506 55 334

About EQT

EQT is a purpose-driven global investment organization with more than EUR 84 billion in raised capital and currently more than EUR 52 billion in assets under management across 17 active funds. EQT funds have portfolio companies in Europe, Asia-Pacific and North America with total sales of more than EUR 27 billion and approximately 159,000 employees. EQT works with portfolio companies to achieve sustainable growth, operational excellence and market leadership.

More info: www.eqtgroup.com

Follow EQT on LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram

About Flying Tiger Copenhagen

Flying Tiger Copenhagen is a global retail brand widely recognized for its award-winning design and unique range of products from party-decorations, kitchen equipment, great gifts for colleagues and toys for the kids. Since Lennart Lajboschitz opened the first store in Copenhagen in 1988, Flying Tiger Copenhagen has grown to now employ more than 6,000 dedicated employees in more than 900 shops in 27 countries. Martin Jermiin is CEO of Flying Tiger Copenhagen which in 2019 had a turnover of DKK 5.2 billion.

More info: www.flyingtiger.com

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

https://news.cision.com/eqt/r/eqt-private-equity-exits-flying-tiger-copenhagen,c3283679

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Isiah Wagoner, a former organizer with Black Unity Eugene, de-escalating the crowd. A pro-police rally was held in Springfield, Ore., on June 22, 2020. (Courtesy of Austin Johnson)
A new COVID-19 app was developed by a New Yorker in less than two weeks for only $50!

Huge Ma, a software engineer for Airbnb in New York, was the one who developed it. Why? Because he discovered that it is quite difficult to make a coronavirus vaccine appointment.

He said that he tried to make a COVID-19 vaccine appointment for his mother in early January. Although there were dozens of websites available, he said that each of them has its sign-up protocol and the city and state appointment systems were very different from one another.

"There has to be a better way," he said via The New York Times.

The new TurboVax COVID-19 vaccine appointment site

Because of the hardship he faced, he decided to create a new app called TurboVax. This is a free website that compiles availability from the state of New York and the other three main cities' systems.

Also Read: Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Plans on Building an Algorithm Marketplace for a 'Decentralized' Social Network

The 31-year-old software engineer was able to complete his innovation in less than two weeks and spending only $50! This new website works by sending the available COVID-19 vaccine appointments on Twitter.

His technology is currently very useful since all you need to do is follow the Twitter account and make sure that the notification update is always on.

hi everyone, this is Huge (creator of TurboVax). the account zoomed past 1000 follows yesterday....and then some. this is 100% due to word-of-mouth so i thank you for sharing with your friends and family. i'm truly blown away by it all



(thread)  TurboVax (@turbovax) February 6, 2021

Compared to the city and state's official systems, this new site offers an easier way to spot available appointments, helping those people who need immediate medical attention.

"It's sort of becoming a challenge to myself, to prove what one person with time and a little motivation can do," said Huge Ma last week.

New COVID-19 vaccine websites are rolling out

The Vice reported that people are forced to create their own COVID-19 vaccine websites. They have no choice since finding a COVID-19 vaccine appointment is really hard in the United States and other parts of the world.

Several medical experts and software developers already made their own websites and apps to help people who really need immediate medical attention. Since they are voluntarily created, it just shows that the states and local governments are also having a hard time accommodating their residents.

For more news updates about COVID-19, always keep your tabs open here at TechTimes.

Related Article: Experts Say These New COVID-19 Strain Symptoms Need Immediate Attention: Heavy Breathing and More

This article is owned by TechTimes.

Written by: Giuliano de Leon.

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
STRATFORD  The Hartford States Attorneys office on Tuesday released a preliminary report and video footage detailing the fatal shooting of a 36-year-old man by Stratford police Friday evening.

Christopher Hagans, a Stratford resident, was killed by gunshot wounds to the head, torso, left upper and lower extremities, Hartford States Attorney Sharmese Walcott said.

The report marks the first time authorities confirmed a person had been killed during the police shooting. Stratford police on Friday only said Hagans, a Black man, sustained injuries and was taken to an area hospital without identifying him at the time.

Walcott is overseeing the state police investigation into the shooting. State law mandates a prosecutor from a different judicial district oversee investigations into deadly uses of force by officers.

The report, released four days after the fatal encounter, claims four police officers shot at Hagans after he did not comply with officers commands.

Police had boxed in Hagans sedan during a traffic stop at a red light, and were attempting to take him into custody on a warrant that included charges of home invasion and strangulation, according to the preliminary report.

Stratford police were assisting Naugatuck police in arresting Hagans on the arrest warrant. Information was provided that Hagans was believed to be armed and dangerous and possibly in possession of a firearm, the report said.

Police surveillance at his residence saw Hagans leave in his car. Officers followed in an unmarked car until it reached the Main Street traffic light.

Officers reported attempting a motor vehicle stop at the traffic light to avoid a potential pursuit by having a marked police vehicle move in front of Hagans vehicle while the unmarked vehicle stayed behind, the report said. Both police vehicles activated red and blue flashing lights while police officers gave verbal commands for Hagans to show his hands.

Body camera footage from Officer John Facto, one of six officers involved and one of two who did not fire their weapons, show police surrounding the car with their guns drawn.

At one point, Facto appears to smack the rear of the car with the butt of his gun while yelling at Hagans to show his hands.

Put your hands up  I cant see his hands, one officer is heard saying.

Hes got a gun! an officer yells out a moment later. Police can be heard warning of walking into one anothers crossfire. Stop reaching! another officer yells as the car suddenly pulls forward.

Several shots ring out and the car pulls forward onto a snow embankment.

Police call out about shots fired as Facto runs around one of the cruisers that had blocked Hagans car in, and a second volley of shots ring out before the clip ends.

Police claim Hagans got out of the car, drawing fire from officers on scene. In the body camera footage from Officer Facto and dashboard camera footage also released alongside the report Tuesday, Hagans cannot be seen exiting the car.

Its unclear from the footage how many shots were fired. In her preliminary report, Walcott said four Stratford police officers discharged their weapons  Lt. Robert Rosenbaum, Detective Glynn McGlynn, Officer Stephen Santoro and Officer Lawrence Overby.

Police said the shooting occurred around 7:35 p.m. Friday at a Main Street traffic light.

Police claim a firearm was found on the ground next to Hagans, and was secured by Officer John Cannata, the sixth officer at the scene. Like Facto, police said Cannata did not fire his gun during the encounter.

Investigators are working to match ballistics evidence recovered from the scene to the firearms reportedly discharged during the incident, the report said.

Walcott said in the report that she met with Hagans family on Monday to express condolences and to explain and answer any questions about the investigative process.

After the investigation by state police detectives, Walcott will decide whether or not the use of force by Stratford police was legally appropriate.

Anyone with information is asked to call the Eastern District Major Crimes Squad at 860-896-3230.
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A series of selfies showing yoghurt dripping down the face of high-profile Australian actor Dan Wyllie were used to expose a 'fatal flaw' in his wife's claims he assaulted her.

The photos, obtained by Daily Mail Australia, were among evidence that led the Offspring actor, 50, of being cleared of claims that he bashed director Shannon Murphy at their Woollahra home last year.

Ms Murphy had admitted tipping her dessert of yoghurt mixed with flax seeds on top of Wyllie on March 21 last year, after he refused to watch a movie with her at home following drinks with neighbours.

She then claimed that Wyllie had assaulted her - a Sydney court hearing allegations he pushed her into the hallway, repeatedly punched her and forced her against the ground so hard she feared her jaw was 'going to snap'.

But Wyllie's barrister Peggy Dwyer argued in closing submissions on Tuesday that Ms Murphy had made out the assault to be 'one continuous event' and had neglected to mention the actor had paused to shoot pictures and video of himself splattered in yoghurt.

'She's been caught out directly in what could only be a bald lie,' Ms Dwyer told Magistrate Greg Elks.

The court heard actor Dan Wyllie took this selfie with his face covered with Ms Murphy's yoghurt and flax seeds after she tipped it over his head on March 21, 2020

A second selfie image showed the yoghurt dessert splattered over his T-shirt

Charges dismissed: Australian actor Dan Wyllie (left) was found not guilty of assaulting his wife and the mother of his child, director Shannon Murphy (right), on March 21, 2020

Ms Murphy claimed that she 'instantly regretted' pouring the yoghurt on him, that Wyllie was furious, that she demanded to see his phone but he then pushed her across the hall and began assaulting her, the court heard.

But her alleged failure to mention Wyllie had stopped to take photos and a video was a 'significant omission' in Ms Murphy's recount of what happened, Ms Dwyer argued.

The court heard was 'no explanation' of how the photos and short clip came about in Ms Murphy's seven statements to police.

'(Wyllie) takes a video of himself still covered in yoghurt, having wiped it from his eye,' Ms Dwyer recalled.

'Ms Murphy was not able to offer an explanation for how that happened and it's a fatal flaw in the prosecution case, a fatal flaw in her credibility.'

She described the actor as calm and frustrated in the video - but not flying into a rage.

Wyllie always denied the assault charge, telling the first police investigator who called him about the incident that he had acted only in self defence to restrain his wife of six years, and to prevent her from hurting herself, according to a document filed in court.

The police prosecutor told the court that the inconsistencies in Ms Murphy account were 'minor' and argued she was a truthful witness.

But Magistrate Elks said Ms Murphy was 'less than honest' about what happened that night and noted she was the original aggressor.

A magistrate dismissed the charge of assault occasioning actual bodily harm on Tuesday, saying he couldn't find it beyond reasonable doubt, and saying Dan Wyllie's wife was 'less than honest' about what happened. Wyllie was on crutches this week

'I form the view that she was being less than honest with the court in relation to what truly occurred,' the magistrate said.

In his decision, Magistrate Elks recounted Ms Murphy's version of events, where the couple had evening drinks with neighbours before heading back to their Woollahra flat.

Wyllie then went to the spare room and refused to watch a movie with Ms Murphy, who then went into the kitchen to get yoghurt for dessert, Magistrate Greg Elks recalled.

But then '(Ms Murphy) admitted to tipping the yoghurt with flaxeed over his head,' the judge said in his decision.

Ms Murphy claimed that Wyllie was furious about the yoghurt attack, told her 'it's over, you f***ing b***h', and stormed into the bathroom, according to the magistrate's summary of her claims.

Ms Murphy alleged that she then went to reach for Wyllie's phone to see what he had been looking at in the room. She then claimed that Wyllie threw her into the hallway.

Ms Murphy alleged that Wyllie pinned her against the wall, with an artwork behind her falling to the ground. She then claimed he had hit her from behind and rained up to 10 blows down on her.

At one point, she claimed to briefly black out. At another, she claimed her head was pushed to the floor so hard she felt her jaw was 'going to snap', the magistrate said.

But Wyllie - who the court heard lost work due to the charges - always denied his wife's version of events and the charges against him were dismissed.

Actress Toni Collette was dragged into the case, according to submissions before the court (above on Monday), and spoke to Wyllie's character

The police prosecutor had described Ms Murphy as an 'honest' witness who 'gave an open and frank concession' to the court about striking Wyllie with the phone.

'She wasn't proud of her actions, she acknowledges she was the instigator,' he said.

However, the magistrate had a different characterisation of what sort of witness she was.

Mr Elks described Ms Murphy 'as an evasive witness who was prone to not answering questions that were asked', instead giving lengthy answers that portrayed her in a better light.

'She was not an impressive witness and I formed the opinion she had tailored her evidence to suit a scenario in which she had been the original aggressor,' the magistrate said.

In his decision, Magistrate Elks said he was also 'unsettled' by a revelation that Ms Murphy had told police at one point what she told them earlier wasn't true.

'A lie is a lie and that does cast a great pall over the complainant's evidence,' the magistrate said.

The magistrate said a 'great pall' had been cast over Ms Murphy's evidence by 'a lie' she had told police

The magistrate added each police officer who saw her following the incident recorded seeing no visible injuries to Ms Murphy.

'The raining down of 10 blows by the defendant would have resulted, in my view, in significant injury. Clearly in the photographs there is not significant injury,' the magistrate found.

Actress Toni Colette was even dragged into the proceedings as a character witness for Wyllie.

The hearings have concluded.

JACKSON COUNTY, MI  The case of a former police officer accused of lying under oath is moving toward a jury trial.

David Lubahn, 52, waived his right to a preliminary examination Feb. 10. His case was heard before 54-B District Judge Richard Ball in East Lansing.

Jackson-area police officer fired after being criminally charged with perjury, misconduct

The former Blackman-Leoni Township Department of Public Safety officer is accused of one felony count of perjury other than a court proceeding and one common law offense of misconduct in office, per court records.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced the charges against Lubahn in September, after an investigation by her office.

Lubahn was fired with cause by a unanimous vote during a virtual Blackman Township Board of Trustees meeting Dec. 21.

The charges stem from an Oct. 23, 2019 incident in which Lubahn responded with other Blackman-Leoni officers to a report of shots fired at Comfort Inn and Suites, 2435 Shirley Drive.

Police located the men believed to be involved in two rooms, and inside one of the rooms, Lubahn saw what appeared to be a locked gun safe, according to the investigation. He allegedly found a key to the safe and opened it and found a gun and magazine inside, investigators said, adding that Lubahn did not have consent for the search or a valid search warrant at the time.

Lubahn later obtained a search warrant where he told the judge he had reason to believe there was a gun in the safe but did not disclose that he had already opened the safe, investigators said.

Footage from Lubahns body camera shows him opening the safe before obtaining the warrant, investigators said. That footage will not be released until it comes up in court proceedings or after the conclusion of the case.

Lubahn also wrote his police report to support the narrative that he obtained a search warrant before opening the gun safe, investigators said.

The case will now return to Jackson County, where a circuit court judge will hear it at a future date.

Read more from MLive:

Jackson snow plow crashes into vehicles, injuring two, police say

Jackson approves additional funds for foreclosure prevention program

Police release name of man found dead on Hillsdale County sidewalk

78-year-old man drives wrong way on I-94, causes crash
Space cooling already accounts for 14% of residential electricity demand in Brazil, and it is expected to increase further because of climate change.

Very few studies investigate the relationship between climate change, cooling needs, and electricity demand. In a new study in Energy and Buildings, a team of researchers from Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro and CMCC@Ca'Foscari - a joint program of Ca'Foscari University of Venice and CMCC Foundation - investigate how climate and income during the period 1970-2010 shaped cooling services in Brazil. This historical relationship allows projecting the resulting energy demand for cooling services across three warming scenarios: +1.5C, +2C, +4C.

The study shows that the average air conditioning equipment days of use would increase by more than 100% in Brazil, in a 4C warming scenario. This would substantially impact the need for space cooling and consequently, the associated energy consumption. But even in the case of more optimistic future warming scenarios, energy consumption - and consequent emissions - will increase. Because of cooling needs, average CO2 emissions, today of 0.62 Mt per year, are projected to increase in the three warming scenarios respectively by 70% (+1.5C), 99% (+2C) and 190% (+4C).

"To define past and future ambient thermal comfort needs we use the wet-bulb Cooling Degree Days (CDDwb), a measure of temperature which accounts for air's humidity" explains Enrica De Cian from CMCC@Ca'Foscari, co-author of the study and principal investigator of the ERC Starting Grant project ENERGYA - Energy use for Adaptation. "Brazil is a very peculiar country as it varies widely in climatic conditions and population density. Our study shows that the highest temperature growth will happen in the northern region, characterised by low population density. Therefore, it will not translate into relevant energy consumption, excepting for the city of Manaus, the seventh largest city of Brazil, which is in the North region of the country, at the center of the Amazon rainforest".

The North is already saturated, with an average of 328 annual days of air conditioning use. On the opposite in the South region, a temperature increase of 4C would inflate the energy consumption by almost 5 times.

Total energy demand for space cooling in the country may rise consistently because of the income effect alone, as it has been observed in the ?rst decade of this century. "In addition to temperature and population density, income of a region is crucial in shaping energy demand" explains Malcolm Mistry, a researcher at CMCC@Ca'Foscari. "Socio-economic drivers are also important to assess trends in ownership rates and types of air conditioning units in use, as typically there is a de?cit in achieving thermal comfort in many Brazilian households because of budget constraints."

Considering population and income increase alone, the ownership rate of space cooling appliances in Brazil can reach 96 air conditioning units per 100 households in 2035, compared to a current average of 40 units, boosting energy demand by 125%.

Energy ef?ciency can potentially reduce this growth in energy consumption observed for all warming scenarios. The potential carbon emissions avoided by energy savings from ef?ciency measures depends on the fuel mix of the power sector. In Brazil, the authors conclude, a 59% improvement of ef?ciency is feasible but it would require much more aggressive energy ef?ciency policies than those currently in place.

###

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Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- This time is different may be the most dangerous words in business: billions of dollars have been lost betting that history wont repeat itself. And yet now, in the oil world, it looks like this time really will be.For the first time in decades, oil companies arent rushing to increase production to chase rising oil prices as Brent crude approaches $70. Even in the Permian, the prolific shale basin at the center of the U.S. energy boom, drillers are resisting their traditional boom-and-bust cycle of spending.The oil industry is on the ropes, constrained by Wall Street investors demanding that companies spend less on drilling and instead return more money to shareholders, and climate change activists pushing against fossil fuels. Exxon Mobil Corp. is paradigmatic of the trend, after its humiliating defeat at the hands of a tiny activist elbowing itself onto the board.The dramatic events in the industry last week only add to what is emerging as an opportunity for the producers of OPEC+, giving the coalition led by Saudi Arabia and Russia more room for maneuver to bring back their own production. As non-OPEC output fails to rebound as fast as many expected -- or feared based on past experience -- the cartel is likely to continue adding more supply when it meets on June 1.CriminalizationShareholders are asking Exxon to drill less and focus on returning money to investors. They have been throwing money down the drill hole like crazy, Christopher Ailman, chief investment officer for CalSTRS. We really saw that company just heading down the hole, not surviving into the future, unless they change and adapt. And now they have to.Exxon is unlikely to be alone. Royal Dutch Shell Plc lost a landmark legal battle last week when a Dutch court told it to cut emissions significantly by 2030 -- something that would require less oil production. Many in the industry fear a wave of lawsuits elsewhere, with western oil majors more immediate targets than the state-owned oil companies that make up much of OPEC production.We see a shift from stigmatization toward criminalization of investing in higher oil production, said Bob McNally, president of consultant Rapidan Energy Group and a former White House official.While its true that non-OPEC+ output is creeping back from the crash of 2020 -- and the ultra-depressed levels of April and May last year -- its far from a full recovery. Overall, non-OPEC+ output will grow this year by 620,000 barrels a day, less than half the 1.3 million barrels a day it fell in 2020. The supply growth forecast through the rest of this year comes nowhere close to matching the expected increase in demand, according to the International Energy Agency.Beyond 2021, oil output is likely to rise in a handful of nations, including the U.S., Brazil, Canada and new oil-producer Guyana. But production will decline elsewhere, from the U.K. to Colombia, Malaysia and Argentina.As non-OPEC+ production increases less than global oil demand, the cartel will be in control of the market, executives and traders said. Its a major break with the past, when oil companies responded to higher prices by rushing to invest again, boosting non-OPEC output and leaving the ministers led by Saudi Arabias Abdulaziz bin Salman with a much more difficult balancing act.Drilling DownSo far, the lack of non-OPEC+ oil production growth isnt registering much in the market. After all, the coronavirus pandemic continues to constrain global oil demand. It may be more noticeable later this year and into 2022. By then, vaccination campaigns against Covid-19 are likely to be bearing fruit, and the world will need more oil. The expected return of Iran into the market will provide some of that, but there will likely be a need for more.When that happens, it will be largely up to OPEC to plug the gap. One signal of how the recovery will be different this time is the U.S. drilling count: It is gradually increasing, but the recovery is slower than it was after the last big oil price crash in 2008-09. Shale companies are sticking to their commitment to return more money to shareholders via dividends. While before the pandemic shale companies re-used 70-90% of their cash flow into further drilling, they are now keeping that metric at around 50%.The result is that U.S. crude production has flat-lined at around 11 million barrels a day since July 2020. Outside the U.S. and Canada, the outlook is even more somber: at the end of April, the ex-North America oil rig count stood at 523, lower than it was a year ago, and nearly 40% below the same month two years earlier, according to data from Baker Hughes Co.When Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz predicted earlier this year that drill, baby, drill is gone for ever, it sounded like a bold call. As ministers meet this week, they may dare to hope hes right.More stories like this are available on bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.2021 Bloomberg L.P.
GLASGOW, Scotland, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- iomart, the managed cloud and security service provider, has announced it has achieved Level 1 Payments Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) certification.

Compliance with PCI DSS Level 1 provides independent verification from a Qualified Security Assured Assessor that iomart's proprietary secure cloud service and data centres meet the highest levels of security and compliance for the processing, storage and transmission of cardholder data.

Reece Donovan, CEO of iomart, said: "Achieving the highest level of PCI DSS certification provides our customers with the reassurance that the security and governance of their data is our top priority. They can focus on delivering their services knowing that we have got everything in place to keep their card payment data safe."

iomart provides public, private and hybrid cloud solutions to a wide range of businesses and organisations that deal with sensitive cardholder data and where PCI DSS compliance is critical to their operations.

The Level 1 certification confirms that iomart's private and shared hosting services and UK data centres, have been verified to secure cardholder data for customers dealing with more than 300,000 card transactions a year. Level 1 is the most stringent of the PCI DSS levels and shows that iomart's systems engineers maintain the highest security standards.

To achieve Level 1 certification, iomart underwent a thorough on-site audit by a Qualified Security Assessor from accredited security partner One Compliance.

Steve Flockhart, Compliance Manager for iomart, added: "Our Level 1 PCI DSS certification is the result of a substantial team effort right across our business. We are proud of our compliance with the highest standards for the cloud computing industry and our continued commitment to data integrity and security on behalf of our customers."

iomart's Level 1 certification will help its customers towards achieving their own PCI DSS compliance.

iomart is one of the most highly accredited providers in the cloud computing industry. The company is certified for ISO 27001, ISO 20000, ISO 9001, ISO 23001, ISO 14001, ISO 50001 and Cyber Essentials and is approved as a supplier to the G-Cloud 12 and Digital Outcomes & Specialists 5 procurement frameworks by the Crown Commercial Service.

About iomart Group PLC

For over 20 years iomart Group plc (AIM: IOM) has been helping growing organisations to maximise the flexibility, cost effectiveness and scalability of the cloud. From data centres we own and operate in the U.K., and from connected facilities across the globe, we can provide multiple secure infrastructure solutions from branch office backups, to hyper cloud migrations, and everything in between, delivered typically with a 24/7 managed service. Our team of over 400 dedicated staff work with our customers at the strategy stage through to delivery and ongoing management, to implement the secure cloud solutions that deliver to their business requirements. Learn more at www.iomart.com

Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/776401/iomart_Logo.jpg

SOURCE iomart
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The Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC) Command in Anambra State said on Wednesday that 83 persons died in the 245 road accident recorded in the state in 2020.

The Sector Commander, Andrew Kumapayi, told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Awka that the number of accidents in the state was high, compared to the 194 recorded in 2019.

Mr Kumapayi said that out of 576 persons involved in the crashes, 493 persons sustained some degree of injuries while 83 died.

From the data, there was an increase in road traffic crashes in 2020, compared to what was recorded in 2019.

It was in June 2020 that we recorded the highest fatality. Out of nine fatal crashes, 15 deaths were recorded, he said.

The sector commander identified speed as one of the major factors responsible for road mishaps in the state.

He said the corps was making efforts to reduce the rate of road crashes by 15 per cent and fatalities by 20 per cent in the state.

The corps has initiated a strategy which includes public education, enforcement of traffic rules and regulations as well as (the) use of mobile courts to try traffic offenders to serve as a deterrent.

We now have three magistrates, one in each mobile court in the three senatorial districts, he said.

(NAN)

Editors note: As part of the Staten Island Advance/SILive.coms year-long undertaking, The Disparity Project, we are shining a spotlight on the differences in opportunity and outcomes across the borough, focusing on key areas that include criminal justice, economic security, housing and education. This is the fifth of a series of stories focusing on educational inequities and struggles on Staten Island.

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y.  When Staten Island teacher Ife Damon was preparing for the new school year, she knew that -- during this period of time defined by the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and reinvigorated conversations about racial justice -- connecting her students to their community would be more important than ever.

She is a long-time advocate of community-based learning, and she said she knew that such culturally responsive programming would be especially impactful this academic year. Compared to traditional learning, through community-based programming, educators connect what students learn, based on state standards, to whats happening in their own community.

[Community-based learning] is using standards as skills that help students to learn about and improve their community. And community can be school community, it could be the neighborhood community, city, local, as well as global community, Damon explained. Its just a way of getting content  being more student-centered with schoolwork in the way thats engaging for students, but that still addresses the standards to master and demonstrate proficiency.

While all students benefit from this model, Damon said it can make the greatest difference for students of color.

Im a major advocate of [community-based learning], because it is culturally responsive, its student-centered, it focuses on students personal interests, its culturally relevant as well, she told the Advance/SILive.com in a recent interview.

Damon is an English teacher at Curtis High School in St. George, where students of color -- Black and Hispanic/Latinx students -- make up 77% of the school population, according to city Department of Education (DOE) data.

The school is located on Staten Islands North Shore, an area that is more ethnically, racially and economically diverse than the rest of the borough. Impactful disparities exist between schools within the North Shore itself, and between schools on the South Shore compared to those on the North Shore, research shows.

Damon pointed to the author Zaretta Hammond, who writes about culturally responsive teaching and has analyzed how children of color learn, as well as the global perspective of how different cultures learn.

For example, most Eastern cultures have a more collective mindset in learning, while European cultures are more individual-based, Damon explained.

In a study by Kaylan Louise Carlson, research showed that culturally responsive teaching allows students to work together to bring all cultures to the forefront, instead of moving some students forward and leaving others behind.

Thats why community-based learning is so effective for students of color.

It means seeing students of color celebrating their culture throughout the course of learning, instead of during specific months or certain celebrations, Damon explained. This can be done through studying the work of cultural icons and featuring less-known people of color, she added.

When you implement a collective sort of activity, which community-based learning is definitely about, its a collective approach, because its about your community, Damon said. Its about your role in a larger setting or your role in a whole. With community-based learning, it addresses that  because the focus is on a collective consciousness.

And bringing cultures and communities of students of color into a classroom is critical to their success, according to a separate study from the Multnomah County Partnership for Education Research, which is based in Oregon. The study suggested that students culture, heritage and experiences should be brought to life in the classroom  with curriculum reflective of the students via classroom course materials, texts and other practices.

A large part of community-based learning is assigning projects. Damon said studies show children of color are more successful in project-based learning because its more involved.

Rather than have students read a passage in a textbook and write an essay in response, Damon said her students take part in larger, collective projects that both teach standards-based skills, as well as connect the community.

Traditionally, teachers will just talk at students and lecture to them, and it doesnt work. Its just the fact of the matter, it doesnt work  and I feel community-based learning is, again its just a more student-centered, as opposed to teacher-centered way of learning  and it does engage students, she said.

TIME CAPSULE PROJECT

For Damon, the best way to connect the standards required of students at the start of the 2020-2021 school year, while implementing community in learning, was through a time capsule project.

[The time capsule] was centered around these current events and, more specifically, around COVID-19, as well as Black Lives Matter protests, the current protests, and just the racial climate in America and globally, said Damon during a recent interview with the Advance/SILive.com.

The time capsule was the focus for her class during the first marking period  with students sharing news articles on the coronavirus, Black Lives Matter protests, as well as advancements in technology and social media throughout 2020.

They also had an opportunity to use their creativity. They could create a rap, they could create artwork, they could create protest posters. They also had to write to their pre-COVID self, as well as their future self 20 years from now, and express their hopes and goals about what society looks like in the future, she explained.

Students also wrote a letter to protesters, and conducted interviews with family or friends about their perspective throughout the pandemic and protests. It was an opportunity for Damon and her students to have discussions that were open, honest and vulnerable.

She was able to share her experiences as a Black woman in America. And the topic of police brutality was discussed with her students, she recalled.

Some of her students  whether they were Black students directly impacted by police brutality, or relatively impacted by it, or knew someone impacted  opened up and had honest conversations.

People were able to share perspectives, she said. As an educator, you want to create a safe space where every opinion is welcome, so we tried to make sure that there wasnt a vibe of anti-police or anything like that. We really wanted to be able to really analyze the different sides of the argument and understand different perspectives.

CONTRIBUTING TO HISTORY

Damon said her students also created videos about how quarantining during COVID-19 has personally impacted their life.

It was really eye-opening, because a lot of students are struggling, she said. We know that. We hear that on certain levels, but when you hear students talk about it directly from their lives like that, it really becomes eye-opening. It also influenced my co-teacher and I in even being more thoughtful about the assignments that were giving, and making sure they are not too overwhelming for students  because they are having a hard time in general.

The time capsule project was a way for students to contribute to historical documentation and information that would be used as a source of experiences throughout 2020.

Now they have the opportunity to be a primary source and provide information for children 20 years from now  2020 will be abstract to them, she said. Its focused on an audience larger than just the teacher, and so it makes it more meaningful  because now youre actually possibly contributing to the whole, Damon said.

She shared the different perspective that, unlike the global health crisis of 2020, her students arent old enough to experience firsthand the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, which means any information they learn is all secondary.

And she has a support system backing her at Curtis High School, as her assistant principal of the English Department works to collaborate at grade level, and even at the school level, on big community-based projects.

But Damon said she still sees a lot of traditional learning in schools across Staten Island. The reality is, she explained, that the model needs to come from leadership, as teachers need training. And colleges typically use traditional learning methods for the next generation of educators.

I think its definitely very rare, she said. There are some schools that their focus is around community-based learning, but as a whole, I think that were still very much stuck in a traditional paradigm, which is not serving students.

If youre a parent, student, or teacher who has been affected by disparities and inequities that exist in Staten Island schools on the North Shore, we want to hear from you. You can reach out to education reporter Annalise Knudson at aknudson@siadvance.com.

READ MORE STORIES ON EDUCATION FOR THE DISPARITY PROJECT:

Chronic absenteeism at challenged schools: How will student attendance rates be impacted by coronavirus?

More needs to be done to bring diversity to school leadership on S.I., experts say

Rate of learning loss amid coronavirus could be severe on North Shore, experts fear

Educational inequity: North Shore schools facing mounting obstacles, experts say

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Autos today warn us of potential collisions, park themselves in tight spots, drive up to us from the parking lot to where we exit from a store on a rainy day, and they steer and change lanes for us as we coast along major highways. When it seems there's not much left for a smart car to do for us, someone usually comes along and gets a leg up on the competition.

In Hyundai's case, make that four legs.

The South Korean automaker announced Tuesday a prototype vehicle that can not only smoothly roll over rugged terrain, but can actually 'walk' over obstacles as well.

The TIGER robot is equipped with extendable, omnidirectional wheel structures that can extend into legs that enable them to bypass obstacles such as walls, logs or crevices.

As John Suh, head of the Hyundai Motor Group's New Horizons Studio, put it in a promotional video released this week, the prototype vehicle can "transform from four-wheel drive to four-legged walking."

An earlier version of TIGER was unveiled at the 2019 CES tech trade show. That robot, known as Elevate, was larger and was built to carry passengers. TIGERTransforming Intelligent Ground Excursion Robotis much smaller, the size of a suitcase, and is not intended for human transport.

TIGER has a storage bay that its developers say can be used to carry emergency equipment, medical supplies or food to locations that pose risk or danger to manned vehicles. As one reviewer put it, TIGER is like "a real-life Transformer, but without the 'bent on world domination' vibe."

The robot drives like an all-wheel vehicle in normal mode. But on rocky terrain, the wheel structures transform into large limbs. The wheels lock and a multi-jointed leg, aided by 28 motors and 28 motion sensors, can maneuver around any obstruction.

Hyundai isn't limiting its sights solely on Earth travel. It sees TIGER as being a capable accessory for interplanetary missions.

"Vehicles like TIGER, and the technologies underpinning it, give us an opportunity to push our imaginations," said Suh. "We are constantly looking at ways to rethink vehicle design and development and redefine the future of transportation and mobility."

Hyundai envisions linkage between TIGER and a drone that could transport the vehicle to remote destinations. Drones or other unmanned aerial vehicles, the company said, may also be used to charge the robots.

Hyundai recently acquired Boston Dynamics, a tech company known for its walking and dancing robots. Hyundai is also partnering with engineering software company Autodesk and Sundberg-Ferar, industrial design consultants.

At this time, TIGER is just a concept vehicle. Suh said he expects New Horizons to examine larger payload capacities as well as other new features. The company, he said, wants "to garner some insights from our future customers about what they need in terms of size and capability."

In the immediate future, Suh sees the company resolving technical issues that have cropped up with the protoype. He estimates that testing of beta-stage models will begin in 2023 or 2024.

"There's a lot of technical obstacles that we need to overcome so it has the flavor of a science project," Suh said. "But our great desire is to make it a product. One day, for sure."

Explore further Apple near deal with Hyundai on autonomous cars: reports

 2021 Science X Network
The Albany and Schenectady boards of education got failing grades in a new report examining transparency in school board meeting procedures.

The Schenectady school board went into executive session 11 times between Jan. 1 and June 30, 2020, and in each case did not disclose the reason for closing the meeting. In Albany, just two of 17 closed meetings were conducted properly over the same period, according to the review by the New York Coalition For Open Government.

In Albany, board members improperly moved the proceedings into executive session citing litigation that was not identified, negotiations on unspecified contracts and using a "general boilerplate motion that simply recites the Open Meetings Law statute," according to the report.

"I think there is this belief that if you just state what's in the law that's sufficient," Coalition For Open Government President Paul Wolf said in a virtual press conference Wednesday.

Merely reciting the language in the law is insufficient, according to New York's Open Meetings Law. Rather, a motion for executive session must clearly show the public there is a proper basis for the closed session.

Albany School Board President Anne Savage said the board consults regularly with an attorney on the appropriate language to use for motions.

The board "encourages and supports the community's right to observe our work, and we are committed to doing so in a very transparent manner," Savage said in a statement. "That is why we have recorded every board meeting since 2015 and make those recordings available alongside all board and board committee agendas and meeting documents via the district's website."

The board is open to suggestions and will consult an attorney about adding more specific information, like the names of bargaining units with contracts under discussion, she added.

"We are happy to make this change, and believe that a review of our executive session motions shows that we have complied with the spirit and intent of New York's Open Meetings Law," Savage said.

A spokesperson for the Schenectady city school board did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Open Government coalition began its inquiry into executive session practices in 2017 with a review of meetings at 14 western New York government entities and found that 97 percent of the sessions were held incorrectly. A 2018 follow-up report found that 75 percent of closed-door meetings held by the same local governments were conducted incorrectly.

In 2020, the group reviewed the meeting minutes of 20 school boards during the first six months of the year. Every motion for an executive session was reviewed to determine if it complied with the legal requirement to identify the subject matter to be discussed with some degree of particularity. Any district that met the standard less than 65 percent of the time received a failing grade.

Out of 158 executive session motions reviewed, 96, or 61 percent, were not in compliance with the Open Meetings Law, according to the report which cites opinions from the state's Committee on Open Government. During the six-month period studied, 39 percent of executive session motions were made correctly.

Two school boards the group sought to review did not post all their meeting minutes during the time period reviewed. In just one case, the board meeting rejected the motion to enter into an executive session.

The districts held an average of nine meetings during the six-month period, which means, "more than once a month, these bodies are holding meetings behind closed doors," Wolf said.

Wolf noted that most board members are well-intentioned, volunteering their time for the good of the district, but bad practices have become ingrained at local government organizations.

The coalition recommends that the offices of the state attorney general and comptroller work to inform the public about Open Meetings Law and investigate and fine violations.
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One in 10 Americans has received at least one dose of the coronavirus vaccine as immunization efforts continue to be ramped up, new data reveal.

Currently, 32.8 million people in the U.S. - or 10 percent of the population - has received an initial dose and 9.8 million - 2.9 percent - are fully inoculated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

For the last three days, the seven-day rolling average has plateaued at 1.5 million shots per day, meeting President Joe Biden's goal.

Of the doses administered, about 22.6 million have been Pfizer-BioNTech's jab and 20.4 million have been the jab from Moderna.

North Dakota and Utah have used the most of their supply at 95.5 percent, followed by Montana at 87.6 percent, West Virginia at 86.8 percent and New Mexico at 85.3 percent.

It comes as Texas announced it has teamed up with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to create three new vaccination sites with the ability to vaccinate 10,000 people daily.

In addition, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that New York City would be getting two more mass vaccination centers - one in Queens and the other in Brooklyn - and its dose allocation is raised to 320,000 a week

One in 10 Americans have received at least one dose of the coronavirus vaccine, with about 1.5 million people being vaccinated every day for the past three days, meeting President Joe Biden's goal

A total of 32.8 million people in the U.S. have received an initial dose and 9.8 million - 2.9 percent of the population - are fully inoculated against the virus (above)

North Dakota and Utah have used the most of their supply at 95.5%, followed by Montana at 87.6%, West Virginia at 86.8% and New Mexico at 85.3% (above)

On Wednesday, FEMA announced it is partnering with Texas to build three new mass community vaccination centers.

They will be located at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, home of the Dallas Cowboys; Fair Park in Dallas, where the Texas State Fair is held; and NRG Stadium in Houston, home of the Houston Texas.

When all three sites, aimed at serving underserved communities, are opened on February 26, they will be able to administer more than 10,000 shots daily.

FEMA will be responsible for providers its own vaccine doses, which are separate from those allotted by the CDC.

On Wednesday, Governor Greg Abbott more details will be released in the coming days about how eligible Texans can register for the vaccine at those locations.

''These mass community sites will allow us to expand access to COVID-19 vaccinations in underserved communities and help us mitigate the spread of the virus,' Abbott said in a statement.

'Thank you to our partners at FEMA for working with the state of Texas to establish these vaccination sites and help us protect our most vulnerable.'

The centers are being described as 'pilot sites' with more to come if they prove to be successfully.

In a tweet, Rep Sheila Jackson Lee (D) aid she would continue to push for large vaccination sites in neighborhoods so they can be more accessible to seniors and working families.

'FEMA now has a large role in ensuring mass vaccinations and mass immunity across the nation,' she wrote.

Texas has teamed up with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to create three new vaccination sites with the ability to vaccinate 10,000 people daily. Pictured: A police officer controls traffic at a drive-through COVID-19 vaccination site in Robstown, Texas, February 9

The sites, in Arlington, Dallas and Houston are aimed at providing shots to underserved communities, and more will built if the 'pilot sites' are deemed successful. Pictured: AT&T Stadium in Dallas, which will be one of the sites

It comes one week after FEMA partnered with California to open two mass vaccination centers, one at Oakland-Alameda Coliseum and the other at California State University, Los Angeles.

Similarly in New York, Governor Cuomo announced on Wednesday that the state has partnered with the federal government to open mass vaccine sites in 'socially vulnerable communities'.

The first two sites will be at York College in Jamaica, Queens, and at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn.

Both areas' primary residents are communities of color and low-income communities, both of which have been hit hard by the pandemic for both infections and deaths.

On Wednesday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (pictured) announced that the state is building its largest mass vaccination sites at York College in Jamaica, Queens, and at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn

Each site will be able to vaccinated about 3,000 people per day over eight weeks, and will be aimed at providing shots to black and Hispanic communities. Pictured: Medgar Evars College, which will be one of New York's sites

Cuomo noted that the virus has killed black people at twice the rate of white people and Hispanic people at 1.5 times the rate, but minority communities have had less access to healthcare communities.

'These sites are different than anything we've done before,' he said.

'The federal government is going to provide a special dosage allocation for these sites, and they will be staffed jointly by the federal governmentfederal Army personnel, among others and state personnelNational Guard, among others.'

Cuomo said both sites will be able to vaccinated about 3,000 people per day over eight weeks, making them the largest mass vaccination sites in the state.

Each site will only be open to residents of those boroughs, just like Yankee Stadium in the Bronx and Citi Field in Queens.

'They are going to address a dramatic need in bringing the vaccine to the people who need it most,' Cuomo said at a press conference on Wednesday.

'It's a bold step - only a first step. We need to do more.'

The state is also expected to see a five percent increase in its supply of its virus, from 250,000 per month to about 320,000 per month.

'We now have ten million New Yorkers waiting on 300,000 doses' delivered per week, Cuomo said.

'A big question on the call with the White House coordinator by the governors is supply, supply, supply.'

The governor said the increase in doses is 'not proportionate to the need, but has been helpful.'

Cuomo encouraged New Yorkers to stay the course and not ease up on mitigation measures such as mask and social distancing.

"Now more than ever, it's critically important we stay united and keep the momentum on our side - especially as new variants of the virus threaten to upend the progress we have made,; he siad.

'Simultaneously, we also must continue to get New Yorkers vaccinated as quickly and fairly as possible.
The vehicle pulled up behind me. I heard what sounded like ... automatic gunfire. I thought my car was getting shot at and then I got out and I had my police star around my neck, Bunge said on the 911 call. And I walked up to their car with my gun out ...
Ivanhoe now holds 175 kilometres of strike in the highly-prospective Western Foreland district that hosts the prolific Kamoa and Kakula copper deposits, the first discoveries within this previously unrecognized region of the Central African Copperbelt

New assay results confirm strike extension of Kamoa North high-grade copper trend for at least 800 metres on Ivanhoe's 100%-owned Kiala Discovery, including copper grades up to 12.40% over 5.53 metres

Ivanhoe now holds 35 kilometres of 100%-owned exploration licences along strike to the north of the Kiala Discovery

New drilling at the Makoko Sud Discovery on the Western Foreland licences west of the Kakula Mine intercepts significant copper mineralization over an additional 7.5 kilometres of strike

Kolwezi, Democratic Republic of Congo--(Newsfile Corp. - February 10, 2021) - Robert Friedland and Yufeng "Miles" Sun, Co-Chairmen of Ivanhoe Mines (TSX: IVN) (OTCQX: IVPAF), announce that the company plans to soon commence an expansive 2021 exploration program on its 100%-owned Western Foreland exploration licences, which include approximately 2,550 square kilometres in close proximity to the Kamoa-Kakula Copper Project in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

Ivanhoe's DRC exploration group is targeting high-grade Kamoa-Kakula-style copper mineralization through a regional exploration and drilling program on the Western Foreland exploration ground, which shares the same geological setting as Kamoa-Kakula. Ivanhoe Mines' 100%-owned exploration licences cover the ground that Ivanhoe's geological team considers to be the most prospective in the Western Foreland region.

The initial 2021 exploration program includes 40,000 metres of combined aircore and diamond drilling, airborne and ground-based geophysics, soil sampling and road construction. Field work will commence at the start of the 2021 dry season, which typically begins in April. The initial 2021 budget is US$16 million, which may be expanded based on program results. Much of this year's exploration will focus on more than 1,700 square kilometres of new, 100%-owned permits that were acquired in 2019 and received environmental certification in 2020.

"Though the COVID-19 pandemic curtailed our field exploration plans in 2020, we were able to accomplish a significant amount of geophysical surveys and sampling work, which are our key early-stage prospecting techniques for identifying high-priority targets in this part of the Central African Copperbelt," said Mr. Friedland.

"Exploration is in our DNA, and given the outstanding regional prospectivity of our landholdings in close proximity to the Kamoa-Kakula discovery, we are anxious to ramp up our exploration program as aggressively as possible.

"Our record of discovery successes at Kamoa-Kakula is unparalleled, and we have tremendous confidence in the ability and tenacity of our exploration team to leverage our proprietary exploration knowledge to deliver the DRC's next great copper discovery on our 100%-owned ground.

"It was in the spring of 2016 that the team of geologists now leading our Western Foreland exploration efforts made the Kakula Discovery, which has transformed the Kamoa-Kakula Project into the world's highest-grade, major copper mining operation. Given the geological similarities between Kamoa-Kakula and our adjoining exploration ground, which is more than six times larger than the Kamoa-Kakula mining licence, the Western Foreland area is unquestionably one of the most prospective copper exploration districts anywhere in the world.

"While Ivanhoe will soon join the ranks of leading copper producers, our commitment to high-quality exploration with leading-edge technology is core to our long-term business strategy. We view it as our research and development division, designed to provide us with a pipeline of new development opportunities for years to come."

Ivanhoe's geologists applying same exploration models on the Western Foreland licences that successfully led to the discoveries of Kakula, Kakula West, Makoko Sud and Kamoa North Bonanza Zone

Ivanhoe's Western Foreland Exploration Project consists of 17 licences to the north, south and west of the Kamoa mining licences. The 17 licences cover a combined area of approximately 2,550 square kilometres. The primary exploration target in the Western Foreland area is Kamoa-Kakula-style sedimentary copper mineralization that occurs at the base of the lower Nguba "Grand Conglomerate", particularly where the lower Nguba sits in direct contact with the underlying Upper Roan sandstones.

Exploration models that successfully led to the discoveries of Kakula, Kakula West, and the Kamoa North Bonanza Zone on the Kamoa-Kakula joint-venture mining licence, are being applied to Ivanhoe's Western Foreland extensive land package by the same team of exploration geologists responsible for the previous discoveries.

The ideal structural setting for Kamoa-style mineralization usually is close to the western Nguba Basin edge. Deposits occur at the base of the Nguba Group, a widely developed package of rocks that mark the transition from a thick underlying sequence of sediments deposited under oxidizing conditions (good for transporting copper), to deposition under reducing conditions (good for precipitating copper). Ivanhoe's 100%-owned exploration permits cover approximately 175 kilometres of prospective strike in this target setting.

Additional exploration permits increase Ivanhoe's coverage of the most prospective ground

In 2019, Ivanhoe acquired an additional 1,711 square kilometres of 100%-owned exploration permits within the Western Foreland area, solidifying its landholdings of the most prospective ground. In Q2 2020, Ivanhoe received approval for its environmental mitigation and rehabilitation plan for the new permits, allowing exploration work to begin. The new permits, particularly those southwest of Makoko Sud, are located in an area that never before has been explored in any detail with modern exploration techniques. There is limited access to the area and Ivanhoe is planning to construct new bridges and roads to allow its exploration teams into the area. Having such an underexplored area immediately along strike from one of the largest copper deposits in the world, represents a compelling exploration opportunity.

Reconnaissance exploration generating targets for drilling

In addition to drilling in early 2020 at the Kiala Discovery that adjoins the northern boundary of the Kamoa-Kakula mining licence, and drilling in the second half of 2020 at the Makoko Sud Discovery - approximately 20 kilometres west of the Kakula Discovery - Ivanhoe's exploration work in 2020 included stream-sediment sampling, soil geochemical sampling, as well as outcrop and stream mapping on the new tenements acquired in 2019. In total, 411 stream-sediment samples and 958 soil samples were collected and processed for analysis.

The sampling and mapping work has enhanced Ivanhoe's geological understanding of the exploration permits and moves the team closer to generating targets for future exploration and drilling. Ivanhoe's geologists first identified the prospectivity of the Kamoa-Kakula area in the mid-2000s by stream-sediment and soil-geochemical sampling.

A high-resolution magnetic and radiometric survey commenced in Q4 2020 and is ongoing. To date, more than 80% of Ivanhoe's Western Foreland exploration licences have been covered by the survey. In Q2 2021, Ivanhoe plans an Xcalibur airborne gravity survey. The goal of the surveys is to better understand the stratigraphic and structural architecture of the new exploration areas, something that is key to generating early-stage targets for ground surveys.



Western Foreland area looking south from Makoko toward the Zambian Border.



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Assay results confirm strike extension of Kamoa North high-grade copper trend for at least 800 metres on Ivanhoe's 100%-owned exploration licences at the Kiala Discovery

Mr. Friedland and Mr. Sun also announced that assay results from drilling completed in early 2020 confirm the extension of the Kamoa North high-grade copper structure for at least 800 metres in the Kiala Discovery area, part of Ivanhoe's 100%-owned Western Foreland licences that adjoin the northern boundary of the Kamoa-Kakula mining licence.

The high-grade copper zone at the Kiala Discovery was originally discovered on the Kamoa-Kakula mining licence, and delineated through a series of step-out fences of holes drilled on 100-metre spacings in a northerly direction onto Ivanhoe's 100%-owned exploration licences.

The structure controlling the zone of high-grade copper remains open to the north, and Ivanhoe now has secured 35 kilometres of highly-prospective, 100%-owned exploration ground along trend and to the north of the Kiala Discovery.

Selected drill holes at the Kiala Discovery include:

DKIA_DD007 intersected 7.21 metres (true width) of 7.98% copper , at a 1% and 2% copper cut-off, from 345.44 metres down hole.

, at a 1% and 2% copper cut-off, from 345.44 metres down hole. DKIA_DD011 intersected 3.82 metres (true width) of 5.35% copper , at a 1% and 2% copper cut-off, from 348.00 metres down hole.

, at a 1% and 2% copper cut-off, from 348.00 metres down hole. DKIA_DD014 intersected 5.30 metres (true width) of 12.42% copper , at a 1% and 2% copper cut-off, from 366.70 metres down hole.

, at a 1% and 2% copper cut-off, from 366.70 metres down hole. DKIA_DD016 intersected 3.59 metres (true width) of 9.71% copper, at a 1% and 2% copper cut-off, from 351.40 metres down hole.

Geology of the Kiala high-grade copper trend

Copper mineralization at Kiala predominantly ocurs at positions where the Kamoa Pyritic Siltstone gradually narrows ("onlaps") across the underlying Roan conglomerate and sandstone unit. The high-grade copper zone is between 50 metres and 150 metres wide, and trends in a north-south direction, co-incident with a series of north-south trending growth faults.

The Kiala area is considered prospective, as two key ingredients to high-grade mineralization occur in this area. First, the faulting is postulated to have provided increased fluid flow of copper-rich brines in this area. Second, the onlap of the basal Nguba Diamictite units has brought the highly-reduced silstone into contact with the Roan aquifer. This favourable combination also has been responsible for Bonanza-style grades in the Kamoa North area of the Kamoa-Kakula Project.

High copper grades have been intersected on four of the five 200-metre-spaced sections completed to date. Copper mineralization at the Kiala Discovery predominantly is chalcopyrite and bornite, with localized minor chalcocite. An upward zonation from bornite to chalcopyrite also is present (see Figure 4).





Figure 1: Plan view of the Kiala high-grade zone showing copper grades.



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Figure 2: Section Line 1 across the Kiala high-grade copper zone.



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Figure 3: Section Line 2 across the Kiala high-grade copper zone.



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Figure 4: Copper grade profiles of recent drill holes in the Kiala Discovery zone.



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Recent drilling on the Western Foreland licences at the Makoko Sud discovery, due west of the Kakula Deposit, intercepted significant visual copper mineralization over an additional 7.5-kilometre strike length

After restricting exploration drilling activities in early 2020 as a safety precaution to protect employees and drilling contractors from COVID-19, drilling re-commenced in Q3 2020. The 16 holes, totalling 6,871 metres, were drilled to the west of the Makoko Sud Discovery area, which is located approximately 20 kilometres west of the Kakula Deposit.

The drilling intercepted significant, shallow copper mineralization (including up to 6.01 metres grading 3.38% copper) over a 7.5-kilometre strike length in a south-westerly direction along strike from the initial Makoko Sud Discovery area. Road clearance commenced in the second half of 2020 to extend the current exploration opportunities to the south and west from Makoko Sud.

Significant new drill intercepts from Makoko West include:

DMKK_DD117, a 3.6-kilometre step-out hole from previous Makoko Sud drilling, intersected 6.01 metres (true width) of 3.38% copper , at a 2% copper cut-off from 259.72 metres down hole and 9.75 metres (true width) of 2.63% copper at a 1% copper cut off.

, at a 2% copper cut-off from 259.72 metres down hole and 9.75 metres (true width) of 2.63% copper at a 1% copper cut off. DMKK_DD118, a 1.6-kilometre step-out hole from previous Makoko Sud drilling, intersected 4.19 metres (true width) of 3.01% copper , at a 2% copper cut-off from 209.50 metres down hole and 5.15 metres (true width) of 2.78% copper at a 1% copper cut off.

, at a 2% copper cut-off from 209.50 metres down hole and 5.15 metres (true width) of 2.78% copper at a 1% copper cut off. DMKK_DD123, a 7.5-kilometre step-out hole from previous Makoko Sud drilling, intersected 3.33 metres (true width) of 1.44% copper, at a 2% copper cut-off from 570 metres down hole and 17.77 metres (true width) of 1.39% copper at a 1% copper cut off.

The recent Makoko West drilling is extremely significant for the exploration potential of the new exploration permits as it demonstrates that both the target stratigraphy extends westward and that the copper mineralizing system on the western edge of the basin is laterally extensive. Future drilling in the Makoko West area will target specific structural locations that are conducive to developing higher copper grades.

Table 1: Assay composites at 1% and 2% copper cut-off for Kiala drill holes.





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Table 2: Location information for the Kiala drill holes.





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Table 3: Assay composites at 1% and 2% copper cut-off for recent Makoko West drill holes.





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Some of the results in Table 3 (marked by an asterisk) are reported as portable XRF (pXRF) results (niton values). Full ICP results are pending for these holes. The procedure used for pXRF results is outlined under the Qualified Person and Quality Control and Assurance section on the following page.

Table 4: Location information for the Makoko West drill holes.





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Qualified Person and Quality Control and Assurance

Scientific and technical information in this news release has been reviewed and approved by Stephen Torr, P.Geo., Ivanhoe Mines' Vice President, Project Geology and Evaluation, a Qualified Person under the terms of National Instrument 43-101. Mr. Torr is not independent of Ivanhoe Mines. Mr. Torr has verified the technical data disclosed in this news release.

Ivanhoe Mines maintains a comprehensive chain of custody and QA-QC program on assays from its Western Foreland exploration project. Half-sawn core is processed at IME's on-site preparation laboratory and prepared samples then are shipped by secure courier to Bureau Veritas Minerals (BVM) Laboratories in Australia, an ISO17025-accredited facility. Copper assays are determined at BVM by mixed-acid digestion with ICP finish. Industry-standard certified reference materials and blanks are inserted into the sample stream prior to dispatch to BVM.

A number of the results included in this release are based on portable XRF (pXRF) readings (niton values). Samples are pulverized at the project's onsite laboratory, pressed into a pellet and analyzed using a pXRF instrument under controlled conditions. Ivanhoe Mines routinely tests pulps prior to dispatch to BVM with a pXRF instrument and the correlation between the two techniques has demonstrated the pXRF values are reasonably accurate. Nevertheless, the values that are included in this news release are for indicative purposes and should not be relied upon with the same degree of certainty as those reported from a commercial laboratory.

About Ivanhoe Mines

Ivanhoe Mines is a Canadian mining company focused on advancing its three principal joint-venture projects in Southern Africa: the development of major new, mechanized, underground mines at the Kamoa-Kakula copper discoveries in the DRC and at the Platreef palladium-platinum-nickel-copper-rhodium-gold discovery in South Africa; and the extensive redevelopment and upgrading of the historic Kipushi zinc-copper-germanium-silver mine, also in the DRC.

Kamoa-Kakula is expected to begin producing copper concentrate in July 2021 and, through phased expansions, is positioned to become one of the world's largest copper producers. Kamoa-Kakula and Kipushi will be powered by clean, renewable hydro-generated electricity and will be among the world's lowest greenhouse gas emitters per unit of metal produced. Ivanhoe also is exploring for new copper discoveries on its wholly-owned Western Foreland exploration licences in the DRC, near the Kamoa-Kakula Project.

Information contacts

Investors: Bill Trenaman +1.604.331.9834 / Media: Matthew Keevil +1.604.558.1034

Cautionary statement on forward-looking information

Certain statements in this release constitute "forward-looking statements" or "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities laws, including without limitation, (i) statements regarding the planned 2021 exploration program on the Western Foreland exploration licences, including that the program includes 40,000 metres of combined aircore and diamond drilling, airborne and ground-based geophysics, soil sampling and road construction; and (ii) statements regarding field work will begin at the start of the 2021 dry season, which typically begins in April.

Such statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the company, or industry results, to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements or information. Such statements can be identified by the use of words such as "may", "would", "could", "will", "intend", "expect", "believe", "plan", "anticipate", "estimate", "scheduled", "forecast", "predict" and other similar terminology, or state that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will" be taken, occur or be achieved. These statements reflect the company's current expectations regarding future events, performance and results and speak only as of the date of this release.

All such forward-looking information and statements are based on certain assumptions and analyses made by Ivanhoe Mines' management in light of their experience and perception of historical trends, current conditions and expected future developments, as well as other factors management believe are appropriate in the circumstances. These statements, however, are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events or results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking information or statements including, but not limited to, unexpected changes in laws, rules or regulations (including retroactive application), the failure of contractual agreements with the State to be honoured in whole or in part, or in the enforcement or application of laws, rules and regulations by applicable authorities; the failure of parties to contracts to perform as agreed; social or labour unrest; changes in commodity prices, including the price of copper; unexpected failure or inadequacy of infrastructure, or delays in the development of infrastructure, the failure of exploration programs or other studies to deliver anticipated results or results that would justify and support continued studies, development or operations, and the results of economic studies and evaluations. Other important factors that could cause actual results to differ from these forward-looking statements also include those described under the heading "Risk Factors" in the company's most recently filed MD&A as well as in the most recent Annual Information Form filed by Ivanhoe Mines. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking information or statements. The factors and assumptions used to develop the forward-looking information and statements, and the risks that could cause the actual results to differ materially are set forth in the "Risk Factors" section and elsewhere in the company's most recent Management's Discussion and Analysis report and Annual Information Form, available at www.sedar.com.

Although the forward-looking statements contained in this news release are based upon what management of the company believes are reasonable assumptions, the company cannot assure investors that actual results will be consistent with these forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date of this news release and are expressly qualified in their entirety by this cautionary statement. Subject to applicable securities laws, the company does not assume any obligation to update or revise the forward-looking statements contained herein to reflect events or circumstances occurring after the date of this news release.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/74122
After an 18-month royal commission style inquiry, Crown Resorts new $2.2 billion casino may never open its doors after former Supreme Court judge Patricia Bergin found the group unfit to hold a casino licence in NSW.

The 750-page report was released on Tuesday under parliamentary privilege. It found Crown needed a management overhaul if it ever wanted to hold a casino licence, and that the states gambling regulator should reconsider Mr Packers involvement.

In todays episode of Please Explain Daily, national editor Tory Maguire and business journalist Patrick Hatch discuss the future of Australias biggest casino giant after the findings of the Crown inquiry report.

Our supporters power our newsrooms and are critical for the sustainability of news coverage.
The Namibian Qualifications Authority has warned prospective students applying to institutions of higher learning to be vigilant, especially at this time of the year - and to always verify the accreditation status of the institution and course before enrolling for their studies.

NQA said it is important to be aware that bogus institutions are not only found outside the borders of Namibia but they are also operating right here at home and within our communities.

NQA's spokesperson Catherine Shipushu told Youth Corner they only evaluate and recognise qualifications obtained at accredited institutions - whether in Namibia or abroad.

"Studying at an unaccredited institution leads to dire consequences for students because the qualifications they obtain will not be recognised for any purpose. Essentially, they have invested time and money in a qualification that holds absolutely no value," said Shipushu.

Accreditation is confirmation by the NQA that an institution can provide specified courses and assess the performance of persons enrolled in such courses. Accreditation may be granted to any person, institution or organisation offering training or educational services.

She said academic qualification holders are encouraged to submit their qualifications for evaluation as most employers now request for an NQA report during the recruitment process.

Evaluation, on the other hand, is the process of giving definition or value to a qualification by comparing it to qualification types on the National Qualifications Framework (NQF) for Namibia. The evaluation of qualifications is also aimed at verifying the authenticity, legality and validity of the awarding body and the specific qualification.

"Training providers also request prospective students to submit evaluation reports before they can be granted admission for studies. It is, therefore, important to have your qualifications evaluated to have the report ready for when you need it," advised Shipushu.

She added: "The evaluation process is quite simple; the qualification holder simply downloads the application form on the NQA website. The form is completed and submitted to the NQA along with the relevant required documents".

Shipushu also stated the evaluation process takes 30 working days, subject to the completeness of the application and availability of information.

"The evaluation of qualifications is a service offered by the NQA for free. The NQA does not evaluate certificates of attendance or participation," she informed.

Shipushu has noted errors omitted by those applying for evaluation and especially sent through post.

"Some of the applications that are submitted through the post or courier services tend to be incomplete, which means they cannot be processed until the outstanding documents are submitted. This prolongs the evaluation process and is a major cause of frustration to the clients who may need the evaluation report urgently to apply for a job or studies," she mentioned.

NQA advises the public to ensure all the required documents are attached and that their applications are submitted well in advance to avoid disappointments.

NQA also conducts campaigns to educate the public about their services to ensure the clients have a positive experience when they access their services.

"Recently, we have noted concerning cases of qualification fraud specifically relating to people altering evaluation reports that are issued by the NQA to confirm the authenticity, validity and legality of qualifications. The same applies to accreditation - in that some people are fraudulently falsifying NQA documents and using such documents to lure unsuspecting prospective students to their institutions. In both these cases, the consequences on our communities - and the education system at large - are monumental, and that is why the NQA has a zero tolerance approach towards fraud," Shipushu assured.

Close Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox Top Headlines Namibia Education By submitting above, you agree to our privacy policy. Success! Almost finished... We need to confirm your email address. To complete the process, please follow the instructions in the email we just sent you. Error! Error! There was a problem processing your submission. Please try again later.

The NQA is further appealing to all institutions that are currently unaccredited to apply for accreditation for their programmes to be recognised and ensure that students, funding organisations and families that invest their hard-earned money in the education of their loved ones get a return on their investments.

During the accreditation process, the NQA verifies whether the training provider has met the relevant requirements, which includes financial stability, employment of qualified teaching staff and appropriately designed curricula, amongst others.

Accreditation is only granted to institutions that have met these requirements.
Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- This time is different may be the most dangerous words in business: billions of dollars have been lost betting that history wont repeat itself. And yet now, in the oil world, it looks like this time really will be.For the first time in decades, oil companies arent rushing to increase production to chase rising oil prices as Brent crude approaches $70. Even in the Permian, the prolific shale basin at the center of the U.S. energy boom, drillers are resisting their traditional boom-and-bust cycle of spending.The oil industry is on the ropes, constrained by Wall Street investors demanding that companies spend less on drilling and instead return more money to shareholders, and climate change activists pushing against fossil fuels. Exxon Mobil Corp. is paradigmatic of the trend, after its humiliating defeat at the hands of a tiny activist elbowing itself onto the board.The dramatic events in the industry last week only add to what is emerging as an opportunity for the producers of OPEC+, giving the coalition led by Saudi Arabia and Russia more room for maneuver to bring back their own production. As non-OPEC output fails to rebound as fast as many expected -- or feared based on past experience -- the cartel is likely to continue adding more supply when it meets on June 1.CriminalizationShareholders are asking Exxon to drill less and focus on returning money to investors. They have been throwing money down the drill hole like crazy, Christopher Ailman, chief investment officer for CalSTRS. We really saw that company just heading down the hole, not surviving into the future, unless they change and adapt. And now they have to.Exxon is unlikely to be alone. Royal Dutch Shell Plc lost a landmark legal battle last week when a Dutch court told it to cut emissions significantly by 2030 -- something that would require less oil production. Many in the industry fear a wave of lawsuits elsewhere, with western oil majors more immediate targets than the state-owned oil companies that make up much of OPEC production.We see a shift from stigmatization toward criminalization of investing in higher oil production, said Bob McNally, president of consultant Rapidan Energy Group and a former White House official.While its true that non-OPEC+ output is creeping back from the crash of 2020 -- and the ultra-depressed levels of April and May last year -- its far from a full recovery. Overall, non-OPEC+ output will grow this year by 620,000 barrels a day, less than half the 1.3 million barrels a day it fell in 2020. The supply growth forecast through the rest of this year comes nowhere close to matching the expected increase in demand, according to the International Energy Agency.Beyond 2021, oil output is likely to rise in a handful of nations, including the U.S., Brazil, Canada and new oil-producer Guyana. But production will decline elsewhere, from the U.K. to Colombia, Malaysia and Argentina.As non-OPEC+ production increases less than global oil demand, the cartel will be in control of the market, executives and traders said. Its a major break with the past, when oil companies responded to higher prices by rushing to invest again, boosting non-OPEC output and leaving the ministers led by Saudi Arabias Abdulaziz bin Salman with a much more difficult balancing act.Drilling DownSo far, the lack of non-OPEC+ oil production growth isnt registering much in the market. After all, the coronavirus pandemic continues to constrain global oil demand. It may be more noticeable later this year and into 2022. By then, vaccination campaigns against Covid-19 are likely to be bearing fruit, and the world will need more oil. The expected return of Iran into the market will provide some of that, but there will likely be a need for more.When that happens, it will be largely up to OPEC to plug the gap. One signal of how the recovery will be different this time is the U.S. drilling count: It is gradually increasing, but the recovery is slower than it was after the last big oil price crash in 2008-09. Shale companies are sticking to their commitment to return more money to shareholders via dividends. While before the pandemic shale companies re-used 70-90% of their cash flow into further drilling, they are now keeping that metric at around 50%.The result is that U.S. crude production has flat-lined at around 11 million barrels a day since July 2020. Outside the U.S. and Canada, the outlook is even more somber: at the end of April, the ex-North America oil rig count stood at 523, lower than it was a year ago, and nearly 40% below the same month two years earlier, according to data from Baker Hughes Co.When Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz predicted earlier this year that drill, baby, drill is gone for ever, it sounded like a bold call. As ministers meet this week, they may dare to hope hes right.More stories like this are available on bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.2021 Bloomberg L.P.
This year marks the 42nd anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and the US. Forty-two years ago, Madelyn Ross was a senior in Princeton University, majoring in East Asian Studies. "When I heard about the establishment of diplomatic relations, I realized that it might be possible for me to go to China as a student or English teacher. I had been studying Chinese language and history in college so I was eager to take advantage of the chance to see China for myself," Ross, now the Associate Director of China Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and Executive Director of SAIS China, said in an interview with People's Daily recently.

"China felt like a great mystery in 1979. Before I left, I had almost no access to Chinese news or people. Only a few Americans had been to China in the past thirty years," Ross told People's Daily. Ross came to China and did graduate work in Chinese at Fudan University in Shanghai in 1979-1980, where she was one of the first American students to study in China following the normalization of China-US relations.

The first time Ross went to a completely unfamiliar country, her mood was complicated. But she was met at the airport by two teachers from the university, and people were kind and friendly from the very beginning. "As an American, I was as much or more of a mystery to my Chinese colleagues and friends as they were to me. Some people were curious and questioning, and others were cautious at first -- but in all cases there was mutual respect and a lot of goodwill. I had many friends in Shanghai and I was able to develop some strong lasting friendships.

Since then, Ross has forged an indissoluble bond with China. She has worked for 30 years in China-related positions at educational and non-profit organizations. "Many Americans who have studied Chinese have been able to use this experience in their work in government, business, and other sectors. Thousands of Chinese have stayed in the United States and become productive citizens in all aspects of life, or gone back to China with a better understanding of what America is like. When the US and China go through troubled periods in their relationship, these people on both sides have a relatively realistic view of the issues and are helpful in maintaining dialogue and solving problems," Ross said.

During Biden's administration, Ross believes that more positive signs may be seen. She thought that limits on educational exchanges between China and the US will remain in place due to the pandemic, but these will be lifted as soon as possible. "In the long term, the new administration has made it clear that it intends to be more open and global in outlook, will encourage study abroad, and will be more welcoming toward international students and scholars. I am optimistic that positive changes will be felt immediately by Chinese and other international students in the US," Ross said.
Several Congress members walked out of the Lok Sabha in protest while Modi was speaking on the farm laws

Parliament proceedings on Wednesday were marked by Prime Minister Narendra Modi's remarks defending the Centre's new farm laws, and the Opposition hitting back by taking aim at the Union Budget.

Several Congress members walked out of the Lok Sabha in protest while Modi was speaking on the farm laws.

FOLLOW LIVE UPDATES ON PARLIAMENT HERE

Speaking in the Lok Sabha, the prime minister said the Central Government has great respect for the farmers who are voicing their views on the three farm bills, which is why senior ministers have been talking to them.

He further alleged that 'andolanjeevis' were polluting the pure motives of protesting farmers by hijacking well-intentioned agitations.

Modi made these remarks while replying in the Lok Sabha to the discussion on the Motion of Thanks to the President's address.

The Congress' leader in Lok Sabha Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, speaking to reporters after the walkout by his party MPs, said they were forced to do so as the prime minister did not say anything to satisfy the party's concerns over the farm laws.

Following are the key updates from the day 

Lok Sabha

Proceedings in the Lok Sabha were marked by Prime Minister Narendra Modi's speech, during which he laid out the government's stand on the farm laws in detail. Several Congress MPs staged a walkout during his address, including Rahul Gandhi.

Debate over farm laws

During his address, Modi said that neither has any agricultural 'mandi' (market) shut down after the three laws were enacted nor has the MSP stopped. Rather the MSP has only increased, which no one can deny, Modi stated.

"I consider the kisan andolan to be pavitra (pure). But, when andolanjeevis hijack well-intentioned agitations, showcase photos of those jailed for serious offences, does it serve any purpose? Not allowing toll plazas to work, destroying telecom towers- does it serve a pavitra andolan?," asked Modi.

"This House, our government and we all respect farmers who are voicing their views on the farm bills. This is the reason why the topmost ministers of the government are constantly talking to them. There is great respect for farmers."

Modi said those who are disrupting the House are doing so as per a well-planned strategy as they are unable to digest that people can see the truth.

"Through their games, the trust of the people can never be won," he said, amidst protests by the Opposition members.

Modi said the Congress has taken different stands in Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha. "A divided and confused party like this can do no good to the country," he added.

Subsequently, Congress' leader in the Lok Sabha Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury told reporters, "We thought the prime minister will talk about some important steps for the welfare of the farmers. Over 206 farmers have lost their lives, but the prime minister is not willing to say anything about it."

"He was talking about what his government has done for farmers and in that he also said the farm laws would benefit some people... But I said why are you bringing a law which is not beneficial for all. You say all is well, if that is so, what is the need to bring the laws," Chowdhury said.

He is the prime minister of all, and all farmers want that these farm laws to be withdrawn, the Congress leader said.

'Na jawan, na kisan'

Congress leader Shashi Tharoor on Wednesday, while discussing the Union Budget, said that Indian citizens have been repeatedly left disappointed by the governments "mediocrity" in public policy.

Tharoor said that the government has come out with a Budget which deceives people with respect to the allocation in defence and health sectors. "Lal Bahadur Shastri had said 'Jai Jawan Jai Kisan'. The contribution of this budget is 'na jawan na kisan'." he quipped.

In a similar vein, Saugata Roy of Trinamool Congress said "Fiscal prudence has been thrown out of the window."

"Spend it like Sitharaman," Roy said in a jibe aimed at the finance minister, while accusing her of dismantling PSUs.

Breach of privilege notice against Mahua Moitra

Towards the latter part of the day, a Bharatiya Janata Party member gave a breach of privilege notice against Trinamool Congress (TMC) MP Mahua Moitra over her remarks against a former chief justice of India in the Lok Sabha.

The notice has been moved by BJP MP PP Chowdhary.

"While speaking on Motion of Thanks on President's address, she has cast some aspersions with respect to the conduct of a judge. So the question is whether the conduct of a judge can be discussed on the floor of the House or not," he said.

He referred to an article in the Constitution to contend that no allegation can be levelled against a sitting or ex-judge.

The statement made by her was deliberate, the BJP MP added.

Another BJP MP Nishikant Dubey demanded that Moitra's membership be terminated.

NK Premchandran, who was in the Chair, said that the notice is under consideration of the Lok Sabha Speaker.

Several MPs demand restoration of MPLAD scheme

The Lok Sabha sitting for Wednesday, which was extended beyond midnight on Wednesday, also saw several MPs cutting across party lines demanding the restoration of the Member of Parliament Local Area Development (MPLAD) scheme suspended last year.

Under the scheme, MPs can recommend development programmes involving an expenditure of Rs 5 crore every year in their constituencies. Last year, the government suspended MPLAD (Member of Parliament Local Area Development) fund scheme during 2020-21 and 2021-22 and said that the funds will be used for managing health services and the adverse impact of COVID-19 pandemic in the country.

"As most of the MPs and parties are requesting for MPLADS, we also request the finance minister to consider (restoring) MPLADS," GR Reddy (TRS) said during general discussion on Budget 2021-22.

Lok Sabha has 543 members and Rajya Sabha has a strength of 245. Speaking during the discussion, Supriya Sule (NCP) said that elected representatives cannot undertake any development work in their local area when people come with demand.

"We have to tell them that MPLADS has been suspended for two years," she said.

The situation is exactly opposite in Maharashtra where the state has ensured that every MLA including from the opposition gets Rs 5 crore every year, she said, adding there is no cut even during COVID-19 pandemic.

"Obviously, they are doing something right, considering GST (revenue) is not coming but they are managing well. I think maybe you all should take a lesson from Maharashtra Finance Minister Ajit Pawar. He can guide you run the ministry a little better. It is always good to take ideas from people," she said.

Shiv Sena MP Shrirang Barne too demanded that scheme be restored. On the rising number of digital lending platforms, Sule said, there is no regulation for such NBFCs and borrowers are harassed.

With regard to the farmers' issues, she said the government should take all political parties in confidence.

Union minister Giriraj Singh on Wednesday said the nearly empty Opposition benches in Lok Sabha during the general discussion on the Union Budget showed its double standards.

When BJP member Ganesh Singh was speaking on the budget, Giriraj Singh pointed at the nearly empty benches of the opposition and said it showed the "double standards" of Congress leaders, including Rahul Gandhi and Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury.

K Suresh, who was in the Chair, said he was present in the House.

At this, Giriraj Singh said Suresh was sitting in the House as a presiding officer and not as a (Congress) member.

Rajya Sabha

The Centre on Wednesday gave written replies in the Rajya Sabha on several important issues, including the Hathras gangrape case and prior information about arrests in terror-related cases.

Various Opposition parties raised objections in the Rajya Sabha to a bill for developing the major ports of the country.

Defence minister Rajnath Singh will make a statement in Rajya Sabha on Thursday regarding the Present Situation in Eastern Ladakh, said the Raksha Mantri's Office on Twitter.

The Chinese defence ministry on Wednesday claimed Indian and Chinese troops at the south and north banks of the Pangong Lake in eastern Ladakh have started disengagement. There was no comment from the Indian side.

'HC monitoring Hathras case'

The Centre informed Parliament that the Allahabad High Court is monitoring the CBI probe into the rape-and-murder of a 19-year-old woman in Hathras in Uttar Pradesh as directed by the Supreme Court.

In a written reply to a question in the Rajya Sabha, Union Minister of State for Home G Kishan Reddy said the apex court had observed that since the Uttar Pradesh police was divested of the probe and the Central agency is carrying out the investigation, there would be no room for apprehensions at this stage.

He said the investigation into the Hathras rape-and-murder case has been transferred to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on the recommendation of the state government through a gazette notification of 10 October, 2020.

'5,922 arrested in terror cases between 2016 and 2019'

As many as 5,922 people were arrested in different parts of the country between 2016 and 2019 under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), the government informed Parliament.

In a written reply to a question in the Rajya Sabha, Union Minister of State for Home G Kishan Reddy said according to the latest data of the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), the total number of people arrested under the UAPA in 2019 was 1,948.

A total of 5,922 people were arrested under the anti-terror law between 2016 and 2019, while 132 people were acquitted during the said period, the minister added.

Debate on Port Authorities Bill

The Congress, TMC, SP, RJD, DMK, CPI(M) and CPI expressed objections to the Major Port Authorities Bill, 2020.

Participating in the debate, Shaktisinh Gohil (Congress) alleged that the loopholes in the draft copy of the bill were deliberately kept in order to help the "backdoor entry of the friends" into the sector.

Gohil's party colleague and former shipping minister GK Vasan said in the world of cut-throat market competition, fixing tariff by the port authority should not be at the cost of the ports' revenue.

P Wilson of the DMK alleged that the bill has been brought to serve the interests of private players and reduce the state governments' say in the development of ports.

On a provision in the bill that says the port''s master plan will overtake the state''s master plan, he said, "the master plan has been hijacked".

With inputs from PTI
India's soybean meal exports rose nearly six-folds to 3.36 lakh tonnes during January this year on higher demand in the global market, an industry body said on Wednesday. In January 2020, soybean meal exports stood at 58,000 tonnes, said D N Pathak, the executive director of Indore-based Soybean Processors Association of India (SOPA).

Pathak also stated that Indonesia (79,375 tonnes), France (70,500 tonnes) and Germany (48,765 tonnes) were among the largest importers of Indian soybean meal in January this year. The leftover product after extracting soybean oil is called soybean meal.

Pathak said that Indian soybean meal prices are competitive against this product from the US, Brazil and Argentina. This is increasing India's soymeal exports.

He expressed hope that India's soybean meal exports could double to 18 lakh tonnes in the current oil marketing year (October 2020-September 2021). In the last oil marketing year, 8.62 lakh tonnes of soybean meal were exported from the country.

Authorities have filed additional charges against a speeding driver accused of causing a two-vehicle crash last month after a high school student injured in the head-on collision died on Tuesday.

Michael Pillarella, 26, of the Manahawkin section of Stafford, is now also charged with aggravated manslaughter and vehicular homicide, the Ocean County Prosecutors Office said in a statement late Tuesday.

Pillarella was driving north on Radio Road in Little Egg Harbor at about 9:45 p.m. on Jan. 30 when lost control of his car on a curve, crossed over the center line and struck a southbound vehicle.

The teenage driver and passenger in the other car were flown to Jersey Shore University Medical Center in Neptune with serious injuries. The passenger died of her injuries on Tuesday while the driver remains in critical condition, authorities said. She attended Pinelands Regional High School, according to PressofAtlanticCity.com.

Pillarella was driving 74 mph and blood tests to determine if he was intoxicated are still pending, according to the prosecutors office. He was charged two days after the crash with aggravated assault and assault by auto as well as issued summonses for reckless driving and failure to maintain a lane.

Pillarella, who was treated at an area hospital for injuries in the crash, was also Tuesday ticketed for speeding. He remains in the Ocean County jail.

This is every parents worst nightmare, Ocean County Prosecutor Bradley Billhimer said in a statement. Our thoughts and prayers are with the family and friends of both of these young women. The driver should have been celebrating her birthday last weekend, instead she was fighting for her life in the hospital. The passenger that passed away this evening should have been celebrating her birthday this upcoming weekendthis is such an unspeakable tragedy.

Pillarellas attorney  Ventnor-based Andrew Imperiale  declined to comment when reached by NJ Advance Media on Tuesday morning.

Jeff Goldman may be reached at jeff_goldman@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JGoldmanNJ.

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SEATTLE, Feb 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- LumiThera, Inc., a commercial stage medical device company delivering photobiomodulation (PBM) treatment for ocular disorders and diseases, today announced it has completed enrollment in its multi-center United States clinical study in non-neovascular (dry) Age-Related Macular Degeneration (AMD) patients.

The randomized, multi-center study, LIGHTSITE III, enrolled the last patient at the Byers Eye Institute at Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA with Principal Investigator, Diana Do, M.D. "We are very pleased to be able to enroll the last subject in the Study! Initial efficacy data will be available in approximately 13 months," indicated Dr. Do. "The study will continue to follow patients for up to 24 months."

LIGHTSITE III, using the Valeda Light Delivery System is a FDA, IDE-approved prospective, randomized, double-masked trial being conducted in ten leading retinal centers throughout the United States. The study enrolled 100 patients suffering from dry AMD and will treat and follow patients over the course of two years. In addition to demonstrating safety, key efficacy endpoints include visual acuity, contrast sensitivity and reduction of drusen deposits.

The National Institute of Health and division of the National Eye Institute provided a $2.5M grant to partially support the U.S. study.

"It is exciting to be involved in a potential new treatment for dry AMD patients," remarked Allen Hu, M.D., Principal Investigator, Cumberland Valley Retina Consultants. "Our experience to date in the trial with the Valeda system has been very encouraging."

LumiThera obtained a CE mark to commercialize the Valeda Light Delivery System in the European Union for the treatment of ocular damage and disease including dry AMD. The LIGHTSITE II post-marketing study with top retinal centers in key European countries was recently completed with limited enrollment due to COVID-19 and will provide results later this year.

"Our commercial experience with Valeda to date in Europe has been positive," stated Rene Ruckert, M.D., M.B.A., acting Chief Medical Officer. "I have been involved in both Eylea and Lucentis drugs for neovascular (wet) AMD and to be involved in a novel, noninvasive treatment for dry AMD is very exciting."

"It has been challenging to enroll patients in clinical trials during the COVID-19 pandemic," stated Cindy Croissant, M.B.A., Vice President, Clinical Operations. "We are truly appreciative of the hard work all the centers have done to safely provide Valeda treatments to dry AMD patients in these studies."

"The data we continue to accumulate from these trials will be used to further support our commercialization efforts and global regulatory submissions," stated Clark Tedford, Ph.D., President and CEO. "We enlisted top retinal private and university centers in the U.S. for the LIGHTSITE III trial and if successful, the study should allow an important treatment choice in preventing vision loss for patients in the U.S."

Visit the Company's website at www.lumithera.com.

About LumiThera Inc.

LumiThera is a commercial-stage medical device company focused on treating people affected by ocular disorders and diseases including DME and dry age-related macular degeneration, a leading cause of blindness in adults over 65. The company is a leader in the use of PBM for treatment of acute and chronic ocular diseases and disorders. The company is commercializing the office based Valeda Light Delivery System to be used by eye care specialists as medical treatments.

The Valeda Light Delivery System has been granted authorization to use the CE Mark by an EU Notified Body as required for commercial use in the European Union only. Valeda is not approved for use by the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) in the USA.

2021 LumiThera, Inc., All rights reserved.

SOURCE LumiThera Inc.

Related Links

https://www.lumithera.com/


The implementation of the deal is seen as a basis for economic integration into the EU.

Ukraine is looking forward to agreeing with the European Union on a specific timeframe for a comprehensive review of achieving the objectives of the Association Agreement with the EU.

This was announced by Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal at a meeting with President of the European Council Charles Michel in Brussels, Belgium, on February 9, the Ukrainian government's press service said.

"We consider the Association Agreement to be a tool for Ukraine's integration into the EU, while the activities on its implementation [are seen] as a basis for bringing our economies and markets closer," Shmyhal said.

Ukraine-EU top priorities

The prime minister noted that one of the top priorities of Ukraine is to start a dialogue on updating the parameters of the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area (DCFTA) between Ukraine and the EU.

"This will promote the further development of bilateral trade, as well as strengthen the sectoral provisions of the Agreement," Shmyhal said.

Read alsoPM Shmyhal highlights Ukraine's goal on path to European integration

He also noted the significance of starting a formal, focused dialogue with the EU on Ukraine's green transformation and harmonization of Ukrainian policy with the European Green Deal.

"Ukraine is committed to further integration of energy markets with the EU, implementation of energy reforms to meet the commitments to bring Ukrainian energy legislation in line with EU laws," he said.

Other related news reports

Reporting by UNIAN

Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen reached out to the people of Hong Kong in a Lunar New Year message on Wednesday, telling them that while democracy is not perfect it is humankind's best system and they should keep the faith.

Democratic Taiwan has become a safe haven for many Hong Kongers who have fled the Chinese-run city in the face of a mounting crackdown on dissent after Beijing unveiled a new tough security law last year following months of protests.

Tsai and her government have offered strong support for the protesters, to the fury of Beijing, which considers Taiwan its own territory and has denounced the island for encouraging violence and criminality.

In a message a day before Thursday's Lunar New Year eve, which starts the most important holiday in the Chinese-speaking world, Tsai expressed thanks to the "many friends who speak Cantonese" who follow her Facebook page, the language being Hong Kong's most widely spoken.

'Please believe that although the democratic system is perhaps not perfect, it remains to date the best system for human society. Please keep the faith and don't give up," she said in Mandarin, before switching to Cantonese to say "happy new year'

On Tuesday, Tsai also expressed her best wishes to China for the new year, but said she would not yield to Chinese pressure and reiterated a call for dialogue to resume with Beijing.

However China again rebuffed her, saying their current tensions were all Taiwan's fault.

China has increased its military activity around the island in recent months, responding to what Beijing calls "collusion" between Taipei and Washington, Taiwan's most important international backer.

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Huge hit: David Rhodes was charged 90,000 to rescue his 157,000 pension from fraudsters

Pension scam victims have lost millions of pounds more to the government-appointed trustees hired to get their money back.

The Mail previously revealed how tens of thousands of savers had lost up to 10 billion in rogue schemes that looked safe because they were registered by the HMRC and overseen by The Pensions Regulator.

But now, some of the victims of the government-sanctioned scam schemes have found that the trustees hired to recover their money from fraudsters have swallowed up much of their surviving life savings.

Victims say Dalriada Trustees 'inexplicably' held their recovered retirement savings for years and then only paid a fraction of their money back.

One man who waited for seven years to have his pension pot returned had 90,000 of it deducted in charges  including 18,000 for 'member's information', which consisted of one letter or email from the trustee a year.

Many others have been waiting for almost a decade for Dalriada to return their nest eggs that were rescued in full from scammers.

The Pensions Regulator and the High Court appointed Dalriada to take charge of more than 100 suspected scam pension schemes affecting more than 5,400 people and involving over 260 million in transferred retirement funds.

The independent trustee's role is to investigate what happened with the rogue scheme, contact victims, try to recoup remaining funds and minimise any tax liabilities.

But research by the Mail has shown that in 12 Dalriada-run schemes where information is publicly available, the trustee took 3,558,819 in fees from members' surviving funds between 2012 and March 2018.

This does not include any extra administration costs such as legal fees or consultancy.

It means the total figure taken in fees for all the Dalriada-run schemes could run into tens of millions of pounds.

Probe: MPs on the Work and Pensions Committee have launched an inquiry into pension scams

Former managing director David Rhodes transferred his 157,000 pension to a scam scheme in 2012, but the entire pot was rescued before the scammers could get away with it.

His joy at learning it had been saved turned to frustration and despair when it was held by Dalriada for seven years before he finally got just 67,000 back in September 2019.

David, 65, from Hornsea, East Yorkshire, says: 'I was devastated. This is going to affect my standard of living during retirement and is a massive hit. I had to cut back on my travel plans, downsize my house and think about saving money.'

After emailing Dalriada 20 times over the years, David finally got a basic breakdown of what his 90,000 had been spent on: 60 per cent on legal fees, 20 per cent on administration and 20 per cent on 'member's information'.

He says: 'All I got was one letter or later email from the company a year, so it seems an extraordinary amount to spend on information.'

Another former British Airways worker is still waiting to get back the 56,000 held by Dalriada after he transferred it to a scam scheme in 2011.

The revelations come as MPs on the Work and Pensions Committee have launched an inquiry into pension scams.

Victims have told how they are treated like criminals and hounded for fees worth up to 40 per cent of the pension they lost.

Dalriada Trustees says it can take a long time to deal with cases because the schemes it takes over are usually complex with poor documentation.

Pursuing the recovery of lost assets and attempting to minimise the impact of tax liabilities on the schemes is often a time-consuming and costly process involving court hearings, as was the case in the pension scheme in Mr Rhodes' case.

Sean Browes, from Dalriada Trustees, says: 'Our team who specialise in this difficult area are always mindful of the members' interests.

Since 2011, Dalriada has secured the recovery of more than 30 million of members' funds.'

A High Court judge has ruled a significant number of pension schemes can in principle make applications to the Fraud Compensation Fund.

HMRC says that, since 2013, it has been able to use new laws to help detect scam schemes and comes down hard on scammers.

moneymail@dailymail.co.uk
A Chinese flag is illuminated by sunshine in the Hall of Honour on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Canada, on Sept. 22, 2016. (Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press)

Canadian Visa-Application Centres in China Owned by CCP-Affiliated Companies

A company owned by Chinese police in Beijing collects detailed personal information as part of the Canadian visa-application process, raising security concerns for travelers applying for a visa to Canada and other countries.

Beijing Shuangxiong Foreign Service Company, which operates the Canadian visa-application centre in Chinas capital, is owned by the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau, according to a Globe and Mail report. With a number of the centres staff found to be members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), questions are raised about how private information is kept from the regime that is known for surveillance and security threats.

Chinese security services obviously have a huge interest in mining visa data, Robert Potter, a cybersecurity consultant in Australia who has worked as an adviser to the Canadian government, told The Globe.

He said visa-application centres are of high intelligence value. Government agents have a better chance of infiltrating a foreign state if they can learn from these centres about how to get their visas approved.

The knowledge could also be used to bar Chinese citizens from leaving the country. Potters said some people, such as Uyghur Muslims, a large ethnic minority group that the CCP is bent on controlling, can get flagged as a terrorist just for applying for a visa to leave China.

If youre an Uyghur and youre applying for a visa to Canada on humanitarian grounds, giving that information to the security service is really dangerous.

Guy Saint-Jacques, a former Canadian ambassador to China, said its best to assume there is no privacy for visa applications made in China.

You can bet the Chinese government is interested in knowing who is going to study where abroad, who is going as a tourist, and who wants to leave and immigrate, he said.

Turnisa Matsedik-Qira, of the Vancouver Uyghur Association, demonstrates against Chinas treatment of Uyghurs while holding a photo of detained Canadians Michael Spavor (L) and Michael Kovrig outside a court appearance for Huawei Chief Financial Officer, Meng Wanzhou at the British Columbia Supreme Court in Vancouver, Canada, on May 8, 2019. (Jason Redmond/AFP via Getty Images)

Close Ties With the CCP

Beijing Shuangxiong describes itself as among the first agencies approved by the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau to provide individuals with entry and exit services.

Its staff is found to have close ties with the ruling CCP.

You Xiangdong, the companys legal representative and general manager, serves as secretary of its CCP branch, according to the Globe. The company also has close ties to Beijing Youth Politics College, a school that has been training new generations of CCP leadership.

Beijing Shuangxiong is a subcontractor for VFS Global, a company that holds a contract with the Canadian government to provide visa-processing services around the globe.

In China, the company relies on subcontractors to run the 11 Canadian visa-application centres, which collect personal and biometric information that is then transferred to Canadian immigration officials for deciding who can be granted visas.

Peter Brun, chief communications officer for VFS Global, told the Globe that VFS operates with locally-owned facility management companies to offer visa-application services.

Individuals or local companies having a stake in the facility management companies you describe have no access to visa-application data. They cannot influence the visa-application process set by the Canadian government, Brun said.

However, The Globe revealed much closer operational and financial ties with Chinese state-backed companies.

Beijing Shuangxiong is wholly owned by Beijing Tongda Asset Management Group, a subsidiary of Beijing Sifu Enterprise Management Office. According to corporate records, Beijing Sifu is an arm of the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau, the citys police. A 2017 Beijing City document describes Beijing Sifu as a work unit of the citys police.

The Shanghai Municipal Education Commission owns 30 percent of Canadian visa offices in that city. China Travel Services, a large centrally-owned company, owns the majority share of the centre in Guangzhou. Pei Zhongyi, a member of the Chinese Peoples Political Consultative Conference, a key apparatus of the CCP regime, holds a 93.55-percent ownership of the subcontracting company in Jinan city.

Brun said all application data is encrypted upon entry and then transferred securely and directly to servers located in Canada only. He said only Canadian government officials can gain access to this data.

Brun said VFS Global conducts credit and criminal record checks on all employees before they are hired and staffs e-mail and telecommunications are monitored for security risks.

Western countries like Britain, Italy, Belgium, Ireland, and New Zealand also use services provided by Beijing Shuangxiong.

Scott Jones, head of the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security and CSE deputy chief of IT security, looks on during an announcement on the National Cyber Security Strategy on Parliament Hill, in Ottawa, Canada, on June 12, 2018. (Justin Tang/The Canadian Press)

Canadian Immigration Agency Defends Arrangement

Canadas Department of Citizenship and Immigration defends the visa-application arrangements it has made with the companies across China.

For any foreign company to operate in China, they must be partnered with a local Chinese company, and Canadian contractors are not exempted from this, department spokesman Remi Lariviere told The Globe. Canadian officials closely monitor the activities of visa-application centres (VACs) around the world to ensure that our stringent privacy standards are met.

Lariviere said applications are handled according to Canadas privacy laws and the service providers have pledged not to interfere with visa applications. As set out in the contract, VACs are expressly forbidden from providing any visa-related advice to applicants or from making any type of determination on their application.

Ward Elcock, a former director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, said the fact that companies are connected to Chinas security agencies or that its government plays a part in the Canada visa-application process represents a lazy abdication of our standards to those of a police state.

In Canada, opposition parties have urged the Trudeau government to terminate the contract with VFS Global. NDP MP Jenny Kwan has written to Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino and Public Services Minister Anita Anand to express serious concerns around the security of information handled by VFS Global.
The Solidarity Community Care Organisation, received a donation of sanitary pads from Hilma Itewa one of their most committed members.

The Organisation in turn donated the sanitary pads to 18 girls from the Etope laShilongo Village in the Omulonga Constituency, in the Ohangwena Region.

Constancio Mwandingi, Founder and Executive Chairperson of the Organisation said they are grateful for this donation. "You have joined the prestigious group of our supporters and donors, who donated sanitary pads to our organisation before, for distribution to girls in our village"

He said with this gesture they will be contributing to the health and well-being of the community they live in. "This is a good example of how community members can help their own communities and we do not necessarily have to ask from others, if we can help ourselves," he added.

Solidarity Community Care Organisation is a registered Namibian Community Based Welfare Organisation founded on 24 March 2006, by Constancio Mwandingi.

Mwandingi, founded the Organisation after being diagnosed with HIV and felt it necessary to take any kind of action to prevent and eradicate HIV/AIDS and poverty to make a better future for the children in his community and Namibia as a whole.
The 2021 Toyota Highlander has two special offers available until March 1. The vehicles that are eligible during this sales event include the 2021 Toyota Camry, RAV4 and Highlander.

Individuals who have been thinking about purchasing a new Toyota vehicle can take advantage of the Run the Numbers Winter Event that is happening now through March 1. The vehicles that are eligible during this sales event include the 2021 Toyota Camry, RAV4 and Highlander.

The 2021 Toyota Camry AWD has two offers available. The first is a lease offer of $209 per month for 39-months with $2,999 due at signing. This is a low-milage lease of 32,500 miles. The second offer is total customer cash of $1,500 for the 2021 Toyota Camry AWD models.

The 2021 Toyota Camry gas models have similar offers to those listed above. However, the lease is $219 per month and the rest of the conditions are the same. The customer cash back for the 2021 Toyota Camry is $1,000 and this is not included on the TRD model.

Similarly, there are two offers available for the 2021 Toyota RAV4. The first is a 30,000-mile lease offer of $199 per month for 36 months with $2,999 due at signing. The second offer is $1,250 customer cash on gas models and $750 customer cash on hybrid models.

Finally, the 2021 Toyota Highlander has two very similar offers to those listed above. It has a lease offer of $269 per month for 36 months with $2,999 due at signing. There is also a $1,750 customer cash option that is available for both gas and hybrid models.

Potential customers who would like to learn more about the Run the Numbers Winter Event can visit the dealerships website https://www.foxtoyotaclinton.com/. Drivers who wish to learn more can reach the dealership by phone by calling 865-494-0228. For those who would like a more personal experience, Fox Toyota is conveniently located at 288 Fox Family Lane in Clinton.
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Ohios public school districts should come up with a plan to address learning loss by April 1, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said in a coronavirus briefing on Tuesday.

The ask comes a week after the Ohio Department of Education publicized a report which showed losses for Fall 2020 in both kindergarten readiness and third-grade English language arts scores, two landmark state assessments used to guide a students future. The report showed almost half of the students for the literacy and language sections of the kindergarten tests scored not on track and proficiency rates in third-grade tests dropped 8 percentage points.

DeWine urged Ohioans to stay calm despite the concerning losses and brought state Superintendent Paolo DeMaria to Tuesdays briefing virtually to discuss the results. DeMaria said most districts anticipated these drops and are working to address them, and recommended looking at individual student needs rather than the average on state testing. DeWine wants a plan, though, so that the state and the legislature can work on making changes to support schools through recovery.

We need to be bold in our ideas, he said.

DeWine also outlined some of the funding available for making these changes, including $2 billion in additional federal funding approved in December. The state is upping wellness dollars, which aim to provide support services for schools like supporting mental health initiatives. The proposed state budget for 2022-23 relies on federal funding for coronavirus safety in schools, but allocates an increase of $100 million in wellness dollars for each year, with the budget accounting for $13.1 billion to schools and districts across the state.

The Ohio legislature moved closer last year to determining a revised school funding formula which would determine the cost of educating individual children. That proposed formula, as passed by the Ohio House, died at the end of the year in Senate Committee. The formula would adjust the cost of education per child depending on factors like whether the child has a disability or is economically disadvantaged.

A report examining the learning loss in Ohio students for Fall 2020 found that the losses for the third-grade tests were steeper in areas with higher rates of job loss and COVID-related unemployement.

Each school district may already have started on a plan, but DeWine wants a public discussion on how to recover lost learning. This could include extended school day hours, more tutoring, remote learning options or adding days to the beginning or end of the school year.

Regardless of the individual plan, we have to move, and we have to move quickly, he said.

That conversation has already started in Cleveland. Cleveland schools CEO Eric Gordon said in a city council meeting Monday that the district wont just fail students who have fallen behind, but expects the district to offer a robust summer learning program to help kids catch up. Gordon, when asked at a vaccination event on Tuesday whether he felt secure in funding for return to school, said short-term funding feels secure, especially with the recent federal dollars. He worries though, about long-term funding, and noted that when the 2008 recession hit, the districts most-strained budget was the year after the economy started to recover.

Vaccines are also key in the return to school buildings, and DeWine said on Tuesday hes happy with the shift in public school districts moving from remote to in-person learning. Many schools and districts are in the midst of vaccinating school staff. Those vaccines were made available on the condition of returning to buildings -- in some form -- by March 1.

Related coverage:

-- Ohio kindergarten readiness, third grade language arts scores drop during pandemic, state data shows

-- Ohio 2022-23 budget would provide $54 million annually for high-performing charter schools

-- Ohio 2022-23 budget ups wellness dollars for K-12 schools, does not address funding debate

-- See when your Ohio schools staff is set to start receiving coronavirus vaccines


Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has opened a criminal investigation into Donald Trumps attempt to interfere with Georgias election, the New York Times reported on Wednesday. While the former president faces potential criminal liability in several states, including New York, now that he has left office, the Georgia probe may pose the most immediate threat. All available evidence suggests that prosecutors are considering charges that amount to election frauda felony offense under Georgia law, and the very crime that Trump claimed he sought to stop.

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The New York Times reported that Willis, a newly elected Democrat, has formally requested that multiple state officials preserve documents related to an investigation into attempts to influence the administration of the 2020 Georgia General Election. Willis investigation appears to focus on an hourlong phone call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, on Jan. 2. During this conversation, which Raffensperger later released to the public, Trump repeatedly pressured the secretary of state to overturn the election results. I just want to find 11,780 votes, he told Raffenspergerone more than the 11,779 votes by which he lost the state. The former president repeatedly urged Raffensperger to throw out existing votes for Biden and find new votes for Trump. He also implied that he might withhold support for Republican candidates in Georgias Jan. 5 Senate runoff if Raffensperger could not get this thing  straightened out.

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You know, under new counts, and under new views, of the election results, we won the election, Trump said. He instructed Raffensperger to work out on these numbers to reverse Bidens victoryand warned that the secretary of state might face criminal charges unless he complied with this order.

As election law expert Rick Hasen noted at the time, there is no question that Trump was asking Raffensperger to manufacture enough votes to overturn the Georgia election on the basis of paranoid delusions. The former presidents call was thus not only corrupt, but very likely criminal. Under Georgia law, it is illegal to falsify any records used in connection with an election, or to place any false entries in such records. And any person who solicits, requests, commands, importunes, or otherwise attempts to cause the other person to falsify voting records is guilty of criminal solicitation to commit election fraud in the first degree. The crime is a felony offense, punishable by up to three years in prison (and no less than one year). An individual is culpable even if they failed to induce fraud.

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Its easy to see how Trumps conduct falls squarely within these prohibitions. The former president commanded Raffensperger to alter election recordson the basis of absurd liesto hand him Georgias electoral votes. He thus asked the secretary of state to commit election fraud. This solicitation is, itself, a felony. Trump would likely argue that he lacks the requisite intent because he did not want Raffensperger to falsify the records, just to correct them. (Or, in his own words, get them straightened out.) This defense would hinge on the claim that Trump truly believed there were 11,780 legitimate votes for him waiting to be found. But that is a question for the jury, not a reason for prosecutors to decline charges.

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Willis noted in the retention request that the investigation includes potential violations of Georgia laws prohibiting the solicitation of election fraud, the making of false statements to state and local governmental bodies, conspiracy, racketeering, violation of oath of office and any involvement in violence or threats related to the elections administration. This lengthy list of possible offenses indicates that the district attorney is focusing on the most obvious charge, solicitation of election fraud, but also looking at a broad range of criminal laws in building her case against Trump. In her letter to state officials, Willis described the Trump investigation as a high priority and said the case will go before a grand jury as early as March, with subpoenas to follow shortly thereafter.

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Willis has authority to probe the Jan. 2 phone call because Raffenspergers office is located in Fulton County. Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr, a Republican, also has the power to charge Trump for his interference in the election. Raffensperger set that process in motion when his office launched an investigation into the call. The secretary of states office will present its findings to the Georgia State Election Board, which then has the option of reporting possible fraud to the state attorney general for further investigation. It will probably take a significant amount of time for the board, which is controlled by Republicans, to reach a decisionand even if it refers the case to Carr, there is no guarantee he will prosecute Trump. The attorney general has positioned himself as a staunch ally of the former president and vigorously opposed his recent impeachment. (The article of impeachment explicitly cites Trumps call to Raffensperger.)

In light of Carrs evident loyalty to Trump, Willis investigation may be Georgias best shot at bringing Trump to justice. Now that he is a private citizen, Trump may no longer claim immunity from indictment. Trump spent the months after Nov. 3 falsely accusing Democrats of stealing millions of votes. His lies led to a violent insurrection and his own impeachment. All the while, Trump said he simply wanted courts to closely scrutinize alleged fraud in the election. He may soon get his wish.

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Plus, Bill's Message of the Day, say goodbye to law and order Joe.

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A llama that had been on the loose for nearly a year was rescued Sunday in north Alabama after becoming trapped in a septic tank ditch.

Alex, a Bolivar llama roaming Jackson County Road 96 for months, fell into the ditch and was trapped for about three hours, according to Southeast Llama Rescue, which took possession of Alex after he was rescued by Stevenson Volunteer Fire & Rescue firefighters Sunday.

After several hours he was successfully, and safely, removed from the septic tank, the fire department posted on its Facebook page Monday.

After reaching safety, Alex was taken to Auburn Universitys veterinary school for evaluation.

Alex, a Bolivar Llama on the loose in north Alabama for nearly a year, was rescued Sunday after becoming trapped in a septic tank ditch for hours.

The llama was unable to stand on its own as of Tuesday morning and showed signs of dehydration and inflammation, the llama rescue group said. Alex also had damage to his foot, which was bandaged to prevent it from becoming infected.

Currently he is on fluids, anti-inflammatories, antibiotics and electrolytes, Southeast Llama Rescue said on its Facebook page. Overall doing O.K., but not quite out of the woods yet.

Once Alex receives a clean bill of health, hell be headed to a safe haven in Anniston, according tot he fire department.

Medical workers at a hospital protest against Myanmar's military coup in front of their medical facility in Naypyidaw, Feb. 5, 2021.

Myanmars health service is on the verge of a breakdown as medical workers and providers join a nationwide civil disobedience campaign opposing the military power takeover, forcing most government-run hospitals to close their doors, hospital officials in Yangon said Tuesday.

Some government-run hospitals continue to treat current in-patients but are unable to accept new ones, sending people streaming into private clinics in several townships, they said.

Doctors, nurses and other medical personnel around the country have been participating in the civil disobedience movement  a steady stream of nonviolent public protests against the military coup  since Feb 2.

COVID-19 prevention and vaccination programs are jeopardized now that lab technicians have joined in the movement, health professionals said.

Myanmars ruling authorities can no longer determine the daily infection situation and have suspended vaccination programs.

An official from Yangon General Hospital said the civil disobedience campaign has nearly forced the government health care sector to come to a standstill.

More and more doctors and nurses are participating in the civil disobedience movement, said the official who declined to give his name for safety reasons. As many as 80 percent of the hospitals in Myanmar have shut down. Those who are affected by these shutdowns are the patients.

Yangon General Hospital, including the intensive care units, closed at around 3:30 p.m. Monday, he added.

Dr. Than Min Htut, head of Pathein Hospital in Pathein, said his medical institution is providing treatment only to existing patients.

We still had nearly 300 patients when the movement started on Feb. 5, he said. We are providing treatment for them, [but] we are no longer accepting new patients.

Medical staffers are referring new patients to doctors at private clinics and nonprofit hospitals, Than Min Htut said.

Were also transferring patients to military-operated hospitals if they want to go, he added.

Private clinics now are providing treatment for emergency patients, he said.

Everything has gone to waste

Updated figures on COVID-19 infection rates are no longer available because those who work in labs that test samples also are involved in protests against the coup, Than Min Htut said.

I assume the number of COVID-19 cases has fallen, he said. Before Feb. 5, there were consecutive days when they didnt register any new cases, so we can assume that the current infection rate is low. But it is difficult to confirm because the COVID labs are not operational for now.

On Tuesday, Myanmar recorded 141,448 coronavirus cases, including 21 new cases, and 3,180 deaths, including three new fatalities, according the Ministry of Health and Sports, which issued an announcement urging all ministry workers to return to their jobs to continue virus prevention and vaccination programs.

RFA could not reach Dr. Khin Khin Gyi, the ministrys director of emerging infectious disease, for comment.

Yangon-based writer and medical doctor Phyo Thiha said the military coup has derailed COVID-19 vaccination task forces.

We had received the vaccines, and we were giving the shots, he said. Now, the number of vaccinations is dropping, [and] I think the number of new cases is almost zero because the testing mechanisms are no longer operational.

It would be difficult for the military government to try to regain the headway that medical professionals had made with the vaccination program, Phyo Thiha said.

If the government sets dates for vaccinations, its work will be hampered by the nationwide protests, he said. Under the current circumstances, nothing can be done. Everything that has been done has now gone to waste.

Reported by RFAs Myanmar Service. Translated by Ye Kaung Myint Maung. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.
White House Says Its on Track for 100 Million COVID-19 Shots in 100 Days

The Biden administration is on track to meet its goal of 100 million COVID-19 vaccine doses to be administered by President Joe Bidens 101st day in office, the White Houses coronavirus coordinator said on Feb. 10.

Weve been making steady progress over the past few weeks, getting more vaccine supply, getting more vaccinators on the ground, and creating more places to get vaccinated. We are on track to meet the presidents goal of delivering 100 million shots in his first 100 days in office, Jeffrey Zients said during a virtual press briefing.

Several vaccines against the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, which causes COVID-19, were developed with support from the Trump administration and granted emergency authorization in December 2020. But vaccine deployment started slowly, falling short of a goal of 20 million Americans being vaccinated by the end of the year.

Distribution and administration has steadily ramped up and reached more than 1 million daily doses three times under the Trump administration. It has continued growing since Biden took office on Jan. 20.

The seven-day average of shots administered is now at 1.5 million, up from 1.1 million two weeks ago, according to data that Zients presented.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 44.7 million doses had been given as of the morning of Feb. 10. But because both of the approved vaccines require two doses, initial doses have gone to 33.7 million people, while about 10 million have gotten two injections.

Safeway pharmacy manager Kel Fanny draws up a COVID-19 vaccine at a mass vaccination site at the Clark County Event Center at the Fairgrounds in Ridgefield, Wash., on Jan. 27, 2021. (Alisha Jucevic/Reuters)

Biden repeatedly said during the 2020 campaign that he would push to get 100 million shots administered in his first 100 days if elected. Biden told reporters last month that the administration might be able to push the daily injection rate to 1.5 million, but the White House said he didnt set a new goal.

Critics have panned the original goal, saying its too low. Administration officials defended it, saying accomplishing the threshold would be unprecedented.

Biden told reporters earlier this week that his administration was short on vaccines and short on organization when he entered office. Trump administration officials, including holdover Dr. Anthony Fauci, have rebutted Bidens claim of the previous president not having a plan in place, pointing to his Operation Warp Speed program.

The weekly allocation to states, tribes, and territories of vaccine doses has increased 28 percent in Bidens first three weeks in office, Zients said Feb. 10.

The Biden administration is pushing for more mass vaccination sites, partnering with California last week to open several. More sites were announced during the briefing, including three in Texas. Sites at NRG Stadium in Houston, Fair Park in Dallas, and AT&T Stadium in Arlington will be capable of handling over 10,000 shots a day. Theyre expected to be open the last week of February.

The administration has also worked on increasing the number of qualified professionals on the ground to administer vaccines, turning to retired doctors and nurses, and deployed hundreds of personnel from across the federal government to support vaccination operations across the nation. There are plans to deploy thousands more in the coming weeks.
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I have four kids and 11 grandkids. I have no favorites among anybody, he said. Ive been involved with all of them and there are great stories among them. Because there are different mediums. Like, Naperville Loves a Parade is extremely unique  you just dont find that kind of art anywhere with that detail and that quality of work and that concept. The Laughing Lincoln is an incredible one. Weve got a young Abe Lincoln, with no beard, who is laughing. This is when he was a young legislator from Illinois.
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Community Advocates for a Sustainable Environment is hosting its fifth annual Renewable Energy and Sustainable Living Fair  online this year  from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday, March 6.

Visitors will be able to view company profiles and talk with representatives of the represented organizations over Zoom. Raya Salter, policy director of NY Renews and one of the climate activists appointed to the Climate Action Council, will give a speech. The Council is tasked with developing the state's climate action plan to get to net zero by 2050, as required by the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act.
MBABANE  Churches should open by this coming Sunday!

This was said by church leaders who had gathered at the National Disaster Management Agency (NDMA) offices in Mbabane yesterday morning to deliver a petition, requesting government to lift the ban on churches.

The 10 church leaders, who included Back to Gods Bishop Elijah Dlamini, Rest in Christs Bishop Vincent Hlatshwako and Gods Grace Church Pastor and Siphofaneni Member of Parliament (MP) Mduduzi Gawuzela Simelane, delivered the petition to NDMA Chief Executive Officer Russell Dlamini.

The move to deliver the petition, which mainly demands government to lift the ban on the closure of churches, comes after the Acting Prime Minister, Themba Masuku, enforced the current one-month lockdown which was effective from January 16.

The lockdown followed the COVID-19 second wave, which saw a spike in COVID-19-related deaths in the country.

According to the church leaders, through the petition, the church in Eswatini wished to join the nation in expressing concern over the exponential increase in the number of COVID-19 infections, resulting in deaths. We mourn with families, communities and the nation at large the loss of lives of individuals who were contributors to families and even national development. We further applaud ongoing efforts by government to prevent and respond to the pandemic. We express our support and recognise our role as the church of continuously embark in prayer and seek the face of our God to put an end to this crisis (sic), said the church leaders.

They said they understood that the emergence of the global pandemic had huge negative impacts on social life, economy of the country and spiritual lives of people. They said these impacts hit hard on people such that they were now mostly in need of the church more than ever, for their mental wellness. As the church, we view this fight with spiritual lenses and are convinced that this is a spiritual battle manifesting itself in the physical.

A drug that could improve blood flow in the lungs of Covid patients will be trialled at NHS hospitals in Reading, Oxford and Cardiff to see if it can boost survival odds.

Doctors led by Oxford University scientists will test how effective almitrine bismesylate, a lung stimulant, is at treating seriously ill Covid patients.

The 116-patient trial started this week at the Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading and will be extended to John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford and University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff over the next four months.

Patients who get very sick with coronavirus develop a condition called hypoxia, in which the levels of oxygen in the blood drop to dangerously low levels.

Not getting enough oxygen into the blood can, over extended periods of time, cause permanent organ damage that can ultimately be fatal.

Researchers say this is because the virus prevents blood being diverted away from infected parts of the lungs to areas that still work properly, meaning blood is wasted in vessels where they can't pick up any oxygen.

And they believe this pill, branded as Duxil but not currently on the market, could help reverse this problem by closing off those damaged parts of the lungs to make the blood's oxygen uptake more efficient.

If the drug works it could be another breakthrough discovered on British soil, after researchers in the UK proved dexamethasone could cut Covid death rates.

Since that discovery last year, the wonder steroid has saved between 12,000 and 27,000 lives in Britain and 650,000 around the world, a study has estimated.

A drug that could help reduce the need for respirators in Covid treatment has begun testing in a clinical trial, University of Oxford researchers have announced. (Pictured: A Covid patient in intensive care in Spain)

The 116-patient trial started this week at the Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading (pictured) and will be extended to John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford and University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff over the next four months

Almitrine, which has been used in patients recovering from strokes in China, works by constricting the blood vessels in regions of the lung where the oxygen is low.

Oxygen gets into the blood when it is transferred from air pockets in the lungs.

This process happens in tiny blood vessels than run through the lungs and then take out the freshened blood into the heart to be pumped around the body.

If the lung tissue is infected  which may make it thicker with swelling or particularly wet if there is fluid build-up like in pneumonia  this process doesn't work as well. As a result less oxygen gets through into the blood so there is less available to organs.

Almitrine works by minimising how much blood goes into these inefficient areas and diverting it to the healthier, functioning parts of the lungs.

DEXAMETHASONE 'HAS SAVED 12,000 LIVES IN THE UK' Using dexamethasone to treat Covid-19 patients could have already saved 650,000 lives around the world, a study suggests. This includes 12,000 British lives. Scientists from the University of Oxford found in a large clinical trial last year that dexamethasone, a cheap and widely available steroid, could reduce deaths from Covid-19 significantly. The researchers found that the drug cut the risk of death by a third for patients on ventilators. For those on oxygen, it cut deaths by almost a fifth. The scientists reported their findings last year in June and experts now say the drug could have saved between 12,000 and 27,000 lives in the UK up to this point. Around the world the estimate is 650,000 lives  but this could be up to 1.4 million. The study was published in the journal Nature Communications. Source: Press Association Advertisement

It has been successful in treating acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), which causes inflammation in the lungs.

Researchers say almitrine could have the same effect in Covid patients, with the potential to help restore the natural protective process in the lungs and increase oxygen levels in arterial blood.

Lead researcher Professor Peter Robbins, from the University of Oxford, said: 'The primary idea behind medical treatment is that it is supportive  its aim is to keep people alive while they make their recovery from the disease.

'In a way, you can view the potential support from almitrine as extending peoples individual runway to make a recovery from the disease.

'The idea behind our trial is to enhance the supportive treatment  extend peoples runway.'

Almitrine will be given to patients over a seven-day period to determine whether it is effective in reducing the need for ventilators.

Professor Robbins said: 'I am pleased about our decision to use oral, rather than intravenous, almitrine for the trial.

'This lower tech approach could also be used in low- and middle-income countries which maybe have no, or insufficient, infrastructure to provide oxygen.

'As an oral drug, it really does have the potential to extend the runway to recovery for many people.'

The trial will examine the effect of the drug on two different groups.

The first group will be made up of those who need breathing support and will measure the oxygen levels in their blood during treatment.

The other group are those who do not require assisted breathing but will be monitored for whether or not the drug reduces the need for respiratory support.

Nicky Lloyd, acting CEO of the Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust, said: 'This trial offers a great opportunity to supplement our increasing understanding of Covid-19 and meet the need for new, cost-effective treatments.

'The Royal Berkshire Hospital is a research-active hospital, which is well-placed to improve care and outcomes for our patients by taking part in collaborative research studies.'

Dr Nick Talbot, chief investigator for the overall trial across the three sites, added: 'If almitrine proves beneficial for our patients, we think it would represent a really important new approach in the management of Covid-19.'
STRATFORD  A preliminary report about a fatal police shooting and two minutes of police body cam footage from the scene raise more concerns than they allay, the head of the states ACLU branch said Wednesday.

In a prepared statement, David McGuire, executive director of the ACLU of Connecticut, said 36-year-old Christopher Hagans should be alive today.

Another Black man has died at the hands of police in Connecticut, and once again the public is left with more questions than answers about police behavior in his death, McGuire said.

Hagans was shot several times Friday about 7:35 p.m. on Route 110 after police tried to box in a car he was driving in an attempt to arrest him on a warrant from Naugatuck police on charges that included home invasion and strangulation.

Police said they believed Hagans to be armed and dangerous, he didnt follow officers commands, and he had a gun which was found at the scene.

On body cam footage released Tuesday, officers warn Hagans repeatedly to show his hands and stop reaching. A burst of shots ring out after the vehicles brake lights go off and accelerates forward, then several more can be heard seconds later.

There was no answer at the door of Hagans north Stratford home Wednesday morning  the site of a 2009 standoff during which he allegedly barricaded himself inside the house with a rifle after assaulting a pregnant girlfriend.

Hagans record also includes convictions for first-degree robbery and witness intimidation connected to a 2013 Bridgeport arrest for which he was sentenced to serve eight years behind bars, according to Judicial Branch records. A message was left Wednesday with Hagans lawyer in that case.

Hartford States Attorney Sharmese Walcott is overseeing a probe of the shooting by detectives from the state police Eastern District Major Crimes Squad.

State law mandates that a prosecutor from a different jurisdiction oversee investigations into uses of deadly force by police.

The law also mandates prosecutors overseeing such investigations release a preliminary report within five business days with certain details.

Walcott released a preliminary report in the case Tuesday, but it came up short on details, said McGuire, who raised a number of concerns about the case.

He said its unclear when Hagans died. Prepared statements from Stratford and state police Friday and Saturday, respectively, said an unnamed suspect did sustain injuries and was transported to an area hospital.

According to Walcotts preliminary report, an autopsy was performed Saturday that determined Hagans had died of gunshot wounds to the head, torso, left upper and lower extremities.

Authorities gave no update on Hagans condition until Tuesday.

McGuire also took issue with the camera footage from the case released by the states Division of Criminal Justice on Tuesday in the form of a 2-minute, 5-second video posted to the state police YouTube account.

More than half of the video consists of distant dash cam footage from one of the officers, John Cannata, who didnt fire his weapon, and 30 seconds or so is from Officer John Facto, who was positioned near the rear of the vehicle and also didnt fire his weapon.

Walcotts report identified the other officers involved  who fired their weapons  as Lt. Robert Rosenbaum, Detective Glynn McGlynn, Officer Stephen Santoro and Officer Lawrence Overby.

It is unclear when Mr. Hagans died and whether prosecutors and police failed to tell the public in a timely manner, and it is uncertain why prosecutors released body camera footage from only two of six police employees, particularly when the currently available footage appears to contradict part of police accounts, McGuire said. We are concerned by prosecutors lack of explanation regarding these critical details.

Walcotts report said that all available body worn camera and motor vehicle dashboard camera footage has been obtained from the Stratford Police Department. Authorization has been given for the portion of the footage that covers the incident to be released.

In an email Wednesday a spokesman for the states top prosecutor indicated the footage released Tuesday was all there was.

I spoke with States Attorney Walcott and she said that the body cam footage released yesterday is the only body cam footage that covers the actual incident, said Alaine Griffin, director of communications for the chief states attorneys office.

She did not immediately reply to an email seeking clarification about whether the other four cops had body cams on.

Town and local police have repeatedly declined to comment on the case and referred questions to Walcotts office, though Michael Downes, the mayors chief of staff, said Wednesday that the four officers who fired their weapons are not currently on duty.

The officers involved are currently out on paid administrative leave, Downes said. Thats protocol in any such instance, and no indication of any wrongdoing.

Hearst Connecticut Media left messages Tuesday and Wednesday with the Stratford Police Union Local 407.

Walcotts report said her office is committed to working closely with investigators to complete an independent, objective and thorough investigation in a timely and transparent manner. Hagans wife and siblings met with Walcott Monday afternoon.

It is the Hartford prosecutors first investigation of a police-involved shooting since her appointment last year.

Walcotts predecessor, Gail Hardy, withdrew her application for reappointment to the post after being suspended and publicly criticized for taking years to issue formal reports that found police officers justified in four fatal shootings dating as far back as 2008.

Its unclear when more information will be released regarding Fridays shooting.

Further updates will be provided in a manner that does not compromise the ongoing Division of Criminal Justice investigation, Walcotts preliminary report concluded.

Includes previous reporting from the Associated Press.

Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 10)  President Rodrigo Duterte is expected to sign an executive order that will allow local government units in Metro Manila to have down payments for COVID-19 vaccines procured from the UK's AstraZeneca.

This was confirmed by Metropolitan Manila Development Authority Chairman Benhur Abalos in an interview on CNN Philippines' The Final Word on Wednesday.

Abalos said he met with Executive Secretary Salvador Medialdea on Tuesday to iron out possible issues that may arise from the legal issuance.

"It is part of exemptions in the Procurement Law that the President can exempt advance payments of more than 15% to address contingencies arising from national or man-made calamities such as the COVID-19 pandemic," Abalos said.

Current procurement law bars advance payments beyond 15% of the contract price, but the Government Auditing Code of the Philippines grants the President the sole power to allow advance payments. The Bayanihan Act also authorizes advance payments during emergency procurement, but it does not cover LGUs.

The MMDA Chairman hopes Duterte will immediately sign the EO since AstraZeneca has been requiring down payments in some contracts by February 24. The British pharmaceutical firm is asking for 20% down payment in the COVID-19 vaccine procurement.

San Juan City Mayor Francis Zamora, who procured 100,000 AstraZeneca doses for the city's over 50,000 residents, emphasized the down payment problem has to be resolved for a smooth implementation of their local vaccination program.

"We want to help, we want to allocate funds. But if we will be sued because of that little hindrance, our efforts will be wasted. All we want is to get our people vaccinated to protect them from COVID-19," Zamora said.

Abalos said Metro Manila LGUs are prepared for their vaccine rollout as the AstraZeneca doses are expected to arrive in July this year.

Malacanang has yet to respond when exactly will Duterte issue the EO.
Steve Coogan will play a detective in a new drama about the struggle that the family of Stephen Lawrence faced to achieve justice.

The actor will appear as DCI Clive Driscoll who led the investigation that saw two of the teenagers killers finally convicted of murder  18 years later.

The three-part ITV drama is a sequel to its 1999 programme about the case, The Murder of Stephen Lawrence.

Small Axe actress Sharlene Whyte will play Doreen Lawrence and Hugh Quarshie will reprise his role, from the original drama, as Neville Lawrence.

Expand Close Doreen and Neville Lawrence, the parents of murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence (Michael Stephens) / Facebook

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Whatsapp Doreen and Neville Lawrence, the parents of murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence (Michael Stephens)

ITV said the drama is set 13 years after Lawrences death.

It tells the story of the ongoing struggle by Doreen and Neville Lawrence to achieve justice and how a detective, DCI Clive Driscoll  working closely with the Lawrences  puts together an investigation that finally  more than 18 years after his death  secures the convictions of two of the gang who committed the murder of Stephen.

Producer Madonna Baptiste said: The Lawrences campaign for justice totally transformed attitudes to race and equality in the UK and its an honour to be able to help tell what is an untold chapter in their story.

Current events only highlight how relevant and important Stephens case remains.

Expand Close Hugh Quarshie will reprise his role as Neville Lawrence (Dominic Lipinski/PA) / Facebook

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Whatsapp Hugh Quarshie will reprise his role as Neville Lawrence (Dominic Lipinski/PA)

Alrick Riley, who will direct all three episodes, said: The case of Stephen Lawrence is a testament to the fortitude, persistence and determination of the Lawrence family.

These films will chart the successes, disappointments and the emotional toll they endured.

Its also the story of Clive Driscoll, the lead detective, who managed to forge a friendship with the Lawrences over the years it took to achieve two convictions. Its an honour to have the opportunity to tell their story.

ITV said the drama is being produced with the full support of the Lawrence family, most notably Baroness Doreen Lawrence and Dr Neville Lawrence, who have given the drama their blessing.

Paul Greengrass, Jimmy Mulville and Jed Mercurio are among the executive producers.
The 'wack job' Minnesota gunman, 67, accused of killing a nurse and wounding four others at a health center had threatened to carry out a mass shooting at the clinic two years prior to Tuesday's attack and had a restraining order taken out against him by one of the facility's doctors, it has been revealed.

Gregory Paul Ulrich, from Buffalo, had a vendetta against the Allina Health Clinic on Crossroads Campus Drive in Wright County, Buffalo, and its staff because they refused to give him opioids for a back injury, according to his former roommate.

Court records show Ulrich had reportedly made threats against four Allina health clinics in total and was served a restraining order in 2018 against Andrew J Burgdorf MD, a practitioner at the facility where he launched yesterday's attack, after making threats and harassing him with phone calls.

But, despite vowing to do something 'big and sensational so that it makes an impact', a judge ruling the 67-year-old 'not mentally competent' and officials warning he should not be allowed to possess a weapon, Ulrich was reportedly still granted a firearms permit and obtained a handgun just months before carrying out Tuesday's deadly attack.

As well as the apparent threats against medical staff, Ulrich had also been issued a no trespassing order for a local church after sending a 'disturbing letter' to the pastor.

Ulrich was arrested and is currently being held in the Wright County Jail over the shooting that took place at the clinic late Tuesday morning.

The Wright County Sheriff's Office said the criminal complaint against Ulrich will be completed by the attorney's office Thursday.

He faces charges including one count of second-degree intentional murder, four counts of first-degree attempted murder and one count of possession of explosive or incendiary devices.

Wright County Attorney Brian Lutes said in a statement Wednesday that he will 'aggressively prosecute Ulrich for this horrible crime and the pain he caused to the victims, their families and the entire community.'

Five people were wounded after the gunman entered the facility not long before 11am and opened fire.

One of the victims - a nurse - died after being transported to the Hennepin County Medical Center. She was identified Wednesday as Lindsay Overbay, a 37-year-old mother-of-two who worked at the facility, by her friends in a GoFundMe page set up to help support her two children.

Three other victims remain in hospital with one in a stable but critical condition and the other two upgraded to fair. A fifth victim was discharged Tuesday. Their identities have not been released.

'Suspicious packages' were also located at the clinic and the nearby Super 8 motel - roughly one mile from the center - where Ulrich was known to have been staying prior to to the attack.

It is not yet clear if any of the devices had detonated but windows appeared to have been blown out in both buildings.

Gregory Paul Ulrich, 67, (left) had threatened to carry out a mass shooting at the clinic two years prior to Tuesday's attack and had a restraining order taken out against him by one of the facility's doctors Andrew J Burgdorf MD (right), it has been revealed

Ulrich, from Buffalo, had a vendetta against the Allina Health Clinic (above) on Crossroads Campus Drive in Wright County, Buffalo, and its staff because they refused to give him opioids for a back injury, court records show

New details have now emerged about Ulrich's apparent motive for the deadly attack after authorities said Tuesday he had been known to law enforcement since at least 2003.

Court records show a petition for a restraining order was filed against Ulrich in fall 2018 by a man named Andrew John Burgdorf - one of the 11 practitioners listed on the Allina Clinic website.

Ulrich made harassing phone calls to Burgdorf and threatened him, the court documents seen by DailyMail.com show.

The petition documents have not been released because Burgdorf's lawyer requested they remain confidential at the time of the filing.

According to the Minnesota Star Tribune, Ulrich wanted to seek revenge on Burgdorf and the medical staff who he felt had 'tortured' him by refusing to give him drugs for his back injury.

Allina medical staff told police at the time they believed Ulrich was likely to carry out his threats.

'I believe Mr. Ulrich is a high threat to society and himself,' Burgdorf said, according to the police report.

It is not yet known if Burgdorf is among Ulrich's five victims or if he was in the center at the time of the attack.

Authorities have not yet confirmed if the four surviving victims are staff or patients at the facility which is based in the small community of around 15,000 people.

The 2018 police report said Ulrich had threatened to carry out a mass shooting, to do something 'big and sensational so that it makes an impact' and made various threats against a total of four Allina facilities with the Buffalo site being his main target, the Tribune reported.

It is not clear if Ulrich planned to carry out additional attacks at other locations after first targeting the Buffalo clinic but authorities confirmed other 'suspicious devices' were found at the Super 8 hotel where Ulrich was staying.

The nurse killed by suspected Minnesota gunman Gregory Paul Ulrich, 67, at a health clinic in Buffalo Tuesday has now been identified as 37-year-old mother-of-two Lindsay Overbay (left with a child and man believed to be her son and husband)

A map of the Allina Health Clinic which is just one mile from the Super 8 Motel. Suspicious packages were found at both locations

The sheriff's department at the Super 8 motel where 'suspicious devices' were also found

The Super 8 motel above. It is not yet clear if any of the devices had detonated but windows appeared to have been blown out there and at the clinic

Testimony filed by a nurse as part of Burgdorf's motion for a temporary protection order against Ulrich cited an incident on October 29 2018 where medics pressed the panic alarm at Buffalo Hospital when the suspect entered and started yelling at staff.

Ulrich had approached the nurse 'unfocused and disoriented' asking for his medical records and telling the medic about his medical history, the document states.

'[Ulrich] expressed that Buffalo Hospital had previously sent him to Abbott Northwestern Hospital because he had overdosed on narcotic pain medication,' it read.

'He wanted me to agree with him that Buffalo Hospital should not have transferred him to Abbott Northwestern Hospital.'

Ulrich's 'behavior escalated' and he started yelling, with the nurse reporting that she was fearful for the safety of herself and others at the hospital.

Another staff member pushed the panic alarm and Ulrich left before a security guard arrived, the document states.

Ulrich was served with a temporary restraining order on November 9 of that year ordering him to stay away from Burgdorf, Burgdorf's home, the Allina Clinic and the Buffalo Hospital.

Following a December hearing, Ulrich was given a harassment restraining order up until December 13 2020.

A court filing from the hearing says Ulrich called Burgdorf three times in an hour, becoming increasingly threatening each time.

He threatened the doctor saying that 'killing one individual wouldn't be enough' and speaking of 'mass violence at a medical clinic and hospitals', the documents state.

'His intent was to create enough of a sensation to get public recognition that would warrant at least 30 years in jail [and] possibly a straight jacket,' it reads.

'[Ulrich] stated he had practiced different scenarios [and] he was testing how to get through security with a length of steel since he knew he had only seconds after getting past security to achieve his goal.'

The Tribune reported that the same month the order was granted, Ulrich was charged with violating it.

Ulrich pleaded guilty but the case was later dismissed in April 2020 after he underwent a mental health evaluation and was deemed 'mentally incompetent'.

An aerial view of the mobile park where Ulrich lived. His former roommate at the trailer claims Ulrich was granted a firearms permit last year despite his threats against the health clinic and doctor

Local church Zion Lutheran (pictured) also obtained a no trespassing order against Ulrich in 2019 after the pastor received a 'threatening letter' from him, a church bulletin said

During court proceedings in June 2019, a court official said Ulrich had previously applied for and been denied a gun permit.

'It is highly recommended that the defendant not be allowed to have use or possession of any dangerous weapons,' they wrote.

Five months later in November 2019, Ulrich was then ordered to hand over any weapons or permits for weapons.

However despite the recommendations of the court, Ulrich's threats and his 'mental incompetence', his former roommate claims he was in fact granted a firearms permit and had showed off to him a gun he bought just months before Tuesday's mass shooting.

Raymond Zandstra, who lived with Ulrich in his mobile home for two years until last July, told Fox 9 he had seen a copy of a permit allowing the 67-year-old to carry a firearm in his home last year.

Zandstra said Ulrich then showed off his new handgun - a Smith & Wesson - last summer.

'He showed me a new handgun he got, I said, 'What?' You shouldn't have a gun,' he told the outlet.

DailyMail.com has not yet been able to verify whether or not Ulrich was granted a gun permit.

Neither Buffalo Police Department nor Wright County Sheriff's Department returned a request for information Wednesday.

Zandstra slammed law enforcement for allegedly allowing him to obtain a firearm saying they 'knew he was a wack job' and harbored a grudge against doctors 'because they wouldn't give him all the pain killers he wanted.'

'They'd give him a month supply, and it would be gone in a few days,' he told Fox 9.

Police said Ulrich had been known to law enforcement for some time and they believe he targeted the Allina Health Clinic on Crossroads Campus Drive in Wright County, Buffalo, (above) and its staff

Law enforcement personnel and first responders gathered on the scene outside the clinic

One of the broken windows following the mass shooting and explosion at the clinic

Zandstra also said Ulrich had a particular vendetta against one doctor and even erected a sign in front of his own home slamming the medic as a 'quack.'

The former roommate, who moved out when Ulrich took out a restraining order against him, described the suspected killer as 'nothing but trouble' and said the police would often pay him a visit.

He said Ulrich was often drunk or high on a mix of painkillers, glue and marijuana.

Richard Ulrich, the suspect's younger brother, also said he believed his opioid addiction was behind the mass shooting.

He told The New York Times that Ulrich worked in construction for some years and had possibly injured his back on the job.

He had back surgery about two years ago and became dependent on opioids he had been prescribed, Richard said.

His brother was angry when doctors refused to prescribe more of them to him.

'He would call me once in a while, but that's usually what he would talk about, that he was mad at the doctors for not giving him opioids and that they should open up the gates on the opioids. It didn't make a lot of sense to me,' he said.

As well as his harassment of medical professionals, a local church also obtained a no trespassing order against Ulrich in 2019 after the pastor received a 'threatening letter' from him.

A newsletter on the website for Zion Lutheran Church in Buffalo revealed the complaint against Ulrich and warned staff to call police if he turned up at the property.

'Pastor Ted informed the council of a disturbing letter received from Greg Ulrich,' it read.

'The Buffalo Police Department was called and informed Pastor Ted that Mr. Ulrich is well known to them and recommended that a no trespassing order be issued so that if he ever did appear at Zion the police could take action.

'The order was issued the following day and the staff have been given a picture of Mr. Ulrich and informed to call 911 if he does appear on any of Zion's properties.'

Prior to Tuesday's attack, Ulrich did not have any weapons offenses.

But court records show he had a long rap sheet of arrests and convictions for drink driving and possession of small amounts of marijuana dating from 2004 through 2015.

Most of the offenses were in Wright County, including two convictions for gross misdemeanor drunken driving that resulted in short jail sentences.

No charges have yet been filed against Ulrich over the mass shooting that has so far claimed at least one life.

Buffalo Police Chief Pat Budke confirmed Ulrich's identity at a press conference Tuesday afternoon where he said the suspect had been known to law enforcement for some time and is thought to have specifically targeted the clinic.

Buffalo Police Chief Pat Budke (center) confirmed the suspect's identity at a press conference Tuesday afternoon where he said earlier reports that four homemade bombs had been detonated at the center are now known to be incorrect

Both the Buffalo Police Department and the Wright County Sheriff's Department were 'very familiar' with the suspect and had received 'several calls for service [regarding Ulrich] dating back to 2003,' Sheriff Sean Deringer (above) said at the press conference

He said there was no indication that Ulrich was connected to any type of domestic terrorism.

Instead, Budke said they believe the 67-year-old 'targeted the facility or someone at the facility' because he was unhappy with the care he'd received there.

'All I can say is, it's a history that spans several years and there's certainly a history of him being unhappy with health care... with the health care that he'd received,' Budke said.

'None of the information that we have from our past contact with him would indicate that he was unhappy with, or would direct his anger at, anyone other than people within the facilities where he had been treated or where they had attempted to give treatment.'

Ulrich has lived in the community for some time and has been in contact with healthcare professionals at the clinic for 'quite some time',' authorities said.

'None of the information we have at this time suggests he would focus on any other individual or clinic.'

Police said they believe he acted alone and they are not looking for any further suspects involved in the shooting.

Both the Buffalo Police Department and the Wright County Sheriff's Department were 'very familiar' with the suspect and had received 'several calls for service [regarding Ulrich] dating back to 2003,' Sheriff Sean Deringer said at the press conference.

'He is no stranger to law enforcement,' authorities said.

Budke said earlier reports that four homemade bombs had been detonated at the center are now known to be incorrect.

He said that 'suspicious packages' had been located at both the clinic and the nearby Super 8 motel - roughly one mile from the center - where Ulrich was known to have been staying.

Budke said it was not yet clear if any of the devices had detonated and if the damage to the building was from gunfire or an explosive.

Police were first called to reports of shots being fired at the clinic at 10:54 am.

Officers responded to the scene and found several people injured inside the clinic, who they immediately administered aid to.

They located the suspect and he was taken into custody, police said.

During a secondary search of the building, officers found what they described as a 'suspicious package' in the lobby.

The clinic was evacuated and the Minneapolis bomb squad was called to the scene. They were still on the scene at 3pm.

Authorities then received information that Ulrich was staying at the Super 8.

Officers went to the motel where they found 'additional suspicious devices' and also evacuated the building.

A search warrant was obtained and officers continue to be investigating the scene.

Budke said the situation was contained by 11:42 am and there was no ongoing threat to public safety.

Hours after the attack, law enforcement also cordoned off a small mobile home park near the city's Pulaski Lake, about a mile from the clinic, and searched a mobile home where Ulrich had lived.

Five victims were rushed to hospital following the shooting.

Four patients were taken to North Memorial Health Hospital in Robbinsdale and the fifth at Hennepin County Medical Center.

The North Memorial hospital is known for dealing with the most severe of critical incident injuries.

The hospital confirmed Tuesday night that one of the victims had died.

Budke choked back tears in Tuesday's press conference as he said: 'This is a day that no community would want to go through - especially those staff that were there and families of those that were injured.'

There had been conflicting reports about whether any bombs had detonated at the scene.

Initial reports based on police dispatch audio said that four homemade bombs had been detonated inside the family medicine and urgent care clinic at the facility just 30 minutes after the shooting.

'The male is saying that he had four homemade explosive devices. They all went off,' a voice says over the audio, adding that there could be another device inside the suspect's briefcase that had not gone off yet.

Agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives search for evidence at the Allina Health Clinic parking lot after a shooting

A Minneapolis Police Bomb Squad vehicle is seen outside the Allina Health Clinic Tuesday

The man was 'sprawled out on his stomach' and had said the gun and his briefcase was by the front desk of the clinic, the audio reported.

Wright County spokesman John Holler later told CNN no bombs were found on the scene but Minnesota Governor Tim Walz said at a press conference the incident involved some IEDs.

'At the time what we know is there was an active shooter situation and some improvised explosive devices,' Walz said at a briefing one hour before the local authorities held their press conference.

'It's not confirmed yet the causalities or those injured in this.'

Walz confirmed the suspect was in custody and that the incident appeared to be the work of a single individual.

He added that it was too early to determine the motive for the attack.

The police dispatch audio reported that '15 shots were fired' and 'that somebody came in and started shooting.'

At least five were said to be critically injured with voices later saying there was 'one down' and that there were 'several victims with one [victim's condition being] critical if not fatal.'

Three female victims were said to be by the front entrance with gunshot wounds - with at least one critical and one shot in the abdomen.

A local woman told Fox9 she was dropping her mom off for an appointment when she saw two nurses come running out the front of the building.

At least five people were wounded including one killed after the gunman entered the facility not long before 11am and opened fire

Local schools were placed on lockdown and a flight ban was issued over the area

'I pulled in and was getting ready to drop her off at the door and two of the nurses came running out and they got in and said they heard about 11 shots within a minute,' she said.

She said the nurses told her they didn't see a shooter.

They then saw the front windows 'be shot out' about two minutes later so they drove away from the scene, she said.

Another local resident Jim Rich told Fox 9 the incident was 'very out of the norm for the area' where everyone knows each other.

A law enforcement source told the outlet the incident was a 'disaster.'

Multiple law enforcement teams were drafted in to the scene with the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearm and Hennepin County all sending in teams to assist Buffalo Police and Wright County Sheriff's Department.

The State Patrol reported that it was flying six boxes of blood from the Red Cross to Buffalo Hospital for the victims.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey called the situation an 'unspeakable depravity' and said the city was also sending in emergency responders to assist Buffalo.

'There is an unspeakable depravity in doing harm to those who work to heal us. Those who have stepped up and risked their own health for ours,' he tweeted.

'Our first responders are on their way to the scene to help. Today Minneapolis stands with our neighbors in Buffalo.'

Local schools went into lockdown and a flight ban was issued over the area Tuesday morning while the investigation was underway.

Allina Health owns or operates 12 hospitals and more than 90 clinics across Minnesota.

At the Allina Health Clinic in Buffalo, 11 practitioners are listed on the website.

Buffalo is a city of about 15,000 people based around 40 miles northwest of Minneapolis.

The NSW and federal governments $484 million replacement of the Dungowan Dam is plagued by cost blowouts, poor planning and questionable use of public funds for irrigation water, the Productivity Commission has found.

In a scathing assessment of a project that was a key 2016 election commitment of Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce to his electorate, the commission used a draft report into national water policy to highlight what it termed the flawed proposal.

The dam was a key election promise from Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce to his electorate in 2016. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

The 22.5 gigalitre dam, to be built in the Peel River valley to the south-east of Tamworth, was pledged ahead of the 2016 federal election when Mr Joyce promised an $850,000 feasibility study into the project.

State and federal governments committed $150 million to build the dam but this has since blown out to $484 million. Early works on the project, which is supposed to increase water security to Tamworths 35,000 residents, are due to begin ahead of a final business case.
LOS ANGELESBroker.xxx on Wednesday announced it is celebrating its official one-year anniversary by brokering the sale of Broker.xxx on Wednesday announced it is celebrating its official one-year anniversary by brokering the sale of JPEGWorld.com , one of the Internet's iconic "old-school" TGPs.

"Before the rise of the video tube sites, Thumbnail Gallery Posts (TGPs) were the most common adult free websites," explained listing agent Jimmy "Wizzo" of Broker.xxx . "If you've been on the Internet and in the industry as long as I have been, you've probably heard of JPEGWorld, and it's got a lot of nostalgia for many surfers. It is nice to see these websites are still alive and well."

The website features thousands of galleries and photos from the highest quality adult producers, and was launched in 2003 and operated for 18 years by its loyal owner, who is now leaving the adult industry for other opportunities.

"My experience with selling JPEGworld with Broker.xxx was quick, easy, and professionally handled from start to finish of the process," said the former owner. "Jimmy and Jay both were helpful in answering any questions I had and payment was promptly sent after everything was transferred. We received full asking price for the property and couldn't be happier."

During its first year in business, Broker.xxx said it has become "the largest adult brokerage and industry deal-maker." The company's website currently lists more than $20 million in listing available for acquisition by buyers. There are more than 400 website and domain listings.

"When I first started in this industry, I idolized JPEGWorld and it was an honor to help it find a new home," said Juicy Jay, founder and CEO of Broker.xxx. "This week we are completing the sale of two additional properties, and there are new properties being listed, including a paysite network, a large publisher network, and other free sites."
About 3,000 pupils in special classes in post-primary schools will return to the classroom on February 22.

The leadership of the two second- level teacher unions have agreed to co-operate with the limited reopening.

It means students attending these classes will return for in-person teaching and learning on the same day on which primary school special classes go back.

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The Teachers Union of Ireland (TUI) announced its co-operation earlier this evening and subsequently the Association of Secondary Teachers lreland (ASTI) gave its backing.

The ASTIs support came after a contentious meeting of its Standing Committee, which warned that the overall Framework Plan for a safe return of schools was inadequate.

The ASTI leadership said the plan needs to be substantially reworked in order to ensure a safe phased return of all students in the coming period of time.

The February 22 date was agreed in talks between the Department of Education and the education partners, including teacher unions, parents and school management bodies.

The TUI executive committee also unanimously decided to facilitate the return of Leaving Cert students from some point in the same week, subject to public health advice.

The breakthrough on special classes  and potentially Leaving Cert students - is another small step in the phased re-opening of schools for the first time since the Christmas holidays.

Overall, it means a path has been cleared for up to 20,000 pupils with special needs, across primary and post-primary, to get back to the classroom.

But that represents only a tiny fraction of pupils and there are more than 900,000 awaiting a return date.

Talks have been ongoing between the department and the education partners about a wider return and much will depend on the scale of the improvement in the public health landscape.

High levels of Covid-19 transmission in January left teachers, special needs assistants and many parents nervous about schools re-opening in January forcing the abandonment of plans.

TUI president Martin Marjoram said in taking its decision, the union acknowledges the vital importance of face-to-face provision for this cohort of students and took note of the range of additional supports and measures that have been agreed to protect students and staff.

These measures, which had been sought by TUI, include full contact tracing and fast-track testing, provision of high grade PPE for special education teachers and arrangements for staff in high-risk health categories and pregnant teachers to continue to provide remote learning.

The limited re-opening agreements at primary and post primary do not cover pupils with special needs who are in mainstream classes.

Education Minister Norma Foley said it remained a priority for the Department of Education to agree a shared pathway to in-school learning for children with special needs in mainstream classes in mainstream schools as soon as possible.

She said a five hours a week supplementary programme to support the education and/or care needs of pupils with complex needs - in addition to the remote teaching provided by schools  was in place.

Ms Foley said intensive engagement was continuing with education stakeholders, towards a full return of all students to in-person teaching and learning in primary and post primary schools as soon as possible and when it is safe to do so.
DALLAS, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- As we walk into Black History Month spotlighting the historians who've opened doors in the past, it's important to recognize the leaders who are blazing trails to create opportunities today. On the first day of Black History Month, LaToyia Dennis, author, national mom advocate, experienced marketer, and social influencer, launched Melanin Moms Media, a national digital advertising and marketing firm specializing in connecting women of color to national brands.

LaToyia Dennis, founder of Melanin Moms Media

The purpose of Melanin Moms Media is to connect brands, activations, and events, specifically to provide income to mom bloggers and influencers of diverse racial backgrounds and to connect brands to their target audiences. Statistics show that women in general face gender discrimination. However, moms of color face a triple jeopardy as they are subject to lower economic opportunities due to race, gender, and motherhood. These grim statistics have been exacerbated even more with the global COVID-19 pandemic, with current reports showing that women, especially women of color  specifically Black women, have been adversely impacted most with layoffs, furloughs, stalling careers, and financial jeopardy. A recent Catalyst study revealed that while women of color are predicted to be the majority of all women in the United States by 2060, they only make up 5% of executive and senior-level positions. Seeing the current economic outlook and lack of resources for minority women, LaToyia Dennis was inspired to create this network to provide income and opportunities for this often-overlooked pool of talent.

"Since joining the mom influencer community four years ago, I have met many amazing moms of color with stellar content that are still passed over for campaigns," said Dennis, founder of Melanin Moms Media. "With my experience in advertising sales, sponsorship activation, event production, and brand engagement, I decided the time was right to start a company that pulled my experience, expertise, and passion together to help moms of color influence the world. My mission is to help moms live a life of purpose, fully engaged, and financially free."

While Melanin Moms Media is a newly established company, LaToyia Dennis is an expert in brand activations and engagements, having managed numerous corporate and celebrity partnerships. She has vast experience engaging influencers, primarily moms, for brands as part of their sponsorship deliverables and activation. She also incorporated this model during her Motivated Mom Tours and Retreats, where she hired dozens of influencers and bloggers of color to produce content to reach diverse audiences.

"LaToyia recommended me for a dream paid collaboration, where I was featured as a storyteller on a topic that is dear to my heart and on a platform that gave me notoriety and credibility," said Elayna Fernandez, The Positive Mom, award-winning storyteller and digital marketing strategist. "LaToyia also hired me as a speaker for her Motivated Mom Tour, where I experienced her dedication, professionalism, and passion to help mom entrepreneurs. I am grateful to LaToyia for all the wonderful opportunities she has provided for me."

Melanin Moms Media is free to register and open to mom influencers, bloggers, and service providers worldwide. Women control between $5 - $15 trillion in worldwide spending and are responsible for 85% of all consumer purchases. One in five Americans are women of color, which is 20.3% of the US population. "There are an estimated 85 million mothers in America, and we are creating an opportunity for brands to partner specifically with moms of color to influence the world," said Dennis. "Melanin Moms Media is holding a space for brands to partner with us to create and implement quality campaigns, captivating digital content, event activation, and brand engagement using moms of color influencers to reach moms of color consumers."

Media Contact:

Kayla Tucker Adams

[email protected]

214-403-9852

SOURCE Melanin Moms Media

Related Links

https://melaninmomsmedia.com



Press Release

February 10, 2021 Incumbent and former Senators honor late Senator Victor S. Ziga Incumbent and former senators honored former Sen. Victor S. Ziga, who passed away on January 31, 2021 at the age of 75, during a hybrid necrological service held at the Senate session hall Wednesday. Ziga was accorded arrival honors led by Senate President Vicente C. Sotto III, the family of the former senator, and Senate officials. The Senate President presented to the family of the late senator Senate Resolution No. (SRN) 84, expressing the profound sympathy and sincere condolences of the Senate on the death Ziga who served the chamber from 1987 to 1992. "The passing away of a great and dedicated public servant, who had established standards of excellence in and devotion to public service, is a great loss to the nation," SRN 84 read. Sotto, in his eulogy, said Ziga's life as a public servant truly mirrors the ideals as a man for the masses, being involved in numerous typhoon relief operations and other civic organizations. "When the pages of our history would be reviewed by the coming generations of students and the public, they would be convinced that there was a man who did his work quietly and without fanfare and pomposity but only the best interest of his country," Sotto said. "We say goodbye to our dear colleague and friend, Filipino, and statesman, Sen. Victor S. Ziga. We shall all strive to follow your example of extraordinary simplicity while holding extraordinary power," the Senate President added. For Senate Majority Leader Juan Miguel "Migz" F. Zubiri, Ziga was a brilliant legislator who was behind landmark legislations like the Government Assistance to Students and Teachers in Private Education, the Local Government Code of 1991, and the Magna Carta of Public Health Workers. "Sen. Victor Ziga was a doer through and through; a workhorse who got things done without needing much fanfare. Instead his legacy persists through the work he has left behind... Even beyond his political career, he devoted himself to helping the Filipino in any way he could--medical missions, relief operations, emergency response," Zubiri said. Ziga, according to Senate Minority Leader Franklin Drilon, is a simple man who was raised to be of service to the Filipino people. Apart from being one of the magnificent 12 who voted against the extension of the Phil-US bases treaty in 1991, Ziga also ensured that health care workers were protected by passing the Magna Carta of public health workers, a measure that is significant today because of the pandemic health workers would have to address, Drilon said. "I did not have the honor to work with Vic (Ziga) in this august chamber, but I consider it a distinct privilege to have worked with him in the Liberal Party (LP). Sen. Ziga as well as his mother, former Sen. Tecla San Andres Ziga, were stalwarts of the LP," Drilon added. Former Laguna governor and Sen. Joey Lina, in his virtual eulogy, described Ziga's pursuit of excellence in life as inspiring, noting that apart from becoming a lawyer, he was also a highly successful politician. "Indeed, fixed sterling accomplishment in life and pursuit of excellence certainly deserve the admiration not only of Bicolandia but the entire Philippines," Lina said. Sen. Win Gatchalian said apart from being a statesman, a lawyer and a business leader, Ziga is also a family friend. "Vic Ziga earnestly carried on this proud family tradition by making significant contributions to nation building in these turbulent times in our republic's history. Throughout his distinguished career as a member of the Batasan Pambansa, cabinet secretary, and senator of the 8th Congress of the Philippines. Sen. Ziga embodied the patriotism, integrity and competence we should expect from every Filipino leader," Gatchalian said Sen. Christopher Lawrence Go, who consider Ziga as an inspiration, vowed to continue his advocacy against the use and abuse of illegal drugs. "As a new senator, former Sen. Ziga is an inspiration to me and to the new generation of senators and public servants. Aside from the proposed bills he pushed as a senator and as a member of the Batasang Pambansa, nothing could diminish his significant contribution to the executive and the private sector. We cannot repay all of this and for this we are truly thankful," added Go, who first crossed paths with the former senator when he joined the group campaigning for the presidency of then Mayor Rodrigo Duterte in 2015. Sen. Emmanuel "Manny" Pacquiao described Ziga as a noble public servant who used his influence to protect the weak and the vulnerable sector, including the youth and the senior citizen. "We take comfort knowing that he maximized his potentials by serving the people. He was a noble public servant, lived his life to the fullest and we are all inspired... I am inspired. Today, let us make a commitment to honor his legacy by also loving our country with utmost courage and determination. When we do so, we glorify and magnify our Almighty God and Father, the creator of heaven and earth," Pacquiao said in his virtual eulogy. In response, Albay Board Member Vic Ziga Jr. expressed his gratitude for the honor given to his father by the Senate. "I'm sure he will visit the Senate halls where he once was honored by the Filipino people in having a seat and being of service to his country," he added. Ziga also authored and co-authored 295 bills and resolutions, the most notable of which was the measure which sought to require all primary and secondary schools to integrate the teaching of the dangers of drug dependence and drug abuse in their curriculum, and the bill which sought to prohibit the manufacture, distribution, and sale of cigars and cigarettes without the warning "Smoking is dangerous to your health" printed on their labels, packs, cartons, or packages. During Ziga's stint as senator, he served as chairman of the Committee of Public Works and Highways and as Vice-Chairman of the Committees on Agriculture and Food, Public Services, and Tourism, and was member of 12 other committees.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 10)  San Juan Mayor Francis Zamora assured on Wednesday there are available funds to provide medical assistance to the citys eligible vaccine recipients who may experience adverse reactions to coronavirus vaccines.

Zamora said they did not allocate a specific amount for the coverage for treatment costs, but the budget for this will come from San Juan City's public assistance center, the Department of Health, and the Department of Social Welfare and Development.

We have about 150 million worth of funding for medical assistance. Medication or hospitalization na kakailanganin kung sakaling may (that will be needed in case of) adverse effects, it will fall under that fund, the mayor said in a briefing.

Zamora said they are targeting to inoculate 85,400 of the citys 122,000 population, in a bid to achieve herd immunity, a situation where the virus would have only a few people to infect and thereby contain its spread.

The number of people who registered in the San Juan COVID-19 vaccination program has reached 23,202 since the profiling started a month ago, 3,708 of whom are healthcare workers. This sector is supposed to get the first anti-coronavirus shots based on the government-prescribed vaccine priority list.

The local chief executive said the city launched last month a portal where residents can pre-register for the free COVID-19 vaccination. To urge more people to enlist, the LGU started making house-to-house visits on Monday.

Zamora also asked permission from the national COVID-19 task force chairperson Francisco Duque III if he could be the first anti-coronavirus shot recipient in San Juan to help alleviate his constituents fears about vaccination.

I am volunteering to be the first to be vaccinated in San Juan to show people the mayor himself is confident in the vaccination process, he said.

Aside from Zamora, almost all Metro Manila mayors are more than willing to be the first in their respective cities to receive the shots to increase the publics trust in vaccines, Metropolitan Manila Development Authority Chairman Benhur Abalos said in the same briefing, but he did not name them.

Nationwide, only 66 percent of Filipinos are willing to get immunized against a disease that has so far killed over 11,000 people in the country, according to results of a survey released by Social Weather Stations in November last year.
A man wore a Nazi symbol while shopping in Melbourne

Pauline Hanson has called for a ban on Nazi and ISIS symbols, saying Australians 'don't like racism'.

The One Nation leader said they represent 'hate, extremism, barbarity and terror' and urged Australia to follow countries such as France, Germany, Brazil and Israel by implementing a nationwide ban.

Several voters on social media said it was ironic that Senator Hanson was speaking out against hatred when she has spent most of her career trading on the politics of division.

In her first speech in Parliament in 1996, Senator Hanson claimed Australia was in danger of 'being swamped by Asians'.

Twenty years later in 2016 she called for a ban on Muslim immigration and new mosque building and said Islam was incompatible with Australian values.

The following year she caused outrage by wearing a burka into the senate chamber and again demanding a ban on the religious garment.

It comes after a man was spotted shopping at Moorabbin Wholesale Farmers Fresh market, south-east Melbourne, while wearing a Nazi armband on Friday - but police were unable to arrest him because it was not illegal.

'People who wear or parade these symbols have lost all sense of decency. They're clearly promoting racial hatred and vilification and at the very least are in breach of Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act,' Senator Hanson said in a statement.

'These symbols aren't fancy dress - they're a stark and cruel reminder to survivors and their families of mass killing, oppression, gas chambers and terrorist attacks,' she added.

Last month a group of young men hosted an Australia Day party in the Grampians National Park in Victoria wearing all black, holding white supremacist flags and performing Nazi salutes

'They're symbols that rekindle fear and even terror in the hearts of hundreds of thousands of Australians. Holocaust survivors and their extended families along with immigrants from ISIS dominated countries in the middle east know too well what the symbols stand for.

'And by protecting those who display them by not banning their use and display across the nation the Federal Government is contributing to those feelings of fear.'

Senator Hanson - who has long campaigned for freedom of speech - also called for the symbols to banned in video games sold in Australia.

'Labor and the Coalition are happy to ban bikie colours, but both have sat on their hands when it comes to Nazi and ISIS extremists who continue to act as a serious threat to Australians,' she said.

Last month a group of young men hosted an Australia Day party in the Grampians National Park in Victoria wearing all black, holding white supremacist flags and performing Nazi salutes.

Labor has called for an inquiry into right-wing extremism, which Australia's spy agency has warned is a 'growing' threat.

One Nation's vote at the Queensland election in November had halved compared with the 2017 election.
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Stunning renderings have been revealed for an island resort off the coast of Saudi Arabia that's part of a Red Sea 'giga-resort' that will ultimately span 22 islands and six inland sites.

The new designs are by renowned architect firm Foster + Partners and show its vision for Shurayrah, the gateway island to the enormous Red Sea Project, which will comprise 50 resorts when it's completed in 2030.

Foster + Partners is calling its concept 'Coral Bloom', as the additions will 'enhance what is already there'. And Red Sea Project chairman his Royal Highness Prince Mohammed bin Salman likes what he sees, because he's given Coral Bloom his official stamp of approval.

The dolphin-shaped island of Shurayrah will be the gateway to the wider Red Sea Project, a new giga-resort on the Red Sea coast of Saudi Arabia

The hotels and leisure facilities on Shurayrah have been designed by architecture firm Foster + Partners to 'nestle into the landscape'

Pictured are Foster + Partners' plans for a sea pool on Shurayrah. The architecture firm also plans to add new beaches and a lagoon to the island

Shurayrah will be the first island of the Red Sea Project to be developed, with Foster + Partners' designs revealing what the hotels and leisure facilities will look like there.

Eleven hotels are planned in total and Foster + Partners has designed them to 'nestle into the landscape'.

They have also been realised with Covid-19 concerns in mind - there will be no internal corridors, for example.

Eleven hotels are planned for Shurayrah. They have been designed with Covid-19 restrictions in mind - there will be no internal corridors for example

This is a rendering of the arrival lobby, which will give visitors one of their first impressions of the island

Above is how Foster + Partners have imagined a bedroom suite at one of the island's hotels will look - all curves and natural colours

Gerard Evenden, head of studio at Foster + Partners, said: 'Our vision for Shurayrah is inspired by the island's natural state, with the hotels designed to give the impression that they have washed up on the beaches and nestled among the dunes almost like driftwood.'

On the leisure facilities front, Foster + Partners, founded by Norman Foster in 1967, has added new beaches and a new lagoon to the island, which is shaped like a dolphin. Plus, the renderings show plans for a photogenic new sea pool.

The firm added that the absence of high-rise buildings 'will ensure the spectacular vistas remain uninhibited, while creating a sense of mystery for guests as the island slowly reveals itself'.

Regenerative tourism is also at the heart of Foster + Partners' plans for Shurayrah and The Red Sea Development Company's wider ambitions for the destination as a whole.

An aerial view of Shurayrah. Gerard Evenden, head of studio at Foster + Partners, said: 'Our vision for Shurayrah is inspired by the islands natural state, with the hotels designed to give the impression that they have washed up on the beaches and nestled among the dunes almost like driftwood'

Pictured is the design for a communal relaxation space at one of the 11 hotels planned for the island of Shurayrah. A sunset over the Red Sea makes for a magical background

John Pagano, CEO of The Red Sea Development Company, said: 'We expect guests to be awed by what they see when they first arrive at The Red Sea Project, enjoying a truly immersive barefoot luxury experience'

Pictured is a sunken seating area and fire pit overlooking the Red Sea. Scenes like this will be commonplace on Shurayrah Island by the end of 2022

Pictured is the sort of view that will be typical in a hotel room on the island of Shurayrah. The Red Sea Development company expect that there will be 8,000 rooms like this in the Red Sea Project destination by 2030

John Pagano, CEO of The Red Sea Development Company, said: 'We expect guests to be awed by what they see when they first arrive at The Red Sea Project, enjoying a truly immersive barefoot luxury experience. The Coral Bloom designs, taking inspiration from the incredible flora and fauna found uniquely in Saudi Arabia, promise to make that vision a reality.

'Shurayrah Island is the gateway to The Red Sea Project so it's important that it sets the standard in groundbreaking architecture and sustainable design, not just for our destination, but globally too. This is achieved by going beyond simply protecting the environment, to applying a regenerative approach.'

Given the green-light in 2018, The Red Sea Project aims to create a brand new ultra-luxury tourism destination between the cities of Umluj and Al Wajh, around 770 miles (1,240km) from the capital, Riyadh, and 430 miles (700km) from Mecca.

Set within a 10,810-square-mile (28,000-square-kilometre) area that encompasses an archipelago, 125 miles (200 kilometres) of previously untouched coastline, deserts and dormant volcanoes, the new destination will eventually be home to 48 hotels.

The Red Sea Project has already passed 'significant milestones' and work is on track to welcome the first guests at Shurayrah by the end of 2022, when an international airport will also launch.

Pictured is the rendering for the Central Hub building at the heart of the island of Shurayrah, surrounded by trees and shrubs

Police and protesters clashed outside Greece's parliament Wednesday amid student demonstrations in Athens and other cities against an education bill that would allow police to patrol university campuses.

In the capital, riot police used tear gas and some demonstrators threw rocks during the confrontation outside parliament.

Greece's center-right government says it wants to establish a campus police force to stop university grounds from being used for illegal activities such as selling counterfeit goods or to organize violent protests.

Left-wing opposition parties and education unions are supporting demonstrations against the legislation, accusing the government of taking advantage of the country's virus lockdown to impose oppressive police measures.

Lawmakers are set to vote on the education bill Thursday.

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Following a guarded tour of ongoing works at the Liberia Broadcasting System (LBS) along with Chinese Ambassador Mr. Ren Yisheng, Liberia's Foreign Minister H.E. Dee - Maxwell Saah Kemayah, Sr., said he is impressed by the progress being made on the project with support from the Chinese counterparts.

A foreign ministry issued Tuesday said.

"I'm very much pleased with what we're seeing at LBS. There are things that I am seeing here that, though I have been coming here before, but as Minister of Foreign Affairs, this is my first visit," he said at the climax of the tour Tuesday, February 9, 2021 during an interview at the LBS Compound in Paynesville.

Through its partnership with the Government and People of the Republic of Liberia, the Chinese Government is helping the Liberian state broadcaster LBS with the construction of modern studios, some of which will be used for commercial purposes to free up airtime and development programs.

It added that Minister Kemayah and Ambassador Yisheng assessed a site designated inside LBS Compound where construction is to take place for a proposed two story building for the state broadcaster. According to Minister Kemayah, the Chinese are waiting for the design to be approved by the Liberian authorities to see how they can move ahead.

Minister Kemayah stressed that this is in line with H.E. President George Manneh Weah's vision to ensure that all Liberians and residents within the borders of the country have access to information and awareness on the development and activities in Liberia.

He extended thanks and appreciation to the LBS management headed by Director General Madam Estelle Liberty Kemoh and her deputy Madam Tetee Gebroe, among others, for their great work, commitment and dedication in running the affairs of the state broadcaster.

Minister Kemayah reaffirmed his commitment and support as it relates to his ongoing advocacy and lobby for support to the LBS.

The Liberian Foreign Minister also said the tour at the LBS is in line with his reform agenda at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, pursuant to the vision of H.E. President George Manneh Weah.

As the bridge between the international community and the Government and people of Liberia, he said the Ministry of Foreign Affairs sees it fit to visit projects being undertaken by Liberia's friends and partners in the international community to see what they are doing, assess the level of progress made with respect to different projects and see the challenges.

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Also speaking during the interview, Chinese Ambassador to Liberia H.E. Mr. Ren Yisheng thanked Minister Kemayah for the invitation to visit LBS, Liberia's Information Minister and Chairman of the Board of LBS Mr. Ledgerhood Rennie and the management team of LBS for the reception.

Highlighting the important role played by the media in disseminating information to the public about what is happening in Liberia and the world at large, Amb. Yisheng noted that the media play an important role in promoting economic development, cultural affairs and tourism, among others.

In order to deliver on all of these commitments, he stressed that the media need capacity and the resources, adding that China is very pleased to help with its partnership with the Liberian Government and LBS in making this to work.

Amb. Yisheng said he was very pleased to have the opportunity to see the progress made on the refurbishment of structures at LBS, adding that China will continue to support the Liberian government in boosting the capacity of the media sector, in particular, the LBS.

Madam Estelle Liberty Kemoh, Director General of LBS, thanked the Foreign Minister of Liberia H.E. Kemayah and Amb. Yisheng for the visit and committing more support to strengthen the state broadcaster LBS.

She pledged the commitment of her management team to do exactly what they have been given the opportunity to do to disseminate information to the public and continue to lead the broadcast sector in Liberia.

The statement concluded that Madam Kemoh also appreciated her former boss, now LBS Board Chair Minister Rennie, for continuously giving the LBS family a listening ear amidst his busy schedules.

Embarek said at a news conference the theory that the virus leaked from a laboratory is extremely unlikely, and that his team will not investigate it further. Embarek said the most likely pathway for the virus was a crossover into humans from an intermediary species, which he said "could have been very convoluted." He also said the idea that COVID-19 can be transmitted through trade in frozen products is possible.

The team visited the city's Huanan Seafood Market, which was initially believed to be the epicenter of the outbreak, the Wuhan Institute of Virology and laboratories at state facilities, including the Wuhan Center for Disease Control.

Peter Ben Embarek, an expert in viral illnesses for the World Health Organization, said Tuesday in Wuhan that his team's findings indicate COVID-19 probably originated in bats, but says it is unlikely the bats were in Wuhan.

The leader of international experts investigating the origins of COVID-19 in China says they saw no evidence of large outbreaks of the disease prior to its December 2019 discovery in the city of Wuhan.

Dr. Liang Wannian, an expert with China's Health Commission, told reporters at the briefing the novel coronavirus could have been circulating in other regions before it was officially identified in Wuhan.

The WHO dispatched Embarek and his 10-member team to Wuhan last month to track down the source of the virus, which has killed more than 2.3 million people among more than 106 million infected worldwide.

Monday the WHO expressed concern about new reports that vaccines against the coronavirus may not sufficiently protect against new variants. On Sunday, South Africa suspended its vaccination campaign against COVID-19 after a new study revealed that the AstraZeneca vaccine it was using is less effective against a variant of the virus found in the country.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Monday at a media briefing that the decision is "a reminder that we need to do everything we can to reduce circulation of the virus with proven public health measures."

The study, conducted by the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and not yet peer reviewed, concluded that the British vaccine offered only "limited protection against moderate forms of the disease caused by the South African variant, in young adults."

The news was a blow to South Africa, which has seen more than 46,000 people die from the virus. It had planned to begin inoculating its population with a million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine in the coming days. But the study found that the vaccine was only 22-percent effective in moderate cases of the South African variant of the disease.

The study did not explore the vaccine's effect against severe cases. The variant has been found in at least 32 other countries, including the United States. AstraZeneca said Sunday it was developing another vaccine that would be more effective against the South African variant, which could be expected by this autumn.

But WHO's chief scientist, Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, cautioned Monday that countries should not assume the AstraZeneca vaccine does not work, noting that all available evidence shows that vaccines reduce death, hospitalizations and severe disease.
Long-distance travel by road is usually tiresome and not something many people look forward to.

It becomes a nightmare if a call of nature knocks in the middle of the journey.

In most instances, bus and matatu drivers stop in the middle of nowhere, and as soon as the door is opened, people rush out in different directions in search of the nearest bush to relieve themselves.

However, this unhealthy habit will soon become a thing of the past on the busy Nairobi-Nakuru-Eldoret highway.

The Nakuru County government is partnering with other agencies in the construction of more than 20 toilets along the busy highway.

The toilets will offer relief to motorists and passengers, as well as reduce incidence of open defecation.

Cost of project

The devolved unit has already started building the toilets, which will cost at least Sh20 million, at various stopovers along the road including Total Junction, Longonot and Maai Mahiu.

County Public Health Chief Officer Samuel King'ori says the move is part of an elaborate plan to eradicate the problem of open defecation along major roads in the county.

"We are building public toilets at various stopovers along the busy highway including at Kinungi, Kikopey, Salgaa, Kibunja, Total Junction, Pipeline and Longonot.

Already, we have set up some at Total junction, Longonot and Maai Mahiu," revealed Mr King'ori.

The Nakuru-Subukia-Nyahururu road will also benefit from the project, the official said.

Travellers and truck drivers, especially those using the busy Nairobi-Nakuru-Eldoret highway, are usually forced to relieve themselves in nearby bushes, thereby putting residents at risk of disease outbreaks.

Open Defecation Free

Nakuru falls along the Nairobi-Eldoret highway, which is part of the Northern Corridor and is the most important road to Western Kenya and the artery that connects Kenya and the landlocked countries of Uganda, Southern Sudan, Rwanda and Burundi.

The road is crucial for the transportation of Western-bound cargo from Nairobi city and the Port of Mombasa.

Nakuru has attained 87 per cent toilet coverage and only about two per cent of the population practises open defecation; 45 per cent of the population share toilets, while 356 villages in the county are certified Open Defecation Free (ODF).

Nakuru launched the ODF campaign in 2017, with rural and far-flung areas as the main area of focus.

According to Mr King'ori, a sustained campaign targeting various villages, which is aimed at sensitising residents on hygiene, has seen the number of sanitation-related diseases drop significantly.

"Proper hygiene has eradicated communicable diseases. In Nakuru, we have been able to reduce cholera, diarrhoea and typhoid cases by at least 80 per cent and we seek to have them eliminated in the county," stated Mr King'ori.

Cholera outbreak

In 2014, the Ministry of Health expressed concern over the high number of people who defecate in the open, mainly along the main highways.

Health officials identified open defecation as one of the leading causes of typhoid and diarrhoea in the county.

Nakuru has in the past been hit by major cholera and other disease outbreaks linked to open defecation.

In 2015, for instance, a cholera outbreak claimed about 30 lives while 298 cases were reported in one month in Nakuru County.

The most affected areas were Kihoto, Kikopey, Salgaa, Kaptembwo, Ponda Mali, Mogotio at the border of Nakuru and Baringo counties.

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Sanitation facilities

Last year, Mr Adrian Kamotho, an advocate of the High Court, sued Transport Cabinet Secretary James Macharia for failing to come up with a policy that would ensure there are public toilets on major highways.

In the petition, lawyer Kamotho also sought to have the Council of Governors (CoG) cited for contempt for failing to constitute a working group to come up with the policy as directed by a judge early this year.

Justice Kossy Bor had directed the CS in January 2020 to form a group of representatives from the CoG, Kenya National Highways Authority, Kenya Rural Roads Authority and Kenya Urban Roads Authority.

The group would be tasked with formulating a policy for the provision of toilets and other sanitation facilities on the country's major road network.

Travellers to the countryside and back to the city usually relieve themselves in the bushes or in hotels along the highways.
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EP Global Opportunities Trust plc (the "Company")

Total Voting Rights

As a result of the purchase of 75,000 Ordinary 1p shares placed into Treasury on 9 February 2021 and in conformity with Disclosure Guidance and Transparency Rule 5.6.1A, the issued share capital and voting rights of the Company are as follows:

Class of share Total number of shares in circulation Number of voting rights attached to each share Total number of voting rights of shares in circulation Number of shares held in treasury (carrying no voting rights attached until issued) Total number of shares in issue Ordinary 1p Shares 38,367,725 1 38,367,725 26,141,917 64,509,642

The above total voting rights figure may be used by shareholders as the denominator for the calculations by which they will determine whether they are required to notify their interest in EP Global Opportunities Trust plc under the FCA's Disclosure Guidance and Transparency Rules.

10 February 2021

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Tel: 0131 270 3800

The Company's registered office address is:

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EH3 7JF
A brave elderly man armed himself with a stick and fought off a gang of thugs who tried to break into his home after police ignored his calls for help three times.

Peter Damianopolous, 81, took matters into his own hands after waking to the sound of the would-be burglars trying to break down his door in Lalor in Melbourne's north about midnight on Tuesday morning.

The great-grandfather called triple-zero three times with no success after yelling at the thugs to leave from the other side of the door.

'I told them 'I kill you, you bastard' and they left,' he told 7News.

'When you call triple zero they're supposed to help you, but nobody helped me - they left me alone.'

His daughter Christine Vrantsis said she was 'livid' police failed to show up.

'Why was he alone? Why was someone not there?' she said.

The 81-year-old's neighbour saw three suspects flee in a car but by that point the group had already busted the lock on his door - leaving him completely exposed had the thieves decided to return.

Police eventually arrived in the morning eight hours after his first call to check up on him.

Peter Damianopolous, 81, was forced to arm himself with a stick and fight off a gang of thugs after they tried to break down his door

Police on Wednesday apologised to the octogenarian, admitting they had failed to keep him safe when he needed them most.

'A man aged in his 80s and living alone should expect that after someone has tried to force their door, in the middle of the night, that police will be there to help,' a Victoria Police spokesman told Daily Mail Australia.

'We acknowledge and accept that there was a failure in our service delivery to Peter, not only in making sure he felt safe but that he could rely on us to be there when he needed us.

'It is up to us to ensure he felt safe in his home when he felt threatened. We didn't on this occasion and for this we offer our sincere apology.'

The force said they had also spoken to Mr Damianopolous and his daughter to apologise for not coming.

President Joe Biden delivers remarks on the national economy and the need for his administration's proposed $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief legislation in the State Dining Room at the White House in Washington on Feb. 5, 2021. (Stefani Reynolds-Pool/Getty Images)

Biden Announces New Pentagon China Task Force

President Joe Biden said Wednesday that the Pentagon will conduct a new review on how the U.S. military will handle the threat posed by China.

It will require a whole-of-government effort, bipartisan cooperation in Congress, and strong alliances and partnerships, said Biden at the Pentagon building. Thats how well meet the China challenge and ensure the American people win the competition of the future.

The review, he added, will help chart a strong path forward on China-related matters.

On Sunday, Biden told CBS News that the Chinese regime should expect extreme competition from the United States, although he said the relationship doesnt necessarily need to be based on conflict. We will confront Chinas economic abuses, Biden explained, saying the regime is the U.S.s most serious competitor.

However, in the interview, Biden said that he will take a different approach to the CCP than Trumpwhose administration frequently criticized the regime for its rampant human rights violations, spreading of disinformation, and other abuses.

The new Pentagon group will be responsible for providing recommendations on the U.S.s position toward China matters and will provide its findings to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in four months.

No final public report is anticipated, although the department will discuss recommendations with Congress and other stakeholders as appropriate, the Pentagon wrote in a statement on Wednesday about the new task force.

According to the Pentagon, the task force will be headed by Ely Ratner, a longtime aide to Biden. Ratner previously served as vice president of the Center for a New American Security think tank.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the Trump administration was correct in taking a tougher stance against the CCP.

I think in fairness to President Trump he was right to take a tougher approach to China. That was the right thing to do, he said in an interview with CNN on Sunday.

But what does this require of us? We have to engage China from a position of strength. And whether its the adversarial aspects of the relationship, the competitive ones, or the cooperative ones which are there in our mutual interest, we have to deal with it from a position of strength, Blinken continued.
(TNS)  Most of the world is yet to experience the benefits of a 5G network, but the geopolitical race for the next big thing in telecommunications technology is already heating up.For companies and governments, the stakes couldnt be higher. The first to develop and patent 6G will be the biggest winners in what some call the next industrial revolution. Though still at least a decade away from becoming reality, 6G  which could be up to 100 times faster than the peak speed of 5G  could deliver the kind of technology thats long been the stuff of science fiction, from real-time holograms to flying taxis and Internet-connected human bodies and brains.The scrum for 6G is already intensifying even as it remains a theoretical proposition, and underscores how geopolitics is fueling technological rivalries, particularly between the U.S. and China.This endeavor is so important that its become an arms race to some extent, said Peter Vetter, head of access and devices at Nokia Oyjs research arm Bell Labs. It will require an army of researchers on it to remain competitive.Years of acrimony under the Trump administration have hit Chinese technology companies hard, but that hasnt stopped the country from emerging as the leader in 5G. It has the worlds largest 5G footprint, and  despite multiple attempts by the U.S. to take it on  Huawei Technologies Co. towers over rival 5G vendors globally, mostly by offering attractive prices.The development of 6G could give the U.S. the opportunity to regain lost ground in wireless technology.Unlike 5G, North America will not let the opportunity for a generational leadership slide by so easily this time, said Vikrant Gandhi, senior industry director of information and communications technologies at consultancy firm Frost & Sullivan in the U.S. It is likely that the competition for 6G leadership will be fiercer than that for 5G.Its clear that 6G is already on the minds of policy makers in both Washington and Beijing. Former President Donald Trump tweeted in early 2019, for example, that he wanted 6G as soon as possible.China is already moving ahead. The country launched a satellite in November to test airwaves for potential 6G transmission, and Huawei has a 6G research center in Canada, according to Canadian media reports. Telecommunications equipment manufacturer ZTE Corp. has also teamed up with China Unicom Hong Kong Ltd. to develop the technology.The U.S. has demonstrated that it has the ability to seriously handicap Chinese companies, as in the case of ZTE, which almost collapsed after the Commerce Department banned it for three months in 2018 from buying American technology. Similar moves could hamper Huaweis 6G ambitions.Washington has already started to sketch out the 6G battle lines. The Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions, a U.S. telecom standards developer known as ATIS, launched the Next G Alliance in October to advance North American leadership in 6G. The alliances members include technology giants like Apple Inc., AT&T Inc., Qualcomm Inc., Google and Samsung Electronics Co., but not Huawei.The alliance mirrors the way that the world has been fractured into opposing camps as a result of 5G rivalry. Led by the U.S, which identified Huawei as an espionage risk  an allegation the Chinese giant denies  countries including Japan, Australia, Sweden and the U.K. have shut the firm out of their 5G networks. However, Huawei is welcomed in Russia, the Philippines, Thailand, and other countries in Africa and the Middle East.The European Union in December also unveiled a 6G wireless project led by Nokia, which includes companies like Ericsson AB and Telefonica SA, as well as universities.The lack of trust in Chinese companies like Huawei is unlikely to abate with 6G. Democracies are growing increasingly worried about how 5G technology is being used by authoritarian regimes, with fears that 6G could enable technologies such as mass drone surveillance. China is already using surveillance cameras, AI, facial recognition and biometrics such as voice samples and DNA to track and control citizens.Currently China seems to be doing everything in terms of surveillance and suppression to make sure that they lose future markets in the U.S. and Europe, said Paul Timmers, a senior adviser at Brussels-based think tank European Policy Centre and former director of digital society and cybersecurity at the European Commission. This indicates that the technical approach to 6G cannot be trusted to be decoupled from state ideological objectives.While commercial 5G was introduced around 2019, countries are still rolling out networks and developing applications that could attract businesses and turn the technology profitable. Likewise, 6G may not reach its potential at least 15 years from now, said Gandhi of Frost & Sullivan. Only about 100 wireless carriers worldwide offer 5G services in limited areas right now.But researchers have an ambitious vision for what the next-generation network could offer. At a potential rate of 1 terabyte per second, 6G is not only much faster, but also promises a latency  which causes lags  of 0.1 millisecond, compared to 1 millisecond, or the minimum for 5G. To achieve that, scientists are focusing on the super high frequency terahertz waves that could meet those speed and latency requirements, though there is not yet a chip capable of transmitting so much data in a second.It still remains too early to tell whether the envisioned futuristic world defined by 6G will eventually materialize. In that theoretical world, everything in our environment will be connected to the 6G networks  not only can people communicate with things like furniture and clothes, but those gadgets can also communicate among themselves.Major scientific obstacles abound  for example, researchers must solve the question of how airwaves traveling extremely short distances can easily penetrate materials such as water vapor or even a sheet of paper. Networks may need to be ultra-dense, with multiple base stations installed not only on every street, but also in each building or even each device people use to receive and transmit signals. Thats set to raise serious questions over health, privacy and urban design.Technological advances, especially those as futuristic and complex such as 6G radio communication should be developed carefully, said Gandhi. We believe that countries cannot start soon enough. The private sector cannot start soon enough. And that is why we already have initiatives such as the Next G Alliance.
"Mr.Queen" has become one of the hot topics in Kdramaland for its continuous high viewership ratings and unique story concepts.

The drama "Mr.Queen" tells the story of a man who was trapped in the body of a woman from the Joseon dynasty. The unexpected adventure will give them a major plot twist in their respective lives.

Now that the drama is coming to an end, viewers are also curious about what to expect in the remaining last two episodes of "Mr.Queen" and what will happen to Shin Hye Sun and Kim Jung Hyun's characters after their return at the palace.

In the previous 18th episode of tvN's weekend drama that aired on Feb 7, King Cheoljong (Kim Jung Hyun) and Kim So Yong (Shin Hye Sun) were both seen struggling to fight for their lives. According to the latest updates, the said episode garnered an average viewership rating of 15.5 percent and rocketed up to 18.6 percent in the Seoul metropolitan area, showing the unwavering popularity of the drama.

Spoiler Alert!

Meanwhile, the palace was put into agony after hearing the news of Cheoljong's death. However, Kim So Yong doesn't believe that her husband was already dead; she has this intuition that there is something happening inside the palace, and she started to investigate it herself.

She went out of the palace to search for her husband, but while she was in the process of looking for the king, she shot an arrow at her cousin Kim Byung In (Na In Woo), drawing the line of turning him into her enemy.

Kim So Yong and King Cheoljong are Fighting for Their own Battles

Along with her was Court Lady Choi (Cha Chung Hwa), who collapsed after being hurt by a soldier, and Hong Yeon (Chae Seo Eun) immediately ran off to save her queen. After trying their best to help each other and saving the queen, Kim So Yong was still captured by Kim Byung In and was put in the place where King Cheoljong disappeared, giving the viewers a high tension about the happening in the story.

What Could be "Mr.Queen's" Major Plot Twist?

Court Lady Choi and Hong Yeon, who has been giving bright and bubbly chemistry throughout the drama, will be facing new challenges in the last remaining episodes of "Mr.Queen." Same as with the main characters Kim So Yong and King Cheoljong, who were both in the middle of the crisis, fighting for justice.

These are just some of the major plot twists that viewers should look forward to in the upcoming two episodes of the drama. Will these characters live their happy endings?

The attention was also focused on whether the ending will be the same as from its original concept or the director and the writer will make something different towards the ending of the story.



Are you ready to say your final goodbye to the smashing hit drama "Mr.Queen"? Let us know in the comments!

For more K-Drama, K-Movie, and celebrity news and updates, keep your tabs open here at Kdramastars.

Kdramastars owns this article.

Written by Shai Collins.

YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 10, ARMENPRESS. The specialists of the International Mine Action Center of the Russian defense ministry continue demining works in the territory of Nagorno Karabakh, the Russian defense ministry reports.

The engineering units of the Russian peacekeeping forces have already cleared nearly 1242,3 hectares of land, 398,8 km long roads. 24,227 explosive devices were found and neutralized.

In the course of demining and clearing the territory of explosive objects in Nagorno Karabakh, Russian peacekeepers use modern robotic systems.

Editing and Translating by Aneta Harutyunyan
Washington:

The Pentagon on Saturday said the US forces have killed the head of Islamic States Afghanistan branch in a strike on the terror groups headquarters in Kunar Province.

The killing of Abu Sayed, the emir of Islamic State of Iraq and SyriaKhorasan Province (ISIS-K), marked the third time within a year that the terror groups Afghanistan branch has lost its leader.

US forces killed Abu Sayed, the emir of Islamic State of Iraq and SyriaKhorasan Province (ISIS-K), in a strike on the groups headquarters in Kunar Province, Afghanistan, on July 11, Pentagon Spokesman Dana White has said.

The raid also killed other ISIS-K members and will significantly disrupt the terror groups plans to expand its presence in Afghanistan, she said.

ISIS leaders chose Abu Sayed to lead the group after Afghan and US forces killed the previous ISIS-K leaders

Hafiz Sayed Khan in late July 2016, and Abdul Hasib, in late April of this year.

Afghan and US forces launched a counter-ISIS-K offensive in early March, 2017, to drive fighters from Nangarhar and send a clear message to ISIS that there is no sanctuary for their fighters in Afghanistan, White said.

General John Nicholson, who leads US forces-Afghanistan, said, We will continue until they are annihilated. There is no safe haven for ISIS-K in Afghanistan.

The US has been hitting ISIS targets in the war-torn country regulaly and in April it dropped the largest non-nuclear bomb it has ever used in combat.

The deployment of the so-called Mother Of All Bombs (MOAB) killed at least 95 jihadists, according to reports.

Also read: G20 Summit: Modi equates Pak-based terror outfits with ISIS, Al Qaeda

For all the Latest World News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
TDT | Manama

The Daily Tribune  www.newsofbahrain.com

Commander-in-Chief of the Bahrain Defence Force (BDF) Field Marshal Shaikh Khalifa bin Ahmed Al Khalifa yesterday paid an inspection visit to a BDF unit, where he was informed about its combat readiness, military preparedness and workflow.

The Commander-in-Chief stressed that the loyal BDF personnel affirm, marking the BDFs 53rd anniversary, their dedication in serving His Majesty King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, the Supreme Commander, and the cherished homeland, as well as to make all sacrifices to defend the nation, and maintain the strength of the BDF.

The Commander-in-Chief praised the unwavering support enjoyed by the military forces in the Kingdom to continue defending the nation, urging the BDFs brave officers and servicemen to continue training and acquiring military knowledge to increase their combat skills and enhance their field capabilities.

He wished all the BDF affiliates further success in carrying out their patriotic and humanitarian responsibilities.
I was a ten-year-old, but the memories of the '62 debacle are eidetically etched in my mind; that feeling of helplessness of the elders, their sense of shame, the silent imprecations, the muted curses in private but dignified poise in public, were a temporal marker in the growth of my consciousness as an Indian.

The short war, while it lasted, was an unending season of solemnity and sadness. My father tried to explain to me the enormity of the loss, the depth of our humiliation. I dont know how much of it sank in me cognitively, but the emotional equivalent seeped through me, as if by a process of osmosis. That moment forever lodged itself like an iron in the soul. My young mind, perhaps in a compensatory behaviour, supported a belief that someday, we will be able to pay back the debt of history.

As I grew up and became wiser in the ways of the world - especially when I became aware of the contretemps of political power play and the metrics of military confrontations - I modified my unstated wish into a more moderate plea: Oh, God, please dont let us face the same humiliation, at least not in my lifetime.

The recent traumatic events of our soldiers fighting, unarmed, under some weird protocol, against a devious and barbaric enemy, soldiers being clubbed, being pushed off cliffs and dying of hypothermia, though not in same category of misfortunes, are rooted in reasons quite similar. I was reminded of Brigadier Dalwi's lament in The Himalayan Blunder, "This is a record of the destruction of a Brigade without a formal declaration of war". This time round, at least twenty Indian soldiers died, and many more were injured, in an absurd engagement, without so much as a chance for our men to fire a shot - something straight out of an Italo Calvino or Kurt Kusenburg story.

In 1962, we had a Prime Minister who felt more at home strutting on the international stage, peddling his peculiar nostrums of non-alignment and Panchsheel to enhance his personal standing in the world. Getting China - which was perceived to be an enemy by everyone else except him - its due place under the sun was his seminal concern. Despite repeatedly being warned of the bellicosity of the Chinese by those who knew, he refused to square up to the reality, because how could he - a man of peace - countenance the thought of war? It seems he was prepared to lose territory rather than lose his face. His paranoia about the military eyeing his ouster led him to deliberately starve it of resources and stunt its growth. Finally, when the moment of reckoning came, he entrusted the conduct of war to those who had no other credential than that they enjoyed his trust: Krishna Menon & General Kaul. But talent for intrigue and currying favour does not come in handy in fighting a war. The rest, as they say, is history.

We have now a high-profile PM who is also a global player, bonding on equal personal terms with POTUS. At the same time, in a seemingly deft act of diplomacy, he sleeps with Americas and our own arch enemy - China. Reportedly, he has established a personal equation with President Xi Jinping. But other than diplomacy, he has also let himself be known as a decisive man of war, and has tried to live by this image. All the spectacular military feats against Pakistan, our idee fixe - are supposed to flow from his iron will.

General Kauls seem to be an undying tribe in the army, and even now, reportedly, an unhealthy proximity between the military and political leadership has grown. And it has consequences. History bears witness that China strikes at an opportune moment (in '62 the world attention was riveted on the Cuban missile crisis, today the world is snowed under the Wuhan Virus avalanche originating from China) and in such a manner that the friend feels obliged to cover up for the enemy and go into denial for fear of losing face. 2020 is not 1962, and such matters are independently verifiable. Hence his government has been in denial, and has felt obliged to prevaricate, obfuscate, and tell downright lies to domestic audience. Now that the truth is out the government finds itself hard-pressed to admit and explain the killing of soldiers. From denial, the government has come down to the familiar mournful tune of 'stabbing in the back.' When a war seems to be the only course of action, policy planners seem to have discovered that the national interest is best served by diplomacy, peaceful negotiations and avoidance of war. And China loves, as always, has plotted the mortification of its ambitious neighbour just as it did in '62 ; it is China's way to tell the world who is the hegemon. The situation is still live, and one cant look into the seeds of the time, but there does not seem to be much cause for joy.

But what about the simulated war being fought with greater seriousness within the borders of the country? Going by the social media posts, one would think that a large number of Indians take the reality of the disputed "Modi jee's 56 inches" quite seriously. The mobilization on both sides is impressive; a sizeable population is attacking their bete noire with all they have: invective, satire, mockery and moralism, and an equal number defending their bete noire with all they have - lies, chicanery, and recourse to the history of Congress. Of course, Mr. Modis jugular is quite a prized trophy for his detractors, but it is way too insignificant compared to the Chinese jugular. Of course, political scores need to be settled but not when we are in the process of a debt that the nation owes to history. Admittedly it is a lying, self-obsessed government, but unfortunately this is the only government that we have at the present time, and the conduct of war is in the hands of this government. Persistent questioning is all right, the right to be told the truth is spot on, but this rubbing brings in defenders, the battalion of Bhakts, and the discourse becomes divisive when the call of the hour is to put everything in abeyance. Similarly, the Bhakts who try to hang their "56-inch" on any peg that is available, are sure to bring, in retaliation, the demolition squads in droves.

On Twitter, there was a bare as bone tweet  "twenty soldiers killed in Ladakh." Pat came a retweet form a journalist of repute, a leading light of the left liberal brigade, with the following comment: "Knock, knock, Modi jee, are you there?"

Social media is overflowing with callous and crass remarks and this is just an emblematic example. But little do they realise that they are trivialising the tragic death of our soldiers fighting under impossible constraints. To offset it, there is another example of a paid, commissioned anchor of a Hindi TV channel trying to salvage the image of the government by shifting the blame on to the Army. Whose war are those brave men fighting anyway?

I remember the emotional climate of 62, and I can definitely say that a feeling pulse in our national heart has atrophied, gone dry. The difference in the public mood between '62 and now is dramatic. In '62, Indian women - for whom gold means a part of their lives - came forward to freely donate it to the national defence fund without demur. (When boycott of Chinese goods is mentioned today, figures and fine economic calculations roll out. This gestures of solidarity against the enemy is not economically feasible, we are told!) The unlettered, untutored masses knew that it was matter of life and death and the nation spoke in a chorus of approval for the nation, for the army. I exclude the communists, because they are a class apart, a different species.

If ever there was a case of not learning the lessons of history, this is the one. Or is it that in a globalised world profit is placed above patriotism? May be some favourable economic deal with the Chinese will act as a healing balm and we will again be dining with the Dragon till such times it makes a decent dinner of us.

Tonight, I will tell my God that He should consider my unstated prayer as withdrawn.

India Today magazine once referred to Manoje Nath, a 1973-batch IPS officer, as being fiercely independent, honest, and upright. Besides his numerous official reports on various issues exposing corruption in the bureaucracy in Bihar, Nath is also a writer extraordinaire expressing his thoughts on subjects ranging from science fiction to the effects of globalization. His sense of humor was evident through his extremely popular series named "Gulliver in Pataliputra" and "Modest Proposals" that were published in the local newspapers.

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Brent crude prices rose again by 0.2% to US$61.20 by 0110 GMT after rising nearly 1% on Tuesday as industry data showed a fall in US crude oil stocks.

S&P/ASX 200 (INDEXASX:XJO) has gained 0.67% to 6867 points by about 2.10 pm as the Westpac-Melbourne Institute Index of Consumer Confidence rose by 1.9% in February to 109.1  the second highest reading in seven years.

Notably, the index is 14.2% above its pre-pandemic level in February 2020 and up 44.3% compared to the 29-year lows hit in April 2020 of 75.6 points.

A reading more than 100 points denotes optimism.

Mortgager confidence hits decade-high levels

Consumer views on house price expectations rose by 6.5% to a 7-year high of 154.7 this month.

But the run-up in home prices may be impacting consumer views on affordability with the time to buy a dwelling index falling by 3.1% to 120.7.

However, record low borrowing costs continue to boost the morale of those with a mortgage with the mortgager confidence sub-index gaining 2.6% to a decade high of 113.4 in February.

Top gainers

Todays top gainers on the ASX include ( ) (+25.00%), ( ) (+19.35%), ( ) (+25.00%), ( ) (+15.79%) and ( ) (+14.89%).

Proactive news headlines:

BlackEarth Minerals skyrockets on securing graphite supply and marketing agreement with German-based Luxcarbon

( ) has soared on signing a graphite supply and marketing agreement with Luxcarbon GmbH, Germany - a move that further positions the company as a supplier of graphite concentrate and downstream graphite products to EV and alternative energy markets.

Kin Mining raising up to $15 million to progress next phase of exploration and resource growth at Cardinia Gold Project

( ) is undertaking a capital raising of around $15 million to progress the next phase of exploration and resource growth at its Cardinia Gold Project near Leonora in Western Australia.

Ansila Energy begins phase 1 operational workstreams following Hartshead acquisition

( ) (OTCMKTS:PGNYF) (FRA:P6V) has started implementing several workstreams following the completion of its acquisition of the remaining 78.4% interest in Hartshead Resources Limited (HRL) that it doesnt already own  solidifying its position as a new UK North Sea gas developer.

ioneer sees Biden Administration as a catalyst for its business and US vehicle electrification

ioneer Ltd ( ) ( ) (FRA:4G1) believes the new Biden Administration in the US will be a catalyst for its business and US vehicle electrification.

Blackstone Minerals upgraded to highest tier of trading on US OTC markets due to strong interest

Blackstone Minerals ( ) (OTCQX:BLSTF) (FRA:B9S) has begun trading on the US-based OTCQX Best Market under the code of OTCQX:BLSTF following the rapid increase in value of its shares and strong interest from US investors.

Pantoro awards key EPC contract to GR Engineering for processing facility at Norseman Gold Project

( ) (FRA:RKN) has issued a Letter of Intent for the award of engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) works for the processing facility at the Norseman Gold Project to GR Engineering Services ( ).

Castillo Copper further extends Big One Deposit following final results from 2020 program and historical assays

( ) ( ) ( ) has further extended the large copper discovery at Big One Deposit within the Mt Oxide Project in Queenslands Mt Isa copper-belt following the final results from its 2020 program and recently found historical assays.

Ora Banda Mining infill drilling at Riverina South returns up to 3 metres at 32.4 g/t gold

s ( ) (FRA:M6N) infill drilling program at Riverina South deposit within the wider Davyhurst Gold Project in Western Australia has delivered strong assay results of up to 3 metres at 32.4 g/t from 34 metres.
After successfully establishing air and sea links, Israel is looking into the potential of road links with the UAE to further develop the bilateral trade corridor, said the top diplomat at the newly opened Israeli Embassy in Abu Dhabi.

The air and sea links have already enabled goods traffic on flights within a few hours and ships within 16 days between the two countries, pointed out Eitan Naeh, Head of Mission at the embassy to the Emirates News Agency (Wam).

Naeh is expected to officially submit his diplomatic credentials to the UAE Government soon.

"Now we are looking into the potential of trailers and lorries carrying goods from the UAE reaching Israel in three days and vice versa in the near future," the diplomat, who arrived in Abu Dhabi early last week, said.

Corridor linking East and West

"I truly believe that the UAE on the eastern part of Arabia and Israel on the western part of Asia - on the Mediterranean - can create a trade corridor through land and sea [to the rest of the world]," he added. "This corridor of peace will create great possibilities for trade and tourism."

"It all has to be investigated. Business communities in Israel and the UAE are now looking into ways to increase trade. Each country brings its relative advantage. We have trade agreements with the West [US and European Union]. You are an opening to the East. So, it is a huge market," explained the 57-year-old diplomat who had earlier served as the Israeli Ambassador to Azerbaijan and Turkey, and Deputy Head of Mission at the embassy in London.

130,000 Israelis visit UAE

The envoy revealed that around 130,000 Israeli tourists visited the UAE since the air traffic was launched in the wake of the Abraham Accords, which was signed in September 2020.

"Were very curious people. We like to travel. Israelis are traveling all over the world," the Israeli diplomat said.

He heard from tourism industry sources that nearly 50,000 Israelis a month may visit the UAE during the winter season. "We are talking about a few hundred thousand of visitors a year."

Once the vaccination against Covid-19 is complete in both countries, he expects increased tourist traffic. "I know that UAE tourism companies already making enquiries about packages in Israel. Israel has got many climate zones, forests and mountains and water bodies, which will attract visitors from the UAE."

Infrastructure, investments and technologies

The envoy pointed out that both countries have an advanced infrastructure. "We can learn from each other."

Israel has identified around 29 potential areas for cooperation with the UAE and bilateral agreements in eight areas have already been signed, he said.

On investment front, the Israeli Head of Mission already had talks with some investment companies from Israel that want to come and invest in the UAE.

"I think there is a lot of room for mutual investments. More Israeli companies will open their front offices here in the UAE or set up factories," he said.

In science and technology sector, setting up joint research and development centres where each country can bring its expertise and advantage, is a potential priority.

"No one country knows everything. Israel is in the semi-arid climate, so we do have a very advanced desert research centres down in the south," he noted. "There are things that we already know and there are things that we can study, then research and develop together."

"Israelis are firm believers and thats why we believe in what we call circles of innovation. We can set up joint circles of innovation."

Dialogue to overcome baggage of history

He believes dialogue between Israel and the UAE will encourage many others to follow suit to settle their differences. "We are very ancient people. We carry with us a long history. We carry that bag on our back, but were certainly the kind of people like yourselves [Emiratis] who look very much into the future," he said.
SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Invitae Corporation (NYSE: NVTA), a leading medical genetics company, today announced that members of its management team will present at the 10th Annual SVB Leerink Global Healthcare Conference on Wednesday, February 24, 2021 at noon Eastern/9:00 a.m. Pacific.

The live webcast of the fireside chat may be accessed by visiting the investors section of the company website at ir.invitae.com. A replay of the webcast will be available shortly after the conclusion of the fireside chat.

About Invitae

Invitae Corporation (NYSE: NVTA) is a leading medical genetics company, whose mission is to bring comprehensive genetic information into mainstream medicine to improve healthcare for billions of people. Invitae's goal is to aggregate the world's genetic tests into a single service with higher quality, faster turnaround time, and lower prices. For more information, visit the company's website at invitae.com.

Contact:

Laura D'Angelo

[email protected]

(628) 213-3369

SOURCE Invitae Corporation

Related Links

www.invitae.com


"You heard of honest Socrates

The man who never lied:

They weren't so grateful as you'd think

Instead the rulers fixed to have him tried

And handed him the poisoned drink.

How honest was the people's noble son.

The world however did not wait

But soon observed what followed on.

It's honesty that brought him to that state.

How fortunate the man with none." - Bertolt Brecht

Laffaire Salman Khan was deconstructed in different, even discordant ways by various groups of people, depending on their particular socio-economic situations. A large section of Bollywood declared it as a triumph of justice and a vindication of their peculiar ethic that claims special privileges for celebrities who entertain the nation, who spend so much on charity, who keep the industry going (several hundreds of crores are said to be riding on Salman Khan).

Those who are not star-struck, nor are rich and famous received it as yet another confirmation of their belief that the law of the land cannot chastise the rich and the famous. Still others  commentators, anti-corruption activists etc.  saw it as an endorsement of the truth alone triumphs motto. As a former IPS officer who has put in forty years in the organisation  I see it quite differently. To me, it is yet another stern warning that the perils of honesty and commitment to the rule of law come with an unacceptable risk  for the policeman.

Society has evolved considerably from its earlier identification with courageous and conscientious upholders of law as heroic figures; achievers and the successful are the new role model. In a time when even directors of CBI have been seen to be puny foot-soldiers of the rich and powerful, characters like Ravindra Patil seem to be chasing illusory, quixotic goals. As a lowly constable, he had the temerity to stand for truth, equality before law and a determination to bring the powerful to justice. In doing so he went against the organizational culture. He was a turncoat of his profession. No wonder the Mumbai police force excommunicated him.

(Ravindra Patil was a commando from Mumbai police who was assigned as bodyguard to Salman Khan in the wake of threats to him from the Mumbai underworld, and was with him on the fateful night when the superstar ran down pavement dwellers and ran away. Patil was the lone eyewitness, who stuck to his account that Salman Khan was drunk and drove rashly despite being cautioned. Repeated threats, inducements and pressure from his own department did not dissaude him, and he paid the price with his eventual dismissal, and ultimate death, alone in a hospital. Newspapers report his statement to a friend a mere two days before his death: "I stood by my statement till the end, but my department did not stand by me. I want my job back, I want to survive. I want to meet the police commissioner once.")

The system wreaks punishment in great detail to those who stand for truth in contemporary society, and the utter futility and pointlessness of such a gesture would be evident if we plot the life of the individual in history as opposed to the timeless image of the hero. Satya Harischandras insane commitment to fulfill a promise made in a dream cost him his kingdom, and his son. He sold himself into slavery of the worst kind, and even felt duty-bound to ask his wife to part with a portion of the saree covering her modesty. He passed the test and the gates of heaven opened for him. The gods themselves anointed him. Those were the days when gods and men were on equable terms of association - reward, and punishment, redemption and retribution followed close at hand.



Patil was similarly seized by a delusional notion called commitment to rule of law; he believed in the grandiose promise of law made grander still by the Latin it is couched in. Fiat Justitia Ruat Caelum (Let justice be done though heavens fall). We have rarely seen the heavens fall, but the fall of those who try to bring the powerful to justice is an everyday occurrence. When it confronts the powerful, the law of the land reads itself differently from the way it initially wrote itself. So he had the devil to pay for his naivete. He was subjected to physical threats, he had to go in hiding, he was deprived of his job; his family deserted him, he contracted the most virulent disease that can afflict a human being, was reduced to begging and died an anonymous death. Patils victory was both pyrrhic and pointless. The powerful man walked free in a few hours .The policemans prolonged suffering, disgrace and ultimate death did not sanctify any cause because no such cause exists today and the just gods who in mythical times rewarded the virtuous and punished the wicked have departed long back, leaving no addresses.

But there is cold comfort at hand. Media, the nearest equivalent of God in our godless world, have woken up to him as if he had been incarnate yesterday. Perhaps if it had taken some notice earlier Patil may still have been alive. But no one, it seems, wants martyrdom interrupted because the deaths of these suckers serve a very utilitarian purpose. They help derive a very comforting moral: fighting injustice and corruption in the system is beyond the realm of an ordinary man's effort. So while in principle the society may continue to endorse the values of probity in public life, it can merrily go about its business in the usual manner.

India Today magazine once referred to Manoje Nath, a 1973-batch IPS officer, as being fiercely independent, honest, and upright. Besides his numerous official reports on various issues exposing corruption in the bureaucracy in Bihar, Nath is also a writer extraordinaire expressing his thoughts on subjects ranging from science fiction to the effects of globalization. His sense of humor was evident through his extremely popular series named "Gulliver in Patiliputra" and "Modest Proposals" that were published in the local newspapers.
SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Zippin, an industry leader in checkout-free technologies for brick-and-mortar retail, today announced the launch of its latest retail format: a hotel convenience store. Zippin's partner, Fujitsu, the leading systems integrator in Japan, has worked with Koyo Group to implement the world's first checkout-free store within a hotel at the Yokohama Techno Tower Hotel . It is also the first store in Japan open to the general public to use biometric authentication technology to verify customers' identities.

Koyo and Zippin in Japan

WIth this partnership, the store operator is keeping shoppers and workers safe during the pandemic with a cashierless checkout, eliminates stress of lines and wait times, and raises customer satisfaction by optimizing the product lineup.

The grab-and-go Green Leaves + (plus) store which sells pre-packaged food and beverages as well as fresh bento box meals, opened early this year as a pilot and customers are able to enter the store via smartphone app. Customers must register their credit card information, and then enter the store with the QR code displayed on the Green Leaves + app. Customers can also use the multi-biometric authentication technology that links their palm vein and facial recognition information with the smartphone application. After registering this in advance, a smart phone is no longer required for entry, just a simple swipe of the palm.

Koyo will start full-scale operation at the store in April 2021. Early analytics suggest Koyo has relatively high traffic during the 9 hours it's open every day. Shoppers are spending an average of 113 seconds in the store which is considerably fast considering the size of the store and variety of items furthering Zippin's "zip in and out" approach.

"Zippin is excited to work with Fujitsu to power the checkout-free technology for this new Koyo hotel store. We believe that there is big growth potential for checkout-free retail in Japan . The Green Leaves + store at Yokohama Techno Tower Hotel is helping to lead the way to a better retail experience at hotels, hospitals, and other places where people need convenient access to food and drinks," said Zippin Co-Founder and CEO Krishna Motukuri.

In addition to hotels, Koyo also operates convenience stores and restaurants in more than 500 hospitals. This first hotel convenience store will also be a model for how checkout-free technology could work in a hospital settingwhere people need 24 hour access to food and drinkwithout having to require a constant staffing presence. The new store is part of a multi-phase expansion plan by Koyo to ultimately create new convenient foodservice concepts for hospitals.

"Any store that provides all-hours access is an ideal location for checkout-free technology, because the stores can be kept open without having to maintain staffing levels, especially in off-peak periods. The opportunities are endless," added Motukuri.

For more information visit GetZippin.com .

About Zippin

Zippin has developed the next generation of checkout-free technology enabling retailers to quickly deploy frictionless shopping in their stores. Our patent-pending approach uses AI, machine learning and sensor fusion technology to create the best consumer experience: banishing checkout lines and self-scanners for good, and letting shoppers zip in and out with their purchases. Zippin's platform leverages product and shopper tracking through overhead cameras, as well as smart shelf sensors, for the highest level of accuracy even in crowded stores. Founded by industry veterans from Amazon and SRI with deep backgrounds in retail technology, AI and computer vision, Zippin is headquartered in San Francisco and backed by Evolv Ventures (Kraft-Heinz), Docomo Ventures, Nomura Research Institute, SAP, Maven Ventures, and Core Ventures Group. For more information, visit www.getzippin.com.

Media Contact:

Lindsay Stevens

213.200.9638

[email protected]

SOURCE Zippin

Related Links

http://www.getzippin.com


Nestled in the Texas Hill Country lies the small town of Fredericksburg, which has earned a top spot on a Forbes roundup of the the most idyllic small towns in the U.S. to visit in 2021.

Founded in 1846, the Texas small town gem has lured visitors to its rolling hills dotted with bluebonnets and cool bungalow rentals called "Sunday Houses."

Featured on the Forbes list for small town charm include Deadwood, South Dakota; Rockport Massachusetts, Captiva Island, Florida; Elizabeth City, North Carolinaand our own Texas destination, Fredericksburg. These small town jewels provide travelers with a way to get off the grid and enjoy the small town pace.

TEXAS TRAVEL DESTINATIONS: These are the top 5 Texas travel destinations for 2021

"Equipped with spectacular natural beauty and fascinating historic backgrounds, these five towns are the perfect fit for experiencing the quieter side of the United States," Forbes' Jared Ranahan writes.

Fredericksburg, Texas

Named after Prince Frederick of Prussia, Fredericksburg has been affectionately deemed "The Aspen of Texas," according to Fodor's Travel Publication. Tucked in the heart of the Texas Hill Country, the German-influenced town offers attractions that include a wildflower farm, wine tastings and a historic downtown strip filled with eclectic boutiques. Outdoor enthusiasts might want to spend a day hiking Enchanted Rock or hitting the Texas Wine Trail.

"The truth is that its hard not to love the town where you can shop a day on Main Street and still not see everything...Or spend a day touring the Texas Wine Trail in townor afternoon hiking Enchanted Rock, according to Fodors Hill Country editor Debbie Harmsen.

Elizabeth City, North Carolina

Located in the northeastern corner of North Carolina, Elizabeth City has been named one of the "100 Best Small Towns in America." This waterfront small town gem was founded in 1794. Visitors can head out to the beaches of the Outer Banks, Ghost Harbor or Hampton Roads. If you love the outdoors, travelers can explore the 20,000 acres of nearby state parks or head out hiking on the Fenwick-Hollowell Wetlands Trail.

UniversalImagesGroup/Universal Images Group via Getty

Deadwood, South Dakota

If you want a taste of the Old West, Deadwood is a step back in time. The small town destination is nestled among the Black Hills of South Dakota, and the historic downtown area is a perfect spot to stroll through. Travelers can head out to the Black Hills underground mine, Broken Boot Gold Mine or go on one of the historic tours offered by a Wild West tour guide.

John Greim/LightRocket via Getty Images

Rockport, Massachusetts

If lobsters and lighthouses are more of your thing, consider heading to the small coastal town of Rockport. Venture over to the creative district of Bearskin Neck or the cool waters of Halibut Point State Park. Travelers can also head to Gloucester, Manchester-by-the Sea or the historic Salem for their East Coast journey.

Jeff Greenberg/Jeff Greenberg/Universal Images

Captiva Island, Florida

Just off of Florida's Gulf Coast, the idyllic small town gem of Captiva Island boasts miles of sandy beaches and activities including biking, sailing and birding. If you need a peaceful, off-the-grid getaway, consider some of the other barrier islands, like Sanibel Island and Cayo Costa.
The potential impact and reach that these findings have on opioid prescribing, harm reduction and the substance use crisis as a whole is significant, Marc Bennett, Comagine Healths president and chief executive officer, said.

Comagine Health, a leading national nonprofit health care consulting firm, published multiple peer-reviewed journal articles in 2020 contributing to the impact on opioid prescribing, harm reduction and the substance abuse crisis. Comagine Healths research contributions are critical to understanding the complex nature of addiction and its impact on communities.

The potential impact and reach that these findings have on opioid prescribing, harm reduction and the substance use crisis as a whole is significant, Marc Bennett, Comagine Healths president and chief executive officer, said. Our ability to quickly pivot our work to understand how COVID-19 has impacted the communities we work with has been especially impressive.

The information gleaned from these studies will help inform safe use messaging for people who use drugs, understanding of perceived barriers to care during a pandemic, prescribing practices, and understanding of the complex nature of addition and its impact on rural communities.

Comagine Healths Research and Evaluation team recently published an annual report https://comagine.org/resource/1416 sharing an in-depth review of the substantial work done in 2020. The report includes information about projects, publications and presentations. The report also features a look into future research work.

The Research and Evaluation team began in 2012 with a partnership with Oregon Health & Science University Department of Family Medicine on an NIH-funded study investigating Oregons Prescription Drug Monitoring Program (PDMP). The team has been involved in 30 research and evaluation projects with findings cited in over 400 peer-reviewed journals.

The journal articles published in 2020 include:

Health & Justice

Reducing Overdose After Release From Incarceration (ROAR): Study Protocol for an Intervention to Reduce Risk of and Non-Fatal Opioid Overdose Among Women After Release From Prison https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7349469/

Journal of Addiction Medicine

Like Yin and Yang Perceptions of Methamphetamine Benefits and Consequences Among People Who Use Opioids in Rural Communities https://journals.lww.com/journaladdictionmedicine/Citation/2021/02000/_Like_Yin_and_Yang___Perceptions_of.10.aspx

Journal of Addiction Medicine

The Impacts of COVID-19 on Mental Health, Substance Use, and Overdose Concerns for People Who Use Drugs https://journals.lww.com/journaladdictionmedicine/Abstract/9000/The_Impacts_of_COVID_19_on_Mental_Health,.99136.aspx

Journal of General Internal Medicine

Prescription Opioid Dispensing Patters Prior to Heroin Overdose in a State Medicaid Program: A Case-Control Study

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32935311/

Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety

A Comparison of Trends in Opioid Dispensing Patterns Between Medicaid Pharmacy Claims and Prescription Drug Monitoring Program Data https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pds.5097

Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety

Identifying Opioid Dose Reductions and Discontinuation Among Patients With Chronic Opioid Therapy

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/pds.5096?af=R

To learn more about this work, please visit comagine.org/resource/1416.

https://comagine.org/resource/1416

# # #

About Comagine Health

Comagine Health, formerly Qualis Health and HealthInsight, works collaboratively with patients, providers, payers and other stakeholders to reimagine, redesign and implement sustainable improvements in the health care system. As a trusted, neutral party, we work in our communities to address key, complex health and health care delivery problems. In all our engagements and initiatives, we draw upon our expertise in quality improvement, care management, health information technology, analytics and research. We invite our partners and communities to work with us to improve health and redesign the health care delivery system. For more information, please visit comagine.org.


Goldstreet Partners hires Charlie Scharf as Director of Investment Sales

CHICAGO, IL / ACCESSWIRE / February 10, 2021 / Charlie Scharf joins Goldstreet Partners team and brings nearly five years of investment sales and commercial experience to the Goldstreet Partners team. As the full-service real estate company based in Chicago, IL continues to expand, the firm is on-pace for record growth in 2021.

Charlie's experience includes being responsible for handling retail investment properties ranging from $1M-$20M. His expertise is in understanding the capital market forces affecting real estate, understanding commercial thoroughfares, as well as establishing deep relationships with private owners, investors and developers. His energy has proved accredited to his past team's success, as he acts diligently to garner the best possible results for his clients. Charlie understands the urban fabric of Chicago, knows the leasing and sales environment, and endeavors to cast the most valuable perspective on any given listing.

Mr. Scharf is a graduate of DePaul University, and prior to joining Goldstreet Partners, he spent four working for CBRE in Investment sales, and Maserati of Chicago as its head manager, where he provided great success to their sales and marketing initiatives. Prior to that, he gained vast experience at Tesla Motors.

Charlie's attributes much of his early growth in his career to varied internships and jobs with industry leaders providing him with invaluable practical knowledge, hands-on experience and the motivation to develop and implement successful sales strategies.

CEO David Goldberg commented, We are honored to have Charlie Scharf join the Goldstreet Team. As we continue to expand our reach and capabilities, we look forward to Charlie's growth within our organization.

About Goldstreet Partners:

Goldstreet is a full-service real estate company that focuses on the retail sector. They specialize in hospitality and lifestyle projects and work with both tenants and landlords to expand brands and lease space. At Goldstreet Partners, they pride themselves on understanding the needs of landlords, retailers, and hospitality brands.

Contact Goldstreet Partners

225 N Columbus Dr. Suite 100, Chicago, IL 60601

(847) 274-8504

info@goldstreetre.com

www.goldstreetre.com

For more information about Goldstreet Partners, contact the company here:

Goldstreet Partners

David Goldberg

(847) 274-8504

info@goldstreetre.com

225 N Columbus Dr. Suite 100

Chicago, IL 60601

SOURCE: Goldstreet Partners

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/628847/Charlie-Scharf-Joins-Goldstreet-Partners-and-Brings-Nearly-Five-Years-of-Investment-Sales-and-Commercial-Experience-to-the-Goldstreet-Team


(Newser)  Carol Dodge initially thought police had found the man who killed her daughter nearly 25 years ago. In fact, prosecutors convicted the wrong mana fact Dodge herself helped discover. Christopher Tapp, who did not match DNA evidence from the scene, was cleared after serving 20 years in prison for the June 1996 rape and murder of Idaho teen Angie Dodge, based on what he said was a coerced confession. Meanwhile, police identified a new suspect with help from a genetic genealogist. On Tuesday, all of the hard work paid off. Brian Leigh Dripps, 55, pleaded guilty to raping and killing the 18-year-old, who lived across the street from him in Idaho Falls. "All I really know is I went over there with the intent to rape her," Dripps told a Bonneville County court, per East Idaho News. "I didn't mean to murder her. I guess it just happened when I was there."

story continues below

Dripps, who was arrested in May 2019 after a discarded cigarette butt presented a DNA match, said he'd been using cocaine and alcohol that night and couldn't remember the murder itself. But "I had a pocket knife with me," he said. The teen had been stabbed to death in her apartment, per the Idaho Statesman. Her brother, Brent Dodge, said Tuesday was "a good day" in that it brought "some finality" to the case. "As we heard Brian Dripps plead guilty and admit to killing my sister and to raping her, there was some finality there that we've got the right guy this time," he said, adding the family was "looking forward to healing." The judge at Dripps' April 27 sentencing hearing is expected to follow the recommendation of 20 years to life outlined in the plea agreement. (Here's why Carol Dodge initially pored over the case.)
The views expressed by public comments are not those of this company or its affiliated companies. Please note by clicking on "Post" you acknowledge that you have read the TERMS OF USE and the comment you are posting is in compliance with such terms. Your comments may be used on air. Be polite. Inappropriate posts or posts containing offsite links, images, GIFs, inappropriate language, or memes may be removed by the moderator. Job listings and similar posts are likely automated SPAM messages from Facebook and are not placed by WFMZ-TV.

Election 2020 Family of Police Crackdowns Victim Urges Rooting Out Dictatorship

Mya Thwet Thwet Khine after being shot down on Tuesday.

Mya Thwet Thwet Khine, a 20-year-old student who was shot in the head by a police officer during an anti-coup protest in Naypyitaw on Tuesday, was pronounced brain dead that night. She has been put on life support but has no chance of recovery. She is currently in the intensive care unit at Naypyitaw 1,000-Bed Hospital.

The police shooting of the young protester, the most serious casualty of the protesters in demonstrations against the military coup, has drawn national outrage. Her grieving family talked to the media on Wednesday.

Media: Could you talk about the incident yesterday?

Mya Thadoe Nwe: Police and fire engines moved forward, and told protesters to step backward. We were watching the protest by the road. As police stepped back behind the line, protesters threw stones and water bottles at them. As you saw in the video online, we were hiding for fear that we would be hit. We heard gunshots, but we thought they were just shooting in the air. As we were about to leave, [my sister] was shot. I thought she just fainted from anger. She had said she felt dizzy, and only after her helmet was taken off and blood burst out, did I know that she had been shot. Then people came to help and took her [to the hospital]. I was so worried that I didnt even know how I got here [hospital].

Media: What is her current situation?

MTN: She only has a 5 percent of chance of recovering.

Media: How does your family feel about the incident?

MTN: Our hearts are broken. We only have our mother. Our father has already passed away. We have four siblings. I am the eldest, and she is the youngest. My mother cant stand that this has happened to her youngest daughter. Words fail to express how sad we are.

Media: What do you want to say to other people who are taking to streets?

MTN: We are fighting against the military dictatorship not for the interests of an individual person or party. I want people to know that the military dictatorship affects all the people, the entire nation. And I want this message to be spread to the world. It is not for the interests of individuals. The military dictatorship must be rooted out for the sake of future generations.

Media: What do you plan to do next?

MTN: I will continue to fight against the military dictatorship. To compensate for the suffering of my younger sister, I would like to urge all the people in the nation to continue to fight against the military dictatorship until it is rooted out. Please also make sure the world knows about this. And I would also like to urge the global community to help.

Media: What is your view of the military shooting on peaceful protesters?

MTN: As you can see in online videos, my sister and I were not on the middle street, and we didnt cross the line. We hadnt done anything to them. As we were about to leave, my younger sister [was hit] and just fell down.

Media: What medical treatment will be provided to your sister?

MTN: She was too seriously injured for surgery.

You may also like these stories:

Myanmars Ethnic States Rise Up in Protest Against Military Coup

Myanmar Anti-Coup Protesters Defy Ban, Take to Streets for Fifth Day

Central Bank of Myanmar Staff Join Anti-Coup Protests
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

Claims that forests "fall silent" because birds are killed in such large numbers during 1080 poison drops are unsupported by newly released research by Te Herenga WakaVictoria University of Wellington scientists.

Aerial 1080 (sodium monoflueoroacetate) operations control introduced mammals such as possums, rats, and stoats that prey on native species, including birds. The introduced mammals are also vectors of bovine tuberculosis and eat significant amounts of native vegetation.

Debate around continued use of 1080 often centers on its potential impact on non-targets, with some groups saying it kills large numbers of the very birds it aims to protect.

Associate Professor Stephen Hartley and Master's students Roald Bomans and Asher Cook, from the University's School of Biological Sciences, used bioacoustic monitoring to track the short-term general and species-specific trends of birdsong in treatment and non-treatment areas.

Their study was conducted for a five- to eight-week period before and after three different 1080 drops in the Aorangi and Southern Remutaka Ranges of the lower North Island in 2014 and 2017. Non-treatment sites in the Taraura and Northern Remutaka Ranges were studied for comparison.

The study's results are in the New Zealand Journal of Ecology.

Overall, the researchers found little evidence of short-term negative effects on native bird communities.

After the 2014 Aorangi operation, the mean prevalence of birdsong increased slightly in treatment sites, while it remained at near-identical levels in non-treatment sites during the same period. In the 2017 Aorangi operation, birdsong decreased in both treatment and non-treatment sites, but there was no evidence this was connected to 1080 in treatment sites.

In the 2017 Southern Remutaka operation, birdsong actually increased in treatment sites two to six weeks after 1080 was dropped, whereas birdsong decreased in non-treatment sites.

In all cases, both increases and decreases were minor.

Of nine native bird species studied for specific impact, five showed no impact, three showed increases in birdsong after at least one operation, and one (the tomtit) showed an increase, a decrease, and no change.

One introduced species, the chaffinch, showed a very slight decline after one of the three operations, which might plausibly be linked to 1080, as this species is known to eat grains, and the toxin is delivered via cereal baits.

Interpreting the findings, Associate Professor Hartley says: "We know from previous work that most native New Zealand forest birds benefit in the years immediately following effective mammal control. This study confirmed that modern 1080 operations do not cause forests to go silent, and that few, if any, native birds are suffering short-term adverse effects. Regrettably, without appropriate control of introduced mammals, population declines and extinctions of Aotearoa's native and unique biodiversity will continue."

Explore further Birdsong finds rhythm between science and art

More information: undefined undefined et al. Bioacoustic monitoring of lower North Island bird communities before and after aerial application of 1080, New Zealand Journal of Ecology (2020). undefined undefined et al. Bioacoustic monitoring of lower North Island bird communities before and after aerial application of 1080,(2020). DOI: 10.20417/nzjecol.45.2
A number of Maine families are appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court over a state law forbidding students who attend religious schools to receive public tuition funds.

Three families in Maine are seeking to challenge the state's tuition program contending that the exclusion of students attending religious schools from federal funding is "unconstitutional," Christian Headlines reported.

Under the Maine's Town Tuitioning Program, students in towns without their own high schools are provided with state tuition payments to be used at a nearby private or public schools, except religious schools, the Maine Public Radio says.

Tulsa World says that lawsuits have been filed over the years but the courts have always voted in favor of the state insisting that federal funding on religious education violates the separation of church and state.

The law which had been in effect since 1873 is upheld by the U.S. Circuit of Appeals.

Further to Christian Headlines report, lawyers of the Institute for Justice (IJ) and First Liberty Institute filed the lawsuit representing the three families.

The regulation is described as "unconstitutional" by IJ Senior Attorney Michael Bindas.

"By singling out religion-and only religion-for exclusion from its tuition assistance program, Maine violates the U.S. Constitution. Parents deserve the right to choose the school that is best for their children, whether it's a school that focuses on STEM instruction, offers language immersion, or provides robust instruction in the arts," he said.

"Maine correctly allows parents to choose such schools-or virtually any other school they think will best serve their kids. But the state flatly bans parents from choosing schools that offer religious instruction. That is unconstitutional," Bindas further stated.

The family of Amy and Dave Carson wanted to have their daughter attend Bangor Christian School, a private school that supports their Christian belief. But in accordance with the state's tuition program, their daughter is not eligible for tuition assistance. Maine's education department contends that while the school they have chosen is accredited, it is "sectarian" which instills "a Biblical worldview" to its students and holds a curriculum that provides religious instruction.

Angela and Troy Nelson, on the other hand, want to send their children to Temple Academy which is a tuition-approved secular educational institution but a Christian school. Thus, the Nelson children are also not entitled to receive the state's tuition payments since the school provides a faith-based instruction.

Atty. Lea Patterson of First Liberty Institute said that the state ""has rejected parental choice in education and allowed religious discrimination to persist" for 40 years.

"The Supreme Court should act now so yet another generation of schoolchildren is not deprived of desperately needed educational opportunity and the right to freely exercise their religion," Patterson argued.

According to Maine Public Radio, the courts rejected the appeals for the case last year but Bindas said it was given a new hope following a Supreme Court ruling in 2020 that allows Montana's tax credit program to be used for religious schools.
Popcorn and Inspiration: Salmon Fishing in the Yemen: The Power of Faith

PG-13 | 1h 47min | Comedy, Drama, Romance | 20 April 2012 (UK) When Salmon Fishing in the Yemen hit theaters in 2011, a New York subway poster advertising the lottery showed a Boeing 747 with the words Kevins Airline stenciled on its side. And a huge photo of Kevins face on the rear stabilizer fin. The caption read: That kind of rich.

In this delightful comedy-drama-romance, a wealthy sheik, upon falling in love with cold-water fly-fishing on his Scottish estate, decides that hell just construct himself a convenient fly-fishing river smack-dab in the middle of a Yemen deserthis homeland. What would you call that?

Dr. Alfred Jones (Ewan McGregor) points out the sheer folly of the sheiks vision, in Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. (CBS Films Inc.)

That kind of rich could have been the alternative title for Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. However, its not about the squandering of wealth that it first appears to be. Its about the project as a concrete manifestation of the sheiks deep and poetic understanding of faith.

If You Build It They Will Come

When the British military inadvertently blows up a mosque in Afghanistan, the prime ministers top spin doctor, Patricia Maxwell (Kristin Scott Thomas), immediately orders her team to dig up a good news story from the Middle East. Said story is to be exploited into a warm, fuzzy diversion of public attention away from said mosque fiasco.

Patricia Maxwell (Kristin Scott Thomas) and Sheik Muhammed (Amr Waked, R) in Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. (CBS Films Inc.)

The sheiks intention to reconstruct his beloved salmon-fishing milieu in the Yemen desert is quickly sniffed out. He claims that, more than anything else, its an offering of healing, peace, and spiritual uplifting for his troubled people. Warm and fuzzy perfection!

Exceedingly uptight scientist Dr. Fred Jones (Ewan McGregor, never better) is a fisheries expert. Spin-doc Patricia saddles him with overseeing the salmon-fishing project, to which he is at first vehemently opposed due to its staggering, on-the-page, logistical and scientific impossibility.

Dr. Alfred Jones (Ewan McGregor), a fisheries expert, explains why its impossible to transplant a Scottish fly-fishing stream in the middle of the desert, in Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. (CBS Films Inc.)

Aided in his initial foot-dragging efforts by the sheiks comely representative Harriet (Emily Blunt), Fred soon finds himself eventually swayed by the sheiks infectious charm, warming to the plan and, of course, also eventually warming to Harriet.

Emily Blunt plays a consultant who falls for Dr. Jones in Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. (CBS Films Inc.)

The sheik, charismatically played by Amr Waked (whom producer Paul Webster considers the George Clooney of the Middle East, according to the press notes), is a man of moral stature, a philosopher, and a keen observer of life. He ruminates, Fishermen only care about patience, tolerance, and humility. (Renowned fly-fishing author John Gierach would definitely have something hilarious to say about that.) But the sheik hopes that the Yemen locals will possibly benefit from such a mindset, since we see them forever patrolling about, brandishing AK-47s, and yelling a lot.

Harriet (Emily Blunt) and Fred (Ewan McGregor) starting to feel a spark, in the comedy-drama-romance Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. (CBS Films Inc.)

The Power of Faith

The acting in the film is all-around stellar. Its a cast of stars who excel at comedy as well as drama, and Amr Waked is a revelation.

Lasse Hallstrom, whos helmed such films as Whats Eating Gilbert Grape, masterfully steers the subtle and very funny rhythms of European humor. He also engineers very moving dramatic scenes between the male and female leads, capitalizing on their powerful chemistry.

Emily Blunt and Ewan McGregor play a consultant and a fisheries expert who help realize a sheiks vision of fly-fishing in the desert, in the comedy-drama-romance Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. (CBS Films Inc.)

Hallstrom also underscores the films theme of the power of faith with various interchanges between no-faith Fred and the faithful sheik. Remember, this Fred were talking about is a secular guy, an atheist. He needs to take baby steps toward faith, and the sheik helps him do that. For example, Dr. Fred also loves fly-fishing, and the sheik points out, hilariously, that Freds fishing fun (standing in a stream for hours, waving a stick, with no guarantees) is not too terribly distant from  ahem  faith?

Amr Waked (L) and Ewan McGregor discuss matters of faith, in Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. (CBS Films Inc.)

Furthermore, theres the example of the dilemma of stocking the salmon run with farmed fish, which most likely lack their original wild instinct to head upstream to spawn. Freds hunch that its still deeply in their nature to run is pointed out again as being closely related to faith.



Finally, the entire apparently cockamamie project is one huge act of faithwhat else could it be? There are always setbacks, but one must demonstrate faith by persistence. At one point, the sheik wonders aloud, after a setback perpetrated by angry countrymen who dont yet understand his vision, whether his project glorifies God or man.

We already know. Weve seen the warmth of his hospitality, the depth of his philanthropy, the extent of his faith, and know his grand gesture to have enriched our lives. We know it by the laughter, tears, and the renewed faith in humanitys goodness that we feel.

Harriet (Emily Blunt) and Fred (Ewan McGregor) observing a modern-day miracle of sorts, in Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. (CBS Films Inc.)

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

Director: Lasse Hallstrom

Cast: Ewan McGregor, Emily Blunt, Kristin Scott Thomas, Amr Waked, Catherine Steadman, Tom Mison, Rachael Stirling, Tom Beard

Running Time: 1 hour, 47 minutes

Rating: PG-13

Release Date: April 20, 2012 (UK)

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Experts from across the world will discuss cybersecurity, supply chain, health, civil-military relations, intelligence and the effect of COVID-19 on each at the 2021 Institute for Leadership and Strategic Studies (ILSS) Symposium.

UNG, in partnership with the Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute and the Army Strategist Association, will host the fifth ILSS Symposium, "Implications of the COVID-19 Pandemic on National Security," as a hybrid event April 7-8.

"With any international crisis, nation-states are concerned with the impact on the security of their nations, which ultimately translates to the security and well-being of their people," Keith Antonia, associate vice president of military programs, said. "The pandemic has been presenting highly complex problems for leaders in the private and public sectors to identify and resolve within the interconnected realms of geopolitics, health, economics, technology, and human security. This symposium is designed to contribute to the discussion relating to these problems."

Registration is open on the ILSS Symposium webpage. Participants may either attend the free symposium in-person or online via Zoom. The in-person option will accommodate 50 people with COVID-19 risk-mitigation measures in place.

The main speakers for the event are:

Jason Schuette, founder of Spectrum Advocates LLC. His topic is "Cybercriminal exploitation in the COVID-19 environment."

Laura J. Lane, chief corporate affairs, communications and sustainability officer for UPS. Her topic is "Implications of the pandemic on the global supply chain."

Lindy Heinecken, professor and chair of the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. Her topic is "The paradox of framing COVID-19 as a national security threat."

Raina MacIntyre, professor of global biosecurity and Australian government National Health and Medical Research Council Principal Research Fellow at the Kirby Institute at the University of South Wales and adjunct professor at Arizona State University.

Matthew Kralovec, director of Hawkeye360 ISR solutions. His topic is "Protecting the Galapagos in your PJs: impact and opportunity from COVID-19."

"We are honored to host experts with deep knowledge in these fields," Dr. Edward Mienie, executive director of UNG's strategic and security studies program and partnerships and associate professor of strategic and security studies, said.

Panel presentations, which will be a maximum of 20 minutes each, are also part of the symposium. They will be selected from abstracts, which should be submitted by March 1. Those interested in serving as a panelists should email 500-word abstracts and 150-word short biographies to keith.antonia@ung.edu. International and U.S. faculty and students, both graduate and undergraduate, may submit.

A fiction and creative nonfiction story contest tying in with the symposium theme will be judged by UNG faculty members Dr. Renee Bricker, Dr. Bibek Chand and Dr. Donna Gessell. Cash prizes will be given to the winning author and two runners-up. The winner will have travel and lodging costs covered to attend the symposium.

For more details on the writing contest, visit the ILSS Symposium webpage.
Feb. 10, 2021 - A new paper published online in the Annals of the American Thoracic Society describes a "virtual" recovery program for sepsis patients that may also help post-COVID-19 patients and survivors of other serious illnesses.

In "Translating Post-Sepsis Care to Post-COVID Care: The Case for a Virtual Recovery Program," Stephanie Parks Taylor, MD, Department of Internal Medicine, Atrium Health, Charlotte, North Carolina, and co-authors describe a model of virtual care they developed and successfully implemented for patients who have left the hospital after being treated for sepsis. They also address ways that this model of care may help severe COVID-19 patients who have survived their illness but need continuing care.

"Our initial health services research indicated that recommended post-sepsis care practices were inconsistently applied for sepsis survivors, but the application of these practices was associated with fewer rehospitalizations and deaths at 90 days post-discharge," said Dr. Taylor. "We decided to engage a multidisciplinary stakeholder group to develop a mechanism to deliver best-practice post-sepsis care. Given the challenges many patients experience returning for face-to-face visits after critical illness, the virtual transition program emerged as an ideal approach that combined quality, patient-centeredness and scalability."

This multicomponent sepsis transition and recovery program, known as "STAR," is conducted virtually by a specialized nurse navigator, who provides best-practice care for high-risk sepsis survivors post-hospital discharge. The nurse navigator helps deliver care through low-technology telehealth methods, including electronic health records (EHRs), secure messaging services and telephone. The sepsis nurse navigators monitor and support patients from a centralized, geographically distant location.

"While there is still a lot to learn about COVID-19 survivorship, based on what we currently know we can assume COVID survivors experience many of the same issues as recovering sepsis patients," said Dr. Taylor. "The STAR program leverages a virtual platform that addresses the challenges of care delivery in a pandemic setting."

According to Dr. Taylor, these challenges include strain on the health care system due to a rapid surge in survivors and reduced access to traditional primary care follow-up due to physical distancing.

Dr. Taylor and colleagues cite a number of factors that they have found important to successfully implementing their program:

Adequate human, financial and technological resources. Upfront funding and adequate training for the navigators are critical for success. Navigators should be trained in a number of areas, such as sepsis education, communication skills and cultural awareness.

A method to identify high-risk patients. The team developed and deployed a data-driven, EHR-embedded algorithm and risk models to identify patients at high risk of post-discharge death or rehospitalization.

Robust and effective operational processes. Among the additional elements that should be part of the program's operation are: optimization of medications, including frequent reassessment and adjustment of dosages; screening and early intervention for functional, cognitive and mental health problems, which are common among sepsis survivors and appear to be even worse for COVID-19 survivors; symptom monitoring to ensure that new infections do not occur, and to look for signs that other pre-existing conditions are worsening (such as weight gain for heart failure patients) or indications of adverse drug reactions (such as bleeding for patients receiving anticoagulants), and establishing goals of care, in partnership with patients, and communicating this information to the patient's primary care physician. STAR navigators are supported by a hospital-based physician (hospitalist) who reviews cases and discusses issues that arise.

Dr. Taylor notes that Atrium Health is an integrated health system, and that home health or community paramedicine providers can be activated for evaluation or treatment in patients' homes. "Whether the implementing site is an integrated health system or not, programs will need to establish robust communication pathways for efficient exchange of information between navigators and relevant partners," she said. "I think a potential misstep could be implementing a transition program that identifies problems among sepsis survivors but lacks an efficient process for responding effectively to those problems."

Additionally, much of the home care and some of the post-acute skilled nursing facilities are integrated within the health system, but many are not. Dr. Taylor and co-author Marc A. Kowalkowski, PhD, are now studying how to overcome barriers to providing extra support to post-acute care settings, as these patients are particularly vulnerable after hospital discharge.

The authors add that there are a number of advantages of a virtual navigator platform for sepsis transition and recovery:

Improved access and adherence to follow-up. This type of program can help ensure sepsis survivors get follow-up care, which is frequently not provided or easily accessible. It may also reduce rural, socioeconomic and disability disparities.

Frequent reassessment and adjustment of patients' care plan. This is made possible by virtual visits with nurse navigators, who can provide long-term follow up at short intervals. The STAR navigator program continues for 90 days after hospital discharge, and patients with persistent challenges have the most frequent navigator contact.

Consistent "check-ins" from a familiar health professional may have psychological benefits. The nurse navigator can help alleviate the stress disorders that are common among sepsis survivors.

The program is cost-effective and scalable. This model of care delivery enables one STAR navigator to accept 20-30 new patients a month and provide 90 days of support.

Dr. Taylor concludes, "Since severe COVID can be considered a type of sepsis, COVID patients are entering the STAR program if they meet its eligibility criteria. Currently, post-COVID patients are receiving the same elements of care as sepsis survivors, with special attention to respiratory symptoms and associated complications. Part of our research involves evaluating the extent to which post-COVID recovery differs from non-COVID sepsis recovery, so we hope to have data to determine whether there will be factors that are unique to COVID survivorship."

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President Joe Biden on Wednesday ordered new sanctions against the military regime in Myanmar, taking action after the military this month staged a coup in the Southeast Asian country and arrested de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi and other senior politicians.

Biden said he was issuing an executive order that will prevent Myanmar's generals from accessing $1 billion in assets in the United States. Biden added that more measures are to come.

'The military must relinquish power it seized and demonstrate respect for the will of the people of Burma,' Biden said.

Biden said the new sanctions will allow his administration to freeze U.S. assets that benefit Myanmar's military leaders while maintaining support for health care programs, civil society groups and other areas that benefit the country's people. He said the administration planned to identify specific targets of the sanctions later this week.

'The people of Burma are making their voices heard, and the world is watching,' Biden said, using an alternate name for Myanmar. 'We'll be ready to impose additional measures and we'll continue to work with our international partners to urge other nations to join us in these efforts.'

Warning: At the White House, Joe Biden said: 'We'll be ready to impose additional measures and we'll continue to work with our international partners to urge other nations to join us in these efforts.'

Takeover: This was how the military moved in on the elected government in Mandalay, Myanmar, on February 2

Before Biden spoke from the White House, large crowds demonstrating against the military takeover again took to the streets in Myanmar, even after security forces ratcheted up the use of force against them and raided the headquarters of Suu Kyi's political party.

It remains to be seen what, if any, impact the U.S. action will have on Myanmar's military regime. Many of the military leaders are already under sanctions because of attacks against the Muslim Rohingya minority.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a supporter of Suu Kyi, said he appreciated Biden's 'ongoing engagement with Congress on prompt and practical steps to restore democracy in Burma. I hope all nations that respect democracy and the rule of law will join the U.S. in imposing meaningful costs and accountability on the junta.'

White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters shortly before Biden's announcement that 'there's certainly a recognition that this will need to be a coordinated effort' with the international community to press change in Myanmar.

The U. N. Human Rights Council was set to hold a special session on Myanmar on Thursday.

The protesters in Myanmar are demanding that power be restored to Suu Kyi's deposed civilian government. They're also seeking freedom for her and other governing party members detained by the military after it blocked the new session of Parliament on Feb. 1.

Witnesses estimated that tens of thousands of protesters, if not more, turned out Wednesday in Yangon and Mandalay, the country's biggest cities. Rallies also took place in the capital, Naypyitaw, and elsewhere.

Protests: Demonstrators flash a three-fingered symbol of resistance against the military coup and shout slogans calling for the release of detained Myanmar State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi during a protest in Mandalay, Myanmar

The military cited the government's failure to act on unsubstantiated allegations of widespread voter fraud as part of the reason for the takeover and declaration of a one-year state of emergency. The generals maintain the actions are legally justified, and have cited an article in the constitution that allows the military to take over in times of emergency.

Suu Kyi's party has said it's effectively a coup. The Biden administration also was quick to officially determine the takeover was a coup, setting the stage for Wednesday's announcement.

The U.S, first imposed sanctions in 1998 after the military there violently suppressed a protest. These were tightened over the following decades because of what Washington deemed human rights violations by the ruling military regime.

The restrictions were gradually eased in response to reforms and after the release of Suu Kyi from house arrest in 2010.

But in 2019, President Donald Trump introduced new sanctions against Myanmar's military leaders over the killings of Rohingya Muslims.
The Ebonyi State Government has secured a total of 3,500 doses of anti-rabies vaccine for dogs and cats to prevent and eradicate rabies across communities in the state.

The state Commissioner for Agriculture and Natural Resources, Moses Nomie, stated this during the launch of a free anti-rabies vaccination campaign on Wednesday in Abakaliki.

Mr Nomie said the programme, in collaboration with the Federal Government through the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, would get rid of rabies by the year 2030.

The theme for the two-week anti-rabies vaccination campaign is: End Rabies in Ebonyi; Collaborate, Vaccinate.

The commissioner explained that the state government was collaborating with the federal government to ensure that dogs in rural and urban areas of the state were captured during the exercise to prevent rabies.

The Director, Veterinary Services Department in the state Ministry of Agriculture, Ephraim Nwanga, said the programme was a welcome development. He expressed hope that it would achieve 70 per cent coverage.

I believe the exercise will achieve 70 per cent coverage and once it is achieved, the society will live without rabies; and even when bitten, the virus will not get to the level of community transmission.

We are going to continue the vaccination of dogs and cats till 2023, Mr Nwanga said.

IDSR

The director said the World Health Organisation (WHO) included rabies in the Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response (IDSR) list as a matter of public health importance.

He said the programme was being co-sponsored by WHO, World Organisation for Animal Health and the Nigerian government.

Meanwhile, the Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Agriculture, Rita Okoro, described rabies as one of the deadly viral diseases that affect human health, transmitted by dogs and cats.

According to her, each dose of the vaccine administered on a dog is expected to last between two and three years.

She urged the public to join in the fight against rabies by taking advantage of the programme to bring their pets for the vaccine.

We are creating awareness on rabies disease, targeting dogs and cats both in rural and urban areas.

The Vice President of Dog Breeders, Ebonyi Chapter, Victor Chidiebere, commended the federal and state governments for the free anti-rabies vaccine.

He said it takes a lot to care for dogs. The vaccine will go a long way to give relief to dog and cat owners in the state.

I am impressed with the programme and wish they will continue to assist breeders with more than one pet.

A dog owner, Kenneth Nwaoba, appreciated the governments and the partners for the exercise and urged them to sustain it to eradicate rabies, noting that this is because dog breeding is a lucrative venture.

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(NAN)
Clashes and heavy shelling near Aleppo has led to fourteen injuries, reports SANA.

Fourteen civilians were injured, including five children and three women, due to clashes and exchanged shelling between Turkish occupying forces, supported by their mercenaries of terrorist organizations, and the SDF militia in the western countryside of al-Bab in the Aleppo countryside.

Local sources told SANA that fierce clashes with heavy weapons erupted on Monday evening between the Turkish occupation, its mercenaries and the SDF militia. The occupying forces launched artillery attacks on a number of villages in the vicinity of Manbij city in the northeastern countryside of Aleppo, causing material damage to locals houses and agricultural fields.

The repeated clashes between SDF and the Turkish occupying forces in the countryside of Aleppo, Raqqa and Hassakeh over the last months, have resulted in martyrdom and injury of dozens of civilians and caused huge damage to private and public properties.

This article was edited by The Syrian Observer. The Syrian Observer has not verified the content of this story. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author.
David Bowie's daughter Alexandria Zahra Jones, known as Lexi, took to Instagram on Tuesday to share an unseen snap of her father at her 13th birthday party.

In the sweet photo, the late rock star was seen sat alone at a table decorated with paper plates and cups that were ready for Lexi, now 20, and her friends.

Looking to the camera, David wore a serious expression as he held up a single orange balloon for an amusing tableau.

Dad duties: David Bowie's daughter Lexi Jones, 20, shared a sweet unseen snap of the late rock star at her 13th birthday party on

Gushing about her famous father in the photo, Lexi wrote in the caption: 'Rad Dad.'

Lexi is a budding artist based in California and is selling her artworks on Depop for up to $300.

She is the child of the Space Oddity hitmaker and Somali fashion model Iman, who first met in 1990 at a dinner party.

After her birth, it was said that she helped her father put his workaholic attitude 'into perspective' and give him the will to stay healthy after his first heart attack.

Happy memories: Lexi was born in the year 2000 to David and Somali supermodel Iman, who were happily married until his shock death from cancer in 2016

David also had a son, Duncan Jones, from a previous marriage while Iman shares her daughter Zulekha Haywood with a former love.

It has been five years since David shockingly passed away at the age of 69, on January 10, 2016, after an 18-month battle with cancer.

Iman married the English rocker in a romantic ceremony in Lausanne, Switzerland in April 1992 which was later formalised in a wedding hosted in Florence in June.

She previously revealed how she did not want Lexi to follow her into modelling or becoming a superstar child of a famous couple, like many of her peers.

Carving her own path: Lexi is a budding artist based in California and is selling her artworks on Depop for up to $300

In a 2018 interview with Net A Porter, Iman, 64, said: 'Every agency, every designer, called me to say: "If she wants to, we'd love for her to model for us."

'I said: "No, she doesn't." I know why they wanted to her to model  it's because she is David Bowie's daughter.

'She says I am overprotective. But I told her, this can all wait, it isn't going anywhere.

'Have a life that is private while you can, because one day soon it is going to be public, so enjoy this.'

Iman and Lexi remain very close and back in May last year, Lexi shared an emotional post after revealing she hadn't seen her mum for six months.

Lexi was stuck in Los Angeles during the coronavirus pandemic while her supermodel mother was at her home in New York.

In a Mother's Day post, Bowie's youngest child appealed to others to follow the lockdown guidelines so she could see her family again soon.

'Everyone please stay inside I haven't seen my mom for 6 months because we live on opposite coasts and it is very difficult to leave ny right now but I'm a child and I miss her dearly so pls be party poopers this one time so it doesn't take 2 f***ing years to see her again thank you!' she wrote.

The two were later reunited in New York.
Thought world tours were off the agenda? Think again.

I discovered the joys of visiting countries around the world via incredible online Airbnb experiences.

I Zoomed off to Italy to make pasta with a grandma, listened to a monk chanting in Japan, took a leopard safari in Sri Lanka, toured Paris and made chocolate with a chocolate-maker in Jamaica. Read on to lap-up my laptop adventures...

Creating handmade pasta with an Italian grandma

Nonna Nerina Tamanti (left) and her granddaughter, Chiara Nicolanti (right), host an online pasta-making class

If you want to learn how to make pasta by hand, then turn to the ultimate teachers  Italian grandmas.

Handily, a few are willing to pass on their culinary wisdom via Airbnb experience 'Pasta with the Grandmas'.

Four years ago mother, model and actress Chiara Nicolanti set up a pasta-making Airbnb experience with her grandma, Nonna Nerina Tamanti [Nonna is Italian for grandma], who'd been making pasta for decades.

It was a huge hit, with people coming from far and wide to Nonna Nerina's home in the village of Palombara Sabina, just north of Rome, hungry to learn how to turn eggs and flour into the likes of gourmet fettuccine, spaghetti and ravioli.

The pandemic-friendly online version, which sees bookings distributed between Nonna Nerina and a handful of other grandmas in the village, is also extremely popular and, I can reveal, great fun, very satisfying and impressively staged, with multiple camera angles.

On the left are Ted's eggs and flour at the beginning of Nonna's pasta-making class. Pictured right is the finished dish

The sessions are filmed in the basement of Nonna Nerina's house, which used to be a public winepress room and where, said Chiara, 'the community used to meet, share stories, bring food, and recover during the bombardment in the Second World War... and the grandmas can still remember it'.

Our session was hosted by Chiara, 33, and Nonna Nerina, 84, herself. Chirpy Chiara translated Nonna's pointers and occasionally made her wear silly wigs - and the pair constantly cheerled our efforts.

And the result? Eye-opening. I'm a hopeless cook, genuinely, yet after 90 minutes with this octogenarian oracle and her effervescent offspring, I managed to conjure up fresh pasta that wasn't just edible, but actually quite delicious.

'Pasta with the Grandmas' costs 31pp. Visit www.airbnb.co.uk/experiences/1610894.

En-chanting Zoom call with a monk and a cellist

Airbnb's 'Healing Concert Cellist & Japanese Monk' experience is hosted by Kuniatsu Suzuki in Osaka (left) and cellist Dorette Roos (right) in Cape Town

There can be few more en-chanting ways to start the day than by listening to a Japanese monk reciting mantras accompanied by beautiful solo cello playing.

I booked the Airbnb 'Healing Concert Cellist & Japanese Monk' experience and opted for a 7am Saturday slot, hoping it would soothe a mind that whirs frantically from dad duties to work duties and back again without much respite.

It was definitely effective, even dampening the buzz two cups of strong Peruvian coffee had given me.

The session is hosted by Kuniatsu Suzuki in Osaka and the cello playing is courtesy of the supremely talented Dorette Roos, a former Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra member who joins the session from her Cape Town home.

A screenshot of Ted's session with Kuniatsu, who at this point was describing an ancient piece of Buddhist scripture

The ever-joyful Kuniatsu encouraged the group, which included participants in San Francisco, Seattle and the Philippines, to chant along with him. But I, along with others, opted to just let the melodious chants and music wash over me.

If you do book it try not to fall asleep, because Kuniatsu, pen and notepad at the ready, asks each participant in turn for their reaction afterwards.

Healing Concert Cellist & Japanese Monk costs 5pp. Visit www.airbnb.co.uk/experiences/2038668.

The 'Fabulous day in Paris with a Parisian' session is run by actual street-tour guides

Zoom into the City of Lights

An Airbnb experience called 'A fabulous day in Paris with a Parisian' you'd think might be setting itself up for a fall.

After all, how can a Zoom call recreate being in the City of Lights, with its crazy traffic; beguiling architecture; buzzy bars and bistros; vibrant markets and aromas of coffee, baguettes and cheese.

Obviously, it can't  but it does offer up an entertaining and interesting taster of the city for those who've never been and a reminder of what makes it so great for those who are missing it. Which is most of us.

The experience is run by a group of actual Parisian tour guides who cleverly deploy short videos and photos they've taken to help with their fun-filled on-screen jaunts to some of Paris's most enticing sights.

Where the Zoom group goes is decided by a vote during the session.

With our guide, Antonio Montani, we ascended the Eiffel Tower, swung by the Palais-Royal and had a nose around an open market, learning interesting nuggets of information as we went. Tres bon!

A fabulous day in Paris with a Parisian costs 12pp. Visit www.airbnb.co.uk/experiences/1657932.

Former BBC correspondent Nick Davis, pictured, is now an artisanal chocolate-maker in Jamaica

A sweet life in Jamaica

The penultimate stop on my 'world tour' was Jamaica, for a mouthwatering experience with artisanal chocolate-maker Nick Davis.

He's a former BBC correspondent who now runs Jamaican gourmet chocolate firm One One Cacao, and he was a wonderfully witty and energetic host.

Derby-born Nick hosts his session  'Chocolate Origins & Create with a Maker'  from his cottage on the edge of the Blue Mountains, overlooking the capital, Kingston.

He makes his chocolate at a small sea-front factory, a mile down the road from Ian Fleming's GoldenEye villa.

Nick gave us a brief history of Jamaica before we tackled the practical part of the experience  transforming a bar of chocolate into our own creation by melting it down and 'tempering it'.

This involved freezing it with an extra ingredient to personalise it  we chose salted Spanish almonds.

Nick said: 'When it comes out of the fridge or freezer it's like the chocolate was just made, we've in essence "reanimated it".'

He was spot-on, our bar had been transformed from very good to heavenly.

The final part was a quick photo tour of the One One Cacao plantation during which we learned how chocolate is produced, including the vital part the local midges play in the process.

Nick said: 'Our industry is tiny, but the unique genetics found here in Jamaica are some of the best in the world. We have 3,000 farmers, we've entered the prestigious Academy of Chocolate Awards using beans from three of them and won twice. It's that special. '

'Chocolate Origins & Create with a Maker' costs 11pp. Visit www.airbnb.co.uk/experiences/1701766.

Leopard safari guide Dhanula Jayasinghe

A spot-on leopard safari

It's impossible not to be wildly enthusiastic about the 'Go On a Leopard Safari in Sri Lanka' Airbnb experience.

Within seconds I was energised by host Dhanula Jayasinghe's infectious enthusiasm for his subject matter, namely the leopards that roam the Yala and Wilpattu national parks, where he works as a safari guide for luxury tented camp company Leopard Trails.

Dhanula, who has a degree in zoology, trained us to tell the difference between leopards, jaguars and cheetahs, showed us some quite remarkable photos and video footage he and his colleagues had taken of leopards fighting buffalo, wild pigs  and each other  and taught us the art of distinguishing one leopard from another.

And to round it off came some intriguing leopard stories. It was a bit like being in an interactive wildlife documentary. Thoroughly enjoyable.

Go On a Leopard Safari in Sri Lanka costs 11pp. Visit www.airbnb.co.uk/experiences/1707300.
Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US

Iran ready to help improve the defense capability of Syria

European Parliament head proposes to strengthen sanctions on Russia

UK PM gets married in London

Armenia reports COVID-19 new 81 cases: for people die

EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia

2 people die in Armenia road accident

Nigeria: Students taken hostage a month ago are released

61 quakes recorded in Congo per day

Syrian MFA: EU lost credibility due to blind obedience to US policy

Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack

Mher Grigoryan: Clarification of border points is possible only after withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops from Armenia

Suspicious deal: Whether there was profit from buying DNA IDs?

Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war

4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack

Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities

Kocharyan: I have to ask people how it happened that overwhelming majority elected this leader

Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country

Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia

US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs

Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners

Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions

Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US

Iran intensifies its diplomacy amid Armenia-Azerbaijan border tensions

Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes

Lukashenko accuses West of destabilizing situation in Belarus

Armenia Central Electoral Commission chief on snap elections: No legal basis for postponing, suspending any function

Armenias Pashinyan is met by Yerevan district residents chanting against him

We are ready to be fully engaged in negotiation process to resolve Karabakh issue, says Armenia acting PM

Armenia ex-President Kocharyan gives interview to Russia TV channel

Armenia acting premier: We are ready to start withdrawing troops at any moment

Canada MFA expresses concern over 6 Armenian soldiers capture by Azerbaijan troops

There are omissions in registration documents of political forces that applied to Armenia Central Electoral Commission

Armenia Central Electoral Commission chief: There is activeness in Yerevan for the past day or two

Three new cases of coronavirus reported in Artsakh

Group of US Congress members threaten Azerbaijans Aliyev regime with sanctions

Chicago mayor is sued for allegedly refusing interview with white reporter

Iran exports oil to US for first time after long interval

"Armenia" bloc top 50 MP candidates are announced

42 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia

Sri Lanka public beach is covered in charred plastic pellets due to fire in container ship

US preparing list of targeted sanctions on Belarus authorities

China believes it will own America by 2035, Biden says

15 al-Shabab militants killed in Somalia

Newspaper: Armenia political forces that applied for running in election impatiently await CEC decision

Newspaper: Changes are expected in Artsakh

California prisoner who considers himself Satanist beheads cellmate, dismembers his body

Newspaper: Armenia acting PM's "mutually beneficial" proposal to collapse state system?

Armenia National Security Service Reserve Officers' Union members meet with His Holiness Karekin II

EU is ready to help Armenia and Azerbaijan with border delimitation and demarcation

ARF-D member on Nikol Pashinyan: 103 years ago Armenia's founding fathers would have executed him for treason

Iran President hails brotherly ties with Azerbaijan

Robert Kocharyan on years of his leadership in Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia

Situation on Armenian-Azerbaijani border is still tense, more on COVID-19 in Armenia, May 28 digest

"Armenia" alliance of political parties paying tribute to founder of First Republic Aram Manukyan

Yerevan.today: Armenia acting PM not greeted at ruling party's headquarters, citizens call him 'capitulator'

Russia MOD reports on maintenance of ceasefire regime in Nagorno-Karabakh

Armenia acting MOD meets with Russian counterpart in Moscow

Armenia 2nd President: I see possibility of restoring borders of Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast

We can provide our army with some key, modernized weapons, says Armenia ex-President Kocharyan

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan: Captives issue is not one that any opposition force can resolve

OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs release statement on detention of 6 Armenian servicemen by Azerbaijan

Armenian acting Deputy PM: Discussion on issues possible only after withdrawal of Azeri troops from Armenia's territory

Armenia acting PM on Syunik roads, Russian military posts: This is only place where there are working nuances

Armenia acting PM: Process of return of POWs will intensify after upcoming elections

Putin congratulates Aliyev on Republic Day

Josep Borrell: A group of EU Ministers will visit Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan

Armenia acting PM: We're not going to escalate situation for 30% of Sev Lake

Armenia 3rd President visits Vanadzor, pays tribute to heroes of Battle of Gharakilisa (PHOTOS)

Armenia ex-President Kocharyan lays flowers at Battle of Karakilisa memorial (PHOTOS)

Armenia acting PM: Solution to captives issue is matter of time

Shoygu to Harutyunyan: Russia, Armenia strengthen military cooperation

Armenia acting premier: We are 100% honest toward our country

Artsakh President pays tribute at Stepanakert memorial, Shushi Tank-Monument

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan on Meghri corridor plan: Not beneficial to us now to discuss it as "corridor"

Acting PM: "Cement," "fittings" were stolen while constructing Armenia state "building"

Two new cases of coronavirus reported in Artsakh

Catholicos of All Armenians visits Sardarapat Memorial, again separate from state officials

MOD dismisses Azerbaijan statement on Armenia army firing toward Nakhchivan

Jerusalem Post: Israel prepares for a new war with Hamas

France, UN World Food Programme partner to support displaced people in Armenia

Armenia ex-President Kocharyan: Today we are not full-fledged negotiating party

Norwegian prime minister opposes series of NATO reforms

Armenia deputy FM briefs UN, Red Cross leaders on consequences of Azerbaijan aggression against Artsakh

NATO Secretary-General: Afghans must take full responsibility for peace and stability in their country

104 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia

Armenia acting premier: Our sovereignty, independence cannot be subject of discussion

Karabakh state-finance minister announces resignation

Artsakh MFA: Sardarapat victory has inspired all Armenians for over a century

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan: In contrast to kneeling, disgraceful authorities of the day, we have determination

Armenia President: Today we stand on threshold of Sardarapat of morality, dignity

Catholicos of All Armenians: Our people shall find strength to overcome this ordeal as well

Armenia First Republic Day event is held under very modest conditions

Newspaper: Armenia authorities claiming to be popular close off First Republic Day event to public

Armenia ex-President Sargsyan: Now or never!

Armenia President, then acting premier arrive at Sardarapat Memorial

Newspaper: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan's new "cleverness?"

France ambassador: I wish Armenia to be able to live its independence in peace, prosperity

Bashar al-Assad wins Syria presidential election

Reporters not allowed entering Sardarapat Memorial of Armenia
STOCKHOLM, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Elkem has signed an agreement to acquire a brand-new plant near Lyon in France, custom-designed for producing highly specialised organo-functional silicones (OFS). The acquisition underpins Elkem's strategy of growth and specialisation.

The purchase price is in the low double-digit millions of euros, and production is expected by the end of the year.

"With this acquisition, Elkem continues to deliver on our growth and specialisation strategy. This new plant will enable us to more quickly extend our offerings within advanced high value products for attractive specialty markets, further strengthening our position as one of the world's leaders in fully integrated silicone manufacturing," says Michael Koenig, CEO of Elkem.

Organo-functional silicones combine the superior performance of silicones with the functionality, compatibility and potential reactivity of organic materials. The processing is advanced and gives OFS products with highly specialised properties.

"Elkem already has a broad global offering of advanced silicone solutions, ranging from commodities to specialties. We have recently complemented our portfolio of specialties with the acquisitions of Polysil and Basel Chemie. The acquisition of this new OFS plant provides the technology and capacity to further accelerate our growth, particularly within release coatings, personal care and other specialty markets. It is a good example of how we position for the future, in a complex market environment," says Frederic Jacquin, SVP Elkem Silicones.

The OFS plant is located near Elkem Silicones' existing activities south of Lyon, including both the upstream plant in Roussillon as well as the production site and R&D center in Saint-Fons.

"This acquisition reinforces Elkem's solid footprint in France. The new production capacity is in line with our strong commitment to support our development in the Auvergne-Rhone-Alpes region," says Bertrand Mollet, EMEA Region Director Elkem Silicones.

CONTACT:

Laurent Leservoisier, Elkem Silicones

General Counsel & Communication Director

+ (33) 4 72 13 19 00

laurent.leservoisier@elkem.com

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

https://news.cision.com/elkem-silicon/r/elkem-acquires-new-plant-in-france-to-accelerate-growth-in-specialised-silicones,c3283999

The following files are available for download:
Lt. Governor John Fettermans announcement Monday that hes running for U.S. Senate has prompted critics to raise the issue of a 2013 incident in which he pulled a gun on an unarmed Black man.

Fetterman was the mayor of Braddock at the time, and, according to local news reports, he thought he heard several gunshots near his home just before the jogger ran past. He defended his response to the incident in a statement Tuesday night in which he said that he made a split-second decision to intervene for the safety and protection of my community.

Fetterman made sure his son was safe, called 911 and then got into his truck and went after the man, according to a 2013 WTAE report. When he found the jogger, he pulled a gun on the man and ordered him to wait for authorities.

In the 2013 interview with WTAE, the jogger, identified as Chris Miyares, said he believed the gunshots were actually bottle rockets behind the nearby library. He also said Fetterman pointed the shotgun directly at his chest.

Fetterman refuted the claim at the time and said he simply showed the gun to make sure Miyares could see he was armed. He said the guns safety was on and did not have a round chambered.

In 2016, Fetterman spoke to Philly Voice and said part of his decision came from fear stemming from the then-recent Sandy Hook shooting.

I know people have been shopping this around to the press, but this had nothing to do with race, Fetterman told Philly Voice in 2016. The runner could have been my mother for all I knew, thanks to what the jogger was wearing.

On Tuesday, the Philadelphia Inquirer said Fetterman declined to be interviewed for a story about the incident, responding instead with a statement.

PennLive obtained that statement on Tuesday night:

Eight years ago, I was outside with my son Karl, who was 4 at the time, when I heard a loud burst of gunfire. It was coming from an area near our home that had been the site of countless shootings over the years. The truth is, there is a gun problem in Braddock and there always has been.

I got my son inside safely and called 911. I then saw a lone individual dressed entirely in black and a full face mask running from the vicinity of the gunfire. The individual turned and started running towards our local elementary school  and this was just a few weeks after the Sandy Hook child massacre.

I made a split-second decision to intervene for the safety and protection of my community, and intercepted the person to stop them from going any further until the first responders could arrive. I stayed in my truck and never came in physical contact with the individual. I had my shotgun, but it was never pointed at the individual, and there wasnt even a round chambered.

Between the ski mask and the way this person was dressed, bundled head to toe in the dead of winter, I didnt know what race that individual was, or even their gender.

Law enforcement came in under a minute and spoke to the individual, and no charges were filed.

In the 2016 interview, Fetterman called it an odd situation and said they never fully figured out what happened prior to his decision to go after the jogger.

If my brother had been running from the scene of 13 assault rounds, Id have done the same thing, Fetterman told Philly Voice. It was an emergency situation, an incredibly scary situation, [I] thought it might be the last time Id see my son.

Reactions remain mixed, and one Pittsburgh housing justice activist, Randall Taylor told the Inquirer he would like a full explanation of what happened.

The Inquirer story noted that retiring Republican Sen. Pat Toomeys campaign released a statement Monday that mentioned the incident and that others have quietly talked about the potential issues it could create for Fetterman as the campaign gets underway.

Read more on PennLive:
A MAN who subjected a pensioner to an horrific unprovoked 14-minute attack including stamping on his head while he was lying unconscious on the ground has been jailed for 13 years.



Jonathan O'Driscoll (31) was sentenced as Cork Circuit Criminal Court heard that just weeks before he committed the savage assault he had been taken to hospital after suffering a psychotic incident - and was discharged just four days late despite pleading to be kept in treatment as he feared he might hurt himself or someone else.

Judge Sean O'Donnabhain jailed O'Driscoll for 15 years, suspending the final two years of the term, for assault causing serious harm to Christopher 'Christy' O'Callaghan (73) in Macroom, Co Cork on March 21 2019.

The assault left the pensioner in a critical condition in Cork University Hospital (CUH) - and, when he recovered, he was no longer capable of independent living.

Mr O'Callaghan is well known in the world of greyhound racing as he trained a number of winners of the Irish Laurels in the 1970s and 1980s.

ODriscoll formerly of Coolcower House, Macroom pleaded guilty to assault causing serious harm to Christy OCallaghan at Sleaveen East, Macroom.

The court heard that the attack lasted for almost 14 minutes.

Read More

Det Garda Alan O Sullivan said Mr OCallaghan was sitting in his parked car shortly before midnight when ODriscoll suddenly dragged him from his vehicle and started stamping on his head.

CCTV security camera footage displayed how ODriscoll dragged the pensioner from the car and threw him around like a rag doll.

The attack was entirely unprovoked and no explanation for it was offered. O'Driscoll did not know Mr O'Callaghan.

Shocked members of the public raised the alarm and when Gardai arrived at the scene they found ODriscoll cradling Mr OCallaghan.

Det Garda OSullivan said that ODriscoll "stomped" four times on the pensioner's skull.

He kicked him when he was in a lifeless position, he said.

Mr OCallaghan suffered serious injuries including a bilateral scalp laceration, fractures to his facial bones, extensive soft tissue damage, fracture of the ribs, a collapsed lung and subdural haematoma.

Det Garda OSullivan said that Mr OCallaghan will never be right again.

He now requires the assistance of two nurses to walk and is frustrated at how his happy life was shattered.

In a moving victim impact statement, Mr OCallaghan said that before the brutal assault he enjoyed an active, fulfilled life.

I enjoyed working with greyhounds and attended the greyhound track twice a week. I had made a lot of good friends through the dogs. Since I was so badly assaulted my life has totally changed. I have been in hospital since and I have not been home," he said.

"Nobody will ever know half of what I suffered. Aside from the physical injuries and pain, the loneliness of lying here in my hospital bed is terrible altogether. Sometimes I wish I was dead."

"You (ODriscoll) took away my basic human rights. I cannot go to the toilet on my own. I have to be taken by a nurse who is normally female, which to me is embarrassing and degrading. I do not think I will be left home unaccompanied again. This breaks my heart.

Defence counsel Siobhan Lankford BL said her client was from a difficult background and suffered from both anxiety and depression.

Two weeks before the assault ODriscoll suffered a psychotic incident and was admitted to a hospital.

But he was discharged after four days despite telling staff that he didnt want to be released as he still felt too unwell.

Judge ODonnabhain said that it was an extraordinarily vicious and unprovoked assault.

He pointed out that the life of the pensioner was now effectively a living hell.

Judge ODonnabhain warned there was no excuse for the sustained, deliberate and prolonged violence.
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With the Senate "trial" on the House impeachment of former President Trump just underway, CBS News has come in with a poll asserting that 56 percent of Americans favor conviction, with 44 percent opposed.

According to CBS:

A new CBS News poll finds 56% of Americans say the Senate should convict former President Trump in his upcoming impeachment trial. CBS News director of elections and surveys Anthony Salvanto joins CBSN AM to break down the results.

CBS News thus seems intent on reinforcing Republican complaints that the Democrats are throwing not only caution, but due process as well to the wind in their rabidly partisan zeal to crush private citizen Trump for all time  along with his supporters.

Imagine if Mr. Trump, following acquittal in the Senate, were to be indicted in a criminal action  in Anywhere, USA. Would CBS News announce a poll, on the first day of that trial, stating that 56 percent of Americans feel that private citizen Trump should be convicted? Seems so  notwithstanding that such a poll would be about as fair as the guilty verdicts handed out during the French Revolution, sending thousands of victims to the guillotine.

Since when do our juries hand down guilty verdicts with the reading in court of the indictment? This is comparable to the undue process practiced by CBS News in asserting that the 56 percent of the American people have determined at the outset that private citizen Trump stands convicted as charged. One hesitates to ask the anti-Trump zealots if they understand what a bill of attainder is  and that their "trial" violates the Constitution's ban on bills of attainder. If they feel free to act against Mr. Trump, the way the Queen of Hearts acted against Alice, dispensing with the need for a fair trial before convicting, how can they possibly understand what a bill of attainder is?

But didn't Alice respond to the Queen's adverse and unfair ruling by declaring something to the effect of "you're just a bunch of cards"?

It is, alas, not to be expected that Mr. Trump's attorneys respond to the utter disgrace of this "trial" and the CBS News poll, to boot, by declaring "this is just a charade, having nothing to do with jurisprudence nor with political fair play, and we will not participate further  let the Republican senators do their duty to the Constitution, to our legacy of liberty, and act in solidarity to put an end to this attempt at Soviet-style justice."

Besides, what kind of "fair play" is it to enter, as the lying Democrats did, Mr. Trump's remarks of Jan. 6 in the record without including his call for a peaceful demonstration, to offer for the record a twisted, prejudicial version of the events at the Capitol that day, to leave the impression that the former president had any responsibility for the tumult.

The New York Times is free, under the First Amendment, to accuse anyone defending Mr. Trump's quarrel with the results of the 2020 presidential election of making "baseless claims." If the Democrats were honor-bound to seek "Truth unto Its Innermost Parts," as the Brandeis University motto states, this sham of a proceeding, let alone the twisted process employed, would never have taken place, because this "impeachment" rests on "baseless claims," along with the four years of the anti-Trump resistance, including Russia-gate and Impeachment I.

For nearly two years, the country, along with President Trump, was subjected to a Mueller probe based on lies, deception, and undue process. But isn't another special prosecutor engaged in a probe of Russia-gate? While the Democrats and their media advance guard take pains to destroy our justice system, equating accusations with findings of fact, what on Earth is happening with John Durham's investigation? Or is this special prosecutor under house arrest  to be charged with being an agent of the anti-Christ Trump?

There is a Yiddish word that 44 Republican senators should shout ASAP from the Capitol's steps: "Genug!" (Enough.)
Director Lijo Jose Pellisserys Malayalam language independent action film Jallikattu, which had been selected as Indias official entry to the 93rd Academy Awards for the foreign film category, is out of the Oscar race. The 15 shortlisted films are from Chile (The Mole Agent), Czech Republic (Charlatan), Denmark (Another Round), France (Two of Us), Guatemala (La Llorona), Hong Kong (Better Days), Iran (Sun Children), Ivory Coast (Night of the Kings), Mexico (Im No Longer Here), Norway (Hope), Romania(Collective), Russia (Dear Comrades),Taiwan (A Sun) and Tunisia (The Man Who Sold His Skin).

Jallikattu, starring Antony Varghese, Chemban Vinod Jose, Sabumon Abdusamad, and Santhy Balachandran, follows the plot of a bull that runs amuck from a slaughterhouse in a hilly remote village with all the residents gathering to hunt it down.

Also Read | Inside the third front of the farm agitation

Released in its home state Kerala in October 2019 and premiered at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival and the 24th Busan International Film Festival, where it received much acclaim, Jallikattu was the latest feather in Pellisserys cap, who is known for titles such as Angamaly Diaries (2017) and Ee.Ma.Yau (2018), both of which are considered pathbreaking outings in Malayalam as well as Indian cinema. Jallikattu is the second Malayalam film to be submitted as Indias entry to the Oscars in the past decade after Adaminte Makan Abu in 2011. Zoya Akhtars musical drama Gully Boy was the selected entry last year.

Critics and industry experts have often pointed to the intense need for promotion and marketing for entries like Jallikattu to make it to the final list of Oscar nominations, even running campaigns that could cost upwards of Rs.10 crore in some cases. Producers need to go and camp in LA for a few months, hire a publicity team, book auditoriums and hold screenings for jury members, get featured on all, or most, important American media outlets-print, radio, television and digital, as part of a promotional campaign that ideally, should result in a full-fledged theatrical release in at least some parts of the US. Its not always about the money, but the acumen and that is evident in the fact that only three Indian films have ever made it to the final list of Oscar nominationsMother India (1957), Salaam Bombay! (1988) and Lagaan (2001).

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CLEVELAND, Ohio  Jay-Z, Foo Fighters, Tina Turner and Iron Maiden lead this years historic list of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nominees. Rolling Stone was the first to reveal the class Wednesday morning.

The Class of 2021 will be inducted during a ceremony held in Cleveland at a yet-to-be-determined date and venue this fall. Joining the aforementioned acts on the ballot are Mary J. Blige, Kate Bush, Devo, The Go-Gos, Chaka Khan, Carole King, Fela Kuti, LL Cool J, New York Dolls, Rage Against the Machine, Todd Rundgren and Dionne Warwick.

It marks the most female-heavy ballot the Rock Hall has ever produced with seven of the 16 acts being led by women. These 2021 nominations are also the most racially diverse in 15 years.

This remarkable ballot reflects the diversity and depth of the artists and music the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame celebrates, said John Sykes, Chairman of Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation, in a statement. These Nominees have left an indelible impact on the sonic landscape of the world and influenced countless artists that have followed them.

Artists are eligible for a nomination 25 years after the release of their first official recording. The 2021 ballot features two newly eligible acts in Jay-Z and Foo Fighters. Other acts nominated for the first time (while having to wait much longer) include Blige, The Go-Gos, Iron Maiden, Warwick and Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti.

Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl is looking to earn his second induction into the Rock Hall, having already gotten in with Nirvana in 2014. The same goes for Carole King, who was inducted as a non-performer/songwriter in 1990, and Turner, who earned induction as part of Ike & Tina Turner in 1991. King and Turner could join Stevie Nicks (2019) as the only women to be inducted into the Rock Hall twice.

LL Cool J leads the way in terms of repeat nominees. The rap legend is on his sixth nomination. Chaka Khan is on her third solo nomination (fifth if you count her nominations with funk band Rufus). This years ballot also comes with Northeast Ohio ties. Devo originated in Akron while Grohl is a Warren native.

Notably missing out on nominations this year were Kraftwerk, nominated six times since 2003, and Dave Matthews Band and Pat Benatar, who finished in the top two in the 2020 Fan Vote. Speaking of which, fans can have their say via the annual online poll until April 30 by visiting rockhall.com. The top five artists from the Fan Vote will comprise one fans ballot tallied along with more than 1,000 other ballots from musicians, historians and music industry members.

The Rock Halls Class of 2021 will be announced in May. Ticket information for the fall ceremony will be announced at a later date.

Koo, a microblogging platform that was launched in March last year, is another new entry in Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Aatmanirbhar Bharat mission. The platform, which is an alternative to Twitter, offers a similar experience like the latter but in the Indian vernacular along with the English language. The platform is also the winner of the government's Aatmanirbhar Bharat app challenge from 2020.

A user can be part of the platform by downloading the Koo app itself on either iOS and Android device, or they can simply visit the webpage.

I am now on Koo. Connect with me on this Indian micro-blogging platform for real-time, exciting and exclusive updates. Let us exchange our thoughts and ideas on Koo. Join me: https://t.co/zIL6YI0epM pic.twitter.com/REGioTdMfm  Piyush Goyal (@PiyushGoyal) February 9, 2021

What is Koo?

Koo is a microblogging platform that enables it users to express their opinion on any given subject. The app was developed by Aprameya Radhakrishna, who is the co-founder and CEO. The platform won the The Digital India Aatmanirbhar Bharat Innovate Challenge in March last year, an initiative that rewards the best Indian apps which has the potential to develop into a world class apps.

Why is Koo in news?

Despite being acknowledged by the government as one of the potential game changer in the Digital India campaign, Koo began to fade away until recently when Union Minister Piyush Goyal tweeted about him joining the platform. Along with Goyal, union minister Ram Shankar Prasad, Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan, and Karnataka Chief Minister BS Yediyurappa are among the other top dignitaries to join the platform.

The development comes after the ongoing disagreement between the Indian government and Twitter over the blocking and unblocking of accounts linked to the ongoing farmer protests in New Delhi.

Government ministries and departments such as the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY), Central Board of Indirect Taxes (CBIC), National Institute of Electronics and Information Technology (NIELIT), India Post, MyGovIndia, Digital India, and National Informatics Centre (NIC), among others, are also on the platform.

How do I download Koo?

Koo is available for both Android and iOS devices. The app is named Koo: Connect with Indians in Indian Languages on Google PlayStore, while it is named as "Koo" on the App Store. An user can also visit the website and click on the Google Play or App Store download options to be redirected to a download link.

What are Koo's features?

The features provided by Koo are quite similar to Twitter and allows its users to follow individuals and browse through a feed. The users can also share their opinion in Indian languages such as Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Tamil, and English, and as per reports the platforms are also coming with other languages soon.

Unlike Twitter's 280 character limit, Koo provides its users to sum up their message in 400 characters. There are also language communities that provide content in a particular language.
Pia is best known for her performances as Roshini in Venkat Prabhu's comedy Goa and Saro in K. V. Anand's political thriller Ko. (Credit: Instagram)
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A planned Special Recognition Payment for frontline healthcare workers must be extended to social care professionals, gardai and Defence Forces personnel, the Government has been told by one of its own TDs.

Sligo Leitrim TD Marc MacSharry made the demand after the Taoiseach told the Dail that the Cabinet will respond to and recognise the extraordinary efforts that frontline healthcare workers have made.

Mr Martin said: The Government will do that. The precise timeframe has to be considered. We are not out of this pandemic yet.

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His comments came after Independent TD Joan Collins described as astounding and shameful the fact that the HSE has not given a childcare allowance to healthcare workers.

In England and Scotland, a once-off payment of 500 has been paid to healthcare workers and in France there has been a payment of 1,500, she pointed out.

A key question was post-Covid leave, respite and a chance to recover from fatigue and burnout, she added, calling for the Taoiseach to commit to this measure too and to start planning it now.

Fianna Fail TD Mr MacSharry welcomed the pledge of a special recognition payment to all frontline health staff but said others had also made an extraordinary contribution throughout the pandemic.

He suggested an amount up to 1,000 be made available to all those who have served us so well at the sharp end of the Covid crisis.

Part-time workers should also be provided with recognition on a pro-rata basis, he added.

It is simply essential that we express our appreciation in a tangible way. The total cost would be between 70m-120m, which is significant, but which in no way reflects the level of indebtedness of all citizens to the extraordinary contribution of those who operate face-to-face with Covid so that others may live and be safe. It is simply the right thing to do.

Other jurisdictions had shown us that such payments can be made, quite apart from existing pay agreements, he said.

Clearly legislation will be required to provide for such payments. Meanwhile we have seen in recent weeks in a proposed mouth-watering pay increase for one individual in a State role without any adherence to pay agreements or international benchmarking, so our front-line caregivers and lifesavers can and should be acknowledged in this way.

Private sector employers in health, social care, and essential retail should also demonstrate their gratitude to staff in a similar way, he said.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-10 17:30:23|Editor: huaxia

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WARSAW, Feb. 9 (Xinhua) -- At a virtual summit of China and Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries held on Tuesday, participants jointly formulated a list of activities to push ahead with cooperation between Beijing and CEE countries.

In a world fraught with challenges, the cooperative mechanism between China and CEE countries will undoubtedly inject new impetus and greater confidence into recovery, setting the blueprint for further development.

GROWTH MOMENTUM

As an integral part of and helpful supplement to the reciprocal collaboration between China and Europe, China-CEEC cooperation has born fruits in multiple areas in recent years, ranging from trade, investment to joint efforts in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since the cooperation mechanism was launched in 2012, China's trade with CEE countries has increased 85 percent, logging an average annual growth rate of 8 percent, which is three times the growth of China's foreign trade and twice the growth of its trade with Europe as a whole.

China-CEEC cooperation is "a unique initiative that builds bridges between Europe and Asia" and is complementary to the cooperation between the European Union (EU) and China, Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic said.

Riding a wave of fast-growing momentum, China's total trade volume with 17 CEE countries reached 103.45 billion U.S. dollars in 2020, crossing the 100-billion-dollar mark for the first time.

"China's long-term focus to encourage regional cooperation with CEE countries is grateful," Arijandas Sliupas, Lithuania's former vice minister of transport and communications, told Xinhua, adding that relevant policies concerning the framework of cooperation between China and the EU are crucial as well.

George Tzogopoulos, director of EU-China programs and senior research fellow at the International Center for European Studies, told Xinhua that China wants to link its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) with the new European priorities that can speed up recovery, safeguard public health and foster green development. China-CEEC cooperation serves as a useful format for China's engagement with Europe.

VACCINE COOPERATION

Throughout the pandemic, China has been working closely with CEE countries on containing the virus. On top of providing face masks, test kits, and other essential supplies, China has reiterated commitment to making its COVID-19 vaccines a global public good, as there won't be a substantive revival unless the pandemic is brought under control.

Serbia has received the first batch of 1 million doses of China's Sinopharm inactivated coronavirus vaccines.

"We know that mass vaccination is possible thanks to the first million doses that arrived from China," said Darija Kisic Tepavcevic, Serbia's minister of labor, employment, veterans and social affairs, adding that China had given Serbia immense assistance from the very beginning of this battle.

Hungary quickly followed suit, securing a deal to buy China's Sinopharm vaccine, which will allow the vaccination of 2.5 million people.

Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Peter Szijjarto said, "This deal will speed up vaccination, which could save the lives of thousands of people and contribute to lifting restrictions sooner."

Hungary was the first EU member to sign up for Chinese vaccines. China has said it will actively consider vaccine cooperation with other CEE countries.

FUTURE COOPERATION

From the Mediterranean to the Baltic, from the Danube to the Balkans, BRI projects have blossomed, supporting development in each country and bettering people's lives, as all 17 countries have signed agreements on Belt and Road cooperation.

"We all know how important Chinese investment is for industrial production in Serbia," said Mihailo Vesovic, director of the division for strategic analyses, services and internationalization at the Serbian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, referring to China's Zijin Mining's investment in the steel plant in Smederevo, a city in central Serbia.

Highlighted by Greece's Piraeus Port, Poland's Krasnik Bearing Factory and the like, China's foreign direct investment in CEE countries totaled 3.14 billion dollars by the end of 2020.

To the north of Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Stanari Thermal Power Plant went into operation in August 2016. Built by China Dongfang Electric Corporation, it has generated on-grid power of more than 7 billion kilowatt-hours since then, which has mainly been sold to European markets, including Croatia and Germany.

In Croatia, the China Road and Bridge Corporation is working on the construction of the Peljesac Bridge, a 2.4-km-long bridge connecting the Croatian mainland with the Peljesac Peninsula. It is an iconic infrastructure project funded by the EU.

Last year, the total contract value of China's newly signed overseas projects with the 17 countries spiked 34.6 percent to 5.41 billion dollars, making it possible for China and the CEE countries to further enhance cooperation in the future. Enditem
The Eurovision Song Contest recently ruled out a fully staged event for 2021, but there are still 3 possible scenarios under consideration.

The Eurovision Song Contest will definitely make its welcome return this May despite the pandemic but, in the prevailing circumstances, it is regrettably impossible to hold the event in the way we are used to, said Martin Osterdahl, Executive Supervisor of the ESC.

Were grateful for the renewed commitment and backing from the City of Rotterdam and the ongoing support of all the participating broadcasters. We very much hope to be able to gather in Rotterdam in May and will do all we can in the coming weeks to achieve this. With an ever-changing situation we are taking our time to ensure that we can host the Eurovision Song Contest in the best and safest way possible, he added.

Organisers will now focus their efforts on Scenario B, a socially distanced event with artists performing in Rotterdam.

A further decision on how the Contest will be staged will be taken in the coming weeks.

The 3 remaining scenarios being planned for are:

Scenario B: Socially distanced Eurovision Song Contest

Everyone attending the Eurovision Song Contest at Rotterdams Ahoy Arena would need to practice social distancing.

Strict health and safety measures (including frequent COVID testing) would be in place at the venue. A protocol to protect artists, delegations, and crew on and off site would be adhered to.

If there are any delegations who cannot travel to Rotterdam, their artists will perform live-on-tape with a recorded performance being used.

Those who can travel to Rotterdam will perform their songs live on stage.

There would be 9 shows (6 dress rehearsals, 2 Semi-Finals and a Grand Final), either with no audience or a reduced audience to allow for social distancing. The final capacity would be dependent on local government guidelines.

There will be activities in the city of Rotterdam held in a safe and responsible way.

Scenario C: A travel restricted Eurovision Song Contest

A Eurovision Song Contest, from Rotterdams Ahoy Arena but no delegations or artists will travel to Rotterdam.

Hosts and interval acts will still be live from the Ahoy.

The performances of ALL the participants will be live-on-tape.

Strict health and safety measures (including frequent COVID testing) would be in place at the venue.

A protocol to protect crew on and off site would be adhered to.

There would be 9 shows (6 dress rehearsals, 2 Semi-Finals and a Grand Final), either with no audience or a reduced audience to allow for social distancing. The final capacity would be dependent on local government guidelines.

There will be reduced activities in the city of Rotterdam held in a safe and responsible way.

Scenario D: a lockdown Eurovision Song Contest

A Eurovision Song Contest without an audience and virtual activities will be considered to explore the host city of Rotterdam.

The performances of all the participants will be live-on-tape.

There would be 9 shows (6 dress rehearsals, 2 Semi-Finals and a Grand Final), but no audience.

Montaigne will represent Australia, but a song is yet to be confirmed.

Related
Updates on CCP Virus: Chinese Critics Decry WHOs Wuhan Probe as a Farce

A Chinese dissident has condemned the World Health Organizations findings on the source of the pandemic as a farce, adding that the Chinese regime is likely to leverage them to deflect responsibility for causing the global crisis.

According to Yuan Hongbing, a Chinese academic and vocal critic of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) living in Australia, the WHO investigation in Wuhan was akin to a farce staged by the Chinese regime.

We could have predicted that this so-called investigation would come to this, he said in an interview.

Some Gulf States See Daily Cases Back up Near 2020 Highs

Several Gulf Arab states have seen daily CCP virus cases climb back towards the highs recorded last year, prompting authorities to re-impose restrictions on travel and gatherings as they roll out vaccination campaigns.

Bahrain on Tuesday registered 759 new daily infections, slightly above a record hit in September. In Kuwait, daily cases rose above 1,000 on Tuesday for the first time since May after having fallen below 300 in December.

New Heineken CEO to Cut 8,000 Jobs

Heineken NV plans to cut about 8,000 jobs, the Dutch beer group said on Wednesday, seeking to restore operating margins to pre-pandemic levels after a sharp decline in profit because of the governments CCP virus restrictions.

The worlds second-largest brewer, which makes Europes top-selling lager Heineken as well as Tiger and Sol, said it would save 2 billion euros ($2.4 billion) over the next three years to 2023 under CEO Dolf van den Brinks EverGreen plan.

House Democrats Unveil $1.9 Trillion Relief Package

Proposed funding includes $7.5 billion for the CDC to prepare, promote, administer, monitor, and track vaccines against COVID-19, the disease caused by the CCP virus. Lawmakers also want to give $46 billion to the Department of Health and Human Services to detect, diagnose, trace, and monitor COVID-19 infections, and other work-related to trying to mitigate the spread of the illness from China.

Another $7.6 billion would go to the department to establish a public health workforce including people tracing contacts of those infected by COVID-19. And a $6 billion chunk would fund tribal health programs.

Worlds Second-Oldest Person Survives at Age 116

A 116-year-old French nun who is believed to be the worlds second-oldest person has survived COVID-19 and is looking forward to celebrating her 117th birthday on Thursday.

French media report that Sister Andre tested positive for the virus in mid-January in the southern French city of Toulon. But just three weeks later, the nun is considered recovered. I didnt even realize I had it, she told French newspaper Var-Matin.

Double Masks Block More Particles: CDC

A new government study finds that wearing two masks can be better than one in protecting against the spread of COVID-19.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday reported the results of a lab experiment. The researchers found that particles were blocked twice as much when two masks were worn.

One-Third of US Adults Skeptical of Vaccine, Poll Shows

About 1 in 3 Americans say they definitely or probably wont get the CCP virus vaccine, according to a new poll.

The poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that while 67 percent of Americans plan to get vaccinated or have already done so, 15 percent are certain they wont and 17 percent say probably not. Many expressed doubts about the vaccines safety and effectiveness.

Lockdowns Weigh on German Beer Sales

Bars have been closed for more than three months, Carnival celebrations are canceled, and its not clear when things will get better in Germany.

Official data released last week showed beer sales in Germany dropped 5.5 percent last year to 8.7 billion liters (2.3 billion gallons), a decline fostered by lengthy shutdowns. German bars and restaurants were closed from March until May, and have been shut again since the beginning of November.

Dementia Sufferers Twice as Likely to Get Infected

People with dementia are twice as likely to catch the CCP virus, commonly referred to as the novel coronavirus, a study has suggested.

The study found that patients with dementia had a significantly increased risk of contracting COVID-19, compared to patients without dementia. A large number of those patients also have additional chronic health conditions, which are also factors that increase the risk of infection.

Union Approves Deal With Chicago Schools to Return to Class

The Chicago Teachers Union has approved a deal with the nations third-largest school district to get students back to class during the CCP virus pandemic, union officials announced early Wednesday.

The union said 13,681 members voted to approve the agreement and 6,585 voted against it. In a statement, the union described the agreement as the absolute limit to which CPS was willing to go at the bargaining table to guarantee a minimum number of guardrails for any semblance of safety in schools.

Patients With Gum Disease 9 Times More Likely to Die: Study

A new study has found that people with gum disease who contracted COVID-19 were at least three times more likely to have severe complications from the disease, including a higher risk of hospitalization and death.

A team of international researchers published their peer-reviewed study in the Journal of Clinical Periodontology earlier this month. They evaluated 568 patients, of whom 45 percent had gum disease. The research team found that COVID-19 patients with gum disease were 3.54 times more likely to be admitted to the ICU, 4.57 times more likely to need a ventilator, and 8.81 times more likely to die from the virus, as compared to those who had contracted the CCP virus but did not have periodontitis.

UK Identifies 2 More Variants With Antibody-Resistant Mutation

British health authorities have identified two more COVID-19 variants with a mutation that makes them resistant to antibodies.

Two variants identified by the UKs New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (NERVTAG) contain the E484K spike protein mutation, which has been found to result in weaker neutralization by antibodies in laboratory experiments.

Eva Fu, Tom Ozimek, Zachary Stieber, Alexander Zhang, Lorenz Duchamps, Reuters, and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Lord Brittan's widow was left 'speechless' on seeing the secret court document that persuaded a judge to grant search warrants for her two homes.

She expressed her astonishment at the information provided by police to justify the raids and at the fact no officers faced misconduct charges.

The document, which the Mail can reveal today, shows that the decision to seek a warrant had been 'considered at DAC [deputy assistant commissioner] level'.

This is a reference to Steve Rodhouse, 'gold commander' of the bungled VIP sex abuse inquiry into high-profile figures, including Lady Brittan's husband, the former home secretary.

Lord Brittan's widow, Lady Diana, was left 'speechless' on seeing the secret court document that persuaded a judge to grant search warrants for her two homes

The application makes clear that police sought the warrants because they believed she would not allow them entry when they arrived at her homes in London and North Yorkshire in March 2015.

In yesterday's Mail, Lady Brittan said the raids were a 'violation' that left her feeling like a criminal.

Authorised by Detective Inspector Alison Hepworth, the warrant states: 'Given the status of the individuals involved in these applications, it is not felt that the occupants would allow search of their premises on a voluntary basis.

'Given the nature of the material sought, any delay or pre-warning of an intention to search would allow the removal or destruction of such material with minimal effort.'

She expressed her astonishment at the information (pictured) provided by police to justify the raids and at the fact no officers faced misconduct charges

Steve Rodhouse, was 'gold commander' of the bungled VIP sex abuse inquiry into high-profile figures, including Lady Brittan's husband, the former home secretary (pictured)

Critically the document includes the wholly incorrect claim that 'Nick', the fantasist Carl Beech, was 'credible' and 'telling the truth'.

It states: 'The victim in this matter has been interviewed at length by experienced officers from the child abuse investigation team.

His account has remained consistent and he is felt to be a credible witness who is telling the truth.'

That sentence helped persuade District Judge Howard Riddle to grant the warrants at the centre of the Operation Midland scandal.

The Daily Mail has now obtained a copy of the search warrant application used to justify the raids on Lady Brittan's homes

Lady Brittan, 80, a former long-serving magistrate, said: 'This is the most extraordinary search warrant I have ever seen. The information that might support the application is not there.

'Judge Riddle presumably believed the fact that the application had been signed off at a very senior level.

'And he would have taken, I suppose, some comfort in that. And he had no reason, I suppose at the time, to believe that he was not being told the entire story.'

The secret court document obtained by the Mail was part of a two-stage process that gave police permission to raid the homes of Lady Brittan, six weeks after her husband died.

Pictures of police vehicles during two-day search at Lord Brittan's North Yorkshire home in March 2015

The first involved a detective completing a confidential form and the second involved three murder squad officers going before court to get official permission to storm her houses.

The document also shows that when asked if there was anything that might undermine their request, the Metropolitan Police simply answered 'N/A'  not applicable.

In fact, police were aware of several factors that raised questions about the claims made by Beech.

In an article for the Mail in July 2019, former High Court judge Sir Richard Henriques, who wrote a scathing report about Operation Midland, insisted Beech had 'not been consistent', dating back to when the liar had first made claims of child sex abuse.

Sir Richard said: 'His allegations made to the Wiltshire Police in 2012 were fundamentally inconsistent with those made to the Metropolitan Police in 2014 and with Beech's blogs also published in 2014.

'The identities of subsequent named alleged rapists were inconsistent. The alleged locations were inconsistent, persons allegedly present were inconsistent, the alleged accompanying acts of violence were inconsistent.'

Judge Riddle, now retired, has said he was misled over warrants for raids on the homes of Lady Brittan, former Armed Forces chief Lord Bramall and Tory ex-MP Harvey Proctor.
People walk towards Sather Gate on the U.C. Berkeley campus in Berkeley, Calif., on July 22, 2020. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

UC Berkeley Tightens Virus Lockdown, Imposing Solo Exercise Ban and Enhanced Monitoring of Dorms

The University of California, Berkeley has ramped up its COVID-19 restrictions, issuing an urgent sequestering requirement for students living in campus dorms, asking them to remain confined to their rooms, with few exceptions, and prohibiting exercising alone outdoors.

University authorities said in a notice Monday that students in dorms must remain in their rooms at all times, except to seek medical care, in case of an emergency, to go the bathroom, or to get food.

After you pick up your food, you are required to return immediately to your room, the notice cautions, noting that students may only go out to collect food at specific times and from designated food distribution kiosks.

Students may also leave their rooms to get their mandatory, twice-per-week COVID-19 test.

UC Berkeley has been grappling with higher COVID-19 infection numbers. Between Jan. 31 and Feb. 6, 164 students, faculty and staff tested positive for the disease, according to the universitys COVID-19 dashboard, a 12 percent increase from the prior week.

According to an email to students, as reported by the Daily Californian, measures in place to enforce the dorm lockdown will include campus police officers monitoring dormitory halls and frequent inspections of ID cards.

We dont wish for residents to be alarmed by this increased UCPD presence, but we must ensure the health of our community, the email reads, according to the outlet.

Besides a heavier campus police presence, more university staff will be monitoring dorms to ensure compliance. To raise compliance further, the university encouraged students to report those who dont follow the rules.

Reporting what you witness will help protect your fellow students and our community. We are all in this together, the notice reads.

The solo exercise ban, a brand new measure imposed by Mondays lockdown order, may soon be lifted, however.

We are working with the city of Berkeley to determine whether outdoor exercise may be permitted, and we will provide more information on this in the near future, the notice reads.

Students discouraged by the harsh measures and considering fleeing from campus were advised to stay put.

We understand that some students may wish to leave campus to temporarily or permanently live elsewhere (e.g., with family members) but we strongly advise against leaving, the notice said. You risk bringing COVID home with you and infecting a loved one who may be more likely to become severely ill; even if you have had a negative test recently, you may be incubating the virus.

The enhanced restrictions are to be in effect at least through Feb. 15.

The announcement comes as California on Tuesday surpassed New York to become the state with the largest COVID-19 death toll.
Himachal Pradesh: No bird mortality, ban lifted on fishing at Pong wetland

by Rajiv Mahajan

February 10,2021 | Source: Tribune India

As many as 2,800 fishermen, who had been earning their livelihood by fishing in the Pong wetland, got respite after the ban on fishing was lifted today. The ban had been imposed by the Kangra district administration on January 3 after the avian influenza (H5N1) outbreak in the Pong wetland wildlife sanctuary. After rendering jobless, the fishermen, who were engaged in catching fish through 16 fisheries cooperative societies, have demanded a compensation because of the restricted fishing activity in the wetland. On the first day of the ban lifting, most of the fishermen were hesitant to resume normal fishing activity in the Pong wetland and preferred to wait and watch for a few days.



The district administration, in its order under the Disaster Management Act-2005, had restricted the movement of human and domestic livestock around one-km periphery of the Pong wetland, declaring it an alert zone. The administration had also prohibited sale or purchase of poultry products, fish and meat within the area under jurisdiction of Dehra, Jawali, Fatehpur and Indora subdivision in Kangra district. DC Kangra Rakesh Prajapati, who revoked fishing ban order last evening, told The Tribune that after receiving a communique from the Deputy Director, Animal Husbandry, intimating that there was no mortality in poultry for the past five days, the restriction imposed on fishing activity in the Pong wetland had been withdrawn. The district administration had lifted the ban on the sale of poultry products, fish and meat in all four Indora, Fatehpur, Jawali and Dehra subdivisions on January 28 but kept the same to be enforced within the 10-km radius of the avian influenza-infested zone near the Pong wetland in Fatehpur subdivision. Praveen Kumar, Kewal Kumar and Ashok, presidents of Khatiyar, Sthana and Sihal fisheries cooperative societies, while welcoming the decision, have appealed to the government to consider the demand of the fishermen of granting compensation to the fishermen as they had no means of livelihood during the ban period of over one month.

 The Tribune Trust, 2021
Russian state nuclear corporation Rosatom is ready to construct a nuclear power plant (NPP) in Kazakhstan, Russian Ambassador to Nur-Sultan Alexey Borodavkin said on Wednesday, KBC reports.

In April 2019, Russian President Vladimir Putin said after the talks with his Kazakh counterpart, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, that Moscow had proposed building a nuclear power plant in the Central Asian country.

Tokayev later said that the decision to build a nuclear power plant in Kazakhstan would be made taking into account the opinion of the majority of the population, while in June 2019 he told reporters that there had been no plans to build a nuclear power plant in the country yet.

As far as I understand, taking into account a shortage of electricity, Kazakhstan will need this NPP in the near future and Russia is ready to build it.
A goldfish has undergone surgery to fix his broken jaw using paperclips.

Stephen the greedy goldfish ran into trouble when he bit off more than he could chew attempting to eat a catfish.

Owner, Shona Hingston, from Northumberland, returned home to find Stephen in distress with only the catfish's tail sticking out of his mouth.

Stephen the goldfish, pictured, was injured after he tried to eat a catfish in his tank in Northumberland

Fortunately, his owner Shona Hingston, pictured left, is a vet, and was able to provide immediate assistance removing the catfish - who also survived - before preparing her pet for surgery

Ms Hingston, used plastic covered paper clips to reconstruct Stephen's jaw which was broken

Luckily Ms Hingston, a peripatetic veterinary surgeon, flew into action cutting Stephen's throat to remove the Cory catfish - who amazingly survived the ordeal.

The following day Stephen was rushed into surgery where Ms Hingston, 42, anaesthetised him before stitching up his throat and making a fixator out of plastic paperclips to hold his broken jaw together while it healed.

Remarkably the paperclip trick worked, the device was removed once his jaw had mended and now Stephen is happy and back in his tank.

Ms Hingston, from Northumberland, operated on Stephen at Vets4Pets Cramlington where she was due to work the following day as a locum vet.

She has had Stephen for eight years and said she 'Blue Petered' the paperclip trick although still has no idea how slow-moving Stephen managed to catch the quick catfish.

She said: 'I came home to find Stephen with only a tail sticking out his mouth.

Shona Hingston, pictured, is not sure how a slow moving gold fish was able to catch and eat the more nimble cat fish. Though, she said, gold fish are incredibly greedy

'Nothing I did could move the fish, that I assumed was dead, so I cut his throat - I know that sounds awful but he was in real distress - and got the fish out.

'It was really badly damaged but alive so I kept him in a nursery tank with his friends to see if he would recover and he did.

'Stephen however now had a hole in his throat and had broken his jaw trying to swallow the fish.

'I anaesthetised him the next day, sutured his throat and put an external fixator made of plastic covered paperclips - because metal damages them - on his jaw.

'Unfortunately inside his mouth all the tissue was seriously damaged because catfish are sharp so I didn't hold out a lot of hope.

'I put Stephen in a quarantine tank and syringe fed him until I could remove the fixator and I was satisfied he could feed himself.

'He is now back in his tank and thriving.

'Goldfish will literally eat anything, they are extremely greedy.

'It's just the catfish are super fast and fancy goldfish are slow, so no idea how that happened.

'The anaesthetic is the tricky bit. And knowing that you can do more for all these animals than people think.

'Goldfish are not kids pets, they need loads of looking after.

'They actually need loads of space and they are intelligent, can recognise and remember faces and can even be taught tricks.'

The Cory catfish that Stephen tried to eat, pictured, also survived his ordeal

Stephen, pictured, has survived his ordeal and is once again thriving in his fish tank
Another 12,364 people in Britain have tested positive for Covid-19, bringing the total number of coronavirus cases in the country to 3,972,148, according to official figures released on Tuesday.

The country also reported another 1,052 coronavirus-related deaths. The total number of coronavirus-related deaths in Britain now stands at 113,850. These figures only include the deaths of people who died within 28 days of their first positive test, the Xinhua news agency reported.

The latest figures were revealed as Britain is stepping up efforts to speed up vaccine rollout to bring the pandemic under control.

More than 12.6 million people in Britain have been given the first jab of the coronavirus vaccine, according to the latest official figures. Britain aims to complete the vaccination of the top priority groups, which cover 15 million people, by mid-February and offer all adults their first dose by autumn.

Earlier on Tuesday, British Health Secretary Matt Hancock announced tough fines up to 10,000 pounds (about $13,780.77) and jail terms up to 10 years for those breaking quarantine rules designed to prevent new coronavirus variants from entering the country.

Hancock also announced that from Monday, all international arrivals will be required by law to take further coronavirus tests on day two and day eight of their quarantine.

Meanwhile, from next Monday, arrivals from "red list countries" must pay 1,750 pounds (about $2,411.77) for their own hotel quarantine, transport and testing, said Hancock.

Previously, Britain has banned all travel by non-British or Irish passengers from more than 30 "red list countries" where there is a risk of known variants. Those countries include South Africa, Portugal and South American nations.

England is currently under the third national lockdown since the outbreak of the pandemic in the country. Similar restriction measures are also in place in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

To bring life back to normal, countries such as Britain, China, Germany, Russia and the US have been racing against time to roll out coronavirus vaccines.
Lendleases new boss Tony Lombardo will have the task of simplifying a sprawling $8.24 billion global business when he takes over the top job from long-serving chief executive Steve McCann at the end of May.

Mr McCann said on Wednesday he would retire after a dozen years at the helm of Lendlease and hand over to the former accountant Mr Lombardo, the groups Asia head.

Tony will commence in his new role as the group pursues its revised strategy focusing on leveraging its competitive edge in the development and delivery of large-scale, mixed-use urbanisation projects and growing the investments platform, Lendlease chairman Michael Ullmer said.

Lendlease CEO Steve McCann will leave the company at the end of May. Credit:Peter Rae

Tonys time as CEO Asia, as well as prior roles including group CFO, make him eminently qualified to lead Lendlease into the future, he said.
Clinical proof of concept achieved for derazantinib monotherapy in FGFR2 gene fusion-positive iCCA

20.4% objective response rate and 6.6 months median progression-free survival consistent with previously published interim results

Safety and tolerability profile confirmed





Basel, Switzerland, February 10, 2021

Basilea Pharmaceutica Ltd. (SIX: BSLN) announced today topline results from cohort 1 of the phase 2 study FIDES-01, which is assessing the anti-tumor efficacy of the orally administered fibroblast growth factor receptor (FGFR) inhibitor, derazantinib, in patients with inoperable or advanced intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma (iCCA), a form of bile duct cancer, and confirmed FGFR2 gene fusions.1 Patient enrolment into cohort 1 was completed in July 2020. Enrolment into cohort 2 of FIDES-01 is ongoing, assessing the activity of derazantinib in iCCA patients with FGFR2 gene mutations or amplifications.

In total, 103 patients with iCCA and FGFR2 gene fusions who had received at least one prior chemotherapy regimen were enrolled in the intent-to-treat population in cohort 1. The objective response rate (ORR) is 20.4% based on 21 patients with a confirmed partial response. ORR is the pre-defined primary efficacy endpoint for cohort 1 and has been assessed through an independent central radiology review. The disease control rate (DCR), reflecting the proportion of patients with a partial response or with stable disease, was 72.8%. The median progression-free survival (PFS) in patients was 6.6 months. The results are not yet fully mature, as 12 patients are still ongoing, including 3 patients with a partial response. Consistent with previous data, derazantinib has shown a well manageable safety profile. The most common drug-related adverse events reported for once-daily oral 300 mg derazantinib were hyperphosphatemia (elevated phosphate levels in the blood), asthenia (weakness)/fatigue, increased liver enzymes, nausea, dry mouth, dry eye, diarrhea and dysgeusia (distorted taste). The percentage of patients experiencing drug-related adverse events of nail toxicities was low (6%) and events of retinopathy, stomatitis or hand-foot syndrome were each reported in only 1% of patients.

Dr. Marc Engelhardt, Chief Medical Officer, said: "We are very pleased that the positive topline results from the first cohort of the FIDES-01 study provide the clinical proof of concept for derazantinib as monotherapy in its first indication, although the data are not fully mature yet and a number of patients are still continuing their treatment. The efficacy results shown with derazantinib are consistent with the efficacy seen with FGFR inhibitors as a class in FGFR2 gene fusion-positive iCCA patients, and the safety and tolerability data strengthen the evidence for derazantinib's potential differentiation versus other FGFR inhibitors."

He continued: "We expect the publication of a number of interim and topline results across the entire FIDES clinical program throughout 2021 and 2022. Based on its unique kinase inhibition profile, derazantinib has potential for enhanced activity in combination therapy. We are therefore particularly interested to see the first efficacy data on the combination of derazantinib with other anti-cancer agents in our urothelial and gastric cancer studies, which may allow us to further strengthen the evidence for its differentiation versus other FGFR inhibitors both from the efficacy and safety perspective. The upcoming data read-outs across different patient populations and indications both as monotherapy and combination therapy will also help us determine the optimal overall regulatory strategy for derazantinib."

About derazantinib

Derazantinib is an investigational orally administered small-molecule FGFR inhibitor with strong activity against FGFR1, 2, and 3.2 FGFR kinases are key drivers of cell proliferation, differentiation and migration. FGFR genetic aberrations, e.g. gene fusions, mutations or amplifications, have been identified as potentially important therapeutic targets for various cancers, including intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma (iCCA), urothelial, breast, gastric and lung cancers.3 In these cancers, FGFR genetic aberrations are found in a range of 5% to 30%.4

Derazantinib also inhibits the colony-stimulating-factor-1-receptor kinase (CSF1R).2, 5 CSF1R-mediated signaling is important for the maintenance of tumor-promoting macrophages and therefore has been identified as a potential target for anti-cancer drugs.6 Pre-clinical data has shown that tumor macrophage depletion through CSF1R blockade renders tumors more responsive to T-cell checkpoint immunotherapy, including approaches targeting PD-L1/PD-1.7, 8

Derazantinib has demonstrated antitumor activity and a manageable safety profile in a previous biomarker-driven phase 1/2 study in iCCA patients,9 and has received U.S. and EU orphan drug designation for iCCA. Basilea is currently conducting three clinical studies with derazantinib. The first study, FIDES-01, is a phase 2 study in patients with inoperable or advanced iCCA. It comprises one cohort of patients with FGFR2 gene fusions and another cohort of patients with mutations or amplifications.1 The second study, FIDES-02, is a phase 1/2 study evaluating derazantinib alone and in combination with Roche's PD-L1 checkpoint inhibitor, atezolizumab, in patients with advanced urothelial cancer, including metastatic, or recurrent surgically unresectable disease, expressing FGFR genetic aberrations.10 The third study, FIDES-03, is a phase 1/2 study evaluating derazantinib alone and in combination with Lilly's anti-VEGFR2 antibody ramucirumab and paclitaxel, or with Roche's PD-L1 checkpoint inhibitor atezolizumab, in patients with advanced gastric cancer with FGFR genetic aberrations.11 Basilea in-licensed derazantinib from ArQule Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Merck & Co., Inc., Kenilworth, N.J., U.S.A.

About intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma

Intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma (iCCA) is a cancer originating from the biliary system. The age-adjusted incidence rate of iCCA in the United States has been increasing over the past decade and is currently estimated to be approximately 1.2 per 100,000.12 Patients are often diagnosed with advanced or metastatic disease that cannot be surgically removed. Current first-line standard of care is the chemotherapy combination of gemcitabine and platinum-derived agents. The prognosis for patients with advanced disease is poor, with a median survival of less than one year.13

About Basilea

Basilea Pharmaceutica Ltd. is a commercial-stage biopharmaceutical company, focused on the development of products that address the medical challenges in the therapeutic areas of oncology and infectious diseases. With two commercialized drugs, the company is committed to discovering, developing and commercializing innovative pharmaceutical products to meet the medical needs of patients with serious and life-threatening conditions. Basilea Pharmaceutica Ltd. is headquartered in Basel, Switzerland and listed on the SIX Swiss Exchange.

Disclaimer

This communication expressly or implicitly contains certain forward-looking statements, such as "believe", "assume", "expect", "forecast", "project", "may", "could", "might", "will" or similar expressions concerning Basilea Pharmaceutica Ltd. and its business, including with respect to the progress, timing and completion of research, development and clinical studies for product candidates. Such statements involve certain known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors, which could cause the actual results, financial condition, performance or achievements of Basilea Pharmaceutica Ltd. to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Basilea Pharmaceutica Ltd. is providing this communication as of this date and does not undertake to update any forward-looking statements contained herein as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

For further information, please contact:

Peer Nils Schroder, PhD



Head of Corporate Communications & Investor Relations Phone +41 61 606 1102 E-mail media_relations@basilea.com (mailto:media_relations@basilea.com)

investor_relations@basilea.com (mailto:investor_relations@basilea.com)

This press release can be downloaded from www.basilea.com.

References

FIDES-01: ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT03230318 T. G. Hall, Y. Yu, S. Eathiraj et al. Preclinical activity of ARQ 087, a novel inhibitor targeting FGFR dysregulation. PLoS ONE 2016, 11 (9), e0162594 R. Porta, R. Borea, A. Coelho et al. FGFR a promising druggable target in cancer: Molecular biology and new drugs. Critical Reviews in Oncology/Hematology 2017 (113), 256-267 T. Helsten, S. Elkin, E. Arthur et al. The FGFR landscape in cancer: Analysis of 4,853 tumors by next-generation sequencing. Clinical Cancer Research 2016 (22), 259-267 P. McSheehy, F. Bachmann, N. Forster-Gross et al. Derazantinib (DZB): A dual FGFR/CSF1R-inhibitor active in PDX-models of urothelial cancer. Molecular Cancer Therapeutics 2019 (18), 12 supplement, pp. LB-C12 M. A. Cannarile, M. Weisser, W. Jacob et al. Colony-stimulating factor 1 receptor (CSF1R) inhibitors in cancer therapy. Journal for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer 2017, 5:53 Y. Zhu, B. L. Knolhoff, M. A. Meyer et al. CSF1/CSF1R Blockade reprograms tumor-infiltrating macrophages and improves response to T cell checkpoint immunotherapy in pancreatic cancer models. Cancer Research 2014 (74), 5057-5069 E. Peranzoni, J. Lemoine, L. Vimeux et al. Macrophages impede CD8 T cells from reaching tumor cells and limit the efficacy of anti-PD-1 treatment. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America 2018 (115), E4041-E4050 V. Mazzaferro, B. F. El-Rayes, M. Droz dit Busset et al. Derazantinib (ARQ 087) in advanced or inoperable FGFR2 gene fusion-positive intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma. British Journal of Cancer 2019 (120), 165-171. ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT01752920 FIDES-02: ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT04045613 FIDES-03: ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT04604132 S. K. Saha, A. X. Zhu, C. S. Fuchs et al. Forty-year trends in cholangiocarcinoma incidence in the U.S.: intrahepatic disease on the rise. The Oncologist 2016 (21), 594-599 A. Lamarca, D. H. Palmer, H. S. Wasa et al. ABC-06 | A randomised phase III, multi-centre, open-label study of Active Symptom Control (ASC) alone or ASC with oxaliplatin/5-FU chemotherapy (ASC+mFOLFOX) for patients (pts) with locally advanced/metastatic biliary tract cancers (ABC) previously-treated with cisplatin/gemcitabine (CisGem) chemotherapy. Journal of Clinical Oncology 2019 (37), supplement, abstract 4003





Press release
Kasganj : , Feb 10 (IANS) A police constable was killed and an Sub-Inspector grievously wounded in assault by aides of a known liquor smuggler, late on Tuesday night.

The deceased constable has been identified as Devendra while the SI has been identified as Ashok Kumar.

Omkar Dhimar, brother of the accused Moti Dhimar, was killed in an encounter on Wednesday morning.

The two policemen had reportedly gone to serve a legal notice for attachment of property to a history-sheeter named Moti over his alleged liquor smuggling activities when they were ambushed by his aides, stripped and assaulted with sticks and other weapons and taken hostage.

A search operation was conducted and additional forces were called after the policemen, who had managed to flee from the site of the incident, informed the officials.

The two police personnel were found with serious injuries in a field in Nagla Dhimar village under Sidhpura police station and were taken to a local hospital. However, Devendra succumbed to his injuries later during treatment.

The police team has recovered Ashok Kumar's bike from the spot. Another unknown bike has also been found.

The policeman's bike was found fallen on the ground with their uniform and shoes on top. It is believed that the attackers also humiliated the cops by stripping them and then assaulting them.

According to ASP Aditya Verma, "A police officer and constable of Sidhpura police station went to Nagla Dhimar and Nagla Bhikari on information, where they were assaulted. The case is being thoroughly investigated." The Chief Minister's Office released a statement later in the night, that said Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has called for strict action against those involved in the crime. "Action to be taken against the culprit under National Security Act," it said.

The Chief Minister has also directed officials to ensure proper treatment of the injured inspector and announced ex-gratia of Rs 50 lakh and government job for a family member of the constable who lost his life.

Meanwhile, ADG Ajay Anand has reached Kasganj to stock of the situation.

District Magistrate Chandra Prakash Singh said the Chief Minister is personally monitoring this case. "He has given orders to take strict action against the culprits."

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The Police in Ogun State on Wednesday refuted social media reports that the home of Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka, located in the Kemta area of Abeokuta, the state capital, was attacked by suspected herdsmen.

The police spokesperson, Abimbola Oyeyemi, in a statement said contrary to the reports, the incident was triggered by a stray cow sighted on Tuesday within the vicinity of Mr Soyinkas home.

The attention of Ogun State Police Command has been drawn to a video circulating on social media about a purported attack of Nobel Laureate Prof Wole Soyinkas house by Fulani herdsmen and the command wishes to set the record straight, Mr Oyeyemi said.

The police spokesperson said one Kazeem, an indigene of Ijeun, who is into the cattle business, was informed by his cattle herder, Awalu Muhammed, that one of the cows was missing.

While Mr Muhammed was searching for the stray cow around Kemta Estate where Soyinkas house is located, the police said, Mr Soyinka saw him and ordered him to move the cow away from the vicinity.

Mr Oyeyemi said the DPO of Kemta Division, who heard about the incident, quickly moved to the scene with a patrol team and the owner of the cows was invited to come with the Fulani man in charge of the cattle.

The duo were questioned and properly profiled, the police said.

The entire place was inspected by the DPO and it was established that it was just a case of stray cow as nothing was damaged or tampered with. It was, therefore, a thing of surprise to see a video trending on social media that the respected Professor Wole Soyinkas house was invaded by Fulani herdsmen with the view to attack or kill him.

The video is nothing but a calculated attempt by mischief makers to cause panic in the mind of people. There is nothing like an invasion of Prof Wole Soyinkas house or any form of attack on his person.

He said the Commissioner of Police, Edward Ajogun, has been to the scene for on the spot assessment, adding that he personally interviewed the owner of the cattle and Mr Sorinola.

The command hereby wishes to warn the fake news peddlers to desist from it as they may be made to feel the weight of the law, the police said.

It is an offence for anybody to originate or help in circulating fake news. The command will, therefore, henceforth be tracing and fishing out those deliberately dishing out fake information to members of the public especially the one that cause panic in the mind of innocent people.

Mr Soyinka has been openly critical of the deteriorating security situation across Nigeria especially the incursion of armed herders linked to crimes.

The ministry of agriculture has over the last three months provided assistance to nearly 1 000 farmers, including supplying them with fertilisers as well as seeds and crop field preparation services at a subsidised rate.

Of 9 921 farmers assisted, the majority of beneficiaries are women, making up at least 58%. The government allocated over N$22 million to support the Dry Land Crop Production Programme (DCPP) and the Cereal Value Chain Development Programme with the aim of increasing food production, programme coordinator James Nzehengwa said.

"The programmes are aimed at increasing food production and productivity along cereal value chains and thereby enhancing food security and creating resilience to climate change," said Nzehengwa.

Nzehengwa said the programme is available in all 10 crop producing regions and urged those who have not benefited from the programme yet to visit the agriculture extension officers in their area.

The programme is implemented in the four O northern regions, Kunene, the two Kavango regions as well as Zambezi, Omaheke and Otjozondjupa. The ploughing services are expected to run until the beginning of March. Since the commencement of the rain season in November last year, 2 245 crop farmers were assisted with ploughing and planting through government and private subsidised tractors.

On average, farmers spend N$250 for a government tractor and 150 for a private tractor. The N$350 of the N$500 charged by private tractors is paid off by government. When using the traditional methods to prepare the land, farmers also receive N$250 subsidy from the same ministry.

Equally, 6 791 crop farmers also received seeds on a subsidised rate across the country while 891 received fertilisers to improve soil fertility and productivity of the land, Nzehengwa informed.

The ministry is also subsidising weeding services and procurement of storage provision facilities. According to Nzehengwa, weed control remains a challenge that contributes to low crop yields among communal farmers.

Each farming household qualifies for N$250 per hectare to a maximum of five hectare per farming household.

"Maximum of five ton grain storage facilities will be subsidised at 65% to a maximus of N$2 500 per farming household," said Nzehengwa.



Heathrow is charging passengers an extra 8.90 a flight to keep its check-in desks, baggage system and lights going after losing 1.5billion in nine months due to Covid.

These costs are normally covered by annual fees agreed with airlines, but passenger numbers have plummeted over the last year, culminating in the airport losing its status as Europe's busiest last Autumn.

In July and September, flights were down by more than 84 per cent compared with the same period in 2019.

Airport bosses insist the charge would be removed once passenger numbers are back on the rise, but said it was needed this year to 'achieve full cost recovery', according to the Times.

Currently Britons are not allowed to leave the country unless they have a legally permitted reason.

Holiday giant Jet2 yesterday announced it had cancelled all trips and flights until April 14 due to travel restrictions and growing uncertainty over when lockdown will end.

The company said it was handing out full refunds for holidaymakers who have had their travel plans scrapped.

It came after Matt Hancock unveiled a brutal crackdown on those breaking travel restrictions, insisting those who lie about whether they have been to mutant coronavirus hotspots face up to 10 years in prison.

Heathrow Airport, pictured yesterday, is charging passengers an extra 8.90 a flight to keep its check-in desks, baggage system and lights going

How will the new border rules work? Matt Hancock has announced details of the tougher border measures to MPs. TEN YEARS IN PRISON Mr Hancock said that arrivals who lie on their passenger locator forms about visiting 'hot spot' countries, in order to avoid hotel quarantine, face up to a decade in prison. It affects British arrivals from 33 countries deemed high risk of new variants. Nationals of those countries will be refused entry to the UK and most direct flights have already been banned. The countries include all of South America, large parts of Africa - including South Africa - and the United Arab Emirates. HOTEL QUARANTINE Arrivals from Red List nations will have to quarantine at a Government-designated hotel for 10 days. It will cost the travellers 1,750 each, although the Government is paying the upfront cost and will bill them afterwards. Attempts to break out of the quarantine before the 10 days are up could result in a fine of up to 10,000. They are not eligible for the five-day 'test and release' scheme. None of the 16 hotels involved in Number 10's quarantine plan have been named for 'commercial reasons'. REPEATED COVID TESTS Red List arrivals will be required to test negative for coronavirus 72 hours before departure, using a kit that meets UK government standards. They will be tested again on day two and day eight of quarantine, with costs included in the wider charge of the hotel stay. NON-RED LIST ARRIVALS The same requirement for a negative test result 72 hours before departure applies. Once in the UK, they must isolate for 10 days at home or in private accommodation, with the authorities able to check that they are obeying the rules. Tests will be required on day two and day eight of isolation, and must be booked through a government portal in advance of travel. The portal will be launched on Thursday. The costs are not yet known but PCR tests typically cost around 120 a time. TEST AND RELEASE The test and release scheme - which allows non-'red list travellers' to leave isolation if they test negative after five days is staying in place. Many essential business travellers are likely to take this option. However, Mr Hancock suggested even though they will not be subject to quarantine after the five-day test, they will still be required to have tests on day two and days eight. That means they could be screened four times in total. Advertisement

The Health Secretary said he made 'no apologies' for incredibly harsh measures, warning that protecting the UK from variant strains that can potentially evade vaccines is 'mission critical' - and hinting they might need to be in place until the Autumn.

He revealed the government is creating a new criminal offence of hiding from the authorities that you have visited one of the countries on the UK's 'red list'.

The draconian step came as he confirmed that from Monday all arrivals will have to take three gold-standard PCR coronavirus tests before being allowed to freely move around the UK.

One has to be completed abroad before departure and two during their 10-day isolation period in the UK. Those who fail to get the checks could be hit with thousands of pounds in fines.

Mr Hancock also declared that 4,600 rooms have now been secured by the government from 16 hotels so the 'quarantine hotel' system can get up and running as planned on Monday, although the Department of Health refused to name them.

All incomers from 'red list' countries must stay in the rooms for 10 days, costing 1,750 each - with a supplement for people sharing rooms - including food and drink and their testing bill.

Arrivals from dozens of high-risk countries on the 'red list' will have to test negative 72 hours before travelling, and then be screened again twice, on day two and day eight.

Failure to stick to the hotel quarantine will be punishable with a fine of up to 10,000, Mr Hancock said.

Meanwhile, all other travellers will also have to show a negative result before coming to the UK, and then face two more tests while isolating at home or in other private accommodation. The government has not said how much that will cost although typically it is around 120 per test.

The existing 'test and release' scheme will stay in place so people can escape restrictions five days after arrival - but they will still have to be tested on day two and day eight regardless.

Mr Hancock said failure to get the screening - which must be booked in advance through a government portal - will be punishable with a 1,000 fine on the first occasion, and 2,000 on the second.

And he said people who lie about whether they have been to 'red list' countries could be hit with a jail sentence of up to 10 years under a new law.

The maximum punishment puts the offence in a category with some of the most serious, alongside things such as carrying a firearm with intent. Sentences for rape can be shorter than 10 years, although the maximum for that level of crime is life.

The tests required are the PCR variety rather than the quicker and cheaper lateral flow.

The announcement was met with concern from business chiefs, who called for extra help for the aviation sector.

The Confederation of British Industry's chief UK policy director Matthew Fell said: 'Business understands the priority is to protect the health of the population, and supports measures to reduce infections and hasten the return to a normal way of life.

'Yet these new quarantine rules and testing requirements are a further reminder of just how challenging the situation is for the international travel sector right now.

Currently Britons are not allowed to leave the country unless they have a legally permitted reason. Pictured: a passenger arriving at Heathrow yesterday

Check-in desks at Heathrow Airport were once again deserted yesterday due to the ongoing travel restrictions

Six in ten Britons say they 'could cope well' with ten days in hotel quarantine From Monday, UK residents returning from 33 countries will have to isolate for 10 days in hotels. Now, a YouGov poll has revealed that most Britons think they'd cope well with the quarantine. Forty four percent think they would cope fairly well in this situation, while a further 16% think they would cope very well A third (34%) say they would either not cope very well (19%) or not well at all (15%) Women (37%) are slightly more likely than men (31%) to say they wouldn't cope well in hotel quarantine Advertisement

'Further, immediate support is now essential to protect companies and jobs in the aviation sector and its supply chains in the difficult months ahead. The Government should also be clear on a road map to relaxing restrictions when health data permits.

'The UK's world-class aviation sector  which underpins so much of our economic activity  must be supported so that it can play its full part in the country's recovery.'

Paul Charles, CEO of travel consultants The PC Agency, said: 'Mass traveller testing alone is to be welcomed as it enables Government to stay one step ahead of possible new variants, but adding several layers of complexity to travel will stall any economic recovery.

'The Government needs to signal that it is looking to loosen border restrictions again from April, when there will be much less pressure on the NHS and infection/mortality rates will be lower.

'What is the exit route out of this? Travel cannot work on the short-term whim of Government.'

He added: 'When infection and mortality rates are much lower and the NHS is not under pressure due to vaccines taking effect, then there is no reason for such measures to be in place.

'So, I would still expect travel to short-haul Europe to be likely from 1st May onwards and that's when consumers should be booking for.

'Some countries will still no doubt insist on negative test proof but travel should very much open up further. This will enable people to visit family again and travel on business, as well as for holidays.'

Mr Charles said the government needed to signal that restrictions will be diluted from the start of April, or the travel sector could go over a 'cliff-edge' with 'hundreds of thousands of job losses and business failures'.

Heathrow chief executive John Holland-Kaye insisted in October when the figures were revealed that 'Britain is falling behind' because 'we've been too slow to embrace passenger testing' for Covid-19.

By comparison, coronavirus testing regimes had been implemented at all three 'continental rivals' - Paris Charles de Gaulle, Amsterdam Schiphol and Frankfurt - the airport said in a statement.
Traditional burial in a graveyard has environmental costs. Graves can take up valuable land, leak embalming chemicals and involve nonbiodegradable materials like concrete, as well as the plastic and steel that make up many caskets. But the other mainstream option -- cremation -- releases dangerous chemicals and greenhouse gasses into the environment.

So, what's an environmentalist to do when making plans for the end of life?

A new study from the University of Kansas in the journal Mortality details how older environmentalists consider death care and how likely they are to choose "green" burials and other eco-friendly options.

This article is specifically asking if older adult environmentalists consider how their bodies are going to be disposed as part of their environmental activism." Paul Stock, Study Lead Author, Associate Professor, Sociology and Environmental Studies, University of Kansas

In addition to a literature review on the ecological costs of various disposal methods, Stock and co-author Mary Kate Dennis of the University of Manitoba interviewed 20 people in the Kansas. Participants were 60 years and older, engaged in environmental activities and possessed spiritual values that guided their environmentalism.

"We were really surprised to see both answers -- that yes, they're planning on green burial, and no, it's not even on their radar," Stock said. "We were often the ones introducing these people that are so knowledgeable in so many areas of the environment and activism to green burial. We would ask them, 'Do you want your body to be buried in a green burial?' And many would say, 'I don't know what that is, can you tell me about it?'"

The researchers said awareness of green burials -- where a body is placed into the soil to facilitate decomposition without durable caskets or concrete chambers -- is growing for some older people. But the practice of green burial remains clouded by a funeral industry looking to make profits, and it can be influenced by considerations of family, religious and cultural traditions, as well as the practices of institutions like the military that carry out funerals.

"The business of burial has shaped all of our ideas about how we can be buried," Dennis said. "A lot of participants said they weren't aware of green burial. We're sort of presented with two choices -- you're going to be put in the cemetery or cremated. Then, we start expanding to other options, but that's only been in recent times.

You see some of their desires, like, 'I want to be put out on the land.' Or you see in some of our green-burial narratives where people took it into their own hands. But you have to have be empowered to go against the grain, so I think for a lot of us we didn't even know a green burial was possible, and pushback from society, capitalism and the funeral industry has created a situation where we don't even know the possibilities -- some of the environmentalists in our study didn't know there were laws that say they can be buried on their own land."

The researchers found more than half of their environmentally minded participants planned on eventual cremation.

Among those planning burials, there was "unequal knowledge about green burial as an option" even though Lawrence is at the vanguard of green burial in its municipal regulations and even boasts a green-burial section in the local cemetery, Oak Hill, where "metal, concrete, plastic, other synthetic materials and/or stone may not be used for interment."

"We heard different stories and different requests or thoughts of what they're going to ask their loved ones to do with their bodies," Stock said. "The introduction of green burials is very much -- like a lot of their thoughts on where or how they wanted to be disposed of -- about a sense of place. What struck us and what was so interesting was that Lawrence had, at least at the time, the only municipal-owned cemetery in the country that allowed green burials."

Perhaps the varying answers given by participants is a result of a lack of conclusive evidence that no one form of handling human remains is decidedly more eco-friendly than another, as the issue has been little-studied.

"There's not a clear line," Stock said. "What really struck us was there's not actually too much science done on comparing what's more environmental. There are really just one or two papers out there using common environmental measurements -- whether it's a carbon footprint or some other kind of way -- to even give us technical measurements to compare. We essentially don't have too much information to guide us as scientists, much less for older adults as to what is the greenest way of taking care of ones remains."

The investigators predicted that as green burials gain in popularity, more options for green disposal of bodies will become commonly available, even ones that today seem eccentric.

"The mushroom suit -- when we talk about that with our undergrads they're usually sort of puzzled and intrigued," Dennis said. "People wonder, 'How does that work?" But it's an interesting one. Basically, you're wrapped in material and then mushrooms grow out of you, and it cleans the toxins. There's going to be more new and awesome ways to be buried that we haven't even heard of yet."
Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-10 07:27:16|Editor: huaxia

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Photo taken on Feb. 9, 2021 shows the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C., the United States. U.S. Senate on Tuesday voted to proceed with the second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump. The Senate voted 56-44 that the impeachment trial of Trump is constitutional despite calls from some Republicans to dismiss proceedings. Six Republican senators voted with all 50 Democrats. (Xinhua/Liu Jie)

WASHINGTON, Feb. 9 (Xinhua) -- U.S. Senate on Tuesday voted to proceed with the second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump.

The Senate voted 56-44 that the impeachment trial of Trump is constitutional despite calls from some Republicans to dismiss proceedings. Six Republican senators voted with all 50 Democrats.

"The Senate shall proceed with the trial," said Democratic senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, who is presiding over the trial, after the vote was tallied.

The vote came after House impeachment managers and Trump's defense team spent four hours debating over whether a president who is out of office can be subject to a Senate trial.

Congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the lead impeachment manager, opened his presentation with a video showing disturbing footage of how protesters overran police and ransacked the Capitol.

The 13-minute video concluded with Trump's deleted tweet on Jan. 6, which said "these are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away."

"If that's not an impeachable offense, then there's no such thing," Raskin said.

Trump's legal team contended that Trump did not incite the rioters and that his speech about the election was protected by the First Amendment.

Trump's lawyer David Schoen charged that Democrats were using impeachment as a political "blood sport" to try to keep Trump from running for office again.

Opening arguments in the trial are set to begin Wednesday. It will continue at least through Friday, but could extend into next week.

The House impeachment managers and Trump's team will have 16 hours over two days each to present their case to the Senate, according to the agreement struck between Democrats and Republicans, as well as the House managers and Trump's legal team.

The House, where Democrats have a majority, voted to impeach Trump over "incitement of insurrection" on Jan. 13, a week after his supporters stormed the Capitol building.

Trump has rejected a request that he testify during the trial, and the former president's legal team argues that any conviction would be unconstitutional.

Senate conviction requires a two-thirds majority. Democrats, who only hold half of the 100 Senate seats, would need at least 17 Republicans voting to convict the former president.

Trump is the first president in the U.S. history impeached twice. In December 2019, House Democrats impeached Trump on two articles - abuse of power and obstruction of Congress - over his efforts to pressure Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden and his family. He was acquitted by the Republican-led Senate in February 2020. Enditem
[February 10, 2021] CRS Data's MLS Tax Suite Enters Canadian Market, Signs Nova Scotia Association of REALTORS

CRS Data, a leading provider of property tax data in the U.S., has expanded into the Canadian market with the introduction of the Nova Scotia Association of REALTORS to its growing roster of customers. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210210005059/en/ CRS Data, a leading provider of property tax data in the U.S., has expanded into the Canadian market by welcoming the Nova Scotia Association of REALTORS to the team's growing roster of customers. The innovative platform offers extensive map layer tools and simplified property data features for real estate professionals. (Photo: Business Wire) CRS Data began talks with the Nova Scotia Association of REALTORS three years ago when the team expressed interest in integrating a robust property tax data system for their expanding member base. CRS Data is known for its long-term commitment and customized approach to product integration. The team collaborated to build out and customize the MLS Tax Suite system to service real estate professionals throughout the Province of Nova Scotia. "The CRS Data team was fully committed to growing a relationship with our association and perfecting the MLS Tax Suite to display data exactly as we envisioned for our members throughout the Province of Nova Scotia. They let nothing to chance as our teams brainstormed and collaborated together," said Bonnie Wigg, Director of MLS and Member services for the Nova Scotia Association of REALTORS. "We are so pleased with the MLS Tax Suite experience and the wide breadth of map features, statistics and historical data our members will have at their fingertips moving forward."



CRS Data works closely with MLSs and associations to help empower their membership experience through reliable data tools. The team offers personable customer support, ease of use and a multifaceted, user-driven approach to product development. Across all regions of the U.S., the company now services its MLS Tax Suite product to 1,376 counties in 36 states. With the introduction of the Nova Scotia Association of REALTORS, the MLS Tax Suite is now serviced to the entire Province of Nova Scotia, and the team is poised to service other areas of Canada.

CRS Data's MLS Tax Suite is regularly updated with intuitive enhancements. The team is committed to creating the leading property tax data platform, with map layers and prospecting capabilities that enrich the lives of real estate agents. "We are honored to play such an important role in our customers' professional lives," said Nikki Morgan, MLS Sales Executive and product expert at CRS Data's MLS Tax Suite. "Our MLS Tax Suite further adds to the value of the MLS and plays a pivotal role in the service offered by real estate professionals all over the U.S., and now in Nova Scotia. We are beyond thrilled to grow our reach with this new entry into the Canadian market." Throughout the MLS Tax Suite, all data and map features are accompanied by written and video tutorials. This integrated support helps users get the most out of their property data and map tools. The team's help desk is also available by phone and email. While in-person meetings are currently limited, CRS Data hosts live webinar trainings to support customers and ensure they are getting the most out of the product. The MLS Tax Suite is customizable, with a team that is adamantly against upselling and dedicated to creating the best product for their customers. The team also recently expanded the platform's prospecting tools and functionality to increase map search capabilities and ensure simplified access to on-market and off-market listings. Real estate professionals and executives can learn more by visiting https://www.crsdata.com/mls-tax-suite/. About CRS Data: Headquartered in Knoxville, Tenn., CRS Data is a leading provider of public record information servicing bankers, MLSs, appraisers, investors, and other specialty financial customers across the U.S. CRS Data is focused on providing accurate and timely property data, quality products and unparalleled customer satisfaction. Visit www.crsdata.com to learn more. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210210005059/en/

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Donald Trump's historic second impeachment trial opened Tuesday with graphic video showing the former president whipping up a rally crowd to march to the Capitol and "fight like hell" against his reelection defeat, followed by images of the deadly attack on Congress that came soon after.

In an early test of the former president's defense, Trump's team lost a crucial bid to halt the trial on constitutional grounds. Senators confirmed, 56-44, their jurisdiction over the trial, the first of a president no longer in office. While six Republican senators joined the Democrats in proceeding, the tally showed how far prosecutors have to go to win conviction, which requires a two-thirds threshold of 67 senators.

Tuesday's vote was on whether a former president could be tried after leaving office.

House Democrats prosecuting the case told senators they were presenting "cold, hard facts" against Trump, who is charged with inciting the mob siege of the Capitol to overturn the election he lost to Democrat Joe Biden.

Senators sitting as jurors, many who themselves fled for safety that day, watched the jarring video of Trump supporters battling past police to storm the halls, Trump flags waving.

"That's a high crime and misdemeanor," declared Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., in opening remarks. "If that's not an impeachable offense, then there's no such thing."



Trump is the first president to face impeachment charges after leaving office and the first to be twice impeached. The Capitol siege stunned the world as hundreds of rioters ransacked the building to try to stop the certification of Biden's victory, a domestic attack on the nation's seat of government unlike any in its history. Five people died.

Acquittal is likely, but the trial will test the nation's attitude toward Trump's brand of presidential power, the Democrats' resolve in pursuing him, and the loyalty of Trump's Republican allies defending him.

Trump's lawyers are insisting that he is not guilty of the sole charge of "incitement of insurrection", his fiery words just a figure of speech as he encouraged a rally crowd to "fight like hell" for his presidency. But prosecutors say he "as no good defense" and they promise new evidence.

Security remained extremely tight at the Capitol on Tuesday, a changed place after the attack, fenced off with razor wire with armed National Guard troops on patrol. The nine House managers walked across the shuttered building to prosecute the case before the Senate.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Biden would not be watching the trial of his predecessor.

"Joe Biden is the president, he's not a pundit, he's not going to opine on back and forth arguments," she said.

With senators gathered as the court of impeachment, sworn to deliver "impartial justice", the trial started with debate and a vote over whether it's constitutionally permissible to prosecute Trump after he is no longer in the White House.

Trump's defense team has focused on that question, which could resonate with Republicans eager to acquit Trump without being seen as condoning his behaviour.

Lead lawyer Bruce Castor said that no member of the former president's defense team would do anything but condemn the violence of the "repugnant" attack, and "in the strongest possible way denounce the rioters". Yet Trump's attorney appealed to the senators as "patriots first", and encouraged them to be "cool headed" as they assess the arguments.

At one pivotal point, Raskin told the personal story of bringing his family to the Capitol the day of the riot, to witness the certification of the Electoral College vote, only to have his daughter and son-in-law hiding in an office, fearing for their lives.

"Senators, this cannot be our future," Raskin said through tears. "This cannot be the future of America."



Trump attorney David Schoen turned the trial toward starkly partisan tones, the defense showing its own video of Democrats calling for the former president's impeachment.

Schoen said Democrats are fuelled by a "base hatred" of the former president and "seeking to eliminate from the American political scene."



It appears unlikely that the House prosecutors will call witnesses, in part because the senators were witnesses themselves. At his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, Trump has declined a request to testify.

Presidential impeachment trials have been conducted only three times before, leading to acquittals for Andrew Johnson, Bill Clinton and then Trump last year.

Timothy Naftali, a clinical associate professor at New York University and an expert on impeachment, said in an interview, "This trial is one way of having that difficult national conversation about the difference between dissent and insurrection."



The first test Tuesday was on the constitutionality of the trial, signalling attitudes in the Senate. Six Republicans joined with Democrats pursue the trial, just one more than on a similar vote last week. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana added to the ranks of Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitt Romney of Utah, Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania.

The Democratic-led House impeached the president swiftly, one week after the attack. Five people died, including a woman shot by police inside the building and a police officer who died the next day of his injuries.

(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.)
Thiruvananthapuram, Feb 10 : With Assembly polls in Kerala slated to be held in April-May 2021, talks are doing the rounds that the state Congress could get a new chief as incumbent Mullappally Ramachandran is likely to be moved to the Upper House of Parliament.

Congress' Kannur Lok Sabha MP K Sudhakaran is the front runner for the party post, and he has given enough indications that he is ready to step in.

At the same time, there are also talks that the lone Rajya Sabha seat, which the Congress-led opposition is certain to win in April, might be given to outgoing Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, Ghulam Nabi Azad.

The Congress expects that by sending Azad to the Upper House from Kerala, it could well keep the Muslim community in Kerala firmly on its side, a crucial factor in the Assembly elections.

Currently, Indian Union Muslim League -- the second biggest ally in the Congress-led UDF -- has a firm grip on the Muslim community in the coastal state. But, of late, the ruling Communist Party of India-Marxist is doing everything possible to split the Muslim votes.

A senior Congress leader told IANS on the condition of anonymity that things are quite fluid as to finalisation of candidate for one of the three Rajya Sabha seats that the Congress-led UDF will win.

"It is not easy for our leadership to come to a decision because it has always been the practice to accommodate outgoing state President. In 2011, the present Leader of Opposition in the Kerala Assembly, Ramesh Chennithala, was the state unit chief. He was asked to contest the Assembly polls. So if Ramachandran is moved, he will either be asked to contest the Assembly polls or given the Rajya Sabha seat," the leader said.

Ramachandran, 76, enjoys the reputation of a no-nonsense leader and has been in the Lok Sabha for a record seven times. In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, he did not contest his Vatakara seat in Kozhikode district.

It will be known in the coming days whether the Congress effects a rejig in organisational posts, as it tries hard to regain power in Kerala.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text

Rite Aid is trying to fill more than 2,000 pharmacy jobs. Kroger said in December that it planned to hire nearly 1,000 health care workers; it has already hired hundreds this year. Hy-Vee said in December that it was recruiting 1,000 pharmacy technicians who traditionally have served as support staff but, thanks to a recent regulatory change, are now able to administer vaccines in many states.

BARI, FEB 10 - Italian police on Wednesday arrested four people including a city councillor in a probe into alleged bribes in exchange for services at the city council in the Puglia city of Foggia. The councillor was placed under house arrest, as were a council functionary, a local businessman, and a retired doctor. The councillor was named as 66-year-old centre-right politicians Bruno Longo. He allegedly obtained a bribe of 35,000 euros to have some invoiced from the council paid out to the Web service businessman, 57-year-old Luigi Panniello. The other arrestees were retired doctor Antonio Apicella, 70, and Antonio Parente, 54, an informatics clerk on the city council. The alleged bribe was paid out in three tranches between 2018 and 2019 by an information technology firm in Campobasso, police said. The centre-left opposition ion the council said the affair was so serious it warranted the resignation of the centre-right mayor and his administration. (ANSA).
STAMFORD  Sema4, the health care information company that recently opened a large laboratory in the city, announced Wednesday a plan to become a publicly traded company.

In a move that values the company at approximately $2 billion, Sema4 will go public through a process that essentially acts as an alternative to an initial public offering. It will result in Sema4s shares trading on the Nasdaq Global Market upon the transactions expected completion in the second quarter of this year.

To facilitate the process, an agreement with special purpose acquisition company CM Life Sciences is expected to generate proceeds of up to approximately $793 million when the transaction is completed. Of that amount, up to $343 million would be paid to Sema4 stockholders and the remainder would support Sema4s operations.

This transaction is a significant milestone for Sema4, Eric Schadt, Sema4s founder and CEO, said in a statement. The additional resources will allow us to greatly accelerate our business plans organically and inorganically, developing and bringing in more cutting-edge precision model solutions across multiple disease areas.

In addition to approximately $443 million of cash held in CM Life Sciences trust account, a group of institutional investors plans to participate in the transaction through $350 million of private investment in public equity.

Those investors include Casdin Capital, Corvex Management, Greenwich-based Viking Global Investors, Fidelity Management & Research Company LLC, Counterpoint Global (Morgan Stanley), Perceptive Advisors, SB Management, a subsidiary of SoftBank Group Corp, funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates Inc. Existing investors include funds and accounts managed by Blackrock and Deerfield Management.

The disruptive promise in combining these genomic and clinical data sets, at the patient level, is profound but takes a team of experts, the right business model, and lots of growth capital, Eli Casdin, founder and chief investment officer of Casdin Capital, said in a statement. We therefore could not be more excited to lend our partnership and fill the balance sheet for the foremost leader in the field, Eric Schadt and the expert team hes assembled at Sema4. With an early start, unique business strategy and more than 150 leading data scientists, this is the premier company in one of the biggest, winner-take-most markets in life sciences.

Since its 2017 founding, Sema4 has grown quickly in Connecticut.

In December, it announced the opening of its approximately 70,000-square-foot lab in Stamfords Waterside section. The new facility has the capacity to process thousands of genomic tests per day  a boon for the company in its efforts to provide information related to thousands of genetically identifiable diseases to patients across the country.

Sema4 is headquartered 1.5 miles east, at 333 Ludlow St. It also has a laboratory in Branford.
Erdogan appears to have traded them for millions of doses of the Chinese COVID-19 vaccine. Protests are taking place in front of the Chinese embassy in Ankara. The ratification of an extradition treaty with China faces an uphill battle. Turkish opposition parties are on the attack against the sultan.

Ankara (AsiaNews)  For days, members of the Uyghur community in Turkey have been protesting in front of the Chinese embassy in Ankara against the genocide carried out by the Chinese government against Muslims in Xinjiang.

Now however, we have news of Uyghurs deported from Turkey to China via third countries, said Abdurresit Celil Karluk, a Uyghur sociologist who teaches at Haci Bayram Veli University in Ankara speaking to AsiaNews.

We are standing in front of the embassy to ask where are our relatives, about whom we have not heard for years, Karluk explained, but we have problems with the police.

The police have in fact put up barriers at the entrance to the building, ordering demonstrators to stop the protest.

For their part, demonstrators, some of whom are survivors of Xinjiang concentration camps, denounced the violence their countrymen endure at the hands of Chinese authorities.

Now Uyghurs living in Turkey fear that the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will deport them to China in exchange for massive supplies of the Chinese coronavirus vaccine.

Turkish opposition leaders have noted that China has delivered only one third of the 30 million doses promised, the Associated Press recently reported.

Turkey has not yet ratified an extradition agreement with China, which was signed years ago and ratified by China last December.

About 50,000 Uyghurs live reside in Turkey, and a few joined the Islamic State group in Syria.

Turkish police have detained about 50 Uyghurs on terrorism charges and are now holding them in deportation centres, Turkish lawyers say.

China has used the charge of terrorism as well as separatism to justify anti-Uyghur repression in Xinjiang. Beijing has also been accused of setting up a system of concentration camps to keep Uyghurs and Kazakhs under control.

According to expert data, confirmed by the United Nations, over a million Uyghurs and member of other Turkic Muslim minorities faith have been arbitrarily detained in Xinjiang, which the indigenous population calls East Turkestan.

Recent press stories have highlighted the existence of labour camps in the Chinese-controlled autonomous region, with hundreds of thousands of Muslims reportedly employed by force, especially during the cotton harvest.

According to German researcher Adrian Zenz, the Chinese government is also conducting a forced sterilisation campaign to control the growth of the Uyghur population.

China has denied these allegation, arguing that the forced labour camps in Xinjiang are actually job training centres, part of a poverty alleviation plan.

Turkish and Chinese authorities have also denied claims that the extradition treaty would be used to deport Uyghur dissidents to China.

For Karluk, Given the current political situation, it will not be easy for the [Turkish] government to get [the national] parliament to ratify the extradition agreement with China.

President Erdogan's religious and nationalist base is very sensitive to the Uyghur cause, a fact that the presidents political opposition is exploiting to weaken him.

A decade ago Erdogan himself had accused Beijing of carrying out genocide against the Uyghurs; after the failed coup in 2016 and the cooling of relations with the US and Europe, things changed.

In the past few years, the Turkish leader has sought Chinas political and economic support, putting any criticism of the East Asian giant behind.
Directed by Andrey Konchalovsky; written by Konchalovsky and Elena Kiseleva

Dear Comrades, the Russian entry for Best International Feature Film at this years Academy Awards, addresses one of the most significant and least understood episodes in the history of the Soviet Union: the massacre of dozens of workers in Novocherkassk on June 2, 1962, on the orders of Nikita Khrushchev, the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU).

Twenty-six people are believed to have been killed in the incident (other estimates go far higher), but the real number was never established and perhaps never will be. Seven young workers were accused of banditry and executed, while dozens more were sent to labor camps for many years. Most were not rehabilitated until the dissolution of the USSR.

Dear Comrades

The new film directed by Andrey Konchalovsky, one of Russias best-known filmmakers, has generated significant coverage of the event in Russia, including interviews with historians, and has been received favorably by the international media.

Dear Comrades, set in June 1962, focuses on Lyudmila (Lyuda, played by Yulia Vysotskaya), a loyal Communist Party apparatchik and convinced Stalinist. Over the course of the film, she develops from a devout believer in the party and Stalin into someone who questions the humanity of the Soviet system. In the films opening, we see Lyuda, a city council member, receiving extra portions of meat in a grocery store under conditions where most residents have to wait all night to get potatoes, and often dont obtain meat at all. Lyuda blames Khrushchev, above all. Under Stalin, she repeatedly says, food prices were never raised, only lowered.

Dear Comrades (Andrey Konchalovsky)

At a June 1 meeting of the city council, she confidently proclaims that the workers she is responsible for are under control. In this meeting, as throughout the film, Lyuda refers to the workers as hooligans and criminals. Then, however, the news arrives that workers at the Locomotive Plant and the Electric Plant have gone on strike to protest the rise in food prices.

A demonstration by the workers, carrying banners with the portrait of Lenin and the slogan Workers of the World Unite, proceeds toward and surrounds the city administration building. The protesters jeer the head of the city council. The council members, shocked, infuriated and scared, manage to flee the building through the back door. The scenes of the council consulting during the demonstration and then taking flight are among the strongest in the movie.

The social and political tension gripping the city finds expression in Lyudmilas own household. Her daughter Svetka (Yuliya Burova), a student, works at the affected plant. In opposition to her mother, Svetka defends Khrushchevs secret speech at the 20th Communist Party congress in February 1956, in which the latter acknowledged some of Stalins worst crimes. She expresses the determination to join a protest by workers scheduled for the following day.

Yuliya Vysotskaya and Yuliya Burova

On June 2, the city council meets with Communist Party Central Committee members who have flown in from Moscow. Among them is Anastas Mikoyan (Goga Pipinashvili), one of the few Old Bolsheviks who survived the Great Terror of the 1930s. By 1962, he is the No. 2 figure in the Soviet Union, after Khrushchev. In a discussion about how to respond to the protests, Lyuda distinguishes herself by suggesting that everyone participating in the demonstration needs to be rounded up and the instigators found and executed. Mikoyan is impressed and asks her to submit her proposal in writing.

The Central Committee wants to send armed troops to the city, but a Red Army representative opposes sending in soldiers with live ammunition. In the end, he has to yield to the pressure of the party leadership. The city is placed under de facto martial law and, on the orders of Mikoyan and company, entirely cut off from the outside world.

At a demonstration of thousands of workers that same day, the massacre occurs. These scenes in Dear Comrades are effective and highly disturbing. The filmmakers have KGB snipers firing the deadly rounds at the protesters. This version of events, while plausible, has not been conclusively established, and most historians assume that both the military and the KGB were involved. Lyuda herself escapes only narrowly and witnesses someone she knows shot dead.

After the massacre, Lyuda cannot find her daughter anywhere. Throwing political caution to the wind and driven by elementary maternal instinct, she searches desperately for Svetka, fearing that she is among the murdered. The same Lyuda who had called for all instigators of unrest to be shot just a few days ago becomes increasingly disturbed by the inhumanity with which the massacre is covered up.

Yuliya Vysotskaya

Her disillusionment is only deepened by comments from her religious and bitterly anti-communist father (Sergei Erlish). He tells her that everything happening was presaged by the Red terror during the Civil War and the requisition of grain from the peasants. Konchalovsky portrays this grim and bitter man as something of an oracle whose supposed political wisdom is gradually revealed by the reality of the massacre and ensuing cover-up.

Eventually, a KGB agent, Viktor (Andrey Gusev), heavily involved in the massacre, reveals an elemental human decency and helps Lyudmila find out what has happened to her daughter.

Illegally, they visit a cemetery on the outskirts of the city where, as they are told, many of those who had been killed have been buried in secret. A worker, forced to bury some of the corpses the previous night, tells them he is sure Svetkas corpse was thrown on top of another body in a grave. Further surprises lie in store.

While Lyuda is a fictional character, the reconstruction of the June 1962 events in Dear Comrades is largely accurate. For decades, the massacre was treated as a state secret in the Soviet Union. The first accounts of it did not appear in the Soviet press until 1988. In 19921994, a presidential commission conducted an investigation into the massacre based on newly accessible archives. The movies historical advisor was Yuri Bagraev, a former high-ranking member of the military prosecution in the USSR and post-Soviet Russia, and a member of that commission.

Konchalovskys film offers a view of the crisis of Stalinism in the USSR, but he does so from the standpoint of the Stalinist bureaucracy itself. Viewers are called upon to sympathize with Lyuda, who defends the Stalinist terror of the 1930s and only becomes concerned with the human costs of the Soviet system when her own family becomes involved; and with Viktor, who first participates in a massacre and then talks about acting po-chelovecheski (in a humane manner or like a decent human being). There is a healthy amount of political and intellectual blindness and complacency in these portraits.

By contrast, the striking workers are portrayed in the manner in which the bureaucrats view themas drunkards, hooligans and criminals. Lyudas overt contempt for them is never countered. In fact, even Lyudas daughter, the only one who directly contradicts her, at one point dismissively notes that nothing but heavy drinking can be expected from workers. Historically, this has no basis. While there were criminal elements in the crowd, the historian Vladimir Kozlov argues they were insignificant in the context of a protest by tens of thousands of industrial workers.

However, for Konchalovsky, it seems, any change for the better will come from elements such as the arch-Stalinist Lyuda and the KGB man Viktor.

More fundamentally, the focus on Lyuda and Viktor distracts from and skews the sentiments that prevailed among the Soviet masses at the time and that drove events such as the Novocherkassk walkout: the widespread desire for a return to the goals and aspirations of the October Revolution in opposition to the parasitic, tyrannical bureaucracy.

The Novocherkassk massacre has to be understood within a broader political and social context. In 1956, with his speech about Stalins criminality, Khrushchev initiated the so-called Thaw in which more political and artistic freedoms were granted. The revelations, reflecting the profound crisis of the bureaucracy, galvanized millions of workers, youth and intellectuals not just in the USSR but internationally.

Among broad sections of the Soviet working class, youth and intelligentsia, there was genuine anger about social inequality and what many perceived as the betrayal of the 1917 revolution. Moreover, the social weight of the working class in Soviet society had been significantly strengthened: after a wave of industrialization in the 1950s, the urban population now for the first time outnumbered that in the countryside. Many workers were young. They had expectations of rising living standards and far-reaching political changes, and they were willing to fight for them.

In the 19611962 period, Khrushchev rolled back social concessions made earlier, while implementing certain pro-market measures. A currency reform was introduced and food prices and work norms were raised, thus lowering workers income. According to the historian Kozlov, These developments, combined with growing problems of social justice and mass egalitarian criticism of new Soviet barons and  dacha capitalism, raised popular unrest.

The Novocherkassk uprising was one of a series of urban uprisings and strikes that rocked the Soviet Union in 19611964 and threatened the rule of the bureaucracy. When the strikes and demonstrations occurred in Novocherkassk in June 1962, Kozlov noted, calls for uprisings and strikesreports of anti-government leaflets and statements, as well as insults addressed to Khrushchev personally, were coming in from everywhere.

How close the Novocherkassk protest came to being a full-blown insurrection is indicated by a member of the bureaucracy, Iu. Rukhman, who later recounted: I was standing there looking out of a window of the city department as the procession was streaming past. The mood was somber. Workers, our workers, were carrying portraits of Lenin and banners and we were on the other side of the barricade. At this moment, there was essentially no authority in the city. The political character of the Novocherkassk events is downplayed and obscured in Dear Comrades .

Nor was Novocherkassk an isolated episode on the international level. In 1953, an uprising by workers in Stalinist East Germany was crushed by Soviet tanks. Three years later, a mass strike movement in Poland occurred almost simultaneously with a revolt by Hungarian workers against Stalinist rule, also violently suppressed.

In 1964, Khrushchev was replaced by Leonid Brezhnev through a political coup in the Politburonot least of all because the former was considered incapable of dealing with the mass discontent in the working class. In 1968, amidst a global upsurge of working-class struggles, workers in Czechoslovakia moved to challenge the bureaucracy, a movement again crushed bloodily through a military intervention by the Moscow bureaucracy.

These working-class uprisings vindicated the perspective and analysis of Leon Trotsky, the co-leader of the October revolution and leader of the Left Opposition against Stalinism. In The Revolution Betrayed (1936), Trotsky analyzed how the bureaucracy, which had arisen under conditions of the international isolation of the 1917 October revolution and Russian backwardness and poverty, acted as a counterrevolutionary force within the degenerated workers state. The bureaucracy, which enjoyed vast social privileges, found itself in constant conflict with the socialist legacy of the October revolution and the working class. Its nationalist program of socialism in one country was both counterrevolutionary and historically unviable. Eventually, Trotsky warned, the bureaucracy had either to be overthrown in a political revolution by the Soviet working class, acting in alliance with workers internationally, or it would move to restore capitalism and destroy the Soviet Union.

In an interview on Russian television, Konchalovsky indicated that, as far as he was concerned, the great tragedy in 1962 was that there were those who still believed in Stalin. In reality, the great tragedy of Novocherkassk and similar uprisings wasalong with their bloody suppressionthe stark contrast between the socialist aspirations of the workers and their lack of a political leadership and perspective.

A worker from Novocherkassk gave expression to this when he later noted that in one of the old Novocherkassk preliminary investigation cells, the following inscription had been scrawled on the wall: Here sat working men. They suffered for the workers cause. Thats how it was. Those who were imprisoned believed that they had been struggling for justice, but where could they have learned how to wage a correct political struggle?

Responsibility for the absence of socialist leadership rests with Stalinism. Stalins political genocide of revolutionaries and socialists in the 1930s, including almost the entire cadre of the Bolshevik Party of 1917, thousands of Trotskyists in the USSR and Leon Trotsky himself in 1940, had decapitated the working class, cutting it off from a political understanding of its own history.

Konchalovskys decision to focus on some of the most degraded elements of this bureaucracy flows from his own social and political orientation. Konchalovsky was born in 1937 to a privileged family in the USSR, which was extremely close to leading party circles. His father, Sergei Mikhalkov, authored both the Soviet anthem and the anthem of the Russian Federation and was, for decades, a member of influential state and party bodies. Today, Konchalovsky, like his younger brother Nikita Mikhalkov (also a director), maintains close ties to the Putin regime, which emerged out of the Stalinist destruction of the USSR. (Konchalovsky adopted his grandfathers surname.) The main producer of the film is Alisher Usmanov, a former Stalinist bureaucrat who has become one of the richest oligarchs in Russia, with a net worth of $11.68 billion. The film has also received heavy backing from state television.

Konchalovsky, who no doubt has considerable gifts and skills as a director, is a representative of a social type that, unfortunately, is not uncommon in Russia: the court artist who places his or her work and talent at the disposal not of the people but of the state, and who, for the sake of making a career, sacrifices historical and artistic truth. (Vadim Rogovin, in his account of the Great Terror, analyzed the emergence of this layer under Stalin.)

Throughout the post-war period, the impact of Stalinism was abetted by the role of revisionist tendencies like Pabloism which promoted the illusion that the Stalinist bureaucracy was a progressive social force which could be reformed at the very point when it was challenged constantly by revolts in the working class. Falsely claiming the banner of the Fourth International, which had been founded by Trotsky in 1938 and was only defended and continued by the International Committee, the Pabloites subordinated the working class to the bureaucracy in the Stalinist-ruled countries and to bourgeois forces internationally. It was only because of this prolonged and bloody undermining of socialist consciousness in the working class that the perpetually crisis-ridden Soviet bureaucracy could maintain its rule and ultimately destroy the USSR and restore capitalism

The combination of an apologetic account of Stalinism with anti-Communism that Konchalovsky ultimately offers in Dear Comrades is not only an accurate expression of his own political and ideological evolution. It also reflects the dominant ideological trend of the Putin regime in Russia, which has combined a promotion of Tsarism and anti-Communism, including in its most vile, anti-Semitic forms, with a glorification of Stalin. In short, a whitewash and promotion of all the forces of counter-revolution in Russian history.

The broad and serious response to Konchalovskys movie is an indication of the enormous relevance of these historical questions for the development of political consciousness of workers today. But it also makes clear that both the historical and artistic fields must not be left to those who use the crimes of Stalinism to promote anti-communism and, in this case, perversely, to legitimize the Stalinist bureaucracy itself. A serious reckoning with the socialist alternative to Stalinism offered by Trotsky, the Left Opposition and the Fourth International is overdue, in Russia and internationally.
TV actor Anita Hassanandani and husband Rohit Reddy became parents to a baby boy on February 9, 2021. While, the couple had several congratulatory messages pouring in from their friends from the TV industry along with their fans, one of the most special reactions to this happy news came from Anita's close friend and TV Czarina Ekta Kapoor. Ekta recently visited Anita at the hospital and had the most adorable way to celebrate this occasion.

Ekta Kapoor took to her social media handle to share a lovely video wherein one can see the new beaming mommy, Anita Hassanandani lying in her hospital bed. Ekta can be seen asking Anita to strike a pose to which the Yeh Hai Mohabbatein actor gives out her infectious smile. In the end, Ekta can be seen wishing Anita on this joyous occasion and says that her nephew has been born.

Also Read: Anita Hassanandani & Rohit Reddy Welcome Baby Boy; Hina Khan, Nakuul Mehta & Others Congratulate

Not only that, but Ekta Kapoor also had a beautiful message for Anita Hassanandani. She congratulated Anita and her husband Rohit Reddy for becoming parents on the post. Ekta who is also a mother to her adorable son Ravie also wrote in the caption of the post how she is going to discuss babies now with Anita instead of their work and love life. Lastly, she welcomed her best friend into the 'Mummy Dadddy Club.' Take a look at the post shared by Ekta.

Anita Hassanandani had been nailing her pregnancy phase in a fun manner as she engaged in some endearing photoshoots. Recently, the Kavya Anjali actor also spoke about her first pregnancy. While talking to Times Now about the same, Anita had said, "I feel so ready! We have also put together a very special crib just for our baby-to-be. In fact, I have done so many photoshoots but nothing can compare to the fun I had during my maternity shoot."

Also Read: Nakuul Mehta And Jankee Parekh Welcome Baby Boy; Share Adorable Post To Announce The Good News!

Anita Hassanandani and Rohit Reddy are not the only TV couple who have embraced parenthood this year. Recently, Nakuul Mehta and his wife Jankee Parekh had also become parents to a baby boy. Apart from that, actor Karanvir Bohra and his wife Teejay Sidhu also welcomed a third baby girl after their twin daughters, Bella and Vienna.
The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
Hudson, NY (12534)

Today

Rain. High around 50F. Winds N at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 100%. Rainfall near a half an inch..

Tonight

Rain. Low near 45F. Winds NNW at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 100%. Rainfall around a half an inch.
What 2021 Has in Store for Our Craft Beer Industry
Kochi, Feb 10 : A bench of the Kerala High Court on Wednesday gave relief to Bollywood actor Sunny Leone and two of her close aides from being arrested on a complaint filed by an event manager in Kochi in an alleged cheating case.

The court asked the Crime Branch wing of the Kerala Police probing the case not to arrest the three till they are served notices as per the criminal procedures.

Early this month in the state capital, the actress was questioned by the Kerala Police at a private resort in the same case, where she explained the entire sequence of events and claimed she had done no wrong.

R. Shiyas who conducts events in and around Kochi had filed a complaint with the Kerala DGP that Sunny Leone had taken Rs 29 lakh from him while promising to attend various inaugural functions in the state but failed to do so.

The complainant said that her manager had taken money in several instalments from 2016 onwards, promising to attend five functions. But the same did not happen and he, subsequently, complained to the police.

According to her, while admitting that her manager had taken the money and she had given dates several times, the event manager could not comply with her dates and, hence the issue arose.

With the relief from the court, Sunny Leone and her associates will have to cooperate with the police probe team.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Volkswagen has joined a slew of companies such as Uber, Hyundai, Daimler, and Airbus which are looking to tap the potential technology of flying cars. The German automobile giant is conducting a feasibility test about flying cars in China.

Volkswagen said, "Beyond autonomous driving the concept of vertical mobility could be the next step to take our mobility approach into the future, especially in the technically affine Chinese market. Therefore, we are investigating potential concepts and partners in a feasibility study to identify the possibility to industrialize this approach."

The European automaker's China head Stephan Woellenstein told Volkswagen CEO Herbery Diess in an interview on LinkedIn that the company wants to develop a drone that can be licensed in a bid to participate in this future market. China is the biggest automobile market globally and also accounts for a lion's share of Volkswagen's sales.

This news comes as companies are racing to cash in on the commercial 'robo-taxis' market which could be worth $1.5 trillion by 2040. Though it sounds exciting, vertical mobility brings with itself many more challenges including safety and reliability compared to electric mobility. Flying vehicles will need to operate in crowded airspace and will also need a regulatory framework, which can take years to materialise.

Also read: Deceptive December! Auto retails decline 10% in Jan
STOCKHOLM, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- MGI Tech Co., Ltd. ("MGI")'s high-throughput gene sequencer has helped the regions throughout Sweden greatly improve their COVID-19 testing capabilities from the laboratory at the National Pandemic Center located in Karolinska Institute (KI). Sweden's STV News, the national public television, recently reports that only one percent (1%) of the positive COVID-19 samples have been currently sequenced in Sweden and main regions in the country have been commissioned to increase the figure to ten percent (10%). The KI laboratory is one of the few highly specialized laboratories in Sweden that can perform whole-genome sequencing and COVID-19 monitoring. The high-throughput gene sequencers and automation system used in this laboratory are from MGI.

In March 2020, KI and MGI jointly announced the establishment of a 10,000-person multi-omics laboratory for COVID-19 testing in Stockholm. The lab is equipped with MGI's high-throughput automated virus nucleic acid extraction equipment MGISP-960 and ultra-high-throughput gene sequencer DNBSEQ-T7, helping Sweden identify the variants quickly and accurately to provide the complete viral genome sequence information, while doubling the local COVID-19 testing capacity.

The head of the National Pandemic Center, Dr. Jessica Alm, notes "the super sequencer flown in from China, boasts a sequencing throughput eight (8) times more than other sequencers." Professor Lars Engstrand from KIsays that, "our current focus is on monitoring the UK's COVID-19 mutations, but the attention is also being paid to other mutations that may occur. At the same time, as Sweden has now rolled out its vaccination program, we also need to track those strains that may not be sensitive to the vaccine."

Professor Engstrand also notes that "high-throughput sequencing enables us the access to the full sequence of a virus, and we can identify mutations accurately, and trace and monitor the virus. Through sequencing of the host (human) of a virus in multi-omics dimensions, it can also help us better understand the pathogenesis and provide an important reference for clinical diagnosis and vaccine development." He adds, "For sudden outbreaks of novel infectious diseases of an unknown origin, high-throughput sequencing, as a mature genetic testing technology, has achieved a good balance in terms of accuracy, comprehensiveness, cycle time, throughput, availability, and cost, and has become a fundamental tool for relevant scientific research."

SOURCE MGI Tech Co., Ltd.

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

IT Ministry welcomes Twitter to do busines in India, yet raises doubts about transparency

Lawful orders are binding on any business entity and must be obeyed immediately, MeitY tells Twitter

Twitter global leadership requests better engagement with Government of India

The high-profile virtual meeting between Ajay Prakash Sawhney, Secretary, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), and Twitter global delegates - Monique Meche, Vice President-Global Public Policy and Jim Baker, Deputy General Counsel and Vice President-Legal - concluded a little while from now. The meeting took place amidst extant friction between the nation and the microblogging site. At the heart of the disagreement between the two parties lies alleged fake news, bot accounts and organised propaganda versus the stifling freedom of expression and free speech.

ALSO READ: MeitY coochy-coos KOO - India's alternative to Twitter

The government accuses Twitter of a delayed action against flagged accounts which allegedly spread misinformation using the hashtag '#FarmerGenocide'. "Spreading misinformation using an incendiary and baseless hashtag referring to 'farmer genocide' at a time when such irresponsible content can provoke and inflame the situation is neither journalistic freedom nor freedom of expression as envisaged under Article 19 of the Constitution of India," said IT Secretary Ajay Prakash Sawhney.

While drawing a comparison between disturbance at Red Fort on the Republic Day and Capitol Hill in the USA, the government accused Twitter of differential treatment in two incidents. The IT Secretary went on to add that misuse of Twitter for execution of such campaigns designed to create disharmony and unrest in India is unacceptable and the social media platform must take strong action against such coordinated campaigns targetted at India, through in compliance with the applicable law of the land.

ALSO READ: Kangana Ranaut threatens to leave Twitter, says will join homegrown Koo

Sawhney emphasised that Twitter is welcome to do business in India but raised doubts about its commitment to transparency and healthy conversation on the platform. The senior official also reminded Twitter that lawfully passed orders are binding on any business entity and the same must be obeyed immediately. This was in reference to Centre's list of Twitter handles sent to the platform for deactivation in the backdrop of farmers' protest.

"In India, its Constitution and laws are supreme. It is expected that responsible entities not only reaffirm but remain committed to compliance to the law of land," Sawhney said.

Responding to points raised by MeitY over Twitter's commitment to transparency and healthy conversation on their platform, the platform's leadership affirmed commitment towards following Indian laws and rules. Twitter officials also expressed their continued commitment towards building their services in India. They requested better engagement between Government of India and Twitter's global team.

ALSO READ: Centre steadfast on ban call for 257 Twitter handles
He described scenes that seemed to be from a faraway country fighting off savage insurgents, not from the heart of American democracy. People died that day, Mr. Raskin said. Officers ended up with head damage and brain damage. Peoples eyes were gouged. An officer had a heart attack. An officer lost three fingers that day. Two officers have taken their own lives.

He seemed to linger on details that would resonate personally with the experience of his audience. Members of Congress, at least on the House side, were removing their pins so they couldnt be identified by the mob as they tried to escape, Mr. Raskin said.

His voice grew quiet as he made his big point.

Senators, this cannot be our future, Mr. Raskin said. This cannot be the future of America.

Mr. Raskin, a former constitutional law professor, opened his presentation with a violent video montage culled from news footage, floor speeches and an array of clips posted on social media by the participants.

The presentation was arranged to show Mr. Trump as a kind of narrator for the reconstruction of events. It began with his speech to supporters at a Stop the Steal rally outside the White House that the president had promoted as the culminating spectacle of his long-running and false claim that he had won the election.

The video showed Mr. Trump urging his supporters to head over to the Capitol, then cut to shots from the crowd in which his supporters were heard vowing to take the Capitol and get the traitors. The scene then moved toward the end and a clip of a defiant Mr. Trump outside the White House.

I love you, Mr. Trump told his supporters in a short video, made ostensibly to encourage them to leave the Capitol and go home. Youre very special.
The Nagol is Back! VTOs guide to this years Nagol, plus where to stay and play in south, central and north Pentecost.
Nestled in the Texas Hill Country lies the small town of Fredericksburg, which has earned a top spot on a Forbes roundup of the the most idyllic small towns in the U.S. to visit in 2021.

Founded in 1846, the Texas small town gem has lured visitors to its rolling hills dotted with bluebonnets and cool bungalow rentals called "Sunday Houses."

Featured on the Forbes list for small town charm include Deadwood, South Dakota; Rockport Massachusetts, Captiva Island, Florida; Elizabeth City, North Carolinaand our own Texas destination, Fredericksburg. These small town jewels provide travelers with a way to get off the grid and enjoy the small town pace.

TEXAS TRAVEL DESTINATIONS: These are the top 5 Texas travel destinations for 2021

"Equipped with spectacular natural beauty and fascinating historic backgrounds, these five towns are the perfect fit for experiencing the quieter side of the United States," Forbes' Jared Ranahan writes.

Fredericksburg, Texas

Named after Prince Frederick of Prussia, Fredericksburg has been affectionately deemed "The Aspen of Texas," according to Fodor's Travel Publication. Tucked in the heart of the Texas Hill Country, the German-influenced town offers attractions that include a wildflower farm, wine tastings and a historic downtown strip filled with eclectic boutiques. Outdoor enthusiasts might want to spend a day hiking Enchanted Rock or hitting the Texas Wine Trail.

"The truth is that its hard not to love the town where you can shop a day on Main Street and still not see everything...Or spend a day touring the Texas Wine Trail in townor afternoon hiking Enchanted Rock, according to Fodors Hill Country editor Debbie Harmsen.

Elizabeth City, North Carolina

Located in the northeastern corner of North Carolina, Elizabeth City has been named one of the "100 Best Small Towns in America." This waterfront small town gem was founded in 1794. Visitors can head out to the beaches of the Outer Banks, Ghost Harbor or Hampton Roads. If you love the outdoors, travelers can explore the 20,000 acres of nearby state parks or head out hiking on the Fenwick-Hollowell Wetlands Trail.

UniversalImagesGroup/Universal Images Group via Getty

Deadwood, South Dakota

If you want a taste of the Old West, Deadwood is a step back in time. The small town destination is nestled among the Black Hills of South Dakota, and the historic downtown area is a perfect spot to stroll through. Travelers can head out to the Black Hills underground mine, Broken Boot Gold Mine or go on one of the historic tours offered by a Wild West tour guide.

John Greim/LightRocket via Getty Images

Rockport, Massachusetts

If lobsters and lighthouses are more of your thing, consider heading to the small coastal town of Rockport. Venture over to the creative district of Bearskin Neck or the cool waters of Halibut Point State Park. Travelers can also head to Gloucester, Manchester-by-the Sea or the historic Salem for their East Coast journey.

Jeff Greenberg/Jeff Greenberg/Universal Images

Captiva Island, Florida

Just off of Florida's Gulf Coast, the idyllic small town gem of Captiva Island boasts miles of sandy beaches and activities including biking, sailing and birding. If you need a peaceful, off-the-grid getaway, consider some of the other barrier islands, like Sanibel Island and Cayo Costa.
Jammu and Kashmir will get statehood at the right time: Amit Shah

Not seditious to have different views from government: Supreme Court

Before the ceasefire on Feb 24, Pakistan resorted to over 4,000 border violations

PM package an important component says govt as 2,000 Kashmiri migrants expected to return this year

No civilian aware of move to abrogate Article 370: Govt

India

oi-Deepika S

New Delhi, Feb 10: The government on Wednesday denied that civilians, including a journalist, were privy to information related to the abrogation of Article 370, which gave special status to Jammu and Kashmir.

The Central government got the approval of Parliament on August 5, 2019 for the abrogation of Article 370 and bifurcation of the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir into two union territories.

"No sir," Union Minister of State for Home G Kishan Reddy told the Rajya Sabha when asked whether civilians, including a journalist, were privy to knowledge about the abrogation of Article 370 prior to the information being shared with Parliament on August 5, 2019.

For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications

Story first published: Wednesday, February 10, 2021, 12:52 [IST]

The importance of masking up has been a focus of public health messaging both locally and nationally for nearly a year now. In Yakima County t

Donald Trump is permanently banned from Twitter, even if he runs for the presidency again, the social media site's chief financial officer has said.

Speaking in an interview with CNBC, CFO Ned Segal said Twitters policies do not allow someone to come back once they have been removed.

"The way our policies work, when you're removed from the platform, you're removed from the platform," he said.

"Whether you're a commentator, you're a CFO, or you are a former or current public official. Remember, our policies are designed to make sure that people are not inciting violence, and if anybody does that, we have to remove them from the service and our policies don't allow people to come back.

He was removed when he was president and itd be no difference for anybody who is a public official once they have been removed from the service.

"The way our policies work, when you're removed from the platform, you're removed from the platform whether you're a commentator, you're a CFO or you are a former or current public official," says $TWTR CFO @nedsegal on if President Trump's account could be restored. pic.twitter.com/ZZxascb9Rz  Squawk Box (@SquawkCNBC) February 10, 2021

Mr Trump was banned from the site last month after the US Capitol was stormed. Twitter said it permanently suspended his account due to risk of further incitement of violence.

After he was banned, the former US President said: Twitter is not about FREE SPEECH. They are all about promoting a radical Left platform where some of the most vicious people in the world are allowed to speak freely.

Mr Trump's impeachment trial is currently in progress and if he is not acquitted he would not be barred from seeking presidency again.
It took more than a decade for Chinese scientists to find the bats thought to be responsible for the 2003 SARS coronavirus outbreak.

In the Yanzi and Shitou caves in the mountainous Jinning district in Chinas Yunnan Province, thousands of Chinese horseshoe bats were biding their time, quietly harbouring a natural reservoir for SARS. The scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the EcoHealth Alliance found that the disease was most likely transferred to humans through an infected civet, a small cat-like creature.

The World Health Organisation team say farewell to their Chinese counterparts after the WHO-China Joint Study Press Conference on Tuesday. Credit:AP

They also found that it was possible the bats transmitted SARS directly to villagers in the area. The villagers had witnessed bats flying close to their houses, one had handled a bat corpse.

The 10 years of research saw painstaking, multinational collaboration to find the source of a disease that infected 8000 people around the world, yet still - to this day - it is not definitive.
London: The European Commission says it will not block the first wave of coronavirus vaccine shipments to Australia, paving the way for the nationwide rollout to begin as planned.

In a widely criticised ploy to shore up its own supplies, the European Union last month gave itself sweeping powers over whether vaccines manufactured on the continent by Pfizer and AstraZeneca can leave the territory.

The export controls were hurriedly drawn up after the drug manufacturers warned the number of doses available to Europe over the coming months would be slashed because of production problems.

Pfizer and AstraZeneca now have to ask the EU for approval before vaccines can be flown abroad. Officials would be lawfully permitted to curb exports if they conclude the shipments would deprive the EUs 27 member countries of its pre-agreed doses.
Machine_ has been appointed as the local digital creative agency for PepsiCo's snack portfolio, including Nik Naks, Simba, Doritos and Lays.

Always-on calendars serve their purpose  but they are becoming the stocking fillers of social media. The real magic to creating engaging social media content is to be right there in the moment with your audience, speaking about the same things that they are, and subtly sliding your brand into the conversation. Its not about beating them on the head with your strategy document to get their attention while theyre trolling a celebrity. As a brand, if youre not relevant to the conversation, youre not really welcome.

Brandon Mncube, head of Digital Marketing & Media for the snacks division at PepsiCo Sub Saharan Africa, says that through the pitch process they were looking for an agency that showcased a deep strategic understanding of South Africas youth market, and how to meaningfully connect with them by telling an engaging story online.According to Mncube, they found what they were looking for at Machine_, after the agency delivered a pitch specific to the Nik Naks brand. Through the pitch Machine_ really demonstrated their strategic capability with an insightful understanding of our nuanced audience, while proving their ability to both creatively and effectively use digital and social media platforms to connect and engage with our consumers. Their unique approach to the process also grabbed our attention within the first five minutes of the pitch, so we knew right away that the chemistry and culture fit was there.Jacques Shalom, ECD of Machine_ in Johannesburg, believes that brands need to fight so much harder to be relevant and are not necessarily adapting their communication approach to the nuances of social media.Machine_ has shown consistent growth over the past 12 months starting 2020 with a strong through-the-line appointment on Heineken SA. Most recently the agency added the Absolut Vodka (digital creative agency) to their existing portfolio of Pernod Ricard SA brands in Johannesburg.Machine_ is known for being a solution orientated partner in what can sometimes be a jaded industry. Fostering these type of partnerships requires a strong agency culture and an ability to build agile teams that function as an extension of our clients brand. And we approached this pitch in true Machine_ fashion, with strong work-that-works and our heart on our sleeve, commented Lindsey Rayner, managing partner of Machine_ Johannesburg.The IAS facilitated the process from RFI through to the creative pitch, and contract negotiations. Johanna McDowell, chief executive of the IAS says: We ensure client/agency connection from the onset by setting up partnerships with strong foundations both from the creative delivery view point through to the contractual negotiations and onboarding.
Appointment

10 February 2021

Hotel Jerome, Auberge Resorts Collection, Aspen's luxurious mountainside retreat and most storied hotel, is delighted to welcome Patrick Davila as general manager. Davila's extraordinary background includes over twenty years in luxury hospitality and prolific excellence in theater and film. As general manager, he will lead operations, guests services and innovative programs to convey an authentic Aspen experience that blends Hotel Jerome, Auberge Resorts Collection's rich history and modern spirit.

Davila has a deep love for history, the arts, travel and adventure that began at a young age. Originally from Mexico City and raised by archeologist parents, his early years were filled with visits to dig sites, museums, theaters and galleries. Today, he is an inspired patron of the arts, having previously been involved with the production of three Broadway shows and the Napa Valley Film Festival, where he served as chairman. Providing others with a well-thought, imaginative experience is second nature to Davila. Also an avid skier and mountain biker, he brings a passion to provide travelers and the local community with a taste of artful mountain living.

Davila joins one of the world's most celebrated properties directly from another. He was most recently the director of operations and served as interim general manager at Meadowood in Napa Valley, Calif. During this tenure, he served on the advisory board of the Napa Valley Vintners. Prior to his time in Northern California, Davila held leadership positions with Alden Hotels in Houston, Patina Group in Los Angeles, Postrio in San Francisco and Restaurant Daniel and Cafe Boulud in New York.

Davila holds a Bachelor's degree in Hotel and Restaurant Management from Tecnologico de Monterrey in Mexico.
Jaipur, Feb 10 : For the first time in independent India, the Preamble of the Constitution and the fundamental duties were read in the Assembly by Governor Kalraj Mishra before the start of his formal address to the sixth session of the 15th Rajasthan Legislative Assembly on Wednesday.

Mishra introduced this new tradition before his address. While reading the Preamble and duties of the constitution in the Legislative Assembly, the MLAs repeated them after him.

After administering the oath to all legislators to promulgate the constitution and the fundamental duties, the Governor read the complete address.

Meanwhile, as the Governor continued his address, Communist Party of India (Marxist) MLA Balwan Poonia created an uproar raising slogans like 'Andolankari Zindabad' in protest against the three farm laws. The CPI(M) leader continued to create a ruckus in the well of the House and the Governor kept reading the address.

Many Congress leaders, including party whip Mahesh Joshi and state Parliamentary Minister Shanti Dhariwal, came to pacify Left leader Poonia who was joined by other leaders who raised slogans in favour of farmers saying 'Jai Kisan' while BJP MLAs continued chanting 'Jai Shri Ram.' Later, the Congress leaders convinced Poonia to come out of the Assembly and took him out as the Governor continued his address.

After reading the speech for nearly 45 minutes, the Governor left the Assembly.

Earlier, Congress MLA Indira Meena came to the Assembly driving a tractor to show her support for farmers protesting against the three farm laws. However, she was stopped by the police personnel before reaching the Assembly gate following which she gave the steering of the tractor to the driver and walked on foot to the assembly.
ROME, FEB 10 - An initial dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine should be followed up by another one of the same vaccine, the health ministry said Wednesday, ruling out the use of another vaccine to follow the first Astrazeneca jab. The ministry said there were "still too few data on the interchangeability of the AstraZeneca vaccine with other anti-COVID vaccines". Meanwhile in talks with premier-designate Mario Draghi Italy's provincial leaders called for the formation of a "civilian army" to boost the vaccine rollout in Italy, which has been delayed by failures to deliver the agreed amount of doses by producers including AstraZeneca and Pfizer, sources at the government-formation talks said. "A civilian army is needed to play its part to implement the challenge of the vaccinations," said the president of the Italian union of provinces (UPI), Michele de Pascale, after the talks with the former head of the European central Bank. "But another point of emergency," de Pascale said, "are the schools. which from a building standpoint are experiencing an emergency for some time and the (COVID) Recovery Plan is an opportunity to get them back within norms and launch an energy saving programme". (ANSA).

Ten ministers are physically attending the meeting, while others are joining virtually.

The Ministries of Petroleum Resources, Humanitarian Affairs, Water Resources, Power, Interior as well as Communications and Digital Economy are expected to make presentations at the 33rd virtual meeting of the Federal Executive Council (FEC).

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the meeting is being presided over by President Muhammadu Buhari at the Council Chambers of the Presidential Villa, Abuja, on Wednesday.

NAN also reports that the Vice President, Yemi Osinbajo; Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Boss Mustapha; and Chief of Staff to the President, Ibrahim Gambari, are physically attending the meeting.

Ten ministers are also physically attending the meeting.

The affected ministers include those of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed; Attorney General and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami; Minister of Finance, Zainab Ahmed: Science and Technology, Ogbonnaya Onu; and Suleiman Adamu, Water Resources.

Others include the Minister of Interior, Rauf Aregbesola; Power, Sale Mamman; Humanitarian Affairs, Sadiya Umar; Communications and Digital Economy, Isa Pantami; and Minister of State-Petroleum, Timipre Sylva.

The Head of Service of the Federation, Folasade Yemi-Esan, and other ministers are participating in the weekly council meeting from their respective offices in Abuja online.

(NAN)
Right now we notice that hottie EmRata is sharing her pregnancy life in great detail and much to the delight of "journalists" around the world. And all of THAT inspires this fair use and educational glimpse at pop culture, community news and top headlines.

CAUTION!!! COWTOWN CRASH COURSE CONTINUES!!!

KCPD: 10 vehicles involved in crash at I-470 at 3-Trails Crossing Kansas City police said 10 vehicles were involved in a crash Tuesday evening on Interstate 470 in the 3-Trails Crossing area.Authorities said at least one person was hurt.Police said the vehicles were not driveable. Interstate 470 was closed to northbound Highway 71 and northbound Interstate 435.

Vaxx For Troops

KCVA offers COVID-19 vaccine to veterans Tuesday night KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Veterans enrolled with the Department of Veterans Affairs have the opportunity to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. The Kansas City VA Medical Center announced Tuesday that it had 200 doses of the vaccine available. Interested veterans can visit the Honor Annex, 4251 Northern Avenue.

BRING PUPPER INSIDE!!!

Extreme cold poses threat to outdoor pets FAIRWAY, KS (KCTV) - During this cold snap, make sure to keep a close eye on your pet! Just because they have fur, doesn't necessarily mean they're protected. They can get hypothermia, frostbite, and even freeze to death in single digit temperatures. If brining your pet inside isn't an option, make sure they have shelter outside.

EmRata Shares EPIC Celebration Of Life

Emily Ratajkowski goes FULLY NUDE to show off baby belly at 33 weeks Emily Ratajkowski once again went fully nude to show off her pregnant baby belly at 33 weeks. The 29-year-old model shed all clothing in an artsy black and white snap posted onto Instagram early Monday morning.

Prez Trump Lawyer Stays Losing First Round Of Impeachment Deuce

Trump unhappy with his impeachment attorney's performance, sources say Former President Donald Trump was unhappy with his impeachment lawyer Bruce Castor's opening argument on the Senate floor Tuesday, two people familiar with his reaction told CNN.

Welcome New Friends

House Republicans warn Biden of escalating migration crisis amid surge in border numbers EXCLUSIVE: More than 50 House Republicans on Tuesday warned President Biden of a brewing "crisis" of illegal migration at the southern border amid indications of a surge in numbers -- just as Biden has forged forward with a number of policies limiting border security and interior enforcement.

WHO Said So

WHO will end research into 'extremely unlikely' theory that COVID-19 originated in Wuhan lab World Health Organization investigators said Tuesday that they would no longer pursue research into whether the coronavirus leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China. Peter Ben Embarek, a food safety and animal diseases expert, announced the decision during a press conference to wrap up a visit by an international team of WHO experts to the city where COVID-19 was first identified in December 2019.

Prez Biden Backs Free Money For Everybody

Biden endorses sending stimulus checks to Americans earning $75,000 during meeting with top CEOs President Biden on Tuesday said he supported a proposal from House Democrats that would send $1,400 stimulus checks to Americans earning up to $75,000 annually, rejecting a push from the party's centrist wing to dramatically curtail eligibility.

Enduring Kitten Tech Trouble

Texas lawyer trapped by cat filter on Zoom call, informs judge he is not a cat A Texas lawyer accidentally left a kitten filter on during a video conference call with a judge and was unable to change it, eventually responding to a judge's query about why he was being addressed by a digital feline by saying: "I'm here live. I am not a cat."

More KC Booze Debuts

Amid pandemic, three new breweries opened across Kansas City metro in 2020 Opening a brewery in the midst of a global pandemic wasn't part of their business plan, but nevertheless, the Kansas City-area craft beer scene added three new breweries in 2020. Transparent Brewing Co. became the first craft brewery in Grandview in August, Pathlight Brewing Co. opened in Shawnee in June, and Lost Evening Brewing Co.

Local Hero Fights Cold

Homeless advocate helps others during extreme cold KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Arctic cold continues to have a firm grip on the Kansas City metro and some people experiencing homelessness are braving the elements. Advocate Lindsey Anne said there are people still living outside and the individuals she helps complain they're wet and their biggest request is a need for items to stay warm.

Weather Warning Tonight

Light snow possible Wednesday, still very cold Hide Transcript Show Transcript WE'LL STAY MOSTLY CLOUDY FOR MOST OF THE EVENING HOURS. HERE'S YOUR FORECAST. YOU STILL SEE THE IMPACT GRAPHICS, MINUS 1 AT FIVE. CLOSE TO ZERO AT SIX AND SEVEN. STILL IN AND OUT OF THE FLURRIES. ONE BELOW HEADING INTO EIGHT AND NINE TONIGHT.

And this is the OPEN THREAD for right now.
Press Release

February 10, 2021 One News Agenda interview of Sen. Win Gatchalian with Cito Beltran on face-to-face classes, 'no-fail policy' and internet access and gadgets for all learners Q: Will we ever get back to face-to-face classroom setting? What is our situation? SEN WIN: That is the million dollar question, when can we open classes using face-to-face or back to face-to-face? It's really a moving target, in fact we're also monitoring what's happening outside the country. In the US, Europe talagang open, close, open, close but the only research that came out about face-to-face classes was from the CDC, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the US and they we're saying, in their one year of analysis and observation, they concluded that schools are not the haven for virus contraction. So meaning students can actually avoid contracting the virus in schools and the logic for that is, in schools they are monitored, they practice health protocols, social distancing. It is only in their homes or outside the schools that you cannot control them anymore. That's the only research that I have seen so far that stated that schools can be a safe haven for a virus-free environment. Having said that, of course iba sa states at iba dito, we have to analyze that research very carefully and see if that is adaptable here but it is a moving target. Kanina lang I saw in the news that infection rate has jumped to two percent again. So nanalo na tayo below one percent but again it jumped to two percent. In other words, as soon as we leave our guards down, these things can happen. The virus infection rate can go up again and that will prompt our decision makers to postpone and to take a safer route, postponing of face-to-face classes. Q: What about doing pilots, laboratory type settings because there are places that claim to be Covid-free? SEN WIN: I looked at the numbers again and 408 LGU's out of 1,500 are Covid-free, zero Covid sila especially in the islands; Batanes, Siquijor, these types of island provinces zero sila in some of their municipalities. I've been advocating that since last year, there's no substitute to face-to-face classes here in our country. The learners will absorb the lessons faster and deeper if they have face-to-face classes and interaction with their teachers but naudlot yun because of the new variant that all of a sudden appeared in our country and that's why DepEd postponed it for a while. But then again I say this, face-to-face classes is a moving a target as soon as we have knowledge on what is going on and adjust to the environment of preventing infection then we can actually open some face-to-face classes in zero risk or low risk areas. Case in point that 400 LGU's that I mentioned, may mga LGU's that never had Covid from the beginning, they're so remote, so far that they never had Covid and these types of LGU's, I think with the proper health protocols can conduct face-to-face classes. Q: If there are 400 LGU's then why not push for that? I hate to say this pero parang style tamad, lahatan na lang para walang problema... by simplifying the management style here you are actually creating problems on the ground. What about calling that out? SEN WIN: These are tough decisions, if you ask me on face value I would advocate face-to-face classes in those 400 LGU's that don't have any cases of Covid. On face value, it makes very logical sense they conduct face-to-face classes because wala naman infection doon. I also see the bigger point of view of the IATF because they are not only looking at education per say, they are also looking at potential transmission, movement of people, movement of our constituents and movement of trade and goods. Case in point here is that new variant in Bontoc. Bontoc is a remote municipality up in the mountains, I've been there a few times and I would never have thought that Bontoc will be a hotbed for the new variant, but then again we have OFW's that went back to their province, alam natin our OFW's are scattered all over the place even from very far flung areas. So my point on the matter is, yes we advocate education on face value, we want to pursue face-to-face because it's effective but I also see the point IATF looking at the bigger picture and looking at the movement of people, goods and the potential of one are getting hit by this type of new variant or other variants. They took the conservative route, in other words they took the most safest route. Q: Yes it's the conservative route, this is the safest in their mind but is it the right decision? What about creating facilities to ensure face-to-face education without the risk of contamination? SEN WIN: One of the proposal is fifty percent capacity in our schools, in those 400 LGU's so when we say face-to-face classes full blown, 100 percent of the students will go to classes, what we cn do is implement a conservative approach. For example, fifty percent muna, so that means twice a week they will attend classes. That way even twice a week it means a lot already for the students and the teachers actually, because the teachers are pressured to teach, the teachers are pressured to make sure the learners are learning but if they don't have that face-to-face interaction, the only interaction they have is through text or Facebook Messenger which is quite difficult especially in remote areas. We can actually apply conservative methods to open face-to-face classes but then again, I truly advocate this and even last year, but I do understand that it's a moving target. Kanina lang I saw the infection rate moving to two percent. I was actually shocked because for a very long time we were below one percent and this goes to show that there is so much things and so many uncontrollable variables in the light of this virus, so many things we cannot predict. IATF is just taking the most prudent, conservative route in order for them to prevent this from spreading. Also, I think because, this is my analysis on this, since the virus vaccine is already coming soon IATF wants to focus on that, making sure the logistics is in place and making sure the LGU's attention is fully at the vaccine rollout. If we open classes it will take attention away and again, this is my own analysis, one of the things that I was thinking, IATF wants to make sure that the mayors, the LGU's have full attention on how to deliver the vaccines in every place, nook and cranny of our country. Q: Now, there is no such thing as a failing grade, am I correct in that? SEN WIN: Diyan pumapasok yung sinasabi mo na convenient, it's really convenient to just pass everyone and let them proceed the higher grade. That's the most convenient way, wag na tayo mag exam or assessment. Education is not about what's convenient for our government, it's about making sure that our learners learn and we help those who cannot keep up. I'm not in favor in that 'no-fail' proposal because we have to pinpoint the weaknesses of our learners. Learners who are weak in Math, learners who are weak in Reading, we have to pinpoint that then intervene through tutorials or through one-on-one classes or one-on-one intervention. That way, when he or she moves to the next grade level, he can keep up with the rigors of the next grade level and work well in the next grade level. The problem with the 'no-fail' policy is that we cannot pinpoint the weaknesses and it would be very difficult for the learners to keep up with next grade level if that learner will have some weaknesses or subjects that he cannot comprehend with. Q: Given the reality that everything is online... how do we even properly assess who is lagging? SEN WIN: It's not going to be the usual where there are small quizzes and then there is big exam and then there is the final exam. Even in basic education it's not the same anymore, DepEd had to innovate and come up with a different assessment system. For example, in Reading or in Mathematics there will be an assessment of some sort, for example the student will be given a series of tests and the student will be required to submit a series of let's say short or written examinations. Based on those examinations, the teacher will assess the weaknesses of the student. It's not the usual quizzes or exam, there will be a different assessment methodology. Most likely it will be written, most likely it will be in packets but the important thing here is we will be able to determine what are the weaknesses, what subject matters need improvement and intervention. Q: Apparently there are four million kids who did not enroll this school year... should we just kiss this school year goodbye? SEN WIN: That for me is a very dangerous policy because the divide between the rich and poor will definitely widen. Right now, those who have access to the internet and laptops and those who go to exclusive or private schools, they can actually study. In fact a lot of the kids in private schools are studying using online learning. If we do decide to cancel classes for the public schools because a lot of our students, almost 70 percent don't have access to the internet, then they will be left behind. We have to innovate solutions that can reach those learners, these are the distance learning materials that were developed by DepEd, iba pa yung issues doon, we have to reserve that for another session but the modality that DepEd took which I agree, they took to self-learning modules and through different interactions used by the teachers and by the divisions. For example, in Valenzuela we use Facebook live as a mode to teach and deliver to the homes of our learners. So that's one way in a sense that our teachers deliver it through Facebook live, the learners can text, can join in the chat but we all know that it's not as fast as real-time. Somehow, in a way, our teachers can explain through live sessions the materials that they have to learn. Q: Maraming estudyante, no tablet, no cellphone, no nothing nakikiupo na lang sa kapit-bahay and kung may Covid doon magkakahawa-hawaan. What is the government doing about this, what funding is there? SEN WIN: To answer your question straight, there is very minimal programs that will address what you mentioned earlier, laptops, gadgets, internet connection to the homes of all of our learners. There is a budget for that but I have to admit it's not big enough to give laptops and give access to the internet to all of our learners. I have a proposal and this is very ambitious, it's a concept of shared responsibility. Internet connection and laptops and gadgets are basic necessities for all learners just like electricity and water and my proposal is to give everyone laptops and internet connection whether in full subsidy or in partial subsidy but it's a shared responsibility for all of us. Somebody has to foot the bill, it's a shared responsibility for us and for the government. The logic for that is, if we give learners access to the internet and gadgets, the whole country will become progressive, it's not fair and not inclusive if only a handful of people will have access to the internet and progress, it has to be the entire country and in order to do that everyone has a shared responsibility.
"Royal Secret Agent" lead star Kim Myung Soo discussed his experience working in the drama as well as his upcoming military enlistment in an interview for a Korean media outlet.

"Royal Secret Agent" is a historical drama that takes place in the Joseon Dynasty era. Kim Myun Soo stars as Sung Yi Kyum, who topped the state examination and worked in the administrative and research department of the government office. One day, he was caught doing an illegal act, and as punishment, he was assigned to work as a secret royal inspector.

His new job is to solve cases and take down corrupt government officials with the help of Hong Da-in (Kwon Nara), a female inspector, and Park Chun Sam (Lee Yi Kyung), his loyal servant who is very talkative but a caring friend. Sung Yi Kyum will experience a lot of personal growth as the story progresses.

Kim Myung Soo talks about his character as Sung Yi Kyum and working with his co-stars Kwon Nara and Lee Yi Kyung

The actor shared in the interview that he did his best to express Sung Yi Kyum's personal growth as naturally as possible so that the viewers could easily relate to him. Kim Myun Soo went on to express that the drama wants people to understand the sense of justice. His character as Sung Yi Kyum believes in justice, but his values aren't strong enough. However, being assigned to work as a secret royal inspector, he learns the values of justice, and he becomes enraged with those people who abuse and take advantage of the weak. His character eventually grows into a person who seeks justice and punishes evil deeds.

Kim Myung Soo then talks about his co-stars Kwon Nara and Lee Yi Kyung sharing what it is like working with them. The actor expressed that they all share a close bond, and if they make mistakes on set, they would just burst into laughter as they are very familiar with each other. Kim Myung Soo also shared that his co-stars are terrific people to work with. The actor became close with them, especially with Kwon Nara. He shares that her bright and refreshing personality is her strongest asset. Lee Yi Kyung, on the other hand, does a lot of impromptu on set and makes the production staff laugh most of the time.

Kim Myung Soo also shares his thoughts on his upcoming mandatory military enlistment

The actor will enlist for his mandatory military service by entering the Marines on February 22. Kim Myung Soo expressed that he doesn't have any special motivation or goals in mind. He continued that all Korean men are required to serve and defend the nation, and he understands that he is one of those men. The actor concluded that he always admires the image of the Marines, so he decided to voluntarily enlist before he starts with the drama's filming. The actor wants to serve the country well.

You might be interested in: 'Royal Secret Agent' Lead Star Kim Myung Soo is Planning to Enlist in the Military Soon

Kdramastars owns this article.

Written By Liza Parker
Mumbai, Feb 10 : In a major setback for the National Stock Exchange (NSE), the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) has imposed a penalty of Rs 1 crore on the bourse in the co-location case for failing to ensure a level playing field for trading members subscribing to its TBT (Tick-by-Tick) data feed system.

The capital market regulator has also penalised former MDs and CEOs of NSE, Ravi Narain and Chitra Ramakrishna, with a fine of Rs 25 lakh each.

The SEBI order observed that the violations in this case are serious in nature, even though there are no investor complaints on record arising out of such violations.

"Such nature of default with regard to non-adherence to the laid down obligations under the SECC regulations as observed in this case would compromise the regulatory framework and should be dealt with by imposing monetary penalty on the noticees so as to send an effective message to the market participants as a whole," it said, adding that the violation has continued for a long period of time.

SEBI noted unequal access is apparent at different stages of the concerned technology process.

"As brought out earlier, many trading members had repeatedly resorted to accessing the Secondary Server without any checks and balances and actions on the part of the first-level regulator except for certain emails/ advisories. Thus, NSE as a Stock Exchange failed to ensure a level playing field for trading members subscribing to its TBT data feed system," said the order.

Review of TBT system architecture indicated data was disseminated to members in a sequential manner whereby the member who connected first to the POP server received the ticks (market feed) before the members who connected later. Hence, the system architecture of the TCP-based TBT system was prone to manipulation, it said.
The U.S. Navy sends the USS Makin Island and fighter wing of Marine F-35s to the Persian Gulf. One of the reasons is that they signify a U.S. presence against what is seen as belligerent Iran.

Lately, the Persian Gulf has been active with deployments of U.S. warships regularly.

According to the U.S. 5th Fleet, they have deployed several elements of the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit that passed through the Straits of Hormuz, now in the Persian Gulf. These include the USS Makin Island (LHD-8) with other naval group units, reported USNI.

The Makin Island passed into the Persian Gulf after February 5 when USS Somerset (LPD-25) went ahead, according to the Navy, which confirmed it last Tuesday. But one more ship, the USS San Diego (LPD-22), which makes up the Amphibious Ready Group, has been in the Gulf since January.

But some reports say that San Diego has shifted operations to the Oman Gulf. It is replaced by the Makin when it arrives to continue operations in its place.

Amphibious ship get deadlier with F-35s

Onboard, the Makin is a wing of Marine F-35B Lighting II Joint Strike Fighters that joins another unit, the Marine Medium Tiltrotor Squadron 164 (Reinforced). When Operation Octave Quartz was done in Somalia and Africa, the operation had aerial cover and support of F-35s where troops were repositioned in Octave Quartz.

When the U.S. Navy ships pass into the Hormuz, Makin traveled on a guided-missile cruiser USS Port Royal, including the support ship, fleet oiler USNS Carl Brashear in its group.

Also read: Pentagon Wants a Larger 500-Ship Navy That is Different from Most Expectations

When the USS Nimitz left for the Persian Gulf, the Makin is the initial U.S. capital ship to replace the aircraft carrier. The Nimitz Carrier Strike Group start for 60 days operating in the Persian Gulf when it left to join the Indian Navy. Nimitz CSG was with the Makin in Octave Quartz; this is one of the most essential ARG missions in 2020.

ARG exercises

The three-light carriers Makin Island, Somerset, and San Diego of the Amphibious Ready Group (ARG) left the U.S. West Coast last October, starting all California Coast deployment practices. Units were training for their eventual send off to the Middle East.

It is usual for navy ships to take a rotation in places like the middle east to replace spent groups with fresh ones that keep the units refreshed all the time.

Why even ARGs are vital to U.S. plans in the Mideast

It is vital that the U.S. keeps an active naval presence and not let up in there. Iran's activities made the U.S. military keep the pressure on Tehran to push back without firing a bullet or launching a missile.

To keep an eye on Tehran and launched deterrents like carrier strike groups (CSGs) that patrolled the Arabian Seas to support allies in the Mideast. It was in July when it joined the mighty 5th Fleet of America after its June deployment.

Last Monday, the Nimitz CSG joined the Theodore Roosevelt CSG in the South China Sea but sailed back to the U.S. East Coast.

The USS Makin and the rest of the ARGs are strategies for the U.S. Navy to keep ships and planes ready to strike with F-35s, even without a larger CSG in the area.

Related article: Light Carrier Studies Show Advantages They Have for the US Navy

@ 2021 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
[February 10, 2021] Tasker Payment Gateways LLC Releases their 2021 Guide to Selling High-Risk Products on Squarespace

SOUTH PORTLAND, Maine, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Updated for 2021, Tasker Payment Gateways LLC's Guide to Selling High-Risk Products on Squarespace is free to read and accessible to anyone. The company's president, Matt Tasker, says that the Squarespace guide is more than just a way to attract website traffic. "There have been so many times that I've spoken to new and established Squarespace website owners who mention that they have turned to Tasker Payment Gateways LLC's Squarespace high-risk guide to answer their questions. Of course, we hope that people will contact us for a high-risk payment gateway or merchant account recommendation, but I also find it encouraging when a site owner or their web developer is able to use their existing Squarespace website instead of having to spend resources building a new site on a different platform." Squarespace is a great site-building option for online sellers, with its user-friendly features and tools to easily customize an e-commerce website. However, the major payment integrations such as PayPal, Stripe, and Square will not work with high-risk products. For those who sell regulated products online, such as smoking pipes and glassware, an alternative payment gateway becomes necessary, and that is where the Tasker Payment Gateways LLC's Guide to Selling High-Risk Products on Squarespace proves most useful. The Squarespace guide is intended for high-risk site owners, developers, and internet marketing managers who use Squarespace. It offers answers to merchant account and shopping cart integration questions that are specifically catered to business owners who are using Squarespace to sell high-risk products, such as premium cigars, CBD, grinders, bongs, and other smoking accessories. Some topics include: how to sell high-risk products using Authorize.Net or NMI, how to integrate third-party payment gateway code to Squarespace, and other Squarespace high-risk payment gateway integration details.



According to Matt Tasker, the guide has been most helpful to new online sellers and their developers. "Business owners who have built a website on Squarespace want to know that they'll be able to find an alternative payment gateway that will support regulated products, so we provide details about some of the best options available." Tasker Payment Gateways LLC says that the most appreciated area of their Squarespace-focused guide delves into little-known high-risk payment integration tips, focusing on Foxy.io, NMI, and others. This saves site developers time and frustration when it comes to integrating their Squarespace site with a high-risk payment gateway and merchant account that allows regulated products such as water pipes, CBD, and other smoke-shop items.

"We hear a lot of valuable feedback from new business owners who have built a site on Squarespace, but then find that their site builder's out-of-the-box payment processor does not integrate with a high-risk payment gateway. That's where our guide is most useful," Matt Tasker explains. "Our guide provides specific information for high-risk site owners. We pride ourselves on knowing what we do for a living, and there are situations where our nearly twenty years of experience in the high-risk-payment-gateway business cannot be replicated, including our vast experience helping online businesses like smoke shops accept credit cards. We provide detailed information about how to set up an alternative cart, a high-risk friendly payment processor, and integrate Authorize.Net or NMI while still using Squarespace. We know which payment gateways and merchant account providers allow Squarespace site owners to sell pipes, glass, grinders, bongs, CBD, premium cigars, and even tactical items. It takes many years of 'doing it for a living' to build a resource like this." This Squarespace high-risk payment integration information is a valuable support for high-risk-business owners who need to know what their payment gateway alternatives are when major processors like PayPal, Stripe, and Square are not viable options. For online-business owners who are either brand new to selling high-risk items or established businesses in need of a payment integration that is high-risk-friendly, Tasker Payment Gateways LLC's Squarespace guide provides specific information with detailed steps to integrate a Squarespace website with a high-risk-friendly payment gateway, allowing high-risk business owners to safely accept credit cards online. You can read Tasker Payment Gateways LLC's updated 2021 guide to selling high-risk products on Squarespace, for free, by visiting https://taskerpaymentgateways.com/sell-high-risk-products-payment-gateway-squarespace/. Media Contact:

Matt Tasker

207-772-8737

290963@email4pr.com View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/tasker-payment-gateways-llc-releases-their-2021-guide-to-selling-high-risk-products-on-squarespace-301225359.html SOURCE Tasker Payment Gateways LLC

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Six people have been affected by the UK variant of the coronavirus in Alabama. Alfonzia Jackson, a Birmingham man, died from the variant in early February.

Infectious Disease Specialist Dr. Ali Hassoun said people shouldn't worry as long as they continue safety measures, like washing your hands, wearing a mask and social distancing.

He said the UK variant may be easily transmittable, but that doesn't mean people are at a larger risk of being sick with the variant.

"Its the same exact virus but like any other virus, with time, it evolves and mutates," said Dr. Hassoun. "In a way it's changing its shape or its covering."

Dr. Hassoun said it's important to not identify the UK variant as a new strain.

"If there were a new strain, that means itd have a different way of entering the cell," Dr. Hassoun said. "It may not respond to treatment and vaccination."

Based off of research we have now, the Pfizer and Moderna vaccine work against the UK variant.

Dr. Hassoun said there is a way to get the virus under control, especially as the state continues to vaccinate people.

"If we get more people vaccinated, then less virus will be in the community," said Dr. Hassoun. "Less virus in the community means it's less likely for mutation and change."

Dr. Hassoun said the South African strain of the coronavirus is not of concern here in Alabama. There has been one case of 501b2 found in South Carolina.
Perus government imposed another two-week lockdown on January 31 in an attempt to counter a renewed collapse of the countrys health care system. Family members of COVID-19 patients have been left waiting in the streets for up to three days to fill life-saving oxygen cylinders, and the daily death toll has risen to over 180 in a country of just 32 million inhabitants. Late January figures show 600 excess deaths in the country when compared to January, 2020, pointing to a vast underestimation of the already alarming rate of COVID-19 deaths.

The new lockdown involves a total ban on land and air travel in or out of 10 of the 26 regions in the country, including the capital, Lima. It allows each person to leave their home for just one hour a day. Before the second wave of the pandemic spread in the northern hemisphere with the murderous maintenance of an open economy for the holiday season, Peru had sustained the worlds highest per capita death rate, a situation the renewed lockdown backhandedly admits may be repeated in the next months.

The Pargue Taruma Cemetery in Manaus, Brazil. Credit: Bruno Kelly

Peru has thus far recorded over 42,000 official COVID-19 deaths and roughly 1.2 million cases. Among the hardest hit are Peruvian health care workers, with nearly 300 doctors having died from COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic, along with over 100 nurses.

The medical consensus is that the real number of infections and deaths is far higher, as the country has a test rate of only 200,000 tests per million inhabitants.

This rate is just one fifth that of the United States, which itself suffered open sabotage by the Trump administration in order to hide the extent of the pandemics spread. At the same time, the Peruvian test rate is much higher than in neighboring countries such as Brazil and Argentina, where it stands at just 140,000 per million, and Mexico and Bolivia, where the rate is under 50,000 per million.

The capital of the Peruvian Amazon, Iquitos, was left out of the lockdown, after already having registered cases of the new Brazilian variant first found in travelers from Manaus. This new variant is suspected to be a major factor in the horrific collapse of the health infrastructure in Brazils Amazonian capital. Authorities are being forced to fly no less than 1,500 patients out of Manaus to avoid more deaths from the lack of oxygen. Perus department of Huanuco and the capital Lima have also registered cases of the Brazilian variant. In neighboring Bolivia, more than 100 cities had their COVID-19 alert status raised to maximum last week, but no lockdown has been announced yet.

Parallel to the surge in cases in Latin America is the unprecedented surge in the demand for medicinal oxygen, which now stands at almost triple the production and distribution rate in Manaus, and has surged by more than 700 percent in Mexico from December 20 to January 20, according to local authorities. In both Mexico and Peru, pandemic profiteers have tripled the price of oxygen cylinders.

With a rolling average of more than 1,000 deaths and 45,000 new cases in Brazil for 18 days now, the lack of oxygen is already threatening Brazils largest and richest city, Sao Paulo, which has taken in patients from around the country. The leading medicinal oxygen producer, White Martins, has notified local authorities in the city that it will retrieve oxygen cylinders from 3,000 home users in order to avoid a collapse in distribution to hospitals. From the north to the south of Brazil, nine states have more than 80 percent of COVID-19-dedicated ICUs occupied, while expansion capacity is hindered by hospitals struggling to treat patients who avoided or were unable to find medical care during the pandemic, leading to the onset or aggravation of other diseases.

The new Brazilian variant, named P.1 by the expert community, shares many genetic characteristics with the UK and especially the South African variants, which are believed to be more contagious than the original Wuhan strain. In the case of the South African variant, clinical trials have already found a dramatic decrease in the efficacies of two of the newest vaccines, from Novavax and Johnson & Johnson. The Novavax vaccine had its efficacy reduced from 89 percent in the UK to just 50 percent in South Africa, where the new strain is already dominant, while the Johnson & Johnson vaccine saw its efficacy drop from 72 percent in the US to just 57 percent in South Africa.

The P.1 variant was originally detected in Japan, after the genetic sequencing of samples taken from SARS-CoV-2 carriers coming from Manaus. Japanese authorities notified their international counterparts on January 10, and by January 27, eight countries, including South Korea, the United States and a number of European countries, had already registered cases of the new variant. Brazilian researchers have concluded that the new variant now accounts for at least 91 percent of cases in Manaus, up from 50 percent in December.

The resurgence of COVID-19 in the Amazon region connecting Brazil and Peru is the direct product of the murderous herd immunity policies pursued by the ruling classes internationally, and underscores their utter bankruptcy. Manaus was the stage for some of the most terrifying scenes internationally in the pandemic in mid-2020, with pictures of hundreds of fresh graves being dug seen around the world.

In September, a preliminary study estimated that 76 percent of the population in the city had already contracted COVID-19. The local authorities boasted that the city had achieved herd immunity, using this as the pretext for reopening schools and sending 110,000 pupils back to their classrooms5 percent of the citys population. The Manaus study was accepted for publication in the prestigious Science magazine, but appeared only in January, when the city was already seeing a 600 percent jump in COVID-19 deaths from December.

The same January 15 Science issue in which the article on the Manaus infection rate appeared, published a piece in the magazines Perspectives commentary section by British health experts Devi Sridhar and Deepti Gurdasani, reviewing the Manaus data. They warned bluntly in their headline, Herd immunity by infection is not an option.

They wrote: What the findings of Buss et al. definitively show is that pursuing herd immunity through naturally acquired infection is not a strategy that can be considered. Achieving herd immunity through infection will be very costly in terms of mortality and morbidity, with little guarantee of success. The article concluded: Even a mitigation strategy whereby the virus is allowed to spread through the population with the objective of keeping admissions just below health care capacity, as is done for influenza virus, is clearly misguided for SARS-CoV-2.

The same conclusion was reached almost in parallel by another team of Brazilian experts that had their work published in the Lancet on January 27. Titled Resurgence of COVID-19 in Manaus, Brazil, despite high seroprevalence, the article also raised the possibility that the Manaus surge could be related to the new variants evading previously acquired immunity. The Lancet paper also raises the crucial point that the same infection rateor attack rate, as it is termed by immunologists to differentiate it from active infectionswas found in the Peruvian Amazon capital, Iquitos. At the time, the EFE Spanish news agency posted a report titled The strange case of the Peruvian city where the coronavirus disappeared, also raising the dangerous and unsubstantiated prospect that herd immunity had been achieved in the city.

Lucas Ferrante, the lead author of an August 7 Nature Medicine article, titled, Brazils policies condemn Amazonia to a second wave of COVID-19, told the Intercept on February 3 that the new Brazilian strain may turn Manaus into the epicenter of a deadly international third wave of the pandemic. Expressing with utmost clarity the scientific understanding of the dynamics of the breeding of new variants, he said that the new variant was caused by the second wave his team had warned about in August. He concluded: Either a lockdown is imposed now, or Governor Wilson Lima and President Bolsonaro will be responsible for the impact of additional infections and deaths in the republic and around the world.

Even at this point, Manaus authorities are refusing to shut down non-essential services. On Monday, Ferrante stressed to Estado de S. Paulo: It is unthinkable to return to in-person learning in any part of Brazil right now, in order to avoid the further spread of the new variant. We also recommend the shutdown of factories in the Manaus Industrial District, adding this could be done without pay cuts for workers.

In fact, the city has been a central target of Bolsonaros herd immunity policy. The president and his sonsespecially Eduardo, the head of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the Brazilian House who was a special guest at Trumps White House in the lead-up to the January 6 putschcelebrated the liberation of the city in late December, when authorities decided to reopen the economy. This followed a small, and largely staged, protest against restrictions by a handful of Bolsonaro loyalists. This had the same character as the staged anti-lockdown protests attended by right-wing militias in Michigan and other US states.

The reopening of Manaus was the most blatant act in what has been recently described by law scholars at the University of Sao Paulo (USP) as an institutionalized strategy for virus propagation by the Bolsonaro administration. A legal team coordinated by USPs Global Health and Ethics expert, Deisy Ventura, in collaboration with the Conectas advocacy group, was able to document a timeline of actions taken by the Bolsonaro administration, including federal decrees, the promotion of quack cures and the undermining of any measure that restrained the economy.

This timeline, together with the unchecked spread around the world of deadlier new variants of SARS-CoV-2, stands as testimony to the essential unity of the ruling classes internationally in promoting the spread of the virus in the name of herd immunity, despite the somewhat more polished language of some European leaders, the incoming Biden administration or Bolsonaros local rivals in Brazil. Against clear scientific requirements, one state after another is pressing ahead with reopening schools, with the Sao Paulo government boasting of leading the back-to-school drive by enforcing the return of pupils in face of a strike by teachers.

Manaus stands as Bolsonaros pandemic Guernica. Just as the punitive bombing of the small Spanish town by the fascists in 1937 previewed the horrors of World War II, the murderous policy pursued in the Amazonian capital exposes the cruelty of the ruling classes and the pandemic carnage that is being unleashed worldwide.

Workers around the world must take the struggle against the herd immunity in their own hands, organizing a shutdown of non-essential services with full compensation for workers and ruined small businesses to stop the spread of the virus until effective vaccines are available worldwide.
President of the Senate, Senator Ahmed Lawan, on Wednesday, reprimanded a legislative aide following his failure to wear a face-mask while within the premises of the National Assembly.

In a statement by his Special Assistant (Press), Ezrel Tabiowo Ezrel, Lawan, who was in the company of his security details while making an entrance into the Complex before plenary, spotted the aide - names withheld - standing at the lobby without a face-mask.

The President of the Senate upon seeing the aide, stopped to caution him querying, "where is your face-mask?"

The legislative aide who looked rattled by the unexpected question, mumbled, "it's in my pocket, Sir", while making frantic effort to retrieve his face-mask from his trousers.

The Senate President then watched as the aide quickly had his face-mask worn, and, thereafter, proceeded to his office at the White House Wing of the Complex to have a leadership meeting before the resumption of plenary.

Vanguard News Nigeria

MADRID, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- MedLumics, a privately held medical device company developing AblaView, the first optically-guided real-time ablation catheter system for the treatment of Atrial Fibrillation (AF), announced today that it has closed an upsized EUR 18 million (USD 21.7 million) financing round and has appointed Rich Ferrari as Chairman of the Board of Directors. MedLumics' optical catheter displays lesion creation in real-time providing the physician with direct visual confirmation of conduction tissue denaturation.

Kurma Partners joined the round which includes and was initially led by Asabys Partners, along with new investors, VI Partners Swiss Innovation and CDTI Innvierte Economia, and existing investors Andera Partners, Caixa Capital Risc and Innogest Capital II. Having achieved pre-clinical feasibility in 2020, these proceeds will now enable MedLumics to initiate first in-human regulatory clinical studies and automate scalable product manufacturing.

Concurrent with the financing, Medlumics welcomes renowned venture capital investor Rich Ferrari as new Chairman of the Board of Directors. Mr. Ferrari brings to the team his wealth of experience in medical device innovation and commercialization as a successful CEO of two publicly traded medical technology companies and as co-founder and Managing Director of De Novo Ventures. Current Chairman Olivier Litzka of Andera Partners will assume the role of Vice Chairman.

Commenting on the news, James Greene, CEO of MedLumics, said: "We are very pleased to have received funding from such a strong investment syndicate and I am delighted to welcome Rich Ferrari as Chairman to our Board. We are honoured to have attracted someone of his calibre and look forward to benefiting from his impressive experience to support MedLumics as we progress through our development towards market entry. I would like to give heartfelt thanks to Olivier Litzka for his advice and guidance these past years and we are very grateful for his continued support as Vice Chairman of the Board."

Olivier Litzka, Partner at Andera Partners, commented: "We have seen an intensive and exciting period between 2017 and 2020, in which Medlumics has masterminded technically one of the most difficult to accomplish challenges in the electrophysiology lab by delivering a catheter which is capable of performing real-time lesion assessments during AF ablation. Following this achievement, we are in a favourable position to have attracted Rich Ferrari, an accomplished medtech entrepreneur, executive, board member and investor, and we look forward to moving towards clinical proof of concept under his Chairmanship."

Rich Ferrari, newly appointed Chairman, added: "I am very excited to be joining such a competent team and board of directors. The Medlumics technology has the potential to greatly enhance clinical outcomes by providing real time feedback on constant contact of the ablation and visual display of the depth and conductivity of the tissue."

Peter Neubeck, Partner at Kurma Partners, said: "We are excited to work with MedLumics in developing a truly innovative technology, a potential game changer in the interventional treatment of Atrial Fibrillation, a multi-billion-euro market opportunity. Patient outcomes will be dramatically impacted by the ability of clinicians to follow in real time the progression of ablations and their quality. We are happy to be joining this talented team and our syndicate partners, in supporting MedLumics' evolution into a successful international business."

Atrial Fibrillation is the most common type of cardiac arrhythmia, currently affecting an estimated 33 million people worldwide. AF recurrence remains high with more than 20% of patients undergoing repeat ablation within one year of initial treatment. Addressing an unmet clinical need, AblaView is the first imaging system to directly assess lesion creation, allowing the operator to confidently ascertain the stability of the contact and the positioning of the catheter on the atrial wall. Recent preclinical studies have been successful in demonstrating reliable monitoring of the continuity and transmurality of the cardiac tissue ablation in real-time.

Rich Ferrari has over 35 years in the healthcare industry, with a demonstrated history of working in the venture capital and private equity industry. Prior to founding De Novo Ventures in 2000, Rich was a successful CEO of medical technology companies, CardioThoracic Systems (CTS) and Cardiovascular Imaging Systems, both of which he took public. Rich remains very active as Executive Chairman of De Novo Ventures and mentors many first time CEOs. He also serves as a faculty member of the Stanford Biodesign Emerging Entrepreneurs Forum, as well as a board member for the Stanford Coulter Foundation for Translational Medicine. Rich holds a BS degree from Ashland University and an MBA from the University of South Florida.

About MedLumics

MedLumics SL, founded in Madrid in 2009, is a medical device company focused on the design and development of an optically guided radiofrequency ablation system for the treatment of Atrial Fibrillation. Its flagship product, AblaView, allows the operator to directly assess both the positioning of the ablation catheter on the myocardium and the continuity and transmurality of the ablation. Medlumics Ireland Ltd. is a subsidiary and IDA company developing automated optical sensor and packaging processes for high volume manufacture. www.medlumics.com

February is Heart Awareness Month in a number of countries. Resources and activities are available at the following sites: 25 Ways to Take Part in Heart Month; Heart Month.

About Kurma Partners

Founded in July 2009, Kurma Partners is a key European player in the financing of innovation in healthcare and biotechnology, from pre-seed to growth capital, notably through Kurma Biofund I through III and Kurma Diagnostics, as well as via strategic partnerships with prestigious European research and medical institutions. Innovative projects from Academia and research institutions, aspiring to meet unmet medical need is an important pillar of the firm's investment strategy, a second is venture capital financings of innovative young companies in Biotech and MedTech. www.kurmapartners.com

About Asabys Partners

Asabys Partners is a venture capital manager firm specialized in the healthcare sector, founded by Josep Ll. Sanfeliu and Clara Campas and participated by Alantra. Its first investment vehicle, Sabadell Asabys Health Innovation Investments SCR, SA, was launched in 2019 and is backed by the Banc Sabadell as reference investor. The fund has a target size of more than 80M and invests in healthcare companies across three verticals: medtech, digital therapeutics and biotech, that have highly innovative and disruptive technologies. The fund's investment in the company benefits from the financial backing of the European Union under the European Fund for Strategic Investments ("EFSI") set up under the Investment Plan for Europe. The purpose of EFSI is to help support financing and implementing productive investments in the European Union and to ensure increased access to financing. www.asabys.com

About VI Partners

VI Partners is Swiss venture capital advisor. Its partners have been working together since 2002. Its mission is to build bridges between entrepreneurs' dreams and successful companies and enable savvy investors to partner with the best start-up companies. VI Partners has been advising Venture Incubator fund since 2002 and its new VI Partners Swiss Innovation Fund since 2020. The managing partners have also been active contributors to the entrepreneurial scene in Switzerland and Europe since the 90s. VI Partners invested over CHF 230m in more than 50 companies since inception. www.vipartners.ch

About CDTI

CDTI is the body from the General State Administration that supports knowledge-based innovation, advising and offering public aid for innovation through subsidies or partially reimbursable aids. CDTI also internationalizes the R&D and innovation business projects of Spanish companies and entities and manages Spanish participation in international R&D organizations, such as Horizonte2020 and Eureka, as well as in the Science and Space industries. Additionally, through the Innvierte Economia Sostenible initiative, it supports and facilitates the capitalization of technology companies. www.cdti.es

About Caixa Capital Risc

Caixa Capital Risc is Criteria Caixa's venture capital management arm. With more than 10 years of experience, provides equity and participating loans for innovative companies with a high growth potential across three verticals: Life Science, ICTs, and Industrial Technologies. Through nine different investment vehicles, Caixa Capital Risc currently manages a portfolio of 123 innovative companies in Spain and Portugal, for a total volume of 230 million euros. Of these, 24 companies are in the Life Sciences sector, for a total volume of 100 million euros. https://www.caixacapitalrisc.es/en/

About ANDERA

Andera Partners (previously Edmond de Rothschild Investment Partners) is a leading investor in minority investments into privately owned companies. Its Life Sciences team brings together deep experience both over 60 years of experience in the Life Science industry and more than 100 years of private equity and venture capital experience.in the Life Science industry and in private equity and venture capital. The team has raised more than  1 bn through its BioDiscovery franchise and is currently starting to invest out of its new BioDiscovery 6 fund, both in biotech and medtech, and all over Europe and the US. https://www.anderapartners.com/en/

About INNOGEST

Innogest is a venture capital firm founded in 2005 with offices in Turin, Milan and San Francisco. With over 200 million of capital under management, Innogest Capital focuses on promising seed and early stage ventures developing medical devices, diagnostics and digital health and is particularly active in oncology, cardiology and neurology. http://www.innogestcapital.com/

SOURCE MedLumics

Hasina Begum overcame a tediously long struggle as she waited to come back home from Pakistan where she has been stuck since the past 18 years. And she did return a fortnight ago to her home, her 'heaven' as she called it, in Aurangabad in Maharashtra. But in what can only be called a tragedy of unimaginable level, Hasina passed away on Tuesday at her home after suffering a heart attack.

65-year-old Hasina had gone to Pakistan 18 years ago to meet the relatives of her husband when she lost her passport. This was only the beginning of an arduous and painful wait after Hasina was sent to a Pakistani jail when she couldn't ascertain her true identity.

Hasina started experiencing chest pains on the early hours of Tuesday and her relatives, with whom she was living at the moment, called for a doctor but before they could take her to the hospital, she breathed her last.

Hasina had recently come to know that a property she had owned since 2000 had been encroached upon and she had lodged a complaint about it too, TOI reported. Interestingly, these very property papers had helped Hasina get her freedom from the Pakistan prison as the Aurangabad police who pursued her case used these very documents to provide her true identity proof to their Pakistani counterparts.

A resident of Aurangabad, Hasina is married to Dilshad Ahmed, a resident of Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh.

The Aurangabad police had filed a 'missing person's' report in the matter after relatives of Hasina took the matter up to them and it was then further sent to Pakistani authorities.

News agency ANI had quoted Hasina as saying when she landed in India, "I went through a lot of hardships and I am feeling peace after returning to my country. I am feeling as if I am in heaven. I was imprisoned forcefully in Pakistan."

Hasina said she was in Lahore when she lost her passport and the authorities there 'forcefully' sent to a jail in Pakistan. She had time and again urged the Pakistani authorities to release her as she was innocent but they only started trying to ascertain her identity after they received a report from the police in Aurangabad in India.
ORLEANS  Tom Conrads long service to the Nauset Public Schools, first as principal of the high school and then as superintendent, will end with his retirement in June. Conrad shared the news at a joint meeting of the Nauset school committees Feb. 3.

I have been truly blessed to be in public education over 43 years, 29 of which in the Nauset system, he said. I am totally grateful to be able to work in a community that values education at the highest level. Conrad promised to work toward a smooth transition to a new leader for the system.

I think you have really set us up to be successful in terms of putting together a group to develop a strategic plan that will really lead us forward, said Orleans Elementary School Committee Chair Gail Briere, adding that a search committee will be formed soon and a search consultant hired to help with the process. In the meantime, she said, we are going to enjoy every single day that we have with you, Tom.

Conrad said hes looking forward to enjoying three beautiful grandchildren that have come into our life the last 13 months. Im going to work unbelievably hard to be the best grandparent I can be.

That Conrad intends to work hard at something is no surprise to those who know him.

Hes multi-faceted, longtime high school teacher Mark Mathison, who is also president of the Nauset Education Association union, said in an interview. Hes got apartment buildings that he has to take care of. Hes out lobstering all the time. When he has any time in the summer or weekends, hes out setting traps with his buddy Johnny Quigley. Hes not afraid to get his hands dirty.

I see him as a visionary, Briere said in an interview. He anticipates paradigm shifts in education and society and continuously reinforces the need for reflection, analysis, and implementation of best practices to meet those future changes. You have seen his energy, his optimism. He is open to new ideas.

Thats what Nauset Superintendent Michael Gradone was looking for in 1993 as he considered candidates for a principalship that was open again after just a year. Nauset High School needed a shot in the arm, he said in an interview. Schools go through cycles. I wanted to have things shaken up a bit. Tom had lots of ideas for programs that he had initiated at his previous high school. That would be Marshwood High School in Eliot, Maine. Ironically, Conrad had learned about the Nauset position a year previously while vacationing on the Cape, but too late to apply.

He always had ideas on the front burner, Gradone said. When a science teacher wanted to start a marine biology class, he said, she was understandably focused on the college-bound student who might major in marine sciences and get a grounding before applying to colleges. Tom gave her a blinking green light on the condition she design two courses, one for the college-bound and one for the kid who couldnt wait to get out of high school so he or she could fish for a living. Thats what set Tom apart. He wanted Nauset to be among the very best high schools everywhere, but also kept very much in sight the fact that we served a wide variety of kids.

Conrad came in here and dragged Nauset High School kicking and screaming from a blue-collar-focused school into the 20th century, the 21st century, Mathison said. The demographics of these towns were changing, and he recognized the need to have multiple AP courses instead of multiple automotive and welding courses. Kids in the trades could get some basics here; we still have arts, metal and woodworking.

Mathison was impressed that Conrad, whose children went through the Nauset system, made it his business to know about other peoples kids He knows the kids that are playing sports, that are in the chorus, that have won art awards from The Boston Globe, the kids in woodshop that have produced some simple little table with their own two hands and some simple little tools. Hes genuine and sincere about knowing the kids and their families, and celebrating whether the kid goes to Harvard or becomes a plumber.

The Monday after Columbine, said Gradone, recalling the 1999 school shootings in Colorado carried out by two high school seniors, I did what every superintendent in the country did. I met with my high school principal and said, Can it happen here? It was the most reassuring conversation I can remember because what (Conrad) did was tick off the individual students from the student body of at that point close to 900. In each case, he could find either some adult on the staff or some program that each student cared about, because what we were looking for was the social isolate who might become so angrily disengaged they might turn to violence It was testimony to the fact that he never lost touch with the students.

One of Toms real strengths is his interpersonal skills, said Briere, who met him when she became principal of Orleans Elementary School. He builds relationships with others, very sincerely. Whatever were working on, his total attention is on that particular topic Very often he says to us, To stay the same is to fall behind. Hes always challenging us.

The superintendent is really resilient in the face of adversity, Briere said of his leadership in response to the pandemic.

Conrads attitude and energy are always positive, regional school committee chair Chris Easley said in an interview. He truly never shied away from extra work if doing it would improve education. He rose to every occasion.
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In the last few months, there is an unprecedented acceleration in the adoption of technology by companies. They are quickly digitising their processes, how they service their customers and also the way they work. As employees work part from home and part from office, hybrid workplaces have become the new normal.

So what is a hybrid workplace? "It will have different meaning for different organisations based on their needs," says Ira Gupta, Head of Human Resources, Microsoft India. Different groups of people have different needs; there is a group of people who prefers working from office, then there is another group who wants to continue working from home two to three times a week.

"A hybrid workplace will have flexibility at its core that will allow people to engage with it on terms they are most comfortable with. There will not be a one size fits all. But in many cases, it will not be fully remote either," she says.

This flexibility and the agility of the new workspace will also change the fundamentals of how an office space has been created in the past. Earlier all the processes, employee benefits were created on the premise that all the employees work together in physical proximity and that will change considerably.

Also read: Crisis brings opportunity: The many lessons from COVID-19

Microsoft, says Gupta has virtualised its recruiting and onboarding. Even technology is personalised and digitised. Benefits have been changed to factor in the new normal. Tele-medicine has been included in addition to other medical benefits. A pandemic sick leave has been introduced for those who need to care for themselves or for their family members. Mental health leave has also been added. "It was never a priority to the same extent as it became in the last few years. That is going to accelerate significantly," she says.

While technology is playing an important role, Gupta says, the culture of an organisation will also have to be strengthened. She says, "At a time when some people come to work more often than others, the key to a resilient workforce will be the culture of the organisation. That is going to get stronger."

She explains that there is an expectation that every employee of the firm will embody certain values. But in a remote environment, there might be new joinees who have not yet visited office or met colleagues. "That's where the role of culture becomes so much more important, because your current leaders, your current managers, the current peer group who that new individual is interacting with needs to be able to embody it through not just words but action. That's where I think a lot of HR time and energy needs to be spent," she says.

Also read: WEF 2021: 'Skilling workforce in post-pandemic world must to ensure global growth'

She says that's while one of Microsoft's core product is Microsoft Teams, the company is not in favour of a completely remote workplace. "I very much doubt that a 100% technology workplace can work. At Microsoft we're not in favour of it all."

The reasons are simple. Gupta says, virtual interaction cannot replace personal interaction to build relationships. A video call still cannot replace coffee table gossip conversations where a lot of business intelligence gets communicated. It is also not easy to replace brainstorming sessions.

This means that physical offices are not going anywhere but their look and feel will change. People will be coming to office but might come a little less than before. It might be for a meeting or a brainstorming session. "I think what is likely to happen is there will be many more meeting rooms created. There will be more single telephone booths and different sizes of conference rooms so that people can come, huddle and leave," says Gupta.

Benguela  The Criminal Investigation Service (SIC) in the centre-west Benguela Province arrested, last Monday, the director of municipal services of the National Social Security Institute (INSS), Rene Baptista dos Anjos, for allegedly being involved in crimes of fraud and forgery of documents.

According to the SIC spokesman in Benguela, sub-inspector Victorino Kotingo, in statements to the press, the INSS official is accused of involvement in criminal association that has embezzled state coffers in more than Akz 14 million (US $21K equivalent) since 2019 to the present date.

The amount was used to pay retirement pensions to citizens who earn monthly salaries, as staff of the Ministry of Education.

He said that three other citizens allegedly beneficiaries are part of the group of detainees, as well as an element that pretended to be the head of human resources of the provincial education department.

Victorino Kotingo clarified that the alleged head of Education Human Resources and the INSS official were responsible for falsifying the entire process for the insertion of individuals in the social security system.

According to the spokesman, the Public Prosecutor's Office may order further investigations that will culminate in the arrest of other elements involved, taking into account the procedural complexity of the case.

According to the SIC spokesman in Benguela, sub-inspector Victorino Kotingo, in statements to the press, the INSS official is accused of involvement in criminal association that has embezzled state coffers in more than Akz 14 million (US $21K equivalent) since 2019 to the present date.

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The amount was used to pay retirement pensions to citizens who earn monthly salaries, as staff of the Ministry of Education.

He said that three other citizens allegedly beneficiaries are part of the group of detainees, as well as an element that pretended to be the head of human resources of the provincial education department.

Victorino Kotingo clarified that the alleged head of Education Human Resources and the INSS official were responsible for falsifying the entire process for the insertion of individuals in the social security system.

According to the spokesman, the Public Prosecutor's Office may order further investigations that will culminate in the arrest of other elements involved, taking into account the procedural complexity of the case.
LANSING (AP)  Republicans who control Michigan's Senate on Tuesday proposed $2 billion in COVID-19 relief aid, including $500 million in state funding to help businesses hurting due to the pandemic.

The plan would spend less than what was outlined by Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer  $5.6 billion  and the GOP-led House, which voted last week to spend nearly $3.6 billion. The Legislature and governor must agree before disbursing billions in federal relief enacted by Congress and then-President Donald Trump in late December.

Commitments received for a placement of A$15,991,634 at A$0.145 per share

Significant participation from North American and European institutional and sophisticated investors

This capital raising enables proceeding with the Phase 2b PTSD trial in mid-2021 as planned and sees the Company well capitalised

ADELAIDE, Australia, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Bionomics Limited (ASX: BNO,OTCQB: BNOEF, Germany: AU000000BNO5), a global, clinical stage biopharmaceutical company, is pleased to announce that it has entered into placement agreements with a number of North American and European institutional and sophisticated investors, to raise A$15,991,634. The Company used its 15% placement capacity under Listing Rule 7.1 of 110,287,132 shares.

The new shares will be issued at $0.145 per share representing a 263% premium to the Company's capital raise in September 2020 and a 20% discount to the 30-day volume weighted average price (VWAP) as of 5 February 2021. Completion of the placement is anticipated to be 26 February 2021.

Following completion of the placement, the Company will commence an Entitlement Offer allowing eligible shareholders the opportunity to acquire new shares at the same price. Further details of the Entitlement Offer will be provided in a subsequent announcement. Under the Subscription Agreement dated 2 June 2020 with Apeiron Investment Group Limited (Apeiron), the family office of entrepreneur and investor Christian Angermayer, Apeiron agreed to recapitalise the Company and assist in securing further equity capital (Subscription Agreement) to fund the Company's BNC210 Phase 2b Clinical trial for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

As part of the capital raising activities approved by shareholders at the General Meeting on 26 August 2020, Apeiron agreed to underwrite the further raising to the amount of A$15,000,000 at a minimum price of A$0.06 per share. This underwriting obligation has been fully fulfilled by this capital increase.

Dr. Errol De Souza, Executive Chairman of Bionomics said, "We are pleased to have gained further support from overseas investors as we pursue a treatment for patients suffering from PTSD. The placement was strongly oversubscribed and, as such, we were able to substantially minimize dilution to all our current shareholders by limiting the placement to 15% of the outstanding shares versus the shareholder approved sale of up to 250 million shares. We were pleased that a number of well-known specialist life sciences investment funds participated adding to a very strong shareholder base, which includes Apeiron Investments, Biotech Value Fund, Merck, Peter Thiel and Mike Novagratz. We remain on track to the completion of our ongoing 7-day dosing pharmacokinetic study of our novel BNC210 tablet formulation in 1Q CY2021 and starting the Phase 2b PTSD trial in mid-2021".

Apeiron founder Mr Christian Angermayer said "We are pleased to support Bionomics both as an underwriter in this placement and as a long-term shareholder of the Company. We look forward to participating in the Entitlement Offer alongside other investors. PTSD and other mental health disorders are enormous burdens for those that live with them. Bionomics' lead drug BNC210 has already received Fast Track Designation from the FDA and I am confident of the strong potential of the upcoming Phase 2b PTSD trial to drive value for both patients and shareholders."

AUTHORISED BY THE BOARD

About Bionomics Limited

Bionomics (ASX: BNO,OTCQB: BNOEF) is a global, clinical stage biopharmaceutical company leveraging its proprietary platform technologies to discover and develop a deep pipeline of best in class, novel drug candidates. Bionomics' lead drug candidate BNC210, currently in development for initiation of a second Phase 2 trial for the treatment of PTSD, is a novel, proprietary negative allosteric modulator of the alpha-7 (7) nicotinic acetylcholine receptor. Beyond BNC210, Bionomics has a strategic partnership with Merck & Co., Inc (known as MSD outside the United States and Canada).

www.bionomics.com.au

Factors Affecting Future Performance

This announcement contains "forward-looking" statements within the meaning of the United States' Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Any statements contained in this announcement that relate to prospective events or developments, including, without limitation, statements made regarding Bionomics' drug candidates (including BNC210), its licensing agreements with Merck & Co. and any milestone or royalty payments thereunder, drug discovery programs, ongoing and future clinical trials, and timing of the receipt of clinical data for our drug candidates are deemed to be forward-looking statements. Words such as "believes," "anticipates," "plans," "expects," "projects," "forecasts," "will" and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements.

There are a number of important factors that could cause actual results or events to differ materially from those indicated by these forward-looking statements, including unexpected safety or efficacy data, unexpected side effects observed in clinical trials, risks related to our available funds or existing funding arrangements, our failure to introduce new drug candidates or platform technologies or obtain regulatory approvals in a timely manner or at all, regulatory changes, inability to protect our intellectual property, risks related to our international operations, our inability to integrate acquired businesses and technologies into our existing business and to our competitive advantage, as well as other factors. Results of studies performed on our drug candidates and competitors' drugs and drug candidates may vary from those reported when tested in different settings.

SOURCE Bionomics Limited

Related Links

http://www.bionomics.com.au


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Two more king cobras caught

PHUKET: Kusoldharm rescue workers have caught two more large king cobras, this time at a house in Srisoonthorn, central Phuket.

animalsenvironmentnatural-resources

By Eakkapop Thongtub

Wednesday 10 February 2021, 05:45PM

A team of Kusoldharm rescue workers were called to the house, in Baan Pakrong Cheep, Moo 9, Srisoonthorn, by assistant village chief Sanit Rayasakul at 9:30am today (Feb 10).

Natthapong Kongkhim and fellow rescue workers arrived and were shown two king cobras under a rack used to hold toys for children.

The rescue workers had the two snakes  one male, the other female  safely snared after about 15 minutes.

The male king cobra was about four metres long and weighed around seven kilograms, while the female king cobra was about 3.5m long and weighed about 5kg.

We took the two king cobras to keep at our centre in Baan Muang Mai, Mr Natthapong explained.

We will call officers from the Phang Nga Wildlife Nursery Station to take them and release them into the wild, he added.

Just late last week Kusoldharm rescue workers warned people in the Moo 2 area of Pa Khlok to beware king cobras near their houses after four large king cobras were caught in the area in the past month.

The latest snake to be caught in that area, last Friday (Feb 5), measured some five metres long.
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- From the advent of photography to the age of social media, U.S. presidents have been among the most common subjects for the camera. So what better way to tell a story of the medium's evolution than through those historical figures.

That was the thinking of Cara Finnegan in writing Photographic Presidents: Making History from Daguerreotype to Digital, publishing this spring.

The title might suggest a coffee table book filled with iconic photos of iconic presidents, but there are few. Finnegan, instead, is telling a history of photography and its influence through its interactions with the nation's chief executives, and at key moments of transformation in the technology.

"I wanted to account for what happened when presidents met new media, and how both of them were changed as a result," said Finnegan, a communication professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Her previous work has examined the effect of photos of Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War dead and Barack Obama's Flickr site, among other topics. Her new book received a National Endowment for the Humanities Open Book Award.

Photography was a new medium not just in 1839, with the invention of the daguerreotype - a light-sensitive plate that required a long exposure and could not be duplicated - but with each transformation in technology that followed. Halftone reproduction brought photos to the mass media. Better cameras and film later made it possible to capture the unaware in unflattering ways. The digital era made it possible to shoot, share and manipulate photos with ease.

Finnegan intersperses chapters on the changing technology with chapters on presidents and presidential events that illustrate photography's capabilities, limitations and effects at those points in time, and how those helped shape public values around its use.

One constant throughout, she said: "Presidents always wanted to control their image." They worried about what looked presidential and what didn't, as well as the "camera fiends" who might capture the embarrassing pose.

"I think of presidents as kind of the visual equivalent of canaries in the coal mine," Finnegan said, "or warning bells for what the medium might be doing with and to us at any moment."

That was true with one of the first presidents to sit in front of a camera - actually a former president - John Quincy Adams. He was first photographed in the early 1840s, more than a dozen years after leaving office.

Adams had been portrayed in numerous portraits, busts and sculptures, and expected the more heroic or flattering treatment he had seen in those forms. "He really subscribed to the idea, which a lot of people in the period subscribed to, that these images should portray you as you want to be seen," Finnegan said. "The photograph, by contrast, showed a little too much of who you really were."

Adams made clear in his extensive diary that he understood photographs would be important, but didn't like what he saw. He thought all his photos were "hideous."

Surprisingly, George Washington was a common presence in many early daguerreotypes, despite his death decades earlier. "It makes no sense," Finnegan said. "And yet it makes total sense when you just start picking away at it."

Washington was then the nation's most beloved figure, so photographs often pictured people posing with, or gazing at, paintings or busts of him. "Photography seemed to need George Washington to make it important," Finnegan said.

He also served as a photographic link back to the founding generation, as did Dolley Madison, the widow of a president and perhaps the most famous American woman at the time, and still alive to be photographed in the 1840s.

Yet few people saw those earliest photos. The daguerreotype could not be reproduced or printed. By the time William McKinley assumed the presidency a half-century later, however, photos were a common feature of magazines and newspapers - yet news photography was still limited, and Finnegan uses McKinley's 1901 assassination to illustrate the point.

"The idea by then was that you should be able to chronicle everything, maybe even the assassination itself, which one newspaper falsely claims," Finnegan said. But such a photograph wasn't possible for many reasons; the technology just wasn't there.

"So what they do instead is photograph everything else. And they become obsessed with publishing what they called his last photographs," Finnegan said. "It's like McKinley's last everything. Pages and pages in the magazines and newspapers."

By the 1930s, the 35mm camera, with its faster shutter speeds and film, had ushered in the "candid camera" era. Existing anxieties about the camera fiend - similar to today's paparazzi - only increased, Finnegan said. President Franklin Roosevelt and his aides worried not only about potential photos of him in a wheelchair or leg braces, but embarrassing shots of him eating a hot dog at a political picnic or looking ill, when he wasn't, at a ballgame.

"They didn't want pictures of him looking bad in general," Finnegan said, "and the candid camera has a way of making people look bad."

Finnegan brings her history of photographic presidents up to the present by examining how Barack Obama and White House photographer Pete Souza broke new ground by sharing behind-the-scenes photos through social media. Through that she examines the tensions for every presidency between control versus interactivity, public versus private, revealing the real person versus the presidential image.

"The move to put his images on Flickr also raised a whole lot of other questions about how social media works, what copyright is, who controls the image of the president, and what is and isn't acceptable. It also provides a glimpse into the way the whole society at that point, and I think still today, has been dealing with the impact of social media," Finnegan said.

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Kangana Ranaut never fails to grab attention with her sensational comments on her Twitter page. The actress in one of her latest tweets, has claimed that she is better than Hollywood action star Tom Cruise when it comes to pulling off stunts.

The actress shared an article in which Manikarnika action director Nick Powell, who has coordinated stunts in Hollywood films such as The Gladiator and The Last Samurai, told the tabloid that Kangana had pulled off smoother stunts than Tom Cruise in the film. She also tweeted, "Ha ha ha bahut pareshaan hain librus, yeh Dekho renowned action director of Braveheart and many legendary Hollywood action films said I am better than Tom Cruise when it comes to action... Hahahahaha bechare librus aur tadpo."

See her tweet.

Ha ha ha bahut pareshaan hain librus, yeh Dekho renowned action director of Brave heart and many legendary Hollywood action films said I am better than Tom Cruise when it comes to action ...

Hahahahaha bechare librus aur tadpo. https://t.co/pVYxZhYUOM  Kangana Ranaut (@KanganaTeam) February 9, 2021

Kangana made this controversial claim after a netizen brought up the viral behind-the-scenes video of her, riding a wooden horse on the sets of Manikarnika.

Earlier, the actress had shared stills from her upcoming films Dhaakad and Thalaivi, and compared herself to Meryl Streep and Gal Gadot. Kangana had tweeted, "Massive transformation alert, The kind of range I display as a performer no other actress on this globe has that right now, I have raw talent like Meryl Streep for layered character depictions but I can also do skilled action and glamour like Gal Gadot #Thalaivi #Dhaakad."

If that wasn't enough, when one of the Twitter users trolled Kangana for her comparison tweet and accused her of blasphemy, the actress lashed out at him by saying, "Why just because she is white you automatically assume we can't be as good as her, forget their budgets or our age gap, tell me purely about the craft can she do Thalaivi and Dhaakad both? Fashion and Datto both? Panga and Krish both? Tanu and Thalaivi both?"

I honestly want to know why do we worship white people? Forget their budgets and our age gap, tell me about just acting can she do Thalaivi and Dhaakad? Queen and Tanu? Fashion and Panga? Kaya and Datto? Answer is she cant, then why not emerge from the deep rooted complex? https://t.co/59ir97DCw5  Kangana Ranaut (@KanganaTeam) February 9, 2021

Ever since Kangana Ranaut took over her Twitter page from her official team, the actress has been stirring controversies one after the other.

ALSO READ: Kangana Ranaut Flaunts Her Acting Range, Compares Herself To Meryl Streep & Gal Gadot

ALSO READ: Swara Bhasker Slams Kangana Ranaut For Normalising Hatred & Bigotry
Despite their eagerness to participate, only one of five primary care physicians said they were giving the vaccine to their patients, according to a survey conducted in mid-January by the Larry A. Green Center with the Primary Care Collaborative, a nonprofit. Given the widespread shortages of supply, many could not get the vaccine, and a third of them reported they had not been in contact with their local health department.

Dr. Katelin Haley, a family medicine doctor in Lewes, Del., is one of the lucky few who just received 240 doses of the vaccine and will be immunizing patients this week. Her staff had been checking every day with the state to see when they could expect a shipment. Chasing the vaccine has been almost a full-time job, she said.

While Dr. Haley, who also works with Aledade, is sympathetic to the states struggle to get adequate supplies of the vaccine, she thinks practices like hers need some of the doses. Its a delicate balance to address the states needs and the individual practices needs, she said.

Some physicians, like Dr. Altman, have received small amounts of the vaccine but they do not know when they may have enough to immunize all of the patients who qualify. In late January, Dr. Altman and his staff vaccinated 200 patients in the practices parking lot, in spite of the frigid weather. Patients were literally in tears, they were so grateful for our efforts, he said.

The Trump administration left it up to the states to determine how they distributed the vaccines, and the states, and even local communities, are taking different approaches. So much of whether primary care is leveraged depends on the state, said Ann Greiner, the chief executive of the Primary Care Collaborative.

Although the demand for vaccines is currently outstripping supply, relying on primary care doctors to vaccinate the public when supply begins to outpace demand later in the year is essential, said Dr. Asaf Bitton, a primary care doctor who is the executive director of Ariadne Labs at Brigham and Womens Hospital and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Their involvement will be critical to overcoming vaccine hesitancy and reaching herd immunity.

While some conversations are beginning to take place, they should have been starting to happen six months ago, he said.
The target of the first significant raids by the Criminal Assets Bureau in 2021 are a family-based gang who have been described as a mini Rathkeale Rovers crew whose criminal base in the southeast has grown significantly in recent times.

Senior sources say the gang has made tens of thousands of euro from tarmac scams across Europe, the US and Canada and have been laundering the cash as well as significant money for one of the biggest drug dealing gangs based in the region.

Gardai announced that CAB had frozen 16 bank accounts containing 540,000 in total, following search operations in Tipperary and Kilkenny.

This is a crew that have invested in at least two pubs, multiple houses and apartments as part of a money laundering scam which is very international in its dimension, a senior source said.

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The Sunday World can reveal that a number of suspected main players in the gang are facing money laundering charges in Sweden.

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Whatsapp CAB officers targeted four residential properties and a business premises where they seized a 201 Volvo XC90 and financial documents.

It is not just Sweden that this gang have their tentacles, intelligence indicates that they are also known to law enforcement in the United States and Canada as well as a number of EU states, the source said.

The gang operates nationwide and overseas by posing as tradesmen and quoting a "good price" for jobs ranging from laying tarmac to cleaning gutters.

Because of their international tarmac scams, the gang whose base is a Co Tipperary town, have been compared to the infamous Rathkeale Rovers gang but gardai say there are no major links between them and the Limerick gang.

This crew do their own thing  like other similar crews they are not overly involved in organised burglary but in saying that a key member is up on charges for a burglary in south Dublin, the source said.

They are heavily involved in laundering money for other criminal networks, including those based in south Kilkenny and Waterford city.

Sources said the links the gang have with one of the most prolific drugs trafficking networks in the southeast is particularly concerning with the tarmac crew suspected of now engaging in wide-scale money laundering for them.

Investigations have established there are around 20 core members aged from early 20s to late 60s.

Sources said there will be more arrests and searches as part of this probe.

In the operation, CAB officers targeted four residential properties and a business premises where they seized a 201 Volvo XC90 and financial documents.

The search operation targeted an Organised Crime Group (OCG) originating in the Munster and south Leinster region with considerable links across the continent of Europe, a Garda spokeswoman said.

Over the course of the investigation, assistance was sought from and provided by Europol. Fund transfers in excess of 4m were identified from other jurisdictions to Irish bank accounts linked to members of the OCG.

The search operation involved searches of four residential properties and a business premises. It was conducted by Criminal Assets Bureau personnel supported by the Emergency Response Unit and assisted by local Divisional personnel and the Garda Dog Unit.

This morning's operation has resulted in the freezing of 16 bank accounts linked to members of the OCG. The accounts contain cumulative funds of 540,000, she added.

Joe Bidens victory in the 2020 presidential election is seen as a positive development by those who favor renewable forms of energy over fossil fuels.

The Trump administration moved to reverse more than 100 climate and environmental rules, considering them burdensome to the fossil fuel industry. Biden, soon after taking the oath of office, took numerous actions to unravel Trumps environmental policies, starting with executive orders to block the Keystone XL pipeline and to return the United States to the Paris climate accord.

Biden has made combating climate change a national priority  and more and more people agree it should be. He plans to clamp down on industry polluters to reduce carbon emissions and to invest in renewable energy in order to deal with climate change and to help revitalize the economy. His strategy makes sense both environmentally and economically. Here are some key reasons we should start moving away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy:

 Fossil fuels visible effects on climate change. Climate change and its many manifestations, such as wildfires, droughts, storms and hurricanes, increasingly represent a clear and present danger, which our government leaders can no longer dismiss. Considering all of the environmental disasters we are seeing and fossil fuels culpability in them, renewable energy sources are the best answer.

 Economic growth. Renewables are also a potentially resounding answer as we look to bring an ailing economy back to full strength. Coal jobs are disappearing, but as renewable energy is ramped up, there will be many more jobs available in the solar and wind power industries. As a transition takes place, communities and utilities can start training workers in renewable energy fields.

Biden is focused on creating the clean energy economy of the future with millions of solar and wind power jobs that are safer, healthier and pay very competitively. He recognizes the coal industry had an important role to play in the 20th century, but he knows his job is not to prop up old and dying industries of the past. Instead, we need to invest in new technologies that make our environment cleaner and our economy stronger.

 National security. Because of our insatiable demand for oil in the world marketplace, the United States is unwittingly propping up the price and helping dictators and terrorists finance their wars and destruction. Just because the United States has become largely energy independent over the last decade does not mean we are immune to the global ramifications of our vast consumption.

Then we have to counter this effect by sending our military to unstable regions of the world to try to maintain peace for critical commerce. In essence, we are paying for our oil twice  once at the pump and again with our tax dollars.

 Human health. The costs and risks to our health are real. The burning of fossil fuels and emission of pollutants in the air that we all breathe causes chronic respiratory diseases like asthma in children and COPD in the elderly. This causes a drag on our education system and our economy because hundreds of thousands of children are often missing school and their parents are missing work to take them to see doctors and other health care specialists. This is not to mention the dangers and risks to their health and esteem and confidence as desired productive members of society.

There is no doubt that those countries that address these problems and turn them into opportunities will be the ones that thrive for decades to come. So the United States shouldnt just be taking part in the growing clean energy revolution; we should be leading it, as the Biden administration is poised to do. This is not a partisan issue.

Steve Melink is the author of Fusion Capitalism: A Clean Energy Vision for Conservatives and founder/CEO of Melink Corp., a pioneer in renewable energy solutions for the commercial building industry. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.
President Muhammadu Buhari has said the Kano-Maradi rail line would enhance import and export trade between Nigeria, Niger Republic and neighbouring countries when completed in 2023.

The President stated this Tuesday while performing the groundbreaking ceremony of the mega project in Katsina, capital of Katsina State.

The Commander-in-Chief who joined top government functionaries such as Rotimi Amaechi, the Minister of Transportation as well as Governors Aminu Masari, Abdullahi Ganduje, Mohammed Badaru and Abdullahi Ganduje of Katsina, Jigawa and Kano states respectively, on zoom, noted that the project on completion will establish an end-to-end logistic supply chain in railway transport services between northern and southern regions of the country, reaching Nigerian southern ports of Lagos and Warri.

He said: "The project, when completed, would serve import and export of goods for Niger Republic and other countries in the sub-region through Nigerian ports. The country would earn revenue through expansion of trade and commerce, while the people of Niger Republic will benefit from ease of transportation logistics at affordable cost in their import and export business, adding that "the entire route encompasses territory inhabited by close to 80 million people across 10 states of the country."

According to President Buhari, "the Kano - Maradi rail line has been identified as a viable line that will significantly enhance the movement of passengers and freight to the hinterland, especially raw materials from both agricultural and mineral resources for our industries. The connection to Niger Republic through rail will also foster Trans-Sahara trade and contribute to the expected gains in the African Continental Free Trade Area Agreement."

The first citizen also highlighted major railway projects due for commencement soon saying in the next few years, major towns and cities across the geo-political zones would be connected by rail.

"On the eastern corridor of the country, the Port Harcourt - Enugu - Makurdi - Maiduguri rail line with branches to Owerri, Imo state and Damaturu, Yobe state have been awarded for reconstruction to include a deep seaport in Bonny Island and a Railway Industrial Park in Port Harcourt with the objectives of achieving a vibrant and functional railway infrastructure in the Eastern part of the country.

"The Federal Ministry of Transportation and Ministry of Finance have been directed to vigorously act on engagement and concluding financial arrangement with appropriate co-financiers to partner with the federal government for the development of the West-East Coastal rail line from Lagos to Calabar and linking Onitsha, Benin, Warri, Yenagoa, Port Harcourt, Aba and Uyo.

An elated Amaechi had this to say of the project: "The scope of this project having its corridor within Kano, Katsina, Jigawa state and the 25 km extension into Niger Republic, involves the construction of single-track standard gauge rail line with an alignment of approximately 284km transversing Kano, Dambatta, Kazaure, Shangele, Mashi, Daura, Katsina, Jibiya, Maradi and the 94 km branch line from Kano to Dutse, the capital of Jigawa state."

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According to him, the project includes 15 railway stations of different categories with major stations of approximately of 3,000 peak passengers capacity in the cities of Kano and Katsina and stations of standard category in Kazaure, Daura Jibiya, mild stations in Dambatta, Shangele, and Mashi as well as haul stations in Kunya, Kano airport, Muduru, Dandara, and in Niger Republic at Ano Mata and Maradi.

The route, Amaechi added will have "accessories and special installations including power and water supply scheme, signalling systems, and communications," adding that it would "reach a partial completion in 2023 when it would be ready to handle passenger and freight daily traffic forecast of 9, 364 passengers and approximately 3,000 metric tons of freight on return trips between Kano and Maradi."

The 284 km rail line is contracted to Mota Engil Nigeria Limited, a Portuguese firm, which boasts of huge experience in rail construction and rehabilitation, amongst others.

Vanguard News Nigeria
U.S. soldiers fold the American flag during the closing ceremony of Philippine and U.S. military joint exercises at Camp Aguinaldo in Quezon City, Philippines, May 19, 2017

In their first conversation since Lloyd Austin became the U.S. defense secretary, he and Philippine counterpart Delfin Lorenzana reaffirmed their nations commitment to a decades-old military alliance in a phone call Wednesday, officials said.

Lorenzana said he discussed bilateral ties and security concerns with Austin, who was named as the chief at The Pentagon by Joe Biden, the new American president. The two defense secretaries, according to Lorenzana, also discussed security concerns in the South China Sea. Tensions have increased there since Beijing passed a law last month that empowers its coast guard to use force against foreign ships in those contested waters.

Secretary Austin reaffirmed the commitment to the Philippines-U.S. alliance through the Mutual Defense Treaty and the agreement regarding the treatment of U.S. Armed Forces visiting the Philippines, Lorenzana said in a statement, referring to the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA), a bilateral pact established in 1999 that governs visits to the Philippines by U.S. military forces.

Last year, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte ordered the VFA cancelled after Washington revoked the visa of a senator who, while serving as his national police chief, had launched the governments deadly war on drugs. In June, Duterte suspended his cancellation order amid increasing Chinese threats in the South China Sea but by November called for taking another six months to determine the status of the VFA.

Both sides committed to sustain dialogues amidst the pandemic and strengthen cooperation between the two defense establishments, Lorenzana said, adding they agreed to meet face-to-face soon.

In Washington, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said the discussions underscored the value the VFA brings to both countries.

The secretaries discussed the importance of enhancing the Armed Forces of the Philippines capabilities and increasing interoperability between the two militaries through a variety of bilateral security cooperation activities, Kirby said in a statement issued on Wednesday morning (Manila time).

He stressed that the discussions focused as well on upholding international rules and norms, to include the 2016 Arbitral Tribunal ruling.

Kirby was referring to a ruling by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague that went in favor of Manila and struck down Beijings expansive territorial claims, including waters that reach the shores of other claimant countries.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who took office just days before the ruling, initially ignored calls to enforce it or try to raise the issue with Beijing. Instead, he distanced Manila from Washington, its traditional ally.

Duterte sought to ingratiate himself with China and went to Beijing on several state visits. Those visits led to hundreds of millions of dollars in fresh investment pledges tied to Beijings One Belt, One Road initiative  Chinas strategy to build a modern-day Silk Road through a network of ports, railways, roads and trade routes.

But Duterte shifted course and last year used the U.N. General Assembly to state that the ruling on the South China Sea was beyond compromise and already part of international law.

Overlapping claims

While China claims nearly all of the South China Sea, six other Asian governments  Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam the Philippines and rival Taiwan  claim parts of the potentially mineral-rich waterway. Indonesia is not officially a party to the dispute, but is at odds over Beijings claims to parts of the sea that overlap on its territorial waters.

On Tuesday, the Philippines new military chief, Gen. Cirilito Sobejana, said he would order more military assets deployed to the disputed region to protect Filipino fishermen in light of the new coast guard law passed by China.

Meanwhile on Tuesday, the U.S. Navys aircraft carrier strike groups the Theodore Roosevelt and the Nimitz conducted dual-carrier operations by coordinating maneuvers in a highly trafficked area of the South China Sea, the Pacific Fleet said.

In Manila, Sen. Risa Hontiveros, an opposition lawmaker who is among the most vocal Philippine politicians critical of China, called on Lorenzana to be more assertive in dealing with China.

We should focus on enforcing our laws in our own waters because China will interpret and implement its law the way it pleases, Hontiveros said on Wednesday.

We should step up our game by protecting the livelihood and economic interests of our compatriots in the West Philippine Sea, she said, using the Philippine name for the South China Sea.

She welcomed the governments assurance that the Philippine Coast Guard as well as the military would ensure the protection of Filipino fishermen, but insisted their fears should be taken seriously.

The DND better start listening to our fisherfolk, she said, using an acronym for the Department of National Defense.

Alec Baldwin, Christian Slater and AnnaSophia Robb were seen filming their upcoming mini-series Dr Death in New York this week.

The show covers the real-life case of Texas surgeon Christopher Duntsch who earned the nickname 'Dr Death' for his malpractice against patients.

In a tense-looking scene, 27-year-old AnnaSophia could be seen confronting Alec and Christian as they sat at a bar table.

In character: Alec Baldwin (pictured), Christian Slater and AnnaSophia Robb were seen filming their upcoming mini-series Dr. Death in New York this week.

Face to face: In a tense-looking scene AnnaSophia, 27, could be seen confronting Alec and Christian as they sat at a bar table

AnnaSophia could be seen making sure to wear her mask between takes as she interacted with members of the crew outdoors in the chilly winter weather.

Although she wore a sleek pair of pumps for her actual scene she swapped them out for a pair of fleece-lined boots when the cameras were off.

Christian was also spotted in his mask and costume, carrying a cool beverage as he made his way around the mounds of snow lining the streets.

Over 30 patients were either killed or maimed by 'Dr. Death's' botch jobs and he is now serving life for intentionally injuring Mary Efurd during spinal surgery.

Premise: The show covers the real-life case of Texas surgeon Christopher Duntsch who earned the nickname 'Dr. Death' for his malpractice against patients

Careful: AnnaSophia could be seen making sure to wear her mask between takes as she interacted with members of the crew outdoors in the chilly winter weather

Dashing through the snow: Although she wore a sleek pair of pumps for her actual scene she swapped them out for a pair of fleece-lined boots when the cameras were off

AnnaSophia stars in the mini-series as Dallas prosecutor Michelle Shughart who was on the case that eventually got him convicted in 2017.

Joshua Jackson will be playing 'Dr. Death,' whose defense team argued that the harm he caused his patients was unintentional.

Alec and Christian are respectively playing Robert Henderson and Randall Kirby, two other surgeons who blew the whistle on Christopher Duntsch.

It was Robert Henderson who performed the rescue surgery on Mary Efurd after 'Dr. Death' botched her 2012 spinal operation.

Refreshed: Christian was also spotted in his mask and costume, carrying a cool beverage as he made his way around the mounds of snow lining the streets

Backdrop: Over 30 patients were either killed or maimed by 'Dr. Death's' botch jobs and he is now serving life for intentionally injuring Mary Efurd during spinal surgery

Who's who: AnnaSophia stars in the mini-series as Dallas prosecutor Michelle Shughart who was on the case that eventually got him convicted in 2017

Meanwhile Randall worked with Christopher once and later 'went up the chain of command' and 'told them he was bad news,' he told People.

Prosecutors unearthed a 2011 email in which Christopher wrote: 'I am ready to leave the love and kindness and goodness and patience that I mix with everything else that I am and become a cold blooded killer.'

The year after the conviction the story became a Wondery Media podcast called Dr. Death, which is now the basis for the mini-series.

Although 50 Shades Of Grey heartthrob Jamie Dornan was originally cast in the title role it was announced last October that Joshua would be replacing him.

Details: Alec and Christian (pictured) are respectively playing Robert Henderson and Randall Kirby, two other surgeons who blew the whistle on Christopher Duntsch

Alec's character: It was Robert Henderson who performed the rescue surgery on Mary Efurd after 'Dr. Death' botched her 2012 spinal operation

Christian's character: Meanwhile Randall worked with Christopher once and later 'went up the chain of command' and 'told them he was bad news,' he told People

Alec's latest sighting comes not long after his wife 'Hilaria' apologized for faking her Spanish heritage in a controversy that came to light at the end of 2020.

Although she goes by 'Hilaria' and her CAA bio claimed she was born in Majorca, she is in fact from Boston and had the given name Hillary Hayward-Thomas.

Various interviews show her slipping into a Spanish accent and she once forgot the English word 'cucumber' during a televised cooking segment.

Origin story: The year after the conviction the story became a Wondery Media podcast called Dr. Death, which is now the basis for the mini-series

Production history: Although 50 Shades Of Grey heartthrob Jamie Dornan was originally cast in the title role it was announced last October that Joshua would be replacing him

As the story gained steam she insisted to the New York Times that the 'cucumber' moment was a 'brain fart' because she was nervous and unused to TV.

While appearing on the Cat & Nat podcast in New York in April 2020 she said: 'I moved here when I was 19 to go to NYU,' and when she was asked: 'From?' she replied: 'From - my family lives in Spain. They live in Majorca.'

When the scandal took off she told the New York Times: 'I was born in Boston. I spent time in Boston and in Spain. My family now lives in Spain. I moved to New York when I was 19 years old and I have lived here ever since.'

In the headlines: Alec's latest sighting comes not long after his wife 'Hilaria' apologized for faking her Spanish heritage in a controversy that came to light at the end of 2020

Family man: Hilaria, 37, has been married to Alec, 62, since 2012 and they have five children - Carmen, seven, Rafael, five, Leonardo, four, Romeo, two, and Eduardo, five months

Last Friday she said on Instagram that she was 'sorry' about the whole affair and allowed that she 'should have been more clear.'

However she insisted that she was brought up 'with two cultures, American and Spanish' and feels 'a true sense of belonging to both.'

Hilaria, 37, has been married to Alec, 62, since 2012 and they have five children - Carmen, seven, Rafael, five, Leonardo, four, Romeo, two, and Eduardo, five months.

Sleek and chic: AnnaSophia's prosecutor outfit included a pair of black slacks and a matching leather handbag as well as an attractive navy coat

Before 'action': AnnaSophia and Christian could be seen chatting to a member of the production whilst stood on a sidewalk that still had residue of the recent snowfall
Getty Images / Contributed Photo

CLINTON  A local man will spend just over a year in prison after he was sentenced this week on a federal gun charge, federal prosecutors said.

Alexander Luong, 31, was sentenced Tuesday by Judge Jeffrey A. Meyer to one year and one day in prison, followed by three years of supervised release.
The family of a teenager who was stabbed to death with a hunting-style knife have been left 'speechless' after learning one of the five men charged with his murder has been released despite breaching his bail conditions eight times in a year.

Jack Beasley, 17, was allegedly stabbed to death after getting into an argument with a group of boys outside an IGA supermarket in Surfers Paradise, Queensland, on December 13, 2019.

Five teenagers - then aged between 15 to 18 - were charged with his murder and will appear in Southport Magistrates Court on Thursday to have their charges heard.

But one of the alleged killers, whose name has been suppressed by the courts, has repeatedly breached his bail conditions while waiting for his court hearing.

The man, who is now 20, was arrested on February 2 by Brisbane police for riding a scooter without a helmet. He allegedly gave police a false name at the time.

Jack Beasley and his father Brett. Jack was allegedly murdered during an altercation with five teenagers in 2019. It is alleged one of his alleged killers has breached his bail eight times

The scene of the alleged Jack Beasley murder in December 2019

When he fronted Brisbane Magistrates Court last week the man, from North Booval, was sentenced to 12 months probation after pleading guilty to breaching bail and failing to comply with police directions.

He was initially denied bail but has been again bailed in the Supreme Court, according to the Gold Coast Bulletin. The terms of his latest bail are not known.

The same man admitted to breaching his bail conditions six times in two months after appearing in court last November.

Jack Beasley's father, Brett was outraged the alleged killer is again a free man.

'Once again, it's just another kick in the guts for our family,' Brett Beasley told the publication.

'How many times has this got to happen?'

'I'm speechless. It definitely makes the whole process harder.'

The 20 year old was initially bailed by the Supreme Court on April 1, 2020.

It is clear to me and to the community that some young offenders simply don't care about consequences,' Annastacia Palaszczuk said

Brett Beasley (left) and his wife Belinda set up a foundation to educate and drive change after the death of their son Jack Beasley (right)

On Tuesday Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk announced a crack down on young criminals with 'all the force and resources at our disposal' after a series of shocking alleged murders rocked the state.

Courts will now be able to have high risk offenders aged 16 and 17 fitted with GPS trackers as part of bail conditions and police on the Gold Coast will carry metal detecting wands to stamp out knife crime under the tough new measures.

'The new measures will target hardcore youth criminals who repeatedly offend and put the community at risk,' Ms Palaszczuk said on Tuesday.

'They will feel the full force of the law when it comes to our changes on bail.'

'The loss of four innocent lives cannot go unanswered. It is clear to me and to the community that some young offenders simply don't care about consequences,' Ms Palaszczuk said.

'It's this 10 per cent who are responsible for 48 per cent of the crime. They're the ones we are going to target with all the force and resources at our disposal.'

The Jack Beasley Foundation, set up by Brett Beasley and his wife, Belinda, released comments in response.

'While yesterday's announcement is a big step in the right direction, here's a perfect example of why the Bail Laws need massive reform and there needs to be some accountability around the continual safe landing decisions in relation to youths that Breach Bail.'

'Long overdue. Fingers crossed they get these in ASAP.'

The foundation, set up to help educate and drive change around youth violence, has the tagline 'Detect knives, save lives'.

Ms Palaszczuk said the changes target about 400 repeat offenders who are responsible for almost half of all the state's youth crime.

There were growing calls for action after a Brisbane couple and their unborn baby were killed when a teenager allegedly crashed a suspected stolen car on Australia Day.

Jack Beasley died at Surfers Paradise in 2019 aged 17

On Friday night a Townsville woman was killed when she was hit by a car being driven by a vigilante, who had been chasing down an alleged stolen car being driven by teenagers.

Seven legislative changes, including the use of GPS trackers, will be passed by the Queensland government in February.

'It's not the panacea, but it is one tool that we don't have right now,' Assistant Commissioner Cheryl Scanlon said.

'We have seen it used in other places and that's what the trial is all about.'

Judges will also have a presumption against bail for offenders who commit serious indictable offences such as breaking and entering, sexual assault and armed robbery while on bail.

Parents and guardians will have to provide assurances in court that bail conditions will be met before young offenders are released.

Daily Mail Australia contacted the office of Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk for comment.
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According to recent data released by Egypt's National Council for Women (NCW) and the National Council for Childhood and Motherhood (NCCM) during the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence in 2020, the number of girls and mothers reporting actual or potential incidents of female genital mutilation (FGM) reached 1618 reports[1] between June 2019 and December 2020. In 2005, when the Child Helpline was first established, there were 240[2] reported incidents.

The rise in the number of reported cases of FGM is seen as a promising sign that the country's efforts to raise awareness is starting to work.

"Egypt will not accept violence against women and girls. Backed by a strong political will, the government is intensifying efforts to seek parliament approval for increasing penalties on perpetrators of this crime," says H.E. Maya Morsy, President of the NCW and Co-chair of the National Committee for Eradication of FGM. "We are reaping the fruits of two years of extensive awareness around FGM, which has led to an increased number of families and medical personnel come forward and report it."

Egypt has a multi-layered strategy to end FGM in the country, which includes improved data on the prevalence of this harmful practice and research to understand its root causes and perceptions. This began with the Egypt Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) in 2014 and there are plans to roll out additional prevalence studies this year.

Although the DHS revealed that 92 per cent of ever-married Egyptian women aged 15-49 had undergone FGM (or cutting), there has been a noticeable decline among younger women, with rates among girls aged 15-19 dropping from 97 per cent in 1985 to 70 per cent in 2015.[3]

"When my husband and mother told me that my girl should undergo FGM, I refused," shared Amal Ahmed*, a FGM survivor and now a mother from the Cairo governate, in an interview with UN Women. She was only 10 years old when Amal and her sister were forced to undergo FGM. The trauma of the experience never left her. Today, Amal has a 11-year-old daughter whom she protects fiercely. "I told my mother: 'You did it to me, but I'm not doing it to my daughter. I'm not going to destroy my girl's life." Many Egyptian women share a similar story, which is why eliminating FGM has become a key national priority.

Contributing legislative changes include a law criminalizing FGM in 2008, strengthened penalties under the Criminal Code in 2016, and the Egyptian Cabinet just approved a bill that is now before Parliament to further increase penalties proposed by the National Committee for Eradication of FGM - to a minimum of five and a maximum of 20 years in prison for doctors or nurses who perform FGM.

The 'National Strategy for the Empowerment of Egyptian Women 2030,' adopted in 2017 by President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, vows to eliminate FGM under its protection pillar. And in May 2019, the NCW and the NCCM launched a National Committee for Eliminating FGM, which includes representatives of all concerned ministries, religious and judicial bodies, civil society and development partners.

Awareness-raising has also been key, with community mobilization and grass-roots initiatives engaging civil society organizations, religious and opinion leaders. UN Women, UNFPA and other development partners contributed to a national 'mega awareness campaign' in June and July 2020, initially launched on the National Day to End FGM, which aimed to inform Egyptian families about the consequences of this harmful practice, including the legal penalties and official channels of reporting (including the government-managed Child Helpline and the Women's Complaints Office helpline). The door-to-door campaign, while observing COVID-19 safety and prevention measures, reached at least 14 million Egyptian women, men and children across the country's 27 governorates to mitigate the increased risk of FGM due to the socio-economic fallouts of the COVID-19 pandemic. It also informed the public about the fatwa [legal ruling on points of Islamic law] from the Al Azhar institution and the Coptic Church that confirm that FGM is not associated with any religion and is considered sinful. Furthermore, activities coordinated by the National Taskforce for Eradication of FGM have reached 74 million Egyptians since its establishment.

The NCW and UN Women Egypt also released their first feature film, "Between Two Seas" in 2019, with the financial support of USAID and the Government of Japan. The film tackles a number of women's issues, including FGM, and has won 14 awards in major international film festivals. To ensure that the main messages of the film are conveyed to communities across Egypt, a series of public screenings were organized in different governorates in 2020, including Cairo, Assuit, Fayoum, Minya, Damietta, Luxor and Qena. These screenings were followed by discussions with the audience and influenced some viewers to change their mind about making their daughters undergo FGM.

"I had planned to take my 11-year-old daughter tomorrow to the doctor to perform FGM, but now that I have seen this film it has affected me and I will never do such harm to my daughter," said 31-year-old Mahasen Kamal*, a mother and survivor of FGM, who attended one of the screenings.

While community awareness about the negative consequences of FGM is more than ever before, the practice of FGM in Egypt continues . The proposed bill on harsher penalties for FGM perpetrators now before Parliament is one of many measures that the country is rolling out. There has also been a consistent effort to mobilise men and boys to end this harmful practice, such as through the 'Because I am a Man Campaign' and through sport tournaments.

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"We're encouraged to see FGM reporting on the rise. It's a sign that our advocacy is working and that legal changes are making an impact," says UN Women Egypt Country Representative Christine Arab. "But we need to keep up this momentum. The gains made cannot be lost and we must do even more to ensure that all girls are protected from this practice going forward."

*Name changed to protect the survivor's identity

Notes

[1] Data published by the National Committee for Eliminating FGM (Power-point Presentation)

[2] Calculation is based on figures published on the official website of the NCCM: Child Helpline 16000 (nccm-egypt.org)

[3] The Ministry of Health and Population/Egypt, El-Zanaty and Associates/Egypt and ICF International. 2015. The Egypt Demographic and Health Survey 2014. Cairo, Egypt: Ministry of Health and Population and ICF International. https://dhsprogram.com/publications/publication-FR302-DHS-Final-Reports.cfm ; UNICEF. 2016. Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting: A Global Concern. https://www.unicef.org/media/files/FGMC_2016_brochure_final_UNICEF_SPREAD.pdf
The leading European financier announced the closing of a US$36.5m in a debt/equity deal

LONDON, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Founded in 2018, Storfund is a technology driven global eCommerce funding enterprise. Storfund announced today it has raised $36.5 million of capital through the Private Debt team of Swiss bank Union Bancaire Privee (UBP) and private investors. This fresh investment will be used to expand Storfund's global operations and help marketplace merchants access working capital and unlock liquidity.

In its initial 18 months of operations, Storfund has enjoyed rapid growth, fast becoming Europe's leading eCommerce funder - a feat that saw the business break even in its first six months. Between December 2019 and December 2020 Storfund saw a 1200% growth and expects to continue this growth trajectory for the next two years. This year, Storfund aims to provide $1 billion of cash advances to eCommerce merchants selling on Amazon and other European, American, and Asian marketplaces.

The only European Amazon approved funding provider, Storfund has a presence in 17 out of Amazon's 20 marketplaces. It is also integrated into other leading European eCommerce sites and is due to be rolled out onto several other marketplaces during 2021.

Storfund's API driven propriety technology brings innovation and efficiency to the receivables finance industry which has been unable to serve e-commerce merchants due to its traditional approach. Technology streamlines processes and lowers costs, which is ultimately passed on the e-commerce merchants. Storfund's bespoke underwriting standards based on marketplace microstructure indicators rather than traditional credit metrics allow Storfund to onboard e-commerce merchants within 24 hours and manage risk on a dynamic basis.

By combining access to working capital and international cross-border payments in over 50 currencies, London-based Storfund provides eCommerce sellers around the world with an end-to-end solution for stabilising cash flow, accelerating growth and increasing profitability from their local and international sales.

eCommerce is now an indispensable part of the global retail framework. Like many other industries the pandemic has reshaped the retail landscape and accelerated its exponential transformation. 2020 saw global eCommerce surpass $3.5 trillion in sales, accounting for 22% of the entire global retail market.

Storfund was conceived by former investment bankers George Brintalos and Akbar Ahsan. Together they recognised the unique financial needs of eCommerce merchants. George Brintalos said: "Storfund bridges the gap between eCommerce and capital, which is under served by traditional banks which are either too rigid to adapt or are withdrawing from the SME sector. We are here to address the capital needs of this new category of entrepreneurs, providing them with the liquidity they need to naturally grow their business, without adding unnecessary debt on their balance sheet or diluting their share capital base."

Akbar Ahsan added: "Storfund uniquely understands the cashflow challenges of eCommerce merchants and offers a frictionless liquidity solution for the digital age. We are pleased that investors saw the value of Storfund's tech-first approach which combined with our real time risk management puts us at the forefront of our industry. This investment round will accelerate our scale up and help us in our mission to alleviate the pain of long payment terms and provide growth capital to eCommerce merchants."

Colin Greene, Head of Private Debt at UBP said: "Fintech and e-commerce are generating attractive financing opportunities. We are pleased to work with Storfund and support the financing they provide to SMEs who sell through e-commerce marketplaces."

For more information, please visit https://storfund.com.

Please contact / Math.morrison@hound-global.com /Josh.simon@hound-global.com / David.cotgreave@hound-global.com for more additional information, assets and interviews.
Though Riya been away from the silver screen for quite some time now, she is grabbing all the attention through her pictures on Instagram. (Credit: Instagram)
Brenda Kerber, pictured, was a follower of Rama cult leader Frederick Lenz

The daughter of a woman who disappeared from her White Plains home in 1989 has opened up about the Rama cult with which her mom was involved.

Shannon Altenhofen has decided to open up to DailyMail.com after the remains of her mother, Brenda Kerber, were found at the bottom of a New York reservoir last month.

Family members have said that Altenhofen's descent into the cult started when she became enamored with Tony Chester, a 'Church of Science' minister in Grants Pass, who she followed to California where she lived in an ashram.

Kerber was introduced by Chester to Frederick P. Lenz III - a man who recruited people to 'American' Buddhism and who many considered a cult leader.

She later moved with Chester to New York to become a closer follower of Lenz, who often referred to himself as Zen Master Rama.

In diaries found after her death, Kerber wrote that 'Rama is my true love.'

The mom, who was 40 when she went missing, died by suicide, police revealed in January.

Cops said her death was ruled a suicide after 'a review of the evidence in the case and the recent findings from the vehicle,' and an examination by the medical examiner.

'My purpose in doing this is to relay some information to families who have this type of involvement in other similar groups to maybe prevent that in the future,' Altenhofen said.

Altenhofen, who now lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, said she was a 21-year-old college student around the time of her mom's disappearance.

'I will say her involvement with this group happened much earlier than her disappearance. Again I can't be specific about dates because it's been long enough that I just don't have that in my mind anymore,' she said.

Brenda Kerber was born in 1949 in Corvallis, Oregon and had 'a normal life through grade school,' according to a letter published to ex-cult.org by her parents  who are now deceased.

Brenda Kerber disappeared from her home in 1989 and her death has since been ruled a suicide

She soon married her high school sweetheart Jim Gillespie, with whom she had Altenhofen, according to the letter.

The couple divorced and Kerber met her college sweetheart, Michael Kerber, while getting her bachelor's degree in General Science at Oregon College of Education in Monmouth in 1973.

Brenda married Michael, with whom she had a son named David and who adopted Altenhofen.

In 1981, the couple moved to Grants Pass where Kerber's husband Mike became a manager of a farm cooperative. Kerber took a job working at an elementary school.

She later took a job working as a computer analyst and newsletter editor for a large insurance company called Smith Management, Inc. from 1982 to 1985.

Zen Master Rama was the leader of a cult of computer programmers who practiced American Buddhism

Zen Master Rama was accused of financially and sexually exploiting his followers

'Brenda was doing very well at her new profession,' her parents wrote, but she had troubles getting along with her co-workers.

'She had a good relationship with her parents at that time, often calling upon her father for ideas in editing her newsletter.'

Kerber's second marriage eventually broke down over 'lack of communication' and she 'became enamored with a young minister, Tony Chester, and his 'Church of Science',' according the letter.

'It started with searching for some meaning or spiritual answers. She has certainly been described by my aunt as a 'seeker' her whole life,' Altenhofen said.

She said Kerber started 'seeking' answers 'probably like a lot of people maybe going through a marital breakup.'

Altenhofen said she was around 18 years old when Kerber began getting involved with a 'small faction' of the Rama cult while living in Grants Pass.

Cops found Brenda Kerber's car with her remains inside during a recent environmental study of the reservoir bottom

Divers with New York State Police recovered the 1982 Ford Granada in January

Kerber's car went missing with her in 1989, but officials found her identification and diaries at her home

Kerber's daughter noted that it is hard to remember exact details of Kerber's slip into the cult more than 30 years later as she was young and pursuing her own interests at the time.

Her parents wrote that Kerber 'became enamored' with a young minister named Tony Chester and his 'Church of Science' in Grants Pass, which 'included a good deal of meditation.'

She started going to a retreat in Northern California called Ananda and began to draw away from her family, according to the letter from her parents.

'She wanted us to become involved and begged us to understand. She became involved with a group who had a 'guru' named Yogananda and followed his teachings.'

Altenhofen has now described these groups as a 'pipeline' to Lenz.

Kerber's involvement intensified from simple Buddhism classes to eventually moving into an ashram in San Francisco  before then moving to upstate New York 'to be very involved with this group.'

'That's quite a progression of intensity,' Altenhofen said.

Chester left Grants Pass around 1986 and moved into the Los Angeles Area and Kerber followed suit, moving to the Bay Area in the summer of 1987, according to her parents.

'We feel that Tony Chester had much to do with her leaving Oregon for the Bay Area,' her parents wrote.

Kerber found temporary work in the computer field and later landed a job at Stanford University, according to her parents.

'She seemed to be moving forward and was less involved with religion for a short period. Then Zen came into the picture through Frederick Lenz,' her parents wrote.

Kerber and her son David rented a home in Menlo Park, near Stanford, for $1,600 per month.

David Kerber did not respond to requests seeking additional information from DailyMail.com.

'We are confident now that Tony Chester was a recruiting agent for Frederick Lenz at this time and got Brenda working with him in recruiting new members,' her parents claimed in the letter.

Altenhofen said her mother eventually moved into an ashram in the Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco, where she once visited her during a Spring Break trip home in her freshman year of college.

'She had moved into this ashram in Pacific Heights with a group they called themselves Ananda or something,' she said.

'I said: 'What am I supposed to do for the holiday?' I remember asking her that and she was still very connected to being a parent because had parented me until around this time,' Altenhofen said.

Altenhofen said her mom was living in a tiny one-room space within the ashram.

'I remember thinking this is so bizarre, because it was all adults. There were no families, no children, and I think it was an unspoken thing that children weren't allowed there.'

Altenhofen recalled her mother feeling 'very conflicted about her role as a parent' with a grown child and the new direction she was going.

'She was willing to have me come and stay at her ashram where children were not allowed and I don't know if she had to get permission from the group to have me be there,' she said.

She said the feelings of seeking life changes upon becoming an empty-nester are a 'normal trajectory but lambasted the 'cult' for appearing to force her into choosing that life.

'I'm an empty-nester, my daughter is in her mid-20s and there's a difference between leading your own life and becoming disengaged from family and any kind of care-taking,' Altenhofen said.

'It seemed like the route she was choosing was making her choose.'

Altenhofen also recalled meeting Chester several times in Grants Pass and in Menlo Park during his alleged influence over her mother.

'I think sometimes kids have a sixth sense about people that adults don't always have and he struck me as a grifter,' Altenhofen said.

'My ongoing feeling was that he was a grifter - a kind of a con artist and that my mom wasn't able to see that.'

Kerber later insisted on moving to New York with Chester to become a follower of Lenz, selling most of her furniture and making arrangements for her son David to live with his father in Grants Pass and signed over custody to him.

Chester and Kerber left the Bay Area for New York around January 1989 and rented a room with an elderly woman named Mrs. S. Palazzetti in Mt. Kisco, New York, according to her parents.

Kerber only provided her parents with a post office box for an address and an answering service for a phone contact, and took out a $6,000 loan for a 'computer programming course.'

'I do know that the expectation of this group, which really was about making money for [Lenz] at the end of the day, was in doing computer programming,' Altenhofen said.

Altenhofen said her mom was older than many of the others involved and struggled 'keeping up with young people working in the tech industry.'

'She then wasn't able to provide this success and money for this person, Frederick Lenz, which is what they were requiring,' Altenhofen said.

She said people were required to pay 'tithes' to Lenz and money was a primary motivation for the alleged cult.

'I don't know if she was working more than one job or what to make those payments, but she was very distressed that she wasn't measuring up to the expectations of this group.'

She continued: 'As a cult, that is the nature of the focus - demoralizing people.'

Altenhofen said her mother was obsessed with 'pleasing' Lenz and 'felt very inadequate.'

In May 1989, Kerber's parents 'made a special stop to see her and had a very traumatic visit.'

Kerber's parents paid for Altenhofen to visit her mother in June -- just months before she disappeared.

'She had a very unsatisfactory time with her, but did not feel that she was in a cult at that time,' her parents wrote.

Altenhofen remembers the visit with her mom, during which Kerber told her daughter she would be 'joining her group more intensively and that we wouldn't be able to see her.'

'She compared it to being cloistered like a nun. She asked me if I would like to join her, at the time I was in college and into myself and I didn't think much of it other than that's not something I wanted to do,' Altenhofen said.

'So I told her I didn't want to be a part of that, and she let me know that she wouldn't be able to see me again for a long time.'

What was the Rama cult and who was Frederick Lenz? The Rama cult was a group of computer scientists who followed Frederick Lenz, who called himself Zen Master Rama, and his teachings of American Buddhism. The group was labelled as a cult in the Congressional Quarterly Researcher, an independent Washington-based publication. 'Some 900 members in several cities believe Lenz is the first earthly incarnation of the Hindu deity Vishnu,' the report reads. 'To attend seminars and meditation sessions sponsored by Lenz's Advanced Systems Inc., adherents in such high-paying fields as computer programming allegedly pay up to $70,000 a year.' Trina Walker, a former student, told The New York Times in a 1993 article that Lenz had more than a hundred students just in Westchester County. Mark Laxer, a former student of Lenz, accused him of forcing followers into a 13 day fast before telling them he had attained 'enlightenment.' 'He had us go on a 13-day fast, and I was pretty dizzy,' Laxer said. 'At that point he had about 100 disciples, and that's when he hit us with this news. It was like we were imprinted. After that, we were allowed to eat, but we had to stay up all night for a month.' Female members told numerous outlets that Lenz had sexually abused them. 'Over the years, several have claimed that Lenz encourages his followers to sever family ties, convinces them that he has godlike powers -- including the ability to protect them from cancer -- and then financially or sexually exploits them,' reads a Washington Post article from 1996. Three Los Angeles women went public with allegations of the guru's abuse, the outlet reported at the time. One former follower said Lenz emerged from the bathroom nude except for a towel, demanding sex and carrying a handgun. Sources: The New York Times, Washington Post, Journal News Advertisement

Altenhofen said that her mother's 'cryptic' comment to her caught her attention because it 'was distinctly stated.'

'She was definitely messaging me something and it was cryptic but it was very clear she wasn't going to be around much at all,' she said.

Kerber later moved to White Plains and rented a room from Gerald Desharnais, who reported her missing on October 10, 1989.

She was last seen by a former friend on September 28, 1989, according to The Journal News. The friend told White Plains police he also talked to her three or four days later.

In her apartment, cops found two diaries that detailed her obsession with Lenz and her personal identification papers inside a pocketbook. Cops noted that her station wagon was missing.

'Rama is my true love. He makes me feel like an a**,' Kerber wrote in the diary. 'This is the end of the fairy tale. Good night.'

Altenhofen told DailyMail.com that there has 'certainly been speculation' about possible romantic or sexual relationships between members of the cult.

'I don't have any firsthand knowledge of it and in all honesty I don't know that I'd want to at this point, being that she has passed,' she said.

Detectives Al Cuzzo and John Kelleher of the While Plains Police Department were initially assigned to the case and the family has praised them for their involvement.

Kerber remained missing until January 19 when her 1982 Ford Granada was found submerged in the Muscoot Reservoir during an environmental study of the bottom conducted by the New York City's Department of Environmental Protection.

The car was hauled out and White Plains police later said Kerber's remains were identified inside.

Kerber died by suicide, police said after 'a review of the evidence in the case and the recent findings from the vehicle,' and an examination by the medical examiner.

'The medical examiner has ruled cause of death as a suicide and I believe that the police detective are continuing to keep the case open for the reason that there is context to that cause of death,' Altenhofen said.

Her father, Jim Barratt, told The Washington Post before his death that he believed his daughter committed suicide, and blamed Lenz.

Zen Master Rama was the head of a group of computer programmers considered by some former members and experts to be a cult, according to The Journal News.

'He's a son of a b***h, any way you look at it,' Barratt told the outlet.

Altenhofen said her mother's disappearance troubled her grandfather 'until the end of his days' but she now finds knowing her body has been found to be a 'very positive' juncture.

'There is a lot of peace that does come with being able to have her remains and put her in a place that gives her some dignity,' she said.

'There is a lot of irony in what's going on with QAnon stuff right now, and I hope this maybe sheds some light for [other families].'

According to The Journal News, Lenz died in April 1998 at the age of 48 after taking barbiturates and either fell or jumped off the dock of his home.
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Armenia acting PM: We're not going to escalate situation for 30% of Sev Lake

Armenia 3rd President visits Vanadzor, pays tribute to heroes of Battle of Gharakilisa (PHOTOS)

Armenia ex-President Kocharyan lays flowers at Battle of Karakilisa memorial (PHOTOS)

Armenia acting PM: Solution to captives issue is matter of time

Shoygu to Harutyunyan: Russia, Armenia strengthen military cooperation

Armenia acting premier: We are 100% honest toward our country

Artsakh President pays tribute at Stepanakert memorial, Shushi Tank-Monument

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan on Meghri corridor plan: Not beneficial to us now to discuss it as "corridor"

Acting PM: "Cement," "fittings" were stolen while constructing Armenia state "building"

Two new cases of coronavirus reported in Artsakh

Catholicos of All Armenians visits Sardarapat Memorial, again separate from state officials

MOD dismisses Azerbaijan statement on Armenia army firing toward Nakhchivan

Jerusalem Post: Israel prepares for a new war with Hamas

France, UN World Food Programme partner to support displaced people in Armenia

Armenia ex-President Kocharyan: Today we are not full-fledged negotiating party

Norwegian prime minister opposes series of NATO reforms

Armenia deputy FM briefs UN, Red Cross leaders on consequences of Azerbaijan aggression against Artsakh

NATO Secretary-General: Afghans must take full responsibility for peace and stability in their country

104 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia

Armenia acting premier: Our sovereignty, independence cannot be subject of discussion

Karabakh state-finance minister announces resignation

Artsakh MFA: Sardarapat victory has inspired all Armenians for over a century

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan: In contrast to kneeling, disgraceful authorities of the day, we have determination

Armenia President: Today we stand on threshold of Sardarapat of morality, dignity

Catholicos of All Armenians: Our people shall find strength to overcome this ordeal as well

Armenia First Republic Day event is held under very modest conditions

Newspaper: Armenia authorities claiming to be popular close off First Republic Day event to public

Armenia ex-President Sargsyan: Now or never!

Armenia President, then acting premier arrive at Sardarapat Memorial

Newspaper: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan's new "cleverness?"

France ambassador: I wish Armenia to be able to live its independence in peace, prosperity

Bashar al-Assad wins Syria presidential election

Reporters not allowed entering Sardarapat Memorial of Armenia
The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
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Kabul, Feb 10 : Over the past five days, Afghan security forces have enhanced a crackdown on terrorists in Nangarhar province, an active militant stronghold, killing several of them, an army commander has revealed.

The provincial commander, General Karim Niazi said on Tuesday that 22 militants were killed and 11 others injured in Hisarak and Shirzad districts over the past 24 hours, reports Xinhua news agency.

Overall there were more than 80 dead militants as a result of the operations, he said.

Without providing details on the identity of the militants, the official added that the security operations would last until the insurgents were completely wiped out of the province.

Both the Taliban and the Islamic State (IS) terror group are active in parts of Nangarhar.

A number of Taliban and IS members were arrested over the past weeks in the province.

Nangarhar and the neighbouring Kunar, Laghman and Nuristan provinces have been the scene of increasing insurgency over the past few years.

Security forces have also discovered and defused 80 IEDs.

"Securing the strategically important Nangarhar would ultimately shrink the activities of militants in neighboring Kunar, Nuristan and Laghman provinces," a local observer said.
(NEW YORK) -- Here are today's In Crisis headlines:



Senate votes Trump impeachment trial is constitutional, can proceed

The historic second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump began Tuesday morning with presentations by House impeachment managers and Trumps legal defense team, and ended with a 56-44 vote affirming that the trial was constitutional, clearing the way for it to proceed. Only six Republicans joined with all 50 Senate Democrats in that vote, again signaling that its unlikely that Trump will be convicted, since that will require 17 Republican senators to join the Democratic majority.



Democratic House impeachment managers began Tuesdays hearing by playing a 13-minute video that shows Mr. Trump telling supporters prior to the January 6 Capitol attack, "We're going to walk down to the Capitol." People in the crowd then shout, "Let's take the Capitol." Afterward, Democratic congressman and impeachment manager Jamie Raskin declared, "That's a high crime and misdemeanor. If that's not an impeachable offense, then there is no such thing."

The former president's attorney, Bruce Castor, sidestepped the Capitol mob violence and instead argued that the impeachment is a Democratic political vendetta. "We are really here because the majority in the House of Representatives does not want to face Donald Trump as a political rival in the future," he said. Co-defense attorney David I. Schoen argued that prosecuting the former president would damage the country. Both attorneys insisted the trial itself was unconstitutional.



House impeachment managers today were required to file all motions, except those related to witnesses, by 9:00 a.m. ET, and the Trump legal team must respond to the House managers motions by 11:00 a.m. The trial will resume at noon on Wednesday with arguments and a vote for any motions made by either side. After that, opening arguments begin. The House impeachment managers have up to 16 hours over two days to present their case, though both sides are limited to eight hours of arguments each day.

The trial comes just shy of a month after the House impeached Trump for a second time, on January 13, on a single article of incitement of insurrection pertaining to the storming of the U.S. Capitol by his supporters on January 6, which resulted in the deaths of five people, including an officer of the Capitol Police. The attack occurred the same day Congress was formally certifying President Joe Bidens presidential election victory, an election that Trump, his supporters and many congressional Republicans continue to declare was fraudulent, despite a lack of evidence and over 60 failed court challenges.



COVID-19 numbers

Here's the latest data on COVID-19 coronavirus infections, deaths and vaccinations.



Latest reported COVID-19 numbers globally per Johns Hopkins University

Global diagnosed cases: 106,993,984

Global deaths: 2,343,277. The United States has the most deaths of any single country, with 468,217.

Number of countries/regions: at least 192

Total patients recovered globally: 59,843,328



Latest reported COVID-19 numbers in the United States per Johns Hopkins University

There are at least 27,193,850 reported cases in 50 states + the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and Guam. This is more than in any other country.

U.S. deaths: at least 468,217. New York State has the greatest number of reported deaths in the U.S., with 45,140.

U.S. total people tested: 323,442,507



The greatest number of reported COVID-19 cases in the U.S. is in California, with 3,442,672 confirmed cases out of a total state population of 39.51 million. This ranks second in the world after England, which has 3,480,147 cases. Texas is third, with 2,518,701 confirmed cases out of a total state population of 29 million.



Latest reported COVID-19 vaccination numbers in the United States

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports a total of 62,898,775 COVID-19 vaccine doses have been distributed in the U.S. Of those, 43,206,190 doses have been administered, with 32,867,213 people receiving one or more doses, and 9,840,429 people receiving two doses. The Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines, which are the two most prevalent in the U.S., each require two doses to be effective.



Biden administration to expand COVID-19 vaccine distribution to underserved communities next week

The Biden administration will send some COVID-19 vaccines directly to community health centers across the U.S. as early as next week. Equity is core to our strategy, President Bidens COVID coordinator Jeff Zients told reporters Tuesday, and equity means that were reaching everyone, particularly those in underserved and rural communities and those who have been hit hardest. White House COVID coordinator Jeff Zients said delivery of vaccines has increased to 11 million doses a week, what the Biden administration says is a 28% percent increase since the president took office.

Meanwhile, pharmacies have begun taking vaccine appointments under a new federal program. Walgreens began scheduling appointments Tuesday for shots as early as Friday in 15 states under a new federal program thats sending vaccines directly to 6,500 pharmacies that are part of 13 national chains. A Walgreens spokesperson tells ABC they believe their COVID-19 vaccine appointment scheduling website crashed Tuesday morning due to an influx of people trying to book an appointment, but that the issue was resolved within an hour. CVS will begin taking appointments Thursday in 11 states, also for vaccinations as early as Friday. Some pharmacies have already been vaccinating people with doses received from states.



COVID-19 didnt originate in a laboratory, WHO declares

The World Health Organization's investigation into COVID-19s origins has all but ruled out a controversial hypothesis that the disease was leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan, the central Chinese city where the outbreak was first reported in December 2019. WHO scientists said cases were detected earlier than at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, where the virus was first discovered, but theres no conclusive evidence of widespread transmission in China before December 2019. Its still unclear how the virus was introduced to the seafood market and how it spread among the vendors. The WHO team said it has so far failed to pinpoint an animal source.

Copyright  2021, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.
The U.S. Coast Guard rescued three people on Tuesday from an uninhabited island in the Bahamas where they had been stranded for 33 days, surviving on coconuts, conchs and rats, the authorities said.

The stranded people  two men and a woman identified as Cuban nationals  were spotted waving a makeshift flag during a routine surveillance patrol of the area on Monday, the Coast Guard said in a statement.

Lt. Riley Beecher, commander of the aircraft that first spotted the trio, said his plane was flying around 500 feet in the air when he spotted a flag.

Ive seen this island many times, but it kind of stood out, he said on Wednesday. As we got closer, right on top of the flag, two individuals came out frantically waving their hands, trying to signal us down that they were really in distress.
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To help understand where our digital lives are going next, Ill steal a line from All the Presidents Men: Follow the money.

Why is Spotify going big into podcasts? Because music streaming is a financial death trap and Spotify has to find something that isnt. Ubers push into delivering everything is a classic tactic: If one business isnt profitable, use it as a foundation to sell something else that is. Apple is branching into fitness class subscriptions and (maybe eventually) cars because its trying to find a second act after the iPhone.

The companies that shape how we spend our time and money and remodel industries make choices based not only on whats compelling to us but also on whats helpful to their bottom lines.

This is not bad! Money is handy! And Im oversimplifying companies complex strategies. While profit motives dont explain everything, they are a useful lens to see where technology is headed and why.
We're trying something new here on Gamasutra! We're piloting a new Gamasutra Webcasts series, featuring great speakers who will share insight into the art and business of making games.

The very first presentation in this new series, featuring indie marketing superstar Victoria Tran is now available for free on-demand.

Now working as community director at Among Us developer Innersloth, Victoria was previously communications director at Kitfox Games, working on titles including Boyfriend Dungeon, Dwarf Fortress, Pupperazzi, and more.

She has a serious knack for building communities and knows how to get people interested in her projects--and she's going to share a little bit of how she does that!

What to expect:

A 30-minute presentation by Victoria Tran on how to convey your game's value through marketing

A 15-minute presentation on game publishing and distribution from our sponsor Xsolla

A 15-minute moderated live Q&A

Here's what you'll learn:

How the value of a game is calculated in a potential player's mind

How to create a customer value proposition

How to use this information in your messaging

Writing tips to help your messaging shine

And stick around for an audience Q&A!

Featured Presentation: Conveying Your Game's Value

So you have a game and you've decided to self-publish, but now the marketing is all up to you. Most importantly, one of the biggest responsibilities is up to you: how do you craft a message that makes people understand and care about your game? It isn't just as easy as saying "add value."



What is valuable? How do you find your game's value? And what are the ways you can actually create that message? What writing tips should you keep in mind? No one will be interested in your game if you cannot tell them why it is interesting in a way that they actually care about. Let's learn how to stand out in a noisy market!

Sponsor Presentation: Navigating the Future of Game Publishing and Distribution

With players spread across multiple game platforms and services, many challenges have emerged for developers. At Xsolla, we believe the platform of the future is an independent, decentralized system that utilizes common, unified basic principles and standards. This system spreads to all current platforms and uses them as sources for gaining new users, building a community, and acting as sales channels.

Key takeaways: Learn how to navigate the future of game publishing and distribution with solutions that easily integrate with your existing business and allow you to grow across all platforms.

Speakers

Featured Speaker: Victoria Tran

Community Director

Innersloth

Victoria Tran is the Community Director at Among Us developer Innersloth. Previously, she worked at Kitfox Games, working on projects like Boyfriend Dungeon, Dwarf Fortress, Pupperazzi, and more. When she is not exploring ways to create kinder game community spaces and how tech and compassion interact, she co-organizes Game & Colour MTL, a group that supports and amplifies game developers of colour in Canada.

Sponsor Guest Presenter: Chris Hewish

President

Xsolla

Chris Hewish is the President of Xsolla and is an award-winning interactive executive and studio head, with experience driving operations and go-to-market strategies across all video game industry segments. He has used his skills to lead multi-team video game studios and global interactive business units with hundreds of employees at companies like Activision, DreamWorks Animation, Survios, Skydance, and Xsolla.

Moderator: Kris Graft

Editor-in-Chief and Publisher

Gamasutra

Kris Graft is editor-in-chief and publisher of Gamasutra, the leading site dedicated to the art and business of making games.
In this webinar, we will be discussing initiatives implemented in adapting to the new norm, as well as the outlook in Australia for healthy volunteer recruitment in a restricted market.

A successful clinical trial requires many things, but perhaps the most resource-intensive element is the timely recruiting of an adequate number of suitable, reliable participants that meet the protocol guidelines. This is even more important when the trial needs to target patients with conditions or specific genetic backgrounds.

With the pandemic reducing the volume of international travelers that had previously formed a large portion of the participant pool, Nucleus Network pivoted to target other demographics to fill the participant cohorts for their clinical trials. Whilst not without its challenges in an unpredictable and unchartered market, Nucleus has proceeded with delivering recruitment volumes at a rate equal to or exceeding the pre-COVID level.

In this webinar, we will be discussing initiatives implemented in adapting to the new norm, as well as the outlook in Australia for healthy volunteer recruitment in a restricted market. Register for this webinar to hear about how:



Australia is open for business for Phase 1 and scaling up medical research capacity

With facilities in the USA and Australia, Nucleus Network can offer integrated, multi-site trial capability

Interest in medical research is higher than ever in the general public and harnessing this for clinical trials requires a new approach

Join expert speakers from Nucleus Network, Cameron Johnson, CEO; Jeffrey Wong, Director of Business Development; and Mari Ericksen, Director of Marketing and Communications in a live webinar on Tuesday, February 23, 2021 at 4pm EST.

For more information, or to register for this event, visit Recruiting for Phase 1 Clinical Trials During a Full Lockdown.

ABOUT XTALKS

Xtalks, powered by Honeycomb Worldwide Inc., is a leading provider of educational webinars to the global life science, food and medical device community. Every year, thousands of industry practitioners (from life science, food and medical device companies, private & academic research institutions, healthcare centers, etc.) turn to Xtalks for access to quality content. Xtalks helps Life Science professionals stay current with industry developments, trends and regulations. Xtalks webinars also provide perspectives on key issues from top industry thought leaders and service providers.

To learn more about Xtalks visit http://xtalks.com

For information about hosting a webinar visit http://xtalks.com/why-host-a-webinar/


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Authorities have charged two men with robbing three banks and attempting to burglarize two others in Cape May County starting late last month.

One, Edward Hulme, is accused of going into the banks, while his alleged partner, Damian Leblanc, was the getaway driver, the New Jersey State Police allege. Each is charged with crimes, including robbery, conspiracy and drug possession charges for narcotics found during their arrests.

The first heist occurred on Dec. 30, 2020, at the Sturdy Savings Bank on Route 47 in Dennisville. A man robbed the branch with a note and got into a Honda CRV, police said.

While State Police detectives investigated that robbery, two more occurred at TD Bank branches - Jan. 7 in Marmora and Jan. 11 in Cape May Court House - in which a similarly-described man robbed the branches and left in a Honda CRV, police said.

Detectives later identified Hulme, 43, as the alleged robber and tied Leblanc, 39, to the Honda, which investigators located at a residence on Academy Road in Lower Township, where they both lived, authorities said.

The State Police believe the duo also also attempted to commit burglaries at a First Bank of Sea Isle branch and the Franklin Savings Bank in Ocean View, in Dennis Township, they said.

Last week, on Feb. 3, Middle Township police officers arrested Leblanc driving in their town, while teams of police from several agencies, including the FBI, executed a search warrant at their home and arrested Hulme.

Investigators found the clothing Hulme allegedly wore in the robberies, as well as heroin and Xanax pills in bar form, police said.

Both suspects remained jailed Tuesday in Cape May County pending court appearances. The Cape May County Prosecutors Office is handling the case.

Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to NJ.com.

Kevin Shea may be reached at kshea@njadvancemedia.com

New York, Feb 10 : Former US President Donald Trump is said to be "yelling" at the TV and fuming at the rambling presentation of lawyers representing him at his second impeachment trial, which enters Day Two on Wednesday.

"President Trump was not happy with the performance of his legal team in action," reports Politico, quoting people "familiar" with Trump's thinking. On a scale of one to 10 on an anger scale, Trump is at an 8, according to insiders in the Trump orbit.

Trump's lawyers are getting ripped across the board. "I have no idea what he's doing. I just don't understand it," Alan Dershowitz, a Trump lawyer from his first impeachment trial, told a television network.

Opening arguments begin Wednesday after an emotional first day took Senators and the audience back to the deadly January 6 attack on the US Capitol. The Senate voted 56-44 on the question of the trial's constitutionality. The 56 who voted for the trial to proceed includes 6 Republicans. When the trial finally ends, a total of 67 senators are needed to vote to convict.

More grisly video is expected to surface via the House Democratic prosecutors on Wednesday, seeking to link Trump directly to the riot that killed five people and injured several others seriously.

Trump is the first US President to be impeached twice and also the first to face trial after leaving office. He is charged with "incitement of insurrection" for all the ways in which his rhetoric inflamed a pro-Trump mob to storm the US Capitol.
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.
President Donald Trump addresses a campaign rally on the eve of the run-off election to decide both of Georgia's Senate seats in Dalton, Ga., on Jan. 4, 2021. (Leah Millis/Reuters)

Trial Authorization Vote Signals That Senate Will Acquit Trump

Forty-four Republicans voted against proceeding with the trial against former President Donald Trump, the clearest signal yet that the Senate will ultimately acquit the president of the impeachment charge against him for a second time.

Three Republican senators signaled on Tuesday that the vote is a barometer for how many senators will vote to acquit the president when the trial is over.

Ive got to believe that its going to be highly unlikely that therell be anywhere near enough for conviction, Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) said, according to The Hill. It takes some mental gymnastics to on the one hand consider this to be an unconstitutional action, on the other hand, to consider conviction is part of it.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said he would be very surprised if any Republicans changed their minds during the trial.

If you feel that you have no authority, then you cant go on and say well we have no authority but I guess Ill go ahead and convict anyway, Hawley said, according to The Hill. Id be surprised if many or any of those people change their minds on the underlying question of whether or not to oppose a penalty or not.

Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) said the Tuesday vote was a predictor for the ultimate outcome.

I think just like the one a couple of weeks ago was, Braun said, according to The Hill.

Tuesdays vote mirrors one cast last month when 45 Republicans voted to declare the trial unconstitutional.

House Democrats, joined by 10 Republicans, voted on Jan. 13 to impeach Trump on a single charge of inciting an insurrection, alleging that the president directed the mob which breached the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Trump denies the charges. In a speech given on the day of the Capitol breach, the president told supporters to peacefully and patriotically make their voices heard.

Im gonna vote like I voted the other day through the trial. I dont think its constitutional, I dont think we should be doing it, Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) said, according to The Hill.

The impeachment managers and Trumps attorneys spent roughly four hours on Tuesday persuading the senators on whether the trial is constitutional. The central argument by the impeachment managers posited that if the Senate was unable to try a former president, then presidents would have a so-called January exception to commit impeachable offenses during their last days in office knowing they could not be tried. The defense attorneys called that idea nonsense.

If my colleagues on this side of the chamber actually think that President Trump committed a criminal offense  after hes out of office, you go and arrest him. So there is no opportunity where the president of the United States can run rampant in January at the end of his term and just go away scot-free. The Department of Justice does know what to do with such people, Trump attorney Bruce Castor said.
New Delhi, Feb 10 : As rescue operations are underway in the aftermath of the flash floods at Raini village in Tapovan area of Chamoli district in Uttarakhand, the state government on Wednesday said that at least 34 bodies have been recovered, while 206 people are still feared missing.

However, two employees of Rishi Ganga Power Corporation Ltd, were later located near their residence after they had gone missing following the environmental catastrophe.

According to the government officials, rescue operation is on to evacuate about 25 to 35 people, who are currently trapped inside a tunnel in the Tapovan region.

The officials added that 100 State Disaster Response Force (SDRF), 176 National Disaster Response Force (NDRF), 425 Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) personnel, 124 Army personnel, four healthcare teams of Uttarakhand and 16 fire officials have been deployed in the flood-affected areas.

Chief Minister Trivendra Singh Rawat has been constantly monitoring the relief and rescue operations.

He said, "There is no shortage of daily essential commodities in the flood-hit areas, even as relief assistance is being provided to the kin of the deceased. Efforts are on to establish the identity of the bodies through collected DNA samples." At least 360 families from 13 villages in the border area were affected following the disruption in road links due to the catastrophe.

Except for Pang and Murada, which remained as the the worst affected villages in Uttarakhand, power has been restored in all the remaining 11 villages. Drinking water lines have been repaired in 10 villages and work is underway in the remaining others.
South Africa: Public Works cleared of wrong doing

The Department of Public Works and Infrastructure has noted the release of the report by the Public Protector into the departments award of a lease contract to media company, Tiso Blackstar Group.

The lease was for the premises located at Hillside House, 17 Empire road, Parktown, in Johannesburg, which housed the Judicial Commission of Inquiry into State Capture.

On 12 November 2018, the Public Protector received a complaint regarding a procurement transaction by the department.

At that time, it was alleged that the department awarded a lease agreement to Tiso Blackstar, a privately owned company from England without following due processes and contrary to supply chain management processes as stipulated in terms of the Public Finance Management Act, 1 of 1999 (the PFMA).

It was also alleged that Tiso Blackstar is not a historically disadvantaged enterprise nor owned by historically disadvantaged individuals, thus not complying with the prescribed prescripts.

The Department is pleased to note that the Public Protector found that the Department did not break any prescript or law in terms of the award to Tiso Blackstar.

It has been cleared of any wrongdoing and non-compliance as the award was made in strict compliance with the regulations. National Treasury also sanctioned it, the Department of Public and Infrastructure said in a statement.

The department made requests to National Treasury dated 08 March 2018 and 13 March 2018 for approval in order to deviate from the competitive bidding process to negotiated procedure in line with clause 8 of the National Treasury Regulation Instruction Note 3 of 2016/2017.

On 23 March 2018, the National Treasury issued the department with the Approval. The allegations that were made, are therefore factually incorrect.

The Department of Public Works and Infrastructure is committed to ensuring compliance with the regulatory and constitutional framework governing procurement, the department said.  SAnews.gov.za

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Right to Work Group Demands Documents on Firing of Labor Panels Top Lawyers

National Right to Work Foundation (NRTWF) officials are demanding copies of all documents related to President Joe Bidens unprecedented firing of the National Labor Relations Boards (NLRB) two top lawyers.

The lawyers were NLRB General Counsel Peter Robb and his deputy, Alice Stock, who briefly replaced her former boss; they were both subsequently replaced on an acting basis by Bidens selection of Peter Ohr.

On January 20 at 12:23 PM, a mere 23 minutes after the President formally took office, President Bidens Office of Presidential Personnel demanded that Robb resign or be fired, the NRTWF said in a statement on Feb. 10.

After Robb refused to resign, citing the unprecedented nature of the demand and his Senate confirmation to a four-year term, he was fired that same day. Robbs deputy, Alice Stock, received a similar threat the next day only to be fired as well when she refused to resign.

No NLRB general counsel has previously been fired from the position, which comes with a four-year term and requires Senate confirmation. The NRTWFs demand for documents is contained in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the NLRB. The board has 10 days in which to at least acknowledge receipt of the request.

The FOIA also demands documents concerning actions that Ohr took shortly after moving into the general counsel position, in ordering regional NLRB offices to reverse the neutrality agreement position previously adopted by Robb in cases involving employees of hotels in Seattle and Boston.

Robb had sustained employee appeals in both cases and ordered NLRB regional officials to issue complaints against UNITE HERE union officials and hotel management. Both cases were just a few weeks away from scheduled trials before NLRB Administrative Law Judges, the NRTWF statement reads.

However, about a week after Robbs unprecedented firing, Ohr directly ordered Seattle NLRB officials to withdraw the complaint and dismiss one of the cases, which had been filed by [NRTWF] staff attorneys for Embassy Suites housekeeper Gladys Bryant.

The Seattle Region did so on January 29. The next business day, Boston NLRB officials dropped the other case, which Foundation staff attorneys were litigating for four Boston Hotel housekeepers who had had UNITE HERE thrust upon them.

The NRTWF argued in the two cases that, since NLRB case law forbids employers from providing more than ministerial aid to employees who attempt to vote out, or decertify, an unwanted union, the government should apply the same standard when a case involves management officials assisting union efforts to become the sole bargaining agent on behalf of a firms employees. A policy memo issued by Robb had endorsed such a neutral application of the law.

The NRTW FOIA also seeks all documents and communications concerning these issues between Ohr and any Member of the U.S. House of Representatives or any U.S. Senator, any officer, employee or representative of a labor organization, any representative of  the Biden-Harris transition organization, or any official or employee of the U.S. Government, including officials and employees of the National Labor Relations Board, among other parties.

The Biden Administrations radical, unprecedented firing of NLRB General Counsel Peter Robb immediately resulted in so-called Acting General Counsel Peter Ohr quashing two Foundation-backed cases, which threatened a key privilege union bosses use to seize power over workers across the country, NRTWF President Mark Mix said in the statement.

This FOIA request seeks documents related to this scandalous power grab, which is clearly designed to shut down multiple NLRB prosecutions of Bidens union boss political allies for their violation of workers legal rights.

The NRTWFs FOIA follows a similar document request from four leading House Republicans to the Biden White House.

Biden is heavily indebted to labor unions, having received more than $29 million in contributions to his 2020 presidential campaign, according to opensecrets.org.
In the early 20th century, Nobel laureates were most likely to have German or French academic history. Today, the US dominates the CVs of scholars who win the coveted prize. What has changed in a hundred years?

A study by W. Bentley MacLeod and Miguel Urquiola of Columbia University describes how several higher education reforms in the US led to increased competition and revolutionized the quality of research.

The National Bureau of Economic Research working paper says that in the 1800s, a majority of the American universities had religious trustees who would often discard academic merit over religious affiliations. Early colleges did not prioritize trained or specialized personnel. Practical courses such as business and engineering were not taught.

The system forced rote learning, which was not the case in Europe, where the post-Protestant Reformation states generously funded their universities and invested in faculty.

Early US universities failed to cater to the rising demand of business, law, sciences, and engineering. As industrialization made these subjects relevant, the gaps between the demand and supply of the courses began widening.

But in the 1870s, Cornell and Johns Hopkins Universities showed they could attract students by offering specialized courses in a wide range of areas, the authors find. Harvard and Columbia followed suit by setting up specialized departments for arts and science, and created professional schools.

This transition was helped by private donations and public funding. Academic journals were created to record research output, while higher pay, better labs, and reduced teaching load helped professors focus more on quality research.

The number of colleges in the US swelled thereafter, unlike Europe. However, the authors also note that quality education in the US came along with growing inequality, as only a handful of universities received a disproportionate share of the federal funds.

Also read: Why Does the U.S. Have the Best Research Universities?





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A hacker broke into a Florida towns water supply last week and tried to poison it with lye. The incident was reported on Friday when a plant operator at a water treatment facility in Oldsmar, Florida , noticed his mouse dash around his screen. For three to five minutes, police said, he tracked the arrow as it clicked open one software function after another until it finally landed on the controls to the waters levels of sodium hydroxide, also known as lye.

Then, he watched the hacker whod taken control of the system raise the levels of sodium hydroxide more than 100-fold, according to police  a hazardous level that could sicken residents and corrode pipes.

The operator was able to quickly fix the levels moments after the hack, police said.

At no time was there a significant adverse effect on the water being treated, Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said at a news conference on Monday. Importantly, the public was never in danger.

But the near-miss incident was the latest alarming sign that critical infrastructure in America is vulnerable to cyberattacks. In July last year, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency warned that infrastructure like water and power plants, emergency services and transportation systems make attractive targets for foreign powers attempting to do harm to US interests or retaliate for perceived US aggression.

Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, hospitals nationwide have seen a surge in cyberattacks. In December, it was revealed that Russian hacking groups were behind massive breaches at the US Treasury and Commerce departments.

In a tweet on Monday, Senator Marco Rubio said he was asking the FBI to provide all assistance necessary in the investigation into the Oldsmar attack.

This should be treated as a matter of national security, he wrote.

In Oldsmar, a city northwest of Tampa with about 15,000 residents, a plant operator first noticed someone remotely accessing the computer system at around 8am on Friday. The employee didnt think much of it, Mr Gualtieri said, because supervisors commonly used TeamViewer software to monitor the system.

TeamViewer spokesman Patrick Pickhan said the company was aware of reports of the hack and was monitoring the situation; he condemned any malicious behaviour on its software.

Read More

 Washington Post
Panaji, Feb 10 : An Indian Navy commando rescued a woman from drowning in the Mandovi river off Panaji, an official statement said on Wednesday.

The woman had jumped off the Mandovi bridge, which links the state capital to Bardez sub district, when marine commandos on a routine sortie rushed to her rescue.

"On a routine sortie of marine commandos in the Mandovi river at Goa, the crew noticed a woman falling off the Panjim bridge. The boat was immediately diverted to the scene and a commando dived into the river to rescue the lady," a statement issued by the Indian Navy said.

After her rescue, the woman was provided first aid at a nearby local naval jetty.

"The lady was found to be in good health after medical examination by the resident naval doctor, and thereafter was handed over to the local authorities," the statement also said.
The Biden administration will continue to pursue the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from the UK to face charges in the US, according to a statement released by the Department of Justice (DoJ) on Tuesday.

The Biden governments statement was in part a response to the January 4 decision of District Judge Vanessa Baraitser blocking the extradition of Assange on mental health grounds onlyshe completely endorsed the US prosecutions denial of the free speech and freedom of the press rights of the WikiLeaks publisherand to set the record straight in advance of the Friday deadline for the administration to appeal the ruling.

Joseph Biden (left) (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez) and Julian Assange (AP Photo/Matt Dunham)

A statement from DoJ Acting Deputy Director and Senior Communications Advisor Marc Raimondi said, While we are extremely disappointed in the courts ultimate decision, we are gratified that the United States prevailed on every point of law raised. In particular, the court rejected all of Mr. Assanges arguments regarding political motivation, political offense, fair trial, and freedom of speech. We will continue to seek Mr. Assanges extradition to the United States.

The statement was also a direct rebuke to a coalition of civil liberties and human rights groups that mounted a campaign for the Biden administration to drop the effort to extradite Assange that was initiated by the Trump White House.

In a letter dated February 8 addressed to Bidens Attorney General Monty Wilkinson, the coalition of twenty-four organizationsincluding the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Freedom of the Press Foundation and Human Rights Watchwrote, We urge you to drop the appeal of the decision by Judge Vanessa Baraitser of the Westminster Magistrates Court to reject the Trump administrations extradition request. We also urge you to dismiss the underlying indictment.

The joint letter also explained, The indictment of Mr. Assange threatens press freedom because much of the conduct described in the indictment is conduct that journalists engage in routinelyand that they must engage in in order to do the work the public needs them to do.  In our view, such a precedent in this case could effectively criminalize these common journalistic practices.

The organizations also drew a connection between to the prosecution of Assange and the historical development of undemocratic measures in the US and internationally, It is unfortunately the case that press freedom is under threat globally. Now more than ever, it is crucial that we protect a robust and adversarial presswhat Judge Murray Gurfein in the Pentagon Papers case memorably called a cantankerous press, an obstinate press, a ubiquitous pressin the United States and abroad.

In a separate statement the Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, said, Most of the charges against Assange concern activities that are no different from those used by investigative journalists around the world every day. President Biden should avoid setting a terrible precedent by criminalizing key tools of independent journalism that are essential for a healthy democracy.

The official announcement from the DoJ on Tuesday laid to rest any illusions that the Biden administration would take a position on First Amendment rights any different than that of Donald Trump. Biden intends to pursue the prosecution of Assange on 17 charges under the Espionage Act of 1917 that carry a maximum prison sentence of up to 170 years.

Although a US grand jury had issued a sealed indictment of Assange in March 2018, the charges against him were only made public more than a year later in April 2019 after the WikiLeaks journalist was evicted from the Ecuadorean Embassy and arrested in London. Julian Assangeinitially detained on a bogus charge of bail jumpingwas remanded to Londons notorious HM Prison Belmarsh where he has been held without bail pending a final decision on his extradition to the US.

As the World Socialist Web Site and other defenders of the rights of journalists to tell the truth to the public about government policy have consistently maintained, Assange has committed no crimes. He has been targeted by the governments of the US and UK because WikiLeaks published details about the criminal actions of imperialism during the illegal wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that began in 2001 and 2003, respectively. WikiLeaks also exposed the role of major corporations in imperialist crimes as well as the conspiracy of the Democratic Party leadership during the nomination process for the 2016 presidential elections.

The decision by the Biden administration to push on with the persecution of Assange comes as absolutely no surprise to those who base themselves on a class analysis and understanding of the logic of political developments.

It is significant that the Trumps top national security official in the DoJ, John C. Demers, is still in place at the National Security Division. Demers was asked by the Biden transition team to stay on for continuity purposes while many other Trump political appointees resigned.

Meanwhile, Mr. Demerss predecessor from 2013 to 2016, John Carlin, has returned to the DoJ and is currently serving as the acting deputy attorney general. That there really are no fundamental differences between the Trump and Biden administrations on key national security topics is demonstrated by the fact that Carlins predecessor, Lisa O. Monaco, in charge of the National Security Division from 2011 to 2013, is Bidens nominee to be deputy attorney general but has not yet been confirmed.

Additionally, The New York Times was cynically promoting illusions that the Democrat Biden might stop the Assange extradition policy while it was fully aware that no such change was in the offing. Speaking out of both sides of its mouth, The Times said on Monday, A Friday deadline in the London extradition case may force the Biden administration to decide whether to keep pursuing a Trump-era policy, while at the same time, For now, the Justice Department remains committed to appealing the denial of its request to extradite Mr. Assange, said Marc Raimondi, a spokesman for its National Security Division.

It is also possible to go back further and review what Biden said about Assange more than ten years ago after WikiLeaks had published the diplomatic cables and when he was Vice President during the Obama administration. When asked about the WikiLeaks exposures on NBCs Meet the Press on December 19, 2010, Biden called Assange a high-tech terrorist and furthered the unproven claim that this guy has done things that have damaged and put in jeopardy the lives and occupations of people in other parts of the world.
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The GCC construction market witnessed steady project completions in 2020 despite the drop in announcements and contract awards, with the second half delivering 68 per cent of the projects worth nearly $196.4 billion, almost the same as in 2019, said a report.

The UAE led the urban project completions with a 50% share, while Saudi Arabia drove the energy project completions with 33% contribution, as per the 26th edition of the BNC Projects Journal.

Qatar emerged the top contributor in the transport sector with 39% share, followed by the UAE with 23% share.

The GCC construction market is estimated at $2.4 trillion, with around 21,000 active

projects as of December 2020, stated the Journal titled 21 Reasons Why Construction Will Rebound in the Middle East.

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic impact, new scheme announcements and project awards during 2020 saw a disproportionate drop.

In 2019, GCC registered a 4% YoY growth in project announcements, however, the construction market witnessed a trend reversal with the figures dropping as much as 67% YoY in 2020. GCC project awards also declined, falling by as much as 35% in 2020.

December surfaced as top performer in 2020 in terms of project completions in the GCC as it posted $33.8 billion figure, said the report.

The project announcements, project awards and project completions for that month were driven by Saudi Arabia. A similar trend was noticed in the last quarter of 2020 as the kingdom contributed 45%, 40% and 38% towards announcements, awards and completions respectively for Q4, it added.

"Identifying 21 reasons to be optimistic about 2021 was a challenge we set out for ourselves

and as we worked on the list we realized that there are many powerful positives that businesses should consider in their mid to long term plans for construction in the Middle East," remarked Avin Gidwani, CEO, Industry Networks.

"We are cautiously optimistic about construction in 2021 as the pandemic continues to cause

economic upheaval even as vaccines and treatments are rolled out to return the region and the world to normalcy," he added.-TradeArabia News Service
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ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.  Authorities are looking for two children reportedly taken by their mother  from the custody of the state Children, Youth and Families Department  during a dental appointment on Tuesday in Northeast Albuquerque.

Albuquerque police say Javon Rosales, 6, and Elijah Covington, 3, were last seen Tuesday at 11:20 a.m. at a dentist office at 5000 Menaul NE, near San Mateo. Police say the boys mother, Clorisa Covington, took them without permission or authority to do so.

She was last seen driving a small gray SUV with a temporary tag but that vehicle has since been found abandoned.

There are concerns for Javon and Elijahs safety due to them being removed from the mothers custody by CYFD, Albuquerque police spokeswoman Rebecca Atkins said.

Authorities say Clorisa Covington is known to associate with her boyfriend, Fabian Gonzales, who is awaiting trial in connection with the high-profile August 2016 death of 10-year-old Victoria Martens.

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Rosales is described as 4 feet tall, 50 pounds, with brown hair and brown eyes. He was last seen wearing a black jacket, black pants and shoes that were red, black and gray.

Elijah Covington is described as 3 feet tall, 35 pounds, with brown hair and brown eyes. He was last seen wearing a black hoodie, black pants with a red Adidas stripe and Nike shoes that were red, black and gray.

Clorisa Covington was last seen wearing a dark blue windbreaker, black pants, red and black Jordan shoes and is reportedly five months pregnant.

Maurice Moya, an investigator with Fabian Gonzales defense team, said there is no current association between the two.

Hes not with her now, he hasnt been with her for months, he said, adding that Gonzales has had enough bad publicity that has cost him multiple jobs, including one at Walmart, and gotten him kicked out of four apartment complexes in the past year.

Tips: If anyone has seen or has any information on the whereabouts of Javon, Elijah or Clorisa please notify the Albuquerque Police Department.
Posted Wednesday, February 10, 2021 4:56 am

State Rep. Vicki Kraft, R-Vancouver, recently expressed disappointment that a school choice bill she authored may not receive a public hearing, possibly killing the bill for the session.

According to a news release, House Bill 1215 would establish the K-12 Education Scholarship Program in Washington state. The program would award up to $7,000 per student each school year to be used for costs related to private school or homeschool instruction. The measure was referred to the House Education Committee, however Kraft said the committee chair recently told her no public hearing would be scheduled.

"I do think at the very least, the public should be able to discuss the merits of this bill in an open setting with the Education Committee members during this legislative session. This bill is about giving parents, not government, the choice of what type of education their children should be able to receive. At a time like this during the COVID-19 shutdown, when even the state's top school officials are saying the education system is not working for kids, now is the time to have that discussion," Kraft said in the release.

Without a public hearing, Kraft's bill is likely dead for the session.

"I'm not letting this bill slip away quietly to its death. It is too important for the parents and children of our state. It challenges the status quo and gives parents options, including the ability to homeschool, provide private education, or choose the public-school option that is best for their child," she said. "At the very least, parents should be heard! It's time we discuss best practices and school choice options. I hope the Education Committee chair will reconsider and immediately schedule House Bill 1215 for a public hearing."

The release directed parents and citizens who would like a public hearing scheduled for House Bill 1215 to call the toll-free Legislative Hotline, (800) 562-6000, and ask to leave a message for their lawmakers, or contact members on the House Education Committee at leg.wa.gov/House/Committees/ED/Pages/MembersStaff.aspx.
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

Economists have been using game theory to study decision-making since the 1950s. More recently, the interdisciplinary field of neuroeconomics has gained popularity as scientists try to understand how economic decisions are made in the brain. Researchers led by Professor Masayuki Matsumoto and Assistant Professor Hiroshi Yamada at the University of Tsukuba in Japan studied populations of neurons across the monkey brain reward network to find out where and when expected value is calculated.

The team trained monkeys to perform a lottery task for a reward. The monkeys saw two pie charts on a computer screen. The colors in the charts told the monkeys the size of the reward and the probability of getting it. Mathematically, the expected value is the size of the reward multiplied by the chance of getting it. Thus, a highly probable large reward would create a high expected value and a small reward with a low probability would create a low expected value. The monkeys consistently chose the pie chart that depicted the higher expected value, and behavioral models showed that their decisions were indeed based on this integrated value, not simply the probability or the size of the reward.

The brain has a network of connected regions that all have functions related to processing rewards. The researchers recorded brain activity from four regions that have been implicated in decision-making: the cOFC, mOFC, VS, and DS. They analyzed brain activity when monkeys simply saw one pie chart, but did not have to make any choice. This allowed the researchers to identify brain regions involved in calculating the expected value, not those involved in making choices. They found that all four regions contained neurons that responded to parts of the calculation. Nevertheless, state-space analysis showed that as a population, only the cOFC and VS stably represented the calculated expected value. Additionally, these two regions also stably represented risk-return.

Although both the cOFC and VS integrated reward size and probability, the team noticed that brain cells in these regions did not behave the same way over time. Analysis showed that the expected value signals in the cOFC developed quickly, while those in the VS developed gradually each time the monkey saw one of the pie charts.

Finding that only the cOFC and VS signal expected value differed from previous studies. "Our use of state-space analysis as a means to characterize the dynamics of neuronal populations was the key," explains Matsumoto. "Using this method, we were able to see differences in both stability and as well as the time course of the signal."

Explore further Dopamine neurons mull over your options

More information: Hiroshi Yamada et al. Neural population dynamics underlying expected value computation, The Journal of Neuroscience (2021). Journal information: Journal of Neuroscience Hiroshi Yamada et al. Neural population dynamics underlying expected value computation,(2021). DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1987-20.2020
Conservative Leader Erin O'Toole rises during question period in the House of Commons on Jan. 28, 2021. (The Canadian Press/Sean Kilpatrick)

Conservatives Chances of Success in Reaching for the Centre

Political scientists and strategists agree that Conservative Leader Erin OToole is reaching for both centrist and Ontario voters, but disagree on whether the approach will succeed.

Barry Cooper, a political science professor at the University of Calgary, says the Conservatives are trying to gain the mushy middle, which is already pretty much monopolized by the mushy Liberals, and the approach wont work.

If you are a conservative and you have deep suspicions about various forms of political correctness, youre going to look around for somebody like that to vote for, and if you dont find it in the Conservative Party, then youre probably not going to vote, Cooper said in an interview.

He adds that appeasing the media wont be a winning strategy if the media are part of the problem.

During Andrew Scheers tenure as party leader, he was often confronted by members of the media over his personal beliefs on social conservative issues. More recently, the Conservatives voted to oust Ontario MP Derek Sloan, who has been featured negatively in media reports over some of his comments, with reporters on multiple occasions asking Scheer or OToole whether Sloan would be expelled.

Daniel Bernier of Earnscliffe Strategy Group says conservatives will vote Conservative, so reaching for the centre makes sense.

Bernier, who says he is from the progressive conservative school, believes the Conservatives dont need to go further right.

I dont think that Conservatives need to be extreme in their position and thats where  Sloan was pushing a little bit too much, he says, adding that the Conservatives must be able to strike a balance that appeals to Canadians.

Canadians are concerned about economy and environment, so you need to be able to find ways to merge those two.

Bernier believes the Conservatives must present a practical alternative to what he says is the Liberals mishandling of relations with China, the underdevelopment of natural resources, and burdensome regulations on business.

I dont think they need to be either Trudeau lite or Trudeau-like or anything like that, he says.

Salim Mansur, a professor emeritus at the University of Western Ontario and a former Conservative candidate contender who was barred by the party from running, says the Conservative Party today seems too much like the Liberals. He says the Tories should go beyond merely focusing on winning the major urban centres in Ontario where voters are looking for a certain ideology.

The Conservative Party has to decide what it stands for. It is at the moment, and has been, without any distinction from the Liberals. They stand for globalism, he said in an interview.

Mansur, who has been outspoken on issues such as mass immigration and radical Islamism, was disqualified as a candidate for the Conservatives, but ran as a candidate for the Peoples Party in the 2019 election.

A Muslim himself, Mansur says the Conservatives dropped him because they said his views were Islamophobic.

They were doing exactly what the Liberals wanted them to do, he said.

Same thing would apply to the great number of people who question U.N. Agenda 2030Erin OToole will not allow them to be part of the Conservative Party or Conservative caucus, people like Derek Sloan or Jim Karahalios.

Political scientist Tom Flanagan, an important figure in former prime minister Stephen Harpers 2006 election campaign, says OToole needs to handle extremists correctly but must be careful to defend his own when the opposition is constantly expanding the definition of extremism.

Its essential for the leader to draw a line on the partys right flank that excludes extremists. On the other hand, he has to be quick to defend all those who fall inside the line, because the Liberals are always trying to move it, Flanagan said.

He adds that the Conservatives havent been able to attract independents and soft Liberals thus far, so their fortunes lie in gaining those who desert the Liberals as a result of the partys missteps.

Events and mistakes will have to play a part in driving them away from Trudeau, Flanagan said. Perhaps their bungling of vaccination may do the trick.
Lagos State Governor, Mr Babajide Sanwo-Olu, has expressed support for the move by the Federal Government and the Police Force to integrate the concept of community policing into the formal security architecture of the state.

The development, Sanwo-Olu said, will allow security agencies to efficiently nip crimes in the bud and swiftly respond to security breaches and prevent it from blowing out of proportion.

Sanwo-Olu, spoke on Tuesday, at the event organised by the Police Force and hosted by the state government to sensitise members of the public on community policing.

The event, with the theme: "Understanding Community Policing: A Framework for Action," held at the Governor's office, Alausa, Ikeja, had in attendance, Commissioners of Police in all the Southwest states, religious groups, traditional institution, labour unions, civil society groups, and chairmen of the 57 Local councils in the state.

The mass sensitisation followed the approval of a community policing strategy by the Federal Government to further localise the operations of the police.

Sanwo-Olu, represented by the Commissioner for Economic Planning and Budget, Mr Sam Egube, said the implementation of the community policing strategy was long overdue, given the nature of crimes and the need to enhance public safety.

The Governor urged residents of the State to embrace the initiative and volunteer information that would prepare security agencies to respond and isolate troublemakers in their communities.

He said: "The integration of community policing into the formal security architecture is a welcome development and this should be further encouraged with the keen participation of all members of the public because they are the ones that can identify and provide timely information on security challenges.

"Our administration believes in ensuring and enhancing public safety and security as a critical requirement for economic growth and development. We shall continue to provide support for strategies that will ensure and enhance quality and effective security for the lives and properties of all residents."

Sanwo-Olu, also urged members of the public to be committed to the campaign in securing their communities in line with extant laws and regulations.

Inspector-General of Police (IGP), Muhammed Adamu, represented by Assistant Inspector General (AIG) in charge of Zone II, Mr Ahmed Ilyasu, said implementation of the strategy was to bridge the gap between the police and communities, stressing that the Police Force was ready to collaborate with critical stakeholders in the communities to achieve the objectives.

He said: "The concept of community policing in the 21st century has gone beyond the mundane approach of policing, rather than policing of the community. It is policing within the community that connotes security is every citizen's business.

"Our community policing is a strategy of combating crimes and we are so passionate about it, as it is the only almighty formula in solving crimes, criminality and veritable measure in crises management situation in the nation."

Meanwhile, Vice President of Industrial Global Union, comrade Issa Aremu, commended the police for the mass sensitisation, which he described as "timely."

The trade union activist said it was time for the repositioning of the police for efficient service delivery as the agency at the centre of internal security.

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He called for more investment in equipment of the men in uniform and a reward system for those who distinguish themselves in the line of duty.

"The organised labour is proud of Governor Sanwo-Olu's dexterity in managing the security crises occasioned by COVID-19 pandemic and EndSARS protest," Aremu stated.

Also, Wale Okunniyi, who spoke on behalf of the civil society groups, expressed solidarity to the move towards community policing.

The event was also attended by Oba of Lagos, represented by Opeluwa of Lagos, Chief Lateef Ajose and AIG in charge Zone 17, Isaac Akinboyede.

Vanguard News Nigeria
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Universal HIV testing with linkage to treatment and prevention may be a promising approach to accelerate reductions in new infections in generalized epidemic settings, according to a study published February 9th, 2021 in the open-access journal PLOS Medicine by Catherine Koss of the University of California, San Francisco, and colleagues.

Despite major gains in HIV testing and treatment, in 2019 there were 1.7 million new HIV infections, of which nearly 60% occurred in sub-Saharan Africa. Daily oral pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) with tenofovir disoproxil fumarate/emtricitabine is highly effective for HIV prevention and could substantially reduce new HIV infections if offered alongside access to HIV testing and treatment. But little is known about the incidence of new HIV infections among PrEP users in settings with generalized HIV epidemics, particularly outside of selected risk groups. To address this knowledge gap, Koss and colleagues conducted community-based HIV testing and offered universal access to PrEP in 16 communities in the Sustainable East Africa Research in Community Health (SEARCH) study in rural Kenya and Uganda. They offered rapid or same-day PrEP initiation and flexible service delivery with follow-up visits at facilities or community-based sites over a period of 144 weeks. According to the authors, this study is the first in sub-Saharan Africa to assess HIV incidence after offering PrEP at a population level.

Among 74,541 individuals who tested negative for HIV, 21% were assessed to be at elevated HIV risk, and 5,447 (35%) of those individuals initiated PrEP, with 79% participating in follow-up visits. Over 7,150 person-years of follow-up, HIV incidence was 0.35 per 100 person-years (95% CI 0.22-0.49) among PrEP initiators. Among matched historical controls in 8 of the communities, HIV incidence was 0.92 per 100 person-years (95% CI 0.49-1.41) over the year prior to PrEP availability. Compared to matched historical controls, HIV incidence was 74% lower overall in PrEP initiators in 8 of the communities (adjusted incidence rate ratio [aIRR] 0.26, 95% CI 0.09-0.75; p=0.013), and 76% lower among women (aIRR 0.24, 95% CI 0.07-0.79; p=0.019), but not significantly lower in men. Data on HIV incidence among historical controls were not available for the remaining 8 communities.

Because rates of new HIV infections are higher in women than in men, the results suggest that PrEP may help to close the gender gap in new infections. According to the authors, universal access to HIV testing, treatment, and prevention, including rapid provision of PrEP with flexible service delivery, could reduce HIV incidence in generalized epidemic settings.

Dr. Kamya states "We know that PrEP is highly effective - and now we need systems that make it easier to start and continue taking it. This study showed that providing broad access to PrEP in community-based settings significantly reduced HIV incidence."

Dr. Koss adds "We found that universal HIV testing with easy access to PrEP was associated with lower rates of HIV, particularly among women."

###

Research Article

Peer-reviewed; Experimental study; Humans

In your coverage please use this URL to provide access to the freely available paper:

http://journals. plos. org/ plosmedicine/ article?id= 10. 1371/ journal. pmed. 1003492

Funding: Research reported in this manuscript was supported by the Division of AIDS, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of the U.S. National Institutes of Health under award numbers U01AI099959 and UM1AI068636, the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation under award number OPP1159068. This research was also supported by the U.S. National Institutes of Health under award numbers 2R01AI098472 (to MG for measurement of tenofovir hair concentrations) and K23MH114760 (to CAK). Gilead Sciences donated tenofovir disoproxil fumarate/emtricitabine (Truvada) as study drug. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH, PEPFAR, Gates Foundation, or Gilead Sciences. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing Interests: I have read the journal's policy and the authors of this manuscript have the following competing interests: CAK has received grant support to institution from the US National Institutes of Health and Gilead Research Scholars Program in HIV. DVH has received grant support from the US National Institutes of Health and study drug donation from Gilead Sciences. CM has received grant support from the US National Institutes of Health, the Stupski Foundation, and the Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub Foundation. LiBB has received grant support from the US National Institutes of Health. VJ has received grant support from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention/PEPFAR.

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Members enjoy access, in the palm of their hands, to a Porte spending account and optional savings account without a brick and mortar bank. Other benefits include: access to paychecks up to two days faster when enrolled in direct deposit, optional overdraft service, cash back rewards at participating retailers and real-time account alerts. In addition, members receive a sleek and modern Porte black Visa debit card that represents the smart decisions they are making today to pave the way for a positive financial journey in the future. Give More  Porte's Giving Program, #DoorToChange: Through Porte's #DoorToChange program, members shop with a purpose. With every purchase made with the Porte card, a donation is made to the Porte charity partner of the member's choice.2

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2Visit Portebanking.com/disclaimers#door-to-change for more information on Porte's #DoorToChange program.

3Must register & verify ID to open account. Terms, fees apply. Issued by MetaBank, N.A., Member FDIC.

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5The national rate is posted by the FDIC and are calculated based on a simple average of rates paid (uses annual percentage yield) by all insured depository institutions and branches for which data are available. More details about the calculation may be found at: https://www.fdic.gov/regulations/resources/rates/#one. The national rate for savings accounts is reported by the FDIC as 0.05 % APY as of 01/04/2021. This data is verified on a quarterly basis.

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8Visit Portebanking.com/disclaimers#porte-perks for more information on Porte Perks.

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Ukraine counts on NATOs support in monitoring air situation along the border with Russia and proposes to use the airspace in the Simferopol flight information region (FIR) for NATO air operations.

Ukrainian Infrastructure Minister Vladyslav Kryklii said this during talks with NATO Assistant Secretary General for Defence Policy and Planning Patrick Turner on Wednesday, Ukrinform reports with reference to the Infrastructure Ministry's Facebook page.

Ukraine adheres to the chosen course of integration into the Euro-Atlantic systems of collective security. One of the important areas of such integration is Ukraine's participation in the NATO Air Situation Data Exchange (ASDE) programme. In modern conditions, it is important to strengthen control of civil air traffic and respond to crisis situations in the Black Sea region and the ATO zone. Taking into account the updated EASA bulletin on flight safety in the Simferopol FIR and the abolition of the US Federal Aviation Administration restrictions on flights in the Simferopol FIR, we propose to use this part of the airspace for NATO air operations to transport troops, equipment, cargo and the like. We hope for NATO's support in monitoring air situation along the border with Russia, Kryklii said.

The meeting took place during the visit of a government delegation to Brussels.

As reported, a Ukrainian government delegation headed by Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal began a working visit to Brussels on February 9. Shmyhal met with European Council President Charles Michel and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg to discuss a number of important issues.

On February 11, Shmyhal will take part in the seventh meeting of the EU-Ukraine Association Council in Brussels.

ish
Boryspil International Airport in January 2021 reduced passenger traffic to 333,800 people, which is 68.2% less than in January 2020.

As Interfax-Ukraine was told in the airport's press service, on international flights, in particular, passenger traffic amounted to 301,000 (68.9% down), on domestic  32,800 (59.5% down).

The number of arrival and departure flights serviced by the airport in January 2021 amounted to 3,480 (54.6% down), including 2,708 international flights (59.7% down), and 772 internal flights (17.4% down).

The volume of cargo handled by the airport in January 2021 decreased by 23.8%, to 2,700 tonnes.

Some 2,034 tonnes of cargo from arrival flights were handled (22.3% less than in the same month of the previous year), and 676.6 tonnes for departure flights were handled (27.9% down). At the same time, only 42 kg (97% down) on arrival and 25 kg (99.6% down) on departure were processed on domestic flights. Everything else is international.

The amount of serviced mail amounted to 497.3 tonnes, which is 42.1% less than in January 2020. The volume of arrived postal items decreased by 62.1% (to 220.2 tonnes), the number of postal items sent from Ukraine decreased 0.3% (to 277 tonnes).
A Chinese spacecraft has made it to Mars for the first time, boosting Chinas attempt to be a space power on par with the US.

Tianwen-1 reached Mars orbit, Chinese state media reported at 8:57 pm. Beijing time on Wednesday. It will orbit for several months before sending a rover to land on a large plain on the Martian surface.

The Chinese mission is part of a flurry of visitors to the Red Planet that includes NASAs Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover, which is likely to reach Mars later this month and will test technologies for future human exploration. The Hope spacecraft from the UAE entered Martian orbit on February 9.

While these missions raise hopes for a Neil Armstrong moment on Mars, speedy breakthroughs are unlikely, according to Richard de Grijs, an astrophysics professor at Macquarie University in Sydney. Mars is the big goal but thats going to take some time, he said.

Chinas space programme has ambitious plans reaching into the next decade, including sending Chinese astronauts to the moon. Its a multi-year well-formed program, doggedly going forward, de Grijs said.

Tianwen-1 is part of a broader effort to close the gap with A Chinese spacecraft landed on the far side of the moon in 2019 and another lunar mission returned to Earth in December carrying samples.

The country is poised to notch up more accomplishments this year, including the launch of the initial part of a space station.

Other private and government programmes aiming at Mars have suffered setbacks.
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Imagine you are on the waiting list for a Patek Philippe Nautilus  a wait that might be eight or even 10 years long, but at least youre in line.

Then you see an Instagram post from a Patek fan questioning whether the model is being discontinued.

It turns out to be true. And suddenly the watch that you had expected to buy new for around $33,700 is available only on the secondhand market, selling for as much as $180,000. You would likely be surprised, unhappy  even angry.

And those were the responses of much of the watch world last month when @patekaholic, as Jasem al-Zeraei is known to his 344,000 Instagram followers, teased them with a post suggesting that the Ref. 5711/1A-010, a stainless-steel timepiece with a black-blue dial, would be withdrawn from production this year.

The reaction has been insane, Mr. al-Zeraei said Saturday. People are sad that they wont get their allocation.
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Sports lie at the margins of our culture, different from how it is elsewhere in the world, and from how it used to be. This is one of the reasons why criminality among youth proceeds unchecked. There is no youth labour market, and the school system ruthlessly triages youth.
There have been 1,006 further Covid-19 cases and 54 more deaths, the Department of Health confirmed today.

This brings the total number of cases in the state to 205,939 and the total number of coronavirus related deaths to 3,794.

Out of the 54 deaths confirmed today 45 of these deaths occurred in February, five occurred in January and four are still under investigation.

The median age of those who died was 86 years and the age range was 48 - 104 years.

Read More

Of the cases notified today, 476 are men while 524 are women. The median age is 35 years old and 65pc are under 45 years of age.

There are 516 cases in Dublin, 63 in Cork, 46 in Galway, 43 in Meath, 36 in Louth and the remaining 302 cases are spread across all other counties

As of 8am today, 1,032 Covid-19 patients are hospitalised, of which 173 are in ICU. There were 40 additional hospitalisations in the past 24 hours.

As of February 7, 240,487 doses of a Covid-19 vaccine have been administered in Ireland. Some 153,654 people have received their first dose and 86,833 people have received their second dose.

This comes as the fine for travelling abroad for a non-essential reason is to increase to 2,000.

Taoiseach Micheal Martin has asked Health Minister Stephen Donnelly to sign off on regulations which will increase the existing 500 fine to 2,000 as soon as possible.

This means a couple jetting out of Ireland for a holiday will now be hit with a 4,000 on the spot fine.

Yesterday, Tanaiste Leo Varadkar warned that Government advice against non-essential travel abroad is likely to continue for the rest of this year and into 2022.

In a blow to people hoping to take a foreign holiday later this year, he urged people to forget about non-essential international travel, unless reliable vaccine passports are developed.

He also said the Wage Subsidy Scheme (WSS) and the Pandemic Unemployment Payment (PUP) will be extended into the second quarter of this year because not all services including pubs, restaurants and hairdressers will be open by the end of March.

Speaking on Today FMs The Last Word, Mr Varadkar said: The strong advice from Government at the moment and for a very long time has been to avoid non-essential travel abroad and I think that advice will most likely stay in place for the duration of the year if not into next year, unless we get to the point where we can develop reliable vaccine passports.

However, when questioned about the vaccine passports, the Tanaiste said he shouldnt have used that term because the science doesnt stand up for that at the moment.

He added: The vaccine passports yet don't stack up scientifically or medically because we just dont know at this stage what extent vaccines reduce transmission.

Mr Varadkar said travel between countries with low levels of transmission is more likely before vaccine passports, however that is a long way away", adding: For now forget about non-essential international travel, unfortunately.
She's been maintaining a healthy fitness regime after her weight crept up to nearly 13 stone after 'hitting rock bottom' in lockdown last year.

And Frankie Essex showed off her slimmed-down figure as she uploaded snaps from her 'work' trip to Mexico to Instagram on Tuesday.

The former TOWIE star, 33, looked sensational as she visited Tulum's Matcha Mama cafe with her personal trainer boyfriend Luke in a red bikini top.

In her element: Frankie Essex showed off her slimmed-down figure as she uploaded snaps from her 'work' trip to Mexico to Instagram on Tuesday

Showcasing her toned figure, the Essex native styled her frilly bralet with a white wrap-up skirt, complete with a thigh-high slit.

The influencer upped the fashion ante as she accessorised with dainty silver jewellery, white sandals and circular-framed shades.

Scraping her tresses away from her face and into a bun, Frankie accentuated her features with matte make-up.

Smitten: The former TOWIE star, 33, looked sensational as she visited Tulum's Matcha Mama cafe with her personal trainer boyfriend Luke in a red bikini top

Radiant: Showcasing her toned figure, the Essex native styled her frilly bralet with a white wrap-up skirt, complete with a thigh-high slit

Late last year, the beautician displayed her slender frame in a selfie after confirming she has begun a new fitness regime.

The television personality admitted she was 'feeling good' as she prioritised her health during the UK's third nationwide lockdown.

In an exclusive interview with MailOnline, the social media star admitted she 'felt like s***' when she discovered her weight in November after 'swerving those scales' during the coronavirus pandemic.

Frankie - who has shared candid images of herself in underwear - aimed to lose up to one and a half stone in eight weeks using Muscle Food's Goal Getters plan.

Feeling motivated: Late last year, the blonde displayed her slender frame in a selfie after confirming she has begun a new fitness regime

Reality star Frankie has been open about her fluctuating figure in the past, having shed two stone back in 2016, before gaining weight a year later due to a crippling knee injury.

The older sister of Joey Essex overhauled her eating habits once again in 2019, but insisted she's struggled to commit to the lifestyle since COVID-19 struck.

'I make so many excuses', Frankie told us. 'I got on the scales about two weeks ago at the night time - which you shouldn't really do - and I was 12st 13lbs. I just thought, ''Oh my God!''

'I kept making excuses until I hit rock bottom and got on the scales. I didn't even tell Luke at first, but I'm only hurting myself at the end of the day. It's not really about the dress size for me, as if I lose weight, I'd still be able to fit into a lot of my clothes.
Photo: The Canadian Press Dr. Bonnie Henry leaves the podium after speaking during a press conference in Victoria, B.C., on January 22, 2021. British Columbia's provincial health officer and attorney general are seeking a court injunction ordering three churches to follow public health orders and not hold in-person religious services. Dr. Bonnie Henry says in her response to the petition that the ban on indoor gatherings, including in-person religious services, is necessary to limit the spread of COVID-19 in B.C. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chad Hipolito

British Columbia's provincial health officer and attorney general are asking for a court injunction ordering three churches to follow public health rules banning in-person religious services.

The application in B.C. Supreme Court comes after the churches filed a petition challenging the province's prohibition on services, arguing they violate people's rights and freedoms.

The Riverside Calvary Chapel in Langley, the Immanuel Covenant Reformed Church in Abbotsford and Free Reformed Church of Chilliwack filed the petition last month.

Dr. Bonnie Henry says in her response to the petition that the ban on indoor gatherings, including in-person religious services, is necessary to limit the spread of COVID-19 in B.C.

She says transmission of the virus seems highest in settings of sustained interpersonal interaction indoors or in enclosed spaces, and loud talking, chanting and singing also increase spread.

The churches are represented by a Calgary-based advocacy group, the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, which questions in a statement why people can gather in stores, gyms and bars but not places of worship.
Hyderabad, Feb 10 : The Congress has demanded Telangana Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao apologise for allegedly calling a group of people "dogs" during a public meeting in Nalgonda district on Wednesday.

Party incharge for Telangana, Manickam Tagore said the Chief Minister should apologise.

"CM calls women at Nagarjuna Sagar public meeting as Dogs. Don't forget all those women standing there are the reason you sit in that position. Change your words reflect your attitude. Don't forget this is a democracy. Dont forget they are our bosses! Appologize Chandrasekar," Tagore said in a tweet.

The Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) chief reportedly made the remark when some people tried to interrupt his speech at the public meeting at Haliya and wanted to submit a memorandum.

Rao asked the police to take the memorandum. When they continued to raise slogans, the Chief Minister asked them to either sit calmly or leave gracefully.

"All the five of you leave. There are lot of dogs like you," KCR said.

The trial of the senator, a former minister, is expected to commence on February 22.

The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) will February 22 arraign a former Minister of Aviation, Stella Oduah, at the Federal High Court, Abuja, for alleged financial impropriety.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that Ms Oduah was scheduled to be arraigned on Tuesday, but the judge, Inyang Ekwo, had to adjourn the case because the ex-minister was absent and had not been served with the relevant court documents.

Ms Oduah was in February 2014 removed as the aviation minister by then President Goodluck Jonathan following scandals she was involved in.

The former minister who later got involved in the campaigns for Mr Jonathan's failed 2015 re-election bid, is currently the senator representing Abia North in the National Assembly.

Charged

The EFCC recently charged her alongside eight others with fraud offences in the case marked, FHC/ABJ/CR/316/20.

According to NAN, the anti-corruption agency alleged that Mrs Oduah misappropriated public funds while serving as a minister.

EFCC's prosecuting counsel, Hassan Liman, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, in trying to defend Ms Oduah's absence from Tuesday's proceedings, confirmed to the court that the senator had not been served with the court processes.

The lawyer, therefore, urged the judge to adjourn the case to enable the anti-graft agency to serve the legislator.

"My lord, the matter has been set out today (Tuesday) for arraignment but I have been informed by the commission that the first defendant (Oduah) is yet to be served.

"In view of that my lord, may I humbly apply for a very short date," he said.

Responding, the judge, Mr Ekwo, said it was the duty of the prosecution to produce defendants in court.

He then adjourned the matter till February 22 for defendants to take their plea.

Scandals

Ms Oduah was sacked by then President Jonathan on February 12, 2014, after she was stained by scandals, one of which was about the purchase of two bullet-proof cars by an agency under her supervision, the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) for N255 million.

The purchase was in violation of Nigeria's public procurement and appropriation laws.

The House of Representatives Committee on Aviation, which conducted an investigative hearing on the matter, also found out that in its report that the spending of the N255 million was not covered by the 2013 budget.

The House also noted at the time that Ms Oduah breached Nigerian laws by exceeding her approval limit and signing off over N634 million for the agency to buy 54 vehicles.

Another panel set up by the President also indicted Ms Oduah for breach of relevant laws.

While battling with the procurement scandal, Ms Oduah was also enmeshed in another certificate scam.

Searchlight

Although she has never been prosecuted, Ms Oduah has since her removal as the minister, come under the searchlight of various investigative bodies.

For instance, the Federal High Court in Abuja had at the instance of the EFCC on October 18, 2019, made an interim order of forfeiture of the assets of some companies which the EFCC believed had links to the former minister.

The two affected companies were Crystal Television Limited and Sabora International Limited.

The firm's assets placed under the order of interim forfeiture included dredging vessels and quarry equipment located at Chifuyi village, Apo, Abuja, said to be owned by Sabora International Limited based in Port Harcourt, Rivers State.

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The rest of the assets said to be owned by Crystal Television Limited located in Kaura District, Behind Games Village, Abuja, were 20 crates of television/radio equipment, two installed cooling units, one top-class Total Energy 274KVA generator, and mast above 120 feet.

But the judge, Mr Ekwo, on June 8, 2020, vacated the interim forfeiture order on the grounds that there was no proof the firms had any links to Ms Oduah.

The defunct Special Presidential Investigation Panel (SPIP) on the Recovery of Public Property which was being led by Okoi Obono-Obla also filed charges of non-declaration of assets against Ms Oduah at the Federal High Court in Abuja in 2018.

Ms Oduah was never brought to court to answer in respect of the case, but the charges were still pending in court as of the time the SPIP was disbanded by President Muhammadu Buhari in September 2019.
The newly established UAE Circular Economy Council provides an ideal platform to build synergies to expedite the implementation of the circular economy principles, said Dr Abdullah Belhaif Al Nuaimi, Minister of Climate Change and Environment.

The minister spoke soon after the UAE Cabinets approval of the formation of the UAE Circular Economy Council, chaired by Dr Al Nuaimi, a WAM report said.

Members of the new body comprise Abdulla bin Touq Al Marri, Minister of Economy; Omar bin Sultan Al Olama, Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence, Digital Economy and Teleworking Applications, and Dr Thani bin Ahmed Al Zeyoudi, Minister of State for Foreign Trade.

The Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure, the Ministry of Industry and Advanced Technology, and the Ministry of Cabinet Affairs are also represented on the council.

Other members include Sheikha Shamma bint Sultan bin Khalifa Al Nahyan, CEO of Alliances for Global Sustainability; Razan Khalifa Al Mubarak, Managing Director of the Environment Agency  Abu Dhabi; Dawood Abdulrahman Al Hajri, Director-General of Dubai Municipality, and Dr Salem Al Kaabi, Director-General of Abu Dhabi Waste Management Centre (Tadweer).

Eight other members come from various local government entities as well as the private sector.

The council is responsible for overseeing the development of the implementation strategy for the UAE Circular Economy Policy 2021-2031 that targets the adoption of the circular economy concept in four priority areas  green infrastructure, sustainable transportation, sustainable manufacturing, and sustainable food production and consumption.

The policy was developed jointly by the Ministry of Climate Change and Environment (MoCCAE), the Ministry of Economy, the Ministry of Cabinet Affairs, and the Office of the Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence, Digital Economy and Remote Work Applications.

Moreover, the council is mandated to follow up on the execution of sectoral initiatives, approve key performance indicators for the progress made, and align federal and local strategies with the policy requirements.

It will also propose the foundations for general and sectoral plans and projects that apply the principles of a circular economy, boost the participation of the private sector in circular economy ventures, encourage relevant public-private partnerships, enhance scientific research in the field, and scale up international cooperation aimed at driving global implementation of the circular economy. -- Tradearabia News Service
Yvesmark Chery

Model

Age: 24

Hometown: Brooklyn, New York

Yvesmark Chery went to college to pursue a career in IT, but life took him elsewhere  into the world of high fashion modeling. It all started when an ex-girlfriend signed him up for a casting. The 24-year-old took the opportunity and ran with it. Since then, hes carved a lane for himself as a high fashion and commercial model with vitiligo. Throughout his still-burgeoning fashion career, he secured a gig with skincare brand Youth To The People and appeared in major campaigns with household clothing brands H&M, Adidas and Puma. He has also appeared in Vogue Italy  and thats just the beginning. Today, he continues to lead by example as a flourishing model with vitiligo, telling Refinery29 in 2020, I want other people to look at me and be like, If he can do it, I can do it.'

Instagram: @yvesmark.chery

In honor of Black History Month, In The Know is highlighting changemakers making an impact on the world through cultural advancement, community leadership, and entrepreneurial innovation. See all of the honorees here.

The post In The Know Honors: Yvesmark Chery appeared first on In The Know.

Pawan Jailkhani, Chief Revenue Officer at 9X Media Group has put in his papers after 11 years according to media reports. He was part of the executive committee at 9X Media which provides strategic direction to the company.

Pawan joined 9X Media in 2008 as senior vice president - sales. He was promoted to executive vice president - sales in 2010. In 2012, he was appointed as chief revenue officer of the group and also become an executive board member.

Prior to joining 9X Media, he was a senior vice president - sales with the Zee Network where he spent more than 13 years. During that time he gained extensive experience and achieved a number of successes in the national and regional markets as the network went through various phases.




"We ask those who are afraid to calm down and those who have some doubts to overcome them. Who have been the first to get vaccinated? Doctors, nurses, and healthcare workers who are exposed on a daily basis," he remarked.





"Do you think doctors and nurses would be that enthusiastic to receive this protection if it were not safe? I do not think so. Follow the example of those who have decided to get vaccinated ," he added.





Santillan noted that people should be afraid of the unknown, but this is not the case he said as vaccines have been used for many years in the world in order to control a series of diseases, which have been pushed back throughout the time.





"People are usually afraid of what might happen, of an adverse reaction. But in the face of the administration of over a million and a half vaccines in the world, the big question is: Have deaths or very severe reactions been reported? No. So, this fear is reduced," he explained.





The hospital's director asked the population to pay attention to the vaccination process in Israel a country with the highest proportion of citizens vaccinated against COVID-19 in the world in January and where the curve of infections and deaths has dropped significantly.





"We thank all those who helped healthcare workers and will later help all Peruvians get vaccinated," the doctor stated.





"This vaccination will be important if we all participate with great faith and hope, because (if we compare) this disease and what it causes (anguish, pain, hospitalization, and suffering), this little pain (in the arm) is practically nothing," he added.





Santillan explained that the vaccination process at Bartolome Hospital will take place in five days.

(END) KGR/RRC/RMB/MVB

After becoming the first person at Bartolome Hospital to receive the COVID-19 vaccine, Dr. Carlos Santillan the heath establishment's director urged the population to leave their fear behind and join the immunization process, which began on Tuesday in the country , adding that it brings a lot of faith and hope.Published: 2/9/2021
Cities and towns throughout Massachusetts were left unrecognizable in March 1888, buried underneath a blanket of white, blasted by wind-whipped snowdrifts of roughly 20 feet and battered severely by what has gone down in the books as one of the largest winter storms to hit the Northeast.

In the wake of the Great Blizzard of 1888, the title the storm rightfully earned, hundreds were left dead across the region. In Massachusetts, residents in the Berkshires had to dig out of as much as 40 inches of snow while dealing with bone-chilling temperatures.

It was a blizzard that communities across the region were largely unprepared for close to the turn of the century, resulting in a death toll of more than 400 people, as many as 200 of which were reported in New York City alone, according to the National Weather Service.

This was a storm that came on very suddenly, said Joe Dellicarpini, a science and operations officer at the weather services Boston/Norton office. It started out as rain and then turned quickly over to snow, with 50-mile-per-hour winds and blizzard conditions, and temperatures plummeted into the single digits.

Whether its the soul-crushing Great Blizzard of 1888, the paralyzing April Fools Day Blizzard of 1997 or the hurricane-level Blizzard of 2005, Massachusetts knows winter storms.

For those who live in the Bay State and New England more generally, winter weather is just a part of life from November through March, with the most brutal chilly and stormy conditions typically felt in January and February.

Snow, sleet, freezing rain, cold temperatures and teeth-chattering wind chills are common occurrences in the commonwealth in the winter months, the weather service noted.

While most of the time these weather elements are only a nuisance to our daily routines, at times they can produce hazardous or life-threatening situations for those who are not prepared, the federal agency said.

In the aftermath of a noreaster that brought as much as 24 inches of snow to Massachusetts last week and with Arctic temperatures on the way this week, the weather service took a look at the 10 worst winter storms to hit the state during a virtual discussion last Tuesday.

The following weather events are considered to be the most severe winter storms to hit Massachusetts. They are laid out by chronology, not by severity.

A winter storm on Jan. 4, 2018 pounded Western Massachusetts. This is a view of Lyman Street in downtown Springfield near the Amtrak station. (Don Treeger/The Republican)

The 2018 bomb cyclone

Three years ago, Massachusetts was battered with a bomb cyclone, a meteorological term that means a rapidly intensifying area of low pressure.

The resulting storm dumped 10 to 18 inches of snow across the region, with the heaviest precipitation felt along a fine line in Southeastern Massachusetts, said Torry Gaucher, a meteorologist at the Boston/Norton weather service office.

More notable perhaps were the intense winds the severe winter storm brought to Massachusetts, with gusts as high as 75 miles per hour recorded on Cape Cod and Nantucket.

Major coastal flooding was also a big concern as the storm wreaked havoc on the commonwealth, sparking a 2- to 3-foot storm surge that washed out waterfront cities and towns, stranded cars and damaged homes. The storm also flooded numerous streets in Boston, where first responders took to rubber boats to try to help trapped residents.

The terrorizing cyclone even led to a new record high water mark of 15.1 feet being set in Boston, surpassing the monumental Blizzard of 78s record just by the skin of its teeth, Gaucher noted.

Sliding fun in Forest Park in Springfield, Massachusetts as winter storm Juno moves out of the area Tuesday afternoon, Jan. 27, 2015. (Michael S. Gordon/The Republican)

The 2015 Winter Blitz

Records previously set by the 78 storm were also broken six years ago when, in less than 20 days, four major snowstorms thrashed the region.

From the end of January to mid-February, we totaled up somewhere about 77 inches of snow, Gaucher said. For a 30-day period in 2015, we measured 94.4 inches of snow, smashing the old record of 58.8 inches set back in 1978.

The first major weather event to hit the state during what has come to be known as the 2015 Winter Blitz was the storm dubbed by the Weather Channell as Winter Storm Juno, which swept through Massachusetts from Jan. 26 to 27, halted transportation and dropped as much as 24.4 inches of snow in Boston and 34.5 inches in Worcester.

On This Day in Southern New England Weather History: January 26-27, 2015 Winter Storm. This storm brought 1 to 3 feet of snow to much of the region. However, the Hartford & Springfield areas were "spared" with less than 8 inches of snow. pic.twitter.com/CDO99dxbbc  NWS Boston (@NWSBoston) January 26, 2020

Much of Nantucket was left in the dark in the aftermath of Juno, with thousands of residents suffering power outages as the blizzard bore down on the state, pummeling the island with steady winds of 51 mph and gusts of 62 mph.

There was a sharp cutoff in the track of the winter precipitation, where Western Massachusetts and Connecticut saw significantly lower snow totals than the rest of the region. Springfield only picked up 7.3 inches, while Hartford saw roughly half a foot.

The highest totals were recorded in Central Massachusetts and northern Middlesex County, where 35-plus inches of snow were picked up.

Things were pretty much brought to a screaming halt, Gaucher said. Plenty of snow fell throughout the region.

Crews worked early one Saturday morning to clear snow from the Holyoke Transportation Center in the wake of the Blizzard of 2013, also known as Winter Storm Nemo. (Greg Saulmon/The Republican)

The Blizzard of 2013

Also known as Winter Storm Nemo, the Blizzard of 2013 was no joke.

From Feb. 8 to 9 eight years ago, Massachusetts was battered by heavy and rapid snowfall, coastal flooding, strong winds, high seas and power outages.

Winds peaked at 83 miles per hour in Falmouth, 77 mph in Hyannis and 76 mph in Boston. Meanwhile, snowfall totals reached 24.9 inches in Boston, 28.8 inches in Worcester and 21.5 inches in Springfield, according to the weather service.

Although the Blizzard of 2013 never hit blizzard status in Western Massachusetts, it led then-Gov. Deval Patrick to declare a driving ban, marking the first time such a declaration has been made since former Gov. Michael Dukakis did so during the Blizzard of 78.

I didnt do this lightly, Patrick said of the ban eight years ago.

Across the Northeast, more than 600,000 homes and businesses lost electricity, the Associated Press reported in 2013. More than 5,000 flights were canceled, as officials shut down Boston Logan International Airport and New York Citys three major airports.

In the end, Nemo was blamed for at least four deaths in New York and Canada, according to The Associated Press.

Snow removal complaints piled up in Springfield in the aftermath of the storm. During a meeting about the citys response to the weather event, State Rep. and then-City Councilor Bud L. Williams both summed up residents dissatisfaction and grilled the Department of Public Works.

They dont do a good job; they do terrible work, Williams said at the time, referring to the dozens of private contractors that teamed up with department crews to clear the streets.

Jose Joncalves, an engineer on the Nordic Explorer, watches from the ice-covered bow as the 115-foot trawler docks Saturday, Jan. 22, 2005, in Portland, Maine, where the mercury dropped to minus 11 degrees. The New Bedford, Mass., fishing ship came inshore to avoid being at sea during this weekend's expected blizzard. (Robert F. Bukaty/AP)

The Blizzard of 2005

The Blizzard of 2005 was one for the books, too, bringing more than 2 feet of snow to much of Massachusetts and hurricane-force wind gusts to the Cape and Islands.

The noreaster walloped most of southern New England with 1 to 3 feet of snowfall from Jan. 22 to 24, according to the weather service. Heavy wind gusts also produced 6-foot snowdrifts and bitterly cold wind chills, Gaucher noted.

We saw a pretty incredible snowstorm, the meteorologist said. I can vividly remember being snowed in at my grandparents house in northwest Rhode Island for this one.

The agencys data showed as much as 38 inches of snow fell in Plymouth, 36.5 in Haverhill, 30 in Cambridge and 22.5 at Boston Logan International Airport.

Parts of Central and Western Massachusetts saw a little bit less precipitation, though snowfall amounts were still sizable, with 24.1 inches recorded in Worcester and roughly a foot reported across the Berkshires and Pioneer Valley, forecasters said.

Wind gusts came close to 85 miles per hour on Nantucket and in Sandwich, while Plymouth saw 72-mile-per-hour gusts, according to the weather service.

Very strong wind gusts were associated with this storm, giving us those blizzard-like conditions, Gaucher said.

A tractor-trailer lies on its side on Route 57 in Agawam on April 1, 1997. (The Republican file photo)

The April Fools Day Blizzard of 1997

On March 30, 1997, the weather was mild. With temperatures reaching the 60s in Boston, conditions looked peaceful.

That all changed when a cold front moved in a day later. Temperatures soon dropped into the 40s, and a light rain started falling. By the afternoon, the precipitation had changed over to heavy snowfall.

Snow fell at rates of 2 to 3 inches per hour, lasting through April 1. By the time the paralyzing winter storm came to an end 26 years ago, it was considered the third-biggest snowstorm in Bostons history. It has come to be known as the April Fools Day Blizzard of 1997.

This was probably one of the biggest snowstorms of my memory as a young child. I was almost 7 years old at the time and remember the whole power outages, being stuck inside, cooking on the wood stove, Gaucher said. It was quite a memorable snowstorm event.

The massive blizzard knocked down numerous trees and power lines, blasted the state with wind gusts of up to 70 miles per hour and dumped 30 inches of snow across Massachusetts, according to the weather service.

The entire state was blanketed by the hefty winter precipitation, with Milford seeing 36 inches of snow, Milton 30 inches, Natick 29 inches, Reading 27 inches, Boston 25-plus inches, Bedford 24 inches and Taunton 23.3 inches, weather service data showed.

Really, the higher totals were in northern Rhode Island, actually where I grew up up in Burrillville, all the way through Worcester County, then up towards the Boston area, getting that 20-to-30-inch accumulation worth of snow, " Gaucher said.

Roads were barely visible, and wind gusts of 50 to 70 mph were seen across Eastern Massachusetts, according to the weather service.

Then-Gov. William Weld declared a state of emergency amid the blizzard, allowing cities and towns to receive state aid to dig out of the snow. The assistance came in the form of plows, tree-cutting crews and other resources. Three Pioneer Valley communities -- Chester, Colrain and Westfield -- were among the first in the commonwealth to seek help.

The winter storm also prompted Logan International Airport to shut down for more than 24 hours. While many travelers returned to their homes, hundreds had to spend the night in nearby hotels. Others were forced to sleep in airports.

Three people died in the 97 noreaster.

The Blizzard of 1996 brought as much as 18.2 inches of snow to Boston, Massachusetts and 16.3 inches to Hartford, Connecticut from Jan. 6 to 9. Transportation was halted. Schools were closed, and roof collapses were reported. (National Weather Service)

The Blizzard of 1996

Only a year before the April Fools Day Blizzard of 97 hit the commonwealth, Massachusetts and much of southern New England was hit hard by another historic winter storm: the Blizzard of 1996.

From Jan. 6 to 9, more than 20 inches of snow fell in Connecticut, Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts. The violent winter storm began in central Virginia and tracked upward across the Mid-Atlantic before settling in New England, according to the weather service.

Philadelphia saw roughly 32 inches of snow, its greatest snowfall on record, noted Kevin Cadima, lead meteorologist at the weather services Boston/Norton office.

This was actually one of the biggest snowstorms for the middle Atlantic region in terms of expansive area of snowfall, Cadima said. It was anywhere from 2 to 3 feet of snow, widespread from southwest Virginia all the way into the New York City area.

The blizzards impact was noteworthy. Roofs were collapsed by the dozens of feet of snow. Transportation was halted, and schools were closed for several days.

The storm dumped as much as 22.8 inches of snow in Providence, Rhode Island and 16.3 inches in Hartford, Connecticut. In Massachusetts, 18.2 inches were recorded in Boston, 14 inches in Worcester and 18 inches in Springfield, weather service data showed.

In northern New England, there was little to no snowfall, making the blizzard definitely a Mid-Atlantic and southern New England snowstorm, Cadima pointed out.

Some locations actually saw a little more than 2 feet, but it just wasnt as widespread as it was further to the southwest across the middle Atlantic region, the meteorologist said.

An aerial shot of the Great Nor'easter of December 1992, one of the most severe nor'easters to hit New England. (National Weather Service)

The Great Noreaster of December 1992

Thirty years ago, the historic Halloween Noreaster of 1991 swept through Massachusetts. Less than 14 months later, the state was battered by another devastating winter storm, one that has earned the moniker the Great Noreaster of December 1992.

The unforgiving coastal storm was driven by a succession of meteorological events and maintained by hurricane-force wind gusts and very high tides and waves, according to a report prepared by a weather service Disaster Survey team following on-scene assessments and interviews during the week of the noreaster.

In the wake of the storm, homes were left destroyed, beaches eroded and communities buried.

The Great NorEaster of December 1992 was one of the epic storms of all time, the report said. At some locations along the northern New Jersey, New York City and Long Island coasts, it produced record tides, even exceeding those produced by the hurricanes of 1938, 1944, 1954 and 1960.

At many other locations from northeastern Massachusetts to Maryland, it produced tides within 1 or 2 feet of record values, the report added.

The storm arrived in New England on Dec. 12 and was reported as of one the most severe noreasters to hit the region.

We dont talk about this storm too much, but this was actually one of the fiercest storms to hit New England in terms of snowfall, wind and destructive coastal flooding, Cadima said.

#OTD in Weather History: December 12, 1992



One of the fiercest nor'easters of the 20th century affected SNE with major coastal flooding, high winds, & heavy snow inland. pic.twitter.com/7oYKHddMmd  NWS Boston (@NWSBoston) December 12, 2020

The noreaster produced incredible snowfall totals across many mountainous locations, while barely having any effect on valley communities, according to the weather service. Snow was elevation-dependent, Cadima noted. That being said, very, very prolific amounts were recorded, the meteorologist said.

In the Berkshires, 30 to 48 inches of snow were reported. Worcester saw 32 inches, and Connecticut recorded roughly 27 inches, weather service data showed.

The shear weight of the snow, accompanied by wind gusts that reached as high as 78 miles per hour in Boston and 74 mph on Cape Cod, led to widespread power outages and tree damage, according to the agency.

Schools were closed for a week, and National Guard personnel had to bring in heavy equipment to remove the snow.

Close to 200 homes were damaged in Connecticut. Another six were destroyed in Nantucket, and one was left devastated in Plymouth. Severe beach erosion was recorded across southern New England as well.

Probably one of the more impressive aspects of this storm was the coastal flooding, Cadima said. It was destructive coastal flooding, especially across the Connecticut coast. We had nearly 200 homes damaged, but we also had significant damage on the east coast of Massachusetts and Nantucket, with severe beach erosion along all our coastline.

Following a heavy storm, one that has come to be known as the "Perfect Storm," high water surrounded a home on Broad Sound Ave., in Revere, Massachusetts on Oct. 31, 1991. (AP Photo/Julia Malakie)AP

The Perfect Storm

The 1991 unnamed hurricane cost the six-person crew of the Gloucester-based Andrea Gail their lives when the storm exploded in late October.

Better known as The Perfect Storm, the severe weather event 30 years ago was the inspiration for the book and movie of same title.

Also known as the Halloween Noreaster of 1991, the storm brought great destruction to the northeast coast of the United States from Oct. 30 to 31 and created waves that were felt as far south as Florida, the Bahamas and even Puerto Rico. The lives of hundreds of mariners were threatened as well, according to the weather service.

This storm was probably one of the highest-impact coastal flood events from an extratropical cyclone that the east coast of Massachusetts has ever seen, probably only surpassed by the Blizzard of 78, Cadima said. Just destructive flooding, homes just ripped off their foundation, some homes destroyed.

Winds peaked at 78 miles per hour in Chatham. A 5-foot storm surge was also seen in Boston, where 30-foot seas were spotted. Further east in the open Atlantic Ocean, 30- to 60-foot seas were recorded, according to Cadima.

So you can imagine, with all that easterly fetch, all that water piling up and that wave action, it produced significant damage, over 100 homes destroyed along the east coast of Massachusetts, the meteorologist said.

A car sits atop the guardrail on Interstate 291 east at the Indian Orchard exit in Massachusetts during the Blizzard of 1978. (Republican File Photo)

The Blizzard of 1978

For every major winter weather event that has hit Massachusetts in the past four decades, the Blizzard of 1978 has always been the benchmark.

The historic weather system, more formally known as Northeastern United States Blizzard of 1978, dropped 27.1 inches of snow in Boston, 20.2 inches in Worcester and 14.5 inches in Springfield from Feb. 5 to 7, 1978.

Cadima was 10 years old when the storm hit New England and vividly remembers the weather event, sometimes called the Great Blizzard of 78. It was the greatest snowstorm he had ever seen, the meteorologist noted.

I was just a young child at that time, but this is really the storm that peaked my interest in weather and really got me on my path to meteorology, Cadima said. Without this storm I might not be doing what Im doing right now.

The 78 blizzard developed along the Mid-Atlantic coast and meandered offshore, bringing high winds, record snowfall and devastating flooding over four high tide cycles, according to the weather service.

New England was brought to a standstill for more than a week.

We had hurricane-force wind gusts combined with that heavy snow. You take 2 to 4 feet of snow with 80- to 90-mile-per-hour winds, this was a truly crippling blizzard. This just completely shut down the entire region, Cadima said. Travel was nonexistent. Businesses were closed for literally over a week. The world basically stopped in southern New England for over a week.

The National Guard was called in to help the state dig itself out of the snow, and residents throughout the commonwealth were left without heat, water, food and electricity in the aftermath of the storm.

Quite an impressive storm, Cadima said, but equally as impressive was the coastal flooding, just complete devastation and destruction along the Eastern Massachusetts coast.

Amid the slow-moving winter storm, cars could be seen abandoned on various highways in Massachusetts, including Route 128 near Needham and Interstate 290 in Worcester.

The snow fell so rapidly plows could not keep up. Adding to the difficulty of clearing the roads were the numerous cars stuck in the blizzard.

Many drivers were stranded on roads because the heavy snowfall started slightly later than expected. People were also skeptical of the warnings issued ahead of the storm after a series of inaccurate forecasts were made the previous month, according to the weather service.

However, the major storm system wound up wrecking more havoc on the Northeast than any storm since, causing roughly 100 deaths and $520 million in damages to the region.

We had just a blizzard of epic proportions, Cadima said.

A man walks along Main Street in Springfield the morning following the Blizzard of 1888. (The Republican file photo)

The Great Blizzard of 1888

As the Great Blizzard of 1888 held the Northeast in its clutches from March 11 to 14, the eastern seaboard from Maine all the way to the Chesapeake Bay was left paralyzed.

The storm, which actually was a combination of three blizzards that struck one after the other, dumped as much as 55 inches of snow in some areas. Snowdrifts of 30 to 40 feet were reported, and an estimated 400 people died during the brutal weather event. Other estimates put the death toll from the blizzard trio somewhere between 250 and 500 people.

The storm system was nicknamed The Childrens Blizzard, because it resulted in the deaths of many children on their walk home from school, according to the weather service.

A contributing factor to the death toll was the poor construction of many homes and schoolhouses built as the upper Midwest was experiencing a pioneer boom, the federal agency explained in an article. There is an account of a schoolhouse in Nebraska that lost its roof during the storm. Fortunately, the teacher was able to lead the children to shelter.

In Springfield, a man by the name of Edwin F. Leonard noticed a hat in a snowbank. When he went to pick it up, he found a young girl buried under the snow. Miraculously, she survived.

Others throughout the Northeast and the United States as a whole were less fortunate.

In another instance, a teacher in Plainfield, Nebraska tried to lead children to her home less than 90 yards from the schoolhouse. The group lost their way with the children dying of hypothermia while the teacher lost her feet to frostbite, the weather service said.

Across Massachusetts, residents food supplies and the heat in their homes quickly ran low over the course of the three storms. Coal moved by rail, but trains were not moving. The 1888 blizzard later led to Boston investing in an underground subway system.

In Western Massachusetts, a train made it as far as the North Wilbraham-Indian Orchard line before coming to a standstill. For the next two days the many passengers aboard were stranded.

Thousands of workers in the Springfield area were stranded at mills and factories, and tens of thousands of pounds of snow were transported from city streets via horse-drawn wagons.

The storm cut off and immobilized east coast cities, crippling transportation and affecting one quarter of the U.S. population, the weather service said.

Along with prompting investments in Bostons unground train system, the blizzard also led to federal action being taken due to authorities many failures during the trifecta of storms.

The failure of the Signal Service to issue a Cold Wave Warning for these two calamitous blizzards became a motivating factor for moving the meteorological service out of the War Department so as to improve forecasting and preparedness efforts, the weather service said. Two years later, the legislation creating the Weather Bureau under the Dept. of Agriculture was signed by President Benjamin Harrison on October 1, 1890.

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Lamprell, up 6.0% at 77.40 pence, 12-month range 7.02p-78.80p. The United Arab Emirates-based oil rig construction business has climbed roughly 15% so far this week on the back of rising oil prices. Brent oil hit USD60 a barrel for the first time in more than a year on Monday.







Gem Diamonds, up 4.6% at 53.57 pence, 12-month range 23.00p-69.93p. Shares in the diamond miner have risen in the past four sessions, and it is currently trading at a year-to-date high. Gem owns the Letseng diamond mine in Lesotho. Gem sold 99,172 carats for a total of USD189.2 million in 2020, compared to 111,291 carats for USD182.1 million in 2019.







SMALL-CAP - LOSERS







Fuller, Smith & Turner, down 5.9% at 828.00p, 12-month range 486.00p-948.00p. The pub firm fell after Dutch beer maker Heineken said it plans to slash 8,000 jobs. Pub, restaurant and bar closures across the globe have sapped on-trade consumption of beer.







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By Eric Cunha; ericcunha@alliancenews.com

Copyright 2021 Alliance News Limited. All Rights Reserved.
The Culture Ministry, via the National History Museum of Romania, will support the organization of the public and cultural diplomacy programme that will celebrate the 140th anniversary this year of diplomatic relations between Romania and Spain.

"This is a very important event for us, and we will treat it as such. This will be a good occasion to promote and strengthen the connection between the Romanian diaspora in Spain and the values of our national culture. At the same time, we will bring to the public's attention some elements of the Spanish culture. It will be a programme that will give us the opportunity to promote cultural diversity, which is very necessary for identifying a common language between the different groups in the society," Minister of Culture Bogdan Gheorghiu said in a press release sent to AGERPRES on Wednesday.

The calendar of the actions and events included with the Romania-Spain 2021 anniversary programme is established by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, through the Romanian Embassy in Spain, as coordinator.The central moment of the cultural manifestations will be represented by the most important Romanian archaeological exhibition that was ever proposed to the Spanish audience. "Dacia - the Last Frontier of the Roman World," to be held at the National Museum of Archeology in Madrid. The exhibition will be organised under the coordination of the Ministry of Culture, through the National History Museum of Romania, with the support of the Romanian Cultural Institute and the Ministry of National Defence.The cultural programme also includes the following events: a presentation of the history of the Romanian culture in Madrid, various set-ups in the public space (the exhibition of the "Fiesta" installation, a project conceived and made by architects Attila Kim and Bogdan Ciocodeica), concerts, including a George Enescu anniversary moment, exhibitions (the Romanian-Spanish diplomatic archives, a common exhibition Romania-Spain, an exhibition of the Memorial of the Victims of Communism) and so on.The funds needed for the preparation and unfolding of the Romania-Spain anniversary programme 2021 will be taken from the budgets of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of National Defence, the Ministry of Culture and the Romanian Cultural Institute. The Romania-Spain anniversary programme 2021 will also benefit from financial support from other institutions of the central and local public authorities, according to law.

AGERPRES

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Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- This time is different may be the most dangerous words in business: billions of dollars have been lost betting that history wont repeat itself. And yet now, in the oil world, it looks like this time really will be.For the first time in decades, oil companies arent rushing to increase production to chase rising oil prices as Brent crude approaches $70. Even in the Permian, the prolific shale basin at the center of the U.S. energy boom, drillers are resisting their traditional boom-and-bust cycle of spending.The oil industry is on the ropes, constrained by Wall Street investors demanding that companies spend less on drilling and instead return more money to shareholders, and climate change activists pushing against fossil fuels. Exxon Mobil Corp. is paradigmatic of the trend, after its humiliating defeat at the hands of a tiny activist elbowing itself onto the board.The dramatic events in the industry last week only add to what is emerging as an opportunity for the producers of OPEC+, giving the coalition led by Saudi Arabia and Russia more room for maneuver to bring back their own production. As non-OPEC output fails to rebound as fast as many expected -- or feared based on past experience -- the cartel is likely to continue adding more supply when it meets on June 1.CriminalizationShareholders are asking Exxon to drill less and focus on returning money to investors. They have been throwing money down the drill hole like crazy, Christopher Ailman, chief investment officer for CalSTRS. We really saw that company just heading down the hole, not surviving into the future, unless they change and adapt. And now they have to.Exxon is unlikely to be alone. Royal Dutch Shell Plc lost a landmark legal battle last week when a Dutch court told it to cut emissions significantly by 2030 -- something that would require less oil production. Many in the industry fear a wave of lawsuits elsewhere, with western oil majors more immediate targets than the state-owned oil companies that make up much of OPEC production.We see a shift from stigmatization toward criminalization of investing in higher oil production, said Bob McNally, president of consultant Rapidan Energy Group and a former White House official.While its true that non-OPEC+ output is creeping back from the crash of 2020 -- and the ultra-depressed levels of April and May last year -- its far from a full recovery. Overall, non-OPEC+ output will grow this year by 620,000 barrels a day, less than half the 1.3 million barrels a day it fell in 2020. The supply growth forecast through the rest of this year comes nowhere close to matching the expected increase in demand, according to the International Energy Agency.Beyond 2021, oil output is likely to rise in a handful of nations, including the U.S., Brazil, Canada and new oil-producer Guyana. But production will decline elsewhere, from the U.K. to Colombia, Malaysia and Argentina.As non-OPEC+ production increases less than global oil demand, the cartel will be in control of the market, executives and traders said. Its a major break with the past, when oil companies responded to higher prices by rushing to invest again, boosting non-OPEC output and leaving the ministers led by Saudi Arabias Abdulaziz bin Salman with a much more difficult balancing act.Drilling DownSo far, the lack of non-OPEC+ oil production growth isnt registering much in the market. After all, the coronavirus pandemic continues to constrain global oil demand. It may be more noticeable later this year and into 2022. By then, vaccination campaigns against Covid-19 are likely to be bearing fruit, and the world will need more oil. The expected return of Iran into the market will provide some of that, but there will likely be a need for more.When that happens, it will be largely up to OPEC to plug the gap. One signal of how the recovery will be different this time is the U.S. drilling count: It is gradually increasing, but the recovery is slower than it was after the last big oil price crash in 2008-09. Shale companies are sticking to their commitment to return more money to shareholders via dividends. While before the pandemic shale companies re-used 70-90% of their cash flow into further drilling, they are now keeping that metric at around 50%.The result is that U.S. crude production has flat-lined at around 11 million barrels a day since July 2020. Outside the U.S. and Canada, the outlook is even more somber: at the end of April, the ex-North America oil rig count stood at 523, lower than it was a year ago, and nearly 40% below the same month two years earlier, according to data from Baker Hughes Co.When Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz predicted earlier this year that drill, baby, drill is gone for ever, it sounded like a bold call. As ministers meet this week, they may dare to hope hes right.More stories like this are available on bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.2021 Bloomberg L.P.
Before the pandemic, Va'La Hospitality's 1,000-square-foot Los Angeles office served as a sleek creative headquarters for the bar consulting agency. The brick-lined room's bar and lounge area were adorned with a mid-century modern hutch and glassware. Nowadays, it's crammed with commercial refrigerators, hundreds of crates and thousands of pounds of beans and rice.

The space has become the hub for No Us Without You, a small nonprofit group that has been providing food security for nearly a year to a group of people forgotten amid the pandemic: undocumented restaurant workers. These laborers made up 10% of the U.S. restaurant and bar industry in 2014, according to the Pew Research Center.

Every week, No Us Without You is now feeding 1,500 L.A. families - a total of 7,500 people - with fresh produce and dry goods. The organization has evolved, implementing more programs to meet the needs of this vulnerable sector: diaper donations, coronavirus testing, student tutoring, rental assistance and a community fridge. They've also extended their food boxes to mariachi performers, day laborers and street vendors.

Va'La Hospitality co-owners Damian Diaz and Othon Nolasco founded No Us Without You in March, when Los Angeles first issued a covid-19 "safer at home" order. Being consultants for some of the most popular bars and restaurants in the city, they knew that as undocumented back-of-the-house employees, some of their former colleagues would face massive job losses and receive little to no government assistance because of their status.

"Everyone thinks they get paid cash under the table; there might be a few mom-and-pop places that still do that, but it's very rare to hear," says Nolasco, 40. "The risk is just too high to not have people on payroll, especially if they get hurt with workman's comp. These families are paying into a system that they are not eligible to benefit from and are getting taxed every paycheck for unemployment insurance . . . and not being able to get unemployment insurance."

Of the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country, many are cumulatively paying billions of dollars each year to state and local taxes, according to the nonpartisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. Some file taxes under an individual taxpayer identification number in hopes that one day it will help their case in gaining legal status. Others apply for jobs through fake Social Security numbers, and their employers withhold payroll taxes.

No Us Without You is one of a few efforts around the country to help undocumented restaurant workers during the pandemic. At its start last year, the team behind Win Son and Win Son Bakery in Brooklyn launched a fundraiser for the community that by the end of March had brought in more than $30,000, according to Eater NY. Revolutionizing Asian American Immigrant Stories on the East Coast (RAISE) raised more than $90,000 to support nearly 500 undocumented restaurant workers in New York City.

In mid-March, Diaz and Nolasco reached out to the dishwashers and cooks they knew and explained that the pandemic was most likely going to last for a while.

"That really scared people because they're like, 'Well, what are we going to do? We don't have money saved. How will we pay our rent?' " Nolasco says. "These are hard-working people, working two or three jobs just to really survive, and the little money that is left over, it gets sent back home to Central America or Mexico."

The first day, the duo loaded up Nolasco's 12-year-old truck with food they bought using $400 of their own money. Diaz calculated that it would cost $33 to feed a family of four for a week. They ended up helping 10 families.

As they connected with more people and word began to spread, their list of families ballooned. They built a social media presence and asked friends and family to donate money.

One of the first people Nolasco contacted was Cedric Ransburg, a 35-year-old bartender who had previously worked with Va'La Hospitality. He's been volunteering with No Us Without You for five days a week since its beginnings and has seen firsthand how it's grown. "The day I realized I didn't have to use my Prius to carry things anymore, that's how I knew that things were changing," Ransburg recalls.

Corporate sponsors started lending a hand. Tecate bought them a refrigerated box truck. Sysco Corp. and PepsiCo gifted them refrigerators. The team began ordering boxes of food from Vesta Foodservice instead of packaging the items themselves.

They were learning as they went, something Nolasco admits they're still doing. Worried that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement would show up to their office, they shifted to having recipients pick up food at locations that regularly change. To maintain social distancing, they've organized a contactless drive-through pickup. They also deliver to those who can't get to them.

No Us Without You now turns out 150,000 pounds of food every week, with the help of nearly a dozen volunteers composed of bar industry folks. They have a queue of more than 100 families vetted by Diaz, who plans to add them to the program as it raises more funds through donations and grants.

Diaz spends nearly every day on the phone, checking in with each of the families the way a social worker would, listening to their worries and noting their needs.

"What I hear is fear, paranoia and, in some cases, helplessness," says Diaz, 35. "I've had families reach out to me saying that they want to kill themselves and they can't take this anymore because they are tired of seeing their two or three kids go to the refrigerator every day prior to our help to see an empty fridge."

One of their first recipients was Jose Ventura, a 49-year-old undocumented restaurant worker hailing from Oaxaca, Mexico. Ventura had been working more than 50 hours a week to provide for his family back home, including paying for his three daughters' higher education. But his work hours yo-yoed as the pandemic raged on.

Ventura first heard about No Us Without You through a mutual friend and has been receiving food boxes ever since.

"I feel strongly that the help I'm receiving from the organization is more than I could have expected from the government itself," Ventura says in Spanish through a translator. He wonders when members of his community will get the coronavirus vaccine, saying that their lives matter because they add value to the U.S. economy.

Mercedes Cortes, a 59-year-old undocumented street vendor from Puebla, Mexico, first heard about the nonprofit on Telemundo before she was linked to them through a friend in May.

"To digest other people wanting to help this sector of the populace here was unfathomable," Cortes says in Spanish, adding that she hates feeling like a criminal in this country.

Cortes, who is raising her 11-year-old granddaughter and sends money back home, says she's thankful that the organization helps with her family's basic needs. She came to the United States over 20 years ago in search of a better and safer life for her and her family.

"My family and I came to work in this country and be honorable humans," Cortes says. "My husband and I both pay taxes, fees for street vending, and tickets we receive on the street when we forget to move our car."

The organization is not planning on capping the number of people it serves. Diaz and Nolasco are thinking ahead and even recently leased some land to grow produce for their food boxes, with plans to create jobs through that.

While Nolasco finds his work with No Us Without You to be meaningful, he bristles at some of the backlash his team has received from people upset that the group is supporting undocumented workers.

"We're happy to feed those that have fed us for years," Nolasco says. "At the end of the day, if you take all politics aside, we are feeding families. We're feeding mothers and children. If you have a problem with little kids and parents who are out of work getting food that has nothing to do with you politically, I just don't know what to tell you."
New Delhi, Feb 10 : A Delhi court is slated to pronounce on Wednesday the judgment in the criminal defamation case filed by former Union Minister and veteran journalist M.J. Akbar against fellow journalist Priya Ramani for accusing him of sexual misconduct.

In the wake of #MeToo movement in 2018, Ramani had made allegation of sexual harassment against Akbar. Pursuant to this, he filed the criminal defamation case against her and resigned as the Union Minister. Trial began in 2019 and went on for almost two years.

In 2017, Ramani wrote an article for the Vogue where she described her ordeal of being sexually harassed by a former boss during her job interview for his publication. One year later, she revealed that the person alluded to as harasser in article was M.J. Akbar.

Akbar told the court that Ramani's allegations were fictitious and cost him his stellar reputation and position. Priya Ramani, on the other hand, contested these claims, pleaded truth as her defence and said that she made allegations in good faith, public interest, and for public good.

If found guilty, Ramani would be punished with imprisonment for a term which may extend to two years, or with fine, or with both. The judgement in the case will also set a precedent for similar cases which arose from the discourse-changing #MeToo movement.

On February 1, Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Ravindra Kumar Pandey had reserved the judgement in the case after hearing rebuttal arguments of counsel of the complainant -- Advocate Geeta Luthra for M.J. Akbar and Rebacca John for Priya Ramani.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Potential and policy

Vietnam was quite fortunate to meet the electricity demand in 2020, but this will be difficult to repeat in 2021 because of the obvious danger of power shortage. Therefore, to ensure enough electricity for socio-economic development from 2021 onwards, the promotion of wind and solar power projects is both necessary and urgent, in addition to solutions to remove difficulties for stagnant projects and promote electricity saving.

According to the World Bank (WB), Vietnams offshore wind power has a potential of 475GW and the total capacity of Vietnam's currently operating power plants is about 40GW, with the main sources from hydroelectricity and coal-fired thermal power. The potential for offshore wind power is many times higher than the existing capacity, capable of meeting current and future power demand.

To encourage investment in wind power development, the Prime Minister issued Decision 39/2018/Q-TTg on September 10, 2018, on amending and supplementing a number of articles of Decision 37/2011/Q -TTg dated June 29, 2011, on the support mechanism for wind power projects in Vietnam.

Accordingly, the price of wind power in the mainland has been increased to VND1,927 per kWh while offshore wind power will be VND2,223 per kWh. This electricity price will be applied to a part or the whole plant with commercial operation date before November 1, 2021, and applied in 20 years from the date of commercial operation.

Therefore, businesses and investors have made efforts to speed up progress of wind power plants to enjoy incentives from the Governments policy.

However, a renewable energy expert said that investing in wind power to enjoy incentives will also face certain risks. The investment in wind power is much more difficult than in solar power projects, together with the influence of the COVID-19, so many projects are facing the possibility of delaying progress.

In addition, with the wind power project added to the planning, the investors must take wind measurement data for at least 12 months to complete the feasibility study report. Only after the wind measurement data has been gathered can investors conduct the design for the project. Moreover, investors are also worried about the price mechanism, difficulties in construction, policies and laws, and the transmission of wind power to the national grid.

Nguyen Tam Tien, the General Director of Trung Nam Group - one of the companies investing largely in renewable energy projects, said that Vietnam is facing the opportunity to welcome a big wave of investment after the COVID-19 pandemic, including in the field of renewable energy, but to seize the opportunity we must have superior policies than other countries.

In my opinion, there should have a preferential, clear and stable price policy, because good policies will help us attract private resources, and then investors themselves will have to develop the best plans and solutions to promote the efficiency of their projects and the people will be the biggest beneficiaries. In other words, good policies will help renewable energy projects to develop sustainably, Tien emphasised.

Stable and consistent

Amid the difficulties facing investors, the Ministry of Industry and Trade reported to the Prime Minister for the approval of the extension of the time of applying the increasing electricity prices for wind power projects under Decision 39 until the end of 2023.

The Ministry of Industry and Trade is also studying the mechanism of selling electricity directly from electricity producers to electricity consumers.

This mechanism will create a driving force to attract investment from various economic sectors to develop power sources, especially renewable energy, towards creating a competitive electricity retail market in accordance with the Politburo's Resolution No. 55-NQ/TW dated February 11, 2020, on the national energy development strategy until 2030, with a vision to 2045.

In particular, thanks to the effectiveness of the EU-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement (EVFTA), large capital sources and offshore wind power technology from the EU will easily participate in promoting offshore wind power in Vietnam.

Experts and investors hope that the opportunity has converged enough for Vietnam to make a breakthrough to lead ASEAN and become a major offshore wind power centre of the world. It is also the driving factor for the marine industries and services and for the export of wind power to ASEAN and neighbouring regions.

Thus, it is not only necessary to have a good price mechanism to attract private investment in energy sector, but also the stable and consistent mechanisms and policies. In addition, related recommendations should be clearly quantified to ensure the transmitting capacity of the wind power projects and the capacity for power absorption of the power system in the project area.
Former Love Island star Dr Alex George has joined Virgin Media Ones The Six OClock Show as the shows resident doctor.

Dr Alex, who is currently working on the frontline with the NHS, joined Muireann OConnell and Martin King via video to discuss medical advancements and myths surrounding the coronavirus.

The medic said that the last few months have been tough but that things are improving now that a significant number of vaccines have been administered in the UK.

He discussed some misconceptions about the vaccinations with the The Six OClock Show hosts, saying that there are always side effects with every vaccine. After the first dose, the next day I was a bit achy.

Dr Alex addressed the public concern's about major side effects, saying When you have the vaccine, we ask you to sit there and if theres a serious reaction it will be in the first minute or so of having the vaccine.

Read More

And he told how one of the unexpected benefits of the Covid-19 pandemic is that fewer people have been prescribed antibiotics in the last year.

Around one-fifth less prescriptions have been given out, he revealed.

Last week, Prime Minister Boris Johnson appointed Dr Alex as an Ambassador for Mental Health, advocating for better mental health facilities and support after the death of his younger brother Llyr. He was asked about his new role on the show and said he is investigating how young people can be supported and school and university.

The diagnosis of mental health in children has gone from one in nine to one in six, said Dr Alex.

He stressed the importance of having a routine and getting outside while respecting Covid guidelines, adding that fresh air is great for the mind and body.

Dr Alex also encouraged viewers to consider taking Vitamin D supplements (after consulting their doctor) as we do not get enough Vitamin D from sunlight alone. It plays a role in mental health and bone health.

The Six OClock Show airs weeknights at 6pm on Virgin Media One.
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Its no surprise that the PlayStation 5 (PS5) has been extremely popular since its launch in November, with over four million consoles sold since launch. However, what is surprising is that the PS5 has broken all launch month gaming hardware sales records ever, despite its steep prices at $500 for the full console and $400 for the digital edition, not to mention its launch in the middle of the largest economic disaster since the Great Depression. In fact, the console was so popular that it is nearly impossible to find one online before they become sold out  unless, of course, youre willing to pay upwards of over $1,000 for one.

So whats the secret to putting the PS5 in as many households as possible? What has made it so that any restock in stores is cleared out by customers within the same day? And why does the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines look entirely different, with vaccines sitting on shelves and advocates calling out to not let them expire?

Well, as fortune would have it, there are a multitude of much-needed lessons we can learn from Sonys rollout of its next-gen console that would revolutionize mass vaccination efforts moving forward.

Limited supply

Sonys limited supply of PS5s has created a rush to be the first get one and join an exclusive group of fans who bought the console and experienced it early on. The exclusivity of the COVID vaccine has led to select healthcare facilities and pharmacies providing a limited stock of the vaccine to only a single premium group of people at a time. Thus, the rush for exclusivity and saving loved ones from getting the virus doesnt manifest like scrambling to buy a PS5 in time for Christmas break. By excluding so many people from early vaccination efforts through tiered vaccination plans, the vast majority of the demand for the vaccine was effectively removed from the start, creating inequities in vaccine availability.

First-come, first-serve

Yet, the highlight of selling the PS5 was that it was sold on a first-come, first-serve basis, like any other product. The high demand led to long intermittent stretches of sold-out stock at virtually all locations. Thats not a bad thing though  in fact, it signals that console sales were so efficient that demand for the PS5 outperformed the fastest manufacturing and supply shipments possible. When every single individual product is sold to consumers as quickly as possible, thats efficiency at its very best.

Oppositely, in my own state of Pennsylvania, our vaccination plan has been anything but efficient. The plan is divided into four tiers  Phase 1A, 1B, 1C, and 2. The state has been in Phase 1A since the vaccines became available here in December. Phase 1A does not include front-line workers, such as EMS personnel, grocery store clerks, city bus drivers, teachers, and daycare coordinators  high-risk groups who can spread the virus throughout cities much more easily than the healthcare workers and seniors included in Phase 1A. Especially with healthcare workers already universally masking, which significantly slows the spread of COVID-19, prioritizing vaccines for healthcare workers may not have been the best choice for efficient vaccine rollout.

Because vaccines were prioritized similarly across the country, people have faced moral dilemmas that shouldnt have occurred. One physician in Texas recently went to court for stealing a COVID-19 vaccine vial. His reason?  the leftover vaccine in the open vials would have expired had nobody used it within a few hours, so he took it home for his family after failing to find healthcare workers who did not already get vaccinated under phase one of the states strategy. Now, he is facing punishment of up to one year in jail and a $4,000 fine for breaking from county guidelines. This is not the kind of person who should be prosecuted in this pandemic.

Clear communication

When PS5s are available, stores and news outlets know the anticipated restock dates and relay that information to consumers so that people can purchase them as soon as consoles restock at stores. There are even Twitter accounts, like Wario64, that people can follow for live updates on PS5 restocks online.

As for COVID-19 vaccines, why do we not communicate vaccine restocks to the general public? The story of the Texan physician from earlier is a symptom of this bigger problem. Leaving vaccines for the select few instead of opening efforts to everybody has led to thousands of them sitting on shelves and left to expire. In turn, this has led us to witness patches of cities with huge shortages of vaccines alongside surpluses of it in warehouses. But it doesnt have to be this way.

What if we had clear communication between pharmacies, hospitals, and local governing bodies about where the stock of vaccines is used up and where there is a surplus? If we could be as efficient as the gaming community has been with announcing PS5 restocks, we might have a fighting chance to curb the outright trashing of vaccines that are currently being left to expire.

Console preorder

When the PS5 was first announced, fans could place preorders and have it shipped to their homes or available for pickup in-store on day one. Preorders allow stores to estimate the rate at which they will sell the console early in its release and plan how many to buy accordingly. It also ensures that consoles get into consumers hands as fast as possible, keeping consumers, stores, and Sony happy.

So far, we have only very recently seen some localities implementing a similar strategy to preorders for vaccinations. In places like New Jersey and Philadelphia, pre-registration for the vaccine is a new option for the general public to be pre-placed into a respective tier so that they can get the vaccine as soon as possible. While this is promising for a better rollout moving forward, this needs to be the standard across all states so vaccines can sell out as quickly as Sonys PS5.

No PlayStation 5 shaming

Never have gamers shamed gamers who obtained the PS5 early on launch day. People are not angry that PS5s werent left for children who needed them more in this difficult past holiday season. Yet, when it came to people trying to keep themselves and their families protected from a virus that is almost unprecedented in its killing capacity, honest and good-willed people were shamed for wearing masks when healthcare workers need them more, then shamed for not wearing masks when it became law, and finally, shamed again for getting vaccinations when healthcare workers need them more. Instead of empathizing with others and realizing that people are following their natural instincts to protect themselves, this mixed messaging and villainization has led to a thoroughly weak public health effort overall. In the one moment in recent history that a strong emergency preparedness sector was vital, we were unclear about expectations and harsh with people who were only doing what was best for their loved ones. Lets be clear  shaming is not a public health strategy.

Its time for us to broaden our vaccination strategy and leave our mistakes behind. Although PS5 rollout has not been without its own challenges, Sony has been successful because they know how to get a product into peoples hands. At this point, we have a chance to learn and revolutionize our vaccine strategy. Pretty soon, we will see PS5s on shelves like any other product, but that will be after the rush to get early access is over, not at the initial launch  which is what weve seen with the vaccine so far. If we want COVID-19 vaccine rollout to be as successful as the PS5, we need to learn from the best in marketing business and emulate Sonys tactics for worldwide success year after year.

Zane Kaleem is a medical student and can be reached on Twitter @zanekaleem.

Image credit: Shutterstock.com

The company had in December 2020 announced plans to invest Rs 7,000 crore in the next few years to double downstream capacity to six lakh tonnes a year.

"Our net debt to Ebitda ratio will be 3.1 by March 2021. We expect this to come down to below 3, in the next financial year," Managing Director Satish Pai said on February 10, while addressing the media after the company announced its third quarter results. In June 2020, the ratio was 3.8.

The company reported a 76.2 percent year-on-year (YoY) jump in December quarter standalone net profit to Rs 340 crore. In the corresponding quarter of the previous financial year, the profit was Rs 193 crore.

The number, however, came lower than the market expectations as a CNBC-TV18 poll had estimated it at Rs 380 crore.

Pai noted that demand for aluminium, at nearly a million tons a month, was back to its pre-COVID-19 levels.

Increasing investment, lowering debt

Hindalco will invest Rs 730 crore on a 34,000-tonne extrusion plant at Silvassa. The fully automated plant includes three extrusion presses and will enable Hindalco to service premium customers in the building & construction, auto & transport, electrical, consumer and industrial goods sectors.

New Delhi, Feb 10 : The Goa Assembly Speaker on Wednesday informed the Supreme Court that the Legislative Assembly would consider on February 26 a petition filed by a Congress leader seeking disqualification of 10 MLAs, who switched to BJP in July 2019.

Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, representing the Assembly Speaker, submitted before a bench headed by Chief Justice S. A. Bobde. The bench also comprising Justices A.S. Bopanna and V. Ramasubramanian, in its order, said: "Tushar Mehta, Solicitor General appearing for the Respondent(s), states that the disqualification petition(s) has been listed by the Respondent - the Speaker Goa State Legislative Assembly, for disposal on February 26, 2021. List these matters in the first week of March." During the brief hearing in the matter, the bench orally stressed that the disqualification pleas should be kept for disposal. The remarks were made by the bench. Mehta said that disqualification petition would be heard on February 26. "We are saying disposal in the order," bench observed orally.

A plea was filed by Congress leader Girish Chodankar from Goa seeking disqualification of 10 MLAs who switched to BJP from Congress in July 2019. He had argued that the disqualification pleas have been pending for one and a half years, and it is yet to be heard.

In the disqualification plea, Chodankar had contended that these MLAs had ex-facie incurred disqualification under Article 191(2) of the Constitution, read with para 2 of the Tenth Schedule. He insisted that they are liable to be disqualified as member of the Assembly.

During arguments, the Congress leader had cited the Supreme Court verdict, which ruled that the Speaker must decide disqualification matter at the earliest. "The Speaker must decide now", said senior advocate Kapil Sibal, who was representing Chodankar, citing the decision in Keisham Meghachandra Singh v. The Hon'ble Speaker Manipur Legislative Assembly & Others, which set a 3-month time line for the Speaker to decide on disqualification.
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By Ritah Kemigisa

The government has unblocked social media services nearly a month after a shutdown was imposed on the eve of the January 14th poll.

Early last month, the government restored internet services but social media platforms remain blocked and were only accessible using Virtual Private Networks (VPN).

In a tweet, this morning, the Minister of State for ICT and National Guidance Peter Ogwang confirmed that internet and social media services have been fully restored.

He has meanwhile apologized to Ugandans for the inconveniences caused but says it was for the security of our country.

Minister Ogwang has asked Ugandans to use the services for constructive purposes.

President Museveni who won his 6th term in office had since accused the platforms of being undemocratic.

Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter played a crucial role in mobilizing support for NUPs Robert Kyagulanyi.

AS the white pirogue drifted in the waters just off Belle Garden in Tobago early yesterday morning, fishermen working nearby knew something was wrong.

What they saw in the small vessel stunned them.

Fourteen bodies, all of them male, along with a skull and other skeletal remains, were piled inside the vessel as it floated four miles off Belle Garden, police confirmed.

The bodies were all clad in tracksuits and green rain jackets and were severely decomposed, police investigators said.

Parents have been urged to show keen interest in the type of contents their children post or watch on the internet and the various social media platforms.



They should monitor and encourage the children to be circumspect when posting stuff on the internet.



Mr Stephen Ofosu, Ashanti Regional Director of the Department of Children, who made the call, said parents had a critical role to play in the kind of information their children assimilate from the internet.



He was speaking at separate outreach programmes in some schools and markets in Kumasi to mark this years Safer Internet Day celebration.



It was organized by the Ashanti regional Department of Children under the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection as part of efforts to promote safer use of the internet by children and the youth.



This years celebration, which was on the theme Positioning and Partnering for Child Online Protection, was supported by Child Online Africa, a child welfare NGO.



Among the schools visited were the A.M.E Zion JHS and Ahmadiyya Islamic JHS cluster of schools in Kumasi.



Mr Ofosu, stressed the need for children to ensure that contents posted on the internet did not carry pornography and other harmful materials that could destroy their holistic development.



He advised children to use the internet for research and educational purposes to enhance their academic performances.



Mr Ofosu also advised the school children and market women to continue to adhere strictly to all the COVID-19 preventive protocols to reduce the rise in the number of positive cases in the country.

Source: GNA









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

Featured Video
Aunt Jemimas new name is getting mocked mercilessly on social media.

Quaker Oats, a division of PepsiCo Inc., announced Tuesday that its iconic pancake mix and syrup will be renamed the Pearl Milling Company. Aunt Jemima products will continue to be sold until June when the brand name change takes effect; products will still have the same familiar red packaging.

Pearl Milling Company is named after the company founded in 1888 in St. Joseph, Missouri, that originated the self-rising pancake mix.

Quaker said last year it would retire the Aunt Jemima name because the characters origins are based on a racial stereotype. The image and character were inspired by the 19th century mammy minstrel character, a Black woman content to serve her white masters; mammy was often portrayed by white actors in blackface.

A Syracuse woman, Anna Short Harrington, portrayed Aunt Jemima from 1935 to 1954 after being discovered while cooking pancakes at the 1935 New York State Fair. She was hired as an actress to dress up like Aunt Jemima and travel North America, serving pancakes and promoting the brand. Nancy Green, a former slave, originated the role with an apron and head scarf in 1893.

The new logo features an illustration of the Pearl Milling Company instead of Aunt Jemimas smiling face, and the packaging features the new name in a similar font.

This image provided by PepsiCo, Inc., shows Quaker Oats' Pearl Milling Company brand pancake mix and syrup, formerly the Aunt Jemima brand. Aunt Jemima products will continue to be sold until June 2021, when the packaging will officially change over. (PepsiCo, Inc. via AP)AP

Many social media users agreed a new name was needed, but didnt like the choice the company landed on.

Aunt Jemima was a legend. Pearl Milling Company? You go woke and become a joke. Never will I buy this wannabe knock-off of the legend. You just lost a life long customer, one Twitter user wrote.

Another joked that it sounded like the Dunder Mifflin Paper Company from The Office, and shared a Photoshopped image of what Im gonna think EVERYTIME I hear the name Pearl Milling Company.

Pearl Milling Company sound like the plantation they had Aunt Jemima... at! Im not falling for the trap! a third tweet said.

Im not writing Pearl Milling Company on my grocery list, a fourth tweeted.

Pearl Milling Company is a bad name for pancake mix and syrup. It just doesnt sound like something edible, a fifth Twitter user said.

Aunt Jemima was very problematic. But Pearl Milling Company sounds like something undelicious that needs to be cleaned off the factory floor, another agreed. Think Ill stick with maple syrup.

Others joked that Pearl Milling sounded like a mining company or a gravel manufacturer.

See more social media reactions:

Anyone feel like the new #auntjemima syrup will just taste worse because of the name change.  Big T (@TheDeizzle) February 10, 2021

Pearl Milling Company is a bad name for pancake mix and syrup. it just doesnt sound like something edible https://t.co/JggQhEQwi8  Ska Nate (@shoupp_n) February 10, 2021

I think it sounds like a gravel mining company.  Michelle J. Rozovics (@RozoRuminations) February 10, 2021

Aunt Jemima was very problematic. But Pearl Milling Company sounds like something undelicious that needs to be cleaned off the factory floor. Think I'll stick with maple syrup. #rebrandingsyrup pic.twitter.com/UUgFjJ9LjN  Jim Maxwell (@1jcmaxwell) February 10, 2021

Cant wait to find out the Pearl Milling Company is built on an old Indian burial ground. https://t.co/TWu16UksKZ  Mike Schmidt (@The40YearOldBoy) February 10, 2021

The problem for me with Aunt Jemima changing to Pearl Milling Company is that the branding is so ingrained that even with the new name and logo, I still see the old logo and name. #AuntJemima #advertising pic.twitter.com/QqWraR23Pj  Jenny Kalahar (@jennybookseller) February 9, 2021

PEARL MILLING COMPANY SOUNDS LIKE THE NAME OF AN OBSCURE YET HIGHLY INFLUENTIAL LATE '60s/EARLY '70s BAND THAT PLAYED A HYBRID STYLE OF ROCK AND FUNK WITH A JAZZ INFLUENCE  Dart_Adams (@Dart_Adams) February 10, 2021

Im not writing Pearl Milling Company on my grocery list.#auntjemima pic.twitter.com/e1SsYhP9jT  Irma (@tangled30) February 10, 2021

What I'm gonna think EVERYTIME I hear the name Pearl Milling Company...#PearlMillingCompany #AuntJemima pic.twitter.com/5URBsLpxYi  Leapin Lizard (@Leapin_Lizard) February 10, 2021

"at Pearl Milling Company, we pride ourselves in making the best quality maple syrup"

The Commercial: pic.twitter.com/zN9mSk5tPa  ElvisBrows27 (@ElvisBrows27) February 10, 2021

The brand formerly known as Aunt Jemima after they changed their name: pic.twitter.com/FBgYBIZlah  iBlewupthemoon (@iblewupthemoon) February 10, 2021

Pearl Milling Company sound like the plantation they had Aunt Jemima thick ass at! I'm not falling for the trap!  The 224 Podcast (@The224Podcast) February 10, 2021

Me at the store: Im looking for Aunt Jemima syrup! Clerk: sorry sir this is all we have. Me again: *leaves the store* pic.twitter.com/G3MIrc6vwB  Yo Midas (@YoMidas1) February 10, 2021

just texted the museum I got a historical artifact (aunt jemima) pic.twitter.com/xgWTKpiOyB   (@planetdoreen) February 10, 2021

Aunt Jemima was a legend. Pearl Milling Company? You go woke and become a joke. Never will I buy this wannabe knock-off of the legend. You just lost a life long customer. @pearl https://t.co/VJPbU0BXcJ  blunt force instrument (@bluntlyangry) February 10, 2021

Me at the grocery store looking for Aunt Jemima syrup tonight pic.twitter.com/D9nuasXR82  Rich (@UptownDCRich) February 10, 2021

The Associated Press reports Quaker Oats bought the Aunt Jemima brand in 1925 and modified its logo over the years to distance itself from negative stereotypes. However, social justice initiatives in the wake of George Floyds death and Black Lives Matter protests sparked many brands to make bigger changes, like Uncle Bens rice, now known as Bens Original.

Quaker said it sought input from customers, employees and external cultural experts in developing the new name for Aunt Jemima. The company said its also donating $1 million to groups that empower Black women and girls as part of the Pearl Milling Company rollout.

Great-grandson of Syracuses Aunt Jemima angry at her removal: This is an injustice
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YANGON, Myanmar  Large crowds demonstrating against the military takeover in Myanmar again defied a ban on protests Wednesday, even after security forces ratcheted up the use of force against them and raided the headquarters of the political party of ousted leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

Witnesses estimated that tens of thousands of protesters, if not more, turned out in Yangon and Mandalay, the countrys biggest cities. Rallies also took place in the capital Naypyitaw and elsewhere.

The protesters are demanding that power be restored to Suu Kyis deposed civilian government. They are also seeking freedom for her and other governing party members since the military detained them after blocking the new session of Parliament on Feb. 1.

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As part of Generation Z, we are first-time voters. This is our first time to protest as well, said one student who declined to give her name for fear of harassment. They negated our votes, and this is totally unfair. We do not want that. We hope they release our leaders and implement a real democracy.

The military says it acted because Novembers election, which Suu Kyis National League for Democracy won in a landslide, were marred by irregularities. The election commission had refuted the allegation.

Some demonstrators in Yangon gathered at foreign embassies to seek international pressure against the coup.

A small group outside the Japanese Embassy held signs and chanted We want democracy, we get dictators! They sat in several childrens wading pools, three or fewer per pool, in what appeared to be a tongue-in-cheek way of showing compliance with an emergency law that bans gatherings of more than five people.

Others marched through the city, chanting and waving flags of Suu Kyis party.

Another group hauled a fake coffin as part of a mock funeral for Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, the military chief who is the countrys new leader.

Civil servants in many areas have been risking their jobs to march with the protesters, and even some police have switched sides to oppose the coup. In a dramatic video shot Wednesday in a small village in Kayah State in eastern Myanmar, a group of 42 policemen and women declared their allegiance to the ousted elected government and resisted the entreaties of a senior officer to return to duty. Local residents flocked to their side to ward off any effort to arrest them.

The head of the U.N. International Labor Organization, Guy Ryder, urged Myanmars military leaders to ensure that workers and employers are able to exercise their freedom of association rights in a climate of complete freedom and security, free from violence and threats.

I call on the military to immediately remove orders restricting assemblies of more than five persons, a halt to the repression of dissenting voices and the full respect of workers fundamental and human rights and freedoms, Ryder said. I urge military leaders to ensure no workers, including civil servants, are detained, intimidated or harassed for participating in peaceful protests.

The burgeoning protests and the juntas latest raid suggest there is little room for reconciliation. The military, which ruled directly for five decades after a 1962 coup, used deadly force to quash a massive 1988 uprising and a 2007 revolt led by Buddhist monks.

In Naypyitaw and Mandalay on Tuesday, police sprayed water cannons and fired warning shots to try to clear away protesters. In Naypyitaw, they shot rubber bullets and apparently live rounds, wounding a woman protester, according to witnesses and footage on social media. The reports could not be independently confirmed.

Human Rights Watch cited a doctor at a Naypyitaw hospital as saying the woman was in critical condition. The doctor said the woman had a projectile lodged in her head, believed to be a bullet that had penetrated the back of the right ear, and had lost significant brain function. The doctor said a man had been also been treated with an upper body wound consistent with that of live ammunition.

State television network MRTV, in one of its few reports on the protests, on Tuesday night broadcast scenes it claimed showed the protesters were responsible for the violence.

Myanmar police should immediately end the use of excessive and lethal force the New York-based watchdog urged.

No major incidents were reported in connection with the big turnout at Wednesdays protest in Mandalay. Social media users said 82 people who had been arrested were freed due to the work of local lawyers.

Medical students and personnel, lawyers and Buddhist monks were among a huge cross-section of residents who marched in Mandalay, but the most social media buzz was generated by a contingent of shirtless muscled men with well-defined six-packs who were said to be members of a fitness gym.

Yangons most photogenic marchers were a group of young women who dressed in formal gowns more suitable for a wedding reception.

The military on Tuesday night raided the national headquarters of Suu Kyis party, which before the military seized power had been slated to take power for a second five-year term.

Kyi Toe, a spokesman for the party, wrote on Facebook that the army broke into the headquarters in Yangon and another office and took away documents and computer hardware. The headquarters was shuttered Wednesday.

U.S. President Joe Biden ordered new sanctions Wednesday, saying he was issuing an executive order that will prevent Myanmars generals from accessing $1 billion in assets in the United States. Biden added that more measures are to come.

The military must relinquish power it seized and demonstrate respect for the will of the people of Burma, he said.

A day earlier, the U.S. had strongly condemned the violence against demonstrators.

We repeat our calls for the military to relinquish power, restore democratically elected government, release those detained, and lift all telecommunication restrictions, and to refrain from violence, State Department spokesman Ned Price said.

New Zealand suspended all military and high-level political contact with Myanmar, Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta announced in Wellington, adding that any New Zealand aid should not go to or benefit Myanmars military government.

The U.N. Human Rights Council, the 47-member-state body based in Geneva, is to hold a special session on Friday to consider the human rights implications of the crisis in Myanmar.

Britain and the European Union spearheaded the request for the session, which will amount to a high-profile public debate among diplomats over the situation in Myanmar and could lead to a resolution airing concerns about the situation or recommending international action.

British tech tycoon Mike Lynch faces 'degrading' treatment in a US prison if he is extradited on fraud charges, a court was told yesterday.

Lawyers defending the 55-year-old warned that he suffers from health problems and cannot be guaranteed humane treatment if he is found guilty and imprisoned on the other side of the Atlantic.

And they said there was a 'realistic possibility' of criminal prosecution in the UK if his extradition is blocked  adding that 'the United States is not the global marshal of the corporate world'.

High stakes: Autonomy founder Mike Lynch outside court yesterday where he is fighting extradition to the US on fraud charges

They are calling for Lynch's extradition to be blocked on grounds that the claims against him mostly concern actions in the UK and must be dealt with by the British justice system.

Lynch, who founded the Cambridge-based software firm Autonomy, is accused of cooking the books at his company before it was sold to Hewlett Packard for 7billion. He denies the allegations.

His case is seen as a key test of the 'forum bar' exception to the UK-US extradition treaty, which critics say is unbalanced.

But the US government yesterday dismissed Lynch's protestations as 'nonsense' and said his actions caused indisputable harm to a plethora of American victims, including businesses and individuals.

The opening clashes came on the first day of the high-stakes extradition hearing, which is taking place at Westminster magistrates' court this week.

If Lynch is extradited and found guilty in the US, he faces a decade in prison.

He has hired Alex Bailin, the star QC who successfully defended Pentagon hacker Lauri Love from extradition, to lead his legal team.

Yesterday, Bailin told District Judge Michael Snow that 'family man' Lynch, who is married with two daughters, was an upstanding British citizen with 'exceptionally strong' links to the UK and was someone who had at one stage served as a Government scientific adviser.

But he said the multi-millionaire lived in fear of arrest after US authorities laid charges against him, and that he could now be subjected to poor treatment at their hands if he was found guilty and jailed.

Lynch suffered from complex health conditions and if he was forced to share a jail cell with other inmates without private space he would be at risk of serious infection, Bailin said.

The QC told the court: 'There is no assurance from the [US] government that he will receive any of the medical items that he needs or that he will go to a specific prison.

'The reality is that Mr Lynch would face a degrading experience, with his particular medical and hygiene needs.

'He would not have access to private facilities and there is therefore a real risk that he would be unable to perform his daily hygiene needs and that would cause a cycle of getting infections.' Bailin added: 'The United States is not the global marshal of the corporate world.

'This case belongs in Britain: it concerns events, the overwhelming majority of which occurred in the United Kingdom. The forum bar in the extradition act was introduced and designed to provide protection in cases precisely such as this.'

The Autonomy fraud allegations, following the sale to HP in 2011, were investigated by the UK Serious Fraud Office but dropped due to a lack of evidence.

But Bailin told the hearing that the SFO reserved the right to prosecute Lynch if his extradition is blocked.

'What is clear is that a decision in Mr Lynch's favour by this court would not be an automatic get-out-of-jail-free card,' he said.

Speaking for the US government, Mark Summers QC insisted that Lynch would be provided with 'adequate' care by American authorities.

He said that it 'cannot be the case that someone with gastro-enterological problems is rendered immune from prison'.

He said: 'This case is straightforward. This was an English company, cooking its books in England, making it appear what it wasn't, and then persuading an American company to grossly overpay for it, based on those cooked books.

'The only unusual feature of this case was the titanic scale of the money involved.'

Former Autonomy finance chief Sushovan Hussain, a close ally of Lynch, was extradited and found guilty of fraud by a US court in 2019. He was jailed for five years.

Lynch has not left the UK since learning of the American extradition bid two years ago and has handed over his British and Irish passports to the authorities.

He appeared in person yesterday after spending the lockdown at his 6million Suffolk home with his family. The hearing continues.
TIGO Tanzania has unveiled a new service dubbed Amka na Tigo to reward customers free calls every day.

The Tigo Tanzania, Head of Marketing Services, William Mpinga, said, "We want to give back to all our customers at the beginning of the year as a reward for being part of our successes in 2020.

"We believe every customer is important to us and this offer signifies the fact that communications is essential service and we want to empower all our customers to make the right connections with friends, family and businesses very early in the day."

He said Amka na Tigo will empower all Tigo customers, since most people plan their day in the morning by talking to family, friends and business associates.
A malfunctioning automatic throttle may have caused the pilots of a Sriwijaya Air jet to lose control, resulting in the Boeing 737-500's crash into the Java Sea last month, Indonesian investigators said today.

National Transportation Safety Committee investigators said they are still struggling to understand why the jet nosedived into the water minutes after taking off from Jakarta on January 9, killing all 62 people on board.

The investigators issued a preliminary report that provided new details of the pilots' struggle to fly the plane from almost as soon as it became airborne.

A malfunctioning automatic throttle may have caused the pilots of a Sriwijaya Air jet to lose control, resulting in the Boeing 737-500's crash into the Java Sea last month, Indonesian investigators said today. Pictured, officials inspect debris from the crashed jet on January 9

Pictured, Indonesian Navy divers pull out a part of an airplane out of the water during a search operation for a Sriwijaya Air passenger jet that crashed into the sea on January 10

The Sriwijaya Air plane - with 62 people on board - took off from Soekarno-Hatta international airport on January 9 at 2.36pm for a 90-minute flight over the Java Sea between Jakarta and Pofntianak in West Kalimantan - Indonesia's section of Borneo island.

But at 2.40pm - just four minutes after takeoff - the Boeing B737-500 plane plunged nearly 11,000 feet in less than 60 seconds to an altitude of just 250 feet, with witnesses claiming they heard two explosions.

All 62 passengers and crew aboard the flight were Indonesian, including seven children and three babies.

The plane is an older model than the Boeing 737 MAX jet involved in two earlier fatal crashes - including the Indonesian Lion Air crash in 2018 which killed 189.

On Wednesday, the Indonesian authorities released an initial report on last month's deadly crash, as the hunt continued for the plane's still-missing cockpit voice recorder.

People watch the live broadcast of the Preliminary report Sriwijaya Air crash by The National Transportation Safety Commission (KNKT) in Jakarta, Indonesia, February 10

The Boeing 737-500's crashed into the Java Sea last month, killing 62 people. Shrapnel from the Sriwijaya Air plane was lifted from the crash site around the Thousand Islands on January 11

The lead investigator, Nurcahyo Utomo, said the left engine's throttle lever moved backward on its own while autopilot was engaged, reducing the power output of that engine before the jet plunged into the sea.

He said pilots of previous flights had reported problems with the automatic throttle system on the 26-year-old jet.

The pilots' last conversation with air traffic control was about 4 minutes after takeoff, when the crew responded an instruction to go up to 13,000 feet.

The plane's flight data recorder showed the plane reached an altitude of 10,900 feet and then began declining, Utomo said.

While on autopilot, power to the left engine was reduced while the right engine's power remained steady.

The pilot fought to bring the plane up, but it rolled onto its left side, Utomo said. A minute later the data recorder showed that the automatic throttle had been disengaged as the plane pitched down.

The flight data recorder stopped recording a few seconds later.

'So far, we don't know if the engine's throttle was broken or not, but it's an anomaly since the left throttle moved far back and the right did not,' Utomo said, adding that movements of an auto throttle are linked to 13 other components of the plane.

The chairman of the safety committee, Soerjanto Tjahjono, said several components have been sent to Boeing's factory for further investigation.

Divers were able to recover the crashed plane's flight data recorder, which tracks hundreds of parameters showing how the plane was being operated.

The plane - a Boeing B737-500 - is understood to have fallen 10,000 feet in less than 60 seconds just four minutes after it took off

Pictured on January 9, terrified relatives of the 62 people onboard the missing Sriwijaya Air flight wait for news at the Supadio airport in Pontianak - where the plane was expected to land

But they were unable to find the memory unit from the cockpit voice recorder, which could tell investigators what the pilots were doing - or failing to do - to regain control of the plane during the brief, erratic flight.

The module apparently broke away from other parts of the voice recorder during the crash.

Investigators are working with Boeing and engine maker General Electric to review the information from the flight data recorder.

A team from the US. National Transportation Safety Board and Federal Aviation Administration has also joined the investigation.

The report offered new details on persistent problems with an auto-throttle on the 737-500 on the Sriwijaya Air jet and the airline's efforts to fix them.

An auto-throttle can be used by pilots to set the speed automatically, thereby reducing their workload and wear on the engines.

Jakarta-based aviation analyst Gerry Soejatman said auto throttle problems should not cause the plane to crash unless combined with other factors, since the crew could simply turn off the auto throttle.

Rescuers are seen bringing up one of the engines. At 2.40pm - just four minutes after takeoff - the Boeing B737-500 plunged nearly 10,000ft in less than 60 seconds

Indonesian navy divers and other rescue members stand on rubber boats during the search and rescue operation for the Sriwijaya Air jet at the sea off the Jakarta coast on January 12

'I am not satisfied that this accident could be that simple. Other factors must have come into play,' Soejatman said. 'Pilots are trained to notice this and prevent loss of control.'

The plane had been out of service for almost nine months last year because of flight cutbacks caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Regulators and the airline said it underwent inspections before resuming commercial flights in December.

The disaster has reignited concerns about safety in Indonesia's aviation industry, which grew quickly after the economy was opened following the fall of dictator Suharto in the late 1990s.

The United States banned Indonesian carriers from operating in the country in 2007, lifting the action in 2016, citing improvements in compliance with international aviation standards. The European Union lifted a similar ban in 2018.

Sriwijaya Air has had only minor safety incidents in the past, though a farmer was killed in 2008 when a plane went off the runway while landing due to a hydraulic issue.

In 2018, a Boeing 737 MAX 8 jet operated by Indonesia's Lion Air crashed, killing 189 people. An automated flight-control system played a role in that crash, but the Sriwijaya Air jet did not have that system on board.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-11 06:06:14|Editor: huaxia

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by Xinhua writers Xia Lin, Liu Ya'nan

NEW YORK, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- U.S. governors, educators, scholars, artists as well as business people have manifested their determination to strengthen the cooperation between the United States and China in the upcoming Year of the Ox, while expressing their appreciation for the contributions made by the Chinese American community to this country.

Steve Orlins, president of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, said that the Ox symbolizes hardwork, persistence and honesty in Chinese culture, and for over 50 years, the committee's work has embodied those qualities.

"In this new year, in the spirit of the Ox, my National Committee colleagues and I will continue to work hard in building U.S.-China dialogues and exchanges, and improving the bilateral relationship," he added.

Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker said he is pleased to join the celebration, and wants to take a moment to wish those in the Chinese community throughout the Commonwealth a very happy Chinese Lunar New Year.

"We are proud to have such a vibrant piece of that culture here in the Commonwealth and especially in Boston. We are grateful for our continued friendship and collaboration," added the governor.

Lieutenant Governor of New York State Kathy Hochul said that she is very proud that New York State serves as the hub of rich culture and diversity, and it's home to more than 600,000 Chinese.

"We recognize that our strength comes through our diversity and that comes through the immigrants who have found their way here and built this country. That is why there is no room for xenophobia or hate in our state," she said.

"New York State stands with the Chinese community because together, we'll defeat COVID-19, and come back even stronger," added Hochul.

Harvard University President Lawrence Bacow conveyed a message that Harvard remains firm in its support of the collaborations that it has developed with scientists and researchers across China, some new and some going back in the years.

"Only by working together in mutual good faith, can we succeed in advancing the frontiers of knowledge and addressing the challenges we face in building a shared future that is safe, free, and fair for all," said Bacow.

"I also want you to know that Harvard remains committed to welcoming to our campus Chinese students and scholars in all fields of study, as we do from scholars and students from all over the world," he added.

Henry Lee, professor emeritus at University of New Haven, on this occasion showed his "deepest gratitude and appreciation" to all the Chinese in the United States.

"You are true the pillar of our community. You are the capstone of harmony. We work hard. We are honest and put the community together in such integrity," he added.

Tony Malkin, CEO, president and chairman of the Empire State Realty Trust, confirmed the message that the Empire State Building will be lit in red on Feb. 10 from sunset until 2 am to celebrate this significant holiday.

"We are proud that this lighting continues to celebrate not only the Lunar New Year, but also the ongoing partnership between the Empire State Building and the Chinese people, and the people of Chinese descent all around the world," he added.

Matias Tarnoposky, president and CEO of the Philadelphia Orchestra, said that the orchestra first connected with the people of China nearly 50 years ago.

"We value the people-to-people exchange through music that has marked our relationship since then. In these unprecedented times, it is important to remember the power the music has to bring us together now and in the future," he said.

"Music is a unifying, equalizing force," he added.

Clive Gillinson, executive and artistic director of Carnegie Hall, said that now more than ever, music serves as an inspiring bridge between peoples and cultures especially during a time of great distancing for most of us.

"May the Year of the Ox bring us all many opportunities to expand our partnership and continue our work together, to advance mutual cultural celebration both here and abroad," he added.

Chinese Consul General in New York Huang Ping expressed his appreciation for the above dignitaries to send their best wishes on the occasion of the Chinese Lunar New Year. He also highlighted the Chinese people's determination and perseverance to write a new chapter in 2021 with their U.S. counterparts.

"In spite of the dark clouds overshadowing China-U.S. relations in the past year, the two peoples supported each other in fighting the pandemic, put hearts together to overcome difficulties and preserve the bonds of people-to-people exchanges," he said.

"The spirit of mutual respect and win-win cooperation continue to prevail. The expectations for a sound and steady development of China-U.S. relations stay strong under new circumstances," he added.

The Chinese Lunar New Year, or Spring Festival, is the most important holiday for Chinese around the world. This year's Spring Festival falls on Feb. 12, which marks the beginning of the Year of the Ox. Enditem
Family and friends of longtime local lead prosecutor Stan Lanzo who died Feb. 4 have set up the Stan Lanzo Christmas Fund to honor his life and commitment to those children less fortunate. The fund will provide Christmas presents to the Chattanooga area foster children with a particular emphasis on older children. In lieu of flowers, contributions in his memory should go to the Stan Lanzo Christmas Fund, Chattanooga Bar Foundation, 801 Broad St., Suite 420, Chattanooga, TN 37402. Contribute to Stan Lanzos Christmas Fund online here Attorney Lanzo passed away a battle with Parkinsons disease. Attorney Lanzo passed away a battle with Parkinsons disease.

He was born on Sept. 7, 1942 to Rocco Anthony and Elizabeth Irene (Case) Lanzo and was a native of Revere, Mass.

After he graduated from the University of Tennessee Law School in 1968, he began a career as an attorney that would span nearly six decades. He moved to Chattanooga following law school and served as assistant district attorney until he retired from the DAs office in 1996 and moved into private practice.

It was said of him, "All who met Stan remembered his larger-than-life laugh, his love for travel, and his distinct Boston accent. He commanded respect in the courtroom and served Hamilton County with integrity.

"Mr. Lanzo left a lasting legacy in his adopted home state of Tennessee. He fought tirelessly as an advocate for victims, protected the community as a prosecutor, and, later, stood up for the rights of Tennesseans as a defense lawyer. Although a determined litigator in the courtroom, he had a heart of gold and a soft spot for the less fortunate. Each Christmas he would ask for a list of children in local foster care and make sure to fulfill their entire wish lists to Santa. In particular, he made sure the older children received gifts, as he was afraid they might be overlooked.

"To his family, he was the head of the household and a caregiver to his late mother, Irene. To his nieces, he dubbed himself Prince Charming and the name stuck. To his nephews, he was an adventurous boat captain and a loyal travel companion. And if anyone was ever in need in his extended family, Stan was there to help. Stan Lanzo left this world better than he found it and will be sorely missed. May you rest in peace: The Man. The Myth, The Legend, the Italian Stallion..

Survivors include sister, Carol Lanzo Anderson; brother-in-law, Richard D. Paul; nieces; Beth Paul Wolpman, (A.J.), Brenda Paul Asmus, (Chris), Janyce Peach Lever, Sharyn Peach; great-nephews; Zachary Asmus, Benjamin Asmus, (Taryn); Great-nieces, Jessica Wolpman Bian, (Kevin), Jillian Wolpman, Maren Asmus, Alexis Lever and his dear friend Tommy Payne and family.

Mr. Lanzo was preceded in death by his parents, sister, Marilyn Lanzo Paul, brother-In-law Ray Anderson and nephew Bart Savage.

Arrangements are by Bisbee-Porcella Funeral Home.
(Natural News) Democrats often tout their allegiance to our nations founding document, the U.S. Constitution, but in fact, they dump on it regularly and hold it up only when it suits their political objectives, all of which pretty much amount to amassing more power.

Last summer, as Black Lives Matter and Antifa thugs burned cities, destroyed businesses, beat police officers and killed Americans, Democrats didnt see riots or insurrection, they saw demonstrations of the First Amendments freedom of speech, assembly and expression provisions.

But when conservatives gathered to oppose the violence or speak out about it, Democrats saw racism, bigotry, and authoritarianism.

Now, as they launch the second sham impeachment trial against former President Donald Trump, Democrats see it as their constitutional duty and obligation to hold him responsible for the same kind of behavior his supporters engaged in (rioting) that BLM and Antifa engaged in most of last year  even though there is nothing in the Constitution giving Congress the power to try a former president who has already left office.

But its worse than that, even: Democrats arent just engaging in an unconstitutional act, they are flat-out lying about their case. And Trumps legal team knows it.

Per Trending Politics:

Just one day before another sham impeachment trial, President Trumps legal team has methodically laid out their case in a blistering new memorandum.

The memorandum makes the case for Trumps innocence in detailed and methodical fashion. At one point in the letter, Trumps lawyers say that the Democrats are leaving out a chilling fact about that fateful day.

On page 7 of the memorandum, the Trump legal team confirms that law enforcement received reports of a potential attack on the Capitol well before Trumps January 6th speechthrowing out the possibility of a sudden incitement by the 45th Presidents speech.

Despite going to great lengths to include irrelevant information regarding Mr. Trumps comments dating back to August 2020 and various postings on social media, the House Managers are silent on one very chilling fact. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has confirmed that the breach at the Capitol was planned several days in advance of the rally, and therefore had nothing to do with the Presidents speech on January 6th at the Ellipse, the Trump legal team noted. (Related: TIME magazine ADMITS the election was rigged against President Trump; when does Bidens impeachment begin?)

According to investigative reports all released after January 6, 2021, the Capitol Police, the NYPD and the FBI all had prior warning there was going to be an attack on the Capitol, the Trump team continued.

Embarrassingly enough, even members of the Democratic leadership themselves have admitted on the record, albeit subsequent to January 6, 2021, that they believed the riots were pre-planned, with some, including Representative James C. Clyburn, the House Democratic Whip, going so far as to accuse fellow House Members of coordinating and planning the attack in advance as co-conspirators, the team added.

Either the President incited the riots, like the Article claims, or the riots were pre-planned by a small group of criminals who deserve punishment to the fullest extent of the law, the team noted further.

In fact, federal investigators are certain that the assault was planned  months in advance, in fact.

Days before former President Trumps impeachment trial begins, newly filed federal charges against anti-government activists offer fresh, compelling evidence that the accused perpetrators of the Capitol riots pre-planned their attack days and weeks in advance and in plain sight of an FBI that vowed to be vigilant to extremist threats, Just the News reported on Monday, citing a dozen FBI affidavits laying out the evidence.

The new information adds to a growing body of evidence that the attack was most definitely planned in advance, which of course puts the lie to the Democrats (and RINOs) insistence that Trump incited the insurrection that took place Jan. 6.

No one who is sane believes that.

See more reporting like this at Hoax.news.

Sources include:

JustTheNews.com

TrendingPolitics.com

Trump.news
COLUMBUS, Ohio - The death of a vampire bat 19 days after giving birth presented scientists studying the animals in 2019 with an unexpected chance to observe a rare event: a female bat's adoption of an unrelated baby.

The researchers had captured common vampire bats in Panama as part of ongoing studies of the formation of cooperative relationships among strangers. The team used infrared surveillance cameras to observe six hours of vampire bat activity spaced over the span of each day.

Two unrelated and unfamiliar female bats were observed forming a social bond based on mutual grooming and food sharing that increased over time. The researchers had named them BD and Lilith.

Lilith gave birth to a female pup about five weeks after the bats first met in captivity. As Lilith grew ill and spent less time caring for her pup, BD picked up the slack and even appeared to start nursing the baby. After Lilith died, BD adopted the pup, consistently nursing, grooming and sharing blood meals with the baby with almost no assistance from other adults in the colony.

"It's really cool that the little pup was adopted by the mother's closest social partner," said lead author Imran Razik, a graduate student in evolution, ecology and organismal biology at The Ohio State University.

"Even though it's a single observation, this method of recording social interactions every day for many hours allows us to contextualize it and better understand these social relationships. It's all about the social relationships."

The study is published today (Feb. 10, 2021) in Royal Society Open Science.

Razik works in the lab of senior author Gerald Carter, assistant professor of evolution, ecology and organismal biology at Ohio State, who studies vampire bat social behavior.

For this study, the team combined 23 adult and three juvenile common vampire bats captured from three distantly located roosts in the wild into a single captive colony, with plans to track how strangers developed social relationships over time.

Over four months, three surveillance cameras captured 652 hours of sampling periods, recording any cooperative behaviors that lasted at least five seconds. Vampire bats commonly groom each other and regurgitate their meals to feed roostmates that have been unsuccessful at getting their own meal of live animal blood. Carter's group fasts adult bats to induce costly investments of food sharing between recently introduced individuals.

The surveillance showed several clear trends. BD and Lilith increasingly groomed each other over time on an almost equal basis, and BD shared food with Lilith up until her death, even though Lilith did not frequently share food with BD. Lilith's grooming of her pup sharply declined shortly after birth, and her food-sharing interactions with the pup barely got off the ground. After Lilith died (of what the researchers believed was a gastrointestinal illness), BD provided steady grooming support to the pup, and her food-sharing with the baby noticeably increased. BD was still providing care to the pup at the end of the experiment.

BD's interactions with the baby actually began before Lilith died.

"I was noticing that sometimes the pup would lean over and attach to BD every now and then. And as Lilith was getting sick, I noticed the pup would spend more time near BD. I suppose Lilith didn't have the energy to raise the pup as she normally would have," Razik said.

Though the researchers don't know exactly when or by what mechanism, BD began to lactate. On the day Lilith died, Razik manually expressed milk from BD to confirm she would be able to nurse the pup that was "still in a stage of full dependency."

The researchers don't know why BD adopted Lilith's pup, but the adult vampire bats' social connection may provide clues.

"Both of these females had grooming relationships with several other bats in the colony, but those weren't as strong as the relationship they had with each other," Razik said. "This is only one observation, but it's interesting to speculate about what's going on."

###

This work was supported by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, with which the authors are affiliated; the Animal Behavior Society; a graduate enrichment fellowship from Ohio State; a student research grant from Sigma Xi; and a Critical Difference for Women Professional Development Grant from Ohio State. Additional co-authors are Bridget Brown and Rachel Page, both from Ohio State.

Contact:

Imran Razik,

Razik.2@osu.edu

Written by Emily Caldwell,

Caldwell.151@osu.edu
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is calling on Azerbaijan to provide urgent medical assistance to a journalist who has been in prison for 19 months and on a hunger strike for more than a week.

Polad Aslanovs already poor health is now failing after eight days on hunger strike to press his demand for a fair trial and transfer to house arrest, the Paris-based media freedom watchdog said in a statement on February 9.

RSF said Aslanov weighed only 44 kilograms when he began the hunger strike and he is now complaining of kidney and stomach pains.

The group quoted the journalists wife as saying he is not receiving any medical care.

Gulmira Aslanova fears her husband could be transferred to a cell for tuberculosis patients where conditions are unsanitary and conducive to the transmission of diseases, according to the statement.

Aslanov, the editor of the xeberman.com and press-az.com online news portals, is critical of the authorities in a country where RSF said many media outlets have been silenced or have had to relocate abroad, the main independent websites are blocked, and at least two other journalists are currently in prison.

Aslanov was working on a story allegedly implicating members of the State Security Service in extortion when he was arrested in June 2019.

In November 2020, he was convicted on what RSF called trumped-up charges of high treason for allegedly providing information to Iran.

The journalist denied any wrongdoing and filed an appeal a few days after his conviction, but a court began hearing his appeal only on February 4 -- a delay for which RSF said there was no justification.

RSF said Aslanov was expelled from the initial appeal hearing for protesting against the illegal presence of state security agents involved in bringing the original charges against him. He also objected to the judges decision to bar reporters from the hearing.

The Azerbaijani authorities continue to persecute Polad Aslanov, who was already convicted in a completely arbitrary manner, said Jeanne Cavelier, the head of RSFs Eastern Europe and Central Asia desk.

We condemn this inhuman treatment that is putting a journalists life in danger and we call on the Azerbaijani authorities to provide him with medical care and to ensure that he gets a fair hearing when the court considers the substance of his appeal on 15 February, Cavelier added.

Azerbaijan is ranked 168th out of 180 countries in RSF's 2020 World Press Freedom Index.

Critics of Azerbaijan's longtime President Ilham Aliyev and his government say authorities in the oil-rich South Caucasus nation frequently seek to silence dissent by jailing journalists, human rights activists, and civil-society advocates.

Aliyev denies any rights abuses. He took power in 2003 shortly before the death of his father, Heydar Aliyev, a former KGB officer and communist-era leader who had ruled Azerbaijan since 1993.
One of the top-performing public high schools in the country will no longer admit students based on academic performance, ending more than a century of merit-based admissions.

More than seven hours into a marathon meeting Tuesday, the San Francisco Board of Education voted 5-2 to use the same lottery-based system to assign students to Lowell High as other district high schools instead of maintaining the previous system that used test scores and grades.

The vote was the latest in a string of controversial school board decisions focused on the countrys racial reckoning, including the renaming of 44 school sites affiliated with slavery, oppression and colonialism even as the districts 52,000 students remain in distance learning, many struggling with academic and mental health issues.

District data shows students of color suffering greater learning loss than their white counterparts.

The boards desire to confront thorny issues and take symbolic actions in the middle of a pandemic has riled parents, alarmed the mayor and landed the district in the national spotlight, facing broad scrutiny over its decision-making process and priorities.

I dont know what the San Francisco public school board is doing, Wai Yip Tung, who has two children in the district, told The Chronicle this week. Ive lost trust in them. Are children the priority? I just dont feel its a priority to them.

The board circumvented its normal process to fast-track the Lowell decision, giving the public just one week to digest the proposal before a vote. Usually a policy change, especially a controversial one, would take at least two weeks and often much longer as it moved through committees, each offering the public a chance to comment.

The board members cited pervasive systemic racism and a lack of diversity at Lowell as the primary reason to end the merit-based admission process following an incident in which students were exposed to racist, pornographic and anti-Semitic images in an online school forum. The district continues to investigate the incident.

Board members insisted the change to the admissions system was urgently needed, even though it wont go into effect until fall 2022. The board had already suspended merit-based admission for this year because of a lack of grades and test scores amid the pandemic.

We must recognize the need for a culture shift in our schools and address racism, said school board President Gabriela Lopez. This resolution comes after years of advocacy from students and community members.

The issue, however, divided the city given Lowells reputation as an academically rigorous school for students with Ivy League dreams, similar to elite private schools at a public school price.

And the boards focus on Lowell fanned the flames of a feud between the district and the mayor, city attorney and families who say school officials have focused on hot-button issues instead of reopening classrooms. Some parents and public officials circulated the possibility of a recall election or a permanent change to how board members are elected or if they should be appointed.

People are engaged because theyre angry, said parent Todd David, a longtime education advocate. I would not be surprised if the question is put to voters whether an elected school board is truly serving the children of San Francisco.

As was the case with the boards last regular meeting, those waiting for district officials to address the topic of getting students back in classrooms had to sit through more than seven hours of other topics first.

Lopez said Wednesday that she is looking to create a COVID response committee to focus solely on updates related to the pandemic and reopening, while also working on addressing the marathon format.

These long meetings are clearly a result of (the online format) and an adjustment on all ends, she said. But I dont think anyone would say nine-plus-hour meetings are engaging after a certain point.

It was after 10 p.m. before the board voted on Lowell.

Lopez, Alison Collins, Mark Sanchez, Faauuga Moliga and Matt Alexander voted for the change, while board members Jenny Lam and Kevine Boggess voted against it, citing a need for more community involvement.

Lowell has tried in the past to change its admission criteria to get a more diverse study body. In addition to relying on grades and test scores, it sets aside 30% of its spots for qualified students from underrepresented schools.

Still, Lowell, with nearly 2,900 students, currently enrolls less than 2% Black students compared with 8% districtwide and less than 12% Hispanic students compared with 32% in all schools. Asian American students represent 51% of enrollment at Lowell, compared with 29% districtwide.

But the upset over Lowell goes beyond demographics. Hundreds of students gathered at Lowell Friday to demand the school board take action to address what they said was a culture of racism at the school.

Several speakers at the meeting noted that racism isnt an issue isolated to one school.

Last school year, 14% of 11th-graders across the district said they experienced harassment at school based on race, ethnicity or national origin at least once in the previous 12 months. In recent years, schools across the Bay Area have experienced incidents of racism, including swastika graffiti and slurs or anonymous racial harassment online.

San Francisco resident Sheryl Davis, who supported the change at Lowell, said during public comment that the district had failed in a bigger way to address racism.

Theres racism everywhere, she added.

Some who supported the measure still criticized the process, which excluded an in-depth community discussion or any research on what impact the decision will have on the schools enrollment.

Though some board members said changing the admissions system would address the racism and a lack of diversity at the school, not every member agreed. Boggess said before the board meeting that he would oppose the measure because he believes its beneficial to have a school thats viewed as elite, and that merit-based admissions arent inherently racist.

The Lowell proposal also includes the creation of a community coalition to oversee an equity audit and form a plan to address the ongoing toxic racist abuse that Black and other students of color have experienced at Lowell, which Boggess did support.

Our real issue is around equity, he said.

Some supporters said that pouring resources into Lowell meant other schools get less.

Lowell is a public school and needs to be treated as such, said parent Rionda Batiste, who supported the resolution. Every public school needs to be brought up to the standards of Lowell.

Its unclear if the new primarily lottery system will diversify enrollment. Other district high schools that use the lottery system also lack diversity, including June Jordan, which is 66% Hispanic, and Washington, which is 56% Asian.

Parent Mihir Mehta, whose son is a junior at Lowell, said he disagrees with the vote. I dont agree a merit-based system is inherently racist, he said.

He said he supported expanding the idea of merit to include a wide range of student attributes, adding there was little opportunity to advocate for that.

Whats pissed me off more is the way the board has gone about doing this in a sneaky way, just springing it on the public without a dialogue, he said. There are lots of ways diversity can be improved or enhanced at Lowell without blowing up the admission process the way its being done.

Lowell physics and geology teacher Scott Dickerman agreed.

Effectively theyre telling the rest of us who are upset about all this to just shove it, he said. They dont want an interactive process.

Jill Tucker is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jtucker@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jilltucker
Nicole Williams opened up about her fertility journey after undergoing egg retrieval surgery as she hopes to start a family with husband Larry English.

On Tuesday, the 34-year-old star shared a snap of herself in a hospital bed and footage of herself being escorted back to her car in a wheelchair after the 30-minute procedure, which is typically minimally invasive way.

'So, I wasn't going to post this but I've decided it's an important step to this whole fertility journey and although it's not glamorous, it's real life,' she began in a lengthy caption.

Nicole Williams opened up about her fertility journey after undergoing egg retrieval surgery as she hopes to start a family with husband Larry English

The Toronto native continued: 'This was my egg retrieval day! I was an emotional mess because on top of being hormonal, I had just broken my foot and I'm also scared to death of needles.'

In addition to praising her 'amazing' nurses, Williams revealed her man was only able to stay with her until surgery, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

After waking up, she was thrilled to learn she had 13 eggs and hoped that being 'real' about her experience would help others navigate their own fertility journeys.

Feeling tired: The 34-year-old star shared a snap of herself in a hospital bed and footage of herself being escorted back to her car in a wheelchair after the 30-minute procedure, which is typically minimally invasive way

'Not all eggs will mature and that is why we only had 8 embryos,' she explained. 'We are happy and feel blessed no matter the outcome!'

She also gave a special shoutout to her doctor, Shahin Ghadir, and Southern California Reproductive Center.

'Thank you so much @drshahinghadir and the entire nursing staff at @scrcivf for keeping me comfortable and positive throughout this journey!I will update you guys with more soon!!!' she concluded.

'So, I wasn't going to post this but I've decided it's an important step to this whole fertility journey and although it's not glamorous, it's real life,' she began in a lengthy and raw caption

The video in her slideshow showed a nurse wheeling her to the car as she held onto a pair of crutches, which she's needed since injuring her foot.

After English asked her how she was feeling, she admitted to being 'tired' and said she was ready for bed.

Despite not feeling her best, Williams looked great in a cozy pair of grey sweatpants, a matching zip-up hoodie and a cropped black top.

Ready to be a mom: The Toronto native continued: 'This was my egg retrieval day! I was an emotional mess because on top of being hormonal, I had just broken my foot and I'm also scared to death of needles'

In September, she told DailyMail.com exclusively that she and her husband of nearly four years have been talking about having children for 'years' and couldn't wait to see 'mini Nicoles and Larrys' running around.'

'We've been talking about it for years and getting closer to pulling the trigger,' gushed Williams.

As for the timeline, she said she hoped to welcome kids 'hopefully sooner than later' and were 'getting closer to pulling the trigger.'
A COVID-19 survivor from County Limerick has raised thousands of euro for the Irish Cancer Society through an online fundraising campaign.

TJ ORiordan, a native of Abbeyfeale, contracted Covid-19 over Christmas and during his isolation he was left alone with his thoughts.

He says he found the time away from his family very difficult, especially when he had no symptoms but he found a way, as he puts it, to turn a bad positive into a good positive.

TJ decided that raising funds for a cause close to his heart would be a great way to move away from his strange start to the year. So, on the anniversary of his fathers death, TJ vowed to shave his head on Valentines Day as a way to raise funds for the Irish Cancer Society.

Within the first 24 hours the campaign had surpassed his target of 950.

"I was very surprised at the large response, especially with the uncertainty lockdowns bring to people, I didnt think that many people would donate," said TJ who has been blown away by the support.

He is now hoping to raise 5,000 and the fundraiser will remain open for another week after Valentines Day.

TJ says he is delighted with the amount of donations and that anything raised above the initial goal is "just a bonus." He wants to thank those who have donated so far.

"Their donation is going to a great cause especially during these times as the cancer services are under pressure, appointments are being cancelled or people cant make it in. They need the money now more than ever, he said.

Click here to donate and check out TJs Facebook page for more details.
Growing up in the dusty streets of Etwawa township, in the East Rand, Njabulo Mabanga was faced with many challenges and being raised by an unemployed single mother with seven siblings made things especially difficult. However, Mabanga's resilience and motivation to succeed could never be deterred by his situation.

Njabulo Mabanga

Tell me about yourself?

When did you first realise your passion for writing?

Where do you get your information or ideas for your books?

Why do you self-publish your books, and what advice would you give to writers wanting to take the self-publishing route?

There are also numerous platforms, free platforms that can showcase your work to millions of audiences or potential readers around the world.

Tell me about your new book titled Stop Being A Nice Guy. To be more specific, why did you choose this title, is it because of personal experiences?

Why do a lot of overly nice people tend to get taken advantage of? The nicer you are, the more you often get disrespected, seen as no threat, hardly get promotions in their workplaces etc.

Here's an antidote for only R200.00#UJRegistration2021 #richmnisi #NSFAS Zuma Vitamin D pic.twitter.com/trUAZzeCME  The Nonconformist (@NjabuloMabanga) February 3, 2021

Do you get feedback from your readers?

Despite all the hardships, after completing high school, through the National Financial Student Aid Scheme (NFSAS), Mabanga enrolled for a BA degree in communications with a focus on psychology and philosophy. With a degree he was able to find employment and provide for his family, which to him meant the world.Being a timid child, who believed that because of his situation at home his opinion wouldnt matter, he began writing and that is where he found freedom to express his emotions and views, that is where his journey to being an author began.I interviewed Mabanga and this is what he had to say about his journey:I am from Ekurhuleni, an area called Barcelona, located at Etwatwa. I grew up there and my family still resides there. I hold a BA degree in Audiovisual Communications on which I also majored in Psychology, Communications, and Philosophy. Which I think it is that background that fundamentally guides the kind of content I usually write about. So, both the psychology and philosophy disciplines play a massive role in the direction I take regarding not just my books but my blog as well.I think it has always been innately there but, sometimes as people we ignore or do not realise our strengths or talents on earlier years maybe because we arent given platforms to utilise them, or we just take them for granted as we get distracted by other things.So, the initial realisation came after I wrote a film script that came top of the class in the audiovisual communications course I studied. Furthermore, as I was working, some of my colleagues used to come up to me when drafting emails or any other written content to help them or structure their messages. That was also one of the signs that made me realise, that  okay maybe I need to focus my energy more on writing and take it more serious. From thereon, I created my blog and started writing.What was most astounding was that I discovered that I was able to evoke the intended emotion on the reader, meaning that I could convey my message clearly and concisely as I intended it to be  that was also one of the primary motivators to write more and express myself more in written word, and that passion grew and continues to grow today.With my educational background in Psychology, I think it has made me to be more aware of the social and cognitive behaviours of individuals, as such; the content I write about usually is from the observation of people around me, and therefore I interpret their motivations or reasons for a certain behaviour they portray or even how they engage with other people, and then do research about what I gather. My books are non-fiction books, as such research is a non-negotiable element in my writing.Ideas can literally come from anything, even a slight conversation with an individual or even a just a mere observation can be content for either my books or blog. Also, my experience gives me ideas for the books. I mean, there are a lot of things we can share amongst each other and if there is an experience, I feel worthy of sharing with the next person, it gets onto paper. Hence, people shall be careful around me because hey they might feature on my next book, lol.I prefer self-publishing fundamentally because I like to control my creativity and my overall work. Owning 100% of my IP and royalties is also a huge motivator. Also, being published by the big publishing companies is not easy, and it is also not a guarantee that your book will do well.We live in a digital age, where a middle man is slowly and surely becoming unnecessary, we have the direct to consumer privilege that those before us never had, and for me, I believe the world now is on the side of creatives or artists - an artist can independently produce, market, and sell their own work while getting the rewards their work is worth and get to own their IP, and that on its own is a huge reason for people to self-publish.For those who would like to self-publish, I would advise them to do research as we live in an information age. Information is out there, and you can actually succeed as much on your own as you couldve if you were published by a third party.In my journey so far, I have received quite a lot of questions from fellow young authors who would like to get started or would like to publish their books but do not know where to begin, which made me to start a venture that helps authors who would like to self-publish. I assist them from the actual writing up to the promotion of their self-published books. The platform is called Titanium Press, which can be found on Facebook.Is it partly from personal experience and also from being observant of the people around. So, how it came about, I saw a lot of people complaining about their kindness was being taken advantage of, how being nice has been bad for them, or they dont get reciprocation for their niceness etc. Which is somewhat an experience I share.I then briefly researched this. I literally went on Twitter and searched tired of being nice or no more my nice guy. I was shocked at the number of people that were complaining about how being nice is actually bad for them and in fact; people use them, underestimate them, get seen as no threat, and generally arent taken serious. This was evidence that proved that being too nice is not as good as it is always portrayed. Thenwas born.I am now working on a new book titled. It also contains priceless value and will be released this year.Yes, I do get feedback from my readers and so far it has been quite positive. A lot of the readers relate to the ideas and the overall content I write about. For me, that is also what makes me continue doing what I enjoy. Giving valuable content to an individual has been of paramount importance and that is what I pride myself most about. I always say when people buy my books, they arent just buying written words but value, a lifelong lesson which can even be passed onto the next generations. Some feedback is on my website.
ELK CITY, Idaho, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Therapeutic Solutions International, Inc., (OTC Markets: TSOI), announced today acquisition of the JadiCell, cell therapy, for use in the treatment of acute respiratory distress syndrome and other lung pathologies.

"Having worked with the Team at Therapeutic Solutions International for over 4 years, I am glad to place our highly promising and clinically advanced stem cell therapy into this innovative and cutting-edge company," said Dr. Amit Patel, inventor of the JadiCell. "Therapeutic Solutions International is unique in that it is currently running clinical trials in the area of nutraceuticals, as well as developing preclinical and clinical stage immunotherapies. There are numerous synergies to be had with the existing work and expertise in the Company."

"While there is a lot of excitement about various approaches to lung inflammation, there are very few therapies that not only potently block pathological immunity while concurrently induce regeneration of pulmonary tissues," said Dr. James Veltmeyer, Chief Medical Officer of the Company. "To date, by far the most promising regenerative therapy our scientists have worked with for acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) has been the JadiCell. I am honored to work with our team of experts such as Dr. Francesco Marincola and Dr. Santosh Kesari in leading the JadiCell through Phase III and into the hands of patients."

"It is a significant accomplishment to acquire rights to this extremely promising and cost-effective technology that is scalable and functions as a 'cellular drug,'" said Famela Ramos, Vice President of Business Development. "To our knowledge this is the only stem cell therapy for lung pathologies that does not require animal components and can be generated in sufficient quantities to address the multi-billion-dollar market of ARDS."

"Dr. Patel and his team have been strong collaborators with us since our first licensing deal using the JadiCell for Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy," stated Timothy Dixon, President and CEO of the Company. "Having worked with these cells, we appreciate that to date they are by far the most effective at production of cytokines, stimulation of regeneration, and inhibition of pathological inflammation. We are extremely confident in our ability to take these cells to the finish line in treatment of end stage lung disease."

About Therapeutic Solutions International, Inc.

Therapeutic Solutions International is focused on immune modulation for the treatment of several specific diseases. The Company's corporate website is www.therapeuticsolutionsint.com, and our public forum is https://board.therapeuticsolutionsint.com/

[email protected]

SOURCE Therapeutic Solutions International

Related Links

http://www.therapeuticsolutionsint.com



Lucknow:

A massive fire broke out in the Trauma Centre of the King Georges Medical University in Lucknow on Saturday evening, but no one was injured.

The fire, suspected to have caused due to a short circuit in the air conditioner, broke out on the second floor of the six-storied building and soon spread to other floors of the KGMU, officials said.

Around six fire tenders were rushed to control the flames, they added. It took two hours for the firemen to douse the fire.

All patients on the floor were shifted to safer places and as a precautionary measure, other floors were also evacuated. There is no report of any casualty, District Magistrate Kaushal Raj Singh said.

Taking a serious note of the fire, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath ordered a probe by the Commissioner, Lucknow and asked him to submit a report within three days.

The Chief Minister asked him to fix responsibility for the incident and punish those found guilty of the lapses, an official release said.

State Health minister Siddharth Nath Singh said patients have been shifted to other government hospitals.

Meanwhile, Union Health Minister J P Nadda spoke to Singh and enquired about the incident.

He said the Union Health Secretary is in touch with state health officials.

Spoken to @sidharthnsingh, Health Minister UP & inquired about fire accident in KGMC. Health Secretary, GOI is in touch with state officials, Nadda tweeted.
Insurance Australia Group chief executive Nick Hawkins has admitted its bungled business interruption policies were not clearly written, after the insurer reported a $460 million loss for the December half.

The results were weighed down by the $865 million set aside for an expected flood of claims from business owners who lost income as a result of COVID-19 restrictions, after the insurance industry lost a landmark court case over pandemic exclusions.

IAG chief executive Nick Hawkins. Credit:Dominic Lorrimer

The test case sought to prove exclusions in business interruption policies were valid, despite referencing an outdated act of Parliament. Five judges of the NSW Supreme Court of Appeal unanimously sided with policyholders in rejecting the insurance industrys case.

IAG quickly launched a $750 million capital raising and later reported it expected the total pre-tax hit to earnings to be $1.15 billion if further legal challenges are unsuccessful.
It's the news the many feared: early data shows the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine may provide only "minimal protection" against mild to moderate illness caused by the coronavirus variant first identified in South Africa.

But this doesn't mean governments should throw out their AstraZeneca stockpiles. Experts say it's possible -- and very likely -- that the shot is still effective in preventing severe disease and death.

The news could, however, be a major roadblock on the world's way out of the pandemic, which can't 'end' until the virus stops circulating widely.

The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine is cheaper and easier to transport and store than some of the other vaccines approved for use to date and as such, was going to play a key part in combating the pandemic in low and middle-income countries. If the vaccine isn't effective enough against the new variant, it could deepen the already huge vaccination gap between the world's richest and poorest countries.

The study from South Africa suggested that two doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine provided "substantially reduced" protection against mild to moderate Covid-19 disease from the new virus variant first identified there, known as B.1.351.

The study has not yet been peer reviewed or published in full, so many unknowns remain. What we do know is that it included a relatively small number of volunteers who were predominantly young and healthy and therefore not likely to suffer from severe Covid-19 disease. That meant the study did not assess protection against severe disease, hospitalization and death and many experts have suggested it could still prevent these outcomes.

"In the medium term, what matters most is preventing more serious forms of Covid-19; and it is thought the AstraZeneca vaccine will do this," Dr Peter English, a consultant in communicable disease control, told the UK's Science Media Centre.

New vaccination strategy

Less effective vaccines could force countries where the new variants become dominant to shift their vaccination strategy.

Instead of trying to achieve herd immunity, the focus might be on preventing as many deaths as possible even while the virus continues to circulate.

South Africa is pausing its rollout of the AstraZeneca vaccine following the release of the study on Sunday.

Speaking to CNN, Professor Salim Abdool Karim, who is a co-chair of South Africa's Covid-19 advisory committee, said the country will likely adopt a more "stepped approach," in which they assess the impact of the vaccine as it is rolled out.

"We would start by vaccinating about 100,000 individuals in the first step. We would look at the hospitalization rates once we've done those vaccinations. And if we find that the hospitalization rates are below the threshold -- that we are looking at -- then we can be confident that the vaccine is efficacious ... and if so, we can then proceed to continuing the rollout," he said.

"If we find that the hospitalizations are substantial -- more than we anticipated -- then we would have to stop, take stock of where we are and perhaps switch to other vaccines."

But the AstraZeneca vaccine is a key part of mass vaccination programs in many countries worldwide.

The UK has been administering it since last month and the government said Monday it would continue to be used. While the UK is one of the at least 41 countries where the South African variant had been detected, the number of cases caused by it remain extremely low. But the mutation found in the South African variant -- known as the E484 mutation -- has also been found independently in a samples of the variant first seen in the UK.

The European Union has also approved the vaccine, although several European countries have advised against using it in older people because of limited efficacy data in that age group.

The COVAX program -- a coalition that includes Gavi and the World Health Organization with the aim of distributing Covid-19 vaccines to poorer countries -- is reliant on this vaccine. Last week, COVAX announced a plan to distribute more than 337 million doses worldwide -- of which 336 million doses are the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine and 1.2 million doses are the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.

Experts from COVAX said Monday that the WHO's Strategic Advisory Group of Experts is finalizing new recommendations for use of the AstraZeneca vaccine and will present them to the Director-General on Tuesday.

Other coronavirus vaccines have shown more promise against the new variants. Real-world trials of some of the other vaccines, including Johnson & Johnson and Novavax, showed some protection against the new variants. Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna also said their vaccines should be effective against the new variants, although their data was based on lab studies rather than real-world trials.

South African health officials said they are hoping to receive first doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine by the end of the week. The country has also ordered another 20 million vaccines through a deal with Pfizer/BioNTech, but it is not clear when those doses will arrive.

Still, the AstraZeneca vaccine will be, at least initially, the most accessible option for many countries.

Relieving the burden on health services

A vaccine's role is to teach the immune system to spot and fight a virus quickly. Essentially, it helps the body remember an infection so it acts faster if you become infected. "Your own immune system will also react to clear the virus, but without the vaccine, this reaction will be slower," said Dr Julian Tang, honorary associate professor and clinical virologist at the University of Leicester.

The currently available coronavirus vaccines work by inducing antibodies and T-cells that have been shown to fight the original coronavirus. Antibodies work by attaching to and attacking the proteins on the surface of the virus -- in the case of coronavirus, this is the spike protein.

If the virus changes too much, notably in its spike protein, the antibodies induced by the vaccine may not not bind to the new version of the virus very well, Tang explained.

"This means that these vaccine antibodies cannot clear as much of these viruses when you are infected so there is more virus left that needs to be cleared by your own immune response -- which reacts more slowly," he added.

"But the studies suggest that there is enough binding from these vaccine antibodies to at least remove some of the variant viruses from the system -- to prevent more severe disease and death."

One of the main reasons the pandemic has been deadly is because of the sheer number of people in need of medical attention, and a partially effective vaccine, while not ideal, would reduce this burden.

There have been instances where health care systems became unable to cope with the number of patients coming in. When this happens, some patients might die because they can't access help on time. There is also a knock-on effect on the entire system, with non-urgent treatments postponed or canceled.

Experts argue that a vaccine will prove to be beneficial if it can reduce the burden on health services.

"This may look like fewer individuals requiring an ICU bed and more individuals able to recover at home," said Dr. Oliver Watson, an infectious diseases researcher at Imperial College London, adding that this could have "real material consequences in settings where hospitals are very stretched."

This has been the case in many European countries, including the UK, where the government was forced to open several field hospitals to prevent the National Health System becomes overwhelmed.

Tweaking the vaccine

The data from South Africa is no doubt a setback to vaccination campaigns but scientists are already working on updates to the existing vaccines to make them more effective against new variants.

AstraZeneca said Saturday it is working with Oxford University to adapt the vaccine against the B.1.351 variant and that it would advance it through clinical development to make it "ready for autumn delivery should it be needed." Last month, Pfizer said it was "laying the groundwork" to create a vaccine booster that could respond to coronavirus variants.

"We see this all the time with the influenza vaccine," said Tang. Flu vaccines are adapted each year to target the virus strains that are circulating the most. Sometimes, the vaccine picked doesn't match the strain that becomes prevalent.

"Mismatched vaccine seasons do allow more influenza infections, morbidity and mortality -- but to some extent, this is inevitable as the virus will always be mutating first -- then we will have to adjust our vaccines to match the new virus," Tang added.

The UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock said Monday the flu blueprint might work for the coronavirus in the future.

"The jab is updated each year according to the mutations and variations that have happened and been spotted in the preceding few months, and that is manufactured over the summer, and then delivered into the arms of those who are most vulnerable to flu in the autumn," he said.

When it comes to Covid-19, he explained that we need to be thinking about how to protect people in a similar way.

The good news is that developing a vaccine that would work against the new variants doesn't mean starting from scratch, so updates could become available soon.

"The genome of the variant spike protein is known, and the technology to "plug in" the genes for it into mRNA and vector vaccines is well-established," said English. "Within months we hope to see availability of new vaccines, tailored to the South African variant."
Clymer: Please Help Address Racial Division

By McCracken County Judge Executive Craig Clymer

MCCRACKEN COUNTY - As the Judge Executive of McCracken County, I write to you to ask for your help in addressing an element of racial division in our County and Region. Specifically, I ask you for a monetary contribution to McCracken Countys Unity Tower. It is a project to paint this artistic message of black and white racial unity on the water tower across I-24 from the Confederate Park in Reidland.Our Country is experiencing great racial divides. We see white and black divisiveness, including allegations of racism in our law enforcement agencies, and constantly in the national news. Locally, McCracken County hosted meetings between representatives of the black and the white community to discuss the presence of racism; is it systemic, and what can we do better? The talks were very beneficial, producing action items for achieving better relationships.Meanwhile, Confederate flags, large Confederate flags, fly in the Confederate Park alongside I-24 in our community. Some 40,000 cars pass daily. Because the park is private property, we cannot remove the flags as they are protected by the United States Constitutions guarantee of free speech.Two important points here: First, many, possibly most, people believe the Confederate flag represents racism. Others insist that there is no racism message; that the flag only honors Confederate veterans of the Civil War. No matter the belief of those who fly the flag, nor the message intended, the perception of bigotry is sufficient justification for us to act.A second point is that, regardless of the intended message pronounced by the Confederate flags, passersby do not know that the Park is privately owned and that it is not government condoned speech. Accordingly, they justifiably question whether our Community is racist. We spend millions of dollars and countless hours promoting our Community as a wonderful place to live. Meanwhile we take no action to address a very contrary message perceived by millions of travelers through our Community.I am dedicated to funding this project entirely from volunteers such as you, through private donations, and zero tax dollars. The design shown above will be painted on the tower in a size sufficient for all to view as they travel I-24. I ask that you take part in this effort to send a positive message of racial unity in McCracken County, Kentucky.Thank you for taking the time to consider doing this for McCracken County and the entire Western Kentucky region. If you know of other community-minded folks, please invite them to join us as well. There is a go fund me account that is available for your convenience at gofundme.com. Search for McCracken County United We Stand Message. To maximize your tax deductible donation, you may mail a check made to Unity Tower Fund directly to my office at:McCracken County Judge Executive300 Clarence Gaines St.Paducah, Kentucky, 42003Thank you for your consideration and any help you can provide.Respectfully,Craig Zeiss ClymerMcCracken County Judge Executive270.444.4707On the Net:
michael barbaro

From The New York Times, Im Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily.

[music]

Today: The Biden administration is determined to quickly reopen Americas public schools for in-person learning. To do that, it will have to convince teachers and their unions that returning to the classroom is safe. My colleague Dana Goldstein on whether thats likely to happen. Its Wednesday, February 10. Dana, welcome back to the show.

dana goldstein

Thanks for having me.

michael barbaro

I think its been, maybe, like six months?

dana goldstein

[LAUGHS] Yes, I can tell you to the date, because it was the last thing I did before I gave birth to my second baby in August  was do a Daily episode.

michael barbaro

Oh my God, thats right. It was like literally on the eve of your childs birth.

dana goldstein

Im pretty sure I went into labor the next day.

michael barbaro

[LAUGHS]

dana goldstein

But the episode came out after I had the baby. So people were like, wow, did you record that in the hospital room?

michael barbaro

No! The answer is no!

dana goldstein

Im not that much of a superhero.

michael barbaro

Were not that kind of an operation.

[chimes]

So I want to start by asking you what the Biden administrations plan is for reopening schools.

dana goldstein

Well, President Biden has been quite clear.

archived recording (joe biden) It should be a national priority to get our kids back into school and keep them in school.

dana goldstein

He expects K-8 8 schools, he has said, to reopen within 100 days of his inauguration.

michael barbaro

Aggressive.

archived recording (joe biden) Then my team will work to see that a majority of our schools can be open by the end of my first 100 days.

dana goldstein

That would put us in about mid-April.

archived recording (joe biden) Masking, vaccinations, opening schools. These are the three key goals from my first 100 days.

dana goldstein

And the reason that it is so aggressive is that about 1/3 of the nations schools are still totally remote, and another 1/3 are in some sort of hybrid scenario.

michael barbaro

Mm-hmm.

dana goldstein

And about half of the kids are not in school across the United States. So even though we are nearing the first anniversary here of the pandemic, we still have a very severely disrupted education system in this country.

michael barbaro

When we spoke with you last all those months ago, we talked about the very specific requests that public school teachers were making to feel comfortable returning to the classroom. I remember face masks were one of their demands, temperature checks for people entering school buildings, low positivity rates for communities around the schools. And so what is the status of those requests?

dana goldstein

Well, I think its important to say, first of all, that the low community positivity rates, and just the general background of the virus being controlled, has not been achieved, really, in most parts of the country.

michael barbaro

Mm-hmm.

dana goldstein

So its a raging pandemic right now. It looks like the numbers are going down. But of course, right now, were also very concerned about the emergence of these new variants that appear to be highly transmissible. So weve never really achieved, as a country, the first thing that the teachers and their unions wanted, which was community control of the coronavirus.

michael barbaro

Right.

dana goldstein

I mean, the schools did already get quite a bit of federal money. They used it for things like face masks, face shields, desk partitions, hiring nurses in some cases, all types of hygiene and all types of staffing to meet some of these demands. And in broad swaths of the country  particularly in the South and in more conservative areas  the schools are open and the students are in school. But in the places where the teachers unions are powerful, where teachers have this political voice, those are the places where the schools are much more likely to be closed. They have again and again cited the fact the virus remains out of control, that the country has not taken other difficult steps that they think it needs to take before schools are reopened, such as shutting down dining, shutting down movie theaters  basically curtailing other types of activity that spread the virus.

michael barbaro

Am I right in thinking that teachers and their unions in this moment are exerting a pretty significant amount of influence over this school reopening decision-making? And in a sense, they are deciding, in many communities, whether schools will be reopened for in-person instruction. Theyre almost exercising a kind of veto.

dana goldstein

There are a very, very powerful force, perhaps the most powerful force, in wide swaths of the country that are controlled by Democrats and where unions are powerful. In places like Texas and Florida and Arizona, where unions dont have that much power, its a totally different story. Teachers have fought for mitigation measures  and won them sometimes  but they havent had that veto power over reopening schools.

michael barbaro

Got it. And so at this point, despite all these reservations from teachers, whats the most powerful case being made from people in the Biden administration for reopening schools? What are they arguing?

dana goldstein

Heres the basic argument. Its been almost a year of this crisis. Remote learning is not working for kids. It is subpar compared to in-school learning. It is hurting kids academically, emotionally, in terms of their mental health. And its hurting disadvantaged children the most. So whether your family cant afford a great internet connection at home, or maybe you have a disability that makes it hard for you to learn via a screen. Or maybe youre just a child under the age of 8 or so, and you cant really manipulate the computer on your own, and so it requires having a parent or grandparent next to you every minute of the day to guide you through this remote instruction  in a way that has left your family reeling and maybe prevented an adult from working in a way that impacts the broader economy of your city, state and the country. I mean, this is the basic argument for why schools do need to reopen.

michael barbaro

Right. Which, I think, brings us to the question of the risks involved in being in a classroom and benefiting from all those things you just described. And remind us of what the current thinking of those risks are. Because I feel like over time, in conversations with our colleagues from the Science desk and health reporters at The Times, that the consensus seems to be that the risks are lower  significantly lower  than previously thought.

dana goldstein

Thats right. Of all the different types of settings where groups of people come together, schools seem to be among the safest as long as mitigation strategies like masking, social distancing, handwashing are observed. And theres a lot of data now internationally to back that up. There are new studies from the E.U., from the C.D.C. here in the United States, even in some places where the positivity rates for the virus itself in the larger community were quite high, there was very limited spread of Covid in the schools when there was compliance with strategies like masking. Now, the risk is not zero. There are not zero cases of spread of Covid in schools. But its a risk-benefit calculus that is constantly being readjusted as more evidence comes to light. What I will say is that all of these studies that were talking about, they were not conducted with these new variants. They were conducted with the coronavirus we have come to know in the United States over the past 10 months. So this is kind of a looming unknown, which is, OK, we are feeling pretty confident that we can operate schools pretty safely with the virus as weve been living with it. But what if, over the next few weeks and months, we are dealing with a significantly different foe? And I would say thats the moment were in right now, which is so interesting politically and in terms of the health impact of this really big decision about whether to reopen in those places that remain closed.

michael barbaro

So how do teachers and teachers unions answer the kind of consensus  especially in a pre-coronavirus variant world  that the situation is relatively safe? Its clear that they are disappointed with the level of community spread in many parts of the country, but given the understanding that schools remain pretty safe, how do these teachers unions defend their decision to be so reluctant about returning?

dana goldstein

So theres thousands of these union affiliates across the country, so you cant totally generalize. But what Ive been covering is this kind of complicated dance that has emerged where some of the national union leaders, like Randy Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers, are coming out to embrace this scientific consensus that schools can be safe under certain circumstances, allying themselves with President Biden and his push to reopen. This is a change in tune for some of these union leaders who, when President Trump was asking to reopen schools, were just flatly rejecting of that and really were angry that he and the Republicans in Congress were not giving the money to schools that schools said they needed in order to do this safely. But on the ground in places like Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, it is a lot more complicated. In those places which are run by Democrats, a lot of the local unions still do not feel it is safe. They are not necessarily swayed by the rhetoric of the Biden administration or of a national union leader. And what they really want  and what theyre fighting for  is teacher vaccination. They really want their teachers to be vaccinated before theyre required to go back into the classroom in many parts of the country.

michael barbaro

So in other words, getting it right, in this moment, for many of these teachers and their unions, looks like getting a vaccine. That is the new standard by which they are measuring their comfort with bringing themselves and their students back into the classroom.

dana goldstein

Right, and some are actually even pushing it a little bit beyond that. Some union leaders Ive spoken to on the ground are saying, well, we dont know for sure if once youre vaccinated, you cant maybe still pick up a trace amount of the virus and bring it home and give it to your loved one. For example, I spoke to a teacher in Chicago whose wife has late-stage breast cancer and has restarted chemotherapy, and it is just not clear to him right now whether hes going to be granted the accommodation to continue to work from home. So for this teacher, going back without a vaccination is something he just really cant comprehend. And even once hes vaccinated, I think he still has some real concerns about what this would look like for his family and for himself. I think this is a really difficult case, where youre basically saying, in the aggregate, the risk is pretty low and the benefits to children might outweigh these sort of aggregate risks. But for any individual in a really, really difficult scenario like that teacher, its going to be a very big ask.

michael barbaro

But if vaccines and vaccinations are the solution  or a very big part of it  what exactly is the Biden plan for getting teachers vaccines and making teachers a priority in the vaccination process? Because my sense is that that is mostly a decision  who gets the vaccine and in what order  made by state leaders.

dana goldstein

Yeah, youre absolutely right about that. And thats exactly where the rubber meets the road and where we have a really big challenge as a country. Because even in places where teachers are technically eligible for the vaccine  like many counties in California or in Chicago, for example  teachers are reporting that theyre having trouble getting the vaccine.

michael barbaro

Are states making teachers a priority?

dana goldstein

About half the states have prioritized the teachers for vaccines currently.

michael barbaro

OK, so thats vaccines. What else is the Biden administration pushing on right now? What else are they doing?

dana goldstein

So President Biden is in a very careful dance with his allies at the teachers unions. He is offering something to them that they really, really want, which is a $130 billion schools funding package as part of the Covid relief bill, the Rescue Act. It includes money for all kinds of things that teachers unions love, like protecting jobs for teachers, as well as all sorts of mitigation, funding related to the pandemic for cleanliness and safety and masks, and all that kind of stuff.

michael barbaro

Mm-hmm.

dana goldstein

But it goes beyond that. Under the Trump administration, there was a very confusing hodgepodge of guidance on schools that appear to be very ideologically motivated at times. The Biden administration is expected in the coming week to come out with new guidance for schools about how to reopen safely, and the unions are saying this is really something thats going to help them by showing this to their local members on the ground, telling them that someone whos more trusted  President Biden, his appointees have come up with this new roadmap for us that we can follow. But its really complicated, because President Biden doesnt want to get too far out ahead of what teachers are feeling and wants to be sensitive to their anxieties.

michael barbaro

Right. Whats so interesting about all this, Dana, is that President Biden sees himself as an ally of unions and as an ally of the teachers union, right? And the reality is that to meet this goal he has, he needs this ally to come along with him and play ball. And its not clear that they are there yet.

dana goldstein

Yeah, its a very careful needle that President Biden is trying to thread here. He wants to bring the teachers and the unions along with the school to reopen K-8 schools without making them feel disrespected or not listened to, which is really how they felt under the previous administration of President Trump.

[music]

And the politics on the ground are so tough. I mean, in many of these places  like Chicago, for example, or Philadelphia  its teachers unions versus Democratic mayors, other Democratic elected officials, school boards. Its a sort of fight in the family, and thats sometimes the nastiest kind of toughest fight to resolve.

michael barbaro

Well be right back. Dana, you mentioned fights within the Democratic family, and you mentioned Chicago. It does feel like that is where one of the biggest battles over school reopening has just unfolded. So tell us about that.

dana goldstein

Right, so Chicago is the third largest school district in the country. It has over 300,000 students, and the vast, vast majority have been out of school since the beginning of the pandemic.

[music]

archived recording (lori lightfoot) The fact of the matter is that it is not sustainable.

dana goldstein

And Mayor Lori Lightfoot really was clear she wanted to get back to school in January.

archived recording (lori lightfoot) Thanks to an $8.5 million investment, every classroom and front office that will be used during this time will be equipped with its own HEPA purifier. These purifiers 

dana goldstein

She said that the district had done a lot to improve ventilation and come up with all sorts of great cleanliness, hygiene, safety practices in school. And she wanted to offer parents the opportunity to get their K-8 kids back in school.

archived recording (lori lightfoot) Its thanks to measures like these that we are confident in our ability to support our students Monday and every day moving forward. Let me also 

dana goldstein

And the unions were still asking for more.

archived recording The union fired back this afternoon, saying what theyve been saying for weeks  they dont buy it. archived recording (teacher 1) School is a place where we come together as a community, and until its safe to do so, I refuse to go back into the buildings. archived recording (teacher 2) I am making this decision not only for myself, but for the safety of my students and their families. archived recording (teacher 3) C.P.S. and C.T.U. stuck on four main issues  the timeline for reopening, accommodations for staff with vulnerable household members, health metrics that would pause in-person learning, and vaccinations.

dana goldstein

You know, they were asking for more accommodations for teachers with vulnerable relatives. They were asking for a vaccination for teachers before they had to return. They were asking for even more stringent building safety measures. And this really dug in over the past week.

archived recording We begin this hour 18 with that breaking news on the Chicago Public Schools.

dana goldstein

 bringing the city to the point of a potential strike.

archived recording C.P.S. sending a letter out to staff and families saying, among other things, come Monday, pre-K and cluster teachers and staff must show up. If you dont show up, you will be locked out from that software that allows you to teach remote.

dana goldstein

Where the city had threatened that if teachers didnt show up to work in person, they were actually going to lock teachers out of Google Classroom, which is the platform that teachers were using to interact with kids.

archived recording And that is important because the union has said, you lock one of us out, you lock all of us out. And that lockout could trigger a strike.

michael barbaro

I just want to pause and understand that threat. So teachers, faced with a directive to come back to school, said, no, we dont like what the City of Chicago, your preparations look like. And the City of Chicago says, if you dont return to the classroom, we will lock you out of the software needed to teach remotely?

dana goldstein

Yes.

michael barbaro

Thats a heck of a threat.

dana goldstein

Yeah. And the reason why that is so shocking and such a sort of freighted thing to threaten is that the majority of parents that returned a survey in the City of Chicago asking them if they were ready to send their kids back to classrooms and if they wanted to do that, in fact, said no.

michael barbaro

Huh.

dana goldstein

The majority of parents said that they wanted to continue teaching their kids remotely, having their kids at home. And it is a predominantly Black and Latino school district. Those communities have borne the brunt of the pandemic, and those parents are not really confident that now is the right time to send their kids back, in many cases.

michael barbaro

So when the city made that threat to lock teachers out of the Google Education platform, who was that threat on behalf of if the majority of parents surveyed said that they wanted their kids at home using a Google remote learning platform?

dana goldstein

Well, it was on behalf of two groups, Id say. First would be those parents who do want to go back. Although that group is disproportionately white compared to the number of white families in Chicago, still, the majority of kids in that group are also Black and Latino. Mayor Lightfoot and the school superintendent have said that every parent does deserve that option, and Mayor Lightfoot has spoken about, as a mother, observing her own 12-year-old daughter struggling with remote learning, and she has said that if it is not good enough for her child  and she doesnt feel like it is adequate for her kid  that it shouldnt be all that is offered to any child. But also, the mayor and school C.E.O. did bring up several times that some families did not return this survey at all, and these are the kids that, in many ways, educators are most worried about right now.

michael barbaro

Mm-hmm.

dana goldstein

They are the ones who have drifted away from the school system over the course of the pandemic. They are not logging in regularly to online classes. They may not have an adult whos able to stay home from work to guide them through remote instruction. Their families may be suffering economically from the pandemic, or having health issues related to the pandemic, or just going through any one of a number of traumas that we know that the pandemic is causing. And so what Mayor Lightfoot and the school C.E.O. said was, these kids might come back if we reopen schools. And we cant really get them back, maybe, until we do that. So both sides  both Mayor Lightfoot and the teachers unions  theyre both arguing that they have the best interests of the kids that are most vulnerable in mind. Both sides really are making that argument.

michael barbaro

So what ends up happening in this pretty high-stakes standoff in Chicago?

dana goldstein

So all through the month of January and into February, there were these very tense negotiations between the union and the Mayors Office and the school C.E.O. And it all culminated after a weekend of all-nighters on Sunday.

archived recording (lori lightfoot) So good afternoon, everyone. We are here to announce the very good news that our children will be returning to in-person learning this week.

dana goldstein

When Mayor Lori Lightfoot stepped out in a news conference and announced a tentative deal with the Chicago Teachers Union to get kids back in school 

archived recording (lori lightfoot) CPS has finally reached a tentative agreement with the Chicago Teachers Union, that opens up the school doors for safe in-person learning for our pre-K 

dana goldstein

They said that they were going to accelerate vaccination for thousands of teachers to go as fast as they could on that. But for those teachers who maybe werent able to access a vaccine, if there arent enough vaccine doses to go around, they did say that they would have the option of taking an unpaid leave of absence for the next quarter instead of teaching in person. So its not necessarily what the teacher wants  which is to continue to get paid for some sort of work from home  but it does promise to protect that teachers job during this time.

archived recording (lori lightfoot) This agreement was about making sure everyone in our school communities just arent safe, but also that they feel safe, and feel that their lived experience and fears and frustrations have been heard.

michael barbaro

I imagine from the perspective of many teachers, the choice theyre being given is essentially work and potentially put your loved ones at risk, or ensure that your loved ones are safer, but you dont get paid.

dana goldstein

Yeah, and thats a really stark choice for an individual teacher to have to make. But I think what you have to also think about is that many other essential workers have taken on a lot of risk to themselves and their families to work outside their homes during this pandemic.

michael barbaro

So if the teachers do decide to endorse this deal, when would they be back in the classroom?

dana goldstein

So preschool and high-needs kids, potentially those with disabilities that require special services, will be back on Thursday, elementary school students on March 1, and middle school students on March 8.

michael barbaro

Mm-hmm, so pretty fast.

dana goldstein

Yes, although Mayor Lightfoot did want the students back in January. So it is a pretty big shift in terms of the number of weeks of learning here.

michael barbaro

And this does seem to fall within the Biden administrations desired timeline.

dana goldstein

It does. And what we heard on background it that a lot of calls were going back and forth between the mayors office, the school superintendent, the teachers unions, and Washington, potentially speaking to folks in the Biden administration  and also to New York, where Randy Weingarten, the teachers union president, is located. And all of these people were negotiating with each other, talking, pushing each other, accommodating each other in some cases, fighting. And thats what it took to get to this agreement, which is still tentative and still very controversial with rank-and-file teachers in Chicago.

michael barbaro

Right. So are we right to think of Chicago as a meaningful test case in this Biden goal of reopening schools by the 100-day mark of his administration?

dana goldstein

Yeah, I think it is. I mean, Chicago has a very feisty union thats always up for a fight, and if they can get to reopening in the next few weeks there, I think it will offer a path forward for those other places that remain closed. But remember, this whole Biden push is only for K-8.

michael barbaro

Right.

dana goldstein

And the parents of high school kids are saying, what about us? When are our kids going to be part of this conversation? For those schools and cities, maybe, that dont manage to negotiate the reopenings this spring, were then pushing to fall.

michael barbaro

Mm-hmm.

dana goldstein

And for parents and students that left school in 2020, now were talking about a third, potentially, disrupted school year.

michael barbaro

Right.

dana goldstein

This is going to be devastating for a lot of families.

michael barbaro

Right. Theres a lot riding on getting kids back into classrooms.

dana goldstein

Yeah, and its interesting, because I just came back from parental leave with a new baby, and I had thought, when I stepped out to have my baby in August, that I might be returning to the story of recovery  educational, social and mental health recovery for the nations students  as kids were basically all back in school at some point this semester. I now think Im going to be covering a very different story over the next six months  that the fight and debate over whether schools can be reopened and how they should be reopened, in many parts of the country, continues, and it is not over at all.

[music]

michael barbaro

Thank you, Dana. We appreciate it.

dana goldstein

Thanks, Michael.

michael barbaro

On Tuesday afternoon, after we spoke with Dana, White House press secretary Jen Psaki seemed to lower expectations for President Bidens 100-day school reopening plan. His plan, she said, was to have a majority of K-8 schools holding in-person classes for as little as one day a week. Hours later, in Chicago, the Teachers Union announced that its members had ratified the agreement with the city, paving the way for students to begin returning to classrooms there starting this week. Well be right back.

[music]

Heres what else you need to know today.

archived recording Esteemed members of the Senate, going forward with this impeachment trial of a former president of the United States is unconstitutional, and as a matter of policy, it is wrong as wrong can be for all of us as a nation.

michael barbaro

During the opening day of Donald Trumps impeachment trial, the Senate rejected the claim from his defense team that it would be unconstitutional to prosecute a former president. The vote was 56 to 44, with 6 Republicans joining all 50 Democrats. However, the vote revealed just how little Republican support exists to convict Trump  something that would require 17 Republicans. After the vote, Democratic House impeachment managers began presenting their case that Trump incited an insurrection at the Capitol 

archived recording (donald trump) Were going to walk down to the Capitol. archived recording Yeah! Take the capitol! Take the capitol! Take the capitol!

michael barbaro

 beginning with a 13-minute video that juxtaposed Trumps words on January 6 with the riot that followed.

archived recording (jamie raskin) Senators, the president was impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives on January 13 for doing that.

michael barbaro

After the video had concluded, the lead House manager, Democratic representative Jamie Raskin, addressed the senators in the room directly.

archived recording (jamie raskin) You ask what a high crime and misdemeanor is under our Constitution? Thats a high crime and misdemeanor. If thats not an impeachable offense, then there is no such thing.

michael barbaro
Pakistans top court has commuted the death sentences of two mentally ill prisoners who have spent decades on death row in a landmark judgment hailed by human rights activists.

"If a condemned prisoner, due to mental illness, is found to be unable to comprehend the rationale and reason behind his/her punishment, then carrying out the death sentence will not meet the ends of justice," the country's Supreme Court ruled on February 10.

The judges asked authorities to make amendments in the relevant laws and regulations, and said exemptions from death sentence should be subject to certification by a medical board.

Ali Haider Habib, a spokesman for Justice Project Pakistan, a charity that provided legal aid to the prisoners, said he was stoked about the judgment that he hoped will set a precedent for all courts while sentencing mentally ill prisoners.

"We hope the guidelines detailed in the judgment will permeate to all levels of the judiciary and prison staff so that mental illnesses can be detected and treated instead of being ignored and denied," Habib said.

Pakistan in 2008 ratified the international Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities prohibiting the execution of mentally ill prisoners.

Since then, only one mentally ill prisoner was executed, in 2015, according to Justice Project Pakistan.

One of the two inmates whose death sentence was commuted on February 10 has spent 30 years on death row and was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 2000. Kanizan Bibi was 16 when she was charged with murdering her employers wife and five children. Police said she was having an affair with her employer, who was arrested and hanged.

The second prisoner on death row who had his sentence commuted was convicted of murdering a religious scholar in 2001. Imad Ali was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 2008. The Supreme Court halted his execution in 2016.

In its February 10 ruling, the Supreme Court also ordered prison officials to file a new mercy petition for a third prisoner who has spent more than 15 years on death row. President Arif Alvi has the authority to pardon Ghulam Abbas.

According to Justice Project Pakistan, there are 4,225 people on death row in Pakistan, and more than 600 mentally ill prisoners are in the countrys overcrowded prisons.

The group says 515 people have been executed since Pakistan lifted a six-year moratorium on the death penalty after militants killed more than 150 people at a school in the northwestern city of Peshawar in December 2014.

With reporting by dpa and AP

Quick review of the upcoming streetcar extension proves particularly astute . . . Profs tell their students to get ready for an EPIC rent spike as government transit only serves to help the fortunes of developers.



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Sales of beer in pubs more than halved last year and have fallen to the lowest level since the 1920s amid trading restrictions and lockdowns, the British Beer and Pub Association has revealed.

With pubs, bars, restaurants and nightclubs shut up and down the country, nearly 8billion worth of beer sales were lost in the past 12 months.

The BBPA is calling on the Government to provide the sector with a firm reopening date, as thousands of businesses and jobs remain at risk.

Having examined key data about where and how Covid-19 appears to be spreading, the BBPA said trading restrictions imposed on the hospitality sector could not be justified, even before the rollout of vaccines.

Data: Number of acute respiratory incidents by institution from 29 June to 31 January

In the second quarter of last year, pub and on-trade beer sales plummeted by 96 per cent, and even with the Eat Out to Help Out scheme in the summer, sales remained down over a quarter.

Pub beer sales were 77 per cent lower in the final three months of last year compared with 2019, as pubs were closed under various tier systems and an English national lockdown in November.

Philip Whitehead, chairman of the BBPA said the industry needs clarity about when it could expect to get back in business and start recovering.

He added: 'After nearly a whole year under forced closure, or open but under severe restrictions, pub trade has been decimated and sales of beer in pubs have plummeted .

'Furthermore, due to their revenue falling off a cliff in 2020, pubs are holding debt and have little to no cash left.

'We need the government to continue to provide financial support for pubs when they reopen to bridge the gap to full recovery.'

The Government has said it will broadcast its roadmap plans for getting Britain's businesses open again on 22 February.

Plans brewing? The Government has said it will broadcast its roadmap plans for getting Britain's businesses open again on 22 February

The BBPA said: 'While grateful for previous support, due to the levels of debt built up in the last 11 months the sector will not be able to bear additional business rates, VAT, beer duty and employment costs, even if all ongoing trading restrictions end in the Spring.

'Even during the current lockdown, the sector is facing ongoing costs of upwards of 100m every month.'

Businesses in the sector have spent a total of around 500million making their premises compliant with health and safety rules in the wake of the pandemic.

The BBPA said there had been no spike in infections as a result of pubs being reopened at certain points last year.

It said: 'We urge the Government to commit to the re-opening of all pubs in line with the wider economy once vulnerable groups have received the vaccine.

'All current mandatory trading restrictions must be immediately reviewed and gradually removed as pubs reopen.'

Among other measures, the BBPA is calling on the Government to extend the business rates holiday this year and announce a 5 per cent cut in the beer duty rate at the Budget on 5 March.

The BBPA said that 1 in every 3 spent in pubs goes to the Exchequer, adding that the pubs and brewing sector supports around 900,000 jobs across the country.
Stacey Manson, a nurse, gives a vaccination at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, Jan. 20, 2021. (Ryan Young/The New York Times)

Credit - Ryan YoungThe New York Times/Redux

In an ideal world, there would be enough vaccines to inoculate everyone who wanted to get immunized against COVID-19. People would get their shots on a first come, first serve basis, wed achieve herd immunity in a matter of months and COVID-19 would become a soon-distant memory.

But with some 240 million people over age 16 who need a COVID-19 vaccine (and two doses at that), and just over 42 million administered by early February, supply is far below demand, and will likely remain that way for months to come, despite vaccine makers pushing production lines as hard as they can.

As the U.S. works through the vaccine priority groups and begins to shift into ever larger populations in coming months, the pace of doses shipped could continue to outstrip the pace of administration. So far, the shots have been reserved primarily for health care workers, people living in long term care facilities, and those over 65. Some states have begun vaccinating essential workers like law enforcement officers, teachers and those who work in mass transit. But still, all of these groups are relatively easy to reach and vaccinate since theyre all well-defined.

The next big priority group, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) includes people with underlying health conditions that make them more vulnerable to COVID-19. While many are connected to the health care system by virtue of their medical conditions, there are a substantial portion of these patients who arent seeing doctors or getting their medical problems addressed.

According to the CDC, up to 60% of Americans have chronic conditions, some of which put them at higher risk of developing COVID-19. And 44 million Americans have no health insurance, making them less likely to have regular access to health care. The CDC lists 12 conditions ranging from diabetes to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, heart and kidney diseases, cancer and obesity that put people at higher risk of getting COVID-19 or having complications if they do. And there are other conditions like asthma, hypertension and many more for which they are still gathering data, but so far, those conditions too might heighten those risks.

Story continues

Given that there continues to be a limited supply of doses, doctors and local health officials are bracing for gut-wrenching decisions about which patients to vaccinate first, with a potential nightmare scenario of cancer patients fighting with heart patients for scarce vaccines. Should someone with cancer undergoing chemotherapy get vaccinated before someone awaiting a liver transplant? Does someone with asthma have a higher risk of getting COVID-19 than someone with dementia? No one wants to be on the committee that makes these allocations, says Dr. Cameron Wolfe, associate professor of medicine in the division of infectious diseases at Duke University. Just over a decade ago, Wolfe was part of his hospitals committee that determined how to distribute scarce H1N1 vaccines during that outbreak, and knows doctors and patients can make compelling arguments for nearly every patient. Its a problem for which there is no right answer.

Daniella Levine Cava, mayor of Miami-Dade in Florida, is concerned about how her health officials will make those distribution decisions when the time comes, and hopes for more guidance either from the federal or state government. The governor of Florida has opened vaccination up to people over age 65 with health conditions, and thats already caused confusion and anxiety among residents, since Cava says doses ear marked for this group are still limited. We have a lot of people desperate in that category, and very worried, very anxious, she says. It will be complicated to determine eligibility. There are so many different categorieshow do you determine and judge who is more at risk? Im in favor of national uniformityThis is the kind of thing that cries out for predictabilitythe more predictability and clarity we can have, the better.

State health departments are inclined to stay out of such granular decisions, for two reasons. First, theres no universal solution that works for everybody, and any strategy they might choose to use to triage patients for vaccines would be criticized. Second, the more prescriptive states are about allocating vaccines, the longer the shots take to get into peoples arms, and the greater the chance that some are wasted as doctors try to parse through the policies and spend precious time making sure theyre complying with them.

When we get to that population, our preference would be to have the decision made between the provider and the patient, says Dr. Jinlene Chan, acting deputy secretary of public health services for the Maryland department of health. That, Chan says, would ensure that doctors, who have the most information about their individual patients, will be able to broadly stratify patients in terms of their COVID-19 risk. That risk boils down to two vulnerabilities: first, how much risk their patients have for getting infected in the first place, which takes into account where they live and the infection rates there, and their exposure to high-risk settings such as hospitals or public venues; and second, their risk for getting severely ill and potentially dying from COVID-19.

Balancing these risks will, indeed, likely fall to doctors, and, Wolfe says, the simplest strategies might be the most efficient. A starting point to avoid the ethical and medical tangle of comparing people with different conditions is to use age as the determining factor. Older people tend to have more health issues, and when they do, their conditions are generally more intense and severe than those experienced by younger people. And thats especially the case with COVID-19, which hits elderly people harder. If I cant medically stand in front of two patients and separate their arguments, how do I break the tie in cases where there is a scarce resource? he says. Sometimes age is the easy delineator. If someone is hypertensive with a BMI of 30, but only 25, their risk is less than someones who is hypertensive with a BMI of 30 but age 64.

And if age isnt a tie breaker, practicality may rule the daywhoever is available and can get vaccinated sooner should get the shot.

But that layers the sticky question of access on top of sensitive triage issues. So far, doses have been funneled to hospitals, health clinics and other health care centers in order to reach the first priority group of health care workers. Yet 25% of the U.S. population doesnt see a doctor regularly, according to a 2020 JAMA Internal Medicine study, much less have access to a hospital or clinic. As a result, many of these people have chronic conditions that arent treated at all, or, if they are, arent well controlled. Reaching this group of people, and making them comfortable with getting vaccinated, is a black box that public health officials havent quite decoded yet.

For now, hospitals and health systems are focusing on the lowest hanging fruit: their own patients. At least they have electronic medical records for these people, and can contact them to let them know when they become eligible for vaccination. Plus, they can mine the health records to triage them by COVID-19 risk and therefore vaccination priority. Between two patients with diabetes, for example, they can determine who has the less controlled blood sugar level and place that person higher on the list than someone whose disease is better managed.

At UCLA Health, this system generates an invitation list based on a risk score that weaves in not just the patients medical condition, but data from social determinants as well, such as poverty, income, education, housing, and geographic residence. These are part of the CDCs Social Vulnerability Index, originally created to identify medically vulnerable people and target health resources to them after natural disasters such as hurricanes or infectious disease outbreaks like COVID-19. The index includes census data on 15 factors that help to stratify peoples overall health risk by acknowledging that some aspects of a persons health status has nothing to do with his or her medical condition but rather living conditions, which in turn drives their access, or lack thereof, to health services.

To identify our most vulnerable patients, we have an elaborate point system that incorporates age, clinical and social risk data from the medical record to risk stratify our patients, says Dr. Eve Glazier, president of the faculty practice group at UCLA Health and an associate clinical professor at the David Geffen UCLA School of Medicine. The formula weighs factors such as age, and, say, whether a cancer patient is in remission or currently undergoing chemotherapy. Glazier says there are 120,000 patients over age 65 with chronic health conditions who are being prioritized over those over age 65 without health issues. We are really trying to avoid the Ticketmaster free-for-all approach, she says. The first-come-first-serve strategy is antithetical to any approach that we would consider is fair and equitable.

At Orlando Health, a private health system in central Florida, officials formed a committee to come up with broad guidelines for helping doctors navigate the difficult decisions they might have to make as demand for vaccine doses continues to outstrip supply. We recently received 2,000 doses for medically vulnerable patients we are serving here, says Dr. George Ralls, senior vice president and chief medical officer of Orlando Health. We have 400,000 people over 65 in our network who qualify for vaccination. So 2,000 doesnt go very far. Were trying to find the riskiest patients and trying to give them the vaccine first.Their system starts with age: We fine-tuned it to pull people out who we thought were at higher risk, starting with age as the main differentiator, Ralls says. We stratified the group of people aged 65-70, pulled up patients with certain diseases and then looked at people aged 60-65, and worked through it like that Patients with chronic conditions who arent able to get vaccinated if there arent enough doses in one round of vaccinations will be next in line and notified when more vaccines are shipped. Its going to go like that for a while, he says. As we continue to get small allocations of vaccine, we will apply them the best we can to patients who fit the highest risk profile.

Whats becoming clear is that highest risk wont mean the same from hospital to hospital, or county to county, or state to state. And that can lead to misunderstanding and frustration, as people with the same health condition, living in the same part of the country, might not be able to get their shots at the same time. UCLA Health is trying to head off any potential conflict by sending regular emails to their patient population outlining the systems triaging plan, how they came up with it, and which people are getting vaccinated at any given time.

Still, some patients desperate for a shot are opting to game the system and find a hospital even if it isnt the one at which they are being treatedor a state-run vaccination clinic, that might get them vaccinated sooner. And thats fine, say most doctors and public health officials, who at this point are more focused on ensuring that as many people get their shots as quickly as possible than establishing and policing complex priority policies. Were encouraging our patients to get the vaccine where they can get it first, says Glazier of UCLA. Los Angeles county isnt using a risk stratification at their mega vaccination sites, and we are very candid about the model we are using given the amount of doses we have. If they can get vaccinated at Dodger Stadium, then we encourage them to do that. Glazier says the UCLA system will record that vaccination in the patients health record and drop them from future COVID-19 vaccine invitation lists.

The challenge experts are worried about is figuring out how to help people with chronic health conditions who arent linked to a network like UCLA, Duke or Orlando Healthwithout further burdening the rollout. Not only are they harder to reach, but it will be harder for vaccinators to validate that they qualify for a shot. Its not likely that states will require letters from doctors or other verification of their condition, since that adds a layer of bureaucracy that will further slow the push of vaccines into peoples arms. Any time you have to prove something, that gets awkward at the point of service, says Ralls. I dont know how that is going to play out, and havent heard anything about a plan for public distribution other than people saying they have a medical condition. Thats a hurdle pharmacies, which are expecting to be the next large dispenser of vaccines to the public, will soon have to face as more people with these conditions turn to their local pharmacies for shots.

In Maryland, Chan says the state is working with community leaders to reach more people who arent connected to a doctor or health system, regardless of whether they have an underlying health condition, to make sure more residents get vaccinated. They are currently jumping off of their existing vaccination data to figure out where people arent getting vaccinated, and to the extent possible, determine how many people with existing health conditions might live in those areas so officials can start directing more doses there. You cant look at somebody and know whether they have an underlying condition or not, she says. So were working with community organizations and theyre giving us feedback about the degree of outreach well need, and how we can almost walk the community to actually identify and find those individuals.

Such efforts will take extra effort and resources, but are an integral part of the vaccine rolloutwhich, to date, havent been the focus of the COVID-19 vaccine campaign. Were trying to play catch up because most of our efforts so far in COVID-19 have focused on making vaccines and testing them, and not so much on delivery, says Dr. Daniel Hoft, director of the St. Louis University center for vaccine development. Thinking more deeply about the mechanics of the rollout will be crucial to making sure that the next priority group stepping up to get vaccinated gets their shots when they need them, where they need them.

This 2020 electron microscope image made available by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows the spherical particles of the new coronavirus, colorized blue, from the first U.S. case of COVID-19.

MADISON COUNTY  Prior to the early 1950s, there was only one island in the stretch of the Mississippi River between its confluence with the Missouri River and Arsenal Island in St. Clair County - Mosenthein Island.

North of Mosenthein, an anti-cline, or upward dome of bedrock traverses the river from east to west, leaving shelf-like protrusions of rock in a chain. These rocks were navigation hazards to barge traffic, especially when the river level was low.

To evade this hazard, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began planning and constructing an almost 8.5-mile long shipping canal, The Chain of Rocks, after World War II. The canal will mark 70 years of service in 2023.

The Corps also created two islands with this project, Chouteau to the north and Gabaret to the south. The pair are separated by the Gabaret Slough, which does not empty into the canal and only connects to the river during high water.

Chouteau Island, likely named for St. Louis founder Auguste Chouteau, comprises 3,200 acres. Until the Great Flood of 1993, about 40 families lived and farmed there. Now, more than 70 percent of the island is in public ownership under the Corps and the Illinois Department of Natural Resources (IDNR). Most of the island has been cleared of trees in favor of field crops but there are some margins of willows and cottonwoods along the rivers edge.

Gabaret Island occupies 1,300 acres. Louisiana Purchase explorers Meriweather Lewis and William Clark camped at Gabaret on Dec. 11, 1803, prior to setting up Camp Dubois, their winter camp, near current-day Wood River. Camp Dubois served as the Corps of Discovery Expeditions launching point to send the crew up the Missouri River. However, both rivers have changed course since 1804, making the original Camp Dubois inaccessible. For more camp information, visit here.

Near Gabarets south end, the Corps of Engineers built Mississippi River Lock #27 on the canal. This is the southernmost lock on the river and the only one south of the Mississippis confluence with the Missouri. The island played a role in the Underground Railroad between Missouri and Illinois. During the early morning hours of May 21, 1855, Mary Meachum, a free woman of color, accompanied a small group of slaves and their guides across the Mississippi, using what would later become Gabaret Island as a stop on the journey. Unfortunately, a police officer awaited the group in Illinois and Meachum was arrested and jailed.

Mosenthein Island covers 1,077 acres and is probably the only location in the region that remains as it was in 1803. It is only fully accessible by boat or air and is mainly composed of bottomland forest. Camping is not permitted on Chouteau and Gabaret.

According to the IDNR, hunting is allowed within 650 acres of bottomland forest and 420 acres of prairie and scrub or shrub habitat. Allowable animals to hunt within statewide regulations include:

 Squirrel

 Archery Deer

 Upland Game (Cock Pheasant, Bobwhite Quail, Rabbit and Hungarian Partridge)

 Wild Turkey (Spring), (Fall Archery) and (Fall Shotgun)

 Crow, Woodcock, Snipe and Rail

 Waterfowl

 Teal

 Dove

IDNR treats this trio of islands as a satellite area of Horseshoe Lake State Park, which is southeast of the canal and islands. People may camp there between May 1 and Sept. 30 each year for up to seven days every 30-day period between those start and end dates. Horseshoe Lake accommodates 26 tent or trailer campsites.

The lake itself is one of many cut-off oxbow lakes in the region, left behind when the main channel changed course through the centuries. The river used to flow through what is now Brooklyn, heading northeast along the southeast sides of Madison and Granite City before making a large, graceful turn south then southwest to Fairmont City and East St. Louis, where it rejoined the current main channel.

Not coincidentally, the pre-Columbian city of Cahokia (1050-1350) was located to the south of the lake. At its height, around 1100, the city and its 120 mounds covered five miles from west to east, just south of what is now Horseshoe Lake and during the 13th Century, Cahokia may have had a population rivaling that of contemporary London, England.

In 2015, sedimentary analysis from beneath the lake revealed that two large floods occurred while it was connected to the Mississippi, one between 1100 and 1260 and the other between 1340 and 1460.

Reach reporter Charles Bolinger at 618-659-5735
Then-national security adviser Chung Eui-yong, third from left, and then-National Intelligence Service chief Suh Hoon, second from left, hold a meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, Sept. 5, 2018, during their visit to Pyongyang as presidential envoys. A third summit between President Moon Jae-in and Kim took place about two weeks after their visit. Chung was sworn in as foreign minister, Tuesday, and Suh succeeded Chung as President Moon's national security adviser in July 2020. Courtesy of Cheong Wa Dae



By Do Je-hae



President Moon Jae-in has rehired Chung Eui-yong, his first national security adviser from May 2017 to July 2020, as minister of foreign affairs with the hope of resuscitating inter-Korean and U.S.-North Korea talks to bring new momentum for his peace process before the twilight of his presidency sets in later this year. It is Chung who met with former U.S. President Donald Trump in March 2018 and brokered the first summit between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Singapore three months later.



Chung's surprise appointment last month as foreign minister, replacing Kang Kyung-wha who had served in the post since the beginning of the Moon administration in May 2017, came about six months after the appointment of former National Intelligence Service (NIS) head Suh Hoon as national security adviser in July 2020. Chung and Suh led the preparations for the series of summits between Moon and Kim in 2018, culminating in Moon's visit to Pyongyang in September that year. At the time Moon said that Kim had agreed to reciprocate the visit. Chung and Suh both visited Pyongyang twice that year ahead of the inter-Korean summits and met personally with Kim. Suh is a career veteran at the National Intelligence Service (NIS) and has devoted most of his career to dealing with North Korea affairs.



Moon's high expectations for Chung and Suh are well-known, but it is unknown whether Pyongyang has similar expectations for them. Some experts said that given their special expertise in talks with North Korea, Pyongyang could be hoping they will be able to mediate between North Korea and the U.S.





Presidential envoy Chung Eui-yong, left, talks to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un during Chung's visit to Pyongyang, Sept. 5, 2018, ahead of the third summit between President Moon Jae-in and Kim in the North Korean capital, Sept. 18. Courtesy of Cheong Wa Dae

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has ruled that it does have jurisdiction over war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Palestinian territories of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.

This paves the way for investigations into Israel and Hamas conduct during Israels murderous assault on Gaza in 2014 and Israels response to the weekly protests held under the banner of the Great March of Return that started in March 2018 and lasted for more than a year.

According to United Nations figures, Israels bombardment of Gaza in 2014 killed 2,251 Palestinians, including 1,462 civilians, and injured 11,231. Of the Palestinians who lost their lives, 521 were children and 283 were women. The civilian death toll was far higher than that of the estimated 400 fighters belonging to Hamas, the Islamist group that controls Gaza and the ostensible target of the war. Just 67 Israeli soldiers, along with six civilians, were killed, and 1,600 soldiers were injured. The UNs Human Rights Council (UNHRC) concluded that the mass killing and destruction were deliberate, not accidental, resulting from explicit decisions taken at the highest level of the Israeli government.

Gaza Strip, July 2014: The Kaware family home, where eight people, including six minors, were killed, and from the Hamad family home where six members of that family, including one girl  a minor  were killed. (source: Muhammad Sabah and B'Tselem-Creative Commons)

Israeli forces responded to the largely peaceful Great March of Return protests, held in Gaza near its border with Israel, by firing tear gas canisters, some of them dropped from drones, rubber bullets and live ammunition, mostly by snipers. As a result, 214 Palestinians, including 46 children, were killed, and over 36,100, including nearly 8,800 children were injured. One in five of those injured (over 8,000) were hit by live ammunition. In contrast, just one Israeli soldier was killed and seven others injured during the demonstrations.

The ICC ruling constitutes a potential legal barrier to Israels plans to extend and/or build new settlements and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahus plans, now on hold, to annex the Jordan Valley in breach of the ban on an occupying power settling civilians in or annexing occupied territory.

While Fatou Bensouda, the ICCs chief prosecutor in The Hague, announced in December 2019 that there was sufficient evidence to investigate allegations of war crimes, she requested a jurisdictional ruling from ICC judges to confirm that the court has the necessary territorial jurisdiction before proceeding to a full investigation. The Palestinian Authority, which is an observer state at the UN, joined the ICC in 2015 and asked it to investigate Israeli war crimes.

Until now, the ICC has largely confined its investigations to Africa, which accounts for virtually all of those indicted or arrested by the court since its founding nearly two decades ago. The announcement reflects the increasing international opposition, and within Israel itself, to the wars, repression, occupation, dispossession, torture and collective punishment inflicted on the Palestinian people.

This latest ruling has infuriated Israel and its patron in Washington, which rejects any constraints on its geostrategic interests and plans for a new imperialist carve up of the world in which Israel plays a central role in carrying out this agenda and suppressing the working class in the region.

Neither state signed up to the 1998 Rome Statute that established the ICC with powers to prosecute individualsnot statesaccused of genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes committed since July 2002, when the statute came into force. This was because their record of wars of aggression and criminal actions would open their officials to prosecution.

As the ICC came under pressure from the major powers, Bensouda sought to deflect allegations of anti-Israel bias by accusing the Palestinians of committing war crimes, despite the grossly uneven nature of Israels seven-week long war against Gaza in 2014 and provisions in the UN Charter recognizing the right of self-defence when attacked.

Last April, the Trump administration revoked Bensoudas entry visa to the US and two months later announced that it was placing sanctions on the ICC in response to the courts intention to probe the conduct of US forces in Afghanistan. Netanyahu called the ICC a kangaroo court and a politicized court obsessed with conducting witch hunts against Israel, the United States and other democracies that respect human rights.

While any investigation or prosecution of Israeli officials by the ICC is fraught with practical difficulties, which Israel will seek to exploit, and Bensoudas term of office expires in June, the ICCs ruling poses two threats to Israel.

It opens up the possibility that hundreds of Israeli government and military officials could be open to arrest if they travel abroad to countries that have universal jurisdiction, although countries including the UK have refrained from using such powers against Israelis. A senior Israeli official in the Justice Ministry said that it had prepared a list of hundreds of Israelis who might be at risk and that We are preparing to mount a full defence for any Israeli citizens that the court attempts to legally persecute if an investigation is opened.

Second, the ruling, by recognising the Palestinian Authority as a state with the right to seek redress from the court, paves the way for legal action against Israel in the ICC over any construction in West Bank and East Jerusalem settlements that are now home to nearly 700,000 Israelis, or the demolition of homes belonging to Palestinians. As an Israeli official told Ynet News, the online outlet for the Yedioth Aharonot newspaper, It is unprecedented that every action taken on the West Bank can now be investigated by the court.

Attacking this latest ICC ruling, Netanyahu said, Today, the court proved once again that it is a political body and not a judicial institution. The court ignores real war crimes, and instead persecutes Israel, a country with a stable democratic regime that holds up the rule of law and is not a member of the court. With this decision, the court harmed democratic nations right to defend themselves from terrorism and played into the hands of elements that undermine efforts to expand the circle of peace.

Netanyahu released a video statement accusing the court of pure anti-Semitism, even as it refuses to investigate brutal dictatorships like Iran and Syria, who commit horrific atrocities almost daily. He pledged to fight this perversion of justice with all our might.

Netanyahus statements distort the ICCs actual ruling that merely determined that Palestine, which is recognised by the UN General Assembly and whose Palestinian Authority, established under the 1993 Oslo Accords had joined the ICC, could delegate its jurisdiction to the ICC. The court insisted that it had no authority to rule on Palestinian statehood and that its ruling on jurisdiction is neither adjudicating a border dispute nor prejudging the question of any future borders.

In Washington, the incoming Biden administration continued former President Donald Trumps support for Israel, with State Department spokesman Ned Price saying, The United States objects to todays [ICC] decision regarding the Palestinian situation. Israel is not a State Party to the Rome Statute

The United States has always taken the position that the courts jurisdiction should be reserved for countries that consent to it, or that are referred by the U.N. Security Council, he added, concluding, We will continue to uphold President Bidens strong commitment to Israel and its security, including opposing actions that seek to target Israel unfairly.

The furious response by Tel Aviv and Washington to the ICCs ruling flows from the ever-escalating pursuit of their predatory interests by means of military force.
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Biden, the 46th president, is America's second Catholic President. The first was John F. Kennedy  when he became President in 1961.

From the start of his campaign, Biden wanted everything to be about his faith. A favored campaign slogan for the Biden camp was the "battle for the soul of the nation."

It didn't matter the media outlet. They all loved reporting on how Biden was a "deeply devout Catholic" and that his faith is a huge factor in "shaping his politics." Even Speaker Pelosi publicly praises Biden's faith and willingly admits that his Catholic faith has shaped his career and public policies. An article in The New York Times stated, "President Biden, perhaps the most religiously observant commander in chief in half a century, speaks of how his Catholic faith grounds his life and his policies."

Interesting, isn't it? How the media and every single big-time progressive politician have no problem mixing Biden's faith with politics. But suppose you are a Christian who is pro-life and not in favor of the Supreme Court legalizing same-sex marriage. In that case, the response you get from the Left is the complete opposite. How was Judge Amy Coney Barrett (also a deeply devout Catholic) treated during the Senate confirmation hearings? Senator Dianne Feinstein and her colleagues didn't praise Judge Barrett for her faith. Instead, Senator Feinstein expressed her concern about how Judge Barrett's faith might influence her decisions by stating, "The dogma lives loudly within you, and that's of concern." But if the Left is so concerned about a person's faith interfering with their public service, why isn't the Left disparaging Biden from talking about how his faith shapes his public policies?

The main reason? Because President Biden is as much of a progressive as he is a Catholic. He is what I refer to as a "Progressive Catholic." Don't believe me? Listen to what he said in his book, Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics, "I'm as much a cultural Catholic as I am a theological Catholic." Biden continues, "My idea of self, of family, of community, of the wider world, comes straight from my religion. It's not so much the Bible, the beatitudes, the Ten Commandments, the sacraments, or the prayers I learned. It's the culture."

Because Judge Barrett is a conservative Catholic and not a progressive, liberal Democrats are concerned about her "dogmatic" positions embedding on her judgment. Therefore, she must be censored at all costs. However, in President Biden's case, he gets a pass because he'll keep on advancing progressive policies like the Equality Act (which will eviscerate religious freedoms in America), government funding of abortion, and the Green New Deal.

It's not a question of whether President Biden has a right to express his religious beliefs. He has that right under the Constitution. It's really about charging the media for being inconsistent by not allowing conservatives to do the same.

Let's hope the media will admit to their intolerance and learn to be more receptive to Americans who hold conservative viewpoints.
If you're in a nursing home operated by the Department of Veterans Affairs, data shows you're about half as likely to contract COVID-19 as you are in a non-VA senior living facility, and 13 times less likely to die from the disease.

In the past year, 1,679 residents of VA nursing homes, which it calls community living centers or CLCs, contracted COVID-19, and 143 died "within 30 days after a positive test," according to the department.

With more than 30,000 American veterans living in these facilities, that translates to an infection rate of 5.47 per 100 people and a death rate of less than .5%.

Read Next: GOP Air National Guardsman in Congress: Convict Trump, Save America

Roughly one-third of the 1.4 million Americans living in a nursing home tested positive for COVID-19 in 2020, and the death rate was 6.5%, according to data published by AARP.

VA officials attribute the lower infection and death rates to implementing infection prevention and control measures as soon as the virus began spreading. The VA limited new admissions, quarantined veterans returning to their homes from medical care, restricted visitors and tested residents and staff regularly, VA officials said.

Late last year, then-VA Secretary Robert Wilkie described the decision to lock down nursing homes as one of the "hard choices" of the pandemic.

VA nursing home patients are among the most fragile Americans, with the majority of residents being World War II veterans.

"At this very tough time in their lives, we cut them off from families and friends but we did it in order to protect them," Wilkie said in an interview with Military.com.

He added that as a result of the low number of cases and deaths, VA was sharing "lessons learned ... with the rest of the country, particularly on the nursing home front."

The Government Accountability Office reported last week that 95% of the VA's 134 nursing homes had at least one issue with infection control in the five years preceding the pandemic.

According to the GAO, 365 infection prevention and control deficiencies were found at VA nursing homes from 2015 through 2019 -- including staff not washing their hands properly, not using gowns and gloves as recommended or failing to clean reusable medical items correctly.

"Many of these practices can be critical to preventing the spread of infectious diseases, including COVID-19," GAO analysts wrote in the report.

The review was conducted at the request of Democratic Sens. Jon Tester of Montana, and Edward Markey and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. It follows media reports on the quality of care at VA nursing homes and scrutiny of an internal ratings system based on quality metrics tracked by the VA but not provided to veterans or families.

In one egregious case, a veteran died in 2019 at the VA's Eagles' Nest Community Living Center in Georgia, days after his daughter found him covered with more than 100 ant bites.

An investigation found that staff was aware of the fire ant infestation and other veterans had been bitten.

The VA moved the facility's 34 residents elsewhere last spring and closed the facility in December. It plans to build a new home in Atlanta.

According to the GAO, 62% of the VA's community living centers inspected had infection control issues in consecutive years and an additional 19% had them in multiple nonconsecutive years.

Roughly one-third had deficiencies in at least three consecutive years.

The GAO also found that VA inspectors classified all of the deficiencies as "not severe," meaning the inspector determined that residents were not harmed, even though at least one case involved poor hygiene among staff working with residents with active cases of Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, a bacteria that can cause pneumonia and bloodstream infections.

The GAO sent the report to the senators and the VA but made no recommendations.

VA Spokesman Randy Noller said the department took corrective measures as a result of infection control deficiencies identified during unannounced surveys between 2015 and 2019.

According to AARP, the rate of COVID-19 infections among U.S. nursing home staff members was 9.3 per 100 people in December. The VA did not provide the breakout for employees who work at its community living centers, making it difficult to calculate the comparable rate.

As of Monday, 1,272 Veterans Health Administration employees were COVID-positive. Since the beginning of the outbreak, 18,725 VA employees have tested positive, and 125 have died.

Noller said the VA will continue to "enforce ongoing vigilant safeguards to protect the highly vulnerable community living center veterans."

The department has published a plan for facilities to follow in resuming in-person services and allowing visitation, which will vary by facility, he added.

Veterans living in VA community settings were in the first tier of those offered the COVID-19 vaccine by the department.

-- Patricia Kime can be reached at Patricia.Kime@Monster.com. Follow her on Twitter @patriciakime.

Related: VA's Complicated Vaccine Priority System Causes Disparities, Confusion
The agreement will ensure BlackEarth has access to an extensive range of products from anywhere in the world and Luxacarbons supply network will ensure the concentrate and downstream produced products are sold to Tier 1 buyers throughout Europe.

The terms of the agreement are for three years with the ability for the parties to extend this by mutual consent.

( ) has soared to a new record high on signing a graphite supply and marketing agreement with Luxcarbon GmbH, Germany - a move that further positions the company as a supplier of graphite concentrate and downstream graphite products to EV and alternative energy markets.

Luxcarbon is one of Germanys major suppliers of graphite and carbon products to top tier suppliers like Volkswagen, Mercedes, Ford as well as to major chemical corporations.

Shares skyrocket

Recognising the importance of the agreement, investors have responded positively with shares more than trebling.

From the previous close of A$0.092, securities have been as much as 205 per cent higher to A$0.28, a new record, on volume of more than 270 million.

Under the terms of the agreement, Luxcarbon will source and supply to BlackEarth up to the amount of 25,000 tonnes per annum of high-grade concentrate, which BlackEarth will use to assist Urbix in completing its plant development - as part of its existing MOU commitment with Urbix.

The agreement also provides that Luxcarbon shall exclusively market and sell up to 25,000 tonnes of BEM and BEM JV produced material annually into the European markets to meet growing demand for battery EV material.

Positive commercial outcomes

The agreement also provides the BEM team with the advantage of having a secure and substantial product supply to meet its proposed downstream JV operations and other downstream production plans that it is developing in Australia and in overseas jurisdictions  a unique strategic advantage that will position the company well for growth and development during 2021 and beyond.

BlackEarth managing director Tom Revy said: The board is delighted to sign this agreement with Luxcarbon, a leader in the graphite supply and marketing of graphite concentrate and downstream products throughout Europe.

This agreement provides a number of great outcomes for BlackEarth.

Firstly, it enables us to secure a supply of world-class graphite concentrate that can be supplied to Urbixs operations in the USA and also our own downstream processing facility whilst we complete the development of our plants in Australia and Madagascar.

Secondly, Luxcarbon are leaders in the supply and understanding of downstream graphite products and this will assist us greatly.

Members of the Luxcarbon team and BlackEarth director David Round have previously worked extensively together in developing sales and market networks for the supply of substantial quantities of graphite and the company is confident this relationship will ensure similar, positive commercial outcomes for both companies.

Revy said: We are excited at the prospects and opportunities this unique agreement provides to our shareholders.

The supply arrangement will continue whilst BlackEarth fast tracks the development of its own high-grade, large-scale graphite properties in Madagascar, which will then form a regular supply to its proposed downstream graphite operations.

Demand for downstream products

Demand for energy store and use is expected to surge over the next few decades and the production of critical commodities such as graphite will need to jump to unprecedented levels just to meet demand.

According to a new World Bank Report, just to meet the increasing demand from this segment, graphite output will need to jump by nearly 500% by 2050.

The marketing and sales components of this agreement provide BEM with the opportunity to supply its refined product to meeting this growing demand from EV manufacturers as well as related industries that require expanded and purified graphite products.

In addition, members of the BEM executive team have extensive experience with developing supply and logistical networks in Europe (and other markets) and the companys relationship with Luxcarbon is expected to assist in positioning the company as a preferred supplier in the early stages of the anticipated strong demand for downstream graphite products.

Expanding EV and battery markets

BlackEarths focus, with the help of Luxacarbon, will be to develop supply chain logistics and sales channels for the initial supply of downstream products for use in the rapidly expanding EV and battery market.

Europe has seen significant EV growth with sales increasing 44% in 2019 with Germany and the Netherlands contributing nearly half of overall EV-market growth in Europe.

In both countries, these strong EV sales resulted from increased demand for new models, the availability of existing models with larger battery sizes, and changed government incentives.

In the first quarter of 2020, European EV sales rose as the overall EV penetration rate increased to 7.5 per cent.

The strong regulatory tailwinds and high purchase incentives in several European countries could dampen the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and further boost the EV market.

Notably, the EUs new emissions standard - 95 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometre for passenger cars - could boost EV sales as 95 per cent of the fleet must meet this standard in 2020 and 100 per cent in 2021.

Congress and TMC MPs staged a walkout while Prime Minister Narendra Modi was repling to the motion of thanks to President's address in the Lok Sabha on Wednesday (February 10).

Congress' Adhir Chowdhury said that the reason for walking out during the session was that the prime minister did not discuss the opposition's concerns over the deaths of protesting farmers.

"We walked out because PM didn't discuss our concerns over farmers' death. He agreed that amendments are required in farm laws, some states will be benefitted and some' won't. Why do you have to bring laws that won't be benefitting everyone?" Chowdhury was quoted as saying by news agency ANI.

Meanwhile, PM Modi in his address blamed the opposition for attempting to disrupt the parliament.

"Noises and attempts to obstruct are part of a well-thought strategy. The strategy is to keep making noises otherwise the lies and rumours will be exposed and truth will come out," said PM Modi.

"You (opposition) won't be able to win people's confidence like that," he added. Defending the farm laws, PM Modi said that the laws were made keeping in mind the larger interest of the society.

(With inputs from ANI)

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Dr Ciara Nolan and Dr Francois Bonnet rescue golden retriever Neesha after she was lost on Lughnaguilla in Co Wicklow for two weeks

The couple who walked 10kms from the highest peak in the Wicklow mountains to rescue a lost dog say they would do it all over again if needed.

Speaking to Independent.ie, Dr Ciara Nolan (32), an obstetrician at the Rotunda Hospital, said she and her partner, Dr Francois Bonnet (35), a registrar anesthesiologist at Dublins Mater Hospital, would happily do the four-hour mountain trek again if it meant saving the life of an animal in distress.

The couple made headlines when a video Ciara took of Francois painstakingly carrying Neesha, a near-starving and frozen golden retriever, on his back wrapped up in a spare jacket went viral.

Their generous act of kindness brought untold relief to Neeshas worried owners, Erina OShea-Goetelen, her husband Serge Goetelen and their children Shannagh (20) and Caolin (16).

The Irish-Belgian family who live in Aughavannagh, Co Wicklow, had all but given up hope of ever seeing their beloved dog again after she went missing after chasing a deer while out for walk on January 23.

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Despite ongoing searches and even sending a drone up over the Wicklow mountains in a bid to find her, they thought she would never survive being lost in the mountains for a fortnight.

But by sheer chance, Ciara and Francois, who are avid mountain-climbers, came across Neesha while they were out for a hike last Saturday.

Expand Close Dr Francois Bonnet rescues golden retriever Neesha after she was lost on Lughnaguilla in Co Wicklow for two weeks / Facebook

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Whatsapp Dr Francois Bonnet rescues golden retriever Neesha after she was lost on Lughnaguilla in Co Wicklow for two weeks

Ciara, who took part in a medical expedition to Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania before the pandemic as part of trauma training, said they knew straight away that Neesha was almost on deaths door.

"The dog was very lucky we found her, she said.

"We know how to recognise hypothermia, it was just pure luck we found her, she said.

Fortunately, the couple packed all the right gear for their trek, including bringing extra clothing, including a spare ski jacket and snacks for their hike up Lugnaquilla, near their home in Arklow.

"The weather was terrible but we had nothing else to do so we thought lets get some fresh air. We just love the outdoors, especially during lockdown, she said.

As they were climbing up the mountain they saw Neesha shivering on a rock.

We spotted her hunkered down beside a little rock that didnt offer any protection (from the elements), she said.

"She was completely exposed to the elements. She was so weak she didnt have the energy to stand. She just lifted her little head.

Francois, who hails from Nice in France, knew right away that Neesha was suffering from hypothermia and immediately wrapped her up in the spare ski jacket to warm her up.

"She was completely frozen and she had injuries on her paw, said Ciara, adding the couple could tell from her injuries that they werent fresh cuts which set off alarm bells that she had been exposed to the elements for several days.

They gave Neesha sips of tea from their flask to warm her up and fed her small bits of bread to kickstart her metabolism. Despite weighing more than 20 kgs, Francois hefted Neesha up on his shoulders and the couple began the long trek down the mountain.

"He slipped and fell a few times so we used my scarf like a baby sling on his back. We just wanted to get her down from the mountain, said Ciara.

It was completely out of the question that we would leave her there, she said, adding Francois didnt complain once.

"He was absolutely wrecked but we were running on adrenalin.

After a gruelling 10km trek the couple took the longer but less arduous route back home and put Neesha in front of the fire.

They contacted the local ASH animal rescue centre which was able to put them in touch with Neeshas owners, who were in complete disbelief" that she had been found alive.

"I spoke to Erina and said I think I have your dog, said Ciara.

"She said is she breathing? Is she alive? I said yes, we have her here, shes ok, shes in front of the fire.

The Goetelen family brought Neesha to their vet who treated her with antibiotics and painkillers for what turned out to be dermatitis from sheltering on the hard rock.

The Goetelens meanwhile, are eternally grateful for the couples kindness, saying they were not only frontline medical heroes, but heroes in every sense of the word.

What they did for our dog, theres no words to thank them, Erina told Independent.ie this evening. "So much courage and energy. What they did is beyond belief.

Neesha is recovering from her ordeal

Her spirit is good. Theres a twinkle in her eye, she said.

Ciara, meanwhile, said the couple is delighted with how things turned out and would do it all over again.

"Francois was definitely sore the next day but he said hed do it a million times over again, she said.
1. Roads. The citys roads are a mess. Significant resources are needed to fix them.

2. Public safety. The crime rate is too high. Police pay and resources come first.

3. More city programs. The city must invest more in city programs and services.

4. Comprehensive plan. The city needs to focus on rebuilding and rebranding.

5. Cut city spending. City officials must get serious about trimming the budget.

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The rancor that occurred, Saturday, February 6, at the sitting of the Lagos State Judicial Panel of Inquiry investigating the shootings and alleged killings at the Lekki Toll gate in Lagos in October 2020, in addition to reported cases of police brutality is most unfortunate and disturbing. It will be recalled that the clampdown on protesters at the Lekki Toll Gate, the widespread mayhem that followed, in the shape of attacks on police men and police stations, the assault on warehouses where COVID-19 palliatives had been detained by unconscionable politicians, the attack on homes and businesses of both politicians and innocent persons, in general, the needless loss of lives  attracted mass outrage.

A meeting comprising the 36 state Governors, the FCT Minister, the Inspector General of Police and the Human Rights Commission in October 2020, chaired by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo resolved at the time that all state governments should set up panels of inquiry and organize public hearings to establish the truth and ensure that justice was done, and victims duly compensated. Most states promised to set up the panels of inquiry, 29 did eventually, but some did not. As at January 30, 2021, the following states: Borno, Jigawa, Kano, Kebbi, Sokoto, Yobe and Zamfara had refused to set up any panel of inquiry. Kogi state announced that it had also constituted a panel of inquiry, but that panel has not met for even five minutes to date.

In some of the states where the panels exist and have been sitting: Plateau, Nasarawa, Kaduna, Ekiti, Ogun, Edo, Ondo, Rivers, Delta, Cross River, Abia, Bayelsa, Anambra and the Federal Capital Territory, the pace of work has been rather slow and inconsistent. In Oyo State, the panel commenced sitting in January 2021, two months after its inauguration! The panels in Niger State, Katsina, and Rivers have since concluded sitting. But of all the states, Lagos State has been the most responsive, the most active, and one of the very first states to commit to doing a thorough job of ensuring justice and establishing the truth. The nine-member Lagos Panel of Inquiry and Restitution, as announced, was set up on October 16, 2020. Justice Doris Okuwobi (rtd) was named Chair of the Panel. It began sitting on Tuesday, October 27, 2020. The Okuwobi panel has received more coverage than any other panel in the country, perhaps because of its consistency, its proximity to the Lagos-Ibadan media, the international media as well, and the fact of the Lekki Toll Gate being the epicentre of the #ENDSARS protests.

In October 2020, the Lekki Toll gate and its satellite, the Ikoyi Bridge Toll gate managed by the same company, the Lekki Concession Company (LCC) were the primary locations of the protest against police brutality in Nigeria, with specific focus on the notorious Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS). The protests soon spread to other parts of the country, even if the Northern parts of the country adopted another label and were significantly different in orientation from the protests in the South. Nigerias Southern protesters talked about an end to police brutality. Northern youths who would later be joined by Governors of the North and traditional rulers called for an end to insecurity. Both groups were linked by a common thread  the crisis of insecurity in Nigeria, the failure of the security agencies and the urgent need for government to deliver on its mandate under Section 14(2) (b ) of the 1999 Constitution, to wit: the responsibility to protect the people and ensure their welfare. Nigeria thus found itself in the grips of a movement: an organized, but decentralized rebellion against the Nigerian state and its ineffectuality, more desperate than the youth protests of 1962 against the Anglo-Nigerian Defence Pact and far more incendiary than the Ali-Must-Go-Protests of 1978. It was youth revolt in ebullition against mis-governance, bad politics, poor leadership and elite greed. The youths had five specific demands. The battle was fought on the streets and social media. The youths called for reform. They demanded change. They even asked for better welfare for policemen. But then everything went out of hand.

The Nigerian Governments expressed commitment to accede to the five demands and to investigate the reported killings and acts of inhumanity and ensure justice gave intimations of hope. In the course of its proceedings, the Lagos Panel of Inquiry offered useful details that kept that hope alive: all those stories about the number of persons that died or were shot, whether or not live bullets or blank bullets were used, how and why anyone asked for the deployment of soldiers to confront harmless, unarmed and defenceless protesters, and shoot in whatever direction, the role of the police, the state government, state officials Every week, testimonies and revelations at the Lagos Panel of Inquiry provided useful insights. But all of a sudden, that panel is now in disarray, and that is what is disturbing. Last Saturday, it must have been common sense that retrained members of the panel from engaging in fisticuffs. How sad

But the signs of impending chaos were foreseeable. Earlier in the year, the Nigerian Army stopped appearing before the panel. Army counsel disclosed that their mandate with their clients, that is the Nigerian Army, expired in November 2020 and the panel had been so informed. Justice Okuwobi however, affirmed the rights of the panel, appropriately under the Tribunals of Inquiry Act, and adjourned the date for the response of the Army to already issued summons to February 27. I am not too sure any soldier will show up to respond to those summons. After the embarrassment that the Nigerian Army has received with its testimonies over whether or not its officers used live bullets and killed persons at the Lekki Toll Gate, the military hierarchy may have opted for the option of decided contempt in the face of and away from the face of the panel, knowing of course, that the likely penalty may be inconsequential.

To worsen matters, the Lagos Panel of Inquiry degenerated into near-chaos on Saturday, February 6, 2021. The source of confusion was the decision of the panel announced by five panel members, including Justice Okuwobi, to approve the re-opening of the Lekki and Ikoyi Bridge Toll Gates by their managers, the afore-mentioned LCC. Four members of the panel objected to this resolution and immediately made public their position in a now widely-circulated Dissenting Opinion signed by Ebun-Olu Adegboruwa SAN. By the weekend, the same panel hitherto praised for being an exemplar, had become a divided house. The video of the proceedings that is in circulation is embarrassing to say the least. We saw members of the panel having a shouting match. I do not want to re-hash the arguments: about whether or not a quorum was formed, the right of the civil society representatives to be in attendance and whether or not they were, the fact that a civil society member  Segun Awosanya (aka Segalink) is on the Chairpersons side in the matter, and the reasonableness or not, of the dissenting quartet apparently led by Ebun Olu Adegboruwa SAN who has been accused of adopting tactics that would be considered strange in a Court of Appeal procedure even if the Okuwobi panel is quasi-judicial. The legal correctness of the proceedings of the panel, and the dissensions within would require a closer scrutiny of the facts to which we are not full seised but it is sufficient to express alarm about how a process that was meant to calm nerves and promote truth and reconciliation has now become a catalyst for conflict. By Monday morning, the matter before the Lagos Judicial Panel of Inquiry had spilled back onto the streets, with implications for public safety.

For, by the morning of Monday, February 8, a coordinated protest against the decision of the Lagos Panel of Inquiry to grant the Lekki Concession Company the permission to re-open its toll gates had gone viral on social media with such hashtags and banners as #RevolutionNow, #OccupyLekkiTollGate and a protest is purportedly planned for Saturday, February 13 at 7 am. The LCC had approached the Lagos Panel to ask for permission to resume operations. The two toll gates under its management have been shut down since October 2020. The position of the dissenters is that a reopening of the toll gates will compromise evidence and forensic analysis and hence, the status quo should be maintained until the work of the panel is concluded. The Okuwobi Five argued that the forensic investigation had been concluded and there was no justification to continue to shut LCC out of business indefinitely. Outside the panel, those who want to #OccupyLekkiTollGate on February 13 are convinced that re-opening the toll gate will derail the course of justice. Whichever way you look at it, another Lekki Gate protest is not an encouraging prospect. The way the arguments are packaged on both sides, every proposition sounds and looks plausible and ominous. But I guess this is the time to advert our minds to a number of fundamental issues.

One in principle, the investigations and judicial inquiry emplaced by the state governments of Nigeria over the 2020 #EndSARS protests were meant to reassure the people and demonstrate governments readiness to respond to popular yearnings. The Lagos Panel in particular had proved promising. Now, that it is divided, it is difficult to see how its objectives have not been compromised, and how this has not provided a bad example for other states where the panels have been slow and non-committal. Will the panel still be able to work as a team?

Two  those who argue that the Lekki Toll Gate is a crime scene that should be left intact till the conclusion of the work of the panel may be missing the point. That toll gate is no longer a crime scene. It was never treated as such. Elsewhere, crime scenes are preserved, cordoned off, to protect the integrity of evidence and investigations. This so-called crime scene was never protected. It was in fact subjected to a thorough clean up, and whatever was hidden was picked up by visiting inspectors and trespassers, including a certain camera, the content of which has not been disclosed. Vehicles and motorists have been passing through, glad that they have not had to pay any tolls for more than three months. Whatever has not been established before now, may be difficult to prove again. The dissenters in the panel may have the legal right to hold a different opinion, but they risk being accused of sabotage and fuelling another round of protests.

Three- the Lekki Toll Gate is a public-private partnership scheme. The investors have to pay back loans, maintain the staff who have been kept at home for months, process insurance claims and fix the offices and infrastructure destroyed during the #EndSARS protests. But majorly, they are paying a price for identity politics. Most of the protesters are angry in part, because of deep-seated suspicions about the ownership of the toll gate. Even in the absence of verifiable evidence, the Lekki Toll gate has become a symbol of power, oppression and graft in the eyes of many. Does it belong to the Lagos State Government or some oppressors? Whatever the truth is, the managers of the Lekki and Ikoyi Toll Gates have had to pay so much. They have lost money and time. They have been vilified. Their brand has been dragged in the mud. What if on top it all, they are truly innocent? How about their staff who have been jobless for months? Even in the worst of circumstances, the toll gates would still be re-opened anyway at some point.

Four  But will the re-opening sabotage the investigations? May be not. The US Congress was attacked by a domestic terrorist mob on January 6, 2021. Five persons died on that occasion. Congress has since re-opened and continued its work, but that has not stopped the investigations. What we are actually dealing with in our case, is a terrible lack of trust in the Nigerian process. Nobody trusts the government. The people would rather trust anybody who is willing and ready to attack the government or raise doubts about its methods. This alienation is self-inflicted by government itself. Here is an example: During the October 2020 #EndSARS protests, the Nigerian government promised to accept and address the five demands by Nigerian youths. But shortly after, the same government clamped down on the protesters. Bank accounts belonging to known leaders of the protests were frozen. The airports of Nigeria became a no-go-area for such persons. Even now, the Central Bank of Nigerias decision to ban financial institutions from cryptocurrencies has been linked to an attempt to cut off financial oxygen for protests. Here is another example: the Governor of Lagos State was accused of lying to the public! The combination of these factors has ignited the anger of the average Nigerian youth again. The flame of that anger could result in an inferno that we do not need. The fire this time could be worse than the explosion last time.

Five  will the Lagos panel of inquiry reverse itself because of the threat of a resumption of protest on February 13? I doubt. But I worry more about the damage that may have been done to the Okuwobi panel. Nothing must be done to derail the work of this Panel of Inquiry. Its original mandate should be preserved: to investigate, to unmask the truth, to make recommendations that will ensure justice, and to ensure the compensation of victims.

Nigeria lost so much last year. To shut down Lagos again and initiate another round of chaos is difficult to imagine. The security agencies, whatever the provocation, must not behave like goats this time around. The Lagos State Government must act and think wisely, must not tell lies, and take steps to prevent further trouble at the Lekki Toll Gate.
Syracuse, N.Y.  A group of politically powerful Columbus statue supporters have ramped up their fight against Mayor Ben Walsh, who last year announced he will remove the Christopher Columbus statue from downtown Syracuse.

The Columbus Monument Corporation sent letters to leaders of every permanent political party in Syracuse in recent weeks. Those letters outlined the groups disgust with Walshs decision and came with a message:

We want you to know that this is a very important issue to our group of supporters, and we plan to fight Walshs plan, the letter said. We are well organized, well-funded, and highly motivated.

The letters are the latest escalation in the groups fight against Walsh. In recent months, theyve blasted the mayor frequently on social media, organized letter writing efforts to the newspaper and dedicated a page on their website to Walsh.

Greg Loh, a spokesman for Walsh, said the groups ongoing fight is only serving to divide the community.

Its disappointing the Corporation continues to ignore the community concerns that have existed about the statue for decades, Loh said. Instead of using their energy and resources to help bring people together to honor our Italian American heritage in a way that respects all cultures, as is happening in Buffalo, they are instead personalizing the issue and further dividing the community.

The Corporation delivered letters to leaders of the Democratic, Republican, Conservative and Working Families Parties, according to Nick Pirro, a spokesman for the group and former Onondaga County Executive.

Pirro said the organization has no plans to endorse in the mayors race, nor are they looking to wade into politics. They havent spoken with other mayoral hopefuls like Michael Greene or Khalid Bey, he said, and dont plan to.

We just wanted people picking candidates to know what our position is, he said. Were not trying to get involved in the political side of it.

Still, the overtures to political committees reflect a group that clearly understands how to pull the levers of power in city politics.

They sent a letter to leaders of the Working Families Party two days after a report that Walsh would seek that partys ballot line. Walsh will need to either earn the WFP endorsement or create his own line if he wants to be on the ballot in November.

David Knapp, head of WFPs local chapter, said he expects the removal of the Columbus statue will be part of his partys agenda for Syracuse this year. (Note: Knapp is not the chairman of the Onondaga County Legislature. Thats a different David Knapp, who is a Republican).

Knapp added that the party appreciates Walshs principled stance on the topic.

Im guessing the Columbus Monument Corporation did not take the time to read our party platform before hand delivering us this letter, Knapp said. I am also personally taken aback by their statement in the letter that they support racial justice, but want it equally applied. They clearly dont understand the complex issue of racism, and I hope they take this opportunity to examine these historic harms more deeply.

In addition to the pressure on local political parties, the Columbus group has organized a letter-writing campaign to Gov. Andrew Cuomo and more than a dozen state legislators. That letter asks Cuomo to stop Walshs cancel culture act.

The public and political pressure on Walsh is in addition to the groups fight to stop the statues removal through legal action. They filed a notice of claim last month announcing their intent to sue the city. Theyve argued Walsh doesnt have the legal authority to remove the statue, and that taking it down will cost a cash-strapped city hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The Columbus Monument Corporation is a non-for-profit that has organized the annual Columbus Day luncheon and wreath-laying ceremony for years. They have a nine-member board of directors whose president is Mark Nicotra, a former town supervisor who now works in County Executive Ryan McMahons administration. Pirro is vice president.

Other board members include Bob Gardino, a former chairman of the Syracuse Republican Committee.

Were approaching this not as a political thing, but as an attack on our heritage, Pirro said. [Walsh] didnt take that into regard at all when he made his decision...its unacceptable and there are thousands who are going to join us in fighting it.
Martin Phipps, a prominent San Antonio attorney and owner of a popular River Walk bar, is accused of psychologically and verbally abusing his then-wife, according to an arrest affidavit.

Phipps, 51, was arrested Monday by the San Antonio Police Department on suspicion of telephone harassment, a Class B misdemeanor, for repeatedly contacting 24-year-old Brenda Vega, to whom he was briefly married, the affidavit alleges.

Vega told San Antonio police in December she had to get away from Phipps after he confronted her in an aggressive and agitated state and that he may have been under the influence of drugs at the time, according to the court documents. The documents did not divulge details about what led to the confrontation.

Vega fled to Mexico, leaving behind her personal belongings, because she was in such fear for her life, the affidavit said. While she was on her way to the airport, Phipps called and texted her multiple times asking her to return, but Vega refused and asked him to stop contacting her.

According to the court documents, Phipps attempted to get a hold of Vega 40 times, mostly through text messages, the day after she left. Police described his actions as reasonably likely to demean, harass, alarm and torment the victim.

On Dec. 19, a week before the confrontation, the two signed a marriage certificate.

On ExpressNews.com: Phipps arrested by San Antonio police

When Vega returned from Mexico in January, she filed a report with SAPD alleging that Phipps was verbally abusive and while no physical violence had occurred she wanted to document that she was scared of (Phipps), court records show. She also asked officers how to obtain a protective order.

Vega filed for annulment of the marriage, saying she was fearful of violent retaliation and threats of civil litigation for leaving Phipps, the affidavit said. She alleged that Phipps induced (her) to enter into the marriage by duress, according to the original annulment documents.

The annulment was granted on Jan. 22 by state District Judge Laura Salinas after it was amended to list both husband and wife as co-petitioners, indicating that they both wanted the annulment, court records show. In the amended version, the duress allegation was excluded.

Vega, who was Phipps former legal assistant, started with his law firm in January 2020, according to her LinkedIn profile.

Michael McCrum, the attorney hired by Phipps to represent him in the criminal case, said he believes the charge was part of an orchestrated campaign  to malign Martin.

From all that Ive seen, I dont think theres any merit to it, McCrum said.

The arrest Monday follows a handful of high-profile resignations, including Phipps former law partner T.J. Mayes, at his law firm, Phipps Deacon Purnell. Mayes accused Phipps of being involved in a scheme to defraud creditors, according to a resignation letter obtained by the Express-News.

Mayes said Phipps had psychologically abused Vega and on several instances gleefully expressed a willingness to assault her physically.

Prior to the resignations, the former partner, along with five other employees gave Phipps a letter on Jan. 8 demanding immediate measures to cure the hostile work environment,  according to a copy of the letter obtained by the newspaper.

Mayes filed a formal complaint against Phipps with the Texas Bar Association and a letter to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Phipps firm, then called Phipps Anderson Deacon LLP, is one of the two law firms hired by Bexar County in 2017 to sue opioid drug manufacturers and distributors that the county alleges are responsible for causing and contributing to San Antonios addiction epidemic. The lawsuit was filed the next year.

Phipps also is the owner of the rooftop bar Paramour.

Staff Writers Emilie Eaton, Patrick Danner and Brian Chasnoff contributed to this report.

Ukraine fulfills all the conditions for receiving the second tranche of macro-financial assistance from the European Commission this spring.

Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said this at a meeting with Executive Vice President of the European Commission Valdis Dombrovskis in Brussels on February 10, Ukrinform reports with reference to the Government portal.

The prime minister assured that the government will abide by its obligations to fulfill all the conditions set out in the annex to the memorandum of understanding between Ukraine and the EU.

"We expect to successfully complete the program in the first quarter of 2021 to obtain the second tranche of macro-financial assistance in the spring of this year," Shmyhal emphasized.

He thanked the European Commission for the decision to provide Ukraine with the first tranche of macro-financial assistance worth EUR 600 million at the end of last year. "Timely receipt of funding by Ukraine has become extremely important to maintain macroeconomic and financial stability in Ukraine," Shmyhal noted.

Denys Shmyhal thanked Valdis Dombrovskis for his personal support in resolving urgent issues for Ukraine and invited him to attend the celebrations marking the 30th anniversary of Ukraines independence.

As reported, a Ukrainian government delegation headed by Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal began a working visit to Brussels on February 9. Shmyhal met with European Council President Charles Michel and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.

The program of the visit includes a series of working meetings with representatives of the European Commission and the European Parliament.

On February 11, Shmyhal will take part in the seventh meeting of the EU-Ukraine Association Council in Brussels.

ish
Guwahati, Feb 10 : With the planned bus yatras ahead of the Assembly polls in Assam, the Congress intends to connect with the people in the remotest parts directly to give them a sense that the party stands with them to save the northeastern state from the policies of the BJP.

Speaking to IANS, senior Congress leader Sushmita Dev, who will be leading the 'Axom Basaon Ahok' bus yatra in the Barak Valley of the state, said, "We have split Assam into four groups -- upper Assam, lower Assam, middle Assam and Barak Valley. There are four people who will lead the yatras in every region." According to Dev, Pradyut Bordoloi, chairperson of the party's campaign committee, will begin his bus yatra on February 12 from Bordua Satra, the birthplace of Srimant Sankardev that falls under the Batadraba Assembly constituency in Nagaon district, while Congress Legislature Party (CLP) leader Debabrata Saikia will kick off his bus yatra on February 12 after paying homage to Piyali Phukan at his memorial in Sivasagar city.

Congress MP from Kaliabor, Gaurav Gogoi, will begin his yatra from Guwahati, while Dev will start her bus yatra from Silchar enroute the Barak Valley.

Dev said that the idea behind the bus yatra is to cover two constituencies in a day, and not hold massive rallies.

"Through these bus yatras, we will meet people from different sections of the society and discuss their issues and problems. It will not be a one-way dialouge, as people will be allowed to speak. We will take notes of the every issue raised by the people, which will be later included in the party's manifesto," she said.

Dev also said that the bus yatra will continue for 10-15 days, and the big rallies will keep on happening in the middle. "The idea is to go among the people," she said.

Dev, who is also the chief of the Mahila Congress, further said, "Our ground assessment and surveys tell us that there is a massive groundswell of anger against the ruling BJP in Assam. While the undemocratic government of the BJP may not let this resentment come to the fore by muzzling the voices and intimidating the critics, the Axom Basaon Ahok shall give the people a platform to speak up and make the Congress a vehicle for their aspirations. And the Congress needs to engage with the people so that there is a greater connect when it comes to their problems." Lamenting at the ruling BJP, she said that "the culture of Assam is being challenged" and there is a division being created between the Bengalis and the Assamese people because of the BJP's policies, not to mention the rising unemployment in the state.

When asked who suggested to hold the bus yatras to connect with the people, the Congress leader said, "We don't just want to hold big rallies. Even Rahul Gandhi was very clear that we always gather 50,000 people in the rallies, give speeches and then come back. He stressed on holding micro interactive sessions which will go deeper." Dev added that the outreach committees created by the party was actually the idea of Rahul Gandhi.

"Rahul Gandhi suggested that you cannot engage with the people in big rallies. While that is also necessary, the state leaders should not expect people to come to them in the big rallies. That is the reason why he clubbed the manifesto and the outreach committees together," she said.

To a question if the Congress will miss the presence of three-time former Assam Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi, who passed away in November last year, Dev said, "If you look at our proposed bus yatras, Tarun Gogoi also features in the campaign. Apart from that, people like Pradyut Bordoloi, Gaurav Gogoi, myself, Ripun Bora and several senior leaders will be there." She said that the Congress is taking forward the 15 years of peace, unity and progress ushered in Assam under the leadership of Gogoi.

"The 15-year rule may not have been perfect, but somehow it was very inclusive. Tarun Gogoi stood for something. What his government did in 15 years is there for everyone to see," she said.

Dev also dispelled the rumours that the Congress is a divided house and said, "There was a bad narrative that the Congress is a divided house, which has been cleared today as all the senior leaders of the party were on the stage to announced the bus yatras." Stressing that the Congress' priority is to protect the future of Assam, she said, "The only way to save the future of Assam is people's participation. We want to connect with the people and we have to do this together for the sake of the future of Assam and to repair the damage caused in the last five years." Commenting on the recent defections from the party, Dev said, "Every political leader goes through a phase of ups and downs in their political careers. One may feel that that they are going down, but to jump to the other side is political opportunism." She said that politics is all about standing by one's ideology, and to jump to another party for more opportunity is nothing but political opportunism.

Dev also said that senior Congress leader Jitendra Singh has given a common vision to the party leaders and it is time to defeat the BJP regime which is just not working for the betterment of Assam and its people. "And to conquer the northeast, we have to win Assam back," she said.

The elections for the 126-seat Assam Assembly are likely to take place in April-May this year. the Election Commission of India is yet to announce the poll schedule.

(Anand Singh can be contacted at anand.s@ians.in)
About 600 rescue workers are involved in the operation, two days after the sudden flood in the Alaknanda river system in Chamoli district that was possibly triggered by an avalanche or glacier burst.

New Delhi : The death toll in the Uttarakhand disaster rose to 32 with six more bodies being recovered, officials said Tuesday as multiple agencies raced against time to reach about 30 workers trapped inside a tunnel at a power project site and 174 people remained missing.

In Parliament, Union home minister Amit Shah said the Centre is working in close coordination with the Uttarakhand government.

"Rescue operation to evacuate these people is going on a war-footing and all-out efforts are being made for searching missing persons, he said.

The State Emergency Operation Centre said six bodies were found Tuesday, taking the death toll to 32, and 174 people are still missing.

With the hours ticking by, fears escalated about those missing since the disaster struck on Sunday morning, according to officials.

The missing people include those working at NTPC's 480 MW Tapovan-Vishnugad project and the 13.2 MW Rishiganga Hydel Project and villagers whose homes nearby were washed away.

Some family members of the missing workers are camping at Tapovan, waiting for some news about them.

About 70 missing workers are from Uttar Pradesh, an official said in Lucknow. Among them 34 are from Lakhimpur Kheri district alone.

Teams of the Army, Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), National Disaster Response Force and State Disaster Response Force coordinated efforts to rescue 25-35 people who were working in a tunnel at the Tapovan-Vishnugad project when the waters came rushing in.

The ITB alone has deployed 450 personnel in the rescue effort, according to Shah's statement.

The workers have been trapped in the 12-ft-high and about 2.5-km-long 'head race tunnel'.

"Clearing of debris and slush continued the whole night. About 120 metres of the tunnel entrance stretch is now clear," ITBP spokesperson Vivek Kumar Pandey said in Delhi.

"The height of the accumulated slush has reduced more. ITBP personnel are waiting to enter as soon as any movement deep inside the tunnel is possible," he said.

A senior official added that the rescuers have not been able to make any contact with those stuck inside but are hopeful for "signs of life".

Uttarakhand DGP Ashok Kumar said efforts are on to push through the debris and expressed hope that a breakthrough could be made soon.

The district administration is also searching for the missing from areas along the Alaknanda river.

Relief is being distributed by helicopters among people at 13 villages cut off due to the washing away of a bridge in the avalanche at Malari. The total population of these villages is around 2,500, officials said.

The villages that lost road connectivity after the calamity are Raini Palli, Pang, Lata, Suraithota, Suki, Bhalgaon, Tolma, Fagrasu, Long Segdi, Gahar, Bhangyul, Juwagwad and Jugju.

On Tuesday, Uttarakhand chief minister Trivendra Singh Rawat undertook an aerial survey of the affected areas, visited the ITBP hospital in Joshimath, about 300 km from Dehradun, and met the 12 workers who were rescued from a small tunnel in Tapovan on Sunday evening.

He also visited Lata and Raini to meet residents of the disaster-hit villages.

The priority is to get to those trapped inside the tunnel and save as many lives as possible, he said.

Additional heavy machines could be pressed into service to expedite the process of clearing the tonnes of debris inside the tunnel, blocking the path of rescue personnel.

The clearing of slush and debris is a painstaking exercise but the multi-agency rescuers are there in large numbers and taking turns to dig in deeper with the help of heavy machines, officials said.

As the temperature dipped to freezing levels at the site, awash with slush, silt and debris, bonfires were lit at multiple locations to keep the rescuers warm.

The rescuers are carrying tall wooden planks which are being used by them to wade in through the slush and will later also help create a platform to pull out the trapped people using ropes.
New York, Feb 10 : The 100 member US Senate voted 56-44 to proceed with Donald Trump's historic second impeachment trial Tuesday, defeating an attempt by the former President's defense team to halt the trial because he is no longer in office.

The 56-44 vote was on the question of whether the Senate has jurisdiction to proceed with the trial. It came after a total of four hours of initial arguments by both sides.

Dominating Day One was a 13 minute patchwork of video clips of the January 6 insurrection. It began with Trump whipping up a crowd to march to the Capitol and acefight like hell" against the election results and transitioned to visuals of Trump supporters smashing glass, breaking doors, slamming police officers and a woman getting shot.

Trump's defense team focused all its energy on the question of constitutionality, while Democrats pointed to the grisly videos and declared "If that's not an impeachable offense, then there's no such thing." Trump is the first US president to face impeachment charges after leaving office and the only one to be impeached twice.

(Nikhila Natarajan can be reached at nikhilanatarajan@gmail.com)
Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-11 01:08:25|Editor: huaxia

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Photo taken on Feb. 10, 2021 shows China-donated Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccines in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea. A batch of China-donated Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccines arrived in Malabo, capital of Equatorial Guinea, on Wednesday. (Photo by Li Boyuan/Xinhua)

MALABO, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- A batch of China-donated Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccines arrived in Malabo, capital of Equatorial Guinea, on Wednesday.

This is the first batch of vaccine aid provided by the Chinese government to African countries, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said Tuesday at a press briefing.

The Chinese aid is the fruit of the excellent relations between the two countries, said Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, Vice President of Equatorial Guinea, who received the Chinese vaccines at the airport.

"Faced with the pandemic, no country, no matter how powerful, is not spared. However, in this context of crisis, only China has extended its hand to Equatorial Guinea, which has become the first African country to receive Chinese vaccine aid, and we are grateful for it ", he said.

During the Extraordinary China-Africa Summit on Solidarity against COVID-19 held in June 2020, African countries were reassured to be the first beneficiaries of Chinese vaccines. China has kept its promise to deliver the vaccines to Equatorial Guinea as soon as possible, which will help it defeat the coronavirus, said Qi Mei, the Chinese Ambassador to Equatorial Guinea.

The safety and effectiveness of Chinese vaccines are recognized by the international community. Despite huge domestic demand for vaccines, China is determined to overcome the challenges to make vaccines an accessible and affordable public product for developing countries, she said. Enditem
The presidency has said that the court will determine the legality or otherwise of President Muhammadu Buharis extension of the tenure of...

The presidency has said that the court will determine the legality or otherwise of President Muhammadu Buharis extension of the tenure of Mohammed Adamu as Inspector General of Police.

Last week, Buhari directed Adamu to continue in office for three months.

Legal practitioners have kicked against the action, insisting that the President does not have such powers.

Ebun-Olu Adegboruwa (SAN) stated that Buhari violated the constitution.

The lawyer declared that Nigeria presently has no IGP recognized by law.

Adegboruwa said the constitution provides that before appointing or removing an IGP, the President must consult the Nigeria Police Council.

But speaking to Channels TV on Tuesday, presidential aide, Femi Adesina told Nigerians to allow the law to take its course.

It is within the prerogative of the President to appoint who the IGP would be, and he has done that.

Whether he is retired or not, its a legal matter. I know some lawyers are in court, the court will pronounce on it, he said.
The Covid vaccine made by AstraZeneca will for now only be administered to essential workers in Spain, including teachers, law-enforcement officers, firefighters and members of the armed forces  but not supermarket workers.

Although the treatment has been approved by European authorities for anyone over the age of 18, the Spanish government is taking a conservative approach: first it ruled out people over 80 years of age, then it further reduced the target group to those under 55. And on Tuesday, a committee of experts advising the National Healthcare System established that individuals under 55 with certain pre-existing medical conditions will also be left out, at least during the initial phase.

Neither the Health Ministry nor the committee have provided explanations for their decision, but the reasoning is laid out in a draft document detailing Spains revised vaccination strategy, to which EL PAIS has had access.

Eleven days after the European Commission greenlighted the vaccine, the Spanish government had yet to announce guidelines for its use

Due to the characteristics of the AstraZeneca vaccine known to date [...] it is recommended for use on people between the ages of 18 and 55, except for those with severe immunodepression (including cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy treatment, uncontrolled cardiovascular disease, or severe liver, kidney, metabolic/endocrine or neurological diseases). People with these conditions and those over the age of 56 (born in or before 1965) will be vaccinated at a later date when their age group or risk group comes up, and with the most appropriate vaccine depending on availability and new available evidence.

The reason for leaving out people with these underlying health conditions is that they were not included in the clinical trials for the vaccine. However, experts such as Ildefonso Hernandez, the spokesperson for the Spanish Society for Public Health, had called for people with diabetes or high blood pressure under the age of 55 to be prioritized, as they are also vulnerable to the most severe manifestations of Covid-19.

The decision is not irreversible, and new reviews of the vaccination plan could include some of the age or risk groups that are now being left out. Health Minister Carolina Darias has also reiterated that the process must be the same across Spain, following announcements by some regional governments that they would begin administering the AstraZeneca vaccine without waiting for central authorities to reach a decision that did not seem forthcoming: 11 days after the European Commission greenlighted the vaccine, the Spanish government had yet to announce guidelines for its use.

Who gets the vaccine

Teachers, police officers and firefighters are first in line to receive the AstraZeneca vaccine. Marta Jara / Europa Press

The largest group slated to receive the AstraZeneca vaccine is made up of around 760,000 teachers in early, primary and secondary education, according to union estimates. There are also around 240,000 law enforcement officers from the National Police, the Civil Guard, and regional and local agencies. Some 120,000 members of the military are also eligible, as well as 23,000 prison workers and 20,000 firefighters.

The AstraZeneca shots will also be administered to healthcare professionals who are not considered frontline workers: physiotherapists, occupational therapists, pharmacy office workers, legal medicine workers, home assistance workers, and employees at day centers and centers for minors.

Not included in the list are supermarket employees, who were considered essential workers during the three-month lockdown between March and June of last year.

Eligible groups will receive 1.8 million doses that Spain is hoping to have in February, with more expected to arrive in the coming months. This process will run parallel to the ongoing vaccination campaign with the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines, which are being administered to care home residents and workers, frontline health workers and people with need for daily assistance who are not living in care facilities.

No adverse effects

The Spanish Medicines and Health Products Agency (AEMPS) on Tuesday released the second evaluation of adverse effects seen in coronavirus vaccines. The study analyzed 1.1 million doses administered to January 24 and did not find any cases of severe or unexpected adverse effects. The most frequently reported side effects were fever, pain in the injection site, headaches, dizziness, nausea and diarrhea.

According to the Health Ministrys latest report from Tuesday, 2.1 million doses out of a total available stock of 2.4 million have already been administered. Around 832,000 people have received both doses. The vast majority of the doses available in Spain are made by Pfizer-BioNTech (2.1 million), followed by AstraZeneca (196,800) and Moderna (87,700).

Recommendations for those who have recovered from the coronavirus The updated protocol recommends against vaccinating people under the age of 55 if they have recently had the virus. The recommendation is to wait six months from the date of the positive test result. This does not apply to people over the age of 55 or to those who are at high risk.

English version by Susana Urra.
SOUTHFIELD, Mich., Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The Academies of Racine at Horlick High School, part of the Racine Unified School District, has partnered with the SME Education Foundation to make manufacturing and engineering education and career opportunities available for students via the Foundation's Partnership Response In Manufacturing Education (PRIME) schools initiative.

Made possible through funding from Haribo of America and the Racine Community Foundation, Horlick High School students now have new opportunities to explore career preparation and growth.

SME PRIME schools directly address the manufacturing and engineering talent shortage by partnering with industry to provide modern equipment, a tailored curriculum and hands-on training to high schools across the country. SME PRIME students learn about manufacturing and engineering technology and processes through an industry-informed curriculum tailored to meet the needs of local industry.

"This partnership provides industry-relevant education and training to the Academies of Racine at Horlick Pathways in Manufacturing and STEM for our students," said Alex DeBaker, executive director of Academies for the Racine Unified School District. "Our collaboratively designed curriculum enables students to have a unique opportunity to explore manufacturing, engineering and STEM, expanding their career opportunities after graduation."

The SME PRIME program works with local manufacturers to develop and access a pool of skilled local talent who have been trained  and often certified  to fill specific roles at their respective companies, providing a direct community benefit.

"SME PRIME schools are central to our commitment to inspiring, preparing and supporting young people," said Rob Luce, SME Education Foundation vice president. "Our partnership with Horlick High School is an achievement, and we're proud to join with Haribo and the Racine Community Foundation to welcome these committed educators to our national team."

Horlick High School joins the other Academies of Racine high schools, Park and Case, in implementation of the SME PRIME program. Case High School initiated implementation in 2019 through funding from Putzmeister; Plastic Parts Inc.; Butterbuds; JC Styberg; Twin Disc; Racine Community Foundation; SC Johnson; and the Green Bay Packer Foundation.

"This initiative to interest and educate young people in a STEM foundation and skills are critically important in developing future achievers in our communities," said Valerie Freeman, robotics pathways teacher at Park High School and a member of the SME Education Foundation board. "We're committed to providing instruction and guidance to all students. With support from the community, manufacturers and the Foundation, these students have a unique and expansive opportunity."

Since 2011, SME PRIME schools have been initiated in 62 communities across 23 states, creating opportunities for more than 100,000 students. In 2019 and 2020 alone, the SME Education Foundation partnered with 14 new schools to create custom programs through partnerships with private industry.

Located in southeastern Wisconsin, the Racine Unified School District is the fifth-largest school district in the state, serving nearly 17,000 students.

About the SME Education Foundation

As the philanthropic arm of SME, an internationally recognized nonprofit organization serving the manufacturing industry, the SME Education Foundation inspires, prepares and supports the next generation of manufacturing and engineering talent. The Foundation leverages the 90-year history and thought leadership of SME in the manufacturing and engineering industry to provide curated experiences for thousands of high school students at SME conferences and tradeshows and builds hands-on manufacturing programs in high schools across the country. The Foundation also awards millions of dollars in scholarships every year to graduating high school seniors and both undergraduate and graduate students. Through its SME PRIME program, the Foundation has reached over 100,000 students in 62 schools across 23 states. All Foundation activities are designed to empower young people to pursue careers in manufacturing and engineering.

Visit the SME Education Foundation at smeeducationfoundation.org . Follow @mfgeducation on Twitter or facebook.com/SME.Education.Foundation .

SOURCE SME Education Foundation

Related Links

http://smeeducationfoundation.org


FCW Insider: Feb. 10

President Biden's nominee for OMB director came under fire during her hearing for mean tweets aimed at Republican lawmakers. "I regret the language," she said.

The two leaders of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence say the government's response to the hack so far has been "disjointed and disorganized."

Newly reported cybersecurity vulnerabilities inched past 17,000 in 2020, signaling worsening security in the defense industrial base, according to a National Defense Industry Association report.

Quick Hits

*** The IRS elevated Nancy Sieger to the post of permanent CIO. She had been serving as acting CIO of the tax agency since June, 2019.

*** Customs and Border Protection reopened the comment period on a proposed rule that would move the use of facial recognition systems on non-citizen and non-resident travelers in and out of the United States out of the pilot phase and make it a permanent fixture of international travel. The comment period for the Biometric Exit/Entry program had concluded in December, 2020. The use of facial recognition in government systems have been controversial, with civil liberties groups worried about the effectiveness of the technology and the adequacy of privacy protections.

*** In its latest bulletin on the $50 billion Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions telecommunications contract, the General Services Administration reminded agencies that zero dollar task orders are banned under the terms of the contract. Agencies have until March 31 to move half of their telecom inventory off legacy contracts and onto EIS. The transition to EIS is expected to be complete by the end of fiscal year 2022.
Kids want to fish? You don't know how yourself? Here's a little help
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The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) will set up a desalination plant with 200 MLD capacity per day to overcome shortage in Mumbai, an official said on Wednesday.

The standing committee of the civic body has given in-principal approval to set up the desalination plant and for appointment of consultants to prepare a detailed project report, a release issued by the civic body stated.

The committee gave an in-principle approval towards payment of charges worth Rs 5.50 crore for preparing a detailed project report and Rs 40 lakh for bid documents, the civic body's statement said.

A four-member panel chaired by the municipal commissioner will be set up for the implementation of the project, the release said.

According to the BMC, the desalination plant, with a capacity of 200 MLD per day, will require a capital investment of Rs 1,600 crore and Rs 1,920 crore in operational costs for the next 20 years.

Meanwhile, the BJP, which is in the Opposition in the Shiv Sena-ruled civic body, has raised questions about the need for the project and the expenses for the same.

It also lambasted the for not inviting tenders or expression of interest, while appointing the consultant.

"If 900 million litre of leakage is prevented in city, is there any need for additional 200 million litre from this project?" Prabhakar Shinde, the BJP's group leader in the civic body said, adding that the ruling party should stop wasting public money.

According to the BMC, M/s I.D.E Water Technologies had submitted an unsolicited proposal, when the civic body was thinking about desalination of seawater to overcome water issues.

The company had submitted the proposal as per the Maharashtra Infrastructure Development Enabling Authority Act 2018, the release stated.

The project will be implemented by inviting bids as per Swiss challenge model, the civic body stated.

As per the company's proposal, the plant needs 6 hectares of land and up to 8 hectares, if the project is expanded, the release said.

The said it has identified 12 hectares of government land under control of the Maharashtra Tourism Development Corporation at Manori in the western suburbs and has started communication with the tourism authority for the land.
The fifth largest airline flying to Spain's Costa del Sol, Jet2.com, will not resume its operations until at least 15 April.

The company had announced last October that it was suspending flights until 10 February, but has once again extended the date it plans to restart operations.

"Due to the current uncertainty and travel restrictions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, we have made the decision to extend the suspension of flights until 14 April 2021 inclusive," says the company, which flew 964,123 passengers to the Costa del Sol in 2019.

Refunds

Jet2.com say they will "quickly " reimburse customers who are affected by the change. "We will continue to automatically cancel the affected reservations with a full refund."

They also explain that for customers who will be traveling from 15 April onwards, more updates will be provided when appropriate, adding, "We would like to thank our valued customers for their patience and understanding."

Package holidays

The airline, which also offers package holidays to the coast suspended its operations in Malaga when, at the end of July 2020, the United Kingdom ordered a quarantine for travellers arriving from Spain.

Subsequently the government of Spain ordered the ban on the arrival of UK tourists to prevent the spread of the 'British' variant of the coronavirus - a suspension that has again extended, allowing only the arrival of British and Spanish residents who are returning home.
Fuck Manson, and fuck the vile, misogynist GoT fandom for the things they said about her.

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I have had a soft spot for her ever since I first saw her on got. I really hope she will be ok

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Throw his ass away OMG!

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Big month for exposing abusers



It's difficult to say exactly that I'm glad or happy but it's good that they are being exposed



I hope Esme gets support through this

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Thanks for the clear warnings OP

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I remember her talking about her GOT experience and how it affected her. :(

I can't read the article because I know it will be too triggering but I hope she has a good support system and will be ok.

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Hes told the world time and time again, This is who I am, says Bianco. He hid in plain sight.



This is so true and so goddamn enraging

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And now assholes are using that to defend him. Twitter is full of well what did they expect, its Manson.



And like, idk, maybe they expected to be treated as human beings worthy of respect and common decency?

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People using that reasoning has been very weird to me, because I'm sure plenty of them are the "you shouldn't judge a book by its cover" types but it's not surprising that the morality of people shifts depending on the subject being discussed.



I remember a popular, or at least known, narrative that was clear to me as a child only vaguely aware of Manson was that there was more to him, he was intelligent, and to not judge him by his outward appearance etc.

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He is trash. I am so here for these people being exposed recently. I just wonder how many other victims there were.

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JFC I hate him so much. I can't imagine how terrified she was.

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That was such a harrowing read. This part especially bears repeating, constantly: Hes told the world time and time again, This is who I am, says Bianco. He hid in plain sight.

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reading rn, but didnt realize TWELVE women came forward. Who are the bands he's toured with?

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From the wiki (I'm assuming they'll want to be excluded from this narrative, too bad)-related bands, co headliners, etc:

Hole, smashing pumpkins, slipknot, Rob Zombie, Alice cooper, slayer, NiN, Korn(Brian used to urinate in their food apparently), Ozzy Osbourne, megadeth,U2 and the corrs (How did that happened?), black sabbath, chevelle, papa roach, kasabian, the pretty reckless (there's video of him being awful to Taylor at some point while performing), of mice and men, alice glass and the intermittent appearance of Jonnhy Depp.



Opening and supporting acts: (big who? to most of these):

NYloose, Fluffy,drill, l7, helmet, rasputina, powerhman5000, cage, Queen Adreena, Apocalyptica, Mudvayne, Peaches, gODHEAD,The Union Underground,Cold, Disturbed, Professional Murder Music, duo opala, stonesour, amazonica, arabrot, mikur, ink, deadly apples, Ho99o9, New Years Day, Krokodil, September Mourning, Head Wound City, Knee High Fox,Deap Vally,Die Mannequin, Sadist,Unlocking the Truth,Hide,OURS ,picture me broken, bleeding through, nashville pussy, jack off jill, monster magnet ,palaye royale, jim rose circus, arab on radar, monster vodoo machine, danzig, 3 colors red, moonspell, 12 rounds, godhead, the reunion underground,13 even, peaches, turbonegro, blue felix, esoterica, pink shot riot, page 44, skyline, hatchet dawn, vanity beach, fear of comedy, butcher babies, hammerlord, apocaliptica and deathstars.



Well, that was fucking long. And I'm sure I'm missing a bunch of nobodies in between. I apologize if I misspelled some of the bands' names but I don't care that much.



There are a lot of potential witnesses and this is not even counting the festivals. There were a ton of Ozzfests, etc.

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Of the supporting acts..



Picture Me Broken's singer is daughter of Gregg Allman (of The Allman Brothers Band/ex-husband of Cher) so I'd hope that might have protected her.



I used to know a guy who worked for gODHEAD & was friendly with them, and he was an abusive piece of shit, and that's all I'm gonna say about that. Manson produced gODHEAD's debut album.



Jack Off Jill included the now-ex-girlfriend of Twiggy Ramirez, Manson's bassist, who accused Twiggy last year (what is time? maybe 2019?) of raping & abusing her.



The Union Underground had one song that was a minor hit back in the day called "Turn Me On, Mr. Deadman."



Powerman 5000's lead singer is the younger brother of Rob Zombie.



Vanity Beach used to be called CVM & the only song of theirs I know is called "Bitch in a Bodybag" so do with that what you will.

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no need to apologize!! I am hoping some of them come forward as witnesses, but like the ray fisher stuff, that would trigger SO MUCH. Hopefully this happens sooner rather than later.

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lmao at the mention of johnny depp



i bet him, marilyn and paul bettany had a group chat talking about women they'd love to set fire to. smdh.

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I feel so sorry for her, before for how misogynistic the GoT fans were to her and how misogynistic and awful the story was to her character, and now this, i hope Marilyn Manson pays for everything he has done and she can heal.





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Just read the whole thing. His personal assistant makes it clear his own inner circle were basically under his control and that they had to "walk on eggshells" around him



But sometimes I can't be but angered at how many people go along with it. Helping and arranging and to a degree aiding in the abuse of the women he was around. I get very angry mixed feeling about it all.



I don't want rehab or anything like that for Brian, the guy is a total sociopath!

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Genuinely her death scene was what made me give up on GoT because it was so unnecessarily misogynistic that I thought less of the show as a whole (tbf I was already kind of uninterested in it but that was def the final nail in the coffin).

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HAMBURG (dpa-AFX) - Hamburger Hafen und Logistik AG or HHLA (HHULF.PK, HHULY.PK) Wednesday said it achieved a positive Group operating result for fiscal 2020, despite restrictions on business due to the efforts to combat the coronavirus pandemic.



Group operating result or EBIT was around 123 million euros, down from previous year's 221 million euros.



Adjusted for one provision, Group EBIT would be approximately 166 million euros.



In the financial year, Group revenue amounted to around 1.30 billion euros, lower than previous year's 1.38 billion euros.



In the listed Port Logistics subgroup, revenue declined to 1.27 billion euros from 1.35 billion euros last year.



Throughput volume in the Container segment decreased 10.6 percent to 6,776 thousand standard containers or TEU.



Further, the company said its Executive Board intends to propose a dividend to the Supervisory Board and Annual General Meeting of 50 to 70 percent of the result for the Port Logistics subgroup based on the previously communicated payout ratio.



HHLA will publish complete figures for the 2020 financial year and a business forecast for fiscal 2021 on March 25.



Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

HAMBURGER HAFEN UND LOGISTIK-Aktie komplett kostenlos handeln - auf Smartbroker.de
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DUBLIN, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Aerlytix, the aviation finance technology specialist, has announced a partnership with FlightAware, the global provider of flight information and insights, that delivers an innovative automated fleet monitoring solution  Aerlytix Alert Tracker.

The Aerlytix solution was developed by the company in Dublin for the global aviation financing industry using FlightAware's AeroAPI, a query-based engine for accessing real-time, historical and predictive aviation information. By offering access to detailed flight information, the Aerlytix Alert Tracker drives sounder metrics-based decision-making.

As part of its cutting-edge technology platform, which provides industry-leading analytics, the Aerlytix Alert Tracker enables clients to gain an understanding of the performance of any aircraft where the client has an interest.

Alan Doyle, CEO, Aerlytix, said: "Working with FlightAware data gives us the confidence that our clients are getting the best flight data on the market. We are delighted to collaborate with FlightAware on technology solutions that drive simplification by providing quality analytics, processes and controls to clients. Aerlytix is transforming aviation financing with disruptive technology, and this partnership is central to that."

Daniel Baker, CEO, FlightAware, said: "Aerlytix's use of FlightAware's AeroAPI data to power-decisions made by the aviation financing industry is in lock-step with our goal of providing actionable insights through the data we synthesize. By putting the right information in the hands of decision-makers, the tool created through our partnership with Aerlytix offers a unique strategic advantage to users."

Using an 'exception-based' methodology, the solution enables Aerlytix clients to maintain processes and controls when monitoring fleets, whether they are managed/owned, part of an Asset Backed Security or specific fund. The solution automatically distributes current fleet information to risk, compliance and commercial professionals without the need for creating manual reports.

Aerlytix Alert Tracker automatically alerts clients when their aircraft have not flown for a specified period, when aircraft are flying again or when aircraft have flown into a jurisdiction of interest.

The Aerlytix Alert Tracker simplifies processes through automation whilst delivering productivity wins by freeing resources to work on other value-added activities, and provides near-live outputs and analytics.

Customer Jackson Square Aviation's Chief Technical Officer, Aidan Reynolds, has stated that "this new fleet monitoring solution works really well for us, the implementation was quick and simple."

Working with FlightAware, Aerlytix looks forward to delivering additional transformative technology to ensure its clients are benefitting from the transparency this software and data provides.

SOURCE Aerlytix
YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 10, ARMENPRESS. Artsakhs Foreign Ministry has issued a statement, informing that for security reasons, the entry procedure of foreign citizens to the territory of the Republic of Artsakh in the post-war conditions has been updated.

Citizens of foreign countries wishing to visit the Republic of Artsakh must first apply to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Artsakh to obtain a permit to enter Artsakh. This procedure applies both to foreign citizens who need an entry visa, and to citizens of visa-free countries.

Taking into account security considerations, information about applications is also transmitted to the Russian peacekeeping forces.

After the approval of applications, the foreign nationals who submitted them are informed about it and after receiving their visas at the Permanent Representation of the Republic of Artsakh in Yerevan, they can leave for Artsakh.

As for the timing, corresponding works are being carried out to improve the mechanism. The entry permit is issued within 3 or 4 working days. Sometimes the process may take longer, in which case the foreign national who submitted the application will be notified about it.

The mechanism is already in progress. In recent days, representatives of a number of foreign media and international organizations have arrived in the Republic of Artsakh under this procedure, the statement says.
Washington: US President Joe Biden on Wednesday, local time, ordered new sanctions against the military regime in Myanmar, taking action after the military this month staged a coup in the Southeast Asian country and arrested de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi and other senior politicians.

Biden said he was issuing an executive order that will prevent Myanmars generals from accessing $US1 billion ($1.29 billion) in assets in the United States. Biden added that more measures are to come.

The military must relinquish power it seized and demonstrate respect for the will of the people of Burma, Biden said.

Biden said the new sanctions will allow his administration to freeze US assets that benefit Myanmars military leaders while maintaining support for health care programs, civil society groups and other areas that benefit the countrys people. He said the administration planned to identify specific targets of the sanctions later this week.
The prime minister said that neither has any agriculture 'mandi' shut down after the three laws were enacted nor has the MSP stopped

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday said the Central Government has great respect for the farmers who are voicing their views on the three farm bills, which is why senior ministers have been talking to them.

He further stated that 'andolanjeevis' were polluting the pure motives of protesting farmers by hijacking well-intentioned agitations.

Modi made these remarks while replying in the Lok Sabha to the discussion on the Motion of Thanks to the President's address. As he made his remarks, Congress MPs staged a walkout in protest.

Two days earlier, the prime minister had defended the laws in the Rajya Sabha, questioning Opposition parties over their "U-turn" on the agriculture sector reforms.

'No mandis have shut down after new laws:' PM

The prime minister said that neither any agriculture 'mandi' (market) has shut down after the three laws were enacted nor has the MSP stopped, rather the MSP has only increased which no one can deny.

FOLLOW LIVE UPDATES ON PARLIAMENT HERE

"I consider the Kisan Andolan to be pavitra (pure). But, when andolanjeevis hijack well-intentioned agitations, showcase photos of those jailed for serious offences, does it serve any purpose? Not allowing toll plazas to work, destroying telecom towers- does it serve a pavitra andolan?," said Modi

"This House, our government and we all respect farmers who are voicing their views on the farm bills. This is the reason why the topmost ministers of the government are constantly talking to them. There is great respect for farmers."

"After the laws relating to agriculture were passed by Parliament, no mandi has shut. Likewise, MSP has remained. Procurement on MSP has remained. These facts can't be ignored," he said.

The prime minister said those who are disrupting the House are doing so as per a well-planned strategy as they are unable to digest that people can see the truth.

"Through their games, the trust of the people can never be won," he said, amidst protests by the Opposition members.

Modi said the Congress has taken different stands in Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha. "A divided and confused party like this can do no good to the country," he added.

Modi said India has managed the COVID-19 pandemic successfully despite adverse predictions and the country has now become a ray of hope for the world.

He said the world post- COVID-19 is turning out to be very different and in such times remaining isolated from the global trends will be counter-productive.

"That is why India is working towards building an ''Aatmanirbhar Bharat'' (self-reliant India), which seeks to further global good.

"Predictions were made that India cannot survive as a nation, but people of our country proved them wrong and we are now a ray of hope for the world," he said.

Two days earlier as well, the prime minister had hit out at the Opposition over its stance on the new farm laws. He quoted his predecessor Manmohan Singh on the need for reforms in the farm sector.

"Manmohan ji is here, I will read out his quote. Those taking a U-Turn (on farm laws) will perhaps agree with him. There are other rigidities because of marketing regime set up in 1930s which prevent our farmers from selling their produce where they get highest rate of return. It is our intention to remove all those handicaps which come in the way of India realising its vast potential at one large common market,'" Modi had said.

He also said, "MSP was there. MSP is there. MSP will remain in the future."

With inputs from PTI
Seoul, Feb 10 : North Korean leader Kim Jong-un specified policy direction related to this year's economic development plan at a meeting of the ruling party, a state-media report said on Wednesday.

Pyongyang's official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said in the report that at the second plenary meeting of the eighth Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea (WPK), Kim, also the newly-re-elected party General Secretary, set forth tasks for different sectors, including economy and culture, and called for "enhancing the role of the state organs for economic guidance to carry them out".

Kim also put forward tasks for the fishing sector so as to provide people with more marine products, reports Xinhua news agency citing the KCNA reported as saying.

He stressed the need for the economic sector to carry out innovative and reasonable plans to protect the economy and consolidate its independence, the report said.

"Propping up agriculture is an important state affair" that must be successful in solving the food problem and pushing ahead the cause of socialist construction, Kim added.

Noting that the party will support bold economic renovation, Kim reiterated the need for economic officials to "decisively enhance their responsibility and role in planning and guiding this year's economic work", the KCNA report said.

The meeting, which will continue until Wednesday, is the second of its kind this year after the first one was held last month.
A message in a bottle launched from Blackpool washed up on a Sussex beach 60 years later.

Two friends who found it are trying to trace the Roy Orbison fan who hoped their bottle would reach America.

Indiana Tarrant, 21 and Luca Gamberini, 21, were skimming stones on Hove beach on Tuesday, February 2 when they made the unusual find.

Indiana Tarrant, 21 and Luca Gamberini, 21, were skimming stones on Hove beach on Tuesday, February 2 when they made the unusual find

The friends, pictured, initially thought the bottle was empty, but they soon found it was sealed and had a message inside.

The letter, was sealed inside a bottle and was launched from Blackpool Pleasure Beach on August 7, 1961

At first they thought the bottle was empty, but when they opened it they discovered a letter dated August, 7, 1961.

They are now trying to track down the person who wrote the letter and threw it into the sea in the hope that it would reach the United States.

The note says: 'Dear you Yanks,

'How's life across the Pond? Threw this from the Pleasure Beach in Blackpool, UK.

'Suppose I should say cheers for the help in the war. Roy Orbison is starting to kick off here and everything's seeming to get pretty groovy.

'I wonder what it's looking like on your side. Never been to America but I'd love to put on a Stetson and ride on horseback.

'Hope this message finds somebody well.

'Bobby Doseuegs and Mates.'

The ink on the letter is quite faded after 60 years in the sea, but the message is still legible - although it never reached the United States

Mr Tarrant and Mr Camberini, who live in Hove, said at a first glance the bottle looked empty.

But on closer inspection, Indiana realised it had sealed cap and a note had been placed inside.

He said: 'I showed it to Luca and we decided to take it home.

'It had wax around the cap so we cut that off with a bread knife and we managed to get it open.

'It took us a while to get the letter out but eventually we got it out with a pair of tweezers.'

Mr Tarrant said that he turned to the internet in the hope of finding some information about the letter's sender, but it returned no searches.
WINSTED  According to the Board of Selectmen, Winsteds new town manager is going to a great fit.

Joshua Steele Kelly was hired Tuesday as town manager, replacing Robert Geiger, who announced his retirement in September 2020.

Kelly most recently was town administrator in Bolton, as well as Bolton Lakes sewer administrator. He also is on the board of directors for the Connecticut Council of Small Towns.

During Tuesdays Zoom meeting to announce Kelly, the Board of Selectmen congratulated him.

Congratulations, said Selectman Melissa Bird. Youre gong to be a great fit.

Geiger, who had promised the town he would stay on until a new town manager was in place, also congratulated Kelly.

Im looking forward to the change and will work with you, Geiger said. Well dump everything weve got, formally and informally, to make you as successful as possible.

Mayor Candy Perez also was pleased the selection of Kelly. We believe he will bring a lot of creativity and energy to continue our momentum forward, she said.

One of the first interactions I had in the selection process was Bob (Geiger), to let me know he wasnt able to come to my first interview with the board, Kelly said. It was an incredibly personal touch.

That speaks to the personal connections Ive been able to make with you, and every person in the community, he said. Being considered for a town manager position in a global pandemic has been a different experience. Im very optimistic about Winsteds future, and (I will) do right by the citizens of the town and make sure were on a vibrant path forward.

Youll be bombarded with information over the next three weeks, and everyone will be available to you and your questions, Geiger said.

Kelly previously also served as a management analyst for the town of Windsor and did his graduate work as assistant in the town managers office in Windsor, according to Perez.

The Town of Winchester continues to move forward with encouraging sustainable growth, Perez said. Through the hard work and support of many invested community members and a strong town staff we have begun to witness the transformation of our town.

In his application, Mr. Kelly stated, I have been able to increase efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability so that staff are able to deliver higher quality services to residents. I will bring this same work ethic, perspective and attitude to Winchester, along with my genuine excitement to be an active part of your community, Perez said.

We believe that we have found in Joshua Kelly a town manager that will embrace the essential traits that Winchester needs  executive leadership, fiscal responsibility, enthusiasm, and an investment in our community, she said.

Kellys tentative start date is early April.

Kelly has a bachelor's degree in political science from Wheaton College and a Master of Public Administration from the University of Connecticut. He has a Graduate Certificate in public financial management from UConn, as well, Perez said. His past work in local government also includes serving on the Inland Wetland and Conservation Commission, a board representative in Waterford, and a member of the Zoning Board of Appeals, according to Perez.

We are fortunate that our current town manager, Bob Geiger, will work with Mr. Kelly during the transition to introduce him to the NHCOG, emergency services, staff, etc. to help Mr. Kelly become more acquainted with the community prior to his arrival, Perez said.

His contract includes a salary of $120,000; three weeks vacation; contribution to his 401(k); and the same health care benefits received by other municipal employees.
Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- This time is different may be the most dangerous words in business: billions of dollars have been lost betting that history wont repeat itself. And yet now, in the oil world, it looks like this time really will be.For the first time in decades, oil companies arent rushing to increase production to chase rising oil prices as Brent crude approaches $70. Even in the Permian, the prolific shale basin at the center of the U.S. energy boom, drillers are resisting their traditional boom-and-bust cycle of spending.The oil industry is on the ropes, constrained by Wall Street investors demanding that companies spend less on drilling and instead return more money to shareholders, and climate change activists pushing against fossil fuels. Exxon Mobil Corp. is paradigmatic of the trend, after its humiliating defeat at the hands of a tiny activist elbowing itself onto the board.The dramatic events in the industry last week only add to what is emerging as an opportunity for the producers of OPEC+, giving the coalition led by Saudi Arabia and Russia more room for maneuver to bring back their own production. As non-OPEC output fails to rebound as fast as many expected -- or feared based on past experience -- the cartel is likely to continue adding more supply when it meets on June 1.CriminalizationShareholders are asking Exxon to drill less and focus on returning money to investors. They have been throwing money down the drill hole like crazy, Christopher Ailman, chief investment officer for CalSTRS. We really saw that company just heading down the hole, not surviving into the future, unless they change and adapt. And now they have to.Exxon is unlikely to be alone. Royal Dutch Shell Plc lost a landmark legal battle last week when a Dutch court told it to cut emissions significantly by 2030 -- something that would require less oil production. Many in the industry fear a wave of lawsuits elsewhere, with western oil majors more immediate targets than the state-owned oil companies that make up much of OPEC production.We see a shift from stigmatization toward criminalization of investing in higher oil production, said Bob McNally, president of consultant Rapidan Energy Group and a former White House official.While its true that non-OPEC+ output is creeping back from the crash of 2020 -- and the ultra-depressed levels of April and May last year -- its far from a full recovery. Overall, non-OPEC+ output will grow this year by 620,000 barrels a day, less than half the 1.3 million barrels a day it fell in 2020. The supply growth forecast through the rest of this year comes nowhere close to matching the expected increase in demand, according to the International Energy Agency.Beyond 2021, oil output is likely to rise in a handful of nations, including the U.S., Brazil, Canada and new oil-producer Guyana. But production will decline elsewhere, from the U.K. to Colombia, Malaysia and Argentina.As non-OPEC+ production increases less than global oil demand, the cartel will be in control of the market, executives and traders said. Its a major break with the past, when oil companies responded to higher prices by rushing to invest again, boosting non-OPEC output and leaving the ministers led by Saudi Arabias Abdulaziz bin Salman with a much more difficult balancing act.Drilling DownSo far, the lack of non-OPEC+ oil production growth isnt registering much in the market. After all, the coronavirus pandemic continues to constrain global oil demand. It may be more noticeable later this year and into 2022. By then, vaccination campaigns against Covid-19 are likely to be bearing fruit, and the world will need more oil. The expected return of Iran into the market will provide some of that, but there will likely be a need for more.When that happens, it will be largely up to OPEC to plug the gap. One signal of how the recovery will be different this time is the U.S. drilling count: It is gradually increasing, but the recovery is slower than it was after the last big oil price crash in 2008-09. Shale companies are sticking to their commitment to return more money to shareholders via dividends. While before the pandemic shale companies re-used 70-90% of their cash flow into further drilling, they are now keeping that metric at around 50%.The result is that U.S. crude production has flat-lined at around 11 million barrels a day since July 2020. Outside the U.S. and Canada, the outlook is even more somber: at the end of April, the ex-North America oil rig count stood at 523, lower than it was a year ago, and nearly 40% below the same month two years earlier, according to data from Baker Hughes Co.When Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz predicted earlier this year that drill, baby, drill is gone for ever, it sounded like a bold call. As ministers meet this week, they may dare to hope hes right.More stories like this are available on bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.2021 Bloomberg L.P.
TURIN, FEB 10 - A Turin city councillor for the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement (M5S) has caused a row by posting anti-semitic drawings including a hook-nosed Jew holding a bloody knife behind his back in an attack on the newspaper group that publishes liberal dailies La Repubblica and La Stampa. Monica Amore, who has a history of posting conspiracy theories against the neoliberal global financial establishment, attacked the Gedi newspaper group for backing former European Central Bank president Mario Draghi's bid to form a new government. After condemnation form M5S leaders she apologised for the cartoon but said "I thought it was interesting that the Gedi group had so many backers". On Wednesday Amore was inundated with hostile reactions to her post including one that said "Beware, because Benito [Mussolini] was strung up upside down", referring to the desecration of the slain Fascist dictator's body in 1945. "Shame on you, Nazi," was another post. Amore has asked for a meeting with Turin's Jewish community leaders to apologise for what she posted in person. The M5S is split on supporting Draghi, once an anathema to the anti-establishment movement, but is expected to throw its considerable weight behind him once a delayed online vote takes place. (ANSA).
Facebook will start scaling back all political content in its News Feed for some users, including posts from people's family and friends, as part of a trial to test ways the social media giant can rank posts on its platform.

The company said on Wednesday it would temporarily reduce the political content for some users in Canada, Brazil and Indonesia this week and in the United States within the coming weeks.

In a blog post, Facebook said the point of the trial was to explore a 'variety of ways to rank political content in people's feeds' before deciding what approach to use in the future.

The tests will extend to all political content, including posts from family and friends. It is not just limited to political news posted by media outlets or posts from political figures.

It was not immediately clear how Facebook planned to classify political content as part of its test, how users would be selected or how significantly it would effect their feed.

Facebook will start scaling back all political content in its News Feed for some users, including posts from people's family and friends, as part of a trial to test ways the social media giant can rank posts on its platform

Content from official government agencies and services will be exempt from the tests, as well as COVID-19 information from health organizations like the CDC and WHO.

Facebook says it is trying to get a better understanding of peoples' tolerances for the political content they see after receiving feedback that users don't want such posts overtaking their News Feed.

It comes after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last month that he wanted to 'turn down the temperature' of political conversations on the social networking site because 'people don't want politics and fighting to take over their experience on our services'.

He said at the time that Facebook will no longer recommend politics-themed groups to users and was working on ways to reduce the amount of political content served up in users' news feeds by its automated systems.

In the blog post on Wednesday, Facebook said: 'It's important to note that we're not removing political content from Facebook altogether.

'Our goal is to preserve the ability for people to find and interact with political content on Facebook, while respecting each person's appetite for it at the top of their News Feed.'

As part of its tests, Facebook says they'll survey people about their experience to determine how effective the new approaches will be.

In a blog post, Facebook said the point of the trial was to explore a 'variety of ways to rank political content in people's feeds' before deciding what approach to use in the future

Facebook's announcement of the tests comes at a time when some have questioned the influence of social media platforms - especially in the wake of the US Capitol riots.

Facebook and other platforms have also come under fire for enabling political misinformation and manipulation, notably during election periods.

Liberals have accused Facebook of allowing hate speech and misinformation, while conservatives claim social media platforms are engaging in censorship.

The world's largest social network insists political content only makes up a small percentage of the content on News Feed.

'Based on our analyses in the US, political content only makes up about 6 percent of what people see on Facebook.

'And although each person's News Feed is different, we know even a small percentage of political content can impact someone's overall experience.

'We're always trying to make News Feed better, and this means finding a new balance of the content people want to see.'

Facebook said it would share what they learn during the trial and the 'approaches that show the most promise'.

The social media giant has previously made large-scale changes without such public tests, including tweaking its algorithm to prevent articles from certain news websites from appearing on its feed.
Wonder Woman 1984 action star Gal Gadot praised the extraordinary 'women of wonder' featured in Vanessa Roth's six-part short-form docuseries Impact for National Geographic.

The 35-year-old mother-of-two executive produced Impact - premiering April 19 - which focuses on resilient women overcoming obstacles in places like Puerto Rico, Michigan, California, Brazil, Louisiana, and Tennessee.

'All of these women are just incredible and they are the real heroes. I keep on calling them my women of wonder because they are the true heroes,' Gal gushed during Tuesday's virtual winter TCA press tour - according to ET.

HBIC: Wonder Woman 1984 action star Gal Gadot praised the extraordinary 'women of wonder' featured in Vanessa Roth's six-part short-form docuseries Impact for National Geographic (pictured December 31)

Premiering April 19! The 35-year-old mother-of-two executive produced Impact, which focuses on resilient women overcoming obstacles in places like Puerto Rico, Michigan, California, Brazil, Louisiana, and Tennessee

'I go to set and I get dressed and I get my costume and sword and everything, I fight, but to make believe. They actually are there on the ground, sweating and all they can to really make the world a better place.'

It was in 2017, when Wonder Woman was released, when Gadot 'started to understand the influence she had on young people.'

'You start to think about, "Okay, so I need to really be responsible and be truthful." I felt like I had such a big reach to people and just wanted to do something good,' the Israel Defense Forces veteran said.

Gal gushed during Tuesday's virtual winter TCA press tour: 'All of these women are just incredible and they are the real heroes. I keep on calling them my women of wonder because they are the true heroes'

Gadot continued: 'I go to set and I get dressed and I get my costume and sword and everything, I fight, but to make believe. They actually are there on the ground, sweating and all they can to really make the world a better place'

'I just wanted to do something good': It was in 2017, when Wonder Woman was released, when the Israel Defense Forces veteran 'started to understand the influence she had on young people'

'I wanted to use my reach and my platforms to get to as many people and shed light on these amazing, incredible women's stories.'

Gal will reprise her role as the a**-kicking antiquities dealer Diana Prince in Zack Snyder's Justice League, which premieres March 18 on HBO Max.

The star-studded superhero ensemble includes Ray Fisher, Ezra Miller, Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Jason Momoa, Willem Dafoe, Jared Leto, Amy Adams, Jesse Eisenberg, Joe Manganiello, and more.

'#SnyderCut': Gal will reprise her role as the a**-kicking antiquities dealer Diana Prince in Zack Snyder's Justice League, which premieres March 18 on HBO Max

'#UsUnited': The star-studded superhero ensemble includes (from L-R) Ray Fisher, Ezra Miller, Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Jason Momoa, and more

On Tuesday, Gadot - who boasts 70.9M social media followers - shared a casually-clad snap of herself at a park captioned: 'Sending you all love from the great outdoors!'

The Between Two Ferns actress and her husband of 12 years - real estate developer Yaron 'Jaron' Versano - will next celebrate the fourth birthday of their daughter Maya on March 19.

Gal and the Dutch-born 45-year-old are also proud parents of nine-year-old daughter Alma.

On Tuesday, Gadot - who boasts 70.9M social media followers - shared a casually-clad snap of herself at a park captioned: 'Sending you all love from the great outdoors!'
A former inmate of China's mass detention camps in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) has spoken out about sexual violence against fellow inmates after Uyghur women testified to the BBC that they were serially and gang-raped in the camps.



The woman, who gave only the single name Dina, said she hails from the same county -- Xinyuan county in Xinjiang's Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture -- as Tursunay Ziawudun, whose testimony sparked international condemnation of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP).



One woman told the BBC that women were removed from their cells "every night" and raped by one or more masked Chinese men.



Tursunay Ziawudun, who fled the region after her release and is now in the U.S., said she was tortured and later gang-raped on three occasions, each time by two or three men, the BBC reported.



Dina said she had personally seen evidence that young Uyghur women were being targeted for sexual violence during her time in the camp.



"What [Tursunay Ziawudun] said is true," Dina, a former Chinese national who has since obtained citizenship of Kazakhstan, told RFA. "



"They always go for the young, beautiful Uyghur women," she said. "There was one woman [in the camp], about 20 years old. They took her away about 9.00 p.m. one night, and sent her back just as we were getting up in the morning."



"From that day on, she was in a daze and said nothing to anyone. She wouldn't eat."



Dina was held in a "re-education" camp in Xinjiang from to .



She shared a cell with a dozen other women, who were forced to eat and urinate in the same room.

Forced into sexual relationships

She said many of the women were forced into sexual relationships with the men in charge of the camp.



"We were sent later to a [reconstructed camp called a] party school, and many of the women [were forced into sexual] contact with the camp leaders," she said.



The ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has denied the reports of rape, saying the camps are there to "retrain" Uyghurs for the labor market and to combat "terrorism."



But as evidence of its genocidal policies in Xinjiang mounts up, a spokesman for the World Uyghur Congress told RFA that the international community now knows what is going on in Xinjiang.



"They are trying to cover up the truth, use diplomacy and state-controlled media to spread lies and mislead the international community," Dilxat Raxit said.



"But these victim testimonies have once again made the international community more aware of the genocidal policies that the Chinese government is pursuing against the Uyghurs," he said.



Serikjan, who founded the Kazakhstan-based rights group Atajurt that played a key role in exposing the reality of the Xinjiang camps to the rest of the world, recently went to the U.S. on a lobbying trip, he told RFA.



"We focused on the 're-education' camps in Xinjiang, and we also talk about how to get more information and expose more crimes against humanity that are happening in the Xinjiang camps," he said following meetings with former inmates and human rights groups.



"We also discussed how to ban cotton and tomato imports from Xinjiang around the world, because those products ... involve forced labor and are linked to the ... camps in Xinjiang," he said.



We have provided a lot of evidence for forced labor, sexual slavery, sterilization, and forced abortion. Therefore, the US government recently decided to ban the import of any cotton and tomato products from Xinjiang."



Meanwhile, Xinjiang officials are gearing up to forced Muslim Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities -- especially those in government employment -- to show loyalty to the CCP by performing Han Chinese culture in the form of the Lunar New Year celebrations.



"China is using the Spring Festival to identify whether Uyghur cadres have resisted Chinese culture," Raxit told RFA. "Uyghurs are being told to write poetic couplets and hang up lanterns across the region, and these will be inspected by stability maintenance teams."



"[Those who fail the inspections] will be accused of boycotting Chinese culture, labeled 'extremists,' and locked up in the concentration camps, where they will be subjected to political brainwashing," he said.



Assimilation parties

The World Uyghur Congress sent a number of video clips to RFA showing Uyghurs beating gongs and drums to celebrate Lunar New Year, as well as Uyghur residents praising the "beauty" of decorations.



"The Chinese government has adopted coercive measures in a bid to force the Lunar New Year celebrations on Uyghurs ... as part of their political goal of assimilation," Raxit told RFA.



Dina said similar moves are afoot in her former hometown in Ili.



"All Kazakhs and Uyghurs are expected to hold family gatherings for Lunar New Year to demonstrate national and family unity," she said. "The [Han Chinese] visit your home and you are expected to visit theirs as well, to socialize and eat with them."



"All the village committees must arrange a program of events, and attendance is mandatory," Dina said. "If you are refuse, they will send you straight to the [camps]."



She said some of the camps have been rebranded "entrepreneurial centers," and are used to source forced labor from inmates.



"There are two in Nilek county: one is making clothes, the other naan bread," she said.



Kazakh scholar Reis Khan said the authorities have also forced Muslims to eat pork as part of the "festivities" since 2017.



"The authorities have forced people to put up poetic couplets and distributed pork to Muslim families," Khan said.



"But now, in the name of 'easing tensions,' they are arranging for Han Chinese visit Muslim families," he said. "They then have the Muslim families go regularly to Han Chinese people's homes to eat pork with rice."



Reported by Qiao Long for RFA's Mandarin Service. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.
Twenty United Nations peacekeepers were injured, including several seriously, in central Mali on Wednesday when their base came under fire, a U.N. mission spokesman said.

The base near the town of Douentza in was attacked around 0700 GMT, a spokesman for the MINUSMA mission, Olivier Salgado, told Reuters.

He did not say who was responsible. Islamist militant groups linked to al Qaeda and Islamic States regularly attack U.N. peacekeepers and Malian soldiers in the area.

"The MINUSMA chief firmly condemns the attack and has ordered that all measures be taken to treat the wounded," Salgado said.

Deployed since 2013, the U.N. currently has over 14,000 peacekeepers in Mali.

Short link:





Investor Presentation Update

Perth, Feb 10, 2021 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Hastings Technology Metals Ltd ( ASX:HAS ) ( FRA:5AM ) provides the latest Investor Presentation Update on their Australian Yangibana Rare Earth project.1. Drilling results confirm a major 2km long zone of economic mineralisation at Simon's Find2. Simon's Find and the recently announced Fraser's North and South drill results form a continuous zone of economic mineralisation 4km long3. The Fraser's - Simon's Find - Bald Hill trend now forms an 8km-long economic mineralised corridorTo view the presentation, please visit:About Hastings Technology Metals Ltd

Hastings Technology Metals Ltd (ASX:HAS) (FRA:5AM) is advancing its Yangibana Rare Earths Project in the Upper Gascoyne Region of Western Australia towards production. The proposed beneficiation and hydro metallurgy processing plant will treat rare earths deposits, predominantly monazite, hosting high neodymium and praseodymium contents to produce a mixed rare earths carbonate that will be further refined into individual rare earth oxides at processing plants overseas.

Neodymium and praseodymium are vital components in the manufacture of permanent magnets which is used in a wide and expanding range of advanced and high-tech products including electric vehicles, wind turbines, robotics, medical applications and others. Hastings aims to become the next significant producer of neodymium and praseodymium outside of China.

Hastings holds 100% interest in the most significant deposits within the overall project, and 70% interest in additional deposits that will be developed at a later date, all held under Mining Leases. Numerous prospects have been identified warranting detailed exploration to further extend the life of the project.

Brockman Project

The Brockman deposit, near Halls Creek in Western Australia, contains JORC Indicated and Inferred Mineral Resources, estimated using the guidelines of JORC Code (2012 Edition).

The Company is also progressing a Mining Lease application over the Brockman Rare Earths and Rare Metals Project.

Hastings aims to capitalise on the strong demand for critical rare earths created by the expanding demand for new technology products.

Hong Kongs highest court on Thursday denied bail to pro-democracy media mogul Jimmy Lai, nearly six months after his arrest for alleged fraud and colluding with foreign powers in violation of a draconian national security law imposed on the city by the ruling Chinese Communist Party.

Lai, 73, had been released on Dec. 23 under an HK $10 million (U.S. $1.3 million) bail decision by a lower court to live under house arrest while awaiting trial, but the ruling was revoked a week later by a panel of three Court of Final Appeal (CFA) judges after a legal challenge from the department of justice. Lai had also been granted bail days after his August arrest, but the bail was revoked, and he was rearrested on Dec. 3. In total, he has spent 59 days in jail.

On Tuesday, the CFAs panel of five judges unanimously ruled that the lower court had granted bail to Lai on an erroneous line of reasoning due to a misconstrued reading of Article 42 of the Security Law, which states that bail can only be granted based on sufficient grounds for believing that the criminal suspect or defendant will not continue to commit acts endangering national security. Common law traditionally allows for the granting of bail unless a judge has reason to believe a defendant may flee or commit another crime while awaiting trial.

The judges said Lai is welcome to reapply for bail before his April 16 trial date because Tuesdays ruling reflected how the lower court came to its decision, rather than whether he is eligible for bail.

They also ruled that the far-ranging Security Law cannot be amended, despite clauses deemed to run counter to the Basic Law, Hong Kongs mini-constitution.

Tuesday marked the first time the CFA had ruled on a case related to the National Security Law, which was imposed on Hong Kong in June 2020. Observers said following the ruling that the CFAs interpretation raises the bar for those charged under the Security Law, placing the onus on the defendant to convince the court to grant them bail.

Lai's redetention on New Years Eve came after an article in the official CCP newspaper, the People's Daily, hit out at the decision to grant him bail. The media tycoon was the first person to be released on bail after being charged under the National Security Law.

'Collusion with foreign powers'

Lai had earlier been granted bail on condition that he remain in his home and report to the local police station three times a week, and surrender his travel documents to the authorities. The bail conditions would also have barred him from giving any media interviews, posting on social media, publishing articles, and meeting with overseas officials.

He is accused under the National Security Law for Hong Kong of calling on overseas institutions, organizations and personnel to impose sanctions or take other hostile actions against Hong Kong or China between July 1 and Dec. 1, 2020.

Prosecutors have cited interviews he gave to foreign media organizations, including the Wall Street Journal, CNN, and Fox News, as well as comments and accounts he followed on Twitter.

Some of the evidence cited by prosecutors predates the implementation of the new law, including a meeting Lai held with former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on July 8, 2019 during a trip to Washington, before the national security law took effect.

China was among the world's biggest jailers of journalists in 2020, continuing a pattern of total state control over the media begun under CCP core leader Xi Jinping, according to press freedom campaign groups.
She's one of the Pussycat Dolls - who are currently awaiting the pandemic to be over so they can go on their reunion tour.

But this hasn't halted Ashley Roberts from flaunting her God-given assets in a new photoshoot for Euphoria Magazine.

The blonde bombshell, 39, stunned in new snaps, posing in an array of sparkling dresses.

Glamourpuss: Ashley Roberts flaunted her God-given assets in a new photoshoot for Euphoria Magazine, pictured in a nude minidress with cream leather gloves

Channeling her pop star diva status, Ashley looked alluring in one number - a nude minidress with cream leather gloves.

Her golden tresses falling around her bare shoulders, Ashley teased her bust as she stared down the camera lens, her make-up flawless with natural earthy tones.

She went from golden girl to woman in black in another snap - trading the outfit for a similar ensemble, this time in black and silver, with a purple sheen to it.

Another dark look saw her don a leather dress with feather detailing, featuring a cut-out at the bust.

Golden girl to woman in black: In another snap she traded the outfit for a similar ensemble, this time in black and silver, with a purple sheen to it

Black widow? Another dark look saw her don a leather dress with feather detailing, featuring a cut-out at the bust

Hollywood glam: Changing into a rose gold minidress, Ashely added a white feather boa to this look

Blonde on blonde: Ashley, 39, stunned in the new snaps, posing in an array of sparkling dresses

Changing into a rose gold minidress, Ashely added a white feather boa to this look, channeling Hollywood glam.

Ashley and the rest of the Pussycat Dolls - Carmit Bachar, Nicole Scherzinger, Jessica Sutta, and Kimberly Wyatt - are on hold until the current health crisis raging the world is beaten - allowing stadiums to reopen and public events to recommence.

Ashley meanwhile continues her role as a radio personality, appearing on Heart FM.

In stark contrast to her recent glamourous photoshoot, she rocks an entirely different look when she is seen leaving the Global studios every weekday.
Mathnasium began franchising in 2003 and climbed to the top of the industry at a remarkable pace, providing entrepreneurs and career-changers a strong investment opportunity while helping children succeed in math.

"We're honored to be recognized on this list year after year alongside some of the top franchises in the world. It's a testament to our proven business model and the caliber of our franchisees," said CEO Shant Assarian. "We work closely with our franchisees to ensure they have the support, tools, and resources they need to best serve their customers and realize the full potential of their investment. Our franchisees care deeply about the communities in which they operate and the children they educate. We're incredibly blessed to have such capable and passionate people operating Mathnasium Learning Centers."

Mathnasium has become an important resource for families around the world, helping their children excel at math, gain confidence and build a promising future. The need has been magnified with the impact the COVID crisis has had on schools. Mathnasium now offers instruction both in-center and online, providing much-needed flexibility during the pandemic.

About Mathnasium

Mathnasium is North America's leading math-only supplemental education franchise. Since 2002, the Mathnasium Method  the result of decades of hands-on instruction and development has been transforming the lives of children in grades 2-12, helping them understand, master, and love math. With more than 1,000 learning centers worldwide, Mathnasium has been ranked on Entrepreneur Magazine's list of top 500 franchises for over 15 years.

www.mathnasium.com

Contact:

Mathnasium Franchise Development

Email: [email protected]

Phone: 888.763.2604

SOURCE Mathnasium Learning Centers

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A law allowing authorities to keep convicted terrorist Abdul Nacer Benbrika behind bars at the end of his jail sentence has been upheld by Australias highest court.

The terror plotter was sentenced to 15 years in prison in February 2009 for his role in leading 16 other men to plot attacks on Melbourne landmarks.

Abdul Nacer Benbrika has been in custody since 2005.

After time served in custody awaiting his trial, he was due to be released from Barwon Prison on November 3 last year. However, a continuing detention order was granted in the Supreme Court of Victoria on Christmas Eve following an application by Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton.

This meant Benbrika was ordered to stay in prison for the maximum available period of three extra years because of his unacceptable risk to the community.

SAGINAW, MI  Police have released the name of a Harbor Beach man killed in a traffic crash in Saginaw.

Darrel Pearce, 50, was the fatal victim of the two-vehicle crash that occurred on Interstate 675 on the afternoon of Monday, Feb. 8.

At 5:23 p.m., Saginaw County sheriffs deputies responded to the collision site on I-675 near North Michigan Avenue in Saginaw. They determined a 2003 Pontiac Grand Prix driven by a Pearce man had been stopped in the right lane of travel. A 1999 Chevrolet Trailblazer driven by a 24-year-old Midland man was northbound on I-675 when it struck the stopped Pontiac from behind, deputies said.

Pearce died at the scene. The other driver was not arrested or hospitalized.

Undersheriff Mike Gomez said an autopsy on Pearces remains is pending. The investigation is ongoing as deputies do not yet know what caused Pearce to have been stopped in the roadway.

Read more:

Man killed in two-vehicle crash on I-675 in Saginaw

Its a freedom of speech thing for me, says Bay County man flying anti-Biden flag with crude wording

Michigan woman whose boyfriend was killed during police raid faces new drug charges

Man killed in two-vehicle crash on I-675 in Saginaw
FAIRFAX, Va., Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- GRS Technology Solutions, a technology & cybersecurity consulting firm, supporting small and medium sized businesses in the Washington DC area, recently announced their newest designation as a Registered Provider Organization (RPO) approved by the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) Accreditation Board. With this achievement, GRS can now provide Organizations Seeking Certification (OSC) with consulting services to obtain their CMMC.

GRS has been assisting government contractors in meeting the most stringent regulations, including DFARS, GDPR, HIPAA, PCI, and NIST 800-171 standards. This RPO classification allows them to expand their comprehensive list of compliance and security services designed to be less stressful, more certain and cost-effective.

"As an RPO, GRS will be able to provide a complete cybersecurity and compliance solution to organizations bidding on DoD contracts," said Larry Burbano, founder and CEO of GRS Technology Solutions. "We could not be more excited about this accomplishment and what it means for our clients and the business community." Our cybersecurity team composed of CMMC Registered Practitioners (RP) has been helping defense contractors with their NIST SP 800-171 DoD self-assessment score and getting them ready for their CMMC L3 assessment, using enclave cloud solutions, such as Microsoft GCC High and Azure Government.

GRS also will be:

Authorized to represent itself as familiar with the basic constructs of the CMMC Standard.

Able to deliver non-certified CMMC Consulting Services.

Able to help and guide defense contractors with all the documentation of practices, object evidence, and process adoption required to achieve CMMC Level 3.

You can validate GRS CMMC RPO official profile on the CMMC-AB Marketplace

About CMMC

Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) is "a unifying standard for the implementation of cybersecurity across the Defense Industrial Base (DIB)" to provide assurance that sensitive unclassified information is being protected. As part of the framework, it verifies that cybersecurity best practices are being implemented up to "cybersecurity maturity level" through a certification process.

About GRS Technology Solutions

GRS is a technology and cybersecurity consulting firm that has been supporting small and medium sized businesses in the Washington, DC area since 2008. They have been providing high-end, enterprise-level managed IT & cybersecurity solutions, including cloud services, IT management, help desk support services, technology strategy, and cybersecurity and compliance solutions. They aim to be an integral part of your success by helping you leverage information technology to the fullest. GRS partners with their clients as an extension of their businesses, not as a contractor or freelancer, bringing an entire team of experts to be an integrated and extended strategic IT partner as part of your company.

For more information visit grstechnologysolutions.com or send us an email at [email protected].

SOURCE GRS Technology Solutions

Related Links

https://www.grstechnologysolutions.com/


Cambodia has resumed the import of four species of fish from Vietnam after they objected to a ban placed on all farmed fish imports across the border last month.

The Agriculture Ministry decided to allow the import of four farmed fish species: pangasius djambal, pangasius larnaudii, catfish, and giant snakehead fish. The move comes after Vietnam objected to Cambodias flat ban on all farmed fish into the country, as it attempts to push its fledgling aquaculture sector.

In January, the Vietnamese Minister of Industry and Trade Tran Tuan Anh wrote a letter to Cambodian Minister of Commerce Pan Sorasak asking him to reconsider lifting the ban on farmed fish imports from Vietnam.

The Ministry of Agriculture Forestry and Fisheries, in collaboration with relevant ministries, will continue to address the challenging issues of aquaculture to develop the aquaculture sector and strengthen the competitiveness of aquaculture operators in line with the principles of free trade, read the Agriculture Ministry statement.

Last year, the Cambodian government aggressively pushed for local fish farms as a potential job creator during the COVID-19 pandemic. An aquaculture association was formed late last year and the government planned to give farmers who switched to aquaculture free fish feed.

Cambodian Agriculture Minister Veng Sakhon told VOA Khmer on Tuesday that local fish products were facing challenges and that people farming fish were still unable to produce enough fish products.

Sok Raden, president of the Cambodian Aquaculturist Association, wasnt opposed to the ministrys reversal. Cambodia had more than 20,000 tons of the four species that will be imported, he said, but this stock had to be sold as soon as possible as temperatures rise and fish farmers require income to repay their debts.

This is the ministrys measure, so I dont have to deny or give any comments on this. But we are aware that we will face challenges because we, firstly, owe the banks money. Secondly, we need to sell the fish to get cash to pay for the next crop of fish, he said.

The fishery expert wanted the government to limit the number of imports so that the local market was not flooded with imported fish.

I, on behalf of the Aquaculturist Association, will request the Fisheries Administration to limit [the amount] or to come up with a procedure to avoid a surplus of fish we already produce, he said.

When they import more, vendors or businesspersons will not buy domestic products, causing a risk to our fish stock that are facing water shortages, he said.

Pen Sovicheat, undersecretary of state at the Ministry of Commerce, told VOA Khmer that the decision to suspend and allow the import of fish was a technical task managed by the Ministry of Agriculture.

He said that the Ministry of Commerce supports free trade and multilateralism in line with the Asean framework and the principles of free trade of other international trade organizations.

In general, the Ministry of Commerce does not have a specific opinion on the goods mentioned above. But still, as a technical framework for international trade, we support a trade-related position in the ASEAN community, a position that supports trade in the international community, he said.
Opening arguments begin Wednesday in Donald Trump's impeachment trial after an emotional first day that wrenched senators and the nation back to the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Trumps attorneys sought to halt the trial on constitutional grounds, but lost that bid on Tuesday. Their arguments were meandering at times, leaving Trump fuming over his lawyers performance and allies questioning the defense strategy. Some called for yet another shakeup to his legal team.

Also Read | Inside the third front of the farm agitation

House Democratic prosecutors are seeking to link Trump directly to the riot that left five people dead, replaying videos of the rioters trying to stop the certification of Democrat Joe Bidens victory and Trumps statements urging them to fight the election results.

On Wednesday, they plan to use Capitol security footage that hasnt been publicly released before as they argue that Trump incited the insurrection, according to Democratic aides working on the case.

Senators, many of whom fled for safety the day of the attack, watched Tuesday's graphic videos of the Trump supporters who battled past police to storm the halls, Trump flags waving. More video is expected Wednesday, including some that hasn't been seen before.

Trump is the first president to face an impeachment trial after leaving office and the first to be twice impeached. The riot followed a rally during which Trump urged his supporters to fight like hell," words his lawyers say were simply a figure of speech. He is charged with incitement of insurrection."

Thats a high crime and misdemeanor," Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., declared in opening remarks. If thats not an impeachable offense, then theres no such thing."

On Wednesday and into Thursday, the managers plan to tell a succinct" story, according to the aides, who were granted anonymity to discuss the upcoming arguments. They will start with Trump's false claims that there was massive election fraud and build to the Jan. 6 riots as a culmination" of his efforts to overturn his defeat.

The Democrats will argue that Trump inflamed and encouraged groups that had violent backgrounds, the aides say, and they will show how much worse it could have been. The aides said they will use the new Capitol security footage to make that case, but did not describe it.

Security remains extremely tight at the Capitol, fenced off with razor wire and patrolled by National Guard troops.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Biden would not be watching the trial.

Joe Biden is the president, hes not a pundit, hes not going to opine on back and forth arguments," she said.

The House impeachment managers described police officers maimed in the chaos and rioters parading in the very chamber where the trial was being held. Trumps team countered that the Constitution doesnt allow impeachment at this late date.

Thats a legal issue that could resonate with Senate Republicans eager to acquit Trump without being seen as condoning his behavior.

Lead defense lawyer Bruce Castor said he shifted his planned approach after hearing the prosecutors emotional opening and instead spoke conversationally to the senators, saying Trumps team would denounce the repugnant" attack and in the strongest possible way denounce the rioters." He appealed to the senators as patriots first," and encouraged them to be cool headed" as they assessed the arguments.

Trump attorney David Schoen turned the trial toward starkly partisan tones, arguing the Democrats were fueled by a base hatred" of the former president.

Republicans made it clear that they were unhappy with Trumps defense, many of them saying they didnt understand where it was going  particularly Castors opening. Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, who voted with Democrats to move forward with the trial, said that Trumps team did a terrible job." Maine Sen. Susan Collins, who also voted with Democrats, said she was perplexed." Sen. Lisa Murkowki of Alaska said it was a missed opportunity" for the defense.

Six Republicans joined with Democrats to vote to proceed with the trial, but the 56-44 vote was far from the two-thirds threshold of 67 votes that would be needed for conviction.

At one pivotal point, Raskin told his personal story of bringing his family to the Capitol that day to witness the certification of the Electoral College vote, only to have his daughter and son-in-law hiding in an office, fearing for their lives.

Senators, this cannot be our future," Raskin said through tears. This cannot be the future of America."

The House prosecutors had argued there is no January exception" for a president to avoid impeachment on his way out the door. Rep. Joe Neguse, D-Colo., referred to the corruption case of William Belknap, a war secretary in the Grant administration, who was impeached, tried and ultimately acquitted by the Senate after leaving office.

If Congress stands by, it would invite future presidents to use their power without any fear of accountability," he said.

It appears unlikely that the House prosecutors will call witnesses, and Trump has declined a request to testify. The trial is expected to continue into the weekend.

Trump's second impeachment trial is expected to diverge from the lengthy, complicated affair of a year ago. In that case, Trump was charged with having privately pressured Ukraine to dig up dirt on Biden, then a Democratic rival for the presidency.

This time, Trump's stop the steal" rally rhetoric and the storming of the Capitol played out for the world to see.

The Democratic-led House impeached the president swiftly, one week after the attack.

This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text.

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HERSHEY, Pa. -- A disease of the joints, osteoarthritis affects more than 30 million adults and is the fifth-leading cause of disability in the United States. In a new study, scientists have discovered the cellular pathway that leads to osteoarthritis and have identified a commonly used anti-depressant -- paroxetine -- that inhibits this pathway. The team found that Paroxetine not only slows down cartilage degeneration, but also promotes cartilage health in both mice and human cartilage in vitro. The drug may be the first-ever treatment for this debilitating, degenerative disease.

"Osteoarthritis destroys joint cartilage and results in pain and disability," said Fadia Kamal, assistant professor of orthopedics and rehabilitation at Penn State College of Medicine. "Patients live with this pain until their cartilage is extremely degenerated. Unfortunately, an invasive artificial joint replacement surgery is the only treatment orthopedists are currently able to offer. There has been a dire need to identify novel therapeutic targets, approaches or agents that can actively halt or reverse the osteoarthritis disease process."

In previous research, Kamal and her colleagues found that elevated expression and activity of the enzyme G protein-coupled receptor kinase 2 (GRK2) leads to pathologic cell growth in heart and kidney disease.

Kamal explained that osteoarthritis is similarly driven by pathological growth of cartilage cells, a process called chondrocyte hypertrophy, but how this proliferation occurs had been a mystery. Given their knowledge of the role of GRK2 in heart and kidney disease, Kamal and her team decided to investigate the enzyme in osteoarthritis patients. They found that patients with osteoarthritis or acute injury to the joint had high levels of GRK2 in their cartilage cells, or chondrocytes.

"We discovered a central role for GRK2 in cartilage degeneration, where GRK2 pushes chondrocytes to destroy the cartilage matrix surrounding them instead of replenishing and maintaining it." said Kamal. "In other words, the cells receive a bad signal to destroy cartilage."

The researchers confirmed the role of GRK2 in cartilage degeneration in two experiments: in one, they performed a genetic deletion of GRK2 from cartilage cells in mice, and in the other, they administered paroxetine -- an FDA-approved selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) that is a potent GRK2 inhibitor -- to the mice. In both cases, they found that not only did GRK2 deletion prevent chondrocyte hypertrophy and halt osteoarthritis progression, but it also promoted cartilage regeneration.

"We found that paroxetine could return cartilage cells back to a normal state and preserve the cartilage surface," said Kamal.

In other experiments with cultured human osteoarthritic cartilage, obtained from patients undergoing knee replacement surgery, the team also confirmed the ability of paroxetine to mitigate chondrocyte hypertrophy and cartilage degradation.

The results will appear on Feb. 10 in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

"Our findings present elevated GRK2 signaling in chondrocytes as a driver of chondrocyte hypertrophy and cartilage degradation and identify paroxetine as a disease-modifying drug for OA treatment," said Kamal. "This is important given that around 80% of the U.S. population will develop radiographic evidence of osteoarthritis by age 65 and with the growing prevalence of osteoarthritis risk factors, such as obesity and diabetes, osteoarthritis will likely carry an even greater burden in the future."

The team is currently seeking approval from the FDA for a new trial of this drug to treat osteoarthritis.

"If this trial works, we will have found a new solution to an age-old problem of joints in the body wearing out because of cartilage destruction and loss," said Kamal. "We hope to intervene with this disease-modifying treatment for the benefit of our patients."

###

Other Penn State authors on the paper include Vengadeshprabhu Karuppagounder, postdoctoral researcher; William Pinamont, research assistant; Natalie Yoshioka, graduate student; Adeel Ahmad, medical student; and Reyad Elbarbary, assistant professor of orthopaedics. Also on the paper are Elijah Carlson, medical student at SUNY Upstate Medical University; Eric Schott, Vice President of Translational Research and Operations, Solarea Bio; Heather Le Bleu, graduate student, University of Oregon; and Michael Zuscik, Mack Clayton Professor and Vice Chair of Research in the Department of Orthopedics, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.

Fadia Kamal is an inventor on patent application (#63/113,021) submitted by Penn State that covers "GRK2 inhibition by paroxetine ameliorates osteoarthritis." All other authors declare no competing interests.

The National Institutes of Health, the Arthritis National Research Foundation and the Barsumian Foundation Fund supported this research.
ECU

So, it's nice to see that owners of the C8 and the R8 are getting along. And by that, we're referring to a friendly session of straight-line racing between a pair of YouTubers owning such beasts.In the American corner, we have actress and vlogger Emelia Hartford, who currently owns the Internet's most muscular C8. We're talking about a machine whose 6.2-liter LT2 V8 has been pushed to 1,022 hp and 944 lb-ft (1,280 Nm) of twist at the rear wheels, as shown by a recent dyno run completed on C16 race gas and methanol.Of course, with GM's efforts to keep aftermarket developers from cranking the factoryof the new LT2 motor having been successful, finding a workaround wasn't easy. In fact, this is still a work-in-progress build, as, for instance, the lines of code that allow the vehicle to pull timing between shifts hadn't been inserted at the time of the race against the Audi. Yep, that means a lot of stress on the clutch baskets - keep in mind that the clutches have been replaced by custom units.The German corner is occupied by a second-generation R8 that has also been taken down the TT path, albeit with the monster delivering up to 1,400 hp at the wheels, depending on the ECU map (a four-figure output is an aspect we need to keep in mind here). This is hooned by Cody Detwiler (a.k.a. WhistlinDiesel ).So, welcome to 2021, ladies and gentlemen drivers. This is a time when N/A "supercars" (some enthusiasts might challenge that definition when it comes to the C8 Stingray) engage in rev battles after they have twin-turbo kits installed (2:30 point of the clip below), drivers (and passengers) know their hand signals for the police being around (5:30 timestamp), and the only reason to stop racing is when the air filter gets shot straight off the car - don't fret, thanks to the now-mandatory rear bumper delete, this is clearly visible (7:50).Now, once the said no-lift-shift matter is addressed, we should get to see this C8 Corvette doing its thing at the drag strip. And while the prepped surface of the track increasing stress on the hardware might cause additional trouble, keep in mind that we're here to witness the journey rather than the (nine-second?) destination.
In an on-demand world Simon Plowright is a paragon of patience. For his new nature documentary, Quoll Farm, the Tasmanian nature filmmaker spent a year living and shooting on an abandoned farm so he could get close to the native eastern quoll population. His reward, after months of cohabitation, was not just footage of the native marsupials foraging, breeding, and rearing joeys in their dens, but encounters where the tiny creatures impudently treat him as part of the furniture. The unadorned intimacy is quietly compelling.

I believe in never touching the wildlife. Leave them alone and the animal will trust you at some point. If you let them come to you youll be rewarded by wonderful experiences, Plowright says. Some wildlife films stage things  its a common practice. We didnt have to do any of that. Its 100 per cent genuine.

Filmmaker Simon Plowright at Quoll Farm. Credit:ABC

Quoll Farm, an international co-production that debuts in Australia on the ABC, plays as a contrast to the prevailing design of contemporary nature documentaries. It is site-specific instead of traversing vast realms, and has a sense of time that divides 12 months  beginning and ending in Tasmanian winters  into seasonal rhythms so that the caterpillars quolls feast on in the spring give way to summers many moths.

Along with his cinematographer and fellow producer, Nick Hayward, Plowright maps the quolls habitats and identifies individuals. Weighing no more than a kilogram, quolls such as young mother Clover and canny hunter Sasha become characters in the story, frenetic and curious as they pop up from gaps in flooring or make their nocturnal rounds. But the 55-minute documentary is equally alert to the quolls many predators, and the fate some suffer.
The Government has conceded its plan for living with Covid-19 is not working and it is drafting a new framework for exiting the third national lockdown.

Just weeks after Taoiseach Micheal Martin insisted the Government was sticking to the original plan it has emerged the framework is now being overhauled to provide for a slower reopening of the country.

Yesterday, Tanaiste Leo Varadkar admitted the Government was redrafting the existing plan to take into account the national vaccination roll-out and the emergence of new variants.

The move follows weeks of calls from the public and businesses for clarity on when the Government planned to ease Covid-19 restrictions.

Read More

Since Christmas, the Government has refused to give any clarity on when childcare, schools and colleges will reopen.

Retailers, restaurant owners and publicans have also been left in the dark for more than a month.

The revised framework will involve a much slower reopening of society. It will begin with schools reopening, followed by construction and over time other sectors will be permitted to reopen.

The details of the new plan will be worked on over the next two weeks before being published on February 22.

The announcement came just hours after Labour leader Alan Kelly called on the Taoiseach to outline a strategy for dealing with the pandemic as he said the Plan for Living with Covid-19 has become irrelevant.

Living with Covid has failed. So we dont have a strategy, said Mr Kelly.

I dont expect him to stand up and say living with Covid is still our strategy because it has never worked. Its not working now. So I want to know what is the strategy.

In recent weeks, the Taoiseach, along with Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe have robustly defended the Plan for Living with Covid-19, which was published last September.

Since the plan was published the Government has imposed two national lockdowns.

Read More

During an interview on RTE Radio One, the Tanaiste said when the Government developed its plan last summer it did not take into consideration the introduction of vaccines and did not know about the possibility of new variants of the virus.

Theres been a degree of experience over the past couple of months in terms of what reopenings can cause problems and which ones dont, he added.

The Tanaiste said it was now appropriate that the Government refreshed the existing Plan for Living with Covid-19. He said the new plan will also take into account issues such as extending the Pandemic Unemployment Payment and the wage subsidy scheme.

Mr Varadkar said he did not expect construction to open before March 5.

He said personal services such as hairdressers and barbers were not expected to open until after March 5.

The current lockdown has been in place since just after Christmas.




Lucknow, Feb 10 : In the middle of the ongoing farmers' agitation for the repeal of the three new Union farm laws, the Congress has been working at a fast pace to strengthen its political base. The party feels that in the western districts of Uttar Pradesh by coming out in favour of the farmer protests, it is preparing the political ground for the upcoming panchayat (civic) polls and Assembly elections.

In order to support the farmers in their protest, the Congress's own 'anti-farm laws' movement is going to kick-off from Wednesday. The party's National General Secretary and Uttar Pradesh party in-charge, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, will embark on a four-day programme in the state. She will address rallies in Saharanpur on Wednesday, Meerut on February 13, Bijnor on February 16 and a 'kisan Panchayat' in Mathura on February 18. Farmer leaders may also join Priyanka in these events.

Priyanka Vadra, who went to Rampur to visit the family of a farmer who died during the protest, is likely to gain an edge by holding a 'Kisan Panchayat' in Uttar Pradesh. She will attend four 'Kisan Panchayats' in the state, thus spearheading the Congress' campaign from western UP.

According to former Congress MLA Imran Masood, Priyanka will reach the panchayat at 2 p.m. on Wednesday. Seating arrangements for nearly 15,000 people have been made at the venue in Saharanpur.

In western UP, the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) is also all set to gain political mileage from the farmers' agitation, say analysts. After Mathura and Baraut, crowds thronging the panchayats in Shamli are making other political parties restless. The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and the Samajwadi Party (SP) are silent, but the Congress is desperate to gain some political mileage. Wherever there is no presence of the RLD, the Congress wants to influence the farmers towards it.

At the same time, a strategy has also been chalked out to stop the RLD from trying to dent the Congress's traditional strongholds.

Ahead of the UP Assembly elections next year, the Congress is working to gain a major vote bank through the anti-farm laws movement by campaigning at the grassroot level in the western UP districts where the party's base is strong.
World News: FAO Members endorse Declaration for Sustainable Fisheries and Aquaculture

February 10,2021 | Source: FAO

The 34th session of FAO's Committee on Fisheries (COFI34) ended its week-long meeting on Friday with its Members endorsing the first-ever Declaration for Sustainable Fisheries and Aquaculture, urging stronger action to combat illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing, and stressing the importance of recovering from impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Declaration outlines a global vision for fisheries and aquaculture, while highlighting the sector's essential contributions in the fight against poverty, hunger and all forms of malnutrition. This is central to efforts to implement the 2030 Agenda and make agri-food systems more inclusive, resilient and sustainable, a global concern that will be discussed at the UN Food Systems Summit, in September.



In her closing remarks on the last day of COFI34, FAO Deputy-Director General, Maria Helena Semedo, said fisheries and aquaculture were of critical importance for global agri-food systems transformation. "We all share a common goal - the sustainable management of our valuable aquatic resources," Semedo said. "This is vital to having better production, better nutrition, a better environment and a better life for all so that, together, we can achieve the Sustainable Development Goals."



The Declaration builds upon existing international instruments aimed at promoting sustainable fisheries and aquaculture around the world, such as the landmark FAO Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries, recognizing successes since the endorsement of the Code and identifying new and urgent priorities. COFI34 marked the 25th anniversary of the Code with a High-level Special Event. Since its adoption in 1995, the FAO Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries has been the main instrument for developing international agreements, guidelines and tools to ensure the effective conservation, management, utilization and production of living aquatic resources.



In 2018, global fisheries and aquaculture production (excluding aquatic plants) reached an all?time record of nearly 179 million tonnes. Overall capture fisheries, with 96.4 million tonnes represented 54 percent of the total, while aquaculture, with 82.1 million tonnes, accounted for 46 percent. The 2020 State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture (SOFIA) report estimates that total fish production is set to increase to 204 million tonnes in 2030, up 15 percent from 2018, with aquaculture's share growing from its current 46 percent to 53 percent. Aquaculture has been the fastest expanding food production sector globally over the last decades, growing at an average of 5.3 percent per year since the turn of the century. FAO estimates that 34.2 percent of all marine fish stocks are fished beyond biological sustainable limits, a threefold increase since monitoring started in 1974.



IUU fishing



At COFI34, Members acknowledged the need for greater monitoring and transparency in fishing operations, and noted further efforts were needed to combat illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing. Countries were urged to become a party to the FAO Agreement on Port State Measure (PSMA), considered a potent international instrument to combat IUU fishing. During COFI34, the Russian Federation announced it was becoming a Party to the PSMA, joining another 68 FAO Members including the European Union on behalf of its Member States, which have adhered to the Agreement since its adoption in 2009. Earlier this year, the United Kingdom also agreed to become a Party to the Agreement, following its departure from the EU. FAO confirmed that it would be further strengthening its $20 million Global Capacity Development Programme to support countries in enhancing their capacity to implement the PSMA and complementary international instruments.



COVID-19 response



COFI Members also requested that FAO supports fisherfolk communities affected by the pandemic through its COVID19 response and recovery programme. The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the fisheries and aquaculture sector through changing consumer demands, market access and logistical problems related to transportation and border restrictions. The report The impact of COVID-19 on fisheries and aquaculture food systems, featured during the COFI34, showed that fish supply, consumption and trade revenues for 2020 are all expected to have declined due to containment restrictions, while global aquaculture production is expected to fall by some 1.3 per cent, the first fall recorded by the sector in several years. The report also noted that global fisheries and aquaculture could face further disruption in 2021 as lockdowns affect supply and demand across the sector.



COFI34 recognised the importance of the sustainable use of aquatic resources for biodiversity conservation. In addition, the meeting stressed the crucial need to improve data collection in the fisheries sector to support evidence-based decision making, especially in support of small-scale fishers, whose critical role will be celebrated during the International Year of Artisanal Fisheries and Aquaculture in 2022. FAO is working with Duke University and WorldFish, a non-profit research organization, to assess the economic, environmental and social contribution of small-scale fisheries to food security, nutrition and development at global level. The next COFI session (COFI35) will be held from September 5-9 in 2022. The committee is the only global inter-governmental forum where FAO Members meet to consider issues and challenges facing fisheries and aquaculture. Fisheries and aquaculture will also be discussed at the World Ocean Summit in March, as well as the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in November and in the UN Biodiversity Conference (COP15) in December.



The COFI 34 Declaration is available at: http://www.fao.org/3/ne472en/ne472en.pdf?utm_source=miragenews&utm_medium=miragenews&utm_campaign=news
The World Health Organization (WHO) has warned against jumping to conclusions about the efficacy of coronavirus vaccines.



This is after a South African study suggested that the AstraZeneca jab was less effective against a local variant of the virus.



But experts are hopeful that the vaccine will still be effective at preventing severe cases.



Head of WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said data used in the study was from a "limited sample size" and the participants were "younger and healthier".



"It is important to determine whether or not the vaccine remains effective in preventing more severe illness," he said in a statement.



But he acknowledged that manufacturers of vaccines will have to adopt to mutations of the coronavirus.



"It seems increasingly clear that manufacturers will have to adjust to the evolution of the virus, taking into account the latest variants for future shots, including boosters.



"We know viruses mutate and we know we have to be ready to adapt vaccines so they remain effective," he said.

Source: BBC









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Hyderabad: Discrimination towards male candidates by way of restraining them from applying for nurse posts is unacceptable under the law and this amounts to a violation of the Articles 14 and 21 of the Constitution, the Telangana High Court has ruled.

The ruling was made in response to a writ petition alleging discrimination based on gender in recruitments by the Singareni Collieries Company Ltd.

Justice Ponugoti Naveen Rao said government recruiting agencies cannot take shelter under Rule 22 and 22-A (Special Reservations) of the Telangana State and Subordinate Service Rules, 1996, and exclude anyone in the filling of posts. Unless and until a policy decision is taken to reserve the posts exclusively for some category, the recruiter cannot move forward on the basis of the existing rules, the court stated.

Justice Rao was dealing with a petition filed by Md. Fasiuddin from Godavarikhani of Peddapalli district challenging the employment notification issued by the Singareni Collieries. The company had called for applications to seven categories of posts, which included the post of junior staff nurse.

The notification had said only female candidates need to send applications to fill the junior staff nurse posts. The petitioner argued that there cannot be recruitments based on gender.

J. Srinivasa Rao, counsel for the Singareni company contended that there was the practice in the company, for several years, that the posts of junior staff nurse were to be filled with women only. Counsel argued that Under Rule 22 and 22A of the Telangana State and Subordinate Service Rules, the company has the power to make special reservations for some posts.

Disagreeing with the contentions, Justice Rao stressed that, if so, a policy decision must be taken this way or necessary regulation be incorporated to allow exclusive reservation. The court directed the Singareni Company to receive applications from eligible male candidates also.

The court asked the company to extend the date of submission of application forms to make it convenient for eligible candidates to apply for the posts. However, the entire exercise of appointment for these posts shall now abide by the result of the writ petition, the court said.
The number of routine operations being carried out in the NHS fell by nearly a quarter in January as doctors and nurses turned their attention to coronavirus patients.

NHS figures leaked to the Health Services Journal reveal almost 23,000 fewer ops - including hip replacements and cataract replacements - were carried out last month compared to December.

The number of surgeries taking place each well fell from 110,000 to just 85,000 as staff strained to keep up with the influx of Covid-19 patients.

And separate data showed 103,491 patients on waiting lists were classed as 'priority two', meaning they should be seen within a month.

Hospital Covid admissions surged in late December, forcing NHS staff to rapidly expand critical care units to accommodate the extra patients.

At the peak of the second wave in January there were almost double the number of Covid patients on wards than during the first wave of the pandemic, and there are still more than there were in April and May last year.

NHS bosses warned the added pressure would lead to delays in seeing patients suffering from other conditions - including cancer - which charities have said is putting thousands of lives at risk.

Leaked NHS figures showed 103,491 patients on waiting lists needed to be seen within a month. Hospitals suffered spiralling admissions during the first wave of the pandemic

Above is the latest data, from last month, on the number of patients on NHS waiting lists. It shows they surged from September as hospitalisations also rose

At the peak of the second wave in January there were almost double the number of Covid patients on wards than during the first wave of the pandemic, and there are still more than there were in April and May last year

As many as 110,000 elective day operations and 18,000 planned overnight admissions were conducted every seven days in the first three weeks of December, official NHS data shows.

But this dropped to around 85,000 day cases and 10,000 overnight admissions every week in the next month.

This was a reduction of 23 per cent and 44 per cent respectively.

London and the South East faced the biggest drops in procedures, by 40 per cent in day cases and 57 per cent in overnight admissions.

The two regions were hit hardest in the second wave - along with the East of England - after the more infectious mutant Kent variant of the virus emerged.

In the capital some hospitals halted all operations not considered immediately lifesaving - including cancer surgery - as they buckled under the strain.

The latest official figures from NHS England show 4.46million people were on waiting lists by December, of which almost 200,000 had been for more than a year.

This was the highest number since records began since 2007 and 140 times more than in 2019.

For comparison, there were a total of 4.42million patients on the waiting in 2019, and 4.45million the year before. There were just 1,398 people waiting a year or longer last year.

And above is the data from November showing the number of ambulances waiting more than 60 minutes and the numbers in critical care beds

Dr Nick Scriven, former president of the Society for Acute Medicine, described the figures at the time as reflecting exactly how 'dire' the situation is.

'Millions of people (are) waiting to start hospital treatment and 330,000 people waiting more than six weeks for key diagnostic tests,' he said.

'The effects of Covid-19 will be seen for years to come and the impact on many individuals could be irreparable.

'But what is of particular note and concern for us in urgent care is that the attendances at emergency departments were higher than the peak in April and this data is well before the effects of the current wave will be seen - and this is against a backdrop of many hospitals being at capacity now.

'So whether you look at the here and now or the future, the challenges are truly daunting.'

Professor Neil Mortensen, president of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, said the figures showed the 'calamitous impact' of the virus on the NHS.
All quiet: A normally bustling Grafton Street in Dublin city centre was eerily void of people yesterday, and there is no sign it is going to change soon. Photo: Gareth Chaney/ Collins

The Government has conceded its plan for living with Covid-19 is not working and it is drafting a new framework for exiting the third national lockdown.

Just weeks after Taoiseach Micheal Martin insisted the Government was sticking to the original plan it has emerged the framework is now being overhauled to provide for a slower reopening of the country.

Yesterday, Tanaiste Leo Varadkar admitted the Government was redrafting the existing plan to take into account the national vaccination roll-out and the emergence of new variants.

The move follows weeks of calls from the public and businesses for clarity on when the Government planned to ease Covid-19 restrictions.

Read More

Since Christmas, the Government has refused to give any clarity on when childcare, schools and colleges will reopen.

Retailers, restaurant owners and publicans have also been left in the dark for more than a month.

The revised framework will involve a much slower reopening of society. It will begin with schools reopening, followed by construction and over time other sectors will be permitted to reopen.

The details of the new plan will be worked on over the next two weeks before being published on February 22.

The announcement came just hours after Labour leader Alan Kelly called on the Taoiseach to outline a strategy for dealing with the pandemic as he said the Plan for Living with Covid-19 has become irrelevant.

Living with Covid has failed. So we dont have a strategy, said Mr Kelly.

I dont expect him to stand up and say living with Covid is still our strategy because it has never worked. Its not working now. So I want to know what is the strategy.

In recent weeks, the Taoiseach, along with Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe have robustly defended the Plan for Living with Covid-19, which was published last September.

Since the plan was published the Government has imposed two national lockdowns.

During an interview on RTE Radio One, the Tanaiste said when the Government developed its plan last summer it did not take into consideration the introduction of vaccines and did not know about the possibility of new variants of the virus.

Theres been a degree of experience over the past couple of months in terms of what reopenings can cause problems and which ones dont, he added.

The Tanaiste said it was now appropriate that the Government refreshed the existing Plan for Living with Covid-19. He said the new plan will also take into account issues such as extending the Pandemic Unemployment Payment and the wage subsidy scheme.

Mr Varadkar said he did not expect construction to open before March 5.

He said personal services such as hairdressers and barbers were not expected to open until after March 5.

The current lockdown has been in place since just after Christmas.

Commuters now have yet another reason to avoid packing themselves into subway stations. New York City's transit system exposes riders to more inhaled pollutants than any other metropolitan subway system in the Northeastern United States, a new study finds. Yet even its "cleaner" neighbors struggle with enough toxins to give health-conscious travelers pause.

Led by NYU Grossman School of Medicine researchers, the study measured air quality samples in 71 stations at morning and evening rush hours in Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. Among the 13 underground stations tested in New York, the investigators found concentrations of hazardous metals and organic particles that ranged anywhere from two to seven times that of outdoor air samples.

Notably in the report, publishing online Feb. 10 in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, one underground platform on the PATH line connecting New Jersey and Manhattan (Christopher Street Station) reached up to 77 times the typical concentration of potentially dangerous particles in outdoor, aboveground city air. This figure is comparable to sooty contamination from forest fires and building demolition, the study authors say.

Air quality was also measured in another 58 stations during rush hours in Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington. While no station's readings reached the severe levels of contamination seen in New York's worst transit lines, underground subway stations within each of these cities still showed at least twice the airborne particle concentrations as their respective outside samples at morning and evening rush hours.

"Our findings add to evidence that subways expose millions of commuters and transit employees to air pollutants at levels known to pose serious health risks over time," says study lead author David Luglio, a doctoral student at NYU Grossman.

"As riders of one of the busiest, and apparently dirtiest, metro systems in the country, New Yorkers in particular should be concerned about the toxins they are inhaling as they wait for trains to arrive," adds co-senior study author Terry Gordon, PhD, a professor in the Department of Environmental Medicine at NYU Grossman.

Further analysis of air samples showed that iron and organic carbon, a chemical produced by the incomplete breakdown of fossil fuels or from decaying plants and animals, composed three-quarters of the pollutants found in the underground air samples for all measured subway stations. Although iron is largely nontoxic, some forms of organic carbon have been linked to increased risk of asthma, lung cancer, and heart disease, the study authors say. Gordon notes that further research is needed to assess potentially higher risk for transit workers who spend far longer periods of time in the stations than riders.

The Metropolitan Transit Authority reported that 5.5 million people rode New York City's subways every day in 2019, while PATH puts its daily ridership at more than 284,000.

For the investigation, the research team took over 300 air samples during rush hour in stations in Manhattan, Philadelphia, Washington, Boston, and along train lines connecting New York City to New Jersey and Long Island. The data reflects more than 50 total hours of sampling across about 70 subway stops. In addition to real-time monitoring of the air quality, the team also used filters to collect airborne particles for later analysis.

According to the findings, the PATH-New York/New Jersey system had the highest airborne particle concentration at 392 micrograms per cubic meter, followed by the MTA-New York at 251 micrograms per cubic meter. Washington had the next highest levels at 145 micrograms per cubic meter, followed by Boston at 140 micrograms per cubic meter. Philadelphia was comparatively the cleanest system at 39 micrograms per cubic meter. By comparison, aboveground air concentrations for all measured cities averaged just 16 micrograms per cubic meter.

Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency advises that daily exposures at fine particle concentrations exceeding 35 micrograms per cubic meter pose serious health hazards.

Besides the Christopher Street PATH station, the most polluted stations in the Northeast included Capitol South in Washington, Broadway in Boston, 2nd Avenue on the F line New York City, and 30th Street in Philadelphia, according to the findings.

Gordon cautions that the researchers did not measure riders' short-term exposure to the airborne substances, which would more closely mimic their experiences dashing to catch a train at the last minute. In addition, it remains unclear whether the steep drop in New York subway ridership due to the COVID-19 pandemic has influenced the metro's air quality, he adds.

Next, Gordon says he plans to investigate sources of subway station air contamination, such as exhaust given off by diesel maintenance locomotives, whipped up dust from the remains of dead rodents, and poor ventilation as potential culprits. He also encourages researchers and transit authorities to examine why some systems are less polluted than others in a bid to adopt practices that might relatively quickly make stations safer for riders.

###

Funding for the study was provided by National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences grants P30 ES000260, P30 ES009089, and T32 ES007324.

In addition to Gordon and Luglio, other NYU Grossman researchers include Maria Katsigeorgis; Jade Hess; Rebecca Kim; John Adragna, George Thurston, Colin Gordon, and Amna Raja. Jonathan Fine, MD, at Norwalk Hospital in Norwalk, Conn., was also involved in the study. M.J. Ruzmyn Vilcassim, PhD, at the University of Alabama in Birmingham served as the study co-senior author.

Media Inquiries

Shira Polan

212-404-4279

shira.polan@nyulangone.org
Achieving a Balance in Support of Great Power Competition

The Department of Defense (DoD) is implementing the 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS), and to be successful, must strike a balance between resourcing Conventional and Irregular Warfare (IW) capabilities. Most of the attention is on Service Conventional force modernization programs to prepare for armed conflict with peer or near-peer competitors, hereafter referred to as "adversaries. This includes a drive for new weapon systems, programs that increase lethality in support of armed conflict, and capabilities that require vast resources to develop and field. However, armed conflict is only a portion, albeit an important portion, of great power competition. Competition short of armed conflict is what precedes, and if successful, can prevent armed conflict. IW should be at the center of competition short of armed conflict as DoD's ability to effectively execute IW operations will have the greatest impact in achieving the United States Governments (USG) objectives.

This paper focuses on the competition short of armed conflict Joint Force activity as it supports the NDS and Great Power Competition. It highlights opportunities for Combatant Commanders (CCDR) to utilize IW to be successful in contested spaces. It also addresses why it is critical that IW capabilities are sustained and/or expanded.

The NDS signals a back-to-the-future type change in DoDs focus, with DoD continuing the enduring mission to provide combat credible military forces needed to deter war and protect the security of the nation. Of course, should deterrence fail, the mission is to win in war. The mission has not changed. However, the threats have, and so has the environment in which the joint force will fight. The NDS is clear that inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S. national security. Similar to the heady Cold War days of old, the great powers will square off on the global stage. Only now there are three; the United States, Russia, and China, as well as other lesser regional actors. Not unlike the Cold War, the great powers will compete largely through proxies. The great power nations will develop and support smaller combatant nation states that serve their interests instead of waging war directly between themselves. The result of these activities is a world that is becoming more unstable.

To be successful in this competition, the NDS speaks to three lines of effort (LOE); LOE One Build a More Lethal Force, LOE Two Strengthen Alliances and Attract New Partners, and LOE Three Reform the Department for Greater Performance and Affordability. Implementing these LOEs requires tough decisions and trade off analysis on where to cut funding in order to resource new capabilities. The first LOE, rebuilding military readiness and a more lethal force, rests largely with the Services who have the Title X responsibility to organize, man, train, and equip our forces and to develop the doctrine for employing those forces. The second of these LOEs, strengthening alliances and attracting new partners, is largely the domain of the Joint Force CCDRs. They must take the forces and the doctrine generated in LOE One and employ them as part of a whole-of-government approach across all phases of military operations. The third LOE, Reform the Department for Greater Performance and Affordability, although important, does not have a direct impact on the thesis of this paper and is not discussed in any detail.

Similar to what the United States saw in the Cold War, the NDS calls for increased lethality. During the Cold War, this resulted in weapon systems such as (Army) Pershing II Missile System, the M1 Main Battle Tank, the Multiple Launch Rocket System, and the AH64 Attack Helicopter; (Air Force) B-1 Bomber, F-15 and F-117 Fighter and Attack Aircraft; (Navy) Ohio Class Submarines, Aegis Combat System, F-14, and F/A-18 Fighter and Attack Aircraft. Not only increased lethality in terms of new weapon systems, but also in the tactics, techniques, and procedures to harness and enable a synergy from those systems, working together in an increasingly complex environment. Towards the end of the Cold War, the doctrine was Air Land Battle. Today the emerging doctrine is Multi-Domain Operations (MDO).

The concept of MDO is supported by a continuum of competition that spans three phases; cooperation, competition short of armed conflict, and armed conflict. It is in the competition phase where IW operations can have the greatest impact in the grey zone between peace and war. During competition, IW strengthens the USGs position by building a proxy base, denying space to adversaries, and turning denied space secured by those adversaries into contested space. A successful competition phase sustains USG partners and deters armed conflict indefinitely on terms favorable to the USG.

Strengthening existing USG alliances and attracting new partners or proxies generally takes place during what CCDRs refer to as the shaping and deterrence phases of a campaign and what MDO now refers to as cooperation and competition short of armed conflict. In competition, DoD seeks to advance national interests without large scale violence. The intent is to deter, or if necessary, defeat the USGs adversaries' efforts and their proxies to deny space while maintaining conditions favorable to USG interests. At the same time, where there is denied space secured by USG adversaries, competition seeks to turn these areas into contested spaces. DoD's primary means to achieve this end state are IW capabilities such as unconventional warfare, counterterrorism, security force assistance, stabilization, and counterinsurgency.

Growing global instability brought on by great power competition is expanding requirements for IW. To be successful, DoD must adequately resource those IW capabilities and the doctrine for their employment. Of course, this is the friction point between the Services, as discussed in LOE One and the Joint Force, as discussed in LOE Two.

Given finite resources, DoD and specifically the Services, face tough decisions regarding the allocation of those resources. The Services focus on warfighting and increasing the lethality of the force, while harvesting the resources of organizations and or capabilities that do not directly contribute to this increase in lethality as bill payers. For example, the Army had planned to shutter the Peace Keeping and Stability Operations Institute (PKSOI). This move appears to be a result of some in Army leadership positions laser focused on a return to peer competition using largely conventional ways and means. This position contrasts with that of other Army leaders who support the future requirement for a counterinsurgency (COIN), specifically the stability component of COIN, as a future multi-domain operations warfare requirement. Even in great power competition, USG adversaries will likely not fight the United States head-to-head. They will use other countries and even non-State actors (violent extremist organizations, trans-national criminal organizations, etc.) as proxies or attempt to destabilize USG partner nations. Institutions such as the PKSOI exist to provide DoD leadership and Joint Force Commanders with a broader range of options to employ in the protection of USG interests.

The Air Force has also signaled a shift towards more lethal capabilities. Like the Army, Air Force Special Operations Command is already conducting a strategic shift from a focus on counterinsurgency (COIN) operations to preparing for high-end combat against technologically advanced adversaries. Although this shift includes a range of missions from COIN to major war and identifies a combat continuum for Special Operations missions that includes low-intensity conflict operations, the continuum does not guarantee that appropriate attention and resources will be given to the low-end of that spectrum.

In both examples, the Army and the Air Force are focused on increasing the lethality of the force in support of the less likely but most dangerous scenario, which is the armed conflict phase of multi-domain operations. However, in doing so, the Services are potentially placing DoD. By extension, the USG is at risk by under-resourcing DoDs capability to effectively engage in competition short of armed conflict.

DoD must not lose focus of the larger picture. Unmatched lethality is important. However, the pathway to success is achieving a balance between unmatched lethality in support of armed conflict; and not only sustaining but expanding IW capabilities in support of competition short of armed conflict. During the time that institutional DoD (the Services) is shifting resources to increase lethality and prepare for the possibility of the first big, MDO; the Joint Force (the CCDRs) will fight hundreds of non-kinetic battles out in the competitive spaces between USG proxies and those proxies of Americas adversaries. If DoD is successful in this competition short of armed conflict, the USG will gain an advantage and can deter MDO. If DoD is not successful, the USG will be placed at a competitive disadvantage, a situation that may actually lead to MDO. DoD would be foolish to allow great power adversaries to succeed in the competitive space, gathering support, while the USG is marginalized and placed in a position of weakness. IW represents the best set of capabilities DoD and the USG can employ to win in the competitive space as part of great power competition. These capabilities must be adequately resourced.

Mr. Charles Barham is a retired U.S. Army Colonel with 29 years of service (1981-2010). He also served for four years as a Department of the Army Civilian, Management and Program Analyst in the Afghanistan/Pakistan Hands Program (2010-2014). He currently serves as a Department of the Air Force Civilian, Management and Program Analyst at USCENTCOM in the Operations Directorate, Interagency Action Group, Civil Affairs Operations Division as a Foreign Humanitarian Assistance Analyst, and the Assistant Foreign Humanitarian Assistance Program Manager. He served for more than three years in Afghanistan as; Assistant Director of the Police Reform Directorate, Combined Security Transition Command - Afghanistan 2006-2007, Senior Socioeconomic Advisor in HQ ISAF-DCOS/STAB under Generals David Petraeus and John Allen 2011, as Deputy Director of the NATO/Afghan Transformation Task Force, HQ ISAF under General Joseph Dunford 2013, and as a Senior Planning, Programing and Budgeting Advisor to the Afghan National Army Special Operations Command 2014. He has served for over eight years in HQCENTCOM in positions including Senior Socioeconomic Advisor, Interagency Planner, Stabilization Analyst, and Foreign Humanitarian Assistance Analyst. He has a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from the University of Richmond, a Master of Business Administration from Oklahoma City University, and a Master of Strategic Studies from the U.S. Army War College. He has published on-line articles in Small Wars Journal, SOF News, and Real Clear Defense.
Tunis/Tunisia  MPs at the House of People's Representatives (HPR) criticized, Tuesday, "the poor communication strategy adopted by the Health Ministry in its efforts to persuade Tunisians register for the vaccination campaign as a large number of them fear the vaccine's side effects.

MPs also questioned the State's readiness as to how to compensate citizens who react badly to the vaccine.

MPs raised this issue at a plenary session held, Tuesday by the HPR, while reviewing the bill relating to the State's authorization to join the global vaccination initiative against the COVID-19 virus "Covax".

The bill, consisting of two articles, includes the State's authorization to comply with the general terms and conditions set by the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation "Gavi".

Under the terms and conditions set by the Alliance, the Tunisian State has to provide necessary guarantees to manufacturers of COVID-19 vaccines by showing commitments to compensate for any damage that may result from the side effects of vaccination. This approach was imposed by the vaccine manufacturers as insurance companies have refused to cover these risks on the pretext of their inability to assess them.

According to MPs, Tunisian citizens are feeling confused because of the ministry's poor communication strategy as it is trying to convince them of the vaccine's safety. A limited number of Tunisians have registered for the "Evax" online platform dedicated to vaccination (only 3%).

MPs called on the Health Ministry to conduct awareness campaigns on the sources of vaccination and the extent of their effectiveness, similar to the ones held by the State in the 1980s against several diseases including tetanus.

Officials are still vaccinating health care workers and residents or staffers at long-term care facilities that were part of the first phase of the vaccination effort, known as 1a, but also have started giving shots to people who are 65 and older or work as front-line essential workers, including teachers.
The owner of a Staffordshire Bull Terrier that attacked a 3-year-old girl last month inside a Spring restaurant has been ordered not to keep any dogs in her home as her criminal case proceeds in court.

State District Judge Hilary Unger on Wednesday set bond conditions for Jennifer Romano, also requiring that the 46-year-old woman not have contact with the injured girl or her family.

Romano was booked Monday into the Harris County Jail on felony charges of injury to a child and tampering with evidence. She made her combined bond of $7,500 on Wednesday, according to court documents.

Her attorney, Angela Weltin, said Romano owns several dachshunds that she will no longer be able to keep in her home. She also owned Kingston, the terrier who on Jan. 9 lunged and bit Ronin Waldroup on the face at the Loose Caboose Restaurant, deputies said.

The girl was treated at Memorial Hermann Hospital in the Woodlands for deep lacerations, puncture wounds and tearing to the skin on the right side of her face. She received 14 stitches and may have to receive plastic surgery, court records state.

Weltin on Wednesday called the attack by Kingston, a rescue dog, a tragedy.

Our hearts go out to (Ronin) and her family, Weltin said. We are praying for a swift recovery and full healing. Kingston has since been euthanized. The sad story continues as the rescue dog owner, Jennifer Romano, is charged by the District Attorneys Office with two serious felony offenses arising out of the sorrowful event.

Through their attorney, Maureen Farrell, the girls family said they were grateful that the district attorneys office charged Romano with the felonies.

While the criminal process does not heal Ronin's wounds, it brings the family comfort to know that our community takes seriously the horrible decision Romano made to put Kingston, who had bitten before, in a service vest and bring him into a restaurant, Farrell said. Romano knew the staff would probably not say a word and were likely not trained in the ADA-compliant questions they could and should ask."

The Waldroup familys statement points at whether Romano complied with the Americans with Disabilities Act. Kingston had been wearing a service dog vest during the attack, authorities said, and Romanos doctor had previously stated that her animals helped her with her general anxiety disorder.

Dogs that only provide comfort or emotional support do not qualify as service animals, which the act defines as dogs trained to do work or perform tasks for a person with a disability.

Service dog educator Kaydin Downey said her company, Hamilton at Your Service, LLC, which conducts workshops and consultations about service dogs, was relieved to see charges filed.

Knowing she was roaming free with multiple other animals with potentially more service dog vests of their own, as a witness testified to in court, was frightening to everyone, especially the Waldroups who are trying their best to resume back to normal life, Downey said.

Ronin is still trying her best to cope everyday and though we specialize in disabilities including PTSD and aiding families in offering support and techniques, Cece and James have been doing flawlessly on their own. Ronin has a long journey ahead of her but she has the absolute best parents in the world to support her during this time.

Witnesses said Romano fled the scene after the unprovoked attack, and authorities also said Romano concealed Kingston from deputies while they were trying to seize the dog. Kingston was euthanized following a Montgomery County judges ruling to do so, despite Romanos claims that the dog could be re-trained.

The dog has bitten people in at least two other attacks, including one within the last year, one Harris County investigator said.

The latest attack occurred while both parties stood in line at the restaurant at 26403 Preston Ave. One witness, who arrived at the Loose Caboose with Kingston, told investigators the girl grazed the dog before the incident. He added that Romano told him it was the girls fault, according to charging documents.

Another witness claimed that they saw Ronin Waldroup standing 1 or 2 feet behind the dog before it turned around and bit her face.

In recent years, Romano has also been named in multiple lawsuits surrounding a different pit bull, Gus, who she claimed to be rehabilitating through her now-defunct business, Maggies House Rescue.

In a previous bite case in 2013, a Montgomery County judge ruled that Gus caused serious bodily injury and ordered the dog euthanized.

Staff writer Julian Gill contributed to this article.

samantha.ketterer@chron.com
On a wintry March day in 1896, the newly appointed director to the French Armys Statistical Bureau, Colonel Marie-Georges Picquart, was sorting through a fresh pile of trash on his desk. The bureau was, despite its bland name, the militarys counter-intelligence office, while the garbage was hardly garbage, but instead the daily harvest from the trash pails at the German Embassy.

What began that ordinary day, however, speaks to our current moment. As bizarre as the conspiratorial online fantasies of QAnon seem, its sordid stew of anti-Semitic ideas and images are old. So we can look to the past for warning signs and inspiration.

In France that morning 125 years ago, the director discovered a crumpled telegram from Max von Schwartzkoppen, the German military attache, to a French officer named Esterhazy. We are not, warned the attache, getting our moneys worth in military information. Digging up a recent memo written by Esterhazy, the stunned director compared its handwriting to a letter sent to the attache two years earlier that contained vital secrets. The handwriting was identical, yet the military authorities pinned the crime of treason not on Esterhazy, but a different French officer who had since been serving a sentence of life imprisonment on Devils Island.

Suddenly, this day was not like any other. Picquarts response to his startling discovery helped to transform a judicial matter into the existential crisis we know as the Dreyfus Affair. Named after Alfred Dreyfus, the French Jewish officer wrongly accused of treason, the affair opened wide a fault line running through France. One side were the Dreyfusards who privileged reason and believed Frances identity was defined by the abstract principles of equality and liberty.

On the other side, however, were the anti-Dreyfusards who privileged the irrational and insisted that Frances identity was rooted in la terre et les morts  the soil that countless generations had cultivated and in which countless ancestors were buried. For the first camp, objective truths based on incontrovertible evidence proved Dreyfuss innocence; for the second camp, subjective truths based on the indelible otherness of Jewish people proved Dreyfuss guilt. In effect, alternative versions of reality faced off against one another.

Enter Picquart, the man picking through the German trash. Like Dreyfus, he hailed from Alsace and excelled at engineering and military school. Unlike Dreyfus, he was Catholic and conservative. He was also an unrepentant anti-Semite who, like his fellow officers, believed that Dreyfus was a traitor. Yet upon discovering new evidence that incriminated Esterhazy, Picquart did not retreat to his old prejudices. Instead, he reported his finding to his superior officer, General Charles-Athur Gonse, in the expectation that the investigation would be reopened.

Though the general shared Picquarts contempt for Jewish people, he did not share his respect for reality. When Gonse asked why he cared if this Jew remains on Devils Island, Picquart blurted: Because he is innocent! Ordered by his commander to forget what he had found, Picquart replied: I will not carry this secret with me to the grave. Though suddenly reassigned to a desert outpost in Tunisia, Picquart persisted. Returning to France, he testified on Dreyfuss behalf. His commanders rewarded Picquart by charging him with forging evidence  a richly ironic accusation as the army had done the same to fatten their case against Dreyfus  and tossed him into prison.

With the publication, shortly after, of Emile Zolas JAccuse! the militarys conspiracy and governments complicity were brutally exposed. In short order, Dreyfus was retried, pardoned and exonerated, as was his unlikely advocate, Picquart. In his recent book on the Dreyfus Affair, the lawyer and novelist Louis Begley praises Picquart as a hero. If so, it is a heroism that should be commonplace, yet most often is uncommon. Picquarts fidelity to republican principle  indeed, to the reality principle  determined his behavior. No less important, his courage to insist upon this principle, regardless of the cost, allowed him to act upon it. The cost of Picquarts heroism was the intense hatred of the institution to which he had devoted his life. Loathing him more than the Jewish man whose life he helped to save, the army sought to banish Picquart from their midst.

This effort failed because, as Zola promised, truth marched on. But this hardly means that truth will always march on  a sobering thought when our present so closely resembles Frances past. Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has hawked claims that Jews were behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the California wildfires, though stripped of her committee seats, has not been repudiated by the GOP.

Since Jan. 6, the GOP has had opportunities to divorce itself from both Greene and the man that QAnon claims as its savior, Donald Trump. Yet only three Republican House representatives voted to both impeach Trump and strip Greene of her committee seats. Not coincidentally, Rep. Adam Kinzinger belongs to this trio. A staunch conservative and military officer like Picquart, Kinzinger has ignited the same passionate anger among Republicans as Picquart did among his rightwing peers. Kinzinger discovered that one cannot be both a Republican in good standing and a Republican of good faith. Time will tell if truth, thanks in part to the heroic acts of people like Kinzinger, still has the stamina to march on.

Zaretsky teaches at the University of Houston and is the author of The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas.

South Korea-based Bespin Global, a leading cloud technology consulting and management company, is setting up its regional headquarters and two innovation centres in Abu Dhabi to accelerate digital transformation from the UAE capital.



The Abu Dhabi Investment Office (ADIO) and Bespin Global have announced a partnership that will see the latter receive financial and non-financial incentives from ADIO to establish in Hub71, Abu Dhabis global tech ecosystem. The partnership is part of ADIOs AED2 billion ($545 million) Innovation Programme, an initiative of the Abu Dhabi governments Ghadan 21 accelerator programme.



ADIOs partnership with Bespin Global provides a further boost to Abu Dhabis position as a regional innovation hub.



Dr Tariq Bin Hendi, Director General of ADIO, said: Abu Dhabi is focused on championing constructive disruption. We are turning the status quo on its head with the purpose of promoting innovation, spurring solutions and creating long-term success for all. ADIO is committed to driving the future of innovation in the region and we are excited to support Bespin Global as we work together to pave the way for large-scale digital transformation from Abu Dhabi.



Under the partnership, Bespin Global will establish its MEA headquarters and build two innovation centres  a Cloud Operations Centre and a Technology Hub for its cloud experts  in Abu Dhabi to help drive advancements in technology and digital transformation. Bespin Global will grow its commercial and technical team as it taps into new areas such as Financial Services and FinTech.



Mouteih Chaghlil, CEO of Middle East & Africa  Bespin Global, said: This strategic partnership between Bespin Global and ADIO ensures we have the support and enablement to grow our Middle East presence. We have shared goals to grow digital offerings and help enterprises leverage the full power of cloud. To do that we need to hire and train the best talent and provide them with the best place to live, where they not only perform their job, but also contribute in Abu Dhabis vision to become a regional innovation hub and help the UAE progress on the global competitiveness index.



Bespin Global will collaborate with local universities to nurture talent, with plans to hire 5-10 Emirati interns each year, in addition to hosting hackathon programmes. ADIO, along with Hub71, will support Bespin Globals expansion by connecting the technology company across Abu Dhabis innovation ecosystem, unlocking access to relevant partnerships, opportunities and networks to fuel its growth.



Chaghlil continued: Abu Dhabis central position on the world map, paired with its involvement in a variety of crucial industries including Financial Services, Energy and Communication, makes it a sought-after business hub, internationally. This aligns with Bespin Globals mission to make superior and cutting-edge cloud technology services more accessible across the Middle East and Africa. Im confident that this powerful partnership will benefit the country, and region at large.



Bespin Global has chosen Hub71 for its Abu Dhabi location. The fast-growing tech community supports the growth of global tech startups with market access, opportunities to raise capital and access to a deep pool of tech talent through its robust partnerships with corporates and government entities, helping to advance technology and digital transformation.



Hanan Harhara Al Yafei, CEO of Hub71, said: We are excited to welcome Bespin Global into our fast-growing community as their regional presence will complement the bright founders who are accelerating Abu Dhabis digital transformation. Technology companies like Bespin Global enhance our ecosystem and add to the seamless, mutually-beneficial exchange of mentorship, expertise and talent that facilitates the disruptive technologies shaping our future economy.  TradeArabia News Service






Former President Donald Trump did not find the performance of his defense team favorable on the opening day of his Senate impeachment trial, according to a source providing informal advice to the team.

The rambling opening statements of Trump lawyer Bruce Castor were openly criticized by Republicans.

Trump Impeachment Trial Update

The Senate impeachment trial's first day ended where it began: with most of the Senate Republicans opposed to the proceedings, an apparent sign that there likely would not be adequate votes in the end to convict the former president.

The Senate voted on Tuesday 56-44 to proceed with Trump's trial on the House charge that he incited the violence at the storming of the US Capitol on January 6, reported PBS.

Six Republicans joined 50 Democrats in voting in favor of the impeachment trial.

Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., who voted in the House in favor of the impeachment of the former president, stated it is possible, but not likely, that more Senate Republicans will vote for his conviction. Kinzinger surmised there would not be enough to get to 67 votes. He also remarked if the Senate impeachment vote was held in closed doors, he believes it would pass.

According to Kinzinger, "I think over time, people are going to wake up to really how bad, at least, the tone was in the last four years, particularly January 6, and I don't think history is going to judge too kindly those that stood by and picked politics over that oath-keeping decision," reported ABC News.

The trial commenced on Tuesday with harrowing video footage of his supporters on Congress, but Republican senators made it apparent how difficult it will be to secure a conviction.



Also Read: Trump Happier, Calmer Since Twitter Suspension, According to Former Aide



The vote in favor of the constitutionality of the historic trial rejected a bid by the former president's attorneys to throw it out on the grounds that a former president cannot be impeached having left the office, reported NDTV.

The performance of Trump's legal team on the trial's first day has drawn sharp criticism from Republican senators and other witnesses. Many of them appeared unimpressed by the at times rambling and incomprehensible opening statements.

Two members of Trump's legal team, Bruce Castor and David Schoen, was looking on Tuesday to prompt the Senate to dismiss the trial on constitutional grounds.

Trump did not attend his second impeachment trial and is prohibited from tweeting. However, his team is making sure Republicans feel his presence.

Trump's allies were actively tweeting and retweeting posts in his signature all-caps and exclamation-pointed style from multiple accounts. They defended him as Democratic House managers expounded their case on the first day.

The legal team is now working on regrouping. However, no major changes were imminent.

According to the anonymous source, Castor, a former district attorney in Montgomery County, Pa., and Schoen, an Alabama-based attorney who has earlier represented Trump's friend Roger Stone, suffered from a lack of experience in Senate trials with a short amount of time to prepare.

Related Article: Trump Will Not Testify During Impeachment Trial, According to Legal Team

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Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-11 06:31:35|Editor: huaxia

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MADRID, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- The Yiwu-Madrid (YXE) freight railway, the longest rail link in the world, connects the eastern Chinese city with the capital of Spain. For the northern Spanish city of Valladolid, the YXE offers a unique opportunity to deliver their products -- especially food and agricultural produce -- straight to the Chinese markets.

"We expect to take advantage of the passage of this train through the city with the construction of an intermodal railway station as well as a container management and logistics center in order to promote commercial exchanges with China," Oscar Puente, Mayor of Valladolid, told Xinhua in an interview.

"We hope to be an important player in the future of bilateral trade relations with China. We have always maintained very close contact with the Chinese community here. For example, in the midst of the pandemic, we received significant donations of medical supplies from the local Chinese community," said the mayor.

He said Valladolid will continue to maintain "the best and closest possible relations" with the Chinese community and with China.

Valladolid, situated in the heart of the Autonomous Community of Castilla and Leon, is a major producer of agricultural products and boasts a booming food processing industry.

The city lies on the Atlantic rail freight corridor, which is bound to become a key artery in the coming years and is aiming to replace road transport. The corridor connects the western part of the Iberian Peninsula to France and Germany.

Puente highlighted that both the Spanish and the Portuguese branches of the Atlantic corridor pass through Valladolid, making the city a communication hub with the rest of Spain and even the rest of Europe.

Spain's Ministry of Public Works has built Europe's most important railway repair workshops in Valladolid and is also preparing to construct an intermodal freight station next to these workshops that aims to boost goods traffic by rail with Valladolid as a departure and arrival point.

The city of Valladolid is also involved in an industrial, logistics and agri-food project in the surroundings of this multimodal freight station. The project will start with a first phase over 150 hectares close to the workshops and could eventually extend to 700 hectares, the mayor said.

The YXE train passes through this project's development area, which includes an agri-food park and the future multimodal station. "Therefore, the YXE train would allow us to connect with the rest of Spain and with the rest of Europe, but obviously China represents an important market opportunity for us."

"We will be able to export agri-food products from Castilla and Leon to China, and at the same time we will use raw materials and agri-food products imported from China," he said.

Valladolid aims to extend its cooperation with China to cultural exchanges and tourism as well. The mayor said that although Spain and China are separated by thousands of kilometers, culturally they are much closer to each other.

"We share many values and elements that make our relationship very easy. The local Chinese community, for example, is perfectly integrated in Spain and they have adapted very well here," said Puente.

"We have always felt respect and admiration for the customs, serenity and rigor of the Chinese people and also for the work they carry out in our country. Therefore, I believe that Spain and China have a very rich and bright future ahead of them," he said. Enditem
'Ab zyada ho Rahi hai', says PM Modi as Congress stages walk out in Lok Sabha

India

oi-Briti Roy Barman

New Delhi, Feb 10: As Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been replying to the motion of thanks to the President's address and addressing the House over the new farm laws, Congress stages walkout from the Lok Sabha raising slogans to repeal farm laws.

Opposition MPs create an uproar in the Lok Sabha as PM Modi speaks on Farm Laws during his reply to the Motion of Thanks on the President's Address.

The Prime Minister in Lok Sabha said that the government bought in three laws regarding agriculture. "This was part of a response to the crisis facing agriculture sector. We made an honest effort to address the problems in the sector."

The PM further said that debates about the new farm laws could have focussed on the Centre's intent in introducing them. "As far as protests are concerned, the farmers sitting at Delhi's borders have the wrong impression."

While Congress party leader Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury interjected, PM Modi slammed him by saying, "Adhir Ranjan ji, ab zyada ho raha hai (this is too much). I respect you. You will get more publicity than TMC in Bengal. Do not worry...This does not look good, why are you doing this?"

"These attempts to shout and create chaos is part of a well-thought political conspiracy," but you [Opposition] cannot earn people's trust this way," Modi took a jibe at the MPs.

"These laws are not coercive. They only offer options. There are no restrictions on the old Mandis. And the current budget gives additional funds for modernisation of mandis," the Prime Minister stated.

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Story first published: Wednesday, February 10, 2021, 17:54 [IST]
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Bedeviled by compensation, title and relocation bottlenecks, thousands live in precarious conditions in crumbling Saigon complexes, not knowing when their lot will improve.

Nguyen Thi Thanh, 54, wears a helmet every time she leaves her house.

She is not preparing for road traffic. She is afraid that chunks of the ceiling along the corridors could fall off any time.

Thanh lives in the Truc Giang residential quarters in Ho Chi Minh Citys District 4, a complex built before 1975.

These days, the ceiling along corridors of most blocks has peeled off, revealing rusted, dark brown metal bars. There are cracks everywhere. Electric wires and cables are intricately wound and the electric boxes badly damaged.

The balcony on a corridor of the dilapidated Truc Giang apartment complex in District 4, HCMC, January 2021. Photo by VnExpress/Ha An.

Apartments on the highest floor in this complex suffer water leaks every time it rains.

Thanh, 33, who lives in one of the top apartments, said every rainy season, he has to apply cement on the roof to prevent the water leak. But even this layer of protection cannot prevent water from seeping in if it rains heavily. When this happens, the entire family has to take shelter at their parents house.

"I dont need a beautiful house. I just need a safe one," he said.

In 2018, municipal authorities found a private investor to rebuild the Truc Giang complex.

The investor suggested that residents move back into the complex after it has been rebuilt, with the conversion rate of changing every one square meter of the old apartment for 1.1 m2 in the new apartment.

Those not okay with this conversion rate can sell their apartments to the investor at VND27.5 million ($1,193) per square meter.

However, several residents did not accept the exchange rate, saying it was too low compared to the market price of VND40-50 million per square meter.

With such disagreements yet to be settled, the investor was caught up in legal procedures that could create difficulties in the site clearing process. The investor quit.

The city changed its tactic then to resettling all residents of the Truc Giang complex to another condo project in District 11, around 8 km (5 miles) away.

So far, 119 families have agreed to move along with compensation that has not been revealed, but four families who live on the ground floor are refusing to move.

This prevents the authorities from setting up barriers around the buildings for demolishing them, or cutting water and power supply even as they continue the search for a new investor.

Nguyen Thi Bao Trinh, chairman of District 4s Ward 13, where the Truc Giang complex is located, said that just in one week in late January, the ward invited the four families at five different times to try and persuade them, but have failed to do so.

Around one kilometer from Truc Giang, the Vinh Hoi residential complex in District 4s Ward 6 is facing similar problems.

The district has been able to attract several investors to demolish the project for rebuilding, but so far, only 18 of 244 families have agreed to the plan.

The city had at first arranged new residences for Vinh Hoi families at the Vinh Loc B condo project in Binh Chanh District, around 20 km away. Most residents said the new location was too far away from their schools and places of work.

The district authorities then came up with a new resettlement plan that would move the residents to the Tan My condo, just 5 km away. While more residents are amenable to this plan, there are those who are reluctant to leave Vinh Hoi.

The ceiling of a house at Vinh Hoi apartment building in HCMC's District 4, Janauary 2021. Photo by VnExpress/Ha An.

Valid reasons to stay put

Dao Duy Dat, 69, who lives with his family at one of the four houses at the ground floor in the Truc Giang complex, said he has encountered administrative problems related to the ownership of the house.

"The government sold me this house five years ago at a preferential price because I was a war veteran, but until today, all the related paperwork to transfer the house's ownership to me has not been completed.

"Im worried that if we decide to move out without an official ownership certificate, we will not be provided with another place to live in," he said, adding that he will agree to move once the authorities make sure that his family will have proper ownership at the resettlement location.

Nguyen Ngoc Tien, chairman of Ward 6, said the biggest reason preventing residents from moving is that they do not want to leave a place and a neighborhood that they have spent almost a lifetime in.

In some cases, residents want to hold on to the downgraded apartments to wait for an investor who can offer a better compensation and relocation deal.

"These are all reasonable wishes of the people, but yet in a situation when these buildings are seriously degraded, moving is the only way to ensure safety for their lives and assets and we truly hope for cooperation from all residents," Tien said.

He said that the Vinh Hoi complex hosts many cracks, the balcony along corridors are broken and pose significant danger, especially for children who play in the area.

New law proposed

The city now has as many as 474 condo projects built before 1975 that are seriously downgraded and need to be rebuilt.

However, due to several factors, including disagreements over compensation and obstacles in site clearance, the city has been able to demolish and rebuild just two of them  one at 192 Nam Ky Khoi Nghia Street in District 3 and the Nguyen Kim project in District 10.

City authorities have suggested that the Ministry of Construction makes changes to a degree on

renovating and reconstructing of apartment buildings to remove a provision that requires consensus of all residents of a building to demolish it.

Instead, the agreement of just 50 percent of the residents should be enough for authorities to carry out demolitions, they have proposed.

Le Hoang Chau, chairman of the HCMC Real Estate Association, said the citys proposal was necessary. The association itself has suggested the same thing to the Standing Committee of the National Assembly, he added.

It was not clear how this rule would protect the rights of the other 50 percent of the residents.

Vietnam now has around 2,500 old and downgraded apartment buildings and a majority of them are in Hanoi and HCMC. By the end of last year, just 1 percent had been renovated, Deputy Minister of Construction Nguyen Van Sinh said at a meeting with HCMC last November.
Twitter briefly suspended the official account for Republican Rep. Devin Nunes for about 30 minutes on Tuesday after he failed to solve a reCAPTCHA puzzle.

Nunes, whose personal account was not suspended, reportedly failed to get past the social media site's anti-spam filters and was suspended by Twitter's automated systems, Business Insider reported.

'Our automated systems took enforcement action on the account in error and it has since been reversed,' a Twitter spokesperson told the outlet.

'The enforcement action was taken as a result of the account's failure to complete an anti-spam challenge that we regularly deploy across the service,'

The official Twitter account for Devin Nunes, pictured, was reportedly suspended for about 30 minutes after he failed an anti-spam filter test

Twitter said that an automated systems took enforcement action on Nunes' account, pictured, and suspended it in error

Many websites, like Twitter, use reCAPTCHAs to verify that a user is human by having them solve puzzles that require users to click on certain images.

Twitter users noted that it looks like the account has not tweeted since December 8, though data from a ProPublica tracking project indicates his tweets remain intact.

Critics were quick to joke about the temporary lockout.

'So in other words, Devin Nunes failed the Turing Test,' @snorkelsthepug joked, referring to the test used by computer scientists to determine if a machine has artificial intelligence capable of thinking on its own.

The account @DevinAlt, a fake account to troll the congressman, mocked Nunes' inability to solve the reCAPTCHA puzzle.

'Dammit why do they have to make these so hard?' quipped the account, with an image of a reCAPTCHA puzzle with the solution 'First Amendment.'

Twitter users were quick to joke about the suspension after Devin Nunes reportedly failed the reCAPTCHA

Nunes sued Twitter for $250million after the account parody account @DevinCow claimed to be one of Nunes' cows at his family's dairy farm in Iowa.

The Republican said that Twitter was liable for the tweets, and claimed the parody tweets ruined his reputation.

Judicial circuit Judge John Marshall tossed out the case in June 2020.

Marshall cited Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a federal law that protects internet publishers from being held liable for content published by third parties.

Section 230 has received its own recent criticism from both Republicans and Democrats as tech giants face concerns about biased decisions to kick people off social media platforms, including former President Donald Trump.
The Walvis Bay municipality has withdrawn a decision to evict a centre offering counselling services from a municipal property over an outstanding rental bill of over N$40 000.

The local authority had initially served the African Counsellors Social Development with an eviction notice for non-payment.

The non-governmental organisation has been providing psychosocial support to Walvis Bay residents since 2018. Thus, the organisation has been renting the building just next to the Kuisebmond police station from the municipality for the past four years.

Founder and president of the association Dr Saltiel Kalola initially yesterday told New Era that they were evicted for owing N$41 000 and had to do counselling under a tree on Monday.

"The municipality has completed its mission to chase us from the premises. The staff have been operating from under a tree next to the office and our work has been a success," he said. The organisation, in collaboration with the municipality and the Erongo governor's office last year counselled residents of the Otweya settlement after the devastating fire at Twaloloka. However, Kalola in another emailed message yesterday, told New Era that they have been engaging with the administration's management of the municipality to find an amicable solution for the situation.

"We have resolved the matter and there is no more need for media coverage. In future, whenever something comes up, we will give you a notification," Kalola said.

The doctor, however, could not say when his staff members will move back to the rented facility. The centre offers counselling in a wider range of societal issues such as marital, drug and alcohol abuse, teenage pregnancies to name a few.

A letter by Erongo governor in support of the organisation yesterday indicated that the organisation have been providing counselling for people that are suicidal, survivors of gender-based violence, former fishermen and about 2 045 community members. "It is against this background that I am recommending them for any assistance that will enable them to operate their planned programmes," governor Neville Andre said in the letter. Questions posed to the municipality remain unanswered yesterday.
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New Mexico State Police Officer Darian Jarrott put on his uniform, got in his patrol car and went out to do his job last Thursday, like every workday. On this day, it would involve assisting Homeland Security in a drug operation.

Jarrott, 28, the father of three with a fourth child on the way and a man known for his friendly smile, never made it back to his Lordsburg home after that shift. He was shot and killed by 39-year-old Omar Felix Cueva, a convicted felon with a history of drug offenses whom authorities said was on his way to do a drug deal. After he killed Jarrott near Akela on Interstate 10 east of Deming, Cueva fled, with police in pursuit, exchanging gunfire. He was shot and killed near Las Cruces  after he got out of his vehicle and wounded a Las Cruces police officer, who was airlifted to an El Paso hospital. Thankfully, the Las Cruces officer was treated and released. So we have only one fatality to mourn today among the ranks of those in New Mexico who do, in fact, put their lives on the line to protect and serve.

The shootings prove thats not just a cliche or talking point.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, last year was one of the deadliest in the nations history for law enforcement officers, with 264 federal, state, military, tribal and local officers dying in the line of duty, according to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund. COVID-19 claimed 145 lives  a number that could still grow as additional cases are scrutinized.

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The No. 2 cause of death: gunfire. Forty-eight officers were shot and killed on the job last year, at least 30 of them with handguns, 13 with rifles. Others have yet to be determined. The deadly incidents ranged from responding to domestic calls (seven) to investigating a suspicious person or activity (11) to attempting an arrest (six). The list goes on. Four died responding to an in-progress robbery or burglary, three were killed during traffic stops and two were killed while serving warrants. On average, the fallen officer last year was 47 years old with at least 17 years service, leaving behind two children.

So far this year, according to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, 20 officers have died in the line of duty. Eight of those are firearms-related.

Just last week, two FBI agents serving a child pornography search warrant in Florida were shot and killed, and three more were wounded. A State Police K-9 officer was wounded in a traffic stop on I-40 last year. Thankfully, she survived. And the memories here are still fresh of the 2015 murders of Albuquerque police officer Dan Webster and Rio Rancho officer Gregg Nigel Benner, both shot and killed during traffic stops.

Homeland Security hasnt released details of its operation last week, but we are a border state with heavy Juarez cartel presence and two interstate highways that make us a drug hub. Cueva in 2002 pleaded guilty in connection with importing 37 pounds of cocaine into the United States and has other drug offenses in his background, including a 2010 case in which he was accused of possessing several pounds of methamphetamine with intent to distribute. This isnt the profile of someone with a problem who needs treatment. Its the profile of a drug dealer.

We will collectively mourn officer Jarrott  a man friends say was dedicated to his family and his community. All of Lordsburg is devastated, said resident D.J. Saucedo. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham ordered flags at half staff. Rep. Yvette Herrell, R-Alamogordo, whose district includes Deming and Lordsburg, spoke of the debt we owe the brave men and women who stand in the gap to protect us from evil. Local lawmaker Candie Sweetser, D-Deming, talked of the pain in a small, close-knit community. My prayers and love are with the family and friends of NMSP Office Darian Jarrott as we mourn this tragic loss, she wrote in a post.

The governor referred to the scourge of violent crime, and shes right about that. After all, this is a place where a suspect with an arsenal explained all the firepower by noting to law enforcement New Mexico is, indeed, a dangerous place.

So we would do well to remember that its the men and women of our police agencies  federal, tribal, state and local  who do in fact put their lives on the line when they go to work. Every single day. The next time you see a cop, think of NMSP Officer Darian Jarrott and say thanks.

That could bring a smile.

This editorial first appeared in the Albuquerque Journal. It was written by members of the editorial board and is unsigned as it represents the opinion of the newspaper rather than the writers.

The 545 acres of farmland is located near the intersection of 165th Avenue and Grand Boulevard in Eagle Creek Township, according to the ordinance. The land surrounding the farm is mostly farmland, with residential property to the south and vacant subdivision lots to the east, according to the ordinance.
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Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-10 07:10:16|Editor: huaxia

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NEW YORK, Feb. 9 (Xinhua) -- Cloopen Group Holding, a leading multi-capability cloud-based communications solution provider in China, started trading on the New York Stock Exchange Tuesday, with the shares skyrocketing on its initial public offering (IPO) day.

The company, trading under the ticker symbol of "RAAS," announced the pricing of its IPO of 20 million American depository shares (ADSs), at 16 U.S. dollars per ADS for a total offering size of approximately 320 million dollars, assuming the underwriters do not exercise their option to purchase additional ADSs.

Each ADS represents two Class A ordinary shares of the company.

Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and China International Capital Corporation are acting as joint bookrunners of this offering.

The Beijing-headquartered company is the largest multi-capability cloud-based communications solution provider in China, as measured by revenues in 2019. It is also the only provider in China that offers a full suite of cloud-based communications solutions, covering communications platform as a service, cloud-based contact centers, and cloud-based unified communications and collaborations, according to its prospectus.

Li Yipeng, chief financial officer of Cloopen, told Xinhua that the listing was a milestone for the company as it will help drive brand awareness and boost the company's long-term development.

Li said that there is great potential in China's cloud-based communications sector, as the application of cloud technologies to enterprise communications in China remains nascent, which enables ample room for growth.

"China's cloud-based communications industry is still in the early stages of development relative to more mature markets globally, and is experiencing significant transformation driven by rapid advancements in cloud and AI technologies. Enterprises in China increasingly focus on digital solutions and are adopting new technologies to improve the efficiency and quality of their intra- and extra-organizational communications," he said.

China's cloud-based communications industry had a total market size of approximately 35.7 billion yuan (about 5.54 billion U.S. dollars) in 2019, and is expected to increase to approximately 101.5 billion yuan in 2024, the company said in its prospectus, citing a report by China Insights Consultancy, an independent research firm.

Cloopen shares soared 200 percent from its pricing to close at 48 dollars apiece on Tuesday.

As of Monday, the S&P U.S. Listed China 50 index, which is designed to track the performance of the 50 largest Chinese companies listed on U.S. exchanges by total market cap, stood at 6,143.13, marking a 9.41-percent gain for the month-to-date returns and a 17.58-percent rise for the year-to-date returns. Enditem
A Maine fisherman made a one-in-30 million discovery recently - he found a yellow lobster,

The rare crustacean was caught and donated to the University of New England's Marine Science Center in Biddeford, by Marley Babb - a Tenants Harbor lobsterman.

University of New England

Called Banana, the yellow body of the lobster is reportedly the result of a genetic mutation that binds with shell pigments in the proteins.

The marine species, officially referred to as a 'crystal lobster,' was born with a disorder called leucism that results in skin coloration that is white, pale or patchy.

The Marine Center team is now sharing a $860,000 grant to research the effect of warming Gulf of Maine on lobster larvae and their progress in growing to adulthood, with the Maine Department of Marine Resources and other organisations.

Also Read: Rare Purplish-Red Diamond Sold For Rs 20.6 Crore At Christie's Auction

University of New England

The step comes as two recent reports from 2019 have discovered that a warming ocean and local oceanographic variations, have an effect on the lobster populations in Atlantic Canada in southern New England.

So, one theory is that yellow exterior of the banana could be the product of climate change.

Also read: Labourers Find High-Value Diamonds In Madhya Pradesh Mines, They'll Now Get Lakhs From Auction



University of New England

The lobster is around a pound to a pound and a half, which is the average.

Owing to the lighter colour, Banana is more apparent to predators, giving it a lower chance of survival. The Marine Science Center (MSC) team, however, said that they are caring for the lobster and do not intend to return it to the wild.

What are the chances of a person coming across such a rare lobster?
The International Criminal Court (ICC) is back on the warpath with its latest effort to do the bidding of a non-state actor (Palestine) in order to damage a non-member state (Israel). This time, the Court action was a split decision ruling on jurisdiction over events in the "territories" dating back to 2014. As international law scholar Eugene Kontorovich simply put it:

The ICC's decision about jurisdiction over Israel has no basis in international law. It accepts jurisdiction over a non-member state at the behest of a member that is not a state: a one-ride ticket for Israel.

The decision of the Court is not a great surprise.

For years, the Palestinians have sought to use international organizations and international courts to fight Israel, rather than negotiate directly for a peace agreement with it. The ICC has been one of the favored venues for this strategy of attempting to criminalize Israel's actions, and the Court has regularly shown over the years its greater interest in cases targeting Western democracies than those investigating rogue regimes or terror organizations.

The ICC was established as a kind of court of last resort for the pursuit of justice against the worst perpetrators of mass atrocities, countries where no fair judicial process existed to investigate, charge, hold court proceedings, and judge and sentence the offenders. But its actions, especially in recent years, seem to suggest a particular delight and preference for targeting Israel, which like the United States is not a member state of the ICC. More to the point, Israel has an established judicial system and procedures and processes to consider the kind of wrongdoing the ICC was targeted to address.

Legal scholar Alan Dershowitz offered this assessment of the ICC action regarding Israel:

According to British military expert Richard Kemp, "No country in the history of warfare has done more to avoid civilian casualties than Israel did in Operation Cast Lead." Israel's Supreme Court has imposed daunting restrictions on its military and has provided meaningful remedies for criminal acts committed by individual Israeli soldiers. The role of the International Criminal Court, according to the treaty, is to intrude on the sovereignty of nations only if those nations are not capable of administering justice. The principle of "complementarity" is designed to allow courts in democratic nations, like Israel, to address their own problems within the rule of law. Only if the judiciary totally fails to address these problems does the court have jurisdiction  even in cases involving parties to the treaty, which Israel is not.

Independent of the current controversy, the ICC has been on a wobbly footing for years, enduring regular condemnation in various areas. In the roughly 20 years since it was established, the Court has spent nearly $1.5 billion Euros and secured only five criminal convictions.



ICC headquarters complex in the Hague. A lot of buildings for only five cases.

Photo credit: OSeveno CC BY-SA 3.0 license.

Many key member states have been critical of the Court. Late in 2020, an extensive Independent Expert Review of the ICC resulted in the release of a lengthy report calling for extensive reforms of the Court. The report focused on human resource problems, ethical issues and conflicts of interest, excess spending, efficiency and fairness of the judicial process among a host of issues requiring more than 300 pages of documentation of problems and suggested reforms. The decision this week might take some of the internal pressure off by attracting renewed support from the large international club of Israel-bashers.

The court's latest decision immediately came under fire from various countries. The U.S. State Department wasted no time challenging the Court's action:

Today, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued a decision claiming jurisdiction in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, while expressly recognizing the serious legal and factual questions that surround its ability to do so. As we made clear when the Palestinians purported to join the Rome Statute in 2015, we do not believe the Palestinians qualify as a sovereign state, and therefore are not qualified to obtain membership as a state, or participate as a state in international organizations, entities, or conferences, including the ICC. We have serious concerns about the ICC's attempts to exercise its jurisdiction over Israeli personnel. The United States has always taken the position that the court's jurisdiction should be reserved for countries that consent to it, or that are referred by the UN Security Council.

Australia released a similar statement:

Australia has deep concerns with the ruling of the Pre-Trial Chamber of the International Criminal Court that it has jurisdiction in relation to the 'Situation in Palestine'. Australia does not recognize a 'State of Palestine', noting that matters relating to territory and borders can only be resolved through direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.

Dershowitz agreed with these rebukes of the decision on jurisdiction:

The highly politicized International Criminal Court just declared statehood for Palestinians. They did it without any negotiation with Israel, without any compromise, and without any recognized boundaries. They also did it without any legal authority, because the Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court, makes no provision for this criminal court to recognize new states. Moreover, neither Israel nor the United States ratified that treaty, so the decisions of the International Criminal Court are not binding on them." He added: "As the dissenting judge so aptly pointed out, the Palestine decision is not based on existing law. It is based on pure politics. And the politics of the majority decision is based in turn on applying a double standard to Israel  as the United Nations, the International Court of Justice and other international bodies have long done.

The dissenting Judge Peter Kovacs issued a lengthy opinion stating that the majority's approach had "no legal basis in the Rome Statute, and even less so in international law," as well as that "acrobatics with provisions of the Statute cannot mask legal reality." This dissent mirrored briefs submitted by several leading State Parties to the Rome Statute, including Germany, Australia, Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Uganda, and Brazil.

The latest decision by the ICC should be viewed as a warning to both member states and non-member states, and in particular Western democracies, that regardless of the quality and fairness of the judicial system that is operative in their own countries, the ICC might be coming for them if the political payoff for doing so is popular among the right parties.
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A secret United Nations report says North Korea has used attacks over the internet to steal hundreds of millions of dollars. The money was then used to pay for the countrys nuclear program and to improve its ability to develop ballistic missiles. The attacks are a violation of international law.

The report was released to reporters Tuesday. It says North Korea was able to increase its nuclear and missile programs in 2020. North Korea remains under many international sanctions.

One unnamed official from a U.N. country said in the report that North Korea paid for its military expansion with over $300 million stolen through cyberhacks and internet fraud.

The report points to new ballistic missiles that have been shown in recent military parades. It also says those missiles could be large enough to carry nuclear weapons and could possibly reach the United States.

North Korea announced in January that it had developed what it claimed to be the worlds most powerful weapon. That weapon is a submarine-launched ballistic missile. However, the weapon has yet to be tested. Little else is known.

The show of military strength is partly because of the change of administration in the United States, said Sojin Lim. She is a Korea expert at Britains University of Central Lancashire.

Lim told VOA that the nuclear program is seen by Kim as the only way for North Korea to survive.

Recently, because of the COVID-19 situation, their economic situation has become even worse. And especially with the new administration in the (United) States, the new President (Joe) Biden, North Korea has no way to discuss or negotiate with America, she said.

The report was written by North Korea watchers for the U.N. Security Councils North Korea sanctions committee.

Lim argued that sanctions on North Korea have not worked.

Sanctions give more hardship for civilians, but its own aims or purpose, which is the change in policy of the country, has not been working in that way, she said. She added that the international community needs to find a new way to deal with North Korea.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump met North Korean leader Kim Jong Un three times in 2018 and 2019. The meetings failed to get North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons.

The Biden administration is working on a new policy for North Korea, U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters on February 4. He said the effort is under way.

Most experts, however, see little hope of any progress toward denuclearization on the Korean Peninsula.

Im Susan Shand.

VOAs Henry Ridgwell reported this story. Susan Shand adapted it for Learning English. Mario Ritter, Jr. was the editor.

________________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

ballistic missiles  n. weapons that can travel very great distances carrying explosives

sanctions  n. measures taken against a country to cause it to observe international law

cyber adj. related to computers or things that take place over the internet

hack v. to secretly get into computer files or a network in order to take information or cause damage

fraud  n. a crime of using dishonest methods to take something valuable from another person or people

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The day before nurses at Saint Vincent Hospital will vote on the authorization of a strike, the hospitals CEO Carolyn Jackson said any thought of a work stoppage was irresponsible considering the circumstances.

We certainly are hopeful that we can reach an amicable resolution to the contract, and that there is no strike Jackson told MassLive on Tuesday. I feel that its irresponsible to even talk about a strike during a global pandemic and we feel we have an excellent offer on the table.

The union, consisting of 800 nurses at the hospital, announced on Monday a strike authorization vote would take place on Wednesday.

A positive vote doesnt mean the nurses will strike but provides the unions negotiating committee the ability to call a strike. If the committee issues its official notice to strike, the hospital will then have a minimum of 10 days before the nurses go out on strike, the union said.

Jackson said the hospital is prepared if the nurses strike to continue providing care.

It would be challenging, but we do have a comprehensive strike plan in place, Jackson said. We are prepared to provide excellent quality of care if the nurses do go on strike.

Jackson said the hospital would work through agencies to hire replacement nurses.

But we are hopeful that will not occur, Jackson said.

Wednesdays vote is the latest move in a year-long battle between Tenet Healthcare, the parent company of Saint Vincent Hospital, and the Massachusetts Nurses Union.

The MNA began publicly highlighting staff concerns at the start of the pandemic.

Every hospital in the country has been challenged during COVID with staffing, Jackson said. Between a surge in patients, staff illnesses and various other things its been a challenge across the commonwealth as well as across the country. We definitely are not alone in having staffing challenges on our floor.

Jackson said the latest offer to the nurses union is a way to boost staffing. New staff, Jackson said, could be lured to Saint Vincent Hospital through the offer, which includes wage increases between 5% and 22% by the end of 2022, retroactive pay, lump-sum payments, enhanced benefits for part-time nurses and hiring of critical care nurses.

We do believe we have an excellent offer on the table that will help us recruit and retain nurses and help us ensure we are able to maintain the ratios in the current contract, which is more generous than most if not all of the hospitals in the commonwealth, Jackson said.

Jackson believes much of the lobbying by the union is to implement nurse-to-patient ratios that were pitched as a 2018 ballot question. Massachusetts voted down the measure by a 70 to 30 margin.

Essentially, the MNA is attempting to push that same legislation on Saint Vincents right now, Jackson said.

Complaints from nurses at Saint Vincent Hospital date back to last February when more than 70% signed a petition calling for safer staffing levels.

A month later, more than 200 nurses attended a negotiation session with management to provide information about the staffing levels.

Last May, after furloughs were implemented, nurses filed a vote of no confidence in Jackson and her management team.

Last month, nurses picketed outside the hospital. In December, more than 400 nurses participated in an information picket to protest the same conditions.

I dont believe [the disagreements] have impacted patient care, Jackson said. Everybody is professional about their job and making sure that patients have gotten the care they need. We certainly put our differences aside and the patients first.

According to the union, nurses have filed 500 reports citing staffing and patient care issues. Jackson acknowledged reports had been filed but wasnt aware of 500. Jackson said the reports were examined and resolved in real-time.

Its something that they send to document what they perceive as an unsafe condition, Jackson said. However, we look at all of them. We take them through to the grievance process. It is my understanding that none of them have reached the level of a second step. Theyve all been worked through and either fixed or dismissed based on their merit.

The voting by the nurses will take place from 6 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. on Wednesday. The vote will be conducted the day before the next negotiation session on Thursday.

This vote and potential strike are really about nurses standing up for our patients and community in the wake of Tenet administrations continued refusal to put their concern for patients ahead of their desire for profits, Marlena Pellegrino, a registered nurse at the hospital and chair of the nurses local bargaining unit said in a statement.

Regardless of the vote, a potential strike or Thursdays meeting, Jackson emphasized to the public that the care at Saint Vincent Hospital wont be affected.

Saint Vincent has delivered throughout the pandemic and continues to deliver and will deliver in the future the same excellent, high-quality care that we always have, regardless of the situation, Jacksons said.

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A man has been charged with drug supply offences after police seized $30,000 worth of designer handbags, sunglasses and watches, as well as two luxury cars and illicit drugs during a major operation.

Surry Hills RES investigators arrested a 56-year-old man after a vehicle stop in Courallie Avenue, Homebush on Wednesday.

Police searched the man's Range Rover SUV and seized more than $5,000 cash.

Surry Hills investigators then acquired a search warrant for the man's home in Greenacre, in south-west Syndey, and a fruit market warehouse at Flemington.

A 56-year-old Greenacre man (pictured, right) has been arrested and charged with eighteen offences after major police operation

With assistance from Bass Hills Region Enforcement Squad and the dog unit, police searched the Greenacre home and seized designer handbags, sunglasses and watches valued at $30,000 and more than $25,000 cash.

Two vehicles, a Range Rover SUV and a Nissan Skyline GT-R, valued at $160,000, were also seized.

Police seized $30,000 worth of designer handbags, sunglasses and watches from the Greenacre home

Another vehicle, a Dodge SUV towing a boat located near the Greenacre home was investigated, where police seized more than 715g of heroin, 315g of methylamphetamine and 75g of cocaine.

Investigators searched the Flemington warehouse and seized a pen gun, ammunition, prescription medication, steroids and nearly 500g of an unknown powder.

In addition, nearly 90g of heroin was located inside a truck at the warehouse and seized.

The Greenacre man was taken to Auburn police station and charged with eighteen offences, including fourteen drug charges, three firearm charges and one charge of dealing with property proceeds of crime.

Police confirmed the crime syndicate had supplied prohibited drugs worth half a million dollars throughout Sydney

The man was refused bail and will appear at Burwood local court on February 11.

In August last year, officers from Surry Hills Region Enforecement Squad formed Strike Force Pangolin to investigate the large-scale supply of prohibited drugs across Sydney.

So far, the strike force detectives have charged two men, aged 39 and 43, and a 52-year-old woman with drug-related offences who all remain before the courts.

Investigators had conducted an extensive investigation into the activities of the crime syndicate before the operation, said Surry Hills Region Enforcement Squad Commander, Detective Chief Inspector Steve Patton.

Two vehicles, a Range Rover SUV and a Nissan Skyline GT-R, valued at $160,000, were also seized by NSW Police

'Since inquiries under Strike Force Pangolin commenced, it is alleged this syndicate supplied prohibited drugs worth half a million dollars throughout Sydney,' Mr Patton said.

'During the course of this investigation, officers identified a man was using his employment as a truck driver to facilitate the movement and supply of illicit drugs from a fruit market in Sydney's inner west.'

Mr Patton said the man had also using registered post to send cocaine interstate.

Mr Patton said the NSW Police Force will continue to target criminals that seek to profit from criminal activities including the supply of prohibited drugs, which 'can cause significant damage in the community'.
Catherine Allison & Company Solicitors, Dundalk are going from strength to strength following 20 years in business.

Catherine Allison opened her Solicitors practice in Dundalk in April 2000 and celebrated 20 years in business in April 2020.

Unfortunately, celebrations could not take place due to Covid restrictions, however, we could not let this occasion pass without

a big thank you to all of our clients, staff and colleagues in Dundalk.

Catherine is very pleased with the growth of the business and would like to extend her heartfelt thanks to all her clients and local business for their support over the last twenty years. She would also like to thank her team for their hard work in

helping to grow the business so successfully and believes that by treating her employees well she ensures that they constantly want the best for the company and productivity is always very high.

Catherine believes a happy, healthy working environment is especially relevant to the overall smooth operation of the business. Catherine is very much involved in team spirit and she along with her staff have enjoyed a number of activities together some work related e.g. courses on time management, mindfulness retreats, spa weekends. Catherine also along with her staff is involved with local charities and recently in December 2020 donated to The Peter McVerry Trust.

A staff group photo when they had a sponsored Christmas Jumper day and walk to support this charity

She also regularly donates to St John of God and recently purchased a 72 inch Smart TV for their Blackrock hub which we

believe has been of great benefit to the young adults with special needs who attend.

See presentation picture with Catherine, Letitia, Donna and Roisin below:

Since opening the doors of her business when there was just herself and one secretary (and just one client on her books!) she has become one of the leading figures in the locality in her profession practicing in three jurisdictions, Ireland, Northern Ireland and England/Wales.

Catherine states a lot of Irish Clients are also doing business in the U.K. and Northern Ireland and we have been involved in U.K. Insolvency, Purchases, Sales, Lease of Business Premises, Construction, Employer disputes, and defence

of Personal Injury claims.

On entering Catherines offices at 6 Roden Place, Dundalk you are met with stylish, comfortable and colourful surroundings

which captures the essence of this young vibrant firm. The decor and modern spacious environment is certainly inviting and will help to make any clients visit to this firm of solicitors a more than pleasant one. We have three spacious boardrooms to meet clients for essential business and still practice social distancing.

Catherine originally practised in a very large city firm of Solicitors in London for many years which was ranked one of the

U.Ks leading property firms and she specialised there in commercial property for many years. Her practice now employs a

staff of 13 employees, all of whom, coincidentally, are female!

We were referred to as Sisters  In  Law by the Irish Times in their Article on Women in Business.

Catherines staff are long serving employees with most of them working in the practice for over 15 years! The practice employs 5 solicitors, Catherine, Sinead, Annemarie, Grace and Emma, 2 Senior Legal Executives, Letitia and Kathleen, and our own in house fully qualified accountant Wendy. The office is also supported by experienced legal admin staff, Donna, Aine, Joanne,

Patricia, Saoirse and not forgetting our lovely Roisin from St John of Gods who has worked with us every Monday for over ten years and who we all miss at this time due to the Covid-19 restrictions and hoping we can get lots of hugs from her soon when she is back to the office.

This young dynamic firm practices in Property Law, to include Commercial, Residential Conveyancing and Company Corporate

matters and act for many large Building Developers. This firm also holds a great reputation for litigation matters to include road traffic accidents, accidents at work, employment law and inquest hearings.

Catherine has recently been involved in a number of high profile inquest matters and her compassion and practical guidance to the families throughout this delicate and emotional process is second to none. The firm also has a large Family Law practice and its reputation speaks for itself with the wonderful reviews that can be found on our social media platforms.

Our feedback tells us that our family law department is extremely compassionate and practical, particularly, with Separation,

Divorce, access and maintenance issues and clients will feel at ease discussing such personal issues. This firm excels in family

law matters with its priority to protect the family unit whilst also protecting the parties assets which sometimes can include family businesses etc. and large property portfolios. We are in no doubt that with Catherines extensive business knowledge you can be assured that this firm will do all it can to preserve properties, existing businesses etc. for anyone who unfortunately finds themselves going through family law proceedings.

Catherine Allison acted for Executor in the Estate for her good friend and colleague Conor Breen. She was appointed by the Law Society and confirmed by the Executor in March 2017 to take over the administration and wind up of the practice which was owned solely by Conor Breen at the date of his death. Catherine was glad to help Conor Breens dependent family in this process. All McDonough & Breen deeds are held by us for safe keeping

Feel free to contact us and discuss your legal affairs. Or to make a new or updated Will, which service is offered to all former

McDonough & Breen clients who held a Will.

Catherine Allison is also a qualified Personal Insolvency Practitioner and holds a PIP licence from the Insolvency Service

of Ireland. Catherine has carried out insolvency work for over twenty years, originally in London and in the last twenty years in

Ireland and Northern Ireland. Catherine also holds a diploma in Personal Insolvency Law awarded by the Law Society in

December 2013. In September 2016, Catherine was appointed as a Duty Solicitor at the Repossession Court under the new Government Abhaile Home Mortgage Arrears Legal Aid Scheme for Dundalk and Monaghan and this entitles people in Residential Home Mortgage Arrears free government funded legal advice with us to include representation at the Repossession

Lists and a state legal consultation to establish a Solution.

We handle large volumes of Personal Insolvency Appeals to the Circuit Court and High Court where the insolvency arrangement involves the primary principal residence. Catherine goes above and beyond the call of duty to help distressed individual borrowers and business people to help debtors get back to solvency and save their businesses, and in particular, to save their family home and primary principal residence where possible.

Catherine confirms that ongoing repossessions in County Louth are continuing at an alarming rate and there can be up to fifty

cases in the court list at a time and there is no end in sight to the court lists as banks such as Permanent TSB and AIB Bank now are reported to be selling more loans to the so-called Vulture

Funds.

The government scheme, she feels, is a lifeline for people. IT IS FREE government funded and legal aid may be provide for subsequent Court work. They say you may not always get what you want but we believe with Catherine Allison & her team fighting for you, you will ! Catherine Allison & Co have saved at least 300 homes from repossession and this has helped to stop homelessness and banks or creditors repossession.

If your home is in negative equity, or you are drowning in debt, Catherine is renowned as the woman to sort you out and get your life back on track and back to solvency. If your home is valued at 100,000 and you have a mortgage of 200,000, we have a great chance to have it written down to market value (i.e. 100,000 knocked off the loan so it is affordable) in a Court Insolvency Arrangement under the new appeal system. Legal Aid is usually available for such PIA appeals.

Catherine believes it is of paramount importance that all adults, not simply the elderly, should have a Will. This is particularly so if they own property or other assets. Making a Will is a very simple procedure and not at all a costly one. A Will should be

used as an opportunity to minimise tax liability for loved ones and other expenses associated with intestacy. It can ensure that the Will makers ultimate intentions are carried through on death and that any children and family left behind are adequately provided for.

During the current pandemic we have prepared a large volume of Wills putting peoples minds at rest during this very difficult time and for the duration of the pandemic we are offering this service free of charge to all essential works and all O.A.Ps in receipt of state pension. If this is something you wish to avail of please telephone our office on 042 93 20854 while we still have availability. (Wills are held by us for safekeeping).
Four Louisiana state troopers were arrested on Monday on charges that they used excessive force and deactivated their body cameras during arrests, the authorities said.

Louisiana State Police investigators filed the charges on Monday against the troopers, who patrol Monroe, a city in the northern part of the state, as well as surrounding parishes. The troopers  identified as Dakota DeMoss, 28; George Harper, 26; Randall Dickerson, 34; and Jacob Brown, 30  will remain on administrative leave, the agency said in a statement.

The charges arose from encounters in July 2019 and May 2020, the statement said.

In 2019, during a traffic stop in Ouachita Parish, two of the troopers found suspected narcotics and placed the driver into custody, the State Police said. Troopers Brown and Dickerson utilized excessive and unjustifiable force on the handcuffed driver, deactivated body-worn cameras and reported untruthful statements about the drivers alleged resistance, the statement said.

The two troopers were charged with simple battery and malfeasance in office, the statement continued.
Remember just two years ago, how giving up chocolates or caffeine for Lent felt like hell? Now that struggle would be a godsend.

Another Lenten season will start Feb. 17 with Ash Wednesday. But for many it feels like the pandemic already has been one year-long Lent.

Which begs the question: Jesus, havent we given up enough?

Think about it. Weve given up hugs and kisses. Weve given up concerts and social gatherings. Weve given up birthday parties and vacations. With the early shortages many were forced even to give up meat and toilet paper. What else is there to sacrifice?

So saith the Lord, or at least his spokesmen here on Earth: its complicated.

Even after Gabe Ruiz gave up studying to be a priest four years ago, the San Antonio tech entrepreneur always gave up something for Lent. Until now.

Last year, the pandemic hit halfway through his Lenten promise to shut his laptop at 5 p.m. Suddenly, that screen became his only way to see his colleagues. It also was one of the only ways Ruiz could take his mind off the constant barrage of lockdown alerts and case counts.

On ExpressNews.com: No crosses on foreheads - Ash Wednesday will look different this year

Now Ruiz feels so disconnected from Lent, hes chosen not to give up anything.

Im actually going to start implementing a particular prayer in my life with hopes that I can become reconnected to Lent and how I used to experience it, Ruiz said.

Yes, these many months of mask wearing and social distancing have taken self-sacrifice to a new level. But giving up something because you have to just isnt the same as because you want to. And Lent is as good a time as any to appreciate the true meaning of sacrifice.

A free choice versus a mandated choice, theres a lot of difference in that, said Frank Emmett, a licensed clinical psychologist and director of clinical services at The Ecumenical Center in San Antonio. They all fall under the rubric of sacrifice. However, it is a different kind of sacrifice.

As Lenten sacrifices go, the six-week observance usually means no meat on Fridays and no treats until Easter. The abstention is a nod to Jesuss 40-day fast in the Judean Desert, where the Bible says he shrugged off every temptation Satan threw his way.

Emmett said hes comfortable with calling the pandemic a long Lent because in some way everyone has made sacrifices during the pandemic for the betterment of each other. Whether its wearing a mask or making a donation to a food bank, such sacrifices are like Lenten gifts, he said.

But dont kid yourself. Giving up alcohol in the year of our Lord 2021 doesnt carry too much weight when you cant hit the bars. Youre not fooling anybody, certainly not a higher power, with that kind of sacrifice.

Those are not gifts of the heart or soul, Emmett said. Those are yielding to essentially either legal mandates or to external mandates imposed by society at large. That to me is the difference internally. It may look the same on the outside, but if youre a person of faith, its not. It feels different.

This Lent will be different, with churches once again making a pandemic pivot from traditional Lenten practices. In addition to following the Vaticans lead for a hands-off Ash Wednesday  the Vatican has directed priests to sprinkle ashes on heads instead of rub them on foreheads  Archbishop Gustavo Garcia-Siller and other bishops will again allow Catholics during Lent to eat meat on Fridays and to skip Mass on Sundays, Easter included.

On ExpressNews.com: Cibolo church leaders offer curbside prayers

Churches in the archdiocese of San Antonio and other parishes applied the same dispensations last Lent, as COVID-19 cases grew and food and toilet paper supplies dwindled.

But Lent is about more than just sacrifices. Fasting aside, Lent also is about praying and giving, two acts of goodwill that can galvanize and unite people even as a pandemic forces them apart.

I think about Lent not only as what am I not going to do, but what am I going to do to prepare myself, said District 7 Councilwoman Ana Sandoval. I havent given up for Lent in a long time. I only do more.

Sandoval said that as a kid she used to give up gum and soda for Lent. Now as an adult and a public servant, she sees Lent as an opportunity to reflect on and refine her work in the community and her relationship with her parents.

Pati Rodriguez-Aranda can relate to reinforcing ties to an older generation.

For years, the retired spa owner in San Antonio fed her mother twice a day in a nursing facility before she died in January after a 12-year battle with dementia. Rodriguez-Aranda said those visits opened her eyes to the loneliness of seniors, which the pandemic has only made worse. Rodriguez-Aranda wants to do something about that for Lent.

Mom is gone (and) I dont have to return back there, but Id like to come back and volunteer to spend time with the seniors, said Rodriguez-Aranda. Even though there is a pandemic going on, I still would like to go and visit.

While Sandoval admits she feels less connected to Lent this year because of the pandemic, she does see Easter as not only a time to celebrate Jesuss resurrection but also a time to focus on renewed life with more COVID-19 vaccinations and fewer cases.

In a way, this Lent also allows us time to think about what will my life be like (and) how do we prepare for that post-pandemic life, Sandoval said.

Father David Munoz of San Juan de los Lagos Parish & Shrine in San Antonio sees the ongoing pandemic as more of a perpetual Good Friday, the day of fasting and repentance that commemorates Jesuss crucifixion and death.

He recommends sacrificing some of the time spent watching Netflix or Hulu and using that time instead to pray more.

On ExpressNews.com: Anglin: This Easter, the most essential service is staying home

No question this past year has tested our faith, especially those who have lost a loved one to COVID-19.

But you can use this time to make the most of the sacrifices ahead, chosen or imposed, by giving more of yourself.

After all, the Bible does say give, and it will be given to you. Why not do more this Lent than just do without?

rguzman@express-news.net | Twitter: @reneguz

A court in Telangana gave dealth penalty for a 23 year old who committed rape and murder of a 5-year old in Narsingi limits

Hyderabad: In a landmark judgment, a court in Ranga Reddy has rewarded a man with death penalty on Tuesday for the rape and murder of a 5-year-old minor girl in the Narsingi police limits. A fine of Rs. 1,000 was also imposed against the accused.

According to the police, the accused, Dinesh Kumar Dharne, 23, is a native of Madhya Pradesh.

The victim's family was from Odisha and her parents worked as labourers in Narsingi. On 12 December 2017, the victim's mother lodged a complaint with the police claiming that Dinesh had taken her daughter on the pretext of giving her chocolate and raped her before murdering, said the police commissioner of Cyberabad, VC Sajjanar.

Meanwhile, Dinesh returned to the camp even as the girl's parents were searching for their daughter. When the girl's mother questioned him, the accused told her that he had dropped her at the labour camp some time ago and that she might be playing somewhere. After a detailed investigation, the police zeroed in on Dinesh. The police raided his room and brought him to the station. During interrogation, he confessed to the crime. He was remanded to judicial custody on 13 December 2017, said the official.

However, Dinesh absconded after obtaining bail and went to Madhya Pradesh, interrupting the trial for a brief period. Special teams were formed to nab him and he was produced before the court. He was awarded the death penalty on Tuesday.
Mumbai: The RBI has put restrictions on withdrawals from Independence Co-operative Bank Limited, Nashik because of the lender's present liquidity position. However, 99.89 per cent of the depositors are fully covered by the Deposit Insurance and Credit Guarantee Corporation (DICGC) insurance scheme, the Reserve Bank said in a statement on Wednesday.

As per the insurance scheme, every depositor in a bank is entitled to receive deposit insurance claim amount of his/her deposits up to Rs 5 lakh from the DICGC. The restrictions will remain in force for a period of six months.

"Considering the bank's present liquidity position, no amount from the total balance across all savings bank or current accounts or any other account of a depositor, may be allowed to be withdrawn, but are allowed to set off loans against deposits subject toconditions," the central bank said. The RBI has also put certain other restrictions on the bank from the close of business on Wednesday.

It said the chief executive Officer of the bank will not, without prior approval of RBI, grant or renew any loans and advances, make any investment, incur any liability, and disburse any payment, among others. It further said the issue of the directions to Independence Co-operative Bank Limited should not per se be construed as cancellation of banking licence by RBI.

The bank will continue to undertake banking business with restrictions till its financial position improves, it added. The Reserve Bank also added that it may consider modifications of the directions depending upon circumstances.

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NATO Allies recognize Ukraine as a potential candidate for NATO membership and support Ukrainian efforts to join the Alliance, according to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.

He said this at a press conference following talks with Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal in Brussels on Tuesday, February 9, according to an Ukrinform correspondent.

"NATO's door remains open, and we work with countries like Ukraine. Ukraine is recognized as a candidate for NATO membership. NATO allies help and support Ukrainian efforts to join the Alliance. I feel certain that as part of the future project we have launched in NATO, NATO 2030, [] the enlargement policy will be part of that. And also when NATO leaders meet in Brussels later this year, enlargement and NATO's open door policy will be discussed and addressed," Stoltenberg said.

He recalled that NATO made a decision about the membership of Ukraine during the 2008 Bucharest Summit and Allies "stand by that decision and all subsequent decisions following that Summit."

"The focus now should be on the reforms, and I welcome the clear message from the [Ukrainian] Prime Minister on the need to continue to reform, to make sure that we have, or Ukraine has, democratic political control over its defense institutions and armed forces, that continued efforts [are made] to fight corruption and to strengthen democratic institutions of Ukraine. This is good for Ukraine, regardless of NATO. But in addition, the more successful Ukraine is in implementing reforms, the closer Ukraine hopes to meet NATO standards, and the closer you can come to NATO membership," Stoltenberg said.

He noted that the NATO enlargement policy had been a great success and it had "helped to spread our values throughout Europe - the rule of law, individual freedom, democracy."

"Since the end of the Cold War until now, we have almost doubled the number of members of NATO. At the beginning of the 1990s, we were 16 members, now we are 30 members and we added two members just over the last few years," Stoltenberg said.

A Ukrainian government delegation headed by Shmyhal began a working visit to Brussels on February 9. Shmyhal has already met with European Council President Charles Michel and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. The program of the visit also includes a series of working meetings with representatives of the European Commission and the European Parliament. On February 11, Shmyhal will lead the talks in the format of the EU-Ukraine Association Council.

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Paris, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 10th Feb, 2021 ) :Europe's leading airline, Ryanair, urged Wednesday that Air France be forced to give up lucrative French airport slots if it receives more state aid.

Paris is in talks with European Union officials on the delicate issue of state aid to the French flag carrier, which has already received substantial help from the government.

"Should yet another enormous and illegal state aid bailout occur, then effective remedies must be applied to ensure fair competition in the French market and to protect the interests of the French consumer / visitor," a Ryanair statement said.

The low-cost airline is based in Ireland and regularly underscores the amount of money being allocated to keep struggling rivals in the air.

In exchange for more aid, Air France must be prepared to give up "a substantial number of its take-off and landing slots at key French airports including Paris Charles De Gaulle, Paris Orly and Lyon," Ryanair argued.

French officials and the European Commission are currently discussing the terms of a further recapitalisation of the Air France-KLM group, which has suffered from the Covid-19 crisis.

EU officials have already indicated that in exchange for their approval, Air France should give up coveted slots at Orly, which is essentially saturated now.

Air France on the other hand has indicated that such a move posed a serious threat because it was counting on Orly operations to help it rebound from the crisis.

French officials want to avoid putting Air France, which was struggling even before the pandemic, at a competitive disadvantage.

Ryanair urged EU competition chief Margrethe Vestager to "stand firm in her discussions with the French government.

"Either Air France gets no state aid or proper remedies should be put in place to ensure a fair and level playing field for all airlines," it insisted.
Europe's first Pay-as-you-go tolling system on the A8 motorway Athen-Patras

Greece is the first country in the European Union to operate an electronic toll system in which car drivers are only charged for actual kilometers driven on the motorway. The new "Hybrid Multi-Lane Toll System" from Kapsch TrafficCom supplements the unpopular existing payment system that charges drivers for an entire section of road, even if they exit after the first toll barrier.

"Kilometer-based toll billing is the future," says Michael Weber, Strategic Sales Mnager of Kapsch TrafficCom. "The European Union sees traditional section payment as an unfair phase-out model and is pushing to charge only for actual kilometers driven in the future. This method will be mandatory for new toll routes and a recommended feature for existing toll routes. This means that the changeover on the A8 motorway from Athens to Patras in December 2020 is not only groundbreaking for Greece, but is likely to set a precedent throughout the EU."

To use the new service, cars will be equipped with on-board units that attach to the vehicle's interior windshield When the car enters a toll checkpoint, the system will automatically debit the toll costs from the owner's customer account. As soon as the vehicle exits the route, any overpaid costs for the entire section will be credited back to the driver's account in a mileage-based billing transaction.

Reduced emissions and improved traffic flow

Cities and towns along the Athens-Patras motorway have lobbied for the introduction of the hybrid multi-lane toll system. The reason is that motorists wanting to avoid the cost of an entire stretch of motorway 8 stayed instead on roads going through towns, which resulted in a considerable noise and emissions burden.

"Other toll routes in Greece, Spain or Italy, are likely to follow the example of the new 'Hybrid Multi-Lane Toll System,'" says Michael Weber. "The billing technology not only ensures that costs are charged fairly in line with European Union recommendations, but can also be expanded to include additional services. For example, it is possible to set the toll for vehicles according to different environmental standards: e-vehicles would pay less than gasoline or diesel, for example."

Kapsch-Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xNaF0r8-S4&feature=emb_title

For additional information: www.kapsch.net/ktc?lang=en-us

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210209006188/en/

Contacts:

Press contact

Carolin Treichl

T +43 50 811 1710

carolin.treichl@kapsch.net

Updated at 2:42 p.m. ET on 2021-02-10

Bangladeshs army chief met with U.N. officials in New York on Tuesday, a spokesperson confirmed, days after rights groups urged the United Nations to review ties with the worlds top provider of peacekeepers in light of a recent media report alleging corruption in its security forces.

The head of United Nations Peace Operations brought up allegations from recent media investigations during his meeting with Bangladeshi Gen. Aziz Ahmed at U.N. Headquarters, a U.N. peacekeeping spokesman told BenarNews.

On Tuesday afternoon, the Under-Secretary-General (USG) for Peace Operations, Jean-Pierre Lacroix, met with Bangladesh chief of Army Staff, General Aziz Ahmed, as part of a routine meeting with defense personnel from countries that contribute personnel to our operations. The meeting, which took place virtually, was requested by Bangladesh, the spokesperson said.

USG Lacroix discussed Bangladeshs contributions to peace operations and the countrys support to meet peacekeeping challenges, according to the spokesperson.

The spokesperson noted that the under-secretary general paid tribute to Bangladeshi keepers who had been killed or injured in the line of duty, including in a recent attack by Islamic extremists in Mali.

The visit by Gen. Aziz took place a little over a week after Al Jazeera published a TV news documentary and reports, which were based on a two-year investigation into his family and its connections with Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.

The reports by the Qatar-based news organization linked him and at least one of his brothers to allegations of corruption, including a military purchase of Israeli-made surveillance equipment despite a Bangladeshi trade ban with the Jewish State.

USG Lacroix recalled the allegations from recent media investigations as well as what the spokesperson of the Secretary-General has recently said on this matter, the U.N. peacekeeping spokesperson added but without going into more detail.

Atul Khare, the under-secretary-general of Operational Support, and other U.N. officials met separately with Aziz on Tuesday to talk about operational support elements of Bangladeshs contributions to peace operations, the spokesperson said.

Al Jazeera aired its documentary on Feb. 1, after Gen. Aziz began a visit to the United States where he met with U.S. Army officials in Washington last week before heading to New York for his meeting with U.N. officials.

Among other things, it alleged that he was protecting his brothers who had fled abroad after being convicted of murder.

The investigative report secretly filmed one of the generals brothers saying that he can deploy Bangladesh security forces for his own personal and political purposes, including the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), an elite paramilitary unit, human rights groups alleged.

On Friday, Human Rights Watch and six other rights advocacy groups, citing the Al Jazeera investigation, called on the U.N. to postpone any talks with Bangladeshi officials about augmenting Bangladeshs contribution to U.N. Peacekeeping Operations. Bangladesh is the biggest contributor of uniformed troops to those operations.

Discussions about increasing Bangladeshi troop deployments in U.N. missions should be put on hold pending the results of the U.N.s comprehensive review of its ties with the military, the rights groups said in a joint statement.

They were alluding to an earlier statement from the Bangladeshi military that the generals visit to U.N. Headquarters was to play an important role in increasing the number of Bangladeshi U.N. peacekeepers.

The report also alleged that the military had secretly purchased surveillance equipment manufactured by an Israeli company which, according to Al Jazeera, listed Hungary as the country of origin. Al Jazeera claimed that Gen. Azizs brother, Haris Ahmed, was a key figure in the deal.

The Bangladesh Army rejected the claim.

The truth is the equipment was procured from Hungary for one of the army contingents due to be deployed in the U.N. Peacekeeping Mission, said Rashadul Alam Khan, assistant director of the Inter Service Public Relations Directorate at the Ministry of Defense.

Nowhere in the equipment was mentioned/written that these were of Israeli origin. There is no scope of defense co-operation/procurement from Israel since Bangladesh does not have any formal diplomatic relation with the country.

Days later, the U.N. called for an investigation into the Al Jazeera allegations.

The allegations of corruption is a serious matter that should be investigated by the relevant authorities, Stephane Dujarric, spokesman for the U.N. Secretary-General, told reporters last week.

Every peacekeeping operation in which Bangladesh participates is governed by an agreement laying out the world bodys specific requirements, he added.

The U.N. has not identified in any of these agreements a requirement for the capability provided by the operation of electronic equipment in the nature described by Al Jazeera in its documentary, Dujarric said during a daily press briefing on Feb. 4. And such equipment has not been deployed with Bangladeshi contingents in U.N. peacekeeping operations.

This report has been updated to include new quotes by U.N. officials.
Instagram will demote Reels that feature TikTok watermark. The company is making the change through an update to its algorithms. The move is likely to help Instagram get more original posts on its TikTok-like service Reels instead of just re-posting of content from the competitor.

Were building on what weve learned from Explore to recommend fun and entertaining videos in places like the Reels tab, and personalize the experience. We are getting better at using ranking signals that help us predict whether people will find a reel entertaining and whether we should recommend it, Instagram spokesperson Devi Narasimhan told The Verge.

According to the report, Instagram will not be hiding or banning such videos but rather wont promote it. Users can still see the posts but it may not appear on the Reels feed of the app.

ALSO READ: TikTok creators on life after the ban, rival apps and future of content creation in India

Instagram had launched Reels shortly after the Trump government announced plans to ban TikTok. Back in July last year, Reels debuted in India following the ban on the Chinese video sharing network. Reels is identical to TikTok as it allows users to record short videos and edit them with music tracks, filters and more.

Since the debut, Instagram has made a few changes to the interface to promote Reels. According to a September Fortune report, Reels hasnt had a lot of traction. Since the service is integrated within Instagram, it should reflect on the apps overall downloads.

A Sensor Tower report said that Instagram was the sixth top app globally in January 2021. Telegram, TikTok, Signal, Facebook and WhatsApp booked the top five slots.

In India, the service is taking on a slew of home-grown video sharing platforms such as Moj, Josh, Chingari, Mitron, and more. Interestingly, Moj by ShareChat was among the top 10 apps globally on Google Play Store in January 2021, according to the Sensor Tower report.
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It is thus with this optimism  reinforced by gains recorded in youth candidacy in the 2015 elections and the inspiring organisation of the #EndSARS protests  that we approach a future of youth leadership. Many ideas are packed into this lecture, and we do have a roadmap to rethink various aspects of youth politics.

Youth participation in politics and their roles in government have gained traction amongst Nigerian youths in the last two decades. Discussing this subject at a well-attended lecture at the University of Texas at Austin on February 9, under the title, Youth, Politics, and the Future of Nigeria, Ololade Bamidele, an active member of the Nigerian civil society, a successful career journalist, and currently the secretary to the Editorial Board of Premium Times (the digital news media), commented on the socio-political and economic circumstances of the Nigerian youth, which, he explained, produced the Not Too Young To Run (NTYTR) and #EndSARS movements, two of the more recent expressions of youth frustration with the Nigerian status-quo.

He logically kicked off his account by providing the definition of youth in Nigeria, as well as an introduction to the countrys expanding youth demography and its socio-economic implications. This is followed by a historical contextualisation of the changing roles played by youth in Nigerias political evolution, from the pre-colonial era till present times. Then he moved on to the factors limiting youth participation in politics, rounding off with an explanation on how the resulting agitations produced NTYTR and the #EndSARS movements, and what this means for the future of youth participation in Nigerian politics.

In his introduction, Bamidele explained that these movements, which he attributes to the rising levels of discontent in leadership performance and limited youth representation in leadership positions, also have, as a source of agitation, questions on the origin of people who can aspire to, attain, and exercise positions of leadership in Nigeria. As such, the common use of the maxim which proclaims the youths as the leaders of tomorrow is not because of its appeal amongst the youth whom it supposes to enthrone, neither is it an outcome of its truism founded on the principle of a natural law of succession, which provides that the older generations yield the stage for the new ones. On the contrary, its popularity is mostly due to its transformation into a motto that expresses youth frustrations against what appears to be an idea of a divine right to leadership, held by an elite clique that is impervious to changing times and standards.

Moving to the definition of Youth, this, he explained, depends on differing sociological perspectives, cultural contexts, and national delineations as provided for by the United Nations (UN). Thus, after providing (youth) definitions drawn from the Economic Community of West African Countries (ECOWAS), the UN, South Africa, Liberia, and Kenya, he settles on that provided in Nigeria by the National Youth Policy of 2009, which defines Nigerian youths as those between the ages of 18 and 35. In the case of Nigerias youth demography, over forty (40) per cent of the populace is said to fall within this category. This number, which is consistently expanding owing to high fertility rates, poor family planning decisions, and lowering death rates, is projected to hit 400 million by 2050.

In providing a historical context to buttress the argument for the central role of youth in societal development, Bamidele made the point that youths have played key roles in the social and political organisations of societies across various nationalities and groups.

He explains that the existing economic difficulties created by an expanding population unmatched by economic growth and social investments in education and healthcare are made more dire by low economic earnings. This issue of low economic earnings has remained because of the failure to move the discussion on the diversification of the economy from a mono-product economy beyond the talking stage. These complications, he submitted, can only be resolved by changing the nature of politics, improving governance through more inclusiveness, and better resource allocations to cater to the needs of the population.

In providing a historical context to buttress the argument for the central role of youth in societal development, Bamidele made the point that youths have played key roles in the social and political organisations of societies across various nationalities and groups. Whereas you had the age-grade associations in the traditional pre-colonial period, the colonial era had young Nigerians  the likes of Herbert Macaulay, Julius Ojo-Cole, and J. B. Danqua  organising and leading the movement against colonial rule. They created political associations like the West African Students Union (WASU), and the National Youth Movement (NYM) in 1925 and 1934, respectively. These associations, which later morphed into political parties on the eve of independence, came to include personalities such as Samuel Akinsanya, Kofo Abayomi, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Obafemi Awolowo, and Samuel Ladoke Akintola. Others were the National Council for Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC) in 1944; Action Group (AG) in 1950; Northern Peoples Congress (NPC) in 1949; and the Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU) in 1950. Such were the nations political actors at the time of independence  made up of youths in their 20s and 30s.

In the era after political independence from Britain, the military officers who hijacked power, and those who led the country during and after the Civil War, including Kaduna Chukwuma Nzeogwu, Yakubu Gowon, Olusegun Obasanjo, and Murtala Mohammed were in their late 20s and 30s. Even those who opposed the military as members of student unions under the aegis of the National Union of Nigerian Students (NUNS) set up in 1956, youth activists, members of civil society, and professional groups were youths representing the frontline of progressive social actions. They stood in defence of social freedoms and human rights against tyrannical and oppressive regimes, often suffering through several consequences.

Things, he said, began to change with the coming of the Second Republic in 1979, and the instances of repressive leadership. Thence the frontline roles of the youth began its decline, culminating in their consignment to the Youth Wing of political parties. Before long, the youth were reduced to agents of destabilisation in the hands of political elites who deployed them as thugs, especially during elections. With growing youth populations, less state intervention, and increasing unemployment, more youths resorted to decadent behaviour, littering the streets of the urban centres in various regions of the country as area boys, agbero, and Yan Daba.

The NTYTR and the #EndSARS are, therefore, symbolic in the sense that they represent an increasing capacity of Nigerian youths to organise and channel their frustrations into social movements and protests to call for a change in the status quo.

Regarding the factors limiting youth participation in politics, Bamidele listed poverty and other legal and political hindrances such as eligibility restriction, marginalisation, and the commercialisation of politics as responsible. The age restrictions which stipulate 40 years as the requirement to vie for the presidential seat; 40 years for senatorial positions; and 30 years for memberships to the federal and state Houses of Representatives, automatically disqualifies everyone in the youth bracket. And with commercialisation comes the added challenges of sponsorship in Nigerias money-intensive election processes. This, he said, further marginalises the youth who is already economically disempowered, and increases the necessity for godfathers and godfatherism. Due to these factors, the huge youth population, which accounts for over 50 per cent of voters registration in the country, has not translated into increased youth participation in elections and their representation in elective offices.

This way, the options of Nigerian youths are almost exhausted as they are denied the opportunity to wield the transformative tool of political office, while being compelled to bear the brunt of poor political decisions. Hence the feeling of frustrations built-up into the energies that produced the NTYTR movement and the #EndSARS. The NTYTR and the #EndSARS are, therefore, symbolic in the sense that they represent an increasing capacity of Nigerian youths to organise and channel their frustrations into social movements and protests to call for a change in the status quo. The success of the former (NTYTR) in bringing about a reduction in the age requirements for elective offices and that of the latter (#EndSARS) in bringing an end to the notorious police squad (SARS) represents an awakening by the youths as to the efficacy of pressure groups.

It is thus with this optimism  reinforced by gains recorded in youth candidacy in the 2015 elections and the inspiring organisation of the #EndSARS protests  that we approach a future of youth leadership. Many ideas are packed into this lecture, and we do have a roadmap to rethink various aspects of youth politics.

Toyin Falola is professor of History at The University of Texas at Austin.
West Bengal assembly elections 2021: Mamata Banerjee mocks BJP's 'rath yatras' in State

India

oi-Ajay Joseph Raj P

Raiganj, Feb 10: West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Wednesday took a swipe at the BJP for launching a series of rath yatras, ahead of the State. The Trinamool Congress leader said the BJP leaders were campaigning in the state on raths "as if they are gods".

Mamata Banerjee further accused the saffron party leaders of working with a divisive political agenda, alleging their objective was to divide the society on the basis of religion. She further went on to say that the BJP was even resorting to lies about Hinduism.

Maharashtra CM Uddhav Thackeray slams Amit Shah in letter to Shiv Sainiks

"Rath Yatra is a religious festival. All of us have participated in this festival. We know Lord Jagannath, Balaram and Goddess Subhadra travel in those chariots. But, the BJP leaders are using this rath yatra for their own political purposes to divide the society and pit one against the other. BJP leaders are travelling on raths as if they are gods," she said during a rally in Raiganj.

The West Bengal Chief Minister again accused the BJP of bringing outsiders to the State for Assembly Elections, that is expected in April/May, adding that all these people do is eat at houses of locals for a photo opportunity.

18 Indian sailors stuck in China to return to India on Feb 14

"Some outsiders are coming in luxury cars and indulging in photo sessions to show they are having food at houses of villagers," she said, claiming at the food served during such photo-ops is brought from five-star hotels.

"Bengal will be ruled by those from the state and not by people coming from Gujarat," she asserted.

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Story first published: Wednesday, February 10, 2021, 15:22 [IST]
MADDY Hill will reprise her role as Nancy Carter in EastEnders after five years away from Albert Square.

The actress (30) will make a surprise return to Walford after settling down to start married life in New Zealand with her husband Tamwar Masood, played by Tenet star Himesh Patel.

Nancy first arrived in the square in 2014 and quickly became embroiled in drama as her family took over The Queen Vic. However, her unlikely romance with Tamwar resulted in them heading off on an adventure, travelling around the world.

After her exit from EastEnders in 2016, Hill joined Casualty as the paramedic Ruby Spark. She left the show after two years in April 2020 when her character decided to look after her baby niece after her sister's death.

"I'm so excited to be coming back and reconnecting with all the hilarious, warm, talented cast and crew and meeting some lovely new faces," Hill said.

"I absolutely loved playing Nancy and have often wondered what she's up to, so feel very grateful to be able to rediscover her five years on."

Jon Sen, executive producer, said: "We're delighted to have Maddy back and I can't wait for audiences to see what's in store for Nancy.

"There's a lot of mystery surrounding her return and she's coming back to a family that have been through a very difficult year - things are definitely not as Nancy left them.

"Maddy is a fantastic actor and we feel very lucky to have her back in Walford." Hill will begin filming this month with scenes airing in spring.
This year our dine and drink business locations throughout the Gorge have suffered with closures. You can help support your favorites by purchasing take out and gift cards. Many of these business will offer curb-side delivery and some will deliver to your home. Lets keep the Gorge going strong!
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Senior Reporter

More than 70 000 tonnes of top dressing fertiliser will be distributed to farmers in both the Command Agriculture and Pfumvudza inputs schemes by month end as transport bottlenecks have been cleared.

At the same time Zimbabwe's fertiliser industry, with Government support, wants to accelerate plans to produce all top dressing fertilisers, as it now manages to meet demand for basal fertilisers.

Cyclones Chalane and Eloise, which both closed Beira for several days and caused other delays in Mozambique, coupled with the Covid-19 national lockdown causing general logistical delays around the world.

The fertiliser is in high demand this year with good rains pushing Zimbabwe towards a record harvest and thus far more fields and farms needing the nitrogen top dressing.

In an interview yesterday, Permanent Secretary for Lands, Agriculture, Fisheries, Water and Rural Resettlement Dr John Basera said the current season saw a significant surge in the number of farmers who wanted fertiliser owing to favourable rains.

"There had been significant surges in terms of hectarage under different crops, "therefore fertiliser demand outpaced supply, hence the shortages".

Covid-19 had negative effects on global logistics especially the supply of raw materials used in the manufacturing of fertiliser, both basal and top dressing," said Dr Basera.

"Further, the two natural calamities cyclone Chalane and Eloise only worsened the situation at the port of Beira and other ports.

"However, Government is now in the process of ramping and expediting the importation and distribution of nitrogenous fertilisers for the two programmes, the Command Agriculture and the Presidential Input Scheme (Pfumvudza).

"Our target is to complete top dressing distribution amounting to over 70 000 tonnes for both programme by end of February 2021."

The Agriculture Ministry was working with other line ministries, such as Foreign Affairs and International Trade, Finance and Economic Development and other agencies to expedite the imports.

Everyday, more than 1 500 tonnes of nitrogenous fertilisers are now being moved and distributed.

"Going forward, the short, medium and long term plan is to localise fertiliser manufacturing and thus import substitution. The number one and smartest export is not to import what you can produce locally. We would want to cut the fertiliser import bill significantly, whilst creating business and employment locally," he said.

Dr Basera said Government was working with all stakeholders to roll out a five year fertiliser import substitution roadmap approved by Cabinet in June last year.

After the record harvests now expected from the summer rain-fed crops, attention is being given for the winter cereal season. Lake Kariba is filling up, so there should be adequate power generated, and the dams and lakes needed for irrigation were also filling.

"So we need to get the act right and plan ahead in terms of provision of the necessary input items on time, while crowding in the private sector," he said.

Zimbabwe Fertiliser Manufacturing Association secretary Mr James Chigwende concurred with Dr Basera saying bottlenecks had been cleared around the importation of top dressing fertiliser.

Local production was able to satisfy all the required 300 000 tonnes of basal fertiliser each year, but the current infrastructure could only provide 90 000 tonnes of the 270 000 tonnes top dressing hence the need to import.

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The industry was collaborating with Government to capacitate Sable Chemicals so that it produces 240 000 tonnes.

"Going forward the industry is ready to provide fertiliser. We are excited that the challenges that we have been experiencing has been attended to.

"We also thank the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe for its continued support in the provision of foreign currency and we hope it continue to do so," said Mr Chigwende.

He also implored Government to provide early indications of its requirements under the inputs schemes for all farmers, so that the industry could make preparations to have all fertiliser requirements in place on time.
HONOLULU (AP)  Hawaii lawmakers are considering bills that could force oceanfront property owners to remove sandbags and heavy tarps that can significantly contribute to coastal erosion.

Dozens of owners along Hawaii beaches have used loopholes in environmental laws to leave emergency measures in place for extended periods to protect homes, hotels and condominiums, The Honolulu Star-Advertiser reported Sunday.

Under proposed legislation in the current session, owners would face strict deadlines for removing protections and increased penalties for installing them without permission.

House and Senate bills set a hard deadline of three years for removing current and newly authorized emergency protections.

A bill introduced by Democratic Sen. Chris Lee increases fines for homeowners and contractors who install structures without state permission.

Owners and builders could both be fined up to $25,000 for each day that an illegal structure remains on the public shoreline, up from the current maximum fine of $15,000.

Lee said his bill clarifies that temporary fixes property owners have enjoyed are not going to become long-term solutions that cause permanent damage.

Losing beaches to erosion will have a devastating impact on the local economy, on local businesses, on jobs, on people who live in those communities, to say nothing of the families who will lose that beach for their kids, Lee said.

Property owners can legally only keep emergency protections in place temporarily.

But the state Department of Land and Natural Resources has used liberal interpretations of the timeframe, allowing sandbag walls to remain in front of properties for years after issuing repeated approvals or losing track of them.

Coastal scientists warn the protective structures can be just as damaging to beaches as seawalls, which have contributed to the loss of about a quarter of the beaches on Oahu, Maui and Kauai.

Waves hitting an armored shoreline pull sand from the beach. Sandbags also have blocked public shorelines, created eyesores and littered beaches with heavy fabric and rope torn and whipped about by waves.

Property owners on Oahus North Shore have taken some of the most dramatic steps by installing so-called burritos constructed of heavy, black material anchored by sand-filled tubes to protect homes from being pulled into the ocean.

Kelly Slater, 11-time world surfing champion, installed the protections without first obtaining state permission and paid a $2,000 fine. Slater said that without the beach armoring, owners would have lost properties outright.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
An Anaheim firefighter checks temperatures at a COVID-19 vaccination center set up in a parking area of Disneyland themepark in Anaheim, Calif., on Jan, 13, 2021. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

Orange County Sees Declines in COVID-19 Cases as Death Toll Mounts

SANTA ANAJanuary became the deadliest month for COVID-19 in Orange County Feb. 9 with 33 more fatalities logged, but all of the other indicators such as case and positivity rates continued a downward trend.

The adjusted daily case rate per 100,000 people dropped from 39 last Feb. 9 to 29.7, and the test positivity rate on a seven-day average, with a seven-day lag, dropped from 10.9 percent last week to 9.4 percent.

The countys Health Equity Quartile Positivity Rate, which measures the cases in highly affected, needier parts of the county, declined from 13.9 percent last week to 12.4 percent.

The numbers for the states color-coded tier framework are updated on Tuesdays.

To move to the less-restrictive red tier from the top purple tier in the states coronavirus regulatory system, the county has to improve to 4 to 7 new daily cases per 100,000 and a 5 percent to 8 percent positivity rate with a health equity quartile at 5.3 percent to 8 percent.

The death toll for January now stands at 861, surpassing the previous record established in December when 852 died. The death reports are staggered because they come from a variety of sources and are not always logged immediately.

The death toll since the pandemic began now stands at 3,416. Of the deaths logged on Feb. 9, four were skilled nursing facility residents, raising the total to 872 since the pandemic began. Another 377 who succumbed to the coronavirus were assisted living facility residents.

The Orange County Health Care Agency (OCHCA) reported 560 new cases Feb. 9, bringing the countys total to 239,766.

The number of coronavirus patients in county hospitals continued its downward trend, declining from 1,046 Feb. 8 to 1,058 and the number of patients in intensive care decreased from 331 to 324, according to the OCHCA.

The countys state-adjusted ICU bed availability remains at zero, and the unadjusted figure increased from 9.6 percent Feb. 8 to 10.2 percent. The state created the adjusted metric to reflect the difference in beds available for COVID-19 patients and non-coronavirus patients.

The OCHCA also reported 7,104 tests Feb. 9, bringing the total to 2,797,847.

Dr. Clayton Chau, the director of the OCHCA and the countys chief health officer, told the Board of Supervisors that about 75 percent of those who die from COVID-19 are 65 and older, so county officials have been prioritizing that demographic in the first phase of vaccinations.

Board of Supervisors Chairman Andrew Do and Chau complained of what they characterized as inaccurate reporting on the countys transparency and its vaccination rate. Supervisor Don Wagner asked Chau about one newspapers report that San Diego was vaccinating its population at twice the rate of Orange County.

Chau pointed out that in the initial stage of inoculations only frontline health care workers were receiving shots and San Diego has more people in that demographic than Orange County. But Orange County has more seniors, so now it is catching up, he added.

At least 300,000 Orange County residents have been vaccinated, Chau said, adding its likely a lot more than that because the data is very confusing at the state system. Thats all I can say  We, the state and everybody is trying our best to reconcile that number.

Chau said it will all become a moot point soon when the Federal Drug Administration is expected to authorize the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which requires only one shot and does not require deep freezing. The one-shot process is a great deal less complicated to administer than handling vaccines that require a booster shot, Chau explained.

Chau said if all goes as planned, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine could arrive in Orange County by the first week of March.

Supervisor Lisa Bartlett pointed out another issue with one large hospital system that she did not identify insisting on only vaccinating residents 75 and older even though the county and state have lowered the eligibility to 65 and older.

When residents are turned away from their health care provider they are turning to the county to get a shot at one of its super sites, Do said.

Do emphasized that the county receives 20 percent of the vaccines sent from the state with the rest going to hospitals and health care systems.

We only get 37,000 doses a week and thats piddly compared to the population of 3.2 million, but people dont care about that. They just take all of their arrows and aim them at us, Do said.

Chau and Do said the county is focusing on a variety of ways to deliver vaccines to higher-risk seniors in poorer neighborhoods. For those seniors not technologically savvy enough to register through the countys Othena app and website, the county is working on a hotline, which is staffed by operators who can speak a variety of languages to help make appointments.

There are about 607,000 people now registered with the Othena app, Do said.

The county is also offering mobile PODs to bring vaccines to seniors in COVID-19 hot sports, and will soon open up a medium-sized POD at Santa Ana College, Do said.

County officials are also working with the Orange County Transportation Authority to provide free busing to vaccine distribution points.

Although the state has opened up the first phase to other populations such as educators, Chau said that for the next couple of weeks the county wants to power through vaccinating seniors.

The states issues with its database is also gumming up the vaccine distribution, Chau and Bartlett said.

Orange County is vaccinating at a higher rate than Los Angeles, Riverside and San Bernardino counties, according to Wagner.
The fancy tinned fish trend has landed in Philly big time, from various markets around town to restaurants, distillery tasting rooms, and bottle shops that sell them retail. Here are the highlight cans from my tasting of two dozen examples.

Conservas Braseadas Gueyu Mar sardines, $20 a 3.7-oz. can at Hermans Coffee (1313 S. Third St.): Pretty much all the seafood that originates from this small cannery connected to chef Abel Alvarezs beachside restaurant in Asturias is exceptional, and these fish  plump, silvery, and scented with Iberian smoke  were easily among the most memorable seafood things I sampled during my snow day tasting from Hermans. They were so good, I would consider one day splurging for Gueyu Mars octopus or grilled tuna necks, which can exceed $40 a can. This line is also available at Bloomsday Cafe, whose co-owner Zach Morris called the brand magic.

Les Mouettes dArvor sardines, $9 a 4-oz. can at Hermans Coffee: Only fish from boats that dock within five miles of the cannery are used at 62-year-old Les Mouettes dArvor in Concarneau, which specializes in French presentations of sardines, mackerel, and anchovies. And the freshness of the Brittany coast was captured in every can Ive tasted, from the red pepper and citrus in olive oil flavor to the tin of sardines packed in local sea salt and butter that turned golden when I warmed the can briefly in the oven. Di Bruno Bros. also carries some of this line, as does Riverwards Produce (2200 E. Norris St.), which sells the cannerys collector tins of La Molenaise sardines from France ($7.99 for 4 oz.), whose vintage design is a nod to the film Les Seigneurs by Olivier Dahan.

Jose Gourmet from Portugal is one of my favorite brands, in part for the whimsical illustrated artwork on its boxes, but also for its exceptional quality. The octopus in garlicky oil was tender and full of flavor ($19 at Hermans Coffee), and easily could have passed for an expert restaurant effort. But Jose's little squid ($13.99 at Di Bruno Bros.) are a true marvel of cephalopod delicacy, their tiny heads stuffed like a sausage with rice then stewed in a savory spiced tomato ragout.

Espinaler Razor Clams ($11 a 4-oz. can at Hermans Coffee): This renowned 125-year-old cannery from just north of Barcelona is one of the leaders in high quality tinned seafood, as well as for its famous appetizing sauce, which is more tangy that hot. Its canned clams are exceptional. A white box of its premium line cockles were tender and briny, with enough juice to make a perfect plate of pasta. Im partial, though, to the meatier baton-shaped razor clams. If you can find them, the larger untrimmed razors come in a richer, brinier broth.

Patagonia Provisions mackerel with Spanish paprika in oil ($7 for 4.2-oz. can at Hermans Coffee): The clothing manufacturer is known for touting sustainability and a charitable mission with its tinned seafood products, and smoked mussels are its best seller. I was especially impressed, by the meaty and mild mackerel packed in vivid orange oil.

Ramon Pena giant fried mussels in escabeche ($12 a 3.9-oz. can at Hermans Coffee): I dont always love the silty texture of some tinned mollusks, but the fried mussels from renowned Galician canner Spains Ramon Pena had a perfect tenderness in the red pepper zing of its tangy escabeche marinade, I ate the whole can. Selections from this line are also available at A Taste of Spain in the Reading Terminal Market.

Wildfish Cannery king salmon ($12 a can at Hermans): The king salmon Alaskan cannery is the epitome of an artisan product. Its so vivid, a fragrant puff of alder smoke practically emerges the moment you open the can to reveal a chunk of moist, brick-red flesh.

Conservas Ortiz white ventresca tuna ($17 a 3.8-oz. can at Di Bruno Bros.): This was the most Ive ever paid for a tin of tuna, but the buttery richness of the flaky belly meat inside was stunning, the canned Spanish answer to o-toro tuna sushi. The standard bonito del norte albacore cans from Ortiz ($7) are also worth the upgrade over the usual supermarket bargain cans.

Cantabrian anchovies ($14 a plate at Pizzeria Beddia): If youve only had the brackish mush of standard pizza anchovies, youre in for a flavor and texture revelation with plump, dusky fillets of prized brown anchovies from the Cantabrian coast in Northern Spain. Joe Beddia serves them alone as an appetizer on a plate glossed with Arbequina olive oil at his pizzeria because they are a singular experience like Parmesan  so savory. (He uses Sicilian anchovies on his pies). Cantabrian anchovies come in many levels of quality, but the Donostia brand ($10 a 3.17-oz. jar at Hermans) is recommendable. Ortiz Spanish anchovies ($15.99 a 3.3-oz. jar at Di Bruno Bros.) are also exceptional.
It has been a season worth celebrating, what with the good rains that have ensured almost every dam in Zimbabwe is filled to capacity, with some spilling.

It is a really huge spectacle, especially after we last had such an experience many years ago, with successive droughts denying us plenty of rains in the last decade.

But amid these celebrations, it should not be forgotten that in times of plenty, there is need to remember the lean days ahead and start preparing for them.

Yes, we have the good rains, yes we have the dams, but what are we doing about ensuring that this plenty of rain is turned into future source of food security?

The answer lies in the development of irrigation schemes, or at least the resuscitation of the existing ones.

With the water that has been harnessed so far in our reservoirs, it is possible for farmers to fight the disarray in agriculture usually witnessed in times of droughts.

The beauty of irrigation is that farmers can grow up to three crops per year, making the country a greenbelt throughout the year.

What this calls for is the adopting of strategies to introduce vibrant irrigation systems to help alleviate, if not obliterate, the effects of climate change.

Reliance on rain-fed agriculture has become unsustainable and can be self-defeating. The earlier we address this, the better, and plenty of rains received this season present a perfect opportunity.

And it is time for the private sector to form partnerships with Government and other agencies to start new irrigation schemes and revive those that are not doing well.

The majority of farmers in Zimbabwe depend on rain-fed agriculture, while a few A2 farmers have installed irrigation facilities on their farms.

Yet the potential for Zimbabwe to move into irrigation with much vigour is massive, mainly because the Government has the will to do that.

The country is already endowed with tracts of arable and fertile land which can be exploited fully to support irrigation schemes.

It is should be unacceptable from now onwards to allow starvation when the country has so many water bodies that are full of water, when the development of irrigation is the answer.

Irrigation feeds well into the New Dispensation's broad development agenda aiming at attaining Vision 2030 of achieving an upper middle income status.

Through irrigation, there is potential to spearhead an export-led growth, with agricultural products such as flowers, beans, peas in high demand in such lucrative markets as Europe.

It is refreshing to note that Lands, Agriculture, Fisheries, Water and Rural Resettlement Minister Dr Anxious Masuka has been prioritising the establishment of irrigation schemes since his appointment.

Speaking during a recent tour of Insukamini Irrigation Scheme in Lower Gweru last week, Dr Masuka said members of irrigation schemes who fail to use their irrigated land as productive farms will be removed and replaced by those willing and with the capacity to do so.

A Statutory Instrument to support the plan is expected soon, he said.

It is also important that Government has since budgeted $57 million for the rehabilitation of irrigation schemes across the country and wants this expensive infrastructure to be fully used by productive farmers.

But the first port of call should be the modernisation of irrigation through the acquiring of new technologies or at least attract investors who will contribute to the development of irrigation.

Apart from the irrigation schemes, individual farmers should strive to direct their earnings towards equipping their farms with modern irrigation facilities to ensure an increase in their yields.

With the adoption of irrigation by farmers, Zimbabwe can easily achieve food security, and quickly realise the much anticipated turnaround in crop production.

Government should revisit past irrigation development blueprints with a view of improving them by addressing those areas which provided challenges to their success.

From now on, irrigation should be the watch word for the Ministry of Lands to avoid situations where citizens end up looking up to Government for food relief each season.

In fact, Zimbabwe's agriculture story can change for the better in few seasons with the adoption of vibrant irrigation systems.

It is clear that the future lies in irrigation cropping, and the more farmers wake up to this reality, the more prospects for a food secure Zimbabwe are enhanced.

Tugwi-Mukosi and

Marovanyati dams

Something has to be urgently done at Tugwi-Mukosi Dam in Chivi and Marovanyati Dam in Buhera to ensure that the dams benefit local communities.

These two dams were recently completed and they have a huge capacity to irrigate thousands of hectares between them.

It was a good scene when Tugwi-Mukosi spilled recently, with the event making headlines in the media.

The Zimbabwe National Water Authority chipped in, issuing a statement celebrating how the accumulated waters in Tugwi-Mukosi will re-assure sugarcane farmers in the Lowveld, more than 100 kilometres away.

Well, there is nothing wrong with Tugwi-Mukosi Dam water being channelled to sugarcane growers who in turn produce more sugar, with some for exports.

But communities around the dam should also start benefiting through establishment of irrigation schemes, especially after recent announcement that it has the capacity to irrigate 40 000 hectares.

The long-drawn crafting of a development master plan for Tugwi-Mukosi Dam catchment area should finally come to an end, so that the process is expedited to ensure the reservoir starts benefiting surrounding communities.

Communities that surround the dam have been pinning hopes on the establishment of irrigation schemes in the surrounding areas that would draw water from the dam.

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Such hopes have been raised because the area is generally affected by drought, which has resulted in some families relying on food handouts from Government almost every season.

Tugwi-Mukosi Dam can make Masvingo province, and especially Chivi South where it is situated, a green belt through irrigation, with the potential to contribute significantly to national food security.

It remains untenable that villagers watch the water flow from Tugwi-Mukosi Dam to "far away" Chiredzi and Triangle to water cane fields, when they have not started benefiting.

But the longer it takes to develop the development master plan, the more rural communities treat Tugwi-Mukosi as "their" dam and not "our" dam.

At the same time, Marovanyati Dam is Buhera's crown jewel, as its intended purpose is to provide multi-purpose domestic, agricultural and industrial water supply to the district.

While there are already existing irrigation schemes like Murambinda, there is scope for development of more such facilities to ensure many communities benefit.

It is encouraging that Government is fully aware of this necessity following the commissioning of Marovanyati Dam last year.

Just like Chivi, Buhera has been one of the hardest hit districts in the country by successive droughts.

But the establishment of new irrigation schemes and the resuscitation of others remains vital to improving the livelihoods of ordinary Zimbabweans.
Imagine not been able to speak to your family and friends; to pick up the phone for a chat; to sing along to your favourite song. That is the reality that Madeline O'Connor must live with every day.

She can no longer speak such is the progression of her Motor Neurone disease, though she was only diagnosed less than a year ago.

In April 2020, the Tralee woman's life was turned upside down when she learned she had Motor Neurone Disease (MND) - a devastating diagnosis at any time but one that came right at the beginning of the pandemic.

It is also a diagnosis that altered her life forever, and today, in the midst of another lock-down, she is sharing her story of the incurable illness and what the past year has been like.

In an interview via typed questions, Madeline shared her story about Motor Neurone in a bid to raise awareness of the implications of living with the disease.

Prior to her diagnosis, Madeline had noticed frightening symptoms but had no idea what was wrong or what was to come.

"I had a stammer as a child and it returned in August 2019. Someone close to me was very sick at the time, I presumed it was stress. My voice got weaker and weaker, and by the time I was diagnosed with MND in April 2020, my words were slurring. I would be on the phone at work and people would ask me, "Are you ok?" or get frustrated that they couldn't understand me.

"When I speak, it sounds perfect in my head. But now nobody can understand me," she says.

Since then, Madeline (65) has been forced to give up her job at the Eir Call Centre as her voice had deteriorated so much - one of the many symptoms of Motor Neurone.

Now she uses an app on her iPad to communicate, but this is far from ideal, and she still hopes and prays that her voice may return - but given her condition, that is unlikely.

"I resisted it [using the app] at first. I did everything I could to get my voice back. I still pray it will come back. But I can communicate well with the help of the app," she says.

But while she can communicate somewhat, every day is a battle for Madeline.

"I can say things perfectly in my head, but nobody can understand me. I miss chatting with my daughter, Mari, [and] with my friends and family the most. I miss being able to sing along with the radio and to walk into a shop and ask the sales assistant for something without hassle.

"I also always loved walking, hiking and aerobics but, unfortunately, I can't do those things anymore. I still do pilates every morning, albeit online."

This month, Irish Motor Neurone Disease Association (IMNDA) is holding a sponsored silence to raise awareness of the difficulties facing someone who has lost their voice.

According to IMNDA, more than 80 per cent of people living with MND will experience some form of speech difficulty during their illness, and some will lose their voice completely.

Motor Neurone Disease is a progressive neurological condition that attacks the motor neurones, or nerves, in the brain and spinal cord. This means messages gradually stop reaching muscles, which leads to weakness and wasting. MND can affect how you walk, talk, eat, drink and breathe. However, not all symptoms necessarily happen to everyone, and it is unlikely they will all develop at the same time or follow a specific order.

"It is difficult to go out into the community when people don't understand that I require a little more patience. If we could raise awareness of the needs of MND patients then it would be a wonderful confidence boost for us to go out into the community and enjoy life as normal," says Madeline. Her diagnosis came just as the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, making things even more difficult given the restrictions but the difficulty in accessing medical support.

To have your life turned upside down by not only COVID but also a life-changing illness has made 2020 a difficult year.

"Nobody was allowed into the hospital when I got my diagnosis, and I found this very tough. I knew nothing about MND. I cried for days when I first heard," she says.

"It has been strange to receive this sort of diagnosis during the COVID-19 pandemic. The first person my daughter and I met on the way home from hospital was a Garda at a Checkpoint. He was very kind, but the pain of receiving this diagnosis was certainly heightened by the strangeness of the pandemic. It's quite isolating and has been tough to process this disease without friends and family."

However, despite the condition and an uncertain future, Madeline is keeping the bright side out and is strongly supported by her daughter, Mari. Both have nothing but praise for the Irish Motor Disease Association and are urging people to support the sponsored silence, to understand how difficult their lives are but also to help the association to raise funds. This February, the IMNDA is running the #Voice4MND campaign. All it asks is that you stay silent for a minimum of 30 minutes so you can sense what it would be like to lose your voice.

"Imagine one hour, imagine one day, imagine one week without your voice. We want you to give up your voice so you can experience what it is like for someone with MND," is the plea from the organisation.

The IMNDA provides specialised services for people affected by this debilitating disease such as equipment on loan, financial assistance towards home help, and advice and home visits by an MND nurse. In order to provide these vital services, the IMNDA depends heavily on the generosity of the public and supporters of the association who generate over 83 per cent of its income. The sponsored silence will help in that regard, as well as helping people like Madeline who live this reality daily.
[February 10, 2021] Juniper Systems Limited Announces Customisation Programme for Ultra-Rugged Handheld Computers

BIRMINGHAM, United Kingdom, Feb. 09, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- An enhanced product customisation programme has been announced by Juniper Systems Limited, for their line of ultra-rugged handheld computers and sub-meter GNSS receiver. Whilst product customisation has been performed by the company for several years, the programme has recently been elevated to include more options and flexibility.

As an Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM), Juniper Systems now offers four levels of product customisation, with options to fit the needs of most Value-Added Resellers (VARs), Independent Software Developers in need of hardware, or technology companies who desire equipment reflecting their brand. Juniper Systems have customised our products for companies in industries such as radiation detection, surveying and mapping, construction and machine control, said Mr. Simon Bowe, managing director at Juniper Systems Limited. Now were expanding our services so even more companies can reap the benefits of having their personalised, branded rugged computers. All of Juniper Systems ultra-rugged computers can be customised, including the flagship Mesa 3 Rugged Tablet, as well as the Allegro 3 and Archer 3 Rugged Handheld Computers, and the Geode GNS2 Sub-meter GNSS Receiver.



The company released its plan for four levels of customisation, from basic appearance to the seamless integration of specific accessories: Level 1 provides primarily cosmetic enhancements, including custom logos, brand colors, shipping boxes and labels, with options for logo placement and contact information.

provides primarily cosmetic enhancements, including custom logos, brand colors, shipping boxes and labels, with options for logo placement and contact information. Level 2 allows for proprietary functionality to be added, such as a barcode imager, RFID, radio, sensors, and Controller Area Network (CAN) integrations, to name a few.

allows for proprietary functionality to be added, such as a barcode imager, RFID, radio, sensors, and Controller Area Network (CAN) integrations, to name a few. If internal integrations are not feasible they can be added externally with a Level 3 customisation, whilst retaining the computers ultra-rugged IP68 rating and ergonomic features.

customisation, whilst retaining the computers ultra-rugged IP68 rating and ergonomic features. Level 4 involves operating system customisations, such as a logo or splash screen on boot, the addition of proprietary applications, and custom accessories. Levels of customisation can be blended, ensuring each customer gets exactly what is needed for their particular business.

Whilst Junipers computers are manufactured in Logan, Utah, U.S.A., they are shipped from and serviced at their EMEA headquarters near Birmingham, U.K. The Service Centre handles repairs, offers live tech support, and its proximity to Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and India eliminates expensive shipping costs and long lead times that can be experienced with far-east manufacturers. Juniper Systems customisations can be implemented for lower minimum quantities than other OEMs require; customers can afford to have their own branded device without committing to excessive volumes. This is particularly advantageous for small-and mid-sized companies who desire a high-quality rugged product but cannot manage thousands of units on hand. We make the customisation process very easy, working with each customer every step of the way, said Mr. Andy Cray, technical manager for Juniper Systems Limited. From there, the level of complexity is up to the customer. We can do easy things like custom-colored bumpers on the Mesa 3 Rugged Tablet, or more sophisticated services, like ensuring the proper BIS Certification for shipment to India. Its all up to the customer. More information can be obtained in the short video, or by contacting Juniper Systems Limited directly at +44 (0) 1527 870773 or via email InfoEMEA@junipersys.com. About Juniper Systems Limited

Based out of Logan, Utah, USA, and Birmingham, UK, Juniper Systems (https://junipersys.com) is a world leader in the design and manufacture of ultra-rugged handheld computers and provides field data collection solutions for use in extreme environments. Since 1993, professionals have utilised Juniper Systems innovative mobile technology in the geomatics, industrial, natural resources, military, utilities and public services markets. A photo accompanying this announcement is available at: https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/3101b3ab-8d68-48ed-bf60-ef1eb541e133

Contact: Simon Bowe, Managing Director +44 (0) 1527 870773 simon@junipersys.com https://junipersys.com Barbara Sanner, Media Contact +1 480 980 0298 barbara.sanner@junipersys.com

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The largest private employer in San Francisco announced today that more than half of its workforce will continue working remotely or on a flexible schedule after the pandemic is over.

Salesforce introduced its Work From Anywhere strategy, estimating that more than 65% of employees will adopt the new system, based on a company survey.

For those that will be coming into an office, the current spaces will be redesigned to accommodate more of a community hub feel, focusing on collaboration and breakout areas to foster moments of human connection.

Without the attachment to physical office space, the company will also be able to expand its talent search. Our talent strategy is no longer bound by barriers like location, so we can broaden our search beyond traditional city centers and welcome untapped talent from new communities and geographies, the statement said.

Salesforce has more than 9,000 employees in the Bay Area, according to LinkedIn, and leases more than two-thirds of its namesake Salesforce Tower.

While Salesforce has yet to comment on what this all means for its overall office footprint in San Francisco, it certainly wouldnt be the first company to downsize due to the changing nature of work. Old Navy announced Tuesday it would be shutting down its Mission Bay offices and moving into parent company Gap Incs workspace. Last week, Yelp confirmed its San Francisco headquarters at 140 New Montgomery St. were up for lease and in August 2020, Pinterest paid $89.5 million to terminate its lease for 88 Bluxome.
President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has appointed Major General Francis Adu Amanfo (rtd) as the New National Security Co-ordinator. The new appointment comes on the back of the recent demise of Mr Joshua Kyeremeh, who held the position of National Security Co-ordinator in President Akufo-Addos first term of office.



Major General Francis Adu Amanfo (rtd) is a well-known figure within Ghanas intelligence community. He was appointed by Former President Kufour as Ghanas Ambassador to Liberia.



Until his appointment as an ambassador, Major General Adu Amanfo was the Head of Defence Intelligence in the Ghana Armed Forces.







In a related development, the president has also appointed Edward Kwaku Asomani as the new Deputy National Security Co-ordinator. Prior to his appointment, Kwaku Asomani was the director of Analysis at the Ministry of National Security.



An Alumni of Oxford University, he worked in a number of reputable international organizations in England before returning to Ghana to take up a position as the executive director of Danquah Institute.

The new appointments took effect from 8th February, 2021







Source: Peacefmonline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The arrest and extradition from Kenya to the United States of an alleged kingpin in the trafficking of millions of dollars' worth of poached ivory and rhino horn has been hailed as a major victory in the fight against wildlife crime.

A US investigation led to the extradition of Mansur Mohamed Surur, a Kenyan national, charged as part of a group that allegedly smuggled and transported 10 tons of elephant ivory and 400 pounds of rhinoceros horns  worth nearly $7.5 million  to the US. Kenyan authorities arrested Surur last July and was extradited to the US late last month. According to prosecutors, the items were procured in Uganda, Guinea and Senegal, and were sent to buyers in the United States and Southeast Asia.

Matt Morley, Director of Wildlife Crime for the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) said the extradition was an important development in the prosecution of senior members of the so-called Kromah wildlife trafficking network.

"In this investigation, the US Government's coordinated approach to tackling wildlife crime, is a benchmark example which IFAW would encourage other countries to emulate. Until now, those involved in wildfire trafficking have enjoyed low risks and high rewards for their crimes  action like this and the recent tough sentences passed down by courts in China in December 2020 against ivory traffickers, are an indication that these days are coming to an end," said Morley.

US authorities allege the Kromah network is responsible for the illegal slaughter and trafficking of the horns and tusks of dozens of rhinos and more than 100 elephants, both endangered species. The trafficking of the ivory and rhino horn has been linked to drug-related crime. Two of Surur's co-defendants, Moazu Kromah and Amara Cherif, were arrested earlier and extradited from Uganda and Senegal, respectively. Another defendant, Abdi Hussein Ahmed, is a fugitive.

Surur faces up to life in prison on the top count  conspiracy related to heroin trafficking. He pleaded not guilty through an interpreter.

Poaching and illegal wildlife trafficking threaten the existence of some of the world's most iconic species that are critical to maintaining the health and biodiversity of the ecosystems they inhabit.

Read more about our wildlife crime work on our website here.

About the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) - The International Fund for Animal Welfare is a global non-profit helping animal and people thrive together. We are experts and everyday people, working across seas, oceans and in more than 40 countries around the world. We rescue, rehabilitate and release animals, and we restore and protect their natural habitats. The problems we're up against are urgent and complicated. To solve them, we match fresh thinking with bold action. We partner with local communities, governments, non-governmental organizations and businesses. Together, we pioneer new and innovative ways to help all species flourish. See how at ifaw.org.

Press Contacts

Wildlife Crime Program  Communications Manager

Victoria Bowden

Communications manager

Mobile: +971 5856 18037

email: [email protected]

SOURCE International Fund for Animal Welfare

Related Links

http://www.ifaw.org


New Delhi:

US space agency NASA sending humans on Mars has been one of the most discussed topics among the scientists and space enthusiasts for years. However, in what could be termed as a disappointing development, NASA has admitted that it cannot afford to send humans on Mars.

NASA opened about on the topic in a meet of American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronauts which was held on July 12. NASA has been grabbing headlines for years regarding its future possibility to send humans on Mars.



However, there are constraints especially with too little funds and NASA says landing humans on Mars will be a huge challenge.



I cant put a date on humans on Mars, and the reason really isat the budget level we described, this roughly two per cent increase, we dont have the surface systems available for Mars, said William Gerstenmaier, NASAs chief of human spaceflights, Ars Technica reported. And that entry, descent, and landing is a huge challenge for us for Mars.



The future Mars missions that include making Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft is costing too much to NASA. The US space agency, as a result, cannot afford to start designing vehicles to land on Mars or ascend the surface, according to the report.



Meanwhile, private companies like blue Origins and SpaceX are preparing for Mars mission. SpaceX founder Elon Mask has even announced plans to make human colonies on Mars aims to send humans to the red planet in 2025.



Vice President Mike Pence had earlier hinted on commercial space  a kind of contracting NASA used to fund its commercial cargo and crew programs. "The truth is that American business is on the cutting edge of space technology," he had said.



However, since NASA has the support to extensive Moon surface program, Gerstenmaier opened the door to the possibility of landing humans on Moon again.



If we find out theres water on the Moon, and we want to do more extensive operations on the Moon to go explore that, we have the ability with Deep Space Gateway to support an extensive Moon surface program, he said. If we want to stay focused more toward Mars we can keep that.

For all the Latest Science News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
Italy commemorates victims of the Foibe with national day of remembrance.

Italy's president Sergio Mattarella has recalled the "horror" of the Foibe during a ceremony today to remember the victims of the mass killings in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Istria and Dalmatia by Tito's partisans, both during and after world war two.

The massacres were committed mainly against the local ethnic Italian population by Yugoslav communists who occupied the Istrian peninsula during the last two years of the war.

"The suffering, deaths, uprooting, and exodus forced on tens of thousands of families in the areas of the eastern border, of Istria, of Fiume, of the Dalmatian coasts, are inscribed with an indelible mark," said Mattarella.

"The crimes against humanity unleashed in that conflict did not exhaust themselves with the liberation from Nazi-Fascism, but continued in their persecution and violence, perpetrated by another authoritarian regime, the communist one," said the president.

The exact number of victims is unknown but there may have been up to 15,000 killed, with many of them tortured, shot or pushed to their deaths into the deep, narrow carsic sinkholes or chasms known as foibe.

The killings occurred in 1943 and again in the weeks before and after the end of the war in 1945.

The Giorno del ricordo, marked annually on 10 February, commemorates the victims of the ethnic cleansing as well as the exodus of Italians who left their homes in Dalmatia and Istria in the years after 1943.

Known in English as the 'National Memorial Day of the Exiles and Foibe,' the annual remembrance day was declared in 2004 by then Italian president Carlo Azeglio Ciampi.

In 2007 Ciampi's successor, President Giorgio Napolitano, referred to the Foibe as "one of the barbarities of the past century."

Last summer President Mattarella joined Slovenian president Borut Pahor in laying a wreath at a Foibe memorial in Basovizza near the northern Italian city of Trieste.
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District Court of Guam Chief Judge Frances Tydingco-Gatewood administered the oath-taking for 41 new U.S. citizens on the eve of Veterans Day 2020 outside the federal courthouse in Hagatna.

Photo by Kevin Milan/ The Guam Daily Post

Update, March 14: Police say a body found by a boater at Hagg Lake on March 12 was identified as that of 38-year-old Tara Callahan. A medical examiner determined she died by suicide.



Washington County sheriffs deputies are searching for a missing woman who may be in crisis.

The sheriffs office said deputies responded to an apartment in Aloha on Friday night after receiving reports that Tara Callahan, 38, may be a danger to herself.

Deputies said they learned Callahan may have gone to Hagg Lake with the intention of harming herself. When they arrived at the lake, they found Callahans car at a boat ramp but couldnt find her.

Over the weekend, search and rescue teams looked for Callahan in the woods and on the shoreline of the lake  and used drones in their search. The sheriffs office marine patrol division also checked the water near the boat ramp where her car was found.

As of Tuesday, deputies have not been able to find Callahan. The search continues, and the case remains under investigation.

Deputies urge anyone who has information about Callahans location to call 503-629-0111.

-Jayati Ramakrishnan; 503-221-4320; jramakrishnan@oregonian.com; @JRamakrishnanOR




Microstructure and macroscopic electro-mechanical properties are closely coupled in so-called ferroelectric polymers. An explanation for the high temperature dependence of this coupling has now been found at TU Wien.

In certain materials, electrical and mechanical effects are closely linked: for example, the material may change its shape when an electrical field is applied or, conversely, an electrical field may be created when the material is deformed. Such electromechanically active materials are very important for many technical applications.

Usually, such materials are special, inorganic crystals, which are hard and brittle. For this reason, so-called ferroelectric polymers are now being used. They are characterised by the fact that their polymer chains exist simultaneously in two different microstructures: some areas are strongly ordered (crystalline), while disordered (amorphous) areas form in between. These semicrystalline composites are electromechanically active and therefore combine electrical and mechanical effects, but at the same time they are also flexible and soft. At TU Wien, such materials have now been studied in detail  with surprising results: above a certain temperature, the properties change dramatically. A research team from TU Wien in cooperation with research groups from Madrid and London has now been able to explain why this happens.

From micro-sensors to smart textiles

"If you can control the mechanical behaviour of a material with the help of electric fields, you can use it to build tiny sensors, for example," says Prof. Ulrich Schmid from the Institute of Sensor and Actuator Systems at TU Wien. "This is also interesting for atomic force microscopes, where you set a tiny tip in vibration to scan a surface and generate an image."

The field of application of such materials can be expanded dramatically if it is possible to induce such electromechanical properties not only in rigid materials, but also in flexible, soft materials. On the one hand, flexible materials have a completely different vibration behaviour, which can be exploited in the construction of tiny sensors. On the other hand, such materials also open up completely new possibilities  such as smart textiles, flexible energy storage or for integrated energy harvesting.

"Solids can be crystalline, in which case the atoms are arranged in a regular lattice, or they can be amorphous, in which case the individual atoms are randomly distributed," explains Jonas Hafner, who is working on this research project as part of his dissertation. "The special thing about the material we studied is that it can be both at the same time: It forms crystalline regions, and in between the material is amorphous."

The crystals are responsible for the electromechanical properties of the material, the amorphous matrix holds the tiny crystals together, overall creating a very soft, flexible material.

Too much heat

In order to be able to further develop and improve such materials, the research team first investigated their basic physical properties. During their investigations, they came across a surprising phenomenon: the ferroelectric polymers, which consist of a combination of crystalline and amorphous areas, change their microscopic composition at a certain temperature  which has surprising effects on the macroscopic electromechanical behaviour.

Normally, the electromechanical properties of a material only disappear when a very high temperature causes such large oscillations at the atomic level, that the electrical order in the material disappears completely. This critical temperature is called the "Curie temperature". But in the case of the material now being studied, things are more complicated: "In our case, the electromechanical properties of the tiny crystals remain. Microscopically, the crystals are still electroactive, but on the macroscopic level, this electroactive behaviour disappears," says Jonas Hafner.

Lost contact between the crystal grains

The team was able to explain how this effect occurs: As the temperature rises, the proportion of amorphous areas of the polymer increases, and at a certain point the tiny crystals lose direct contact among each other. This means that mechanical forces can no longer be transferred from one of the tiny crystals to the next, because they are all completely embedded in a damping amorphous matrix. This dramatically changes the mechanical and electromechanical behaviour of the material.

"Only if we understand these fundamental effects we can explain how microscopic and macroscopic properties correlate in such materials," says Ulrich Schmid. "We are working with numerous project partners who then use such materials  in atomic force microscopes, in sensors, in chips. There are numerous potential applications for this exciting material phase."
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 10)  No COVID-19 vaccine has been approved for general use, and the public should only receive anti-coronavirus shots that have been acquired by the government, Food and Drug Administration chief Eric Domingo reminded the public.

Ang bakuna po ay maaari lamang ma-access through the governments vaccination program, Domingo told a briefing on Tuesday.

[Translation: The COVID-19 vaccines can only be accessed through the governments vaccination program.]

DOH Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire echoed Domingo. "It is only through the national government that you can get these vaccines that are forthcoming," she said in a separate briefing.

The FDA chief made the reminder following reports that some individuals and institutions were offering for sale illegal COVID-19 vaccines, which authorities warned could pose serious health risks.

The DOH, NTF (National Task Force), and FDA reiterate that safety and quality of vaccines purchased unlawfully cannot be guaranteed as these may be counterfeit or have been transported in the right temperature, the agencies said in a joint statement issued Tuesday night.

The public is reminded that counterfeit or spoiled vaccines may result in serious harm or injury, even death, they added.

Only shots approved for emergency use will be given under the COVID-19 immunization program. American pharmaceutical firm Pfizer was the first to receive emergency use authorization for its COVID-19 vaccine from the countrys drug regulator, followed by British firm AstraZeneca. There are pending EUA applications for other vaccines at the FDA.

Domingo called on the public to report to the FDA those who have tried to sell them coronavirus vaccines because this is a violation of the conditions of the emergency use authorization.

He also urged those who are not yet eligible to wait for their turn to get a vaccine with regulatory approval, as supplies are limited and needed most by frontline health workers and other people who have a greater risk of dying if they catch COVID-19.

Procurement of vaccines is being handled exclusively by the national government, although tripartite agreements can be entered into by the private sector and local government officials. All of these vaccines will be given for free, and inoculation should also be authorized by the government. Initial vaccine doses are expected to arrive this month, officials said.

The issue of illegal vaccine distribution in the Philippines is not new. Last month, civic leader Teresita Ang-See said more than 100,000 Chinese nationals in the country received unauthorized vaccines as early as November last year.
LONDON, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Panaseer, the first Continuous Controls Monitoring (CCM) platform for enterprise security, today announces that it has joined forces with PwC UK, a leader in cybersecurity consulting services, to offer continuous Cyber Risk Monitoring. This will pave the way for continuous and accurate measurement, monitoring, and reporting of cyber risk.

Panaseer and PwC UK bring together best-in-breed technology and consulting services. Gartner recognised CCM as a new product category in its 2020 Risk Management Hype Cycle and listed Panaseer as an inaugural vendor. PwC UK was named a Leader in European Cybersecurity Consulting Services in the Forrester Wave for European Cybersecurity Consulting Providers in Q4 2019.

Customers will be able to leverage executive reporting dashboards from PwC UK, which are informed by continuously updated, accurate, assurance metrics from Panaseer. Together the companies can meaningfully advise and improve a customer's risk posture. The collaboration combines PwC UK's strategic and executive reporting expertise with accurate and real-time security data from Panaseer's CCM platform.

This joint offering will reduce the risk of cyber incidents and fines, whilst saving time and resource that is currently spent on security reporting and compliance. By giving a holistic and quantitative view across the entire technical security landscape, customers are able to complete robust risk modelling and scoring to make risk-based diagnosis and decisions. They can also prioritise investments based on risks that matter the most, which will maximise RoI from risk reduction initiatives.

Charaka Goonatilake, CTO, Panaseer: "One of the biggest challenges in cybersecurity is visibility. As the threat landscape expands and regulatory pressures increase, it becomes even more important to be able to have a continuous and accurate measurement, monitoring and reporting of cyber risk. This is what CCM enables. Our collaboration with PwC UK takes it one step further. By wrapping together our technology with its consulting services, risk modelling good practices and executive reporting dashboards, we are enabling customers to make critical decisions based on risk scoring and business context."

Philippe Korur, Cyber Risk Reporting Platform Lead, PwC UK said: "Our cyber team is passionate about driving tangible value to our clients through innovation and pragmatism. Through Panaseer's CCM platform, our clients can leverage existing tooling investments in order to effectively enable a strong continuous control monitoring capability with minimal further investment. This combined with our cyber risk advisory services and risk reporting will enable our clients to get the best value and protection."

About Panaseer

Panaseer is the first Continuous Controls Monitoring platform for enterprise security. It helps businesses make informed risk-based security decisions. The company is aiming to become the security measurement platform of choice for security, risk and IT leaders that are shifting to data-driven programmes. Its clients include the world's largest financial institutions and critical infrastructure enterprises.

Panaseer recently scooped the award for 'Best Regulatory Compliance Tools and Solutions' at the SC Awards Europe in 2020. Its total funding to date is $15.6 million and backers include Evolution Equity Partners, Notion Capital, Albion Capital, Winton Ventures, Paladin Capital Group and Cisco Investments.

For more information: www.panaseer.com

About PwC

At PwC, our purpose is to build trust in society and solve important problems. We're a network of firms in 157 countries with over 276,000 people who are committed to delivering quality in assurance, advisory and tax services. Find out more and tell us what matters to you by visiting us at www.pwc.com .

PwC refers to the PwC network and/or one or more of its member firms, each of which is a separate legal entity. Please see www.pwc.com/structure for further details.
YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 10, ARMENPRESS. Armenias defense ministry has appealed to the professional commission of the healthcare ministry to organize the treatment of 12 servicemen, who were wounded during the recent Artsakh War, abroad, Minister of Healthcare Anahit Avanesyan said during the Q&A session in the Parliament, in response to the question of the ruling bloc MP Narek Mkrtchyan.

There are cases when our wounded soldiers will need additional or more complex treatment abroad. There is concrete procedure for such cases when the defense ministry is submitting such applications to the professional commission of the healthcare ministry which in turn assesses whether there is a need to send them abroad or not, and after that it makes a decision, as a result of which the government fully covers the costs of the treatment of the wounded servicemen. At this moment 12 such applications have been submitted for the commissions discussion, and they are in process, she said.

The minister added that the medical care of the wounded servicemen is being carried out at the expense of the state funds.

Editing and Translating by Aneta Harutyunyan
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.
(@FahadShabbir)

At least two people, including a local police chief, were killed after multiple bomb blasts rocked the Afghan capital early Wednesday, officials said

Kabul, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 10th Feb, 2021 ) :At least two people, including a local police chief, were killed after multiple bomb blasts rocked the Afghan capital early Wednesday, officials said.

The latest violence in Kabul follows a pattern of attacks during morning rush-hour traffic targeting prominent Afghans including politicians, journalists, activists and judges.

Police spokesman Ferdaws Faramarz told reporters that two people were killed and another wounded in their vehicle by a bomb in downtown Kabul.

Interior ministry spokesman Tariq Arian told AFP that one of those killed was a district police chief in the capital.

An AFP photograph at the scene said the bomb had ripped through the rear of what was appeared to be an armoured vehicle.

Minutes earlier, another blast targeting a vehicle in the same district wounded four people, Faramarz added.

A third blast targeted a police vehicle in Paghman district on the outskirts of Kabul.

Authorities did not say if the blasts were caused by so-called "sticky bombs" attached to the vehicles, or roadside improvised explosive devices.

Wednesday's blasts come a day after militants shot dead four government employees in an ambush in the capital.

No group has so far claimed responsibility for the attacks.
Joao Barbieri, a convicted international weapons smuggler, is sought by Brazilian authorities after he walked out of a prison in Rio de Janeiro in November 2020 with a fake court document. Barbieri had served only three years of a 27-year prison sentence for his role in the shipment of 60 rifles that were shipped by his father from Miami to Rio de Janeiro in 2017

Brazilian authorities have launched a manhunt for an international weapons dealer who walked out of prison after he forged his early release form.

The Federal Justice and the Penitentiary Administration Secretariat are also looking into how Joao Barbieri managed to create the fake early release document that allowed him to leave the Bangu Prison Complex in Rio de Janeiro in November 2020, according to TV Globo.

Barbieri was arrested in 2017 and was sentenced to 27 years in jail for his involvement in an arms trafficking organization that concealed thousands of weapons in pool heaters that were shipped from Florida to Brazil.

A federal court in Rio de Janeiro first learned of Barbieris early release in January when judge Marcelo Granado, who oversaw his case, had sought additional information on Barbieri and Joao Roza, a second prisoner who also obtained a fake document and was allowed to leave the same prison in October 2020. Rozas prison release was granted October 14.

During a federal court hearing Monday, the Penitentiary Administration Secretariat told Granado that Barbieris release permit had been issued by the 8th Federal Criminal Court of Rio and that he left the prison November 18.

However, the 8th Federal Criminal Court of Rio disputed the Penitentiary Administration Secretariats findings and announced that it had never signed off on Barbieris and Roza's early release.

Criminal defense lawyer Afonso explained to TV Globo that the 8th Federal Criminal Court of Rio did not have the authority to approve the release for Barbieri because his case was not in the court anymore.

Granado has now issued an arrest warrant for Barbieri and Roza.

Joao Barbieri, pictured above during his arrest in August 2018, exited the Bangu Prison Complex in Rio de Janeiro in November 2020, despite only serving only three years of a 27-year sentence for smuggling firearms

Pictured is a shipment of rifles that were seized at Galeao International Airport after agents discovered them inside four water heaters that had been shipped from Miami to Rio de Janeiro in May 2017

A scanner at Galeao International Airport in Rio de Janeiro displays some of the 60 AR-15 and AK-47 that were seized in a shipment sent from Miami to Rio de Janeiro by a firearms smuggling ring

Barbieri, who had been in custody since August 2017, is the stepson of Frederick 'Lord of the Arms' Barbieri, who in July 2018 received a 13-year prison sentence in Florida for smuggling more than 1,000 firearms from Miami to Rio de Janeiro.

Federal prosecutors learned that the senior Barbieri, a Brazilian national who later became a naturalized American citizen, shipped military-style rifles with their serial numbers removed and that guns were also sold to drug traffickers and gangs in favelas or slums.

Frederick Barbieri caught the attention of U.S. federal agents after a shipment of four water heaters with 60 AR-15 and AK-47 rifles was busted at Galeao International Airport in Rio de Janeiro in May 2017.

Joao Barbieri walked out of the Bangu Prison Complex (pictured) with a fake document that approved his early release in November 2020 after having served three years of a 27-year sentence for weapons smuggling
Can cats talk? Of course they can  and I speak as someone with extensive experience of felines. I consider myself something of a cat whisperer  a skill that that comes from 63 years of devoted cat companionship.

I like to think that Ted Platell, my rescue cat, and I understand each other. He knows I love and worship the ground his four paws gently pad on, and he has devised a language that lets me know exactly what he's thinking and wants.

Pleasure, pain, annoyance  a cute little trill that tells me it's time for his evening treat, and another more shrill one reserved for mention of visits to the 'vee - ee - tee'. Yes I'd say we understand each other perfectly.

But what animal lover wouldn't love to know what their pet is really thinking? Wouldn't we love to hear them articulate their thoughts? To hear an 'I love you so much, Mummy' as they stare dreamily into your eyes, while receiving a blissful head rub and scratch behind the ears?

I like to think that Ted Platell, my rescue cat, and I understand each other. He knows I love and worship the ground his four paws gently pad on, and he has devised a language that lets me know exactly what he's thinking and wants

Pleasure, pain, annoyance  a cute little trill that tells me it's time for his evening treat, and another more shrill one reserved for mention of visits to the 'vee - ee - tee'. Yes I'd say we understand each other perfectly. Pictured: Amanda with her cat Ted

Well, we're one step closer. No, I can't expect a Mr Ed-style 'what time do you call this, woman, my bowl has been empty for hours,' from Ted, as I creep in after a long day at the office, but I can, apparently, get a rough translation of some of his purrs, growls and mews.

It comes in the form of a new app called MeowTalk from the computer geek, engineer (and devoted cat lover) Javier Sanchez, the brains behind Amazon Alexa, that is attempting to interpret and translate cat speak into human language. All you have to do is record your cat's meowings into your smartphone and the app interprets them into 13 different sentences.

They are: 'I'm hungry,' 'I'm happy', 'I'm angry', 'Leave me alone', 'I'm in love', 'Feed me', 'Let me out', 'Let me in,' 'I'm going to attack', 'Hello there', 'I'm hunting,' 'I'm in pain', and 'I'm resting'.

I can, apparently, get a rough translation of some of his purrs, growls and mews. It comes in the form of a new app called MeowTalk from the computer geek, engineer (and devoted cat lover) Javier Sanchez

Unlike their human servants, cats do not share a common language. Each animal's meow is unique, so instead of a generic database for cat sounds, the app's translation differs with each profile.

It is hoped that over time, as the makers of the app pool responses, the various interpretations will allow humans a broader understanding of the communication abilities of man's second favourite companion.

Needless to say I was very excited to give it a go (with Ted's full co-operation, naturally).

But my first skerrick of doubt? Thirteen sentences? That's the vocabulary of a snail!

My Ted is way brighter than that, and I'm desperate to prove the sceptics (OK, dog lovers  animal affiliations tend to be divided along very strict cat/dog lines) wrong. For too long, dog owners have trumpeted their species' superiority, their empathy, their unconditional affection, while cats have been dismissed as intellectually and emotionally inferior and aloof.

Which is, of course, piffle. I mean, if cats were so moronic, why would Cleopatra and the ancient Egyptians have chosen their felines to be buried alongside them for the afterlife? If nothing else, for a bit of good chat. They didn't choose to spend eternity with a drooling Fido, now did they? Conscious of my late mother's saying that 'a house is not a home without a cat', I've shared my life with a succession of felines, firstly in my native Australia and throughout the 35 years I've lived in London.

But my first skerrick of doubt? Thirteen sentences? That's the vocabulary of a snail! My Ted is way brighter than that, and I'm desperate to prove the sceptics (OK, dog lovers  animal affiliations tend to be divided along very strict cat/dog lines) wrong

I purchased two tiny ginger moggies from a filthy pet shop in Islington, North London, for a fiver, when I first moved here. Bruvvers they were and so were named Ronnie and Reggie, the Claw Brothers.

After they passed away, the castaway Jimmy entered my life. Then, after he ate his last prawn nine years ago, my mate Ted, a mangy white and ginger moggy kitten I rescued from Battersea Dogs & Cats Home, moved into my cottage.

A brief word at this point about Ted Platell: he has every right to be angry, and if he could, I'm sure he'd have an awful lot to say about his start in life, having been subjected to a South London gang initiation ceremony as a tiny kitten.

Holding him by his little paws, they immersed him in boiling water up to his armpits, then cut The Cross of St George into his tummy. Common practice in those parts, the Battersea staff told me at the time.

Somehow, he survived and a kindly (or complicit) young woman knocked on the rescue centre door late at night and flung a bleeding and burnt Ted through the doorway.

Neither his fur nor his bare tummy has ever quite recovered from that cruelty. And yet despite his traumatic beginning, Ted loves people.

He waits at the front door for ten minutes for his human friends to arrive, somehow anticipating their arrival with soft little meows. I am not making this up, ask my friend and colleague Andrew Pierce, who is a constant recipient of Ted's love and trust.

After they passed away, the castaway Jimmy entered my life. Then, after he ate his last prawn nine years ago, my mate Ted, a mangy white and ginger moggy kitten I rescued from Battersea Dogs & Cats Home, moved into my cottage

A brief word at this point about Ted Platell: he has every right to be angry, and if he could, I'm sure he'd have an awful lot to say about his start in life, having been subjected to a South London gang initiation ceremony as a tiny kitten

He just knows, intuits somehow, that Andrew's on the way, and he's there, waiting for him at the door for us to share a socially distanced hello. Ted likes tinned tuna, spring water not sunflower oil, and prefers eating it from a wine glass not a plate, scooping out each delicious morsel with his paw. He lingers over it as one might a special Cabernet Sauvignon.

So could this new app capture such a fine mind, and shine a light into his complex thought processes? I download it to find out and, as instructed, place the mobile under said cat's nose each time it 'speaks', to record the conversation.

At first, every meow is translated by MeowTalk as: 'I am angry.' I persevere, following Ted around the cottage, phone in hand.

I capture his little chirrups when his second favourite human, Andrew, arrives for a brief, distanced doorstep chat. Once more, MeowTalk says: 'I am angry.' Now I know that is not true or fair. Ted is also the least grumpy little guy in England, so when almost every meow is translated as 'I am angry,' I start to worry.

Could it be ... shudder... that Ted secretly hates me? That he's only in this relationship for the tuna, after all?

At first, every meow is translated by MeowTalk as: 'I am angry.' I persevere, following Ted around the cottage, phone in hand

No, it occurs to me. Ted simply hates being followed around the house by me with a phone under his nose! At 5am, with Ted prancing on my bed, meowing softly, which I manage to capture without him noticing, I suddenly start to feel a little more relieved.

'I love you,' says the app, which is nice to hear, even at that unearthly hour, but what I really think he's trying to say is: 'I forgot to go before I went to bed and need a pee. I'm now in my mid-50s in human years, and my bladder isn't what it was.'

When that plaintiff little meow at bedtime, which he uses to remind me of that special time of night, when he gets his favourite Dreamies treat, comes back as 'I'm in pain,' I realise what an impatient little chap he is and jump to the task immediately.

And maybe Ted's displays of anger could be put down to simple exuberence: a loud cry as he rips my Spurs scarf to bits is interpretted by the app as anger, when I know he just wants to play. Cat playtime is just a dress rehearsal to actual killing, after all. I'm starting to think Mr Sanchez might be onto something ... how long before Ted and I are enjoying real conversations?

Dr Sarah Ellis, Head of Cat Advocacy for International Cat Care, says I shouldn't look too forensically at Ted's emotions, as interpreted by science.

Neither his fur nor his bare tummy has ever quite recovered from that cruelty. And yet despite his traumatic beginning, Ted loves people. He waits at the front door for ten minutes for his human friends to arrive, somehow anticipating their arrival with soft little meows

We are, and probably always will be, a long way from deciphering their minds: 'Without the visual clues of seeing the cat in the context that causes the specific meow and the accompanying behaviour and body language, we perform only just above chance at identifying the correct context in which a meow vocalisation occurs. They simply don't all sound the same.'

So, as any cat lover of long standing knows, they are as individual as people. And, she says, a cat's meows can change as they get older and then there's the added confusion that they 'speak' differently to different people.

Britain's foremost cat behavioural expert and our bestselling feline author, Vicky Halls, agrees although she can see the appeal of the app.

And while Vicky accepts many of us are guilty of anthropomorphism, attributing human thoughts and feelings to animals, 'it tends to lead to a lot of misunderstanding  animals are not people!'

'Although the concept of owners projecting their own anxieties and personalities on their cats is not something that has been researched specifically, from my own experience I would say that it is not uncommon for people to make the assumption that their cats have similar thoughts and feelings to their own.'

Regarding the concept of MeowTalk, she says: 'Understanding cats isn't really about trying to translate the sounds they make into our own language.

'We need to work harder to learn how to understand the multiple ways that cats communicate their needs and emotions. We desperately want to discover some kind of link between cats and humans, some way of understanding them and them understanding us.'

While MeowTalk sounds great fun  and it is  Vicky believes we should perhaps spend a little more time learning the intricacies of cat language rather than trying to turn it into human speak.

Moggies like Ted refuse to be adorned and would not countenance what he would consider to be a naff necklace

'To try to interpret their intelligence from a human perspective rather misses the point. No cat can be reduced to an app.'

To his credit, Sanchez says his new invention is a work in progress and even at this crude stage it is enormously entertaining, especially as you can override its interpretation and add any translation you like from the chosen 13.

Meanwhile, he is using the information gathered by people using his app, recording and labeling cat sounds, to develop more sophisticated software to better understand and interpret each individual cat's voice and extend their human vocabulary.

His ultimate goal is to develop a cat collar with a soundbox attached which translates the wearer's meows into human speak.

Which sounds pretty creepy, not to say impractical. Moggies like Ted refuse to be adorned and would not countenance what he would consider to be a naff necklace. He'd have a collar off in five minutes, as quickly as he smashed off the cones of shame the vets attempted to get him to wear to stop scratching his bare belly.

Ted prancing around in a human voice-transmitting cat collar?

Now that really would make him angry.

Houston Police Assistant Chief Sheryl Victorian has been selected to lead the Waco Police Department, officials announced.

Waco City Manager Bradley Ford said his recommendation  which must be approved by the Waco City Council next week  came after a five-month search, with more than 40 applicants from 17 states.

Sheryls depth of hands-on management experience, her educational background and her support for innovative programs all stood out, Ford said, in a news release this week. Sheryl shared our communitys vision for a leader who embraces continuous improvement, community policing and a commitment to serving and protecting all of our citizens.

In a statement, Victorian said it was a privilege to be considered to lead Wacos department.

Maintaining the trust of the community, adopting and improving our department to meet the changing needs and demands of policing and keeping our officers and citizens safe are my objectives from day one if council approves my selection, she said. It would be an honor to lead the department and I look forward to working proactively to keep Waco a great community to work, live and raise a family.

Breaking barriers: HPD captain promotions set to be most diverse group ever

Victorians selection marks the latest move for a woman who broke barriers while at the Houston Police Department. Victorian joined the police department in 1993. She started at Southeast Patrol Division, and over the course of her career, served stints at the Training Division, Special Victims, Juvenile, Internal Affairs, Major Offenders, Homicide.

When she was promoted to captain (now known as commander) she was assigned to South Central. At the time, just two other Black women had held that rank. Soon after  in 2017  Chief Art Acevedo selected her to join the highest ranks within the department, as an assistant chief.

She graduated from Texas Southern University with a bachelors degree in public affairs, went on to earn a masters degree in criminal justice from The University of Houston-Downtown, and then returned to Texas Southern University to pursue a doctorate degree in administration of justice.

If Victorians selection is approved next week, she will become Wacos first female and first Black police chief. (Nationally, women make up about 15 percent of local police officers and and only about 3 percent of local police chiefs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.)

Karen Warren, Staff Photographer / Houston Chronicle

In an interview, Victorian said the selection said a lot about Wacos values, and that she hoped she could inspire other women and people of color to pursue higher heights in public safety.

Related: New Houston ISD police chief takes oath

Chief Art Acevedo described Victorian as a phenomenal leader, saying Wacos gain is Houstons loss.

Ive often said the greatest challenge in American policing isnt with officers themselves, he said. Its the leaders. And Im proud Dr. Victorian is going to be chief. She's going to be a great leader for Waco.

Victorians promotion also reflects the chiefs philosophy of making agreements with those he promotes to the assistant chief level that they only have a few years before they must find jobs elsewhere. Victorians departure will mark the third time in recent years that members of the Houston Police Departments senior leadership have left to lead other departments.

To me being a police chief is like being a coach, Acevedo said. You want your assistant coaches to go on to lead their own teams.  It brings me great joy to see people Ive had the honor of working with get their own departments and make their marks.

In May of 2020, former chief Pete Lopez left HPD to become chief of the Houston ISD Police Department. A few months later, in October, Assistant Chief Henry Gaw also resigned from the department, to become chief of the Katy ISD Police Department. And Assistant Chief Wendy Baimbridge was one of several finalists considered to lead the Fort Worth Police Department.
Covid jabs are safe for BAME people, England's deputy chief medical officer insisted today as he slammed social media scare stories as 'nonsense'.

Professor Jonathan Van-Tam revealed in a Q&A about the coronavirus vaccines that he was concerned uptake is lower and slower in ethnic minority groups.

The Government has repeatedly been warned that black, Asian and other minorities are likely to be less willing to get a vaccine. No10 has been told to step up its efforts to reach people who are concerned about the side effects of the vaccine.

Historic racism and unequal treatment from the NHS have been blamed by SAGE for the divide, along with religion or culture-specific claims about the ingredients in the vaccines  for example that it contains animal products banned in Islam or Judaism, which is untrue. None of those used in the UK contain animal products.

Professor Van-Tam said it was vital everyone gets the vaccine when they are offered it because coronavirus 'doesn't care about the colour of your skin'.

Vaccines will have the biggest effect on getting life back to normal if the majority of the population gets them, which should cause Covid hospital admissions and deaths to plummet in the coming months.

So far, 12.7million people across the UK have had their first dose  around one in five adults  and the NHS is on track to hit 15m by next Monday.

Professor Jonathan Van-Tam, England's deputy chief medical officer, is of Vietnamese descent on his father's side, though he was born in Boston, Lincolnshire

Professor Van-Tam said today: 'I have concerns uptake in the minority ethnic groups is not going to be as rapid or as high as in the indigenous white population of the UK.

'And this really concerns me, because the big message I have for everyone listening is that this virus just doesn't care what ethnic background you're from.

'It just doesn't care about the colour of your skin or where you live in the world or any of these things, it just cares that you're a human being, that you don't have immunity and that you're susceptible.

'This is really worrying, it's a massive concern to people who are older and people who have higher risk conditions. The virus does not discriminate.'

Professor Van-Tam insisted vaccines were safe for black, Asian and minority ethnic communities, saying that with more than 12million vaccines administered across the UK 'we're getting to a point where, if we were going to see any kind of safety signal, it would be pretty obvious by now'.

HACKNEY VACCINE CENTRE REDUCES HOURS DUE TO LOW UPTAKE A Covid vaccination centre in London has had to reduce its opening hours because not enough people are coming forward for the jab. The John Scott inoculation hub in Hackney, East London, claimed 'really slow patient uptake' forced it to close at 2pm on three days last week. The centre, which is open to patients from 40 GP surgeries, had been administering vaccines from 10am until 8pm every day until the sudden drop-off in appointments. Health chiefs fear vaccine hesitancy among black, Asian and ethnic minority (BAME) groups is behind the poor uptake in the diverse inner London borough. Around 45 per cent of Hackney's population is made up of people from BAME backgrounds, predominantly of black African or Caribbean ethnicity. Numerous surveys have shown minorities - who studies have shown are up to three times as likely to die from Covid - are more reluctant to get the jabs due to a mistrust in the Government. And a report over the weekend suggested twice as many white over-80s had been for a jab compared to elderly black Britons. Dame Donna Kinnair, chief executive and general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing said officials had been too slow to shut down anti-vaxx myths online. She said: 'I think they [anti-vaxx rumours] have been around for a long time and I believe that we as community leaders or clinical leaders have been slow to react to them.' Advertisement

He said polling showed that 'vaccine confidence is generally really high in the UK compared to many parts of the world, and the enthusiasm and likelihood that people are going to accept Covid-19 vaccines when called is super high'.

He added: 'People get it that this virus is horrible and kills you  particularly if you're in a high risk group or elderly group  with ease.'

SAGE has warned the Government that getting high vaccine uptake among ethnic minorities will be tricky and that the NHS must make extra efforts with hard-to-reach communities.

In a paper released publicly in January, Government advisers warned that more than half of black people could turn them down, SAGE has warned.

Scientists told ministers that vaccine uptake in the past has been lower among ethnic minorities.

And they said extra effort should be made to improve this now because of the desperate need to get as many people as possible vaccinated against coronavirus.

Low trust in the health service or scientists, fears about safety and difficulty getting access to vaccines have blighted acceptance rates in black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) communities, researchers said.

Further complicating the problem is the fact that the same ethnic groups are more likely to die of Covid-19 than white people, so it is extra important that they get a jab.

SAGE said ministers should make sure there is equal access to for vaccines for all ethnic groups and cultures, and that efforts should be made to produce 'culturally relevant' advice, get local community leaders to help explain the science and tackle people's concerns, and make sure everything is available in multiple languages.

Writing in the report, SAGE members said: 'Within previous national vaccination programmes in the UK, reported vaccine uptake has been lower in areas with a higher proportion of minority ethnic group populations.

'There is a significant risk that vaccine uptake for Covid-19 will also be lower among minority ethnic groups.

'Barriers to uptake must be understood and addressed within the Covid-19 vaccination programme.'

The scientists included results from the UK Household Longitudinal Study, which is run by the University of Essex.

The study showed that a shocking 71.8 per cent of black people said they were unlikely to get a Covid vaccine if they were offered one.

Black and black British was the group least accepting of a vaccine, the survey found, but 42 per cent of people of Pakistani or Bangladeshi descent and 32 per cent of mixed race people said the same thing.

By comparison, other Asian people - including ethnic groups from the Far East and the Middle East - had the lowest levels of scepticism, with 86 per cent saying they would be likely to get a jab.

This put them ahead of white British people, on 84 per cent. Non British white people were slightly more sceptical, with 26 per cent saying they would be unlikely to get vaccinated.

Lashing out at social media myths about vaccines, Professor Van-Tam said today that people should stick to getting important information from doctors and scientists.

He said the vast majority of people would prefer to take their vaccine advice from trusted sources rather than 'some of the nonsense that is circulated on social media'.

Professor Van-Tam added: 'If my central heating system breaks down I'm going to call a heating engineer to explain to me what's wrong and what needs to be fixed I'm not going to ask a brain surgeon.

'So why would you go to those kind of sources of information when you have really readily accessible good sources from trusted voices in the NHS?

'Your own health professionals that you know and see periodically throughout your life?'

A paper presented to the Government by SAGE included the results of a survey which showed a shocking 71.8 per cent of Black people said they were unlikely to get a Covid-19 vaccine if offered one

The expert medic also condemned 'nasty, pernicious' scare stories circulating on social media about the potential impact of Covid vaccines on fertility.

'I have never heard of a vaccine that affects fertility,' he said. 'I was discussing this only yesterday with the chief medical officer [Professor Chris Whitty].

'We recognise that this is a nasty, pernicious scare story, but that's all it is.

'It is deliberately designed to target people's worries and their aspirations in life. It's completely and utterly groundless.'

Asked about the study carried out in South Africa which showed low efficacy for the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine for mild disease, Professor Van-Tam said it should be interpreted with caution.

'I'm not sure that really tells us about whether the vaccine is still going to be really important in terms of protection against severe disease and protection in an older age group, and they're the people who are most at risk,' he said.

'It would be a very, very big public health win indeed if all of the vaccines that we're deploying simply stop people going into hospital, even if they don't flatten the infection rate. That would be a major, major public health victory.'

On whether mandatory vaccination would tackle low uptake in certain groups, Prof Van-Tam said: 'While it sounds very attractive, on the face of it  'let's make something mandatory'  but what you do is you also create resistance.'

It comes as the Royal College of Physicians is urging people not to share 'dangerous' videos claiming steam inhalation can prevent Covid-19.

The BBC reported that alternative 'treatments' are being sent on apps such as WhatsApp, as well as being widely available on social media.
Eight minority correctional officers at a Minnesota county jail filed a racial discrimination lawsuit claiming they were barred from guarding the former Minneapolis police officer charged in George Floyd's death.

The suit, filed Tuesday in state district court, alleges that a superintendent at the Ramsey County Adult Detention Center, or ADC, in St. Paul reassigned officers of color to another floor when the former officer, Derek Chauvin, was arrested on murder charges in May.

The suit says the officers  who identify as African American, Hispanic, Pacific Islander and mixed-race  were "segregated and prevented from doing their jobs by defendant solely because of the color of their skin."

The officers also claim that Chauvin received special treatment from a white lieutenant.

"When Officer Chauvin arrived, they were prepared to do the jobs they had done every single day up to that point, until, that is, Superintendent Lydon's order prevented them from doing so," the officers' attorney, Lucas Kaster, said at a news conference Tuesday, referring to jail Supt. Steve Lydon.

IMAGE: Ramsey County Law Enforcement Center (Stephen Maturen / Getty Images file)

"The impact on our clients has been immense. They're deeply humiliated and distressed, and the bonds necessary within the high-stress and high-pressure environment of the ADC have been broken," he said.

Chauvin was arrested and charged with second-degree murder and manslaughter four days after video recorded on May 25 showed him kneeling on Floyd's neck for about nine minutes as Floyd repeatedly said he could not breathe.

The lawsuit says the correctional officers were performing their regular duties at the jail when they were informed that they would be reassigned because of Chauvin's arrival.

The suit claims that Lydon ordered that all minority officers were not allowed to guard Chauvin or interact with him or to even be on the fifth floor, where Chauvin was held.

The officers were "extremely upset and offended," the lawsuit says.

One of the plaintiffs, Devin Sullivan, regularly processes and books high-profile inmates. The suit alleges that he was in the middle of patting down Chauvin when Lydon told him to stop and replaced him with a white officer.

The suit also says two other officers saw on security cameras that a white lieutenant "was granted special access" to Chauvin. The lieutenant was allowed access to Chauvin's cell unit, sat on his bed, patted his back "while appearing to comfort him" and let Chauvin use a cellphone.

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Several of the minority officers asked to speak with Lydon, who "denied he was racist and defended his decision."

The Ramsey County Sheriff's Office did not return a request for comment Tuesday, and Lydon could not be reached at numbers listed for him.

In June, the plaintiffs filed discrimination charges with the state Department of Human Rights. Kaster told the Star Tribune newspaper of Minneapolis that the case never gained traction, so attorneys requested that it be closed so they could pursue legal action.

Kaster said at Tuesday's news conference that his clients sued to hold Lydon and Ramsey County "responsible for the discrimination that occurred under their watch."

According to the Star Tribune, a spokesman for the sheriff's office initially denied the officers' claims but later acknowledged Lydon's order and said Lydon had been temporarily demoted while the department conducted an internal investigation. The outcome of the investigation was not clear.

In a statement that he gave during the investigation and that the sheriff's office provided to the Star Tribune, Lydon said he was trying to "protect and support" minority employees by shielding them from Chauvin.

Kaster said Tuesday that Lydon's explanation was never given to his clients and that it was provided only after the fact.
Our most important partner in Indo-Pacific Region: US on India

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

New Delhi, Feb 10: The United States called India as one of the most important partners in the Indo-Pacific Region and welcomed New Delhi's emergence as a leading global power.

US State Department spokesperson Ned Price during a press briefing said, India is one of the most important partners in the Indo-Pacific region to us. We welcome India's emergence as a leading global power and its role as a net security provider in the region.

"We cooperate on a wide range of diplomatic and security issues, including defense, non-proliferation, regional cooperation in the Indo-Pacific, counter-terrorism, peacekeeping, environment, health, education, technology, agriculture, space and oceans and that list is not exhaustive," he also said.

PM Modi speaks to US President Biden; Discuss security in Indo-Pacific region, climate change

Price welcomed India's tenure at the United Nations Security Council as a non-permanent member and said that the US remains India's largest trading partners. While mentioning the conversation between US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, the spokesperson said, Secretary Blinken today spoke with his Indian counterpart Foreign Minister Jaishankar. I think I would start by saying that the US-India comprehensive strategic partnership is both broad as well as multifaceted. We will continue to engage at the highest levels of pour government to deepen cooperation on many fronts and we are confident that the strong and upward trajectory of our partnership will continue.

Twitter blocks portion of accounts, cites free speech | OneIndia News

We are closely monitoring the situation. We know the ongoing talks between governments of India and China and we continue to support direct dialogue and a peaceful resolution of those border disputes," he said while commenting on the India-China border dispute.

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Story first published: Wednesday, February 10, 2021, 8:43 [IST]
LOS ANGELES, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- "10 Soups For All," a cookbook authored by Chef Damien Pierre released on all online reading platforms including a Spanish version "10 Sopas Para Todas" to connect more emotionally with the community he serves. Dami's Famous Foods currently operates as a delivery service throughout the week on DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub and a vendor at the local Brentwood Farmers market every Sunday. He takes pride in serving during these troubling times. He shares his booth amongst other vendors of different ethnicities  Latinx to be the majority.

10 Soups for All (Spanish) 10 Soups for All (English)

During these unprecedented times, one thing that can be seen in every household to bring a family together is a good soup that represents each culture. Chef Pierre's recipe for Cow Heel Soup, a staple in many caribbean households used to treat cold and flu-like symptoms and bring comfort during cold weather conditions, is amongst the ethnic dishes featured in the cookbook. Chef Pierre's roots and upbringing play a big role in the creation and inspiration for this culinary compilation. Each soup featured in the book extends from the diverse community that exists in the Los Angeles area and is meant to familiarize the palette, making it an enjoyable and resonating experience for all.

"The release of this book derives from my childhood, being born in Brooklyn, NY, growing up in South Florida, having friends who are of Latino-Caribbean descent, and relocating to Los Angeles," explained Dami's Foods Owner Damien Pierre. "Just because you don't speak the same language as certain cultures doesn't mean you can't reach or connect with them in other ways."

The spanish version of Chef Damien Pierre's book, "10 Sopas Para Todas," can be purchased on Apple, Barnes and Noble (NOOK), Kobo here , and the english version "Ten Soups For All" can be downloaded here . Both versions can be purchased on Amazon here .

Photos - www.damien-pierre.com/damis-books

MEDIA CONTACT:

Crystal Greer / 310-500-5425 / [email protected]

Social Media

Twitter: www.twitter.com/damisfoods

Instagram: www.instagram.com/damisfoods

Facebook: www.facebook.com/damisfoods

About Damien-Pierre

Damien started Dami's Famous Foods in October 2015 and released its first product, Dami's Famous BBQ sauce, in October of 2015. He currently operates a delivery service through DoorDash, Grubhub, and Uber Eats, authors cookbooks, and is developing more products to offer. Damien credits his Caribbean roots as the reason he cooks with a fusion twist. Learn more at damisfoods.com .

SOURCE Dami's Famous Foods

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Macro 4?s new out-of-the-box self-service portal caters to rising demand from companies that are fast-tracking digital initiatives

Crawley, UK, February 9, 2021 ? Macro 4, a division of UNICOM? Global, has launched an out-of-the-box self-service portal that companies can set up within days to give their customers secure online access to information and documents relating to their customer journeys.

The new Columbus portal allows businesses to avoid the effort, costs and risks of using an internal or external web development team to create their own self-service portal from scratch.

Macro 4 has seen a surge in demand for self-service portal solutions as companies fast-track their digital initiatives during the pandemic to provide a better experience for the growing number of customers who are interacting with businesses online.

?Online self-service is an obvious way to relieve the pressure on contact centers and other frontline teams who are handling increasing volumes of customer queries now that less business is conducted face to face,? said Darren Jack, Technical Services Manager at Macro 4. ?The key to doing this successfully is to make sure your self-service portal is easy to use, and gives customers fast access to the information they need, including all correspondence, and important documents such as orders, bills, statements, and so on.

?But many first-generation portal systems are struggling to cope with the explosion in online traffic and they can also be more difficult to use, particularly on mobile devices. Security weaknesses are another common issue. The need to address these problems quickly has accelerated the trend towards ?short, sharp? projects that can be completed in a matter of days ? with companies opting for customizable off-the-shelf software like ours to deliver a high-quality, branded customer experience with minimal effort.?

Businesses are seeking to improve the breadth and depth of information available on their portals in order to increase customer engagement, as well as reduce the need for in-person or phone contact. Additionally, they are using portals as a more secure way of sharing confidential information with teams in different physical locations.

?Particularly in the current climate, with so many businesses working from home, it?s no longer practical for accountancy firms to send confidential audit reports by post, for example. Companies need a way to make large, complex documents like these easy to access and work with online, without compromising security by emailing them. Our Columbus self-service portal provides a fast and flexible solution to support this kind of requirement,? said Darren Jack.

To meet the needs of remote workers, many companies are also setting up portals catering to employees. For example, human resources portals are improving access to information such as payslips, employee contracts and absence records, both for staff who need secure online access to their own information and for HR teams, who can no longer rely on their paper records.

Strong portal security and enhanced protection for personal and confidential data are priorities as companies face increasing cyber threats and compliance challenges. Macro 4?s self-service portal is underpinned by Columbus DW, the company?s enterprise content management system, which provides encrypted and tamper-evident data storage as well as allowing redaction, strong user authentication, granular access controls, access monitoring and information lifecycle management to enable compliance with the GDPR and industry-specific regulations.

An integrated identity and access management system identifies and authenticates portal users and controls the information that individuals are allowed to access. The Macro 4 system also helps businesses to streamline the onboarding process, which can be a significant challenge when enrolling large numbers of new portal users. For example, once customers have registered for online access they can be automatically sent an email including login information and a link to the portal.

Customers can access information they are authorized to view using any device with a web browser. Internal employees can be given access to the same information through a separate browser interface or on a mobile app.

Importantly, companies are able to customize the Macro 4 system to create a branded portal to suit their own needs, with flexibility about what information is presented and how. The portal can be embedded within an existing website or operate as a standalone site, with the option to include additional useful resources, such as employee contact lists and FAQs, and links to other web pages. The look and feel of the system can be tailored to match the branding of the business so customers have a seamless experience as they move between the portal and other parts of the company website.
The Advisor of the Syrian National Reconciliation has lambasted Turkeys medical initiative in northern Syria, writes North Press.

Turkeys initiative to open a college and health institute in northern Syria is a dirty initiative, according to the Advisor of the Syrian National Reconciliation.

Salim al-Kharrat described the step as a confirmation of the occupation of Syrian territories. The Turkish initiative took place as a consecration of the demographic change policy, which the Turkish regime has been following in its held-areas in Syria.

Al-Kharrats words came in an exclusive statement to North Press, commenting on the Turkish presidents decree to open a medical faculty and a health institute in al-Rai town, Aleppo northern countryside.

It is clear and obvious that Syria rejects any initiative by Turkey because it presents the dirty intentions against Syria, al-Kharrat added.

The aggressor and the occupied Turkey confirms its occupation and tries to beautify that through false fake projects that have been already rejected, he stated.

Such a step is considered a flagrant violation of international law and the United Nations Charter, al-Kharrat noted.

This event represents the continuation of the Turkish regimes obstinacy to flare up and prolong the crisis in Syria through supporting all mercenary forces such as the Muslim Brotherhood and their groups, the Islamic State (ISIS), al-Nusra and Turkistan, according to al-Kharrat.

This is a sample of a new occupation and settlement represented in the Turkish occupier in a time when all conferences and meetings, especially those have been held in Astana and Sochi, stressed the respect of the Syrian state, land and people, in addition to recognizing its sovereignty, he concluded.

On February 7, SANA quoted the Syrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates that the Turkish decision to open a college and institute in a town north Aleppo, is a flagrant violation of international law.

Syria rejects the Turkish regimes decision to open a college and institute in a town north Aleppo altogether, an official source from the Syrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates said.

This article was edited by The Syrian Observer. The Syrian Observer has not verified the content of this story. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author.
Kurt Miller

Miller is the executive director of Northwest RiverPartners, a Vancouver- based nonprofit organization that advocates for hydropower.

Could Idaho Rep. Mike Simpsons ambitious proposal for ending the decades-long dispute over salmon and the four lower Snake River dams bring peace in our time?

Simpson, a Republican representing Idahos 2nd Congressional District, unveiled his proposal last Saturday for a $33.5 billion Columbia Basin Fund to pay for breaching the lower Snake River hydroelectric dams.

Envisioned as part of a multitrillion-dollar climate stimulus package that the Biden Administration is expected to offer later this year, the fund would aim to replace the lost power from breaching the dams with other forms of clean energy and energy storage. The fund would also try to compensate communities that depend on the dams for irrigation, barging of grain and other agricultural products along the river and other activities.

Hopefully, the magnitude of the proposed fund puts to rest the question of whether those dams bring great value to the region.

Simpsons noble goal is to create more financial security and maintain electric reliability for all of our regions hydropower customers, while ushering back robust salmon populations to Idaho.

Northwest RiverPartners has long-opposed breaching valuable, carbon-free, hydropower dams like the four lower Snake projects. Because these dams already allow a significant number of salmon to pass upstream and downstream, the case for breaching them in order to recover salmon populations lacks the scientific evidence required to justify the inevitable financial hardships that would result. Even Simpson admits he doesnt know if healthy salmon populations will return as a result of his plan.

A 2020 federal study showed that the energy replacement costs, alone, could result in an immediate 25% increase in electricity bills for public power customers. Those negative impacts would be most deeply felt by the regions vulnerable populations, who already struggle with an outsized energy burden.

At the same time, we recognize that if Congress ultimately decides the dams must go, it only makes sense for the federal government to mitigate the economic blow.

This is where Simpson has made a big difference in the conversation. The region has been bogged down in an unfruitful debate over whether the lower Snake River dams are valuable to the Pacific Northwest. Some anti-dam groups have felt the only way to get the dams out is to attack their value to our communities.

The $33-billion-plus proposal, which many anti-dam groups are backing, sets a sincere baseline for the value these dams bring to our region. In truth, even this massive expenditure may not be adequate, but Simpsons proposal allows diverse stakeholder groups to finally engage in honest conversations and focus on our shared concernsthe environment, salmon, clean energy and communities.

With Simpsons proposal a mere concept at this point, there are many unanswered questions.

For example, a growing body of science points to warming, acidifying oceans as the driving factor behind worldwide declines in marine fish populations, including salmon. Breaching carbon-free hydropower dams wont address this problem.

It is also clear this is an expensive and monumental task that will leave many stakeholders wondering if their concerns can and will be addressed with sufficient federal fundingfunding that depends on Congressional approval.

There are significant reasons not to fall in love at first sight with the Simpson plan, but we see this as an opportunity for the regions diverse stakeholders to begin a sincere conversation, study the issues and carefully listen to one another. That is a welcome change.

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Bollywood star Salman Khan on Tuesday apologised for 'mistakenly' submitting a false affidavit in the Jodhpur session court in 2003, during his hearing in a case related to the poaching of two blackbucks in Jodhpur in 1998.

The final verdict in the case will be pronounced on Thursday.

Salman Khan appeared before the Jodhpur session court for the hearing of his appeal against conviction in the blackbuck poaching case through video conferencing. His lawyer Hastimal Saraswat told the court that the affidavit was mistakenly submitted to the court on August 8, 2003, for which the actor should be forgiven.

During the hearing, Saraswat said, "The affidavit was mistakenly given on August 8, 2003, as Salman had forgotten that his licence was given for renewal because he was too busy. Therefore, he mentioned that the licence had gone missing in the court."

Salman Khan was arrested in 1998 for hunting two blackbucks in Kankani village near Jodhpur. At that time, a case under Arms Act was registered against him and the court had asked him to submit his arms licence.

Salman Khan gave an affidavit in the court in 2003, saying that he had lost the licence. He also lodged an FIR at the Bandra police station in Mumbai in this connection.

However, the court later came to know that Salman's arm licence was not lost, but had been submitted for renewal.

Public prosecutor Bhavani Singh Bhati had then demanded that a case of misleading the court should be filed against the actor.

A trial court in 2018 had convicted Salman and awarded five-year imprisonment to him for the killing of two black bucks during the shooting of the film 'Hum Saath Saath Hain' in October 1998. The actor had challenged the trial court verdict in the sessions court. Salman's fellow actors Saif Ali Khan, Tabu, Neelam and Sonali Bendre, who were present on the spot in Kankani along with him, have been acquitted.
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A dramatic aerial shot of a line of fire tearing through the Australian landscape has won the people's choice award in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year contest.

The drone image of bushfire in northern Australia captured by Robert Irwin, son of wildlife conservationist Steve Irwin, received 55,486 votes from around the world to win the annual international competition by the Natural History Museum.

The shot and four others emerged as favourites after some 25 images were chosen out of 49,000 submissions. The five images will go on display until August 1 2021 at the Natural History Museum in London.

The four highly commended images that won over the public include Ami Vitale's portrayal of a bond between ranger and rhino before the animal dies, in 'the last goodbye', and the wintry portrait of a mountain hare taken in Scotland's Cairngorms National Park by Andy Parkinson, from Derbyshire.

A dramatic aerial shot of a line of fire tearing through the Australian forests, taken has won the people's choice award in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year contest.

The last goodbye by Ami Vitale, showing Joseph Wachira comforting Sudan, the last male northern white rhino left on the planet, moments before he passed away at Ol Pejeta Wildlife Conservancy in northern Kenya, which was Highly commended 2020 in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year People's Choice Award

Hare Ball by Andy Parkinson, showing a Mountain Hare forming the shape of a ball as it grooms in Cairngorms National Park, Scotland, which was Highly commended 2020 in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year People's Choice Award

Close encounter by Guillermo Esteves, which was Highly commended 2020 in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year People's Choice Award, shows a moose on the side of the road at Antelope Flats in Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming, USA, taking an interest in a dog in a car

Drey dreaming by Neil Anderson, showing an Eurasian red squirrel asleep in a box the photographer Neil had put up in one of the pine trees near his home in the Scottish Highlands. The image was Highly commended 2020 in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year People's Choice Award by the Natural History Museum in London

Resting dragon by Gary Meredith, Australia. The Great Sandy Desert in Western Australia is home to a wide variety of wildlife, which exists alongside man-made mining operations. When the opportunity arises, the long-nosed dragon makes use of human structures. This individual positioned itself on a piece of wire mesh outside a workshop, waiting for the sun's rays

Spirit of Bhutan by Emmanuel Rondeau, France. On assignment for WWF UK, Emmanuel's brief was to photograph the elusive wildlife of the Bhutanese mountains. Surprised to find a rhododendron at an altitude of 3,500 metres (11,500 feet). Weeks after installing a camera trap, he was amazed to find an incredible head-on picture of a takin

Eye to eye by Andrey Shpatak, Russia. This Japanese warbonnet was photographed in the north of the Gulf of Oprichnik in the Sea of Japan. These unusual fish lead a territorial lifestyle among the stones and rocks of shallow coastal waters

Family portrait by Andrew Lee from the United States. Capturing a family portrait of mum, dad and their eight chicks proved tricky for Andrew - they never got together to pose as a perfect 10

Licence to kill by Britta Jaschinski, Germany. Britta's photographs of items seized at airports and borders across the globe are a quest to understand why some individuals continue to demand wildlife products

Baby on the rocks by Frederic Larrey, France. When this six-month-old snow leopard cub wasn't following its mother and copying her movements, it sought protection among the rocks

Life Saver by Sergio Marijuan Campuzano, Spain. As urban areas grow, like Jaen in Spain, threats to wildlife increase, and Iberian lynx have become a casualty of traffic accidents as they too seek to expand their own territories

Turtle time machine by Thomas Peschak, Germany/South Africa. Although green sea turtles are classified as endangered today, at locations like Little Farmer's Cay in the Bahamas, they can be observed with ease. The photographer, Thomas, hopes that this image provides just a glimpse of the bounty our seas once held

Lion king by Wim van den Heever, South Africa. As Wim watched this huge male lion lying on top of a large granite rock, a cold wind picked up and blew across the vast open plains of the Serengeti, Tanzania. As the last rays of sun broke through the cloud, the lion lifted its head and glanced in Wim's direction, giving him the perfect portrait of a perfect moment

Shut the front door by Sam Sloss, Italy/USA. This coconut octopus was spotted walking around the black sand of the Lembeh Strait, Sulawesi carrying its house made of shells. Remarkably, this small octopus constructs its own protective shelter using clam shells, coconuts, and even glass bottles

White danger by Petri Pietilainen, Finland. While on a photography trip to the Norwegian archipelago, Svalbard, Petri had hoped to spot polar bears. When one was sighted in the distance on a glacier, he switched from the main ship to a smaller rubber boat to get a closer look

Drawn and quartered by Laurent Ballesta, France. Scraps of grouper flesh fall from the jaws of two grey reef sharks as they tear the fish apart. The photo was captured near Fakarava Atoll, French Polynesia
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Trump told them to fight like hell, prosecutor says

Democrats on Wednesday began presenting their case in former President Trumps impeachment trial, but faced a steep climb if they hoped to persuade enough Republicans to convict the former president.

With more chilling video footage of last months assault on the Capitol, including plans to show unseen security camera footage, the prosecutors argued that Mr. Trumps false claims about his election loss and fiery language at a rally near the White House provoked the mob of supporters.

The evidence will show that he clearly incited the Jan. 6 insurrection, said Representative Jamie Raskin, the lead impeachment manager. He told them to fight like hell, and they brought us hell that day, he added, calling Mr. Trump the inciter in chief. Follow our updates here.

Republicans: On Tuesday, six Republican senators joined 50 Democrats in voting to proceed with the impeachment trial  a far smaller number than what would be needed to convict Mr. Trump. The six were Senators Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitt Romney of Utah, Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Patrick Toomey of Pennsylvania.
YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 10, ARMENPRESS. Minister of Healthcare Anahit Avanesyan hosted Head of the EU Delegation to Armenia, Ambassador Andrea Wiktorin, the ministry told Armenpress.

The cooperation in the healthcare sector was discussed during the meeting.

Minister Avanesyan thanked for the support provided in particular for fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, including for the arrival of emergency medical teams, as well as for the joint work with the Armenian partners.

The EU Ambassador attached importance to the ongoing joint programs, expressing hope that they will continue.

I hope our cooperation frameworks will not be limited only to solving short-term, very urgent healthcare problems, but we will be able to conduct a comprehensive activity and complete all our joint programs launched in the past, the EU Delegation chief said and was interested in the coronavirus situation in Armenia.

I am happy to note that the coronavirus-related situation in our country is already stable and controllable, but we do not lose vigilance and are working very hard for acquiring the vaccines and starting the vaccination process, the minister said.

Coming to the post-war problems, the EU Ambassador attached importance to the involvement of the ministry of healthcare on these matters. The minister stated that their structure is quite actively participating especially in the rehabilitation programs.

Editing and Translating by Aneta Harutyunyan
New Delhi, Feb 10 : BKU leader Rakesh Tikait has said that the farmer protests would go on indefinitely if the government didn't take back the three contentious farm laws.

"If the government does not accept our demands, we will continue to sit on protest till even 2024," Tikait told IANS.

He further stated "As long as the three farm laws are not taken back, a law on MSP is not made and the Swaminathan Committee report not implemented, we would continue our struggle." Tikait also said that the government was benefiting only the commission agents.

When asked about the inconvenience caused to people of Delhi due to the farmer protests, he said, "People of Delhi themselves are part of this movement."

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text


Madrid, Feb 10 : Spain's overall Covid-19 caseload has increased to 3,005,487 after an additional 16,402 people tested positive for the virus in the lat 24 hours, the Health Ministry said.

In the same period, the country also registered 766 new fatalities, the highest number of deaths in a single day since April 2020, taking the total toll to 63,061, Xinhua news agency quoted the Ministry as saying on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, the incidence rate of the virus has continued to fall, dropping from 667.33 cases per 100,000 inhabitants on Monday to 630 cases on Tuesday.

A total of 2,167,241 coronavirus vaccine doses have already been administered in Spain.

The regional health authorities have also started to use the 196,800 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine that arrived in the country over the weekend.

For now, this vaccine will only be administered to people in the 18 to 55 age group.

On Tuesday, the government confirmed that it was maintaining the ban on flights arriving from Brazil, South Africa and the UK until at least March 2 in a bid to stop the spread of the new coronavirus variants.

Spain's border with Portugal will also remain closed until March 1.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
UAE President His Highness Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan congratulated UAE citizens and residents and people of the wider region for the success of the UAEs Hope Probe arrival to Mars in the first-ever Arab interplanetary mission that marks the Arab worlds entry in the global race of space exploration.

The UAE made history on Tuesday evening (Feb 9), as the first Arab nation, and the fifth in the world, to reach Mars after the Hope Probe successfully entered the Red Planets orbit on, at 7:42 pm.

The probe overcame the most critical part of its mission, the Mars Orbital Insertion (MOI) that involved reversing and firing its six Delta V thrusters to rapidly reduce its speed from 121,000 km/h to 18,000 km/h. During the 27-minute critical phase, the contact with the probe was kept to a minimum., said a Wam news report.

Hailing the historic breakthrough, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan said: This historic achievement would not have been possible without the persistence and determination to implement the idea that emerged at the end of 2013 by His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of UAE and Ruler of Dubai, who followed it up closely until its success.

He also praised the efforts of HH Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces, in dedicating all kinds of support needed to make the dream come true. Thanks to both leaders and the team of scientists and engineers behind the project for proving to the world that the UAE is capable of achieving the impossible.

Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed hailed the space project, which was the outcome of solid institutional collaboration and a bold vision that aimed to serve mankind and the international science community.

The Hope Probe is the first of three exploration missions to arrive to the Red Planet in February. China and the US are leading ambitious projects to Mars, scheduled to arrive on February 10 and February 18, respectively. Hope probes arrival to Mars, after travelling 493 million kilometres in a seven-month journey in space, marks the UAEs 50th anniversary celebrations.

Now that it has entered the Martian orbit, the Probe will transition to the Science phase transmitting its first image of Mars back to Earth within just one week.

The Rulers of Dubai and Abu Dhabi celebrated the project as a great success for the UAE, the wider Arab region and the global scientific community following six years of technical and logistical efforts to complete the project. They hailed the team of engineers and scientists behind the project who made the Arab team come true after relentless efforts.

Hailing the success of the mission, HH Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum said: The Hope probes historic arrival to Mars is the greatest celebration of the 50th anniversary of our country. It sets the beginning of the next 50 years with boundless ambitions and dreams. He added: Our next accomplishments will be even bigger and greater.

Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid noted that Our biggest success is building national scientific expertise who will contribute to the international science community.

He added: We dedicate our Mars achievement to the people of the UAE and the rest of the Arab world. Our success proves that Arabs are capable of reviving the regions legacy and status in the scientific sphere.

We mark our countrys 50th anniversary by our Mars stop, and invite Arab youth to join the UAEs science movement that marched at high speed.

HH Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan said: the Hope Probes successful arrival to Mars is an Arab and Islamic achievement that was made possible by the relentless efforts of our youth. The mission marks our entry in the global race to space. He added that The probes arrival to the Red Planet celebrates our journey of 50 years in the best image that fits the UAE and captures its true story to the world.

He noted that the Emirates Mars Mission paves the way for the next 50 years of sustainable scientific development in the UAE.

The human capital is the true wealth of our nation. Investing in our people forms the main pillar of all our development strategies and policies.

Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed stressed: The Emirati youth will be the ones leading our development for the next 50 years with their acquired knowledge and skills. The Emirates Mars Mission contributed to building highly-qualified Emirati capabilities equipped to make more accomplishments in the space sector.

Millions of viewers

Beamed live around the world by international television stations, the moment was marked by a dazzling laser show on the facade of the Burj Khalifa reviewing the journey of the Hope Probe, the stages of the project, and the efforts of the Emirati scientists who participated in the realisation of the countrys space dream.

As hundreds of spectators watched the stunning display, the worlds media were joined by high-level government officials and the Emirati Hope Probe team for a special briefing on the missions progress.

During the event, Sarah Al Amiri, Minister of State for Advanced Technology, Chairperson of the UAE Space Agency and leader of the scientific team of the Emirates Mars Mission project, gave a detailed explanation in Arabic and English of all stages from ideation to launch and the seven-month journey to space.

Her briefing shed light on the Hope Probes journey and the UAE's long-held dream of reaching space. A meeting was also held between the scientific team and several media professionals, offering in-depth detail on aspects of the project.

Attending media also received continuous updates from the Ground Control Station at the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center in Al Khawaneej as Omran Sharaf, Project Director of the Emirates Mars Mission, provided information about the Probe's path in the final critical minutes before entering the capture orbit around Mars.

The core mission will involve capturing more than 1,000GB of new data over one Martian year (687 Earth days), which will be shared with 200 scientific and educational institutions around the world. The mission can be extended for another two years, to provide the first-ever complete picture of the Martian atmosphere.

Through closely studying the connection between current Martian weather and the climate of the Red Planet, scientists will gain deeper insights into the past and future of the Earth as well as the potential for human life on Mars and other planetary objects.

The defining moments

The most critical phase of the Hope Probes entry to the Red Planets orbit, the MOI, commenced at 7:30p.m. UAE timing.

Previously programmed by the team before the launch, the probe automatically fired its six Delta V thrusters to rapidly reduce its speed from 121,000 km/h to 18,000 km/h. The deceleration burn took 27 minutes until 7:57pm as the probe safely entered the capture orbit.

At 8:08pm, the ground control station at Al Khawaneej received the first transmission from the Hope probe, signalling the success of the mission.

The probes entry to Mars orbit marks the end of four of the six stages of its space journey that started in July 20, 2020: launch, early operations, cruise and the Mars Orbit Insertion. The probe is currently entering the transition to science phase, before it commences the science phase to study the Martian atmosphere.

First Day in Mars

On its first day in Mars, the team restored communication with the probe to ensure its systems remained intact after the dangerous phase it had just passed. For the next 3-4 weeks, daily contact will be scheduled between the probe and the team back on Earth, enabling a quick turn-around of command sequence uploads and telemetry receipt. The probe will capture its first picture of Mars in the first week of its arrival.

Transition to Science phase

After a period of testing and validation, a series of manoeuvers are performed to get the Hope Probe in the correct position to move into the Science Orbit.

The next stage in the Hope Probes journey is the transition from the Capture Orbit to an acceptable Science Orbit in preparation for its primary science operations. The rebooting of the probes systems can last for 45 days, while the radio signals will take from 11-22 minutes to travel from Hope to earth and back.

The Science phase

The last phase of the probes journey is set to begin in April 2020. The probe will officially enter the Science phase to complete the first-ever planet-wide, 24x7 picture of Mars atmospheric dynamics and weather daily, throughout all seasons for one full Martian year (687 earth days) until April 2023.

The probe, however, can be used for another two years for additional data collection.

The three science instruments installed on the probe will enable the collection of 1,000GB comprehensive new Martian data, which will be shared for free with over 200 research centers.

The insights and data we gain from understanding the Martian climate will add new dimensions to human knowledge about how atmospheres work, which will help scientists and researchers evaluate distant worlds for conditions that might support life.

Understanding the geographical and climate changes of Mars and the other planets will help us gain deeper insights to find solutions for key challenges facing mankind on earth.

A Global Picture

Once it reaches Mars orbit, the Hope probe will provide the first-ever complete picture of the Martian atmosphere, monitoring weather changes throughout the day during all seasons, which has not been done by any previous mission.

The mission will provide deeper insights on the climatic dynamics of the Red Planet through observing the weather phenomena in Mars such as the massive famous dust storms that have been known to engulf the Red Planet, as compared to the short and localized dust storms on earth. It will focus on better understanding the link between weather changes in Mars lower atmosphere, with the loss of hydrogen and oxygen from the upper layers of the atmosphere.

The probe, for the first time, will study the link between weather change and atmospheric loss, a process that may have caused the Red Planets surface corrosion and the loss of its upper atmosphere.

Exploring connections between todays Martian weather and the ancient climate of the Red Planet will give deeper insights into the past and future of Earth and the potential of life on Mars and other distant planets.
Donald Trump's impeachment trial could be finished as early as Saturday if there are no witnesses called by the prosecution as senators prepare to barrel toward a finale vote on the former president.

Additionally, Trump's legal team is not expected to use the full 16 hours allotted to them to make their case - which would also cut down on trial time.

And the Senate now will be in session late Friday and on Saturday after Trump attorney David Schoen dropped his request to have them recess for the Sabbath. Schoen, an observant Jew, said he would let the other defense attorneys take the lead during that time.

Donald Trump's defense lawyer David Schoen argued Tuesday that Democrats are using the impeachment proceedings as bloodsport to drag the former president through the wringer

House lead impeachment manager Representative Jamie Raskin points up at a video that he had just shown of Trump supporters storming the U.S. Capitol building, cut together with parts of the former president's speech on January 6

Trump attorney Bruce Castor started off his defense of the former president with a rambling soliloquy that veered between name-dropping the senators he knows and praising the Senate for its work

Multiple Democratic senators told CNN that, after a conference call with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Tuesday morning, they believe a final vote on a conviction could occur Sunday or Monday.

Republican Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri also told reporters on Capitol Hill that he thought the trial would wrap this weekend.

'I think Saturday or Sunday,' he said.

Trump is accused of engaging 'high Crimes and Misdemeanors by inciting violence against the Government of the United States' when it came to the January 6th MAGA riot on Capitol Hill that left five dead and trail of destruction in his path.

The Democratic House impeachment managers argue Trump's rally that morning - where he told supporters to 'fight like hell' and march on the Capitol - along with his earlier false claims the election was stolen from him incited the insurrection.

Trump's legal team countered that his speech is protected by the first amendment, argued the FBI has evidence the riot was planned well before January 6th, and claimed Trump can't be impeached because he's no longer president.

The Senate would vote on whether or not to call witnesses as only they can issue a subpoena. House impeachment managers have not yet requested them but are preserving that option. They did invite Trump to testify but he declined.

Helping matters move along is the fact that the Senate is supposed to be in recess next week in honor of Presidents' Day, which is always an incentive for the senators to work quickly.

Meanwhile, Schoen's request to have the trial continue through the Sabbath was prompted by Trump's own desire to complete the trial without delay, CNN reported.

Schoen wrote that he was withdrawing his request because he was 'concerned about the delay in the proceedings in a process that I recognize is important to bring to a conclusion for all involved and for the country.'

And he told reporters on Capitol Hill Tuesday that it was his decision to withdraw his request for the Sabbath recess.

'I made that decision. I thought it would be inconveniencing too many people. I can't participate,' he said.

But Trump also didn't want the trial delayed. He is expected to be acquitted after several Republican senators have said the trial is unconstitutional, arguing a former president cannot be impeached.

The Senate was initially going to recess Friday evening and Saturday but will now work through those days. They've scheduled a session for Sunday afternoon in case that day is needed.

Former President Donald Trump is also said to be eager to see the trial end; he's expected to be acquitted by the Senate

Tuesday kicked off the first day of Donald Trump's second impeachment trial

Republican Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri told reporters on Capitol Hill that he thought the trial would wrap this weekend

Tuesday kicked off the first day of Trump's second impeachment trial.

It will move forward after a majority of senators voted the trial was constitutional. But 17 Republicans need to cross the aisle to get the two-thirds needed to convict the former president. Democrats only got six Republicans to vote with them on Tuesday, a promising sign for Trump.

Democrats began their impeachment case against Trump Tuesday afternoon with a video that highlighted the profanity and violence during the January 6 MAGA attack on the Capitol.

The former president's defense team claimed the show was part of the left turning the proceedings into a 'bloodsport' for some of Trump's biggest critics.

'We now learn that the House managers in their wisdom have hired a movie company and a large law firm to create, manufacture and splice for you a package designed by experts to chill and horrify you and our fellow Americans,' Trump's defense lawyer David Schoen decried from the Senate floor.

He added: 'They don't need to show you movies to show you that the riot happened here. We will stipulate that it happened, and you know all about it. This is a process fueled irresponsibly by base hatred by these House managers.'

The more than 14-minute video presented at the top of the Democrats' case included cuts between the violence of the pro-Trump mob and the former president's speech just beforehand.

The Democrats went for the gut punch, using their opening argument to remind senators of what happened the day of the riot, the confusion, fear and brute force that was in play as lawmakers fled from the mass of Trump supporters.

The video showed highlights from the insurrection, including Trump urging his supporters to 'fight like hell' at a rally outside the White House that morning. It also showed the violence and destruction the rioters inflicted as they fought their way through police lines and breached the building.

The defense team also presented their own video more than an hour-and-a-half into their two-hours of argument.

Their video included dramatic, dark music with clips of Democrats preemptively saying they would call to impeach Trump starting just days into his presidency. This included a 2019 clip of Representative Rashida Tlaib, just after becoming a congresswoman, saying, 'We're going to impeach the motherf***er.'

Meanwhile, lead Impeachment manager Jamie Raskin began the Democrats' case with an impassioned speech on the constitutionality of the impeachment trial and ending with an emotional personal story of the riot and how it affected him. At times he held back tears as he recounted what happened on January 6.

And it wasn't just about him, he told a captive Senate audience, which sat in silence listening to him.

''This trial is personal for every senator and for every member of the House, for every manager and all our staff and the capital police and the Washington DC metropolitan police and the National Guard and maintenance and custodial crews and the print journalists and TV people who were here,' Raskin said.

In contrast, Trump attorney Bruce Castor started off his defense of the former president with a rambling soliloquy that veered between name-dropping the senators he knows and praising the Senate for its work.

'And you know, senators of the United States, they are not ordinary people. There are extraordinary people in the technical sense, extraordinary people,' Castor said.

'I have been around the United States senators before. Two of them in this room from Pennsylvania and I would like to think are friendly towards me or at least friends of mine when we are not politically adverse,' he noted.

He talked about how he worked in the Senate forty years ago and 'I got lost then and I still do.'

He eventually got around to mentioning Donald Trump. He launched a general defense about the freedom of speech, noting people have the right to disagree with anyone, even Trump.

'I do not expect and I don't believe former president expect anybody to walk back any of the language. If that is how they feel about the way things transparent over the last couple of years in his country, they should be allowed to say that. And I will go to court and defend them if anything happens to them as a result,' Castor said.

Even Republican senators were baffled by Castor's meandering speech.

Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana said Trump's legal team was 'unfocused, they attempted to avoid the issue. And they talked about everything but the issue at hand. And when they talked about it, they kind of glided over it, almost as if they were embarrassed of their arguments.'

Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said Trump's defense 'had a missed opportunity' with Castor.

And Texas Senator John Cornyn said Castor 'just rambled on and on and on and didn't really address the constitutional argument.'

'I've seen a lot of lawyers and a lot of arguments and that was it was not one of the finest I've seen,' he said.

Senator Susan Collins of Maine noted: 'I was perplexed by the first attorney, who did not seem to make any arguments at all, which was an unusual approach to take.'

But Castor defended himself, telling reporters on Capitol Hill: 'I thought we had a good day.'

He said there would be no changes to the defense strategy going forward.

During Wednesday's trial session, Democrats will start the clock on their 16 hours to make their case for Trump's impeachment.
Now spanning four generations, the T.U. Parks Construction Company continues to stress the importance of education. Current Chairman and CEO Larry Parks and Senior Project Manager Robert Parks remember the words from company founder and grandfather, T.U. Parks, who said, never stop learning. The company has established a $50,000 T.U. Parks Construction Company Endowed Scholarship through the Chattanooga State Foundation.

With a shortage of workers in the industry and across all areas of the construction industry, Chattanooga State offers an excellent curriculum for the industry that allows any individual to either learn a trade or profession or to improve oneself within their chosen industry, stated Mr. Parks. He noted that individuals who enroll at Chattanooga State have the option to complete one skill, continue their educational path to earn an associate degree, or transfer to a four-year university for an additional degree.

Since 1944, the companys objectives included never sacrificing quality, never stop learning about the industry and never neglect the personal touch. The industry has been good to our company, said Mr. Parks, This is our way of giving back that will benefit students for years to come.

For more information about this scholarship and other giving opportunities, visit chattanoogastate.edu/establish-fund or contact Tammy Sawyers, director, College Advancement at 697-3359, tammy.sawyers@chattanoogastate.edu.




Shortly after we started getting into this vaccination, I started to ask for this data  I wanted it, we needed it, we were trying to get it and we were finding problems, Dr. Romero, who is also chairman of the C.D.C.s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, said in an interview. He said several state epidemiologists were at work filling in the gaps by cross-referencing against secondary sources.

Just as the pandemic has laid bare racial disparities in health care, it has exposed disparities in who is getting vaccinated. Black people and Latinos are far more likely than whites to get infected and die of Covid-19. And in cities across the country, including here in Washington, wealthy white residents are lining up to be vaccinated in low-income Latino and Black communities.

People in underserved neighborhoods face a variety of obstacles, experts say, including registration phone lines and websites that can take hours to navigate, and a lack of transportation or time off from jobs to get to appointments. And people of color, particularly Black people, are more likely to be hesitant about getting vaccinated, in light of the history of unethical medical research in the United States.

The community health centers program is aimed at closing that gap. It will be relatively small at first; the administration is allocating one million doses for just 250 of the nations so-called federally qualified health centers. There are nearly 1,400 centers operating 13,000 sites serving almost 30 million patients  about one in 11 Americans, according to the Health Resources and Services Administration, which finances the program.

Over all, the pace of vaccinations is increasing, amid slow growth in supply, which continues to be a limiting factor. As of Tuesday, the seven-day average of vaccine doses administered across the United States was reported by the C.D.C. to be about 1.49 million doses a day.

When Mr. Biden became president, the federal government was shipping 8.6 million doses of vaccine to states each week. That number is about to go up to 11 million  an increase of 28 percent, Jeffrey D. Zients, Mr. Bidens coronavirus response coordinator, told reporters Tuesday. That tracks with expected increases in manufacturing.

The one million doses to the community clinics will be in addition to the supply being sent to the states. Separately, the White House announced last week that on Thursday, the administration will begin shipping an additional one million doses to 6,500 pharmacies.
( ) highlighted that preparations for the well re-entry programme at the Oza field in Nigeria is advancing apace with the major drill rig components due on site this week.

Re-entry work is then expected to start at the site within two weeks.

Oza-1s re-entry programme will also include the testing of three oil zones, each independently, and a combined production test.

The rig is then due to be skidded, on the same drill pad, to a new drilling slot for a horizontal well which, the company highlighted, is expected to deliver significant production levels and cash flow in an abbreviated time frame.
NASA's first mission to the trojan asteroids installs its final scientific instrument

With less than a year to launch, NASA's Lucy mission's third and final scientific instrument has been integrated onto the spacecraft.

The spacecraft, which will be the first to explore the Trojan asteroids---a population of small bodies that share an orbit with Jupiter---is in the final stages of the assembly process. Just five months ago, at the beginning of the Assembly, Testing and Launch operations (ATLO) process, the components of the Lucy spacecraft were being built all over the country. Today, a nearly assembled spacecraft sits in the high bay in Lockheed Martin Space in Littleton, Colorado.

"A bit over a year and a half ago, I was excited to hold the first small pieces of metal that were destined to travel to the Trojan asteroids," says Hal Levison, principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute. "Now there is an actual spacecraft, nearly ready to go. It is incredible."

The final instrument, L'Ralph, was built by NASA's Goddard Space Center in Greenbelt, Maryland and was received at Lockheed Martin on January 21 and integrated on to the spacecraft on January 26. L'Ralph is the most complicated instrument that will fly on Lucy, as it is actually two instruments in one. The Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC), will take visible light color images of the Trojan asteroids. The Linear Etalon Imaging Spectral Array (LEISA), will collect infrared spectra of the asteroids. Both of these components will work together to allow Lucy to determine the composition of the Trojan asteroids and provide insight into the early history of our solar system.

The L'Ralph instrument experienced significant COVID-19 related delays, particularly when construction had to be halted when Goddard was placed under stage 4 COVID restrictions in April of last year. However, both the L'Ralph team at Goddard and the ATLO team at Lockheed Martin rose to the challenge and developed a new schedule that allowed everyone to work safely while keeping the spacecraft on track for its originally planned October 16, 2021 launch.

"The L'Ralph team has done an outstanding job to deliver a fantastic instrument," says Dennis Reuter, L'Ralph instrument principal investigator, from Goddard. "Doing what they did under normal conditions would have been remarkable. Doing it under the actual conditions that had to be dealt with is amazing."

L'Ralph has been installed on Lucy's Instrument Pointing Platform. This platform provides the spacecraft significant flexibility during the encounters---the instruments can point at the Trojan asteroids during the high-speed flybys while the high gain antenna remains pointed at Earth---as well as carrying out fine adjustments and out-of-plane pointing to get the best data possible on these elusive objects.

Lucy's other two scientific instruments, L'TES and L'LORRI, designed and built at Arizona State University, and Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, respectively, as well as the two Terminal Tracking Cameras have already been installed on the platform. Now that L'Ralph is installed, the platform itself will be installed onto the spacecraft bus - making Lucy one step closer to ready for her 12-year-long journey to the Trojans.

"Lucy ATLO has been tremendously successful and having L'Ralph delivered and integrated onto the Instrument Pointing Platform is a great start to the new year," said Donya Douglas-Bradshaw, mission project manager from Goddard.

###

Southwest Research Institute's Hal Levison and Cathy Olkin are the principal investigator and deputy principal investigator of the Lucy Mission. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center provides overall mission management, systems engineering and safety and mission assurance. Lockheed Martin Space is building the spacecraft. Lucy is the 13th mission in NASA's Discovery Program. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Discovery Program for the agency's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, D.C.

Nancy Neal Jones

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

Katherine Kretke

Southwest Research Institute

This story has been published on: 2021-02-10. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
New Delhi:

The first woman to win Fields Medal, Maryam Mirzakhani, an Iranian-born mathematician on Saturday died in a US hospital after a four year long battle with cancer.

Firouz Naderi, a friend of Mirzakhani announced her death on Instagram. Mehr agency in Iran quoted her relatives who confirmed Maryam's death .

A light was turned off today. It breaks my heart ..... gone far too soon, wrote Naderi, a former director of Solar Systems Exploration at NASA.

A genius? Yes. But also a daughter, a mother and a wife, he added in a subsequent post.

40-year-old Mirzakhani, a professor at Stanford University in California, died of cancer she had been battling for four years spread to her bone marrow, Iranian media said.

In 2014 Mirzakhani won the Fields Medal, the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for Mathematics, which is awarded by the International Congress of Mathematicians.

The award recognised her sophisticated and highly original contributions to the fields of geometry and dynamical systems, particularly in understanding the symmetry of curved surfaces such as spheres.

She had already won the 2009 Blumenthal Award for the Advancement of Research in Pure Mathematics and the 2013 Satter Prize of the American Mathematical Society.

Born and raised in Tehran, Mirzakhani initially dreamed of becoming a writer, but by the time she started high school her affinity for solving mathematical problems and working on proofs had shifted her sights.

It is funits like solving a puzzle or connecting the dots in a detective case, she said when she won the Fields Medal.

I felt that this was something I could do, and I wanted to pursue this path.

Mirzakhani became known on the international mathematics scene as a teenager, winning gold medals at both the 1994 and 1995 International Math Olympiadsfinishing with a perfect score in the latter competition.

In 2008 she became a professor of mathematics at Stanford. She is survived by her husband and young daughter.

(With PTI Inputs)

For all the Latest Science News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
(Natural News) Since 2001, when China entered the WTO, three months to the day after September 11th, the United States has accumulated trade deficits of over $10 trillion. $5 trillion is owed to China and $1 trillion is owed to Mexico.

(Article by Jim Hoft republished from TheGatewayPundit.com)

Under this arrangement, the total debt of the United States has skyrocketed by over $13 trillion. Without this arrangement, we would have maintained a similar debt ratio of the economic activity seen in pre-9/11 2001.

We the People should AUDIT these trade and budgetary figures to be sure the goods & services represented in these debts did, in fact, change hands, the proper revenue/income recognition took place, and that the proper taxes have been paid. There is a very strong possibility that this issued debt did not have a corresponding benefit to the American people.

Since the 2008-2009 housing crisis, there has been about 25 companies that have gone from being worth less than $500 billion (half a trillion) to over $10 trillion dollar (or 20-fold!) in 12 years. What do all these companies have in common? They might be engaging in some of the following activities that Wall Street Firms are prohibited from partaking in:

Insider Trading  Knowing something the public does not know before the information is publicly disclosed and trading on it to profit at the expense of the public (Example; zombie Wall Street). These firms might be capturing non-public information from people using their search engines and trading on these searches to the detriment of the American Public.

 Knowing something the public does not know before the information is publicly disclosed and trading on it to profit at the expense of the public (Example; zombie Wall Street). These firms might be capturing non-public information from people using their search engines and trading on these searches to the detriment of the American Public. Behaving as both an Agent/Principal . Issuing (raised the money for a company or other institutions) securities and were paid 4-7% of the amount raised and then sold these same securities to your clients and receive a commission. This is outlawed in the finance industry. (These similar activities might not be outlawed in the Big Tech space.)

. Issuing (raised the money for a company or other institutions) securities and were paid 4-7% of the amount raised and then sold these same securities to your clients and receive a commission. This is outlawed in the finance industry. (These similar activities might not be outlawed in the Big Tech space.) These companies may or may not be collecting personal information about their clients and using it unfairly to undermine the very companies using their platforms. Imagine if you went to Vegas and played poker and the dealer was able to see all your cards in real time while you were playing and dealt cards to the other players based on what you held. Would you really still want to play Texas Hold Em?

These companies sell your personal information to the highest bidder (Example: Who has figured out how to manipulate you most effectively.) These financial companies pay tech companies to gather psychological facts about their clients. Supposedly they have mapped over 5,000 characteristics about most individuals and quite possibly know you better than you know yourself. This is worse than the NSA spying on you because at least with the NSA, they work to protect Americans and are sworn to adhere to the fourth amendment. The merger of Big Money and Big Tech are obsessed with using psychological data to enslave Americans to take on unnecessary debt to buy things they dont need to impress people they dont even know or might not even like.

We have been entrapped by psychographically-charged predatory lending on a national scale (A sort of debt diplomacy). Corrupt politicians and ideologically-obsessed government employees have sold out the average American to get their cut of these ill-gotten gains. Is this why Twitter, Google, Facebook (all occasionally funded by We the Peoples intelligence apparatus) does not care if they trounce all over the US Constitution? The United States Constitution defines how We the People agree to be governed. These corrupt politicians possess both the weakest minds our society has ever created and obnoxious personalities typically reserved for a Jerry Springer show. This same ineptness is why We the People are being treated like farm animals. Implied mask mandates are being forced to breathe in our own bacteria, inhibiting up to 20-30% of the oxygen flow to our brains, and possibly damaging our lungs as well. Why havent we heard any studies about this potential damage to our bodies?

General Flynn, American Patriots, Trust Seekers, and thousands of other conservative accounts and sites (including myself) have been censored by unholy alliance of the oligarchs found in both Big Money and Big Tech.

Gateway Pundit was recently banned from Twitter after building a base of over 375,000 followers. I know from firsthand experience built a base of 130,000 and had 3,300,000 million impressions a day. Gateway Pundit had three times as many followers as me, so you can imagine how many people are being denied their ability to read their unique viewpoint. All this spells a breakdown of our key ingredient of a prosperous society, trust. These psychopaths that loaded us with debt ( I think we should haircut all debt of every person/institution that has its holdings in offshore trusts) to make up for the trillions stolen from the American Public. All these trillions which corporations made through the violations of our constitutional rights simply be taken back by freezing all equity markets to determine what is fair compensation to the American Public which funded this companies. (Keep in mind during WWI the markets closed for 6 months). Google, Facebook, Apple, and any other companies who used Intellectual Property that was paid for by US Taxpayers should be properly deluded, and every share should be journaled into a US Sovereign wealth fund for the benefit of the American People.

Read more at: TheGatewayPundit.com and BigTech.news.
President Muhammadu Buhari yesterday flagged off the groundbreaking ceremony of the Kano-Katsina-Jibiya-Maradi railway project with a branch line to Dutse in Jigawa State.

Speaking virtually from the State House in Abuja, the president said that the project, when completed, will enhance economic activities, particularly the trans-Saharan trade between the two countries.

He urged private investors to take full advantage of the opportunity and engage in legitimate businesses aimed at transforming the nation's economy.

The groundbreaking, which was held at Kwarin Tama village in Katsina state, was attended physically by the minister of transportation, Rotimi Amaechi.

Other dignitaries present include the ministers of interior, information and culture, foreign affairs, heath, science and technology, the governors of Katsina, Kano, Jigawa, and Maradi in the Niger Republic.

Emirs of Katsina, Kano, Dutse, and top security heads of Nigeria and the Niger Republic were also in attendance.

The railway project is expected to connect three northern states - Kano, Katsina, and Jigawa - then terminate at Maradi, Niger Republic.

The rail line is also expected to financially empower Nigeria as the import and export hub for the Niger Republic and help the country compete favourably with other coastal West African countries in

facilitating trade with the region's landlocked countries.
NEW YORK  New York state is within its rights to keep its election ballots decluttered and prevent voter confusion with rules limiting how a political party gets on ballots, an appeals court said Wednesday.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected a challenge to the state's new election ballot rules by the SAM Party of New York. It said the party, whose full name is Serve America Movement, was unlikely to succeed with claims that ballot rules violate the First and 14th amendments.

SAM became a political party in 2018 when it ran a gubernatorial ticket that drew over 55,000 votes. Since then, it says it has nominated dozens of successful candidates for offices ranging from village trustee to the House of Representatives, including 19 in the most recent election cycle.

The ruling now puts its status as a political party in jeopardy.

The party claimed state rules amended last April were unconstitutional because they require a party get 130,000 votes or at least 2% of the vote in presidential or gubernatorial elections to maintain a place on the ballot. Previously, the state required only 50,000 votes to qualify.
Syracuse, NY -- A Syracuse man who went home after striking and critically injuring a pedestrian more than a year ago will avoid jail.

Arnim Amador pleaded guilty to felony leaving the scene of a motor vehicle crash with injuries after the 12:47 a.m. crash on Jan. 16 that left a woman badly injured in North Geddes Street.

Under the plea, Amador will spend six months in home confinement, monitored by an electric bracelet, and five years on probation.

Judge Stephen Dougherty offered the plea over the objections of prosecutor Chris Bednarski, who wanted Amador to spend 1 to 3 years in prison.

Typically, a defendant given a so-called split sentence between confinement and probation is ordered to jail for some period of time. But judges arent allowed to sentence people to weekends in jail during the pandemic and Dougherty noted Amadors otherwise impressive personal circumstances in offering the home-confinement sentence.

Bednarski, the prosecutor, noted that Amador drove home after striking the 55-year-old woman, caring more about himself than the victim hed just struck.

The woman is going to suffer physical and mental problems, I think, for the rest of her life, the prosecutor added.

Details of the crash were not discussed in court Tuesday. But Amador was not charged with any driving-related crimes in connection with the crash itself; only his flight afterward.

Amador is a Spanish language interpreter for a New York City-based company, according to his LinkedIn page.

Staff writer Douglass Dowty can be reached at ddowty@syracuse.com or 315-470-6070.
A man who was 21 when he had sex with a 16-year-old boy he met on Tinder has been jailed for one year.

Shane Chubb, now aged 24, pleaded guilty to one count of engaging in sexual intercourse with a child under the age of 17 between April 13 and April 15, 2017.

Dublin Circuit Criminal Court heard that the boy was a virgin.

Chubb also pleaded guilty to one count of assaulting the boy on April 15, 2017 at Chubbs home at Cookstown Road, Tallaght. He has no previous convictions.

Sergeant Gary Farrell told the court that the victim, who is legally entitled to anonymity, joined the Tinder dating app in 2016 before being removed because he was under the age of 18.

In 2017, he re-joined the app with a fake date of birth and got chatting to Chubb online. The boy told Chubb he was only 16, but that he was mature.

Read More

The pair kept in contact and made arrangements to meet in Chubb's home for tea, before the boy suggested that he stay the night.

During this visit, the pair ended up having sex, Sgt Farrell told the court, with the boy later telling gardai: He took my virginity.

The pair met the next day in Chubb's house where they discussed what had happened, with the boy telling Chubb this was his first experience of sex.

Later on, Chubb started kissing the boy and then started biting him, including on his chest, arms and thighs.

The boy eventually screamed out in pain at one of the bites, asking Chubb: Why did you do that? He left shortly afterwards.

The boy texted Chubb later that night saying: You really hurt me and scared me a bit. The boy said he no longer wanted to keep in touch.

Chubb replied saying I hurt and scared you? He added: I hope you know I never intended to hurt or scare you. He apologised for biting the boy.

The boy confided in his sister about the incident and went to gardai a couple of days later. He was not in court for the sentence hearing and did not wish to make a victim impact statement, the court heard.

Judge Karen O'Connor said that the levels of dysfunction in the background of the defendant were extreme but said she had to mark the seriousness of the offence.

He took advantage of a child, he was fully aware (of the victim's age). He is a highly intelligent man who knew what he was doing was wrong, she said.

Judge O'Connor said that an important message had to go out that if someone meets someone online and is aware the person is a child there will be consequences.

Noting his tragic background and his guilty plea as mitigation, she suspended the second year of a two year prison term. She imposed conditions that Chubb stop using Tinder during the entire term and engage with the Probation Services.

The offence comes with a maximum sentence of five years.
The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
VINCENNES, Ind. (WTHI) - The Knox County health department is having a hard time getting enough vaccine doses to cover both the first and second rounds of the COVID-19 shots. However, over at Good Samaritan hospital, folks there say they're not having a problem.

The problem comes down to the availability of the vaccine doses. The Knox County health department is giving out the Moderna vaccine. This is due to that vaccine being easier to store.

The downside is there is not as much of the Moderna vaccine to go around. Knox county gets about 400 doses of its vaccine a week. Good Samaritan hospital gives out around 350 doses of the Pfizer vaccine per day.

Adam Thacker with Good Samaritan hospital says "You've heard nationally of struggles to get vaccine and we're in the same boat. We would take more and the question is can we get more, can we get more? But on the same note, we have been able to get steady allocation from the State Department of Health."

The hospital began rolling out the Pfizer vaccine in December. They are able to give the vaccine to residents of not just Knox county, but around the state. With only a week waiting period, that's good news for those who are needing it.

Thacker says, "We haven't had to cancel anybody or throttle back. Our clinic we've been able to continue to expand and we hope that continues to be the case."

To register for the COVID-19 vaccine: Click Here
A Marks & Spencer store in Paris has shut its doors after experiencing weeks of food shortages and delays of fresh food imports from the UK.

The Chaussee d'Antin branch, which is one of 20 stores in the country, has closed for the final time following weeks of empty shelves - although the company says the closure is not related to delivery problems caused by Brexit.

It comes just weeks after M&S stores in France started running out of food as Brexit rules were blamed for millions of pounds worth of meat exports from Britain being left to rot in Rotterdam and Calais.

The Marks & Spencer store in Chaussee d'Antin, Paris, has shut its doors for the final time. Pictured: Shoppers outside the Champs Elysee store in Paris

Last month it was revealed that shelves in the supermarket's food halls in Paris and Lille had been left bare after the company became the latest to be affected by Brexit border delays - with lorries trying to cross the Channel being held up for days.

Among the products that appeared to be affected were sandwiches, biscuits and ready meals such as curries.

An M&S spokesman confirmed at the time that the lack of groceries was a result of 'Brexit teething problems' disrupting supply chains.

In January, fresh salads were out of stock at an M&S store in the Porte Maillot district of western Paris.

A sign said that because of new trade rules, 'we have not been able to receive our delivery today.'

Fresh salads and pasta dishes were also out of stock at a second store, on Franklin Roosevelt Avenue near the Champs Elysees.

At a third branch, on Boulevard Montmartre in central Paris, shelves of ready-to-eat fresh food were empty. An employee said the supply disruption was because of 'Brexit and the New Year.'

A spokesman for Lagardere, the French firm, which holds the franchise for some of the stores in France, said it was working with M&S on the supply disruptions and expected the problems to be fixed by the end of January.

The scenes came as British butchers said shipments had been suffering from tight customs rules.

Last month images emerged of half-empty food shelves at a number of M&S stores in France

At an M&S supermarket in Lille shelves stood empty amid an issue with post-Brexit supply chains

In January items were out of stock at a Paris branch and a sign read: 'Due to new UK/EU import legislation, we're sorry some of your favourites might be missing'

One exporter told The Times that there had been five containers of fresh pork held in the Dutch port of Rotterdam for a fortnight after a problem with a veterinary certificate being filled in incorrectly.

Nick Allen, chief executive of the British Meat Processors Association, said: 'The new post-Brexit customs system for meat products is convoluted, archaic and badly implemented.

'If continental supermarkets are unable to have products delivered the way they need them to be, this trade will simply be lost as EU customers abandon UK suppliers and source product from European processors'.

Fresh food still goes through a number of checks when travelling from Britain. Pictured: Trucks rolling onto a ferry at the Port of Dover

Despite Britain's new trade deal with the EU, fresh food still needs to go through a number of checks when travelling from Britain, including a safety examination to ensure it complies with the bloc's rules.

However fresh food coming into Britain from the EU does not have to be checked due to a six-month embargo to ensure imports continue to flow smoothly.

MailOnline has contacted Marks & Spencer for comment.
Bollywood actor Kangana Ranaut has decided to withdraw the suit she field against the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) regarding an alleged demolition case of her residence in 2018. This was informed to the Bombay High Court by her lawyer, Birendra Saraf. Her lawyers also said that she is willing to do so in the next 4 days and would apply for regularisation.

It was also informed that she will seek to apply for regularisation in the next week. The High court has also directed the

BMC to decide on the application in accordance with the law.

RELATED NEWS Bombay HC Reserves Judgement in Sonu Sood Vs BMC Case

Besides the High Court has also granted protection of 2 weeks to Kangana Ranaut from any possible coercive action in case an adverse decision is taken by BMC. She can then approach the court again for relief.

Justice Prithviraj Chavan permitted Ranaut to withdraw the appeal and said no coercive action shall be taken by the civic body until the application for regularisation is heard and decided, and for two weeks thereafter. The appellant (Ranaut) is permitted to apply for regularisation before the MCGM within a period of four weeks, Justice Chavan said.

The corporation shall decide the same expeditiously and in accordance with law, the court said. In case of any adverse order against the appellant, no coercive action shall be taken thereafter by the BMC to enable the appellant to file appeal, the court said.

The MCGM is also known as the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC). The city civic body in March 2018 had issued a notice to Ranaut for alleged illegal merger of three flats owned by her in Orchid Breeze building in suburban Khar.

The Dindoshi civil court dismissed her suit against the notice in December last year, following which she moved the high court. The civil court, while dismissing the suit, had noted there was grave violation of the sanctioned plan while amalgamating the three flats.

Ranauts petition said since she bought the flats in 2013, she had not made any structural changes. She had carried out only certain cosmetic changes, said the appeal filed through advocates Aseem Naphade, Monisha Bhangale and Prasanna Bhangale.

Last year, the civic body had initiated demolition of alleged unauthorised construction at Ranauts bungalow in Pali Hill area here. The HC later held the municipal corporations action as illegal and malicious.

(With PTI inputs)
Prime Minister on Wednesday assured his Canadian counterpart that India would do its best to facilitate supplies of COVID vaccines sought by Canada.

Trudeau, who made a telephone call to the prime minister, said that if the world managed to conquer COVID-19, it would be significantly because of India's tremendous pharmaceutical capacity and Modi's leadership in sharing this capacity with the world, according to a Prime Minister's Office (PMO) statement.

During the call, Prime Minister Trudeau informed Modi about Canada's requirements of COVID-19 vaccines from India.

Prime Minister Modi assured his Canadian counterpart that India would do its best to support Canada's vaccination efforts, just as it had done for many other countries already.

"Was happy to receive a call from my friend Assured him that India would do its best to facilitate supplies of COVID vaccines sought by Canada," Modi said in a tweet.

"We also agreed to continue collaborating on other important issues like Climate Change and the global economic recovery," he said.

The two leaders also reiterated the common perspective shared by India and Canada on many important geo-political issues. They agreed to continue the close collaboration between both countries in fighting global challenges like Climate Change and the economic impacts of the pandemic, the PMO said.

The leaders looked forward to meeting each other in various important international fora later this year, and continuing their discussions on all issues of mutual interest, it said.

India is one of the world's biggest drugmakers, and an increasing number of countries have already approached it for procuring coronavirus vaccines



Last week, external affairs ministry spokesperson Anurag Srivastava said India had sent 56 lakh doses of coronavirus vaccines under grants assistance to a number of countries while 100 lakh doses were sent under commercial supplies.

India has already rolled out a massive coronavirus vaccination drive under which two vaccines, Covishield and Covaxin, are being administered to frontline health workers across the country.

While Oxford-AstraZeneca's Covishield is being manufactured by the Serum Institute of India, and Covaxin is being produced by Bharat Biotech.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
The Theodore Roosevelt and Nimitz Carrier Strike Groups steam in formation in the South China Sea, Feb. 9, 2021.

Two U.S. aircraft carrier strike groups conducted dual operations in the South China Sea on Tuesday, the latest in a series of U.S. military maneuvers in those turbulent waters.

In a sign of growing international pushback against Chinas expansive claims and assertive behavior, French Defense Minister Florence Parly confirmed Monday that a French nuclear attack submarine and an accompanying support ship recently completed a patrol in the South China Sea.

The operations point to the expanding role of non-claimant states in the South China Sea, which is contested by China, the Philippines, Taiwan, Vietnam, Brunei and Malaysia.

Earlier in January, Nikkei Asia reported that Germany is considering sending a naval frigate through the South China Sea as early as this coming summer  indication of an increasing willingness among such nations to deploy military assets to back up their diplomatic messaging.

The United States is at the forefront of this pushback.

The deployment of the Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group and the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group was the second dual aircraft carrier operation by the U.S. in the South China Sea in little over six months.

The ships and aircraft of the two strike groups coordinated operations in a highly trafficked area to demonstrate the U.S. Navys ability to operate in challenging environments, the U.S. Navy said in a statement.

Through operations like this, we ensure that we are tactically proficient to meet the challenge of maintaining peace and we are able to continue to show our partners and allies in the region that we are committed to promoting a Free and Open Indo-Pacific, Rear Adm. Doug Verissimo, commander of the Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group, was quoted as saying.

The last dual carrier operation in the South China Sea was in July 2020, involving the USS Ronald Reagan and USS Nimitz.

Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesman Wang Wenbin criticized Tuesdays operation, noting the U.S. has frequently sent warships and aircraft to the South China Sea as a show of force, which is not conducive to regional stability and peace.

China will continue to take necessary measures to firmly safeguard its national sovereignty and security, and will work with regional countries to resolutely protect the peace and stability of the South China Sea, Wang said.

Last week, the USS John S. McCain Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer conducted a freedom of navigation operation (FONOP) in the Chinese-occupied Paracel Islands, which a Chinese military spokesman described as seriously violating Chinas sovereignty and security. It was the first such FONOP since President Joe Biden took office last month.

An F/A-18E Super Hornet fighter jet launches from the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz during dual carrier operations in the South China Sea, Feb. 9, 2021. (U.S. Navy photo / Drace Wilson)

And earlier in January, the Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group carried out routine operations in the South China Sea, including maritime strike exercises and coordinated tactical training between surface and air units.

Allies involved

Other countries are joining the fray too.

In series of tweets on Monday, Parly revealed that the SNA Emeraude, a nuclear attack submarine, recently completed operations in the South China Sea.

According to Parly, the SNA Emeraude was accompanied by a support ship, the BSAM Seine.

This extraordinary patrol has just completed a passage in the South China Sea. A striking proof of the capacity of our French Navy to deploy far away and for a long time together with our Australian, American and Japanese strategic partners, she said.

Parly added that operation was meant to affirm international law, and that France intends to protect its sovereignty and interests in the Indo-Pacific region, where it still controls numerous territories.

U.S. allies Japan and Australia have also participated in military exercises in the South China Sea in recent months.

Meanwhile, a growing number of non-claimant powers have formally challenged Chinas maximalist South China Sea claims in the United Nations, including the U.S. but also Australia, Indonesia, France, Germany, and Japan.

For instance, in September 2020 the United Kingdom, France, and Germany submitted joint diplomatic notes to the U.N. rejecting Chinas baseline claims in the Paracel Islands, its historic rights claims, and other aspects of Chinas position.

According to specialists, outside countries have long pursued their interests in this contested body of water. Hoang Viet, an expert on the South China Sea, told BenarNews that European countries are particularly concerned about upholding international law and in particular the navigational freedoms granted by international law.

A Political Science Lecturer at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) has asked the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) to find a new face to lead the party.



Speaking in an interview on Neat FM's 'Me Man Nti' programme, Dr Amakye Boateng was of the view that John Mahama's time is passed.



"I don't think the NDC needs (former) President Mahama again . . . the party needs a new image, the party should reinvent itself," he said.



He further suggested that NDC should "clear its entire leadership and bring in new faces . . . the party should renew itself".



Listen to him in the video below





Source: Peacefmonline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Officials of the Lagos State Environmental Tasks Force accompanied by policemen and persons suspected to be thugs have burnt down a community whose residents witnessed the October 20 shooting of peaceful #ENDSARS protesters by soldiers at the Lekki Tollgate.

PREMIUM TIMES sourced some of its witnesses from the community for its groundbreaking investigation into the shooting, which revealed that soldiers and policemen shot directly at the protesters, killing some and injuring several others.

After originally claiming that soldiers deployed to the tollgate to disperse protesters were given only blank rounds and that they merely shot in the air, the army later admitted that the troops carried both live rounds and blank bullets.

Ahmed Taiwo, a major general, who represented the army at a judicial panel investigating the #ENDSARS shooting, argued that the soldiers carried live rounds because hoodlums had infiltrated the protest.

Residents of the community also accused the divisional police officer of the nearby Maroko Police Division, Raji Ganiyu, of shooting and killing some of the protesters. Mr Ganiyu denied the allegation.

A 24-hours notice

Residents of the community who spoke to PREMIUM TIMES said policemen and some officials of the environmental task force, arrived at the community on Tuesday and told them to vacate their residences within 24 hours.

The residents, who asked not to be named for fear of being arrested by the authorities, said they were still trying to gather their belongings on Wednesday morning when a contingent of taskforce officials, mobile policemen and persons that looked like thugs arrived and immediately started pulling down structures in the community.

Residents of the demolished community witnessed the October 2020 shooting of #ENDSARS protesters Residents of the demolished community witnessed the October 2020 shooting of #ENDSARS protesters

They said while a bulldozer was pulling down the mainly makeshift houses, the thugs were setting fire to the fallen structures. Policemen chased residents who were still trying to salvage their belongings far into the banks of the lagoon, injuring some of them, witnesses said.

People were scared and thought they were going to be arrested and ran towards the lagoon where they sustain deep cuts in their legs from broken bottles that were discarded there, one resident said.

Residents of the demolished community witnessed the October 2020 shooting of #ENDSARS protesters Residents of the demolished community witnessed the October 2020 shooting of #ENDSARS protesters

Police mock residents over #ENDSARS

Another resident said he and other residents were stopped and searched by the policemen who claimed they were looking for weapons hidden in the shanties.

He also said the policemen mocked residents of the shanty for participating in the protest and for speaking to the media after the indiscriminate shooting of peaceful protesters at the tollgate.

They were laughing at us as we struggled to gather our properties. The policemen said: Sheybi na una be #ENDSARS protesters abi?

No comments

When reached for comment, the spokesperson of the Lagos State Environmental Taskforce, Taofeek Adebayo, asked for 30 minutes to find out why the community was demolished and burnt.

When he was reached later, he directed this reporter to the police for comment.

Muyiwa Adejobi, the spokesperson of the Lagos State Police Command, said he was not aware of the demolition but promised to find out. He is yet to revert on this.
Beijing: A team of World Health Organization (WHO) visiting China to probe the origins of COVID-19 in Wuhan on Tuesday (February 9, 2021) dismissed the `lab leak` theory of the coronavirus.

Peter Ben Embarek, the Danish food safety expert leading the international team said his group will not recommend further investigation into the theory that the virus was accidentally leaked from labs conducting coronavirus research, as per the Washington Post.

Embarek said, following a 12-day visit to the Chinese city, that the judgment was based on "long, frank, open discussions with researchers and management" at institutions including the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

"Our initial findings suggest that introduction through an intermediary host species is the most likely pass way and one that will require more studies and more specific targeted research ... The findings suggest that a laboratory incident hypothesis is extremely unlikely to explain the introduction of the virus into the human population," the WHO expert said.

British member Peter Daszak who has collaborated with the WIV through his EcoHealth Alliance nonprofit, on Twitter wrote that it was a unanimous the decision to downplay lab theory among the 17-member team.

The global health body stated four hypotheses on how the virus spread: direct zoonotic spillover; introduction through intermediary host species; food chain, frozen food products, surface transmission; and finally a laboratory-related incident, Sputnik quoted him as saying.

Though the laboratory incident hypothesis is extremely unlikely to explain the introduction of the virus into the human population, the WHO expert said.

"It has not been possible to pinpoint any animal species as a potential reservoir for this disease, and they indicate that currently and also back in 2019 it does not look like there was the circulation of the virus in any animal species in the country," he said.

The WHO has been investigating the reports of pneumonia-like symptoms emerging from Wuhan in December 2019, which led to the identification of a new coronavirus it triggered a global pandemic that has infected more than 90 million people and killed more than 1.9 million.

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Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later. Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size Last October, NSW Customer Service Minister Victor Dominello proposed revolutionary reforms to liquor and gaming laws that he oversees. One of the most controversial elements of the proposal was a plan to transition pokie players from dropping the odd pineapple on the slots to having to register and pre-load money onto regulated, cashless cards that would be linked to the gamblers identity. The idea was that such a card would help curb the activities of problem gamblers  with the added factor it might also stem money laundering in gambling venues. On February 9, the liquor and gaming laws and their potential reform were shoved into the spotlight as former Supreme Court judge Patricia Bergin handed down a report that followed an 18-month inquiry into Crown Resorts, which exposed allegations of money laundering. In her comments to the Independent Liquor and Gaming Authority, she said such a card could be a powerful mechanism against organised crime. The plan for the card was developed in response to a 12 per cent increase in poker machine expenditure during the COVID-19 pandemic  the biggest annual increase in the history of Liquor and Gaming NSW. So how would such a card work? What are the criticisms of it? And why might we need one? What is the gambling card and how would it work?

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The government has proposed that all gaming machine players register and preload money onto a government-regulated card that would operate similarly to the states cashless Opal cards (which are for public transport). Players would need a card to play on a machine. The card aims to reduce both gambling harm and money laundering in NSW, which has been dubbed by the head of the Alliance for Gambling Reform, Tim Costello, as the non-casino pokies capital of the world. The card would be overseen by the Privacy Commissioner and linked to the states existing exclusion register, which is designed to prevent thousands of self-excluded gamblers from accessing poker machines. Individuals sign a deed asking to be banned from one or more gaming venues. If youre on the register, you wouldnt be able to get a card. As it stands, there are no sanctions for individuals or venues for breaching the states exclusion register. In fact, 2019s NSW Gambling Survey showed 92 per cent of excluded gamblers were able to enter a venue they should have been restricted from to play the pokies. Under the proposed reforms, separate from the card, venues would face up to a $27,000 fine if found to be in breach of the self-exclusion restrictions. The proposal would also allow relatives of gamblers to apply to have their relatives banned from venues. Between July and December 2020, total gaming machine profit was $4.4 billion, up from $4 billion in the last six months of 2019, despite halted trading in pubs and clubs due to restrictions implemented to stop the spread of the coronavirus. Mr Dominello, as Minister for Customer Service, has cited the death of Sydney man Gary van Duinen, who took his own life following a poker machine binge at Dee Why RSL, as part of the motivation behind the card proposal.

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Why are we talking about this now? Commissioner Bergins 750-page report into Crowns suitability to keep the licence for its new $2.2-billion Barangaroo casino has found that Crown Sydney was not a suitable person to hold a casino licence but there are steps the giant may take to make it suitable to hold a licence. The report showed that Crowns gaming machines had been used to launder money in its Melbourne and Perth casinos, bringing Mr Dominellos card proposal into the limelight. Although the inquirys report says a gambling card would be a matter for government, it notes casinos would be free to introduce their own mechanisms of a similar kind for their own patrons. There is a recent development in this regard in NSW with a proposal for the introduction of a gambling card that would enable the tracking of cash through a casino, the report says. How would a cashless card stop money laundering? Money laundering occurs where the origin of illegally obtained funds is concealed by a complex sequence of transfers or transactions. Gaming machines and the larger gambling industry can be used to assist this process because they are among the only arenas where significant amounts of cash can flow in and out of a premises in a largely unregulated way. The scale and frequency of the transactions make gaming machines a perfect place to hide the profits from nefarious or illegal deals.

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For example, an individual can enter an RSL club, put say $1000 into a machine, play for three minutes and cash in most of that sum. This process is referred to as cleaning money and provides a justification for having large amounts of cash on ones person. If the individual is questioned about the origins of the money? Theyve just had a good day on the pokies. About 20 per cent of the $6 billion players lose on gaming machines each year is almost certainly associated with crime, according to estimates from the Australian governments ministerial expert advisory group on gambling. This is because NSW has a very high load limit, meaning anyone can enter a pub or club in the state and put $7500 into one machine. Its not that high anywhere else in the country, except in the ACT where there is no limit. In her recent report, Commissioner Bergin refers to the gambling card as a powerful tool in addressing the major issues facing the industry. The proposal has been the subject of some public debate and is not free from controversy. However, it appears that the very significant utility of the card to assist the problem gambler would not be an issue. It is also obvious that it would be a powerful mechanism to assist in combating money laundering. How many people have a gambling problem in NSW? Just over half (53 per cent) of adults in NSW gamble, according to the 2019 NSW Gambling Survey. The Problem Gambling Severity Index from 2019 indicates 1 per cent of NSW adults are problem gamblers. If youre a single male aged between 18 and 24 who happens to be unemployed, youre most likely to make up the 1 per cent of adults who are problem gamblers, according to the index. The consequences of gambling are not limited to the player  an international study into gambling found in 2017 that for every problem gambler, six people around them are affected financially, socially or psychologically. What are the criticisms of the card? NSW has 95,000 poker machines across 4000 venues, 1500 of them at The Star casino in Sydney. All up, the NSW gaming machine industry is worth $6 billion. Its machines bring in a whopping $1 billion in state taxes each year and create up to 100,000 jobs. Clubs NSW has warned this is the worst time to force expensive solutions on clubs as they continue to grapple with the financial impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

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Because the cards are linked to an individuals identity, some people are concerned they will create a potential for data breaches and also feel Clubs NSW have not been adequately consulted in the development of the plan. Concerns have also been raised by Alliance for Gambling Reforms Tim Costello about the importance of ensuring the design of the cards does not detach players from the value of losing real money as this could have an inverse effect on curbing gambling harm. Has a card worked anywhere else? This is the first proposal in the world to create cashless gaming cards that will connect a players identity to their pre-loaded money and be accessible by a regulatory government body and relevant pub or club. Nova Scotia in Canada abandoned a gaming card program in 2014 where players would use preloaded cards instead of cash. But Nova Scotias program was not identity-linked, so players were able to skirt around the system by swapping, sharing and hoarding multiple cards. What are the next steps? Will a card be introduced? Thanks to an unlikely alliance between the Greens and One Nations Mark Latham, Mr Dominello has enough crossbench support in the upper house to suggest the card reform could pass, although Labor remains divided on it.

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THE chairman of the Josiah Magama Tongogara Legacy Foundation Dr Simbi Mubako and the founder of the organisation Senator Angeline Tongogara join the nation in mourning the death of liberation war icon Lieutenant-General Douglas Nyikayaramba (Rtd).

Ambassador Nyikayaramba was the foundation treasurer at the time of his death and before his appointment to become the country's envoy to Mozambique he played a significant role in facilitating the placing of a memorial stone at Magakayi Village near Masinga in Inhambane province of Mozambique and the development of a health centre for the village at the place where General Tongogara died in 1979.

"The chairman, the founder and the trustees of the Josiah Magama Tongogara Legacy Foundation mourn the loss of Ambassador Lt-General (Rtd) Douglas Nyikayaramba, the Ambassador of Zimbabwe to Mozambique, who was a Trustee of the Foundation and the currently serving Treasurer".

The Tongogara Foundation supports disadvantaged students with good academic grades for leadership development by sponsoring tuition assistance and scholarships, and promotes developmental and entrepreneurial activities.

"The Foundation and the Trustees will deeply miss Ambassador Nyikayaramba's dedication and commitment to this initiative, his organisational skills, and his humour. May his soul rest in peace", read the statement.

Cde Nyikayaramba, a former senior army officer succumbed to Covid-19 complications yesterday at a local hospital.

A devastated family has slammed a hospital after their 78-year-old relative with a broken hip was left lying on a mattress on the floor days before she died after contracting Covid-19.

Maureen Paterson was admitted to University Hospital Wishaw in North Lanarkshire, Scotland, on December 16 after suffering from various cognitive issues.

Her daughter, Lynn Barrie, says Mrs Paterson called her in a 'terrible state' on New Year's Day before it was discovered her stoma bag had 'broken several times'.

She then contracted coronavirus later that same month before her family called to check on her on the morning of January 28 - only to find she had taken a fall and broken her hip.

Mrs Paterson passed away on Thursday morning last week. Lynn has now submitted a formal notice of complaint over what she describes as 'gross incompetence'.

A devastated family has slammed a hospital after Maureen Paterson, 78, was left lying on a mattress on the floor with a broken hip days before she died after contracting Covid-19

Lynn, from Bellshill, said: 'When mum was admitted we asked if she could have one-to-one care as she is very frail but they stopped that.

'We told them to watch as she is very frail and if she fell she would break her hip. She was then moved to another ward and that's when she went downhill.

'On Hogmanay she called me in a terrible state and on New Year's Day it turned out that her stoma bag had broken several times.

'The staff said they didn't have any bags in the hospital so my daughter Leanne went to mum's house and got bags. She then went to the hospital and showed the nurses the correct way to put it on as it had been stuck on with surgical tape.'

Lynn stated that on January 4 her mother sustained a cut to her hand and she then contacted Wishaw hospital management regarding her mother's condition.

She was then given permission to visit Mrs Paterson every day. Lynn further claims her mother was not given her asthma inhalers for three days.

She then contracted Covid-19 a few days later before Mrs Paterson's family were told she had fallen and broken her hip.

Lynn said: 'She contracted Covid which is understandable considering what is going on at the moment. She was then moved to a single room in the Covid ward.

'Again we warned the staff that she is very frail, unsteady on her feet, and at a serious risk of falling. We were only informed she had broken her hip when we called the hospital for an update.

'One family member had been told it happened at one particular time and we were told a different time which leads me to believe they have no idea when she had taken a fall and how long she was lying there.

'Myself and my daughter requested a meeting and after that we went down to see her and she was lying in her room on a mattress on the floor. I couldn't believe it that she hadn't even been put into a bed.

'There was no means for mum to go to the toilet as she had no catheter or a urinary pad. We were advised by the staff they were intending on using a bedpan on mum whilst her hip was broken.'

Mrs Paterson pictured with her family. On February 1, doctors called the family to notify Mrs Paterson was nearing the end of her life and she died four days later

Lynn claims the family were then told Mrs Paterson would need an operation to repair her hip or she would die in bed.

However, doctors told the family the surgery itself was not without risk and could result in death.

On February 1, doctors called the family to notify Mrs Paterson was nearing the end of her life and she died four days later.

Lynn added: 'We are all absolutely devastated. I wouldn't want any family having to go through this. This is gross incompetence as far as I'm concerned.

'We gave the staff several warnings about this and now it's happened.

'We are well aware of the great nurses and staff at Wishaw that go above and beyond for their patients but in this instance the staff have failed in their duty of care to my mum.'

NHS Lanarkshire confirmed a complaint had been received from the family regarding Mrs Paterson's care.

Anne Leitch, chief nurse at University Hospital Wishaw, said: 'We would like to convey our deepest sympathy to the family and our thoughts are with them at this most difficult time.

'We aim to provide the highest standard of care to all our patients and we regret any instance where someone feels we have not met this standard.

'We can confirm that NHS Lanarkshire is managing a complaint through our formal complaints process and we will respond directly to the family. We therefore cannot make further comment at this time.'
Asking prices for first-time buyer homes in the North West of England are rising the most across the country, while those trying to get on the property ladder in London may have room to negotiate as prices are declining in the capital.

New research by property portal Rightmove has found that the average asking price for a first-time buyer home in the North West at the start of the year was 8.6 per cent higher than 12 months earlier, or around 11,000 more expensive at 144,453.

Conversely, first-time buyers in London were looking to spend on average some 6,600, or 1.4 per cent, less than a year ago for their first home - although at a typical 474,950, starter homes in the capital remain the most expensive in the country.

Prices for first-time buyers have increased at a faster rate than the market generally

Prices for first-time buyers have increased at a faster rate than the market generally.

The national average asking price of first-time buyer properties was 200,578, up 3.9 per cent compared to a year ago, or an annual rise of 7,475.

That compares to an increase of 3.3 per cent across the whole market, according to Rightmove, which defines first-time homes as properties with two bedrooms or fewer.

Richard Powell, director at Ryder & Dutton estate agents with branches across East Lancashire, North Manchester and West Yorkshire, said prices in the region are siring because demand outstrips supply.

'Weve less properties for sale per branch than at any time since the late 1980s, which of course causes prices to rise,' he said.

'Having said that, people still want to buy homes and in many cases its no more expensive to buy in the North West than to rent, especially with low mortgage rates available.'

The table shows the change in average asking prices for first-time buyer homes over the past 12 months

London calling: The capital is the only region where average asking prices for first-time buyer properties have fallen year-on-year, Rightmove said

He added that former mill towns like Oldham, Rochdale, Bury and Blackburn have many terraced properties around the 100,000 to 200,000 mark that are available to buy.

'Coupled with more Help to Buy schemes and new-build developments, its probably easier to become a first-time buyer in this part of the world than many other regions, which also helps to push prices up,' he added.

The current Help to Buy scheme is due to end on 31 March, but a new one will begin on 1 April. The most important changes are that the new scheme is only available to first-time buyers, and includes a number of regional price caps.

Yorkshire and the Humber had the second biggest annual increase in average asking prices for first-time buyer homes, at 8.4 per cent, followed by the West Midlands, at 7 per cent.

First-buyer homes in the North East, where prices have risen 5.6 per cent, are the least expensive across the country, priced on average at 112,150.

London is the only region where average asking prices for first-time buyer properties have fallen year-on-year.

Neil Ewen, director at Central Estate in Walthamstow in London, said: 'We're based towards the outskirts of London, where people can get a bit more space and the neighbourhoods are a little greener, and we're seeing huge levels of demand for first-time buyer properties.

'About 80% of our business is with first-time buyers and even as recently as January we were seeing really high levels of demand for property.'

He added: 'I think it's a good time to get on the ladder in Walthamstow - it's a cool place with lots going on and even our properties that were previously struggling to find a buyer are now being snapped up.'

Rightmove's director of property data Tim Bannister said: 'Despite the higher asking prices in London, first-time buyers in the capital appear to have a window of opportunity to negotiate a good deal, with this being the only region to have seen average first-time buyer asking prices fall over the past 12 months.

'Conversely, sellers in the North West who are looking to trade up and move into a bigger home are in a strong position'.
Twitter has started blocking accounts which are spreading inflammatory and divisive comments after a request from the Government of India. The microblogging site has reportedly blocked half the accounts out of the 1,178 flagged by Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).

Earlier, the Government had threatened the company officials with jail term or penalty for not following its order and banning the accounts.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 10)  Vice President Leni Robredo is pushing for the faster rollout of the countrys COVID-19 vaccination program to also speed up the economic recovery.

In her video message, Robredo said the government should set better goals to achieve herd immunity especially during this time that many Filipinos already lost their jobs due to the global health crisis. Herd immunity is when a large part of a population is immune to an infectious disease.

Dapat yong goal natin better than 2023, she said. Nakakapag-alala yon kasi as of now, ang daming naghihirap na mga Pilipino, ang dami nang nawalan ng trabaho, so dapat yong goal natin the faster na mabakunahan ang mas maraming tao.

[Translation: Our goal should be better than 2023. This is worrisome because as of now, many Filipinos are suffering, many lost their job, so our goal should be faster vaccination of many people.]

The faster Filipinos are immunized against COVID-19, the faster we can go back to normal, she said.

The Philippine economy contracted by 9.5% in 2020 due to dampened consumer spending and business activity caused by the pandemic. As of October, the country has an unemployment rate of 8.7% which translates to 3.8 million people.

Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said in a recent briefing that they intend to finish vaccinating the target population by 2023 with the approved plan by national authorities. She noted, however, that this can also be achieved even before that year.

The government is targeting to acquire 148 million vaccine doses and inoculate up to 70 million people aged 18 years old and above this year, with health care workers first in line. They are followed by senior citizens, person with comorbidities, frontline personnel in essential sectors including uniformed personnel, and the indigent population.

READ: LIST: Priority sectors, subgroups in COVID-19 vaccination program

Vaccine procurement efforts are also being done, with some local government units even allocating funds for their own purchase through tripartite agreements.

However, surveys earlier conducted revealed that many Filipinos are rather not willing to be vaccinated due to concerns on safety, efficacy, and cost.

Robredo said if needed to be the first one and in public, she said she is willing to be inoculated if it will help boost vaccine confidence of Filipinos.
Child prodigies are not rare. Paul Klee drew 'Woman with Parason' at before the age of six years. Salvadore Dali also started painting at the age of 6. But when reality TV star Kim Kardashian claimed that her and rapper Kanye West's daughter North allegedly painted a scenic canvas full of Bob Ross-like imagery, the internet was a bit more skeptical.

Kardashian shared an image of a finished painting depicting a beautiful landscape on her Instagram story on Tuesday.

The unbelievably impeccable painting that reminded many of the dreamy landscapes painted by television's Bob Ross, got many netizens speculating that Kim had shared a fake painting and forged Norths signature on it just to show off. The seven-year-olds painting was too perfect for netizens to believe that she actually did it. One of the tweets mentioned that they would bet anything, even their life, to prove that the painting was not done by North.

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I will bet anything (even my life) that this painting was not done by north west pic.twitter.com/aaegkDJJKO  Ethan (@sirconeus) February 8, 2021

the fact that kim photoshopped norths signature on this like girl.... she did not paint that pic.twitter.com/5DC8Lbb1FZ  (@howtohydrate) February 9, 2021

After the accusations started leveling up, Kim posted a statement on her Instagram Story where she slammed the people who were doubting her childs talent. The 40-year-old owner of Skims warned in bold capital letters that people should not play with her when it comes to her children. She went on to explain that her daughter and her best friend have been taking a serious oil painting class where their talents and creativity are being encouraged and nurtured.

Kim further mentioned that her seven-year-old daughter worked incredibly hard on her painting which took several weeks to complete. She said that as a proud mom, she wanted to share North'swork with everyone, but instead of praising her work, she is seeing op-ed pieces in the media and social media from grown adults breaking down whether or not her child actually painted it. She questioned the people and wrote, How dare you see children doing awesome things and then try to accuse them of NOT being awesome!?!?!

Depsite the explanation, however, there were a few netizens who went on to make some memes. One of the memes shared the iconic Starry Night painting by Dutch Post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh, and wrote that it is an exclusive North Wests painting.

exclusive: north wests new painting!! pic.twitter.com/epUxoAC20d  agnes and zoe (@zoeandagnes) February 9, 2021

Another user shared Leonardo da Vincis Mona Lisa and asked whether they have seen North's latest creation.

Did you guys see North Wests painting? pic.twitter.com/YtdUwtUeBj  (@kayyorkcity) February 10, 2021

Kardashian recently returned to Instagram in January after taking a two-week-long break amid rumors of divorce with husband and rapper Kanye West.
The founder and leader of the Alive Chapel International, Bishop Elisha Salifu Amoako has charged the leader of Alabaster International Ministry, Prophet Kofi Oduro to render an unqualified apology to President Akufo-Addo for brandishing him as a hypocrite.



According to him, Kofi Oduro calling President Akufo-Addo names is immaterial at the moment but rather the compliance to the measures put in place by the government especially when everyone contributed to the recent hike in the Covid-19.



Speaking to the media in his office, Bishop Salifu Amoako found it prudent that Ghanaians after going through some hardships and lockdown decided to celebrate at the end of the year, lowering their guards with regards to the safety protocols.



but because we are human beings and are capable of making mistakes we did not follow the safety protocolseverybody contributed to the rising of the Covid-19 cases; the rallies and political campaigns. Those who travelled from abroad as part of the spread of the Covid-19 and the Christmas festivity also contributed to the spread of the Covid-19. But in all of these, the President came to talk to us that we should manage the situation we all find ourselves in very well so that it does not escalate, he indicated.



To him, President Akufo-Addo sought to encourage Ghanaians to make efforts to manage the Covid-19 situation in the country without speaking against anybody to warrant the verbal attack of Pastor Kofi Oduro.



He wondered why the leader of Alabaster International Ministry will go haywire on President Akufo-Addo when he [the President] being a spiritual leader did not touch churches in his new restrictions to curb the spread of the new coronavirus.



if Kofi Oduro goes the extra mile to speak against the President and his council of state who advises the President, I think it is wrong. Pastor Kofi Oduro, you and your church, you owe the President an apology, he charged.



It is not difficult to apologise; it is only arrogant people who find it difficult to say I am sorry. I am sorry can save your life and your family and so I feel that Pastor Kofi Oduro, you owe the President some apology. Accept your mistake and find a way to apologise that your utterance was in a bad taste, he chided.



He also used the occasion to plead with the members of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) especially, Hopson Adorye to forgive Pastor Kofi Oduro for speaking against President Akufo-Addo in that manner.

Source: Daniel Adu Darko/Peacefmonline.com









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Two US carriers conducted a military exercise in the South China Sea, signaling President Joe Biden and his administration are taking a strong stance to oppose Chinas territorial claims in the disputed waters.

The dual carrier operations by the Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group and the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group, which took place yesterday, saw a multitude of exercises aimed at increasing interoperability between assets as well as command and control capabilities, the US navy said in a statement.

The exercises were used to demonstrate its ability to operate in challenging environments, it said.

Through operations like this, we ensure that we are tactically proficient to meet the challenge of maintaining peace and we are able to continue to show our partners and allies in the region that we are committed to promoting a free and open Indo-Pacific, Rear Admiral Doug Verissimo said.

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The dual carrier operations come as Mr Biden seeks to send a signal to both US allies and China that the US will continue to patrol the South China Sea, of which China claims more than 80pc.

Last Friday, the USS John S McCain conducted a freedom-of-navigation operation in the vicinity of the Paracel Islands.

In the past, the US emphasised its policy mainly verbally, but since the Trump administration it has been promoting it much more explicitly with specific actions such as dispatching its two aircraft carriers to the South China Sea, said Yongwook Ryu, an assistant professor at the National University of Singapores Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy who focuses on East Asia.

He said Mr Biden is sending out a clear message to Beijing that it is not going to be soft toward China on certain issues, including the South China Sea disputes, despite its willingness to cooperate with China on some other issues such as climate change.

Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan and China are among those that claim sovereignty to parts of the South China Sea.

The US side has been frequently sending its military vessels to the South China Sea to flex its military muscles, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said yesterday in response to a question about the US operation.

China will continue to take the necessary measures to ensure our sovereignty, our security and our development interests.

"We will work with regional countries to ensure the peace and stability of the South China Sea.

Mumbai, Feb 10 : Southern actress Sruthi Hariharan says she always looks for roles that do not cater to convention. In the new Tamil web series Vadham, Shruti plays police inspector Shakthi who is obsessed with justice.

"As an actor, I have always selected roles that are challenging, and don't always cater to convention. In 'Vadham', I personally related a lot to Sakthi Pandiyan as a character, who fearlessly fights for what is right and is determined to solve the murder of an influential businessman," she added.

The actress continued: "Playing this role also involved intense action sequences and the process of shooting for it was both exciting and tough to master. The immense support shown by our director, Venkatesh Babu, helped me ace my character." The drama series revolves around IPS Officer Sakthi Pandiyan, who is out to solve the murder of an influential businessman with an all-women task force. It will touch upon how as a woman officer, she faces oppression and threats in her fight against the system and against powerful politicians.

Writer-director Venkatesh Babu said: "This high intensity drama, spearheaded by a determined female police officer, makes for a perfect binge-watch session for audiences who enjoy solving crime mysteries. Sruthi Hariharan has truly brought alive the character of Sakthi." The 10-episode series also stars Ashwathy Warrier, Semmalar Annam, Preetheesha Premkumaran and Vivek Rajgopal, and will release on MX Player on February 12.
Federal government says it has expended N37 billion to promote the micro, small and medium enterprise (MSME) survival fund scheme.

The initiative is a component of the Nigeria economic sustainability plan (NESP) which was developed by a committee headed by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo.

The government had announced that the survival fund portal will be opened yesterday for the guaranteed offtake stimulus scheme and the general MSME grant.

According to a statement issued by Laolu Akande, spokesperson to the vice president, the N37bn covered schemes such as N50,000 payroll support for over 300,000 beneficiaries, one-time grants of N30,000 to about 100,000 artisans, and 100,000 Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) business name registrations.

Akande explained that ministers and heads of government agencies had presented reports to Osinbajo at a meeting of the economic sustainability committee on Monday.

He said the governor of Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Godwin Emefiele, reported the bank's intervention schemes such as disbursement of over N192billion for household and MSMEs grants to 426,000 beneficiaries, with plans to do over N100billion more.

Emefiele also said that under the collateral-free agric-business and small & medium enterprise investment scheme, there were ongoing grants of concessionary loans between N150,000 to N2.5 million.

In that category, the governor said over N106 billion had been disbursed to over 27,000 beneficiaries.

"In the agric sector, Agriculture and Rural Development minister, Alhaji Sabo Nanono, also reported that under the ESP, a total of 5.4 million farmers have now been enumerated to get the support under the plan, " the statement read.

"He added that for the enumeration which involved geospatial tagging, almost 73,000 N-Power volunteers were trained and 30,000 of them deployed to 774 local government areas.

"For the purposes of funding through the CBN, the minister disclosed that 2.9 million of the farmers have had their BVN enrolment validated.

"Also, the clearing of 3,200 hectares of land for farming is ongoing in several states including Edo, Plateau, Ekiti, Cross River, Ogun, Kaduna, Kwara, and Osun States while rural road constructions have reached about 28 per cent completion covering 344km, linking about 500 markets across the country."

A Winnipegger who travelled to Africa and Europe has brought back Manitobas first detected case of the U.K. variant of COVID-19, officials learned this week, just as they prepare to loosen pandemic restrictions.

A Winnipegger who travelled to Africa and Europe has brought back Manitobas first detected case of the U.K. variant of COVID-19, officials learned this week, just as they prepare to loosen pandemic restrictions.

"Once (variants) do find their way into Manitoba, I think the probability of yet another surge is quite high," said Dr. Anand Kumar, an infectious disease specialist, who noted vaccines still aren't widely available.

"This could be a lot more complicated than the simple story that we're at the beginning of the end."

JOHN WOODS / THE CANADIAN PRESS FILES Dr. Anand Kumar, ICU attending physician for the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority.

Manitoba officials say a traveller came home to Winnipeg on Jan. 19, after going to Africa and then Europe. The person took a COVID-19 test on Jan. 21, which came back positive the next day. All five members of the travellers household had self-isolated.

The positive sample was selected for sequencing, a practice in which scientists at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg dissect its gene structure and look for mutations. On Monday evening, the lab informed the Manitoba government the sample contained the B.1.1.7 variant, which has taken hold in the United Kingdom. British authorities believe it is 30 per cent to 50 per cent more transmissible.

Once (variants) do find their way into Manitoba, I think the probability of yet another surge is quite high."  Dr. Anand Kumar

As with variants that have taken hold in South Africa and Brazil, the U.K. strain has a modified spike protein that does a better job of binding to cells than the original COVID-19 virus.

While public health officials generally categorize an exposure as 15 minutes of contact with someone, some have suggested a shorter time period might account for the more transmissible strains that have started to circulate in Ontario and Alberta.

Flights with variant case Click to Expand Manitobas online list of flights with confirmed COVID-19 cases shows how the Winnipegger with the B.1.1.7 variant flew home. Two flights on Jan. 19 are listed as having a variant of concern linked to this flight. Air Canada flight 271 from Toronto-Pearson to Winnipeg has rows 13 to 19 marked as a possible exposure. The other is Lufthansa flight 470 from Frankfurt to Toronto-Pearson, with rows 39 to 45 possibly exposed.  Dylan Robertson

"This (U.K.) variant, and the others, are significantly more transmissible than the standard version we've been dealing with," said Kumar, an ICU physician who is helping the federal lab figure out which samples should undergo genetic sequencing.

Dr. Brent Roussin, Manitoba's chief public health officer, noted that coronaviruses mutate frequently, but it wasn't a problem in the province until now.

"Weve detected many, many variants in Manitoba over time, just none of them really had any clinical significance, up until now," Roussin said.

"So, we do anticipate seeing the other variants of concern here in Manitoba."

Meanwhile, Manitobans who have a travelling housemate who brings a COVID-19 variant home will have to self-isolate for as many as 24 days.

Roussin said that when a variant case is confirmed, all household contacts will need to isolate for 14 days after the positive cases incubation period, which ends 10 days after the onset of symptoms.

For example, in the case of a man who returns home, has a cough, and ends up having been infected with a variant, his wife and kids would be stuck at home for 24 days after the onset of his symptoms.

Meanwhile, Roussin said Manitoba has plans to ramp up both screening and sequencing for variant strains. Screening involves checking for mutations in batches, while sequencing is a much more detailed process that can take weeks.

The provincial government currently sequences just five per cent of positive COVID-19 samples. It argues this falls within national guidelines, and that it wouldnt be worth the expense to sequence each single positive test.

MIKAELA MACKENZIE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Dr. Brent Roussin, chief provincial public health officer.

On Tuesday, Roussin said samples that are picked to be sequenced come from anyone who has travelled internationally, and from outbreaks in the general population.

University of Manitoba biology professor Jeffrey Marcus said his colleagues pay around $200 to sequence one genetic sample in Manitoba, regardless of whether its a human or animal virus.

He argued the province should sequence every single positive case, which he said under current rates would cost up to $20,000 a day. Marcus said the cost would be worth it to keep cases low until vaccines are widely available.

"They might have to lock down the city of Winnipeg for three or four weeks to get community spread from one of these new variants under control," Marcus said.

"If we have to do that, $20,000 a day seems pretty cheap to me."

Weve detected many, many variants in Manitoba over time, just none of them really had any clinical significance, up until now.  Dr. Brent Roussin

Provincial officials say the reason Manitoba has reopened gradually relates to the rise of virus variants.

Its also why the province expanded its isolation orders as of Jan. 29, in which almost everyone who enters Manitoba is required to self-isolate for two weeks. Before that, the requirement didn't apply to people who arrived in Manitoba from Western Canada and west of Terrace Bay, Ont.

Meanwhile, the federal Quarantine Act applies to most Canadians who arrive home from abroad, by compelling them to isolate for two weeks. They also need to get a negative COVID-19 test before entering Canada, and air passengers will soon need to pay $2,000 to stay in a hotel for three days upon arrival.

Both the federal and provincial orders exempt essential workers, including those who have to cross into Minnesota and North Dakota for work, which are two of the states with the highest spread of COVID-19.

Both Kumar and Marcus stressed that the fundamentals for containing COVID-19  masks, distancing and washing hands  also work to keep the variants at bay.

"In the absence of any ability to actually control the infections, we have to use those tools that we have available," Marcus said.

"The more people try to make exceptions for themselves, for whatever good reason they think they have, the more likely were all going to be in trouble."

As of Friday, the province will allow more businesses to reopen, but with gathering limits.

dylan.robertson@freepress.mb.ca
The mother of a man murdered in cold blood nine years ago said the pain of knowing his killers are free to walk the streets of Londonderry is becoming more unbearable every day.

Andrew Allen (24) died almost immediately after being shot three times by a dissident republican gunman on February 9, 2012 at his home in Buncrana, Co Donegal.

Mr Allen was shot in front of his partner at approximately 9.20pm and pronounced dead at the scene. A car believed to be involved in the murder was found on fire at Churchbrea, Fahan, three miles outside Buncrana, shortly after the shooting.

Mr Allen had moved out of Derry a number of months earlier after receiving death threats alleging he was a drug dealer - something his family have vehemently and consistently denied.

His family's viewpoint was supported by evidence heard during an inquest into Mr Allen's killing in which the court heard he had no savings or trappings associated with selling drugs.

Republican Action Against Drugs, which later merged into the Real IRA, claimed responsibility for Mr Allen's death.

A total of six people have been arrested by Garda Siochana but to date no one has been convicted - something that Mr Allen's mother Donna Smith finds difficult to come to terms with.

Speaking to the Belfast Telegraph, Ms Smith said: "Every day I wake up, the realisation that Andrew isn't with us gets harder and harder to accept.

"Andrew's two children are now 13 and 15 and looking at them and seeing how they are doing so well, I know Andrew would be so proud of them.

"But they are growing up without their father and that just hurts.

"The men who murdered my son are free. They are free to walk the streets of this city (Derry) and I could walk past them but my son is dead.

"I know there are people who know the names of my son's killer and while part of me thinks no one will ever come forward with that information, part of me still hopes that some day their conscience will make them do the right thing.

"I do understand why people would be reluctant because I know the level of terror and control these organisation inflict on the community, but I would appeal so much to anyone who has information to give it to the Guards (Irish police).

"I don't blame the Guards for the lack of convictions, they have been so good to us as a family and keep in touch with us - but they need evidence and that can only come from either the people who did this to Andrew or from their community."

A Garda spokesman said: "We are grateful for all the witnesses that have come forward and made statements but gardai believe that there are still people in both Buncrana and Derry city who have information that may assist with the investigation.

"Many people have been arrested and questioned over the past nine years and An Garda Siochana are grateful for all those who have assisted the investigation.

"An Garda Siochana together with our counterparts in the Police Service of Northern Ireland continue to investigate and are currently following several lines of enquiry on both sides of the border.

Anyone with information can contact Buncrana Garda Station 00353 74 9320540 or the Garda Confidential Line on 1800 666 111.
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

A survey of more than 80,000 adolescents has revealed factors associated with having friends outside of school, and shows that non-school friendships are more strongly associated with alcohol use than school friendships. Rupa Jose of the University of California, Irvine, and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on February 10, 2021.

Most research on adolescent friendships has focused on ties between peers who attend the same school. While some evidence suggests that friendships between adolescents who attend different schools may have a significant influence on delinquency, few studies have explored this topic on a large scale.

Now, Jose and colleagues have analyzed survey data from 81,674 adolescents who enrolled in sixth to twelfth grade from 1994 to 1995. Participants reported how many in-school and non-school friendships they had and how often they engaged in alcohol use or delinquent behaviors, such as skipping school or lying to parents. The researchers also examined factors that might impact friendships, such as participation in school clubs, socioeconomic status, and distance from school to home.

The analysis revealed two main findings: Non-school friendships are more strongly associated with deviant behaviors and alcohol use to a significantly greater degree than in-school friendships. In addition, participants with non-school friends still tended to be engaged with their schools, such as by participating in clubs, and they tended to play central roles in their peer groups.

The study also identified factors associated with a greater proportion of non-school friends, such as attendance at a private Catholic school (perhaps a proxy for attending a school further from home, and/or economic status) or having more educated parents (potentially a proxy for wealth or economic status). Further, it identified factors linked to greater delinquency or alcohol use, such as lack of parental support or enrollment at a school with a high dropout rate.

These findings add to mounting evidence that non-school friendships may be more likely to promote delinquency and alcohol use than in-school friendships. The various associations identified in the study could help inform efforts to reduce delinquency and underage drinking.

The authors add: "Most existing research focused on in-school friendships, but we found that out of school friendships are important as well; adolescents with more out of school friendships reported more adolescent deviance and alcohol use. Also, a somewhat surprising finding was that youth who have more out of school friendships are more central in the school network and more likely to participate in school-based clubs."

More information: Jose R, Hipp JR, Butts CT, Wang C, Lakon CM (2021) A multi-contextual examination of non-school friendships and their impact on adolescent deviance and alcohol use. PLoS ONE 16(2): e0245837. Journal information: PLoS ONE Jose R, Hipp JR, Butts CT, Wang C, Lakon CM (2021) A multi-contextual examination of non-school friendships and their impact on adolescent deviance and alcohol use.16(2): e0245837. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0245837
The pandemic was disruptive due to the lockdowns, precautions, and the general scare  and all this led to perforce behavioral change in how we shopped.

Ipsos global survey christened Shopping During the Pandemic shows distinct changes in shopping behavior: at least 1 in 2 (49%) urban Indians said they ate out less in local and small restaurants (indoors or outdoors) after the COVID19 outbreak. 6 in 10 global citizens (63%) claimed to have stopped eating out at small and local restaurants. In some markets it was more alarming of those who stopped patronizing small and local restaurants for in-person dining experience  esp. in Chile (83%), Peru (82%), Mexico (82%) and Argentina (81%).

For urban Indians it was a mix of multitude of factors  the lockdown led to closure of most restaurants and when they reopened with all SOPs prescribed, people were still stricken with apprehension about hygiene and contact. Of course, now we see restaurants operating with social distancing and precautions and people have generally started to step out to eat out, said Amit Adarkar, CEO, Ipsos India.

In fact, Ordering-in too decreased by 41% for urban Indians.

Online Shopping

4 in 10 Indians (43%) claim to have shopped more online (than before), during the pandemic. 43% global citizens too shopped online, more than before, during the pandemic. Interestingly, the top markets that saw highest surge in Online Shopping were those of Chile (59%), Great Britain (55%), South Korea (54%) and Turkey (54%).

Behavioral change seen for online shopping among Indians, during the pandemic was more a manifestation of safety, convenience and mood elevation; and of course, the altered macro forces of lockdown and constrained reopening, added Adarkar.

Buying from farmers and local manufacturers

The survey shows buying habits to be quite stable, though more for global citizens with 61% claiming to have bought from farmers and small manufacturers; almost half of urban Indians polled (45%) said they were patronizing farmers and small manufacturers. Japan (84%) and Sweden (77%) emerged at the top in displaying this behavior.

Being Vocal for Local became more heightened during the pandemic, especially to support the tiny businesses which were reeling under the severe impact of the pandemic, said Adarkar.

42% Indians claimed to have continued with the habit of visiting in-person local markets and kirana shops during the pandemic. 54% global citizens too showed a similar trend.

For essentials, grocery and of course some outing. After all, the lockdown was a new phenomenon for all and it was hard for everyone to be locked-in within the four walls of their homes, reasoned Adarkar.
If we lose our patience, we will crush you under our feet. Keep this in mind. I warn BJP and Congress leadership be in your limits, KCR said.  DC file photo

Hyderabad: TRS supremo and Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao lost his cool and spit fire against not only the opposition parties  the BJP and the Congress  while addressing a public meeting at Nellikal in Nagarjnasagar Assembly constituency on Wednesday, but also women in the audience, whom he termed dogs.

Rao warned sternly, BJP and Congress parties are crossing all limits while criticising me and my government. We are tolerating all this nonsense. But there is a limit for everything. If we lose our patience, we will crush you under our feet. Keep this in mind. I warn BJP and Congress leadership be in your limits.

Rao lost his temper again a few minutes later, while addressing the public gathering, when some youth and women, allegedly BJP activists, obstructed him by raising slogans against him and displaying some papers.

He called them dogs, while directing police to whisk away the dogs from the venue.

I have seen so many dogs like you. I dont care if dogs like you bark at me. If you have any concerns or issues, bring it to the notice of the government through a proper channel. You cannot disrupt a meeting being held by a leader like me, he said.

The TRS chief directed police personnel on duty at the venue to catch and take them away in the public address system.

He further said, there are several dogs like you. Police... take them out. Take their papers whatever they want to give. They are just a handful of people here. We are a huge gathering. If we retaliate, there will not be any trace of you. You will be reduced to dust.

Rao termed BJP leaders new beggars, quoting a Telugu proverb. He said these days BJP leaders are talking in a manner akin to a beggar, who is new to the profession and begging at odd hours, ignorant of when to beg.

Rao also said, dont resort to senseless activities. If you have anything to say to people, you also hold a public meeting. People will decide. Coming to meetings of other parties and disturbing them is not good culture. People will teach you a lesson. I am warning their leader to be careful. There is a limit to our patience. If you cross the limits, we know what to do.
AMSTERDAM (dpa-AFX) - Dutch industrial production declined at a softer pace in December, figures from the Central Bureau of Statistics showed on Wednesday. Industrial production decreased 0.2 percent year-on-year in December, following a 2.7 percent fall in November. Production declined for the eleventh straight month. About a third of all business classes in industry produced more in December. Production in the chemical industry grew the most, by 8.5 percent. Meanwhile, production in repair and installation machines declined 25.1 percent. On a seasonally and working-day adjusted basis, industrial production rose 0.5 percent in December. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

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.
Select Group, a leading private real estate developer in the UAE, has announced its foray into Business Bay and Dubais Downtown district with its latest project, 15 Northside in Business Bay.

The new project comes following Select Group's handover of its most recent project, Jumeriah Living Marina Gate in July last year.

The 15 Northside will be Select Groups first foray into Business Bay and Dubais Downtown district. Work on this latest property, perched on the waterways of Dubai Canal, has already begun in earnest this month.

This development was acquired with shell and core in place, completed to about 50%," a company official told TradeArabia.

"The group is now altering some elements of the design and the facade, and will be completing all the fit-outs and interiors from this point on," he stated.

Select Group said on completion, the project will consist of two towers, and contain 349 residential units in total, made of up of studios, one-, two-, and a select number of three-bedroom apartments.

It will also provide a dual level gym, a spacious deck floor with an infinity pool overlooking the Downtown Skyline and a relaxing roof terrace for all residents. The construction is almost 50% over and is set to be completed by Q3 2022, it added.

CEO Rahail Aslam said: "Having built a strong reputation for delivering premium residences, at a fantastic price point within Dubai Marina over many years, we are very excited by the prospect of bringing this same standard of quality to another area in Dubai."

"The 15 Northside, thanks to a unique and contemporary design, will offer a spectacular range of differing views from various vantage points across its 21 floors. These will include Dubai Canal, Dubai Creek, Burj Khalifa, Dubai Frame, Ras al Khor Wildlife Sanctuary and even sights of Ain Dubai, explained Aslam.

"Business Bay is an excellent location for us to expand into, we have recently delivered one of the most talked about developments in the city with Jumeirah Living Marina Gate, and are looking forward to bringing the Select Group standard of premium finishes and unmatched waterfront living Downtown," he added.-TradeArabia News Service
The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
Liverpool, Feb 11 : Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp was unable to travel to Germany for his mother's funeral due travel restrictions in place due to Covid-19. Klopp's mother, Elisabeth, died at the age of 81, German media reports said on Tuesday.

"She meant everything to me, a mother in the real sense of the word," Klopp was quoted as saying in the local newspaper Schwarzwaelder Bote.

"She is now in a better place. Not being at the funeral is due to the terrible times we are in now. Once conditions allow it, we will hold a wonderful memorial service," he said.

Germany has introduced strict travel restrictions from countries such as the United Kingdom which have been hit by a new, more contagious variant of the coronavirus.

Liverpool's official Twitter handle offered condolences for Klopp, who led the club to their first Premier League title in three decades last season. "You'll Never Walk Alone, Jurgen," they said in their tweet accompanied by a photograph of Klopp and a heart.
The Perspective

Atlanta, Georgia

February 9, 2021

Cllr. Tiawan S. Gongloe

President of the LNBA

I am greatly honored and elated to be here this morning to speak to the gallant men and women of the Armed Forces of Liberia as a keynote speaker at the beginning of this very important week in the life of the Armed Forces of Liberia which, under normal circumstances, should end on February 11, 2021, with an elaborate national program. Such an elaborate celebration is not possible this year for the insecurity situation created by the COVID 19 pandemic.



As a person who, over the years, has expressed critical views about governance issues, bordering on the respect for human rights and the rule of law, I remain forever grateful to the Chief of Staff and the men and women of the Armed Forces of Liberia, for providing me this unique platform to express my opinion about the way forward for empowering the Armed Forces of Liberia, the mother of the security sector, in order to adequately perform its role as the protector of our collective security in a more meaningful way.



I want to begin by saying a little bit about my link with the Armed Forces of Liberia. In 1994, I was contracted by the Liberian National Transitional Government headed by Cllr. David D. Kpomakpor to prosecute a group of military men led by the late General Charles Julu who attempted to overthrow the transitional government on September 15, 1994. I was appointed as the trial counsel and commissioned with the rank of colonel of the Armed Forces of Liberia, by a special order issued by the Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces of Liberia. Let me quickly say that at the end of the trial, which lasted for six months, I was very happy to be decommissioned.



Before speaking on the topic of the day, permit me to briefly reflect on the past of the Liberian military. Military activities started in Liberia as a small militia force to defend the colonies of black settlers from the United States of America established along the coasts of Liberia, especially the one that was established on the Providence Island and later moved to Cape Mesurado. The settler who is historically given credit for the beginning of the Liberian state, Elijah Johnson and Joseph Jenkins Roberts were all militia generals. After the colonies collectively declared themselves an independent state called Liberia, with the exception of Maryland, which later joined the republic, the boundaries of Liberia were constantly encroached upon by the bordering French and British colonies of what is known today as Ivory Coast, Guinea, and Sierra Leone, respectively. Also, the authority of the Government of the newly declared independent Republic was not accepted by some kings and chiefs of many rural parts of the country. In order to deal with these issues, the Legislature created the first military force of Liberia in 1908 and named it the Liberian Frontier Force (LFF). The Frontier Force was also used to collect taxes and to recruit, mostly young men from the interior parts for forced labor on the farms of officials of government, carry out public works, such as road-building, and to work on commercial farms at home and abroad.



In the performance of these duties, the Frontier Force, most often, used excessive force, sometimes leading to the deaths of those who rebelled against the central government. Opponents of the government who were not killed were captured and detained in military prisons, the notorious of which were post stockade at the Barclay Training Center in Monrovia and Camp Belleh Yallah, deep in the Belleh Forest, in the part of the country known today as Gbarpolo County. Certainly, this made the military an enemy of a majority of the people of Liberia.



Following the 1980 coup, there were summary trials of civilians by a military tribunal set up by the military junta. Many of those who were tried by the tribunal were executed. Those who were not executed were imprisoned either at the post stockade in Monrovia or at Camp Belleh Yallah. Also brought before the military tribunal, for trial, were six student leaders of the Liberian National Student Union (LINSU), who challenged the Peoples Redemption Council (PRC) Decree 2A, which banned among other things, students political activities. They included Ezekial Pajibo, Alaric Tokpa, Kpede Woiwor, Siapha Blackie, Nyomo K. Brownell, and Mayonga Wilson. The trial ended with the conviction of the student leaders and a sentence of death by firing squad. The entire Liberia became tense as a result of the sentence and the junta backed down and released the student leaders.



In 1984, the military junta had two notable engagements with the students. The first was when Ezekial Pajibo, Alaric Tokpa, Christian Herbert, James Fromayan, Dempster Yallah and his wife Lucia Massallay (now Yallah) were arrested and detained at the post stockade and later transferred to Camp Belleh Yallah on the suspicion that there were the authors of an underground leaflet titled REACT on the ground the under publication violate PRC Decree 88A which prohibited any criticism of officials of the three branches of the Liberian Government. The second encounter of the students with the military was following an order by the Commander-in- Chief, then Master Sergeant Samuel K. Doe, to the Minister of Defense, then Gray D. Allison to  move or be removed. Upon the issuance of this order by the Commander-in-chief, the military invaded the campus of the University of Liberia on August 22, 1984, when students were protesting on the campus against the illegal detention of Prof. Amos C. Sawyer at the post stockade, without any charge. The military indiscriminately assaulted students and teachers, including your humble servant and raped many females in broad day light. The misuse of the army in the ways that I have briefly catalogued made the army a bitter enemy of a majority of the people of Liberia.



Today, the situation has changed considerably with the 1986 Constitution of Liberia coming into full force, which makes it unconstitutional to detain civilians in military prisons or to try civilians before court-martial boards or any form of military tribunal. Also, the reformed Armed Forces of Liberia has demonstrated a high degree of professionalism, national consciousness and has, largely, not engaged in the reckless use of force as was done by the military in the past.



Today, we are all proud of the performance of the men and women of the Armed Forces as part of the United Nations Peace-keeping Force in Mali.

Having given a brief narrative of my temporary, but, quite interesting time with the Armed Forces of Liberia and made some observations about its past and present history, let me now focus on the topic that the chief of Staff humbly requested me to speak on today. General Johnson, you in your letter to me you asked me to speak on the topic: Enhancing Military and Legislative Interaction in a Democracy: Liberia in perspective



This topic requires that I first deal with the interactions between the military and the legislature in a democracy before I can speak about whether or not it should be enhanced in Liberia. In order to understand the interactions between the military and the legislature, one has to find out the nature of the relationship between the two. The military in any democratic country is a critical agent of the Executive Branch of Government. However, its creation is not possible without an act of the legislature. Also, while the military is controlled by the executive branch and obeys only the lawful order of the executive branch, whose head is the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces, its survival and personnel, as well as logistical strength, depends on budgetary appropriations made by the Legislature. Further, the military cannot participate in any war or peace-Keeping duty unless the legislature approves such a mission.



The general nature of the relationship between the military and the legislature in a democracy is universal. Hence, it is not different from what obtains in Liberia. The existence of the Liberian military is traced to the legislative Act of 1908 which created the Frontier Force, as the first organized military arm of the Liberian Government. This act was amended in 1956 and further amended more recently in 2008. The command structure of the military cannot be constituted without the approval of the legislature. Article 54(e) of the Constitution of Liberia provides for the consent of the Legislature for the appointment of members of the military from the rank of lieutenant or its equivalent and above meaning up to the ranks of generals and the chief of staff.



Further, it cannot be over-emphasized or over-stated that the existence, maintenance, and functioning of the military depend on the National Legislature, as mandated by the Constitution of Liberia. Article 34 b) and c) of the Constitution of Liberia provide, The Legislature shall have the power: b) to provide for the security of the Republic; and c) to provide for the common defense, to declare war and authorize the Executive to conclude peace; to raise and support the Armed Forces of the Republic, and to make appropriations therefor provided that no appropriation of money for that use shall be for a longer-term than one year; and to make rules for the governance of the Armed Forces of the Republic. This, men and women of the Armed Forces of Liberia, is the nature of the relationship that exists between the military and the Legislature in Liberia.



Given the relationship between the military and the legislature as defined by the Constitution of Liberia, it is obvious that there has to be frequent interactions between the military and the legislature in order to give life to the mandate of the Constitution of Liberia on the functions of the legislature regarding the existence and effectiveness of the military. The Constitution has mandated this interaction as it has guaranteed that funding for the military has to be provided for by the legislature.



In light of what I have said, thus far, about the relationship between the legislature and the military, it appears to me that the answer to the question whether or not the interaction between the military and the legislature should be enhanced is in the affirmative.



What remains for me to do at this juncture is to explore how the interactions between the military and the legislature can be enhanced for our collective security, for a better Liberia, the Liberia in which the security, peaceful existence and the welfare of all Liberians on an equitable basis will become the paramount concerns of both, the military and the legislature, in their interactions.



In order for the military to play a key role in the building of a better Liberia, there are two cardinal points that I urge the military to take into consideration in the performance of its national duties:

The first is that the military must be a force for our collective security by remaining unrelenting and unreservedly committed to protecting our evolving democracy. Towards this end, I plead with the military to stay out of politics and let the politicians make whatever mistake they can make. In other words, political mistakes, no matter how terrible they may be, must be corrected by political actions and not military interventions. We have been down that road and we must all say forward ever to political solutions and backward never to military interventions. The Liberian people will never, again, accept any justification for the military take-over of their government.

I can say without any fear of contradiction that the national difficulties that we are experiencing today are traceable to the militarys, widely publicized intervention to redeem the people of Liberia from rampant corruption and one party rule. It is true that Liberia was governed by one group of people for a very long time under the banner of the Ground Old True Whig Party. Yes, there was rampant corruption. Yes a few people were enjoying a disproportionate share of the incomes generated from the resources of Liberia. These problems were political problems, in nature, that required only political solutions.

There is no record to show that any Liberian or group of Liberians requested the intervention of the military to solve these problems on April 12, 1980. The progressive politicians were aware that a majority of the men and women of the Armed Forces of Liberia in 1980 did not have sufficient education or experience, or any political or ideological training and therefore, they were even more dangerous than those that were in power. As Thomas Sankara, the Late Revolutionary leader of Burkina Faso once said, A soldier without any political or ideological training is a potential criminal.

The seizure of homes, farms and properties of former government officials, the looting of properties, the frequent raping of wives and daughters of former government officials and other forms of abuse of human rights that occurred, immediately after the military takeover are examples of what Sankara was warning the world about.

The worst of all the negative effects of the coup was the total breakdown of the chain of command in the army and the paramilitary forces. Enlisted men became captains, majors, colonels and even generals on the morning of the coupdetat, without any ability to command a squad. This was the beginning of the indiscipline in the military and para-military forces of Liberia, which until this day our country is still struggling to curtail.

Having made this observation, let me quickly say that my general observation and the observations of many critical Liberian thinkers that I have spoken to is that the armed forces, for more than a decade, has been incrementally disciplined and more professional that it is now trusted by the public more than the para-military forces. I call upon the paramilitary forces to follow the good example of the Armed Forces of Liberia and to become more professional and disciplined in the performance of their functions.

We need not emphasize that the so-called rescue mission orchestrated by some non-commissioned officers and enlisted men of the Armed Forces of Liberia in 1980, was unjustifiably chaotic and bloody and took us far away from finding solutions to Liberias problems because these problems were political in nature and required only political solutions.

In fact the intervention of the military on April 12, 1980 prevented the attempts by the politicians to solve these problems. It began with the mayoral election of 1979, which was postponed to 1980, in which Prof. Amos C. Sawyer of the Movement for Justice in Africa was an independent candidate supported by the progressive politicians and Mr. Chuchu Horton was the candidate of the ruling political party, the True Whig Party.

In 1980, it was clear to the True Whig Party that its hold on to power could not last anymore without the democratic approval of the Liberian people through a free and fair election. Hence, in that year, the TWP began preparation for competition with the progressive politicians in an election that President Tolbert had said would be held in 1983.

The Progressive Alliance of Liberia (PAL) formed a political party at the beginning of 1980 called the Progressive Peoples Party ( PPP) and MOJA held its first National Congress at the Monrovia City Hall in March 1980, which ended with a resolution for MOJA to form a political party to compete with the TWP in 1983. The True Whig Party at the beginning of 1980 held its first quadrennial congress in Buchanan, Grand Bassa County, in preparation for the expected election in 1983.

While all the political teams were preparing and rehearsing for a competition, in the political arena, scheduled to take place in 1983, the military, wrongly reading the hot political atmosphere that was developing in Liberia, intervened and violently overthrew the TWP Government and arrogated unto itself the title of a redeemer by naming its collective membership as the Peoples Redemption Council. And so, the Armed Forces of Liberia, stole the show on the early morning of April 12, 1980.



The 1980 military coup has delayed, up to this day, the change that the Liberian people struggled for and expected. This is a clear indication that violence does not necessarily solve any political problem, but only gives a temporary emotional relief. What violence clearly does is to delay solution to any political problem. Liberia is a clear example. Therefore, let me appeal to the military to never again intervene in the politics of Liberia. Keep to your military duties and leave governance with the politicians, no matter how bad governance may be. Again I say let political mistakes be corrected by politicians not soldiers.

The second suggestion is about how the military can play a leading role to reverse the increasing level of food insecurity in our country. The military with the support of the legislature should expand the scope of the militarys role of providing for our collective security, beyond protecting us from invasions from across our borders to our collective security from hunger. Death by hunger and death from the use of force amounts to the same thing, death. Liberians are dying slowly from the lack of food because we are not producing enough food as a nation to feed ourselves.



Most of our hard-to-earn foreign exchange is spent to import food, especially our staple food, rice. Countries less endowed with good climate and soil compared to Liberia grow rice, not only for local consumption, but also for export. It will interest you to know, for an example, that Egypt, a desert country, until recently, was the largest producer and exporter of rice in the Middle East region. It is shameful for Liberia, to say the least. What explanation do we have, as Liberians, for importing rice from China and India, countries with more than a billion people each, to feed?

I suggest that the military forms a robust agricultural battalion, in order, to find ways to solve our collective food insecurity problem. The level of discipline that exists in the military makes ideal for leading our national effort to overcome our food insecurity problem. I call on the legislature to make adequate budgetary appropriation for strengthening the Armed Forces of Liberia, as a redeemer of the Liberian people, in the unending cycle of hunger. The Liberian government must also provide more incentives for entrepreneurs that want to venture into food production.

As a nation, we cannot make progress, if we cannot produce most of the food that we eat. Through the process of eminent domain, the Government of Liberia should identify huge parcels of farmland in each county and make them available to the military to produce food for Liberia. This is the best way for the army to protect our collective security, for now. These activities will also provide opportunities for civilian jobs for agricultural school students, graduates and graduates from T-Vet programs in the operation and repairs of farming machines, and other logistical and administrative services. It can be done, once there is a political will.

My suggestion, which some may classify as extraordinary is based on the fact that the government and people of Liberia cannot reverse the high level of poverty in Liberia without taking extraordinary steps for the increase in rice production. Without an increase in rice production in Liberia, the price of rice will continue to rise and a rise in the price of rice will lead to an increase in poverty. Studies have shown that there is a direct link between rice production and poverty in Liberia.

These studies have shown that if more rice is produced in Liberia, the price of rice will drop and this will lead to a reduction in poverty level in Liberia. For example, based on earlier studies by researchers on the link between rice and other cereal production and poverty, Clarence Tsimpo and Quentin Wodo, two World Bank , in their paper entitled, Rice Prices and Poverty in Liberia(2008) reached the following conclusion:

In Liberia however, at least under the current conditions, the impact of a change in the price of rice is not ambiguous. This is because a large share of the rice that is consumed is imported, while the rice that is locally produced is used mostly for auto-consumption rather than for sale on the market. In such circumstances, an increase in the price of rice, whether imported or locally produced, will tend to result in higher poverty in the country as a whole (even if some local producers will gain from this increase), while a reduction in price will lead to a reduction in poverty. Furthermore, because rice represents such a large share of the food consumption of households, any change in the price of rice is likely to have a rather large effect on poverty measures.



According to an FAO report dated May 20, 2019, rice for human consumption accounted for over 80 percent of imports . This means that 80 percent of the money that we spent in Liberia to import from other countries was spent on rice in 2019. The situation remains the same today. It also means that if we produce more rice in Liberia, we will save that money and invest it in ways that could develop our country.



Based on the foregoing, my advice to President George M. Weah is that his policy titled the Pro-Poor Agenda for Prosperity and Development (PAPD) which is meant to reduce poverty and promote prosperity and national development in Liberia cannot and will not succeed until and unless more rice is produced in Liberia, than is imported. If he does not promulgate programs for the radicle increase in food production, then at the end of his six years in power Liberians will become poorer than they were on the day that he was inaugurated as President of Liberia. Therefore, I urge the President, as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Liberia, to amend his legislative agenda for this year and going forward, to include an increase in the budget of the Armed Forces of Liberia for the use of the men and women of the Armed Forces to lead the country in the production of more rice in Liberia. The security threat to the survival of our nation is not external threat from the borders of Liberia; rather, it is internal threat based on our high dependency on the importation of rice. The military must be used to deal with this threat to our survival as a sovereign nation. I urge the Legislature to fully cooperate with the President, if and when he decides to focus on the use of the military for increase rice production in Liberia.

Distinguished Officers, men and women of the Armed Forces of Liberia, other distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen, this is my little input on the use of the military with the support of the legislature to make Liberia a better place for all Liberians.



I wish the men and women of the Armed Forces of Liberia a blissful celebration of Armed Forces Day, 2021.

I thank you.




Intel is suing a former Oregon employee, alleging he took trade secrets when he left for Microsoft and used the information to gain an advantage in later business negotiations with Intel.

Engineer Varun Gupta worked at Intel for ten years before joining Microsoft in January 2020, according to the suit. He allegedly loaded Intel trade secrets onto two USB drives before quitting and then accessed them on his Microsoft-issued laptop, The Oregonian/OregonLive reported.

Gupta could not immediately be reached by the newspaper for comment. Intel and Microsoft are increasingly rivals as Microsoft develops its own chip engineering capabilities.

In this case, however, the litigation indicates Intel and Microsoft worked together to investigate. Intels complaint claims Gupta denied knowing the location of one USB drive, but later turned it over to Microsoft for analysis.

In his new role at Microsoft, Gupta used the confidential information and trade secrets he misappropriated from Intel, deploying that information in head-to-head negotiations with Intel concerning customized product design and pricing for significant volumes of Xeon processors, Intel alleged in Fridays filing.

An internal investigation concluded that he had transferred 3,900 Intel documents to a USB drive, according to the complaint.

Intel seeks unspecified damages in the suit, attorney fees and an injunction preventing Gupta from using or disclosing the material on the USB drive. It filed the suit Friday in U.S. District Court in Portland.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia

2 people die in Armenia road accident

Nigeria: Students taken hostage a month ago are released

61 quakes recorded in Congo per day

Syrian MFA: EU lost credibility due to blind obedience to US policy

Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack

Mher Grigoryan: Clarification of border points is possible only after withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops from Armenia

Suspicious deal: Whether there was profit from buying DNA IDs?

Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war

4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack

Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities

Kocharyan: I have to ask people how it happened that overwhelming majority elected this leader

Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country

Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia

US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs

Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners

Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions

Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US

Iran intensifies its diplomacy amid Armenia-Azerbaijan border tensions

Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes

Lukashenko accuses West of destabilizing situation in Belarus

Armenia Central Electoral Commission chief on snap elections: No legal basis for postponing, suspending any function

Armenias Pashinyan is met by Yerevan district residents chanting against him

We are ready to be fully engaged in negotiation process to resolve Karabakh issue, says Armenia acting PM

Armenia ex-President Kocharyan gives interview to Russia TV channel

Armenia acting premier: We are ready to start withdrawing troops at any moment

Canada MFA expresses concern over 6 Armenian soldiers capture by Azerbaijan troops

There are omissions in registration documents of political forces that applied to Armenia Central Electoral Commission

Armenia Central Electoral Commission chief: There is activeness in Yerevan for the past day or two

Three new cases of coronavirus reported in Artsakh

Group of US Congress members threaten Azerbaijans Aliyev regime with sanctions

Chicago mayor is sued for allegedly refusing interview with white reporter

Iran exports oil to US for first time after long interval

"Armenia" bloc top 50 MP candidates are announced

42 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia

Sri Lanka public beach is covered in charred plastic pellets due to fire in container ship

US preparing list of targeted sanctions on Belarus authorities

China believes it will own America by 2035, Biden says

15 al-Shabab militants killed in Somalia

Newspaper: Armenia political forces that applied for running in election impatiently await CEC decision

Newspaper: Changes are expected in Artsakh

California prisoner who considers himself Satanist beheads cellmate, dismembers his body

Newspaper: Armenia acting PM's "mutually beneficial" proposal to collapse state system?

Armenia National Security Service Reserve Officers' Union members meet with His Holiness Karekin II

EU is ready to help Armenia and Azerbaijan with border delimitation and demarcation

ARF-D member on Nikol Pashinyan: 103 years ago Armenia's founding fathers would have executed him for treason

Iran President hails brotherly ties with Azerbaijan

Robert Kocharyan on years of his leadership in Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia

Situation on Armenian-Azerbaijani border is still tense, more on COVID-19 in Armenia, May 28 digest

"Armenia" alliance of political parties paying tribute to founder of First Republic Aram Manukyan

Yerevan.today: Armenia acting PM not greeted at ruling party's headquarters, citizens call him 'capitulator'

Russia MOD reports on maintenance of ceasefire regime in Nagorno-Karabakh

Armenia acting MOD meets with Russian counterpart in Moscow

Armenia 2nd President: I see possibility of restoring borders of Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast

We can provide our army with some key, modernized weapons, says Armenia ex-President Kocharyan

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan: Captives issue is not one that any opposition force can resolve

OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs release statement on detention of 6 Armenian servicemen by Azerbaijan

Armenian acting Deputy PM: Discussion on issues possible only after withdrawal of Azeri troops from Armenia's territory

Armenia acting PM on Syunik roads, Russian military posts: This is only place where there are working nuances

Armenia acting PM: Process of return of POWs will intensify after upcoming elections

Putin congratulates Aliyev on Republic Day

Josep Borrell: A group of EU Ministers will visit Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan

Armenia acting PM: We're not going to escalate situation for 30% of Sev Lake

Armenia 3rd President visits Vanadzor, pays tribute to heroes of Battle of Gharakilisa (PHOTOS)

Armenia ex-President Kocharyan lays flowers at Battle of Karakilisa memorial (PHOTOS)

Armenia acting PM: Solution to captives issue is matter of time

Shoygu to Harutyunyan: Russia, Armenia strengthen military cooperation

Armenia acting premier: We are 100% honest toward our country

Artsakh President pays tribute at Stepanakert memorial, Shushi Tank-Monument

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan on Meghri corridor plan: Not beneficial to us now to discuss it as "corridor"

Acting PM: "Cement," "fittings" were stolen while constructing Armenia state "building"

Two new cases of coronavirus reported in Artsakh

Catholicos of All Armenians visits Sardarapat Memorial, again separate from state officials

MOD dismisses Azerbaijan statement on Armenia army firing toward Nakhchivan

Jerusalem Post: Israel prepares for a new war with Hamas

France, UN World Food Programme partner to support displaced people in Armenia

Armenia ex-President Kocharyan: Today we are not full-fledged negotiating party

Norwegian prime minister opposes series of NATO reforms

Armenia deputy FM briefs UN, Red Cross leaders on consequences of Azerbaijan aggression against Artsakh

NATO Secretary-General: Afghans must take full responsibility for peace and stability in their country

104 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia

Armenia acting premier: Our sovereignty, independence cannot be subject of discussion

Karabakh state-finance minister announces resignation

Artsakh MFA: Sardarapat victory has inspired all Armenians for over a century

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan: In contrast to kneeling, disgraceful authorities of the day, we have determination

Armenia President: Today we stand on threshold of Sardarapat of morality, dignity

Catholicos of All Armenians: Our people shall find strength to overcome this ordeal as well

Armenia First Republic Day event is held under very modest conditions

Newspaper: Armenia authorities claiming to be popular close off First Republic Day event to public

Armenia ex-President Sargsyan: Now or never!

Armenia President, then acting premier arrive at Sardarapat Memorial

Newspaper: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan's new "cleverness?"

France ambassador: I wish Armenia to be able to live its independence in peace, prosperity

Bashar al-Assad wins Syria presidential election

Reporters not allowed entering Sardarapat Memorial of Armenia
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Afghanistan: At least six security forces members were killed and over 12 were wounded in separate Taliban attacks in Baghlan and Nimroz provinces in Afghanistan on Sunday (February 7) night, reported TOLO News.

The Taliban attacked a convoy of the government forces in the northern province of Baghlan on Sunday in which three soldiers were killed and six more were wounded, TOLO News quoted sources in Baghlan

The source further revealed that the incident happened on Baghlan-Kunduz Highway in Baghlan-e-Markzai district.

The Taliban ambushed the security forces while they were on their way from Kunduz to Kabul. The sudden impact damaged some army vehicles and injured many.

As per the report, the Taliban has claimed responsibility for the attack, but the local security forces have not yet commented on the attack.

In another attack, the Taliban ambushed a security outpost in Chakhansoor district, Nimroz province, claiming the lives of three policemen and wounding six others, a source revealed.

But provincial council members stated that a total of nine policemen were killed in the attack. Moreover, the Taliban has not commented on Nimroz attack.

Live TV
President Trump: We have won this election in Georgia based on all of this, and theres nothing wrong with saying that, Brad. You know, I mean, having a correct  the people of Georgia are angry. And these numbers are going to be repeated on Monday night along with others that were going to have by that time, which are much more substantial even. And the people of Georgia are angry, the people of the country are angry. And theres nothing wrong with saying that, you know, that youve recalculated, because the 2,236 in absentee ballots, I mean, theyre all exact numbers that were done by accounting firms, law firms, etc., and even if you cut them in half, cut them in half and cut them in half again, its more votes than we need. Brad Raffensperger: Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is the data you have is wrong. We talked to the congressmen, and they were surprised. But they  I guess there was a person named Mr. Braynard that came to these meetings and presented data. And he said that there was dead people, I believe it was upward of 5,000. The actual number were two. Two. Two people that were dead that voted. And so thats wrong. That was two. Trump: Well, Cleta, how do you respond to that? ... Trump: Now, do you think its possible that they shredded ballots in Fulton County? Because thats what the rumor is, and also that Dominion took out machines. That Dominion is really moving fast to get rid of their, uh, machinery. Do you know anything about that? Because thats illegal. Ryan Germany. No, Dominion has not moved any machinery out of Fulton County  Well, but, no, but have they moved, have they, have they moved the inner parts of the machines and replaced them with other parts? No. Are you sure, Ryan? Im sure. Im sure, Mr. President. ... Raffensperger: Mr. President, the problem that you have with social media, they, people can say anything  Trump: No, this isnt social  this is Trump media. Its not social media, its really not. Its not social media. I dont care about social  But  I couldnt care less. Social media is big tech. Big tech is on your side, you know  I dont even know why you have a side, because you should want to have an accurate election. And youre a Republican. We believe that we do have an accurate election. No, I  no, you dont. No, no you dont. You dont have it. You dont have, not even close. Youre off by hundreds of thousands of votes. ... Trump: Because you know what they did and youre not reporting it, thats, you know, thats a criminal, thats a criminal offense, and you know, you cant let that happen. Thats, thats a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer. Thats a big risk. But they are shredding ballots, in my opinion, based on what Ive heard. And they are removing machinery and theyre moving it as fast as they can, both of which are criminal finds. And you cant let it happen. And you are letting it happen. You know, I mean, Im notifying you that youre letting it happen. So, look, all I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more that we have. ... Trump: So, so tell me, Brad, what are we going to do? We won the election. And its not fair to take it away from us like this. And its going to be very costly in many ways. And I think you have to say that youre going to re-examine it. And you can re-examine it, but re-examine it with people that want to find answers, not people that dont want to find answers. For instance, Im hearing Ryan, that hes probably, Im sure a great lawyer and everything, but hes making statements about those ballots that he doesnt know. But hes making them with such, he did make them with surety, but now I think hes less sure, because the answer is they all went to Biden, and that alone wins us the election by a lot. You know, so. Raffensperger: Mr. President, you have people that submit information and we have our people that submit information. And then it comes before the court. And the court then has to make a determination. We have to stand by our numbers. We believe our numbers are right. ... Trump: Well, under law, youre not allowed to give faulty election results, OK? Youre not allowed to do that. And thats what youve done. This is a faulty election result. And honestly, this should go very fast. You should meet tomorrow, because you have a big election, election coming up, and because of what youve done to the president  you know, the people of Georgia know that this was a scam. And because of what youve done to the president, a lot of people arent going out to vote. And a lot of Republicans are going to vote negative because they hate what you did to the president. OK? They hate it. And theyre going to vote. And you would be respected, really respected if this thing could be straightened out before the election. You have a big election coming up on Tuesday. ... Trump: I mean, look, thats  youd have to be a child to think anything other than that, just a child. I mean, you have  Cleta Mitchell: How many ballots? How many ballots, Mr. Secretary, are you saying were processed then? Raffensperger: We had G.B.I. thoroughly investigate that. We had our  this is Ryan Germany. We had our law enforcement officers talk to everyone who was  who was there after that event came to light. G.B.I. was with them, as well as F.B.I. agents. Trump: Well, theres no way they could  then theyre incompetent. Theyre either dishonest or incompetent, OK? Theres only two answers: dishonesty or incompetence. ... Trump: I would like you to, for the attorneys on my, Id like you to perhaps meet with Ryan, ideally tomorrow, because I think we should come to a resolution of this before the election. Otherwise, youre going to have, youre going to have people just not voting. They dont want to vote. They hate the state, they hate the governor and they hate the secretary of state  I will tell you that right now. And the only people that like you are people that will never vote for you. You know that, Brad, right? They like you. You know, they like you. They cant believe what they found. They want more people like you. So, look, can you get together tomorrow? And Brad, we just want the truth, its simple.
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BJP tally in Rajya Sabha likely to go up by 1 next year

Most number of sedition cases filed in Karnataka: Rajya Sabha told

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

New Delhi, Feb 10: As many as 93 cases of sedition were registered in different parts of the country in 2019 in which 96 people were arrested, the Rajya Sabha was informed on Wednesday.

Union Minister of State for Home G Kishan Reddy said chargesheets were filed against 76 people while 29 were acquitted by the courts in 2019.

The highest number of 22 sedition cases in 2019 was registered in Karnataka where 18 people were arrested, he said in a written reply to a question.

G Kishan Reddy said 17 sedition cases were registered in Assam where 23 people were arrested.

A total of 11 sedition cases were registered in Jammu and Kashmir where 16 people were arrested. As many as 10 sedition cases were filed in Uttar Pradesh in which nine people were arrested, he said.

Replying to another question on whether any step has been taken to strengthen the sedition law (Section 124A of the IPC), the minister said the "amendment of laws is an ongoing process".

For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications

Story first published: Wednesday, February 10, 2021, 16:19 [IST]
Armanino's TrustExplorer provides an additional layer of transparency into the recently launched ETP

SAINT HELIER, Jersey, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- CoinShares, Europe's largest digital asset manager with $4 billion in AUM, today announced that it will be offering an attestation service for its new physically backed Exchange Traded Product (ETP), CoinShares Physical Bitcoin (Ticker: BITC), via Armanino's Real-Time assurance application, TrustExplorer. This blockchain-enabled solution allows investors to independently verify the bitcoin backing BITC through viewable and downloadable attest reports that are generated daily.

BITC has been well received by the marketplace with total volumes exceeding $23M in the first 14 days of trading. Through the integration of Armanino's on-demand attestation services, CoinShares offers investors enhanced visibility into the underlying bitcoin of its BITC product. This capacity for independent verification of assets further advances CoinShares' mission to bring tailored investment products to the digital asset marketplace, which offer unparalleled security and transparency, therefore bridging the gap between institutional finance and digital assets.

CoinShares' Head of Product, Townsend Lansing, commented, "Our team at CoinShares is dedicated to utilising innovative technology to continue our mission of bringing trust and transparency to the ETP space. As we first pioneered with our XBT Provider product line, which has $3.8 billion in AUM, we are now bringing this same innovation to our new product line, which was built with the needs of institutional allocators in mind."

Armanino is a top 25 accounting firm specialising in digital assets. The TrustExplorer application leverages blockchain technology to independently verify the amount of bitcoin physically backing the ETP match the Issuer's liabilities. This unique application allows CoinShares to advance the industry by adding another layer of transparency to its best-in-class physical ETP structure.

Noah Buxton, Director and Blockchain & Digital Asset Practice Leader at Armanino LLP added, "CoinShares Physical represents an exciting capital markets innovation, and we are evermore confident that such platforms must be met and served with innovative assurance tools. Anything less would be a disservice to the potential of digital assets. Since onboarding CoinShares XBT Provider ETPs in 2020, we have seen TrustExplorer's ability to provide highly accurate attest reporting. We are humbled to continue as an important ingredient in the recipe of CoinShares' valuable, compliant and transparent digital asset products."

About the CoinShares Group

CoinShares is Europe's largest digital asset manager, managing billions of assets on behalf of a global client base. Our mission is to expand access to the digital asset ecosystem by pioneering new financial products and services that provide investors with trust and transparency when accessing this new asset class.

For more information on CoinShares, visit: https://coinshares.com

About Armanino LLP

Armanino LLP (www.armaninollp.com) is one of the 21 largest independent accounting and business consulting firms in the United States. Armanino provides an integrated set of audit, tax, business management, consulting and technology solutions to companies in the U.S. and globally. Armanino is recognized as a global leader digital asset solutions. The firm helps clients adapt and change in every stage of business, from start-up through rapid growth to the sale of a company. The firm extends its global services to more than 100 countries through its membership in Moore Global, one of the world's major accounting and consulting membership organizations.

Media Contact

Jay Morakis

646 859 5951

press@coinshares.com
Election authorities in Ecuador ruled Tuesday thousands of ballot boxes must be reviewed, with the candidate to face frontrunner Andres Arauz in a runoff still undecided.

Left-leaning former minister Arauz, candidate for the Union for Hope, was the clear winner of Sunday's election after receiving 32.2% of the vote.

The result gave Arauz, seen as a disciple of former president Rafael Correa, a spot in the April 11 runoff.

His opponent is less clear, with Indigenous environmental activist Yaku Perez narrowly ahead of conservative banker Guillermo Lasso, by 20.12% to 19.48%.

The three leading candidates on Tuesday met with electoral observers from the Organization of American States (OAS) and Ecuador National Electoral Council (CNE) authorities.

More than 3,770 ballot boxes need to be reviewed for irregularities, the CNE said Tuesday.

Perez said he had "confidence" in the vote counting process due to the OAS mission's involvement.

Meanwhile, Lasso said he would wait for 100% of ballots to be counted and the official word of the CNE.

Because the margin is so small, and about 1.5 million votes have to be recounted, it could be days before the second candidate is determined, a local newspaper reported.

Ecuador is in the throes of a deep economic crisis due to the drop in oil prices and the pandemic.

The country's GDP plummeted by 11% in 2020, accompanied by a sharp rise in poverty and unemployment.

(Disclaimer: This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed; only the image & headline may have been reworked by www.republicworld.com)
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Southern Adventist University invites the public to a free, virtual, live event on Thursday, Feb. 25, at 11 a.m. featuring internationally acclaimed artist and renowned speaker Makoto Fujimura.

Mr. Fujimura is a leading contemporary artist whose process-driven, refractive slow art has been described by David Brooks of The New York Times as a small rebellion against the quickening of time. It has graced museums around the world, including the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC.

What Mr. Fujimura does in the studio is a theological work as much as an aesthetic one. While pouring pulverized minerals onto handmade paper to create prismatic, refractive surfaces, he finds a quiet space that fosters awareness, patience, prayer, and praise. During his presentation, The Theology of Making, Mr. Fujimura will share his deep exploration of the spiritual calling to creativity, blending Asian history and Christian principles while highlighting a unique artistic journey.

As the presidential appointee to the National Council on the Arts from 2003-2009, Mr. Fujimura served as an international advocate for the arts. In 2014, the American Academy of Religion named Mr. Fujimura as its Religion and the Arts award recipient. He founded the International Arts Movement in 1992 and Fujimura Institute in 2011. His books have won numerous awards; his most recent title, Art and Faith: A Theology of Making (Yale University Press), was released this January.

For more information and to register for this online event, visit southern.edu/faithandart.
Longford County Council has issued an apology for the involvement of a former council in the "cold and callous" treatment of Longford women in Mother and Baby Homes.

Speaking at a meeting of Longford County Council this afternoon, Cathaoirleach, Cllr Paul Ross stated:

"Following the publication of the Final Report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes, An Taoiseach Micheal Martin issued a formal apology on behalf of the State to former residents of the Mother and Baby Home institutions.

"The report depicts a grim picture of a cold and callous Ireland, which damaged the lives of thousands of people, by consigning them or their relatives to institutions across the country.

"Unfortunately, in those institutions, mothers and babies suffered material and emotional deprivation. There were horrific rates of infant mortality. Women felt they were left with no choice but to give up their children for adoption.

"Some 56,000 mothers and 57,000 children passed through the Mother and Baby homes between 1920 and 1998. The report also states that a further 25,000 mothers and a larger number of children were likely to have resided in the County Homes that were not examined by the Commission.

"This report, which shines a light on yet another dark part of Irelands very recent history, confirms in cold hard facts, what many of us already knew.

"Significant numbers of Longford mothers and their children ended up in some of the homes studied. These include:

 Castlepollard Mother and Baby Home in Westmeath

 Dunboyne Mother and Baby Home in Meath

 Bethany House in Dublin

 Pelletstown (later known as St Patricks) in Dublin

 Sean Ross Abbey in Roscrea

 Bessborough in Cork

 And the Cork County Home

"As Cathaoirleach of Longford County Council and on behalf of the Elected Members, I want to acknowledge and unreservedly apologise for the pain and suffering caused to these girls, these young women and their babies; the survivors and those now deceased, and their relatives.

"We are sorry for the role that this local authority played in those times and for its involvement with these homes.

"I also want to acknowledge the generations of our own mothers and babies whom, unsupported by state and society in their own county, ended up in Mother and Baby Homes in other counties around the country. They deserved better than this."

Chief Executive of Longford County Council Paddy Mahon said he was "struck by the harrowing experiences and the sheer heartbreak that these mothers and their children must have endured".

"This report outlines the role that this local authority and its County Manager played in determining the fate of mothers and their children," he said.

"While institutions based in County Longford were not a primary focus of this Mother and Baby Homes Report, Longford people will be familiar with the role played by the County Home during these dark times.

"Longford County Council ran the County Home and its successor, St Josephs from 1942 until 1971, when the Midland Health Board took over. The County Home had a maternity unit where unmarried mothers could go, and many of the children born there were 'boarded out' to foster homes. Some were also adopted.

"The report mentions five toddlers who were transferred from Pelletstown in Dublin to the Convent of Mercy, Longford due to overcrowding. This is understood to refer to the Newtownforbes Industrial School.

"Clothing allowances were paid by local authorities for boarded out children and the report says children in Longford were 'very badly clad since the outbreak of the war'.

"In the mid-1950s, Longfords County Manager approved a number of American adoptions resulting in increased anxiety among children boarded out in Longford who feared for their futures.

"The report also cites how pressure was exerted on unmarried mothers by Longfords County Medical Officer to allow their children to be adopted. They were led to believe that there was no alternative. Boarding out or foster homes were not even mentioned as an option.

"After 1942, records show that Councils and County Managers became key decision makers in relation to provision for unmarried girls and mothers. The report provides examples of how Longfords County Manager sought maintenance payments from families of girls or women who were admitted to mother and baby homes. These families may have been unaware of the situations facing their daughter, sister, niece or granddaughter or of the decisions being made about them.

"Longford County Council was one of five local authorities (along with Meath, Westmeath, Cavan and Louth) that came together to fund the Dunboyne Mother and Baby Home. It was run by the Good Shepherd Sisters in County Meath from 1955 until 1991. It was initially designed for women on second or subsequent pregnancies, but the vast majority were first-time mothers.

"Of the Mother and Baby Homes studied by the Commission, the Castlepollard Mother and Baby Home had the highest rate of admissions of girls or women who gave their previous address as County Longford. It opened in 1935 and closed in 1971 and was run by the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. The public health authorities contributed towards the costs of women admitted there. The Commissions report has identified that there were 247 deaths among children connected with the home, mostly within their first year of life.

"In my capacity as Chief Executive of Longford County Council, I also want to acknowledge the pain and distress suffered and I apologise unreservedly for the decisions taken that impacted all those who experienced life in these institutions.

"We are sorry for the part that this Council played in exacerbating the trauma of these girls and women, their children and their wider families and for not recognising their plight during these times."

Cllr Ross added that the government intends to give detailed consideration to the report over the coming months with a view to developing a comprehensive Government Action Plan spanning eight themes, as follows:

A survivor-centred approach; Apology; Access to Personal Information; Archiving and Databases; Education and Research; Memorialisation; Restorative Recognition; Dignified Burial.

"Longford County Council wishes to be associated with the State apology issued by An Taoiseach," said Cllr Ross.

"Our Council will actively participate with Government in furthering the development of its Action Plan as it relates to local government. The Council is committed to supporting local measures that form part of the suite of follow-up actions, including for example, in relation to memorialisation and access to archives and records.

"The testimony in this report shows the cruel attitudes, heartless treatment and wilful ignorance that was displayed towards these mothers and children, on our own doorstep.

"As a parent myself reading it, I am appalled that this happened, and that it happened so recently. I can only imagine the distress that they must have gone through.

"These mothers and their children did nothing wrong. They did not deserve to be treated this way by state or society."
New Delhi/Guwahati, Feb 10 : Ahead of Assembly polls in the state, the Assam Congress is set to launch four bus yatras named 'Axom Basaon Ahok' which will criss-cross the state for two weeks, meeting voters and discussing their grievances and issues.

While interacting with the media in Guwahati, Assam Pradesh Congress Committee President Ripun Bora said the party will reach out to every household in the state to know their sufferings and hardships in five years of the BJP's "misrule".

"We will visit every house to know problems of people they have been facing for last five years," said Bora.

According to party leaders, one yatra each will be led by Pradyut Bordoloi, chairperson of the party's campaign committee, Gaurav Gogoi, Debabrata Saikia and Sushmita Dev.

According to the party's plans, Bordoloi's bus yatra will begin from at 10 a.m. on February 12 from Bordua Satra, the birthplace of Srimant Sankardev that falls under Batadraba Assembly constituency of Nagaon district, while Saikia will kick off his bus yatra on February 12 at 3 p.m.

Saikia, who is the Congress Legislature Party (CLP) leader in the Assembly shall start his bus yatra after paying homage to Piyali Phukan at his memorial in Sivasagar city.

Meanwhile, Gogoi, Congress MP from Kaliabor, will begin his yatra from Guwahati after paying tribute to great Assamese warrior and Ahom army leader Lachin Borphukan at his memorial located on banks of Brahmaputra river in state capital. He will begin his yatra at 12 p.m. on February 13, while Dev will start her bus yatra from Silchar and will be touring the Barak valley.
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Editorials represent the institutional view of the newspaper. They are written and edited by the editorial staff, which operates separately from the news department. Editorial writers are not involved in newsroom operations.

Nashville hot chicken is coming to Bridgeport, as Howling Hot Chicken plans a Feb. 15 opening at 4615 Main Street.

The new chicken joint comes from the restaurateurs behind the popular Milkcraft ice cream brand, with locations in Fairfield, New Haven, and West Hartford.

Howlings menu offers chicken tenders and sliders in a range of heat levels, starting with a no-spice version and progressing through lite mild, medium, hot, very hot and reaper. The most extreme level will require diners to sign a waiver, according to a news release.

Tenders and sliders are served as combos with fries, pickles and potato bread or kale slaw for $10.99 to $12.99, or as single pieces ($3.85 to $5.45.) Other sides ($1.50 to $5) include mac and cheese, cheese fries and mayo-based comeback sauce. Howlings chicken is halal, free-range and antibiotic free, according to the company.

Director David Mainiero told Hearst Connecticut in December that the new concept has been in the works for almost three years, and his team has taken trips to Nashville for research and development.

Milkcraft has some of the most fabulous, all-natural ice cream. This is going to be very similar [but] with a different product, he said. Weve been sourcing and designing this restaurant pre-pandemic. Its very with the times.

Howling will offer online ordering, call-ahead takeout, curbside pickup and delivery, with standard operating touchless procedures in place.

A fourth Milkcraft ice cream shop is set to open next door to Howling this spring.

Nashville hot chicken has made recent strides in Connecticut, with the fall openings of Haven Hot Chicken in New Haven, Birdcode in West Hartford and Fowl Play at the Parkville Market food hall in Hartford.

Howling Hot Chicken opens at 11 a.m. Feb. 15 at 4615 Main Street in Bridgeport. Information: 203-540-5507, howlinghotchicken.com. Follow the restaurant on Instagram at @HowlingHotChicken or Facebook at facebook.com/howlinghotchicken.
India's pulses production has increased significantly in the last few years, leading to a reduction in imports and an annual saving of Rs 15,000 crore in foreign exchange to the country, Agriculture Minister said.

Addressing a conference organised by Indian Institute of Pulses Research (IPPR) on World Pulses Day, the minister said the country is moving towards becoming self-sufficient in pulses production.

The output has increased to 240 lakh tonnes from 140 lakh tonnes in the last six years because of efforts made by farmers and scientists as well as the government's initiative, he said.

Stating that pulses demand is estimated to reach 320 lakh tonnes by 2050, Tomar said there is a need to shift focus on increasing the production to meet rising demand.

"The dependence on pulses imports has come down and the country is saving Rs 15,000 crore annually," he said.

Tomar also highlighted that the government has increased the minimum support price (MSP) of pulses significantly and is also procuring the foodgrain.

He said the government has taken various steps to double farmers' income, including crop insurance scheme, Rs 1 lakh crore agri-infrastructure fund and PM-Kisan.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A second teenager has been arrested on suspicion of the murder of an aspiring lawyer, 22, who was attacked after going to Waitrose to buy his mother orange juice.

The 19-year-old man was detained this afternoon over the stabbing of Sven Badzak in Kilburn, north-west London, on Saturday, February 6.

A 17-year-old boy was arrested on suspicion of murder on Tuesday and remains in custody at an east London police station.

Sven Badzak, 22, (pictured) was stabbed to death in an unprovoked attack on Willesden Lane in Kilburn at 5.30pm Saturday

Mr Badzak, who was working for his father's construction company and hoped to do a law conversion course, had been to Waitrose supermarket and was waiting outside a bagel shop with a friend when the pair were attacked.

They were allegedly chased and became separated before Mr Badzak fell to the ground and was stabbed multiple times.

His 16-year-old friend also suffered multiple stab injuries but escaped into a shop in Willesden Lane, and is in a stable condition in hospital.

Mr Badzak's mother, Jasna Badzak (pictured) a former Conservative Party activist, called on the Prime Minister to help ensure her son's killers are caught

Knife crime victim Sven Badzak met Prime Minister Boris Johnson as a child (pictured)

Mr Badzak's mother, a former Conservative Party activist, called on the Prime Minister to help ensure her son's killers are caught.

Ms Badzak said her son had met Boris Johnson and other well-known Conservative politicians when he was younger, through her campaigning work with the party.

Anyone with information can call police on 101 quoting the reference CAD 5580/06Feb, or, to remain anonymous, contact Crimestoppers on 0800 555111 or online.
New Delhi: A man wanted in connection with the violence at the Red Fort on Republic Day was arrested by Delhi Police from Punjab, officials said on Wednesday.

Iqbal Singh, carrying a reward of Rs 50,000 on his arrest, was nabbed from Hoshiarpur in Punjab on Tuesday night by the northern range of Delhi Police's Special Cell, Deputy Commissioner of Police (Special Cell) Sanjeev Kumar Yadav said.

Deep Sidhu

On Monday, the Special Cell had arrested actor-activist Deep Sidhu, a "prominent player" behind the violence at the Red Fort.
New Delhi:

Two terrorists were killed in an encounter with security forces in Jammu and Kashmir's Satora area of Tral on Saturday morning. The encounter broke at around 8:15 AM on Saturday. At least three terrorists were expected to be trapped. The operation is still underway.



A senior police officer said the bodies of the terrorists were yet to be recovered and that the exchange of fire continued.



The encounter began after militants opened fire on security forces who were carrying out a search operation in Satoora forest area of Tral, 36 kms from Srinagar.



The police officer said the search operation was launched on information about the presence of some militants there.

#Visuals Two terrorists killed in an encounter with security forces in Satora area of Tral (J&K), operation underway. pic.twitter.com/ccQZg5N8Ct  ANI (@ANI_news) July 15, 2017

LIVE Updates:

#12:52 PM

-2 bodies visible, some of them have entered in cave, the exchange of fire is still on. I hope some more will be eliminated: J&K DGP SP Vaid



-Exact outfit is not known. They are looking like foreign terrorists, it must be Jaish: J&K DGP SP Vaid on Tral encounter

#12:00 PM

- The J&K Police has now confirmed that around 7 or 8, not three terrorists are trapped in the encounter location in Tral. At least 2-3 have been killed, sources said. Police are also using choppers in the encounter.

Last week, seven Amarnath pilgrims were killed and 12 injured when terrorists opened fire at a patrol vehicle on the Srinagar-Jammu Highway on Monday night. The Government has since constituted a Special Investigation Team to track down the culprits, in addition to Indian Army's ongoing cordon and search operation throughout the state.

Suggested read: Amarnath Yatra attack: PDP MLA's driver spills beans on terrorists' plot in interrogation

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Senior BJP leader Uma Bharatis first reaction to the terrible news of the Chamoli glacier break/avalanche disaster on Sunday -- I told you so  fully aligns with the reservations of all those who put a higher value on conservation than on the development of natural resources for economic growth.

On Sunday, a part of the Nanda Devi glacier broke off and avalanched down, causing a flash flood in the Rishiganga and Dhauliganga -- the upper riverine stretches of the Alakananda, which feeds into the mighty Ganga -- washing away back-to-back dams diverting water into a privately-owned hydro project on the Rishiganga stretch and seriously damaging an under-construction government-owned power generation project at Tapovan.

As minister for water resources in the first BJP government of Narendra Modi, Ms Bharati had dragged her feet on the development of the upper reaches of the Ganga in Uttarakhand -- much to the dismay of gung-ho advocates of development and growth. Conservationists cite the fragile structure of the Himalayas to caution against over-exploitation of the riverine system for electricity generation.

Others go so far as to blame the recent much-publicised widening of the highways connecting the Char Dham  the four pilgrimage shrines in Garhwal -- Badrinath, Kedarnath, Gangotri and Yamnotri. Construction of roads is still done the old way, by simply carving additional road width out from the mountain side, causing significant soil erosion both above and below the road. Measures to bind the exposed mountainside using nets or by planting fast-growing ground cover are only a sideshow, rarely given prominence, in already overloaded road construction budgets.

But then, isnt it always the growth-wallahs who stick their necks out by measuring risk versus rewards, even in the playground of the Gods --as the Himalayas are believed to be. On the other hand, it is safe to be a conservationist, simply because there are so few downsides to the belief that only the sparing use of natural resources is sustainable. Multiple alternative sources of growth do remain unexploited, like higher productivity in the use of existing resources or the use of alternative clean technologies for power generation, like solar or offshore wind.

At times like the present one, in the immediate aftermath of a human tragedy, calculating the trade-off between lives cruelly snatched away from loved ones and the potential economic gains from development seems particularly pointless.

It is also unclear to what extent the disaster is the outcome of over-exploitation of resources in the back-to-back construction of dams to divert water into tunnels to run turbines for electricity generation. The shearing-off of glaciers, causing an avalanche and a flash flood in downstream riverine systems, is a natural calamity. After all, avalanches do happen, and lives are lost.

Doubtless, lessons must and will be learnt, with respect to continuous monitoring of the higher reaches for signs of fragility. Assessing the geological safety of hill development -- extending road access, urban sprawl and related projects -- is no longer a choice. Coupled with the depredations of climate change, already fragile ecosystems could tumble over the edge much faster if the rate and style of intrusive development is not carefully regulated.

How much of a say should local communities have in large projects being created in their midst is another vexed question -- on which there are no clear answers. The wisdom and public interest orientation of NIMBY (not in my backyard) communities varies and is often romanticised. In comparison, centralised planning is easy to vilify as representing the cruel, uncaring impositions of rules made by outsiders. Ultimately, help must come from science in guiding the government on project site selection and regulations for risk minimisation and occupational safety for project workers.

In 2013, Prime Minister Narendra Modi made history as chief minister of Gujarat by arranging transport for Gujarati pilgrims stranded in the Kedarnath flash floods. In a similar vein, within a day of the incident, R.K. Singh, Union minister for power, visited the damaged NTPC-owned Tapovan hydro generation project.

VIP visits are a traditional, albeit a much-reviled, device for speeding up the release of funds for relief work and energising those engaged in the onerous on-site task of rescue, relief distribution and rehabilitation. But it is a tradition that a politician ignores only at his peril -- after all we are like that only. Happily, the minister, previously a civil servant who retired as Indias home secretary -- did more than just that. He was on the button when he commented that the structural safety of glacier formations around large project construction sites in mountainous regions should be monitored for geological stress, much more so than they are done now. Early advance warnings of incipient trouble can enable the evacuation of workers, at the very least.

Adroit operational steps to minimise the downstream damage also mitigated the scale of the disaster. Reportedly, emergency measures to release water stored in downstream dams at Rishikesh and Srinagar helped create the required space to absorb the upstream water shock. All these actions speak to our improving capacity for the safe operation of large water systems. To the credit of the civil administration, households along the affected stretch of the river, potentially under threat from flood waters, were reportedly evacuated as a precaution, though the waters subsided subsequently.

National Disaster Management Authority personnel were also visibly in attendance, although it is unclear whether more boots on the ground, in an area chock-a-block with the security forces, is of additional value. The NDMA, sadly, remains a neglected cousin of the military and the police in terms of their technical capacity, rescue equipment and surge capacity for assisting the local civil authorities.

The bulk of the casualties are of on-site contract workers -- mostly migrants from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Hopefully, once these two hydro projects are completed, the memories of those who laid down their lives during their completion will be commemorated in a suitable manner.

The chief minister of Uttarakhand announced Rs 4 lakhs as relief for the families of each of the victims. An additional Rs 2 lakhs each would be given from the Prime Ministers Relief Fund.

The question which remains unanswered, however, goes far beyond the welfare of the families of the deceased. The jury is still out on what is an acceptable societal trade-off between the risk of mortality and morbidity and the compulsions of economic development.
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New Delhi: The Uttar Pradesh Madhyamik Shiksha Parishad has announced the dates for UP Board Class 10 and 12 Exams 2021. The UPMSP board exams 2021 have been scheduled to begin on April 24, 2021.

Deputy CM Dinesh Sharma announced the date for the exam on Wednesday (February 10).

As per tentative stats, around 56 lakh students from both Class 10 and 12 are registered to appear for the UP Board Exam 2021. and release of the UP 10th and 12th Date Sheet 2021. Of the total number of students, around 29,94,312 students are due to High School / Class 10 exam whereas 26,09,501 students will be appearing for the intermediate examination.

While the students were eagerly waiting for the announcement of exam dates, UPMSP had another surprise for them. The Uttar Pradesh 10th and 12th Board Exam 2021 will be held in two different shifts, i.e. morning and evening, for students of both classes. The morning shift of the examination would operate from 8 AM to 11:15 AM, whereas the evening shift will be from 2 PM to 5:15 PM.

The schedule will be available on the official website of UPMSP  upmsp.edu.in or check your date sheet here.

Live TV
Although clown fish are conceived on coral reefs, they spend the first part of their lives as larvae drifting in the open ocean. The fish are not yet orange, striped or even capable of swimming. They are still plankton, a term that comes from the Greek word for wanderer, and wander they do, drifting at the mercy of the currents.

When the baby clown fish grow big enough to swim against the tide, they high-tail it home. The fish cant see the reef, but they can hear its snapping, grunting, gurgling, popping and croaking. These noises make up the soundscape of a healthy reef, and larval fish rely on these soundscapes to find their way back to the reefs, where they will spend the rest of their lives  that is, if they can hear them.

But humans  and their ships, seismic surveys, air guns, pile drivers, dynamite fishing, drilling platforms, speedboats and even surfing  have made the ocean an unbearably noisy place for marine life, according to a sweeping review of the prevalence and intensity of the impacts of anthropogenic ocean noise published last week in the journal Science. The paper, a collaboration among 25 authors from across the globe and various fields of marine acoustics, is the largest synthesis of evidence on the effects of oceanic noise pollution.

They hit the nail on the head, said Kerri Seger, a senior scientist at Applied Ocean Sciences who was not involved with the research. By the third page, I was like, Im going to send this to my students. 

Anthropogenic noise often drowns out the natural soundscapes, putting marine life under immense stress. In the case of baby clown fish, the noise can even doom them to wander the seas without direction, unable to find their way home.

The cycle is broken, said Carlos Duarte, a marine ecologist at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia and the lead author on the paper. The soundtrack of home is now hard to hear, and in many cases has disappeared.

Drowning out the signals

In the ocean, visual cues disappear after tens of yards, and chemical cues dissipate after hundreds of yards. But sound can travel thousands of miles and link animals across oceanic basins and in darkness, Duarte said. As a result, many marine species are impeccably adapted to detect and communicate with sound. Dolphins call one another by unique names. Toadfish hum. Bearded seals trill. Whales sing.

Scientists have been aware of underwater anthropogenic noise, and how far it propagates, for around a century, according to Christine Erbe, the director of the Center for Marine Science and Technology at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, and an author on the paper. But early research on how noise might affect marine life focused on how individual large animals responded to temporary noise sources, such as a whale taking a detour around oil rigs during its migration.

The new study maps out how underwater noise affects countless groups of marine life, including zooplankton and jellyfish. The extent of the problem of noise pollution has only recently dawned on us, Erbe wrote in an email.

The idea for the paper came to Duarte seven years ago. He had been aware of the importance of ocean sound for much of his long career as an ecologist, but he felt that the issue was not recognized on a global scale. Duarte found that the scientific community that focused on ocean soundscapes was relatively small and siloed, with marine mammal vocalizations in one corner, and underwater seismic activity, acoustic tomography and policymakers in other, distant corners.

Weve all been on our little gold rushes, said Steve Simpson, a marine biologist at the University of Exeter in England and an author on the paper.

Duarte wanted to bring together the various corners to synthesize all the evidence they had gathered into a single conversation; maybe something this grand would finally result in policy changes.

The authors screened more than 10,000 papers to ensure they captured every tendril of marine acoustics research from the past few decades, according to Simpson. Patterns quickly emerged demonstrating the detrimental effects that noise has on almost all marine life.

With all that research, you realize you know more than you think you know, he said.

Simpson has studied underwater bioacoustics  how fish and marine invertebrates perceive their environment and communicate through sound  for 20 years. Out in the field, he became accustomed to waiting for a passing ship to rumble by before going back to work studying the fish.

I realized, Oh, wait, these fish experience ships coming by every day,  he said.

Marine life can adapt to noise pollution by swimming, crawling or oozing away from it, which means some animals are more successful than others. Whales can learn to skirt busy shipping lanes and fish can dodge the thrum of an approaching fishing vessel, but benthic creatures like slow-moving sea cucumbers have little recourse.

If the noise settles in more permanently, some animals simply leave for good. When acoustic harassment devices were installed to deter seals from preying on salmon farms in the Broughton Archipelago in British Columbia, killer whale populations declined significantly until the devices were removed, according to a 2002 study.

These forced evacuations reduce population sizes as more animals give up territory and compete for the same pools of resources. And certain species that are bound to limited biogeographic ranges, such as the endangered Maui dolphin, have nowhere else to go.

Animals cant avoid the sound because its everywhere, Duarte said.

Even temporary sounds can cause chronic hearing damage in the sea creatures unlucky enough to be caught in the acoustic wake. Both fish and marine mammals have hair cells, sensory receptors for hearing. Fish can regrow these cells, but marine mammals probably cannot.

Luckily, unlike greenhouse gases or chemicals, sound is a relatively controllable pollutant.

Noise is about the easiest problem to solve in the ocean, Simpson said. We know exactly what causes noise, we know where it is, and we know how to stop it.

In search of quiet

Many solutions to anthropogenic noise pollution already exist, and are even quite simple: Slow down, move the shipping lane, avoid sensitive areas, change propellers, Simpson said.

Many ships rely on propellers that cause a great deal of cavitation: Tiny bubbles form around the propeller blade and produce a horrible screeching noise. But quieter designs exist, or are in the works.

Propeller design is a very fast-moving technological space, Simpson said. Other innovations include bubble curtains, which can wrap around a pile driver and insulate the sound.

The researchers also flagged deep-sea mining as an emergent industry that could become a major source of underwater noise, and suggested that new technologies could be designed to minimize sound before commercial mining starts.

The authors hope the review connects with policymakers, who have historically ignored noise as a significant anthropogenic stressor on marine life. The United Nations Law of the Sea BBNJ agreement, a document that manages biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction, does not mention noise among its list of cumulative impacts.

The U.N.s 14th sustainable development goal, which focuses on underwater life, does not explicitly mention noise, according to Seger of Applied Ocean Sciences. The U.N. had an ocean noise week where they sat down and listened to it and then went on to another topic, she said.

The paper in Science went through three rounds of editing, the last of which occurred after COVID-19 had created many unplanned experiments: Shipping activity slowed down, the oceans fell relatively silent, and marine mammals and sharks returned to previously noisy waterways where they were rarely seen.

Recovery can be almost immediate, Duarte said.
INDIANAPOLIS, Feb. 9, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for investigational bamlanivimab (LY-CoV555) 700 mg and etesevimab (LY-CoV016) 1400 mg together, Eli Lilly and Company (NYSE: LLY) announced today. This therapy is authorized for the treatment of mild to moderate COVID-19 in patients aged 12 and older who are at high risk for progressing to severe COVID-19 and/or hospitalization. Bamlanivimab and etesevimab should be administered together via a single intravenous infusion as soon as possible after a positive COVID-19 test and within 10 days of symptom onset.

In addition, the FDA has authorized infusion times for bamlanivimab alone and bamlanivimab and etesevimab together to be as short as 16 or 21 minutes, respectively  a significant reduction from the previously authorized time of 60 minutes. This decision has been made in response to feedback received from front-line nurses and doctors administering these infusions and are aimed at reducing the burden on the healthcare system.

"Lilly has dedicated our time, resources, and expertise to discover and develop therapies to treat COVID-19," said Daniel Skovronsky, M.D., Ph.D., Lilly's chief scientific officer and president of Lilly Research Laboratories. "Bamlanivimab alone under emergency use authorization has already provided many people with an early treatment option that could prevent hospitalizations and we are excited to now add an additional therapeutic option with a similar demonstrated clinical benefit. Additionally, with the risk of resistance emerging as various strains of the virus arise, bamlanivimab and etesevimab together could potentially allow efficacy against a broader range of naturally occurring SARS-CoV-2 variants as these new strains spread around the world."

The EUA is based on Phase 3 data from the BLAZE-1 trial, announced January 26, 2021, which demonstrated bamlanivimab and etesevimab together reduced the risk of COVID-19 hospitalizations and death by 70 percent. These data replicate earlier results, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, in a much larger group of patients. Additionally, the outcomes seen with bamlanivimab and etesevimab together are consistent with the reduction in risk of hospitalization or ER visits seen with bamlanivimab alone. The most common adverse event more often reported for patients receiving bamlanivimab and etesevimab together versus placebo was nausea on the day of infusion.

While Phase 2 and Phase 3 trials evaluated a range of doses of bamlanivimab alone and bamlanivimab and etesevimab together, data demonstrated consistent and similar clinical effects among all doses studied. Additionally, initial results from an ongoing Phase 2 study provide viral load and pharmacodynamic/pharmacokinetic data which demonstrated bamlanivimab 700 mg and etesevimab 1400 mg together produced similar effects to those observed in the Phase 3 trial with bamlanivimab 2800 mg and etesevimab 2800 mg together. Together, these data provide confidence in the authorized dose, which expands available supply to help more patients without sacrificing potential efficacy.

The FDA grants EUA to provide availability of a medicine that may help diagnose, treat or prevent a life-threatening disease when no adequate and approved alternatives are available. This administration of bamlanivimab and etesevimab together is authorized only for the duration of the declaration, unless the authorization is terminated or revoked sooner. The authorization is temporary and does not replace the formal review and approval process. The administration of bamlanivimab and etesevimab together remains investigational and has not been approved under a Biologics License Application (BLA). Evaluation of its safety and efficacy is ongoing in clinical trials. Data from these studies will be used to support a future BLA submission for the treatment.

Bamlanivimab alone is authorized in numerous countries, while bamlanivimab and etesevimab together is currently authorized in the U.S. and Italy. Lilly will continue working with global regulators to make these therapies available around the world. In an effort to help as many patients as possible, Lilly will continue to supply bamlanivimab alone under the authorizations granted in various countries while continuing to accelerate manufacturing of etesevimab for use around the world. Lilly, in collaboration with Amgen, plans to manufacture up to 1 million doses of etesevimab for administration with bamlanivimab by mid-2021. There are 100,000 doses ready immediately and an additional 150,000 doses will be available throughout the first quarter.

"As COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and subsequent deaths continue to rise, we are committed to working with the U.S. government to supply our antibody therapies for use by patients across the country," Skovronsky added.

Lilly anticipates procurement and allocation of bamlanivimab and etesevimab together will mirror the process followed for bamlanivimab alone  making the therapy available directly to governments for allocation based on unmet needs. Global allocation will be made based on Lilly's guiding principles that aim to ensure access for patients with high unmet need, no matter where they live.

For more information about the use of bamlanivimab alone or bamlanivimab and etesevimab together for the treatment of mild to moderate COVID-19 in high-risk patients under the FDA's emergency use authorization, contact Lilly's 24-hour support line at 1-855-LillyC19 (1-855-545-5921). Patients and physicians can visit covid.infusioncenter.org or the HHS Therapeutics Distribution locator to find a potential treatment location.

For media resources, including product images and fact sheets, please click here.

Important Information about bamlanivimab alone and bamlanivimab and etesevimab together

Bamlanivimab and etesevimab together and bamlanivimab alone have not been approved by the FDA for any use. It is not known if bamlanivimab and etesevimab together or bamlanivimab alone are safe and effective for the treatment of COVID-19.

Bamlanivimab and etesevimab together and bamlanivimab alone are authorized under Emergency Use Authorization only for the duration of the declaration that circumstances exist justifying the authorization of the emergency use under Section 564(b)(1) of the Act, 21 U.S.C  360bbb-3(b)(1), unless the authorization is terminated or revoked sooner.

Healthcare providers should review the Fact Sheet for information on the authorized use of bamlanivimab and etesevimab together and bamlanivimab alone and mandatory requirements of the EUA. Please see the FDA Letter of Authorization, Fact Sheet for Healthcare Providers, and Fact Sheet for Patients, Parents and Caregivers (English) (Spanish) for bamlanivimab and etesevimab together. Please see the FDA Letter of Authorization, Fact Sheet for Healthcare Providers, and Fact Sheet for Patients, Parents and Caregivers (English) (Spanish) for bamlanivimab alone.

Authorized Use and Important Safety Information

Bamlanivimab and etesevimab together and bamlanivimab alone are authorized for use under EUA for treatment of mild to moderate COVID-19 in adults and pediatric patients (12 years of age and older weighing at least 40 kg) with positive results of direct SARS-CoV-2 viral testing, and who are at high risk for progressing to severe COVID-19 and/or hospitalization.

Limitations of Authorized Use

Bamlanivimab and etesevimab together and bamlanivimab alone are not authorized for use in patients:

who are hospitalized due to COVID-19, OR



who require oxygen therapy due to COVID-19, OR



who require an increase in baseline oxygen flow rate due to COVID-19 in those on chronic oxygen therapy due to underlying non-COVID-19 related comorbidity.

Treatment with bamlanivimab and etesevimab together has not been studied in patients hospitalized due to COVID-19. Benefit of treatment with bamlanivimab alone has not been observed in patients hospitalized due to COVID-19. Monoclonal antibodies, such as bamlanivimab and etesevimab, may be associated with worse clinical outcomes when administered to hospitalized patients with COVID-19 requiring high flow oxygen or mechanical ventilation.

Important Safety Information

There are limited clinical data available for bamlanivimab and etesevimab together and bamlanivimab alone. Serious and unexpected adverse events may occur that have not been previously reported with bamlanivimab and etesevimab together and bamlanivimab alone.

Hypersensitivity Including Anaphylaxis and Infusion-Related Reactions

Serious hypersensitivity reactions, including anaphylaxis, have been observed with administration of bamlanivimab and etesevimab together and bamlanivimab alone. If signs and symptoms of a clinically significant hypersensitivity reaction or anaphylaxis occur, immediately discontinue administration and initiate appropriate medications and/or supportive care.

Infusion-related reactions have been observed with administration of bamlanivimab and etesevimab together and bamlanivimab alone. These reactions may be severe or life threatening. Signs and symptoms of infusion-related reactions may include:

fever, difficulty breathing, reduced oxygen saturation, chills, fatigue, arrhythmia (e.g. atrial fibrillation, sinus tachycardia, bradycardia), chest pain or discomfort, weakness, altered mental status, nausea, headache, bronchospasm, hypotension, hypertension, angioedema, throat irritation, rash including urticaria, pruritus, myalgia, dizziness, and diaphoresis.

If an infusion-related reaction occurs, consider slowing or stopping the infusion and administer appropriate medications and/or supportive care.

Clinical Worsening After Bamlanivimab Administration

Clinical worsening of COVID-19 after administration of bamlanivimab has been reported and may include signs or symptoms of fever, hypoxia or increased respiratory difficulty, arrhythmia (e.g., atrial fibrillation, sinus tachycardia, bradycardia), fatigue, and altered mental status. Some of these events required hospitalization. It is not known if these events were related to bamlanivimab use or were due to progression of COVID-19.

Limitations of Benefit and Potential Risk in Patients with Severe COVID-19

Treatment with bamlanivimab and etesevimab together has not been studied in patients hospitalized due to COVID-19. Benefit of treatment with bamlanivimab alone has not been observed in patient hospitalized due to COVID-19. Monoclonal antibodies, such as bamlanivimab and etesevimab, may be associated with worse clinical outcomes when administered to hospitalized patients with COVID-19 requiring high flow oxygen or mechanical ventilation. See Limitations of Authorized Use.

Adverse Events

Bamlanivimab and etesevimab together

Based on Phase 2 data from BLAZE-1, nausea was the most commonly reported adverse event, reported by 4% of subjects in both bamlanivimab and etesevimab together and placebo groups. Pruritus and pyrexia were more frequently reported from subjects treated with both bamlanivimab and etesevimab (2% and 1%) compared to placebo (1% and 0%, respectively).

Based on Phase 3 data from BLAZE-1, the most common adverse events were nausea, dizziness, and rash. These events each occurred in 1% of subjects treated with bamlanivimab and etesevimab together and in 1% of placebo subjects.

Bamlanivimab alone

Adverse events reported in at least 1% of BLAZE-1 clinical trial participants on bamlanivimab 700 mg alone or placebo were nausea (3% vs 4%), diarrhea (1% vs 5%), dizziness (3% vs 2%), headache (3% vs 2%), pruritus (2% vs 1%) and vomiting (1% vs 3%).

Use in Specific Populations

Pregnancy

There are insufficient data on the use of bamlanivimab and etesevimab together and bamlanivimab alone during pregnancy. Bamlanivimab and etesevimab together and bamlanivimab alone should only be used during pregnancy if the potential benefit outweighs the potential risk for the mother and the fetus.

Breastfeeding

There are no available data on the presence of bamlanivimab or etesevimab in human or animal milk, the effects on the breastfed infant, or the effects on milk production. Breastfeeding individuals with COVID-19 should follow practices according to clinical guidelines to avoid exposing the infant to COVID-19.

About bamlanivimab

Bamlanivimab is a recombinant, neutralizing human IgG1 monoclonal antibody (mAb) directed against the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2. It is designed to block viral attachment and entry into human cells, thus neutralizing the virus, potentially treating COVID-19. Bamlanivimab emerged from the collaboration between Lilly and AbCellera to create antibody therapies for the prevention and treatment of COVID-19. Lilly scientists rapidly developed the antibody in less than three months after it was discovered by AbCellera and the scientists at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Vaccine Research Center. It was identified from a blood sample taken from one of the first U.S. patients who recovered from COVID-19.

Lilly has successfully completed a Phase 1 study of bamlanivimab in hospitalized patients with COVID-19 (NCT04411628). A Phase 2/3 study in people recently diagnosed with COVID-19 in the ambulatory setting (BLAZE-1, NCT04427501) is ongoing. A Phase 3 study of bamlanivimab for the prevention of COVID-19 in residents and staff at long-term care facilities (BLAZE-2, NCT04497987) is also ongoing. In addition, bamlanivimab is being tested in the National Institutes of Health-led ACTIV-2 study in ambulatory COVID-19 patients.

About etesevimab

Etesevimab (LY-CoV016, also known as JS016) is a recombinant fully human monoclonal neutralizing antibody, which specifically binds to the SARS-CoV-2 surface spike protein receptor binding domain with high affinity and can block the binding of the virus to the ACE2 host cell surface receptor. Point mutations were introduced into the native human IgG1 antibody to mitigate effector function. Lilly licensed etesevimab from Junshi Biosciences after it was jointly developed by Junshi Biosciences and Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Science (IMCAS). Junshi Biosciences leads development in Greater China, while Lilly leads development in the rest of the world.

Lilly has successfully completed a Phase 1 study (NCT04441931) of etesevimab in healthy U.S. volunteers to evaluate the safety, tolerability, pharmacokinetics and immunogenicity. A Phase 2/3 study in people recently diagnosed with COVID-19 in the ambulatory setting (BLAZE-1, NCT04427501) is ongoing. Junshi Biosciences has completed a similar Phase 1 study in healthy volunteers in China and has initiated Phase 1b/2 trials in COVID-19 patients globally.

About BLAZE-1

BLAZE-1 (NCT04427501) is a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled Phase 2/3 study designed to assess the efficacy and safety of bamlanivimab alone or bamlanivimab and etesevimab together for the treatment of symptomatic COVID-19 in the outpatient setting. To be eligible, patients were required to have mild or moderate symptoms of COVID-19 as well as a positive SARS-CoV-2 test based on a sample collected no more than three days prior to drug infusion.

In the Phase 2 portion of BLAZE-1, cohorts of mild to moderate recently diagnosed COVID-19 patients, were randomized to one of three doses of bamlanivimab (700 mg, 2800 mg, and 7000 mg), bamlanivimab 2800 mg plus etesevimab 2800 mg, or placebo. Results from the Phase 2 cohorts of BLAZE-1 were published in the New England Journal of Medicine and The Journal of the American Medical Association.

In the Phase 3 portion of BLAZE-1, the combination therapy arms enrolled mild to moderate, recently diagnosed COVID-19 patients who are at high risk for progressing to severe COVID-19 and/or hospitalization, studying bamlanivimab 2800 mg plus etesevimab 2800 mg versus placebo. The primary outcome measure for the Phase 3 portion of the BLAZE-1 trial was the percentage of participants who experience COVID-related hospitalizations or death from any cause by day 29. The key secondary endpoints were change from baseline to day 7 in SARS-CoV-2 viral load, persistently high SARS-CoV-2 viral load on day 7, time to sustained symptom resolution, and COVID-related hospitalization, ER visit or death from any cause from baseline by day 29. Additional endpoints include change from baseline in viral load at other time points, symptom improvement, symptom resolution, as well as safety.

The study is ongoing with additional treatment arms. Across all treatment arms, the trial will enroll up to 3,300 participants.

About BLAZE-4

BLAZE-4 (NCT04634409) is a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial designed to assess the efficacy and safety of bamlanivimab alone, and bamlanivimab and etesevimab together, at various doses, versus placebo for the treatment of symptomatic COVID-19 in the outpatient setting. Across all treatment arms, the trial will enroll an estimated 1,000 participants in the United States and Puerto Rico.

The primary outcome measure is percentage of participants who have a viral load greater than 5.27 at day 7. Additional endpoints include change from baseline to day 7 in SARS-CoV-2 viral load, percentage of participants who experience COVID-related hospitalization, ER visit or death from baseline through day 29, as well as safety.

About Lilly's COVID-19 Efforts

Lilly is bringing the full force of its scientific and medical expertise to attack the coronavirus pandemic around the world. Existing Lilly medicines are being studied to understand their potential in treating complications of COVID-19, and the company is collaborating with partner companies to discover and develop novel antibody treatments for COVID-19. Lilly is testing both single antibody therapy as well as combinations of antibodies as potential therapeutics for COVID-19. Click here for resources related to Lilly's COVID-19 efforts.

About Eli Lilly and Company

Lilly is a global healthcare leader that unites caring with discovery to create medicines that make life better for people around the world. We were founded more than a century ago by a man committed to creating high-quality medicines that meet real needs, and today we remain true to that mission in all our work. Across the globe, Lilly employees work to discover and bring life-changing medicines to those who need them, improve the understanding and management of disease, and give back to communities through philanthropy and volunteerism. To learn more about Lilly, please visit us at www.lilly.com and www.lilly.com/news. P-LLY

Lilly Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements (as that term is defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995) about bamlanivimab (LY-CoV555) alone or bamlanivimab and etesevimab (LY-CoV016) together as potential treatments for patients with COVID-19, as well as its supply, and reflects Lilly's current beliefs and expectations. However, as with any such undertaking, there are substantial risks and uncertainties in the process of drug development and commercialization. Among other things, there can be no guarantee that future study results will be consistent with the results to date, that bamlanivimab alone or bamlanivimab and etesevimab together will prove to be safe and effective treatments or successful preventative therapies for COVID-19, that bamlanivimab alone or bamlanivimab and etesevimab together will receive regulatory approvals or additional authorizations, or that Lilly can provide an adequate supply of bamlanivimab alone or bamlanivimab and etesevimab together in all circumstances. For a further discussion of these and other risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ from Lilly's expectations, please see Lilly's most recent Forms 10-K and 10-Q filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Lilly undertakes no duty to update forward-looking statements.

PP-LI-US-0373 02/2021 Lilly USA, LLC 2021. All rights reserved.

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SOURCE Eli Lilly and Company

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Opposition politicians who had vowed to disrupt president Hage Geingob's speech to open parliament were left furious yesterday when a pre-recorded video statement was instead played in the National Assembly chamber.

Parties such as the Namibia Economic Freedom Fighters (NEFF) and the Popular Democratic Movement (PDM), as well as the Rally for Democracy and Progress (RDP) have been anticipating Geingob's appearance in the National Assembly this week to bombard him with questions on the Fishrot corruption scandal, among other things.

The Namibian last month reported that Geingob's 2017 intra-party election campaign and Swapo were prominently mentioned as beneficiaries of the scandal in documents submitted to the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) by lawyers Sisa Namandje and Maren de Klerk.

Geingob has in the past denied knowledge of the scandal, insisting that Swapo did not "directly" benefit from the scam.

The president's supporters insisted that Geingob was not aware of the scandal and that he is a victim of name-droppers.

MPs had to wait yesterday only to learn the president was not going to attend parliament physically.

Speaker of the National Assembly Peter Katjavivi explained Geingob's absence at the opening ceremony yesterday was planned and done to allow parliament to comply with Covid-19 regulations.

Some MPs, especially Henny Seibeb and Bernadus Swartbooi of the Landless People's Movement (LPM), tried to disrupt the proceedings without success.

They demanded that Katjavivi stop playing Geingob's pre-recorded message to answer to why they were not informed of his absence in advance.

This was also in vain.

After Katjavivi's attempted explanation, opposition party members walked out of the chamber while Geingob's pre-recorded message, which was inaudible at times, was being played.

PDM leader McHenry Venaani also expressed disgust at the president's absence.

"What the president did is an act of cowardice for opting not to come to this house and act responsibly," he said.

Swapo MPs clapped loudly after Geingob's recorded message came to an end.

After the virtual opening, LPM parliamentarian Utaara Mootu said it was clear from Katjavivi's explanation that Geingob dodged parliament to avoid questions on the Fishrot scandal.

Mootu said Geingob has now created an "illusion that he is indeed involved in the Fishrot scandal and that he does not want to account [for it]".

"He is a runaway president. It shows that he doesn't want to talk about what the nation needs to know right now. The president is taking us for a joke . . . and we are not going to sit back and allow things to happen as they did. We will make sure the president is held to account," Mootu said.

PDM parliamentarian Inna Hengari said Geingob's virtual address yesterday was a clear indication that the executive does not have regard for the rules of the National Assembly.

She said the president has, as a result, lost the public's trust and that of the legislative arm of government.

"It was disrespectful for the president not to show up and to play a pre-recorded video. We will table a vote of no confidence in the speaker because he does not respect the rules of the house," she said.

NEFF MP Longinus Iipumbu was also not impressed with Geingob's absence.

Prime minister Saara Kuugongelwa-Amadhila, however, defended the decision to allow the president to open the parliament virtually.

"I don't understand how we [MPs] can debate from three or two different places and don't see anything wrong with that but we see something wrong with the president opening parliament using a virtual platform. There is nothing illegal about that. There is nothing unbecoming about that," she said.

She said it was also not correct to assume that Geingob's absence meant he was running away from questions as he is "not obliged to take questions during the opening of parliament".

"It is only during the state of the nation address when the president is allowed to take questions, but even if the state of the nation address was to be held virtually, they were still going to be allowed to ask those questions virtually. We do hold international conferences virtually," she said.

VIRTUAL MESSAGE

During his virtual address, Geingob urged parliamentarians to conduct themselves inside and outside the parliament chamber with honesty and integrity.

"As lawmakers, you are representatives of the people and therefore you are held to very high standards. I say this to you with cognisance that this applies to representatives of all the organs of the state, including the executive, which I represent," he said.

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The president emphasised the government's effort to address the negative effect of the Covid-19 pandemic on the local economy.

He further called on MPs to respect the rules of the National Assembly during debates and that their conduct should not betray the public trust.

"You should aspire to set high standards of conduct by displaying exemplary behaviour, as well as setting goals which the people of this nation, especially the younger generation, can aspire to. Lively and intelligent debates are welcome, as these are signs of our vibrant and thriving democracy," he said.

The president further urged MPs to work in unison to ensure that the bills lined up for tabling during this session of the National Assembly are debated and passed.

This includes laws to punish gender-based violence perpetrators such as the combating of rape amendment bill and the combating of domestic violence amendment bill, which include appropriate penalties "that not only demonstrate that the government takes the offence of rape seriously, but also our resolve to deter offenders from committing these heinous crimes".
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Pune, India, Feb. 10, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The global automotive acoustic engineering service market size is expected to experience significant growth by reaching USD 22.43 billion by 2027 while exhibiting a CAGR of 11.8% between 2020 and 2027. The growth is attributable to the growing focus on engine downsizing and the growing preference for passenger vehicles that propel the demand for advanced automotive acoustic engineering service globally. This information is published by Fortune Business Insights, in its latest report, titled, Automotive Acoustic Engineering Service Market Size, Share & Covid-19 Impact Analysis, By System Type (Physical Testing, Virtual Testing), By Application Type (Interior, Drivetrain, Powertrain, Body, and Others), By Vehicle Type (Passenger Cars and Commercial Vehicles), and Regional Forecasts, 2020-2027. The report further mentions that the market stood at USD 14.24 billion in 2019 and is likely to gain momentum in the forthcoming years.





COVID-19 Impacts Vehicle Sales Leading to a Period of Stagnation

The global pandemic, COVID-19, has led to an unprecedented loss for the automotive sector. With several manufacturing operations being halted for a temporary period, there has been a sharp decline in the sales of automotive across the globe. This is hampering the growth prospects of the market. However, the government is trying every possible means to bring back the economy to normalcy that will contribute to the growth of the market in the near future.





List of Top Companies Profiled in the Global Automotive Acoustic Engineering Service Market are:

Autoneum (Zurich, Switzerland)

Schaeffler (Werdohl, Germany)

HEAD acoustics GmbH (Herzogenrath, Germany)

FEV Group Gmbh (Aachen, Germany)

AVL List GmbH (Graz, Austria)

Siemens Industry Software Inc (Texas, United States)

Bertrandt (Ehningen, Germany)

Bruel & Kjr (Nrum, Denmark)

EDAG Engineering GmbH (Wiesbaden, Germany)





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The automotive acoustic engineering service is a type of process that involves developing, designing, simulating, and testing of sound that originates from the vehicle components such as engine, interior cabin, and others. Stringent government norms on noise pollution have given precedence to such processes that enable the auto manufacturers to keep the overall vehicle noise within the permissible range during manufacturing.





What does the Report Include?

The market report includes a detailed assessment of various drivers and restraints, opportunities, and challenges that the market will face during the projected horizon. Additionally, the report provides comprehensive insights into the regional developments of the market, affecting its growth during the forecast period. It includes information sourced from the advice of expert professionals from the industry by our research analysts using several research methodologies. The competitive landscape offers further detailed insights into strategies such as product launches, partnerships, mergers and acquisitions, and collaborations adopted by the companies to maintain market stronghold between 2020 and 2027.





KEY DRIVING FACTORS

Growing Preference for Passenger Vehicles to Aid Growth

According to the data by CNBC, the automotive sector registered sales of around 77.5 million new vehicles, with China being the leading auto market. The growing preference for passenger vehicles backed by the increasing demand for convenience and high disposable income is expected to boost the demand for advanced automotive acoustic engineering service systems across the globe. Additionally, the manufacturers are focusing on engine downsizing that enables displacing heavier engines with a lighter one that provides equivalent power ergonomics as the larger engine. This further leads to better fuel efficiency and reduced friction causing less noise within the vehicle. Therefore, such initiatives by the automotive manufacturers are expected to bode well for the global automotive acoustic engineering service market growth during the forecast period.





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MAJOR SEGMENTATION

Virtual Testing Held 48.8% Market Share in 2019

The virtual testing segment, based on system type, held a market share of about 48.8% in 2019 and is projected to showcase significant growth owing to the growing adoption of virtual testing systems to quickly and accurately detect faults within the vehicle.





REGIONAL INSIGHTS

Europe to Remain Dominant; Presence of Established Automotive Companies to Aid Growth

Among all the regions, Europe is expected to hold the highest position in the global market during the forecast period. This is attributable to the presence of established automotive companies in the region. The companies such as Audi, BMW, and Volkswagen are actively investing in developing advanced automotive acoustic engineering service solutions to manufacturing noiseless vehicles that will bode well for the market growth in Europe between 2020 and 2027.





COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPE

Facility Expansion by Key Players to Expand Their Product Portfolio and Boost Sales Revenue

The global automotive acoustic engineering service market is consolidated by the presence of major companies that are focusing on expanding their facilities to develop advanced automotive acoustic engineering service solutions. Additionally, key players are striving to maintain their presence by adopting strategies such as partnership, the introduction of new products, and collaboration that will bode well for the growth of the market during the forecast period.





Browse Detailed Summary of Research Report with TOC:

https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/automotive-acoustic-engineering-services-market-104751





Key Industry Development

April 2019  Bosch, a leading engineering products provider, established a new factory at Abstatt, Germany. According to the company, the new testing plant is soundproof, semi-anechoic, and isolated to provide an effective environment to test and compare automotive components.





Detailed Table of Content:

Introduction Research Scope Market Segmentation Research Methodology Definitions and Assumptions

Executive Summary

Market Dynamics Market Drivers Market Restraints Market Opportunities

Key Insights Merger, Acquisitions, and Partnerships Distributor Analysis  For Major Players Growth and Penetration Analysis Porters Five Forces Analysis PEST Analysis Vendor Landscape

Global Automotive Acoustics Engineering Service Market Analysis, Insights and Forecast, 2016-2027 Key Findings / Summary Market Analysis, Insights and Forecast  By Vehicle Type Passenger Cars Long Range Market Analysis, Insights and Forecast  By System Type Physical Testing Virtual Testing Market Analysis, Insights and Forecast  By Application Type Interior Drivetrain Powertrain Body Others Market Analysis, Insights and Forecast  By Region North America Europe Asia pacific Rest of the World



TOC Continued!





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Automotive Smart Display Market Size, Share & COVID-19 Impact Analysis, By Size Type (3-5, 6-10, >10), By Technology Type (LCD, TFT-LCD, and Others), By Application (Head-up Display, Center Stack, Digital Instrument Cluster, and Rear Seat Entertainment), By Vehicle Type (Passenger Cars and Commercial Vehicles), and Regional Forecast, 2020-2027

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Meet Bryan McRae, an experienced analytics and strategy professional making his mark in New York City. McRae, a 2016 economics graduate, spent the majority of his childhood in Hawaii and Japan as both of his parents served in the Air Force. After Bryans parents retired, the family moved to Felicity, Ohio, where Bryan attended Felicity High School but often found himself dreaming, wondering, curious about life outside of his small town.

Bryan chose UC for a couple of reasons. I really wanted to be close to home to help my family care for my mother, who had breast cancer, and have a world-class education at the same time, he said. During high school I was in a post-secondary program and took classes at UC Clermont which exposed me to UCs world-class faculty and programs. The rest was history.

Read on to learn more about Bryans story.


A local human rights group, ZimRights has challenged the government's proposed COVID-19 roll out plan saying it fails to meet constitutional demands needed to protect the right to life and death.

In a statement, ZimRights said yesterday's pronouncement by Information minister Monica Mutsvangwa during a post-cabinet briefing that the Cabinet had approved guidelines for the COVID-19 vaccination programme, is unconstitutional as the guidelines are a far cry of what they demanded of government in fulfilment of its Constitutional obligations to protect the right to life and health of all citizens.

Below is the full statement...

ZimRights has approached the High Court demanding a comprehensive vaccine roll-out plan including details of the budget allocations. Throwing figures that have no source and details of how it is meant to work does not amount to a plan.

Slogans and declarations do not amount to a plan. Propaganda responses to issues of life and death only show culpable negligence on the side of our national leadership.

In November 2020, the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights issued a Statement on universal and equitable access to vaccines for COVID-19 in which it emphasised that every person has the right to have access to safe and effective vaccine. In the statement, the Committee gives further guidance on what the right to health, in the context of COVID 19 entails.

The right to health requires States to make health facilities, services and goods, including vaccines, available, accessible, acceptable and of good quality. Vaccines for COVID-19 must not only be produced and made available, says the Committee. They must also be accessible to all persons without discrimination.

The right includes ensuring that there is adequate investment in the health services infrastructure, public awareness and measures to combat disinformation.

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This pronouncement is in line with both the African Charter and our own Constitution. Article 16 of the African Charter places an obligation on all state parties to take all necessary measures to protect the health of their people and to ensure that they receive medical attention when they are sick. Section 76 of the Zimbabwean Constitution provides for the right to health.

Section 29 of the same Constitution creates an obligation on the state to take reasonable measures to ensure everyone achieves access to health services. Access to safe and effective vaccine against COVID-19 is therefore a human right for all Zimbabweans.

The health of a nation must be a matter of high priority for any government. Leaving this task to the benevolence of donors and well-wishers is grossly immoral and outrageous.

So far, that appears to be the government's plan. In order to avert a great catastrophe caused by the government's abdication of its constitutional obligations, ZimRights will leave no stone unturned.

Today ZimRights will file an appeal against the decision of Justice Chatukuta. Beyond the local legal system, other avenues will be explored to ensure that the right to life and health is protected. ZimRights calls on the people of Zimbabwe not to tire in demanding tangible action from the government.
The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
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Guwahati, Feb 10 : A district court in Assams Hojai district on Wednesday sentenced a man to death for raping and murdering a four-year-old girl a year ago.

A court official said that Additional District and Sessions Judge N. Chena Baya Deuri convicted Chandan alias Vikram Harijan for the rape and murder of a minor girl under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code and the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, 2012.

The court also imposed a fine of Rs 5 lakh on the convicted criminal, to be paid to the victim's family as compensation.

According to the police, Harijan lured the minor girl with some gifts from outside her house and took her to a secluded place. He then raped the girl before strangulating her to death on February 26, 2020.

The police filed the chargesheet before the court within two months of registering the case, but the hearing was interrupted due to the Covid induced lockdown.

The parents and relatives of the deceased minor girl have expressed their satisfaction over the verdict.

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Covid restrictions for millions of Greater Sydney residents will be relaxed from Friday as NSW recorded 24 straight days of zero locally acquired cases.

The four square metre rule at all venues except gyms will be slashed in half allowing businesses to effectively double capacity.

Weddings and funerals will continue to be capped at 300 and masks will only be mandatory on public transport, freeing hospitality workers and people attending places of worship from wearing face coverings.

Dancing, singing and standing hospitality are still not allowed.

The relaxed restrictions will come into effect from 12:01am on Friday, reintroducing the two square metre rule for venues across the Greater Sydney region, which includes Wollongong, the Blue Mountains and the Central Coast.

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian (pictured) has announced a further easing of Covid restrictions for Greater Sydney, effective 12:01am on Friday

All venues except gyms will move from the 4sqm capacity rule to the 2sqm capacity rule allowing them to effectively double capacity

Greater Sydney has been subjected to tightened restrictions from December following the Avalon Covid cluster, which was quickly brought under control.

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian said Wednesday the decision to further ease restrictions was about striking a balance between public health and keeping the state's economy moving.

'We want to give the community and businesses the confidence to move forward, especially with the 2qm rule which will allow most venues to double their capacity,' she said.

But Ms Berejiklian begged residents not to become complacent now restrictions were easing.

'However, as we ease restrictions it is important we don't let our guard down. The community needs to continue to play their role in being Covid-safe and coming forward for testing with even the mildest of symptoms,' she said.

The state government previously increased household gathering limits to 30 and outdoor public gatherings to 50, from January 29.

Masks will only be mandatory on public transport (pictured) across Greater Sydney under the eased restrictions

Hospitality workers in Greater Sydney will no longer be mandated to wear face masks under changes to Covid restrictions

Masks will still be 'strongly encouraged' in indoor venues where social distancing is not possible.

NSW Health said Wednesday it was continuing to investigate the source of infection of a returned overseas traveller from Wollongong who tested positive for Covid two days after being released from mandatory hotel quarantine.

The man had flown into Sydney from South America where he mostly likely became infected.

'Genomic testing results indicate this case is not related to any other cases in hotel quarantine at the same time,' NSW Health said.

'Further investigations are necessary to determine the source of the case, including the possibility it is an old infection from overseas. Some tests need to be taken over several days, and further information will be released as it becomes available.'

Juba  To mitigate the risk of cross-border disease spread and minimize the risk of travel, trade and public health security, the Government of Japan and the World Health Organization (WHO) to establish port health facility at Juba International Airport to maintain the International Health Regulations (IHR) 2005 core capacities.

"Implementing IHR (2005) and establishing port health facility at Juba International Airport will help South Sudan to expand its response capacity to detect, assess, report and respond promptly and effectively to public health risks", said Hon. Elizabeth Acuei Yol.

"We acknowledge the support of the Government of Japan and WHO", said Hon. Elizabeth Acuei Yol. "The establishment of this Port Health facility at the Juba International Airport is a significant milestone towards meeting the country's obligation under the IHR (2005) and in enhancing its preparedness and response capacity to address these challenges".

Since South Sudan became a member state of WHO, the Ministry of Health with support from WHO and partners has initiated the process of strengthening port health services to facilitate the implementation of core capacity requirements for points of entry.

"I sincerely wish that the facilities will be fully utilized by the Ministry of Public Health in response to COVID-19 to protect people of South Sudan from the pandemic" said Nobuhiro Kikuchi, Head of Development Cooperation of the Embassy of Japan.

On this occasion, Japan and WHO also donated two all-terrain vehicles to the National Blood Transfusion Services to improve access to the much-needed lifesaving blood supplies to health facilities to reduce morbidity and mortality.

Close Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox Top Headlines South Sudan Health International Organisations By submitting above, you agree to our privacy policy. Success! Almost finished... We need to confirm your email address. To complete the process, please follow the instructions in the email we just sent you. Error! Error! There was a problem processing your submission. Please try again later.

The vehicles were handed over by the Head of Development Cooperation in the Embassy of Japan, Mr Nobuhiro Kikuchi, to the National Minister of Health, Elizabeth Acuei Yol, in the presence of WHO and the media.

The over USD 162 000 plan to have a fully equipped port health facility at Juba International Airport will be operational by next month. The facility is key to galvanizing South Sudan's epidemic preparedness and response.

WHO appreciates the sustained contribution to the well-being of the people of South Sudan by the Government of Japan, said Dr Guracha Guyo on behalf of Dr Olushayo Olu, WHO Representative for South Sudan. "The establishment of a port health facility will ensure routine core capacity to respond to events that may constitute a public health emergency of international concern.

Since 2015, the Government of Japan, through WHO has been supporting the overall humanitarian response in South Sudan, including the establishment of blood transfusion services in different parts of the country and the Public Health Emergency Operations Centre (PHEOC) in Juba, provision of lifesaving emergency medicines and supplies, strengthening disease surveillance and outbreak response as well as training of community health workers on communicable disease management.

The groundbreaking ceremony on 4 February 2021, was performed by Honorable Elizabeth Acuei Yol, Minister of Health, in the presence of the Head of Development Cooperation at the Embassy of Japan, the Undersecretary Ministry of Health, Senior Ministry of Health Staff, Civil Aviation Authorities, WHO South Sudan and the media among others.
PARK RIDGE, Ill., Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- (AANA)Leaders of the American Association of Nurse Anesthetists (AANA) congratulated Denis McDonough on his confirmation as Secretary of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and pledged the AANA's continued support of the VA to ensure the nation's veterans receive timely, expert, quality care.

In a Feb. 8 letter to the secretary, AANA CEO Randall D. Moore, DNP, CRNA, MBA, highlighted the critical role Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetists (CRNAs) play in the VA healthcare system. Moore requested a meeting with the new secretary to continue the AANA's discussions with the agency on the need for permanently expanding full practice authority within the scope of CRNA licensing for providing anesthesia services to veterans in every state.

Permanently removing barriers for CRNAs mean less staff shortages in VA medical facilities, easing the back log of waiting patients, said Moorehimself a veteran. A retired commissioned officer of the Army Reserve with more than 22 years of military service, Moore served as an infantryman, combat medic, and nurse anesthetist. He served as an active-duty CRNA with the Army, including with forward surgical teams in Afghanistan.

"Nurse anesthetists are experienced and highly trained anesthesia professionals who provide high-quality patient care, demonstrated through evidence in decades of scientific research," wrote Moore. "By standardizing care delivery models across the country via permanent full practice authority for CRNAs, veterans will receive consistently safe and high-quality care delivery in any VHA facility. More than 1,000 CRNAs are available in the VHA to provide every type of anesthesia care as well as chronic pain management services to veterans."

"We appreciate the work the agency has already accomplished to protect our nation's veterans, especially during the [COVID-19] public health emergency," wrote Moore. The public health emergency "has shown the urgent need for healthcare professionals to care for patients and also highlights the important role that CRNAs play in our healthcare system, especially when workforce barriers to practice are eliminated both at the state and federal levels," he said.

In April 2020, the VA issued Directive 1899, which allowed healthcare professionals, including CRNAs, to practice and operate within the full scope of the license, registration, or certification. This past fall, the VA issued an interim final rule confirming that VA healthcare professionals, including CRNAs, may practice their profession consistent with the scope and requirements of their VA employment, notwithstanding any state license, registration, certification, or other requirements that unduly interfere with their practice. The rulemaking also confirms the VA's authority to establish national standards of practice for healthcare professionals, which will standardize a healthcare professional's practice in all VA medical facilities.

CRNAs are the primary providers of anesthesia to U.S. military personnel. The ability of CRNAs to provide high-quality care, even under the most difficult circumstances, has been recognized by every branch of the U.S. military. CRNAs have full practice authority in the Army, Navy, and Air Force and are the predominant provider of anesthesia on forward surgical teams and in combat support hospitals, where 90 percent of forward surgical teams are staffed by CRNAs.

"We appreciate the VA and VHA's recognition of CRNAs' value and skill to healthcare, including the work on Directive 1899 that emphasized the importance of allowing CRNAs to practice to the full extent of their training," said Moore.

"We strongly applaud the move by the VHA to remove barriers to care for our nation's veterans, including encouraging facilities to implement full practice authority for CRNAs, to allow them to practice to the top of their scope and education. This move allowed the VHA greater flexibility to care for our veterans, in a more efficient and cost-effective way that increases access to care," he wrote. "While we applaud the temporary removal of workforce barriers during this emergency, our nation's veterans deserve access to timely, cost-effective and high-quality care within the VA health system at all times, and we think that it's critical that full practice authority for CRNAs working within the VA be made permanent."

SOURCE American Association of Nurse Anesthetists

Related Links

www.aana.com


The BBC has axed editorial director Kamal Ahmed and two others from its news board in a 'modernisation' plan - leaving it with no ethnic minority members despite a pledge to increase senior management diversity last year.

An 80 million savings plan saw the job cuts announced by the broadcaster this afternoon, the 'restructuring' as part of 'plans to modernise BBC News'.

The slimmed-down board will remain headed by director of news and current affairs Fran Unsworth, who earns 340,000-a-year.

Two other members of the board, Gavin Allen and Jo Carr, have also lost their jobs after the restructuring.

In 2019, the corporation said all senior leadership groups should have at least two staff members from minority ethnic backgrounds.

However, Ahmed's departure will mean that the BBC News board is now all-white.

Former newspaper man Ahmed's role was created by Unsworth in 2018 and she said she was 'thrilled he was joining her top team'.

However, the pair are said to have had differences of opinion over the department's editorial direction, leading to his removal.

A BBC insider told MailOnline: 'No one working here was very surprised. Most people think he had it coming.

'Kamal had gone to Tony Hall (Previous director-general) arguing that we needed this editorial director role, and Tony created it for him. But most people think it was a non-job. He and Fran (Unsworth) did not get on.

'People didn't like him. They didn't understand how he was elevated so quickly, and many didn't forgive him for that speech he got paid for to a hedge fund while lots of job losses were being announced here.'

Ahmed had a role as editorial director and oversaw Question Time for his 205,000 salary

The BBC said it was 'restructuring' the board as part of 'plans to modernise BBC News'

Reacting to the change, one BBC source told the Telegraph: 'And just like that our news board is all-white again. Not the direction I and many others hoped we would be going in.'

On Wednesday night, an email signed by dozens of BBC staff is believed to have been sent to Mr Davie protesting Ahmed's removal.

Tufayel Ahmed, a journalist and lecturer, said: 'Not even two years ago the BBC made a big fuss about being more inclusive and 'stepping up' by having BAME representation in every leadership team, and now it seems to be back-pedalling on its own promises.

'The BBC's decision to cut its only BAME news board member is particularly worrying because BAME people are being disproportionately affected by job cuts during the pandemic for no discernible reason.

'BAME journalists are already so woefully underrepresented in our newsrooms, especially at senior levels.'

From broadsheet to broadcast: The rise of Kamal Ahmed Kamal Ahmed is a former newspaper man who started his career in Scotland and during the nineties. He moved to the Guardian and was appointed executive news editor at the Observer. Ahmed briefly left journalism to become the Director of Communications at the Equality and Human Rights Commission but returned to reporting as business editor of the Sunday Telegraph in 2009. He replaced Robert Peston as the business editor of BBC News in March 2014 and the next year took his role as economics editor. Four years later he was announced as BBC News's Editorial Director in a position created by Fran Unsworth on the News Board. Ahmed previously hit the headlines last February when he apologised for accepting a 12,000 payment for speaking at a banker's conference. He received 12,000 for a 40-minute appearance at the Aberdeen Standard Investment's conference, just days after telling 450 of his colleagues that their jobs were being cut. He came under fire both publicly and within the BBC for his 12,000 fee for the event and has sent an email to colleagues apologising. Advertisement

However, a BBC spokeswoman said: 'The final membership of the BBC News Board has not been announced. Two out the eight posts  a quarter  are currently vacant.'

In June last year the BBC said it would increase diversity by investing 100million over three years.

The move, which starts in April 2021 is targeting 20% of off-screen talent coming from under-represented groups.

Within that includes people with a disability or from a BAME or 'disadvantaged socio-economic' background.

It had already pledged to increase the proportion of leadership roles filled by women from 44% to 50% by next year, and raise the share of such senior roles held by BAME staff from 11.5% to 15%.

Tim Davie, the director-general, said on taking the job that diversity was 'mission critical' to the BBC.

Ahmed, whose mother is from Rotherham and whose father is from Sudan, had a role as editorial director which included overseeing Question Time and was paid around 205,000. He joined the BBC in 2014.

He found himself challenged in February last year when Victoria Derbyshire told him to 'reconsider the decision to close our programme'.

It came after he had shared a post about a probe by Newsnight that had resulted in the Government announcing measures to ban putting children under the age of 16 in unregulated accommodation.

Ahmed wrote: 'Investigations matter. Original journalism matters.'

Derbyshire made her feelings known about her programme's cancellation, and has condemned the BBC's claims that it pulled the show off air because it had failed to grow its live audience.

As well as Ahmed, Gavin Allen's 180,000 role as head of news output, overseeing the likes of Radio 4's Today programme, News at Six and Ten and the now-axed Victoria Derbyshire show, will also be closed.

The post of Joanna Carr, who as head of BBC current affairs looked after Panorama and Newsnight and is paid around 165,000, will also go.

In a note to staff, Unsworth said she would 'like to thank them for their outstanding contribution to BBC News to date and we are exploring future options for them'.

Gavin Allen's 180,000 role as head of news output has also been closed as part of the cuts

Unsworth said the new board will help in 'increasing the impact of our world-class journalism, addressing changes in the way audiences consume news, achieving our savings target, and building a diverse culture inclusive of all.'

Who is on the BBC News Board? Francesca Unsworth, director, News and Current Affairs Jamie Angus, Director, World Service Group Alan Dickson, Chief Financial and Operating Officer Anna Gronmark, HR Director Katie Lloyd, Development Director Kate McAndrew, Chief of Staff Jonathan Munro, Head of Newsgathering Naja Nielsen, Digital Director Sarah Ward-Lilley, Managing Editor Advertisement

It comes after the BBC announced cuts to Newsnight, 5Live and other news output as part of cost-cutting plans and an effort to reach the young.

The plans to 'modernise its newsroom' will lead to around 450 job cuts and includes a review of the number of BBC presenters 'and how they work'.

The board will be whittled down from 11 to eight, as there will be three new roles.

Jamie Angus, currently director of the World Service Group, will become senior controller, news output and commissioning.

Jonathan Munro, who is head of newsgathering, will become senior controller, news content and deputy director of news, 'responsible for the production of the journalism that supports the BBC's news programmes and platforms.'

The changes to the board will come into effect in March.

Ahmed previously hit the headlines last February when he apologised for accepting a 12,000 payment for speaking at a banker's conference.

He received 12,000 for a 40-minute appearance at the Aberdeen Standard Investment's conference, just days after telling 450 of his colleagues that their jobs were being cut.

He came under fire both publicly and within the BBC for his 12,000 fee for the event and has sent an email to colleagues apologising.

In the email, he wrote: 'I realise now that I did not think things through sufficiently at the time of the booking and, although I did not break any of the BBC's guidelines on external speaking, it was a mistake to agree to a fee.

BBC executives Gavin Allen (left), Naja Nielsen (second from left), Jonathan Munro (second from right) and Kamal Ahmed (right) sat in front of staff on barstools at New Broadcasting House as they cut 450 jobs last year

'I have told ASI this morning that I will not be taking any payment. I wanted to say sorry that a mistake made by me has become a public and internal issue.'

Days before, Ahmed was one of four senior BBC bosses who sat on bar stools as they announced the job cuts.

He drew criticism after he turned up for the 'bloodbath' announcement wearing a black T-shirt and casual trousers.

This was reportedly out of character for the man who as political editor of the Observer was regarded as the faithful Fleet Street mouthpiece of Tony Blair's spin doctor Alastair Campbell.

BBC broadcaster Victoria Fritz tweeted: 'Got to be the first time I've not seen Kamal in a sharp suit and tie. At least he wore black.'
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Kate Winslet got global recognition after her leading role in James Cameron's Titanic. She shared the screen space with Leonardo DiCaprio and the film went on to become the biggest blockbusters of all time. For her performance, Winslet had received an Oscar nomination in the Best Actress category. Recently, Kate appeared on a panel of women for the Los Angeles Times and explained how she felt as if Titanic came to her as a "fluke". Read ahead to know more.

Also read: 'Divergent' Cast Has Kate Winslet, Shailene Woodley And Others; Know Their Characters

Kate Winslet's take on her career

Kate appeared on the panel of women with Michelle Pfeiffer, Rashida Jones, Vanessa Kirby and Andra Day. She was asked about being relatively unknown despite an Oscar nomination for the Best Supporting Actress for the 1995 film Sense and Sensibility. Winslet explained that she was plagued by the feeling that she did not belong to the industry. She said she was the overweight girl who would always be at the end of the line because her name was a W, sometimes she couldnt even get in a door of the audition because they would run out of time before the Ws.

Also read: Kate Winslet's Father Gets '1st Dose' Of COVID-19 Vaccine; Says 'It's A Huge Relief'

Rashida Jones asked Kate how she seemed to have the foresight to stave off pressure from Hollywood to capitalise on her rising star before solidifying herself as the household name she is today. Kate said the honest answer was that she was scared of Hollywood since it was a big, scary place where everyone had to be thin and look in a certain way. She knew that she did not look that way or feel like she fitted there so if she was ever going to belong, she had to earn her place and according to her, she had not earned it.

Also read: Kate Winslet Reveals She Felt Good About Her Nude Scene In 'Ammonite'; Read More

Kate stated that her role in Titanic was a fluke and despite having two Academy Award nominations, she felt she couldnt compete with younger and more in shape popular actresses. She had to go through major life events until she found the courage to dominate show business. She had a feeling of "maybe that was just luck". When she became a mother at 25, all of that evaporated completely. Two years later, she was asked to do Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) which was a huge turning point in her career.

Also read: Kate Winslet Reveals She Lost Track Of How Many 'Avatar' Sequels James Cameron Was Filming

Get the latest entertainment news from India & around the world. Now follow your favourite television celebs and telly updates. Republic World is your one-stop destination for trending Bollywood news. Tune in today to stay updated with all the latest news and headlines from the world of entertainment.
BETHLEHEM HOUSING: The American Public Health Association Caucus on Homelessness recently recognized Trinna Stanford, director of the Bethlehem Housing program of Catholic Charities Archdiocese of New Orleans, as a 2020 Outstanding Clinician. The award acknowledges providers that have gone the extra mile to improve health outcomes for individuals and families experiencing homelessness. Since March 2020, Bethlehem Housing program provided shelter and intensive case management services to 33 new client families, consisting of 40 adults and 64 children who were previously homeless. In addition, Bethlehem Housing has also provided short-term assistance to eight families, consisting of 11 adults and 23 children. SUICIDE PREVENTION: Be Well-Come Together is organizing a free Zoom session on suicide prevention at 6 p.m. Monday, Feb. 22. The presenter will be Dr. Claire Houtsma, coordinator of suicide prevention at the Southeast Louisiana Veterans Health Care System. To register, email bewellcometogether@gmail.com.

NARCONON: Benzodiazepines such as Valium and Xanax are involved in a fifth of all overdose-related deaths. For free substance abuse screenings or referrals, call Narconon at (800) 431-1754. For information about benzodiazepines and other substance abuse issues, visit www.narcononnewliferetreat.org/blog.

SURVIVORS OF SUICIDE SUPPORT GROUP: NOLA Survivors of Suicide Loss is a free, peer-led support group for adults who have lost a loved one to suicide. The usual Zoom meeting time for the group is from 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. on the second and fourth Wednesdays of each month; to register to attend a meeting, visit nolasurvivors.com/contact-us or email survivors.nola@gmail.com.

UNIVERSITY OF HOLY CROSS: Free telecounseling is available from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Thursday from the University of Holy Cross. To schedule a session, call (504) 398-2168.
MET Eireann is warning of possible gale force winds in over the next two days as temperatures look set to plummet in Limerick and across the country.

A Status Yellow snow/ice warning was issued earlier this week and now the forecaster has issued a Status Yellow wind warning.

Both warnings are due to come into effect at 8am tomorrow and will remain in place for 24 hours.

"Strong to gale force southeast winds in conjunction with rain, sleet and snow will lead to poor visibility and hazardous conditions," states the wind warning.

Limerick City and County Council says its crews are monitoring the situation and motorists making essential journeys are advised to exercise caution when driving.
The European Union (EU) and Better Work this week announced progress of their joint efforts to improve garment industry working conditions in countries such as Bangladesh and Vietnam.

In late 2019, the EU joined Better Work  an initiative between the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the International Finance Corporation (IFC), a member of the World Bank Group  as a new donor in addition to Australia, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands and the United States. Along with other donors, the EU supports Better Work in accelerating improvements in garment industry working conditions and to achieve more sustainable production patterns.

Achievements of the partnership so far include evolving factory services in the face of Covid-19, including ongoing assessments of working conditions in areas such as health and safety, gender equality, wages and overtime; as well as advisory and training services which focus on worker-management dialogue, gender equity, leadership skills, and cultivation of continuous learning.

In the context of the Covid-19, financial and human resources have been redirected towards helping factories reopen under new health and safety guidelines, partnering on health and safety awareness campaigns, and working closely with national governments, employers and workers on industry-wide responses to rebuild a more resilient garment sector.

The garment industry reported catastrophic losses due to the pandemic in the first half of 2020. Only three in five workers returned to factory jobs, and women have been disproportionately affected.



Better Work has supported factories as they reopen under new health and safety guidelines, developed virtual factory engagement services to continue to monitor working conditions during the pandemic and worked with industry partners to address practical and policy changes.

Supporting the recovery of the garment industry is a priority for us, given the strong development impact of the sector in terms of quality jobs, particularly for women and young people, says Ousseynou Nakoulima, IFC Western Europe director.

Marjeta Jager, deputy director general for the Department for International Partnerships (DG INTPA), at the European Commission (EC) adds: In many factories across the world, the garment industry is helping people, especially women who represent 80% of the garment workforce, to get a decent job, a living wage and social protection. Better Work plays an important role in those improvements.

Better Work brings all levels of the garment industry together to improve working conditions and boost the competitiveness of apparel businesses. It is active in nine countries reaching more than 2m workers, including Bangladesh, Cambodia, Egypt, Haiti, Indonesia, Jordan, Nicaragua, Vietnam and Ethiopia.

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Martha Newton, ILO deputy DG of Policy, notes: Throughout 2020, Better Work supported hundreds of factories to implement Covid safe working practises. The programme devised new ways to communicate with workers, supported measures to address their concerns, and became a conduit for sharing the ILOs policy advice on issues confronting employers and workers as the pandemic took its very destructive and unpredictable path.

Better Work will be at the forefront of the ILOs efforts to support a more equitable, resilient and sustainable garment industry.
(CVE: EVER) CEO Kevin Keough joined Steve Darling from Proactive with news the company has just released their final drill results from 2020 on their Golden Lion property in Northern British Columbia. Keough telling Proactive what they have learned from this drill program and also what they are planning on doing in 2021 at both Golden Lion and Snoball.

Enhanced Reciprocal has been suspended until the next BC Health announcement

In line with the Public Health Authorities travel restrictions, we have suspended our enhanced reciprocal program with Manning Park, Mt. Seymour, Mt. Washington, SilverStar Mountain and WhiteWater. This will be revisited after the next BC Health announcement. Please note we are still accepting Baldy Mountain Resort enhanced reciprocals.

I paid happily for the Apex seasons pass for the hill I love and the great deal of having two free day passes to stated mountains above. I have no problem wearing my mask and keeping my distance up there, but when you pull the pin on free days offered, that can make a person mad. This was going to be my big free day month as my lay off likely ends next month. I used the Baldy portion last Sunday then again on Friday and I was super happy with the deal and looked forward to more of what my pass was offering me.

A case of bad timing, maybe. What makes it truly unfair is that I can drive to any of those mountains, pay, and enjoy my day. Just like the large percentage of Albertan and Quebecois plates you see in every ski hill parking lot in the valley and beyond. Why dont the hills and the government make it mandatory to show ID at the ticket windows and refuse people who dont reside within a certain proximity of any given hill?

Ill tell you why... because the money keeps rolling in. Its not about being safe and fair. After the recent dumps of snow more than ever the hills fill up, and the people who bucked up before the snow flew lose out in this specific case. The rule essentially stops nothing covid wise but guarantees profit to the hills and the government.

Scott Burrell, West Kelowna
The Mar-a-Lago estate is seen in Palm Beach, Fla., on Dec. 18, 2019. (Wilfredo Lee/AP Photo)

Palm Beach Council President Suggests Trump Can Live at Mar-a-Lago

Palm Beach, Florida, Town Council President Margaret Zeidman confirmed that former President Donald Trump is allowed to live at his Mar-a-Lago property amid disputes.

It seems there is nothing  that would prohibit him from living in the owners suite, Zeidman said, according to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

After departing Washington D.C. on Jan. 20, Trump moved back to the Mar-a-Lago resort.

Neighbors of Trump have alleged that the former president is in violation of the towns ordinances and want him evicted.

On Tuesday, the Palm Beach Town Council addressed Trumps residency at the resort but did not hold a vote.

John Marion, Trumps lawyer in Palm Beach, argued that there is nothing in an agreement with the towns ordinances that prevents the former president from residing at Mar-a-Lago. Trump, he added, can live there under the towns zoning rules because hes a bona fide employee there, according to the paper.

This guy as he wanders the property is like the mayor of the town of Mar-a-Lago if you will, Marion said. He is always present.  He loves it there, and he loves the people that he sees there. He enjoys it. It is his home.

According to Marion, Trumps duties include evaluating employees, overseeing the sprawling property, conducting events, and other responsibilities.

Philip Johnston, a representative for Preserve Palm Beach, argued that Trumps presence would spoil the towns atmosphere.

We feel that this issue threatens to make Mar-a-Lago into a permanent beacon for his more rabid, lawless supporters, Johnston claimed, without providing evidence or a reason why.

The Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., on Jan. 11, 2018. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

John C. Randolph, Palm Beachs town attorney, said in a memorandum last week that Trumps right to reside at Mar-a-Lago may hinge on whether he is technically employed there, as local laws stipulate that a private club may provide living quarters for its bona fide employees only.

This issue, therefore, hinges primarily on whether former President Trump is a bona fide employee of the club, Randolph wrote.

Around the same time, Trumps lawyers said a 1993 usage agreement for Mar-a-Lago did not say whether the owner of the property could not reside there.

Randolph in the Tuesday meeting appeared to side with Marion, Trumps lawyer.

He oversees the property. He evaluates the performance of the employeeshes constantly doing that. He suggests improvements relating to the operation of the club.  He reviews the clubs financials. He attends events at the club and welcomes the people that are guests, he said, according to NPR. He welcomes and thanks everybody thats attending. He greets members and their guests as he sees them. He recommends the events to be held at the club. He suggests candidates for membership and signs the documentation relating to those members.

The Epoch Times reached out to Trumps team for comment.
A group under the banner, Citizens United for Equal Justice has promised a massive protest if Bong County Superintendent Esther Walker does not hand over her son to Police.

Phillip Bestlow, the son of Superintendent Walker was reported by parents of a rape victim in July of last year for allegedly tempering with their daughter.

According to Assistant Commissioner of Police Frederick Neppay, Police have since launched a man hunt for Phillip but is nowhere to be seen.

Some insiders who begged not to be named told our Bong County Correspondent that Superintendent Walker in December of last year, bought a plane ticket for the rape suspect to leave the Country.

The group said it is all together unacceptable for the Superintendent to keep mute about the issue even though it is alleged that she even aided the victim with cloths and foods weeks after the incident occurred.

The group according to its president Peter Kollie, Madam Esther Walker is a woman and if her dignity should be respected as a leader, she needs to do all it takes to ensuring that her son faces Justice.

Mr. Kollie told Journalist via mobile Interview that his group will no longer relent in taking to the streets placards to claim central government attention to the situation.

"The sup. has been accused by some citizens of sending her son outside of the Country, this is unconfirmed but if we find out that it is true, it will be different because we ourselves will get her out of that position" he adds.

Our Bong County Correspondent says Superintendent Walker has not commented on the issue as she keeps saying that it is not timely to talk about her son alleged involvement in the reported case
Unionists have backed calls for border checks between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic to prevent the spread of coronavirus, despite them being rejected by the UK Government.

It comes after Fianna Fail Senator Robbie Gallagher proposed Northern Ireland should implement similar border controls to the Republic.

On Monday, the Irish Government introduced gardai manned checkpoints near the border, with people from Northern Ireland being turned back and liable for a fine of 100 if they cross without good cause.

Asked if they were considering introducing a similar policy in Northern Ireland a Department of Health spokesperson said: "The public health regulations state you must not travel away from home without a reasonable excuse. The PSNI have the power to take action against those away from home without a reasonable excuse."

TUV leader Jim Allister and UUP MLA Doug Beattie said they would be supportive of similar checks and fines being introduced if it helped stop the spread of Covid-19.

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Whatsapp Call: Senator Robbie Gallagher said NI should implement controls at border

Mr Gallagher, a former garda, said it was "disappointing, frustrating and irritating" that an all-island approach to tackling the pandemic had still not been implemented.

"I appeal to both the Government and the authorities in the North to make another effort to try to get that all-island approach to this killer disease," he said.

DUP MP Carla Lockhart also raised the issue in the House of Commons yesterday, saying travel from the Republic risks spreading new variants of coronavirus.

Mrs Lockhart asked Health Secretary Matt Hancock if he agreed Northern Ireland should implement border controls. However, Mr Hancock said he "did not agree" and that the UK Government was working closely with Dublin "to safeguard our borders against the challenges we face".

Mr Beattie said he thought people were getting confused around recent comments on the border from unionists.

"We fully appreciate this is because of Covid restrictions, but we were told they could never do anything on the border and yet they are," the Army veteran said.

"They said it was because of security issues and the peace deal and that's why we ended up with the Brexit deal we have."

He said the Republic was doing something it said it couldn't do, and now politicians there were asking Stormont to do the same. "There's no difference between the two things, the reality is that, in extremes, both the Irish Government and the Northern Irish Government could put police on the border."

Mr Allister said it was ironic politicians in the Republic were now calling for border controls.

"A few months ago even the thought of a camera on the border would have put some people into a frenzy and now you can have what's approaching a hard border and nobody turns a hair.

"You'll get no objection from me to that, the problem doesn't only travel in one direction, but it demonstrates to me that the customs border should equally be there.

"I think it confirms their whole argument was phoney about the border, when it suits you can have one."

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Veteran musician Shem Tube is dead. Born Shem Andayi, he was among the few surviving western Kenya music legends from the '50s and '60s.

He reportedly succumbed to complications from diabetes at a hospital in Luanda Township, Vihiga County, on Sunday. He was in his early 80s.

Speaking to the Nation on Sunday evening, fellow musician Sila wa Sila said Tube's daughter, Marthe Ayoma, had confirmed the sad news. She informed him that her father had died at Romo Romo Hospital in Luanda.

"We will be liaising with the family for the funeral arrangements," he said.

Sila, the Music Copyright Society of Kenya (MCSK) regional chairman in western Kenya, said he would liaise with his counterparts on the funeral arrangements.

MCSK national chairman Lazarus Muli, in a condolence message, eulogised Tube for his musical prowess that greatly influenced some local Benga and rhumba artistes.

Unique style

"The MCSK fraternity has lost one of its founder members who greatly influenced others," Muli said.

Tube of the Abana ba Nasery Band, was renowned for having been among the innovators of the popular Omutibo beat, fusing it with percussion sounds from scratching a Fanta bottle with a coin.

This is a style he initially popularised with the Mwilonje Jazz Band from the 1950s to the 1970s. The unique beat would gain popularity among African music fans in Europe and other parts of the world.

He had many fans among radio disc jockeys in the UK, who marvelled at the use of a Fanta bottle to produce a unique sound.

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Several other musicians picked up the music style both locally and internationally.

Notably, Douglas Paterson an American African music archivist, travelled to meet Tube to chat with him about his unique sound.

Popular songs

Similarly, Kenyan-born US-based artiste Joseck Asikoye of the Jabali Afrika group, has also been in the forefront of promoting some of Tube's music.

Some of Tube's popular songs from back then include Maombi ya Mummy, Grace Mpenzi and Hadija Mrembo.

Among Tube's contemporaries were Enos Okola and Justo Osala, both whom he recorded songs with under the label Country Music of Western Kenya.

Some of the songs they produced include Khwakosa Sina, Khwesimba Murwe, Esimiti Khusilenje.

Other musicians from western Kenya, who worked with Tube included Fanuel Amimo, John Nzenze (who died last year), Jimmy Lasco, Anthony Susu and Man Kale.

Surviving veteran musicians from western Kenya from Tube's generation include Sukuma Bin Ongaro, now a gospel artiste, and Peter Kombo.

The whole of the UK is now working together to roll out the Covid-19 vaccine.

A total of 407 million doses have been bought by the UK Government, and every injection is helping to protect people and provide a route back to normality.

Every step of the roll-out involves a network of people collaborating across every nation of the UK to protect as many lives as quickly as possible, while also reducing hospital admissions that are creating such pressure on the NHS.

Joint effort: The whole of the UK is now working together to roll out the Covid-19 vaccine

The UK Government has made available more than 6bn to develop and procure Covid-19 vaccines, and it is now distributing doses to health services in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, as well as the Crown Dependencies and Overseas Territories.

After becoming the first country to approve a vaccine for use, we now have three authorised vaccines for Covid-19.

Those approved have met strict standards of safety, quality and effectiveness set out by the independent Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). They are available locally across the UK, and provided free.

At the heart of the biggest vaccination programme in NHS history are thousands of scientists, medics, armed forces personnel, logistics staff and volunteers who make it all possible. Read their inspiring stories below.

Rajan Bindra, 44, is an aviation consultant, who lives in Slough, Berkshire, with his wife and two children. He worked as a volunteer at the local vaccination centre.

'I was in charge of managing the car park, which is the first port of call for anybody who comes along. I wanted people to see my smiling eyes behind a mask so they were put at ease.

'We made a point of referring to them as 'customers' or 'guests' to treat everyone with respect. I was there when my 80-year-old mother arrived for her vaccination. I thought, 'Do I need to ask for her ID?'  I did anyway. But then she asked if I could park her car for her. I had to tell her we weren't offering a valet service!'

Vaccine volunteer Rajan Bindra, pictured with his mother, who came to the centre for her jab

Lieutenant Calum MacLeod, 27, serves with the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards in Leuchars, Fife, and has been involved in setting up vaccination centres.

'We're doing anything from helping to lay flooring, to moving chairs and tables around. We have been on task now for just under two weeks. It's a vast effort by everyone involved. I'm from the local area so it feels good to be getting these vaccinations out.

'A lot of my soldiers are really happy and motivated to be helping out communities across Scotland. The Army brings organisational capacity and a can-do attitude to the task.'

Lt Calum MacLeod has been working to help set up vaccination centres across Scotland

Professor Paul Heath, of St George's, University of London, oversaw Phase 3 trials at St George's Hospital, London, of a UK Government-backed vaccine produced by US pharmaceutical company Novavax. The vaccine has now passed Phase 3.

'The Novavax trial involves around 15,200 participants at 33 sites across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

'This is a double blind, randomised, placebo-controlled trial to understand whether the vaccine has a significant efficacy against Covid-19. Once that's been done  and obviously ensuring that the vaccine is safe  the data will be presented to the regulator, who will consider whether they want to provide an emergency licence.

'It is good to have lots of different vaccines because we have a lot of people to vaccinate.'

Professor Paul Heath oversaw Phase 3 vaccine trials of a UK Government-backed vaccine

Corporal Sally Woodcock, a 34-year-old RAF clarinettist, was deployed to a vaccine hub in Powys, Mid Wales.

'I'm not one to sit about doing nothing, so it's fantastic that I've been able to help out. In Powys, I'm with five other musicians and a pilot.

'We've been doing all sorts. It can vary depending on how many volunteers there are, but today I was doing car park duties. I've also been carrying out admin roles and operating the phones.

'We're all mucking in together  there's no kind of division between the military and volunteers. I received a jab myself because we were working with the public and alongside nurses. It was absolutely painless.'

Cpl Sally Woodward, left, volunteered at a vaccine hub, while David Lawrence, right, is CFO at Valneva, which is developing a vaccine in Livingston, West Lothian

David Lawrence is Chief Financial Officer at Valneva, which is developing a vaccine in Livingston, West Lothian. The biotech company is one of seven vaccine developers that the UK Government has struck usage agreements with.

'The next wave of clinical trials will involve around 3,000 to 4,000 people to make sure there is enough data to confidently understand the vaccine's safety and efficacy. Rather than just doing small-scale manufacturing to produce the initial material for the clinical trials, we're now using a full-scale manufacturing process.

'That means that if the regulator gives its approval the vaccine could be deployed the day after. We're taking a risk now that means we can potentially deliver the vaccine faster, and supply the 60 million doses we promised the UK in time.'

Royal Navy reservist Lt Cdr Ruth Fleming, 46, helped coordinate a team of military personnel building a vaccination centre in Merthyr Tydfil, South Wales.

'My work as a logistics officer included making sure the team was fit and well and where the government wanted them to be. All the military are can-do people and help bring new perspectives.

'I'm usually a data scientist at Swansea University, and while on deployment I could still commute home to see my husband and two young kids. I'm really proud to have done my bit, and I will be at the front of the queue as soon as I get the opportunity to have the vaccine myself! My in-laws have already had it and my parents will have it soon.'

Lt Cdr Ruth Fleming, left, helped build a vaccination hub, while Prof Saul Faust runs a clinical research facility

Professor Saul Faust is director of the NIHR Southampton Clinical Research Facility at the University of Southampton.

'During the pandemic, I have focused on delivering trials of vaccines, treatments and diagnostic tests across the Wessex region. Without the vaccine, we will not be able to prevent further waves and the impact that has on the NHS.

'I work in national networks and groups to make best use of the superb UK clinical research infrastructure, which has delivered almost all of the global scientific advances in Covid-19. It has been a huge collaborative effort across the whole of the UK.'

Major Charlie Martell was the Officer Commanding for the construction of a vaccination centre at Fort Regent in Jersey, which can now deliver 1,500 doses a day.

'That wasn't a strict mobilisation, but a case of gathering local reservists and asking, 'Can you turn up and build a mass vaccination centre?'

'We had a good response  it was a very effective local solution to a local problem. Building the centre took 10 days with 20 reservists. We were working flat out from when the site opened at 7am to when it closed at 7pm. It was very quick because we were able to start at a moment's notice.'

Major Charlie Martell oversaw the building of a vaccination hub in Jersey

Deirdre Webb, 57, from Belfast, is director of nursing at the Public Health Agency Northern Ireland and managed the rollout of the vaccination programme to care homes.

'The care homes have gone through such hard times, so we were committed to deploying the vaccine there as soon as possible. All our care homes have now received the first doses. Within our care homes and clinics the people who allow us to work effectively are the house porters, the drivers, the cleaners, as well as the volunteers. They are the unsung heroes.

'I am going to be trained as a vaccinator as well so I can't wait for that. But at the moment I am involved in the planning. I lead on the workforce and logistics part of the programme.'

Deirdre Webb, director of nursing, managed the roll-out of vaccines across Northern Ireland
DUBLIN, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Offshore Pipeline Market Forecast to 2027 - COVID-19 Impact and Global Analysis by Diameter (More than 24 inches and Less than 24 inches), Line Type (Export Line, Transport Line, and Others), and Product (Oil, Gas, and Refined Products)" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The market was valued at US$ 11.97 billion in 2019 and is projected to reach US$ 15.01 billion by 2027; it is expected to grow at a CAGR of 3.1% from 2020 to 2027.



The US, Canada, and Mexico are major economies contributing to the offshore pipeline market in North America. North America is a developed region in terms of various factors such as modern technology, standard of living, and infrastructure. The region comprises ~14% of the crude oil and 6% of the natural gas reserves in the world.



It supplies ~23% of oil and ~27% of gas to the world. It represents ~22% of the total energy consumed worldwide. The US and Canada are witnessing exceptional growth in the production of shale reserves, fossil fuel, oil sands, and tight oil. The oil & gas industry in North America is anticipated to witness low investments in the exploration and production activities during the forecast period.



North America is still recovering from the decline in crude oil prices. Countries in the region are highly investing in new technologies, which is expected to result in more exploration activities in offshore. Offshore oil and gas pipeline infrastructure in the US and Canada is anticipated to continue running on full capacities in the coming years. In the US, ~70% of petroleum products and crude oil are supplied through pipelines. In Canada, ~97% of petroleum and natural gas products are shipped through pipelines.



The demand for energy generated in North America is growing; therefore, the exploration and production are moving toward harsh environments. In particular, the recent discovery of a few new extraction techniques has opened multiple oil and gas shale regions in extremely remote areas. The transportation of produced crude and natural gas from these remote locations would drive the growth of the offshore pipeline market in North America.



US to Dominate North America Offshore Pipeline Market during Forecast Period



The US is an economically developed country, and it experiences constant improvements in various technologies and infrastructures. Trump administration's "America First" energy plan promises gas and shale oil revolution to make America energy independent and create energy-related jobs for the majority of Americans. The US is witnessing a drastic boom in the energy and oil sector, and has increased the production of oil and gas. With the growing number of offshore oil & gas production activities in the Gulf of Mexico, the US is anticipated to witness substantial growth in the offshore pipeline market during the forecast period.



Moreover, upcoming 18 new gas production projects are alleged to hold a combined 836 billion ft3 of natural gas reserves. In 2018, Chevron Corporation announced that the Chevron-operated Big Foot deepwater project, located in the US Gulf of Mexico, has started crude oil and natural gas production.



Thus, the surging number of offshore oil and gas production projects drives the demand for pipeline systems and services, which bolsters the growth of offshore pipeline market.



Key Topics Covered:



1. Introduction



2. Key Takeaways



3. Research Methodology



4. Offshore Pipeline Market Landscape

4.1 Market Overview

4.2 PEST Analysis

4.3 Ecosystem Analysis

4.4 Expert Opinion



5. Offshore Pipeline Market - Key Market Dynamics

5.1 Market Drivers

5.1.1 Rise in Demand for Natural Gas and Crude Oil

5.1.2 Requirement for Safe, Cost-Effective, and Efficient Connectivity

5.2 Market Restraints

5.2.1 Complications Associated with Cross - Border Pipeline Transportation

5.3 Market Opportunities

5.3.1 Discovery of New Oil & Gas Reserves

5.4 Future Trends

5.4.1 Developments in Flexible Pipe Technology

5.5 Impact Analysis of Drivers and Restraints



6. Offshore Pipeline - Global Market Analysis

6.1 Offshore Pipeline Market Overview

6.2 Offshore Pipeline Market - Revenue, and Forecast to 2027 (US$ Million)

6.3 Market Positioning - Global Market Players Ranking



7. Offshore Pipeline Market Analysis - By Diameter

7.1 Overview

7.2 Offshore Pipeline Market, By Diameter (2019 and 2027)

7.3 More than 24 inches

7.4 Less than 24 inches



8. Offshore Pipeline Market Analysis - By Line Type

8.1 Overview

8.2 Offshore Pipeline Market, By Line Type (2019 and 2027)

8.3 Export Line

8.4 Transport



9. Offshore Pipeline Market Analysis - By Product

9.1 Overview

9.2 Offshore Pipeline Market, By Product (2019 and 2027)

9.3 Oil

9.4 Gas

9.5 Refined Products



10. Offshore Pipeline Market - Geographic Analysis



11. Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic on Offshore Pipeline Market

11.1 Overview



12. Industry Landscape

12.1 Overview

12.2 Market Initiative

12.3 New Product Development

12.4 Merger and Acquisition



13. Company Profiles

Bechtel Corporation

Fugro

John Wood Group PLC

Larsen & Toubro Limited

McDermott International, Inc.

Petrofac Limited

Saipem S.p.A.

Sapura Energy Berhad

Subsea 7 S.A.

TechnipFMC plc

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/ro4xui



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



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SOURCE Research and Markets

Related Links

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on Wednesday refuted reports of sending IT experts and supplying equipment to help the military to regulate the internet to control the mass protests against the coup.

"There have been false information and rumours about on issues relating to Myanmar, which can serve as a reminder that one should not be too credulous of similar claims," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin told a media briefing here.

He was replying to a question on reports about rumours from that has sent equipment and IT experts to to help control the internet and impose news blackouts.

"I haven't heard about anything like that," Wang said.

"As Myanmar's friendly neighbour, China is following the situation in Myanmar and hopes that parties in Myanmar will bear in mind national development and stability, properly handle their differences under the constitutional and legal framework and maintain political and social stability," Wang said.

Since the military coup ousting the elected government headed by de-facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi, China has opposed sanctions and called for actions by the community to contribute to Myanmar's political-social stability and peace and reconciliation so as to avoid escalation of tensions.

(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.)
Tiny glass beads from Venice made their way to Alaska decades before Christopher Columbus' arrival in the New World.

The beads, the color and size of blueberries, were uncovered in a house pit in Punyik Point, a seasonal Inuit camp near the Continental Divide in Alaska's Brooks Range.

Archaeologists determined the objects were created between 1440 and 1480 following a radiocarbon-dating of twine that held the jewelry.

Researchers from the University of Alaska suggest the beads were among trinkets that passed hands through various trade routes  starting in Europe, then along the Silk Road to China, through Siberia and finally to the Bering Strait.

According to the study, the new discovery resets the clock on when traded began between Europe and North America.

Scroll down for video

Venetian glass beads discovered in Alaska were brought to North America decades before Columbus' arrival in the New World in 1492, according to a new paper in the journal American Antiquity

Mike Kunz, an archaeologist with the university's Museum of the North in Fairbanks, discovered a total of 10 beads in three locations in the Brooks Range: Punyik Point, Kinyiksugvik and Lake Kaiyak House.

Kunz theorizes the baubles were just small piece of a number of trinkets that made their way various trade routes that began in Europe, then along the Silk Road to China, through Siberia and finally across the Bering Strait.

They were then presumably brought across the frigid Arctic Ocean to Alaska by kayak.

Punyik Point was a popular stopping point for traders, Kunz says, because of the many caribou in the area.

According to archaeologist Mike Kunz, the beads could have traveled from Italy along the Silk Road to China then to Siberia and across the Bering Strait to Alaska

'And, if for some reason the caribou didn't migrate through where you were, [it also] had excellent lake trout and large shrub-willow patches,' he added.

University of Wisconsin archaeologist William Irving found several turquoise beads at Punyik Point in the 1950s and 1960s.

But Irving had no way to know when they were deposited.

Flash forward to 2004, when Kunz and Bureau of Land Management archaeologist Robin Mills returned to the ancient campsite.

They found three more beads there, along with copper bangles, metal loops that could have been earrings and other metal pieces that could have been part of a necklace or bracelet.

Wrapped around one of the bangles was twine that had survived centuries of burial just a few inches below the surface.

Because twine is made of plant fibers  probably the inner bark of a shrub willow, the scientists surmised it meant they finally had organic matter to conduct radiocarbon dating on using Accelerator mass spectrometry.

'We almost fell over backwards,' Kunz said in a release. 'It came back saying [the plant was alive at] some time during the 1400s. It was like, Wow!'

With that information, along with radiocarbon dating of charcoal found nearby, they surmised the glass beads at all three locales arrived at some point between 1440 and 1480.

The beads discovered at Punyik Point were found with metal bits that were likely part of a necklace or bracelet. Performing radiocarbon-dating on twine wrapped around copper bangles, researchers determined the objects were from between 1440 and 1480 AD

'The beads challenge the currently accepted chronology for the development of their production methodology, availability, and presence in the Americas,' the researchers wrote in a new paper in the journal American Antiquity.

'This is the first documented instance of the presence of indubitable European materials in prehistoric sites in the Western Hemisphere as the result of overland transport across the Eurasian continent.'

According to Kunz and Mills, the beads probably made landfall at Shashalik, an ancient trading post north of modern-day Kotzebue, and then were transported further inland.

The archaeologists theorize they were part of a necklace or other piece of jewelry.

The item's location, at the entrance to an underground house, suggests it was dropped or discarded rather than intentionally buried.

Venice has been known as a glassmaking mecca for over 1,500 years, with the island of Murano the center of production since at least since the 13th century.

Columbus' ships landed in the Bahamas in October 1492, before venturing on to Cuba and Haiti, where he started the first European settlement in the Americas since the Norse some 500 years earlier.

After briefly returning to Spain, Columbus made three more voyages to the New World between 1493 and 1502, exploring the Lesser Antilles, Trinidad, Puerto Rico and the northern coast of South America.

The bead variety, commonly known as 'Early Blue' and 'Ichtucknee Plain,' has been found throughout the Caribbean, the east coasts of Central and North America, and the eastern Great Lakes region, but only after Columbus' arrival, generally between 1550 and 1750.

The BioRescue research project, a program aiming at saving the northern white rhinoceros from extinction, exemplifies the challenges to overcome when conducting research and conservation in an international consortium in times of a global pandemic.

COVID-19 hampered communication and travels, prevented or delayed crucial procedures, caused losses in revenues, and by that may have lowered the chances of survival of the northern white rhino. The consortium adjusted strategies gained valuable knowledge during these challenging times and continued with its mission.

The effects of the pandemic on the BioRescue project are described in detail in a scientific paper published in the Journal of Applied Animal Ethics Research.

There are only two northern white rhino individuals left in the world, both females. To prevent the extinction of the northern white rhino, an international consortium of scientists and conservationists seeks to advance assisted reproduction technologies and stem-cell associated techniques to create northern white rhino embryos in-vitro.

In the near future, the embryos will be transferred to southern white rhino surrogate mothers to create northern white rhino offspring. This boundary-pushing program is conducted by an international team working within a global framework and includes scientists and conservationists from institutions in Germany, Kenya, Japan, Czech Republic, USA, and Italy.

From March 2020 onwards, the work of the consortium has been severely affected by the Covid-19 pandemic in several ways at the local, national and international levels.

At the international level, the most striking obstacle was international travel restrictions. "The consortium partners had previously agreed upon collecting oocytes from the last two northern white rhinos every three to four months. This is considered a safe interval to maintain the health of the females while maximizing the number of harvested oocytes, equivalent to potential future embryos and offspring" says BioRescue project head Thomas Hildebrandt from the Leibniz-Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW).

Following such an interval, oocyte collection was planned for March 2020 at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya.

"Owing to international travel restrictions, the procedure had to be canceled and could only be conducted after the re-opening of Kenya's borders in August 2020," adds Leibniz-IZW BioRescue scientist Susanne Holtze, who shares the first authorship of the publication with Hildebrandt.

"This does not only mean that one crucial opportunity was missed and possibly several valuable embryos could not be generated, but it also affected the subsequent procedure in August 2020," Holtze explains.

It is likely that the prolonged interval since the last oocyte collection in December 2019 compromised oocyte quality and was the reason that out of 10 oocytes, no embryos could be created. The delay of possible embryo transfers in Kenya will also decrease the chances for northern white rhino calves to grow up with individuals of their kind.

This ultimately implies that almost a year was lost for the program - a serious delay in the race against time to prevent the extinction of the northern white rhino.

On the other hand, the involuntary break provided us with valuable new insights into the reproduction management of northern white rhinos. We still made progress in 2020 as we could successfully continue our research with our Kenya mission in December." Thomas Hildebrandt, BioRescue Project Head, Leibniz-Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW)

In addition to the delays in conducting the procedures at Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya, for which strict travel regulations and on-site hygiene rules had to be followed, the pandemic posed several further challenges to the consortium. Lockdown and temporal closures of public facilities caused notable losses in revenues for the consortium partner Safari Park Dv?r Kralove in the Czech Republic.

"We faced the unprecedented situation of having no revenues from entrance fees and other services. However, against all odds, we were quickly able to develop new ways of how to approach our potential visitors and supporters online and this allowed us to keep our support to the northern white rescue program on the same level as in previous years. Our highest priority is protecting species from extinction and COVID-19 confirmed how important the support by individual donors is," says Jan Stejskal, the Safari Park's Director of Communication and International Projects.

Similarly, the not-for-profit Ol Pejeta Conservancy experienced drastic reductions in revenue from international tourism owing to a ban on international travel, national curfews, and the isolation of the capital Nairobi.

"Therefore, fundraising was necessary to maintain our wildlife and conservation programs and pay for salaries," says Ol Pejeta Managing Director, Richard Vigne. "Nevertheless, safeguarding the animals and professional veterinary care was maintained at all times in cooperation with the Kenya Wildlife Service."

For the research facilities of the consortium partners in Germany, Italy, and Japan, different levels of restrictions were put in place on laboratory work. Crucial work at Leibniz-IZW, Avantea Laboratory of Reproductive Technologies (Italy), Kyushu University (Japan), and the Max Delbruck Center for Molecular Medicine (Germany) could be carried on to a limited extent.

"Staff at labs was limited, hygiene rules were enacted, transportation of samples and equipment were hampered and last but not least closure of schools and child care facilities forced parents to switch from lab work to mobile work at home," Sebastian Diecke from Max Delbruck Center sums up. Laboratories and offices at the University of Padova were also closed and online-teaching and research were implemented.

The team in charge of the ethical monitoring of the BioRescue program continued working from home and had to adjust strategies to carry on the ethical assessment for all procedures. "Despite all difficulties, the ethical assessment was always performed and BioRescue procedures have uninterruptedly maintained high standards of quality and respect for the safety and welfare of both researchers and the animals involved," says Barbara de Mori from the University of Padua.

"COVID-19 has disastrous consequences all over the world, but two new embryos that we produced in December 2020 demonstrate that our BioRescue team is committed to overcome all scientific and logistic challenges the northern white rhino rescue might bring. We will be grateful for everyone who decides to support us in our mission," adds Jan Stejskal."

Besides the downside effects of the pandemic, there were also a few positive ones. For example, the closure of international borders opened up new opportunities for assisted reproduction procedures in Germany which were important for advancing and perfecting methods and techniques.

For example, a designated mating partner of a southern white rhino female in a German zoo could not be transferred, and therefore, assisted reproduction was a welcome alternative to regular natural mating. Secondly, social distancing regulations helped to establish a new culture of online meetings within the consortium partners on a more regular basis, which proved useful and will continue in the future.

Lastly, there is a renewed awareness for the destruction of habitat and the loss of biodiversity as key drivers for emerging zoonotic diseases.

"BioRescue is not only about saving the northern white rhino. In the long run, it also is a much-needed step for the healing of disrupted habitat in Central Africa and therefore for preventing global pandemics in future," says Thomas Hildebrandt. "It is ironic and bitter, that our mission was severely affected by the very thing it ultimately intends to make more unlikely, a pandemic."
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson welcomed the news that the World Health Organization recommended on Wednesday the Oxford-AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine for use globally by all adults after some countries have questioned its efficacy.

Earlier this week, South Africa said it would put on hold the use of AstraZeneca's COVID-19 shot in its vaccination programme after data showed it gave minimal protection against mild-to-moderate infection caused by the country's dominant coronavirus variant.

"It was good to see the World Health Organization today confirm its support for the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine for use in everyone over the age of 18, and obviously over the age of 65," Johnson told a press conference.

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The HSE said it has received 30 complaints about GPs charging for Covid-19 consultations which should be free.

The complaints were lodged between March last year and February 7 this year.

A spokeswoman said these related mostly to private or out-of-hours GPs.

Complainants were advised to raise it directly with the GP, she said.

None of the complaints related to medical card patients.

An agreement was made between the HSE and GPs not to charge patients and a set fee is paid through the HSE.

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Meanwhile, Covid-19 claimed the lives of more than 1,440 people since the beginning of the year as the third wave of the pandemic surged.

Another 68 deaths were reported last night, 50 of whom died in February with the other fatalities in January and December.

However, the number of daily cases of the virus fell to 556, one of the lowest daily totals recorded since early December, although levels are expected to rise again later this week.

Monaghan, Carlow, Waterford and Wexford are the worst-hit counties with the 14-day incidence lowest in Roscommon, Kerry and Kilkenny.

There are more signs of pressure easing on hospitals, although the number of Covid-19 patients being treated remains high.

Numbers in hospital with Covid-19 fell to 1,104 with 182 seriously ill patients in intensive care.

It comes as a new study of patients in 12 countries, including Ireland, has revealed the extent to which underlying frailty increases the risk of death in Covid-19 patients. The research from the University of Birmingham found that very severely frail individuals with Covid-19 were three times more likely to die than those who were not frail, even taking into account their age.

They also found that those with severe frailty who survived the virus were seven times more likely to need increased care out of hospital.

The Geriatric Medicine Research Collaborative (GeMRC)  the group of experts behind the study  are now calling for improved global public health policy after their research showed that frailty, independently of older age, increases the risk of death from Covid-19.

Frailty is a state where the body becomes more vulnerable to the effects of illness. It is identified by clinicians using a holistic assessment that considers how much support the person needs from others in their daily living before becoming unwell  not just their medical problems.

The risk of frailty increases as we get older, but it can develop at different ages.

Senior author Dr Carly Welch, clinical research fellow in geriatric medicine at the University of Birminghams Institute of Inflammation and Ageing and chair and co-founder of the GeMRC, said: It was identified very early in the pandemic that older age was a significant risk factor for a higher chance of death with Covid-19.

However, not all older people are the same, we all age differently  some people can live well into their 90s without developing frailty, and it can develop even without the presence of other long-term conditions.

Our findings are important as we have been able to demonstrate that not only older age but also frailty, independently from one another, increase the risk of death from Covid-19 and also a subsequent increased need in care for survivors.

Dr Daisy Wilson, clinical research fellow, said: We have evidence those most at risk from Covid-19 are those who are older, or living with frailty, or have underlying health conditions.
With its five wall-length windows, Nick Crandall's restaurant, Railroad Pub & Pizza, can bring in a lot of outside air. In late December, though, Washington state regulators said the restaurant could not qualify as "outdoor" dining, and would have to close because of heightened coronavirus restrictions.

So Crandall went to Facebook to protest, giving a video tour of the Burlington, Wash., pub and its vast, garage-door-style windows. "I'm just kind of curious on what the science is for outdoor dining, how much airflow you need to do," he said. He took aim at the state's Democratic governor, Jay Inslee, suggesting he use "common sense." The video was viewed over 73,000 times.

It may sound like yet another politicized, Trump-era battle over coronavirus restrictions - yet this one ended in something that looks less like polarization and more like compromise.After Crandall and others complained and took to the media, state regulators introduced a new policy, which appears to be one of the first of its kind, allowing certain restaurants to count as "open air" dining even if they have four walls. In a new pandemic trend, these establishments can open up large windows or doors and actively measure levels of carbon dioxide, the gas we all exhale when breathing, as a key indicator of how much fresh air is circulating.

Now Crandall's restaurant is open again - with a CO2 monitor whose reading he tries to keep under 450 parts per million, only slightly higher than levels in the outside air, per state policy. Thanks to the human burning of fossil fuels, outdoor levels currently average around 415 parts per million, and are steadily rising.

It's part of a new wave as scientists, citizens and businesses including gyms, restaurants and bars try to quantify the airborne coronavirus risk in hopes of staying open. Sales of handheld carbon dioxide monitors have boomed, so much that one popular model, the $250 Aranet4, sold out rapidly, requiring its Latvia-based manufacturer, SAF Tehnika, to dramatically ramp up production.

"We did not expect to, you know, have this increase so exponential," said Toms Reksna, marketing director for the Aranet, speaking from the country's capital, Riga.

The trend is also catching on fast with a number of coronavirus activists - or citizen scientists - who tweet out their readings in different locations and use the hashtag #covidco2. In Australia, a group of "CO2Guerillas" have been documenting measurements in grocery stores, doctor's offices, and businesses, often displaying very high levels of carbon dioxide. In Japan, the use of monitors is also catching on, including on a massive screen recently at a concert venue.

The impetus for measuring carbon dioxide is simple: An increasingly powerful body of evidence suggests the coronavirus is airborne, capable of traveling distances well beyond six feet in tiny aerosols released when infected people talk, shout, sing or just breathe. But there's currently no sensor that can monitor, in real time, whether these infectious aerosols are floating around us when we're indoors.

But carbon dioxide can, in some ways, act as a proxy. People exhale it when they breathe, and the gas builds up in indoor spaces that aren't well ventilated, reaching concentrations far above the baseline level of outside air.

"It gives you some insight into ventilation, which is really hard to figure out otherwise," explains Linsey Marr, an aerosol expert at Virginia Tech. "Even building owners and managers often don't know much about the ventilation. The person who knows is the person who installed it, and they are usually long gone."

Marr is a medical adviser to the network of CrossFit gyms - installing indoor monitors is now part of their coronavirus guidelines, at her urging.

Longtime experts on indoor air say the heightened attention to ventilation is very valuable, and that carbon dioxide measurements can definitely be useful. Yet amid the grass-roots frenzy to find the next gadget that can confer a safety edge during the pandemic, some worry about misunderstandings.

"It is a piece of information, not a smoking gun," said indoor air expert Jeffrey Siegel of the University of Toronto. "If you have a long period of measurement in a space with a sensor that you know how to interpret, then it means something different than if you bring a sensor inside, read a few minutes of data, and say, 'Oh, my God, the ventilation doesn't work.'"

- - -

When scientists want to measure carbon dioxide to a very high level of accuracy, they use sophisticated lab equipment. It can cost thousands of dollars. That is not what citizen activists are generally using during the pandemic.

Rather, a variety of handheld or mountable sensors, costing around $100 and up, have become popular. Experts recommend devices that use a technology called non-dispersive infrared sensing (NDIR), a well-known technique based on the same basic physical principles that drive the so-called greenhouse effect. Whether in the atmosphere or a small chamber within your sensor, carbon dioxide absorbs a type of radiation with a wavelength longer than that of visible light, often dubbed infrared or heat radiation.

At the scale of the Earth, greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide not only absorb this type of radiation but also re-emit it, keeping some of the heat within the planet's system, rather than letting it escape to space. Within the far smaller sensor, infrared gets beamed from one side of a chamber to the other, and carbon dioxide concentrations are calculated based on how much radiation arrives at the other end without being absorbed by the gas.

In theory, at least, such measurements can give a good sense of how many humans have been exhaling into a space, and how much their breath is lingering.

"The reason CO2 measurements are important is that they can give an indication of how much air you are breathing that is coming out of other people's respiratory systems," says Richard Corsi, an indoor air quality expert at Portland State University who has been taking carbon dioxide measurements for years with many different instruments.

A critical figure, Corsi says, is the "rebreathe fraction," which refers to the percentage of the air you breathe in that others in the same indoor space recently breathed out. For instance, he has calculated that when the indoor concentration of carbon dioxide reaches 800 parts per million, then each time you breathe in, one percent of the air you inhale has come from the exhalations of others. During a pandemic, that's an alarming thought.

But carbon dioxide concentrations of 1,000, 2,000, or even 4,000 can be found in poorly ventilated indoor spaces, where people simply aren't aware how much of the gas has built up.

"Many teachers are reporting, they say they have 2,000, 5,000, and then curves of it going up in classes," said Jose-Luis Jimenez, an aerosol science expert at the University of Colorado at Boulder who has promoted the use of the sensors and has been involved in testing a number of them for accuracy.

It is very good news that the pandemic has raised our consciousness about the quality of air within buildings, a subject that has been neglected for decades, say longtime experts such as Corsi and the University of Toronto's Siegel. And in their field, carbon dioxide has long been used as a proxy for how well ventilated a space is by outside air.

But at the same time, these scientists worry that carbon dioxide measurements can be misinterpreted or even, in some cases, give a false sense of security.

Siegel warns, for instance, that handheld devices can require calibration, can sometimes be confounded by other greenhouse gases (such as water vapor), and can drift in their measurements as time passes. That doesn't make measurements useless, he said - but it does mean that you have to have some experience with your instrument, and should be measuring consistently over time.

"The more engagement with indoor air, the better everything is," he said. "But the problem is, good indoor air or bad indoor air is not defined by a spot measurement of CO2 with a low-cost sensor, without appropriate interpretation."

Corsi, meanwhile, cautions that even if very low or very high carbon dioxide concentrations may appear easy to interpret, many readings will fall into more of a gray area, somewhere between around 700 to 1000 parts per million.

Are you safe in such a space? The answer is, it depends. For instance, Corsi notes, a space with 25 people in it and a CO2 measurement of 700 parts per million is far better ventilated than one with three people in it and the same measurement.

Moreover, he adds, if a room has a portable HEPA air filter, or a good HVAC system with similarly strong filters (properly installed), then your risk will be lower even though carbon dioxide levels may seem a tad high. Carbon dioxide, a tiny molecule, passes right through these filters, even though the larger aerosols containing viruses can be caught by them.

"I think a single point measurement of CO2 can tell you something in the extremes, but when you get into this middle, typical area, there's a lot of nuance," Corsi said. Ideally, he thinks, there should be an app that would help people interpret CO2 levels by inputting other information, such as the number of people in a space and how much time they plan on spending there.

Reksna, marketing director for the Aranet, says the device's start-up guide tells users how to calibrate it, and after that it is accurate to within about 50 parts per million (which would certainly be enough to distinguish low concentrations from high ones).

"We have dedicated technical support for the whole business ecosystem where we try to explain these things," he said. "We have recently launched an Aranet forum as well. So we do try to inform the consumers as much as possible."

One more thing to keep in mind: Just as has happened with outdoor air all across the Earth, humans can fill the air indoors with carbon dioxide by burning wood or fossil fuels, such as in fireplaces and gas stoves. In these cases, concentrations can spike for reasons that have nothing to do with our breathing.

In other words, CO2 measurements can be useful and informative, but have to be understood in context.

- - -

Still, the baseline principle is hard to dispute: If carbon dioxide levels are very low in a business, or office, or grocery store, or wherever - then your coronavirus transmission risk is probably also low, at least from people who aren't very close to you. (The risk will be lower still if people are also masked and wearing their masks properly.)

What's unfolding in Washington state right now may be a case study of how well - or how poorly - the technique can be employed through a concerted policy effort involving state regulators and individual businesses.

"There's been a number of studies that have used CO2 levels as kind of a risk proxy for covid," said Sheri Sawyer, a policy adviser to the state's governor, Inslee, who was centrally involved in issuing the new guidance on "open air" dining. The document is a joint product of the state's health department and its Department of Labor and Industries.

"And we thought that made great sense for businesses to use that as a tool for what their risk is for covid transmission."

"It's kind of uncharted territory," Sawyer continued. "But certainly, given what businesses are going through, we think it's a worthy endeavor to try to figure these answers out."

The new Washington state policy is one factor that is driving "a tremendous spike in demand for these products," said Travis Lenander, the CEO of CO2Meter.com, which manufactures the devices used in Crandall's restaurant.

Indeed, Sawyer says the state is now receiving a large number of questions from businesses about how to use carbon dioxide monitors, and suggests that this is probably the beginning of a lengthy dialogue between the state and its restaurants and other venues. The state has just added an FAQ document to further help restaurants learn to use their monitors, adjust them when needed and set up spaces with good airflow.

The large response so far is "a sign businesses are seeing this as a way they can open up," she said.

That's certainly how Crandall, in Burlington, feels. "Everybody is trying to figure out how to open their doors, and spending all this money on heaters, and trying to figure out these CO2 detectors," said Crandall, who has also installed one at his other business, the Train Wreck Bar & Grill.

"You've got all these employees that you want to get hired back, and get your system up rolling again, and hopefully you can start paying your bills and get ahead again."
Nairobi  Kiambu Senator Kimani Wamatangi is the new Senate Majority Whip, replacing Murang'a Senator Irungu Kang'ata who was ousted after Tuesday's Parliamentary Group meeting.

Jubilee Party Secretary General Raphael Tuju said Kangata had been leaking party secrets and can not be trusted any more.

Tuju denied reports that Kang'ata was ousted over a letter he wrote to President Uhuru Kenyatta in December on the unpopularity of BBI in Mt Kenya region.

"Senator Kangata has tried to create a narrative that he is being removed because of the letter he wrote to the President. But I want to make it clear that we invited him and discussed other confidential issues in which we put him online to be able to talk to us. But in a most unfortunate way he decided to discuss the issues outside. That was his biggest failure as far as leadership is concerned," he said.

The Secretary General also said that the rest of the Senate leadership were not able to trust Senator Kang'ata going forward.

"They way in which he did them was what was the question. There are ways of addressing issues with decorum when you want to talk to the leadership of the party and where the President is involved."

Tuju added: "You cannot kiss and tell. You are supposed to keep the confidentiality of the meeting but if you expose what was said, that is not acceptable."

Senate Majority Leader Samuel Poghisio welcomed Wamatangi to his new role.

"This is not something that is new to Kenya, I have always said that we all serve at the pleasure and to promote the interests of the party, where loyalty is key," he told reporters after the meeting.
UK-based Mabey Bridge has announced that it had successfully delivered two critical construction site access bridges in support of a multi-billion-dollar modernisation and infrastructure improvement programme led by the Bahrain Petroleum Company (Bapco).

An Acrow Group company based in Gloucestershire, Mabey Bridge has been supplying modular bridging solutions to over 150 countries worldwide.

The Bapco Modernization Programme (BMP), which constitutes the company's largest capital investment in its 90-year history, is designed to boost its refining capacity, as well as improve energy efficiency, with a vision to becoming one of the most competitive and environmentally-compliant oil refineries in the region, in support of Bahrain's comprehensive, kingdom-wide economic development programme "Bahrain Economic Vision 2030," where infrastructure improvements play a vital role.

Mabey Bridge said its role was mainly to support the construction of Bapco's new industrial facilities with the supply of two 2-lane bridges.

The aim was to facilitate easy access of construction vehicles and deliveries of specialist equipment to the construction site, without any interference to the local road network, said the UK company.

Two identical Compact 200 bridges were supplied to meet the requirement, each one sized 27m x 6.3m, complete with parapets and anti-skid decks.

They were installed in one week sideby-side to provide an access route in both directions, so the project could begin as soon as possible, it added.

Mabey Bridge pointed out that the two-way spans helped ensure that the main roadways would be clear of large construction vehicles and civilian transportation would not be interrupted in any way.

Post-installation technical assistance was also provided by Mabey Bridge to ensure extra-heavy load requirements were met, it added.

On behalf of the Owners Integrated Project Management Team (Bapco and Worley), BMP Project Director Hafedh AlQassab said: "The quality of service provided by Mabey Bridge, in the design and installation of the bridge, was first-rate and recognised by all stakeholders as a positive addition to the BMP Project allowing the safe movement of materials from the main project laydown area to the site."

Bapco currently owns a 267,000 bpd refinery, along with storage facilities for 14 million barrels and marketing and marine terminals for its portfolio of petroleum products. The BMP will expand the processing capacity to 380,000 bpd.

Mabey Bridge CEO Michael Treacy expressed delight at playing a key role in this prestigious programme in Bahrain.

"The provision of quick, safe access to site for construction traffic is of paramount importance and we are delighted to have been able to demonstrate how modular steel solutions can deliver real project efficiencies in transformational construction projects like this," he added.-TradeArabia News Service

The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
For four frantic hours last weekend, Jeffrey Fangs two youngest children were lost on the streets of San Francisco  moving targets sitting, somewhere, in his carjacked silver minivan.

Fang, a DoorDash delivery driver, had been working Saturday night when he encountered the carjacker in a quiet residential neighborhood. There was a brief struggle. A phone was snatched; an accomplice appeared. And in a matter of minutes, Fangs van was gone, and the children with it.

While police officers searched the streets of the city, so too did a team of amateur sleuths, including some of Fangs friends and several strangers. And around 1 a.m. Sunday, the children were found in the van, which had been abandoned across town.

They are OK, Fang said in an interview Monday. I was able to finally get some sleep last night.

San Francisco, a technology hub that gave birth to the digital gig economy, has legions of casual workers trying to make ends meet with deliveries and other services during the pandemic. The case of Fang and his abducted children underscored the vulnerability of these workers, inspiring hundreds of people to not only try to help find his children but also to donate thousands of dollars to his family since they were found.

Fang, 39, who delivers food to support his wife and three children, said in the interview that mealtimes were the only times of day he could really make a profit. It was difficult to find  let alone pay for  child care during the dinnertime hours, he added, so he would sometimes take his children along with him.

Most of the people in the gig economy, were trying to make it, Fang said. Were doing what we can, but the odds are stacked against us. Its not easy. Oftentimes, we have to balance between impossible choices.

Around 8:45 p.m. Saturday, Fang took an order to the residential neighborhood of Pacific Heights. His son, who is just shy of 2 years old, was asleep in the back seat. His daughter, 4, was quietly watching Shrek 2.

Fang stepped out to deliver the meal near the intersection of Jackson and Laguna streets. When he returned to his van, he saw a man in the drivers seat.

In a rush of adrenaline, Fang said he grabbed the mans arm to pull him out. The two struggled, he said, before the stranger grabbed Fangs phone and fled to an apparent getaway car, where another man waited behind the wheel. Fang said he followed the car on foot as it began to roll away, hanging on to the door handle before somehow making his way inside the vehicle and demanding that the men return his phone. They did, Fang said  and then he rushed back to the corner of Jackson and Laguna to find his children.

But they, and the van, were gone.

Fang called the police and his wife. He also called his friend Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez, a reporter with the public radio station KQED.

Fang and Fitzgerald Rodriguez have known each other for nearly a decade; they met as college students and bonded over a shared love of Star Trek. Fitzgerald Rodriguez was at the Oakland home of his fiancee, Anna Kaminski, when he answered Fangs call.

He almost apologizes to me on the phone, like, Im sorry to ask, but my car was just stolen with two of my kids in the back seat, Fitzgerald Rodriguez said. I just immediately flew into breaking-news mode.

Fitzgerald Rodriguez, 34, figured that he had enough followers on social media to be of some use. So he posted a description of Fangs van, a silver Honda Odyssey, and contacted other news outlets to get the word out.

Then he and Kaminski, 30, set out across the Bay Bridge to find Fang. She drove, and he tuned into a police scanner using an app on his phone.

We were kind of tethered to the police scanner, Kaminski said, not fully knowing what all the codes meant, just listening for any mention of the Honda Odyssey.

The California Highway Patrol sent out an Amber Alert. Social media posts about the children reached hundreds of thousands of people. And some San Francisco residents took it upon themselves to scour the streets in search of the minivan.

I was fielding tweets and Facebook messages, Fitzgerald Rodriguez said. Its just shocking the amount of people who said they would turn their digital reactions into real-life reactions.

One of them was Max Leung, a community organizer in the Bay Area. He said he was at his home in San Francisco when he learned about the childrens disappearance on social media. He had never met Fang, but he decided to help.

I couldnt just sit at home and worry, Leung said. As soon as I saw the news, my heart sank. All I could think about was how terrified these children must have been and how worried the parents must have felt.

As the community mobilized around him, Fang stayed rooted to the spot where his minivan had disappeared. The police were there, and so were news reporters. In front of rolling cameras, Fang pleaded for his childrens safe return.

I was trying not to break down or think about the worst thing that could happen, Fang said. My mind was going through scenarios. Minutes felt like years.

During the hours he spent in that frenzied haze, Kaminski and Fitzgerald Rodriguez appeared with coffee and food from McDonalds. Leung arrived, too.

It was not until early Sunday morning that police pulled Fang aside to let him know that his children had been found. They appeared to be unharmed and were still inside the minivan, which had been abandoned. It was spotted by two officers patrolling in the departments Bayview District.

It was immediate relief, for sure, Kaminski said, adding that her fiance was so excited, he had spilled his drink.

I threw my coffee in the air so high, it came splattering behind us, Fitzgerald Rodriguez said.

We just screamed and cried and hugged each other, Leung said.

I was extremely elated and thankful, Fang said.

Tony Xu, chief executive of DoorDash, expressed relief in an emailed statement. As a father myself, I can only imagine how terrifying this incident must have been for Mr. Fang and his family, he said. We have been in contact with him to offer our full support and our thoughts remain with him and his loved ones.

Reports about Fangs experience revived criticism of DoorDash and other gig economy companies, especially in a state where voters recently approved a ballot measure exempting such companies from having to treat workers as employees.

Gig workers are at the bottom of the totem pole, Fang said, adding that the pandemic had made it even more difficult to make safe decisions about child care. Obviously, the issue is quite broad. I dont have all the answers, but it would be helpful to shine more light on it with detailed discussions.

A GoFundMe page that Fitzgerald Rodriguez set up to help the Fang family take some time off to rebound from the ordeal had raised more than $140,000 by Wednesday, exceeding a $100,000 goal. DoorDash also gave financial assistance to Fang, a spokesperson said, without specifying how much.

After the children were recovered, police took them to a hospital to check for injuries. And around dawn on Sunday, Fang welcomed them back home. The children, he said, did not seem to remember much; it was possible that they had slept through much of the episode.

The San Francisco Police Department, which has not yet publicly identified suspects or reported an arrest in this case, expressed appreciation for the public support. There was significant social media generated regarding this incident, Sgt. Michael Andraychak, a department spokesperson, said Monday.

But he said the social media posts and public input did not appear to have led to the discovery of the minivan in Bayview.

Still, Fang said he was grateful to all of the people who had rallied to help Saturday night. I am super thankful for it, he said. It brings hope back into ones heart about the state of humanity and society  that good can come of it.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Patients With Gum Disease 9 Times More Likely to Die from COVID-19: Study

A new study has found that people with gum disease who contracted COVID-19 were at least three times more likely to have severe complications from the disease, including a higher risk of hospitalization and death.

A team of international researchers published their peer-reviewed study in the Journal of Clinical Periodontology earlier this month. They evaluated 568 patients, of whom 45 percent had gum disease. The researchers concluded that periodontitis was associated with higher risk of ICU admission, need for assisted ventilation and death of COVID19 patients, and with increased blood levels of biomarkers linked to worse disease outcomes.

The research team found that COVID-19 patients with gum disease were 3.54 times more likely to be admitted to the ICU, 4.57 times more likely to need a ventilator, and 8.81 times more likely to die from the virus, as compared to those who had contracted the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus but did not have periodontitis.

The reason for the increased risk of COVID-19 complications is that gum disease can be a sign of inflammation throughout the body.

It is well-established that systemic inflammation is not only linked with periodontal disease, but to several other respiratory diseases as well, said Dr. James Wilson, president of the American Academy of Periodontology.

Therefore, maintaining healthy teeth and gums in an effort to avoid developing or worsening periodontal disease is absolutely crucial in the midst of a global pandemic like COVID-19, which is also known to trigger an inflammatory response, Wilson said in a news release.

Periodontitis is an infection that can cause gums to bleed and can even lead to loss of teeth and surrounding bone. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 47.2 percent of adults aged 30 years and older have some form of periodontal disease, with the risk increasing with age. Just over 70 percent of adults aged 65 and older have periodontal disease.

Warning signs of gum disease include bad breath or bad taste in the mouth that wont go away, tender or bleeding gums, as well as loose and sensitive teeth.

Meanwhile, the number of new daily COVID-19 infections in the United States recently fell below 100,000 for the first time this year, according to figures published Feb. 7 by Johns Hopkins University. Newly reported infections dropped to 89,581 from 104,015 on Feb. 6, according to the tally.

The number of daily deaths due to the CCP virus have also fallen sharply in recent days, to 1,276 on Feb. 7, the lowest figure this year, from a historic peak of 5,085 on Feb. 4.
Rescuers airlifted an Alaskan skier after he was nearly killed in a bear attack in the mountainside where a brown bear mauled him, Saturday.

US Coast Guard Rescues Skier After Bear Attack

According to the United States Coast Guard, the victim was with a group of skiers who were climbing up a mountain near Haines, Alaska for a backcountry ski outing. They also added that the skier sustained injuries to his hands and head as a result of the bear attack.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game stated that the bear was accidentally awoken by the victim. The brown bear was reportedly a mother that was protecting her cub and sensed danger prompting it to attack.

In an interview with CNN, Carl Koch, a state wildlife biologist said that the skier realized at some point during the attack that it would be better to just play dead. The biologist also said that this is a good idea in circumstances like this.

Moreover, the Coast Guard said that they deployed an MH-60 Jayhawk helicopter to locate the man and two other skiers. The helicopter from the Air Station Sitka found the skiers in the mountainside at around 1,600 feet, 10 miles northwest of Haines.

After lowering down a rescue swimmer to assess and evaluate the condition on the ground, the Coast Guard used a litter to lift the man to the aircraft. He was immediately taken to Juneau to be treated.

The two skiers with the victim were the ones who alerted the Coast Guard of the attack and they also gave first aid to the victim.

During the time of the rescue, the Coast guard said that the bear attack victim was alert. However, they did not have further details about his condition, CBC reported.

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According to the helicopter's co-pilot, Lt. Cmdr. Will Sirokman said that the satellite communication device of the skiers was able to provide them with the exact elevation and GPS coordinates of the site where the attack happened.

Moreover, they also noted that the brightly colored fabric that the skiers used was very helpful in catching the attention of the helicopter. The Coast Guard also mentioned that it was one of the crucial things that helped them find the victim on time.

Meanwhile, the other two skiers went down the mountain on their own and did not need assistance as stated by the Coast Guard, NBC News reported via MSN.

Bear Attacks in Alaska

After the bear attack that almost killed the Alaskan skier, the state's Department of Fish and Game stated that these bear attacks are not common in the area.

A study in 2019 by the Alaska Section of Epidemiology only identified eight bear attacks that led to 10 details between the years 2000 and 2017.

However, in 2020, at least two people have died in a bear attack in Alaska. In July, a man was killed just near Hope, while in September, a man from Ohio who was on a moose-hunting trip was killed in a bear attack at Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve.

RELATED ARTICLE: Grandfather Sentenced with Probation for Death of 18-Month-Old Granddaughter Who Fell from Cruise Ship

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Authorities chased people suspected of armed robbery and car theft across Houston highways Tuesday night and early Wednesday, in one case reaching speeds of more than 140 mph, officials said. Eight suspects were taken into custody and no one was injured in the three separate high-speed police pursuits.

In the first case, two people around 10:30 p.m. robbed a convenience store at gunpoint, said Lt. R. Willkens of the Houston Police Department. The duo grabbed money from the cash register and fled in a silver Chevy Impala from the store, located at 738 Lathrop Street in northeast Houston.

Police officers located the vehicle through a retail security system that provides GPS tracking and attempted to pull them over, Willkens said. The driver stopped, but then took off, prompting a police chase that lasted for several minutes.

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The driver crashed on Collingsworth Street near Interstate 59 and both suspected robbers ran. Officers caught up and arrested the pair, Willkens said. No one was injured in the pursuit.

Separately, an HPD officer spotted a stolen car around 1 a.m. Wednesday at Bingle Road and Hammerly Boulevard in the Spring Branch area. When the driver refused to stop, police pursued the car for half an hour across Houston's highways from Interstate 10 to U.S. 59 to Interstate 610 to U.S. 290.

A police officer performed a "pit maneuver" to stop the car at Hollister Street and West Little York Road. Five people, including two males and three females, were taken into custody and their parents were called to the scene. Police did not disclose their ages.

An hour later in northwest Harris County, a man armed with a handgun robbed a Circle K store at 9096 Jones Road, said Lt. S. Wilson of the Harris County Sheriff's Office. The man made off with cash, but officials tracked him through a similar GPS tracker in the stolen money.

Authorities spotted the vehicle and tried to stop it, but the driver fled. Deputies chased the fleeing suspect through neighborhoods and down highways for 35 minutes at speeds of more than 140 mph, Wilson said.

The Texas Department of Public Safety and Harris County Constable's Office Precinct 4 helped with the pursuit.

Eventually, deputies deployed strip spikes that worked to stop the driver, who crashed into a curb on North Gessner Road near Fallbrook Drive, Wilson said. The man tried to run but law enforcement took him into custody.

The weapon and cash were recovered inside the car. No one was injured and no property was damaged in the chase.
A man gets his first dose of the COVID-19 vaccination last week at Berkshire Community College. The state on Thursday will announce 74,000 appointments for mass vaccination sites and pharmacies at locations statewide.
On Tuesday, President Donald Trumps second impeachment trial opened with a devastating presentation from the House managers showing why the former presidents actions were worthy of conviction and demonstrating the immediate danger of failing to condemn Trump and ban him from future office. It was a tough act to follow.

How did Trumps legal teamculled from the bottom of the barrel following a falling out with his first team and the refusal of major firms and conservative legal advocates to represent himdo in response?

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Bruce Castor, the former Pennsylvania district attorney who is most famous for having declined to prosecute Bill Cosby for rape, opened up the defense arguments and lets just say it did not go well.

Heres a sampling of the Twitter responses:

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Bruce Castor making his opening statement. pic.twitter.com/JX25zdokBd  Matt Fuller (@MEPFuller) February 9, 2021

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This impeachment speech is like the time I went on TV to talk about iPhones, but the host got me confused with a different guest and asked a question about the Japanese bond market and I just had to roll with it.  Kevin Roose (@kevinroose) February 9, 2021

Problem for upcoming managers response is one I remember from my courtroom days -- it's often hard to respond to a really lousy opponent.



It's like trying to wrestle Jello.  Frank Bowman (@FOBowman3) February 9, 2021

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If Trump still had his Twitter account, he may Tweet-fire this lawyer on the spot.  Seung Min Kim (@seungminkim) February 9, 2021

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Before the defense presentation was done, My Cousin Vinny was trending on Twitter.

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What was so bad about Castors performance? For one, in what was supposed to be the opening of a specific procedural and jurisdictional defense, it was hard to identify a consistent narrative thread or particular legal argument he was trying to make. Castor basically conceded this at the end, saying that he had produced his rambling presentation on the fly in response to how well the House managers made their case.

Ill be quite frank with you, we changed what we were going to do on account that we thought the House managers presentation was well done, Castor said.

"I'll be quite frank with you, we changed what we were going to do on account that we thought the House managers' presentation was well done" -- Bruce Castor pic.twitter.com/aAbkxdCZhk  Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 9, 2021

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He went on to say that the legal team did have answers to the merit case made by the House managers at the start of the trial, and they would get to those  eventually. But because the managers had presented the meat of the alleged crime right up front, rather than simply debating the Senates jurisdiction, he said the Trump team was unprepared. I thought that what the first part of the case was, which was the equivalent of a motion to dismiss, was going to be about jurisdiction alone, Castor said. We have counterarguments to everything that they raised, and you will hear them later on in the case.

From the perspective of pleasing his client, the dog-ate-my-homework routine wasnt even the worst part. In an effort to convince the Senate that the impeachment trial was unnecessary, Castor repeatedly pointed out that the American people had already fairly voted Trump out of officethe opposite of what Trump said in his months of complaints about election theft, which had ultimately inspired his supporters to attack the Capitol.

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Castor winds down his very bizarre speech by daring the DOJ to arrest Trump pic.twitter.com/jmoxdIU6Pm  Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 9, 2021

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The American people just spoke and they just changed administrations, Castor said. Therefore, theres no need to impeach Trump and bar him from future office because the electoral systemwhich Trump just spent two months trying to overturn, and which the mob on Jan. 6 sought to halt through violenceworked out in the end. The people are smart enough  to pick a new administration if they dont like the old one, Castor said. And they just did!

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Here's Bruce Castor admitting that Trump lost fair and square pic.twitter.com/cNLUqkqDyo  Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 9, 2021

Inexplicably, Castor repeated the Trump lost the election so you dont have to punish him for trying to steal it argument a couple more times before moving to ground the former president will surely appreciate even less: If the Senate determines it doesnt have jurisdiction to try Trump, then he can always be prosecuted by the Justice Department.

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After hes out of office, you go and arrest him, Castor said. So there is no opportunity where the president of the United States can run rampant in January at the end of his term and just go away scot free. The Department of Justice does know what to do about such people and so far I havent seen any activity in that direction.

And, again, these were Castors mostperhaps onlyintelligible points. After he spoke, the defense team then moved on to David Schoen, who delivered a more impassioned and somewhat more cohesive case that the current impeachment is a partisan witch hunt against the president with no basis in fact.

Ultimately, perhaps there was some strategy to the double act. Schoens performance was an aggressive attack on the impeachment managers, one of whom had just spilled his soul about the devastating trauma that he and his family experienced the day of the Capitol attack. Castors bizarre and nonsensical ramblings may have served as a palate cleanser, so that Schoens cutting criticism of the House side didnt follow directly on impeachment manager Rep. Jamie Raskins powerful performance. All the presidents defenders need to do, in the end, is to keep 17 Republican Senators from joining the Democrats.

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In the end, only six Republicans joined the Democrats in voting that a trial of a former president is constitutional and should go forwardSens. Bill Cassidy, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Pat Toomey, Mitt Romney, Ben Sassemeaning it appears there are already more than enough votes for the Republicans to acquit Trump no matter what arguments they hear. Cassidy was the only Republican who initially signaled a desire to dismiss the case to change his vote this time around, with Minority Leader Mitch McConnellwho had reportedly spoken positively of impeachment early onvoting again with the vast majority of the rest of his conference to let Trump off of the hook.

Castor and Schoen may have made it more embarrassing for them to stick with Trump, but if the last four years demonstrated anything, it was the limits of shame as a force in politics.
So-called trial marriages are to be prohibited, after a religious ruling issued by the Ministry of Endowments, reports Enab Baladi.

The Syrian regimes Ministry of Endowments has prohibited trial marriages, according to a fatwa (ruling on a point of Islamic law) it issued on Tuesday.

According to what the ministry published on its Facebook page, trial marriage is forbidden and void, and cannot be considered a [legitimate] marriage. Trial marriages destroy families and corrupt society.

According to the ministrys fatwa, trial marriage makes the woman a plaything for the man to use at his whims. Trial marriage also violates the mans dignity and stature and is inconsistent with the purposes and provisions of Sharia law as it inherently disrespects the woman, and fails to safeguard her dignity and the dignity of her family.

The ministry also considered that trial marriage affects custody issues, destroys values and morals within the family, and has serious social consequences, for which it is forbidden and in violation of the personal status law currently in force in Syria.

What is a trial marriage?

At the end of last year, Egyptian lawyer Ahmed Mahran created a new initiative he called trial marriage, which he considered to be the most appropriate model for [that] stage.

According to Mahran, trial marriage aims to limit the spread of divorce in the Arab community through preserving the family entity and the exclusion of divorce as a solution to the problems spouses face in the early years of marriage.

Trial marriage puts a time limit on the marriage contract in order to test whether the spouses will remain on good terms or not. Separation cannot take place before the end of the time limit.

In a statement to the BBC, Mahran said that he was inspired by the list of movables, which is one of the well-known pre-marriage customs in Egypt. The list specifies who owns which piece of furniture, electrical appliances or the like. The husband signs the list of movables and pledges to return the appliances to his spouse should he be requested to do so. In the same line of thought, Mahran proposed the idea of attaching a legal contract to the marriage, including immaterial conditions that the couple agrees upon before getting married. The contract acts as legal protection in the event that one of the parties does not comply with the conditions.

The lawyers idea sparked a wide debate in Arab societies, namely with regards to its compatibility with Islamic law.

According to the Al Azhar International Center for Electronic Fatwa, marriage is a monumental covenant that cannot be tampered with, and the requirement that there be no separation between the two spouses for a period of five years, or less or more, in the so-called trial marriage is an unprincipled condition that has no significance, and is thus forbidden. 

Al Azhar said that trial marriage is incompatible with the foundations of the marriage system in Islam, and clashes with its provisions and purposes, in addition to the fact that it abuses women and does not safeguard their dignity or that of their families. This marriage destroys values and morals in society.

This article was translated and edited by The Syrian Observer. The Syrian Observer has not verified the content of this story. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author.
KYODO NEWS - Feb 10, 2021 - 23:16 | All, World

China's Defense Ministry said the country has agreed with India to resolve military tensions on their contested border and their front-line troops have started disengagement from Wednesday.

India, however, has yet to make an announcement, raising skepticism that the disengagement will be realized.

The agreement came after the nations held talks nine times, the Chinese ministry said, adding the troops will withdraw in a "phased and planned" manner.

Military strains have been intensifying in the border area since the two sides' troops clashed there in June last year and Indian soldiers were killed for the first time in about 45 years.

New Delhi said that 20 Indian soldiers died in the clash in the Ladakh region of northern India. Chinese casualties are undetermined.

The two armies held a ninth round of commander-level talks on Jan. 24 for a solution to the standoff in eastern Ladakh. Local media reported the meeting lasted around 15 hours with the Indian side calling for a complete withdrawal of Chinese troops.

The media said close to 100,000 Indian and Chinese troops have been deployed in the area as both sides have been holding on to their ground and showing readiness for a long-haul, amid continuing diplomatic and military talks to find an amicable solution.

China, meanwhile, has pledged to resolve the conflict with India through dialogue.
Samsung Galaxy S-series phones always come with an upgraded version of One UI. This year also, the Galaxy S21 series packed One UI 3.1 out of the box. Now, as per Sammobile, Samsung is rolling out the One UI 3.1 update to Galaxy S20 FE.

It is almost like a tradition by Samsung to start seeding the latest version of One UI, which comes bundled with Galaxy S-series phones to the existing phones. And the process has already begun with the last years budget flagship.

Note that the One UI 3.1 update is based on Android 11 and the Galaxy S20 FE has already bagged the Android 11 update. So, this is an incremental update over the One UI 3.0 update.

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You wont notice many changes in the UI. However, there are several fine tunings and granular changes that are meant to make the already great One UI more polished.

Notably, the Galaxy Tab S7 lineup where the first one to grab the One UI 3.1 update. Talking about the Galaxy S20 FE One UI 3.1 update, it arrives with version G781BXXU2CUB5.

It is currently live for Galaxy S20 FE model number SM-G781B across multiple European countries. To be specific, it is rolling out in Netherlands, Belgium, Greece, Romania, Spain, Germany, Nordic, Czech Republic, Switzerland, Italy, United Kingdom, France, Slovenia, Baltic, Portugal, and Poland.

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The Android security patch level is bumped to February 2021

Good thing is that the update also brings the latest February 2021 security patch. Just so should you know, the latest Galaxy S20 FE One UI 3.1 update also includes a new version of the bootloader.

The previous Android 11 One UI 3.0 update did not change the bootloader version. But with the latest update, it is now bootloader build v2. Besides, the possibility of shifting back to the old bootloader version is also gone.

Well, you might be wondering what all features this One UI 3.1 update for Galaxy S20 FE brings. To give you a brief, it includes Google Discover right on the home screen.

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It also adds the video call effects for third-party apps, which were introduced with the Galaxy S21 lineup. Some privacy features are also included where it removes location data from photos.

There are some improvements in camera quality, Gallery, Multi-Window, etc. It weighs around 1.7GB in size. So, make sure that you downloading this update on a stable Wi-Fi internet connection.

As usual, the update is pushed via OTA in batches. Meaning that it wont be straightaway available for all Galaxy S20 FE users. Still, you can check for the update manually. For that, head over to Settings.

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Then you need to navigate to System updates. From there, tap the Download and install option. You can proceed with downloading and installation of the update if a new update is available.
Former Prime Minister H D Deve



Gowda on Wednesday said the country needs Ghulam Nabi Azad's political sagacity and commitment, as he retires from the Rajya Sabha.

The 87-year-old JDS supremo thanked the senior Congress leader and former Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir for his friendship and camaraderie over the years.

"The country needs his political sagacity and commitment, and am sure he will be blessed with many more years of service to the nation", Deve Gowda said in a tweet.

Azad's term in Rajya Sabha, where he was Leader of the Opposition, is coming to an end next week.

(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.)
North West Health MEC, Madoda Sambatha, has ordered the closure of the Wolmaranstad Post Office and Home Affairs offices after they failed to comply with COVID-19 regulations.

The two institutions are reportedly not meeting the requirements of social distancing, wearing of masks in public and sanitising.

The closure of the Wolmaranstad Post Office and Home Affairs office follows the closure of a supermarket in Zeerust and one store in Tlokwe by the MEC last month.

Sambatha continues to criss-cross the province, raising awareness on COVID-19, encouraging public compliance to prevention measures, and checking businesses for compliance with the regulations.

"We will continue to enforce compliance with COVID-19 regulations to prevent the further spread of the virus. We will not hesitate to order closure of any business or facility where there is complete disregard of COVID-19 prevention measures," Sambatha said on Tuesday.

Sambatha has committed to continue with the compliance and awareness campaign drive.

"Though we are about to roll out the vaccine, it does not mean other prevention measures like social distancing, wearing of masks and sanitising are to be abandoned. They remain key to prevent the spread of the virus. Vaccination should be considered one method of prevention.

"The wearing of masks in public is still mandatory, and so are social distancing and sanitising. All residents are requested to comply with the regulations," the MEC said.

He reminded citizens that their personal care and health are their responsibility.

"There is a need for all members of the community to continue to comply with the regulations to minimise the impact and spread of this contagious disease."
Amateur radio in GISuser GISuser magazine asks is it time for Ham Radio to acknowledge the Hacker Community?



GISuser is a publication for the Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping community, in the article Harry Wilson writes:



The concept of Ham Radio originated over a hundred years ago, and as of today, it is not in an ideal position. You may have already heard people talk about how ham radio is dying, and even though there is a lot of truth to that, there are still things that can be done to save this community.



People who ruled amateur radio have gotten old, and now the young blood needs to step up to keep the tradition going. The good news is that in the past couple of years many amateur licenses have been issued and it is being revived slowly. Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, the demand for Ham radios has also increased. Many specialized online shops are currently offering radios for sale under leading brands in the industry.



One of the main reasons ham radio is lacking behind is that its community is constantly neglecting new radio technologies. These technologies can help save Ham radio and can completely revive it. To tackle this problem, the first thing we need to do is accept the hacker community. Now, keep in mind, a hacker doesnt only refer to people who hack technologies to gain illegal benefits. A hacker is a person who has learned about the technology by dismantling it. Below I have mentioned a few things we can do to attract the hacker community towards ham radio. Lets take a look



Read the full article at

https://gisuser.com/2021/02/is-it-time-for-ham-radio-to-acknowledge-the-hacker-community/



GISuser on Twiiter

https://twitter.com/gisuser/status/1359185858621018112

New Delhi: Actor-activist Deep Sidhu, who was arrested for the violence at the Red Fort on Republic Day, has told police that he had no "bad intentions" and went to the historic monument as everybody was going there, officials said on Wednesday.

The Delhi Police's Crime Branch questioned Sidhu on Wednesday about his whereabouts and acts at the Red Fort on January 26, officials said.

The actor-activist was sent to seven-day police custody on Tuesday by a court here following his arrest a day earlier from Karnal bypass in connection with the violence at the Red Fort.

Sidhu, according to police, was "a prominent player" behind the January 26 incident.

Following his arrest by the Delhi Police, he was handed over to the Crime Branch, which is probing the case in connection with the violence and vandalism at the historic fort.

On first day of police remand, the focus of investigation remained on how Sidhu reached the Red Fort and his activities there on the day of incident, a senior police officer said.

Sidhu initially denied being present at Singhu border on January 25 but after the police presented evidence, he admitted that he was present at the farmers' protest site but slept at a spot a bit away from there.

The actor-activist claimed that when he woke up on January 26, there were two-three missed calls and messages on his mobile phone about people heading to the Red Fort, so he too reached there with his three friends using his mobile phone to navigate.

Sidhu and his friends left Singhu border at around 11 am in a vehicle and reached the Red Fort at around 1 pm. After violence broke out there, they returned to the border in the same vehicle, he said.

When questioned about his role in the flag hoisting incident at the fort, he denied his involvement and claimed that he did not gather or instigate the crowd, the officer said.

According to the officer, when asked why he went to the Red Fort when it did not figure in the route approved by authorities for the tractor parade, Sidhu claimed that since everybody was going, he too went there but had no "bad intentions".

While on the run, Sidhu kept switching his locations between Haryana and Punjab, police said, adding that the hunt for his three friends is on.

Police are now trying to recover his mobile phone and probing the exact locations where he hid while also verifying whatever he revealed during the interrogation, the officer said.

Police had announced a cash reward of Rs 1 lakh for information leading to Sidhu's arrest.

After the January 26 violence, which had left over 500 security personnel injured and one protester dead, the 36-year-old actor-activist was posting videos on social media.

However, Sidhu's counsel had on Tuesday claimed that he had nothing to do with the violence and was at the wrong place at the wrong time.

The violence took place when tens of thousands of farmers broke barriers to storm the national capital on January 26 during their tractor parade to highlight their demand for repealing the new agri laws.

However, their parade dissolved into unprecedented scenes of anarchy as they fought with police, overturned vehicles and delivered a national insult hoisting a religious flag from the ramparts of the Red Fort, a privilege reserved for India''s tricolour.

Thousands of protesting farmers who reached ITO from the Ghazipur border clashed with police.

Many of them driving tractors reached the Red Fort and entered the monument, where the religious flag was also hoisted. Over 500 police personnel were injured and one protestors died.

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Armenias Human Rights Defender Arman Tatoyan posted the following on his Facebook page:

The rights of villagers and their peaceful and regular lives need to be of primary significance in the settlement of border disputes.

For instance, in the 1920s, among the issues that were always troubling Armenian villagers in the bordering settlements of Soviet Armenia were the attacks and plunder of gangs from Azerbaijani territories (also from the Red Kurdistan later), theft of animals, sale of lands by Azerbaijani land owners to Armenian villagers and then unlawful demand for the return of those lands.

For instance, the report of the executive committee of Zangezur canton of July 3, 1922 addressed to the Central Executive Committee of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic states that there cant be normal life and friendly relations without the issue of land and administrative borders of the Zangezur province with Kubatlu. A few reports addressed to the Armenian Central Executive Committee of the executive committee of Zangezur canton in mid-1925 serve as evidence of this, in regard to the border disputes between Kapan and Kubatlu for the same reasons. Similar issues were raised in the report addressed to the land department of the peoples committee on land work of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic on October 18, 1926.

The historical documents serve as evidence of the fact that the local Azerbaijani regimes and the Central Executive Committee of Azerbaijan have always appropriately and inappropriately blamed the Armenian villagers living in the borderline settlements of Zangezur for border trespassing and for carrying out unlawful activities in their territory. Border disputes and the Azerbaijanis provocations against villagers have always contributed to all this.

In essence, these were the ways of seizing the territories of Soviet Armenia.

We Armenians need to learn lessons from these important historical facts and, in our days, guarantee the rights of the residents of Armenias borderline villages with several protectors.

MBABANE  Commercial electricity consumers will save up to E21.7 million in electricity in the current financial year.

The saving on electricity comes after the Eswatini Energy Regulatory Authority (ESERA) recently announced the approval of three per cent tariff hike on electricity for domestic consumers and there was no change effected on businesses except the authority announced a decrease in the average tariff on electricity.

The decrease was staggered in two, with 1.33 per cent for the 2021/2022 financial year and 1.27 per cent for the 2022/2023 financial year.

Mathematically, this means that the three per cent increase on domestic consumers and the 1.33 per cent decrease on the average tariff, gives the non-domestic consumers a relief of 4.3 per cent. Given that the current subsidy paid by the businesses amounted to E501 million annually, 4.33 per cent of that is E21.7 million.

ESERA Manager Consumer and Stakeholder Management Sikhumbuzo Nkambule said the organisation was cognisant of the prevailing socio-economic conditions, the COVID-19 pandemic inclusive, as well as the negative impacts it had brought to many families. He said having evaluated all prevailing circumstances, taking into account the many families that have been structurally denied access to clean energy; it had found it more beneficial to the citizens to begin the process of gradually rebalancing the tariffs.

What do we mean by rebalancing tariffs? At present, tariffs in Eswatini are such that, all domestic customers are being heavily subsidised by business customers, to ensure that every liSwati can have access to clean energy. This heavy cross-subsidy is as a result of high cost of delivering power to customers, as informed by a Cost-of-Service Study conducted in 2018, he said.

Nkambule shared that the study informed the sector that, at present, the average cost of electricity supply per unit stood at E2.11, yet domestic customers were currently paying less than this average.

This means that the rest of the non-domestic customers (business customers) are shouldering the rest of the balance to offset the difference from average unit cost of E2.11 to the current E1.75 per unit being paid by domestic customers.

The present subsidy being contributed by business customers is E501 million  business could use to pay taxes, offer better CoLA/increments, re-invest and create more jobs.

This subsidy makes our local companies uncompetitive on the international markets due to higher production costs, one of which is electricity. Further, businesses could relocate due to cost of doing business being higher due to the subsidy, thus create high unemployment, he said.

Nkambule explained that at face value, an increase in a price of a commodity could be viewed as negative, hence the need to unpack fully the tariff rebalancing package.

He further explained that by increasing domestic tariff by 3 per cent, the authority had therefore considered cushioning a huge number of the most vulnerable customers through the Life Line tariff as opposed to protecting a few affording customers, whilst maintaining the buying power of the remaining customers who are still employed and cushioned by a 3 per cent Cost of Living Adjustment.

This has been seen as the most equitable distribution of limited resources which can be deployed in these trying times of COVID-19. The Authority has further tried to ensure that the general price level do not increase, in fact the general price level went down. By extending most of the benefits of the price fall to business, the Authority is confident that the interest in self-generation by business customers will diminish, hence ensuring long-term price stability.

Business Eswatini (BE) welcomed the decision by the energy regulator that saw commercial tariffs marginally reduced while moderately increasing the consumer side of the equation.

BEs Chief Executive Officer Nathi Dlamini stated that the organisations aspiration and goals for improving the economy and creating a low-cost investment destination for international and local investors was shared by EEC, which was a good thing. He shared that they were proud of their association with EEC and for their good intentions for both commercial and domestic consumers.
WALNUT CREEK, Calif., Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Heffernan Insurance Brokers, one of the largest full-service, independent insurance brokerage firms in the United States, expands its Bay Area California footprint by acquiring Micor Insurance Brokers located in San Jose. Corrie Foos, president of Micor, and his team, joined Heffernan Insurance Brokers effective February 1, 2021. The Micor San Jose office is Heffernan's 10th California location.

Foos has over 45 years of experience in the insurance industry and received his Associate in Risk Management (ARM) designation in 1981. Foos founded Micor Insurance Brokers that same year and has specialized in commercial property & casualty business. Before joining Heffernan, Micor was a part of the cluster Archway Insurance Brokers.

"We are excited to join the Heffernan team," says Corrie Foos, now Vice President at Heffernan Insurance Brokers. "We see this as a great culture fit and look forward to the opportunities provided for our clients and staff as being part of a larger, dynamic organization."

"We've been looking forward to bringing Corrie Foos and the team onboard since we began conversations last year. The Micor team will work closely with our Menlo Park branch to support one another in providing excellent service to existing clients and generating new opportunities," said F. Michael Heffernan, President and CEO of Heffernan Insurance Brokers. "We're excited to have the Micor team onboard and our first location in San Jose."

As part of the next phase of Heffernan's growth strategy, we are interested in collaborating with privately held independent brokers across the United States. If you are interested in learning more, please contact Matt McKenna, Director of Corporate Development, at 925-746-7962 or [email protected].

About Heffernan Insurance Brokers

Heffernan Insurance Brokers, formed in 1988, is one of the largest independent insurance brokerage firms in the United States. Heffernan provides insurance and financial services products to a range of businesses and individuals. Headquartered in Walnut Creek, Calif., Heffernan has offices in San Francisco, Petaluma, Menlo Park, Truckee, Bakersfield, Woodland Hills, Los Angeles and Irvine, CA; Phoenix, AZ; Portland, OR; Seattle and Olympia, WA; St. Louis, MO; Philadelphia, PA; and London UK.

Employee-owned, Heffernan Insurance Brokers was named the Top Mid-Sized Broker in the United States to work for in 2009 by Business Insurance Magazine. The firm has been among the Top Greater Bay Area Philanthropists since 2003.

For more information, visit www.heffins.com. License #0564249

SOURCE Heffernan Insurance Brokers

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Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-11 04:15:02|Editor: huaxia

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UNITED NATIONS, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- The threat to international peace and security posed by ISIL terrorist fighters is "on the rise again," the UN counter-terrorism chief Vladimir Voronkov told the Security Council on Wednesday.

Despite the competing priorities brought by the COVID-19 pandemic, Voronkov, head of the UN Office of Counter-Terrorism (UNOCT), said that it is "crucial" for member states to remain focused and united in thwarting terrorism.

"While ISIL has not developed a purposeful strategy to exploit the pandemic, its efforts to regroup and to reinvigorate its activities (has) gained further momentum," he said.

Via a videoconference, the UN official flagged that the terrorists, also known in Arabic as Da'esh, have maintained the ability to move and operate, including across porous borders.

At the same time, the pandemic's socio-economic toll and political fallout could further render individuals receptive to radicalization and recruitment.

As the international community continues to grapple with the legacies of the group's so-called "caliphate," the UNOCT chief said that some 10,000 ISIL fighters, mostly in Iraq, are pursuing a protracted insurgency, posing "a major, long-term and global threat."

"They are organized in small cells hiding in desert and rural areas and moving across the border between the two countries, waging attacks," he elaborated.

Voronkov also spoke of the precarious situation of the mostly women and children with links to the fighters, zeroing in on the dire humanitarian and security situation in detention facilities and displacement camps, "especially in al-Hol."

"Nearly two years after the territorial defeat of ISIL, some 27,500 foreign children are still in harm's way in the camps in northeast Syria, including about 8,000 children from some 60 countries other than Iraq," he said, adding that 90 percent are under 12.

Based on humanitarian urgency, moral imperative and legal obligations, the UN official echoed the secretary-general's call to member states to "voluntary repatriate adults and children stranded in Iraq and Syria."

The UNOCT head briefed the Council on ISIL's activities in West Africa, Asia and Southeast Asia, recalling two suicide bombings conducted by women in the Philippines last August.

And he updated on his office's activities, including the launch of a Global Programme on Prosecution, Rehabilitation and Reintegration - in close cooperation with the Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate (CTED) and the UN Office on Drugs and Crim (UNODC) - to assist Indonesia, Burkina Faso and Lake Chad Basin States, with Mozambique support on standby, if requested.

Noting that 2021 is the 20th anniversary of Resolution 1373, which the Security Council adopted on countering terrorism in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks in the United States, Voronkov urged member states to recommit themselves under UN auspices to "multilateral action against terrorism." Enditem
Area Road Crews Prepare for More Ice to Come

By West Kentucky Star Staff

Ballard

Calloway

Carlisle

Crittenden

Fulton

Graves

Hickman

Lyon

Marshall

McCracken

Trigg

WESTERN KENTUCKY - The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet District 1 Snow & Ice Team has all crews out treating highways in anticipation of another round of freezing drizzle, freezing rain, and sleet expected to arrive over the region this afternoon and evening into Thursday morning.The District 1 Super Tanker is spraying brine enhanced with calcium chloride along Interstate 24 and Interstate 69, today.Freezing drizzle has moved from Missouri into Ballard County in the last hour.Individual counties have the following to report:Freezing Drizzle4 trucks out treating A & B routes. Air temp 295 trucks out treating bridges and overpasses7 trucks out treating roadways.5 trucks out treating potential trouble areas.3 trucks out to spot treat bridges and trouble areasTreating bridges and overpassesTreating A routes -- 5 trucks out.Livingston5 trucks on road treating A routes then moving to Ball trucks out treating roads.10 trucks out at this time. treating A and B routs with pre-wet salt. Air temp. 28. . Road temp is 25 - 31.5 trucks out at this time. Treating potential trouble areas on I-24. Air temp. 27.5 vehicles out treating bridges. No precipitation at this time.The National Weather Service has issued a Winter Storm Warning for much of the region in anticipation of several rounds of freezing rain and winter mix rolling across the region through Thursday. That will be followed by extreme cold temperatures through the weekend into next week.Due to the likelihood of accumulating ice, The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet is reminding motorists that travel may become hazardous. While ice accumulations are expected to be well below the ice storm of 2009, there will be plenty of opportunities for travel disruptions. The National Weather Service indicates about 70 to 80 percent chance of  inch of accumulating ice. As a comparison, the ice storm of 2009 was about an inch to 2 inches of ice.The potential for damage to trees and power lines is significant. As a precaution, highway crews are checking chain saws and other tree-clearing equipment.Kentucky Transportation Cabinet crews have pretreated roadways and are continuing to spread salt and calcium chloride today. However, once the ice starts to accumulate, the ability to improve driving conditions will be limited. Extreme low temperatures into and through the weekend will severely limit the effectiveness of salt and other ice-fighting chemicals.KYTC engineers are asking the public to avoid travel as the ice accumulates. Crews will be focused on maintaining access for emergency vehicles as the heaviest round of freezing rain is expected Wednesday night into Thursday.The public is urged to closely monitor changing weather conditions as this winter storm develops and ice accumulates.The freezing rain and sleet will be followed by extreme cold heading into the weekend with a low temperature on Sunday morning around 6 degrees at Paducah.
Press Release

February 10, 2021 Dispatch from Crame No. 1029:

Sen. Leila M. de Lima's Congratulatory message for Hongkong Pro-Democracy Movement Nobel Nominees (addressed to Joshua Wong, Agnes Chow, Ivan Lim) Dear Joshua Wong, Agnes Chow & Ivan Lim: I convey my heartfelt congratulations on the nomination of Hongkong's pro-democracy movement for the Nobel Peace Prize. The nomination is a fitting recognition of the immeasurable courage of a people united in defense of civil rights and liberties. In the continuing struggle for a just and humane society for all, the people of Hongkong has inspired movements worldwide and taught tyrants to be wary. And wary they should be, for across the world there is a mounting discontent and a burning outrage against tyrannical governments, especially amid the global health crisis. For those who were besieged with injustice, there is now a common battle cry: "we are going to pull a Hongkong!" February 24 will mark my 4th year in detention. Like you, I have been jailed for speaking up against an oppressive regime. But we have a shared conviction that no prison walls can silence us as we continue to fight for our people's freedoms and dignity. Indeed, as you and your fellow youth bravely demonstrated on the streets of Hongkong, despite the excessive and unnecessary force deployed against you, we will prevail over this vicious persecution. In solidarity always, Leila M. de Lima Access the handwritten copy of Dispatch from Crame No. 1,029, here: https://issuu.com/senatorleilam.delima/docs/dispatchno1029
There were novel ways to help alert people in the path of catastrophic floods; evidence-based ideas to support those with mental illness and prevent suicide; as well as a solution to making a commute to work smoother, with fewer road projects to heighten traffic.

And those were just a few of the concepts floated by students Thursday night, when they summed up months or years of research into just 180 seconds at the University of Miami Graduate Schools fifth annual Three-Minute Thesis Competition.

In all, 10 graduate students competed for the title in their timed lectures, which were broadcast virtually for the first time. Two students managed to edge above the others in capturing the attention of the nearly 200 audience members, as well as the judges.

First place went to Marybeth Arcodia, a Ph.D. student in atmospheric sciences, who explained how her research on the interaction of two Pacific atmospheric waves can help forecasters determine months in advance when and where to expect flooding events in the United States.

Knowing how Pacific conditions affect U.S. rainfall can give management officials and individuals more time to prepare and evacuate, saving millions of dollars in infrastructure damage and sparing countless lives, said Arcodia, whose adviser is Ben Kirtman, professor of atmospheric sciences at the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science.

Marybeth Arcodia and Cho-Hee Shrader, first and second place winners of Thursday's Three-Minute Thesis Competition.

Second place and the audience choice award went to Cho-Hee Shrader, a Ph.D. student in prevention science and community health, whose work focuses on how the social network theory of homophilyor the fact that friends and significant others often share similar traitscan affect ones communication and knowledge about pre-exposure prophylaxis, a medicine that can be used to prevent HIV transmission. This is particularly important in Miami, which is now considered the epicenter of the HIV epidemic for the United States, Shrader said. The virus is especially prevalent among minorities, with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates showing that 20 percent of Latino gay men and 50 percent of Black gay men will be diagnosed with HIV by age 50, if current trends persist. Shrader wants to disrupt that trend by fostering conversations among Latino and Black gay men to make discussing this medicine, called PrEP, less taboo.

These conversationsif constructivecan actually destigmatize the virus and save lives, said Shrader, whose adviser is Mariano Kanamori, assistant professor in the Division of Prevention Science and Community Health at the Miller School of Medicine.

Arcodia and Shrader will hopefully go on to compete in the Council of Florida Graduate Schools Three-Minute Thesis Competition in April, said Tiffany Plantan, director of education for the Graduate School.

Competitors of the Three-Minute Thesis held Thursday, Feb. 4.

The eight other student competitors also showcased their research in a creative, accessible way and administrators praised them for committing to the nerve-wracking competition.

Particularly in this time, where we know that all of us are experiencing different types of hardship and have additional stress, these students really were very courageous and resilient and did a phenomenal job at presenting their dissertation research, said Willy Prado, dean of the Graduate School and the Universitys vice provost of faculty affairs. These students were able to connect with the audience, and they were able to translate their research to a lay audience very effectively, which is one of the goals of this competition.

Their projects also highlighted the breadth of research happening across the University, Prado said.

For example, civil engineering Ph.D. candidate Nima Hosseinzadeh is working on more eco-friendly forms of concrete that will also last longer in harsh winters and hopefully curtail the nations endless need for road repairs.

School of Architecture masters student Shannon Newberry is studying how humor can be reflected in structures, particularly inflatable ones. And Jennifer Ann Lamy, another graduate student in architecture, is using the history of racism in U.S. housing and building policies as a backdrop to craft a starter home design that would be more equitable and safe for Black living in Miami today.

Miami Herbert Business School doctoral student Rosy Xu explored how fake news that quickly spreads on social media can impact business revenues. She found that 80 percent of companies listed on the S&P 500 are severely affected by fake news, which can mean a 3 percent loss in stock purchases. Yet, businesses can reduce the damage by disclosing the truth.

Firms that respond directly to fake news successfully reduce the chance of future taxes by almost 90 percent, and those firms that take immediate action in dispelling rumors, limit the damage to their reputations, she said. Managers need to address the increasing threats of fake news on social media before they escalate.

If you missed the Graduate Schools 2021 Three-Minute Thesis Competition, you can watch a full recording of the event on YouTube.
The birr is the unit of currency in Ethiopia.

The National Bank of Ethiopia (NBE) has further prohibited making over five cash transfers a week from a single bank account to multiple accounts via mobile and internet banking; Automated Teller Machine (ATM) and Point of Sale (PoS) terminals; and electronic accounts that operate through mobile money services.

Last month the regulatory bank limited transactions from a single account to multiple accounts through account-to-account transfer to just five a week, reversing the previous unlimited policy. Thus, with the latest circular issued a week ago, an account holder cannot make more than five transfers a week from an account via any transaction channel.

Signed by Solomon Desta, the vice governor of the central bank in charge of financial institutions supervision, the latest circular exempted deposit accounts of the government, state-owned enterprises, government universities, international organisations and embassies from the weekly transaction restriction.

However, the prohibition is not applicable to account holders in effecting utility payments, buying mobile top-ups and making salary payments. Transactions effected by financial institutions from their accounts are also exempted from the restriction.

The latest circular also entitles commercial banks to conduct due diligence and exempt private businesses and non-government organisations from the restrictions. The banks can spare established businesses that have a trusted business relationship with the respective bank from the prohibition, according to the circular.

Since early 2020, the central bank has been imposing limits on transactions and cash withdrawals.

The regulatory bank imposed a restriction on the depositing of money on behalf of another account in mid-September 2020 following the currency changeover, only allowing account-to-account transfers.

In May 2020, the regulator put a 100,000 Br daily and a million Birr monthly withdrawal limit on individuals and a 300,000 Br daily and 2.5 million Br monthly withdrawal cap on businesses. A few months later in October, the central bank altered the directive and decreased the daily withdrawal limit to 50,000 Br for individuals and 75,000 Br for businesses.

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Two weeks ago, the central bank reported that it has identified individuals that made multiple account-to-account transactions between July and September. The due diligence conducted by the bank demonstrated that 20,178 account holders made more than 1.4 million transactions in just three months through all the banks.

According to the report, a single individual recorded the highest 4,974 monthly transactions through the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia (CBE). Simultaneously, the highest daily transaction recorded at 482 was made by a single person through the Bank of Abyssinia. The central bank also listed 20 individuals who made 44,020 transactions in the three-month period mainly through CBE.

In its letter, the central bank ordered all commercial banks to refrain from opening an account for these individuals whose transactions were allegedly suspicious. The banks were also told not to commence any business relationships with them.
What should be the development priorities for the country in 2021 to build on the successes of the previous 12 months?

Senior economist Nguyen Tri Hieu

All the free trade agreements (FTAs) Vietnam has inked with foreign partners in recent years have opened new doors to global markets, helping to widen export potential. These markets are demanding, so our success in clinching these agreements is just the first step. More important is how Vietnam can avail of the advantages these new-generation FTAs can bring, such as tax advantages and the ease of exploiting market potential.

To be eligible for such advantages, Vietnamese goods must be of high quality and be on par with the requirements set in these agreements, as well as customers taste in these markets. Our major exports like coffee and rice have established a reputation in the global market, however there are technical barriers (in healthcare or in food sanitation, for example) that in many cases our products still fail to meet.

The government has set forth major guidelines for development moving forward, where security, national defence, and international cooperation and integration are taken into consideration. The signing of the FTAs paves the way for our country to meet a high level of these considerations. Ushering in a new development period, the government has given birth to a very concrete action plan that is set to bring Vietnams economy to new heights.

In the past year, Vietnam has successfully accomplished the goals of containing COVID-19 and achieving positive economic growth. These factors will lay the bedrock for our continued development and pushing up international integration in successive years. In addition, the launching and development of 5G is expected to bring Vietnams mobile communications traffic to a new level with high volumes, enabling smartphone users to grab information more swiftly and efficiently.

How can the efficient implementation of the amended versions of laws on investment, enterprises, and securities be ensured?

The amended laws, which came into force in 2021, aim to facilitate development of the stock market and investment market, but set new rules for market participants. That means while they are supposed to continue to support businesses, they are designed to create a stricter legal corridor to regularise the markets..

As the countrys economy evolves, legal mechanisms must adapt to the market and provide clear and concrete guidance for enterprises to follow, while eliminating overlaps and outdated regulations.

To join the new playing field, firms must strictly comply with these regulations. We all know that economic activities, once governed by strict regulations, could ensure a fair competition between diverse economic sectors, and that is a prerequisite for development.

One of the essential matters to ensure the effective enforcement of these laws is that the relevant admin agencies that implement the laws  such as the Ministry of Industry and Trade, the Ministry of Planning and Investment, the State Bank of Vietnam (SBV), and tax authorities  must craft particular action programmes. The governments supervisory office should be continuingly tracking the performance by these administrative agencies and alert the agencies for any irregularities and obstacles.

As government changes now take place, the new administration needs to present a report by the end of the year showcasing to policymakers and people what we have achieved with the laws, what the shortcomings are, and which contents need to be supplemented to have practical views on whether these revisions could bring the expected results.

One of the most outstanding points in the domestic market in 2020 was the intensified appearance of mobile money services. What are the challenges to be resolved to promote these services and ensure the markets healthy performance?

Several leading telecom groups including Viettel, MobiFone, and VinaPhone were green lit by the government to come up with mobile money services through acquiring intermediary payment licenses. This means a large proportion of the population in rural areas who are still unbanked can now carry out transactions if they have a smartphone and deposit some money on their accounts opened by these groups.

These mobile money services can be deemed digital money as it could be used for business transactions. This, however, also poses a risk of money creation outside the banking system. Until now only the central banks and commercial banks are allowed to create money.

Now, telecoms companies may be able to give any credits to their customers account and their customers may use these credits to pay for purchases  and so the telecoms companies are in fact given the ability of money creation.

Of course, we may expect that any credits are equivalent to the money their customers give to them or deposit. In that case it is balanced out, and there is no money creation. But what kind of control needs to be in place so that the telecoms companies dont abuse the ability is the crucial issue the banking authority needs to consider.

Further, we must ensure that the telecom groups must not use deposited money for any other purpose, other than to settle customer purchases. Any company may utilise short-term investments including intra-day investments where the money flow returns at the end of the day but such investments may risky by essence.

If telecoms firms use money deposited by their customers for such investment, they are exposed to potential losses. Regulations should be in place to prevent the telecoms companies from being engaged in such transactions.

I do believe all telecoms groups are overseen by the government and strictly adhere to the law, but the problem is we must have in place a proper supervisory mechanism and I do not see that at this point at time.

Vietnams financial landscape has seen the strong emergence of foreign exchange trading floors, meaning colossal risks to investors. What is the state of the current operation of forex trading floors in this country?

Scores of forex trading floors have sprung up around Vietnam in the past year that invite investors with very tempting profits that may be 10-fold higher than bank rates. Such trading floors are often fraudulent, however. They secured people to participate with high profits and security against losses. They actually pay their investors with profits as promised but when investors invest in a big sum, they cause the forex floors to collapse.

The victims can do nothing in the absence of legitimate contracts, and so this mandates prudent consideration by the central bank and the MoF.

In fact, albeit some trading floors  some functioning as information portals  are based in Vietnam, all the transactions occur outside the countrys territories. For example, these platforms for forex trading can claim they are part of UK-based exchanges. Vietnamese people can do business transactions in the UK through the Vietnamese-based platform. The payment can be processed through customers credit cards in foreign currencies and the procedure seems legal as it appears not to impinge on regulations on forex trading.

The operation of such a forex market would raise a question as to whether their operation is legal or not, especially if Vietnamese participants transact only in foreign currencies and have nothing to do with VND, and they pay for their currency purchases with credit cards.

To increase the appeal of Vietnams stock exchanges, how can foreign-invested enterprises be encouraged to participate?

Most foreign firms receive capital injections from their parent companies or from foreign financial institutions, which is their advantage. They therefore are not as much reliant on local capital sources compared to Vietnamese ones. Partly foreign-owned firms may consider listing on a bourse once having a certain volume of potential local shareholders.

We should encourage foreign companies to move into the stock market because in doing so they will need to ensure information transparency and this will bring benefits to both shareholders and investors.

We know that many such enterprises operating in Vietnam have relations with overseas companies which also export their products to Vietnam. Through trade agreements, we may encourage these overseas firms to not only sell products to Vietnam, but also support their subsidiaries here to go on the bourse to participate in Vietnams financial market.

In addition, relevant government agencies and ministries would help firms go on the bourse here, wading through a complexity of procedures and legalities. With simpler procedures, foreign firms may participate in the stock market more vigorously.
Protests in Myanmar against the military overthrow of the elected government have grown in recent days. But the countrys military rulers have taken steps to make organizing the protests difficult or even illegal.

Here is a look at who is organizing the protests and the problems they face:

Is protesting permitted?

It was unclear for many days after the military overthrow on February 1 whether demonstrations were permitted or not.

But as the demonstrations grew and spread around the country, the military announced Monday it was banning peaceful public protests in the countrys two largest cities.

Gatherings of more than five people were outlawed and curfews were put in place from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. for areas of Yangon and Mandalay. Thousands of people have been demonstrating in those cities since Saturday.

The new restrictions have raised concerns about the possibility of a violent crackdown.

Who is leading the protests?

For the most part, the protests have grown without any clear leadership structure.

This movement is leaderless -- people are getting on the streets in their own way and at their own will, said Thinzar Shunlei Yi, a well-known activist.

Activist groups, professional work groups, unions and others across Myanmar have all come out to protest. The demonstrators are supported by Aung San Suu Kyis National League for Democracy party. Suu Kyi was ousted from power in the military takeover.

Myanmar experienced direct military rule for more than 50 years until 2012. Shortly after the latest military overthrow, a Facebook page called Civil Disobedience Movement started calling for peaceful protests. The page now has more than 230,000 followers. It is also widely used by Twitter users in Myanmar.

Health care workers also started a protest campaign. They are urging employees to refuse to work at state-run medical buildings.

Some people who live in Yangon have voiced their anger by making loud noises across the city at night.

What are the difficulties?

One of the biggest problems for protesters has been the militarys attempts to block communications.

Facebook has 22 million users in Myanmar, nearly 40 percent of the population. The government acted quickly to shut Facebook down. But people then began moving to other social media services like Twitter.

People have also been passing around information about how to keep communications secret and how to stay safe during protests. Some of the information had been designed for use by pro-democracy demonstrators in Hong Kong.

Last weekend, the military temporarily cut internet services and some phone service. But many protestors were quick to overcome those problems, with some using phones registered in neighboring Thailand.

Even when the internet was completely cut off on Saturday for 24 hours, people were able to communicate within Myanmar by phone, said Clare Hammond. She is a senior campaigner for the rights group Global Witness.

For others, simple word of mouth and an understanding of where demonstrations took place in earlier years has brought them out in protest.

Will the protests continue?

The protesters seem to remain operating without fear, even with the new restrictions in place on demonstrations.

Some are worried, however, that the military is preparing for a violent crackdown similar to those that ended past uprisings in 2007 and 1988.

Linda Lakhdhir is a legal advisor at Human Rights Watch. She said the military could try to use violations of the new rules, as well as existing laws, to justify another crackdown. She called the laws draconian.

At times, police have used water cannons and non-deadly bullets at some protests, raising concerns about the possibility of additional government measures.

Im Susan Shand.

The Associated Press reported this story. Susan Shand adapted it for Learning English. Bryan Lynn was the editor.

________________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

crackdown  n. a serious attempt to punish people for doing something that is not permitted

draconian  adj. very severe or cruel

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Fishersville, United States , Feb. 09, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Augusta County, VA commercial HVAC repair contractor VA Commercial Repair Solutions (VCRS) announced the launch of a joint venture (JV) with Fire and Safety Equipment of Lynchburg. Under the terms of the JV, VCRS will provide commercial mechanical contractor services to customers across the Shenandoah Valley, and Central and Northern Virginia.

More information about VA Commercial Repair Solutions is available at https://vacommercialhvac.com

The Fishersville-based licensed Mechanical, Refrigeration and Electrical contractors joint venture (JV) with Fire and Safety Equipment further expands the companys position in Northern and Central VA.

Under this new JV, VA Commercial Repair Solutions will provide design, installation, repair, and maintenance services for Type 1 and Type 2 stainless steel cooking hoods, exhaust fans, makeup air supply units, and stainless steel backsplashes while Fire and Safety will provide their expertise through installing Badger Fire Suppression Systems.

The new JV gives VCRS an expanded foothold in the local commercial refrigeration and restaurant appliance repair market. Their Professional mechanical, refrigeration and electrical maintenance technicians are qualified and trained to service refrigerators, range exhaust hoods, commercial-grade appliances, air curtains, and other equipment. The company provides 247 emergency services and routine preventive maintenance year round.

Their local mechanical, refrigeration and electrician technicians in Augusta County thoroughly inspect all commercial restaurant appliances and with rare exceptions, will always recommend repairs before replacement. Virginia Commercial Repair Solutions ensures that all installations and equipment repairs comply with local building codes as well as all mechanical and electrical specifications. Top-rated commercial mechanical repair technicians in Augusta County offer 2 years of preventive maintenance services and 1 year of labor on all installations at no additional cost.

According to a spokesperson for VA Commercial Repair Solutions, We are excited to announce our new Joint Venture with Fire and Safety Equipment with whom we share a commitment to honesty, efficiency, and customer service excellence. We look forward to providing restaurants and other commercial enterprises with the most efficient mechanical and electrical contractor services Virginia has to offer.

VA Commercial Repair Solutions is a licensed and insured refrigeration, electrical, and mechanical contractor based in Fishersville, VA. Founded in 2009, the company is the preferred commercial restaurant appliance and refrigeration repair contractor with more than 6,000 satisfied customers.

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Phone: +1-540-457-4822

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Richard Rhorer, deputy publisher of the Simon & Schuster trade imprint, will leave that position March 15 to become publisher of a new, yet-to-be-named lifestyle imprint.

In explaining the reasoning for the new imprint in a memo to employees, S&S CEO Jonathan Karp wrote: If the pandemic has shown anything, its that the marketplace for bestselling and enduring works of practical nonfiction is as vibrant as it has ever been, if not more so. The new imprint, Karp said, will publish books that address topics foundational to how we livefrom the meals we prepare, the relationships we nurture, and the households we manage, to the personal and professional goals we set and strive to achieve.

In selecting Rhorer to head the imprint, Karp wrote that he has worked with him since Rhorer first joined S&S in 2011, and praised him for his superb judgment, publishing and marketing expertise, and his multifaceted skill set. Karp added that Rhorer has been integral to the publication strategies and launch plans of the trade imprints most successful practical nonfiction titles, such as Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, Think Like a Monk, and the business bestseller Contagious.

With Rhorers new appointment, Dana Canedy named Irene Kheradi associate publisher of the S&S imprint, effective March 8. Kheradi is currently v-p and executive managing editor for production and copy editing. She will report to Canedy, who took over as head of the S&S imprint when Karp was named CEO of the company last summer. Kheradi started at S&S in 1989, was named executive managing editor for the trade publishing group in 1998, and was appointed to her current position in 2013.

In an unrelated promotion, Samantha Cohen was named v-p and director of production strategy and operations, reporting to S&S COO and CFO Dennis Eulau. Cohen has led the digital content development, adult interior design, and desktop publishing teams since 2013, and will now add responsibility for pre-press, adult managing editorial, copyediting, production management, and reprints.
The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
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Decades of job loss, the opioid crisis, and the current pandemic have all shaken the already tenuous health care system of rural America. This is happening in the wealthiest nation on Earth, with a GDP of over 20 trillion dollars. Why is this happening? And how can the medical education system better prepare future physicians to meet rural patients needs?

Despite our countrys abundance of wealth, crushing poverty exists out of sight from most Americans. People living in cities are often familiar with the sight of urban poverty and homelessness, even if these issues do not personally impact them. Rural poverty, a key issue facing millions of Americans, remains comparatively hidden. In the past two decades, U.S. medical education has increasingly prioritized teaching how social conditions affect health care outcomes. Therefore, it is essential that rural poverty be prioritized as a key part of these conversations.

Looking at a map, rural America is hard to miss  it accounts for at least 75% of land area and almost two-thirds of U.S. counties. These 3 million square miles are home to roughly 50 million people (at least 15-20% of the population). As any country dweller can attest, there are many positives to rural life. Easy access to nature, decreased/absent traffic, and relatively low cost of living to name a few. Despite this, decades of data point to substantial economic hardship and widespread health disparities affecting rural residents.

Rural Americans are more likely to suffer from poverty, unemployment, and serious disability. The U.S. Census Bureau found that rural poverty rates have exceeded metro poverty rates every year since 1959. Rural residents tend to be older and thus require more treatment. Compared to metro counties, rural counties are twice as likely to contain highly concentrated poverty, with poverty rates of at least 20%. In these high poverty counties (HPCs), there are thousands of families who live without basic necessities, even running water and effective sanitation. Economic and social inequities translate into health inequities, which compounds the issues rural communities face and diminishes health care outcomes. Since 1999, the percent of the rural poor living in HPCs has almost tripled, and numerous hospitals have closed. Rural health care is in crisis, with diminished public knowledge relative to the scale of the struggles faced.

It is hard to describe the rural health crisis without a litany of shocking statistics. Although 15-20% of the U.S. population, rural residents suffer at least 60% of all trauma deaths. Less than half of rural counties have hospitals with obstetric services, and rural hospitals have been closing across the country for decades. The number of practicing rural physicians is actively declining, even with a growing overall rural population. It is expected that there will be a quarter fewer active rural physicians in 2030 as the older generation retires. Too few young doctors are pursuing careers in rural medicine, and the number of medical students from rural backgrounds declined by 28% between 2002 and 2017.

It is important to remember that disparity does not define the experience of all rural people  many communities are doing well. From small towns, sprawling farms, and Native reservations, rural America is as complex and diverse as the rest of the country. The Census Bureaus Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) indicates that low housing costs mitigate the cost of rural poverty when compared to its urban counterpart. However, there is no denying the serious lack of resources and health care burden shouldered by rural residents.

The ongoing rural crisis is well documented and is the subject of increased media attention, as well as academic and popular literature. Yet for many, rural issues remain outside of mainstream consciousness. Worse, some people from metro counties disparage and stereotype rural areas. In light of ongoing problems, it is no wonder that many rural residents feel as though they are forgotten by the rest of country.

Health care providers have a responsibility to evaluate how inequity determines medical outcomes. Physicians have a key role in fixing the ways in which medicine fails to meet the needs of the most vulnerable. Medical schools are increasingly incorporating inequity-focused material as part of their curriculum through considerate overviews of social determinants of health. For future physicians, these classes provide an opportunity to better serve individuals from historically neglected backgrounds. However, if these lessons do not inform about rural health care inequities, then they are failing in their mission. Institutions that genuinely value health equity must work to explain the insufficiency in rural health resources when compared to those of the larger public.

Many schools have made positive steps. Some offer comprehensive rural track programs that focus on identifying and educating students interested specifically in rural medicine. Oregon Health & Science University School of Medicine (and others) require mandatory rural clinical rotations. Such experiences have been shown to significantly increase the likelihood of students starting a rural career. Government agencies also are providing support. The National Health Service Corps (NSHC) and the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps (PHSCC) provide loan forgiveness and employment for physicians interested in rural practice.

Despite these efforts, most educational institutions can do more. Adopting rural tracks and recruiting rural students are two evidence-based ways to recruit rural doctors, yet only 43 of 180+ U.S. medical schools offer RTs (according to the AAMC). The strongest predictor of future rural medical practice is having a rural background; yet only 4.3% of all medical school matriculants in 2017 were from a rural county.

The rural health care crisis is one of the greatest challenges facing the United States. Addressing this issue requires a country-wide effort, and awareness initiatives only go so far. Physicians have a key responsibility in addressing this problem, and prioritizing rural health in medical education is an essential starting point for encouraging future change.

Statistics on rural poverty and demographic data taken from Rural Poverty in the United States (2017) by Sherman Tickamyer and J. Warlick.

Nick Richwagen, Evan Chen, and Jacob Riegler are medical students.

Image credit: Shutterstock.com
She and her boyfriend had been together for 4-5 years and had two children together, but she had been recently interested in Baylock, eventually admitting to police they were thirsty to talk and be with one another, she said. Her boyfriend and friends had talked about killing him multiple times in the past, records show.
A study of women who were new mothers in the late 1970s found that those who were given longer, paid maternity leave lived healthier lives as they entered middle age.

While universal paid maternity leave is now available in many Western European nations, this has not always been the case. A new study by University of Georgia economist Meghan Skira looked at the health of Norwegian mothers before and after paid maternity leave became law in 1977. She found that the health benefits of leave continued for years after their children were born.

Skira, an associate professor in the Terry College of Business, worked with economist Aline Butikofer of the Norwegian School of Economics and Julie Riise of the University of Bergen on the study. Their paper, "The Impact of Paid Maternity Leave on Maternal Health," is online in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy and appears in the journal's February 2021 print edition.

Public health studies and some economic studies have found positive short-term benefits for women and children of extended postnatal leave, but the approach by Skira and her co-authors was different. They were able to analyze the longer term health effects of paid maternity leave for thousands of Norwegian women both before and after leave laws were implemented in July 1977.

"This sharp change in who was eligible for paid maternity leave provides a nice natural experiment," said Skira. "It provides an environment where we can examine the causal health effects of paid leave. Our findings show that having access to paid leave leads to important health benefits for mothers around age 40."

The women who gave birth after July 1977 were in better health across the board as they hit middle age, but the biggest gains in health were seen among low-income women who may not have been able to afford to take the full amount of unpaid leave available before the change.

Skira and her co-authors examined biometric data like body mass index, blood pressure, cholesterol levels and rates of diabetes combined with self-reported rates of pain, mental health, tobacco use and exercise habits to paint a comprehensive picture of women's health at 40.

The women who had access to paid leave had 2.5% to 3.7% lower BMI than those who did not have access. They were 10% less likely to have high blood pressure. They were 16% to 18% less likely to smoke and 14% to 20% more likely to exercise regularly.

We know that women are healthier at 40, but we don't know exactly why. We did not find significant changes in income or employment among the women who had access to the reform, so the health improvements are unlikely due to income effects. We speculate that a reduction in stress, more time to recover from childbirth, and perhaps breastfeeding played a role. More research on exactly why maternal health improved would be valuable." Meghan Skira, UGA Economist

The study does draw clear causation between women staying home after giving birth and being healthier as they enter middle age.

"In a typical observational study, you would be worried that those who take more leave are different in ways that might make their health better or worse," Skira said. "Those who take longer leave may be wealthier or have more family support. On the other hand, those who have more postpartum health problems may take more leave. But here, because there is this sharp change in access to paid leave for everyone, the concerns about selection into leave-taking are minimized."

This was possible because the Norwegian Institute of Public Health collects health data on its citizens around age 40 as a way to benchmark the nation's well-being. Because of the so-called Age 40 Program, Skira and her co-authors had access to a tremendous set of birth, health and income data for the women who gave birth immediately before and after the law changed in 1977.

Norway expanded its paid leave policies again in 1987 and 1992, but those expansions marginally improved women's health at age 40, Skira said.

"There does seem to be evidence of diminishing returns to leave length," Skira said. "But maternal health is only one dimension of maternity leave to consider -- effects on children's outcomes, women's labor market attachment and employers are also important."

As the mothers of 1977 continue to age, Skira hopes to examine their use of long-term sick leave and disability insurance to see if the health benefits they gained in middle age made a difference in their quality of life as they entered retirement. It's too early to tell what the long-term benefits of this policy shift will be, she said.

"While things have changed since the late 1970s, understanding the effects of this policy change is important since it extended leave benefits from a level similar to what the U.S. offers today under the Family and Medical Leave Act," Skira said. "Our results, therefore, may inform the current debate over family leave policy."
A woman said that a man she met on Facebook offered her $3,000 to transport immigrants who were in the country illegally, according to an arrest affidavit filed on Feb. 4.

The case unfolded at about 10 p.m. Feb. 2, when a Texas Department of Public Safety trooper requested assistance from the Cotulla Border Patrol Station on a traffic stop. The trooper had pulled over a Chevrolet Tahoe for speeding on a construction zone on Interstate 35 near Artesia Wells in La Salle County.


21 runners killed during mountain race in northwestern province of Gansu; Indian variant of Covid-19 found in Guangzhou; Beijing willing to arrange for vaccines to be sent to Taiwan

May 28, 2021 08:15 PM
YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 10, ARMENPRESS. Economy Minister Vahan Kerobyan says the allocation of additional resources to businesses affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Artsakh is an important and critical task. He especially highlighted one particular point of the Pashinyan Administrations roadmap  the restoration of economic activity and elimination of the economic consequences of the war and the coronavirus.

In an interview to the Herankar program, the minister said that businesses greatly need support. He said they are working round the clock over this matter to find financial measures and increase liquidity in the market. We are speaking about new investments, but we shouldnt forget the numerous businessmen who believed in Armenia long ago, made their investments and in 2020 were hit really hard, and they got hit hard not because they are bad businessmen but because of totally objective reasons. The pandemic forced everyone to stop, 90% of the world business had bad results in 2020. Now, we very well understand that providing these companies with additional resources is an important and critical task. And this is reflected in the prime ministers roadmap unveiled on November 18, 2020, where he had namely noted that we must to everything to restore economic activity and eliminate the economic consequences of the war and the coronavirus.

He said the government is doing everything to speed up the process.

Editing and Translating by Stepan Kocharyan

Weeks after Democrats took control of Congress and the White House, a Black lawmaker is making a renewed push for a national commission to examine the impact of slavery and reparations for descendants of millions of enslaved Africans.

Rep. Shelia Jackson Lee, D-Texas, announced the reintroduction of H.R. 40 to create the reparations commission last month, and next week the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties is set to hear testimony on the bill.

H.R. 40 has a long history in the House, championed for decades by the late Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., and now by Lee.

The reparations commission would study the history of slavery, the role federal and state governments played in supporting slavery and racial discrimination against the descendants of enslaved Africans.

"Economic issues are the root cause for many critical issues impacting the African American community today," Lee said.

The commission would make recommendations regarding "any form of apology," compensation and atonement for slavery, Lee said. "Truth and reconciliation about the 'original sin of American slavery' is necessary to light the way to the beloved community we all seek. The uncomfortable truth is that the United States owes its position as the most powerful nation in the world to its slave-owning past."

Calls for reparations increased this summer after anti-racism protests swept the country in the wake of the death of George Floyd, a Black man who died as a White Minneapolis police officer pressed his knee into Floyd's neck. It also became an issue during the Democratic presidential primary race, with the eventual winner, Joe Biden, supporting the creation of a commission.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., who oversees the full committee, said America has been forced recently to pay greater attention to the stark racial disparities dividing the country.

Washington Post photo by Matt McClain.

"As our nation continues to reckon with systemic racism in policing and a pandemic that has disproportionately devastated communities of color, the need to substantively confront America's legacy of slavery, segregation, and Jim Crow subjugation has only grown in urgency," Nadler said in a statement. "Discussing H.R. 40, a bill to study reparations, affords an opportunity to do just that. It is only by initiating national conversations about reconciliation, reparative justice, and reparations that we can build a fairer, more equitable future. I am proud that the House Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on this issue."

Dreisen Heath, a Human Rights Watch official who is scheduled to testify during the reparations hearing next week, said that "promises to end white supremacy, end systemic racism, and provide racial healing ring deeply hollow if the federal government is not taking steps to advance reparations for slavery, other forms of state-sponsored violence against Black people, and ongoing racial discrimination created by public policy."

But the push for a commission is likely to face opposition in both the House and Senate, as it has in the past.

The House Judiciary subcommittee held a hearing on H.R. 40 in 2019, as the country marked the 400th anniversary of slavery in the English colony of Virginia.

Then-Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said he did not support reparations.

"I don't think reparations for something that happened 150 years ago, for whom none of us currently living are responsible is a good idea," McConnell told reporters. "We tried to deal with our original sin of slavery by fighting a Civil War, by passing landmark civil rights legislation. We elected an African American president. I think we are always a work in progress in this country. But no one currently alive was responsible for that, and I don't think we should be trying to figure how to compensate for that."

During the 2019 hearing, Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of "The Case for Reparations," rejected McConnell's argument that "America should not be held liable for something that happened 150 years ago, since none of us currently alive are responsible. This rebuttal proffers a strange theory of governance that American accounts are somehow bound by the lifetime of its generations. But well into the century, the United States was still paying out pensions to the heirs of Civil War soldiers. We honor treaties that date back some 200 years despite no one being alive who signed those treaties."

On Tuesday, Rep. Steve Cohen, D- Tenn., chairman of the judiciary subcommittee, said it is imperative that the country take up the issue of reparations for more than two centuries of slavery followed by brutal Jim Crow segregation and decades of systemic racism.

"This hearing will look into creating a review of that history and what should be done about it," he said. "Our nearly 250-year history of slavery has never been properly addressed and certainly has had an adverse effect upon African-Americans' economic opportunities."

The number 40 in H.R. 40 refers to "40 acres and a mule," a broken promise made by the government to newly freed enslaved people at the end of the Civil War in 1865.

"The Union victory in the Civil War helped pave the way for the 13th Amendment to formally abolish the practice of slavery in the United States," according to a National Archives history. "But following their emancipation, most former slaves had no financial resources, property, residence, or education - the keys to their economic independence."

Government efforts to help formerly enslaved people "achieve some semblance of economic freedom, such as with '40 acres and a mule,' were stymied," according to the National Archives. "Without federal land compensation - or any compensation - many ex-slaves were forced into sharecropping, tenancy farming, convict-leasing, or some form of menial labor arrangements aimed at keeping them economically subservient and tied to land owned by former slaveholders."

Carter Woodson, the founder of Black History Month, wrote in his 1933 book "The Mis-Education of the Negro," that the poverty that afflicted Black people, "for a generation after Emancipation held them down to the lowest order of society, nominally free but economically enslaved."

In July, dozens of organization, including the ACLU, Amnesty International, Asians Americans Advancing Justice and the NAACP, sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other lawmakers demanding Congress move swiftly on the issue of reparations.

"People in the U.S. are increasingly aware that there is no way forward from the current strife without addressing one of the nation's most egregious violations of human rights-the institution of slavery," the organizations wrote in a joint letter to Congress.

"HR 40 is simply a first and reasonable step. ...The bill has been introduced for 30 years - yet for 30 years, it has languished. If the protests have demonstrated anything, it is that action cannot wait."
Cambodia's Lt. Gen. Hun Manet, a son of Prime Minister Hun Sen, thumbs up as he receives a shot of the COVID-19 vaccine at Calmette hospital in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Wednesday, Feb. 10, 2021. Cambodia began its inoculation campaign against the COVID-19 virus with vaccines donated from China, the country's closest ally. (AP Photo/Heng Sinith)

Three sons of Cambodian leader Hun Sen were inoculated against COVID-19 on Wednesday as the country began distributing vaccines donated from its closest ally, China.

Hun Manet, the head of the army and Hun Sen's eldest son, urged all Cambodians to be vaccinated and thanked China for the donation.

"I trust this vaccine and that is why I have been vaccinated with it," Hun Manet said.

China is donating 1 million doses of the Chinese-made Sinopharm vaccine, enough for half a million people, and the first shipment of 600,000 doses arrived in Cambodia on Sunday.

Hun Sen's two sons-in-law, government ministers and other officials were vaccinated at a state-run hospital.

Hun Sen himself backtracked on receiving the vaccine because he is 68.

In China, the Sinopharm vaccine was approved only for people ages 18-59 because that is the population studied in clinical trials. While there is not yet data on its effectiveness for other age groups, other countries have discretion to use it in older people.

China is Cambodia's biggest investor and its closest political partner, while Hun Sen is shunned by some Western nations who consider his government to be repressive. Cambodia in turn backs Beijing's geopolitical positions in international forums on issues such as China's territorial claims in the South China Sea.

A Cambodian nurse prepares the COVID-19 vaccine at Calmette hospital in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Wednesday, Feb. 10, 2021. Cambodia began its inoculation campaign against the COVID-19 virus with vaccines donated from China, the country's closest ally. (AP Photo/Heng Sinith)

Cambodian Environment Minister Say Sam Al, right, receives a shot of the COVID-19 vaccine at Calmette hospital in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Wednesday, Feb. 10, 2021. Cambodia began its inoculation campaign against the COVID-19 virus with vaccines donated from China, the country's closest ally. (AP Photo/Heng Sinith)

Cambodia's Lt. Gen. Hun Manet, right, a son of Prime Minister Hun Sen, prepares to receive a shot of the COVID-19 vaccine at Calmette hospital in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Wednesday, Feb. 10, 2021. Cambodia began its inoculation campaign against the COVID-19 virus with vaccines donated from China, the country's closest ally. (AP Photo/Heng Sinith)

Cambodia's Lt. Gen. Hun Manet, right, a son of Prime Minister Hun Sen, receives a shot of the COVID-19 vaccine at Calmette hospital in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Wednesday, Feb. 10, 2021. Cambodia began its inoculation campaign against the COVID-19 virus with vaccines donated from China, the country's closest ally. (AP Photo/Heng Sinith)

Cambodia's Lt. Gen. Hun Manet, a son of Prime Minister Hun Sen, receives a shot of the COVID-19 vaccine at Calmette hospital in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Wednesday, Feb. 10, 2021. Cambodia began its inoculation campaign against the COVID-19 virus with vaccines donated from China, the country's closest ally. (AP Photo/Heng Sinith)

A Cambodian nurse gives a shot of the COVID-19 vaccine at Calmette hospital in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Wednesday, Feb. 10, 2021. Cambodia began its inoculation campaign against the COVID-19 virus with vaccines donated from China, the country's closest ally. (AP Photo/Heng Sinith)

China also announced it would give Cambodia 1 million doses of the vaccine produced by Beijing Institute of Biological Products Co., but a date for delivering the rest of the promised amount has not yet been set.

Cambodia has recorded 478 confirmed cases of infection with the coronavirus, with no deaths.

Hun Sen said earlier this month that Cambodia seeks to reserve 20 million vaccine doses to inoculate 10 million people, roughly two-thirds of its total population.

In addition to the Chinese donation, Australia has announced a grant of $28 million to purchase 3 million doses, and it is set to get 7 million doses through the World Health Organization's COVAX initiative.

Explore further Follow the latest news on the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak

 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
Mumbai, Feb 10 : Actress Bhumi Pednekar is heading to Rishikesh after wrapping the Dehradun schedule of her next film Badhaai Do. She is excited to shoot in Rishikesh because she feels the holy town has only brought her good luck.

"Rishikesh holds a very special place in my heart and it has been incredibly lucky for me! I shot in this most beautiful place for my debut film Dum Laga Ke Haisha, then for Shubh Mangal Saavdhan, and both these films went on to become huge hits. Now, I will be shooting in Rishikesh again for Badhaai Do and I'm certain that it will become my lucky charm for the third time!" Bhumi said.

She shared that visiting Rishikesh will evoke a lot of nostalgia for her.

Bhumi said: "I'm really excited to soak in this city because there are so many memories attached to it. I have always received so much love from the people of Rishikesh every time I have visited and I'm looking forward to their warm hospitality again. It's been a while. I can't wait to go back and relive all the nostalgia, all the love, all the incredible local food of Rishikesh." Badhaai Do is the second instalment in the Badhaai Ho franchise. While the first film starred Ayushmann Khurrana and Sanya Malhotra, the new film will see Bhumi team with Rajkummar Rao to take the franchise forward.

The film is directed by Harshvardhan Kulkarni, who helmed the Gulshan Devaiah-starrer comedy Hunterr (2015), and is written by Suman Adhikary and Akshat Ghildial, who earlier wrote Badhaai Ho.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text

Dream Water signs agreement with leading Chinese distributor for the sale of Dream Water products across Asia, including through TMall, one of the world's largest online marketplaces

Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - February 10, 2021) - Harvest One Cannabis Inc. (TSXV: HVT) (OTCQB: HRVOF) ("Harvest One" or the "Company"), a uniquely positioned, CPG company, announced today that it has further expanded its international presence with the signing of a Distribution Agreement (the "Agreement") with leading distributor Golden River Services Ltd. ("Golden River"), based in China.

"Aligning our core brands with one of China's leading consumer goods distribution networks is an important step in the advancement of Harvest One's international strategy," said Gord Davey President and CEO of Harvest One. "Golden River has access to enormous online distribution throughout several prominent regions in Asia. International expansion is a key priority for Harvest One as we continue to evaluate opportunities to expand the growth of our consumer brands. Our online sales in North America have grown significantly, so gaining access to the largest online market in the world meets another strategic milestone for Harvest One."

Under the Agreement, Golden River will sell and distribute Dream Water products throughout China and other Asian countries, including Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan. Golden River is a leading Asian consumer goods distributor representing prominent brands such as Nestle, Brita, Durex and Jamieson. Golden River has significant online presence with retail partners such as Taoboa Global Shopping and TMall Global Shopping, with over 500 million active monthly users. They also have retail access through airlines and duty-free shops which aligns with Dream Waters existing business in North America.

For more information on Golden River please visit their website at: www.goldenriverservice.com.

About Harvest One

Harvest One is global CPG company that develops and distributes premium health, wellness and selfcare products with a market focus on sleep, pain, and anxiety. Harvest One is a uniquely positioned company in the cannabis space with a focus on cannabis infused and non-infused consumer packaged goods. Harvest One owns and operates three subsidiaries; Dream Water Global, LivRelief (consumer) and Satipharm (medical and nutraceutical). For more information, please visit www.harvestone.com.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

Certain statements contained in this press release constitute forward-looking information. These statements relate to future events or future performance about Harvest One and its business and operations, which include, among other things, statements with respect to the Strategic Review, its corporate strategy moving forward, its financial position, and future opportunities available for the Company. The use of any of the words "could", "intend", "expect", "believe", "will", "projected", "estimated" and similar expressions and statements relating to matters that are not historical facts are intended to identify forward-looking information and are based on the Company's current belief or assumptions as to the outcome and timing of such future events. Actual future results may differ materially. The forward-looking information contained in this press release is made as of the date hereof, and the Company is not obligated to update or revise any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by applicable securities laws. Because of the risks, uncertainties and assumptions contained herein, investors should not place undue reliance on forward-looking information. The foregoing statements expressly qualify any forward-looking information contained herein.

Neither TSX-V nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX-V) accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Investor Relations:

Colin Clancy

Investor Relations

IR@harvestone.com

1-877-915-7934

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/74140
MINNEAPOLIS (AP)  The suspect in the fatal shooting at a Minnesota medical clinic was able to enter the building despite threatening violence there two years earlier, posting a sign near his home about a doctor he disliked and frightening a nurse at a nearby hospital so much that a colleague hit a panic button for help.

Despite these red flags, Gregory Paul Ulrich entered an Allina medical clinic northwest of Minneapolis on Tuesday and opened fire, killing one staff member and injuring four others before he was arrested, authorities said. Authorities also found a suspicious device at the clinic and other devices at a hotel where Ulrich, 67, had been staying.

While police have said they had multiple run-ins with Ulrich, one security expert says its not clear whether police could have done more to prevent Tuesdays attack.

Ulrich is expected to be charged Thursday with murder and possession of explosive devices, prosecutors said. Ulrich, who remained jailed Wednesday, did not return a phone message left at the jail by The Associated Press.

Allina identified the person who died as Lindsay Overbay, a 37-year-old medical assistant whom family and friends said had two young children. Allina also identified one of the injured as Sherry Curtis, a licensed practical nurse, but didnt give her condition and said it was not identifying the others because of their families wishes. Three people remained hospitalized Wednesday, with one in critical condition, one in fair condition and the other in good condition.

Authorities released few new details Wednesday, but court documents and interviews with people who know Ulrich paint a picture of a man who appeared volatile, had a problem with abusing painkillers, and was confrontational with medical care workers who treated him in Buffalo, a community of about 15,000 people roughly 40 miles (65 kilometers) northwest of Minneapolis.

Police Chief Pat Budke said Tuesday that Ulrich has a long history of conflict with medical clinics in the area. Requests to talk with Budke about what steps were taken to protect the clinic were not returned Wednesday.

Rich Stanek, a former Hennepin County sheriff who now runs a public safety consulting firm, said although Ulrich was well-known to law enforcement, its not clear what more police could have done.

When their deputies responded to calls with him, they were probably already on guard, Stanek said. But tracking him day to day? Not so much. The courts are going to have to figure out what happened. When he got arrested, if he suffered from mental illness, did they just make a referral and let it go?

Stanek said another issue is what the clinic did to protect its employees and patients: Theres no question the clinic had an obligation to protect, especially if there were recent threats.

The health system said in a statement that while Tuesday's shooting appears to be isolated, it has increased security at its facilities.

According to a police report, Ulrich threatened to carry out a mass shooting at the clinic Oct. 13, 2018, and a doctor told investigators that Ulrich had talked about shooting, blowing things up, and practicing different scenarios of how to get revenge. The doctor said Ulrich told him he dreamed about getting revenge on the people who tortured him, referring to issues he had with back surgeries and medication he was prescribed.

Ulrich told police he had been talking about his dreams and that he wouldnt actually do anything, and police took him for a mental health evaluation at a facility in Monticello, the report says.

But Allina medical staff believed Ulrich might act on the threats and took legal action to bar him from the companys property. A restraining order prohibited Ulrich from having contact with the doctor or going into the clinic and the nearby Allina-run Buffalo Hospital.

The application for the restraining order included a statement from a nurse at the hospital who said Ulrich had gone to the front desk in October 2018, seeking his medical records. She said he was unfocused and disoriented, and started yelling. She became fearful and a colleague pushed a panic alarm, she said, and Ulrich left when security approached.

Court records show Ulrich denied the allegations but did not object to the restraining order, which was due to expire Dec. 13, 2020.

It wasnt known Wednesday if the doctor was among the victims of Tuesdays attack; calls to his home rang unanswered.

Ulrich violated the restraining order and tried to plead guilty in May 2019, but the court didnt approve his plea and ordered an investigation. A court services agent found that Ulrich applied for a permit to buy a gun, and the court agreed with the agent's recommendation that he be barred from having one.

The court ordered a psychological evaluation that June, but court filings show Ulrich was unwilling to leave his home, claiming he was in too much pain. The charge of violating the restraining order was dismissed April 15, 2020, when the prosecutor said Ulrich was found mentally incompetent to proceed.

Raymond Zandstra, who lived with Ulrich in a mobile home park in Buffalo from February 2019 until last July, said Ulrich had mental health issues but never sought treatment.

Zandstra said he moved out after a dispute that ended in a restraining order. He said he saw Ulrich abuse prescription pills, use marijuana and alcohol and sniff glue. Ulrich told him he used to be a union carpenter but hurt his back, which was why he didnt work, Zandstra said.

Zandstra said Ulrichs animosity toward local health care workers started when Ulrichs doctor stopped prescribing him painkillers. He said Ulrich called his doctor no good, and put a sign attacking him by name on a shed facing the road that led to the Buffalo Hospital.

He didnt like the doctor, he didnt like the hospital, he didnt like the clinic because nobody would bend over to give him his painkillers anymore," Zandstra said.

BUCHANAN, MI -- Hows this for your first major release?

River Saint Joe Brewery, which has only been open since April 2, is releasing its first bottled beers on Feb. 12. But theyre not your average wheat or stout beers.

Both of the releases are collaboration beers with award-winning Journeyman Distillery in Three Oaks, Michigan, which is located just down the road and only about 20 minutes away.

We use Journeyman barrels because they make great whiskey, and Journeyman is also certified organic, said co-founder and CEO Brian Dougherty of River Saint Joe Brewery, which is farmstead brewery that grows 15 organic hop varieties on its 5 1/2-acre hop yard.

Organic barrel-aged beers are required to be aged in barrels that previously had organic whiskey, other distilled spirits or wine in them, he added.

They bottled only about 350 of each of the two types of beer, and they go on sale Feb. 12. Retail is $16 each in 500 ml bottles. They can be purchased online and in advance for pick up at riveraintjoe.com.

The beers:

Winnower Wheat Wine Ale (10.5% ABV)

Tasting Notes: Whiskey and wood scents first lead to a strong vanilla flavor; then transitions to combinations of various stone fruit. Notes of apricot, cherry, apple, and pear appear as secondary flavors. Winnower aged for seven months in Journeyman Last Feather Rye Whiskey barrels.

Scythe Imperial Stout (10.5% ABV)

Tasting Notes: With initial scents of bourbon and vanilla, this Imperial Stout has a wonderful dark chocolate flavor up front. The exceptionally smooth mouth feel leads to secondary flavors of molasses and faint coffee. Scythe Imperial Stout was aged for nine months in Journeyman Bourbon Whiskey barrels.

We visited River Saint Joe Brewery last week on our search for Michigans Best Outdoor Dining.

READ: Play River Rocks, get farm-to-table cuisine at this SW Michigan outdoor dining spot

While at the brewery, Dougherty said they typically have about 10 beers on tap. Their head brewer is Brandon MacClaren.

We followed up with him this week to ask a few more questions about the brewery.

River Saint Joe Brewery in Buchanan, Michigan grows all of its own organic hops for a variety beers. It is on our search for Michigan's Best Outdoor Dining.John Gonzalez

How many barrels of beer did River Saint Joe produce in 2020?

We opened in April of 2020 and havent been full capacity at any point this year, but we produced around 300 bbl so far.

How many barrels of beer Do you expect to produce in 2021?

Our best guess is around 600 bbls. Its been hard to predict though, because of the circumstances and pandemic regulation.

How big of a brewing system do you have?

We have a 10 bbl system and a 1.5 bbl system. We leaned small, because we emphasize crops from the farm and maintain a local focus.

You said you make 15 variety of hops that you use in all of your beer, except for one you get from Oregon. What are the hops that you grow on the farm?

Weve sourced a small amount of organic Magnum from Oregon Hophouse for bittering, but the vast majority of the hops come from the farm.

Flatwater Farms, the approximately 180 acre organic farm thats our home, has Magnum, Hallertau, Willamette, Cascade, Crystal, Nugget, Chinook, Tahoma, and Alpha Aroma currently in the hop yard. This year, the farm will be planting Triple Pearl and Triumph for the first time. Previously, Zeus, Newport, Liberty, Columbia, Sorachi Ace, Cluster, and Glacier.

Do you have an overall brewing style? What has been your top selling beers?

Our overall style is farmstead and organic, where we use as much from the farm as possible. Our water, which has a great brewing profile, comes from the farm. The power that helps us brew comes from solar panels on the roof. We want to be as much plant-to-pint as the land will responsibly allow.

The best seller has been the Farmhouse Pale Ale, which features organic cascade and chinook hops from Flatwater Farms and unmalted wheat from Granor Farm, another local organic farm. The Chocolate Rye Porter, uses Nugget from the farm, and Michigan rolled oats. The Golden Ale, which also uses Flatwater Farms Cascade hops, does really well, particularly in the summer and those looking for a more sessionable beer.

I see you have wine, too. Are you buying that from somewhere else?

Were producing our wine in partnership with Good Harbor Vineyards in Lake Leelanau, which is run by brother and sister, Sam and Taylor Simpson, who are also good friends.

What is Brandons brewing background? Was he a homebrewer? Or did he work at other places. Is he originally from the area?

Brandon started as a home brewer. He began his professional brewing career about 10 years ago at New Holland Brewing, moved to Founders, and then was the head brewer at Roak before he became the founding head brewer at River Saint Joe. He is originally from Livonia.

River Saint Joe Brewery in Buchanan, Michigan is a farm-to-table restaurant and organic brewery. It is on our search for Michigan's Best Outdoor Dining.John Gonzalez

IF YOU GO

River Saint Joe

15475 Walton Road, Buchanan, MI 49107

269-409-8015

Current Hours: 4-8 p.m. Thursday, 2-8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, and noon-6 p.m. Sunday; closed Monday-Wednesday

More info: riversaintjoe.com/ or on Facebook at facebook.com/riverstjoebrewery

Just in time for Valentine's Day, Cold Hearted from Bell's Brewery in Comstock, Michigan, "is a beer for your ex's parents -- the Cold Hearted ones who never thought you were good enough." It will be available at its General Store, exclusively, in downtown Kalamazoo on Feb. 10, 2021. It goes on sale online at 11 a.m. Feb. 9. Cold Hearted is an IPL at 7% ABV. It follows up last year's popular Black Hearted Black IPA.Bell's Brewery, Inc.

More Michigan Beer Stories

Bells releases Cold Hearted just in time for Valentines Day

Fresh watermelon, lots of bubbles combine in this new spritz from New Holland

This new Michigan Brewery App puts all your favorites in one place

Michigan craft beer trends, what to look for in 2021

Non-alcoholic beer creating a buzz in Michigan

Amys Top 10 Michigan beers of 2020

Gonzos Top 10 Michigan beers of 2020

Want to pass along a Michigan beer story idea or tip? Feel free to email us:

Amy Sherman: asherma2@mlive.com

John Gonzalez: gonzo@mlive.com

Follow our Michigans Best adventures on social media:

@mlivemibest on Twitter

@mlivemibest on Instagram

Facebook at MLiveMIBest.

Join in by using the hashtags #mibest and #outdoordining and #mibeer.

In addition:

Amy Sherman is on Twitter @amyonthetrail, as well as Facebook and Instagram @amyonthetrail.

John Gonzalez is on Twitter @michigangonzo, as well as Facebook and Instagram @MichiganGonzo.
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Belgium is an important international trade and investment partner of Ukraine, Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal has said.

He wrote about this on Twitter after a meeting with Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Belgium Sophie Wilmes in Brussels on February 10, according to an Ukrinform correspondent.

"I had a great dialogue with Sophie Wilmes on current issues. Belgium is an important trade and investment partner of Ukraine. I believe the economic mission of the BFTA to Ukraine in 2022-2025 would be a powerful impetus for strengthening our relations," Shmyhal said.

On Wednesday, the Prime Minister spoke with the leaders of Ukrainian NGOs in Belgium and Luxembourg via videoconferencing. "Thank you for your hard work to preserve Ukrainian traditions and support Ukraine in the EU," he said.

Shmyhal also held an online meeting with representatives of European companies. "Our dialogue demonstrated a strong interest in Ukrainian markets. Ukraine will pursue a path of critical economic reforms and promote economic partnership with the EU," he noted.

A Ukrainian government delegation headed by Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal began a working visit to Brussels on February 9. Shmyhal met with European Council President Charles Michel and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.

The program of the visit includes a series of working meetings with representatives of the European Commission and the European Parliament.

On February 11, Shmyhal will take part in the seventh meeting of the EU-Ukraine Association Council in Brussels.

ish
Mumbai, Feb 10 : One of the prime accused in the sensitive Bhima-Koregaon case, Rona J. Wilson has moved the Bombay High Court demanding a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to probe fake evidences planted into his computer and dismissal of the case against him, here on Wednesday.

The plea has been filed through his lawyer R. Sathyanarayanan and comes in the wake of a report by a US-based digital forensic firm Arsenal Consulting which has said that a Wilson's laptop was hacked and 10 letters planted in it prior to his arrest.

These letters were used by the Pune Police and later the National Investigation Agency as the basis of their evidence against Wilson and other activists arrested in the famous Bhima-Koregaon case.

Arsenal Consulting claimed that not only was Wilson's computer 'attacked and compromised' from June 13, 2016 for over 22 months, but similar malware attacks were made on even other accused in other high-profile Indian cases.

The hacker, who has not been identified, had used the malware to create hidden folders where the 10 incriminating letters were sent using an advanced version of MS Word which was not available on Wilson's laptop.

The US firm's report further said that it found no evidence suggesting that Wilson ever interacted with the top 10 most important documents used to prosecute him, and said he had in fact never opened those documents.

While making the series of sensational arrests in nationwide raids during 2018, the Pune Police had contended that among other things, the accused were hatching a conspiracy to assassinate Prime Minister Narendra Modi and overthrow the legitimately elected government.

When questioned on this, Bharatiya Janata Party Leader of Opposition, Devendra Fadnavis - who was Chief Minister at the relevant time - guardedly denied knowledge on this, but said that there was clinching evidence available on the 'Urban Naxals' case.

He said that the Supreme Court has declined them bail owing to the strong evidence but preferred further comments as the matter is sub-judice.

Wilson was among over two dozen accused nabbed from all over India for their alleged links with Maoist elements, for inflammatory speeches during the Bhima-Koregaon battle's 200th anniversary on Jan. 1, 2018, which resulted in caste riots the following day which claimed at least one life.

They were charged with 'waging war against the nation', spread the ideology of the banned CPI (Maoist) groups, inciting caste conflicts and hatred in society, etc.

In Jan. 2020, the Bhima-Koregaon and the related Elgar Parishas cases were handed over by the BJP at the Centre to the NIA despite strong opposition by the newly-elected Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government of Shiv Sena-Nationalist Congress Party-Congress.
Tunis/Tunisia  Minister of Foreign Affairs, Migration and Tunisians Abroad, Othman Jerandi had a telephone conversation with Abdul Hamid Dbeibah who has just been elected Libyan Prime Minister, wishing him success in his new position.

The telephone conversation was an opportunity for the Minister of Foreign Affairs to reaffirm Tunisia's commitment to support the efforts of Libyans in their consensual political process, the establishment of their constitutional institutions and the reconstruction of their country.

For his part, the Libyan Prime Minister welcomed Tunisia's consistent stance on the Libyan issue and its unwavering support "for the peaceful and consensual political process as the only way out of the crisis in Libya".

He welcomed, in this vein, the positive and constructive role Tunisia has played in advancing reconciliation between the Libyan parties, by hosting the Libyan Political Dialogue Forum, with the support of President Kais Saied.

The Forum, held in Tunisia, was a fundamental element in the success of the Geneva Forum which led to the election of a new Libyan executive.

The Libyan Political Dialogue Forum, last February 5, elected in Geneva, Switzerland, the list led by Mohammad Younes Menfi to the presidency of the Presidential Council, thus providing Libya with a new unified provisional executive, charged with overseeing the transition until the general elections on December 24.

The winning list received 39 votes out of 73. It is composed of : Mohammad Younes Menfi, President of the Presidency Council; Musa Al-Kouni and Abdullah Hussein al-Lafi, members of the Presidency Council; and Abdul Hamid Mohammed Dbeibah, Prime Minister-designate.
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Recently, I came across a biography of Braj Kishore Prasad  the foremost, but forgotten enlightened leader of Bihar. I would like to introduce your readers to the life and times of this patriot. The book - Shri Braj Kishore Prasad - The First Associate of Gandhiji in Bihar - is written by Surendra Gopal, Retired Professor of History, Patna University, published by Bihar Vidyapeeth Patna, 2012, $12.

The advent of modernity in Bihar was symbolized by the establishment of schools and colleges by the zamindars for the dissemination of English education needed for the introduction of the British system of management in their territories. B Prasad was a product of this change. He was a renaissance man - erudite, liberal, jurist, social reformer, freedom fighter and philanthropist.

He obtained a master and law degrees in spite of the adversity he faced after the death of his father. He encouraged the spread of English education among both sexes and promoted foreign travel for higher education. He showed his commitment to promote foreign travel by attending the dinner hosted for Dr. Ganesh Prasad after his return from England and sending Ambika Charan to Japan and meeting his expenses. While welcoming Charan, he arranged a secular dinner crossing the caste barriers.

A fearless fighter for justice when people were afraid to speak against the authorities, he tried to redress the plight of the peasants through legal means even before the arrival of Mahatma Gandhi in Champaran. His efforts resulted in the Settlement Report, though not very helpful to ryots, but at least it proved that the government acknowledged the grievances of the peasants.

B. Prasads organizational ability, his legal acumen and familiarity with the peasants problems helped Gandhiji to redress the sufferings of the peasants. Gandhiji took him to Ranchi to meet with the Governor on at the latters invitation. The meeting led to the introduction of The Champaran Agrarian Bill of 1917, which recommended the abolition of the tinkathia system and return of  the tawan (for releasing the peasants for cultivating indigo). It was a positive step, though not very satisfactory.

The aftermath of the Champaran movement brought a new breed of full-time politicians with a definite ideology and methodology. The lead was taken by B. Prasad. Though he differed with Gandhiji, at times, he was his most trusted colleague. Whenever Gandhiji was away from Champaran, he deputed B. Prasad to substitute for him. Braj Kishore Prasad along with Anugrah Narayan Singh and Rajendra Prasad nurtured and strengthened the functioning of the Congress Party in Bihar. Such was his popularity and influence nationwide that he was elected as a member of the Congress Working Committee - the apex decision making body. But he confined his activities to Bihar and tried to implement Gandhijis policies in the State.

As a Chairman of the Reception Committee of the Congress Session at Gaya in 1923, he exhibited his organizational ability and integrity. He was a social reformer and he supported the efforts of those with whom he differed. Though defeated by the Maharaja of Darbhanga for the membership of the Bengal Legislative Council, he supported the Maharaja for introducing the Panchayat system to minimize litigation among the villagers.

Like Gandhiji, B. Prasad regarded that social reforms would improve the conditions of the peasants. He worked hard for the emancipation of women who were mainly engaged in the household affairs with no role in the society due to illiteracy prevailing among them. He provided examples by encouraging his daughters to get education discard purda and participate in the community affairs. He sent his daughter - Prabhavati- to live in Gandhijis Ashram- a bold step at that time. This had a salutary effect and people followed his example by letting their women folks to get education and involve in political and social activities. Women joined the freedom struggle and suffered imprisonment.

Though indisposed, he kept a close watch on the civil Disobedience Movement and guided it from Patna. During the worst earthquake in Bihar in 1934, B. Prasad with failing health supervised the relief work. He did not live to see the independence of India as he passed away in 1946.

The book -a labor of love - is based on sound principles of historical research. Written in a people-friendly language, it traces the history of freedom struggle and reform movement in Bihar, which involved masses in the social and political activities. We get a glimpse of the rise of caste and communal politics in Bihar due to the election of local bodies and provincial legislature. The book is a must on the bookshelves of those interested in Indian struggle for freedom as the history of India revolves round Bihar. The author has done a commendable service to the historical research. Several appendices relating to the Champaran movement and the speech of Braj Kishore Prasad add to the value of the book. The printing of the book is good, but the binding is bad.

Editor's note: Mr. Prasad, who was born on January 14, 1877, was married at 11 years of age to Phuljhari Devi. They had seven children though two daughters and a son died at infancy. Two sons and two daughters survived. One of the daughters, Prabhavati, later married to Loknayak Jaya Prakash Narayan, while other daughter Vidyapati married to Mritunjaya Prasad, son of India's first President Dr. Rajendra Prasad.


Nicola Sturgeon was facing fury today after her Government demanded English authorities quarantine all travellers flying into England if they were planning to go to Scotland.

The First Minister was accused of trying to extend Scottish laws south of the border with the demand that would force England to lock people up in hotels for 10 days even if local rules said they did not need to.

Under plans unveiled by Health Secretary Matt Hancock last night, only arrivals from 33 Red List nations would be required to stay locked in a hotel for 10 days in England.

Scotland however, is forcing all international arrivals into its airports to undergo the stay at a cost of 1,750. Scots Transport Secretary Michael Matheson last night confirmed the SNP government in Edinburgh wants Boris Johnson to adhere to Scotland's policy for travellers heading north of the border via England.

Tory MP Peter Bone said Ms Sturgeon needed to clarify what her government was demanding.

'If someone arrives in England and then travels to Scotland they have to abide by the Scottish laws but it is wrong for the First Minister of Scotland to try and impose her laws on English airports,' he told MailOnline.

'Thats ridiculous and bears no logic. If that is what she means I think the UK Government should firmly reject that idea.

'She should clarify ... and make it clear that quarantine rules will apply once someone goes into Scotland.'

Passengers arriving at UK airports have to fill out a 'passenger locator form' in the 48 hours before arriving in Great Britain.

Details required include 'your travel details, including times and dates ... and the address where you will stay in the UK.'

This would theoretically allow authorities to identify travellers going on to Scotland.

Scots Transport Secretary Michael Matheson last night confirmed the SNP government in Edinburgh wants Boris Johnson to adhere to Scotland's policy for travellers heading north of the border

Under plans unveiled by Health Secretary Matt Hancock last night, only arrivals from 33 Red List nations would be required to stay locked in a hotel for 10 days

Such a move by the PM would effectively partially impose the Scottish policy on England, and it is not clear how it would be enforceable at ports and airports

Addressing the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood yesterday, Mr Matheson said: 'Passengers entering England from the red-list countries who then seek to travel onto Scotland will have to isolate in a hotel in England. Last week, that was 130 people.

'We continue to press the UK Government to adopt what we believe is a more comprehensive approach, and require all arrivals to go into a quarantine hotel.

'We ask the UK Government to work with us to identify international travellers not caught by this approach so that arrangements can be made for them to isolate in a quarantine hotel, in line with the policy in Scotland.'

Mr Matheson told MSPs the UK's strategy on international travel was 'no longer sufficient to provide the protection necessary'.

Given the lack of investigation globally into new strains of the virus, Mr Matheson said it was 'very hard to say with confidence where the high-risk countries are'.

'That is why the Scottish Government wants a comprehensive approach to managed isolation,' he added.

Last night Mr Hancock announced people returning to England from Red List destinations would have to pay 1,750 to quarantine for 10 days in Government-designated hotels.

Those caught lying about their movements could be fined 10,000 or jailed for 10 years.

He indicated the quarantine measures might be in place until the autumn if vaccine booster jabs are needed in response to coronavirus variants.

He told MPs that 16 hotels have been contracted to provide 4,600 rooms for the quarantine programme, which begins on Monday.

The Scottish Government said that it would go further and require all international travellers arriving into Scotland to stay in a quarantine hotel.

No international flights are currently operating to Wales or Northern Ireland.

Mr Matheson told MSPs that six hotels have been block-booked in Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow, with up to 1,300 rooms available.

Transport Secretary Grant Shapps told Times Radio this morning that insisting on the same quarantine rules as Scotland would cut off crucial supply routes for vaccines and other essential goods.

Transport Secretary Grant Shapps told Times Radio this morning that insisting on the same quarantine rules as Scotland would cut off crucial supply routes for vaccines and other essential goods.

'Scotland is in a slightly different position. A lot of their supply chain comes through England. For example the short straits, that's Dover to Calais, brings into the UK as a whole 75 percent of our medicines, 40 percent of our food, much of which will go to Scotland,' he said.

'If we were to do what Scotland have done we would actually be closing off their supply routes for critical goods. And a certain number of people need to move around to make sure critical infrastructure is kept going.

'The technical stuff that keeps the water supply and keeps electrics running. Sometimes people need to come and go... We wouldn't have the vaccines, we wouldn't have medicine for all sorts of purposes, we wouldn't have food on the shelves...

'Some people say why don't you just close the borders, or even quarantine everybody. That wouldn't work, we wouldn't be able to function as a country.There would be massive social costs and economic costs. That's not practical.'

A Welsh Government spokesman said Wales will be adopting the new border measures announced for England.

The spokesperson said: 'This will include all people returning to Wales from 15 February being required to book and pay for tests before they travel. This will be done through the UK portal, whether a person has been in a Red List country or not.

'People returning to Wales from Red List countries are doing so through other ports in the UK, primarily via England. From 15 February, all arrivals in England will be required to isolate in designated hotels.

'This includes anyone planning to travel on to Wales, and they will need to enter a designated hotel for quarantine in England. This will need to be booked before travel.'


On Tuesday morning, the police carried out a major vehicle check near Mertert. A number of drivers were fined for various offences.

Six people were fined 74 each because the windows of their vehicles were not sufficiently cleared of snow and their field of vision was not clear enough.

One driver was fined 145 and lost two points for refusing to give way to a pedestrian on a pedestrian crossing. Four other drivers received the same penalty for using their phones while driving and two others for failing to wear a seatbelt.

Finally, two people were fined 24 each because they could not present valid insurance document for their vehicles.
United States President Donald Trump addresses the nation via video about the results of his second impeachment by the United States Congress Wednesday.
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

With businesses looking to support the mental health of their staff more than ever, Wellcome is urging them to take a science-based approach. Miranda Wolpert shares what we've learned so far about what works for supporting mental health at work.

2020 brought disruption to most people's working lives including, for many, a loss or struggle to find employment. Those who were employed (and those who employed others) faced new challenges: from adapting to working at home, to balancing work with home schooling, to dealing with new risks when working on the frontline. There is no doubt that COVID-19 has significantly affected where and how we work and raised employee mental health even higher on the workplace agenda.

At last year's World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, Wellcome encouraged businesses to stop throwing money at programmes advertised on glossy brochures, and focus instead on understanding the science behind what really works for whom in terms of supporting mental health at work. A year on, at virtual Davos Agenda 2021, it was encouraging to see workplace mental health top of the agenda for so many.

As our work over the last year at Wellcome has shown, despite progress, we still have a lot to learn about this.

What have we learned in a year?

In 2020 we funded ten global research teams

to look at the evidence behind promising approaches for preventing anxiety and depression in the workplace, with a focus on younger workers.

The approaches included peer support, financial wellbeing, flexible working and group psychological first aid. Two teams also looked specifically at interventions in low- and middle-income countries, focusing on mindfulness and involving the workforce.

Until we publish the full findings from this research later this year, here are a few examples of what we've learned:

Flexible working can reduce work-life conflict, which can be a major source of stress, depression and anxiety. But the uptake of flexible working often depends on the amount of support from managers and the culture of the organization.

Breaking up excessive sitting with light activity by just one hour per eight-hour day may reduce depression symptoms by 10% and anxiety symptoms by 15%. Some ways to break up excessive sitting include sit-stand desks, standing meetings and encouraging movement breaks.

Having more autonomy in your role is associated with lower rates of anxiety and depression. Employers can increase employees' autonomy by allowing them more freedom to craft how they do their roles.

The research also highlighted some important gaps in the evidence. For example, although there is significant research about how effective mindfulness interventions are in high-income countries, we know far less about their use in workplaces in low- and middle-income countries, particularly in industries such as hospitality and tourism. Many of the research teams noted the lack of detail about how different interventions affect younger workers. And approaches to measuring mental health in the workplace are very inconsistent, making it hard to compare across studies.

What next?

Later this year, in partnership with the World Economic Forum, we'll be launching a second commission to review the evidence behind other promising approaches to supporting mental health at work. We're particularly keen to understand more about the effectiveness of specific approaches in low- and middle-income countries and how to support different groups within the workforce.

We'll also continue to talk to businesses about what it means to take a science-based approach. We've already spoken to many organizations who are thinking about how they can best support the mental health of their employees. And it's been encouraging to see a growing number of organizations collaborating on this, including through networks such as the Global Business Collaboration for Better Mental Health and One Mind at Work, who see how important evidence is.

Our hope is that in the future employers who want to make the biggest difference for their staff will make use of the existing evidence and also work with researchers to build new evidence. In this way, businesses could rapidly increase our understanding of what works and what doesn't. We're looking forward to working with them so that at next year's Davos meeting we have even more progress to report and celebrate.

Explore further Work addiction can be harmful to mental health

President Joe Biden on Tuesday endorsed the House Democratic proposal to give $1,400 direct payments to everyone making $75,000 or less and couples making $150,000 or less in the coronavirus stimulus bill now making its way through Congress.

Biden simply said, Yes, and did not elaborate when asked if he agreed with the proposal, according to White House pool reports.

And White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said later that Biden supports that where the status of negotiations is at this point. Yes, the $75,000.

Still, Psaki said talks were continuing on the scale of the payments and where they would cut off.

These negotiations are ongoing, she said. We certainly support the discussions as theyre happening, and certainly his view is hes open to the discussion about making them more targeted and ensuring that people who need relief the most receive the relief.

House committees this week are drafting the sections of the stimulus bill that fall under their jurisdiction as congressional Democrats make plans to pass the $1.9 trillion legislation through a process known as reconciliation, which prevents a filibuster and allows them to enact the bill without Republican support.

The House Ways and Means Committee on Wednesday will begin drafting its section of the coronavirus bill, including the $1,400 stimulus payments and an extension of temporary federal unemployment insurance benefits until Aug. 29 and increases the extra weekly federal payment to $400 from $300.

The proposal also would cut off all stimulus payments for individuals earning more than $100,000 or couples earning more than $200,000.

CORONAVIRUS RESOURCES: Live map tracker | Newsletter | Homepage

New Jersey and its municipalities would get $9.4 billion in federal aid under a proposed formula proposed Tuesday by the House Oversight Committee. The state would receive $6.5 billion and localities $2.9 billion out of a pot of $350 billion.

Such assistance has been a top Democratic priority and the Republican refusal to provide any assistance delayed approval of a stimulus bill for months in the last Congress.

The committee will vote Friday on approving aid to states and localities striving to deliver critical services to struggling families and save the jobs of essential public servants like teachers, firefighters, and other first responders during the coronavirus pandemic, according to chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y.

Even though Republican-run Texas would get $27.2 billion, second only to California, and Florida would get $16.4 billion, the fourth-highest total, the top Republican on the Oversight Committee, Rep. James Comer of Kentucky derided what he called a plan to bail out locked-down, poorly managed liberal states.

Another committee, Transportation and Infrastructure, will meet Wednesday to draft its section of the legislation, which includes $26.1 billion in funds for transit agencies in large metropolitan areas.

Based on previous allocations, NJ Transit could get close to $2 billion. There also is an additional $2.2 billion for transit to be allocated to those agencies with the greatest need. And there is $1.25 billion for specific grant programs, including New Starts, which will partially fund construction of the new Portal Bridge over the Hackensack River.

Amtrak would receive $1.5 billion, which would allow the passenger railroad to restore daily long-distance service and recall its furloughed employees and pay them through Sept. 30. Airports and their concessionaires would get $8 billion.

Also in the proposal is $50 billion for the Federal Emergency Management Agency to reimburse state, local, tribal and territorial governments for COVID-19 expenses such as deploying the National Guard, providing personal protective equipment, and vaccination efforts.

The Energy and Commerce Committee, chaired by Rep. Frank Pallone Jr., D-6th Dist., will draft provisions speeding up vaccine distribution and increasing testing on Thursday.

As new variants of the virus emerge, it is vital that Congress act quickly to provide relief to the American people and the resources and support needed to bring an end to the COVID-19 pandemic, Pallone said.

The panels top Republican, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington, asked Pallone to pause the partisan sprint towards a reconciliation package for one week and begin earnest, bipartisan negotiations on further COVID relief with the GOP minority.

The committee under Republican control used the same parliamentary procedure to try to repeal the Affordable Care Act in 2017, and McMorris Rodgers was a member of House Republican leadership when the GOP majority used reconciliation to pass its 2017 tax cut that the Congressional Budget Office said would increase the deficit by $1.9 trillion over 10 years.

Pallone declined comment on McMorris Rodgers request.

On the Senate side, while lawmakers are serving as jurors in the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump, the committees are drafting sections of the stimulus bill. Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Robert Menendez of New Jersey said Tuesday that his panel would add $10 billion in foreign aid to the legislation to help fight the coronavirus and variants in other countries before they migrate to the U.S.

For as long as COVID-19 is anywhere, it can spread everywhere, directly threatening the national security, our economy and the health and safety of the American people, Menendez said at a press conference with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and several committee chairs.

We understand the sense of urgency here. COVID-19 knows no borders. The longer we allow the virus to spread, the more it mutates into new strains; and the more it mutates into new strains, the greater the threat to the efficacy of our vaccines and the ability to rebuild our economy and restore our way of life.

Jonathan D. Salant may be reached at jsalant@njadvancemedia.com.

Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to NJ.com.
Prof PONTIANO KALEEBU is the executive director of the Uganda Virus Research Institute (UVRI), the lead agency in Uganda's race to get the Covid-19 vaccine and at the same time the director of the partner organization the Medical Research Council/UVRI & London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine Uganda Research Unit.

In an interview with David Lumu, he said it may take Uganda a longer time to get a locally-made vaccine but the effort put in will accelerate UVRI's efforts to find the elusive vaccine for HIV/Aids and other infections.

At the moment, the biggest debate about Covid-19 revolves around the vaccine, which has already started being rolled out in some countries; what is the current state of affairs as far as Uganda is concerned?

It is exciting that vaccines have started to come in to remedy the situation while many more are still being developed. Even low and middle-income countries are beginning to receive the vaccines, already the vaccines have reached South Africa, they will soon reach Kenya, Egypt and other places.

In Uganda there are efforts to get the vaccines. We have three major ways to this. One is through what we call the COVAX facility. In order to have access to vaccines, different organizations, manufacturers and governments including WHO, The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations (GAVI) and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) set up the Covid-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) Facility aimed to accelerate the development and manufacture of Covid-19 vaccines, and to guarantee fair and equitable access for every country in the world including low and middle-income countries.

Already, there are 90 million vaccine doses allocated for Africa through COVAX facility and by the end of 2021, there will be about 600 million doses. The aim is to reach about 20% of the Africa population by the end of the year.

The initial supply to Uganda of about 3.6 million doses is expected to be delivered towards the start of March 2021. The ministry of Health set up a COVAX advisory group that is working through the Uganda National Immunization Technical Advisory Group (UNITAG).

It is currently discussing the allocation, criteria on how the Covid-19 vaccine will be prioritized and phased. This team has already come up with a priority list that includes some essential health workers, security forces and vulnerable groups like people 50 years and above and others with diseases like diabetes.

The team will also advise on the efficacy and science of different vaccines. Secondly, we also have the African Union and the Africa Centers for Disease Control who are also aiming for an additional supply to reach an additional 20 per cent of the African population by the end of 2021.

Thirdly, our government is negotiating to bring about 18 million doses using our resources with the expectation of getting the supplies from Serum Institute of India. But considering that there is a lot of global demand for the supplies, any one of the three approaches may not be able to deliver the vaccines on time, hence the need for the different approaches.

As time goes on, there will be private people who will also join in or partner with government to purchase and deliver Covid-19 vaccines. Government has also put together a National high level committee on accessing and deploy-ing the Covid-19 vaccines. It will be coordinated through the Office of the Prime Minister.

So, there is a lot of preparations going on, including training materials and vaccine deployment plans which have been developed.

How soon should we expect the vaccines developed in Uganda?

We are also developing our vaccines through funding from Government, but as you know this is not a quick process it takes time, all the same it's a good and wise move which will allow to develop more capacity in vaccine development even beyond Covid-19.

I am glad these efforts have been highly supported by government and the president himself, for our scientists to come up with a vaccine quickly. However, it will take us a longer time to get a vaccine than other countries that have developed the vaccine because they started their research much earlier, building on a catalogue of research done on HIV/Aids and other infections over the years.

It not possible to give timelines, and this means that for now, we have to utilize the vaccines that become available and ensure that these existing vaccines are accessible to Ugandans as we build on our own capacity. We have those from Pfizer and Moderna with about 90 per cent protection.

Then there is one from AstraZeneca and Janssen vaccines. Globally more vaccines are coming out. The Russians and Chinese recently published their results showing their vaccines are effective.

So, we are hoping that in the long term, if majority of people are vaccinated plus the additional few who get infections, we shall reach the herd immunity and the transmission of the virus will go down. The other plan is to conduct more trials of new vaccines, since as we now realize, with the mutation of the virus, the more products we have, the better.

We are working with colleagues at Imperial College London to prepare for a trial of a new vaccine in the coming few months.

In Uganda, we have delayed in starting our vaccine trial as the vaccine we are supposed to use is being redesigned to improve on its performance. Why prioritize those above 50 years? How safe are those below that age bracket?

Basing on the data that has been collected, although all ages get infected, those who are most severely affected are in the older age group of 50 years and above.

Even among the older people, the most vulnerable are those who have co-morbidity diseases like diabetes and hypertension.

In December, the Chinese community in Uganda imported a Covid-19 vaccine for its own people. Have you made any effort to tap into this vaccine? Or was the vaccine tailored to work only on the Chinese?

In this case, we as UVRI played no part. But what everyone needs to know is that a vaccine is not tailored to a race or country, but rather to the virus and now there are several Covid-19 variants being reported. What could happen is that a Covid-19 variant may be common in one location and affecting majority of the people there, and may require specific vaccine to match the virus.

So, it is the virus variants that determine which vaccine to be given but not the race. We couldn't just jump on the Chinese vaccine before getting results from their trials to know how effective. This information is now coming in and decisions will be made.

Seeing the huge effort to get the Covid-19 vaccine within a year since the pandemic broke out, one wonders why such similar effort is not put into the fight against Malaria and HIV/Aids, which kill more people annually than Covid-19. Some critics even suggest that it could be deliberate because malaria and HIV/Aids have not ravaged western nations like Covid-19...

There are a number of reasons why getting a Covid-19 vaccine has moved very fast. A lot of the technology has come from the investments put in research for the HIV/Aids vaccine as well as other infections like malaria and tuberculosis.

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Years of working to get these vaccines has really helped a lot in fast-tracking the Covid-19 vaccine. Besides that, Covid-19 has had a lot of funding, much higher than the HIV/Aids vaccine.

About $90 billion has been invested in the Covid-19 vaccine in a short time compared to about $15 billion for HIV vaccines over the past 20 years. But, of course the $90 billion includes large manufacture and delivery where HIV has not yet reached.

Then most of the minds stopped all other activities and concentrated on Covid-19. So, we can see that if we put our energies and resources together, we can move faster. In this generation, we had never seen a pandemic affecting millions of people globally, but the quick availability and use of resources and advances in science helping to come up with a vaccine so quickly. This is now giving us hope of fast-tracking the development of other vaccines.

But it's very important to know these viruses are different, HIV is much more complicated and developing a vaccine against HIV is not as straight forward as for Covid-19

What explains the reducing numbers of Covid-19 cases in Uganda yet people seem to have abandoned standard operating procedures like wearing masks and social distancing?

It is true Covid-19 numbers are rising globally although here in Uganda we have seen some declines in the past few weeks. The fact is that for now we are not sure why, we need to study this more. On the other hand, such drops are not new and I call upon all Ugandans to heed government's advice in combatting the pandemic. It is too early to celebrate because Covid-19 is still with us for some time.

UK Government extend Covid-19 vaccination contract with Wrexhams Wockhardt factory

This article is old - Published: Wednesday, Feb 10th, 2021

Wockhardt has been awarded a six-month extension of its agreement with the UK Government to fill-finish COVID-19 vaccines.

An 18 month contract had initially been signed for the global pharmaceutical and biotechnology company to carry out the crucial stage of the manufacturing process CP Pharmaceuticals, a subsidiary of Wockhardt based in Wrexham.

The new agreement has now been expanded to last until August 2022, with the manufacturing continuing to be undertaken in Wrexham.

UK International Trade Secretary Liz Truss, said: This is a brilliant bit of news for the UK and people of Wrexham.





It brings important investment to the local area, bringing jobs and security to the community as we battle this awful pandemic.

Wockhardts investment shows the strength of our trading ties with India which is a further boost to our already-strong vaccine supply as we build back stronger from coronavirus.

Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng said: While the UKs vaccination programme has been a national success story so far, we need to take steps to ensure we can manufacture vaccines into 2022 should we need to revaccinate or provide boosters to the population.

By extending our contract with Wockhardt, we will ensure the UK has uninterrupted fill and finish capacity, guaranteeing we have sufficient supplies to protect the British public in the long-term.

Speaking about the contract Ravi Limaye, Managing Director, Wockhardt UK added This extension by the UK Government displays our collaboration and commitment in the vital role that we have been playing in the fill-finish process for COVID-19 vaccines in UK.

Wockhardt, a global pharmaceutical and biotech organisation, brings in affordable, high quality medicines to market.

In the UK, Wockhardt is one of the largest suppliers into the NHS for over 20 years, has had a presence in Wrexham for over two decades and employs over 400 people at its 612,000 square feet high-tech manufacturing facility.

Shango Has Been Named to the Cannabis 50 List Shango CEO Brandon Rexroad said, This is a great honor from a prestigious organization. We are thrilled to be cited as one of the best cannabis companies in the country.

Multistate cannabis company Shango has been named to the Cannabis 50 List published by MGO (Macias Gini & O'Connell LLP), one of the fastest-growing professional services firms in the U.S.

MGOs 2nd annual Cannabis 50 list highlights companies, organizations and individuals that had a positive impact on the U.S. cannabis and hemp industries in 2020. MGO is a leader in accounting, tax, audit and advisory solutions for the cannabis and hemp industries.

"From a global health crisis and subsequent economic fallout, to cannabis being deemed 'essential' in a pandemic and the sweeping public support for legalization during the election, cannabis and hemp investors, operators and advocates endured great challenges but also made great strides forward, during 2020," says Scott Hammon, head of MGO's Cannabis Practice. "The Cannabis 50 is our way of recognizing those who are reshaping and inspiring the growth and success of the cannabis industry. We honor individuals and organizations who overcame obstacles to make progress during a transformative year.

Other notables on this years list were Snoop Dogg, Martha Stewart, Willie Nelson, Jay-Z, Green Thumb Industries, Curaleaf, Leafly and Ocean Spray.

In watching operators within the Cannabis industry navigate their growth, I think Shango has really stayed true to their vision. They value quality and their people, and put them first, while also being socially responsible within the communities they serve, says Francisco Colon, CPA and partner of MGOs Cannabis Practice.

Shango CEO Brandon Rexroad said, This is a great honor from a prestigious organization. We are thrilled to be cited as one of the best cannabis companies in the country.

Honorees on the Cannabis 50 list appear in MGOs "Cannabis 50 Impact Review," and will be featured in expanded interviews and additional content, webinars and panels that will be rolled out throughout 2021.

The MGO honor included the following, Shango takes a community first approach to their Corporate Social Responsibility program by adopting local causes and performs activations directly within their market areas. Each retail/dispensary location adopts their local Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) post and does direct fund-raising and charitable events. Theyve also partnered closely with Veterans Village in Las Vegas, raising funds and non-perishable food and clothing items. They are proactive advocates for Breast Cancer Awareness. They have a long-running pink purchases event in October that supports local charities like Ink Ribbon in Las Vegas, and they sponsor a breast cancer awareness radio show in Oregon for Breast Friends. Shango Moreno Valley is actively working within their community and have committed to monthly food drives of non-perishable food as well as fresh produce they receive from local farmers to help Unity of Faith Food Pantry along with the Salvation Armys Adopt a Family Program.

Specific criteria for making the list were not disclosed.

The Cannabis 50 is free to download at http://www.cannabis50.com.

2020 Cannabis 50 honorees include (In Alphabetical Order): 4Front Ventures, Aphria, Inc., AYR Strategies, BDS Analytics, Benzinga, CANN, Cannabis Certification Council, Columbia Care, Curaleaf, Curio Wellness, Dentons, Dr. Lawrence Smart, Drug Policy Alliance, Dutchie, East West Bank, Fox Rothschild, Gotham Green Partners, Green Thumb Industries, Grown In, Innovative Industrial Properties, Intrinsic Capital, Jay-Z, Just Live, Last Prisoner Project, LeafLink Financial, Leafly, Martha Stewart, Michele Roberts, Mitch Meyers (BeLeaf Medical), Morris Beegle (We Are For Better Alternatives), Nancy Whiteman (Wana Brands), Nasir "Nas" Jones (Smoke: Marijuana + Black America), National Cannabis Risk Management Association, NCIA, NewTropic, Ocean Spray, Sana Packaging, Shango, Snoop Dogg, Social Club TV, Solar Therapeutics, SPACs, Stiiizy, THC Design, The Voting Public, Uncle Bud's, Verano Holdings, Viridian Capital, Willie Nelson and Wyld.

About MGO LLP

One of the top 100 CPA firms in the country, MGO has a 30-year history of providing trusted accounting, tax, audit and advisory services to many leading public corporations, private companies and government agencies. MGO was one of the first national accounting firms to develop and provide targeted accounting and advisory services to the cannabis and hemp industries. Today, MGO provides industry-leading experience and a suite of proven solutions to help operators, regulators and institutional investors navigate the complexities of the cannabis and hemp industries. or information about MGO, contact Lorna Donohoe; ldonohoe@mgocpa.com.

About Shango

Shango is an established, vertically integrated cannabis brand offering a full range of award-winning products, including flower, extracts and cannabis-infused edibles, in Oregon, California, Nevada and Michigan. Shango has full-service recreational and medical cannabis stores in Portland, OR, Moreno Valley, CA, Las Vegas, NV, and Lapeer and Bay City, MI. In Q2 2021, Shango Michigan will add a third provisioning center, as well as two extraction facilities, a commercial kitchen and an indoor cultivation facility in Hazel Park. The company will soon open a state-of-the-art cannabis distribution operation in Southern California. Shango Missouri will soon open two stores in Springfield and one in Joplin.

A recognized leader in the cannabis industry, Shango sets the standards for product quality, consistency and business conduct. Global Health & Pharma named Shango the Best Multi-State Medical Cannabis Dispensary in the U.S. in its 2020 Healthcare and Pharmaceutical Awards. Macias Gini & O'Connell named Shango to its 2021 Cannabis 50 list, recognizing companies that are reshaping and inspiring the continued growth of the cannabis and hemp industries. Shango is committed to cannabis education and is a fierce advocate of the safe and responsible use of cannabis products. For more information, go to http://www.goshango.com.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-10 19:32:11|Editor: huaxia

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Carrie Lam, chief executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR), commends seven serving and retired senior police officers in Hong Kong, south China, Feb. 10, 2021. Carrie Lam on Wednesday presented the Chief Executive's Commendation for Government/Public Service to seven serving and retired senior police officers for their significant contributions to safeguarding national security. (Xinhua)

HONG KONG, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) Carrie Lam on Wednesday presented the Chief Executive's Commendation for Government/Public Service to seven serving and retired senior police officers for their significant contributions to safeguarding national security.

The officers receiving the award are Commissioner of Police Tang Ping-keung, Deputy Commissioner of Police Lau Chi-wai, Senior Assistant Commissioner of Police Choi Chin-pang, Assistant Commissioner of Police Kan Kai-yan, Assistant Commissioner of Police Kong Hok-lai, Senior Superintendent of Police Li Kwai-wah, and former Commissioner of Police Lo Wai-chung, according to a government statement.

Since the national security law in the HKSAR took effect last year, the Hong Kong Police Force has established a department for safeguarding national security with law enforcement capacity and within a critical time span completed the preparation for the necessary manpower, equipment, facilities, and the formulation of managerial and operational strategies and procedural guidelines.

In the past few months, relevant officers presented outstanding leadership, professionalism and courage to shoulder responsibility and unwavering commitment to discharge their duties in safeguarding national security, the statement said.

Among them, the seven officers made personal sacrifices to safeguard national security and ensure the full implementation of the "one country, two systems," demonstrating steadfastness and fearlessness, the statement said. Enditem
CANTON, Ohio, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- TimkenSteel Corp. (NYSE: TMST) will release its 2020 fourth-quarter and full-year financial results on Thursday, February 25, after the market closes on the New York Stock Exchange.

The company will host a conference call at 9 a.m. ET on Friday, February 26 to discuss its financial performance with investors and securities analysts. The financial results will be available online at investors.timkensteel.com.

TimkenSteel earnings call information:

Conference call Friday, February 26, 2021

9 a.m. ET

Toll-free dial-in: 833-238-7951

International dial-in: 647-689-4199

Conference ID: 6591728 Conference call replay Replay dial-in available through March 5, 2021

800-585-8367 or 416-621-4642

Replay passcode: 6591728

About TimkenSteel Corporation

TimkenSteel (NYSE: TMST) manufactures high-performance carbon and alloy steel products in Canton, OH serving demanding applications in automotive, energy and a variety of industrial end markets. The company is a premier U.S. producer of alloy steel bars (up to 16 inches in diameter), seamless mechanical tubing and precision components. In the business of making high-quality steel primarily from recycled materials for more than 100 years, TimkenSteel's proven expertise contributes to the performance of our customers' products. The company employs approximately 2,150 people and had sales of $1.2 billion in 2019. For more information, please visit us at www.timkensteel.com .

SOURCE TimkenSteel Corp.

Related Links

http://www.timkensteel.com


Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian offered to hold such elections on December 25 in response to anti-government protests sparked by the outcome of the war in Nagorno-Karabakh. The Armenian opposition dismissed the proposal, insisting on its demands for his resignation and the formation of an interim government.

The ruling My Step bloc pointed to the opposition stance when it stated on Sunday that Pashinian and his allies see no need to dissolve the current parliament. It also claimed that most Armenians do not want snap elections.

Opposition leaders scoffed at the statement, saying Pashinian has simply realized that he stands no chance of winning the vote.

Let them not blame the parliamentary opposition for not holding pre-term elections or attribute that to [a lack of] public demand, said Iveta Tonoyan of the opposition Prosperous Armenia Party (BHK), which has the second largest group in the National Assembly.

Arman Boshian, a lawmaker representing My Step, said, meanwhile, that the conduct of snap polls will be back on the government agenda if the BHK or the other parliamentary opposition party, Bright Armenia, agrees to discuss its practical modalities.

If not a single parliamentary opposition faction is prepared to discuss and work out a roadmap to holding pre-term parliamentary elections we will take note of that fact and move on, said Boshian.

Our opposition colleagues are now trying to make everyone believe that they did not speak out against pre-term elections, said Babken Tunian, another pro-government lawmaker. They can now reaffirm that once again and make a very concrete proposal, in an appropriate format, as to how, when and through what mechanisms they see the conduct of those elections.

Tonoyan ruled out such a possibility and made clear that the BHK and its opposition allies making up the Homeland Salvation Movement will continue to campaign for Pashinians resignation.

The opposition alliance has scheduled its next anti-government rally for February 20.
Ahead of the assembly elections



in Assam, the opposition on Wednesday announced that the party would launch a bus yatra campaign titled "Asom Bachao Ahok" (Come, let's save Assam) from four parts of the state from February 12.

The buses will move across the state for two weeks and party leaders will meet voters to discuss issues concerning

"With these bus yatras, the top leadership of the party will fan out to the remotest corners of the state and discuss with people its issues and problems," the campaign committee chairman of the party, Pradyut Bordoloi, said at a press conference here.

Bordoloi will lead the yatra from Borduwa Satra, the birthplace of Srimant Sankardeva, the 15th century cultural and religious icon of the state.

Lok Sabha MP Gaurav Gogoi, MLA Debabrata Saikia and All India Mahila President Sushmita Dev will lead the campaign from Guwahati, Sivasagar and Silchar respectively.

"The people of the state are fed up with the BJP's misrule. In my yatra, I shall be interacting with diverse sections of the society to understand what needs to be done over the next five years to bring peace and prosperity in Assam," said Bordoloi, the MP of Nagaon.

Pradesh Committee president Ripun Bora said that the party will reach out to every household in the state to know their sufferings and the hardships they had to endure during the five years of the BJP's "misrule".

The assembly election in is likely to be held in March-April.

Meanwhile, Aam Aadmi Party general secretary Bandip Dutta and BJP leader from Darrang district Pinku Moni Das joined the Congress along with their supporters in the presence of Bora and other senior members of the party.

(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.)
By Dafina Gercheva, Resident Representative, UNDP in Ukraine and

Nicolaj Sonderbye, Senior Democracy and Human Rights Advisor

Why stepping up the implementation of the UNs Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights makes sense for Ukraines businesses and government

Global and regional business models are changing rapidly and a growing number of investors, producers and consumers worldwide are demanding more sustainable and socially-responsible policies, more ethical business conduct, greener and more decent jobs, gender equality and equal opportunities.

A tested framework to promote respect for human rights in the private sector

It is well known that unscrupulous and predatory business practices often lead to an abuse of human rights. These can for example include forced labour, numerous forms of discrimination, unequal pay or unequal treatment based on race, ethnic origin, colour, sex, national or social origin etc., unsanitary and unsafe working conditions, and little to no social protections. An estimated 450 million people working in supply chains around the world are often in particularly precarious situations with respect to their human rights.

In recognizing that voluntary corporate social responsibility (CSR) measures are not providing sufficient protection, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) endorsed the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) in 2011. The UNGPs clearly state that governments have a duty to protect human rights, and businesses have a responsibility to respect them. Both must provide access to remedy and remediation for rights violations, regardless of whether governments are able or willing to protect these rights.

The framework also calls on all governments to develop, enact and update national action plans on business and human rights as part of the state responsibility to protect its citizens.

Fortunately, there is a growing global movement of governments and companies taking up the UNGPs as minimum standards. The EU and EU Member States are amongst the key drivers of the move towards mandatory human rights due diligence procedures. Several EU Members States have already introduced mandatory due diligence legislation into their national legal frameworks and have established access to remedy procedures.

Acknowledging that voluntary action has not brought about the necessary change, the European Commissioner for Justice, Didier Reynders, announced in April 2020 that the European Commission is committed to introducing legislation in 2021 to make human rights due diligence mandatory for all EU companies. He made this announcement during a high-level online event hosted by the EU Parliaments Responsible Business Conduct Working Group, during which the Commissioner presented the findings of the Commission study on options for regulating human rights due diligence requirements.

A good business

What the private sector and policy makers are starting to realize is that the UNs Guiding Principles are not just good to implement for moral and ethical reasons: they are good for business, and good for the economy. For example, the UNGPs help companies to identify, prevent and mitigate risks of adverse corporate human rights impacts, including their operational and reputational risks. Recent evidence-based research shows that those companies that adhere to the UNGPs have even been better able to navigate the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic than those companies that do not.

Another benefit comes from attracting Foreign Direct Investments (FDI). Global investors are more likely to invest in those businesses that do their best to retain jobs and protect labour rights and those that dont may be at risk of discrimination lawsuits or public shaming. Many companies therefore actively brand themselves as adhering to the UNGPs as well as to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the UN Global Compact. To mitigate the risks, many companies go beyond mere branding and compliance and are increasingly playing active and key roles in promoting democracy and the rule of law, and are supporting anti-corruption efforts, social protection and equal opportunities in the workforce.

Ukraine is in many ways at the forefront of all these developments and actively supports a number of international agreements from the SDGs to the Paris Agreement. In September 2019, for example, President Volodymyr Zelensky issued a decree to integrate the SDGs into all areas of national policy. The legal commitment to respect, promote and fulfil human rights is enshrined in national law in Ukraine, and is integrated in international and regional agreements. However, despite general progress on human rights, there is much room to improve the adoption and implementation of the UNGP in Ukraine, and to leverage its many benefits.

Most Ukrainian companies may not yet be fully aware of the true benefits of adopting and implementing the UNGPs and as a consequence may be missing out on many opportunities, such as access to global and regional credits, FDI and global and regional supply chains. There may be many reasons for this including lack of awareness of the UNGPs, lack of capacity to implement the UNGPs, financial constraints, lack of knowledge of the demands and potential new market opportunities, legislative and procedural gaps and lack of incentives.

A shrinking population in search for better living conditions and decent jobs

Similar to other Eastern European States outside the EU, Ukraine continues to face a significant depopulation as millions of citizens migrate in search for decent jobs and improved living conditions. Because of these dynamics, the population of Ukraine is projected to drop from 43.7 million in 2020 to 35.2 million in 2050, a 19.5 percent decline. This trend could be reversed simply by adopting and adhering to the UNGPs on Business and Human Rights. This, together with a set of incentives and policies for people to stay or return to Ukraine, would contribute greatly to the further development of domestic economy.

The continued conflict in the east of Ukraine and the COVID-19 pandemic have both contributed to a difficult situation in Ukraine, forcing many businesses to lay off staff or shut down completely. Some sectors are in desperate need of access to financing and targeted incentives. A recent UNDP survey of the COVID-19 impact on micro-, small- and medium- sized enterprises (MSMEs) in the east of Ukraine, done in partnership with the Kyiv School of Economics, documented the difficulties many of them have faced during the pandemic.

The European Union is the most important export market for Ukraine, but has yet to be fully explored and developed. As the EU legislators, EU investors and clients are furthering the implementation of the UNGPs and moving towards mandatory human rights due diligence procedures, it is important that Ukraine be in step with this effort. Doing so could bring significant benefits in the form of decent job creation, sustainable economic growth, improved livelihoods, reduced inequalities and progress in human rights and all SDG indicators. Ignoring this opportunity could produce the opposite effects, further worsening the situation for Ukraine and its citizens.

Building forward better

Ukraine is facing significant socio-economic challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing conflict in the east, and could be at increasing risk of a deeper socio-economic recession. To avoid the precipice and reorient the country towards a brighter future filled with shared prosperity and expanded opportunities for all Ukrainians, we must stay focused on the challenges and opportunities afforded by the UNGPs on Business and Human Rights. We should work more closely with businesses and those who work in and for them to build the country forward better in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. In doing so we must put human rights, gender equality and non-discrimination at the centre of all recovery plans. The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights provide a clear framework for this, and an opportunity to address the challenges that lie before us. Embracing this framework will bring numerous benefits to Ukraine, its government, the private sector and its citizens, including the youth and the most affected and vulnerable.

Ukraine will not be able to overcome its current challenges unless all sectors work together to ensure that human rights principles, human rights due diligence and access to remedy are integrated into legislation and practices. This will require a solid and inclusive multi-stakeholder process fully owned by the government, businesses and the citizens of Ukraine to develop a National Action Plan on Business and Human Rights.

UNDP has a long history in Ukraine, supporting all levels of government, businesses and the oversight institutions and organisations, including Parliament and civil society organizations (CSOs). We are also actively involved in supporting the development of a vibrant and inclusive private sector, assisting with skills development, market analyses and resilience work. With this experience and drawing on our global network of offices in more than 170 countries, we intend to continue working with all our partners in the private and public sectors to promote and fully adopt the UNs Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights for the benefit of the country and people of Ukraine.
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.
Letters: Immigrants do essential work in U.S., so need the vaccines as well
The intent of farm laws is to wipe out Mandis: Rahul in Lok Sabha

COVID19: PM Modi gives credit to doctors, nurses, sanitation workers, ambulance drivers

India

oi-Briti Roy Barman

New Delhi, Feb 10: Prime Minister Narendra Modi has replied on Wednesday to the motion of thanks on the President's address in the Lok Sabha, saying India will emerge as a strong player in a post-coronavirus world.

"The post-COVID world is turning out to be very different. In such times, remaining isolated from global trends will be counter-productive. We will have to emerge as a strong player. That is why, India is working towards building an Aatmanirbhar Bharat," Modi said.

Taking to the context of Manish Tewari's statement that said India stayed protected from Corona by God's grace, PM Modi give credit to doctors and nurses about the same.

"This indeed is God's grace that the entire world shook but we remained safe. It was because doctors and nurses came as God, because they couldn't return to their homes for 15 days."

The Prime Minister also mentioned the sacrifices of the sanitation workers and Ambulance drivers towards the working against COVID.

"We could win against COVID as our sanitation workers kept patients clean-when nobody else went close to them, it was matter of life and death for them too. They came as form of God. Ambulance drivers knew that they're driving a COVID positive person, they came as a form of God."

Earlier in Rajya Sabha, the PM had delivered his reply to the President's address on Monday where he had referred to his predecessor Manmohan Singh on the need for reforms in the farm sector as he defended the farm laws. He also tried to allay fears of farmers over Minimum Support Price for crops.

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Story first published: Wednesday, February 10, 2021, 17:23 [IST]


London, United Kingdom, 02/10/2021

London, UK  Domestic violence remains the most prevalent and significant crime attacking the very fabric of our communities. Statistics paint a grim picture showing that one-third of women will suffer from domestic violence in their lifetime, with one in four women injured in their current or former relationship. With citizens too frightened to leave during the Covid-19 Pandemic Lockdown, Kayson Solicitors warns that domestic violence is becoming a serious issue in the run-up to the national lockdown in the UK.

Domestic violence during the Covid-19 is a stark reality that women across the country have to face. While the federal government will no doubt be taking extreme measures to prevent a widespread outbreak of the virus plaguing the UK, Kayson Solicitors says that the efforts in place to protect citizens are not enough for many women who already live in fear of their domestic situations. Commenting on the prevalence of domestic violence during the Covid-19, which has seen a sharp rise of 7% this year, reaching 259,324 victims, Kayson Solicitors managing director said that Domestic violence is already far too prevalent in our society, and the lockdown is turning our way of life into a dystopian nightmare. Its worrying to see the number of domestic violence cases increase during the Covid-19 lockdown.

While the police will continue to operate on a 24-hour basis, the other public services which women may rely on face serious challenges during the lockdown. Centers that provide resources and support for victims are also likely to be affected by the lockdown, leaving them incredibly vulnerable, she said.

As a concerned Family solicitors Waltham Abbey, we are urging the society to be more open about such a pertinent issue that has existed for generations and is still prevalent in our culture in modern times and to break the silence. We are worried that the lockdown would only lead to further incidents of domestic violence and urge the government to confront and address the issue head-on, the director added.

With the many legal courses of action, including divorce, provided by a domestic violence solicitor Waltham Abbey, victims of domestic violence may find themselves better equipped to deal with their situation. Divorce law is meant to protect people who are suffering from domestic violence at the hands of their partners and giving them a chance to get away from the abuse. Divorce law allows a victim to decide whether to fight for the marriage or for the children or both. A lawyer will provide assistance to help you negotiate child custody and child support. The lawyer will work with you to try to resolve the issue, and if a resolution is not possible, they will present your case to the courts for a decision.

Divorce solicitors Waltham Abbey with their consistency, efficiency, and skills, know how to deal with all kinds of emotional situations. Their clients are young and old, married and unmarried; many of them facing life-changing decisions. Therefore, solicitors always work with an eye on the bigger picture, planning to give clients a positive and supportive way to handle a breakup.

We at Divorce solicitors Waltham Abbey work with you throughout the whole divorce process no matter how simple or complex your case is. The process may be stressful and downright depressing, but we try to make it as easy, straightforward as it can be, said the managing partner. For more information, visit anchor link  https://www.kaysonsolicitors.co.uk/family-law/domestic-violence-helplines/

About Kayson Solicitors:

Kayson Solicitors is one of the leading law firms in the UK known for their expert advice on divorce. It has a dedicated team of solicitors and legal experts supporting its clients globally. The company stands for providing clients with comprehensive legal advice supported by research, industry-leading experience, skills, and data for its clients in Waltham Abbey and across the country.

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Kerala: As jellyfish blooms increase in North, fishers put a pause on work

by Amritha Mohan

In the early hours of the day, when the sky is clear and blue, swarms of jellyfish wade through the waters surrounding Kavvayi islands, some four kilometres from the nearest town, Payyanur, in Kannur district of Kerala. It is a beautiful sight indeed. When you watch them slowly propel themselves through the water, they dont even seem that dangerous, says Satheeshan T.V. a fisher worker from the island. Aesthetics aside, jellyfish blooms sighted in estuaries in and around Kavvayi as well as Madakkal, Nileshwaram, Padanna, Valiyaparamba and neighbouring regions in Kasargod district have become a cause for concern for the fisher workers here. Sighted from November to March, jellyfish blooms are almost an annual phenomenon in these coastal regions of North Malabar. However, their scale has increased at an unprecedented rate, observe fisher workers from the region. Normally, we wouldnt mind. We have been sighting them every year, so you expect them to bloom at this time. We try to avoid trapping them in our nets as much as we can. But now, it appears that their numbers are increasing at a steady rate, so much so that some of us have to stop going for work for days, says Madhu, a long-time fisherman, who stays near Madakkal.



Jellyfish is a collective term for any umbrella-shaped gelatinous animal in marine waters and is considered the oldest animal found on earth, having overcome 500 million years through natural selection. Over 90 percent of a jellyfishs body is composed of water. Experts estimate that India is home to around 50 jellyfish species, out of which at least 20 species have been identified in Kerala. Around six species of these have reported regular blooms in the state. A 2016 article by A. Biju Kumar and Riyas A., published by Society for Environmental Education Kerala (SEEK), has elucidated that jellyfish blooms have been notably increasing in Kollam districts Paravur, Elathur and Korappuzha in Kozhikode, as well as Nileshwaram and Padanna in Kasargod. While venomous stinger jellyfish species have been reported across the globe, regional scientists say that most of the species found in Keralas coasts are not fatal and can, at the most, induce itching and swelling, upon contact.



Jellyfish woes for fisher workers, aquaculture



The discomfort caused by certain jellyfish is such that the indigenous species has been named after it. The local name for jellyfish is kadal chori, which literally translates to sea-itch. In Kavvayi and neighbouring regions in Kannur and Kasargod, they are also called kanjaampothu. However, the fisherfolk also mention that not all jellyfish are harmful. There is a white jellyfish (Acromitus flagellatus) with black patches on its umbrella, which is mostly innocuous and commonly seen here, especially near the mangroves. There is another yellow jellyfish (Chrysaora caliparea), and its more dangerous. If you touch it, it stings for a second and then you start itching. Theres nothing you can do but wait for it to pass, says Sandeep CK, who works as a tourist guide and fisher worker in Kavvayi. Apart from the severe itching, fishers are troubled by jellyfish that clog their nets; it is often an arduous task to shake them off. With the ongoing prawns and shrimps season, the presence of jellyfish makes it difficult to efficiently catch other types of fish, say the workers. During the prawns season, we throw our nets hoping for a good catch, but what do we get instead? Hundreds of jellyfish. If their liquid splashes on our face or eyes by accident while we shake them off our nets, our eyes begin to swell. Well have to stay away from work if that happens, says Satheeshan.



These free-swimming animals are known to reduce the marine resources available for catch, and reduce the number of fishing days for fishermen. For instance, a study published by the Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute (CMFRI) in 2015 found that jellyfish are also known to feast on sardine larva in substantial quantities. This has the potential to disrupt the marine food chain as well, the study suggests. T. Purushothaman, a shrimp farmer from Payyanur and president of Aquaculture Development Cooperative Society (ADCOS), further observes that these jellyfish were found preying on post-larva shrimps, which affects their breeding. During the time of high tide, weve seen jellyfishes swim along with post larva shrimps, and feed on them. This ultimately has an impact on the recruitment of shrimps, said the aqua-farmer, who is also the recipient of the Jagjivan Ram Innovative Farmer award instituted by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR).



Coastal aquaculture is one of the fastest-growing industries in India, with a total of 1.53 lakh (153,000) hectare area in nine maritime states under shrimp culture producing 6.8 lakh (680,000) metric tonnes of product, data sourced from Marine Products Export Development Authority (MPEDA) shows. Such rapidly increasing aquaculture/mariculture/cage culture practices can act as a catalyst for jellyfish swarming, a study on jellyfish aggregations, published in 2020, found. Other industries such as tourism, power generation, desalination, and shipping have also reported considerable economic losses due to jellyfish blooms. Jellyfish are known to sting swimmers and tourists in Keralas beaches. Sometimes, dead jellyfish collectively deposit on the shores of the beach, which impacts the aesthetics of the region, observes Savitha Mohanan K.M., a research scholar from Kannur University, who has also worked as a project assistant in the Fisheries Department in Kanhangad.



Causes for jellyfish surge



While there is no scientific consensus on whether jellyfish are exponentially increasing at a quantifiable rate across the globe, it is safe to argue that the jellyfish blooms have been increasing, rather than decreasing, in most places where they have been studied. A 2012 study (by Brotz et al.) showed a 62 percent increase in jellyfish blooms out of the 45 Large Marine Ecosystems (LME) studied across the world, wherein the Arabian Sea also noted an increasing trend. Jellyfish blooms have been sighted in Thiruvananthapuram, beaches in Goa, Mumbai, Visakhapatnam, Odisha among other coastal regions. In Indias west coast, majority of blooms occur towards the end of the southwest monsoon (June-September); blooms of Crambionella orsini start towards the end of monsoon and last still post-monsoon (October-January), while Acromitus flagellatus blooms occur in backwaters during November-May, a study by Riyas A. and Biju Kumar, Department of Aquatic Biology and Fisheries under University of Kerala, noted. What are the possible reasons for this increase in the number of jellyfish blooms along the coast of Kerala? As per regional scientists and marine biologists, this surge is attributed to several factors, both natural and man-made ones. A variety of natural factors, including winds, changing tidal movements, surface currents, water temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen, as well as man-made factors- such as water quality deterioration, eutrophication, overfishing, translocation, habitat modification have a significant role to play here.



The complex life cycle of this Cnidarian species is a major contributing factor for its unique existence, which is often impervious to rising temperatures and lack of oxygen in the water. They can survive in such conditions, as opposed to other marine beings. Therefore, a rise in sea temperature and global warming can facilitate these blooms, says Riyas A., research scholar. But researchers also mention that it would be wrong to say that climate change is the only reason for this global phenomenon. Keralas coastal infrastructure can be another factor. Two-thirds of the states seawalls are made of granite, providing a hard surface for jellyfish larva to settle and multiple, notes A. Biju Kumar. Increasing marine activities, which lead to rising nutrient levels in the sea (particularly phosphates, leading to eutrophication) can increase the productivity of planktons, which jellyfish mostly feed on. When the number of planktons increases, jellyfish also increase. Its natural predators like sea turtles and swordfish are supposed to prey on jellyfish and maintain the balance of the marine food chain, but when there are fewer predators, it is only natural that jellyfish populations surge, added the professor.



The way forward



Scientists are united in their opinion that not only are there no quick-fixes to this issue, but also that such an approach would be detrimental to the study of the species. We are yet to efficiently and economically utilise the jellyfish found in Keralas coasts, as opposed to states like Andhra Pradesh, which started engaging in jellyfish processing, trade and export to Southeast-Asian countries four to five years ago, observes Dinesh Kaippilly, Head of the Department, Aquaculture, Kerala University of Fisheries and Ocean Studies ( KUFOS). Export earnings from jelly fish in the state are negligible: In the last 20 years, exports have remained at a meagre 1,092 tonnes in the state.



It was only in 2000, when large numbers of jellyfish blocked the cooling system of the Madras Atomic Power Station (MAPS) in Kalpakkam, Tamil Nadu, that discussions on jellyfish blooms and their consequences gained spotlight in India. Lack of adequate background and historical data pertinent to the region is a major deterrent for jellyfish studies. This is because the species had no economic value earlier, and it is only now that some research is being done on its export and trade value. Its impact on aquaculture also needs to be scientifically studied, because this definitely has ramifications on the marine economy of the state, says Biju Kumar. The species taxonomic diversity and complex life cycle make it further challenging for researchers to properly categorise and mark their surge in population because the rate of jellyfish blooms are often variable and irregular. It is in this hope that the University of Kerala plans to host the Seventh International Jellyfish Bloom Symposium at Thiruvananthapuram in 2022, in an attempt to address the gap in the regions jellyfish studies. The scientists, therefore, call for a holistic understanding of the surge of jellyfish blooms. While this seems to be linked to human activities, their mechanisms need to be thoroughly researched, due to the significant impact it has on marine ecosystems and human beings. Fisher workers, meanwhile, are on the look-out for other options, like new devices, to tackle the jellyfish influx.

 2021 Mongabay-India
GOVERNMENT received a total of $7.37 billion from oil, gas and quarrying/mining companies in fiscal 2018, with the largest payment of $2 billion coming from majority State-owned National Gas Company (NGC).

However, for the period 2019 to 2020, unaudited figures indicate a declining trend in revenue.
Housing is a commodity that is in limited supply, and when there is a limited supply, the price rises to curb the demand. This is an essential function of the free market.

Housing unaffordability is the result of artificial scarcity, created locally mostly by land use regulations and legislation, such as the ALR, environmental constraints and local governments. When there is demand to live in an area, as we have seen for the past few years here, the market should naturally respond by increasing the supply of housing.

Restricting the supply of homes drives prices out of reach of most homebuyers. Approving the Spiller Road development will help prevent prices from continuing to skyrocket by creating more housing. This development will increase the supply of housing, making housing more affordable for all of Penticton as move up buyers will be selling their homes to purchase newer homes, opening the market for first time buyers and buyers in all price ranges.

Without approving this development, tax revenues the City would receive from developments, go to other government bodies. Developments outside our boundaries, and the people who live there (because our regulations would not allow them to live in Penticton), tax our services, amenities and infrastructure; ultimately becoming burdensome to the taxpayers within Penticton. Developments such as Skaha Hills, Heritage Hills and subdivisions in Naramata do not provide tax revenue to the City of Penticton.

The City of Penticton will realize significantly more tax revenue by building the Vinterra Development at 1050 Spiller Road; construction jobs will grow. It is estimated that for every 100 new homes built, 253 local jobs are supported, supporting local wages and salaries of $7,388,000. Local business owners will see an increase in income of $2,670,000 and local tax revenues will increase by $854,000.

Currently Canada is undergoing a megatrend by way of a generational housing shift. Baby boomers are retiring in record numbers and leaving the inner suburbs for the outer suburbs, for smaller towns or for townhouses. It is part of a broad-based generational movement of people.

Unless we support new developments within the City of Penticton, we are forcing development to occur outside of our municipal boundaries. Not approving this development would be contrary to the Official Community Plan that the City has worked on tirelessly for nearly a decade!

Penticton desperately needs the proposed Vinterra development at 1050 Spiller Road.

Gil Szabo

I am a realtor, and a rancher, that lives next door to the proposed development.
A valet at a Boston hospital who was shot in the eye by police as officers confronted a man armed with what they thought was a real gun has sued his employer, saying the hospitals security staff mishandled this situation.

Justin Desmarais, a valet at Brigham and Womens Hospital, was doing his job on Feb. 7, 2020, when he ended up with a gunshot wound to the head and right eye that left bullet fragments in his brain, according to the suit filed last month in Suffolk Superior Court, The Boston Globe reported Tuesday.

The events were set in motion by Juston Root, who was armed with a paintball gun.

When hospital security first interacted with Root, he was nonsensical, the lawsuit said. When Root showed his paintball gun, security bungled their response, mischaracterized the threat when they summoned police, and escalated matters while waiting for officers to arrive, the lawsuit said.

A spokesperson said Brigham and Womens Hospital does not comment on pending litigation.

The suit seeks a jury trial and unspecified damages.

Root, who had a history of mental health issues according to his family, fled the area in a car and was fatally shot by police a few miles away.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Somalia's Ministry of Health confirmed 57 new cases of the coronavirus in the last 48 hours raising the total number to 4920.

The capital Mogadishu recorded the highest number of cases with 35 cases while Somaliland reported 14 and Puntland 10.

Two more patient have succumbed to the coronavirus disease, pushing the cumulative fatalities to 136 while 13 more patients recovered from the virus.

Last week the world health organization in Somalia announced the country will receive 1.2 million doses of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine this month.

The vaccine is a combination of first and second hand and will be given to 600,000 Somalis.

Vaccines for 20% of the Somali population are free, provided by the Covax Center, a joint venture between the World Health Organization and GAVI.

The 1.2 million vaccines will be vaccinated by health, municipal and frontline workers, and is sufficient for 3% of the country's population according to who.
Local business sees surge in bookings for summer

A holiday cottage rental agency has reported a significant surge in bookings from off island visitors for this summer.

Island Escapes says it has seen bookings from off island customers steadily rise since the start of January, with advance bookings well up on pre-pandemic levels, despite the Isle of Man border being closed to visitors at this time.

The company has decided to suspend taking further new bookings from overseas customers for the summer season until more clarification is received

Director of Island Escapes, John Keggin said: "We have seen a significant surge in bookings from off island residents for the summer period, July 2021 onwards  particularly over the last 2 weeks



Meanwhile, Mr Keggin said the Manx Government needs to give clarity to the Island's tourism businesses whether border restrictions will be eased this summer.

He added: It is obvious that the situation in the United Kingdom is still very serious in relation to Covid-19 but those of us who work in tourism desperately needs some clarity from the Government as to whether tourists are likely to be allowed to visit the Island later this summer, should the United Kingdom situation improve and our own vaccination programme continue as planned. Protecting the island must come first, but with so much positivity about holidaying at home within Britain this year, it is clear residents of the United Kingdom are including the Isle of Man in their thoughts, perhaps boosted by the recent excellent publicity and newly announced Loganair routes.
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Breastfeeding women with COVID-19 do not pass along the SARS-CoV-2 virus in their milk but do transfer milk-borne antibodies that are able to neutralize the virus, a multi-institutional team of researchers led by the University of Idaho reported.

The team analyzed 37 milk samples submitted by 18 women diagnosed with COVID-19. None of the milk samples were found to contain the virus, but nearly two-thirds of the samples did contain two antibodies specific to the virus.

"Taken together, our data do not support maternal-to-infant transmission of SARS-CoV-2 via milk," the researchers reported Tuesday in the journal mBio published by the American Society for Microbiology." These results support recommendations to continue breastfeeding during mild-to-moderate maternal COVID-19 illness."

U of I researchers Michelle "Shelley" McGuire and Mark A. McGuire led the work funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Shelley is a nutrition researcher focused on human milk and directs U of I's Margaret Ritchie School of Family and Consumer Sciences. Mark is a lactation physiologist and directs the Idaho Agricultural Experiment Station. Both are on the faculty of the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. Their research is featured on the CALS website, The Vandal Theory podcast and in U of I presentations.

The research team also includes scientists from the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry;Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School; University of Rochester Medical Center; and Washington State University. The team now has enrolled nearly 50 women who were diagnosed with COVID-19 and has followed their progress with the disease for as long as two months.

The initial study published in mBio reported on the first group of 18 women who submitted milk samples. Results from the larger study funded by both the Gates Foundation and the National Science Foundation are forthcoming, but the researchers are confident that they will support, expand and confirm the initial findings, Shelley said.

Earlier, the McGuires and their colleagues published a related review of scientific studies focused on coronaviruses in human milk and found that scant evidence exists about their presence or absence.

That work, published in Maternal & Child Nutrition in May, found only one study that tested human milk for the SARS coronavirus after that virus was detected in 2003. The review found no efforts to detect the subsequent and deadlier MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) coronavirus in human milk.

The dearth of knowledge spurred this multi-university effort, which is informing national and global guidance related to COVID-19 and breastfeeding, Shelley said.

Explore further Follow the latest news on the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak

More information: Ryan M. Pace et al. Characterization of SARS-CoV-2 RNA, Antibodies, and Neutralizing Capacity in Milk Produced by Women with COVID-19, mBio (2021). Ryan M. Pace et al. Characterization of SARS-CoV-2 RNA, Antibodies, and Neutralizing Capacity in Milk Produced by Women with COVID-19,(2021). DOI: 10.1128/mBio.03192-20 Kimberly A. Lackey et al. SARSCoV2 and human milk: What is the evidence?, Maternal & Child Nutrition (2020). DOI: 10.1111/mcn.13032 Journal information: mBio
Overall, public transport patronage fell by 80 per cent last year as Queenslanders stayed home to manage the health impacts of the pandemic.

Brisbane City Councils bus drivers should be among the first people to receive the COVID-19 vaccine as frontline workers, says lord mayor Adrian Schrinner. Credit:Nine

However, federal and state health authorities have yet to come on board.

Brisbane City Council has made the case for its bus drivers to be among the first to receive the COVID-19 vaccine as essential workers to encourage commuters back on the buses.

While the use of public transport was increasing, lord mayor Adrian Schrinner said giving bus drivers the vaccine jab would encourage more commuters back to public transport.

Council is gearing up our efforts and working with Queensland Health to ask for our bus operators to be amongst the first people to receive that voluntary vaccine that will be rolled out because they are frontline workers, he said.

As we have, from next month, the vaccine starting to be rolled out in our community, we now have the opportunity for a higher level of confidence to come back to our public transport.

We know that confidence is a critical issue here. We know that in recent times there was advice from the Chief Health Officer and a directive to wear masks on public transport, and we know that we all had to wear masks around for a few days.

The Australian government is responsible for buying, selecting and regulating the COVID-19 vaccines. The Queensland government is in charge of delivering the vaccines across the state.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-10 18:30:30|Editor: huaxia

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Photo taken on Dec. 22, 2020 shows Russia's Sputnik V vaccine at a plant in the Karaganda Region, Kazakhstan. (Photo by Kalizhan Ospanov/Xinhua)

Chinese and Russian pharmaceutical companies are filling the gap in developing countries with genuine goodwill, wider accessibility, and fairer rollout.

Vaccine research and development has always been the priority of both China's and Russia's response to the unprecedented health crisis.

BEIJING, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- As the COVID-19 pandemic is still raging all over the globe, many believe vaccines are light at the end of the tunnel.

"If pandemics are microbial wars, then vaccines are our preferred weapons of mass salvation," wrote World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in a recent Foreign Policy article.

Several developed and developing countries have joined the COVID-19 vaccine race, and in a short span of time, offered a variety of selections.

Vaccines developed by Moderna, Pfizer-BioNtech and AstraZeneca are popular amid shortages in the West, while Russian's Sputnik V as well as vaccines made by China's Sinopharm and Sinovac Biotech, despite approvals and welcomes in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Central and Eastern Europe, met with some suspicion in the West.

Unfortunately, the main ground for that doubt does not come from a scientific perspective, but political and ideological ones.

Some Western politicians see China as one adversary, particularly in the science and technology domain, and Russia as another.

Peruvian President Francisco Sagasti receives a dose of COVID-19 vaccine from Chinese pharmaceutical firm Sinopharm in Lima, Peru, Feb. 9, 2021. (Peruvian Presidential Press/Handout via Xinhua)

Those with a Cold-War mindset tend to overlook the proven safety and effectiveness of Chinese and Russian vaccines. They dismiss them in media, confuse the public out of habitual prejudice, and eventually turn a blind eye to the fact that Chinese and Russian vaccines, like all other effective ones, can play a role in the global fight against the pandemic.

In fact, vaccine research and development has always been the priority of both China's and Russia's response to the unprecedented health crisis.

With arduous efforts of their researchers, Chinese experts have provided substantial scientific data and solid clinical evidence to prove the accountability of their jabs.

A paper published on Lancet this week said that interim results from late-stage trials showed that Sputnik V had an efficacy rate of 91.6 percent.

Both countries have collaborated with other countries and the WHO in an open and comprehensive manner since the start of the pandemic and in every battle with the coronavirus through both information sharing and material assistance.

The "Western" vaccines, cleared by rich countries already, are not enough to meet the demand of their own, and even more scant for the rest of the world.

Thus, Chinese and Russian pharmaceutical companies are filling the gap in developing countries with genuine goodwill, wider accessibility, and fairer rollout.

As the world is struggling with the unceasing COVID-19 pandemic, there is a danger of deepening mistrust towards the made-in-China and made-in-Russia. Political games can only do harm, while science-based decisions can save more lives. 
The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company

The poor outcome of Italy's recent auctions for large scale solar suggests that the next tender will have similar results. pv magazine has spoken with two major experts from the Italian PV sector who claim that a change of pace is required, hinging on a streamlined authorization process, more competition and a focus on agricultural land.Italy's last three renewables tenders for projects exceeding 1 MW went under-subscribed, with prices following an upward trend, in stark contrast with the Spanish case. According to several experts and analysts, the Italian procurement exercises are a "fiasco" ...

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.
Restaurant, bar and hotel owners are pressing for the extension of a VAT cut and another year of rates relief, arguing many will emerge from the lockdown deep in debt, with no reserves and facing a long road to profitability - if they survive.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak is coming under pressure from hospitality industry representatives to maintain the 5% VAT on food, non-alcohol drink, accommodation and entrance to certain attractions, introduced last year but due to expire at the end of March.

Restaurant, bar and hotel owners have hardly benefited from the cut so far due to the closure of premises for most of the last year, said Colin Neill, chief executive of Hospitality Ulster.

Maintaining VAT at 5% - down from 20% - will not only help the battered industry but also boost consumer spending and confidence, the industry group argues.

"It is all to play for but there is no indication yet," Mr Neill said on whether the chancellor will decide to keep the cut in place. Hospitality Ulster has been working with trade groups in Britain in their campaign on VAT and on rates, arguing businesses largely have not benefited from the cut.

"And therefore it has not cost the Government so we are making the case that it is justifiable that it continues," Mr Neill said.

He added, however, that the industry wants to make the 5% rate permanent.

The hospitality industry argues that these measures will allow businesses to return to some profitability much sooner than the estimated up to two years.

Mr Neill said businesses are also looking for a business rates holiday to be extended for another year. Finance Minister Conor Murphy has been "sympathetic" but the decision will be easier if London takes the lead on the issue, he said.

Nearly a year on from the first lockdown, and with no date for re-opening, it is not clear how many bars, restaurants and hotels will survive, the industry representative said. "It is hard to estimate and we will know until re-opening which are gone," said Mr Neill. He cited a survey that suggested 11% of pubs, 18% of hotels and 29% of restaurants are at risk of closure. Many of them will be debt ridden with exhausted reserves, he added.

Across the UK, it is estimated that activity in the hospitality sector dropped 85% in the first half of 2020, compared to 20% in the overall economy.

While hospitality reopened for some months during the summer and early autumn, sales still declined 48% in the third quarter, according to UK Hospitality.

"The current lockdown leaves only one in five sector businesses believing they have enough cash flow to survive beyond February," the organisation reported.

"Business confidence remains low: 41% of businesses believe they will fail by mid-2021 and 72% of businesses expect to fail by the end of 2021 without a change in circumstances.

"The industry is heading into the worst quarter for sales from January to March which has been compounded by a UK-wide loss of 7.8bn of revenue in Christmas sales and the removal of the job retention bonuses which creates an additional 2.1bn black hole in the sector's finances in February 2021."
Alameda County jail inmates who are forced to prepare food and clean kitchens for a private contractor without pay can sue for minimum wages and overtime, a federal judge ruled Tuesday.

California labor laws and the Constitutions 13th Amendment, which outlawed slavery, entitle nine pretrial inmates at Santa Rita Jail in Dublin to sue the contractor, Aramark Correctional Services, for wages and overtime they would have been paid as employees, said U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar of Oakland. He said the inmates could also sue Alameda County for minimum wages.

The ruling only rejected attempts by Aramark and the county to dismiss the suit and did not say whether they owed any sums to the inmates. But attorney Dan Siegel said he would now seek to expand the case to a class action on behalf of more than 100 pretrial inmates at the jail, seeking as much as several million dollars in unpaid wages for a period that began four years before the suit was filed in November 2019.

The decision should provide a road map for other cases challenging the exploitation of county prisoner labor for private profit in California, Siegel said.

Lawyers for the company and the county were not immediately available for comment.

The food prepared and packaged by the inmates is sold by Aramark to other institutions. According to the lawsuit, inmates are required to work in the jail kitchen, overseen by Aramark employees, and are told that if they refuse, they can be placed in solitary confinement and can face longer sentences if convicted of the charges they face.

Inmates are also given production quotas and can face discipline for missing work because of illness or injury, the suit said.

Tigar said the claims in the suit, if proved, were enough to show that the company and the county both had employment relationships with the inmates.

The inmates allege that Aramark dictates the length of prisoner-employees shifts, and that Aramark can effectively terminate them if Aramark is dissatisfied with them, which is enough to show an employment relationship, Tigar said. He said evidence that sheriffs deputies forced the inmates to work, and threatened punishment for taking sick days, would show that they were also county employees.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @BobEgelko
Mamata arrives 30 minutes late for Cyclone Yaas review meet with PM Modi, leaves after handing over documents

Centre seeks services of West Bengal Chief Secretary, officer to report in Delhi after PM-Mamata meet row

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Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Kerala polls likely after Feb 15

India

oi-Deepika S

New Delhi, Feb 10: The dates for the state elections in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Assam and Puducherry is likely to be announced after February 15. The final call will be taken after the commission visits poll-bound states to take stock of election preparedness.

Reportedly, electoral body is planning to held holding single-phased elections in Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Puducherry. Assam may see elections in 2-3 phases.

The terms of the legislative assemblies of the four states and the Union Territory of Puducherry end on different dates in May and June and the elections are likely to take place in April.

Meanwhile, the top brass of the Election Commission would visit poll-bound Tamil Nadu, Puducherry and Kerala to take stock of election preparedness.

Cheating case: Kerala HC grants interim protection from arrest to Sunny Leone

They would visit neighbouring Puducherry on February 12 and Kerala on February 13 and 14 to interact with poll officials and civil and police officers to take stock of election preparedness.

The commission also interacts with political parties.

The commission usually visits poll-bound states before announcing the election schedule. But in the case of Bihar, the poll panel had visited Patna after announcing the election dates.
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Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-10 22:49:17|Editor: huaxia

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COTONOU, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- China and Benin have signed a financing agreement to support high impact social and economic projects in the West African country.

Chinese Ambassador to Benin Peng Jingtao and Benin's minister of foreign affairs and cooperation Aurelien Agbenonci signed the agreement on Tuesday in the economic capital Cotonou.

Worth about 7.7 million US dollars, the economic and technical support package will help finance high-impact social and economic projects within the action program of the Benin government.

"China will continue to provide its tireless support to the government and the people of Benin in their reforms and also in their modernization efforts," Peng said.

Agbenonci said the signing of this donation agreement is further evidence of the friendly and cooperative relations between Benin and China. Enditem
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The official says the committee, so far, had forfeited assets in 25 locations across the country.

The Federal Government's inter-ministerial committee on assets disposal said Tuesday that it would create a central database of assets for finally forfeited assets.

The chairman of the committee, Dayo Apata, said this during a courtesy visit of the committee to the headquarters of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) in Abuja.

Mr Apata, who is the Solicitor-General of the Federation and Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Justice, said: "the committee will create a central database of assets that had been forfeited to the Federal Government to ensure the Federal Government gets value for all the forfeited assets".

"Introducing uniform process of assets disposal, and avoiding wastages, so that the Federal Government can have the full benefit of what has been forfeited," a statement by the EFCC quoted Mr Apata as saying.

He commended what he described as the "unprecedented synergy" among the relevant agencies represented on the committee.

"For the first time in Nigeria, all agencies are sitting together and discussing on the same table on issues related to assets management and disposal," he said.

Mr Apata, at the committee's maiden press briefing on February 2, said the committee, so far, had forfeited assets in 25 locations across the country.

He said on Tuesday that "16 of the 25 sites were finally forfeited at the instance of the EFCC".

"So it is only reasonable to come and pay homage and discuss with you how we can execute this assignment", Mr Apata stated.

On his part, the acting chairman, EFCC, Mohammed Abba, said the commission would assist the committee in the execution of its mandate.

He also promised to facilitate the request of the committee to visit various zones of the country for onsite inspection of forfeited assets.

Committee to sell assets within six months

Last November, the Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami (SAN) inaugurated a 22-member committee with a six-month mandate to sell off all assets forfeited to the federal government.

The minister, while inaugurating the 22-member committee, said the initiative was borne out of the president's directive in October 2018 following recommendations of the Presidential Audit Committee on Recovery and Management of Stolen Assets and a need for efficient management of the assets.

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Members of the committee included the representatives of the Office of the Chief of Staff to the President; the Federal Ministry of Justice; Federal Ministry of Finance; Federal Ministry of Works and Housing, Auditor-General of the Federation, Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, Independent Corrupt Practices (and other related offences) Commission.

They also include the representatives of Nigerian Army, Nigerian Navy, Nigeria Police, Nigeria Security Civil Defence Corps, Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency, Department of State Security, National Drug Law Enforcement Agency, Department of Petroleum Resources, National Oil Spillage, Detection and Response Agency, Bureau of Public Procurement, and the Civil Society Organisation.

Others are youth representatives, the media, and other industries included by the Attorney General of the Federation.
Wednesday, February 10, 2021

As you might know, Garrison indicted Clay Shaw for perjury after his acquittal on conspiracy charges. He claimed Shaw lied when he denied knowing David Ferrie and Lee Harvey Oswald. Garrison told his staff to go out and find new leads to help prove his perjury case.

Garrison had strict instructions on the maintenance of this file:

There are many memos of Shaw Leads II. Most of the leads are nothing more than rehashed rumors or stale leads that were of no interest when first reported. Needless to say, none of the leads panned out. Here is one of the first memos:

Regarding Lead I, they interviewed Guzman in May 1969, who said he never worked for Banister. He never saw Oswald at Thompson's cafe, and said he knew nothing about Shaw or Oswald.

I am glad that Al Clark is "allegedly a respectable homosexual." They followed up with Clark who was not certain that he had been introduced to Oswald. Perhaps it had been Gordon Novel.

This is all craziness. 96 people were arrested at the 'fag ball' in 1962. So what on earth does have to do with Clay Shaw? They combed the list of arrestees looking for friends, or people who lived near, Clay Shaw. This is all pure Garrison propinquity theory - in particular, the "long shot special." By the way, Clay Shaw was not one of the people arrested.

You can read more about the "fag ball" here.

Dr. Martin Palmer was Clay Shaw's physician, and he was also gay. Why that lead is relevant is beyond me. Because of the persecution of Clay Shaw, Palmer moved to Alaska, and he died in 2009.

The James Lawrence lead was important - they were desperate to find someone to rebut Lloyd Cobb's testimony at the Clay Shaw trial that Shaw was extremely busy during the months of July - October 1963 - they were finalizing the financing of the International Trade Mart. Cobb was in contact with Shaw every day - and testified that Shaw only left town once, in that period, to go see his mother in Hammond, Louisiana.

The Beard-Sohr lead is also insane - both subjects are in Angola prison. There is a previous memo from September 1967 that said a Mr. John Smith was playing pinball on Canal Street when Oswald walked into the Penny Arcade. Lead XI refers to David Gentry - a friend of Clay Shaw's who identified Shaw's friends to Garrison.

Lee Harvey Oswald was seen all over the French Quarter in various gay bars. Here he was playing pool on five occasions.

The Mattachine Society was an early gay rights group. Once again, Oswald is seen with homosexuals - this time at a straight coffee house. Garrison did talk with Delphine Roberts - she worked for Guy Banister - but she said nothing about ever seeing Lee Harvey Oswald in Banister's office.
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Residents temporarily evacuated from Homestead after fire, no injuries

A Saturday afternoon fire in an apartment at a senior living complex was quickly extinguished and nobody was injured.
[February 10, 2021] Mark Friedman Joins Frontline Education as Chief Marketing Officer

MALVERN, Pa., Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Frontline EducationTM, a leading provider of school administration software purpose-built for K-12, today announced that Mark Friedman has joined the company as Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). Friedman will lead Frontline Education's go-to-market strategy, business development and client communications programs, bringing 25 years of sales, marketing and business development experience to the company. "The chief marketing officer is critical to the future success of Frontline Education as we continue to scale the company, growing our portfolio and our brand," said Mark Gruzin, CEO of Frontline Education. "We are excited for Mark Friedman to bring his broad expertise and client-centric approach to Frontline, enhancing our go-to-market initiatives with a proactive strategy that provides tangible value to our clients." Prior to joining Frontline Education, Friedman served as SVP, Global Customer Success for Genesys, Chief Marketing and Business Development Officer for SoundBite Communications, President & CEO of Peppercoin and VP of Global Marketing for Lucent/Kenan Systems. In these various positions and throughout his career, Friedman has explored the organic integrations between marketing, customer uccess, and other customer-facing functions.



"I am thrilled to join a rapidly growing company that is focused on serving and supporting K-12 education," said Mark Friedman, CMO of Frontline Education. "I had wonderful opportunities throughout my schooling with educators who stepped in and helped me become who I am today. Through my work at Frontline Education, I look forward to giving back to the education community that gave so much to me." Mark Friedman graduated from the University of Pennsylvania's Management & Technology program, holding a BS in Finance from The Wharton School and BS in Systems Science Engineering from The School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He also earned an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management, with concentrations in Corporate Strategy and Marketing.

Friedman will lead marketing and business development strategies to ensure that the needs and challenges faced by educators are understood and translated into approaches that bring additional value to the education market. About Frontline Education: Frontline Education is a leading provider of school administration software and services purpose-built for K-12 to support the growth of people and optimize the management of processes. With solutions for human capital management, student management, and business operations, Frontline partners with school systems to deliver tools, data and insights for greater efficiency, productivity, and performance resulting in more time for initiatives that matter to the education community. Frontline's broad portfolio includes solutions for proactive recruiting and hiring, absence and time, professional growth, student information systems, special education, special programs, Medicaid reimbursement, school health management, payroll, benefits and financial management. Educational organizations representing over 80,000 schools, millions of educators, administrators and support personnel have partnered with Frontline Education in their efforts to develop the next generation of learners. Frontline Education corporate headquarters are in Malvern, PA, with offices in Roseville, CA; Salinas, CA; Naperville, IL; Andover, MA; Walled Lake, MI; New York, NY; Rockville Centre, NY; Brecksville, OH; Austin, TX and Plano, TX as well as a growing remote workforce. View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mark-friedman-joins-frontline-education-as-chief-marketing-officer-301226072.html SOURCE Frontline Education

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A WOMAN is facing a possible prison sentence after she admitted committing multiple shoplifting offences during the Covid lockdown.

When arraigned at Limerick Circuit Court, Carrie Benn, 28, who has an address at Rutland House, Rutland Street admitted stealing hundreds of euro worth of goods from a variety of stores at different locations.

When the case was called, prosecuting barrister John OSullivan said a total of 20 charges had been preferred against Ms Benn and that 14 sample charges were to be put to her.

This, he said, was acceptable to the State on the basis that the full facts relating to all matters will be outlined to the court during the sentencing hearing.

As each of the 14 charges were read by the registrar, the defendant confirmed that she wished to enter a guilty plea.

All bar two of the offences occurred since the introduction of restrictions last March due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Most were committed on dates last summer and the defendant was arrested and charged late last year with the DPP directing prosecution on indictment.

Ms Benn, who appeared before the court via video-link from Limerick Prison, has admitted stealing a variety of items including a ghd hair straighter, bluetooth speakers, baby bottles, saucepans and pots, hundreds of euro worth of clothing, solar panels and a hand-held vacuum cleaner.

She has also pleaded guilty to stealing various grocery items, four bottles of brandy, five bottles of wine, three bottles of vodka, and 140 worth of meat.

After her client formally entered her guilty pleas, barrister Eimear Carey requested an adjournment of the case to facilitate the preparation of a probation report in relation to Ms Benn.

There was no objection from the State and Judge Tom ODonnell adjourned the matter to next month when he will evidence in relation to each of the offences.

Under the provisions of the Criminal Justice (Theft and Fraud Offences) Act, 2001, a maximum sentence of ten years imprisonment can be imposed in relation to each of the offences.

Sainsbury's has today waded into the supermarket price war by slashing the cost of hundreds of its most popular food and drink items to match discount rival Aldi.

The grocery chain said it is launching the scheme to 'help shoppers who are working hard to balance budgets, with the events of the past year continuing to put pressure on people's purses'.

It comes against a backdrop growing pressure from German discounters Aldi and Lidl, whose low prices are forcing the biggest UK supermarkets to replicate in order to stay ahead.

However, unlike the other market leaders, both Aldi and Lidl have failed to benefit substantially from the surge in demand for online orders and home deliveries since the pandemic fully impacted the UK.

A graphic shows how the supermarket giant has slashed the price of some of its most popular grocery items

Cheapest to most-expensive supermarkets Lidl, 42.67

Aldi, 43.01

Asda, 48.71

Tesco, 53.30

Morrisons, 53.61

Sainsbury's, 56.38

Ocado, 66.83

Waitrose, 68.69 Advertisement

Sainsbury's said its commitment will mean that around 250 products will see prices reduced to match the equivalent items at Aldi.

It said the move will focus on its most popular items with customers, including meat, chicken, fresh fruit and vegetables, and dairy.

Mark Given, chief marketing officer, said the price reductions will be funded by a 'significant investment' by Sainsbury's.

'We recognise that giving customers good value is a core part of our strategy so will invest to keep prices low,' he said.

'When we've completed research, our shoppers have highlighted our quality and value for money, but with customers who also shop in other supermarkets we need to improve our price perception.

'We need to communicate this better with customers because the value is there.'

It said price reductions will include reducing a kilo of plain flour from 80p to 45p, a kilo of baby potatoes from 95p to 65p and a 21-day matured rump steak from 2.50 to 2.32.

Other examples will see the price of a kilo of British chicken breast fillets slashed from 5 to 4.79, two smoked Basa fillets cut from 2.50 to 2.39 and a kilo of frozen berry mix priced at 2.50, down from 2.39.

The price match is the first new initiative of chief executive Simon Roberts' plan, announced in November, to put food back 'at the heart of the business'.

Mr Roberts added: 'We are making great progress delivering our Food First plan and I'm determined that in these tough times, we do even more to help our customers save money.

'Our new commitment to match Aldi prices on hundreds of our most popular products will mean our customers can be confident that they are getting the quality they expect from Sainsbury's at great prices.'

Sainsbury's said it is launching the scheme to 'help shoppers who are working hard to balance budgets, with the events of the past year continuing to put pressure on people's purses'

It comes against a backdrop growing pressure from German discounters Aldi and Lidl, whose low prices are forcing the biggest UK supermarkets to replicate in order to stay ahead

The cuts, which will primarily involve own-brand products, come almost a year after Tesco launched its own Aldi price match scheme to keep its prices in competition with the fast-growing discounters.

Aldi has seen its rapid sales growth fall behind some of its rivals during the pandemic, as its smaller online proposition meant it has not been able to fully take advantage of the booming demand for home deliveries.

Figures from Kantar showed that Aldi sales grew by 5.7% in the 12 weeks to January 24, compared with 12.2% growth across the UK grocery market as a whole.

Sainsbury's sales were 12% higher for the period after expanding its online delivery capacity, according to the data.

A study last month found Lidl and Aldi were the cheapest supermarkets of 2020, with Waitrose coming in as the most expensive, and Sainsbury's in sixth, behind Asda, Tesco and Morrisons.

Researchers tracked the price of 45 popular products such as Hovis bread, Knorr stock cubes and free-range eggs in eight major supermarkets for at least 100 days between January and December 2020.

The average price of each item over the year and the total average cost of all 45 items in the 'trolley'  taking the weight and quality of items into account - was calculated by consumer group Which?

Aldi announced in September it will open 100 new stores and create 4,000 jobs after profits surged by 49 per cent in a year.

The discount giant plans to pump 1.3 billion of investment into the stores by the end of 2021.

The expansion is part of a long-term plan to grow from 894 to 1,200 locations in the UK by 2025.

Despite campaign promises to invest in our nations infrastructure, create good-paying union jobs, and build our economy back better, President Bidens track record from his first week in office is coming up short.

On Day One, Biden canceled the Keystone XL pipeline. Then he signed an executive order halting oil and gas leasing on public lands. Now, Keep it in the Ground activists are calling on him to shut down the Dakota Access Pipeline, which has been safely operating for more than three and a half years  delivering up to 570,000 barrels of North Dakota crude oil per day to U.S. markets.

Unfortunately, it seems the president is paying homage to the vocal far-left rather than the millions of blue-collar union workers and working class families who put him in the White House.

Many Americans agree that climate change should be among the top priorities for the Biden administration. According to an October Pew Research Center survey, 44% of voters ranked climate change as a very important issue. While this percentage has grown in recent decades, it still lags significantly behind the leading issue: the economy, which 79% of voters recognized as very important in the 2020 election. This was followed by health care (68%) and the coronavirus outbreak (62%).

Bidens decision to block the $9 billion Keystone XL pipeline  which was estimated to support 11,000 American jobs in 2021, generate $1.6 billion in gross wages, serve as a lifeline to labor unions in the wake of the pandemic, and ultimately usher in $140 million in annual property tax revenues for state and local governments  certainly does not seem to align with his promises of creating jobs and investing in infrastructure.

Or consider the presidents decision to ban oil and gas leasing on federal lands and waters.

Reports from the American Petroleum Institute forecast detrimental effects on the economy, with potential losses of nearly 1 million jobs by 2022, more than $9 billion in government revenue at risk, and U.S. households spending a cumulative $19 billion more on energy by 2030.

High energy-producing states with large areas of federal land, such as New Mexico and Wyoming, stand to lose not only thousands of industry jobs and access to affordable energy, but also billions in state revenue that could hurt public services, schools, infrastructure and health care. In Wyoming, where more than half of the states oil and more than 90 percent of its natural gas is retrieved from federal land, the oil and gas industry paid $1.67 billion to state and local governments. In New Mexico, that number is even larger, with the industry contributing $3.1 billion, about 40 percent of the states revenue of which $1.4 billion is earmarked for education funding.

Nationally, more than 12 percent of U.S. natural gas production and nearly a quarter of U.S. oil production is sourced from public lands and waters, and without it, our nation will need additional foreign oil and gas. And since the president said no to Keystone XL, it wont be coming from Canada. In fact, it will strain the global market, raising costs on consumers and adding to the coffers of petro-authoritarian nations that would seek to do democracy harm.

Preventing the construction of Keystone XL or banning drilling on public lands wont reduce the importance of fossil fuels in the American economy. Beyond the economic ramifications, these misguided, anti-energy policies revive American dependence on foreign energy, and cut off access to reliable, affordable, American-produced energy to our allies and trade partners around the globe  jeopardizing our strategic advantage as a global hegemon and instead allowing foreign states to grow their influence.

Good environmental policy and policies that promote American economic growth are not mutually exclusive. For example, TC Energy, Keystone XLs developer, committed to use only renewable energy to operate the pipeline system, and eliminate all greenhouse-gas emissions from operations by 2030. This is a positive example of addressing environmental concerns while recognizing the still-critical role of crude oil and ensuring reliable access to the United States.

More broadly, an all of the above strategy that welcomes investment in renewable energy sources but recognizes the importance of the cornerstones of American energy  oil and natural gas  is key to fueling the our nations economy, bolstering our energy security and national security, and achieving our shared future economic and environmental goals.

As the United States continues its COVID-19 recovery, it is more important now than ever to set aside politics and come together to focus on sound policies that put our nation on the path to success.

Craig Stevens is a former senior adviser in the Energy Department and is the spokesman for Grow Americas Infrastructure Now. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.
KYODO NEWS - Feb 10, 2021 - 12:20 | All, Japan, Coronavirus

As the 10th anniversary of the 2011 quake-tsunami disaster approaches, Emperor Naruhito and Empress Masako are considering meeting with survivors online as the coronavirus pandemic makes it difficult for them to visit northeastern Japan, an Imperial Household Agency source said Wednesday.

Video conferences with residents of Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima -- prefectures hard hit by the March 11 disaster that triggered a nuclear crisis -- are expected to start in mid-February, according to the source.

The emperor and empress, who have visited the region when they were crown prince and crown princess, are expected to pray for victims and offer words of encouragement to the survivors.

Former Emperor Akihito and former Empress Michiko made frequent visits to the disaster-stricken region. The current emperor ascended the throne following his father's abdication in April 2019.

If the government holds a ceremony on March 11 to commemorate the disaster's 10th anniversary despite the virus situation, the emperor and the empress plan to attend, according to the source.

Last year, a state-sponsored memorial ceremony that had been held every year in Tokyo since 2012 was canceled for the first time due to the pandemic.

In January, the emperor and the empress met online with residents of Kumamoto Prefecture in southwestern Japan, where torrential rains left many dead or missing last July.
India has developed two corona vaccines and has started corona vaccination on January 16. India is also supplying vaccine to other countries also under the Vaccine Maitri initiative. India has supplied Indian-made COVID-19 vaccines to countries including Bhutan, Maldives, Nepal, Myanmar, and Bangladesh. After many neighbouring countries, Dominica and Barbados on Wednesday received 'Made in India' corona vaccines under the Vaccine Maitri initiative.

External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar took to Twitter to share this information. He wrote, "A gesture of goodwill, an example of support. Made in India vaccines arrive in Dominica." Consolidating our Caribbean connect. Barbados receives Made in India vaccines.

India dispatched two consignments of Covishield corona vaccines to the countries of Barbados and Dominica under the Vaccine Maitri initiative. The consignments of vaccines, manufactured by the Serum Institute of India (SII) was departed from Mumbai.

Meanwhile, Coronavirus cases rise unabated across the globe, with more than 107.4 million infected by the deadly contagion. While 79,428,653 have recovered, 2,348,727 have died so far. The US remains the worst-hit country with 27,793,890, followed by India, Brazil, Russia and the United Kingdom.

Also Read:

WHO team says coronavirus unlikely to have leaked from Chinese labs

Brazil reports 1,350 corona deaths, over 50,000 cases in a day

America: The death of George Floyd sparked global unrest and ultimately, change.


Mass attendees were given prayer cards with a reproduction of a painting of Jesus the Good Shepherd on the front and the full names of Zamudio  Nancy Cithlaly Zamudio Rodriguez  and her daughters on the back. They also received a prayer card with Zamudios and the girls photos on it, and a cutout paper butterfly, saying in Spanish, In memory of the Espinosa Family. A flower on the grave withers. A tear for them evaporates. A prayer will lift their souls to God.
The proposal to require domestic airline passengers to prove they have tested negative for Covid-19 is a "horrible idea," according to Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian.

Bastian told CNN's Poppy Harlow Tuesday that the proposal being discussed by the Biden Administration would drain testing resources away from people who need it more. He said the number of confirmed Covid cases transmitted during air travel since the start of the pandemic has been "absolutely minimal."

"It will not keep domestic flyers safer," he said. Planes have hospital quality air filters on board and exchange fresh air into the cabin every few minutes, reducing the chance of transmission.

"In fact [there are] very, very few documented cases globally, not just domestically," Bastian said of air-travel related infections. He added that the domestic testing requirement would take "about 10%" of the resources the country needs "to test sick people away from those people."

Covid tests are required for some international travelers in an effort to stop new variants of the virus from spreading more rapidly in the United States. Tests are also required before boarding flights to Hawaii but not for most domestic flights.

Bastian said adding the requirement would be a "logistical nightmare" that would be a body blow to the already struggling airline and hospitality industries.

"It would set us back another year in the recovery," he predicted.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told CNN that there is no decision yet to require testing, but it is one of the options being considered by the Centers for Disease Control.

"There has got to be common sense medicine and science really driving this," he said.

Delta announced Monday that it would continue to not book passengers in its planes' middle seats through at least April. It is the only US airline that continues to limit capacity.

"It's expensive. No question about it," Bastian said. But the cost of keeping the middle seat open is partly offset by higher fares that Delta has been able to charge, he added.

The amount that Delta passengers paid on average for every mile traveled in the final three months of the year was down only 3% from the pre-pandemic period a year earlier. That's significantly better than that of the other three major US airlines -- American, United and Southwest -- which are battling declines of 15% to 19%.

"People are prioritizing, as they should, their health and safety and comfort as they travel," Bastian said. "And we're getting a meaningful premium for travel on Delta."

Delta began offering vaccines to its employees at Atlanta's Hartsfield Airport this week, prioritizing employees who are age 65 or older. The company is also offering vaccines to employees of other airlines.

Some have suggested vaccines should be required of all airline employees who interact with the public. But Bastian said it is too soon to discuss such a requirement.

"First of all, most of our employees can't even get the vaccines. We don't have the supplies yet," he said. "We'll strongly encourage vaccinations. I know our people understand how important it is to restore confidence back in travel and getting vaccinated is one of those steps that we'll take. I think that's a decision for later on as we go through the course of the vaccination efforts."

Correction: A previous version of this story misspelled Delta CEO Ed Bastian's surname.
(TNS)  Washington state would vault to the forefront of the movement to purge fossil fuels from automotive fleets under bills introduced in the Legislature to ban registration of new gas- and diesel-powered vehicles in 2030.House Bill 1204 and Senate Bill 5256 cover new model passenger vehicles and light- duty trucks, and would kick in at the start of the next decade. The bills call for these vehicles  to be registered in Washington state  to use an electric battery or hydrogen. They put no sunset date on the ownership and sale of 2029 or earlier model gas- and diesel-powered vehicles.Electric cars  if charged by power generated from sources such as wind, solar, nuclear or hydro  can be a key part of a global push to reduce carbon emissions that drive climate change. The push to electrify cars gained momentum last month when General Motors announced a goal of ending the sale of internal combustion engines by 2035.But the Washington bills are facing behind-the-scenes pushback from state Attorney General Bob Ferguson, whose legislative director has not submitted public testimony but in an email to two legislators expressed "serious concerns" about the bills.In the Jan. 28 email, Yasmin Trudeau cautioned that should the proposal become law, it would face a swift legal challenge in federal court from opponents who would argue the state had exceeded its authority under the federal Clean Air Act. Trudeau wrote, "we would very likely lose in district court" and set an unfavorable precedent.California is the only state granted an exemption from the federal Clean Air Act to set its own emission standards for automobiles. Other states, including Washington, can choose to follow the tougher California standards, which Gov. Gavin Newsom  in an executive order last year  said should include a 2035 end to sales of new gasoline and diesel-powered passenger vehicles.But California's legal authority under the Clear Air Act exemption has come attack through federal rule-making under the Trump administration, and is being litigated. And the new California 2035 standard  once it becomes a formal rule  also is likely to face legal challenges.Trudeau, in her email, said that litigation filed against the Washington legislation could complicate efforts to move forward with the California phaseout of gas vehicles.In response to a Seattle Times inquiry about the email, a spokesperson for Ferguson said the attorney general "supports the policy objective behind this legislation," and would defend any laws passed by the Legislature. The spokesperson, Brionna Aho, said, "To assist the Legislature with advancing the policy objectives of this legislation in a way most likely to survive legal challenge, we presented preliminary legal concerns for the Legislature to consider."Proponents of the Washington bills say they have structured the legislation in a way they hope will sidestep that federal preemption against states other than California setting rules that regulate emissions standard, and thus survive a legal challenge.The bills' language leaves out any intent to lower emissions. Instead it describes an effort to boost the Washington economy by shifting to lower-cost fuels largely produced from regional electricity. The bills also cite the need to reduce water pollution, which is not part of the federal preemption, caused by fossil fuels that drip from vehicles."There are many other reasons to switch from gas to electric besides emission reductions  useful life of the vehicle, fueling and maintenance costs," wrote state Rep. Nicole Macri, D-Seattle, a House sponsor of the legislation, in response to Trudeau's email.The legislation has been championed by Matthew Metz, a Washington attorney who founded and co-executive director of Coltura, a nonprofit calling for a "gasoline-free America." Metz said that action by 2030 is needed to give the state a chance for meeting ambitious targets set by the Legislature for cutting almost all greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050.He also said passage of the bill also would bolster the case for proposing a national target to phase out internal combustion engines in 2030, rather than 2035 as Newsom has proposed for California."This will help push the whole thing forward," Metz said.In response to the concerns raised by the state Attorney General's office, Metz has proposed amending the language in the bills, so that any regulation to carry out the Washington law does not take effect until Jan. 1, 2025. He said that would fend of lawsuits until that date, and by then, any legal issues surrounding California's standards should be resolved.A survey of Washingtonians in September by the Center for Climate Change Communications at George Mason University found 59% of Washingtonians either strongly or somewhat support the 2030 measure. And the legislation has been boosted by some environmental groups advocating for strong action on climate change."Unlike bills that require complex regulatory mechanisms, the ... bill is a simple mandate to stop selling new cars that emit climate pollution within the time that science tells us we must," said Andrew Kidde of 350 Seattle, a chapter of an international group campaigning to end the age of fossil fuels.The bills received a hearing Feb. 1 in the House Transportation Committee, and would have to be voted out of that committee this month to have a significant chance of passage.Rep. Jake Fey, D-Tacoma, chair of the House Transportation Committee, said he has yet to meet with other Democrats on the committee to discuss the bill, and whether  given the concerns raised by the state attorney general  it should move forward.He also noted other urgent items for the committee to address, including a transportation funding package during a virtual session when fewer bills will move through the Legislature, and there is limited time for House floor debate in the remote sessions prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic."This will not be a bill that will take 15 minutes in committee and 15 minutes on the floor to debate. This will take a lot of time," Fey said. "We've got to make choices ... It doesn't look like this has a high likelihood of moving forward.""We are still going to push. I feel passionately about this. We have to show leadership," Metz said.
(Alliance News) - The following is a round-up of London-listed company director and manager changes announced on Wednesday and not separately reported by Alliance News:







Eleco PLC - construction software firm - Says Jonathan Hunter, who took on the role of interim chief executive back in September, has been appointed CEO on a permanent basis. Hunter was appointed to the board in June 2016, having held a number of senior management positions within Eleco since joining in 2010. He was appointed COO in 2017 prior to his appointment as interim CEO.







600 Group PLC - West Yorkshire, England-based manufacturer and distributor of machine tools, precision engineered components and industrial laser systems - Says Chief Financial Officer Mitch Krasny steps down as a director with immediate effect by mutual agreement. A formal process to identify a successor has been initiated.







GCP Infrastructure Investments Ltd - focuses primarily on investments in UK infrastructure debt - Says that, following conclusion of Wednesday's annual general meeting, Non-Executive Director David Pirouet has retired. Company appoints Steven Wilderspin, effective Wednesday. Wilderspin is currently a non-executive director at Blackstone Loan Financing Ltd and HarbourVest Global Private Equity Ltd.







Mineral & Financial Investments Ltd - Cayman Islands-based investment company specialising in junior mining companies - Adds Mark Brown, president of Pacific Opportunity Capital Ltd, to the board as chair. Jacques Vaillancourt will assume the role of president, chief executive & director of the company.







W Resources PLC - tungsten, tin and gold mining company - Says Non-Executive Director Oscar Marin Garcia will step down from the board on Friday to focus on increased commitments in his business. The search for a new non-executive is underway. Garcia says: "Whilst my current commitments mean I am unable to remain on the board of directors, I remain a strong advocate of W Resources and its operations in Spain and I intend to retain my beneficial shareholding in the company."







Nuformix PLC - pharmaceutical development firm based in London - Says Chris Blackwell has resigned as non-executive chair and director of the company with immediate effect "due to personal reasons that require his immediate attention". A process to appoint a new chair will start immediately.







Smith & Nephew PLC - medical devices manufacturer - Appoints John Ma as a non-executive director. Since 2019, he has served as chief executive & chair of Ronovo Surgical, a start-up soft tissue surgical robotics business he founded. "We are delighted to have secured a Board colleague with John's track record growing medical device businesses across China and the wider region," says Smith & Nephew Chair Roberto Quarta.







Ground Rents Income Fund PLC - real estate investment trust - Appoints Barry Gilbertson as a non-executive director, effective Wednesday. He was recently appointed as executive chair of Custodian Capital Ltd, a subsidiary of Mattioli Woods PLC, in January. Adds that Malcolm Naish has informed the board he intends to retire as chair and a non-executive director at the company's next annual general meeting. It is intended Gilbertson will success Naish on his retirement.







Atalaya Mining PLC - Cyprus-based copper producer - Appoints Neil Gregson, who has over 30 years' experience of investing in mining and oil and gas companies, as a non-executive director. From 2010 to 2020 he was a Managing Director at JP Morgan Asset Management where, as a member of the equity team, he was a portfolio manager investing in mining and energy companies globally.







By Lucy Heming;A lucyheming@alliancenews.com

Copyright 2021 Alliance News Limited. All Rights Reserved.
Pittsfield Committee Votes to Keep Bike Lane on North Street

PITTSFIELD, Mass.  North Street's new configuration survived the vote of the Committee on Public Works.

The Public Works Committee on Monday rejected a petition from Ward 2 Councilor Kevin Morandi to eliminate the new bike lanes and return to two travel lanes in a 3-2 ruling with Ward 4 Councilor Chris Connell and Ward 7 Councilor Anthony Maffuccio voting in favor.



Morandi brought this petition to the last City Council meeting, where he withdrew his motion and the council unanimously voted to send the petition to the Public Works Committee so that Public Services and Utilities Commissioner Ricardo Morales could give a detailed explanation of the project and answer questions.



This pilot program aims to make North Street a Complete Street that prioritizes all methods of transportation beyond just vehicles and to implement traffic calming measures. Late last year, the first block of North was made to merge into one lane and added a bike lane. The same was done to an additional block of North in front of the YMCA, where diagonal parking was introduced.



"With these changes, we're implementing, the goal is to eventually have some permanent solution for the problem we have on our downtown streets which is speeding vehicles and conflict points," Morales said in a presentation he gave to the commission.



The pilot is through the state's Shared Streets and Spaces Program, which provides cities and towns with grants as small as $5,000 and as large as $500,000 to improve plazas, sidewalks, curbs, streets, parking areas, and other public spaces in support of public health, safe mobility, and renewed commerce.



It started with a design grant that was accepted by the City Council last year when Pittsfield received funding to design various projects related to shared streets. Ultimately, it was granted $240,000 to perform some of the pilot programs in late 2020, two of them being the North Street bicycle facilities on the first block of the street and diagonal parking between Melville and Union Streets.



Before implementation, Morales evaluated the purposed changes with several city departments including the Police and Fire Departments and based on input by department directors and City Planner CJ Hoss, was able to make a better design and get the necessary funding.



In September, the city was awarded the grant through state Department of Transportation and, by the middle of November, 90 percent of the work had been installed.



Since then, Morales said he has been monitoring additional services that rely on the corridor.



In 2017, the city adopted the Complete Streets policy, which prompts the administration to consider providing a safer mode of transportation alternative from single-person vehicles in all of the decisions it makes in relation to roadwork.

Morales assured the committee that based on the width measurements of emergency vehicles and the space allowance that is provided when a car pulls over, there is plenty of room for them to pass in the one-lane configuration.



Though he voted against Morandi's petition, Kavey explained that his hang up on the pilot is in the lane variations on North from one to two and back. He is not against a change in layout for the downtown but finds the variance problematic.



"My only real concern with what is happening in downtown is the one lane, two lane, one lane, two lane, the going to two lanes merging, I watched how dangerous it is, especially for people who aren't around here," he said.



Ward 6 Councilor Dina Guiel Lampiasi, who spoke in support of the bike lanes in the previous City Council meeting, said the pilot will be an adjustment because people have driven down North Street in its previous fashion for their whole lives.



"This is a project that there's going to be growing pains," she said. "And it can be really difficult when we receive calls from constituents and seeing kind of the light at the end of the tunnel or helping others to maybe see what we're envisioning for those of us that are into this."



Guiel Lampiasi added that she is on North Street nearly every day and has not experienced any backup of traffic from the changes even though she takes her lunch break at infrequent times.
New Delhi, Feb 10 : The country's largest electricity exchange, the Indian Energy Exchange (IEX), has entered into a strategic partnership with a third investor for its new platform.

Gas utility GAIL has picked up 5 per cent equity stake in the Indian Gas Exchange (IGX), marking it the third investor to participate in the platform.

On January 22, Adani Total Gas and Torrent Gas also acquired 5 per cent equity stake each.

IGX's participation with GAIL is expected to lead to robust value addition in development of the gas markets in the country.

Launched on June 15, 2020 as a gas-trading platform, IGX has now become the first gas exchange to receive authorisation from Petroleum and Natural Gas Regulatory Board (PNGRB) under recently notified Gas Exchange Regulations, 2020.

With 15 members and more than 500 registered clients, the Exchange offers an alternative to the gas spot market in India by providing ease of trading, payment security and greater access to the market.

It currently operates from three physical hubs -- Hazira and Dahej in Gujarat, and KG Basin in Andhra Pradesh.
Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- This time is different may be the most dangerous words in business: billions of dollars have been lost betting that history wont repeat itself. And yet now, in the oil world, it looks like this time really will be.For the first time in decades, oil companies arent rushing to increase production to chase rising oil prices as Brent crude approaches $70. Even in the Permian, the prolific shale basin at the center of the U.S. energy boom, drillers are resisting their traditional boom-and-bust cycle of spending.The oil industry is on the ropes, constrained by Wall Street investors demanding that companies spend less on drilling and instead return more money to shareholders, and climate change activists pushing against fossil fuels. Exxon Mobil Corp. is paradigmatic of the trend, after its humiliating defeat at the hands of a tiny activist elbowing itself onto the board.The dramatic events in the industry last week only add to what is emerging as an opportunity for the producers of OPEC+, giving the coalition led by Saudi Arabia and Russia more room for maneuver to bring back their own production. As non-OPEC output fails to rebound as fast as many expected -- or feared based on past experience -- the cartel is likely to continue adding more supply when it meets on June 1.CriminalizationShareholders are asking Exxon to drill less and focus on returning money to investors. They have been throwing money down the drill hole like crazy, Christopher Ailman, chief investment officer for CalSTRS. We really saw that company just heading down the hole, not surviving into the future, unless they change and adapt. And now they have to.Exxon is unlikely to be alone. Royal Dutch Shell Plc lost a landmark legal battle last week when a Dutch court told it to cut emissions significantly by 2030 -- something that would require less oil production. Many in the industry fear a wave of lawsuits elsewhere, with western oil majors more immediate targets than the state-owned oil companies that make up much of OPEC production.We see a shift from stigmatization toward criminalization of investing in higher oil production, said Bob McNally, president of consultant Rapidan Energy Group and a former White House official.While its true that non-OPEC+ output is creeping back from the crash of 2020 -- and the ultra-depressed levels of April and May last year -- its far from a full recovery. Overall, non-OPEC+ output will grow this year by 620,000 barrels a day, less than half the 1.3 million barrels a day it fell in 2020. The supply growth forecast through the rest of this year comes nowhere close to matching the expected increase in demand, according to the International Energy Agency.Beyond 2021, oil output is likely to rise in a handful of nations, including the U.S., Brazil, Canada and new oil-producer Guyana. But production will decline elsewhere, from the U.K. to Colombia, Malaysia and Argentina.As non-OPEC+ production increases less than global oil demand, the cartel will be in control of the market, executives and traders said. Its a major break with the past, when oil companies responded to higher prices by rushing to invest again, boosting non-OPEC output and leaving the ministers led by Saudi Arabias Abdulaziz bin Salman with a much more difficult balancing act.Drilling DownSo far, the lack of non-OPEC+ oil production growth isnt registering much in the market. After all, the coronavirus pandemic continues to constrain global oil demand. It may be more noticeable later this year and into 2022. By then, vaccination campaigns against Covid-19 are likely to be bearing fruit, and the world will need more oil. The expected return of Iran into the market will provide some of that, but there will likely be a need for more.When that happens, it will be largely up to OPEC to plug the gap. One signal of how the recovery will be different this time is the U.S. drilling count: It is gradually increasing, but the recovery is slower than it was after the last big oil price crash in 2008-09. Shale companies are sticking to their commitment to return more money to shareholders via dividends. While before the pandemic shale companies re-used 70-90% of their cash flow into further drilling, they are now keeping that metric at around 50%.The result is that U.S. crude production has flat-lined at around 11 million barrels a day since July 2020. Outside the U.S. and Canada, the outlook is even more somber: at the end of April, the ex-North America oil rig count stood at 523, lower than it was a year ago, and nearly 40% below the same month two years earlier, according to data from Baker Hughes Co.When Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz predicted earlier this year that drill, baby, drill is gone for ever, it sounded like a bold call. As ministers meet this week, they may dare to hope hes right.More stories like this are available on bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.2021 Bloomberg L.P.
Mumbai/New Delhi, Feb 10 : Wockhardt, the global pharmaceutical and biotechnology major headquartered in Mumbai, on Wednesday announced that it has been awarded a six-month extension of its agreement with the United Kingdom (UK) government to fill-finish Covid-19 vaccines.

This expands the original agreement from 18 to 24 months that is, until August 2022 and the manufacturing would continue to be undertaken at CP Pharmaceuticals, a subsidiary of Wockhardt based in Wrexham, North Wales.

UK International Trade Secretary Liz Truss, on a visit to Mumbai as part of a drive to improve business links between the UK and India, announced the extension and said, "This is a brilliant bit of news for the UK and the people of Wrexham. It brings important investment to the local area, jobs and security to the community as we battle this awful pandemic. Wockhardt's investment shows the strength of our trading ties with India which is a further boost to our already strong vaccine supply as we bounce back stronger from coronavirus." Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng said: "While the UK's vaccination programme has been a national success story so far, we need to take steps to ensure we can manufacture vaccines into 2022, should we need to revaccinate or provide boost to the population. By extending our contract with Wockhardt, we will ensure the UK has uninterrupted fill and finish capacity, guaranteeing we have sufficient supplies to protect the British public in the long-term." Habil Khorakiwala, Founder Chairman of the Wockhardt Group, said, "We are happy to extend our collaboration with the UK government to make vaccines available and the arrangement brings in a huge sense of purpose and pride, it upholds our ongoing global commitment to fight against an unprecedented pandemic." Murtaza Khorakiwala, Managing Director and Global CEO of Wockhardt, added, "The extension of the arrangement with the UK government for manufacturing vaccines for Covid-19 showcases our global strength in world-class sterile injectable facilities and confidence by the UK government on our expertise and experience." Speaking about the contract, Ravi Limaye, Managing Director, Wockhardt UK, said, "This extension by the UK government displays our collaboration and commitment in the vital role that we have been playing in the fill-finish process for Covid-19 vaccines in UK." In the UK, Wockhardt is one of the largest suppliers into the National Health Service (NHS) for more than 20 years, and has had a presence in Wrexham for more than two decades. It employs more than 400 people at its 6,12,000 square feet high-tech manufacturing facility.

JACKSON, Miss. (WTVA) - The Mississippi Highway Patrol (MHP) is initiating its D.R.I.V.E. campaign to combat teenage driving deaths.

The campaign stands for Driving Requires Initiative Values and Education.

According to MHP, 70 teenagers died in traffic crashes on Mississippi roadways in 2020. Forty-nine teenagers died in 2019.

Research has shown Mississippi consistently ranks in the top 5 nationwide regarding teen driving fatalities based on crash analysis information, according to an MHP news release shared Wednesday.

To combat this, MHP will take the campaign to schools, community colleges, universities, churches and civic organizations.

Due to the pandemic, we will work with educators, community leaders, first responders and parents regarding the safest ways to present the program, Maj. Johnny Poulos, MHP public affairs director, said. Receiving a drivers license brings a sense of accomplishment and freedom to teenagers while bringing worry and concern to some parents. We want our teenagers to enjoy this milestone in their lives, but at the same time, they have to understand the responsibilities and possible consequences that come with driving.

MHP will use presentations, provide guest speakers and seatbelt rollover simulators when possible.

Troopers will discuss many topics including distracted and impaired driving, seatbelt usage and driving with teen passengers.
Insightec is strategically positioned for expansion in the China market

HAIFA, Israel and MIAMI, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Insightec, a global healthcare company focused on creating the next generation of patient care, announced it received market approval by The National Medical Products Administration (NMPA), the Chinese agency for regulating drugs and medical devices (formerly the China Food and Drug Administration, or CFDA).

The approval for the Exablate 4000 (Exablate Neuro) platform, will enable unilateral Focused Ultrasound treatment for patients living with debilitating tremor from Essential Tremor and Tremor-dominant Parkinson's Disease that has not responded to medications.

"This achievement reflects positive momentum to bring Focused Ultrasound to movement disorder patients in China," commented Maurice R. Ferre MD, Insightec CEO and Chair of the Board of Directors. "We are committed to improving the quality of life of patients in China and worldwide with impactful therapeutic treatments."

MR-guided Focused Ultrasound (MRgFUS), also referred to as high-intensity Focused Ultrasound, delivers acoustic energy precisely to the Vim of the thalamus, considered to be responsible for tremor, to heat and ablate the tissue. The procedure does not require surgical incisions, implants or anesthesia.

Nearly 60 leading neurosurgeons in medical centers around the globe are treating patients with hand tremor from Essential Tremor or Tremor-dominant Parkinson's Disease on a regular basis with the Exablate Neuro. Performed in a single session in an MRI suite, many patients experience immediate tremor relief with minimal side effects, returning home the same day.

"There are millions of people in China living with diminished function due to hand tremors from Essential Tremor and Tremor-dominant Parkinson's Disease," said Peng Qiu, Insightec China Country Manager. "Our elderly communities will now have an option that uses highly advanced technology that is less invasive."

Exablate Neuro has received marketing approval for Essential Tremor from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and regulatory bodies in Argentina, Australia, Canada, Chile, Europe, Israel, Japan, Kazakhstan, Korea, Russia, Taiwan and Turkey.

Insightec's Exablate Body system is used in 20 hospitals across China to treat symptomatic uterine fibroids.

About Insightec

Insightec is a global healthcare company creating the next generation of patient care by realizing the therapeutic power of acoustic energy. The company's Exablate Neuro platform uses Focused Ultrasound, guided by MRI, to provide tremor relief to patients with Essential Tremor and Tremor-Dominant Parkinson's Disease. Research for future applications in the neuroscience space is underway in partnership with leading academic and medical institutions. Insightec is headquartered in Haifa, Israel, and Miami, with offices in Dallas, Shanghai and Tokyo. For more information, please visit: www.insightec.com.

Forward-looking Statements

This document contains forward-looking statements regarding, among other things, plans, expectations, and future events. In some cases, forward-looking statements can be identified by the following words: "may," "can," "will," "could," "would," "should," "expect," "intend," "plan," "anticipate," "believe," "estimate," "predict," "project," "potential," "promise," "continue," "ongoing," or the negative of these terms. Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from what is expressed or implied by the statements. Any forward-looking statement is based on information available to INSIGHTEC as of the date of the statement. All written or oral forward-looking statements attributable to INSIGHTEC are qualified by this caution. INSIGHTEC does not undertake any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statement to reflect any change in circumstances or in INSIGHTEC's expectations.

"Exablate," and "Exablate Neuro," as well as the "INSIGHTEC" logo, whether standing alone or in connection with the word " INSIGHTEC," are protected trademarks of INSIGHTEC.

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A High Court judge, who stopped the Electoral Commission from conducting the Nairobi gubernatorial by-election and allowed the county assembly to vet deputy governor Anne Kananu, has recused himself from all cases touching on the governorship of Nairobi County.

Justice Anthony Mrima disqualified himself from handling the ten petitions that have been filed by different individuals and rights' groups challenging the nomination of Ms Kananu as the deputy governor and her ascension into the office of the governor.

The judge noted that his decision to allow vetting of Ms Kananu sparked mixed reactions and that the whole matter on the leadership of the Nairobi City County has elicited enormous public interest.

One of the reactions after the delivery of the ruling in the consolidated petition was the filing of a complaint at the Judicial Service Commission (JSC) on the grounds that the court is biased.

"The filing of complaint per se does not preclude a Court from dealing with the matter. It all depends on the circumstances of the case. There are instances where, depending on the nature of the matter and in order to enhance public confidence in the administration of justice, a Court may consider recusing itself from that particular matter. That is the position I opt for in this matter," said the judge.

However, he explained that in allowing the vetting process to continue the court acted in the best interest of the Nairobi City County and of the Country at large and in public interest.

He said the court had no option but to avoid a looming constitutional crisis.

This is because when the court suspended decision of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries commission (IEBC) to call for a by-election, it meant that IEBC would not proceed on with any of the preparations towards the holding of the by-election.

"As the parties had stopped the carrying out of the by-election by IEBC on one hand, and on the other hand, the constitutional time set under Article 182(5) of the Constitution was running, it therefore meant that all the matters before Court in the impeachment Petition were to be concluded within the period of 60 days," said the judge.

But as at now, the impeachment Petition is still pending and is coming up for a ruling on empanelment of a Multi-Judge bench on February 25, 2021.

"The truth, therefore, is that it's practically inconceivable to have both the impeachment Petition determined and if the Petition is dismissed then a by-election to be conducted within the remainder of the 60 days if at all any would be left by then," said justice Mrima.

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He added that the unique circumstances in Nairobi also involve a constitutional lacuna and the cases introduced a novel scenario.

This is because Article 182 of the Constitution mainly focuses on the absence of a governor and the deputy governor and that a by-election follows thereafter.

The issue is what happens to a legal process for the nomination of a deputy governor which is not concluded by the time the governor leaves office.

"The Constitution and the law is silent. The Constitution did not contemplate such a situation and as a result there is no provision on the way forward. That is a constitutional lacuna," said Justice Mrima.

He observed that in such instances, courts have acted in public interest and asserted the Court's inherent jurisdiction in dealing with the lacuna.

"Faced with such a situation, a court cannot fold its legal hands and cite inability to act. If that happens then it amounts to abdication of duty on the part of the court," he stated.

The judge explained that the only way out to deal with the lacuna and in public interest was to allow the nomination process which had been legally initiated to proceed.
The newly launched products are light weight and can be installed easily.

Gurugram-based Elan Professional Appliances Pvt Ltd has launched two portable COVID-19 Vaccine Freezers  an IoT-enabled Portable COVID-19 vaccine freezer with temperature range from 2 C to -20 C and a portable COVID vaccine freezer maintaining temperature only at 86 C. Both the portable products are equipped with advanced features maintaining efficiency and efficacy of the vaccine.

Sanjay Jain, Director, Elanpro said, Vaccines are required to be stored at highly specific temperatures to remain effective. Any deviation from this can have an impact on a vaccines efficacy and, at worse, render it in-effective. With Elanpros portable COVID vaccine freezers, it is an excellent solution in preserving the vaccine's efficacy.

The newly launched products are light weight and can be installed easily. Additionally, the freezer can also be used for other vaccines. Another benefiting feature of the product is that it can easily be converted into a refrigerator.

The product comes with an IoT-enabled remote which helps in monitoring temperature as per the requirement. The freezer runs on vehicle batteries. Also, this highly advanced product sends a notification via email and SMS if the temperature variance is observed. It is also equipped with an alarm to alert for variance in temperature monitoring. The newly launched product is also embedded with a data logger. These solutions come from 2 litres to 100 litres battery freezers (portable freezers).
Suspect Dead After Officer-Involved Shooting in Washington State

A suspect was shot dead in Seattle late Tuesday after firing at police officers, the Seattle Police Department said.

A 911 caller reported hearing a shot fired at 9:16 p.m. near 24th Avenue South and South Massachusetts Street and additional callers said they saw a man firing a gun in the same area.

Police officers who responded were nearly immediately engaged by the suspect, who walked towards them, raised a firearm, and fired at them, according to a police spokeswoman.

Upon their arrival, they actually heard shots going off, she told reporters on the scene. After pulling up in front of the Northwest African American Museum, the suspect came around the corner from the parking lot and began firing at them, she added.

Multiple officers returned fire, striking the suspect.

Officers attempted to render aid but the suspect died from the gunshot wounds.

Officers located two people who had been shot by the suspect nearby. The victims were rushed to a nearby hospital in life-threatening condition. One died during travel to the hospital.

Preliminary information suggested the suspect had a relationship with the victims and that the suspect may have lived in the area. The identities of the suspect and the victims have not been released as of early Wednesday.

The police spokeswoman promised an open, transparent investigation. Detectives from the departments Homicide Unit were investigating, as were Force Investigation Team officers.

Police officials plan on releasing video of the officer-involved shooting within 72 hours, per department policy.

The shooting was the fifth use of force incident this month, according to department data.
Patna, Feb 10 : Taking charge of the department of industries in the state, Bihar's new Industry Minister Shahnawaz Hussain on Wednesday said the state has plenty of infrastructure, but it needs to take off. After assuming charge of the ministry, he said in his new role as minister, he'll attempt to generate employment in the state.

He said the first priority of the NDA government is creating opportunities for employment and entrepreneurship. Hussain said the existing infrastructure in Bihar needs to take off. "Bihar is a big state and creating opportunities for employment and entrepreneurship is the government's responsibility," he said. "Our government will fulfil this promise since there is no shortage of infrastructure," he added.

Praising Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, Hussain said Kumar is an experienced campaigner and the state will benefit from his experience.

Before this ministry officials welcomed Hussain when he reached his office. On Tuesday, the state cabinet was expanded in which Hussain was included as a minister.
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Copyright  2021 Albuquerque Journal

Touting a significant improvement in case counts, New Mexico officials on Wednesday said more than half the states counties have moved beyond the strictest COVID-19-related restrictions.

That includes the states most populous counties  Bernalillo, Sandoval, Santa Fe and Dona Ana  which have advanced to the states yellow level from the red designation. That means limited indoor dining is allowed and certain other public health measures are relaxed.

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They are among 15 total New Mexico counties now in yellow. Four other counties have now achieved the green and least-restrictive status: Catron, Harding, Sierra and Union.

I know that its been a long, tough, uphill road but, New Mexicans, were resilient and were strong.  Today is a day to really feel good about the collective efforts of the state, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said Wednesday afternoon in a livestreamed COVID-19 update.

Her office on Wednesday also announced that it is lifting travel quarantine requirements due to the improving picture.

Beginning Thursday, New Mexico will no longer require self-quarantine for visitors or New Mexicans arriving into the state. The order had required a 14-day quarantine for those coming into New Mexico from most other states.

The Governors Office is still advising people to quarantine upon entering the state and to take a COVID-19 test.

As for college athletics, though both the University of New Mexico and New Mexico State Universitys home counties transitioned from red to yellow status on Wednesday, that does not change the public health orders current prohibition of home games for either the Lobos or Aggies basketball teams or any of their spring sport teams that have recently started competitions.

Lujan Grisham acknowledged that opening up more businesses and loosening travel restrictions creates risk. And state officials emphasized the need to remain vigilant and continue taking precautions to slow the virus spread.

We wouldnt have created this system and made these decisions  if we didnt think we could manage them, she said.

While announcing the relaxed restrictions, the state on Wednesday also reported 512 new COVID-19 cases and 31 new deaths.

While Lujan Grisham acknowledged the days high mortality rate, she said the states average daily COVID-19 case count has dropped by 66% over the past month. And health officials are hopeful that the death rate will continue to fall based on current case counts.

The state is now averaging about 449 new cases and 17.7 COVID-related deaths, down from peaks of about 2,600 cases and 35.86 deaths in November and December, respectively. Human Services Secretary Dr. David Scrase said patients can be hospitalized for weeks prior to dying and there are often complications in reporting COVID-related deaths, so hes hopeful the states death rate will continue to decline as cases have done.

I think we are now finally seeing that, he said.

Leveling up

The state has established a three-tiered system, designating each county in either red, yellow or green. As a county moves from red to green, public health measures put in place to slow the spread of the coronavirus can be relaxed.

In red, some of the restrictions include capping gatherings at five people, no indoor dining and houses of worship are capped at 25% occupancy. In yellow, people can gather in groups of 10, restaurants can offer indoor dining at 25% capacity and places of worship can be one-third full. In green, indoor dining can go up to 50% occupancy, churches can also be half full and people can gather in groups up to 20 people, according to the health departments website.

Every two weeks, the Department of Health updates a map showing each countys COVID test positivity and the number of new cases per capita. Restrictions in each county can be relaxed if the test positivity rate is 5% or less or if the county is averaging fewer than eight daily cases per 100,000 people.

Scrase said the tiered system was designed to accurately reflect the spread of the virus in a community.

When we were wrestling  about setting up the red-yellow-green, our biggest concern at the time was creating a system that didnt let people bounce back and forth all the time. Because thats more difficult for businesses, he said. I think that two-week period helps us smooth out the data.

When the map was last updated on Jan. 27, Harding County was in the green tier. Colfax, Grant, Los Alamos, San Miguel, Socorro, Sierra and Union counties were in yellow and the other 25 counties were in red.

Bernalillo, Sandoval, Santa Fe and Dona Ana, reached yellow by having a positivity rate under 5%.

The other counties in yellow are Cibola, Colfax, Curry, Grant, Guadalupe, Los Alamos, Mora, Quay, San Miguel, Taos and Valencia.

And while four counties have reached green status, they still face business restrictions. Close-contact recreation businesses, such as movie theaters and bars and nightclubs, will still remain closed.

New Mexico Senate Republican leadership, in a statement after the governors announcement, raised concerns that those businesses dont currently have a path to open.

The reality is, most of our businesses remain 75% closed and most of our children are still out of school. With a higher death rate than most other states, there is little if any proof that the governors extended closures are working, said Sens. Greg Baca of Belen, Craig Brandt of Rio Rancho and Mark Moores of Albuquerque. Meanwhile, our students continue to suffer and our businesses continue to hang on by thread. It is time that we stop patting ourselves on the back and get serious about curing the ailments created by the pandemic and this administration.

Lujan Grisham said during the briefing that if cases continue to decline and the number of vaccines coming to the state continues to increase, counties and businesses could see fewer public health orders in a yet-to-be-created green-plus tier.

If we crush the virus so its not really able to move around  we should be looking forward to a full season of tourism, getting everyone back to school and having a few limitations on those activities, Lujan Grisham said. Thats the goal. Thats the desire.

Vaccine efforts

One reason cases are declining is because of the rollout of the vaccine.

Officials said 18 times more New Mexicans are getting vaccines each day than are testing positive.

A state vaccine dashboard shows that 365,297 vaccines have been administered. Of those doses, about 264,000 people have received their first shot and about 101,000 have received a second dose. The state has administered over 65,000 doses of vaccine in the past seven days, according to the dashboard.

Thats in addition to about 112,000 doses of vaccine that have been delivered to federal agencies including the Veterans Affairs, Indian Health Services and the Bureau of Prisons.

Scrase said modeling done by Los Alamos National Laboratory shows that already the number of COVID cases in New Mexico has declined 16% because of the vaccinations alone.

The vaccine is working and were beginning to see an effect, he said.

Meanwhile, major pharmacy chains across the country announced they will soon begin offering vaccines through a partnership with the federal government. As part of that program, Walgreens will start giving vaccines to eligible New Mexicans beginning Friday at roughly 70 stores in the state. A Walgreens spokeswoman said residents should register for those vaccines through the state health department.

At this time, vaccine inventory remains very limited and is available only to eligible individuals, which includes adults age 75 and older, Emily Delnicki of Walgreens said in an email.
(ANSAmed) - ATHENS, 10 FEB - Greece's government has condemned a hostile reception received by Migration Minister Notis Mitarakis on a visit to the Evros land border checkpoint and refugee reception center in the region of Orestiada in the country's northwest.



Mitarakis, who visited the area on Monday, is leading a controversial plan to increase the capacities of the local reception and identification center for asylum seekers and the pre-departure detention facility.



And under a tight police escort, Mitarakis was met with a hail of stones, firecrackers, eggs and plastic cups of coffee as local residents gathered to express their strong opposition to the plans in the town's central square, where hundreds had gathered to make their sentiments clear.



The President of the Evros Outpost Community, Christos Tyrbakis, went on record to claim that Mitarakis stated angrily that if he wanted to, he will bring 10,000 asylum seekers to the area if the locals attempt to prevent the government's plans.



Tyrbakis told reporters: "Mr. Mitarakis was clearly annoyed when I informed him about the local community group's opposition to the plans. He got angry and stood up, seemingly ready to bang his hand down on the table. He then said, 'I will proceed with my plans, and if I want I will bring 10,000 people here.' I told him that we will not back down, and that we will use all of the means at our disposal to stop his plans, and then I got up and left the room." Mitarakis has since taken to Twitter on Tuesday to pour cold water on Tyrbakis' claims, tweeting via his personal account: "All of us who were at the meeting and saw the statement of the president of the Outpost Community made via a video on facebook were surprised by the transfer of false information. It seems that the only reason he came to the meeting was to create tension with his statement to the local community." Mitarakis added: "I think the fact that I have been in touch multiple times here shows my sincere willingness to talk. Also, the fact that we have just 168 people (living in the KYT) in a place with 700 beds makes the government's policy to reduce flows and the non-stay of asylum seekers in Evros clear." In late January, the Regional Council of Eastern Macedonia and Thrace has already reaffirmed its unequivocal position against any plan to expand the facility.



The Migration Ministry has insisted that the expansion is necessary due to the fact that the average monthly arrival of refugees and migrants over the last four years amounts to 811 people, and because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the existing facilities are deemed inadequate for quarantine, as well as registration and identification purposes.



The ruling party New Democracy released a media statement condemning the hostile reception received by Mitarakis.



"We unequivocally condemn the attack that the Minister of Immigration and Asylum, Mr. Mitarakis, received outside the Orestiada City Hall; no form of extreme behavior is going to stop the Ministry's constant efforts for dialogue with the citizens of Evros," it said.



While it also condemned the attack, opposition party KINAL stressed the need for the Prime Minister's direct action on the migrant issue in Evros.



"Evros must not become a 'warehouse of lost souls', and the Eastern Aegean must cease to act as something similar' the chapter that was opened in March 2016 with the EU-Turkey Joint Declaration must be closed," said KINAL's media statement.



The statement added: "Greece and the European Union need to collect the keys to the refugee crisis from [Turkey President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan. The government must stand up to the European institutions for a common European policy on asylum and immigration, which does not work to the detriment of the country and the refugees. A coalition for the proportional distribution of asylum seekers throughout the Member States is the only way for all parties in the democratic arc. The Prime Minister must assume his responsibilities and stop hiding behind his ministers." It remains to be seen how the dialogue between the government and the Evros community will play out, but it is clear that the government will not face an easy ride in trying to force through their plans on the migration issue.



Opposition is rife also on the East Aegean islands with similar government plans to build new closed centers. While a new replacement site on Lesvos for the current 'tent city' camp at Kara Tepe has been controversially approved by local municipalities recently, there is vehement opposition for a similar plan on Chios.



Local communities on Chios staged a protest rally on Saturday against the creation of a new, closed and controlled reception and identification center in the area of Tholos.



Resident groups spoke out through a joint press statement, defiantly claiming that they will no longer accept the government's "organized plan to turn our islands in prisons".



The plans for the new facility were announced last week by Mitarakis, immediately drawing strong reactions against the move from community groups in the nearby villages of Sykiada, Langada and Vrontadou.



The government plans to replace the current much-maligned VIAL reception and identification center, which has been operating since 2016 and is home to 2,340 people, despite having a maximum capacity for only 1,040. (ANSAmed).


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How did a country of a million sad songs finally emerge as the Eurovision winner thanks to Lordi? What happened in Finnish popular music at the turn of the last century and is there something that prevents Finland from reaching Sweden's level of success in pop music?

These are some of the questions that the authors tackle in Made in Finland: Studies in Popular Music, which is the first anthology published in English outside of Finland focusing on research in Finnish popular music. It has been edited by Toni-Matti Karjalainen and Kimi Karki. Karjalainen has recently been appointed as professor of arts management at the Sibelius Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki.

The story of Nordic music is strongly characterised by its search for its own identity between the East and the West, the local and the global scene. Besides the local cultural heritage and myths, this story is also moulded by the strong presence of nature, four distinctive seasons of the North, the weather, and the general melancholy connected to Nordic music.

"Most typically, this story has left its mark on the darker music genres like heavy metal, but it's also relevant in Finnish schlager (iskelma) music, Finnish rock, not to mention in music by Sibelius and other classical figures who have influenced pop music," Toni-Matti Karjalainen says.

Millennium was a game-changer

Popular music has had its own role in the way people have been affected by cultural influences. In Finland, it has absorbed both Slavic and Anglo-American characteristics. According to Karjalainen, the Finnish tango and schlager music are examples of a merger of Eastern and Western influences.

Up until the end of the 1990s, the Finnish music was mostly inward oriented. The country's festivals, performances and music industry in general were mostly aimed at local markets. Then something happened.

In 2000-2001, the hiphop duo Bomfunk MC's climbed up the charts, and their hit Freestyler became the best-selling single in Europe. In 2000, "love metal" band HIM hit the top of various international rock charts, and the electronic dance music artist Darude became a global phenomenon with his single Sandstorm. The song is still regularly played all over the world.

"All of a sudden multiple artists and different music styles had an international breakthrough almost at the same time. It seemed as though the international music scene discovered Finland overnight," Karjalainen describes.

There is also statistical evidence of this change. In 2001, the market value of Finnish pop as an export was five times as big as in 1999.

And the success continued. In 2003, the Finnish rock band The Rasmus gained international fame, and many of the band's albums were certified gold and platinum. Heavy metal bands, especially Children of Bodom and Apocalyptica, also started to gain fame, and the genre eventually became a well-known Finnish phenomenon. Around the same time, Nightwish started its climb to become the biggest Finnish music export.

"The completely unexpected Eurovision victory of Lordi in 2006 was a culmination of sorts in the worldwide reputation of Finnish pop music."

Bigger success stories yet to come?

Finland is still not as successful as Sweden, which is often said to be the third biggest music exporter in the world. Finland has gained more fame in recent years, however, and the authors of the book predict that international success may be around the corner in the 2020s. "It seems as if different forms of pop music have begun to conquer new territories in a major way," Karjalainen says.

Today, the reign of translated schlagers is but a distant memory. So what is the status of Finnish pop music nowadays?

"These days, the Finnish popular music scene is a combination of the unique Finnish cultural characteristics as well as the collective identity that it shares with other Nordic countries. In fact, Finland has various music export collaborations going on with its neighbouring countries," Karjalainen notes.

An international publication series as the publisher

The book by Karki and Karjalainen features 13 articles by scholars who examine the history and phenomena of popular music from various angles. It will be published as part of the Global Popular Music Series by the esteemed global publisher Routledge.

The articles in the book delve into an array of topics, including popular music of the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland, Finland as a heavy metal nation, Finnish rock (suomirock), the influence of British pop on Finnish popular music, the music culture of Finnish American labour movement, and underground music in Finland.

"When planning the book, we also tried to make it interesting to the many Finland enthusiasts and friends of Finnish music around the world. For example, the book features an interview with Tuomas Holopainen, which may be of interest to a number of Nightwish fans," Karjalainen says.

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A hospital trust is charging NHS workers more than 500 per year to use the staff car park as they continue to battle the coronavirus pandemic.

Epsom and St Helier NHS Trust claim to have introduced the charges in a bid to 'manage demand' after 'car parks became far too busy' in recent weeks, the Mirror reported.

One NHS worker explained staff are 'angry' about the move as they have 'had no perks during the pandemic,' adding that 'nurses, cleaners and porters' at the Trust have died due to the virus.

They added: 'It's a tough time and I can't afford to pay these charges.'

Matt Hancock promised at the start of the Covid-19 outbreak that ministers would cover the costs of hospital car parking for NHS staff 'going above and beyond every day' in England.

However, the Department of Health said in July that the scheme cannot continue indefinitely and only 'key patient groups' and staff in 'certain circumstances' will be able to park for free.

Epsom and St Helier NHS Trust have introduced the charges in a bid to 'manage demand' after 'car parks became far too busy' in recent weeks. Pictured: St Helier Hospital in Sutton

Matt Hancock promised at the start of the Covid-19 outbreak that ministers would cover the costs of hospital car parking for NHS staff 'going above and beyond every day' in England. Pictured: Epsom Hospital

The Trust claims it had free parking in place 'whenever possible' between March and January.

It then reinstated charges for employees from January 26, with staff asked to pay up to 500 per year for a card allowing them to park outside the two hospitals in Epsom and Sutton.

Bosses claimed that rates were calculated in accordance with their salary.

These charges reportedly range from 5 per day to 25 per year, with an additional 11 per week for a 'scratch card' to display in the window.

Epsom and St Helier NHS Trust told the Mirror it 'had no other option' but to reintroduce parking charges as they 'began to reinstate outpatient appointments and planned care procedures following the first wave.'

The Trust claims it had free parking in place 'whenever possible' between March and January. Pictured: Stock image

A statement added: 'Despite offering all staff access to free and discounted parking options nearby, as well as increasing our free park and ride services and introducing additional pick up and drop off spots, the situation had become so difficult that we were causing large tailbacks onto public highways, and finding a space was so challenging that staff were late for work and patients late for long-awaited appointments.'

Bosses added it had introduced a 'number of measures' to support their staff throughout the pandemic, including free hot meals and a 'broad range of measures to aid staff health and well being.'

MailOnline has contacted Epsom and St Helier NHS Trust for further comment.

Fury erupted in July after the Department of Health admitted a scheme for ministers to cover the cost of hospital car parking for NHS staff could not continue indefinitely.

It said only 'key patient groups' and staff in 'certain circumstances' would be able to park for free.

Doctors slammed the move, with the British Medical Association calling it a 'rebuff to the immense efforts of staff and the sacrifices they have made to keep others safe'.
New Delhi: Deficiency of a lung-protecting protein in the Caucasian population may have made Europe and North America more susceptible to the spread of a coronavirus variant as compared to Asia, suggests a study by Indian scientists which also reveals how mutant forms of the virus may find new ways to infect people.

The study, published in the journal Infection, Genetics and Evolution, assessed the global spread of the coronavirus variant with the D614G mutation, which is the predominant lineage infecting North America and European populations.

Also Read | Inside the third front of the farm agitation

This variant spread so rapidly that in just 10 weeks between February and March 2020 over 64.11 per cent of globally infected individuals were identified to carry the mutant virus starting from only 1.95 per cent in January.

However, the researchers, including those from the National Institute of Biomedical Genomics (NIBMG) in Kalyani, West Bengal, said this subtype took a significantly longer time to reach a 50 per cent relative frequency in East Asia -- 5.5 months -- compared to the 2.15 months it took in Europe, and the 2.83 months it took in North-America.

According to the scientists, a deficiency of the protein Alpha-anti-trypsin (AAT) across the populations of Europe and North-America is one of the main factors that explain the rapid spread of this variant in the two continents compared to its transmission in Asia.

"For the coronavirus to enter cells, its spike protein binds with the ACE2 receptor in human cells, and the human enzyme TMPRSS2 cleaves at the junction of two subunits S1 and S2 of the protein, enabling the virus to fuse with the cell," said study corresponding author Nidhan K Biswas from NIBMG.

"But due to the D614G mutation in the spike protein, the virus gained an additional cleavage site which enables it to fuse better with cells," Biswas told PTI.

In lineages of the coronavirus carrying the D614G mutation, the 614th molecule of the virus spike protein -- aspartic acid -- denoted by D is replaced by the molecule glycine, noted as G.

"Instead of one cleavage site, the mutated virus has two such sites, and it can take dual advantage of this and enter cells more easily," Biswas explained.

Based on the current study, he said this site in the virus is cleaved by the host protein neutrophil elastase which is normally involved in clearing up bacterial infections in the lungs.

The levels of the elastase molecules in the body are naturally kept in check by AAT whose main function is to protect the lungs from inflammation and tissue damage, the study noted.

"The issue is that if we have high neutrophil elastase then it also creates more damage to the lung cells. So there is a balance mechanism via the AAT enzyme that already exists by nature in everyone's lungs," Biswas explained.

According to the study, AAT deficiency is highly prevalent in European and North-American populations, but much less in East Asia.

Specifically, Biswas said AAT deficiency in the general population is very high in Italy and Spain.

He explained that the lack of this protein makes it much easier for the neutrophil elastase molecule to act on the virus spike subunits, resulting in a significantly faster spread of this mutant.

"The issue is that individuals with AAT deficiencies have high neutrophil levels and if they are infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus with the D614G mutation, their cells can quickly take the virus up and into the whole system," the NIGMB scientist explained.

The researchers believe this finding, along with other social factors may explain the differential geographical/ethnic spread of 614G.

While the findings offer clues about the transmission of the virus variant, Biswas cautioned against any interpretations of the study on disease severity and mortality caused by the strain.

He said the research also provides some clues on the spread of other variants of the coronavirus such as the ones first reported in the UK and South Africa which are "built on the backbone of the D614G mutation."

"The UK and South African variants also have this mutation backbone so they may have a similar transmissibility pattern, and probably they may have additional capabilities that scientists need to find out," Biswas added.

However, he said further experimental studies on lab-cultured cells are needed to validate these conclusions.

The scientists believe the findings open up the possibility for considerations of AAT supplements in the prevention of infection with the D614G subtype SARS-CoV-2 virus.

This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text. Only the headline has been changed.

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THE Moshi Municipal Council (MMC) in Kilimanjaro Region has approved a 52.5bn/- budget that includes the government's subsidies and 6.46bn/-, which is expected to be accrued from the council's own sources.

Speaking during the council's meeting recently, which was meant to discuss the council's 2021/2022 budget, the MMC Mayor, Juma Raibu said 60 per cent of the approved budget would be used for development projects and 40 per cent for regular expenditures.

"The council will also allocate 10 per cent of its budget revenues as empowerment loans for the youth, people with disabilities and women as directed by the government, that every council should set aside funds and allocate them to vulnerable groups as interest-free loans", he said.

Mayor Raibu also urged the government through its relevant authorities to provide the MMC with the 1.3bn/- it asked for to be used for the ongoing construction of the new Moshi bus terminal at the Ngangamfumuni ward, within the municipal.

He also proposed to the Tanzania Rural and Urban Roads Agency (Tarura) to think of splitting the agency's programme by constructing two kilometres of road on tarmac level in each of the 21 MMC wards, so that every ward would get the services equally.

"I propose that you use the funds to construct two kilometres of road in every ward in every budget, whereby by doing so it will come a time that all roads are paved on the same given time instead of serving only one ward while others wait for their turn," he advised.

Earlier, the Moshi District Tarura Manager, Eng James Mnene, told the council meeting that during the 2021/22 financial year, the institution had set aside more than 166m/- to be used for routine maintenance of 60.01 km of roads which are of tarmac level within Moshi municipality.
NSW residents will soon be able to access their promised vouchers for dining out and other recreational activities, as the trial of the state governments Dine & Discover program kicks off this week.

The $500 million program, announced in last years budget, provides every NSW adult with four $25 vouchers: two to be used on meals out from Monday to Thursday, and two for entertainment and recreation any day of the week.

Diners at Sake in The Rocks. Credit:James Alcock

Only one voucher may be used per transaction.

The system will be trialled at 45 businesses in The Rocks, in Sydneys CBD, and Broken Hill, in the states west, from Thursday. Five hundred people currently have access to the vouchers.


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An Idaho man has pleaded guilty to the 1996 murder and rape of his teenage neighbor - after an innocent man spent 20 years in prison for the crime.

Brian Dripps, 55, admitted killing 18-year-old Angie Dodge - who had her throat cut in her Idaho Falls apartment - in a Bonneville County Courtroom on Tuesday.

He said he did not intend to kill her or remember doing it but confessed he was high on cocaine and alcohol at the time and admitted to sexually assaulting her.

Dripps was finally convicted thanks to genetic genealogy - but only after another man, Christopher Tapp, had served 20 of his 30-year sentence for the killing.

Tapp said he wrongly confessed to the crime in 1997 after Idaho Falls Police Department officers repeatedly questioned him over 20 hours.

They are also said to have fed him details of the case and told him he could face the death penalty unless he implicated himself and another suspect.

Dripps told the court in a change of plea hearing Tuesday: 'All I really know is I went over there with the intent to rape her. I was pretty high on cocaine and alcohol. I had a pocket knife with me.

'I didn't mean to murder her. I guess it just happened when I was there. I remember the rape part, that's all I remember of that evening.'

Brian Dripps, 55, admitted killing 18-year-old Angie Dodge - who had her throat cut in her own apartment - in a Bonneville County Courtroom on Tuesday

Dripps said he did not intend to kill Angie, pictured, or remember doing it but confessed he was high on cocaine and alcohol at the time and admitted to sexually assaulting her

Dodge and Dripps were neighbors and did not have a relationship, police said. Captain Bill Squires of the Idaho Falls Police Department's Investigations Bureau said: 'He knew Angie as an acquaintance. Not friends, he just knew of her.'

Dripps faces 20 years to life in prison under a plea agreement; he will be sentenced on April 27.

Following his confession Angie's brother Brent told EastIdahoNews.com: 'Today was a good day in that there's some finality to it.

'As we heard Brian Dripps plead guilty and admit to killing my sister and to raping her, there was some finality there that we've got the right guy this time and we're looking forward to healing and going through the process of grieving.'

Christopher Tapp celebrates after his post conviction relief hearing at the Bonneville Courthouse in Idaho Falls, Idaho, Wednesday, March 22, 2017. Tapp, who experts say was coerced into a false murder confession, is now free after spending half of his life behind bars

The high school dropout who served 20 years for a crime he didn't commit Christopher Tapp served 20 of a 30-year sentence for the 1996 slaying of Angie Dodge. His conviction was overturned using evidence obtained through a technique called 'genetic genealogy' - the same used to identify the 'Golden State Killer.' While the technique has been used to implicate suspects in crimes previously, this is the first time it has been used to exonerate someone who has already been jailed. Tapp, a 20-year-old high school dropout at the time, had been sentenced in 1998, based only a confession which he later retracted. He was released in 2017 and fully exonerated in 2019 after Dripps confessed to the murder. Tapp wrongfully confessed to the crime in 1997 after Idaho Falls Police Department officers repeatedly questioned him over 20 hours, feeding him details of the case and telling him he could face the death penalty unless he implicated himself and another suspect. The initial investigation spanned several months, and by the start of 1997, detectives began to suspect that Tapp and his friend Benjamin Hobbs may have been involved. Hobbs was arrested in Ely, Nevada, in connection with a rape and accused of using a knife during the crime. Tapp was arrested in January and questioned about Hobbs suspected involvement in Dodges killing. Over the next few weeks, Tapp was interrogated nine times and subjected to seven polygraph tests. At various times, police officers suggested he could face the death penalty, told him that he was failing the lie detector tests, suggested he may have repressed memories of the killing and offered him immunity if he implicated Hobbs and another suspect. He eventually confessed to being involved in the death. But none of the DNA found at the crime scene matched Tapp, Hobbs or the other suspect. It all belonged to the same unknown man, according to the analysis. Prosecutors, seemingly unaware of the nature of some of the police contact with Tapp, accused him of lying and rescinded his plea deal. Tapp was convicted after his recorded confession was played for the jury. Over the years, advocacy groups for the wrongfully convicted began fighting for Tapps exoneration. Even and the victims mother, Carol Dodge believed he was innocent. Advertisement

Dodge was raped and murdered in her own apartment on June 13, 1996.

Her body was found by colleagues after she failed to turn up for work.

Idaho Falls police then took DNA blood samples from 20 men known to have frequented recreational boat docks on the Snake River where youths, including Tapp, would often hang out.

But none of the samples matched the semen found on Dodge's body, according to the Idaho Statesman.

Tapp was sentenced in 1998, based only a confession which he later retracted.

The court agreed to release him from prison in 2017, but the charges were not dropped.

He was exonerated in July 2019 evidence based on DNA and a genetic family tree.

The court completely overturned Tapp's conviction based on evidence found with 'genetic genealogy' - the technique used to identify the suspected 'Golden State Killer' by making DNA matches with his distant relatives.

Dripps, who in 1996 lived just across the street from Dodge, confessed to the crime after officers tested a cigarette butt he had thrown away against the crime scene DNA.

On Tuesday Deputy Attorney General Jessica Kuehn asked Judge Joel Tingey to have Dripps clarify what he did with his pocket knife that caused her death.

'Do you remember cutting the victim's throat?' Tingey asked.

Dripps said he didn't remember, but he did not deny cutting Dodge's throat.

Wrongly convicted Tapp said in 2019: 'It's a new life, a new beginning, a new world for me, and I'm just gonna enjoy every day.'

He had the support of Dodge's mother, Carol Dodge, and advocacy group the Innocence Project.

Idaho Falls Police Department Public Information Officer Jessica Clements released a statement on behalf of the department Tuesday.

'We would like to thank the Idaho Attorney Generals Office for their diligent efforts to see this case through the prosecutorial stages and in reaching this plea agreement  which included Mr. Dripps admitting his guilt in court this morning,' Clements said via email.

'We hope that Carol and the Dodge family may feel some measure of peace as they process the hearing today and the upcoming sentencing.'

Genetic genealogy first made headlines in April 2018, after it was used to find the alleged 'Golden State Killer' in California who is blamed for 12 murders and more than 50 rapes dating back to the mid-1970s.

In that case - as well as dozens of others that have been solved since - DNA found at crime scenes was compared to the databases for genealogy websites.

The websites allow users to post DNA test results and then generate a list of people with similar genomes, enabling users to find distant relatives.

Dodge and Dripps were neighbors and did not have a relationship, police said. Captain Bill Squires of the Idaho Falls Police Department's Investigations Bureau said: 'He knew Angie as an acquaintance. Not friends, he just knew of her.' Dripps faces 20 years to life in prison under a plea agreement; he will be sentenced on April 27

Dodge was raped and murdered in her own apartment on June 13, 1996. Her body was found by colleagues after she failed to turn up for work

The databases also allow police officers to search through people with similar genetic profiles to DNA found at crime scenes. Tracing back through family trees and seeing where the DNA crosses can lead investigators to a suspect.

Tapp's case was the first in which genetic genealogy has been used to prove innocence.

'It's just such an incredible feeling to be a part of clearing an innocent man's name,' CeCe Moore, the genetic genealogist who worked on the case, said in an interview with ABC.
Merck, which was founded in 1891, has been in the vaccine business for more than 100 years, having developed some of the worlds most well-known vaccines, including those for mumps, hepatitis A and chickenpox. In 2019, it was the first company to win approval from the Food and Drug Administration for an Ebola vaccine.

When the coronavirus began spreading around the world, however, Merck was slow to announce plans for a vaccine. By the time it provided details about two vaccine candidates in late May, most of its major competitors had already announced deals, and Pfizer and Moderna had already begun early clinical trials.

But Merck didnt have to be first to win. Executives decided to pursue two projects that they felt had advantages over competitors. One vaccine, developed in partnership with the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, would rely on the same technology, based on a harmless livestock virus, that had yielded their successful Ebola vaccine. The other, acquired through a purchase of Themis Bioscience, was based on an existing measles vaccine.

Both of the experimental Covid vaccines, the company said, would be tested using a single dose, and Merck was also exploring whether the one using the livestock virus could be given orally  two big edges over potential competitors, especially in the developing world.

In July, Mercks chief executive, Kenneth C. Frazier, warned against moving too quickly. I think when people tell the public that theres going to be a vaccine by the end of 2020, for example, I think they do a grave disservice to the public, Mr. Frazier said in an interview with a Harvard Business School professor. Mr. Frazier recently announced that he would retire as chief executive later this year, a decision that had been long planned.

In an interview in August, Dr. Nicholas Kartsonis, Mercks senior vice president of clinical research for vaccines and infectious diseases, said the companys position as leading vaccine maker gave it the luxury of time. We are a much larger company. We are not as beholden to having to be first, he said.
A Louisiana woman was arrested on Tuesday in connection with the disappearance and death of 15-year-old Quawan Charles whose body was found in a sugar cane field days after he was reported missing last fall.

Janet Irvin, 37, was jailed on charges of felony failure to report Charles missing and of contributing to juvenile delinquency, Sheriff Tommy Romero said.

Irvin was previously recorded telling private investigators that she had picked up Charles from his father's home without the man's consent, and brought him to her trailer to hang out with her 17-year-old son. The teens reportedly smoked marijuana together before Charles left alone.

On the recording, Irvin conceded that she should have called the police once she learned that he never made it home that night.

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Janet Irvin, 37 (left), was arrested on Tuesday in connection with the disappearance and death of 15-year-old Quawan Charles (right) last fall. The boy's body was found days after he was reported missing

No bond has been set for Irvin, who was arrested in Lafayette Parish and then moved to the Iberia Parish jail. If convicted as charged, she could face more than two years in prison.

'I hope this arrest begins to help this family heal. and by no means is this case closed,' Romero said in a news release.

Four attorneys for Charles' family said: 'We are thankful that she is finally being held criminally responsible.'

The family filed a missing persons report on October 30, 2020, in the St. Mary Parish town of Baldwin. The teen's body - which an autopsy report described as unclothed - was found the evening of November 3 about 20 miles away in a sugar cane field near the Iberia Parish town of Loreauville.

Two autopsies, one for the family and the other for the Iberia Parish Coroner's Office, found small amounts of alcohol and THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, in his blood.

The attorneys provided a copy of the report made for the coroner. It said Charles might have drowned himself during a psychotic episode possibly brought on by marijuana.

The autopsy said in part, 'Reportedly he had been at a residence where drugs were consumed including possible marijuana (THC) and psilocybin mushrooms. Reportedly after smoking a substance the decedent passed out and when he awoke he became combative. Reportedly he said he was "going to kill himself."'

DailyMail.com visited the Chastant Trailer Park where Quawan was last seen alive

Tests did not detect any psilocybin, also known as magic mushrooms, according to that report. Although the family's autopsy is not yet complete, its toxicology report had the same findings for drugs and alcohol, attorney Ron Haley said.

The report to the coroner said another witness reportedly saw Charles crawling in culverts behind a school, and quoted autopsy witnesses as saying surveillance video showed him alone near the area where his body was found.

Although the report said Charles' body was found submerged in a ditch, the attorneys said in their statement he died in shallow water.

'It is well understood that the accidental drowning of an able-bodied person in ankle-deep water is nearly impossible,' they wrote.

In their statement about Irvin's arrest, the lawyers said she was arrested after sheriffs deputies met with their private investigator to exchange notes.

'We are thankful that the fruits of this meeting led to an arrest of Ms. Irvin, but this is only the first step in a long march towards justice for Quawan,' they said.

Quawan was seen at his father's home in Baldwin on October 30. His body was found 25 miles north three days later

Ron Haley, one of the family's attorneys, described Irvin's arrest as 'a big step in the right direction,' but argued that there was enough probable cause to bring charges against her three months ago.

'She did not report Quawan missing within a certain amount of time. Thats evident by the statements that shes given to our investigators and presumably law enforcement officers know when she called 911 or went to the police stations to report it,' Haley told KLFY. 'She couldve been arrested then after Quawan ended up dead.'

Celina Charles, Quawan's cousin, told KATC: 'Today is the day that justice has been served. I mean, we have some ways to go. She has to be charged and convicted. But this is a start. She is arrested.'

Irvin's arrest came a month after an audio recording was made public of the woman talking to the Charles family's private investigators.

In it, Irvin is heard describing picking Charles up on October 30 and admitting she should have contacted the authorities when she found out that he didn't arrive home that night.

The boy's family did phone the police but said they were dismissed.

'Yes, I should have called the cops. I should have went further,' she said in the recording.

Irvin, pictured left in a previous mugshot, conceded in an audio recorded made by private investigators that she should have called the police to report Charles missing after learning he failed to return home

It is not clear if she knew she was being recorded, but she went on: 'I get off of work at like noon, Friday. So, we go out to Baldwin. We pick him up.'

The investigator then asked Irvin's son, Gavin, if the pair smoked drugs together and he said they did.

'Yeah, he smoked some weed. That was it,' the teenager said.

Charles had horrific injuries on his face when he was found days after going missing.

The preliminary autopsy reports said that those were the doing of 'aquatic' animals and that no foul play was involved.
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Construction will start on Monday in Omokoroa on installing two pedestrian/cycle path bridges on either side of the railway bridge on Omokoroa Road.

Western Bay of Plenty District Council has awarded the contract to HEB Construction which will start work on site on Monday, February 15, and continue until June 2021.

Councils Project Manager Raj Sumeran says the eastern side pedestrian bridge will be a three-metre wide shared pedestrian/cycle path, wide enough for emergency vehicle access.

The western side will be a 1.8-metre wide pedestrian/cycle path only and will link the path in Kayelene Place and the new path being built as part of the Omokoroa Road urbanisation project that is currently underway.

Traffic management will be in place throughout the project timeframe, the majority of which will be stop/go.

Raj says the work means some disruption over the coming months but every effort will be made to keep this to a minimum. Letters have been sent to all affected property owners.

The best thing about this work is that pedestrians and cyclists will have safe access across this railway bridge  something that has been lacking. It will also provide safe links with the cycleway/footpath in Kayelene Place and Omokoroa Road  as part of the upgrade being done between Western Avenue and Tralee Street.

The HEB team is working closely with service providers close to the work site to make sure disruption to neighbouring properties is kept to a minimum.

As the work involves multiple aspects, traffic management may change daily as is required  depending on the task.

The community will be notified in advance of expected disruptions to traffic flow. Work will be carried out weekdays from 7am until 5.30pm and on some Saturdays from 7am until 1pm.
South Carolina tire giant Michelin North America has signed on to support the International African American Museum's first traveling exhibit.

Rising now on Charleston's waterfront with an expected opening next year, the museum will be equipped with a 3,000-square-foot space for changing exhibits.

The Michelin-sponsored exhibition announced Feb. 9 will be the second displayed in the space but the first that will be created by the museum to travel the country, said chief operating officer Elijah Heyward.

When the museum opens in 2022, the first exhibit featured in the changing gallery area will be an as-yet-unannounced show from another institution, he said. That will be followed by the premiere of this exhibit that will be developed by the IAAM and funded by Michelin North America, which is based in the Upstate and is part of the France-based tire manufacturer.

After its display in Charleston, it will go on to be the museum's inaugural traveling exhibit.

In addition to physically moving between museums and other institutions, the theme of the display will be focused on the broader theme of mobility, Heyward said. An announcement from the museum and Michelin described theme as "the concept of freedom of movement among African Americans."

This partnership supports Michelins efforts to recognize the legacy of those whose movements have not been always free and to teach the value of being free to move in all spheres of life, William McMillian, executive sponsor of the African American Network for Michelin North America, said in a statement.

The company hopes, McMillian added, that the exhibit starts conversations about a "central question": "If you are not free to move, are you fully free?"

There will also be an education component, Heyward said, with the creation of a full curriculum for K-12 students corresponding with the exhibit and its themes of mobility and movement.

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As part of the partnership, some Michelin employees will be working with the Center for Family History, which is already operating and is aimed at helping African Americans research and understand often hard-to-find genealogical information.

Michelin North America employs more than 9,700 workers in the Palmetto State, and it recently upped its investment in South Carolina with plans to spend $175 million on new equipment at sites in Greenville and Spartanburg.

This isn't the manufacturer's first contribution to the museum. In 2017, the company donated $500,000 to help pay for the construction.

The financial terms of Michelin's latest gift were not disclosed.

Construction, which was supported by more than $100 million in gifts from local and state government, businesses, foundations and private donors, started in mid-2019. The building itself, which is being constructed on a site that was one part of Gadsden's Wharf, a port used in the transatlantic slave trade in Charleston, should be completed later this year.

Exhibit installations, landscaping and other work leading up to the museum opening will follow with an official debut in 2022.

Fundraising continues as the museum works to build up its endowment and fund other components of its future operations.

Most recently, Sony Corp. announced last month that it was gifting $1.7 million worth of audiovisual equipment for use in the galleries.

In continuous demonstration of United States-Liberia's traditional and historical ties, the Government of America thru the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and the U.S. Department of Health & Human Service's Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) recently donated more than 430up-to-date nursing and midwifery textbooks to the Liberia Board of Nursing & Midwifery (LBNM) to help boost Liberia's health service delivery.

Newly accredited United States Ambassador to Liberia, Michael A. McCarthy, who made the formal handover to LBNM authorities last week Friday, 5 February noted, "Our understanding of medicine is always improving. That's why it is essential for medical students to have up-to-date textbooks. Nursing and midwifery affect some of the most vulnerable and precious among us: newborns and their mothers. With these 430 textbooks, the next generation of nurses and midwives can practice their craft confidently knowing they are equipped with the latest knowledge."

Ambassador McCarthy's emphasis is very critical to healthcare delivery anywhere in the world, particularly Liberia, where basic health services are still a challenge. Issue of having up-to-date relevant textbooks in our colleges and universities to properly prepare medical students, including nurses and midwives who are to provide efficient healthcare delivery cannot be overemphasized or ignored.

Trained and qualified health practitioners are 'sine qua non' to providing comprehensive healthcare services to the population of Liberia. Anything short of that could mean manning our hospitals and health centers with square pegs in round holes. News of preventable deaths at the hands of health practitioners, including midwives in the country basically derives from lack of adequate knowledge.

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According to the U.S. Embassy in Monrovia, Ambassador McCarthy's first public event on Friday, February 5, 2021 since his arrival in Liberia demonstrates the value the U.S. Government places on healthcare and critical front-line workers such as nurses and midwives.

We wholeheartedly welcome the donation and commend the U.S. Government for this important intervention in the Liberian health sector, which it has continuously done in line with historical ties existing between Liberia and America that has lasted over 100 years.

We also laud the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and the U.S. Department of Health & Human Service's Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) for making this gesture possible. As the U.S. Embassy in Monrovia noted via a press release, the Government of America supports internal medicine residency training and family medicine training, including in nursing and midwifery, via the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, commonly referred to as PEPFAR.

Now in its 18th year, PEPFAR supports antiretroviral treatment for nearly 17.2 million people living with HIV-AIDS globally - including in Liberia. It has also enabled 2.8 million babies to be born HIV-free to mothers living with HIV and has provided critical care and support for 6.7 million orphans, vulnerable children, and their caregivers so they can survive and thrive.

It's our hope that the Liberia Board of Nursing & Midwifery would make effective use of the textbooks in ensuring that nurses and midwives deployed across the country are up to the task in serving the public.
LANSING, MI  Michigans Lewis Cass building made headlines last summer when Gov. Gretchen Whitmer renamed it the Elliott-Larsen building.

But this week 70 years ago, Michigans oldest standing state office building was in the news for something else entirely: a massive fire lit by a state employee who hoped it would help him avoid the Korean War.

It was lunchtime on Feb. 8, 1951 when firefighters from five different cities began pumping an eventual five million gallons of water through 19,100 feet of hose to try and quell the roaring blaze, which was set in the M (presumably for mezzanine) and seventh floors of the building.

At that time, the new(ish) building housed many state departments as well as the Library of Michigan. Valuable papers, blueprints and reports were stored there by nearly every department with offices in the state office building.

An estimated 25,000 documents, state department reports, maps and studies were destroyed in the blaze while an additional 30,000 were waterlogged, soaked and splattered by water that cascaded down stairways and elevators and then was frozen by the minus-10-degree temperatures in the states capital that night.

Total damages were estimated at the time to be near $8 million, even though the final insurance settlement checked in just south of $1.5 million, according to an article published in the Lansing State Journal a decade later on Feb. 8, 1961.

In the subsequent days, library workers carted thousands of salvaged books and documents to a nearby reform school where they were stacked onto bleachers to dry.

Meanwhile, highway department workers used hot irons to try and smooth soaked road plans after they, too, had dried out on makeshift racks placed wherever there was room.

Air conditioners were brought in to try and dry the shelves of books from the ravaged library, but mildewed books continued to emerge from the wreckage four weeks after the blaze at a rate of nearly 200 a day.

The Capitols Law Library served as the states temporary library and employees were forced to work in Quonset huts, a nearby YMCA and an abandoned bus station for weeks, according to the LSJ report from 1961.

The aftermath of a fire that ripped through the Lewis Cass Building in Lansing in February 1951.Library of Michigan

The fire

According to reports, the fire was reported at 12:40 p.m. when most of the buildings 1,300 employees were out for lunch.

By 1:30 p.m., firefighters from five different departments, as well as a small army of volunteer firefighters, were on the scene where smoke was billowing from the seven-story building at 320 S. Walnut Street.

The decision was made to fight the fire from the outside since the rapidly-moving blaze had quickly consumed much of the upper levels of the building, making it too dangerous to send men inside.

This was difficult because the M floor did not have windows, leaving firefighters with no way to attack the blaze which had eaten its way through the top floor and into the floor below.

Michigan State Police eventually used their firearms to shoot holes in the buildings upper floor windows so that firefighters, using aerial ladders and construction cranes, could shoot water down inside the building.

According to the LSJ, at least two commanders, Chief Hugh Fischer of the Lansing Fire Department and Capt. Robert Foster, collapsed from smoke inhalation while trying to find a way to fight the inferno, which burned for several days before it could be controlled.

The extreme heat made it humanly impossible to get to the flames, Fischer was quoted in the 1961 article from the Lansing State Journal. We had three strikes against us when we arrived. The extreme cold, no lights on the mezzanine floor and no windows.

Staff work to preserve waterlogged and frozen documents damaged in the 1951 fire at the Lewis Cass Building in Lansing.Library of Michigan

The aftermath

Richard Shay, a 19-year-old clerk in the state highway department, eventually admitted to starting the fire at 12:38 p.m., just two minutes before the first alarm was reported. He later pleaded guilty to arson and served time in prison.

He later told Life Magazine in an article published in March 1951 that he thought being arrested for starting a little fire and becoming undesirable for military service would keep him from being drafted to the war in Korea.

Ironically, according to Life, Shays draft board later revealed he would have been exempt from the war because he had a wife and an 8-month-old daughter.

Fortunately, no one was killed in the blaze, but as Lansing State Journal reporter Dick Frazier wrote in 1961, the disaster literally shook state government at the time and its effects were felt as much as a decade later.

Other historians have noted that the incident proved to be an object lesson on the importance of record keeping, since many documents lost in the fire were unrecoverable and proper inventories and backups didnt exist.

Other lingering reminders are more noticeable. The Elliott-Larsen Building, as it is known today, is now a six-story U-shaped structure since the seventh story was never replaced after the fire.

The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1984.

MORE MICHIGAN HISTORY

Looking back at Pascoes Place, Lake Michigans fresh perch paradise

Michigan cavalry captured Confederate President Jefferson Davis this week in 1865

NASA rockets once flew from launch pad hidden in Michigan wilderness

How Michigans worst mining disaster left 51 dead, most entombed underground

Dutch settlers founded Holland on this day in 1847

First-of-its-kind Pere Marquette car ferry made maiden voyage on this day in 1897
The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
Robert Gentile, a Connecticut man long suspected by federal authorities of having organized crime involvement, appears to shrug off his speculated role in the famed Isabella Gardner Museum heist in a recent television interview.

In the interview with WTNHs Dennis House at his Manchester home, Gentile said, They can say what they want. I dont care. It doesnt bother me.

Gentile, now in his 80s, has denied any involvement with the $500 million theft that has vexed the FBI since 1990, according to numerous media reports.

While facing gun charges in 2016, federal prosecutors said that Gentile, a Manchester resident with a decades-old criminal history, told an undercover federal agent that he had access to two of the paintings and could see them for $500,000 a piece, the Associated Press reported.

Federal prosecutors told a judge that Gentile had spoke of the paintings while being held in a federal prison in Rhode Island while he was held without bail awaiting trial, according to the Associated Press report.

At the time, Gentiles lawyer, A. Ryan McGuigan, sought to have the charges dismissed, claiming that the federal authorities sought to entrap Gentile with a gun sale to get Gentile to cooperate with the FBIs investigation into the Gardner Museum heist, the Associated Press reported.

Gentile eventually accepted a deal with the government, plead guilty to the charges and was sentenced to 3 1/2 years in federal prison. He was released in 2019, according to the Associated Press.

The brazen Gardner Museum theft in March 1990, in which two robbers dressed as Boston police officers tied up security before cutting the 13 paintings from their frames, garnered widespread attention, but the yearslong search for the precious art, including works from Rembrant, Vermeer, Degas and Manet, has yet to recover the works.

The museum, still hanging the empty frames, has offered a $10 million reward for the return of the art.

In a separate 2013 case against Gentile for gun and drug charges, federal prosecutors reportedly told a judge that they found a handwritten note with the names of all the paintings while searching Gentiles longtime Manchester home, the Associated Press reported.

Focus shifted to Connecticut in 2013 when the FBI publicly announced that they had evidence that some of the paintings had moved through the state at some point, possibly decades ago.

The FBI believes with a high degree of confidence that in the years after the theft, the art was transported to Connecticut and the Philadelphia region, and some of the art was taken to Philadelphia, where it was offered for sale by those responsible for the theft, said Richard DesLauriers, then the head of the FBIs Boston office. With that same confidence, we have identified the thieves, who are members of a criminal organization with a base in the Mid-Atlantic states and New England.

Though the FBI said a sale took place, they had limited knowledge of the destination of the paintings.

Despite claiming to know the identity of the thieves, the FBI never publicly released any names.
Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - February 10, 2021) - Getchell Gold Corp. (CSE: GTCH) (OTCQB: GGLDF) ("Getchell" or the "Company"), a leading Nevada focused Gold and Copper exploration company, is pleased to announce the remaining results from the recent six-hole 1,995 metre drill program at the Company's flagship Fondaway Canyon Gold Project in Nevada ("Fondaway" or "Project").

Key Highlights

Assay results have been returned for the last 3 holes (FCG20-04, 05, and 06) completed during the 2020 drill program at Fondaway Canyon;

These final three holes all intersected broad zones of gold mineralization and have significantly extended the previously defined gold domains;

8.6 g/t Au over 9.8 metres high-grade gold intercept was encountered by FCG20-04 as it pierced the main Half Moon Shear Vein 54 metres below surface;

high-grade gold intercept was encountered by FCG20-04 as it pierced the main Half Moon Shear Vein 54 metres below surface; 2.5 g/t Au over 58.0m including 10.3 g/t Au over 5.2m , was intersected by FCG20-04 within the newly identified North Fork Gold Zone that extended known gold mineralization 200 metres ;

including , was intersected by FCG20-04 within the newly identified North Fork Gold Zone that extended known gold mineralization ; Holes FCG20-05 and FCG20-06 successfully extended the mineralized Colorado structural zone, initially intersected by holes FCG20-02 and FCG20-03, 150 metres down dip towards the southwest;

down dip towards the southwest; 1.8 g/t Au over 90.0m including 4.4 g/t Au over 11.1m was returned from the Colorado SW Extension in FCG20-05;

including was returned from the Colorado SW Extension in FCG20-05; 1.5 g/t Au over 37.7m and 1.1 g/t Au over 38.3m were returned from the Colorado SW Extension in FCG20-06; and

and were returned from the Colorado SW Extension in FCG20-06; and Highlighted gold zones remain open laterally and down-dip.

"We are extremely encouraged with our results from Getchell's inaugural drill program at Fondaway Canyon within the Central Target Area. It's not very often that every hole of an exploration drill program returns gold intersections as good as or better than anticipated," stated Mike Sieb, President, Getchell Gold Corp. "Our 2020 drill program substantially expanded the known mineralization and demonstrated our broadest gold zones remain open with excellent potential for further extension."

Assay results have now been received for all six diamond drill holes (FCG20-01 to FCG20-06) from the drill program completed at Fondaway Canyon in late 2020 with the notable gold mineralized intervals highlighted in Table 1*.

President Mike Sieb is hosting an online presentation of these drill results on Friday, February 12, 2021, at 2pm EST. The session will feature a live Question and Answer period. All investors and media are welcome to register here: https://bit.ly/3cUJ7np.

New North Fork Zone and Half Moon Shear Vein Drill Results

Drill hole FCG20-04 was collared north of where the Half Moon Vein is exposed on surface and drilled to the southwest. FCG20-04 was designed to (i) pierce the Half Moon vein to characterize the mineralization; and (ii) extend the gold mineralization intersected in hole FC17-04, drilled in 2017 by a previous operator, down-dip to the southwest (Figure 1).

Hole FCG20-04 encountered the high-grade Half Moon Shear Vein 108.1m down hole and 54m vertically below surface (Figure 2 and 3). In addition, two notable gold intercepts were encountered further down the hole that are interpreted to be splays of the main Half Moon Gold Shear Vein. The three Half Moon Shear Vein related gold intercepts are highlighted below.

8.6 g/t Au over 9.8 metres (main Half Moon Shear Vein); 2.7 g/t Au over 20.5 metres; and 6.3 g/t Au over 3.3 metres.

In addition, hole FCG20-04 encountered a broad 144 metre intercept of gold mineralization, newly identified as the North Fork Gold Zone, extending to the bottom of the hole with the final sample of hole FCG20-04 returning 7.9 g/t Au over 1.0 m indicating the lower extent of the North Fork Gold Zone was not reached. Within the North Fork broad zone of mineralization, the following notable gold intercepts are highlighted:

2.5 g/t Au over 58.0 m including 3.5 g/t Au over 36.1 m; 2.8 g/t Au over 13.4 m; and the last sample grades 7.9 g/t Au over 1.0 m.







Figure 1: Fondaway Canyon Central Area Plan Map showing 2020 drill hole locations.

To view an enhanced version of Figure 1, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/3941/74109_82de1cd70417b86d_001full.jpg

The newly identified North Fork Gold Zone is geologically modelled as a 100m thick shallowly dipping to the southwest zone of gold mineralization and the results observed in FCG20-04 support this model. In addition, the North Fork Gold Zone represents a 200m step out to the southwest from hole FC17-04 and is open laterally and down-dip. As can be observed in the plan map of the area (Figure 2), there are no adjacent holes that have targeted the North Fork Gold Zone's depth horizon.







Figure 2: Half Moon and North Fork Gold Zones Plan Map showing hole FCG20-04 gold grades.

To view an enhanced version of Figure 2, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/3941/74109_82de1cd70417b86d_002full.jpg

Of note is hole FC17-05, a hole drilled in 2017 by a previous operator and shown in Figures 1 and 3. Hole FC17-05 encountered a significant intercept of gold mineralization at the bottom of the hole, is 300 metres distant from the end of hole FCG20-04, and is within and on plunge with the projected window of the down-dip extension of the North Fork gold zone indicating a significant further potential extension to the North Fork Gold Zone.





Figure 3: Fondaway Canyon North Fork Zone (NE-SW) Long Section

To view an enhanced version of Figure 3, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/3941/74109_82de1cd70417b86d_003full.jpg

Colorado SW Extension Drill Results

Drill holes FCG20-02 and 03 were both collared from the historic Colorado Pit (Figure 1) and successfully extended the known gold mineralization towards the southwest (Figure 4). The results from FCG20-02 and 03 are detailed in a Company news release dated January 27, 2021, and Table 1 presents a summary of the notable gold intervals from holes FCG20-02 and FCG20-03.

Drill holes FCG20-05 and 06, were collared on the same pad near the canyon floor and drilled to the northeast along a plane connecting the Colorado Pit to Pack Rat zone and on plane with hole FCG20-02 (Figures 1 and 4). Holes FCG20-05 and 06 were designed test the down-dip extension of the mineralization observed at surface at the historic Colorado Pit and the mineralization encountered in holes FGC20-02 and 03.

Both holes, FCG20-05 and 06, encountered broad 100-metre-thick zones of gold mineralization within the Colorado SW Extension Gold Target Zone. FCG20-05 encountered the Colorado SW Extension Gold Zone between 175 and 270 metres down hole while FCG20-06 encountered the zone between 165 and 285 metres downhole. The following notable gold intercepts are highlighted:

FGC20-05

1.8 g/t Au over 90.0 m including 3.0 g/t Au over 45.3 m and including 4.4 g/t Au over 11.1m 6.3 g/t Au over 3.3 m; and 0.6 g/t Au over 28.0 m.

FGC20-06

1.5 g/t Au over 37.7 m including 2.1 g/t Au over 19.2 m; and 1.1 g/t Au over 38.3 m including 2.5 g/t Au over 10.6 m.

The strongly mineralized interval encountered in FCG20-05 represents a 150-200m step out to the southwest from the mineralization intersected in hole FC20-02 and is open laterally and down-dip.

Of note is hole FC17-01, a hole drilled in 2017 by a previous operator and shown in Figures 1 and 4. Hole FC17-01 encountered a significant intercept of gold mineralization at the bottom of the hole, is 250 metres distant from hole FCG20-05, and is within and on plunge with the projection of the down-dip extension of the Colorado SW Extension Gold Zone indicating a significant potential further extension to the Colorado SW Extension Gold Zone.







Figure 4: Fondaway Canyon Colorado to Pack Rat (NE-SW) long section

To view an enhanced version of Figure 4, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/3941/74109_82de1cd70417b86d_004full.jpg











Table 1: Fondaway Canyon 2020 Drill Program Highlighted Gold Intervals*



To view an enhanced version of Table 1, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/3941/74109_table1.jpg





Table 2: Fondaway Canyon 2020 Drill Locations and Orientation (UTM metres - NAD83 Z11N)



To view an enhanced version of Table 2, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/3941/74109_table2.jpg

Scott Frostad, P.Geo., is the Qualified Person (as defined in NI 43-101) who reviewed and approved the content and scientific and technical information in the news release.

* Gold Intervals reported in this news release are drill indicated core lengths, as insufficient drilling has been undertaken to determine true widths at this time. Average grades are calculated with un-capped gold assays, as insufficient drilling has been completed to determine if capping levels for higher grade gold intercepts are required.

The 2020 drill core was cut at Bureau Veritas Laboratories' ("BVL") facilities in Sparks, Nevada, with the samples analyzed for gold and multi-element analysis in BVL's Sparks, Nevada and Vancouver, BC laboratories respectively. Gold values were produced by fire assay with an Atomic Absorption finish on a 30-gram sample (BV code FA430) with over limits re-analyzed using method FA530 (30g Fire Assay with gravimetric finish). The multi-element analysis was performed by ICP-MS following aqua regia digestion on a 30g sample (BV code AQ250). Quality control measures in the field included the systematic insertion of standards and blanks.

About Getchell Gold Corp.

The Company is a Nevada focused gold and copper exploration company trading on the CSE: GTCH and OTCQB: GGLDF. Getchell Gold is primarily directing its efforts on its most advanced stage asset, Fondaway Canyon, a past gold producer with a significant in-the-ground historic resource estimate. Complementing Getchell's asset portfolio is Dixie Comstock, a past gold producer with a historic resource and two earlier stage exploration projects, Star and Hot Springs Peak. Getchell has the option to acquire 100% of the Fondaway Canyon and Dixie Comstock properties, Churchill County, Nevada.

The Company reiterates that its near-term strategy to advance its assets is not impacted by the COVID-19 Corona virus. The Company continues to monitor the situation and is in compliance with all government guidelines.

For further information please visit the Company's website at www.getchellgold.com or contact the Company at info@getchellgold.com.

Mr. William Wagener, Chairman & CEO

Getchell Gold Corp.

+1 303 517 8764

info@getchellgold.com

The Canadian Securities Exchange has not reviewed this press release and does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this news release. Not for distribution to U.S. news wire services or dissemination in the United States.

Certain information contained herein constitutes "forward-looking information" under Canadian securities legislation. Forward-looking information includes, but is not limited to, statements with respect to the private placement and the completion thereof and the use of proceeds. Generally, forward-looking information can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "will" or variations of such words and phrases or statements that certain actions, events or results "will" occur. Forward-looking statements are based on the opinions and estimates of management as of the date such statements are made and they are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements or forward-looking information, including: the receipt of all necessary regulatory approvals, use of proceeds from the financing, capital expenditures and other costs, and financing and additional capital requirements. Although management of Getchell have attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in forward-looking statements or forward-looking information, there may be other factors that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements and forward-looking information. The Company will not update any forward-looking statements or forward-looking information that are incorporated by reference herein, except as required by applicable securities laws.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/74109
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Farmers are still agitating because ministers of the Modi government have failed to present any "alternative" to the three new agri laws, the Samuykta Kisan Morcha (SKM), an umbrella body of 41 farmer unions, said on Wednesday.

The SKM is leading the protest against the three central farm laws at several border points of Delhi.

On Prime Minister Narendra Modi's address in Lok Sabha, SKM leader Darshan Pal said that union leaders have only been raising the "genuine" issues of the farmers.

"The agitation has been continuing because the ministers of the Modi government have not been able to come up with any solid alternative to the new laws or the MSP (minimum support price), despite 11 rounds of talks," Pal said in a video message.

It is "absolutely clear" that the new laws will finish government mandis (wholesale markets) and private mandis where big corporates will sell and buy will have monopoly, he claimed.

"What is the problem and your (prime minister's) objection if both the mandis remain," Pal said referring to one of the new farm laws of the Centre.

He said that the prime minister termed those protesting against the farm laws as 'andolanjivis' (professional protesters), and that they raised different issues and "misguided" the farmers.

"The truth is thate we are struggling on genuine issues of farmersfor the past six months and have not raised any issue or demand beyond it," said the SKM leader.

Pal said that the farmers and people of the country should not be taken in by the prime minister's speech in Lok Sabha and continue to strengthen the agitation against farm laws.

"I want to say to the farmers and the people to understand what Modi said in Parliament and not be taken in by his statements about the leaders of the farmers agitation," he said.

Prime Minister Modi said in the Lok Sabha that the government and Parliament have great respect for farmers who are voicing their views on the three farm bills, and made it clear that those who want to continue with the old agriculture marketing system can continue doing so.

Replying in Lok Sabha to the discussion on the motion of thanks to the President's address to the joint sitting of Parliament, Modi staunchly defended the three contentious farms laws and attacked the opposition for "misleading" farmers.

Seeking to allay apprehensions on the farm laws, Modi said neither any agriculture 'mandi' (market) has shut down after the three laws were enacted nor has the MSP stopped, rather the MSP has only increased which no one can deny.

The prime minister also said the government has offered to discuss clause by clause of the three farm laws and if there are any shortcomings it was ready to make changes.

(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.)
Armenias Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan on Wednesday held a consultation on the 2020 agricultural seasons results and the activities projected for 2021.

Deputy Minister of Economy Arman Khojoyan reported that according to data available from the Statistics Committee, GDP grew by 1.4% in the agricultural sector in 2020. 2.3% growth was recorded in crop production and 0.6% growth - in livestock. 228,000 hectares of arable land were cultivated, with some 155,000 plots of irrigated land. Among the state-supported programs, the leasing program gained strong momentum in 2020, under which 295 units of agricultural machinery were acquired, while the number of beneficiaries almost doubled.

Tangible growth has been registered in the program of intensive orchards. The volume of intensive orchards increased 10-fold to 518.6 hectares in 2020 as compared to 53.2 hectares cultivated in 2019. The number of beneficiaries increased from 17 to 53.

According to the Deputy Minister, considering the ever-growing interest in the program, the Ministry plans to introduce a systemic approach in 2021, which will feature a training component. Short-term and long-term farming courses will be held at the Agrarian University of Armenia.

A rural insurance program was implemented in 6 regions, covering 2 crops. In 2021, the program shall be implemented nationwide, covering a total of 11 crops. The pedigree cattle breeding program proved quite effective last year. It was facilitated by the UNDP-supported Sustainable Communities program and the Miasin project, implemented in cooperation with the Ministry of Economy of the Republic of Armenia. The project implies construction of smart livestock buildings.

20 smart livestock buildings were built and 35 contracts were signed in 2020. The project is being implemented in the border settlements of Gegharkunik and Vayots Dzor Provinces. It will be implemented in Syunik Province from February 15. Animal vaccination activities and preparations for the planned stock-taking campaign are underway.

With reference to purveying and procurements, the Deputy Minister noted that 98,000 tons of fruit and vegetables were procured in 2020, which is 11,000 tons more than the previous years procurements. Mapping of grape plantations has been carried out on the way to setting up a vineyards register; these activities will continue this year in order to expand the geographic coverage.

To propel the exports of Armenian wines, a cargo storage hub and an online platform will be established in Berlin, through which Armenian wines shall be available across the European continent. Efforts are underway to this end.

Legislative reforms have been made in the field of brandy production. Talks are currently underway with the management of a chain of three Russian supermarkets to support the processing and export sectors, set up a representative office, a logistics center in Armenia, as well as to organize direct exports of local products to Russian supermarkets.

Under a World Bank-backed lending program, relevant contracts have been signed with 57 processing companies to upgrade their production facilities and introduce food safety systems. As for the state-subsidized agricultural credits, the number of loans has increased more than 4 times in 2020 as compared to 2019. The loan portfolio has almost doubled in volume.

The Premier was next informed about the 2020 results and the upcoming projects in the field of pasture management and infrastructure development. Mediating WB loans, a veterinary service center was built in Hrazdan, Kotayk Province. The auditorium of the Faculty of Animal Husbandry of the Agrarian University was supplied with modern equipment, and the construction of pasture irrigation systems was completed in 8 communities.

By this yearend a veterinary service center will be set up in Tumanyan community of Lori Province; pasture irrigation systems will be built in 11 communities; livestock pools will be built in 70 communities, which will be used to take stock of and vaccinate animals.

The Deputy Minister noted that the state-supported agricultural programs will be continued in 2021.A program of state assistance for the production of spring grains, legumes and forage crops will be presented in the near future.

Prime Minister Pashinyan hailed the positive dynamics and called for consistent implementation of effective programs, noting that no strategic support program should be left outside the state assistance framework.

The Premier next inquired about the current situation in the field of water use. Reference was made to the water supply system reform and the management of debts accumulated by water users. Issues of improving the systems profitability were discussed during the meeting.

The Prime Minister instructed to explore different options for improving accuracy in the planning of water use, minimizing water losses, finding systemic solutions to the problem of arrears and submit finalized proposals for further discussion.
The comments were made by Party General Secretary and State President Nguyen Phu Trong during his phone talk with First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) Central Committee Raul Castro Ruz.

The Vietnamese leader cited Cuban leader Fidel Castros saying: For Vietnam, Cuba is willing to shed its blood.

He thanked Raul Castro for his congratulations on the success of the 13th National Congress of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV), the 91st founding anniversary of the CPV, and his re-election as the General Secretary of the 13th CPV Central Committee.

Congratulatory messages like these from Raul Castro and many Cuban agencies and organisations have vividly demonstrated the special friendship between the two countries as well as the close ties and mutual trust between Party and State leaders of the two countries, top leader Trong said.

He described the 13th National Party Congress as a milestone in the development of the CPV and Vietnam.

The top Vietnamese leader shared the current difficulties facing Cuba and expressed his belief that under the leadership of the PCC, led by Raul Castro, the Cuban people will overcome all challenges, complete the socio-economic update policy set at the sixth and seventh National Party Congresses, and successfully organise the eighth National Party Congress of the PCC scheduled for April 2021.

For his part, Cuban leader Raul Castro praised the prestige, role, and major contributions of Party General Secretary and President Trong to Vietnams cause of national construction and defence and the Vietnam-Cuba special friendship.

He noted his belief that under the leadership of the CPV, led by Party General Secretary and President Trong, the Vietnamese people will successfully materialise guidelines set at the 13th National Party Congress and reap more fruit in socialism building.

Raul Castro spoke highly of the valuable support of the Vietnamese Party, State, and people to their Cuban counterparts, especially in ensuring food security in Cuba through rice supplies and effective cooperation in agriculture and other spheres.

The Cuban Party, State, and people will make all-out efforts to preserve and promote the special friendship, he affirmed.

On this occasion, the two leaders also exchanged invitations to visit their respective countries.

Michael T van der Veen, one of the three attorneys representing Donald Trump in his Senate impeachment trial, once reportedly described the former president as a "f***ing crook" as he represented another client.

The Philadelphia lawyer also worked for a client who sued Mr Trump in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election for making voter fraud claims despite having no evidence. And in August 2020, a marketing email from van der Veens law firm had castigated Mr Trumps attempts to suppress mail-in votes.

It was in 2019 when Mr van der Veen made crude remarks while representing Justin Hiemstra, a student at the time, Mr Hiemstra told the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Mr Hiemstra was accused of attempting to hack into a government database to obtain Mr Trumps tax returns. Im not sure if [those comments] were made to make me feel more comfortable, or if they were his actual opinions, he told the paper. He definitely came off as fairly anti-Trump in the context that I knew him.

Mr Hiemstra pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two years of probation.

In the same report, the Inquirer published a screenshot of a marketing email from Mr van der Veen's firm from August 2020, which said that "Donald Trump doesn't want you to be able to vote". The firm was writing about the decision to file a suit against the US Postal Service "to force it to deliver ballots" for the presidential election.

Mr van der Veen went on to sue Mr Trump, the US Postal Service and Postmaster General Louis DeJoy on behalf of independent candidate Melvin Johnakin, accusing Mr Trump of making repeated claims that "voting by mail is ripe with fraud, despite having no evidence" to support it. In the suit, the plaintiff sought "to preserve and protect the essential right to vote and prevent large-scale disenfranchisement."

The lawsuit was later settled in November, as a part of a broader effort to stop the Postal Service from making changes that could delay the mail delivery service, reported the Washington Post.

Speaking to his local paper about his previously reported positions on the former president, Mr van der Veen said his decision to join Mr Trump's defence team had nothing to with his personal views about him, and that he is approaching it like any other case.

I have a client who is in need of and who deserves the best representation he can get, and thats what were giving," Mr van der Veen was quoted as saying by the paper.
UNICEF-Uganda acknowledges that 'Early Childhood Development (ECD) is key to a full and productive life, and to the progress of a nation.

When investments are made in mothers and young children, children's risk of dying under the age of 5 is reduced, they stand a better chance of doing well at school and they are also more likely to break the 'intergenerational cycle of poverty'.

The earliest years are the most crucial point of child development and attending early education lays the foundation for lifelong learning and supports children's social and emotional development. We need to prioritise keeping early years settings open in full because of the clear benefits to children's education and wellbeing and to support working parents. Caring for the youngest age group is not something that can be done remotely.

ECD in Covid-19 fight

The argument to allow preschool settings to reopen is presented with the consideration that they should be part of the wider national strategy to contain the spread of the coronavirus in the country whilst the role of early childhood learning in supporting parents and delivering the crucial care and education needed for our youngest children is sustained in the short and long term.

Therefore we believe that keeping these facilities closed is akin to blocking major parts of our community out of the solutions to the problem which in itself thwarts public health advancement of holistic approaches.

As we use the public health guidelines to highlight our commitment to care for all lives, we note an international education researcher; Andy Hargreaves's study in which he notes that "A first class system of early childhood education is the hallmark of a caring and civilized society."

Health risks

Early years settings remain low-risk environments for children and staff. 0-5 year-olds continue to have the lowest confirmed rates of coronavirus of all age groups, and there is no evidence that the new variants of coronavirus disproportionately affects young children. Evidence shows that pre-school children are less susceptible to infection and are not playing a driving role in transmission.

There is no evidence showing that the new strain of the virus causes more serious illness in either children or adults and there continues to be strong evidence that children are much less susceptible to severe clinical disease than older people. Meaning that having these settings open should not affect ongoing control measures.

Underdevelopment and disorders

Attending an early years setting is highly valuable for all children, leading to positive social and emotional, language, and physical development. The lack of access to provision impedes children's development significantly.

There is a risk of isolated young children developing issues such as post-traumatic stress disorder, attachment problems or a sense of grief which could have fundamental and long-term effects.

Early years settings can be the most stable element in a child's life and there is a heightened risk of safeguarding issues as vulnerable young children are not in regular contact with professional carers and other children at a time of increased financial and emotional stress. Remote contact and learning experiences cannot replace the need for human contact and interaction which is crucial to healthy development.

Poverty and low-incomes (most attributed to the pandemic) only exacerbates the loss endured by the very young children. Because the first six years of life is an incredibly sensitive period for brain development, deprivation during this time has profound and potentially long-term consequences.

Less access to early learning opportunities, among others, mean higher rates of physical and cognitive stunting.

Human-capital

Children under the age of 5 make up the largest age group in the population structure, in 15-20 years these will be the core active population whose productivity is essentially founded on the education pillars (or lack of them) currently in existence.

This means that the decision to initiate young people straight into primary school deprives them of the strong founding pillars that are intended to build the life resilience-ability that will the define labour force productivity of the country in the nearby future.

Increasing inequality

With an already wide income gap, we risk to have this gap widened by keeping these settings closed. Children that skip the formal element of early years typically start formal schooling at a distinct disadvantage, without the critical building blocks in place for early literacy, numeracy and executive functioning.

This learning loss is very difficult to "catch up" in later school years, especially in poor-performing schools and overcrowded classrooms with little or no capacity for remedial support.

It is probable that some children could benefit from alternative home-schooling interventions however, this is a tiny fraction of the high-income earning group mainly in urban areas, leaving the largest group of young people denied of a formal learning opportunity because remote learning or home schooling has the following challenges:

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It is difficult to align home school or remote learning with the ECD curriculum.

Because of the activity based nature of learning in early years, suitable resources are not easily accessible at home hence many learners may experience learning loss in their social and communication development.

Increased vulnerability to child safety from impatience of parents attempting to teach, abuse from untrained adults such as housemaids.

A freeze on literacy developments as this area requires specified resources.

Enhancing learning difficulties such as dyslexia or speech impediments due to lack of specialised stimuli like as peer groups for speech development.

Examining all or some of the issues raised clearly shows that the ministry's decision needs urgent revision and immediate U-turn to the short and long term benefits to all.

jmaserejje@elimisha.org

The author is director of Faculty Harris Academy, London UK & senior consultant at Elimisha Education (U)
In recent days there has been a flood in good news on the covid front. Consider that a recent report from Bank of America, which notes that "COVID-19 hospitalizations continue to plunge" we read the following encouraging data points:

The number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 in the US has declined dramatically to 81,439, or 51,035 (down 39%) from the peak which occurred on January 5th  a rapid turn in the crisis. The decrease is broad-based (50 states + DC, except for AK, which saw a minimal 2-person increase over the past week).

The weekly percentage change in US COVID-19 hospitalized is consistent with the largest declines seen during the coronavirus crisis. Moreover the 7-day test positivity rate has declined to 7.2% from the 13.6% peak on January 8th. Since hospitalizations are lagged relative to time of infection,US coronavirus outbreaks peaked back in the second half of December.

Finally, the vaccine rollout in the US accelerated to more than 2 million doses per day over the weekend and a cumulative 41.2mn doses had been administered through February7th.

The recent widespread improvements prompted Goldman to get this close to declaring the all clear: in a Monday note from chief economist Jan Hatzius, he writes that "the global virus situation has improved significantly, with both new confirmed cases and the positivity rate down meaningfully since December. It is still too early for a significant impact from vaccinations, so we would attribute the improvement to other factors such as new restrictions, greater caution in individual behavior, and perhaps partial herd immunity in some places."

More notably, Hatzius notes that "the renewed improvement in the UK is particularly noteworthy because of the concerns about new variants, in this caseB117, which surfaced first there.... the UKs response to its B117-heavy infection surge in December was similar to Frances response to its surge in October. The fact that both countries saw their infections decline in similar ways after the ELI increase suggests that B117 has not been a game changer, at least so far."

So much for worries that mutant strains would render both the response strategy and vaccines moot.

And yet despite this impressive improvement in the pandemic, some are hinting that covid may be here to stay for a long, long time. Take the CEO of Johnson & Johnson, Alex Gorsky, who told CNBC that people may need to get vaccinated annually for Covid-19, Gorsky told CNBC the virus can mutate as it spreads causing it to have different responses to therapeutics and vaccines.

Unfortunately, as [the virus] spreads it can also mutate, he told CNBCs Meg Tirrell during a Healthy Returns Spotlight event. Every time it mutates, its almost like another click of the dial so to speak where we can see another variant, another mutation that can have an impact on its ability to fend off antibodies or to have a different kind of response not only to a therapeutic but also to a vaccine.

"We'll be getting a Covid-19 shot just like we would a flu shot. What that shot is going to be comprised of, I don't think we know today. But I think we could all imagine a future where we're living with this. But where we can keep the science at pace with the virus, so that we can keep on living our lives" Gorsky said.

Of course, the CEO of J&J - a company which stands to make billions from selling the covid vaccine year after year - has a clear conflict of interest and would like nothing more than to sell vaccines indefinitely... and to see Covid circulate within the population forever. After all, that would not only pump up JNJ's stock price but the CEO's compensation as well.

What is more troubling is that the narrative that covid will never actually go away is one that the mainstream media is starting to trumpet as well. As the WSJ reported earlier this week, while "vaccination drives hold out the promise of curbing Covid-19, but governments and businesses are increasingly accepting what epidemiologists have long warned: The pathogen will circulate for years, or even decades, leaving society to coexist with Covid-19 much as it does with other endemic diseases like flu, measles, and HIV."

Going through the five phases of grief, we need to come to the acceptance phase that our lives are not going to be the same, said Thomas Frieden, former director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. I dont think the world has really absorbed the fact that these are long-term changes.

So does that mean masks and social distancing forever? Perhaps:

Endemic Covid-19 doesnt necessarily mean continuing coronavirus restrictions, infectious-disease experts said, largely because vaccines are so effective at preventing severe disease and slashing hospitalizations and deaths. Hospitalizations have already fallen 30% in Israel after it vaccinated a third of its population. Deaths there are expected to plummet in weeks ahead. But some organizations are planning for a long-term future in which prevention methods such as masking, good ventilation and testing continue in some form. Meanwhile, a new and potentially lucrative Covid-19 industry is emerging quickly, as businesses invest in goods and services such as air-quality monitoring, filters, diagnostic kits and new treatments.

Of course, it also means that while some zombie companies will exist only thanks to billons in periodic PPP bailouts, other companies will make unprecedented profits as they directly benefit from a perpetual pandemic.

More importantly, it will means constant media propaganda, because any time the administration needs to pass a multi-trillion stimulus - say when ratings sag - it can just crank up the panic dial to max and greenlight itself another multi-trillion fiscal boost which makes the economy ever more artificial and unable to survive on its own two feet absent constant government handouts.

Most importantly it means that tens of millions of people will become perpetual financial wards of the state, cementing any political system that promises constant handouts to all those who no longer have a chance of coping, or survival in a world where universal basic income - which is gradually becoming the norm - is pulled away.
Students at King Middle School spent an hour Tuesday racing against time to craft sturdy space capsules that could withstand a fall from atop a chair as part of an immersive traveling STEM lab that stopped by the school.

Beaumont was the latest stop of the mobile STEM lab created by Learning Undefeated, a Maryland-based non-profit that has partnered with the Texas Education Agency to provide STEM exposure to underserved communities.

What we are doing here is going across the state of Texas providing students with hands-on STEM, Desurae Matthews, the Education Program Lead for Learning Undefeated, told The Enterprise. We are trying to introduce them to science at a young age.

Students were put into teams and given a brief history lesson on space capsules before working together to craft their own protective capsules for Lego figurines.

I think this in particular is a really good experience for them because it is actually exposing them to STEM on this level, King Science teacher Tina Hickman said. Most kids are hands-on these days, and now they will have some background knowledge if they do decide to be an engineer.

One of those students was Jeremiah Lee, who used bubble wrap and tape with his team to build a capsule.

We didnt know where to start and we didnt have much time to do it, Lee said. We wanted to make sure that if it were to fall it would be able to stay together in any condition.

Lee said the experience increased his passion for science, a field he could see being his career one day.

I told my mama I was planning on being an engineer, he said. Last year my fifth-grade teacher Mr.Rodriguez would make science fun, he would make songs about it and have each person in the classroom say a part of the song.

Sparking that passion at a young age is a strong priority for Hickman and Beaumont ISD, one that has been difficult with the barriers presented by the pandemic.

I do try to give them hands-on experiences within the constraints of COVID, Hickman said. I dont want to just limit them to individual bookwork, I still want them to experience some type of normalcy within a group, of course safely.

The constraints of COVID have made the mission of Learning Undefeated even more important.

Because they are unable to do all the normal field trips at school anymore, with this mobile STEM lab we basically bring the field trip to them, Matthews said. It is a field trip in the parking lot.

Learning Undefeated first toured the Texas coast with one of their mobile units after Tropical Storm Harvey ravaged coastal communities.

When the storm hit we were like, Why dont we send one of the mobile labs to Texas? Matthews said. There are so many schools without equipment, without lab space  so we originally only saw schools in severely impacted areas.

Districts visited included Port Arthur, Vidor, and Little-Cypress Mauriceville.

The success of the program evolved into a full-fledged partnership funded by the Texas Education Agency.

Tori Bishop, the education coordinator for the non profit, said the activity Tuesday helped students apply some of the knowledge they had been learning about space capsules.

We get them to think about engineering and in that process we have them build a space capsule, Bishop said. Then we test to see if it works, then if it doesnt work they go back, rebuild it and retest it again.

At the end of the program, students had varying success, but all came away smiling, and with a new perspective on science.

Hickman, a said the activity fit well with her curriculum.

I teach a little bit of everything, Hickman said. I teach physical science, so we just finished our unit on space so this works really well for them.

Jaliah Strother, another student whose favorite subject is math, said it was refreshing to get out of the classroom.

It took a lot of time, and we used a lot of tape, she said of her capsule.

Quadarius Matlock said his team was able to work cooperatively with most of the available materials.

It felt good to get out of the class, Matlock said. We are in class 24/7 except to go to lunch or go to another class so this was nice.

isaac.windes@hearstnp.com

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In the race to get people immunized in the U.S., pharmacists made a key discovery -- that vials of Pfizer's covid-19 vaccine contain an extra dose. Extracting that extra bit of vaccine, however, hinges upon the availability of a specialized syringe that is in short supply.

When a medication or vaccine is injected, some amount of it can linger in the syringe in what's known as the "dead space" between the plunger and needle. Low-dead space syringes are designed to minimize that, and with it, waste. That makes them a crucial tool in extracting six doses, instead of the five that were expected, from each Pfizer vial.

The pressing need for low-dead space syringes is relatively new. The specialized syringes are considered a niche product, used when dealing with drugs like fertility treatments, where medication waste can be especially costly.

In an early plan, the Biden administration described dead-space syringes and needles as one of 12 supply shortfalls it planned to address. Yet it is not as easy as flipping a switch and the vaccination campaign is trying to outpace faster-spreading covid variants.

"If you've got fires burning, every drop of water matters so you have to use as much as you can as quickly as you can and strategically," said Bruce Gellin, former director of the National Vaccine Program Office in the Department of Health and Human Services.

The syringe issue is one of several officials are addressing to ensure no drop of limited vaccine is wasted as states continue to criticize the government for a lack of supply. Since President Joe Biden took office Jan. 20, federal agencies have issued guidance that allows people to get follow-up shots a few weeks later than the recommended interval if needed, and says that in "exceptional circumstances" it's okay to mix and match doses.

These steps provide a window into efforts to push along the country's complex and high-stakes vaccine effort. It is occurring amid staggering logistical complexities and supply shortages as well as the threat of renewed spread from the variants.

Another approach to deploy shots in arms faster is to focus on first doses, as the U.K. is doing. However, that risks giving people less protection and could inadvertently promote the emergence of variants, Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious diseases expert, said at a White House briefing Monday.

Low-dead space syringes have gained the spotlight against a backdrop of shortages of Covid-19 vaccines, a key constraint throughout the U.S. immunization push to date.

"The biggest challenge I'm hearing from states right now is simply a lack of supply," said Rep. Diana DeGette, a Colorado Democrat who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee's oversight panel, which held a hearing last week with state officials on boosting vaccine distribution. "They stand ready to vaccinate many more Americans if we just get them the doses they need."

Andy Slavitt, a senior adviser to the White House's covid-19 effort, said at a briefing last week that about 80% of Pfizer kits contain low-dead space syringes, while the rest contain other syringe types that could be used to extract the sixth dose. Asked for comment on Monday, the White House referred to Slavitt's remarks.

In reality, it's unclear just how available those syringes are.

Hospitals and others that are part of Premier Inc., a group-purchasing organization, are looking to obtain more low-dead space syringes, "so we know they're not getting everything that they need," said Jessica Daley, a pharmacist and vice president of strategic supplier engagement at Premier. The group is collecting information about what's included in Operation Warp Speed kits from the more than 4,100 acute care hospitals and facilities across the country that are its members.

Most suppliers are limiting providers to an allocation based on their purchasing patterns, meaning securing extra supply of low-dead space syringes for Covid-19 vaccination efforts can be difficult, Daley said.

Becton Dickinson and Co., the world's largest needle and syringe manufacturer, contracted with the U.S. government to deliver 286 million needles and syringes for the vaccination push, including 40 million low-dead space syringes. Yet because demand for the devices has historically been much lower, "we have limited production capacity," said Troy Kirkpatrick, senior director of public relations.

"Initially when we were having conversations with the government, low-dead space is not something that was talked about as needing to prioritize," Kirkpatrick said. "This extra dose came up at the end of the discussion, not the beginning."

The Biden administration has taken steps to ramp up vaccine distribution, saying Tuesday that it will boost weekly vaccine doses to states to 11 million Pfizer-Inc-BioNTech and Moderna Inc. shots. Both vaccines require two doses several weeks apart.

While extracting more doses per vial will help boost supply, the Biden administration also has been trying to sort out what advice to give about the second shot.

The day after Biden took office last month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued guidance saying the follow-up dose of the messenger RNA-based Pfizer and Moderna vaccines could be given up to six weeks after the initial shot and that the vaccines could be mixed if absolutely necessary. The recommended intervals that were studied in clinical trials are three weeks for Pfizer's shot and four weeks for Moderna's. The Food and Drug Administration also offered support for "modest delays."

Just two weeks earlier FDA leadership had issued a statement saying extending the time between doses hadn't been studied and could put "public health at risk."

The FDA declined to provide data it may have consulted in issuing the guidance. Kristen Nordlund, a spokeswoman for the CDC, said Pfizer's clinical trial on its vaccine included people who received their second dose up to 42 days after the first. Receiving a vaccine made by a different company for a second dose hasn't been studied.

Jay Butler, deputy director for infectious diseases at the CDC, described the changes as pragmatic responses to real-world circumstances. Interchanging doses is better than restarting the vaccine series from the start, especially as "we really have no data at all on the safety of three doses," Butler said, speaking at a briefing last month hosted by the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
New Delhi, Feb 11 : The Samyukta Kisan Morcha (SKM) on Wednesday announced a 4-point program including "Rail Roko" across the country for four hours on February 18 in a move to intensify the ongoing farmers' agitation against the three farm laws.

The SKM, an umbrella body of the farmers' unions spearheading the protest against the new farm laws of the Central government held a meeting at Singhu border on Wednesday to chalk out further plans to intensify the movement.

Farmers' leader Darshan Pal said in a statement after the meeting that "Rail Roko" program will be held on February 18 from 12 p.m. to 4 p.m. across the country as a part of the agitations.

The SKM has taken four decisions to intensify the movement, he said.

The four point programs include: 1. From February 12, all road toll plazas in Rajasthan will be made toll free.

2. On February 14, candle march and Mashaal juloos and other programs will be organised across the country remembering the sacrifice of the martyred soldiers in the Pulwama attack.

3. On February 16, the farmers will show solidarity throughout the country on the birth anniversary of Sir Chhoturam.

4. "Rail Roko" program will be held on February 18 from 12 p.m. to 4 p.m. across the country.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Kotak Investment Advisors (KIAL) has said it has achieved closure of its new Real Estate Fund worth around $380 million or Rs 2,770 crore, which will target a range of real estate financing opportunities across key cities in India.

The new fund will target both early-stage and late-stage real estate projects in residential, commercial, retail, warehousing and hospitality sectors, the company said in a statement.

The around $380 million real estate fund is anchored by a clutch of leading global financial investors and is one of the largest dedicated real estate financing funds closed in recent times in India, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic..

Our new Real Estate Fund has been closed at an opportune time. We have a flexible investment mandate enabling us to provide much-needed capital to address the short-term financial dislocation in the real estate financing market as well as long-term capital to address the liquidity issue, said Srini Sriniwasan, Managing Director, Kotak Investment Advisors.

Vikas Chimakurthy, CEO, Kotak Realty Fund said: The new ~$380 million fund is the 11th fund in our real estate fund series since our first fund raise in 2005. With this fund, we cross a total raise of ~$2.2 billion. This demonstrates strong confidence of global investors in our longstanding track record and our ability to source, underwrite and manage real estate investments. We have a robust pipeline of transactions coming through as financing and structured credit solutions.

The real estate fund is set up as an Alternative Investment Fund (AIF) under SEBI regulations managed by the Alternate Asset Management Company - Kotak Investment Advisors.

Kotak Investment Advisors (KIAL), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Kotak Mahindra Bank, focuses on the Alternate Assets business of the Group.
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Ursula von der Leyen today issued a grovelling apology for the EU's vaccine shambles, admitting the bloc acted 'late' and was 'over-confident'

Ursula von der Leyen today issued a grovelling apology for the EU's vaccine shambles, admitting the bloc acted 'late' and was 'over-confident'.

The European commission president also conceded its rollout was still not 'where we want to be' in a humbling speech in Brussels.

However, she defended trying to thrash out at unified approach for the 27 member states, even though she has likened it to a 'tanker' compared to the UK's 'speedboat'.

UK government figures last night showed 12,646,486 people have now received initial jabs, with another 516,392 having had their booster.

By contrast the EU as a whole has administered fewer than 18million doses to its population of around 450million people.

Globally there are around 4.6million jabs being given every day, with around one in 10 of those happening in the UK.

Speaking at an EU Parliament plenary session, Ms von der Leyen said: 'We are still not where we want to be. We were late to authorise.

'We were too optimistic when it came to massive production and perhaps we were too confident that, what we ordered, would actually be delivered on time.'

The EU as a whole has administered fewer than 18million doses to its population of around 450million people

Ms von der Leyen also said she was sorry for the confusion over the threat to suspend the Northern Ireland protocol in order to block vaccine exports - which was humiliatingly dropped.

'The bottom line is that mistakes were made in the process leading up to the decision,' Ms von der Leyen said.

'And I deeply regret that. But in the end we got it right.'

Ms von der Leyen said she still believes that 70 per cent of the EU's adult population can be vaccinated by the end of summer, swiping at pharmaceutical companies for not keeping pace with scientific advances.

'Industry has to match the groundbreaking pace of science,' Ms von der Leyen said.

'We fully understand that difficulties will arise in the mass production of vaccines.

'But Europe has invested billions of euros in capacities in advance, and we urged the member states to plan the vaccine rollout. So now we all need predictability.'

Despite the chaos, the three groups of MEPs stuck with Ms von der Leyen's approach of member states moving together.

'The key decisions were right,' Manfred Weber, leader of the Christian Democrat European People's Party, said.

UK government figures last night showed 12,646,486 people have now received initial jabs, with another 516,392 having had their booster

The Socialists and Democrats party leader Iratxe Garcia said: 'Fiasco, catastrophe, disaster: they ring very true to our citizens.'

But she added that her party would stick with Ms von der Leyen on the bloc moving together.

'Criticism is necessary but with a constructive spirit,' she said.

Ms Von der Leyen's assessment came as the bloc's death toll passed 500,000, a statistic that fundamentally challenges the EU's vaunted welfare standards and healthcare capabilities.

It comes as the bloc is fighting off the remnants of a second surge of Covid-19 that has kept communities from Portugal to Finland under all kinds of lockdown, curfews and restrictions as authorities race to vaccinate as many people as possible.

The last official weekly figures from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control are expected on Thursday but Johns Hopkins University produced a daily tally showing the number stood at 500,809 on Wednesday.

By comparison, the United States, with a population of 330 million, leads the world per nation with more than 468,000 deaths.
Dianne Buswell has credited dance for relieving 'the stress and anxiety of real life'.

In a new interview with DARE Magazine, the Strictly Come Dancing star, 31, revealed exercise 'takes her to a relaxed place' as she touched on mental health, self-love and body image.

The ballroom expert turned up the heat as she slipped into a deep blue swimsuit for the publication's accompanying cover shoot, which was taken in a swimming pool.

'It's a mind-awareness thing': Dianne Buswell credited dance for relieving 'the stress and anxiety of real life' in a new interview with DARE Magazine

On her fitness regime, the choreographer, who was partnered up with The Wanted's Max George on the latest edition of the BBC show, said: 'I always think you should work out because you want to, not because you have to.

'I think it should be something you do because it makes you feel good and you're excited your body can do that, rather than I need to change this or that about myself. It's about the mind feeling good and the mind giving you energy.

'It's a different approach but it works for me, and I know it's worked for a lot of other people as well.'

The media personality stressed the importance of prioritising the art form as she elaborated: 'There was a massive period where I couldn't dance. For me, whenever I dance, I don't think of any other worry.

In her element: The Strictly star, 31, turned up the heat as she slipped into a deep blue swimsuit for the publication's accompanying cover shoot, which was taken in a swimming pool

The ballroom expert revealed exercise 'takes her to a relaxed place' as she touched on mental health, self-love and body image (pictured with Max George on the show in 2020)

'Even if the world was crumbling down around me and I went to dance, I would feel almost completely normal in that moment. That's what I found with yoga and Pilates too.

'I switch off from everything else and focus on the breath and it takes me to a relaxed place.

'It's a bonus that you're working out at the same time, but it never really feels like that, it's more a mind-awareness thing. I love that feeling of being taken away from the stress and anxiety of real life.'

The Australian went on to discuss how she's battled with her self-esteem in the past, stating: '[Self-love is] hugely important, so many people don't give themselves enough credit, but it's important to be happy with how you are.

'You should be exercising because, 'I love that my body can actually do this,' rather than, 'I hate this about my body so I'm going to do this.

'It's about switching that brain flick in your mind, as doing that helps in the process of being a healthier you. Rather than focusing on things you hate about your body, you'll achieve so much more looking at the things you love about it.

'100 percent, it (confidence) has been hard at certain points in my life. [Dancing is] one of those industries where you're always comparing yourself to other people.'

On comparing herself to other dancers during her childhood, the TV star added: 'Growing up, that's all I ever did  compare myself to the dancer next to me, like, ''Oh, I look different to her, my body shape is different, I need to be like her,'' because she was winning.

'My success never came by trying to be someone else': The Australian went on to discuss how she's battled with her self-esteem in the past (pictured in 2020)

'It can be so tough as a dancer to finally go, ''Ok, I accept I am who I am.'' The moment I accepted that was when I found all my success came.

'My success never came by trying to be someone else  in fact I was going down and down and I wasn't achieving what I wanted to and I didn't know why.

Dianne admitted she's excelled in her career since accepting her authentic self as she shared: 'The minute I was like, ''Right I'm going to be me, this is who I am, this is how my body is, this is how I dance,'' everything started to happen.

'I encourage that in people, to not look at someone else. We're all different and al have something to offer and the minute you concentrate on that, the sky's the limit.'

Out now: Dianne Buswell is the cover star of Superdrug's DARE Fit and Healthy magazine

The athlete has been met with criticism from trolls throughout her three-year stint on Strictly, and admitted she's faced even more scrutiny since joining YouTube with her influencer boyfriend Joe Sugg, who she's been dating for three years.

On combatting backlash, Dianne confessed: 'When I came here, I didn't realise how big Strictly was and how much you're literally judged for absolutely everything.

'At the beginning I found that extremely hard. Moving into the YouTube world, you're always going to get criticism. It's awful and really sad, but it's happening more than we know.

'But you just have to think about how many positive ones you get, compared to those negative ones. It's so outweighed, it's crazy. I'm lucky I can look at the positive ones and go, ''That's so nice'' and the negative ones sort of close it down.

'But it scares me that some people can't do that and it could stay in someone's mind forever and really make a difference. I think more needs to be done about it.'

Dianne Buswell is the cover star of Superdrug's DARE Fit and Healthy magazine out February the 10th on sale in supermarkets and newsagents.
Hearts decorated by St. Helena Elementary School students line the schools entryway this week, in a reminder that love, empathy and art can endure in the most unusual of times.

Retired art teacher Linda Rowland came up with the idea to coincide with Valentines Day.

Its about spreading the love, she said.

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When Rowland would enter a classroom, she would give instructions to two sets of students at once: the masked students sitting at their socially distanced desks and kids participating from home via Zoom, who were provided art materials ahead of time.

Rowland calls the two groups the Roomers and the Zoomers.

Its different working with a group of kids in class and also looking into the camera, but it can be done, she said.

Art has a freeing effect on kids whose lives have become rigidly circumscribed during the pandemic.

For example, one assignment calling for students to paint old newspapers didnt quite go as planned, so Rowland gave the kids gloves and told them to apply the paint by hand.

You could see their whole bodies getting into it, Rowland said. It was such a stress reliever.
Cong made noise about farm laws, but never discussed its content: PM Modi

India

oi-Deepika S

New Delhi, Feb 10: Slamming the Congress, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday said the Opposition should have debated on the intent of the farm laws and not their colour.

"During the coronavirus pandemic, the three farm reform laws have been introduced to ease the difficulties of farmers and future challenges. Unfortunately, the Opposition has held discussions over the colour, if it's a black law or white law. It would have been better if they had looked at it's content and intent instead," Modi said.

He went on to add, "Efforts were made to identify the concerns of farmers. We make the laws for the people of this country. Even now, if they make any suggestions, we do not have objections."

Meanwhile, the opposition leaders raise the slogan of 'kaala kaanoon radd karo (repeal the black laws)' as they voice their dissent on the farm laws.

On Opposition creating ruckus in Lower House, PM Modi said, "The laws were brought through ordinances and after due discussions in Parliament. All the sloganeering and protests are pre-planned strategy to prevent the truth from coming out."

Defending the laws, PM Modi said the 'mandis' have not been affected and are functioning as before.Farmers have been given the rights to go and sell their farm producsta anywhere. There are no restrictions by the new laws.

Thousands of farmers, especially from Punjab, Haryana and parts of Uttar Pradesh are camping at Delhi borders for over two months seeking repeal of the three farm laws and legal guarantee of MSP of crops.

Eleven rounds of talks between the Centre and the protesting unions have failed to break the deadlock. The government has offered some concessions including suspension of the laws for 18 months, which farm unions have rejected.

Meanwhile on January 12, the Supreme Court stayed the implementation of the laws for two months and appointed a panel to look into the matter.
London, Feb 10 : UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock has announced tough fines and jail terms up to 10 years for breaching quarantine rules imposed in an effort to prevent the new coronavirus variants from entering the country.

Hancock told lawmakers in the House of Commons on Tuesday that there will be fines between 5,000 pounds ($6,890) and 10,000 pounds ($13,780) for failing to quarantine in a designated hotel, reports Xinhua news agency.

Anyone who lies on their passenger locator form about having been in a country on "the red list", will face a prison sentence of up to 10 years, he added.

The Health Secretary also announced that from February 15 onwards, all international arrivals will be required by law to take additional coronavirus tests on day two and day eight of their quarantine.

"If either of these post-arrival tests comes back positive they'll have to quarantine for a further 10 days from the date of the test," he said.

Hancock further announced that a fine of 1,000 pounds ($1,378) will be imposed on any international arrival who fails to take a mandatory coronavirus test, and a fine of 2,000 pounds ($2,756) for failing to take a second test.

Meanwhile, from February 15, arrivals from "red list countries" must pay 1,750 pounds ($2,411) for their own hotel quarantine, transport and testing, said Hancock.

The government has secured 4,600 hotel rooms and are working on getting more, he said.

"We must strengthen our defenses" further and responding to new strains is "mission critical", he added.

The latest development came amid rising concerns over the spread of the coronavirus variant first detected in South Africa.

A trial has found the Oxford vaccine had limited efficacy against mild disease from the variant.

England is currently under the third national lockdown since the outbreak of the pandemic in the country.

Similar restriction measures are also in place in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Health official: 'I am hopeful for the brighter days ahead'
CAIRO  Amid tight security measures to prevent the outbreak of protests, the Egyptian authorities continue the campaign to remove dozens of residential buildings in the historic Islamic district of Sayeda Aisha in the capital Cairo, which led to the displacement of hundreds of families despite their possession of proof that their houses are legally built.

Mohammed Omran, from the Sayeda Aisha area, woke up Jan. 16 to the sound of tractors demolishing dozens of houses surrounding the historic Sayeda Aisha Mosque on the grounds that these buildings were randomly built and had no official permits.

Omran, who works as a security guard in a private company and earns a salary of 3,600 Egyptian pounds (about $230) per month, told Al-Monitor, They [destroyed] our houses and told us that they were illegal despite the fact that we have been living there for more than 50 years and benefit from services offered by the government itself, such as electricity and water.

He said, More than 500 families have been affected, and some cannot afford to pay rent in any other region due to the high prices [of housing]. We conveyed all these problems to the officials and expressed our rejection of such practices, but [no one heeded our demands]."

Omran noted that the government has housed only a small number of families [whose homes were demolished]. Many others were left without any compensation or alternative housing. When we asked about the matter, they [officials] said that we will be contacted later to discuss compensation, but no one has reached out to us yet.

Jihan Abdel Moneim, deputy governor of Cairo, told Al-Monitor that the governments decision to remove buildings in this historic area is legal, as the residents of this area do not possess official papers and their houses were randomly established.

Abdel Moneim defended the governments decision, saying, The demolition process included only random buildings, and it aims at providing suitable housing for citizens instead of having them live in unsuitable areas, as part of a large development plan approved by the government with the participation of the armed forces to develop Historic Cairo and all residential areas there.

On Dec. 22, 2020, Prime Minister Mustafa Madbouly announced that he was tasked by President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to coordinate with the Egyptian Armed Forces Engineering Authority and set up a project to develop Historic Cairo, remove old buildings in the area and rehouse citizens in alternative places.

According to the plan for the development of Historic Cairo, the displaced residents are compensated either by being granted alternative housing, the cost of the apartments from which they were displaced or the cost of monthly rent to reside in other residential places.

An Egyptian human rights lawyer working on the issue of the right to housing told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity, A number of lawyers interested in this issue will reach out to families who have been displaced to provide legal support and file cases against the demolition decisions.

He noted, The Egyptian authorities have a long record of displacement and arbitrary removal of real estate. The same happened in el-Warraq and Nazlat el-Samman areas overlooking the Pyramids, and before that in the Maspero Triangle area in the heart of the capital Cairo. The citizens demands and concerns over residing in faraway residential areas or being deprived of their right to the place in which they live are never heeded."

The lawyer added, Despite the fact that in most cases residents possess the required legal papers, they are afraid to take legal measures for fear of security prosecutions, especially since the authorities arrest citizens from the opposition, accuse them of terrorism and imprison them for many years.

Article 63 of the 2014 Egyptian Constitution states that all forms of arbitrary forced migration of citizens are forbidden. Violations are a crime without a statute of limitations.
Arriving travellers put in quarantine hotels in England will be charged 1,750 for their stay, Health Secretary Matt Hancock has announced (Steve Parsons/PA)

Arriving travellers put in quarantine hotels will be charged 1,750 for their stay, Health Secretary Matt Hancock has announced.

Passengers arriving into England face fines of up to 10,000 for failing to quarantine, and those who lie on their passenger locator forms face up to 10 years in jail.

UK nationals or residents returning to England from 33 red list countries will be required to spend 10 days in a Government-designated hotel.

The Scottish Government said this approach is not sufficient so it is requiring all international travellers arriving into Scotland to stay in a quarantine hotel.

No international flights are currently operating to Wales or Northern Ireland.

Mr Hancock indicated the measures might be in place until the autumn if vaccine booster jabs are needed in response to coronavirus variants.

He told the Commons that 16 hotels have been contracted to provide 4,600 rooms for the quarantine programme, which begins on Monday.

Anyone who attempts to conceal that they have been in a red list destination in the 10 days before arrival faces a prison sentence of up to 10 years, Mr Hancock said.

He also confirmed the new enhanced testing regime for all international travellers, with two tests required during the quarantine process from Monday.

Those who fail to take a test face a 1,000 fine, followed by a 2,000 penalty and an extension to their quarantine period, to 14 days, if they miss the second test.

Mr Hancock told the Commons: People who flout these rules are putting us all at risk.

He added: I make no apologies for the strength of these measures, because were dealing with one of the strongest threats to our public health that weve faced as a nation.

Asked when the new rules will be relaxed, Mr Hancock replied: We want to exit from this into a system of safe international travel as soon as practicable and as soon as is safe.

He said work is ongoing to assess the current vaccines against variants of the virus, adding: If that isnt forthcoming then we will need to vaccinate with a further booster jab in the autumn, which were working with the vaccine industry.

These are the uncertainties within which we are operating and hence, for now, my judgment is the package weve announced today is the right one.

Shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth claimed the public wants the Government to go further on border measures.

Our first line of defence is surely to do everything we can to stop (new variants) arising in the first place, he said.

That means securing our borders to isolate new variants as they come in. Hes announced a detailed package today but he hasnt announced comprehensive quarantine controls at the borders.

A spokeswoman for travel trade organisation Abta said requiring passengers to pay for multiple tests once leisure travel is restarted would have serious cost implications and hurt demand.

She urged ministers to develop a roadmap to reopen travel.

Single adults will be charged 1,750 for a 10-day stay in a quarantine hotel, which covers the hotel, transfer and testing.

It is not known if couples or families will be charged a discounted rate.

Rory Boland, editor of consumer magazine Which? Travel, said the policy will be prohibitively expensive for many people.

He went on: Airlines should be made to offer passengers the option of cancelling for a full refund, as well as fee-free rebooking, while these restrictions remain in place.

Passengers required to stay in a quarantine hotel will need to reserve a room in advance through an online system.

A document leaked last week indicated that the Government expects about 1,425 arrivals a day to require a room.

This would mean the 4,600 rooms could be fully booked after just three days, but Mr Hancock told MPs that we will secure more as they are needed.

These travellers will only be allowed to enter the UK through a small number of ports that currently account for the vast majority of passenger arrivals, Mr Hancock added.

A Government document seen by the PA news agency indicates that hotels will only be paid 50 per night to take part.

Paul Charles, from travel consultancy The PC Agency, commented: Its no wonder hotels are less than enthusiastic. Their costs will outstrip the income from Government.

He also warned that the UK economy will take a massive hit from the lack of certainty over reopening.

In other developments:

-Extra coronavirus testing will be carried out in the borough of Lambeth, south London, after a case of the South African variant was discovered.

 Some 12,646,486 people had received a first dose of vaccine up to February 8, a rise of 352,480 on the previous day.

 A further 1,052 people were reported to have died within 28 days of testing positive for Covid-19 as of Tuesday, bringing the UK total by that measure to 113,850.

 As of 9am Tuesday there had been a further 12,364 lab-confirmed cases of coronavirus in the UK.
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Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi welcomed on Feb. 9 a senior Moroccan delegation that arrived in Israel to reopen the countrys liaison office. Moroccan diplomat Abderrahim Beyyoud will head the Tel Aviv bureau. In parallel, David Govrin, who heads Israels liaison office in Rabat, met today for the first time with Moroccan Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita. Morocco's King Mohammed VI had already indicated that the opening of mutual embassies was near.

Still, Israel-Morocco relations are not just a matter of diplomacy and diplomats. On Feb. 8, Israel's Minister of Public Security Amir Ohana spoke over the phone with his Moroccan counterpart, Interior Minister Abdelouafi Laftit, in a conversation that was reportedly especially warm and friendly. At the beginning of the conversation, Ohana greeted Laftit in Moroccan Arabic, noting that as a son of Moroccan immigrants, reestablishing bilateral ties is of special significance for him. He had waited many years for this to happen, he said. The two ministers then invited each other to visit their home countries in order to promote cooperation in the field of public security. They agreed to meet in the near future either in Morocco or Israel.

Ohana was certainly not the first Israeli minister to speak on the phone with his Moroccan counterpart. He was not even the first Israeli minister of Moroccan origins to do so. On Jan. 18, Interior Minister Aryeh Deri  who was born in Morocco  spoke on the phone with Laftit. "I have spoken this morning with my colleague, Moroccan Interior Minister Abdelouafi Laftit. We decided to establish a joint team to study the possibility of bringing [Moroccan] foreign workers [to Israel] for the nursing sector and to consider visa exemption. Apart from that, I shared with him memories from my hometown Meknes in Morocco. We exchanged invitations for visits in Israel and Morocco," tweeted Deri.

As a reminder, Israel and Morocco reestablished diplomatic ties on Dec. 10. The agreement was part of a US-brokered deal that includes American recognition of Moroccos sovereignty over the long-disputed Western Sahara region. In recent years, Rabat had accelerated its diplomatic campaign on this issue. Clearly, the king felt it was a last-minute opportunity to generate a Washington change of policy on that, before the presidential elections.

With Western Sahara in the background, Jerusalem was not sure about Rabats commitment to real peace. But moves in recent weeks demonstrate that the king and the government in Rabat are fully engaged in bringing the two peoples closer. This is excellent news for Israel, and not just on the diplomatic level. With tens of thousands of Israelis connected through their families to Morocco, the desire to build bridges is enormous. More so, several Israeli ministers of Moroccan origins consider building bridges to be a personal chore. They are very much excited and proud of that.

Ministers of Moroccan origins reflected this Israeli excitement shortly after the agreement in a series of statements. Strategic Affairs Minister Michael Biton said, I was born in Israel, but Morocco flows through my veins. Today is a holiday for me. I hope to return to Morocco soon for an official visit  this time as a minister in the Israeli government. Transportation Minister Miri Regev said, Generations of Moroccan Jews have dreamed of peace with the country where they were born and where our culture is so deeply rooted. May the blessing of Allah come upon us and upon them. Then-Economy Minister Amir Peretz posted an especially moving video, greeting Moroccans using the Moroccan Arabic dialect. "As-Salamu Alaykum, my name is Amir Peretz, a minister in the Israeli government, and I am very happy about [the resumption of] diplomatic relations between Morocco and Israel. I was born in Morocco, in Boujad, and I feel like my dream has come true, said Peretz, adding he wished his Moroccan-born parents were still alive to share with him this special day.

The rapid progress on Israel-Morocco relations stands in sharp contrast to Israels lack of relations with Algeria and Tunisia.

Shortly after the agreement with Morocco, Tunisia made it clear it was not going to follow suit. A statement by Tunisias Foreign Ministry said, "As Tunisia respects the sovereign positions of other countries, it affirms that its stance is principled, and changes in the international scene will never affect it.

The issue of Israel came up again in Tunisia a few weeks ago  again in a negative way. In a video posted on Facebook, Tunisian President Kais Saied is heard denouncing in Arabic protests he said were the work of divisive forces. Then he added a phrase that sounded like the Jews, or al yahood. Tunisian Jews worldwide were quick to condemn the president. In response, Saied denied denigrating Jews in any way. On the other hand, he did repeat his stance against Israel and in favor of the Palestinian cause, making clear that normalizing ties with Israel was certainly not on his agenda.

While President Saied has made his position on Israel crystal clear, there are also other voices in Tunisia. In a Dec. 14 interview, former Tunisian Foreign Minister Ahmed Ounaies argued that Algerias public battle against Morocco on Western Sahara is one of the main reasons the kingdom decided to resume diplomatic relations with Israel. The geopolitical scene in the world and in the region has changed, so Moroccos choices went in a new direction, said Ounaies.

Indeed, Israeli diplomats estimate that for Algeria, the Western Sahara issue is a major element in resisting normalization with Israel, perhaps no less than the Palestinian issue. As for Tunisia, a senior diplomat in Jerusalem told Al-Monitor that the likelihood of Tunisia under Saied changing its mind on Israel is practically nil.
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(Newser)  One of the five people shot Tuesday at a Minnesota health clinic has died. Three of the victims were in critical but stable condition Tuesday night and one had been released, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports. Meanwhile, details were coming in on the suspect, 67-year-old Gregory Paul Ulrich, who was arrested and jailed after the late morning tragedy at the Allina Health Clinic in Buffalo. Ulrich's ex-roommate says the suspect is an addict and was angry his doctor wouldn't prescribe more painkillers, and Buffalo Police Chief Pat Budke says Ulrich had a history of making violent threats after being unhappy with health care he had received.

story continues below

He also has a long history with law enforcement in the town, going back as far as 2003. The former roommate says Ulrich was so unhappy with the aforementioned doctor, he put the man's name on a sign accusing him of being a "crook and just no good," and attached it to the shed of his mobile home, "facing the main road going to the hospital so everybody could see it." Authorities say he threatened a mass shooting or bombing at the same clinic in 2018. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz says "some improvised explosive devices" were found by authorities after the Tuesday shooting, NBC News reports. (Read more Minnesota stories.)
The European Commission and the high representative announced the adoption of a new agenda for the Mediterranean region, including Egypt, the European delegation in Egypt said on Wednesday.

The European Union (EU) in Brussels said the agenda is meant to boost the strategic partnership between the EU and the Mediterranean, according to the EU statement.

The new agenda is based on the conviction that by working together and in a spirit of partnership, common challenges can be turned into opportunities, in the mutual interest of the EU and its Southern Neighbours, said the EU.

The agenda includes an economic and investment plan that targets boosting the long-term socio-economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic in the southern neighbourhood, read the statement.

Under the new EU's Neighbourhood, Development and International Cooperation Instrument (NDICI), up to 7 billion for the period 2021 to 2027 will be allocated to its implementation, which can mobilise around 30 billion in private and public investments in the region over the next decade.

This communication sends a crucial message about the importance we attach to our Southern Neighbourhood. A strengthened Mediterranean partnership remains a strategic imperative for the European Union. 25 years after the Barcelona Declaration and 10 years after the Arab Spring, challenges in the Mediterranean  many of which resulting from global trends  remain daunting,, said EU High Representative and Vice-President Josep Borrell.

To address these challenges, we need to renew our mutual efforts and act closely together as partners, in the interest of all of us. This is what this new agenda is all about. We are determined to work together with our Southern Partners on a new agenda that will focus on people, especially women and youth, and help them meet their hopes for the future, enjoy their rights and build a peaceful, secure, more democratic, greener, prosperous and inclusive Southern Neighbourhood, Borrell explained.

The Commissioner for Neighbourhood and Enlargement Oliver Varhelyi said that the renewed partnership with the Southern Neighbourhood presents a new beginning in EUs relations with its southern partners.

Based on common interests and common challenges, developed together with our neighbours... Europe wants to contribute directly to a long-term vision of prosperity and stability of the region, especially in the social and economic recovery from the COVID-19 crisis. In close dialogue with our partners, we have identified a number of priority sectors, from creating growth and jobs, investing in human capital, and good governance. We consider migration to be a common challenge, where we are ready to work to fight irregular migration and smugglers together with our partners as it is a risk for all of us. We will work together to bring real change on the ground for the benefit of both our neighbours and Europe, according to Varhelyi.

The EU said that the new agenda focuses on five policy areas, including human development, good governance and the rule of law, resilience, prosperity, and digital transition.

It also includes providing support to countries to address security challenges and find solutions to ongoing conflicts, in addition to addressing the challenges of forced displacement and irregular migration, and facilitating safe and legal pathways for migration and mobility.

The agenda concentrates on green transition as well as introducing an economic investment plan for the Southern Neighbours to ensure the quality of life for people in the region improves and economic recovery is realised.

The plan includes preliminary flagship initiatives to strengthen resilience, build prosperity and increase trade and investment to support competitiveness and inclusive growth.

The EU provided support to Egypt mainly through the European Neighbourhood Instrument with 756 million in the period from 2014 to 2020.

Since 2008, Egypt has been a beneficiary of the Neighbourhood Investment Platform which leveraged 7 billion in concessional loans from European Financial Institutions combined with public and private sector financing for projects in the sector of renewable energy, energy efficiency, irrigation, water and wastewater management, transport, financial inclusion, support to micro, small and medium-sized enterprises, and education, according to the EU.

Moreover, projects under the North of Africa window of the EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa (EUTF Africa) in Egypt amount to 89 million, stated the EU.

In addition, Egypt benefits from EU thematic programmes and instruments, including the European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights, the Civil Society Organisations and Local Authorities programme under the Development Cooperation Instrument, the Partnership for Research and Innovation in the Mediterranean Area (PRIMA) and Horizon 2020.

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(Photo : Screenshot From JayzTwoCents YouTube) RTX 3060 Launches Ahead of Expected Release Date? Introducing the Cheapest of the RTX 3000-Series

The recently announced budget gamer's champ, the Nvidia RTX 3060 has reportedly been pictured in the wild even ahead of its expected rumored release coming later this month. Nvidia initially showed off the GeForce RTX 3060 specs at the CES 2021.

Nvidia GeFroce RTX 3060 release date

The RTX 3060 was touted during the CES 2021 as a particular mid-range GPU that is designed to bring raytraced gaming towards every PC gamer. Nvidia also confirmed the best news regarding the RTX 3060 GPUs saying that they will go on sale for just $329 which is a huge difference compared to the RTX 3090 price.

According to the story by TechRadar, the price reportedly makes the GeForce RTX 3060 the cheapest among the whole RTX 3000-series. However, Nvidia did not really reveal when the particular GPUs will hit the shelves. While the initial rumor was pointing out towards an upcoming February 25 RTX 3060 release date, some particularly eagle-eyed Redditors have already been able to spot the said GPU out in the wild.

Where to buy RTX 3060 online

It was noted that the particular Reddit user known as He_never_sleeps has reportedly been able to stumble upon two different Gigabyte RTX 3060 GPUs on the shelves of a certain unnamed country in Europe. The Redditor was even reportedly able to pick up one of the two said GPUs.

However, since the RTX 3060 has still not yet been officially released as of the moment, he also notes that he can't really get the card to function within Windows due to the existing lack of available drivers. This was not the only "discovery" of the said GPUs as another Redditor also shares a similar story.

Read Also: Best RTX 3080 Stock Tracker Apps: How to Boost Your Chance of Buying

RTX 3060 price could soar?

Another Reddit user also claims that one of the shops in the user's unnamed country actually had seven different units of the said PALIT RTX 3060 12GB GPUs in stock. They were reportedly sold for a whopping $750 USD which is said to be twice the price of the MSRP.

According to an article by Wccftech, that particular country is actually Pakistan. The known official Nvidia distributor Zah Computers reportedly has the said card up for sale as of the moment, but how long still remains to be unseen. Although the said Nvidia RTX 3060 has reportedly started hitting the store shelves somewhat ahead of the supposed rumors release which is in two weeks, it still remains to be seen as to whether the GPU's official launch will be maybe just as messy as in comparison to its predecessors.

The supply issues have reportedly been quite a consistent issue along with the latest generation of the popular GPUs coming from Nvidia with both the RTX 3080 as well as the RTX 3060 Ti actually being particularly hit badly. According to a European retailer known as Alternate, the prices of the GPUs are expected to increase as the availability of the whole RTX 3000 series will reportedly deteriorate much further within Q1 of 2021.

Related Article: Qualcomm Snapdragon X65 5G Modem: New mmWave Module with 10Gbps Download Speed Expected to Launch This 2022

This article is owned by Tech Times

Written by Urian Buenconsejo

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
The sun broke through the cream-colored blinds at my mothers New Jersey home. I felt its warmth on my face before throwing my body weight to one side, trying once again to roll and push up to sit.

I hoped the sudden movement would give me some momentum, but it wasnt enough and I rolled back down, my back once again flat against the bed, sinking deeper into the plush mattress my mother had bought for me when I returned to her home.

In my bedroom in Mumbai, my mattress is made of high-density foam, a better surface to move on for someone like me, someone with muscular dystrophy. If I needed a hand to sit up, my live-in caregiver, Martha Tirki, was a holler away. But in New Jersey, my mother was still sleeping upstairs and I hated the thought of waking her up to help me. My part-time caregiver wouldnt arrive for another hour. After more failed attempts with lots of twisting and turning, I finally sat up.

I took some seconds to feel good about this because it was easy to think otherwise, to think: All of that and I havent even gotten out of bed yet.
San Jose is the latest Bay Area city to require large grocery stores to offer hazard pay to its employees during the pandemic.

On Tuesday, the San Jose City Council voted 7-3 to pass a law mandating that large grocery stores pay their workers an additional $3 an hour to compensate them for continuing to risk contracting the coronavirus as they interact with streams of customers in enclosed spaces.

The ordinance requires grocery stores with 300 or more employees nationwide to offer the pay bump for 120 days. It takes effect 30 days from the final adoption, which is expected in the coming weeks. Because the measure did not garner eight votes on the council, the ordinance could not go into effect immediately.

Last week, Oakland adopted a measure requiring grocers to pay workers an additional $5 per hour on top of their regular pay. Council members voted unanimously and the law went into effect immediately after the vote.

Proponents of the measure, including the United Food and Commercial Workers union, say grocery store workers have risked their lives throughout the pandemic by being in constant contact with customers. Many have contracted the virus and 137 grocery workers have died across the country, according to the union  which said it only kept a tally for unionized workers, so the numbers could be higher.

The San Jose City Council passed a much-needed hazard pay ordinance for thousands of local grocery workers in San Jose, Jim Araby, spokesman for the union, said in a statement. Some of the pandemic profits will be put back in the pockets of grocery workers who face the risks of exposure to ensure that our communities have access to food.

Other cities such as Long Beach, Santa Monica, Montebello (Los Angeles County) and Seattle have passed similar laws mandating supplemental pay for grocery store workers. Santa Clara County will vote later this month for a $5-an-hour pay bump for workers in grocery stores and fast-food restaurants in the county, excluding San Jose.

The growing push for hazard pay has met resistance from the California Grocers Association, a trade group representing grocers. The group contends that the laws can cause economic harm for grocers and could lead to store closures. Supermarkets could also pass the cost of the new laws onto customers.

Interactive Vaccine Tracker: Latest developments Detailed information about the coronavirus vaccines as it becomes available.

A day after Oakland passed its law, the trade group filed a lawsuit against the city seeking to declare the law unconstitutional. It also filed a case against Montebello, and has a pending case against Long Beach, which was the first city in the state to enact a hazard pay requirement on grocers.

After Long Beach implemented a $4-an-hour increase for grocery workers, Kroger this month said it soon will close a Ralphs and Food 4 Less, specifically citing the misguided city rule as a reason for closing.

But other grocers such the Save Mart Companies, which operates the Lucky, Save Mart and FoodMaxx stores, have continued hazard pay. Its unionized workers have received a pay increase which ranges from $2.50 to $3.50 an hour since the beginning of the pandemic, according to Araby. The company has 16,000 employees across 225 stores.

Trader Joes, which is not unionized, voluntarily raised its thank you pay from $2 to $4 an hour last week. The grocer has been paying hazard pay since the beginning of the pandemic.

Shwanika Narayan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: shwanika.narayan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @shwanika Instagram: @shwanika


A potential Neptune-to Saturn-sized planet that 'could be suitable for life' has been discovered in the habitable zone of a neighboring star system.

The exoplanet, dubbed 'C1,' was spotted in the Alpha Centauri triple star system 4.4 light-years from Earth, which is also home to Alpha Centauri A and B, along with the more famous Proxima Centauri.

C1, if it is a planet, is speculated to have a radius between about five to seven times that of Earth, along with a mass that is about 20 to 50 times of our planet.

'If what weve seen is actually a planet, then the most exciting possibility to me would be if it has any smaller moons orbiting it,' Kevin Wagner, a Sagan Fellow in NASA's Hubble Fellowship Program at the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory, told DailyMail.com.

'Those, if they exist, would likely be rocky and could be better places for life to exist than in the clouds of a giant planet.'

The discovery was made possible with a newly developed system for mid-infrared exoplanet imaging, in combination with an extremely long observation time  all of which were performed using the Very Large Telescope in Chile.

Astronomers were able to reduce unwanted signals that come from the telescope and camera, in the same way noise-cancelling headphone block out certain sounds, allowing them to detect faint signals coming from the potential planet.

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A potential Neptune-to Saturn-sized planet has been discovered in the habitable zone of a neighboring star system that 'could be suitable for life.' The exoplanet, dubbed 'C1,' was spotted in the Alpha Centauri triple star system 4.4 light-years

The new capabilities were developed by a team of international astronomers, in collaboration with the initiative Breakthrough Watch/NEAR, which is a global astronomical program looking for Earth-like planets around nearby stars.

'NEAR is a stepping stone in the larger field of exoplanet imaging, which for a while has been limited to wide-orbit super-Jupiter planets, and just now is starting to reach into the habitable zones of nearby stars,' Wagner said.

However, the team of international scientists clearly state that without subsequent verification, the possibility that C1 might be due to some unknown artifact caused by the instrument itself cannot be ruled out just yet.

'What we can measure is really only brightness and position. From that, if we assume that the detection is indeed a planet, we can deduce a possible range of orbits, range of radii for the planet, and range of temperatures,' explained Wagner.

'The radius and temperature both contribute to the overall brightness. The orbit also contributes, because closer orbits lead to higher temperatures.

The discovery was made possible with a new system for mid-infrared exoplanet imaging, in combination with an extremely long observation time  all of which were performed using the Very Large Telescope in Chile. The team used it to observe Alpha

'Its a complex multi-dimensional space where one parameter depends on the others, so our estimates currently have very wide ranges.'

'For instance, one of the known artifacts is a persistence (or burn-in) effect that causes the camera to retain the signal of the stars during chopping, much like what would happen to logos that were displayed for too long in the corners of old plasma screen TVs,' explained Wagner.

'This creates lines in the image that we understand and know how to model and subtract from the data. We don't have a similar explanation for C1, but there certainly could be something that we haven't thought of.'

The new method provides more than a tenfold improvement than current capabilities that are directly observing exoplanets, Wagner explained.

'Most earlier studies focused on 1-5 microns, which is great for detecting young super-Jovian planets, but is not where Earth-like planets are brightest,' explained Wagner.

'NEAR is focused on 10-12.5 microns, which is close to the Earth's thermal emission peak.'

'The trade-off is that the background is much higher at longer wavelengths, so we need much longer exposure times and anything that we can do to mitigate the background really helps.'

The team has being working on the science to perform such capabilities for nearly 20 years and after 100 hours of observations, their time may have finally paid off.

Astronomers were able to reduce unwanted signals that come from the telescope and camera, in the same way noise-cancelling headphone block out certain sounds, allowing them to detect faint signals coming from the potential planet

Alpha Centauri was chosen because it sits in the habitable zone, which is the region where a planet might be able to retain liquid water on its surface, thus making the area suitable for candidates that would be suitable for life.

Current capabilities have indirectly detected a planet nearly twice the size of Earth in the system orbiting Proxima Centauri, which was done using the star's radial velocity variation or the tiny wobble a star exhibits under the tug of the unseen planet.

However, such indirect methods are not powerful enough to find rocky planets in more widely separated habitable zones, Wagner explained.

This is where Wagner and his teams capabilities come in to play - they are able to reduce the noise to directly image planets that could be hiding in the area.

The new method provides more than a tenfold improvement than current capabilities that are directly observing exoplanets. NEAR is focused on 10-12.5 microns (pictured), which is close to the Earth's thermal emission peak

The scientists used what they call an adaptive secondary telescope mirror to boost the sensitivity of the imaging system, which corrects any distortion of light from Earth's atmosphere.

A star blocking device, called a coronagrpah, was also applied that blocks light from stars one at a time.

Finally, the team developed a completely new technique that allows observation to switch back and forth Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B, and it does so very rapidly.

'We're moving one star on and one star off the coronagraph every tenth of a second,' Wagner said.

'That allows us to observe each star for half of the time, and, importantly, it also allows us to subtract one frame from the subsequent frame, which removes everything that is essentially just noise from the camera and the telescope.'

The team observed the Alpha Centauri system for nearly 100 hours over the course of a month in 2019, collecting more than 5 million images. By removing known artifacts and coronagraph residuals, the team was able to see a simulation with the data that suggests C1 could be a Neptune- to Saturn-sized planet

He compares the capabilities to that of noise-cancelling headphones, as the desired sound can be heard over unwanted noise - it allows the team to remove unwanted noise to hear signals from a potential planet.

The team observed the Alpha Centauri system for nearly 100 hours over the course of a month in 2019, collecting more than 5 million images.

By removing known artifacts and coronagraph residuals, the team was able to see a simulation with the data that suggests C1 could be a Neptune- to Saturn-sized planet.

'There are several possibilities here. Probably our best shot at determining the nature of C1 is to repeat the NEAR experiment,' said Wagner.

'If we detect the object again in a different location, then we can check if that is consistent with orbital motion, and if so that would be very good evidence that it's in fact a planet.'

'If it stays in the same place, then an exozodiacal dust disk or instrumental artifact would be more likely, and a different type of experiment will be needed to tell the difference in that case.'
It was grand for one summer. We got to see a bit of the country, our own country, and give back to the economy in the process.

Those holidays to Kerry, Donegal, Wexford, and Galway made us feel incredibly wholesome; not only were we abiding by the rules, we were also helping out the hotels, the restaurants, the publicans and the little shops in those cute villages we passed along the way.

Wholesome, honest to goodness fun, just like the old days. Sweet reminiscence and nostalgia, our cosmopolitan children cavorting on the beaches we frequented in our own youth.

And how happy everyone was to see us. We were welcomed like old friends, reminded you just can't get service like it anywhere in the world. Best of all, it only took a couple of hours to get home, no waiting around for flights, traipsing through departure lounges, your head splitting with a hangover.

Do it again? For another summer? Sure we've done all the good places, where else is there to go? The Midlands? Please.

As lovely as she is there's only so much of Ireland you can see, only so much you can do within its dark, cloudy confines. For a real holiday experience, a real break, you need to go off foreign; sunshine and cheap beer, mystery and intrigue, the unknown and the unknowable.

Well, that won't be happening this year lads, not on NPHET's watch anyway.

Despite the vaccine, despite a light appearing at the end of this darkest of tunnels, we won't be tanning our flabby Covid-torsos on the beaches of the Mediterranean come the summer months.

No, it's destination Offaly, Longford and Leitrim I'm afraid, another opportunity to feel good about ourselves when really we'd prefer to be full of self-loathing in Dubai or someplace.

Because we would feel guilty, wouldn't we? Some of us even feel guilty if we go outside our 5km radiation zone.

We're the good people, the ones preventing this virus from spiralling out of the control. We'll stay in this country for as long as it takes, visit each of every one of its counties if that's what it takes - except Westmeath, we have our limits.

But the more we see the bold people defying the rules, heading off on their intercontinental jaunts with nary a hint of guilt in their condemned souls, the more we think 'well if they can do it, why can't we?'

Facilitating the bold people, doing their best to recoup the billions of Euro they've lost in the past year, are the airlines. They too, like the publicans, hoteliers and non-essential retailers, have seen the guts torn out of their businesses.

Whereas the others have either been completely shut down or effectively so, the airlines have remained open, albeit with significantly reduced flights.

And whereas the publicans have, for the most part, patiently waited for the signal to reopen, reminded their customers that no means no, some airlines haven't been so well-behaved.

One in particular, in an attempt to boost bookings for the forthcoming summer, ran an advertising campaign with the slogan 'Vax and Go', intimating that once we'd all received that valuable vaccination we could immediately hop aboard a plane and tell the pilot to drop us in the nearest swimming pool.

If only it were that simple. Even when you've received your vaccine, both doses, you remain vulnerable to Covid-19 for days, if not weeks. Worse, much worse, than any factual inaccuracies, is this encouragement of foreign travel at a time when that should be the furthest thing from our minds. Yes, we'd all love to be booking our flights abroad, maybe to Washington to see Uncle Joe, but when it comes to our list of priorities that's way, way down the list.

A lot of people just want to see their families again, others are anxiously waiting to see if they still have jobs to go back to, yet more are hoping to get outside, to taste the fresh air, for the first time in months. Dangling the carrot of foreign travel in people's faces right now is not just 'inappropriate' - as the Advertising Standards Authority For Ireland (ASAI) described it - it's immoral.

There's already enough in the way of temptation out there without putting ideas into our tired, sun-deprived heads.

The West Feliciana Parish Sheriff's Office on Monday gave the rape kit in the case against an Angola assistant warden to the State Police Crime Lab, evidence that remained untested for more than six months.

A grand jury issued a no true bill rejecting the second-degree rape charge against Louisiana State Penitentiary assistant warden Barrett Boeker on March 6, but without any evidence from the rape kit.

The victim's rape kit, formally known as a sexual assault forensic examination, was taken at Woman's Hospital in December, well before the grand jury session.

West Feliciana Sheriff J. Austin Daniel admitted the entire process "should have been done more timely."

Sheriff's Office representatives picked up the rape exam results and evidence from the East Baton Rouge Coroner's Office a week after the grand jury issued the no true bill. The rape kit has since been in the possession of the Sheriff's Office.

"Once the grand jury came back with a no true bill, I didn't think it was a great big hurry," Daniel said. "I thought it was a moot issue, but evidently it wasn't."

Daniel said West Feliciana District Attorney Sam D'Aquilla suggested two weeks ago the rape kit should should get tested.

"We want to just close all the doors on this case so it cannot be said we did not do this or did not do that  so we sent it," D'Aquilla said Monday.

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In March, D'Aquilla told The Advocate the rape kit was not pertinent in the investigation because consent was in question, not whether intercourse occurred. However, sexual crime experts and the victim in this case said the rape kit holds important evidence beyond DNA, like evidence of bruising from the assault.

+3 Expert: DA omitting rape kit in case against Angola asst. warden 'unbelievable' The grand jury that declined to charge a state prison assistant warden in a rape case earlie

"I've been asking the DA and West Feliciana Sheriff's Office, discussing getting this evidence, since the very beginning," said Priscilla Lefebure, who alleged Boeker raped her on two different occasions at his home on Angola property. "I just felt like I did it all for nothing and it didn't matter. What was the point of going through all that and then not to even look at or consider (or) look at any of it?"

The Advocate typically does not name people who report they are victims of sexual assault. But Lefebure said she wanted to have her name used.

Lefebure said she has worried about how the Sheriff's Office has treated the rape kit these last three months: if it was properly stored in a refrigerator, if any evidence had been tampered.

"I've wanted it sent because this is my right as a woman, a young, educated woman," Lefebure said. "I wanted to expose the truth about what happened to me."

D'Aquilla said in March his office would reopen the case against Boeker if any further evidence is found.
The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
Police at the scene of the Sean Graham bookmakers shooting as family members and survivors lay flowers.

A police officer suffered a mild concussion during a controversial arrest at a memorial event for the 1992 Sean Graham bookmakers massacre.

Two police officers have been at the centre of a public fallout after intervening when coming across a crowd on the Ormeau Road on Friday.

It resulted in the arrest of Mark Sykes, a victim who had been shot multiple times in the atrocity.

Read More

Chief Constable Simon Byrne apologised for the officers actions saying they did not reflect the values of the PSNI, but he has since been criticised for acting before the Police Ombudsman can complete her investigation.

One of the officers has been placed on suspension while the other has been repositioned.

It has now been reported on the BBC Stephen Nolan programme that one of the officers suffered a mild concussion after being attacked by someone in the crowd.

There is no suggestion that Mr Sykes was involved.

It also emerged that the Police Federation of Northern Ireland, who represent rank and file officers, is to lodge a legal appeal to reverse the officers suspension.

Political motivations for the arrest have also been played down, as one of the officers is a Catholic from the Republic of Ireland who joined to increase the representation of nationalists in the PSNI.

Mr Sykes had previously said the arrest should never have happened. He estimated that around 15 people attended the memorial event, whereas the PSNI had said the figure was closer to 30.

He said he was unsure of exactly how current Covid restrictions should have applied to the gathering.

"I now know that the regulation is six but there's 25 for funerals.... We had prayers. There was a prayer service going on," he told the BBC.

He admitted to swearing at the officer who spoke to him, but insisted he had not been physically aggressive.

He was later released after being detained by police.

"I didn't get up on Friday morning to be arrested. I am sure the person who arrested me didn't get up on Friday morning to arrest me," he said.

"But somebody decided to arrest me on Friday and I think we need to get to the bottom of that.

As a result of a sniper attack on positions of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in Pisky area of Donetsk region, a Ukrainian soldier was wounded by a gunshot, the press center of the Skhid (East) task force said.

"Today, on February 10, the armed formations of the Russian Federation once again violated the ceasefire regime in the area of responsibility of the Skhid [East] task force. As a result, one Ukrainian soldier was wounded," the task force said in a message on its Facebook page.

It is noted that the serviceman was promptly taken to a medical institution, where he was provided with the necessary medical assistance. The state of health of the wounded soldier is satisfactory.

"The Ukrainian defenders provided an adequate response to the aimed shot of the enemy," the message said.

OSCE representatives were notified of the actions of Russia-occupation troops through the Ukrainian side of the Joint Center on Control and Coordination of the ceasefire and stabilization of the contact line (JCCC).
MELBOURNE, Australia, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Socialsuite, a global leader in impact-management software, accelerates its market expansion into North America, by appointing Daniel Nielsen as Global Head of Growth, and Christian Mosley as Head of Sales. Both appointees will be based out of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada and will support the North American region.

Socialsuite gathers feedback and sentiment which provides insights to help manage social issues. Its customers include charities, philanthropic foundations, government organisations and companies, including Scope, Salvation Army and YMCA in Australia and Smile Train, Desert Aids and Second Muse in the US.

The appointments follow a funding round in 2020 backed by Salesforce Ventures, Tidal Ventures and others, which was expected to reach $1.5 million but went on to deliver more than $2.5 million. The increased funding has enabled Socialsuite to accelerate its growth in the North American region to meet increased demand.

"The demand for Socialsuite has been growing internationally over recent years but due to recent events, including natural disasters, COVID-19 and rising social inequality movements, we have seen an exponential increase in demand, with international revenue now comprising 35% of our total," says Socialsuite CEO, Brad Gurrie. "With trillions of dollars flowing into social programs and demand for services increasing, charities around the world are struggling to keep up with demand for their support, accept donations and demonstrate the results of their programs. Socialsuite is able to help not-for-profits to measure their impact and report back to stakeholders.

"Daniel and Christian are critical hires for Socialsuite to support that growth and add more value to our customers in North America. They add a wealth of business strategy and sales knowledge to our team and both bring an outstanding track record of driving growth, innovation, and high-performance teams. We look forward to benefiting from Daniel and Christian's expertise as we accelerate our market expansion into North America," says Gurrie.

With more than 20 years' experience leading high-growth marketing organisations at SaaS, retail and nonprofit, Nielsen brings extensive knowledge about marketing growth, customer acquisition, demand generation, data analysis, and global go-to-market strategy. Nielsen will be responsible for establishing a scalable growth strategy that helps Socialsuite move into its next growth phase by expanding into the North American market first and then globally.

"I was immediately drawn to the opportunities for Socialsuite to expand into a new market with truly breakthrough technology. I am excited to contribute to Socialsuite's mission to help build a future where all organisations can use technology to report impact as effectively as financial performances. I look forward to taking on this challenge with the team," says Nielsen.

Mosley brings nearly a decade of experience working at the intersection of technology, charity, and finance. Mosley has experience in leading and building high-performing sales and customer service teams. At Socialsuite, Mosley will be responsible for a robust sales and customer support strategy, helping Socialsuite make inroads into the North American market.

"After nearly a decade of engaging with and supporting nonprofit organisations, I know how important impact measurement is and how difficult it can be to get started. Socialsuite's pioneering impact-management software reduces the barrier to adoption; helping nonprofits understand if their actions are meeting objectives. I'm thrilled to be joining the team and can't wait to help drive Socialsuite's expansion into North America," says Mosley.

About Socialsuite

Socialsuite produces technology that helps a diverse range of organisations monitor their impact on people. It is a global leader in impact-management software.

Socialsuite's simple, easy to use technology rigorously measures the potency of social investment programs to greatly enhance accountability reporting.

Its automated data-collection, analysis and reporting tools provide accurate and timely insights for organisations that need to monitor and understand the impact of their initiatives.

Socialsuite's one-click access to interactive, tailored and dynamic reports help governments, corporate and philanthropic investors determine the best use of their capital. Its data collection and analysis tools help companies and NGOs understand if their actions are meeting objectives.

For consultants and analysts, the Socialsuite platform provides a worldwide audience for their own impact measurement metrics, opening the door to 'big data' analysis and global benchmarking.

Socialsuite is a fast-growing global company based in Melbourne, Australia. It has clients across Asia Pacific, Americas and Europe. They include financial institutions, large companies, government agencies, philanthropic foundations, not-for-profits and NGOs that want to monitor and fully understand how they impact people.

SOURCE Socialsuite
Zdenka Janderova appreciates the small class sizes at the University of North Georgia (UNG). Makenzie Bryant is grateful for faculty members' accessibility and the UNG community's welcoming nature. Janderova and Bryant will share their experiences and help high school students learn about UNG at the Feb. 27 virtual Nighthawk Preview event.

"It's a very individualized experience," Janderova said of her time at UNG. "It's easier to make connections and get where you want to go. The education is fantastic."

Janderova and Bryant are on the student panel for the online open house event, which will offer sessions in English and Spanish for prospective undergraduate students. New for this spring is that presentations will be available online in the week leading up to the Nighthawk Preview so interested students, parents and families can play an interactive role by having questions prepared.

"People are on information overload, but we want to ensure they have the opportunity to connect with an actual person who can answer their questions and be specific," Nathan Rice, director of undergraduate recruitment, said. "This shows the commitment UNG has to students and families. We don't expect them to just go find it on their own."

High school students and their parents and families can sign up for the free event on the Nighthawk Preview webpage.

UNG faculty, staff and students will be available to answer questions in Spanish in a roundtable discussion 9-10 a.m. Feb. 27, with a trio of English roundtable sessions set for 10-11:30 a.m.

From 11-11:30 a.m., the student panel will feature a student from each campus, plus a member of the Corps of Cadets. A university showcase is set from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. to allow prospective students to ask more questions in breakout sessions.

High school students can text questions to 706-701-2160 ahead of time. They will have the opportunity to ask questions during the roundtables, as well.

Thanks to the online format, high school students can learn about all five of UNG's campuses and its online offerings in one event.

"It's a great opportunity for students and families to learn more about the college search process and UNG in general to see if they can find their home here," Rice said.

Bryant, a senior from Gainesville, Georgia, pursuing a degree in communication with a concentration in public relations, is excited to share how UNG has helped her grow inside and outside the classroom.

"The way we have been impacted really speaks volumes," Bryant said. "It gets students excited about the potential future they have at UNG."

Janderova, a senior from Gainesville, Georgia, pursuing a degree in biology, appreciates that the student panel allows high school students to hear straight from UNG students about what to expect.

"I want to give them a firsthand look at what college is like and what opportunities are available," Janderova said.
Keystone Investment Trust plc

LEI: 5493002H3JXLXLIGC563

Results of Annual General Meeting

At the Annual General Meeting of the Company held on 10 February 2021, shareholders approved the following resolutions:

1. to receive the Annual Financial Report for the year ended 30 September 2020.

2. to approve the Annual Statement and Report on Remuneration.

3. to approve the Company's Dividend Payment Policy to declare four dividends in respect of each accounting year, with one payment in respect of each calendar quarter.

4. to reappoint PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP as Auditors to the Company and authorise the Audit Committee to determine their remuneration.

5. to re-elect Mrs Karen Brade a Director of the Company.

6. to re-elect Mr Ian Armfield a Director of the Company.

7. to re-elect Mrs Katrina Hart a Director of the Company.

8. to re-elect Mr William Kendall a Director of the Company.

9. to re-elect Mr John Wood a Director of the Company.

Ordinary Resolution

10. THAT:

the Directors be generally and unconditionally authorised in accordance with Section 551 of the Companies Act 2006 as amended from time to time prior to the date of the passing of this Resolution (the 'Act') to exercise all powers of the Company to allot relevant securities (as defined in that Section) up to an aggregate nominal amount (within the meaning of Sections 551(3) and (6) of the Act) of 2,083,052, such authority to expire at the conclusion of the next AGM of the Company or the date fifteen months after the passing of this Resolution, whichever is the earlier, but so that this authority shall allow the Company to make offers or agreements before the expiry of this authority which would or might require relevant securities to be allotted after such expiry as if the authority conferred by this Resolution had not expired.

Special Resolution

11. THAT:

the Directors be and they are hereby empowered, in accordance with Sections 570 and 573 of the Companies Act 2006 as amended from time to time prior to the date of the passing of this Resolution (the 'Act') to allot equity securities for cash or (if such allotment constitutes the sale of relevant shares which, immediately before the sale, were held by the Company as treasury shares) otherwise, pursuant to the authority given by Resolution 10 set out above, as if Section 561 of the Act did not apply to any such allotment, provided that this power shall be limited:

(a) to the allotment of equity securities in connection with a rights issue in favour of all holders of a class of equity securities where the equity securities attributable respectively to the interests of all holders of securities of such class are either proportionate (as nearly as may be) to the respective numbers of relevant equity securities held by them or are otherwise allotted in accordance with the rights attaching to such equity securities (subject in either case to such exclusions or other arrangements as the Directors may deem necessary or expedient in relation to fractional entitlements or legal or practical problems under the laws of, or the requirements of, any regulatory body or any stock exchange in any territory or otherwise);

(b) to the allotment (otherwise than pursuant to a rights issue) of equity securities up to an aggregate nominal amount of 618,156; and

(c) to the allotment of equity securities at a price not less than the net asset value per share calculated with debt at market value and this power shall expire at the conclusion of the next AGM of the Company or the date 15 months after the passing of this Resolution, whichever is the earlier, but so that this power shall allow the Company to make offers or agreements before the expiry of this power which would or might require equity securities to be allotted after such expiry as if the power conferred by this Resolution had not expired; and so that words and expressions defined in or for the purposes of Part 17 of the Act shall bear the same meanings in this Resolution.

12. THAT:

the Company be generally and subject as hereinafter appears unconditionally authorised in accordance with Section 701 of the Companies Act 2006 ('the Act') to make market purchases (within the meaning of Section 693(4) of the Act) of its issued ordinary shares ('Shares').

PROVIDED ALWAYS THAT:

(a) the maximum number of Shares hereby authorised to be purchased shall be 14.99% of the Company's issued ordinary shares on 10 February 2021, the date of the Annual General Meeting, (being 9,266,163 shares);

(b) the minimum price which may be paid for a Share shall be its nominal value;

(c) the maximum price which may be paid for a Share must not be more than the higher of: (a) 5% above the average of the mid-market values of the Shares for the five business days before the purchase is made; and (b) the higher of the price of the last independent trade in the Shares and the highest then current independent bid for the Shares on the London Stock Exchange;

(d) any purchase of Shares will be made in the market for cash at prices below the prevailing net asset value per Share;

(e) the authority hereby conferred shall expire at the conclusion of the next AGM of the Company or, if earlier, on the expiry of fifteen months from the passing of this Resolution unless the authority is renewed at any other general meeting prior to such time; and

(f) the Company may make a contract to purchase Shares under the authority hereby conferred prior to the expiry of such authority which will or may be executed wholly or partly after the expiration of such authority and may make a purchase of Shares pursuant to any such contract.

(g) any shares so purchased shall be cancelled or, if the Directors so determine and subject to the provisions of Sections 724 to 731 of the Act and any applicable regulations of the United Kingdom Listing Authority, be held (or otherwise dealt with in accordance with Section 727 or 729 of the Act) as treasury shares.

13. THAT:

the period of notice required for general meetings of the Company (other than AGMs) shall be not less than fourteen clear days.

Resolutions 1 to 13 were passed on a poll vote.

A breakdown of the proxy votes registered is shown below.

Resolution Votes for (including votes at the discretion of the Chairman % Votes Against % Votes Withheld

Ordinary Resolutions

1 2,803,467 100 637 0 1,645 2 2,796,714 99.8 5,909 0.2 3,126 3 2,801,554 100 1,447 0 2,748 4 2,801,756 100 2,601 0 1,392 5 2,787,012 99.6 12,611 0.4 6,126 6 2,796,322 99.9 2,764 0.1 6,663 7 2,797,910 100 1,330 0 6,508 8 2,764,982 98.8 35,970 1.2 4,797 9 2,790,772 99.7 10,180 0.3 4,797 10 2,789,704 99.6 13,833 0.4 2,211

Special Resolutions

11 2,791,048 99.6 11,105 0.4 3,595 12 2,801,294 99.9 2,700 0.1 1,754 13 2,794,795 99.7 9,534 0.3 1,419

At the time of the Annual General Meeting, the Company's issued share capital, excluding 5,778,363 shares held in treasury, consists of 61,815,632 ordinary shares of 10p. On a poll these carry one vote per 1 of nominal capital, accordingly Total Voting Rights were 6,181,632. The above tables represent the number of votes registered. The number of shares represented are 10 times the above numbers.

Invesco Asset Management Limited

Corporate Company Secretary

10 February 2021
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Budapest (Hungary) 08 February 2021 (SPS)- World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY) denounced in a press release, issued Monday, the dubious death of young Saharawi, Mohamed Salem Fahim, whose dead body was found by family hidden for more than 2 weeks in Moroccan morgue in occupied El Aaiun.

WFDY shows its solidarity with the family and friends of the late Mohamed Salem Fahim, as well as with all the victims of the Moroccan occupation, the press release emphasised.

Following is the full text of the Press Release:

-----------------

The young Saharawi Mohamed Salem Fahim had been missing for more than 20 days under mysterious circumstances. The 5th of February his family found his body in the morgue of El-Aaiun Hospital. The fact that the Moroccan authorities hid the body for so many days and have not given any explanation for his death suggests the worst, that is, that we are facing a new political assassination by the Moroccan occupation.



The brutality suffered by the Sahrawi youth and people has been aggravated since that fateful morning of 13 November of 2020, when the Moroccan occupation forces opened three breaches east of the wall of shame in clear violation of the ceasefire agreement to attack a group of peaceful Saharawi civilians who were peacefully protesting in front of the illegal Guerguerat breach.



In this situation, it is worth denouncing the complicity that several countries in the world, political leaders and representatives, etc. have shown towards the occupation of Western Sahara. From the then President of the United States, Donald Trump, validating the Moroccan occupation by recognising Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara; to the latest delirious case of the self-proclaimed president of Venezuela, Juan Guaido, in which this representative of the pro-imperialist coup-plotters in Venezuela supported the Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara.



The World Federation of Democratic Youth shows its solidarity with the family and friends of the late Mohamed Salem Fahim, as well as with all the victims of the Moroccan occupation.



The World Federation of Democratic Youth reaffirms its steadfast position on the side of the Saharawi youth and their right to a free sovereign state. The only solution to the situation of the Saharawi youth and people is exercising the right of self-determination.



The World Federation of Democratic Youth condemns the complicity and negligence of all those who are contributing to the normalisation of the occupation; who are whitewashing the crimes of the Moroccan occupation; and who are denying or obstructing the exercise of the right to self-determination of the Saharawi people in total violation of all relevant UN and AU resolutions and against the basic principles of international law. (SPS)

090/500/60 (SPS)
Windows to Russia

In Russia it is said that chickens are milked, and cows carry eggs.  A mockery of those who believe ridiculous rumors.

Manitoba is recognizing teachers and school staff with a formal week of appreciation, but educators would rather the province acknowledge their work by prioritizing them in the COVID-19 vaccination lineup.

Manitoba is recognizing teachers and school staff with a formal week of appreciation, but educators would rather the province acknowledge their work by prioritizing them in the COVID-19 vaccination lineup.

Cheri Chartier estimates she has as many as 40 close contacts daily, given she moves between three cohorts throughout a typical school day.

Despite that fact, the rural Manitoba teacher can expect a vaccine around the same time other Manitobans in the 40-to-50 age range can, regardless of whether they work from home or elsewhere.

"Not only am I exposed to (all) those people, all of them are exposed to me and then they go home to their families each day. If I get COVID right now I would feel terrible if I was responsible for infecting any of my students and coworkers," Chartier told the Free Press.

The irony is not lost on her that Teacher and Staff Appreciation Week is underway at the very time she doesnt know where she falls on the immunization list.

Chartier added, "I would love to arrive at school in the fall having teachers and staff vaccinated."

Front-line health care workers, residents and staff in congregate living settings, and First Nations people make up the first priority group in Manitobas vaccination campaign. The public will be cohorted by age, in 10-year-increments, for vaccines.

The current plan doesnt prioritize teachers, but the province indicated a category for essential workers could be added if more vaccine supply is approved. When the initial plan was unveiled two weeks ago, public health officials said they would hold stakeholder meetings and review the epidemiological situation and risks before making a decision.

Chartier said she agrees with the first phase of the program, but doesnt understand why teachers are not next in line if they have so many contacts in comparison to other essential workers.

Not only do teachers gather daily in large groups, but the overwhelming majority of students is too young to be eligible for a COVID-19 vaccine, she said, adding immunizing staff will protect students.

The Manitoba Teachers Society confirmed Tuesday it had yet to be contacted by the province to discuss the matter.

On Feb. 1, union president James Bedford penned a letter to the health minister, in which he said educators are "extremely disappointed" with the vaccination schedule, considering they have been putting their health at risk daily to teach students.

Across the country, educators have been praised for making schools safe this year  yet, calls to prioritize their vaccinations after health-care workers and vulnerable populations have largely been ignored, said Shelley Morse, president of the Canadian Teachers Federation.

Only officials in Ontario and Quebec have indicated teachers will be prioritized, Morse said, although Ontario is the only province to put that in writing.

Following an initial phase similar to Manitobas, Ontario plans to immunize adults who are 80 and older and front-line workers, including first responders and teachers, among other groups.

The strategy is in line with recommendations put out by the national advisory committee on immunization, which suggest essential workers be part of the second rollout stage.

Morse said priority access to the vaccine is imperative to keep schools open and allow for economic recovery, especially as new variants pose additional threats to school communities. Meantime, as educators await vaccines, she said teachers want universal mask mandates so even the youngest pupils must wear face coverings daily.

maggie.macintosh@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @macintoshmaggie


AGL, Australias largest greenhouse gas emitter, is also the most prolific violator of environmental regulations for coal-fired power plants, collecting twice the rate of breaches as its market share in NSW and Victoria, analysis shows.

Data gathered by the Australia Beyond Coal alliance and published on the Coal Impacts Index website, also found AGL was responsible for the highest number of power failures at its plants.

AGLs Bayswater coal-fired power plant in the NSW Hunter Valley led other power stations in the numbers of breaches, including a water pollution incident that cost the company more than $1 million in fines. Credit:Dominic Lorrimer

AGL operates the Bayswater and Liddell plants in the NSW Hunter Valley and the Loy Yang A plant in Victorias Latrobe Valley.

The three power stations were found to have breached their licences 111 times since 2015, accounting for about three quarters of all violations  more than twice the roughly one-third market share these coal-fired plants command, the alliance said.

The election for the posts of Mayor and Deputy Mayor of Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation, which witnessed pitched battle between ruling TRS and BJP in December last, will be held on Thursday and K Chandrashekhar Rao-led outfit has fair chances to bag both the positions as a single largest party. The Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) party bagged 56 divisions, while BJP secured 48 divisions and MIM won in 44 divisions and Congress won in two divisions, in the 150-seat civic body.

The BJP's strength has come down to 47 following the death of one of its members. The saffron party, which gave run for TRSs money has also decided to put up its candidates for both Mayor and Deputy Mayor, its chief spokesperson K Krishna Saagar Rao said.

"BJP is contesting for both Mayor and Deputy Mayoral positions in the spirit of democracy and to oppose the opportunist, dubious election of TRS party's design to attain Mayor position through a backhand deal with AIMIM. TRS did not get people's mandate to run GHMC, the mandate was fractured and leaned massively towards BJP," he told PTI.

TRS sources said their Mayoral and Deputy Mayoral candidate's names will be given to its members in sealed covers. The Lok Sabha MPs and MLAs, who have their vote in the city are ex-officio members of the corporation.

Besides, MLCs and Rajya Sabha members, who have their vote in the city, have to give an option, choosing the GHMC, to be able to vote, official sources said. According to GHMC sources, there are 44 ex-officio member votes in the GHMC and TRS has 32 followed by MIM 10, BJP 2 who are eligible to vote taking the total number of votes to 194.

With ex-officio member votes, the TRS strength goes up to 88, MIM 54 and BJP 49 leading to total 193. There has to be a quorum of 50 per cent (97) of the members to conduct Mayor Elections and whichever candidate secures more number of votes will be elected as the Mayor.

The election will be held at 12.30 PM on February 11 and an hour earlier all the 150 corporators would be administered the oath, the Telangana State Election Commission (SEC) said on Wednesday. Further, if for any reason the elections are not held on February 11, it will be held the next day, the SEC had said.

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The Russian and Turkish authorities intend to establish mutually beneficial full-fledged cooperation in the space industry, the press service of the state corporation Roscosmos reported.



"Active work is underway to prepare a bilateral intergovernmental framework document, which will lay a solid foundation for the further successful development of cooperation on joint space efforts between countries," TASS cited the state corporation as saying.



The Turkish authorities have already declared their interest in space cooperation with Russia, and Roscosmos is ready to discuss the possibilities of launching full-format bilateral cooperation, the press service noted, adding that they expect specific proposals from Turkey in this area, including sending a Turkish astronaut into space.
Construction of about 70 wind turbines in Midland and Saginaw counties is set to begin in April.

An exact date for construction has not yet been set.
Feeling a bit iffy? Plan your day better with May 30, 2021 horoscope. 

Aries Horoscope: Family ties are likely to get strengthened as your spare time for your near and dear ones today. Travelling to a distant location will be fun, especially if it is with lover! Day looks favourable for those pushing for a property deal. You are likely to accomplish something that had been posing a challenge to you for long on the academic front. Wise investments will see your wealth grow. Not eating right may lead to health problems. You are likely to become an asset for the organisation you work for through sheer competence.

Lucky Number: 18

Lucky Colour: Golden Brown

Taurus Horoscope: Not spending enough time with family may upset spouse and other family members. Sheer thrill of new sensations can extend your vacation. A property deal shows all signs of going wrong today. Support on the academic front will be most welcome. Participating in a social event is likely to give you an immense sense of satisfaction. Something you have invested in is likely to give good returns. Acquiring extra qualifications for getting a good break in the job market is possible. Someone can motivate you to take up an exercise regimen.

Lucky Number: 7

Lucky Colour: Chocolate

Gemini Horoscope: You may come a step closer to realising your dream of owning a piece of property. Job prospects for college freshers look dim at present, but the situation is likely to improve. Some of you can go ahead with renovation work of your house. Success will not be far off for those focussing on earning money. Your initiative on the professional front is likely to prove profitable. You will be able to keep a lifestyle disease under check. Family front will be abuzz with activities and prove most entertaining. A much anticipated journey can keep you in an excited state.

Lucky Number: 4

Lucky Colour: Grey

Cancer Horoscope: A business trip is likely to bring new deals, but keep your cards close to your chest. Good returns from a property deal are likely for some. Your performance on the academic front is likely to be praised. You will manage to free yourself from pettiness and narrow-mindedness, and look at the broader picture. Financial security is assured. Freshers are likely to hear of a job opportunity. Not being regular in your exercise routine is likely to affect health. Homemakers are likely to get a free hand in doing things their way on the home front.

Lucky Number: 6

Lucky Colour: All Shades of Green

Leo Horoscope: You are likely to achieve something big on the social front through family support. Some of you can enjoy a leisure trip with friends. Putting money in property at this juncture will be a step in the right direction. You are likely to overtake others by burning the midnight oil on the academic front. Opportunities you are awaiting may not arrive soon, but keep at it. Financially, you are likely to enjoy a comfortable period. Office routine is likely to prove frustrating for some. Health is likely to improve through your initiative.

Lucky Number: 11

Lucky Colour: Magenta

Virgo Horoscope: Those suffering from aches and pains will find distinct improvement in their condition. Comforting news about a family youngster or sibling is likely to provide immense relief. This is an excellent day for undertaking a long journey. You may wallow in false pride over a piece of property. You will need to retain your focus, if you want to amount to something in your career. Gains in the real estate market may become a reality soon. Preempting problems by applying yourself intelligently on the professional front will keep you on a safe wicket.

Lucky Number: 4

Lucky Colour: Beige

Libra Horoscope: You will enjoy excellent health, despite excesses. Those on an outing are in for a thrilling time! There is a good chance of firming a property deal that you had been after. You will manage to maintain your tempo on the academic front. Some of you are likely to strike a good deal on the property front. It is not the best time for you to plan on a job switch, so give it some more time. Organising a party or a function at home will make it possible to meet your near and dear ones.

Lucky Number: 15

Lucky Colour: Sea Green

Scorpio Horoscope: Problems during travel are foreseen. There is a good scope of acquiring something on the property front. Career planning may take priority over other things for the career-conscious. Channelizing your energy in something you want to accomplish appears possible. Money flows in smoothly and will not be a cause for worry. Things turn favourable as you go all out on the professional front. You will find yourself in the best of health. Something done together as a family will be most enjoyable.

Lucky Number: 8

Lucky Colour: Forest Green

Sagittarius Horoscope: Excellent health is yours for the asking. You can get harassed driving in a new place due to incorrect directions. A long journey will prove enjoyable in more ways than one, as you find love! Converting an ancestral property into builder floors is possible. A make or break situation may arise on the academic front, but you will be able to tackle it well. Your financial situation is set to improve, as earning opportunities come to you. Joining forces with someone on the business front will be beneficial, so think about it.

Lucky Number: 9

Lucky Colour: Brown

Capricorn Horoscope: A business tour is in the offing for some and will prove fruitful. Bargain pricing may tempt some to sign the dotted line on the property front. On the academic front, those pursuing studies may have to start burning the midnight oil. Some of you can make a plan with your near and dear ones to visit someone close. Financial situation is set to get better, as prospects for increased earnings brighten. Dont get caught on the wrong foot at work, as it may spoil your image. You enjoy good health by remaining regular in your exercise regimen. You are likely to enjoy a family gathering today.

Lucky Number: 8

Lucky Colour: Parrot Green

Aquarius Horoscope: A package tour to an exotic destination can be lapped up by some. Pending paperwork concerning a property will be completed and get you the ownership. You may need extra time to complete an important project or assignment on the academic front. This seems to be a favourable day which allows you to accomplish much. Money spent for a good cause will give excellent returns in kind. You may receive appreciation for a job well done on the professional front. You will manage to overcome lethargy and make yourself health conscious. You are likely to enjoy total family time today.

Lucky Number: 5

Lucky Colour: Lavender

Pisces Horoscope: Monetary worries may trouble you, despite the situation remaining satisfactory on the financial front. This is a good time to share the joys that family has to offer by going out together. This is a good day to organise a trip with family. Your disinterest will be apparent on the academic or professional front, so it is time to tighten your belt. An important project will be seen to completion through your untiring efforts on the professional front. You will maintain good mental health as you make conscious efforts to drive out the negativity within.

Lucky Number: 22

Lucky Colour: Dark Slate Grey

About Author: Astrologer Manisha Koushik is a renowned Tarot Card Reader, Numerologist, Name Therapist and Vastu-Fengshui Consultant. Know more 

Did we pique your curiosity about your future? Read your detailed Horoscope and Rashifal to know more.
The rights to rare recordings of songs by artists including Vera Lynn, Glenn Miller and Cole Porter have been snapped by an AIM-listed firm.

One Media IP now has a catalogue of 2,000 tunes by 70 greats, who also include Count Basie and The Andrews Sisters.

Concerts and live recordings by artists, who are being rediscovered by global audiences also feature.

Classic hits: One Media IP has snapped up the rights to rare recordings of songs by artists including Vera Lynn (pictured), Glenn Miller and Cole Porter

Music streaming has soared since the world first went into Covid lockdowns last year and people were forced to stay at home  and companies with song rights are profiting.

People who are over 60  in what One Media described as the 'Dad's Army' generation  are estimated to make up 29 per cent of streaming listeners.

Music licensing business models have boomed.

One Media, whose songs are on platforms like Spotify and Amazon and are used in films and TV, bought the royalties from 21 Vision for an undisclosedsum.

Its stock rose 1.3 per cent, to 7.6p.
WASHINGTON - The Senate voted along mostly partisan lines Tuesday to pursue Donald Trump's second impeachment trial, after hours of arguments and the airing of a gripping documentary of the deadly Capitol riot that followed Trump's inflammatory rally on Jan. 6.

Aided by the graphic 13-minute video that spliced violent images of the Capitol siege with Trump's rhetoric, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., and other impeachment managers delivered an impassioned account of the physical and emotional trauma to lawmakers, police, staffers and local residents. They said there was no "January exception" in the Constitution - meaning that a president couldn't escape accountability through impeachment just because he had left office before the trial.

"If that's not an impeachable offense, then there is no such thing," Raskin said of Trump's behavior.

Trump's lawyers countered that the trial - the first proceeding of its kind for an ex-president - would be unconstitutional because Trump was no longer in office, even if he was impeached by the House before leaving. One of the attorneys acknowledged that the former president lost the election, undercutting one baseless claim that Trump has spread since Nov. 3.

The Senate swiftly voted 56 to 44 against Trump. The proceedings will resume at noon Wednesday.

The historic trial opens just one month after the senators gathered in the same chamber to certify the results of the electoral college that gave President Joe Biden his win, only to be interrupted as a frightening mob overtook the Capitol in an unprecedented siege after Trump implored his supporters at a rally to fight on his behalf.

The insurrectionists broke through metal barricades, smashed windows and assaulted police officers to gain access to the citadel of U.S. democracy - prompting Vice President Mike Pence to be quickly ushered into safety and hundreds of lawmakers and staffers to take cover from rampaging rioters. At least five people died, including Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, who was memorialized under the Rotunda last week.

Reminders of the riot persist, with tall steel fencing and barbed wire encircling the once-open Capitol grounds, now patrolled by National Guard troops.

The House impeachment managers leaned on legal rulings, images and emotion, particularly Raskin's recounting of his return to the chamber on Jan. 6 for the first time after burying his son. The former president's defense lawyers addressed the crux of Tuesday's debate - the constitutionality of the proceedings - only late in their presentation.

In a distinct appeal to a Republican Party that has long prided itself on its support of law enforcement, Raskin detailed the injuries sustained by 140 Capitol Police officers that day, such as brain damage, gouged eyes, heart attacks and mental trauma. At least two have died by suicide.

"Senators, this cannot be our future. This cannot be the future of America," Raskin said. "We cannot have presidents inciting and mobilizing mob violence against our government and our institutions because they refuse to accept the will of the people under the Constitution of the United States."

The argument failed to sway 44 of the chamber's 50 Republicans, with most favoring dismissing the case against Trump outright - a tally demonstrating the unlikelihood that 17 GOP senators will choose to join Democrats to convict the former president.

That vote was similar to one taken by the Senate last month, in which only five Republicans - Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitt Romney of Utah, Patrick Toomey of Pennsylvania and Ben Sasse of Nebraska - voted that an impeachment trial of a former president was constitutional. Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., joined them Tuesday in breaking with their party to allow the trial to proceed.

Some GOP senators on Tuesday were compelled by legal arguments from the Democratic impeachment managers, as they invoked conservative legal luminaries such as former 10th Circuit Judge Michael McConnell and attorney Charles Cooper, who have argued in favor of the trial's constitutionality.

"Anyone that listened to those arguments would recognize that the House managers are focused, organized, they relied both upon precedent, the Constitution and legal scholars. They made a compelling argument," said Cassidy, who took diligent notes throughout the day.

In contrast, Cassidy said, Trump's team was "disorganized."

"They did everything they could but to talk about the question at hand. And when they talked about it, they kind of glided over it, almost as if they were embarrassed of their arguments," he said.

Raskin said Congress's impeachment powers were precisely structured to hold accountable leaders such as Trump, who Raskin said "may not know a lot about the framers, but they certainly knew a lot about him."

In an extraordinarily raw accounting of what he experienced, Raskin also shared that his daughter and son-in-law had come with him to Capitol Hill that day, wanting to remain close in their grief following the death by suicide of Raskin's son, Tommy, days earlier. The lawmaker's voice broke after he relayed to senators that his daughter, Tabitha, told him following the insurrection that she never wanted to come to the Capitol again.

"It was very powerful and heart-wrenching testimony," said Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md. "And I think he posed the question that's going to hang over this trial at the end, which is whether the verdict will show our children that our democracy is safe and the Capitol is secure."

Rep. Joe Neguse, D-Colo., another House impeachment manager, leaned heavily on historical precedents, walking senators through the impeachments of Sen. William Blount in 1797 and Secretary of War William Belknap in 1876, both of which occurred after the men were no longer in office.

That was ample evidence that Trump can be convicted even after leaving office, Neguse said.

"Honestly, it's hard to imagine a clearer example of how a president could abuse his office: inciting violence against a coequal branch while seeking to remain in power after losing an election," Neguse said. "Presidents can't inflame insurrection in their final weeks and then walk away like nothing happened. And yet that is the rule that President Trump asks you to adopt."

Rep. David Cicilline, D-R.I., a third impeachment manager, directly cited a tweet Trump sent hours after the mob stormed the Capitol, saying the social media missive demonstrated precisely "how President Trump himself felt" even while the nation was in horror. In it, Trump had lamented that his "sacred landslide election victory" had been "stripped away" and embraced his followers as "great patriots."

"The president of the United States sided with the insurrectionists. He celebrated their cause. He validated their attack," Cicilline said

When Trump's defense took over, attorney Bruce Castor spoke first, delivering a 48-minute address in which he repeatedly flattered senators, calling them "extraordinary." He admitted that Trump lost the 2020 presidential election by noting that "he was removed by the voters," suggesting he had been punished enough.

Castor argued that Trump's remarks Jan. 6 were simply a matter of "free and robust political speech" rather than incitement of insurrection, "and if people go and commit lawless acts as a result of their beliefs and they cross the line, they should be locked up."

A person familiar with the Trump legal strategy who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not cleared to speak publicly said Castor's speech was part of the defense team's efforts to neutralize the emotional arguments made by the House impeachment managers, although it was unclear whether he succeeded.

"I thought I knew where it was going, and I really didn't know where it was going," said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., one of Trump's closest allies.

The second Trump lawyer, David Schoen, immediately took a confrontational and fiery tone at the rostrum, accusing Democrats of instigating a politically motivated impeachment proceeding. He also warned that Democrats were trying to disenfranchise the millions of voters who supported Trump.

He accused House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., of intentionally holding on to the impeachment article so a trial couldn't occur until Trump was out of office - although it was Republican Mitch McConnell, then the Senate majority leader, who decided against a prompt trial.

The former president's team also played video clips of Democratic lawmakers - including Raskin, Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., and Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas - calling for Trump's impeachment for various perceived sins since the start of his presidency in 2017.

"This is about our Constitution and abusing the impeachment power for political gain," Schoen said. "They don't want unity, and they know this so-called trial will tear this country in half."

Trump's second impeachment trial has undergone adjustments compared to his first because of the coronavirus pandemic that has upended the daily operations of the Senate.

Aides familiar with the preparations said senators are allowed to watch the proceedings from the public galleries above the floor or in the Marble Room, a senators-only space behind the chamber, to allow for social distancing. Tables set up in the well of the Senate for the managers and Trump lawyers held bottles of hand sanitizer and at least one bottle of Clorox wipes.

Still, senators - nearly all masked, an exception being Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky. - stayed at their desks to listen to the four hours of arguments from the impeachment managers and Trump's defense attorneys.

As the Democratic video played, nearly every senator was glued to the screens in the Senate chamber - although Paul doodled on a paper pad in his lap and Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., also focused most of his attention on papers in front of him.

Some focused intently, others stared blankly, and some frowned. Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, appeared to redden at one point.

The impeachment trial could continue every day through the Presidents' Day weekend under the terms of a resolution adopted shortly after the Senate convened Tuesday afternoon.

How long the trial runs will depend on several factors, including whether House impeachment managers decide to call witnesses to testify about Trump's behavior. Senior aides to the managers' team declined to comment Tuesday on the possibility of witnesses, although there was a palpable lack of appetite among even the most ardent Democratic proponents of impeachment to do so.

"We don't want to rush justice," said Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, who watched the Senate proceedings from the chamber on Tuesday. "But by the same token, we don't want to unnecessarily delay."

Raskin, as he left the Senate on Tuesday evening, said he was heartened to win over even one more Republican. "We were told that it would be completely partisan and locked from the last vote, and it wasn't, so people's minds are open," he said.

Biden, meantime, remained intentionally disengaged from the proceedings and instead focused on his agenda, including coronavirus relief.

Asked Tuesday whether he was going to watch the trial, Biden replied: "I am not."

"Look, I told you before: I have a job. . . . The Senate has their job; they're about to begin it," he said. "I'm sure they're going to conduct themselves well. And that's all I'm going to have to say about impeachment."
ROCHESTER, Minn. - We issue this warning every winter when the Minnesota cold makes the walk from the front door to the car door nearly unbearable.

Still, it bears repeating. Don't start your car and walk away leaving it unlocked.

The City of Rochester has an ordinance requiring that cars remain locked if the key is in the ignition.

Though it may be uncomfortable, Officer Andrew Gagnon with RPD suggests sitting in your car while letting it warm-up. Each winter a lot of cars get swiped while warming up. Gagnon likes the remote starts where you keep your key fob with you as you start the car remotely.

"For instance, if the car is unlocked, which usually the car locks with an auto-start, but if somebody gets inside your car and tries to take it, as soon as you step on the break, it automatically cuts off the engine."

He adds this isnt unlikely.

It's typical every year for this to happen, you don't see the higher numbers we're seeing now -- in the summer, spring, or fall, Gagnon explains.

RPD wants us to know that if your car gets stolen because you have left it running and unattended, there could be added insult to injury as you could get a ticket for breaking the law.
Celebrity socialite Paris Hilton is talking about the alleged abuse that she endured while she was at a Utah boarding school. She testified in a Utah court on Monday against Provo Canyon School.

The boarding school staff members were accused of inflicting emotional, physical, and psychological abuse during her stay as a teenager. Hilton is now 39 years old.

Hilton said in her testimony that she is an institutional abuse survivor and she speaks on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of children that are currently in residential care facilities across the United States, according to a People report.

"For the past 20 years, I have had a recurring nightmare where I'm kidnapped in the middle of the night by two strangers, strip-searched, and locked in a facility. I wish I could tell you that this haunting nightmare was just a dream, but it is not," Hilton was quoted in her testimony to the Utah Senate Judiciary, Law Enforcement, and Criminal Justice Committee.

Hilton then said that she was verbally, mentally, and physically abused on a daily basis. She added that she was cut off from the outside world and stripped of all her human rights.

"Without a diagnosis, I was forced to consume medication that made me feel numb and exhausted. I didn't breathe fresh air or see the sunlight for 11 months. There was zero privacy. Every time I would use the bathroom or take a shower, it was monitored," Hilton was quoted on a Crime Online report.

She added that she could feel piercing eyes looking at her naked body at 16 years old and that she felt violated every single day.

The socialite told Utah lawmakers that she spent time at three Utah schools during her childhood, including the Provo Canyon School.

Hilton said that talking about something personal was terrifying. However, she added that she cannot go to sleep at night knowing that there are children that are experiencing the same abuse that she and so many other had experienced, according to a USA Today report.

Related story: Florida Sheriff's Office Uses Academic Records, Abuse Histories to Label Children as 'Potential Criminals'





Provo Institution Abuse Claims

The said institution is now under new ownership and the administration has said that it cannot comment on anything that came before the changes, which includes Hilton's time spent in the institution. Other celebrities have also come forward with their experiences ever since the documentary was released.

The list includes Michael Jackson's daughter, Paris Jackson, and tattoo artist Kat Von D. Hilton then called on U.S. President Joe Biden's leaders in Congress to take action and said she intends to push federal legislation regarding the matter.

Hilton said that the bill is going to help a lot of children but there is more work to do and she is not going to stop until change happens.

Additional reports showed that Provo Canyon School has been in the spotlight for an array of abuse, which includes physical abuse, drugging children, sexual abuse, and mistreatment. As of now, the school remains open and reportedly supports the Utah bill.

The associate administrator at the school, Tim Marshall, said that the school has eliminated the use of seclusion or isolation a long time ago and has also stopped drugging and using restraints as a form of discipline.

Read more: Samba Schools Call For End of Religious Abuse During Rio Carnival
(Natural News) An Illinois high school senior faces a disciplinary hearing this week after she refused to participate in the schools Student Gender and Sexuality Program because it would violate her religious beliefs.

(Article republished from DecisionMagazine.com)

Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy (IMSA) in Aurora, Illinois, requires that all their students complete the program in order to graduate. According to the schools Safe Zone Facilitator Guide, students must agree to both stay engaged and experience discomfort while participating in the program. The program also rewards those who affirm the LGBTQ community and want to serve as an ally with a special sticker and pin.

Marcail McBride asked the school for a religious accommodation allowing her to forego the class, but IMSA officials told her she would need to complete the program by Jan. 30 or risk disciplinary action.

When McBride failed to do so, Dana Ginnett, the schools associate director of Student Affairs, informed McBride through email that a disciplinary hearing would be held to determine her punishment.

Yet according to attorneys with First Liberty Institute, the Illinois Religious Freedom Restoration Act requires IMSA to refrain from placing a substantial burden on the religious exercise of its students. By forcing McBride to participate in the Student Gender and Sexuality Program to avoid penalties, the school has placed a substantial burden on McBride and is thus breaking the law, they argue.

Additionally, Illinois Public Act 094-0933 allows McBride to opt out of any sexual education program without threat of reprisal.

No pupil shall be required to take or participate in any class or course in comprehensive sex education if his parent or guardian submits written objection thereto, and refusal to take or participate in such course or program shall not be reason for suspension or expulsion of such pupil, the law says.

Yesterday, First Liberty Institute sent a letter to Jose Torres, president of IMSA, on behalf of McBride and her parents. The letter instructed school officials to cancel the disciplinary hearing and immediately approve McBrides religious accommodation.

Schools should never violate the religious conscience of their students, said Keisha Russell, counsel with First Liberty Institute. We hope President Torres ends the school administrators clearly unlawful behavior and protects the religious liberty of every student by granting an accommodation to the family.

Read more at: DecisionMagazine.com and Indoctrination.news.
Mining specialist Charlie Stephenson from SI Capital talks through the latest results for ( ).

The company has further extended the large copper discovery at the Big One Deposit within the Mt Oxide Project in Queenslands Mt Isa copper-belt.

This follows the final results from its 2020 program and recently found historical assays. Stephenson explains why these results are encouraging and his professional projections for the mining project.
The Political Parties Dispute Tribunal has issued interim orders stopping the Jubilee Party from expelling six nominated senators.

The six, Isaac Mwaura, Millicent Omanga, Mary Seneta, Falhada Dekow, Naomi Waqo and Victor Prengei, filed a complaint against the ruling party over their expulsion.

The tribunal ruled: "Pending hearing and determination of this application inter-parties this tribunal hereby stays any further implementation of Jubilee Party decision dated February 8 to expel the applicants from the party."

The complaints will be mentioned on February 16 and 17.

On Monday, Jubilee Secretary-General Raphael Tuju said the six appeared before the committee in 2020 and earlier this year on "disciplinary violations as per Article 13 of the party's constitution".

Ms Omanga, Ms Seneta, Ms Dekow, Ms Waqo and Mr Prengei are accused of skipping the State House Senate Parliamentary Group meeting convened by President Uhuru Kenyatta in May last year.

Mr Mwaura, who faced the disciplinary committee last week, is accused of disloyalty to the party and advocating for the interests of the United Democratic Alliance (UDA), associated with Deputy President William Ruto.
It's a terrible indictment of any society that those who lost arms, legs, their eyesight or their minds must constantly go to court to fight for a modest pension.

Our politicians have made a hames out of the victims' issue, but this time criticism for not being ready to pay Troubles survivors what they deserve shouldn't be directed to their door.

It's Boris, Brandon, and the boys in London who are to blame on this one. They must immediately step up to the plate and reach agreement with Stormont on funding for the pension scheme.

Finance Minister Conor Murphy says he's been asking the Secretary of State to meet him on the issue since September. That Brandon Lewis hasn't done so is preposterous. Why is the plight of those who have suffered so much during the Troubles not worth a half an hour Zoom call in six months? The Northern Ireland Office said Mr Lewis strongly supported the victims payment scheme. But it added: "He has always been clear that the devolved funding settlement means that the Executive is funded through the block grant, together with its own revenue-raising capabilities to deliver its statutory responsibilities, including this scheme. The UK Government has provided unprecedented levels of funding to the Northern Ireland Executive this year." The reality is that Stormont cannot alone afford to pay for a scheme which will cost 800m. Much of that will be upfront as victims in their 70s or 80s - often in ill-health - are much more likely to choose a one-off lump sum payment than say 2,000 a year. If the Tory government refuses to assist then funds will have to be diverted from health, education and other vital areas of the Northern Ireland budget. It's certainly not unfair to expect London to cough up some cash. Whoever you deem is most to blame for the Troubles - republicans, loyalists or the State - it cannot be denied that Britain was a central player in the conflict. Despite their many other differences, there's not a party in Stormont which doesn't think that the Treasury should show some generosity here. If it doesn't, then our hospitals and schools will inevitably have their budgets cut. The scheme is due to open for applications next month, and the Court of Appeal has given the Executive Office four weeks to find a solution. Sources have indicated Brandon Lewis is now finally willing to sit down with Stormont ministers to discuss the matter. He must do so swiftly. It's adult conversation time.
Members of the US National Guard collect their weapons before beginning their shift at the US Capitol in Washington ahead of Donald Trump's impeachment trial. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty

The arguments by opposing lawyers in the Senate impeachment trial of former US president Donald Trump this week are expected to revolve largely around a pair of constitutional questions: a first amendment defence of his fiery speech ahead of the violent January 6 attack on the Capitol; and a challenge to the legality of putting a former president on trial.

Mr Trumps case will feature broad legal questions about whether his actions violate the Constitution.

Most legal scholars who have studied the issue think post-presidential impeachment and conviction are allowed based on history and past practice in Congress.

The overwhelming scholarly consensus supports this argument, said Steve Vladeck, a constitutional law professor at the University of Texas School of Law.

Read More

A prominent conservative lawyer added political and legal heft to the Democrats argument that Mr Trump can be tried in the Senate even after he has left office. The assertion from Republican lawyer Charles Cooper in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece published Sunday undercuts the central argument embraced by most GOP lawmakers that it is unconstitutional to convene the Senate trial because Mr Trump is no longer president.

Mr Cooper, who has represented high-profile Republicans and conservative causes in court, said pointedly in his column that because the impeachment power includes the authority to prevent officials from holding future office, it defies logic to suggest that the Senate is prohibited from trying and convicting former officeholders.

All but five Republican senators previously signalled their support for Mr Trumps primary line of defence advanced in a test vote last month by Senator Rand Paul. It was not clear whether Mr Coopers view would sway GOP lawmakers.

Senators should reconsider their view and judge the former presidents misconduct on the merits, wrote Mr Cooper, who has represented former Trump national security adviser John Bolton, the National Rifle Association and former attorney general Jeff Sessions, a long-time friend.

Mr Vladeck said he doubted Mr Coopers backing would change the outcome of the trial. A conviction requires the votes of 67 out of 100 senators in a chamber evenly divided by party.

Republican senators were gravitating toward this argument [made by Mr Paul] because it allows them to avoid having to condemn or condone what Trump did, Mr Vladeck said.

Its a technicality that doesnt actually have to be correct.

Read More

 Washington Post
People love sharing things created by their children. Whether it is a poorly rhyming poem or a distorted sketch, parents will love it all and share it everyone they know.

Celebrities are no different. In fact, since they have millions of followers, they love showing off even more. Reality TV star Kim Kardashian claimed that her and rapper Kanye West's first born, North West allegedly painted a scenic canvas.

However, the internet wasn't impressed and were very expressive about how they do not think that North actually painted that. Kim had shared the image of the painting depicting a beautiful landscape on her Instagram story.

Instagram

The painting reminded everyone of the dreamy landscapes painted by television's Bob Ross and many wondered if Kim had shared a fake painting and forged North's signature on it.

Folks believed that the painting is too perfect to have been painted by a seven-year-old. One user even wrote while sharing an image of the painting that, 'I will bet anything (even my life) that this painting was not done by north west'.

I will bet anything (even my life) that this painting was not done by north west pic.twitter.com/aaegkDJJKO  Ethan (@sirconeus) February 8, 2021

Once the accusations were evident enough, Kim took to Instagram again and slammed everyone for doubting her child's abilities. She posted a long note to her story and it was crystal clear that was furious.

She started the note by writing, 'DON'T PLAY WITH ME WHEN IT COMES TO MY CHILDREN!!!'

Then, she added that North and her best friend have been taking serious oil painting classes.

She also said that North 'worked incredibly hard' on her painting and it took her several weeks to complete.

Instagram

She questioned the people and wrote, How dare you see children doing awesome things and then try to accuse them of NOT being awesome!?!?!



However, the internet is cruel and people made many memes on this whole scenario.

exclusive: north wests new painting!! pic.twitter.com/epUxoAC20d  agnes and zoe (@zoeandagnes) February 9, 2021

The North West painting drama is my favorite drama of 2021 so far.  Alex James (@ArexJames) February 9, 2021

Did you guys see North Wests painting? pic.twitter.com/YtdUwtUeBj   (@kayyorkcity) February 10, 2021

However, there were also others who believed that the seven-year-old actually painted it.

North west is 7 years old and has more talent in her one painting than I have had in my whole life  chloe elizabeth  (@cchloelizabeth2) February 9, 2021

the fact that a seven year old can paint better than me is amazing. i absolutely love this painting done by north west. @KimKardashian pic.twitter.com/xdtL7Rk4AK  ariah barbara (@kuwonudreads) February 10, 2021

The memes are funny but I took a Bob Ross painting class when I was 7, like North West, and the whole point is that they all turn out that nice. Mine is like identical.  The Yank Beour (@searchforjuice) February 10, 2021




Got a Great Idea? Check Out this Grant Program

By Tim Brockwell

PADUCAH - A Paducah nonprofit is partnering with a Missouri company to offer local small businesses the opportunity to compete for several development grants.Sprocket, Inc. is teaming up with Codefi, Kentucky Innovation, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to award up to $200,000 in Innovation Development service grants to five small businesses or individuals.Sprocket founder Monica Bilak says the purpose of the West Kentucky Innovation Challenge Grant program is to find practical solutions to business problems. She says Sprocket can help provide some of the tools required to bring those solutions to fruition, but it's up to local businesses to present those ideas."We're looking for people who are wanting to solve business problems, and usually they're persistent business problems. They've kind of come upon, or are thinking of an automated solution. Because what we will do is provide software development and business expertise." Bilak said.Codefi Co-founder Dr. James Stapleton said he's seen this process work in southeast Missouri, and thinks it can work in western Kentucky as well."There are people involved in all kinds of industries that have problems and disconnects they know software can fix," Stapleton said." Some may be in the process of starting a business or involved in an existing business that, with the technical know-how, could expand into the digital economy. We're here to mentor and support those with the best and brightest ideas and turbo-charge these new or expanded businesses into reality."Codefi will host a free webinar Wednesday entitled "How to Build a Software Company Without Code". all interested parties are encouraged to participate.The application deadline is Feb. 19. On Feb. 26 semifinalists will be announced.On March 5 all semifinalists will be offered pitch training in the lead up to pitch day on March 12, during which semifinalists will present their ideas. Winners will be announced on March 26.Click the link below to apply, or for more information about the challenge.On the Net:
BRUSSELS, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The European Wireless Infrastructure Association (EWIA) welcomed its newest member, Phoenix Tower International, a global tower company with EU presence in France, Spain, and Ireland, which joined the trade association after EWIA's last Annual General Meeting.

"In the context of Next Generation EU, independent wireless infrastructure operators have a positive role to play as the Commission and the legislators are addressing important questions on 5G and the connectivity agenda in Europe." says Tobias Martinez Gimeno, Chairman of EWIA. "In this context we welcome Phoenix Tower International as a new member so that our sector can speak with a stronger and even more representative voice in our ongoing engagement in Brussels."

"We are honored and delighted to be part of EWIA and look forward to working with all members to promote increased connectivity and wireless infrastructure across Europe" declared Dagan Kasavana, CEO of Phoenix Tower International.

While EWIA is extending its membership, its footprint across European countries is also increasing with 10 towerco members operating across 14 European countries: Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, The Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, the United Kingdom, Switzerland and Sweden.

About EWIA

The European Wireless Infrastructure Association is the European trade association of wholesale wireless infrastructure providers. Our members invest in and operate wireless infrastructure essential to the delivery of mobile voice, wireless broadband and other wireless networks.

EWIA advocates policies that encourage the network infrastructure investment and deployment necessary to make advanced wireless broadband available everywhere for consumers, businesses, health care, public safety and the countless other sectors that rely on always-on wireless connections.

About Phoenix Tower International

Phoenix Tower International was founded in 2013 with a mission to own and operate high quality wireless infrastructure sites in stable markets experiencing strong wireless usage growth around the world. PTI is currently focused on infrastructure expansion throughout Latin America, the Caribbean, the United States, and Europe.

Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1436174/Phoenix_Tower_International_Logo_Logo.jpg
UP eases covid restrictions: Shops allowed to open Mon to Fri in districts with less than 600 active cases

Canada dials India for COVID-19 vaccine, Delhi says will do its best

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

New Delhi. Feb 10: Canada has informed India about its requirements for the COVID-19 vaccine.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi received a telephone call today from Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada.

Prime Minister Trudeau informed Prime Minister Modi about Canada's requirements of COVID-19 vaccines from India. Prime Minister assured the Canadian PM that India would do its best to support Canada's vaccination efforts, just as it had done for many other countries already.

Expressing his appreciation, Prime Minister Trudeau said that if the world managed to conquer COVID-19, it would be significantly because of India's tremendous pharmaceutical capacity, and Prime Minister Modi's leadership in sharing this capacity with the world. Prime Minister thanked PM Trudeau for his sentiments.

The two leaders also reiterated the common perspective shared by India and Canada on many important geo-political issues. They agreed to continue the close collaboration between both countries in fighting global challenges like Climate Change and the economic impacts of the pandemic.

The leaders looked forward to meeting each other in various important international fora later this year, and continuing their discussions on all issues of mutual interest.

For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications

Story first published: Wednesday, February 10, 2021, 23:02 [IST]
HARTFORD  Gov. Ned Lamonts proposed mileage tax to raise $90 million a year for the states failing transportation fund, would likely allow out-of-state truckers to avoid the expense, while hitting hard Connecticuts 8,000 registered commercial haulers, according to the leader of the state organization representing them.

Joseph Sculley, president of the Motor Transport Association of Connecticut Inc., said Wednesday that he hopes state lawmakers ignore the proposal, just like they rejected the governors plan for trucks-only highway tolls last year.

But Lamont said that the estimated $90 million a year would allow Connecticut to leverage federal funding for a billion dollars in projects over the next five years. And Speaker of the House Matt Ritter said that it makes sense to have largest trucks pay for their wear and tear on state roads.

Well listen to peoples concerns, Ritter said. But the idea is that a 50,000-pound truck causes more damage.

Sculley, in a reprise of arguments that helped kill Lamonts plan for trucks-only tolls, said that Connecticut tractor trailers pay an average of about $17,000 in annual state and federal fees, including more than $9,000 per vehicle to the state.

The 500-member organization includes every kind of hauler, from beverage delivery to construction and long-haulers. He recalled that since the last time state officials proposed a mileage tax back in 2017, most of the 22 states that had similar levies abandoned them because of the trouble in collecting the money from trucks that pass quickly through states.

This is a tax that will slam in-state business and out-of-state trucking companies are going to evade it, Sculley said in reaction to a Hearst CT Media report indicating that Lamonts budget includes $90 million in new revenue from the heaviest trucks on state roads and highways. We know that because it happens in other states.

Sculley said he was disappointed that nearly a year after the governor declared truckers essential workers, he has targeted them for more revenue.

Truck tolls were in his last budget and they didnt make it, Sculley said. I think there could be bipartisan opposition to this.

He said that the only way to enforce such a plan would to have roadside enforcement, which neither the State Police, nor the state Department of Revenue Services have personnel to administer the tax. It seems like were trying to go back to a failed model.

Melissa McCaw, Lamonts budget director who is secretary of the Office of Policy and Management, said that trucking companies would be assessed on a monthly basis for large tractor trailers that drive through the state and that keeping track of them wont be hard for the DRS.

Senate Minority Leader Kevin Kelly, R-Stratford, sided with the truckers. Clearly its a tax, he told reporters during a Zoom spin session with reporters after the budget address. Its a regressive tax and it is surely going to fall to the middle class.

kdixon@ctpost.com Twitter: @KenDixonCT
Rwanda flag carrier airline RwandAir yesterday announced the suspension of flights on its southern Africa routes due to concerns on Covid-19 variants prevalent throughout the region.

In a statement, the airline said the suspension was effective from 8 February 2021.

"In view of the global concerns on Covid variants prevalent throughout southern Africa, RwandaAir announces the suspension of its flights to Johannesburg, Capetown, Lusaka and Harare, effective 8 February 2021.

Scheduled flights will resume as soon as there is more clarity on the situation. Affected customers can re-book and fly at a later date at no additional cost -- or request a refund," it said.

In a related matter, Emirates also suspended flights to Lusaka and Harare "due to operational reasons".

"Emirates flights to/from Harare, a linked service with Lusaka, will temporarily be suspended from 13 February to 28 February 2021 due to operational reasons," the airline said.

"Flights to/from Lusaka will continue to operate as four weekly services. Customers holding tickets with final destination Harare will not be accepted for travel at their point of origin," it added.-- New Ziana.

Beirut: One of Saudi Arabias most prominent womens rights advocates, Loujain al-Hathloul, has been released from prison, one of her sisters said on Thursday (AEDT). Hathloul had been in custody since May 2018, when she was arrested as part of a government crackdown targeting feminist activists.

Her imprisonment, along with her allegations that she was tortured while in custody, focused global attention on the punishing, years-long crackdown by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on human rights activists, civil society figures and dissidents.

Saudi human rights activists Loujain al-Hathloul. Credit:Amnesty International

Her release - which sister Lina al-Hathloul announced in a joyous Twitter message - was one of the clearest signs yet that Saudi Arabia was taking steps to blunt criticism of its human rights record by Biden administration officials.

Loujain is at home!!!!!!, the sister wrote.

Colombia is not a country usually associated with crude oil. Low proven petroleum reserves and falling production see Colombia rank well behind many of the global oil heavyweights, yet petroleum has emerged as a crucial economic driver and is responsible for a significant portion of export earnings and fiscal revenues. At the peak of the last oil boom when Brent was trading at over $100 per barrel, Colombia was pumping just over one million barrels daily, giving the economy a notable boost. By 2013, crude oil was responsible for 55% of exports, nearly 5% of GDP, and more than a fifth of government revenues. The rapid growth of Colombias oil industry triggered an economic miracle where the strife-torn country experienced strong growth with gross domestic product expanding at rates greater than many of its regional neighbors. During 2011 GDP expanded by 6.9% year over year and in 2013 by 5.1%. Colombias economic growth and currency are closely correlated to crude oil prices. The prolonged oil price slump which began in August 2014 has hit Colombia hard. GDP growth plunged, hitting a multiyear low of 1.4% in 2017 while the Colombian peso collapsed losing 37% between 2014 and 2019. The sharp drop in government revenue saw Bogota announce progressively larger budget deficits. After the devastating impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and ongoing oil price slump, there are increasing signs that Colombias economic miracle may have abruptly ended.

It is estimated that Colombias economy shrank by 8.2% during 2020, while the peso continued its catastrophic tumble, losing 9% over the course of the year. Those events along with a sharp decline in fiscal revenue saw Bogotas budget deficit blow out to an estimated 9% of GDP. Despite the economy being expected to return to growth during 2021, annual GDP is only expected to expand by around 4%, one of the lowest growth rates growth in Latin America and below those experienced during the last oil boom. The impact of sharply weaker oil prices on Colombias economy is multifaceted negatively affecting exports, the balance of trade, government revenue, foreign direct investment, and the value of the Colombian peso. This is weighing heavily on the economy and foreign investment. Between the end of 2014 and 2019, Colombias exports declined by 28% to be worth $28 billion. That can be blamed on the sharp decline of crude oil exports, which over the period plunged 44.5% to $15.9 billion. This trend continued during 2020 with data from DANE (Spanish), Colombias statistical agency, showing that exports for the first 11 months of the year tumbled by 22.5% year over year because of an unhealthy 45.5% drop in oil exports. The value of the Colombian peso has crashed, losing 52% since the end of 2014 and 7% over the last year alone, seeing it ranked as the worst-performing currency thus far in 2021. Those developments are placing considerable pressure on Bogotas finances and weighing on foreign direct investment, notably for Colombias economically vital hydrocarbon sector.

Related: Could Oil Prices Break $100 Next Year?



During 2020, investment in Colombias petroleum industry plunged (Spanish) 49% to $2.05 billion, the lowest level since 2016. Exploration spending plummeted to $350 million, or less than half of the $780 million invested during 2019. As a result, exploration and development activities virtually ground to a halt with only one operational drill rig at the end of May 2020. Even by the end of December 2020, there were only 14 operational rigs which were less than half of the 33 drill rigs reported a year earlier. This is particularly worrying because of Colombias limited hydrocarbon reserves. According to the energy ministry (Spanish), the country finished 2019 with 2.036 billion barrels of proven oil reserves with a short production life of just over six years. Those low oil reserves and limited production life threatens Colombias economic miracle, especially when it is considered that there have been no major oil discoveries in the Andean country for over a decade. Those alarming numbers highlight the urgency with which Colombia needs to attract significant amounts of investment for its petroleum industry so as to significantly boost hydrocarbon exploration, oil reserves, and production. The peak industry body the Colombian Petroleum Association (ACP  Spanish initials) anticipates 2021 industry investment of $3.1 billion to $3.45 billion, which at the bottom end represents a notable 51% increase over 2020. Despite that hefty year-over-year increase exploration spending only increases moderately to range between $500 million and $550 million, of which almost half is earmarked for natural gas. While that is greater than 2020, it is still well-below pre-pandemic levels, indicating investment is not recovering as swiftly as required. Much of the anticipated spending will be direct to offshore projects on Colombias Caribbean coast, where the Andean country is hoping to replicate Brazil and Guyanas considerable offshore success. Toward the end of 2020, Colombias energy ministry issued regulations governing offshore hydrocarbon exploitation which, along with the allocation of blocks for exploration and production secured an investment of $1.6 billion.

Related: The Oil Deal That Could Break Up Iraq



Regardless of the projected amounts, Colombia is still unable to attract the investment required to adequately expand exploration activity in order to significantly boost oil and natural gas reserves so that it can attain energy security. A range of issues is weighing on Colombias appeal as a destination for investment in its oil industry. Key are ongoing security risks in regional areas where central government control is weak. Oil pipelines are a popular target for sabotage, with the Cano Limon-Covenas and Transandino pipelines attracting most of the attacks. During 2020, there were 29 incidents involving the 210,000 barrel a day Cano Limon-Covenas pipeline and a similar number for the 85,000 barrel a day Transandino pipeline. Illegal valves used to syphon crude oil and other products from industry pipelines are an ever-growing problem. Much of that activity can be blamed on the National Liberation Army (ELN  Spanish initials) and FARC dissidents, which view Colombias petroleum infrastructure as legitimate targets.

Community blockades and oilfield invasions are also an ever-present hazard. The oil industry lacks a social license to operate in many areas and is perceived by some communities as a major environmental hazard. The ACP recently released a statement (Spanish) condemning the seizure of oilfields in Colombias Llanos Basin by different indigenous groups. Community blockades, which are also common, forced Gran Tierra Energy to shutter production at two of its blocks in the Putumayo Basin during 2019 and 2020. It is these hazards that contributed to Occidental Petroleums decision to sell its onshore Colombian oil assets in October 2020. Colombias high breakeven prices, pegged at $40 to $45 per barrel after-tax, and the discount applied to the heavy and medium sour oil grades produced in Colombia is also a disincentive for foreign energy companies.

The outlook for Colombias economically vital petroleum industry is improving but there is a long way to go before it returns to pre-pandemic levels. A combination of a prolonged oil price slump, high breakeven costs, escalating security risk and growing international demand for sweet light crude oil grades is weighing on investment. For those reasons, Bogota may not be able to successfully reactivate Colombias hydrocarbon sector and expand proven oil reserves as well as production to the desired levels. This will sharply impact the economy making it impossible for Colombia to experience the strong rates of growth previously witnessed.

By Matthew Smith for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
The Ministry of Health has pledged to set up five Intensive Care Units (ICUs) at Masaka Regional Referral Hospital to enable it manage critical Covid-19 patients.

Mr Atek Kagirita, the Covid-19 incident commander at the Ministry of Health, said the facility manages Covid-19 patients from all districts of Greater Masaka and beyond, which informs their decision to boost its capacity.

However, Mr Kagirita did not give a timeframe within which the ICU facilities will be established and the budget for the project.

"According to our records, Masaka reported its first case on March 22, 2020 and has 677 Covid-19 confirmed cases and 32 deaths which are 10 per cent of the national cumulative death, a percentage which needs much attention," Mr Kagirita said while launching home-based care (HBC) at Ssaza Hall in Masaka City at the weekend.

Dr Nathan Onyachi, the Masaka Regional Referral Hospital director, said they currently lack an ICU and are yet to decide where those promised by government will be placed.

"We thank government for considering us under this new project [of acquiring ICUs] and when they are put in place, they will be put to good use," he said.

Mr Bernard Lubwama, a surveillance officer from the Ministry of Health, said the HBC is aimed at curbing stigma among communities and reducing congestion in hospitals.

The Health ministry introduced home-based care last October to relieve the constrained health system.

" It's already clear that we have to learn how to live with Covid-19 and among other ways of managing it is to heed to home-based care, which will be for only asymptomatic patients and when patients are managed from home, stigma towards Covid-19 patients will be reduced," Mr Lubwama said.

He said the Ministry of Health has already dispatched rapid diagnostic tests to regional referral hospitals, health centre IIIs and IIs, adding that health officers have been trained on how to use them.

Mr Lubwama said the community should go for testing because it is now free-of-charge and one gets results within 30 minutes.

"When one is a contact or develops Covid-19 symptoms, they should go to the nearest government health facility and test.

When one is found positive without any symptoms then he/she can be managed from home with the surveillance of village health team and health workers,' he said.

Mr Lubwama revealed that the Ministry of Health is rolling a programme to train and create taskforces in communities at sub-county and parish level to support the existing district Covid-19 taskforce committees in implementing the home-based care programme of Covid-19 patients.

Dr Hebert Kazoora from the Ministry of Health said the home-based care excludes people of old age, adding that such people should be taken to health centres for further management.

"As we advance to HBC, people should practise all standard operating procedures (SOPs) in management of Covid-19 patients at their homes for 10 days until they test negative for the virus," he said.

Challenges

At the height of Covid-19 pandemic last year, the government had promised to install 10 ventilators, but this never materialised.

Recently, Mr George Otim, the commissioner of Health Services Infrastructure at the Health ministry, said they had established 143 ICU beds at 14 regional referral hospitals.

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However, a recent mini-survey by Daily Monitor revealed that some hospital administrators are still keeping the beds in stories as they lack space where to set up the ICU beds .

Masaka hospital

Masaka Regional Referral Hospital was constructed in 1927, as a treatment centre for syphilis, before it was later elevated to a referral status in 1995 to offer services to the greater southern region districts.

Since then, the hospital has been grappling with many challenges ranging from lack of space to accommodate the overwhelming numbers of patients, inadequate drugs and irregular power supply.

The facility serves 10 districts; Masaka, Kalungu, Rakai, Lyantonde, Lwengo, Sembabule, Bukomansimbi, Kyotera and Kalangala and Masaka City.
Saharanpur: Ahead of kisan mahapanchayat, Section 144 was imposed in Uttar Pradeshs Saharanpur district on Wednesday (February 10), due to various reasons including upcoming festivities, COVID-19 pandemic and law and order.

District Magistrate of Saharanpur issued an order citing various reasons including upcoming festivities, the spread of COVID-19 pandemic and the possibility of violence by the anti-social elements in the state.

The move comes ahead of the Congress General Secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadras visit to attend kisan mahapanchayat. "Today I will be in Saharanpur to listen, understand, share my feelings with the farmers and support their struggle. The BJP government will have to withdraw the black agriculture law," Priyanka Vadra tweeted (in Hindi).

She was heading towards Saharanpur to attend kisan mahapanchayat and was also scheduled to offer prayers at Shakumbhari Devi Temple before attending the programme. The Congress leader is also expected to also conduct a dialogue with farmers in Bijnor and Muzaffarnagar districts on February 13.

Congress had earlier extended its full support to the call for chakka jam from farmers for three hours last week. The grand old party and the other opposition parties have raised their concern against the new farm laws.

Farmers have been protesting at different borders of the national capital since November 26 last year against the three newly enacted farm laws: Farmers Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, 2020; the Farmers Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and farm Services Act 2020 and the Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act, 2020.

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AIIMS Director Dr Randeep Guleria

India has been seeing a downward trend in the number of new daily coronavirus infections. Most states are currently reporting fresh cases in the hundreds or in two-digits, with the exception of Maharashtra and Kerala.

While the number of daily cases being reported in Maharashtra has declined considerably, it is still remarkably higher than the rest of the nation. Similarly, in Kerala, which had once set an example for effective COIVD-19 management, daily coronavirus infections are still being reported in the thousands.

As per data shared by the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, together, these two states account for 71 percent of the total COVID-19 caseload of the past week.

Out of a total 80,536 fresh cases being reported last week, 56,932 came from Kerala and Maharashtra; of this, 39,260 cases came from Kerala alone.

A News 18 report quoting IANS stated that All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) Director Dr Randeep Guleria has hinted at the possibility of the presence of the mutant strain of Sars-CoV-2 in these two states.

COVID-19 Vaccine Frequently Asked Questions View more How does a vaccine work? A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine. How many types of vaccines are there? There are broadly four types of vaccine  one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine. What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind? Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time. View more Show

He said: We will have to investigate whether any mutant strain of coronavirus is under circulation in the state which is causing a spurt in the daily infection.

Commenting on the COVID-19 situation in the southern states, Dr Guleria said: Kerala initially controlled the virus spread well, when strict restrictions were in place. However, ever since they started opening up, the number of cases being reported also started increasing manifold.

The AIIMS chief further said the demographic of Kerala could be another contributing factor behind the continued infection spread. A large number of people in Kerala are elderly and suffer from comorbid conditions, he said.

Dr Lalit Kant, former head, epidemiology and communicable diseases, Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) said the age structure and presence of chronic illnesses greatly influence disease spread, and in Kerala, the incidence of asthma is quite high. Meanwhile, both states have a high incidence of obesity, hypertension, and diabetes also.

Follow our coverage of the coronavirus crisis here
Ms. Syngal spoke about the large numbers of women and people of color who work in retail, noting that the heavier toll the pandemic has taken on both groups has meant that the need for government aid in her industry seems especially pointed. Mr. McMillon, whose company raised wages for 165,000 hourly workers last year, spoke about Walmarts approach to employee pay and its role in distributing vaccines, the person said.

Mr. Bidens rescue plan includes direct payments of $1,400 per person for individuals earning up to $75,000 a year and, in a change Democrats agreed to this week, a rapid phase out in payments so that no household with income above $200,000 a year receives a check. Asked by reporters before the meeting if he supported that change, the president replied yes.

Shortly before the meeting, Mr. Bidens spokeswoman described the Oval Office gathering as the first of many engagements that the president intends to have with company executives and leaders of business groups as he ramps up his efforts to lobby on behalf of his Covid-19 relief plan.

In her daily briefing for reporters, Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, defended the minimum-wage proposal. A Congressional Budget Office report released on Monday said that a $15-an-hour minimum wage, as Mr. Biden wants, could cost the economy as many as 1.4 million jobs.

The president supports it because he believes that raising the minimum wage is something that American workers, American families deserve, and that lifting 27 million American workers out of poverty, reducing inequality, would be a very positive step for our country, Ms. Psaki said.

She said other provisions of the relief act would increase job growth, though the White House has not provided an estimate of how many jobs the plan would create. On Tuesday, Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee wrote to the administration to formally request such an estimate in short order.

This data is essential for members of Congress to have in advance of voting on any proposed Covid-relief legislation, the Republicans, led by Representative Kevin Brady of Texas, said in the letter.
Kingstree, SC (29556)

Today

Cloudy skies. High 73F. Winds N at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Some clouds this evening will give way to mainly clear skies overnight. Low near 50F. Winds light and variable.
Southern Seven Health Dept. Warns of Vaccine Scams

By West Kentucky Star Staff

SOUTHERN ILLINOIS - The Southern Seven Health Department is warning people to be on the lookout for scams related to COVID-19 vaccines or testing.S7HD says they have received calls from citizens reporting scams which are popping up in Southern Illinois.It seems scammers and con artists are now preying on peoples fears surrounding COVID-19 and their desires to get vaccinated against this disease, said Nathan Ryder, Outreach Coordinator for Southern Sevens Contact Tracing program.Some of the many scams include telephone calls or text messages promising vaccine appointments in exchange for a payment over the phone. Online ads have also started appearing on Facebook and Craigslist selling COVID-19 vaccine appointments. Some scammers have even started going door to door offering the promise of COVID-19 vaccines or even in-home COVID testing, some for payments of $150 or more.S7HD says the best way to get a COVID-19 vaccine at this point is to sign up with your local health departments vaccine registry, or to contact a trusted provider like your local pharmacy or family physician. The Illinois Department of Public Health also has an online list of approved vaccine providers.Southern Seven will never ask you for your social security number, Medicare number, or bank account information, Ryder said. The information we will ask you for when we call to schedule your vaccine appointment is very limited. We will also never ask you for a payment for a COVID-19 vaccine. We provide these vaccines for free.S7HD adds that COVID-19 vaccines are still in very limited supplies. S7HD will call individuals on their registry and schedule appointments for vaccination clinics throughout their seven counties. Appointments will be scheduled utilizing the information submitted to the S7HD vaccine registry.
On February 1 the military of Myanmar, the Tatmadaw, launched a coup d'etat. President Win Myint and State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi were detained, along with ministers and their deputies and members of the parliament. They were accused of some minor crimes and will be kept off the streets for some time. Aung San Suu Kyi party, the NLD which had widely won the latest election, will be prohibited.

All that was not astonishing and is unlikely to make a big difference in the politics within and towards the extremely complex country:

Theres no smoking gun, of course, but its virtually impossible that Beijing had not been at least informed, or consulted, by the Tatmadaw on the new dispensation. China, Myanmars top trade partner, is guided by three crucial strategic imperatives in the relationship with its southern neighbor: trade/connectivity via a Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) corridor; full access to energy and minerals; and the necessity of cultivating a key ally within the 10-member ASEAN.

...

None of that will change, whoever runs the politico-economic show in Myanmars capital Naypyidaw. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Aung San Suu Kyi, locally known as Amay Suu (Mother Suu) were discussing the China-Myanmar economic corridor only three weeks before the coup. Beijing and Naypyidaw have clinched no less than 33 economic deals only in 2020.

...

Yet this is not all about China. The Tatmadaw coup is an eminently domestic affair  which involved resorting to the same old school, CIA-style method that installed them as a harsh military dictatorship way back in 1962.

The NLD and Suu Kyi had simply become to assertive and threatened to touch the commercial businesses the military runs. That could not be condoned.

There are several ethnic insurgencies ongoing in Myanmar. There is are a lot of warlords and off the record drug and weapon business. The NLD did not care about that nor will the military:

The [election] end result privileged the NLD, whose support is negligible in all border regions. Myanmars majority ethnic group  and the NLDs electoral base  is the Bamar, Buddhist and concentrated in the central part of the country. The NLD frankly does not care about the 135 ethnic minorities  which represent at least one third of the general population. Its been a long way down since Suu Kyi came to power, when the NLD actually enjoyed a lot of support. Suu Kyis international high profile is essentially due to the power of the Clinton machine. If you talk to a Mon or a Karen, he or she will tell you they had to learn the hard way how much of an intolerant autocrat is the real Suu Kyi. She promised there would be peace in the border regions  eternally mired in a fight between the Tatmadaw and autonomous movements. She could not possibly deliver because she had no power whatsoever over the military. Without any consultation, the electoral commission decided to cancel voting, totally or partially, in 56 cantons of Arakan state, Shan state, Karen state, Mon state and Kachin state, all of them ethnic minorities. Nearly 1.5 million people were deprived of voting.

While Suu Kyi once had 'western' support, they gave her a Nobel Peace Prize, that has long been lost:

Suu Kyis biggest mistake was believing that she could, through her brand of nationalism, dismiss accusations of genocide directed against the Rohingya. In the process, she lost Western support. From that point, she has been on borrowed time, and the military barely hid its distaste for her. To be sure, the military anticipated the impact and the reaction from the international community and took into consideration the new US administrations preoccupations with domestic issues. Myanmar doesnt even figure in the top 10 priorities of President Joe Bidens foreign policy.

Given the above it is astonishing to see that only a few days after the coup happened the country is already experiencing a U.S. style color revolution.

Just consider this ABC News 'Explainer' which is typical for color-rev reporting:

EXPLAINER: How are the Myanmar protests being organized?

For the most part the protests have grown organically. This movement is leaderless  people are getting on the streets in their own way and at their own will, said Thinzar Shunlei Yi, a prominent activist. Activist groups, professional work groups, unions and individuals across Myanmar have all come out in opposition to the coup, as has Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy party.

...

Health care workers also started a protest campaign, wearing red ribbons, holding signs and urging other medical staff to not work at state-operated health facilities. Street protests over the weekend featured the heavy presence of unions, student groups and other groups representing professions as diverse as park rangers and book printers. Yangon residents have voiced dissent by banging pots and pans together across the city at night.

...

Making the rounds have been copies of safety protocol information sheets, some of them originally from Hong Kong, with instructions on how to encrypt communications and how to stay safe during protests.

"The movement is leaderless," said one of its longtime leaders who is well known to this 'western' reporter. ...

The highlighted points are all standard attributes we have seen in other color revolutions around the world. This type of reporting by Reuters is also quite typical:

Myanmar's anti-coup protesters defy crackdown with humour

Protesters returned to the streets of Myanmar on Wednesday despite the shooting of a young woman the previous day, with some deploying humour to emphasise their peaceful opposition to this months military takeover.

...

We cannot stay quiet, youth leader Esther Ze Naw told Reuters. If there is blood shed during our peaceful protests, then there will be more if we let them take over the country. There were no reports of violence on Wednesday and in many places protests took on a festive air, with bare-chested body builders, women in ball gowns and wedding dresses, farmers in tractors and people with their pets. Some set up a protest line in inflatable rubber tubs. Thousands joined demonstrations in the main city of Yangon, while in the capital, Naypyitaw, hundreds of government workers marched in support of a growing civil disobedience campaign.

...

Earlier, soldiers took over a clinic that had been treating wounded protesters in Naypyitaw on Tuesday, a doctor there said. The teenager was shot when police fired, mostly into the air, to clear the protesters.

Another sign of a color revolution are dedicated protester fan accounts which post pictures of people carrying English language signs. These are clearly color-rev public-relation efforts aimed at a 'western' public.

So this is evidently a color revolution effort against the military.

What is irritating with it is the speed with which it took off. Color revs usually require years of group building and leadership preparation. They need monetary and communication support as well as political directions from 'advisors' in 'western' embassies. Here it took only ten days to launch it.

In 2005 the Bush administration cultivated the Myanmar 'civil society' and Suu Kyi, who was then under house arrest. It popped up in the 'Saffron color revolution' in 2007 and with Cyclone Nargis in 2008 when the Bush administration tried to use Responsibility to Protect (R2P) nonsense to get a military foot on the ground.

But that all is a long time ago and after Suu Kyi had come to power there was no necessity to keep those efforts alive.

Then again - under Myanmar's 2008 constitution the military was still effectively in charge. Together with Suu Kyi's large win in the latest election there may have been an long planned 'western' attempt underway to finally unseat the military from its privileged position and to pull the country out of China's orbit.

But the chance for that eventually to happen is practically zero. Some 70% of Myanmar's population lives in rural areas. The protests occur only in the three big cities Yangon, Mandalay and Naypyitaw and are relatively small. The military is ruthless and will have no trouble to take the protesters down.

Whoever launched this nonsense should be held responsible for endangering those people.
New Delhi, Feb 10 : As part of the Central Vista project, prestigious institutions like the National Museum and the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, located in central Delhi, will be shifted to other locations.

The Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) will be set up in a new building to be built on the Jamnagar House plot while the National Museum will be shifted to the North and South Blocks.

The National Museum that showcases artefacts associated with the history and cultural heritage of the last 5,000 years in India is located on Janpath in New Delhi. It operates under the supervision of the Ministry of Culture. Similarly, the Ministry of Culture also oversees the IGNCA since 1985. In 1987, the centre was made an autonomous body. It works for the promotion of academic research in the field of arts and culture.

Union Minister of State for Housing and Urban Affairs (Independent Charge) Hardeep Singh Puri told the Rajya Sabha on Wednesday that as part of the Central Vista project, the heritage building of the National Archives will be retained there while the National Museum will be relocated to the contiguous North and South Blocks. The IGNCA will be temporarily set up in the remodelled Janpath Hotel building and later, it will be set up in the new building constructed on the Jamnagar House plot.
Speaker of Kwara State House of assembly Engr Yakubu Danladi Salihu on Tuesday sworn in the only Peoples Democratic Party (PDP)lawmaker Hon John Raheem Agboola, representing Ilorin South Constituency as a member of the hallowed chamber.

The inauguration, of Agboola, the only opposition PDP lawmaker in the house of assembly was in compliance with 14 month's Appeal court Judgments in his favour.

The Speaker of the House, Mr Yakubu Danladi administered the oath of office and oath of allegiance on the new member.

Danladi, in his remark, congratulated the new member and expressed optimism that the new lawmaker would adjust to the legislative business of the House in view of his experience.

"You are already familiar with the task ahead, we say congratulations and welcome on board," the speaker said.

He described the inauguration of Raheem-Agboola as one of the beauties of democracy and described the legislative arm as the strongest arm of government in a democracy.

The new Legislator, while speaking with newsmen after his inauguration, described his triumph as a product of judiciary.

He promised that he will not disappoint the electorate in Ilorin South constituency for the confidence reposed in him.

Raheem-Agboola, who was member of the House during the 4th Assembly between 1999 and 2003, succeed AbdulAzeez Elewu who contested under the platform of the All Progressives Congress (APC).

The new member was accompanied to his inauguration by some PDP stalwarts led by the state Chairman, Alhaji Kola Shittu, relations, friends and well-wishers.

Agboola who was persistently denied the victory since 2019 general elections had gone to the tribunal, appeal court and supreme Court where his victory was affirmed.

But despite the court judgements and series of protests the leadership of the house of assembly persistently ignored the court judgements

Former Deputy Speaker of Kwara state house of Assembly, and former Nigeria's Ambassador to Spain, Professor Mohammed Yisa Gana had last week criticised the continued refusal of the state assembly to swear in Hon Raheem Jimoh Agboola as the duly elected lawmaker representing Ilorin South after being declared winner by the supreme court, describing it as very unfortunate and worrisome.

Gana, who is also from Kwara North, same with the Speaker Hon Yakubu Danladi-Salihu

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warned the Speaker, who he said is very young and lucky to become the number three man in the state, being the first time in politics to beware of his roles and not destroy his political career.

Ambassador Gana further advised the Speaker, Hon Yakubu to beware of contempt of court and therefore do, the needful and swear in Hon Agboola immediately before he is forced to do so.

He said, "I will advise him in his own interest to as quickly as possible make arrangement to swear in Hon Agboola. It's very important, he does so, because he should not ruin his political career and tarnish his own image. He is still very young and the future still lies ahead of him. He should also be aware that he's playing with contempt of court. It was an error that the matter was taken to the Supreme Court, and despite that, the Supreme Court upheld the ruling of the Appeal Court, where the whole matter, should have ended. "

Ambassador Gana also cast aspersions on the integrity of the house of assembly which makes laws and automatically expect people of the state to obey the law but decided to disobey the court judgement.

Vanguard News Nigeria
The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
The government and the World Bank are holding discussions to secure funding to procure COVID-19 vaccines for Ghana.



The World Bank Country Director, Mr Pierre Frank Laporte, who confirmed this to the Daily Graphic yesterday, said the bank had already concluded informal discussions with the government and expected a formal request from the latter.



Basically, we have had informal discussions with the Minister of Health and the Minister of Finance, but we are yet to receive a formal letter of request from the government, which I believe will be soon, he said.



Background



President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo had said the government had commenced discussions with some COVID-19 vaccine manufacturing companies, with the goal of ordering suitable doses of the vaccines for use in Ghana.



That followed the completion of work by the committee formed by the government to recommend the appropriate decisions on COVID-19 vaccines.





The President made this known last month when he opened the 72nd annual New Year School and Conference in Accra, saying details of the committees work would be announced very soon.



A source close to the Presidency told the Daily Graphic yesterday that the government was relying on multiple sources of funding to procure COVID-19 vaccines, which were expected to be in the country by the end of next month.



World Bank ready to assist



Mr Laporte, who was speaking to the Daily Graphic on the banks assistance to the government in the procurement of COVID-19 vaccines, said the global development finance bank was treating such funding with urgency, adding that the funding would be ready in a matter of weeks once a request was made.



The money should be ready by April because this is an emergency; but right now we have not firmed up any figure, he said.



$12 billion approved



The World Bank had, a fortnight ago, encouraged African countries that had not yet requested its support to send letters to their World Bank Country directors asking for support for vaccine procurement and deployment from the $12 billion facility which the Governing Board of the bank had approved.



It also urged African countries to focus and prioritise efforts towards the funding programmes and not slow down the momentum through complex contracts and intermediaries.



Preparedness



Mr Laporte said internally, the bank had already had discussions with manufacturers and suppliers of vaccines on procurement and other logistical strategies.



He said Ghanas preparedness to receive the vaccines had been one of the banks main concerns and part of its discussions with the Ministry of Health.



Are people adequately sensitised to the vaccination? Is there a healthcare team ready to receive the vaccine? Vaccines are not normal medicines and so there needs to be some preparedness beforehand, he said.



Cost



Mr Laporte was throwing light on any specific assistance the World Bank Group was offering Ghana.



The interview came on the heels of a presentation the President of the World Bank Group, Mr David Malpass, had made to African countries, stressing the need for them to prioritise the roll out of COVID-19 vaccines.



In a virtual meeting on the bank's COVID-19 Financing Strategy for African countries a fortnight ago, Mr Malpass had said every month of delay cost the continent $13.8 billion in Gross Domestic Product (GDP).



That is in addition to the loss of lives and human capital, he said.



He said the bank could assist with facilitating the procurement of vaccines for countries in Africa.



Inoculating populations will require delivering the vaccines safely and effectively. Cold chain equipment, energy infrastructure, logistics, transport, community engagement and trained human resource are all keyareas needed for the effective deployment of vaccines, he said.



Mr Malpass stressed that where there were gaps in readiness, the countries should work quickly to fill them.



He said since the outbreak of COVID-19 in March last year, the bank had committed $25 billion to African countries to support their health and economic recovery and that it expected to commit an additional $15 billion by June this year.



Mr Malpass said the World Bank was preparing emergency vaccine financing projects in 21 countries in Africa, including Ghana, Ethiopia, Niger, Mozambique, Tunisia, Eswatini and Cape Verde.



The funds are available now, and for most African countries, the financing will be on grant or highly concessional terms. The International Finance Corporation (IFC) is working to mobilise financing for vaccine production and therapeutics focused on developing countries, he said.



He said in implementing the vaccines programme, the bank was working directly with governments, including financing their purchases from vaccine manufacturers and via COVAX.



For deployment efforts, were working with partners such as the World Health Organisation (WHO) and UNICEF, he said.



Other means



According to the source at the Presidency, the government was relying on multiple sources of funding to procure COVID-19 vaccines.



It said in one such arrangement, the government sent an indemnity, a sovereign guarantee, last Friday to help secure the funding.



There are other means, and as it stands now, some thousands of vaccines will be coming into the country in two weeks, it said.



Government ready



On the governments preparedness to roll out the COVID-19 vaccination, the source said a six-stage plan was adopted by the government last week to guide the deployment of COVID-19 vaccines in the country.



The six stages include vaccine selection and population segmentation, regulatory approval, procurement, communication, roll-out and monitoring, it said.









Source: graphiconline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Two UC Santa Barbara engineers are among 129 new members worldwide elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) for 2021. Materials and chemistry professor Craig Hawker(link is external) and Rachel Segalman(link is external), chair of the Chemical Engineering Department, join the 106 American and 23 foreign engineers honored this year. Election to the NAE is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer.

Segalman, the Edward Noble Kramer Professor and a professor of both chemical engineering and materials, was recognized "for contributions to semiconducting block polymers, polymeric ionic liquids and hybrid thermoelectric materials."

Hawker, the Alan and Ruth Heeger Chair in Interdisciplinary Science, who also serves as the director of the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) and the Dow Materials Institute, was cited for "contributions to polymer chemistry through synthetic organic chemistry concepts and the advancement of molecular engineering principles."

"Our campus is thrilled to congratulate Professor Craig Hawker and Professor Rachel Segalman on their election to the world-renowned National Academy of Engineering," said UC Santa Barbara Chancellor Henry T. Yang, who was elected to the NAE in 1991. "Election to the NAE by one's peers is among the highest professional honors in engineering, and recognizes years of accomplishment having significant impact on health and the quality of life. Both Craig and Rachel have distinguished themselves as pioneers in their fields, and we take tremendous pride in their frontier research contributions."

"The College of Engineering is extremely proud and honored to have two highly distinguished faculty members elected to the National Academy of Engineering," said Rod Alferness, dean of the UCSB College of Engineering, who was elected to the NAE in 2003. "Professor Segalman and Professor Hawker have made pioneering contributions to the areas of structural control over soft matter and synthetic polymer chemistry, respectively. In addition, they are inspirational leaders in their departments and at the university, and outstanding mentors to colleagues and students. Their scientific discoveries and innovation will drive their fields of engineering and positively impact society for years to come."

With particular interests in energy, efficiency, sustainability, and materials and interfaces, Segalman's research focuses on controlling self-assembly, structure and the properties in functional polymers. Structural control over soft matter through microscopic length scales is an essential tool to optimize properties for applications ranging from solar and thermal energy to biomaterials. Her work paves the way for the development of sophisticated materials for energy application such as photovoltaics, fuel cells and thermoelectrics.

"The perception is that this is an individual honor, but I see it as a recognition for the university and the decades of wonderful people who I've been able to work with," said Segalman, referring to her collaborators, colleagues, mentors, students and supportive staff. "I also believe our selection is a testament to UCSB's collaborative culture for creating an environment that allows scientists and students to be inspired together and pursue research in new directions."

Segalman's lab participates in numerous collaborative research groups at UCSB through the Materials Research Laboratory, the Mitsubishi Chemical Center for Advanced Materials, and the Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies. Her research group also partners with researchers at UCSB and other institutions through Synthetic Control Across Length-Scales for Advancing Rechargeables (SCALAR), the Center for Materials for Water and Energy Systems (M-WET), and the BioPolymers, Automated Cellular Infrastrucutre, Flow and Integrated Chemistry Materials Innovation Platform (BioPACIFIC MIP).

A recipient of multiple honors throughout her career, Segalman also is an elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) and the American Physical Society (APS). Her additional awards include the prestigious Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government to early-career scientists and engineers; the National Science Foundation's Early CAREER Award; and the Dillon Medal from APS. Segalman received her bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and her Ph.D. in chemical engineering from UCSB.

Hawker's research activities focus on synthetic polymer chemistry, integrating cross-disciplinary studies to develop nanostructured materials having unique physical and mechanical properties for applications in biomaterials and energy research. His groundbreaking work has formed the basis for more than eighty U.S. patents and ten start-up companies. A number of these companies have developed drugs to improve the quality of life for people who suffer from chronic kidney disease (CKD). Last year, he received the American Chemical Society's Kathryn C. Hach Award for Entrepreneurial Success in recognition of his "innovative leadership in creating, developing and commercializing revolutionary polymer-based therapeutics and personal care products through multiple successful start-up companies."

"I am thrilled by this honor, especially when I think about all of the people over the years who made this happen, including Ed Kramer, who was Rachel's graduate advisor at UCSB and a huge reason why I joined the faculty at UCSB," said Hawker, who is also an elected fellow of the Royal Society, the National Academy of Inventors and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. "Our election reflects the university's status as a leader in materials and polymer science. It also shows UCSB's unique collaborative culture where great science and engineering are built on a tradition of working across boundaries. The sum is certainly greater than any individual research success."

Hawker received a bachelor's degree in chemistry from the University of Queensland, and his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, after which he completed postdoctoral research at Cornell University. He joined UCSB in 2004 after a decade as a researcher with IBM.

Individuals in the newly elected class will be formally inducted during the NAE's annual meeting on October 3, 2021.

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BUFFALO, Minn.  A man was in custody after a shooting at a health clinic outside of Minneapolis on Tuesday that left one person dead and four more injured, the authorities in Buffalo, Minn., said.

The shooting sent a wave of panic through residents of the tight-knit community, who were devastated that health care workers  already under siege over 11 months of a pandemic  were now contending with violence at work. By midafternoon, a suspect was in custody, a man with a history of grievances that authorities said they had known of for years.

It is heart-wrenching to see the violence that occurred today in Buffalo in a place Minnesotans go to heal, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota wrote on Twitter.

The shooting took place at the Allina Clinic Crossroads in Buffalo, a city of about 16,000 residents about 40 miles northwest of Minneapolis. The clinic provides health screenings, child vaccinations and primary care, among other services, according to its website.
Most of us forgot to celebrate, but Australias national paid parental leave scheme turned 10 years old on January 1. You blink, and theyre all grown up, right? Well, right  but also wrong.

Its well worth celebrating a decade of paid leave for working parents  lets face it, usually mums. But the scheme still has a way to go before its fully fledged.

First, the good news.

Illustration: Dionne Gain Credit:

In 2010, the Rudd government announced a historic national reform to grant 18 weeks paid leave  at the minimum wage  to the eligible primary caregivers of babies born on or after January 1, 2011. Before that, there was the baby bonus, initially a lump-sum cash payment to all new mothers, regardless of income. The bonus was later means-tested and paid fortnightly, then phased out with the introduction of the paid parental leave, or PPL, scheme. In 2013, a further dad and partner payment was introduced to give the partners of eligible PPL recipients two weeks of leave, again paid at the minimum wage.
Bielamowicz, for one, has discovered the benefits of a little public exposure. Last month, as he and his partner were considering whether to throw in the towel, a local newspaper columnist wrote about their tribulations. The company was immediately overwhelmed by orders from school nurses, cancer patients and essential workers, many of whom said they had given up on finding N95 masks.
New Delhi, Feb 10 : With Valentines Day round the corner, romance is in the air and on OTT platforms too. From new-age love stories to heartbreaking saga, there are many romantic titles lined up for release.

Here are the titles releasing around February 14, which promise to take you on a ride full of emotion.

To All The Boys: Always And Forever

The final film in the romantic franchise, To All The Boys, will release on February 12. The franchise featuring Noah Centineo and Lana Condor is based on Jenny Han's bestselling trilogy following high schooler Lara Jean's romantic entanglements. The final part shows Condor's Lara Jean preparing for the end of high school, as she re-imagines what life with her family, friends, and Peter (played by Centineo) will look like after graduation. The film will release on Netflix.

Life In A Year

The film follows 17-year-old Daryn who finds out that his girlfriend is dying. He sets out to give her an entire lifetime's joy in the last year that she has left. Directed by Mitja Okorn, and written by Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews, the film stars Cara Delevingne, Cuba Gooding Jr., and Nia Long. It premieres on Amazon Prime Video on February 14.

The Map Of Tiny Perfect Things

The science-fiction rom-com follows the story of two teens who are stuck in an endless loop, and fall in love with each other. It stars Kyle Allen and Kathryn Newton. It will be released on Amazon Prime Video on February 12.

The Big Day

The Netflix series follows six engaged couples as they plan their lavish dream weddings. The series promises all the revelry, dance and emotions, while taking a look at India's multibillion-dollar wedding industry. It will be released on February 14.

Namaste Wahala

The Indo-Nigerian film narrates an interracial romance with humorous and heart-wrenching hiccups. Directed by Hamisha Daryani Ahuja, the film stars Ruslaan Mumtaz and Ini Dima-Okojie. It will be released on Valentine's Day on Netflix.

Girls Hostel

From romance to complexities of relationships, the series will explore the everyday lives of four students, as they come together to deal with their own personal issues. The show features Srishti Shrivastava, Shreya Mehta, Ahsaas Channa, Parul Gulati, and Simran Natekar in lead. It will be released on SonyLIV on February 19.

Crashh

The series tells the tale of four siblings, who were separated at a very young age after their parents died in a horrible crash. It's a story how their lives are interconnected. The show stars actors Aditi Sharma, Anushka Sen, Zain Imam, Kunj Anand and Rohan Mehra. It will release on February 14 on Alt Balaji and Zee5.

Latest updates on Valentine's Day 2021

-- Syndicated from IANS
A flight student and instructor were forced to make an emergency landing on the Pennsylvania Turnpike Monday evening during a cross-country flight out of Trenton, the planes owner told PennLive.

The single-engine Cessna 172, better known as the Skyhawk, landed around 6:30 p.m. on the westbound side between the Lebanon-Lancaster and Harrisburg east exits, authorities said. No one was injured, but the plane was damaged by two tractor-trailers after it landed on the highway, officials said.

Mustang Sally Aviation, LLC owns the plane, and managing member Keith Furlong said the pilots did a wonderful job in carrying out a textbook emergency landing.

In a statement, the Federal Aviation Administration said local authorities would release the identities and medical conditions of the people aboard the plane.

The bottom line is they landed the aircraft safely on the turnpike, and there was no damage done to the aircraft when they landed on the turnpike, Furlong said in a phone interview with PennLive. Thats what pilots are trained to do.

READ MORE: Very lucky pilot unhurt after landing plane on Pa. Turnpike, getting hit by tractor-trailers

Furlong said the Cessna was manufactured in 2006 and is the most popular training aircraft in the world. He said the student and instructor were completing a cross-country trip from Trenton-Mercer Airport to an unknown destination Monday when they were forced to land.

Mustang Sally Aviation provides planes for people of a variety of backgrounds, including ex-military members, aspiring career pilots, or those who just want to learn to fly in their free time, Furlong said.

The accident ratio is one per million flight hours, which is a lot of time. Its by far the safest training plane out there, he said, adding that landings of this kind only happen about every three to five years.

A variety of issues could have caused the emergency landing, Furlong said, but the reason remains unclear.

Mark Sites, who described himself as a first responder with the Pennsylvania Turnpike, was at the landing site Monday night and said the plane would need to be disassembled for removal from the highway. Furlong said the plane will be taken to a training school in Trenton.

Authorities are not sure what forced the plane to make the emergency landing. The Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board are investigating.
FAIRFAX, Va., Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- CGI (NYSE: GIB) (TSX: GIB.A) announced the launch of the CGI OnCue360 solution for the State of Michigan, where the platform will be used to ensure regulatory compliance with CARES Act pandemic relief funding and track information about grant spending for local and regional program managers state-wide.

"This new tool from CGI puts us in a strong position to help us meet federal reporting requirements and make sure we are doing our part to track the necessary data," said Ruth Schwartz, Director of the SIGMA office in Michigan. "The OnCue360 tool was implemented within our current platform and provides us with another helpful mechanism for living up to the CARES Act regulations."

"We are proud to work alongside our Michigan partners to help ensure compliance with new federal mandates designed to protect the integrity of CARES Act funds," said Stephen Arrants, Vice-President, CGI. "CGI OnCue360 is a powerful tool in the hands of municipal, county and state program managers who are required to serve as responsible stewards of these vital public resources."

Cloud-based CGI OnCue360 is a mobile regulatory enforcement and data-collection solution that allows smartphones, tablets and desktop computers to capture and report information from the field in real time. It provides the ability to record and track data, electronic signatures and digital photographs, and includes a robust web interface to schedule and manage appointments. Information collected by Michigan officials will help ensure compliance with recent CARES Act regulations issued by the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

About CGI

Founded in 1976, CGI is among the largest independent IT and business consulting services firms in the world. With 76,000 consultants and other professionals across the globe, CGI delivers an end-to-end portfolio of capabilities, from strategic IT and business consulting to systems integration, managed IT and business process services and intellectual property solutions. CGI works with clients through a local relationship model complemented by a global delivery network that helps clients digitally transform their organizations and accelerate results. CGI Fiscal 2020 reported revenue is C$12.16 billion and CGI shares are listed on the TSX (GIB.A) and the NYSE (GIB). Learn more at cgi.com .

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The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
Im a big fan of the filibuster. One of the moving principles of American democracy is that the majority should never be allowed to run roughshod over the minority. Even people on the losing end of a political debate have a place at the table. The Senate filibuster is one element of that.

But I am also a fan of responsible government. The flip side of minority power in American democracy is that the minority behave responsibly and act as a loyal opposition. This means actual engagement, and its the exact opposite of simply killing off any legislation your constituents dont like.

Senate Republicans often say you cant ignore 74 million voters. Thats true. But you cant ignore 81 million voters, either. Im not crazy about all of President Joe Bidens agenda, and parts of it are really bad ideas. But, just as Biden deserves a Senate vote on his Cabinet nominations even if Republicans dont love them, he deserves a Senate vote on the legislative program he campaigned on, whether Republicans love all of it or not. Biden won the election, and his campaign proposals have earned a full measure of congressional attention. Anything else would be profoundly undemocratic.

Filibuster should not be GOP default

If Senate Republicans want to preserve the legislative filibuster, its fate is in their hands. For the past several years, Republicans have used the filibuster as an easy way to kill proposals that they didnt like, or that would force them to cast politically difficult votes. This has to stop. It would be unwise for Republicans to rely on Senate Democrats like West Virginia swing vote Joe Manchin to defend their right to block legislation simply because they can.

The filibuster must be used responsibly as a last resort rather than as the Republican default position. We cant continue on the path we are on. When the dust settles, either the Party of No will be dead or the filibuster will be.

The $15-an-hour minimum wage is a perfect test case for this new ethic of responsibility. While there are efforts to squeeze it in under the reconciliation procedure and avoid the threat of a filibuster, Biden admits it will probably have to be passed as a stand-alone bill. And even some Democrats have their doubts about the project.

Story continues

US Capitol Building on Feb. 3, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

As they should, because the $15 minimum wage is a ridiculous idea. The only reason Fight for $15! was invented was because some organizers back in 2012 needed to come up with a good chant for a protest rally by striking fast-food workers. They could have just as easily settled on Fight for $14! but I suppose that doesnt roll off the tongue as well.

Even so, raising the minimum wage is not a ridiculous idea, nor is it a liberal or conservative one. It has been raised about two dozen times since its inception in 1938, the last time in 2009 under a law signed by President George W. Bush, a Republican, in 2007. In 2021 dollars, the federal minimum wage has ranged from a low of $4.25 in 1948 to a high of $12.19 in 1968.

Trump's voters: Don't dismiss Trump's economic voters as Capitol attackers waving Confederate flags

In short, theres a perfectly reasonable policy discussion to be had about raising the minimum wage. If progressives want $15 an hour, its up to them to pony up the analysis rather than just wave their hands about economic justice and living wages. And Republicans who oppose the idea need to argue the facts rather than using the filibuster to shut down the discussion.

Minimum wage a negotiable number

And there is plenty of room for compromise because there are facts to be argued on both sides. The Congressional Budget Office just reported that while a $15 minimum wage would obviously result in substantial wage increases for many, it would also eliminate 1.4 million jobs by 2025 and increase the federal deficit by $54 billion over 10 years.

Even Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a top proponent, wants to raise the wage over five years rather than immediately.

Unless you're coming up with protest chants, there's nothing sacred about a specific minimum wage number, and its not a fight to the death. The current $7.25 minimum wage was equal to about $8.80 in today's dollars when it took effect in 2009. Eventually, the involved parties should weigh the economic trade-offs and settle on a number that makes people of all political stripes minimally unhappy. Thats the way a functional democracy works.

Erase structural racism: 5 steps Joe Biden can take to make U.S. laws, policies more just

And that is the test. Progressives have their aspirations, as they should, but they need to be willing to work with  and listen to  Republicans on this specific issue without dragging every political fight over the past 20 years into the mix. Republicans need to do the same while accepting that, when it comes to this kind of ordinary, work-a-day business, they cant take their ball and go home if they dont like what they hear. Filibustering a minimum wage increase because you think the number coming to the Senate floor is 40 cents too high is irresponsible.

Once upon a time, that was the way Congress, and especially the Senate, worked. Nobody knows that better than Joe Biden, and if anybody can foster that sense of shared responsibility, its him. It might disappoint a lot of people on both sides, and it makes a lousy protest chant, but Settle for $12.85 phased in over six years! is what democracy sounds like.

Republican Chris Truax, an appellate lawyer in San Diego, is a legal adviser for The Guardrails of Democracy Project, CEO of CertifiedVoter.com and a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.

You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @usatodayopinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter. To respond to a column, submit a comment to letters@usatoday.com.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Irresponsible Republicans could force Democrats to kill the filibuster
Russian Government Warns Business Of US Cyber Attack

The Russian government has issued a cyber security warning to local organisations they say are at risk of US reprisals for the latest SolarWinds assaults.

The warning comes from the National Coordination Center for Computer Incidents (NKTsKI), an agency created in 2018 by KGB successor the Federal Security Service (FSB). It said that the US government had threatened to carry out retaliatory attacks on Russian critical infrastructure following the large-scale cyber espionage campaign which the Kremlin has waged on US government and other organisations in the past year.

The fifteen-point advisory issued by NKTsKI recommends updating incident response plans, correctly configuring security tools, training users on how to spot phishing, avoiding third-party DNS servers and using multi-factor authentication. Also,application controls, firewalls, updated passwords, email security and prompt patching.



The US accused Russia for the SolarWinds attacks, after it emerged that Kremlin-sponsored operatives had performed a major spying operation on government departments including the Department of Justice, the State Department and the Treasury. The White House Press Secretary has said the US reserves the right to respond at a time and manner of our choosing to any cyber-attack.

President Biden now has the delicate task of seeking cooperation with Russia over arms treaties but a way to punish the Kremlin for this cyber-attack and other pressing issues.

Reports suggest he has given the intelligence community the task of investigating four key areas:

The SolarWinds attack.

Possible interference in the 2020 election.

Efforts to muzzle Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

A bounty program to pay Taliban fighters in Afghanistan for killing US troops.

The earliest awareness of the attack on the US was from the experts at the FireEye cybersecurity firm which found itself under attack from hackers it thought were working for Russia. Their investigation revealed that the same hackers were able to monitor internal email traffic at the US Treasury and Commerce departments and other departments.

The hackers are thought to have used hacks that got into software updates released by the SolarWinds IT company, which serves government customers across the executive branch, the military, and the intelligence services.

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Irish street artist Fin DAC is working on artwork in this undated photo. / Courtesy of Fin DAC



By Kang Hyun-kyung



For Irish artist Finbarr Notte, the city is a huge canvas to fill in with his art. He began to view the concrete jungle as a space for his art in 2005 when he worked in digital advertising in central London. Back then, graffiti and street art were part of everyday life, inspiring young artistic souls like him to consider becoming an urban artist.



But then in 2008, legendary street artist Banksy held the Cans Festival street art event in London, inviting artists from around the world to exhibit their works. It was then that the idea cemented in Notte's head to become a street artist.



In his early years, painting walls with graffiti was not appreciated. It was illegal, so he hid behind the alias, "DAC," at first. But as acceptance of street art has increased in his country, the alias has become more like a penname rather than to protect his anonymity.



When asked to define street art in comparison to gallery art, Notte, now better known as Fin DAC, said he doesn't do definitions.



"Today' definitions become tomorrow's dogmas," he told The Korea Times during a recent interview. "For me, street art has always been about freedom from those definitions and parameters that are often present in the gallery world."



Fin DAC is a rebel and nonconformist. He defies the accepted visual language of street art and calls it "urban aesthetics." One of his most common street art subjects is Asian women.

With his uniquely delicate spraypainting style, the self-taught Irish street artist has been recreating urban spaces with Asian beauty. Korean women wearing hanbok or traditional clothing, as well as Chinese and Japanese women, have been his models.



He said that Asian beauty was misrepresented in the West and that some Westerners' perceptions of Asian women are a reflection of their inadequate understanding of Asian culture and heritage.





He recently collaborated with renowned British photographer Mick Rock for the art project, MIDARO, arranged by British fine art gallery West Contemporary. Using Rock's iconic images of David Bowie, Debbie Harry, Lou Reed and Iggy Pop, the global release will be four different versions of limited-edition prints, each in an edition of 51, to celebrate the number of Rock's years in the industry. West Contemporary will also release 12 limited-edition signed photo prints curated from Rock's archive for the collaboration. All prints will be available for purchase from March 2 at west-contemporary-editions.com .



Below is a transcript of his recent Korea Times interview.









Q: What does your pseudonym Fin DAC stand for and what does it mean?



A: DAC stands for Dragon Armory Creative. It was the name of my portfolio website long before I became an artist. My original dragon logo was designed for that, and in my early days, the idea was that the logo would be my identity. I'd sign my illegal street work with the logo and no name, so there would be an air of mystery to it all. But quite soon after I got into street art, the scene started to change and there were more legal opportunities to paint walls, so the need for anonymity was eradicated.



Q: What is your definition of street art? How is it different from gallery art?



A: I don't do definitions. Today's definitions become tomorrow's dogmas. For me, street art has always been about freedom from those definitions and parameters that are often present in the gallery world.



Q: Why was it Asian beauty that fascinated you, not European or American beauty? How would you compare Asian beauty with European or North American counterpart?



A: There was and is no fascination. I see myself as a xenophile who's curious about the variety and differences in all cultures and countries, appreciative of those differences and saddened by the loss or misunderstanding of them in the modern world. Making comparisons demands those differences. My decision to focus mainly on the depiction of Asian women was more to do with  what seemed to me to be  a serious lack of positive representation, and the idea that the work I did could counteract or counterbalance overly objectified depictions that were or are the norm.





This image capture from Galeries Bartoux shows Fin DAC's work of Korean woman.



Q: Who or what has inspired you to work on projects depicting Korean women? Is there a certain message you'd like to present through your work?



A: I've done numerous works featuring both Korean women and traditional clothing. Regardless of the culture I'm depicting, that depiction comes from a genuine inquisitiveness and desire for understanding. If there's any message, it's simply to highlight traditions and culture that are being lost to Westernization, and to depict women who are strong and proud of themselves, their culture and heritage. My focus when visiting any country is to try and understand that culture from the inside and not just what's exported for Western taste. Of course, I still imbue my work with my own slant, but hopefully that doesn't detract from the original culture and traditions.



Q: Regarding Asian beauty, do you see any striking or subtle differences among Asian women as objects of your project? How do Korean, Chinese and Japanese women differ from one another when you depict them?



A: Seeing my muses as "objects of my project" is specifically what I don't do. My muses are an integral part of my work and what inspires me is their uniqueness and individuality. Part of the problem with the Western gaze and Orientalism is that it tends to lump cultures and ethnicities together even if there are only vague similarities. Lots of my works are referred to as "Geishas" regardless of the particular Asian culture or c0untry the subject matter is derived from. This simplistic worldview leads to continued ignorance and negative stereotypes. If I can impact that in a positive way, then that's a great thing.



Q: When did you start to become fascinated with street art? Were there any particular people, events or experiences that inspired you to become a street artist?



A: I started working in digital advertising around 2005, working in central London and taking train journeys every day. Street art and graffiti were just part of the fabric of everyday life. All my work buddies were in their early 20s, so super enthusiastic about it all and it just rubbed off on me. But it was the Cans Festival in Waterloo that really cemented the idea in my head that I could be a part of it as an artist.





Fin DAC / Courtesy of Fin DAC
The SDLP has called on Secretary of State Brandon Lewis and Finance Minister Conor Murphy to urgently sit down and hammer out a solution on the Troubles payment scheme so victims finally receive a pension.

South Down MLA Colin McGrath was speaking after the Court of Appeal ruled that the Executive Office has a legal duty to fund the pension scheme.

London and Belfast have been at loggerheads over who will pay the estimated 800m cost of financial support for those severely injured in the Troubles.

Mr McGrath, who chairs the Executive Office Committee, said: "It is welcome that the court has set a four-week deadline for the Executive and British Government to find a solution, but it is regrettable that it was forced to do so.

"While the British Government clearly must meet their financial commitments to this scheme, the public row between the Secretary of State and Finance Minister is unedifying and serves to retraumatise victims and survivors.

"Ministers (must) get around the table and agree a solution that allows these payments to be made urgently. Victims and survivors should not be forced to wait any longer."

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Labour shadow secretary of state Louise Haigh said: "It is disgraceful that the issue of funding has not been resolved, and victims should never have been put in this position.

"The Secretary of State must now meet urgently with the Justice Minister and commit to funding the initial cost of the scheme. Applications are due to start next month and are already long-overdue. Victims must not wait a moment longer."

First Minister Arlene Foster said it was a reassuring ruling for innocent victims.

"It is disappointing that Sinn Fein ministers blocked and delayed this scheme," she said.

"Whilst the payments will be made from the Northern Ireland Executive, there is a strong argument that the Government should be increasing (our) budget accordingly to fund the pension.

"Some of the eligible claimants live outside Northern Ireland. I have been pressing this with the Government and we need to see action."

Sinn Fein MLA Linda Dillon said that Stormont didn't have the money to fund the pension.

"There are pressing questions to be asked of British Secretary of State Brandon Lewis," she said.

"Why, after five months, has he yet to respond to a request for a meeting from the First and Deputy First Minister, Justice Minister and Finance Minister to address the issue of finances?"

Ulster Unionist MLA Doug Beattie accused the Executive Office of acting shamefully. "I have to question why it seems so content to be repeatedly embarrassed in the courts. This ruling represents the latest abject failure in meeting the needs of injured Troubles victims. The victims have acted with grace and dignity and have yet again been let down."

TUV leader Jim Allister said: "I believe Sinn Fein politics of 'who gets' the pension was a greater impediment than 'who pays', but now the time for feet-dragging is over.

"My message to Stormont, and particularly Sinn Fein, is simple: 'Stop the politicking, respect innocent victims and get them paid.'"

The case was taken by Brian Turley, one of the 'Hooded Men', who suffered inhuman and degrading treatment by the British Army in 1971.

Kenny Donaldson of Innocent Victims United said: "We believe that Dublin should contribute to the victims' payment scheme as well as London and Stormont. There were two states involved in the Troubles.

"Many terrorist attacks were mounted from the Republic of Ireland. Also, under the current scheme, victims of the Dublin and Monaghan bombs, and others, won't be eligible for payment."
[February 10, 2021] Yamaha Launching Demonstration Project for Online Tours of Sights in Japan

HAMAMATSU, Japan, Feb. 10, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Yamaha Corporation has developed the online "Video Tour" and "Remote Tour" programs, both of which make it possible for people to enjoy seeing spots in Japan remotely and safely from their homes. The company is holding a demonstration project for the online tours in February. Furthermore, demonstrations of the new "Audio Guide/Explanatory Guide" application (*), which can be used safely to reduce the risk of COVID-19 infection in museum and elsewhere, will also be conducted in preparation for the resumption of inbound travel to Japan. The demonstration project is being carried out as part of the project to strengthen the profitability of arts and culture on consignment from the Cultural Affairs Agency, in connection with the agency's Strategic Project to Create Culture and the Arts for fiscal 2020. Details of the agency's project are available on its dedicated website: https://bunka-syueki.jp/ Note:

(*) The demonstration of the "Audio Guide/Explanatory Guide" application is conducted with people residing in Japan. After the demonstration, Yamaha will consider making the application usable at other facilities including those outside Japan. Image1: https://kyodonewsprwire.jp/prwfile/release/M100577/202102090790/_prw_PI1fl_sc4Zm46k.png



Overview 1. "Video Tour/Remote Tour" for anyone to enjoy from home

Yamaha offers two types of tours one can take to enjoy sightseeing from home without going out. "Video Tour" makes it possible to enjoy visiting various locations on video with multi-language subtitles and several interactive functions. "Remote Tour" allows people to enjoy traveling in Japan through real-time video. Furthermore, participants can send applause and cheers to the venues visited and/or send tips to them just by tapping the buttons on their smartphones while enjoying the "Remote Tour." This function is powered by Yamaha's original technology "Remote Cheerer." One can take part in both types of tours through the "OMOTENASHI GUIDE" application. Example of "Video Tour" and "Remote Tour" (for illustration purposes only):

https://kyodonewsprwire.jp/prwfile/release/M100577/202102090790/_prw_PI2fl_qxOaiAC2.png 2. Multi-language "Audio Guide/Explanatory Guide" for use at spots Yamaha will also conduct the demonstration (*) of its new "Audio Guide/Explanation Guide," which can be used safely to avoid the risk of COVID-19 infection in museums and elsewhere. Providing audio guidance via visitors' smartphones helps reduce physical contact, which could be caused by sharing dedicated rental devices, as well as close contact among visitors that could otherwise be made if the guide gives them vocal explanations nearby. This function can be used by launching the "OMOTENASHI GUIDE" application at each facility. (*) Please refer to the previous note. Image2: https://kyodonewsprwire.jp/prwfile/release/M100577/202102090790/_prw_PI3fl_gjG6SN48.png For more information, please visit the following websites: OMOTENASHI GUIDE powered by SoundUD:

http://omotenashiguide.jp/en/ Remote Cheerer powered by SoundUD:

https://soundud.org/en/serviceinfo/remote-cheering-system-remote-cheerer-powered-by-soundud-beta/ The demonstration project's dedicated website: https://bunka-syueki.jp/ SOURCE Yamaha Corporation

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This Chicago based tech startup lets you send messages, flowers and gifts to loved ones long after you're gone.

CHICAGO, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- CircleIt, a futuristic technology that gives users the ability to send cards, media and gifts to loved ones across time, announced today it has surpassed 1 million downloads. While less than a year old, CircleIt is seeing a big surge in global demand. Since January 1, 2021, we have nearly tripled our user base with over 650,000 downloads in 167 countries.

Art Shaikh, CircleIt Founder, shares "today is truly a day for celebration; the technology that was inspired by my father's gift of handmade cards left behind after his passing is now in the hands of families around the world." Shaikh's father passed away in 2012 and left letters, cards and gifts for him to deliver to family members on future holidays and occasions. It's this unique sentiment that inspired Shaikh to launch CircleIt.

"With CircleIt, you can send cards to any future date and time. For example, I can schedule a card full of wisdom and well wishes to my 4-year-old niece for her future wedding day - possibly decades from now. All I have to do is select the occasion, even if I don't know the actual date, and our smart technology will take care of the rest."

This modern solution to legacy preservation has been well-received around the world. "Families have been finding their own ways of storing memories and preserving their heritage for generations," says Shaikh, "I've had people contact me - saying how their family has an old chest of pictures, recipes, books, memorabilia and documents that go back years. And now they can ensure their family history continues to live on [digitally] for generations." Shaikh adds "and with the addition of our future gifting functionality, you can order flowers and gifts to be delivered to your loved ones from beyond the grave." From a mother with cancer crafting messages containing life-long advice to her young children to a grandfather with early onset Alzheimer's scheduling messages and gifts to be delivered years down the road - the possibilities are endless.

Sending gifts and messages to loved ones from beyond the grave isn't exactly new. Whether it's a wife receiving flowers on Valentine's Day each year after her husband's passing, or a daughter getting flowers from her father years after he had passed, families have long looked for ways to connect with their loved ones after they're gone. With CircleIt, there's now a centralized place for people to preserve their memories and facilitate gift and flower deliveries for years to come, Shaikh said, which is something you can't find from traditional social media and other communication platforms. "Every technology of today is bound by time. Everything is now, now, now. It's for the likes," he said. "There's not a single technology out there to safeguard your legacy for generations."

Through patented technology, CircleIt enables the creation and scheduling of chat messages, cards and physical gifts to be delivered at any future date. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Art Shaikh and his team have big plans for future releases of CircleIt. "We want our users to grow with us. Our goal is to become the global go-to platform for legacy planning, preservation and fulfillment."

This one-million milestone comes in the wake of a recent press surge surrounding the Chicago-based startup's unique solution to a global problem. Chicago Inno quotes Shaikh comparing CircleIt to a North American greeting card giant, "we're [like] Hallmark for the 21st century."1 With media requests coming in daily, Shaikh has recently made appearances on various podcasts and radio networks such as the Dougy Center's Grief Out Loud Podcast andChicago-based WGN, continuing to tell his touching story and spread the gift of CircleIt to families around the world.

ABOUT CIRCLEIT

CircleIt, available in App Store and Google Play was inspired by the story of a unique gift left from beyond the grave. The family of CircleIt founder, Art Shaikh, was left with gifts from his father to be delivered after he passed. "My father left us a box full of handmade cards, treasured memories, meaningful trinkets, candid stories and cultivated wisdom - meant to be shared among family and stored for future generations."

CircleIt was built to replicate this unique gift he left behind for his family - a gift that continually reminds his family of his love and allows him to be there to celebrate milestones and inspire future generations even after he was gone. Shaikh shares that "CircleIt was built for my mother to help carry on his legacy. Built so that others can experience the joy it has given all of us. Built in memory of my father, Arif Shaikh."

CircleIt, founded in 2018, is a Chicago-based startup with 17 employees. The startup has raised $2 million to date, but Shaikh is in the process of raising a $15 million Series A round, which is likely to close in March. Shaikh previously worked at Salesforce, leaving the company in May to dedicate his life to delivering CircleIt to the world.

For more information, visit https://circleit.com/

Media Reference:

https://www.facebook.com/justcircleit/

https://www.instagram.com/justcircleit/?hl=en

Featured Video: https://youtu.be/Tx6aYt0sCR8

Contact Information:

Samantha Ruffolo

CircleIt

312.838.4948

hello@circleit.io

SOURCES

1https://www.bizjournals.com/chicago/inno/stories/profiles/2021/01/20/circleit-sends-gifts-to-loved-ones-after-you-die.html

Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tx6aYt0sCR8
New Delhi, Feb 10 : The Supreme Court on Wednesday stayed the Andhra Pradesh High Court order, questioning the wisdom of the state legislature, the government, the Chief Minister and advocates representing the state.

A bench, headed by Chief Justice S.A. Bobde and comprising Justices A.S. Bopanna and V. Ramasubramanian, after hearing submissions by senior advocate Sajan Poovayya, representing Andhra Pradesh, said: "Issue notice. In the meantime, there shall be stay of operation of the impugned order(s) of the High Court." On December 30 last year, the High Court had passed an order after the government filed an application seeking recusal of the judge stating he had prejudged the issue even without hearing the government.

"The court, instead of addressing the issue at hand, has chosen to travel completely beyond the scope and has proceeded to castigate the wisdom of the legislature, the government, the Chief Minister as well as the advocates representing the government," said the state government in its plea through advocate Mahfooz Ahsan Nazki.

The state government argued that the observations made in the order are completely uncalled for and grossly misconceived and are therefore liable to be set aside forthwith.

The government's plea said the bench presided by the same judge on October 1, last year, posed a question as to why the court should not declare that there is a constitutional break down of state machinery. However, the top court stayed this order on December 18 last year.

The state government cited the observations made by the judge during the hearing of the case, including: "How could the government auction the properties of the state, had government become bankrupt to auction government properties, we will declare there is breakdown of constitutional machinery in the state and hand over administration to the Central government." The state government said besides rejecting the application for recusal, the High Court judge proceeded to make various unconnected and uncalled for observations. "This state has been burdened with this unceremonious task only in view of the nature of the impugned order, which, it is most respectfully submitted, is completely unwarranted, unprecedented and therefore, completely unsustainable," it said.
Donald Trump was "screaming" at his TV during his lawyer Bruce Castor's meandering opening statement at his impeachment trial, reports say.

The ex-president was unhappy with the start made by his defence team his historic second impeachment trial in the US Senate, according to CNN.

"Multiple people tell me Trump was basically screaming as Castor made a meandering opening argument that struggled to get at the heart of the defence team's argument," said CNN's chief White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins.

The former president watched the start of the impeachment trial on Newsmax at his Mar-a-Lago estate and reportedly grew frustrated at his lawyer's presentation after the emotional opening given by House impeachment managers.

"President Trump was not happy with the performance of his legal team in action, one person familiar with his thinking told Politico.

At one point Newsmax cut away from the trial for punditry from Mr Trump's former impeachment lawyer, Alan Dershowitz.

"I have no idea what he is doing, said Mr Dershowitz said about Mr Castor.

The American people are entitled to an argument  but this, just, after all kinds of very strong presentations on the part of the House managers  it does not appear to me to be effective advocacy.

Republican Senators were also seemingly unimpressed with what they had seen.

I thought the president's lawyer, the first lawyer, just rambled on and on and on and didn't really address the constitutional argument. That was not one of the finest I've seen," said Senator John Cornyn of Texas.

Senator Susan Collins of Maine was also "perplexed" with Mr Trump's defence lawyer.

"He did not seem to make any arguments at all, which was an unusual approach to take," she told reporters.

Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy said Mr Trumps team did a terrible job and was disorganised, random and did everything they could but to talk about the question at hand.

In response to the criticism, Mr Castor told reporters, "We had a good day."
The Associated Press

A spacecraft from the United Arab Emirates swung into orbit around Mars on Tuesday in a triumph for the Arab worlds first interplanetary mission. Mission controllers at the UAEs space center in Dubai announced that the unmanned craft, called Amal, Arabic for Hope, reached the end of its nearly seven-month, 300-million-mile journey and began circling the red planet, where it will gather detailed data on Mars atmosphere. The orbiter fired its main engines for 27 minutes in an intricate, high-stakes maneuver that slowed the craft enough for it to be captured by Mars gravity.

After the engine firing, it took a nail-biting 15 minutes or so for the signal confirming success to reach Earth. Ground controllers rose their feet and broke into applause. Tensions were high: Over the years, Mars has been the graveyard for a multitude of missions from various countries.

Two more unmanned spacecraft from the US and China are following close behind, set to arrive at Mars over the next several days. All three missions were launched in July to take advantage of the close alignment of Earth and Mars.

Amals arrival puts the UAE in a league of just five space agencies in history that have pulled off a functioning Mars mission. As the countrys first venture beyond Earths orbit, the flight is a point of intense pride for the oil-rich nation as it seeks a future in space.

An ebullient Mohammed bin Zayed, the UAEs day-to-day ruler, was on hand at mission control and said: Congratulations to the leadership and people of the UAE for the indescribable joy of the arrival at Mars.

About 60% of all Mars missions have ended in failure, crashing, burning up or otherwise falling short in a testament to the complexity of interplanetary travel and the difficulty of making a descent through Mars thin atmosphere.

A combination orbiter and lander from China is scheduled to reach the planet on Wednesday. It will circle Mars until the rover separates and attempts to land on the surface in May to look for signs of ancient life.

A rover from the U.S. named Perseverance is set to join the crowd next week, aiming for a landing Feb. 18. It will be the first leg in a decade-long U.S.-European project to bring Mars rocks back to Earth to be examined for evidence the planet once harbored microscopic life.

If it pulls this off, China will become only the second country to land successfully on Mars. The U.S. has done it eight times, the first almost 45 years ago. A NASA rover and lander are still working on the surface.

For the UAE, it was the countrys first venture beyond Earths orbit, making the flight a matter of intense national pride.

For days, landmarks across the UAE, including Burj Khalifa, the tallest tower on Earth, glowed red to mark Amals anticipated arrival. This year is the 50th anniversary of the countrys founding, casting even more attention on Amal.

The celestial weather station aimed for an exceptionally high Martian orbit of 13,670 miles by 27,340 miles (22,000 kilometers by 44,000 kilometers). It was set to join six spacecraft already operating around Mars: three U.S., two European and one Indian.

Amal had to perform a high-stakes series of turns and engine firings to maneuver into orbit and achieve what has eluded so many before.

Anything that slightly goes wrong and you lose the spacecraft, said Sarah al-Amiri, minister of state for advanced technology and the chair of the UAEs space agency.

The success represents a tremendous boost to the UAEs space ambitions. The countrys first astronaut rocketed into space in 2019, hitching a ride to the International Space Station with the Russians. Thats 58 years after the Soviet Union and the U.S. launched astronauts.

In developing Amal, the UAE chose to collaborate with more experienced partners instead of going it alone or buying the spacecraft elsewhere. Its engineers and scientists worked with researchers at the University of Colorado, the University of California at Berkeley and Arizona State University.
Grand Rivers Man Arrested on Burglary Charge

By West Kentucky Star Staff

LIVINGSTON COUNTY - An investigation into a complaint led to the arrest of a Grand Rivers man on Wednesday.A woman contacted the Livingston County Sheriff's Office on Tuesday, and said that a man had entered her home, went to a back bedroom, and began removing the floor.The man reportedly told the woman that he used to live there and was trying to retrieve something.After the woman confronted the man, he left but said that he would be back later.Deputies located the man, identified as 52-year-old Christopher Ford, and he was placed under arrest on a charge of second degree burglary.He was lodged in the McCracken County Jail.

A worker sets up direction signs in the empty halls of one of the mass COVID-19 vaccination sites as the wait for more doses to arrive continues, on Tuesday, Feb. 9, 2021, in Montreal. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ryan Remiorz
Republic Day violence: Another accused Iqbal Singh arrested

India

oi-Deepika S

New Delhi, Feb 10: Iqbal Singh, another accused in the Republic Day violence case, has been arrested by the Special Cell of Delhi Police. He was taken into the custody from Hoshiarpur in Punjab last night.

Thousands of protesting farmers who reached ITO from the Ghazipur border clashed with police. Many of them driving tractors reached the Red Fort and entered the monument, where the religious flag was also hoisted. Over 500 police personnel were injured and one protestors died.

At the Red Fort on January 26, several police personnel had fell or jumped tens of feet down a wall after being pushed to the edge by a marauding mob.

Twitter blocks portion of accounts, cites free speech | OneIndia News

After the January 26 violence, which had left over 500 security personnel injured and one protestor dead.
The foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) outbreak continues to leave meat vendors in the northern regions desperate and stranded.

The outbreak that was first detected in the Oshikoto region last December led to the restriction of animal movement in the northern regions, resulting in suppressed economic activities in the livestock sector. Meat traders, who have been making a living from selling raw and grilled meat (kapana) for years, say they are battling to earn a living and pay their workers, as they are now required to buy meat carcasses from as far as Grootfontein, and many cannot afford it.

Many meat vendors have closed, as locals can no longer slaughter their own cattle. A stroll around the popular Oshakati open market testifies to the negative effect the FMD restrictions have had on meat vendors, as many meat stalls are unoccupied. Those who have stayed on, bear the brunt of increased meat prices.

Rauna Iiyambo (41), a vendor at the Oshakati open market for more than 10 years, has been providing for her family by selling raw, fresh beef. Before the FMD outbreak, she could make at least N$1 500 a day and could source more meat for the next day's sale. She says this is not the case anymore.

"The meat has become scarce and when it is available, it is very expensive. Those of us who sell meat here have to wait until a Grootfontein farmer, who sells meat, makes his delivery rounds, and he is not here every day. So, when our supplies are finished we have to wait for his next visit, which can be a week later. We are seriously having a hard time. I am aware of the FMD outbreak in the region but I understand we have to have the animals vaccinated but the process is taking long. We are not making profit as we did before. They (government) should hurry up and vaccinate the animals so that business and life can get back to normal," said Iiyambo.

Another kapana vendor, Kashima Apono, also based at the Oshakati open market, shared Iiyambo's sentiments.

"I have been a vendor here selling meat for more than 15 years and I have made a living and sent my children to school with the money I make from selling meat. At the moment, we are not happy at all. The meat that is available at the markets has become expensive because those that sell know that we are desperate so they increased the prices. The local abattoir is even more expensive. This is just terrible, we have been out of business due to the Covid-19 pandemic and just as we got back to business, we are hit by this FMD outbreak," complained Apono.

Grootfontein-based livestock farmer Peter Visagie spends his week travelling across the northern regions of Oshana, Oshikoto, Ohangwena and the Kavango regions with a trailer filled with meat.

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"People are struggling to get meat because they are not allowed to slaughter and the meat is now more expensive. Before the outbreak, we sold a piece of beef to vendors for N$10, but we are now selling it for N$25, the head was N$150 now we sell it for N$300, while a calve was sold at N$6 000 but now you get it for N$15 000. I usually divide my time between Rundu and the north-central regions. One week here and one week there. It is an unfortunate situation that meat vendors are in and we also cannot reduce our prices because meat has become expensive," said Visagie.

Chief veterinarian Albertina Shikongo said although the ministry of health began livestock vaccination last month, starting in Kunene, Oshana, Oshikoto and Omusati regions, it does not have enough doses to cater to all animals in the affected regions.

"We do not currently have enough doses to vaccinate all animals in the affected areas at the same time, we are still procuring vaccines. We are aware of the economic impact on business activities related to livestock and we urge those affected to be a little patient," said Shikongo.
American student convicted of resistance to Moscow police ordered to undergo mental exam

   /  

13:57 10/02/2021

MOSCOW, February 10 (RAPSI)  The U.S. student Trevor Reed convicted of using violence against Moscow police has been ordered to undergo mental examination, the Moscow City Courts press service has told RAPSI.

In July 2020, Moscows Golovinsky District Court sentenced Reed to 9 years in penal colony. The court also recovered 100,000 rubles ($1,400) from the defendant in compensation for moral harm per injured person.

In 2019, Trevor being under the influence of alcohol resisted two Moscow police officers breaking uniform of one of them and beating another one.




Senator Ted Cruz has slammed Democrats as 'hypocrites' for their second impeachment push against Donald Trump, claiming they 'cheered on BLM and Antifa' while accusing Trump of inciting the fatal riot at the U.S. Capitol.

'The president's language at times is a little over heated. But if you look at the language he used, saying things like 'fight', saying things like 'go retake our country', if that is now incitement then we better prepare a long line to indict every candidate for office, anyone who's ever run,' Cruz said in an interview on Tuesday with Fox News host Sean Hannity.

'The president was careful to say that the protesters should be peaceful,' claimed Cruz, a Texas Republican, speaking after the first day of Trump's impeachment trial in the Senate.

He said that anyone who attacked police or engaged in violence during the January 6 riot should be harshly prosecuted, but argued that Democrats were unwilling to make the same demand of violent protesters on their own side.

Senator Ted Cruz has slammed Democrats as 'hypocrites' for their second impeachment of Donald Trump, claiming they 'cheered on BLM and Antifa' riots

Rioters storm the Capitol in Washington on January 6. Democrats accuse Trump of inciting the violence with his speech just prior to the attack

'If you engage in violence whether you're left wing or right wing, that's unacceptable. The difference is, the Democrats have been complete hypocrites on this, cheering on BLM and Antifa and apologizing for their violence,' said Cruz.

'We have had Democrats for a year, cheering on -- we have seen violence all of the country, we've seen riots all over the country,' Cruz said. 'What do the Democrats do, they cheered it on... They celebrated.'

Cruz singled out Vice President Kamala Harris, who tweeted out a call for donations to a bail fund for demonstrators in Minnesota.

'She raised money to pay for the bail, to bail out the violent criminals,' Cruz said.

Cruz was one of the members of Congress who supported Trump's attempt to challenge the slates of electors from several states during the joint session that was interrupted when the mob breached the Capitol.

His critics call him a member of the 'treason caucus' accused of inspiring the riot, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez even accused him in a tweet of 'trying to get me killed,' remarks the New York Democrat has refused to apologize for.

A left-wing demonstrator adds fuel to a burning barricade in an intersection in downtown Tacoma last month. Cruz accused Democrats of a double standard

In the interview on Tuesday, Cruz argued that the impeachment case being presented against Trump by House Democrats 'fails on the merits.'

'Nothing he said meets the legal standards for incitement. Incitement is very clear,' argued Cruz. 'Incitement is very clear and saying "go and attack."'

He said that remarks made by Democrats in the past come closer to meeting the standard for incitement, but that he felt it was all protected speech.

'We have the First Amendment, we have robust political speech, and people are entitled to be idiots,' he said.

Cruz called the impeachment trial 'political theater' that would be pointless without the votes needed to convict.

'I think today typified what we're going to see this week, which it reminded me of Shakespeare. It's full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,' he said.

On Tuesday, the Senate voted 56-44 to move forward with the impeachment trial, rejecting arguments from Trump's attorneys that it is unconstitutional

'We're going to see this week a whole lot of Democrats pounding the table and a lot of moralizing. And a lot of venting their hatred for Donald Trump.'

'This is going to be venting the id of the Democrats, and it's going to end with failure. It's going to end with Trump being acquitted,' Cruz added. 'The Democrats want a week of political theater raging at Donald Trump.'

On Tuesday, the Senate voted 56-44 to move forward with the impeachment trial, rejecting arguments from Trump's attorneys that it is unconstitutional to convict after a president leaves office.

Six Republicans sided with the Democrats in the vote, but the tally suggested that the trial will result in acquittal.

At least 16 Republicans would need to defect for a conviction, which requires a two-thirds majority of the Senate. A conviction could bar Trump from holding office in the future.
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1.3 tonnes of cocaine seized at Gioia Tauro port Drugs confiscated in three different operations

(ANSA) - ROME, FEB 10 - Finance police have seized over 1,3 tonnes of pure cocaine in three separate operations in the southern port of Gioia Tauro in the last week, sources said on Wednesday.



If the drugs had gotten through, they would have flooded the streets of Europe and generated revenues of around 260 million euros for the Calabrian-based 'Ndrangheta, the sources said.



(ANSA).





Greta Thunberg has come under attack for using her "bully pulpit" to wade into political issues, such as the farmers' protest in India, by Mohinder Gulati, former Chief Operating Officer, United Nations Sustainable Energy for All in his open letter to Thunberg.

International child rights activist Greta Thunberg has come under attack for using her bully pulpit to wade into political issues, such as the farmers protest in India. Mohinder Gulati, Former Chief Operating Officer, United Nations Sustainable Energy for All, has written a letter to Thunberg, which is also marked to the United Nations Secretary-General.

In his letter, Mr. Mohinder Gulati wrote about how his admiration for Greta had turned into disappointment. The letter said that his heart warmed up when he heard her in 2018 and 2019 because we had been advocating that the youth would drive the change for a better future, and you emerged as a torch bearer of that trust. He added that her well-earned bully pulpit to wade into political issues, such as farmers protest in India, were not as simple as she believed. In the letter, Mr. Gulati laid down the four key issues one should consider to form an informed opinion on the Farmers Protest.

The first key issue that Mr. Gulati identifies is emissions from burning crop residue. Mr. Gulati chastises Greta on her lack of knowledge on this issue.

The letter reads, Indian farmers, mostly around Delhi in the states of Punjab, Haryana, and Uttar Pradesh, burn about 100 million tons (Mt) a year of crop residue which generates 140 Mt of CO2, 12 Mt of other noxious gases and 1.2 Mt of particulate matter choking a population of about 50 million in the area. Crop residue burning also destroys the nitrogen and carbon potential of the soil, kills the microflora and fauna beneficial to the soil, removes the large portion of the organic matter, and unavoidably leads to increased use of chemical fertilizers.

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Smog in Delhi forces young children to skip school and stay indoors, 2.2 million children suffer irreversible lung damage. Your embassy in Delhi can inform you how they gasp for air during that period. Do you support farmers demand to let them continue to burn crop residue and add to emissions?

The second key issue that Mr. Mohinder Gulati brings attention to is food wastage. Mr. Gulati contends that the wastage of food itself emits Carbon Dioxide and that the sheer massive scale of food wastage in India is enough to be the third largest emitter of Carbon Dioxide behind USA and China. Farmers Protest are against privatization in the agricultural sector, which is the need of the hour to build massive supply chains and storage facilities in order to curtail the shortage of food.

The third key issue that Mr. Mohinder Gulati invokes is the specter of a water crisis looming large in India. With farmers over-utilizing underground water for irrigation purposes, over 65% of Indian ground water is considered over-exploited. Excessive use of fertilizer also remains a serious issue.

The letter goes on further, as Mr. Gulati cautions Greta and the readers that strong vested interests are against the farm laws. The new farms laws would bring in transparency which would close the loophole to exploit tax free agricultural income.

Mr. Gulati closes his letter with an appeal of peaceful dialogue between the farmers and the Government, but warns against the influence of any foreign actors. Farmers in Punjab, Haryana, and part of Uttar Pradesh have a legitimate apprehension which needs to be addressed through dialogue and not intransigence of either party. India has adequate institutions of Parliament, Courts, Media, and public opinion to allow peaceful protests and open dialogue to solve its myriad problems of poverty and development., the letter read.

The open letter from Mr. Mohinder Gulati, offers a legitimate environmental insight and criticism of Gretas activism. This was not just a critique of Greta, but also of hundreds of Indian environmental activists, who dont seem to have any plan or strategy to Indias environmental crises, but wont spare an opportunity to contribute to the problem.

Also read: Space Taxi: Indian startups Bellatrix Aerospace and Skyroot Aerospace partner to launch vehicle for satellites
The objective of this resource infill drilling program is to close the current drill spacing from a nominal 40 x 25 metres pattern to a 20 x 25 metres pattern to allow the inferred resource to be upgraded.

The Riverina South mineralisation is the direct continuation of gold mineralisation being mined within the main Riverina deposit.

s ( ) (FRA:M6N) infill drilling program at Riverina South deposit within the wider Davyhurst Gold Project in Western Australia has delivered strong assay results of up to 3 metres at 32.4 g/t from 34 metres.

Drilling recommenced in mid-January following the release of the Riverina South maiden mineral resource estimate in October 2020 which sits at 650,000 tonnes at 2.1 g/t for 43,000 ounces and includes both an open pit component and an underground component.

This program is the third phase of drilling that has occurred in rapid succession on the Riverina South deposit, which also includes the historical British Lion mine.

On-track to deliver extensions

Managing director David Quinlivan said: This project is on track to deliver mine extensions with the deeper drilling ongoing.

We are keen to see how the upgraded mineral resource at Riverina South can contribute to the ore stream flowing from main Riverina open pit mining operations.

The mining is picking up pace, so the time is now in relation to incorporating Riverina South into this larger operation.

Other notable results include 5 metres at 10.4 g/t from 21 metres, including 2 metres at 24.8 g/t and 13 metres at 3.2 g/t from 25 metres.

The Riverina South drilling program has targeted a 1-kilometre-long, highly prospective strike extension corridor immediately south of the main Riverina mining area where open pit mining commenced in October with ore stockpiles building ahead of the ongoing commissioning of the 1.2 million tonnes per annum process plant.

Further RC drilling

Around 7,400 metres of reverse circulation drilling remains in the phase-3 program, with the current program following on from the phase-1 exploration RC program (32 drill holes for 3,639 metres) completed in early 2020.

The phase-2 RC program totalled 68 holes for 7,338 metres which closed the drill hole spacing down to 40 x 25-metre spacing in two discreet areas at Riverina South and resulted in the declaration of the maiden mineral resource.

Riverina South mineralisation is the direct continuation of the gold mineralisation that is currently being mined within the main Riverina deposit.
(Alliance News) - Tullow Oil PLC said Tuesday it has signed two separate sale and purchase agreements with Panoro Energy ASA for all of Tullow's assets in Equatorial Guinea and its Dussafu asset in Gabon.

The two agreements total USD180 million, consisting of up to USD105 million for the Equatorial Guinea deal, and up to USD70 million for the Dussafu assets and a further USD5 million consideration to be paid after both transactions have completed.

"These are important, value accretive deals for Tullow that will have a positive effect on our financial position as we look to further reduce our net debt and continue constructive discussions with our creditors. These transactions are also in line with our strategy of investing our capital on cash-generative, high return investment opportunities in our core portfolio," Chief Executive Rahul Dhir said.

Tullow noted the Equatorial Guinea deal is made up of USD89 million upfront cash and contingent cash payments of up to USD16 million linked to asset performance and oil price.

For its Dussafu asset, Panoro will pay USD46 million upfront cash and up to USD24 million linked to asset performance and oil price.

The assets, Tullow said, saw a performance of the sale of about 6,000 barrels of oil per day in 2021 and held about 20 million barrels of 2P reserves.

Dhir continued: "Our Equatorial Guinea assets have formed an important and stable part of our non-operated West Africa producing portfolio since 2003. We will be exiting Equatorial Guinea after many years of successful investment and co-operation and we thank the government of Equatorial Guinea for their continued support. Gabon remains a core country of operations for Tullow and we will continue to invest in our assets and seek new opportunities."

Upon completion of the Equatorial Guinea deal, Tullow production forecast for 2021 will reduce by about 4,500 bopd. Group 2P reserves will reduce by about 14 million barrels, 3P reserves will reduce by approximately 22 million barrels and 2C resources will reduce by approximately 26 million barrels.

After the Dussafu deal, Tullow production forecast for 2021 will reduce by about 1,500 bopd, Group 2P reserves will reduce by approximately 5 million barrels, 3P reserves will reduce by approximately 10 million barrels and 2C resources will reduce by approximately 5 million barrels.

Completion of both deal is expected in the first half of 2021.

Net proceeds from the deal, the company said, will be used to strengthen its balance sheet as part of its strategy to reduce its net debt and focus its capital on high-return investment opportunities within its current portfolio.

Turning to trading, Tullow said its working interest oil production in 2020 averaged 74,900 bopd, which was in line with expectations.

As a result, 2020 full year revenue is expected to be about USD1.4 billion, down from USD1.68 billion in 2019. While gross profit is expected to be about USD400 million compared to the USD1.69 billion loss recorded in 2019.

Looking to 2021, working interest oil production is forecast to average 60,000 to 66,000 bopd - partly attributed to the Covid-driven drilling hiatus in 2020.

Capital expenditure is forecast to be about USD265 million, with an additional USD100 million to be spent on decommissioning.

Tullow previously started discussions with its creditors with regards to its debt refinancing options and these discussions are progressing constructively and are expected to conclude in the second quarter of 2021.

"As part of these discussions, Tullow and its lenders agreed to extend the redetermination of the group's RBL facility, which was due to complete in January 2021, by up to one month. This is to allow additional time for the lending banks to review the new business plan and operating strategy. Following its September 2020 RBL facility redetermination, Tullow had USD1.8 billion of debt capacity approved by the lending syndicate," the company added.

Shares in Tullow Oil closed 1.1% higher in London on Tuesday at 30.09 pence each.

By Paul McGowan; paulmcgowan@alliancenews.com

Copyright 2021 Alliance News Limited. All Rights Reserved.
Across the United States, the twin crisis of the pandemic and economic downturn are depleting donations and could force as many as a third of nonprofits to close for good, officials said. But here in Chattanooga, one mission-minded church is filling a gap for four local nonprofits: The Bethlehem Center, The Chattanooga Community Kitchen, The Chattanooga Rescue Mission and Hope for the Inner City.This past Christmas Eve, Silverdale Baptist Church asked its congregation to give a special gift to benefit local mission partners who minister to the neediest in our community: the hungry and homeless.Silverdale raised over $32,000 over Christmas to help these local mission partners. On Tuesday, Feb. 16 at 10:30 a.m. in Oaks Coffee House's upper room, Silverdale Baptist Church will present these funds to these local partners to help them effectively reach the community."Unexpected support like this shows the faithful heart of Pastor Tony and the Silverdale Family," says Jens Christensen from Chattanooga Community Kitchen, "these funds will help meet urgent needs and keep meals on the table throughout the cold, wet days ahead.""As a church, we want to bring God's peace and healing to Chattanooga," says Tony Walliser, lead pastor at Silverdale. He goes on to say, "We believe that through serving our community, assisting the poor, caring for the sick and educating the next generation, we can positively impact people's lives and families."Officials said, "Silverdale is committed to reaching our community for Christ and partners with over thirty local nonprofits throughout the year and funds them through our members faith missions offerings and 100 percent of Oaks Coffee House's profits."Silverdale Baptist Church exists to lead people into an authentic relationship with Christ so they will worship God, grow in their faith and serve the Lord in our community and world. Join us for worship every weekend on-campus and on-line; visit silverdalebc.com for service times and locations."
Egypt's President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi met on Wednesday with Iraq's Foreign Minister Fouad Hussein in Cairo, where the Iraqi minister expressed Baghdad's keenness to continue "intensive coordination and consultation" with Cairo on all levels, the Egyptian presidency said in a statement.

Such keenness, the statement quoted Hussein as saying, comes in light of the strong relations and ties that bind the two countries, and also the importance and centrality of the Egyptian role in the region in a way that contributes to facing the common challenges that the Arab nation is going through.

Egypt's presidential spokesman Bassam Rady said in the statement that El-Sisi expressed Egypt's pride in its historic relations with Iraq, and the keenness to strengthen its Arab national role.

El-Sisi also stressed on providing full support to the Iraqi people in all fields, whether on the bilateral level or through the tripartite cooperation mechanism with Jordan, Rady said.

This, El-Sisi says, comes within the framework of Egypt's policy based on rational, balanced principles and solid moral constants aimed at achieving stability, progress and prosperity for all.

In August 2020, during their third trilateral summit, El-Sisi, Jordan's King Abdullah II and Iraq's Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi addressed enhancing cooperation in all fields, Rady said, especially in energy, power linkage, infrastructure and food.

The three leaders urged fostering trilateral cooperation in terms of the economy, trade and investment with the aim of establishing strategic integration between Egypt, Jordan and Iraq.

Rady added that the meeting also witnessed a review of the political and security situation in the region and the challenges in this regard, and El-Sisi and Hussein agreed to continue consultations between the two countries to restore security and stability.

They also discussed bilateral relations between the two countries, as well as ways to enhance areas of economic, commercial and investment cooperation, in addition to following up on the implementation of projects emanating from the tripartite cooperation mechanism with Jordan, Rady noted.

The Egyptian president concluded Wednesday's meeting by asking Hussein to convey greetings to Iraqi President Barham Salih and Prime Minister Al-Kadhimi, the statement said.

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The result is something of an id of American conservative thought. Hosts intemperate remarks on race, immigration and other subjects lend the shows a renegade feel and keep listeners loyal and emotionally invested.

Its like your friend in the bar, said Lewis A. Friedland, a professor who studies talk radio and politics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where stations serve up six or more hours of right-wing talk a day. Hes your buddy, and hes kind of like you and he likes the same kind of people that you like and doesnt like the same kind of people that you dont like.

Mr. Limbaugh led the rise of right-wing talk in the late 1980s, after deregulation of the radio industry paved the way for harder-edged shows. In recent years, even as its audience aged and podcasts ate into its market share, radio received a jolt from President Trump, a fan of the genre who catapulted its grievances into policy. Last year, Mr. Trump awarded Mr. Limbaugh the nations highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

We always had shock jocks, said Michael Harrison, publisher of the talk-radio trade magazine Talkers. But then we had a shock president.

Just as Mr. Trump echoed the blunt language of talk radio, its hosts defended the presidents acidic language and frequent falsehoods  even when he claimed, without evidence, that the election had been stolen.

Leading radio anchors did not explicitly urge an assault on the Capitol, and Mr. Trump often spoke more brazenly than his media counterparts, including in a speech to his supporters in Washington just before the riot. But it was no accident that regular listeners to Mr. Limbaugh and others believed that a grave misdeed had occurred in the 2020 vote count.

On Dec. 16, Mr. Limbaugh  the countrys No. 1 radio host, with an audience of about 15.5 million a week  told listeners that Mr. Biden didnt win this thing fair and square, and we are not going to be docile like weve been in the past, and go away and wait till the next election.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-10 23:54:23|Editor: huaxia

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MUSCAT, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- The Omani Health Ministry on Wednesday announced 190 new COVID-19 infections, raising the total number of confirmed cases in the country to 136,377, the official Oman News Agency (ONA) reported.

Meanwhile, 166 people recovered during the past 24 hours, taking the overall recoveries to 128,255, while one person reportedly died, pushing the tally up to 1,537, according to a ministry statement quoted by ONA.

The ministry urged everyone to adhere to social distancing instructions by the supreme COVID-19 committee. Enditem
Mobily and Nokia have extended their managed services partnership by signing a three-year agreement under which Nokia will manage and maintain the radio and transport network in Riyadh and other regions.



Nokia has been a managed services partner to Mobily for the past ten years. The comprehensive managed services partnership will see Nokia supporting a range of operating capabilities which will enable Mobily to offer a superior user experience through improved service and network performance. It will also increase the overall efficiency of the network operation.



Mobily will also be leveraging Nokias Global Delivery Centers (GDC) which will bring uniquely-skilled staff, tools and world-class operational capabilities throughout the managed services scope. Nokias service delivery excellence will further allow Mobily to focus on expansion and bring new services to the Saudi market.



Alaa Malki, CTO at Mobily, said: Operational transformation is needed to manage a mix of technologies. Nokias global experience in network operations and best practices helps us to be the forerunner in this transformation. Partnership with Nokia marks a new chapter in our collaboration and complements our business objectives. We look forward to further enhancing the end user experience through continuous improvement of our network quality and service agility.



Tareq Khalaf, head of the customer team at Nokia, said: This deal showcases our continued commitment to support Mobilys network at superior quality levels. We are driven to deliver streamlined operations that help our customers respond quickly to fast-changing user demands. Together with Mobily, well be able to connect with a broader ecosystem and deliver the highest degree of efficiency.  TradeArabia News Service
Colorado Springs, CO (80903)

Today

Scattered thunderstorms during the morning becoming more widespread this afternoon. High 58F. Winds NNE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 90%..

Tonight

A steady rain this evening. Showers continuing overnight. Low around 45F. Winds N at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 80%.

interview

Outgoing Australian High Commissioner to Nigeria, Claire Ireland, speaks about her impressions of Nigeria and why Australian mining companies are yet to begin extracting minerals in Nigeria.

The outgoing Australian High Commissioner to Nigeria, Claire Ireland, speaks in this interview with PREMIUM TIMES' Publisher Dapo Olorunyomi, Taiwo Hassan Adebayo, Busayo Agbola and Adebimpe Abodunde on how Nigeria can attract big multinational corporations into its mining sector, and other issues.

Excerpts:

PT: What are your impressions about this country, which you now have to leave?

High Commissioner: I have only been here for 18 months, which is a lot shorter than I had intended. But I think as many of us have been affected by the COVID-19 crisis, I have been too. Very sadly, my family hasn't been with me and I have three young children; 15, 13 and 9. They're not here at the moment and so now, with the COVID crisis, you have to do quarantine every time you travel, so I can't see them as much as I could before. So it is with a very heavy heart that I made the decision to leave the posting early so that I could be with my family.

I work for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in Australia and over the last five years, they have had a really strong commitment to women leadership and to supporting women to take more leadership roles and to be much more engaged across the agencies. We set a target about four or five years ago to have 40 per cent of ambassadors to be female by 2020.

At the time they made that target, it was only 25 per cent of Australian ambassadors around the world that were female and so in a very short period of time they've managed to achieve that target and I'm definitely one of those people who have benefited from that. I was very well supported to take on this role to come here, and when I found, as a woman in a leadership role, that I was faced with this challenge of my family and my career, I was given a huge amount of support by Canberra to step down.

I haven't been penalised at all, they've given me some time out to stay with my family so I can reconnect with them, having been separated for almost nine months now. And so they've really supported me to do that and given me the time off. And then I will be welcomed back into the department. They're very keen for me to carry on and take further roles in Africa down the line. So whilst I'm very sad to be leaving here, I'm also very proud of the Australian government for its commitment to women leadership and it has enabled me to make what has been a very tough decision in a positive way with a huge amount of support.

The Australian government really does prioritise Nigeria as a country. So, even though I'm leaving, they have already identified someone to replace me. They have gone through the process very quickly, we've submitted all the necessary paperwork to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and, hopefully, my replacement will be here very soon so we won't have a big gap between me and the next person. And I think that's really indicative of the commitment that the Australian government has to filling the role.

PT: With regards to Nigeria, what are the Australian foreign policy goals?

High Commissioner: I arrived at a time when we were going through change. We had moved to our current embassy location and we had bought a new piece of land, which is where we are today. And there was a commitment to invest in building a new high commission premises and that really demonstrated our longevity that we saw in terms of our relationship here in Nigeria and the region more broadly.

We have invested a significant amount of money in purchasing this piece of land and we have just completed the first phase of this building. There will be another phase to do another part to this building. So we're in this transition of scaling our presence up. But in so doing, we had to scale down our people on the ground at that moment, and so a lot of focus came on to getting the High Commission up and running and so there was less focus at that time on our policy work.

Once we got the embassy back up and running in December last year, one of the first things we did was to have one of our senior official talks with the government of Nigeria. It had been eight years since we had our last senior official talks.

But the team and I really prioritised that as a first priority for us to be able to answer that very question that you just asked me. What are our priorities here, where are we focused, what are we going to do?

So we had the senior official talks. We had a very senior representative come from the Australian government, with the Nigerian High Commissioner who came from Canberra, and we had the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. And I think during those talks, we really acknowledged that we have a modest but a focused engagement here in Nigeria.

While we don't have a huge amount of investment or two-way trade, we have a very long historical relationship that dates back to the 1960s. Just before Nigeria had its independence, the Australian government had a representative here who became the High Commissioner as soon as Nigeria got its independence. And so for the last 60 years, we have had a very enduring relationship built in the Commonwealth.

But perhaps at this moment in time, there wasn't a very deep trade relationship particularly or a very deep political relationship. So the senior official talk was a chance to really regroup and say where our priorities are.

Following the senior official talks, what the team and I have done is to develop an internal think-piece to guide us on where our priorities are for the next five years. We wanted to make sure the outcome of the senior official talks was really embedded in our engagement and we identified four main areas where we are going to work. The first area is our economic relationship. Like I said, we don't have a big two-way trade between our countries. Australia buys oil from Nigeria and we used to sell wheat but it is not (in) huge numbers.

What we do have, though, is a big intellectual investment in the mining sector. Since 2003, the Australian government has been working very closely with the Nigerian government to support the development of the mining sector, and that was really starting from the basics, in terms of getting the mining legislation in place. The legislation that is in place in Nigeria now is very similar and mirrored on the mining legislation in place in West Australia, for example.

And so we've shared intellectual knowledge and capability of our own experience of 150 years in the mining sector to make sure we've enabled Nigeria the opportunity to develop its mining sector and get that legal framework in place, which is really critical and a foundation for it. So that's happened and the sector is developing.

There is still a lot for the sector to develop in terms of being able to be competitive, compared to the rest of West Africa like Ghana, Senegal, who've got much further advanced mining sectors. But what Nigeria is doing, and it has had support from the World Bank through a project called Mcdyver, is in terms of mapping and geology.

For example, to be enabled to get mining leases transparently and for the private sector to purchase, they need to know what's in the ground, they need to have the geological data and that needs to be open and transparently available. That's what the mining industry is working on and the Mcdyver project has been helping them to do.

Australia has been very much supporting that in the background, sharing our technology, experience and skills. We have a couple of Australian mining companies here working on the ground to develop projects and have mining leases. And so they're very much looking forward to the day when they can begin extracting minerals. For the moment, they're not there yet, they're still taking their analysis before getting to that point.

I think what's exciting when I talk to them is we are really excited that if Nigeria is able to get an internationally recognised company to have a successful mining operation in the ground. It would really demonstrate to the rest of the world the transparency and the good systems because Australian companies, they have to operate with good environmental due diligence, good social due diligence. If all those things are in place and you have an international company like an Australian company in place, you know then you have world-class standard.

At the moment Nigeria has a Canadian company, Thor, who's doing some gold mining and that has been the first one to really hit off. I keep my fingers crossed and hope that Australia could be the next country to have a successful relationship and partnership with Nigeria in terms of the mining sector.

And I think, what I said to the mining minister, that is what would really show to the rest of the world that Nigeria is open for business and is a credible country to do business in when it comes to the mining sector. We are not there yet but we are getting close and there is a lot of people working very hard to make that happen. Australia will stay fully engaged in that sector and fully supporting, where we can.

And then, just recently, we had a very successful engagement with Premium Times itself, in terms of the women in mining monograph that was done. And I think going back to my earlier point on women in leadership, and from my own experience with women engaging in the mining sector, we see that also as critical. So to be able to work on those areas is really the whole package when it comes to supporting the mining sector.

So mining is probably the biggest area that we're engaged in. The other main area is the education sector. We have had over the years something called the Australian Awards. The Australian government had a scholarship programme for Nigerians to study in Australia. But at the moment, with the COVID crisis, our borders are closed and so we've had to put a pause on that programme. I know it is a challenge for international students right now.

But in Australia, our universities are world-class and it is a big destination for international students in the world. I really hope that, once the COVID crisis is over and people are able to travel again, that we would be in that situation where we would be able to promote the education sector in Australia. Over the last five years, we have seen the number of Nigerian students who are studying in Australia has gone up quite a lot. It is still not a lot of people, it is still only around 3,000. But a few years ago, that was only 500 students.

And I think there is that recognition that Australia is a real gateway to South-east Asia and the Pacific. So when you come to study in Australia, it's not just a fantastic Australian education you're getting, it's also a gateway to networks, to other students. Particularly, there are Chinese students, Pacific students studying in our universities. And so those networks are formed and enable Nigerians to broaden their own networks into an area that perhaps they haven't historically had those relationships. So the mining and the education are really, from a sectoral perspective, the areas that we are actively engaged in.

Agriculture is an area that we feel is, perhaps, underexplored. But there is raw potential, given the similarities in our climates. At the moment, we are not doing a huge amount in that area. We're doing some light exchange in the dairy sector but we are not doing a huge amount. Like I said, our analysis and research show that given the similarity in climate, given that Nigeria wants to become more productive in its own country, and that we have the technology and capabilities that could be worth sharing, I think over the next five years, I think we'd like to explore that more. But our priorities remain the mining sector and the education sector.

PT: Is there something you are doing regarding supporting Nigeria to develop local capacity in the education sector, especially basic education?

High Commissioner: Our relationship is an economic partnership, so we don't have a bilateral aid programme in Nigeria. We do give aid financing but through the multilaterals. I am very conscious that we give our bilateral aid assistance to the Pacific and Asian Pacific countries who are our neighbours. It is the Europeans, Americans who give a lot of bilateral aid assistance here in Africa and in Nigeria particularly.

To answer your question, the last thing we think Nigeria needs is Australia to come here with another basic education project. So we give our money to the multilaterals and we trust the multi-laterals to prioritise investment in this country. For example, we put a lot of money into UNICEF who work here, we put a lot of money into UNDP and the World Bank. We are believers in the multi-lateral system and the global rules-based system, and so we feel the better way to get aid investment to support basic education, like you're talking about, is through the experts like the World Bank and the UN system. That is how our money comes through for that. We don't have any separate bilateral programmes, to answer your question directly.

PT: When you started, you mentioned the historic relationship between Nigeria and Australia. How do you assess the current relationship, with regards to shared commitment to international public good like climate change and fighting terrorism?

High Commissioner: This is something I have really been thinking about during my time here. Because when you come here as a high commissioner, you're here to promote the relationship between two countries and you want to see a really strong bilateral relationship. And one thing I have really tried to understand is, where is the added value in that relationship and what can we bring?

And I really have landed back to that point, multilateralism. Those kind of shared values is something we really have in common. Back in 1960 when our relationship first started, it was very much off Nigeria being a member of the Commonwealth and we were members of the Commonwealth, so that partnership organisation brought us together. And that was the basis of our relationship then.

I think the distance between the two countries makes a bilateral relationship very different to what you would have with a European country. So it is where can we really add that value?

So for example, right now, Nigeria and Australia are both in the Human Rights Council. We are working in the UN on the human rights council, both of us pushing for those issues to become mainstream and institutionalised in our partner countries. And I think where our added value comes, and where our relationship with Nigeria particularly comes, is to work on those shared values. The global dynamics are changing and the power dynamics are changing and understandably for Australia, we've really focused on our backyard in terms of the Asian Pacific, and that's our priority in terms of our neighbours.

And I hear a very similar story when I hear the Nigerian Foreign Minister talk about your background in terms of the ECOWAS community. So I think we're really like-minded in our approach. While we have different focus areas, the approach to focus in our immediate neighbours and surrounding. For us, it is the Pacific, Asian Pacific, the Asean community. For us, we're part and parcel of that. When I hear Nigeria talk about its foreign policy, it is about its immediate neighbours Cameroon or Benin, then the Chad Basin, then the ECOWAS and the African Union.

So our approach is actually very similar and I think what is interesting is where we can help potentially bring the two together. The more that we can help share in the Asian Pacific what's happening, the more we can learn from Nigeria about what's happening in Africa. And it is at that higher level where I think there's a real potential for working together, and it is those shared values like human rights and climate change. In the Commonwealth still we have those forums where we can work together.

PT: Do you have any running programme with Nigeria on climate change?

High Commissioner: No, I don't think we do.

PT: You should, because Nigeria is considerably affected by the climate change. You are aware of the farmers and herdsmen crisis and it has a link with climate change.

High Commissioner: Absolutely. When I presented my credentials to President (Muhammadu) Buhari, one thing he spoke to me about was the climate change issue and the Lake Chad Basin. And he was really concerned about it. We did talk about the fact that, while we don't have a programme particularly between the two countries, we have a lot of shared experience.

So obviously in Australia you know our climate is very harsh. Fires. Drought is also something we've struggled with. And the Murray-Darling basin is a big trans-boundary water resource that has really suffered over the years of drought. Our water sources have dried up and we've had to work together collectively across states to be able to reinvigorate the climate and support farmers who depend on the water resource for it.

So we have a lot of experience that we can share and that's something we are very committed to. And obviously, we will be at the Cup 21 in Glasgow. It is disappointing that it won't be this year and had to be postponed till next year. But Australia stands firmly committed to that agenda. So again, working at the multi-lateral level and we would be working with Nigeria. But on a bilateral level, we don't have a programme.

PT: How optimistic are you that the support you have given Nigeria to develop this legal framework in the mining sector will translate to something that will encourage companies from your country to operate here? And how optimistic are you about Nigeria's business environment to encourage investment from abroad?

High Commissioner: My background, before I got into the foreign policy side, I worked in aid for 25 years and I'm very passionate about it. But I'm also very passionate about the fact that you have just touched on, that you actually need a trade relationship and trade is a really important part of it.

To get to sustainable economic development, I am a firm believer that we need to move away from lots of small-scale projects and we need to focus on positive change and institutionalised change. I am often having debates with my colleagues who work on the aid programme here about when that kind of mining company finally takes off that will be potentially 100-150 year mine? A really long duration in terms of economic engagement, which will in turn employ up to 5000 people down the value chain for a sustained number of years. And how much more transformation that will be to the economy than another project which perhaps doesn't have that sustainability?

So I'm a real believer that you need to get that proper sort of engagement and you need to have that trade to be able to sustain the economy. But I do believe, (my background is in environmental management), that you have to do it sustainably, so environmentally sustainable development is critical.

So whilst I'm passionate about the mining sector, it has to be done right, it has to be done with the community's engagement, it has to be done in a way which isn't going to negatively impact the environment. So if you get that all right, I really believe that is much more beneficial long-term for a country's development than small aid projects which potentially don't have the sustainability.

To answer the second part of your question, how optimistic am I about that happening anytime soon? I think I've realised that it's going to take longer than I imagined when I first arrived. I would love to be leaving here to say that the Australian Mining Company is now at the extraction stage. But it is not and there are still these roadblocks that the companies come across. And I think what we have here is that the Australian government kind of convey what those policies are.

Why is it that the international company isn't yet at the extraction stage? One of the things that we have discovered with our private sector companies is the alignment of community development agreements with the mining leases. That presents a sort of challenge. Getting access to information on the geology has been a challenge. And so, I think that's where we can bring the conversation to the mining minister, about what those challenges are which are preventing the companies to be exploring or further extracting at the moment.

So it's not happening yet. I think there are still a few hurdles to get through. But we are certainly passionate and will advocate to try and make it happen. We certainly see the potential. There are a lot of phenomenal resources here in Nigeria to make it happen but it is going to take sustained commitment by the Nigerian government to make it a reality.

PT: Does Australia have any local laws that prevent multi-nationals from using products produced by children or from using children in their factories or mines?

High Commissioner: Yes we do actually. There are a couple of things to note here. One, we have members signed up to the EITI, Extraction Industry Transparency Initiative. Australia is committed to that and that is part of the process, you know, having that transparency out there. Linked to that is also another initiative called the Voluntary Principles Initiative (VPI) and that's about making sure companies and governments sign up to exactly what you're saying, that commitment to social due diligence, environmental due diligence.

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Australia was taking on the chair of the VPI this year and Nigeria is also a member of that, engaged in that. And that was something we were hoping to really take forward this year but perhaps got a bit slowed down because of the COVID crisis.

But certainly, this is where I mean we are real advocates of free trade system, a global laws-based system. And WTO, as you know, is a system we are really passionate about. We want to see a real trading system with the rules in place that we all kind of follow and commit to. So we really do it into those values and ensuring that environmental standards and social standards are committed to. So yeah, we've signed up to those agreements, we advocate for those agreements in the UN, we advocate for them in the WTO and we certainly implement them in our own country.

PT: What priorities does Australia have for Africa?

High Commissioner: Can I answer that in two ways, personally and professionally?

I first worked in Africa, in Kenya in 1995, so I've worked in Africa for a number of years. I have lived in Kenya, I have lived in Uganda, I have lived in South Africa, I have worked across most of Sub-Saharan Africa. But it was the first time I have lived and worked in a West African country, and it's been such a different experience to my East African experience. But it is one I have really loved. It is so different to any country in Africa that I have worked in before.

Whilst there were a lot of frustrations, as with any country, it is a country that really gets under your skin in a positive way. I think I feel for Nigeria because as soon as you say the word, Nigeria, people have this negative impression of Nigeria. But when you get here, and you live and work here, your mind is opened up in the most incredible way.

The potential for Nigeria is phenomenal. The education of so many Nigerians is superior, I often feel uneducated and under-qualified when I am talking to people like you. People have studied in Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge. Nigerians value education in a way which I have seen in no other country and are really so well educated, so the potential is phenomenal.

I see lots of frustrations, both from my own day to day experiences and from fellow Nigerians who are frustrated. But also, what I see is a phenomenal commitment. Both from Nigerians in Nigeria and also the diaspora, the commitment to this country is so inspirational and so motivating.

To answer the second part of your question, I think Australia, we're honest about our relationship. It is not huge, but it is a relationship we are committed to. And like I said, we have invested in this new high commission residence and we see ourselves here for the long term. We are commitment in terms of our engagement on a global platform and in the UN, in the Commonwealth, and we see the relationship as one we would want to continue at that kind of global, multi-lateral level.

I hope that in 5-10 years' time I come back and I see the Australian Mining Company in the ground and I meet a lot more Nigerians who have studied in Australia. If I come back in 5-10 years' time, that would be what success looks like to me. I will leave here an absolute advocate for Nigeria and I will tell people a positive story about the potential of Nigeria and particularly the youth of Nigeria.

PT: Do you have any sleepless nights over the conduct of Nigerians in your country?

High Commissioner: I know that today, there was a petition of about 200,000 people in the UK to have an investigation and a parliamentary debate about what happened in Lekki (tollgate shooting). So it is fascinating to see you have that many Nigerians represented in the UK that can have that kind of positive impact on government.

To answer that question, we don't have a huge diaspora in Australia. It's only about 8,000 Nigerians who are registered in Australia. But what you do have are 8,000 really well-educated Nigerians. They are doctors, professors, legal practitioners. They are a very smart, well-educated diaspora who do engage and engage regularly with me.

So what we try to do as the High Commission here and also as the diaspora back in Australia is to help promote a more positive image of Africa back in Australia. There's an African music festival that a Nigerian organises in Melbourne each year and we try to sort of promote that positive image.

But just like you've had Nigerian citizens in the UK raise concerns over the EndSARS, you've had in Australia. And I'm aware that the Nigerian diaspora in Australia have written to the prime minister with their concerns about what is happening. I think it is incredible to see that breadth of support for what is happening in Nigeria by the diaspora in other countries.

I don't think I have quite as big a headache as my counterparts in America or in the UK. But Nigerians are really vocal and they're really committed to their country and that's what I have seen. Even in Australia, we see that.

A common belief in nature conservation is that people need to "know nature" in order to care about it. However, new research has found that farmers in the Brazilian Amazon can develop strong connections with nature despite having little knowledge of local biodiversity - in this case local bird species.

The study, led by researchers at UK and Brazilian institutions, and published in the journal People and Nature, examined the psychological attachment to nature amongst non-indigenous farmers who have settled in the Transamazon Highway region, an area of the Amazon that is experiencing deforestation.

The majority of farmers expressed views that indicated a strong connection with nature, despite recognising fewer than half of the species in the survey. The research, which involved interviews with 227 farmers, found that knowledge of birds and nature connection were not correlated, and they did not have any predictors in common.

Many farmers recognised bird species that have adapted to farmland and are widespread in Brazil, but most struggled to identify birds that only live in the Amazon forest.

The study is the first of its kind to be carried out in the "Global South" and is significant because previous, similar studies in the US and Europe indicated that knowledge of biodiversity enhances connection with nature.

The Amazon rainforest is under threat from deforestation and climate change, and its farm-forest frontiers are suffering from intense habitat and biodiversity loss. Therefore, understanding the feelings and motivations of its farmers is vital as studies have shown that farmers who care strongly about nature are more likely to engage in conservation.

Dr Katarzyna Mikolajczak, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) and lead author of the study, said: "Farmers' decisions are critical for the survival of the Amazon and the species that live there, but their environmental motivations are rarely studied. We investigated how a form of the farmers' ecological knowledge - the ability to recognise local bird species - related to their sense of attachment and caring about nature, known as nature connection.

"We found that farmers do not need intimate knowledge of local biodiversity to care about nature. However, at the same time, farmers might have difficulty protecting species without some knowledge - many of the farmers struggled to identify birds commonly found in the Amazon, so may fail to realise the value of forests as an irreplaceable habitat for many species.

"Our results contrast with previous similar studies that have taken place in industrialised nations in the Global North, namely the UK and the US, that found a positive correlation between knowing and caring about nature.

"This suggests that the relationship between ecological knowledge and nature connection is complex and might be context-specific, and we shouldn't assume there is a 'one-size-fits-all' approach to encouraging nature conservation. Our findings indicate that having a knowledge of nature is not necessary in order to connect with nature."

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New Delhi: Veteran Bollywood star Rajiv Kapoor, 58, died of a cardiac arrest on February 9, 2021. The youngest child of legendary filmmaker-actor Raj Kapoor and the younger sibling of brothers Randhir Kapoor and late Rishi Kapoor, Rajiv was rushed to a hospital in Mumbai but unfortunately succumbed to the attack.

Family member and noted actress Neetu Kapoor in a new statement informed all that late actor Rajiv Kapoor's Chautha will not take place due to the deadly novel coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic.

She shared on Instagram along with late actor Rajiv Kapoor's picture: Due to the current pandemic circumstances, there will be no Chautha held for the Late Mr Rajiv Kapoor for safety reasons. May his soul rest in peace. The entire Raj Kapoor family is a part of your grief too.

Several fans and celebs reacted to his untimely demise and extended condolences.

His last rites took place in Chembur on February 9 evening. Several stars such as Shah Rukh Khan, Alia Bhatt and family members including elder brother Randhir Kapoor, nephews Ranbir Kapoor, Aadar Jain amongst others bid him a teary adieu.

Rajiv Kapoor aka Chimpu (fondly called by family and close friends) made his Bollywood debut in Ek Jaan Hain Hum back in 1983. He entered movies as a leading actor in father and veteran filmmaker-actor Raj Kapoor's last directorial venture Ram Teri Ganga Maili in 1985.

Chimpu starred in several movies including Aasmaan (1984), Lover Boy (1985), Zabardast (1985) and Hum To Chale Pardes (1988).

He was last seen in 1990 release Zimmedaar in 1990 after which he turned to producing and directing, as per reports.

May his soul rest in peace!
Founded in 1997, China Bakery Exhibition is the first professional exhibition in China's bakery industry. Since its seventh session in 2003, the event has taken place in Canton Fair Complex in Guangzhou every May. The name of the event was changed to China Bakery Exhibition in its ninth session in 2005. Since its inception, after 20-plus years of development, China Bakery Exhibition has become a large, influential professional exhibition in China. With its exhibitors covering the whole industry chain of the bakery industry, such as raw and auxiliary bakery materials, additive enterprises, bakery machinery and equipment, appliance and mold enterprises, bakery packaging equipment and design & production, food cold chain logistics, catering management and training services, etc., China Bakery Exhibition has enjoyed a high reputation in the industry at home and abroad, especially among the bakers in southern China and Southeast Asia.

Mr. Wu Weiquan, Honorary President of A.C.B.A., fully affirmed the strategic cooperation and placed high expectations on it, pointing out that A.C.B.A. has been committed to promoting the development of China's bakery industry with diversified industry service models. IM Sinoexpo is known as the world leader of the exhibition groups and a master of the food exhibition industry. The cooperation has contributed to the close connection from multiple dimensions, the green channel of the bakery industry in China and the world, the integration of the bakery industry and the catering industry, and the service upgrade of the traditional industries and new functional platforms. At the same time, it will also bring more international perspectives and more excellent industrial resources to the future development of China's bakery industry, and create a world-class exhibition stage for the future development of the bakery industry. It is believed that with the organic development of more businesses on the two platforms, more possibilities will be created and that the integration and progress of the bakery industry in China and the world will be promoted through the continuous optimization of industrial structure.

Mr. Wang Mingliang, founder and director of IM Sinoexpo, said, "The strategic cooperation between both parties is very important for both sides. The joining of China Bakery Exhibition will continue to consolidate IM Sinoexpo's leading position in food portfolio in China exhibitions. The company has boasted flagship shows such as Hotelex Shanghai (with an exhibition area of 300,000 square meters), FHC (Food and Hotel China, with an exhibition area of 200,000 square meters), and held sub shows in Beijing, Tianjin, Chengdu and Guangzhou, forming a strategic system of regional expansion in all directions in the country. Combined with holding the Expo Food Guangzhou and the Guangzhou International Food and Ingredients Exhibition every year, the company has thus further expanded the scope of its food & catering portfolios. From 2018 to 2020, the company has successively worked with Shanghai International Franchise Expo, Shanghai International Canned Food and Raw Materials, Machinery and Equipment, Machinery and Equipment Expo and Shanghai Hot Pot Ingredients and Supplies Exhibition, creating an ecological circle of the whole food production and supporting sectors from supplies, ingredients and food materials to packaging and equipment. China Bakery Exhibition will be instrumental in IM Sinoexpo's efforts to expand the ecological circle in the whole food industry. Looking into the future, our company not only can empower China Bakery Exhibition with the resources in the ecological circle, but also can expand CBE to other regions and make use of Informa Group's rich global resources in the food & catering portfolios to help China's bakery industry go global in an all-round way."

After the signing ceremony, both sides will jointly prepare for the 24th China Bakery Exhibition which will be held in the Canton Fair Complex in Guangzhou from May 24 to 26 this year. It is believed that with the support of strong domestic demand, many years of experience and influence of A.C.B.A. in the industry, and the advantages of IM Sinoexpo in show management, marketing and upstream and downstream resources of the food industry, China Bakery Exhibition will open up a new chapter through the cooperation between the two sides and that China's bakery industry will be embracing a better future!

SOURCE Sinoexpo Informa Markets

The European Union welcomes Ukraine's progress in implementing reforms within the framework of the Ukraine-EU Association Agreement, emphasizing that their sustainability and consistency directly depend on the effective fight against corruption and adherence to the principles of the rule of law.

This was said in a draft report of the European Parliament, put to a vote during the plenary session of the EP today. The rapporteur was MEP Michael Gahler (EPP).

Whereas while Ukraine has made substantial advancements in its implementation of AA-related commitments and integration with the Union, several of the reforms initiated need to be completed, in particular in the areas of the rule of law, good governance and anti-corruption, as, despite notable progress, widespread corruption continues to hamper Ukraines reform process; whereas, moreover, some additional measures still need to be adopted in order to avoid any backsliding, with a focus on the judiciary, the document reads.

As noted, the success of anti-corruption policy is a prerequisite for supporting reforms by citizens of Ukraine, as well as improving the business climate and attracting direct investment.

"The European Parliament ... encourages the Ukrainian authorities to further progress on reforms, in particular in the area of the rule of law and anti-corruption, and to ensure the independence and continued work of key anti-corruption institutions," the document says.

In this context, the European Parliament welcomes the reconstitution of the National Agency for Prevention of Corruption (NAPC) and the entry into force of the new laws on illicit enrichment and on whistle-blowers in January 2020, as well as the start of the operations of the High Anti-Corruption Court in September 2019.

The document once again emphasizes the EU's position on the outcome of the 27 October 2020 ruling of the Constitutional Court, which created a legal gap in the Ukrainian anti-corruption architecture and seriously weakened the NAPC. In this context, the draft report calls on the Ukrainian authorities to act as soon as possible to reinstate a fully operational, effective and comprehensive institutional architecture to fight corruption, including in the judiciary, while fully preserving the latters independence from the executive and legislative powers.

At the same time, it underscores that a fully empowered NAPC plays a crucial role in this context and that the Constitutional Courts ruling should not be used as a pretext to weaken or sideline it; trusts that the immediate reaction by various political stakeholders, in particular members of the Verkhovna Rada, will soon result in legislation filling this legal gap that weakens anti-corruption efforts;

On February 9, during the European Parliament plenary debate on the EU Association Agreement with Ukraine, Executive Vice President of the European Commission Valdis Dombrovskis noted that the issue of the rule of law and the fight against corruption remain the key factors in promoting reforms in Ukraine and in its relations with the European Union.

Despite notable progress, widespread corruption continues to hamper Ukraines reform process. Its key institutions must have strong and independent leadership and the chance to do their work free of political, economic or other interference, he stressed.

According to Dombrovskis, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau must be fully independent. Over the years, the Bureau has demonstrated its effectiveness and produced tangible results. The fight against corruption is a key condition for the EU's macro-financial support, he stressed.

He said that he intends to raise these issues during a meeting with Prime Minister of Ukraine Denys Shmyhal, who is on an official visit to Brussels.

ish
What price love? Billionaire rag trader Solomon Lew has found out the hard way after losing an appeal in his three-year battle to buy the $7 million Thai villa where he proposed to his wife Roza.

Solomon Lew. Credit:John Shakespeare

Lew claimed he had been cut out of a deal to buy a luxury Phuket pad, but a Singaporean judge this week found that wasnt the case. In 2017 Credit Suisse banker Kai Nargolwala sold the property in Phukets glitzy Andara Resort to Hong Kong businessman Christian Larpin. This was despite Lew verbally agreeing to purchase the villa several weeks earlier.

But who could blame the vendor? Larpin had offered $US2.7 million ($3.5 million) more.

However, the matter of Andaras Villa 29 and its sentimental value made it a deeply personal for Lew.
Mumbai, Feb 10 : At least four people were injured when a major fire followed a blast in a gas cylinder godown of a major oil and gas company in the thickly populated Versova suburb of Andheri west, here on Wednesday, officials said.

According to the BMC Disaster Control, the blaze was reported around 9.45 a.m. in the Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Limited (HPCL) gas cylinder storage depot located on Yari Road near the Anjuman School.

Even as panic gripped the locality, Mumbai Fire Brigade rushed 16 fire-tenders to battle the massive blaze, the cause of which is not known. The conflagration was brought under control in a couple of hours, said an official.

At least four persons were injured, including two who have sustained severe burns, and all have been taken to the R.N. Cooper Hospital, Vile Parle, for treatment.

They are: Rakesh Kadu, 30, Laxman Kumavat, 24, both with 40 per cent injuries and Manjit Khan, 20, and Mukesh Kumavat, 30, with 60 per cent burn injuries.
A group of Massachusetts unions on Wednesday sent a proposal to the state, calling for a rapid vaccination plan for school employees in 10 to 20 high-need school districts this month.

The plan was suggested by Massachusetts two statewide teachers unions, along with the Professional Fire Fighters of Massachusetts, the Massachusetts AFL-CIO, and other labor organizations in a letter to Marylou Sudders, the states secretary of Health and Human Services.

K-12 employees are included in Phase 2 of the states vaccination program, which began earlier this month. But, a specific plan on how educators will get the vaccine has not been unveiled.

The unions suggested that a rapid vaccination plan should first be rolled out in low-income communities of color that have high COVID19 transmission rates.

Getting students who need inperson learning back to school safely is an issue of equity, the letter reads. The education of our students, preK through college, has been badly disrupted by COVID19. Hundreds of thousands of students are being taught remotely some or all of the time, some with great success while others continue to struggle. And while no child and family is left untouched by COVID19, the disparate impact of the coronavirus on people of color is mirrored in their schools.

The unions have proposed that the state set aside enough vaccine doses from the current supply being stored in freezers to pilot a program in 10 to 20 high-needs school districts while the state continues to vaccinate people ages 65 to 74. Then, when more vaccine supply is available, the program should be scaled up statewide, the unions suggested.

My colleagues and I are reporting for in-person teaching with young students, who cant always mask up and distance properly, said Susan Buckley, an instructional paraprofessional at the Beachmont School in Revere, one of the cities that would be included in the proposed pilot program. It would give me a great deal of confidence to know that the staff has been vaccinated and add that extra layer of protection for my students and all the families of the Revere Public School community, both in school and back at home.

State officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

There have been some hiccups in Massachusetts vaccine rollout. This week, older residents stood out in the cold at the vaccination site at the Eastfield Mall in Springfield, braving below-freezing temperatures to get the vaccine. The administration of Gov. Charlie Baker has asked residents to wait in cars before a vaccine appointment.

Older residents have had some problems making appointments online, leading the state to launch a COVID vaccine call center.

An analysis published Tuesday by the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School gave Massachusetts Fs on three of four key COVID-19 performance measures: deaths per capita, vaccinations per capita and vaccinations as percent of doses available.

The unions said that Massachusetts lags behind most states in the percentage of vaccine doses administered and the share of the population already vaccinated. As of Tuesday, 960,100 doses of vaccine have been shipped to Massachusetts providers, with 696,051 first doses administered and 214,361 second doses administered, according to Department of Public Health data.

The state has no plan in place to get the vaccine into the arms of all school employees, so weve united with the firefighters union to create our own, said Massachusetts Teachers Association President Merrie Najimy. Unions are charged with protecting the health and safety of their members, which ultimately protects their communities. By streamlining an on site process for vaccinating school employees, this union-led plan will make our schools and communities safer. Its time to act.

The unions said they are not trying to jump the line ahead of older residents, but want the state to come up with a plan for educators.

We believed that it was reasonable to place educators in Phase 2, although it should apply to all educators, including those in higher education, the letter reads. Everyone in Phase 2 has a compelling case for prioritization. Many of the elderly people in Phase 2 are our relatives, friends and neighbors, and many are the grandparents and caretakers of the children we educate.

Mascon Medical leaders would lead the process of contracting with the personnel needed, identifying sites and working with municipal partners to make the program successful, the unions said. If needed, EMTs and firefighters would administer the vaccines and provide medical care.

Many firefighters and EMTs have children and know firsthand how important it is for them to be safer when they are back in school, said Rich MacKinnon Jr., the president of the Professional Fire Fighters of Massachusetts. We know the benefits of vaccinating school employees locally and efficiently and are eager to put our experience to work with this plan to take care of those who care for our children.

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She often treats herself to some downtime with her girlfriend Demi Sims amid their 'work' trip in Mexico.

And Francesca Farago turned up the heat as she posed by a swimming pool in a sizzling snap shared to Instagram on Tuesday.

The Too Hot To Handle star, 27, caught the eye as she slipped into quirky black bikini, fresh from her own brand Farago The Label.

Wow-factor! Francesca Farago turned up the heat as she posed by a swimming pool in a sizzling snap shared to Instagram on Tuesday amid her lengthy 'work' trip to Mexico

Highlighting her incredible figure, the influencer styled a halterneck bralet with a barely-there thong, complete with criss-cross detailing.

A wide-brimmed fedora hat, meanwhile, added a touch of edgy chic to her stunning appearance.

The media personality ensured focus remained on her incredible outfit as she went make-up free and wore her tresses loose.

Loved-up: The Too Hot To Handle star, 27, often treats herself to some downtime with her girlfriend Demi Sims during their sun-soaked getaway

In good company: The smitten couple have been going strong ever since they went public with their romance last month

Close circle: The influencer and her TOWIE girlfriend, 24, cosied up to some of their close pals during their holiday

Last month, the blonde and her TOWIE girlfriend, 24, shocked social media as they got their names tattooed on each other's bottom and wrist, just days after going public with their relationship.

The pair are among a host of reality stars who have switched their 'work' trips from Dubai to Mexico amid a ban on UAE flights.

Celebrities and influencers have been flocking to Mexico's bars and beaches as it establishes itself as the latest COVID getaway destination.

Former love: The Canadian first received attention for her role in the Netflix original series Too Hot to Handle last April, when she briefly dated her co-star Harry Jowsey (pictured in 2020)

The Canadian first received attention for her role in the Netflix original series Too Hot to Handle last April, when she briefly dated her co-star Harry Jowsey.

Demi has previously dated Leonie McSorley, with them last being seen out together in October, and having confirmed their romance in July.

The pair are currently in the country with Demi's sister Chloe, 38, and cousin Frankie, 33.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-10 14:54:59|Editor: huaxia

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ADDIS ABABA, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- Ethiopia needs up to 330 million U.S. dollars to meet the target of vaccinating 20 percent of the country's population, the health minister has said.

Ethiopia expects to cover the cost from government coffers as well as from international financial partners, Lia Tadesse told journalists on Tuesday.

The country has secured 9 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines, the minister said.

"Ethiopia is a large country with a large population, so it will not be limited to one set of vaccines for its population," Tadesse said.

"Ethiopia is also interested in acquiring Chinese and Russian-made COVID-19 vaccines... provided they have been proven to be safe for use," she said.

Ethiopia will vaccinating its population from April, giving priority to high-risk groups such as the elderly, those with serious preexisting health problems, health professionals and social workers, Tadesse said.

Ethiopia has reported 143,566 confirmed cases and 2,158 COVID-19-related deaths as of Tuesday evening. Enditem
University of South Carolina to help lead Savannah River National Laboratory research innovation and workforce development

COLUMBIA, SC  February 10, 2021  The University of South Carolina and the Battelle Savannah River Alliance (BSRA) are partnering to conduct critical research at one of the countrys premier national laboratories  the Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL).

South Carolina is a key member of the BSRA team that includes four other universities from the region: Clemson University, Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Georgia and South Carolina State University. South Carolina also brings the University of South Carolina Aiken as part of UofSCs teaming arrangement with BSRA.

UofSC will impact scientific developments locally, nationally and internationally by providing cutting-edge advancements in national security, energy and environmental research. The universitys efforts will boost the labs workforce development and strengthen its ability to serve more national laboratory needs.

The South Carolina system will recruit faculty members at the Columbia and Aiken campuses as part of its role to support the SRNL management and operations contract, which was announced by the Department of Energy in December. These faculty will collaborate with SRNL to train the next generation of national laboratory personnel and expand the economic base of South Carolina by developing technology solutions for the state and the nations industries.

Additionally, UofSC will recruit other personnel who will be engaged in research and workforce development over the five-year period of the initial contract.

The contract includes a five-year base agreement with five one-year options. The estimated value of the contract is $3.8 billion over the course of 10 years if all options are exercised.

The reach of this lab will be global. UofSCs impact in the future will be greatly amplified as a result of this partnership, College of Engineering and Computing Dean Hossein Haj-Hariri says. This is also a significant injection into the economy of the state by developing the workforce, recruiting faculty and graduate students, and bringing talent that helps bridge UofSC and the lab, and creates joint positions.

Employing approximately 1,000 staff, SRNL conducts research and development for diverse federal agencies, providing practical, cost-effective solutions for the nations environmental, nuclear security, energy and manufacturing challenges. As the Department of Energys Environmental Management Laboratory, SRNL provides strategic scientific and technological support for the nations $6 billion per year waste clean-up program.

UofSC will establish an undergraduate scholarship program to encourage a diverse workforce at the lab. UofSC Aiken, which will focus on advanced manufacturing, cyber security and virtual reality workforce development and research, will establish an education summer camp for high school students.

It means workforce development at all levels, specifically outreach to students at all levels, all the way to middle school or even younger, Haj-Hariri says. Part of managing the lab is expanding its workforce, expertise base, and unique facilities to serve more national needs.

South Carolina attributes the success of the BSRA bid, in large part, to the strong support provided by state leadership.

The University of South Carolina is honored to be a part of this unique collaborative, UofSC President Bob Caslen says. Through the support of Governor McMaster and state leadership, researchers and students on our Columbia and Aiken campuses, as well as those at South Carolina State and Clemson, will engage in great scientific discovery and industrial innovation for many years to come.

This is a transformative opportunity for our research community and will poise UofSC to reach new heights of research excellence, says Prakash Nagarkatti, vice president for research. Our role in managing the Savannah River National Laboratory will help us attract innovative new faculty and outstanding students to join our ranks.

About University of South Carolina

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By Carma Hassan and Eric Levenson, CNN

(CNN) -- A 67-year-old man who was "very familiar" to authorities wounded five people in a shooting Tuesday at the Allina Health Care Clinic in Buffalo, Minnesota, officials said.

Police received a 911 call about shots fired just before 11 a.m., Buffalo Police Chief Pat Budke said. When officers arrived they found multiple victims and took the suspect into custody.

Officers found a suspicious package in the corner of the health clinic's lobby, according to Wright County Sheriff Sean Deringer. Police also found several suspicious devices at a nearby Super 8 motel where the suspect was staying, Deringer said.

The suspect was identified as Gregory Ulrich, who Budke said has lived in the area for a "long time."

Budke said that most likely the shooting was "targeted at that facility or someone within that facility" given the suspect's history of conflict.

"There is a history of him being unhappy with health care -- with the health care he received," he said. The chief said he didn't know whether the shooter said anything during the incident.

Kelly Spratt, president at Allina Health -- Buffalo Hospital, said he didn't have updated information on the victims' conditions. Several were sent to hospitals with level 1 trauma centers, he said.

The sheriff described the clinic as "a horrible looking scene" when he arrived, and after emergency responders rendered aid and removed the victims, the suspicious package was found during a secondary search.

"We have contacted the Minneapolis Bomb Squad, and they are on scene right now helping us with that," the sheriff told reporters.

Deringer said Ulrich's history with law enforcement dates to 2003.

The suspect likely will appear in court Thursday at 10:30 a.m., Wright County Attorney Brian Lutes said.

Several other law enforcement agencies said they were responding to the incident.

The ATF St. Paul bureau said it was heading to the facility after reports of an "active shooter." Minneapolis Police spokesman John Elder also told CNN there was "zero indication" of a threat to Minneapolis but said police are sending resources to assist with the incident.

The Allina health clinic is located in Buffalo, Minnesota, a city about 40 miles northwest of Minneapolis. The clinic's website describes the location as a convenient health care option and part of the Buffalo Crossroads family clinic.

Buffalo has a population of about 16,000 people, and the city's residents are about 97.5% White with a median household income slightly above the state average, according to the US Census.

The nurse killed by suspected Minnesota gunman Gregory Paul Ulrich, 67, at a health clinic in Buffalo Tuesday has now been identified as a 37-year-old mother-of-two.

Lindsay Overbay died Tuesday after being rushed to hospital following the mass shooting at the Allina Health Clinic on Crossroads Campus Drive in Wright County, Buffalo, that morning.

Hennepin County Medical Center spokeswoman Christine Hill said Tuesday night that one person brought to the hospital after being shot had died.

Overbay's loved ones identified her Wednesday on a GoFundMe page set up to help her family including her two young children, while three other victims remain in hospital.

One is in a stable but critical condition and the condition of the other two has been upgraded to fair. A fifth victim was discharged Tuesday.

The identities of the surviving victims is not known.

While the small community of 15,000 reels from the tragedy, new details have emerged about Ulrich's possible motive for the attack as official records reveal he threatened to carry out a mass shooting at the clinic two years earlier and had a restraining order taken out against him by one of the facility's doctors.

The nurse killed by suspected Minnesota gunman Gregory Paul Ulrich, 67, at a health clinic in Buffalo Tuesday has now been identified as 37-year-old mother-of-two Lindsay Overbay (left with a child and man believed to be her son and husband)

Lindsay Overbay died Tuesday after being rushed to hospital following the attack on the Allina Health Clinic on Crossroads Campus Drive in Wright County, Buffalo, that morning

The suspected killer: Gregory Paul Ulrich (above) threatened to carry out a mass shooting at the clinic two years earlier and had a restraining order taken out against him by one of the facility's doctors, records show

Overbay was described as a 'beautiful mother, daughter and friend' and 'the bright light in so many peoples lives' who 'could light up a room with her contagious laugh and "I don't give a s**t" attitude' in the GoFundMe page.

She was reportedly attending college classes to further her career because she wanted to provide a better life for her two young children.

The GoFundMe had reached more than $28,000 in donations as of Wednesday.

It is not clear if Overbay had any interactions with her suspected killer prior to Tuesday's deadly attack.

Ulrich, from Buffalo, reportedly had a vendetta against the Allina clinic and its staff because they refused to give him more opioids for a back injury.

Court records say Ulrich made threats against four Allina health clinics in total and was served a restraining order back in 2018 against Andrew J Burgdorf MD, a practitioner at the facility where he launched yesterday's attack, after making threats and harassing him with phone calls.

Ulrich had also been issued a no trespassing order for a local church after sending a 'disturbing letter' to the pastor.

Ulrich was reportedly still granted a firearms permit and obtained a handgun just months before carrying out Tuesday's deadly attack.

Ulrich, from Buffalo, had a vendetta against the Allina Health Clinic (above) on Crossroads Campus Drive in Wright County, Buffalo, and its staff because they refused to give him opioids for a back injury, court records show

Hennepin County Medical Center spokeswoman Christine Hill said Tuesday night that one person brought to the hospital after being shot had died. Overbay pictured

Overbay's (center) loved ones identified her Wednesday on a GoFundMe page set up to help her family including her two young children

Ulrich was arrested and is currently being held in the Wright County Jail over the shooting that took place at the clinic late Tuesday morning.

Five people were wounded after the gunman entered the facility not long before 11am and opened fire. Three other victims remain in a hospital and a fourth has been discharged.

'Suspicious packages' were also located at the clinic and the nearby Super 8 motel - roughly one mile from the center - where Ulrich was known to have been staying prior to to the attack.

It is not yet clear if any of the devices had detonated.

The Wright County Sheriff's Office said the criminal complaint against Ulrich will be completed by the attorney's office Thursday.

He faces charges including one count of second-degree murder, four counts of first-degree attempted murder and one count of possession of explosive or incendiary devices.

Ulrich had a restraining order taken out against him by one of the facility's doctors Andrew J Burgdorf MD (above) in 2018, it has been revealed

Wright County Attorney Brian Lutes said in a statement Wednesday that he will 'aggressively prosecute Ulrich for this horrible crime and the pain he caused to the victims, their families and the entire community.'

New details have now emerged about Ulrich's apparent motive for the deadly attack after authorities said Tuesday he had been known to law enforcement since at least 2003.

Court records show a petition for a restraining order was filed against Ulrich in fall 2018 by a man named Andrew John Burgdorf - one of the 11 practitioners listed on the Allina Clinic website.

Ulrich made harassing phone calls to Burgdorf and threatened him, the court documents seen by DailyMail.com show.

The petition documents have not been released because Burgdorf's lawyer requested they remain confidential at the time of the filing.

According to the Minnesota Star Tribune, Ulrich wanted to seek revenge on Burgdorf and the medical staff who he felt had 'tortured' him by refusing to give him drugs for his back injury.

Allina medical staff told police at the time they believed Ulrich was likely to carry out his threats.

'I believe Mr. Ulrich is a high threat to society and himself,' Burgdorf said, according to the police report.

It is not yet known if Burgdorf is among Ulrich's five victims or if he was in the center at the time of the attack.

Authorities have not yet confirmed if the four surviving victims are staff or patients at the facility.

The 2018 police report said Ulrich had threatened to carry out a mass shooting, to do something 'big and sensational so that it makes an impact' and made various threats against a total of four Allina facilities with the Buffalo site being his main target, the Star Tribune reported.

It is not clear if Ulrich planned to carry out additional attacks at other locations after first targeting the Buffalo clinic but authorities confirmed other 'suspicious devices' were found at the Super 8 hotel where Ulrich was staying.

A map of the Allina Health Clinic which is just one mile from the Super 8 Motel. Suspicious packages were found at both locations

The sheriff's department at the Super 8 motel where 'suspicious devices' were also found

The Super 8 motel above roughly one mile from the medical center

Testimony filed by a nurse as part of Burgdorf's motion for a temporary protection order against Ulrich cited an incident on October 29 2018 where medics pressed the panic alarm at Buffalo Hospital when the suspect entered and started yelling at staff.

Ulrich had approached the nurse 'unfocused and disoriented' asking for his medical records and telling the medic about his medical history, the document states.

'[Ulrich] expressed that Buffalo Hospital had previously sent him to Abbott Northwestern Hospital because he had overdosed on narcotic pain medication,' it read.

'He wanted me to agree with him that Buffalo Hospital should not have transferred him to Abbott Northwestern Hospital.'

Ulrich's 'behavior escalated' and he started yelling, with the nurse reporting that she was fearful for the safety of herself and others at the hospital.

Another staff member pushed the panic alarm and Ulrich left before a security guard arrived, the document states.

Ulrich was served with a temporary restraining order on November 9 of that year ordering him to stay away from Burgdorf, Burgdorf's home, the Allina Clinic and the Buffalo Hospital.

Following a December hearing, Ulrich was given a harassment restraining order up until December 13 2020.

A court filing from the hearing says Ulrich called Burgdorf three times in an hour, becoming increasingly threatening each time.

He threatened the doctor saying that 'killing one individual wouldn't be enough' and spoke of 'mass violence at a medical clinic and hospitals', the documents state.

'His intent was to create enough of a sensation to get public recognition that would warrant at least 30 years in jail [and] possibly a straight jacket,' it reads.

'[Ulrich] stated he had practiced different scenarios [and] he was testing how to get through security with a length of steel since he knew he had only seconds after getting past security to achieve his goal.'

The Tribune reported that the same month the order was granted, Ulrich was charged with violating it.

Ulrich pleaded guilty but the case was later dismissed in April 2020 after he underwent a mental health evaluation and was deemed 'mentally incompetent'.

Ulrich pleaded guilty but the case was later dismissed in April 2020 after he underwent a mental health evaluation and was deemed 'mentally incompetent'.

An aerial view of the mobile park where Ulrich lived. His former roommate at the trailer claims Ulrich was granted a firearms permit last year despite his threats against the health clinic and doctor

Local church Zion Lutheran (pictured) also obtained a no trespassing order against Ulrich in 2019 after the pastor received a 'threatening letter' from him, a church bulletin said

During court proceedings in June 2019, a court official said Ulrich had previously applied for and been denied a gun permit.

'It is highly recommended that the defendant not be allowed to have use or possession of any dangerous weapons,' they wrote.

Five months later in November 2019, Ulrich was then ordered to hand over any weapons or permits for weapons.

However despite the recommendations of the court, Ulrich's threats and his 'mental incompetence', his former roommate claims he was in fact granted a firearms permit and had showed off to him a gun he bought just months before Tuesday's mass shooting.

Raymond Zandstra, who lived with Ulrich in his mobile home for two years until last July, told Fox 9 he had seen a copy of a permit allowing the 67-year-old to carry a firearm in his home last year.

Zandstra said Ulrich then showed off his new handgun - a Smith & Wesson - last summer.

'He showed me a new handgun he got, I said, "What? You shouldn't have a gun,"' he told the outlet.

DailyMail.com has not yet been able to verify whether or not Ulrich was granted a gun permit.

Neither Buffalo Police Department nor Wright County Sheriff's Department returned a request for information Wednesday.

Zandstra slammed law enforcement for allegedly allowing him to obtain a firearm saying they 'knew he was a wack job' and harbored a grudge against doctors 'because they wouldn't give him all the pain killers he wanted.'

'They'd give him a month supply, and it would be gone in a few days,' he told Fox 9.

Police said Ulrich had been known to law enforcement for some time and they believe he targeted the Allina Health Clinic on Crossroads Campus Drive in Wright County, Buffalo, (above) and its staff

Law enforcement personnel and first responders gathered on the scene outside the clinic

One of the broken windows following the mass shooting at the clinic

Zandstra also said Ulrich had a particular vendetta against one doctor and even erected a sign in front of his own home slamming the medic as a 'quack.'

The former roommate, who moved out when Ulrich took out a restraining order against him, described the suspected killer as 'nothing but trouble' and said the police would often pay him a visit.

He said Ulrich was often drunk or high on a mix of painkillers, glue and marijuana.

Richard Ulrich, the suspect's younger brother, also said he believed his opioid addiction was behind the mass shooting.

He told The New York Times that Ulrich worked in construction for some years and had possibly injured his back on the job.

He had back surgery about two years ago and became dependent on opioids he had been prescribed, Richard said.

He said his brother was angry when doctors refused to prescribe more of them to him.

'He would call me once in a while, but that's usually what he would talk about, that he was mad at the doctors for not giving him opioids and that they should open up the gates on the opioids. It didn't make a lot of sense to me,' he said.

As well as his harassment of medical professionals, a local church also obtained a no trespassing order against Ulrich in 2019 after the pastor received a 'threatening letter' from him.

A newsletter on the website for Zion Lutheran Church in Buffalo revealed the complaint against Ulrich and warned staff to call police if he turned up at the property.

'Pastor Ted informed the council of a disturbing letter received from Greg Ulrich,' it read.

'The Buffalo Police Department was called and informed Pastor Ted that Mr. Ulrich is well known to them and recommended that a no trespassing order be issued so that if he ever did appear at Zion the police could take action.

'The order was issued the following day and the staff have been given a picture of Mr. Ulrich and informed to call 911 if he does appear on any of Zion's properties.'

Prior to Tuesday's attack, Ulrich did not have any weapons offenses.

But court records show he had a long rap sheet of arrests and convictions for drink driving and possession of small amounts of marijuana dating from 2004 through 2015.

Most of the offenses were in Wright County, including two convictions for gross misdemeanor drunken driving that resulted in short jail sentences.

No charges have yet been filed against Ulrich over the mass shooting that has so far claimed at least one life.

Buffalo Police Chief Pat Budke confirmed Ulrich's identity at a press conference Tuesday afternoon where he said the suspect had been known to law enforcement for some time and is thought to have specifically targeted the clinic.

Buffalo Police Chief Pat Budke (center) confirmed the suspect's identity at a press conference Tuesday afternoon where he said earlier reports that four homemade bombs had been detonated at the center are now known to be incorrect

Both the Buffalo Police Department and the Wright County Sheriff's Department were 'very familiar' with the suspect and had received 'several calls for service [regarding Ulrich] dating back to 2003,' Sheriff Sean Deringer (above) said at the press conference

He said there was no indication that Ulrich was connected to any type of domestic terrorism.

Instead, Budke said they believe the 67-year-old 'targeted the facility or someone at the facility' because he was unhappy with the care he'd received there.

'All I can say is, it's a history that spans several years and there's certainly a history of him being unhappy with health care... with the health care that he'd received,' Budke said.

'None of the information that we have from our past contact with him would indicate that he was unhappy with, or would direct his anger at, anyone other than people within the facilities where he had been treated or where they had attempted to give treatment.'

Ulrich has lived in the community for some time and has been in contact with healthcare professionals at the clinic for 'quite some time', authorities said.

'None of the information we have at this time suggests he would focus on any other individual or clinic.'

Police said they believe he acted alone and they are not looking for any further suspects involved in the shooting.

Both the Buffalo Police Department and the Wright County Sheriff's Department were 'very familiar' with the suspect and had received 'several calls for service [regarding Ulrich] dating back to 2003,' Sheriff Sean Deringer said at the press conference.

'He is no stranger to law enforcement,' authorities said.

Budke said earlier reports that four homemade bombs had been detonated at the center are now known to be incorrect.

He said that 'suspicious packages' had been located at both the clinic and the nearby Super 8 motel - roughly one mile from the center - where Ulrich was known to have been staying.

Budke said it was not yet clear if any of the devices had detonated and if the damage to the clinic was from gunfire or an explosive.

Police were first called to reports of shots being fired at the clinic at 10:54 am.

Officers responded to the scene and found several people injured inside the clinic, who they immediately administered aid to.

They located the suspect and he was taken into custody, police said.

During a secondary search of the building, officers found what they described as a 'suspicious package' in the lobby.

The clinic was evacuated and the Minneapolis bomb squad was called to the scene. They were still on the scene at 3pm.

Authorities then received information that Ulrich was staying at the Super 8.

Officers went to the motel where they found 'additional suspicious devices' and also evacuated the building.

A search warrant was obtained and officers continue to be investigating the scene.

Budke said the situation was contained by 11:42 am and there was no ongoing threat to public safety.

Hours after the attack, law enforcement also cordoned off a small mobile home park near the city's Pulaski Lake, about a mile from the clinic, and searched a mobile home where Ulrich had lived.

Budke choked back tears in Tuesday's press conference as he said: 'This is a day that no community would want to go through - especially those staff that were there and families of those that were injured.'

There had been conflicting reports about whether any bombs had detonated at the scene.

Initial reports based on police dispatch audio said that four homemade bombs had been detonated inside the family medicine and urgent care clinic at the facility just 30 minutes after the shooting.

'The male is saying that he had four homemade explosive devices. They all went off,' a voice says over the audio, adding that there could be another device inside the suspect's briefcase that had not gone off yet.

Agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives search for evidence at the Allina Health Clinic parking lot after a shooting

A Minneapolis Police Bomb Squad vehicle is seen outside the Allina Health Clinic Tuesday

The man was 'sprawled out on his stomach' and had said the gun and his briefcase was by the front desk of the clinic, the audio reported.

Wright County spokesman John Holler later told CNN no bombs were found on the scene but Minnesota Governor Tim Walz said at a press conference the incident involved some IEDs.

'At the time what we know is there was an active shooter situation and some improvised explosive devices,' Walz said at a briefing one hour before the local authorities held their press conference.

'It's not confirmed yet the causalities or those injured in this.'

Walz confirmed the suspect was in custody and that the incident appeared to be the work of a single individual.

He added that it was too early to determine the motive for the attack.

The police dispatch audio reported that '15 shots were fired' and 'that somebody came in and started shooting.'

At least five were said to be critically injured with voices later saying there was 'one down' and that there were 'several victims with one [victim's condition being] critical if not fatal.'

Three female victims were said to be by the front entrance with gunshot wounds - with at least one critical and one shot in the abdomen.

A local woman told Fox9 she was dropping her mom off for an appointment when she saw two nurses come running out the front of the building.

At least five people were wounded including one killed after the gunman entered the facility not long before 11am and opened fire

Local schools were placed on lockdown and a flight ban was issued over the area

'I pulled in and was getting ready to drop her off at the door and two of the nurses came running out and they got in and said they heard about 11 shots within a minute,' she said.

She said the nurses told her they didn't see a shooter.

They then saw the front windows 'be shot out' about two minutes later so they drove away from the scene, she said.

Another local resident Jim Rich told Fox 9 the incident was 'very out of the norm for the area' where everyone knows each other.

A law enforcement source told the outlet the incident was a 'disaster.'

Multiple law enforcement teams were drafted in to the scene with the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearm and Hennepin County all sending in teams to assist Buffalo Police and Wright County Sheriff's Department.

The State Patrol reported that it was flying six boxes of blood from the Red Cross to Buffalo Hospital for the victims.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey called the situation an 'unspeakable depravity' and said the city was also sending in emergency responders to assist Buffalo.

'There is an unspeakable depravity in doing harm to those who work to heal us. Those who have stepped up and risked their own health for ours,' he tweeted.

'Our first responders are on their way to the scene to help. Today Minneapolis stands with our neighbors in Buffalo.'

Local schools went into lockdown and a flight ban was issued over the area Tuesday morning while the investigation was underway.

Allina Health owns or operates 12 hospitals and more than 90 clinics across Minnesota.

At the Allina Health Clinic in Buffalo, 11 practitioners are listed on the website.

Buffalo is a city of about 15,000 people based around 40 miles northwest of Minneapolis.
Vacant land on the peninsula owned by the city of Charleston  seven-tenths of an acre at the end of F Street  could become the site of a 55-unit affordable housing development.

It's a plan the city has been working on for more than two years, and there are some unusual aspects to the deal. Notably, the city will long-term lease the land to a developer rather than selling it or giving it to a nonprofit group.

Most, but not all, of the planned apartments will be set aside for tenants with low incomes; a difficult type of housing to develop that will be aided by city and state loans, a land lease, and state and federal tax credits.

Of the 55 apartments anticipated, 11 will be for people earning no more than 30 percent of the area median income (AMI), which works out to $17,000 for a single person and is considered very low income.

Units in that particular category are often needed more than any other income threshold," said Geona Johnson, the city's housing director.

Another 30 units will be for people earning 50 or 60 percent of AMI. At the high end, there will be 14 moderate-income units for people earning up to 80 percent of AMI, $45,000 for a single person.

"I think it is very much needed, and it's in the district I represent," Councilman Robert Mitchell said.

The rents have not been determined, but typically in such developments the rent is up to 30 percent of the maximum allowable income of the tenants. Having some units for people with higher, moderate incomes helps generate enough rent to finance ongoing maintenance and repairs.

The property is located behind two affordable housing apartment complexes owned by the Charleston Housing Authority, at 670 and 676 King Street, and is bordered by F Street, the U.S. Highway 17 off-ramp and the Lowcountry Lowline linear park.

Charleston acquired the land as part of a $4.6 million purchase of railroad right-of-way from Norfolk Southern Corp., to create the Lowcountry Lowline.

City Council agreed on the night of Feb. 9 to lease 0.7-acres behind 670 King St. to a Greenville company for 60 years. The company is NHE Inc., doing business as Lowline Housing LP.

Over the past year South Carolina has become more attractive in terms of financing affordable housing," said Robinson Villa, director of development for NHE.

He said state and federal low-income tax credits, and state financed low-interest tax-exempt bonds, will provide much of the financing. The city and the Charleston Redevelopment Corporation also plan to loan the company a combined $1,670,000.

By structuring the deal as a long-term land lease, the city is lowering the cost of the project  the developers don't need to buy land  and the city is not giving up ownership of the property. After 60 years the city gets the land back, plus the apartment building.

Canada is extending its ban on cruise ships through February 2022 because of Covid-19, effectively shutting down popular summer trips to Alaska for another year.

The prohibition will allow authorities to focus on the rollout of the coronavirus vaccine and limit the spread of new variants, the government said in a statement Thursday.

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The decision is a setback for an industry trying to get back in business after being in dry dock for almost year due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Alaska is one of the industrys top destinations -- it attracted a record 1.33 million cruise guests in 2019 -- and the ban will also affect New England cruises that travel north to Montreal and other stops.

This extension, if not amended as pandemic conditions improve, or through action by U.S. authorities, would potentially require our brands to cancel our Alaska and Canada/New England cruise vacation seasons this year," Carnival Corp., the largest cruise operator, said in an email.

Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings Ltd., which also sails to Alaska, said it was studying the order and hasnt canceled cruises that visit Canadian ports.

We are currently exploring several initiatives that may allow such cruises to continue, especially for the important Alaska season," Norwegian said. Given the fluidity of the current environment, we will also continue to work with the Canadian government to amend their current suspension."

Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. didnt immediately respond to a request for comment.

Outbreaks of Covid-19 on cruise ships early in the pandemic led to deaths among passengers and crew, and stranded several ships as port after port turned them away, ultimately leading to a shutdown. The industry is still closed in the U.S., but cruise companies have been aiming to gradually return to service and get most of their fleets back to sea by year-end.

Maritime Law

Maritime law bars foreign-flagged ships from transporting passengers directly between two U.S. ports, so Alaska voyages typically make stops in Canada. Alaska represents about 5% of the global cruise-line deployment, according to the Cruise Lines International Association, the trade group known as CLIA.

While this is beyond our control, we remain committed to operating any portion of our Alaska season," Carnival said. We are hopeful that positive progress relative to the pandemic accelerates to the point that the Canadian Transport Minister will rescind the interim order and allow cruise vacations to resume in 2021."

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New Delhi, Feb 10 : In a massive capacity building exercise ahead of the Covid-19 vaccination roll out for the people above 50 years, the central government will be increasing the number of inoculation sites to 75,000 in a couple of weeks from now, said Dr N.K Arora, Head, Operations Research Group, National COVID-19 Task Force.

Arora, who was speaking at a virtual event on Wednesday said that the move is aligned with the government's intent to vaccinate over 50 lakh people everyday.

"In the next couple of weeks, the number of immunisation centres will be increased from 50,000 to 75,000 and we would be able to vaccinate about 5 to 7 million people everyday," he said.

Arora added that the country has the capacity to inoculate 1 crore people everyday.

"We have the capacity to vaccinate 10 million individuals per day," he said.

More than 36,000 vaccination sites would be needed to reach the figure as shared by Arora.

Currently, the government is running the nationwide Covid immunisation programme through 38,445 vaccination centres across 28 states and eight Union Territories (UTs), which are being expanded regularly, as per the data extracted from the CoWIN application.

The addition to the existing vaccination sites is expected to accelerate the pace of immunization as well as complete the immunization of priority groups in a timely manner set by the government.

Earlier, Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan said that the government expects to immunize the 30 crore of people categorised under different priority groups, by July this year.

Suneela Garg, Public Health Expert and Advisor to the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), told IANS that in addition to the upscale of vaccination centres, the optimum use of the sites is also important to complete the inoculation of all the priority groups.

"We have to vaccinate more number of beneficiaries at every site. We have the capacity to conduct upto 200 vaccinations in each session. The threshold of 100 vaccinations must be removed and the government should encourage the vaccination centres to inoculate a greater number of people since we are now looking to immunize 27 crore more of them in vaccination drive," she said.

Garg suggested that the government should attach at least three vaccination centres to each cold chain point for mass coverage. India has currently around 29,000 cold chain points.

The suggestion indicates an increase of the vaccination centres to 90,000.

"It will automatically improve the daily average of vaccination which has stayed below 3 lakh so far," she added.

India has immunised over 66 lakh people so far with an average of around 2.75 lakh vaccinations per day. The drive started on January 16 to vaccinate around 1 crore healthcare workers who are at the top of the government's priority. It was extended to around 2 crore frontline workers since February 6.

The government plans to start inoculation of the third priority group, which is 27 crore vulnerable people who are in the 50 plus years age group, from March.

The government has also directed the states and UTs to conclude the first dose administration of all healthcare workers by February 24 while the deadline for the frontline workers is March 6.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Israelis across the political spectrum prefer the status quo to the two-state solution, and Palestinians are only willing to accept a two-state solution that Israelis will be unable to accept, according to a new RAND Corporation report that assesses whether there are any alternative solutions to the conflict that average Israelis and Palestinians would support.

Derived from a series of innovative, structured focus group discussions, the report suggests that the Biden Administration's recent reaffirmation of U.S. policy to support a "mutually agreed two-state solution, one in which Israel lives in peace and security alongside a viable Palestinian state," will face a steep uphill climb.

The analysis focused on five plausible alternatives: two-state solution, one-state solution, confederation approach, Israeli annexation of the West Bank's Area C, and perpetuation of today's status quo. Almost all parties were extremely pessimistic about the feasibility of any. About 60% of Israelis said the status quo could feasibly continue, as it has for decades, and many others believed that it was manageable and preferable to the risk of other alternatives. Peace was considered a "romantic notion" that was simply not attainable at this time.

"One of our key goals was to determine if there were areas of overlap in opinions and feeling among Israelis and Palestinians that might offer avenues for negotiation, leading the parties closer to peace," said Daniel Egel, lead author of the report and an economist at nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND. "Sadly, the data show the opposite. The data highlight the deep distrust and profound animosity of each side for the other."

Resolving the crisis will likely require more holistic "peace deals" than have been previously offered, the researchers found. While previous deals have focused on economic dividends, the international community has shied away from the security guarantees that could help find common ground between these two peoples.

Researchers conducted four-hour-long discussions with 273 individual West Bank Palestinians, Gazan Palestinians, Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs in 2018 and 2019. The focus groups, based on RAND's Delphi method, aimed to complement extensive polling efforts by others on this topic.

One key finding is that getting Israeli Jews to support any alternative to the status quo will require a shift in both domestic and international politics. "It is hard to imagine a departure from current trends unless strong, courageous leadership among Israelis, Palestinians and the international community articulates a desire for a better future for all," said C. Ross Anthony, co-leader of the report and director of RAND's Israeli-Palestinian Initiative.

Researchers found that among Israeli Jews there are two major impediments to anything but the status quo: a lack of trust in Palestinian objectives and a general belief that none of the other alternatives are feasible. The lack of trust results in fear, xenophobia and a willingness to forgo basic principles of democracy when it comes to the rights of Palestinians.

Another key finding is that Palestinians will likely require international security guarantees for any peaceful resolution. Palestinians perceived all five alternatives as biased against them and primarily serving the interests of the more powerful Israelis.

Palestinians indicated they would be willing to accept a modified two-state solution, with an independent state with geographic contiguity, political autonomy, a standing army and control over the borders. While such a solution would be very difficult for Israel to accept, a two-state solution where the international community made credible commitments to guarantee Palestinian security could be more viable, researchers concluded.

The third key policy finding is that educating Israelis and the Palestinians about the alternatives could help. Pre-testing showed that few focus-group participants started with a clear understanding of any of the alternatives, but receiving a brief overview allowed them to make a more informed decision and some changed their minds.

"An information campaign, educating individuals about all the alternatives, could be an important component of efforts to promote a peaceful resolution to the conflict," said co-author Shira Efron, a senior research fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) and special advisor on Israel for RAND.

"We hope that in the coming years Israelis and Palestinians and the international community will have the courage to make the commitments - and sacrifices - to resolve what has been one of the most enduring political challenges in the post-World War II period," said co-author Charles Ries, adjunct senior fellow at RAND.

###

The report, "Alternatives in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict," was sponsored by a generous gift from Peter and Carol Richards.
AI Researchers write papers predicting political insurgencies due to current social media algorithms. Tweet this

Recent discussions and movies like Social Dilemma tend to emphasize the second aspect. However, two papers written before these events by Aimdyn researchers in collaboration with Criminal Justice professor Jason Gravel from Temple University showed both aspects are the basic ingredients for more frequent and larger insurgencies and political violence based on mathematical models and algorithms used in Artificial Intelligence (AI).

"Algorithms on social media platforms are able to "optimize" homophilya powerful natural human tendency to associate with similar otherby suggesting content that your friends like even before those friends share that information with you. By sharing content an algorithm has already determined your friends are likely to be interested in, you give legitimacy to that content and to your friends' interest in that content," said Jason Gravel, Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at Temple University.

"Information and misinformation alike can rapidly permeate pockets of individuals with similar views, unencumbered by geographic, or time constraints. Soon things become "obvious" in some social circles, no matter how farfetched they may seem from the outside looking in. Under these conditions, little to no coordination among actors in a network is necessary for large scale mobilization around an issue," Gravel said.

The models also suggest a possible remedy: a balancing of suggested content and suggested network associates, similar to the fairness doctrine of the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC), introduced in 1949 and abandoned in 1987.

The results could thus be used to inform future decisions made by the tech giants in order to move in a direction less susceptible to huge political outbursts.

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Aimdyn Inc is an AI and ML Research company based in Santa Barbara, CA. It has a long history of ML and AI development and analysis with predictive capabilities, applied to large societal issues, from damage control for the Gulf Oil Spill to mapping out the spread of the current COVID-19 pandemic.

To learn more about Aimdyn Inc. and these projects, visit www.aimdyn.com

Research Papers:

M. Fonoberova, I. Mezic, J. Mezic, J. Hogg, J. Gravel. "Small-world networks and synchronisation in an agent-based model of civil violence", Global Crime, 20:3-4, 161-195, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1080/17440572.2019.1662304

M. Fonoberova, I. Mezic, J. Mezic, R. Mohr. "An agent-based model of urban insurgence: Effect of gathering sites and Koopman mode analysis", PLOS ONE 13(10): e0205259, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0205259

SOURCE Aimdyn
Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US

Iran ready to help improve the defense capability of Syria

European Parliament head proposes to strengthen sanctions on Russia

UK PM gets married in London

Armenia reports COVID-19 new 81 cases: for people die

EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia

2 people die in Armenia road accident

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61 quakes recorded in Congo per day

Syrian MFA: EU lost credibility due to blind obedience to US policy

Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack

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Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war

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Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities

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Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country

Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia

US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs

Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners

Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions

Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US

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Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes

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Armenia Central Electoral Commission chief on snap elections: No legal basis for postponing, suspending any function

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42 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia

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Armenia National Security Service Reserve Officers' Union members meet with His Holiness Karekin II

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Armenia ex-President Kocharyan: Today we are not full-fledged negotiating party

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Emma Manners has shared a stunning throwback photograph alongside actress Elizabeth Hurley and Lady Georgia Daventry on Instagram.

The Duchess of Rutland, 57, is seen in the centre of the snap - believed to be from the noughties - mirroring Elizabeth's pose, while Viscountess Daventry pouts for the camera.

Mother-of-five Emma, who lives Belvoir Castle, in Leicestershire where The Crown was filmed, appeared to be reminiscing on more sociable times amid the global pandemic with the glamorous snap.

She captioned the age-defying photo of the trio, who are now in their fifties: 'Golden oldie'.

Emma Manners shared a stunning throwback photograph on Instagram. Pictured left to right: Elizabeth Hurley, Duchess of Rutland and Lady Georgia Daventry

Elizabeth Hurley (pictured) has previously revealed the exercise regime used to maintain her youthful appearance on Instagram

Emma (pictured centre) last posted an age-defying snap with Elizabeth Hurley and her son Damian in 2019, while shopping at The Engine Yard

Viscountess Daventry commented that they 'look like babies' in the throwback photograph posted by Emma

Emma who has had a lengthy friendship with Elizabeth Hurley, 55, and Lady Georgia Daventry, didn't post the year the photograph was taken.

Despite not tagging her companions, both Elizabeth and Viscountess Daventry commented on the snap.

'I love,' Elizabeth wrote.

Referring to Emma's new Spotify podcast, Duchess, Lady Georgia Daventry added: 'So much posing and pouting!! We look like babies... good luck with your new podcast'

The post racked up over 600 likes, with many gushing about the stunning photograph.

The throwback photograph racked up over 600 likes, with many gushing about their 'stunning' appearances

One wrote: 'Stunning!! What a great pic!!

Another said: 'What a precious picture. Gorgeous'

A third added: 'Fabulous'

Having spent most of 2020 welcoming virtual guests to her stately home, savvy aristocrat Emma last shared a photograph alongside Elizabeth Hurley in 2019.

In the snap the duo are seen late night shopping at The Engine Yard, a retail village located within restored 19th century buildings on the Duchess' estate.

Elizabeth often gives a glimpse into how she maintains her ageless appearance on Instagram, with posts showing her grueling exercise regime and previously revealed in an interview with Woman & Home magazine that she moisturisers about ten times a day.

Elizabeth Hurley who has documented her lockdown on Instagram, was previously snapped alongside Georgia Daventry in 2018 (pictured)

She's been keeping followers up to date with a parade of snaps in glamorous outfits and bikinis, celebrating her 55th birthday by embracing the social media trend for a bathtub photo.

Meanwhile Duchess Rutland has been worked on her podcast and managing Belvoir Castle, with the help of her children Lady Violet, 27, and her siblings Alice, 25, Eliza, 23, Charles, 21, and Hugo, 17, who have pitched in to tend to the family estate throughout lockdown.

In her new podcast, the Duchess revealed it was a challenge to join high society after growing up on a farm near Cardiff.

She moved into her grand home in June 1992, after marrying David Manners, 61, 11th Duke of Rutland.

I come from a very, very different world to the one I married into and if I'm honest about my upbringing, I always felt it equipped me enormously well for the journey of the life I carried out to this date,' she said.

Press Release

February 10, 2021 GRACE POE's INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

ANC Headstart Karen Davila: Senator Grace, good morning to you, ma'am. Sen. Grace Poe: Good morning, Karen, and to your viewers. Davila: Alright, Senator, you led the hybrid hearing yesterday and you are calling for a suspension of this very controversial implementation of the MVIS. First of all, what can be done to actually order the LTO to suspend it? Poe: First of all, Karen, it is just not me alone calling for the suspension of the PMVIC. It is also a collective decision of the senators who attended our hearing, all of us, unanimously. What can we do? We can't really impose our will on the executive, although with our oversight function, we can submit a committee report with a recommendation to suspend this. Now based on our hearing yesterday, it's been discussed, and Senator Drilon and Recto pointed this out, that really there's no legal basis for the DOTr to delegate a power that's been delegated to them. Meaning, they have the power to do the testing, but for them to delegate it to a private company or individual, there is a legal concern regarding that. So that can definitely be challenged. Davila: Okay, so that is one concern. Let's talk about details of the hearing first. You said yesterday "the timing could not have been worse," so are you against the MVIS as a whole or is it only the timing, Senator? Poe: Okay, let me clarify. The motor vehicle inspection system is actually a good program because it checks the roadworthiness of cars and the safety of the motorists. On the other hand, the delegation to a private motor vehicle inspection center is what is highly debatable. Number one, they didn't go through a proper bidding process which is normally required of a public-private partnership. Number two, there were questionable public hearings. DOTr, LTO claim that they conducted... but many of the stakeholders, leaders of different advocacy groups, who were supposed to have been consulted, were not present during those hearings. And number three, of course, the timing and the prohibitive increase in fees. In the past, it was about P400 to P500 for every private vehicle. Now, it will increase to about P1,500. Initially, they even wanted P1,800. Now why is this a concern? Why did they start with private motor vehicles? There are about four million of those, whereas public vehicles are about 400,000. They could have begun with that, especially when there's more incidence of mechanical failure when it comes to heavy trucks or buses. Those are really more of the concern when it comes to the riding public. Senator Recto pointed out that with the P1,500 in fees for the initial testing, those 23 centers will stand to make about P6 billion a year without public bidding. Now, 23 centers, their goal was to have about 458, so they have less than 0.4 percent in operation. That means there will be about 476 cars per testing center and with that about 200 hours of testing. There are only 24 hours in a day. If it's 30 minutes per car, how can they possibly accommodate that? What is the implication of that? Number one, when it comes to social distancing, if there's a long line of cars and motorists having their cars tested, how can you maintain social distancing? And number two, the equality in the law. There are only 23 testing centers, so in some parts of the Philippines, they will still be conducting the old testing which is the emissions test. And here in Metro Manila, since we have our testing centers, supposedly we'll have to be paying more. So there's really a lot of discrepancy at this point. Davila: Okay, I'm curious, Senator, maganda ang punto mo kanina. Are you seeing this, number one, is this a revenue measure? I was thinking in the beginning this was a revenue-generating measure for the government but you pointed out, would the P6 billion to P8 billion be earned by the private testing centers, not by the DOTr? Poe: See, that's where it's highly suspicious. For the P6 billion, and that's just minimum, that's just considering that you don't fail your emission test. Because if you fail your emission test, you will go back and be fined another P900. So actually Senator Recto computed about P8 billion in revenue that will go to the private sector. How much will the government get? The computation, these private centers will only pay the government P100,000 for the license to operate their center. So if there are about 458 centers, considering if they already rolled it out, government will stand to earn about P45.8 million, that's less than one percent. So, malayo. Davila: It doesn't even make sense. Poe: It does not make sense because even when we had this Aerocity for San Miguel in the airport, we had to ensure that the government was going to get its money back. With the NLEX-SLEX connector road, public bidding was conducted; the Mactan Airport, all of these public-private partnerships have gone through a grueling process of screening. Whereas this one, all of a sudden they allow the 23, because right now it's only 23 centers that operate, with not one regulation in place when they rolled it out before Dec. 29. So the question begs to be asked, who are these preferred individuals who were able to win those licenses to operate those private centers? So we're asking them to submit not just the names of the companies, but the incorporators of those companies as well. Davila: Because the 23, could it be possible that they would have relatives, for example, who are, for example, relatives of members of, I don't know, members from the government, the DOTr, the LTO, that would be a conflict of interest, Senator? Would that be allowed? Poe: You know, initially, for any DOTr contract, it says that any member of the DOTr, their families to a certain degree, is not allowed to participate. Suspiciously, in this private motor vehicle inspection center agreement, they took that provision out and all they did was put that those in the accrediting committee may not participate. Meaning, you can still be a relative of an officer of the DOTr or the LTO, or you yourself in the DOTr, LTO, as long as you're not in the selection of accrediting committee, you may actually own a private motor vehicle inspection center. Again, let me reiterate, sa ating mga kababayan, P8 bilyon, P6 hanggang P8 bilyon ang mapupunta sa pribadong sektor. At hindi lamang 'yun, gagastos kayo ng P1,500 na dati ay P500 lamang. Ang kaibahan nito, kung P36 ang bawat kilo ng bigas, 'yung idadagdag ninyo dito sa pambayad dito ay halos 46 na kilong bigas na. Lalung-lalo na sa panahon ngayon, sa pandemyang ito, ngayon pa nila tataasan ng ganyang kalaking singil na hindi naman mapupunta sa ating mga kababayan ang pera. Pupunta lang 'yan sa pribadong sektor na anong benepisyo ang mapupunta sa atin. Ang daming naging aberya. Maraming nagpapa-test na paulit-ulit na bumabalik dahil bumabagsak sila. Samantalang sa casa na may maayos na pamamalakad... Davila: At may insurance ka pa sa casa. Usually may insurance ang may-ari ng sasakyan. Poe: Ito, oo babayaran mo. Tapos sinasabi nila dapat daw walang human intervention dito sa test na ito dahil ipinagmamalaki nila na computerized na lahat ito. 'E hindi ganun ang nangyayari. 'Yung mga nagre-report na nagpapa-test, tao pa rin ang nagte-test. Tapos 'pag naghahanap sila ng engineer na mag-eeksplika bakit sila bumagsak, sa ibang mga centers, wala noon. Kaya hindi pa sila handa para sa roll out na ito. 23 centers pa lang ang available. Ano, ipagsisiksikan nila ang halos araw-araw 400,000 na sasakyan para mag-test. Davila: You make strong points with number one, paano pinili 'yung 23 centers na 'to kung walang bidding? Who owns these 23 centers? So this will be the subject, Senator, of the next hearing? That's important. Poe: Well, actually I will be submitting already a committee report by next week. We asked them to submit the names of the owners, we will incorporate that in the committee report. Regardless of who the owners will be, the most important action that we will recommend is for the immediate suspension of the private motor vehicle testing...First of all, the government's not ready, it's under very suspicious terms that they approved these centers, and the people will be paying more out of pocket. Davila: Now let's take the side of the Vehicle Inspection Center Operation Association of the Philippines, this is the group, ito 'yung VICOAP. During the hearing, they told you, Senator, this is a bargain to protect our families. 'Yun po 'yung sinabi nila sa hearing. Sabi nila you're only paying P4 a day for light vehicles, P1.80 a day for motorcycles, kung baga murang-mura lang daw ito para protektahan ang pamilya. And under this there's less corruption, they argue, no LTO fixers. And they claim it's really time to upgrade the current testing methods. Poe: I agree with the goal that they have. We really need to upgrade our testing equipment and testing centers. And there's no price that can be enough to guarantee the safety of our loved ones and ourselves. On the other hand, we've seen that what they're claiming is actually not necessarily the only option that we have. First of all, the government, since 2001 with the Motor Vehicles Users Fund, had already collected more than P200 billion. And with that, I think the charge that could be used for testing which the government was able to save is about P30 billion. Where did that go? First, they put it in the PITC where usually the government agencies park their money if they can't use it so that they don't lose it. And then afterwards, it was reverted back to the National Treasury. So the question is, why did the DOTr not utilize that money that they had so that they can come up with their own testing centers? Now if you say, well the private sector might be better off doing it. It's true. In some cases, it might be good. But from the beginning, there's no public bidding, there's no consultation, how do we know that the individuals who were chosen are actually capable, competent and actually above board. So wala na sigurong korapsyon sa testing, sa umpisa pa lang kasi meron na. Kung hindi nila mapapatunayan, bakit hindi maayos ang pag-select nila o pagpili ng mga korporasyon at indibidwal na magpapatakbo nito? Davila: What is the accountability of Transportation Secretary Art Tugade in all these? Considering you just pointed out the DOTr could have actually made the testing centers so that the income would go to the government in full and then go back to the National Treasury? Poe: Well first of all, the DOTr has to account for what they did with the money that was collected from the motorists, that was supposed to be about P30 billion. Now, Secretary Tugade did not deem it necessary to show up in our hearing yesterday. But with our recommendation that we suspend the operations of these centers, we are expecting to hear what his stand is regarding this, because it is within his authority to suspend this. So, I would like to hear what his rationale is if he does not suspend it because the senators are unanimous, number one, with the question on legality; number two, in the equal implementation of the law; number three, with the questionable granting of licenses for these centers to operate with no public bidding; and number four, with the prohibitive costs to the public. Davila: But, Senator Grace, if you will be submitting, if you're going to be completing your committee report already without Secretary Tugade first attending the hearing, and all of you asking questions, don't you think the possibility of him actually not implementing it will be much smaller than if he actually faced all the senators? Poe: Number one, I really think that it would have been better for him to show up. On the other hand, there's really command responsibility. And with or without his testimony, it is quite clear, all of those violations were committed in granting those licenses to those private individuals for the centers. Now, if he does not implement it, there's no reason for us not to have to reopen a hearing and to summon him to come. Remember, we can always have another hearing and this time for them to detail where the P30 billion from the motors users charge went when it was supposed to have been allocated for pollution control and these testings as mandated in the Clean Air Act of 1999. So these things we can ask him to come in. But in the meantime, so that at least our countrymen need not suffer further from the inconvenience and the costs, if it will help, we should already release at least the stand of the Senate or the senators who attended the hearing that we suspend the implementation of this order by the Department of Transportation. Davila: Okay. Now, I wanted to ask you also because there's a confusing part in this memorandum, if it was settled in yesterday's hearing. Is it also mandatory, under Republic Act 10930 cited by this LTO memorandum, the submission of a driving school certificate, does it call for enrolling in private driving academies? Is that part of it? Is that mandated? Poe: No, that was not discussed extensively in our hearing. But at the top of my head, I'm sure this would have to go through another scrutiny, I wish they had done their vetting because which driving schools will be accredited, to what extent? What costs will it be, will it have to be somehow subsidized by the government? Who can really afford this? Although for professional driver's licenses, there are certain requirements that are really mandatory. They have to be enrolled in classes to ensure that they can handle these public vehicles. But then again with the intention of rolling out these testing centers for the safety of the public. Again, our question is, why didn't you begin with vehicles that are usually the ones that have mechanical failure and breakdowns? Or that are taken by the majority which are public transportation, heavy trucks, buses, etc. Why did they begin with private vehicles? In fact, they said they had no capability, at this point, of testing heavy vehicles. And sometimes it makes us wonder that they started with private vehicles because that's four million cars and the fees are higher, so they will make more money... Davila: Because, just for the viewers, the fees, is it P1,000 for a car? Poe: It's P1,500. I used to be P400 to P500. Davila: For emission testing. Poe: At kapag bumagsak kayo, babalik pa kayo uli at P900 pa rin ang sisingilin sa inyo. Sa ibang bansa, hindi na kailangan 'yan. Kapag bumagsak ka, ayusin mo kung ano ang kailangang ayusin, at pagbalik mo, hindi ka na sisingilin pa ulit. Alam mo ginamit pa ng LTO na sa ibang bansa daw, at saka ng DOTr, sinabi nila na sa ibang bansa mas mataas ang bayad kapag nagpapa-test ka ng sasakyan. Natural, 'e mas mayaman ang mga bansa na sinabi nilaJapan, Korea, China. Dito naman sa atin, sabi nga ni Senator Recto parity of income 'di ba, parang ang layo ng kanilang kapasidad sa atin. At saka 'yung kaibahan may naipon nang pera ang gobyerno na dapat nilang inilaan diyan. Saan nila dinala ang pera na 'yun? Davila: Okay, another question, is it true that these private motor vehicle testing centers are asking vehicle owners to sign waivers? Poe: One attested to thatthat if you have your car tested, you're supposed to sign that you will accept whatever the results are and you cannot lodge a complaint. That alone is quite telling, isn't it, that they're not really confident about the results of their tests. That's why we said in each of these centers there should be an engineer who would be knowledgeable about these tests. There should be proper customer service; there should be a desk that motorists can lodge complaints to, specifically assigned for these testing centers. I think they rolled it out, considering that this has been in the works for many years. It seems that within the last months, hoping maybe that nobody notices it, they rolled it out so quickly even without the regulations, approving already certain companies and individuals to participate without public bidding. So as the VACC said, Mr. Evangelista said, 'kung walang konsultasyon, maaaring may korapsyon.' So kung wala silang tinatago 'e 'di ilabas nila lahat 'yan at sagutin nila. Ang problema doon sa hearing namin, namimilipit ang abogado ng DOTr. Supposedly, si Mr. Yebra, bar topnotcher, mukhang mabait naman, pero nung tinatanong siya, hindi rin niya masagot ng tama ang mga tanong, ng maayos. Dahil nga mahirap, sabi ko nga, paano mo gagawing puti ang kabayong itim. Kapag may tinatago ka, mas mahirap depensahan 'yun. Davila: Okay. The bigger picture is this is not the first controversial order, so to speak, that DOTr and the LTO is mandating. This is coming from the car seat law, right. So, before we go to the car seat law, considering the economy has contracted by 9.5 percent, we have a vaccine rollout issue next week, what is happening, Senator, why are they focusing on things like these? Poe: You know what would be even more noble and nice is if the DOTr concentrated on, 'let's hire private vehicles to deliver the vaccines, refrigerated trucks, etc.' But no, the focus has been on implementing a law that should have been subject to public information for the past year. I think they're a year delayed already for the seatbelt law, and instead of being true to the intention of the law, they added a few provisions that are highly contentious which is having fitting centers for the car seats. Imagine, aside from buying a car seat, you have to go to a fitting center for them to check if you installed the car seat property and if you bought the right car seat. In any country that I've been to, I don't think this is required. And another thing is the question of when you go to this fitting centers, will you have to pay another fee to get approved? So that's another layer of bureaucracy and another opportunity for corruption. Now, another question that we ask is, is it possible that instead of having a car seat or booster for certain children, I know that you can probably buy a harness that you can just attach to the seatbelt, which is less costly. So that those that can't afford to get a car seat would be able to have this. The intention of the law is good because, you know, kids are very fragile and we really need to be very conscious about their safety inside the cars. But the rollout, at this time, and also it seems like the lack of regard for the cost of it to the public is what's quite sad and bothersome. Davila: So, that's exactly it, you said it, Senator. The intention of the law is good and we all know that you know that the World Health Organization came out to the report that car seats save lives, right, we all know that. But the question is, it's the ridiculousness of the details that actually shocked people. So I wanted to ask you, are we all missing something here with the LTO, like mandating that 12 years old, the height of 4'11", you know, things like that shocked us. You said it, this fitting center, it escapes the mind. Is there another intention here? Do they want to make money, what is it? Poe: I think it's up to the public really. We're going to have our committee report. I don't want to speculate based on my emotions, but I think it's pretty clear. Most of us are not dumb. I think that with what's happening now, especially supposedly they said the IATF was the one who mandated that members of the same household in a car should wear a mask. Saan ka ba naman nakakita 'nun? Talaga bang pinag-aralan 'yan ng IATF? At kung hindi alam ng IATF, it is the responsibility of the DOTr, the LTO to tell them, "I don't think this is necessary." First of all, you're in your car with your family members, when you go home, you have to keep those masks on? I can understand carpooling when you're with individuals of different households and also in public utility vehicles, but not in your own private cars. So again, this is an avenue for corruption because you can be apprehended and even if you're with your family, they can fine you. So, what are they focusing on when we're supposed to be on the same page helping each other to alleviate the hardships of our countrymen especially at this time. So, I don't know if they're out of touch, if they're incompetent or they simply don't care. Davila: I just wanted to clarify this, is it true that one of the issues I mean, of course, former Sen. JV Ejercito was outraged, one issue is they're requiring safety belts even in taxis, jeepneys, TNVS etc. Well, this is another issue. Poe: One of the provisions of the law is that within one year, the DOTr and the LTO is supposed to report to Congress the findings that they have with regard to having safety requirements in public utility vehicles. They have not done so. They're supposed to have conducted a study. Because if they say it is not feasible at this time, Congress can make the necessary adjustments to the law. You know even in other countries, children don't really have all of those safety equipment in public utility vehicles. It's just not rolled out extensively all over the world. So we also have to be very practical. What is the most acceptable way that is effective but doable in order to protect our children in these public utility vehicles? They're supposed to submit that, they haven't done it. We're not the experts in that. They're supposed to hire experts in the field. Now, if they still don't do it within a couple of months, the Senate and House will probably have to hire our own consultants to suggest to us what needs to be done. And when it comes to our budget hearings, definitely, it will take a toll on whatever we will be approving, in terms of budget that we will allot to the DOTr because they seem to not be able to roll out what their responsibilities and obligations are to the public. Davila: To close this, before I ask you about Bayanihan 3, I think there's been a lot of surprises from the LTO. I think that's the holistic message here, with the newest one being the MVIS. What is, essentially, your message being the chairperson to the LTO and the DOTr? Poe: Sa mga namumuno ng DOTr at LTO, isang apela naman sa inyo. Maganda ang intensyon ng pagkakaroon ng inspeksyon para sa ating mga sasakyan. Maraming namamatay dahil sa sakuna pero kung talagang maayos ang intensyon niyo, sana inuna niyo ang mga pampublikong sasakyan. At saka sana gawin ninyong bukas ang inyong mga pagdinig at ang inyong pagbibigay ng prangkisa dito sa mga testing centers na ito. Ngayon na naghihirap ang ating mga kababayan, ngayon sana huwag naman ninyong taasan ang singil. Lahat tayo ay may kanya-kanyang hamon. Davila: Okay. Bayanihan 3, this will be the next, I think, bill that you will be tackling in the Senate. In the Lower House, you already have the Speaker and Cong. Stella Quimbo already ironing it out. What are you seeing in Bayanihan 3, do you believe we need it, Senator Grace? Poe: I agree with any initiative that will help our people reeling from this pandemic, anything at all that the government can give. But let us consider the following things: Bayanihan 2 was extended, therefore we still need to get a proper accounting of what was spent in Bayanihan 2if there are any savings or deficit. Number two, where are we exactly going to source the funding for this? Right now, our debt is more than P10 trillion and in 2022, there's an additional program debt of about P3 trillion more, so that will be P13 trillion total. I would like to know where we will be able to source the funding for that because a lot of, even in Bayanihan 2, is from unprogrammed funds. How are you going to source it? Where are we going to spend it, before we make empty promises. Davila: Before we make empty promises. My last question, are you going to have yourself vaccinated? Poe: Absolutely. Davila: Ah you are. Are you particular with what kind of vaccine? Poe: Well, I still have to read up really on the different vaccines that are available. I've heard that, I don't want to name any more vaccine because the studies change from day to day. But definitely I'd like to say that I hope that we will be able to assure the public that this is our best defense for now against the virus. And I'd like to protect myself as well as my loved ones and the people I work with. I think it's a responsible step for me to get vaccinated and I encourage those of us who can to have it done. Davila: Another question, what about your mom? Si Ma'am Susan Roces po, given her age, I'm just curious. You know seniors, it's much more controversial for them if they will have themselves vaccinated. Like my parents, it's always a question. Is she going to have herself inoculated? Poe: Well, I think she's watching now, maybe you should call her... but she is very interested. I am grateful, she'll be 80 years old and very healthy...
CBMM uses simulation and design optimization to accelerate testing and use of the naturally occurring element niobium with other materials such as steel in new solutions

Physical tests that used to take five years can be performed digitally in less than a year to analyze durability, toughness, efficiency

3DEXPERIENCE platform on the cloud can help CBMM improve performance and get to market faster

Dassault Systemes (Paris:DSY) (Euronext Paris: #13065, DSY.PA) today announced that CBMM, the Brazil-based leading supplier of niobium products and technology, is using the 3DEXPERIENCE platform on the cloud to optimize the development of new applications of niobium for the automotive industry. Niobium, a readily available, reliable, soft metal that is ductile, malleable and highly resistant to corrosion, can improve material properties, leading to increased energy efficiency, safety and performance of end products.

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Photo courtesy CBMM

CBMM aims to test and increase the use of niobium with other materials such as steel more quickly, to reduce costs and the sales cycle, as well as accelerate its time to market. The 3DEXPERIENCE platform enables it to unify its design, engineering, testing and manufacturing data in a single, fully collaborative digital environment. CBMM can simulate and experience the use of materials and their applications in different product parts, analyze their durability, toughness and efficiency, and optimize their design. It can also create a knowledge base of the many tests and simulations that can be accessed and shared by its international teams to work and innovate more collaboratively.

Projects already underway include the development of new truck structures, road implements, and modern brake systems with more efficient discs and supports.

"Through Dassault Systemes' solutions, we will optimize the development time of niobium applications and improve our performance," said Rodrigo Barjas Amado, Head of Strategy New Business Development, CBMM. "Developing an application, including its physical tests, takes up to five years. The 3DEXPERIENCE platform will allow us to carry out this same development in less than a year. Digitalized testing processes will also enable automotive manufacturers to access data on the advantages of using new materials and parts with niobium, expanding its use."

"CBMM has a robust technology program to expand and diversify the global niobium market, in addition to exploring its synergies with graphene. A fully integrated digital approach on the cloud with the 3DEXPERIENCE platform helps them comply with sustainability requirements, reduce deadlines, and improve production performance," said Thomas Grand, Vice President, Energy Materials Industry, Dassault Systemes. "CBMM can also extend its use of the 3DEXPERIENCE platform to automate and accelerate simulations of supply chain management, workforce planning and mine automation to mitigate social, governance and environmental risks or negative impacts."

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About Dassault Systemes

Dassault Systemes, the 3DEXPERIENCE Company, is a catalyst for human progress. We provide business and people with collaborative 3D virtual environments to imagine sustainable innovations. By creating virtual experience twins of the real world with our 3DEXPERIENCE platform and applications, our customers push the boundaries of innovation, learning and production. Dassault Systemes brings value to more than 290,000 customers of all sizes, in all industries, in more than 140 countries. For more information, visit www.3ds.com.

3DEXPERIENCE, the Compass icon, the 3DS logo, CATIA, BIOVIA, GEOVIA, SOLIDWORKS, 3DVIA, ENOVIA, EXALEAD, NETVIBES, MEDIDATA, CENTRIC PLM, 3DEXCITE, SIMULIA, DELMIA, and IFWE are commercial trademarks or registered trademarks of Dassault Systemes, a French "societe europeenne" (Versailles Commercial Register B 322 306 440), or its subsidiaries in the United States and/or other countries.

About CBMM

World leader in the production and commercialization of Niobium products, CBMM has more than 400 customers in 40 countries. Headquartered in Brazil, with offices and subsidiaries in China, the Netherlands, Singapore, Switzerland and the United States, the company supplies cutting-edge products and technology to the infrastructure, mobility, aerospace, and energy sectors. In 2019, CBMM invested in 2DM, a company dedicated to graphene.

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Britney Spears has broken her silence about a controversial documentary about her father's conservatorship, suggesting that there is much more to the story - and warning that people do not know everything about 'the actual person living behind the lens'.

The singer, 39, appeared to address fan concerns after the Hulu and New York Times special, Framing Britney Spears, launched her conservatorship battle with her father Jamie Spears into the spotlight once again.

Although she did not reference the documentary specifically, the mother-of-two sent a clear message about its content on Tuesday, telling fans: 'Remember, no matter what we think we know about a person's life it is nothing compared to the actual person living behind the lens.'

Britney also appeared to address reports that she is refusing to work until her father is removed as her conservator, insisting in a second tweet that while she loves being on stage, she is 'taking the time to learn and be normal' and to 'enjoy the basics of everyday life'.

Britney Spears (seen in July 2019) has spoken out in the wake of a new documentary about her dad's conservatorship, telling fans 'it is nothing compared to the actual person behind the lens'

The 39-year-old did not reference the documentary - Framing Britney Spears - specifically, but she made clear that there is much more to the story than what is shown on screen

She shared a throwback video of herself performing hit song Toxic at the 2018 New Years Rockin' Eve ball drop in Times Square, and wrote: 'Can't believe this performance of Toxic is from 3 years ago !!!

'I'll always love being on stage .... but I am taking the time to learn and be a normal person ..... I love simply enjoying the basics of every day life !!!'

Though she made it seem like her hiatus was strictly personal, Britney's lawyers have previously said she refuses to perform while dad Jamie is 'in charge' of her career through her conservatorship.

Britney's last live performance took place on October 21, 2018, ten months after the end of a year-long residency in Las Vegas.

She was due to start a second residency at the Park Theater in the Park MGM Hotel and Casino in February 2019, however the singer canceled all performances just a few weeks before the first date, after her father nearly died from a ruptured colon.

At the time, she stated that she was taking an 'indefinite work hiatus', explaining that she wanted to 'dedicate her focus and energy to [caring] for her family'.

'We have a very special relationship and I want to be with my family at this time just like they have always been there for me,' she concluded.

However, in November, a lawyer for the pop sensation told a court that Britney is scared of her father and is refusing to perform again until he is removed as her conservator. She has asked that his co-conservator, Jodi Montgomery, her longtime care manager, become her permanent conservator

'My client has informed me that she is afraid of her father,' Britney's attorney Samuel D. Ingham told a judge during a hearing to determine whether another conservator should be appointed.

Britney also appeared to address reports that she is refusing to work until her father steps down as her conservator, insisting that she is 'taking the time to learn and be a normal person'

Free Britney movement: The new documentary Framing Britney Spears spotlights fans' concerns over the popstar's wellbeing

'She also stated that she will not perform as long as her father is in charge of her career.'

The judge declined the request for Jamie's removal from the conservatorship but said she would consider it in the future.

Jamie, 68, has been Britney's conservator since 2008, when he took control of her business affairs amid fears for her mental health.

In September 2019, he temporarily relinquished his powers to Montgomery due to 'personal health reasons' but he remains in control of her finances.

The singer's conservatorship struggle is now under fresh scrutiny following the release of the New York Times-produced documentary, which was released on Friday and sparked much public outcry about Britney's situation.

The film explores her meteoric rise to fame, cruel treatment by the media, very public struggles with mental health and ongoing conservatorship battle with father.

It was directed by Samantha Stark and produced by the New York Times, and appeared on Hulu on Friday before being televised on FX that same evening.

It begins with a montage of the #FreeBritney movement, including courthouse protests and social media videos.

An in-person protest is accompanied by the slogan: 'What do we want? Free Britney! When do we want it? Now!'

Although Jamie no longer holds the conservatorship over her 'person' he does over estate thereby restricting, for example, her ability to make financial decisions.

Britney's ex-husband Kevin Federline - with whom she has two sons Sean, 15, and Jayden, 14 - weighed into the controversy on Tuesday evening, insisting that he has 'no involvement' in the singer's conservatorship battle, but suggesting that he supports Montgomery being named as her sole conservator.

Speaking out: Britney's boyfriend Sam Asghari called Jamie a 'total d**k' in an Instagram post, which also appeared to accuse Britney's dad of trying to control the couple's relationship

Background: Asghari initially met Spears in 2016 when they worked together on her video, Slumber Party, and they began dating soon thereafter (pictured together last month)

In a statement shared with E! News, Federline's lawyer Mark Vincent Kaplan said that his client believes Montgomery - who has been acting alongside Jamie has Britney's co-conservator, and whom the popstar wants to take over the role completely - is doing 'an admirable job'

'Kevin has no involvement with regard to Britney and her attorneys asking to remove Jamie as conservator,' Kaplan stated. 'He has stayed out of the conservatorship issues.

'He thinks Jodi Montgomery has done an admirable job and he has no other position to state with regard to the conservatorship.'

Britney's boyfriend Sam Asghari also had something to say in the wake of the documentary's premiere, branding Jamie a 'total d**k' in a furious post shared to his Instagram Stories on Tuesday.

He wrote: 'Now it's important for people to understand that I have zero respect for someone trying to control our relationship and constantly throwing obstacles our way,' referring to Spears' dad.

'In my opinion Jamie is a total d**k. I won't be going into details because I've always respected our privacy but at the same time I didn't come to this country to not be able to express my opinion and freedom.'

The Iranian fitness model added an animated 'mic drop' emoji.

A source told Page Six on Monday that Spears has yet to actually watch the documentary, which also focuses how the media covered her over the years.

Pause: Britney's father Jamie (pictured in a scene from the documentary) was named as his daughter's conservator in 2008, and he maintains control over her finances and career

'As of Sunday, Britney hadnt watched the documentary, but shes aware of it,' said the insider. 'She had not seen any of it.'

Spears hasn't watched the doc, as it would irritate her amid her ongoing legal battles with her father, the source said - although the singer may well have watched it since the insider spoke out.

'Shes chosen not to watch it because shes fed up with the conservatorship,' the source told the outlet. 'She feels there is a hole missing in her life because of the conservatorship and that she wont be able to live a normal life until thats over. She knows its a battle for her whole life.'

Speaking with CNN in December, Jamie said he and Britney hadn't talked in four months, and that he remained focused to remain at the head of the conservatorship.

'When a family member needs special care and protection, families need to step up, as I have done for the last 12-plus years, to safeguard, protect and continue to love Britney unconditionally,' he said.

A look back: The documentary examines the Lucky singer's ongoing legal struggle over her conservatorship against her father (pictured in old footage shown in the episode)

'I have and will continue to provide unwavering love and fierce protection against those with self-serving interests and those who seek to harm her or my family.'

After Britney suffered a famous breakdown and lost custody of her two sons, - Preston, 15, and Jayden, 14, she was placed in the conservatorship of Jamie and a lawyer called Andrew Wallet.

But in the documentary the pop star's friend and ex-assistant Felicia Culotta said she knows 'firsthand' what Britney is 'capable of.'

The show also features interview footage with Adam Streisand - a lawyer she spoke to previously about the conservatorship around the time it first began.

His conclusion was drawn from his discussions with her where she was aware that her conservatorship was inescapable but just wanted Jamie out of his position.

Another one of the interviewees in the documentary is Jive Records marketing executive Kim Kaiman who worked with Britney early on in her career.

'The only thing Jamie ever said to me was: "My daughter is going to be so rich shes going to buy me a boat," Thats all Im gonna say about Jamie,' said Kim who said that it was Britney's mother Lynn who 'supported' her at this time.

Britney's former assistant Felicia shows the cameras around her house and opens a box of fan mail near the beginning of the show.

'These are letters to me from the fans so if I got this many you can imagine, oh, the ones that Britney got would fill up the entire room,' said Felicia before revealing her role in Britney's life.

Although she did not receive a specific definition on what I was supposed to do in her care of Britney, titles like 'chaperone' were initially thrown around.

Scared: 'My client [Britney] has informed me that she is afraid of her father,' Britney's attorney Samuel D.Ingham told a judge in November. 'She will not perform again if her father is in charge of her career'

Felicia shared that 'at one point they wanted to call me her partner and we didnt think that sounded right' and ultimately 'we settled on assistant.'

'To be honest I didnt then nor do I now understand what a conservatorship is especially for somebody Britneys age and somebody capable of so much that I know firsthand shes capable of,' said Felicia who has 'known her since she was five.'

In a court filing last August Britney's attorney Samuel D. Ingham III said that Britney 'is strongly opposed to having [Jamie] return' and prefers that co-conservator Montgomery permanently replace him.

Per the Associated Press, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Brenda Penny failed to suspend Jamie's conservatorship in November. She said she would consider future petitions for his suspension or removal.

'My client [Britney] has informed me that she is afraid of her father,' Ingham told her. 'She will not perform again if her father is in charge of her career.'

Protest: The new film which was directed by Samantha Stark appeared on Hulu this Friday before being televised on FX that same evening

Britney was subject to questionable scrutiny early on, appearing on Star Search in 1992 aged 11 and being asked by an adult male presenter: 'Do you have a boyfriend?'

'Of all the things that she could be asked about, because what else could we possibly talk to a woman or a girl about? Theres so much more to her that everybodys missing,' noted Britney's ex-stylist Hayley Hill in the new film.

Agent Nancy Carson who represented child talent took up Britney's case and Her mom was just so sweet, so proud of her daughter and her dad too was very proud of Britney and he was more concerned with the financial aspect of it.'

Nancy said Jamie wondered: 'How was he gonna be able to make this happen? Could he make it happen? But I know he wanted to make it happen for her.

Deep dive: Framing Britney Spears reexamines the ...Baby, One More Time singer's life story, putting a spotlight on the media's treatment of the star while also doing a deep dive into her 12-year-long conservatorship. It's availble to stream via Hulu now

Calling Britney 'a funny, sweet, wonderful little girl,' Nancy explained that her talent and Lynn moved up to New York for training and auditions.

'All this led to the Mickey Mouse Club audition and she nailed it,' said Nancy, revealing Britney 'loved' the job 'and when it ended it was devastating.'

Britney, who was born in McComb and brought up in Kentwood, Louisiana, went back down south for a brief interregnum as a regular high school girl.

But when Britney got a record deal Felicia was enlisted to travel with her - at the request of Lynn who was raising her younger daughter Jamie-Lynn.

Kim told the documentarians that Felicia 'was really sitting in for the parents,' adding that Britney was 'serious' and 'focused' with regard to her work.

Old relationships: In the documentary produced by the New York Times the pop star's friend and ex-assistant Felicia Culotta said she knows 'firsthand' what Britney is 'capable of'

Jamie was battling various personal problems - drinking, a failed gym business, bankruptcy - and according to Kim: 'Lynn supported Britney.'

She was only 16 years old when in 1998 her ...Baby One More Time single and video catapulted her to global pop superstardom.

During Britney's teen stardom she was heavily sexualized both in her songs and videos and in the media coverage of her.

As she grew into adulthood she was needled by journalists about her breasts and the question of whether she was a virgin.

In her early 20s in 2003 Britney sat for an interview with Diane Sawyer - who played a clip of Maryland's First Lady Kendall Erlich saying figuratively that 'if I had an opportunity to shoot Britney Spears I think I would,' a remark for which she later apologized.

Troubled past: After Britney suffered an famous breakdown and lost custody of her two sons she was placed in the conservatorship of Jamie and a lawyer called Andrew Wallet

When Britney got over her shock at the remark she managed to counterargue that Im not here to, you know, babysit her kids.'

'Ill say this, you know,' said Hayley in her interview. 'I worked with all the boy bands, all of em - not one of the boys was ever under any scrutiny.'

Britney found herself in crisis when she got involved with boy band star Justin Timberlake - who then blamed her for the breakup in his single Cry Me A River.

In a flash Britney was widely portrayed as the villainess and even Diane Sawyer took an accusatory tone, asking her: 'What did you do?'

All the same all of the criticism ultimately made her 'more free' as she was 'less concerned with pleasing everybody,' Hayley contended.

Rehearsal footage showed Britney responding to the accusation of being a 'diva' by saying: 'Im not a diva! I know what I like and I know what I want.'

The way the family was: Britney's lawyer has argued that 'she is afraid of her father' and 'will not perform again if her father is in charge of her career'

Kevin Tancharoen, who was a backup dancer and her tour director for five years early in her career, dished: 'She was definitely in control of a lot of decisions.'

He went on: 'That idea that Britney is a puppet who just gets moved around and told what to do is incredibly inaccurate.

'When I was involved in all of those years, we would present a lot of ideas. She would have to like them and she would have to approve them. She was very creative.'

Kevin added: 'She was the one who knew what she wanted to do, and she would make that happen or her people would make that happen for her.

In an interview during the early days of her stardom Britney herself said 'thats why I am where I am today because I do have control, you know?'

Just a kid: Britney was subject to questionable scrutiny early on, appearing on Star Search in 1992 aged 11 and being asked by an adult male presenter: 'Do you have a boyfriend?'

She explained: 'And you just control what you do, you know? You have to otherwise you get sucked in by people that are not necessary.'

Ultimately Britney married sizzling rap hunk Kevin Federline in 2004 and then they welcome two sons.

When she had a scandal after being photographed driving with her baby in her lap, her defense was that Jamie did the same with her when she was little.

She filed for divorce from Kevin just weeks after Jayden was born and according to her mother's memoir was also undergoing postpartum depression.

Initially Britney seemed at ease with the paparazzi attention but began to feel increasingly beleaguered by it.

In late 2007 she lost custody of Preston and Jayden but was still able to visit them amid her progressive public deterioration.

Rise to fame: She was only 16 years old when in 1998 her ...Baby One More Time single and video catapulted her to global pop superstardom

Infamously she shaved her head because Im tired of everybody touching me,' and then was then snapped whaling on a photographer's truck with an umbrella.

'Its so easy, its so much fun to take a celebrity whos a young beautiful talented girl and rip her to shreds,' remarked Kim bleakly.

The Toxic singer in short order took up with Sam Lutfi who became her manager and was, according to the documentary, loathed by her parents.

Then one notorious evening she was hospitalized after allegedly barring herself in a room with the children instead of giving them over to Kevin as directed.

Britney for a time lost even visitation rights to the children - and Jamie soon obtained the temporary conservatorship that became permanent.

Vivian Lee Thoreen, who was part of Jamie's legal team around this time, explained that 'having a conservator of the estate appointed for someone is that they are substantially unable to manage their financial affairs or they are susceptible to undue influence or fraud.'

She apologized later: Maryland's First Lady Kendall Erlich said figuratively that 'if I had an opportunity to shoot Britney Spears I think I would' on account of her being a bad role model

The attorney, who not long after speaking to the documentary got back into Jamie's legal team, said: 'Its more than just: "I cant balance my checkbook." Its: "I could be duped into giving away my money."'

The Spears parents alleged in legal documents that Sam crushed pills into Britneys food and was exerting total control over the pop star, obtaining a restraining order despite his denials of their accusations.

At the beginning Jamie held the personal conservatorship, whilst he and Andrew Wallet shared the estate conservatorship.

Adam Streisand, a lawyer who is famous for cases about celebrity estates and who happens to be Barbra Streisand's cousin, gave his two cents as well.

Near the start of the conservatorship he took a meeting with Britney at the Beverly Hills Hotel and the first question I had was: "Does Britney have the capacity to be able to hire me? Does she have the ability to take my advice?"

Clapback: When Britney got over her shock at the remark she managed to counterargue that Im not here to, you know, babysit her kids'

'So the first thing is Britney was able to make the judgment: Hey, I get whats going on. I get that Im not gonna be able to resist this conservatorship or avoid this conservatorship, right? So thats a pretty sound judgement,' Adam argued.

'The second thing was, she said: "I dont want my father to be the conservator." That was her one request. She wanted a professional, somebody independent.'

Acknowledging the judge had seen the medical records and he had not Adam said: 'I felt that based on my interactions with Britney that she was capable of retaining me and directing me and that the judge should have allowed that to happen.'

Shortly before reentering Jamie's legal team Vivian commented: 'Of the cases that I have been involved with I have not seen a conservatee who has successfully terminated a conservatorship.'

At the dawn of the conservatorship the pop star shot an MTV documentary called Britney: For The Record and emotionally discussed the matter.

Cultural landmark: Infamously she shaved her head because Im tired of everybody touching me,' and then was then snapped whaling on a photographer's truck with an umbrella

If I wasnt under the restraints that Im under right now, you know, with all the lawyers and doctors and people analyzing me everyday and all that kind of stuff, like if that wasnt there Id feel so liberated and feel like myself,' she said.

'When I tell them the way I feel its like they hear me but theyre really not listening. Theyre hearing what they wanna hear. Theyre not really listening to what Im telling them. Its like...its bad. Im sad,' Britney continued, fighting back tears.

Britney rapidly began performing again and eventually managed a major comeback including hit singles like Work B**** and a Las Vegas residency that began in 2013.

Her babies: Ultimately Britney married sizzling rap hunk Kevin Federline in 2004 and then they welcome two sons - Preston, 15, and Jayden, 14

Felicia was hired by the touring company in a much reduced role from the one she once had when Britney was rising to superstardom as a teen.

'I took a backseat and simply did what I was hired to do,' said Felicia, noting: I dont really know what went on. I just dont know that they knew her well enough to realize her capabilities in making the decisions. Just me looking in, thats what I saw.'

Jamie got 1.5% of gross revenues from the residency - and then in 2018 Andrew Wallet petitioned the courts for more money, arguing that this conservatorship should be viewed more as a hybrid business model.'

Britney canceled her second residency prematurely on grounds of her father's recent hospitalization and stopped posting on Instagram.

In early 2019 Andrew mysteriously removed himself from his role in the conservatorship of Britney's estate - leaving Jamie there alone.

The way they were: She filed for divorce from Kevin just weeks after Jayden was born and according to her mother's memoir was also undergoing postpartum depression

By the end of that year the conservatorship battle was raging between Britney and Jamie and the #FreeBritney movement was gaining steam.

During the whole media frenzy around the matter her brother Bryan gave an interview confessing shes always wanted to get out of the conservatorship.

In legal documents Britney said she wanted 'a qualified corporate fiduciary' in charge of her estate rather than her father.

The documents also alluded to the singer being vehemently opposed to this effort by her father to keep her legal struggle hidden away in the closet as a family secret, acknowledging the whole world is watching.'

Last a year a judge declined to remove Jamie from his role 'today' but added Bessemer Trust Company - which Britney picked out - as co-conservator.

Id know at some point she will tell her story, I know she will, said Felicia in an interview at the end of the documentary.

'And I am so grateful for when that point comes that shes able to sit down and, you know, everything will fall into place.'

The New York Times noted that Britney's parents and siblings, as well as Sam Lufti and her current lawyer Samuel Ingham, would not film interviews for the movie.

'The New York Times attempted to reach Britney Spears directly to request her participation in this project,' they added. 'It is unclear if she received the requests.'
Customers talk with bank clerks for loan counseling at a bank's sales office in Seoul on Jan. 5. Yonhap



By Lee Min-hyung



Commercial banks here are expected to continue reducing their recruitment in 2021 amid falling demand for traditional bank clerks and sales offices with the rise of digital banking.



According to data from industry tracker CEO Score, the actual number of employees at 19 banks here declined by 324 as of the end of last December, compared to the previous year.






Euthanasia. AIDS. Sex abuse. Sounds like a great night in, doesnt it? Yet this unpromising material forms the basis of three stonking TV dramas screening right now. For Foxtel, Samantha Strauss has made The End, a dramedy set largely in a Gold Coast retirement village, which opens with an elderly lady botching a suicide attempt. Twice. Russell T. Davies has made Its a Sin (originally for Britains Channel 4 and screening here on Stan), documenting 10 years in the lives of a group of friends in a London sharehouse as their community is devastated by AIDS. Its way more joyful than it has any right to be. And Shane Meadows  along with Skins Jack Thorne  have created The Virtues (also for Channel 4, in 2019, and also now screening on Stan) that in four commanding episodes explores the long legacy of childhood trauma in a manner thats as hypnotic as it is heart-stopping.

All are personal stories. All are impossible to look away from. Two of them are actually tremendously entertaining and uplifting. And it took all three writers a long time to get there.

Russell T. Davies drama Its a Sin depicts how a group of friends living in a sharehouse in 1980s London are affected by HIV-AIDS. Credit:Stan

The first rule of storytelling is to write about what you know. But too often that results in self-indulgent confessionals of no interest to anyone but your immediate circle. Or stories so personal no one else can find a way in. Or yarns so coloured by your own perspective and emotion  be it anger or affection  that any broader point is completely lost.

These three series avoid all those traps, for a few reasons.
Tata Starbucks announced on Wednesday that its Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Navin Gurnaney will be stepping down from the post and will be replaced by Sushant Dash. Dash will take over as CEO from May 1, 2021. Dash will join Tata Starbucks on April 1, 2021, as CEO-designate.

"Navin Gurnaney, CEO, has made the decision to pursue an opportunity outside of the company," Tata Starbucks said in a statement.

"Under Gurnaney's leadership, the company has experienced accelerated growth, new city entries and store formats, numerous contributions related to social impact initiatives, as well as innovative product offerings," the statement added. "With this transition, Sushant Dash will join Tata Starbucks as CEO Designate effective April 1, 2021, and take over as CEO on May 1, 2021," Tata Starbucks said.

Dash is currently working at Tata Consumer Products where is President Packaged Beverages Business, India, Bangladesh, and the Middle East. Dash was part of the core team which opened the first-ever Tata Starbucks store in the country in 2012. He was responsible for the strategy and marketing of the Starbucks brand in the country.

Sunil D'Souza, MD and CEO, Tata Consumer Products Ltd (TCPL), spoke about Gurnaney leaving Tata Starbucks. He said, "Navin has made significant contributions to the Tata Starbucks business in India, stepping up expansion and enhancing the customer experience... We remain committed to growing the Tata Starbucks business and brand and are happy to bring in Sushant, with his strong marketing, operational and leadership experience to spearhead the next phase of growth."

Starbucks Asia Pacific President Sara Trilling said, "India is a strategic market for Starbucks, and we remain committed to the long-term in the country."

Tata Starbucks opened the doors of its store in October 2012. The venture is a 50-50 partnership between Tata Consumer Products Ltd and Starbucks. Tata Starbucks currently operates in 17 cities through 216 stores across India.

Also read: Starbucks fined Rs 1.04 crore for profiteering; asked to reduce prices
8 victims rescued in human trafficking raids in Missouri

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A Missouri anti-trafficking operation led to the rescue of six adults and two children as part of ongoing efforts to combat the scourge nationwide.



Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt said that in coordination with several state and federal agencies, law enforcement conducted a successful operation at two truck stops in St. Joseph, which resulted in three arrests and eight victims being rescued. Two of the victims were children, a 2-year-old and an infant, he said in a press release on Saturday.



This operation was successful because of cooperation between my office, the St. Joseph Police Department, the state highway patrol, the Buchanan County Sheriffs Office, and 13 other agencies and departments. This unprecedented success should send a clear message to traffickers: you are not welcome in Missouri, and you cant hide any longer, Schmitt said in a statement.

Sixteen different agencies participated in the effort, including: the St. Joseph Police Department, Missouri State Highway Patrol, Attorney Generals Office, Kansas City Police Department, Buchanan County Sheriffs Office, Johnson County Sheriffs Office, Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Marshals, Department of Corrections, Probation and Parole, State Parks, and others, the statement noted.

A similar anti-trafficking operation in the Midwestern state took place in October 2020, in which 10 women and three children younger than 5 were rescued. Five arrests were made in the investigation surrounding that rescue.

According to The Epoch Times, the ongoing effort has been part of a larger project called the Hope Initiative, a state operation to combat trafficking, an initiative the attorney generals office says aims to reduce the number of illicit massage businesses, which are known as hotspots for trafficking.

Since its October launch, 16 massage parlors were shuttered in December and 16 more evictions of similar businesses are pending, The Epoch Times reported.

Twenty-five million people worldwide are ensnared in some form of human trafficking, according to 2018 data from the Walk Free Foundation.



The latest development comes on the heels of several operations in recent months that the U.S. Marshals, in coordination with other agencies, carried out across several states where dozens of missing children were rescued, many of whom had been trapped in trafficking.



In October, the Department of Justice announced that a five-day effort called Operation Find Our Children" was completed throughout the commonwealth of Virginia, which led to the recovery of 27 children.



In August 2020, 25 children who ranged in age from 13 to 18, a few of whom were trafficking victims, were recovered in Ohio in a similar effort called Operation Safety Net. Also in August, 39 children were rescued in Georgia as part of Operation Not Forgotten while several individuals in connection with their disappearance were arrested, including some who were sex offenders.
She's been in Barbados since December.

And Montana Brown looked sensational as she flaunted her toned figure in a baby blue bikini and enjoyed a stroll along the beach on Wednesday.

The Love Island beauty, 25, radiated beauty as she embraced her natural 'frizzy' locks and posed up a storm during her sun-soaked walk.

Stunning: Montana Brown looked sensational as she flaunted her toned figure in a baby blue bikini while at the beach in Barbados on Wednesday

Montana showcased her taut midriff and ample cleavage in a scooped blue bikini top and tiny pair of matching string-tie bottoms from her Swim Society range.

The beauty wore her long locks down and let them cascade over one shoulder as she smiled and laughed while working all her angles for the camera.

She kept things natural for the beach shoot, only adding the lightest touch of make-up including a slick of lipstick and blusher.

Montana also took to Instagram Stories during the day to show her fans her beauty regime and told them she's embracing her natural tresses.

Glowing: The Love Island beauty, 25, showcased her taut midriff and toned physique as she laughed in front of the camera while rocking a two-piece from her own collection

While speaking to the camera, Montana penned over her clip: 'Actually quite like my frizzy hair'.

It comes after Montana thanked her followers for sending her 'lovely messages' and supporting her decision to travel in the midst of a global pandemic.

Montana was seen leaning against a wall post as she sported a daisy embroidered one-piece from her swimwear brand, Swim Society.

Her chocolate tresses tumbled down in an effortless wave and she rocked natural make-up.

Embracing it: Montana also took to Instagram Stories where she told fans she 'actually quite likes' her 'frizzy' hair

She wrote alongside her stunning snaps: 'Just wanted to say a thanks to everyones lovely messages. Its hard to know where the line is with posting content and I really dont want to be upsetting anyone.

'I get the odd message with people being quite angry. I travelled well before lockdown, Ive stayed out here because I can work from abroad and I started my business last year in lockdown and Id like to give it a fighting chance to be honest.

'Sending love to you all, I am going to continue posting and again, its not my intention to be insensitive to anybody as I know this is an awful time for a lot of people. Sending love.' (sic)

Montana recently slammed 'insensitive and irresponsible' influencers who have jetted abroad for 'work trips' during the Covid pandemic, despite facing criticism herself.

She told The Sun: 'I do think it is insensitive and irresponsible to put on social media that you're partying or with a large group of people, as it's rightly seen as wrong by people who are losing family members and losing their businesses.

'A lot of people's worlds are crashing down around them. We have a social responsibility to stick to the guidelines in some capacity and just be aware that other people are going through hell.'

The reality star, who has been in Barbados since December, also insisted her trip was completely different from the ones she fiercely judged.

Wow: Montana Brown in a cream swimsuit on Sunday as she admitted it's 'not my intention to be insensitive' as she thanked others for supporting her decision to travel during the pandemic

Chic display: The star was seen leaning against a wall post as she sported a daisy embroidered one-piece from her swimwear brand, Swim Society, and penned a lengthy caption

She said: 'I travelled before there was a national lockdown to see my family, so it was legal for me to travel. I spent Christmas out here. I've been here ever since and haven't moved. I actually haven't dealt with that much hate online because of that.'

Hoards of celebs including Love Islanders Molly-Mae Hague and Maura Higgins and TOWIE's Yazmin Oukhellou were widely criticised for taking 'work trips' to Dubai in recent weeks.

But with the UAE now added to the UK's 'red list' and direct flights banned, it seems Mexico has become the new hotspot for reality stars.

TOWIE's Frankie Essex, Too Hot to Handle's Francesca Farago and her girlfriend Demi Sims, model Lottie Moss and pop star Dua Lipa have all been pictured in the country.
The Hamilton County Health Department has added 4,597 first dose Pfizer appointments to the schedule. With the increase in doses, the Health Department announced the opening of a third vaccination site located at the Enterprise South Nature Park, 190 Still Hollow Loop.

Health Department Administrator Becky Barnes said, Opening a vaccination site at Enterprise South Nature Park allows us to expand our efforts to another part of Hamilton County. We are delighted for the opportunity to offer the vaccine at three locations.

New First Dose Appointments

February 15-18 at the Tennessee Riverpark

February 19-20 at the Enterprise South Nature Park

People in the eligible phases (1a1, 1a2 and adults 70+) are encouraged to visit https://vaccine.hamiltontn. gov/ and make their appointment online. Those who do not have access to the internet can call the appointment call center for assistance:

 First dose appointments: 423-209-5398

 Second dose appointments: 423-209-5399

A Spanish vaccine webpage and Spanish appointment call center are available for residents who speak Spanish.

 Spanish appointment line: 423-209-5384

 Spanish vaccine webpage: http://health.hamiltontn.org/ en-us/allservices/coronavirus( covid-19)/vaccine/ vacunacioncontracovid19.aspx

All three call center lines are open Monday-Friday from 8AM-4PM. Due to high call volume, callers may experience a busy signal and need to hang up and call back.

General COVID-19 questions may be directed to the Health Departments hotline at 423-209-8383. Hours are Monday-Friday from 8AM-4PM and Saturday 10AM-3PM. Bilingual representatives are available.

Current Phases/Eligibility

Hamilton Countys vaccine distribution is guided by phases according to the State of Tennessees Vaccination Plan. Only those eligible in the current phases will be able to make an appointment.

Phase 1a1 includes:

 Hospital/Free-Standing Emergency Department Staff with Direct Patient Exposure and/or Exposure to Potentially-Infectious Materials

 Home health care staff

 COVID-19 mass testing site staff

 Student health providers

 Staff & Residents of Long Term Care Facilities

 (Skilled Nursing Facilities, Assisted Living Centers, Homes for the Aged, DIDD Residential Centers, Group Homes)

 First Responders with Direct Public Exposure including Jailers

 Individuals >18yrs who cannot live independently due to serious chronic medical condition or intellectual or developmental disabilities

Phase 1a2 includes:

Other Health Care Workers with Direct Patient Exposure

 Primary care providers and staff

 Outpatient specialty providers and staff working with acute patients

 Pharmacists and staff

 Patient transport

 Outpatient therapists

 Urgent visit center providers and staff

 Environmental services

 Oral health providers

 Behavioral health providers

 Outpatient laboratory staff working with COVID-19 specimens

 Funeral/mortuary workers with direct decedent contact

Age Group Bracket :

 70 years or older, must be Hamilton County resident

 No specific medical conditions are required

Important Information to Know Prior to Appointment

 Do not arrive more than 15 minutes prior to your scheduled appointment.

 Wear appropriate clothing to get a shot in upper arm

 Bring proof of Hamilton County residency (if applicable)

 Bring proof of Hamilton County employment (if applicable)

 Bring proof of age (if applicable)

 Bring COVID-19 Vaccine Encounter form (if possible; form available for download on registration page)

 Be prepared to wait 20 minutes after shot

 Be prepared for the entire process to take an hour or more

Vaccination Record Card

When patients receive their first dose with the Health Department, they will receive a Vaccination Record Card with the following important information.

 The vaccine manufacturer (either Moderna or Pfizer)

 The date the first dose of vaccine was given

 The date the second vaccine dose is due

It is important to keep the Vaccination Record Card because when making the appointment for the second dose of vaccine, it helps ensure the correct product is received and in the correct timeframe. The current recommendation is that second dose vaccinations be received either on or after the recommended date on the Vaccination Record Card, not before.

Additional Resources

 Stay up-to-date on new vaccine appointment information. Follow the health department via their email newsletter and social media accounts, available at this link: http://health.hamiltontn.org/ AllServices/Coronavirus(COVID- 19)/ConnectWithUs.aspx .

 Download and print the Health Departments new bilingual poster COVID-19 Vaccine Registration Information at this link: https://bit.ly/2YFsVOy
The Egyptian Foreign Ministry extended condolences on Wednesday to Morocco over the death of workers in a textile factory in the Moroccan city of Tangier as the result of a flood.

Egypt affirms solidarity and support for Morocco in this painful and difficult situation, wishing a speedy recovery for all the injured, the ministry said in a statement.

According to Moroccan authorities, 24 people were killed in the incident, which took place on Monday. An AFP correspondent cited a Tangier official as saying that the death toll rose to 28 on Tuesday, and that most of the victims were women.

Senior fire and rescue service official Abderrahim Kabajj told Morocco's 2M television station that the victims drowned after being trapped.

Short link:



Tokyo, Feb 10 : Officials from the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force (MSDF) said that one of their submarines that collided with a commercial vessel off the western coast of the country has been damaged more than initially thought.

The officials said on Tuesday that the 84-metre-long Soryu Class submarine sustained damage to its conning tower and its hydroplane due to the collision in the Pacific Ocean, off the main island of Shikoku.

The submarine's communications equipment also sustained damaged, which led to a three-hour delay to report the incident.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Katsunobu Kato told a press briefing on Tuesday that steps should be taken by the MSDF to ensure that such communications delays do not occur again.

MSDF Chief of Staff Adm. Hiroshi Yamamura offered his apologies and said the communications delay was inexcusable.

Defence Minister Nobuo Kishi has also apologized for the incident in which three crew members on the submarine were injured.

On Monday, Kishi said that despite the commercial vessel being visible in the submarine's periscope, it was unable to avoid the collision.

But, according to informed sources within the Defence Ministry, the collision may have been a result of human error on the MSDF's part, with personnel on the submarine failing to properly check the surroundings using sonar before surfacing.

Kishi also said that the Japan Coast Guard has launched a probe with the full cooperation of the MSDF and the Defense Ministry.

Transport Minister Kazuyoshi Akaba has confirmed that no one aboard the commercial vessel was injured and it was able to navigate away without any problem.

He also said the Japan Transport Safety Board will conduct an independent investigation into the incident.
As many of the nations pupils close in on a year of virtual remote learning, public policy analysts are highlighting the scope of the digital divide and ways in which policymakers can close it.Boston Consulting Group, the education nonprofit Common Sense Media and the Southern Education Foundation released a detailed report last month titled Looking Back, Looking Forward: What it will take to permanently close the K-12 digital divide to examine the magnitude of the divide and potential solutions moving forward.While policymakers have made efforts to expand access to computers and broadband since the COVID-19 pandemic began last year, analysts say up to 12 million K-12 students remain underserved.Titilayo Tinubu Ali, senior director of research and policy at the Southern Education Foundation, said the report showed that digital inequity is most pronounced in the southern states and rural areas. The report noted the divide has disproportionately affected rural states and 40 to 50 percent of students in Alabama, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Mississippi since the start of the public health crisis.Sometimes in conversations about education equity, it can be a very bicoastal conversation or a big-city conversation, Ali pointed out. Its really impacted rural and southern states in a disproportionate way.The divide also severely affects Black, Latino and Indigenous students, who make up about 55 percent of disconnected students, while representing about 40 percent of total affected students, according to the report. Sixty percent of disconnected K12 students families are unable to afford digital devices, and about 25 percent, many of them rural and Native American, lack access to reliable broadband service entirely. Approximately 40 percent also face insufficient digital literacy or language barriers.Schools across the country received $1.5 billion in federal CARES Act funding last year to help close these gaps as schools pivoted to virtual learning amid school closures. States also took the initiative to mitigate the divide with limited resources.Texas launched Operation Connectivity, which provided about 1 million laptops and 500,000 hot spots. Oklahoma used grants to award 50,000 devices and data plans across 175 districts. Vermont provided $3,000 per family to offset line extension fees, while Alabama allocated $100 million and Ohio allocated $50 million for efforts geared toward expanding connectivity and access to devices.In December, federal lawmakers approved additional COVID-19 relief funding for schools, including $50 billion which can be used for pandemic-related expenses including distance learning.But analysts say more than 75 percent of existing efforts aimed at closing the gap will expire within three years, meaning many students who've benefitted from these programs will lose digital access. More will be needed to close the divide and keep it closed in the years ahead.Amina Fazlullah, director of equity policy at Common Sense, said the good news is that districts and states have helped lay the groundwork for closing the divide.Its not because of some technological barrier or something we have to innovate around, she said. With some policy changes and commitment to providing funding and support to address the divide, we can close these (gaps).Addressing tech adoption and affordability gaps for students nationwide will require an additional $6 billion to $11 billion in the first year and $4 to $8 billion annually after that. Funds will need to go toward installation, service fees, devices, repairs and support for Internet connectivity and e-learning devices. Additional funding will be needed to connect all students with broadband infrastructure capable of 100/100 Mbps.While prior analyses estimated that it would cost $10 billion to $20 billion at the low end and $80 billion at the high end to expand broadband infrastructure, these assessments did not fully account for costs related to home access to adequate speeds and ongoing maintenance to ensure sustainable, universal broadband access, the report noted.But failing to tackle digital inequity could cost even more in the long run.According to the report, students without reliable tech and Internet access have lower GPAs than those with access. Those lower GPAs could eventually lead to a 4- to 6-percent drop in expected annual income, which will amount to a $22 billion to $33 billion annual loss in GDP.If you take that against the cost of doing it, even on the high end, theres value, Fazlullah said, adding that technology will play a role in mitigating the significant learning loss that has occurred during school closures.Boston Consulting Group Managing Director Lane McBride said that when most students return to a full in-person learning model, the homework gap that existed before the pandemic will grow. Failing to close the divide, he said, will exacerbate systemic inequities.The digital divide predated the pandemic, leading to lower academic performance and learning loss for affected families, he said. And it will continue after the pandemic if we do not act.The benefits of digital equity go beyond just education, according to Fazlullah. Achieving digital equity could improve students' quality of life after high school when they seek access to jobs, telehealth services, social services and more. It will also enable families to safely access various public resources when there are risks or hurdles to doing so in person, for example during a pandemic.A lot of these things can be done through the Internet, and if you cant do these things from home when people are socially distanced, you have to jump through a lot of hoops or put yourself in harms way to access these benefits, Fazlullah said.But closing the virtual gap is a multifaceted challenge that will depend on more than just funding. McBride said expanding broadband availability will require policymakers to incentivize tech-agnostic investment and encourage shared deployment. Public-private partnerships will also likely be necessary to assess specific student needs.To address non-financial adoption challenges, policymakers should also designate funds to offer technical and digital training, increase trust in technology solutions and design solutions to address distinct student needs  all with the aim of ensuring usage, he said, adding that putting a timeline on closing the divide could still prove difficult.All of this considered, analysts are confident that President Joe Bidens newly minted administration will get the ball rolling in the right direction. They expect federal E-rate funds administered through the Federal Communications Commission, for instance, could help provide broadband services to students without reliable connectivity.The new administration recently selected Miguel Cardona as its education secretary, bringing his experience as an educator in Connecticuts high-tech Meriden Public School District and as Connecticuts education commissioner to the table. Jessica Rosenworcel, a vocal proponent of expanding connectivity during her time with the FCC, also now serves as director of the FCC.The FCC issued a public notice last week asking for comments about how E-rate funding should be used for digital equity.Theyve been really receptive to ideas and trying to get this right, Ali said.Fazlullah believes policymakers should examine how systemic inequities played a role in the digital divide, particularly for many students of color. She said this could influence how lawmakers respond to the infrastructural and tech needs of communities throughout the nation.We need to make sure policies stop the redlining of children out of education, Fazlullah said. Because weve allowed for redlined communities to have less access to connectivity through our policy choices, that has resulted in the digital divide.Im hopeful that policymakers are going to end that practice and that they invest in support for services and devices, and that they invest in the deployment of robust infrastructure to every community in the United States.Some digital equity advocates and policymakers see this as an opportune moment to start closing the divide for good.McBride said policymakers, educators and parents will also need to maintain an interest in the problem over the months and years ahead, even after students return to schools and vaccines are widespread. He said there's no "silver bullet" when it comes to digital equity.We are in a unique moment to close the divide  while there is focus and urgency on the issue, McBride pointed out. To succeed in bridging the digital divide, efforts must take advantage of the momentum on the issue today and maintain the need even beyond the pandemic."
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I'm struggling to hold fast to my Christianity because of Donald Trump. Not exactly Trump himself, though, but the undying support of the self-professed Christian pro-life movement that he enjoyed. My faith is in tatters because of that alliance. And I am constantly wondering if I am indirectly complicit because I dedicated my life to the same Jesus the insurrectionists prayed to in the Capitol building after ransacking it and promising to kill those who didn't do their bidding.
DGAP-News: IuteCredit Finance S.a.r.l. / Key word(s): Annual Results

IuteCredit reports unaudited 12M 2020 results on 18 February 2021



10.02.2021 / 10:00

The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.





IuteCredit reports unaudited 12M 2020 results on 18 February 2021

Invitation to earnings call on 19 February 2021



Tallinn, Estonia, 10 February 2021. IuteCredit Europe ("ICE"), a leading European personal finance group, cordially invites investors and analysts to an earnings call with the Management Board on 19 February 2021, 10.00 CET, following the publication of its unaudited 12M 2020 results on 18 February 2021.



Earnings Call:

CEO Tarmo Sild and CFO Kristel Kurvits will comment on the unaudited results by means of a presentation. The call will be held in English.



Please register here: http://emea.directeventreg.com/registration/5375735.

The corresponding presentation will be available on the Company's website prior to the earnings call.



Contact:

IuteCredit

Kristel Kurvits, Group Chief Financial Officer (CFO)

Email: kristel.kurvits@iutecredit.com

Phone: +372 50 88 77 0

Evelin Kanter, Group Chief Legal Officer (CLO)

Email: evelin.kanter@iutecredit.com

Phone: +372 50 52 72 9



Aalto Capital (Investor Relations)

Sven Pauly, Consultant

Email: sven.pauly@aaltocapital.com

Phone: +49 89 898 67 77 0



About IuteCredit:

IuteCredit - established in 2008 - is a leading European personal finance company. The Group is specialized in consumer credits via its 100% subsidiaries using equity and loan capital. IuteCredit serves customers currently in Moldova, Albania, North Macedonia, and Bulgaria as well as Bosnia and Herzegovina.

IuteCredit's loan products are unsecured consumer loans with maturities between 1 month and 36 months and car-secured loans with maturities up to 60 months.

The mission of IuteCredit is to create the extraordinary experience in personal finance by exceeding customers' expectations.

www.iutecredit.com
ORANGEBURG  When Robert Greene II was a child growing up in Augusta, he wanted to be an astronaut. He watched a lot of Star Trek and thought about adventure far away.

His parents instilled in him a love for reading and his dad liked to talk with him about history, especially African American history.

I will never forget the day he sat me down to watch the film Glory, Greene said. He was trying to make me understand that there was this long history of Black resilience in the U.S. that I should be aware of.

That long history of resilience eventually became the subject of Greenes career. In college he studied linguistics and creative writing, minoring in history. He loved writing, he said. He loved history. And he glimpsed another possible future: teaching.

For his masters degree, he pursued history and gained his first opportunities to stand before other students and share his growing knowledge. In 2019, he earned his doctorate in American history from the University of South Carolina.

Today, at 34, hes a professor at Claflin University in Orangeburg and is writing both scholarly and popular articles. He has contributed to The Nation, Jacobin, Dissent, The Washington Post, Oxford American, Scalawag, In These Times, Politico, and Current Affairs.

In the spring, hes lead instructor at the Modjeska Simkins School, a project of the South Carolina Progressive Network launched in 2015 to teach the history thats too often left out of regular classrooms. Its model is the Freedom School set up by SNCC and CORE in Mississippi during the summer of 1964, and Simkins own leadership training program of the 1940s.

It seems there is a hunger about Americas past, so my job is to do the best I can to shed light on it, Greene said.

So he writes about police violence, the death of John Lewis, voter suppression, Reconstruction, and the Black Panther Party. He writes about Julian Bond, Southern communism, the politics of Clarence Thomas, and Martin Luther King Jr.s democratic socialism. He even wrote about the race-sensitive progressivism of a 1995 episode of Deep Space Nine, part of the Star Trek franchise.

His goal, he said, is to write the kind of history that my parents would enjoy reading.

With a degree in American history, he could focus on any aspect of the topic, but he chooses to dwell on the unique African American experience, mostly because its so interesting and important, he said. It tells us so much about the countrys demons and its potential.

Im trying to get across the idea of how diverse and how important the Black community is to the nations intellectual and political history, Greene said.

So he writes about the importance of the Black vote, and the efforts by political candidates to win it. He writes about the significance of Emanuel AME Church in downtown Charleston. He writes about new dances invented by Black people.

He will continue to study history and share his knowledge with college students, and to write popular essays that help us to understand who we are and what we are made of  especially now, in this perilous moment when the countrys citizens must decide what they want: a true democracy or something else.

This moment could turn any number of ways, Greene said. Will the American people push to finish the work of the civil rights movement, embracing a multiracial, multiethnic society, and leveling the playing field, or will reactionary forces win the day?

We are at a crossroads, he said. The main thing you draw from history is that nothing is ever set in stone, nothing is ever truly determined. It depends on what people are determined to do.
And on Oct 4, 2017, in Little kids and 'toxic stress': we can solve this

Parents who spank their kids. First graders who already had behavioral problems were even more disruptive if their parents spanked them. Spanking has also been linked to mental health problems and cognitive difficulties.

Parents who are emotionally distant. This can contribute to: behavioral problems, insecurity, and emotional difficulties.

They're helicopter parents. Over-controlling parents have been linked to higher levels of anxiety and depression in children. Researchers found these children were less open to new ideas and more self-conscious.

Parents who yell at their kids a lot. Shouting, cursing and insults can have the same negative effects as physical discipline.

Parents who let kids watch TV when they're really young. Researchers said children who watched more TV were less likely to participate in class and had lower math scores.

They're authoritarian. Authoritarian parents discourage open communication . They make demands without explaining why. One study showed, when these parents checked children's homework it inhibited the child's overall school performance.

Parents of unsuccessful kids could have these 6 things in common.

Raising children requires good parenting techniques as well as avoiding bad habits. A positive body image help children develop socially. Quality time with kids also helps them in school. But just as important are avoiding mistakes that can curtail a child's social, physical, emotional and intellectual development . The following is a transcript of this video.

Oct 16, 2017, Business Insider: Parents of unsuccessful kids could have these 6 things in common

Several news sites have openly claimed that the emotional, behavioral, and learning problems affecting so many children and causing such difficulties at school are the result of bad parenting, also known as childhood trauma.

Clearly schools are taking a decisive role in mental health areas today like never before.

The article advised teachers to be on the lookout for signs of anxiety disorders and to take steps to help kids deal with them.

All these can also be the start of mental illnesses such as depression and anxiety disorders, according to the researchers.

Researchers also found that anxiety symptoms among adolescents often materialize at school, and these symptoms include obsessions/compulsions, social anxiety, panic disorder, agoraphobia, separation anxiety, physical injury fears, generalised anxiety, and posttraumatic stress.

The use of antidepressants by young people aged 15 to 19 rose 44 percent among boys between the years 2004 to 2013 and by 48 percent among girls in the same period.

Up to 1520 percent of children and adolescents aged three to 18 are inhibited by mental problems such as anxiety, depression and behavioural disorders, according to the Norwegian Institute of Public Health.

Its important to redouble efforts to improve mental health and prevent mental illness by detecting adolescents with anxiety problems, conclude the researchers.

The researchers found that having various anxiety problems were linked to a reduced health-related quality of life.

Take a look at recent headlines and its clear we have resigned ourselves to accept that our children are in need of help. The Scandinavian publication Science Nordic flat-out said so in September in the story, Teachers can help nip mental illness in the bud .

Teachers are struggling to deal with many students with serious behavior problems. There is strong criticism over the actions of schools where they physically restrain out-of-control students or lock them in seclusion rooms. In Britain, there have been huge increases in the number of students being permanently excluded because of assaults on other children and on teachers, even among preschool students.

NOTE: American parents don't seem to realize that they are being blamed for their kids mental health issues. Schools have gone from institutions of elementary and secondary learning to... institutions. And soon, as this trend continues unabated by a realistic crisis response, we will have a return to institutionalization of Americans. We are brain injuring kids at a breakneck speed. Not just autism - mental illness, crippling anxiety, depression. Parents haven't forgotten how to raise kids. Teachers haven't forgotten how to teach. The RAW MATERIAL - the kids - are different. Institutions are coming. Mark my words. Pharma and pediatricians are to blame first, I think. Then the food industry. Then technology and the trend away from a belly crawling infancy to seated 24/7 and standing too soon. Anne is following the tragedy closely. See her list of headlines at the end of this post. The facts are out there - Anne is connecting the dots. K By Anne Dachel Stress, mental illness, childhood trauma, anxiety, depression theyre plaguing our children at ever-increasing levels. Schools are making a major effort to address the situation. I have seen literally HUNDREDS of stories from everywhere in the English speaking world in the last couple of months. Educators from pre-school to universities are talking about the emotional difficulties our children have to deal with. Schools are partnering with mental health clinics and hiring additional counselors, adding calming rooms, and holding workshops so teachers can understand that the student of the 21 st century is a very vulnerable individual.

CNN called out parents for the toxic stress theyre causing in children.

We now know that there is another significant consideration: Prolonged stress at home can disrupt development and set children back before school even begins.

A growing body of research shows that trauma at home can seriously affect a child's health and education. Physical or emotional abuse, neglect, parental mental illness, exposure to violence or the accumulated burdens of poverty can trigger what is known as a "toxic stress" response.

In the short term, this can inhibit children's ability to learn, to manage emotions and build relationships with peers, putting them at a disadvantage before they ever even set foot in a classroom. Children who have experienced four or more traumatic experiences are more than 30 times more likely to have a learning or behavior problem than their more fortunate peers.

In the long run, toxic stress can actually disrupt the development of the brain and other organs and body systems and increase the risk for chronic disease, heart attack, stroke, mental illness and cognitive impairment well into adulthood.

Despite the prevalence of toxic stress and the severity of its impact on children's lives, existing education, health, and social support systems are not set up to help the children most likely to experience trauma, which often goes untreated.

As a member of the autism community and as someone in touch with a lot of other parents, all this talk about anxiety is nothing new. Anxiety is so often a part of the disorderand in many cases, its severe. We mean extreme fear over new situations, sudden changes in routine and constant preoccupation with things being a certain way.

Experts have been studying anxiety as a factor in autism for a long time, as this report from the University of Indiana shows.

Many children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) will receive another diagnosis at some point in their development. In a 2008 study, seventy percent of a sample of children with ASD ages 10 to 14, had also been diagnosed with another disorder. Forty-one percent had been diagnosed with two or more additional disorders (Simonoff, et al). These additional disorders, or comorbid diagnoses, can at times be extremely debilitating for individuals with autism spectrum disorders. The most common types of diagnoses are those related to anxiety.

Recently researchers at The University of Amsterdam reviewed 31 studies that focused on the presence of anxiety disorders in children under 18 years old with ASD. Upon review of these studies, researchers concluded that about 40% of children with ASD had at least one comorbid diagnosed anxiety disorder (van Steensel et al., 2011).

So is the common presence of anxiety disorders in children with ASD just an unfortunate coincidence?

Does one thing have anything to do with the other?

Could the behavioral/mental conditions rampant among our children be subtler forms of the damage we call autism? I have to ask because I remember a similar conversation I had with Dr. Andrew Wakefield back in July.

In part of that Skype interview entitled, What Happens To A Nation if You Shave a Few IQ Points off Its Children?

Dr. Wakefield addressed the explosion in special education in this country, in some places totaling one in five students, even one in four, like in Woodland Hill, PA.



Here was my question: Do you feel that weve focused too narrowly on a link between vaccines and autism while ignoring other damaging effects of vaccination?

Andy:

The answer lies in the way in which medicine naturally takes place, the way in which diseases present to doctors. Medicine gives you the sharp end first.

Andy went on to describe regressive autism with a dramatic change in the health of a child.

The parents are clearly aware that there is something wrong with this child. So the way in which we at the Royal Free saw this and many doctors around the world have seen this, is to see these severe acute cases first. Those are the original ones described, and then as you go on and understand it, the spectrum necessarily and inevitably broadens as you realize that this is affecting many children, but perhaps to a lesser degree or to subtly different degrees.

So medicine gives you the sharp end first. That is just the natural way it happens.

At the other end of the spectrum, what would happen if you simply shaved nine points off the IQ of every child in the country? How long would it take to be picked up?

Lets say vaccines do pervasive damage to the brain, and it varies from child to child. At one end of the spectrum, it is a severe disintegrative disorder, and at the other end of the spectrum, its just taking nine points off a childs IQ. How long would it take the system to pick that up, and who would pick it up?

Well, it wouldnt necessarily be picked up by doctors, because you dont go and say, well my child is less intelligent than his other siblings or his cousins, and I want him investigated. That doesnt happen.

What happens is its reflected at a population level in schools exactly as were seeing now. So if you dumb down a nation, if you dumb down the children of a country, that will be reflected in failing grades, fewer people being smart enough to go to college, more failure, more expulsion from schoolall of these kinds of things that then take a long time to recognize and are picked up in a different system, the educational system. And indeed in the prison system, so a lot of these children who have behavioral disturbances are being expelled from school, and they will and they are ending up in the prison system. The prisons are full of people with the kind of disorders were concerned with.

Have we over-focused? By necessity, no, because thats where we were led by the patients, and that it absolutely crucial, but it is quite obvious, and people have been saying this for a long time, that vaccines are associated with a range of neurological and immunological disorders which affect children now in academic fashion. This is not something new.

So what happens if you inject multiple neurotoxins into vulnerable babies and small children? Will there be it just different degrees of toxic impact?

Will some, like Hannah Poling, develop autism? (Yes, medical experts at HHS conceded her vaccine injury case that resulted in autism. And yes, she did have a pre-existing condition that made her susceptible to a vaccine reaction, but no one makes any effort to determine which children carry the same risk.)

Will other children just lose a few IQ points, and will still others develop one of the behavioral conditions routinely diagnosed in our children, like the all-too-common anxiety disorders?

Maybe its time we stepped away from the solitary claim that vaccines cause autism. The vaccine promoters have successfully changed autism into an acceptable condition that only requires awareness and services, Andrew Wakefield has been made into the all-time fall guy for falsely linking vaccines to autism, and health officials will never admit that any increase in autism ever means more children actually have autism.

AUTISM is a NORMAL and ACCEPTABLE part of childhood. Period.

But what about whats happening in our schools? Why are so many children in special education? Why do 20 percent of students today suffer from anxiety? Why are schools spending big amounts to address behavioral issues? How long can we sustain this change in children? Will every child in the future have some kind of diagnosis?



###



Anne Dachel is Media Editor for Age of Autism.

Oct 16, 2017, Walla Walla Union-Bulletin: Walla Walla school staffers to get child trauma training

Oct 16, 2017, Nova Scotia Chronicle: Early start times put students at risk of developing anxiety, depression: study

Oct 16, 2017, (Troy, MO) Lincoln County Resource Board to fund $1.2 million in 2015 for childrens [mental health] services

Oct 15, 2017, UCLA Daily Bruin: Mental health screenings, treatment services now free for all students

Oct 12, 2017, (Ann Arbor) Michigan Daily: Students, faculty talk mental health resources on campus at panel talk

Oct 12, 2017, Lexington (MA) Wicked: Experts say many causes for Lexingtons youth mental health crisis

Oct 12, 2017, Hutchinson (WA) News: Childhood trauma and the effects on student performance

Oct 12, 2017, Pell City, AL, St. Clair News: Sensory room gets funding

Oct 11, 2017, Good Housekeeping: "Sesame Street" Just Launched a Series of Videos to Help Kids Cope With Trauma

Oct 11, 2017, New York Times: Why Are More American Teenagers Than Ever Suffering From Severe Anxiety?

Oct 11, 2017, Our Windsor (Ontario, Canada): Student mental health needs growing, Ontario colleges say

Oct 10, 2017, (Provo UT) Daily Universe: Anxiety rises among college students

Oct 8, 2017, Irish Times: Teachers to be trained to help reduce pupils anxiety

Oct 8, 2017, Cape Cod (MA) Times: Falmouth partnership aims to manage students mental health struggles

Oct 7, 2017, BBC: Special needs pupils' exclusion rate 10 times higher

Oct 7, 2017, NY Newsday: Complex trauma disorder among youth needs recognition, experts say

Oct 6, 2017, UK TES: Pupils 'failed' by lack of mental health training for teachers

Oct 6, 2017, UK Oxford Mail: Violence rocks our schools: primary school expulsions soar by 57 per cent in Oxfordshire

Oct 5, 2017, (UK) York Region: Violent special needs classroom incident still haunts York Region teacher 2 years laterSchool board weighs best course of action for teachers, students

Oct 4, 2017, Fayetteville AR News: Ozark Guidance Teaches About Classroom Trauma

Oct 4, 2017, UK Yorkshire Post: Schools need greater focus on mental health

Oct 4, 2017, CNN: Little kids and 'toxic stress': we can solve this

Oct 4, 2017, Santa Fe (NM) Reporter: Restraining Order Santa Fe Public Schools moves toward compliance with a new law on student restraint and seclusion

Oct 4, 2017, Sault Ste. Marie Star (Ontario): OP-ED: The sad ABCs of classroom violence

Oct 4, 2017: Alliston, ON, Simco.com: Student attacks against teachers a concern in Simcoe County

Oct 3, 2017, New Zealand Herald: Teachers kicked and bitten by students

Oct 2, 2017, (UK) Hertfordshire Mercury: Surge in Hertfordshire school expulsions following rise in pupil attacks on adults

Oct 2, 2017, Herald Scotland: GROWING numbers of young children face being parked on readily available drugs

Sept 29, 2017, (Cheshire, UK) Warrington Guardian: Rise in pupils excluded for abusive behavior

Sept 29, 2017, The News, New Glasgow, Nova Scotia: Teachers learn skills to help students suffering with mental health issues

Sept 29, 2017, WTOK-TV, Meridian, Ms: Self-harming students receive help from school

Sept 29, 2017, (UK) Northwich Guardian: West Cheshire state schools hand out 1,783 exclusions in just one year

Sept 28, 2017, Red Deer News Now (Alberta, Canada): Wolf Creek Public Schools hires additional staff to work with severely disabled students

Sept 28, 2017, CBC News (Nova Scotia): Worker hit with chair raises alarm about violence at Sydney youth centre

Sept 28, 2017, Toronto (Canada) Globe and Mail: How schools aim to head off mental-health woes

Sept 27, 2017, The Mint Hill (NC) Times: Its not fussiness Sensory processing disorder is a real problem

Sept 27, 2017, Bangor Daily News: York school system nearly $1M over budget in special education spending

Sept 27, 2017, The Vermont Commons: Breaking the vicious cycle of childhood trauma

Sept 27, 2017, UK, East Anglian Daily Times: Physical assaults against teachers on the rise in Suffolk and Essex

Sept 27, 2017, Midland (MI) Daily News: Grant will boost mental health services for students

Sept 27, 2017, UK Tes: Teachers must learn to tackle pupil distress, psychologists say

Sept 26, 2017, EdSource: Addressing early childhood trauma requires shift in policy, more training for teachers

Sept 26, 2017, Duluth News Tribune: Duluth adds social-emotional learning specialists to two schools

Sept 26, 2017, The Irish News: First of its kind nursery provides specialist day care for kids with complex needs

Sept 26, 2017, Patch Lexington, MA: Meeting Will Address High Stress Among Lexington High School Students

Sept 26, 2017, Petoskey (MI) News: Schools put state's seclusion/restraint policy into effect

Sept 25, 2017, Insauga.com: Ontario Teachers Calling for Action on Student Violence

Sept 25, 2017, BBC: NHS staff to help anxious school pupils

Sept 25, 2017, ITV (UK): Pilot scheme to launch specialist mental health services in Wales' schools

Sept 25, 2017, Oswego County (NY) Today: Sensory Rooms Provide Calming Environment For Local Students

Sept 23, 2017, Oneida (NY) Daily Dispatch: Mental health program aims to help youths

Sept 23, 2017, UK Mirror: Mental health crisis in universities amid record number of student suicides

Sept 23, 2017, The UK Guardian: Schools fear impact of budget cuts amid girls' mental health crisis

Sept 22, 2017, Wicked Local, Hudson: Schools bring new focus to social-emotional learning

Sept 21, 2017, Orange (TX) Leader: LU awarded $1.8 million to enhance school counselor mental health training program

Sept 21, 2017, The Tennessean: Nashville teacher restrained 4-year-old boy in locker multiple times, new lawsuit states

Sept 21, 2017, Australia, Daily Telegraph: Disabled Kids Neglected Despite Record Funding

Sept 21, 2017 Danvers (MA) Wicked: Training Danvers teachers to work with students with anxiety

Sept 21, 2017, Petosky (MI) News: New strategies offer help for area students with mental health issues

Sept 21, 2017, London TES: Primary teachers 'ill-equipped' to spot pupils' mental health problems

Sept 20, 2017, The UK Guardian: Primary school teachers 'not trained to deal with mental health issues'

Sept 20, 2017, WKBT TV, LaCrosse, WI: Northside Elementary aims to become a 'trauma-informed' school

Sept 20, 2017, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Dal News: Helping Teachers Address Mental Health in Their Classrooms

Sept 20, 2017, The Hutchinson (KS) News: Speaker to focus on effects of childhood trauma

Sept 20, 2017, Dundee, Scotland, Sunday Post: Study finds one in four girls aged 14 has depression

Sept 19, 2017, Logan, UT, Cache Valley Daily: Local group studying childhood trauma

Sept 19, 2017, Lima, OH online: Ada schools trains in mental health first aid

Sept 19, 2017, Worcester (MA) Telegram: Experts presentation in Worcester explores effects of childhood trauma

Sept 19, 2017, Eden Prairie (MN) Current: Back to school: Practical tips for kids with mental health disabilities

Sept 18, 2017, KVOA-TV, Tucson: 4 Your Health: Schools not equipped for serious health issues

Sept 18, 2017, Battle Creek Enquirer: Harper Creek schools seek to help traumatized students

Sept 18, 2017, Edwardsville (IL) Intelligencer: Mental health on campuses requires more attention

Sept 17, 2017, Worcester (MA) Telegraph: As I See It: Addressing childhood traumas and their lifelong implications

Sept 17, 2017, New Zealand Stuff: Mental health intervention for preschoolers could be the answer to our high suicide rates

Sept 16, 2017, Khaleej Times UAE: Kids as young as three at risk of depression

Sept 15, 2017, Phoenix Daily Tribune Phoenix Center, Marble Falls ISD expand partnership through mental health care services

Sept 15, 2017, Huff Post (UK): Number Of Children With Autism Being Excluded Has Risen And Its 'Incredibly Troubling'

Sept 14, 2017, Newsweek: WHY ARE SCHOOLS LOCKING UP SO MANY OF OUR KIDS?

Sept 13, 2017, CBC News (Canada): Durham teachers want more special needs support, say violence rising in elementary schools

Sept 13, 2017, CafeMom.com: IOWA SCHOOLS ARE PUTTING KIDS IN LOCKED BOXES FOR TIME-OUT

Sept 13, 2017, Beloit (WI) Daily News: Board Updated on Use of Physical Restraint and Seclusion in Schools

Sept 12, 2017, Wannaroo Community News, Australia: Koondoola: Burbridge Schools new multi-sensory room awakening students senses

Sept 12, 2017, Wichita Falls, TX, NBC 3: Documentary highlights childhood trauma

Sept 10, 2017, Maui News: You are not aloneDealing with challenging behavior was topic for 52 early childhood professionals

Sept 9, 2017, NJ.com: Hunterdon County Partnership for Health and school districts work to reduce stress in students

Sept 9, 2017, (UK) The Sheffield Star, Yorkshire: Hundreds march to protest Sheffield Council's 'failings' towards children with special needs

Sept 9, 2017, Auckland (New Zealand) Newshub: Call for doubling of counsellor numbers in schools S

Sept 9, 2017, Radio Prague (Czech Republic): RISE IN LEARNING DISABILITIES AMONG STUDENTS

Sept 8, 2017, Fort Atkinson (WI) Daily Union: District starts Trauma Informed Schools initiative

Sept 8, 2017, Vermont Lawmakers Examining How The State Addresses Childhood Trauma

Sept 8, 2017, ClickonDetroit: High school-based clinic improves students' health Staff offers variety of physical, mental health services

Sept 8, 2017, Fox News Seattle: Anxiety rates among students rise as school year starts

Sept 8, 2017, Education Drive, Washington DC: Sensory rooms can improve special education comfort, engagement

Sept 5, 2017, Huff Post: Schools, Please Stop Locking Kids in Closets

Sept 5, 2017, (UK) The Guardian: People give up: the crisis in school support for children with special needs

Sept 5, 2017, Radio New Zealand: Special education wait times 'appalling'

Sept 4, 2017, Southern MN (Owatonna, MN): CDC finds distressing jump in suicide rate for middle school students

Sept 4, 2017, Jerusalem Post: One to Three Students in Every Classroom Suffer from Depression

Sept 3, 2017, New Zealand, Stuff.co.nz: Police handcuff children as number of 111 calls from schools rise

Sept 3, 2017, Reading (PA) Eagle: Reading School District addresses violence at Reading Intermediate High School

Sept 3, 2017, Corry, PA, GoErie.com: New mental health services available for Corry students

Sept 2, 2017, Sudbury (Ontario) Star: Sudbury Accent: Back-to-school anxiety

Sept 1, 2017, Portsmouth, NH, Seacoast Online: Rochester Rep wants to reform school restraint policies

Aug 31, 2017, Camden (NY) Courier Post: Calming classroom shows kids empathy, coping skills

Aug 30, 2017, St. Joseph (MI) Herald Palladium: BH schools takes on mental health crisis

Aug 29, 2017, UK Guardian: The rise in student mental health problems  I thought my tutor would say: deal with it

Aug 28, 2017, The Scotsman: 250,000 children in Scotland lack mental health support

Aug 28, 2017, Education Dive, Washington, DC: As states seek to reduce suspensions, schools look for ways to handle discipline

Aug 27, 2017, London Daily Star: School pupils as young as FOUR face suspension at school
Blog

Maina Modu is the programme manager for Routine Immunisation in Borno State, working with the State Primary Health Care Development Agency (SPHCDA). He coordinates the state emergency routine immunisation coordination centre activities.

Borno State's routine immunisation emergency coordination centre is nestled at Maiduguri's Maman Shuwa Memorial Hospital, in the Polio Emergency Operations Centre (EOC). Modu and his team work with partners and the state to ensure that routine immunisation (RI) continues to happen in the state. They coordinate logistics, service delivery, and community engagement activities.

Modu said his team has targets on how many children under 1 year of age they are meant to reach with immunisation services annually. "The administrative target shows that we are supposed to reach up to 265,168, but what is on ground is far far beyond that. If you look at our coverage like in November last year, we reached up to 90% but still a lot of children were not reached in some areas," he said.

Some of the areas where the RI team is unable to reach children are places cut off by the current insurgency in the North East, such as parts of Dikwa Local Government Area (LGA). Dikwa LGA is east of Borno State and has ten wards. The LGA was once controlled by non-state armed groups (NSAGs), known as Boko Haram, in August 2014 but was recaptured by the Nigeria army in June 2015. The LGA capital Dikwa town lies some 90 km away from Maiduguri and is a gateway to several other LGAs, including Bama, Ngala, Mafa and Marte.

Over the years of the insurgency in North East Nigeria, the abduction of women and girls, destruction of towns, the killing of hundreds of innocent civilians, and large-scale displacement has been reported. Livelihoods have been devastated and assets looted. Although the Nigerian military regained control of Dikwa, travel by road to Dikwa from Maiduguri is only feasible with military escort. Nine of the ten wards in Dikwa LGA are inaccessible to humanitarian partners due to insecurity. The humanitarian response is therefore limited to the people in Dikwa town, who are dependent on humanitarian assistance due to lack of livelihood opportunities. Most of the internally displaced persons (IDPs) are farmers from the inaccessible neighbouring villages and LGAs. Dikwa has 17 IDP camps that are managed by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) and Agency for Technical Cooperation and Development (ACTED). High congestion across the IDP camps has degraded the quality of services provided in the camps. This is a result of IDPs self-settling in between the already planned shelters.

The inaccessibility of most of Dikwa LGA and other LGAs in conflict-affected areas is a huge concern for development agencies working in the region and the state agencies set up to provide healthcare services, like the SPHCDA. Modu admits that the insurgency has made the state's routine immunisation service delivery challenging.

"Right now, we operate in 377 out of the 672 existing health facilities," he said. "This limitation is due to the security challenges we have which has affected the routine immunisation approach in the state." He notes that prior to the insurgency the state already had challenges with routine immunisation service delivery, both on the side of supplying vaccines and generating demand for immunisation services.

Fortunately, in 2015, the state signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) and The Aliko Dangote Foundation (ADF), which helped the state begin to address the supply side challenges. The MOU was to help revamp the routine immunisation system. "In the first year of the MOU, the state was to contribute 30% while the two principal partners provided 70% of the budget," Modu explained. In the second year, the state's portion of the funding increased to 50%, and in the third year the state was to provide 70% of the funding. The MOU was initially meant to end in 2018

They channeled the funds towards vaccine logistics, including the procurement of Solar Direct Drive (SDD) Refrigerators to store and distribute the vaccines and outreach services across all the health facilities. "We are funding each of the 377 health facilities to conduct four outreach services per month," Modu said, adding, "We disburse these funds directly from the state to the health facilities quarterly. We also have funding for monthly review meetings to review the performance of activities with the health facility workers."

The funding from the MOU is also used to get communities on board with the state's routine immunisation drive, and train health workers. "We fund the community engagement aspect where we engage the Bulamas, the Lawans and the district heads to ensure they can enlist their under 1 aged children in their domains. We also fund the training of our health workers in routine vaccine introduction," Modu said.

Adapting cold chain storage in the midst of insurgency

As a result of the insurgency, the MOU between the state and the two principal partners was extended till 2021. "Dangote Foundation and BMGF are providing 30% of the funds while the state government is providing 70% till 2021," Modu explained.

For routine immunisation activities to continue in conflict-affected areas, ensuring that the cold-chain logistics remain in place is crucial. "At the peak of the insurgency we were able to provide SDDs across the state," Modu said, but added that in some LGAs security challenges began to increase between 2014 and 2015, affecting government health infrastructures.

The state's goal was to provide one SDD to each of its 311 wards, but the humanitarian crisis meant the state had to look at other ways of ensuring that the cold chain for vaccines is provided. "If you look at the case of Dikwa, Dikwa is only one ward that's hosting all the IDPs in Dikwa and you know the criteria is to give one SDD per ward," Modu explained. "We are trying to ensure that the other devices we have for storage reach to health facilities and then the SDD will only be installed in Dikwa." He pointed out that the health facility where the SDD will be installed must be a government health facility. Other health facilities would then come there and pick up their vaccines.

"We deploy the SDDs where the security situation is stable," Modu said, adding, "In most of the conflict affected LGAs we have to ensure we deploy devices that can keep our vaccines. Like now in Damasa, we were able to go and install one SDD there to ensure that vaccines are available. Then there's also a new device, an indigo device, that can keep our vaccines. It does not require much maintenance. If you charge this device, it can last for at least 10-15days. So, we are trying to deploy such devices to the security compromised areas to ensure that vaccines are available in those locations."

According to a blog on vaccination innovations by Bill Gates in 2018, a group of inventors called Global Good created the Indigo Cooler. The cooler keeps vaccines at the right temperature for at least five days with no ice, no batteries, and no power required during cooling.

Modu said the state is working towards deploying the indigo cooler for RI activities after they experienced its benefits in supplementary immunisations. "It is a friendly device, just like a vaccine carrier and having the required temperature for storing vaccines. So we are working with a partner to ensure that all our health facilities located in the security compromised areas are provided with the indigo vaccine carriers," he said, adding, "If we have devices like indigo, they can collect their vaccines for a week or two weeks and then keep it in their facilities before having to report back to the apex health facility."

To ensure that SDDs and other storage devices can get into conflict zones, the Borno PCHDA enlisted the help of the Nigerian Military. "We also use the support of military to convey these devices to station our routine immunisation activities in conflict areas, especially Dikwa, Kala Balge, in Monguno, because of the destruction by this insurgency of our infrastructure," Modu said, adding that "In a town like Dikwa for instance, we operate only in 4 health facilities out of which only two are government health facilities. The other two apart from these, Disanga IDP camp and the ICRC clinic, are all supported by humanitarian agencies."

Meeting the demand for RI services in conflict zones

In 2021, two additional health facilities will likely be supporting immunisation service delivery in Dikwa. "Throughout 2020 we are operating only in 4 health facilities and you can see the huge population concentrated in Dikwa. Now we understand that Intersource is also willing to commence routine immunisation in Dikwa and the current Dikwa dispensary has been renovated, so they are about to start as well," he said. The Dikwa Dispensary was renovated by a private sector partner, and primary health services were also expanded through the construction of a 20-bed facility, and provision of a deep solar-powered borehole to the PHC.

The increased demand for RI services in Dikwa and other towns where IDPs have fled for refuge prompted Modu's team to make changes to the immunisation days at the existing facilities. "For us to reach out to more children we need to optimise our sessions, so we asked those health facilities to conduct daily fixed immunisation sessions and then also at least 4 outreach sessions per week to meet up our target," he said.

Generating demand for RI services in places like Dikwa has not been difficult, Modu said, because caregivers living in the IDP camps are "always eager to accept whatever the government is bringing." He said the challenges that arise come when some mothers become non-compliant to routine immunisations because the health workers' offer does not appear as attractive as the package given by humanitarian agencies. "Sometimes they may react to say 'you're giving us routine immunisation all these times but you're not bringing anything like other organisations who are giving us money, non-food items, and food items'," he said.

Community engagement with the traditional institutions has also proven to be key for generating demand and building sustainability into the RI program. The state engaged the Emirs and Lawans as part of the strategy to foster ownership and support for the program. Modu said some traditional leaders came to expect to be paid to carry out their duties as a result of the influence of humanitarian agencies, but continued advocacy to the traditional institutions has helped these leaders see that supporting this program is their responsibility.

Distributing vaccines safely to conflict-affected zones

Most humanitarian workers coming into Dikwa and other conflict-affected areas from Maiduguri arrive by helicopter, a service provided by the United Nations Humanitarian Air Service and managed by the World Food Programme (WFP). Modu said vaccines are delivered to conflict areas by road with military escort, and where that is not possible, by helicopter.

The state distributes vaccines through zonal storage facilities, one in Maiduguri to cater to the central zone and one in Southern Borno to take care of the nine LGAs in the South. "For those safe areas we have a direct vaccine delivery system in place where our vehicles can convey the vaccine from the zonal post to the individual health facilities, but for the security compromised areas we have a plan for the LGAs to come and collect their vaccine," Modu said. "We do that monthly and we pay transportation for conveyance of vaccines to those LGAs."

He said the major challenge they face in distributing vaccines is the "delay in movement of vaccines from the state to the LGAs. Because we need to have security clearance from the military who will convey vaccines to those locations. And even if the LGA is to come and collect the vaccine at the state level, we need to have a clearance for the LGA to collect the vaccine and convey to their LGA."

Most of the LGAs in Borno affected by the insurgency are in the north and central zones of the state, and in order to ensure that vaccines get to these areas, Modu said the state disburses monthly stipends of N10,000 to the LGA Cold Chain officers that come to Maiduguri to collect their vaccines.

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Dealing with human resource challenges

A significant number of the health workers providing services in conflict-zones like Dikwa and environs are employed by partners providing humanitarian services at health facilities. When partner programs end, they disengage their personnel, and where there is no sustainability plan built into the program, it results in a dearth of skilled health workers.

"If we discover such challenges, we quickly deploy health workers to those locations to provide routine immunisation services," Modu said. "In Dikwa I think we deployed three of such individuals to provide services. We have them across the state in the conflict-affected areas." He said the state has currently deployed about 100 health workers to support routine immunisation services. He added that health workers recruited to fill human resources for health gaps for routine immunisation services are paid N20,000 per month, and when the state is planning to engage new health workers, this pool of workers are first to be deployed. "That is how we motivate our health workers to provide services in some areas," he said.

Charting the path ahead

Modu says he is proud of the commitment and sacrifice that the frontline health workers and his team have made to continue providing RI services despite the security challenges facing the state. "A lot of us in Borno, be it partners, state or LGA staff, have all faced a lot of challenges, but we insist that we would not stop the fight until we reach out to all eligible children," he said.

He says the state has the necessary structures in place for routine immunisation but is quick to point out that the drivers of success for the program in the state has been the MOU with the Dangote Foundation and BMGF. That agreement is set to end this year, although the state is considering extending the MOU to a broader range of primary health care services, Modu said.

To move forward, Modu is eager to see the state PHCDA established and Primary Health Care Under One Roof (PHCUOR) become a reality in Borno. "As I am speaking to you now the SPHCDA has no budget, has no overhead, but because of the synergy with partners, that's why most of our activities are moving as a state," he said, adding, "So, my prayers is to have PHC Under One Roof in Borno State. That will move us forward."

By Adaobi Ezeokoli

Ada is the Editor of Nigeria Health Watch. She has a B.A. in Communications - Journalism and Creative Writing, and an M.A. in Ancient Near Eastern History. She is a documentary photographer. She tweets as @adankemeze.

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Europe's leading airline, Ryanair, urged Wednesday that Air France be forced to give up lucrative French airport slots if it receives more state aid.

Paris is in talks with European Union officials on the delicate issue of state aid to the French flag carrier, which has already received substantial help from the government.

"Should yet another enormous and illegal state aid bailout occur, then effective remedies must be applied to ensure fair competition in the French market and to protect the interests of the French consumer / visitor," a Ryanair statement said.

The low-cost airline is based in Ireland and regularly underscores the amount of money being allocated to keep struggling rivals in the air.

In exchange for more aid, Air France must be prepared to give up "a substantial number of its take-off and landing slots at key French airports including Paris Charles De Gaulle, Paris Orly and Lyon," Ryanair argued.

French officials and the European Commission are currently discussing the terms of a further recapitalisation of the Air France-KLM group, which has suffered from the COVID-19 crisis.

EU officials have already indicated that in exchange for their approval, Air France should give up coveted slots at Orly, which is essentially saturated now.

Air France on the other hand has indicated that such a move posed a serious threat because it was counting on Orly operations to help it rebound from the crisis.

French officials want to avoid putting Air France, which was struggling even before the pandemic, at a competitive disadvantage.

Ryanair urged EU competition chief Margrethe Vestager to "stand firm in her discussions with the French government.

"Either Air France gets no state aid or proper remedies should be put in place to ensure a fair and level playing field for all airlines," it insisted.

Explore further Ryanair contests aid to rivals before EU court

 2021 AFP
Terry Mattingly leads GetReligion.org and lives in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He is a senior fellow at the Overby Center at the University of Mississippi.

An example on delegitimizing Israel

by Punsara Amarasinghe

Since Indian premier Narendra Singh Modis historic visit to Israel in 2017, the bilateral relations between India and Israel has been elevated into a strategic partnership with a deep sense of solidarity against Islamic terrorism. The academic discussions emerged in contemporary international relations scholarship tend to highlight Indo-Israel strategic partnership as a success story of how Israeli diplomacy won over a state, who questioned Israel's recognition in the past. However, it is worthy to note that Indias tiny neighbour Sri Lanka had its strategic alliance with Israel before India developed it and it was often seen as Israelis success story in South Asia during the cold war era.

Jewish relations with Sri Lanka has a long history which even dates back to the biblical epoch as the Sri Lankan city Galle is said to be the biblical Tarshish to which Biblical figure king Solomon sent merchant ships. Besides the unproven biblical legacy in the antiquity, the Jewish presence in the island nation saw a considerable progress during the British rule as many European Jews held prominent positions in the colonial administration. In the early stage of British rule then chief Justice of Sri Lankan Sir Alexander Johnston proposed to establish a Jewish settlement in the island. But, this was ignored by the colonial office in London. Both Israel and Sri Lanka became independent states in 1948.

At the inception of the newly born nation, Israel coped with the diplomatic resistance stemmed from the Arab world, especially the recognition of Israel as an independent state was refused by many post-colonial countries including India. But, Sri Lankas first prime minister D.S Senanayake initiated island nations cooperation with Israel, despite many Asian and African states had their discontent with recognizing Israel due to the Palestinian issue. During D.S Senanayakes era, Sri Lankan navy purchased its first gun ship from Israel which was named as Gajabahu 1. Apart from that, Israeli technical advisors provided its technical assistance to dig tube wells in the dry zone of northern Sri Lanka. But these budding efforts of creating Israel-Sri Lankan comity was reversed by the nationalist rhetoric of SWRD Bandaranaike who came into power of Sri Lanka in 1956. Driven by his anti-western sentiments, Bandaranaike upheld his position more supportive toward the Arab cause against the formation of Israel. SWRD Bandaranaike defended Egyptian president Abdul Gamal Nassars decision to nationalize Suez Canal as an inevitable move for the sovereignty of Egypt.

The Israeli-Sri Lankan relations were further deteriorated during the administration of Mrs. SirimavoBandaranayke, whose foreign policy was based on the principles of non-aligned movement and non-aligned representatives from Arab countries mainly expressed empathy for the Palestinian liberation cause by denouncing the state of Israel. As a stalwart of Non-aligned movement Mrs. Bandaranaike took more keen interest in forming relations with PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization) regardlessof PLOs relations with Tamil separatist organizations in the early 1970s. In fact, several PLO representatives visited Sri Lanka to urge the government to terminate its diplomatic ties with Israel. In the backdrop of such flourishing relations between Sri Lanka and PLO, the Israeli ambassador in Colombo Yitzhak Navon condemned Sri Lankas hobnobbing with Arab terrorist organization who were plotting to exterminate the existence of the state of Israel. Within two months after Navons statement Bandaranaike severed the diplomatic ties with Israel arguing that Israel had violated UN security council resolution 242. Sirimavo Bandaranaikes decision was highly praised by the Arab leaders as a bold act made in favour of the Palestinians liberation cause. The was a perfect illustration showing how PLO delegitimized Israels image outside the Middle East.

Much more closer ties between Israel and Sri Lanka were restored after 1977 under Sri Lankas first executive president Junius Richard Jayewardene, when island nation began to suffer from LTTE terrorism. Cabinet minister LalithAthulathmudali, who previously worked as a lecturer in law at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Jayewardenes son Ravi Jayewardene were determined that Sri Lanka should seek technical assistance from Israel to combat LTTE. In fact, Jayewardene desperately turned to Israel after his requests were denied by the West regarding purchasing weapons. Security ties soon led to the establishment of diplomatic relations, and in April 1984 an Israeli mission was opened in Colombo for the second time. The vivid account given by Victor Ostrovky and Claire Hoy in their bestselling work By Way of Deception: A Devastating Insiders Portrait of the Mossad indicates how Sri Lanka government was aided by Mossad in early 80s. According to Ostrovsky,it was a Mossad operative (katsa) named Amy Yar who advised JR Jayewardenes government to accelerate countrys most ambitious development Mahaweli project as a quick remedy for the energy crisis and more importantly as the most suitable strategy of settling Sinhalese farmers in the dry zones of the island. Under Mossads guidance two Israeli academics provided a broad analysis on the worth of this project which crucially helped Sri Lankan government to convince the World Bank for its 250 million $ investment. Furthermore, a large amount of contract of Mahaweli project was given to a major Israeli company Solel Bonah and eminent Israeli architect UlrikPlesnerplanned six new towns of for the Mahaweli settlements. The new swing of Israeli presence in Sri Lanka in the early 1980s and the opening of Israeli embassy in Colombo in 1984 caused a paranoia among the Muslim ethnic minority in Sri Lanka on a new Jewish conspiracy theory in Sri Lanka. In particular, the antipathy that arose from the Muslim organization sympathizing PLO in Sri Lanka often filled with slogans portraying Israel as a state ruthlessly perpetrates violence.

President Jayewardenes successor Ranasinghe Premadasatook a completely different approach toward Israel with his pro-Arab stances. He confounded the West by voting against the UN General Assembly Resolution 46/86 in 1991 that was adopted to revoke the determination in Resolution 3379, which had called Zionism a form of racism. Premadasas decision to vote against the resolution brought no any particular fame to a small island nation like Sri Lanka, even as a traditional pro-soviet state during cold war India sided with the USA in the general assembly. Premadasa made its final blow against Israeli presence in Sri Lanka by terminating the diplomatic ties in 1992. The whole process of delegitimizing Israel and thwarting Israel-Sri Lanka relations were rooted in the astute manipulation led by PLO and the supporters in the local Muslim community in Sri Lanka, which undermined every strengthening diplomatic effort between the two nations.

(Punsara Amarasinghe is a former visiting researcher at Global Legal Studies Center at University of Wisconsin Madison and currently reading for PhD in law at institute of law, politics and development at ScuolaSuperioreSant Anna in Pisa, Italy. He holds LL.M in international law from South Asian University, New Delhi. He can be reached at punsaraprint10@gmail.com )
Employees of the University of Namibia (Unam) are disgruntled with vice chancellor Kenneth Matengu's plan to cut costs at the institution.

This includes eight faculties being cut down to four, and restructuring the university's top management structure.

Unam has already closed its 10 regional centres, which comprise Tsumeb, Khorixas, Swakopmund, Otjiwarongo, Keetmanshoop, Gobabis, Oshakati, Rundu, Katima Mulilo and Eenhana, and replaced them with online academic support.

The university last Wednesday announced it will function online only for this year's first semester due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

When Matengu was appointed in 2018, he promised to make sure the university's N$2,6 billion asset base would be transformed from being liabilities to generating revenue.

A university source yesterday revealed the institution needs about N$2,3 billion to survive annually.

This includes its wage bill of between N$900 million and N$1 billion.

In the 2020/21 financial year, Unam was allocated N$900,2 million, which involved 5,1% of the Ministry of Higher Education, Training and Innovation's total allocation.

A group of dissatisfied university employees has written an open letter about the planned restructuring and shared it with The Namibian.

They say Unam is to blame for its financial woes, attributing it to the management's bloated salaries, poor collection of student fees, and low tuition fees.

"Sadly, this exponential growth in numbers has not seen a corresponding growth in systems and efficiencies, which has caused maladministration and the growth of students' discontent over the years," the letter reads.

Despite denying maladministration at the university, Unam spokesperson John Haufiku yesterday said the rapid growth in the number of students has various significant implications for its "systems, processes, infrastructure and staff complement ... ".

The university had 19 000 students in 2014, and currently has 30 000.

Haufiku was, however, adamant that no employee would be lost, but said contract workers would not return after their contracts expire.

"When new projects become available, consultants are either rehired according to their skills and availability, or services are assigned to a relevant faculty. There have not been job losses to any of our permanently employed staff. The relocation of services from Unam's regional centres has caused the redeployment of staff to the nearest campus," he said.

Haufiku said pro-vice chancellors will now become directors of the university's various campuses.

In the letter, the employees claim Matengu's cost-cutting exercise is to protect his salary.

"This large salary may well be the reason Matengu's administration is adamant about various cost-cutting measures that have left some staff members grossly unhappy," it states.

Matengu, when contacted for comment, did not respond to questions related to his salary.

Haufiku said employees' salaries are in line with their qualifications and skills, but said staff at management level are paid less than at other universities.

"To keep these firebrands interested in the training and tutelage of future generations, we must remunerate them competitively. Otherwise, they may be tempted to seek employment elsewhere.

The university's human capital department remains committed to making sure that staff are paid competitive salaries so that staff turnover is kept low," he said.

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Haufiku said the university is raising funds through local projects and international grants.

"Though still at the initial stages, significant strides made so far prove that the university will be able to continue raising funds from external entities to supplement the good efforts made by the Namibian government," he said.

The university has generated income through its sanitiser production at its Hage Geingob campus, Covid-19 testing and water-bottle manufacturing at its Sam Nujoma campus.

It has also received grants through the Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) and the Welsh government.

Additionally, the university last year scored USD35 000 (N$553 000) through a Google Artificial Intelligence (AI) award for inclusion.

Highlights The company is expected to announce AR products around 2022-23.

Apple has set up secret labs for micro-OLED displays.

A report says mass production of these micro displays will take several years.

Apple is working on smaller and thinner displays that will be used in upcoming AR devices. According to a report, the Cupertino-based giant has partnered with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) to develop micro OLED displays. Interestingly, the report says that TSMC is working at a secret Taiwan lab.

Nikkei Asia reports that the new displays will be used on the upcoming augmented reality (AR) devices. The news about Apple's AR devices came last month when Bloomberg reported that the company was working on an AR glass codenamed N421. It added that the product could be years away from reality but claimed that Apple was targeting 2023 to launch its AR product line.

The new report adds that the company plans to develop a "radically different" type of micro OLED display which will be built directly onto chip wafers. Citing sources briefed on the matter, the Nikkei Asia report further explains that unlike traditional LCD screens or OLED displays that use glass substrates, the micro OLED displays will likely be smaller and use less power. It adds that this material will make it suitable for wearable AR devices.

The report also claims that the micro OLED displays are under trial production, and it will take a few years to achieve bulk production. Notably, the micro OLED displays said to be in manufacturing are less than an inch in size.

Apple is using an experts panel who understand displays to learn the know-how of such small display. The report adds that some parts of micro display manufacturing can be done in the existing TSMC production facility.

It further adds that the secretive lab for Apple's micro OLED display is in Longtan District in the northern Taiwanese city of Taoyuan. It also hints that the company is working on micro-LED tech and has trial production units in place.

Talking about experts, the report says that Apple hired veterans from Taiwanese display maker AU Optoelectronics as well as from Japan and more places. Citing sources familiar, the report claims that people signing up for the new work are signing a "strict non-disclosure agreement."

It's worth noting that Apple was earlier planning to launch its AR devices in 2020, however, the pandemic caused supply chain issues and led to delay in the project. Last year, Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said that the company could be expected to launch the long-rumoured AR devices by 2022.
The West Australian State Solicitor has been called in by the Racing and Gaming Minister to urgently assess findings of an inquiry into Crown in Sydney which found the entity unfit to run a casino in New South Wales.

Paul Papalia said the findings of the Bergin report, which alleged Crown had facilitated money laundering at its Perth and Melbourne casinos, were deeply concerning.

Racing and Gaming Minister Paul Papalia has called in the State Solicitor to take a look at WA-relevant findings from the Crown inquiry. Credit:Nine News Perth

The Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries has requested that the State Solicitor urgently assess the findings of the report and advise the Gaming and Wagering Commission of the relevance of the findings to WA, Mr Papalia said.

The department has also requested that the commission meet urgently once it has received the State Solicitors advice in order to consider the report sooner than planned.

ZCL is one of the fastest growing manufacturers of specialty active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) and advanced intermediates

Advent International, one of the largest and most experienced global private equity investors, announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire a majority stake in ZCL Chemicals Limited, one the fastest growing pharmaceutical companies in India. The business was formerly known as Zandu Chemicals Ltd.

With this transaction, Morgan Stanley Private Equity Asia (MSPEA), a private equity platform that previously managed a minority investment in ZCL, will exit their investment.

ZCL is one of the fastest growing manufacturers of specialty active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) and advanced intermediates.

ZCL will be our third pharmaceuticals investment in India and the second in the API space. ZCL is a high-growth business, led by a capable management team, which will further fortify our presence in the API market, a key sub-sector focus of ours, said Shweta Jalan, Managing Director and Head of India, Advent International, India.

Over the last 12 months, Advent has committed over $1.2 billion globally across the healthcare sector. The firm has also committed over $600 million in four Indian businesses over the same period in varied sectors such as healthcare, consumer, and financial services amongst others.

The acquisition of ZCL helps us get closer to our goal of creating a top five merchant API platform in India, said Pankaj Patwari, Director, Advent International India.

We are very pleased with this transaction and excited to partner with Advent. In the last 12 years we have established ZCL as one of the leading pure-play API companies in the country, and today marks an important milestone in these efforts, said Nihar Parikh, Executive Director, ZCL Chemicals Ltd.

The transaction will be subject to customary closing conditions.

ZCL Chemicals was advised by Jefferies (Sole Financial Advisor), Bombay Law Chambers (Legal Counsel) and Deloitte (Finance and Tax).
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A beautiful Roman mosaic depicting a leopard hunting an antelope is set to stay in the UK after a local museum scrambled together enough money to purchase it.

The 8ft by 6.5ft panel was unearthed in 1974 and is thought to have been made 1,700 years ago during the Roman occupation of Britain, experts believe.

It was one of three mosaic panels unearthed by archaeologists in the grounds of Dewlish House in Dorset.

Two of them were donated to the Dorset County Museum but the third was kept by the owners of the estate before being auctioned in 2018 for 28,000. It was subsequently sold to a European collector.

The proposed sale was described as 'cultural vandalism' by historians due to the 'international importance' of the mosaic.

British officials then stepped in and enforced a temporary export ban on it last year, which was extended to January to allow the Dorset County Museum enough time to raise the 150,000 needed to buy it.

Had they failed, the priceless piece of British history would have been shipped abroad to an overseas collector.

A beautiful Roman mosaic, discovered at Dewlish House in Dorset and depicting a leopard hunting an antelope, is set to stay in the UK after a local museum raised the money to buy it

The proposed sale of the mosaic (pictured) was described as 'cultural vandalism' by historians due to the 'international importance' of the mosaic

The museum in Dorchester received over 100 donations, including 50,000 from the V&A Purchase Grant Fund, 40,000 from the Art Fund, 30,000 from Sainsbury's Headley Trust and 10,000 from the Association for Roman Archaeology.

The precious panel is now undergoing specialist cleaning before taking pride of place in the museum, which itself has undergone a recent 16.1million redevelopment.

Dr Jon Murden, director of Dorset County Museum, said: 'We are delighted to have secured this for the nation.

'It is one of a handful of mosaics made by a school of mosaic workers called the Durnovarian School they were based in Dorchester. It is one of the most important British Roman finds in terms of mosaic art ever discovered.

'It is in incredible condition considering its age but is undergoing some very delicate cleaning. It is not like cleaning the grouting in your bathroom tiles.

'Once cleaned and conserved, it will take pride of place within the restored historic stairwell at Dorset Museum.'

British officials then stepped in and enforced a temporary export ban on the sale of the mosaic (pictured) last year, which was extended to January to allow the Dorset County Museum enough time to raise the 150,000 needed to buy it

Pictured L-R: Conservator Riva Boutylkova, Director Dr Jon Murden and Museum Technician Mark Pettit assessing the mosaic after it arrived at the Dorset County Museum last week

Riva Boutylkova, Jon Murden and Mark Pettit scrutinise the leopard mosaic at the museum. It is currently being cleaned before going on show later this year

The mosaic is one of three mosaic panels unearthed by archaeologists in 1974 on the grounds of Dewlish House in Dorset

He said the mosaic floor panel would have been made for a significant Roman landowner's grand home in the 4th century.

It is made up of just three colours of cream, black and terracotta red using materials from the local area.

Dr Murden added: 'What it depicts is quite amazing. It is a leopard bringing down a gazelle and leaping on its throat. It is nature in action.

'But what is staggering for me is this knowledge of African animals in to fourth century Dorset shows how interconnected we were globally even at that point in out history.

'It had been purchased by a European collector and so it would have gone into a private collection and would not have been available for people to see and enjoy or for scholars to research about what this means for Roman Britain at that point.'

The fundraising campaign to save the mosaic was backed in huge numbers locally including by John Seymour, a retired army soldier who lives in the village of Dewlish.

The 8ft by 6.5ft mosaic panel was first unearthed in 1974 and dates back 1,700 years, experts believe. There were two other osaics.Pictured, one of the other mosaics found in 1974

Two of the three mosaics were donated to the Dorset County Museum but the third was kept by the owners of the estate before being auctioned in 2018 for 28,000. It was subsequently sold to a European collector. Pictured, one of the two mosaics saved by the museum in the 70s
Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- This time is different may be the most dangerous words in business: billions of dollars have been lost betting that history wont repeat itself. And yet now, in the oil world, it looks like this time really will be.For the first time in decades, oil companies arent rushing to increase production to chase rising oil prices as Brent crude approaches $70. Even in the Permian, the prolific shale basin at the center of the U.S. energy boom, drillers are resisting their traditional boom-and-bust cycle of spending.The oil industry is on the ropes, constrained by Wall Street investors demanding that companies spend less on drilling and instead return more money to shareholders, and climate change activists pushing against fossil fuels. Exxon Mobil Corp. is paradigmatic of the trend, after its humiliating defeat at the hands of a tiny activist elbowing itself onto the board.The dramatic events in the industry last week only add to what is emerging as an opportunity for the producers of OPEC+, giving the coalition led by Saudi Arabia and Russia more room for maneuver to bring back their own production. As non-OPEC output fails to rebound as fast as many expected -- or feared based on past experience -- the cartel is likely to continue adding more supply when it meets on June 1.CriminalizationShareholders are asking Exxon to drill less and focus on returning money to investors. They have been throwing money down the drill hole like crazy, Christopher Ailman, chief investment officer for CalSTRS. We really saw that company just heading down the hole, not surviving into the future, unless they change and adapt. And now they have to.Exxon is unlikely to be alone. Royal Dutch Shell Plc lost a landmark legal battle last week when a Dutch court told it to cut emissions significantly by 2030 -- something that would require less oil production. Many in the industry fear a wave of lawsuits elsewhere, with western oil majors more immediate targets than the state-owned oil companies that make up much of OPEC production.We see a shift from stigmatization toward criminalization of investing in higher oil production, said Bob McNally, president of consultant Rapidan Energy Group and a former White House official.While its true that non-OPEC+ output is creeping back from the crash of 2020 -- and the ultra-depressed levels of April and May last year -- its far from a full recovery. Overall, non-OPEC+ output will grow this year by 620,000 barrels a day, less than half the 1.3 million barrels a day it fell in 2020. The supply growth forecast through the rest of this year comes nowhere close to matching the expected increase in demand, according to the International Energy Agency.Beyond 2021, oil output is likely to rise in a handful of nations, including the U.S., Brazil, Canada and new oil-producer Guyana. But production will decline elsewhere, from the U.K. to Colombia, Malaysia and Argentina.As non-OPEC+ production increases less than global oil demand, the cartel will be in control of the market, executives and traders said. Its a major break with the past, when oil companies responded to higher prices by rushing to invest again, boosting non-OPEC output and leaving the ministers led by Saudi Arabias Abdulaziz bin Salman with a much more difficult balancing act.Drilling DownSo far, the lack of non-OPEC+ oil production growth isnt registering much in the market. After all, the coronavirus pandemic continues to constrain global oil demand. It may be more noticeable later this year and into 2022. By then, vaccination campaigns against Covid-19 are likely to be bearing fruit, and the world will need more oil. The expected return of Iran into the market will provide some of that, but there will likely be a need for more.When that happens, it will be largely up to OPEC to plug the gap. One signal of how the recovery will be different this time is the U.S. drilling count: It is gradually increasing, but the recovery is slower than it was after the last big oil price crash in 2008-09. Shale companies are sticking to their commitment to return more money to shareholders via dividends. While before the pandemic shale companies re-used 70-90% of their cash flow into further drilling, they are now keeping that metric at around 50%.The result is that U.S. crude production has flat-lined at around 11 million barrels a day since July 2020. Outside the U.S. and Canada, the outlook is even more somber: at the end of April, the ex-North America oil rig count stood at 523, lower than it was a year ago, and nearly 40% below the same month two years earlier, according to data from Baker Hughes Co.When Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz predicted earlier this year that drill, baby, drill is gone for ever, it sounded like a bold call. As ministers meet this week, they may dare to hope hes right.More stories like this are available on bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.2021 Bloomberg L.P.
Police in Bulawayo arrested 10 youths for attending a vuzu party at a house in Emganwini contravening the lockdown regulations imposed last month.

This is the third time this year where Bulawayo police have arrested 'party animals' in the city.

Bulawayo police spokesperson Inspector Abednico Ncube confirmed the arrest adding those in police custody included; Oscar Sibanda (18), Brendon Dube (26), Mbalenhle Matongo (19), Luyanda Sibanda (18), Omphile Ndlovu (18) all of Emganwini, Dumolwenkosi Ncube (18), Duduza Bhebhe (18), Khulisani Ndlovu (19), and Mandlenkosi Nyoni (18), and Njabulo Dube (19) of Emakhandeni.

The accused were arrested following a tip-off the police received.

"When the police arrived at the scene, it was observed that the accused persons were drinking alcohol and dancing to music," Ncube told NewZimbabwe.com.

"A cooler box and three empty bottles of 750 milliliters blended whisky were recovered at the scene. It was established that the house belongs to the parents of one of the accused persons who are currently staying in South Africa."

The accused persons were detained at Nkulumane police station, where some of them managed to pay a $5 000 fine each while others are still in custody waiting for their parents to bail them out.

Ncube added; "As police, we would like to thank the public for the job they are doing in informing and joining hands with the police in the fight against crime. Together, we will all go a long way in trying to eradicate criminal activities in our community."

On 24 January, police in Bulawayo arrested 15 people holding a party at a house in Nkulumane suburb before apprehending a dozen people with eight of them minors in Pumula South suburb the following day.

Ncube urged parents and guardians to keep a close eye on their children to avoid paying unnecessary fines from their hard-earned cash.

"We are also appealing to members of the public to monitor their children so that they will not get involved in any criminal activities and end up being arrested and paying such amounts of money for fines," he said.

KALAMAZOO, MI  Police say a customer at a business subdued and disarmed a gunman who threatened another customer.

The suspect, a 45-year-old Kalamazoo man, was soon arrested without further trouble.

The incident happened Tuesday, Feb. 9, at a business on Schuster Avenue. Police responded to a report of man pointing a gun at another customer. Another customer, who was not involved, disarmed the gunman and subdued him until police reached the scene.

Kalamazoo Public Safety would like to extend its gratitude to the heroic patron who put the welfare and safety of their fellow citizen above their own, police said in a statement.

Police did not identify the business or those involved.

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The Executive Secretary, National Agricultural Land Development Authority (NALDA), Mr. Paul Ikonne, said the agency has concluded plans to set up three rice processing mills in Adamawa State.

He said, the deal, which is in partnership with the state government would also assist farmers in value addition as well as boost food sufficiency.

In an interactive session with farmers in the state, Ikonne, said the government would assist the farmers to make money from their produce through value addition which had been lacking in agriculture.

He said the era of middlemen buying off farm produce from farmers at a ridiculous rate and engaging in price arbitrage was over, adding that the farmers will henceforth add value to their produce and sell.

He explained: "I am here in Adamawa State with a message from the president, the message says go to all the communities, develop their land and make the people rich.

"The only way to achieve that in all the communities is through agriculture, and if it is through agriculture and we are all farmers, that means this message is for us.

"NALDA is back to make millionaires in all the communities in the country.

We have to discover that the people that make money from farm produces are not the farmers."

According to him: "NALDA coming back as a business platform is to help you understand that what you are doing is business, and when you understand it is business, you will be able to know how much you will place on what you are producing."

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However, the NALDA boss said the agency had identified its 4000 hectares of farmer estates in the state as well as received additional donations of 5000 hectares for farming in the state.

Adamawa State Governor, Ahmadu Fintiri, commended the partnership, saying it would empower farmers in the state. He said he was committed to supporting NALDA in all areas of its endeavours.

Represented by the State Commissioner of Agriculture, Dr. Dishi Khabe, he added: "Where NALDA thinks we can come in, on behalf of the state government, we will come in and always do that."

Fintiri added: "I want to applaud NALDA for this great task, the state government cannot do it all alone, the federal government cannot do it all alone, but if a synergy is well built between both parties, our farmers would smile a home.

"The idea of this programme is to have food sufficiency in the state which is the goal of NALDA as it affects our farmers in the grassroots, and I saw when the data was collected, how it was collected, and I saw it was done to achieve its desired aim at the grassroots".
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A group of teenagers entered NSW Parliament on Wednesday morning with a mission: to guarantee students a seat at the table when bureaucrats make education policy.

Theres no ignoring that our current system is not working for everyone, said Jadzia Wolff, from Kingscliff High School in northern NSW. There are so many students who just dont fit. School isnt for them, theyre not engaged and thats never going to change unless something is done about the way they can voice their concerns and feel supported.

Enter DOVES, the new state-wide council of NSW student representatives. Jadzia is among 13 students who have designed the new model, which will have a direct line to the Education Minister on policy matters involving students.

Students from around NSW are part of a new advisory committee to the Education Minister. Credit:Janie Barrett

The 24-person councils name is an acronym for the Department of Student Voices in Education and Schools, as well as a symbol for peace. Its members will come from across NSW and host regular forums within their own communities before taking key messages back to the state government.
I had to reassure my staff that, Hey, I support you and the decision that you make, your fight, Rader said. We talk about this, too, in meetings, that what you are fighting for I agree with, your fight is not against me, we all work for students and we are on the same page. But I was kind of caught in the middle of what was documented in the media as a crossfire.
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(Newser)  German prosecutors have charged a 100-year-old man with 3,518 counts of being an accessory to murder on allegations he served during World War II as a Nazi SS guard at a concentration camp on the outskirts of Berlin, authorities said Tuesday. The man is alleged to have worked at the Sachsenhausen camp between 1942 and 1945 as an enlisted member of the Nazi Party's paramilitary wing, said Cyrill Klement, who led the investigation of the centenarian for the Neuruppin prosecutors' office. The man's name wasnt released in line with German privacy laws, the AP reports. Despite his advanced age, the suspect is considered fit enough to stand trial, though accommodations may have to be made to limit how many hours per day the court is in session, Klement told the Associated Press.

story continues below

The Neuruppin office was handed the case in 2019 by the special federal prosecutors' office in Ludwigsburg tasked with investigating Nazi-era war crimes, Klement said. It comes after prosecutors in the northern town of Itzehoe announced accessory to murder charges last week against a 95-year-old woman who worked during the war as the secretary of the SS commandant of the Stutthof concentration camp. That case and the charges against the 100-year-old man both rely on recent legal precedent in Germany establishing that anyone who helped a Nazi camp function can be prosecuted for accessory to the murders committed there. It was established in 2011 with the conviction of former Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk as an accessory to murder on allegations that he served as a guard at the Sobibor death camp; a federal court subsequently upheld the 2015 conviction of former Auschwitz guard Oskar Groening achieved with the same line of reasoning, solidifying the precedent.

(Read more Nazis stories.)

The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
And with the indulgence of my media partners, Im going to take a break for a little while to regroup and heal. So thats it. -Eddie McGuire, 9 February 2021.

After Eddie yesterday stated that he was taking time out from media commitments, Nine has confirmed Hot Seat episodes will resume following the end of the Australian Open. There are no changes planned.

McGuire will also return to Footy Classified hosting, twice-weekly when AFL resumes.

FOX Footy is yet to confirm if any break will impact on McGuire calling games -first game is March 18 but hosting duties are expected in early March.

Related
BEIJING, Feb. 9 (Xinhua) -- President Xi Jinping and other Chinese leaders have extended festive greetings over the phone or via other means to veteran comrades ahead of the Spring Festival, or the Chinese Lunar New Year.

Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, and the other leaders wished the veterans a happy Spring Festival, good health and long lives.

The veteran comrades spoke highly of the remarkable achievements made by the whole Party, military and Chinese people of all ethnic groups under the leadership of the CPC Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at the core over the past extraordinary year.

They also called on the entire Party, military and Chinese people of all ethnic groups to rally even closer around the CPC Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at the core, strive to secure a new victory in fully building a modern socialist country, and celebrate the centenary of the CPC with great achievements.
New Delhi, Feb 10 : The Supreme Court on Wednesday sought response from the Maharashtra government on a plea claiming that tigress Avni, shot dead by a civilian hunter at Ralegaon in November 2018, was not a man-eater.

The top court also demanded answers on the aspect of the reward given for killing of the animal.

A bench headed by Chief Justice S.A. Bobde and comprising Justices A.S. Bopanna and V.Ramasubramanian decided to examine a plea by activist Sangeeta Dogra and asked her to prove her claim that human remains were not found in the animal's autopsy.

Avni, the tigress, was believed to have killed 13 villagers and in November 2018, she was shot dead near Borati village in Yavatmal by a team of Forest Department officials and a civilian hunter.

Avni, also known officially as T1, was killed after a massive hunt involving 200 paragliders, infrared cameras, and Calvin Klein fragrances.

The incident occurred after three months, Supreme Court allowed authorities to shoot the animal, if tranquilizers didn't work. Dogra moved the top court seeking action against those involved in the killing of the animal.

The petitioner submitted before the bench that human remains were not found in the autopsy of the animal. The bench also asked the petitioner, how could post report establish that the animal was a man-eater or not? Dogra replied that a man-eater would have nails and hair in the intestine for six months, but her stomach was empty.

Dogra argued that hunters were also illegally rewarded for killing her. The bench noted that the authorities flouted orders that they shall not reward anyone who kills (the tigress). The bench said it will issue notice in the matter, as the reward was a clear violation.

Dogra alleged that state authorities organized a function after the hunt, during which a silver idol of a tigress was handed to the civilian hunter.

The incident triggered outrage among wildlife activists, who queried why no efforts were made to tranquilize Avni, instead she was killed in cold blood. After a hearing in the matter, the top court sought reply from Maharashtra government and its forest authorities on Dogra's petition.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
The state will set up three mass vaccination sites at the end of this month at Houstons NRG Stadium and Dallas-Fort Worths AT&T Stadium and Fair Park, Gov. Greg Abbott announced Wednesday.

The centers are part of a federal program to vaccinate up to 12,000 people a day across all three so-called super sites. The locations, operated mostly by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, will begin vaccinating members of the public on Feb. 24.

They will be the largest to administer the vaccine in the state, and come as federal agencies become more involved with state-level plans as part of President Joe Bidens response to the pandemic.

A cornerstone of the presidents plan is ramping up vaccine distribution, particularly in underserved communities that have been hit especially hard by the pandemic and ensuing recession.

The impact of this virus has been disproportionate on people of color, Mayor Sylvester Turner said earlier this week. Yet when the vaccine is on the scene, it seems as though it is converse of that.

Abbott said Wednesday that the sites will allow us to expand access to COVID-19 vaccinations in underserved communities and help us mitigate the spread of the virus.

The Houston site will be able to administer up to 6,000 shots per day, while the other two could administer as many as 3,000 apiece, according to FEMA. Additional information about registering for appointments will be announced over the next several days.

IN-DEPTH: Gov. Abbott announces super sites for COVID vaccinations

The sites will be the largest to administer COVID-19 vaccines in Texas, which has lost more than 38,000 residents to the coronavirus, and represent an increased federal presence in the states vaccine rollout under the Biden administration.

Our state and local partners have made an extraordinary effort in the vaccine rollout, these sites are another opportunity to work together and assist in the vaccine administration, said Tony Robinson, FEMAs local administrator. We are making progress, but the job isnt complete until everyone who wants a vaccine receives a vaccine.

Abbott had disclosed the locations in a tweet earlier this week, initially planning for one site in Houston and one in Dallas, each administering upward of 5,000 shots per day for eight weeks. The pilot program could expand to other cities if it is successful, officials said.

We will work together with our state and local partners to closely monitor vaccination uptake at each of these sites and make real-time decisions to ensure the best utilization of the additional vaccines that have been made available, a FEMA spokesperson said in an email.

The super sites will also follow state guidelines for vaccine eligibility. Currently, Texas is inoculating members of priority groups 1A and 1B  a set of more than 9 million people including health care workers, nursing home residents, most people with pre-existing conditions, and anyone 65 and older.

The agency is encouraging anyone who is able to get a vaccine before the new sites open to do so, instead of waiting for the additional supply. A spokesperson did not say whether a person must be a resident of Houston or Dallas to make an appointment.

In recent weeks, Texas officials have employed a similar strategy at the state level, designating about 80 vaccination hubs statewide that receive most of the weekly vaccine allotment. The largest hubs clock in just above 10,000 doses a week, though allocations vary by site.

This week, Houston Methodist Hospital received the largest allocation for a vaccine hub, with 12,675 doses  around 1,800 shots a day.

Roughly 35,000 people have died in Texas from the virus.

U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Houston and chair of the congressional coronavirus task force, said residents will also be able to make appointments for the super sites through their local jurisdictions vaccination scheduling system.

It is time to get fully operable in fighting COVID-19 across the nation with an effective distribution protocol for getting vaccinations to millions of people as fast as possible, said Jackson Lee, who had previously introduced legislation requiring FEMAs help in upscaling inoculation sites.

cayla.harris@express-news.net

Staff Writer Robert Downen contributed to this report.

The Young and the Restless has a lot of veteran cast members, and one of them is Joshua Morrow. For years, he has played Nicholas Newman on the long-running CBS daytime soap opera. In a recent interview, Morrow talked about being on the show for so many years and why he hasnt really looked anywhere else for roles.

Joshua Morrow on The Young and the Restless in 2015 | Cliff Lipson/CBS via Getty Images

Joshua Morrow as Nicholas Newman on The Young and the Restless

Nicholas is the ultimate legacy character of all legacy characters on The Young and the Restless. The character is the son of longtime characters Victor Newman and Nicole Nikki Newman and has been on the shows canvas since he was born in 1989.

The character was rapidly aged to be a teenager in 1994 and Morrow debuted in the role. He has portrayed the character since then, remaining on the show for a full-time basis for going on 30 years.

Nicholas is a typical soap opera good guy, despite some misdeeds he may take part in. Morrow spoke about in a 2018 interview with Soap Opera Digest and was also asked if the 1994 version of himself would have thought hed still be on the show so many years

I remember when I got the job, I just couldnt believe that they wanted this dude who grew up on a lake in Oklahoma to do this, he said. If you wouldve told me Id be doing it 24 years later, I just never wouldve guessed it. I kind of was always wandering around here like, When are they gonna figure it out that Ive been fooling them for so long? Its been an incredible ride, and Im very excited about the prospects and I hope the show goes on forever and ever and ever. I dont know how long Ill do it, but I know we work very hard to tell stories that people are still interested in. Im very, very proud of this show.

Joshua Morrow doesnt regret being with The Young and the Restless for so many years

You kind of go, Is that normal? I wanted to be an actor because I wanted to play a lot of different people and be creative, he told the publication. But I love my job. I skip to work!

RELATED: The Young and the Restless Sharon and Adams Rekindling is Finally Happening

He has had roles in a movies over the years, but isnt interested in doing anything other than his role on the soap opera.

Theyre not big parts, and I always shoot around my work schedule, but its enough to keep me interested, he added. Never for a second do I wish I would be doing something other than Y&R . As an actor, there are other roles that Id love to try to do, but I have a family to take care of and I have never second-guessed my decision to stay on Y&R. I have never gone to work and thought, I dont want to be here right now.

The Young and the Restless airs weekdays on CBS.
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Kisumu ward representatives have approved the Constitution (Amendment) Bill 2020 becoming the second after Siaya to pass it.

The MCAs unanimously voted for the proposed amendments endorsing the Bill in a sitting held on Tuesday.

The House resumed on Tuesday afternoon at 2.30 p.m. after a long recess with the consideration of the proposed constitutional changes being the main business of the day.

The MCAs approved the Bill amidst uncertainty on the referendum push following a High Court ruling on Monday that barred the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) from subjecting the BBI Bill to a referendum, pending hearing and determination of seven cases filed.

Justices Joel Ngugi, George Odunga, Jairus Ngaah, Janet Mulwa and Chacha Mwita, however, ordered that the process to pass the Bill to amend the Constitution can continue before the 47 county assemblies and Parliament.

This gave the Kisumu county assembly, under the leadership of Speaker Elisha Oraro the greenlight to continue with the process.

Mr Oraro said they carried out public participation last week from February 5 to February 8 paving way for the Bill to be passed on Tuesday.

According to the report of the public participation carried on the Bill by the Legal and Justice Affairs Committee and tabled by East Seme MCA Seth Okumu, the public felt there is a need to have such documents available in good time for thorough perusal.

According to Mr Okumu, the public were n approval of the establishment of a ward development fund.

"It was the prayer that the county assembly of Kisumu considers the approval of the BBI Bill," said Mr Okumu.

The committee resolved that the assembly resoundingly approves the Bill.

MCA Beatrice Pamela who seconded the motion, said the interests of all groups have been taken care of.

"The draft is taking care of the gender issues since there will be representation of women in the Senate," said Ms Pamela.

Kondele MCA Joachim Oketch said he supported the Bill for the sake of peace in his ward, which is usually hard hit by violence every electioneering period

Majority leader Mr Kenneth Onyango said the passing of this Bill was only the first step and there was need for civic education before referendum.

"Lets resume assembly mashinani to give us a good opportunity to meet the people and carrying out a comprehensive civic education to make them understand the benefits of BBI," said Mr Onyango.

Immediately after the Bill was passed, Speaker Elisha Jack Oraro held a press conference together with the MCAs and stated he would forward the certificate, the approved committee report and the bill to the National Assembly and the Senate on Thursday as required.

Homa Bay County Assembly members will debate the Building Bridge Initiative (BBI) constitutional amendment Bill 2020 at a special sitting on Thursday.

MCAs are expected to pass the Bill, following intense lobbying by the Orange Democratic Movement leader Raila Odinga.

Initially the House had planned to debate the Bill after February 19 according to an advertisement the office of the clerk of the assembly had place in local dailies.

However, after a meeting convened by Homa Bay Governor Cyprian Awiti, his deputy Hamilton Orata, the County Assembly Speaker Elizabeth Ayoo, Majority Leader John Kiasa last week, the House leadership amended its timetable to pass the Bill this week.

A new advertisement has since been published asking county residents to present their views about the report by close of business on Wednesday before a debate on Thursday.

Mr Odinga visited Homa Bay on Tuesday where he asked the church to embrace and support BBI.

Ms Ayoo accompanied him to Homa Bay high school when they both witnessed the installation of the new Homa Bay Catholic Diocese Bishop Micheal Odiwa.

In Busia, the County Assembly has subjected the BBI Bill, 2020 to the public participation process across all the seven sub-counties in the county.

The exercise will run for three days before the Bill goes back to the assembly for and debate and possible adoption.

Nominated Member of the County Assembly Florence Ologi (ODM) tabled the Bill last Wednesday after the MCAs were taken through the draft during their meeting with ODM party leader Raila Odinga in Nairobi a fortnight ago.

Legal and Human Rights Committee chairman David Kokonya said the draft Bill is a public document which the public must be given a chance to understand its contents to enable them make informed decisions.

In an advertisement in the daily newspapers, the county assembly invited the public to submit their views on the proposed Bill.

The first public participation meetings were held at Funyula CDF hall yesterday on February 9 and in Bunyala at Port Victoria Town hall.

On Wednesday, February 10, the exercise will be held in Butula at Family Life hall and Nambale at the Deputy County Commissioners office and on Thursday, in Teso South and Teso North constituencies at the Deputy County Commissioners offices at Amukura and Amagoro respectively.

The last meeting will be held in Matayos constituency at the Agricultural Training Center in Busia town on February 12.

Nangina Ward MCA John Obwogo said they have hit the road to sensitise county residents on the contents of the draft Bill to enable them make informed decisions.

We dont want our people to vote on what they dont know. That is why we are exposing the draft report to them so that they give their views before we make a final decision as the assembly, said Mr Obwogo.

Speaking separately on Tuesday at Kocholia during the launch of Kenya Medical Training College, Teso campus, Busia governor Sospeter Ojaamong said the document is good for vast development.

Close Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox Top Headlines Kenya Governance By submitting above, you agree to our privacy policy. Success! Almost finished... We need to confirm your email address. To complete the process, please follow the instructions in the email we just sent you. Error! Error! There was a problem processing your submission. Please try again later.

With the elevation of funds to counties from 15 percent to 35 percent and introduction of the Ward Fund, the Bill is the best for Kenyans. Development will be realised fast at the grassroots level, said Mr Ojaamong.

In Vihiga, residents have up to Tuesday next week to give their views about the Bill.

During the one-week period, locals will only make their views through submission of memoranda as their will be no gatherings to conduct public participation.

Assembly Clerk Ambaka Kilinga said the decision was taken in line with the government protocols aimed at containing the spread of Covid-19.

Mr Kilinga said the memoranda will be considered by the Committee on Justice and Legal Affairs before the draft is considered by the 38-member assembly.

Majority Leader Henry Asava said the 38-member assembly is in support of the Bill.

The majority coalition in the House is made of Musalia Mudavadi's ANC, Raila Odinga's ODM and Ford Kenya of Moses Wetang'ula.

Mr Asava (ANC) observed that the parties that form the majority at the assembly resolved they will endorse the document in line with the decision taken by their party leaderships.

Reporting by Rushdie Oudia, George Odiwuor, Shaban Makokha and Derick Luvega
BOSTON, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Labster , the award-winning producer of virtual laboratory simulations, today announced it raised $60 million in Series C funding. The round was led by new investor Andreessen Horowitz , joined by existing investors GGV Capital , Owl Ventures , Balderton Capital , David Helgason , founder of Unity Technologies , Northzone , Swisscom Ventures , and EduCapital . The round brings Labster's total capital raised to $100 million.

Named one of Newsweek's 50 U.S. Businesses That Stood Out During the Pandemic , Labster's core team of 200 employees supports over 2,000 universities and high-schools, tens of thousands of courses, and millions of students who use Labster. The latest round of capital will enable Labster to focus on growing the size of its global team to serve students around the world.

Currently in 70+ countries, Labster has already put together an ambitious roadmap for expansion, and is now hiring across all major teams such as engineering, product, sales and customer success. The company will establish operations in South America this spring in the next stage of its plan to serve educators and students around the world with virtual lab simulations for hybrid, remote, and in-person learning modalities.

"One of the biggest questions we asked ourselves throughout 2020 was how we could help improve learning outcomes and dramatically increase the motivation of the many students forced to learn from home," said Michael Bodekaer Jensen, Founder & CEO of Labster. "This round of funding will allow us to accelerate our global expansion and development of new science courses so we can help millions more students."

Mads Bonde, Founder and Chairman of Labster, cited the company's unique learning product as the reason for its growth. "The pandemic has clearly shown that a lot of ed tech fails because it merely brings old teaching methods online, without tapping into the many technological possibilities that are leveraged for consumer apps and games. Students are bored and we're losing out on the potential for so many future scientists," said Bonde. "Labster's game-based platform makes learning addictive. Our approach stimulates students' natural curiosity and attains much higher learning outcomes. In the future, we will see new scientists, healthcare professionals, and science-literate adults who were first trained in a Labster simulation."

Labster is growing its core offerings to meet the needs of educators and students who are determined to continue learning without interruption due to the pandemic or the many other barriers to education. They are exploring additional ways to extend their award-winning virtual lab platform to students of all backgrounds, including those who may not have laptops or broadband Internet service. In the future, some students may use mobile devices to access Labster's high-quality virtual lab simulations.

"Labster recognizes that if you combine the best aspects of in-person instruction and a game-based platform, it's a transformative learning experience for students," said Scott Kupor, Managing Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. "We are excited to support the Labster team, especially now, when teachers and students are especially in need of its engaging virtual labs."

"If 2020 has taught us anything, it's that students everywhere need access to high-quality learning anywhere," said Jenny Lee, Managing Partner at GGV Capital. "We believe Labster successfully leverages its game engine to deliver interactive virtual lab experiences that consistently engage science students whether they are learning inside a school building or at home."

"It has been incredible to watch Labster's progress over the past four years as they have pushed forward their mission of democratising high-quality education," says Lars Fjeldsoe-Nielsen, who led Labster's Series A for Balderton Capital, "Adoption has already skyrocketed across Europe and North America, and the team is now building on this momentum, bringing access to best-in-class education to new corners of the world and inspiring the next generation of scientists."

Labster's focus continues to be on supporting instructors as they empower their students to become the next generation of scientists to change the world. Labster simulations have proven to be a complementary learning tool for in-person university and high school education and have also been an essential resource to many hybrid and online courses.

To learn more about Labster and its virtual labs, please visit: www.labster.com

About Labster

Labster is dedicated to developing fully interactive virtual laboratory simulations that are designed to stimulate students' natural curiosity and highlight the connection between science and the real world. The simulations can be used in a variety of different ways, from a full lab replacement to a supplemental learning activity. Labster works in collaboration with over 2,000 colleges, universities and high schools around the world, including MIT, Yale, ETH Zurich, the University of Cambridge, and Imperial College. To join the team or learn more, visit careers.labster.com or www.labster.com.

About Andreessen Horowitz

Andreessen Horowitz backs bold entrepreneurs who move fast, think big, and are committed to building the next major franchises in technology. Founded by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, the firm provides entrepreneurs with access to expertise and insights in innovation, executive and technical talent, market intelligence, business development, and marketing and brand-building. Find us in Menlo Park, Calif., and at www.a16z.com .

Contact: Jayson Lynn, [email protected]

SOURCE Labster

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http://www.labster.com



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Foreigners in Israels largest city have begun receiving vaccinations against COVID-19. Israel has had one of the most successful vaccination campaigns in the world, though there has been controversy.

Dozens of asylum seekers and foreign workers received their first vaccine doses in Tel Aviv on Tuesday. They included people from the Philippines, Moldova, Nigeria, Sudan and Eritrea, the Associated Press reported.

Many people from around the world come to Israel seeking work opportunities or asylum. Tel Aviv, as Israels economic hub, has a large foreign population. This community contrasts with Israels foreign-born Jewish population, which is able to receive citizenship relatively easily due to Israels Law of Return.

Israel's coronavirus vaccination drives began in December. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to vaccinate every adult by the end of March. So far, Israel has administered at least one vaccine dose to more than 40% of its population, according to Our World in Data, putting Israel first in the entire world.

Most vaccines against COVID-19 require two doses to be fully effective.

Israel also led the world for several weeks in daily vaccine doses administered but has now been surpassed by the United Arab Emirates, according to Our World in Data, which is affiliated with Oxford University.

Israel has been lauded for its speedy vaccine rollout, but some observers, including members of Congress, have criticized it because Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are being vaccinated at much slower rates. The Palestinian Authority started administering vaccines last week after receiving a batch from Israel. Israel has also disputed its responsibility for vaccinations in the Palestinian territories, saying that task falls to the Palestinian Authority.
The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
President Joe Biden prefers to hold meetings in the Oval Office sitting in an armchair next to the fireplace. He often has a slim leather briefing book at his elbow and sometimes balances a slender card on his knee while hes talking, to reference figures and key points he wants to make.

(Natural News) When pressed by the Biden regime to hand over private data on customer purchases made in the Washington, D.C., area around the time of the Capitol false flag insurrection, Bank of America (BofA) was more than happy to oblige.

According to Fox News host Tucker Carlson, BofA jumped at the opportunity to pore through its customer database and identify suspects who traveled to D.C. in early January. It then handed this personal information over to the feds as part of an investigation.

BofA reportedly flagged customer records if they contained indicators of travel to D.C. between Jan. 5-6; purchases of hotel, Airbnb, or VRBO accommodations during this time; any purchases of weapons between Jan. 7 and Inauguration Day (Jan. 20); and any airline-related purchases since Jan. 6.

One innocent BofA customer was actually interrogated by the feds because his purchasing history was apparently suspect. This individual was quickly cleared as a non-target in the Biden regimes political witch hunt against conservatives.

Keep in mind that BofA is doing all this without the consent or even knowledge of its customers. This is highly illegal, but since America has devolved into a nation of sanctioned lawlessness, depravity and perversion, whats to stop them?

According to reports, more than 200 people have thus far been identified as fitting the profile of a potential terrorist who went to D.C. on Jan. 6 to protest.

One individual who claims to have been a BofA customer for 16 years announced on social media that she pulled her funds from the banking institution after learning about its fascist complicity.

All banks have responsibilities under federal law to cooperate with law enforcement inquiries in full compliance with the law, a spokesperson for BofA told the media, suggesting that the bank does not comment on any of its communications with law enforcement.

BofA cites Bank Secrecy Act as justification for betraying customers

In its defense, BofA says it has leeway under the Bank Secrecy Act to share private customer data with law enforcement when it has the potential to deter and detect money laundering, terrorist financing, and other criminal acts and the misuse of our nations financial institutions.

BofA would seem to hold the position that private customer data is up for grabs whenever the government asks for it, even if customers are never told about it.

To be fair, banks that refuse to comply with government demands, no matter their illegality, have in the past been issued large civil monetary penalties, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).

When asked for comment by FOX Business, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan, and Citi all refused to respond.

If only this amount of effort was put into dealing with the 2020 election fraud situation. There is plenty of proof out there to suggest that massive criminality effectively stole the White House for Chairman Joe Xiden, who is now illegally occupying the Peoples House and using it to lay the blueprints for the communist Chinese takeover of America.

They all know what you had for lunch but could find no voter fraud, joked one commenter at The Gateway Pundit about the misplaced priorities of federal law enforcement.

One law, the Patriot Act, has forever changed the banking industry, wrote another, noting that none of this would have been possible were it not for the post-911 treason of George W. Bush. It has forever changed the banking industry  thanks G.W.

If you have an account with Bank of America, it is time to close that account, wrote yet another. There must be consequences for this tyranny.

More related news about the Capitol siege and the governments witch hunt against conservatives can be found at FalseFlag.news.

Sources for this article include:

NaturalNews.com

TheGatewayPundit.com

MSN.com
The leading testing companies and laboratories in the United States said their COVID-19 tests are ready to accurately identify new virus variants as they emerge.

According to an ABC News report, two of the largest test processing laboratories in the country, Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp., said they had not reported any changes to the accuracy of their testing data with false negatives from the U.K. COVID-19 strain.

Medical device and health care company, Abbott, said its BinaxNOW tests are still working as promised. Abbott is the company that produced rapid tests bought in large numbers by the U.S. government.

Dr. Mary Rodgers, Abbott's principal scientist and head of infectious disease research, told ABC News that the company has continued to keep track of the new variants as they continue to emerge.

"We've been bringing in samples to confirm our prediction based on the sequences, which indicate that there's no cause for concern for any of our Abbott tests," Rodgers said.

Related story: Everything You Need To Know About New COVID-19 Variants, From Transmissibility To Risks

As COVID-19 Variants Spread, Do They Complicate Testing?

Three variants originating in the U.K., Brazil and South Africa, have been reported in the U.S., which raised concerns that as the virus continues to mutate, the country's current tests to detect the virus might become less accurate.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) earlier sent a notice to health care providers with a caution that the potential of future strains impacting testing accuracy is still possible.

The letter added that the variants could lead to false negatives in PCR tests and that tests for detecting multiple SARS-CoV-2 genetic targets "are less susceptible."

Public health experts said that such concerns from the federal government are legitimate and should push testing companies to review if their tests can detect variants that are not yet reported.

"It is highly likely that future COVID-19 strains will remain detectable because we design our tests to be robust, knowing that virus mutations will naturally occur over time," Abbott said in the report.

COVID-19 Vaccine Rollout

The U.S. government will start shipping supplies of COVID-19 vaccines directly to community health centers instead of state governments next week, according to a Reuters report.

Health officials said this was in line with the government's efforts to speed vaccinations and to ensure doses are reaching vulnerable people. The government will send doses to 250 centers nationwide that will be based on nearness to vulnerable groups like homeless people and those with limited English proficiency.

Health officials noted that the federal government would initially distribute one million vaccine shots and would increase from there. The program, which will eventually be expanded to over 1,300 community health centers, is part of President Joe Biden's initiative to increase access to COVID-19 doses.

Meanwhile, Walgreens is part of a federal pharmacy program that would ship doses directly to drugstores this week. The pharmacy chain plans to start COVID-19 vaccinations this Friday at some of its stores in 15 states, including Chicago and New York City, CNBC reported.

However, all those pharmacies will get a limited supply, and shots will be available to Americans, who are on the high-priority list.

Read also: Biden To Add South Africa To Travel Ban List To Combat New COVID-19 Variant

YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 10, ARMENPRESS. Minister of territorial administration and infrastructure Suren Papikyan received on February 9 Ambassador of Sweden to Armenia Patrik Svensson, the ministry told Armenpress.

The minister congratulated the Ambassador on assuming office in Armenia, wishing success to all his future activities.

We are ready to strengthen and expand the Armenian-Swedish cooperation in different areas. The multi-sectoral directions which are under the coordination of our agency can outline new cooperation opportunities in the agenda of the Armenian-Swedish partnering relations, the minister said.

Mr. Papikyan added that the successful experience of the Armenian-Swedish partnership has been especially demonstrated in the cooperation with the civil aviation, the migration service.

The Ambassador reaffirmed the readiness of the Swedish side to develop the mutual partnership with Armenia and expressed confidence that his activities will contribute to deepening the current partnering relations with the ministry. He stated that the Swedish side is interested in the exchange of experience on strengthening local democracy and administration reforms.

Editing and Translating by Aneta Harutyunyan
China's first nuclear power unit using Hualong One, a domestically designed third-generation nuclear reactor, has entered commercial operation on Jan. 30.

The No. 5 unit of Fujian Fuqing Nuclear Plant, marks that China has made it into the world's top rank of the third-generation nuclear technology, becoming another country that masters the technology after the U.S., France and Russia.

In nearly 20 years of research and development, the research team of Hualong One conducted a total of 54 research projects, and the reactor holds independent intellectual property rights in multiple fields. Core technologies have been tackled in reactor core design, active and passive safety, fuel, and computational analysis software.

The independent technological innovation propelled the upgrading of high-end equipment manufacturing. Hualong One has over 5,300 suppliers across the country for its more than 60,000 equipments. All core equipments, as well as 88 percent of all equipments were built by China.

Through the demonstration project of Hualong One, China has completely grasped the core technologies and experiences of building third-generation nuclear power plants. The country is now able to manufacture major equipment for 8 to 10 third-generation nuclear power plants.

According to Zhao Hao, general manager of Fujian Fuqing Nuclear Power Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of the China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC), the commercial operation of Hualong One will likely generate nearly 10 billion kWh of electricity each year, potentially reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 8.16 million tonnes and standard coal consumption by 3.12 million tonnes in annual terms. It is also an equivalent to plantation of over 70 million trees annually. The reactor has a profound significance for China to improve its energy structure, peak carbon dioxide emissions, and achieve carbon neutrality.

From being commenced in Fuqing on May 7, 2015, to the commercial operation on Jan. 30 this year, the No. 5 unit saves 20 to 30 percent of cost compared with similar projects abroad. This makes Hualong One one of the most popular third-generation reactors in the world.

Two Hualong One projects are currently under construction in Karachi, Pakistan, and Chile and the UK also expressed their interest in introducing the reactor, Zhao noted.

Based on current market situations, each Hualong One unit is able to create an output of over 200 billion yuan ($31.01 billion) and create more than 150,000 jobs in China during its designed life. Besides, each exported unit will also generate revenue of nearly 20 billion yuan in the mechanical and material industries

Hualong One is a signboard of China's equipment manufacturing, just like high-speed trains, said Xu Ligen, chairman of board of the Fujian Fuqing Nuclear Power Co., Ltd.

The most central part of a nuclear power plant is the reactor core in which a minor fault could trigger gigantic problems. "Hualong One is the world's most advanced third-generation nuclear technology, and safety is its major highlight," Zhao told People's Daily.

"We placed three super large tanks above the reactor core, each holding a thousand tonnes of water. Once the active system fails, the water will go down automatically and cool down the reactor," Zhao said. The combination of passive and active safety system has largely lowered the risk of meltdown and release of radioactive materials, he added.

Besides, the nuclear power plant is covered by a two-layer concrete "shell" with a total thickness of over 3 meters. The shell can not only lock radioactive materials inside, but also resist the impacts from large aircraft and earthquakes of 9 magnitude.
KPMG's UK chairman has apologised after telling consultants at the top City firm to 'stop moaning' during a Zoom call about pandemic pay cuts.

Bill Michael also told the 1,500 consultants on the meeting to quit 'playing the victim' card' in a discussion about how coronavirus is affecting working life at the company.

Employees at the Big Four accountancy firm's London office had registered their concerns over bonuses and possibly pension pay being trimmed back.

Hospitality and events businesses across the country are being devastated by coronavirus restrictions, and 10million workers are still on the furlough scheme and amid fears that unemployment will rocket when the scheme ends in April.

KPMG announced an 11 per cent salary slash to the firm's 582 partners to safeguard jobs and providing more wriggle room to make new hires of graduates.

Partners still pocketed an average of 572,000, down from 640,000 the previous year.

The chairman himself had his salary shaved down by 14 per cent to 1.7million.

Bill Michael also told the 1,500 consultants on the meeting to quit 'playing the victim' card' in a discussion about how coronavirus is affecting working life at the company

Yet many staff complained following Mr Michael's comments during Monday's virtual town hall.

'If someone tells you to stop moaning in the middle of a recession and when people are dying... It's incredibly insensitive,' one told the Financial Times.

Others interpreted the chairman's message as one of motivation, impressing the need to ask for help if they are struggling.

Mr Michael, 52, said in a statement: 'I am sorry for the words I used, which did not reflect what I believe in, and I have apologised to my colleagues.

'Looking after the wellbeing of our people and creating a culture where everyone can thrive is of critical importance to me and is at the heart of everything we do as a firm.'

The Australian, who took the reins at KPMG in 2017, also sent an all-staff email expressing 'regret' for his language.

He alluded to his own hospital battle with Covid last March and said he understood the toll the pandemic was taking.

The majority of KPMG's 16,000 people are working from home during lockdown.

The FT reported that an app for employees to register grievances anonymously has stopped working after some comments remarked on Mr Michael's insensitivity.

The majority of KPMG's 16,000 people are working from home rather than the Canary Wharf office (pictured) during lockdown

During the virtual town hall meeting on Monday, staff reportedly also raised concerns over a ranking system that grades team members from best to worst.

KPMG has reported a 2 per cent fall in revenue in the year to September 30 to 2.3billion.

KPMG did not furlough any of its staff during the pandemic, and is even overhauling its offices at the cost of 44million and bolstering remote working technology.

It followed a similar trend among rivals. Deloitte announced a 17 per cent cut in average partner pay to 731,000 last September.

PwC said in December that its partner pay fell 10 per cent to 685,000. EY's average partner pay slipped just 1.8pc to 667,000.

KPMG also added it has put in place 'a range of support measures' to help employees adjust to remote working, including new mental health resources, 'flex' hours and a company podcast to help colleagues stat connected.
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For all their importance as a breakthrough treatment, the cancer immunotherapies known as checkpoint inhibitors still only benefit a small minority of patients, perhaps 15 percent across different types of cancer. Moreover, doctors cannot accurately predict which of their patients will respond.

A new study finds that inherited genetic variation plays a role in who is likely to benefit from checkpoint inhibitors, which release the immune system's brakes so it can attack cancer. The study also points to potential new targets that could help even more patients unleash their immune system's natural power to fight off malignant cells.

People who respond best to immunotherapy tend to have "inflamed" tumors that have been infiltrated by immune cells that are capable of killing both viruses and cancer. This inflammation is also driven by the immune signaling molecule interferon.

"There are some factors that are already associated with how well the immune system responds to tumors," said Elad Ziv, MD, professor of medicine at UCSF and co-senior author of the paper, published Feb. 9, 2021, by an international team in Immunity. "But what's been less studied is how well your genetic background predicts your immune system's response to the cancer. That's what is being filled in by this work: How much is the immune response to cancer affected by your inherited genetic variation?"

The study suggests that, for a range of important immune functions, as much as 20 percent of the variation in how different people's immune systems are able to attack cancer is due to the kind of genes they were born with, which are known as germline genetic variations.

That is a significant effect, similar to the size of the genetic contribution to traits like high blood sugar levels or obesity.

"Rather than testing selected genes, we analyzed all the genetic variants we could detect across the entire genome. Among all of them, the ones with the greatest effect on the immune system's response to the tumor were related to interferon signaling. Some of these variants are known to affect our response to viruses and our risk of autoimmune disorders," said Davide Bedognetti, MD, PhD, director of the Cancer Program at the Sidra Medicine Research Branch in Doha, Qatar, and co-senior author of the paper. "As observed with other diseases, we demonstrated that specific genes can also predispose someone to have a more effective anti-cancer immunity."

The team identified variants in 22 regions in the genome, or in individual genes, with significant effects - including one gene, IFIH1, that is already well known for the role its variants play in autoimmune diseases as varied as type 1 diabetes, psoriasis, vitiligo, systemic lupus erythematosus, ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease.

The IFIH1 variants act on cancer immunity in different ways. For instance, people with the variant that confers risk of type 1 diabetes had a more inflamed tumor, which suggests they would respond better to cancer immunotherapy. But the researchers saw the opposite effect for patients with the variant associated with Crohn's, indicating they might not benefit.

Another gene, STING1, was already thought to play a role in how patients respond to immunotherapy, and drug companies are looking for ways to boost its effects. But the team discovered that some people carry a variant that makes them less likely to respond, which may require further stratification of patients to know who could benefit most from those efforts.

The study required a huge amount of data that could only be found in a dataset as large as The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), and from which they analyzed the genes and immune responses of 9,000 patients with 30 different kinds of cancer.

All told, the scientific team, which includes members from the United States, Qatar, Canada, and Europe, examined nearly 11 million gene variants to see how they matched with 139 immune parameters measured in patient tumor samples.

But the 22 regions or genes identified in the new study are just the tip of the iceberg, the researchers said, and they suspect many more germline genes likely play a role in how the immune system responds to cancer.

The next step, Ziv said, is to use the data to formulate "polygenic" approaches - taking a large number of genes into account to predict which cancer patients will benefit from current therapies, and developing new drugs for those who will not.

"It's further off," he said, "but it's a big part of what we hope will come out of this work."

###

The co-first authors are Rosalyn Sayaman, PhD, at UCSF and City of Hope and Mohamad Saad, PhD, of Qatar Computing Research Institute at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Doha, Qatar.

See the paper online for additional author, funding and disclosure information.

About UCSF: The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is exclusively focused on the health sciences and is dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care. UCSF Health, which serves as UCSF's primary academic medical center, includes top-ranked specialty hospitals and other clinical programs, and has affiliations throughout the Bay Area. Learn more at https:/ / www. ucsf. edu , or see our Fact Sheet.

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Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) the president pro tempore of the Senate, pauses in the Rotunda of the Capitol awaiting the article of impeachment against former President Donald Trump, in Washington, on Jan. 25, 2021. (J. Scott Applewhite/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

Leahy Vows to Conduct Senate Impeachment Trial With Fairness to All

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), who serves as president pro tempore and is presiding over the impeachment trial, said on Tuesday he would conduct the proceedings with fairness to all.

My intention and solemn obligation is to conduct this trial with fairness to all, Leahy wrote in a letter (pdf) addressed to his colleagues. I will adhere, as have my predecessors in the Senate who have presided over impeachment trials, to the Constitution and to applicable Senate rules, precedent, and governing resolutions.

Leahy was asked to preside over the impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump after Chief Justice John Roberts refused to do so. The U.S. Constitution requires the Chief Justice of the United States to preside over the impeachment trials of U.S. presidents.

Roberts presided over Trumps first impeachment trial last year but did not give reasons for his decision not to preside over the second trial. Legal scholars have surmised that his not presiding is because Trump is no longer president.

In a statement in January, Leahy acknowledged that the Senate impeachment trial will be conducted against a non-president, while adding that he will take an additional special oath to do impartial justice according to the Constitution and the laws.

Robertss decision to not preside had also added to the debate on whether the proceedings were constitutional, given that the Senate was trying Trump for his alleged conduct as president.

The Senate on Tuesday voted 56-44 to approve the impeachment trial against Trump following a 4-hour debate on the constitutionality of the proceedings. Republican Sens. Susan Collins (Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Mitt Romney (Utah), Ben Sasse (Neb.), Bill Cassidy (R-La.), and Pat Toomey (Pa.) joined Democrats to say that the trial was constitutional, which has allowed the proceedings to move forward to its next stage.

The debate surrounding constitutionality stems from the fact that Trump is no longer in office. The U.S. Constitution does not explicitly say impeachment is not for former officials, which has prompted discussion over whether the impeachment provisions can be read to only apply to sitting officers.

Trumps lawyers have argued that the Senate has no jurisdiction to try a former official, that the charge against the 45th president is deficient, that their client was deprived of due process and had his right to free speech violated by the article of impeachment, according a memorandum released by the defense team on Monday.

The lawyers have also denied claims that Trump had incited violence that Democrats claim led to the Jan. 6 breach of the U.S. Capitol.

Meanwhile, Democrats are arguing that the Constitution gives the Senate full authority to preside over the impeachment of Trump.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), argued during the debate on Tuesday that discontinuing the trial because Trump has left office would create a January exception, during which future presidents could abuse their power without fear of being convicted and barred from holding future office.

But Trumps attorney Bruce Castor refuted the argument saying that the idea of a January amnesty is nonsense.

If my colleagues on this side of the chamber actually think that President Trump committed a criminal offense  after hes out of office, you go and arrest him. So there is no opportunity where the president of the United States can run rampant in January at the end of his term and just go away scot-free. The Department of Justice does know what to do with such people, Castor said.

The vote on Tuesday has signaled that 44 Republican senators are likely to vote against convicting the former president. The Senate requires 67 votes to convict, according to the Constitution.

Ivan Pentchoukov contributed to this report.
For two months after Joe Biden was declared the winner, Trump relentlessly attacked election officials in Georgia, including Raffensperger and Kemp, claiming they were not doing enough to uncover instances of voting fraud that might change the outcome. In addition to the phone call to Raffensperger, he also called Kemp in early December and pressured him to call a special legislative session to overturn his election loss. Later that month, Trump called a state investigator and pressed the official to find the fraud, according to those with knowledge of the call.
Scientists are looking into bringing back a quieter and more fuel-efficient supersonic aircraft, nearly 20 years after Concorde took its last flight. Credit: Pedro Aragao/Wikimedia, licensed under CC 3.0

Almost 20 years after Concorde was grounded, civilian supersonic aircraft seem ready to take off again. New technology is pushing a new generation of aircraft forward, but challenges remain, from regulations to plain old economics.

24 October 2003 was the end of an era. On that day Concorde, the legendary supersonic airliner, made its final commercial flight, flying from London Heathrow to New York City's John F. Kennedy airport. Since then no commercial supersonic airliners have operatedthe regulatory, technological and commercial problems being too much to overcome. The futuristic dream of a three-hour flight between London and New York, that Concorde offered, seemed shattered.

Now, however, almost 20 years later, we might be returning to that supersonic dream. New technological advances allow designs to succeed where Concorde failed and a range of companies and research institutes are heavily investing in a new generation of civilian supersonic aircraft. The US company Boom wants to fly a scale model of its supersonic airliner, called the Overture, in 2021, and has already raised $196 million to do it. NASA has pioneered the X-59, an experimental supersonic aircraft that lowers noise levels of the infamous sonic boom. And Aerion, in cooperation with Boeing, is developing a supersonic business jet, which could fly by 2025.

"This is not just a dream anymore," said Professor Nicole Viola of the Polytechnic University of Torino in Italy, where she works on supersonic airliners. "Everywhere people are working on this."

Sonic boom

One important boost behind the resurgence of civilian supersonic aircraft is that they could produce less noise and reduce the problem of a sonic boom.

When an immobile object, such as a stereo, produces sound, its sound waves spread in all directions. If they were visible to the naked eye, these waves would look similar to what happens when a stone is dropped in a pond, with little waves spreading in concentric circles.

When an aeroplane goes supersonic, however, it moves ahead of the sound it produces. This leads to its soundwaves trailing behind the aircraft in a cone-like shape, similar to the waves trailing behind a boat. An approaching supersonic aircraft is inaudible, but when it crosses the observer, they get hit by a sudden, boom-like sound of concentrated sound waves that is quite uncomfortable. In some cases these booms can cause damage to buildings and supersonic military jets flying over land have even been known to break windows.

This means that in most countries, routine supersonic flight is banned over land, severely limiting the potential routes of a civilian supersonic plane. For this reason, Concorde only flew routes that were largely over water.

New designs, however, are pioneering so-called low-boom technology.

"The (intensity) of the sonic boom is mainly dependent on the aerodynamic shape of the plane," explained Gerald Carrier, senior aerodynamicist at French aerospace lab ONERA. He was involved in a project called RUMBLE, which gathered evidence around the noise emitted by sonic booms and low-boom aircraft for regulatory authorities.

Carrier notes that, by shaping the geometry of the plane, the loudness of the boom can be reduced from more than 100 decibels for Concorde, similar to listening to a jackhammer, to 70-80 decibels for the new designs, about the sound of a vacuum cleaner.

"Proper shaping of the aircraft with characteristics like a very long front nose can reduce noise. By mastering this we can sculpt the sound signature of the aircraft and make the boom less annoying."

For now, low-boom civilian aircraft are still theoretical, although they're getting closer to launch. Boom hopes to fly a one-third scale model of their design in 2021 and NASA wants to start flight tests of the X-59 in 2022. Carrier compares the noise new low-boom designs would make to very distant fireworks. People would still hear it, but it's not window-breaking loud.

Low-boom became possible because of advances in tools and research. New computers programs make it easier to simulate the properties of an aircraft and experiment with 3-D-shapes. And since the 1960s, when Concorde was designed, we know much more about sonic booms. "We benefit from decades of new research and developments," said Carrier.

Yet even this new generation of supersonic aircraft will still produce noise, and regulation needs to be crafted for these low-boom designs. The RUMBLE project simulated how much sound these new aircraft would produce and what the effect would be on buildings, measured sonic booms with Russian military aircraft and even studied the effect on humans.

Graphic - what is a sonic boom? Credit: Horizon magazine

"We looked at how people reacted to different levels of sonic booms, so called psycho-acoustic studies," said Carrier. Specifically, they put speakers next to a house in which test subjects were located. From time to time these speakers produced sounds similar to a sonic boom. The test subjects then had to report how this affected their wellbeing, capacity to do tasks and ability to sleep. Based on these results, governments can decide how much noise is acceptable from these new aircraft.

"We want to help define regulations that can limit the sonic boom of new aircraft to an acceptable level for humans," said Carrier. These regulations might then allow supersonic aircraft to fly over land, dramatically expanding the routes they can service.

Mach

In Torino, Prof. Viola will be exploring another way to test sonic boom in her project MOREandLESS, which has just kicked off and will run for four years. In one experiment, researchers will shoot small projectiles in the shape of planes out of a gun on a large, outdoor testing track. The projectiles achieve a sonic boom, which is then measured by microphones situated around the track to see what different designs will do for the noise. "We will investigate a wide range of speeds, from Mach 2 to 5," said Prof. Viola.

Mach is the unit of speed for supersonic aircraft. Mach 1 means that the aircraft goes as fast as the speed of sound at that location, which can differ based on the local temperature, which, in turn, is mainly dependent on altitude (the higher up in the atmosphere, the lower temperatures are). At sea level, with a temperature of 15C, Mach 1 is located at 340.3 metres per second or 1225.08 km per hour. At an altitude of 11,000 metres, that becomes 295 metres per second or 1062 km per hour. Supersonic is generally designated as the area between Mach 1 and 5, or 1 to 5 times the speed of sound. The Boom Overture, for example, is planned to maintain a Mach 2.2 speed, similar to the cruising speed of Concorde.

Prof. Viola is also studying fuel optionsanother key issue that new supersonic civilian aircraft will face. One of the reasons why Concorde was uneconomical was its high fuel consumption, especially during low-speed phases of flight. And although the new generation of supersonic aircraft designs have reduced fuel use through interventions like more economical engines and better aerodynamics, they would still spend more than a regular, subsonic jet, producing problems of pollution and climate impact.

A key way to reduce this is new forms of fuel. "Emissions of course depend on the type of engine," said Prof. Viola. "But they also depend on the fuel, and the chemical processes at the basis of combustion."

For Prof. Viola, two candidates for more sustainable fuels spring out: biofuels and liquid hydrogen. Hydrogen is 'candidate number 1," said Prof. Viola, because it doesn't produce CO 2 emissions. But biofuels, which are derived from biomass such as plants or waste, are also still in the running, possibly mixed in with regular jet fuel.

Economics

But for all the new technology, what will make or break the new generation of supersonic is economics. "The last straw for Concorde was that the economics just weren't viable," said Dr. Turab Zaidi, who jointly leads the Aerospace Systems Design Lab at Georgia Tech Lorraine, which is located in Metz, France. "British Airways and Air France just couldn't stand the amount of money they were losing."

Dr. Zaidi investigated whether that situation will shift in the future for the project OASyS, and whether airlines can profitably operate these new aircraft. In the project they developed two scenarios for supersonic airliners in the period between 2035 and 2050, and their conclusion seems cautiously optimistic.

"Across the scenarios we found that a market does exist," said Dr. Zaidi. "It's not as high as some of the manufacturers are projecting. But granting certain assumptions, there is a market."

Their study starts from the current aviation market and projects how it will evolve, taking into account economic growth, which will most likely produce an increase in the use of airlines. It then calculates the size of the group of consumers who would take these supersonic aircraft, such as business passengers wanting fast connections or tourists who now pay for the premium offerings of airlines.

However, this potential market relies on a range of assumptions on how supersonic aircraft will evolve, such as fuel efficiency and regulation.

"For the high-demand scenario, we assumed land overflight is permitted," said Dr. Zaidi. "That is one of the big constraints on a high-demand scenario. When you don't allow land overflight, you severely limit the amount of destinations and force planes to fly slower when over land, reducing fuel efficiency."

Nevertheless, in general, Dr. Zaidi seems optimistic. "A lot of the things that ended Concorde have shifted," he said. "The demand for fast airline connections never went away since then and we might see a resurgence now."

Explore further Virgin seeks to revive supersonic commercial flightbut faster
(HealthDay)It's known that face masks help protect against COVID-19 infection, but U.S. health officials said Wednesday that the tighter the mask, the better.

In lab experiments, wearing cloth or medical masks close to the face cut COVID transmission by 95%, according to a new report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"These laboratory-based experiments highlight the importance of good fit to maximize overall mask performance," wrote the researchers, led by Dr. John Brooks, of the CDC's COVID-19 Emergency Response Team.

"There are multiple simple ways to achieve better fit of masks to more effectively slow the spread of COVID-19," the researchers noted.

Using dummies, the CDC team tested two methods to prevent air leakage from the mask's edges: double masking (wearing a cloth mask over a medical mask) and knotting and tucking masks. For this, they knotted the ear loops of a medical mask at the mask edges and tucked in and flattened any extra material close to the face.

When people wear tight-fitting masks, infection could be slashed, experiments showed.

Some experts worry that double masking could discourage mask-wearing altogether.

"I would rather people focus on finding one quality mask that meets the mark, versus trying to layer masks and create discomfort, difficulty breathing  or frustration that might lead to no mask at all," Saskia Popescu, an infectious disease epidemiologist at George Mason University in Virginia, told the Washington Post.

David Rothamer, an engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has experimented with masks on mannequins in classrooms while studying the best ways to prevent the spread of the virus in college classes. He told the Post that he is not a proponent of double masking because it consumes more masks and can lead to more air leakage.

"The only reason to [wear two masks] is if you can get better fit," he said.

Two other ways to improve fit, the CDC researchers said, include use of a mask fitter (a fitted plastic frame for a mask) or wearing a nylon covering over your mask.

Unlike N95 respirator masks, cloth masks and surgical or medical masks fit loosely, allowing respiratory droplets to escape, the researchers explained. They are not intended to block airborne particles.

By controlling the spread of aerosol drops, the mask experiments showed that an infected person is less likely to transmit COVID, while a non-infected person is less likely to become infected.

The CDC authors noted limitations to their study, including their use of just one type of medical mask and one type of cloth mask. Still, they added, "continued innovative efforts to improve the fit of cloth and medical procedure masks to enhance their performance merit attention."

The report was published Feb. 10 in the CDC publication Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

Linsey Marr, an engineering professor at Virginia Tech who has studied how to maximize mask efficiency, had some advice on getting the best mask fit.

"You should not be able to see or feel any kind of open spots around the edges of your mask, especially around your nose, which is why a metal bridge is so important for fitting tightly around the nose," she told the Post.

"You don't want gaps around the cheek or chin, really anywhere. One way you can check for that is when you are breathing through it, does it feel like air is leaking out of the side? Put your hand on the edge to see if you feel anything. When you breathe in, you should feel suction up against your face," Marr added.

Other signs of leakage include eyeglasses fogging up or cold breath coming from the sides of masks while outside, she said.

If masks fail these tests, Marr said, try something different. "People's faces have such different shapes that you can try to find something that can work better for your face," she advised.

President Joe Biden has urged all Americans to wear masks and signed executive orders requiring their use on federal property and on planes, trains and buses. Thirty-six state governments now require people to wear face coverings, the Post reported. The District of Columbia and Puerto Rico also have mask orders. Meanwhile, three statesIowa, North Dakota and Mississippihave lifted such mandates, the Post said.

Explore further Follow the latest news on the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak

Copyright  2020 HealthDay. All rights reserved.
Elon Musk.

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk said on February 10 that he had bought Dogecoin - a cryptocurrency - for his newborn, further extending his support to digital currencies.



Bought some Dogecoin for lil X, so he can be a toddler hodler

 Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 10, 2021

"Bought some dogecoin for lil X, so he can be a toddler hodler," said the Tesla and SpaceX CEO on Twitter.

Musk's tweet comes after Tesla revealed on Monday that it had bought bitcoins worth $1.5 billion and would soon accept it as a form of payment for cars, sending the cryptocurrency shooting higher.

The announcement, buried deep in Tesla's 2020 annual report, drove a roughly 20 percent surge in the world's most widely held cryptocurrency to over $47,000. At that price, 0.8 bitcoins was enough to buy an entry-level Tesla Model 3.

Musk's tweets about certain companies and cryptocurrencies have sent their prices soaring in recent weeks. In fact, him putting a "#bitcoin" tag on his Twitter bio sent the most popular currency flying on January 29.

The billionaire entrepreneur has nearly 44 million followers on Twitter.

A few days after his namecheck on Twitter, his cryptic one-word tweet triggered a massive rally in Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency based on a meme about a Shiba Inu dog.

Dogecoin's value started to soar after Musk tweeted the image of rocket with a trailing tweet "Doge". This was enough for the cryptocurrency's price to skyrocket.

In his subsequent tweets, Musk wrote "Dogecoin is people's crypto" and "No highs, no lows, only Doge".

Dogecoin, is also among one of the many altcoins. Altcoins is an umbrella term for digital currencies other than the bitcoin, the most well known and popular cryptocurrency.

According to The New York Times, the altcoin Dogecoin was created by Jackson Palmer in 2013. He built his own satirical mash-up cryptocurrency that combined bitcoin with the Doge meme hed seen on social media.
New Delhi:

Back from a successful series of foreign visits, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will resume hectic work of domestic politics from Sunday, a day ahead of Parliament's Monsoon Session, and Presidential and Vice Presidential elections on Monday.



The meetings to be presided by PM Modi on Sunday include:



#3 PM: BJP Parliamentary Party executive meeting



#4 PM: Meeting of the ruling NDA leaders



#5 PM: Meeting of all NDA MPs



PM Modi will also be present at the all party meeting called by Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan on Sunday.



The NDA huddle a day ahead of Monsoon Session is crucial for the ruling alliance to decide on the strategy to handle Opposition's attack in the wake of escalated tension in Kashmir Valley and Dokalam dispute with China.



The meetings are also likely to yield NDA's vice presidential candidate. Vidyasagar Rao, Venkaiah Naidu and Najma Heptulla among NDA's vice-presidential probables.



Also, Sources in BJP said that NDA's Presidential nominee Ram Nath Kovind will once again meet all the NDA MPs on Sunday.



Parliament's MOnsoon Session begins on Monday and will continue till August 11. The session will begin with elections for the post President of India and Vice President of India. The term of current President Pranab Mukherjee ends on July 24.

Suggested read: Vice-Presidential election 2017: RSS in favour of fielding candidate from upper caste, South India

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
Jamaican Dancehall superstar Popcaan has reacted to the stabbing death of rising Ghanaian artist Unruly Grank, aka Soft Metal, allegedly by a fellow Cape Coast artist. Unruly Grank was previously known as Gully Grank, but changed his name after Unruly Boss visit to Ghana one year ago.

Grank, whose real name is Emmanuel Aikins, was stabbed to death with a cutlass in Cape Coast on Sunday (February 7). The alleged assailant, Dancehall artist Shadow, has been arrested, according to reports by GhanaWeb and PulseGhana.

Police in the West African country confirmed the incident and said that Shadow, whose real name is Bright Ellis, stabbed Grank after a misunderstanding ensued between them at the Orange Beach Resort near the Cape Coast Castle. Ellis, who also sustained injuries, reported to a police station to make a statement and was later arrested at an area hospital.

Unconfirmed reports say that Grank first pulled out the cutlass, which was taken away by Ellis who stabbed Grank on his neck during the incident.

Video surfaced online that showed friends and family wailing as Unruly Granks body was removed from the scene.

Popcaan, who has a huge fanbase in Ghana, reacted to news of Unruly Granks sudden death in an Instagram Story yesterday and wrote, Strength to the cape coast youths. Rest up Grank @unruly.grank_ with the prayer emoji.

Grank reportedly met and displayed his talents to the Unruly Boss after the Jamaicans visit to the Cape Coast Castle in January 2020, for the Year of Return.

Popcaan was supposedly impressed by a freestyle from Gully Grank, and offered him the name Unruly Grank instead, according to TasteNews. The artist later wrote in an Instagram post last year, @popcaanmusic gave me that name I will make him proud with that name.

Grank, 24, started out in the industry in 2016 and is said to have taught himself to speak patois. His first breakthrough hit was Jah Know which won best Dancehall song of the year at the Central Music Awards in 2018.

His recent tracks included Frass Pon Frass and Pull Up.
An article in the form of an open letter entitled Dear Egypt was published on various Ethiopian websites. The article consisted of a narrative defending Ethiopias right to construct the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, comparing it to Egypts Aswan High Dam and detailing developments after Egypts project was built.

This article, also in the form of an open letter, is a counter-argument to the narrative of successive Ethiopian governments that Egypt has been opposed to Ethiopias development.

Dear Ethiopia,

I hope everything is fine your way. I am aware of the difficulties that you are experiencing at the moment, and I look forward to your overcoming them peacefully.

First, I would like to remind you of a spiritual bond that has connected your people with mine for centuries. As early as the 4th century CE, if you still recall, a blessed son of mine spread the word of God and revealed His Light upon your territory. It was my blessed son St Athanasius who ordained another revered son of mine, St Frumentius, whom your children call Abba Salama, as your first ever bishop. You remember, dear Ethiopia, that you still use my calendar, namely that of the Egyptian Coptic Church, as your own for your day-to-day activities.

Dear Ethiopia, though it may come as a surprise to many of your sons and daughters, I also played a crucial part in keeping your country up-to-date and in modernising your economy. In 1905, my banking experts helped you to establish the Bank of Abyssinia (later the National Bank of Ethiopia), the first bank in Ethiopia, and my good hearted children were excited to see your people issue their first banknotes at this time, just like any other modern state.

Do you still recall that after I gained independence on 28 February 1922, your land was the first in Africa and among the very few in the world at the time to host one of my earliest diplomatic missions? I hope you still have good memories of my faithful son, the senior diplomat Farag Mikhail Moussa, who worked hard in his capacity as consul to my mission in Addis Ababa to promote relations with your government. He took good care to help to transform your economy, and he established my permanent trade mission in Piazza in downtown Addis Ababa for the exchange of commodities and to boost trade between our two peoples.

Dear Ethiopia, when fascist Italy invaded your territory in 1935, my children formed a commission in defence of the Cause of Abyssinia (your official name at the time). They mobilised resources to support you against the Italian invaders and sent field hospitals to your territory, one of them ruthlessly bombed by fascist Italians. The pressure put by my people, who sympathised with your just cause, pushed my government to enforce sanctions imposed by the League of the Nations against fascist Italy to the detriment of the invaders. I wonder why you still call the 1929 Agreement on protecting my childrens water quota of the River Nile colonial, when you should have realised that the above activities in defence of your cause were in essence the acts of a sovereign nation.

When my good son Gamal Abdel-Nasser took office as president after the July 1952 Revolution, he authored a book dedicated to promoting relations with you. He believed that such amicable relations between Egypt and Abyssinia could never have been established except between fully-fledged brothers. It was my son Nasser and yours, Haile Selassie I, who worked together for a dream that our Mother Africa had been yearning for decades to achieve. Both of us, along with other children of Africa, co-founded the Organisation of African Unity (OAU).

Here you need to remember that it was courtesy of Nasser that the seat of this continental body blossomed in your New Flower  your capital city of Addis Ababa. You surely know that had Nasser wanted to have the seat of the OAU in Cairo, he would have secured it in the blink of an eye, as you know he was a staunch supporter of the African liberation movements and he is still highly revered in the hearts and minds of the African peoples.

Dear Ethiopia, in June 2014 another good son of mine, Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi, took over as president, and in his inauguration speech he plainly said that he will not allow the GERD issue to be a bone of contention or an obstacle in developing relations with sisterly Ethiopia. Perhaps you remember his visit to your beautiful capital in March 2015, when he addressed your parliament in good faith, and unequivocally said that he would be happy to see the schools in your beautiful country powered with electricity, but that while your children worked for that, they should not forget the right of my children to secure their needs of water.

But even so, dear Ethiopia, you are still dealing with me with much suspicion and trying your best to deny me my right to life. You are still adamantly rejecting reaching a balanced deal with my children and their brothers in Sudan on the GERD. I am in no way opposed to your progress  how could you think that when you know that I have supported you in your darkest moments? How can you tell your people that I, Egypt, do not want to see you developed, upgraded and prosperous?

It is true that my sons will stand up firmly to protect my peoples right to life and their share of water that has flowed to them since the dawn of history down from your mountainous land to my barren desert. It is also true that belligerent remarks by some of your children drive me to the edge. But I am patient, and I want you to exercise self-restraint and attend to the serious work of defusing the tension between us.

Escalation favours neither of us, as it opens wide the doors of interference by those who do not want to see us living in peace and harmony. Plus, my dear, why do you think that defending my right to life means I hate to see you prosperous? Could your prosperity be attained at the expense of my people and their brothers in Sudan? Is that your recipe for a win-win deal?

Dear Ethiopia, I understand how difficult your transformation is and how challenging your homegrown existential threats are. But please do not rub salt into the wounds: return to your senses and do what is right for the betterment of my people and yours.

Sincerely,

Egypt

*The writer is a former press and information officer in Ethiopia and an expert on African affairs.

*A version of this article appears in print in the 11 February , 2021 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly

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A man who was arrested for growing marijuana on his farm at Mugui village in Embu East sub-county pleaded his case saying the plant has medicinal value.

Gerald Njiru Ireri said he has been using Cannabis as a vegetable for nearly half a decade. He said he was introduced to the holy herb by a man identified as Gacathi Mbui.

Njiru said Mbui used to live in the forest in the early 1970s and claims to have used it to cure a woman who had a large cancerous wound sometime back, the Standard reports.

The elderly man also cried foul, accusing the area chief of uprooting and destroying his marijuana plants without his consent.

I am a God-fearing man and the chief has uprooted my plants without my consent. This is a traditional herb which needs to be adopted for its medicinal value, he said.

Police also arrested the mans wife who said she has been uprooting the plants to discourage her husband but her efforts had proved futile.

The area chief Mark Nyaga said they swung into action to arrest Njiru after members of the public snitched that he had a nursery of cannabis. Damn you snitches! May you get stitches.

The administrator also revealed that Njiru previously served two separate jail terms over cannabis. He said they have since launched a crackdown to establish where he supplies the herb.

Here are some Twitter reactions to the helpless mans arrest:

I personally know this old man. He was recently released from jail where he had been incarcerated for 7year for the same crime of growing Cannabis in his farm  Highland Boy (@Highlandboy1) February 9, 2021

He looks healthy, let the man continue being a vegetarian.  Kenya West (@KinyanBoy) February 9, 2021

Its not like hes been stealing 2 billion shillings per day since 2013.  Negritude (@BozNegritude) February 9, 2021

Bora ako healthy akuna shida aachiliwe bana@TLM  TUNUGUS LIVES MATTER  (@BazengaWaMemes) February 9, 2021

Sasa makosa yake ni gani ??shamba ni yake ,mwili ni yake na mboga ni yake ,awachiliwe were all advised by healthy workers to eat greens  Plimo Tuimengit (@TuimengitP) February 9, 2021

This is complete BS! Let the man be! Our ancestors enjoyed these indigenous plants until those colonialists set foot in these parts with their nonsensical rules. Its time to revert to our ways of doing things.  Rarin (@Rarin) February 9, 2021

wamemshikisha kiberiti to make their case strongshaaaka hii ni Kenya  SADIST (@the__sadist) February 9, 2021

Smallish fish under siege.  A R A B B U  N D E G E (@arabbu) February 9, 2021

So the guy was arrested for getting high on his own supplyso unfair.  KHAEMBA WANDABUSI . (@ItsKhaemba) February 9, 2021

Why arrest a vegetarian who is just enjoying his meal. Senator @ledamalekina this is not fair at all  Josh Oluga (@Josholuga) February 9, 2021

The same Marijuana is legal in our donor states https://t.co/c5EwckgMj6  Karomaindo  (@mcpipita) February 9, 2021

Pack this narrative up. Cannabis is medicine. Its reputation is grounded in colonialism and racism. Cannabis. Is. Medicine. https://t.co/ERXJKJF3Md  SM (@SilasMiami) February 9, 2021

Double Standards.

Watu ya Sigara kubwa all walking scott free. https://t.co/1bVWgY7d0n  Sultan (@nasirkenya) February 9, 2021

Legalise cannabis and let people be. This thing of frustrating people who are minding their business needs to stop. https://t.co/Ao0vAbi0go  Scheaffer Okore. (@scheafferoo) February 9, 2021

Imagine people. Coming to arrest you in your house where you were minding your own business  https://t.co/hz0QhCf49a  HEART BREAK KID (@NotNice_12) February 9, 2021

Cant get over the disciplining logic of colonialism  disciplining land to meet juridical specifications of what counts as food or to accommodate private landownership and then disciplining the people associated with that land for reaping what the land provides https://t.co/xQrBxyb7KQ  mumbi. (@miss_mumbz) February 9, 2021



I hate this shit.

I am sure he never once bothered anyone.

Just grew his food, worked and did his Life.

But the colonized mind shall never give peace to the Free mind. https://t.co/eAEdNHWtRl  Yahshua (@Yahshua_YesSure) February 9, 2021

Kenya has some really outdated laws   many African countries are already farming marijuana for export.. https://t.co/YWWONPJb3g  Excelsior (@RavS82) February 9, 2021

We really need to grow up as a country. https://t.co/LBSEkrM2fQ  Samurai Noetic. (@SupremeGREAM) February 9, 2021

@NPSOfficial_KE @IG_NPS do you know tobacco smoking kills 8 million people each year,no deaths recorded from smoking marijuana alone,let the man be #meditation #legalizeit https://t.co/dIOstJxRsi  Sav (@juliusmk_) February 9, 2021

#LegalizeItAlready! Let the old man go! Arrest Uhuru and Sonko and set bail at 2 billion a day! #UshenziKE! https://t.co/zCD2oe4FW5  Wanjiku Revolution (@WanjikuRevolt) February 9, 2021

What is this nonsense..set that old wise man free bana #legalizemarijuana https://t.co/zxPI1EXKKm  itch (@MuthicaniNjorua) February 9, 2021

Wale wa kuiba 2 Billion a day mshamalizana nao kwanza? https://t.co/tfZq6ZtYFl    (@Shirley_Sein) February 9, 2021

Free the man we can all see clearly hata alikuwa na Kiberiti ya kuwasha jiko.

LEGALIZE https://t.co/L2b4q9HuZn  Kevo Kiptindinyo (@KevoMkale_) February 9, 2021

Mtu akikula mboga yake, kwake, yenye amekuza kwa shamba yake kutumia pesa zake ni makosa? Such a BS country  https://t.co/WPIHJXWoaS  The Go Getter (@CallmeSonik) February 9, 2021
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This year's event will focus on educating the fashion industry about diversity and inclusion and providing solutions for brands interested in changing the dynamics.

NEW YORK, NY / ACCESSWIRE / February 10, 2021 / Harlem's Fashion Row (HFR), the organization championing for diversity in the fashion arena, is gearing up for the 3rd staging of their annual Digital Fashion Summit with title sponsor, American Eagle Outfitters, Inc.

In honor of Black History Month, HFR's virtual event will be hosted on February 18, 2021, under the theme, 'Moving beyond the Black Box, A New Conversation about Race." More than 50 professionals from across the fashion and retail industry are expected to join in the new conversation about race and fashion. Fashion Designer, Filmmaker, and Chairman of the CFDA Tom Ford is scheduled to deliver the keynote address. Samira Nasr - Editor in Chief of Harper's Bazaar, Teri Agins - Author and Former Wall Street Journal Columnist, and Fashion Designer, Sergio Hudson are also slated to be our guest panelists during the virtual event.

But that's not all. Several exciting topics are up for panel discussions. The panels and conversations will include brands on the frontlines of making a difference. Attendees can expect real discussions with real strategies. Topics will include:

 Retail Revolution - Retailers Making A Difference and Buying Designers of Color

 The Fashion Industry's Role in Promoting Diversity

 An Editor's Perspective on Race and Fashion

 How the Race Conversation is Impacting the Faces of NYFW

 History of Black Fashion and Looking Towards the Future

Since 2007, Harlem's Fashion Row has been promoting people of color in fashion. Founder and CEO of HFR, Brandice Daniel, said: "The year 2020 has revived many concerns in the fashion industry regarding the lack of diversity and inclusions of blacks in retail, top management positions, and not being able to receive funding. Our goal is to educate the industry on potential solutions, provide solutions to brands still searching for answers, and to share the best practices over the past six months."

The partnerships of AEO Inc. and the American Eagle and Aerie brands for this year's event is a welcomed endorsement of the growth of the Digital Fashion Summit. "As an industry leader, at AEO we are committed to achieving sustained and long-term progress for people of color within our company and the fashion industry," said Terry Roberts, Chief Inclusion & Diversity Officer, AEO, Inc. "We are proud to partner with Harlem's Fashion Row as part of its Annual Digital Fashion Summit to celebrate the enduring influence of Black people in fashion and to be an active participant in the important conversations happening around race, inclusion, culture, and belonging. Together, we can create lasting change."

In addition to AEO Inc., HFR is also proud to partner with Tommy Hilfiger and Levi's.

The Digital Fashion Summit virtual event will take place from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm with scheduled breaks. For registration and further information, visit HFR website.

About Harlem's Fashion Row

HFR is the premier agency creating a bridge between brands and designers of color in fashion through brand strategy, collaborations, new media, experiential marketing, recruiting, and pipeline programs. To learn more about HFR, visit www.harlemsfashionrow.com.

CONTACT:

Media contact: Frances Armand

Email: frances@armandconsulting.net

SOURCE: Harlem's Fashion Row

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/628807/Harlems-Fashion-Row-Poised-to-Host-3rd-Annual-Digital-Fashion-Summit-in-February
Did you do a Personally Procured Move, also known as a PPM or DITY move, in 2020? If so, be sure that you have the special travel W-2 when you complete your 2020 income tax return.

Many military families are eager to file their tax returns when the IRS opens the filing season on Feb. 12, 2021, especially when they are expecting a refund. Having this special W-2 is an important part of having an accurate income tax return filing.

Reimbursements for PPM moves are taxable income to the military service member. As such, the Defense Finance and Accounting Service issues a W-2 for that money. It's found on MyPay, in the tax document section, under Travel/Miscellaneous Tax Statement (W-2).

Thankfully, that money isn't always taxable, or at least not all of it. Active-duty military service members moving on Permanent Change of Station orders are the only group of U.S. taxpayers who are still eligible to deduct moving expenses from their income tax calculations.

You'll use the information on the travel W-2 to calculate your deductible moving expenses on IRS Form 3903, Moving Expenses. The IRS has pretty specific rules on which moving expenses can be deducted. If you're unsure what you can include in your calculations, consider getting free assistance from your installation's Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) program, or get advice from the Military OneSource MilTax program.

If you've been reimbursed more than your actual expenses, you must include the excess as income on Line 1 of your 1040 tax form. This may increase your tax liability for the year, which means you'll either get a smaller refund or owe a larger payment.

If qualified service members moving on PCS orders have actual moving expenses that exceed their reimbursement, they can deduct the excess costs on Line 13 of the 1040 tax form. This may decrease your tax liability for the year, which means you'll either get a larger refund or owe a smaller payment.

Either way, it's important that you report the income listed on your travel W-2. It has been reported to the IRS, and not showing it on your tax return may cause it to be flagged for review or even audit. Plus, if your expenses exceed your reimbursement, you want to get the benefit of that moving expense deduction.

If you don't know that it exists, it's easy to miss the travel W-2. The first time I saw one, I had no idea what it was or what to do with it. We ended up just adding it to our taxable income and paying full taxes on it. Be smarter than me, and calculate your actual moving expenses so that your tax return will be as accurate as possible, and you won't have to pay taxes on the full amount of your reimbursement.

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NEW HAVEN  For former residents of the now-demolished Church Street South housing complex, its been a long time coming.

A judge has approved an $18.75 million settlement of a class-action lawsuit filed in 2016 on behalf of residents and former residents of the apartment complex that had existed opposite Union Station.

Superior Court Judge Linda Lager, presiding over the case on the states complex litigation docket in Waterbury, issued a final approval in the case.

The plaintiffs attorney, David Rosen, and representatives from the Massachusetts-based landlord Northland Investment Corp. submitted the settlement, which came out of a mediation process, in October, according to court documents.

We think the settlement is actually going to help people; help them take care of their families, Rosen said Tuesday.

It may help some of them find better living accommodations. It may help children have their needs, educational and otherwise, met more fully, Rosen said.

Northland, in a written statement, said, We would like to thank the Honorable Judge Linda Lager for her continued guidance in helping the parties reach this resolution, and Mediator and Retired Judge Jonathan Silbert for his ongoing work with the parties.

The settlement has always been about the Church Street South families, and we hope it will contribute to helping them move forward in a positive way, the statement said.

The case involved plaintiffs Personna Noble, Luz DeJesus, Yomaly River, Rosa Rodriguez and Christina Foster, their children and a putative class of current and former residents of the Church Street South housing complex, against defendants Northland Investment Corp., Lawrence R. Gottesdiener  the chief executive and chairman of the board at Northland  Church Street New Haven LLC, DeMarco Management Corp. and Wm. M. Hotchkiss Co., according to the settlement.

Under the settlements terms, former Church Street South tenants who qualify will receive up to $20,000 per person, depending on how long they lived at the complex after December 2013. (A family of four could receive up to $80,000, a family of five could receive up to $100,000, etc.)

They also will be eligible for payments from a $2.65 million dedicated fund for enhanced injuries if they demonstrate to a panel of special masters, which Rosen said has been formed as part of the settlement, that they sustained serious property damage or mold-related injuries while living there.

Former residents also will get preferred rights to rent affordable apartments at any new complex that Northland, which began demolishing Church Street South in June 2018, builds at the site. We know theyre working on it, Rosen said. We know theyre working with the city of New Haven to come up with a plan that works for everybody.

Lager found Friday in her order approving the settlement that it was is fair, adequate and reasonable, was the result of intensive, informed, arms-length negotiations conducted by the parties with the assistance of a capable and highly experienced mediator and it does not improperly grant preferential treatment to any individual or segment of the Settlement Class.

According to Rosen, a total of 872 people have come forward so far with claims that they lived at Church Street South during the period covered by the settlement, of which 743 so far have been shown to be qualified.

Of those, 294 so far have filed claims that they sustained enhanced injuries, Rosen said. Those claims have to be reviewed by the panel of special masters, he said.

According to the terms of the settlement, people found to be on the rent rolls are eligible to receive between $8,000 and $20,000 depending on how long they lived at Church Street South. People who were not on the rent rolls will receive a flat $5,000 if they can prove they lived there with a government-issued document, he said.

In their lawsuit, plaintiffs alleged that they and others who lived at Church Street South from Dec. 19, 2013, to Dec. 19, 2016, suffered, by reason of conduct of Defendants ... injuries consisting of diminution in rental value, interference with tenancy rights, emotional distress, property damage, illness, and physical injury.

The defendants in the case have at all times denied, and continue to deny, all allegations whatsoever of any wrongdoing, negligence, fault, or liability, and assert that their actions have been lawful and proper in all respects and in compliance with all applicable legal duties, the settlement states.

... But in order to avoid the uncertainties, risks and expense of further litigation, they have agreed to settle and terminate all existing or potential claims against them pursuant to the terms and provisions of this Second Amended Settlement Agreement, the settlement says.

As part of the settlement, Rosens law firm is being paid reasonable fees and expenses not to exceed $2.85 million.

In the event the Court awards Class Counsel Fees and Expenses in an amount less than $2.85 million, 83 percent of the difference between the amount awarded and $2.85 million will deposited into the Base Payment Fund, and 17 percent of such difference will be deposited into the Enhanced Payment Fund, it says.

mark.zaretsky@hearstmediact.com
Turnover is down 12% at one of the main retail distributors across the Irish Sea (Liam McBurney/PA).

Turnover is down 12% at one of the main retail distributors across the Irish Sea.

AM Nexday blamed uncertainty amongst businesses based in Great Britain following the introduction of the Northern Ireland Protocol.

Senior manager Sarah Hards said her organisation recruited extra staff and incurred additional costs to cope with post-Brexit checks and paperwork.

She added: There does not seem to be enough rewards for us really here.

Post-Brexit checks at all Northern Irelands ports will resume from Wednesday.

Inspections of animal-based food produce arriving at Belfast and Larne ports were suspended recently amid concerns over the safety of staff.

AM Nexday describes itself as Irelands number one retail distributor.

Ms Hards said turnover was down 12% from January 2020 to January this year.

iAs part of our inquiry on Brexit and the Northern Ireland Protocol, we are hearing from:



ai Ian Davies, Stena Line

ai Sarah Hards, AM Nexday

ai Stephen McAneney, Allied Fleet Services

ai Nick McCullough, DFDS Northern Ireland



Watch live: https://t.co/Zs6IBorA17#NIProtocol pic.twitter.com/gSlWGt9Y3s  Northern Ireland Affairs Committee (@CommonsNIAC) February 10, 2021

Huge numbers of lorries carry food across the Irish Sea every day.

The business development manager at the company added: Many of our customers are key and have stayed open during every lockdown.

Suppliers in Great Britain are fearful.

She told the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee of MPs that some customers were not completely prepared.

A lot of people just did not think that this was going to go through, something would pull them back at the last minute, she said.

In our business we reached out to all of our customers and said that this is what we need you to do.

Threatening graffiti expressing opposition to a so-called Irish Sea border had appeared in the Larne area in Co Antrim.

Former Stormont agriculture minister Edwin Poots ordered the suspension of checks shortly before stepping down from the role to receive medical treatment.

His successor Gordon Lyons maintained the position.

The Police Service of Northern Ireland has since said there was no evidence of credible threats.

On Tuesday, the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs said checks will resume on a phased basis from Wednesday.

Sinn Fein and the DUP are at loggerheads over whether the withdrawal of staff was justified at all.

Unionists and loyalists are opposed to post-Brexit arrangements, which they believe threaten the integrity of Northern Irelands place in the UK.

Ms Hards also raised concern about lack of experience at the Trader Support Service (TSS).

She said: It is not their fault, they have been brought into this role and have no previous experience in customs or logistics whatsoever, so they sometimes fail to grasp what you are talking about, even after a long conversation.

Expand Close Checks at Larne Port were suspended amid concerns over the content of threatening graffiti (PA) PA / Facebook

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Whatsapp Checks at Larne Port were suspended amid concerns over the content of threatening graffiti (PA)

It would be good to have someone in TSS with customs experience, with a logistics background.

She said because the TSS staff are working from home, it means there is a delay if they have to contact more senior staff to find answers and sometimes it is not the answer she really needs.

Declarations should be simplified and the grace period for transit of some goods should be extended beyond April, she said.

She acknowledged that officials from Stormonts Agriculture Department have been helpful.

Further regulation is due to be published on Thursday.

Ms Hards added: If they are overly-onerous, I do see retailers and customers trying to source goods from somewhere else, possibly on the island of Ireland.

If there is so much information required it will put people off bringing freight into Northern Ireland.

I really hope this is not the case but it is just a wait and see.

Committee chairman Simon Hoare said the Northern Ireland Protocol was neither Armageddon nor nirvana.

Business leaders before the committee said they would like further grace periods of light-touch regulation, since the protocol was only agreed a short time before the end of the original transition period.

The Government has asked the EU for an extension and they are due to meet for talks on Thursday.

Nick McCullough, who manages the Northern Irish arm of logistics firm DFDS, said businesses will struggle to be ready for more change in April.
Peru on Tuesday began its coronavirus immunization program just two days after receiving 300,000 vaccine doses from state-owned Chinese company Sinopharm.

The country has been hard hit by a second wave of the coronavirus pandemic sweeping Latin America. It has recorded around 1.2 million cases and more than 42,000 deaths from Covid-19 among its population of 33 million.

Hospitals are overrun with almost 13,800 Covid patients while they have also reported a lack of oxygen to treat those with breathing problems. Health care workers at several hospitals in the capital Lima were the first to receive the vaccine on Tuesday morning.

Armed forces airplanes left the capital to take vaccines to the worst hit regions of the country, such as the jungle area of Huanuco, some 350 kilometers (220 miles) northeast of Lima.

Peru will receive another 700,000 doses of the Chinese vaccine on Sunday. It has agreed to purchase 38 million doses of the Sinopharm vaccine and another 20 million of the Pfizer/BioNTech one.

Other deals have been made to purchase 14 million AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccines and 13.2 million Covax jabs. Authorities have yet to announce when immunization of the wider population will begin, but the country plans to vaccinate 26 million people.

The government of President Francisco Sagasti has received harsh criticism over the delays in unrolling an immunization program compared to neighbors Chile and Bolivia.

Sagasti himself was vaccinated Tuesday evening at a Lima hospital. "Don't be afraid of the vaccine," he said, adding that he hoped all "Peruvians are vaccinated this year."

Meanwhile, Argentina announced it has approved the emergency use of the Indian-made Covishield vaccine.

The Covishield vaccine is essentially the same as the British developed AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine that previously received approval in late December.

Argentina has also approved the use of the Russian Sputnik V vaccine, having already received 820,000 doses. It began its immunization program on December 29 and has so far only used the Sputnik V vaccine.

Argentina has recorded just under two million cases and over 49,000 deaths from Covid-19 among its 44 million population.

In neighboring Chile, the ministry of health reported Tuesday that it had vaccinated more than one million people against the coronavirus, six days after launching a mass-vaccination campaign for the elderly.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y.-- An annual fundraiser supporting the Staten Island grown Sandy Ground Historical Society will take to the virtual space this month.

The event, titled Rising from the Sandy Ground, aims to inform those from Staten Island, and beyond, of Sandy Grounds lesser known history as well as begin a fundraiser to support the Sandy Ground Historical Society. The grounds, currently located in the Rossville neighborhood of Staten Island, were a haven from persecution for freed African-Americans -- starting with the first documented land purchased by an African-American on Staten Island in 1828. The land was purchased three months after slavery was abolished in New York state.

The sites historic museum features an exhibit detailing story quilts and the history of Sandy Ground and its storied families. Since this years fundraiser is virtual, organizers have chosen to have a screen to screen conversation highlighting black culture and hosting a presentation on Sandy Ground by esteemed guest speaker Julie Roberts.

The stream will also portray artwork from members of the community and have an open conversation on fundraising ideas to maintain Sandy Ground in 2021. The events featured panelists are Yolanda R. Scott, President of the Delta Sigma Theta Staten Island Alumnae Chapter and Dominique Sharpton, National Director of Membership of the National Action Network.

The free, virtual event will take place Saturday, Feb. 13 at 2 p.m. Those who wish to participate must register beforehand. The Sandy Ground Historical Museum is currently located at 1538 Woodrow Road. For more information, visit Sandy Grounds website.

Sylvia Moody D'Alessandro, Sandy Historical Society executive director, at the Sandy Ground Festival in Rossvile on August 18, 2018. (Staten Island Advance/ Victoria Priola) Staten Island Advance/ Victoria Priola
Andrew Yang has a double-digit lead over his two closest competitors in the race for the Democratic Party nomination for New York City mayor, according to a new poll.

With 28 per cent support, the tech entrepreneur and former presidential candidate leads the pack in a crowded field of hopefuls vying to succeed outgoing Mayor Bill de Blasio.

Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams and City Comptroller Scott Stringer placed in second and third place, respectively, and appear to be the only candidates with a realistic chance of closing the gap, according to Politico.

Adams received 17 per cent of the vote while Stringer garnered 13 per cent support, according to the online survey conducted by Core Decision Analytics.

The poll surveyed 842 Democratic Party voters online from January 20 through January 25.

Andrew Yang is the frontrunner in the race for the Democratic Party nomination for mayor of New York City, according to a new poll. Yang is seen above announcing his candidacy in Manhattan on January 14

Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams (left) and City Comptroller Scott Stringer (right) placed in second and third place, respectively, and appear to be the only candidates with a realistic chance of closing the gap

Both party primaries are scheduled for June 22.

There are dozens of candidates running from both parties, though it is widely accepted as a foregone conclusion that the winner of the Democratic primary will easily capture the mayoralty in liberal-dominated New York City.

According to the survey, Yang is helped by the name recognition he earned after his longshot presidential campaign for the Democratic nomination.

He maintains a lead even after he was criticized last month for spending much of his time outside New York City since the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

Since the lockdowns were imposed last spring, Yang has bounced back and forth between his Hell's Kitchen apartment to his $500,000 weekend home in New Paltz, New York, which is about 80 miles outside Manhattan.

During an interview with the New York Times last month, Yang, who has an autistic son, talked about fulfilling his duties as a CNN commentator from his apartment amid the pandemic.

'We live in a two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan. And so, like, can you imagine trying to have two kids on virtual school in a two-bedroom apartment, and then trying to do work yourself?'

That prompted several people, including parents, who go through this on a daily basis, to blast the former presidential candidate for his 'tone deaf' remarks.

But the controversy doesn't appear to have hurt him in the eyes of potential Democratic Party voters.

An overwhelming majority of those polled - 84 per cent - said they knew who Yang was, compared to just 60 per cent for Adams and 66 per cent for Stringer.

Adams, 60, has held elected office in New York State since 2006. Stringer, also 60, was first elected to the New York State Assembly in 1992. He was also Manhattan borough president before being elected city comptroller in 2013.

Other candidates are languishing in single digits as voters who were polled said that they did not know who they were.

Maya Wiley (left), an attorney and former aide to de Blasio who left her role as a pundit for cable news channel MSNBC in order to run for mayor, gets just 8 per cent in the latest poll. She had just 33 per cent name recognition. Tied with Wiley at 8 per cent is Shaun Donovan (right), who served as former President Barack Obamas secretary at the Department of Housing and Urban Development

Maya Wiley, an attorney and former aide to de Blasio who left her role as a pundit for cable news channel MSNBC in order to run for mayor, gets just 8 per cent in the latest poll. She had just 33 per cent name recognition.

Tied with Wiley at 8 per cent is Shaun Donovan, who served as former President Barack Obamas secretary at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Donovan was also commissioner of New York Citys Department of Housing Preservation and Development under the administration of then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Dianna Morales, Kathryn Garcia, and Ray McGuire each polled at 2 per cent.

Morales, 53, was CEO of a Bronx social services non-profit called Phipps Neighborhoods until she stepped down to run for mayor.

The Harvard grad supports defunding the police and is running on a progressive platform.

Garcia, 50, served as the 43rd Commissioner of the New York City Sanitation Department from 2014 to 2020.

She previously held roles as the chief operating officer of the New York City Department of Environmental Protection and the interim chair and chief executive officer of the New York City Housing Authority.

McGuire, 64, is a businessman and former executive at Citigroup.

He holds an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School and a Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School and is campaigning on a pledge to fix the economy and end racial unrest.

Kathryn Garcia (left) and Dianna Morales (right) are both tied at 2 per cent, according to the poll

Ray McGuire, 64, is a businessman and former executive at Citigroup. He also has just 2 per cent support, according to the poll

McGuires former career as a finance executive appears to be a turn-off for voters as 32 per cent of those surveyed said they would not vote for him.

Knowing that the former president remains popular with progressives, Donovan regularly brings up his time working in the Obama administration, though he does not mention his time serving Bloomberg, who is unpopular.

When asked which issues are most important to them, 30 per cent said vaccine distribution was top of the list.

Nineteen per cent of those polled said the most critical issue facing New York City is reopening the economy while 16 per cent said crime and safety.

Of those polled, just 6 per cent said police reform was the most critical issue facing the city - a far cry from last spring, when protests and demonstrations in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing were roiling the country.


In an effort to reach out to the Indian government, Cairn Energy PLC of the UK has said that it wants the government to come out with a swift solution on the controversial tax dispute case.

This comes after reports that the India government is likely to challenge an international arbitration award that went against it over the retrospective levy of taxes. Cairn Energy chief executive officer Simon Thomson is set to visit India next week.

In a Twitter message, Thomson indicated that a quick decision on the issue will lead to a positive investment climate in India.

We would request, along with others, that the Indian government move swiftly to adhere to the award that has been given. It is important for our shareholders, who are global financial institutions and who want to see a positive investment climate in India. I am sure that working together with the government, we can swiftly draw this to a conclusion and reassure those investors the positive investment climate that India offers, he said.

He indicated that over decades Cairn projects have generated over $20 billion revenue for the government of India and also benefited the people of states like Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh and Rajasthan.

In December, a Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague had ruled that the Indian government should pay damages worth $1.2 billion to the company and a case of retrospective tax was wrongly applied on Cairn. The court had ruled that the claim by the India government was in breach of the guarantee of fair and equitable treatment.

What the case is all about?

The case is related to the retrospective taxation claims by the Indian government. In 2006-07, as part of a group reorganisation, Cairn UK transferred shares of Cairn India Holdings to Cairn India. This has led to the interpretation that the global energy major had made capital gains, ahead of the initial public offering (IPO) by Cairn India. Following this, the income tax authorities had clapped a tax demand of Rs 24,500 crore on the company.

Cairn Energy sold the majority of its stake in Cairn India to Anil Agarwal-led Vedanta group in 2011, barring 9.8 per cent stake in the company. Though the company wanted to sell this residual stake too, the tax department was against the move and also froze the payment of dividend by Cairn India to Cairn Energy. The damages that the international court ruled also include the value of the share attached by the income tax department in January 2014 and sold in 2018 to partially recover the tax dues.
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ROCHESTER, Minn. - The second impeachment trial of the nation's 45th president began today on Capitol Hill and the Senate quickly shot down the argument the impeachment is unconstitutional.

The trial began today with graphic video of the deadly January 6th attack on Congress and the former president riling up a crowd before that attack.

The lead House prosecutor told Senators the case would present "cold, hard facts" against former President Donald Trump.

The 45th president is charged with inciting the siege of the Capitol to overturn the election he lost to Democrat Joe Biden.

Senators sitting as jurors, watched the video of the chaotic scene, rioters pushing past police to storm the halls.

Political Analyst Rayce Hardy sees the prosecution of Trump as a futile effort.

"I do not believe that President Trump will be convicted of the high crimes and misdemeanors he is being impeached for. I don't believe that will happen. I just don't believe there's enough votes. Regardless of the situation, whether that's what he did is a high crime and misdemeanor or not, I don't believe 17 Republicans will vote against him," says Hardy.

A conviction would require at least 67 Senators to find the former president guilty.

If that were to happen, the Senate could then consider whether to ban the former president from holding federal office again.

In that case, only a simple majority would be required to effectively end the political career of Donald J. Trump.
A new pact has been signed between Britain and India which will see the creation of 1,500 new high-skilled jobs in the UK.

Mumbai-based Tata will create the new jobs in the UK as part of a new investment agreement, the Telegraph reports.

It is also hoped that a newly agreed, separate, enhanced trade partnership with India will act as a roadmap for a more sophisticated free-trade deal in the future.

The deal was struck with Tata Consultancy Services to create the 1,500 jobs, while a separate agreement with Wockhardt, an Indian pharmaceutical company, also secured 40 new jobs and investment in Wrexham, North Wales.

A new pact has been signed between Britain and India which will see the creation of 1,500 new high-skilled jobs in the UK and comes as International Trade secretary Liz Truss (pictured) ended her five-day trip to India

They were signed as International Trade secretary Liz Truss ended her five-day trip to India.

On top of enhanced investment from Indian companies, Truss also separately secured an enhanced trade partnership with India which she saw as laying the foundations for a potential 'future free-trade deal' as well as deepening ties with India.

Speaking after securing her her deal for Britain, Truss said it will 'create opportunities for UK businesses that were simply not there as part of the EU, and set the stage for a much closer partnership with one of the economic powerhouses of the present and future'.

Additionally, the International Trade secretary said that Britain would be looking to explore closer ties with India over the 'industries of tomorrow' which include science, tech and green growth.

A Government source told The Telegraph that ties with India are at the heart of Britain's post-Brexit plans for growth and development.

The deal was struck with Tata Consultancy Services to create the 1,500 jobs, while a separate agreement with Wockhardt, an Indian pharmaceutical company, also secured 40 new jobs and investment in Wrexham, North Wales. Pictured: Liz Truss visiting Mumbai this week

It comes after Truss confirmed the UK was applying to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), a 9 trillion pan-Pacific free trade area.

It is hoped the UK would become the 12th member of the bloc of nations which also includes Japan, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

The CPTPP accounts for around 13 per cent of global commerce and Ms Truss said that membership of the bloc would vindicate the decision to leave the EU.

Speaking about the UK's application, the International Trade Secretary said: 'Joining will create unheralded opportunities for UK businesses that simply weren't there as part of the EU  and deepen our ties with some of the fastest-growing markets on earth.

It comes after Truss confirmed the UK was applying to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), a 9 trillion pan-Pacific free trade area

'It will mean lower tariffs for car manufacturers and whisky producers, and better access for our brilliant services providers, delivering quality jobs and greater prosperity for people here at home.

'We're at the front of the queue and look forward to starting formal negotiations in the coming months.'

She also described the UK's application as a 'huge dollop of Brexit boosterism'.

Other signatories of the CPTPP, which came into effect in 2018, are Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam.

Additionally, Ms truss remains confident the UK will be able to strike a trade deal with the US, describing the potential deal as 'in the pipeline' while speaking on Sky's Ridge on Sunday.
Sawfish have disappeared from half of the world's coastal waters and the distinctive shark-like rays face complete extinction due to overfishing, according to a new study by Simon Fraser University researchers, published in Science Advances.

Sawfish, named after their unique long, narrow noses lined by teeth, called rostra, that resemble a sawblade, were once found along the coastlines of 90 countries but they are now among the world's most threatened family of marine fishes, presumed extinct from 46 of those nations. There are 18 countries where at least one species of sawfish is missing, and 28 more where two species have disappeared.

According to SFU researchers Helen Yan and Nick Dulvy, three of the five species of sawfish are critically endangered, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species, and the other two are endangered.

Their teeth on their rostra are easily caught in fishing nets. Sawfish fins are among the most valuable in the global shark fin trade and rostra are also sold for novelty, medicine and as spurs for cockfighting.

The current presence of all sawfishes world-wide is unknown, but Dulvy warns complete extinction is possible if nothing is done to curb overfishing and to protect threatened habitats, such as mangroves, where sawfish can thrive.

"Through the plight of sawfish, we are documenting the first cases of a wide-ranging marine fish being driven to local extinction by overfishing," Dulvy says. "We've known for a while that the dramatic expansion of fishing is the primary threat to ocean biodiversity, but robust population assessment is difficult for low priority fishes whose catches have been poorly monitored over time. With this study, we tackle a fundamental challenge for tracking biodiversity change: discerning severe population declines from local extinction."

The study recommends that international conservation efforts focus on eight countries (Cuba, Tanzania, Columbia, Madagascar, Panama, Brazil, Mexico and Sri Lanka) where conservation efforts and adequate fishing protections could save the species. It also found Australia and the United States, where adequate protections already exist and some sawfish are still present, should be considered as "lifeboat" nations.

"While the situation is dire, we hope to offset the bad news by highlighting our informed identification of these priority nations with hope for saving sawfish in their waters," says Yan. "We also underscore our finding that it's actually still possible to restore sawfish to more than 70 per cent of their historical range, if we act now."

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France is planning to introduce an age of sexual consent for the first time, making sex with under-15s illegal, and will make it easier to punish historic sexual abuse.

The move from France's government comes amid growing public pressure and a wave of online testimonies about rape and other sexual violence by parents and authority figures.

Child protection activists and victims celebrated the announcement, but say France needs to do more as a society to stop this abuse.

France's lack of an age of consent - along with statutes of limitations - have complicated efforts to prosecute alleged perpetrators.

In France, it is an offence for someone in a position of authority to have sex with a person under the age of 18.

In comparison, in the UK, sex with under-13s is statutory rape.

Recent cases have involved a prominent modelling agent, a predatory priest, a surgeon and a group of firefighters accused of systematic abuse.

Child protection activists and victims celebrated the announcement that an age of consent would be introduced, but say France needs to do more as a society to stop abuse. Pictured: Dozens of people gathered on February 7 in Paris to demand 'Justice for Julie'. Ten years ago, Julie, 13 years old, was raped by about twenty firemen in a Parisian fire station

Calling such treatment of children 'intolerable,' the justice ministry said 'the government is determined to act quickly to implement the changes that our society expects.'

'An act of sexual penetration by an adult on a minor under 15 will be considered a rape,' Justice Minister Eric Dupond-Moretti said Tuesday on France-2 television.

Perpetrators could no longer cite consent to diminish the charges, he said, though exceptions would be made for teenagers having consensual sex.

The change still needs to be enshrined in law, but the announcement is a major step after years of efforts to toughen French protection for child victims of rape and other sexual violence.

'Finally!' said Fatima Benomar, whose group Les Effrontees has pushed for tougher rules against sexual abusers of children.

'It's very good that there is this revived debate, that there is an idea of a minimum age (of consent). ... This will make adults more responsible.'

An effort to set Frances first age of consent three years ago in the wake of the global #MeToo movement failed amid legal complications.

But it has gained new momentum since accusations emerged last month of incestuous sexual abuse involving a prominent French political expert, Olivier Duhamel.

That unleashed an online #MeTooInceste movement in France that led to tens of thousands of similar testimonies.

#MeToo has gained new momentum since accusations emerged last month of incestuous sexual abuse involving a prominent French political expert, Olivier Duhamel (pictured)

The Justice Ministry is in discussions with victims' groups about toughening punishment of incestuous abuse and extending or abolishing the statute of limitations on sexual violence against children, because it creates such deep trauma that it can take decades for victims to speak out.

The law currently allows child victims to file complaints until they are 48.

The ministry also says it wants 'to ensure that victims of the same perpetrator do not receive different legal treatment,' which could broaden the scope to prosecute those accused of abusing multiple people over decades.

Legal time limits have hampered French authorities' ability to investigate a number of high-profile cases.

One such case is that of influential cardinal, Philippe Barbarin, convicted then acquitted of covering up for a predatory priest.

Another is that of modelling agent Jean-Luc Brunel, an associate of disgraced late U.S. financier Jeffrey Epstein, accused of an array of sex crimes.

A third case involves surgeon Joel le Scouarnec, convicted after accusations he sexually abused more than 300 children over decades.

One high profile case in France is that of Philippe Barbarin (pictured) an influential cardinal who was convicted then acquitted of covering up for a predatory priest

Another high-profile case is that of modelling agent Jean-Luc Brunel, an associate of disgraced late U.S. financier Jeffrey Epstein, accused of an array of sex crimes. Pictured: Brunel wrestles with Epstein's former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell

France's highest court was considering a case Wednesday involving a woman who says multiple firefighters raped her when she was between 13 and 15.

A lower court downgraded the charges to sexual assault, but her lawyers want them reclassified as rape.

Under current French law, sexual relations between an adult and a minor under 15 are banned.

Yet the law accepts the possibility that someone under 15 is capable of consenting to sex, leading to cases where an adult is only prosecuted for sexual assault instead of rape, and faces a lighter prison sentence.

In the Duhamel case, the Paris prosecutor opened an investigation into alleged 'rapes and sexual abuses by a person exercising authority' over a child following accusations in a book by his stepdaughter that he abused her twin brother in the 1980s, when the siblings were in their early teens.

Duhamel, saying he was 'the target of personal attacks,' stepped down from his many professional positions, including as a TV commentator and head of National Foundation of Political Sciences.

A third case involves surgeon Joel le Scouarnec, convicted after accusations he sexually abused more than 300 children over decades. Pictured: A sketch of Scouarnec in court

The foundation manages the prestigious Sciences Po university in Paris, whose director Frederic Mion resigned this week amid the fallout from the affair, which entangled multiple people in France's intellectual elite.

Since the Duhamel accusations surfaced, searing accounts of alleged incestuous abuse filled social media networks. Other prominent figures in cinema and politics have also been accused.

The movement spawned an offshoot #MeTooGay wave in France of long-suppressed testimonies of sexual abuse by older men.

Activists say improving laws is part of the battle, but they also are pushing for more child-centred public policies to train teachers and others to spot and report abuse.

The World Health Organisation says international studies show that one in five women and one in 13 men report having been sexually abused as a child.

A sign on a wall reads 'Duhamel, and the others, you will never be in peace' referring to Olivier Duhamel and others accused of sexual abuse. The sign on the left 'Mion Resignation' refers to Frederic Mion, head of Sciences Po university, in Paris

Frederic Mion (pictured) resigned this week after accusations emerged last month of incestuous sexual abuse involving a prominent French political expert, Olivier Duhamel who was the head of National Foundation of Political Sciences

Protests were seen in France on Tuesday after a woman claimed that she was raped by 20 firefighters over a period of two years from the age of 13 to 15.

The woman, now aged 25, said she was groomed by a firefighter who assisted her during an anxiety seizure in 2008.

Ten years on from the alleged abuse, three men have been charged with sexual violation and the country's highest court is set to rule on the case on Wednesday.

The case of the alleged victim, who has been dubbed 'Julie' by French media,sparked protests in France, with campaigners demanding an age of sexual consent should be enshrined in law.

Julie claims that one firefighter named Pierre began grooming her at age 13 before she was raped by him and 19 of his colleagues over a period of two years.

In French law, there is an 'age of sexual majority' at 15, but there is no age below which a minor cannot be deemed to consent. Above, protests in Paris on Sunday

In January 2009, Pierre allegedly visited Julie's home and raped her while her mother was out for a dog walk.

Julie told investigators that in November 2009, Pierre, while wearing full uniform, allegedly took Julie to his apartment where two colleagues came over and proceeded to gang-rape her.

At least three of the firefighters have admitted to having intercourse with the then-teenager, although they maintain that the sex was consensual.

Julie says she was 'terrified and paralysed with fear' at the time.

The men visited her home 130 times over two years, according to a report in The Guardian.

The girl's mother told investigators she had no idea what was going on. 'I even made cake for the firemen,' she said.

Of Pierre, she said: 'I thought he was the last person to do such a thing because he had helped her so many times and saw how vulnerable she was.'

Julie's mental and physical health deteriorated following the alleged assaults, and she was prescribed anti-anxiety medication.

After being taken off medication in July 2010, Julie disclosed the abuse to her mother, who filed a police report.

Dozens of people gathered this Sunday at Place Saint-Michel to demand "Justice for Julie"

Her case has been taken to the country's supreme court of appeal and will reach its conclusion on Wednesday.

Currently three men are charged with 'sexual violation' although prosecutors will argue that all 20 men should be convicted of rape.

In France, the maximum sentence for sexual violation is seven years, compared with 20 for rape.

In order to bring rape charges in France, the complainant must prove she was forced or violently coerced.

The victim's legal advocate, Marjolaine Vignola, said: 'Every stereotype about rape is in this case: The judges and the psychiatrist say Julie is a liar, that she consented to sex with all those men and that she is lying about being raped because she is ashamed.'
Smoke detector maker Halma has appointed Dame Louise Makin chairman making her the 12th woman to hold the job in the FTSE 100.

The mother-of-two replaces Paul Walker at the safety equipment maker in July.

She spent 15 years as chief executive of healthcare firm BTG and is a non-executive board member at testing company Intertek, where she will step down in June.

Makin was a non-executive director at Neil Woodfords Patient Capital Trust but left several months before it was taken over by Schroders.
The Federal Capital Territory Police Command has launched an investigation into the alleged existence of a human milk factory that also harbours 115 young mothers in the nation's capital.

It denied any rescue operation or arrest in connection with 115 young mothers involved in the human milk factory.

There has been an online report that breast milk of young, pregnant mothers in an undisclosed location in Abuja is used to produce cheese for online sale.

But the police command, in a statement, said it was soliciting information from the public on the existence of such a place.

"The FCT Police Command wishes to dissociate itself from the viral article trending in some sections of the social media suggesting that the command arrested or rescued 115 young mothers from a human milk factory.

"The command wishes to categorically state that there is no record of such incident or operation in the command."

The statement signed by the Spokesperson of the FCT Command and Deputy Supretentent of Police (DSP), Mr. Yusuf Mariam, said the command was "soliciting useful information from members of the public on the occurrence of the incident.

"While urging residents to remain calm, law-abiding and comply with all COVID-19 regulations, the command wishes to reiterate its unflinching commitment to the protection of lives and property within the FCT.

"Report all suspicious movements within your vicinity, emergency or distress call these numbers: *08032003913, 08061581938, 07057337653 and 08028940883.

"To report the conduct of police officers, call the Public Complaint Bureau (PCB) Line: 09022222352," Mariam said.
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L: California Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks during a news conference at the California State Capitol in Sacramento, California on Aug. 16, 2019. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) R: President Joe Biden delivers remarks about the CCP virus at the Hotel Du Pont in Wilmington, Delaware, on March 12, 2020. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Biden Opposes Recall Effort of California Gov. Gavin Newsom: Psaki

White House press secretary Jen Psaki revealed on Tuesday President Joe Bidens standing on a recall effort pushing to remove the governor of California from office.

In addition to sharing a commitment to a range of issues with @GavinNewsom from addressing the climate crisis to getting the pandemic under control, @POTUS clearly opposes any effort to recall @GavinNewsom, Psaki said on Twitter.

Psakis message on Twitter came a few hours after she was asked about Bidens position on the campaign effort to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom at a press briefing.

Newsom, a Democrat in his first term, is facing criticism from within his party and from Republicans for his handling of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus pandemic, among other issues.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom outlines his 2021-2022 state budget proposal during a news conference in Sacramento, Calif., on Jan. 8, 2021. (Rich Pedroncelli/Pool/AP Photo)

As of Wednesday, the state is set on surpassing New York with the highest death toll nationwide with more than 45,000 people dead from the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, which causes the disease COVID-19.

California, the most populous of the 50 states, is one of the hardest hit in recent months and has reported 45,009 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, a private research university that analyzes the data available on the pandemic.

New York, in comparison, which was hard-hit during the early stages last spring, has reported 45,140 lives lost.

As of Feb. 10, the campaign has garnered more than 1.4 million signatures of the 1.5 million required to get on the ballot, while some Silicon Valley players have recently voiced support.

Organizers of the recall effort have until March 17 to submit the needed 1.5 million certified signatures to trigger a recall election. If the campaign is successful, Newsom will be the third state governor, and the second in California, to be successfully recalled in U.S. history.

Anne Hyde Dunsmore, campaign manager and finance director of Rescue Californiathe organization behind the efforttold Epoch Times affiliate NTD that based on recent polls, she believes the recall effort against Newsom is vastly different from that faced by former California Gov. Gray Davis, who was recalled in 2003 only a few months into his second term.

Former California Gov. Gray Davis (left) and chairman/CEO of Showtime, Matt Blank attend the after party for the film premiere of Spinning Boris on March 3, 2004 at the Paramount Theatre, in Los Angeles, California. (Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images)

I see this as a citizen movement, Dunsmore said. Were attracting interest all across the board, and if you dig down into those polls, I think the more dangerous numbers are that within the no party preference category of voters, hes upside down there toohis disapproval is higher than his approval.

A spokesman for Newsom has told news outlets that the recall campaign is a waste of money and that the governor would rather focus on getting through the homestretch of the pandemic.

Isabel van Brugen contributed to this report.

From NTD News
Actor Kangana Ranaut told the Bombay High Court on Wednesday that she would file a regularisation application before the Mumbai civic body in connection with alleged irregularities at her residential flats in suburban Khar.

Ranaut's counsel Birendra Saraf sought to withdraw the appeal filed by the actor against a civil court's December 2020 order dismissing her suit challenging notices issued by the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM) for illegally merging three flats in a suburban building.

Justice Prithviraj Chavan permitted Ranaut to withdraw the appeal and said no coercive action shall be taken by the civic body until the application for regularisation is heard and decided, and for two weeks thereafter.

"The appellant (Ranaut) is permitted to apply for regularisation before the MCGM within a period of four weeks," Justice Chavan said. The corporation shall decide the same expeditiously and in accordance with law, the court said. "In case of any adverse order against the appellant, no coercive action shall be taken thereafter by the BMC to enable the appellant to file appeal," the court said.

The MCGM is also known as the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC).

The city civic body in March 2018 had issued a notice to Ranaut for alleged illegal merger of three flats owned by her in Orchid Breeze building in suburban Khar. The Dindoshi civil court dismissed her suit against the notice in December last year, following which she moved the high court.

The civil court, while dismissing the suit, had noted there was "grave violation of the sanctioned plan" while amalgamating the three flats. Ranaut's petition said since she bought the flats in 2013, she had not made any structural changes. She had carried out only "certain cosmetic changes", said the appeal filed through advocates Aseem Naphade, Monisha Bhangale and Prasanna Bhangale.

Last year, the civic body had initiated demolition of alleged unauthorised construction at Ranaut's bungalow in Pali Hill area here. The HC later held the municipal corporation's action as illegal and malicious.
Hospital Purchased Services Patented Technology Categorization of purchased services spend in a dashboard is not a strategy. Hospitals are being told that category spend visualization is an effective way to find cost savings. However, this simply isn't true. Hospitals need to roll up their sleeves and gain visibility to the line-item details."

Lisa T. Miller, Founder and CEO of VIE Healthcare Consulting, has transformed healthcare organizations purchased services spend management through her forward-thinking approach and patented technology in purchased services. The USPTO office has approved 17 new claims for VIE Healthcares Invoice Analytics System. The system is the only solution of its kind to receive recognition from the patent office.

The Purchased Services Invoice Analytics System

The Invoice Analytics System is the only solution of its kind that provides healthcare organizations with the line-item details to their purchased services spend. All other approaches require manual effort and do not go to the line-item spend level. This proven, patented technology, now offered by VIE Healthcare Consulting, is called Invoice ROI. Invoice ROI offers invoice reconciliation, contract optimization, business intelligence, and an analytics platform with real-time line-item contract reconciliation and benchmarking performance provided monthly for outsourced services.

The Invoice ROI process begins with line-item reconciliation of the past 12 to 18 months of purchased services invoices to reveal the hidden costs in pricing errors and off-contract spend that may be undetected by the purchaser. The Invoice ROI technology allows for real-time invoice reconciliation for outsourced purchased services. Invoice accuracy is matched to the contract and performed before the payment of invoices for real-time corrective action.

In some cases, up to 30% of healthcare organization purchased spending is either not detailed on the contract or does not match the contract pricing, said Miller. From there, VIE Healthcare Consulting experts identify trends in utilization that can increase costs and provide preventative advice to save money. By moving straight to benchmarking before carrying out a line-item analysis, significant cost-saving opportunities are often overlooked and missed.

Using invoice line-item details, combined with other data inputs to identify trends, variations, quality, and utilization improvement opportunities allows for significantly greater optimization of purchased spend.

Invoice ROI technology provides healthcare organizations with cost-saving opportunities identified by purchased services line-items in real-time. This gives administrators the intelligence they need to predict future spending.

According to Miller, Categorization of purchased services spend in a dashboard is not a strategy. Hospitals are being told that category spend visualization is an effective way to find cost savings. However, this simply isn't true. Hospitals need to roll up their sleeves and gain visibility to the line-item details. Dashboards can be useful in some situations, but shouldn't be used in every situation. Categorization via a dashboard can be used as a tool, but shouldn't be relied on as a strategy.

She added, It's important to understand where the market is. However, with benchmarking alone - you still miss cost savings opportunities I\if your hospital is not doing reconciliation and isn't reviewing 12-18 months' worth of historical invoices, youre leaving money on the table.

The Purchased Services Patent

The Invoice Analytics Systems patent is the only one issued for technologies that address automation and line-item precision in purchased services spend. The patented technology provides healthcare organizations with the ability to analyze their agreement terms with the invoice line-item details for payment accuracy. It also facilitates purchased services line-item benchmarking and algorithms, which identifies line-item opportunities to reduce costs.

US patent number 20190228394A1 contains 17 claims covering the processes and technology in VIE Healthcare Consulting's Invoice ROI system. Those claims include a method for analyzing purchased services transactional invoice data in real-time and performing invoice analytics. The patent includes the line item benchmarking, data storage for line item purchased services data, transforming the extracted and segmented line-item data into a feed report, and transforming the determined avenues for cost savings in business service transactions between the client and vendors. All computer programs that perform the analysis and produce reports are also included in the patent.

About VIE Healthcare Consulting

VIE Healthcare has dedicated over 21 years to partnering with healthcare organization clients to reduce and eliminate unnecessary costs. The company fields a team of cost savings experts, data scientists, technology specialists, healthcare business analysts, and healthcare executives. VIE Healthcare Consulting has been delivering real results to clients since 1999. Located in Wall Township, New Jersey, VIE Healthcare Consulting specializes in healthcare organization non-labor expense reduction and offers the industry's only Cost Savings Strategy that is a proven framework for mining every cost-saving opportunity.

VIE Healthcare Consulting will help healthcare organizations achieve the best pricing for products and services, identify and implement cost savings, uncover hidden costs, optimize utilization, improve efficiencies, provide professional negotiation services and perform meaningful data analytics. To date, they have saved clients $720 million.

VIE Healthcare has set new pricing benchmarks as they go beyond industry pricing "norms" and helps healthcare organizations improve operating margins by effectively and rapidly achieving cost savings. VIE Healthcare's margin improvement services apply to all healthcare organizations such as independent hospitals, health systems, physician practices, surgical centers, IDNs, healthcare payers, academic medical centers, and nursing homes.

About Lisa Miller

Lisa Miller is the nation's leading healthcare consultant. She is a trusted advisor to hospital leaders on margin improvement initiatives including cost reduction, revenue improvement, patient experience, and strategic growth opportunities. She's developed proprietary technology in healthcare data optimization and intelligence that delivers guaranteed financial improvement.

Miller is a recognized leader in healthcare costs, hospital purchased services, healthcare benchmarking, supply chain management, and performance improvement. Since founding VIE Healthcare in 1999, Miller and her team have generated millions of dollars in non-labor cost savings and revenue improvements for their healthcare clients. Lisa's approach is comprehensive and enterprise-wide.

One of her areas of expertise is conducting clinical cost analysis, linking the cost data to actual reimbursements, and pinpointing additional areas to reduce costs and improve surgical case profitability.

"As CEO and founder of VIE Healthcare, my focus is on delivering immediate, guaranteed margin improvement and sustainable cost savings to our clients to help them respond to those demands. Cost control and margin improvement are the urgent strategic priorities for all healthcare systems as the industry grapples with emerging digital technologies, combating spiraling costs and a renewed emphasis on high-quality patient care."

To learn more about Invoice ROI and the patented technology Invoice Analytics System, reach out to Lisa Miller for a purchased services discussion at viehealthcare.com/contact/
A dozen Guatemalan migrants were found hiding inside a pickup truck's flatbed during a traffic stop in the Mexican Gulf coast state of Veracruz.

The Mexican National Guard reportedly heard screams when they pulled over the driver for not wearing a seatbelt, at a checkpoint on the highway in the municipality of Los Choapas. The migrants were shouting for help after suffering in the unbearable heat in the cramped interior.

'Noises were heard in the cargo area and some voices calling for help due to the extreme heat in the region,' the National Migration Institute said in a statement.

Soldiers found the immigrants sitting next to each other, in two rows, in the back of the pickup truck with sofas covering each side, and a tarp over the top.

A Mexican National Guard member inspects a pickup truck that was stopped Tuesday in Veracruz with 12 Guatemalan migrants hidden inside. They were provided medical attention and then processed by the National Migration Institute before they were deported to Guatemala

The National Guard troops removed some of the furniture from the vehicle in order to allow the migrants to step out the pickup truck.

The migrants, all men, admitted to being illegally in Mexico and were provided water and medical assistance on the scene.

They were later transported to a nearby National Migration Institute center where they were processed and deported back to Guatemala.

The driver and a passenger were arrested and remained in custody of Mexico's Attorney General's Office.

It is unknown how much time the Guatemalan migrants had been in Mexico and where they were being ferried to.

It is also unclear if they were part of the caravan of nearly 8,000 Central Americans, mostly from Honduras, who in January were stopped in Guatemala from illegally advancing toward the border with Mexico as part of their journey to the United States border to seek asylum from President Joe Biden's administration.

The inspection of a pickup truck (pictured) led Mexico's National Guard to 12 Guatemala migrants hidden in the flatbed of the vehicle moments after the driver was pulled over on a highway in Las Choapas, Veracruz, for driving without a seatbelt

At the behest of former President Donald Trump in 2019, Mexico was forced to deploy its National Guard force to seal its southern border with Guatemala as a method to stop the massive flow of Central American migrants to the Mexico-United States border.

On Saturday, President Biden reversed several agreements that Trump's administration had formed with the governments of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras as measures to prevent migration to the U.S. southern border.

In a statement, State Department Secretary Antony Blinken said the United States had 'suspended and initiated the process to terminate the Asylum Cooperative Agreements with the Governments of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras as the first concrete steps on the path to greater partnership and collaboration in the region laid out by President Biden.'

The so-called 'safe third country' agreements, inked in 2019 by the Trump administration and the Central American nations, forced asylum seekers from the region to first seek refuge in those countries before applying in the United States.

Part of a controversial bid by Trump to crack down on illegal immigrants from Central America who make up a large part of migrants apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border, the policies were never implemented with El Salvador and Honduras, the State Department said on Saturday.

Transfers under the U.S.-Guatemala agreement have been paused since mid-March 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic, the statement added.

Biden announced last Thursday that he is planning to increase the admissions of refugees to 125,000 in the coming fiscal year, a more than eight-fold increase after former President Donald Trump slashed levels to historic lows.

During his presidency, Trump portrayed refugees as a security threat and a drain on U.S. communities as he took a series of measures to restrict legal immigration.

Biden is confronting a refugee program hobbled by Trump's policies, which led to the closure of resettlement offices and the reassignment of program staffers. Trump's actions also disrupted the pipeline of refugees to the United States, a situation exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic.

Biden said the goal of 125,000 refugee admissions - up from 15,000 this year under Trump - would be for the coming fiscal year, which begins on October 1, 2021.
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Kathmandu, February 10

The government has announced a public holiday on the occasion of Sonam Lhosar on Friday, February 12.

The Ministry of Home Affairs says the cabinet meeting on Monday made the decision.

Accordingly, all government offices, public corporations and diplomatic missions abroad will remain closed on Friday.

The Tamang community celebrates this festival as the new year.
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H.E. Dr. Rania A. Al-Mashat, Minister of International Cooperation, said that the House of Representatives approved 5 non-refundable grant agreements to the Ministry with multilateral and bilateral development partners, valued at $41 million to promote the National Development Agenda 2030, by implementing development projects in a number of sectors.

Al-Mashat clarified in a statement that the grants approved in the sectors of health, trade, investment, environment, women empowerment and transportation, showcase the keenness of the Ministry of International Cooperation in supporting the implementation of development projects in various sectors to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in coordination with multilateral and bilateral development partners, various government agencies, and the private sector.

The House of Representatives approved Presidential Decree No. 696 of 2020 in regards to the exchange of letters between the Arab Republic of Egypt and the Government of Japan concerning a $9.5 million contribution to an economic and social development program.

They also approved the Presidential Decree No. 697 of 2020 regarding the approval of the fourth amendment to the aid grant agreement between Egypt and the United States of America on stimulating trade and investment in Egypt at a value of $26.5 million; and Resolution No. 723 of 2020 was condoned, it is regarding the cooperation agreements between Egypt, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the International Development Association worth $750 thousand through the multi-donor trust fund to support pollution management and environmental health to finance the "Sustainable Persistent Organic Pollutants Management Project" (POPs).

Presidential Decision No. 730 of 2020 was also approved regarding the exchange of letters between Egypt and the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation in terms of providing a grant worth $242 thousand to finance the "Supporting Safe Work Spaces to Achieve Gender Equality in the Tourism Sector in Egypt" project. Moreover, the House of Representatives also approved Resolution No. 698 of 2020 for a grant agreement between Egypt and EBRD to modernize Cairo Metro Line 1 at a value of $3.6 million.

Al-Mashat explained that the Ministry is working to advance international partnerships and to continue promoting effective development cooperation through Economic Diplomacy and its three pillars: Multi-Stakeholder Platforms that liaise the development partners with the governmental entities across different sectors, the ODA SDG Mapping Framework to map the development projects to the 17 UN targets, and the Global Partnerships Narrative which puts "People at the Core, Projects in Action, and Purpose as the Driver".

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In the plenary session of The House of Representatives, Al-Mashat presented the role of the Ministry of International Cooperation in implementing the "Government of Egypt Programme 18/2019 - 20/2021" and the effort made by the Ministry this past year in strengthening relations with multilateral and bilateral development partners, and in securing development funds in various sectors such as private sector and Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs).

In 2020, the Ministry secured $9.8 billion in development financing; of which $6.7 billion were secured for financing sovereign projects making up for 67.7% of the portfolio total and the private sector with a value of $3.1 billion holding 32.3%. This reflects the government's commitment to strengthening the participation of the private sector in development efforts.

Ministry of International Cooperation

The human spaceflight module of Gaganyaan will be launched after the second unmanned mission planned in 2022-23, Union minister Jitendra Singh said on Wednesday. It was initially envisaged that the Rs 10,000 crore Gaganyaan mission aims to send a three-member crew to space for five to seven days by 2022 when India completes 75 years of independence.

"First unmanned mission is planned in December 2021. Second unmanned flight is planned in 2022-23, followed by human spaceflight demonstration," Singh said in a written reply to a question in Lok Sabha. His response also hinted at delay in the last and crucial manned spaceflight.

In her Budget speech, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had said the first unmanned launch is slated for December 2021. In the past, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) officials had pointed to the delay due to the coronavirus-forced lockdown.

Singh also said the astronaut training at Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center (GCTC), Russia was halted for a period for nearly a month and a half last year. "As per COVID 19 protocols in Russia and health advisories issued by local authorities, the astronaut training in Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center (GCTC), Russia was halted for a period from 28th March, 2020 to 11th May, 2020. As per the revised COVID 19 protocols the training of Indian astronauts has henceforth resumed since 12th May, 2020," he said.
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On Wednesday, February 10, in Brussels, Prime Minister of Ukraine Denys Shmyhal and Executive Vice-President of the European Commission Valdis Dombrovskis plan to start a process of negotiations on further liberalization of trade between Ukraine and the European Union. This is stated in the speech of Valdis Dombrovskis on the report on the implementation of the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement.

"Tomorrow, Prime Minister Shmyhal and I will also launch the process for the review of trade liberalisation for goods, which is foreseen under Article 29 of the Association Agreement [...] The agreement has an immense potential, and the EU is ready to explore all possibilities to continue enhancing our sectoral cooperation and economic integration," Dombrovskis said while presenting the report on the implementation of the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement.

The Executive Vice-President also noted that the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement is a unique platform for Ukraine to advance on its reform path, bringing our economies and societies closer together.

In addition, Dombrovskis noted that the EU also stands by Ukraine in fighting the pandemic.

"We have re-oriented several ongoing and future assistance programmes, with more than EUR 190 million going to Ukraine to help meet its COVID-19-related needs. In addition, we are exploring options to help Ukraine receive early access to vaccines. As part of the COVAX program, Ukraine will receive 117,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine in February, and 2.2 million to 3.7 million doses of the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccines during the first half of the year," he said.

The Executive Vice-President also stressed that Ukraine remains committed to achieving peace in Donbas.

"The EU expects Russia to use its considerable influence over the armed formations that it backs. The enforcement of our sanctions in response to the undermining of Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity by Russia is consistent and unwavering [...] Ukraine must be praised for its constructive approach and President Zelensky's efforts, Russia must reciprocate," he said.

As reported, Prime Minister of Ukraine Denys Shmyhal, together with other members of the government, went to Brussels, where the seventh meeting of the EU-Ukraine Association Council will take place.
A South Dakota judge on Feb. 8 struck down a voter-approved constitutional amendment that legalized recreational marijuana after Gov. Kristi Noems administration challenged it.

Circuit Judge Christina Klinger ruled the measure approved by voters in November violated the states requirement that constitutional amendments deal with just one subject and would have created broad changes to state government.

Amendment A is a revision as it has far-reaching effects on the basic nature of South Dakotas governmental system, she wrote in her ruling.

Brendan Johnson, who sponsored the amendment and represented a pro-marijuana group in court, said it was preparing an appeal to South Dakotas Supreme Court.

Two law enforcement officers, Highway Patrol Superintendent Col. Rick Miller and Pennington County Sheriff Kevin Thom, sued to block legalization by challenging its constitutionality. Miller was effectively acting on behalf of South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who had opposed the effort to legalize pot.

Klinger was appointed as a circuit court judge by Noem in 2019.

Todays decision protects and safeguards our constitution, Noem said in a statement. Im confident that South Dakota Supreme Court, if asked to weigh in as well, will come to the same conclusion.

Thom also praised the ruling, saying it solidifies the protections of a 2018 constitutional amendment that required further amendments to stick to one subject.

In her ruling, Klinger said that marijuana legalization would have touched on business licensing, taxation and hemp cultivation. The amendment would have given the states Department of Revenue power to administer recreational marijuana, but Klinger ruled that by doing so, it overstepped the authority of the executive and legislative branches of government.

Lawyers defending legalization had cast the lawsuit as an effort to overturn the results of a fair election. About 54 percent of voters approved recreational marijuana in November.

Possessing small amounts of marijuana would have become legal on July 1, but that will not happen unless a higher court overturns the ruling.

Marijuana has become broadly accepted around the United States, with a Gallup Poll in November showing 68% of Americans favored legalization. South Dakota was among four states that month to approve recreational marijuana, along with New Jersey, Arizona and Montana. Fifteen states and the District of Columbia have done so.

Supporters have argued that legalization creates jobs and raises tax money for governments that badly need it. Opponents have argued that marijuana leads to use of harder drugs, and may also lead to more impaired driving and other crimes.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Legislation South Dakota
A Boston man, who is in the midst of serving multiple life sentences for a 2009 double murder in Providence, Rhode Island, is now facing new charges in connection with an unsolved killing 10 years ago in the same city, according to authorities.

A Providence County Grand Jury returned an indictment charging 35-year-old Nigel Nichols, who previously lived in the Mattapan neighborhood of Boston, with 10 felony counts stemming from the 2011 killing of Steven Latimer, Rhode Island Attorney General Peter F. Neronha announced Tuesday.

Nichols, who is currently imprisoned at the Adult Correctional Institutions in Rhode Island, is accused of fatally shooting Latimer and wounding multiple other victims with an illegal gun during the early morning hours of Oct. 2, 2011, according to a statement from the attorney general.

Authorities claimed Nichols, in a drive-by shooting on Dyer Street in Providence around 3 a.m., killed Latimer and injured three other victims. He is accused of driving his car alongside another moving vehicle with the four victims inside and opening fire on them with a pistol before speeding away.

The passage of time does nothing to lessen the pain felt by families who have lost a loved one at the hands of another, particularly when such crimes go unsolved for many years, Neronha said in his statement. Nearly 10 years have passed between the day Steven Latimer was murdered and todays indictment. This is a major step forward in our efforts to obtain justice for Mr. Latimer and his family.

In connection with the 2011 shooting, Nichols is being charged with single counts of murder, discharging a firearm during a crime of violence resulting in death, shooting a gun from a motor vehicle and illegal possession of a firearm, officials said.

He is also being charged with three counts of assault with a dangerous weapon and discharging a firearm during a crime of violence resulting in injury, according to prosecutors.

I would like to give the utmost praise to Providence Police Detective Angelo AVant for his continuous work investigating unsolved cases, seeking out that one fresh tip or new piece of evidence to move the case to the prosecution phase, Providence Chief of Police Colonel Hugh T. Clements said. As time passes, it can be difficult to unlock the mysteries of these cases and we constantly reach for that new piece of information to uncover the truth. Detective AVant is a great investigator and I commend him on the pride he takes in working these extremely difficult cases.

Six years ago, a Providence County Superior Court Jury found Nichols guilty of murdering both David Thomas and Domingo Ortiz in Providence in December 2009. He is in the middle of serving four consecutive life sentences along with a consecutive 30-year sentence in connection with the killings, according to authorities.

The Mattapan man, authorities said, was linked to the murder of an Army soldier and his friend as well as the wounding of the service members younger brother on Dec. 6, 2009, the Associated Press previously reported.

Nichols is scheduled to be arraigned in Providence County Superior Court at a future date.
Sheldon Hill in his beekeeping clothes. He is behind a keyboard in an effort to help others struggling with mental health issues.

Thai pro-democracy groups have vowed to intensify their protests calling for monarchy reform and a new constitution a day after a Bangkok court sent four of their leaders into pretrial detention on royal defamation charges.

Thousands of demonstrators gathered on Wednesday in central Bangkok for a second day to demand the immediate release of leaders, and to protest the government's "inaction" toward their demands. One of the key protest leaders, Panusaya Sithijirawattanakul said earlier that the refusal of bail is a sign that authorities are adopting a confrontational stance.

A court on Tuesday denied bail to lawyer Arnon Nampa, student leader Parit Chiwarak and two others accused of breaking Thailand's lese majeste law. The detained leaders are among activists who have spearheaded a movement that's broken long-held taboos about publicly discussing and questioning the country's monarchy, which sits at the apex of power in Thailand.

More frequent protests will pile pressure on Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-Ocha's government, which is facing a no-confidence vote next week and battling a slump in the trade- and tourism-reliant economy. While political analysts expect the authorities to charge more activists in the coming days under the lese majeste act to weaken the protest movement, Prayuth has said the government is merely enforcing existing laws.

Thailand's lese majeste law is one of the harshest in the world, mandating as many as 15 years in prison for each instance of defaming, insulting or threatening the king, queen, heir apparent or regent. Since late November, the authorities have charged at least 58 activists who have led demonstrations and called for a review of monarchy's powers.

The Bureau of the Royal Household has said it doesn't give comments to the press. Prayuth said on Wednesday Thai people should help one another and learn from protests in the past when asked about today's planned gathering.

The movement that started mid-2020 is demanding constitutional reforms and the resignation of Prayuth, who ruled the country as junta leader for five years before becoming premier after 2019 elections. While street rallies had become less frequent since mid-December due to Thailand's fresh wave of Covid-19 infections, public demonstrations will now resume, Panusaya said.

"The court's refusal to allow our friends to get bail is a sign that there's no compromise" Panasuya said. "So we now have to come out and show our strength and tell them that we won't stop with our demands."

The Human Rights Watch expressed concern about the increasing use of lese majeste laws against pro-democracy activists and said the detained leaders may spend years in jail without trial.

"Holding people in pretrial detention for peaceful expression portends a return to the dark days when people simply charged with this crime end up spending years in jail while their trials drag on interminably," Brad Adams, Human Rights Watch's Asia director said in a statement Wednesday. "The Thai government should address the demands of critics and protesters instead of putting them in jail for long periods before they are tried on flimsy charges."
Cognite has been awarded three contracts by Statnett, the system operator of the Norwegian power system, to develop and deliver a data contextualization platform and digital solutions within the areas of Power System Analysis and Smart Asset Management.

By selecting Cognite, Statnett gains access to scalable, cloud-based technology that will help the grid operator achieve its ambitious digitalization goals. The energy transition depends in part on a robust power grid that can integrate new sources of renewable energy and handle the growing electrification of society. Liberated, contextualized data will help power that transition.

"This partnership strengthens our ambition to become more data-driven in our decision-making processes. We're developing digital solutions and making them available to our core business, which will help us boost our efficiency, improve our customer response time, and reduce costs," said Beate Sander Krogstad, Executive Vice President for IT at Statnett.

Cognite and Statnett have over the past two years participated in a research and development project to find better and more efficient ways to query and handle data in the power system domain. The R&D collaboration uncovered a need for a data contextualization platform, a software solution that combines data and metadata from different sources and systems.

As part of the contracts awarded by Statnett, Cognite's industrial DataOps platform, Cognite Data Fusion, will be used as part of Statnett's data platform. More than 50 industrial companies worldwide, among them Hafslund E-CO, Aker BP and OMV, are using Cognite Data Fusion to operate and produce smarter, safer, and more sustainably. For Statnett, Cognite Data Fusion will give applications and analysts easy access to contextualized data, and enable Statnett to develop new, relevant applications at the top of the contextualization platform.

"Cognite's solutions can help digitalize the power and utilities industry, and Statnett will now be able to incorporate these solutions into its operations. As this partnership kicks off, I would also like to extend an invitation to other interested parties to reach out so that we can explore further opportunities for collaboration," said John Markus Lervik, CEO of Cognite.

Faster analysis, smarter maintenance

One of the areas where Cognite's solutions will be used is in Power System Analysis (PSA). As the electrification of society accelerates, grid operators such as Statnett need to be able to connect new power generation systems and consumers to the grid in a safe and efficient manner. To process grid connection applications, analysts need to examine large quantities of data to determine whether the grid must be upgraded to handle the increased load.

With all the relevant information needed to process grid connection applications accessible in one location, Statnett's analysts can more efficiently process grid connection applications. This will streamline Statnett's workflows and help the grid operator assist customers throughout the connection process.

Cognite will also contribute technology for Smart Asset Management (SAM). Today, Statnett conducts regular maintenance of transformers, power lines, gas-insulated substations, and the other components that form the power grid. With improved access to contextualized data in Cognite Data Fusion, Statnett can better determine the condition of the various components and how it will change over time.

Cognite's bid for the contracts was awarded the highest overall score as part of the open request for proposals (RFP) process. Cognite's bid exhibited a high level of expertise and met Statnett's technical and security-related requirements.

About Cognite

Cognite is a global industrial software-as-a-service (SaaS) company supporting the full-scale digital data driven transformation of heavy-asset industries around the world. Our core product, Cognite Data Fusion (CDF), is an industrial data operations and contextualization platform, putting raw data into real-world industrial context, enabling rapid application solution creation at scale. CDF powers companies with contextualized OT/IT/ET data to develop solutions that increase safety, sustainability, efficiency, and drive revenue. Visit us at www.cognite.com and follow us on Twitter @CogniteData or at LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/cognitedata

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210209006336/en/

Contacts:

Michelle Holford

Global PR Lead, Cognite

+1 (512) 744-3420 (US)

+47 482 90 454 (Norway)

michelle.holford@cognite.com
A new vaccine mega site will be launched this month at NRG Stadium, according to the White House COVID-19 Response Team.

Houstonians can expect approximately 10,000 shots a day to be administered at NRG Stadium, according to the Biden administration. NRG Stadium will be one of three mega sites in Texas including Fair Park in Dallas and AT&T Stadium in Arlington. The Houston mega site is expected to launch during the week of February 22.

"These mass community sites will allow us to expand access to COVID-19 vaccinations in underserved communities and help us mitigate the spread of the virus," Governor Greg Abbott said about the plan.

COVID-19 VARIANTS IN HOUSTON: Expert warns of 'next wave' after new COVID-19 variant found in Houston

Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner praised the site as an accelerant in the vaccination process.

"We must work collaboratively to vaccinate as many people as possible and in a targeted way to include a diverse population," Turner said.

Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo weighed in about the increase in vaccine capacity in Harris County.

"Reaching herd immunity is the keystone to recovering from this pandemic and getting our economy at full force again, but we'll only get there if we work together to make it happen," Hidalgo said in a release.

Approximately three percent of Texans have received the first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, according to Texas Department of Health Services officials. In an interview with Chron, Infectious Disease Expert Dr. Peter Hotez estimates that nearly 40,000 people in Harris County must be vaccinated per day to achieve herd immunity of at least 70 percent.

"To get ahead of [the spread], we would have to vaccinate 3/4 of the population to lower transmission which is roughly 3.6 million residents," Hotez said. "We would need 40,000 immunizations a day to get ahead of this in Harris County."

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The division, under the Commerce Ministry, has started an exercise to formulate a national packaging initiative, which will be part of the proposed policy.

The ministry on Wednesday said that a stakeholder consultation was organised to define the scope and the national packaging initiative as part of the national policy that is currently being finalised.

According to Pawan Agarwal, Special Secretary (Logistics), packaging deserves greater attention from improving the overall logistical efficiency perspective.

"Valuable inputs on packaging came from... participants and more such key players would be involved in the formulation of the National Packaging Initiative," it said in a statement.

It added that e-commerce companies such as Amazon and Flipkart were urged to invest in sustainable packaging as they are one of the biggest users of packaging material.

It was also pointed out that dangerous and chemical verticals would also need special attention from the packaging perspective.

(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.)
Please enable cookies on your web browser in order to continue.

The new European data protection law requires us to inform you of the following before you use our website:

We use cookies and other technologies to customize your experience, perform analytics and deliver personalized advertising on our sites, apps and newsletters and across the Internet based on your interests. By clicking I agree below, you consent to the use by us and our third-party partners of cookies and data gathered from your use of our platforms. See our Privacy Policy and Third Party Partners to learn more about the use of data and your rights. You also agree to our Terms of Service.
Using and remote-sensing equipment, teams intensified efforts on Wednesday to reach the 25-35 men trapped in a sludge-choked tunnel since the glacier disaster three days ago and more than 170 remained missing, hopes of finding them alive fading with every passing hour.

The multi-agency operation at the NTPC hydel project site has been going on uninterrupted since Sunday, when a possible glacier break in the upper reaches of the Himalayas triggered an avalanche and floods in the Alaknanda river system, with no breakthrough in sight, officials said.

So far, 32 bodies have been recovered from different places in the disaster-hit areas of Chamoli district. Eight bodies have been identified and 174 people are still missing, the State Emergency Control Centre in Dehradun said.



WATCH: 'Not much progress in rescue ops, 32 bodies recovered', informs Uttarakhand DGP

The missing people include those working at NTPC's 480 MW Tapovan-Vishnugad project and the 13.2 MW Rishiganga Hydel Project and villagers whose homes were washed away as a wall of water came hurtling down mountainsides.

A focal point of the work has been efforts to penetrate through tonnes of silt, sludge and debris to get to the 25-35 people, who were at work inside the 1,500 metre tunnel at Tapovan when the waters came rushing in.

"All strategies at the moment are focussed on rescuing those trapped inside the tunnel with the help of all the resources at our disposal, including and remote-sensing equipment," Deputy Inspector General (DIG) Nilesh Anand Bharne, Police chief spokesperson, told PTI at Tapovan.

Drilling through the debris has become more difficult with the silt inside the tunnel drying up and getting harder, he said.

Rescue teams have so far managed to progress 80 metres inside the tunnel and have to make their way through tonnes of debris for at least 100 metres more to reach those trapped inside, the DIG added.

The complicated design of the tunnel is making the task even more difficult, prompting the rescue teams to consult NTPC officials.

More than 600 Army, Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), Disaster Response Force (NDRF), State Disaster Response Force (SDRF) and Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB) personnel are engaged in the search-and-rescue operations.

Several measures, including drilling holes to take oxygen to the men inside the tunnel, are also being contemplated, added project consultant A K Shrivastava.

The multi-agency group of rescuers flew a camera-equipped drone inside the Tapovan tunnel on Tuesday but could not pinpoint the location of survivors or the way forward due to darkness, a senior Disaster Response Force officer said.

"We are still hopeful. The teams will continue making attempts, clearing the slush to enter deeper into the tunnel and locate the trapped," he said.

As rescuers said they were "hoping against hope" to reach the workers at the soonest, outside the tunnel, family members of those inside waited with bated breath to hear news about their loved ones.

Officials on the ground and those monitoring the rescue from Delhi told PTI the continuous accumulation of slush and silt inside the tunnel is the biggest hurdle for rescuers.

"Heavy machines have removed more slush from the tunnel the whole night. A joint team of ITBP, NDRF, SDRF and sister agencies entered the tunnel this morning... more slush and water coming from inside the tunnel is making the way ahead difficult," ITBP spokesperson Vivek Kumar Pandey said in the capital.

The ITBP has deployed a team of about 450 personnel apart from those from the NDRF, state disaster response force and the Army.

When contacted, Director General of Police Ashok Kumar said all possible efforts will be made to save the lives of those trapped inside the tunnel.

The villages that lost road connectivity in the wake of the calamity are Raini Palli, Pang, Lata, Suraithota, Suki, Bhalgaon, Tolma, Fagrasu, Long Segdi, Gahar, Bhangyul, Juwagwad and Jugju.

Relief is being distributed by helicopters among villagers cut off due to the washing away of a bridge in the avalanche at Malari. The total population of these villages is around 2,500, officials said on Tuesday.

On Tuesday, Uttarakhand Chief Minister Trivendra Singh Rawat undertook an aerial survey of the affected areas, visited the ITBP hospital in Joshimath, about 295 km from Dehradun, and met the 12 workers who were rescued from a small tunnel in Tapovan on Sunday evening.

"The event happened in a hanging glacier, adjacent to Raunthi glacier, which originates from Raunthi/Mrigudhani peak (6,063 metres above sea level)," Kalachand Sain, director of the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology, said.

A hanging glacier is a body of ice that breaks off abruptly at the edge of a precipice or steep slope.

The observations also suggest that rock mass weakened over a period of time due to freezing and thawing of snow. This must have led to the creation of a "weak zone", triggering its collapse, which resulted in the formation of a temporary dam that eventually breached, causing the floods.
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You might have thought you were going to be spared the slipping and sliding this winter. After all, we reached February with barely a dusting of snow in the metro area.

But starting Thursday, its expected to snow -- and keep snowing, off and on, until Saturday.

Its actually not unusual for the city to see its snowiest 24 hours of the year in the weeks after Groundhog Day. So it went in 2019 (4.9 inches on Feb. 9) and 2018 (4.2 inches on February 20).

And so its likely to be in 2021.

A couple poses for photos in Portlands South Park Blocks in February 2014 before heading to their wedding at the Slavic Church Emmanuel on Southeast 82nd Avenue.LC- The Oregonian

The National Weather Service has issued a winter storm watch for Thursday and Friday for the Portland area. The city could get somewhere between one inch and five inches of snow, with more in the Columbia River Gorge. Along with snow and ice, you can expect it to be windy.

This is a good reason to stay home and off the roads, if possible. That said, the expected storm is nothing compared to big Portland-area blizzards of the past.

Back-to-back storms in January and February of 1916, for example, brought more than 27 inches of snow to the city, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data. An even larger grouping of storms in late January 1893 dumped 31.8 inches.

A Portlander tries to get to her car in the aftermath of the city's epic 1937 snowstorm.

1950 saw 41 inches of snow drop on Portlands airport in the month of January, a single-month record.

Recent snow amounts have been paltry by comparison.

A swing sits idle above Oaks Bottom as freezing rain glazed many Portland areas in 2017.LC- The Oregonian

In the 21st century, the snowiest December came in 2008, with 14.9 inches. Meanwhile, the 24-hour snow record for these past 20 years: 11.8 inches over Jan. 10-11, 2017. (Official snow totals historically have been measured downtown or at the airport -- or both.)

Below are the five largest 24-hour snow totals in recorded Portland history, according to the National Weather Service:

1. Jan. 21, 1943: 15.5 inches

2. Jan. 2, 1902: 15 inches

3. Dec. 22, 1892: 14 inches

4. Dec. 10, 1919: 13.5 inches

5. Feb. 1, 1937: 12.8 inches

-- Douglas Perry

dperry@oregonian.com

@douglasmperry
CSIS director David Vigneault holds a press conference on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, on July 16, 2020. (The Canadian Press/Sean Kilpatrick)

Canadas Spy Agency Head Says Chinese Regimes Threat Coming on All Fronts

CSIS Act limits agencys capabilities, says Vigneault

The head of Canadas spy agency said the greatest threat to Canadas national security comes from China and Russia, while bemoaning the outdated legislation that is limiting the agencys capabilities.

Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) director David Vigneault also called for greater overall collaboration and awareness to deal with a higher threat level amid the pandemic, speaking at a webinar hosted by the Centre for International Governance Innovation on Feb. 9.

CSIS has previously warned about the theft of COVID-19 vaccine research and attempts by China and Russia to gain access themselves or recruit insiders and former employees to do so.

Regarding China, Vigneault made the distinction between the Chinese people and the ruling regime.

To be clear, the threat does not come from the Chinese people, but rather from the government of China, Vigneault said after lauding the contribution Chinese Canadians have made to Canada in a number of areas.

The Chinese Communist Party is pursuing a strategy for geopolitical advantage on all frontseconomic, technological, political, and militaryand using all elements of state power to carry on activities that are a direct threat to our national security and sovereignty, he said.

Vigneault provided the example of Chinas Operation Fox Hunt, which threatens and intimidates Chinese diaspora to repatriate.

Operation Fox Hunt  claims to target corruption, but its also believed to have been used to target and quiet dissidents to the regime, he said.

Last October, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested five people in an alleged Operation Fox Hunt plot.

Vigneault also singled out globalization and rapid technological changes as factors that have created more opportunities for interference.

Interference has always been present in Canada, but the scale, speed, range, and impact have grown as a result of globalization and technology, he said.

Outdated Legislation

Vigneault said the threats Canada now faces are vastly different from what was envisioned in the 1984 CSIS Act, which was better suited to the Cold War. The legislation unduly limits our investigations in a modern era, he said.

The CSIS Act  greatly impedes our ability to use modern tools and assess data and information. We need laws that enable these types of data-driven investigations, Vigneault said, adding that it limits our ability to provide relevant advice to key partners.

Though Vigneault did not refer to any case specifically, in July 2020, a Federal Court justice had denied a request by CSIS to gather foreign intelligence from a location inside Canada, on the grounds that the method proposed to do so was beyond CSISs legal mandate.

The court released a redacted version of the ruling in early February 2021. While the redactions prevent the proposed method of intel-gathering to be known, the document contains several sections that refer to the internet, including a heavily redacted section titled the jurisprudence relating to information accessible through the internet and two references referring to jurisprudence recognizing the borderless nature of the internet.

Vigneault went on to say that sectors that are particularly vulnerable to theft of intellectual property include biopharma, health, quantum computing, and artificial intelligence.

This is because these types of advanced technologies are largely developed by academia and small startups, which are attractive targets due to having less security and threat awareness in place, he added.

[They are] more likely to pursue financial and collaboration opportunities, which can, and sadly are, exploited by other countries, Vigneault said.

He called it state capitalismwhere other countries dont reciprocate Canadas openness and support for a level playing field but instead take advantage by aggressively advancing their own economic intelligence and military states interest at our expense.

Thus, partnerships like the Five Eyes intelligence alliance are critical for Canada, and like-minded countries are looking to form alliances to protect their interests, Vigneault said.

But the onus also falls on the Canadian public, business sector, and academia to collaborate in combating national security threats, Vigneault said, calling for a broader societal approach, which could address another core focus for CSISviolent extremism.

In todays dynamic threat environment, government, civil society, and the private sector must work together to harden the targets and protect our national interests, Vigneault said.

The debate between privacy and security often comes up for spy agencies. Vigneault said what is detrimental is adopting an overly simplistic view that there can only be two alternatives: either allowing agencies to spy on people or letting individuals retain full privacy.

Canada deserves a more dynamic, a more mature discussion on these issues.
Fewer married couples with children considering divorce amid COVID-19 pandemic, survey finds

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The number of married couples in the U.K. considering divorce has declined since the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a survey released by the Marriage Foundation.



According to the UK Household Longitudinal Coronavirus survey, couples considering getting divorced dropped by two-thirds compared to the rate before the pandemic started.



Researchers examined 3,005 parents who filled out a survey for the Office of National Statistics and found that twice as many married couples said their relationship had improved amid the COVID-19 restrictions.

We've looked at a big household study and they looked at 3,000 parents who are both married and cohabiting, actually mums and dads. And in previous years, they've asked similar relationship questions. So we've got a comparison for what people look like before COVID times and then in June and September, said Harry Benson, research director for the Marriage Foundation, in an interview with Premier News.

"What we found is that the degree to which couples, both married mothers and fathers, were seriously considering divorce was down by about half for fathers and about down by 80 percent for mothers. That's really important because this is people who are saying, 'We are seriously considering divorce most or all of the time,' he said.

Sir Paul Coleridge, founder of the Marriage Foundation, told Premier he believed the divorce boom that has been predicted due to COVID-19 is not happening and sees no indication that it will happen.

It seems that the centuries-old marriage vows 'for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health' still resonate and hold good for the majority of married couples who are hanging in there through thick and thin even whilst their relationships are being stress-tested," he said.

"Although the increased level of unhappiness among a small minority of parents most likely reflects the generally stressful and uncertain circumstances of lockdown, most other indicators of relationship stress are showing lower levels compared to normal.

In the United States, divorce rates have been decreasing for many years, and the similarly-predicted surge in divorces did not happen as a result of the pandemic.

In 2019, according to Census Bureau data compiled and analyzed by the Virginia-based Institute for Family Studies, the U.S. divorce rate hit its lowest level in approximately 50 years. The 2019 divorce rate was much lower than in 1980 when the National Vital Statistics reported that 22.6 divorces per 1,000 marriages occurred, the Institute for Family Studies report explained in November. The 2019 rate was, however, higher than the 1960 rate when 9.2 marriages per 1,000 ended in divorce.



The falling divorce rates are happening alongside falling marriage rates, the data showed.

In 2019, 33 out of 1,000 unmarried adults got married, which is slightly below 35 per 1,000 in 2010, and considerably below the 86 per 1,000 rate in 1970.



Institute for Family Studies Research Director Wendy Wang, who wrote the report, told The Christian Post in November that she did not believe the pandemic would have a lasting effect, and that evidence showed divorce rates would decline as a result of it.

In fact, recent survey data shows the pandemic has actually brought more couples closer to each other, Wang said. Also, initial data from some states suggest that divorce filings have declined.

A majority of married Americans say that the pandemic has made them appreciate their spouse more. And half agree that their commitment to marriage has deepened, she added.









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Time Warp: The Greatest Cult Films of All Time 

SBS Viceland, Thursday 9.20pm

What makes a film a cult film? The answers from some of the talking heads in this series vary from a film that never stops showing, to one that wasnt successful on its first release but gained a following to something you could only find on VHS. Then there are movies that were banned, once a guaranteed entry to cult status.

This is the second instalment of Time Warp  the first focused on midnight movies  looking at arguably the best kind of cult films: horror and sci-fi (episode three is camp and comedy).

Sid Haig in cult horror film The Devils Rejects.

Its loosely hosted by legendary director and producer Joe Dante (Gremlins, The Howling), who is joined by king of camp cult films, director John Waters (Polyester, Cry Baby) and actors Illeana Douglas and Kevin Pollack, who add little, but the reminiscences from directors and actors are as fun as the twisted plotlines themselves, and the tales of low-budget workarounds a real treat.
This story was published in partnership with The 19th, a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom reporting on gender, politics and policy.

Lawmakers in several statehouses this year want to stop lesson plans that focus on the centrality of slavery to American history as presented in The New York Times 1619 Project, previewing new battles in states over control of civics education.

Republican lawmakers in Arkansas, Iowa, Mississippi, Missouri and South Dakota filed bills last month that, if enacted, would cut funding to K-12 schools and colleges that provide lessons derived from the award-winning project. The South Dakota bill has since been withdrawn.

Some historians say the bills are part of a larger effort by Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, to glorify a more white and patriarchal view of American history that downplays the ugly legacy of slavery and the contributions of Black people, Native Americans, women and others to the nations founding.

1619: How an accidental encounter brought slavery to the United States

A reflection table at Eastern Senior High School in Washington, D.C., captures students' reflections to a daylong student-devised event inspired by The 1619 Project.

Political battles have long been fought, largely in education boards, over how American students learn about everything from the Civil War to ethnic studies and health. But proposed legislation that would penalize schools for teaching curriculums based on the 1619 Project signals a new era of policy debate over civics education that may increasingly play out in state legislatures.

The project, which was first published in The New York Times Magazine in 2019 and for which its creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary, marked the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first known enslaved Africans in the British colonies that became the United States. It includes audio, essays, poems, graphics and visual art pieces that reframe the legacy of slavery in contemporary American life, arguing that Black Americans are the foundation of U.S. democracy.

The Pulitzer Center, in partnership with the 1619 Project, has made available related lesson planning and says more than 4,000 educators from all 50 states have reported using its resources. While some historians have criticized parts of the project, The Times has stood behind it (a more recent editors note further defending the project acknowledges that the newsrooms separate opinion section has published pieces against it), and other historians have praised the projects approach and rigor and treatment of the role of white supremacy in U.S. history.

Story continues

Experts in history criticized Republican legislators for supporting bills that make such an overt move to force teachers to gloss over parts of U.S. history. It comes after a year in which many Americans have protested systemic racism within U.S. institutions, and education has not been immune from that conversation. Top Republicans, including Trump, have expressed support for nationalist propaganda, as well as the preservation of racist monuments.

Do we want historical facts and details that are researched and published by experts taught? Or do we want nationalism taught? said T. Jameson Brewer, an educator and assistant professor at the University of North Georgia. Thats a very scary sort of suggestion, that schools would engage in ideological nationalism for political needs.

The anti-1619 Project bills (which come after Republican U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas filed related legislation last July) are brief and use similar or identical language. The legislation out of Arkansas and Mississippi both call the project a racially divisive and revisionist account of history that threatens the integrity of the Union by denying the true principles on which it was founded. The Iowa bill expands its threat to school funding by suggesting any teachings with any similarly developed curriculum could face repercussions. The Missouri bill would prohibit teaching, affirming or promoting claims, views or opinions presented in the 1619 Project as an accurate account or representation of the founding and history of the United States of America.

States push for 'patriotic' education

Some Republican governors have also proposed using state money to shape how history is taught.

In November, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves proposed spending $3 million on a Patriotic Education Fund that would allow schools and nonprofits to apply for money to provide teaching that educates the next generation in the incredible accomplishments of the American Way. In a budget proposal, he wrote: Across the country, young children have suffered from indoctrination in far-left socialist teachings that emphasize Americas shortcomings over the exceptional achievements of this country.

In South Dakota, Gov. Kristi Noem last month proposed spending $900,000 for a curriculum that teaches the states students why the U.S. is the most special nation in the history of the world.

Trump also tried to push patriotic education, creating a 1776 Commission that released a report on Martin Luther King Jr. Day that was criticized for its inaccuracies and erasure of Black people, Native Americans and women and was quickly taken down by President Joe Biden after he took office.

I think what were seeing is a right-leaning or Republican state sort of picking up the reins as it were, trying to push forward with that exact same agenda, just at the state level, Brewer said.

Sending a message

James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association, which represents more than 12,000 historians, has been tracking the anti-1619 Project legislation. He expressed concern about efforts at the state level to omit the roles of racism and white supremacy in American history.

You cannot heal divisions by pretending they dont exist, he said. The way to address divisions is to understand the history of those divisions.

Grossman added that curriculum proposals that appear to be ideological are an attempt to deal with a perceived sense of This isnt my country anymore, by making it into something that never really was.

Koritha Mitchell, an associate professor of English at Ohio State University, noted that several of the bills include language that seeks to address the 1619 Project as a revisionist, racially divisive framing of history. But, she said, race does not intertwine with history only when people of color are involved.

Thats one of the main ways this whitewashing of history happens. We dont even call it whiteness. We call those heroes. Founding Fathers. Americans. Pioneers. We pretend whiteness has nothing to do with those laudable labels, she said.

Mitchell said the legislation on the statehouse level is aimed at sending a message at a time when Republicans hold more majorities than Democrats in the statehouse but have lost control in Congress.

Theres more leeway at the state level to do something to put people who arent straight white men back in their proper place, she said. And whether they succeed or not, it is important that theyre flexing that muscle of reminding people, No, no, no. This is still the United States. Where the people who belong in power are straight white men.

Outlook for legislation

Its unclear whether any of the anti-1619 Project bills will become law. Phil Jensen, a Republican representative who filed the bill in South Dakota, told The 19th in an email that he has withdrawn the legislation and is focused on other work, including a resolution that celebrates Black History Month.

I have chosen to withdraw that bill as I do not feel that I can adequately address it as well as I would like to at this time, he wrote.

Jensens Black History Month resolution, which downplays Americas involvement in slavery in part by claiming the country has a positive record on race and slavery, has also been publicly criticized.

Skyler Wheeler, a Republican representative who introduced the bill in Iowa, said in a statement: The Legislature absolutely has an interest in preventing racist, divisive, historically and factually inaccurate, and politically driven propaganda masquerading as history curriculum from being used in taxpayer-funded schools.

The Republican lawmakers who sponsored the other bills did not respond to requests for comment.

Grossman noted that in the 1950s, some legislators monitored textbooks to see how the Civil War was being taught and teachers were accused of being communists.

This has a long history in a way, of the most conservative aspects of American political culture jumping on teachers and education curriculum and caricaturing it as being somehow unpatriotic, he said.

A decade ago, lawmakers in Arizona passed a bill prohibiting Mexican-American studies. A federal judge in 2017 ruled the law was enacted for racial and political reasons, which made it unconstitutional.

Mitchell credits Hannah-Jones, also a staff writer at The Times, for the 1619 Project having a profound influence on some peoples foundational understandings of American history.

Its a backlash to her success at getting ordinary Americans to hold themselves to higher standards, Mitchell said.

Hannah-Jones, a native of Waterloo, Iowa, who expressed disappointment about a bill being introduced in her home state, told The 19th that she doesnt believe the lawmakers who have filed these statehouse bills have actually read the 1619 Project. She encouraged them and others to read the initiative before deciding how they feel about it. Hannah-Jones also said that no matter ones politics, she hopes people can agree that an education is about introducing differences in opinion and challenging perceptions.

Michele Foster, an education professor at the University of Louisville, said much of what she learned about slavery she got from her family, not school. She sees a connection between the Capitol riot on Jan. 6 and the slate of bills filed, linking them to fear of a changing country.

I think there are historical and societal conditions that give rise to this fear, and one way to deal with fear is to pass legislation that restricts it, she said. Because that way you feel like you can control what people learn, and then you can have the status quo.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Slavery history: States threaten funds for schools teaching 1619 Project
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The CBIRC on Sunday outlined a target of cutting the total outstanding value of trust-financing products by another 1 trillion yuan this year. Photo: IC Photo

Chinas banking and insurance regulator has pledged to continue its crackdown on the trust industry this year, with a particular focus on curbing trust financing and channel lending, amid concerns about mounting risks in the sector.

At a meeting on Sunday, the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission (CBIRC) outlined a target of cutting the total outstanding value of trust-financing products by another 1 trillion yuan ($155 billion) this year and effectively shutting the business down completely over the next five years, several trust firm executives who attended the annual regulatory work conference told Caixin.

For years, the trust industry has played an important role in shadow banking by providing loans to higher-risk companies and those with difficulty obtaining credit from banks. But the authorities have become increasingly concerned about the potential risks in the once-freewheeling and lightly regulated sector following a series of scandals and defaults involving billions of yuan. Among the most high profile are Sichuan Trust Co. Ltd., which failed to repay investors more than 20 billion yuan, and Shanghai-listed Anxin Trust Co. Ltd., which was found to have a 50 billion yuan black hole in its books.

Read more

China Tightens Rules for Scandal-Hit Trust Sector Amid Campaign to Contain Risks

Trust financing, which involves providing loans to businesses that are packaged into trust products and sold to investors, became a booming business for trust firms last year as companies scrambled for cash to help them weather the impact of the Covid-19 outbreak or to repay maturing loans. After surging 34% in 2019 to 5.83 trillion yuan, outstanding trust financing continued to increase in 2020, rising by 10.5% in the first half of the year to 6.45 trillion yuan (link in Chinese), according to data from the China Trustee Association (CTA), the industrys state-backed self-regulatory body.

The growth came despite demands from the regulator that firms should shrink their outstanding trust financing business by at least 20% from 2019 levels, equating to a total of around 1 trillion yuan (link in Chinese).

By the end of September, after further window guidance from the CBIRC, the total outstanding value of financing-related trust products declined to 5.95 trillion yuan. The figure accounted for 28.5% of all trust products, down from a peak of 30.3% at the end of June, according to the latest CTA report (link in Chinese).

Trust financing has grown even as the overall value of assets managed by the trust industry has been shrinking since reaching a peak of 26.25 trillion yuan in 2017 as the government has implemented a campaign across the financial sector to rein in risky lending and investment and control leverage. Assets managed by the countrys 68 licensed trust companies fell to 20.9 trillion yuan at the end of September, down 3.4% from the end of 2019, and set for the third straight annual decline, data from the CTA show.





The meeting was held to discuss supervision of the trust industry in 2021 and was attended by local branches of the CBIRC, senior managers of trust companies, and staff from industry organizations including China Trust Protection Fund Co. Ltd., which operates the state-backed bailout fund for trust companies.

A number of trust companies were called to account by the regulator for their poor performance last year, multiple sources close to the matter told Caixin. Among them were four companies that had expanded their trust financing business: Jiangsu International Trust Corp. Ltd., China Jingu International Trust Co. Ltd., Guolian Trust Co. Ltd. and National Trust Ltd., the sources said. Six failed to meet the annual goal, including Citic Trust Co. Ltd., one of Chinas largest trust firms, and troubled Jilin Province Trust Co. Ltd. These firms are being required by the regulator to make up the shortfall for 2020 and complete their target for 2021, the sources said.

CBIRC officials also told the meeting that the regulator will tighten its grip on the channeling business, where trust companies earn commissions by facilitating lending by third parties, typically banks, without bearing sufficient risk control responsibility. A source who attended the meeting said that as a result, it will be almost impossible for such partnerships between banks and trust firms to continue.

In 2019, nearly one-third of the 68 licensed trust companies were punished by regulators for a wide range of violations, including conducting illicit off-balance-sheet lending, with fines amounting to 22.5 million yuan. At least four firms were punished for their involvement in illegal activity in the channeling business, including Citic Trust.

The CBIRC officials at Sundays meeting criticized some trust firms for skirting regulations by packaging trust financing products into investment products and hiding trust financing behind complex product structures. They also made it clear the regulator wants the trust industry to return to its roots of managing money and encouraged firms to increase their involvement in managing assets for charitable trusts and family trusts, the sources said.

Timmy Shen contributed to this report.

Contact reporter Luo Meihan (meihanluo@caixin.com) and editor Nerys Avery (nerysavery@caixin.com)

Download our app to receive breaking news alerts and read the news on the go.

Advancing two high-upside gold projects in Idaho

More than 30% insider ownership

Funded through 2021

What Gold Mines Canada does:

Toronto-based Idaho Champion Gold Mines Canada Inc ( ) (OTCQB:GLDRF) is a discovery-focused exploration company advancing two high-upside gold projects in Idaho.

The company's 100%-owned Baner gold project is Idahos newest gold discovery, consisting of 227 claims totaling 1,829 hectares, which the company believes has multi-million-ounce potential.

Baner is located in the middle of the Orogrande Shear Zone, which hosts a number of gold deposits including the Friday mine owned by Finlands Endomines. Friday is expected to produce about 9,000 ounces of gold per year for more than seven years.

Idaho Champion said Baners highly-oxidized mineralization begins at surface and exploration has discovered open-pit potential. For example, drill results from a 2018 exploration program included 5.76 grams per tonne (g/t) gold over 12.65 metres (m) from a depth of 8.65m to 21.30m.

The company also has 100% control of the past-producing Champagne gold project, which has an historical non-NI-43-101 compliant resource of 2.3 million tonnes of 1.2 g/t gold equivalent. Bema Gold had a heap leach gold mining operation at Champagne from 1990 to 1993.

Located near Acro, Idaho, the Champagne mineral system boasts significant precious and base metal samples of up to 294 g/t silver, 2.7 g/t gold, 2.8% zinc, 6.6% lead, and 0.3% copper.

The Champagne gold project encompasses 10 square miles with numerous historic mines, veins, adits and artisanal pits discovered on the property. Idaho Champion believes the Champagne property has great exploration potential, as the company said historical drilling points to a high-grade gold and silver zone.

Champion acquired five patented lode mining claims, including the historically-mined open pit, and one patented mill site in April 2020.

Idaho Champion Gold Mines Canada is led by CEO Jonathan Buick, managing director of Harp Capital Corp and Buick Group Corp, who has successfully raised more than $400 million over his career with a focus on Korea and Japan.

How is it doing:

In early February, Idaho Champion Gold Mines released results from an induced polarization survey at its Champagne gold project, which showed strong IP responses over more than two kilometres.

The survey revealed chargeability and resistivity data from across the 26-square kilometre project, demonstrating the applicability of the IP technique to mapping and known sulfide-bearing mineralization around the historic mines on the property.

It also identified deeper chargeable and resistive bodies that may indicate the buried roots of the Champagne precious metals system.

A couple of weeks earlier, the company had released results from a 2020 reconnaissance reverse-circulation (RC) drilling campaign at the Champagne project, which included 0.94 g/t gold equivalent over 35.1 metres along with 98 g/t and 50 g/t silver near surface.

Idaho Champion Gold Mines also noted that drilling encountered near-surface oxide gold and silver mineralization in volcanic breccias below and adjacent to the existing historic open pits.

As well, in late 2020, the company announced rock sample results from a mapping and sampling program on the North Claims of the Baner project, in which numerous samples returned gold values above 1.0 g/t gold, with one as rich as 25.9 g/t from the historic Zenith Mine just west of recent drilling.

Idaho Champion Gold Mines said the new documented gold occurrence at the BL Mine on the Baner North claims added more than one kilometre to the gold-bearing strike length of the OroGrande Shear Zone.

Inflection points:

Baner project assay results

More Champagne project drill results in 1Q 2021

Identification of additional Baner drill targets

What the boss says:

Commenting on the companys recent drill results from the Champagne Gold Project, Idaho Champion Gold Mines Canada CEO Jonathan Buick said in a statement: We are pleased to see significant intervals of oxide gold and silver mineralization close to the surface around the historic Champagne pits.

He added: Combined with our extensive mapping, sampling, and geophysical program, these initial results will help direct our 2021 program towards the highest priority targets. We look forward to further information from the seven core holes, which tested other targets to the north and south.

Contact Sean at sean@proactiveinvestors.com
Prime Minister Chung Sye-kyun speaks during a meeting with health officials at the Gwangju city government in Gwangju, Wednesday. Yonhap



Prime Minister Chung Sye-kyun said Wednesday that how the nation deals with the pandemic during this week's Lunar New Year holiday will be crucial in the outcome of South Korea's grueling battle against the third COVID-19 wave.



"The Lunar New Year holiday which begins tomorrow is an important crossroad for the trajectory of the COVID-19 (pandemic). The most critical-to-date third wave could either end, or its dying embers could flare up again," Chung said during an interagency meeting on the COVID-19 response held in the city of Gwangju, 330 kilometers southwest of Seoul.



Chung once again stressed the importance of the public's participation to flatten the curve of the third pandemic wave, which peaked at a record high of 1,241 daily cases on Dec. 25.



On Wednesday, South Korea added 444 more COVID-19 cases in the past 24 hours, including 414 local infections, raising the total caseload to 81,930. The figure represents a spike from Tuesday as clusters of infections continued to emerge.






HOLYOKE  State officials blinked on a higher bed count for a new, $300 million Holyoke Soldiers Home after pushback from veterans advocates.

After a fiery trustees meeting on Jan. 27, members of the Baker administration and its design team increased the proposed resident bed count for a new home by 25%. The report came during a monthly trustees meeting on Tuesday evening.

Previous plans included a seven-story facility on Cherry Street with up to 192 beds  a 25% decrease from the state-run facilitys current capacity. Trustees essentially rejected the plan unless it included eight floors and more beds, putting the board and the state at an impasse. It was unclear where the state would land until Tuesday nights meeting.

State health, finance and veterans leaders came back Tuesday, reporting the design team had upped the range to 234 inpatient beds with up to 50 adult day health residents at a new facility.

We threw a hard curveball at you, and you actually hit it, the trustees chairman, Massachusetts National Guard Maj. Gen. Gary Keefe, told state officials.

Were no shrinking violets here, Holyoke trustee Kevin Jourdain added.

The boards previous unanimous vote to accept the state plan with revisions stood.

A grassroots Holyoke Soldiers Home Coalition was formed to advocate for the home following a coronavirus outbreak that claimed 76 veterans lives last spring. The coalition loudly objected after state officials said the clock had run out to change plans for the proposed new facility. A majority of state legislators also objected, along with families of residents, and veterans advocates.

The state is now staring down an April 15 deadline to apply for federal funding that will be the lifeblood of the project. Gov. Charlie Baker also must push a bond bill through the Legislature by Aug. 1 in order to secure federal funding. Even with the backdrop of an ideal fiscal process, the new facility is seven years out, officials have said.

The current 70-year-old facilitys cramped quarters were blamed, in part, for the outbreak. Its former leadership was maligned in an independent report commissioned by Baker. Former Superintendent Bennett Walsh and medical director Dr. David Clinton are under criminal indictment in connection with their response to the outbreak.

Meanwhile the Soldiers Homes attorney on Tuesday briefly informed the board that a U.S. Department of Justice investigation into the outbreak had formally started.

There was no further discussion on that point during the public meeting.

After months of largely halted family visits, those will resume on Feb. 10 with relatively strict controls.

Franklin County trustee Isaac Mass has repeatedly raised concerns about staff members who have opted not to receive the COVID-19 vaccines. The resumed visits coincide with the second dose of the vaccines for residents and staff.

At least once a month, a staff member contracts COVID-19 and shuts down the entire facility, Mass said, arguing that resistant staffers should be moved out of contact with patients.

State officials said they are largely bound by state and federal regulations around infection control and specifically COVID-19 control.

The former FBI special agent who pioneered criminal profiling has revealed why one of the serial killers he hunted shook him more than any other in his 25-year career.

John Douglas, now 75, joined the FBI in 1970 and initially worked as a hostage negotiator before specializing in analyzing and tracking down serial killers.

As part of his research, he interviewed infamous figures such as serial killers Charles Manson and Ted Bundy, and Robert F. Kennedy's killer Sirhan Sirhan.

Following his retirement in 1996, Douglas became an author, and his book Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit, was turned into a wildly popular 2017 Netflix series, executive produced by Charlize Theron and David Fincher, among others.

Douglas' latest book tells of his encounter with white supremacist Joseph Paul Franklin, who he described as the most disturbing person he ever met.

Joseph Paul Franklin, seen in court in February 1997, was executed in 2013 in Missouri

John Douglas, seen in May 2019, said Franklin was one of the most disturbing people he met

Franklin was convicted of eight murders in the late 1970s and 80s, and suspected of carrying out 20. He also shot and almost killed Hustler publisher Larry Flynt, leaving Flynt paralyzed.

Douglas' book was turned into a hit Netflix series staring Jonathan Groff

In all cases, his motive was racism.

'The victim could have been anyone,' Douglas told Fox News.

'He targeted interracial couples, Jewish people, black people. Just his attitude alone was disturbing.

'Many of the murderers I've interviewed, there's usually a sexual bent to their crimes. Sometimes they'll show emotion, even if it's BS.

'But he was a different animal. I was hoping for a faint glimmer of remorse. Instead, he was always bragging, boasting, even trying to educate us on how he planned all his crimes.'

Franklin was executed in November 2013, aged 63.

He was put to death in Missouri for killing Gerald Gordon, 42, in a sniper shooting at a suburban St. Louis synagogue in 1977.

Gordon's case was the only one that carried the death penalty.

Franklin was born in Mobile, Alabama, as James Clayton Vaughn Jr.

Groff plays Holden Ford, a character based on John Douglas in the series Mindhunter

Mindhunter ran for two seasons, with fans still hoping for a third

Douglas, pictured in 1996 - the year he retired, after 25 years in the FBI

The eldest son of an alcoholic drifter who frequently abandoned his family for months or years at a time, Franklin was frequently beaten by both parents, and came to particularly despise his mother.

'My mother was full-blooded German who was 5-foot-9 and weighed about 170 pounds,' he told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

'She could really hit hard with her hands and she liked to beat us with her hand, slap us, hit us with switches or belts.

'One time she took a long stick, 2 1/2 feet long and about 2 inches in diameter. I had gone into the fridge and took some of the milk out to pour into a dish for a cat I'd brought home. When she found out, she took that stick and started hitting me as hard as she could.'

Douglas writes that Franklin suffered an eye injury as a young child which his mother refused to treat, leaving him with severely impaired eyesight.

Franklin in a photo provided by the Missouri Department of Corrections in August 2012

'It only made him despise his mother more,' Douglas explained. 'He ends up dropping out of high school. He wants to become a police officer, but he can't.

'So he's feeling inadequate and is filled with rage. He then becomes gravitated towards extreme groups like the American Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan.

'But he decides that's not enough and wants to take matters into his own hands. This was the birth of a lone wolf.'

He changed his name to honor Joseph Paul Goebbels, Hitler's minister of propaganda, and Benjamin Franklin.

In the early 1970s, Franklin traveled on a road trip to an American Nazi Party conference in Virginia with David Duke, who at the time was a student, and KKK fanatic Don Black.

Diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, he was in his mid-20s in 1977 when he began drifting alone across America, selling blood to make money and robbing up to 16 banks to fund his travels.

In 1977, he bombed a synagogue in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

No one was hurt, but the killings soon began.

His first victims were interracial couple Alphonse Manning Jr. and Toni Schwenn, murdered in a parking lot in Madison, Wisconsin.

That same year, he picked out a synagogue from the Yellow Pages in St. Louis and fired five shots at the parking lot after a bar mitzvah. One struck and killed Gordon, a father of three.

In March 1978 he ambushed Hustler publisher Larry Flynt as he left a courthouse in Lawrenceville, Georgia.

Larry Flynt, now 78, was shot by Franklin in 1978 in retaliation for publishing interracial sex

Franklin was enraged by the 1975 issue of Hustler that featured a black man with a white woman.

'It just made me sick. I think whites marry with whites, blacks with blacks, Indians with Indians. Orientals with orientals,' Franklin told CNN in 2013.

'I threw the magazine down and thought, I'm gonna kill that guy.'

Flynt survived the shooting but was paralyzed from the waist down.

He continued his rampage for another three years, criss-crossing the country and murdering people often at random.

In May 1980 Franklin shot and seriously wounded civil rights activist and Urban League president Vernon Jordan after seeing him with a white woman in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

Franklin initially denied any part in the crime and was acquitted, but later confessed.

Vernon Jordan, a civil rights activist, is pictured with Barack Obama in May 2016

A week after shooting Jordan, he killed two children - cousins Darrell Lane, 14, and Dante Evans Brown, 13 - as they walked across a bridge in Cincinnati, Ohio.

He finally stumbled after killing two young black men in Salt Lake City in 1980.

He was arrested a month later in Kentucky and questioned about the firearm he had with him. He briefly escaped, but police had sufficient information to launch a nationwide hunt.

In October 1980 his tattoos, publicized by the FBI, drew the attention of a blood bank worker, who contacted the FBI. Franklin was arrested in Lakeland, Florida on October 28.

He told CNN in 2013 that his aim throughout had been to start a race war.

Jordan is seen at a National Urban league event in 1971

'There was no remorse when I interviewed him,' said Douglas. 'His only disappointment was that he didn't kill more people. He felt accomplished in life by killing people.

'He felt it was important to carry the torch, to carry out this act of hatred. Deep down, he hoped to create a race war for others to carry the torch for him.

'He admired Charles Manson, whom I interviewed because he felt it was remarkable that Manson could get other people to carry out his dirty work to launch a race war.'

Days before he was scheduled to be executed, Franklin expressed remorse - but Douglas was not convinced.

'He only showed remorse towards the end and it's because they were getting ready to fry him,' said Douglas.

'When I interviewed him he was still fighting the death penalty. He spoke [to us] about his shootings like he was hunting deer. He laughed and joked.

'He didn't care who the people were because, in his mind, they were the enemy.

'He wanted people to listen, but he wasn't that articulate, he certainly wasn't charismatic.

'He was a paranoid lone wolf huffing and puffing because he didn't trust anyone and was filled with anger.'

Douglas told Fox he hopes his book will give new insight into the mind of a killer that has haunted him for years.

'Maybe if he was taken out of his environment as a young child, his life would have taken a different turn,' said Douglas.

'But he was certainly different. And that's what makes him so disturbing.'
[February 10, 2021] File Shredding Software by Jetico Saves Time with Intuitive Interface

Jetico, developer of best-in-class file shredding software, has today announced the release of BCWipe version 7. The latest version of Jetico's solution for securely erasing files beyond forensic recovery will save time with an intuitive and streamlined interface. "Everyone claims they want data privacy. Yet outside the world of IT, most people don't really care enough to start using security software," states Jetico CEO Michael Waksman. "BCWipe 7 is designed to change this attitude. Our data wiping solution is instantly accessible and simple for everyone. Everybody at Jetico is excited about more users appreciating the benefits of BCWipe." New features that improve the accessibility of file shredding software include running common wiping tasks with one click, and reviewing the status of the computer in one glance to improve system performance and privacy. "Based on the feedback of beta users, one of the most popular features of Jetico's BCWipe 7 is running common wiping tasks without having to open the software," says Waksman. "Simply right-click on any file or folder and use BCWipe to instantly erase the data." See easy step-by-step instructions



Highlights of BCWipe version 7: Use all-in-one wiping tasks for thorough clean-ups that save time

Quickly review settings or follow real-time progress in enhanced 'View mode'

Access and review 'Transparent Wiping' and 'CryptoSwap' features for ongoing privacy The Enterprise Edition of BCWipe includes Jetico Central Manager, which allows users to deploy, control, and monitor client software across all workstations. 'Enforcer Mode' also allows administrators to remotely wipe selected data, wipe free space, and more - all without end-user intervention. Learn more by visiting www.jetico.com/bcwipe-enterprise.

About Jetico Jetico provides complete endpoint data protection software for National Security, Compliance and Personal Privacy. Trusted for over 15 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. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210210005338/en/

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Last year was quite the ride and 2021 promises to be another tumultuous year. Traditional capital doesn't typically like investing when there is so much uncertainty. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, many investors began to hold their funds back and we're waiting to see how things unfold.

But at the same time, crisis often precedes opportunity -- and while M&A activity was down overall last year, when you look at the data more closely you will see a flurry of activity in one sector: e-commerce.

The pandemic caused a surge in online shopping and has changed our behavior in the long term. Different investment banks and consulting firms have their own assessments of what percentage of people will revert to pre-COVID shopping habits when the pandemic has cleared, ranging from 40% to 70%, depending on which report you read.

Overall, investors are betting that a significant amount of this shift will be permanent and have turned their focus to this newer asset class.

Halo Effect of E-Commerce

Compared to other industries, e-commerce is still in its infancy and wasn't the focus of more traditional and blue-chip investors. However, in 2020 a new wave of investment vehicles began actively pursuing acquisition of e-commerce sites, their support businesses, and digital marketing firms to compliment other portfolio companies and help them scale. We expect this trend will continue in 2021.

Although an abundance of new capital has flowed into the e-commerce sector, many strategic acquirers are accountable to the companies they represent and need to secure a substantial return on their investment. This means they must complete a comprehensive due diligence process before striking a deal.

It can often take the investors months to conduct a thorough analysis of the company's books and other pertinent records before making an informed decision to invest -- even if the owner has anticipated the acquirer's requests and prepared accordingly.

We always recommend building a business with a potential sale in mind. Of course, when preparing for an exit it helps to understand what prospective acquirers are looking for.

Here are the types of online and digitally native companies we see investors looking at right now.

Customer Loyalty Coronavirus Can't Diminish

Whereas fad businesses typically struggle during recessions, legitimate businesses with true longevity can endure and even thrive. These companies stand out to investors because customers continue buying from them despite the hardships brought on by the pandemic.

These are typically niche businesses that have a strong brand presence and consistently perform in the top quartile. While many companies maintain a healthy level of diversification, they also tend to focus on highly defensible product verticals.

Low TACOS

This is one of the key metrics investors check before deciding to submit an offer on a business. Essentially, the TACOS (Total Advertising Cost of Sales) measures how much it costs you to acquire a new customer and reflects how effective your marketing is.

Strategic acquirers look for businesses that continually streamline efficiency, driving down their TACOS and maximizing the lifetime value per customer.

Companies with a low cost of customer acquisition and a high overall lifetime value get far more attention in than companies with high acquisition costs.

Recurring Revenue

Companies that generate recurring revenue are more desirable than companies that do not. A customer who completes a single purchase represents a low lifetime value compared to a customer who completes many subsequent purchases.

Thus, identifying opportunities to upsell, increasing average order values, and creating subscription-based revenue models makes businesses more attractive to prospective acquirers.

Maintain Clean Financials

Financials play a critical role in the M&A process, from obtaining an accurate business valuation to completing due diligence with as few delays as possible.

We advise our clients to keep accurate and organized records, seeking help from professional accountants as needed. This helps ensure a smooth and seamless transaction, as prospective acquirers will thoroughly analyze the company's financial data and any discrepancies they uncover could delay or completely stall the sale.

Clean financials let an investor know you're serious and that the information they're presented with is correct.

Untapped Opportunities

Strategic acquirers look for businesses with rapid, short-term growth opportunities that drive ROI. These initiatives may involve streamlining for efficiency, launching new and improved ad campaigns, or leveraging manufacturing partnerships and exclusive distribution deals to quickly scale the company.

For example, we recently helped sell a luxury British nightwear company to a major online giftware retailer in the U.S. The acquirer could expose their products to a new, much larger market at a significantly lower operating and marketing cost than the company could have achieved prior to acquisition.

Conclusion

The past year brought many unexpected challenges, but the market has quickly adapted. Many investors are now actively searching for successful e-commerce businesses to acquire for their portfolio and as e-commerce continues to flourish, there will be many opportunities to earn the maximum value for your business.

If you are considering an exit and your business fits one or more of the above criteria, 2021 could be the perfect time to sell.

Chris Shipferling is the managing partner of Global Wired Advisors. He has over 20 years experience working for house holding investment banks such as Citibank, Wells Fargo, Bank of America and Deutsche Bank. At Global Wired Advisors he helps e-commerce and digitally native businesses with revenues of between $5m-$70m get acquired. LinkedIn Bio.


Three San Antonio area men were arrested this week after allegedly possessing child pornography, officials said.

The Texas Attorney General's Office made four arrests using tips from a national reporting system for the online exploitation of children.

Two Bexar County men  James Redden, 32, and Joseph Perryman, 19  were taken into custody.

Redden was arrested Thursday on seven counts of possession of child pornography. A report had been made to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's CyberTipline involving files uploaded to an online account.

The Converse man was booked into the Bexar County jail on bonds totaling $315,000, court records show.

Perryman was arrested Wednesday on two counts of possession of child pornography. Numerous digital devices were seized at his residence after a CyberTipline report involving child pornography uploaded to a cloud storage account, officials said.

He was released Friday from the Bexar County jail on bonds totaling $90,000.

A New Braunfels man  Nicholas De Los Santos, 24  was arrested on Feb. 2 on five counts of possession of child pornography. Investigators seized devices after a a tip reported that child pornography had been uploaded to a cloud storage account.

De Los Santos was booked into the Guadalupe County Jail on bonds totaling $100,000.

The fourth man arrested was Dustin West, 25, of Gatesville, who was charged with two counts of promotion of child pornography on Friday.

After a report of images with the potential of a victim, investigators found clothing from the child at West's residence. They also seized devices for examination by the Digital Forensics Unit. West was booked into the Coryell County Jail north of Killeen.

In a news release, Texas AG Ken Paxton urged parents and teachers to ensure children's safety online. He noted that people who suspect someone is producing or downloading child pornography can report it to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
The EAC Heads of State Summit may have to determine the regional Assembly's sittings when they meet on February 27.

This follows a lack of consensus among legislators on the number of sittings the East African Legislative Assembly (Eala) should hold in the remaining five months of the 2020/21 financial year.

The debate was set off by Susan Nakawuki-Nsambu from Uganda at Eala's January 27 virtual session.

Ms Nakawuki-Nsambu said it was inappropriate for the Council of Ministers to be seen to be assuming the role of the Assembly, whereas the EAC Treaty Article 14(3) reiterates the need for the Council to give directions to all institutions of the Community with the exception of the Heads of State summit, Eala and the East African Court of Justice.

"The rules of procedure of the Assembly provide for up to 80 days of sitting, and the Council cannot be seen to usurp this aspect," she said.

Under the 2020/21 budgetary vote of $97 million, the EAC Secretariat is to receive $48.5million and Eala gets $16.7 million. The Committee on General Purpose realigned Eala's activities in line with a budget allocation of $16 million, but the Council of Ministers called for the reduction of the number of Eala sittings from 21 to 14, a move the Assembly protested saying it was tantamount to micromanaging their activities.

The six EAC partner states are divided on the matter with Burundi and Tanzania in favour of 14 days following the reconsideration of the budgetary ceiling from $104 million to $97 million due to constraints caused by the pandemic. Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, and South Sudan want Eala to determine their sittings as provided for by the Assembly's standing orders and the EAC Treaty.

Rwanda's Minister for EAC Affairs and chair of the Council of Ministers, Manasseh Nshuti, called for consensus.
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Governments of Bayelsa and Delta states have tasked a new online news platform, the Niger Delta Connect (NDC), on objectivity and fairness, promising to support the success of the medium dedicated to reporting events in the Niger Delta region.

Solalina Media launched the NDC on February 1, 2021 with a mission to give the Niger Delta region better coverage and exclusive reportage focusing on developmental journalism.

The Delta State Commissioner for Information, Mr. Charles Ehiedu Aniagwu, described the mission of NDC as noble, saying it would boost the operations of businesses and governments in the region.

He appealed to the platform's management to maintain objectivity and fairness in reporting issues concerning the region.

The commissioner said the Delta State Government would support the news platform to report the giant strides of Governor Ifeanyi Okowa.

He said: "I urge the operators of the platform to promote the interest of the region and its collective aspirations. I believe it will grow to be a hallmark of excellence in reporting events as it concerns the Niger Delta.

"As a government, we will support the platform by providing the screaming achievements of the government to enable them convey the story to Deltans".

Also, the Chief Press Secretary to the Bayelsa State Governor, Mr. Daniel Alabrah, described the birthing of NDC as a welcome development, saying the medium would help to correct negative narratives about the region.

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He said: "The Niger Delta has suffered bad press to a large extent which has negatively impacted on the region. I am optimistic that the online platform will change the narrative and become a major force to reckon with."

He said that the platform should be used to project the image of the Niger Delta and highlight areas of common interest that would improve the development of the region.

Alabrah pledged the support of the government of Bayelsa for the success of the Niger Delta Connect.

The Publisher of NDC, Mr. Moses Oruaze Dickson, said the news platform would give a voice to the region and bring issues affecting the Niger Delta to limelight.

He assured that the platform would provide the best form of journalism by adhering to the ethics of the profession and providing equal and fair opportunities to all.
By Marley Parish, Centre Daily Times (State College, Pa.) (TNS)

A new student housing project is proposed for College Township, but some residents are concerned about how the development could affect their neighborhoods and a nearby nature preserve.

Slated for the former Hilltop Mobile Home Park, the Aspen Heights Squirrel Drive land development project proposes two four-story residential buildings and some commercial space. The plan, which was submitted to the township in November, was reviewed at last weeks planning commission meeting where dozens of community members expressed concerns.

The project  proposed by Texas-based developer Aspen Heights Partners  includes 262 units with 651 beds. Though the majority of units will be student housing, 28 units will be designated workforce housing to comply with township ordinances.

With Oak Ridge Avenue adjacent to the proposed site, some residents voiced concern about traffic, lighting, noise and sight-lines into their homes from potential Aspen Heights residents. While the plan has been designed according to township ordinances, Aspen Heights East Division President David Helfrich said the developer wants to work with the community and ease residents concerns.

In addition to a 300-foot easement to mitigate noise, Helfrich said the plan is designed so that all amenities are enclosed, including courtyards that point toward College Avenue instead of residential neighborhoods to mitigate noise. Lighting will be designed in accordance with township ordinances and guidelines.

We try to be thoughtful, Helfrich said, adding that the developer considers overall community impact when drafting plans.

While the developer is working to determine traffic impact and any potential impact to water pressure, some residents are also worried about Thompson Woods Preserve and how the township plans to protect the refuge.

Im less concerned about traffic. Im more concerned about providing access for the students living (in) this development, Bruce Pincus said. What is the access thats going to be given for the students to walk from this location to campus, to ride their bikes from this location to campus that will not take them through the preserve and will not take them through my neighborhood?

The development plan has yet to be recommended to the township council, but commission member Ed Darrah told council members in an update last week that Aspen Heights Partners have been working with township staff to make headway on the proposal.

While Darrah added that the developer has no authority over Thompson Woods Preserve and that community concerns do not impact the proposal, councilman Paul Takac said he thinks its too early to assert that the preserve shouldnt be a point of concern.

Overall, it looks as though the developer is meeting all the guidelines, all the ordinances that are in this zoning area, Darrah said.

Another public meeting will be held before staff refers the plan to the council; Darrah estimates the proposal will be presented to council members next month.

As noted, the developer has been very cooperative, and we do have a responsibility to mitigate impact to adjacent properties, so I think we will be spending some time on that subject, Council Chair Eric Bernier said.
Health official: 'I am hopeful for the brighter days ahead'
Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-10 07:27:16|Editor: huaxia

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Photo taken on Feb. 9, 2021 shows the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C., the United States. U.S. Senate on Tuesday voted to proceed with the second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump. The Senate voted 56-44 that the impeachment trial of Trump is constitutional despite calls from some Republicans to dismiss proceedings. Six Republican senators voted with all 50 Democrats. (Xinhua/Liu Jie)

WASHINGTON, Feb. 9 (Xinhua) -- U.S. Senate on Tuesday voted to proceed with the second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump.

The Senate voted 56-44 that the impeachment trial of Trump is constitutional despite calls from some Republicans to dismiss proceedings. Six Republican senators voted with all 50 Democrats.

"The Senate shall proceed with the trial," said Democratic senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, who is presiding over the trial, after the vote was tallied.

The vote came after House impeachment managers and Trump's defense team spent four hours debating over whether a president who is out of office can be subject to a Senate trial.

Congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the lead impeachment manager, opened his presentation with a video showing disturbing footage of how protesters overran police and ransacked the Capitol.

The 13-minute video concluded with Trump's deleted tweet on Jan. 6, which said "these are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away."

"If that's not an impeachable offense, then there's no such thing," Raskin said.

Trump's legal team contended that Trump did not incite the rioters and that his speech about the election was protected by the First Amendment.

Trump's lawyer David Schoen charged that Democrats were using impeachment as a political "blood sport" to try to keep Trump from running for office again.

Opening arguments in the trial are set to begin Wednesday. It will continue at least through Friday, but could extend into next week.

The House impeachment managers and Trump's team will have 16 hours over two days each to present their case to the Senate, according to the agreement struck between Democrats and Republicans, as well as the House managers and Trump's legal team.

The House, where Democrats have a majority, voted to impeach Trump over "incitement of insurrection" on Jan. 13, a week after his supporters stormed the Capitol building.

Trump has rejected a request that he testify during the trial, and the former president's legal team argues that any conviction would be unconstitutional.

Senate conviction requires a two-thirds majority. Democrats, who only hold half of the 100 Senate seats, would need at least 17 Republicans voting to convict the former president.

Trump is the first president in the U.S. history impeached twice. In December 2019, House Democrats impeached Trump on two articles - abuse of power and obstruction of Congress - over his efforts to pressure Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden and his family. He was acquitted by the Republican-led Senate in February 2020. Enditem
A pay-as-you-feel dining concept that aims to reduce food waste, food poverty and social isolation is seeing people from all walks of life break bread together on Monday nights in Papamoa.

Everybody Eats is a pop-up restaurant operating out of Bluebiyou  an upmarket restaurant overlooking Papamoa Beach - to bring a sit-down, table service dining experience to the wider community.

Three-course meals are prepared and served by volunteers using food rescued by Good Neighbour and diners pay as much or as little as they can afford.

The registered charity also operates out of Auckland and Wellington, with plans to expand it to other cities in future.

Founder Nick Loosley, winner of the 2020 Kiwibank New Zealand Local Hero of the Year, set up a seven-week trial of Everybody Eats in Papamoa last year. Its success, and sponsorship from the Wright Family Foundation, will see Everybody Eats continue weekly from 15 February.

The trial went really well, with between 120 and 160 people dining each night. It has a really nice vibe and the community seems really into it, he says.

Kai Aroha founder Tania Lewis-Rickard was instrumental in helping to promote Everybody Eats in the community. The volunteer organisation provides free weekly community meals in Greerton, Papamoa and Mount Maunganui.

Everybody Eats values line up with Kai Aroha values - to reduce poverty and social isolation. For those who struggle to have nutritious kai on the table every night of the week they now have two options for community meals.

The Everybody Eats team makes people feel welcomed, comfortable and valued. That is the key factor - the ngakau aroha (compassion). You see the sparkle in their eyes and the cheer in their smiles; its real. Thats what keeps Everybody Eats successful, and of course the delicious kai!

Chef Matt Schaeffer and his brother Nathan Schaeffer co-own Bluebiyou and feel that opening their doors one night a week so everyone can come and eat at their beachside location  on council land in the middle of a reserve - is a great way to give back to the community.

Matt has previously volunteered with Everybody Eats in Auckland and regularly gives up his night off to work at Everybody Eats Papamoa.

I really like the vibe  its wholesome, and therapeutic in a way  and its been a great way to build relationships with other local hospitality professionals.

Bluebiyou chef Matt Schaeffer plating up desserts for diners at the Everybody Eats pop-up restaurant. Photo: Chay McLaren, Fluro Grey.

While donations from diners cover most of the operating costs, sponsorship from the Wright Family Foundation will help meet the cost of consumables, pay some staff costs and top up the rescued food.

The Wright Family Foundation chose to support Everybody Eats after working alongside Nick Loosley and Blue Light in 2020 to provide meals to vulnerable families in South Auckland during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

Were thrilled to support Nick to offer Everybody Eats in Papamoa, says Wright Family Foundation CEO Chloe Wright.

Paying as much as you feel means you can share the load. Supported by a great team of volunteer staff and chefs, our community can only benefit in shared meals and connections of people.

WHAT: Everybody Eats pop-up restaurant at Bluebiyou, 559 Papamoa Beach Road. Pay-as-you-feel.

WHEN: Every Monday night from 15 February, 6pm-8pm
Wednesday, February 10, 2021

The Delaware Supreme Court affirmed the denial of relief based on an alleged undisclosed judicial conflict

In 2010, Appellants Meso Scale Diagnostics, LLC and Meso Scale Technologies, LLC (collectively Meso) filed suit in the Court of Chancery against Appellee entities Roche Diagnostics GmbH, Roche Diagnostics Corp., Roche Holding Ltd., IGEN LS LLC, Lilli Acquisition Corp., IGEN International, Inc., and Bioveris Corp. (collectively Roche), all of which are or were affiliates or subsidiaries of the F. Hoffmann -- La Roche, Ltd. family of pharmaceutical and diagnostics companies. Meso alleged two counts of breach of contract. Roche prevailed at trial, and this Court affirmed the judgment in 2014.

On February 28, 2019, Meso brought a new action asking the court to reopen the case, vacate the judgment entered after trial, and order a new trial. Meso alleged that the Vice Chancellor who decided its case four years earlier had an undisclosed disabling conflict, namely, that Roches counsel had been simultaneously representing him in an unrelated federal suit challenging the constitutionality of Delawares law providing for confidential business arbitration in the Court of Chancery, 10 Del. C.  349 (Section 349). In that federal litigation, which ended in 2014, the Chancellor and Vice Chancellors of the Court of Chancery, as the parties responsible for implementing the challenged statute, were nominal defendants (hereinafter, the Judicial Officers).

The Court of Chancery denied relief and dismissed the action. Meso appeals.

For the following reasons, we AFFIRM the judgment of the Court of Chancery.

The court recited a number of trial court findings

As to extraordinary circumstances, the trial court found that granting relief would severely prejudice Roche by negating a long-settled judgment obtained after trial, while Meso had failed to allege any injustice that it would suffer. Likewise, the trial court found that the ostensible judicial ethics violation Meso has identified is not remotely, much less conceivably, serious under the Rule 60(b) rubric.

The court here

We start with the basic rules governing judicial disqualification and recusal and then consider other ethical considerations relevant to the unique circumstances presented here. We then address the Rule 60(b) issues Meso has raised on appeal.

After its survey of court and ethics opinions

the capacity in which a judicial officer is sued is an important factor to consider. On one end of that continuum is a lawyer representing a judge in highly personal litigation such as a divorce or personal injury case (as in In re Howes). On the other end might be, for example, a situation where a member of the Department of Justice (DOJ), pursuant to state statute,94 represents a judicial officer sued in her official capacity. Even when judges are sued in their official capacity, there are often other nuances...

In this case, the DelCOG Litigation asserted a cause of action under 42 U.S.C.  1983.95 The record overwhelmingly shows that Vice Chancellor Parsons was named as a defendant in his official capacity as a Vice Chancellor of the Court of Chancery and was merely a nominal party in the DelCOG Litigation. He had no financial, reputational, or other personal stake in the suit at any time.

Result

The Vice Chancellor did not decide whether recusal was required in this case, and he concluded that he did not need to reach the constitutional questions because, even if Meso has identified a due process violation, Meso very clearly has not satisfied the requirement of Court of Chancery Rule 60(b) to obtain relief from a final judgment. We agree. We nevertheless have discussed the ethical principles at some length to reinforce that such dual representation situations should be avoided and that the need for vigilance at the outset of a case is imperative. A judge who finds herself in such a situation should follow the procedure set forth in Los  assuming the judge has no actual bias or prejudice, the judge must examine the facts and circumstances of the particular case to determine whether the judges impartiality might reasonably be questioned. We acknowledge Mesos concerns, and we agree with Meso that even though it asserts noclaim of any actual bias or prejudice on his part, the Vice Chancellor, at a minimum, should have disclosed the representation on the record. Meso then would have had the option of waiving the conflict, or formally seeking the Vice Chancellors recusal thereby allowing the recusal issues to be addressed in the proceeding directly instead of years later in a collateral challenge to a final judgment after trial where additional issues come into play.

(Mike Frisch)

https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/legal_profession/2021/02/the-delaware-supreme-court-in-2010-appellants-meso-scale-diagnostics-llc-and-meso-scale-technologies-llc-collectively.html
Meeting with Amit Shah not about change of leadership: Karnataka Minister

Cyclone Yaas: Amit Shah to hold review meeting with Chief Ministers of states to be affected

Amit Shah to flag off 4th round of BJP's 'Poriborton Yatra', address rally in West Bengal

India

oi-Madhuri Adnal

New Delhi, Feb 10: Union Home Minister Amit Shah will flag off the fourth round of the BJP's ''Poriborton Yatra'' from Cooch Behar in poll-bound West Bengal and also address a public meeting on Thursday, a party statement said.

He will address the rally at the Thakurbari ground, the party's chief spokesperson Anil Baluni said.

Later in the evening, Shah will address a meeting of the party''s social media volunteers in Kolkata.

Maharashtra CM Uddhav Thackeray slams Amit Shah in letter to Shiv Sainiks

His earlier trip to the state was postponed following violence during the farmers'' tractor rally in the national capital on Republic Day.

The BJP has planned five rounds of ''Poriborton Yatra'' (journey for change) to cover all 294 assembly seats in the state as it steps up its campaign to end the 10-year reign of Trinamool Congress president and state Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.

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Story first published: Wednesday, February 10, 2021, 14:22 [IST]
Plans to hand 10-year prison sentences to travellers who try to evade coronavirus quarantine rules have been criticised by legal experts and a senior Tory who branded them utterly ridiculous.

Sir Charles Walker said Health Secretary Matt Hancock had announced a plan that demeans his office and told Boris Johnson to rein in Cabinet ministers very, very quickly.

The influential vice chairman of the 1922 Committee of Conservative MPs also accused ministers of robbing people of hope after Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said it was too soon for Britons to book a domestic holiday.

Sir Jonathan Jones, the former head of the Government Legal Department, suggested no court would ever sentence someone to 10 years for lying on passenger locator forms.

People caught misreporting their movements could be fined 10,000 or jailed for 10 years under existing anti-forgery legislation amid moves to protect against new coronavirus strains emerging overseas, Downing Street said.

Mr Hancock announced that people returning to England from 33 red list destinations would have to pay 1,750 to quarantine for 10 days in Government-designated hotels.

Sir Charles told Sky News: Utterly ridiculous thing for the Secretary of State of Health to say. Are we really going to lock people up for 10 years for being dishonest about the fact that theyve been to Portugal?

What a stupid thing to say, I mean a really stupid thing to say. That demeans his office and his position around the Cabinet table.

If anyone is EVER sentenced to 10 years for lying on the form, I will eat a face mask. (A clean one, Iam not mad.) https://t.co/dRi2AFqkJ5  Jonathan Jones (@SirJJQC) February 10, 2021

The backbench MP also accused Mr Shapps of a totally irresponsible statement on holidays after the Transport Secretary suggested foreign trips will remain banned until everybody has had a coronavirus vaccine.

What the Government is doing now is bordering on the very dangerous, to be perfectly honest. It is robbing people of hope, it is robbing people of something to look forward to, and it is very, very stupid and very, very short-sighted, Sir Charles added.

I dont hold the Prime Minister responsible for this but I do hold his secretaries of state responsible for this and he needs to rein them in very, very quickly.

Legal critics said the penalties are disproportionate to the offence, with former Supreme Court justice Lord Sumption arguing the penalties are more severe than those for some violent or sexual offences.

Sir Jonathan, who resigned as the permanent secretary of the Government Legal Department in September, tweeted: If anyone is EVER sentenced to 10 years for lying on the form, I will eat a face mask. (A clean one, Im not mad.)

Former Conservative attorney general Dominic Grieve said 10-year jail terms were a mistake which would never be used by the courts.

The reality is that nobody would get such a sentence anyway, the courts are simply not going to impose it, he told BBC Radio 4s Today programme.

However, Mr Shapps said the public would expect strong action if lives were put at risk by people bringing dangerous new variants into the country.

I do think it is serious if people put others in danger by deliberately misleading and saying that you werent in Brazil or South Africa, or one of the red list countries, he told BBC Breakfast.

I think the British public would expect pretty strong action because were not talking now just about, Oh theres a lot of coronavirus in that country and you might bring some more of it back when we already have plenty of it here.

What were talking about now are the mutations, the variants, and that is a different matter, because we dont want to be in a situation where we later on discover that theres a problem with vaccines.

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Chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance said it is crucial to ease restrictions cautiously to measure the effects, adding: The virus isnt going to be particularly interested in dates.

Mr Johnson defended his approach during a Downing Street press conference.

What businesses up and down the country are going to want is a cautious and measured approach that is pragmatic and one that we dont have to retreat from or reverse, he said.

No 10 said there is no requirement for MPs to vote on the move to impose jail sentences on travellers who flout the rules because they would be convicted under current laws.

Were using existing legislation under the Forgery and Counterfeiting Act 1981 so theres no requirement for a vote, the Prime Ministers official spokesman said.

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The lack of a vote will spare the Government a further embarrassing rebellion on coronavirus restrictions.

The latest one came on Wednesday when 24 Tory MPs opposed regulations which increased fines for people caught at house parties and allowed police extra powers to access Test and Trace data.
Housing Minister Robert Jenrick was accused of a 'betrayal of homeowners' tonight as he confirmed they will get billions of pounds of taxpayers cash to replace dangerous cladding - but only if they live in the tallest buildings.

The cabinet minister unveiled the long-awaited 5billion scheme for victims of the cladding scandal that emerged in the wake of the 2017 Grenfell Tower disaster.

But he revealed that only buildings above 18m tall - or six storeys - would have the cost of replacing the outside of the building covered by the Government.

People living in shorter buildings will have to pay for the repairs themselves using a 'long-term, low-interest' loan scheme that will cap their costs at 50 a month.

But the loan will remain with the property rather that the leaseholder, raising fears it will affect their ability to later sell it.

Additionally they and hundreds of thousands of people in the high-rise blocks will still be left to pay for other defects they did not cause. Many of the firms which applied the cladding have gone bust since Grenfell and will not have to pay a contribution.

The End Our Cladding Scandal campaign group said: 'The Government promised us no leaseholder would have to pay to make their homes safe. Today we feel betrayed.'

Natasha Letchford, a campaigner for the group, said the flammable High Pressure Laminate (HPL) cladding on her nine-story apartment building in Southampton needs to be removed and she could be facing a bill of 40,000 to rip it out.

Another, Zoe Bartley, said she felt 'bitterly betrayed' by the Government because her building is shorter than 18metres and she is now left 'trapped' in her property which she cannot sell.

Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick unveiled long-awaited help for victims of the cladding scandal that emerged in the wake of the 2017 Grenfell Tower disaster.

More than a million homeowners have been left unable to sell or remortgage their flats since the Grenfell Tower inferno in Kensington, west London, which killed 72 people in June 2017

Panels sold without any fire training The manager who sold flammable cladding for Grenfell Tower was given tough sales targets but no training on the product's fire safety, an inquiry heard yesterday. Deborah French was hired as the UK cladding sales manager by construction giant Arconic even though she had no knowledge of the product. She sold panels with a combustible polyethylene core to contractors refurbishing the tower block in Kensington, west London. Speaking at the public inquiry into the disaster, Miss French said she attended a week-long induction at Arconic's offices in France when she joined the firm. She described being given 'training on every aspect of sales'. However the 54-year-old said she was not given any technical training and instead had to learn 'on the job'. Advertisement

Mr Jenrick also unveiled a 'gateway to developer levy' would be implemented through the Building Safety Bill, explaining it would only apply when developers seek permission to develop certain high-rise buildings in England.

He told the Commons the move was 'helping to ensure the industry takes a collective responsibility for historic building safety defects'.

His announcement in the Commons today sparked fury from Labour but also from Tory backbenchers.

Stevenage Conservative MP Stephen McPartland accused the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government of not having a 'grip' on the cladding situation.

Appearing on BBC Radio 4's The World At One programme, he urged the Prime Minister to step in because there is 'up to 11 million people living in these properties'.

'There is incompetence at the heart of this now and it's time to call that out, and that's effectively what I have started to do,' he said.

'And that's why I think Number 10 now has to get involved and take a grip of this situation. Because it's clear, the department doesn't have a grip.'

Downing Street later poured fuel on the fire by suggesting he 'look closely' at the latest cladding package after he branded the announcement a 'betrayal of millions of leaseholders'.

The Prime Minister's press secretary, Allegra Stratton, said: 'Clearly we will encourage McPartland to look closely at the package that's been drawn up.

'Before it was a 1.6 billion package, now it is 5 billion. It is detailed, it is looking at the awful situation many people find themselves in and we think it will go a very long way towards addressing the insecurity and distress that people find themselves in when they are in flats that they worry about.'

In a Commons' statement, Mr Jenrick said: 'We will make further funding available to pay for the removal and replacement of unsafe cladding for all leaseholders in high-rise residential building of 18-metres and above - or above six storeys - in England.

Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick will pledge state assistance for many of those hit with huge costs to repair their fire-risk homes. Pictured: Residents of the Green Quarter development in Manchester city centre

'We continue to take a safety-led approach and this funding will focus on the higher-rise buildings where the independent expert advisory panel tells us - time and again - the overwhelming majority of the safety risk lies, in line with the existing building safety fund and the anticipated scope of the new building safety regulator that we're establishing and will shortly be legislating for.

Chelmsford flat owner feels 'bitterly betrayed' by the Government One woman, Zoe Bartley, owns a one-bedroom flat in Chelmsford but is unable to sell because of a myriad of issues uncovered by inspections carried out last year. They included that her building was fitted with flammable cladding, 'poorly installed insulation' and 'missing fire breaks'. She told LBC: 'We have been told the remedial works could take 18 to 24 months to complete and that we will be liable for the cost if the developer do not pay.' Zoe Bartley is unable to sell because of a myriad of issues uncovered by inspections carried out last year She added that the Government's 3.5billion fund announced on Wednesday will not help because her building is below 18metres. 'This has left my family in a situation where we are unable to sell our one-bedroom flat. Because it is shared ownership we are also unable to sublet the flat, meaning that my family of four, soon to be five, are left trapped in a one-bedroom property unable to move,' she said. 'This announcement has left me feeling bitterly betrayed by the Government.' Advertisement

'This will ensure that we end the cladding scandal in a way that is fair and generous to leaseholders.'

On lower and medium-rise blocks of flats, Mr Jenrick said: 'The Government will develop a long-term scheme to protect leaseholders in this situation, with financial support for cladding remediation on buildings between four and six storeys.

'Under a long-term low-interest scheme, no leaseholder will ever pay more than 50 a month towards the removal of unsafe cladding, many far less.

'Taken together this means the Government is providing more than 5 billion including a further 3.5 billion announced today plus the significant cost of the very generous financing scheme which will run for many years to come to ensure all leaseholders in medium and high-rise blocks face no costs or very low costs if cladding remediation is needed.

'Where it is, costs can still be significant for leaseholders, which is why we want to take these important steps.'

But Labour's shadow housing secretary Thangam Debbonaire branded the scheme an 'injustice'.

'Three and a half years on from Grenfell, hundreds of thousands can't sleep at night because their homes are unsafe.

'The Government has chosen to pile financial ruin on them,' she told the Commons.

'What does the Housing Secretary say to Julie in Runcorn, who lives in a flat with dangerous HPL cladding?

'Her block is under 18m, so she has been unable to access any funding promised so far by the Government.

'She lives in the same development as buildings with the exact same cladding, but over 18m, who can access the fund.

'Why should the arbitrary height limit mean the difference between a safe home, and financial ruin?

Around four million people are stuck in dangerous buildings, with more than a million flat-owners facing crippling costs for safety measures and special insurance.

The scandal has left families facing repair bills of up to 115,000, and without Government action hundreds of thousands of flats are unsellable.

The announcement comes a week after Boris Johnson told the Commons: 'We are determined that no leaseholder should have to pay for the unaffordable costs of fixing safety defects that they didn't cause and are no fault of their own.'

It is believed the cost of the cladding bailout from the Treasury could top 5billion. Ministers have also discussed a levy on construction firms to help foot the bill.

Paul Afshar, of the End Our Cladding Scandal campaign, said: 'The psychological cost of living in firetrap flats is heavy enough to bear.

Last month the Mail also spoke to Lilli Houghton, 26, (pictured) who bought a flat in Leeds with her boyfriend for 145,000 in July 2018. A safety investigation later discovered flammable cladding, forcing her to pay an initial extra 960 in service charges

'Now it looks like we will shortly be saddled with crippling 30-year loans, longer than our mortgages, to fix a problem we didn't cause.

The Government needs to decide where its priorities lie. On the one side you have millions of leaseholders suffering sleepless nights for fear of 40,000 bills landing on their doorstep just to make their homes safe.

Sheffield flat owner could be turfed out of her home after running out of money to pay for 'waking watch' Jennifer Garratt, of Sheffield Cladding Action Group, told ITV News: 'I've actually got a call this evening for my building to discuss whether it is going to be shut down because we've run out of money for the waking watch. 'That is how serious this has got and nothing whatsoever in Jenrick's speech today made any reference to the interim measures. 'He has genuinely had the audacity to get up there and say: 'people can stop having sleepless nights. Leaseholders shouldn't have to worry.' Jennifer Garratt, of Sheffield Cladding Action Group, told ITV News that her building may be 'shut down' because the residents have run out of money to pay for a waking watch 'Well I'm worried because I could be turfed out of my home in the middle of a pandemic, in the middle of a freezing cold winter. 'I don't have anywhere to go where I can move in and not worry about potentially covid to my parents who are in their sixties. 'It is completely ridiculous that they've just decided to sort of say 'ok we'll fix one part of the cladding crisis and say that's job done and we'll pat ourselves on the back. Advertisement

'On the other, the largest developers who collectively have made more than 10billion in profit since the Grenfell fire. Rishi Sunak can and must do the right thing and properly fund cladding removal to make sure millions of voters can, once and for all, sleep safely at night.'

Natasha Letchford, a campaigner for the End Our Cladding Scandal group, said the flammable High Pressure Laminate (HPL) cladding on her nine-story apartment building needs to be removed.

The building is also fitted with flammable Kingspan K15 insulation which is the same as that was used on Grenfell.

Because of the terms of her lease, Ms Letchford, who lives in an apartment complex in Southampton, could be forced to pay 100 per cent of the repair costs even though she only owns 35 per cent of her property.

Ms Letchford said: 'My fear is huge bills. Obviously some if it will be covered, but if they say for example, we're covering the cladding but we're not covering the fire breaks and we're not covering the internal compartmentation, we could still be face a bill of 20-, 30-, 40,000.

'My worst fear is that I can't pay the costs and then I could be made bankrupt, which means that I would lose my house, but I'd also lose my job because as a qualified solicitor you can't be bankrupt. That is my absolute worst nightmare.'

Ms Letchford said she went to bed every night 'not knowing how quickly the building would go up if there was a fire' and had been struggling with panic attacks and anxiety.

'It really isn't just the financial aspect, it is being trapped in somewhere that you feel unsafe,' she said, adding: 'People just don't know how they are going to pay the bills, don't know what they are going to do with their lives.'

Rebecca Ashwin, 40, who lives with her 26-year-old partner, Jack Sandrey at Victoria Wharf, Cardiff, have seen their seven-building complex's insurance increase '10-fold' to more than 600,000 after their block 'failed' external wall testing, achieving a B2 rating.

They feel their life is 'on pause' and are unable to consider moving to reduce their commutes.

The pair worked five jobs to buy their eighth floor home in March 2019 but have already faced costs of 3,000 when including insurance, a waking watch and new fire alarms.

Ms Ashwin, a public sector worker, explained that unless buildings secure an EWS1 form, or External Wall Fire Review form, people are unable to buy or sell homes.

She claimed that her block, which is over 18 metres, was missing fire break and had polystyrene cladding, with an estimate for remediation placed at 60,000 per flat. Such work could take seven years to complete, she said.

Natasha Letchford (pictured above with her partner Jake Ellis), a campaigner for the End Our Cladding Scandal group, said the flammable High Pressure Laminate (HPL) cladding on her nine-story apartment building needs to be removed

Ms Ashwin said homeowners in Wales were 'slipping through the cracks', with the Welsh Government 'extremely slow to react' to the issue.

She has had to inform her work she faces bankruptcy due to her vetting levels, adding: 'At Christmas we were telling people, 'don't buy us anything good because we might have bailiffs coming knocking'.

'Our pillow talk is kind of how would we get out if there was a fire, can we tie our sheets together and get down to the next balcony?' Ms Ashwin said, adding that she had turned to counselling.

'With the lockdown we're both working from home so we're constantly in our dangerous flat, which is the source of all this anxiety.'

She described Wednesday's announcement as another of the Government's 'sticking plasters' and a 'halfway measure', arguing support should be for all leaseholders wherever they live and that developers should be 'held to account'.

'Everybody's in the same situation facing danger, facing bankruptcy and costs and the height of the building shouldn't affect that,' she said.

Because of the terms of her lease, Ms Letchford, who lives in an apartment complex in Southampton (pictured), could be forced to pay 100 per cent of the repair costs even though she only owns 35 per cent of her property

She added the latest measures were a 'huge betrayal of those in flats under 18 metres', adding that people had been 'failed and abandoned by everybody who should be in place to protect us'.

More than a million homeowners have been left unable to sell or remortgage their flats since the Grenfell Tower inferno in Kensington, west London, which killed 72 people in June 2017.

Leaseholders face average costs of 40,000 each  and some of up to 115,000  to replace dangerous cladding.

Just 216 out of an estimated 11,760 dangerous buildings have been fixed in the three-and-a-half years since the Grenfell fire.

The Daily Mail has launched a campaign calling on ministers to make homes safe within 18 months and spare leaseholders the cost.

Among those facing huge bills after cladding was deemed to be dangerous were leaseholders in Manchester's Green Quarter, which the Mail highlighted last month.

Our campaign also calls for the companies responsible for the crisis to be made to pay their fair share.

Last week Barratt became the first housing developer to back a levy. Chief executive David Thomas said the industry had a 'collective responsibility' to cover the costs of the crisis.

The housing ministry is understood to be lobbying the Treasury for a 10billion pot, including the levy on developers.

But leaseholders fear the Government's plans do not go far enough and will still lumber many of them with huge long-term loans.

Last month the Mail also spoke to Lilli Houghton, 26, who bought a flat in Leeds with her boyfriend for 145,000 in July 2018.

A safety investigation later discovered flammable cladding, forcing her to pay an initial extra 960 in service charges.

She then faced a bill for almost 3,000 last month  and was told the total cost of works for each flat could be as much as 43,000.

She said: 'People are taught from a young age to save their money and get a foot on the property ladder.

'Now this is just a complete slap in the face.'
Three correctional officers are on leave as the FBI helps to investigate a prison altercation that hospitalized two officers and two inmates, including a well-known prison rights activist, the Alabama prison system said Monday.

The Alabama Department of Corrections said the incident occurred between staff and inmates at William E. Donaldson Correctional Facility in Bessemer on Jan. 30. The two officers suffered stab wounds and Robert Earl Council and Ephan Moore, both inmates at the prison, were transported to hospitals for treatment for their injuries, the prison system said.

Council, sometimes known as Kinetic Justice, is a prison rights activist who has been involved with prison strikes and other organization efforts. He is serving life without parole for murder.

The U.S. Department of Justice has an ongoing lawsuit against Alabama alleging that state inmates are subjected to unconstitutional levels of violence from both inmate-on-inmate assaults and a pattern of excessive force. The state has denied the federal accusation.

The department said it could not release additional information until the investigation is complete.

We can, however, confirm that three correctional officers have been placed on mandatory leave pending the results of the investigation. We also can confirm that the FBI has agreed to assist in conducting a joint investigation into the incident, Corrections spokeswoman Samantha Rose said.

Rose said it was not unusual to ask for federal help in an investigation of this nature where federal law potentially may have been violated. She did not elaborate.

The prison system said Council was taken to a hospital but is now back in prison custody.

Catrice Britt, Councils niece, said her uncle was trying to intervene in an altercation between guards and Moore.

Robert Earl stepped in to help the guy. ... He is in a lot of pain. He has stitches in his head, broken ribs, eyes swollen shut, Britt told The Associated Press.

Videos circulated on social media that the poster said was shot in the aftermath of the violence. The videos appeared to show a large amount of blood on the prison floor and inmates coughing from lingering pepper spray, or another chemical agent, in the air. An inmate says, they jumped on Robert Earl.

Activists said the incident with Council and Moore needs scrutiny.

What is happening with the training? said Kenny Glasgow, the founder of the Ordinary Peoples Society, a nonprofit focused on criminal justice issues.

Kenneth Traywick, another inmate organizer who is in a separate prison, said the organization effort is non-violent and said that inmate organizers have faced retaliation.

We dont operate with violence, Traywick said.

The prison system said it is investigating the death of an inmate found unresponsive in his cell.

David Lee Franklin, 31, was found unresponsive in his cell Tuesday and was declared deceased by facility medical staff, prison officials said. Franklin was serving a 10-year sentence for possession of a controlled substance out of Jefferson County

Dewitt Searight, 77, passed away at a local hospital on Monday from an apparent ongoing medical issue, the prison system said. He was serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole for murder out of Butler County.
Superstition and sailors, or in our case, fishermen, are like two sides of a coin. A tour of the shores of Lake Victoria will offer you not only picturesque scenes but a rich culture and traditions that the people have clung to over the years.

Fishermen, much like vehicle owners, have a special attachment to their boats. This is evident in the naming.

On the shores of Koginga Beach in Homa Bay town, most of the wooden boats are docked on sand. Others are anchored in the water.

At the bow of every boat is a name that fishermen use to identify their vessels. On closer examination, you notice that the names are -- almost always -- of women.

There is a belief that a boat should be named after a woman. There are exceptions of course, but those are few and far between.

Siprina Nyar Okumu, Beldina Semeji, Obora Mama and Doris Yiengo are some of the names we spot on fishing boats at Koginga Beach.

Caregivers

"These names are dear to us. They are people who were very special in our lives," Mr Rogers Onyango, a fisherman, tells the Nation.

Lake Victoria has tens of thousands of fishing boats currently floating on water.

From the smallest boat that can only take one person, to larger vessels that can stay in the water for a week as more than 10 men engage in fishing.

Mr Onyango says most boats are named after women because they are caregivers. The fishermen name their boats after their mothers, aunts, sisters and grandmothers.

They believe that naming a boat after someone who did good to you is advantageous. Accidents, they say, are caused by wrong naming of fishing vessels.

"Low fish catch is attributed to wrong naming of boats," Mr Onyango says.

Good luck

At Dunga beach -- one of the fish landing sites in Kisumu, it is the same.

The fishermen believe women are lucky and industrious -- the two attributes they need as they cast their nets in Africa's largest lake.

Mr Victor Didi, a boat owner and a fisherman, says a woman is a responsible being and he believes that naming his boat after his wife, mother or grandmother will bring him good luck and ensure he gets a good catch.

"Just like a woman fends for her family, the boat also fends for the owner and naming it after a lady will automatically yield the same fruits through hard work. My boat is named after my mother Rosa Akinyi," says Mr Didi.

So attached is the fisherman to his boat, that he sometimes speaks to it.

Other names

"Any time I feel like I have had a bad day at work, I speak to my boat as if I am addressing my grandmother or mother, asking her why she is allowing my children to go hungry. After this, I get a good catch when I go on my fishing expedition."

His father John Didi Omulo named his boat Nyathi Punda -- a foal, the young one of a donkey. This was because of the traits of the donkey, which is good at sensing danger and strong, he explains.

"My brother's boat is named Israel, to show the journey he has had since he built the vessel, just like the journey of the Israelites from Egypt to Canaan," he offers.

Apart from women, those who are religious name their boats after saints or Christian values for instance Tumaini (hope), Shalom, Jehova Jireh or Emmanuel.

Boats are also named after heroes and memorable events in the history of the region.

Naming process

"Some have named their boats Agwambo after Opposition chief Raila Odinga, who is regarded a hero, while others have named theirs Moreno Ocampo or Kofi Annan owing to his mediation that led to a coalition government," says Mr Didi.

There is, however, a caveat to the naming process.

You have to do a background check on whoever you are naming your boat after, lest the vessel take after their character.

"For instance if you name your boat after your grandmother yet she was a murderer, it will be full of misfortunes until you change the name. It could capsize and kill the occupants, because of the blood on your grandparent's hands," he says.

Another system of naming boats is based on family lineage.

Fishermen whose boats are named after them would like to have their children who will engage in fishing name their boats after them.

Monstrous benefits

Mr Jeremiah Onyuna, a 67-year-old fisherman in Koginga beach, says his boat is named after his great grandfather who was also a fisherman.

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"My great grandfather got the name from his father. It is a name that has been passed down for generations," he says.

Naming a fishing vessel is, however, not a must, according to county Beach Management Unit (BMU) chairman Edward Oremo.

He says boats are like vehicles.

"Some cars have names while others do not. It is believed that naming a boat has monstrous benefits," Mr Oremo says.

Not unique to Kenya

Boat-naming is not unique to Kenya or Africa. In Europe and America, the renaming of a boat is usually a big ceremony with rituals followed step by step to ward off any calamities or bad luck.

The ceremony is not usually complete before champagne is popped and there is a celebration. A bell is also rung to signal the beginning and the end of the ceremony.

The first step is to remove the old metal name tag, which is usually dropped into the sea or lake. This is to ask the gods of the sea to remove the old name from their records.

One would then call out the names of the sea gods facing all the four directions of the compass and pour wine in all the directions.

In libation, at least half a bottle of red wine is poured into the sea from east to west.
By Eleanor Farjeon

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Two weeks ago, I was casting about for a novel or short-story collection - something sweet - that would be just right for Valentine's Day. Being fond of anniversaries, I hoped there might be some appropriate book from 1921 due for centenary celebration. There was. But Eleanor Farjeon's "Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard" - containing six romantic fairy tales recounted by a wandering minstrel - turned out to be far more than just appropriate. It was magical.

Of course, I shouldn't have been surprised since Farjeon (1881-1965) is one of the 20th century's most beloved children's authors, equally adept at verse and prose. "The Little Bookroom," a selection of some of her best stories, received Britain's 1955 Carnegie Medal and, in 1956, was honored with the inaugural Hans Christian Andersen Award. (The book is currently available in the New York Review Children's Collection.) Today, Farjeon tends to be viewed as old-fashioned, "poetic," even sentimental. Still, no one disdains her lyrics to the loveliest of all songs about spring, immortalized in a version sung by Cat Stevens:

"Morning has broken like the first morning.

Blackbird has spoken like the first bird.

Praise for the morning, praise for the singing

Praise for them springing fresh from the Word. . . "

Originally written for adult readers, "Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard" is remarkable in several ways. To begin with, it derives from a Sussex singing game called "The Spring-Green Lady," the music of which is reprinted at the end of the book. In Farjeon's framing narrative, the minstrel Martin Pippin happens upon the weeping Robin Rue, whose beloved Gillian has been locked in a well-house inside an apple orchard by her farmer father. What's worse, she is guarded by six milkmaids, all resolute man-haters. Martin determines to help sad Robin by procuring the six keys that will free Gillian from her prison. He will accomplish this formidable task partly through his charm, but mainly through his storytelling.

Inside the apple orchard, we discover a realm of rococo elegance, artificiality and wit. All the milkmaids bear names starting with J. Entire days can slip by in teasing, small wagers and riddles, games of blindman's buff and warm-weather naps. Following each of Martin's just faintly allegorical tales, the six girls solemnly argue about its possible meanings in "interludes" that recall Platonic dialogues. Throughout, Farjeon maintains this air of playful mock-seriousness, especially when discussion touches on the vexatious nature of love.

The stories themselves vary widely in tone and setting. In "The King's Barn" an impoverished young king decides to become a monk, but is first required to pass four Saturday nights in prayer on a certain holy mountain. During the week, William resides in a nearby town and pays for his keep by assisting a swarthy, unwashed blacksmith. During his Saturday vigils, he responds ecstatically to the wondrous beauty of nature and, increasingly, to the wondrous beauty of a mysterious young woman bathing in a nearby pool. Already you can probably guess the twist in this tale, but not the exquisiteness of its telling.

In the next, "Young Gerard," the gentle hero and the equally gentle daughter of the Lord of Combe Ivy obviously belong together. Alas, Gerard is only a poor shepherd lad. Or is he? What about his visions of colorfully dressed folk wildly dancing and singing in the starlight? What about that mysterious crone with a crutch whose eyes are "as piercing as thorns"?

Helen, the heroine of "The Mill of Dreams," passes 20 satisfying years living entirely through her imagination, fantasizing myriad exotic adventures with a sailor-boy she once spoke to for seven minutes. Illusion and reality happily commingle for her - until matters grow even more Borgesian when the sailor-boy actually reappears, now grizzled and middle-aged, yet every bit Helen's equal as a romantic dreamer.

In "Open Winkins" three of four brothers vanish for a month and return as soulless zombies. Hoping to release his siblings from this death-in-life, Hobb, the eldest, crosses into an unearthly realm inhabited by the enigmatic Margaret, whose golden-blond tresses contain a single strand of black hair. "At all times," sighs the infatuated Hobb, "she was lovelier than his dreams of her." No doubt, but is Margaret what she seems?

In my favorite story, "Proud Rosalind and the Hart-Royal," Farjeon mingles chivalric romance, medieval legend, Norse lore about Wayland the Smith, the hunting of an elusive white stag and elements reminiscent of Shakespeare's "As You Like It." Even its minor characters, such as four ladies-in-waiting, can be the stuff of dreams:

"There was Linoret who was like morning dew on grass in spring, and Clarimond queenly as day at its noon, and Damarel like a rose grown languorous with its own grace, and Amelys, mysterious as the spirit of dusk with dreams in its hair."

While each of Martin Pippin's stories is rich in misdirection and reversals, Farjeon saves the best surprise for last, when Gillian is finally freed. Years later, she would bring back her minstrel in 1937's "Martin Pippin in the Daisy-Field," when he would again relate marvels, this time to the small daughters of the former milkmaids.

These tales are definitely intended for children and one might well be Farjeon's masterpiece: "Elsie Piddock Skips in Her Sleep." Late at night, on enchanted Mount Caburn, Elsie - a natural-born skipper - trains under Andy Spandy, the fairies's own skipping master. Her twists, steps and leaps are dazzling, utterly preternatural - until all her skill vanishes after she grows physically too big to use the little rope she learned on. We then flash forward to modern times when a crass developer plans to build factories on Mount Caburn. To prevent this, a 109-year-old Elsie, now tiny and shrunken from age, hobbles on to the proposed construction site, a child's skipping rope in her hand. What happens next you'll need to find out directly from Martin Pippin. Happy Valentine's Day!

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Michael Dirda reviews books for Style every Thursday.


A man has been sent forward for trial to the current sitting of the Central Criminal Court in Dublin on two counts of alleged rape.

The offences are alleged to have taken place against the same female at an address in Leitrim on July 6, 2020 and July 7, 2020.

The defendant who cannot be named in order to protect the identity of the alleged victim was brought before a recent court sitting in Co Donegal.

Leitrim State Solicitor Noel Farrell told the court that the book of evidence had been served. He said it was the DPP's direction that the defendant be sent forward for trial to the present sitting of the Central Criminal Court.

The judge granted legal aid in respect of one solicitor and two barristers.
Recently, I was on a FaceTime call with a friend I met through social media who is in the same profession as I am. Through the pandemic, weve brainstormed and been there for each other. So I was shocked when  via FaceTime  I was informed that my friends dog had bitten a few people, and so my friend felt it was best to put the dog down. But they wanted to do it themselves. They thought that going to the vet and having the vet hold the dog down would be inhumane. Without even thinking what the answer might be, I said: Wait! How do you put your own dog down? Silence. And then they said, A gun.

They admitted to me that they shot their own dog and buried it in a grave they dug. I couldnt believe this. Is this legal? Is this morally OK? To me, its murder! Theyre asking for sympathy on social media saying their loving family dog had to be put down, and I hate that Im carrying this knowledge that the dog was shot and buried by its loving owner. What do I do? Name Withheld

The purpose of a child, the Russian thinker Alexander Herzen suggested in his 1849 dialogue-essay Consolatio, is to be a child  to play, to enjoy itself, to be itself. Because children, in time, do come of age, we are tempted to think that the final aim of a child is, precisely, to come of age, gaining an adults plans and projects, and this, he noted, is a confusion. We are spared such confusions when it comes to dogs, because they have no long-term plans or projects: In the familiar formula, the life in their days matters more than the days in their life.

A dog that repeatedly bites people  were not talking about a soft mouth nip but a bite that inflicts injury and, typically, scars  can be legally categorized as dangerous. (Dog bites are a main reason children end up in the E.R.) What this designation entails depends on the state or municipality. A so-called dangerous dog may be required to wear a muzzle when not confined; its owner may be required to purchase a large liability-insurance policy; or, depending on statutes and circumstances, a court may simply order the dog to be euthanized. An owner can enlist the services of a behaviorist for a dog with a history of biting, but with no guarantee of success. And an owner may be subject to criminal and civil liability for injuries inflicted by the dog  resulting in the sort of penalties and payment of damages that could interfere with whatever plans and projects an owner has for herself or her family.
Trump is being represented by two lawyers, David Schoen and Bruce Castor. Much of their argument will seemingly center on the idea that the Senate lacks the constitutional power to try a former president because, by definition, he cannot be removed. (The president was impeached by the House before he left office, and most legal scholars agree that a former president can be tried by the Senate even after leaving office.)

They also argue that Trumps falsehoods about a stolen election, delivered at a rally outside the White House before the pro-Trump mob mounted its assault, are protected by the First Amendment.

The early signs suggest that the House managers face an uphill climb in persuading enough Republican senators to vote for impeachment; they would need 17 to join the Democrats to achieve the necessary two-thirds majority. Do they stand a chance?

Frankly, it looks unlikely. In the Senate last month, 45 Republicans voted for a proposal that would dismiss the trial as unconstitutional because Trump is no longer in office. Of course, we dont know what new information will come out in the trial. There could be something thats so incendiary that Republicans  or at least 17 of them  decide to condemn Trump.

A few Republican senators have expressed openness to convicting Trump. If they do, are any of them at risk of facing a pro-Trump Republican challenge for their Senate seat anytime soon? Or censure from their state parties, like some pro-impeachment House Republicans faced?

Any Senate Republican running for re-election who voted for a conviction would likely face a primary challenge from the Trump wing of the party. Thats part of the reason we havent seen many of those senators taking such a position.

Of those whove expressed any kind of openness to a conviction, several (Senators Susan Collins, Mitt Romney and Ben Sasse) arent up for re-election in 2022. Others (Senators Richard Shelby and Rob Portman) have announced their intention not to run for re-election. Still, those senators could face other repercussions: In Nebraska, the state Republican Party is moving forward with a censure resolution against Sasse.
You dont have to look very hard at images of the Capitol riots to see them: the flags of several hate and anti-government groups from around the U.S, including the Proud Boys and Three Percenters.

But you could also look closer to home, experts say, because hate groups are operating in New Jersey, too.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks and calls out hate groups in the U.S., released its annual report on the groups last week. It found that there are at least 16 hate groups in New Jersey, including anti-Semitic Black nationalists and some of the same white supremacist groups that were seen at the Capitol, including the Proud Boys, Patriotic Front and the New Jersey European Heritage Association.

We have this presence here that I think a lot of people dont realize, said Jared Maples, who leads the states Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness.

Its not a new presence  New Jersey has had hate groups going back many years  but Maples said his office has been monitoring the movements and became concerned early last year, especially about white supremacists.

We were the very first government entity in the United States to label white supremacy as a top level terror threat, Maples said. They also listed anti-government extremists and anarchists as a medium threat level, he said, based on their ideology and actions. Were seeing this truly remarkable convergence of some of those ideologies, complementing each other in some cases. They actually united a little bit.

His office issued a supplemental threat assessment in September that discussed how a combination of factors, including COVID-19, civil unrest, disinformation and the chance of a contested election, could lead to major problems, including the possibility extremists would use election result protests to attack government buildings and law enforcement officers.

Robert Louden, a former NYPD lieutenant and professor of criminal justice and homeland security at Georgian Court University in Lakewood, said he believes President Donald Trump made hate groups and people on the fringes feel empowered and like they were getting behind a cause.

Some people that were out there thinking about this kind of stuff, going on weekend retreats to train in militia movements and things like that, feel emboldened by his rhetoric and the rhetoric of people around him, Louden said. These people are always looking, always searching for something. And some of them found it.

Trump is facing a historic second impeachment trial over accusations that he incited the Capitol riot, which the former president denies.

David Anderson, 47, and Francine Graham, 50, killed four people and stormed a kosher market in Jersey City in December of 2019.Anderson photo via AP, Graham photo via New Jersey Attorney General's Office

The effects of these hate groups were felt across New Jersey even before the unrest and rioting at the Capitol. Groups like the Proud Boys and Three Percenters showed up at rallies against COVID-19 restrictions across the state.

In December of 2019, two attackers who killed four people and stormed a kosher market in Jersey City were apparently driven by hatred of Jews and law enforcement, Maples said. He said that evidence shows they were inspired by an anti-Semitic Black Hebrew Israelite rhetoric, though they werent group members.

Its not just the groups themselves, its the people that will be inspired by those groups, by those ideologies, Maples said. In the past, law enforcement worried mostly about foreign groups, like ISIS, inspiring lone wolf attacks. But what weve seen in the last couple years is this incredibly alarming trend of those bad actors that are like lone wolves, that are being inspired, whether it be through white supremacy or the Black separatist movement, like we saw in Jersey City, he said.

The Southern Poverty Law Center reports that the number of active hate groups in New Jersey is trending downward in recent years from a high of 40 in 2015. Groups listed in past years, including neo-Nazi group the Atomwaffen Division, are no longer believed to be active. But given the frequent splintering of groups and their interest in keeping a low profile, that doesnt mean there are fewer people with those separatist views, Maples said.

Overall, weve seen an irrefutable uptick in bias and hate crime in New Jersey, in the United States, as well, and quite frankly, most of the world... Its inconceivable to say theres been a reduction in the amount of people that are adhering to these ideologies, he said. I think one of the questions we face is how we make sure were aware of what these ideologies are and ensuring that we do what we can to limit their influence in inspiring attacks.

Heres a look at the hate groups in the Southern Poverty Law Centers latest report.

New Jersey European Heritage Association

The NJEHA was among the groups who participated in the Capitol riots, according to the Anti-Defamation League. The league said the small white supremacist group was formed in 2018 that frequently spreads racist and anti-Semitic propaganda online and via fliers in Princeton and elsewhere in Central New Jersey.

Members see themselves as defenders of white European people and white culture and believe they have to fight back before the white race goes extinct, according to the ADL.

The South Jersey gym owner who refuses to keep his gym closed says that he used a megaphone with a white supremacist sticker on it because someone in the crowd handed it to him. pic.twitter.com/cQOIXmi8TE  Juan Melli (@juanmelli) May 21, 2020

Israelite School of Universal Practical Knowledge

This is a sect of the Black Hebrew Israelite movement  which is based on the idea that Black people are the true Israelites and that the Twelve Tribes of Israel are people of color, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. This group is based in Newark, the center said.

Not all Black Hebrew Israelite groups are extremists, militant or anti-Semitic, but many of those that splintered off are, including the Israelite School of Universal Practical Knowledge, according to the ADL.

A video on the Newark groups Facebook page shows them preaching on a city sidewalk that Black people are above all the races of people and singling out Chinese people who own stores nearby.

Proud Boys

The Proud Boys, launched by VICE Media co-founder Gavin McInnes, describe themselves as a fraternity of Western chauvinists who arent racist but are simply trying to fight political correctness. In reality, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, their members spout anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant rhetoric and they have been charged with violent brawls and destroying property.

In New Jersey this summer, Proud Boys showed up at rallies against COVID-19 restrictions. Canada has designated the group a terrorist entity.

Atlantic City Skins or AC Skins

The AC Skins are a racist skinhead hate group operating on the Jersey Shore, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. The ADL says many racist skinheads have neo-Nazi beliefs and trappings and listen to music that reflects that.

Over the years, several AC skins members have gone to prison for violent, racist attacks in New Jersey. In 2013, Christopher Ising of Waretown, was convicted of attacking two Middle Eastern men in Sayreville in a planned attack.

Another skinhead, Walter Anthony Dille Jr., is serving life in prison for killing a Black woman, Cindy Cade, 44, of Galloway Township, in 2009.

Israelites Saints of Christ

Like other black nationalists, members of the Israelites Saints of Christ tend to believe that separate institutions or even a separate state for black people is needed to fix the problem of racism, according to the center.

On its website, the statewide group said its mission is to wake up the so-called Blacks and Hispanic Natives to their true Biblical nationality so they can follow Gods teachings. The website for the national group said it does not condone hate or violence and does not consider itself part of the Black Hebrew Israelite movement.

Vinlanders Social Club

The ADL said the Vinlanders Social Club formed in 2003 by a handful of former members and associates of a rogue racist skinhead group, the Outlaw Hammerskins.

The sometimes violent, statewide group relished a reputation for drinking, brawling and following a racist version of Odinism, a form of ancient paganism once practiced by Vikings, the ADL said.

Patriot Front

Maples said Patriot Front is among the more active hate groups in the state. It is a white nationalist group that broke off from Vanguard America after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Patriot Front is an image-obsessed organization that rehabilitated the explicitly fascist agenda of Vanguard America with garish patriotism, the center said.

Michael Nigro | Pacific Press/Zuma Press/TNS On Aug. 12, 2017, white supremacist groups clashed with hundreds of counterprotesters during the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.TNS

Israel United in Christ

Another Black Hebrew Israelite group preaching on the streets of Newark is Israel United in Christ, which is based in the Bronx, New York, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The center said the group, like similar extreme sects of Black Israelites, thinks white people are the devil, Jews are fake Jews and members of the LGBT community are sinners.

Nation of Islam (Five chapters)

The Southern Poverty Law Center said that hate groups associated with the Nation of Islam operate in Camden, Newark, Plainfield, Trenton and Willingboro.

The Nation of Islam rejects claims that it is a hate group, but the center said it is a Black nationalist organization with a theology of innate Black superiority over whites and leaders espousing deeply racist, anti-Semitic and anti-LGBT rhetoric.

Patriotic Dissent Books

Patriotic Dissent Books is one of three distributors of racist and Nazi propaganda on the Southern Poverty Law Centers list for New Jersey. Its not clear where its located in the state or who runs it. The website features sections on Holocaust denialism and Nazism, hawking Adolf Hitlers Mein Kampf and other racist and anti-Semitic books and materials.

Vanguard Productions

The Southern Poverty Law Center says that Vanguard Productions is a hate music label that has been around for years, though its presence online is inconsistent.

Vanguard Productions sells hate music emerging from the National Socialist Black Metal scene, NSBM for short, power electronics, and other genres. In 2019, the label released at least one artist whose album explicitly promotes racist terrorism, the center said.

It has contributed to the release of nearly 100 albums since at least 2014, according to the center.

Micetrap Distribution

Micetrap Distribution LLC was one of the largest distributors of white power materials in the country, according to an ADL expert, before owner Steven Wiegand of Cherry Hill promised to shut it down when he was outed in the media in 2017.

The site released numerous racist music albums and sold hateful merchandise ranging from Hitler and AC Skins shirts to stop race mixing pins.

Its not clear whether the label or any of the business is still active, but the old website is no longer at the same address.

Maples said the public is encouraged to See Something, Say Something, and report suspicious activity to local authorities or NJOHSPs Counterterrorism Watch at 1-866-4-SAFE-NJ (1-866-472-3365) and tips@njohsp.gov.

Thank you for relying on us to provide the journalism you can trust. Please consider supporting NJ.com with a subscription.

Rebecca Everett may be reached at reverett@njadvancemedia.com.
Despite the high-risk and its capital-intensive nature, India's attraction for hydroelectric power has never ceased to exist

When a picture of the wiped out Tapovan Vishnugad Hydroelectric Project clicked by the Indian Air Force appeared on social media, the raw power of nature and the vulnerability of large hydroelectric projects could not have been starker.

Over 150 people have been missing and 28 bodies have been recovered so far after a flash flood ravaged the project to the ground on the morning of 7 February this year. Most of the dead and the missing were workers working in the project site who were caught unaware by the flash flood and swept away. The ferocity of the flood water can be gauged from the water level which was recorded at 1,388 metres at Joshimath at 11 am on the fateful day while in the 2013 flash flood, the highest flood level in the same area was at 1,385.54 metres.

Trigger Warning: This video contains visuals of damage to life and property in the wake of a natural calamity. Viewer discretion advised

The construction of the TapovanVishnugad HEP began in November 2006 and was scheduled to be commissioned in 20122013 with the first unit supposedly going online in September 2012 which however did not happen as planned.

As scientists begin searching for causes behind the tragedy, snow in the region appears to be somewhat of a catalyst from the initial assessment. According to the Environmental Assessment Report of the project prepared by NTPC for the Asian Development Bank, the project has a 3,100 square kilometres mountainous catchment area that includes the Nanda Devi Basin (20 percent of the total catchment), which drains into the Rishiganga, a major tributary of the Dhauliganga. Around 1,483 square kilometres (46 percent) of the catchment is covered in snow that extends up to Nanda Devi, the second-highest mountain in India at 7,817 metres.

Located on river Dhauliganga river in the Alaknanda basin in Uttarakhand, the NTPC-owned Tapovan Vishnugad Hydroelectric Project has four units of 130 MW each. The project which was initially scheduled for completion in 2012-13 first saw an extension up to 2016-17, followed by another one till 2019-20. Yet to be completed the project has also been affected by the inevitable cost overrun because of the delays.

On 5 April 2018, the then Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Power and New and Renewable Energy RK Singh had informed the Lok Sabha that the Tapovan Vishnugad Hydroelectric Project was already facing a time overrun of 84 months and a cost overrun of Rs 867.82 crore. The original cost was estimated to be Rs 2,978.48 crore in November 2006 which was again revised to Rs 3,846.30 crore in January 2014.

Authors Sanchit Saran Agarwal and ML Kansal, both from IIT Roorkee in their article Issues of Hydropower Development in Uttarakhand region of Indian Himalaya published in Water and Energy International in February 2017 had pointed out to a plethora of problems hitting the project ranging from financial ones caused by the powerhouse contractor to those on the technical front like delays in head race tunnel work due to late deployment of tunnel boring machine and by heavy water ingress.

Then there were many administrative issues and the flash floods in June 2013 which damaged the project infrastructure only compounded the problem. The coffer dam was also damaged in a flash flood in August 2012.

With the latest incident, the economic viability of the project itself has come under question. Earlier in the EAC, it was said, "The main quantifiable economic benefit of the project will be the value of the 2,418 GWh of incremental electricity generation added to the Northern region grid. The levelized cost of generation from the plant will be about Rs 2 ($0.0455) per kWh. The financial indicators of the project are satisfactory and the project appears to be economically viable under normal operating conditions." What the project misses now is a 'normal operating condition'.

India's appetite for hydroelectric power

Despite the high-risk and its capital-intensive nature, India's attraction for hydroelectric power has never ceased to exist. The 43rd report by the Standing Committee on Energy (2018-19) in the 16th Lok Sabha said that "the fact that against the total potential of 2,41,844 MW hydro power including pumped storage scheme, only 45,399.22 MW is actually been utilized, speaks volumes."

Terming hydropower as clean, green, sustainable, cheap and as the most preferred among the renewable sources of energy, the panel sought "optimum utilisation of our hydro potential... on a mission mode with a timeline as it has already been done in case of development of solar and other renewable sources."

At present, 2,700 TWH (Terawatt-hour) of hydropower is generated every year and hydropower forms a minimum of 50 percent of electricity production in 66 countries and at least 90 percent in 24 countries.

Collectively taken, the percentage of accidents, if the global number of dams is taken into account, is not high although it can wreak havoc in the affected areas.

As per the data from International Commission on Large Dams, "the overall failure rate of dams is around 1 percent, a time-related analysis shows that this has been reduced by a factor of four or more over the last forty years."

This has been calculated taking into account approximately 36,000 large dams listed in the World Register of Dams which have around 300 reported accidents.

Giving its rationale behind preferring hydroelectric power over thermal, the panel emphasised on the fact that the fossil fuel reserves are limited and may not last long unlike hydel which is renewable in nature. Calling it significantly cheaper in the long run, the parliamentary committee supported the investment of huge capital cost upfront while acknowledging its long gestation period. Taking a cue from a project like the Bhakra-Nangal Dam, the panel felt that hydro projects have a long useful life and don't pollute like their thermal counterparts.

At present, India is the fifth-largest producer of hydroelectric energy in the world with 197 plants capable of producing more than 25 MW.

Downstream drowns in constant fear

Whether NTPC, the public sector power firm which owns the 520 MW-Tapovan Vishnugad Hydroelectric Project, conducted studies into all possible scenarios of a dam break is not known, but the catastrophe anyway rendered all surveys meaningless. The manner in which the dam vanished in Uttarakhand has sent shivers down the spine of people particularly those living in downstream areas of functioning projects or of those under construction. There cannot be a better example than those living in the Brahmaputra Valley in Assam as they will bear the full brunt of catastrophic failures if they occur in the litany of small and massive hydropower projects planned in Arunachal Pradesh.

Although the parliamentary panel admitted serious technical and geological issues while implementing a hydropower project, there seems to be little indication of slowing down and considered them only as hindrances affecting the deadline of a project. "Geological surprises resulting from weak geology in the Young Himalayan region, lack of technology to deal with weak geology, lack of major contractors with expertise in hydropower sector, natural calamities like landslides, hill slope collapses, road blocks, flood, and cloud bursts etc. are a cause of severe setbacks in construction schedules," it said.

Fear of large-scale destruction in case of a dam failure is near permanent in the minds of people who reside downstream but the panel did little to allay apprehensions other than merely accepting that such a panic exists. "There have also been concerns of flooding in downstream areas in case of failure of large hydro dams. Various anti-dam movements, local agitation and R&R related issues indicate that wide scale apprehensions are present in the minds of local people due to construction of big dams," the report said.

Even as news reports are emerging that the Uttarakhand tragedy might be because of Landslide Lake Outburst Flood (LLOF) and not Glacial Lake Outburst Floods (GLOF), this does not negate the dangers for the hydropower projects in North East India.

There are five major river basins in Arunachal Pradesh  Kameng River Basin, Subansiri River Basin, Siang River Basin, Dibang River Basin and Lohit River Basin  and all the major rivers of the state flow into the Brahmaputra river. According to the Central Electricity Authority, Arunachal Pradesh has the potential to produce over 57,000 MW hydropower apart from the estimated potential for the development of micro/mini/small hydel projects around 1,600 MW. Under the Prime Ministers 50,000 MW hydropower initiatives, the Union Ministry of Power has identified 89 hydroelectric projects in Arunachal Pradesh.

While the hydropower potential of the Subansiri River Basin is aggregated to a massive 10,968 MW, the aggregate capacity of the Dibang River Basin is pegged at 9,973 MW followed by an aggregate capacity of 8,217.90 MW in the Lohit River Basin.

"The nature and number of glaciers in eastern Himalaya are different than the western counterpart. Typically, the glaciers in the eastern Himalayan region are in four sub-regions -- Sikkim, Bhutan, West Arunachal and East Arunachal. There are a number of not properly mapped small glaciers which have less than a five square kilometre area and possibly they are more susceptible to climate change-related fluctuations," said professor and head in the Civil Engineering Department, IIT Guwahati, Dr Chandan Mahanta.

"With the continuous enhanced glacial melting and increased precipitation intensity due to climate change in very active Himalayan seismic zone having the potential to trigger many glacial landslides, such glacial lakes pose danger to turn into GLOF events and any downstream reservoir adds to the risk and vulnerability. So, we have to be extremely cautious about planning hydro projects in the eastern Himalayan region especially where the distance between glaciers and planned dams in less. In addition, there are already established hydro power plants at Teesta and Kameng downstream of glaciers which require continuous monitoring," Mahanta said.

In a studied warning, the professor said that currently there are a lot of unknowns to successfully predict and quantify future catastrophic events.

"The need of the hour is to prepare the baseline data to understand the hydrology and geology of these glaciers. Most of these glaciers in eastern Himalaya share the administrative boundaries of China, India and Bhutan but they all come under the same hydrological boundary. It becomes extremely important and challenging to work collaboratively on these glaciers. Also, the Himalayan alpine glaciers being situated at higher elevation adds to the accessibility difficulties to carry out field-based studies," Mahanta said.

Dam break analysis

For any hydroelectric project, the dam break analysis is critical to analyse possible situations if any catastrophic damage occurs to a dam and figure out what steps can be taken to mitigate the crisis.

"This analysis is extremely important because it will assess the extent of devastation in downstream areas depending upon the height of the water wall and its reach vis-a-vis different measurements of time. Say in two hours what is the height of the water wave and how much geographical area it can cover during that period. A dam has to be planned keeping these things in mind. But no structure can prevent what we saw in Uttarakhand," said Uma Baruah, former additional chief engineer, water resource department in Assam.

According to the Union Ministry of Power, a Dam Break Analysis and Disaster Management Plan for downstream areas vulnerable to flooding in case of dam breach are mandatory when a greenfield project is undertaken or a brownfield project has been chosen for expansion.

It is however not known how much of this data is available in the public domain for each project and what kind of mitigation plans the government has in place in case there is a catastrophic event.

"What happened in Uttarakhand on Sunday is unprecedented. When a dam is being designed normally the process is that flood data say for the last 30 or 50 years is being considered to find out the PMF (Probable Maximum Flood). So when a dam is designed on the basis of that data the structure will be safe for that volume of water. But what happened in Uttarakhand no human assessment can calculate the volume of water that may be discharged in such a scenario. The discharge that the Tapovan Vishnugad Hydroelectric Project might not have occurred in the last 100 years. Had the flow of water been at the estimated level, the project would have been safe. Beyond a certain point, the supernatural power takes over unleashing a calamity," said water resources engineer Pradip Pujari.

Run of river dams aren't foolproof

Ironic though it may sound, the Government of India often gives assurances to its people living in downstream areas of various hydroelectric projects that it is using the run of river technology and would therefore not affect the lives of the people concerned. However, when China gave a similar logic behind its plans to develop a large-scale dam on the lower Yarlung Tsangpo which becomes the Brahmaputra river in India, the Centre expressed its apprehensions forthwith.

"The mega dam is proposed inside the Grand Canyon of the Yarlung Tsangpo, where the river drops by 2,000 metres in a short span, making it an ideal place to harness hydropower. This could be the worlds largest dam, providing some 300 billion kilowatt hour of power every year. There is a fear that such large-scale damming of the river would affect the water flow downstream in India and Bangladesh. Yarlung Tsangpo is called the Siang as it enters Arunachal Pradesh from China," a Down To Earth report said.

Although it is claimed that run of river dams do not drastically affect downstream areas by not depriving them of water, the technology is however not infallible. No dam can guarantee full protection from floods and if something like the scale of Tapovan Vishnugad Hydroelectric Project happens, the devastation is nothing but certain. Whether the structure is run of river or not simply does not matter in such a scenario.

"If this volume of water is released at one go no matter what the structure of the dam is, it will give away. Run of river system is fine when the reservoir operation goes on as per plan. What happened in Uttarakhand is an accident and so far as I know the project is not complete yet. Moreover, the structure was not designed to handle this enormous volume of water," said Uma Baruah, former additional chief engineer, water resource department in Assam.

According to Climate Technology Centre and Network, the "Run-of-river hydro projects use the natural downward flow of rivers and micro turbine generators to capture the kinetic energy carried by water. Typically water is taken from the river at a high point and diverted to a channel, pipeline, or pressurised pipeline (or penstock). The technology is applied best where there is a considerably fast moving river with steady seasonal water. How much electrical energy can be generated by a hydroelectric turbine depends on the flow/quantity of water, and the height from which it has fallen (the head). The higher the head, and the larger the flow, the more electricity can be generated."

In other words,"'Run-of-River Plant' means a hydro-electric plant that develops power without Live Storage as an integral part of the plant, except for Pondage and Surcharge Storage."

While it has become apparent that if nature strikes with such a massive force, the fate of the people in and around the dam site and the downstream areas will decide their destiny, there are other situations where human greed may lead to disasters.

"How much water will accumulate in the reservoir or in the catchment area can be calculated by measuring the precipitation in the area. It can be pre-determined up to what level the water will rise in the reservoir in how much time and the sluice gate can be operated accordingly. But in many cases, it so happens that the sluice gates are not opened until the last moment to produce maximum power. This ends up causing mayhem downstream. What I want to say is that the run of the river system is fine when the precipitation is normal," said Baruah.

Although the run of river scheme tends to give a sense of security to the people downstream that the river won't dry up when the rainy season is not around, floods are a totally different ball game. The Kurichu Dam in Bhutan, which is operated by India's Central Water Commission and is a run of river installation, has repeatedly devasted villages downstream in Lower Assam by suddenly releasing water in large quantities. Similar occurrences have happened in 2004, 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2016. Worse the upstream areas often experience cloud bursts during monsoon.

Similar accusations have been often levelled against public power sector firm NEEPCO which manages the 405 MW-Ranganadi Hydro Electric Plant at Yazali in Lower Subansiri district of Arunachal Pradesh. Water discharged from the plant often floods huge areas in the Lakhimpur district in Assam which falls downstream causing a massive loss to livestock and property.

There is one benefit of a run of river scheme as the project will have relatively less impact than a storage project because the submergence area will be limited. However, there is a downside to it as well.

"Since the holding capacity of a run of river project is not much it is still bound to affect some areas downstream," Pujari said.

Nature is boss

What Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote in his poem Ode to the West Wind is perhaps the perfect metaphor to describe nature as 'destroyer and preserver'. No matter what dams will be built in a classic contest between God and science where humans will excel until God decides otherwise. The tragedy at the Tapovan Vishnugad Hydroelectric Project will remain a long-lasting misfortune for the affected families but will soon turn into mere statistics with facts, fiction and foibles hidden and apparent.
The vetting of persons nominated for ministerial positions begins today, with the Minister-designate for Health, Mr Kwaku Agyemang-Manu, and the Minister-designate for National Security, Mr Albert Kan-Dapaah, appearing before the Appointments Committee of Parliament (ACP).



The decision to vet these two nominees ahead of the other 33 nominated for various positions is to ensure that the government becomes functional to carry out the business of state.



Priority will be given to some nominees, particularly for Health, because of the COVID-19 situation in the country, followed by those of National Security and Finance, the Minority Leader and Ranking member of the ACP, Mr Haruna Iddrisu, had earlier explained.



Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the sitting of the ACP will be under strict COVID-19 safety and preventive protocols.



Handover notes



This years vetting is billed to be different from previous vetting processes, as the 26-member ACP, chaired by the First Deputy Speaker, Mr Joseph Osei-Owusu, will critically scrutinise and probe deeper into the backgrounds of the nominees.



Mr Iddrisu gave an idea of what to expect when he told the Daily Graphic that: This years vetting and scrutiny will not be all about curriculum vitae or CVs.



Ahead of the exercise, the Daily Graphic is reliably informed that the committee has received the handover notes from the various ministries.



In compliance with the provisions of the Presidential (Transition) Act, 2012 (Act 845) that requires ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) to provide Parliament with their handover notes, the Table Office of Parliament has acknowledged receipt of the notes.



Vetting process requirements



Prior to the commencement of the vetting process, the Chairman of the ACP writes to the various intelligence and security agencies to elicit information on nominees as to whether they have committed a crime before.



The agencies are to issue communication privately and confidentially to the chairman, who makes it known to the committee.



The chairman also writes to institutions where nominees had worked previously to find out about their conduct with regard to how they discharged their duties at post and whether there were issues of financial malpractice against them.



Besides, the chairman also writes letters to the various educational institutions nominees attended to verify if, indeed, they attended those schools.



It must be established that the committee will be less interested in ethical issues concerning nominees, as all human beings are potentially fallible in terms of values and virtues, except where those values may impact seriously on productivity, accountability and related values that are important for purposes of performing effectively as government appointees.



Petitions against nominees may also have been received from members of the public prior to the beginning of the vetting of the nominees.



Secret balloting



When the Chairman of the ACP is satisfied with details about nominees, the vetting is done in the full glare of the public, but in-camera discussions by the committee may come up when there are sensitive matters concerning a nominee.



After the vetting of a nominee, the committee may reach consensus on his or her suitability. However, where there is no consensus, the committee members will undertake secret balloting to approve or reject him or her.



Order 172 (8) of the Standing Orders provides that where a nominee fails to get 50 per cent of the votes cast by members of the committee, he or she is rejected.



Besides, while the First Deputy Speaker, who chairs the committee, does not retain an original vote at the committee, he does vote.



Regardless of the outcome of any voting, the committee, as a microcosm of the 275-member Parliament, must make observations and recommendations to the House as to the suitability or otherwise of a nominee three days after the vetting process.



Plenary takes ultimate decision



Even if the committee intends to reject a nominee, it must spell out, in a report, its decision to reject him or her after failure to reach consensus at the committee level.



The ultimate decision on a nominee is taken at plenary. The committee will submit observations and recommendations after the vetting to plenary, which takes the decision ultimately on the person, the Majority Leader, Mr Osei Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu, told the Daily Graphic.



These nominees are to be approved by Parliament and the prior approval should come from the entirety of the House, not just the committee, he added.



Withdrawal of nominee



When there is absolute confusion about the fate of a nominee, the Executive may pick the signals and withdraw him or her.



Speaking to the Daily Graphic, the Majority Chief Whip, Mr Frank Annoh-Dompreh, expressed the hope that the Minority members of the committee would not put any impediments in the way of the Presidents nominees during the vetting.



The Minority is part of the governance structure and I do not think its intention is to impede our progress as a government or country. Lets be focused on their strengths and find out if the person nominated has the capacity to deliver, he said.









Source: graphiconline.com









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Featured Video
A research team led by Osaka University has identified the protein used by the body to convert amino acids into the enzyme cofactor cysteine tryptophylquinone, which may lead to the development of novel biological catalysts

Osaka, Japan - Investigators from the Institute of Scientific and Industrial Research at Osaka University, together with Hiroshima Institute of Technology, have announced the discovery of a new protein that allows an organism to conduct an initial and essential step in converting amino acid residues on a crosslinked polypeptide into an enzyme cofactor. This research may lead to a better understanding of the biochemistry underlying catalysis in cells.

Every living cell is constantly pulsing with an array of biochemical reactions. The rates of these reactions are controlled by special proteins called enzymes, which catalyze specific processes that would otherwise take much longer. A number of enzymes require specialized molecules called "cofactors," which can help shuttle electrons back and forth during oxidation-reduction reactions. But these cofactors themselves must be produced by the organisms, and often require the assistance of previously existing proteins.

Now, a team of scientists at Osaka University has identified a novel protein called QhpG that is essential for the biogenesis of the enzyme cofactor cysteine tryptophylquinone (CTQ). By analyzing the mass of the reaction products and determining its crystal structure, they were able to deduce the catalytic function of QhpG, which is adding two hydroxyl groups to a specific tryptophan residue within an active-site subunit QhpC of quinoheme protein amine dehydrogenase, the bacterial enzyme catalyzing the oxidation of various primary amines. The resulting dihydroxylated tryptophan and an adjacent cysteine residue are finally converted to cofactor CTQ.

However, the action of QhpG is somewhat unusual compared with other protein-modifying enzymes in that it reacts with the tryptophan residue on the QhC triply crosslinked by another enzyme QhpD in a process call post-translation modification. Tryptophan, which naturally contains rings with conjugated bonds, needs the fewest changes to become a quinone cofactor. "Although several enzymes are known to contain a quinone cofactor derived from a tryptophan residue, the mechanism involved in post-translational modification, as well as the structures of the enzymes involved in their biogenesis, remains poorly understood," lead author Toshinori Oozeki says.

The proteins were obtained by introducing plasmids with the corresponding genes into E. coli bacteria and made into crystals. X-ray diffraction data of the crystal can determine the QhpG protein structure. The team then used computer software to simulate the docking of the target molecules, the triply crosslinked polypeptide QhpC, based on the crystal structure they found for QhpG. The two post-translational modifications of QhpC are successively carried out in the modification enzyme complex QhpD-QhpG. "Our findings can be applied to development of novel bioactive peptides using enzymes that modify amino acids," senior author Toshihide Okajima says. Some of these applications include creating new enzymes for the bioremediation of toxic chemicals.

###

The article, "Functional and structural characterization of a flavoprotein monooxygenase essential for biogenesis of tryptophylquinone cofactor," was published in Nature Communications at DOI: https:/ / doi. org/ 10. 1038/ s41467-021-21200-9

About Osaka University

Osaka University was founded in 1931 as one of the seven imperial universities of Japan and is now one of Japan's leading comprehensive universities with a broad disciplinary spectrum. This strength is coupled with a singular drive for innovation that extends throughout the scientific process, from fundamental research to the creation of applied technology with positive economic impacts. Its commitment to innovation has been recognized in Japan and around the world, being named Japan's most innovative university in 2015 (Reuters 2015 Top 100) and one of the most innovative institutions in the world in 2017 (Innovative Universities and the Nature Index Innovation 2017). Now, Osaka University is leveraging its role as a Designated National University Corporation selected by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology to contribute to innovation for human welfare, sustainable development of society, and social transformation.

Website: https:/ / resou. osaka-u. ac. jp/ en

About Hiroshima Institute of Technology

At the Hiroshima Institute of Technology, we are guided by the educational approach expressed in our university's philosophy, "Education is love," and motto, "Always Walk Together with God and Serve Humanity" as we endeavor to cultivate engineers and technical experts who will make the world a better place.

The new "HIT.E2024" educational program aimed at cultivating pioneering engineers and technical experts began in April 2020. This program fosters an environment where student-driven, active and ongoing learning takes place, with students' existing expertise and confidence being complemented by stronger connections to society that will cultivate real-world practical competencies truly applicable in the society of tomorrow.

As part of the HIT.E2024 program, first year students in all departments will be required to take the "Introduction to AI and Data Science" introductory level AI and data science course. In addition, we have established the Department of Information and Communication in order to equip students capable of utilizing information to create social value. Through a curriculum carefully adapted to the changing times, this department produces the sorts of engineers and technical experts that are demanded by society and local communities.
New York, Feb. 10, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Reportlinker.com announces the release of the report "Global Marketing Analytics Software Market By Application, By Deployment Type, By Organization Size, By End User, By Region, Industry Analysis and Forecast, 2020 - 2026" - https://www.reportlinker.com/p06021891/?utm_source=GNW

And therefore, organizations are able to assess all the important methods and mediums of marketing and recognize the effectiveness of various marketing efforts. Thus, marketing analytics software products play an important role in improving the marketing strategies of companies, especially for those consumers who are connected to the digital ecosystem over online forums and social media networks and it is easy to analyze purchase-related behavior.



One of the major driving factors for the global market of a marketing analytics platform is the huge increase in the number of people enthusiastically participating in various social media activities. The large bulks of consumer-related data acquired from popular social media platforms have immense potential to uncover trends that can be used to making expansion related decisions. The increasing awareness among companies regarding the benefits of marketing analytics software and the increasing array of application areas of analytics software is also boosting the market.



By Application



Based on Application, the market is segmented into Social Media Marketing, E-mail Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Content Marketing and Others. The social media marketing segment had the largest revenue share of the market in 2019. This can be accredited to the increasing use of social media platforms in developing countries, such as Indonesia, India, and Brazil. The accessibility of affordable internet packages has helped the internet to reach places enabling marketers to understand peoples needs and opt for suitable marketing campaigns.



By Deployment Type



Based on Deployment Type, the market is segmented into Cloud and On-premise. The on-premise segment had a significant revenue share in 2019 due to control and higher security offered by on-premise datacenters. The on-premise deployment of marketing analytics software increases data accessibility for marketing teams, thus assisting to fit the results on the basis of end-users. Deployment of an on-premise analytics platform is encouraging companies to hire specialized talent, therefore high-quality output is ensured.



By Organization Size



Based on Organization Size, the market is segmented into Large Enterprises and Small & Medium Enterprises. The large enterprises segment had the largest revenue share of the market in 2019. Large enterprises practice exhaustive marketing plans and run various marketing campaigns. Online and offline campaigns are endorsed by brands and agencies across different channels to generate large data belong to ad effectiveness, consumer behavior data, and audience preferences. The usage of marketing analytics software is helpful for the marketers to gain useful insights from these data, thus make necessary modifications in their marketing campaigns, can easily track revenue growth, and improve service offerings.



By End User



Based on End User, the market is segmented into Consumer Goods, Industrial, Media & Communication, Healthcare, Retail, BFSI and Others. The media and communication segment had a significant revenue share in 2019 due to the increase in the adoption of connected ecosystems and smart devices that lead to the creation of a demanding customer base. Vendors in the media and communication sector must understand the type of content across several screens and channels and the nature of audience interaction. This data is then processed via analytics platforms for holistic, and quick views of the content-viewing patterns and preferences of the customers to strategize effective marketing campaigns.



By Region



Based on Regions, the market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Latin America, Middle East & Africa. The Asia Pacific had a significant revenue share of the market in 2019. This can be accredited to the dynamic AI development hubs in Vietnam, Singapore, and Malaysia. The new startups that offer AI-enabled analytics services are also boosting the regional market. Moreover, the swift deployment of digital government initiatives in China and Singapore has resulted in the emergence of various startups that offer services on the basis of analytics and advanced technologies thereby driving the regional market growth.



The major strategies followed by the market participants are Product Launches and Partnerships. Based on the Analysis presented in the Cardinal matrix; Accenture PLC, Adobe, Inc., IBM Corporation, and Oracle Corporation are some of the forerunners in the Marketing Analytics Software Market. Companies such as Teradata Corporation, Experian PLC, Wipro Limited, Harte Hanks, Inc., SAS Institute, Inc., and Pegasystems, Inc. are some of the key innovators in the market.



The market research report covers the analysis of key stake holders of the market. Key companies profiled in the report include Adobe, Inc., Accenture PLC, IBM Corporation, Oracle Corporation, Wipro Limited, Experian PLC, Pegasystems, Inc., Teradata Corporation, Harte Hanks, Inc., and SAS Institute, Inc.



Recent strategies deployed in Marketing Analytics Software Market



Partnerships, Collaborations, and Agreements:



Nov-2020: Adobe announced that Adjust, a Global app marketing platform, joined the Adobe Exchange Program. By integrating mobile app data along with data collected from additional touchpoints, current and prospective mutual clients can build a more complete view of the user journey across all channels enhancing their customer experience stack analytics. It empowers them to make more informed, targeted marketing decisions to maximize ROI and enhanced business outcomes.



Nov-2020: Wipro came into a partnership with ThoughtSpot, a technology company. Under this partnership, Wipro enhanced different components of ThoughtSpots search and analytics platform to assist scale feature development. This partnership focuses on enhancing the AI and Cloud ecosystem and build increase the companys footprint in the US.



Oct-2020: Adobe came into partnership with Alteryx, a leader in analytic process automation. Under this partnership, Alteryx APA integrated analytics, data science, and process automation in one self-service platform. This integration made it easier for marketers to answer any query from Adobe Experience Cloud applications and Adobe Experience Platform and integrated Adobe data with other data sources for aggregated answers and actions.



Sep-2020: SAS came into partnership with RTI International, a non-profit organization. In this partnership, RTI and SAS strengthened and enhanced services to clients by integrating subject matter expertise, advanced analytics, scientific rigor, and technical and software products into comprehensive solutions.



Jul-2020: Adobe collaborated with Medallia, a customer experience management software provider. This collaboration aimed to combine Adobes customer behavioral data with Medallias CXM software. The Adobe Experience Cloud features solutions including advertising, analytics, commerce, content management, data management, email marketing, and personalization. The Medallia Experience Cloud utilizes machine learning for customer insights.



Jul-2020: IBM collaborated with Influential, a leader in advanced social media technology. In this collaboration, IBM launched Watson Advertising Social Targeting with Influential, a new solution that harnesses artificial intelligence (AI).



Jun-2020: Harte Hanks collaborated with Flagship Biosciences, a technology-driven tissue analysis services company. Following the collaboration, Harte Hanks developed a targeted, multi-channel campaign including email, digital advertising, and content creation to help Flagship Biosciences engage priority audiences, nurture leads and connect with potential clients.



Jun-2020: SAS entered into a partnership with Microsoft. This partnership focused on enabling customers to easily operate their SAS workloads in the cloud that expanded their business solutions and uncovered critical value from their digital transformation initiatives. In this partnership, SAS integrated with Microsoft cloud solutions including Azure, Dynamics 365, Microsoft 365, and Power Platform and helped the companies shared vision to further normalize AI and analytics.



Nov-2019: Experian came into partnership with Vserv, the leading authentic data platform. The partnership aimed to provide solutions to the banking, financial services, and insurance sector to assist them to reach out to specific consumers, providing access to financial products and services, and facilitate last-mile reach.



Oct-2019: Teradata partnered with Deutsche Telekom, a German telecommunications company. This partnership aimed to strengthen Teradata and Deutsche Telekom, customers benefit from dual technology expertise and an end-to-end offering.



Aug-2019: Wipro entered into a partnership with Google Cloud. The partnership aimed to boost cloud adoption and digital transformation for global enterprises. Under this partnership, Wipro stimulated innovation for enterprises in industry verticals. Wipros industry-focused solutions, with Google Cloud technologies embedded at their core, enabling enterprises to future-proof their IT investments.



Mar-2019: Adobe formed a partnership with LinkedIn, an American business and employment-oriented online service. The partnership focused on expanding LinkedIns account-based marketing portfolio to Adobe Experience Cloud users. Adobe and Microsoft placed key data sources to populate account-based profiles in Adobe Experience Cloud that includes Marketo Engage and Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales.



Acquisition and Mergers:



Dec-2020: Adobe acquired Workfront, the leading work management platform for marketers. Together, the companies are providing Adobes customers access to a single system for supporting planning, collaboration, and governance that improves organizational productivity.



Nov-2020: Experian took over Tapad, a leading provider in digital identity resolution for marketers. This acquisition broadened Experians digital offerings for advertisers, agencies, and publishers and especially for Advanced Television, positioning Experian to take benefit of expansion in the market for digital-data advertising. The acquisition allowed Experian to assist marketers to build a more relevant experience for consumers while continuing to guard consumer privacy.



May-2020: Accenture acquired Byte Prophecy, automated insights, and big data Analytics Company. Under this acquisition, Byte Prophecy strengthened Accentures consulting and technology portfolio in areas like data foundations and advanced analytics.



Feb-2020: Wipro acquired Rational Interaction, a full-service digital customer experience (CX) company. This acquisition helped to scale Wipro Digitals portfolio for Chief Marketing Officers, connecting Rational Interactions ability to locate and organize the customer journey with Wipro Digitals ability to design and develop experiences at a global scale.



Oct-2019: Oracle signed an agreement to acquire CrowdTwist, the leading cloud-native customer loyalty solution. Following the acquisition, Oracle and CrowdTwist aim to empower organizations of all sizes to offer personalized engagement and expand loyalty and reward programs to a brands most valuable customer behaviors.



Aug-2019: Accenture signed an agreement to acquire Analytics8, a privately held Australian big data and analytics consultancy. The companies aim to provide a unique, AI-based approach to assist clients with integrated data, analytics, and automation at scale.



Mar-2019: Accenture took over Storm Digital, a privately owned boutique computer manufacturer. The acquisition expanded the presence of Accenture Interactive in the Dutch market and supported the Experience Agencys ability to build improved experiences from start to finish, by the creative strategy, activation, content creation, measurement, and optimization of media and campaigns over multiple platforms.



Oct-2018: Adobe took over the Marketo, the market leader for B2B marketing engagement. This acquisition focused on taking benefit from the combination of Adobe Experience Clouds analytics, personalization, and content portfolio with Marketos lead management. It helped companies further connect marketing engagement to revenue growth.



Mar-2018: Accenture signed an agreement to acquire Meredith Xcelerated Marketing, a marketing and advertising company. The acquisition would add superior data and analytics skills, strong content creation, and customer engagement capabilities in direct-to-consumer marketing.



Apr-2017: Oracle signed an agreement to acquire Moat, the fastest-growing digital measurement cloud company. The acquisition aimed to combine Oracle and Moat for connecting data to consumer attention for improved media experiences and business outcomes.



Jul-2016: Teradata took over Big Data Partnership, a London-based EMEA-based services provider. This acquisition aimed to widen Teradatas analytic services portfolio, improving Think Bigs expertise and offering their customers more choices, outcomes customized to their goals, and valuable knowledge transfer.



Mar-2016: Harte Hanks acquired Aleutian Consulting, Inc., a leading marketing consulting firm. The acquisition escalated Harte Hanks strategic goal of leadership in smarter customer interactions. Aleutian Consulting is operating as Harte Hanks Consulting and offers go-to-market strategy consulting services integrated with a proprietary fact-based, data-driven analytics approach.



Product Launches and Product Expansions:



Nov-2020: Teradata introduced the DataDNA, a new as-a-service offering. The new offering provides an automated view into data assets with their usage and cross-platform data lineage. DataDNA allows transparency into data assets and their usage for a better understanding of customers by the data flow and reduced data redundancies.



Oct-2020: IBM introduced three new products for increasing the suite of AI solutions for brands and publishers. The IBM Watson Advertising suite of solutions helps AI to assist clients to make informed, data-based decisions. The new products include Watson Advertising Accelerator, Watson Advertising Social Targeting with Influential, and Watson Advertising Weather Targeting.



Sep-2020: IBM launched Watson Advertising Weather Targeting, a new portfolio of triggers. These triggers developed for marketers to assist them to create the connection between weather and product sales actionable at scale without the use of third-party cookies or identifiers. This launch is the result of the collaboration of IBM and Nielsen. IBM integrated the power of weather insights from the Weather Company with Nielsens Retail Measurement Services data to obtain future reports for marketers.



Sep-2020: Oracle introduced a series of innovations within its customer data platform (CDP). The new updates to Oracle Unity allow B2B and B2C marketers to reduce costly and complex customer data integration projects by offering a single platform that integrates all customer data and allows it to be quickly and easily activated within existing business processes.



Jul-020: SAS unveiled four new service offerings, and announced updates to SAS Customer Intelligence 360. This update helped brands to escalate the value delivered through analytics with a hybrid marketing approach. The four new service portfolios included SAS 360 Digital Insight Service, SAS 360 Customer Insight Service, SAS 360 Attribution Service, and SAS 360 Data Activation Service.



Jan-2020: IBM unveiled Advertising Accelerator with Watson, a first-to-market portfolio. This portfolio uses artificial intelligence (AI) to forecast the optimal integration of creative elements that helps in driving high engagement and conversion for a given audience.



Jan-2020: Oracle launched Consumer Insights to assist retail marketers to utilize enriched customer data attributes alongside third-party consumer data from Oracle Data Cloud to discover prospective similar customers. Oracle Cloud offers data sets composed of profile-based, transaction-level data along with other demographic attributes.



Dec-2019: Experian introduced a new solution focused on helping marketers to connect with online and offline attributes and better understand their target audiences. The solution supported machine-learning algorithms and probabilistic techniques to link billions of detect signals and data elements, which includes Mobile Ad IDs (MAIDs) from a variety of internal and external sources.



Scope of the Study



Market Segments covered in the Report:



By Application



 Social Media Marketing



 E-mail Marketing



 Search Engine Marketing



 Content Marketing



 Others



By Deployment Type



 Cloud



 On-premise



By Organization Size



 Large Enterprises



 Small & Medium Enterprises



By End User



 Consumer Goods



 Industrial



 Media & Communication



 Healthcare



 Retail



 BFSI



 Others



By Geography



 North America



o US



o Canada



o Mexico



o Rest of North America



 Europe



o Germany



o UK



o France



o Russia



o Spain



o Italy



o Rest of Europe



 Asia Pacific



o China



o Japan



o India



o South Korea



o Singapore



o Malaysia



o Rest of Asia Pacific



 LAMEA



o Brazil



o Argentina



o UAE



o Saudi Arabia



o South Africa



o Nigeria



o Rest of LAMEA



Companies Profiled



 Adobe, Inc.



 Accenture PLC



 IBM Corporation



 Oracle Corporation



 Wipro Limited



 Experian PLC



 Pegasystems, Inc.



 Teradata Corporation



 Harte Hanks, Inc.



Unique Offerings



 Exhaustive coverage



 Highest number of market tables and figures



 Subscription based model available



 Guaranteed best price



 Assured post sales research support with 10% customization free

Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p06021891/?utm_source=GNW



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ReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place.



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The Big Four have enjoyed an extra boost from online shopping during the pandemic, which the discounters have missed out on

UBS says the threat to the big supermarkets from discounters is past its peak but this does not seem to have stopped ( ) from following market leader Tesco with a pledge to match s prices.

The UKs big four supermarkets have been battling the German limited assortment discounters LADs for customers since 1990 when Aldi opened its first store in Birmingham, with joining in 1994.

Their growing presence as a disruptor in the UK food retail market came to a peak in the 2010s when the Big Four's price cutting led to a long period of grocery price deflation.

But two things stood out for us, said UBS after Lidl published its first-ever public annual report for its GB operations: the LADs profitability was surprisingly low and its gearing stretched.

With a profit margin well below Aldi's and other Big Four retailers and gearing almost ten times Aldis the analysts said: The latest information from Lidl reinforces our view that the discounters are challenged in the UK and that they will likely focus on repairing their profitability and cash flows.

Research by the Swiss bank also points to increasing cannibalisation for Aldi and Lidl and high and increasing toe-stepping with the Big Four.

We believe this shows we have reached discounter maturity in the UK.

Further, online and trip consolidation work against a discounter's offer, which has helped Aldi/Lidl lose share since the beginning of the pandemic.

A key point for the analysts from recent discussions about online grocery is that addressing online comprehensively would be costly and operationally challenging for a discounter.

It is against such a background that Sainsburys has joined its larger rival Tesco in trying to press home its recent online advantage with an Aldi price-match scheme.

The UKs second largest supermarket group has promised to slash cut shop prices for on 250 items to match those on Aldi shelves and chiller cabinets, including meat, chicken, fresh fruit and vegetables and dairy.

This is the first of the strategic tweaks from new chief executive Simon Roberts, which he alluded to in November as part of a plan to drive an inflection in underlying profit momentum.

We are making great progress delivering our Food First plan and Im determined that in these tough times, we do even more to help our customers save money. Our new commitment to match Aldi prices on hundreds of our most popular products will mean our customers can be confident that they are getting the quality they expect from Sainsburys at great prices, he said.
The Supreme Court is sitting today to hear an application by former presidential candidate, Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, seeking leave to amend the election petition he filed last week challenging the victory of the incumbent President, Yoweri Kaguta Museveni.

A panel of nine Justices led by the Chief Justice, Alfonse Owiny Dollo, have convened to hear the application to be presented by Kyagulanyi's lawyers led by Medard Lubega Ssegona.

Also present in court are the respondents in the case who include; the Attorney General, William Byaruhanga, and his legal team, Museveni's lawyers Kiryowa Kiwanuka and Ebert Byenkya as well as the Electoral Commission's legal team.

According to Ssegona, the amendment of the petition is premised on the fact that after Elections, Bobi Wine was placed under house arrest which subjected him to post election detention trauma that hindered him from putting together all he wanted for his petition.

"Following the elections, Kyagulanyi was placed under house arrest. He managed to get himself released after the intervention of the High Court when he was left with only 5 days to prepare his petition. That is a disabling factor. To date, his (Bobi Wine) office of NUP remains under siege by the same respondents. They deny him the freedom, then come to court and say," Notwithstanding the unlawful activities meted out, you should not be granted leave," Mr Sseggona, Robert Kyagulanyi.

He therefore implored the Supreme Court to grant him this application in the interest of justice, equity and fairness.

Kyagulanyi further wants the Court to inquire into this election and make its pronouncement.

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"The amendment is intended to help this court to effectively adjudicate on all matters of controversy as per the petition," Mr Ssegona added.

However, Mr Museveni's lawyer Ebert Byenkya objected to the application reasoning that the rules cited by Mr Kyagulanyi's lawyer, Medard Ssegona are untenable.

He asked the court to dismiss the application arguing that it is out of the specified 15 days' deadline stipulated in the law.

According to Byenkya, presidential election petitions are guided by a time table with strict time frames and amendment is not part of the events for such a petition.

"The first is that the determination of presidential elections petitions does not provide for amendments. In fact, it does not allow amendments," Mr Museveni's lawyer Ebert Byenkya told court Tuesday before the Chief Justice Alfonse Owiny-Dollo adjourned the hearing for a short break.

Earlier, the Chief Justice advised the parties involved to limit the number of their lawyers to three during hearing of any such application so as to observe Covid-19 SOPs.

You are free to come with any number of lawyers you want once we start hearing the main petition because we'll have enough space. However, limit the number for this kind of arrangement to three," he said.


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Mumbai, Feb 10 : Bengali star Rituparna Sengupta rues the fact that her bucket list wish of working with Yash Chopra will never be fulfilled, but she sure hopes to get a chance to work with Rajkumar Hirani and Sanjay Leela Bhansali.

"Like everyone else, I have grown up watching those wonderful love stories and iconic films of Yash Chopra. So when I became an actress, it was on my bucket list to work with Yash ji. Unfortunately, that will not happen because he is no more, but it would be great if I get a chance to work in his brand of cinema. I would also love to work with Sanjay Leela Bhansali, Rajkumar Hirani and Gulzar saab," Rituparna told IANS.

Being an actress in the Bengali film industry for over 30 years, she says her achievements have given her the confidence to take up new challenges.

"I think my success has given me the courage to take more challenges. I always feel I am a fighter and a dedicated actor who is looking for a chance to explore those unexplored areas of performance. That is why I am a constant learner. This is my way to become a better version of myself," shared the actress.

Rituparna is shooting for the film "Antardrishti", the directorial debut of the veteran Bollywood cinematographer Kabir Lal. The film is an Indian adaptation of the Spanish film "Julia's Eye", and is being made in four languages -- Marathi, Bengali, Tamil and Telugu.
Various opposition parties, including the TMC, SP, RJD, DMK, AAP, CPI(M) and CPI, raised strong objections in the on Wednesday to a bill for developing the major ports in the country and alleged that it is aimed at privatising the ports and diluting the powers of the states on land use.

However, the BJD, JD(U), YSRCP supported the Major Port Authorities Bill, 2020, saying it is a welcome move to expand the port development infrastructure.

Opposing the bill, Sukhendu Sekhar Ray of the Trinamool Congress (TMC) said there is nothing in it as it follows the Singapore model of corporatisation.

"This is the first stage of corporatisation and the next step in the offing is privatisation. Parliament is being taken for a ride.... I strongly oppose this bill on behalf of the TMC," he said, participating in the debate on the bill.

Ray said the recommendations of the Standing Committee in this regard have not been taken into consideration.

He said according to the bill, a state government will have no authority in either the sale of land or change of land use, even though the land belongs to the state.

"The powers of the state government have been diluted as it has no say on land," Ray said, adding that the land should go back to the state or the profits from its sale proceeds should go to it.

P Wilson of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) alleged that the bill has only been brought to serve the interests of private players and reduce the state governments' say in the development of ports.

On a provision in the bill that says the port's master plan will overtake the state's master plan, he said, "the master plan has been hijacked".

Wilson also sought that technical members be given a place in the running of ports. He also alleged that the bill will lead to the mushrooming of private ports, which will come up like "bus stands", and this will affect the flora and fauna of the area.

Banda Prakash of the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) urged the government not to privatise ports as it is putting even the profit-making Shipping Corporation of India up "on sale".

"I request the government to withdraw its stand of selling the ports of the country," he said.

Opposing the bill, Ram Gopal Yadav of the Samajwadi Party (SP) alleged that the government is trying to sell the assets of the country and this is the intention of the bill.

He cited the example of the Varanasi airport, where an amount of Rs 800 crore was invested for its development and it is now being sold to private players. "Please do not put the country's assets to be sold to private players for peanuts," he said.

Elamaran Kareem of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) alleged that the bill proposes to convert the port authority into a corporate entity and the assets of the ports will be sold off to private players.

"The bill aims to convert the port authority into a corporate entity and this is only an interim arrangement as the aim ultimately is to privatise them," he said.

Kareem also alleged that "the safety and security is under threat through this bill" and said there should be no compromise on such issues.

Ram Chandra Prasad Singh of the Janata Dal (United) supported the bill but demanded that the states should have a representative in the Port Authority.

He also demanded that the land-locked states be given land to develop their own ports and a policy in this regard formed.

Supporting the bill, Subhash Chandra Singh of the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) called for utilisation of the CSR funds for the creation of infrastructure in the ports and around and asked where these funds have gone. He cited the example of the Paradip port in this regard.

Ayodhya Rami Reddy of the YSRCP welcomed the bill, saying it will help create the infrastructure needed to expand the ports. It would also help develop the major and minor ports in the country, he said, while hailing the proposal for integrated development around the ports.

Manoj Jha of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), Binoy Viswam of the Communist Party of India (CPI) and Narain Dass Gupta of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) also opposed the bill.

(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.)
WALNUT CREEK, CA / ACCESSWIRE / February 10, 2021 / Olive, a mechanical breakdown coverage provider based in Chicago, IL, has seen an exponential increase in sales of "Extended Warranties" for Toyota vehicles during this quarter. Olive, through www.GoGetOlive.com, recently adopted a new approach to the sale and offering of vehicle service contracts and mechanical breakdown insurance (commonly referred to as "extended warranties"), which involves bringing the entire transaction online and removing the waiting period for coverage. The use of state-of-the-art insurtech algorithms guarantees that Olive can provide the lowest possible prices.

Customers have been very pleased with the new coverage platform and product. As one customer on Facebook shares, "All I can say is you folks are a breath of fresh air in this industry. Thanks for going the extra mile and being innovative and not constantly combative."

The economy has led to a number of changes in how people purchase and pay for new or used vehicles, and this has made it necessary for dealerships to update a lot of their systems. "If you bought a used car, truck or SUV, you probably have payments but no warranty at all. Extended Warranties for used cars have become more critical as people keep their vehicles longer with longer payment terms," says Dan Stratford, the Digital Strategist for Olive. "As the economy has become less stable, people are keeping their cars longer and looking for ways to avoid expensive repair costs. They want to feel the security they felt when they purchased a new car under warranty."

An Olive extended warranty for Toyota vehicles offers a number of advantages. First, an extended warranty ensures that the cost of repairs is kept very low. Toyotas are well known for being very well built, reliable vehicles that one can always count on to get the job done, but they still do break down every now and then. When this happens, the cost of getting one's vehicle repaired can be very high, which is where an extended warranty makes all the difference. Olive is out to change how Toyota drivers think about mechanical breakdown protection beyond the basic extended warranties pushed by robocalls and other less than reputable actors. Olive's mechanical breakdown coverage provides Toyota owners with a reliable and affordable way to keep their vehicles in working order.

Online transactions make it possible to access all of the advantages Olive's mechanical breakdown coverage programs have to offer. "In the traditional world of financial services, moving to online transactions has been a long time coming," said Stratford. "Having online quotes and next day coverage is a huge milestone for consumer choice, transparency, and touchless transactions especially now in this new world we've found ourselves in where it is often better to do everything online."

Olive's goal is to prevent breakdowns from becoming any worse than they already are. Breakdowns are a major inconvenience to begin with, and the cost of towing and repairs just makes it so every breakdown can potentially become a very big financial issue. Olive coverage protects every part of the client's vehicle which provides peace of mind to vehicle owners. Olive's extended warranties have no yearly mileage restrictions up to 185,000 miles, something which no other insurer can match.

The company is proud of its 5-Star Google and A+ Better Business Bureau (BBB) ratings and sees these as proof that their coverage is something vehicle owners can rely on. Olive has received a number of 5-Star reviews from pleased clients as well. David D, who recently purchased coverage from the company, shares, "I purchased Olive extended car warranty on 10/9/20. The agent that helped me sign up was Scott. Scott was really professional about his job and customer service. Scott explained all the details about getting my car insured with Olive. Olive needs more sales agents like Scott. Olive CEO, give this guy a reward with pay raise or a higher position in your company. Thanks, Olive, and also thanks to Scott."

For more information on Olive extended auto warranties for Toyota vehicles, visit www.GoGetOlive.com today. Olive is always looking for ways to take the stress out of vehicle ownership and would be more than happy to help find a coverage solution for any and all Toyota vehicle owners, regardless of the financial situation of the owner.

Olive markets Mechanical Breakdown Insurance ("MBI") in the state of California only. Olive markets Vehicle Service Contracts ("VSCs") in all states excluding California, Florida and Washington. MBI is provided by QBE Insurance Corporation, New York, New York, and bound by Repair Ventures Insurance Solutions a licensed property and casualty broker, license # 0E50834. VSCs are provided by QBE Administration Services, Inc., Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. Terms and conditions apply. Please visit https://gogetolive.com/terms-of-service/ for further details.

"TOYOTA is a registered trademark of Toyota Jidosha Kabushiki Kaisha TA Toyota Motor Corporation. References to Toyota in this press release do not imply the sponsorship or endorsement of 'Olive' by Toyota or an affiliation between 'Olive' and Toyota."





Related: Anaheim Ducks Announce New Partnership With Olive (GoGetOlive.com).

For more information about Olive, contact the company here:

Olive

Dan Stratford

(925) 412-3141

dan.stratford@gogetolive.com

1981 N. Broadway Suite 210A

Walnut Creek, CA, 94596

SOURCE: Olive

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/629106/Olive-Sees-Exponential-Growth-In-Toyota-Extended-Warranties-Sold-This-Quarter


Love them, hate them ignore them at national peril, is the babu guarantee and Dilips belief. Share significant babu escapades dilipcherian@hotmail.com

The Nitish Kumar government in Bihar is moving ahead with its announcement last year of retiring identified inefficient employees

Keralas chief secretary Vishwas Mehta came under fire from the National Green Tribunal (NGT) over the continued ineffective solid waste management in Kochi.

According to sources, the tribunal made scathing remarks against the state government while criticising the affidavit filed by Mehta and threatened to prosecute officers responsible for ensuring that parameters of environmental safety are met. The tribunal lamented that the chief secretarys affidavit did not show any effective action being taken on the ground, despite several directives issued in the past two years.

The tribunal, quoting a report by the State Pollution Control Board, noted that the municipal authorities in Kochi were continuing unauthorised operations and were yet to start work for bio-mining.

The directive came while the tribunal was hearing a case seeking direction to take effective steps for infrastructure development for collection, storage, segregation and disposal of tonnes of waste, termed legacy waste, that has accumulated over the years in Kochis Brahmapuram area.

Ironically, the adverse comments come at a time when the state government claims that it is strictly following the green protocol and chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan declared more than 11,000 government offices and public sector undertakings as green on Republic Day!

Nitish to weed out Home deadwood

The Nitish Kumar government in Bihar is moving ahead with its announcement last year of retiring identified inefficient employees. The state home department headed by the chief minister has set up high-level committees to implement the order.

According to sources, a committee headed by additional chief secretary of the home department Amir Subhani will deal with Group A employees of the department. The panel also includes special secretary Vikash Vaibhav, among others. The other committee will be headed by secretary of the home department, K. Senthil Kumar, and include joint secretary Bimlesh Kumar Jha, among other senior officials. It has been tasked with identifying the deadwood from among Group B, C and D employees. Both committees will meet every year in June and December to consider the proposals to retire identified officers. Further, the department has instructed all offices and directorates under it to set up such panels at their level.

Previously, in 2017, the state government had announced to compulsorily retire non-performing education department officials, school headmasters and teachers after disappointing Matric and intermediate exams. But the decision was not followed through, say sources. Will it be any different this time?

Return of the prodigal?

Is Shah Faesal, the former IAS officer from Jammu and Kashmir, contemplating a return to the civil service that he had quit in protest against unabated killings in Kashmir? A tweet by the ex-babu, who was the first Kashmiri to top the civil service exam, in response to Prime Minister Narendra Modis Mann Ki Baat program seems to hint at a change of mind, say some observers. In his tweet, Faesal praised the PMs radio programme and wrote that communication can build solidarities

The buzz around Faesals plans has only grown, especially when he quit Jammu and Kashmir Peoples Movement, the political party he had set up barely a few months later.

Interestingly, his resignation as an IAS officer in January 2019 has been kept in abeyance all this while. The government has not accepted it, pending the investigation into some of his social media posts.

That it was never accepted means that the door is still open for him to rejoin the IAS. Watch this space for updates!
Up to three inches of snow expected Wednesday into Thursday could be followed by ice and more snow this weekend, forecasters said.

The latest round of storms could strike the midstate between 8 p.m. Wednesday and noon Thursday, according to AccuWeather. Forecasters said anywhere from one to three inches of snow could accumulate.

The National Weather Service has issued a winter weather advisory from Wednesday night to Thursday morning, warning residents of potentially dangerous driving conditions. Forecasters said the heaviest snow is expected near and to the south of the Interstate 81 corridor.

The weather advisory is in effect from 9 p.m. Wednesday to 8 a.m. Thursday in Dauphin, Lebanon, Cumberland, Perry, Adams, York, Lancaster, Juniata and Mifflin counties.

This wont be the last of inclement weather central Pennsylvania sees this week, forecasters said.

Between 0.15 and 0.25 of an inch of ice is possible between 7 p.m. Saturday and 7 a.m. Sunday, AccuWeather said. According to the NWS, more snow could land Saturday night.

Although the second half of the weekend will be sunny and free of snow, dont expect it to be warm, forecasters said. Temperatures are expected to peak near 30 Saturday and 36 Sunday.

READ MORE: Heres how much more snow could fall in Pennsylvania this week: interactive map
EAST LANSING, Mich. - The 1918 influenza pandemic provides a cautionary tale for what the future may hold for COVID-19, says a Michigan State University researcher.

After a decade studying a flu virus that killed approximately 15,000 Michigan residents, Siddharth Chandra, a professor in MSU's James Madison College, saw his research come to life as he watched the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"It was so surreal," said Chandra, who has a courtesy appointment in epidemiology and biostatistics. "All of a sudden, I was living my research."

Chandra's research is published in the American Journal of Public Health with co-authors Julia Christensen, a graduate of James Madison College; Madhur Chandra, Senior Community Epidemiologist with the Ingham County Health Department and graduate of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at MSU; and Nigel Paneth, professor of epidemiology and biostatistics and pediatrics at MSU.

Using influenza infection and mortality data on Michigan from 1918-1920, Chandra identified four distinct waves. The first large peak was in March 1918. "After a second spike in cases in October 1918, the governor instituted a statewide ban on public gatherings," Chandra said. "Much like the restrictions that were put in place during the COVID-19 pandemic."

After three weeks, the number of cases decreased and the ban was lifted, which led to another peak in December 1918. "The ban didn't stop the spread of the flu. It just delayed the spike in cases," he said.

Chandra mapped the data showing the peaks and spikes in cases from October 1918 and December 1918 and tracked flu virus case growth by county over time. In October, counties in the southern part of the state and near the Mackinac Straits had the highest numbers but by December, the highest numbers of cases were in the heart of the state.

The most surprising piece of data came 18 months later in February 1920, when a statewide explosion of cases created a massive spike even larger than the one in October 1918. For Chandra, it is an educated guess as to the reasons for this delayed increase.

"Assuming it's the same influenza virus, World War I ended in 1918 and the men were coming home to their families," he said. "We had a mobile agent that brought the virus home to infect family members, which would explain the increase in cases among children and the elderly."

Unfortunately, there is not a way to confirm this, Chandra noted. "We would need samples from patients in 1920 from across the state. Then, we would need to compare those with samples from patients in 1918 from across the state, and that's not likely to happen."

The weather may have also been a factor since cool temperatures with low humidity likely provided optimal conditions for the virus to live and spread. Another factor that played a role was the absence of a vaccine.

"In 1918, there was no hope for a vaccine. In 2021, we have a vaccine available," he said.

One of the key insights from the 1918 pandemic that can inform the public health response to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic is the number of people who are susceptible to the virus. Which means that it is possible that a spike like the February 1920 one will occur in late 2021 or early 2022.

"So many people will remain susceptible until they get vaccinated," Chandra said. "Bad things can still happen a year or two from now even if we see a decrease in the number of cases now. We still have over 200 million people walking around who are susceptible to the virus, including myself."

###

(Note for media: Please include the following link to the study in all online media coverage: https:/ / ajph. aphapublications. org/ doi/ 10. 2105/ AJPH. 2020. 305969 )

Michigan State University has been working to advance the common good in uncommon ways for more than 165 years. One of the top research universities in the world, MSU focuses its vast resources on creating solutions to some of the world's most pressing challenges, while providing life-changing opportunities to a diverse and inclusive academic community through more than 200 programs of study in 17 degree-granting colleges.

For MSU news on the Web, go to MSUToday. Follow MSU News on Twitter at twitter.com/MSUnews
Filling the gap

Previously called Missing Pieces, Lost and Found and now David Lomas Investigates, this New Zealand produced documentary series not only helps people find missing relatives across the globe, but uncovers cultural identities and lost family heritage, helping people fill in the gaps they know theyve had, often for decades.

One show last year had me particularly emotional when a 35-year-old woman discovered the story of the mother she was separated from as a baby. Tragically the French mother had committed suicide 10 years previously after being unable to cope with the grief of not being able to find her daughter for all those years. Her death had also led to the breakdown of wider family relationships in France.

The meeting of the NZ-raised daughter with her long-lost French family was deeply emotional for all sides and ultimately brought significant healing to the wider family in unimaginable ways. What was lost was found, what was broken was healed. The gap had been filled.

I cried like a baby. For a long time. Fortunately it was dark and I hadnt walked my dog yet so a long meander around our neighbourhood was required to help me find some space to reflect.

Finding identity

At its heart, this TV series and its international colleagues (Ive watched both the Australian and British equivalents) is all about people finding a missing part of their lives that just cant be filled in any other way.

Human nature would appear to reveal that the strong desire to know who we are and where we come from is somewhat insatiable, a cry of our heart. I would go as far as to say that we are designed to know our identity, and on the flip side our designer wants us to know who we are.

Psalm 139

Perhaps this is why Psalm chapter 139 is one of the most well-known psalms in the Bible. It provides us with the pathway to finding connection we crave; it provides the most comprehensive answer to the question, Who am I?

The psalmist writes in Psalm chapter 139, verses 13-14, For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mothers womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful,I know that full well. Combined with all the other verses of this psalm, the most beautiful picture of our creation and identity can be drawn. While we have earthly parents, we ultimately have a heavenly creator, a Father, who knew us before we even knew ourselves.

Completeness

David Lomas Investigates is a wonderful celebration of life, but its stories are often mired in tragedy because of the broken nature of humanity and the reality of adversity. Not every story has a happy ending.

Psalm chapter 139 does provide us with a pathway to a happy ending, every single time, should we choose to embrace the bigger picture of who we are and where we come from. I know from my own experience and the experiences of those Ive ministered to, that finding our identity as a son or daughter of the living God makes the most profound difference to our lives.

Knowing our identity in God is the most significant way to find the kind of life in this world that Jesus said we can have. In John chapter 10, verse 10 Jesus says, I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full. Note the life to the full part; this is the deep sense of knowing who we are despite the imperfections that surround us in this world.

The toolbox

Because of what I see and experience in this world I believe that the ability to find our identity is perhaps the most significant tool we can have in our evangelism toolbox. Just watch the end of David Lomas Investigates to see the difference it makes in this world, let alone the difference finding our bigger identity makes to our eternity.

You Say by Lauren Daigle

Artist Lauren Daigle made a significant contribution to our understanding of our identity in God when she released her song, You Say, in July 2018. The lyrics speak directly to the issue of identity, with the chorus summing it up:

You say I am loved when I cant feel a thing

You say I am strong when I think I am weak

You say I am held when I am falling short

When I dont belong, oh You say that I am Yours

And I believe, oh I believe

What You say of me

I believe.

When we know, in the deepest part of our heart, that that we are loved, that we are strong, that we are held and that we belong to God, this can be the most life-transforming and comforting emotion that we have the opportunity to embrace. I should know, I have had to learn this lesson over many years, and am still learning it.

Summary

One of the most sung songs in the world aptly summarises our ability to end the search for our identity when we open our heart to God. John Newton wrote in his 1779 poem, I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see.

May we know the peace that passes human understanding that comes with knowing who we are and where we come from, and may we take that message to all of those seeking to find what they have lost.
Kids want to fish? You don't know how yourself? Here's a little help
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Motorists rolled up to have Covid jabs through their car windows yesterday  as Boris Johnson appealed to the remaining two million most vulnerable Britons to get vaccinated.

Drive-through centres have been set up to help the UK meet its target of inoculating 15 million people by Monday.

But while 13 million in the most vulnerable categories have had the jab, the Prime Minister warned there was still a group numbering roughly twice the population of Birmingham who had yet to receive one.

He said: 'With less than a week to go until the target date of Monday the 15th, there's no doubt we've made great strides  with just over 13 million people now vaccinated in our United Kingdom, including one in four adults in England, over 90 per cent of everyone over 75 and over 90 per cent of eligible residents of care homes for the elderly.'

Speaking directly to the two million vulnerable Britons yet to be vaccinated, he said: 'Now is the moment to do it.'

He added: 'I think the people of this country absolutely understand the importance of protecting the most vulnerable first, and that's what we are doing.'

Drive-through centres, which allow motorists to be vaccinated without leaving their cars, have been set up in St Albans, Hertfordshire, and at Queen Margaret University near Edinburgh, where Mary Foster was one of the first to have the jab yesterday.

The retired home help worker said: 'I think this is great, I'm really excited and I think people who don't want to be vaccinated should think again.'

In other coronavirus developments:

Holiday shambles as Matt Hancock admits he has already booked a summer break in Cornwall - just hours after Grant Shapps said Britons should NOT plan trips here OR abroad this year (while Boris Johnson dodged the question entirely);

Britain's winter Covid wave continues to shrink: Cases fall by a third in a week with 13,013 infections and deaths drop by a quarter with 1,001 more victims;

Britain will start getting out of Covid lockdown in late May if it follows Israel's roadmap for beating the virus;

NHS begins trial of stimulant to boost blood flow in lungs and aid recovery from Covid-19 - as study reveals steroid dexamethasone has saved 12,000 lives in the UK;

Towie star James Lock claims Priti Patel 'incited hate' by slamming influencers who fled lockdown Britain as he says he has received death threats in Dubai.

Motorists roll up to have Covid jabs through their car windows yesterday  as Boris Johnson appealed to the remaining two million most vulnerable Britons to get vaccinated. Pictured: A healthworker administers a vaccine at a drive-through centre at Queen Margaret University near Edinburgh on Wednesday

Drive-through centres have been set up to help the UK meet its target of inoculating 15 million people by Monday. Pictured: A drive-through centre at Queen Margaret University near Edinburgh on Wednesday

The centre at the university can vaccinate about 720 people a day, seven days a week.

It comes as Britain yesterday announced 13,013 more coronavirus cases and 1,001 deaths, as the winter wave continues to be brought under control by draconian lockdown restrictions.

Wednesday's Covid infections are down by a third on last week's figure, while fatalities have shrunk by a quarter compared to the tally a week ago.

The number of Covid patients in hospital has also fallen by more than a fifth in a week, with just over 26,000 beds now taken up by sufferers compared to almost 40,000 at the peak last month.

Meanwhile, Department of Health officials revealed another 415,000 vaccines had been administered on Tuesday, with more than 13million Brits having now received their first dose. With five days still to go, Britain is now cruising towards the Government's target of injecting the 15million most vulnerable by February 15.

With all the key metrics now pointing towards a quickly shrinking epidemic, and with the vaccine rollout steaming ahead, pressure is mounting on the Government to start dropping the most brutal lockdown curbs.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson has promised to lay out a 'route map' out of the national shutdown on February 22, with schools expected to be the first to go back sometime after March 8.

Figures also show Britain has dished out 10 per cent of the entire world's coronavirus vaccines and more than France, Germany, Italy and Spain combined.

Drive-through centres, which allow motorists to be vaccinated without leaving their cars, have been set up in St Albans, Hertfordshire, and at Queen Margaret University (pictured) near Edinburgh

The centre near Edinburgh at the university can vaccinate about 720 people a day, seven days a week

Despite its small population in the global standings, the UK has administered a whopping 13.5million out of 146million doses given out internationally  almost 10 per cent of all the world's jabs so far.

According to the statistics compiled by the Oxford University-based research platform Our World in Data, this puts Britain in third place behind only the US and China, which have far larger populations.

The figures also show more doses have been dished out here than in France, Germany, Italy and Spain combined. European commission president Ursula von der Leyen yesterday issued a grovelling apology for the EU's jab shambles, admitting the bloc acted 'late' and was 'over-confident'.

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair yesterday said the speed with which Covid jabs were developed and rolled out was an 'inspiration' but added that it was 'unfair' poorer countries were missing out due to a lack of a global strategy.

Number 10's pandemic response has come in for widespread criticism on the whole, although ministers have been roundly praised for their vaccine rollout being one step ahead of the rest of the world. Ministers spent more than 6billion developing and procuring the jabs  a fraction of the 200-plus billion spent on supporting businesses during the economically-crippling lockdowns  despite no guarantees any would work.

But critics have warned against getting too complacent as latest figures from the Department of Health suggest the Covid drive has plateaued. The number of doses given to Brits on Monday rose by just one per cent compared to the same time last week, hovering at around 350,000.

Another 414,973 Britons received their first or second dose of the Covid-19 vaccine yesterday, figures published yesterday reveal, up 10 per cent on the 376,922 jabs recorded the same time last week.

But this was a marked slowdown from the week before when the number administered jumped by 20 per cent.

Boris Johnson last night suggested summer holidays for Britons who have had both Covid jabs are on the horizon.

The top 30 countries where the highest number of doses of the Covid-19 vaccine have been administered, with the UK in third place. The data was from Our World in Data, which monitors the vaccines rollout across the world

And this is the number of doses administered as a percentage of the population covered. Experts have said to achieve 'herd immunity', where the virus stops spreading', around 85 per cent need to be vaccinated. The data is from Our World in Data

The Prime Minister said the Government was looking at all kinds of apps and all kinds of possibilities for unlocking travel as the vaccine rollout is ramped up.

He confirmed ministers are in talks with other countries and the aviation industry about an international certification system.

But he added: When were in that different world, which I hope will be as soon as possible, then all kinds of apps and all kinds of possibilities will be open to us.

However, the row over travel and holidays look set to continue after advice from the Government descended into farce last night as ministers bickered over whether it is safe to book a summer break in the UK this year.

Transport Secretary Grant Shapps sparked a furious backlash after declaring yesterday morning: People shouldnt be booking holidays right now  not domestically or internationally.

As anger mounted, Downing Street appeared to distance itself from Mr Shapps at lunchtime, saying it was a choice for individuals.

But Boris Johnson, who earlier this month said he was optimistic about the prospect of summer holidays, appeared to change his mind yesterday.

The Prime Minister told a Downing Street press conference it was just too early for people to be certain about what we will be able to do this summer.

On a chaotic day, Health Secretary Matt Hancock then revealed to Tory MPs he has already booked a holiday in Cornwall this summer. Whitehall sources told the Mail that, despite the cautious message from the PM, Chancellor Rishi Sunak and Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden are working on packages to promote holidays in the UK.

One insider said: We are going to strain every sinew to let people have a holiday this summer.

Another senior Tory said: We are in danger of making holiday a dirty word when it should be exactly the sort of aspirational thing we are celebrating.'

Britain has made 'great strides' in vaccination programme, Boris Johnson says as UK has dished out 10% of all the world's Covid vaccines and reached 13million people  but he urges over-70s to come forward with 2m left to hit Monday's target

BySam Blanchard Deputy Health Editorand Luke Andrewsand Emily Webber For Mailonline

Britain has made 'great strides' in its vaccination programme, Boris Johnson said yesterday as he urged all unvaccinated over-70s to come forward so the UK can hit its target to reach 15million people by Monday.

Despite its small population in the global standings, the UK has administered a whopping 13.5million out of 146million doses given out internationally  almost 10 per cent of all the world's jabs so far.

The Prime Minister, speaking from a Downing Street press conference last night, said: 'With less than a week to go until the target date of Monday the 15th, there's no doubt weve made great strides, with just over 13 million people now vaccinated in our United Kingdom, including one in four adults in England, over 90 per cent of everyone over 75 and over 90 per cent of eligible residents of care homes for the elderly.

'But that still leaves nearly two million people  a population roughly twice the size of Birmingham  that we still hope to reach. Now is the moment to do it.'

According to the statistics compiled by the Oxford University-based research platform Our World in Data, this puts Britain in third place behind only the US and China, which have far larger populations.

The figures also show more doses have been dished out here than in France, Germany, Italy and Spain combined. European commission president Ursula von der Leyen yesterday issued a grovelling apology for the EU's jab shambles, admitting the bloc acted 'late' and was 'over-confident'.

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair yesterday said the speed with which Covid jabs were developed and rolled out was an 'inspiration' but added that it was 'unfair' poorer countries were missing out due to a lack of a global strategy.

Boris Johnson said at a Downing Street press conference tonight that Britain had made 'great strides' in its vaccination programme but that there were still 2million more people to reach by next Monday to hit the February 15 target of 15million

Number 10's pandemic response has come in for widespread criticism on the whole, although ministers have been roundly praised for their vaccine rollout being one step ahead of the rest of the world. Ministers spent more than 6billion developing and procuring the jabs  a fraction of the 200-plus billion spent on supporting businesses during the economically-crippling lockdowns  despite no guarantees any would work.

Ursula von der Leyen issues grovelling apology over EU's vaccine shambles Ursula von der Leyen yesterday issued a grovelling apology for the EU's vaccine shambles, admitting the bloc acted 'late' and was 'over-confident'. The European commission president also conceded its rollout was still not 'where we want to be' in a humbling speech in Brussels. However, she defended trying to thrash out at unified approach for the 27 member states, even though she has likened it to a 'tanker' compared to the UK's 'speedboat'. UK government figures last night showed 12,646,486 people have now received initial jabs, with another 516,392 having had their booster. By contrast the EU as a whole has administered fewer than 18million doses to its population of around 450million people. Globally there are around 4.6million jabs being given every day, with around one in 10 of those happening in the UK. Speaking at an EU Parliament plenary session, Ms von der Leyen said: 'We are still not where we want to be. We were late to authorise. 'We were too optimistic when it came to massive production and perhaps we were too confident that, what we ordered, would actually be delivered on time.' Advertisement

The UK Vaccines Taskforce, run by venture capitalist Kate Bingham, played a key role in secure huge numbers of doses of vaccines ahead of international competition. And the running of the Covid vaccine programme through the NHS, which operates a successful national flu vaccination scheme every year, has smoothed over the rollout.

But critics have warned against getting too complacent as latest figures from the Department of Health suggest the Covid drive has plateaued. The number of doses given to Brits on Monday rose by just one per cent compared to the same time last week, hovering at around 350,000.

The Adam Smith Institute think-tank told MailOnline that while the programme had been a success so far, there was 'no excuse' for blips, because 'the virus doesn't sleep - the virus keeps spreading'. Despite concerns, Britain is within touching distance of delivering on its goal of vaccinating 15million of the most vulnerable by mid-February, which paves the way for the UK become one of the first countries to drop lockdowns completely.

Another 414,973 Britons received their first or second dose of the Covid-19 vaccine yesterday, figures published yesterday reveal, up 10 per cent on the 376,922 jabs recorded the same time last week. But this was a marked slowdown from the week before when the number administered jumped by 20 per cent.

It comes Department of Health figures yesterday suggested the UK's second wave is still shrinking. They announced another 13,013 cases, 32 per cent lower than the same time last week. A further 1,001 deaths from the virus were also reported, 24 per cent lower than last Wednesday. This took the total number of Covid deaths to 114,851.

Speaking at last night's Downing Street briefing, chief scientist Sir Patrick Vallance said it was 'really critical' that everyone who is offered a vaccine accepted it.

Boris Johnson said that if the speed of vaccination the supplies can be kept consistent, the Government planned to have reached everyone over the age of 55 by the end of April.

James Lawson, author of the study Worth a Shot: Accelerating Covid-19 Vaccinations, and fellow at think-tank the Adam Smith Institute, yesterday urged ministers not to be complacent because of early success.

'While the Government has made significant progress since January in boosting the amount of daily doses we can't be complacent,' he told MailOnline.

'We need to keep up the pace, keep accelerating and ultimately should be aiming to even double or triple the number of doses that we are doing compared with yesterday.

'There is ultimately no excuse for slowing down. We can't use the excuse of weekends and weather because ultimately the virus doesn't stop for weekends, the virus doesn't sleep - the virus keeps spreading so we do need to accelerate.'

He added that ministers must make the most of the time before second doses need to be delivered, which will mean vaccinators can reach fewer Britons with first doses every day.

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair (left) said the speed with which Covid jabs were developed and rolled out was an 'inspiration' but added that poorer countries were missing out due to a lack of a global strategy. Ursula von der Leyen (right) yesterday issued a grovelling apology for the EU's vaccine shambles, admitting the bloc acted 'late' and was 'over-confident'

Surge testing has been set up in parts of the country where the South African variant of the coronavirus has been found, or variants with similar concerning mutations that could reduce the efficacy of vaccines

Oxford Covid vaccine IS safe and 'likely effective' for over-65s, World Health Organization rules Oxford University and AstraZeneca's vaccine is safe and 'likely effective' for people over the age of 65, the World Health Organization said yesterday. The WHO has officially recommended the use of the vaccine in adults of all ages and said that doses should ideally be spaced by between eight and 12 weeks. The statement is a hit back against European countries that criticised the jab and refused to use it among their older populations, claiming there was not enough proof it worked. Countries including Germany, France, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Spain, Poland and Italy decided not to roll out the vaccine to older people. News reports from Germany in January sensationally claimed that the vaccine was only eight per cent effective among over-65s, but it later emerged that ministers had put an inaccurate percentage on clinical data that was so vague it was meaningless. However yesterday, Dr Alejandro Cravioto, a director at the WHO, said in a briefing that the jab could be given 'without an upper age limit'. Dr Cravioto said there was 'no reason' that places with the South African variant of the virus should not use the vaccine to keep down hospital admissions and deaths with the virus, in the wake of a study suggesting it may be less effective against it. Advertisement

'The intent behind doing the first dose is to get the maximum coverage of vulnerable groups and that is something we are supportive of - at the same time they should be extending to a wider audience,' he said.

'The worry we have got is without the number of doses increasing on a daily basis you are going to see a slowdown in the number of new doses being given out or first doses being given out as we catch up on second doses.

'For every person we give a second dose to we can't give another first dose out. We do have a worry that if they don't increase the capacity to distribute doses then we are going to see a slowdown either in the number of people who get their second dose or in the people who get a first dose - neither of which is ideal.'

Department of Health figures show the vaccination drive ramped up by at least 25 per cent every week over the first three weeks it was opened  as nurses and volunteers rushed to get Britain moving again.

But it ticked up by just one per cent on February 8, the latest day data is available, when 356,291 doses were administered compared to 352,935 on Monday last week.

Our World in Health data shows Britain has dished out 35 times more doses of Covid vaccines than Germany, which is leading the jabs drive in the EU. Germany has managed 337,000 doses so far, followed by Italy at 270,000, France at 222,000 and Spain's 217,000.

The figures also reveal a sharp disparity between the drive in different continents, with the whole of Africa having given out 17,600 doses so far.

Tony Blair yesterday called on countries around the world to co-ordinate their vaccine strategy saying they have an 'opportunity to learn the lessons from the early vaccine rollout'.

'The speed with which Covid-19 vaccines were developed and are being rolled out has been an inspiration,' he said.

'In just six weeks, the world has already administered 134million shots, with a current rolling average of over 4.5million doses per day. But the unequal distribution of those vaccines is both unfair and unsustainable.

Elderly people and patients with underlying health conditions are among the top four priority groups which make up 15million set to be vaccinated by February 15

'The main challenge has been the lack of any global strategy to co-ordinate and maximise production, and then ensure their swift and equitable distribution to every country in the world.

Nicola Sturgeon branded 'ridiculous' over demand that England quarantines ALL international arrivals heading to Scotland Nicola Sturgeon was facing fury yesterday after her Government demanded English authorities quarantine all travellers flying into England if they were planning to go to Scotland. The First Minister was accused of trying to extend Scottish laws south of the border with the demand that would force England to lock people up in hotels for 10 days even if local rules said they did not need to. Under plans unveiled by Health Secretary Matt Hancock last night, only arrivals from 33 Red List nations would be required to stay locked in a hotel for 10 days in England. Scotland however, is forcing all international arrivals into its airports to undergo the stay at a cost of 1,750. Scots Transport Secretary Michael Matheson last night confirmed the SNP government in Edinburgh wants Boris Johnson to adhere to Scotland's policy for travellers heading north of the border via England. Tory MP Peter Bone said Ms Sturgeon needed to clarify what her government was demanding. 'If someone arrives in England and then travels to Scotland they have to abide by the Scottish laws but it is wrong for the First Minister of Scotland to try and impose her laws on English airports,' he told MailOnline. 'Thats ridiculous and bears no logic. If that is what she means I think the UK Government should firmly reject that idea. 'She should clarify ... and make it clear that quarantine rules will apply once someone goes into Scotland.' Passengers arriving at UK airports have to fill out a 'passenger locator form' in the 48 hours before arriving in Great Britain. Advertisement

'Given the potential for vaccine resistant strains to develop in any part of the word and then spread globally, the whole world is in peril if we allow this situation to persist.

'As more vaccines achieve regulatory approval and new vaccines to deal with new variants arrive, the world must be prepared. Closed borders are not sustainable in the medium or long term.

'We need to create a globally co-ordinated vaccine strategy now, bringing together representatives from science, medicine, the pharmaceutical industry, manufacturing, financiers, distribution and logistics to consider how to accelerate vaccine production and oversee allocation and procurement processes with governments.'

It comes after Ms von der Leyen yesterday issued a grovelling apology for the EU's vaccine shambles, admitting the bloc acted 'late' and was 'over-confident'.

The European commission president also conceded its rollout was still not 'where we want to be' in a humbling speech in Brussels.

However, she defended trying to thrash out at unified approach for the 27 member states, even though she has likened it to a 'tanker' compared to the UK's 'speedboat'.

Globally there are around 4.6million jabs being given every day, with around one in 10 of those happening in the UK.

Speaking at an EU Parliament plenary session, Ms von der Leyen said: 'We are still not where we want to be. We were late to authorise.

'We were too optimistic when it came to massive production and perhaps we were too confident that, what we ordered, would actually be delivered on time.'

Ms von der Leyen also said she was sorry for the confusion over the threat to suspend the Northern Ireland protocol in order to block vaccine exports - which was humiliatingly dropped.

'The bottom line is that mistakes were made in the process leading up to the decision,' Ms von der Leyen said.

'And I deeply regret that. But in the end we got it right.'

Ms von der Leyen said she still believes that 70 per cent of the EU's adult population can be vaccinated by the end of summer, swiping at pharmaceutical companies for not keeping pace with scientific advances.

'Industry has to match the groundbreaking pace of science,' Ms von der Leyen said.

'We fully understand that difficulties will arise in the mass production of vaccines.

'But Europe has invested billions of euros in capacities in advance, and we urged the member states to plan the vaccine rollout. So now we all need predictability.'

Despite the chaos, the three groups of MEPs stuck with Ms von der Leyen's approach of member states moving together.

'The key decisions were right,' Manfred Weber, leader of the Christian Democrat European People's Party, said.

The Socialists and Democrats party leader Iratxe Garcia said: 'Fiasco, catastrophe, disaster: they ring very true to our citizens.'But she added that her party would stick with Ms von der Leyen on the bloc moving together. 'Criticism is necessary but with a constructive spirit,' she said.

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The father of a man whose body was found in Michael Barrymore's swimming pool nearly 20 years ago says he has terminal cancer and may never get the answers he wants about his son's death.

Terry Lubbock, whose 31-year-old son Stuart died following a party at Mr Barrymore's then-home in Roydon, Essex, on March 31 2001, says doctors have told him that he has months to live.

Earlier this year, Mr Lubbock, 76, of Harlow, Essex, said he wanted a coroner to oversee a new inquest.

Terry Lubbock, 76, from Harlow, Essex, (pictured) revealed he has terminal cancer, with just months to live, and fears he will die without getting answer he wants about his son's death

Michael Barrymore, one of ITV's biggest stars with a string of hit shows, is pictured in 2020. Stuart Lubbock (right) died at his home in 2001

31-year-old son Stuart died following a party at Mr Barrymore's then-home in Roydon, Essex, on March 31 2001 (pictured)

Mr Lubbock said in January that he thought information must have emerged which justified a fresh inquiry by a coroner.

'I've been told that my cancer is terminal and that I only have months to live,' he said. 'All I've been living for is to get justice for Stuart.

'I may never get the answers I want now.

'My only hope is that I can live long enough to see something happening about a new inquest.

'I'll rest in peace if I know there's going to be another inquest.'

A coroner recorded an open verdict after an inquest in 2002 and, three years ago, the then-attorney general, Jeremy Wright, refused to give Mr Lubbock the go-ahead to make an application to the High Court for a second inquest.

Terry Lubbock, who has campaigned for justice for his son, says doctors have told him that he has months to live

Earlier this year, Mr Lubbock said he wanted a coroner to oversee a new inquest into Stuart's death

But Mr Lubbock says a fresh Essex Police appeal, which coincided with the broadcast of a Channel 4 documentary Barrymore: The Body In The Pool, in February 2020, has changed the landscape.

A senior detective told reporters a year ago that he believed Stuart Lubbock had been raped and murdered and that 'one or more' of the party-goers was responsible for 'that serious sexual assault'.

Mr Lubbock says he would like police to tell an inquest jury why they believe that.

He said he had hoped that the police would make progress as a result of the broadcast of the documentary.

'I've been disappointed,' he said.

'But something must have emerged in the last year which might lead to a different inquest verdict.

Mr Lubbock says a fresh Essex Police appeal, which coincided with the broadcast of a Channel 4 documentary Barrymore: The Body In The Pool, in February 2020, has changed the landscape

'There should be another inquest.'

No-one has been charged with any offence in relation to Stuart Lubbock's death.

Mr Barrymore, now 68, was arrested in 2007 but never charged with any offence.

In March, Mr Barrymore spoke to ITV's Good Morning Britain programme and described the Channel 4 documentary as 'vile and vicious'.

Mr Barrymore said nobody who was at his house on the night of Stuart Lubbock's death knew what happened.

Asked if he had anything fresh to offer the police, he replied: 'I honestly wish I did.'

He said he had been 'through 20 years of hell'.

Essex Police have said their investigation is continuing.
Romania has its first six European delegated prosecutors to work at the European Public Prosecutor's Office (EPPO), after the College of the EPPO agreed on Wednesday with all the proposals submitted by the Romanian Ministry of Justice, as a result of a selection procedure organised on January 29.

"We therefore have, at national level, the necessary tools to support this new independent body of the European Union, the only European body with criminal prosecution powers. We will now focus on the application of legal provisions, institutional, budgetary and professional training measures for all those who will support EPPO conducting its mission. Romania was one of the first member states to support the establishment of the European Public Prosecutor's Office, both in the negotiation process of the EPPO Regulation and in the operational stages of the new judicial body of the European Union. EPPO will have a key role to play, including in terms of consolidating the rule of law in Europe, combating crime that may affect the financial interests of the European Union," reads a press statement released by the Justice Ministry.

According to the statement, EPPO's operational activity is expected to start soon, and its mission will be even more important moving forward as significant funds will be available from the EU's long-term budget for 2021-2027, amounting to 1,074.3 billion euros, and from the EU's Next Generation post-pandemic recovery package worth 750 billion euros.On January 29, the Justice Ministry announced having selected six candidates for the position of European Delegated Prosecutor in Romania.These are Dana-Manuela Ana, Camelia-Elena Grecu, Constantin Irina and Jean-Nicolae Uncheselu of the National Anti-Corruption Directorate (DNA), Dana-Cristina Bunea of the Prosecutor's Office with the Supreme Court of Justice, and Florin Bogdan Munteanu of the Prosecutor's Office with the Iasi Courthouse.Delegated prosecutors will act on behalf of the European Public Prosecutor's Office in their countries and will have the same powers as national prosecutors with regard to investigations and prosecutions.The European Public Prosecutor's Office, led by Laura Codruta Kovesi, a former DNA chief prosecutor, is an EU body established in April 2017 under the enhanced cooperation procedure. There are currently 22 participating member states, including Romania, according to www.consilium.europa.eu, more than 9 as required by EU legislation for a valid body under this procedure.The role of this body is to work more closely together in the investigation and prosecution of crimes affecting the EU budget, such as fraud, corruption, money laundering, cross-border VAT fraud.The European Public Prosecutor's Office will carry out cross-border investigations in cases of fraud involving EU funds of more than 10,000 euros or in cases of cross-border VAT fraud involving damages in excess of 10 million euros.The European Public Prosecutor's Office consists of a European chief prosecutor, a college of prosecutors, European delegated prosecutors and permanent chambers.


Belgium will use the 443,000 doses of AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine the country will receive over the course of February to vaccinate people under the age of 55.

Regulators in the country of 11.5 million inhabitants have advised against the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine for older people due a lack of data about its efficacy, so Belgiums vaccination task force has reshaped its strategy.

It decided that the doses will go in priority to health care workers under 55 as well as residents and staff in collective care institutions in that age group.

Sabine Stordeur, who co-chairs the task force, said on Tuesday that people from high-risk groups with underlying conditions and police officers working in the field will also be offered AstraZeneca injections.

People over 55 will continue to receive the two other vaccines approved in the EU, Pfizer/BioNtech and Moderna.

Infection numbers have reached a plateau in Belgium, with new daily cases between 2,000 and 2,500, while coronavirus-related deaths are decreasing. So far, some 336,300 Belgiums residents have received a first vaccine dose.

(Disclaimer: This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed; only the image & headline may have been reworked by www.republicworld.com)
The latest news on COVID-19 developments in Canada (all times eastern):

Francesca Passer, a registered pharmacist technician carefully fills the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 mRNA vaccine at a vaccine clinic during the COVID-19 pandemic in Toronto on Tuesday, December 15, 2020. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette

The latest news on COVID-19 developments in Canada (all times eastern):

7:15 p.m.

British Columbia is reporting another 435 cases in what health officials say is progress on pushing back the COVID-19 virus.

A joint statement from provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry and Health Minister Adrian Dix says there were four more deaths, for a total of 1,263 fatalities since the pandemic started.

The statement says 155,585 doses of vaccine have been distributed and 12,802 of those are second doses.

There's been one new community outbreak at the Highridge/Singh group home in Kamloops, within the Interior Health authority.

5:40 p.m.

Alberta is reporting 195 new cases of COVID-19 and 12 additional deaths.

There are 427 people in hospital, with 78 of those in intensive care.

Chief medical health officer Dr. Deena Hinshaw says one new COVID-19 variant case has been detected.

That brings the total variant cases in the province to 104.

4:25 p.m.

Saskatchewan says it will use age to determine who in the general public will be first in line to be vaccinated against COVID-19 once more supply becomes available.

The Ministry of Health has released its plan for a mass vaccination campaign slated to start between April and June.

The province is currently working on immunizing those considered most at risk from the novel coronavirus, including seniors in long-term care, critical health-care workers and those over 70.

Officials say the next phase of the plan will inoculate people with intellectual disabilities in group homes and those in emergency shelters.

At the same time, it will begin giving shots to those in the general population who are 60 to 69.

2:35 p.m.

New Brunswick is reporting 15 new cases of COVID-19 today and one more COVID-related death.

Health officials say the 21st person to die from COVID-19 is a resident in their 80s at the Manoir Belle Vue long-term care home in Edmundston.

Officials say 10 of the newly reported cases are in the Edmundston region, two are in the Moncton region and three cases are in the Saint John area.

The province says there are 183 active reported infections and seven patients are in hospital with the disease, including two in intensive care.

12:45 p.m.

Newfoundland and Labrador health officials are reporting 30 new cases of COVID-19 and introducing a suite of heightened public health restrictions in St. Johns.

Chief medical officer of health Dr. Janice Fitzgerald says community transmission has been confirmed in the capital city and authorities expect to confirm more infections in the coming days.

Fitzgerald says bars, lounges, gyms, cinemas and fitness studios in the metro region must close for the next two weeks.

She says retail stores and restaurants can remain open at reduced capacity as long as social distancing and mask protocols are in place.

11:45 a.m.

Canadians who show up at the land border without a COVID-19 test result in hand will still be allowed in the country.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says Canada can't stop its citizens or permanent residents from coming into the country via car.

But he says the negative tests required at the land border as of next Monday will be mandatory.

He says fines of up to $3,000 could be put in place for those who don't have the test.

Most non-essential travellers coming back to Canada do have to quarantine for 14 days.

11:40 a.m.

Nova Scotia is reporting one new case of COVID-19 today.

Public health officials say the case is in the Halifax area and related to travel outside Atlantic Canada.

The province says it has nine active reported infections.

Officials say they had administered 18,826 doses of COVID-19 vaccine as of Monday, 5,642 of which were second doses.

11:35 a.m.

Ottawa is tweaking financial support programs in place to help people through the pandemic.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says those who received emergency benefits and made up to $75,000 in taxable income won't have to pay interest on 2020 tax debt until next year.

And he says people who applied for the Canada Emergency Response Benefit based on their gross income, rather than net income, won't have to repay the benefit as long as they are otherwise eligible.

Thousands of Canadians received letters last year telling them they'd have to pay back the CERB because they were ineligible due to the way they'd calculated their income.

11:30 a.m.

Starting next Monday, people entering Canada by car will have to have proof they've taken a COVID-19 test.

The test must have been taken within 72 hours of a return to Canada.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made the announcement during a briefing outside his Rideau Cottage home.

The decision to require tests at the land border as of Feb. 15 follows testing requirements already in place for air travellers.

11:10 a.m.

Prince Edward Island is reporting one new case of COVID-19 today.

Chief medical officer of health Dr. Heather Morrison says the latest case involves a man in his 30s who tested positive in another province.

She says that person will isolate outside P.E.I.

There are now four active reported cases of COVID-19 in Prince Edward Island.

Quebec is reporting 826 new COVID-19 cases and 32 more deaths attributed to the novel coronavirus, including five in the previous 24 hours.

Health officials said today hospitalizations dropped by 29, to 940, and 145 people were in intensive care, a drop of 15.

The province says it administered 2,816 doses of COVID-19 vaccine Monday, for a total of 262,594.

Premier Francois Legault is scheduled to hold a COVID-19 briefing this afternoon alongside his health minister and the director of public health.

10:30 a.m.

Ontario says there are 1,022 new cases of COVID-19 in the province and 17 more deaths linked to the novel coronavirus.

Health Minister Christine Elliott says that of those new cases, 343 are in Toronto, 250 are in Peel Region, and 128 are in York Region.

Ontario is also reporting that more than 12,000 doses of a vaccine were administered since the last daily report.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 9, 2021.
Rights activists to turn to CoE over discrimination of Russian-speaking residents of Latvia

 RAPSI, Vladimir Burnov

16:44 10/02/2021

MOSCOW, February 10 (RAPSI)  The Standing Commission on International Cooperation in Human Rights of Russias Presidential Human Rights Council plans to draft a letter to Russias Foreign Ministry, which the body is to readdress to Latvian authorities and the Council of Europe Human Rights Commissioner over discrimination of Russian speakers in that country, Council member Alexander Brod informs RAPSI.

According to the civic activist, the Latvian authorities have halted broadcasts of 16 Russophone TV channels, what, he alleges, is to be seen as continuation of aggressive discrimination policies against Russian compatriots.

Brod believes that these polices are aimed to accelerate assimilation of Russian-speaking population of Latvia, cut them off information flows, and silence them as to expressing their grievances. Russian authorities have already reacted to the problem by informing the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe about harassment of Russian journalists and mass media outlets.

As Brod says, it was his initiative to address the Foreign Ministry; he is of the opinion that other human rights groups and foreign politicians must express their resentment too.
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The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
With both his professional and personal lives in turmoil, San Antonio lawyer and businessman Martin Phipps also is entangled in a battle with the city over Paramour, his swanky rooftop bar.

Phipps, who was arrested this week by the San Antonio Police Department on suspicion of telephone harassment for repeatedly contacting his then-wife, has been cited 19 times for violations of the River Walk noise ordinance.

On ExpressNews.com: Allegations emerge about San Antonio attorney

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Phipps was criminally charged with placing speakers in Paramours patio area, which the city said could be seen from the San Antonio River in violation of city code.

For his part, Phipps has a completely different take on the citys actions  which occurred between Sept. 15, 2018, and Oct. 18, 2019.

The citys crackdown for the alleged crime of visibly misplacing speakers came in response to Paramour hosting Sunday afternoon drag shows, Phipps has argued in court filings. He called it a chilling attack on our constitutional freedoms. The shows feature drag queens who sing, dance, read poetry, wax philosophically and share political commentary.

Instead of capitulating to the harassment and intimidation that these citations represent, both Martin and Paramour remain steadfast in their support of the LGBTQIA+ community and the empowering art of Drag, the filings stated.

The city called the argument completely unfounded and completely untrue.

These violations were issued in response to numerous complaints made by residents who live in the surrounding area, city spokesman Jeff Coyle said in an email. Code compliance received numerous complaints regarding noise from the Paramour being heard on the River Walk at all hours.

Complaints escalated as more apartment and condominium buildings opened along the River Walk near Paramour, he said.

A call to Phipps law firm was not returned Wednesday.

None of the code violations occurred during Paramours Drag Brunch, held from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sundays, Coyle added.

Violation of the noise ordinance is a Class C misdemeanor, punishable by a fine of at least $100 but not more than $2,000. So Phipps could be looking at having to pay anywhere from $1,900 to $38,000.

Still, the citations may not be at the forefront of Phipps concerns at the moment.

On ExpressNews.com: Prominent San Antonio attorney, businessman arrested

Phipps, 51, is facing a Class B misdemeanor for allegedly repeatedly texting Brenda Vega, 24, his one-time legal assistant whom he wed in Dec. 19 before they had the marriage annulled 34 days later.

Phipps law practice also is enduring turbulence, with name partner T.J. Mayes recently exiting the firm while taking to Twitter to level allegations that Phipps psychologically abused Vega. Mayes filed a complaint against Phipps with the State Bar of Texas and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Michael McCrum, who represents Phipps in the criminal case involving Vega, said the charge is part of an orchestrated campaign  to malign Martin.

The Phipps firm is one of two law firms representing Bexar County in litigation against opioid drug manufacturers and distributors accused of causing and contributing to San Antonios addiction epidemic.

Paramour opened atop the Phipps building at 102 Ninth St., where his law firm has operated, in 2015. The drag shows started about a year after the bar debuted.

Phipps has blamed a small but vocal minority for filing noise complaints.

Citing the Texas Citizens Participation Act, Phipps moved to have the charges against him dismissed. The act was created to encourage and safeguard constitutional rights of persons to petition, speak freely and associate freely without the threat of retaliatory lawsuits to restrict the exercise of First Amendment rights.

The act also is commonly referred to as the anti-SLAPP statute because its meant to stop Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation.

The audio speakers referenced in the citys citations unquestionably relate to the dissemination or distribution of dramatic, political or otherwise artistic works, Phipps court filings stated. Indeed, amplified audio speakers and the placement thereof are fundamentally intertwined with the constitutionally protected freedoms of speech and association the TCPA was designed to protect.

In its response, the city said criminal charges are not covered by the TCPA, only civil matters.

San Antonio Municipal Court Judge Peter A. Zamora heard arguments on whether the TCPA applied in a criminal case. The judge denied Phipps motions to dismiss the charges.

Last week, Phipps filed seven cases to appeal the judges ruling.

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A 2019 study of noise levels reaching the Jones & Rio Apartments at 111 W. Jones found they exceeded recommended limits established by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Conducted by the San Antonio River Authority, the study recommended the city develop various criteria and procedures, including establishing a maximum steady state and impulsive noise level for residential and commercial buildings in the area.

Councilman Roberto Trevino requested the study. He and a staff member did not respond to a request for comment.

It was unclear if any action had been taken.

pdanner@express-news.net
U.S. President Joe Biden delivers remarks on the national economy and the need for his administration's proposed $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief legislation in the State Dining Room at the White House in Washington on Feb. 5, 2021. (Stefani Reynolds-Pool/Getty Images)

Biden Aims to Reopen Over Half of Schools At Least One Day a Week by 100-Day Goal

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Tuesday that President Joe Biden aims to reopen over half of schools nationwide for some teaching in person at least one day a week by day 100 of his presidency.

The news comes as parents across America in areas without in-person teaching are desperate for help amid mixed messaging on the issue from the Biden administration, which has left children falling behind academically under lockdown.

Bidens administration has taken a hands-off approach to school reopenings after vowing during his campaign that hed see schools resume in-person classes if elected. In December, Biden said he aimed to ensure a majority of our schools are open within 100 days.

Psaki told reporters during a press briefing that all schools wont necessarily fully reopen by day 100 of Bidens presidency.

His goal that he set is to have the majority of schoolsso, more than 50 percentopen by day 100 of his presidency. And that means some teaching in classrooms. So, at least one day a week, she said. Hopefully, its more. And obviously, it is as much as is safe in each school and local district.

The White House Press Secretary noted that the Biden administration is waiting for official guidance on school reopenings to be released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The agencys director said on Feb. 5 that it will be released in the coming week.

Our focus really, at this point in time, is waiting for the CDC guidelines to come out and give schools across the country, school districts across the country the first medical and scientific recommendations and guidelines that have been given from the federal level, Psaki said.

And obviously, once those are put out publicly and concluded, we will look for ways to work with states to ensure that schools are getting the resources they need.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki speaks during a news briefing at the James Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House in Washington, on Feb. 9, 2021. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Officials have recently said Congress must pass Bidens $1.9 trillion relief plan, which includes $130 billion to support schools in safely reopening, in order for more schools to reopen.

CDC officials earlier released a summary of recent studies that looked at the effect of reopenings on transmission of COVID-19, the disease caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus.

Research both inside and outside the United States shows little evidence that schools have contributed meaningfully to increased community transmission, the officials said.

Arguments about the risk of spreading COVID-19 in schools rely on research of asymptomatic spread of the virus. But the research remains scant. An analysis of four such studies concluded that the risk is between zero and 5 percent. But that analysis only pertained to viral spread within a household. A recent paper that estimated nearly 60 percent of cases resulted from asymptomatic spread was based on assumptions regarding symptom onset and infectiousness duration.

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, then to-be director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, speaks during a news conference in Wilmington, Delaware, on Dec. 8, 2020. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

Teachers dont necessarily have to be vaccinated in order for schools to safely reopen, according to CDC Director Rochelle Walensky.

I also want to be clear that there is increasing data to suggest that schools can safely reopen and that safe reopening does not suggest that teachers need to be vaccinated in order to reopen safely, she said during a Feb. 3 press briefing.

But Psaki later told reporters that Walensky was speaking in her personal capacity and that the official CDC guidance on school reopening has yet to come.

One argument against school reopening is the spread of new mutations of the virus, for example, the CCP virus strain that was first identified in the United Kingdom in December. Initial data indicate that this more-transmissible strain is also more virulent, or harmful, but that needs to be confirmed, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), during a Feb. 8 briefing.

In an interview with CBS over the weekend, Biden said that its time for schools to reopen safely.

You have to have fewer people in the classroom, you have to have ventilation systems that have been reworked, the president said.

Petr Svab and Zachary Stieber contributed to this report.
As of midnight, Tuesday February 9, the HPSC has been notified of 1,006 confirmed cases of COVID-19. There is now a total of 205,939** confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Ireland. The number of new cases in Limerick is 35. This news comes as the figures for those who have received a vaccine stands at 153,654 (first dose) and 86,833 people have received their second dose.

The current 5-Day Moving Average of New Cases in Limerick is 32, while the 14-day incidence rate per 100,000 population (to 09Feb2021) now stands at 300.2

The number of New Cases during last 14 days (to 09Feb2021) now sits at 585.

Of the cases notified today:

476 are men / 524 are women

65% are under 45 years of age

The median age is 35 years old

516 in Dublin, 63 in Cork, 46 in Galway, 43 in Meath, 36 in Louth and the remaining 302 cases are spread across all other counties.**



As of 8am today, 1,032 COVID-19 patients are hospitalised, of which 173 are in ICU. 40 additional hospitalisations in the past 24 hours. The Health Protection Surveillance Centre has today been notified of 54 additional deaths related to COVID-19. 45 of these deaths occurred in February, 5 occurred in January and 4 are still under investigation. The median age of those who died was 86 years and the age range was 48 - 104 years. There has been a total of 3,794* COVID-19 related deaths in Ireland.

As of February 7, 240,487 doses of COVID-19 vaccine have been administered in Ireland:

The COVID-19 Dashboard provides up-to-date information on the key indicators of COVID-19 in the community including daily data on Irelands COVID-19 Vaccination Programme.
Google is taking the media world by storm. The multinational tech giant, which owns an eye-watering 94 per cent of the Australian search engine market  worth about $4 billion  is unsurprisingly using its immense market power to attempt to thwart the federal governments proposal to revise our outdated national media codes.

Andrew Dyson Credit:The Age

Far from being cowed, the Australian government is digging in its heels. It is showing itself to be unafraid of taking on foreign investors who, for decades, have taken unfair advantage of our business-friendly environment, which has resulted in Australia bleeding trillions of dollars to technology companies such as Google, whether in the form of inadequate compensation to local businesses, a failure to pay their fair share of tax, or both.

Googles managing director for Australia and New Zealand, Melanie Silva, declared the new media code would break the companys business model  an ironic claim, given that Google prides itself on constantly changing and adopting new strategies to maintain its market share and stay competitive.




Haiti - News : Zapping...





U.S. Embassy concerned about executive order

In a note the American Embassy in Port-au-Prince wrote, "We have seen an Executive Order issued late February 8 removing three Supreme Court judges. We are deeply concerned about any actions that risk damaging Haitis democratic institutions. The Executive Order is now being widely scrutinized to determine whether it conforms to Haitis Constitution and laws."



VISA for Chile

The Chile Visa Application Center (CAVC) informs the general public that beneficiaries with pending follow-up will be contacted in the coming days. Therefore, we are counting on the collaboration of everyone to facilitate this process.



Disclaimer of FAd'H

The Haitian Armed Forces responded to accusations that soldiers shot and wounded two journalists assigned to two online media on Monday, February 8, 2021, during a moment of panic at the Champ de Mars. The high command, in a note published on Tuesday, February 9, formally denies this allegation and informs that the FAd'H did not carry out any operation and that the soldiers remain stationed at their base.



The Public Treasury disburses US $20 million for the referendum and the elections

"An amount of US $ 20 million has just been deposited in the 'common trust fund' by the Haitian State for the organization of the referendum and the elections. I commend the Government for its efforts to enable the country to renew its political staff," announced President Jovenel Moise.



Covid : closure of the Consulate in Orlando

The Consulate of the Republic of Haiti in Orlando informs the general public and the Haitian Community in particular that its offices will be closed from February 10 to 17, 2021, due to the cases of COVID-19 identified among the Consular Staff. Services will resume normally on Thursday, February 18, 2021 from 9:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.



In case of emergency, contact 407-808-2727

or by email consulatdhaitiaorlando@gmail.com



Obituary : Death of Dr Charles Manigat

Death, this Monday, February 8, 2021, of Dr. Charles Manigat, Former Dean of the Institute of Legal and Development Sciences (Inujed) and former Minister of Haitians living abroad at the age of 90.



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By Justin Deabler

St. Martin's. 304 pp. $27.99

- - -

Pre-pandemic, Houston's Pride festivals and parades drew an estimated 700,000 attendees. All that support for the Texas city's LGBTQ+ community is something the alienated gay teen at the center of Justin Deabler's debut novel could never imagine. In "Lone Stars," Julian Warner is in high school in the late '90s when the only openly gay student he knows is sexually assaulted and is never seen again. That attack takes place a year after University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard was tortured and killed because of his sexual orientation.

You may know Deabler from the MTV reality show "The Real World." The Houston-born Deabler took part in Season 8, which was set in Hawaii in 1998. In fan sites devoted to the show he's described as a "misunderstood intellectual type," much like the lead character in "Lone Stars." In his present-day real world, Deabler is general counsel for the Queens Public Library. He and his husband live in Brooklyn with their son.

"Lone Stars" is a multigenerational story, told with sincerity, heart and a profound understanding of what it means to grow up in a community where being homosexual is considered perverse. It's also a novel about secrets, and not just those pertaining to sexual identity. Julian's grandmother, whom we meet early in the novel, hides her Mexican heritage, dyeing her dark hair blonde and disparaging the Mexicans who work for her husband's cattle business. She pressures her daughter Lacy, Julian's mother, to downplay her intelligence and focus on finding a husband. Julian's father, Aaron, tries to hide his multiple affairs.

All of this plays out against the drumbeat of real events: the 1950s anti-immigration border raids, the Vietnam War, gay rights struggles and 2008's financial crisis. The novel's shining moments have less to do with current events and more to do with the characters breaking away from suffocating relationships and social norms. Julian's mother walks away from a bad marriage and becomes an advocate for gay teens. She's Julian's biggest champion. Julian flees conservative Texas and heads to Harvard.

His journey into adulthood and self-acceptance is marked by sad and horrible moments. Worried that his young son isn't manly enough, Aaron takes Julian to Home Depot and tells him "You can learn a lot from guys at Home Depot." When Julian asks what he can learn, Aaron tells him: "Like how to be a guy." Julian ends up having an anxiety attack in the plumbing aisle when he sees a customer covered with tattoos.

The man reminds Julian of a homophobe who roughed him up and showered him with derogatory slurs after spotting the boy trying on bridal veils at a Renaissance fair. Childhood teaches Julian there's a lot of hate in the world, but at Harvard he learns that places exist where he can be his true self.

One of the best things about "Lone Stars" is how Deabler frames Julian's ultimate marriage not as a gay marriage, but as, simply, a marriage with all the challenges and hardships that come with committing yourself to one person. The men struggle with career choices, annoying co-workers, difficult family members, drinking problems and multiple attempts to build a family through adoption.

Deabler doesn't break any literary barriers with "Lone Stars" or expose any new realizations about what it means to be gay. He tells a life-affirming story about how people of all orientations can inspire one another to live their best life. It's the kind of story we need right now.

- - -

Carol Memmott is a writer in Austin.
The Bombay High Court has adjourned ex Broadcast Audience Reasearch Council India chief executive officer Partho Dasgupta bail plea in the TRP investigation to February 15. Dasgupta would be first required to withdraw his petition submitted to the Supreme Court. The counsel for Dasgupta stated that the petition was filed on health grounds and not on merit.

Special public prosecutor said that despite Dasgupta side informing about withdrawing the petition on February 2, it was still pending. The prosecutor further accused Dasguptas side of forum shopping where the litigants have their legal case heard in the court thought most likely to provide a favourable judgment. Dasguptas counsel denied the charges.

The SC hearing of Dasgupta happened via video conference where counsel had sought two week adjournment to file an application for amendment. The matter was listed after counsel made a telephonic request. However, counsel argued that as the advocate on record at the SC was instructed to withdraw it. Counsel informed the court that the plea was filed while Dasgupta was in the hospital last month during custody on urgent health grounds.

The sessions court rejected Dasgupts plea who is now seeking bail on both health and merit of the case on February 15.
Northern Irelands deputy First Minister has welcomed the lowest daily Covid-19 case number in the region since October.

Another 275 new cases of the virus were announced by the Department of Health on Tuesday.

Michelle ONeill said it is the lowest daily total since October 1.





Northern Ireland has been under strict lockdown restrictions since December following a spike in the number of cases of the virus.

Tuesday also saw notification of a further 10 deaths of patients who had tested positive for Covid-19.

The number of patients in hospitals with Covid-19 was 579, including 60 in intensive care.

Meanwhile, 345,195 doses of coronavirus vaccinations have been administered, including 317,606 first doses and 27,589 second doses.





Ms ONeill said there is still a long road to travel in the pandemic.

Todays new COVID19 cases are the lowest since the 1st of October. 345,195 people have now also received a vaccine, she tweeted.

We still have a long road to travel, it will be difficult and challenging  but with your help, we are coming through this.

Tocvan Ventures (CSE: TOC) Vice President of Exploration Brodie Sutherland joined Steve Darling from Proactive with news the company has released results from their maiden drill program at the Pilar Project in Mexico.

Sutherland talks about the results and what this is telling them about the project and where they plan to focus their attention next.
The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
Televangelist Frederick KC Price fighting for life after COVID-19 ravages heart, lungs and kidneys

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A global call for prayers is now circulating for the 89-year-old founder of the 28,000-member Los Angeles-based Crenshaw Christian Center, Frederick K.C. Price, after a weekslong bout with COVID-19 left him with a ravaged heart, lungs and kidneys.

Today, I am calling on all members and friends of Crenshaw Christian Center New York and on everyone everywhere who has been touched by the teaching of Apostle Frederick K.C. Price to join in a worldwide prayer for the Apostle as he faces the health challenges posed by COVID-19. Specifically, we need to pray for the complete restoration of Apostles lungs, heart and kidneys and any other parts of his body that are now under attack as he remains in the hospital, Minister Baltimore Scott, the staff administrator for the center's New York operations, announced in a statement on Facebook Sunday.

This morning in prayer, I called on Father God to remember His faithful son and servant, Frederick K.C. Price and the beacon of light and truth in teaching the Word that Apostle has been to the body of Christ and to the world. I said that our church family, the Body of Christ and the world need Apostle Price more than ever to remain with us as that true beacon of the Fathers Word and example of integrity and truth the world needs so badly now, Scott added.

Officials at Crenshaw Christian Center East did not immediately respond when contacted for further information of Prices condition on Wednesday, but his son, Pastor Fred Price Jr., who is now senior leader of the church, revealed more than a month ago, when his father turned 89, that both of his parents had contracted the new coronavirus.

Happy 89th birthday Dad, I love you and honor you for the measuring stick of a man youve been my entire life. As many of you know my parents both tested positive for Covid-19. Once the frustration and annoyance passed, I reminded myself of their faith and the many challenges theyve overcome. Coronavirus is just another notch on their belts. Thanks for all your prayers; much love and appreciation to you all, Price Jr. noted on Jan. 4.

Just over two weeks later, as he celebrated his sons birthday on Jan. 22, he explained that the situation had grown taxing.

I figured Id also use this as an opportunity to thank everyone for their prayers for Dad as we continue to stand and fight the good fight of faith. I just havent been in a social media mood lately. Forgive the lack of engagement, but things have been taxing. Ive honestly only felt like praying and studying the word with an occasional praise break these past few weeks, he wrote of Facebook.

The Crenshaw Christian Church, also known as the Faithdome, was founded by Price in 1973. With a seating capacity of 10,000, the church building is recognized as one of the worlds largest houses of worship.

Price, who is a proponent of the prosperity gospel, is also known for his global Ever Increasing Faith Ministries television broadcast that started in 1978.


YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 10, ARMENPRESS. The work in the direction of repatriating Armenian captives is proceeding on a daily basis, and so far Azerbaijan has returned 69 persons who were held captive, Deputy PM Tigran Avinyans Office said in response to an inquiry from ARMENPRESS.

The process of returning captives is of constant and continuous nature. The work in the direction of repatriating Armenian captives is proceeding on a daily basis, and so far Azerbaijan returned 69 persons who were held captive, it said.

Editing and Translating by Stepan Kocharyan
San Francisco, Feb 10 : Chinese conglomerate Huawei has reached a court in the US, demanding it to overturn the Federal Communications Commissions (FCC) decision to designate the company as a national security threat.

In 2019, the FCC voted to prevent US companies from doing business with Huawei and ZTE on national security concerns.

The FCC finalised the ban in December 2020, supported by former President Donald Trump.

"The order on review potentially impacts the financial interests of the telecommunications industry as a whole," Huawei said in its court filing, reports The Verge.

An FCC spokesperson said: "Last year, the FCC issued a final designation identifying Huawei as a national security threat based on a substantial body of evidence developed by the FCC and numerous US national security agencies. We will continue to defend that decision".

Trump's Huawei ban was part of a bigger trade war with China, followed by attempts to ban mobile apps TikTok and WeChat.

President Joe Biden has not renewed the war on TikTok, but his administration has indicated that it will continue to crack down on Huawei.

The company went to court as its Founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei on Tuesday urged the new US administration to adopt a more "open policy" towards Chinese companies, while he also expressed his desire to talk to President Joe Biden.

This was the first time the Huawei founder has spoken to international media since the new administration took office in the US.

He said that Huawei, which became a prime target of US restrictions under the Trump administration, hope to avoid getting embroiled in geopolitics, the South China Morning Post reported.

"Our company does not have the energy to be involved in this political whirlpool. We strive to make good products," he was quoted as saying.

"We hope that the US government can have a more open policy for the benefit of American companies and the development of the US economy." The Huawei founder also reiterated his earlier offer to share Huawei's 5G technology with US companies.
In this Nov. 30, 2020 file photo, Thabisle khlatshwayo, who received her first shot for a COVID-19 vaccine trial, receives her second AstraZeneca shot at a vaccine trial facility set at Soweto's Chris Sani Baragwanath Hospital outside Johannesburg, South Africa. South Africa suspended on Sunday Feb. 7, 2021 plans to inoculate its front-line health care workers with the AstraZeneca vaccine after a small clinical trial suggested that it isn't effective in preventing mild to moderate illness from the variant dominant in the country. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay, File)

South Africa will give the unapproved Johnson & Johnson vaccine to its front-line health workers beginning next week as a study to see what protection it provides from COVID-19, particularly against the variant dominant there, the health minister said Wednesday.

Zweli Mkhize said South Africa has scrapped plans to use the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine because it "does not prevent mild to moderate disease" of the variant.

The one-shot J&J vaccine is still being tested internationally and has not been approved in any country.

But Mkhize, in a nationally broadcast address, declared that the vaccine is safe, relying on tests of 44,000 people done in South Africa, the United States and Latin America.

The J&J vaccine will be used to launch the first phase of South Africa's campaign in which the country's 1.25 million health workers will be inoculated, he said, adding that the workers will be closely monitored.

"The Johnson & Johnson vaccine has been proven effective against the 501Y.V2 variant and the necessary approval processes for use in South Africa are underway," he said. The J&J vaccine has been in clinical tests in South Africa and is in production here, under contract from J&J.

Those shots will be followed by a campaign to vaccinate an estimated 40 million people in South Africa by the end of the year. The country will also be using the Pfizer vaccine and others, possibly including the Russian Sputnik V, Chinese Sinopharm and Moderna vaccines, Mkhize said.

Funeral workers move the coffin of a COVID-19 victim to ahead of a funeral in Vereeniging, east of Johannesburg, South Africa, Saturday, Feb. 6, 2021. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe)

South Africa had purchased 1.5 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, produced by the Serum Institute of India, and the first million doses arrived this month. The first AstraZeneca shots had been meant for front-line health workers.

The locally dominant variant is more contagious and drove a resurgence of COVID-19 that caused nearly twice the cases, hospitalizations and deaths experienced in the initial surge of the disease in South Africa.

South Africa and many other African and poor countries had looked to the AstraZeneca vaccine as it is cheaper and does not require storage in ultra-cold freezers. It is also being produced in large quantities in India for shipment elsewhere.

An added complication for South Africa is that its AstraZeneca doses arrived with an April 30 expiration date. South Africa is looking to swap them, Mkhize said.

A woman wears a mask to protect against coronavirus as the passes a wall mural depicting a syringe , n Cape Town, South Africa, Thursday, Jan. 21, 2021. South Africa is preparing a hero's welcome Monday, Feb. 1, 2021 for the delivery of its first COVID-19 vaccines1 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine produced by the Serum Institute of India. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa will be part of the red-carpet welcome at Johannesburg's O.R. Tambo International Airport for the shipment of the vaccines, which will be followed up later this month by another 500,000 doses of the vaccine. (AP Photo/Nardus Engelbrecht)

A mortuary worker stands next to a coffin carrying the body of a person who died of COVID-19 ahead of a funeral home in Vereeniging, east of Johannesburg, South Africa, Saturday, Feb. 6, 2021. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe)

In this Nov. 30, 2020 file photo, volunteers wait to be checked at a vaccine trial facility set at Soweto's Chris Sani Baragwanath Hospital outside Johannesburg, South Africa. South Africa suspended plans Sunday Feb. 7, 2021 to inoculate its front-line health care workers with the AstraZeneca vaccine after a small clinical trial suggested that it isn't effective in preventing mild to moderate illness from the variant dominant in the country. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay, File)

South Africa by far has the largest number of COVID-19 cases on the African continent with nearly 1.5 million confirmed, including almost 47,000 deaths. That represents 41% of the total for all 54 nations in Africa.

After a resurgence that spiked in early January, cases and deaths are now declining, but medical experts are already warning that South Africa should prepare for another upsurge in May or June, the start of the Southern Hemisphere's winter.

Explore further Follow the latest news on the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak

 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
Google is taking the media world by storm. The multinational tech giant, which owns an eye-watering 94 per cent of the Australian search engine market  worth about $4 billion  is unsurprisingly using its immense market power to attempt to thwart the federal governments proposal to revise our outdated national media codes.

Andrew Dyson Credit:The Age

Far from being cowed, the Australian government is digging in its heels. It is showing itself to be unafraid of taking on foreign investors who, for decades, have taken unfair advantage of our business-friendly environment, which has resulted in Australia bleeding trillions of dollars to technology companies such as Google, whether in the form of inadequate compensation to local businesses, a failure to pay their fair share of tax, or both.

Googles managing director for Australia and New Zealand, Melanie Silva, declared the new media code would break the companys business model  an ironic claim, given that Google prides itself on constantly changing and adopting new strategies to maintain its market share and stay competitive.
Gift shops in Ghanas capital, Accra, are gradually becoming, the talk of town a week ahead of the celebration of Saint Valentines Day.



The shops, mostly decorated in red colours, are stocked with teddy bears, champagne, flowers and chocolates of different brands.



Madam Naa Aku, who has multiple gift shops at Makola, said, I am trading in these items because of the Valentine season. The prices have changed and people are not really purchasing them like they used to but we will still celebrate.



She said a love teddy bear could cost between GHC190 and GHC220 and hopeful sales would pick up before the day- February 14.



Madam Abena Oforiwaa, a trader in chocolates and hampers, said patronage of chocolate was high.



The Ghana News Agency observed that the city was gradually being painted red with love decorations at malls and other trading centers.



The fun appears bigger online and on social media platforms with dealers in E-Commerce attracting clients with juicy Valentine gifts.



Each year on February 14, people exchange cards, candy or flowers with their special valentine.



St. Valentines Day is named for a Christian martyr and dates back to the 5th century, but has origins in the Roman holiday Lupercalia.

Source: GNA









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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WASHINGTON - Federal health officials Wednesday urged Americans to consider wearing two masks as one of several strategies to better protect themselves against the threat of more contagious variants of the coronavirus.

"We know that universal masking works," said John Brooks, medical officer for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's covid-19 response. "And now these variants are circulating . . . whatever we can do to improve the fit of a mask to make it work better, the faster we can end this pandemic."

Two methods substantially boost fit and protection, according to a CDC report and updated guidance on its website. One is wearing a cloth mask over a disposable surgical mask. The second is improving the fit of a single surgical mask by knotting the ear loops and tucking in the sides close to the face to prevent air from leaking out around the edges and toform a closer fit.

Both of those methods reduced exposure to potentially infectious aerosols by more than 95% in a laboratory experiment using dummies, the report said.

A year after the coronavirus's arrival in the United States - with the death toll approaching 500,000 - the updated guidance stresses the importance of mask-wearing as one of the best defenses against more transmissible variants, along with social distancing, avoiding crowds and poorly ventilated indoor spaces, and practicing frequent hand-washing.

The guidance comes at a potentially perilous moment, as health officials race to vaccinate tens of millions of people to protect them from more transmissible and possibly more lethal variants but remain hampered by a limited vaccine supply.

It also represents a new administration's effort to present clear masking guidelines after mixed messaging and the politicization of the issue appear to have bewildered many Americans. Early last year, health officials did not urge their use because of concerns health workers would be unable to get them. Even after health officials reversed course last April after realizing that people without symptoms were driving the virus's spread, President Donald Trump refused to wear a mask and ridiculed those who did.In part as a result, many Americans still disdain them.

Washington Post photo by Sarah L. Voisin

CDC Director Rochelle Walensky acknowledged at a White House briefing Wednesday that some people may be "both tired of hearing about masks as well as tired of wearing them." She noted that "masks can be cumbersome, they can be inconvenient."

Conceding the changing guidance since the start of the pandemic, Walensky said that knowledge about the virus has evolved over time.

"The science is clear," she said. "Everyone needs to be wearing a mask when they're in public or when they are in their own home but with people who do not live in their household. This is especially true with our ongoing concern about new variants spreading in the United States."

Walensky said that research shows that coronavirus infections and deaths have decreased when policies mandating masks are implemented. "With cases, hospitalizations and deaths still very high, now is not the time to roll back mask requirements," she said.

The bottom line, she said, is that wearing any type of mask is better than not wearing one at all.

Until now, the CDC's recommendation has focused on cloth masks because of worries about a shortage of surgical masks and N95 respirators masks for health-care personnel.But as supply has improved, the agency is providing information about the pros and cons of different masks "so consumers can make an informed choice about what they want to use," Brooks said. The agency is still not recommending that consumers wear N95 respirators.

President Joe Biden has urged all Americans to wear masks for his first 100 days, and signed executive orders requiring their use on federal property and on planes, trains and buses. Thirty-six state governments currently require people to wear face coverings in public to curb the spread of the coronavirus, according to a tally by AARP. The District of Columbia and Puerto Rico also have mask orders. Three states - Iowa, North Dakota and Mississippi - have lifted such mandates.

Several European nations have also tightened mask regulations: Germany and Austria last month required people riding on public transportation or going to supermarkets to wear more-protective masks, including N95s that filter 95% of airborne particles. France has mandated its citizens wear masks that block more than 90% of airborne particles in public places. The World Health Organization recommends the public use fabric masks, ideally with three layers.

Brooks and other public health experts say the key takeaway of the new CDC guidelinesis mask fit, which improves filtration, or the ability of material to block tiny particles.

"Double masking is one way you can do it," he said, noting that double masking does not mean double protection. "It may not be the right solution for everybody,"he added. For some people, wearing two masks can impede breathing or obstruct peripheral vision that could lead to a fall and result in injury.

Surgical masks can also be adjusted to make them better fit the contours of the face, Brooks said. The three-ply masks, which may be flat pleated or cone shaped, are not designed to protect against infections from viruses and bacteria but rather to prevent contamination of sterile surgical sites and to prevent blood and other fluids from splashing onto the wearer's mouth and nose.

Knotting the medical procedure mask where the loops attach to the face helps the mask fit closer to your face, but it also slightly reduces mask size, he said.

"People with big faces may have difficulty getting the mask to cover their nose and mouth completely when they do the knot, so you really have to look around and find a technique that works well for you," Brooks said.

Studies have shown that fit also can be improved using simple materials, including nylon hosiery around the neck and over either a cloth or surgical mask, and the use of mask fitters - small reusable and adjustable frames or braces worn either as ear loops or behind the head to secure face-coverings tightly on noses.

The CDC conducted experiments last month to test the effectiveness of mask combinations: A three-ply surgical mask blocked 42% of particles from a simulated cough, and a three-ply cloth mask blocked 44%. But a cloth mask covering a medical mask blocked 92% of the particles, the report said.

In a second experiment simulating someone releasing particles during breathing, a dummy wearing double masks and one wearing a knotted/tucked medical mask reduced exposure for an unmasked dummy by 82% and 62%, respectively. When one dummy was not wearing any masks and the one acting as the bystander wore a double mask or a knotted/tucked medical mask, the bystander's exposure was reduced by 83 and 64.5%, respectively.

But when both dummies wore double masks or knotted/tucked medical masks, the bystander's exposure was reduced by more than 95% in both situations.

Brooks cautioned against generalizing the numeric findings of the studies, however. The experiments used one type of cotton mask and one type of medical mask in a laboratory, "not with human beings,"he said.

Other experts expressed concern that double masking could discourage mask-wearing.

"I would rather people focus on finding one quality mask that meets the mark, versus trying to layer masks and create discomfort, difficulty breathing . . . or frustration that might lead to no mask at all," said Saskia Popescu, an infectious-disease epidemiologist and assistant professor at George Mason University.

David Rothamer, an engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has experimented with masks on mannequins in classrooms while studying the best ways to prevent the spread of the virus in college classes. He said he is not a proponent of double masking because it consumes more masks and can also lead to more air leakage.

"The only reason to [wear two masks] is if you can get better fit," he said.

Linsey Marr, an engineering professor at Virginia Tech who has studied how to maximize mask efficiency, offered these tips for ensuring the best mask fit:

"You should not be able to see or feel any kind of open spots around the edges of your mask, especially around your nose, which is why a metal bridge is so important for fitting tightly around the nose," she said.

"You don't want gaps around the cheek or chin, really anywhere," Marr continued. "One way you can check for that is when you are breathing through it, does it feel like air is leaking out of the side? Put your hand on the edge to see if you feel anything. When you breathe in, you should feel suction up against your face."

Other signs of leakage include eyeglasses fogging up or cold breath coming from the sides of masks while outside, she said.

Another test involves breathing hard in front of a mirror to see if you blink while wearing a mask, which would indicate leakage from the top of the mask.

If masks fail these tests, Marr said, you should try a different kind of mask. "Peoples' faces have such different shapes that you can try to find something that can work better for your face," she advised.
press release

In 2020, the ICRC's humanitarian activities mainly focused on responding to two major crises caused by the COVID-19 outbreak and fighting in Northern Ethiopia.

The ICRC is present in Ethiopia since the beginning of the 1977 Ethio-Somalia armed conflict. Its current major activities in the country are visiting places of detention to ensure both the treatment and conditions of detainees, helping people with physical disabilities (PWDs) get access to quality and sustainable physical rehabilitation services, working closely with the Ethiopian Red Cross Society (ERCS) to restore family links among people separated by armed conflict and other situations of violence as well as providing assistance to people displaced by conflict.

ICRC also trains on International Humanitarian Law (IHL) among members of the defense and polices forces as well as higher learning institutions.

ICRC in Ethiopia has rapidly adapted to the evolving reality of the pandemic in the country and has stepped up its response to the crisis integrating COVID-19 as an important new parameter in its operations.

In response to the humanitarian crisis caused as a result of the fighting in northern Ethiopia since early November, the ICRC has scaled up its response in delivering medicine and medical supplies to health facilities, which were badly affected by a shortage of supplies and also reconnecting families with their loved ones in Tigray. Moreover, the ICRC and ERCS jointly provided emergency relief and water to the affected communities, including internally displaced persons.

Highlights of our work in Ethiopia from January to December 2020

More than 72,000 detainees were visited in different places of detention

Provided free phone call service to 56,781 refugees and 33,281 returnees

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Provided basic medical supplies and emergency kits to 17 primary health care units and 23 hospitals

Together with the ERCS, supplied infection prevention and control materials to 17 COVID-19 treatment centres

Distributed over 700 tones of farming seeds to over 12,350 families affected by violence

Provided livestock vaccination to more than 450,000 domestic animals belonging to 196,800 semi-pastoralists

Constructed water and habitat projects benefiting 80,475 people

Enabled 6,438 people living with disabilities to access physical rehabilitation services

Donated over 4.2 million Birr to ERCS in support of its fight against the spread of the COVID-19 outbreak in Ethiopia

For a detailed report of our work in Ethiopia from January to December 2020, read the complete report.

Ethiopia facts and figures January to December 2020

Ethiopia facts and figures - January to December 2020 - Amharic

Ethiopia facts and figures - January to December 2020 - Affan Oromo
Heineken beer bottles are seen at a bar in Monterrey, Mexico, on June 20, 2017. (Daniel Becerril/File Photo/Reuters)

New CEO to Cut 8,000 Jobs as Heineken Feels Pandemic Effect

BRUSSELSHeineken plans to cut about 8,000 jobs, the Dutch beer group said on Wednesday, seeking to restore operating margins to pre-pandemic levels after a sharp decline in profit because of coronavirus restrictions.

The worlds second-largest brewer, which makes Europes top selling lager Heineken as well as Tiger and Sol, said it would save 2 billion euros ($2.4 billion) over the three years to 2023 under CEO Dolf van den Brinks EverGreen plan.

Savings will be achieved by redesigning its organization, reducing the complexity and number of its products and identifying its least effective spending, Heineken said.

The review of its operations will result in about 8,000 job lossesequating to nine percent of its workforce at the end of 2019and a related 420 million euro charge ($508 million). Personnel expenses will be cut by about 350 million euros ($420 million), it added.

The brewer said ongoing restrictions on social gatherings and hospitality venues meant 2021 revenue, operating profit, and operating profit margin would be below levels in 2019.

It expects market conditions to improve gradually in 2021 and more into 2022, with a slow recovery in European bars and restaurants, less than 30 percent of which were open at the end of January.

The operating profit margin before one-offs should rise to 17 percent by 2023, the company said, versus 12.3 percent last year and 16.8 percent in 2019.

A stock photo of a Heineken beer. (Mehran B/Pexels)

Heineken shares were down 2.2 percent at 09:55 GMT, making them 4.6 percent weaker in the year to date. Analysts said the cautious 2021 outlook and the fact that large restructuring only brought margins back to 2019 levels weighed on the stock.

Underwhelming was the verdict of Bernstein Securities beverage analyst Trevor Stirling of the margin goal.

More Global, More Caution

The brewer said it wanted more top-line growth than competitors and would push premium brands, such as Heineken, and zero-alcohol lager even more. It also aims to become the best digitally connected brewer to serve consumers who are increasingly looking to buy beer online.

Carlsberg, the worlds third-largest brewer, last week said it was banking on most COVID-19 restrictions being lifted in the coming months, serving to buoy earnings in the peak summer season.

Heinekens Van den Brink, who took charge in June, was more cautious, but said vaccination programs in Europe, North America, and some more developed countries in Asia could allow a return to normality this year.

Brazil and Mexico, two of Heinekens biggest markets, are still struggling to deal with the pandemic.

Operating profit fell 35.6 percent in 2020, in line with expectations.

By Philip Blenkinsop
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Fire breaks out at West Virginia oil refinery in US

Iran ready to help improve the defense capability of Syria

European Parliament head proposes to strengthen sanctions on Russia

UK PM gets married in London

Armenia reports COVID-19 new 81 cases: for people die

EU countries invite US to issue joint statement against Russia

2 people die in Armenia road accident

Nigeria: Students taken hostage a month ago are released

61 quakes recorded in Congo per day

Syrian MFA: EU lost credibility due to blind obedience to US policy

Armenia ex-minister of emergency situations hospitalized with heart attack

Mher Grigoryan: Clarification of border points is possible only after withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops from Armenia

Suspicious deal: Whether there was profit from buying DNA IDs?

Armenia ex-president says current authorities are trying to blame Russia for defeat in war

4 people killed in Afghanistani bus attack

Robert Kocharyan: This war could not have happened, it was a consequence of the policy of the authorities

Kocharyan: I have to ask people how it happened that overwhelming majority elected this leader

Armen Gevorgyan presents 'Armenia' bloc program: We offer the concept of a working country

Biden's administration proposed to leave unchanged amount of financial support to Armenia

US Embassy in Baku calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release Armenian POWs

Luxembourg MFA calls on Azerbaijan to immediately release all Armenian prisoners

Russia peacekeepers climb to Armenia Gegharkunik Province village positions

Biden strongly condemns manifestations of antisemitism in US

Iran intensifies its diplomacy amid Armenia-Azerbaijan border tensions

Armenia acting PM on forthcoming snap parliamentary elections: We hope to get 60% of votes

Lukashenko accuses West of destabilizing situation in Belarus

Armenia Central Electoral Commission chief on snap elections: No legal basis for postponing, suspending any function

Armenias Pashinyan is met by Yerevan district residents chanting against him

We are ready to be fully engaged in negotiation process to resolve Karabakh issue, says Armenia acting PM

Armenia ex-President Kocharyan gives interview to Russia TV channel

Armenia acting premier: We are ready to start withdrawing troops at any moment

Canada MFA expresses concern over 6 Armenian soldiers capture by Azerbaijan troops

There are omissions in registration documents of political forces that applied to Armenia Central Electoral Commission

Armenia Central Electoral Commission chief: There is activeness in Yerevan for the past day or two

Three new cases of coronavirus reported in Artsakh

Group of US Congress members threaten Azerbaijans Aliyev regime with sanctions

Chicago mayor is sued for allegedly refusing interview with white reporter

Iran exports oil to US for first time after long interval

"Armenia" bloc top 50 MP candidates are announced

42 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia

Sri Lanka public beach is covered in charred plastic pellets due to fire in container ship

US preparing list of targeted sanctions on Belarus authorities

China believes it will own America by 2035, Biden says

15 al-Shabab militants killed in Somalia

Newspaper: Armenia political forces that applied for running in election impatiently await CEC decision

Newspaper: Changes are expected in Artsakh

California prisoner who considers himself Satanist beheads cellmate, dismembers his body

Newspaper: Armenia acting PM's "mutually beneficial" proposal to collapse state system?

Armenia National Security Service Reserve Officers' Union members meet with His Holiness Karekin II

EU is ready to help Armenia and Azerbaijan with border delimitation and demarcation

ARF-D member on Nikol Pashinyan: 103 years ago Armenia's founding fathers would have executed him for treason

Iran President hails brotherly ties with Azerbaijan

Robert Kocharyan on years of his leadership in Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia

Situation on Armenian-Azerbaijani border is still tense, more on COVID-19 in Armenia, May 28 digest

"Armenia" alliance of political parties paying tribute to founder of First Republic Aram Manukyan

Yerevan.today: Armenia acting PM not greeted at ruling party's headquarters, citizens call him 'capitulator'

Russia MOD reports on maintenance of ceasefire regime in Nagorno-Karabakh

Armenia acting MOD meets with Russian counterpart in Moscow

Armenia 2nd President: I see possibility of restoring borders of Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast

We can provide our army with some key, modernized weapons, says Armenia ex-President Kocharyan

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan: Captives issue is not one that any opposition force can resolve

OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs release statement on detention of 6 Armenian servicemen by Azerbaijan

Armenian acting Deputy PM: Discussion on issues possible only after withdrawal of Azeri troops from Armenia's territory

Armenia acting PM on Syunik roads, Russian military posts: This is only place where there are working nuances

Armenia acting PM: Process of return of POWs will intensify after upcoming elections

Putin congratulates Aliyev on Republic Day

Josep Borrell: A group of EU Ministers will visit Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan

Armenia acting PM: We're not going to escalate situation for 30% of Sev Lake

Armenia 3rd President visits Vanadzor, pays tribute to heroes of Battle of Gharakilisa (PHOTOS)

Armenia ex-President Kocharyan lays flowers at Battle of Karakilisa memorial (PHOTOS)

Armenia acting PM: Solution to captives issue is matter of time

Shoygu to Harutyunyan: Russia, Armenia strengthen military cooperation

Armenia acting premier: We are 100% honest toward our country

Artsakh President pays tribute at Stepanakert memorial, Shushi Tank-Monument

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan on Meghri corridor plan: Not beneficial to us now to discuss it as "corridor"

Acting PM: "Cement," "fittings" were stolen while constructing Armenia state "building"

Two new cases of coronavirus reported in Artsakh

Catholicos of All Armenians visits Sardarapat Memorial, again separate from state officials

MOD dismisses Azerbaijan statement on Armenia army firing toward Nakhchivan

Jerusalem Post: Israel prepares for a new war with Hamas

France, UN World Food Programme partner to support displaced people in Armenia

Armenia ex-President Kocharyan: Today we are not full-fledged negotiating party

Norwegian prime minister opposes series of NATO reforms

Armenia deputy FM briefs UN, Red Cross leaders on consequences of Azerbaijan aggression against Artsakh

NATO Secretary-General: Afghans must take full responsibility for peace and stability in their country

104 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia

Armenia acting premier: Our sovereignty, independence cannot be subject of discussion

Karabakh state-finance minister announces resignation

Artsakh MFA: Sardarapat victory has inspired all Armenians for over a century

Armenia 2nd President Kocharyan: In contrast to kneeling, disgraceful authorities of the day, we have determination

Armenia President: Today we stand on threshold of Sardarapat of morality, dignity

Catholicos of All Armenians: Our people shall find strength to overcome this ordeal as well

Armenia First Republic Day event is held under very modest conditions

Newspaper: Armenia authorities claiming to be popular close off First Republic Day event to public

Armenia ex-President Sargsyan: Now or never!

Armenia President, then acting premier arrive at Sardarapat Memorial

Newspaper: Armenia acting PM Pashinyan's new "cleverness?"

France ambassador: I wish Armenia to be able to live its independence in peace, prosperity

Bashar al-Assad wins Syria presidential election

Reporters not allowed entering Sardarapat Memorial of Armenia
Tesla has been on the move to create its "Chinese-style" electric vehicle that would only have a starting price of $25,000 and to be manufactured in the soon completed Research and Development (R&D) center in Shanghai. It would be the first Tesla to be fully-designed by none other than the main division of Tesla, and would solely be from the Chinese factory.

The world has received and accepted the Chinese-made Model Y and Model 3, to alleviate the production demand of the most bought electric vehicles in the company, which initially debuted in Europe. One of the world's most popular electric vehicle and clean energy companies, Tesla, has turned to other facilities in other countries to answer production demands.

Tesla $25,000 EV in R&D Center Shanghai

While there is mostly no difference between the US-made and China-made Tesla electric vehicles (as they bore the same quality and engineering), the soon-to-release and cheapest EV in the lineup would be purely Chinese. From design, engineering, technology, etc., China would be in charge of the cheapest electric vehicle that Tesla would soon debut.

According to Electrek, Tesla would task its R&D Center in Shanghai, which would soon be completed, to design an electric vehicle that should be affordable and still capture the company's branding. This venture was initially a plan by Tesla, as it aims to give the world a cheap and affordable electric vehicle, with rumors saying that it would be a Model Y.

Read Also: Harley Davidson Opens Electric Motorcycles Division Amid 2020 Q4 Revenue Drop

However, recent reports suggest that Tesla would be making a separate electric vehicle unit, also known as the "Model," and create an entirely new variant in the company's EV lineup. The Chinese R&D center is expected to be up and running by mid-year, meaning that it could debut the new $25,000 EV earliest in the next year.

Tesla: First R&D Center Outside US is in China

Elon Musk has a particular fascination in utilizing the areas and expertise of other countries to manufacture Tesla's electric vehicle for them, as he tasked Germany and China for Gigafactories. Now, the CEO is tasking another country to design, manufacture, and release an electric vehicle to the rest of the world.

According to Tesla's interview with Tom Zhu, Tesla China's President, the R&D Center would have more than 20 laboratories in the facility, meaning that it would be a massive facility to fast track the latest affordable EV. Moreover, the center would already cover every aspect of the vehicle from engineering, design, development, testing, etc.

Additionally, as full-blown research and development center, it would bring a new electric vehicle that would be birthed from there, meaning that from conceptualization and design, it would be done there. The manufacturing would only be given to Tesla's Gigafactory Shanghai who can fast track the vehicle production, ready for its wide release.

Related Article: Tesla 4680 Battery: Panasonic to Start Production by late 2021!





This article is owned by Tech Times





Written by Isaiah Alonzo

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
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Bond has been set for Janet Irvin, the 37-year-old woman arrested in the investigation into the disappearance and death of 15-year-old Quawan Bobby Charles, whose body was found beside a sugar cane field in November.

Irvin appeared before 16th Judicial District Court Judge Lewis Pitman in a virtual hearing Wednesday. Pitman set a $300,000 bond for Irvins charge of failure to report a missing child and a $100,000 bond for her charge of contributing to the delinquency of a juvenile, an Iberia Parish Clerk of Court staff member said.

The accused does not yet have a next hearing date; her arraignment date will be determined either when she posts bond, or if she remains in custody, when the case is screened by the 16th Judicial District Attorney's Office and allotted to a judge, the clerk said.

Irvin was arrested Tuesday by the Lafayette Parish Sheriffs Office and transferred to the custody of the Iberia Parish Sheriffs Office. Iberia Sheriff Tommy Romero said in a video message he believes his department built an extremely strong case against Irvin.

I hope this arrest begins to help their family heal and by no means is this case closed, Romero said.

+2 In Quawan Charles case, woman arrested for failure to report missing child A suspect has been arrested in the disappearance and death of Quawan Bobby Charles, the 15-year-old whose body was found near Loreauville in

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Charles naked body was found submerged in a ditch near a sugar cane field outside the Iberia Parish village of Loreauville on Nov. 3. He had been reported missing by his parents to the Baldwin Police Department in St. Mary Parish on Oct. 30. Charles parents said Irvin and her son picked Charles up from a family home without permission.

A pathology report completed by the Louisiana Forensic Center listed drowning as Charles cause of death though the manner of death, whether accidental, suicide or homicide, was undetermined. Those findings were echoed in a preliminary report and an independent autopsy commissioned by Charles family. There were no signs of struggle prior to his death, but foul play could not be ruled out, the reports said.

Witnesses told investigators Charles was combative after consuming drugs, was acting erratically and made statements about the intention to kill himself. The autopsy noted traces of THC and alcohol were found in Charles system. Its possible Charles suffered a psychotic episode after drug use, which could have led to an accidental drowning or suicide by drowning, the report said.

Attorney Ron Haley, who represents Charles family, said his family and legal team believe its unlikely Charles drowned himself or drowned accidentally in a ditch, and believe his death was a homicide. Haley said hes hopeful Irvins arrest will prompt people with knowledge to come forward and shed new light on the case.

Justice can never be late. Although we believe wholeheartedly this arrest could have been made months ago, were still pleased with the fact that shes arrested, Haley said.
Leviathan receives the net proceeds from the upsized $12.9 million subscription receipt financing

drill permits in place to allow for immediate exploration

trading to commence February 10, 2021 with symbol LVX on the TSX Venture Exchange

VANCOUVER, BC, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ - Fosterville South Exploration Ltd. ("Fosterville South") (TSXV: FSX) (OTC: FSXLF), (FWB: 4TU) and Leviathan Gold Ltd. ("Leviathan" or the "Company") ("LVX") are pleased to announce that further to the press release issued on December 9, 2020 in respect of the upsized subscription receipt financing of $12.9 million (the "Offering"), the escrow release conditions under the Offering have been satisfied. The total net proceeds to Leviathan under the Offering, after deducting the commission and expenses of the agents, was $12.1 million, of which $387,000 was released on the closing of the Offering and the remaining net proceeds of the Offering, in the amount of $11.68 million, have now been released to Leviathan.

Leviathan and Fosterville South are also pleased to announce that Leviathan has completed the acquisition of the Avoca and Timor projects from a wholly-owned subsidiary of Fosterville South.

As previously announced on February 1, 2020, Leviathan has received approval from the TSX Venture Exchange ("TSXV") to list its common shares on the TSXV under the symbol "LVX", with trading to commence on Wednesday, February 10, 2021.

Leviathan Gold Chief Executive Officer, Luke Norman, states, "As I have stated previously, we are all excited with what we have managed to put together; asset, capital and teamwise. We look forward to updating our shareholders in the coming days of our interpretations of the historical workings and their host environment, and how we believe they are merely symptomatic of a very large mineral system that could host multiple deposits analogous to some of the famed orebodies in the region."

Avoca Project

The Avoca project is centred on mesothermal quartz-vein-hosted gold and related placer-style "deep lead" gold mineralization. There is a considerable local history of mining both kinds of deposit. The term "deep lead" refers to buried auriferous river bed deposits. The Avoca goldfield produced approximately 750,000 ounces of gold largely from alluvial gold deposits.

The Avoca project is located approximately 183 kilometres west northwest of the Victorian state capital Melbourne, with good road access. Geologically, the Avoca project occurs within the Stawell zone, west of the Bendigo and Melbourne zones of the Lachlan Fold Belt.

Having previously been mined with a significant amount of gold production from both alluvial and hardrock high-grade sources, Fosterville South considers the Avoca project is highly prospective for hardrock structurally controlled gold deposits. A number of major fault zones have been recognized with strike lengths of ten or more kilometres. Gold mineralization within the Stawell zone is generally base metal sulphide related, which Fosterville South sees as an opportunity for disseminated or fine-grained gold mineralization.

The significant hard rock historic mines within the Avoca licence include the high-grade:

Pyrenees reefs -- 16,199 tons mined for 16,602 ounces of gold to 130 metres at an average recovered grade of 32 g/t gold, worked from 1860 to 1912;





Excelsior reef -- 13,200 tons mined for 9,260 ounces of gold to 100 metres at an average recovered grade of 22 g/t gold, worked from 1909 to 1915;





Vale's reefs -- 1,444 tons mined for 1,388 ounces of gold to 52 metres at an average recovered grade of 29.4 g/t gold, worked from 1865 to 1883; and





Monte Christo reefs -- 2,795 tons mined for 937 ounces of gold to 30 metres at an average recovered grade of 10.3 g/t gold, worked from 1872 to 1877.

The production noted above was obtained from State of Victoria Mining Surveyors and Registrar's quarterly reports from 1860 to 1891 and annual reports issued thereafter. All the production from these reefs occurred within the Avoca licence.

Defined mineralization shoots are present at both the Pyrenees reef and Excelsior reef, as shown from the underground mine plans held for both deposits.

In terms of alluvial gold deposit potential, the Avoca subbasin, located within the Avoca project, is also projected to contain one of the largest unmined deep lead alluvial gold deposits within Victoria.

Timor project

The Timor project occurs immediately east of the Avoca project and occurs within the Bendigo zone of the Lachlan fold belt.

The Timor project area contains numerous hardrock and alluvial gold deposits evidenced by significant historical workings. Historical alluvial production within the Timor project area is in the region of 640,000 ounces of gold.

Around 20 hardrock workings can be considered to have been significant producers. These include the Leviathan group of mines, with recorded gold production of 56,474 ounces of gold from 189,085 tonnes, equating to a recovered grade of approximately 9.14 g/t gold. The Leviathan structural corridor hosts several parallel quartz veins with most of the production coming from one mine active in the early 1900s. Significant potential occurs within the various other veins and faults within the corridor to the north.

In addition, Shaw's reef produced 16,881 tons mined for 12,623 ounces of gold to 130 metres at an average recovered grade of 22.9 g/t gold, worked from 1883 to 1891. Along strike of this fault zone arsenopyrite and stibnite mineralization is recorded in association with the gold mineralization indicating possible epizonal Fosterville-style gold mineralization.

Both these former mines lie on separate large regional north-south structures known to occur for tens of kilometres with a number of hardrock workings over their length. Neither of these two major structures have had significant drilling within the tenement. Only one diamond drill hole and one traverse of RC drilling has been carried out across the Leviathan structure. No drilling has occurred on the Shaw's reef fault zone and numerous other prospective areas within the tenement. These two mineralized structures are a primary focus for exploration within the project.

Qualified Person

The technical content of this news release has been reviewed, verified and approved by Keith Whitehouse, AusIMM (CP), of Leviathan Gold (Australia) Pty. Ltd., a qualified person as defined by NI 43-101.

On behalf of the Leviathan Gold,

Luke Norman, Chief Executive Officer and Director

On behalf of Fosterville South Exploration,

Bryan Slusarchuk, Chief Executive Officer and Director

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. No securities regulatory authority has either approval or disapproved of the contents of this press release.

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 unless registered under the U.S. Securities Act and applicable state securities laws or an exemption from such registration is available.

Forward-Looking Statements

Information set forth in this news release contains forward-looking statements that are based on assumptions as of the date of this news release, including with respect to the timing of the listing of the Leviathan common shares on the TSXV and the geological prospects of Leviathan's and Fosterville South's mineral projects. These statements reflect their respective management's current estimates, beliefs, intentions and expectations. They are not guarantees of future performance. Each of Fosterville and Leviathan cautions that all forward looking statements are inherently uncertain and that actual performance may be affected by many material factors, many of which are beyond their respective control. Accordingly, actual and future events, conditions and results may differ materially from the estimates, beliefs, intentions and expectations expressed or implied in the forward-looking information. Except as required under applicable securities legislation, neither Fosterville nor Leviathan undertakes to publicly update or revise forward-looking information.

SOURCE Leviathan Gold Ltd
From films to real lives, instances of heists and smuggling make for some colourful narratives. But as it is, fact has always inspired fiction. Mangaluru Customs' social media posts show that the outlandish narratives are the mundane in the smuggling world. The customs department has been sharing instances of gold smuggling and how smugglers tend to do it. It must be pointed out that the smugglers have not had a great run as the Mangaluru Customs department appears to have apprehended a lot of them.

Gold smuggling has increased in India over the years due to heavy customs duty of 12.5%. However, the government in its latest Budget decreased the duty to 7.5%, but added an agri cess of 2.5%.

The customs department shared a post on Twitter where it said that a Mangaluru-based passenger was caught with gold valued at Rs 31,73,920. The department said that the passenger smuggled the gold by concealing it in the rectum.

In another case, a passenger from Bhatkal who arrived from Dubai by a SpiceJet flight tried to smuggle 360.58 gm of gold in powder form by hiding it in its rectum. The gold was valued at Rs 18,71,746.

Another time, the custom officers seized 587 gm of gold valued at Rs 29.42 lakh from a passenger from Kasaragod. The passenger who had arrived in an Air India flight from Dubai got the gold in paste form and concealed it in his body.

Mangalore Customs Officers seized gold of net weight 587 gms, valued at Rs. 29.41 lakhs, from a PAX from Kasaragod who had arrived from Dubai by AI Exp. flight No. IX 1814 on 30.01.2021.The gold in paste form, was concealed in the body of the pax.@cbic_india@blrcustomspic.twitter.com/EIo9tESJHR a Customs-Mangaluru (@Cusmglr) January 30, 2021

A passenger from Madikeri who arrived from Dubai in an Air India Express flight smuggled the gold in powder form mixed with solid gum. The Mangaluru Customs department said that the powdered gold was concealed in the body of the passenger. The smuggler had 870 gm of 24 carat gold, valued at Rs 44,19,600.

The gold, in powder form, mixed with solid gum, was concealed in the body of the pax. Gold of 24 carat purity of 870.00 grams, valued at Rs 44, 19, 600/- has been seized.@cbic_india@blrcustoms@AircusM#IndianCustomsAtWorkpic.twitter.com/YxejVPAze3 a Customs-Mangaluru (@Cusmglr) January 21, 2021

Mangaluru Customs department posted details of more passengers smuggling gold in powder form and hiding it in their body.

Two passengers from Kasargod were booked by the Mangaluru Customs department for smuggine 2.153 kg of 24 carat gold in total, valued at Rs 1.10 crore. The passengers hid the gold in paste form in their undergarments. The two passengers had arrived from Sharjah by Air India Express flight.

(2/2) The pax secreted gold in paste form in their undergarments. Gold of 24 carat purity totalling 2.153 kg (1107 gm & 1046 gms) of total value Rs. 1.10 Cr have been seized.@cbic_india@blrcustoms#IndianCustomsatWorkpic.twitter.com/ksDFFVCmBk a Customs-Mangaluru (@Cusmglr) January 15, 2021

In another case, a person from Kasargod arriving from Dubai by an IndiGo flight tried to smuggle gold in powder form and hide it within a speaker. The gold weighing 349.60 gm was valued at Rs 17,82,960.

The officers of Mangalore Air Customs booked a case against a Pax hailing from Kasargod who arrived from Dubai by Indigo flight 6E 8461 at 1655 hrs on 27-12-2020 and tried to smuggle gold concealed in the speaker, totally weighing 349.60 grms in net valued at Rs. 17,82, 960/- pic.twitter.com/udGSbl5hZG a Customs-Mangaluru (@Cusmglr) December 29, 2020

A passenger from Bhatkal who arrived from Dubai in a SpiceJet flight tried to smuggle gold in powder form by concealing it in shirt cuffs. The gold, weighing 257.90 gm was valued at Rs 13,26,120.

Officers caught a passenger from Ullahasnagar trying to smuggle gold worth Rs 5.14 lakh in the form of silver-coated kada or bangle and bead covers of rudraksha mala, while another was caught trying to smuggle 180.93 gm of gold in the form of silver-coated round balls. Another was caught trying to smuggle 99 gm of gold in the form of five rhodium coated buttons of jeans pant. A passenger was caught in Calicut trying to smuggle 80 gm of 24 carat gold in the form of thin sheets hidden inside a laptop. The sheets were caught when the laptop was run under x-ray.

Also read: Budget 2021: Customs duty on gold, silver to be reduced to 7.5%

Also read: India's Gold demand drops 35% in 2020
New Delhi:

There seems to be no end to rift between Bihars ruling coalition parties Janata Dal United and Rashtriya Janata Dal. Latest in the Mahagathbandhan rift, Deputy CM Tejashwi Yadavs name was on Saturday removed from the invitation of a government function hosted by Nitish Kumar Government in Patna.



In another gaffe, despite being not invited a nameplate for Yadav was still put out, which the bureaucrats first tried and hide and then ended up removing altogether.



On Friday, JD(U) ramped up pressure on alliance partner RJD over the corruption case involving Tejashwi, asking it to come clean on the allegations against him. Tejashwi, son of RJD supremo Lalu Prasad, has been named by the CBI as an accused in its probe into the land-for-hotels scam case.

Suggested read: RJD-JD(U) showdown: Nitish may sack Tejashwi from cabinet, say sources



Amid a growing rift in the coalition on the issue, state Janata Dal (United) chief spokesman Sanjay Singh said the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) should provide facts and not display arrogance of having 80 MLAs in the 243-member Bihar Assembly.



The RJD, which is showing the arrogance of 80 MLAs, should not forget that it was reduced to 22 MLAs in the 2010 state polls and in the election in 2015, their number swelled due to the credible face of Nitish Kumar as the head of the coalition, he told PTI.



The JD(U) has 71 MLAs and the other alliance partner Congress 27 while the BJP, which is the main opposition in the House, has 53 MLAs.



The Assembly has representation from the CPI(ML), the HAM (Secular), the LJP and the RLSP among others.



Singh was reacting to the 80-MLA remark of Ram Chandra Purve, the Bihar unit chief of the RJD.

Suggested read: JDU asks RJD to come clean on allegations against Tejashwi Yadav in land-for-hotels case



In Delhi, JD(U) spokesperson K C Tyagi said Chief Minister Nitish Kumar would never compromise on the issue of corruption.



Nitish Kumars stand on corruption is well known. He will never compromise on it, he said.



Asked what his party expected from the RJD over the charges against Tejashwi, Tyagi said the RJD leader should give a detailed explanation over the allegations, an issue his party had made clear following a meeting of its leaders in Patna.



Tyagi also insisted that he never sought Congress chief Sonia Gandhis intervention to defuse the crisis in the Grand Alliance and only welcomed such a suggestion reportedly made by a Congress leader in Bihar.



Meanwhile, Lalu rubbished reports that Congress President Sonia Gandhi had called him up to mediate with Nitish over the Tejashwi issue.



There has been no conversation between Sonia Gandhi and me on this issue. I totally reject this, he said tonight.



He, however, said he could say whether Gandhi had talked to Nitish on this.Earlier in Patna, state Congress chief and minister Ashok Choudhary met Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad, after the RJD chief reached here from Ranchi in the evening. He spoke to Prasad for nearly half an hour.



After the meeting, Choudhary said that the Grand Alliance was intact.



Grand Alliance is intact. There is respect for both Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad in the Grand Alliance. There is no reason for BJP to be happy (that coalition is breaking), he told reporters.



Union minister and LJP leader Ram Vilas Paswan said the Bihar chief minister should take a decision on his association with the RJD at the earliest as Lalu Prasad could break the JD(U) to form a government of his own.



The Congress said the Grand Alliance in Bihar was intact.



It is based on principles. The people of Bihar had rejected a coalition which wanted to break the Ganga Jamuni tehzeeb (syncretic culture) of Bihar, party chief spokesperson Randeep Surjewala told reporters.



To a question on the remarks of some alliance leaders that Sonia should intervene to resolve the present crisis, he said functionaries of all the three parties should consult their leaders, including Nitish Kumar, before speaking on the issue.



JD(U) spokesman Neeraj Kumar, in an apparent reference to Lalu Prasad and Tejashwi, said those against whom accusations have been levelled should explain the source of their assets to silence the opposition.



His colleague Sunil Singh echoed similar views and made it clear that the party would in no case compromise with the clean image of Nitish Kumar, saying the JD)U) president was known for his politics of principles and zero-tolerance to corruption.



A section of the media reported that Tejashwi had made up his mind to tender resignation and the decision to this effect could be announced after the return of Lalu Prasad tomorrow from Ranchi, where he had gone for appearances in courts in fodder scam-related cases.



However, Tejashwi, in a tweet, ridiculed these reports.



Some media in the name of utpati (destructive) sources is running one-point programme of the BJP...I feel like laughing at it loudly (sic), he said.

Suggested read: FIR not sufficient reason for resignation of Tejashwi, we will not let alliance fall down in Bihar, says Lalu

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The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has ignored the uproar over a crackdown on cryptocurrencies, giving several reasons for the move, ordering investigations and blocking all the accounts of companies trading in them.

The apex bank on February 5 joined countries that have outlawed cryptocurrencies, asking banks and financial institutions to close accounts.

Two days later, it opened investigations into the bank accounts and blocked those suspected to be used for fraud.

The bank on Sunday explained that many other countries, investors and economists have warned against cryptocurrencies because of the "significant risks" in transactions.

The risks, it said, include loss of investments, money laundering, terrorism financing, illicit fund flows and criminal activities.

Defining cryptocurrencies as digital or virtual currencies issued by largely anonymous entities and secured by cryptography, the bank said cryptography is a method of encrypting and hiding codes that prevent oversight, accountability and regulation.

Violation of laws

Cryptocurrencies, it said, are issued by unregulated and unlicensed entities and are therefore against CBN Act (2007).

"In effect, the use of cryptocurrencies in Nigeria is a direct contravention of existing laws. It is also important to highlight that there is a critical difference between a Central Bank-issued digital currency and cryptocurrencies," it said, noting it is the issuer of legal tender in Nigeria.

"As the names imply, while Central Banks can issue digital currencies, cryptocurrencies are issued by unknown and unregulated entities.

"Secondly, the very name and nature of cryptocurrencies suggests that its patrons and users value anonymity, obscurity, and concealment. The question that one may need to ask, therefore, is why any entity would disguise its transactions if they are legal."

The CBN said it is on the basis of this opacity that cryptocurrencies have become well-suited for conducting many illegal activities including money laundering, terrorism financing, purchase of small arms and light weapons, and tax evasion.

"Indeed, many banks and investors who place a high value on reputation have been turned away from cryptocurrencies because of the damaging effects of the widespread use of cryptocurrencies for illegal activities."

Boosting its argument, the CBN also cited investor Warren Buffett, who has called cryptocurrency "rat poison squared" a "mirage," and a "gambling device".

"Mr Buffett believes it is a gambling device given it is mostly valuable because the person buying it does so, not as a means of payment; but in the hope they can sell it for even more than what they paid at some point," the Central Bank argued.

Price volatility

During an online forum hosted by the Davos-based World Economic Forum a few weeks ago, Andrew Bailey, the Governor of the Bank of England, highlighted the extreme price volatility of cryptocurrencies as one of the biggest flaws.

Reports from the CBN on February 7 reveal that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) listed Nigeria as one of the countries where fraudsters using cryptocurrencies take hundreds of millions of dollars illegally obtained from the US and other western economies.

The FBI said at least $300 million is fraudulently moved to Nigeria weekly using cryptocurrency instruments.

The agency discovered that fraudulent Nigerians, popularly known as yahoo boys, took control of large chunks of money released as stimulus in the wake of the devastating effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has put many Americans out of jobs.

These fraudsters remitted between $200 and $300 million to Nigeria every week, using cryptocurrencies.

Investigations by the FBI also showed Nigeria did not have the underlying economic base to justify the massive flow of funds on a weekly basis.

The Association of Bureaux De Change Operators of Nigeria (ABCON), and notable ethnic associations including the Arewa Consultative Youth Movement, Ohanaeze Ndi Igbo Youth Movement, Oduduwa Youths, and Middle Belt Youths, expressed support for the ban.

Counter arguments

However, Nigeria's former Vice President, Mr Atiku Abubakar, has joined some youths in advising the apex bank to reverse the decision, arguing that the country couldn't shut down its economy amid the pandemic.

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In a statement on February 7, Mr Atiku said the number one challenge in Nigeria is unemployment among the youth, which he also termed an "emergency", because it affects the economy and exacerbates insecurity in the nation.

"What Nigeria needs now, perhaps more than ever, are jobs and an opening up of our economy, especially after today's report by the National Bureau of Statistics indicated that the foreign capital inflow into Nigeria is at a four-year low, having plummeted from $23.9 billion in 2019 to just $9.68 billion in 2020," he said.

"So, the question central bankers have been asking themselves is 'what is wrong with what is called money, the legal tender of any country, today'? Has anybody come up with a criticism of the use of money, whether it is naira, dollars or the sterling pound?

"Central bankers all over the world believe the reason people are adopting the use of cryptocurrency is because there are certain financial transactions that the current money arrangement, called currency or legal tender, cannot allow. We must understand that digital money is not the same as cryptocurrency."
Eerie footage has emerged showing the normally bustling NSW Blue Mountains region devoid of tourists during one of the busiest times of the year as Covid-19 border closures keep visitors locked-out.

Asian tourists usually flock to the area during the Lunar New Year but tourist sites are virtually empty and tour operators are counting the cost of visitor numbers plummeting by 600,000.

Cableway operator Scenic World, which has the world's steepest railway and glass-floored skyway carriages, would normally be welcoming thousands of visitors who have chosen Australia to ring in the new year - but not this year.

Scenic World's CEO Anthea Hammon (pictured) said the tour operator would normally see thousands of tourists during the Lunar New Year period but Covid-19 border closures have left cableway carriages virtually empty

Scenic World have had to adjust their operations from seven days a week down to four because of declining visitor numbers (pictured, a Scenic World cableway car pre-Covid-19 pandemic)

'Our most visited international group was Koreans right before we closed, there was about 250,000 of them as well as about 230,000 Chinese visitors,' Scenic World's CEO Anthea Hammon said.

'We've completely lost both those markets. They were closely followed by Japan and Taiwan, also countries that celebrate Lunar New Year.

'So we've seen a really significant, absolutely complete decline in all of that visitation.'

Started by Hammon's grandfather Harry in 1945, Scenic World is Australia's most visited privately owned tourism attraction offering panoramic views of the World Heritage listed landscape.

The Blue Mountains is normally bustling with thousands of Asian tourists during the Lunar New Year but tourist sites are now virtually empty

Blue Mountains tourist buses are empty during what is normally one of the busiest times for tour operators in the region. Pictured is Jason Cronshaw, the Blue Mountains Explorer Bus Company owner

International tourists descend on the area for shots of Katoomba Falls, the Three Sisters and the Jamison Valley.

Prior to Covid, Scenic World was open seven days a week but they are now down to operating only four days a week due to declining numbers of visitors.

Hammon said the domestic market will not make up for the revenue lost by the more than 600,000 international tourists that would visit the attraction per year - and other tourism operators agree.

Blue Mountains Tourism president and Blue Mountains Explorer Bus Company owner, Jason Cronshaw, said his buses would probably carry about 8000 passengers over the Chinese New Year period.

'Right now we are only operating one day a week and we're probably lucky to have ten passengers a day, on that one day a week,' Mr Cronshaw said.

Tourist operators have raised concerns the Blue Mountains economy is suffering without international tourists and domestic visitors cannot make up the shortfall

He added that it was the Blue Mountains as a whole that was suffering without the Asian tourists spending money in the local economy.

But some residents are relieved to see less tourists.

'To be honest, you know, living up here for the last 10 years, it's been quite a relief just to have a bit of quite time and enjoy the mountains environment without so many tourists,' local Louise Bennett said.

Australia's international border has been shut since last March to all but citizens and permanent residents who have to go through a two-week mandatory hotel quarantine on arrival at their expense of up to $3000.

There have been just under 29,000 Covid cases and 909 deaths in Australia, far fewer than many other developed countries, because of strict border controls, widespread testing, social distancing rules and lockdowns.
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An image of Gosan measurement station - part of the AGAGE monitoring network - on Jeju Island in South Korea. Measurements from this station were used in the study to quantify emissions from China. Credit: AGAGE

Global emissions of a potent substance notorious for depleting the Earth's ozone layerthe protective barrier which absorbs the Sun's harmful UV rayshave fallen rapidly and are now back on the decline, according to new research.

Two international studies published today in Nature, show emissions of CFC-11, one of the many chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) chemicals once widely used in refrigerators and insulating foams, are back on the decline less than two years after the exposure of their shock resurgence in the wake of suspected rogue production.

Dr. Luke Western, from the University of Bristol, a co-lead author of one of the studies, said: "The findings are very welcome news and hopefully mark an end to a disturbing period of apparent regulatory breaches. If the emissions had stayed at the significantly elevated levels we found, there could have been a delay, possibly of many years, in ozone layer recovery. On top of that, since CFC-11 is also a potent greenhouse gas, the new emissions were contributing to climate change at levels similar to the carbon dioxide emissions of a megacity."

The production of CFC-11 was banned globally in 2010 as part of the Montreal Protocol, a historic international treaty which mandated the phase-out of ozone-depleting substances. Thereafter, CFC-11 emissions should have steadily fallen.

But in 2018 some of the same scientists behind the recent more reassuring discovery found a jump in emissions had begun around 2013, prompting alarm at the time that production of the banned substance had resumed in an apparent violation of the Montreal Protocol.

The first sign of something untoward was spotted by an international atmospheric monitoring team led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Dr. Steve Montzka from NOAA, lead author of the original research paper explained: "We noticed the concentration of CFC-11 had declined more slowly since 2013 than predicted, clearly indicating an upturn in emissions. The results suggested that some of the increase was from eastern Asia."

These unexpected findings were confirmed by an independent global measurement network, the Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment (AGAGE).

Professor Ron Prinn from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), AGAGE principal investigator and co-author of both new papers, said: "The global data clearly suggested new emissions. The question was where exactly?

Emissions of CFC-11 increased substantially in north-east China between 2008-2012 and 2014-2017, and fell back to these earlier levels in 2019. Emissions are concentrated in the Chinese provinces of Shandong and Hebei. Credit: AGAGE/NASA Earth Observatory, earthobservatory.nasa.gov/

"The answer lay in the measurements at AGAGE and affiliate monitoring stations that detect polluted air from nearby regions. Using data from Korean and Japanese stations, it appeared around half of the increase in global emissions originated from parts of eastern China."

Further investigation by media and environmental campaigners exposed usage of CFC-11 in the manufacture of insulating foams in China. Chinese authorities took notice and at meetings of the Montreal Protocol in 2018 and 2019, they confirmed some banned ozone depleting substances were identified during factory inspections, but only in very small amounts relative to those inferred from the atmospheric data. According to their reports, arrests, material seizures, and the demolition of production facilities ensued.

The scientific teams have continued to closely monitor atmospheric levels, and the latest evidence, reported in the two papers on global CFC-11 emissions and eastern Chinese emissions, indicates that those efforts have likely contributed to dramatic emission declines.

Professor Matt Rigby, from the University of Bristol, co-author of both studies, explained: "To quantify how emissions have changed at regional scales, we compared the pollution enhancements observed in the Korean and Japanese measurement data to computer models simulating how CFC-11 is transported through the atmosphere. With the global data, we used another type of model that quantified the emissions change required to match the observed global CFC-11 concentration trends.

NASA computer models help scientists identify an uptick in emissions of CFC-11, an ozone-depleting gas, in the atmosphere. NASA and NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, work together, as part of a long-running research partnership, monitoring efforts on stratospheric ozone. This research continues their partnership, joining scientists from MIT and the University of Bristol. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

"At both scales, the findings were striking; emissions had dropped by thousands of tonnes per year between 2017 and 2019. In fact, we estimate this recent decline is comparable or even greater than the original increase, which is a remarkable turnaround."

Whilst the findings suggest the rapid action in eastern China and other regions of the world has likely prevented a substantial delay in ozone layer recovery, any unreported production will have a lingering environmental impact.

Professor Rigby added: "Even if the new production associated with the emissions from eastern China, and other regions of the world, has now stopped, it is likely only part of the total CFC-11 that was made has been released to the atmosphere so far. The rest may still be sitting in foams in buildings and appliances and will seep out into the air over the coming decades."

Since the estimated eastern Chinese CFC-11 emissions could not fully account for the inferred global emissions, there are calls to enhance international efforts to track and trace any future emitting regions.

Professor Ray Weiss, from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, a Principal Investigator in AGAGE, said: "As a direct result of these findings, the Parties of the Montreal Protocol are now taking steps to identify, locate and quantify any future unexpected emissions of controlled substances by expanding the coverage of atmospheric measurements in key regions of the globe."

Explore further Researchers discover the source of new chlorofluorocarbon emissions

More information: A decline in emissions of CFC-11 and related chemicals from eastern China, Nature (2021). www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03277-w A decline in emissions of CFC-11 and related chemicals from eastern China,(2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03277-w A decline in global CFC-11 emissions during 20182019, Nature (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03260-5 , www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03260-5 Journal information: Nature
A mortgage broker has revealed the five things home buyers should know before securing their first property.

Joshua Vecchio, director of Brisbane firm Hunter Galloway, said his many errors while searching for his first home cost him $5,000 and 12 months of his life.

Now the home loan expert is sharing his top tips on how to create a smooth home-buying process to help others avoid the same pitfalls.

Joshua Vecchio, the director of Brisbane-based mortgage and home loan broker company Hunter Galloway, has shared the five things first home buyers should know before buying a property

Mr Vecchio said the first mistake to avoid when searching for a property is casting your net too wide.

'Searching for my home in 2013, I thought my property brief was simple. [But] I had champagne taste on a beer budget,' Mr Vecchio said in a video posted online.

'It had to be less than $350,000 and had to be a house. It had to be close to the city. Each Saturday I was travelling half the way across Brisbane attending numerous open homes.'

Mr Vecchio said having a large search criteria left him with a long list of potential homes, leaving him with little time to thoroughly check out properties as he rushed between back-to-back inspections.

He urged buyers to know precisely what they want in a home and said there are four steps buyers can take to narrow down their selection.

'Know what you are looking for and be specific as you can,' he said.

'Limit your search to no more than two suburbs, describe what your specific home looks like, know what a deal breaker looks like, and create a buyers brief.'

The second blunder buyers can make is not carrying out their due diligence, Mr Vecchio said.

Mr Vecchio's first tip is to be specific about what you want and limit your search to no more than two suburbs. Pictured: Residential suburbs in Melbourne

In a hurry to buy a home, the mortgage broker said he failed to properly assess properties for potential deal-breakers.

He was once tricked by an agent into believing an owner would give a home to another buyer if he did not act quick.

On another occasion, he entered a contract for a house in a flood zone, which he could have worked out by researching about the location online.

'I spent more than $5,000 on solicitors and building fees all because I made offers on properties that ended up being duds,' he said.

Mr Vecchio said there are three steps buyers can take to ensure they don't miss important details about a property.

'Slow down. If you miss out, all is not lost,' he said.

'Think of it like a busy bus stop. There is always another one around the corner.

Due diligence: Mr Vecchio urged buyers to physically attend inspections and do research before signing contracts as mistakes could lead to hefty costs

Five tips for first home buyers 1. Know what you want Make sure your property brief is specific and limit your search to no more than two suburbs 2. Due diligence Attend property inspections and do your research 3. Budget Assess your initial budget to ensure it aligns with your long term goals so your purchase does not cost you more in the long run 4. Nerves Being nervous is inevitable, but being prepared will help calm the butterflies in your stomach. Learn as much about the process as possible and use checklists to guide you through the process. 5. The process will be stressful Mr Vecchio said first home buyers should be prepared that the process will be stressful so they can take steps to make the journey smoother Advertisement

'Be sure you attend inspections, don't just rely on the report. And three, complete a due diligence checklist.'

Mr Vecchio said the third oversight buyers can make is limiting their budget from the outset which could potentially cost them more down the track.

While searching for his first home, Mr Vecchio's pregnant co-worker was in the process of upgrading her property to make space for her growing family.

She told him she wished they had spent more on their first home and selected a bigger property because they spent so much money in fees trying to sell it later on.

Based on her experience, Mr Vecchio decided to increase his budget and urged others to rethink their initial expenditure to align with their long term plans.

If you decide to boost your spending limit, Mr Vecchio said there are two things to consider to ensure you don't burst you bank account.

'Don't go overboard. Just because a bank will lend you millions, doesn't mean you should take it,' he said.

'The last thing you want to do is have a mortgage, but have no life.'

'An easy way to know if you can increase your limit is to track how much you have saving over the past six months consistently.

Mr Vecchio said first home buyers should consider their long term plans when assessing their initial budget as they could end up paying more later down the track if they quickly outgrow their property

'Add the cost of the rental payments and other bills you will no longer have to pay once you own your property then don't go over this amount.'

Mr Vecchio said nerves are an inevitable part of the experience, but there are ways to calm the butterflies in your stomach and ensure you make the right decisions.

His fourth recommendation is to be prepared as possible to help kill any nerves.

'I'd been helping people buy their dream homes for almost years, but I was still freaking out. I was concerned if my home loan would get declined, if I didn't get approved in time. I was worried about everything and anything,' he said.

'If you are feeling nervous, there are three steps you can take.

'Learn as much as you can about the home buying process, find a fantastic team to help you every step of the way, from your mortgage broker to conveyancer even to your pest inspector, and download and complete checklists.'

The last thing Mr Vecchio wished he was aware of before starting his home-buying journey, was how stressful the process would be.

Mr Vecchio's fourth tip is to kill your nerves by taking steps to be prepared, such as learning as much as possible about the buying process. Pictured: prospective buyers at a Sydney auction

He said he ended up buying his home more than 12 months after he began searching.

'At the time I was still living at home, and because of the trials and tribulations, I had thrown in the towels on an array of occasions,' he said.

'Knowing my anguish, my mother would regularly look and the house I bought in the end was one she had found.'

Mr Vecchio said he hoped sharing his story would help others have a stress-free experience while searching for their first home.

'Buying my first home could not have been more stressful,' he said.

'If I had known then what I know now, the whole process would have been so different.'

Checklists to assist first home buyers throughout various stages of the process are available on the Hunter Galloway website.
The Prefect of the Congregation for the Oriental Churches asks for the intercession of St Maron for crisis-hit Lebanon.

By Lisa Zengarini

On the occasion of the Feast of Saint Maron, patron of the Maronite Church, on February 9, Cardinal Leonardo Sandri, Prefect of the Congregation for the Oriental Churches, participated in a Divine Liturgy at the Church of the Pontifical Maronite College in Rome. At the end of the Liturgy, which was presided over by the Procurator of the Maronite Patriarch to the Holy See, Bishop Rafic El Warcha , the Argentinian prelate addressed the participants with a greeting speech in which he focused on the dramatic situation in Lebanon following the two terrible explosions which devastated Beirut on August 4.

Solidarity in the aftermath of the explosion

In his address, Cardinal Sandri remarked that in spite of the economic, social and political crisis which the Country was already facing before the disaster, Lebanese people have shown great solidarity, working hard - he said - to meet the needs of those most affected: to free the streets from the debris, give shelter to those left without a home, deliver foodstuff and clothes, repairing infrastructures.

He also recalled the solidarity shown by the international community and especially of the Church around the world - and of the Holy See in particular. With both words and charity, Pope Francis himself and Holy See and have been on the forefront, he said. He remembered the numerous Pontiffs appeals for Lebanon, including the one in his recent address to the Diplomatic Corps accredited to the Holy See, but also the many initiatives organized by the Church to help Lebanon get back on its feet again.

The signs of a living Church

Cardinal Sandri remarked that all these gestures are the sign of a living Church that wants to live in the streets of the world by the side of her sons and daughters and all the men and women of good will, putting into practice the example of the Good Samaritan" to which the Holy Father pointed in his Encyclical Letter Fratelli Tutti. He noted that the capacity of the Lebanese people of different religions to live together makes the Country a witness of this message of fraternity.+u

Church, Lebanon and Lebanese diaspora entrusted to St Maron

Recalling the history the Maronite Church, which has had to face many adversities to keep the faith alive, the Prefect finally entrusted the Church, Lebanon and the Lebanese diaspora to St. Maron. He asked for his intercession to end to the suffering aggravated by the pandemic and to enlighten the Lebanese leaders so that they set aside their personal interests and commit themselves to pursuing the good of the Country, as asked by Pope Francis.

Political and economic crisis compounded by pandemic

Lebanon is going through one in its worst political and economic crisis since the official ending of the civil war in 1990, with rising poverty, which has dramatically increased with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, while hosting some 1.5 million refugees from war-torn Syria. Due to partisan interests, political leaders are yet to come to a final agreement on a new government, six months after the twin explosion at the port of Beirut that led to the resignation of Hassane Diab. On Monday, Maronite Patriarch Cardinal Beshara Rai appealed for an international conference under the aegis of the United Nations to end the paralysis, protect the Countrys sovereignty and guarantee some form of stability.
Donald Trump pressed secretary of state Brad Raffensperger to find enough votes to overturn Joe Bidens victory in the state (Jose Luis Magana/AP)

A Georgia prosecutors office has confirmed it has opened a criminal investigation into attempts to influence the outcome of last years US general election.

Officials did not mention former president Donald Trump by name, but Mr Trump has come under intense criticism for a call he made to the states top elections official last month.

Mr Trump pressed secretary of state Brad Raffensperger to find enough votes to overturn Joe Bidens victory in the state.

During the January 2 phone call, Mr Trump repeatedly argued that Mr Raffensperger could change the certified results, an assertion the secretary of state firmly rejected.

All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, Mr Trump said. Because we won the state.

In letters to Mr Raffensperger, as well as the states governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general, Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis informs them that an investigation has been opened and that all records related to the administration of the election should be preserved, particularly those that may be evidence of attempts to influence the actions of people administering the election.

Jeff DiSantis, a spokesman for Ms Willis, said he could not name the subjects of the investigation, but said in an email that the matters reported on over the last several weeks are the matters being investigated.

In her letters, Ms Willis also remarked that officials have no reason to believe that any Georgia official is a target of this investigation.

The initiation of a criminal investigation comes just two days after Mr Raffenspergers office opened an administrative investigation into the call prompted by a third-party complaint that alleged Mr Trump had violated Georgia law.

Investigators with the secretary of states office who look into such complaints typically present their findings to the state election board, which then decides how to proceed.

If the board believes there is evidence that a crime has occurred, it could take action ranging from issuing a letter of reprimand to referring the case to Georgias attorney general or to a local district attorney.
New Delhi, Feb 10 : Union Petroleum Minister Dharmendra Pradhan informed the Rajya Sabha on Wednesday that the prices of petroleum products in the country are governed by international market forces.

The reply from Pradhan came during the Question Hour. Congress member KC Venugopal had objected to the Minister's response, saying that he was not putting forth the facts properly.

Samajwadi Party member Visambhar Prasad Nishad asked why the "prices of fuel were more in the country of Lord Ram and less in Mata Sita's country Nepal".

Petrol and diesel prices in India have risen again on the back of a surge in global crude prices above $60 a barrel now.
Dr Adamu Alhassan Umar, President, Nigerian Cancer Society, said an estimated 124,815 new cases of cancer was recorded in Nigeria in 2020.

Speaking at a media engagement organized by the Africa Health Budget Network (AHBN) in collaboration with the Nigerian Medical Association (NMA) and Nigerian Cancer Society (NCS), to mark this year's World Cancer Day, Umar said of this figure, there were 78,899 cancer-related deaths.

He said there was an urgent need for government and all stakeholders to increase efforts towards improving cancer diagnosis, prevention, treatment and care.

Umar said ensuring that every cancer patient had access to standard care without undue catastrophic impact on the family finances is one of the cardinal goals of the society.

"The five-year survival of cancer in Nigeria is abysmally low because of multiple factors including but not limited to; late presentation, lack of awareness, weak health infrastructure, poverty and high cost of cancer care with associated catastrophic impact on family finances," he said.

Other experts at the programme asked the federal government to come up with an effective funding mechanism that would ensure proper utisilisation of the N1billion budgeted for cancer prevention and control in the country.

The sum is the total amount appropriated for cancer in the 2020 and 2021 budgets. The sum of N729, 861,797 million was budgeted in 2020 and N294, 081,336 million in the 2021budget.

Coordinator of the Africa Health Budget Network, Dr Aminu Magashi Garba, said till date there is no clear financing mechanism on how the cancer fund would be spent despite the fact that the budget cycle for 2020 will end soon.

He said, "The major challenge is not allocation of funds but how to utilise, spend and have the financing mechanism on engaging different government agencies to utilise the resources.

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"A lot of meetings have been ongoing, so many committees have been set up but there is no clear pathway or agreement on how this over N1 billion can be spent for the sake of the cancer patient to ensure this money does not go back to the government's account."

He also called for accountability and transparency in the committees set up on the fund, adding: "People are dying from this disease and we cannot sit by and watch. We want the ministry to do the right thing."

Chairman , House Committee on Healthcare Services, Dr Yusuf Tanko Sununu, said the national assembly created a budget line for cancer in 2019 , and would ensure it is maintained.

He promised that the national assembly would provide adequate oversight to ensure proper utilization of the money.

Representative of the Coordinator of the Cancer Control Programme of the Federal Ministry of Health, Dr Deborah Bitrus, said the cancer fund is meant for the treatment of cervical, breast and prostate cancers , adding that the ministry was working out modalities for the disbursement of the fund.
'Abortion clinic to the stars' shuts down

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An abortion clinic known as the "abortion clinic to the stars" has ceased operations at its Beverly Hills location, according to a report from a pro-life group.

The business certificate for the Pro-Choice Medical Center in Beverly Hills, also known as Sinai Women's Center and Sinai Surgical Center, was scheduled to expire on Dec. 31, 2020. According to a document obtained by the pro-life group Operation Rescue, the business record lists the "reason for closure" simply as "business closing."

The facility, which was located at 99 N. La Cienega Blvd., Suite 303, will be available for lease in April, according to the commercial real estate website LoopNet. A city official who spoke with Operation Rescue said "the office was vacated over the weekend" of Jan. 30-31.

According to Operation Rescue, "The Beverly Hills facility catered to the upper class of society, charging the exorbitant sum of $1,200.00 for a routine first-trimester abortion  almost twice (the) national average cost of 2020 of $620.00." The clinic's website, which remains online, lists its sole services as "first-trimester abortion, second-trimester abortion and late-term abortion."

Dr. Josepha Seletz, the abortionist who owned the Pro-Choice Medical Center, was frequently referred to as "abortionist to the stars" in light of the clinic's proximity to Hollywood as well as its location in an upscale neighborhood. Seletz previously worked at the Eve Surgical Center, a now-closed Los Angeles abortion clinic where the practice of partial-birth abortion was invented.

Over the years, Operation Rescue has kept track of the number of women who've been injured during abortion procedures at Pro-Choice Medical Center. Between November 2015 and May 2018, eight women were transported to the hospital in an ambulance as a result of medical emergencies that transpired while they were undergoing abortions.

The contents of 911 calls made by the Pro-Choice Medical Center, obtained by Operation Rescue, featured several redactions. Arguing that "redactions are covering up the truth," the pro-life group maintained that "transparency is needed to protect the public from abortion dangers that exist at this and other outpatient abortion mills."

An Operation Rescue report published in January revealed that 45 abortion clinics nationwide either closed or halted abortion procedures in 2020.

While the number of abortion clinics across the U.S. has decreased, more clinics are opening that offer chemical abortions (pills) instead of surgical abortions.

Chemical abortions save the clinics money because they're not responsible for the costs associated with disposing of the aborted babies  what is deemed "medical waste"  or coordinating the transfer of the babies' remains to a cemetery for cremation or burial in states that require it.

"The number of surgical abortion clinics continues to decline with six fewer today than last year at this time," Operation Rescue added. "In fact, the number of surgical abortion clinics has fallen each year for at least the past decade from 713 in 2009 to a record low of 458.

"That represents a decrease of 255 surgical facilities  36 percent  over the past 10 years."

The data used in the report was collected between Nov. 16 and Dec. 16, 2020, meaning that it might not reflect the closure of Pro-Choice Medical Center at the end of the year. Although the state saw eight abortion clinics close in 2020, California was one of 12 states where the number of abortion facilities increased over the past year.

A subsequent report based on the same data listed Pro-Choice Medical Center as one of eight abortion facilities that perform abortions up to birth, despite the fact that it has a stated limit of 24 weeks in accordance with California law. The report acknowledged that the abortion facility "limited abortions to under 11 weeks for a portion of 2020 due to the China virus" but later resumed the procedures on a "limited availability" basis.

"I thank God this notorious abortion business is closed. No more babies will die, and no more women will suffer traumatic injuries there. That is a victory worth celebrating!" Troy Newman, the president of Operation Rescue, said in a statement.

The Christian Post reached out to the Pro-Choice Medical Center for comment about its operation status. A response was not received by press time.
Unions and business have sounded the alarm over Australias fuel security after the closure of one of the countrys last oil refineries, ExxonMobils operation in Melbournes west, was announced this week.

The nation could be down to just one plant producing petrol, diesel, jet fuel and other petroleum products for the local market by the middle of the year, with grave doubts over the survival of Queenslands only remaining operation.

The ExxonMobil Altona refinery shutdown looks set to put up to 300 people out of work. Credit:Jason South

The future of what will be Victorias last refinery, Viva Energy in Geelong, now depends on state and federal government support, the company said on Wednesday, the day after the announcement of the closure of ExxonMobils operation at Altona.

There were also concerns of knock-on effects for several other large manufacturing businesses in Melbournes west when the 72-year-old refinery, which is slated to operate for at least another six months, shuts.
An unwavering priority of Russia is to continue consolidating its comprehensive strategic partnership with Vietnam, Russias Acting Consul General in HCM City Vadim Basinskyi affirmed in his article posted on Thanh Nien Newspaper.

The first flight repatriating Russian citizens on Cam Ranh-Novosibirsk air route in April 2020 (Photo: thanhnien.vn)

The cooperation between Russia and Vietnam is developing strongly in all fields on the principle of mutual respect, equality and reciprocal benefit, Basinskyi wrote, adding that the two countries people are standing side by side, supporting each other, and moving forward together.

At present, Vietnam is one of the leading ASEAN countries in terms of trade exchanges with Russia, and two-way investment is also increasing positively. Collaboration in military technology, defence and security, including in cyber security, is developing, while educational, scientific and cultural cooperation is expanded. Each year, Russia provides nearly 1,000 Government scholarships for Vietnamese students, and there are currently about 6,000 Vietnamese students learning at Russian educational establishments.

Russia's Acting Consul General in Ho Chi Minh City Vadim Basinskyi (Photo: thanhnien.vn)

According to the Acting Consul General, it is essential to develop the bilateral relationship, firstly in trade and investment.

Russia plans to expand collaboration in industrial production, transport infrastructure, electricity, oil and gas, assembly industry, health and high technology, he said.

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russian Consulate General has focused efforts on helping arrange flights repatriating Vietnamese citizens from Russia and providing consular support for Russian citizens in Vietnam's southern region.

Since the beginning of March 2020, the agency has supported the return of nearly 25,000 Russian citizens from Cam Ranh and Tan Son Nhat international airports through regular, repatriation and transit flights, Basinskyi wrote.

He took the occasion to thank Vietnamese authorities for helping the Russian Consulate General address arising problems in the period.

Despite impacts of the pandemic, cooperation activities between the two countries have continued to be carried out, mainly in the virtual format. Vietnam has provided medical supplies for Russia, while Russian experts working in Vietnam have exerted efforts to find out effective prevention and control measures, he said, adding that negotiations on Russias Sputnik V vaccine supply are about to be completed.

On the occasion of the Lunar New Year festival, Basinskyi wished Vietnamese people good health, happiness and more achievements. He expressed his belief that when the pandemic is over, the two countries can realize intentions and agreements to further develop bilateral cooperative ties./. VNA
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Gov. Tom Wolfs administration is teaming up with several state lawmakers on a new task force on the COVID-19 vaccine.

Pennsylvania is still in the early phase of distributing the COVID-19 vaccines and some lawmakers, Republicans and Democrats alike, have voiced concerns about the pace of the rollout. The task force will include key members of the Wolf administration and Democratic and Republican lawmakers in the House and Senate.

Wolf said the task force will help improve communication and address issues and solutions.

We have a good working relationship with our legislators, and we know they are the eyes, ears, and voices for Pennsylvanians, Wolf said in a statement. The feedback they receive from their local communities is extremely important, particularly as the commonwealth continues to improve upon this once-in-a-generation vaccine rollout.

Working with leaders from each caucus in the General Assembly, we are creating a task force to ensure collaboration and strengthen communications about the states vaccine plan, Wolf said.

The task force includes Acting Secretary of Health Alison Beam; Randy Padfield, director of the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency; Democratic Sen. Art Haywood; Democratic Rep. Bridget Kosierowski; Republican Sen. Ryan Aument; and Republican Rep. Tim ONeal.

Aument, who represents Lancaster County, said he has been asking for better communication from the administration on handling various aspects of the coronavirus pandemic.

There is no doubt that Pennsylvanias vaccination plan has thus far lagged behind that of many other states, Aument said in a statement. The citizens of this Commonwealth expect results, not partisan infighting that blocks progress. As such, I look forward to working with my colleagues through this collaborative approach to address the challenges in distributing the vaccine in an efficient, effective, and equitable manner to any Pennsylvanian that wants it.

In a news conference Tuesday, Wolf said he is encouraged President Joe Bidens administration is ramping up the supply of vaccines. While supply is the chief challenge, Wolf acknowledged the state must get vaccines out more quickly.

We need to do a better job in Pennsylvania, Wolf said. Thats not something Im at all reluctant to acknowledge.

About 1.4 million vaccines have been distributed through most of the state, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Health (this figure doesnt include the city of Philadelphia, which is handling its own vaccine distribution).

Even as this task force launches, two state senators are also calling for a separate working group focused on vaccinating senior citizens.

Republican Sen. Judy Ward and Democratic Sen. Maria Collett have asked the health secretary to form such a group specifically focused on vaccinating seniors living in long-term care facilities. More than half of Pennsylvanias 22,000 COVID-19 deaths have occurred in such facilities.

Ward and Collett also asked to be included in the administrations broader task force on the vaccine to represent the concerns of seniors. They are the ranking members of the Senate Aging & Youth Committee.

To protect the overall health and welfare of our older Pennsylvanians, its crucial that we do everything possible to get them vaccinated quickly, the two senators wrote.

More from PennLive

Pa. offers new tool and hotline for COVID-19 vaccine info, but not appointments

Pa. Gov. Tom Wolf again seeks a higher minimum wage, and he faces strong opposition again
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For nearly a century, scientists have worked to unravel the mystery of dark matter--an elusive substance that spreads through the universe and likely makes up much of its mass, but has so far proven impossible to detect in experiments. Now, a team of researchers have used an innovative technique called "quantum squeezing" to dramatically speed up the search for one candidate for dark matter in the lab.

The findings, published today in the journal Nature, center on an incredibly lightweight and as-of-yet undiscovered particle called the axion. According to theory, axions are likely billions to trillions of times smaller than electrons and may have been created during the Big Bang in humungous numbers--enough to potentially explain the existence of dark matter.

Finding this promising particle, however, is a bit like looking for a single quantum needle in one really big haystack.

There may be some relief in sight. Researchers on a project called, fittingly, the Haloscope At Yale Sensitive To Axion Cold Dark Matter (HAYSTAC) experiment report that they've improved the efficiency of their hunt past a fundamental obstacle imposed by the laws of thermodynamics. The group includes scientists at JILA, a joint research institute of the University of Colorado Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

"It's a doubling of the speed from what we were able to do before," said Kelly Backes, one of two lead authors of the new paper and a graduate student at Yale University.

The new approach allows researchers to better separate the incredibly faint signals of possible axions from the random noise that exists at extremely small scales in nature, sometimes called "quantum fluctuations." The team's chances of finding the axion over the next several years are still about as likely as winning the lottery, said study coauthor Konrad Lehnert, a NIST Fellow at JILA. But those odds are only going to get better.

"Once you have a way around quantum fluctuations, your path can just be made better and better," said Lehnert, also a professor adjoint in the Department of Physics at CU Boulder.

HAYSTAC is led by Yale and is a partnership with JILA and the University of California, Berkeley.

Quantum laws

Daniel Palken, the co-first author of the new paper, explained that what makes the axion so difficult to find is also what makes it such an ideal candidate for dark matter--it's lightweight, carries no electric charge and almost never interacts with normal matter.

"They don't have any of the properties that make a particle easy to detect," said Palken, who earned his PhD from JILA in 2020

But there's one silver lining: If axions pass through a strong enough magnetic field, a small number of them may transform into waves of light--and that's something that scientists can detect. Researchers have launched efforts to find those signals in powerful magnetic fields in space. The HAYSTAC experiment, however, is keeping its feet planted on Earth.

The project, which published its first findings in 2017, employs an ultra-cold facility on the Yale campus to create strong magnetic fields, then try to detect the signal of axions turning into light. It's not an easy search. Scientists have predicted that axions could exhibit an extremely wide range of theoretical masses, each of which would produce a signal at a different frequency of light in an experiment like HAYSTAC. In order to find the real particle, then, the team may have to rifle through a large range of possibilities--like tuning a radio to find a single, faint station.

"If you're trying to drill down to these really feeble signals, it could end up taking you thousands of years," Palken said.

Some of the biggest obstacles facing the team are the laws of quantum mechanics themselves--namely, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which limits how accurate scientists can be in their observations of particles. In this case, the team can't accurately measure two different properties of the light produced by axions at the same time.

The HAYSTAC team, however, has landed on a way to slip past those immutable laws.

Shifting uncertainties

The trick comes down to using a tool called a Josephson parametric amplifier. Scientists at JILA developed a way to use these small devices to "squeeze" the light they were getting from the HAYSTAC experiment.

Palken explained that the HAYSTAC team doesn't need to detect both properties of incoming light waves with precision--just one of them. Squeezing takes advantage of that by shifting uncertainties in measurements from one of those variables to another.

"Squeezing is just our way of manipulating the quantum mechanical vacuum to put ourselves in a position to measure one variable very well," Palken said. "If we tried to measure the other variable, we would find we would have very little precision."

To test out the method, the researchers did a trial run at Yale to look for the particle over a certain range of masses. They didn't find it, but the experiment took half the time that it usually would, Backes said.

"We did a 100-day data run," she said. "Normally, this paper would have taken us 200 days to complete, so we saved a third of a year, which is pretty incredible."

Lehnert added that the group is eager to push those bounds even farther--coming up with new ways to dig for that ever-elusive needle.

"There's a lot of meat left on the bone in just making the idea work better," he said.

###
Ayodhya, Feb 10 : The Ayodhya Development Authority has finalized the names of three nodal firms, including a global company, to prepare the blueprint for making Ayodhya a world-class city.

"Canada-based multinational firm LEA Associates South Asia Private Ltd and two Indian firms, Larsen and Toubro and Kukreja Architects, will work in conjunction to prepare the vision document, implementation strategy and integrated infrastructure plan for Ayodhya," said Vishal Singh, vice-chairman of Ayodhya Development Authority (ADA).

The three firms will prepare the blueprint for town planning, transport, traffic, infrastructure, finance, economy, heritage, tourism, urban design and renewable resources.

While the Canada infrastructure firm was the brain behind the sprawling Tirupati Master Plan and Smart City, Kukreja Architects had prepared the blueprint for transit-oriented development of an unorganised urban sprawl in Malaysian city of Banda Aceh with its successful spatial model.

On December 26 last year, the state government put up proposal requests from global and Indian consultants for establishing the Greater Ayodhya project and developing a vision document, implementation strategy and integrated infrastructure development plan.

The Ayodhya Development Authority zeroed in on eight firms, which included four Indian companies -- Tata Consulting Engineers, Larsen and Toubro, Kukreja Architects, REPL; and four international consultants -- LEA Associates South Asia, IPE Global, Meinhardt Group International Holdings and Egis Group.

The proposals were sent to the bidding evaluation committee under the chairmanship of state principal secretary, housing, Deepak Kumar, who selected three infrastructure consultants -- LEA Associates South Asia, Larsen and Toubro and Kukreja Architects, on the basis of quality and cost outlay.

ADA vice chairman said the firms will conduct a survey of Ayodhya, evaluate demand, identify stakeholders and hold consultations on development of the holy city before tabling the vision document, which will encapsulate an integrated infrastructure plan for complete development of Ayodhya, while keeping its intrinsic religious character in focus.

The detailed project report, and cost outlay of the Rs 1,200-acre Smart Ayodhya and its rollout will be finalized by the three consultants.
CALGARY - Less than a month after U.S. President Joe Biden nixed the Keystone XL pipeline as part of a sweeping climate plan, another pipeline with implications for Canada is in the crosshairs of a U.S. politician.

Fresh nuts, bolts and fittings are ready to be added to the east leg of the Enbridge Line 5 pipeline near St. Ignace, Mich., as Enbridge prepares to test the east and west sides of the Line 5 pipeline under the Straits of Mackinac in Mackinaw City, Mich., on June 8, 2017. THE CANADIAN PRESS/AP, Detroit News - Dale G. Young

CALGARY - Less than a month after U.S. President Joe Biden nixed the Keystone XL pipeline as part of a sweeping climate plan, another pipeline with implications for Canada is in the crosshairs of a U.S. politician.

However, as talk surrounding the potential shutdown of Enbridge Inc.'s Line 5 intensifies on both sides of the border, shippers are confident that the oil will continue to flow, even as they make contingency plans.

Enbridge Inc.'s Line 5 moves about 87 million litres of oil and natural gas liquids daily from Wisconsin to Sarnia, Ont., passing through parts of Michigan's upper and lower peninsulas. Enbridge says it supplies 53 per cent of Ontarios crude oil needs and more than half of Michigan's propane for home heating.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer last fall ordered a shutdown of Line 5 by May, saying Enbridge repeatedly had violated an easement allowing pipeline operations in the straits. The company is challenging the order in Federal Court and says it won't comply.

Sarnia Mayor Mike Bradley last week said 3,000 jobs at three local refineries will be impacted if Line 5 is shut down, adding to calls from the federal Conservatives and provincial politicians in Ontario and Alberta that Ottawa press the matter with U.S. President Joe Biden.

But on recent conference calls, the CEOs of oil refiners Imperial Oil Ltd. and Suncor Energy Inc. said they're not overly worried that the pipeline will stop deliveries, nor do they expect a shutdown to greatly affect operation of their refineries.

"While we think a shutdown of that pipeline is a very low probability, we are developing appropriate contingency plans that would allow us to supply our refineries in Ontario," said Imperial CEO Brad Corson, adding those delivery methods may include use of the St. Lawrence Seaway, other pipelines and rail.

"With Line 5, we believe shutdown is a very low probability event," chimed in Suncor CEO Mark Little on a call a few days later, adding any higher costs of crude transportation to its refineries at Sarnia, Ont., and Montreal can be recovered from strong local fuel markets.

The companies were given a real world test of their ability to live without Line 5 last summer when the pipeline was partly shut down for several days as a precaution after Enbridge noticed a disturbance to an anchor supporting one of its two underwater pipeline legs.

Little later reported higher transport costs but no disruption at Suncor's refineries, but it's unclear what would happen with a longer outage.

A 6.4-kilometre-long segment divides into two pipes that cross the bottom of the Straits of Mackinac, which connects Great Lakes Huron and Michigan. Opponents say that poses too great a risk of a catastrophic oil spill into the lakes.

Enbridge says the pipeline is in good condition and has never leaked but it reached an agreement with then-governor Rick Snyder, a Republican, in 2018 to replace the underwater segment with new pipe that would be housed in a tunnel to be drilled through bedrock.

The company is seeking several state and federal permits for the US$500 million tunnel project. Two weeks ago, Michigan's environmental agency issued its approval, noting the application satisfied state legal requirements.

Whitmer's shutdown order refers only to the existing pipeline.

In its termination notice, Whitmer's office said the 1953 easement was wrongly granted and violated the state's public trust duty to safeguard its waters. A report by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources said Enbridge had failed to meet safety standards.

Enbridge countered in a lawsuit now before the U.S. Federal Court that the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration has "exclusive authority'' over energy pipelines, adding that Michigan's shutdown order violates the U.S. Constitution by hampering interstate commerce.

Whether the state is legally empowered to close the Line 5 pipeline is the key question before the court, says Dennis McConaghy, an author of two books about pipelines and a former executive with TransCanada (now called TC Energy), the owner of the recently cancelled Keystone XL pipeline.

"Whitmer's order gave them until the middle of May to shut it down and they're now basically going to court really on a matter of jurisdiction," he said in an interview.

"My own view is that Enbridge should win this case but it always depends on what judge you get. There's high uncertainty."

Courts have been reluctant to shut down operating pipelines, pointed out Phil Skolnick, a New York-based analyst for Eight Capital who covers senior Canadian oil and refining companies.

As an example, he said, when a judge ordered the three-year-old Dakota Access Pipeline to be shut down last summer due to a deficiency in its environmental impact assessment, an appeal court judge upheld the order to complete the assessment but allowed continued operation of the pipeline.

Michael Blumm, a law professor at Lewis & Clark Law School in Oregon, agreed Enbridge would likely cite precedence in an appeal if the court decision favours the state.

State law could be pre-empted if there's a conflict between it and federal law but usually the federal and state laws can coexist, he added. He said the Federal Court could also ask the Michigan Supreme Court to give an opinion on the applicability of the public trust doctrine in the case.

Enbridge, meanwhile, is determined to defend itself in court, although it says dates have not yet been set.

"We will vigorously defend the validity of the easement and our right to operate the pipeline," said spokeswoman Tracie Kenyon in an email on Tuesday.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 10, 2021.

With files from The Associated Press

Companies in this story: (TSX:ENB, TSX:SU, TSX:IMO)
Saharanpur : , Feb 10 (IANS) Congress General Secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra on Wednesday promised that his party will repeal the three "black" central farm laws and ensure MSPs for different crops as soon as it returned to power at the Centre.

"When the Congress comes to power again, we will immediately repeal these farm laws. We will also ensure MSPs for all farmers," she said while addressing a 'Kisan Panchayat' in Chilkhana in Saharanpur district.

Priyanka also urged the farmer not to step back from their ongoing agitation across many states in support of their demands and assured that the Congress would stand with them in "their fight against the black laws".

"There should be no politics with farmers. Those who do not respect the sentiments of farmers cannot be called patriots," the Congress leader said.

The Congress leader also flayed Prime Minister Narendra Modi while reminding the audience that the BJP had promised to clear sugar cane dues totalling Rs 15,000 crore within 15 days of coming to power at the Centre.

"Instead, the Prime Minister bought two planes worth Rs 16,000 crore for himself and conveniently forgot about the famers' money," she quipped.

"When a farmer's son becomes a jawan, he provides security to the Prime Minister but the latter does not recognise what lies in the hearts of farmers." "They claim that those protesting on the Delhi borders are not farmers but anti-social elements. Why do they have to ridicule the farmers? And what do they mean by using the term 'andolanjivi'?" she asked.

Earlier, the Saharanpur district administration had imposed Section 144 of the CrPC ahead of the farmers' meeting.

The District Magistrate issued an order to this effect citing various reasons like upcoming festivities, spread of Covid-19 pandemic and possibility of violence by anti-social elements in the state. The restrictions were imposed till April 5.

-- Except for the title, this story has not been edited by Prokerala team and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed
A student from An Giang Province in southern Vietnam was found in a critical condition after two thieves who tried to snatch his dog fired an arrow at his neck.

Senior Lieutenant Colonel Le Van Dau, chief of police of Cho Moi District in An Giang, said on Tuesday that his force was working with authorities in bordering Dong Thap Province to search for the thief ring involved in the case, which took place in Long Dien B Commune of the locality.

This group is responsible for several dog thievery instances in the last few days," he said.

"We are trying to find the group and put them through due process.

However, as the Cho Moi District adjoins Dong Thap Province, the search area is rather large, which has made the searching more time-consuming.

Earlier, the victim P.Q.D., 19, from Dong Thap's Long Dien B, found two thieves trying to steal a dog from his family.

He continued to chase them down with his father on a motorbike before getting shot in the neck by an improvised crossbow.

A supplied photo shows a two-prong arrow after being removed from P.Q.D.'s body.

The victim was promptly brought to Cho Moi District General Hospital before transferred to An Giang Province General Hospital due to his critical condition.

He pulled through thanks to the effort of a surgical team who conducted a three-hour operation to safely remove the arrow from his body.

The arrow is 50 centimeters long with an eight-centimeter, two-prong arrowhead that pierced through his flesh and touched the cervical spine, doctors said.

However, the lesion was not fatal.

The patient has so far regained consciousness and been able to communicate with medical workers.

D. is reavealed to be a freshman at Can Tho University in the namesake city, who just arrived home for the Lunar New Year holiday.

Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam!

press release

Spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights: Marta Hurtado

Location: Geneva

Date: 2 February 2021

We are appalled by a significant increase in the number of attacks against the civilian population in Irumu and Mambasa territory in Ituri province, as well as in Beni territory in North Kivu province by the armed group, the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF). We are also very concerned about human rights violations and violations of international humanitarian law by security and defence forces in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

According to a report by the UN Joint Human Rights Office in the DRC (UNJHRO)* published on Tuesday, at least 849 civilians were killed in these areas in 2020 in attacks attributable to the ADF. Of these, 381 were killed between January and June 2020, and a further 468 were killed between July and December. In the second half of the year, 62 civilians were injured and four women were sexually abused by ADF members.

The report also documents human rights violations and violations of international humanitarian law committed by security and defence forces in the context of their operations against ADF combatants. From January to June, 22 civilians were killed, nine women and 12 children were sexually abused, and 81 were arbitrarily arrested at the hands of security forces. In the second half of the year, 25 civilians were killed, 18 women and 10 children were sexually abused, and 45 arbitrarily arrested by the security forces.

The second half of 2020 was characterised by a number of reprisal attacks by the ADF against the civilian population in territories previously controlled by them. The attacks led to massive displacement in the region. There was also an increase in the number of civilians abducted to perform forced labour. During the year, 534 civilians were kidnapped, of which 457 are still missing.

Violence has continued into the beginning of this year. On 13 January 2021, in Walese Vonkutu, Irumu territory, a group of unknown men attacked the Twa community and killed at least 14 people, including two pregnant women. This assault followed another attack in Walese Vonkutu a month earlier, where 10 people were killed and 30 others were kidnapped.

Given the widespread and systematic nature of the attack directed against the civilian population, some of the documented human rights abuses may amount to crimes against humanity.

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The violence takes place in a context of impunity, where few human rights abuses and violations of international humanitarian law are duly investigated and prosecuted. An ADF attack on Beni prison in October 2020 - during which 1,300 inmates escaped - was a blow to accountability in the country.

The report includes several recommendations for the DRC authorities, including to ensure that security forces act in a manner consistent with norms and standards of international human rights law and international humanitarian law. It also urges the Congolese authorities to enhance protection mechanisms for the civilian population, especially during military operations.

The report underscores the need to facilitate access to justice for victims, and humanitarian aid for survivors, including those who are displaced by the violence. The report encourages the DRC authorities to engage through the judicial cooperation framework to curb cross-border crime, to ensure that perpetrators affiliated with the ADF and other armed groups who seek refuge in countries of the region, in particular Uganda, are tracked and brought to justice.

*The UN Joint Human Rights Office, which was established in February 2008, comprises the Human Rights Division of the UN Stabilization Mission in the DRC (MONUSCO) and the Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights in the DRC.

To read full report (in French), please go to :https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Countries/CD/DRC_Public_Report.pdf


My last full meal in a restaurants indoor dining room was on March 12, 2020. If Id known then what I do now, I wouldve ordered dessert. And maybe a second cocktail.

Before COVID-19, my job as a food writer found me in multiple restaurants each week. But since March, like so many others in Connecticut, I have seen way too much of my own kitchen, dining room table and couch, as the majority of my meals have been at home.

For months, I was relegated to reporting by phone, and didnt actually head back out into the field until outdoor dining resumed in May. Takeout, usually chosen out of convenience on weary Friday nights, became the highlight of the weekend, as we worked through a long list of favorites: pizza, sushi, Greek, Mexican, Indian, Szechuan, barbecue, Nashville hot chicken.

Even as dining rooms reopened in June, my husband and I have stayed out of restaurants indoor spaces, out of an abundance of caution. We chose our limited outdoor dining experiences carefully this summer: uncrowded eateries with plenty of distance between tables, with staff masked up and adhering to strict COVID protocols.

But Im a summer baby, with a July birthday. The cold weather and I have never been friends. My idea of a winter sport is sitting wrapped in a blanket in front of a fireplace, willing April to arrive faster. So as the temperatures started dropping in the fall, I figured it was back to takeout until springtime.

Then in November, Tyler Anderson, chef-owner of Millwrights in Simsbury, announced his plans to set up a village of outdoor greenhouses at the restaurant for the winter months. The individual structures, heated and ventilated, seat up to eight people (with only one party booked per night) with a special $75 four-course menu.

I want to go! my husband cheered when he heard about Andersons new venture. Weve got to do that this winter.

Leeanne Griffin / Hearst Connecticut Media

He, too, is a July baby. We had dined there for his birthday seven months earlier, reveling in a summer evening seated at a table along the footbridge that stretches over the stunning waterfall outside the restaurant. Anderson, especially cognizant of COVID-19 safety because his wife is immunocompromised, created Outdoors at Millwrights in June, setting up a mobile kitchen for an all-alfresco experience with reduced contact between servers and guests.

Reservations for the restaurants winter dining have been filling up quickly, but I was able to score a 5 p.m. table on Super Bowl Sunday. Millwrights was predictably quiet, and a fresh coating of snow frosted the trees overlooking the waterfall.

We were seated in a partially enclosed pod on the bridge, where most two-person parties are placed, with a direct view of the rushing water. Anderson designed them to look like luxury dining cars on trains, with wooden walls, Plexiglass windows and curtains providing a little privacy from diners in the adjacent pods.

An overhead heater beamed warmth down on the table, and our server brought in two portable heaters to rest on the ground. (Side note: The extra floor heater came in handy when my husband accidentally spilled half his water glass in his lap.)

Leeanne Griffin / Hearst Connecticut Media

Id bundled up in a sweater, jacket, scarf, hat and snow boots, but quickly shed the jacket and hat. The heating system can bring the indoor temperature up about 30 degrees from the outside, Anderson said, but it felt warmer.

The four-course menu featured an assortment of small plates to start: tuna tostadas with chili crisp; beets prepared with pastrami spices, Thousand Island dressing and rye croutons; Millwrights signature biscuits with honey-sesame butter. Next came a fondue course, creamy Alpine cheese warmed atop a sterno flame with apples, croutons, pearl onions and pork belly cubes for dipping.

A choice of six entrees featured hearty, winter-friendly compositions: smoked mushroom farrotto with acorn squash, spaetzle-crusted pork schnitzel; scallops with lentils, apple and sweet potato. My pick, a Nashville hot chicken roulade, featured just a hint of spice through its thin, crisped crust, with a Belgian endive slaw to cut through the richness. My husbands smoked shortrib was fork tender, with creamed spinach and crispy sweet and sour potatoes.

One of each dessert, a chocolate hazelnut cake with caramel mousse and vanilla bean creme brulee with quince jam, wrapped the meal.

Service can be either little or no contact, Millwrights website notes. Servers can leave food and drinks outside the structure on a cart, and guests in the greenhouses can alert servers to any needs with the push of a remote.

In the bridge pod, we had more interaction with our two servers, who entered the seating area to deliver food and beverages. But we were comfortable with that level of contact, and we put our masks back on as they came in.

Warm and satiated, I wanted to stay there longer. In fact, people do, Anderson said. Since each party has the structure for the entire evening, theyre encouraged to relax and enjoy their time.

People don't feel in any rush, people like to come and hang out, they bring board games and stuff like that, he said. It's just an opportunity obviously for people to get out of their house, and do something safely.

Its probably back to takeout and home cooking until the weather warms and we get vaccinated. (Hopefully more takeout than cooking. I am so sick of doing dishes.)

But the two-hour meal felt like a glimmer of normalcy.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. - Watch live as California Gov. Gavin Newsom provides an update on the state's COVID-19 vaccination efforts.

In Gov. Newsom's last COVID-19 update, it was announced that California would be joining with the federal government to open two new vaccination centers as test areas for new President Joseph Biden's effort to create 100 mass vaccination sites nationwide in 100 days.

According to a report from The Associated Press on Feb. 10, thousands of COVID-19 vaccination appointment opportunities went unused at the Dodger Stadium mass inoculation site on Tuesday because of apparent confusion over whether people could receive first shots there.

Los Angeles County health officials announced last week that because of short supplies of the vaccine people could only receive second shots at county-run inoculation sites starting Feb. 9.

Dodger Stadium is among vaccination sites operated by the city of Los Angeles, which is not limiting appointments to second shots only. About 4,800 doses that were intended for use Tuesday are being made available Wednesday.


Serbia will begin packaging Russian Sputnik V vaccine in 2 to 3 months, and will establish its proper production before the end of this year, Serbian Health Ministry state secretary Mirsad Djerlek said in an interview Wednesday, TASS reports.

"Initially, the mix will be shipped from Russia, and we will pack it in bottles here; in practice, this can begin in two to three months, in my opinion. The second phase include establishment of production capabilities [in Serbia], and we expect big help from Russia, because the production technology is currently unknown to us, but [the Russian delegation] will present us this technology tomorrow," Djerlek said. "It is also important that Serbia will become the first country in the world, besides Russia, to establish the production of the Russian vaccine. It would be realistic to expect that, before the end of this year, or maybe even one month earlier, we will begin making the vaccine in Serbia."
Former aspiring musician turned media personality Debarl Inea is the new host of the Punchline show on K24 TV.

The Mediamax-owned station unveiled the former Tusker Project Fame contestant as the latest addition to their team, replacing Anne Kiguta who resigned in December last year.

In an announcement, K24 TV said they have rescheduled the popular political show from Sunday to Tuesday at 8:30 pm.

PUNCHLINE IS BACK!!! Tonight at 8.30PM, @debarlinea will be discerning politics differently. Join the conversation on #Punchline Dont miss the show, K24 said ahead of the shows return last night.

Punchline, which debuted in July 2019, will take a new panel format moderated by the former NTV news anchor.

Inea, an incisive and a calm personality, has nearly a decade of experience in interviewing prominent politicians and leaders on mainstream media in Kenya, wrote K24.

Adding: The Punchline panel will elucidate the public for a deeper understanding of the political direction the country is taking, including machinations and strategies being employed by the key players and their pawns.

Debarl joins K24 nearly eight months after he was fired by Nation Media Group as the media house sought to cut back on costs due to the negative impact of the Covid-19 crisis.

Anne Kiguta on her part quit K24 TV citing fundamental disagreement on the editorial processes and direction the show was being forced to take.

It is with regret that today I announce that I will not be returning to the program. Owing to a fundamental disagreement on the editorial processes and direction the show was being forced to take, I suspended my services as an independent contractor to the show on 21st November 2020 My decision was guided by the Code of Conduct contained in the Media Council of Kenya Act which guides all journalists practicing in the republic of Kenya. As a result. I can no longer in good conscience continue to be a part of Punchline, she said.
It had been billed by some as the highlight of the 2020 presidential election petition, but the possibility of the Chairperson of the Electoral Commission (EC), Mrs Jean Adukwei Mensa, being cross-examined is now in dispute.



The Supreme Court will settle that dispute tomorrow when it rules on an application by lawyers for the EC, the first respondent, urging the court to uphold its decision not to call any witness.



The courts decision will also apply to President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, the second respondent in the petition, who has also decided not to call any witness.



If the court upholds the application, it means the petition will be nearing its closing stages, as what will be left will be lawyers filing their written addresses, followed by judgment by the court.



However, if the court dismisses the application, lawyers for the EC and President Akufo-Addo will have to call their witnesses to mount the witness box and swear oaths for their witness statements to be adopted as evidence.



Mrs Mensa and Mr Peter Mac Manu, the expected respective witnesses for the EC and President Akufo-Addo, will then be cross-examined by Mr Tsatsu Tsikata, lead lawyer for the petitioner, former President John Dramani Mahama.



Legal arguments



Over three hours of legal arguments yesterday on whether or not Mrs Mensa should testify, lawyers for the parties (Mr Mahama, the EC and President Akufo-Addo) made their respective arguments before the apex court.



They touched on the rules of court relating to witnesses, case laws on the rights of parties to call or not to call witnesses to adduce evidence, vis-a-vis the courts power to intervene in the exercise of those rights.



Energy Quest Show

Lawyers for the respondents  Mr Justin Amenuvor (the EC) and Mr Akoto Ampaw (President Akufo-Addo)  took the position that the rules of court, specifically the High Court (Civil Procedure) Rules, 2004 (C.I. 47), and its subsequent amendment, C.I. 87, supported their decision not to call any witness.



That was, however, refuted by Mr Tsikata, who submitted that respondents position was not in compliance with any rule of court, including C.I. 99, the rules governing presidential election petitions.



ECs case



Mr Amenuvor premised his application on Order 36 Rule 4(3) of C.I. 47 and Rule 3E (5) of C.I. 87.



He argued that Order 36 Rule 4(3) of C.I. 47 allowed a defendant the right to elect or choose to adduce evidence, saying his client (the EC) had chosen not to adduce any evidence and would, therefore, not call any witness.



If the petitioner (Mahama) has a good case, he should be dancing and happy about the position taken by us, counsel argued.



It was also the case of Mr Amenuvor that the court could not compel the respondents to call witnesses, as the issue of whether or not a witness should testify is not the business of the court.



Akufo-Addos support



Mr Ampaw threw his weight behind the position taken by Mr Amenuvor and added that the petitioner could not force the respondents to call witnesses.



According to counsel, the decision by the respondents not to call witnesses was in favour of the petitioner and, therefore, the petitioner should be happy that the petition would be determined on the strength of the evidence adduced by witnesses for the petitioner.



The petitioner, he added, could, therefore, treat the witness statement filed by the expected witnesses of the respondents as hearsay evidence, in conformity with Rule 3E (5) of C.I. 87.



Unfortunately, the petitioner has closed his case and cannot do that, counsel added.



Petitioners disagreement



Mr Tsikata disagreed completely with all the points raised by lawyers for the respondents and attacked them accordingly.



First, he argued that the EC had already elected to adduce evidence when Mrs Mensa filed a witness statement.



Also, cross-examining Mrs Mensa, he argued, was germane to the petition, as it was the EC Chairperson who made the declaration of the 2020 presidential election results, signed the answer of the EC to the petition and also signed all the supporting affidavits.



Counsel submitted that the lawyer for the EC opposed the petitioners application for interrogatories partly because he had argued that the petitioner could ask those questions during cross-examination, which meant the EC boss was ready for the cross-examination.



As of the time the application was put before the court, the first respondent (EC) had elected to adduce evidence. It has filed a witness statement signed by Mrs Mensa and various affidavits where she had essentially offered herself for cross-examination, he added.



Another leg of counsels argument was that the cross-examination of Mrs Mensa would be in the interest of justice.



He posited that the case was not an ordinary case which talked about the private interest of people but that it was at the heart of the sovereign will of the people of Ghana to elect the President of the country.



It was his case that as the Chairperson of the EC, Mrs Mensa had a constitutional duty to account to the people of Ghana how she discharged her duties during the 2020 elections, especially those in contention in the petition.



She wants to shield herself from accountability by not submitting herself to cross-examination. She must account for that public duty and the best forum to do that is the Supreme Court, Mr Tsikata added.



Petitioners case



In his petition, former President Mahama contended that no candidate won the 2020 presidential election and, therefore, the declaration of President Akufo-Addo as the winner of the election by Mrs Mensa was null, void, unconstitutional and of no legal effect.



He argued that as per the results announced by Mrs Mensa on December 9,2020, no candidate garnered more than 50 per cent of the total valid votes cast, as required by Article 63(3) of the 1992 Constitution.



Former President Mahama, therefore, wants the Supreme Court to declare the declaration on December 9, 2020 as null and void and also order the EC to conduct a run-off between him and President Akufo-Addo.



Respondents answers



In their answers, President Akufo-Addo and the EC argued that the petition was incompetent, lacked merit and raised no reasonable cause of action.



It is their contention that the petition did not even meet the requirement of a presidential election petition, as stipulated in Article 64 (1) of the 1992 Constitution, and was, therefore, incompetent.



That, they argued, was because the petition made no allegation of infractions in the election at any of the 38,622 polling stations and 311 special voting centres.





Source: graphiconline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / February 10, 2021 / Northern Dynasty Minerals Ltd. (TSX:NDM)(NYSE:NAK) ("Northern Dynasty" or the "Company") reports that its recently submitted Request for Appeal ("RFA") of a federal permitting decision concerning Alaska's Pebble Project challenges a key finding of 'significant degradation'.

Prepared and submitted by the Company's 100%-owned US-based subsidiary Pebble Limited Partnership (the "Pebble Partnership"), the RFA argues the US Army Corps of Engineers' ("USACE") finding that the proposed copper-gold-molybdenum-silver-rhenium mine would cause 'significant degradation' to a local watershed is:

inconsistent with the law and Clean Water Act (CWA) regulations;

(CWA) regulations; arbitrary and unsupported by the administrative record, including the Final Environmental Impact Statement ("FEIS") for the Pebble Project; and,

unprecedented in Alaska and detrimental to the future of resource development in the state.

In response to shareholder enquiries, Northern Dynasty intends to highlight many of the compelling arguments within the Pebble Partnership's 56-page (plus appendices) RFA in the coming weeks. A complete version of the document can be viewed at: https://northerndynastyminerals.com/site/assets/files/4888/plp-request-for-appeal-poa-2017-00271-jan-19-2021.pdf.

Following receipt of the Pebble Partnership's 'request for appeal' on January 19, 2021, the USACE has 30 days to notify the appellant as to whether its RFA is complete. USACE guidelines indicate the administrative appeal process should conclude within 90 days, although it may be extended under certain circumstances.

Inconsistent with law and CWA regulations

In June 2020, the USACE informed the Pebble Partnership of its 'significant degradation' finding, based on its view the proposed mine would have a 'more than trivial' impact on a 'preponderance' of factors cited in CWA regulations for measuring effects on aquatic resources. The determination at Pebble relates to direct and indirect project effects within the Koktuli watershed.

In its RFA, the Pebble Partnership argues the 'more than trivial' standard employed by the USACE is not the correct test for assessing a project's impact on aquatic resources or making a 'significant degradation' finding.

"USACE guidance instead provides that 'significant' means 'major': the Guidelines on Analysis of 404 Permit Applications provide that each 404(b)(1) factor should be evaluated on a continuum that includes no effect, negligible, minor, and 'major (significant)' effect. 'More than trivial' is not one of the choices, but most closely equates to negligible or minor, while significant effects are 'major' effects at the other end of the spectrum. Defining 'significant' as major, rather than more than trivial, also fits with common usage: dictionaries define 'significant' as 'having or likely to have a major effect.'

"USACE/EPA guidance on 404(b)(1) Alternatives Requirements provides 'small discharges to construct individual driveways' an example of an activity that would constitute 'trivial impacts.' This underscores that 'trivial impacts' are extremely minor or negligible impacts. Thus, the phrase 'more than trivial impacts' covers the entire continuum between trivial impacts like discharges from individual driveways and major adverse impacts that could constitute significant degradation. Put simply, the fact that a project's impacts are more than trivial does not mean they are significant.

"Indeed, if 'more than trivial' were the standard, almost every project that required an individual 404 permit would trigger a finding of significant degradation." (RFA pp. 13 - 14)

Arbitrary and unsupported by the administrative record

In the Record of Decision ("ROD") issued for the Pebble Project in November 2020, the USACE provides a Factual Determination Matrix to explain how it assessed the CWA 404 (b)(1) factors in making the 'significant degradation' finding.

The Pebble Partnership argues in its RFA that the USACE's Factual Determination Matrix provides little analysis, and is largely a recitation of speculative impacts that may occur without substantiation. The Company believes the justification for the agency's 'significant degradation' finding falls well short of the regulatory requirement that such determinations be "based upon appropriate factual determinations, evaluations and tests."

The Pebble RFA also provides multiple examples of instances in which the USACE's justification for a 'significant degradation' finding is contradicted by the Pebble FEIS - including on such topics as fish and fisheries, water quality and recreation.

"In sum, the record does not support a finding of significant degradation in the Koktuli, or any other watershed. The Factual Determination Matrix shows that the District's approach was to find that if any impacts are theoretically possible and cannot be completely mitigated, they are significant, even if the FEIS found otherwise. The District seeks to ignore the findings of its own FEIS - a document that it developed with input from dozens of scientific experts. This approach fails to meet the regulatory requirement that findings of significant degradation must be 'based upon appropriate factual determinations, evaluations, and tests.'" (RFA p. 20)

Unprecedented in Alaska

In communicating its 'significant degradation' finding to the Pebble Partnership in June 2020, the USACE acknowledged it was not aware of any similar determination for large development projects in Alaska. The singular nature of the USACE's finding provided the impetus for the agency to demand 'in kind' and 'in watershed' compensatory mitigation at Pebble at 'a large ratio' - an unprecedented requirement that is contrary to CWA regulations, USACE guidance and past practice in Alaska.

In its RFA, the Pebble Partnership contrasts the USACE's approach to 'significant degradation' and 'compensatory mitigation' at Pebble to multiple, recent large-scale development projects in the state:

"The above examples demonstrate that the District's consistent approach is to evaluate the 404(b)(1) factors on a continuum from negligible to significant impacts, and that 'more than trivial' impacts is not the standard used to determine whether 'significant degradation' will occur. In addition, the District consistently allows out-of-watershed, out-of-kind mitigation where in-kind or in-watershed mitigation is not practicable. In fact, PLP could identify no examples where the applicant was limited to in-kind mitigation in a very narrowly defined watershed, or was required to use ratios as high as 6.5-10:1, as the District suggested would be necessary for Pebble. The USACE's consistent approach is also to consider all mitigation, including compensatory mitigation and state-imposed conditions under 401, before concluding whether 'significant degradation' will occur." (RFA p. 26)

Finally, the Pebble Partnership argues the precedent established by the USACE's 'significant degradation' finding could have long-term negative consequences for resource development in Alaska.

"A finding of significant degradation for Pebble is unprecedented and indefensible. The District's 'more than trivial' test has no basis in the regulations or USACE precedent. In addition, a finding of significant degradation in the Koktuli watershed is not supported by the record. Using a finding of significant degradation based on speculative impacts to impose burdensome compensatory mitigation sets a dangerous new precedent that could be used against future development throughout Alaska." (RFA p. 27).

About Northern Dynasty Minerals Ltd.

Northern Dynasty is a mineral exploration and development company based in Vancouver, Canada. Northern Dynasty's principal asset, owned through its wholly owned Alaska-based U.S. subsidiary, Pebble Limited Partnership, is a 100% interest in a contiguous block of 2,402 mineral claims in southwest Alaska, including the Pebble deposit, located 200 miles from Anchorage and 125 miles from Bristol Bay. The Pebble Partnership is the proponent of the Pebble Project, an initiative to develop one of the world's most important mineral resources.

For further details on Northern Dynasty and the Pebble Project, please visit the Company's website at www.northerndynastyminerals.com or contact Investor services at (604) 684-6365 or within North America at 1-800-667-2114. Review Canadian public filings at www.sedar.com and US public filings at www.sec.gov.

Ronald W. Thiessen

President & CEO

US Media Contact:

Dan Gagnier

Gagnier Communications

(646) 569-5897

Forward Looking Information and other Cautionary Factors

This release includes certain statements that may be deemed "forward-looking statements" under applicable law. All statements in this release, other than statements of historical facts, that address permitting, development and production for the Pebble Project are forward-looking statements. These statements include statements regarding (i) the mine plan for the Pebble Project, (ii) the social integration of the Pebble Project into the Bristol Bay region and benefits for Alaska, (iii) the political and public support for the permitting process, (iv) the ability to successfully appeal the negative Record of Decision and secure the issuance of a positive Record of Decision by the US Army Corps of Engineers and the ability of the Pebble Project to secure state permits, (v) the right-sizing and de-risking of the Pebble Project, (vi) the design and operating parameters for the Pebble Project mine plan, (vii) exploration potential of the Pebble Project, (viii) future demand for copper and gold, (ix) the potential partnering of the Pebble Project, and (x) the ability and timetable of NDM to develop the Pebble Project and become a leading copper, gold and molybdenum producer. Although NDM believes the expectations expressed in these forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, such statements should not be in any way be construed as guarantees that the Pebble Project will secure all required government permits, establish the commercial feasibility of the Pebble Project or develop the Pebble Project. Assumptions used by NDM to develop forward-looking statements include the assumptions that (i) the Pebble Project will obtain all required environmental and other permits and all land use and other licenses without undue delay, (ii) studies for the development of the Pebble Project will be positive, (iii) NDM's estimates of mineral resources will not change, (iv) NDM will be able to establish the commercial feasibility of the Pebble Project, and (v) NDM will be able to secure the financing required to develop the Pebble Project. The likelihood of future mining at the Pebble Project is subject to a large number of risks and will require achievement of a number of technical, economic and legal objectives, including (i) obtaining necessary mining and construction permits, licenses and approvals without undue delay, including without delay due to third party opposition or changes in government policies, (ii) finalization of the mine plan for the Pebble Project, (iii) the completion of feasibility studies demonstrating that any Pebble Project mineral resources that can be economically mined, (iv) completion of all necessary engineering for mining and processing facilities, (v) the inability of NDM to secure a partner for the development of the Pebble Project, and (vi) receipt by NDM of significant additional financing to fund these objectives as well as funding mine construction, which financing may not be available to NDM on acceptable terms or on any terms at all. NDM is also subject to the specific risks inherent in the mining business as well as general economic and business conditions, such as the current uncertainties with regard to COVID-19.

The National Environment Policy Act Environmental Impact Statement process requires a comprehensive "alternatives assessment" be undertaken to consider a broad range of development alternatives, the final project design and operating parameters for the Pebble Project and associated infrastructure may vary significantly from that currently contemplated. As a result, the Company will continue to consider various development options and no final project design has been selected at this time.

For more information on the Company, Investors should review the Company's filings with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission and its home jurisdiction filings that are available at www.sedar.com.

SOURCE: Northern Dynasty Minerals Ltd.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/628834/Northern-Dynasty-Pebble-Partnership-appeal-challenges-significant-degradation-finding-for-proposed-copper-gold-molybdenum-silver-rhenium-mine-in-southwest-Alaska


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About one out of 10 New York state residents have now received at least one dose of the Covid-19 vaccine, but state officials said they expect only small increases in vaccine supply over the next few weeks.

The state has administered 2.5 million doses of the vaccines developed by Moderna Inc. and the partnership between Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Tuesday. The governor said it was a significant milestone for the state that comes as Covid-19 infection rates continue to fall following a post-holiday surge.

Also Read | Inside the third front of the farm agitation

That is a big deal. This vaccine is the weapon that will win the war," Mr. Cuomo said in a call with reporters. We know the vaccine is successful, and its now a question of production and supply. So there is reason to be optimistic and hopeful. The numbers are coming down, the vaccines are going up."

The states positivity rate for Covid-19 continues to fall, the latest indication that New York is recovering from a jump in cases in the state following the Thanksgiving and winter holiday seasons, Mr. Cuomo said. The seven-day average dropped to 4.38%, the lowest it has been since the beginning of December, he said.

The number of people hospitalized because of Covid-19 also is declining, Mr. Cuomo said. There are 7,875 people hospitalized, down from more than 9,000 in mid-January. There were 138 Covid-19 deaths in the state on Monday, he said.

While New York continues to make progress vaccinating residents, Mr. Cuomo noted that demand for the vaccine continues to exceed the supply. There are currently about 10 million state residents eligible for the vaccine while the state receives about 300,000 weekly doses, he said.

In the coming weeks, the federal government will increase the states allocation of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines by 5%, Mr. Cuomo said. Both versions of the vaccine require two shots. The federal government also will begin allocating vaccine doses to health clinics on top of what it sets aside for the state, he said.

Mr. Cuomo said there will be no significant increase in vaccine supplies until the federal government approves the new one developed by Johnson & Johnson, which requires only one shot, and the company begins widespread distribution.

The Biden administration opposes reallocating second doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines to be used as first doses, Mr. Cuomo said. But in cases in which a person doesnt show up for a second shot, the state will be allowed to use that dose as a first shot, under certain circumstances, he said.

New York will also begin reallocating doses of the vaccine that were set aside for a federally run program where pharmacies are vaccinating staff and residents at long-term care facilities. That reallocation could be around tens of thousands of doses, the governor said.

That program has been slower than anticipated and we believe it was overallocated," Mr. Cuomo said. So we will be reallocating doses from that program into the general state allocation."

(This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text.)

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A team of scientists from the United States has recently explored the prevalence and transmission dynamics of the B.1.1.7 variant (UK variant) of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in the United States. The study reveals that because of 35-45% increased transmissibility, B.1.1.7 may soon become the US's dominant variant. The study is currently available on the medRxiv* preprint server.

Background

As of February 9, 2021, there have been over 106 million confirmed infections of SARS-CoV-2, including 2.33 million deaths, reported to the World Health Organization (WHO).

The concern over the pandemic is increasing globally particularly because of the emergence of new variants of SARS-CoV-2, which are more infectious and may be more lethal than the wildtype virus.

During the later part of the pandemic in late 2020, the B.1.1.7 variant containing spike N501Y mutation has emerged in the UK and rapidly became the predominant variant in the UK and in other European countries.

Similar to the previously identified D614G variant, B.1.1.7 variant's transmissibility is 40  70% higher than other SARS-CoV-2 variants identified globally. Moreover, a growing pool of preliminary studies has suggested that the B.1.1.7 variant may be more lethal than other viral variants. Infection with this variant may increase the mortality rate by 30%.

In the current study, the scientists have investigated the prevalence and transmissibility of the B.1.1.7 variant in the US.

SGTF and B.1.1.7 in SARS-CoV-2 tests at Helix since December 15, 2020. (A) Map of contiguous states in the USA with each bubble representing the number of positive tests from each state. (B) Estimated proportion of B.1.1.7 in total number of positive tests with Cq(N gene) < 27, in the U.S., California and Florida from December 15th, 2020 to January 30th, 2021. The proportion of B.1.1.7 samples was estimated using: (Observed B.1.1.7 sequences/Sequenced SGTF samples) * (Positive tests with SGTF/Total positive tests). Due to the lag in sequencing, the average proportion of B.1.1.7 sequences in sequenced samples with SGTF from the last five days (January 13-18) was used to infer the proportion of B.1.1.7 cases in total positive tests for the January 19-30 time period between. The black line shows the 5-day rolling average of the estimated proportion of B.1.1.7 in total positives. (C) Logistic growth curves fit to the rolling average of the estimated proportion of B.1.1.7 in total positives for the U.S., Florida and California. The predicted time when the estimated proportion of B.1.1.7 cases crosses 0.5 is indicated in red.

Study design

The spike gene-target failure (SGTF) in quantitative reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR)-based diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 infection was utilized to determine the fraction of B.1.1.7 variant in tested specimens.

When mutations are present at the target probe regions, qRT-PCR method can be used to predict the presence of viral variants with genetic differences. In tested specimens, the presence of 69-70 deletion, which is a signature mutation in the B.1.1.7 variant, can be characterized by SGTF.

A total of 460 SGTF specimens collected between December 2020 and January 2021 were sequenced to estimate the prevalence of the B.1.1.7 variant in the US.

Important observations

While examining the prevalence of SGTF in SARS-CoV-2-positive specimens, the scientists observed that in October 2020, the fraction of SGTF was as low as 0.2%, which increased gradually afterward. An increase in SGTF fraction from 0.8% to 4.2% occurred between the first week and last week of January 2021.

By the end of January 2021, the B.1.1.7 variant's prevalence was 3.6% in the US. Regarding nationwide distribution, they observed a significant variation in SGTF fractions across the nation.

To firmly investigate the B.1.1.7 prevalence, they sequenced all SGTF samples and observed that of 460 SGTF specimens, the B.1.1.7 variant was present in 209 specimens collected from ten US states. Moreover, they sequenced three additional B.1.1.7 genomes from California. Of these 212 B.1.1.7-positive specimens, 96 were obtained from California and 87 from Florida.

Regarding the population-level prevalence of B.1.1.7 variant, they observed that by the end of January 2021, about 2.1% of all confirmed COVID-19 cases in the US were caused by the B.1.1.7 variant.

Using a logistic growth model, they estimated 35  45% increased transmissibility of the B.1.1.7 variant in the US, with a doubling time of about 9.8 days.

By conducting time-aware Bayesian phylodynamic analyses, they observed that multiple independent entry events were responsible for the emergence of the B.1.1.7 variant in the US, starting as early as late November 2020.

By estimating the time to the most recent common ancestor, they noticed that the local transmission of B.1.1.7 variant between different US states might have started since December 2020, permitting the rapid transmission of the B.1.1.7 variant at least 30 US states by January 2021.

Study significance

The study reveals that currently, in the US, the B.1.1.7 variant's prevalence is relatively low. However, given the significantly higher transmissibility, B.1.1.7 may soon become the US's dominant variant.

Moreover, the study indicates that multiple international entry events are responsible for the emergence of B.1.1.7 variant in the US, followed by rapid spreading across the nation via community transmission. The scientists suggest that concerned authorities should immediately take vital preventive measures to minimize COVID-19 morbidity and mortality.

*Important Notice

medRxiv publishes preliminary scientific reports that are not peer-reviewed and, therefore, should not be regarded as conclusive, guide clinical practice/health-related behavior, or treated as established information.
RTG developed a specially commissioned animation that depicts Super's (Niu's) quest to collect a series of bags of "fortune" across several city landmarks, to ensure the prosperity for the New Year. The Furla Lunar New Year 2021 campaign, inspired by Chinese culture, marks an exciting new direction for Furla in engaging with its Chinese audience.

"Chinese New Year presents an incredible opportunity for brands like Furla to engage with their customers in new and inventive ways," said Angelito Tan, Founding Partner and CEO RTG Group Asia. "I'm excited to showcase this holistic creative work developed and led by our content development team at INSPIRE, a division of RTG Consulting Group. As a strategic partner of Furla, we are dedicated to positively shaping their brand image in Greater China."

RTG Consulting Group has developed the concept, storyboard, creative content and the global adaptations featured in the campaign.

About Furla

Furla is the original inclusive luxury brand that defined the category over 90 years ago. Since 1927 the brand is dedicated to creating luxury standard accessories which are accessible to a broad audience of consumers.

As the only Italian brand in its category, Furla stands for quality, creativity, and an optimistic yet confident personality.

Furla produces bags, shoes, and small leather goods for both women and men. New licenses for textiles, eyewear, watches and recently the announcement for a license for the first Furla branded fragrances are extending the brand's top quality craftsmanship and contemporary design aesthetic with the purpose to create lifestyle accessories that share its Italian attitude with the world. Inviting customers to discover and express their individuality.

For more information, please visit www.furla.com

About RTG Consulting Group

RTG Consulting Group is a leading luxury business consultancy specialized in advising senior executives of the world's most well-known luxury brands and public institutions. RTG comprises of three independent divisions:

RTG Intuition (business intelligence)

RTG Solutions (business strategy)

RTG Inspire (marketing communications)

We are headquartered in Shanghai, with offices in Beijing and Singapore.

Our core philosophy is grounded in 'Pursuing Betterment'. As individuals, as teams, and collectively as a company, we strive to make a positive impact not only for our brands, but for the world around us. This philosophy is supported by our three pillars: Purpose, Passion, and Perseverance.

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The World Logistics Passport (WLP), a major policy initiative established to increase trading opportunities between emerging markets, has welcomed Israel as a participant in the programme, marked by a virtual signing ceremony with the Federation of Israeli Chambers of Commerce.

As the tenth country to enter the WLP, whose trade strategy and expertise aims to increase the resilience of economies around the world, Israel joins recent member countries India, South Africa, Indonesia, amongst others.

The signing ceremony was attended by Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulayem, Chairman of Dubai's Ports, Customs and Free Zone Corporation (PCFC), and Amir Shani, Vice President of the Federation of Israeli Chambers of Commerce, as well as other Israeli executives from the Chamber.

Bin Sulayem, said: "Dubai is a global trading mega hub with world-class infrastructure that enables the movement of goods between nations through the fastest routes possible, creating time and cost efficiencies. Today, we welcome the Federation of Israeli Chambers of Commerce into the World Logistics Passport, as we further strengthen and elevate ties between our two nations. Through the WLP we aspire to forge closer economic ties and harness our collective experience, to unlock new trade opportunities for Israel with the world, via Dubai, and with Tel Aviv as a major logistics centre.

Trade between Dubai and Israel reached a value of AED 1 billion ($272 million) between September 2020 and January 2021. This included 6,217 tonnes of sea-freight and air-freight moving between the two nations. Major imports and exports included, mechanical and medical devices, electronic devices, flat screens, smart phones, diamonds, and engine spare parts.

Amir Shani, VP FICC and Chairman of the Freight Forwarders Association, said: "We are very excited about joining the World Logistics Passport global network as a partner. We believe our members will greatly benefit from this global incentives programme to expand their trade opportunities.

This partnership will allow Israeli companies to reduce cost and improve their supply chain to and from Israel using Dubai as logistical hub for new markets.

The Abrahams accords and Israels connection to Dubai enables it to become a regional and global player and open new trade routes, possibilities and business exchange.

This in return will reduce the cost of living and promote business growth in the most needed time of Covid-19 crisis. Moreover, the specific incentives under the relief tier of the WLP should further improve the logistics of our Covid-19 vaccine distribution".

Shani added: "The FICC continue to lead the private business sector and to advocate for free global trade by building business platforms as the WLP and partnering with the Dubai Chamber of Commerce to facilitate Business-to-business interactions.

Through the WLP, traders can expect to save 25% on freight costs and 10% on transit time. Take, for instance, the cargo journey from Israel to South East Asia. Transporting high-value, low-weight goods through historically established transport routes in Asia takes considerably longer, and is therefore more expensive, than if the goods pass through Dubai.

The WLP loyalty programme provides traders with a number of financial and non-financial benefits for increased trade volumes, spread across a four-tier membership scheme. Global brands leveraging the WLP and its benefits include anchor tenants such as UPS, Pfizer, Sony, Johnson & Johnson, and LG, all part of the programmes Platinum tier. The WLP also provides participating members with access to Gold and Silver tiers of benefits, which vary based on the value and frequency of trade.

As part of Israels participation in the WLP, the country will be part of the programmes Relief Tier  which supports humanitarian organizations and governments in providing relief in crises. In the case of Covid-19 all companies registered as WLP members involved in vaccine manufacturing and distribution will receive immediate cost and time efficiency benefits and part of the Gold Tier of membership. The WLP Relief Tier promotes and reinforces Dubais position as a global crisis logistics hub for humanitarian supplies.

With Israels entry into the programme, both countries will be strengthening their bi-lateral ties through close cooperation on Covid-19 vaccine distribution and supply chains. Furthermore, Israel will benefit from increased freight through Dubai while providing humanitarian organisations an efficient, centrally located hub for their logistics in the region.

The WLP has a proven track record. In Dubai, 15 local providers have confirmed more than 50 benefits which have in turn been applied to over 300 traders, accounting for approximately 50% of the emirates trade. Since its inception in 2019, the WLP has generated more than AED 3 billion in total trade. TradeArabia News Service

February is Black History Month. Its celebration began in the early part of the 20th century, just about 50 years after the end of the Civil War, by noted Black historian Carter Woodson.

In 1976, the month was officially recognized by President Gerald Ford, who noted it was important to seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of Black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.

Does Black History Month still have relevance and meaning today? Absolutely. In less than one year, there have been senseless and tragic deaths of Black people by those arguably acting under color of law. Houston native George Floyd died in Minneapolis after a white police officer knelt on his neck for almost nine minutes during an arrest. Georgia jogger Ahmaud Arbery was chased and killed by armed white residents who alleged they thought that he was a burglar. Louisville native Breonna Taylor was killed by white plainclothes officers who forced entry into her apartment.

Last year, we also witnessed a video of a woman in Central Park calling police and falsely accusing a Black male bird-watcher of threatening her. Most recently, we saw a video of a woman tackling a young black teen at a trendy New York City hotel, alleging he stole her cellphone when, in fact, she misplaced it during an Uber ride.

Cary Clack: Slavery of the past still looms over the present

Some may argue these are isolated events and not indicative of the overall experience of African Americans. Polling data dispute this notion. In a recent Pew Research Survey, nearly three-quarters of Black people polled said they have experienced discrimination or have been treated unfairly because of their race. This anti-Black discrimination consists of suspicious attitudes, doubts about their intelligence, unfair treatment by an employer or unfair traffic stops by the police.

In fact, the Pew Research Survey found most U.S. adults say the legacy of slavery continues to have an impact on the position of black people in American society today. More than four in 10 (people) say the country hasnt made enough progress toward racial equality.

Former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis recently observed that our country was born with a birth defect that we imported from the Old World  called slavery  and were still dealing with the after-effects of it.

Black History Months celebration is important. For people of African descent, learning about these early accomplishments is inspiring. Recognizing that some of these historical figures completed college and became inventors, doctors and lawyers just one generation after slavery showcases the power of the human spirit to succeed. These empowering stories provide comfort for the daily microaggressions that pale in comparison to what our ancestors faced.

Celebrating Black history is also important for members of the majority. They need to know about the wide range of African American accomplishments. For example, did you know African Americans were involved in building many of our iconic and historic buildings in Washington, D.C., such as the White House and the Capitol? Did you know that African Americans pioneered open heart surgery, perfected crop rotation, and invented the gas mask and traffic light? Of course, you must know that African American lawyers created the legal strategy that ultimately dismantled Jim Crow segregation.

During Black History Month, it is important to reflect on the history of all the people of the U.S., including African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos and Native Americans. But as we are reflecting, I ask that each of us do our part to fulfill the promise of the Declaration of Independence that all men (and women) are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Martin Luther King Jr. observed that at our nations founding, then-enslaved African Americans were issued a bad check with insufficient funds at the U.S. bank of justice as guaranteed by the Declaration of Independence.

By working together, we can achieve justice for all U.S. residents and also Kings dream that all people achieve justice, and then all people can be judged by the content of their character, not by the color of their skin.

Leonard M. Baynes is dean and professor of law at the University of Houston Law Center.
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Rishi Kapoor and Randhir Kapoor's youngest brother Rajiv Kapoor passed away on Tuesday (February 9, 2021). He was 58. Many members of the Bollywood fraternity had arrived at the late actor's Chembur residence to pay their final respects while they also paid their tributes through emotional posts on their social media handles. It is also a personal loss for actor Neil Nitin Mukesh, whose association with Rajiv Kapoor goes long back. The late actor was a dear friend of Neil's father, Nitin Mukesh and was thus an extremely close family friend.

Notably, today marks the fourth wedding anniversary of Neil Nitin Mukesh and his wife Rukmini. However, owing to the unfortunate demise of Rajiv Kapoor, the couple has cancelled all the celebrations for the same. Talking to Bollywood Life about the same, the actor revealed that his entire family is in shock and that there will be no celebrations this year. He also added that 'Rajiv Uncle' was a dear family friend. Neil also shared a heartfelt tribute for the Ram Teri Ganga Maili actor on his social media account.

Also Read: Rishi Kapoor's Brother And Actor Rajiv Kapoor Passes Away At 58

Neil Nitin Mukesh shared some happy memories with the late actor from his wedding day. He shared a series of pictures on his social media handle wherein the late Rajiv Kapoor along with his brother Rishi Kapoor had attended Neil's wedding four years ago. The pictures will inevitably leave one teary-eyed. Along with the post, the New York actor also had a touching message. Neil wrote in the caption, "Such a big loss for our family. We lost our most beloved Chimpu Uncle today. You have left us with nothing but the most fond memories of you. I will truly miss you loads. Love you forever Chimpu Uncle."

Rajiv Kapoor was best known for essaying the main lead in father Raj Kapoor's last directorial venture Ram Teri Ganga Maili. His other notable movies include Aasmaan (1984), Lover Boy (1985), Zabardast (1985) and Hum To Chale Pardes (1988). He had also donned the director's cap for the Rishi Kapoor and Madhuri Dixit-starrer Prem Granth.

Also Read: Rajiv Kapoor's Demise Leaves Dalip Tahil Shattered; Actor Says 'I Can't Believe He's No More'
Zanzibar  ZANZIBAR President Dr Hussein Mwinyi has enumerated ten areas of success during his first 100 days of presidency, vowing to intensify his crusade against corruption, theft and embezzlement of public resources.

President Mwinyi pledged to remain firm against deceitful public servants, charging that all stolen money from the government will finally be returned.

He revealed that some people have already started surrendering the money to Zanzibar Anti-Corruption and Economic Crimes Authority (ZAECA)).

"Take my words; all the stolen money will be returned," President Mwinyi told a press conference at the State House here last evening, adding: "We may opt to excuse those returning the money from prosecution but they have to quit public service because they are thieves."

He promised to nullify ownerships on all plots, which were fraudulently acquired and fairly reallocate them to the deserved Islanders.

"I'm aware that during the campaign, some people were busy looting land, all these plots will have their title deeds quashed." Dr Mwinyi highlighted the Government of National Unity (GNU) as one of his greatest achievement.

"Thanks to the reconciliation of our political differences, Zanzibar is calm and all Zanzibaris are united...they are all yearning for social and economic development," he said.

Other achievements include formation of the government, especially the appointment of ministers, permanent secretaries, regional commissioners and district commissioners.

"We still have some few slots to fill but we are almost done with the govern ment formation," he said.

The eighth phase government has signed two ambitious deals with foreign investors to spearhead the blue economy, which President Mwinyi has vowed to pursue for the country's economic transformation.

The Isles leader further made reference to infrastructure development; stakeholders' meetings; accountability in public service; good governance; cooperation with the private sector and the fight against sexual abuses as areas that his administration has scored high in the first 100 days.

Dr Mwinyi's new government has instituted sweeping disciplinary measures, including dismissals and suspensions against public officers alleged to have abused offices or embezzled public resources.

"We have so far suspended over 80 senior government officers, pending investigations over their alleged misconducts," said Dr Mwinyi, adding: "The war against corruption and theft is continuous as long as I am in the office."

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Citing improved revenue collections, Dr Mwinyi said the government, through Zanzibar Revenue Board (ZRB), collected 101bn/- in December, 2020, an increase of over 80 per cent from the 55bn/- collected in October 2020.

Fielding questions from editors and journalists soon after presenting a summary of his 100 days in the country's top office, Dr Mwinyi said although he doesn't expect to "exhume graves," there are many cases under ZAECA and various courts in the country that the government will ensure they are pursued to their fair conclusion.

He pleaded with all Zanzibaris to support the government initiatives on development and the fight against corruption, saying: "If we remain united and work hard, the future is bright for all of us."

Zanzibar has not been the same, at least within the 100 days, which President Mwinyi has spent in the Vuga-based State House.

Zanzibaris have in the 100-day period witnessed President Mwinyi's firm commitment to unite the Islanders and promote peace and tranquility, as well as instill discipline and accountability in public services.

Majority Islanders have positively embraced their leader and are nursing great hopes on the country's future.

"Should Dr Mwinyi maintain the speed he has demonstrated in these few days, the future for Zanzibaris is bright," says Maulid Ahmed Salum, a fish dealer at Darajani market.

The U.S. Senate declared former President Donald Trump's second impeachment as constitutional on Tuesday causing the proceedings to continue.

The Blaze reported that the Senate decided to continue with Trump's impeachment trial after the former president's legal counsels failed to clearly present its unconstitutionality.

In a final vote of 56-44, Democrats overruled the decision as they were able to tag along six Republicans on their side on the impeachment being constitutional despite Trump being not in office anymore.

According to The Blaze, the six Republican senators who sided with the Democrats to push with the impeachment were Louisiana's Bill Cassidy, Maine's Susan Collins, Alaska's Lisa Murkowski, Utah's Mitt Romney, Nebraska's Ben Sasse, and Pennsylvania's Pat Toomey.

Most notable of those who voted against the constitutionality of the impeachment was Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell who previously said he was pro-impeachment. Similarly, Murkowski was a swing vote after being confused by Trump's Attorney Bruce Castor in terms of his presentation of the unconstitutionality of the impeachment, The Blaze said.

"I was really stunned at the first attorney who presented for former President Trump. I couldn't figure out where he was going," The Blaze quoted Murkowski in explaining.

"It did not seem to make any arguments at all, which was an unusual approach to take," Collins said as per The Blaze.

"If anyone disagrees with my vote and would like an explanation I ask them to listen to the arguments presented by the House Managers and former Pres. Trump's lawyers. The House managers had much stronger constitutional arguments. The president's team did not," Cassidy pointed out in a statement.

NPR reported that the Democrats effectively used a video on the January 6 event to win the votes for the impeachment's constitutionality alongside Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin's statement that Trump's actions "constitute high crimes and misdeamenors" and tearful emotional appeal while recounting his family's experience of the event.

The video the Democrats played during the trial, however, was selectively edited to leave out Trump's call for his supporters to "peacefully and patriotically" let their voices be heard, Breitbart noted.

Nevertheless. House managers, as per NPR, were able to address the scholarly interpretation of the Constitution and rebut the claims that a president can only be impeached while he is in office.

"Their argument is that if you commit an impeachable offense in your last few weeks in office, you do it with constitutional impunity. You get away with it," Raskin said. NPR said he called this the "January exception" to impeachment.

NPR pointed out that Trumps legal counsel "offered an at-times-rambling defense" that was multipronged in terms of it being unconstitutional, that Trump's comments were based his First Amendment right, and that the mob that caused the riot at the Capitol was not Trump's responsibility.

Castor's "meandering and long-winded opening argument," according to NPR, did not convince the Democrats that it is a "partisan maneuver" that would affect future impeachments. The same went for David Schoen, one of Trump's legal counsels, who spoke lengthily on the impeachment's constitutional issues considering Trump is already a "private citizen."

The Blaze said that two-thirds of the Senate or 67 senators is needed for Trump to be convicted for the impeachment, which purports him for "inciting violence."

Earlier reports indicated that Trump shouldn't be blamed for what happened on Jan. 6.

Democrat and The George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley earlier said President Trump "never actually called for violence or a riot." Other reports indicated that leftist groups such as Antifa already staged a protest in the Capitol while Trump hasn't finished speaking at the Ellipse yet. Antifa and BLM members were also seen infiltrating the Trump supporters that day.

Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-10 08:24:48|Editor: huaxia

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ISLAMABAD, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi held a telephonic conversation with his Chilean counterpart Andres Allamand Tuesday regarding a missing Chilean mountaineer who was attempting to scale the world's second-highest peak K2 in winter.

Chilean mountaineer Juan Pablo Mohr was attempting to scale K2 with Pakistan's renowned mountaineer Ali Sadpara, and John Snorri from Iceland when they lost contact and went missing on Friday owing to bad weather conditions, according to Alpine Club Pakistan, a non-governmental organization working for promotion of mountaineering and adventure tourism in the country.

The Foreign Ministry of Pakistan said in a statement that Qureshi expressed his deep concern over the missing team of mountaineers and apprised the Chilean foreign minister of efforts being made by Pakistan to locate them, including a number of search flights by Pakistan Army Aviation helicopters amid challenging weather conditions over a treacherous terrain.

He assured the foreign minister of Chile that Pakistan would make all possible efforts to trace the missing mountaineers, the statement said.

Acknowledging the search and rescue operation, the Chilean foreign minister thanked the government of Pakistan on behalf of the people of Chile and the family of Mohr for assistance in the search operations, the statement added. Enditem
Edison, NJ -- (SBWIRE) -- 02/10/2021 -- A new business intelligence report released by Advance Market Analytics with title Global Business Travel Insurance Market Insights, Forecast to 2025.This report provides a detailed overview of key factors in the Global Business Travel Insurance Market and factors such as driver, restraint, past and current trends, regulatory scenarios and technology development. A thorough analysis of these factors has been conducted to determine future growth prospects in the global market. The study covers emerging player's data, including competitive landscape, sales, revenue and global market share of top manufacturers.



Major Players in Market are:

Assicurazioni Genarali (Italy), Allianz (Germany), Seven Corners (United States), Travel Safe Insurance (United States), USI Insurance Services (United States), MH Ross Travel (United States), American International Group (United States), AXA Group (France), Chubb (United States) and Insure and Go Insurance Services Ltd. (United Kingdom)



Free Sample Report + All Related Graphs & Charts (Including COVID19 Impact Analysis) @

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Keep yourself up-to-date with latest market trends and changing dynamics due to COVID Impact and Economic Slowdown globally. Maintain a competitive edge by sizing up with available business opportunity in Business Travel Insurance Market various segments and emerging territory.



What is Business Travel Insurance?

The global business travel insurance market is expected to witness high growth in the forecasted period due to the rapidly changing global economic order & trade practices. Business travel insurance provides insurance cover for business trips of a customer or an organization and other many services. Additionally, it provides dismemberment benefits and accidental death coverage for employees who are traveling for their company's business. The growth of the business travel market is driven by huge investments made by regional governments.



Business Travel Insurance Market Segmentation and Market Data Breakdown:

Distribution Channel (Insurance Trade, Insurance Company, Bank, Insurance Broker, Insurance Aggregator, Others), Type of User (B2B, B2C, B2B2C), Insurance Cover (Single Trip Travel Insurance, Annual Multi-trip Travel Insurance), End User (Corporations, Government, International Traveler and Employees)



Influencing Market Trend

- Growing Demand for Multi-Trip Policies



Market Drivers

- Significant Growth in Number of Business Trip



Opportunities

- Travel Insurance is Mandated to Obtain VISA in Countries such as the U.S., France, Belgium, and Others



Restraints

- Lack of Awareness towards Business Travel Insurance among Consumers



Challenges

- Stringent Regulations towards Travel Insurance



Do you have any Query? We are here to Assist you@

https://www.advancemarketanalytics.com/enquiry-before-buy/13528-global-business-travel-insurance-market-1



Region Included are: North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Oceania, South America, Middle East & Africa

Country Level Break-Up: United States, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, South Africa, Nigeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Germany, United Kingdom (UK), the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Austria, Turkey, Russia, France, Poland, Israel, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, China, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, India, Australia and New Zealand etc.



What benefits does AMA research study is going to provide?

- Latest industry influencing trends and development scenario

- Open up New Markets

- To Seize powerful market opportunities

- Key decision in planning and to further expand market share

- Identify Key Business Segments, Market proposition & Gap Analysis

- Assisting in allocating marketing investments



Browse in-depth TOC on "Global Business Travel Insurance Market Comprehensive Study 2019-2026":

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Strategic Points Covered in Table of Content of Global Business Travel Insurance Market:

Chapter 1: Introduction, market driving force product Objective of Study and Research Scope the Global Business Travel Insurance market

Chapter 2: Exclusive Summary  the basic information of the Global Business Travel Insurance Market.

Chapter 3: Displaying the Market Dynamics- Drivers, Trends and Challenges of the Global Business Travel Insurance

Chapter 4: Presenting the Global Business Travel Insurance Market Factor Analysis Porters Five Forces, Supply/Value Chain, PESTEL analysis, Market Entropy, Patent/Trademark Analysis.

Chapter 5: Displaying the by Type, End User and Region 2013-2020

Chapter 6: Evaluating the leading manufacturers of the Global Business Travel Insurance market which consists of its Competitive Landscape, Peer Group Analysis, BCG Matrix & Company Profile

Chapter 7: To evaluate the market by segments, by countries and by manufacturers with revenue share and sales by key countries in these various regions.

Chapter 8 & 9: Displaying the Appendix, Methodology and Data Source

Finally, Global Business Travel Insurance Market is a valuable source of guidance for individuals and companies.



Avail 10-25% Discount on various license types @

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Data Sources & Methodology

The primary sources involves the industry experts from the Business Travel Insurance Market including the management organizations, processing organizations, analytics service providers of the industry's value chain. All primary sources were interviewed to gather and authenticate qualitative & quantitative information and determine the future prospects.



In the extensive primary research process undertaken for this study, the primary sources  Postal Surveys, telephone, Online & Face-to-Face Survey were considered to obtain and verify both qualitative and quantitative aspects of this research study. When it comes to secondary sources Company's Annual reports, press Releases, Websites, Investor Presentation, Conference Call transcripts, Webinar, Journals, Regulators, National Customs and Industry Associations were given primary weight-age.



Key questions answered

- Who are the Leading key players and what are their Key Business plans in the Business Travel Insurance market?

- What are the key concerns of the five forces analysis of the Business Travel Insurance market?

- What are different prospects and threats faced by the dealers in the Business Travel Insurance market?

- What are the strengths and weaknesses of the key vendors?



Thanks for reading this article; you can also get individual chapter wise section or region wise report version like North America, Europe or Asia.

Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-11 04:46:23|Editor: huaxia

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Illegal immigrants are seen on the deck of Libyan Coast Guard's ship at the port of Al Khums, Libya, on Feb. 10, 2021. The UN-affiliated International Organization for Migration (IOM) said more than 200 illegal immigrants were rescued off Libyan coast on Wednesday. (Photo by Hamza Turkia/Xinhua)

TRIPOLI, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- The UN-affiliated International Organization for Migration (IOM) said more than 200 illegal immigrants were rescued off Libyan coast on Wednesday.

"We reiterate that no one should be returned to Libya, and that the arbitrary detention of migrants must end," the IOM tweeted.

Because of the insecurity and chaos in Libya following the overthrow of former leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, thousands of illegal immigrants, mostly Africans, choose to cross the Mediterranean from in the North African country toward Europe.

According to IOM, more than 2,000 illegal immigrants have been rescued off Libyan coast so far in 2021.

In 2020, 323 migrants died and 417 others went missing on the Central Mediterranean route while 11,891 illegal immigrants were rescued and returned to Libya, according to the IOM estimates.
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Copyright  2021 Albuquerque Journal

The Navajo Nation has administered about 98% of its available COVID-19 vaccines and more doses are arriving this week from the federal government.

As of Tuesday, the Navajo Nation had administered 77,074 of the 78,520 vaccine doses it had received.

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................................................................

The Navajo Area Indian Health Service, which helps coordinate the reservations vaccine distribution, is expecting a shipment of 28,925 doses within days.

Roselyn Tso, area director for the Navajo Area IHS, credited local health care workers for managing the tribes vaccine clinics alongside testing programs and regular medical care.

We are working very hard to make sure all vaccines available to the Navajo Area IHS are put into the arms of the people that we serve, Tso said during a video update Tuesday.

Drive-through vaccination sites, along with social media posts and flyers informing Navajo residents of vaccine availability at various clinics, have helped boost the number of tribal members that have received COVID-19 vaccines.

These efforts have helped distribute vaccines even in smaller communities, such as Teec Nos Pos, Arizona, and Thoreau, said Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez.

This virus, this pandemic, has probably touched every single person on the Navajo Nation one way or the other, Nez said. A lot of our relatives have lost their lives to COVID-19.

The tribal government has a goal of administering a total of 100,000 COVID-19 vaccines by the end of February.

Nearly 173,000 people live on the reservation, according to Census Bureau data.

Last week, U.S. President Joe Biden signed a Major Disaster Declaration for the Navajo Nation. The move frees up more Federal Emergency Management Agency resources, such as money, staff and supplies, to help the reservation address COVID-19.

Nez said more than 80 federal health care personnel will be coming to the reservation in the coming weeks to assist with vaccinations and clinical care.

COVID-19 vaccine eligibility varies across the vast reservations health care facilities.

Many sites have begun vaccinating people older than 18. All sites prioritize older and high-risk residents.

Some vaccination sites focus on administering the second doses of Pfizer or Moderna vaccines.

The Navajo Nation reported 54 new COVID-19 cases and 15 deaths Tuesday. A total of 28,994 people have tested positive and 1,075 people have died from the disease.

The average case numbers and deaths have held steady for the past two weeks, which health officials call a promising trend.

Health Minister Greg Hunt this morning accused News Breakfast host Michael Rowland of identifying with the Left when questioned over a Liberal party logo on a government advertisement for COVID-19 vaccines.

Oh come on mate. Theres nobody watching who doesnt identify you with the Left. Im honest about my origins. Im bemused, but I did predict to people that Michael Rowland would spend 50% of this interview on this topic, rather than the safety and rollout of vaccines, Hunt said.

Rowland acknowledged the importance of vaccine information but disagreed with Hunts character character summary.

Here it is. Judge for yourself. No, Minister, I don't identify with the left. My job as an ABC journalist is to hold ALL sides of politics to account, as I was this morning. It was, and is, a simple question. You're welcome back on the show any time.@BreakfastNews #auspol https://t.co/Rkm9poIOiZ  Michael Rowland (@mjrowland68) February 9, 2021

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All primary pupils and secondary school students will report to school, but in a staggered manner from March 1 to mid-June, according to a leaked draft government master plan.

Government closed all educational institutions in the country over Covid-19 pandemic in March, last year.

Plans since then to conduct virtual education remained wet in the wings after the government failed to deliver radio and television sets it promised to neighbourhoods across the country.

To fill the learning gap amid uncertainty about schools' re-opening, urban and international schools turned to use largely Zoom and other digital platforms to teach children of parents with means to pay, crowding out the poor.

In an address on February 4, the President announced that semi-candidate classes - Primary Seven pupils, Senior Three and Senior Five students - would resume studies on March 1.

The students in this bracket, he said, number 1.7 million who, if added to the 1.3 million candidates who resumed class on January 18, this year, would total 3 million, meaning there will be five times more facilities for them to use.

The President said nothing about when the other classes would go back to school, leaving parents confused, while his wife Janet Kataha, the Education minister, a day later said nursery schools teaching children aged three to six years will not re-open through the pandemic period.

This newspaper has now seen the latest government master plan to ensure all primary school pupils and secondary school students report back this year in multiple phases.

The first group is the semi-candidates who resume studies on March 1, and will study for three months to the first week of June.

Plan for other classes

Primary Four and Five pupils will constitute the second batch that is expected to return to school around April 12, after the current candidate classes check out for vacation, and study for 10 weeks until roughly mid-June.

In addition, the government plans that Senior One students will get back to school around April 19 and study for 14 weeks to about July 22.

They will be followed by Senior Two students who report to class on or around June 5, coinciding with the departure of the semi-candidates. They will study for slightly over two months, ending around mid-August.

Meanwhile, Primary 1-3 pupils will be the last batch to resume classes and are expected to return to school around June 18 and study for only eight weeks, closing the term nearly at the same time as Senior Two students.

Staggering of the schedule is intended to prevent crowding, which could accelerate spread of Covid-19, according to senior Ministry of Education officials.

This newspaper understands that universities and tertiary institutions have been given some leg room to schedule their re-opening, which the former likely to re-open on March 1. The planned schooling period of 8 to 14 weeks compares with the previous 3-month term, although two months would be too short to exhaust a syllabus.

Education ministry technocrats shared the tentative schools' reopening schedule with Minister Janet yesterday after the ministry's top management agreed to its contents.

"We have sent the schedule to the Minister (Janet) who was in Cabinet today (yesterday)," Mr Alex Kakooza, ministry of Education permanent secretary, said, promising to provide the details to this newspaper today or until the political leadership approves the plan.

In response to question whether the students will be continuing with last year's unfinished term/work or start a new one for 2021, Mr Kakooza, said: "We are not looking at a term, but content coverage. Abnormal situations call for abnormal responses. What we are looking at is what we are supposed to [have covered] when we stopped schools last year."

He added: "As a ministry we are not focusing on the (regular) term I, II and III (schedules). We have come up with materials to cover the entire [year]. We have come up with a time recovery strategy that will spill over into next year."

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Tentative school reopening programme

The plans to reopen schools emerged amid reports countrywide that schools are hiking tuition fees three weeks to the date semi-candidates are expected back in class.

Jan 18 - Mar 31: P.7 candidates break off on March 31 after their Primary Leaving Exams.

Mar 1 - Jun 7 14 weeks: P.6, S.3, and S.5 will report back to school on March 1, and break off on June 7.

Jan 18 - April 6: S.4 and S.6 students will end their final term with exams by April 6.

April 12 - Jun 18 (10 weeks): P.4 and P.5 pupils will resume classes on April 12 and break off on June 18.

April 19 - Jul 22 (14 weeks): S.1 students will report for classes on April 19 and break off on July 22.

Jun 18 - Aug 13 (10 weeks): S.2 students will report on June 5 and break off on August 13.

Jun 21 - Aug 13 (8 weeks): P.1, P.2 and P.3 pupils will report on June 21 and break off on August 13, after eight weeks.
We were due to be married on March 28 last year, but just over a week before this our wedding was cancelled due to Covid restrictions.

We were fully insured under a Dreamsaver policy - or so we thought. When we tried to claim about 27,000 of costs, it offered us just 13,000.

It refused to cover the 8,000 venue fee because guidance from the Competition and Markets Authority says the venue should refund us - but ours said no.

The insurer also refused to cover items such as a personalised table plan, arguing that we had not used wedding suppliers.

Insult to injury: A reader was offered just 13,000 by their insurer when they had claimed 27,000 having been forced to cancel their wedding due to Covid restrictions

It is asking that we send it items such as my wedding dress, mens shoes and bridesmaids dresses, as these can be sold to offset some of the costs to the insurer.

Normally this would be fine, but the dresses and shoes are at different houses and the wedding dress shop is closed because of the lockdown.

I cant believe the insurer wants me to collect these items from so many locations during a pandemic.

S. H., Kenley, South London.

Tony Hazell replies: When we are sold insurance, the glossy details imply that if something goes badly wrong, the insurer will float in like a fairy godmother, wave its wand and put everything right.

But disappointed Cinderellas all too often face a wicked stepmother instead, and must fight for every penny.

Far from removing stress, insurance companies can become the greatest source of it in our lives.

UK General provided your policy, so I went there for answers. Meanwhile, you battled on until the venue offered 4,000 and UK General agreed to cover the other half of the venue fee.

You made a Subject Access Request, which compelled the claims handler to reveal all details held on you. This showed that you had forgotten to include in your claim a 1,000 deposit made to caterers.

UK General had by now increased its offer to 19,592.91.

It continued to argue that some items were usable outside of a wedding. These included your invitations (258), wedding signage (240) and unconsumed alcohol such as prosecco (823).

Even with Valentines Day around the corner, I am not sure you could manage several cases of prosecco on your own (though I am sure my esteemed section editor would be willing to assist you).

After reviewing the case, UK General has agreed to pay your claim in full. You will be receiving a further 4,188.72 covering wedding services and attire, plus 300 redress for the inconvenience you have suffered.

A spokesman says: UK Generals wedding insurance was never intended to cover the effects of the pandemic, but we do understand the need to act sensitively in view of the emotional distress caused to Ms H and her partner by having to cancel their wedding, as well as the financial outlay.

We cannot cover the emotional side, but our policies are intended to protect couples from expenses incurred. The claims team felt it was simply the right thing to do.

Now, that is precisely the sort of reaction we should expect when we make a claim.

UK General admits the pandemic has caused significant . . . reputational damage for the insurance industry in respect of how policy wordings are interpreted.

If there were more consideration of the emotional trauma suffered by customers and less nit-picking through policy wordings, then reputational damage could be avoided or repaired.

You have YOUR say Every week, Money Mail receives hundreds of your letters and emails about our stories. Here are some of the best regarding our article on the demise of the local bank manager: Covid-19 has been a godsend for banks and building societies trying to close branches. Remember, they have no loyalty to the public they are supposed to serve, all they care about is their bonuses. S. E., email. A major bank closed the last branch in my town and sent customers a letter informing them where their new nearest sites are. Unbelievably, you cant get a bus from either one back to our town. O. S., Llanfihangel, Wales. One of the main reasons people no longer visit bank branches is that they are rarely open on Saturdays. I think banks are engineering a reduced footfall to justify the closures. R. R., Leeds. High Street bank branches are finished and dying a slow death, albeit hastened by Covid. High business rates and rents have sped up their demise, as have out-of-town shopping centres which rarely house branches. A. N., Birkenhead. My 87-year-old mother sometimes needs to transfer money between her accounts. Her nearest branch is now 15 miles and two bus rides away. She doesnt have a computer and has no desire to learn how to use one now. K. T., Somerset. I feel sorry for people who are not tech savvy because the fast pace of change is inevitably leaving them behind. N. L., Telford.

Barclays keeps writing to my late mother

Barclays is still writing to my late mother, despite being informed that she died.

I first raised the issue on December 9. On December 31, a deeply upsetting letter arrived addressed to her, regarding funds that had been paid from her account in error and which were being recalled.

The letter concluded: We look forward to hearing from you soon.

It is now six weeks since I made the complaint and it is still not resolved. A. J., Leicester.

Tony Hazell replies: The letter you received was correct in content.

The person who had received funds in error from your late mothers account had made you aware of the issue and then sent a cheque, which was cashed. So the attempted recall was unnecessary and was rejected by the other bank.

But the serious error was that the letter was addressed to your mother and not to you.

Mistakes such as this can be extremely distressing.

A Barclays spokesperson says: It is evident that on this occasion we failed to provide the high levels of service that our customers can expect to receive, and we have offered our apologies for this.

We can confirm that the customers account has been returned to the position it should have been in.

Barclays has offered 200 as good will gesture for the distress and inconvenience caused.

Straight to the point In December I tried to transfer some money from my Betfair betting account to my bank. Something went wrong and my account, which holds 450, was closed. R. B., via email. Betfair refused to comment on this issue, but has now reopened your account. You say someone has since called to explain that your account had been confused with another one from 2007. *** Airport parking firm I Love Meet And Greet gave us a 97 voucher when our flight was cancelled in April. But it was valid for only six months and no one will reply to emails requesting an extension. T. S., Kidderminster, Worcs. I Love Meet And Greet was unable to find your emails, but it says that all vouchers will be valid until the end of the year. The firm has also now offered you a full refund. *** I signed up to a mobile phone contract at Carphone Warehouse, which promised the freedom to use your internet data allowance anywhere in the world. When I asked if this meant I could use unlimited data abroad, the customer assistant said yes. But I later discovered there is a 25GB roaming cap. L. H., Essex. Carphone Warehouse apologises that the cap was not made clearer to you. It has now waived the 370.42 early exit fee so you can find a more suitable contract. *** When my EasyJet currency card expired, I rang the provider, Omnio, to ask for a replacement. But I was told I couldnt have a new card because I already have an account. R. R., Cheshire. EasyJet says it is sorry you were provided with incorrect information. Omnio has now sent you a new card.

Can't get the right service from Hyundai

I purchased a Hyundai i800 in April 2018. When I had it serviced in April 2019, the dealer recommended a service plan, which I took out to cover the car up to and including the fifth-year service.

All was fine until November last year, when I tried to pay off the plan in full. I received confirmation by email, but this was missing the fifth service despite them charging for it.

Since then I have contacted customer services six times to try to get the missing service reinstated.

I have been assured that it will be sorted out, but have received only a further copy of the contract with the missing service.

Please could you help me get my fifth service or my 200-plus back? P. B., Maidstone, Kent.

Tony Hazell replies: I contacted Hyundai and, like magic, it has supplied you with a corrected contract.

I can offer no further explanation because Hyundai has not provided one.

1. Roads. The citys roads are a mess. Significant resources are needed to fix them.

2. Public safety. The crime rate is too high. Police pay and resources come first.

3. More city programs. The city must invest more in city programs and services.

4. Comprehensive plan. The city needs to focus on rebuilding and rebranding.

5. Cut city spending. City officials must get serious about trimming the budget.

Vote

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The impugned conduct of Ms. Yasmin Sooka was also complained to the United Nations and the European Union by Major General Sallay.

Reports from Court indicate that Sri Lankan Army officer Major General Suresh Sallay has instituted legal proceedings against Ms. Yasmin Sooka and the International Truth and Justice Project (ITJP).

Ms. Yasmin Sooka headed an NGO called the International Truth and Justice Project (ITJP)





The plaint filed by Major General Suresh through his Attorney-at-Law, Mrs. Lakshika Bakmiwewa on 07 Feb, Colombo District court states that Ms. Sooka and the ITJP has issued various baseless and false information about Major General Sallay and has caused the same to be widely published, thereby causing damages to the character and reputation of Major General Sallay, who is well reputed in the fields of Global Security and Intelligence.

The plaint states that Ms. Sooka and the ITJP has failed to meet the demand of LKR 1 Billion in damages which was issued by Major Generals lawyers. The plaint further alleges that the conduct of Ms. Sooka and the ITJP is actuated with express malice and the said publication which is defamatory in nature, has paved way for elements sympathetic to the defeated cause to the LTTE to wage attempts on Major General Sureshs life.

The impugned conduct of Ms. Yasmin Sooka was also complained to the United Nations and the European Union by Major General Sallay. Previously, Ms. Sooka and the ITJP had to apologized to a retired Sri Lanka brigadier for falsely publishing his image in one of the reports published in the ITJP website.
New York, Feb 10 : While appearing before a US Senate panel, Neera Tanden, the Indian-American nominee to President Joe Biden's cabinet, apologised to Republican Senators for insulting them in tweets.

Appearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee on Tuesday, she said: "I deeply regret and apologise for my language and some of my past language." Tanden has a record of vicious tweets and she admitted that she had deleted more than 1,000 of them in November 2020 around the time Biden had named her to be the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), a cabinet post.

Despite the Republican opposition, Tanden is certain to be confirmed as the Democrats have a majority in the Senate with Vice President Kamala Harris' casting vote.

She will be the second Indian-American to serve on the US cabinet.

The first was Nikki Haley, who was appointed by former President Donald Trump to be the country's Permanent Representative to the UN with cabinet rank.

Before Tanden's nomination is voted by the full Senate, she will need the approval of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, as well as the Senate Budget Committee.

Republican Senator Rob Portman confronted Tanden with her tweets, saying: "You wrote that Susan Collins is the worst, that Tom Cotton is a fraud, that vampires have more heart than Ted Cruz. You called leader McConnell: Moscow Mitch and Voldemort, and on and on." She replied, "For those concerned about my rhetoric and my language, I'm sorry." The post of the director of the OMB is one of the most powerful in the US as the official oversees the crafting the $5 trillion US budget.

In her opening statement to the committee, Tanden spoke of her Indian immigrant mother Maya and the difficulties she faced as a divorcee raising her and her brother Raj.

"I owe my presence here to their love and support and to the grit and resilience of my mother: an immigrant from India who was left to make it on her own in America with two young children after her divorce from my father.

"Back then she faced a harsh choice, stay in the US and rely on the social safety net or return to India where she knew her children would face the stigma of divorce. She had faith in this country and made the decision, I believe the courageous decision, to stay," she said.

She also recalled how her family relied on government food programmes and housing subsidies till her mother found a job and rose to middle class economic status.

Referring to the government assistance, Tanden said: "My path in life would never have been possible without budgetary choices that reflected our nation's values, many of them made in the very agency I am now nominated to lead.

"I spend every day of my life grateful for a nation, and a government, that had faith in my mother and in me, that invested in our humanity and gave me a fair shot to pursue my potential." Tanden is close to Hillary Clinton, a former Secretary of State and the Democratic Party's presidential candidate in 2016, who was defeated by Trump.

After working in the administrations of former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and also Hillary Clinton's campaign, Tanden became the President of the Centre for American Progress think-tank.

(Arul Louis can be reached at arul.l@ians.in and followed on Twitter at @arulouis)

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
The acquisition and development of the copper assets will be funded from existing cash reserves and a A$90 million placement, which has been supported by professional and sophisticated investors.

Cyprium will pay a total of A$60 million to acquire the assets.

( ) has entered into a share sale agreement with ( ) to acquire that companys Western Australian copper assets.

This includes 100%-owned entity Paterson Copper Pty Ltd, owner of the Nifty Copper Mine, Maroochydore Copper Project and the Paterson Exploration Project, which includes a farm-in agreement with IGO Ltd ( ).

CYM has agreed to pay Metals X a total of A$60 million upon completion of the transaction comprising a cash payment of A$24 million and convertible notes with a face value totalling A$36 million.

It will also replace the financial assurances relating to Nifty which equate to around A$6.5 million, with effect from completion.

$90 million placement

The company has received binding commitments to fund the transaction through a A$90 million placement to professional and sophisticated investors.

This transaction will rapidly advance several of Cypriums previously stated objectives that include building a mid-tier Australian copper mining business by acquiring a portfolio of projects.

An outstanding portfolio

Cyprium executive director Barry Cahill said: This is a truly transformational transaction for Cyprium which provides us with an outstanding portfolio of copper projects.

We have regularly ranked Nifty at the top of our Australia copper project acquisition target list and are delighted to have secured this as part of our quality suite of copper development projects.

Nifty and Maroochydore are a perfect fit for the skill set of our management team, who have a track record of creating value and producing copper, as most recently demonstrated with Finders Resources at the Wetar Copper Project.

Market fundamentals

He said: With favourable market fundamentals for copper, the acquisition of this portfolio represents an outstanding opportunity to generate significant value by securing more than 1.1 million tonnes of contained copper at Nifty and Maroochydore, including significant infrastructure, as well as the extensive Paterson Exploration JV with IGO in the highly prospective Paterson Province.

We are excited about the opportunity to execute our simplified development plan which consists of an open-pit mining operation, feeding a heap leach and SX-EW processing flowsheet.

Cash flows generated are intended to be utilised towards the development of Maroochydore and Cypriums existing Murchison copper-gold projects.

Overview of assets

The Nifty Copper Mine, Maroochydore Copper Project and the Paterson Exploration Project are in the northeast Pilbara region of Western Australia, approximately 330 kilometres east-southeast of Port Hedland.

Nifty Copper Mine

The Nifty mine is on the western edge of the Great Sandy Desert in the north-eastern Pilbara region of Western Australia.

Nifty has produced more than 700,000 tonnes of copper metal and the deposit is still ranked in the top 20 copper resources by copper tonnes in Australia, with considerable potential to increase further.

Nifty retains a JORC 2012-compliant mineral resource of 658,500 tonnes contained copper via an open pit and underground mine.

Maroochydore Copper Project

The Maroochydore deposit is around 85 kilometres southeast of Nifty and includes shallow JORC 2012-compliant resources of 486,000 tonnes of contained copper, consisting of a significant oxide mineral resource of 43.5 million tonnes at 0.91% copper and a primary sulphide mineral resource of 5.43 million tonnes at 1.66%.

Cyprium intends to commence drilling and a metallurgical test-work program with the emphasis to unlock the copper potential.

Paterson Exploration Project

Paterson Exploration Project covers more than 2,800 square kilometres, is highly prospective and in a region that hosts a number of substantial gold, gold-copper, copper and tungsten mines and deposits, including the Telfer Gold-Copper Mine.

In mid-2020, Metals X signed an exploration joint venture with IGO on around 2,400 square kilometres area of the project.

Under the agreement, IGO is to sole fund A$32 million of exploration activities over 6.5 years to earn a 70% interest in the project, including a minimum expenditure before the withdrawal of A$11 million over 3.5 years.

And upon earning a 70% interest, a joint venture will form and IGO will free-carry Paterson Copper to the completion of a pre-feasibility study (PFS) on a new mineral discovery.

Cyprium looks forward to partnering IGO in this joint venture during the initial expenditure stages.

Acquisition funding

The transaction and development of the copper assets are to be funded from existing cash reserves and the A$90 million placement.

Cyprium has received binding commitments for the placement from professional and sophisticated investors in Australia and eligible investors in certain overseas jurisdictions.

This placement will result in the issue of approximately 450 million fully paid ordinary shares at an offer price of 20 cents per share.
NORWALK  Norwalk Public Schools is slated to receive $9.2 million in federal aid for coronavirus relief.

The money is distributed by the state Department of Education as part of the Elementary and Secondary Emergency School Relief Fund II under the CARES Act. The funding is meant to help address school issues that have emerged due to the ongoing pandemic.

According to the CSDE, Norwalk is entitled to $9,214,216 of the $443.1 million in federal aid devoted to Connecticut schools. This is one of the highest amounts of allotments in Fairfield County. Only a few cities in the county got more than Norwalk  Bridgeport received $40 million, Danbury received $10 million and Stamford got $12 million. Hartford received the most in the state with $45 million, followed by Waterbury which received $41 million.

We were pleased to learn that the district will receive additional COVID-related support under the CARES Act, said Norwalk Public Schools Superintendent Alexandra Estrella. ... Although we are still assessing what the grant covers, the award from the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) Fund will be valuable in helping with incremental expenses related to COVID and learning loss.

During the first round of CARES Act funding, Norwalk got about $2 million.

The district received another $8.2 million in coronavirus relief funds the state distributed last year to help with reopening costs, coming in second to Hartford. Those funds were earmarked for staffing needs that came about as a result of Norwalk reopening schools full-time for students in elementary school and on a part-time basis for middle and high schoolers. The rest of it went towards transportation and personal protective equipment such as Plexiglass, additional masks, shields, protective gowns and HEPA filters.

Norwalk schools Chief Communications Officer Brenda Wilcox Williams said the district just found out last week what level of funding it will receive. CSDE will release an application later this month that the district will complete to outline a plan for the funding, in order to receive access to it.

We are in the process of assessing the grant and reviewing what the parameters are for using it, Wilcox Williams said. We know that funds are designated for coronavirus response and relief purposes. ... Our next step will be to have an internal work group look closely at the authorized uses for the grant, as well as the requirements for the application, once it is available.

Wilcox Williams emphasized that the funding is only for responding to challenges posed to the district by the coronavirus pandemic and cannot be used to replace funding in local operating budgets.

The Board of Education just approved a $220 million operating budget proposal for fiscal year 2021-2022, representing an $11.7 million increase over last years budget. However, city Chief Financial Officer Henry Dachowitz recommended the district be given a $4.2 million increase instead, which is about $7 million less than the schools requested.

erin.kayata@hearstmediact.com
Hong Kong: Vaccines advisory panel meets

The Advisory Panel on COVID-19 Vaccines today held a meeting on the application for emergency use of COVID-19 vaccine by Sinovac Biotech (Hong Kong).

Sinovac submitted to the Secretary for Food & Health an application for the authorisation of its COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use, together with the vaccine's Phase 1 and 2 clinical data that it had submitted to the World Health Organization and National Medical Products Administration (NMPA).

It also provided the Phase 3 clinical information of its trials conducted in Brazil that it had submitted to the NMPA, as well as those conducted in Turkey and Indonesia.

The advisory panel noted the Department of Health has followed relevant guidelines to request Sinovac to have relevant research data published in medical journals.

As Sinovac indicated that it has considerable difficulties in compiling the relevant information for publication in medical journals within a short period of time, having regard to the urgency for vaccination, the advisory panel has assessed and examined the aforesaid information on safety, efficacy and quality submitted by Sinovac.

The advisory panel considered the relevant clinical research data provided by Sinovac to be positive, but it requested Sinovac to provide additional data and information to establish that the benefits of using its COVID-19 vaccine for protection against the virus outweigh the risks.

It will convene a meeting after receiving the relevant information.

After the advisory panel provided a recommendation on the application for authorisation of the vaccine, the Secretary for Food & Health will come to a decision on the authorisation of the vaccine for emergency use as soon as possible.

The Government reiterated it will ensure that vaccines satisfy the criteria of safety, efficacy and quality, and obtain emergency use approval in accordance with the relevant requirements as well as stringent approval procedures under the Prevention & Control of Disease (Use of Vaccines) Regulation, before arranging for the public to receive the vaccines.

Its work in vaccine administration will continue to be based on scientific evidence and adhere to the principles of openness and transparency to enhance the public's confidence in vaccines.

This story has been published on: 2021-02-10. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
Donald Trump is facing a criminal investigation in Georgia into his call to its secretary of state asking him to 'find' votes to overturn the election, it emerged Wednesday.

Newly-elected Fulton County prosecutor Fani Willis, a Democrat, sent a letter to state leaders, state officials telling them to save records related to the call, state officials with knowledge of the letter told The New York Times.

Specifically, the criminal investigation is looking into the then-president's January 2 call with Georgia's Secretary of State where Trump told Brad Raffensperger to 'find' enough votes to reverse his loss to Joe Biden in the Peach State.

The letter does not specify what crimes are being investigated but experts have suggested that Trump could have committed conspiracy to commit election fraud, which can carry felony charges and a sentence of up to a year in prison on conviction. A Trump aide dismissed the move as a stunt by Democrats on day two of the impeachment trial.

In the letter, Willis reveals the request to officials, including Raffensperger, to preserve documents is related to a criminal investigation into Trump.

News of the latest probe into the former president comes on the heels of the Senate's decision Tuesday that impeachment trial against Trump is constitutional and will move forward this week.

'The timing here is not accidental given today's impeachment trial,' Trump's senior advisor Jason Miller told DailyMail.com.

'This is simply the Democrats' latest attempt to score political points by continuing their witch hunt against President Trump, and everybody sees through it,' he added.

Fulton County Prosecutor Fani Willis opened a criminal investigation Wednesday into Donald Trump's attempt to overturn the election in Georgia

The criminal probe will specifically focus on Trump's phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in January where he urged him to 'find' the votes needed to overturn his loss in the southern state

The upper chamber is moving forward Wednesday afternoon with the second day of its impeachment against Trump after the former president's legal team faced public mocking from Republican senators and the Twittersphere.

Jurors in Fulton County, which encompasses the blue area of Atlanta, are unlikely to be kind to Trump.

Trump is also already facing a criminal investigation in New York.

Raffensperger also announced Monday his office is opening a separate administrative inquiry into the phone call.

Walter Jones, a spokesman for the Secretary of State confirmed the investigation.

'The Secretary of State's office investigates complaints it receives,' Jones said. 'The investigations are fact-finding and administrative in nature. Any further legal efforts will be left to the Attorney General.'

Trump had refused to accept his loss to Democrat Joe Biden and focused much of his attention on Georgia, a traditionally red state that he very narrowly lost.

Raffensperger's office announced Monday it is opening its own administrative inquiry into the call between the secretary of state and then-president

During the phone call, Trump pushed that Raffensperger had the power to change the certified results in Georgia, despite the secretary of state firmly and repeatedly rejecting this claim.

'All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,' Trump said. 'Because we won the state.'

Miller told DailyMail.com there was nothing unusual about the call, suggesting there is no need for an investigation.

'There was nothing improper or untoward about a scheduled call between President Trump, Secretary Raffensperger and lawyers on both sides,' Miller said.

'If Mr. Raffensperger didn't want to receive calls about the election, he shouldn't have run for Secretary of State,' he continued. 'And the only reason the call became public was because Mr. Raffensperger leaked it in an attempt to score political points.'

The secretary of state's office investigation stems from a complaint by George Washington University Law School professor John Banzhaf III, according to the investigative case sheet.

In an emailed press release sent January 4, Banzhaf said he had filed a complaint with the secretary of state's office requesting 'that this matter be fully investigated, and action be taken to the extent appropriate.'

The complaint suggests Trump may have committed one or more violations of Georgia law, including conspiracy to commit election fraud, criminal solicitation to commit election fraud and intentional interference with the performance of election duties, the release says.

Investigators will present their findings to the state election board, which will then decide how to proceed.

If the board believes there's evidence that a crime occurred, it could take action ranging from issuing a letter of reprimand to referring the case to Georgia's attorney general.
A passenger plane has been engulfed in flames in Saudi Arabia after an airport was targeted in a drone attack later claimed by Yemen's Houthi rebels.

The group are said to have targeted the Abha International Airport in the south-west of the country, causing a passenger plane on the tarmac to catch fire, according to the kingdom's state television.

The Iran-backed Houthis claimed responsibility for the attack soon afterwards, with military spokesman Yehia Sareai saying the group used four bomb-laden drones to target Abha airport.

'This targeting comes in response to the continued aerial bombardment and the brutal siege on our country,' Sareai said, noting that the Houthis consider the airport a military not civilian target.

Saudi state television showed damage to a jet at an airport in the wake of the attack today

This image provided by Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Media on February 10, reportedly shows a view of the damaged hull of a Flyadeal Airbus A320-21

No one was hurt in the assault, but the attack threatened to escalate Yemen's grinding war and the damaged passenger plane at Abha airport served as a powerful reminder of the danger that Houthi rebels pose to Saudi Arabia.

Nearly six years ago, the kingdom launched a bombing campaign that has devastated Yemen, the Arab world's poorest country.

Photographs aired by Saudi state television showed the aircraft, a 3-year-old Airbus A320 flown by low-cost carrier FlyADeal. It appeared the drone had punched a hole through its fuselage, with scorch marks on the metal.

An anchor on state television said there were no injuries on the ground from the fire. FlyADeal did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

This handout image provided by Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Media on February 10 reportedly shows the wreckage of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV or drone) that was used in an attack on Abha International Airport

'A cowardly criminal terrorist attack launched against Abha International Airport in Saudi Arabia by the Huthi militia,' state-run Al-Ekhbariya television cited the coalition as saying.

'A fire that engulfed a passenger plane due to the Huthi attack on Abha Airport is under control,' it added.

The Abha airport, close to the Yemeni border, has been repeatedly targeted in Houthi missile and drone attacks.

Those attacks have wounded dozens and killed at least one person over recent years. The Saudi-led military coalition did not say what type of weapon was used in the attack.

The Houthis have previously crashed drones into the kingdom's Patriot missile batteries, most recently on Sunday when the coalition said it intercepted five 'booby-trapped' drones.

Those attacks, often striking near the southern cities of Abha and Jizan, have wounded dozens and killed at least one person in recent years.

As recently as late January, U.S. forces stationed at Prince Sultan Air Base near Riyadh trained Saudi troops on how to counter the threat posed by drones, which can fly low to the ground, evade radar and detonate against targets in the kingdom.

In November 2017, the Houthis even reached Riyadh's international airport, deep inside the kingdom. No one was hurt in the attack, which marked the first time that a Houthi missile had come so close to a heavily populated center.

Riyadh is around 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) north of the border with Yemen.

The Iran-backed Houthis claimed responsibility for the attack soon afterwards, with military spokesman Yehia Sareai saying the group used four bomb-laden drones to target Abha airport

'This targeting comes in response to the continued aerial bombardment and the brutal siege on our country,' Houthis military spokesman Yehia Sareai said, noting that the Houthis consider the airport a military not civilian target

Wednesday's attack, however, represented the first one to reportedly damaged a civilian aircraft at the facility.

Flight-tracking websites showed delayed and cancelled flights scheduled to either take off or land at the airport.

The Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen said in a statement that it will 'hold the militia accountable in accordance with international humanitarian law,' referring to the Houthis.

Col. Turki al-Maliki, the spokesman for the Saudi-led military coalition, said coalition forces intercepted and destroyed two bomb-laden drones launched by the Houthis toward the kingdom.

He condemned the assault as a 'systematic and deliberate attempt to target civilians in the southern region' of Saudi Arabia.

Pictured: Abha International Airport in the south-west of the country, which was the target of an alleged airstrike carried out by Yemen's Iran-aligned Houthi rebels

Col. Turki al-Maliki (pictured in 2019) the spokesman for the Saudi-led military coalition, said coalition forces intercepted and destroyed two bomb-laden drones launched by the Houthis toward the kingdom

In November 2017, the Houthis targeted Riyadh's international airport in an attack.

Saudi officials later blamed Iran for providing the missile to the Houthis used in that and other attacks on the kingdom amid its grinding war against the rebels.

Tehran long has denied providing arms to the Houthis, though evidence and United Nations expert reports show weapons linking back to Iran.

Wednesday's attack, however, represented the first one to reportedly damaged a civilian aircraft at the facility. Flight-tracking websites showed delayed and cancelled flights scheduled to either take off or land at the airport.

At least two Airbus A320s flown by the Saudia, the kingdom's flag carrier, were on the ground at Abha on Wednesday afternoon, according to the flight-tracking website FlightRadar24.com.

Yemen's Iran-aligned Houthi rebels are said to have targeted the Abha International Airport (shown on a map) in the south-west of the country, causing a passenger plane on the tarmac to catch fire, according to the kingdom's state television

Pictured: Satelite view of the Abha International Airport that was attacked on Wednesday

Another Airbus A320 on the ground there belonged to low-cost carrier FlyADeal. Both airlines did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen said in a statement that it will 'hold the militia accountable in accordance with international humanitarian law,' referring to the Houthis.

Saudi Arabia has been at war with the Houthis in Yemen for nearly six years, a grinding conflict that has spawned the world's worst humanitarian disaster.

Yemen's war began in September 2014, when the Houthis seized the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, and much of the country's north.

Saudi Arabia, along with the United Arab Emirates and other countries, entered the war alongside Yemen's internationally recognised government in March 2015.

Yemen's war began in September 2014, when the Houthis seized the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, and much of the country's north. Pictured: A Yemeni man inspects a house that was destroyed in an airstrike carried out during the war by the Saudi-led coalition's warplanes, on February 05

The Huthis have also resumed an offensive to seize the Yemeni government's last northern stronghold of Marib, according to a government source, with dozens of casualties on both sides.

The US State Department on Friday said it had formally notified Congress of its intention to revoke a terrorist designation against the rebels, which had been announced in the closing days of the Trump administration.

The delisting move came a day after US President Joe Biden announced an end to American support for Saudi-led offensive operations in Yemen.

Biden's decisions last week mark a reversal of policies by his predecessor Donald Trump, a staunch backer of Saudi Arabia and a fierce opponent of Huthi supporter Iran.

Humanitarian groups were deeply opposed to the terrorist designation, saying it jeopardised their operations in a country where the majority of people rely on aid and where they have no choice but to deal with the Huthis.

Biden, who has also halted some weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, called Yemen's war a 'catastrophe' which 'has to end'.

The president last week appointed veteran diplomat Timothy Lenderking as a US special envoy for Yemen, who is expected to boost efforts to end the war.

Biden said Lenderking would support a UN push for a ceasefire and revive talks between the Huthis and the government.

Saudi Arabia, which entered the Yemen conflict in 2015 to bolster the internationally recognised government, has repeatedly been targeted with cross-border attacks.

Last month, it said it had intercepted and destroyed a 'hostile air target' heading towards the capital Riyadh.
Update: All appointments have been taken as of 10:20 a.m Wednesday.

Syracuse, N.Y. -- Onondaga County will open up 1,200 new appointments for the Covid-19 vaccine at 10 a.m. today.

You can register for the appointments here. The slots are expected to fill extremely fast, and most people who try will not get one because demand for the vaccine is far outpacing supplies.

Some of these 1,200 appointments will be reserved for the thousands of seniors who are on the countys waiting list, which is called the ONList.

The 1,200 first-shot doses will be administered on Thursday and Friday.

These doses are for people currently eligible for the vaccine in New York. They are not for people with underlying medical conditions. Eligibility for those people opens Feb. 15.

Onondaga County is still working out how those shots for medically-eligible people will be handled, McMahon said earlier this week. McMahon said the county likely will accept the same proof of eligibility that the state has identified, including doctors notes, attestations or prescriptions. Doctors offices will be consulted to try to identify the most vulnerable patients for shots, he said.

Here are some other ways to get an appointment:

If you are 65 or older, check the Kinney Drugs website. Each Kinney store gets about 100 doses a week. The drugstore chain is opening appointments as supplies come in. You can sign up for an appointment alert from Kinney Drugs.

Wegmans is also a participant in vaccine distribution for seniors. You can check for appointments here.

The state is vaccinating people at 13 large-scale sites, including the New York State Fairgrounds. Make appointments through the states Am I Eligible website.

Its worth clicking on the Get Started button, even if the site says no appointments are available. As cancellations come in, the state reopens appointments -- though its generally a tiny amount and they are booked fast. Still, its worth a try.

The states vaccine appointment phone number is 1-833-697-4829.

Got a story idea or news tip youd like to share with a Syracuse-area reporter? Please contact me through email, Twitter, Facebook or at 315-470-2274.

With more than 10,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases in the state prison and parole systems, New York lawmakers are visiting correctional facilities, jails and detention centers to assess the response to the pandemic.

The first visit was to Fishkill Correctional Facility in late January. State Sen. Julia Salazar, who chairs the Senate Crime Victims, Crime and Correction Committee, was among the lawmakers who toured the medium-security prison in the Hudson Valley.

Fishkill was the site of one of the early COVID-19 outbreaks in a New York state prison. According to the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, there have been 146 confirmed cases in the facility. Six incarcerated people have died, the most virus-related deaths in any state prison.

Salazar, D-Brooklyn, told The Citizen in an interview that a priority for the group is to see how the COVID-19 regulations are being implemented and to hold facilities accountable. She was also interested in visiting Fishkill because of its history. Before it became a state prison, it was a psychiatric hospital.

There are mental health services offered at the prison  the state Office of Mental Health has a presence there  and there is a long-term care unit for older incarcerated people.
When Evan Garber returned to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst for the spring term, the junior from Chicopee said students were given reason to believe they would have more of a campus experience than during the full-remote fall term.

But to Garber and others, the universitys decision to raise the campus COVID-19 response level to high-risk recalls the well-known rental car commercial tagline, Not exactly. The rapid transition from elevated status meant students were ordered not to leave dormitories except for grab-to-go meals, COVID-19 testing at the Mullins Center and specific needs such as medical appointments.

There are opportunities (for movement) based on peoples day-to-day requirements, said Edward F. Blaguszewski, the UMass Executive Director of Strategic Communications and Special Assistant to the Vice Chancellor.

But there arent many. The restrictions were established Sunday for a minimum of two weeks, with classes at full remote.

I feel the words (about protocols) were written with the on-campus students in mind, said Garber, who lives off-campus, follows restrictions and protocols religiously, and is in a 400-member marching band that is now marching remotely with hopes of doing so in much smaller, in-person groups by spring.

Garber did say UMass was much more clear in its spring term communication than in fall that protocols, including quarantines, applied to off-campus as well as on-campus students. After reversing it initial decision to bring back 7,000 students in the fall, UMass went ahead with putting 5,000 students in dormitories for the spring term. That number does not include and estimated 8,000 off-campus students.

The surge at UMass has not affected strategies at other institutions with campus populations.

We have not seen a spike in cases since students have returned, Springfield College Vice President for Student Affairs Patrick Love said.

Any positives we have identified have been contact traced and students have been moved to isolation or quarantine housing. We returned to in-class teaching, where appropriate, on Monday. We will return to in-person dining on Wednesday.

Otherwise, we have continued to encourage students to maintain vigilance in following our guidelines and protocols, while providing them a robust set of in-person and virtual activities.

Smith College is in its initial blue operating mode, with incoming students tested in anticipation of the February 15 resumption of classes. The timing allows them to clear isolation/quarantine in accordance with state guidelines.

During this blue mode, students must remain on campus. Theyre allowed to travel only one mile from campus for work or to purchase essential commodities. Students may not visit off-campus residences or participate in off-campus social gatherings of any kind, said Stacey Schmeidel, Smiths Senior Director of News and Strategic Communications.

In the 14-day period ending Tuesday, Smiths screening program has yielded three positive cases, none of which were students. The positivity rate was 0.1%.

At UMass, nearly 300 positive cases were recorded from Feb. 2 to 4. By the end of the first week, it had risen to nearly 450, causing UMass to alter the rules in a way that literally felt overnight to the students.

Blaguszewski referred to the high-risk requirements as self-sequestration by students. He said the quick transition from elevated status did not indicate an unpreparedness, but rather, the opposite.

We understood there could be an uptick and a surge, and we planned for it. We knew we needed to be transparent, and we needed to be able to act quickly, he said.

There is no literal number (of cases) assigned to each category. It depends on the context of each situation and the input from our scientific experts, he said.

Garber says hes watching the soaring numbers closely.

At what point do they say, we jumped the gun?  he asked.

Garber recognizes the financial loss involved with closing dorms entirely. UMass is a college, but its a company, too, he said.

Blaguszewski, though, said sending students home could easily make it worse.

The state Department of Public Health is advising to keep people in place, and minimize traveling around the state. Some students would be going home to places of high, concentrated COVID-19 cases. We want to isolate people from that, he said.

Blaguszewski said a team of experts and public health specialists, many drawn from the UMass scientific community, meets daily to analyze trends and numbers. They advise Chancellor Kumble Subbaswamy, who makes final decisions on restrictions and protocols.

State Sen. Jo Comerford and State Rep. Mindy Domb, whose districts represent UMass, pledged advocacy for the university.

We are in daily contact with UMass Amherst officials during this current spike, ensuring the state provides the resources necessary to help UMass stop the spread, help students and staff access the resources they need, and help local communities access resources like testing, contact tracing, vaccines, funding and the support they need to grapple with the related economic impact, their joint statement read.

Were also engaged in holding the administration accountable for granular data - aggregated and disaggregated - so that our towns continue to have the resources they need to understand the situation.

What some students think they understand is that gambling on any normalcy this spring doesnt come with favorable odds. One is freshman Trent Lahair, who has already had two false starts.

I had my dorm and classes picked out last fall, and then they pulled the plug before school started, said Lahair, who, like Garber, is from Chicopee.

With an eye on spring term, Lahair picked out his dorm and classes again in December, but says he didnt like the chances of the spring term resembling a normal campus experience. Instead, hes taking classes at Holyoke Community College.

Im still enrolled at UMass, with a deferred status, Lahair said. If the campus was open, Id have stayed, but Im not paying all that money (for a campus on lockdown.) I hope to be there in the fall.

Related:

Tweets and cellphone videos are central to House impeachment managers' case against former president Donald Trump.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., began the trial Tuesday with a graphic 13-minute video that drew on social media footage and Trump's own tweets to establish the chronological order of the events of Jan. 6. The presentation set the stage for the House impeachment managers' case that the former commander in chief incited the violent attack on the Capitol that left multiple people - including a police officer - dead.

"If that's not an impeachable offense, then there is no such thing," Raskin said after airing the video, which spliced together videos from social media posts and news organizations.

Later Rep. David Cicilline, D-R.I., zeroed in on a tweet Trump sent hours after the mob stormed the Capitol, saying it demonstrated "how President Trump himself felt" even while the nation was reeling from the violence. Trump had complained that his "sacred landslide election victory" had been "stripped away" and embraced his followers as "great patriots" in the tweet that was labeled by Twitter immediately after it was posted.

Never before has there been such a trove of social media evidence in a trial to convict a U.S. president.

It's the second impeachment of the social media era - but this time the acts didn't occur behind closed office doors, brought forward by a whistleblower. Americans around the country watched them live on their computer screens in viral videos and 280-character tweets.

"There's no better way to convey the trauma, threat, the outrage, the violence, the hatred of January 6 than by presenting it as a video and splicing together the various perspectives," said Tim Naftali, a history professor at New York University and the former director of the Nixon Presidential Library. "So many of the insurrectionists used their phones to document their own behavior."

"That gives you an unprecedented, unusual, unique record," he added.

Democrats are expected to continue to use social media evidence throughout the process to bolster the case, my colleagues reported. Evidence from social media and text messages is already playing a critical case in the federal criminal cases against the rioters who specifically cited Trump as the reason they stormed the Capitol, and that could also be used to bolster the Democrats' case against Trump.

Audiovisual evidence has historically been a powerful force in impeachment proceedings.

There may not be a historical precedent for an impeachment driven by iPhone videos and tweets. But audiotapes played a pivotal role in the congressional scrutiny of President Richard Nixon that ultimately led to his resignation. The audio was not immediately released to the public, but it did affect members of the House who heard the tapes as they prepared to impeach Nixon, Naftali said.

"There was an immediacy to the Nixon tapes that created a visceral reaction,"Naftali said. "I believe that Nixon's voice - and of course the other evidence - helped shape the bipartisan majority against him."

It's very unlikely that social media posts will have the same impact this time around in a polarized 50-50 Senate, where the odds of convicting Trump are very low. Some experts are skeptical there's any communications strategy that could change enough Republicans' minds to secure the 17 votes they would need to convict Trump.

"I'm not sure there are meaningful wins that could be made from a good communications strategy this time," said David Karpf, an associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University.

Some Republicans in the chamber yesterday looked away as the Democrats' impeachment video played.

Karpf said Democrats may have an eye toward the history books - and not their Republican colleagues - in preparing their evidence.

"I think they're going to do a good job of at least detailing the story so that the moment in history when the Capitol was sacked by the exiting president's supporters because they didn't like the results of election doesn't get ignored or overlooked."

Last time Trump was impeached, social media was just a sideshow to the main event.

One of the biggest differences between this impeachment process and the last one is that Trump no longer has access to his online bully pulpit - as a direct result of companies' concerns that he was inciting violence after the events of Jan. 6. Rather than reacting to each twist and turn of the process in real time in 280-characters or fewer rockets, Trump himself has been largely silent.

That's a major shift from last time, when Democrats used some of the president's own tweets about the process against him as evidence of his mindset - and also raised alarm that he was targeting individual witnesses. Trump was impeached by the House in late 2019 for using the power of his office to pressure Ukraine to damage his political rival and obstructing Congress.

Some of the guardrails that social media companies adopted to prevent the spread of inflammatory content in the wake of the election are still in place, changing the digital debate as well. During the last impeachment, both parties heavily used powerful social media ad tools to raise money off the proceedings. But Facebook has disabled those tools throughout the United States since Election Day.

However, the echo chambers online persist, and researchers are actively monitoring for online misinformation about the proceedings.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 10)  The investigation on Lt. Gen. Antonio Parlade Jr.s social media posts red-tagging a news reporter will also determine whether the journalist is indeed a supporter of terrorist groups, the Armed Forces chief said Wednesday.

Tama si Gen. Parlade na walang nangyayaring torture among the Aetas sa Zambales, Lt. Gen. CIrilito Sobejana said in a media interview. Ang hindi pa natin mapatunayan 'yung pag-tag ni Gen. Parlade kay Maam Tupas na siya ay supporter ng teroristang grupo," he said.

[Translation: Gen. Parlade is right that there was no torture among the Aetas in ZambalesWhat we havent proven yet is Gen. Parlades tagging of Maam Tupas as a terrorist group supporter.]

Sobejana referred to the petition filed by Aetas Japer Gurung and Junior Ramos to intervene in the legal challenge against the Anti-Terrorism Act. They said they were tortured by soldiers and falsely charged under the new law, when they were only trying to avoid being caught in the crossfire during a clash between government forces and members of the New Peoples Army in Zambales in August.

Sobejana said the Supreme Court's dismissal of the Aetas' petition proved that the allegations were false. The high court has yet to release its resolution, but its public information office said the Aetas petition was junked because there is already a pending case before the trial court.

The petition became even more controversial after Parlade called the Inquirer.net reporter Tetch Torres-Tupas, one of those who wrote about the petition, a "propagandist" and said she could be held liable under the law for "aiding the terrorists by spreading lies."

Members of the Justice and Court Reporters Association, of which Torres-Tupas is a member, said they also reported on the petition based on the same Supreme Court pleading. But Parlade accused Torres-Tupas of using as reference propaganda machines of the Communist Party of the Philippines, which the executive Anti-Terrorism Council designated as a terrorist organization.

READ: Lawyers, journalists call out Parlade comment vs. reporter as 'credible threat' under anti-terrorism law

"If this reporter, according to the general, can be charged for aiding the terrorists, an act punishable under Section 12 of the Anti-Terrorism Act, does it mean that the other reporters who wrote the same story are supporters of terrorists as well?" Torres-Tupas wrote on Tuesday.

The AFPs provost marshal general, which probes offenses committed by military personnel, is investigating Parlades online comments against Torres-Tupas.

Sobejana said Parlade's allegations against the journalist cannot be simply dismissed. When asked if that means Torres-Tupas is also under investigation, Sobejana said that is part of establishing the facts.

Hindi rin natin ma-discount pa or ma-drop 'yung possibility na  kasi sinulat nga, e (We also cannot discount or drop the possibility - because she wrote about it). Kung, if you write something, meron ka ringit is a dictate of your emotions, or your sympathy or whatever, Sobejana said.

He said Parlade has the burden to prove that Torres-Tupas is a terrorist supporter. If proven true, the journalist would have the burden of denial.

Sobejana said that although Parlade is chief of the Southern Luzon Command, he is also spokesperson of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict. The provost marshal has reached out to the NTF-ELCAC to find out whether Parlades actions could be part of a strategic communication plan, he added.

Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana earlier told CNN Philippines The Source that he has ordered an investigation on Parlade, recognizing that the general may have overstepped in his remarks against Torres-Tupas. We will investigate, and find out if he deserves to be punished, if disciplinary action will be imposed upon him, he said.

On Wednesday, Sobejana recognized that what Parlade did could be against the Armed Forces rules on the use of social media, but refused to speculate on possible sanction against the military official. He also advised Parlade and Torres-Tupas to meet to settle the issue.

Monrovia  After more than two decades of diplomatic services and humanitarian works, the Government of India, through its Embassy in La Cote D'Ivoire, has withdrawn Mr. Upjit Singh Sachdeva, as its Honorary Consul General to Liberia.

Mr. Sachdeva, who is commonly known as "Jeety" in Liberia, was appointed Honorary Consul General of Indian to Liberia in 1998.

He is also the Chief Executive Office (CEO) of the Jeety Trading Corporation-a premier dealer of building and household materials in the country.

In a letter dated February 5, 2021 and addressed to Liberia's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Dee Maxwell Kemayah, a copy which is in the possession of Frontpage Africa, the Indian government also withdraw the Letter of Commission appointing Mr. Sachdeva as Honorary Consul with immediate effect.

The Indian government, through its Embassy in La Cote D'Ivoire pointed out that Mr. Sachdeva will "cease to function as Honorary Consul General of India with immediate effect".

"The Embassy of India in Abidjan has further honour to express to express the Government of India's sincere appreciation to the Government of Liberia for all the cooperation extended to Mr. Upjit Singh Sachdeva while serving as Honorary Consul General of Indian to Liberia".

Seeking Embassy formation

For sometimes now, the Government of India has been reportedly expressing interest in establishing its Embassy in Liberia to further strengthen bilateral and multilateral relations between the two countries and peoples.

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The lack of an Indian Embassy in Liberia compels Liberians and others planning to make a trip to India to wait for several days before acquiring their visas from La Cote D'Ivoire.

But in the communication, the Indian government requested the Liberian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to "expedite the necessary clearance for establishing the Embassy of India to Liberia".

The Indian government also wants the Liberian government, through its Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to also fast-track the "Agreement" of its designated Ambassador to Liberia, which has already been forwarded for necessary clearance.

Recall in humanitarian works

Though the Indian government did not state reason (s) for recalling Mr. Sachdeva as its Honorary Consul General to Liberia, the action has been taken at a time "Jeety" is making many impactful contributions in the lives of thousands of Liberians, especially the less fortunate and vulnerable citizens.

Through the launch of his hot cooked meal program several years ago, Mr. Sachdeva has been providing feeding and drinks to citizens, including mentally derailed, old folks, vulnerable youths commonly known as "zogos" in Liberia, convicts and prisoners at the Monrovia Central Prison, among others.
Police have charged the partner of missing woman Ju Zhang with murder.

Joon Seong Tan was charged on Thursday night and is expected to face Melbourne Magistrates Court on Friday.

Police say the investigation into the matter is ongoing. Officers spent hours searching bushland in Melbournes north-east for clues that could lead to the missing woman on Thursday, after Mr Tan was taken into custody for a second time.

Ten days after the Epping mothers disappearance, detectives scoured the Darebin Creek Trail near Ivanhoe for hours on Thursday as the search for the missing woman intensified.
Irvine, Calif., Feb. 9, 2021 -- Monoclonal antibodies are showing promise for improving outcomes for COVID-19 patients, but when a hospital is already beyond capacity, administering them can be a challenge. As hospitalizations soared across California, clinicians with UCI Health created a system for delivering monoclonal antibodies that is keeping hospital beds available for patients with the greatest need.

"The hospital bed is one of the most valuable resources that we have, which has been stretched thin by the COVID-19 pandemic," said Dr. Daniel S. Chow, an assistant professor in residence in radiological sciences and co-director for the Center for Artificial Intelligence in Diagnostic Medicine as well as the project's co-principal investigator. "Every effort to expand the number of beds available counts, and that includes being proactive about preventing hospitalizations."

They are partnering with the federal government's response to COVID-19 to share their success in delivering monoclonal antibodies with healthcare systems across the country.

Despite the increasing availability of COVID-19 vaccines, there is still a critical need to identify, develop and expand the use of therapies for those who have the disease. The FDA provided emergency use authorization for the Eli Lilly and Regeneron monoclonal antibodies in November. The treatment - which uses laboratory-made proteins to block the virus from entering into human cells - is authorized for mild to moderate COVID-19 cases in adults and certain pediatric patients who are at high risk to develop severe symptoms or who may require hospitalization.

However, according to NPR and other news sources, healthcare systems have been slow to adopt this treatment because of the steps involved in administering it. The therapy requires an infusion that takes one hour, followed by an hour of observation before patients are released to self-monitor at home.

As of early February, UCI Health had treated about 170 patients with monoclonal antibody therapy and significantly prevented hospitalizations resulting from severe cases of COVID-19.

"As hospitals across the country reach and exceed their ability to accommodate patients due to COVID-19, it is critical that we use every resource to reduce the burden on the healthcare system," said Col. Brian Burk, program manager for the federal government's COVID-19 therapeutics response. "When monoclonal therapies are administered appropriately, they have the potential to reduce disease progression and the need for hospitalization, so we are very excited to see success stories like UCI's."

Since the therapy is only given to patients who have tested positive for COVID-19, the set-up has to be separated from other patients to avoid spreading the disease. With hospitals at or near full capacity, allocating healthcare workers and a safe, designated infusion space is a challenge.

UCI Health has created a successful system for doing this. They set aside six chairs with dedicated staff in an infusion clinic that allows patients to come in and out of a closed loop system that avoids putting non-COVID patients at risk. Patients who fit the emergency use authorization guidelines are referred to the clinic through their doctors when they test positive for COVID-19. The clinic is capable of infusing 24 to 36 patients with monoclonal antibodies per day.

Using AI technology to aid treatments

UCI is also investigating whether its existing machine-learning tool - which is designed to predict the probability that a COVID-19 patient is likely to need a ventilator or ICU bed - can also identify patients who may benefit from monoclonal antibody treatment. The researchers are incorporating EUA guidelines into the model.

"In combination with EUA recommendations, our tool may help us stratify and identify additional patients who may benefit from monoclonal antibodies," Chow said.

Of the first 86 patients who received monoclonal antibody therapy at UCI - which included Latino, white, Asian-American and Black patients - only about 3 percent afterward had to be admitted to the emergency department. This tracks with the FDA's findings that only about 3 percent of high-risk patients treated with the therapy required hospitalization or emergency department visits, compared with 9 percent of patients in the control group.

"If we can avoid ambulatory patients that are symptomatic and COVID-positive from ever having to touch our emergency department or our hospital setting, that helps the community and manages bed flow," said Dr. Alpesh N. Amin, the Thomas & Mary Cesario Chair of Medicine and the project's principal investigator.

"The average hospitalization for a COVID patient at UCI is a little over seven days," added Chow. "So this is actually a very big impact, especially when you consider the associated needs for every hospital day, including nursing and staff needs at a time when personnel are stretched thin, as well as associated medical supplies, etc."

Using the federal response's distribution network, UCI Health is sharing their monoclonal antibody delivery system with other healthcare systems. Interested hospitals can reach out to Amin for a consultation.

"Vaccines give us all hope that end of the pandemic is near, but monoclonal antibodies give us 'more than hope' because we can now treat high-risk patients with COVID-19 and decrease their risk of becoming hospitalized," said Col. Deydre Teyhen, deputy program manager for the federal government's therapeutics response.

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About the UCI Health: UCI Health is the clinical enterprise of the University of California, Irvine. Patients can access UCI Health at primary and specialty care offices across Orange County and at its main campus, UCI Medical Center in Orange, Calif. The 418-bed acute-care hospital, listed among America's Best Hospitals by U.S. News & World Report for 20 consecutive years, provides tertiary and quaternary care, ambulatory and specialty medical clinics, as well as behavioral health and rehabilitation services. UCI Medical Center is home to Orange County's only National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive cancer center, high-risk perinatal/neonatal program and American College of Surgeons-verified Level I adult and Level II pediatric trauma center and regional burn center. It is the primary teaching hospital for the UCI School of Medicine. UCI Health serves a region of nearly 4 million people in Orange County, western Riverside County and southeast Los Angeles County. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

About the University of California, Irvine: Founded in 1965, UCI is the youngest member of the prestigious Association of American Universities and is ranked among the nation's top 10 public universities by U.S. News & World Report. The campus has produced three Nobel laureates and is known for its academic achievement, premier research, innovation and anteater mascot. Led by Chancellor Howard Gillman, UCI has more than 36,000 students and offers 222 degree programs. It's located in one of the world's safest and most economically vibrant communities and is Orange County's second-largest employer, contributing $5 billion annually to the local economy. For more on UCI, visit http://www. uci. edu .

Media access: Radio programs/stations may, for a fee, use an on-campus ISDN line to interview UCI faculty and experts, subject to availability and university approval. For more UCI news, visit news.uci.edu. Additional resources for journalists may be found at communications.uci.edu/for-journalists.
As the first people in South Africa prepare to receive COVID-19 vaccinations outside of clinical trials, government recently released information on which groups of people will receive the vaccine first. While local experts welcome most of the prioritisation choices, some practical nuances remain unclear.

The Department of Health published its Vaccine Rollout Strategy on the third of January, based on an advisory from the Ministerial Advisory Committee (MAC) on COVID-19 Vaccines. The framework for allocation explains that since vaccine amounts are limited, prioritisation is needed and based on both evidence-based practicalities and ethical considerations, including African indigenous values.

The rollout plan has three phases, starting with a target population of 1.25 million frontline healthcare workers (HCWs).

The second phase includes essential workers such as police officers, miners, teachers, various government officials and those working in the food, retail, security, funeral, and banking sectors. People in congregate settings, such as care homes, prisons, and shelters, as well as workers in the hospitality, tourism, and educational sectors are also included. Another phase two population group is people over the age of 60 and adults over 18 who have comorbidities such as chronic lung disease, poorly controlled cardiovascular disease, HIV, tuberculosis, and obesity. The combined target population of phase 2 is around 16.6 million.

Lastly, all others over 18 years old make up phase 3, which has a target population of over 22 million people.

Professor Landon Myer, Head of the School of Public Health and Family Medicine at the University of Cape Town, calls the plan "well thought out and sensible - a considered balance of priorities to protect vulnerable populations, protecting ongoing government functions, and ensuring ongoing economic activity".

Professor Leslie London, a steering committee member of the People's Health Movement South Africa (PHM) explains that it is also not radically different to international norms, such as guidelines from the World Health Organisation. "It's not a big surprise, because it's more or less following what other countries have done and what other guidelines have said, but in South Africa, I think there are quite a few specificities which might apply differently."

Frontlines first

Starting with medical and health personnel makes intuitive sense, given their importance and vulnerability during the pandemic. "With a sharply limited number of doses available in the first phase, the focus on HCWs is strategic on several fronts - and sends a valuable signal at a critical time," says Myer.

However, with it being unclear just how many doses of which vaccine will ultimately be used and when, rationing and prioritisation across this group may also take place. Keymanthri Moodley, a medical ethics expert speaking in her personal capacity, says "the challenge arises when vaccine demand exceeds supply and there needs to be a choice amongst [HCWs]". Those at highest risk from occupational exposure and personal health risk ought to be prioritised for the first rollout of vaccines," she says.

From a civil society perspective, London adds that there needs to be equity among the frontline health workers, such as for community healthcare workers. London says that this group was particularly affected during the first and second wave of the pandemic, even though they are critical to the healthcare service. He refers specifically to difficulties some community healthcare workers faced in accessing personal protective equipment and hopes that the vaccine rollout will not reflect this imbalance again.

"We don't want to see community health workers rationed out, because they are high risk, and they should be protected because they are kind of the arms and feet of the health service and community."

Some experts speaking to Spotlight emphasised that other workers in the healthcare community, such as traditional healers and medical students, should be included in phase one. Now that the electronic vaccination registration portal has been launched, it is clear that these groups are indeed included.

Branching out

"The devil however, as in almost all countries whose vaccination policies I am following, is in the details of Phase 2," says Professor Gesine Meyer-Rath, from the Boston University School of Public Health and the Health Economics and Epidemiology Research Office at the University of the Witwatersrand. She says how the sequencing of this phase will go is important and will reflect what the government most wants to achieve, for instance in prioritising between workers helping society function and those at high health risk.

Myer says that the exact list of essential jobs and sectors is somewhat debatable, for instance, whether mining and retail workers should be included. However, the list is overall acceptable. The prioritisation of people with pre-existing conditions is fairly understandable, although he questions the notion of 'uncontrolled' chronic diseases such as diabetes as a helpful and constant qualifier.

Including people in congregate settings, particularly prisoners, has drawn some public criticism. Public health lawyer Safura Abdool Karim says this is a smart move because of the overcrowded and poorly sanitised nature of many prisons and the turnover of people. "Thinking about prisons as something that's isolated from us is a mistake," she says.

"There are very strong human rights and constitutional imperatives for the [government] to prioritise access to prisoners, because those people are wards of the state, so the [government] has a level of responsibility. Above and beyond that, we know that prisons were a massive hotspot for infections in the first wave," says Abdool Karim.

"I think the categories are fine in and of themselves, the whole issue is context," says London. "I think there's too much preoccupation with whether the government has made the right prioritisation. I find it quite distracting. The real issue is being able to implement it in a way that is equitable."

For instance, he is concerned about people in rural areas accessing the vaccines. "Rural areas have been relatively spared of our epidemic, which means that a lot of vulnerable people in rural areas don't have natural immunity following infection, to the extent that it [confers] you with immunity." There is also concern about equity between different provinces.

Abdool Karim explains that there is also concern about equity given South Africa's tiered medical system. "It's not tenable, in terms of our constitutional democracy to, for example, have preferential access given to people who have medical aid or access to private facilities, but we know that there's a lot more healthcare capacity in the private sector." She says that while the rollout plan may be enough, for now, information about this more granular allocation in the second and third phases will need to be clarified.

Louis Reynolds, also on the PHM steering committee, is a retired paediatrician and particularly noticed the age restriction. "I think certainly that the 18 year age limit seems a bit hard and arbitrary, given the fact that children younger than 18 are also susceptible." He explains that children younger than ten seem to be less susceptible to COVID-19 and don't pick up more severe forms of the disease, but that from around 12 years old, children seem to react more like adults and perhaps should be considered for the vaccines.

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Meyer-Rath explains that the prioritisation may also be influenced by the practicality of which populations are easiest to reach and not only most vulnerable. "Speed seems to be of the essence, lest we end up in a situation where sub-optimal levels of population immunity give rise to additional mutations increasing the virus' transmissibility."

Clarity on process

The vaccine rollout plan has been long-awaited and now gives some clarity on the order of who will get the jab, but experts say that it is unclear how the government came up with this order and whether enough perspectives were involved. Abdool Karim says that while the vaccine MAC membership itself was clear, she would have wanted to understand the further layers of consultation and partnership that informed the rollout.

"Public consultation ought to have been initiated by the Vaccine MAC when it was established," says Moodley. She says that data should have been collected from healthcare workers to inform the decision-making process for phase one. In particular, HCW's should be surveyed to understand levels of willingness to accept the vaccine and personal and occupational risk levels. She says that this could have been the basis of a scoring system to determine who to prioritise with the vaccine.

"The process of determining a schedule of rationing any scarce health resource is highly controversial at the best of times, but perhaps becomes less controversial in an emergency setting such as this," says Myer. He adds that while public participation is critical, it is not fully feasible given the time pressure of the pandemic.
New Delhi, Feb 10 : The Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) has said that as many as 189 central public sector enterprises (CPSEs) had accumulated losses of over Rs 1.40 lakh crore as of March 31, 2019.

A report by CAG noted that out of the 189 companies, the net worth of 77 companies had been completely eroded by their accumulated losses.

"As a result, the aggregate net worth of these companies had become negative to the extent of Rs 83,394.28 crore as on March 31, 2019. Only 15 out of these 77 companies earned profit of Rs 662.45 crore during the year 2018-19," it said.

During the financial year 2018-19, about 157 CPSEs incurred losses. The losses incurred by these companies during the year 2018-19 amounted to Rs 37,310 crore compared to Rs 41,180 crore in 2017-18. On the other hand, 247 government companies and corporations earned profit of nearly Rs 1.78 lakh crore during 2018-19 of which, 73 per cent was contributed by 63 government companies and corporations in three sectors -- petroleum, coal and lignite and power.

Return on Equity (RoE) in these 247 CPSEs was 18.58 per cent in 2018-19 as compared to 19.03 per cent in 225 CPSEs in 2017-18.

Further, the total market value of shares of 54 listed government companies, including five subsidiary companies, the shares of which were traded during 2018-19, stood at over Rs 14.29 lakh crore as on March 31, 2019.

Market value of shares held by the central government in 47 listed government companies (excluding seven subsidiary companies) stood at over Rs 13.35 lakh crore as on FY19-end.
This year our dine and drink business locations throughout the Gorge have suffered with closures. You can help support your favorites by purchasing take out and gift cards. Many of these business will offer curb-side delivery and some will deliver to your home. Lets keep the Gorge going strong!
Key Companies covered are Autoneum (Zurich, Switzerland), Schaeffler (Werdohl, Germany), HEAD acoustics Gmbh (Herzogenrath, Germany), FEV Group Gmbh (Aachen, Germany), AVL List GmbH (Graz, Austria), Siemens Industry Software Inc (Texas, United States), Bertrandt (Ehningen, Germany), Bruel & Kjr (Nrum, Denmark), EDAG Engineering GmbH (Wiesbaden, Germany) and more players profiled in automotive acoustic engineering service market research report

Pune, India, Feb. 10, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The global automotive acoustic engineering service market size is expected to experience significant growth by reaching USD 22.43 billion by 2027 while exhibiting a CAGR of 11.8% between 2020 and 2027. The growth is attributable to the growing focus on engine downsizing and the growing preference for passenger vehicles that propel the demand for advanced automotive acoustic engineering service globally. This information is published by Fortune Business Insights, in its latest report, titled, Automotive Acoustic Engineering Service Market Size, Share & Covid-19 Impact Analysis, By System Type (Physical Testing, Virtual Testing), By Application Type (Interior, Drivetrain, Powertrain, Body, and Others), By Vehicle Type (Passenger Cars and Commercial Vehicles), and Regional Forecasts, 2020-2027. The report further mentions that the market stood at USD 14.24 billion in 2019 and is likely to gain momentum in the forthcoming years.





COVID-19 Impacts Vehicle Sales Leading to a Period of Stagnation

The global pandemic, COVID-19, has led to an unprecedented loss for the automotive sector. With several manufacturing operations being halted for a temporary period, there has been a sharp decline in the sales of automotive across the globe. This is hampering the growth prospects of the market. However, the government is trying every possible means to bring back the economy to normalcy that will contribute to the growth of the market in the near future.

Story continues





List of Top Companies Profiled in the Global Automotive Acoustic Engineering Service Market are:

Autoneum (Zurich, Switzerland)

Schaeffler (Werdohl, Germany)

HEAD acoustics GmbH (Herzogenrath, Germany)

FEV Group Gmbh (Aachen, Germany)

AVL List GmbH (Graz, Austria)

Siemens Industry Software Inc (Texas, United States)

Bertrandt (Ehningen, Germany)

Bruel & Kjr (Nrum, Denmark)

EDAG Engineering GmbH (Wiesbaden, Germany)





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The automotive acoustic engineering service is a type of process that involves developing, designing, simulating, and testing of sound that originates from the vehicle components such as engine, interior cabin, and others. Stringent government norms on noise pollution have given precedence to such processes that enable the auto manufacturers to keep the overall vehicle noise within the permissible range during manufacturing.





What does the Report Include?

The market report includes a detailed assessment of various drivers and restraints, opportunities, and challenges that the market will face during the projected horizon. Additionally, the report provides comprehensive insights into the regional developments of the market, affecting its growth during the forecast period. It includes information sourced from the advice of expert professionals from the industry by our research analysts using several research methodologies. The competitive landscape offers further detailed insights into strategies such as product launches, partnerships, mergers and acquisitions, and collaborations adopted by the companies to maintain market stronghold between 2020 and 2027.





KEY DRIVING FACTORS

Growing Preference for Passenger Vehicles to Aid Growth

According to the data by CNBC, the automotive sector registered sales of around 77.5 million new vehicles, with China being the leading auto market. The growing preference for passenger vehicles backed by the increasing demand for convenience and high disposable income is expected to boost the demand for advanced automotive acoustic engineering service systems across the globe. Additionally, the manufacturers are focusing on engine downsizing that enables displacing heavier engines with a lighter one that provides equivalent power ergonomics as the larger engine. This further leads to better fuel efficiency and reduced friction causing less noise within the vehicle. Therefore, such initiatives by the automotive manufacturers are expected to bode well for the global automotive acoustic engineering service market growth during the forecast period.





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MAJOR SEGMENTATION

Virtual Testing Held 48.8% Market Share in 2019

The virtual testing segment, based on system type, held a market share of about 48.8% in 2019 and is projected to showcase significant growth owing to the growing adoption of virtual testing systems to quickly and accurately detect faults within the vehicle.





REGIONAL INSIGHTS

Europe to Remain Dominant; Presence of Established Automotive Companies to Aid Growth

Among all the regions, Europe is expected to hold the highest position in the global market during the forecast period. This is attributable to the presence of established automotive companies in the region. The companies such as Audi, BMW, and Volkswagen are actively investing in developing advanced automotive acoustic engineering service solutions to manufacturing noiseless vehicles that will bode well for the market growth in Europe between 2020 and 2027.





COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPE

Facility Expansion by Key Players to Expand Their Product Portfolio and Boost Sales Revenue

The global automotive acoustic engineering service market is consolidated by the presence of major companies that are focusing on expanding their facilities to develop advanced automotive acoustic engineering service solutions. Additionally, key players are striving to maintain their presence by adopting strategies such as partnership, the introduction of new products, and collaboration that will bode well for the growth of the market during the forecast period.





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https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/automotive-acoustic-engineering-services-market-104751





Key Industry Development

April 2019  Bosch, a leading engineering products provider, established a new factory at Abstatt, Germany. According to the company, the new testing plant is soundproof, semi-anechoic, and isolated to provide an effective environment to test and compare automotive components.





Detailed Table of Content:

Introduction Research Scope Market Segmentation Research Methodology Definitions and Assumptions

Executive Summary

Market Dynamics Market Drivers Market Restraints Market Opportunities

Key Insights Merger, Acquisitions, and Partnerships Distributor Analysis  For Major Players Growth and Penetration Analysis Porters Five Forces Analysis PEST Analysis Vendor Landscape

Global Automotive Acoustics Engineering Service Market Analysis, Insights and Forecast, 2016-2027 Key Findings / Summary Market Analysis, Insights and Forecast  By Vehicle Type Passenger Cars Long Range Market Analysis, Insights and Forecast  By System Type Physical Testing Virtual Testing Market Analysis, Insights and Forecast  By Application Type Interior Drivetrain Powertrain Body Others Market Analysis, Insights and Forecast  By Region North America Europe Asia pacific Rest of the World



TOC Continued!





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Nearly 65 UC Berkeley students slept overnight at Peoples Park to protest the universitys plans to develop student housing and supportive housing for the homeless at the park, protesters said Tuesday.

Their occupation comes after the university installed fences in some parts of the park for seismic testing as part of its plans to construct a dorm that could go up to 17 stories with 1,200 beds for students. While unclear how high the building for the homeless would be, it is expected to have 150 beds.

The protest began Monday night to support the nearly 30 homeless residents who live there. Those people would have to leave if the university moves forward with development plans, activists said.

Right now, the people of Peoples Park, they are fighting for this land, said student Aidan Hill. They are taking the space and making it their own. The people here care about the land of the unhoused residents of Peoples Park. Thats what drives this movement forward.

The students want the university to leave the park as it is  a space for homeless people to live in peace and to hold community events.

University officials say they have a massive housing shortage and need to build more apartments for the nearly 42,000 students who lived on campus before the pandemic and are expected to return when its over.

The 2.8-acre Peoples Park, between Haste Street and Dwight Way, has a complicated history. It has been the site of student protests for decades and is where deputies killed a man and blinded another on infamous Bloody Thursday in 1969  also in a dispute about the fate of the park. Now, its where homeless residents sleep. Food Not Bombs delivers food daily to the unsheltered people in the park.

Dan Mogulof, a university spokesman, said the school will develop the park. The campus is 6,900 beds short of its goal to house half of its undergraduates and a quarter of its graduate students. The university announced in 2018 that it would build student housing and supportive housing for the homeless, each building no higher than five stories. University officials also said they would construct a memorial to honor the parks history as a hub for student protests half a century ago.

The memorial is still a go. But now, the university wants to go far higher than five stories, and is doing an environmental impact review of up to 17 stories.

We will spare no effort to have people understand how urgent and dire the student housing crisis is and thus how urgent and dire the need is for student housing on property the university owns, including Peoples Park, Mogulof said.

Mogulof said if students want to sleep in the park, we are not going to stop them.

In January, the university closed parts of the park to test the soil. Crews built fences so a team of engineers and geologists could conduct seismic testing.

The tests were done to ensure the park was seismically safe for construction, said Kyle Gibson, a spokesman for the universitys capital strategies department, which oversees campus design, planning construction and real estate.

Students said they served the university with a cease and desist letter Tuesday to put a stop to drilling or testing at the park.

Mogulof said the campus will respond to the letter.

The project will build up to 1,200 beds for sophomores, juniors and seniors and up to 150 beds for the homeless on 2.8 acres of the park. The projects environmental impact report will look at a student dorm of up to 17 stories.

The university is expected to present the project plans to the UC Regents this summer for approval.

If approved, construction would begin in 2022, Gibson said.

On Feb. 2, a group of students removed the fencing and dropped it off at Sproul Hall in defiance of the universitys plans. The next day, crews restored the fences.

On Tuesday, students said they want the university to halt development.

If you want to do something with Peoples Park, make it a community land trust, Hill said. If you want to help the people of Peoples Park, do not destroy what we have built. Do not destroy this community that we have made. We belong here. This is our home.

Sarah Ravani is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: sravani@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @SarRavani
A passenger wearing a Union Flag face mask waits to board one of the few flights departing at Gatwick Airport in London, on Nov. 27, 2020. (Leon Neal/Getty Images)

UK Government Slammed Over 10-Year Jail Threat for Breaking Travel Rules

The UK governments threat of a 10-year jail term for those who lie about their travel history in violation of COVID-19 travel rules has been met with widespread criticism, including from the ranks of the ruling Conservative Party.

The government will be coming down hard on people who provide false information on the passenger locator form, Health Secretary Matt Hancock said on Tuesday in Parliament.

Anyone who lies on a passenger locator form, and tries to conceal that theyve been in a country on our red list in the 10 days before arrival here, will face a prison sentence of up to 10 years, he said.

British Health Secretary Matt Hancock speaks during a press briefing at Downing Street in London, on Feb. 1, 2021. (Chris J Ratcliffe/Getty Images)

This announcement triggered immediate condemnation from Nigel Farage, leader of Reform UK.

This is out of control. 10 years in prison for a lie goes too far, we must resist this tyranny, he wrote on Twitter.

Lord Sumption, a former Supreme Court judge, also questioned the severity of the proposed sentence.

Ten years is the maximum sentence for threats to kill, non-fatal poisoning or indecent assault, he wrote in The Telegraph on Wednesday.

Does Mr Hancock really think that non-disclosure of a visit to Portugal is worse than the large number of violent firearms offences or sexual offences involving minors, for which the maximum is seven years?

Hancocks announcement also drew fire from Conservative lawmakers who are sceptical about lockdown measures introduced to stem the spread of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, also known as the novel coronavirus.

Mark Harper, leader of the COVID Recovery Group of Tory lawmakers, told The Times that he was concerned whether the 10-year sentence was appropriate and warned it could not be introduced without a vote in Parliament.

Former Tory MP and ex-attorney general Dominic Grieve said the 10-year penalty was exaggerated and not going to happen.

The reality is that nobody would get such a sentence anyway, the courts are simply not going to impose it, he told BBC Radio 4s Today programme.

But Transport Secretary Grant Shapps defended the proposed penalties by stressing that the British public would expect pretty strong action to prevent new variants of the CCP virus from entering the country.

You would have to be very much going out of your way to evade and avoid the system and lie and cheat to get the maximum penalty of 10 years, he told BBC Breakfast.

A bill filed in Texas would require business interruption insurance policies to cover losses from a pandemic.

Under SB 249, filed by Sen. Charles Schwertner, business interruption insurance would be required to cover loss caused by a pandemic, including loss caused by the order of a civil authority made to prevent the spread of a pandemic, without regard to whether the pandemic caused a direct physical loss to the policyholders property.

It would apply to all insurers providing business interruption insurance in Texas, including a county mutual insurance company, farm mutual insurance company, Lloyds plan, and reciprocal or interinsurance exchange.

If passed and signed by the governor, the legislation would be effective Sept. 1, 2021, and apply to policies written or renewed with an effective date on or after Jan. 1, 2022.

Topics COVID-19 Texas Profit Loss Business Interruption

The current situation in the Syrian settlement process and cooperation in combating the novel coronavirus infection were in focus of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrovs telephone conversation with United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, the Russian foreign ministry said.

"The sides exchanged views on the current problems of the international agenda, including issues of Syrian settlement, combating the coronavirus pandemic, problems of climate change and the United Nations practical efforts in these areas," the ministry said.

Special attention was focused on the current situation on the ground in Syria. Lavrov and Guterres agreed that it is necessary to invigorate international humanitarian assistance to people in Syria "without politicization and preliminary conditions." The Russian top diplomat stressed the importance of the implementation of the UN Secretary Generals call for mitigation and suspension of unilateral sanctions amid the coronavirus pandemic.

"The sides reiterated mutual interest in closer cooperation between Russia and the UN system to stop the COVID-19 pandemic," the ministry added.
Cabinet approves Grant-in-aid of Rs.100 crore to Brahmaputra Valley Fertilizer Corporation Ltd, Assam

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

New Delhi, Feb 10: The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi today accorded approval to the proposal of the Department of Fertilizers for Grant-in-aid of Rs.100 crore to Brahmaputra Valley Fertilizers Corporation Limited (BVFCL), Namrup (Assam) to sustain operations of it's urea manufacturing units.

BVFCL, Namrup is a Public Sector Undertaking formed as per Companies Act, under the administrative control of the Department of Fertilizers (DoF), Government of India. At present, the Company is operating its two vintage plants viz. Namrup-ll and Namrup-lll in the premises of BVFCL in Namrup, Assam. Despite being the first gas based urea manufacturing unit in India and having all the infrastructure and feedstock availability, it has been difficult to maintain reasonable production level from the existing units in a cost effective manner because of their old & obsolete technology. In order to ensure the safe, sustainable and economic operation of the plants, certain equipment and machineries need to be replaced/overhauled.

The minimum functional repair to be undertaken for smoother operation of the plants with procurement of mechanical, electrical, instrumentation and catalyst items etc. shall attract an estimated expenditure of Rs.100 crores and therefore, Gol approved Grant in Aid of Rs. 100 crores to BVFCL.

BVFCL is situated at North-Eastern part of India, which plays an important role of economic growth in the region. The grant in aid of Rs. 100 crore to BVFCL will restore the urea production capacity of 3.90 Lac MT per annum and ensure timely availability of Urea to Tea Industry & Farming Sector in the entire North Eastern region specially Assam.

It will also continue the existing employment of about 580 employees on permanent basis and another 1500 persons on ad-hoc basis. Further, 28000 people get benefits indirectly by this establishment. This will also strengthen the 'ATMA NIRBHAR BHARAT campaign of the Government of India.

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Story first published: Wednesday, February 10, 2021, 15:37 [IST]
Youth Alliance for Better Future located in Jacob town, Paynesville has urged the Government of Liberia through the Ministry of Gender, Children, and Social Protection, and the Ministry of Justice to institute tough punishment against perpetrators of Female Genital Mutilation or FMG practice in Liberia.

The civil society group in a news conference held Tuesday, February 9, 2021 at a local forum, MamadeeDiakite Intellectual Forum in Jacob town, recalled that in July 2019, the government through the national legislature backtracked on efforts to criminalize Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) practice in the country, and deleted sections from the proposed Domestic Violence Bill (2014) that had sought to outlaw the practice.

"We call on the GOL to ensure that a permanent and comprehensive anti-FGM law which imposes heavy penalties on perpetrators is passed and enforced, we also urge the government to support educational outreach to relevant communities and local chiefs on the harms of FGM", it said.

Reading a press statement, Assistant Secretary General of the Youth Alliance for Better Future SattaNyei narrated that on the 19th January 2018, former Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf signed Executive Order 92, temporarily banning the practice of FGM in Liberia for one year.

She said although the ban was a step in the right direction, but noted that it only covered girls below 18 and imposed lenient penalties on perpetrators. Miss Nyei added that the temporary ban came to an end on January 19, 2019, leaving Liberian girls and women expose to the risk of FGM once again.

She called on President George M. Weah, Vice President Jewel Howard Taylor, along with members of the 54th Legislature to ensure that women and girls in Liberia are permanently protected from FGM practice.

She said putting in place a law that prohibits the practice would ensure that women and girls in Liberia are protected and that Liberia adheres to its regional and international human rights commitments, noting that the government should also support educational outreach to relevant communities and educate local chiefs about the harms of FGM, noting women's rights and health matters must be treated as a national priority.

According to her, more than half of Liberian women are living with the consequences of this harmful practice and many more are at risk, saying those women and girls have little choice in this matter, with reports of forced mutilations.

"Liberia remains one of the three West African countries that do not have a law criminalizing FGM despite having signed and ratified regional and international human rights instruments condemning the practice as a human rights violation, including the Maputo Protocol", she added.

Satta said the temporary ban on FGM was not as effective as initially anticipated during its one year of existence as a law. This was mainly due to lack of knowledge on the existence of the ban and lack of a coordinated multi-sectorial implementation by state agencies, saying that even with the existence of the Executive Order, the number of Sande bushes in Liberia has increased with the practice now extended to 11 counties from the previous 10.

According to her, besides the temporary ban, there has never been any solid attempt at making FGM illegal in Liberia. In fact, the few cases that have gone through the justice system have been covered under Section 242 of the Penal Code which speaks to malicious and unlawful injuries towards another person by cutting off or otherwise depriving him or her of any of the members of his body, finding a person guilty of a felony, which she said is punishable by up to five years in prison says Nyei.

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At the same time she mentioned a case involving Ruth Peal who continues to endure the long term health implications of FGM, In July 2011, members of the politically influential Sande secret society who had kidnapped and forcibly subjected Ruth to FGM were sentenced to three years imprisonment; however, they appealed the judgment and were released on bail.

she also mention in March 2017, where a 16-year-old Zaye Doe died in TappitaNimba county in the Sande bush during forced mutilation, saying traditional leaders (Zoes) subjected Zaye and 25 more girls to FGM despite the government ban on Sande Secret Society operations, including FGM.

"This forced mutilation that led to the death of ZayeDoein 2017 demonstrate the urgency with which the Government of Liberia must act to end this harmful practice, the statement concluded.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y.  Yes, Theyre Open is a web series highlighting local bars and restaurants that are open for takeout, delivery, pickup or dining during the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak.

Live streams from the featured restaurants are broadcast on the Advance Facebook page every weekday around 3 p.m.

On Wednesday, the Advance/SILive.com visited Vodega Deli & Grocery at 829 Castleton Ave., which is open for pickup from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily. Vodega, which offers vegan and plant-based eats, has introduced plant-based ice cream and is best known for its mac and cheese. For more information, visit vodega.nyc/.

Staten Island restaurant owners: If you would like your establishment featured for free as part of Yes, Theyre Open, email reporter Victoria Priola at vpriola@siadvance.com.

YES, THEYRE OPEN: Vodega Deli & Grocery is open for pickup at 829 Castleton Ave. The delis hours are 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily. For more information, visit vodega.nyc/. Posted by Staten Island Advance on Wednesday, February 10, 2021

WANT MORE YES, THEYRE OPEN?

Check out the listings below or check out all of our previous coverage here.

Dolce Fantasia, 1210 Forest Ave.

Applebees Bricktown Way, 2720 Veterans Road West

The Pizza Parlor, 6 Sneden Ave.

Mona Lisa Pizzeria, 839 Annadale Road

District Bar NYC, 2 Sneden Ave.
Israel and Greece agreed yesterday to mutually recognize each others green passports, enabling people vaccinated against the coronavirus to travel freely between the two countries.

Speaking at a joint press conference with Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defined the policy adopted by the two as without any limitations, no self-isolation, nothing. Netanyahu further said that the green passport policy will "allow us to open the economy, trade, cultural institutions and the rest of the education system, but carefully. Once we remove flight restrictions, we will be able to fly to Greece without any limitations."

"I welcome the vaccination campaign of the Israeli population that will allow us to offer Israeli tourists the opportunity to spend their holiday in Greece without any restrictions. I am in favor of a green passport across the European Union, which is being promoted now in Israel, which is making great progress in vaccinating most of their population," Mitsotakis said.

The tourism agreement itself was signed yesterday at the Israeli Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem, by Israel's Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi and his Greek counterpart, Nikos Dendias. I am happy to host here, in Jerusalem, my good friend, Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Denidas, and the Minister of Tourism Harry Theoharis. Together we agreed on the principles for mutual recognition of coronavirus vaccination certification.  This is a very important agreement and achievement for both countries that will develop as the pandemic progresses and will work alongside the guidelines for the return of tourism to both countries," tweeted Ashkenazi.

Apart from the green passport, Netanyahu and Mitsotakis also agreed to cooperate on research over treatment of the coronavirus. During their meeting, Netanyahu told Mitsotakis that earlier in the day he had met with professor Nadir Arber, who developed the new EXO-CD24 treatment. Reportedly, Mitsotakis then asked whether Greece could take part in the clinical trials. Thus, the two leaders agreed to Greeks largest hospital to be part of the clinical trials for the new Israeli treatment.

During the joint press conference, Netanyahu took out of his pocket a vial that contained the new treatment, labeling it a miracle drug. If youre infected by corona and are seriously ill and have a lung problem, take this, inhale it and you come out feeling good, Netanyahu said.

The Greek prime minister said he was very happy to have discussed the issue of this new drug that caught the attention of the international press. "Assuming that we can overcome the regulatory hurdles, Greece would be happy to participate in clinical trials."

Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv reported Feb. 5 that 29 of 30 coronavirus patients who received the EXO-CD24 treatment recovered in three to five days.
Brattleboro, VT (05301)

Today

Rain likely. High 51F. Winds NNE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 100%. Rainfall near a half an inch..

Tonight

Rain likely. Low near 45F. Winds N at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 100%. Rainfall around a half an inch.
French far-right presidential hopeful Marine Le Pen has denied breaking hate speech laws by tweeting 'monstrous' pictures of ISIS atrocities in a trial she slammed as a politically motivated attempt to silence her.

The leader of the National Rally party appeared in a Paris court today after she was accused of spreading hate by publicising the images of James Foley, an American journalist who was murdered by the terrorist group in 2014.

The trial comes as opinion polls suggest she is one of the most popular politicians in France and will go head-to-head with President Emmanuel Macron in the 2022 poll to choose a new head of state.

French far-right presidential hopeful Marine Le Pen (pictured today outside the courtroom) is facing three years in prison for tweeting out 'monstrous' photographs of an American journalist decapitated by Islamic State.

The far-right leader caused outrage by publicising the images in 2015, soon after a series of devastating al-Qaeda and Islamic State attacks on Paris.

She tweeted the decapitation photo of Foley under the caption 'This is Daesh' - an Arabic acronym for ISIS  along with another of a man on fire in a cage, and an ISIS victim being crushed by a tank.

'I am obviously the victim of a political trial,' Le Pen, 52, told journalists today at the courthouse in Nanterre, a Paris suburb.

'The media published them, editorialists, newspapers, TV channels, and nobody was ever prosecuted for doing so - only Marine Le Pen is being prosecuted,' she said.

In 2018 a judge charged her as well as Gilbert Collard, a National Rally colleague who also tweeted the pictures, with 'circulating violent messages that incite terrorism or pornography or seriously harm human dignity and that can be viewed by a minor'.

The charge carries a maximum prison sentence of three years and a fine equivalent to 67,000. The judge will return their verdict on May 4.

Le Pen, who was runner up to Emmanuel Macron in France's 2017 presidential elections, denies the allegations, and describes them as 'an attack on freedom of expression.'

'I am obviously the victim of a political trial,' Le Pen, 52, told journalists today at the courthouse in Nanterre, a Paris suburb

Among those who complained about the French leader's tweets were Mr Foley's bereaved parents, John and Diane.

They accused the politician of using the 'shamefully uncensored' photos for her own political ends.

They said in a joint statement: 'We are deeply disturbed by the unsolicited use of Jim for Le Pen's political gain and hope that the picture of our son, along with the two other graphic photographs, are taken down immediately.'

Le Pen, a lawyer by training, later deleted the picture of Foley after his family's request, saying she had been unaware of his identity.

But on Wednesday she defended their publication, despite acknowledging that 'I find these pictures horribly shocking.'

However, 'It's the crime that denigrates human dignity, not a picture of it.'

The trial comes as opinion polls suggest she is one of the most popular politicians in France and will go head-to-head with President Emmanuel Macron (pictured on February 8, 2021) in the 2022 poll to choose a new head of state

Le Pen also insisted she was the victim of a political witch-hunt - she was stripped of her parliamentary immunity over the pictures, and angrily rejected an order to undergo psychiatric tests as part of the inquiry.

Le Pen had addressed the tweets to BFM TV journalist Jean-Jacques Bourdin, whom she accused of likening her party to the jihadist group.

Manuel Valls, France's Prime Minister at the time, described the photos as 'monstrous', adding that Le Pen had shown 'political and moral failing' and her 'non-respect for victims.'

It was the then Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve who went to the police, saying the tweets should be investigated 'as they do every time these kind of photos are published'.

He said the photos are 'Daesh propaganda and are a disgrace, an abomination and an absolute insult to all victims of Daesh.'

At the time, Le Pen's party was called the National Front (NF), and it has since changed its name to the National Rally.

Despite this, it has historic links with racists and anti-Semites, including Le Pen's own father, the NF founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, a convicted Holocaust denier.

Le Pen regularly focuses her political campaigns on alleged links between uncontrolled immigration and terrorist groups such as ISIS.

Le Pen was in the dock of the Nanterre criminal court with Gilbert Collard, an MEP and political ally.

'It's a political trial,' said Jean-Marc Descoubes, counsel for Gilbert Collard. 'We must remember that at the time we were one year away from the presidential election, the context is extremely tense.'

A poll ahead of next year's French presidential election has put far-right politician Marine Le Pen (pictured) almost level with President Emmanuel Macron, should they make it to the final round [File photo]

Since taking over France's main far-right party from her father, Le Pen has run twice for the French presidency, and recent polling shows her closer than ever to what for her would be the ultimate prize.

That has rekindled speculation about whether the anti-EU, anti-immigration populist could finally enter the Elysee Palace.

Despite recent setbacks for fellow ideologues such as Donald Trump and Matteo Salvini in Italy, a survey reported last month showed her almost neck-and-neck with Macron.

The poll conducted online by Harris Interactive suggested that if a final-round presidential run-off were held today Le Pen would garner 48 percent while Macron would be re-elected with 52 percent, Le Parisien newspaper reported.

It suggested National Rally leader Le Pen would narrowly beat Macron in the first round, gaining 26 to 27 percent of the votes against his 23 to 24 percent.

If accurate, the survey indicates that Macron and Le Pen are set to duel for the presidency for the second time.

The margin, the narrowest ever recorded, set off alarm bells in the French political mainstream as the dual health and economic crises caused by the coronavirus pandemic sweep across the country.

On Thursday, Le Pen is set to have a prime-time TV debate with Macron's Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin, which will be closely watched after critics panned her debate performance against Macron before the 2017 vote.

Le Pen has another legal challenge looming, over claims that she and other party officials improperly spent millions of euros in public funds to pay their assistants while serving in the EU Parliament.

Investigators say almost seven million euros ($7.7 million) was diverted from the European Parliament between 2009 and 2017.
A total of 187 merchant ships, barges and speed boats arrested for infractions on the nation's territorial waters are currently rotting away at jetties belonging to the Nigerian Navy (NN).

The vessels worth several billions of naira were arrested by the navy for alleged involvement in the theft of petroleum products between January and December, 2020.

In a statement, the NN's Director of Information, Commodore Sulaiman Dahun, gave the breakdown of the vessels as 87 ships, 43 barges, 57 speed boats, 393 destroyed wooden boats, 13 trucks, including 16 vehicles.

Dahum disclosed that 13 of the vessels had been forfeited to the federal government and the rest handed over to prosecuting agencies.

He said, "The prosecution of maritime offences received a boost in 2020 following the enactment and application of the law on piracy and suppression of violent crimes at sea. Indeed, the successful prosecution and conviction of arrested persons under the law is expected to serve as a huge deterrent."

He further revealed that within the same period, 140 tankers/trucks and 404 vehicles involved in smuggling activities were also impounded.

Although some of the merchant ships are subjects of ligation at different courts, naval sources said they were pulling down the jetties as a result of water currents.
Drugs Sou Sou (DSS) founder Kerron Clarke is hospitalised at the Mt Hope Accident and Emergency Adult Hospital after being detained by police.

This as police seek advice from the Director of Public Prosecutions on possible charges.
5 Facts About Harriet Tubman: Christian Faith, Visions, Poverty

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The nation is abuzz with the news that nineteenth century abolitionist Harriet Tubman will soon be placed on the $20.00 bill.

Nicknamed "Moses," Tubman led many slaves to freedom during the Antebellum Era and actively supported the Union Army during the American Civil War.

Yet there are many facts about Tubman's life that might not be well known to the American public, who will soon spend money printed with her countenance.

So below are five facts about Tubman, which include her religious beliefs, strict rules for escaping slavery, and economically downtrodden final years.

I. She Was a Devout Christian

Tubman was a practicing member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, itself founded by a former slave named Richard Allen.

"Her white owner in eastern Maryland had a Methodist minister son whose services Tubman's family attended. That area was strongly Methodist, and some Methodists had freed their slaves, although not Tubman's owner," wrote Mark Tooley, an expert in Methodist history.

"She never learned to read but had a capacious memory for Scripture and other material that facilitated her spellbinding oratory. Working with white and black Methodist churches in Auburn [, New York], she helped the indigent, sick, poor and elderly "

Tubman also helped support the building of Thompson AME Church in 1891 and upon her death was in state at the completed house of worship.

II. She Had Visions

In her youth, Tubman suffered a severe head injury from an overseer and from thenceforth claimed to have received visions from the Almighty.

Tubman herself credited these visions with aiding her efforts to successfully transport hundreds of slaves to freedom, with the editors of The Prague Review comparing her to St. Joan of Arc.

"Like Joan of Arc before her, Tubman believed she possessed divine visions and communication with a higher existence," wrote the editors.

"It wasn't just Tubman that believed this but the people around her as well. Slaves would remark on how Tubman would 'consult with God' on journeys back north. It was said at Port Royal during the Civil War, when she treated the ill yet contracted no disease herself, that Tubman must be blessed by God."

Dr. Arthur Jones of the Colorado Women's college at the University of Denver told 9 News in an interview in 2015 that Tubman considered these visions integral to her success.

"She kind of attributed her safety and sense of safety to the sense that she had these super natural powers," explained Dr. Jones.

III. She was a Gun Owner

Tubman was far from a helpless maiden. During her many trips to the South to help slaves escape their bondage, she carried a weapon.

While she never had to use it, Tubman explained once that the firearm was there to shoot any escaped slave who had second thoughts and wanted to return back to the plantation.

When asked if she would have ever truly shot a slave who decided to go back, Tubman once explained that yes she would have done so.

" if he was weak enough to give out, he'd be weak enough to betray us all, and all who had helped us; and do you think I'd let so many die just for one coward man," said Tubman.

Small wonder that when it was announced that Tubman was going to be on the $20, many noted the irony that the Obama Administration was basically honoring a gun-toting Republican.

IV. She Died in Poverty

While widely respected, famous, and having contributed much effort to the Union cause during the Civil War, following the end of slavery Tubman struggled financially.

She moved to Auburn, New York and devoted great resources to helping former slaves while engaging in what became a 34-year battle to get a government pension.

"Because her services as a nurse, cook, spy and scout were not documented compensation was hard to get. All Tubman had received was $200 for 3 years of service," noted one biographical site.

"In 1865 she appealed to the federal government for the first time and then a second time in 1867. Influential friends and community leaders published letters in newspapers advocating for Tubman's case, she deserved a veteran's pension."

Eventually she was able to get a pension of $8 a month. However, this was not through her own service but via her late husband, who had officially served in the conflict.

V. Her Legacy of Helping the Aged

While most remembered for her efforts to free slaves and abolish slavery, Tubman was active in other issues also, including women's rights and care for the elderly.

In 1908, or about five years before her death, Tubman established the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged in the city of Auburn.

"In 1896, Harriet purchased 25 adjoining acres to her home on which stood the building now known as the Home for Aged," noted the National Park Service.

"Here she struggled to care for her charges, and in 1903 deeded the property to the AME Zion Church with the understanding that the church would continue to run the Home. Tubman continued to live at her home, until her own health [deteriorated] and she was cared for at the Home for the Aged."

A: With Park Ridge Community Church I went on mission trips to South Carolina, Tennessee and upstate New York. They were week-long trips and we repaired and did work on peoples houses in the area. At first it was just my mom wanting me to go, but after the first one, I discovered I liked the people I went with. It was people I usually didnt interact with and I got to know new people. I enjoyed most of the work as well; I dont do a lot of manual labor (at home). A lot of the houses we worked on were in poorer neighborhoods, so it felt nice to help them.


The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company
Defending the farm laws as much needed reforms, Prime Minister on Wednesday underlined that change is essential and cited the case of CCA, a British era post in Tamil Nadu for supplying cigars to then UK Prime Minister that was not abolished till several decades after independence.

Speaking in Lok Sabha on the motion of thanks to the President for his address, Modi said change and reforms are essential for the progress of every modern society.

He also mentioned social reformers like Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, Jyotiba Phule and B R Ambedkar who had the courage to push for reforms in society against the prevailing norms.

Stressing that still water leads to diseases while moving water instills new energy, Modi said he opposes the mindset of "status quo" and asserted that the young generation wouldn't wait long for change.

"One should take responsibility and decide according to the needs of the country. This mindset of 'status quo' has also played havoc in stopping the country's progress. Till when will we continue with this status quo," Modi said.

To buttress his point for change, Modi cited a story of CCA, Churchill Cigar Assistant, in the office of Chief Secretary of Tamil Nadu. The post was specifically created for ensuring the supply of cigar to Churchill from Tiruchirappalli in the state.

Despite Churchill losing in 1945 and India becoming independent in 1947, the post continued till several decades later and the fact came to light when the state government set up a commission for raising the salaries of government employees.

The CCA wrote to the Commission seeking a raise but no one was even aware that such a post existed.

This incident is the biggest example of a need for change in governance for the progress of the society, Modi suggested.

He said a country cannot be run by just "cutting ribbons" and photo-ops. "We should make every attempt to bring changes. There may be mistakes, but if the intention is fair, there will be good results," he said.

Not acting due to fear of failure does not benefit anyone, the prime minister said.

He also took potshots at those asking why the laws were introduced when farmers didn't ask for them, saying that India is a democratic country and not a feudal set up where people should seek something from those who are in power.

The government should be sensitive towards the people and take decisions that are good for the country, Modi said, while noting that people did not demand Ayushaman Bharat, Jan Dhan Accounts and Swachh Bharat, but still the Centre initiated these welfare programmes.

He said laws against dowry, triple talaq and child marriage were also not demanded, still, the governments brought these laws as they were required for the overall well-being of the nation.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

The firm says the decision show its commitment to cleaner energy.

French oil giant Total has said it would change its name from Total to TotalEnergies to emphasise its strategy to become a net-zero emissions company.

Patrick Pouyanne, the chief executive officer of the firm, revealed this in a short video posted on the company's website on Tuesday.

He said Total will propose to its shareholders at its annual general meeting on May 28 changing its name to TotalEnergies.

"The board of directors wanted to root this transformation in our identity," Mr Pouyanne said.

"If the resolution is passed that day, Total will become TotalEnergies, "TotalEnergies in one word."

He added this is a major transformation to become the responsible energy company that puts sustainability and sustainable development at the heart of its strategy.

Mr Pouyanne said that Total has always supported the goal of 2015 Paris climate accords because of its activities.

Total is a multinational energy company operating in more than 130 countries. For over 50 years, the company has remained the leader in the downstream sector of the Nigerian oil and gas industry.

In 2003, the company TotalFinaElf changed its name to Total.

The firm has been considered the fastest off the mark of the European oil majors covering the most ground since announcing its low carbon goals.

In a statement, released on the company's webpage on Tuesday, the company plummeted to a $7.2 billion net loss for the whole of 2020, down from its profit of $11.2 billion the previous year, as it dealt with the two major crises of COVID-19 pandemic and oil price crash.

Close Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox Top Headlines Nigeria Petroleum By submitting above, you agree to our privacy policy. Success! Almost finished... We need to confirm your email address. To complete the process, please follow the instructions in the email we just sent you. Error! Error! There was a problem processing your submission. Please try again later.

Total took an impairment of $10 billion notably on Canadian oil sands assets as a result and on an adjusted basis the company's net profits stood at $4.06 billion, down 66 per cent on $11.8 billion in 2019.

According to the statement, Total made $1.5 billion in assets sales in 2020 including the divestment of some non-core assets in the United Kingdom (UK) North Sea.

The company noted that for 2021, oil prices have been above $50 since the year started.

However, the environment remains uncertain and dependent on the recovery of global demand still affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Faced with COVID uncertainties, the company projected its net investments for the year at $12 billion.

"The choice of TotalEnergies naturally includes a nod to our past that we are proud of, and to what we are now without which we would not be able to prepare the future," Mr Pouyanne said.

He described the new name as a new commitment and a banner under which the company will achieve future successes.
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It's the trailer that will give you a clean break in more ways than one.

It enables its users to live off-grid for up to two weeks in complete luxury and it comes with Covid-grade hygiene measures - hospital-grade Hepa filters and germ-killing UVC lighting that disinfects surfaces.

Called the Terra Firma, it is billed as an 'ultra-premium travel trailer'. But it doesn't come cheap - buying one will cost you at least $265,000 (193,159).

The Terra Firma, which is billed as the 'ultra-premium travel trailer'. Prices start from $265,000 (193,159)

Inside the main cabin of the trailer, which has been designed and made by California-based luxury recreation vehicle firm Bowlus

The trailer's zen-like bedroom, which is 'able to convert from two twin beds to an incredible king, accommodating all travel companions'

Its maker, California-based luxury recreation vehicle firm Bowlus, says the exterior of the new limited-edition trailer, which can sleep up to four people, begins with a 'hand-welded spaceframe, shaped from aluminum tubing'.

It adds: 'Eighty panels of polished, high-strength aerospace aluminum are then meticulously fastened to the frame by more than 5,000 aircraft-grade rivets, each scrutinized to meet aerospace specifications to be within 2/1000in of the specification - approximately half the thickness of a human hair.

'Craftworkers then spend more than 100 hours polishing the exterior so the shell can get its iconic, mirror-bright reflection.'

The trailer, which weighs 3,200lbs and is 25ft (7.62m) long and over six-feet wide, has 'two huge skylights in the main cabin and an outdoor kitchen-ready setup, with electrical and propane outlets, which can additionally provide an emergency micro-charge to your electric vehicle'. According to Bowlus, this could extend the battery life of electric SUVs currently on the market for up to 16 miles.

Terra Firm has 'remote temperature monitoring, feeding bowls that slide out seamlessly from a drawer, and a personalized canine bed'

Bowlus says: 'For the first time, pet owners can feel confident that their pet is sitting comfortably with the assurance of temperature control when one is away from their Bowlus and their pet is resting'

As well as the air filters and UVC lighting, there is a freshwater filtration system which, according to Bowlus, 'instils confidence and peace of mind'

Bowlus says that the interiors of the trailer are 'thoughtfully curated with fabrics that are transformed into designer seating and bedding by a brilliant seamstress team' and use colors that 'build on a feeling of ultra-comfort'

Bowlus says the trailer can be towed 'by the widest variety of vehicles of any travel trailer, including electric vehicles (EVs)' and adds that the 'clients chosen names are also emblemized on the fender skirts just before delivery as a finishing touch'.

In terms of technology, the trailer boasts 'a smart brake controller for the triple-axis, motion-sensing accelerometer, and provides highly responsive, smooth braking to any tow vehicle without any modifications'.

It also has a 'user-intuitive touch screen panel displaying an instant overview of the proprietary Bowlus Power Management System, allowing settings to adjust intuitively and simply'.

Through Bluetooth and the internet, this system can also be managed remotely, and users can activate the likes of the heated floor system 'in advance of entry'.

As well as the air filters and UVC lighting, there is a freshwater filtration system which, according to Bowlus, 'instils confidence and peace of mind'.

Other technology includes the 'Find My Bowlus' GPS tracking feature, which allows 'chosen users to access ones location to anticipate arrivals or view trip status to coordinate off-grid camping with friends and family'.

To power the trailer, there is an 8 kWh lithium-iron-phosphate battery system, which can be fully charged within three to four hours. This means the trailer can be used for up to two weeks without having to be connected to an external power source, says Bowlus.

The trailer's interiors are 'thoughtfully curated with fabrics that are transformed into designer seating and bedding by a brilliant seamstress team' and use colours that 'build on a feeling of ultra-comfort'.

Bowlus explains: 'The new Terra Firma color story oozes with the relaxed vibe that comes with a lazy late afternoon watching a spectacular sunset.'

There's a 'hotel-style en-suite bathroom and a spacious and a zen-like bedroom, able to convert from two twin beds to an incredible king, accommodating all travel companions'.

Chief designer and CEO Geneva Long will work with clients to personalize their Bowlus from more than 56million possible interior design combinations

Terra Firma is made from 80 panels of polished, high-strength aerospace aluminum meticulously fastened to a frame by more than 5,000 aircraft-grade rivets

Orders for the Terra Firma are currently being taken, with delivery expected in 2022. Bowlus says the trailer can be towed 'by the widest variety of vehicles of any travel trailer, including electric vehicles (EVs)'

Geneva Long, CEO and chief designer at Bowlus, says: 'The Terra Firma edition continues the Bowlus tradition of bringing new technologies to the RV industry without adding more technology for technologys sake'

BOWLUS TERRA FIRMA FACTS, FIGURES AND FANCY FEATURES Cost: At least $265,000 (193,159) Hygiene: Hepa filters, UVC lighting, freshwater filtration Exterior: Eighty aluminum panels fastened with 5,000 aircraft-grade rivets Length: 25ft (7.62m) Exterior height: 8ft 6in Tracking: Find My Bowlus GPS system Power: 8 kWh lithium-iron-phosphate battery system, electrical and propane outlets Accommodation: En-suite bedroom with twin and king modes Pets: Slide-out feeding bowls Heating: Remote temperature monitoring, heated floors Customization: 56million interior design combinations Advertisement

And if those companions include a pet, don't worry as the Terra Firm has 'remote temperature monitoring, feeding bowls that slide out seamlessly from a drawer, and a personalized canine bed' so 'every family member is comfortably included in the experience'.

Bowlus says: 'For the first time, pet owners can feel confident that their pet is sitting comfortably with the assurance of temperature control when one is away from their Bowlus and their pet is resting.'

In addition, Bowlus says it offers two 'distinctive bespoke customization programs for those looking to add their personal touch and style to their interior'.

The firm explains: 'With each program, chief designer and CEO Geneva Long will work with clients to personalize their Bowlus from more than 56million possible interior design combinations.'

Bowlus says: 'The unique aluminum teardrop shape of Bowlus travel trailers, paired with the latest technology and unparalleled craftsmanship using yacht-quality components, has made the brand the industry leader in carefree luxury land travel. The Bowlus Terra Firma edition is the evolution of the Bowlus story.'

While Ms Long adds: 'We are persistently working to find new ways to elevate the luxury land travel experience with elements that effortlessly enhance lifes precious moments.

'The Terra Firma edition continues the Bowlus tradition of bringing new technologies to the RV industry without adding more technology for technologys sake.'

Orders for the Terra Firma are currently being taken, with delivery expected in 2022.

Bowlus completed construction on the first aluminum riveted travel trailer in 1934.
Wrexham schools wont fully reopen on 22nd as Council take cautious approach with case rate at 217 per 100k

This article is old - Published: Wednesday, Feb 10th, 2021

Wrexham Council have confirmed they will not be following Welsh Governments lead on allowing some younger primary school pupils to return to schools.

Todays seven day benchmark case rate for Wrexham is 217.7 per 100k, the highest in Wales. Second is Flintshire with 203.7 per 100k, both substantially higher than the majority of Wales, and roughly double the Welsh total.

As it stands face-to-face learning in schools has been suspended by Welsh Government, apart for the children of critical workers and vulnerable learners subject to certain criteria.

Welsh Government had indicated a preference for an all-Wales approach on the return for those aged between three and seven to school, with some local flexibility if required, starting from the 22nd of February. The Welsh Government reopening plan would see the introduction of twice-weekly testing for staff members as well as increased financial support for new face coverings.





Wrexham.com understand there had been a firmly expressed desire from Welsh Government for Wrexham Council to follow the wider lead despite the local figures, something that is taking place nearby in Flintshire who are at a similar cases per 100k rate, yet will be proceeding with the 22nd February plan.

Today Wrexham Council have said, Although coronavirus levels are falling in Wrexham, the figures are still very high, so the council and headteachers are carefully considering plans, while continually monitoring the local situation.

In light of this cautious approach, children will not be returning to schools in Wrexham until Friday, February 26 at the very earliest  depending on local coronavirus levels after half-term.

Councillor Phil Wynn, Wrexham Councils Lead Member for Education, says:

Coronavirus levels have been much worse in Wrexham compared to many other parts of Wales in recent weeks, so this is a cautious approach were taking.

Well monitor the local situation continually, and will work with schools to review and finalise arrangements after half-term.

Foundation phase learners will not return until February 26 at the very earliest, and headteachers will keep parents fully informed.

Its all about helping to keep people safe, and the wellbeing of our pupils, staff, parents, carers and wider communities is our priority.

Councillor Mark Pritchard, Leader of the Council, adds:

Were working with primary head teachers, school governors, Public Health Wales and Welsh Government to make sure the return to school is both safe and sustainable.

We must remember that this is a terrible virus, and we cant afford to drop our guard.

This is why its so important that we work in partnership to keep our children, school employees and the communities where our schools are located as safe as we possibly can.

Karen Evans, Chief Officer for Education and Early Intervention, says:

With the councils support, schools will be planning carefully for the return of foundation phase pupils, taking into account the local situation after half-term.

Id also like to reiterate our thanks to parents and carers of older children, who will continue to learn from home.

We know that remote-learning presents many challenges for families trying to manage work and home responsibilities, and were truly grateful to parents, children and staff for their continued efforts.
(Newser)  For a short while this week, Twitter thought Devin Nunes wasn't humana mistake it has since remedied. The New York Post reports that the California congressman or someone on his staff tried to log on to his Twitter account, but the person attempting the sign-in wasn't able to first get past the reCAPTCHA spam filter, which asks users to prove they're not bots by identifying certain pictures out of a bunch. The account was subsequently locked after the person didn't complete the task correctly.

story continues below

Twitter has since stepped in to release Nunes from Twitter jail. "Our automated systems took enforcement action on the account in error and it has since been reversed," a Twitter rep tells Business Insider. "The enforcement action was taken as a result of the account's failure to complete an anti-spam challenge that we regularly deploy across the service." Insider notes the courts last year threw out a $250 million lawsuit against Twitter in which Nunes claimed the platform was liable for unflattering tweets about him from two anonymous parody accounts. (Read more Devin Nunes stories.)

(Alliance News) - The European Commission on Tuesday presented a proposal to member states to extend until April the application of a post-Brexit trade deal with the UK, sources said.

The provisional application of this treaty, concluded late last year, began in January and was to have ended at the end of this month, giving the European Parliament time to study and ratify it.

But the EU "needs more time for the translation of documents" in all the official languages, a commission spokesman told AFP.

A European source said the proposal for an extension had been sent to members for approval and would then be put to a joint UK-EU council looking into the post-Brexit treaty.

European lawmakers began studying the 1,250-page text in the middle of last month.

Britain's Brexit negotiator David Frost confirmed Tuesday that London has been informed of the proposal to extend the deadline.

"It's a little disappointing given that we did discuss this only a month ago," he said.

"It's a little surprising that the EU wish to change it quite so soon. However we will talk with them and see what can be done."

source: AFP

Copyright 2021 Alliance News Limited. All Rights Reserved.
Who: Holly Chmil-Jones learned a lot about the meaning of community at Scranton Technical High School. Shed been a transfer student and her family didnt have much, but the teachers there made me one of their own, she said, noting they collected money to help send her to the Pennsylvania Governors School for the Arts.

So when Chmil-Jones learned an old friend and former Tech classmate shed reconnected with at a recent high school reunion was facing homelessness, she thought of tapping into Techs can-do spirit to help.

Chmil-Jones described that friend, Carol Starkey, 50, as a bubbly, quirky and fun woman who lived for many years in Jermyn. Starkey has an associate degree in office medical technology and early childhood education from McCann School of Business & Technology and served as her fathers caretaker until his death in December. She lost her mother to suicide in 1996 and was close to her dad, with both known for their love of the New York Giants. Since his death, Starkey has been busy packing up her life and downsizing, and she has not slept well, Chmil-Jones said.

What: While Starkey and her dad didnt have a lease on their home, they were on good terms with their landlord, Chmil-Jones said. Less than a month after her fathers death, however, Starkey received an eviction notice. She does not drive, and her sister lives in a local care facility, so Chmil-Jones hoped to find an affordable home for Starkey near public transportation and her sister. Social workers and agencies have helped, too, and Starkey has a temporary place to stay plus a new job lined up for next month.

Why: Friends and cousins help Starkey when possible, but her supporters hope to raise money to get her life back on the right footing. They want to collect enough to cover her first and last months rent and a security deposit for a new home, whether it be a rented room or an efficiency apartment.

The funds will be adapted in the best way for the sustainable solution, Chmil-Jones said. Its important that it be manageable on an ongoing basis.

Contributions also will help pay to move Starkeys bulky items, upgrade an old laptop so she can do well in her new job and pay for her smart phone connection so she can stay in touch with local agencies.

How: The public can donate through the GoFundMe page, Help Carol Beat Homelessness: 1st, last & security, or by mail to Help for Carol Fund, Box 305, Dunmore, PA 18512.

In her own words: To me, supporting Carol right now means stopping a deserving friend and a good person from slipping through the cracks at a time when she is most vulnerable. It is especially difficult out there for single people, specifically middle-aged women. You shouldnt have to cash out a retirement to avoid homelessness. And I would love to see a home share project (which matches people in need with owners of large, old houses who need help with upkeep or bills) launched in Scranton. We have people who need housing and houses which need people. I just want to see Carol home safe, literally.  Holly Chmil-Jones, friend
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An engaged couple who surprised their quarantined friend with a touching request have warmed hearts on social media.

The unidentified lovers spelled out 'Maid of Honour?' in the grass of Hyde Park directly across from the front entrance of the Sheraton Grand in Sydney's CBD.

The five-star hotel is currently being used as a quarantine facility for returned Australian travellers, who must spend 14 days in managed isolation and produce a negative Covid test on day 12 before they are released.

A photo of the handmade sign was captured by Moita Lindgren, an Australian citizen who recently flew home from the US.

Scroll down for video

An engaged couple (right) surprised their friend in hotel quarantine by asking her to be the maid of honour at their wedding with this handmade sign laid out in Hyde Park, Sydney

Ms Lindgren, who has been in quarantine at the Sheraton with her 19-year-old daughter since arriving from Los Angeles on Monday, February 8, told Daily Mail Australia it's lovely to see Australians supporting their loved ones in quarantine.

'I know this couple is here to lift their friends spirits, but it sure brightens the day of so many others too,' Ms Lindgren said.

Her picture, which has garnered 106 'likes' since it was uploaded to Facebook on Wednesday morning, sparked some delighted responses with comments including 'awesome' and 'my heart'.

'Oh my god this is adorable,' one man replied.

'Awww what an amazing surprise,' added a second, while a third wrote: 'That's so lovely.'

'So sweet! We watched lots of wedding photos being taken there,' said a fourth.

Others in quarantine at the same hotel said they wished they'd been lucky enough to get a room with a view.

'So jealous you've got a view of the park, I'm facing buildings,' one woman wrote.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his address in Lok Sabha strongly defended the controversial farm laws and accused the opposition, Congress, of driving propaganda and misleading the poor farmers. The Prime Minister further went on to call Congress a "divided party" that cannot look above their pity propaganda to defame the present government.

Further PM Modi added that the purchase of MSP has in fact increased after the laws were formed. On this ground, the PM took a dig at Congress, saying the opposition must talk about the "content" and "intent" of the farm laws.

This statement initiated an uproar in the lower house, followed by Congress leaders, including Rahul Gandhi, to walk out of the assembly.

After the walkout, the PM again slammed Congress saying, Congress party is divided and confused. Neither it can work for its own good nor it can think about solving the issues of the country. What can be more unfortunate than this.

Congress leader Adhir Chowdhury questioned in Lok Sabha, We walked out because the PM didn't discuss our concerns over farmers' death. He agreed that amendments are required in farm laws, some states will be benefitted & some' won't. Why do you have to bring laws that won't be benefiting everyone?

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This was Blinken's second phone call with Jaishankar after he became the top American diplomat last month. The two leaders first spoke on 29 January.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke with External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Tuesday during which they discussed the situation in Myanmar and issues of mutual concern, according to a State Department spokesperson.

Blinken spoke with Jaishankar to reaffirm the strength of the US-India partnership and to discuss issues of mutual concern, including the situation in Myanmar, State Department Spokesperson Ned Price said in a readout of the call.

During the call, Blinken expressed concern over the military coup and the importance of rule of law and the democratic process in Myanmar.

"The Secretary and the Minister also discussed regional developments, including the value of US-India cooperation across the Indo-Pacific. Both sides look forward to expanded regional cooperation, including through the Quad, and to address the challenges of COVID and climate change," Price said.

This was Blinken's second phone call with Jaishankar after he became the top American diplomat last month. The two leaders first spoke on 29 January.

After Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th President of the United States on 20 January, the two governments have established contacts at the highest level. Biden and Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke over phone on 8 February.

TMC MP Mahua Moitra

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) initiated a breach of privilege motion against Trinamool Congress MP Mahua Moitra on February 10, for her recent speech in Parliament on former Chief Justice of India (CJI) Ranjan Gogoi.

Mahua Moitra had said in Lok Sabha: The sacred cow that was the judiciary is no longer sacred. It stopped being sacred day a sitting CJI was accused of sexual harassment, presided over own trial, cleared himself and accepted a nomination to Upper House within three months of retirement replete with Z+ security cover.

Her remarks have already been expunged from the record, but the BJP wants Moitra to be dismissed from Parliament too.

Rajasthan BJP MP PP Chowdhary, who was a former minister of state for law, has moved the privilege motion against the TMC MP, reported India Today. Additionally, BJP MP Nishikant Dubey has sought the cancellation of Moitras Lok Sabha membership.

Earlier, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Prahlad Joshi had expressed discontent over Moitras speech but did not speak of moving a privilege motion.

He had said: "Raising the issue of the Ram Mandir judgment (the Ayodhya temple-mosque verdict) and bringing the then chief justice and other things, it's a serious matter and we're thinking of taking appropriate measures."



The sacred cow that was the judiciary is no longer sacred. It stopped being sacred day a sitting CJI was accused of sexual harassment, presided over own trial, cleared himself & accepted a nomination to Upper House within 3 months of retirement replete with Z+ security cover pic.twitter.com/ODFn2pd2Z1

 Mahua Moitra (@MahuaMoitra) February 9, 2021

It is believed that the saffron party reconsidered its decision after the defiant Trinamool leader posted a video clip of the speech on Twitter.
[February 10, 2021] 9369-5864 Quebec Inc. Provides Update of Its Ownership of Common Shares of Nuran Wireless Inc.

SAINT-HONORE-DE-SHENLEY, QC, Feb. 10, 2021 /CNW Telbec/ - 9369-5864 Quebec Inc. ("9369-5864") announced today an update in respect of its ownership of common shares ("Common Shares") of Nuran Wireless Inc. ("Nuran"). As a result of a prior equity issuance by Nuran in which 9369-5864 did not participate (the "Company Issuance"), 9369-5864's ownership interest in Nuran was diluted below 10% of the then issued and outstanding Common Shares. On February 8, 2021 and February 9, 2021, 9369-5864 sold 200,000 Common Shares through the facilities of the Canadian Securities Exchange at an average price of $2,71 per Common Share, for gross proceeds of $540,975.15. The Transaction was 9369-5864's first acquisition r disposition of securities of Nuran since the Company Issuance.



Immediately prior to the disposition of the Common Shares described above, 9369-5864 held 1,043,078 Common Shares of Nuran, representing approximately 6.77% of the issued and outstanding Common Shares of Nuran. As a result of the disposition, 9369-5864 now holds 843,078 Common Shares, which represents approximately 5.48% of the issued and outstanding Common Shares of Nuran. In accordance with applicable securities laws, 9369-5864 may, from time to time and at any time, acquire additional Common Shares and/or other equity, debt or other securities or instruments of Nuran (collectively, "Securities") in the open market or otherwise, and it reserves the right to dispose of any or all of its Securities in the open market or otherwise at any time and from time to time, and to engage in similar transactions with respect to the Securities, the whole depending on market conditions, the business and prospects of Nuran and other relevant factors.

9369-5864's registered office is 190 6e Rang N, Saint-Honore-de-Shenley, Quebec G0M 1V0. A copy of the early warning report filed by 9369-5864 in connection with the disposition described above is available on SEDAR under Nuran's profile. This press release is issued under the early warning provisions of Canadian securities legislation. SOURCE 9369-5864 Quebec Inc.

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AS the white pirogue drifted in the waters just off Belle Garden in Tobago early yesterday morning, fishermen working nearby knew something was wrong.

What they saw in the small vessel stunned them.

Fourteen bodies, all of them male, along with a skull and other skeletal remains, were piled inside the vessel as it floated four miles off Belle Garden, police confirmed.

The bodies were all clad in tracksuits and green rain jackets and were severely decomposed, police investigators said.
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Larry Flynt, the 'Hustler' magazine founder and outspoken First Amendment activist who built a $400 million adult entertainment empire, died Wednesday at his Hollywood Hills home. He was 78.

Flynt died due to heart failure his nephew, Jimmy Flynt Jr. said although he had suffered from a slew of health problems since a 1978 murder attempt that left him paralyzed from the waist down.

The controversial mogul and self-described First Amendment champion had been involved in numerous legal battles involving free speech and pornography regulations.

'Larry was a rebel. He had a very complex personality. That's why they made a movie about it,' Flynt Jr. said about his uncle.

He often clashed with feminist groups and the religious right, and was once sued by televangelist the Rev. Jerry Falwell in a case that made it to the US Supreme Court.

Flynt, born in Kentucky, had been in a wheelchair since 1978, when white supremacist serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin attempted to kill him as he left court in Georgia.

Franklin shot him and left him paralyzed, in retaliation for Hustler publishing images of interracial sex.

A self-described 'smut-peddler' who transformed his Mid West strip clubs into the multi-million-dollar Hustler empire, Flynt was passionate about personal freedoms.

He was an unlikely free-speech activist known for his legal battles over pornography regulations. Aside from pornography, he launched unsuccessful bids for political office.

His life was made into a 1996 film, The People vs Larry Flynt, starring Woody Harrelson, Edward Norton and Courtney Love, which chronicled his rise to fame and his clashes with religious institutions and the law.

Larry Flynt, pictured in March 2009, died on Wednesday morning of heart failure

Flynt is seen in November 2004, celebrating his 62nd birthday at The Hustler Club in Paris

Flynt and his fifth wife, Elizabeth Berrios, are pictured at the Oxford Union in February 2014

Flynt was married five times, and had five children - his daughter Lisa Flynt-Fugate died in a car crash in Ohio in October 2014, at the age of 47.

He is survived by T.J. Flynt; Theresa Flynt, who worked in marketing for the retail side of Hustler; Tonya Flynt-Vega, who accused her father of sexual abuse - claims he denied - and began the Coalition Against Pornography; and Larry Flynt Jr, who his father said was 'worthless'.

Woody Harrelson in the 1996 film

He married Elizabeth Berrios, his former nurse, in 1998.

In 2013 he told The Hollywood Reporter he was estranged from four of his five children, because he claimed they just wanted his money and were not prepared to show an interest in running his business.

It was unclear if they had reconciled at the time of his death.

Flynt told the magazine that he maintains a special place in his heart for his fourth wife Althea, who was bisexual and died of AIDS in 1987.

'Althea was the love of my life,' said Flynt.

The pair met when the 17-year-old runaway started dancing in one of his clubs.

They married in 1976 and remained married until her death in 1987.

In the 1996 film, Althea was played by Courtney Love.

Flynt was born into poverty in Magoffin County, Kentucky - the oldest of three children born to a sharecropper and a housewife.

At 15 he joined the army, having forged his birth certificate.

He was honorably discharged, and became for a brief time a bootlegger before enlisting in the navy in July 1960.

Woody Harrelson starred as Larry Flynt in the film The People vs Larry Flynt

Flynt is pictured at home in Los Angeles in March 1979

Flynt opened the first Hustler Club in Ohio in the 1960s and created an empire

Larry Flynt is pictured at home with Althea in March 1979. She died in 1987

Harrelson and Love in the film The People vs Larry Flynt

Larry Flynt's most controversial published photos Jackie Onassis: Photos of the former First Lady sunbathing nude were splashed across pages of the August 1975 issue of Hustler magazine. He bought the paparazzi pictures of her sunbathing on a beach in Greece for $18,000 and quickly sold a million copies of the issue that featured them. In June 1978, a Hustler cover showed a woman's legs and lower torso stuffed into a meat grinder Meat Grinder cover image: In June 1978, a Hustler cover showed a woman's legs and lower torso stuffed into a meat grinder with chop-meat coming out the other end. Flynt added a quote which read: 'We will no longer hang women up like pieces of meat.' 'Pink Shots': In November 1974, the magazine published photos of open vulvas. Flynt had to fight to publish each issue, as many people, including some at his distribution company, found the magazine too explicit and threatened to remove it from the market. Advertisement

Discharged at the age of 22, Flynt took $1,800 from his savings and bought his mother's bar in Dayton, Ohio. With the profits he launched several more, and then the Hustler Club, featuring nude hostess dancers.

When recession pushed his string of Ohio-based strip clubs toward bankruptcy in 1974, Flynt turned what had been a black-and-white newsletter into the most sexually explicit magazine in the United States.

The publication's August 1975 issue of nude photos of Jackie Kennedy Onassis brought attention and dramatically increased sales for Hustler.

He bought the paparazzi pictures of her sunbathing on a beach in Greece for $18,000 and quickly sold a million copies of the issue that featured them.

Hustler claimed a monthly circulation of three million in the mid-1970s, though Forbes said it peaked at two million in 1976.

With explicit sex on cable television, on DVD and on the internet, its circulation fell sharply in the 80s and 90s.

In 1977 he briefly declared himself a born-again Christian, after befriending evangelist Ruth Carter Stapleton, sister of President Jimmy Carter.

He banned smoking at Hustler, gave the staff a raise, began a carrot juice diet and vowed to 'hustle for God.'

He toned down Hustler's content, but then returned to normal operations and announced he was an atheist.

In the late '80s, televangelist Jerry Falwell sued Flynt for libel and the emotional distress caused by a Hustler cartoon that implied Falwell's first sexual encounter was with his mother. He won in a lower court.

But on February 24, 1988, the Supreme Court deemed that if a public figure could receive damages for distress, any kind of satire or parody would be impossible.

The case, Hustler Magazine v. Falwell, is now taught in law schools.

In September, when Falwell's televangelist son, Jerry Falwell Jr, 53, was accused of being in an open marriage, Flynt said he was among 'a parade of charlatans' who preached moral purity, yet failed to live up to their own standards.

Falwell Jr was forced to resign as president of the evangelical Liberty University on August 25 after details emerged of his marital turmoil.

His wife Becki is alleged to have had a seven-year affair with their pool boy, Giancarlo Granda, 29. Granda told Reuters that the relationship involved him having sex with Becki Falwell while Jerry Falwell looked on - something Jerry denied.

Falwell Jr's wife Becki , pictured, had a seven-year affair with pool boy, Giancarlo Granda, 29

Falwell Jr left the conservative institution after a 13-year career there, but walked away with a $10.5 million payout.

Flynt accused Falwell Jr and his fellow evangelical megapreachers of being 'obsessed above all with sexual behavior, ignoring and subverting the core message of Christianity - humility and compassion for the downtrodden - while embracing 'prosperity gospel,' which is to say the gospel of greed above all other values.'

Writing in The Daily Beast, Flynt, a long time Democrat donor, criticized Falwell Jr and other evangelicals for their support of Donald Trump, who has been married three times.

'They support Republican politicians eager to gut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare and other programs designed to do what Jesus Christ strived for: the reduction of human suffering in this vale of tears,' he wrote.

Granda said that he had an affair with Becki Falwell for seven years with Jerry Falwell's consent

Flynt criticized Falwell Jr for his staunch support for Donald Trump

'They live in multimillion-dollar mansions and fly around in private jets, while fleecing their flock for 'prayer donations' guaranteed to cure incurable diseases and afflictions.

'They forget that Jesus Christ only lost his temper and acted violently once: when driving the money-lenders from the temple. But they are not troubled in the least by the banksters on Wall Street, who hoovered up millions from middle-class Americans, granting the 1 percent a get-out-of-jail-free card to do it all over again.

'Instead, these evangelists reserve the whip for gays, women who want to control their own bodies, pot smokers, and other 'heretics' who are only trying to lead fulfilling lives.

'They actually work to increase the sum of human suffering. They are peddlers of religious snake oil.'

Falwell Jr was crucial in marshaling evangelical support for Trump - a task Flynt described as lifting 'the orange buffoon over the hump in 2016'.

Flynt also made a political run himself.

In 1983 he ran for president as a Republican in a long-shot bid, running on a platform of fighting sexual repression.

'I want to keep Big Brother out of your bedroom,' he said at the time.

'If the government can control the single strongest drive you have, they can control anything, and that's the road to fascism.'

Asked, during his campaign launch event, what indication he is receiving that the public is taking his candidacy seriously, Flynt said: 'We get letters saying 'I haven't voted in five years, but you've given me an excuse to now.' People know I'm honest, they know I've got nothing to hide.'

Flynt in 2014 with the cover of his magazine, on its 40th anniversary

Woody Harrelson, who played Flynt in the 1996 film of his life

He opposed the death penalty, and insisted that he did not want Franklin put to death.

He favored same-sex marriage. He spoke out against the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

A private foundation he created contributes to research in spinal cord injuries, child abuse and youth violence.

During Bill Clinton's impeachment trial, he paid for an advertisement in The Washington Post to offer to $1 million for proof that a member of Congress or other senior government official was enmeshed in an adulterous affair, in a bid to show the hypocrisy of Clinton's Republican adversaries.

In 2003 he announced he was running for governor of California, and won 17,458 votes.

'It was pure chaos,' he said at the time.

'I didn't get in the race because I had any illusions of going to Sacramento, I just wanted to raise a little hell and hope I didn't get beat by Gary Coleman.

'I was just taking part in the dysfunction.'

The race was won by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

In October 2016, he offered $1 million reward for 'scandalous' material that would see Trump impeached.

He sought 'verifiable video footage or audio recordings for use prior to the November 8 election clearly showing Donald Trump engaging in illegal activity or acting in a sexually demeaning or derogatory manner.'

Flynt's wealth was always unknown.

He gave estimates of up to $700 million, but financial experts said his fortune varied widely over time with economic conditions, and the 2015 consensus put his net worth at about $400 million.
You called Sen. Sanders everything but an ignorant slut.

So Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy, using a favorite early-SNL reference that is often lost on those under Kennedys age of 69, said to Neera Tanden, President Joe Bidens nominee for director of the Office of Management and Budget, near the end of a Wednesday confirmation hearing in the Senate Budget Committee. Kennedy was the last of numerous senators over the course of two days of confirmation hearings to use their limited time available for questioning one of the would-be most powerful executive branch officials to air grievances about Tandens history of insulting online posts.

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And while a true poster never regrets, Tanden had to do what she had to do.

Tanden, who had deleted more than 1,000 of her name-calling tweets upon getting the call to service in the new Democratic administration, offered the first of her numerous apologies for my past language and social media activity in her opening statement Tuesday in the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

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But Ohio Sen. Rob Portman, the very first Republican to question her, had come prepared with a list of old tweets to read back at her.

You wrote that Susan Collins is the worst,  Portman said. That Tom Cotton is a fraud. That vampires have more heart than Ted Cruz. You called Leader McConnell Moscow Mitch and Voldemort. And on and on.

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Weve(?) waited months to see Republican senators read Tandens tweets back at her, so do watch the video of Portman reciting these in his most practiced tone of lifelessness.

.@senrobportman: "Are these media reports that you deleted more than 1,000 tweets in November in advance of you nomination accurate? If so, why?"@neeratanden: "I appreciate people's concerns about my tweets. I've regretted them. I deleted tweets because I regretted my tone..." pic.twitter.com/6hAupsRoaM  CSPAN (@cspan) February 9, 2021

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Even after the ones she deleted, Portman said, he found, through my staff, that there are still nine pages of tweets about Sen. Ted Cruz, for example.

Senator, I appreciate peoples concerns about my tweets, Tanden said.

She would endure similar roasting in the hearing from Sen. James Lankford, who observed that you have actually tweeted more in the past four years than President Trump tweeted, as far as just numbersa sentence that shouldve been a prelude to presenting her with a medaland that her hostile tone didnt align with Bidens calls for civility.

Tanden returned for more Wednesday in the Budget Committee, where Republicans again raised her posting habits. Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey brought up tweets in which Tanden had insinuated that the Russian hackers changed election results in 2016 to put Trump over the top, and asked her if she believed Trump had been legitimately elected.

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Absolutely, Tanden said.

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, the committees ranking member, read not just Tandens old posts but anonymous negative Glassdoor reviews of her management skills as president of the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank.

With Democrats now in charge of the Senate, the Budget Committee is now the fiefdom of Chairman Bernie Sanders. Sanders and Tanden have had a poor relationship, with Sanders having accused her and CAP during the 2020 presidential race of smearing him, his campaign, and his supporters. (The invective between very online Sanders supporters and Tanden did go both ways.)

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Sanders, who also said during the hearing that he had concerns about Tandens solicitation of corporate donations at CAP, took a grandfatherly approach to their feud in the hearing.

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Of course, your attacks were not just made against Republicans, Sanders said. There were vicious attacks made against progressives, people who I have worked with, me personally.

So as you come before this committee to assume a very important role in the United States government, he continued, at a time when we need serious work on serious issues and not personal attacks on anybody, whether theyre on the left or the right, can you reflect a little bit about some of your decisions and the personal statements you have made in recent years?

She reiterated her regret.

.@SenSanders says it's important to "minimize the level of personal and vicious attacks." Asks Neera Tanden if she'll have a different approach at OMB.@neeratanden: "Absolutely...social media does lead to too many personal comments and my approach will be radically different." pic.twitter.com/QB6FAtrWQr  CSPAN (@cspan) February 10, 2021

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Kennedy was the final, and typically showiest, Republican to question her. He suggested that there may be a perception that if you took Wall Street, turned them upside down, and shook em, youd fall out of their pockets. When he said that you called Sen. Sanders everything but an ignorant slutGraham, in the background, followed up with I wouldntve said ignorant Tanden showed her anger for the first time, saying, That is not true, Senator.

Kennedy then asked her repeatedly whether she meant the insults she tweeted when she tweeted them.

She tried a few different dodges between reiterations of the question. I really feel badly about them, Senator. Social media is a terrible discourse. I feel terribly about them. I look back at them, I said them, I feel badly about them, I deleted tweets.

She finally relented.

Senator, I must have meant them, she said. But I really regret them.
Days after Canada's Justin Trudeau government faced questions over reaching out to India to procure COVID-19 vaccines, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday received a call from his Canadian counterpart. Taking to Twitter, PM Modi said that he had a telephonic conversation with the Canadian PM and assured him that India would do 'its best' to facilitate supplies of the COVID-19 vaccine sought. The Indian Prime Minister also said that duo agreed on continuing to collaborate on important issues like climate change and the global economic recovery.

"Expressing his appreciation, Prime Minister Trudeau said that if the world managed to conquer COVID-19, it would be significantly because of India's tremendous pharmaceutical capacity, and Prime Minister Modi's leadership in sharing this capacity with the world. Prime Minister thanked PM Trudeau for his sentiments," a press release from the PMO read.

Was happy to receive a call from my friend @JustinTrudeau. Assured him that India would do its best to facilitate supplies of COVID vaccines sought by Canada. We also agreed to continue collaborating on other important issues like Climate Change and the global economic recovery.  Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) February 10, 2021

READ | Canada's Trudeau Govt Questioned For Not Asking India & Modi For Vaccine; Takes Pak Route

PM Modi's contact with his Canadian counterpart establishes the smooth diplomatic relations between New Delhi and Ottawa which had been hit briefly after Trudeau administration's meddling into the farmers' protest. The Trudeau government had said that Canada will always be there to defend the rights of peaceful protests, and expressed concern over the situation inviting a stern response from India's Ministry of External Affairs. S Jaishankar-led ministry had then said that such 'comments pertaining to the "internal affairs of India are unwarranted, unacceptable and would damage India-Canada bilateral relations.'

READ | Afghan Painter Paints PM Modi's Portrait In Kabul, Wishes For Long Friendship With India

India's vaccine maitri initiative

Prime Minister Narendra Modi's assurance to Trudeau over the supply of COVID vaccines also marks the extension of India's 'Vaccine Maitri Initiative'. Under the initiative, India has already started exporting COVID-19 vaccines manufactured in India to several countries across the globe upholding the country's stature as 'the World's Pharma'. So far, India has exported the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine manufactured by the Serum Institute of India (SII) and Bharat Biotech's indigenous vaccine to more than 15 countries while another 25 countries are queued at different levels to receive supplies. These include Brazil, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Bhutan, Nepal, and Sri Lanka.

READ | In LS Speech, PM Modi Bats For Farm Laws, Crop Diversification & Exposes 'Andolanjeevis'

Both the vaccines are already in circulation in India with healthcare workers receiving the jabs in the first phase of the immunization drive. On Thursday, COVID-19 vaccines from India landed in Dominica with the Prime Minister of the Caribbean country saying that he did not imagine that the prayers of his country would be answered so swiftly. Sharing a picture of a consignment reaching Dominica, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar described it as "a gesture of goodwill and an example of support".

'Have you phoned Prime Minister Modi?'

Earlier, a video of a Canadian Opposition lawmaker quizzing sitting Procurement Minister Anita Anand over contacting India to procure Covid-19 vaccines for the country is being widely shared on social media. Michelle Rempel Garner, a Conservative MP and Shadow Minister for Health, in a meeting of the standing committee on health asked if the Trudeau government had reached out to Prime Minister Modi for vaccines. Garner asked, Has the minister or Prime Minister phoned Prime Minister Modi to ask if we could get vaccines from India? Anand, clearly caught off-guard responded, "Well, thank you for that question. I am in regular communication with organisations and countries around the world to secure doses of additional vaccines."

READ | 'We Took Things For Granted': EU Admits Poor Decision-making Led To Vaccine Rollout Delay
[February 10, 2021] Christopher Hemming Joins EVOTEK to Promote the Billion Dollar Brand

SAN DIEGO, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- EVOTEK, North America's premier enabler of Digital businesses has announced serial entrepreneur, Christopher Hemming, has joined as the company's first, Brand Ambassador. As a Brand Ambassador, Hemming will be focused on driving awareness and bolstering the EVOTEK, billion-dollar brand. "I am ecstatic to have Chris join the team," said Cesar Enciso, Chief Executive Officer of EVOTEK. "When I created EVOTEK, I set out to build a world-class employee focused culture. Six years later, we have exponentially grown our brand to be representative of that. Chris will be instrumental in accelerating our message in the marketplace." Hemming is considered one of the most connected entrepreneurs in the technology industry. He is the Founder of C10, a private network of C-level and VP technology executives that hosts executive events in 22 cities across the United States. The 40 Under 40 Award recipient has served as a strategic advisor connecting many prominent business leaders and technology executives. "We have created an incredible organization over the last six years, from a start-up to one of the largest privately held systems integrators in the country. As we march towards a billion dollars in revenue, Chris will be focusing on the development and communication of our brand, in both existing and new markets," remarked Jeff Klenner, President.



EVOTEK was established in 2014 to provide technology leadership with innovative ways to thrive in a digital world. Over the years, the company has distinguished itself as a market leader, earning many awards for culture, innovation and growth. With Chris's appointment, EVOTEK is poised to influence and contribute to the tech industry substantially. "In an industry that is saturated with noise, EVOTEK is the one stand-out brand that CIO's and CISO's trust. EVOTEK's unique roster of Fortune 500 executives is transforming the customer experience. It's the perfect time to be focused on expanding the awareness of the company's brand," said Hemming.

About EVOTEK

EVOTEK is North America's premier enabler of digital business with a focus on innovation. With technology offerings in data center and cloud, EVOTEK is uniquely equipped to enable customers with the industry shift from traditional IT computing to secure multi-cloud. With services practices in cybersecurity, mobility, platform engineering and AIOps, EVOTEK is moving up the value chain, closer to the part of digital business that matters most. EVOTEK was named to Inc. Magazine's "Best Places to Work" in 2018 and 2020. For five consecutive years, from 2016-2020, EVOTEK was listed in The San Diego Business Journal's "Best Places to Work" and recognized in CRN's "Solution Provider 500" list, CRN's "Next-Generation 250" list, CRN's "Triple Crown" and highlighted as CRN's "Top 150 Growth Companies", holding the #1 spot in 2017 as the fastest growing system integrator in the country. In 2020, EVOTEK was named to the Inc. 5000 list as one of the fastest growing companies in America. To learn more about how EVOTEK can enable your digital business, visit www.evotek.com.

Follow EVOTEK: Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook Media Contact: Ann Strandberg

(858) 362 5083

291194@email4pr.com View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/christopher-hemming-joins-evotek-to-promote-the-billion-dollar-brand-301225826.html SOURCE EVOTEK

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Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 9)  The Anti-Terrorism Acts chilling effect has been one of the issues raised against the controversial law, but Supreme Court Associate Justice Marvic Leonen said this may be hard to prove.

On the second day of the high courts oral arguments on petitions seeking to junk the anti-terrorism law, Leonen once again debated with his former student, law professor Alfredo Molo III, who represents the petitioners.

Leonen pointed out that Molos clients, including retired Supreme Court Senior Associate Justice Antonio Carpio, did not cower in fear and stop their advocacies despite claiming that the vague and overly broad provisions of the law would chill people into silence.

As a matter of fact, the passage of the Anti-Terrorism Act caused a big protest in the University of the Philippines despite restrictions brought by the coronavirus pandemic, Leonen said.

The magistrate said that while there is always discomfort in dissent, the petitioners are not chilled."

Molo disagreed.

Chilling effect within the concept of constitutional law does not refer to an absolutely chilled population. It refers to that pause in the writer as he composes his words. It is the hesitation inside the mind of the speaker because of a vague and overbroad law. He doesnt know whether the next word he will say will be criminal or in this case, mark him as a terrorist, Molo explained.

"Justice Carpio is not afraid but it would be another thing to suggest that there is no pause, there is no hesitation," he added.

Leonen answered, He is not afraid but he is chilled? To me, that doesnt seem logical.

He reiterated that the issue is "very subjective" and asked Molo to further explain his argument in the written memoranda the parties will submit to the Supreme Court.

RELATED: Aetas blocked from joining petitions vs. Anti-Terrorism Act

Terrorism an evolving, no ordinary crime

In repealing the Human Security Act of 2007, the Anti-Terrorism Act expanded the definition of terrorism. Under the previous law, an act of terrorism is committed when crimes such as piracy, rebellion, and murder are done to sow widespread and extraordinary fear and panic among the populace, in order to coerce the government to give in to an unlawful demand.

The main problem with the Anti-Terrorism Act is it makes no mention of any predicate crime, human rights lawyer Chel Diokno argued. This sets it apart from the laws of other countries and international organizations.

READ: Diokno tells SC: Only the Anti-Terrorism Act punishes based on persons state of mind

Under Section 4 of the assailed law, a person commits terrorism when engaging in acts that intend to endanger someone or to damage public or private property, and certain other actions when the purpose is any of the following: intimidate the public, the government, or any international organization; create an atmosphere of or spread a message of fear; seriously destabilize or destroy the fundamental political economic or social structures of society; and create a public emergency or seriously undermine public safety.

Advocacy, protest, dissent, and similar exercises of civil and political rights are not considered terrorism as long as they are not intended to endanger a person or create a serious risk to public safety, the law states.

Because of this definition of terrorism, the entire law should be struck down as unconstitutional, Diokno said.

Meanwhile, Associate Justice Alexander Gesmundo noted that there is no universal definition of terrorism until now probably because it continues to evolve as a crime." For instance, he said there are cyber-attacks now, crimes which were unheard of decades ago.

Associate Justice Ramon Paul Hernando meanwhile backed another contentious provision which allows the pre-trial detention of suspected terrorists for up to 24 days.

Thats in recognition of the fact that terrorism is a different kind of offense where police would need to dig deeper. Its not just any ordinary crime," he said.

RELATED: Aetas blocked from joining petitions vs. Anti-Terrorism Act
GOVERNMENT received a total of $7.37 billion from oil, gas and quarrying/mining companies in fiscal 2018, with the largest payment of $2 billion coming from majority State-owned National Gas Company (NGC).

However, for the period 2019 to 2020, unaudited figures indicate a declining trend in revenue.
"The Cavit brand has been executing campaigns around pizza for over 10 years and this year we're excited to be adding elements to the program to help small businesses during this challenging time for the industry," said Bethany Burke, Sr. Vice President, Public Relations & Corp. Communications, Palm Bay International, Cavit's exclusive U.S. importer. "Who doesn't love pizza and wine? We can't wait to see consumers around the U.S. sharing their favorite pizza and of course, the delicious Cavit wines they pair it with."

In addition to awareness brought on from the social media posts, for every entry, Cavit will be donating $1 (up to $20,000) to the James Beard Foundation's Open for Good campaign. All participants are also eligible to win one of two $2,500 credits in the Slice app for "free pizza for a year." Cavit customers who order through the Slice app for the first time will receive $5 off if they use the code, CAVIT.

The Cavit Cares Pizza Challenge runs from February 9, 2021 to March 31, 2021; for additional information and official rules please visit Cavit.com/CavitCares.

About Cavit Wines

Cavit, hailing from northern Italy's breathtaking Trentino region, first made its way to America in the 1970s and has become the #1 Italian Wine Brand in America*, with a diverse range of high-quality varietal wines that are versatile and easy-to-enjoy. Cavit swept onto the radar of American wine lovers as an early pioneer of a then little-known white wine called Pinot Grigio. The Cavit Collection is comprised of Pinot Noir, Riesling, Oak Zero Chardonnay, Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Moscato, Cavit Select Red Blend, Rose, Prosecco, Sweet Red and Pinot Grigio  America's #1 Italian wine*. For more information, please visit http://www.cavit.com or follow at http://www.facebook.com/cavitwines and http://www.instagram.com/cavitwines.

About Palm Bay International:

Palm Bay International, a dynamic family-owned company, offers one of the nation's most comprehensive portfolios of imported wines and spirits from key appellations/origins around the globe, as well as a growing roster of domestic wines. Among Palm Bay's most valued assets is its remarkable network of long-term partnerships with the foremost wholesale companies in all 50 states, as well as the Caribbean, Mexico and Central America. With the crucial collaboration of these partners, Palm Bay's portfolio is able to meet the needs of every level of the industry, from independent restaurants and retail stores, to chain accounts, supermarkets, hotels, airlines, cruise ships, duty-free accounts and U.S. military bases. This impressive diversity of brands, accounts and relationships positions Palm Bay as a major source of fine wines and spirits and an industry leader in the U.S. marketplace. For more visit: http://www.palmbay.com.

About Slice

Slice transforms independent pizzerias with the specialized technology, marketing, data, insights shared services and guidance they need, to serve today's digital-minded customers. The low, fixed-cost per order model is designed to benefit both the business owner and consumer alike. Enabling small businesses to thrive makes it easy for customers to order from their go-to shops and discover their next favorite. Serial tech entrepreneur Ilir Sela started Slice to solve the digital challenges of his family's New York City pizzerias. Today, the company partners with over 14,000 pizzerias across 3,000 cities in all 50 states forming the nation's largest marketplace for authentic pizza. For more information, visit slicelife.com.

Contact:

Berk Communications

[email protected]

Palm Bay International

Bethany Burke

[email protected]

*Nielsen xAOC + L 52wks ending 11-28-20

SOURCE Cavit Wines

Related Links

http://www.cavit.com


This silent treatment was purely accidental.

A professor in Singapore realized at the end of an almost two-hour lecture that he had been talking to his students on mute the entire time.

Singapore-based newspaper, The Independent, states that the National University of Singapore professor was very surprised and not a little distressed when he found out that his lesson quite literally fell on deaf ears.

A video on YouTube shows Associate Professor of Mathematics, Wang Dong, ending his lecture by asking his students if they had any questions. It is then that he slowly realizes that his students had been trying to inform him that they hadnt been able to hear him at all.

Professor Dong thus formally concluded the lecture, stating that they would return to the lesson at a later date, this time with the sound on.

However, dont think that the students were heartlessly staring at Professor Dong through their computer screens as he taught them in silence. One student, Azusa Chan, claims that they all attempted to get Professor Dongs attention to no avail.

Students tried all sorts of things to get his attention by unmuting and even calling his phone number, says Chan. However, he did not respond and continued with the lesson.

The participant count dwindled as time went on, as students could not contact the professor and had no other recourse, continues Chan. What you see here are 20-plus students who waited patiently for the professor to come back.

It appears that, at the end of the day, though his students learned no lesson at all, Professor Dong learned a lesson in the fickle nature of online teaching.


Senate Democrats voted down an amendment protecting babies who survived abortion, otherwise known as the Born Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, on Thursday.

As per Christian Headlines, the Senate Democrats defeated the Born Alive Act, which would have imposed criminal and civil penalties for doctors who failed to provide health care for babies who survived abortion. The penalties are imposed on "providers who fail to exercise the same degree of care for babies who survive an abortion or attempted abortion as would be provided to another child born at the same gestational age."

Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse presented the amendment in a brief speech which gathered the support of Democrat Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Bob Casey of Pennsylvania alongside all Republican Senators that were 52 in total, which is 8 votes short of the needed 60 for the amendment to be added to the budget resolution, the Christian Headlines said.

"Every baby, whether she's born in a state of the art hospital with a NICU unit, or whether she's born in an abortion clinic in a strip mall - every baby is born with dignity, and is created in God's image," Sasse raised in his speech.

"And she deserves care. This amendment is aimed at making sure that babies who survive abortions get the same degree of care that any other newborn would. There's nothing partisan about that," he added. "There's a lot of complicated debates in this chamber but this isn't actually one of them. Here's a chance for 100 senators to come together and support every baby. Every baby deserves a fighting chance."

The Catholic Review added that the Born Alive Act requires health workers to transport the child immediately to the hospital following appropriate care. The Act, which was enacted by Congress in 2002, was amended to include the recognition of the baby born alive after abortion as "full legal persons under federal law," the Catholic Review explained.

National Right To Life President Carol Tobias said in a statement that this "shows just how extreme the majority of Senate Democrats are." Tobias pointed out that the Act "is not about abortion" as purported by pro-abortion groups but saving the life of a child who survived it.

"There is no such thing as a 'post-birth abortion.' Allowing a child to die after birth is infanticide," she quipped. "After surviving the violence of abortion, these newborn babies should be given the chance to survive."

Similarly, pro-life group Susan B. Anthony List condemned the Democrats while gave thanks to Sasse for the amendment via Twitter.

"BREAKING: 52 senators just voted to protect living, breathing babies who survive an abortion. (60 votes were required to pass) Requiring medical care for newborn infants shouldn't be up for debate. 77% of voters agree. This SHOULD have passed 100-0," Susan B. Anthony List said

"Thank you @SenSasse for introducing the amendment tonight that simply requires EQUAL medical care for infants, whether they're born in the L&D ward of a hospital, or "accidentally" in an abortion facility," the group added in its Twitter post with the video of the senator during his speech.

Los Angeles Auxiliary Archbishop Robert Barron, on the other hand, took to Facebook to express how "apalled" he was for the disturbing decision of the Democrats.

In a live video message, the archbishop expressed agreement with Sasse that "this should be a non-problem--this should be of anything obvious to us that a child who survived an abortion procedure" and pointed out that if this is "too difficult for the other side to see" then there is no possibility now to create a bridge with those who voted against it.

"What you see is a complete, it seems to me, trumping of the objective by the subject. Is it simply a matter of a decision of the mother or the doctor over the objective reality of this child in dire need who could be saved and is not saved because of subjective decision. I don't know what to do with that, I don't know where to move with that," he stressed.

"In the meantime, what the Church has to do, if a bridge can't be built here--I don't think that is possible--is to raise its voice in protest on behalf of these victims," he ended.
By Dylan Caine

A month ago, our sights were first drawn in horror to the putsch on the Capitol ramparts. In what would become an unbridled humiliation for the Republic, the traitorous battle flag, forever absent from our democratic chambers, was waved alongside the paths of marauding hooligans inspired by the former president. His conspiratorial fetishism brought this nation face to face with a hellish debauchery that injured the spirit of so many Americans anew. Not only did minoritized communities suffer through watching the sight of avowed insurrectionists and white supremacists marching through the halls of our Capitol with revelry, but Jewish-Americans, in particular, were vexed at the propensity of the rioters towards issuing violently Antisemitic threats and slogans. Such actions paralleled those seen in the ghettos of the Old World, but rarely witnessed along our nations hollowed corridors.

At the beginning of the Jan. 6 demonstrations, U.S. Congresswoman Mary Miller inaugurated the day by exclaiming that Hitler was right on one thing, shortly before the raiders breached the Capitol. Among others, this crowd included a pillager wearing a Camp Auschwitz: Staff sweatshirt  mocking the nearly 1,000,000 Jews and 100,000 other persons murdered by Nazis and their collaborators in the extermination camps gas chambers during the Holocaust. From this and other utterances, it was clear that explicit exhibitions of Antisemitism would constitute an essential feature of the ill-fated day. With the 2017 Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia able to serve as precedent  during which white supremacists infamously chanted Jews will not replace us and murdered counter-protester Heather Heyer  Jews have been consistently reminded in recent years of their conditional and incomplete acceptance into the American milieu.

This, of course, is not a new observation, but rather constitutes the culmination of the past half-decade, in which the number and severity of Antisemitic incidents have consistently reached unprecedented heights. Among the worst incidents, the white supremacist murders of 11 congregants at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh and of Lori Gilbert-Kaye at the Chabad Synagogue of Poway have been firmly etched into the American Jewish consciousness. Only a few months after the latter attack, four were murdered at a Jersey City kosher market by assailants affiliated with the so-called Black Hebrew Israelites, a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated hate group. Shortly thereafter, another murder spree took place at a Hanukah party in nearby Monsey, New York, which claimed the life of 72-year old Rabbi Josef Neumann. All of this, in turn, has come in the face of years-long waves of assaults against Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn, where local attackers often appear to exact anti-Jewish violence with impunity. While one could go on, it is clear that our fractured society, which increasingly cultivates Antisemitic delusions like the Soros-caravan conspiracies and QAnon  while also turning a blind eye to hateful incitement perpetrated behind the fig leaf of progressive activism  will be one that threatens the lives of Jews and the members of other minoritized communities for some time to come.

That said, there are moments in this period of transition away from four years of resurgent racist, Antisemitic and Islamophobic politicking that should leave us with a profound sense of satisfaction, if not hope, at our nations ability to reach past those that would seek to halt the rise of this New America from taking shape. The dual election of Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff to the United States Senate as Georgias first Black and Jewish representatives, respectively, in the chamber constitutes an overwhelming triumph for the deep Southern state. Given that Georgia has long been better known as a home to the murderers of Leo Frank, the Jewish factory manager who was lynched 105 years prior, and the Ku Klux Klan acolytes of Stone Mountain, this accomplishment should be viewed as nothing short of remarkable.

All the more spectacular has been Warnock and Ossoffs warm allyship, which was placed front and center throughout their campaigns. Among its many highlights was the collaboration of Warnocks Ebenezer Baptist Church, the historic pulpit of Dr. King, and Ossoffs Atlanta synagogue. The Temple, as the latter is affectionately known, was itself bombed by the Confederate Underground in 1958 on account of its Rabbi Jacob Rothschilds vocal support for the Civil Rights movement. On the coattails of this history, Senator Warnock and Senator Ossoffs elevation to our nations highest legislative body constitutes a renewed and exciting chapter in the story of expanding American opportunity. It is one that is made possible by trailblazers willing to sacrifice tremendously in support of the fundamental dignity of their fellow woman, person and man.

Though the ushering in of the Biden Administration offers a profound sense of relief for many after four long years of escalating assaults on any community that did not strictly toe the MAGA line, it would be foolish to see our work, as Jews or members of other minoritized communities, as anything close to being done. The murder of George Floyd this summer and the countless peaceful demonstrations that followed  which rightfully demanded accountability for violent, systemic police misconduct and the public affirmation of Black lives, in policy, by our elected officials  underscores the challenges that await Americans who would like to merely wish the Trump-eras outspoken racism away. Rather, it is incumbent on all, including those of us in minoritized communities, to actively contribute to the renewal of a societal covenant that upholds the inherent worth of every individual.

It is one that is made possible by trailblazers willing to sacrifice tremendously in support of the fundamental dignity of their fellow woman, person and man. -Dylan Caine

Among factions with competing understandings of communal protection and safety, it cannot be said that a Jew, such as myself, or a member of another minoritized community, will necessarily find every organizing space equally welcoming. Yet, the retention of unjust societal institutions that continue to encroach into the lives of Black and other minoritized citizens in this country requires our full participation in the business of ameliorating systemic racisms persistent violence and daily harms in whichever manner we can. Whether one is an activist, organizer, clergy member, policymaker, academic, lawyer or concerned citizen, everyone has a role to play in transforming our society into one that affirms the unquestionable dignity of every human being. It is in this spirit that refugee and Civil Rights activist Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel left his listeners at the 1963 National Conference on Religion and Race with the choice between the poison of race and the affirmation of the divine blessing in upholding life:

Shortly before he died, Moses spoke to his people. I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day: I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life (Deuteronomy 30:19). The aim of this conference is first of all to state clearly the stark alternative. I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day: I have set before you religion and race, life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life.

Grinnellians, our choice is clear. To establish a better future tomorrow, the holy mission to bury the shackles of race must be incumbent on us all. Choose life.

Dylan Caine is a fourth-year student at Grinnell College and a member of Chalutzim.
NORTH CHARLESTON  In 1929, the Black scholar Lorenzo Dow Turner first heard the Gullah language when he taught a summer course at S.C. State College. At the time, Gullah was considered a dialect, a vulgarization of English. But Turner knew better.

He understood that Gullah had developed among isolated communities along the South Carolina and Georgia coast. In the cadence and the vocabulary of these speakers he recognized Africa.

For the next two decades, Turner committed himself to researching the origins and characteristics of this English creole. He was the first scholar to assert its legitimacy as a stand-alone language.

Yet for decades  and still today  Gullah is sometimes frowned upon.

A lot of adults still feel like English is the language of power and success, so its still discouraged, said Akua Page, co-founder of Geechee Experience. Theres still a stigma around it.

Page and her project partner Chris Cato forcefully reject that stigma. They are unapologetic advocates of Gullah culture, language, birthright and inheritance. And through the Geechee Experience initiative, they are determined to instill pride in people, young and old, with sea island roots.

They started the project in January 2019, setting up an Instagram account that today has 20,600 followers. They also have a YouTube channel and Facebook page. Together, they organize gatherings and teaching events at which they regale their listeners with histories and anecdotes that reinforce a sense of identity.

They wear jeans and hoodies. They exude enthusiasm. They appeal to young people, many of whom are trapped in poverty and saddled by low self-esteem.

They tell them that the Gullah language did not become legitimate; it has always been legitimate.

They tell them how Geechee identity is a result not only of American slavery, but of flourishing societies in Africa, where so much of Geechee knowledge comes from.

Young people coping with poverty and violence develop a protective shell, and little by little the contents inside are corrupted because of negative reinforcement, Cato and Page said. When they hear the Gullah language, when they meet cultural warriors who tell them of the kings and queens who were their progenitors, they soften a little.

They felt seen, Page said. If you let them know who they are, that they actually have greatness within them, they wont be out here being destructive. But if you tell them youre a slave, you came from slaves, thats all youre ever going to be, then why do you think youre gonna get that type of behavior?

These interactions have only strengthened the duos resolve.

Most Black people are poor, and theyre looking for another way, Cato said. We were looking for a way ... to humanize the hood, to make a chance for us to be seen in a different light.

Geechee Experience isnt only about language and identity. Politics sometimes come into play. Page and Cato dont hesitate to call out gentrification and cultural appropriation  to note how downtown Charleston has become primarily a tourist destination, how visitors rarely interact with actual Geechee people, how White-owned businesses use Gullah culture and iconography for branding and marketing purposes.

Its extremely offensive, Cato said.

Were gatekeeping, Page adds.

They grew up together. Cato was best friends with Pages older sister, whose early death brought them closer.

We always knew we was Geechee, cuz people would say that before we would even understand what those words meant, Page said. When we came to school speaking our first language, we were told, You got to turn your Geechee off. Once we were back in our community, we could truly be Geechee. But once we hit the school doors, it kind of felt like we had to put on a mask.

Some among the older generation had the Geechee beaten out of them  literally and figuratively  by their teachers and parents.

I bow to go to da stoe, a young person might announce as he prepared to exit the house.

Excuse me?? would come a mother's challenge.

Page has been teaching school for eight years, hoping to convince her superiors to embrace a curriculum that affirms Gullah culture. It hasnt been easy, but lately, perhaps because of Black Lives Matter protests and heightened awareness of racial injustice, shes able to do more, she said.

The feedback from followers has been encouraging.

They get comments such as, My grandma was Gullah but she was ashamed of it, and Im crying watching your videos because they remind me of home.

The duo solicits feedback and approval. After all, this is about community, they said.

Theyll probably establish a nonprofit. They might develop a special curriculum to distribute to schools. They will continue to hold meetings, in person and online, on aspects of Gullah-Geechee culture and experience. Theyve even created a Geechee flag, to be waved with joy and pride.

Turner surely would be pleased.

 Flash

February 10 marks the 50th anniversary of diplomatic ties between China and Nigeria. On this occasion, Zhao Yong, Charge d'affaires ad interim of the Chinese Embassy in Nigeria, spoke to ChinAfrica about the achievements in China-Nigeria relations in the past 50 years. The following is an excerpt of the interview.





ChinAfrica: What is the current status of the relationship between the two countries? How important is it as part of China-Africa cooperation?





Zhao Yong: China and Nigeria established diplomatic relations on February 10, 1971, and in 2005, the two countries issued a joint communique to upgrade their relations to a strategic partnership. During the 2018 Beijing Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, the two countries signed a memorandum of understanding on jointly promoting the construction of the Belt and Road Initiative.





Over the past 50 years, the two countries have enjoyed mutual understanding, mutual trust and mutual support. Especially, the recent years have seen rapid development of the bilateral relations under the leadership of Chinese President Xi Jinping and Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, with frequent high-level exchanges and deepening political mutual trust. The Nigerian Government firmly adheres to one-China policy, and China actively supports Nigeria's efforts to maintain national peace and stability and pursue economic and social development. The two countries have carried out mutually beneficial cooperation in trade and economic development, security and culture, among other areas, which has brought tangible benefits to the people of both countries.





Nigeria is one of China's most important strategic partners in Africa and the cooperation between the two countries is among the strongest in breadth and depth in bilateral relationships between China and African countries. In particular, the cooperation in Abuja-Kaduna Railway, Ogun Guangdong Free Trade Zone, currency swap, satellite launch and joint maritime scientific research stands out in China-Africa cooperation. China-Nigeria cooperation has become an essential part of China-Africa cooperation and South-South cooperation.





In 2019, the bilateral trade volume between the two countries reached $19.27 billion, 1,900 times that at the beginning of the establishment of diplomatic ties, representing the highest growth rate among China's top 40 global trade partners, and accounting for 9.2 percent of China's trade volume with Africa and nearly 40 percent of China's trade volume with West Africa. In the first 10 months of 2020, the bilateral trade volume between China and Nigeria grew by 0.7 percent year-on-year despite the impact of the epidemic, 14 percentage points higher than the overall trade growth between China and Africa. Nigeria has surpassed Angola as China's second-largest trading partner in Africa and surpassed South Africa as China's top export market in Africa.





For many years, Nigeria has been the largest market in Africa for China's engineering contractors. The 186.5-km-long Chinese-built Abuja-Kaduna Railway completed in 2016 is the first modern railroad in Africa built totally with Chinese technology and Chinese standards. The Lekki Deep Sea Port built by Chinese companies, which started construction in October 2019, will become the largest port in West Africa after its completion.





Nigeria is also a major destination in Africa for Chinese investment. The free trade zones in Ogun and Lekki established by the two countries have attracted large numbers of Chinese companies to invest in businesses there.





In addition, the two countries are also leading in terms of people-to-people exchange, with the number of Nigerian students studying in China over 6,800 in 2019, ranking first in Africa.





China and Nigeria, as the two most populous developing countries in the world and in Africa, respectively, have expanded their relations far beyond the bilateral realm. Both countries are committed to upholding respect for sovereignty rather than interference in other countries' internal affairs, multilateralism rather than unilateralism, free trade rather than protectionism, and fairness and justice rather than hegemony.





Nigeria was the first leg of Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi's visit to Africa at the beginning of this year. In what ways will Wang's visit further promote the development of relations between the two countries?





Just after the New Year, Wang started his official visit to five African countries, including Nigeria. The tradition of Chinese foreign ministers' visiting Africa at the beginning of each year has continued for 30 years, reflecting the great importance China attaches to Africa, the unbreakable friendship between China and its African brothers, and China's firm support for the development of African countries.





February 10 marks the 50th anniversary of diplomatic ties between the two countries, making the year an important point of time for renewing the relationship. Wang's visit to Nigeria as the first stop of his first foreign visit in 2021 highlighted the significance of China-Nigeria ties and importance China attaches to Nigeria.





During the visit, Wang met with Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari and held talks with Nigerian Foreign Minister Geoffrey Onyeama. Broad consensus was reached on reinforcing anti-pandemic cooperation, aligning national development plans, promoting cooperation under the Belt and Road framework, accelerating Nigeria's industrialization, as well as diversifying areas of economic cooperation to include digital and green economy.





Consensus was also reached on closer cooperation on military and security to improve Nigeria's ability to maintain national security. The two countries will also strengthen coordination on global and regional affairs to protect the common interest of developing countries.





In particular, the two foreign ministers signed a memorandum of understanding on the establishment of an intergovernmental committee between the two countries. This is to provide a mechanism to mobilize resources and coordinate efforts of relevant parties, which is helpful for the healthy, stable and rapid development of cooperation between the two countries.





What challenges has the COVID-19 pandemic brought to the cooperation between the two countries? What joint efforts have the two countries taken to fight the pandemic?





Nigeria reported its first imported case of infection on February 27, 2020. As the epidemic spread, the Nigerian Government took measures such as lockdown of cities, suspension of flights and ban on the movement of people, and has well contained the first wave of the epidemic. This, however, has led to restricted movement of personnel and goods and affected the progress of China-Nigeria cooperation projects.





Since the outbreak of the pandemic, China and Nigeria have been supporting each other with solidarity. The Nigerian Government and people offered sincere support to China during the most difficult time in China's fight against the epidemic. Nigeria was one of the first countries to express its condolences. In a statement on February 2 last year, Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari hailed China's exemplary efforts in containing the spread of the disease and China's close communication and collaboration with the international community.





After the outbreak of the disease in Nigeria, China shipped anti-epidemic emergency supplies in time. Video meetings on anti-pandemic technical exchanges held by China were attended by Nigeria's ministers. Solidarity in fighting the pandemic was reiterated at the Extraordinary China-Africa Summit on Solidarity Against COVID-19 held in June last year, attended by Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, and during Wang's visit to Nigeria early this year.





At present, China is boosting cooperation between hospitals of the two countries on combating the pandemic, and working to achieve the accessibility and affordability of vaccines in Nigeria and other African countries, in a bid to help the people of Africa, including Nigeria, overcome the pandemic as soon as possible.





What will be the focus of cooperation between the two countries in 2021?





China and Nigeria work in tandem in a wide range of areas. For 2021, the focus will be on implementing the agreements reached during Wang's visit to Nigeria. First, the two countries will further strengthen cooperation in the fight against the pandemic until it is completely over. Second, the two countries will deepen cooperation in building the Belt and Road together, accelerating the construction of key projects, and helping Nigeria speed up production resumption. Third, the two countries will expand military and security cooperation to improve Nigeria's ability to maintain national security. Lastly, the two countries will further collaborate in international and regional affairs and work together to safeguard the common interests of developing countries.





What are your expectations to the meeting of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) to be held this year?





FOCAC has been an important platform for collective dialogue and an effective mechanism for practical cooperation between China and Africa, and it is also a good example of South-South cooperation. This year marks the conclusion of the implementation of the outcomes of the forum's Beijing summit in 2018. We expect that China and Africa can strengthen cooperation in health, agriculture, infrastructure, digital economy, clean energy and 5G in this year. I believe that with the joint efforts of China and Africa, the next FOCAC meeting will go smoothly in Senegal and promote high-quality post-pandemic China-Africa cooperation, bringing more benefits to the people.
Akshay Kumar is currently busy shooting for his next film Bachchan Pandey in Jaisalmer. The film also stars Kriti Sanon, Jacqueline Fernandez, Arshad Warsi, Pankaj Tripathi and Prateik Babbar. The cast and crew of the films have been waiting for the lockdown to ease and started the shoot in January.

After almost a month of the shoot, the production has decided to stay in Jaisalmer and create a set that shows the backdrop of Uttar Pradesh instead of actually going to the state. The backdrop is essential to the film because it follows the life of a gangster in UP, played by Kumar who wants to become an actor. The director, Farhad Samji decided to use the picturesque scenery of Jaisalmer to add more colour to the film.
Washington, Feb 9 (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 10th Feb, 2021 ) :A gunman opened fire inside a US health clinic on Tuesday, leaving at least five people wounded before a bomb exploded at the facility, reports said.

Police were called to the Allina Health Clinic in Buffalo, Minnesota, just before 11:00 am (1700 GMT), Buffalo Police Chief Pat Budke told tv station KSTP.

The device went off in the clinic around half an hour later, the Star Tribune newspaper said, citing emergency dispatch audio.

The explosion forced medical workers to flee the clinic's parking lot and set up from further away, the paper said.

At least five people were critically injured, including a woman airlifted to hospital with three gunshot wounds, the paper said. The male shooter was taken into custody.

A representative for the clinic confirmed there was an active shooter at the medical center around 11:30 am but did not provide further details, according to CBS affiliate WCCO.

Local media citing police said there was no further threat to the public in Buffalo, a city of around 16,000 people 40 miles (64 kilometers) northwest of Minneapolis.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms said in a tweet agents were headed to the scene.

Its really important for young women to see that you dont have to look like Einstein to be in science and be successful. You can bring your whole beautiful, feminine self to STEM and be successful, Hart said. At every point during my career and education, when I wanted to go a different way, I had a strong Black woman who was like get your behind back in STEM. And that is exactly what Im trying to be for the next generation of young ladies. Thats why I applied to be an IF/THEN ambassador.

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Minutes after his speech heralded a stronger, more pivotal role for India in the post-Covid world order, Prime Minister Narendra Modi tore into the Opposition in his reply to the motion of thanks on the President's address in the Lok Sabha on Wednesday as he alleged that their continuous disruptions in the Parliament over the farm laws was a 'well-thought-out strategy'.

"Those who are disrupting the House are doing so as per a well-planned strategy. They are unable to digest that people are seeing through the truth. Through their games, the trust of the people can never be won," he said.

Those who are disrupting the House are doing so as per a well-planned strategy. They are unable to digest that people are seeing through the truth. Through their games, the trust of the people can never be won: PM @narendramodi #PMInLokSabha  PMO India (@PMOIndia) February 10, 2021

He said that the central government and the Parliament have great respect for the farmers who are voicing their views on the three farm bills and that is why top most ministers have been talking to them. Replying in Lok Sabha to the discussion on the motion of thanks to the President's address to the joint sitting of Parliament, Modi again allayed apprehensions on the farm laws, saying neither any agriculture 'mandi' (market) has shut down after the three laws were enacted nor has the MSP stopped, rather the MSP has only increased which no one can deny.

"This House, our government and we all respect farmers who are voicing their views on the farm bills. This is the reason why topmost ministers of the government are constantly talking to them. There is great respect for farmers. "After the laws relating to agriculture were passed by Parliament, no 'mandi' has shut. Likewise, MSP has remained. Procurement on MSP has remained. These facts can't be ignored," he said.

This House, our Government and we all respect the farmers who are voicing their views on the farm bills. This is the reason why topmost Ministers of the Government are constantly talking to them. There is great respect for the farmers: PM @narendramodi #PMInLokSabha  PMO India (@PMOIndia) February 10, 2021

The Congress walked out of Lok Sabha as PM Modi explained the government's stand on the three farm laws. TMC MPs walked out later as well. Modi said the Congress has taken different stands in Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha. "A divided and confused party like this can do no good to the country," he added.

Modi said India has managed the COVID-19 pandemic successfully despite adverse predictions and the country has now become a ray of hope for the world. He said the world post-COVID-19 is turning out to be very different and in such times remaining isolated from the global trends will be counter-productive.

"That is why India is working towards building an 'Aatmanirbhar Bharat' (self-reliant India), which seeks to further global good. "Predictions were made India cannot survive as a nation, but people of our country proved them wrong and we are now a ray of hope for the world," he said.

Complimenting health care and frontline workers for their relentless work during the pandemic, the prime minister said the way India has managed the coronavirus crisis is a turning point and the world has seen its success. The address of the President has showcased India's 'Sankalp Shakti' and his words have boosted the spirit of confidence among the people of India, infused new confidence and inspired every heart "During the discussion on the President's speech, a large number of women MPs took part. This is a great sign. I want to congratulate the women MPs who enriched the House proceedings with their thoughts," he said.


An ancestral rites table at the home of the family of the first son of Joseon Era scholar Toegye Yi Hwang / Courtesy of Korean Studies Institute



By Kwon Mee-yoo



The charyesang (ancestral rites table) is an important part of Lunar New Year in Korea. One might immediately associate it with all sorts of delicacies laid out on the table, typically seen these days. However, research suggests that the food on the Joseon era charyesang was much simpler, yet with the same respect for ancestors.



According to the "Jujagarye" (The Family Rituals of Zhu Xi), a manual of rituals in daily life, Seollal, or Lunar New Year, is a day for giving New Year's greetings to one's ancestors with light foods. Compiled by Chinese Neo-Confucian philosopher Zhu Xi, the Jujagarye formed the guidelines for rituals during the Joseon Kingdom from 1392 to 1910.



"In the Jujagarye, you should serve a glass of liquor, a cup of tea and a dish of fruit, and you offer your ancestors a drink once, without reciting a ritual prayer, for the memorial service on Lunar New Year," Kim Mi-young, a researcher at the Korean Studies Institute, said.











An example of a contemporary ancestral rites table for Lunar New Year at a typical household in North Gyeongsang Province / Courtesy of the Korean Studies Institute
The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000  far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students  with professional legal representation  filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents  her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer  read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.  2021 The New York Times Company

Restaurants in Philadelphia can bring more diners indoors this weekend if they install enhanced ventilation systems, officials said Tuesday, and the city plans to open three new mass vaccination clinics the week of Feb. 22.

Restaurant operators can expand indoor occupancy to 50% of their capacity starting Friday if they can document that their ventilation, whether through an HVAC system or window fans, sufficiently circulates the air at least 15 times per hour, Health Commissioner Thomas Farley said.

Farley said the new standard, aimed at helping the hard-hit industry bring back customers, should be considered Version 1.0 and may evolve over time.

We are breaking new ground, he said. But we do think this is a way to try to have restaurants get back on their feet economically while keeping customers safe.

Many restaurant owners estimate that an indoor occupancy of at least 50% is what they need to break even amid the coronavirus pandemic. But the new ventilation requirements mean spending more money, and some restaurateurs pushed back against the guidelines.

In a letter to the city, four restaurant operators who had been advising officials complained that their weekly meetings were too brief and controlled to allow us meaningful input and said the plan unveiled Tuesday is inequitable, unscientific, unclear, and unenforceable.

The committee members  Jon Myerow, Avram Hornik, Qamara Edwards, and J Bazzel  along with the Pennsylvania Restaurant and Lodging Association, have suggested the city should follow the state guidelines, which allow restaurants to operate at 50% capacity if they self-certify they are following safety measures.

Patchwork of rules

Still, some of the citys restaurateurs intend to boost their HVAC systems.

Barry Gutin, who owns Cuba Libre, hadnt been sure they would need additional ventilation in the Old City restaurant. But after Tuesdays announcement, he scheduled an installation for an air purifier system. He and his business partner, Larry Cohen, spent $20,000 on equipment, including the air purifier. Theyd already spent six figures to offer outdoor dining.

Its been a patchwork of rules and regulations that change at a moments notice, he said.

 READ MORE: Looking to support Phillys Black-owned restaurants during Black History Month? Here are some of my favorites. | Craig LaBan

The citys new requirements say at least 20% of the air circulating must be outdoor air, the system must have high-grade filters, and it must turn over the air every 4 minutes or more frequently on average.

Restaurants can get approved to increase their capacity by submitting a form showing that their ventilation system was tested and verified by a professional to meet the standards.

The city wont independently verify the claims on the form, but will measure the ventilation in routine or complaint-triggered restaurant inspections.

Restaurants that dont enhance their systems can continue offering indoor dining at 25% capacity. Indoor catering and social gatherings remain banned.

Mass clinic sites planned

The city also plans to begin operating the three mass vaccination clinics on Feb. 22, the same day Philadelphias public school teachers are scheduled to begin getting their shots. The sites will be in or near Harrowgate, University City, and Sharswood, Farley said. They will eventually be among six city clinics operating on a rotating schedule.

 READ MORE: Philly teachers dont report to school buildings for a second day; teacher vaccinations expected to start Feb. 22

The new sites, which will not be open every day, will be at the Community Academy of Philadelphia, the University of the Sciences, and the Martin Luther King Jr. Older Adult Center. The city is already operating a clinic at the Convention Center, where people who received their first doses from Philly Fighting COVID  the vaccine distribution group the city cut ties with  are getting their second doses.

Establishing clinics in neighborhoods is one part of the citys efforts to address racial inequities in the distribution of the vaccine. Farley said the city has not selected the locations for the others it plans to open.

City staff have been meeting with local advocacy groups to bring more Latino residents to vaccine sites, Farley said. The city does not share vaccine recipients data with the federal government, so undocumented immigrants can get inoculated without worrying about their data going to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Farley said.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey all reported modest increases in the number of vaccine doses received this week. Philadelphia is getting more than 25,000 doses, Farley said, about 5,000 more than usual. Plus, Rite Aid pharmacies are receiving more than 4,000 doses directly.

But remember, he said, we have 1.2 million adults in the city of Philadelphia, so it will certainly be many months before everybody has an opportunity to get vaccinated.

Philadelphia launched a new website, phila.gov/businessvaccine, where employers of essential workers can preregister to be notified when vaccine is available for their employees.

Pennsylvania officials said the state received 12,200 more doses this week than last, but they could not say whether three of the four most populated counties the state Department of Health serves  Allegheny, Montgomery, and Delaware  would receive more doses than the 1,000 apiece they got last week.

Department of Health senior adviser Lindsey Mauldin also could not say when Pennsylvanians in the next eligibility group, which includes many frontline essential workers, will be allowed to get shots.

Still, the Health Department is aiming to open vaccinations to the general public by the summer, Mauldin said, despite flawed state-provided registration software and a vaccine supply so limited it has stalled some counties efforts.

Coronavirus cases and hospitalizations in Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and New Jersey all continue to show signs of the spread plateauing or slowing.

The metrics we are seeing continue to point in the right direction, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy said this week. The numbers of new cases, both in terms of raw numbers and the rate of transmission, while still high, are far off the peaks we saw just several weeks ago.

New Jersey has administered more than one million vaccines.

We are seeing increases in our supplies over the next three weeks, the governor said, and that is a big step in the right direction.

Staff writers Erin McCarthy and Allison Steele contributed to this article.
Illegal immigrants who have entered the United States had one goal: to be successful and put food on their tables. However, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said some illegal immigrants commit mistakes and get detained for even a less serious offense, resulting in their deportation. That would change under the Biden administration, according to White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki.

Read also: Top 10 Richest U.S. Immigrants as of 2020

New ICE Guidelines on Illegal Immigrants

In a report by The Post Millennial, Psaki shared in a press conference about the new ICE guidelines that will no longer focus on deporting illegal immigrants imprisoned to simple assaults, DUIs, solicitation, and drug-based crimes.

Psaki noted that the priority for the enforcement of immigration laws would be on those posing a national security threat, or a public safety threat, and on recent arrivals.

"We're talking about the prioritization of who is going to be deported from the country," she said.

Texas Tribune reported about the issuance of the new ICE guidelines to agents this week. While the ICE's plans are not yet final, interim instructions sent to senior officials point to a significant shift as agents will no longer seek to deport illegal immigrants for crimes such as assaults and DUIs.

Instead, they would focus on national security threats, recent border crossers, and those who complete jail terms due to grave felony convictions.

According to USA.gov, those who come to the United States without travel documents or forged documents may be deported quickly without having an immigration court hearing under an order of expedited removal. It also adds that criminal aliens who committed nonviolent crimes may be subject to rapid REPAT or Removal of Eligible Parolees Accepted for Transfer.

However, not all officials from the ICE is in favor of the guideline adjustment. Frustrated ICE officials said the proposed changes would take away the agents' discretion and severely limit their ability to arrest and deport criminals.

Texas Tribune shared an anonymous statement from an official saying that the course of action is extreme to the point that they have gone from enforcing their immigration laws, and now they are told to enforce nothing.

Texas Tribune noted that President Joe Biden earlier expressed remorse in the exceptionally high number of deportations during the Obama regime and pledged to reform the ICE but not eliminate it.

Officials Chafing at the New ICE Rules

When the new guideline's focus has somehow narrowed, questions of public safety emerged. However, Psaki said that nobody is stating that DUI's or assault is acceptable behavior. She noted that those arrested for such activities should still be tried and sentenced appropriately by law enforcement.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) earlier ordered a 100-day pause on deportations, which a federal judge soon halted. It resulted in the DHS setting temporary enforcement priorities while the agency underwent a review.

Meanwhile, Psaki noted that the Biden administration aims to put forward a bill that will redesign and modernize immigration, which, according to her, is long overdue.

"That (bill) addresses not only a path to citizenship but puts in place smart security measures and addresses the root causes of these issues in the countries of Central America," Psaki said.

She added that among the DHS' top priorities now is to be on the lookout for individuals who "pose the greatest national security threat." But critics said the new ICE guidelines pushed by the Biden administration would still allow thousands of illegal immigrants with criminal histories to remain in the country and possibly commit offenses again.

Related article: 6 Ways To Adjust To American Culture For Immigrants

It looks like we won't have to wait long to hear from some baffled Four Seasons Total Landscaping employees about that fateful day in November.

"Four Seasons Total Documentary" is coming.

CONVENIENCE STORE WARS: Buc-ee's might not be as beloved as we all thought

On Nov. 7, former President Donald Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani hosted a press conference at Pennsylvania small business Four Seasons Total Landscaping, not the Four Seasons Hotel Philadelphia. Between a sex shop and a crematorium, Giuliani hosted a bizarre press conference where he repeated Trump's baseless claims of election fraud in front of a garage door.

Salon's Ashlie D. Stevens reports that a team of filmmakers announced the inevitable coming existence of the Four Seasons Total Landscaping documentary on Monday.

According to the press release, "Four Seasons Total Documentary" (yes, that is the real title) is an apolitical "firsthand account of the rollercoaster journey that one well-meaning small business in Philadelphia went through when they agreed to host a political press conference in the midst of the most hard-fought American election in recent history."

The documentary doesn't have a distributor yet, but I'm holding out for Netflix to round out a collection of documentaries covering strange public blunders ("Fyre," "Tiger King").

THE BIG (COMMERCIAL) GAME: Ranking the best and worst Super Bowl commercials

Emmy-nominated director Christopher Stoudt and producers Glen Zipper and Sean Stuart made the upcoming documentary and are hoping it adds a little levity to a very weird and awful year.

Its an honor and privilege to be able to help tell a story that the world has been waiting months to hear," Stoudt said in a statement. "After such a hard year, everyone needed a moment to laugh. Little did we know it would come from a press conference that took place across the street from a crematorium (down the road from a sex shop). This film is a chance to wipe the slate clean, not just for Four Seasons Total Landscaping, but for the entire country.

This isn't even from Four Seasons Total Landscaping's second brush with fame. It made an appearance in a Super Bowl ad for freelance marketplace Fiverr.

I'm only wondering now when it will be added to the National Register of Historic Places.
Just one day after a coalition of prominent civil rights groups made headlines with a letter urging the Biden administration to drop efforts to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the United States on espionage charges, the Biden administration has announced its intention to continue those efforts.

Justice Department spokesman Marc Raimondi on Tuesday said the U.S. government will continue to challenge a British judges ruling last month that Assange should not be extradited to the United States because of the risk he would commit suicide, Reuters reports.

We continue to seek his extradition, Raimondi said.

Assanges arrest and subsequent charges under the Espionage Act in 2019 for what amount to standard journalistic practices which exposed US war crimes marked both a dramatic escalation in the US empires war on critical national security journalism and a sharp divergence from the Obama administrations decision not to pursue such charges in this case. Biden is not just upholding Trumps assault on press freedoms (far and away the single most egregious attack on journalism in the 45th presidents entire four years in office), he is rejecting the Obama administrations decision not to charge Assange due to concerns that it would erode the First Amendment.

As The Washington Post reported during Barack Obamas second term in 2013:

The Justice Department has all but concluded it will not bring charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for publishing classified documents because government lawyers said they could not do so without also prosecuting U.S. news organizations and journalists, according to U.S. officials.  The problem the department has always had in investigating Julian Assange is there is no way to prosecute him for publishing information without the same theory being applied to journalists, said former Justice Department spokesman Matthew Miller. And if you are not going to prosecute journalists for publishing classified information, which the department is not, then there is no way to prosecute Assange.

Nothing about this has changed. The Trump administration did not have access to any evidence that the Obama administration did not also have in 2013, it just chose to squint at the law from a different angle and legally interpret Assanges journalistic activities as a violation of the Espionage Act. There is nothing whatsoever preventing other journalists around the world from facing the same fate under similarly dubious legal interpretations. The US Department of Justice is not going to be using other peoples personal definitions of what constitutes legitimate journalistic activity going forward, its going to be using its own.

Bidens divergence from the Obama administrations less authoritarian position on the matter should not come as much of a surprise, since he took an absurdly hard line against WikiLeaks after the first publications of the earth-shattering Manning leaks in 2010.

I would argue it is closer to being a hi-tech terrorist than the Pentagon papers, Biden said of Assange at the time. But, look, this guy has done things that have damaged and put in jeopardy the lives and occupations of people in other parts of the world.

It should also come as no surprise because, all things considered, this administration has not been much different from the previous one in terms of actual policy. The policy of regime change interventionism in Venezuela is the same. The policy of hawkishness toward China is the same. The policy of starvation sanctions against Iran is effectively the same. In a recent CNN interview Secretary of State Tony Blinken could not speak highly enough of Trumps more incendiary foreign policy decisions like moving the US embassy to Jerusalem and recognizing the illegally occupied Golan Heights as Israeli territory.

There are far, far more similarities between the Trump administration and the Biden administration than there are differences. As is consistently the case with US presidents, the narratives are different, the campaign platforms are different, the political parties are different, but the actual policies and behaviors remain more or less the same.

None of this means we should stop fighting tooth and claw for Assanges freedom: the fight is far from over. There is still time for the Biden administration to opt against appealing the UK court decision not to extradite, thereby leaving the entire embarrassing extradition attempt on Trumps lap.

The US may submit its Assange appeal filing by Friday to meet its deadline, but one would expect a serious policy decision to be made by the new Attorney General who, once confirmed, can review the incredibly weak case against Assange in full before making a determination, a statement by the Courage Foundation reads. Reports are circulating that an interim spokesperson says the Biden admin will continue the Assange case. The incoming DOJ, whose Attorney General is yet to be confirmed, can drop the charges against Assange at any time, including after this Fridays appeal deadline.

So we keep pushing. We cannot allow a corrupt and murderous globe-spanning empire to effectively outlaw inconvenient journalism around the world in the way it would by setting the legal precedent it is trying to set with the Assange case. If journalists everywhere know they can be extradited and imprisoned for publishing inconvenient facts about the US-centralized empire, they will largely refrain from doing so. And that is the whole idea.

Through WikiLeaks Julian Assange has revealed a lot of damning information about the most powerful entities on our planet, but by far the most damning revelation he provided was not a WikiLeaks release at all: it was the revelation that free democracies like the US and the UK will openly imprison and torture a journalist for telling the truth. This has been seen, and it cannot be unseen. We owe him a great debt for bringing such facts into the light. The least we can do is try to get him out of there now.

______________________________

Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my new book Poems For Rebels (you can also download a PDF for five bucks) or my old book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what Im trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else Ive written) in any way they like free of charge.

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Unburned lower floors with untouched cladding in place are seen with the burnt out upper floors of the Grenfell Tower block in North Kensington, west London, on June 18, 2017. (Tolga Akmen/AFP/Getty Images)

UK Government Pledges 3.5 Billion For Unsafe Cladding Removal

The UK government unveiled a new 3.5 billion fund in the House of Commons on Wednesday to help leaseholders strip potentially dangerous cladding from their buildings.

The plans announced by Secretary of State for Housing, Robert Jenrick, will see a mixture of grants and loans issued to those affected in a bid to remove cladding from buildings around the UK that has been identified as being a fire risk in the wake of the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017.

The plans will see the government offer grants to leaseholders of buildings above six storeys or 18 meters in height. They will also offer low-cost loans to leaseholders and landlords of buildings between four and six storeys, as they have been identified as being at a significantly lower risk. Jenrick announced the new low-cost loans should cost leaseholders no more than 50 per month.

Speaking in the Commons, Jenrick stated that the government was committed to bringing about the biggest change in building safety for a generation.

We took action to address the fire safety risks identified following the Grenfell Tower tragedy, and in the autumn we committed to adopting the recommendations of the Grenfell Tower inquiry Phase One report in full, he said.

Britains Housing, Communities, and Local Government Secretary Robert Jenrick arrives at 10 Downing Street in central London, on March 17, 2020. (Tolga Akmen/AFP via Getty Images)

The new measures are in addition to the 1.6 billion safety fund that can currently be applied for by leaseholders within England.

The announcement, however, came under fire from Shadow Secretary of State for Housing John Healy, who bemoaned the length of time it has taken for the government to propose its measures.

I never thought I would be standing here two and a half years later facing a Secretary of State, the third Secretary of State who still cannot say that all the necessary action has been taken and that a fire like Grenfell cannot happen again in Britain, Healy said.

The cladding that carries the most risk is called ACM cladding or aluminium composite cladding. According to the government, 462 buildings have been identified in England as being at risk with a further 1,700 buildings with non-ACM cladding being classified as at risk. However, a report by the Association of Managing Agents suggests that 274,000 flats have dangerous cladding affecting more than 650,000 people.

The Grenfell Tower fire happened on June 14, 2017, killing 72 people and injuring more than 70 others. It was the UKs worst residential fire since the World War II, and the rapid spread of the fire, which saw it engulf the 24-storey building, was largely blamed on cladding used on the exterior of the building.
Washington, Feb 10 : In his first official domestic trip since taking office last month, US President Joe Biden is slated to travel to the state of Wisconsin on February 16, the media reported.

Although the administration has offered no other details of Biden's trip, CNN said that the President will attend a town hall organised by the news network in Milwaukee on February 16.

According to a CNN spokesperson, the town hall will air live from the Pabst Theater and moderated by anchor Anderson Cooper.

This will be Biden's first trip to the 'Badger State' since October 2020 when he has addressed a campaign event in Milwaukee.

In the presidential election held on November 3, 2020, Biden won in Wisconson by garnering 49.45 per cent of the votes, while his predecessor Donald Trump received 48.82 per cent of the ballots.

Since assuming presidency on January 20, Biden has been spending most of his time at the White House in the wake of the raging Covid-19 pandemic in the country, according to a report by The Hill news website.

From the White House, the President has been "delivering speeches on his Covid-19 relief plan and other policy priorities, signed executive actions and held meetings", The Hill report added.

Last week, he embarked on his first trip aboard the Air Force One to his home state Delaware.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Finding new ways to lure tech companies has become an inherent part of state government nowadays.

But one governor is taking it even further than just offering a fat tax break. Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak is touting a proposal that would allow tech companies to create their own local governments, the Las Vegas Review-Journal's Colton Lochhead first reported.

COME BACK TO TEXAS: Is New York City suddenly hurting for the 'young and ambitious' now?

All you need is enough money, a huge chunk of undeveloped land and an "innovative technology" and Nevada will let a Tesla or Facebook of the world establish its own ruling system within an "Innovation Zone."

According to the draft of the proposal obtained by the Review-Journal, company-formed governments would be able to impose taxes, form school districts and justice courts, and provide government services.

Texas is currently seeing a tech boom as companies and their founders move here to take advantage of income tax laws and loose corporate regulations. But could the state stretch far enough to offer jurisdiction to a Governor Elon Musk?

For some context, here are some incentives Texas has offered tech giants, as reported by the Austin American-Statesman's Lori Hawkins:

Samsung's Austin location received an estimated $200 million in tax breaks over a 17-year period. Those tax breaks end in 2023.

Tesla's factory location in Austin, which was announced in July, will receive tax breaks potentially worth up to $60 million.

Apple in Central Texas is getting 65 percent of the company's property taxes reimbursed by the county for 15 years, as long as the company spends at least $400 million purchasing and developing land and creates 4,000 full-time equivalent jobs in the area.

Some of these incentive packages are pretty small compared to what other states have proposed. When Amazon made its very public search for HQ2 known, ultimate "winners" Arlington, Virginia and New York City offered $573 million in tax breaks with $23 million in cash and $1.5 billion in tax breaks with cash grants of $325 million, respectively. (Amazon eventually withdrew from New York after local pushback.)

Tesla also already has a Gigafactory in Nevada, striking a deal with the state that could allow the company to take in nearly $1.3 billion in tax benefits.

WINTER IS COMING (MAYBE): Your iPhone says it's going to snow, but how accurate is it?

Now, there's nothing wrong with wanting higher-paying jobs in your state. But ceding government control to a company seems like a bad idea that could quickly lead to a "Josie and the Pussycats"-like corporate dystopia with government-sponsored brainwashing of America's youth through constant advertisements, not unlike in the underappreciated 2001 musical satire.

And Google has built some swanky campuses in Seattle, so living might not be all bad. But could a local government headed by Amazon lead to a Jeff Bezos-appointed judge to fine me $500 in Amazon gift cards all because I ordered that new novel on Bookshop after the Amazon-created school system failed to fully impart on me the inherent priceless value of Prime 2-Day Delivery?

I kid. But seems like a slippery slope.

In comparison, Texas seems to have enough footing (no income tax!) to draw in some of tech's heavy hitters already, so I expect we won't have to add an honorific in front of Elon Musk's name anytime soon. I look forward to visiting the sovereign state of the Apple Innovation Zone, Nevada if the state passes Sisolak's proposal.


Russian Human Rights Commissioner calls MPs to get on work on domestic violence bill

 RAPSI, Vladimir Burnov

15:05 10/02/2021

MOSCOW, February 10 (RAPSI)  Russias Federal Ombudsman Tatiana Moskalkova on Wednesday called the State Duma lawmakers to continue their work on the domestic violence bill.

The Moscow domestic violence victim emergency center is almost fully-populated, she said at the meeting of the State Duma Committee for Issues Concerning Families, Women and Children.

Moskalkova believes it is necessary to understand the configuration and future of the draft law in question.
[February 10, 2021] Brookfield Infrastructure Announces Intention to Acquire Inter Pipeline Ltd. for C$16.50 per Share in a Transaction Valued at C$13.5 Billion

Highly certain and credible offer delivering immediate 23% premium to Inter Pipeline shareholders





Brookfield Infrastructure willing to consider increasing its offer if granted access to due diligence





Brookfield Infrastructure reports an aggregate economic interest in 19.6% of the issued and outstanding shares of IPL, making Brookfield Infrastructure IPLs single largest investor BROOKFIELD, NEWS, Feb. 10, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Brookfield Infrastructure Partners L.P. (NYSE: BIP; TSX: BIP.UN), together with its institutional partners (collectively, Brookfield Infrastructure), announces today its intention to pursue a privatization transaction in respect of Inter Pipeline Ltd. (IPL or the Company), pursuant to which it will offer to acquire all of the outstanding common shares of the Company (IPL Shares) not already owned by Brookfield Infrastructure, at a price per IPL Share of C$16.50 (the Offer). Under the terms of the Offer and subject to proration, each IPL shareholder will have the ability to elect to receive, per IPL share, C$16.50 in cash or 0.206 of a Brookfield Infrastructure Corporation (NYSE: BIPC; TSX: BIPC) class A exchangeable share (BIPC Share). The share exchange ratio has been calculated based on the closing price of the BIPC Shares on February 10, 2021, the last trading day prior to this announcement. The Offer is fully financed, with a maximum cash consideration of approximately C$4.9 billion (representing 76.2% of the Offers total consideration) and a maximum aggregate number of BIPC shares issued of approximately 19 million (representing 23.8% of the Offers total consideration). Financial and Strategic Benefits of the Transaction Brookfield Infrastructure firmly believes that its Offer is in the best interests of all IPL shareholders and that shareholders should have the opportunity to determine what is best for their investment. Brookfield Infrastructure has a long and successful track record of acquiring large-scale infrastructure companies and believes its Offer is compelling for all IPL shareholders and stakeholders alike for the following key reasons: Significant Premium to both IPLs Recent Trading Levels and the Companys Analyst Consensus Estimates 23% premium to the closing prices of C$13.40 per IPL Share and C$79.97 per BIPC Share on February 10, 2021, the last trading day prior to announcement of this Offer

28% premium to the 30-day volume-weighted average share prices of C$13.07 per IPL Share and C$84.87 per BIPC Share for the period ended February 10, 2021

10% premium to research analyst forward-looking share price targets, which average C$14.98 per share, as well as a significant premium to the trading levels of IPLs relevant Canadian midstream comparable companies

Immediate Catalyst to Surface Value in a Security that has Significantly Underperformed in the Public Equity Markets Despite a strong recovery in global equity markets and a return of commodity prices to pre-COVID levels, IPLs share performance and credit profile continues to be strained

IPL has delivered the lowest 1-year and 5-year total shareholder returns among its Canadian energy infrastructure peers Compelling Valuation and an Opportunity for Immediate Liquidity Compelling valuation, despite the uncertainty of the timely completion and commercialization of the Heartland Petrochemical Complex (Heartland) anticipated by the Company within the next two years

IPL shareholders will have the option to elect to receive all of their consideration in cash, subject to an aggregate limit of approximately C$4.9 billion, representing 76.2% of the Offers total consideration Opportunity to Participate in Brookfields Diverse Infrastructure Platform IPL shareholders have an opportunity to receive an equity interest in a large-scale, global infrastructure company with a long-term track record of delivering compelling returns to shareholders

Brookfield Infrastructure Partners has delivered ~10% annual distribution growth and an 18% annualized total return since inception Brookfield Infrastructure is Uniquely Positioned to Support IPL Through the Environmental Social & Governance (ESG) Focused Transition Brookfield Infrastructure is one of the largest owners and operators of critical and diverse global infrastructure networks which facilitate the movement and storage of energy, water, freight, passengers and data

Brookfield is a responsible Canadian-headquartered company, and IPL will remain a standalone company based in Calgary

Brookfield Infrastructure recognizes that ESG sentiment among public investors is evolving at an unprecedented pace and we are confident that, as part of a larger, more diversified organization, IPL will benefit from Brookfields proven capabilities and stewardship around ESG transition investing

Offer Background Brookfield Infrastructure is currently the largest investor in IPL with an aggregate economic interest in 84,341,555 IPL Shares, representing approximately 19.65% of the issued and outstanding Shares of IPL on an undiluted basis. Brookfield Infrastructure began to accumulate a position in the Company for investment purposes beginning in March 2020. This position is comprised of beneficial ownership and control of an aggregate of 41,848,857 IPL Shares, representing approximately 9.75% of the issued and outstanding IPL Shares on an undiluted basis, and in addition, a cash-settled total return swap (the Total Return Swap) that provides Brookfield Infrastructure with economic exposure to an aggregate of 42,492,698 IPL Shares. The Total Return Swap affords economic exposure comparable to beneficial ownership but does not give Brookfield Infrastructure any right to vote, or direct or influence the voting, acquisition, or disposition of any IPL Shares. In September 2020, Brookfield Infrastructure first approached the Company to discuss a collaborative strategic transaction, ultimately leading to the submission of specific indicative privatization proposals to the Companys Board of Directors in November and December of 2020 based exclusively on publicly available information. The offer prices represented significant premiums in the range of 40% to 50% of IPLs trading prices at various times during our discussions with the Company and were predicated on Brookfield Infrastructures ability to conduct confirmatory due diligence to validate the assumptions underlying its proposed price, in particular regarding Heartland. Each indicative proposal submitted to the Company by Brookfield Infrastructure also contained a "go shop" clause to afford the Company an opportunity to proactively canvass the market for a third party offer at a superior price following definitive agreement. While subsequent correspondence between Brookfield Infrastructure and the Company was positive in spirit, ultimately the Company declined to engage constructively on a privatization transaction citing a view of intrinsic value far in excess of our assessment, largely driven by a more optimistic outlook of future growth and a recovery of commodity prices in excess of current market expectation. Brookfield Infrasructure believes the Companys view fails to recognize the capital market realities facing energy-based infrastructure companies now and in the future.



Consequently, as the largest investor in the Company, Brookfield Infrastructure firmly believes it is in the best interest of all shareholders to be made aware of its efforts in this regard and be given the opportunity to opine directly on the Offer and for the Company to establish a process to facilitate its privatization. Brookfield Infrastructure remains open to engaging directly with the Company on fair and balanced terms. Brookfield Infrastructure has made prior proposals to the Company in good faith, with an objective of receiving access to confirmatory due diligence to support a valuation for the Company above the Offer, indicatively in the range of C$17.00 to C$18.25 per IPL share. Brookfield Infrastructure has made this Offer based exclusively on publicly available information. Any ability for Brookfield Infrastructure to increase the Offer would be predicated on (i) being granted the ability to perform customary confirmatory due diligence, including but not limited to an ability to substantiate credible growth potential and the Companys publicly outlined timeline and commercialization objectives for Heartland, and (ii) IPL not conditioning our access to diligence on restrictions that would preclude our ability to make any offer directly to shareholders, or otherwise inappropriately limit our strategic alternatives in regard to our current position on an appropriate timeline.

Offer Details Full details of the Offer will be included in a formal take-over bid circular to be filed with securities regulatory authorities and mailed to IPL shareholders. Brookfield Infrastructure will request a shareholders list from the Company and expects to mail the Offer and take-over bid circular to IPL shareholders as soon as practical upon receipt of this list. The Offer will be open for acceptance for 105 days following the commencement of the Offer and will constitute a Permitted Bid for purposes of IPLs shareholder rights plan as approved by IPL shareholders on May 7, 2020. The Offer is premised on there being 429,219,175 IPL Shares outstanding, on a fully diluted basis. The Offer will also be subject to certain conditions of completion, including receipt of all necessary regulatory approvals, customary approval by the TSX and NYSE in relation to the issuance and listing of the additional BIPC Shares contemplated by our Offer, absence of material changes to the business and Brookfield Infrastructure owning not less than 66?% of the IPL Shares, calculated on a fully diluted basis, after taking up IPL Shares deposited under the Offer and not withdrawn (in addition to the non-waivable statutory condition that more than 50% of the outstanding IPL Shares, excluding IPL Shares beneficially owned by Brookfield Infrastructure, are deposited under the Offer and not withdrawn). Once the two-thirds percentage acceptance level is met, Brookfield Infrastructure intends, but will not be required, to take steps to acquire all remaining IPL Shares in accordance with applicable law. The BIPC Shares included in the Offer are the economic equivalent of units of Brookfield Infrastructure Partners L.P. (BIP) and are exchangeable for limited partnership units of BIP on a one for one basis. Advisors Brookfield Infrastructure has engaged BMO Capital Markets and Barclays Capital Canada Inc. to act as joint financial advisors and McCarthy Tetrault LLP to act as its legal advisor in connection with the Offer. Laurel Hill Advisory Group has also been engaged to act as Brookfield Infrastructures strategic communications advisor and information agent. Additional Information Laurel Hill Advisory Group has been retained as Information Agent for the Offer. Shareholders may contact Laurel Hill at: Toll Free in North America: 1-877-452-7184

Outside North America, Banks, Brokers and Collect Calls: 416-304-0211

Email: assistance@laurelhill.com Brookfield Infrastructure Partners is a leading global infrastructure company that owns and operates high-quality, long-life assets in the utilities, transport, midstream and data infrastructure sectors across North and South America, Asia Pacific and Europe. We are focused on assets that generate stable cash flows and require minimal maintenance capital expenditures. Investors can access its portfolio either through Brookfield Infrastructure Partners L.P. (NYSE: BIP; TSX: BIP.UN), a Bermuda-based limited partnership, or Brookfield Infrastructure Corporation (NYSE, TSX: BIPC), a Canadian corporation. Further information is available at www.brookfield.com/infrastructure. Brookfield Infrastructure Partners is the flagship listed infrastructure company of Brookfield Asset Management, a global alternative asset manager with approximately US$600 billion of assets under management. For more information, go to www.brookfield.com. No Offer or Solicitation

This news release is for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer to buy or sell, or a solicitation of an offer to sell or buy, any securities. The offer to acquire IPL securities and to issue securities of Brookfield Infrastructure Corporation will be made solely by, and subject to the terms and conditions set out in the formal offer to purchase and bid circular and accompanying letter of transmittal and notice of guaranteed delivery. NOTICE TO U.S. HOLDERS OF IPL SHARES Brookfield Infrastructure intends to make the offer and sale of the BIPC Shares in the Offer subject to a registration statement of BIPC and BIP covering such offer and sale to be filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (the SEC) under the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended. Such registration statement covering such offer and sale will include various documents related to such offer and sale. INVESTORS AND SHAREHOLDERS OF IPL ARE URGED TO READ SUCH REGISTRATION STATEMENT AND ANY AND ALL OTHER RELEVANT DOCUMENTS FILED OR TO BE FILED WITH THE SEC IN CONNECTION WITH THE OFFER AS THOSE DOCUMENTS BECOME AVAILABLE, AS WELL AS ANY AMENDMENTS OR SUPPLEMENTS TO THOSE DOCUMENTS, BECAUSE THEY CONTAIN OR WILL CONTAIN IMPORTANT INFORMATION. You will be able to obtain a free copy of such registration statement, as well as other relevant filings regarding BIP and BIPC or such transaction involving the issuance of the BIPC Shares and the underlying BIP limited partnership units, at the SECs website (www.sec.gov) under the issuer profiles for BIP and BIPC, or on request without charge from Brookfield Infrastructure, at 250 Vesey Street, 15th Floor, New York, New York, 10281-1023 or by telephone at (212) 417-7000. BIPC is a foreign private issuer and Brookfield Infrastructure is permitted to prepare the offer to purchase and takeover bid circular and related documents in accordance with Canadian disclosure requirements, which are different from those of the United States. BIPC prepares its financial statements in accordance with IFRS, and they may not be directly comparable to financial statements of United States companies. Shareholders of IPL should be aware that owning BIPC Shares may subject them to tax consequences both in the United States and in Canada. The offer to purchase and takeover bid circular may not describe these tax consequences fully. IPL shareholders should read any tax discussion in the offer to purchase and takeover bid circular, and holders of IPL Shares are urged to consult their tax advisors. An IPL shareholders ability to enforce civil liabilities under the United States federal securities laws may be affected adversely because Brookfield Infrastructure Corporation is incorporated in British Columbia, Canada, some or all of Brookfield Infrastructures officers and directors and some or all of the experts named in the offering documents reside outside of the United States, and a substantial portion of Brookfield Infrastructures assets and of the assets of such persons are located outside the United States. IPL shareholders in the United States may not be able to sue Brookfield Infrastructure or its officers or directors in a non-U.S. court for violation of United States federal securities laws. It may be difficult to compel such parties to subject themselves to the jurisdiction of a court in the United States or to enforce a judgment obtained from a court of the United States. NEITHER THE SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION NOR ANY STATE SECURITIES REGULATOR HAS OR WILL HAVE APPROVED OR DISAPPROVED THE BIPC SHARES OFFERED IN THE OFFERING DOCUMENTS, OR HAS OR WILL HAVE DETERMINED IF ANY OFFERING DOCUMENTS ARE TRUTHFUL OR COMPLETE. ANY REPRESENTATION TO THE CONTRARY IS A CRIMINAL OFFENSE. IPL shareholders should be aware that, during the period of the Offer, Brookfield Infrastructure or its affiliates, directly or indirectly, may bid for or make purchases of the securities to be distributed or to be exchanged, or certain related securities, as permitted by applicable laws or regulations of Canada or its provinces or territories.



Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward-looking Statements This news release may contain forward-looking information within the meaning of Canadian provincial securities laws and forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended, Section 21E of the U.S. Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, safe harbor provisions of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and in any applicable Canadian securities regulations. The words believe, expect, will derivatives thereof and other expressions which are predictions of or indicate future events, trends or prospects and which do not relate to historical matters, identify the above mentioned and other forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements in this news release include statements regarding Brookfield Infrastructures intention to pursue the privatization of IPL; Brookfield Infrastructures intention to make the Offer; the proposed terms and conditions of the Offer, including the amount, form and mix of consideration under the Offer, the expected conditions to completion of the Offer, the expected timing of the Offer, the pricing of the BIPC Shares issuable under the Offer, the maximum amount of cash consideration and the maximum number of BIPC Shares under the Offer and the anticipated acceptance period of the Offer; Brookfield Infrastructures intentions regarding the funding of the Offer; Brookfield Infrastructures intention to request a list of IPLs shareholders; the expected mailing of the take-over bid circular in respect of the Offer; Brookfield Infrastructures intention to take steps to acquire IPL Shares not acquired under the Offer; and potential further engagement between Brookfield Infrastructure and the Company, including possibly varying the terms or conditions of the Offer. Although Brookfield Infrastructure believes that these forward-looking statements and information are based upon reasonable assumptions and expectations, the reader should not place undue reliance on them, or any other forward-looking statements or information in this news release. The actual outcome of future events could differ from the forward-looking statements and information herein, which are subject to a number of known and unknown risks and uncertainties. Factors that could cause actual events to differ materially from those contemplated or implied by the statements in this news release include the ability to obtain regulatory approvals (including approval of the TSX and the NYSE) and meet other closing conditions to any possible transaction, the ability to realize financial, operational and other benefits from the proposed transaction, general economic conditions in the jurisdictions in which we operate and elsewhere which may impact the markets for our products and services, the impact of market conditions on our businesses, the fact that success of Brookfield Infrastructure is dependent on market demand for an infrastructure company, which is unknown, the availability of equity and debt financing for Brookfield Infrastructure, the ability to effectively complete transactions in the competitive infrastructure space and to integrate acquisitions into existing operations, changes in technology which have the potential to disrupt the business and industries in which we invest, the market conditions of key commodities, the price, supply or demand for which can have a significant impact upon the financial and operating performance of our business and other risks and factors described in other documents filed by Brookfield Infrastructure with the securities regulators in Canada and the United States. Except as required by law, Brookfield Infrastructure undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements or information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

For more information, please contact: Media:

Claire Holland

Senior Vice President, Communications

Tel: (416) 369-8236

Email: claire.holland@brookfield.com Investors:

Kate White

Manager, Investor Relations

Tel: (416) 956-5183

Email: kate.white@brookfield.com





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Saudi Arabian Military Industries (SAMI), a wholly owned subsidiary of the Public Investment Fund (PIF), has successfully launched a new joint venture (JV) with L3Harris Technologies, one of the worlds largest aerospace and defense systems manufacturers.

The new firm, SAMI L3Harris Technologies has been created with the goal of accelerating the Saudi groups growth by developing advanced communication, sensor, and integrated mission systems capabilities in support of Saudi Arabias armed and security forces.

The launch of the JV, which encompasses the entire L3Harris Technologies portfolio of capabilities, was initiated through signing a joint venture agreement by Ahmed Al Khateeb, Chairman of SAMI, and Christopher E. Kubasik, Vice Chairman, President, and COO, of L3Harris Technologies, at the Paris Air Show in June 2019.

The JV achieved its commercial registration in August 2020 and is now fully operational.

Initially focusing on localization of L3Harris advanced communication and sensor products, the JV scope will expand to include prime contractor responsibilities for integrated mission systems and platforms, leveraging robust local industry partnerships, said the statement from SAMI.

Together, the two parties aim to collaborate in areas, such as technical/specialized operator and maintenance training; Transfer of Production (ToP); and Transfer of Technology (ToT) through research and development programs in approved technologies, it added.

CEO Engineer Walid Abukhaled said: "We are pleased to partner with a globally renowned company of L3Harris Technologies stature for the launch of this joint venture, which unlocks exciting opportunities for the Transfer of Technology (ToT) and expertise to Saudi Arabia."

"Our collaboration will further strengthen the Kingdoms military capabilities, enable its self-sufficiency, and create high-quality career opportunities for skilled Saudi citizens. I have full confidence in the capabilities of the joint ventures newly appointed leadership team and wish them every success in their endeavors as we continue to contribute to our overarching goal of supporting the localization of more than 50% of military equipment spending by 2030," he added.

Charles R. CR Davis, Vice President of L3Harris International, said the launch of this joint venture represents another important milestone in the company's journey to establish a long-term presence within Saudi Arabia.

"We look forward to continuing to work closely with SAMI to support them in enabling the local defense industries in the Kingdom. Through this joint venture, we will leverage L3Harris Technologies leadership in technology innovation with Saudi Arabias defense industry champion to provide advanced military capabilities and world-class research and development activities for the kingdom," he added.

The SAMI L3Harris Technologies Board of Directors has appointed Hogan Wilson as the new CEO and Rayan Al Zamil as Chief Financial Officer of the new JV company.

L3Harris Technologies is the first US defence company to form a registered and operational joint venture with SAMI.

The collaboration creates a path for the localization of L3Harris Technologies world-leading communication, sensor, and integrated mission systems for the land, air, and maritime domains, in line with SAMIs mandate to support the goals of Vision 2030.
(Natural News) Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has warned that China will use artificial intelligence (AI) against the U.S. He made the warning during a Feb. 4 interview with Fox News host Maria Bartiromo. According to the former official, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will use AI to comb through huge libraries of personal data using Chinese technology and mobile apps. It will then weaponize the information against the U.S. in order to gain the lead in the race for supremacy.

Pompeos warning came as a response to a question by Bartiromo regarding sanctions on Chinese companies imposed by the Trump administration. She asked the former state secretary if President Joe Biden should keep these restrictions or lift them altogether. [The CCP] will use that information  [and] use artificial intelligence to gather it up. And then they will turn around and tell us that if we dont act in a way thats consistent with what the [CCP] wants, they will impose real costs on the U.S., Pompeo said.

He replied in the affirmative when the Fox News host asked if the information could be used for blackmail. Pompeo remarked that the data illegally obtained from Americans will be used for bad intent,  to harm the U.S.

The former state secretary elaborated that China uses technologies in both the U.S. and Europe that can be found in common items such as cars, television sets and mobile phones. Information gathered by the Chinese regime included peoples addresses, social circles, medical conditions and even genetic data. That information goes back to the Chinese national security state, he commented.

Former President Donald Trump penalized a number of Chinese technology firms during Pompeos tenure as secretary of state. Telecommunications giants Huawei and ZTE were among the companies sanctioned by the Trump administration. Pompeo explained that the sanctions were put in place to protect the American people from these twin evils, referring to the two Chinese companies.

Pompeo was one of the vocal anti-CCP officials in the Trump administration

The former state secretary was among a group of Trump administration officials sanctioned by the Chinese regime over their tough stance on China. He shared with Bartiromo his efforts to warn U.S. allies of the CCPs deceptive nature, advising a distrust but verify approach. Pompeo commented that the Chinese regime has consistently broken its promises over the past 20 years.

Pompeo said he spent a lot of time traveling the world and talking to leaders in Europe, Asia and South America to warn them about China. I spent a lot of time reminding them that while China might show up with a little bit of money, the intent behind that was to create leverage and power. [Other countries] ought not to join an idea that is anti-Western [and] anti-democratic, he continued. (Related: China exploiting Caribbean nations to build military and missile bases that can threaten the continental United States.)

As of writing, the former Trump administration official has been warning of the CCPs domestic infiltration. He claimed the Chinese regime is working to influence federal, state and local levels of power to do its bidding.

Pompeo wrote in a Feb. 3 tweet: Not only has the CCP destroyed millions of American jobs, but [its] behind the gates  lobbying members of Congress [and] working our school boards and city councils to try and change our way of life. We, along with our allies, must take the China threat seriously.

Back in September 2020, Pompeo said in an interview with Fox Business host Lou Dobbs that Confucius Institutes and Confucius Classrooms in schools nationwide would be closed by the end of the year. Confucius Institutes and Confucius Classrooms are cultural exchange programs that have come under scrutiny for their role in promoting the CCPs espionage and propaganda efforts.

I think that everyones coming to see the risk associated with them and the recruitment of spies and collaborators inside of these institutions, he told Dobbs. (Related: SAT test maker touts ties with Chinese Communist Party-funded Confucius Institutes.)

He also mentioned at that time that the U.S. government will address Chinas theft of American intellectual property developed at educational institutions. In the coming days and weeks  the U.S. [will] confront this in a very serious way. [This includes] students [from China] that are studying here [who] are part of this network, Pompeo stated.

Visit CommunistChina.news to read more about the CCPs use of technology against the U.S.

Sources include:

TheEpochTimes.com 1

Video.FoxBusiness.com

Twitter.com

TheEpochTimes.com 2
The UN has argued that dozens of countries should accept the return of thousands of terrorists families, according to The Syria Times.

UN Human Rights experts have called on 57 countries to take back about 10 thousand family members of Islamic State (ISIS) terrorists who carry the nationalities of these countries from northeastern Syria and to prosecute the adults for war crimes or other crimes they committed there.

Reuters quoted the experts as confirming, in a joint statement, that these countries have an obligation to return these individuals in accordance with international law and to prosecute adults for war crimes or other crimes in their local courts.

In turn, the UN Special Rapporteur on the protection of human rights, Violola Ni Ulin, said in a press statement that the return of these individuals to their countries is a very urgent matter.

According to the latest UN statistics, suspected terrorists have brought some 9,462 foreign women and children with them as they returned to their home countries, most notably Turkey.

For years, Syria has been subjected to a new kind of terrorist war in which Arab, regional, and Western countries have been sending terrorists from all parts of the world to Syria in an attempt to undermine its national stances and the independence of its decision.

This article was edited by The Syrian Observer. The Syrian Observer has not verified the content of this story. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author.

RTHK: US senators try again with HK refugee bill

A bipartisan group of senior US senators reintroduced a bill on Tuesday to make it easier for people from Hong Kong fearing persecution after joining protests to obtain US refugee status.

The 12 senators, led by Republican Marco Rubio and Democrat Bob Menendez, said the bill was a response to the national security law introduced by Beijing in Hong Kong last year.

The Hong Kong Safe Harbour Act would make "Hong Kongers who participated peacefully in the protest movement and have a well-founded fear of persecution" eligible for processing as refugees in Hong Kong or a third country.

Refugees from Hong Kong would not be subject to a numerical limitation, a statement from the senators said.

The proposed law would also make it easier for dissidents to seek asylum by waiving provisions that make suspected intent to immigrate or a criminal record disqualifying factors for non-immigrant visas.

Additionally, it would make Hong Kongers who have their residency revoked eligible for refugee status as victims of political persecution.

"The US must do all it can to assist those Hong Kongers who have courageously stood up to defend the city they love from the CCPs persecution and open our doors to them," Rubio said.

Menendez said the aim was "to reiterate to the Chinese Communist Party that the United States stands foursquare with the people of Hong Kong" and to show they would not "fall through the cracks of our broken immigration system... ."

The bill was reintroduced because a previous version expired when a new Senate was seated last month.

The new Biden administration's secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has said the United States should accept people fleeing the Hong Kong crackdown.

"If they're the victims of repression from Chinese authorities, we should do something to give them haven," he told NBC news late last month. (Reuters)

This story has been published on: 2021-02-10. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
Government will be moving to clamp down on food establishments which have been trying to beat the COVID restrictions, by bringing out their staff to prepare meals, which are then put on sale at other locations.
Restaurants will no longer be allowed to sell pre-packaged meals through arrangements with supermarkets and other outlets, as Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley definitively closed this loophole yesterday.

Rowley said this would not be allowed to continue, as it defeats the purpose of the public health regulations. Restaurants and street food vendors were among those businesses ordered to close to limit the movement of people and curb the spread of Covid-19.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-10 21:28:48|Editor: huaxia

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Representatives from Chinese Embassy, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) to Ethiopia, Ethiopian National Disaster Risk Management Commission pose for group photos at the donation ceremony in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on Feb. 10, 2021. The Chinese government on Wednesday donated much-needed humanitarian assistance in support of the WFP operations in the East African country. The donation, comprising 4,000 metric tonnes of maize, is said to cover food ration for about 268,000 Internally Displaced People (IDPs) in Ethiopia's drought-prone Somali regional state, it was noted. (Xinhua/Michael Tewelde)

ADDIS ABABA, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- The Chinese government on Wednesday donated much-needed humanitarian assistance in support of the United Nations World Food Program's (WFP) operations in the East African country.

The donation, comprising 4,000 metric tonnes of maize, is said to cover food ration for about 268,000 Internally Displaced People (IDPs) in Ethiopia's drought-prone Somali regional state, it was noted.

Paul Turnbull, Deputy Country Director of WFP to Ethiopia, said as the Somali region is where most of WFP's responsibilities for relief operations lay, "it's very, very important that we maintain our contributions into the Somali region."

Noting that the food distribution in the region has just started in the first week of February, Turnbull commended China's support to the WFP's humanitarian operations in the country.

"I would like to thank China for the interest in WFP's activities in Ethiopia. This has been received over a few years," he said, adding that "we would like to thank you for this recent contribution as well as the contribution that's being distributed at the moment."

According to figures from the WFP, over the past five years, China's contribution to the WFP has enabled the purchase of about 13,000 metric tonnes of food in Ethiopia.

Zhao Zhiyuan, Chinese Ambassador to Ethiopia, said that the Chinese government has donated about 16 million U.S. dollars to the WFP's Ethiopia operations since 2015, including the latest 2 million U.S. dollars food assistance program.

"As the Chinese saying goes - when disaster strikes, help comes from all sides. WFP Ethiopia has done a lot to resolve food shortage for the stressed population," Zhao said.

He also emphasized that China is Ethiopia's major development partner as well as a firm supporter of WFP's operations.

"China will continue its good working relations with WFP and other international organizations, and the Ethiopian government to promote long-term development of Ethiopia and improve people's lives," the ambassador added.

The latest donation by the Chinese government is said to have come at a critical time as the WFP faces a funding shortfall, and urgently requires about 325 million U.S. dollars to maintain operations in Ethiopia from March to August 2021.

Tadesse Bekele Fanta, Senior Disaster Risk Management Advisor at the Ethiopian National Disaster Risk Management Commission (NDRMC), also hailed China's humanitarian support to the Ethiopian people.

"The People's Republic of China has been very supportive to the people of Ethiopia in terms of addressing the humanitarian caseload," Fanta said.

According to Fanta, Ethiopia is presently "in a very critical situation," in which about 12 million people are at a higher risk of possible need of humanitarian support.

Conflict, drought and seasonal floods have contributed to internal displacement in Ethiopia's Southeastern Somali regional state and elsewhere. The WFP provides food to about 1.1 million IDPs across the country. Enditem
The Federal High Court in Abuja, on Wednesday, ordered the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to unfreeze the accounts of 20 #EndSARS campaigners targeted by the apex bank after last years anti-police brutality demonstrations.

PREMIUM TIMES reported on Sunday how the accounts of the protesters remained frozen despite the expiration of the 90-day order on February 2.

The judge, Ahmed Mohammed, issued the order unfreezing the accounts after the legal teams of both the CBN and the 20 defendants decided to end the case on Wednesday.

The judge commended the two lawyers for their commitment to ensure justice after they announced their decision to withdraw all pending applications and the entire suit.

In the light of this, the ex parte order issued on November 4, 2022 freezing the accounts of the defendants pending the investigation by the Central Bank of Nigeria is here by set aside.

An order is also made unfreezing the accounts of the defendants, Mr Mohammed ruled on Wednesday.

Hearing

Earlier, CBNs lawyer, Michael Aondoakaa, a former Attorney-General of the Federation, told the judge he filed an ex parte application for the extension of the expired order on Tuesday, but later got instruction from the CBN Governor, Godwin Emefiele, to withdraw the case.

Mr Aondoakaa, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, said he was withdrawing the suit in the spirit of reconciliation behind the setting up of the various Judicial Panels of Inquiry set up to probe cases of police brutality in the aftermath of the #EndSARS protests.

He said, This matter involves young people. I talked to my colleagues and I advised, let us discard all the processes. I will withdraw my processes and they will withdraw theirs.

By implication, the order goes, the accounts will be unfrozen, and nobody will be indicted.

The government has set up reconciliation panels. We should give room for a rethink on this matter.

We have the instruction form my client, the Governor of CBN, that in the spirit of reconciliation, we should not apply for the extension of the order.

So we are withdrawing our ex parte motion. We should allow reconciliation and peace to reign.

Freezing order expired last week

Responding, the defendants lawyer, Femi Falana, also a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, confirmed that he had discussed with Mr Aondoakaa on the way forward in this matter.

He, however, insisted that the order ex parte made by this court expired last week.

He said he had filed a motion to have the order quashed but has been overtaken by event, since the order has expired.

After hearing the two lawyers, the judge set aside the order and struck out the suit.

Mr Aondokaa promised to ensure that that the accounts are unfrozen as soon as the courts written order is issued.

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The #EndSARS protesters and promoters targeted in the case by the CBN included Bolatito Oduala, Chima Ibebunjoh, Mary Kpengwa, Gatefield Nigeria Limited, Saadat Bibi, Bassey Israel, Wisdom Obi, Nicholas Osazele, Ebere Idibie, Akintomide Yusuf, Uhuo Promise, Mosopefoluwa Odeseye and Adegoke Emmanuel.

The rest are, Umoh Ekanem, Babatunde Segun, Mulu Teghenan, Mary Oshifowora, Winifred Jacob, Victor Solomon, and Idunu Williams.

Background

The 20 account holders affected by the freezing order had participated in or contributed to the #EndSARS protests which were triggered by grievances arising from years of harassment and rights violations by operatives of the defunct Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS).

The protests led to the disbandment of the police tactical squad in October last year.

In the twilight of the protests, the CBN governor, Godwin Emefiele, on October 15, 2020, directed various banks to place a Post-No-Debit order on the accounts linked to the 20 #EndSARS campaigners.

About three weeks after, the CBN, through its lawyer, Mr Aondoakaa, on November 4, 2020, obtained an ex parte order of the Federal High Court in Abuja freezing their bank accounts for 90 days.

The judge gave the order based on CBNs allegation that the 20 defendants were suspected of terrorism financing.

PREMIUM TIMES reported how the court order was widely condemned as an attack on democracy.

The protesters challenged the order but the judge, who kept adjourning the case, did not conclude hearing on the matter until Wednesday.
kali9/iStockBy BILL HUTCHINSON, ABC News



(JACKSON TOWNSHIP, Ohio) -- An Ohio police officer is being praised for showing restraint and providing a textbook example of his de-escalation training to peacefully end a standoff with an alleged armed robber who was threatening to kill himself, telling the suspect, "You're too young, bud."



Police body camera footage showed the Jackson Township officer, whose name was not immediately released, talking the suspect into putting down his gun and surrendering.



The episode came in sharp contrast to numerous high-profile incidents nationwide when law enforcement officers have come under criticism, and several criminally charged, for quickly resorting to the use of deadly force.



The officer did do a fantastic job, theres no question about that. Im very proud of the way our guys handled that situation," Jackson Township Police Chief Mark Brink told ABC News on Tuesday.



The incident unfolded just after 3 p.m. on Saturday when officers responded to a report of a robbery at a Dollar General store in Jackson Township, which is about 5 miles northwest of Canton, according to a statement from police.



Police said a woman who witnessed the robbery followed the suspect as he drove away from the store and reported his whereabouts to police.



At one point, the suspect, identified as 20-year-old Rashawn Harper of Tennessee, noticed the witness following him and allegedly opened fire on her car, striking it on the side, police said.



"He's shooting at me! He's got a gun!" the 51-year-old witness was heard telling a dispatcher in a 911 call obtained by ABC News affiliate WEWS in Cleveland.



Officers found the suspect's car abandoned in front of a home, police said. An occupant of the residence told police the suspect ran through their backyard toward a golf course, according to the statement.



When officers caught up to the suspect, he was "sitting on a bench with a gun to his head," the police statement reads.



Brink said all of his officers are trained in crisis intervention, and specifically taught how to deal with distraught or mentally ill suspects.



"It was a tough situation. The young man had just shot at a car," said Brink, adding that during the investigation, police learned the suspect had also approached a man and allegedly threatened him with a handgun.



Instead of resorting to deadly use of force, the officer de-escalated the situation by calmly negotiating with the suspect to put down the gun, according to body-camera footage obtained by WEWS.



We can help you, dude. Were not going to hurt you. I promise you we are not going to hurt you. Put it down," said an officer, who joined the Jackson Township Police Department as a part-time member in 2016 and became a full-time officer in September 2017.



During the standoff, Harper told the officer that he had stopped taking his medication for a mental disorder. The officer promised Harper that he would get him a therapist if he put down the gun.



You toss that gun out of there. I put mine away, and Ill come talk to you. I promise you. We can help you. Its not the way," the officer told Harper, according to the footage.



As they continued to speak, Harper told the officer his age, the video shows.



"Come on, bud, you have to talk to me. Dude, you're 20. Youre still so young. Lets go, dude, we don't want to do this. Just put it (the gun) down, bud. We don't want to do it. You dont want to do it. You're 20," the officer said, according to the video.



Brink said the officer negotiated with Harper for three to five minutes before he put the gun down. The officer continued to console Harper even as he was handcuffing him.



Whats up, dude? Look at me. Whats going on?" the officer asked.



Harper responded, I made terrible decisions," according to the video.



When asked why he allegedly committed the robbery, Harper said, "I didn't want to do what I did."



Harper remained in custody on Tuesday in the Stark County Jail on charges of aggravated robbery and felony assault. He was also charged with carrying a concealed weapon, aggravated menacing, obstructing official business and possessing a stolen gun.



Copyright  2021, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

The New Jersey man whose phone number was found in the pocket of a man who committed a mass shooting in Jersey City in 2019 was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison.

U.S. District Judge Katharine S. Hayden handed down the sentence to Ahmed A-Hady, of Keyport, after he pleaded guilty in October to one count of being in possession of a weapon by a convicted felon.

A-Hady became under investigation shortly after federal authorities found his phone number and the address to a Keyport pawn shop on a note in the pocket of David Anderson, who along with his partner, Francine Graham, killed a Jersey City police detective and three people inside a kosher grocery store in December 2019.

While executing a search warrant at the pawn shop, which his father owned, authorities recovered a dozen firearms, including three AR-15 style firearms from the pawn shop and the apartment above the store where A-Hady lived. Three of the weapons were registered to A-Hady, who cannot possess them as a convicted felon.

A-Hady was convicted for attempting to obtain a controlled dangerous substance or analog by fraud in New Jersey in 2012.

Besides the note in Andersons pocket, prosecutors did not produce evidence at multiple bail detention hearings that in any way linked A-Hady to the mass shooting in Jersey City, or that he had even communicated with the two shooters.

During the sentencing, a prosecutor definitively said there was no evidence linking A-Hady to the mass shooting.

There is no connection that the government was able to establish, assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Kearney said Tuesday when asked by Judge Hayden.

Kearney argued Tuesday that A-Hady deserved prison term of 41 to 51 months. He objected to the judges sentence.

A-Hadys attorney, David Glassman, argued for no prison time, citing that many of the weapons recovered were not A-Hadys and that the aftermath of the charges, including more than a month in jail and six months of home incarceration, were an adequate punishment.

In arguing for no sentence, Glassman also said prosecutors inflated the case by trying to link it to the Jersey City shooting. Glassman said the case destroyed an individuals life when prosecutors continually connected A-Hady to the shooting and presented very little evidence to exonerate him once it became clear there was no connection.

Glassman described his client as a man who has overcome drug addiction and has devoted his life to his family while following all of the governments pre-trial restrictions that have been in place since he was charged.

A-Hady took responsibility and apologized during the sentencing for illegally possessing the firearm as a felon. He said the Jersey City shooting and his name being in the shooters pocket threw my course of life off dramatically.

Due to concerns of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, Judge Hayden ruled A-Hady should not be committed to the Bureau of Prisons to begin serving his sentence until at least May 4.

Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to NJ.com.

Joe Atmonavage may be reached at jatmonavage@njadvancemedia.com.

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FRASER TWP, MI  Driving down a busy road in rural Bay County, you may be struck by a provocative flag waving in the wind from one houses flagpole.

F*** Biden the black, red, and white flag proclaims, with And f*** you for voting for him! emblazoned beneath it. Above it flies the more familiar yellow Gadsden, or Dont tread on me, flag.

Jared R. Snyder, the 25-year-old man flying the divisive flags in front of his Fraser Township home, says he is doing so to advocate for free speech and voice his discontent with the current administration of President Joseph R. Biden, though he was not a supporter of ex-President Donald J. Trump.

Its just a freedom of speech thing for me, Snyder told MLive on Tuesday, Feb. 9. Im not going after a race, ethnicity, sexual orientation  nothing. Im simply voicing my opinion that Im not happy with our president. Im not happy that all my friends who work on the (Keystone XL oil) pipeline are now laid off due to decisions the president made.

Bay County Sheriff Troy R. Cunningham said his agency has received calls complaining about the flags.

Were aware of several flags and signs throughout our community that might not be in agreement with everyone, but everyone has the right to express themselves under the First Amendment, he said.

Fraser Township Supervisor Mark Galus said he does not approve of the flags language and has received four or five complaints from residents. When he arrived at work on Monday, Feb. 8, Galus called Undersheriff Chris Mausolf to see if there were any legal recourse.

He more or less came back and told me there is nothing we can do as far as ordinances or anything like that, Galus said. Its just ridiculous. Its crazy. I wouldnt mind it, (but) its just the vulgarity thats on it.

Galus said some of the complaints hes received have been from area residents with kids and grandkids who they dont want to see the flags.

If there were a way of doing it through the township, wed take action, he said. If we could, we would, but our hands are tied. Its terrible.

Snyder bought the Biden-specific flag on Amazon, saying he kind of did so as a joke. He raised it up the pole on Saturday, Feb. 6, he said.

The funny part is, everyone is assuming Im just some big, huge Trump supporter and all that, Snyder said. To blow everyones minds, I did not vote for Trump or Biden.

Snyder identifies politically as Libertarian but declined to say if he voted for 2020 Libertarian presidential candidate Jo Jorgensen. He added hes not surprised some people dont like the flag.

I just feel like I have my right to say I dont like my president, he said. We went through four years of people saying downright nasty things about Trump. I figured, Hey, Im gonna put this up and I did and here we are now.

Asked if hes concerned about offending people by the f-word being on the flag, Snyder balked.

The beauty of the country we live in is I can say what I want and those people also are entitled to their opinions and can say what they want, he said. He has received far more support than criticism for the flags, he added.

The biggest complaint he has seen so far relates to the idea of children seeing the flag. To that, Snyder suggested parents take note to what music their children are listening to.

The attention span of children is pretty short, he said. If youre driving past my house, Id be pretty surprised if your kids even saw my flag.

Snyder also has a bumper sticker on his vehicles tailgate attacking a key figure on the opposite end of the political spectrum from Biden  former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky. The sticker reads, Mitch McConnell is a flagrant d***head.

When you look at whats going on in the country today, theres a lot of hypocrisy from both sides of it, Snyder said. I do not like either side. I do not like the two-party system. I do not like how government is representing us right now.

Saginaw County attorney and free speech advocate Philip L. Ellison said Snyder is within his rights to fly the potentially offensive flag.

My reaction to this from a legal standpoint is he has a legal, constitutional right to exercise his free speech, Ellison said. Free speech, whether its on a sign or in a fortune cook or on a flag, you have a right to it and the government cant handcuff you from exercising that speech, except in highly limited circumstances. This isnt one of them.

Ellison said the remedy for perceived bad speech is to provide counter speech, not for the government to impose less speech.

While governments can regulate the structures of speech, like the physical dimensions of a sign or flag, its proximity to roadways, and the like, they cannot limit its message, again except for in limited contexts, Ellison said.

Ellison also pointed out there have been and continue to be similar political flags bearing vulgar language flying from private residences that have been allowed to fly unfettered from government censorship.

Whats someone to do if you disagree with your neighbors message? Ellison rhetorically asked. Use the time-honored tradition of trying to convince them theyre wrong.

Michigan previously had an obscure statute dating back to 1897 that prohibited the use of indecent, immoral, obscene, vulgar or insulting language in the presence or hearing of any woman or child. The violation was a misdemeanor.

The law drew national attention when, in August 1998, a Roseville man was charged with it for yelling the f-word as many as 75 times within earshot of a 5-year-old boy and a 2-year-old girl after he fell out of a canoe on the Rifle River in Arenac County. The man, thereafter dubbed the cussing canoeist, was convicted of the crime, but a state Court of Appeals in 2002 overturned his conviction, saying the law was too vague.

Then-Gov. Rick Snyder in December 2015 signed legislation eliminating the law.

For those interested in the etymology of the f-word and how its meaning and connotations have evolved over the centuries, Netflixs recently released docu-comedy series History of Swear Words has an episode focusing on it. The show is hosted by Nicolas Cage and debuted on the streaming platform on Jan. 5.

Read more:

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Arrested in Pennsylvania, Michigan man now charged in drive-thru bank robbery

Man killed in two-vehicle crash on I-675 in Saginaw

Wintry road conditions lead to train-van crash in Tuscola County
Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force JoAnne Bass would share every airman's story if she could. Knowing an individual's backstory helps people connect on a deeper level, be open to different points of view and find shared experiences, she believes.

Since assuming her role in August, Bass, the Air Force's first female top enlisted leader, has taken time to focus on individual airmen, telling their stories on her Facebook page.

But Bass says she had a blind spot in her judgment when she reshared one airman's story.

Read Next: Army War College Commandant Suspended Pending Investigation

"I'll be honest: When I read things, I'm a very optimistic person, and I see the positive in all situations, because we all have a journey and a history and a past," she said in an interview with Military.com last week.

Bass reshared an article by Senior Airman Jamie Samuels at Luke Air Force Base, Arizona.

Samuels' story, titled "the many hats I wear," talked about her roles as a mother and a service member. It was also shared on Facebook. In the article, first posted to website Aerotech News in 2020, Samuels said that her daughter's father, also an airman in the pararescue career field -- a high demand, high-stress job -- "took on extra assignments to avoid wearing his dad hat."

Both Samuels and Bass' Facebook posts have since been deleted, but screenshots have been shared in social media and chat channels.

Commenters criticized Bass -- who saw it as a story of perseverance and resilience -- for putting a fragmented co-parenting situation on blast.

"When I read the commentary, I saw it in a different lens," Bass said. "I had to reread the story, and after rereading it, I understood how it could negatively impact another airman."

She's since reached out to both airmen and apologized. "It was very important for me to make sure that they knew that it was never the intent [to harm them]," she said.

But the social media blunder won't stop Bass from advocating for airmen online.

"When I'm out and about talking to our airmen and hearing their stories, there're so many times where I wish I had a GoPro [camera] on me or something so that other airmen and other leaders could hear just the remarkable stories that our airmen have and how they've grown into our Air Force," she said. "When we can get to know airmen and what motivated them to join the United States military, it helps us as leaders better continue to support and lead them.

"What I'm trying to get after is to create a culture where every single one of our airmen who do come in and raise their hand feel like they're part of an organization where they can thrive," she explained.

Bass spoke on a number of issues related to social media, her influence and force changes. Her comments have been edited for clarity and brevity.

Military.com: The Air Force has had a number of reviews, from diversity and inclusion to talent management, in recent months. What are some decisions from these reviews and others that the service plans to announce in coming weeks?

Bass: After being in the seat for about six months, we've really just been building the relationships that we need and kind of the foundation for where we want to get to. I think that 2021 will be a year of executing some of the short-term and intermediate goals that we have with respect to the force.  We've got some uniform board changes that are coming up. I'm looking at the enlisted evaluation system; we are looking at our fitness goals and how to make sure that every airman realizes that fitness is a culture and a lifestyle and directly correlates to readiness. We're trying to make sure that we are addressing and sustaining actions to combat suicides, sexual harassment, sexual assault, discrimination, and then I think you're going to hear us talk more about [extremism in the ranks].

Military.com: As you said, social media has been a tool in trying to get airmen accustomed to having a larger conversation. But it's becoming a problem in the armed forces to a degree since it's been weaponized for people to say things that are either untrue or inaccurate. What's your view now, knowing how negative comments proliferate online, especially from those in uniform?

Bass: I think that social media can be a very powerful tool for good.  Airmen want to go to a place on social media to be able to connect with each other and share information and resources to help each other, become better. I think for that, [these platforms are] helpful to our United States Air Force, because again, it's a grassroots effort that helps in ... that way. Certainly, there are other sites that cause discord and division amongst airmen, amongst service members and amongst Americans. For that, we've got to be better at providing tools to our service members on digital literacy so that we can combat the information warfare that we're in right now.

Military.com: Last month, the Pentagon was tasked to look at social media and extremism as a whole. For airmen who do make disparaging comments online, is there going to be a way to streamline how they are investigated on social media for the comments that they make? Is that something that the Air Force is looking to do?

Bass: We are having the discussions right now on making sure that we get out some guidance on what is acceptable behavior when it comes to online and offline. I've seen on many social media sites, disrespect, harassment, bullying, inappropriate behavior, to include even threats. And, bottom line, that's not OK. And there was no room for that in our Air Force. We've got to create the right and left boundaries for all of our service members, and make sure that they understand that respect is foundational to who we are.

Military.com: Will the services then draw a red line and say, "This is what's going to get you kicked out of the service, if you say these things or believe these things on social media?"

Bass: I don't know that I would offer that it would be things that necessarily kick people out. I think instead, I would frame it in that our airmen are responsible for their actions online and offline. And as a result, we have to have some accountability relative to that, and so that's where we've got to get to.

I would ask that people would just take a step back for a minute and think before they post comments, that they would think about and be mindful of the things that they are influenced by. Again, people have to realize that we're living in an era of information warfare, and there are second- and third-order effects to actions online, and that they can have lasting repercussions offline. We need every airman to understand that, and understand their role that they have with that. In turn, the Air Force has a responsibility to provide some of those guidelines and I think we're going to make sure that we push those things out sooner than later.

Military.com: Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, leaders like yourself have said you're worried about morale and mental health in the force. What are you doing to improve these efforts for airmen to get the help they need?

Bass: We actually have a resiliency working group that is ongoing right here in the Pentagon. They've been working toward some solutions.  And so from an enterprise level, we are waiting for that working group to conclude, and that should be done sometime in the March-April timeframe. And we look forward to seeing what are the sustainable actions that the Air Force can do to help provide the tools that every one of our installations needs to be able to advance their resiliency efforts. Also, I'm seeing a ton of movement -- grassroots efforts -- [at the base level] that airmen have connected together and created organizations and platforms for which they can just come together and bring cross-functional teams to help our families and our airmen become more resilient.

Military.com: You are the first woman to be in the top enlisted role for any service. When talking to airmen, does that weigh on you? Is that in the back of your mind?

Bass: It's not lost on me that I'm the first female chief master sergeant of the Air Force, but I don't think about it unless I get asked about it. I'm just doing what I have done for the last, almost 28 years, which is to be an airman, lead as an airman and talk like an airman. It's an honor, and it's humbling, and if I can be a role model to any group of people, then it's even more humbling. I just want to be the best chief master sergeant that can serve our airmen.

-- Oriana Pawlyk can be reached at oriana.pawlyk@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @Oriana0214.

Related: 'Beijing Biden Is Not My President:' Troops' Social Media Posts in Spotlight After Capitol Riots
Luanda  The minister of National Defence and Veterans of the Homeland, Joao Ernesto dos Santos, spoke last Tuesday in Luanda, dismayed by the death of the chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Mozambique (CEMG), Eugenio Ussene Mussa.

Eugenio Ussene Mussa, in the post of chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Defence of Mozambique since January this year, died Monday of illness.

In a message of condolences addressed to his Mozambican counterpart, Jaime Bessa Augusto Neto, the Angolan minister characterizes the army general Eugenio Ussene Mussa as "a fearless combatant who made himself available early for the struggle for the conquest and preservation of Mozambique's independence".

"The ill-fated General Ussene Mussa held several positions in the military hierarchy with merit, a quality that underpinned his nomination and appointment to the high post of Chief of General Staff of the Armed Forces of Defense of Mozambique", underlines the note.

The 63-year-old Eugenio Ussene Mussa was appointed by President Filipe Nyussi, on January 14, 2021, to assume the post of chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces for the Defence of Mozambique, having been promoted to General of the Army before being pointed to the post.

Eugenio Ussene Mussa, in the post of chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Defence of Mozambique since January this year, died Monday of illness.

In a message of condolences addressed to his Mozambican counterpart, Jaime Bessa Augusto Neto, the Angolan minister characterizes the army general Eugenio Ussene Mussa as "a fearless combatant who made himself available early for the struggle for the conquest and preservation of Mozambique's independence".

"The ill-fated General Ussene Mussa held several positions in the military hierarchy with merit, a quality that underpinned his nomination and appointment to the high post of Chief of General Staff of the Armed Forces of Defense of Mozambique", underlines the note.

The 63-year-old Eugenio Ussene Mussa was appointed by President Filipe Nyussi, on January 14, 2021, to assume the post of chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces for the Defence of Mozambique, having been promoted to General of the Army before being pointed to the post.
New Delhi: The growing complaints of sore feet, stiff back or pain around the kneecap among the protesting farmers -- especially the older ones -- have led to opening of a makeshift massage centre at Singhu Border.

Six plastic chairs, rugs and mats on the floor and a "home-made" pain relief oil from Punjab are being used to help the visibly-tired protestors unwind and reduce their muscle tension.

They have been camping at the border for over 70 days now in protest against the three contentious agri-laws, with no immediate end in sight for the agitation.

Harpreet Singh, who already has his hands full with multiple services at the protest site, said he had heard enough people complaining about bodyaches and fatigue and not doing anything for them was just not an option.

"Staying out for this long, without any homely comfort, in trolleys or tents takes a toll on your body. It is that much difficult if you are old, and here a large majority of people are in their 50s and 60s. The massage centre is to strengthen the muscles worn-out during the ongoing protest," said the 22-year-old from Punjab's Gurdaspur district.

The massage centre, started three days back, opens as early as five in the morning and works till five in the evening.

Singh, who has been camping here for the past two months, is joined by a couple of volunteers for this noble service.

"It is a sewa. We don't keep a count of people coming. But since you have asked, the numbers are increasing by the day," said Singh as he gently rubs the foot of an elderly person with the herbal oil.

Singh, who says he gets to sleep only "five hours a day", is juggling other responsibilities too like helping the old get hot water in the morning for bathing, opening a makeshift reading room well-stocked with books -- on farmers revolution, biography of freedom fighters -- and volunteering at a nearby milk langar in the wee hours.

The young and old benefitting from the services of the massage centre are all praises for Singh and his dedication towards the movement and its people.

"My knee was giving me trouble for several days now. Yesterday, my friend told me about Singh and how effective the massage has proven for his joint pain.

"I went to him and he massaged my knee also. I felt a lot better. Today, I have come for another round. May god bless him and other volunteers for helping us," said Satwinder Singh (55), a farmer from Ludhiana.

Earlier, NGO Khalsa Aid India had installed 25 foot-massagers for the elderly protestors.

While routine everyday activities -- like preparation and distribution of langar food, farmers making motivational speeches from stages, and tractors blaring protest songs -- went on as usual; the Delhi-Haryana Highway, the epicentre of the ongoing farmers' agitation, witnessed a rather slow day on Tuesday with both -- the crowd and security forces -- thinning out.

Additional deployment of Delhi Police personnel at the three main farmers protest sites of Singhu, Tikri and Ghazipur was withdrawn from Monday evening.

According to an order issued by Special Commissioner of Police (Operation and Licensing) Muktesh Chander the entire staff will go back to their respective districts or units with effect from Tuesday.

Thousands of farmers have been protesting since late November at the Delhi borders with Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, demanding a rollback of the Farmers' Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, 2020; Farmers' (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Act, 2020; and Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act, 2020.

The protesting farmers have expressed apprehension that these laws would pave the way for the dismantling of the minimum support price (MSP) system, leaving them at the "mercy" of big corporations.

However, the government has maintained that the new laws will bring better opportunities to farmers and introduce new technologies in agriculture.
Mississauga, Ontario and Sacramento, California--(Newsfile Corp. - February 10, 2021) - Bee Vectoring Technologies International Inc. (CSE: BEE) (OTCQB: BEVVF) (CVE: BEE) (the "Company" or "BVT") is pleased to announce that it will be hosting an Investor Webinar conference call hosted by Virtus Advisory on Thursday, February 18 at 1:00pm EST. The CEO of the Company, Ashish Malik will provide a business update and outline the Company's progress over the last quarter, as well as provide details into 2021 company initiatives and commercialization strategy.

Individuals wishing to participate in the conference call can register by visiting bit.ly/BEEwebinar (full URL https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ZEoPFyiSQKOBCbVn_yckeA).

Participants will receive an email confirmation with a unique access code, which can be used to access the call via phone, or, alternatively, via web link for those wishing to view visuals during the update.

It is expected that there will be time at the end of the call-in during which participants will be able to ask questions via the moderator. Those wishing to submit questions beforehand can do so by emailing - info@beevt.com - with the subject line reading 'BVT Web Investor Call Question.' Submitted questions will be read out by the moderator during the Q&A portion of the call.

Please access the website 10 minutes prior to the start of the call to download and install any necessary audio software. Following the call, an archived video replay will be available shortly after the call.

About Bee Vectoring Technologies International Inc.

BVT, an agriculture technology company, is a market disruptor with a significant global market opportunity in the $240 billion crop protection and fertilizer market. BVT has pioneered a natural precision agriculture system that replaces chemical pesticides and wasteful plant protection product spray applications by delivering biological pesticide alternatives to crops using commercially grown bees. BVT's award-winning technology, precision vectoring, is completely harmless to bees and allows minute amounts of naturally-derived pesticides (called biologicals) to be delivered directly to blooms, providing improved crop protection and yield results than traditional chemical pesticides - and improving the health of the soil, the microbiome and the environment. Currently, BVT has over 65 granted patents, over 35 patents pending in all major agricultural countries worldwide, and has US EPA registration of its Vectorite with CR-7 (EPA Registration No. 90641-2) for sale as a registered biological fungicide for use on the labeled crops.

Additional information can be viewed at the Company's website www.beevt.com. To receive regular news updates from the Company, subscribe at www.beevt.com/newsletter.

Company Contact:

Ashish Malik, President & CEO

info@beevt.com

Investor Contact:

Babak Pedram, Investor Relations

Virtus Advisory Group

Tel: 416-995-8651

bpedram@virtusadvisory.com

The CSE has neither approved nor disapproved the contents of this press release. The CSE does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Certain statements contained in this press release constitute "forward-looking information" as such term is defined in applicable Canadian securities legislation. The words "may", "would", "could", "should", "potential", "will", "seek", "intend", "plan", "anticipate", "believe", "estimate", "expect" and similar expressions as they relate to the Company, "annual revenue potential", are intended to identify forward-looking information. All statements other than statements of historical fact may be forward-looking information. Such statements reflect the Company's current views and intentions with respect to future events, and current information available to the Company, and are subject to certain risks, uncertainties and assumptions, including: planted acres, selling price of competitive chemical pesticides and the US to Canadian dollar exchange rate. Material factors or assumptions were applied in providing forward-looking information. Many factors could cause the actual results, performance or achievements that may be expressed or implied by such forward-looking information to vary from those described herein should one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize. These factors include changes in law, competition, litigation, the ability to implement business strategies and pursue business opportunities, state of the capital markets, the availability of funds and resources to pursue operations, new technologies, the ability to protect intellectual property rights, the ability to obtain patent protection for products, third-party intellectual property infringement claims, regulatory changes affecting products, failing research and development activities, the ability to reach and sustain profitability, dependence on business and technical experts, the ability to effectively manage business operations and growth, issuance of debt, dilution of existing securities, volatility of publicly traded securities, potential conflicts of interest, unlikelihood of dividend payments, the potential costs stemming from defending third-party intellectual property infringement claims, the ability to secure relationships with manufacturers and purchasers, as well as general economic, market and business conditions, as well as those risk factors discussed or referred to in the Company's Filing Statement dated August 14,2020, filed with the CSE and securities regulatory authorities in certain provinces of Canada and available at www.sedar.com. Should any factor affect the Company in an unexpected manner, or should assumptions underlying the forward-looking information prove incorrect, the actual results or events may differ materially from the results or events predicted. Any such forward-looking information is expressly qualified in its entirety by this cautionary statement. Moreover, the Company does not assume responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of such forward-looking information. The forward-looking information included in this press release is made as of the date of this press release and the Company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking information, other than as required by applicable law. All figures are in Canadian dollars.

###

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/74115
The Sydney property market is showing no sign of slowing down, with Channel Seven boss Bruce McWilliam selling his Bellevue Hill home in just eight days.

According to a report by realestate.com.au, the Spanish Mission-style investment property was recently sold for over $9million.

The five-bedroom home was listed with an $8.5million price guide, but is believed to have 'sold well above' that.

Sold: The Sydney property market is showing no sign of slowing down, with Channel Seven boss Bruce McWilliam (pictured outside the Channel Seven office in Sydney in February 2014) selling his Bellevue Hill home in just eight days

The property sits on a 645 square-metre block, with the home built over three levels and offering 'glimpses' of Sydney Harbour.

Speaking to the Wentworth Courier, McWilliam said it was an opportune time to offload the property.

'The market seems strong - there's a shortage of stock,' the Seven Network commercial director explained.

Tidy profit: According to a report by realestate.com.au, the Spanish Mission-style investment property was recently sold for over $9million

Life of luxury: The property sits on a 645 square-metre block, with the home built over three levels and offering 'glimpses' of Sydney Harbour

'And I think people value Bellevue Hill and they value Woollahra - it's hard to get a house.'

McWilliam is estimated to own around $100million worth of residential property in Sydney's eastern suburbs, as well as commercial property in Double Bay.

He bought the Bellevue Hill home in his wife, Nicole McWilliam's name back in 2007 for $4.72million, and was renting it out for $4000 per week.

Moving on: Speaking to the Wentworth Courier, McWilliam said it was an opportune time to offload the property

Making bank: The five-bedroom home was listed with an $8.5million price guide, but is believed to have 'sold well above' that

Speaking about his decision to sell the property, McWilliam said simply: 'Sometimes you have to refresh the portfolio.'

He bought another property in Bellevue Hill for $5.4million in November last year, which is in need of renovations.

McWilliam lives in a property in Point Piper, close to his good friend and former business partner, Malcolm Turnbull.
VANCOUVER, BC & TORONTO, ON / ACCESSWIRE / February 10, 2021 / Silver Elephant Mining Corp. ("ELEF") today announced that ELEF has filed an early warning report under National Instrument 62-103 - The Early Warning System And Related Take-Over Bid And Insider Reporting Issues ("NI 62-103") in connection with its acquisition (the "Acquisition") of 40,000,000 common shares ("Shares") of Victory Nickel Inc. ("VN").

On January 21, 2021, ELEF and VN entered into an asset purchase agreement (the "APA") whereby, among other things, ELEF agreed to subscribe for and purchase, on a private placement basis, 40,000,000 Shares at a deemed price of $0.025 per Share for aggregate consideration of $1,000,000 concurrent with the closing of the asset purchase under the APA, all of which occurred on February 8, 2021.

Immediately prior to the Acquisition, ELEF held no securities in VN. Immediately following the Acquisition, ELEF held 40,000,000 Shares which represents approximately 29.0% of the issued and outstanding Shares on a non-diluted basis. All 40,000,000 Shares are held directly by ELEF and no joint actor of ELEF holds any securities of VN.

ELEF acquired Shares for investment purposes. ELEF intends to evaluate its investment in VN and to increase or decrease its shareholdings from time to time as it may deem appropriate.

ELEF and VN have entered into a voting trust agreement in respect of the Shares acquired by ELEF whereby ELEF has agreed it shall either vote the Shares held by ELEF in accordance with the direction of VN or shall abstain from voting such Shares.

An early warning report will be filed by ELEF in accordance with applicable securities laws and will be available on SEDAR under the VN's profile at www.sedar.com or may be obtained directly from the ELEF upon request at the telephone number below. The head office of VN is located at 80 Richmond Street West, Suite 1802, Toronto, Ontario M5H 2A4 and the Shares are traded on the Canadian Securities Exchange. The head office of ELEF is located at Suite 1610 - 409 Granville Street, Vancouver, British Columbia V6C 1T2. There are no joint actors in connection with the Acquisition.

Contact Information:

John Lee, Chief Executive Officer,

Silver Elephant Mining Corp.

604 569-3661

jlee@silverelef.com

SOURCE: Silver Elephant Mining Corp.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/628881/Silver-Elephant-Mining-Corp-Files-Early-Warning-Report-in-Respect-of-Victory-Nickel-Inc
HOUSTON, Feb. 10, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- C-Bond Systems (the Company or C-Bond) (OTC: CBNT), a nanotechnology solutions company, today announced that it has retained world-renowned chemist and nanotechnology expert Professor Andrew R. Barron to initiate a strategic technology development project: self-healing glass for the automotive sector. The objective of the development will be to create a new nano-liquid chemical solution (Liquid) that repairs visible chips and cracks in windshield glass to reduce replacements and simplify repairs.



C-Bond and Professor Andrew R. Barron, the founder of the Energy Safety Institute (ESRI) at Swansea University in the United Kingdom, are launching the development of a new Liquid that can be applied to a windshield that flows into cracks at the nano-scale and provides an active bond after being exposed to a heat source thus reforming the glass rather than filling with a resin, which is how windshields are currently repaired. A major problem with resin repair is that it relies on the bonding between the resin and the glass and the strength of the resin to replace the strength of the glass. The bonding of a typical resin to glass requires a highly clean surface, which is difficult to ensure, and thus, subsequent failure ordinarily occurs at the glass-resin interface.

The goal of this new Liquid is to be able to heal visible chips and cracks in a windshield after they occur, making it different than C-Bonds current windshield strengthener, C-Bond nanoShield, which is focused on preventing windshield chips and cracks by filling in and repairing microscopic defects on the glass surface.

At our core, we are a technology development company with an IP portfolio value of $33.7 million, stated Scott R. Silverman, Chairman and CEO of C-Bond. We have some of the best scientists in the world working on this project and expect meaningful milestones throughout the remainder of the year, including a patent filing. Although we continue to focus significant efforts on commercializing our products and are generating revenue from those products, we remain committed to expanding our strong IP portfolio, concluded Silverman.

Professor Barron is the founder and director of the Energy Safety Research Institute (ESRI) at Swansea University in the United Kingdom and the Ser Cymru Chair of Low Carbon Energy and Environment. Educated at Imperial College (London), Professor Barron has held posts at Rice University, University of Texas at Austin, and Harvard University. He is the author of over 500 publications, 50 Patents, 8 books, and is the recipient of numerous awards including the Star of Asia International Award, Humboldt Senior Scientist Research Award, and the first Welch Foundation Norman Hackerman Award.

The annual market for automotive glass replacement services in the U.S. exceeded $5 billion in 2016, and is expected to surpass $8 billion by 2025, according to IbisWorld. Approximately 15 million windshields are replaced in the U.S. every year.

Conference Call Details:

To listen to the live call, please dial 877-830-2591 within the U.S. or 785-424-1738 internationally. The conference ID for the live call is 22663. For those unable to participate in the live call, a replay will be available from February 10, 2021 at approximately 1:00 pm EST to February 17, 2021 at 11:59 pm EST. To listen to the replay, please dial 844-488-7474 within the U.S. or 862-902-0129 internationally. The conference ID for the replay is 29211254.

About C-Bond

C-Bond Systems, Inc. (OTC: CBNT) is a Houston-based advanced nanotechnology company and marketer of the patented and patent-pending C-Bond technology, developed in conjunction with Rice University and independently proven to significantly strengthen glass in key automotive and structural applications. The Companys Transportation Solutions Group sells C-Bond nanoShield, a liquid solution applied directly to automotive windshields, sold through distributors. The Companys Safety Solutions Group sells ballistic-resistant glass solutions directly to private enterprises, schools, hospitals, and government agencies. The Company also sells disinfection products, including MB-10 Tablets. For more information, please visit our website: www.cbondsystems.com, Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cbondsys/ and Twitter: https://twitter.com/CBond_Systems.

Forward-Looking Statements

Statements in this press release about our future expectations, including the likelihood that the objective of the development will be to create a new Liquid that repairs visible chips and cracks in windshield glass to reduce replacements and simplify repairs; the likelihood that we are launching the development of a new Liquid that can be applied to a windshield that flows into cracks at the nano-scale and provides an active bond after being exposed to a heat source thus reforming the glass rather than filling with a resin; the likelihood that we expect meaningful milestones throughout the remainder of the year, including a patent filing; constitute "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 is defined in the Private Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties and are subject to change at any time, and our actual results could differ materially from expected results. These risks and uncertainties include, without limitation, C-Bonds ability to raise capital; the Companys ability to successfully commercialize its products; the effect of the COVID-19 global pandemic on the Companys and its customers ability to operate; the Companys ability to source materials; the Companys ability to develop self-healing glass; the Companys ability to retain key employees and consultants; as well as other risks. Additional information about these and other factors may be described in the Companys filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) including its Form 10-K filed on March 25, 2020, its Forms 10-Q filed on November 16, 2020, August 14, 2020, and May 15, 2020, and in future filings with the SEC. The Company undertakes no obligation to update or release any revisions to these forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this statement or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events, except as required by law.

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Professor Jonathan Van-Tam has claimed it's 'perfectly possible' the UK will be giving coronavirus vaccines to children by the end of the year.

England's deputy chief medical officer revealed that 'several' trials were about to get underway to test whether the current crop of Covid jabs are both safe and effective in youngsters.

The approved vaccines by Pfizer, Oxford University and Moderna, are currently only allowed to be given to adults because initial studies never included children.

There is no indication that they wouldn't be safe but a lack of concrete evidence has held regulators back from giving the move the green light.

Extremely clinically vulnerable children, such as those with terminal illnesses, can be considered for the vaccines already, but their family need to go through their GP and they are not routinely being invited like other priority groups.

Children rarely fall ill with coronavirus, which means there is not huge clamour to get under-16s vaccinated. But they can pick up and spread the disease.

Professor Van-Tam told ITV News: 'I believe most of the major manufacturers are now starting to turn their attention to whether we can do some clinical trials to prove that our vaccines are safe and effective in children.

Professor Jonathan Van-Tam has claimed it's 'perfectly possible' the UK will be giving coronavirus vaccines to children by the end of the year

'I know several (trials) are now under way looking at basically the kind of teenage group.

'And it is perfectly possible that we will have some licensed children's vaccines for Covid by the end of the year. It is perfectly possible, but not assured.'

Professor Van-Tam added: 'That shouldn't put you off, if your doctor agrees with you, that it's the right thing for your son or daughter to be vaccinated because of their vulnerability.

'But it is an individual, always an individual decision when you're using medicines and vaccines outside of the label.'

It comes as Prime Minister Boris Johnson insisted that the Government is doing 'everything we can' to return children to school by March 8.

In the Commons, he said: 'I can certainly confirm that we're going to do everything we can... to get our kids... schoolchildren back on March 8 if we possibly can.

Elderly people and patients with underlying health conditions are among the top four priority groups which make up 15million set to be vaccinated by February 15

Britain has dished out 10% of all Covid vaccines in the world with 13million people now jabbed Britain has dished out 10 per cent of the entire world's coronavirus vaccines, figures show  but critics have warned against complacency as data suggests the national rollout has 'hit a wall'. Despite its small population on the global stage, the UK has administered a whopping 13.5million out of 146million doses given out internationally. According to the statistics compiled by the Oxford University-based research platform Our World in Data, this puts Britain in third place behind only the US and China, which have far larger populations. The figures also show more doses have been dished out here than in France, Germany, Italy and Spain combined. European commission president Ursula von der Leyen today issued a grovelling apology for the EU's jab shambles, admitting the bloc acted 'late' and was 'over-confident'. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair today said the speed with which Covid jabs were developed and rolled out was an 'inspiration' but added that it was 'unfair' poorer countries were missing out due to a lack of a global strategy. Advertisement

'In the week of the 22nd we'll be setting out a road map and setting out the way forward for schools.'

It comes amid a vaccine priority row over claims council staff who work with children were offered the chance to skip the Covid vaccine queue.

Staff at council-run Reynolds Children's Day Care in Cleethorpes, North East Lincs, are among a group of authority employees said to have been offered the coronavirus jab.

This is despite the role of 'childcare worker' not being mentioned as part of the vaccine priority list.

However, bosses at North East Lincolnshire Council say staff members at the day care centre were entitled to receive the vaccine as 'front line social care workers'.

They also say the guidance has been tightened in recent days to reduce 'misunderstandings' over vaccine priority.

Frontline health staff and social workers were listed as the second priority group by the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) as part of its guidance in December.

Though the guidance did not name specific roles, it stated that frontline health and social care workers who 'provide care to vulnerable people' were to be considered as a 'high priority for vaccination'.

The guidance also stated that there was an increased risk of infection among residential care home staff, as well as those providing domiciliary care and healthcare workers.

But it did not mention childcare workers.

Instead, it stated that 'the single greatest risk of mortality from Covid is increasing age' and that only those children at 'very high risk of exposure and serious outcomes'  such as older children with severe neuro-disabilities that require residential care  should be offered vaccination at an early stage.

However, local councillor Debbie Rodwell, ward member for Sidney Sussex, where the Reynolds Day Care Centre is located, said she had received complaints about staff being offered vaccines at the childcare facility.

She said: 'A number of people have contacted me as they have not been vaccinated as Reynolds has.

'When I contacted the council they said the rules were not clear before Christmas but they have since been clarified and have tightened up the rules.

'I can understand the upset of those people who are doing the same job as those who have had the vaccine and qualify because they are classed as being on the frontline.

'It is difficult but I am not surprised when others working in children's centres or in schools who are doing the same have not been offered it.'

Another resident in the area, who asked to remain anonymous, said she was 'not happy' about the situation.

She told Grimsby Live: 'All local providers are very unhappy that the one setting giving access to the vaccine is the one that is owned by the local authority.

'All settings on the frontline are facing the same risks but have not been treated as equal.

'A lot of settings in the area are aware and not happy with the inequality of the situation.'
An Indian woman allegedly held as a slave in a squalid corner of a suburban home for eight years was found in a pool of her own urine weighing just 40kg.

The couple accused of imprisoning her allegedly lied about how they knew her when she collapsed in their Melbourne home, a court heard.

She had a temperature of just 28.5C and was suffering from sepsis when she was rushed to hospital in a serious condition in July 2015.

Traumatised and with serious medical conditions, she spent more than two months in hospital recovering - and for much of that time nobody knew her real identity.

The husband and wife, whose home she was found at, are accused of intentionally possessing the woman as a slave between July 2007 and July 2015.

The woman twice came to Melbourne from her home in Tamil Nadu, in southern India, to care for the couple's three children (pictured), then disappeared for eight years, the court heard

A trial for the couple, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, began in Victoria's Supreme Court on Wednesday.

Prosecutor Richard Maidment QC said the woman twice came to Melbourne from her home in Tamil Nadu, in southern India, to care for the couple's three children before returning in 2007.

Eight years later, paramedics found her to be emaciated, weighing just 40kg and suffering from sepsis and untreated type-two diabetes.

The wife called triple-zero after finding the woman collapsed in their Mount Waverley home, and told the operator that she only knew the woman's first name.

She said the woman had come to stay with them, but left a number of times after receiving calls from unknown people.

The couple accused of imprisoning her allegedly lied about how they knew her when she collapsed in their Melbourne home, a court heard

The woman also didn't tell the truth, later telling authorities she was still under the couple's influence and control, and that she was fearful of being illegally in Australia. Her visa expired in August 2007, and her passport in 2011.

Mr Maidment said it's alleged the husband and wife seriously interfered with her fundamental rights and freedoms, including her ability to leave their home, communicate with others and access healthcare.

He said while she didn't pay for lodging all she received in payment was 'the odd $5 or $10 note on her birthday' and some saris in exchange for cooking, cleaning, folding clothes and caring for the children.

The jury heard the woman's son-in-law had arranged for her to work for the family - under the impression she would be paid.

'In the early days she would be allowed to speak on the phone with her son-in-law and daughter two or three times a year, but from about 2012 contact slowed to almost nothing, Mr Maidment said.

The husband and wife, whose home she was found at, are accused of intentionally possessing the woman as a slave between July 2007 and July 2015

When her daughter sent an email to the couple asking for her mother to be sent back to India she received two replies.

The first simply said 'get f**ked' while the second said, in all capitals, 'tell her to go f**k herself', the court heard. Her family in India then contacted Australian authorities who launched an investigation.

Earlier the court heard visa applications for the woman included a letter to her from the couple, describing them as 'eternally grateful' for her help.

Mr Maidment said the letter was written in English, purportedly to the victim who was an illiterate Tamil speaker who didn't know English. He described it as 'window dressing'.
The new dispensary expands patient access to Florida's largest inventory of medical cannabis products

TALLAHASSEE, Fla., Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ - Trulieve Cannabis Corp. (CSE: TRUL) (OTCQX: TCNNF) ("Trulieve" or "the Company"), a leading and top-performing cannabis company based in the United States, announced today the opening of a brand-new Florida dispensary, the Company's 79th nationwide. The new location marks the Company's third in Jacksonville, expanding patient access to Florida's largest and broadest assortment of high-quality medical cannabis products.

The new Jacksonville Baymeadows dispensary supports Trulieve's goal of ensuring direct, reliable access to medical cannabis across its home state of Florida. It joins the Company's 73 other Florida dispensaries, including two additional Jacksonville locations.

"It's important to us that patients have safe, reliable access to the medications they use every day, and to continue to provide that with our newest Jacksonville dispensary," said Trulieve CEO Kim Rivers. "We view every new store opening as an opportunity to further connect with the community, especially those curious about exploring natural relief and medical cannabis. Our staff is well-trained, educated, and ready to serve patients; we encourage everyone to reach out to find out more."

In honor of the Company's brand-new dispensary, all patients  from those new to Trulieve to the dedicated Truliever community  will be eligible for a 25% in-store discount at the new Baymeadows Road dispensary on opening day. In line with policies adopted statewide, all visitors are required to wear masks for the duration of their dispensary visit. Additionally, only patients and their state-approved caregivers will be allowed inside the waiting room and dispensary at this time.

ANNOUNCING: Trulieve Jacksonville Baymeadows Grand Opening WHERE: 8355 Baymeadows Rd., Suite 103, Jacksonville, FL 32256 WHEN: Thursday, February 11, 2021, at 9:00 a.m.

In stores and online, patients will find Florida's largest selection of THC and CBD products in a variety of delivery methods, including edibles, smokable cannabis, concentrates, tinctures, topical creams, vaporizers, and more. Trulieve also offers home delivery statewide for patients and convenient in-store pickup at each of its 74 dispensaries in Florida.

To assist patients with ordering, Trulieve has made our entire catalog of products available for online ordering, with in-store pickup and statewide home delivery options available. In addition, patients can schedule a complimentary 30-minute virtual consultation with a Trulieve certified consultant to help navigate questions on products, devices, or review their doctor's recommendation.

Furthermore, to assist with CDC recommendations for social distancing and in compliance with additional company-enforced safety guidelines, several measures have been taken to ensure the health and well-being of employees and patients, including modifications to the layout of all stores, installation of plexiglass partitions and HEPA air filtration scrubbers in every dispensary, increasing access to masks and sanitizer throughout the store for staff and visitors, utilizing visual aids to direct traffic throughout the store, and increasing the frequency of deep cleanings for all dispensaries.

Trulieve is closely monitoring the coronavirus situation and will update store policies as needed to ensure the highest level of safety of our patients and staff. All updates will be shared directly on Trulieve's website as they are enacted.

The Office of Medical Marijuana Use recently announced the registry has surpassed 475,000 registered medical marijuana patients with an active ID card, with Trulieve consistently selling approximately half of the state's overall volume per the Florida Department of Health. To support the state's rapidly growing patient base, there are nearly 2,700 registered ordering physicians in the State of Florida.

For more information, please visit www.Trulieve.com.

About Trulieve

Trulieve is primarily a vertically integrated "seed-to-sale" company in the U.S. and is the first and largest fully licensed medical cannabis company in the State of Florida. Trulieve cultivates and produces all of its products in-house and distributes those products to Trulieve-branded stores (dispensaries) throughout the State of Florida, as well as directly to patients via home delivery. Trulieve also has operations in California, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Pennsylvania. Trulieve is listed on the Canadian Securities Exchange under the symbol TRUL and trades on the OTCQX market under the symbol TCNNF.

To learn more about Trulieve, visit www.Trulieve.com.

SOURCE Trulieve Cannabis Corp.

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OKLAHOMA CITY, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Oklahoma's non-profit organizations are giving a big thank you to the people of Oklahoma Oil & Natural Gas. Despite the downturn, organizations, companies and individuals from the industry have stepped up to help their fellow Oklahomans across the state.

The people of Oklahoma Oil & Natural Gas provide significant funding for state non-profits

In fact, some of the state's largest non-profits are reporting that the oil and natural gas industry accounts for a large percentage of their annual operating budgets every year, including 2020. Oklahoma philanthropies say the industry remains deeply committed to helping our communities year after year.

"The oil and gas industry is extremely important to United Way, as it is to the entire non-profit sector. Every year, the oil and gas industry gives a third of what our campaign raises," said United Way of Central Oklahoma President & CEO Debby Hampton. "We assist more than one in three central Oklahomans. There is no way we could do that without oil and natural gas."

The people of Oklahoma Oil & Natural Gas have contributed more than $60 million to the United Way of Central Oklahoma over the last ten years. In 2020, the industry contributed $4 million. From volunteer hours to financial support, the Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma says they too can depend on the industry to help provide meals for fellow Oklahomans every year.

"For the Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma, the oil and gas industry is an amazing partner for us. Just this year alone, despite the economic downturn and the struggles the industry has experienced, they have donated $1,378,155," said RFBOK CEO Stacy Dykstra. "They're generous every year to us. They are sincere believers in our mission, and they walk hand-in-hand with us to ensure Oklahomans are well fed."

The people of Oklahoma Oil & Natural Gas are also essential to funding the arts community and other enrichment and quality of life programs. In 2020 alone, they provided nearly $3 million to help support the work of Allied Arts.

"Our partnership with the oil and gas industry is critical. We simply could not serve the number of people that we are serving without their support," said Allied Arts President & CEO Deborah McAuliffe Senner. "We would not be able to grow the programs that we have grown over the years. And we certainly would not be able to attract the type of talent that we want and then also to retain the talent that we have here in Oklahoma."

The people of Oklahoma Oil & Natural Gas also fund the Oklahoma Energy Resources Board (OERB) through a voluntary one-tenth of 1 percent assessment on oil and natural gas production. Since 1993, the agency's purpose is to conduct environmental restoration of abandoned well sites and to educate Oklahomans about the importance of the petroleum industry. Learn more at OERB.com.

SOURCE The people of Oklahoma Oil & Natural Gas
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According to a press release published by United States Department of Defense on February 10, 2021, the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers USS Donald Cook (DDG 75), USS Porter (DDG 78), and a U.S. Navy P-8A from Patrol Squadron (VP) 46 participated in joint air and surface exercises with Turkish frigates TCG Orucreis (F 245) and TCG Turgutreis (F 241), and two Turkish F-16 fighters alongside reconnaissance aircraft in the Black Sea.

According to a press release published by United States Department of Defense on February 10, 2021, the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers USS Donald Cook (DDG 75), USS Porter (DDG 78), and a U.S. Navy P-8A from Patrol Squadron (VP) 46 participated in joint air and surface exercises with Turkish frigates TCG Orucreis (F 245) and TCG Turgutreis (F 241), and two Turkish F-16 fighters alongside reconnaissance aircraft in the Black Sea.

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The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Donald Cook DDG 75, sails behind the Turkish navy Yavuz-class TCG Turgutreis F-241, middle, the Turkish navy Barbaros-class frigate TCG Orucreis F-245, right, and the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Porter DDG 78 (Picture source: United States Department of Defense)

The U.S. Navy ships and aircraft joined the Turkish maritime forces in an integrated surface, air, subsurface warfare exercise. These maneuvers enhanced the tactical proficiency of the ships and aircraft through precision command and control and communication.

The four surface ships met in the Black Sea early in the morning to prepare for a full day of interoperability, demonstrating the U.S. Navys continued commitment to Turkey and NATO cooperation in the region.

First, two Turkish F-16 Fighting Falcons joined the U.S. and Turkish ships to perform an air defense exercise, where aircraft controllers onboard each ship strategically maneuvered the aircraft above. Next, the ships performed a series of tactical maneuvers, practicing precise communication and stationing skills. Finally, the group ended the day by deploying a simulated submarine and hunting for it. A U.S. P-8 Poseidon joined to practice cooperative Anti-Submarine warfare, in which surface ships utilize air assets to expand submarine searches.

The exercise provided operational proficiency in anti-submarine warfare and anti-surface warfare in order to enhance overall multi-lateral operations among NATO Allies.

Donald Cook and Porter entered the Black Sea Jan. 23 and 28, respectively. The two Forward Deployed Naval Forces - Europe (FDNF-E) have operated in the Black Sea with USNS Laramie, and NATO Air Command aircraft E-3A Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS).

The U.S. Navy routinely exercises high-end warfare with NATO Allies and partners. The Turkish Navy is a professional and proficient maritime force that the U.S. Navy routinely works with to ensure regional stability and peace. Multinational training enhances interoperability, allowing us to maintain the vigilance necessary to promote a secure and prosperous region.
24 October 2003 was the end of an era. On that day Concorde, the legendary supersonic airliner, made its final commercial flight, flying from London Heathrow to New York Citys John F. Kennedy airport. Since then no commercial supersonic airliners have operated  the regulatory, technological and commercial problems being too much to overcome. The futuristic dream of a three-hour flight between London and New York, that Concorde offered, seemed shattered.

See also Few aeroplanes land automatically but new systems could make this the norm

Now, however, almost 20 years later, we might be returning to that supersonic dream. New technological advances allow designs to succeed where Concorde failed and a range of companies and research institutes are heavily investing in a new generation of civilian supersonic aircraft. The US company Boom wants to fly a scale model of its supersonic airliner, called the Overture, in 2021, and has already raised $196 million to do it. NASA has pioneered the X-59, an experimental supersonic aircraft that lowers noise levels of the infamous sonic boom. And Aerion , in cooperation with Boeing, is developing a supersonic business jet, which could fly by 2025.

This is not just a dream anymore, said Professor Nicole Viola of the Polytechnic University of Torino in Italy, where she works on supersonic airliners. Everywhere people are working on this.

Sonic boom

One important boost behind the resurgence of civilian supersonic aircraft is that they could produce less noise and reduce the problem of a sonic boom.

When an immobile object, such as a stereo, produces sound, its sound waves spread in all directions. If they were visible to the naked eye, these waves would look similar to what happens when a stone is dropped in a pond, with little waves spreading in concentric circles.

When an aeroplane goes supersonic, however, it moves ahead of the sound it produces. This leads to its soundwaves trailing behind the aircraft in a cone-like shape, similar to the waves trailing behind a boat. An approaching supersonic aircraft is inaudible, but when it crosses the observer, they get hit by a sudden, boom-like sound of concentrated sound waves that is quite uncomfortable. In some cases these booms can cause damage to buildings and supersonic military jets flying over land have even been known to break windows.

This means that in most countries, routine supersonic flight is banned over land, severely limiting the potential routes of a civilian supersonic plane. For this reason, Concorde only flew routes that were largely over water.

New designs, however, are pioneering so-called low-boom technology.

The (intensity) of the sonic boom is mainly dependent on the aerodynamic shape of the plane, explained Gerald Carrier, senior aerodynamicist at French aerospace lab ONERA. He was involved in a project called RUMBLE, which gathered evidence around the noise emitted by sonic booms and low-boom aircraft for regulatory authorities.

Carrier notes that, by shaping the geometry of the plane, the loudness of the boom can be reduced from more than 100 decibels for Concorde, similar to listening to a jackhammer, to 70-80 decibels for the new designs, about the sound of a vacuum cleaner.

Proper shaping of the aircraft with characteristics like a very long front nose can reduce noise. By mastering this we can sculpt the sound signature of the aircraft and make the boom less annoying.

For now, low-boom civilian aircraft are still theoretical, although theyre getting closer to launch. Boom hopes to fly a one-third scale model of their design in 2021 and NASA wants to start flight tests of the X-59 in 2022. Carrier compares the noise new low-boom designs would make to very distant fireworks. People would still hear it, but its not window-breaking loud.

Low-boom became possible because of advances in tools and research. New computers programs make it easier to simulate the properties of an aircraft and experiment with 3D-shapes. And since the 1960s, when Concorde was designed, we know much more about sonic booms. We benefit from decades of new research and developments, said Carrier.

Yet even this new generation of supersonic aircraft will still produce noise, and regulation needs to be crafted for these low-boom designs. The RUMBLE project simulated how much sound these new aircraft would produce and what the effect would be on buildings, measured sonic booms with Russian military aircraft and even studied the effect on humans.

We looked at how people reacted to different levels of sonic booms, so called psycho-acoustic studies, said Carrier. Specifically, they put speakers next to a house in which test subjects were located. From time to time these speakers produced sounds similar to a sonic boom. The test subjects then had to report how this affected their wellbeing, capacity to do tasks and ability to sleep. Based on these results, governments can decide how much noise is acceptable from these new aircraft.

We want to help define regulations that can limit the sonic boom of new aircraft to an acceptable level for humans, said Carrier. These regulations might then allow supersonic aircraft to fly over land, dramatically expanding the routes they can service.

Proper shaping of the aircraft with characteristics like a very long front nose can reduce noise. Gerald Carrier, senior aerodynamicist, ONERA

Mach

In Torino, Prof. Viola will be exploring another way to test sonic boom in her project MOREandLESS, which has just kicked off and will run for four years. In one experiment, researchers will shoot small projectiles in the shape of planes out of a gun on a large, outdoor testing track. The projectiles achieve a sonic boom, which is then measured by microphones situated around the track to see what different designs will do for the noise. We will investigate a wide range of speeds, from Mach 2 to 5, said Prof. Viola.

Mach is the unit of speed for supersonic aircraft. Mach 1 means that the aircraft goes as fast as the speed of sound at that location, which can differ based on the local temperature, which, in turn, is mainly dependent on altitude (the higher up in the atmosphere, the lower temperatures are). At sea level, with a temperature of 15C, Mach 1 is located at 340.3 metres per second or 1225.08 km per hour. At an altitude of 11,000 metres, that becomes 295 metres per second or 1062 km per hour. Supersonic is generally designated as the area between Mach 1 and 5, or 1 to 5 times the speed of sound. The Boom Overture, for example, is planned to maintain a Mach 2.2 speed, similar to the cruising speed of Concorde.

Prof. Viola is also studying fuel options - another key issue that new supersonic civilian aircraft will face. One of the reasons why Concorde was uneconomical was its high fuel consumption, especially during low-speed phases of flight. And although the new generation of supersonic aircraft designs have reduced fuel use through interventions like more economical engines and better aerodynamics, they would still spend more than a regular, subsonic jet, producing problems of pollution and climate impact.

A key way to reduce this is new forms of fuel. Emissions of course depend on the type of engine, said Prof. Viola. But they also depend on the fuel, and the chemical processes at the basis of combustion.

For Prof. Viola, two candidates for more sustainable fuels spring out: biofuels and liquid hydrogen. Hydrogen is candidate number 1, said Prof. Viola, because it doesnt produce CO2 emissions. But biofuels, which are derived from biomass such as plants or waste, are also still in the running, possibly mixed in with regular jet fuel.

Economics

But for all the new technology, what will make or break the new generation of supersonic is economics. The last straw for Concorde was that the economics just weren't viable, said Dr Turab Zaidi, who jointly leads the Aerospace Systems Design Lab at Georgia Tech Lorraine, which is located in Metz, France. British Airways and Air France just couldn't stand the amount of money they were losing.

Dr Zaidi investigated whether that situation will shift in the future for the project OASyS, and whether airlines can profitably operate these new aircraft. In the project they developed two scenarios for supersonic airliners in the period between 2035 and 2050, and their conclusion seems cautiously optimistic.

Across the scenarios we found that a market does exist, said Dr Zaidi. It's not as high as some of the manufacturers are projecting. But granting certain assumptions, there is a market.

Their study starts from the current aviation market and projects how it will evolve, taking into account economic growth, which will most likely produce an increase in the use of airlines. It then calculates the size of the group of consumers who would take these supersonic aircraft, such as business passengers wanting fast connections or tourists who now pay for the premium offerings of airlines.

However, this potential market relies on a range of assumptions on how supersonic aircraft will evolve, such as fuel efficiency and regulation.

For the high-demand scenario, we assumed land overflight is permitted, said Dr Zaidi. That is one of the big constraints on a high-demand scenario. When you don't allow land overflight, you severely limit the amount of destinations and force planes to fly slower when over land, reducing fuel efficiency.'

Nevertheless, in general, Dr Zaidi seems optimistic. A lot of the things that ended Concorde have shifted, he said. The demand for fast airline connections never went away since then and we might see a resurgence now.

The research in this article was funded by the EU. If you liked this article, please consider sharing it on social media.
A pair of men are in custody after a human trafficking sting last week in south Montgomery County that reportedly freed four, including a minor, from sex slavery.

Joshua Albert Regalado, 29, of Richmond, and Jamin Renfroe, 45, of Cordova, Tenn., are charged with promotion of prostitution, a third-degree felony. Both are held at the Montgomery County Jail, according to jail records.

The three-day operation carried out in Shenandoah was spearheaded by the Texas Department of Public Safety, according to a release from the police department.

The goal of the operation was to rescue victims being forced into sex slavery and to arrest those responsible, read a statement from the Shenandoah Police Department.

Law enforcement on Feb. 3 apprehended Regalado, Renfroe and a third person for allegedly forcing four, including a child, into sex work, according to Shenandoah Police spokesman Sgt. Joel Gordon.

The third person arrested and identified by officials was not listed as facing charges in court records for the stings three participating counties. A fourth alleged sex trafficker escaped custody following a vehicle pursuit that ended in a crash on FM 1960 in Houston, Gordon said.

An additional missing child was recovered during the operation, according to Shenandoah PD.

Regalado is also charged with possession of a firearm by a felon, a third-degree felony. He is being held on a combined $100,000 bond, while Renfroe has no listed bond, jail records show.

Regalado has convictions for drug possession in Bexar and Montgomery counties. He has two 2018 convictions for possessing a firearm as a felon.

Gordon explained Shenandoah was chosen for the multi-agency operation because of its close proximity to Harris County.

With the way human trafficking and sex work is being handled now because of the internet, it can happen anywhere. People just go online and unfortunately its almost like ordering a pizza, Gordon said. Its everywhere because of the internet.

Multiple law enforcement agencies involved the Montgomery County Sheriffs Office, the Conroe Police Department, the district attorneys offices of Montgomery County, Harris County and Fort Bend County. Others involved were the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission, the Childrens Safe Harbor and Texas Forensic Nurse Examiners. according to the news release.

jose.gonzalez@chron.com

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Q1 2021 Consolidated Highlights:

Production of 18,398 gold equivalent ounces (14,127 gold ounces, 2.0 million copper pounds and 55,333 silver ounces).

Revenue of $27.8 million . Average realized gold price per ounce of $1,868 and copper price per pound of $3.29 .

. Average realized gold price per ounce of and copper price per pound of . EBITDA of $7.3 million .

. Free cash flow of $5.1 million .

. Cash balance of $15.6 million as at December 31, 2020 .

as at . Cash Operating Costs ("COC") and All in Sustaining Costs ("AISC") of $1,051 and $1,467 .

Juan Gavidia, CEO of Orvana Minerals stated: "I am proud of the Company's achievements this quarter, notwithstanding the challenging COVID-19 restrictions, both pursuant to our internal policies and governmental regulations, of which we strictly follow for the safety and good health of our teams. At $5 million free cash flow, we were able to generate one of our highest quarters of free cash flow, allowing us funding exploration and developmental initiatives at our three business units. Orvana is on track to meet its annual guidance, and in excellent shape to keep executing its long term value creation strategies".

TORONTO, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ - Orvana Minerals Corp. (TSX: ORV) (the "Company" or "Orvana") announced today financial and operational results for the first quarter of fiscal 2021 ("Q1 2021").

OroValle

Quarterly gold production of 14,127 ounces, 5% higher than previous quarter due to 9% higher throughput, partially off-set by 4% lower grade.

Copper production was 2.0 million pounds, 15% higher than previous quarter, due to higher throughput and grade.

On track to meet production guidance.

Revenue of $27.8 million .

. OroValle COC & AISC of $954 and $1,191 .

and . Drilling:

Orovalle drilled 7,214 meters in El Valle in first quarter of fiscal 2021; 4,002 meters were infill drilling and 3,212 meters were in brownfield drilling.



Lidia Program commenced on schedule in the first quarter of fiscal 2021 and permitting for Ortosa Godan is in progress.

Taguas

After the completion of the fieldwork campaign in December 2020 , preparations are underway for 5,000 meters DDH drilling. Subject to the completion of all the required permitting and paperwork, and assuming no activities restriction in Argentina due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the program will be completed between February and April 2021 .

, preparations are underway for 5,000 meters DDH drilling. Subject to the completion of all the required permitting and paperwork, and assuming no activities restriction in due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the program will be completed between February and . A new Mineral Resource Estimate is being updated in compliance with Canadian National Instrument 43-101, by Geosim Services Inc, an independent consulting firm, by February 2021 .

EMIPA

As a result of latest metallurgical testing showing positive results for the Oxides Stockpile Project (OSP), a pilot program is being developed, with final conclusions expected in late fiscal 2021.

New reprocessing and interpretation of historical geological data was completed in December 2020 . Areas of interest will be subject to non-drilling exploration fieldwork during the next three quarters of fiscal 2021. The goal is to develop drilling targets for fiscal 2022 within the most prospective areas of the Don Mario Complex.

Selected Q1 2021 Consolidated Operational and Financial Information



Q1 2021 Q4 2020 Q1 2020 FY 2020 Operating Performance







Gold







Grade (g/t) 2.60 2.70 2.42 2.56 Recovery (%) 92.6 93.3 92.2 93.1 Production (oz) 14,127 13,422 15,815 53,421 Sales (oz) 12,085 14,784 18,663 55,344 Average realized price / oz $1,868 $1,891 $1,473 $1,647 Copper







Grade (%) 0.63 0.58 0.36 0.45 Recovery (%) 81.6 83.4 71.5 80.8 Production ('000 lbs) 2,044 1,780 892 5,611 Sales ('000 lbs) 1,645 1,971 1,051 5,512 Average realized price / lb 3.29 2.93 2.64 2.68 Financial Performance (in 000's, except per share amounts)





Revenue $27,815 $32,586 $29,020 $101,994 Mining costs $17,657 $22,392 $26,004 $82,240 Gross margin $6,263 $3,290 ($2,613) ($2,114) Net income (loss) $1,919 $8,640 ($2,745) ($1,592) Net income (loss) per share (basic/diluted) $0.01 $0.06 ($0.02) ($0.01) EBITDA $7,282 $7,255 $1,515 $9,544 Operating cash flows before non-cash working capital changes $7,494 $4,304 $2,108 $8,959 Operating cash flows $5,087 $13,392 $2,176 $11,435 Free Cash Flow $5,087 $602 $328 $278 Ending cash and cash equivalents $15,562 $15,572 $8,135 $15,572 Capital expenditures (2) $2,407 $3,702 $1,780 $8,681 Cash operating costs (by-product) ($/oz) gold $1,051 $1,241 $1,207 $1,278 All-in sustaining costs (by-product) ($/oz) gold $1,467 $1,609 $1,370 $1,582 All-in costs (by-product) ($/oz) gold $1,518 $1,643 $1,382 $1,614

Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization ("EBITDA"), free cash flow, cash operating costs, all-in sustaining costs and all-in costs are non-IFRS performance measures.

Capital expenditures are presented in the consolidated cash flows in the Audited Financials on a cash basis.

ABOUT ORVANA - Orvana is a multi-mine gold-copper-silver company. Orvana's assets consist of the producing El Valle and Carles gold-copper-silver mines in northern Spain, and the Don Mario gold-silver property in Bolivia, currently in care and maintenance. Orvana is in the process of completing the registration of transfer documents with the mining authorities in connection with the acquisition of Taguas, Argentina. Additional information is available at Orvana's website (www.orvana.com).

Cautionary Statements - Forward-Looking Information

Certain statements made herein constitute forward-looking statements or forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities laws ("forward-looking statements"). Any statements that express or involve discussions with respect to predictions, expectations, beliefs, plans, projections, objectives, assumptions, potentials, future events or performance (often, but not always, using words or phrases such as "believes", "expects", "plans", "estimates", "intends" or "anticipates" or stating that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might", "will" or "are projected to" be taken or achieved) are not statements of historical fact, but are forward-looking statements.

The forward-looking statements herein relate to, among other things: Orvana's ability to achieve improvement in free cash flow; the potential to extend the mine life of El Valle and Don Mario beyond their current life-of-mine estimates including specifically, but not limited to in the case of Don Mario, the processing of the mineral stockpiles and the reprocessing of the tailings material; Orvana's ability to optimize its assets to deliver shareholder value; the Company's ability to optimize productivity at Don Mario and El Valle; any measures taken by the Company to prevent and/or mitigate the impact of COVID-19 and other infectious diseases at or near the Company's mines and support the sustainability of its business including through the development of crisis management plans, increasing stock levels for key supplies, monitoring of guidance from the medical community, and engagement with local communities and authorities; estimates of future production, operating costs and capital expenditures; mineral resource and reserve estimates; statements and information regarding future feasibility studies and their results; future transactions (including the completion of the acquisition of Taguas and subsequent results of any exploration work on Taguas); future metal prices; the ability to achieve additional growth and geographic diversification; future financial performance, including the ability to increase cash flow and profits; future financing requirements; and mine development plans. Forward-looking statements are necessarily based upon a number of estimates and assumptions that, while considered reasonable by the Company as of the date of such statements, are inherently subject to significant business, economic and competitive uncertainties and contingencies. The estimates and assumptions of the Company contained or incorporated by reference in this news release, which may prove to be incorrect, include, but are not limited to, the various assumptions set forth herein and in Orvana's most recently filed Management's Discussion & Analysis and Annual Information Form in respect of the Company's most recently completed fiscal year (the "Company Disclosures") or as otherwise expressly incorporated herein by reference as well as: there being no significant disruptions affecting operations, whether due to labour disruptions, supply disruptions, power disruptions, damage to equipment or otherwise; permitting, development, operations, expansion and acquisitions at El Valle and Don Mario being consistent with the Company's current expectations; political developments in any jurisdiction in which the Company operates being consistent with its current expectations; certain price assumptions for gold, copper and silver; prices for key supplies being approximately consistent with current levels; production and cost of sales forecasts meeting expectations; the accuracy of the Company's current mineral reserve and mineral resource estimates; and labour and materials costs increasing on a basis consistent with Orvana's current expectations.

A variety of inherent risks, uncertainties and factors, many of which are beyond the Company's control, affect the operations, performance and results of the Company and its business, and could cause actual events or results to differ materially from estimated or anticipated events or results expressed or implied by forward looking statements. Some of these risks, uncertainties and factors include the effect of COVID-19 and other infectious diseases on the Company's operations, workforce and supply chain, fluctuations in the price of gold, silver and copper; the need to recalculate estimates of resources based on actual production experience; the failure to achieve production estimates; variations in the grade of ore mined; variations in the cost of operations; the availability of qualified personnel; the Company's ability to obtain and maintain all necessary regulatory approvals and licenses; the Company's ability to use cyanide in its mining operations; risks generally associated with mineral exploration and development, including the Company's ability to continue to operate the El Valle and/or Don Mario and/or ability to resume long-term operations at the Carles Mine; the Company's ability to successfully implement a sulphidization circuit and ancillary facilities to process the current oxides stockpiles at Don Mario; the Company's ability to acquire and develop mineral properties and to successfully integrate such acquisitions; the Company's ability to execute on its strategy; the Company's ability to obtain financing when required on terms that are acceptable to the Company; challenges to the Company's interests in its property and mineral rights; current, pending and proposed legislative or regulatory developments or changes in political, social or economic conditions in the countries in which the Company operates; general economic conditions worldwide; and the risks identified in the Company's disclosures. This list is not exhaustive of the factors that may affect any of the Company's forward-looking statements and reference should also be made to the Company's Disclosures for a description of additional risk factors.

Any forward-looking statements made herein with respect to the anticipated development and exploration of the Company's mineral projects are intended to provide an overview of management's expectations with respect to certain future activities of the Company and may not be appropriate for other purposes.

Forward-looking statements are based on management's current plans, estimates, projections, beliefs and opinions and, except as required by law, the Company does not undertake any obligation to update forward-looking statements should assumptions related to these plans, estimates, projections, beliefs and opinions change. Readers are cautioned not to put undue reliance on forward-looking statements.

SOURCE Orvana Minerals Corp.

Related Links

www.orvana.com



Letters of Offer for a 15m investment scheme aiming to improve the sustainability of Northern Irish farming businesses have now been issued out.

The third tranche of Tier 1 FBIS Capital attracted over 3,800 applications, according to the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs (DAERA).

This tranche of Tier 1 will support smaller scale investments to improve farms' sustainability, with an emphasis on businesses investing in Low Emissions Slurry Spreading Equipment (LESSE).

LESSE can play a significant part in increasing the nutrient available for crop growth from slurry application, DAERA says.

It also plays a role in reducing ammonia emissions and reduces the potential for water contamination and nuisance odours.

The Letters of Offer will now enable farmers to progress to the next stage of their project.

NI's Agriculture Minister Gordon Lyons said: Not only does this fund immediately benefit farmers, it also has a lasting and positive impact on our environment.

"It will also have a knock-on benefit for local agricultural and horticultural supply businesses and contribute to the NI economy.

With 15million funding available for this tranche, Letters of Offer will continue to issue over the next weeks until the budget is fully allocated.

DAERA says it is important that farmers complete and return their Form of Acceptance no later than 28 days from the date of the Letter of Offer.
Yangon: Protesters returned to the streets of Myanmar on Wednesday (February 10) after the most violent day yet in demonstrations against the military coup that halted a tentative transition to democracy under elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

The United States and United Nations condemned the use of force against protesters, who demanded the reversal of the coup and the release of Suu Kyi and other detained leaders of her National League for Democracy (NLD) and activists.

"We cannot stay quiet," youth leader Esther Ze Naw told Reuters. "If there is blood shed during our peaceful protests, then there will be more if we let them take over the country."

Thousands of people joined demonstrations in the main city of Yangon. In the capital Naypyitaw, hundreds of government workers marched in support of a growing civil disobedience campaign, which was started by the health workers.

A doctor revealed that one of the protesters was expected to die from a gunshot wound to the head after the Tuesdays protests. She was wounded when police fired guns, mostly in the air, to clear protesters in Naypyitaw. Three other people were being treated for wounds from suspected rubber bullets, doctors added.

Protesters were also hurt in Mandalay and other cities, where security forces used water cannons and arrested dozens. The state media reported injuries to police during their attempts to disperse protesters, who were accused of throwing stones and bricks.

The military has imposed restrictions on gatherings and a night curfew in the country's biggest cities.

The U.S. State Department said it was reviewing assistance to Myanmar to ensure those responsible for the coup face "significant consequences".

"We repeat our calls for the military to relinquish power, restore democratically elected government, release those detained and lift all telecommunication restrictions and to refrain from violence," spokesman Ned Price said in Washington.

The United Nations called on Myanmar's security forces to respect people's right to protest peacefully.

"The use of disproportionate force against demonstrators is unacceptable," Ola Almgren, the U.N. representative in Myanmar, said.

The protests are the largest in Myanmar in more than a decade, reviving memories of almost half a century of direct army rule and spasms of bloody uprisings until the military began relinquishing some power in 2011.

Avinash Paliwal, a senior lecturer in international relations at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, said Myanmar will not be as isolated now as it was in the past, with China, India, ASEAN and Japan unlikely to cut ties.

"The country is too important geo-strategically for that to happen. The U.S. and other Western countries will put sanctions - but this coup and its ramifications will be an Asian story, not a Western one," Paliwal said.

CRITICAL CONDITION

A doctor in Naypyitaw said the woman who was shot in the head with a live bullet remained in a critical condition but was not expected to survive. Social media video verified by Reuters showed her with other protesters some distance from a row of riot police as a water cannon sprayed and several shots could be heard.

The woman, wearing a motorcycle helmet, suddenly collapsed. Pictures of her helmet showed what appeared to be a bullet hole.

Myanmar`s army took power citing allegations of fraud in a November 8 election that Suu Kyis NLD party won by a landslide. The electoral commission dismissed the armys complaints.

Late on Tuesday, police raided the NLDs headquarters in Yangon during the hours of a military-imposed curfew, elected lawmakers said.

Suu Kyi's party had been due to start a second term on the day of the coup.

Alongside the protests, a civil disobedience movement has affected hospitals, schools and government offices. Staff from the electricity and power ministry in Naypyitaw were among the latest to join the civil disobedience movement on Wednesday, February 10.

Activist Min Ko Naing called in a Facebook post on all government workers to join the disobedience campaign, and for people to take note of who did not participate.

"We need to praise them and we need to protect them. We also need to prepare to take action sometime later to those who threatened and oppressed."

Protesters demands now go beyond reversing the coup.

They also seek the abolition of a 2008 constitution drawn up under military supervision that gave the generals a veto in parliament and control of several ministries, and for a federal system in ethnically diverse Myanmar.

Suu Kyi won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 for campaigning for democracy and spent nearly 15 years under house arrest.

Reportedly, The 75-year-old faces charges of illegally importing six walkie-talkies and is being held in detention until February 15. Her lawyer said he has not been allowed to see her.

Suu Kyi remains hugely popular at home despite damage to her international reputation over the plight of the Muslim Rohingya minority.

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Residents temporarily evacuated from Homestead after fire, no injuries

A Saturday afternoon fire in an apartment at a senior living complex was quickly extinguished and nobody was injured.
opinion

The latest Ugandan government shutdown of the Internet emphasised the fact that this global system of computer networks is not a luxury, but a necessity for our country.

Not just social lives, but business came to a standstill. Some youth coined a phrase "living in the bush," referring to how the five-day shutdown pushed them to a much earlier time of living in Uganda.

As with other places around the world, Ugandans use social media for work and for connecting with friends and relatives.

Individuals, churches, organisations, education institutions and businesses entities have WhatsApp groups and other virtual forums where they discuss developmental and social matters pertaining to their lives.

Last year, we formed a WhatsApp group of our neighbourhood. Its purpose was to mobilise funds for repairing a road leading to our homes.

Modern journalists need Internet in order to serve the prosumer audience, which is no longer passive or just consuming content.

The Internet has made the world a global village and in this age of advanced technology and Internet, it is hard to imagine that a business can run its operations efficiently without an Internet connection. People using Safe Boda, online shopping, education, etc, have all been brought to a standstill.

But, how much investment are we setting aside for Internet expansion and affordability?

According to the 2020 National Population Council report, Uganda has 42, 039,486 people. The Gobal Digital Insights report says there were 10.7 million Internet users in Uganda in January 2020, and the number of Internet users increased by 3.5 per cent between 2019 and 2020.

It further says Internet penetration in Uganda stood at 24 per cent. Simple mathematics shows that more than 31 million Ugandans do not have access to the Internet.

Yet this is an important tool that has several uses such as education and self-improvement, job creation, and social networks, among others. Individuals and corporations use the Internet.

I appreciate the fact that in the Western world, mobile phones have broadband Internet connection, multi-media functions, location awareness, etc. This is different from Africa where a significant number of people still use phones for mainly voice communication.

We need to upscale our Internet uptake. There is need for the country to effectively plan for wider Internet coverage throughout the nation because an empowered population will lead to information literacy and informed decisions.

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Among the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Goal 9 aims to 'significantly increase access to ICT and strive to provide universal and affordable access to the Internet in least developed countries by 2020.'

The Internet is essential for monitoring this economic and social political growth. This is not something that we can achieve in a short amount of time but we need to deliberately plan and set aside funds to expand this public good which is a necessity because it is a driver to information.

Education institutions ought to deliberately and practically include the study of Internet and other application in their curriculum.

Currently, most schools simply teach children how to switch on and off a computer and create a word document.

This is not enough because they are left to discover the Internet on their own and this could be one of the reasons that we do not use it positively.

The Internet should be a basic part of life in Uganda and for more Ugandans. We should make it available just like the rural electrification programme.

The government needs to subsidise the cost of the Internet such that even the local people can access it.

Mr Obonyo is the communications and marketing manager, Uganda Christian University.
Business leaders here are asking the Irish Government to help secure an early announcement of an extension to Brexit grace periods.

Dublin says it wants to ensure European officials are aware of the impact of decisions on Northern Ireland, while Foreign Minister Simon Coveney has spoken in favour of "modest extensions".

Talks between Irish officials and the European Commission were due to take place yesterday.

But for some industry representatives it is not enough, and they argue all parties need to move faster.

"The difficulty is that if they do not move sooner rather than later it would seem that they do not want any discussions on this," said John Martin of the Road Haulage Association.

In a statement last night to the Belfast Telegraph, the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs said its officials are "keeping in very close contact at all levels with the Commission to ensure that appropriate consideration of impacts on the protocol takes place, including in respect of future proposed legislation".

In response to questions on whether Dublin will explicitly advocate or ask for extensions, a spokesperson said: "There are different types of legislation at EU level and different processes in each case.

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"We are working to ensure that whatever the process, there is a good awareness of possible impacts on Northern Ireland in all cases."

According to RTE, Michael Gove, the UK minister responsible for Brexit, sent a letter to the European Commission demanding changes to the NI Protocol and an extension to the two grace periods - one currently set to end in March, the other in June.

The letter, particularly its tone, angered EU officials, according to the RTE report.

The discussions between Irish officials and the European Commission follows the dispute over vaccines after Article 16 of the protocol was briefly invoked to ensure supplies did not cross the border from the Republic to Northern Ireland.

Article 16 allows the UK and the EU to act unilaterally if the application of the protocol is leading to "economic, societal or environmental difficulties".

These difficulties must be both serious and "liable to persist".

The Irish Government wants to make sure future proposed EU legislation is "scanned for any potential impact on Northern Ireland... so that potential complications caused by Northern Ireland effectively being in two internal markets at the same time are spotted early and avoided", according to RTE.

Mr Coveney has indicated that Dublin is open to "modest extensions", but businesses here want the Irish Government to explicitly advocate that and ask for it to happen.

"I am open to advocating for modest extensions or grace periods when appropriate to try to reassure people we are listening to them and, secondly, to ensure that business can operate as best they can under the protocol," Mr Coveney said.

"That is not the same thing as scrapping the protocol."

Hauliers have reported serious problems, particularly in relation to groupage and the movement of food and live animals, and Mr Martin said there needed to be extensions.

"We are advocating for an extension to the grace period to look at all the requirements between GB and NI, for parties to review or eliminate," he said.

He added that the extensions should be for all movements, as the easements now in place largely benefit bigger retailers and wholesalers, rather than smaller businesses.

The call for extensions was echoed by the hospitality industry, which noted that the movement of goods between Britain and Northern Ireland is not close to full capacity due to the closure of most businesses due to the pandemic.

"We definitely need the grace period extended," Hospitality Ulster chief executive Colin Neill said.

"It is about making the protocol work, but there are challenges and the supply issues need to be addressed."

He added: "The UK has to negotiate itself, but we do hope that the Irish use their good offices to help solve the problems."
Tyson Foods has acquired a minority stake in the poultry arm of Malaysia-based food group Malayan Flour Mills.

The US meat major has snapped up a 49% stake in Malayan Flour Mills (MFM) poultry business, which spans from breeding to processing. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Tyson already has a plant and innovation centre in Malaysia. Chris Langholz, the president of Tysons international operations, said: Once completed, the poultry deal will optimise our existing Malaysia business and expand MFMs poultry business. This partnership will add more supply flexibility for both companies in serving halal-certified poultry to consumers and customers in the country and across priority export markets.

Set up in 1961 as a flour milling business, MFM moved into the poultry feed business in 1983 and since then has expanded into breeding, farming and processing. MFM remains one of Malaysias flour millers and has a presence in that industry in Vietnam and Indonesia.

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Teh Wee Chye, managing director of MFM, said: "Malaysia is one of the key poultry markets in south-east Asia, with a high per capita consumption of poultry. Together with Tyson Foods, we look forward to increasing our halal poultry product offerings in the country, especially in the further processed poultry segment, as well as exporting to demand markets with the help of Tyson Foods' global network."

Tyson, citing figures from the Halal Industry Development Corporation (HDC), said the value of Malaysia's halal industry is expected to reach US$147.4bn by 2025. The country exports around $9bn of halal-certified products.

In November, Tyson said it was stepping up its spending on its overseas production, including in Asia. Tyson is building new factories in China and Thailand to produce cooked-chicken products. The company is also expanding an existing site in the Netherlands, a project that will see the facility make chicken and plant-based protein products.
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"This rebranding strategy reflects the Company's vision for the future, and it's broader technology commitment and expertise in driving the innovations needed to shape the future of areas in digital technology solutions across cryptocurrency, blockchain, AI, IOT and cloud" said LiteLink Chairman and CEO Peter Green

Completion of the name change remains subject to approval of the Canadian Securities Exchange

( ) (OTCMKTS:LLNKD) (FRA:C0B:FF) has unveiled plans to change the company name to TechX Technologies Inc.

"This rebranding strategy reflects the Company's vision for the future, and it's broader technology commitment and expertise in driving the innovations needed to shape the future of areas in digital technology solutions across cryptocurrency, blockchain, AI, IOT and cloud" said LiteLink Chairman and CEO Peter Green in a statement.

With the increasing addressable market in digital assets, the company said it will continue to acquire, operate and make strategic investments in this space, and provide accretive value to the group and its shareholders. Digital payments firm Ubuck Technologies is majority-owned by Litelink Technologies Inc.

Completion of the name change remains subject to approval of the Canadian Securities Exchange. The company said it will issue a further news release prior to the change taking effect.

LiteLink is focused on emerging technologies across growth sectors including: crypto, blockchain, AI, IOT and cloud-based technologies. Led by senior leaders and industry experts, the company invests in and provides subject matter experts within portfolio companies to accelerate success and maximize value for shareholders.

On Tuesday, Litelink announced that it has completed a previously announced private placement. The offering was comprised of 10,050,000 common shares at a price of C$0.10 for gross proceeds of C$1,005,000.

Proceeds from the offering will be used by the company for future acquisitions and organic growth investments, including operations by subsidiaries and/or portfolio companies, working capital, and general corporate purposes.

Contact the author at jon.hopkins@proactiveinvestors.com
Photo: Rob Kruyt/BIV files Elyse Vroom walks in front of Murrayville House, where she bought a pre-sale contract for a home. She then found out that when the developer went into receivership, BC Supreme Court would nullify the contract

Notorious Vancouver area developer Mark Chandler was sentenced to seven years in prison Monday after pleading guilty to wire fraud in California.

United States District Court judge Hon. Percy Andersen, for the Central District of California, tacked on an additional 21 months to the 51 months United States attorneys had requested in a sentencing memorandum last December.

The state described Chandlers actions as an extensive fraudulent scheme whereby he solicited investors for a real estate development in Los Angeles, only to spend their money on a lavish lifestyle.

Lies built upon lies is how officials described Chandlers defrauding of 12 victims of just over $1.7 million, which Andersen has ordered Chandler to repay.

Chandler depleted peoples retirement savings and secured four bank loans with his victims properties. One victim was rendered homeless and another lost $749,453.

Banks foreclosed on some properties and two victims filed for bankruptcy.

His scheme, carried out between 2009 and 2011, involved writing fake cheques back to his victims and providing them with fake bank and investment documentation.

His criminal conduct not only financially devastated his victims, but also caused severe emotional distress, the state argued.

Chandler would take money and loans and spend it on himself, the court found. He is said to have used the funds to support his lifestyle, including buying a Mercedes-Benz, transferring approximately $20,000 to his ex-wife, chartering a private yacht, travelling to Las Vegas, making luxury purchases at Ferrari/Maserati, Michael Kors, and Ermenegildo Zegna, and spending thousands more at various high-end restaurants.

In an email written by Chandler and obtained by authorities, Chandler stated he needed fake cheques so he could put on a dog and pony show  to play with these new investors.

Chandler was also ordered to have three years of supervision upon his release. Sentencing documents show he had a history of criminal behavior, including spousal battery in 2009 and felony theft in 2003, in Arizona.

After his Los Angeles fraud scheme, Chandler made his way back to the Lower Mainland in 2011 and established a shell company to allegedly conduct fraud, though Canadian authorities have not pursued claims against him.

Chandler marketed Langley condo development Murrayville House in 2015. In September 2017, the Office of the Superintendent of Real Estate (OSRE) issued a cease marketing order against Chandlers company. Subsequently, a receiver was appointed to the development, and it was determined Chandler had secured 149 purchasers for 91 units and was unable to account for $12.2 million paid to his development company, according to a Mutual Fund Dealers Association (MFDA) hearing notice against Chandlers associate and chartered accountant, Vasant Patel.

After Chandler was extradited in December 2019, Patel was banned in June 2020 by MFDA from conducting securities-related business in any capacity with a mutual fund dealer.

Chandler and his company, 0981478 Ltd., still face a notice of hearing from the (OSRE), although the hearing is postponed indefinitely. The allegations contained within the OSRE notice remain unproven.

No one involved in the Murrayville House condo marketing scheme has been criminally charged in Canada, but Chandler and his companies face several civil proceedings.

Some scorned buyers, whose contracts were nullified, told Business in Vancouver in 2018 that their experience is evidence that the B.C. government needs to step in with strict guidelines for developers conducting pre-sales, and to issue fines when developers break rules and sell units multiple times and pocket deposits without putting them in trust.

What exasperated buyer Elyse Vroom, for instance, is that Chandler had been in receivership before yet escaped being banned from developing further.

His Chandler Homer Street Ventures Ltd. fell into receivership in early 2008 after the BC Supreme Court, in 2007, separately froze $35 million of Chandlers assets after investors alleged he misrepresented real estate deals and forged a multimillion-dollar mortgage document.

Massachusetts health officials say 1,272 doses of the COVID-19 vaccine the state has received have gone to waste as of Friday.

A total of 1,096 of the Moderna shots and 176 of Pfizers were reported as having been wasted or discarded as of Feb. 5, according to the Department of Pubic Health.

Of the 960,100 doses shipped to date this represents a vaccine wastage percentage of 0.13%, health officials said.

It is unclear why the doses were not administered. The number of doses that have gone to waste is likely much higher. Last month, the Jamaica Plain VA Medical Center reportedly threw out nearly 2,000 doses of the Moderna vaccine after the plug to the freezer was accidentally loosened by a cleaning contractor.

The tally at the VA wasnt added to the states total because those shots are shipped directly from the federal government.

Ultra-cold storage at temperatures of minus 80 degrees Celsius is required to keep the Pfizer vaccine viable, while Modernas can be stored at between minus 25 degrees Celsius and minus 15 degrees Celsius.

Early on in the states vaccine rollout, some smaller hospitals reported that theyd lacked the ultra-cold freezers needed to store the Pfizer vaccine, and had to borrow them from neighboring hospitals and other organizations.

The state has come under fire for its vaccine rollout, which critics say is lagging behind other states. This week, some state lawmakers joined a chorus of advocates and residents calling on the Baker administration to address concerns that officials have prioritized vaccinations in the eastern part of the state.

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A police officer has told a court he heard a high-pitched male scream over his radio in the wake of a serious accident involving a highway patrol car and a civilian, and initially thought the scream was someone playing a prank.

Harry Thomas Little, 42, is on trial in the NSW District Court accused of dangerous driving causing grievous bodily harm, after his highway patrol car crashed at high speed into a Mercedes driven by Gai Vieira on The Kingsway in Sydneys south on September 5, 2018.

Harry Thomas Little has pleaded not guilty. Credit:Brook Mitchell

Mr Little has pleaded not guilty.

On Wednesday, Sergeant Garth Quin told the court that, on the day of the crash, he was acting as a spotter in a police operation to detect drivers using their phones behind the wheel. His job was to radio the waiting officers to instruct them which cars to pursue.
YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 10, ARMENPRESS. The Ministry of Economy is bringing significant change to the functions of its two agencies in order to get funding for science not only from the government budget but also from businesses, Minister of Economy Vahan Kerobyan said in an interview.

In his words, science was treated badly during the last 30 years in Armenia. But to some extent this is already under my responsibility, he said. The Ministry of Economy has two agencies  the Intellectual Property Agency and the National Center of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. And through these two agencies science should be commercialized. That is, the product created by science will first of all be registered, and then through the National Center of Innovation and Entrepreneurship it must find the businesses where the given scientific invention or research can become a source of making money for the business, Kerobyan said.

He said they are making significant changes in the work of these agencies in order to be able to finance science not only from the budget but also from businesses.

Kerobyan said it is highly important for businesses to have the opportunities for being able to fund science. This can be in the form of some tax privileges or in the form of some other incentives, but we must bring business and science closer to each other, he said.

Speaking about an earlier idea of his, the project of making Yerevan a regional high-tech hub, Kerobyan said now is the time for such ambitious programs. During the 30 years of independence, one can say that we cant boast about any serious thing. And this has both objective and subjective reasons, however, generations will look at our results, and not at the reasons which existed at the given time. Thus, I believe that it is time for ambitious projects. And we must find the minds, the skills, the resources which will help us to create great things in Armenia. And I wouldnt say that making [Yerevan] a tech center is the most ambitious one, but we do have good opportunities for this, Kerobyan said.

The economy minister says Armenia is the best place for talented startups to come to with their teams, to create their products here, use the Armenian human capital, and in turn Armenia must ensure the entire ecosystem which must serve these companies, such as expos, symposiums, scientific forums.

Armenia is a very good place for them, because it is safe in Armenia, he said, citing the very low violent-crime rates in Yerevan.

The food and climate is great here. We have a great atmosphere so that people from neighboring countries can move here, and for companies to emerge which could create products for the world.

Editing and Translating by Stepan Kocharyan
Source: Xinhua| 2021-02-10 22:27:39|Editor: huaxia

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Yan Gang (L), general manager of China-Belarus Industrial Park Development Company and Yaroshenko, head of the administration of the China-Belarus Industrial Park Great Stone, show signing files during a ceremony for traditional Chinese medicine project in Minsk, Belarus, Feb. 9, 2021. The industrial park is the largest joint project between China and Belarus, which is created as a working platform for high-tech companies from around the world. (Photo by Zhong Yang/Xinhua)

MINSK, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- A signing ceremony for traditional Chinese medicine project to settle in China-Belarus Industrial Park Great Stone was held online between the Chinese corporation Sinomach and the Great Stone on Tuesday.

The new project involves the establishment of a Eurasian exchange center in the field of traditional Chinese medicine as well as a plant for the production of medicines against the new types of coronavirus, the Industrial Park Development Company said.

The Great Stone industrial park has become a landmark and an exemplary project of China and Belarus in the joint implementation of the Belt and Road Initiative, Chinese Ambassador to Belarus Xie Xiaoyong said.

The new project will open up new fields for the industrial clusters of the park and inject new impetus into the pragmatic cooperation between China and Belarus in the fields of medical and health care, he added.

Belarus Ambassador to China Yuri Senko said that traditional Chinese medicine is not only a treatment system, but also represents Chinese culture and history as well as the wisdom of the Chinese people.

Traditional Chinese medicine, which has proven to be effective as an adjunct therapy for the treatment of COVID-19, deserves special attention, he said.

The industrial park is the largest joint project between China and Belarus, which is created as a working platform for high-tech companies from around the world. Enditem
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I had to reassure my staff that, Hey, I support you and the decision that you make, your fight, Rader said. We talk about this too in meetings, that what you are fighting for I agree with, your fight is not against me, we all work for students and we are on the same page. But I was kind of caught in the middle of what was documented in the media as a crossfire.
Members of the National Guard patrol at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Feb. 9, 2021. (Reuters/Joshua Roberts)

Heres How Trumps Lawyers Should Have Explained Why an Ex-President Cannot Be Impeached

Commentary

Theres a very strong argument that the Constitution does not permit impeachment of a former president. Unfortunately, President Donald Trumps lawyers failed to present it.

Admittedly, theres conflicting evidence on whether the Constitution permits late impeachment. The job of the prosecutors was to present the evidence in favor. Aside from a few slips, they did their job fairly well.

On the other hand, the job of the Trump defense team was to present the evidence against late impeachment. They had three opportunities to do this: in their written Answer, in their Trial Memorandum, and in their speeches to the Senate. By and large, they flunked.

Even though Im undecided on late impeachment, its frustrating and painful for me to see a legal team drop the ball that way.

This article will lay out, step by step, the most important evidence against the constitutionality of late impeachment.

First step: Remember that the Constitution is a legal documentthe supreme Law of the Land. We interpret a legal document by (1) reading its words, (2) using established guidelines for reading those words (lawyers call those guidelines rules of construction), and (3) studying the history behind the document.

Second step: Although lawyers have many rules of construction, one of the most important is this: If the document contains a list, then items on the list generally are included, but those not on the list are excluded.

We apply this rule every day in real life. Suppose my wife tells me to visit the supermarket and gives me a shopping list. The list reads as follows:

broccoli

spinach

cauliflower

arugula

Unless theres something really unusual going on, I know from the list that shes not asking me to buy German chocolate cake. If I buy it anyway (as I might), its my own idea and not her instruction.

This rulethat items not on a list are excludedwas at least as important during the Founding Era as it is today. Participants in the 17871790 constitutional debates referred to this rule as a way to construe the document. The rule also played a big role during the debates over the Bill of Rights. It was so prominent that the Founders passed an entire constitutional amendment (the Ninth) to prevent it from applying in a particular case.

Third step: One reason the rule is so important to interpreting our Constitution is that the Constitution contains a lot of lists. The most famous is the documents principal enumeration of the powers of Congress (Article I, Section 8). Every judge and constitutional lawyer understands that if a power is not on a constitutional list, its not there.

Fourth step: The Constitutions impeachment provisions contain not one, but two lists: (1) the enumeration of reasons for which an officer may be impeached, and (2) who can be impeached.

The Constitution itemizes four reasons for impeachment: Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and [high] Misdemeanors. In Great Britain and under some of the early state constitutions, a legislative body could impeach for all sorts of reasonseven mere political disagreement. But everyone agrees the Constitutions list of reasons is exclusive. That means any impeachment would be unconstitutional unless it was supported by guilt of treason, bribery, a high crime (felony), or a high misdemeanor (other serious crime).

Fifth step: The Constitutions list of who can be impeached includes only three categories: The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States.

In Great Britain, Parliament could impeach private citizens who had never held political office. Everyone understands that this is not true in the United States. Why? Because private citizens who have never held office are not on the Constitutions list.

But wait: Former officers are not on the list, either. A former president isnt the same as the current president. Thats the real reason Chief Justice Roberts is not presiding over this trial: The Constitution directs him to preside only when the president is tried, not a former president.

Are Trumps prosecutors arguing that the Constitutions list of impeachable persons simultaneously excludes and includes persons not mentioned? That it excludes private citizens who have not held office, but it includes private citizens who have held office? This seems to be a blatant contradiction.

Conclusion: According to the uniform way we interpret lists in the Constitution, former officers are not impeachable.

Sixth step: There are a number of subsidiary arguments that buttress that conclusion. Here they are:

Contrary to the claim of the impeachment prosecutors, the Constitution doesnt leave us without remedies against ex-officers. Rather, the Constitution explicitly mentions prosecution according to law.

The Constitution has a general policy against certain kinds of legislative unfairness. It appears in several important sections, such as the ban on bills of attainder. This policy suggests we should interpret impeachment narrowly.

Lead impeachment manager Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said, Every single state Constitution in the 1780s either specifically said that former officials could be impeached or were entirely consistent with the idea. In contrast, not a single state Constitution prohibited trials of former officials.

But Raskin is wrong. By a fair reading, the state constitutions of New York and Massachusetts limited impeachment to sitting officers. And the framers took the U.S. Constitutions impeachment language largely from the New York and Massachusetts documents. They didnt follow the constitutions of states such as Virginia, which permitted late impeachment.

But Raskin is wrong. By a fair reading, the state constitutions of New York and Massachusetts limited impeachment to sitting officers. And the framers took the U.S. Constitutions impeachment language largely from the New York and Massachusetts documents. They didnt follow the constitutions of states such as Virginia, which permitted late impeachment. You can trace a process during the Founding Era by which Americans gradually made impeachment more narrow than it had been in Britain.

In sum: Although the Senate already has agreed to take jurisdiction of the Trump impeachment, that decision is not irrevocable. When senators vote to convict or acquit, lets hope they weigh the considerable arguments against late impeachment.

Robert G. Natelson, a leading originalist scholar, is the author of The Original Constitution: What It Actually Said and Meant and several articles on impeachment. He is a former constitutional law professor and senior fellow in constitutional jurisprudence at the Independence Institute in Denver.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Spain's future Queen Princess Leonor is going to study at a 12th-century Welsh castle dubbed the 'Hippie Hogwarts' - following in the footsteps of Princess Elisabeth of Belgium in Wales, the Spanish royal household has announced.

Leonor de Borbon, 15, the eldest daughter of King Felipe VI, 53, and Queen Letizia, 48, will attend UWC Atlantic College, based at the 12th century St Donat's Castle on the country's south coast.

Princess Leonor, who turns 16 at the end of October, will begin her two-year course at the boarding school this summer.

Her parents will personally meet the cost of the 67,000 course.

The most recent royal alumna was Princess Elisabeth of Belgium, 19, the daughter of King Philippe and Queen Mathilde, who enrolled in 2018 but had to cut her time at the college short due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and continued her studies online from home.

The heir to the Spanish throne, 15-year-old Princess Leonor, is going to study in Wales, the Spanish royal household has announced. Pictured, arriving to Alfonso II Square (Cathedral's Square) for Princesa de Asturias Awards 2019 on October 17, 2019 in Oviedo, Spain

Leonor will study at United World College of the Atlantic School which is located at 12th century St Donat's Castle in the Vale of Glamorgan (pictured)

Outdoorsy Elisabeth is now following into her father's footsteps by enrolling at the Royal Military Academy in Brussels, where she is learning about military and social affairs that will help her prepare for her future role as Queen.

The school, for students aged 16 to 19, says it seeks to 'inspire changemakers' who want to work for the common good.

It looks for students who 'can navigate the complexity of life and (reach) beyond easy answers', the school's website said.

The royal household statement noted the school's 'open and critical approach'. The school says it takes in students from around 150 countries.

Princess Leonor obtained admission to the school anonymously, taking several tests before being accepted, the royal household said.

The United World College Movement includes 18 schools around the world, the website said.

Leonor, who already speaks five languages, has become her illustrious father 'hand-right girl,' taking to her royal duties with 'enormous eagerness,' according to Felipe.

Having grown up in the spotlight since her father inherited the throne from King Juan Carlos in 2014, she's learned to keep calm under pressure and has already adopted the polished style of her royal mother, Queen Letizia.

Princess Elisabeth of Belgium (pictured) enrolled in 2018 but had to cut her time at the college short due to the coronavirus crisis, and continued her studies online from home

Princess Elisabeth, 16, will study at United World College of the Atlantic School which is located at 12th century St Donat's Castle in the Vale of Glamorgan (pictured)

Students at UWC Atlantic College in Wales, where Princess Leonor, the heir to the Spanish throne, is to study from this summer

Just like her father, who first spoke publicly as a young prince in 1981, she made her first public speech at just 13 at an event marking the 40th anniversary of the Spanish constitution in 2018.

Leonor will study a selection of subjects including core classes such as Biology, Chemistry, Economics, English Literature, Geography, History, Mathematics and Physics.

She'll also have a wide selection of optional courses to choose from, including Design Tech, Visual Arts, Film studies, Music and Global Politics among others.

Keen Linguist Leonor, who delivered an impressive four-language speech in 2019 at an event in Barcelona in 2019 in her second official outing, will also be able to study foreign languages and literature at leisure.

The College's literary options range from English and French Literature to Czech, Russian, Tibetan, Swedish and Urdu Literature as well.

A stay at the College of the Atlantic will also help Leonor make international friends and learn of different cultures, as per the institution's motto of promoting 'mutual understanding' among their 350 pupils.

Dubbed the 'Hippie Hogwarts,' the boarding school counts The Queen and Queen Noor of Jordan as its current co-presidents and encourages international cooperation from students of all background.

Spain's Crown Princess Leonor attends the State Opening of Parliament at the Lower House in Madrid, Spain, 03 February 2020

United World Colleges (UWC) of students at UWC Atlantic College in Wales, where Princess Leonor, the heir to the Spanish throne, is to study from this summer

King Felipe VI, 53, and Queen Letizia, 48, will personally meet the cost of the 67,000 course. Pictured, attending the delivery of the 'APM Journalism Awards 2019 and 2020'

In 2018, The Times reported that pupils were discouraged from showcasing their wealth with expensive gadgets, and were as likely to rub shoulders with 'refugees from west Africa' and 'California hippies.'

Founded in 1962 by German educationalist Kurt Hahn, he believed his approach to education, for pupils aged 16-19, could lead to a quicker resolution of international conflict, an ethos that is still carried by the establishment which aims to 'promote mutual understanding'.

It has also seen a growing list of international royals sitting on the benches of St Donat's Castle over the years.

King Willem-Alexander, the King of the Netherlands, studied at the College from 1983 to 1985 and graduated with an International Baccalaureate before undertaking his military service and moving on to study History at Leiden University from 1987 onwards.

Princess Raiyah of Jordan, the daughter of King Hussein of Jordan and Queen Noor also attended her institution as a teen before studying Japanese as an undergraduate at The University of Edinburgh.

King Felip VI also attended an international high school as a teen, though he went to the Lakefield College School in Canada rather than Wales. He then returned to Spain to study law at the Autonomous University of Madrid.
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The owner of a bubble tea shop where a female worker was allegedly slapped and kicked said he has received death threats from Chinese gangsters after the footage went viral - as new CCTV vision gives fresh insight into the brawl.

The viral video, which has been viewed more than 100,000 times, showed the moment a verbal altercation took a violent turn inside the Fun Tea store on Gouger Street, Adelaide, on January 29.

A 20-year-old worker was allegedly slapped and kicked during the melee by 39-year-old Gavin Guo, who has since been charged with assault.

Fun Tea director Jason Duan said both he and Guo have been hit with death threats in the wake of the incident, Adelaide Advertiser reported.

'I am very scared,' he said.

The owner of a bubble tea shop where a female worker was allegedly slapped and kicked said he has received death threats from Chinese gangsters after the footage (pictured) went viral

The viral video, which has been viewed more than 100,000 times, showed the moment a verbal altercation took a violent turn inside the Fun Tea store (pictured) on Gouger Street, Adelaide, on January 29

'I have been getting phone calls from blocked numbers every day.

'I have been told gangsters are looking for me and Gavin. I have been threatened. What happened has caused a lot of problems.'

The bubble tea shop posted a statement on their front window last week, denying the alleged attack was over a wage dispute.

The business said the 39-year-old man accused of assault was a customer who had previously got into an argument with the female worker.

'During the incident, one of our four female employees was allegedly struck by a customer,' the statement from the business read.

'The incident arose following a previous verbal argument which the female employee had had with the customer.

The bubble tea shop posted a statement on their front window last week, denying the alleged attack was over a wage dispute

Newly released CCTV footage showed Guo and the worker in a verbal altercation at the counter

The worker removes her apron and vision from a camera inside the cafe shows her approach Guo for further heated discussion. She is then escorted away by a fellow colleague (pictured)

'The management and owners of Fun Tea deplore violence of any sort, and have zero tolerance for assaults or violence.'

But Mr Duan has since admitted the altercation came to a head after the female complained about her $10 an hour pay check.

He has also vowed to pay back the money he owes.

Mr Duan was interviewed by popular Chinese YouTuber Sydney Daddy to tell his side of the story in Mandarin.

His face is blurred in the video, where he explains he went against his lawyer's requests to share his side of the story.

The worker returned to the cafe with friends in CCTV vision ahead of the alleged brawl

People are seen inside the Fun Tea cafe on Gouger Street on the night of the alleged brawl

'I felt suffocated not being able to speak out,' he said in the video, according to ABC.

'This little girl was indeed only [paid] $10 until the day of the incident.'

Newly released CCTV footage showed Guo and the worker in a verbal altercation at the counter.

The worker removes her apron and vision from a camera inside the cafe shows her approach Guo for further heated discussion.

She is then escorted away by a fellow colleague, before returning to the cafe with friends.

Mr Duan is then seen speaking to his young employee and her friends.

Guo then joins the group and the alleged brawl takes place.

The Diocese of Balti still has to pay approximately 20,000 euros to take possession of the land on which it will build a cathedral and a Romanian cultural centre in the city.

The project is an investment, by faith, for the future of our Romanian nation, and, in essence, it is an endeavour for whose great purpose we are all called to contribute, urges His Grace Bishop Antonie of Balti.

Most of the amount for the purchase of the land, of over 250,000 euros, was provided by the Romanian Government.

For those who want to contribute to the financial, the diocese has provided several accounts:

MDL: MD 10AG000000022514025546 Balti, SWIFT- BANK AGRNMD

RON: MD 15AG000000022514025553 Balti, SWIFT-BANK AGRNMD

EUR: MD26AG000000022514025549 Balti, SWIFT-BANK AGRNMD

USD: MD44AG000000022514032306 Balti, SWIFT-BANK AGRNMD

Bishop Antonie said that this project represents an act of justice and honour to the people to whom we all belong.

We see ourselves as good continuators of the spirit of our forerunners, to build a new Cathedral and a Romanian Cultural Centre, to revive and strengthen the Romanian faith of our ancestors, to be an important symbol, but also a factor of the unity of all Romanians from the north of the Republic of Moldova.

Our request is a sign of brotherly love and help and Romanian unity that will remain in the land of ancestral Bessarabia a testimony over time to the glory of God and the prosperity of our Romanian nation, the bishop told Basilica.ro.

The Diocese of Balti is the successor of the Diocese of Hotin, ecclesiastical structure of the Romanian Orthodox Church from the interwar period, which was founded on March 8, 1923.

The first hierarch of the diocese was Bishop Visarion Puiu (1923-1935), during which the Cathedral of the Holy Emperors Constantine and Helen, the episcopal residence and 64 churches (which now belong to the Moscow Patriarchate) were built.

Later, the diocese was pastored by bishops Tit Simedrea (1935-1940) and Partenie Ciopron (1941-1944 as locum tenens). After the establishment of the Soviet regime in the Romanian space on the left bank of the Prut River in 1944, the diocese ceased its activity, but without being abolished by the Romanian Orthodox Church.

In 2007, the Holy Synod approved the registration of this diocese in the Statute for the organization and functioning of the Romanian Orthodox Church. Eleven years later, in the vacant episcopal see of the Balti Diocese was elected His Grace Bishop Antonie Telembici, at that time an assistant bishop of the Archdiocese of Chisinau.
Even if he had a partner, Ryan Bailey wouldnt be spending Valentines Day whipping up an elaborate five-course meal or scattering rose petals over a box of marzipan. Nor would he be whisking his beloved out for a dreamy candlelit dinner.

First of all, Mr. Bailey cant cook. And he lives in Los Angeles, where the Covid-19 situation seems to change daily. As of this writing, outdoor restaurants are open. But who knows what it will look like on Feb. 14?

I hate to politicize Valentines Day, but were still in a pandemic and Fauci said were not supposed to be touching people, said Mr. Bailey, 39, an acting teacher and host of the So Bad Its Good podcast.

The way he sees it, the last thing the world needs right now is a mass-market holiday that pressures people to spend money they dont have on pink-and-red objects they dont need.